The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  A total of 43,000 men fought at Trafalgar, and combined casualties totaled 17 percent; more than 3,100 sailors killed and 4,100 injured, with the Franco-Spanish fleet suffering more than three times as many casualties as the British overall, and ten times as many killed. This disproportion was hardly unusual, and the British usually fared even better against their opponents. By one estimate, in six major fleet engagements between the Glorious First of June and Trafalgar, British fatalities were only one-sixth that of their enemies, and in the course of ten single-ship actions during the Seven Years’ War the French suffered 855 dead, thirteen times more than the British. There are many reasons for these asymmetrical outcomes, but the English had cultivated a psychological advantage based on a belief that the point of battle was to attack. After the loss of Minorca during the Seven Years’ War, Admiral John Byng had been executed not for giving up the island or for cowardice, but “for failing to do his utmost to take or destroy the enemy’s ships,” a capital crime in the Articles of War.

  Peter the Great and Russian Maritime Ambition

  Even as western European powers vied for dominance in the Atlantic and Mediterranean at the end of the seventeenth century, Russia was fitfully emerging as a maritime power of sorts under Peter the Great. The tsar’s achievement was not the construction of a big fleet or the development of a naval bureaucracy—he managed these, although neither proved especially durable—but securing for Russia saltwater ports on the Baltic and Black Seas and pressing his country’s eastward expansion across Siberia toward the Pacific and North America. In 1683, Peter became the first tsar to visit the White Sea port of Archangel and ordered the establishment of its first shipyard. Thirteen years later, and more than two thousand kilometers to the south, he invaded the Ottomans’ Black Sea stronghold of Azov in a campaign that failed because the Russians could not prevent the fort’s replenishment by sea. Peter ordered the construction of twentyfive galleys and fourteen hundred river barges on the Voronezh River, a tributary of the Don, and captured Azov the next year. With the Black Sea proper now in reach, he embarked on a massive shipbuilding campaign, but most of the vessels launched ultimately rotted or were handed over to the Turks (as was Azov) by treaty in 1713. In the meantime, Peter had made a yearlong tour of western Europe where he spent considerable time in the Netherlands and England working in shipyards to learn shipbuilding and gaining a mastery of navigation and naval organization. The tsar also recruited shipwrights and faculty for the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation, established in 1700 (the St. Petersburg Naval Academy followed fifteen years later); he prepared the way for Russian shipwrights, seamen, navigators, and engineers to apprentice in the west; and he modeled Russia’s highly detailed Naval Statute of 1720 on antecedents from France, Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden.

  As much as Russia’s fledgling navy drew on the experience of other maritime powers, it gained practical experience of its own in the Great Northern War (1700–21) against Sweden and her allies. Progress in the first decade went slowly, except for the capture of a Neva River fort near where Peter founded St. Petersburg in 1703. Eight years later the Russians captured Swedish-held cities from the Vistula to the Finnish border, and in 1714 a fleet of galleys ferried sixteen thousand troops to take Helsingfors (Helsinki), which was then Swedish territory. The Swedish fleet of twenty-eight ships (including sixteen of the line) withdrew to the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, where the Russians defeated them at the battle of Hangö. Peter’s fleet included eleven ships of the line, four frigates, and ninety-nine galleys modeled on a Venetian prototype, some Russian-built and others ordered from the Netherlands and England. The latter development alarmed the Swedes, who complained that the sales contravened Anglo-Swedish treaties. In an anonymous pamphlet entitled “The Northern Crisis or Impartial Reflections on the Policies of the Tsar” (1716), Sweden’s very partial Ambassador Count Carl Gyllenborg wrote, “This savage, cruel, and barbarous people design to become masters of the Baltic. The Tsar’s fleet will soon outnumber the Swedish and the Danish put together … and will be the master of the Baltick. We shall wonder then at our blindness that we did not suspect his great designs.” In London, concern about the tsar’s “seducing artificers in the manufacturers of Great Britain into foreign parts” led to an act of Parliament intended to curb the recruitment of skilled craftsman by Russia. Yet Peter’s strategy succeeded brilliantly, and by the Treaty of Nystad, Sweden ceded Livonia, Estonia, Ingermanland, and part of Karelia (near St. Petersburg), thereby reversing several centuries of Russian isolation from the Baltic and establishing it firmly as a major force in European affairs.

