David Abulafia

THE BOUNDLESS SEA

A Human History of the Oceans

 Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Note on Transliteration and Dating

PART ONE
The Oldest Ocean: The Pacific, 176,000 BC–AD 1350
1. The Oldest Ocean
2. Songs of the Navigators

PART TWO
The Middle Ocean: The Indian Ocean and Its Neighbours, 4500 BC–AD 1500
3. The Waters of Paradise
4. The Journey to the Land of the God
5. Cautious Pioneers
6. Mastering the Monsoon
7. Brahmins, Buddhists and Businessmen
8. A Maritime Empire?
9. ‘I am about to cross the Great Ocean’
10. The Rising and the Setting Sun
11. ‘Now the world is the world’s world’
12. The Dragon Goes to Sea
13. Light over the Western Ocean
14. Lions, Deer and Hunting Dogs

PART THREE
The Young Ocean: The Atlantic, 22,000 BC–AD 1500
15. Living on the Edge
16. Swords and Ploughshares
17. Tin Traders
18. North Sea Raiders
19. ‘This iron-studded dragon’
20. New Island Worlds
21. White Bears, Whales and Walruses
22. From Russia with Profit
23. Stockfish and Spices
24. The English Challenge
25. Portugal Rising
26. Virgin Islands
27. Guinea Gold and Guinea Slaves

PART FOUR
Oceans in Conversation, AD 1492–1900
28. The Great Acceleration
29. Other Routes to the Indies
30. To the Antipodes
31. The Binding of the Oceans
32. A New Atlantic
33. The Struggle for the Indian Ocean
34. The Great Galleons of Manila
35. The Black Ships of Macau
36. The Fourth Ocean
37. The Rise of the Dutch
38. Whose Seas?
39. Nations Afloat
40. The Nordic Indies
41. Austrialia or Australia?
42. Knots in the Network
43. The Wickedest Place on Earth
44. A Long Way to China
45. Fur and Fire
46. From the Lion’s Gate to the Fragrant Harbour
47. Muscateers and Mogadorians

PART FIVE
The Oceans Contained, AD 1850–2000
48. Continents Divided, Oceans Conjoined
49. Steaming to Asia, Paddling to America
50. War and Peace, and More War
51. The Oceans in a Box
Conclusion

Museums with Maritime Collections

Further Reading
References
Index
 About the Author

David Abulafia is Emeritus Professor of Mediterranean History at the

University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College and a
former Chairman of the Cambridge History Faculty. His previous books
include Frederick II, The Discovery of Mankind and The Great Sea: A
Human History of the Mediterranean, which has been translated into a dozen
languages. He is a member of the Academia Europaea and a Fellow of the
British Academy, where he is Chair of the Medieval Studies section.
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Two Italies

Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor
A Mediterranean Emporium
The Western Mediterranean Kingdoms
The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
My bounty is as boundless as the sea
(Shakespeare)

Praeceptoribus Paulinis
PNB CED TEBH AHM JRMS PFT
necnon INRD
 List of Illustrations

Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers
will be pleased to amend in future editions any errors or omissions brought to
their attention.

1. Tepuke, a modern canoe based on ancient Polynesian design, built by the

Vaka Taumako Project. (Photo: Wade Fairley, 2008)
2. Rock carving of a boat with a claw sail, possibly dating back to the early
settlements, Olowalu, Maui. (Photo: Bill Brooks/Alamy)
3. Relief carving of the Egyptian fleet during the expedition to the Land of
Punt, 18th Dynasty. Funerary temple of Hatshepsut, Deir El-Bahri, Egypt.
(Photo: Prisma Archivo/Alamy)
4. Drawing of relief carving of the Egyptian fleet in the expedition to the
Land of Punt. (Photo: Interfoto/Alamy)
5. Seal depicting four gazelles, Dilmun (Bahrain), late third millennium BC.
National Museum, Bahrain. (Photo: by kind courtesy Harriet E. W.
Crawford, author of Early Dilmun Seals from Saar: Art and Commerce in
Bronze Age Bahrain)
6. Seal showing a sewn-plank ship, India (probably Bengal or Andhra
Pradesh), 4th–5th century AD, found in Thailand. National Museum,
Bangkok. (Photo: Thierry Ollivier)
7. Coin of the Emperor Victorinus, minted in Cologne, c.AD 270, found in
Thailand. National Museum, U Thong, Suphanburi, Thailand, bequeathed
by Air Vice Marshal Montri Haanawichai. (Photo: Thierry Ollivier)
8. Terracotta head of a Persian or Arab merchant, Western Thailand, 7th or
8th century AD. National Museum, Bangkok. (Photo: Thierry Ollivier)
9. Porcelain ewer, China (possibly Guangdong), c.AD 1000. British
Museum, London. (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum)
10. Three Intaglios, Oc-èo site, My Lam Village, An Giang Provence, Fu Nan
Period 6th century. Museum of Vietnamese History, Ho Chi Min City.
(Photo: © Kaz Tsuruta)
11. 19th-century copy of an original copper plate from Kollam, south India,
AD 849. Cambridge University Library, MS Oo.1.14. (Photo: By kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)
12. Modern reconstruction of The Jewel of Muscat, a 9th-century Arab ship
wrecked off the coast of Belitung, Indonesia. (Photo: Alessandro
Ghidoni, 2010)
13. Changsha Bowl, Tang dynasty, Hunan province, 9th century, from the
Belitung shipwreck. (Photo: © Tilman Walterfang, 2004 / Seabed
Explorations New Zealand Ltd)
14. 14th-century wooden cargo tags from a Chinese junk wrecked off the
coast of Sinan, Korea, 1323. (Photo: National Museum of Korea)
15. Celadon vase with dragon handles, China, Yuan Dynasty, 14th century,
from the Sinan shipwreck. (Photo: National Museum of Korea)
16. Medieval Chinese currency, Northern Song Dynasty. (Photo: Scott
Semens)
17. Mongol ship attacked by Japanese warriors in 1281, detail from the Mōko
Shūrai Ekotoba scroll, facsimile of the late 13th-century original in the
Museum of the Imperial Collections, Imperial Palace, Tokyo, Japan.
(Photo: Pictures from History/Bridgeman Images)
18. Sailing chart showing India, Ceylon and Africa, based on the voyages of
Zheng He, woodblock illustration from Mao Yuanyi, Wubei Zhi, 1621.
(Photo: Universal History Archive/Bridgeman Images)
19. Miniature from Maqamat Al-Hariri, 1237. Bibliothèque nationale de
France, Paris. (Photo: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy)
20. Miniature of St Brendan and monks, c.1460, English school. University
Library, Augsburg, Germany. (Photo: Picture Art Collection/Alamy)
21. Golden boat, first century BC or AD, found Broighter, Northern Ireland.
(Photo: Werner Forman/Getty Images)
22. Iron Age settlement, Santa Luzia, Viana do Castelo, Portugal. (Photo:
João Grisantes)
23. ‘Carp’s Tongue’ swords, 800–850 BC, from a hoard found in the Bay of
Huelva, south-western Spain. (Photo: Miguel Ángel Otero)
24. Viking ship, c.820, found at Oseberg. Kulturhistorisk Museum, Oslo,
Norway. (Photo: © 2019 Kulturhistorisk museum, UiO / CC BY-SA 4.0)
25. Detail of a sail from a Viking memorial stone from Gotland, Sweden, 8th-
9th century. Gotland Museum, Visby, Sweden. (Photo: W.
Carter/Wikimedia Commons)
26. Coin from Haithabu in southern Denmark found in Birka in central
Sweden. (Photo: Heritage Image Partnership/Alamy)
27. Inuit carvings from Greenland. (Photo: National Museum of Denmark,
Copenhagen)
28. Crozier of Bishop Olafur of Gardar, 13th century. (Photo: National
Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen)
29. 15th-century clothing from Greenland, reflecting current European
fashions. (Photo: National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen)
30. The Kingigtorssuaq Runestone, inscribed by two Norse Greenlanders,
13th century or later. (Photo: National Museum of Denmark,
Copenhagen)
31. Merchants’ houses, Lübeck, Germany. (Photo: Thomas Radbruch)
32. Miniature of Jonah and the Whale from Spiegel van der Menschen
Behoudenisse, Dutch school, early 15th century. British Library, London,
Add. 11575, f.65v. (Photo: © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved
/ Bridgeman Images)
33. Jaume Ferrer, detail from the Catalan atlas of the world, attributed to
Abraham Cresques, 1375. (Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France,
Paris)
34. Native inhabitant of La Gomera, illustration from Leonardo Torriani,
Descripción e historia del reino de las Islas Canarias, 1592. (Photo:
Universidade de Coimbra. Biblioteca Geral)
35. Bowl showing a Portuguese caravel, from Málaga, Spain, 15th century.
(Photo: © Victoria & Albert Museum, London)
36. Madeira archipelago, detail from the Corbitis Atlas, Venetian school,
c.1400. (Photo: Bibloteca Nazionale Marciana Ms. It. VI 213, page 4)
37. Elmina, Ghana, miniature from Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg,
Civitates Orbis Terrarum, 1572. (Photo: Chronicle/Alamy)
38. Portuguese padrão from Cape Cross, western Namibia, 1486. Deutsches
Historisches Museum, Berlin, Germany. (Photo: © DHM/T.
Bruns/Bridgeman Images)
39. Detail of the African coast from Martin Waldseemüller’s world map,
1507. (Photo: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)
40. Detail showing America from Martin Waldseemüller’s world map, 1507.
(Photo: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)
41. 1960s copy of the Jagiellonian Globe, c.1510. Jagiellonian University
Museum, Kraków. (Photo: Janusz Kozina and Grzegorz Zygier)
42. Section of Martin Behaim’s globe, 1492. (Photo: © Germanisches
Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Germany)
43. Vasco da Gama’s armada, illustration from Livro das Armadas,
Portuguese school, c.1568. Academia das Ciências, Lisbon. (Photo:
Patrick Landmann / Science Photo Library)
44. Early sixteenth-century colonial architecture in Santo Domingo,
Dominican Republic. (Photo: Image Broker/Alamy)
45. View of the city of Seville, painting attributed to Alonso Sanchez-Coello,
c.1600. Museum of the Americas, Madrid. (Photo: © Photo Josse /
Bridgeman Images)
46. Portrait of the Portuguese Admiral Albuquerque, c.1615. San Diego
Museum of Art, USA. (Photo: Edwin Binney 3rd Collection / Alamy)
47. Portuguese watchtower, c.15th century, overlooking the Al Bidya
Mosque, Fujairah, United Arab Emirates. (Photo: Genefa Paes /
Dreamstime.com)
48. Map of the Atlantic by Hagii Ahmed Muhiddin Piri, also known as Piri
Reis, 1513. Topkapı Palace Library, Istanbul, Turkey. (Photo: Turgut
Tarhan)
49. A view of the Murderers’ Bay, as you are at anchor here in 15 fathom,
illustration by Isaac Gilsemans, 1642. (Photo: Alexander Turnbull
Library, Wellington, New Zealand)
50. View of Judea (Ayutthaya), Siam, attributed to Johannes Vinckboons,
c.1662-63. (Photo: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
51. View of Macau, Chinese school, late 18th century. (Photo: Hong Kong
Maritime Museum)
52. Korean turtle ship from the time of Yi Sun-sin, illustration from The War
Diary Of Yi Sun-sin, 1795. (Photo: Fine Art Images / Heritage Image
Partnership Ltd / Alamy)
53. Portrait of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Japanese school, 16th century. (Photo:
Granger Historical Picture Archive / Alamy)
54. Map of the Arctic from Gerhard Mercator, Septentrionalium Terrarum
descriptio, 1595. (Photo: Princeton University Library, Historic Maps
Collection)
55. European products carried through the Arctic Ocean by Barentsz’s
expedition as far as Novaya Zemlya, 1596–7. (Photo: © Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam)
56. Bowl depicting Dutch ships and merchants, Japanese, c.1800. (Photo: the
author)
57. Imagined bird’s-eye view of Deshima (copied from a woodblock print by
Toshimaya Bunjiemon of 1780 and published in Isaac Titsingh’s
Bijzonderheden over Japan, 1824–25). (Photo: Koninklijke Bibliotheek,
The Hague)
58. Earthquake in Port Royal, Jamaica, Jan Luyken and Pieter van der Aa,
1692. (Photo: Artokoloro Quint Lox/Alamy)
59. Part of the Coromandel Coast showing Fort Dansborg and Tranquebar
by O. G. von Sponeck, 1730. (Photo: Det Kongelige Bibliotek,
Copenhagen)
60. Tupaia’s chart of the islands surrounding Tahiti, c.1769. (Photo: The
Picture Art Collection/Alamy)
61. Kamehameha at the Battle of the Red Mouthed Gun, painting by Herbert
Kawainui Kāne, late 20th century. (Photo: National Geographic/Getty
Images)
62. View of St Helena, c.1750. (Photo: Chronicle/Alamy)
63. Company painting of the Factories at Guangzhou, Chinese school,
c.1820. (Photo: The Picture Art Collection/Alamy)
64. A samurai rides to a meeting with Commodore Matthew C. Perry,
painting by Kinuko Y. Craft, late 20th century. (Photo: National
Geographic /Alamy)
65. Singapore, c.1900. (Photo: Historic Images/Alamy)
66. The port of Essouaira, Mogador, Morocco. (Photo: the author)
67. The Pier Head, with the Royal Liver Building, Cunard Building and Port
of Liverpool Building, Liverpool, 2008. (Photo: Chowells/Wikimedia
Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)
68. The Bund, Shanghai, 2017. (Photo: Luriya Chinwan/Shutterstock)
69. The Black Ball Line clipper ship Ocean Chief reducing sail on her
Australian run, painting by Samuel Walters, c.1850s. (Photo:
Christie’s/Bridgeman Images)
70. Arrival of the RMS Queen Mary, New York, 1938. (Photo:
Imagno/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
71. MS Allure of the Seas, sailing towards the Storebaelt Bridge, Denmark,
2010. (Photo: Simon Brooke-Webb/Alamy)
72. The container ship MV CSCL Globe arriving at Felixstowe, 2015.
(Photo: Keith Skipper/Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0)
 Preface

In the making of connections between human societies, the role of the sea is
particularly fascinating. Connections across large open spaces have brought
together peoples, religions and civilizations in stimulating ways. Sometimes
this has been through individual encounters, as travellers, including pilgrims
and merchants, found themselves visiting alien environments; sometimes it
has been the result of mass migrations that have changed the character of
regions; sometimes it has been the result as much of the movement of goods
as of people, when the inhabitants of distant lands saw, admired, and
imported or copied the art works of another culture, or read its literature, or
were taken aback by some rare and precious item that opened their eyes to its
existence. Such contacts were made overland and up and down river systems,
as well as by sea; but overland they were mediated by the cultures that lay
along the routes being followed, whereas links across the sea could tie
together very different worlds, as far apart as Portugal and Japan or Sweden
and China.
This book is intended to sit alongside my earlier book, The Great Sea: A
Human History of the Mediterranean, first published in 2011. Like that book,
it is a human rather than a natural history, emphasizing the role of often
adventurous traders in making and maintaining contact. Whereas the
Mediterranean accounts for 0.8 per cent of the maritime surface of the globe,
seas as a whole account for about 70 per cent of the world’s surface, and
most of this watery space consists of the vast open areas we call oceans.
From outer space, the Earth is mainly blue. The oceans have distinct but
gigantic wind systems, generated by the movement of air over vast masses of
both warm and cold water: one has only to think of the seasonal monsoons in
the Indian Ocean. The Roaring Forties that would helpfully sweep sailing
vessels from the Atlantic into the Indian Ocean were the same winds that
made entry into the Pacific from the southern Atlantic, around Cape Horn, so
frightening. Currents such as the Gulf Stream, which keeps the British Isles
relatively warm, or the not dissimilar Kuroshio or Japan current, stretch
across thousands of miles.1 We divide the all-encompassing global sea into
the three great oceans; but ancient geographers, with some justice, imagined
it to be a single Okeanos of intermingled waters, a concept revived in modern
use of the term ‘World Ocean’ to describe all the oceans as a single unit.2

The three major oceans have attracted increasing interest as the study of
maritime history has expanded beyond what might more properly be called
naval history, which concentrates on warfare (or peace-keeping) on the
surface of the sea, to greater involvement with the wider questions of how,
why and when people crossed large maritime spaces, whether for trade or as
migrants, and what sort of interdependence was created between lands far
apart from one another by this movement across the oceans. This has led to
debates about the origins of globalization, some of which have been
conducted at cross-purposes, since the concept of ‘globalization’ is a vague
one that can be defined in many ways. A question related to the theme of
globalization that has often been raised is why Europeans opened up routes
across the world after 1500, in the wake of Columbus and da Gama, while the
Chinese, under Zheng He, launched extraordinarily ambitious voyages in the
early fifteenth century that came to a sudden stop. This leads into a range of
questions about the ‘Great Divergence’ between Europe and Asia or other
continents, although, as with globalization, much depends on the criteria one
adopts to measure the process. This book makes plain the dramatic effect of
the entry of European traders and conquerors into distant oceans following
the voyages of Columbus and da Gama, while also insisting that Columbus,
da Gama and the worlds they explored can only be explained by looking at
their long antecedents.
This book also insists that the European presence around the shores of the
oceans can only be understood by taking into account the less well-
documented activities of non-European merchants and sailors, some of whom
were indigenous to the lands in which they lived, others of whom formed part
of widespread diasporas – Greeks and later on Jews from Egypt, Armenians,
Chinese, Malays, and so on. Sometimes the sea routes were managed by a
sort of relay team, as goods passed from one set of traders to another, and
from one type of ship to another, and as local rulers exacted their customs
duties at each stopping point. And sometimes, even in the Greco-Roman
Indian Ocean, they were managed by entrepreneurs who travelled the whole
route from, say, Bereniké on the Red Sea coast of Egypt to Pondicherry on
the south-east coast of India. This is not to deny the transformative effect of
the arrival of the Europeans in nearly every corner of the oceans. After
Columbus and da Gama, the oceans and their islands were bound together in
new ways. Ambitious new routes, longer than anything attempted before,
criss-crossed the world, linking China to Mexico via Manila or the East
Indies to Lisbon and Amsterdam. A further revolution occurred when
steamships began to replace sailing vessels along the ocean routes in the
nineteenth century, while two great canals at Suez and Panama transformed
the routes themselves. And further revolutions in the late twentieth century
introduced massive ships capable of carrying thousands of containers, and
cruise ships that carry as many thousands of passengers.
Insofar as this book has heroes, they are not so often the explorers who
opened up routes across the oceans, but the merchants who followed in their
wake. Traders saw opportunities and made the tenuous links established by
those who found new routes into firm, reliable and regular connections,
whether in the era of Greco-Roman commerce across the Indian Ocean or in
the aftermath of Columbus’s voyages to the Caribbean. They settled down in
trading stations that became major ports – Aden, Havana, Macau, Melaka,
Quanzhou, to give just a few examples. But right up to the early days of the
steamship maritime travel involved risk from shipwreck, piracy, disease, and
– not least – rajahs, sultans and other rulers who saw merchants as fair game
in their hunt for funds, which they raised from confiscation as well as
taxation. The history of long-distance travel across the seas is the history of
people willing to take risks, both physical and financial: men (mainly) who
gambled on business opportunities in faraway lands, in the search for profit.
Using a loose definition, we could call these people capitalists, businessmen
reinvesting their resources in the hope of generating greater and greater
wealth. Such people are visible at the very start of the history of Indian Ocean
trade, in the cities of Bronze Age Mesopotamia, and throughout the centuries
that followed.
The history of maritime trade is not all concerned with exotic items such as
the spices of the Indies. Increasingly, historians have laid emphasis on
humdrum local trade networks bringing primary produce – grain, oil, wine,
wool, and so on – towards markets and towns. Yet those looking for really
big profits were tempted to stray much further afield, eventually creating
links across the oceans that had the power to stimulate economic growth at
both ends of lengthy lines of communication: cities in China producing fine
porcelain, for instance, and cities in Holland buying large quantities of it.
Sometimes trade was masked as the payment and receipt of tribute,
particularly in medieval China and Japan. Princely palaces might set the
agenda by making clear what exotic objects they craved, but rulers could
never prevent their diplomats from trading on the side, and attempts to close
ports only generated new unofficial ones, as at Quanzhou in medieval China,
which became a meeting point for merchants from Java, Malaya, India, the
Arab world, and even Venice and Genoa.
Alongside the peaceful merchants, to be sure, there were plenty of sea
raiders, most famously the Vikings; but here too the search for profit made
raiders into at least part-time traders. There is undeniable fascination in
looking at the exotic objects and foodstuffs that were carried across
sometimes enormous distances, and in thinking about what these things
meant to the people among whom they arrived – whether walrus tusks from
Greenland or lacquer boxes from Japan or sacks of cloves and nutmeg from
the Moluccas. The eternal appeal of rare and beautiful items from far-off
lands, along with curiosity about those lands, prompted merchants and
mariners to try out new routes and to chance upon unknown lands (not least
the two vast continents of the Americas). But it is also important not to forget
the human beings who were themselves treated as disposable cargo – notably
the millions of slaves who were carried across the early modern Atlantic.
When looking for female travellers across the oceans, it is here that we shall
find significant numbers of women. Women also appear among the migrants
who arrived in places as diverse as Viking Iceland, Puritan North America
and Māori New Zealand – even among the Norse travellers who attempted to
settle in North America in the Viking age. Too often, though, the documents
are silent about the women’s history of the sea, other than legends about sea
goddesses.
It is instructive to compare movement across the sea with movement across
land. Many of the problems of carrying large quantities of goods and people
overland were only resolved when railways were constructed in the
nineteenth century, facilitating, for instance, the transfer of vast amounts of
tea from remote quarters of India to the Indian Ocean and, ultimately, the
teeming tea shops of London. Further back in time, the famous Silk Road that
linked China to western Asia and, at some periods, Europe as well, flourished
for relatively short periods, notably the ninth century and the late thirteenth to
early fourteenth century. Its cultural significance is not in doubt, as the ideas
and arts of Buddhism and Islam were carried across the expanse of Eurasia.
But the Silk Road carried only a small fraction of the goods that could be and
were conveyed by ship from China and south-east Asia by way of Malaya
and India towards Egypt and the Mediterranean. This ‘Silk Route of the Sea’
that crossed the Indian Ocean has an uninterrupted history going back 2,000
years, to the age of Emperor Augustus, and the astonishing quantities of
porcelain found on board ships wrecked in the South China Sea makes this
point as clearly as anything: the hundreds of thousands of plates and bowls
loaded on late medieval junks for transfer to the Red Sea simply could not
have been carried overland on the backs of camels – one eleventh-century
wreck contains half a million pieces of Chinese porcelain. Chinese porcelain
was greatly prized in medieval Egypt, to the point where attempts were made
to imitate it: at least 700,000 sherds have been found underneath Fustat, or
Old Cairo. These figures are nothing compared to the quantities of porcelain
shipped from China to Europe in the eighteenth century.
Historians have debated when and how widely the terms ‘Atlantic’,
‘Pacific’ and ‘Indian’ Ocean came into use, and whether they are appropriate.
After all, the Indian Ocean bathes east Africa, Arabia and the Malay
Peninsula as well as India; and early modern geographers tended to
distinguish the northern Atlantic from its southern or ‘Ethiopic’ twin. The
central and southern Pacific was often described as the ‘South Sea’.
Nonetheless, schools of Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean historians have
emerged; indeed, a recent survey showed that more publications about
Atlantic history have been juddering off the presses than publications about
the Mediterranean, which was long the favourite pool of water among
historians, beginning with the pioneering writings of Fernand Braudel. ‘We
are all Atlanticists now,’ the eminent Harvard historian David Armitage
proclaimed, as he set out different ways of writing Atlantic history, whether
comparative, local or transatlantic (that is, about connections across the
ocean).3 But the sense that maritime history is being compartmentalized into
four main disconnected chunks, Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Ocean and
Mediterranean, has attracted increasing criticism; their interaction with one
another must not be ignored. This book is an attempt to write the history of
the three great oceans together. That does mean, in the millennia before
Columbus, treating them separately, because they constituted three spheres of
human movement that were not directly connected to one another by the
movement of humans from one ocean to another, even though goods (mainly
spices) reached the ports of the medieval Atlantic from as far away as the
East Indies, having passed through a non-oceanic sea, the Mediterranean.
After 1492, though, I have laid as strong an emphasis as possible on the
interconnections between the oceans, so that even chapters about (say) the
English and their rivals in the seventeenth-century Caribbean have been
written with an eye on the global context. This makes the last five centuries
more manageable. But it also represents reality: the oceans had become
intimately interconnected, as a quick glance at the Portuguese, Dutch or
Danish maritime networks quickly shows. This interconnection of the oceans
was the great revolution that followed the discovery of the Americas and of
the route from Europe to Asia by way of the southern tip of Africa, and it has
received too little attention.
One important theme of this book is the human occupation of previously
uninhabited islands, beginning with the extraordinary achievements of
Polynesian sailors in settling the scattered islands of the largest ocean of all.
Within the Atlantic, Madeira, the Azores, the Cape Verde Islands and St
Helena had an importance far greater than their tiny size would suggest. In
the Indian Ocean, one very large island, Madagascar, was a miniature
continent with its own distinctive wildlife; it was settled by Austronesians
from the East Indies during what historians of Europe call the Middle Ages.
In some cases humans, and the animals they brought with them, totally
transformed these island environments: the most famous example is the
extinction of the dodo after humans occupied Mauritius.4 Inevitably, though,
immeasurably more has to be left out than included, and I have not attempted
to write what pretends to be a complete or comprehensive history of the
oceans, which would take up many volumes, but a rounded history of the
oceans that homes in on what I think are the best illustrations of long-distance
maritime connections. Some of these, such as the trade in Chinese tea and
porcelain, had an enormous cultural and economic impact on places as far
from China as Sweden and New England.
Another reservation about the way oceanic history has been written
concerns its chronological span. The Atlantic, in particular, has suffered from
an assumption that its history only begins with Columbus, allowing for a
quick reference to the brief stay of Norse men and women somewhere in
North America (though their stay in Greenland was by no means brief, lasting
over 400 years). Quite apart from evidence for trade and migration in the pre-
Columbian Caribbean, going back millennia, we have the rich evidence for
trade in eastern Atlantic waters from Neolithic times onwards, linking
Orkney and Shetland, as well as Denmark, to Atlantic France and Iberia;
much later, we can watch the Hanseatic merchants of the late Middle Ages
trading from Danzig to Lisbon. The close relationship between the Baltic and
the North Sea, and then the Atlantic beyond, means that these seas need to be
considered as extensions of the Atlantic. The ancient and medieval Indian
Ocean has attracted much more attention than the early Atlantic, and it too
has extensions. One is the South China Sea, at the entrance to the Pacific; but
the seas all the way up to Korea and Japan have interacted strongly since
ancient times. These seas have looked away from the Pacific of the
Polynesian navigators, which was a separate world consisting of often tiny
islands scattered across a vast and, it must have seemed, unbounded space.
For this reason the maritime history of Japan, Korea and China before about
1500 will be found in the Indian Ocean chapters. Another extension is the
Red Sea, which gave access to Egypt and beyond that the Mediterranean; that
too receives close attention in this book.5 As for the Arctic Ocean, if it can
be called an ocean rather than, as some have argued, a confined and largely
frozen ‘Mediterranean’ stuck between Eurasia and North America, the history
of the human presence has been told here through the repeated attempts to
carve a route through Arctic ice and water to the Far East by way of the
North-West and North-East Passages – if they existed. And the Southern or
Antarctic Ocean is simply a label for the cold waters at the bottom of our
planet, which are in effect part of the three major oceans, starting somewhere
in the latitude of New Zealand – though the search for the assumed Southern
Continent, which was thought to be much more temperate than Antarctica,
does feature here.6
There is a great deal that this book is not about. Although it is, as the
subtitle insists, a ‘human history’, rather than natural history, it is not
concerned with the impact of human beings on the oceanic environment –
what has been described as the ‘submarine’ history of the oceans. This book
remains on the surface of the sea, with the exception of frequent use of
evidence from shipwrecks, the remains of ships that were after all intended to
stay on the surface. Ocean ecology is an important and urgent issue in the
twenty-first century and has been discussed with passion by environmental
experts.7 Humans are destroying the oceans by dumping plastics and
effluents, and marine life pays a heavy price. Climate change may at last
render accessible sea routes carrying large quantities of goods through the
Arctic Ocean from Europe to and from the Far East. These are crucial
matters, but this book is concerned instead with contacts between humans
across the oceans, linking shores and islands, mostly in epochs when human
impact on the seas themselves was limited, even though human impact on
mid-sea islands such as Madeira or Hawai’i was massive. I am also not much
concerned with fishing, except where it has generated long-distance contacts;
so I do have a fair amount to say about herrings and cod in the Atlantic
aboard Hanseatic and Dutch vessels, and about English ships that probably
ventured close to Newfoundland fishing for cod before John Cabot’s arrival
there in 1497. Later, American whalers briefly feature, in a discussion of the
worldwide trade in whale products, and here one can point to severe
ecological damage well before 1900, as whale populations of large areas of
sea were hunted almost to extinction.
One very important result of the creation of new contacts between distant
landmasses has been the importation and cultivation of alien crops far from
their place of origin. The great example is the potato, a South American
product that became the staple food of the Irish poor (with tragic
consequences); well before that, the Islamic world provided conduits carrying
oranges and bananas as far west as Spain, while Asiatic sugar struck roots in
the Mediterranean, in Atlantic islands such as Madeira, and eventually in
Brazil and the Caribbean. Only part of that story can be told here, the part
concerned with the routes these products took. A classic work by Alfred
Crosby and a pioneering study of the movement of foodstuffs within Islamic
lands by Andrew Watson have looked at the bigger picture.8 These were
developments in which the Mediterranean was heavily involved; but in this
book the Mediterranean lurks offstage. As a largely closed inland sea, long
and narrow, with constant and intensive contact between its shores, it is as
different in character from the open oceans as mountains are from plains.
Besides, I have written about it at length in my previous book.

Writing this book has taken me into periods and places that are far removed
from the Mediterranean. But the origins of this book lie in an essay simply
entitled ‘Mediterraneans’ that I wrote for a book entitled Rethinking the
Mediterranean, edited by William Harris of Columbia University, in which I
compared the ‘classic’ Mediterranean with other closed or semi-closed
watery spaces such as the Baltic and the Caribbean.9 This led me deeper into
the history of other, much larger seas, as did a book I wrote about a very
different aspect of the Atlantic at the end of the Middle Ages entitled The
Discovery of Mankind, in which I observed the surprise of western Europeans
at their first encounters with peoples in the Canaries, the Caribbean and
Brazil, peoples whose very existence they had not suspected.10 Longer ago, I
wrote a lengthy chapter about ‘Asia, Africa and the Trade of Medieval
Europe’ for a new edition of part of the Cambridge Economic History of
Europe, at the invitation of the great economic historian Sir Michael
(‘Munia’) Postan.11 Over lunch in Peterhouse (where I observed some of its
Fellows cruelly baiting the Master, Hugh Trevor-Roper) Postan asked me
what I would be saying in my chapter about medieval Malaya. I realized that
I knew nothing about it, and started on a trail that led me via the problematic
empire of Śri Vijaya in Sumatra to early Singapore and Melaka as they are
portrayed in the remarkable Malay Annals; this interest in early south-east
Asia has never abated.
This book, written mainly in Cambridge and to a lesser extent in Oxford,
could not have been written without the facilities and companionship that
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, supplies. I am particularly grateful
to one of the college’s generous alumni, Andreas Papathomas, for the
foundation of the Papathomas Professorial Fellowship, which it is my
privilege to hold; it reflects his own interest, as a prominent shipowner, in
maritime affairs. Among the college’s many History Fellows, Sujit
Sivasundaram and Bronwen Everill have been ready with thoughts and
suggestions, and I have benefited also from many conversations with John
Casey, Ruth Scurr and K. C. Lin, and with members of the ever-lively
Sherrington Society, who listened to an early draft of parts of my Polynesian
chapters. Two Oxford colleges have very kindly opened their doors to me, for
which I am very grateful: my thanks are due to the Principals (Alan Bowman
and John Bowers) and Fellows of Brasenose College, sister college to Caius;
and to the Principals (Frances Lannon and Alan Rusbridger) and Fellows of
Lady Margaret Hall, not least Anna Sapir Abulafia, Professorial Fellow and
President of the Common Room at LMH. I am also very grateful to those
who have attended talks based on the book or concerned with my views about
how to write maritime history at (among other places) the Legatum Institute
and Erasmus Forum in London, the British Academy Soirée, the èStoria
Festival in Gorizia, the Perse School, North London Collegiate School, St
Paul’s School, the Universidade Nova in Lisbon, the University of
Greifswald (with warm thanks to Michael North), the University of Rostock,
the University of Heidelberg, John Darwin’s seminar at Oxford, the Oxford
Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Harvard University, Princeton
University, La Trobe University (Melbourne), Nanyang Technological
University and the Asiatic Museum, both in Singapore, the College of Europe
in Warsaw (with particular thanks to Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski and
Nicolas Nizowicz), and the newly founded University of Gibraltar, with
which it is a special pleasure to be closely associated, thanks to Daniella
Tilbury, its imaginative and energetic first Vice-Chancellor. On the other side
of the strait, I am grateful to the Instituto de Estudios Ceutíes in Ceuta for its
hospitality in 2015, during the conference commemorating the Portuguese
conquest of the town in 1415. Members of the Algae, a literary circle at the
Athenaeum in London, notably Colin Renfrew, Roger Knight, David
Cordingly and Felipe Fernández-Armesto, have fruitfully discussed aspects
of this book with me as it was being put together. John Guy kindly explained
the upbringing of Sir Thomas Gresham. I am also grateful to Arturo Giráldez
for advice about the Manila galleons, to Andrew Lambert for his thoughts
about the nature of sea power, to Barry Cunliffe for discussing the early
Atlantic with me, to Sidney Corcos (Jerusalem) for rich data about the Corcos
family, and to Chang Na (Nanjing) for her enthusiastic and invaluable help
with the pinyin version of Chinese names.
 Special thanks are due to those who have been of such enormous help
during my travels across the oceans, beginning with a word of praise for the
British diplomatic service in several countries. I was seated by chance next to
Steven Fisher, formerly British ambassador to the Dominican Republic, at a
dinner in Cambridge, and he urged me to visit Santo Domingo, with the
largest, oldest and best-preserved colonial quarter anywhere in the Americas;
he made contact for me with Chris Campbell, his successor, who introduced
me to Thelma de la Rosa García, a counsellor at the embassy, and she
provided outstanding support in the Dominican Republic, especially in
arranging museum visits and a very valuable meeting with Juan Rodríguez
Acosta, director of the Museo del Hombre Dominicano. Steven Fisher also
arranged for me to meet His Excellency Bernardo Vega, president of the
Academia Dominicana de História, where it was my privilege to lecture; and
he introduced me to Estebán Priete Vicioso, architect in charge of the
cathedral and other ancient buildings in Santo Domingo, who very kindly
took me around all the major sites. To all of these, as well as the delightful
staff of the magnificent Nicolás de Ovando hotel in Santo Domingo, based in
Ovando’s palace dating back to 1502, my immeasurable thanks for their
exceptional hospitality. Joe Moshenska in Cambridge provided valuable
information on the eve of my visit to Santo Domingo. I also received very
generous help during my visit to the Cape Verde Islands, thanks to the
enthusiastic support of Marie-Louise Sørensen and Chris Evans, the leaders
of the archaeological team from Cambridge that has been excavating the
earliest European church in the Tropics at Cidade Velha. José Silva Lima and
Jaylson Monteiro, from the Ministry of Culture, very kindly showed me the
World Heritage Site at Cidade Velha and the museums in Praia.
On the other side of the world, A. T. H. (Tony) Smith welcomed me to
Wellington, New Zealand, and James Kane showed me places I needed to see
in Sydney, NSW. Judge William Waung was a delightful host in Hong Kong,
showing me the splendid new maritime museum with which he has been
closely involved; my warm thanks too to Arun and Christine Nigam,
Anthony Phillips, Paul Serfaty and the Royal Geographical Society (Hong
Kong). In Singapore, Antony Phillipson, British High Commissioner,
directed me to the Fort Cannon excavations; John Miksic enlightened me
about his exciting discoveries; Patricia Welch was very hospitable during my
two visits to the city-state; Andrea Nanetti was my kind host at Nanyang
Technological University. My wife and I benefited from the limitless
hospitality of Hiroshi Takayama and his colleagues and students in Tokyo,
Kamakura, Kyoto and Nara, including Minoru Ozawa, Keizo Asaji and
Noriko Yamabe – it is difficult to express sufficient thanks when the
hospitality is so generous and gracious. The same applies to my hosts in
Shanghai, Hangzhou and Nanjing: Michelle Garnaut and the staff of the
Shanghai Literary Festival; Lu Dapeng from the Social Sciences Academic
Press; Dr Jia Min from Fudan University; Prof. Zhu Feng and Dr Chang Na
from Nanjing University; and many others.
I am particularly grateful to the Joukowsky Institute, under Peter van
Dommelen, and John Carter Brown Library, under Neil Safier, for their
welcome to Brown University in Rhode Island during November–December
2017 – for listening to my presentations and also for allowing me to spend an
all-too-brief period as a Fellow at the JCB using its superb collection of
material from the earliest days of European exploration onwards. I owe my
invitation to Brown to two very delightful hosts, Miguel-Ángel Cau
Ontiveros and Catalina Mas Florit. David González Cruz of the University of
Huelva very amiably guided me and others around the sites connected to
Columbus, including Palos and the convent of La Rábida, during a lively
conference to mark the 525th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New
World. Yasir Suleiman and Paul Anderson at the Centre for Islamic Studies
in Cambridge arranged a number of visits by a team from Cambridge to
universities in the Islamic world; particular thanks go to my fellow travellers
Alice Wilson, now at the University of Sussex, in Morocco and the UAE, and
Yonatan Mendel, then at the Centre for Jewish–Arab Relations at the Van
Leer Institute in Israel and now at the University of the Negev, in the UAE
and Qatar. The Lines from Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf are
quoted by permission of Faber and Faber.
None of this would have been possible without the support of my editor at
Penguin Books, Stuart Proffitt, and my editor at Oxford University Press
New York, Tim Bent, nor that of my agent, Bill Hamilton of A. M. Heath.
Candida Brazil has done superb work on my text, as have my copy-editor,
Mark Handsley, and proofreaders, Stephen Ryan and Chris Shaw, my picture
researcher, Cecilia Mackay, and Ben Sinyor at Penguin. I could not be in
better hands. Nor could I have written the book without the unrivalled
facilities of Cambridge University Library, and of Gonville and Caius
College Library, where special thanks are due to Mark Statham. Meanwhile
Anna has put up with all the maritime museums and bookshops that
somehow intruded into our holidays abroad. My thanks to her and my
daughters, Bianca and Rosa, are ‘as boundless as the sea’.