  Although Russian foreign policy veered sharply under Peter’s successors, hostility to the Ottomans remained a constant. Azov fell again in 1736, but it was not until the reign of Catherine the Great that the Ottoman monopoly over the Black Sea was finally shattered. At the start of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74, Catherine dispatched fourteen ships of the line and seven frigates from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. Concerned about a Franco-Ottoman rapprochement, the British refurbished the Russian fleet and offered the services of experienced officers. The Ottomans had more ships of the line than the Russians, but on June 25, 1770, their fleet was almost completely destroyed in a fireship attack in the Bay of Chesma, on the Aegean coast of Turkey, an epochal event that finally fulfilled Peter’s hopes for the Russian navy. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca gave Russia a number of fortresses on the Sea of Azov and at the mouth of the Dnieper and opened the Black Sea, the Bosporus, and the Dardanelles to Russian and other shipping for the first time in two centuries.

  In theory, only Russian merchant ships were allowed to sail through the straits, but others, the French especially, circumvented this restriction by putting their ships under the Russian flag. This fledgling commerce was disrupted by the Russo-Turkish War of 1787–92, which erupted over Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and construction of a naval base at Sevastopol. By war’s end, Russia’s commercial and political activity on the Black Sea centered on Odessa, in what is now Ukraine. Under a succession of able administrators—two of them French—the port grew from a hamlet of two thousand people in 1794 to a bustling city of seventy-five thousand half a century later. Before the coming of the railroad in the mid-nineteenth century, Russia’s Black Sea ports depended less on trade with northern Russia than on the sea trade with ports in the Ottoman Empire, the Aegean, and beyond. Although many Russians immigrated to Odessa in this period, the merchant community was more cosmopolitan than any in the empire, comprising Armenians, Jews, Greeks, Tatars, and German Mennonites, as well as traders from France and other western European countries. Turks came, too, though it was not until the Treaty of Adrianople (Edirne) in 1829 that Turkish ports—as distinct from the straits—were opened to Russian shipping.

  The Trade of Asia

  Russian access to the Black Sea endowed the tsar with unprecedented influence over the Orthodox populations of the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans to the Middle East, and alarmed the British, who feared that Russia might succeed France as the main threat—albeit not a naval one per se—to their Indian trade. During the Seven Years’ War, the East India Company’s armies (manned almost exclusively by Indian soldiers) had defeated the governor of Bengal, an autonomous province of the Mughal Empire that became the cornerstone of British India. The Mughal governor was replaced by a company puppet, and a few years later the enfeebled Mughal emperor was convinced to appoint the East India Company itself as diwan (treasurer) of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. From its base at the Hugli River port of Calcutta, the company moved swiftly to maximize its profits from Bengal, one of the richest areas in India. Thanks to its control of Bengal’s invaluable silk and cotton manufactures, the amount of silver the company had to export to India to pay for imports to Europe fell more than 90 percent, from almost 5 million guilders in 1751–52 to less than 400,000 twenty years later. Yet between 1760 and 1780 the value of exports from Bengal grew nearly threefold, to 12
.5 million guilders per year. The total value of the Dutch and English companies’ imports to Europe grew fourfold in the eighteenth century, but the composition of the trade changed markedly. In the late 1630s, spices (including pepper) accounted for more than two-thirds of the VOC’s shipments and textiles less than 15 percent. A century later the share of spices had fallen to 14 percent, and that of textiles had grown threefold. The English were never as dependent on spices, which represented only 4 percent of their exports in 1731–40, when textiles accounted for more than three-quarters.