David Abulafia
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
8 May 2019
 Note on Transliteration and Dating

The transliteration of the names of people and places is a nightmare in a book

that covers such a long period and embraces so many cultures, as well as
changes of regime. I have tried to combine authenticity with clarity. With
Greek names, I have preferred forms closer to the original Greek sounds than
the Latinized forms long in use: Periplous for a book in Greek describing
maritime routes, rather than the bastardized form Periplus; Herodotos not
Herodotus. Old Norse names have been kept as close as possible to what is in
the sources (omitting the final -r of the nominative form); and, now that
Icelandic crime stories are widely read, I am confident people can cope with
Ɖ and ð (soft ‘th’ as in ‘that’) and Þ and þ (hard ‘th’ as in ‘thin’), valuable
letters which are a sad loss from the English alphabet. Turkish ı is a short
vowel similar to the ‘i’ in ‘sir’, c is ‘j’ and ç is ‘ch’. I have rendered
Polynesian glottal stops with a ’, though I am aware that many transcriptions
use ‘, which I have used for Arabic names to represent the guttural sound
known as ‘ayin.
Place names are particularly difficult; some have been officially changed
only in recent times, even if they have more ancient origins (Essaouira for
Mogador; Mumbai for Bombay; Sri Lanka for Ceylon; Gdansk for Danzig),
and I have sometimes switched back and forth. Where European and
indigenous names are very similar I have preferred the indigenous version, if
it is in current use: Melaka rather than Malacca, recognizing that the city
originated a hundred years before the Portuguese conquest (but one still talks
of the ‘Malacca Strait’); Macau rather than Macao. I have alternated between
New Zealand and the lovely Māori name Aotearoa (‘Long White Cloud’).
Guangzhou became known to westerners as Canton, a Portuguese corruption
of Guangdong (the name of the wider region); but it would be perverse to call
ancient Guangzhou ‘Canton’, so I have used ‘Canton’ only when writing
about the period of intensive European trade up the Pearl River. Generally, I
have done my best to use modern pinyin spelling of Chinese names, so Zheng
He instead of Cheng Ho for the famous admiral, and Quanzhou rather than
the older transliteration of Ch’üan-chou, even though the ‘q’ sound in pinyin
is closer to ‘ch’ or ‘ts’ than to ‘k’. The Korean pirate Chang Pogo is,
however, generally known by the old version of his name, which I have
preferred.
Nowadays it is quite common to find BCE and CE being used instead of BC
and AD, even though the actual date remains exactly the same. Since, for
those who do not want to use a Christian dating system, BC could stand for
‘Backward Chronology’ just as well as ‘Before Christ’, and AD could stand
for ‘Accepted Date’ instead of Anno Domini, I have retained the traditional
forms. BP, on the other hand, signifies ‘Before the Present’, and is used by
archaeologists among others, generally calculating backwards from 1950, so
not quite the ‘present’.
 Part One

T H E O L D E S T O C E A N : T H E PA C I F I C ,
176,000 BC–AD 1350
 1

The Oldest Ocean

The Pacific Ocean is far and away the largest ocean, covering a third of the
Earth’s surface, and the distance from Sumatra to the Ecuadorian shore at the
Equator is around 18,000 kilometres. Even if Polynesian sailors may, very
occasionally, have landed on the shores of South America, regular contact
between the opposing shores was non-existent before the Spaniards launched
their Manila galleons linking the Philippines to Mexico in the sixteenth
century. In the midst of the sea there lie the hundreds of islands in the dozens
of archipelagoes that make up Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia, three
broadly defined zones whose ethnic distinctiveness from one another was
much exaggerated by nineteenth-century anthropologists. Some strings of
islands, such as the Solomon Islands, are closely enough packed for the
inhabitants to be able to see or in some other way detect the presence of close
neighbours. Others, notably Easter Island (Rapa Nui), the Hawai’i islands and
New Zealand (Aotearoa) are well out of sight of the nearest landfall, and in
the last two cases some way removed from the main lines of Polynesian
navigation.
Within this vast space, however, there are extraordinary signs of unity.
Captain Cook and the natural historian Joseph Banks explored immense
tracts of the Pacific in the years around 1770, and they were intrigued to find
that the languages spoken in Hawai’i, Tahiti and New Zealand were mutually
comprehensible and that what are now called ‘Oceanic’ languages were
spoken across the whole north–south span of Polynesia. ‘It is extraordinary,’
Cook stated, ‘that the same Nation each having adopted some peculiar
custom or habit etcetera never the less a carefull observer will soon see the
Affinity each has to the other.’1 Indeed, later research showed that these
languages were related to the language now spoken in Malaysia and
Indonesia, and even to the Malagasy language of Madagascar, all forming a
large ‘Austronesian’ group of languages. Polynesian vaka or waka, the term
for a canoe, matches Malay wangka. Reconstruction of the ancestral
Austronesian language, based on a remarkably rich common vocabulary
concerned with ships and navigation, reveals that the distant ancestors of the
Polynesians were maritime folk, who spoke of canoes commanded by
captains with outriggers, platforms, masts, sails or paddles, and even carved
prows and sterns.2 That said, the eerily beautiful languages of the Pacific had
broken away from those of south-east Asia many millennia ago, suggesting a
common linguistic origin among the early settlers in the Pacific. It is
important to use the phrase ‘linguistic origin’, because language and ethnic
origins may be at odds with one another.3
 The Pacific was both the first area far from land to be settled by humans,
tens of thousands of years ago, and the last. That statement needs to be
qualified: a few small, uninhabited islands in the Atlantic and in the Indian
Ocean were settled from the fifteenth century onwards, places such as
Madeira, St Helena, Mauritius, that will be seen to have played a role out of
all proportion to their size in the maritime networks that came into existence
as the Portuguese, the Dutch and other rivals claimed dominion over the sea
routes across the world; and Antarctica, with no permanent population, can
be left out of account. But the last substantial territory to be colonized by
humans was New Zealand, whose settlement is variously dated somewhere
between AD 950 and 1350. Even though many of its original inhabitants, who
were at first concentrated on the warmer North Island, lived in the interior
away from the sea, stories about the arrival of the first canoes abounded; the
Māoris and the Hawai’ians had no doubt that they were migrants. Once
settled, the Māoris lost interest in large ocean-going seacraft and confined
their navigation to boats better suited to coastal waters. They could say little
about the place from which they had come, other than that it bore the all-too-
common name Hawaiki, a name that conveyed a sense of ‘the place where
our ancestors lived long ago’. Further north, among the chains of islands,
movement across the sea generally remained the norm. These were people
who treated the sea with the familiarity that Tuaregs might show to the
Sahara desert or Incas to the mountains of the Andes: these were all obstacles
that could be overcome, with precise knowledge, determination and
confidence.
Over several millennia an extraordinary maritime culture had come into
being, out in the middle of the ocean, lacking long shorelines, great ports and
access to long rivers bringing produce down from the inner parts of massive
continents. Instead, it was a largely interconnected world consisting of atolls,
coral reefs and volcanic islands: a very diverse world, offering very different
opportunities to those who settled, and thereby providing a great stimulus to
local and even long-distance exchange.4 These Polynesians lacked the
elaborate tools available to navigators, most importantly the art of writing.
Their knowledge was passed down orally, and yet it was extremely detailed,
very accurate and in many respects superior to the instruments of the western
navigators, such as Magellan and Cook, for whom the Pacific was a sea of
constant surprises and uncertainty. There is a simple point that sums up the
mastery over the seas accomplished by the Polynesian navigators: apart from
a northern route across the Atlantic, managed for several centuries by the
Vikings and their descendants, western European sailors did not venture deep
into their neighbourhood ocean until the end of the Middle Ages.
It is difficult to reconstruct the process of settlement. Did it occur from
west to east across the islands of the Pacific, or should we think instead of a
series of spirals that gradually encompassed the islands, creating several
distinct networks of settlement? When did the pioneers arrive? If we cannot
even date their arrival in the last territory, New Zealand, with confidence, it is
all the more difficult to do so on small islands where archaeological research
has been spasmodic, based as much on serendipity as carefully constructed
programmes of excavation. What sort of boats did the first navigators
employ? Across the Pacific there developed different types of boat, with
different shapes of sail (lateen, square, claw and the upside-down triangles
known as sprit sails). But the most challenging problem of all is why the
navigators went looking for more islands. The question is rendered more
difficult by the fact that there were phases of expansion and phases when
expansion ceased. It is also complicated by the often fiery disputes between
the experts, some of whom have tried to prove their point by getting on board
and sailing the seas in reconstructed Polynesian ships.
In this account of the settlement of the Pacific islands some substantial
territories are largely missing: Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, the islands of
Indonesia. They maintained a close relationship to the Asian mainland and
formed the outer edges of what might be described as little Mediterraneans,
the Japan Sea and Yellow Sea in the north, and the South China Sea (which
has often been compared to the Mediterranean) in the south. Another
territory, the Australian continent, was inhabited by people some of whom
used the sea as a source of food, and who greatly respected the sea, but made
no known attempts to venture across the waves once they had settled in their
arid continent. The main concern here is with the open ocean, with
communities scattered over Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia who
inhabited small islands, New Zealand apart, and whose remoteness was
generally no barrier to lively interaction across hundreds and even thousands
of miles.

II

The antiquity of navigation across the Pacific is demonstrated by the arrival

of humans in Australia. The distances involved were smaller than nowadays,
because sea levels were much lower between 140,000 and 18,000 years ago,
while much water was locked in northern ice floes and glaciers. At one
extreme, the sea level stood 100 metres lower than present levels, but within
that time frame it rose and fell, so at some points it was only about twenty
metres lower than nowadays.5 During this era, the Pleistocene, the
Australian continent encompassed the whole of New Guinea and Tasmania;
but it remained isolated from continental Asia (which included Java) by
stretches of open sea dotted with islands that have been given the name
Wallacea, after Darwin’s illustrious contemporary. This separation, which
took place 40,000,000 years ago, ensured that animal species unique to
Australia continued to flourish there, especially marsupial mammals. There
was a sort of island bridge linking south-east Asia (named Sunda by the
geologists) to Sahul (Australia and New Guinea), and it included the small
island of Flores. Here we encounter the first great enigma. In 2003
archaeologists excavating a cave shelter on Flores discovered the remains of
several early humans, dating very roughly to the second half of the low-water
period and possibly several centuries later; more recent discoveries suggest
that other early hominids reached as far as the Philippines.6 These people
were very small, a little over a metre in height, and their brain capacity was
no greater than that of a chimpanzee. However, other physical features make
it clear that they were an early form of human. Their small size was most
probably the result of adaptation to the restricted diet of the island, similar to
the dwarfism found in other species across the world that have lived in
challenging environments. If that is so (and that is only one if) they probably
descended from earlier, taller hominids who had managed to reach Flores
before about 100,000 BC; but since then, and ever after, the island has been
isolated from ‘Sunda’ and the Asian mainland by a stretch of sea. Setting
aside the speculations of nineteenth-century theorists that the inhabitants of
the Pacific were a separate creation of mankind by God, we are left with
evidence that early humans crossed the sea, by whatever means we can only
guess. It has also been suggested that the Flores humans (unkindly
nicknamed ‘hobbits’ by the press) co-existed with modern humans on the
island around 12,000 BC, and that memories of these little people survive in
folk tales; but such folk tales are so widespread in every human society that it
is hard to believe they are credible. The evidence is further complicated by
the contemporary survival on Flores and in parts of the Philippines of
stegodons (animals related to elephants) which seem to have reached these
places by swimming across the sea. Flores remains a mystery.
That modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) reached further still more
than 60,000 years ago is clear from discoveries right across New Guinea,
Australia and Tasmania (then joined to Australia). There are finds of axes
from northern New Guinea that can be shown to be 40,000–60,000 years
old.7 In 2017 Australian archaeologists announced the discovery of a rock
shelter in northern Australia that contained implements dating back to 65,000
years ago, and wondered whether there was interaction between what seem to
be the first Australian members of Homo sapiens and other types of human
who could still be found in east Asia, notably the mysterious Denisovans,
who are thought to have been similar to but different from the European
Neanderthals.8 There is therefore no doubt that the original Aborigines (very
possibly the ancestors of the modern ones) arrived on the continent more than
60,000 years ago; and they must have done so by crossing spaces of over a
hundred miles of open sea, often finding themselves out of sight of land.9
Archaeologists sometimes express surprise and puzzlement at the idea that
early humans of the sapiens type could have turned into sailors. But it is not
at all surprising; as humans, of various types, moved out of Africa to colonize
much of the world by land they had to cross rivers, and used the skills learned
on rivers to cross lakes; and having learned about lakes seas were a
challenge, but one that could be met. Short sea journeys taken by the first
humans to move eastwards on the route out of Africa may well have included
a crossing of the Red Sea near Aden and a crossing of the Persian Gulf near
Hormuz. These early humans had plenty of mental equipment, which they
turned to good use in establishing that extraordinary mastery over nature that
the Australian Aborigines still possess. It makes more sense to insist on that
ability than to speculate about the types of boats these travellers might have
used; bamboo, logs, bark boats, reed boats and much else have been
suggested, but no archaeological evidence has been found, which is hardly
surprising; if any remains survive from the very earliest journeys they lie on
the long-submerged coast of the Sahul continent.10 So the best answer is that
in 65,000 years of travel boat designs must have changed, and that in any
case boats would have been adapted to appropriate conditions; sails might
have been developed where wind was a vital factor in reaching a place, but
not when inter-island navigation was possible in calm waters within sight of
land.11
When looking at the relationship between the original inhabitants of
Australia and the sea several considerations have to be borne in mind. One is
that exploitation of the coastline for food, whether that involves fishing from
boats or foraging on beaches, does not provide proof of longer-distance travel
across the sea and of the making of connections with other communities,
either elsewhere in Australia or on islands beyond its shores. Another is that
the use of modern evidence, such as Aboriginal opinions about the nature of
the sea, though unavoidable, is very problematic. Tribes have moved around;
physical conditions have changed; Aboriginal technology has also changed,
as the people of the land have adapted themselves to local conditions, and as
contact with Europeans has radically (and often disastrously) transformed
daily life, inherited knowledge and social attitudes.
At various times the Australian interior was more hospitable to life than it
is now, and the earliest settlers headed inland, looking for fresh water;
Aboriginal tribes began to colonize the coastlines rather later, about 30,000
years ago at most, judging from current archaeological evidence; no site older
than around 33,000 BC has been found on the coast. The continent remained
very lightly populated; there was apparently no pressure to occupy coastal
land, because food was readily available elsewhere. Shells found at cave sites
a little way into the interior show how links were forged between coastal
settlements and the population of inner Australia; but these shells almost
certainly came as ornaments rather than food, and early sites close to the
coast often reveal a diet based as much, or much more, on local fauna such as
wallabies, rather than fish.12 But the interior became increasingly arid, and
living on the coast became more attractive; stone fish traps found in the
Kimberley region, on the north coast of Western Australia, have been dated
to a maximum of 3,500 years ago, but there is every reason to argue that
these are the lineal descendants of earlier fish traps that were widely used
along the Australian coast.13
These fish traps were a common feature of life in the Torres Strait Islands,
the chain of islands between Australia and New Guinea. Nowadays it is
standard usage in Australia to speak of ‘the Aboriginal peoples and the
Torres Strait islanders’, recognizing the distinct status, origin and culture of
the people of these islands, whose technology has long been more advanced
than that of the Australian Aborigines: more Neolithic than Old Stone Age.
Ethnically, they are closer to the peoples of Papua New Guinea and
Melanesia, and in recent times at least cultural influences from New Guinea
have been profound, including myths, rituals and technology. In the Torres
Strait, groups of people could be found who operated very different
economies: some who depended on small-scale agriculture, and others who
were ‘saltwater people’, making extensive use of the sea, including voyages
back and forth between islands and to the coasts of both New Guinea and
Australia, setting out in dugout canoes with outriggers and sails.14 Some of
these influences from the north were then transmitted along the north-east
coast of Australia to Aboriginal peoples living by the sea: masks and
headdresses of types familiar from Papua New Guinea were being used along
the shoreline when the first Europeans explored what is now known as
Queensland, and other borrowings may have included types of harpoon and
fish hook. In modern times, fish and sea creatures such as turtles and dugongs
completely dominate the diet of the Torres Strait islanders, supplying about
two thirds of a kilo per day, on average. Saltwater people using bark boats
went out into the open sea to catch pelagic fish, that is, fish that live near the
surface of the sea. They developed trading links with their neighbours, which
can be traced back with certainty to around AD 1650 when Indonesian
merchants from Macassar became regular visitors; however, all the signs are
that this was a much more ancient connection, and that as a result of wider
contacts some Aboriginal peoples such as the Yolŋu (roughly pronounced
Yol-ngu) knew a little about the world beyond their coastline.15
In the Torres Strait, on the island of Mer – which, according to one legend,
was a giant dugong who lay down in the middle of the sea and became land –
evidence abounds that this area had become a trading station at the centre of a
lively network of maritime trade, certainly 2,000 years ago but almost
certainly in the much more distant past as well.16 The bones of dogs, rats,
dugongs, turtles and of many types of fish provide part of the proof that the
rich resources of the sea were fully exploited, but a bone pipe dating to
around AD 1 indicates wider trading links. The islanders appear to have
developed outrigger canoes that made contact across the sea safe and regular.
Their style of boat influenced the design of canoes along the coast of
Queensland.17 The islands of the Torres Strait, then, and their sea-based
population, formed a sea bridge between the cultures of prehistoric Melanesia
and those of northern Australia which, thanks to the sea, were not as isolated
from the outside world as is easily assumed. The Torres Strait islanders were
venturesome sailors, but others were much more cautious in their dealings
with the open sea. One Aboriginal people in Australia insist that the sea is
alive and that it has angry moods during which it is likely to kill people:
‘when you are on the sea you mustn’t say anything bad about it. Not criticise
it. Because the sea is alive, like a person. So you must respect it.’18 On
Croker Island, not far from Darwin in the Northern Territory, the Aborigines
claim that the great Rainbow Serpent inhabits the seabed and has to be
placated through special rituals, because the serpent will use the sea to kill
and maim. In the same region, the Yanyuwa people describe themselves as
‘people who originate in the sea’,19 and their boats, like the sea, became
animate. Humans could impregnate their boats with magical power by
singing ‘power songs’ that would calm the sea and that would stay inside the
boat, as if it possessed its own soul.20
It was to the north of New Guinea that really striking changes would occur,
with the colonization of the Pacific islands. Some islands off the north coast
of New Guinea were colonized 35,000 years ago. The Solomon Islands were
being visited 29,000 years ago, and raiders from New Guinea remained a
threat to Solomon islanders over the centuries.21 The Admiralty Islands were
settled 13,000 years ago, if not earlier, and these involved a sea journey of
nearly 100 miles, including navigation out of sight of land. One site, on Buka
in the Solomon Islands, yielded evidence that the diet of the settlers around
26,000 BC included fish and shellfish as well as mammals and lizards.22 But
man cannot live by fish alone, and the availability of one vital necessity was
counterbalanced by the lack of other necessities. Sometimes there was no
hard stone suitable for cutting. In that case it was necessary to obtain obsidian
or another prime cutting stone from further afield. Although the distance is
not great, obsidian from New Britain has been found on New Ireland, both in
the vicinity of New Guinea, and assigned a date of 20,000 BP (‘Before the
Present’). There are plenty of doubters, however. It has been suggested that
times of low sea levels are precisely the times when there is no incentive to
cross the sea, because there is more land to colonize. When the sea level
rises, the land shrinks and people go in search of new land.23 But all this is
speculation. We simply do not know.

III

The name given to the culture that spread across vast tracts of the prehistoric
Pacific is ‘Lapita’. Amid all the speculation it is no surprise to find that this is
not the name any people gave to themselves, but the name of the
archaeological site where their distinctive culture was first identified. An
extraordinary feature of Lapita culture is its spread. No other prehistoric
culture embraces such a large geographical area, in this case including both
the Solomon Islands, which had been settled very early, and islands as remote
as Fiji and Samoa.24 The vast majority of the islands where Lapita settlers
arrived were virgin territory, far beyond the range of the earliest Austronesian
navigators. That is not to say that the Lapita navigators were the descendants
of the earliest Austronesian settlers who had ventured beyond New Guinea
millennia earlier. The genetic identity of the Lapita people remains uncertain,
and the best answer is that they consisted of a mix of peoples of various
origins who gave rise to the varied populations of Polynesia and much of
Melanesia; the uniformity of their culture was not necessarily backed by
uniformity in their appearance, and woolly-haired Melanesians and straight-
haired Polynesians (those are already generalizations taken too far)
participated in a single culture. Rather, this culture seems to have had an
initial focal point in the western Pacific, probably in Taiwan, where the
language of the indigenous population is related to those spoken across
Oceania; and later on it was disseminated outwards from newer focal points
deeper in the Pacific, notably Samoa. Taiwan was itself home to a lively
prehistoric culture in the third millennium BC, and pottery found in the
northern Moluccas is strikingly similar to that of the Polynesian Lapita,
suggesting ancestral links to the inhabitants of the islands off the south-east
coast of Asia. As speakers of Austronesian languages mixed with the
population along and off the coast of New Guinea, an ethnically mixed
population came into being, whose varied origins are reflected in their DNA.
The route they took, over many centuries, therefore began in the Bismarck
archipelago before they spread eastwards through the Solomons.25
Lapita represents a change of gear in oceanic expansion. Until about 1500
BC local exchanges between islands are easily provable from fragments of
obsidian, the sharp-edged volcanic glass that was traded between islands, in
return for what it is hard to say – probably foodstuffs, but even the term
‘trade’ must be used with caution; people may simply have gone out to
volcanic islands to collect the material off the beaches. The Lapita folk
brought pottery, which is their distinctive archaeological ‘signature’, and they
brought animals for which there is no earlier evidence in the islands, notably
pigs, dogs and domestic birds.26 They also brought Pacific rats, and the
bones of these stowaways can be used to date the arrival of navigators in
islands across much of the Pacific; here again the evidence strongly indicates
gradual movement from west to east.27 In broad terms, they were a Neolithic
(‘New Stone Age’) people or group of peoples, familiar with agriculture,
stock-rearing and ceramics.28 Farming transformed the environment of one
island after another, as land was cleared for agriculture and as local species of
birds were hunted, eaten and driven to extinction; the most famous case,
much later, would be the giant moa birds of New Zealand, but there were
local crocodiles and giant iguanas that proved unable to resist human
conquest.
On the other hand, the settlers proved to be experts in agronomy, for they
transformed the often limited resources of islands in Remote Oceania (the
area around Fiji and Samoa) that were so isolated that they offered few fruits
and none of the tubers which provided the staple starch in their diet. Twenty-
eight species of plant have been identified that were brought across the ocean
by the Lapita people: bananas, breadfruit, sugar cane, yams, coconuts, wild
ginger and bamboo were some of the most significant, though different types
of island were suited to different types of plant – yams flourished best in
Melanesia. (Another arrival was the sweet potato, apparently from South
America, which raises the question of whether Polynesian navigators at some
stage reached the opposite side of the Pacific.) The proto-Oceanic
vocabulary, reconstructed by philologists, offers words for planting, weeding,
harvesting and the mounds under which yams were grown, once again
suggesting that the horticultural traditions of the Lapita went far back in time
to the days when their ancestors lived in Taiwan.29 The arrival of plants from
places further west suggests that the voyages eastwards were indeed
colonizing ventures, and were not accidental discoveries by lost navigators
stranded on desert islands, a question to which it will be necessary to return.
The movement of the Lapita peoples across the ocean may not seem rapid.
One estimate for the time taken to reach western Polynesia from the
Bismarck archipelago is 500 years. Yet this may only represent twenty
generations, which in the larger scheme of things makes this expansion quite
fast, even, in the timescale of prehistorians, explosive.
The motives behind this movement of people are hard to fathom. One
historian of Polynesian navigation, David Lewis, identified a spirit of
adventure – a ‘restless urge’ – among Polynesians, citing the Raiateans from
Tahiti, who would go voyaging for several months, touring the islands of that
part of the ocean. They were observed by Joseph Banks, Captain Cook’s
scientific companion, so the evidence is late and somewhat circumstantial.
David Lewis also pointed to the ‘proud self-respect’ of the navigators, a pride
that would prompt sailors to set out to sea in bad weather if, for instance, they
saw that the natives of an island they were visiting were taking to the sea,
even just to fish. This idea fits well with the concepts of honour and shame of
which anthropologists studying these ocean societies have written. Viking-
style raids between islands have also been postulated; one could imagine a
first phase during which the raiders took away coconuts, obsidian and
breadfruit that they found on deserted islands; then, following settlement,
inter-island wars were certainly common.30 But these cases suit a world
already partly settled; the question here is how and why the settlement
occurred in the first place. Overpopulation might seem the obvious choice,
but there is not enough evidence to suggest dense settlement of the western
islands and intolerable pressure on resources.31
As the settlers moved further eastwards, they left behind diseases brought
millennia ago from New Guinea and eastern Asia, such as malaria – unsullied
island habitats are often healthy, and offer a long life expectancy. But the
longer people live and the healthier they are, the greater number of children
they can expect to have, with a better chance of survival to adulthood. In such
an environment younger children might take part in migration almost as a
matter of course, on the proven assumption that there were plenty of places to
settle out in the ocean. The Polynesians set great store by genealogies,
emphasizing the rights of eldest children, while sibling rivalry is a constant
feature of Polynesian legends, suggesting that younger sons were well
advised to keep on the move till they found a new homestead.32 One idea is
that the early Polynesians were primarily dependent on what the sea offered –
‘ocean foragers’ – and that the search for the produce of the sea brought them
further and further out into the ocean, followed by the development of
farming settlements as the pioneers bedded down in their new homes. In
‘Remote Oceania’ their seafood diet included not just oysters, clams and
cowries but turtles, eels, parrot fish and sharks; most of this fishy diet came
from the edges of the reefs or from even closer to shore. There is no evidence
of short-term camps as voyagers squatted in islands; they arrived in new
places and they created homes there; and they preferred to live on the shore,
carefully choosing sites that offered access to the open sea through gaps in
the reefs that surrounded many of the islands. There they built wooden
houses on stilts, a type of house widely dispersed throughout the
Austronesian world. This was not a sudden invasion of strings of uninhabited
islands, but a process of steady expansion eastwards (not necessarily in a
straight line).33
The pottery evidence is so remarkable because it shows clearly that this
was a single culture with regional variations. The pottery was handmade,
without the use of a wheel, and without kilns, meaning it was probably fired
out in the open. Here we have a common ‘dentate’ style, where pots were
often stamped with a tooth-shaped instrument, and intricate patterns were
created with great artistry. These patterns have been seen as a sort of
vocabulary, conveying messages now lost; there were also local variations in
the pottery styles, and the most striking fragments to have survived show
incised human faces, or at least features such as eyes. Possibly these
represent gods or ancestors, and the designs may have been similar to those
used in tattooing, which was widespread (tattooing instruments have turned
up in excavations). The spread of this pottery through ‘Remote Oceania’
provides vital clues about the arrival of the first humans on islands deep
within the Pacific. The inhabitants of the Bismarck archipelago were making
Lapita-style pots around 1500 BC. Over the next century or so the pottery
reached ‘Near Oceania’ (Vanuatu, Kiribati and neighbouring island chains).
By 1200 BC it was being produced in Samoa. Interestingly, only the oldest
pottery from Fiji shows such concern for intricate decoration. Was this art
lost over a generation or two? Did the decoration lose its significance,
particularly in new societies which were not yet part of networks of
reciprocal exchange? Oddly, as the Lapita people moved still further
eastwards they brought their plants and animals, and their knowledge of
navigation, but eventually lost interest in pottery entirely.34
There was a single culture; but was there a shared culture? Chemical
analysis of the clay proves that pots were carried from island to island,
though no doubt some were moved around the Pacific simply as utensils
containing the food navigators needed; many undecorated pots would have
been suitable for use as containers for sago flour, which kept well and
provided ideal nutrition for navigators. Care needs to be taken with the
assumption that the movement of these goods and other items such as
obsidian and chert (the class of rock that includes flint) adds up to ‘trade’.
Trade might be defined as the systematic exchange of goods, for which a
notional though generally variable value is set. In Pacific island societies, as
the great ethnographer Bronisław Malinowski showed, the exchange of goods
was not simply concerned with commercial acquisition; reciprocal exchange
was a means by which individuals established their place in the social and
political pecking order, a way of establishing claims to leadership and of
emphasizing who was a client to whom.35 This would be even truer of
societies that experienced plenty, as these island communities generally did;
and yet there were certainly foodstuffs and tools, most notably cutting
implements and adzes, that were not to be found on coral atolls and that
needed to be obtained over the water. The closer one looks at this world, the
more connected it appears to be.
An example from the western end of the Lapita world provides rich
evidence. Talepakemalai lies on the northern edge of the Bismarck
archipelago. The history of this village can be traced over five or even seven
centuries, beginning halfway through the second millennium BC. At that
point, early in Lapita history, obsidian arrived from islands not far away, as
well as adzes and chert for making tools, plus pottery from twelve sources,
not all identifiable but all distinct in the composition of their clay. Meanwhile
the islanders were adept at making fish hooks, and also decorative jewellery
consisting of beads, rings and other objects created out of shell.
Archaeologists therefore speculate that some sort of exchange network linked
Talepakemalai to a series of island communities in western Near Oceania.
Yet by the first millennium the early expansion had slowed, a process
mirrored in the contraction (or ‘regionalization’) of this part of the Lapita
world. This could reflect a greater degree of autarky, that is to say, less need
to rely on neighbours for certain types of goods, which could now be
produced locally. The local economy perhaps strengthened, but what the
archaeologists tend to see is less evidence for external links, which gives the
illusion of Lapita decline. This may have some bearing on a phenomenon to
be observed in a moment, the long interval between the Lapita expansion and
a new phase of exploration and settlement in the first millennium AD.36
We know very little about Lapita boats. One or two rock carvings offer
clues to the shape of sails (including an interesting ‘claw’ shape, with a
roughly triangular profile, but with a concave top line); but much depends on
the Austronesian words reconstructed by philologists, because nothing of the
original boats survives in the archaeological record. Broadly, we can
conceive of sailing vessels with outriggers, similar to those used in later
centuries; some may have been catamarans, though double canoes of this sort
seem to have developed mainly in Remote Oceania, around Fiji. By modern
times the variety of boats was considerable, but they conform to a common
type: sailing vessels whose builders paid close attention to their stability.37 It
was understood that a single hull did not suit small boats in high seas.
Polynesian boats were hard to topple; and those that set out for new lands
must have been large enough to carry men, women, supplies of food and
water (often stored in bamboo tubes), domestic animals and seeds or tubers
ready for planting in new lands. Those heading for familiar territory evidently
carried goods to be exchanged, such as ceramics, local produce of the soil,
and tools or blocks of stone for making into tools. No doubt there was great
variety, though some features, such as the use of vegetable fibres to tie
together the components, were probably standard. These bonds, made of
coconut fibre, were strong and resilient, and rendered the hull more secure
because of the flexibility they offered.
Navigators had to face strong challenges. The most obvious were the
easterly winds. Colonization of the Pacific occurred in the face of the wind
rather than as a result of happy accidents as sailors were caught in the wind
and carried to unknown islands. The trade winds and the currents all point
westwards; the trade winds cross the Lapita area of settlement from south-
east to north-west, forming a coherent band that matches quite well the Lapita
area. The Pacific currents consist of four main trans-Pacific movements: a
southern current lying away from all the islands; the South Equatorial Current
heading westwards with a slight southward inclination; and above the
Equator two contrary currents that separate Hawai’i from the rest of the
Polynesian world. Looking at the South Equatorial Current, as with the
winds, the broad shape of movement from Samoa westwards very roughly
coincides with the zone of Lapita settlement. Evidently, Polynesian
navigators perfected the art of sailing against the wind; they needed to ensure
that they could return from their explorations, and the best way to do that was
to challenge the winds and currents, tacking back and forth, moving slowly
but securely.
As they developed these techniques over many centuries, they also learned
the art of dead reckoning, judging distance as they sailed to gain some sense
of longitude; they appear to have found this easier to do than European
sailors, who had to await the invention of the chronometer in the eighteenth
century to be sure of their longitude. Tupaia, a Polynesian navigator who
accompanied Captain Cook, astonished Cook’s companions by his almost
instinctive awareness of where the ship stood, without instruments or written
records. The Polynesian navigators proved that one can solve some
challenging problems without any technology at all, just the super-computer
of the human brain.38 As for latitude, much easier to judge, they observed
the stars: ‘to travel between the south of the main Solomons and the Santa
Cruz group was as simple as following a zenith star path – east or west – with
the seasonal winds.’39 Knowing the stars was the key to successful
navigation. This was not casual knowledge but a science learned during a
long apprenticeship, through practical experience and by way of an elaborate
oral tradition; it was a secret science, intended for carefully chosen initiates
who would be able to navigate the boats while the rest of the crew performed
more humdrum tasks.
Even in the 1930s these methods were taught to boys, beginning at the age
of five, as the story of a celebrated sailor from the Carolinas named Piailug
reveals. Once his grandfather decided that the boy should become a
navigator, he had to spend his time listening to stories of the sea and
acquiring information about the science of navigation. His grandfather
assured him that as a navigator he would be better than a chieftain, would eat
better food than others and would be respected throughout society. By the age
of twelve he was travelling the ocean with his grandfather, and he began to
master the secrets of the sea – the movement of birds, the changing map of
the stars, but also magical lore. All this was committed to memory, leading to
a full initiation around the age of sixteen which involved a month of
seclusion during which his teachers bombarded him with the knowledge he
needed. He had no use for written texts, but he made models out of sticks and
stones that he could memorize and rebuild, when the time came to instruct
the next generation in the art of navigation.40 In the Carolinas, navigators
would prepare a sidereal compass, a chart of the key points in the night sky,
which in modern times they greatly preferred to a magnetic compass; in other
parts of the Pacific similar compass-type charts were constructed out of sticks
and stones to show wind direction or the movement of the sun across the
sky.41
The Polynesians did not necessarily require a compass of any sort. There is
the story of a schooner captain who lost his compass overboard and
confessed to his Polynesian crew that he was lost. They told him not to
worry, and took him where he wanted to go. Puzzled by the ease with which
they had achieved this, he asked how they knew where the island was.
‘Why,’ they replied, ‘it has always been there.’42 The extraordinary
confidence Polynesian navigators possessed in their methods can also be
judged from an interview with a navigator from the Marshall Islands
conducted in 1962: ‘we older Marshallese people navigate our boats both by
feel and by sight, but I think it is knowing the feel of the vessel that is the
most important.’ He explained that a practised navigator would have no
difficulty sailing in daytime or at night, and that it was important to take
proper account of the movement of the waves:

by the boat motion and the wave pattern a Marshallese sailor who has
been trained in this kind of navigation may know if he is thirty miles,
twenty or ten, or even closer, to an atoll or island. He also knows if he
has lost his way, and by looking for a certain joining of the waves, he
will be able to get back on course.43

In cloudy weather, any break in the clouds at night-time had to be exploited

immediately; but there were other signs, such as the swell of the sea, that a
practised navigator could use to identify where the boat was heading. There
were plenty of additional signs, various combinations of which made a
landfall a certainty. Land could be detected through the flight of birds such as
terns coming out to sea to feed. Their range from land was known; the
direction they came in the morning and returned at night was the best
possible clue to where land lay. Other signs included cloud formations, which
might change colour, reflecting the land that lay underneath (coral atolls
would cast an opal tinge on the cloud above). Phosphorescent patches in the
sea were a further sign that land was near. Increasing amounts of flotsam
generally suggested land.44 The very smell of the sea air would help guide a
sailor to a known haven.45 It was important to compensate for currents and
wind, making use of the sun by day and the stars by night to adjust course as
appropriate. One of the most extraordinary methods of navigation was what
might be called the Polynesian Theory of Relativity, a system known in the
Carolina Islands as etak. Here, the assumption was that the boat remained
still and the rest of the world moved. Judgements therefore had to be made
about how the position of the islands altered in relation to the boat – a
relationship not just between the boat and its destination, but between the
destination and another island in the vicinity; the method depended on
placing this third point accurately in relation to the stars. This was not
perhaps Einstein; but it involved some powerful mental geometry, not to
mention an astonishingly detailed, carefully memorized, mobile map of the
heavens.46
It is therefore completely wrong to conclude that without writing there can
be no exact science, even if the navigational science of the Polynesians had a
good share of incantations, magical practices and invocation of the gods. The
extraordinary understanding that Polynesian sailors developed of the sea and
its whims, and the increasing evidence that they settled the islands in the face
of the winds rather than by being blown towards landfalls, has significant
implications in explaining the voyages. Much ink has been spilled contesting
the apparently plausible views of Andrew Sharp, whose book Ancient
Voyagers in the Pacific, first presented to the Polynesian Society in 1956,
insisted that those who found new land by and large did so by accident, when
they were blown off course or otherwise lost. Sharp did not challenge the
argument that Polynesian sailors were exceptionally skilled, but he did
underestimate their remarkable abilities.47 What Sharp really demonstrated
was something else: we still do not really know why the Lapita people and
their successors, including the Māoris, settled one territory after another
across the vast expanse of ocean. We can say with some confidence how it
was done, and more or less at what periods it was done (though, even there,
there is forceful disagreement). Why they kept on the move is a topic for
speculation.
The period of rapid Lapita expansion reached a climax around 1000 BC
when Vanuatu and the Fijian islands were settled. This involved ambitious
journeys well out of sight of land, particularly to reach Fiji; there were a few
more stepping stones on the route eastwards that led the Polynesians to
Samoa and Tonga. The Lapita had reached the limits of their expansion, and
had created a series of networks across about 4,500 kilometres of the Pacific,
in a great arc from New Guinea to Tonga.48 Just as great a mystery as the
origins of Lapita expansion is its cessation for up to a millennium. Was this
because Polynesian boats were unable to venture on to the vast tracts of open
ocean separating Lapita lands from Hawai’i, New Zealand and Easter Island?
The problem with this argument is that Lapita sailors had already managed to
reach Fiji and Samoa, well out in the ocean.49 These were very skilled and
imaginative navigators, and it is hard to believe that they were incapable of
adapting their already impressively durable boats to face stormier seas.
Overpopulation was apparently not a strain on them. A fine ecological
balance had been achieved, despite the radical replanting of large tracts of
soil on the islands. The problem with materialistic explanations is that
migration in many parts of the world has often been stimulated by religious
beliefs that are impossible to recover so far back in time. Supposing for the
moment that the Polynesian explorers were guided by a religious imperative
to seek the rising sun (an argument for which, admittedly, there is hardly
even circumstantial evidence), then cultural fashions could have changed as
religious ideas altered. Once the cult of local ancestors developed strongly, a
greater sense of being rooted in the island where one lived would act as a
brake on further expansion – though not, as it turned out, indefinitely.
 2

Songs of the Navigators

Pacific navigation revived by the fifth century AD. Why this should have
happened is as uncertain as why it had ceased in the late Lapita period. A link
to the so-called Little Climatic Optimum has been suggested, but this does
not quite fit the chronology, which suggests a revival of navigation at least a
couple of centuries earlier. Rising sea levels during warmer weather might
have made life difficult on low-lying islands with plantations by the shore,
stimulating migration.1 Only in the millennium after about AD 300 did
settlement expand north and south, and much further west, into areas of
varied climate and resources, as far as Hawai’i in the north and New Zealand
in the south. During this phase Tahiti and the Society Islands were one focus
of settlement, beginning around AD 600, if evidence from domesticated
coconuts on the island of Mo’orea is given full credit; however, the earliest
inhabited sites on these islands that have actually been discovered date from
somewhere between 800 and 1200, although many earlier sites may be under
water as the coastline has altered.2
The journey northwards from Tahiti or the Marquesas to Hawai’i may have
taken three to four weeks, and winds blowing in various directions had to be
managed: first east to west, then west to east, and finally east to west again.
Attempts to mimic the Polynesian voyages during the 1970s, led by Ben
Finney in the canoe Hokule’a, showed that the journey was manageable.
Finney, along with the New Zealander Jeff Evans, has been a pioneer in
reconstructing traditional boat types and in encouraging the Polynesians to
take an interest in their ancient navigational skills, and his experimental
voyages are taken seriously.3 A more difficult question is whether the
Hawai’i archipelago was settled immediately after discovery by a group of
migrants bringing plants and animals, including pigs and dogs, as in the
island chains further south. It cannot be assumed that the settlement of
Hawai’i, a whole group of islands, was a single event; different islands may
have been colonized at different times, sometimes from neighbouring islands
in the archipelago, and sometimes from the island chains much further south,
around Tahiti and Samoa.
The Hawai’ian islands cannot have been discovered by accident; the winds
simply do not permit an accidental arrival from, say, Samoa.4 People had
gone in search of new islands, and they now ranged far from those with
which they were already familiar. This must have tested their navigational
abilities to the limit. They no longer had sight of such night-time star guides
as the Southern Cross. Once they were in the northern hemisphere they had
entered what was for them a new world. Oral traditions told of discoveries
and of journeys back to the starting point to carry the news that there was
new land to settle. These oral traditions are full of fascinating information
about navigation and even some remembered history, but how well that
history was remembered, amid many miraculous accretions, including giant
octopuses, is a moot point.
A distinction began to emerge between two basic types of society in
Polynesia, the so-called open societies, in which a variety of different groups,
including warriors and priests, competed for power and land, and what are
called stratified societies, of which early Tahiti and Hawai’i are good
examples, where there was much less fluidity and a clearly defined elite
emerged, with power concentrated in the hands of hereditary chieftains. On
Tahiti and its close neighbours in the Society Islands the chieftains expected
tribute payments of food and bark-cloth; they expressed their power through
their intimate ties to the war god Oro, a relationship they sealed by acts of
human sacrifice.5 Around AD 1200, the Tahitians began to build terraces and
to lay out orchards where they cultivated breadfruit. They built storage pits
for the breadfruit. They also constructed stone temples with platforms, or
marae, that stood right by the ocean and sometimes jutted out into it. War
canoes would set out from the marae, and a new chieftain would arrive by
boat for his installation. These were societies wedded to the sea. Chieftains
from some of the less well-endowed islands to the east preyed on the richer
central islands, and managed to extract tribute from them. Leadership in war,
celebrated in the cult of Oro, consolidated the hold of chieftains from the
lesser isles over neighbouring territories. Little maritime empires came into
being, and chieftaincies were by no means confined to a single island or part
of one. Tension between chieftains, and in particular between their sons,
would explain the urge to go and seek new lands, without quite explaining
why the new burst of colonization occurred when it did. Arriving in already
populated islands could, however, be dangerous: in some places it was
apparently the custom to kill newcomers the moment they were found.6
 II

The deep interest understandably shown by American archaeologists in the

ancient history of the fiftieth state in the Union is matched by a profusion of
evidence from the archipelago. There is the archaeological evidence; but
there is also the evidence, hard though it is to assess, of elaborate oral
traditions recorded in the nineteenth century, at a time when reading and
writing had become a passion among the Hawai’ians – this was the result of
energetic Christian missionary activity, and for a time resulted in higher
literacy than in the United States.7 Moreover, the islands have attracted
attention because organized hierarchical states came into existence without
parallel in the Polynesian world.8 The Polynesian settlers found a paradise:
whereas each of the atolls and reefs of the island chains of the south Pacific
had an individual character, marked by limitations on what could be
produced in often unpromising soils, Hawai’i was a veritable garden, well
endowed with volcanic soil, though with some variety between the islands.
Evidence from O’ahu shows that settlement was under way along the
shoreline by 800, though the first arrivals may have occurred several
centuries earlier, suggesting that this was not a one-off settlement that then
grew prodigiously. Particularly eloquent, if that is the right word, are the rat
bones from O’ahu and elsewhere. Pacific rats could only have arrived in such
remote places by travelling as stowaways, or possibly as a live food reserve,
on Polynesian canoes. Many rat bones have been found in sinkholes dated to
somewhere between AD 900 and 1200.9
It is generally agreed that these settlers came from the Marquesas Islands,
because of similarities between the tools used in both places, notably adzes
and fish hooks, though contacts were probably flowing both ways, so it is
hard to be sure who influenced whom, and a new style of fish hook adopted
around 1200 indicates links with the area around Tahiti. It will be seen that
oral tradition spoke of close links to Tahiti and the Society Islands, at least in
the fourteenth century. So we can think of settlers converging from two main
directions, whether or not one group had heard of the discovery of the islands
by the other group. Among the tales about early voyages that were still being
related in nineteenth-century Hawai’i, two stand out, even though the
assumed date of the events is some point in the fourteenth century AD. These
dates depend on calculations of generations that are, to put it mildly,
approximate. Hawai’ian narrators were not interested in exact dates. They
measured time by the names of the rulers, and inevitably some reigns were
longer than others. The tales told of voyages across vast swathes of the
Pacific, reflecting an era before Hawai’i became closed off from the rest of
Oceania.
One story begins on the outer island of O’ahu, where the ruler Muli’eleali
tried to divide his section of the island among his three sons, in the same way
that he had inherited one third of O’ahu from his own father. But the obvious
problem was that generation by generation there was less land on which to
subsist. His two youngest sons therefore rebelled and were sent into exile,
moving to the larger island of Hawai’i itself. They introduced new methods
of irrigation that had been developed on O’ahu in order to cultivate staple
root vegetables (notably taro), but a combination of hurricanes and floods
wrecked their work, and they decided that they had had enough of the
Hawai’ian islands; they would return to the land of their ancestors, a place
called Kahiki. If there is any truth in the story, they sailed their double canoe
to what is now south-western Tahiti, an area with striking cultural similarities
to Hawai’i: the Taputapuatea temple in this part of Tahiti bears an identical
name to the Kapukapuakea temple in northern O’ahu, allowing for a sound
shift that converted t to k in the Hawai’ian dialects (so Kahiki is a Hawai’ian
version of Tahiti). One of the brothers then decided he was homesick and
returned north, where he made a very successful marriage to a chieftain’s
daughter and found himself appointed a paramount chief of Kaua’i, an
outlying island beyond O’ahu. But his father-in-law had left behind a son
from another marriage he had made in Kahiki/Tahiti, and the story tells of
journeys back and forth to Kahiki. Another rather gory tale recounts the
experiences of Pa’ao around the same time. He originated in the Society
Islands. When his son was accused by Pa’ao’s brother of stealing breadfruit,
Pa’ao cut his son open to show that his stomach was empty, and then rolled
his canoe out to sea over the body of his nephew, the child of the brother who
had made the accusation. That meant that two lines of succession were
obliterated in the feud. He set out for Hawai’i, building temples and
generating a new line of descendants, who became an important dynasty of
hereditary priests in the Hawai’ian islands. Reduced to essentials, these tales
indicate an ease of movement between Hawai’i and Tahiti or the islands
around Tonga that persisted into the fourteenth century.
One of the tales preserves a song that is as clear about the memory of at
least partly Tahitian origins as one could wish:

Eia Hawai’i, he moku, he kanaka,

He kanaka Hawai’i – e,
He kanaka Hawai’i,
He kama na Kahiki …

Here is Hawai’i, an island, a man,

Here is Hawai’i – indeed,
Hawai’i is a man,
A child of Tahiti … 10

Proof that these stories are not total fantasies has been provided by DNA
evidence that links the modern native Hawai’ian population to the population
of the Marquesas, in eastern Polynesia, and to the Society Islands a little
further west.11 Archaeological finds have been more reticent about contacts
between Hawai’i and the Society Islands. An adze made of stone from
Hawai’i fashioned in Tahitian style and found 2,500 miles away on a coral
island in the Tuamoto archipelago provides minute but precious evidence of
contact. This ‘hawaiite’ rock could only be traced back to Hawai’i. Around
Tuamoto, adzes were produced from stone carried from a wide range of
islands around south-eastern Polynesia; to have identified a Hawai’ian
example, even just one, indicates lengthy (though not necessarily direct) links
far beyond obvious trading neighbours. Alas, it is impossible to date this type
of material securely.12
The oral traditions about later happenings on Hawai’i have nothing to say
about sea journeys after the time of Pa’ao and the men from O’ahu. All the
archaeological evidence too indicates a caesura: Hawai’i, for whatever
reason, became secluded from the rest of the Polynesian world. Around 1400
a long pause in voyaging out of Hawai’i began, despite the continuing
circulation of oral traditions about the inhabitants’ arrival across the sea.13
Yet this did not reflect contraction at home in Hawai’i. The population grew
rapidly, reaching about a quarter of a million by the time Captain Cook
arrived in the late eighteenth century. Whatever tension this created as the
land became ever more densely populated was resolved partly by war and
partly by the assertion of strong central authority by the chieftains – a
process, in some interpretations, of ‘state formation’. As in Tahiti, the war
god, here named Kuy, was propitiated by human sacrifice; the stone temple
platforms became increasingly elaborate; and in time the chieftains claimed
divine descent, thereby marking themselves out clearly from the common
people. These ordinary islanders worked on the land controlled by lesser
chieftains, offering their labour services and regular tribute. All this was a
source of great enrichment to the greater and lesser chieftains, for the growth
in population was also addressed: it was reflected in ever greater
intensification of agriculture, with organized field systems, fish farms where
mullet were encouraged to breed, and irrigation projects, under the patronage
of the god of flowing water, Kane. By the sixteenth century something like an
organized state had emerged in Hawai’i, a stratified society that might very
loosely be described as ‘feudal’.14 The fertility of the land and the efficiency
of Hawai’ian agriculture had reduced dependence on the sea, except for local
fishing. The islands had never depended on the rest of Polynesia for vital
goods – they were too far away. They became little continents, turned away
from the sea that had borne their first settlers to their safe havens.

III

Before turning eastwards to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and southwards to New
Zealand, the last part of Oceania to be settled, a question about contacts right
across the Pacific needs to be addressed. Since Polynesian navigators reached
as far east as Rapa Nui, isolated in vast tracts of open ocean, is it conceivable
that some reached further still and arrived in South America? The search to
identify the first people to reach America is based on any number of false
premises, beginning with the assumption that people would recognize what
they discovered as part of two massive continents (something that Columbus,
for one, failed to do); they would then deserve to be hailed as the ‘true
discoverers’ of the New World. But the question of links between Polynesia
and South America was posed in the reverse form – South Americans
reaching and indeed colonizing Polynesia – by the Norwegian explorer and
self-publicist Thor Heyerdahl. He became obsessed by the idea that the
Polynesians were of American descent, and that they took advantage of the
easterly winds to sail their boats deep into the Pacific. He insisted that he
could see Native American influence on innumerable Polynesian artefacts.
The raft he constructed, Kon-Tiki, bore no resemblance to the type of vessel
used by Polynesian navigators all the way across Oceania; it was copied from
Peruvian sailing rafts deployed after the Spanish conquest of the Inca
Empire.15 Nonetheless, in 1947 he sailed his raft across the open ocean,
miraculously survived the experience, and assumed that just because it was
possible to land (in his case, crash-land) in Polynesia such voyages must have
happened in the past. Evidence from DNA and from the spread of the
Austronesian languages unequivocally demonstrates that the Polynesians
migrated from west to east and not from east to west; and even if Crick and
Watson had yet to identify the structure of DNA when Heyerdahl set sail, the
linguistic evidence had long been clear. This did not prevent Heyerdahl being
voted the most famous Norwegian of all time (rather than Amundsen or
Nansen, just to mention Norwegian explorers), nor did it prevent the
construction of a much-visited museum in Oslo where his strange ocean-
going craft is displayed.
The diplomatic view of modern Norwegian scholars is that Heyerdahl
opened up some important questions. And the question about links between
Oceania and South America is a real one. There is evidence for contact in the
era of Polynesian navigation, though it is not easy to decipher. Most of the
supposed similarities between objects produced in Oceania and along the
American coastline have functional explanations; it is not beyond the
capacity of human beings to invent the same simple item at different times
and in different places. This applies for instance to harpoons, fish hooks
manufactured out of shell, and plank-constructed boats of the sort favoured
by the Chumash Indians off Santa Barbara, California, and in much of
Polynesia.16 The Chumash Indians are often cited as the sort of people who
might have ventured across the sea, since they were busy boat-builders,
specializing in journeys between the mainland and the Channel Islands
opposite Santa Barbara; they were also one of the most economically
sophisticated peoples along that coastline, with a monetary system based on a
currency made out of pierced shells (periodically destroyed to prevent
rampant inflation). But their boats were hard-pressed to cross the Santa
Barbara Channel in rough weather and were far too small and simple to
venture out into the open ocean; besides, fish supplies were plentiful in inland
waters.17 As one goes down the American shoreline the impression of
societies interested in the sea solely for coastal fishing strengthens: the
Kumiai Indians of Baja California loved sardines, sole, tuna (including
bonito) and shellfish, but were not navigators; they used small reed boats,
often capable of carrying just a couple of people.18 Nor do these peoples
show any sign of receiving goods from distant Polynesia.
Thor Heyerdahl was anxious to show that the Galápagos Islands, with the
rich fishing grounds around them, were the first stepping stone into the
Pacific for his supposed Amerindian navigators. This, he hoped, would
embarrass the often virulent critics of his Kon-Tiki expedition.19 Since the
Galápagos lie 600 miles west of Ecuador, reaching them would have been no
mean achievement; they were discovered, or maybe rediscovered, by the
Spaniards in 1535, and it is no surprise that a fair amount of Spanish pottery
was found when Heyerdahl and his companions went to look for evidence of
early visits to the islands a few years after the Kon-Tiki expedition. Although
the Norwegians identified dozens of other fragments of pottery as South
American, mainly from Ecuador, they had to admit to uncertainty about the
dating of much of what they found, which was very simple pottery that could
have been made before or after the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire.
Some more elaborate fragments may simply show that in the sixteenth
century native Indian potters perpetuated styles from the Inca era – one
would expect nothing less, since the overwhelming majority of the population
remained Indian. So we can conclude that South American Indians did
venture out on ships at least as far as the Galápagos; the question remains
whether these were Spanish galleons or the balsa wood rafts in which
Heyerdahl placed his faith, and the most likely explanation is that the pottery
arrived aboard galleons. Nonetheless, the Incas did preserve myths about
rulers going out to sea on mysterious voyages, and maybe these should not be
totally discounted.
The best evidence for pre-Spanish contact is provided by plants that are
very unlikely to have travelled such great distances by natural means,
surviving winds and seas without being destroyed: bottle gourds and sweet
potatoes spread across the Pacific, but originated in South America; in the
other direction, coconuts reached Panama. The word used by the Quechua
Indians in South America for the sweet potato, kamote, has been
imaginatively compared to Easter Island kumara and Polynesian kuumala.20
Seasonal winds made journeys to South America possible, but there is no
evidence for any attempt to settle there and no evidence for active commerce
between South America and any part of Polynesia.21 It might be argued that
the sweet potato was diffused by the Spaniards when they gained control over
trans-Pacific trade routes in the sixteenth century. However, the places where
they were most actively cultivated lay some way from the Spanish trade
routes – Hawai’i, New Zealand and Easter Island – and carbonized tubers of
sweet potato excavated by archaeologists in New Zealand, Hawai’i and
Mangaia can all be dated to the period before the arrival of the Europeans.
Mangaia lies in the Cook Islands, part of Remote Oceania situated north-east
of New Zealand; its specimens have been carbon-dated to about AD 1000.
While it is possible to imagine birds carrying seeds across many thousands of
miles, tubers are another story. It is therefore safe to say that Polynesian
navigators extended their range right across the Pacific during this
extraordinarily ambitious second phase of expansion.
Even more remarkable than possible contact with the admittedly vast
landmass of South America, impossible to miss if you go far enough
eastwards, is the settlement of Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, in the middle of
nowhere. And yet, by contrast with Hawai’i, it at least lies on the plane of
Polynesia, and reaching Rapa Nui posed less of a challenge in dealing with
the winds. There are probably as many theories about the significance of the
island’s enigmatic giant statues as there are statues. The question here is,
rather, by what means navigators reached Rapa Nui and what sort of outside
contacts the islanders maintained after its discovery and settlement.
Heyerdahl, naturally, saw Easter Island as one of the first bases of his
pioneering Peruvian sailors; the locals obliged him by offering him pieces of
South American pottery, but they were just modern Chilean ceramics (the
island is governed by Chile) – they wanted to keep the eccentric Norwegian
gentleman happy.
The first difficulty is agreeing on a date for settlement. One version of the
islanders’ own traditions told how the inhabitants were led there by Hotu
Matu’a from Hiva, who was seeking the sunrise; his name merely means
‘Great Parent’. There are several islands in the Marquesas group, to the north-
east of Rapa Nui, that contain the word ‘Hiva’ in their name, and, as has been
seen, the Marquesas may well have been the source of the Hawai’ian
population.22 These traditions also report a six-week voyage inspired by
Hoto Matu’a’s tattooist, who said he had dreamed of a fine volcanic isle to
the east. The striking feature is not so much the detail in the story but the
awareness that the islanders had come across the sea, and that the world
consisted of more than their own island, a view that, in their extreme
isolation, they could easily have held, and that other less isolated island
peoples have held.23
Counting the fifty-seven generations said to have elapsed between Hotu
Matu’a and the recording of the legend one reaches a date of AD 450; but
such methods, as will be clear from New Zealand, are without much merit,
and some of those working with the same oral material have produced dates
in the twelfth or even the sixteenth century. Fortunately modern science
resolves the difficulty, up to a point: Carbon 14 dating shows that settlers
were already installed on Rapa Nui around the end of the seventh century AD
(690±130), a date derived from material found at a temple platform. Yet this
too is not a flawless way of establishing dates; an even earlier date of AD 318
came from a grave that also contained a bone dated AD 1629. The language of
the islanders, though clearly Polynesian (as seen in the place names
especially) has distinctive features that lead linguists who specialize in
glottochronology to conclude that it broke away from neighbouring tongues
around AD 400; it mixes features from western and eastern Polynesian, and
there has been time for a local vocabulary to develop, such as the word poki
(child). The islanders also developed a very distinctive script, or possibly
brought it along from somewhere else that abandoned its use, though that is
to assume that the script was not developed after contact with and in imitation
of the Europeans. It was a sacred script, almost always inscribed with care on
wooden panels; unfortunately no attempt at decipherment has been totally
convincing.24
 Rapa Nui is best known for the remarkable statues and temple platforms
that pepper Easter Island. The high period of construction stretched over
several hundred years from 1200 to 1600. The statues, which originally
looked away from the sea and towards the volcanic interior, apparently
represented ancestors, while the often elaborate platforms seem to have been
used not just for rituals but as astronomical observatories, so that the loss of
interest in navigation was evidently not accompanied by a loss of interest in
reading the skies. Local priests saw the night sky as a calendar that they used
to fix their festivals.25 Cut off from the rest of the world, the island tried to
survive from its own resources, but, steadily denuded of tree cover by its
inhabitants, Rapa Nui became impoverished. Environmental collapse
provides the best explanation for the end of the era of prosperity that brought
these platforms and statues into being – indeed, over the following centuries
statues were cast down, the inhabitants went to war with one another, often
living in caves, and competition for scarce resources intensified.
Easter Island may well be the great exception to the general rule that
islands were searched out deliberately; whether or not it was found by
accident, it remained off the mental map of the Polynesian navigators. Like
Hawai’i and New Zealand, it did not feature on the hand-drawn map the
Polynesian navigator Tupaia prepared for Captain Cook, which only
extended as far east as the Marquesas.26 Pitcairn Island too was cut off from
the rest of Polynesia and was empty when the mutineers from the Bounty
arrived in 1790; but it had been inhabited in the past, as stone remains were
found – clearly there had been an extremely isolated population that had died
out or emigrated. And a similar story can be told of Kiritimati (in Kiribati), to
which the mutineers eventually moved.27 Some attempts at colonization
were simply not successful, because the fortunes of these island communities
depended on their position within still larger communities of islands that
interacted across the ocean through trade, warfare and marriage ties.
These most remote islands, then, were the realms of Pluto and the
outermost planets, places beyond the outer edge of the interactive world of
the Polynesian chiefdoms, who warred with one another, whose people
traded with one another, and who preserved over generation after generation
their unwritten but detailed and highly effective science of navigation. That
still leaves untold the discovery and settlement of what are by far the largest
islands in Polynesia, and the most inhospitable climatically: the North and
South Islands of New Zealand.
 IV

The history of the discovery of New Zealand has always been a tangle. In
European accounts, Abel Tasman and Captain Cook appear prominently, as
explorers who found the islands and who worked out their shape. That is to
ignore the native Māori population of what the descendants of the original
settlers still call Aotearoa, a name attributed to Hine-te-aparangi, the wife of
Kupe, the first Polynesian navigator to reach North Island – the mountainous,
often cold, South Island was visited and was lightly settled over the centuries,
but the great majority of Māoris would choose to live in the warmer north.
The Māori name of the island means ‘Long White Cloud’ (ao + tea + roa,
‘cloud white long’), because that is what Kupe’s wife thought she saw when
she first approached its shores, not realizing that this was land. Calculating
back the generations, orthodox opinion places the discovery of New Zealand
in the middle of the tenth century AD, a date often refined to 925, though
more modern research insists that the supposed founder may have arrived as
late as the middle of the fourteenth century, assuming that these genealogies
have any merit at all and that Kupe really existed, or indeed that he was not
more than one person.28 This was supposedly followed by a second
settlement, led by a certain Toi, around 1150, and then the arrival of a whole
fleet of canoes in about 1350. That, at least, was the view accepted both by
Māoris and by Pakeha (white Europeans) who tried to write the very early
history of New Zealand in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kupe was
enthusiastically described as the ‘Columbus, Magellan or Cook’ of the
Māoris, a historical figure who certainly existed and who was the most
eminent representative of hundreds of generations of Polynesian navigators in
the Pacific.29 A Māori song began:

Ka tito au, ka tito au,

Ka tito au ki a Kupe,
Te tangata nana i hoehoe te moana,
Te tangata nana i topetope te whenua.

I will sing, I will sing,

I will sing of Kupe,
The man who paddled the ocean,
The man who divided up the land.
The difficulty is that all the information we have about Kupe is derived from
oral traditions, impressive in their command of the finer details of genealogy,
so that even the names of the wives of slaves are given, but packed with
legendary materials – sometimes a giant octopus, sometimes tribes of
goblins, not to mention canoes that turned into stone and a miraculous belt
that churned the surface of the sea. Just because the art of navigation was
transmitted orally and was evidently a very exact science, we cannot assume
that this genealogical information deserves the same credit; indeed, these
genealogies vary from place to place, with generations added and subtracted
to accommodate the traditions of local chieftains. History and symbolism
were mixed together, and then contaminated by contact with the Pakeha.30
Nor is there a single agreed account of Kupe’s career; in one version
Aotearoa was the name of Kupe’s canoe.
These oral traditions themselves were written down, admittedly by Māoris,
but under the influence of British missionaries and other modern settlers. In
one version Kupe sees his god Io in a dream, and the god says to him: ‘Go
forth upon the great ocean … take and possess yourself of some land which I
will show to you.’ The strong echoes here of the story of Abraham being led
to Canaan by God indicate that this tale tells one more about the impact of
Christian missionaries than about Māori traditions. The most vocal critic of
attempts to use these tales as history has called them ‘modern New Zealand
folktales’.31 That said, they are illuminating both for the stories they tell
about the original settlement as the native inhabitants of Aotearoa imagined it
and for the information they convey about navigating the open ocean. At their
core is the certainty that the settlers came from far across the sea, and that
their ancestors lived in a place called Hawaiki. It has been seen that the letter
k becomes t in some Polynesian dialects, and in others a glottal stop is often
used instead of either, so Hawaiki is another form of the name Hawai’i; or,
rather, Hawai’i took its name from a supposed ancestral home much further
to the south, to which the Māoris also attributed their origins.32 They did not
claim to have come from the island group now called Hawai’i. Once again,
though, it is important not to be too credulous. The name ‘Hawaiki’ was a
generic term for the place of one’s ancestors – ‘the old country’, as it were,
whose name was reused again and again to confer a sense that connections to
those ancestors had not been lost by migrants as far away as what we now
call Hawai’i. Children in the womb were described as being ‘in Hawaiki’
before they were born.33 Hawaiki is portrayed in the Māori legends as the
home of a seafaring community that sustained itself by fishing and was riven
by conflict between competing chieftains, but there is little information about
the shape and size of the island or about what grew there, because it was an
idealized place of origin.34
There exist many versions of this story, some of which provide plenty of
names and details, such as the number of people on board Kupe’s boat (one
account says thirty). On both the North and the South Islands Kupe was said
to have given a name to any number of places along the coast that he
supposedly visited; for instance, his point of departure from North Island was
and is known as Hokianga nui a Kupe, which means ‘Great Returning Place
of Kupe’.35 It was natural that local chieftains sought to increase their
prestige by showing that their territory had links to the discoverer of
Aotearoa. The most dramatic version of his story celebrates Kupe’s contest
with an octopus that led him southwards towards Aotearoa and then along the
coasts of North Island, and in some variants South Island too.
The tale begins back in Hawaiki. Muturangi was an inhabitant of Hawaiki
who owned a pet octopus – not any ordinary octopus but an enormous one
named Te Wheke (‘the octopus’) with dozens of children. (If the idea of an
ocean-going octopus as a pet seems strange, so is the assertion that Kupe’s
daughters kept an eel and a mullet as pets.) The octopus and her young would
follow the boats of Kupe and his companions as they headed out into the
open sea searching for deep-sea fish, and they would grab with their tentacles
the bait Kupe trailed in the water, making the work of the fishermen
impossible and leaving the islanders famished. Muturangi thought this was
good sport and refused to rein in his pet octopus, so the only option left was
for Kupe and his friends to go and search for Te Wheke and her brood, and
kill all of them. This was agreed at a meeting of the village elders, who seem
to have been quite unable to restrain Muturangi. So Kupe and his friends
went out to sea with a simple but cunning plan: as a rule, the bait that the
octopuses ate was trailed in the ocean, and allowed to sink far down, to a
point where the fishermen could not detect their presence. This time they paid
out shorter fishing lines, so they were able to sense when the octopuses
seized the bait, and then they pulled in their lines, bringing up the young
octopuses, which they cut to pieces. All the time, though, the mother octopus
watched the massacre of her children without attacking, while keeping her
distance from the canoes. Te Wheke planned to wreak revenge in due course.
But Kupe and his friends were not content to have destroyed only the young
octopuses. They would search out Te Wheke and destroy her as well. Kupe’s
wife insisted he should not abandon her in Hawaiki and go on such a
dangerous mission, so he solved the problem by taking her and his children
along on his canoe, plus a crew of sixty, and set off in pursuit of Te Wheke;
his companion Ngake, or Ngahue, who had sailed ahead of him, found Te
Wheke and together they pursued the octopus further and further southwards,
tracing the orange glow of the beast as she swam far beneath the surface of
the sea.
They found themselves in increasingly unfamiliar waters where the
temperatures were much lower and the nights much longer, but still they
refused to abandon their mission. Then Hine-te-aparangi, Kupe’s wife, saw
the first signs of land and the two canoes were able to replenish supplies on
the north coast of North Island. Ngahue was given the task of tracking Te
Wheke down the east coast, in the hope of trapping her; and Kupe would
explore the west coast, before returning to help Ngahue finish off the
troublesome monster. Ngahue did manage to bottle the octopus up in a great
cave, from which she could not escape without confronting his fully armed
crew; but when Kupe arrived at last and engaged with her he was only able to
wound her, and as evening fell she managed to escape in the confusion of
battle. She swam south and this drew the two canoes ever further towards the
southern tip of North Island, and then into what is now Wellington Harbour, a
large volcanic caldera filled with ocean water. Here the crews rested and once
again took on supplies. Ngahue set out to explore the South Island that lay on
the horizon, but before long the canoes were reunited and tracked down Te
Wheke. Their tactics involved a combination of subterfuge and brute
strength. They confused Te Wheke by hurling calabashes at her head, and she
was convinced these were human heads, so she turned her attention from the
canoes to the calabashes and wrapped her already damaged tentacles around
them. After this, Kupe launched his adze at the spot between the eyes where
an octopus is most vulnerable and the animal was slaughtered.36
Kupe sailed back to Hawaiki with the first news of this great land to the
south. He was asked if the lands he had discovered were inhabited and gave a
non-committal answer: he had seen a wood hen, a bellbird and a fantail; he
had found that the soil was rich and that the islands had an abundance of fish.
(All the signs are that the island was uninhabited before the arrival of the
Māoris, but some oral traditions spoke of goblins or of red-skinned people
with flat noses, thin calves and lank hair, for whom there is no archaeological
evidence.)37 So would he go back there? He answered that question with the
question: E hoki Kupe? ‘Will Kupe return?’, a phrase that continued to be
used in Aotearoa as a polite but firm refusal. Needless to say, the Māoris
could point to exact places where a canoe, or an anchor, a mast or even the
first dog to reach North Island had turned to stone and could still be seen on
the coast of Aotearoa.38
Oral histories separated Kupe’s discovery from later phases of rediscovery
and then of large-scale settlement. An important feature of these stories is the
insistence that news of New Zealand was brought back to Polynesia (usually
identified simply as ‘Hawaiki’). Toi was a chieftain from Hawaiki who is
supposed, on the usual calculation of generations, to have lived in the twelfth
century. The stories about him vary, and what will be followed here is a so-
called ‘orthodox’ version that has been widely circulated because it is
preserved in a nineteenth-century manuscript and goes into some detail; but
there is doubt whether it records authentic Māori tradition.39 In Hawaiki, he
and his men were challenged to a canoe race by neighbours from other
islands, and sixty canoes entered the contest. Toi himself did not take part but
watched the contest from a high point with a great crowd of onlookers;
however, his two grandsons, Turahui and Whatonga, did join the tournament.
The race took the canoes far out to sea, and for once the learned Polynesian
navigators did not read the weather signs with due care and attention; winds
and fogs dispersed the canoes and several disappeared entirely. Consultation
of the gods produced no clear answers to the fate of Toi’s grandsons and the
other canoes that had disappeared. Toi himself therefore set out, thinking that
he might find the lost canoes far to the south, in lands he had only heard
about: ‘I will go on to the land discovered by Kupe in the expanse known as
Tiritiri o te moana, the land that is shrouded by the high mists. I may reach
land, but if I do not, I will rest forever in the bosom of the Ocean Maid.’40
Whether described as Aotearoa, the long white cloud, or as the land
shrouded in mist, this was a place defined in large part by its unattractive
weather. Toi reached the isthmus of Auckland and found a dense population,
so many people that he compared them to ants. He lived among them and
several crew members settled down with local women. (As has been seen,
there is no doubt that these earlier settlers were a fantasy of later tellers of
tales.)41 Toi established himself near Whakatane on the north coast of North
Island, a particularly well-favoured area with a benign climate. But he was
soon drawn into tribal wars, which proves that these accounts of the often
difficult relations between those living on the island reflect the violent and
destructive conflict that still characterized Māori society at the time of
Captain Cook.
Fortunately, Toi’s grandsons had survived the storm that had scattered the
canoes during the contest back in Hawaiki, and they had indeed made
landfall, though not in Aotearoa, but at a place named after its ruler,
Rangiatea (this could be a reference to the island of Ra’iatea, a hundred miles
from Tahiti). And, at home in Hawaiki, Toi’s daughter-in-law did not believe
that Toi would find Turahui and Whatonga so easily; she had a much better
plan, which was to send the pet green cuckoo owned by Turahui on a mission
to find the lost grandsons. She tied a knotted message around the bird, which
duly found Turahui on Rangiatea’s island, and he had no difficulty
deciphering the message: ‘Are you alive? At what island are you?’ He made a
new knotted cord that stated ‘We are all alive at Rangiatea’, and watched the
direction the bird took; then the grandsons and their companions set out in six
canoes along the same trajectory and reached Hawaiki safely, where they
were rapturously received.42
Once again, then, we have a story that not merely commemorates the
discovery and settlement of Aotearoa, but one that places the islands of New
Zealand amid the great island chains of Polynesia. Other stories confirm this:
one account of journeys to and fro between Hawaiki and Aotearoa describes
the introduction of sweet potato into Aotearoa. A visitor from Hawaiki had
carried with him some dried sweet potato that he carried in his belt; he
offered it to his hosts on Aotearoa, reconstituted with water, and they found it
delicious. They then sent to Hawaiki for seeds, which duly arrived.43 But the
fascination of the story of Turahui goes further: the use of knotted cords is
reminiscent of the Peruvian quipus, which were the closest the Incas came to
devising writing, and which they used for messages and for keeping
accounts; this is not for a moment to suggest that Peruvians radiated as far as
New Zealand, but it does serve as a reminder that apparently illiterate peoples
have often developed their own mnemonic systems, and that archaeology is
good at finding inscriptions on stone but not so good at finding knotted cords.
There is no need here to retell all the details of the story of how Whatonga
went in search of Toi, though the most detailed accounts described in great
detail a lavishly decorated canoe with places for sixty-six men, including
several chieftains; images of three gods were carried on board. Having
secured the help of these gods, the canoe was said to have circumnavigated
much of North Island, finally reaching Whakatane and the home of Toi, who
was now chieftain of a great tribe generated by his followers after they took
native women as their brides.44 There is something in these stories that
recalls Telemachos going out to find his father, Odysseus, and though
contamination by Greek myths seems unlikely, it cannot be excluded, for all
the versions we have were recorded after the arrival of European missionaries
and settlers.
Finally, supposedly in the mid-fourteenth century, we hear of a mass
movement of people, in stories that tell how all the great lineages of Aotearoa
descended from the heke or Great Migration of a fleet of canoes from
Hawaiki. The canoes, rather than Kupe and Toi, marked the real beginning of
time on Aotearoa for the Māori tribes. In the oral accounts they were
described in sometimes meticulous detail, including even the exact position
where individual sailors sat by the thwarts; later generations knew which
canoe had brought their own ancestors. When the gods were brought on
board a vessel became taboo (tapu) and only fresh food could be eaten; no
cooking was allowed. Bags made of seaweed were filled with fresh water and
towed behind the boat, keeping the water cool and reducing the weight of the
cargo.45 To calm the waves, the sailors sang magical incantations as they
crossed the ocean:

Fiercely plies the shaft of this my paddle,

Named Kautu ki te rangi.
To the heavens raise it, to the skies uplift it.
It guides to the distant horizon,
To the horizon that seems to draw near,
To the horizon that instils fear,
To the horizon that causes dread,
The horizon of unknown power,
Bounded by sacred restrictions.