  The greatest stimulant to Europe’s Asian trade was Chinese tea, which had been introduced to Europe in limited amounts from the 1660s. The Dutch were the first to pursue the trade regularly, and by 1715 the VOC was purchasing about sixty or seventy thousand pounds per year for the Netherlands, a figure that rose to four or five million pounds by the end of the century. More remarkable was the success of their English rivals, whose purchases grew from twenty thousand pounds per year in 1700 to one hundred thousand pounds in 1706, and six million pounds sixty years later. Until the British government lowered its extortionate import duties on tea (between 79 and 127 percent) in 1784, it is estimated that more than seven million pounds of tea—about half the total imported into continental Europe by the VOC and other trading companies—were smuggled into Britain annually. Reduction of tariffs to 12.5 percent had the combined effect of lowering the retail price of tea, eliminating smuggling, and increasing Britain’s share of tea imports to Europe from 36 to 84 percent.

  The British artist Thomas Daniell’s aquatint Calcutta from the River Hoogly shows the seat of British power in India in 1788, nearly a century after the East India Company established Fort William. The river teems with a variety of different watercraft, from the Bengal dingi at left, a private pleasure barge propelled by sixteen rowers, and two badgras, houseboats with enormous triangular rudders and lowered masts, at right. The scene is dominated by the company’s single-masted, square-rigged “pinnace-budgerow”—in essence a Europeanized badgra with long galleries of windows used by company officials on the rivers of India. Courtesy of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Gift of Lee and Roy Galloway, S1999.8.8.

  In keeping with China’s long tradition of limiting the pernicious influence of foreigners, the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) implemented what came to be known as the Canton system of trade to maintain a safe distance between their subjects and Europeans. The principles were laid out in the Five Regulations of 1759, which limited where and when ships and people could go (European women, including servants, were confined to Macau); required that all trade be conducted only through the government-sanctioned Cohong (gonghang) merchants; limited contacts between Europeans and Chinese; and prevented foreigners from learning Chinese. Only a few hundred Europeans were present in Canton (as the English called Guangzhou) at any time in the eighteenth century, a negligible number in comparison with the thousands of Fujianese and Cantonese who emigrated to or traded with Southeast Asia after the Qing government eased restrictions on Chinese maritime trade in 1683.

  This vast increase in Chinese participation in the commercial and political world of Southeast Asia was a function of private enterprise without government support, but on such a large scale that the overseas Chinese became “merchants without empire,” not unlike the Muslim traders on the coast of India in earlier centuries. Chinatowns had long anchored the colonial cities of Macau, Manila, Batavia, and Melaka, in all of which Chinese merchants and artisans far outnumbered European settlers. Junks of five or six hundred tons from Amoy (Xiamen) frequented Brunei, on Borneo, which was outside the European sphere of influence, and in 1776 an East India Company visitor wrote that “the commerce between China and Borneo [is] somewhat like the trade from Europe to America” in scale. By the end of the century it is estimated that Amoy was the home port of a thousand seagoing junks.

  The Chinese also insinuated themselves into the administrative structures of indigenous states like Mataram Java and Ayutthaya in Thailand, where rulers appointed them tax farmers to keep such lucrative sinecures away from indigenous rivals. In some places the Chinese formed their own fledgling polities under the auspices of local overlords. As their numbers grew, Chinese settlers turned increasingly to agriculture, cultivating food crops and pepper. Other attractions included mining for tin on the Malay Peninsula and gold on Borneo, where there was a gold rush at the end of the century. While the Portuguese, Dutch, and later the British gravitated toward places where Chinese merchants were already active, the overseas Chinese and Southeast Asians were less dependent on Europeans. Bugis merchants from Sulawesi eventually wrested control over several Malay states from the Dutch, and their settlement in the southern Malay Peninsula attracted Stamford Raffles to the island of Singapore, at the eastern end of the Strait of Malacca. In 1819, he leased the island from the sultan of Johor and founded a trading settlement with a view to fostering Chinese trade and undermining the VOC. His choice was exemplary. When the island formally became a British crown colony in 1867 the population had reached 100,000, and today the independent city-state of Singapore is home to five million people and ranks as one of the five busiest ports in the world.