All of this reflects the everyday practices of later generations, whose skill in
building beautifully carved boats can still be admired in Te Papa, the
National Museum of New Zealand at Wellington; such boats could easily
measure twenty or even thirty metres in length. The stories of this migration
report quarrels over the food tribute paid to chieftains on Hawaiki, so one
might like to argue that pressure on food supplies motivated the migrants.
They also report the arrival of all the canoes but one on the east coast of
North Island, followed by a tour of the coast so that each chieftain could
acquire his own patch of territory without getting in the way of his
neighbours. Once again, we hear of the introduction of the sweet potato and
of ceremonies to dedicate a tuber to one of the patron gods of the migrants;
otherwise the migrants seem to have brought few plants or none, and to have
been content with what grew in the unfamiliar temperate climate of New
Zealand. Dogs, hens and rats (themselves often eaten as food, as a delicacy
conserved in fat) are also mentioned in the oral traditions. There is some
debate about the Carbon 14 dating of rat bones, some of which appear to be
2,000 years old, but this is far earlier than other evidence for a human
presence will allow. Two dogs were sacrificed to the god Maru by the crew
of the boat Aotea (‘White Cloud’) that arrived on the west coast.46
Hard evidence for the coming of the Māori as far back as the tenth century
has not been found. Increasingly, archaeologists have been content to argue
from silence and to insist that the date for migration should be pushed later,
right into the middle of the fourteenth century, but possibly a little earlier.
This does not discount the possibility that people vaguely comparable to
Kupe and Toi arrived much earlier, without establishing a settlement.
Discovery is not generally a sudden process; awareness of new land spreads
thinly but does not necessarily lead to further action, as the example of the
Norse arrival in North America shows: the crucial change occurs when this
new knowledge takes its place in a wider world view.
Early settlements, which according to tradition were concentrated on the
west coast of North Island, would have left few traces, and some material
such as stone adzes is hard to date. More suggestive is the discovery of Māori
refuse piled up in middens that also included the bones of now extinct
flightless birds known as moa. On South Island graves were found that
included among the burial goods blown moa eggs alongside adzes and fish
hooks of typical Polynesian design. Did the Māoris hunt these birds to
extinction? The name moa was simply a Polynesian word for domestic fowl.
Arriving in Aotearoa, the settlers transferred the name to several species of
flightless bird that had lived in relative peace on an island that lacked
mammals which might have preyed on the birds; humans, indeed, were the
first mammals to arrive – as a general rule isolated islands do not contain
native mammals. In some of the oral traditions there are references to native
birds of this sort.47 Particularly on the cool South Island, where cultivation
of the soil posed greater challenges to those used to traditional Polynesian
agriculture, the settlers may for a while have relied on the flesh of birds and
on fish and seafood for sustenance. But most of this is speculation. It cannot
be proved that land clearance was under way before about 1200.48 The
important point is that newly arrived people who settled previously
uninhabited islands rapidly changed the ecological balance, whether by
clearing the land for crops, by introducing Pacific rats that attacked wildlife,
or by themselves throwing off balance the delicate relationship between
native flora and fauna and the environment.49 What was true in Aotearoa
was true in virtually every island humans settled, in all the oceans.
In Aotearoa, as in Hawai’i, the population turned its back on the sea, and
regular contact with the rest of the Polynesian world ceased. The new
territory offered the resources the settlers needed, without the shortages of
vital goods that would stimulate trade. For instance, the characteristic green
stone out of which implements and adornments were made was plentiful on
New Zealand, and so was obsidian, a volcanic product that not surprisingly is
abundant on these two islands where volcanic activity has always been lively.
The Polynesians had reached the limit of their spread across the Pacific by
the middle of the fourteenth century AD. The settlement of the Pacific had,
with a significant interruption, taken 3,000 years, but had embraced distances
of more than 3,000 miles. We shall return to the open Pacific when European
sailors entered its waters – first Magellan, and later the famous Manila
galleons linking the Philippines to Central and South America. Yet it has to
be admitted that the simple but effective maritime technology of the
Polynesians trumped that of European sailors, not to mention the Chinese and
the Japanese.
 Part Two

THE MIDDLE OCEAN: THE INDIAN

OCEAN AND ITS NEIGHBOURS,
4500 BC–AD 1500
 3

The Waters of Paradise

Even a cursory look at a map reveals a fundamental difference between the

Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean. Whereas the Pacific is dotted with
islands, especially in the south-west, the human presence in the Indian Ocean
is defined by its coasts. The scattered, empty islands of the Pacific meant that
it became an ocean of migrants; the settled, connected shores of the Indian
Ocean made it into a network of traders. Remote, widely scattered islands
such as Mauritius and Réunion were discovered and settled by Europeans and
those they brought with them as slaves or indentured servants long after the
Polynesians had already set foot on every habitable Pacific island. Besides,
the great concentration of Indian Ocean islands only begins beyond the
ocean’s eastern edge, spilling into the Pacific, in the territories now known as
Indonesia and Malaysia. Among other islands, the Andamans were made
famous by Marco Polo and other travellers because the inhabitants were said
to kill or even eat any visitors; but only one island of any great size stands off
Africa, and that place, Madagascar, was partly settled by Malays or
Indonesians who had travelled all the way from the edges of the Pacific.
This comparison does, however, leave out of account an area within the
Pacific that only gradually became an important area of maritime activity: the
South China Sea, stretching from Singapore across to the Philippines and up
to Taiwan, and the seas beyond, the Yellow Sea and the Japan Sea,
encompassing the coasts of northern China, Korea and the Japanese
archipelago. This great arc, unlike the vast tracts of Polynesia, Melanesia and
Micronesia, developed close links with the Indian Ocean and can sensibly be
treated as an extension of the Indian Ocean world. Nothing symbolizes these
links better than the appetite of Chinese and Japanese Buddhists in the first
millennium AD for Indian texts, relics and even works of art, so that a fresco
painted in the Nara region of Japan in AD 759 clearly portrays an Indian
princess, and carries the imprint of the Hellenistic artists who, in the wake of
Alexander the Great, brought Greek artistic styles to north-western India.1
The waters to the east of China remained remarkably quiet for much longer
than the waters of the Indian Ocean, whose history as a thoroughfare began,
in fits and starts, as Egyptians and Sumerians sent their first trading
expeditions down the Red Sea and the Gulf. All this testifies to the
extraordinary vitality of the Indian Ocean since antiquity; by the first
millennium the only sea where exchanges of goods and the movement of
people were more intense was the much smaller and more confined
Mediterranean.
 Historians of the Indian Ocean have in consequence tended to think of the
Indian Ocean as a sort of Mediterranean, a sea defined by its edges, even if
there exists no southern edge. Like the Mediterranean, it is a sea that falls
neatly into two halves, with Ceylon, the modern Sri Lanka, playing the role
of Sicily, a substantial island looking both ways, while southern India has
something of the role of Italy, with its western and eastern flanks connected
to one another by land or sea, so that these areas functioned as bridges
between the trading world of the western and eastern ‘Indies’. That is a term
drawn from Latin and Greek, and ultimately from Hindi, which by its very
indeterminacy says something important about the vast space of the Indian
Ocean; for in antiquity and the Middle Ages the term ‘Indies’ embraced not
just India and Indonesia but the east coast of Africa, that is, anywhere lapped
by the Indian Ocean. This later led to much confusion about where to find the
mythical medieval king Prester John, a Christian prince who would come to
the salvation of western Europe in the struggle against Muslim power; and it
led to equal confusion when the first Gypsies to reach western Europe around
1400 talked blithely of origins in India, or maybe ‘little Egypt’, but
somewhere out there, at any rate. The confusion was magnified further when
the New World was defined by Columbus as the ‘Indies’, so we do not think
twice about using such terms as ‘West Indian’ for inhabitants of the
Caribbean, and have only recently substituted ‘Native American’ for ‘Red
Indian’. Not surprisingly, some of the ocean’s historians have expressed
dislike for the term ‘Indian Ocean’, which appears to privilege one part of the
extensive shoreline, but this is to apply modern rather than ancient and
medieval concepts of India – a small India rather than the greater Indies.2
 The Indian Ocean is hard to measure. To say it covers 75,000,000 square
kilometres or 27 per cent of the world’s maritime space is to assume we
know where its arbitrarily drawn southern limit should lie.3 It can be defined
by its historic exit points: past Aden and up the Red Sea, which acted as a
bridge between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean; through the Strait of
Malacca past Singapore into the Pacific. To these can be added, much later,
with the Portuguese entry into the Indian Ocean in 1497, the Cape of Good
Hope, giving access to the Atlantic. Another southern edge, the west coast of
Australia, was not of much interest to anyone sailing the seas until the
nineteenth century, and even then to a very limited degree. But one of the
earliest and most vibrant exit points, even though it leads to rivers rather than
the open sea, passes through the waters between Arabia and Iran variously
known as the Persian and the Arabian Gulf.4
It seems odd to speak of ‘the slow creation’ of the Indian Ocean, as if this
space had not been in existence for millions of years before sea traffic began
to pass along its shores and across its open spaces. But from the perspective
of maritime history the question is when the Indian Ocean began to function
as a unit – in other words, when the coasts of east Africa, Arabia, India and
south-east Asia began to interact across the sea, whether through migration or
through trade. In addition to breaking down these shores into a series of
discrete, and at times quite disconnected, coasts, attention has to focus on the
two major gulfs that penetrate deep into the Middle East, the Red Sea and the
Persian Gulf, channels that gave access to two of the earliest, richest and
most innovative civilizations of the ancient world, those of ancient Egypt and
Mesopotamia. To say that they made very profitable use of the sea routes
running south-eastwards from their lands is not to say that the pharaohs or the
merchants of the Sumerian and Babylonian cities made uninterrupted use of
these routes; nor is it to claim that they ventured very far out into the ocean,
though, as will be seen, the Sumerians did make contact by sea with another
great civilization that lay to the east of Mesopotamia. The beginnings of
Indian Ocean trade were jerky; maritime ventures such as the Egyptian
expeditions down the Red Sea to the ‘land of Punt’ were intermittent, and
there is no evidence in the earliest documents or in the archaeological records
that regular voyages took place around Arabia, linking Egyptian ports on the
Red Sea to the Persian Gulf. And yet the produce of the lands along the
shores of the Indian Ocean was irresistible: expensive necessities such as
copper, luxury materials such as black ebony and white ivory, as well as
aromatic resins such as frankincense and myrrh. Egyptians talked of the
products of Punt, which they described as ‘the god’s land’, and in early
Mesopotamia the route down the Persian Gulf was said to lead to the abode
of the Blessed.
The nearer edges of the Indian Ocean and even the Red Sea and the
Persian Gulf were vaguely defined, according to mental maps on which place
names moved around and seem to have indicated where particular products
could be found, rather than where a destination actually lay: the land of
copper, the land of perfumes, and so on. Despite their impressive mastery of
astronomy, the ancient Babylonians had no sense of the scale of the great
ocean that lay beyond the Gulf. A highly schematic Babylonian world map
preserved on a cuneiform tablet in the British Museum, dating from 700–500
BC, not surprisingly placed Iraq at the centre of the world, with the Bitter Sea
(Persian Gulf) leading off to the south-east and a Salt Sea surrounding the
landmass. The aim of the mapmaker was to illustrate Babylonian mythology
rather than to guide sailors to a safe haven, and in this sense it is comparable
to the equally schematic world maps of medieval Europe such as the
Hereford mappamundi. But there is a sense that, even 2,000 years after the
first regular voyages crept out of the Persian Gulf, knowledge of and interest
in the wider expanses of the Indian Ocean had not progressed very far. That
would happen when Greek and Roman trade began to penetrate ever deeper
into the ocean in search of the spices of the Indies.
 One famous physical feature of the Indian Ocean gives the area unity: the
monsoons. They determine the sailing seasons and, more importantly, the
cycle of production of the foodstuffs consumed by the inhabitants and of the
goods that have for millennia been sought out along the ocean’s shores.
Perhaps the most striking feature of food production linked to the monsoons
is the distinction between the areas growing wheat (sometimes mixed with
millet or similar grains) and those producing rice. In the regions to the west
the best hope was to await winter rains, or to dig canals and irrigate the soil
with the help of the great river systems – the Tigris and Euphrates in
Mesopotamia, the Indus in what is now Pakistan. There, bread became ‘the
staff of life’ for Arabians, Persians and north Indians. The western sector was
the sector of bread. But the eastern sector, from southern India across to the
paddy fields of south-east Asia, was wedded to rice in a great variety of
types: husky and round, thin and polished, even (once one reached China)
white, brown, pink and yellow, new and old – this was considered the tastiest
type.5 Grain surpluses, in wheat or rice, underwrote the political success of
the states that emerged close to the ancient and medieval Indian Ocean –
whether Sumer in Iraq, far back in the third and second millennia BC, or
Angkor in Cambodia in the ninth to twelfth centuries AD. With the strong
economic base these surpluses provided, there was plenty of capacity for
diversification into crafts and into the production and distribution of luxury
foodstuffs and dyes, notably the pepper for which the Romans and their
successors had such a powerful craving. Rice, the monsoon crop par
excellence, could also be traded to those areas that did not produce it, or
produced little of it; once the trade routes had been established, there was
more to commerce across the ocean than the conveyance of aromatic spices.
The origin of the monsoons lies in the high air temperatures created in the
Asian landmass during the summer; cooler air is drawn north-eastwards
across the ocean. And then in winter it is much the opposite, as the landmass
cools sharply but the ocean retains its warmth. So between June and October
winds blow favourably for shipping bound from the south-west of the ocean
towards Indonesia, even if that often means sailing through thick blankets of
warm rain. On the other hand, strong winds and tempests at sea made
navigation in the western Indian Ocean very hazardous in high summer,
interrupting traffic to western India, and sailors had to await the slackening of
the winds in late August before essaying this route, although there was a
window of opportunity for the Omani dhows that had a good chance of
reaching India from Arabia in May, June and July. September to May was the
period of the year when sailing from Gujarat in western India to Aden proved
most feasible. During the fifteenth century, vessels set out from Calicut in
January, bound for Aden, and then returned in late summer or early autumn.
Winter was also the ideal time to head down from Aden or Oman to the coast
of east Africa, returning in April and May – a slow return, generally, as it
involved sailing against the currents. Within the Red Sea one had to know
that the safe period for a journey northwards lay in January and February,
while those bound southwards would need to take advantage of winds that
blew southwards in summer time. So, both in the ocean at large and in its
subsidiary seas, it was vital to understand how and when the winds shifted
from south to north.
Without knowledge of the winds, medieval Arabic writers insisted, a
captain would prove himself ‘an ignorant and inexperienced adventurer’.
From December onwards the winds come from the north and reach as far as
Madagascar. By spring, vast quantities of water have been dumped on India
and on the southern tip of Arabia (creating an extraordinarily fertile zone in
western Oman). Even so, the changes in the winds were predictable rather
than certain, and a wise captain knew that helping winds could blow earlier in
the season than expected, or that the monsoons could vary in ferocity from
year to year. The captain would also take into account the seasonal changes
in the currents, though these were heavily influenced by the monsoon winds:
in the Red Sea the summer current ran helpfully from north to south, but in
winter the movement of water was more complex, and navigation along this
sea, already littered with reefs, could be quite perilous; the Persian Gulf
followed a similar pattern in summer but thankfully made an uncomplicated
reverse in winter.6
These characteristics of the Indian Ocean affected the movement of people
and the conduct of trade to a much greater degree than one would find in the
narrow space of the Mediterranean, where it was possible to challenge the
winds and currents, even out of season. The monsoon cycle imposed on
travellers a long stay in port as they awaited the turning of the winds.
Differences in the wind direction and currents in the western and eastern
sectors of the Indian Ocean meant that sea journeys generally had to be
conducted in stages. This was even true in the confined space of the Red Sea,
where merchants had to await suitable winds in way stations along the coast
such as Bereniké and Qusayr al-Qadim, which developed into quite
substantial towns servicing the trade routes in the Roman and medieval
periods. It is therefore no surprise that in the medieval period, at any rate, the
spice route was cut into segments and different stretches were handled by
merchants and sailors of different origins – Malays, Tamils, Gujaratis,
Persians, Arabs of Arabia, Jews or Copts or Arabs of Egypt. Southern India
was the limit of penetration of so-called Roman merchants, that is,
businessmen seeking to pipe spices and perfumes into the Mediterranean via
the Red Sea. Only with the coming of the Portuguese did a sailing nation
appear that sought to span all the great trade routes of this ocean, but they
were as confined by the monsoon season as anyone when trading to and
beyond Calicut and Goa.

II

The Persian or Arabian Gulf is a small area into which many contrasts have
been packed: its north-eastern shore leads steeply upwards to the mountains
of Persia, offering few good harbours; its south-eastern shores are dry, sandy
spaces, mainly flat but afflicted by the intense heat of Arabia and the high
humidity of an area close to the warm sea; its northern tip is waterlogged,
filled with the silt of the Tigris and Euphrates that has carried the shoreline
ever southwards and gives access to lands rich in wheat, themselves
contained by desert and upland. After about 4000 BC a relatively benign
phase came to an end which had seen moderate rainfall in Arabia, and
increasing aridification set in – this, indeed, provided a stimulus to trade, as
self-sufficiency broke down. Another major change occurred with a fall in
sea levels of about two metres by around 6000 BC, so that archaeological sites
that would have been originally on the shoreline now stand a little higher up,
a short way inland.7 Within the Gulf, islands and peninsulas have offered
stopping points for travellers, notably at Bahrain, Qatar and Umm an-Nar
(near Abu Dhabi); and then, beyond the narrowing of the sea at the Strait of
Hormuz, backed by the mountains of Oman, there is access to the ocean
itself, and the chance to make way along the coasts of what are now Iran and
Pakistan as far as the opening of other rivers: the Indus and the many river
systems of north-west India. These different environments were not generally
self-sufficient and depended upon exchange; date palms played a particularly
important part in the networks of maritime trade that emerged as early as the
sixth millennium BC.
At this time a relatively advanced culture developed in southern Iraq that
has been given the name Ubaid; by 4500 BC it came to be characterized by
temples, palaces and the beginning of towns.8 The domestication of animals
and the cultivation of the soil, already under way several thousand years
before, produced, in several corners of Asia and the Middle East, hierarchical
and increasingly sophisticated societies, the ancestors of those that would
create the massive cities and spectacular artworks of Mesopotamia, Egypt,
China and (though rather later) the Indus Valley. It is impossible to
underestimate the importance in these societies of the great rivers, not so
much as means of communication, though that came later, but as sources of
fresh water for agriculture. However, knowledge of Ubaid is still very
fragmentary. Over so many centuries there must have been enormous
transformations, and identifying them is rendered no easier by the sparse and
often inconsistent dating that has been suggested by archaeologists.
The basis of the wealth of the Ubaid culture seems to have been mastery
over agricultural produce and the possession of flocks, used not just as food
but as the foundation of leather and cloth industries, though inevitably the
hard evidence consists mainly of Ubaid pottery, with its distinctive and often
elegant linear decoration. Who controlled this proto-urban society cannot be
said with any certainty; but the occasional presence of traders can be assumed
with some confidence. This is because Ubaid pottery turns up regularly on
sites away from southern Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, in Oman and on the other
side of the Gulf in Iran.9 Shards of very early Ubaid pottery, with a green
tinge and purple decoration, are definitely of Mesopotamian origin. Yet other
Ubaid goods, such as the typical southern Mesopotamian figurines, have not
appeared on sites along the Arabian coast, leading archaeologists to conclude
that the pottery fragments are evidence for occasional visits by merchants
from Iraq, but not proof that a fully fledged trading network had come into
existence. The people of the coast were still limited in their technology to
fairly standard stone tools, and did not have the wherewithal, as far as one
can tell, to launch expeditions across the water; nor were their own
settlements long-lasting towns in germ, but rather villages that came and
went off the map.10 As early as the late sixth millennium, dates, apparently
traded, were arriving in Kuwait and on the island of Dalma off Abu Dhabi,
for their carbonized remains have been identified by archaeologists; then as
now the date was an everyday stand-by in the daily diet, a reliable source of
energy and a quick stomach-filler.
This was not just a simple route up and down the Gulf, linked to the
settlements of Ubaid. Beads of carnelian, a semi-precious stone from Iran or
Pakistan, have been found in Qatar, as also in Iraq.11 Plenty of boats were
being built along the shores of the Gulf in the fifth, fourth and third millennia
BC. Around 5000 BC, to judge from impressions left in fragments of bitumen
found at as-Sabiyah in Kuwait, boats were constructed out of reed bundles
covered with tar. There are traces of barnacles, a sign that these boats set out
across saltwater.12 Further evidence survives in the form of a pottery model
of a ship and a small painted disc carrying the image of a sailing vessel.
Tunny-fishing was certainly one maritime activity of the inhabitants of early
Bahrain, to judge from the fish bones found there by archaeologists. The
finds of Ubaid pottery are neatly spread out along the Arabian coast, which
suggests that boats were jumping from one waterhole to another as they
wended their way down the Gulf.13
It would be hard to insist that this water traffic had yet become the
economic mainstay of Ubaid Iraq, however important it was to the
developing communities of Bahrain and other Gulf stopping places. Ubaid
enjoyed increasingly intense land traffic towards Syria in the west,
Afghanistan in the east and central Asia in the north; southern Arabia would
become more and more important in later phases, when the search for metal
ores was under way. The maritime inhabitants of the Persian Gulf lagged
behind Ubaid in technological sophistication, living in barasti huts made of
wooden poles and palm leaves, while the Mesopotamians increasingly
accustomed themselves to stone-walled houses.14 Fourth-millennium Ubaidi
traders came to collect dates from the Arabian coast and delivered grain or
cloth in return as well as acquiring Gulf pearls, in demand in the increasingly
sophisticated towns of Iraq. Pearl-fishing has been a mainstay of economic
life in the Gulf over many millennia, and references in the earliest cuneiform
tablets from Mesopotamia to the importation of ‘fish-eyes’, meaning pearls,
leads one to suspect that this trade goes back very far in time; pearls, given
their organic origin, tend to survive much less well on archaeological sites
than precious stones made out of minerals.
The traders also brought down the Gulf that upmarket cutting material of
volcanic origin, obsidian, which came all the way from Anatolia by way of
Mesopotamia. Rather than imagining that somewhere in the Caucasus beside
Lake Van a merchant had thought of sending this item to a distant village on
a remote sea, we should assume that this was handed from person to person,
taking many years or even generations to end up where it did.15 This may all
look rather unpromising. What product or process could create firmer links
between the ever more magnificent civilization of ancient Mesopotamia and a
sea bordered by sand dunes and rough mountains? One answer is that those
mountains contained a particular mineral much in demand in the luxurious
cities of early Bronze Age Mesopotamia.

III

The discovery of Sumerian civilization came as a great surprise to the

archaeologists who painstakingly excavated and reconstructed the cities of a
much more familiar group of civilizations in Mesopotamia that were
mentioned in the Bible. It was known that the early Babylonian kings,
speakers of the Semitic language known as Akkadian, called themselves
‘kings of Sumer and Akkad’. But where and what was Sumer? The
unearthing of the lowest levels at Ur and other cities brought, particularly to
the British Museum, astonishing treasures 2,000 years older than the
enormous Assyrian carvings and reliefs of around 700 BC that were also
carted to London. The Assyrians and Babylonians proved to be the heirs to a
very much older civilization of the third millennium BC that did not make use
of a Semitic language, as they did, but that wrote in a similar cuneiform
script; and this could be deciphered once the sound values of the Akkadian of
Babylonia were known, as the enormously plentiful Akkadian tablets that still
survive helpfully include bilingual texts and dictionaries of Sumerian.16
Sumerian literature exerted a fascination for Babylonians long after Sumer
was buried beneath the rubble, rather as knowledge of ancient Rome and its
language has persisted over the centuries in Europe and beyond. Sumerian
myths were rewritten for Babylonian audiences, notably the series of tales
about Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. Indeed, it was the Sumerians who as far as
we know invented the first coherent, standardized system of writing, even if
other civilizations such as that of Egypt preferred not to use the clay tablets
impressed with a dense mass of often microscopic letters that came to be
favoured in Mesopotamia. But these tablets make up in durability (once
baked) for their apparent illegibility.
It is extraordinary, at such a remote period in the past, that we can make
use of all three building blocks out of which the early history of mankind has
to be constructed, rather than just one of them: works of literature;
archaeological finds; and the day-to-day documents left by business houses in
the third millennium BC. Taken together, they show how the Gulf emerged as
one of the great maritime thoroughfares of that millennium, and how it
experienced decline. They help us understand not just the economic
foundations of the first true civilization in the world, Sumer, in southern Iraq,
but its connections to other great civilizations, especially that of the Indus.
They provide the first glimpses of communities of merchants and their
hangers-on who settled in ports en route from India to Sumer and left behind
their detritus – seals, pottery, necklaces. The exotic lands of Dilmun and
Meluḫḫa emerge from a fog, and with increasing confidence they can be
located on the mental map of the Sumerians. But even citing these names
raises problems. Like the term ‘Indies’, the names Dilmun and Meluḫḫa
meant different things at different times, and the assumed location of
Meluḫḫa eventually shifted from Asia to east Africa, long after the Sumerians
had been conquered by the Babylonians and Assyrians. And as for Dilmun, it
entered literature as a never-never land, a paradise where resided Ziusudra,
known to the Babylonians as Uti-napishtim; he was the survivor of the Great
Deluge that swept away the rest of mankind in a version of the story of the
Flood that in many precise details, such as the sending out of birds to test the
waters, anticipates the account of Noah in the book of Genesis. In the
Sumerian Flood narrative, Ziusudra was sent by the gods to Dilmun, which
was to be found ‘where the sun rises’, and was granted the eternal life that
others, such as the hero Gilgamesh, sought but did not find. Bilgames, as the
Sumerians called that hero, even sought out Ziusudra in ‘the Land of the
Living’; but in the end Bilgames too was fated to follow his great friend
Enkidu down into the gloomy Netherworld where disconsolate souls flitted
about but there was nothing to enjoy.17
Dilmun appears again and again in the cuneiform tablets that have been
excavated in the Sumerian cities.18 The one Sumerian word to have reached
modern English and many other languages is ‘abyss’, recalling the Sumerian
abzu, the great freshwater deeps on which the world was said to float, with
the seabed forming a barrier between saltwater and the waters of the abzu
which welled up and fed the springs of life on earth. The god of the abzu was
Enki, who was both the patron of the oldest of the Sumerian cities, Eridu, and
a frequent visitor to Dilmun. And one can see why he would wish to go there
and escape the chatter of humans, which had driven the gods to such
distraction that they unleashed the flood waters on the earth, for, as one tablet
proclaims:

The land of Dilmun is holy, the land of Dilmun is pure,

The land of Dilmun is clean, the land of Dilmun is holy …
In Dilmun the raven utters no cry,
The wild hen utters not the cry of the wild hen,
The lion kills not,
The wolf snatches not the lamb,
Unknown is the kid-devouring wild dog,
Unknown is the grain-devouring boar.19

There, there is neither sickness nor old age. Indeed, such is the store of plenty
that Dilmun has become the ‘house of the docks and quays of the land’, in
other words a rich centre of trade.20 Dilmun slid from being an Eden on
earth to a real place with ships, merchants and treasures piled up in its
storehouses. The god Enki blessed Dilmun and listed the places with which it
would trade in luxury products: gold from a place called Harali, lapis lazuli
from Tukrish (presumably Afghanistan, the great source of the vivid blue
mineral), carnelian and fine wood from Meluḫḫa, copper from Magan, ebony
from the ‘Sea Land’, but also grain, sesame oil, fine garments from Ur in
Mesopotamia, handled by skilled Sumerian sailors:
 May the wide sea bring you its abundance.
The city – its dwellings are good dwellings,
Dilmun – its dwellings are good dwellings,
Its barley is very small barley,
Its dates are very large dates.21

If, as will be seen, Meluḫḫa was a major neighbouring civilization and

Magan was a land rich in copper, then what was being portrayed here was a
great trading city blessed by a great god that lay somewhere towards or
within the Indian Ocean, an entrepôt intermediate between Sumer, Magan
and Meluḫḫa; the task is to see if anything in the archaeological record
proves Dilmun was not simply a fantasy of Sumerian poets.
The clay tablets are the place to begin. Official documents – religious
litanies, royal inscriptions, and so on – enumerated products such as black
wood from Meluḫḫa, presumably ebony, and a table and chair from Magan,
so the places mentioned by the Sumerian poets were real ones. There are
several references to boats of Dilmun, Magan and Meluḫḫa; they are known
to have reached Akkad in the reign of King Sargon the Great, who was
probably the most dynamic ruler of Sumer and Akkad, and who lived in the
twenty-third or twenty-second century BC: ‘at the wharf of Agade he made
moor ships from Meluḫḫa, ships from Magan and ships from Dilmun …
5,400 soldiers ate daily in his palace’.22 This hardly comes as a surprise:
supposedly the son of a gardener who became royal cupbearer and eventually
usurped the throne, Sargon, like many a usurper, assumed that magnificence
and luxury would cast a veil over his controversial origins and path to power.
After Sargon’s reign, there was an interruption in ties to Magan, for some
mysterious reason, and one of his successors, Ur-Nammu (2112–2095 BC)
displayed special pride in restoring this contact, for he had four cones made
out of clay and inscribed with the same inscription in honour of the god
Nanna:

For Nanna, the chief son of Enlil, his lord, Ur-Nammu, the mighty
male, the king of Ur, the king of Sumer and Akkad, the king who built
the temple of Nanna, caused the former state of affairs to reappear, at
the edge of the sea in the customs house trade was [gap in the
inscriptions] … Ur-Nammu restored the Magan trade [literally: boat]
into Nanna’s hands.23
These expeditions into the still uncertain waters of the Persian Gulf were,
then, dedicated to the gods, whose protection was sought and whose temples
benefited from the copper and luxury goods brought from Dilmun, Magan
and beyond.
The best evidence for the reality of Dilmun lies in what would be regarded
as quite humdrum documents about merchants and their import–export
businesses, were they not so exceptionally old. Lu-Enlilla, for instance, was a
garaša-abba or seafaring merchant from Ur, one of the greatest Sumerian
cities, who traded on behalf of the Temple of Nanna and was commissioned
by its administrator, a certain Daia, to take fine cloths and wool on a trading
expedition; he was to exchange these goods for copper of Magan. Copper
was the great desideratum: Sumer had emerged at a time when copper and,
subsequently, copper smelted with tin to make bronze, was required in ever
vaster quantities not just to forge strong weapons and tools but to create
beautiful objects – figurines, panels, bowls. Sumer was rich in the produce of
the soil and of its flocks of sheep and cattle, but poor in metals, robust timber
and good quality stone. The copper-bearing mountains of Oman were the
place to which to turn for metal, and there is no doubt that Magan
corresponds to what is now the Omani peninsula (now partly under the rule
of the sultan of Oman and partly under the rule of the sheikhs of the UAE).24
Proof that the copper came from there lies in the small natural nickel content
of Omani copper, which is closer to the nickel content found in copper
objects from Sumer than it is to the copper of lands to the north. Copper from
the mountains to the north of Mesopotamia was also more expensive and,
given the vast quantities that were traded, was more difficult to transport than
the seaborne copper of Magan. Oddly, Magan bought barley from Ur but
provided Lu-Enlilla with onions, which were plentiful enough in
Mesopotamia, so maybe the sailors on board a ship bound from there had
overstocked their larder with them and Lu-Enlilla simply had to put up with
that.25 Meanwhile life in Magan improved; settlements became more
permanent, stone towers were built, as well as monumental tombs. This was
still a dispersed society, and nothing remotely comparable to the great cities
of Sumer emerged, but merchants in search of copper (of which fragments
survive in local graves) had given a stimulus to an area that in earlier
centuries had been a deserted backwater.26
The sea was becoming more important as Ur and its neighbours became
greater and greater centres of consumption. Difficult routes across the
mountains of Afghanistan could be avoided by taking the sea route to India,
where access could be gained to the increasingly powerful cities of the Indus
Valley. A gift to the goddess Ningal at Ur included two shekels’ weight of
lapis lazuli, carnelian, other prized stones and ‘fish-eyes’ (pearls); these
goods had arrived from Dilmun, ‘the persons having gone there by
themselves from the month Nissannu till the month Addaru’. The names of
these months were eventually passed all the way down to the Hebrew
calendar as Nisan and Adar, and, bearing in mind the astronomical
sophistication of the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia, we can be sure that this
means they were absent for eleven months. The gifts had arrived from
Dilmun, but they had originated in a scattering of places – the presence of
ivory among items listed on some of these tablets suggests links to India, a
land of elephants, and its presence was not incidental, for ivory objects were
lovingly carved in Ur or were imported ready-carved, like some painted ivory
figures of birds, brought from Meluḫḫa, as was much of the carnelian that
was so cherished in Sumer. Sometimes, it appears, natives of Dilmun came
with these goods; and sometimes men of Ur, such as Lu-Enlilla, set out for
Dilmun and carried on their trade there. Some Ur merchants did so as agents
of a temple; but, increasingly, others worked on their own.27 Loans at
interest, business partnerships, trading contracts assigning risk, and other
indications of a commercial economy with many of the attributes of
mercantile capitalism abound, for the first capitalists on record were
Sumerian merchants long ago in the third millennium BC:

Lu-Mešlamtaë and Nigsisanabsa have borrowed from Ur-Nimmar 2

minas of silver, 5 kur of sesame oil, 30 garments, for an expedition to
Dilmun to buy copper there. On the safe return of the expedition, the
creditor will not make a claim for any commercial losses. The debtors
have mutually agreed to satisfy Ur-Nimmar with 4 minas of copper
for each shekel of silver as a just price; this they have sworn before
the king.28

But for the use of weighed silver in place of coin (not such a great difference,
all told), and the names, this could almost be a commercial document from
Barcelona over thirty centuries later.
The contract just cited forms part of the business correspondence of Ea-
nasir, a wealthy merchant of Ur, whose house was identified by Sir Leonard
Woolley during his triumphant excavation of Ur of the Chaldees in the 1920s
and 1930s; it was not a particularly large house, and consisted of five rooms
around a main courtyard, though a couple of rooms had been ceded to a
neighbour. He lived around 1800 BC, at the end of the Sumerian ascendancy
and at a time, as will become clear, when trade to India had contracted. But
he was still a wealthy man. His speciality was copper, which was delivered in
ingots, and he apparently supplied the royal palace. He was surely one of the
most prominent businessmen of his day, maybe a little unscrupulous, but
looking at his wealth it is impossible not to be impressed: one of his
shipments weighed eighteen and a half metric tons, of which nearly one third
belonged to him.29 The character of trade had changed somewhat in the
century since Lu-Enlilla had lived, and the temples of Ur were no longer (so
far as we know) heavily involved in expeditions down the Persian Gulf; this
was business conducted by private merchants, and they preferred to pay for
their goods in silver, weighed by the shekel, rather than in textiles, as had
been the case with Lu-Enlilla. Probably many of the textiles Lu-Enlilla had
sent to Dilmun and beyond were woven in temple workshops by female
slaves attached to the temple itself. Silver, on the other hand, suited the needs
of mobile merchants who constantly and energetically bought and sold, and
traded on the open market in Ur.
Far from being a dry enumeration of imports and exports, Ea-nasir’s
private archive conjures up the passionate disputes that were bound to arise
about the quality of goods and the obligations to fulfil a contract:

Speak to Ea-nasir; thus says Nanni: now when you had come you
spoke saying thus: ‘I will give good ingots to Gimil-Sin’; this you
said to me when you had come, but you have not done it; you have
offered bad ingots to my messenger, saying: ‘If you will take it, take
it, if you will not take it, go away.’ Who am I that you are treating me
in this manner – treating me with such contempt? And between
gentlemen such as we are!’ … Who is there among the Dilmun
traders who has acted against me in this way?30

The word translated as ‘gentleman’ is a technical term for a citizen of a very

respectable social position, and ‘gentlemen’ were bound by a code of honour
to which they swore their adherence in the temple of the sun god, Shamash; it
was this divinely guaranteed contract that he was being accused of
ignoring.31 This is only part of a longer complaint, and just one of several
that Ea-nasir filed away. Even though many of his partners were perfectly
satisfied with his conduct, he has been described as a difficult, perhaps
sleazy, businessman. This may be unfair; he is far more likely to have
preserved documents about transactions out of which claims could arise than
others, perhaps the vast majority, that could safely be discarded once
everyone was quit of their profit.