  By the time Raffles settled on Singapore, American merchants had entered the trade of the Monsoon Seas, where they hoped to find profitable trading opportunities in a world dominated by the British, who after the American Revolution did all in their power to choke the trade of their former colonists. In 1783, the Empress of China sailed from New York with a cargo of ginseng, wine, and brandy, miscellaneous wares, and twenty thousand dollars in silver. One of thirty-four western ships at Canton that year, the Empress of China realized a profit of more than 25 percent and loaded tea, gold, silk, and porcelain for the return passage. But like their European counterparts, the Americans produced little that the Chinese wanted or needed. John Ledyard, a Connecticut-born veteran of James Cook’s third voyage of exploration, promoted the idea of harvesting furs in the Pacific Northwest for sale in Canton as a way of breaking into the lucrative China trade without running a deficit. In September 1787, a consortium of Boston merchants, shipowners, and captains sent out the Columbia Rediviva, under John Kendrick, and Lady Washington, commanded by Robert Gray. Sailing by way of Cape Horn, they reached the Spanish settlement at Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island off British Columbia, where they found three English ships engaged in the same trade. After swapping ships with Kendrick, Gray sailed for Canton, traded the skins for tea, and returned home via the Cape of Good Hope, thus completing the first circumnavigation of the globe under the American flag.

  Merchants from Salem, Massachusetts, were in the vanguard of the China trade, and having helped establish an American presence at Canton they turned to pepper from Sumatra and coffee from Mocha. Imports of the former rose at a great rate, reaching one million pounds in 1802 and more than seven times that two years later. Americans also began trading in Japan after the French invasion of the Netherlands in 1795. Because no VOC ships were available to sail from Batavia to their factory in Japan, the Dutch hired ships from neutral countries like Denmark and the United States. By 1807, eleven U.S. ships had reached Deshima under the Dutch flag. This was a humble start, but four decades later the United States would take the lead in ending Japan’s self-imposed isolation from western powers.

  Maritime Exploration in the Eighteenth Century

  Americans were among the pioneers of transpacific trade and were preceded there only by the Spanish Manila galleon and Russian fur traders. Other Europeans’ engagement with the Pacific had been sporadic and limited to the occasional exploratory voyage, and a few attempts to catch the Manila galleon and harass Spanish coastal trade between Peru and Mexico. But the ocean itself was vast, the technology of the time so inadequate, and the measures of success so particular that the Pacific remained out of bounds. As a result, by the eighteenth century much of the world map still remained a blank.

  A
lthough British and French navigators would reap most of the credit for opening the Pacific, Russians were taking an interest in the North Pacific even before Peter the Great put Russia on the road to naval power. By 1619, Russia had pushed its eastern border to the Pacific, establishing river ports along the way including Yakutsk on the Lena. In 1649, a decade after the first Russians reached the Pacific, Semyon Dezhnev led a hundred men in seven koches (a type of one-or two-masted, square-sailed vessel) down the Kolyma River to the Arctic, around the Chukotski Peninsula, and south through the Bering Strait to the Anadyr River, a distance of roughly fifteen hundred miles. Only about a dozen men survived this first European transit of the strait and Dezhnev’s expedition was all but forgotten. However, the proximity or contiguity of northeast Siberia and northwest America was widely suspected, and shortly before his death Peter the Great appointed the Danish navigator Vitus Bering to explore eastward of the Chukotski Peninsula. After a three-year trek across Siberia, in 1728 Bering sailed the Sviatoi Gavril (Saint Gabriel) from Kamchatka as far as the Arctic Circle, and the next year he sighted Alaska. A decade later, Bering took two brigs from Okhotsk along the Aleutian Islands as far as the Alaska Peninsula. En route back, the expedition reached the Komandorsky Islands, 175 miles shy of the Kamchatka peninsula, where Bering and a number of his crew died on the island that now bears his name. The survivors reached Kamchatka in 1742 with thirty thousand dollars’ worth of sea otter skins, and there followed an island-hopping fur rush through the Aleutians to Alaska. In 1799 the Russian government chartered the Russian-American Fur Company with a monopoly on trade north of Vancouver Island.