IV

Magan, then, lay close to the exit from the Persian Gulf, reaching up to the
tip of the Musandam peninsula, where Oman almost brushes Iran. For many
sailors, Magan must have meant the island of Umm an-Nar near Abu Dhabi,
a significant settlement where plenty of Sumerian pottery has been found and
where copper from the Omani mines reached the Persian Gulf; Umm an-Nar
was a sort of storehouse for goods being despatched towards Iraq.32 The
massive reconstructed tomb at Mleiha in the Emirate of Sharjah (UAE), a
product of the Umm an-Nar culture, is 13.85 metres across.33 However, the
term ‘Magan’ was also applied to the Oman peninsula. As Harriet Crawford
has observed, ‘the ancient scribes seem to have had a rather elastic and foggy
concept of location.’34 But where was Meluḫḫa? Everything suggests that it
was a wealthy and desirable trading partner for Sumer. The creation of a sea
link between Sumer and another centre of high civilization has special
importance in the maritime history of humanity, as one of the first moments,
perhaps the first moment, when civilizations that had developed
independently to a comparable cultural level entered into dialogue with one
another across the sea. Once it has been located it will be possible to return to
the question of where Dilmun was to be found, whether it was a specific
place or a broader region. Sumerian documents often listed Dilmun, Magan
and Meluḫḫa together, because they obviously lay on the same sea route,
with Meluḫḫa at the end. Since ivory was one of the most precious exports
from Meluḫḫa, the choice is narrowed down to the coast of east Africa or that
of India, the two areas from which we could expect elephant ivory to be
exported; and it has been seen that Indian goods did reach Sumer.
In much later centuries, when the Assyrians dominated Mesopotamia
during the early first millennium BC, the name of Meluḫḫa became attached
to parts of east Africa; but that certainly does not mean it was always
identified with the area. In the first place, the route out of the Persian Gulf
tends eastwards, to lands rich in carnelian as well as ivory; there is a short,
clear run from the Strait of Hormuz to the coast of Pakistan. Indeed, the
relationship between that coast and Oman has been so close that from the
eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century the sultans of Oman
possessed an outpost on the coast of Pakistan, at Gwadar, 240 miles from
Oman proper. Moreover, if ships that left the Persian Gulf then turned south
and west, coasting along the shores of Yemen past Aden and maybe as far as
east Africa, we should expect evidence of Sumerian contacts in Yemen too,
but there is none. Nor is there evidence that the inhabitants of what are now
Yemen, Somalia and neighbouring regions were able to launch their own
trading fleets, whereas this was certainly true of the Meluḫḫans. Ships from
Meluḫḫa and Magan are known to have reached Sumer in the days of King
Sargon around 2300 BC and to have docked at his capital, Akkad, where lived
‘Su-ilisu the Meluḫḫa interpreter’. There were enough Meluḫḫans around
Lagash in the century before 2000 BC to create a ‘village of Meluḫḫa’, and
they had a garden and fields producing barley, so Meluḫḫan migrants were
familiar in Mesopotamia at this time.35 Looking eastwards, the journey along
the shores of Iran and Baluchistan to the mouth of the Indus was far less
challenging than that to Africa, and perfectly manageable under a captain
who understood the monsoon seasons.36
It is not beyond credibility that ‘Magan’ actually meant ‘copper’ (rather as
Cyprus, Kupros, did in Greek) and that ‘Meluḫḫa’ meant ‘ivory’, in the
language of proto-historic India. Or Meluḫḫa may originally have meant ‘the
place across the sea’, rather like the medieval term Outremer that Europeans
eventually attached to the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, but could have
meant anywhere across the sea before becoming attached to a particular
place; this might be deduced from the Arabic term milaḥa, possibly derived
from ‘Meluḫḫa’, which was used in the early Middle Ages to mean
navigation, seafaring or seamanship.37 Afghan lapis lazuli could be obtained
from Meluḫḫa; this would have been carried down the Indus Valley to ports
where Sumerian traders were making their purchases. The area also produced
fine woods, including a ‘black wood’ that must be ebony, and sometimes
wooden objects decorated with gold were brought from there, another sign
that Meluḫḫa was no backwater. Finally, and conclusively, inscribed Indian
seals have occasionally been found on Sumerian sites and in reasonable
quantity in the Persian Gulf, so there can be no doubt that contact existed
between Sumer and the Indus Valley. Moreover, Indus pottery has been
found at Abu Dhabi.38
The Indus Valley civilization remains the least known of the great Bronze
Age civilizations, for such evidence as there is often remains impenetrable –
there are inscriptions in a script that cannot be read and a language that
cannot be guessed at, and there is little that can be said about the social and
political organization of a culture whose impressive cities stare blankly at the
excavator. For the Indus Valley appears to have been dominated in the
second half of the third millennium BC by two massive and tightly planned
cities, very similar in layout and construction, Harappā and Mohenjo-daro,
though these are only their modern names. They lie a full 350 miles apart,
and the more southerly city, Mohenjo-daro, stands very roughly 200 miles up
the Indus River.39 These were not, then, cities that had immediate access to
the sea, though from Mohenjo-daro it is easy to imagine craft reaching the
Indian Ocean, and the Indus civilization possessed many dozens of towns and
ports along the ocean shore, in the general area of Karachi, ruling over as
much as 800 miles or 1,300 kilometres of coastline, far beyond the Indus
estuary. One of the most important harbours lay at Lothal, in the Gulf of
Cambay (north-west India), which gave access both to the local river system
and to the open sea, and which offered the facilities ships would require at the
end of the long journey from the Persian Gulf. Lothal possessed a substantial
dockyard and several anchors have been found there. It traded in several
directions, for there were contacts with the Neolithic peoples living further
south along the west coast of India as well as with the Persian Gulf.40
So much attention has concentrated on the mystery of how the two highly
organized mega-cities came to be built along the Indus river system that
rather little interest has been shown in other places, and even the assumption
that these were the twin capitals of a single empire is pleasant speculation.
Rigid central control was in place, for, as the archaeologist Stuart Piggott
observed, the size of bricks used to build the two great cities, the highly
standardized pottery, and the weights and measures show ‘absolute
uniformity’: ‘there is a terrible efficiency about the Harappā civilization
which recalls all the worst of Rome’, while he also observed ‘an isolation and
stagnation hard to parallel in any known civilization of the Old World’. Over
several hundred years during the second half of the third millennium BC not
much changed.41 Although it has proved hard to identify any grand palaces
or temples, this was a highly stratified society in which labour gangs were set
to work pounding grain into flour. It is assumed that the major rural activity,
apart from food production, was the growing of cotton, which is a convenient
argument, as this is a product that leaves little residue archaeologically; there
is no obvious mention of cotton in Sumerian documents that mention
Meluḫḫa, and the Sumerians sent their own textiles to Meluḫḫa, whose main
attraction was the luxury items, semi-precious stones, ivory and fine woods,
mentioned already. Very occasionally one of the distinctive Sumerian
cylinder seals, carved to be rolled across clay, reached Mohenjo-daro, though
Sumerian items rarely appear on Indus sites, even though Indus products such
as carnelian beads appear quite often in Sumer.42 A piece from an Omani
vase also reached Mohenjo-daro, no doubt by sea and river. The best place to
look for signs of contact is the port of Lothal, and, to be sure, gold pendants
of Sumerian origin and (possibly) Mesopotamian pottery have been found in
a merchant’s house there, as has a clay model of a boat. A circular seal found
at Lothal, showing goats or gazelles and a dragon, bears close resemblance to
circular Sumerian seals.43
Seals, however, provide the best evidence for contact the other way, from
the Indus Valley towards Sumer. It is not just that seals, being made of stone,
survive well; they were also used by government officials, priests, merchants
and anyone else who wished to set his seal, literally, on property, and that
could include goods sent by ship to foreign ports; they were functional, but
they were also declarations of identity, and provided vehicles for some of our
earliest written texts. The Indus seals are quite distinctive. Rather than being
rolled on clay they were used as stamps, so they are flat and square; they
generally portray local animals – tigers, humped oxen (zebu), elephants – and
they often carry inscriptions in a distinctive linear script very different to
Sumerian cuneiform.44 So if these seals turn up in the Persian Gulf in
reasonable quantity, we have evidence of visits by Indian travellers to the
area, evidence, in other words, of merchants passing between Meluḫḫa and
Sumer. And they have indeed been found in the ruins of major cities such as
Lagash and Ur, sometimes showing the sorts of animals familiar from Indus
seals, sometimes also containing a few letters in the Indus script. One seal
thought to have been found in Iraq portrays a rhinoceros, which never
appears in Sumerian art, for the animal was unknown in Mesopotamia. This
seal has some Sumerian characteristics as well, such as its shape, and it may
provide evidence for Indians settled in the Sumerian lands, who have already
been encountered at Lagash; but maybe a better explanation, more in accord
with what we know from the Persian Gulf, is that it originated among the
mixed settlements to which it is now time to turn.45

Having identified Magan and Meluḫḫa with reasonable confidence, we are

left with the location of Dilmun. This was another place that wandered
around the Babylonian map, or rather acquired several identities: Dilmun the
abode of the Blessed; Dilmun as a region; Dilmun as a specific place. The
merchants Lu-Enlilla and Ea-nasir clearly knew what they meant when they
talked of Dilmun: for them, it was a place where one could buy copper and
other goods, and it had its own community of traders. What began as a
general term for (most likely) the Persian Gulf roadsteads that ran all the way
down the Arabian shores from Kuwait to the tip of Oman came to mean one
place in particular; the term may originally have signified simply ‘lands to the
south’.46 Archaeologists have identified where that was, and where its
outstations on the route to Magan were as well, notably Umm an-Nar, which
has been mentioned already. The discovery of Dilmun was the work of two
scholars from a not particularly prominent Danish museum in Aarhus,
Geoffrey Bibby and P. V. Glob, later renowned for his book The Bog People,
dealing with the very different topic of the prehistoric victims of human
sacrifice found almost perfectly preserved in Danish bogs. Indeed, as in
Denmark, the issue was bodies, or rather the 100,000 burial mounds visible in
Bahrain and assumed (though this was exaggeration) all to date to some
prehistoric era. Glob and Bibby questioned the easy assumption that Bahrain
had been created as a vast isle of the dead, a cemetery island, which might,
after a fashion, fit with the idea of Dilmun being located there, as a holy
island and the abode of the Blessed.47 According to one tablet King Sargon
of Akkad had conquered Dilmun, which lay in the ‘Lower Sea’, that is, the
Persian Gulf. About 1,600 years later, in the eighth century BC, a warlike king
of Assyria, also named Sargon, sent his armies as far as Dilmun, this time
said to lie on the ‘Bitter Sea’ and to include an island; its king was Upēri,
‘who lives like a fish’ out in the sea.48 Dilmun could not, then, be very far
from Sumer, and the island of Bahrain was an obvious candidate for its
location. The connection went back far in time: around 2520 BC King Ur-
Nanše, ruler of the Sumerian city of Lagash, asserted that ‘ships of Dilmun,
from the foreign lands, brought me wood as tribute’. This visit to the king of
Lagash fits neatly with archaeological evidence that settlement on Bahrain
became denser around the middle of the third millennium BC.49 The coast of
Arabia was an unlikely source of wood for the king of Lagash, and the wood
must have been brought to Dilmun from further afield – from Iran or India.50
Bibby’s team unquestionably made great progress in identifying key sites
on Bahrain and then further afield, notably in Qatar and off Abu Dhabi, and
even some way into Saudi Arabia; but, precisely because they tried to cover
so much ground, they never (to pursue the pun) dug deeply enough into the
history of any of these regions. Still, the importance of Bahrain and its
identity as the major centre of Dilmun became clear as more and more sites
along the Arabian coast were identified. Bibby and Glob uncovered city walls
and streets at Qala’at al-Bahrain (Bahrain fort) on the northern tip of Bahrain;
but at Barbar a few miles away they made their most outstanding single
discovery: a temple of the late third millennium BC, containing a well, for one
of the secrets of Bahrain was the availability of sweet water rising, as the
Sumerians would have said, from the abyss of abzu.51 The motives for
creating a town on Bahrain island are thus not hard to deduce – and as well as
water there were abundant supplies of fish, with 700 edible species
swimming around the Gulf in modern times, so that fish remains a prominent
part of the diet in the Gulf states. It was no different in the Bronze Age: 60
per cent of the bones found at Qala’at al-Bahrain were of fish, though the
inhabitants ate a variety of meats as well, even including mongoose, which is
not native and must have been brought from India; they also imported dairy
goods and cereals from Mesopotamia, so they had quite a varied diet.52
One day in Bahrain a workman in Bibby’s team found a distinctive round
stamp seal made of soapstone and decorated with two human figures; and
more seals turned up in the well of the great temple. As he smoked his pipe,
Bibby wondered whether round stamp seals, thirteen of which had been
found at Ur and three in Mohenjo-daro, made of steatite and even (at Ur)
occasionally adorned with Indus script, might be the product of a place
halfway between the two great cities, Bahrain/Dilmun, no less.53 These seals
are (like Dilmun itself) intermediate between Sumerian and Indus styles, their
patterns matching those of neither grand civilization, but more a mélange of
the two to which some individuality had been added, as in the case of a seal
showing four stylized heads of gazelles arranged in the shape of a cross –
roast wild gazelle was a local delicacy, to judge from the animal bones that
have been found in Bahrain. As more seals have come to light, it has been
found that around one third carry signs from the Indus Valley writing system,
but – before anyone jumps to the conclusion that the Dilmunites conversed in
Indus-speak – the letters are combined in ways not found on inscriptions
from the Indus Valley itself.54 Further weighty evidence of the Indus Valley
connection came from stone globes and cubes used to weigh goods; Bibby
was excited to find that these followed the Indus Valley system of weights
and measures and not that of the Sumerians, but the Dilmunites also used
Mesopotamian weights, which came to light later.55 This apparent confusion
of weights neatly brings out the role of Dilmun as an intermediary between
the cities of Sumer and those of the Indus, a place where goods were
exchanged and where merchants both from Sumer, such as Ea-nasir and his
agents, and from India congregated and did business together.56
Dilmun, then, was both a town that serviced maritime trade between
Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley and the capital of a region dotted with
other coastal or island settlements that must have functioned as safe harbours
for shipping sailing up and down the Gulf. It was a place where merchants
could hang around doing business all year round – between the months of
Nissannu and Addaru, to cite again one of the Sumerian tablets. Whether its
population was an ethnic mix of Indians and Sumerians or consisted to a
large degree of other people is simply unknown, but it makes sense, bearing
in mind the seals, to assume that there was a large Indian settlement there.
Over the many centuries of its existence, this no doubt became an integral
part of local society, as ‘native’ as anyone else (indeed, it is a striking feature
of several of the Gulf states today that a massive proportion of the population
hails from India and Pakistan). However, the political life of Dilmun cannot
be grasped, beyond the sense that it was a well-ordered place. Dilmun had tax
collectors, a not always welcome sign of systematic central management.
Population was rising in the region as a whole, which was good for the tax
collectors, but this also suggests that Dilmun acted as a magnet for settlers
and stimulated production up and down the coast from Bahrain.57 Further
down the coast, in Oman, society remained more obviously tribal and mobile,
and settlements came and went. We should thus think of Dilmun as a small
trading city with offshoots along the western coast of the Persian Gulf, as far
south as Umm an-Nar, which gave access to the copper of Magan.
 Sometimes it is the tiniest and humblest archaeological discoveries that
reveal the most astonishing results. This has been particularly true of
evidence for the types of ships these merchants would have used. A good
point to begin is the description of the boat Ziusudra or Atrahasis built during
the great flood that destroyed the rest of mankind and that was described on
the Sumerian and Babylonian tablets (and later in the book of Genesis). Here,
as a newly discovered tablet reveals, the boat was supposedly a gigantic
version of a round hide-covered boat; the hides were plastered with bitumen
and animal fat on to a frame made of miles and miles of wickerwork, within
which a wooden three-storey structure housed the animals and the hero and
his family.58 Round, keel-less hide boats were well suited to floating
downstream, with the help of a couple of large paddles, though for the return
journey they would have been dismantled and carried back overland; and a
massive round boat with nowhere to go could happily float in the flood
waters that covered the entire world. But for journeys out into the Gulf long
boats were more suitable; a steering oar could be attached, and a sail provided
propulsion. As along the Tigris and Euphrates, reed boats were widely used
within the Gulf. The fragments of bitumen from Kuwait mentioned earlier
leave no doubt that boats constructed wholly or partially from bundles of
reeds were used out at sea around 5000 BC.59 It is conceivable that masted
reed boats, hugging the shore all the way, made the journey from Dilmun to
Iraq and from Dilmun to the mouth of the Indus.
Unfortunately boats made out of reeds tend to leak a good deal, even when
coated with tar, but they are still used for fishing in the Gulf; and they are
quite buoyant, an ancient equivalent of inflatable craft, since the hollow reeds
contain so much air.60 But in Oman, at Ra’s al-Junz, the imprint of long-
vanished wooden planks can be detected on pieces of bitumen dated to the
second half of the third millennium BC; Ra’s al-Junz stands at the eastern tip
of Oman, commanding access to the Indian Ocean, and all the evidence
suggests that it was a regular port of call for ships that must often have
needed repairs in mid-voyage, for its hinterland had little to offer. Moreover,
cuneiform tablets mention the caulking of ships bound for Dilmun and
Magan.61 This bitumen was gathered around what are now oilfields, as thick
mineral deposits seeped up from below and left pools of tar on the surface of
the soil. Bitumen was used for a great many tasks beyond the caulking of
ships, including the sealing of earthenware pots, which by nature are very
porous.62 All this serves as a reminder that it is far too easy to concentrate on
the traffic in exotic goods such as carnelian and ebony, and to forget that
humdrum items – bitumen, dates and fish – were most likely to be found in
the cargo space of a boat sailing the Gulf in the Bronze Age, and long after.
Such cargoes would have perfectly suited a reed boat able to carry a dozen
people at most, with limited storage space. But there is good reason to
assume that the ancestors of the dhow had already come into being; the
quantities of copper being shifted from Magan towards the Sumerian cities
demanded sturdy and well-defended vessels able to carry tons of metal at a
time; nor would Ea-nasir and his colleagues have entrusted their shekels of
silver to small, open, reed boats that could easily become the prey of pirates.
These wooden ships also carried timber from Meluḫḫa and no doubt from the
facing shores of Iran. Indeed, some of that wood may well have been used to
build ships, as the coasts of Arabia and the marshlands of southern Iraq
largely lack suitable timber.63 Craft constructed out of wood were stitched
together; holes were driven through planks and the planks were then bound
together using long stretches of coir rope, made out of the husks of coconuts.
Bitumen, animal fat and padding were then applied to seal the boat. This type
of boat was very resilient, as the hull was quite flexible, and better suited to
the open ocean than more rigid construction using a skeletal hull, which was
the norm in the ancient Mediterranean.64 Sewn-plank boats would remain a
feature of Indian Ocean sea traffic for millennia.
Dilmun may not possess the grandeur of Ur or the sheer scale of Mohenjo-
daro, but what has come out of the earth is extraordinary evidence for how Ur
and Mohenjo-daro interacted in the centuries around 2000 BC. Copper, not
gold, was the metal on which Dilmun set its trademark. With the decline of
the Indus civilization early in the second millennium BC the history of this
connection came to an end. Why this civilization declined has been the
subject of lively debate. The traditional view that an invasion of Aryan
conquerors, speaking an Indo-European language, shattered the Indus
civilization is no longer widely supported. More attention is paid nowadays
to the environmental changes that dried out the Indus Valley and resulted in
the gradual decline of the great cities, while across the wider region
something of Indus culture, even the writing system, lingered for several
centuries, in some places until around 1300 BC.65 The great trade with
Mesopotamia became a trickle; an occasional Indus object turns up on sites in
Iraq, but routes across the sea had become less important to the inhabitants of
north-west India. This did not mean the end of Dilmun, which still appeared
(assuming it is the same place) in a document from eighth-century Assyria.
And the history of Dilmun is also the history of the first maritime trading
route along the coasts of Asia – to all intents the first trade route we know
about anywhere in the world that linked two great civilizations. In later
centuries, there were severe contractions and long interruptions during which
trade and other contact faltered and vanished; but the history of the Indian
Ocean as a great seaway began in the Persian Gulf.
 4

The Journey to the Land of the God

One great Bronze Age civilization of the Middle East has been left out of this
account so far: Egypt. The unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the
early pharaohs, in around 2700 BC, resulted in the creation of a centralized,
affluent society able to draw upon the rich resources in wheat and barley of
the lands regularly inundated by the Nile. When we speak of the importance
of water traffic in the life of Egypt, we refer inevitably, in the first place, to
shipping moving up and down the Nile. The term ‘Great Green’ that appears
in Egyptian texts was used vaguely, though it sometimes meant either the
Mediterranean or the open sea in general, and could also be used for the Red
Sea.1 In the second millennium BC much of the shipping and many of the
merchants who traded with Egypt were foreigners from Syria, Cyprus or
Crete. It has already been seen that there is no evidence for contact by sea
between Egypt and Mesopotamia at this period, although around the time of
the first dynasty in Egypt (c.3000 BC) artistic influences did reach Egypt from
Mesopotamia; for instance an ivory knife now in the Louvre portrays a god in
what looks very much like Sumerian garb.2 But such influences are far more
likely to have trickled through overland, by way of Syria or along desert
routes through what are now Jordan and the Israeli Negev, than by a sea route
around the great mass of the Arabian peninsula. Still, Egypt did develop ties
to the Indian Ocean in the third millennium BC; the Red Sea highway was
used less intensively than the routes the Sumerians and Dilmunites created in
the Gulf and beyond – perhaps, indeed, it was only used intermittently. But
this highway too can be described with increasing certainty, thanks to
extraordinary archaeological discoveries along the Red Sea coast, as well as
one of the earliest and most engaging ancient Egyptian texts to survive.
Before one can make sense of the Egyptian expeditions down the Red Sea,
the most important products of the lands they visited need to be examined.
There is a danger here of a circular argument: they went in search of incense;
the ancient Egyptians’ word ‘ntyw found on inscriptions and in papyri must
surely mean myrrh, because myrrh and frankincense were the most highly
prized ingredients of incense in later times; therefore they visited the lands
where these products could be found; which proves these lands were,
variously, Eritrea, Somalia and Yemen. However, for all its logical faults, this
argument points towards a central feature of the early voyages down and
perhaps beyond the Red Sea: these expeditions went in search of perfumes
rather than spices. The shift from a trade in perfumes and aromatics to one
dominated much more by pepper and the other spices of the east became
really noticeable during the Roman imperial period, when ships ranged much
deeper into Indian Ocean waters; and in the meantime the trade in aromatics
declined precipitously, after the suppression of pagan worship by Christian
emperors deprived merchants of a market in the temples of the Middle East –
though there was a partial recovery by the sixth century AD as Christian
worship made increasing use of the same substances.3 But the history of the
burning of incense before God or before pagan gods goes back very far in
time. Pharaoh himself burned the incense called ‘ntyw before the Egyptian
gods, to accompany animal sacrifices, and these ceremonies were especially
lavish when a new temple was inaugurated, or when the ruler returned in
triumph from war. Incense was burned during the elaborate ceremonies that
sent off dead pharaohs to the Next World, and it was used extensively for
embalming the dead, at which the Egyptians were the unrivalled masters.
It would certainly be helpful to know exactly what ‘ntyw was, so as to be
sure where the Egyptian Red Sea expeditions were heading. Since the way
‘ntyw was used coincides closely with the way myrrh can be used, the idea
that ‘ntyw was actually some form of myrrh makes sense, though there are
other gum-resins such as bdellium that could have been confused with it, and
this is also true of frankincense.4 Gathering these resins takes much the same
form, and the collection of frankincense was described with close attention
by Pliny the Elder, a man whose obsession with scientific detail was so
powerful that he lingered too long in the gas-filled air of the Bay of Naples
and fell victim to the famous eruption of Vesuvius.5 One can wait for the
trees to exude a greasy or sticky liquid that may later harden, and collect that;
or one can make incisions in the bark of the tree out of which oil will seep;
different colours and qualities of incense seep out depending on the process.
Frankincense and myrrh are gum-resins that contain volatile oils – up to 17
per cent in the case of fresh myrrh. In the more benign climate of Bronze Age
south Arabia and Eritrea their cultivation spread over a larger area than now,
for myrrh has now become a prized rarity in Yemen, which has undergone
desiccation over the centuries. Myrrh retains its perfume longer than any
other aromatic, and both products have long been prized for their medical
uses; myrrh is often an ingredient in high-quality toothpaste. In essence,
myrrh was used for anointing, while frankincense was used for burning.6
These were not the only products that the Egyptians brought back from their
expeditions, which also included gold and wild animals, dead and alive. For
all of these, they turned southwards to the land of Punt, ‘the god’s land’.
 II

Just as the Babylonians were often vague about where Dilmun, Magan and
Meluḫḫa lay, the ancient Egyptians did not have a clear sense of where or
what the land of Punt was. This name, which appears in all the modern
literature, is a misreading of a name that generally appears in the form
Pwene, and is sometimes defined as ‘the god’s land’. Punt appears to be the
same place as Ophir, which is said to have been visited by the ships of King
Solomon and King Hiram of Tyre in the tenth century BC. But their fleet
would have sailed out of the Gulf of Aqaba more than 1,600 years after a ship
named Praise-of-the-Two-Lands (Upper and Lower Egypt) was mentioned on
an inscription containing part of the royal annals that has ended up in
Palermo and that dates from the reign of Pharaoh Snefru, around 2600 BC.
The ship was built of cedar or pine wood and apparently was involved with
sixty or more other boats in a raid on the Nubians that brought back
thousands of slaves and an impossible number of cattle (200,000). This ship
was impressively large; its length was a hundred Egyptian cubits, or fifty-two
metres.7 In case this is seen as another example of royal boasting, we can
point to the funeral boat buried next to the Great Pyramid at Giza. This was
built for Snefru’s son Khufu, or Cheops, and it lay for nearly 4,500 years in a
dismantled state before it was unearthed; it is eighty-five cubits long (nearly
forty-four metres), and is made of Lebanese cedar, for one of the eternal
problems of Egypt has been the general lack of large quantities of good, hard
wood.8 It is impossible to be sure that the defeated Nubians about whom
Snefru brayed were what we would now call Nubians, that is, inhabitants of
the upper reaches of the Nile to the south-east of Egypt; maybe they were
other Africans, such as the ancient Libyans who lived to the west of Egypt.
And maybe this was an expedition down the Nile rather than the Red Sea.
Still, the Palermo Stone and the funerary barge between them show that the
Egyptians could build ships with a seagoing capacity, even if many never
ventured further than the Nile.
The description in Egyptian texts of Punt as ‘the god’s land’ is reminiscent
of the way Dilmun was described in Sumerian texts as ‘the abode of the
Blessed’. These places had a mysterious aura to those who heard about them
in the third millennium BC; and this is a constant feature of maritime history –
the news of distant and wonderful lands where (as in Columbus’s Hispaniola
many centuries later) neither food nor fresh water was lacking and paradise
lay either here or not far away.9 And this sense of awe is abundantly present
in the finely crafted ‘Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor’ written on papyrus
somewhere between about 2500 BC and 2200 BC, which tells of a remarkable
voyage to the region of Punt, though the story is really a tale of a visit to
another world entirely, the world of the spirits.10 Here, a sailor relates the
story of his voyage to a royal courtier, who clearly regards him as an ancient
mariner full of yarns, and attempts to brush him aside with the words ‘It is
tiresome to speak to you.’ However, the courtier was being very unfair. The
sailor had set out for the royal mines, probably gold mines, in a ship 120
cubits long and forty cubits wide, with 120 sailors ‘of the pick of Egypt’, for,
‘whether they looked at the sky or looked at the land, they were more
courageous than lions’. It might have helped them more to look at the sea,
because although the sailor praised them for their ability to foretell a storm, a
wave of eight cubits smashed into the ship, which broke apart and sank with
the loss of all lives apart from this sailor, who was cast upon an island rich in
fruit and vegetables, fish and fowl, for ‘there was nothing that was not on it’.
Indeed, his arms were soon so full of the rich produce of the land that he had
to set some of what he had gathered on the ground. Just when he felt so safe
and refreshed, a great serpent, with (oddly) a beard two cubits long, came
upon him; his body glistened with gold and he had eyebrows of real lapis
lazuli. This was a rather different beast to the serpent who led Adam and Eve
astray; he wanted to know how the sailor had arrived: ‘Who brought you to
the island, with water on all sides?’ He told his story and the serpent seemed
satisfied, saying:

‘Fear not, fear not, young man! Do not turn pale, for you have
reached me. Look, the god has let you live and has brought you to the
island of the spirit. There is nothing that is not on it and it is full of all
good things. You will spend month upon month until you have
completed four months on this island. Then a boat will come from
home with sailors whom you know and you will go home with them
and die in your city … and you will embrace your children, kiss your
wife, and see your house. This is better than anything.’

In gratitude the sailor stretched out on the ground in obeisance and promised
to bring word of the noble serpent to his ruler, who would certainly send fine
presents of laudanum, malabathrum (cinnamon leaves), terebinth, balsam and
incense. He said: ‘I shall have boats brought for you laden with all the wealth
of Egypt’; and he would arrange sacrifices in honour of this divine snake. But
the serpent was unimpressed, saying: ‘You don’t have much myrrh, or any
form of incense. But I am the ruler of Punt, myrrh is mine. That malabathrum
you said would be brought, a large quantity is from this island.’ And he gave
the sailor a cargo of myrrh, malabathrum, terebinth, balsam and camphor, as
well as black eye-paint (much in demand among noble Egyptian women, as
contemporary paintings show), and a big lump of incense. He also gave him
hunting dogs, apes and baboons, ‘and all kinds of riches’. Elephant ivory and
giraffe tails were there too, the latter presumably used as fly-whisks. He was
able to load all this on to the boat, which had duly arrived to pick him up as
predicted; and he was told it would take two months to reach home, but when
he did so he would feel like a young man again.
He and the sailors respectfully thanked the serpent-god and travelled north
back home, where the ruler was delighted to see what he had brought and
publicly expressed his thanks to this god; besides, he rewarded the sailor by
making him a ‘follower’, meaning a feudal lord attached to his court.11 So it
is a curious tale that addresses the relationship between the creature comforts
of home and a world beyond everyday human experience. But the story also
sets out clearly some important features of the land of Punt: what could be
obtained there, how long one would need to stop over, how long it would
take to return, and the simple fact that it lay to the south, which must mean
down the Red Sea. Conceivably the island upon which the sailor was cast
was Socotra, which was visited in the first few centuries AD by ships in
search of resins and other luxury goods, and which stands 240 miles off
Yemen.12

III

The existence of southward voyages is confirmed by the major expedition

sent out by Queen Hatshepsut or Hashepsowe in the early fifteenth century
BC, probably a few years before her death in 1458. She was one of a small
and remarkable group of female pharaohs (having previously served as
regent), and she aimed to restore the economic vitality of Egypt after the
overthrow of the dynasty of the Hyksos, Asiatic rulers under whom political
power had fragmented. She took great pride in rebuilding the temples in
central Egypt, abandoned since the Hyksos had ruled Lower Egypt, ‘roving
hordes of them overturning what had been made’. She won the deep, indeed
passionate, devotion of her officials. Ineni, a much-favoured courtier and
master of the royal works, proclaimed: ‘people worked for her, and Egypt
bowed the head.’13 This was commemorated in reliefs and accompanying
inscriptions within the queen’s magnificent funerary temple at Dair al-Bahri,
close to Luxor in Upper Egypt. One of these inscriptions makes it plain that
the history of trade with Punt was not a continuous one, as one could easily
assume. The fantastic land of the serpent-god was only gradually coming into
focus. For the god Amun-Ra makes a curious statement:

No one trod these incense-terraces, which the people did not know;
they were heard of from mouth to mouth by hearsay from our
ancestors. The marvels brought from there under your fathers, the
kings of Lower Egypt, were brought from hand to hand, and, since the
time of the ancestors of the kings of Upper Egypt who lived in olden
days, they were brought in return for numerous exchanges, and no one
reached it except for your royal trading expedition.14

It is reasonable to assume that, before Upper and Lower Egypt were united,
fine luxury items such as spices and aromatics brought from further south
would have passed through Upper Egypt first; and the same would apply to
gold mined further south in Africa. The union of Upper and Lower Egypt to
which the god referred must be the relatively recent restoration of native rule
by her own dynasty, rather than the original unification of the two kingdoms
that had occurred 1,500 years before. But the sense behind the inscription,
even allowing for typical pharaonic exaggeration, is that Hatshepsut was in
some way a pioneer – perhaps reviving the trade to Punt, and integrating its
many stages into a single maritime route managed by royal, rather than
private, fleets.15 This may also have meant that she was bypassing the
straggly overland routes heading off from the Nile or leading down the west
coast of Arabia that were at many times in the past an alternative to the sea
route down the Red Sea. Her ambitious building plans and her determination
to restore the glittering grandeur of pre-Hyksos days prompted her to look far
afield for unguents such as myrrh, luxury materials such as ebony and ivory,
exotic animals such as baboons and, of course, gold. That myrrh was a
particular prize is clear from the use to which this ‘ntyw was put: it would
anoint the limbs of the statue of the god Amun-Ra, which is a possible use for
oil of myrrh; however, the inscriptions do not mention the burning of incense,
which suggests that large quantities of frankincense were not brought from
Punt.
The presence of royal fleets in Punt was intended to make a powerful
impression on its inhabitants. The reliefs even portray the ‘great men of
Punt’, actually the chieftain Parekhou and his corpulent wife Jtj (vocalizing
ancient Egyptian is often pure guesswork, so she is best left in this
unpronounceable form). Although one distinguished Egyptologist described
Jtj as ‘hideously deformed’, it is more likely that the distortion of her body
was a crude attempt to contrast her primitive, servile condition with that of
the true queen, the elegant and in some representations beautiful Pharaoh
Hatshepsut. So too the portrayal of the people of Punt is hardly flattering;
they lived in round huts and had to climb a ladder to go inside their houses.
This was not the sophistication of courtly Luxor. The Puntite chieftains
subject to this king and queen prostrated themselves before the royal
standard, invoking her favour with the words: ‘Hail to you, king of Egypt,
female sun who shines like the solar disc.’16 The inscriptions were intended
to show that the dignitaries of Punt were Pharaoh’s subjects, even if until
now contact had been intermittent or indirect; and therefore what was brought
back was not commercial exchange but humble tribute – a common way to
conduct trade with supposedly inferior peoples, widely practised throughout
Chinese history as well. The tribute was paid over to Pharaoh’s messenger;
and back in Egypt Pharaoh herself would appear under a special canopy, ‘the
dais of the bringing of tribute’, to receive gifts sent from African peoples to
the south of Egypt. Thus one inscription runs: ‘Arrival of the Great Chief of
Punt laden with his gifts by the shore of Wadj Wer before the royal
envoy.’17 But even Pharaoh bartered for tribute, and before they left Egypt
the ships were loaded with gifts of beer, meat, fruit and wine to be sent down
to Punt, and these, or supplies for the journey, were illustrated in the reliefs of
Hatshepsut’s temple, which display a fleet of rather magnificent ships with
billowing sails, oarsmen at the ready and long, heavy stern rudders; even the
details of the long, taut ropes can be seen.18
Such ropes actually survive. Admittedly, those that have been found are
earlier than Hatshepsut’s expedition, which may have been one of several or
many in the period of the so-called New Kingdom. The ups and downs of
trade between Egypt and Punt are unknown; the picture is much more blurred
than in the case of Dilmun. But, as with Dilmun and Meluḫḫa, there are some
basic questions that have to be answered: where Punt was and what route was
taken to reach it. And as with Dilmun and Meluḫḫa, a consensus has only
slowly come into being, largely as a result of major archaeological
discoveries, though they have been made closer to the Egyptian than the
Puntite end of the route. For the coast of the Red Sea has yielded more and
more fresh evidence for how trade between Egypt and the Indian Ocean
operated at key moments in its development: Roman remains at Bereniké;
medieval ones at Qusayr al-Qadim; and now Bronze Age ones at Wadi and
Mersa Gawasis. All these sites lie relatively close to one another; Qusayr is
only fifty kilometres to the south of Wadi Gawasis.19 Their proximity is
easily explained: to reach the Red Sea from the Egyptian desert there were a
number of overland routes that linked the coast to Nile ports, where goods
were reloaded on to freighters for passage downriver. There is good evidence
that a channel was dug that would enable boats to sail from the Lower Nile
through the eastern arms of the delta into the lakes above Suez, and then
down into the Red Sea; but it is unlikely that it was used for the large ships
that Queen Hatshepsut launched, and the best option remained a short trip
overland from the Nile to the coast of the Red Sea. One of the most important
Nile stations was at Koptos near Luxor, which gave relatively easy access to
Wadi Gawasis because it lay in a bend that carried the river a little way
eastwards, and reduced the distance between sea and river, as well as granting
access through low passes through the desert. In the Middle Ages it still
functioned as the departure point for merchants bound for the Red Sea;
medieval Qos was one of the largest towns along the Nile. Koptos–Qos was
also well supplied with local timber, which was relatively rare in Egypt. The
harbour at Wadi Gawasis (technically known as Mersa Gawasis) was in use
between 2000 and 1600 BC, to judge from Carbon 14 dating and from some
fragments of pottery from Minoan Crete of around that time, though there are
earlier and later dates as well, so it was evidently one of the major trans-
shipment stations on the route down the Red Sea.20 But the Egyptians also,
at one or two points, left a pile of rubbish in the local caves (or, some think,
dedicated some of their equipment to the gods in sealed caverns). The
extraordinary dryness of the Red Sea environment has preserved forty-three
wooden boxes in which cargo would have been transported, as well as about
thirty coils of rope woven from papyrus plants that are still in excellent
condition; these date from the Twelfth Dynasty (Middle Kingdom period),
c.2000–c.1800 BC. There are also discarded timbers from ships built out of
cedar, pine and oak, including the blades of ships’ rudders, for barnacles and
worms that had been gathered on the open sea often made heavy repairs
necessary; and there were limestone anchors too.21
Once again it is not always the glossy discoveries that really explain the
past. Some of the most eloquent evidence about where Punt actually was
comes from fragments of smashed pottery: ceramics from Nubia, Eritrea and
Sudan, but also from the area around Yemen on the other side of the Bab al-
Mandeb Strait. Enough ebony survives to show that it was a favourite export,
and it was even prepared before export, because some of the finds consist of
wooden rods already fashioned in their place of origin, which, again, was
Eritrea.22 Gold was mined in an area known as Bia-Punt, which explains the
reference to the ‘royal mines’ in the ‘Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor’. This
too seems to have lain in the highlands of what is now Eritrea. But the most
important exports leave few traces other than occasional blocks of resin: the
perfumes and aromatics carried up the Red Sea which were intended not just
for the living, if they were wealthy enough to afford them, but for the dead, if
they were of high enough status to be properly embalmed.
Taken as a whole, the discoveries at Wadi Gawasis confirm the suspicion
of many Egyptologists that Punt was a broad region encompassing the
southern shores of the Red Sea on both sides, the Eritrean and the Yemeni.
Where the Punt fleet tied up when it reached Punt is still a mystery; it does
not seem that there was a place called Punt in the way that there was a place
called Dilmun, but rather there was an extensive ‘land of Punt’. There must
have been roadsteads similar to Mersa Gawasis that provided the facilities
any seagoing fleet would require if, as once again the shipwrecked sailor
makes plain, a layover of several months was needed before winds and
currents made the return journey safe. Some ships may have penetrated
further south still, reaching what is now Somalia, but there is no evidence that
Egyptian fleets turned east at Aden and encountered vessels from the Persian
Gulf. The Red Sea and the Persian Gulf were still separate worlds, and the
role of the Red Sea as the principal funnel through which goods from much
further east reached the Mediterranean lay long in the future. Indeed, the
Egyptian Red Sea trade went into recession around 1100 BC, and the reasons
are not hard to guess: the pharaohs were preoccupied with attacks attributed
to ‘Sea Peoples’ who came overland from Libya and Syria and from the
waters of the Mediterranean; in addition, their control over the Nile Delta was
undermined by local separatists. As their power weakened, their ability to
fund lavish expeditions to Punt, or to maintain quite such luxurious courts,
also faltered.23 This does not mean that the trade in perfumes and resins
vanished; over many centuries others, including the Nabataeans of Petra,
would maintain the connection by sea and by land.24 For the creation of this
route marked an important moment in the expansion of the trade not just of
the Red Sea but of a much vaster world.

IV

What happened to the Red Sea trade following the crisis in Egypt has to be
reconstructed out of very short references in the Bible that speak of the trade
not to Punt but to Ophir, which seems to have been more or less the same
place, since it lay in a similar direction and produced similar goods.
Curiously, though, the Bible speaks of gold from Ophir but seems
uninterested in incense, even though vast quantities of it were burned in the
Temple; rituals requiring the waving of censers containing incense by the
High Priest Aaron and his successors are described in some detail in the
books of Exodus and Leviticus, which it is now generally agreed took their
current shape around 500 BC. Since these texts, at least in the form we have
them, are so late, archaeology provides the best clues to the use of incense in
the area inhabited by the Canaanites and Israelites at the end of the second
millennium BC. Incense stands or vessels have been found at sites in modern
Israel such as Hazor (from the fourteenth century BC) and Megiddo (from the
eleventh century BC). But the incense may well have been made out of
substances other than frankincense. Sumerian and Assyrian incense was not
made from frankincense (which is further proof that there was no contact
with south-western, as opposed to south-eastern, Arabia); aromatic wood
from the cedar, cypress, fir or juniper tree was favoured instead; some myrrh
was used, but probably a lesser grade of Indian origin.25 According to the
Talmud, the incense used in the Jewish Temple was very carefully mixed
from a great variety of ingredients, beaten fine: eleven spices, including
frankincense, balm, myrrh, cassia, saffron, cinnamon and Cyprus wine; ‘he
who omitted any one of the ingredients was liable to the penalty of death’,
though there is no evidence anyone ever committed such carelessness.26
Even if this is an elaboration of what was actually used, it is a reminder that
the creation of incense, like that of modern perfume, was a complex art and
that no single ingredient was likely to be used on its own.
The Israelites were content with their supply of incense, for when, in the
tenth century BC, the king of Israel, Solomon, and his great ally Hiram, king
of Tyre, launched their own expeditions down the Red Sea, the aim was to
acquire gold rather than resins. Archaeologists argue, almost at fisticuffs,
about how real the picture of Solomon in the books of Kings and Chronicles
was; they differ profoundly about the reliability of the stories that record the
foundation of the Davidic dynasty, though the latest evidence, from Khirbet
Qeiyafa and Tell Qasile in Israel, shows that the biblical version is not all
fantasy. Kings tells how Solomon put together a fleet of ships at a place
called Etzion-Geber on the Gulf of Aqaba–Eilat, where Israel and Jordan
share one of the two northern tips of the Red Sea. The fleet was accompanied
by sailors familiar with the sea, supplied by King Hiram, who was
presumably also closely involved in the building of these ships. They
travelled down to Ophir, where they obtained 420 talents’ weight of gold, a
massive amount (about sixteen tons), which they brought back to King
Solomon.27 Soon after, following the famous visit to Jerusalem of the queen
of Sheba (who came overland in a great camel caravan), more ships were sent
south, described this time as King Hiram’s ships, which makes more sense.
They brought gold, sandalwood and jewels from Ophir, and Solomon used
the wood in the building both of the Temple in Jerusalem and of his palace
next door. Some of the fine wood was even fashioned into harps and other
stringed instruments, for ‘it was the best sandalwood anyone in Israel had
ever seen’. Kings then asserts that at that time silver was of no special value,
so everything was made of gold, even cups and dishes; after this expedition,
he received 666 talents of gold, according to the Bible, whose authors were
almost certainly conjuring a figure out of the air. ‘Solomon had many ships
of Tarshish. Every three years he sent them out with Hiram’s ships to bring
back gold, silver and ivory, as well as monkeys and peacocks [or baboons]’ –
a passage that suggests silver was not quite so worthless after all.28 So much
silver was being brought from Spain by the Phoenicians at this period that it
is conceivable silver was not exactly worthless, but was at least easy to obtain
and lacked prestige.
This was the time when the Phoenicians were beginning to create their
outposts as far afield as Cádiz, even if their settlement there is not as old as
the traditional date, 1104 BC (the term ‘Phoenician’ was invented by the
Greeks and refers to Canaanite traders, whether by sea or by land, who
thought of themselves more as natives of particular cities such as Tyre or
Carthage than as a distinct people).29 The land rich in silver that they were
visiting was called, in classical sources, Tartessos, and it corresponds to parts
of southern Spain; it is often assumed that ‘Tarshish’, mentioned again and
again in the Bible, was the same place, but the Bible is emphatic that
Solomon’s ships were launched on the Red Sea, and the goods they brought
back were not the produce of the Mediterranean.30 The phrase ‘ships of
Tarshish’, rather like the term ‘argosy’ derived from the city of Ragusa
(Dubrovnik) in early modern times, indicated any fleet of capacious sailing
vessels able to breast the high seas. Hiram supplied Solomon with fine timber
not just from distant Ophir but from the cedar forests of Lebanon in the
hinterland of Tyre; and he sent other goods from all over the Phoenician
trading world, as can be seen from the biblical account of how the Temple
was built. The Red Sea was a subsidiary, but exotic, addition to the
Phoenician trade routes that led across the sea to north Africa, Sardinia and
Spain and overland to Assyria. In the sixth century the prophet Ezekiel
poured verbal fire and brimstone on Hiram’s erstwhile capital, Tyre, and
listed all the lands where Tyre traded – among the easiest to identify are
Persia and Yavan (Ionia, that is, Greece), but also Arabia and Sheba, meaning
Yemen or somewhere nearby.31
 It is possible that the story of Solomon’s fleet is a projection backwards
from later times, and it is even possible that a memory lingered of Queen
Hatshepsut’s mission to Punt. Reading between the lines, one can see that
Hiram played a bigger role than Solomon in this enterprise. But the gold of
Ophir was not an illusion; even if the fleets of Ophir were not sailing in the
tenth century, they aroused interest in the ninth. A curious passage in Kings,
accompanied, as usual, by a much later recasting in Chronicles, tells how
Jehosaphat, king of Judah (c.873–849 BC), ‘made ships of Tarshish to go to
Ophir for gold, but they did not go, for they were wrecked at Etzion-Geber;
then Ahaziah the son of Ahab said to Jehosaphat, let my servants go with
your servants in the ships. But Jehosaphat was unwilling.’ Chronicles knew,
or pretended to know, rather more than Kings, though the author was
thoroughly confused between Ophir and Tarshish and offered a different
chronology. Jehosaphat received quite a good press in the Bible; for instance,
just before the decision was made to build the ships he had expelled the male
temple prostitutes against whom the prophets inveighed. Ahaziah, on the
other hand, aroused the ire of the authors of the Bible; he was the king of the
rival northern kingdom of Israel, which came into existence after the death of
Solomon; yet the two kings set aside past enmities, political and religious,
and joined together in a pact, constructing a fleet of ships at Etzion-Geber
bound for ‘Tarshish’. A mercantile consortium of this type, guaranteed by the
ruler’s protection, was perfectly normal at this time. With the prospect of
high profits but the danger of heavy losses, the royal court had the resources
to bear the risk, and at the same time welcomed the opportunity to acquire
gold and luxury goods.32
All went well until Jehosaphat, who tended to have trouble with the very
many prophets telling him what to do, became the target of a certain Eliezer,
son of Dodavahu, who strongly disapproved of the alliance with the ruler of
Israel, a king still tainted with the Canaanite beliefs that his father Ahab had
willingly tolerated. ‘And the ships were wrecked, so they were unable to go
out to Tarshish.’ The exact meaning of the term vayishaberu, translated here
as ‘wrecked’, is not clear, as it could mean ‘destroyed’ in all sorts of ways,
and in the standard English translations the word ‘broken’ is used instead.
But surely what the Bible points to is ships coming apart, whether because
they were poorly constructed, or because they foundered in a storm or on the
many reefs of the Red Sea. For even with Phoenician help it cannot have
been easy to navigate a little-known sea, either for Hatshepsut’s fleet, or
Solomon’s, or this one.
The obvious task of the archaeologists would be to locate Etzion-Geber.
The meaning of the name is not much help; it may indicate something like
‘town of the cockerel’; this is not an area, like some in the Middle East,
where fairly continuous occupation has preserved old names. However, since
the Red Sea ends in a point, now marked by the modern Israeli city of Eilat
and its older Jordanian neighbour, Aqaba, one should not have to seek too
far. In 1938 the American archaeologist Nelson Glueck, much respected for
his work on biblical sites, identified the hillock of Tell el-Kheleifeh, which
stands just inside the Jordanian border with Israel, as the location of Etzion-
Geber. He thought he had found tenth-century pottery there, of varied origin
but dating roughly to King Solomon’s time; but more recent investigations
have shown the pottery to be somewhat later, later even than King
Jehosaphat, and dating to the eighth to early sixth centuries BC, around the
time that the book of Kings was probably being pieced together. Still, it
contains clues: some pieces are stamped with the inscription ‘belonging to
Qaws’anal, servant of the king’, who may well be the king of Judah.33
Another discovery at this site was a potsherd with south Arabian writing,
dating from the seventh century BC or a little later, so traffic up the Red Sea
certainly existed. Others looking for Etzion-Geber have pointed to ‘Pharaoh’s
island’ a little offshore, the site of a crusader castle; the island possesses an
enclosed inner harbour of a type familiar from the Phoenician colonies. The
Phoenicians preferred to found their trading settlements on offshore islands,
as can be seen at Tyre itself and at Motya near Sicily or Cádiz beyond the
Strait of Gibraltar. It would not have been odd to have done the same when
they tried to set up a sea route down the Red Sea, whether in the tenth century
BC or, more likely, in later centuries.34
All this may appear very tenuous, so the best piece has been saved up till
last. The mound of Tell Qasile, now contained within the Land of Israel
Museum in Tel Aviv, contains the quite substantial remains of a town that the
Philistines established on the coast a little north of Jaffa when, arriving from
Crete, Cyprus and the Aegean, these Mycenaean warriors migrated across the
Mediterranean during the convulsions that saw the collapse of the great
Bronze Age civilizations in the region. The town was still active in the eighth
century BC, when someone threw away a fragment of a pot inscribed in early
Hebrew: ‘the gold of Ophir to Beth-Horon, thirty shekels’.35 As for Beth-
Horon, this was either a temple dedicated to the god Horon or a town a little
way to the north-west of Jerusalem, in the West Bank, which – rather than
lapsing into obscurity – is now the seat of one of the Israeli settlements that
have become an obstacle to peace in the Middle East.

‘And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with
Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had
opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense,
and myrrh.’36 It has been seen that these three luxuries already shared their
history 1,450 years before the birth of Jesus. About fifteen years ago, a
colleague at Cambridge was returning from a visit to the Middle East around
Christmas-time. When his luggage was inspected by British customs officials
they asked him what he had bought, and he declared that he had been visiting
Yemen and that his luggage contained frankincense and myrrh. ‘And gold as
well, I suppose!’ came the ironic reply, and he was let through without
further ado. These items were certainly the prestige products of the earliest
trade routes to navigate down all, or most of, the Red Sea. On the other hand,
preferences shifted. The Egyptians had a special interest in myrrh, though
they were also great burners of incense; the Phoenicians and the Israelites
were most interested in gold and had other sources for their incense. And, as
in the case of the early navigators down the Persian Gulf, the expeditions to
Punt and Ophir were punctuated by long periods of silence, during which, if
Queen Hatshepsut is to be believed, contact was lost. Fits and starts
characterized this maritime route even more than that of the Persian Gulf.
Difficulties in navigating past the reefs and shoals of the Red Sea were one
discouragement; the possibility of using land routes was another. One could
reach Eritrea by river and land, and one could reach Arabia by following the
coast of western Arabia overland. This traffic was rendered much easier by
the domestication of the camel, whose date is disputed but may have been
achieved, at least in parts of Arabia, by 1000 BC.37 Competition between
land and sea routes to south Arabia and the facing shores of Africa would last
many centuries. It was not always clear what comparative advantage a sea
route offered those seeking frankincense and myrrh. The Red Sea would only
be used intensively when ships regularly sailed south beyond the fabled lands
of Punt, Sheba and Ophir into the wide expanses of the ocean, and that would
only happen when the attractions of the Indies and of the shores of Africa
became clear. In other words, the Red Sea flourished not for itself but as a
passageway linking Egypt, and beyond that the Mediterranean, to Africa,
India and even Malaya.
 5

Cautious Pioneers

During the first millennium BC, political convulsions in the eastern

Mediterranean and the competition between the rulers of Egypt and
Babylonia for control of the lands inhabited by Canaanites and Israelites,
Philistines and Phoenicians, turned the attention of the great powers away
from the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea; and it was this, perhaps, that enabled
the navies of Solomon and Hiram to take over management of the sea route
to Ophir. But there is little evidence in the literary sources, in surviving
tablets, or in archaeological finds, for regular and intensive movement by
merchant ships up and down these seas. This does not mean contact came to
an end; but the emergence of a powerful Persian Empire, which by the sixth
century had absorbed Iraq as well, brought land routes into the highlands of
Iran to the fore, and Indian goods could also be obtained via the cross-
country routes, while caravan traffic from south Arabia kept consumers
supplied with frankincense and myrrh.
Following the conquest of Babylon by the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great in
539 BC, Cyrus proclaimed himself ‘king of Babylon, king of Sumer and
Akkad, king of the four corners of the world’, setting himself firmly within a
2,000-year-old tradition that had originated in Bronze Age Sumer. Under his
successors the Persian Great Kings expanded their power as far as Ionia on
the coast of Asia Minor, and were keen to take charge of Greece proper as
well. Greeks visited the Persian court and were hungry for information about
the vast empire that had come into being, embracing Egypt, Persia, Babylonia
and Lydia in Asia Minor; but it was difficult to make sense of the information
that trickled through to Ionia and the Aegean. Judging from the geographical
writings that survive in whole or in part, the ancient Greeks were curious
about the shape of Africa, Arabia and India; they were also excited by stories
of bold explorers who had travelled for years around Arabia or even the
whole continent of Africa. Around 500 BC the historian Hekataios, only
known from fragments quoted by later writers, mentioned the Gulf and called
it the Persikos kolpos, ‘Persian Gulf’, which revealed something about the
new political order that had come into being. During the following century
the Ionian polymath Herodotos described a remarkable sea voyage around the
Arabian peninsula that took place around 510 BC, which suggests attempts
were under way to re-establish routes from India to Arabia. Skylax, who
came from Caria on what is now the Turkish coast, and was therefore a near
neighbour of Herodotos, was commissioned by the Great King Darius
Hystaspis to sail with a crew not from the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates
but from the Indus, which he reached overland, and to head out into the ocean
and westwards round Arabia and up the Red Sea. The voyage towards the
port of Arsinoë near Suez took thirty months.1
 There is no reason to be sceptical about Herodotos’ story. Darius was
attempting something that was, potentially at any rate, revolutionary. He
aimed to draw together the Indies and Egypt; and this meant that heavy
engineering work was needed at the Egyptian end of the route too. Darius re-
created the ancient channel through the delta that led up the Nile in one
direction, and out to the Mediterranean in the other. This was not exactly a
precursor of the Suez Canal, for the route ran westwards from the bitter lakes
a little north of Suez; and the ancient Egyptians appear to have laid the
groundwork. The new channel, Herodotos avers, was wide enough for two
triremes to pass one another, and it took four days to navigate its length.2
Once this channel was in operation, shipping could, in theory at least, travel
from the Egyptian city of Babylon (the present-day Cairo) all the way to the
Indus River. An Egyptian inscription from this period found along the route
of the canal boasted that ships could ‘sail directly from the Nile to Persia by
way of Saba’, which would be south Arabia, and Herodotos saw this canal as
part of a wider Persian scheme to conquer the whole vast area between India
and Greece; nor was Darius’ ambition confined to the landmass, for he also
aimed to become master of the seas: ‘after they had made their voyage round
the coast, Darius both subdued the Indians and made use of this sea’.3
Since there was already a port at Arsinoë towards the top of the Gulf of
Suez, and since south Arabian pottery was reaching the Gulf of Aqaba, was
the Red Sea such a neglected area during the first millennium BC? It is always
very risky to argue from silence, and Herodotos, for all his charm, is often
unbelievable, and sometimes confessed that he did not really accept all he
had been told. But the story of Skylax is backed up by the bigger, and more
easily verifiable, story of Persian imperial ambitions. Less credible, with its
description of harvests planted and reaped off the coast of Africa, is another
tale Herodotos told about navigation out of the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean
during the reign of the Pharaoh Necho, or Nekau (610–594 BC):

Libya [i.e. Africa] reveals that it is surrounded by sea, except for the
part that borders on Asia; and as far as we know this originally was
demonstrated by Necho king of Egypt. Once he had finished digging
the channel which leads from the Nile to the Arabian Gulf [i.e. Red
Sea] he sent out Phoenicians aboard ships, commanding them to sail
on and to return past the Pillars of Herakles into the Northern Sea [i.e.
the Mediterranean] and from there to head to Egypt. The Phoenicians
therefore set forth from the Red Sea and sailed through the Southern
Sea [i.e. Indian Ocean]; and whenever autumn came, they would put
to shore and sow the land, wherever in Libya they might happen to
have arrived; and then they waited for the harvest. So, having reaped
the grain, they would sail on, and after two years had passed, they
turned through the Pillars of Herakles in the third year and arrived in
Egypt. And they reported a thing which I cannot believe, but others
might choose to believe, namely that in sailing round Libya they had
the sun on their right hand.4

Herodotos also reported a voyage sent by a later Persian king, Xerxes (485–
465 BC), which was supposed to go round Africa anti-clockwise. The captain,
who this time was a Persian named Sataspes, had been sent on this expedition
as an alternative to being impaled for raping or dishonouring a noblewoman;
but he turned back somewhere in the Atlantic after meeting some small and
primitive folk on the shores of Africa and returned to Egypt. There, Sataspes
was promptly impaled after all by the unimpressed Great King.5 The
problem in Herodotos’ mind was the shape and dimensions of Africa, and
whether the Indian Ocean led into the Atlantic, as he and in due course
Alexander the Great were convinced it must do. Even so, the geographer
Ptolemy would later insist that the Indian Ocean was a closed sea, bordered
on its southern fringes by a broad strip of torrid, uninhabitable lands that
stretched from southern Africa towards south-east Asia.
 This is one of the many great expeditions that have been credited to the
Phoenicians, all too often without much evidence; more recent enthusiasts
have sent them to the Azores, if not America, and to India, if not Malaysia,
and they have even been credited with the building of the city of Great
Zimbabwe in southern Africa a mere 1,800 years after the reign of the
Pharaoh Necho. The point about the direction in which the sun lay has often
been cited to show that they must have sailed along the Atlantic coast of
Africa, though other Phoenicians certainly crept down that coast from
Gibraltar (maybe including the unfortunate Sataspes), definitely as far as
Mogador. Arguments that might disprove the voyage include the rather short
length of time, especially when compared with the more reasonable duration
of Skylax’s voyage around Arabia, all the more so if the Phoenicians stopped
for long periods to watch the grain grow. How would they maintain and
repair their boats? And what sort of ships did they use anyhow?6 The most
important conclusion from Herodotos’ short and puzzling account is that,
whatever they observed, these Phoenicians did not open up new routes into
the Indian Ocean. East Africa would be integrated into the great trading
network of that ocean in due course; but the pioneers in long-distance traffic
across this ocean were the Greeks and the Romans.
Once the Greeks had wreaked their revenge for past attacks by Darius and
Xerxes, and had conquered the Persian Empire, following the lightning
campaigns of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, the Indian Ocean
attracted increased attention both from rulers and from writers. Alexander’s
dreams of unlimited empire were only enhanced when he pressed on into
north-western India, leaving behind Greek army veterans and a legacy of
Greek culture that became intertwined with Buddhism. He was learned in
geography, as one might expect of a pupil of the polymath Aristotle, and on
one occasion he delivered a speech in which he set out how the various seas,
including the Persian Gulf, were related to one another. No doubt Alexander
had read about Skylax, who was quite famous, and about other expeditions
under the Persian banner. He obviously knew about the circumnavigation
reported by Herodotos, for he insisted that ‘from the Persian Gulf our fleet
shall sail round to Libya, right up to the Pillars of Herakles’, and opined that
one result would be the extension of his rule over all Libya, or Africa, not to
mention Asia – his aim was to reach ‘those boundaries which God set for the
whole earth’.7
 In 325 BC he commissioned a Cretan officer named Nearchos to set out
from the Indus and head up the Persian Gulf. Nearchos was an old and trusted
companion of Alexander, and the choice of someone so close to the king to
make this voyage indicates that this was not a trivial enterprise, but that it had
strategic objectives as well as scientific ones. Alexander was at first reluctant
to appoint Nearchos, because he placed such value on his friendship and was
well aware of the risk Nearchos would face leading his fleet into uncharted
waters; but Nearchos insisted he wanted to do this, and as they reviewed the
names of other possible commanders they realized that all of them would
prove unreliable, even chicken-hearted. Nearchos said, if Alexander’s
biographer Arrian is to be believed: ‘O king! I undertake to lead your fleet!
May God help this enterprise! I shall bring your ships and men safe and
sound to Persia, if the sea is indeed navigable and this enterprise is not
beyond human power.’
The sailors for this expedition were from Phoenicia, Cyprus and Egypt,
though individual ships were placed under Greek commanders from
Alexander’s entourage. Some of the ships were partly brought from Cyprus
and Phoenicia, extraordinary as this may seem. In accord with common
practice, they were dismantled or constructed only in sections on the coast of
Lebanon and carried overland to the river system of Mesopotamia. They were
taken down to Babylon, where other vessels were built; how they then
reached the Indus across the Persian mountains is a mystery.8 The
Phoenicians and their Carthaginian descendants were experts at the assembly-
line construction of ships, and would number the planks and fittings so that
everything could be put together exactly as intended.9 Alexander was hoping
for a report on the people, ports and products of the sea coast between
Mesopotamia and India, and this voyage became widely known when not just
Nearchos but several officers in the fleet recorded their own account of the
journey. Alas, only fragments of these accounts have survived, though Arrian
offered a connected account based on Nearchos’ words. His account
combined high adventure and quite specific description, for the records left
by the captains were not, in the main, stirring sea yarns but detailed
navigation guides that recorded in great detail the information the king of
Macedon had requested.
There was, though, more than enough material for yarns as well: having
travelled down the Indus, the ships were delayed by the monsoon for more
than three weeks close to what is now Karachi. Then several ships were lost
in gales, even though the men managed to swim to safety; Nearchos cannot
have had much understanding of the monsoon season at the start of his
voyage, but experience taught him and his captains how important it was to
respect the ocean winds. Mastering high seas was only the first serious
problem; their reception by the inhabitants of the coastline was often
extremely inhospitable. On one occasion, as they sailed along the coast of
Baluchistan, Nearchos was challenged by hundreds of half-naked Indians,
who are described as extremely hairy, ‘not only their heads but the rest of
their bodies’. They had no knowledge of iron, but used their claw-like
fingernails as tools with which they ripped apart the raw fish they ate, and
otherwise they relied on sharp stones for tools; they dressed in animal skins
or even whale skins. He sent a phalanx of men, all capable swimmers, over
the side of his ships; these men had apparently swum, or at least waded, to
shore in their armour, and they struck terror into the Indians.
As they moved beyond what Nearchos regarded as India, down the coast of
Iran, they encountered peaceful town-dwelling folk who fed the sailors with
bread made not from grain but from pounded fish meal obtained from large
sea creatures whose flesh had been dried in the sun; they regarded wheat and
barley as delicacies. Fresh fish were generally eaten raw; and, rather than
being caught out at sea, the fish were scooped out of hollows along the
beaches where they, along with crabs and oysters, were found when the tide
receded. At one settlement, the local sheep tasted of fish because, according
to the report, there was no pasture for animals and so the sheep were fed on
fish meal. Even the beams with which they constructed their houses were
large whale or fish bones. Food was sometimes hard to find as the fleet
coasted along, and those on board had to resort to palm hearts cut from trees
along the coast. Apart from the occasional slaughtered camel, they found
little on which to gorge themselves in the land of the fish-eaters, and were
glad to press on.10
It was perhaps inevitable that the fabulous should become mixed up with
the real, and Arrian reports a visit to an island sacred to the sun where no
human had set foot, and where one of the demi-goddesses known to the
Greeks as the Nereids had once lived. She had lured sailors to the island, but
once they arrived she turned them into fish. The sun god was not amused by
this sport and expelled her, as well as turning these fish back into human
beings, whereupon they settled on the shore and became fish-eaters.
Nearchos had no difficulty in reaching the island and proving that there was
nothing magical about the place. But there was still a sense of being half-lost,
only vaguely knowing where they should be heading. Mapping the contours
of India and Iran was confusing, especially as they approached the Persian
Gulf and the Musandam peninsula that juts out from Oman and almost closes
off the Gulf. Should they sail down the ocean flank of the peninsula past
Arabia or carry on into the Gulf along the coast of Iran? On that side
Nearchos had already found land rich in cinnamon, but he realized that the
Arabian coast was the outer edge of sandy desert, ‘quite denuded of water’,
and rejected the advice of one of his captains that he should follow the shore
of Oman south-westwards. He understood that the route up the Gulf would
eventually take him to Babylonia. As they sailed up the Gulf they
encountered more unconquered tribes living by the shores, and even a
wandering Greek, still wearing his Greek cloak, who had become detached
from Alexander’s army; so, even when coasting along the shores of the
Persian heartlands, they were making discoveries and helping the king of
Macedon understand how his territories fitted together.11 The voyage was
rated a resounding success.

II

The expedition had explored a small but important segment of the coast
between modern Pakistan and the Persian Gulf; the distance was modest
compared to the voyages attributed to the Phoenicians, but the framework for
a maritime network spanning the Indian Ocean was gradually coming into
being. Alexander ordered the creation of a port named (predictably)
Alexandria at the mouth of the Tigris–Euphrates system, to facilitate trade
down the Gulf; so there was some hope of capitalizing on Nearchos’
achievements. But Alexander’s ambitions were soon thwarted by his early
death at Babylon; for the next few years his generals squabbled over and
finally divided his empire. He had sown some seeds: his successors, the
Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Mesopotamia (actively competing
for Syria), became increasingly interested in naval power; and the Persian
Gulf gradually re-emerged as an important channel for traders seeking to
reach the Indies. Alexander had stretched the Greek world as far as India;
partial Hellenization also occurred in the Gulf region, as Greek settlers were
encouraged to establish small trading towns that would service the trade in
Arabian aromatics and Indian spices. Yet Alexander’s successors were
generally more interested in Syria and the Mediterranean, where the
Seleucids played out their rivalry with the Ptolemies of Egypt, than they were
in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Elephants rather than warships were the
great symbols of Seleucid military power. Still, the Seleucid kings operated a
fleet in the Persian Gulf whose task was to make sure that the sea routes to
India remained open, particularly when resurgent Persian power threatened
free access to these waters; Parthian soldiers in Persian service may have
managed to occupy the northern tip of Oman.12
This was an age of urban revival in the Gulf. The Seleucid kings dreamed
of creating a network of Greek towns along its shores. Such a network could
never match the networks created in the Mediterranean, but at least six towns,
and maybe nine or more, were established. Exactly where they were has been
much debated, for they have vanished from the map. Graves found at the
ancient settlement of Bidya, in the small part of the UAE that faces out across
the Indian Ocean, have been described as ‘Hellenistic’, in other words from
the Seleucid period; they overlaid graves dating back to the second
millennium BC. So maybe the Greeks, or rather people infused with Greek
culture (including, to judge from finds in the town, fine glass), reached as far
as this.13 One town which seems to have developed independently from, and
rather more successfully than, the Greek settlements lay at what the Arabs
later knew as Thaj, in what is now Saudi Arabia. Most of its inhabitants were
probably Arabs, and it was the seat of a state that controlled part of the
eastern flank of Arabia.14 On the one hand, there are the ruins of a large city
of whose original name no archaeological record survives; and, on the other
hand, there are the enthusiastic reports of classical writers, going right back to
the time of Alexander the Great, that describe land and sea trade between a
place they called Gerrha and Babylonia, making it plain that this was by far
the most important trading centre in the region.15 According to the Greek
writers, the great speciality of these Arabian merchants was, predictably,
incense, which they carried northwards to their city; Gerrha was an entrepôt
between the lands rich in frankincense and myrrh and the great empires and
royal courts that craved these products and had the means to buy them, to be
used in temple worship and to render ever more magnificent the ceremonies
of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic courts.
King Antiochos III was so keen to benefit from this trade that he made a
state visit to Gerrha in 205 BC; although he was showing the Seleucid flag in
the Persian Gulf, he did not come to Gerrha as a conqueror, and the Greek
historian Polybios emphasized that he gladly recognized the ‘perpetual peace
and freedom’ of the citizens of Gerrha.16 Antiochos was, however, also
happy to go away with massive gifts in frankincense, myrrh and silver; and
he hoped he had persuaded the Gerrhaeans to send their merchants to
Babylonia rather than to Persia or towards his rivals, the Ptolemaic kings of
Egypt, who at this point controlled Syria. To reach the lands of the Ptolemies,
as several papyri from Egypt make plain, south Arabian incense travelled
overland via Petra or other towns on the edges of Syria in the camel caravans
of the Nabataean merchants, and not by ship around Arabia and up the Red
Sea. But, in the second century BC, Syria fell under Seleucid rule; and as a
result the route from Gerrha to the lands of the Nabataeans was unblocked, as
the Seleucid king now stood to gain as much from taxes collected in Syria as
from those collected in Babylonia.17
That is what is known of Gerrha from the Greek historians and
geographers. Then there is the physical evidence from Thaj. Whether or not it
stands on the site of Gerrha, Thaj had a long history as a centre of trade. Thaj
was still being mentioned by pre-Islamic writers of Arabic, fragments of
whose works were preserved by the Muslim Arabs as exemplars of fine
writing: ‘the flowing wells of Thaj invite the wild she-asses’, wrote ‘Amr ibn
Kulṯum some time in the late sixth century AD.18 But much earlier, in the
third century BC, this substantial walled town had been taking delivery of
Greek black-glazed pottery that had filtered through from the Mediterranean.
Rather more pottery arrived from Seleukeia, which was the grand eastern
capital of the dynasty, named with typical contemporary immodesty after
themselves.19 Seleukeia lay some way up the Tigris, at a point where the
distance between the Tigris and Euphrates narrowed briefly. Thaj therefore
had distant connections. The city grew and grew, so that it is the largest
known archaeological site in the Gulf region. Its area was over 800,000
square metres (Pliny the Elder said the circumference of Gerrha was five
Roman miles, making it much the same size).20 But although it had plenty of
fresh water it lay more than fifty miles inland from the coast, with good
access to a port at al-Jubayl, but also, without doubt, to caravan routes that
trekked down the eastern side of Arabia, and that were still being used by
coffee traders plodding their way up from Yemen on their camels in the
nineteenth century.21 This resolves a difficulty that has left some historians
unconvinced that Gerrha and Thaj were the same place. Greek writers
thought of Gerrha as a place by the sea; one early Greek description insists
that rafts (perhaps he meant reed boats) were sent from Gerrha up the Gulf
towards Babylonia; and the geographer Strabo first said it lay by the sea –
and then said it lay some way inland.22 Gerrha, like Dilmun, was both a
specific and a general term: it was a twin city, of a sort that has been by no
means uncommon in the past, combining a large inland metropolis with a
small but handsome harbour on the coast; and Gerrha was also a general
word for the political unit, of whose government we know nothing, that
encompassed both city and port. The greater success of the inland half of
Gerrha may not be evidence that the maritime trade of the Gulf was at last
taking off; but it is evidence that the broader region was experiencing a
renaissance. Even so, the real transformation would occur when the business
affairs of the great kings and of the merchants who served them became still
more ambitious, and regularly reached as far as India.

III

The Ptolemies were not idle while their rivals tried to expand their influence
in the Persian Gulf.23 News of Nearchos’ expedition reached Egypt, for
some of the crewmen were Egyptian. Ptolemy I, who reigned there from 325
to 285 BC, was more interested in building up Alexandria as a major political,
commercial and naval centre from which he could exercise command over
the eastern Mediterranean than he was in the treacherous waters of the Red
Sea. Even so, there were some important initiatives under the early Ptolemies.
One was the re-digging of the ‘Red–Med’ canal that had already been re-dug
at the orders of the Persian king Darius; by 400 BC it had silted up and no one
had shown much interest in clearing it, even though its closure cut off the
trading town of Pithom from its water traffic, and sent it into decline. It was
an ancient town, notorious among Jews as one of the ‘store-cities’ built for
the pharaohs with the labour of Hebrew slaves. Then, under Ptolemy II Soter,
around 270 BC, the city revived as the canal was reopened.24 This initiative
was thought worthwhile because an earlier experiment, under Ptolemy I, had
been so successful. That king had sent an admiral named Philo down the
coast of Africa, in the hope of obtaining elephants for his army, or, if not live
animals, ivory for his court. The Ptolemaic army maintained a special
elephant contingent, and the elephants were housed in their own park, where
the royal animal-keepers could attend to their every need.25 Ptolemy II was
agitated to learn that the inhabitants of the lands where elephants roamed
were in the habit of slicing steaks off the flanks of living beasts; he wanted
his elephants whole and healthy. Since African elephants are rather larger
than Indian ones, he had the chance to acquire bigger and more aggressive
battle-tanks than his Seleucid rivals.26
Elephants alone could not sustain the economic life of the small ports that
sprang up along the Egyptian coast of the Red Sea, and the trickle of sea
trade up the Red Sea from Somalia turned into a regular flow. Egyptian sea
captains were venturing with some confidence beyond Aden to the Horn of
Africa, but hugging the African coast, while those in Seleucid service were
keeping within the Persian Gulf, or close to the shores that led from the Gulf
to the edges of India. As for south Arabia, the land of Sabaea, rich in
frankincense and myrrh, this was an area that was unconquered and
unwelcoming; it sent out its goods, and profited greatly from trade, but the
only foreign traders it welcomed were the Nabataeans, who dominated the
caravan route up to Petra and the Mediterranean coast. Sabaea’s own
merchants were avid buyers of cinnamon from the Horn of Africa. Not just
Sabaean isolationism but problems with navigating the open ocean kept
Egyptian merchant fleets and Seleucid ones apart. The monsoons still had to
be mastered. The ocean was still a place of unpredictable dangers. In the first
century AD, Strabo looked back at the attempts made under the Ptolemies to
penetrate the Indian Ocean, and stressed how in his day regular traffic linked
Alexandria to the Indian Ocean by way of Myos Hormos on the Red Sea, ‘but
earlier, under the rule of the Ptolemies, very few people had been bold
enough to launch their ships and trade in Indian goods’.27 Myos Hormos will
be visited shortly, for it is an extraordinary archaeological site. The early
voyages of exploration along the coast of Iran and north-west India had
proved that a sea route existed but had not actually opened that route; and one
reason was the challenge presented by the monsoons.
An ‘Arabian barrier’ therefore existed, and the challenge of finding a way
past the Sabaean lands only made the Ptolemies keener to bring the barrier
down. These rulers were, after all, patrons of the great library of Alexandria,
which was the home of scholars who knew, or thought they knew, how all the
lands of the world were joined together. Euergetes II, who ruled Egypt in the
middle of the second century BC, enjoyed the company of Alexandrian
scholars who were experts in geography; the most important was
Agatharchides of Knidos, who wrote a book about the Red Sea, mostly lost.
He based his account on a wide variety of travellers’ tales and documents in
the royal archive.28 One lengthy passage from his writings, preserved in a
Byzantine manuscript, gives some clues to the ambitions of the Ptolemies, for
pure knowledge was not the end of the matter. Agatharchides whetted the
appetite of the Ptolemies, who were big spenders and big consumers.
Offering a survey of Arabia, Agatharchides described lands rich in pure gold
nuggets, the smallest the size of a fruit pip and the largest the size of a
walnut, mined from the earth by native peoples who regarded gold as utterly
commonplace, and who valued iron, bronze and silver much more highly; in
their eyes silver was worth ten times the value of gold, weight for weight.
Rather than Gerrha, Agatharchides took the view that Sabas, the capital of the
Sabaeans, rich in frankincense and myrrh, was the finest town in Arabia.
Between them, he says, the Gerrhaeans and the Sabaeans ‘have made
Ptolemy’s Syria rich in gold’.29
The adventures of one mariner, Eudoxos of Kyzikos from 118 BC onwards,
were long remembered by ancient writers. When an Indian traveller was
swept across the seas by the winds and cast all alone upon the shore of the
Red Sea, royal guards found him and had the clever idea of carrying him off
to the court of the inquisitive King Euergetes. This was someone who would
surely know the route to the Indies. He guided the sailor Eudoxos to India,
and they brought back a splendid cargo of aromatics and spices. Eudoxos had
been looking forward to enjoying the profits from the expedition, but his
greedy king took everything for himself. However, after Euergetes died,
Queen Cleopatra II of Egypt sent Eudoxos out once again. Once again the
royal court took everything. After his ill-treatment by the Ptolemies, Eudoxos
was exasperated, for he had hoped for a better outcome under what he
assumed to be the benign patronage of the queen. Eudoxos decided he would
find a different route to India, this time without royal interference; he would
set out from the Mediterranean and circumnavigate Africa to reach India. He
invested a great amount of money in this expedition, and even took boy and
girl musicians with him, hoping to impress the kings of India with them. But
he never reached much further than the Canary Islands, or somewhere in that
region, and had to turn back. He attempted the route round Africa a second
time, but his little fleet was shipwrecked and everyone, including Eudoxos,
was lost, presumed drowned.30 Eudoxos was, then, a pioneer whose career
was filled with frustration and failure, for even when he reached the Indies he
was not able to enjoy the fruits of his expeditions. Yet his career also shows
that the route to the Indies was now a subject of serious interest at the court
of the Ptolemies. The question how best to reach these rich and fabled lands
by sea fascinated kings and sea captains long before Columbus and Vasco da
Gama.
Once a sea route to India was open, the Ptolemies amassed vast amounts of
Indian goods, and the next king of Egypt, Ptolemy Soter II, was said to have
been very popular among the merchants of Delos at a time when this island
had become the hub of eastern Mediterranean trade routes. The eminent
ancient historian Rostovtzeff remarked that he was so popular because the
Delians thought of him as Soter, ‘the man of business, the great merchant’,
rather than Soter, the king of Egypt. The presence of all these Indian luxuries
brought further riches to an island that was already experiencing a great
boom. So much ivory arrived from Egypt that Delian merchants were forced
to sell it at lower prices than they had wished.31 Gradually the Mediterranean
and the Indian Ocean were beginning to interact. Those placed in the middle
– the kings and merchants of Egypt – were fully aware of the advantages this
would bring, in profits and in the luxuries they could enjoy.
 6

Mastering the Monsoon

Strabo’s remark that there was now constant traffic between Egypt and the
Indies is all the more remarkable because this traffic must have built up in a
relatively brief period of no more than a century and a half. This was exactly
the period when major changes within the Mediterranean were taking place,
which saw first Rhodes and then the much smaller holy island of Delos
become the focal points of commercial networks that tied together
Alexandria, Rome (which was becoming the master of wider and wider tracts
of the eastern Mediterranean) and the Syrian coast. Perfumes carried by the
Nabataean merchants filled the market stalls on Delos, which was described
as ‘the greatest emporium on earth’, and boasted a population of 30,000
people crammed into not much more than one square mile.1 Alexandria, with
its teeming population of Greeks, Jews and Egyptians, buzzed with business,
and that business looked not just towards Syria, Greece and Rome but
towards the Red Sea and, at last, the Indian Ocean. A tariff list from
Alexandria, probably from the start of the second century AD, offers a
pungent list of the spices and aromatics that mainly arrived from the Indian
Ocean; to read it is to enter the spice markets of the modern as well as the
ancient Middle East, before moving to the jeweller’s souk: cinnamon,
cardamom, pepper, ginger, myrrh, cassia wood; and then pearls, diamonds,
sapphires, emeralds, beryl, turquoise; and beyond that silk, raw and
processed, as well as wild animals – lions, leopards, panthers – and, amid all
these wonderful cargoes, Indian eunuchs.2
The route across the desert linking the Nile to the Red Sea ports was made
as safe as possible by setting up watchtowers manned by Roman soldiers, and
by providing inns for caravans where both people and camels could be
watered and fed, and goods could be stored safely overnight. According to
Strabo, the Romans invested funds and energy in digging great cisterns to
collect the sparse rainwater of the desert.3 When trouble was taken to clear
the easily clogged canals that linked the Nile to the Gulf of Suez, it was even
possible to travel directly from the Nile to Klysma (modern Suez) and then
down the Red Sea, generally changing boat at Klysma. The satirist Lucian of
Samosata, who wrote in the second century AD, told the tale of a young man
who went down the Nile to Klysma and decided to take ship for India;
meanwhile his friends, puzzled at his disappearance, assumed he had been
drowned while travelling downriver.4 By the reign of Augustus, who died in
AD 14, the India trade was already booming. By the reign of Tiberius (AD 14–
37), coins were flooding into northern and western India, and were even
reaching Ceylon and some parts of eastern India. They were used as money
or as bullion, or even as ornaments (some were pierced, so they could be
worn on a necklace).5
 Mastering the ocean would only become possible when the monsoon
season was properly understood, and this was the work of Hippalos, whose
discovery of the way these winds worked led to the south-west monsoon
being given the name ‘Hippalos’ by later generations of Greek sailors.
Eventually they forgot that the wind was named after a pioneering navigator
who showed some of the adventurousness of a Columbus. Hippalos was a
Greek merchant who made his voyage somewhere around AD 20. He already
knew the coast of India; and he understood the basic pattern of the monsoons,
whose seasonal switch was by now familiar. The question was not when
these winds usually blew, but how they could be exploited to make faster
journeys out of sight of land, shooting past Arabia to India.6 A Greek
merchant whose description of the Indian Ocean will be examined in a
moment wrote: ‘the ship captain Hippalos, by plotting the location of the
ports of trade and the configuration of the sea, was the first to discover the
route across open water’.7 Setting off from the south-west corner of Arabia
with the monsoon wind behind him, Hippalos headed out across the open sea
and struck land near the mouth of the Indus. An express route from Egypt
down the Red Sea and straight on to India was now open, and Greek and
Roman traders were quick to take full advantage. As time went by they
learned to strike out for points further and further south along the west coast
of India, right down to its southern tip.8
Soon after Hippalos braved the open sea, an unnamed sailor who knew not
just the sea but the coastline of the western Indian Ocean wrote, in Greek, a
detailed description of the sea route to India. He was clearly a merchant
rather than a professional sailor, because he was much more interested in the
products of the lands he visited than in detailed information about
navigation.9 The author was also an Egyptian Greek, because he talks of
Egypt as home, mentioning ‘the trees we have in Egypt’; but he was no
armchair traveller: he described how his ship set a course and put on speed.
His style was matter of fact and lacks grace, but he was capable of literary
flight as well, for he offers a dramatic description of the fearsome tides off
Barygaza in north-west India. Sir Mortimer Wheeler enthused: ‘I should
describe it, indeed, as one of the most fascinating books to have come down
to us from antiquity.’10 The original title of this work is Periplous tēs
Eruthras thalassēs, ‘Sea journey around the Red Sea’, for the term
‘Erythraean Sea’ literally meant that, though what he intended is what is now
called the Indian Ocean. What is now known as the Red Sea was often
termed the ‘Arabian Gulf’, not least by the author of the Periplous.11 Around
AD 900 someone in the Byzantine Empire thought it worthwhile to make a
rather messy copy of this work, which is how it has survived; but when it was
originally written is not certain, and some of those who reject a date in the
first century AD would prefer to assign a date in the early second or even
early third century instead.12 The Periplous describes a thriving network of
trade that begins at the Red Sea ports of Myos Hormos and Bereniké, which
will be discussed later since they have yielded superb archaeological finds.
But Bereniké was devastated by an epidemic in AD 166, after which its trade
withered, so the Periplous was surely written before then. Moreover, the
author became very vague when he attempted to describe the waters beyond
India, and the little book must have been written before ships under the
Roman flag began to pass beyond Ceylon, and before Ceylon was identified
as an island rather than the tip of another continent, as he believed.13 It is
clear that the tentative exploration of the early Seleucids had been
transformed, perhaps within a century, into regular, intensive traffic. Not
merely the scale was unprecedented; the creation of links between India (and
also Ceylon) and Alexandria, a connection that would thrive during many
later centuries, vastly expanded the range of contact by sea. For, even if
Greek and Roman merchants did not venture into the eastern Indian Ocean at
the time when the anonymous author sailed the seas, by reaching southern
India he and his contemporaries made contact with the spice merchants from
barely known lands much further to the east.
 One cannot do better than follow the author on his Periplous, before
backtracking to examine some equally eloquent archaeological sites and what
contemporary Romans, such as Pliny the Elder, had to say. This way one can
gain an idea of which areas were valued by sea traders and which they tended
to avoid, whether because they produced little or because the inhabitants were
regarded as hostile barbarians. Interestingly, such people could be found not
far south of Bereniké, well within the Red Sea (following modern use of the
term). Overall, the image of the Red Sea is of an unwelcoming place, a
passageway that for long stretches offers little of its own apart from tortoise
shell at a harbour-less port, suitable only for small boats, named Ptolemaïs
Thērōn, whose name indicates that it had been founded before the Romans
conquered Egypt, and while the Ptolemies ruled there. The south-western
shores of the Red Sea were much more promising. The big attraction of
Adulis was that elephant ivory and rhinoceros horn were carried there from
the lordly city of Axum and from the Ethiopian highlands; sometimes the
great beasts themselves wandered down to the shore near Adulis. But the
serious drawback to Adulis was that raiders interfered with shipping, and it
was vital to moor by an offshore island for safety’s sake.
Further south lay the realm of King Zoskales, ‘mean in his way of life and
with an eye to the main chance, but otherwise high-minded, and skilled in
writing Greek’.14 Greek cultural influence had, then, penetrated far south,
and it is easy to see why: the author lists the goods that the Adulians bought,
including Egyptian cloths, linen goods, glassware, brass, copper pans, iron
for the spears with which they brought elephants low, and some, but not
much, olive oil and Syrian or Italian wine. They clearly craved the products
of Egypt and the Roman Mediterranean, but their parsimonious king was not
terribly interested in gold or silver objects, unless the price was low.15 That,
however, was only part of the story. You could also sell them goods you had
brought from India. They liked Indian steel and iron, as well as Indian cotton
fabrics. Carrying on southwards, the Periplous mentioned harbours either
side of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait that offered cassia, myrrh and sometimes
frankincense. It noted too that shipping would arrive regularly from India
bearing basic foodstuffs such as grain, rice, clarified butter (ghee) and sesame
oil. There is a particularly precious reference to ‘the cane honey called
sakchari’ – cane sugar, still an exotic product of India and lands even further
to the east, which the Romans used therapeutically rather than as a
sweetener.16 Ships from Egypt might tramp up and down the coast, making
up and disposing of their cargoes as they went, or they might head straight for
one of the ports the Periplous singled out.
The Indian Ocean of the Periplous stretched in two directions. The author
was keen to explain what can be found along the east coast of Africa as well
as to spell out the route to India. The whole arc from somewhere near
Zanzibar to western India was becoming a single, vast trading zone. Indeed,
the king of part of Yemen, Charibaël, also ruled part of the African shore.
Unfortunately it is impossible to be sure where the last port of trade in
‘Azania’, that is, east Africa, that the author mentioned might have stood; it
could be Pemba island, or it could be Zanzibar itself. The name he used was
Rhapta, which means ‘sewn’, and referred to the sewn-plank boats that the
locals used for fishing and for hunting turtles.17 A remarkable feature of this
piece of coast is, the Periplous says, that it is ruled by the Arabians of
Mouza, which corresponds to part of Yemen. This relationship was to last
many centuries; in the nineteenth century the sultans of Oman based
themselves at Zanzibar. When the Periplous was written, the main attraction
of this region was ivory, rhinoceros horn and very good tortoiseshell. But
beyond that lay an unexplored coastline, of which the Periplous could only
say that the land tended westwards, until finally the Indian Ocean joined the
‘western sea’, that is, the Atlantic. This traveller was not, then, convinced by
the argument that the Indian Ocean was a sealed sea surrounded by a greatly
elongated tongue of land that stretched from southern Africa to the Golden
Chersonese (Malaya). However, this view gained great influence in later
centuries, as it was confidently supported by the great Alexandrian
geographer Ptolemy.18 Finds of Roman and Indian coins along the African
coast, mainly of the fourth century AD, confirm that contact with ‘Azania’
was maintained over a long period.19
Arabian captains sailed back and forth from Mouza, and some of them
intermarried with the native population, among whom the men were big-
bodied and independent-minded; these Arab sailors learned to speak the local
language.20 The author of the Periplous was impressed by the Arabian
merchants. Describing Mouza itself, he says that ‘the whole place teems with
Arabs – shipowners or charterers and sailors – and is astir with commercial
activity. For they share in the trade across the water and with Barygaza, using
their own vessels.’21 Barygaza is Bharuch in north-western India, so this acts
as a reminder that the arrival of Greek and Roman merchants in the Indian
Ocean did not mean that the newcomers gained a monopoly on business. At
some stage, impossible to determine, Arabian and Indian seafarers had
followed or anticipated Hippalos, and had forged links across the Indian
Ocean.22 Local Indian rulers decorated their coins with pictures of ships,
notably in the Satavahana Empire between AD 88 and 194; this empire
embraced large tracts of central India as well as part of the east coast.23 The
ocean was awakening; and this was the work of its own inhabitants as much
as, very probably more than, it was the work of subjects of the Roman
emperor.

II

The author of the Periplous was aware that something new had been
happening. He talked of a seaside village on the site of present-day Aden,
named Eudaimōn Arabia, or ‘Happy Arabia’, that had previously been a
proper city, ‘when, since vessels from India did not go on to Egypt and those
from Egypt did not dare sail to the places further on but only came this far, it
used to receive cargoes of both, just as Alexandria receives cargoes from
overseas as well as from Egypt’.24 He thought it had been sacked by
someone named in the manuscript as ‘Caesar’, which could be a reference to
an attempt by Augustus to attack Aden with 130 warships. Strabo believed
this expedition had been a success, but all the evidence suggests the
opposite.25 The author of the Periplous was much more interested in offering
a vivid explanation of how frankincense formed on the bark of trees, in a
mountainous, misty corner of Arabia that was so unhealthy that slaves and
convicts were put to work collecting the gum; it was dangerous even to pass
this coast on a ship because it was so disease-ridden, and the frankincense
workers died of either sickness or malnutrition. This would be the western
corner of modern Oman, celebrated today precisely because it is cool and
misty, and unusually fertile by comparison with the rest of Arabia. The local
ruler had the foresight, though, to construct a sturdy fort and warehouse in
which to store the frankincense.26 The rulers of southern Arabia were
beginning to become not just prosperous but powerful. Describing a bay on
the south coast of Arabia, the Periplous declared that frankincense can only
be loaded with the king’s permission; royal agents exchanged frankincense
for grain, oil and cotton textiles.27 Maritime trade was drawing a great
variety of people to their land.
The Greco-Roman merchants who sailed in the wake of Hippalos were
keen to make the fast connection between Egypt and India, and had no
interest in the Persian Gulf. For the Periplous, the Gulf was best avoided; the
best one could say of this ‘vast expanse’ was that there were plenty of pearls
to be had near its opening.28 The author of the Periplous was happy to jump
across the strait and to reach a Persian port called Omana, which was not the
same as modern Oman. Wherever it was, Omana gave access to a hinterland
rich in dates, wine and rice, even though the coastline only produced
bdellium, not that this was to be despised – it is another aromatic resin, a
close cousin to myrrh. This was one of the ports to which merchants of
Barygaza, in India, sent ploia megala, large ships, loaded with fine woods
such as teak, as well as copper and ebony. They took away large numbers of
pearls of modest quality compared to those of India itself, cloth, including
luxurious purple textiles, gold from the Persian interior and slaves.29
Then, following the coast, one eventually reached ‘the mightiest of the
rivers along the Erythraean Sea’, the Sinthos, or Indus, which emptied so
much freshwater into the ocean that long before you reached terra firma you
could see the river water coming out to meet you. One of the seven channels
linking the Indus to the ocean was home to Barbarikon, whose exact location,
after centuries during which the Indus has dumped silt all around its mouths,
is unknown. Barbarikon gave access overland to Minnagar, a major city lying
inland, whose royal court was hungry for textiles, plain and coloured,
glassware, silverware, frankincense, coral and gems that were probably the
attractive light green stones now known as peridots.30 At such points the
author of the Periplous most clearly revealed that what he had written was
more a manual for merchants than a book of sailing instructions. But the
attractions of Barbarikon were as much in buying as in selling. Bdellium,
nard, turquoise, lapis lazuli, indigo and Chinese skins, cloth and yarn were all
mentioned. These Chinese cloths, however they reached the mouth of the
Indus, were made of that rarest and most coveted of fibres, silk.31
Yet even the excellent opportunities offered by the marketplace at
Barbarikon were not enough. The Periplous braved difficult seas, full of
whirlpools, sea snakes and turbulent waves to edge down the coast of India as
far as the Gulf of Barygaza.32 Sailing into the port at Barygaza was a
challenge; ships had to negotiate a narrow gulf, with sharp reefs on the right-
hand side, and a rocky, rough sea bottom that could slice through anchor
cables. This took one through to a desolate landscape where it was hard to see
the low-lying shore, and shoals made navigation even more difficult. For this
reason fishermen in the king’s service would come out to pilot ships through
these waters; oarsmen attached their boats to incoming vessels and tugged
them along, playing along with the tides, which were critical for access, but
also extremely dangerous: ‘they are much more extreme in the area around
Barygaza than elsewhere’. At the flood tide, when there was a great
rumbling, hissing rush of water upstream, one would suddenly see the sea
floor, and channels used by ships would turn completely dry. During the
flood tide ships would be ripped from their anchorage. Not for the only time
in history, a major port was built in an unpromising, seemingly inaccessible
location (compare Bristol, with quite similar tidal problems).
Barygaza was the real focus of attention in the Periplous. Known in
Sanskrit as Bhārukaccha, and nowadays called Bharuch or Broach, it ought to
be an important archaeological site, for its great mound awaits adequate
excavation. It must be one of the most promising but neglected
archaeological sites in the world; occasional finds in the general area include
late Roman pottery and Roman coins.33 From lands to the east of Barygaza
‘everything that contributes to the region’s prosperity’ arrived in the port; this
included semi-precious stones, such as onyx, and Indian cotton cloth, both
fine and ordinary, as well as ivory, nard and bdellium transported from
upcountry. Long pepper, Piper longum, was readily available; this was a type
of pepper that was greatly prized in Rome, where in the first century AD it
sold for fifteen denarii per pound against four denarii for standard pepper.34
Pliny the Elder could not understand what attracted people to pepper, and
even less could he understand why anyone should spend vast amounts of time
and money bringing it all the way from India.35 At the top end of the scale,
there were Chinese silks to be had too.
It is worth pausing to think about the implications. Roman citizens in
Egypt, and beyond that the Mediterranean, were being supplied with clothing
from as far away as India, and it was not necessarily luxury clothing. It was
worth the while of ordinary merchants trading in the Indian Ocean to carry
these goods by sea past Arabia and up the Red Sea. More than once in its
description of India the Periplous remarked, in an entirely matter-of-fact way,
‘for those sailing to this port from Egypt, the right time to set out is around
the month of July’.36 Here are the first signs of what, with a little
exaggeration, can be called a global maritime network, linking the sea
entirely controlled by Roman authority, in the west, to the open spaces of the
Indian Ocean; and how far into that ocean these routes penetrated would be
revealed as the Periplous made its way ever further east. The same
considerations apply when one looks at the trade coming by sea from the
west. Wine arrived not just from Arabia but from Laodicea in Syria and from
Italy too. What condition it was in when it reached India is a question better
not asked, all the more because it was often treated with salt to preserve it.
But the Indians also had an insatiable appetite for copper and tin, the
ingredients of bronze, as is shown by many of the beautiful cast figurines that
survive from this period; the Barygazans were happy to buy the same
coloured or plain textiles as the inhabitants of Barbarikon, as well as coral
and peridot. Away from the royal court, they preferred cheap perfumes to
anything costly. They were very happy to accept Roman gold and silver,
which, as will be seen, was said to haemorrhage out of the Mediterranean into
India. The royal court also purchased slaves, both to play music and to sleep
in the king’s bed.
Barygaza, in the north-western corner of India, seems like the obvious final
destination for India traders coming down from Egypt; for many no doubt it
was, just as this area had been the normal limit of the ships bound from
Babylonia for Meluḫḫa nearly two millennia earlier. But Greco-Roman
captains headed further south as well to official ports of trade (the word the
Periplous uses is the familiar emporion, ‘emporium’). One kingdom after
another along the Indian coast established ports of trade; these were places
where foreign merchants could be both welcomed and supervised. Rulers
wanted to encourage them, because, quite apart from the goods they brought,
luxuries and necessities, they were worth taxing; and yet once one started
taxing merchants, a system had to be in place to make sure that smugglers
were kept under control, and that the quality of goods was adequately
guaranteed.37
Having braved more sea snakes, black ones with blood-red eyes and heads
like a dragon – whatever these beasts really were – Greek ships could stuff
their holds full along these shores: ‘ships in these emporia carry full loads
because of the quantity of pepper and malabathron’. Malabathron, already
encountered in the Egyptian tale of the shipwrecked sailor, is the leaf of the
cinnamon tree, rather than its bark, though ancient authors did not make the
connection between the spice they also knew well and the dried leaves that
were used in medicine, perfumes and food recipes, and to dispel mouth
odour. Malabathron was also ideal for making mothballs. The drawback in
ancient Rome, though not for merchants such as the author of the Periplous,
was that the best-quality malabathron was hideously expensive, as much as
300 denarii per pound. On the other hand, ordinary Greeks and Romans
could buy adulterated malabathron much more cheaply, for as little as one
denarius per pound. Top-grade malabathron was by a long distance the most
expensive spice to come out of India, followed by the best nard at a third of
the price.38 One reason for the high cost was that it was probably gathered
some way into the interior, while much of the pepper was local.
The Periplous jumps quite quickly from north-western India to the far
south of the country; the book enumerates several ports, but the account of
what they supply or buy becomes monotonous, despite occasional vignettes
that show, for instance, Hindu ‘men who wish to lead a holy life for the rest
of their days’ and are celibate.39 This may well reflect the ease with which
ships setting out from south Arabia could strike the coast some way below
Barygaza, if they heeded the advice of Hippalos about when to sail. A route
running directly east-south-east from Arabia to the kingdom of Limyriké in
south India would arrive near the bottom tip of the subcontinent.40 The big
question is how far Greek and Roman merchants penetrated beyond Ceylon,
into the eastern Indian Ocean, in the first century AD. The author of the
Periplous knew a fair amount about the eastern shores of India. He identified
Ceylon, under its ancient name of Taprobané, but he imagined that it
somehow stretched ever westwards till it came close to Azania, that is east
Africa; his Ceylon was, in a sense, the precursor of the great, semi-mythical
Southern Continent of later centuries. Ceylon was rich in pearls, gemstones,
cotton textiles and tortoiseshells, about which he was so enthusiastic
throughout his book that they must have been one of his specialities.41
Beyond Ceylon he evidently relied on hearsay. He had heard of barbarian
peoples with flat noses, and others called the Horse People, who were reputed
to eat human flesh. The change in the character of the Periplous from fact to
near fiction is entirely typical of travel literature throughout the centuries; it is
found in Marco Polo, for example. When the author of the Periplous
described the Ganges, which he knew was ‘the greatest of all the rivers in
India’, comparable, he said, in its rise and fall to the Nile, he was clearly
relying on rumour: ‘it is said that there are also gold mines in the area’.
 He had heard too that beyond the mouth of the Ganges there lay ‘an island
in the ocean, the furthest extremity towards the east of the inhabited world,
lying under the rising sun itself, called Chrysé’, that is, ‘the golden place’.
And, not surprisingly, it attracted his attention because it produced the best
tortoiseshell in the whole Indian Ocean. Whether this land was pure fancy, or
a distant acknowledgement of what later generations would call the Golden
Chersonese (the Malayan peninsula), or perhaps Sumatra, does not greatly
matter, as he was by now well out of his depth, and the short tract ends with
the admission that there are remote, cold and stormy lands far out to the east
that nature and the gods have made impenetrable. But the conclusion that he
or people with whom he had worked knew south-western India is
inescapable. This was the real limit of knowledge and, for the moment, it was
the limit of navigation by the so-called Roman merchants, though not for
south Indian or Malay ones.

III

Recent archaeological research in the Red Sea, at the Roman port of

Bereniké, has transformed our understanding of the scale and intensity of
Indo-Roman trade that passed up the Red Sea on its way to Alexandria and
the Mediterranean. Bereniké Troglodytika was founded by the Ptolemies in
the third century BC, and its site was chosen with close attention to the
currents in the Red Sea, from which a convenient cape protected it. Its
greatest asset was, however, water, for even the Eastern Desert receives rain
in the autumn, and as the wadis either side of the town swelled with water a
strong, if sandy, flow became accessible.42 Still, it was hardly the most
comfortable place in which to live. Drawing no doubt on plenty of horrible
experiences, its excavator has written with feeling of the ‘adverse weather,
with almost constantly blowing winds carrying stinging and blinding sand,
swarms of biting and annoying insects – both terrestrial and airborne –
scorpions, termites, snakes, large spiders, mice, and rats’.43
The Ptolemies knew what they wanted from Bereniké, and as early as the
late third century BC they were taking delivery there of the African elephants
they so greatly prized. The animals were carried on short, broad, deep sailing
ships called elephantegoi that were a challenge to the best captains, because
their deep draught placed them at risk in a sea filled with sandbanks and coral
reefs, and one classical writer, Diodoros the Sicilian, comments that they
were often shipwrecked. A papyrus from 224 BC tells of an elephantegos that
was wending its way south from Bereniké when it was shipwrecked;
fortunately it was travelling in convoy and, since it was on the outward
journey, had no elephants on board. An urgent message was sent to land and
another boat was promptly despatched from Bereniké, so these ships were not
in short supply.44 On at least one occasion elephants were transferred from
the Red Sea to the Nile through the canal that linked the two stretches of
water; but the strong prevailing winds in the upper reaches of the Red Sea
made journeys to its two northern tips hazardous, and it made much more
sense to stop off at Bereniké or one of its rivals, and to send goods overland
to Koptos on the Nile.45 Excavation of Bereniké’s harbour has revealed that
(at least by the Roman period) the berths had been built for large ships,
bigger than those one might expect to find in the contemporary
Mediterranean, including those elephantine elephant transports.46 Bereniké
was, then, already prospering under the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt, who
actively promoted new economic initiatives, including shipbuilding; their
main ambitions lay in and around the Mediterranean, where they built some
vessels so large that there is some doubt whether they could have floated, but
the Red Sea and Indian Ocean entered their calculations too.47
It would be rash to suggest a population figure for Bereniké. Its size
fluctuated over the centuries; its site moved as accumulated silt transformed
the shape of the harbour; its merchants came and went. It is wisest to be
vague and to talk of a population of several thousand, concentrating instead
on who the inhabitants were. For this was a true ‘port city’, a place where
Egyptians, Greeks, Africans from Axum, south Arabians, Nabataeans,
Indians, even visitors from Ceylon, found a temporary or permanent home. A
tax collector from the early Roman period was named Andouros, a name
harking back to Gaul or Germany. People with Latin names also appear, and
some at least must have been from Italy. The illustrious and powerful Jewish
family of Marcus Julius Alexander had agents here – more of this family
shortly. Some naukleroi, or shipowners, were women; around AD 200 Aelia
Isadora and Aelia Olympias used that Greek word to describe themselves,
and operated from Bereniké or nearby. Many languages were spoken, or at
least incised as graffiti – Greek appears most often, as one would expect in
the eastern Roman Empire; but Latin, the south Arabian language, Tamil
from south India, the language of Axum in east Africa all appear. A high-
protein diet was available to many of these people: fish, sea mammals
(dugong), turtles, beef, chicken and pork, which was a favourite in the
Roman army. Garum sauce was made locally from the innards of Red Sea
sardines. Nile catfish were also consumed in Bereniké, probably dried and
then reconstituted; edible snails were a firm favourite in the town’s kitchens.
The inhabitants tried to make Bereniké an attractive place to live, decorating
their houses with textile hangings; and the richer citizens owned gems, even
pearl and gold earrings.48 Temples to deities such as the composite Egyptian
god Sarapis were scattered around the town. By the sixth century Bereniké
possessed a pillared church with space for about eighty people, as well as
side rooms used in part to prepare meals.49
The difficult conditions along the shores of the Red Sea were no deterrent,
then, and other settlements also came into being on the sea’s inhospitable
western shore. Myos Hormos was an important base for Roman trade towards
India, and revived to become a lively centre of trade once again in the
thirteenth century, when it was called Qusayr al-Qadim; it too has been
excavated, with truly impressive results that confirm Strabo’s impression of
the place; he heard that 120 ships sailed every year from Myos Hormos to
India.50 Fortunately, the history of Bereniké can be traced not just in the
physical remains of the town but in papyri and ostraka; these were broken
fragments of pottery used for recording notes, contracts and several
remarkable customs passes issued in Koptos and then carried to the Red Sea
ports, where they had to be presented to the authorities. These customs passes
mention particular goods: ‘Rhobaos to those in charge of the customs gate,
greetings. Let Psenosiris son of Leon pass with eight italika of wine for
loading.’51 Here the merchant, Psenosiris, has a thoroughly Egyptian name,
though his father sounds Greek. And the goods being carried are wine
brought all the way from Italy. Myos Hormos too was home to a mixed
population: one building constructed out of limestone and mud brick, with
stucco decoration, was perhaps a synagogue, though to base this
identification on a single fragment of pottery inscribed in Hebrew may be
wishful thinking.52
Sometimes not just objects found on site, but ostraka and papyri from other
parts of Egypt, talk of links to the Red Sea ports. An Egyptian papyrus
known as the ‘Muziris Papyrus’ tells the story of the transfer of cargo all the
way from Muziris in southern India, where it was loaded on board a ship
called the Hermapollon, a good Greek name celebrating two gods; then it was
sent across the desert to the Nile and up to Alexandria. This papyrus records a
value of 9,000,000 sesterces for the goods brought back from India on the
Hermapollon, of which the state could be expected to claim 2,000,000 in
taxes. At Koptos a whole archive of ostraka has been unearthed, known as the
Nikanor archive. Nikanor was the head of a small transport company that
specialized in the carriage of goods across the desert, and every time he sent
goods to the Red Sea ports, or anywhere else, he expected a receipt to be sent
back, written on a piece of broken pottery. While it is always interesting to
watch the ordinary businessmen like Nikanor in operation, his ostraka also
reveal links to the Alexandrian plutocracy, notably Marcus Julius Alexander,
the nephew of the Jewish philosopher Philo and the son of the official who
administered customs and excise in the desert east of the Nile. Around AD 40
Marcus Julius maintained agents in Koptos and the Red Sea ports. His wife,
Berenice (Bereniké), was a member of the Herodian royal family, and would
later earn notoriety as the mistress of Titus, the general in charge of the
suppression of the Jewish revolt in Palestine.53 That someone of great wealth
and power should become seriously involved in the India trade indicates both
its prestige and its profitability.
The impression, both at Roman Bereniké and at Myos Hormos, is that
these were intermediary ports, and not in themselves significant centres of
consumption; they did not contain splendid buildings, even if their better
houses were comfortable enough; and they owed their existence entirely to
the need to have somewhere on the dusty shores of the Red Sea where it was
possible to do business and to sit out contrary winds. These ports were
funnels through which trade from the Red Sea and far beyond reached Egypt
and the Mediterranean, and vice versa – as far away, indeed, as Vietnam,
Java and Thailand, to which some beads found in Roman levels at Bereniké
have been attributed. The express passage first navigated by Hippalos, or
other routes that struck India even further south, became the standard routes
to and from India, and the lack of finds from the Persian Gulf in Bereniké
underlines this fact: ships bypassed the Oman peninsula, and headed across
open water to Barygaza and southern India. Some of the Indian pots found at
Bereniké were no doubt used by Indian merchants who had taken up
residence there, for the port acted as host to a varied population; inscriptions
in Indian scripts and the distinctive script of south Arabia are no real surprise,
and there are such close similarities between some south Arabian inscriptions
found at Bereniké and others from Myos Hormos that it seems the same
Arabian merchant was author of both sets, and moved back and forth between
these two ports and his homeland in Yemen.54
The principal Indian product to reach Bereniké was pepper, particularly
black pepper from south India, for there can be no doubt that traders regularly
set out from Bereniké for India in search of this commodity. This is
confirmed by passages in Tamil poetry dated somewhere between 300 BC and
AD 300 that tell of the Yavanas, broadly meaning ‘westerners’ (though
derived from the term ‘Ionians’), ‘whose prosperity never waned’. They were
not just merchants but mercenaries, ‘the valiant-eyed Yavanas whose bodies
were strong and of terrible aspect’; they wielded ‘murderous swords’, with
which they guarded the gates of the south Indian cities. The Yavana
merchants paid in gold for what they called black gold, that is, pepper: ‘rich
Muziris, the place where the large and well-crafted ships of the Yavanas
come with gold and leave carrying pepper’. Muziris, we are told, ‘resounded
with the noise’ of this trade.55 One poem speaks of ‘the gifts of gold brought
by the ships’ to the port of Muziris, and ‘those who crowd the port in the
turmoil created by the sacks of pepper piled up in the houses’.56 Late in the
first century AD, the Horrea Piperataria, or ‘Pepper Warehouses’, were built
in Rome; the ground floor alone had capacity for 5,800 tons of pepper,
though it was also used for other spices and for storing incense. The aroma of
all these spices, rather arbitrarily mixed together under one roof, turned into a
stink, and the Horrea were fitted with troughs of water that were intended to
increase humidity and somehow offset the pungency.57
The evidence from Roman and Indian literature is confirmed by the
excavations at Bereniké, which have unearthed two Indian storage jars in the
temple of the Egyptian deity Sarapis, dating to the first century AD; one of
these contained considerable quantities of peppercorns (7.55 kg). Nowhere
else in the Roman world have so many peppercorns been found as in
Bereniké, where they appear not just within the temple precincts but on house
floors, in the street and in piles of refuse. Many were burnt, notably within
another shrine dedicated to a number of gods ranging from the Roman
emperor to a god worshipped in Palmyra, in Syria, called Yarhibol; they were
almost certainly used in religious rituals.58 The archaeologists were also able
to identify grains of Indian rice, and they surmise that rice-based meals were
eaten off the Indian plates aplenty they found on the same site. Sorghum, a
staple foodstuff of east Africa, was also found, indicating connections with
Africa as well as India, as do finds of the Ethiopian pea. Other Indian
products included coconuts, Indian sesame, mung beans and Indian
gooseberries. But there was also plenty of evidence that fruits arrived from
the Mediterranean, including walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, peaches, plums,
apples, grapes and olives. The presence of these foods does more than add
colour to the picture of life in the Red Sea ports. It serves as a reminder that
the Periplous, with its elaborate lists of luxury items, does not tell a complete
story. Spices, gems and exotic luxuries such as ebony and ivory were
certainly a great attraction for India-bound merchants. But even the pepper
they brought back was for general consumption. The standard of living in the
greatest cities of the Roman Mediterranean – Rome, Carthage, Alexandria,
eventually Constantinople – was perhaps higher than at any time before the
eighteenth century, and the India trade contributed to the comfort of the
wealthy, the urban middle classes and, in some measure, people of more
modest means as well. Meanwhile the inhabitants of Bereniké and other Red
Sea ports had their own expectations, of south Italian wine and olive oil
among other items. These reminded them of their homes in Egypt, Syria,
Greece and further afield, and could also be passed on to the towns and courts
of India to their great profit.59
The identification of these foods shows how archaeology has applied ever
more sophisticated methods to analyse the smallest finds, those that would
once have been discarded or not even noticed. Traditionally, pottery has been
the humble but trustworthy source of information. At Bereniké it is certainly
a rich source of data. Among the finest pottery from Bereniké are pieces of
‘rouletted ware’, which hails from eastern India. The Indian ceramics are not
the only evidence of exotic contacts. There is pottery from the kingdom of
Axum, which, as has been seen, possessed a port on the Red Sea at Adulis.
Not much pottery arrived from south Arabia before the fourth century, when
a fair amount reached Myos Hormos and Ayla (Aqaba–Eilat) at the very top
of the Red Sea. From the first century BC onwards a Roman port on the
Arabian side of the Red Sea, across from Bereniké and Myos Hormos,
serviced sea traffic from Yemen towards Petra – ships would dock at Leuké
Komé, ‘White Village’, and unload Arabian incense for carriage overland.
Here is proof that sea transport, with the opportunity to load very large
amounts of goods in each vessel, had now become entirely standard and was
regarded as a safe, efficient way to keep goods on the move.60 Some marble
slabs were brought up to Bereniké from south Arabia. At the same time, the
fine red tableware of the Mediterranean, much of it made as far away as Gaul,
was also used in Bereniké, while the amphorae used for storing wine and oil
came from all around the Mediterranean – southern Spain, Italy, Rhodes, and
maybe Gaza, as well as Ayla. Bereniké merchants were active in the
jewellery trade as well. Gemstones could be found in the hills around
Bereniké itself, notably at Mons Smaragdus, ‘Emerald Mountain’, a source of
rather indifferent emeralds and of beryl stones; and peridots have also been
found. The best evidence for a trade in gemstones comes from a couple of
sapphires which are thought to have been brought from Ceylon.61
It is important to distinguish the different phases in the relationship
between Bereniké and the Mediterranean. In the early phases, the Red Sea
ports could obtain all they liked from the Mediterranean; Roberta Tomber
remarks that ‘essentially everything that was available in Alexandria was
found along the Red Sea coast in varying amounts’. It has been seen that
among the most exciting finds from Bereniké are inscribed ostraka dating to
the first century AD that were issued as customs passes in Koptos. Several of
these mention amphorae filled with Italian wine. Some of this wine may have
been consumed locally and some of it may have been drunk by sailors. But a
reference in a Tamil poem to ‘cool fragrant wine brought by the Yavanas’
leaves little doubt that wine, whether Italian, Greek or Syrian, was gratefully
received in India. Up to fifty sites in India have yielded fragments of
amphorae from the Mediterranean, and Roman writers insisted that Indian
kings greatly enjoyed a tipple. Hard physical evidence of the wine trade also
comes from the rare wrecks that have been discovered in the Red Sea: one
boat from the early first century AD that sank near Myos Hormos was
carrying south Italian wine amphorae; and another, wrecked off the coast of
Sudan, apparently carried wine of the Greek island of Kos, another source of
wine treated with salt.62 All this confirms the claim found in the Periplous,
which at first reading seems extraordinary, that wine was exported all the
way from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. So was olive oil, to judge
from the ostraka, and the stinking fish sauce known as garum, to judge from
amphorae found at Arikamedu in southern India.63 In this sense, the label
‘Indo-Roman’ trade makes sense, even if the merchants whom historians
obstinately call ‘Roman’ were predominantly Greeks and Hellenized
Egyptians. This was not just trade between Egypt and the Indies, but between
the Roman Mediterranean and the Indies. Investors lived as far away as Italy,
whether they were spice merchants in Rome or prosperous citizens of towns
such as Puteoli near Naples; there, the Annii, a prominent business family,
extended the sweep of their maritime trade far beyond the Mediterranean and
took a healthy interest in the Indian Ocean as well.64
It was a trade route that, according to the Elder Pliny, sucked valuable
specie out of the Roman Empire:

Each year, India, China and the Arabian peninsula take at the very
least one hundred million sesterces from our empire; that is what our
luxuries and women cost us. For what fraction of these imports is
intended for sacrifices to the gods, I want to know, or on behalf of the
spirits of the dead?65

Pliny wanted to make a traditional patrician point about the way love of
luxury eroded established Roman values, and whether quite so much was
paid for the goods of the East is doubtful. Even so, there were Roman
senators whose wealth can be valued at 600,000,000 sesterces, in which case
the amount of money lost to India was not as vast as it sounds.66 Pliny’s
comment has given the business affairs of Greco-Roman traders such a high
profile that it becomes easy to forget the role of the Indians themselves, or
other intermediaries; this is particularly true of the routes that stretched
beyond Ceylon towards the Malay peninsula. The excavator of Bereniké,
Steven Sidebotham, has hazarded a guess that Roman objects found as far
afield as Korea and Thailand may have arrived through the Red Sea, though
they would have been passed down a lengthy chain of merchants rather than
being carried most of the way by a single merchant.

IV

Most of what has been written about navigation in the Indian Ocean at this
time has been constructed around the assumption that the term ‘Roman trade’
carries some meaning. It does, in the sense that links between the Indian
Ocean and the Mediterranean heartlands of the Roman Empire were forged
by generations of hardy sailors and traders who funnelled pepper and the
exotic produce of the East up the Red Sea into the Mediterranean. But, as one
historian wrote, ‘to the Indians Rome and Roman meant Alexandria and
Alexandrians’, so that Egyptian merchants, and the Jews who now began to
arrive on the Malabar coast, were all ‘Romans’.67 It is always important to
remember that the economy of coastal India was not sustained simply by
contact with the Roman Empire. Whispers about native merchants are
frustrating, because much more needs to be known about them, not least in
order to place the ‘Romans’ in perspective. A twelfth-century writer from
southern Italy, Peter the Deacon, quoting a fourth-century pilgrim named
Egeria, mentioned Indian merchants who regularly brought their fine ships all
the way to Klysma in the Gulf of Suez, though braving the stiff north winds
of the northern Red Sea was always a challenge, and that was one reason why
Bereniké and Myos Hormos further down the Red Sea coast were preferred.68
To write about the opening of the Indian Ocean solely from the perspective
of Roman trade is to look at the sea through blinkers. But the evidence from
the Indian side is too fragmentary. One must work with the evidence that is
there, and at least 90 per cent of it concerns the ‘Romans’. Indian historians
have debated the impact of these long-distance connections on the
development of the urban civilization of their country. Such controversies are
part of a much wider debate, often intertwined with increasingly obscure
ideological discussions, about the way external economic factors can generate
social change; they can be inspired as much by Karl Marx as they are by the
hard evidence. The neatest argument is that the Romans reached India
because it was worth their while to visit already flourishing towns, whose
business life had been stimulated by demand for fine products at the courts of
local kings and at the Buddhist monasteries that were spreading in the region,
for the monks, with their substantial resources, were not averse to a little
luxury. After all, the vast majority of objects found on these ancient sites are
not connected with Roman trade but are the day-to-day products of local
industry and short-distance commerce.69
Two areas should be examined more closely, because they provide clues to
the presence or absence of the Roman navigators known to the Tamils as
Yavanas. One is Ceylon, or Sri Lanka, and the other is the great expanse of
sea between India and the Malay peninsula, including the Bay of Bengal. The
second-century geographer Ptolemy, who was fascinated by the Indies, said a
great amount about Ceylon. Sometimes his imagination triumphed; his
assumption that one could capture tigers there was simply wrong. But he
knew that the island was a source of ginger, sapphires, beryl, precious metals
and a type of ‘honey’ which must be sugar; and Strabo reported that ivory
and tortoiseshell were sent from Ceylon to the Indian towns where Roman
merchants picked up these goods. The impression from Ptolemy is that
Ceylon had only just become well known to the Roman emperor’s subjects,
and it is striking that the Roman coins that have been found in Ceylon are
mainly later than his own time, dating from the third to the seventh centuries
AD. As well as Roman coins, some coins of the Sasanian kings of Persia and
even the rulers of Axum in east Africa have turned up.70 So by the end of
this period Ceylon had become the hinge of Indian Ocean trade and
navigation, looking both eastwards to Malaya and westwards to Arabia,
Byzantine Egypt and the Horn of Africa. In the early twentieth century, those
who found these coins, mostly of base metal and well worn, would often pass
them into circulation, so one might receive money of Emperor Arcadius in
one’s small change.71 As in the Periplous, Ptolemy magnified the island; but
he only made it fourteen times its true size, and he abandoned the idea set out
in the Periplous that it was the tip of a great southern continent. His southern
landmass consisted, rather, of a belt of uninhabited, uninhabitable, land
stretching from the southern tip of Africa eastwards to the Golden
Chersonese that transformed the Indian Ocean into a closed sea, a massive
Mediterranean.
Beyond Ceylon, the presence of these Yavanas was surely more
intermittent, as the more enterprising, or perhaps foolhardy, captains tried
their luck in less familiar waters. In the second century AD, the geographer
Ptolemy named nearly forty Tamil towns and kingdoms that lay inland, and
the sheer detail of his knowledge of southern India has led to speculation that
Romans (by whom should be understood subjects of the emperor, probably
Greek or Egyptian) lived in some of these places, and continued to spread
eastwards into the Bay of Bengal. The Periplous described how Kamara
(Puhar), Poduké and Sōpatma were the home ports of local ships which sailed
as far as Limyriké, which is the author’s name for the far south-west of India,
and this is precious evidence that the mastery of the seas was shared by
‘Romans’ and Indians. A Tamil poet eulogized Puhar and its trade in these
words:

The sun shines over the open terraces and the warehouses near the
harbour. It shines over the turrets that have wide windows like the
eyes of a deer. In different places at Puhar the gaze of the observer is
attracted by the residences of the Yavanas, whose prosperity is
 without limits. At the harbour there are sailors from distant lands, but
in all appearance they live as one community.72

The town was ablaze with colourful flags and banners, and contained fine
houses with platforms above street level that were reached by ladders.
However, this was not for fear of robbers; the Tamil poets were sure that it
was a safe and prosperous city, and they delighted in the comings and goings
of the great ships that came into port. Some may have come from the Red
Sea, but most must have been Indian and Malay vessels, Arab dhows, maybe
even the occasional ship that had wended its way from the South China Sea –
links to the Pacific will be examined in the next chapter. Archaeology has not
offered much help in confirming the vivid images of the Tamil poet. Puhar
seems to have disappeared beneath the waves around AD 500; a tsunami may
well have destroyed the city in a few hours, and one theory places the blame
on an early eruption of Krakatoa in 535, even if it was less violent than the
astonishing one of 1883.73 Both Puhar and Poduké began as Indian towns;
they were not created by the Yavanas, and it was the Yavanas who came to
seek them out.
One place thought to have been settled by merchants from the Far West lay
at Arikamedu, a village that stood just inside the small enclave of
Pondicherry, ruled by France for roughly two centuries until 1954. Seventeen
years earlier a French collector had become excited when some children
showed him what may have been a cameo carved with a portrait of a Roman
emperor, though it was carried away to Hanoi and has now vanished. Then a
few years later a trial excavation there uncovered wine amphorae brought
from the area around Naples, as well as olive oil jars from the northern
Adriatic and jars of fish sauce from Spain. It has been suggested that the oil
and garum sauce were for foreign settlers, and the wine (which was often
resinated) was for everybody, as further fragments of wine amphorae have
turned up inland. Setting aside doubts about whether Western goods betoken
Western settlers, which have been expressed by the most recent excavator,
Arikamedu looks like a classic ‘port city’, a meeting place for locals and
foreigners, including some who had come from very far away.74 This was a
town where different communities intermingled and probably intermarried –
in the first century AD a woman called Indiké, ‘the Indian woman’, who lived
in Egypt, wrote a letter on papyrus to a female friend or relative, and there
must have been many women like her.75 In these emporia, there were plenty
of opportunities to mix in social life, in religious cults and in doing business.
The excavators found pieces of the typical red pottery made in Roman
Arezzo, in faraway Etruria, dating from the first quarter of the first century
AD – the date of the settlement can probably be pushed still further back in
time, as far back as the third century BC.76 As they probed further into a site
that has, unfortunately, been partly washed away by the river on which it
stands, the archaeologists also brought to light Greco-Roman glassware.
There were upmarket objects too: a gem made of rock crystal and decorated
with a figure of Cupid and a bird may have been made in the Mediterranean
or, more likely, be of local workmanship, but in the latter case that would still
show the cultural influence of the Greco-Roman world as far away as south-
eastern India.77
The settlement expanded, becoming a pole of attraction for Indian and
foreign merchants. No doubt it was at first simply a place beyond the normal
range of Greco-Roman shipping that accumulated Mediterranean goods as
they were passed on from hand to hand through the ports on the western flank
of India, most often in Indian boats. With time Arikamedu drew these
westerners to its harbour, and what some like to think of as a Roman
settlement in the Bay of Bengal came into existence, during the reigns of
Augustus and Tiberius, when the town had already been flourishing for a
century or more. It seems to have remained a lively place until the mid- to
late second century AD. Among the excellent facilities it offered was a
warehouse close to the river, 150 feet long. There were areas given over to
industry, easy to identify from the large number of beads, bangles and cheap
gemstones that are said to ‘litter the area’, and there were what excavators
identified as vats for dyeing cloth, where the inhabitants manufactured the
fine muslins that are mentioned in the Periplous as favourite exports of south
India. Oddly, Roman coins are absent from Arikamedu.78 They were either
sucked into royal treasuries or melted down; yet this did not inhibit intensive
trade. Arikamedu was convincingly identified by Sir Mortimer Wheeler (who
helped excavate the site) as one of the emporia in south-eastern India
mentioned in the Periplous, specifically Poduké. This name also appears in
almost the same form in Ptolemy’s Geography, and is a corruption of the
Tamil word Puduchchēri, which simply means ‘New Town’, so one can
imagine that the Greeks may also have called it Neapolis, which means
exactly the same. Then, over time, the Tamil name was corrupted by the
French and British into Pondicherry.79
 The lure of the Ganges can already be detected in the Periplous. Once this
area became known by repute, the temptation to sail there in search of silk,
pearls and other luxuries became overwhelming, though numbers were
probably much smaller than in the western Indian Ocean.80 Strabo talked of
traders who sailed from Egypt to the Ganges; he described them as ‘private
merchants’, suggesting that these were people who went under their own
steam; and he did not believe everything they told him, so whether they had
actually reached as far as the mouth of the Ganges he could not really say.81
Ptolemy knew a fair amount about the city of Patna, on the Ganges; and he
was aware that a thin tongue of land stretched downwards from south-east
Asia, which he called the Golden Chersonese. This area was explored early in
the second century AD by a sea captain named Alexander who may well have
rounded the southern tip of Malaya, by way of the Strait of Malacca, and
have entered the South China Sea, arriving at a place called Kattigara, which
will be revisited in the next chapter. Greeks and Romans were not terribly
sure where China lay, but they knew it was a source of fine silk, and that was
probably the motive for occasional forays towards the South China Sea; an
embassy from the court of Emperor Marcus Aurelius may have reached the
South China Sea in the late second century, for Chinese records describe the
embassy of ‘Antun’ (Antoninus, the emperor’s cognomen, or additional
name), though they dismissed it as of little consequence because the goods
offered as gifts – or, as the Chinese would prefer to think, tribute – were
regarded as commonplace. This came as a surprise, because the Han court
was aware, though vaguely, that the Roman Empire was a vast polity
comparable to their own great empire. Since the embassy had set out with
rhinoceros horn, elephant ivory and tortoiseshell the diplomats had probably
lost their goods en route.82 Generally, though, even Burma was a stage too
far; a few Roman imperial subjects settled there, as court entertainers in
search of a patron, but there was no port city with a mixed population and
markets full of goods from each end of the ocean and from the hinterland, in
other words another Puhar or Poduké.83 In reality, Greco-Roman navigators
very rarely ventured beyond Malaya, so that Ptolemy’s misunderstanding
about what lay at the bottom of the Golden Chersonese was perpetuated for
over 1,300 years.

V
From the late second century onwards Bereniké went into decline, and one
explanation may be the pandemic (whatever disease it was) that struck the
Roman Empire in the year 166. By the middle of the third century, Bereniké
had not exactly vanished from the map, but there is no evidence that it was
still a major emporium linking East and West. Recovery came, however. By
the fourth century Bereniké was benefiting from developments further south:
the creation of vigorous kingdoms on either side of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait,
in Himyar (Yemen) and Axum (Ethiopia/Eritrea), ancient sources of incense,
ivory and ebony. Meanwhile, goods from the western Mediterranean ceased
to arrive in this part of the Red Sea. One view is that this reflected a growing
fracture in the Mediterranean between east and west, though maybe what this
reveals is, rather, the economic vitality of eastern Mediterranean ports such as
Rhodes, Laodicea (Lattakiah), Gaza and Alexandria, which found themselves
more than able to supply the needs of the Roman outstations in the Red Sea.
This was accompanied by new opportunities to do business in south Arabia
and east Africa, which are suggested by the discovery of a coin from Axum
and another from western India dating to AD 362. Trade with Ceylon around
400 has even been described as ‘brisk’, and the town of Bereniké revived
physically too, as new temples dedicated to Isis, Sarapis and other Egyptian
gods were built, as well as a church and several warehouses.84
The best indication of the manner in which this port looked two ways,
towards the Indian Ocean and towards the Mediterranean, can be found in the
preserved fragments of wood found on this site, which included a small
quantity of Indian bamboo and large amounts of south Asian teakwood,
including a beam more than three metres in length from one of Bereniké’s
shrines.85 Teak was also widely used in shipbuilding, for instance by early
Arab mariners. Yet the material remains also included cedar beams brought
from Lebanon or somewhere in that area, and found in the remains of the
temple of Sarapis. Meanwhile, at Myos Hormos, wood from ships taken out
of commission was re-employed in everyday building. Just as these ships
were put together in what amounted to a giant three-dimensional jigsaw
puzzle, they could be taken apart quite easily, and the planks, beams and
masts reused in quite different ways; wood was precious along the dry edges
of the Eastern Desert. Beams and planks discovered during the excavation of
the town buildings of Myos Hormos bore traces of pitch, iron nails and
barnacles.86
 We are still left with the question of why Bereniké was abandoned in the
sixth century, and its collapse can probably be attributed to a rich
combination of factors: bubonic plague in the Mediterranean and Middle
East, the so-called plague of Justinian; local wars out of which Axum in east
Africa and Himyar in south Arabia emerged as the dominant political forces,
under Christian and Jewish kings who were keen rivals; the ascendancy of
Axumite and Himyarite merchants, with bases at Adulis on the African side
and Kané on the Arabian side. Bereniké did not come to a cataclysmic end. It
declined throughout the sixth century, and when it was finally abandoned no
one lived close enough to raid the site for wooden beams or building stone.
The result was that the dust of the desert blew over the town, and the dry
atmosphere preserved its sand-immersed remains.87 What continued,
however, was traffic up and down the Red Sea; what changed was in whose
hands control of this traffic lay. Over time, the location of the key ports that
linked the Nile, and beyond that the Mediterranean, to the Red Sea changed,
as Myos Hormos, once a minor competitor to Bereniké, emerged in the
medieval period as an important link in the chain connecting the Red Sea to
the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, under its Islamic name of Qusayr al-
Qadim. The connection was broken only for short periods, and the links
between the Indian Ocean and Egypt, and beyond that the Mediterranean,
were not severed even when different people to the Greco-Roman merchants
took charge of the carriage of cargoes from India and east Africa.
 7

Brahmins, Buddhists and Businessmen

Looking at the Indian Ocean from the perspective of the Periplous and
Bereniké presents one overwhelming difficulty. The illusion is created that its
ports interacted when the Greco-Roman ships arrived with merchants on
board who craved the spices of the East. When Bereniké and Myos Hormos
were in decline, it might then be assumed, the whole of this network
crumbled away. Without the Romans, it is true, the Indian kings would not be
able to accumulate so much treasure; but whether they actually put much of
this gold and silver into circulation remains doubtful. Fragments of evidence
suggest that Barbarikon and Barygaza, or at any rate ports in their vicinity,
remained lively centres of trade and industry in the fifth and sixth centuries,
and that many of the stopping places and links that would be described by
late medieval travellers such as the Venetian Marco Polo and the Arab al-
Mas‘udi were already in place.1 In a word, the question concerns continuity,
and relates directly to the idea that the opening of the Indian Ocean routes,
whether it was achieved by Romans, Indians or Malays, or all of them in
collaboration, should be seen as the first step in the creation of global
networks of trade, in which sea routes functioned as the major links. In that
case the India trade of the Cairo Jews around 1100, which will be examined
before long, or the irruption of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean in 1497–8,
were only further stages in the bonding together of the Indian Ocean with the
Mediterranean and with the markets of Europe that lay beyond.
When the evidence for Roman trade is so rich it is tempting to dismiss that
for ‘native’ trade as mere disconnected fragments. But the fragments can be
connected, and they tell a remarkable story in which the Romans no longer
appear as the main actors. To make sense of this story, places very far apart
will have to be examined – as far apart as Madagascar and Malaya, and
beyond Malaya to the very edges of China. This will reveal the sheer expanse
of the area that was tied together by navigators in the first half of the first
millennium AD. It will also show how the links in a chain that stretched all the
way from southern China to the Mediterranean were being forged and
attached to one another, so that the spice trade that had already obsessed the
inhabitants of imperial Rome extended far beyond India and Ceylon. In
particular, the mariners of Indonesia and Malaya became the great
intermediaries sailing regularly between China and India; it was they who
knitted together the networks that had previously functioned apart from one
another; and it was they who made traffic by sea, rather than the arduous
overland route, first of all worthwhile and then supreme.
The subject of this chapter is a dizzying expanse of sea, then,
encompassing the entire Indian Ocean and, beyond that, the South China Sea,
which is ringed by southern China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia and
the Malay peninsula. But the place to begin is a relatively small island very
far from there, in the north-west of the Indian Ocean, with an area of 3,800
km (which still makes it the second largest island in the western Indian
2

Ocean, after Madagascar). Socotra lies about 240 miles south of Arabia and
the same number of kilometres east of Africa.2 It was not, therefore, visited
by coast-hugging vessels, but by those who had mastered the monsoons and
were willing to range out of sight of land, which was worth their while, since
it functioned as a trading hub linking east Africa, the Red Sea and the routes
to India. Even so, the local currents were difficult to manage; in addition, it
could not offer a decent harbour and ships had to anchor off the coast.
Between May and September it was unreachable, because the south-west
monsoon was blowing. It was often chosen as a pirate base, though the
pirates must have been constrained by the same difficult conditions as the
traders. Yet the traders came. The Periplous gives an impression of exact
knowledge garnered by a merchant whose passion for tortoiseshell knew no
bounds:

In the open sea is an island called Dioskourides; though very large, it

is barren and also damp, with rivers, crocodiles, a great many vipers,
and huge lizards, so huge that people eat the flesh and melt down the
fat to use in place of oil. The island bears no farm products, neither
vines nor grain. The inhabitants, few in number, live on one side of
the island, that to the north, the part facing the mainland; they are
settlers, a mixture of Arabs and Indians and even some Greeks, who
sail out of there to trade. The island yields tortoise-shell, the genuine,
the land, and the light-coloured varieties, in great quantity, and also
the oversize mountain variety with an extremely thick shell … The
so-called Indian cinnabar is found there; it is collected as an exudation
from the trees.3
The Periplous also explains that the island was ruled by the king of the
opposing shore of south Arabia (Hadhramawt); it has often fallen under the
control of the rulers of south Arabia, and at present it forms part of the
Republic of Yemen. It used to be visited regularly by sailors from southern
India and Barygaza; ‘these would exchange rice, grain, cotton cloth, and
female slaves’, against great quantities of poor-quality tortoiseshell. The
author then states, mysteriously, that ‘the kings have leased out the island,
and it is under guard’. There are strong hints here that this island is neither
worth visiting for its tortoises, nor worth the trouble of having to negotiate
with the current tenant, who seems to discourage trade.4 Reading between
the lines, it sounds as if the island had once again become a pirate base, for
which its position suited it very well, in seas that are still notorious for piracy.
Over the centuries, though, this island was visited by large numbers of
travellers, for they have left about 250 inscriptions and drawings incised on
the walls of a cave discovered in 2000, all of which happily confirm the
insistence of the Periplous that Socotra was visited by people of very diverse
origins. These inscriptions are in a great variety of languages, Indian, Iranian,
Ethiopic, south Arabian, even Greek, and date from the period between the
first century BC and the sixth century AD.
The Hoq cave is very long – two and a half kilometres – and at some
points as much as a hundred metres wide and thirty metres high, so it must
have appeared an awe-inspiring place, and a cool one on an island baked by
the sun. It was apparently a cult centre for one god or more, and the graffiti
on its walls are not so very different from those that can be found on tourist
sites today: bhadra prapta, ‘Bhadra arrived’, or simply the name of the
visitor, most often in Sanskrit characters.5 One can imagine that sailors and
other travellers who had braved the seas to reach Socotra were keen to offer
their thanks to the gods for a safe journey there, and their prayers for a safe
journey home. Who these gods were is far from clear, but the fact that the
vast majority of inscriptions are in Sanskrit suggests that they were Indian
gods, linked to Hindu or Buddhist cults; quite possibly the cave contained an
image of Buddha himself. For at this period in Indian history the links
between religion and trade were close; the Buddhist monasteries, in
particular, saw no evil in honest profit. They discarded the caste system that
relegated merchants to a less respectable role in society than the priests and
warriors who were acclaimed as the leaders of the Hindu communities. The
spread of Buddhism is generally thought to have stimulated the Indian
economy.6
The evidence that this island was visited over several centuries by Indian
merchants is overwhelming; the earliest inscription is thought to date from
before AD 100, but after 400 the number declined and the visits, or the
practice of recording them, gradually died out – more likely the latter, for, as
will be seen, the coming of Christianity rendered the cave cult obsolete.
Amid the names there are several that speak loudly of contact with India:
‘Samghadasa, son of Jayasena, inhabitant of Hastakavapra’ had reached
Socotra from a town close to Barygaza on the Gulf of Cambay; the town is
still there, under the name of Hathab, but it was already known to the author
of the Periplous and to Ptolemy under the name Astakapra. The Periplous
mentioned it in its description of the hazardous approach to Barygaza, and
excavation there shows that it flourished from the fourth century BC to the
sixth century AD.7 Even more noticeable among the inscriptions are direct
references to Barygaza: ‘Śesasya Visnusena from Bharukaccha arrived’; or a
graffito simply saying Bharukacchaka, ‘the Barygazan’; and best of all: ‘the
sea-captain Visnudhara from Bharukaccha’.8 Evidently, ships bound from
north-west India for the Horn of Africa often stopped in Socotra. At a village
now known as Kosh, archaeologists discovered Indian artefacts but could
produce little or no evidence of links between Socotra and the Mediterranean;
Kosh lies on the northern side of Socotra, confirming the statement in the
Periplous that this was where the inhabitants chose to settle. It is even
possible to say something about the boats that reached Socotra, as the Hoq
cave also contains several drawings, the clearest of which shows a boat with
two rudders and maybe three masts. This compares closely to a sixth-century
image of a boat in the famous Ajanta caves in India, where a triple-masted
ship with two rudders can be seen.9
Some of those who came into the cave to worship were not Indians. The
inscriptions include a sizeable wooden tablet in the Aramaic language of
Palmyra far away in Syria. The tablet records the prayers of a Nabataean sea
captain. The arrival of a Nabataean on the island makes sense: there were
Indian embassies to the rulers of south Arabia, whose main motive must have
been to discuss the trade in incense; and south Arabian pottery was found by
a team of Soviet archaeologists who were let loose on Socotra.10 Some
Nabataeans, then, ventured out across the sea and did not rely on the camel
caravans across Arabia. And then there were the westerners. One mysterious
scrawl says: ‘of the Yavana Cadrabhutimukha’, which is certainly not a
Greek name, even though the term Yavana generally means Greek, Roman or
someone from the Roman Empire. A perfectly good explanation would be
that a Yavana living in India had become assimilated into Indian culture, so
much so that he bore a Sanskrit name and used the Brahmi script in which
Sanskrit was written. Certainly, there were real Greeks on the island as well,
not just because the Periplous and others insisted they were there. Early in
the third century a Greek naukleros, or sea captain, left an inscription in
Greek in the cave: ‘Septimios Paniskos the naukleros kneeled before the gods
and before that [or those] of the cave.’11 Greeks had worshipped Indian gods
in far-off Bactria since the time of Alexander the Great. To show them
respect while sailing around the outer edge of the world was to follow the
natural instinct of the Greeks, Romans and many other peoples.
The history of Socotra was also a story of change. An uninhabited island
had been transformed into a centre of exchange, but its people could only
survive by trading the tortoiseshell and incense they produced for foodstuffs
from Arabia, India or Africa. The greatest change occurred when the
inhabitants became Christian, some time around the fourth century; and
Socotra remained largely or partly Christian until the seventeenth century.
This conversion (assuming it was that, and not a mass migration) took place
at a time when the southern Red Sea was becoming the scene of bitter
confrontation between the Jews, who had converted the kings of south-west
Arabia, and the Christians, whose power was based across the water at Axum
in Ethiopia. As Axum flourished, it attracted trade from across the Red Sea
and sent its own merchants overseas to sell ivory and other prestige products
of the Ethiopian highlands, and to buy incense and spices for the Axumite
court; over a hundred Indian coins of the late third century have been found
at the monastery of Däbrä Damo in Ethiopia (though there is a mysterious
complication: the monastery was only founded a few centuries later). Socotra
benefited from this renaissance of trade; the Hoq cave offers proof that
Ethiopians visited the island around the sixth century, for one or two left their
own names there.12 The early Byzantine traveller Kosmas Indikopleustes
(meaning ‘Kosmas who sailed to India’) wrote his own Periplous in the sixth
century, in which he described how the Socotrans spoke Greek, ‘having
originally been colonists sent thither by the Ptolemies’, and noted that the
local priests were ordained by bishops in Persia. Kosmas did not land there,
though he coasted past the island; however, he met Greek-speakers from
Socotra on the coast of Africa who had evidently come to believe this version
of their history.13 His story circulated widely, as the Arab geographer
resident at the court of King Roger of Sicily, al-Idrisi, said much the same in
the middle of the twelfth century, as did the tenth-century traveller al-
Mas‘udi, whose works were widely read. Al-Mas‘udi also mentioned that
Socotra was a nest of pirates, and that was one recurrent feature of its history;
the pirates he mentioned were Indian ones, who chased after Arab ships
bound for India and China, but Greek and Arabian pirates must also have
been installed there at different times.
All this proves that a historian ignores the smaller, apparently insignificant
places at his or her peril. Socotra was no Barygaza or Bereniké; but this
improbably remote island has thrown up evidence for the real nature of
contact by sea that is, in its way, as rich as anything in the Periplous or in the
excavations at Bereniké and Myos Hormos. The names of its visitors,
generally unadorned by profession or origin, still provide enough evidence to
remind us what sort of people lived on what they must have thought to be a
place on the outer edges of the world.

II

All this is rich evidence for the routes that were not dominated by seafarers
from the Roman Empire, but by dhows from Arabia, sewn-plank vessels from
India, and ships manned by Malay and Indonesian sailors. Malays would
certainly play a prominent role at the end of the Middle Ages, but much
changed in a thousand years, with the rise and fall of trading empires on
Sumatra and on the Malay peninsula. There is, however, extraordinary
evidence that people travelled all the way to east Africa from the eastern end
of the Indian Ocean, speakers of the Austronesian languages that include
Filipino, Malay and the Polynesian languages. They arrived not just in the
ports that marked the southernmost limit of Roman trade, around Zanzibar,
but much further south, where they first visited and colonized the Comoros
archipelago off the coast of Africa (later famous for its ylang-ylang perfume),
and then settled in the greatest of all the Indian Ocean islands, Madagascar.
Whether they took a direct route across the ocean to discover Madagascar,
until then empty of humans, or edged around the coasts of the Indian Ocean
has been much debated. The general consensus is that Malay-speakers
gradually made their way along more and more ambitious trade routes
leading them to southern India and far beyond. Mostly these Malays were
absorbed into host populations over the centuries; but in Madagascar they
were alone, apart from Bantu slaves they themselves brought from east
African ports such as Kilwa and Zanzibar. So what they created was a Malay
– Indonesian society in African waters. Later European observers recognized
the distinctive features of Malagasy society when they expressed the view
that Madagascar was really part of Asia, not Africa.14
Language provides rich evidence for the links between Madagascar and the
opposite end of the Indian Ocean. Glottochronology is, among other things,
the science of dating the moments when languages began to diverge into
dialects that gradually became mutually incomprehensible, to the point where
they can be described as separate languages. It has been seen that Māoris and
Hawai’ians could still make sense of what the other side said in the
eighteenth century. It is clear that the first settlers in Madagascar spoke a
language close to Malay; Malagasy is a language whose cousins mainly lie
on the far edge of the Indian Ocean or deep within the Pacific, and the closest
relative to the Malagasy language is a dialect spoken in Borneo.
Glottochronology suggests that the time of their arrival was late in the first
millennium BC; and the evidence of language is confirmed by that of DNA –
mitochondrial DNA reveals that 96 per cent of the population is descended at
least in part from Asiatic settlers. However, over the centuries the island has
received Bantus, Arabs and many others, so that there are other elements in
both the bloodline and the language; the Bantu settlers probably arrived from
the start of the second millennium AD onwards. There is also similar evidence
to suggest the presence of Austronesians on the coast of east Africa, around
Pemba and Zanzibar. Finally, there is the unspoken evidence of the plants
that have thrived on Madagascar since humans arrived: rice, saffron,
coconuts, yams, plus, very probably, a humble addition to the otherwise
exotic animal population – chickens.15
Part of the fascination of both Socotra and Madagascar is that these were
uninhabited islands far from the mainland that were settled by humans who
had to work out what sort of society they would establish there. On Socotra,
which was frankly desolate, they could only hope to set up a trade counter to
sell what little it offered, and maybe to careen the hulls of passing ships, or
send out pirates to capture them. Madagascar offered a very different
opportunity. This was a landmass that had floated away from India and had
been isolated from the rest of the world for maybe 88,000,000 years, so that,
rather like Australia, its animal population developed independently from that
of the rest of the world; the lemur, a very early primate, is found nowhere
else in the world. The richly forested interior took centuries to tame, but
around the coast early visitors may have been attracted by apparently
unlimited supplies of spices and resins.16 That is to assume with Philippe
Beaujard that Madagascar was a happy discovery of Indonesian merchants in
search of spices, following on from a series of what he calls strategic
commercial voyages; they would then have left behind a core population of
settlers, who would have supplied spices to the traders as they came year
after year in search of the natural wealth of Madagascar. Why people from
what became known as the Spice Islands would go in search of spices on the
other side of the ocean then becomes a mystery; taking these spices home
would have been the equivalent of carrying coals to Newcastle; but there
have been attempts to link this demand to the emergence of the great trading
empires of the South China Sea, especially the early medieval kingdom of Śri
Vijaya, based on Sumatra, which will be examined shortly.
According to this theory, the settlers expanded in numbers and moved ever
inwards into the heart of the island, which they gradually denuded of its
thickest tree cover, and where they exterminated some of its most remarkable
inhabitants – giant lemurs and massive elephant birds, which may be the
enormous rukh that appears in the late medieval tale of Sindbad the Sailor.17
Meanwhile other Indonesian settlers arrived who were attracted by the tales
they heard from seafarers who described the lush paradise of Madagascar.18
That is one plausible scenario; another view would present the Indonesians as
seafarers similar to the Polynesians, setting out in their catamarans in search
of new lands to settle, without a particular interest in the Indian Ocean spice
trade. Unfortunately, Malagasy archaeology is in its infancy, and the results
of excavations shed little light on this problem. One promising site in the
north of Madagascar cannot be dated further back than AD 420, and evidence
from earlier times is very patchy. Fragments of locally made pottery from
roughly AD 700 have emerged from a rock shelter that may have been used by
sailors stopping over on the island before making the long voyage back to
Malaya.19 This could be taken to prove that waves of Austronesians arrived
over many centuries, with contact continuing right through to the fourteenth
century or later, by which time Arab travellers were reporting the existence of
this extraordinary miniature continent.20 The settlers knew iron, and their
technology was therefore much more sophisticated than that of the
Polynesians, who around this time were reviving their colonization of the
farther reaches of the Pacific. What their boats looked like and where else
they sailed is far from certain, though big ships with outriggers feature among
the sculptures at Borobodur in Indonesia, and outriggers are still used on
boats both in Indonesia and in east Africa, including Madagascar.21
Even if the first Austronesians to reach Madagascar were not spice
merchants, and even if contact between the island and the inhabitants’ mother
country was spasmodic, there is enough evidence to show that the Greco-
Roman merchants were not the only pioneers in navigating the Indian Ocean
at the end of the first millennium BC and the start of the first millennium AD.
The great arc from south-east Africa to the East Indies was a space in which
human beings moved impressive distances far out of sight of land. They may
not have possessed the extraordinary navigational skills of the Polynesians
(though conceivably the discoverers of Madagascar possessed some of that
knowledge), but the navigators of the Indian Ocean required and acquired a
detailed knowledge of its shores and islands.22 The different corners of the
Indian Ocean were slowly becoming more connected to one another, and
beyond that to the seas that lap the shores of Vietnam, Java and China.

III

These Malay navigators are the unsung heroes of trade and migration in the
Indian Ocean and in the South China Sea: unlike the Indian travellers, they
are not praised in the Brahmin poems and, unlike the Greco-Roman
travellers, they have left no Periplous; the earliest written history from
Malaya, the so-called Malay Annals, dates from the early seventeenth century
and is rich in stories about fifteenth-century Singapore and Melaka
(Malacca), but for earlier centuries it only offers garbled legends about Indian
ancestors.23 The boats of the Malays and Indonesians are impossible to
describe in any detail, though finding the right woods was no problem: no
one knows whether they resembled dhows, junks or catamarans (and the
simple term ‘dhow’ is a broad description of a variety of roughly similar
ships, varying greatly in size and equipment). Yet they played a crucial part
in transforming the links between furthest Asia and the Mediterranean, so
that south India became a transit point rather than a terminus, and the
terminus shifted eastwards as far as the East Indies and even at times
southern China. The decades when Bereniké was beginning its slide under
the sand were also those in which south-east Asia and its Malay sailors
became a powerful force on the oceans.
The first question is what was known of this region and its inhabitants by
those who lived outside it. The Periplous was vague about a ‘golden land’,
Chrysé, beyond the Ganges; this indicates that contact with its inhabitants
was still quite limited, in the first and second centuries, whether that contact
was effected through very rare visits to the land of Chrysé (for example, by
embassies trying to reach China, such as the Antun embassy mentioned
earlier), or through meeting Malay sailors in the ports of southern India, such
as Arikamedu/Poduké. Sometimes Chrysé simply appeared in late classical
writings as an island beyond India, on the very edge of the habitable world,
but not too distant from the land of the Seres, that is, the silk-weaving
Chinese.24 Chrysé and another island called Argyré were said to be so rich in
gold and silver that the metals had given their names to these two islands;
around AD 40 the Roman writer Pomponius Mela reported a legend that one
had soil that consisted of gold, and the other had soil made of silver, but he
was not so credulous as to believe the tale.25 This rumour was repeated by
the sixth-century Spanish encyclopaedist Isidore of Seville, who knew his
classical sources extremely well, and who became the first port of call for
many who wished to understand the shape of the continents in later centuries.
The Jewish historian Josephus assumed that this was where one could find
Ophir, to which King Solomon had sent his ships a thousand years before his
own day.26 Ptolemy, as preserved by later Byzantine editors, who may have
added their own knowledge and opinions, had a different view: he presented
Malaya as a lump sticking out of south-east Asia, so that its shape is closer to
that of Indo-China than to the Malay peninsula. He arrived at this conclusion
more by accident, no doubt, than because of confusion between precise
information about the two neighbouring regions.27 As for information about
the people who lived in and around Chrysé, this was the usual mish-mash of
startling tales of dark-skinned peoples with barbaric customs, largely
conjured out of thin air.
The people outside the region who knew the area and its inhabitants best
were the Chinese. They have not appeared often in this book before now.
Chinese civilization had developed along the great river systems of east Asia,
and the Chinese connection to water involved freshwater more often than the
open sea. There were important maritime links to Japan, of which more will
be said; and there was plenty of coastal navigation in sizeable junks,
‘storeyed ships’, or louchuan, the sea being a source of fish and salt.28
Evidence for regular long-distance voyages by Chinese sailors is hard to
come by in the early centuries of the first millennium AD. Boat traffic was
dominated by ethnic groups other than the Han Chinese, who lived in the
north and would eventually rule vast expanses of China; perhaps the most
practised sailors were the Yueh in southern China, whose culture fell under
increasingly strong influence from Han China, but who were not yet fully
sinicized. The Yueh created lively commercial links to the coasts of central
China.29 Around 221 BC, when the Han dynasty was founded further north,
there existed four Yueh kingdoms, maybe more; one of them possessed a
capital somewhere in the region of Hanoi, at a place known as Lo Yueh.
Here, one could obtain luxuries that were much in demand at the Han court:
‘rhinoceros horns, elephant tusks, tortoise-shells, pearls, fruits and cloth’, as
well as kingfisher feathers, silver and copper, which were brought to the
Yueh city of Panyu near Guangzhou (Canton) and bought by Chinese
merchants who, according to a Chinese writer of the first century AD,
enriched themselves greatly.30 Links to western Asia were maintained across
the famous but difficult Silk Road, which took caravans across great swathes
of empty desert and through the lands of the Sogdian merchants to the north
of Iran, until the route reached trade centres north and south of the Caspian
Sea. Exotic products, of which silk was only the most famous, arrived by this
route; but it was a hard and slow journey whose safety could only be assured
by plenty of guard posts along the way.31 The Silk Road functioned
effectively in the first century BC and up to about AD 225, while the Han
dynasty could provide this degree of protection.
However, the third century BC was also a period of intense conflict among
the ‘Seven Warring States’ of China, and this conflict deflected the Chinese
from expansion southwards. Then, between 221 and 214 BC the ruler of the
Qin Empire extended his rule over Yueh territory in the face of tough Yueh
resistance, and briefly gained control of much of the coastline of the South
China Sea, around the Gulf of Tongking. The conquest of the Yueh towns
was accompanied by the settlement in the region of ‘criminals, banished men,
social parasites and merchants’, according to a snooty Chinese historian of
the time, but the long-term effect was that the Han Chinese population grew,
particularly in the cities, and flourished through trade with Chinese lands
further north. How much of this trade was carried by sea is unclear, as is the
degree of contact between the Yueh or the Chinese merchants living in their
lands and the inhabitants of the Malay peninsula. Such goods from the Indian
Ocean as arrived dribbled through passageways linking the South China Sea
to the Indian Ocean.32
This marked the beginning of a much closer relationship between the Han
Chinese and the sea. Its characteristics were trade, but also naval warfare. In
138 BC a Chinese navy sailed south from the River Yangtze to fend off Yueh
pirates. Over the next few years a series of Chinese naval attacks maintained
firm pressure on the Yueh statelets along the coast of the South China Sea.
Guangzhou, the capital of the Nan Yueh, fell to the Chinese and was used as
the base for a raid into the Gulf of Tongking; the king of Guangzhou was
captured as he tried to flee by sea. This was a period when the Han Chinese
could confidently extend their power as far south as Vietnam; but holding the
Han Empire together was only possible by firmly suppressing the centrifugal
tendencies of all the many regions and peoples that lay under Han
domination. When Han power disintegrated, Chinese refugees flooded south;
they had already begun to do so during a crisis in northern China between AD
9 and 25, and this further stimulated the emergence of Guangzhou as a major
centre of trade and culture, a city that was able to draw up from Vietnam
exotic birds and animals and tropical plants.33
The Han Empire divided, and the Wei in the north found themselves at
odds with the Wu dynasty, who came to control the south from AD 220
onwards. As a result, the Wu were cut off from the land routes. On the other
hand, the Wu state acquired a long coastline facing out towards the South
China Sea, which the Chinese began to exploit more intensely than before.
Wu Chinese began to look in new directions for the luxuries they had known
while they lived in the cities of the north.34 These even included the
frankincense and myrrh of Arabia, as well as coloured glass from Phoenicia
and amber that might well have originated in the Baltic, all of which had once
percolated down the Silk Road.35 The question was how they could obtain
these goodies, and the answer lay in their relations with the regions between
China and India, in other words Indo-China and Malaya/Indonesia. As will be
seen, they also hoped to create a series of links to the land of birth of
Buddhism at a time when Buddhist texts and relics were enormously prized
in China.
These links could be laid down in two main directions. One route led from
the ports of southern China and along the coast of what is now Vietnam, to
the territory the Chinese called Funan.36 From there one could follow the
coast right round till one reached the Isthmus of Kra, the narrow neck of land
that links the Malay peninsula to Asia. After crossing the isthmus by land,
which could take a good ten days as the terrain was covered with forests hilly
and, travellers could take ship once again in southern Thailand and then leap
across the Bay of Bengal from Burma to north-eastern India. For a while
Funan was able to maintain a stranglehold on the movement of people and
goods from the South China Sea towards the Indian Ocean, and the isthmian
route, despite its awkwardness, was preferred. The alternative route went all
the way by sea from Indo-China along the Malay coast, past what is now
Singapore and through the Strait of Malacca, jumping across the Bay of
Bengal from somewhere on the western side of Malaya.37 Chinese ships
avoided the open sea, to judge from a text known as the Liang shu: ‘the
Zhang hai [South China Sea] is of great extent and ocean-going junks have
not yet crossed it directly’.38 The dividends for those in power were
considerable. Around AD 300, Shih Chong was the governor of a region that
lay along the trade routes towards Canton and Hanoi, and he accumulated
enormous wealth by taxing merchants and ambassadors who passed through
his lands laden with goods; he also traded on his own behalf, sending out
merchants to collect ivory, pearls, scented woods and perfumes, while he was
particularly proud of half a dozen coral trees that stood three or four feet high
and were beautifully coloured. He also possessed thousands of beautiful
female slaves:
 He asked a few tens of them each to hold various scents in their
mouths; and when they talked and laughed, the fragrance was wafted
by every breeze. He then had powdered gharu-woods as fine as dust
sprinkled over an ivory bed, and asked those that he specially loved to
step on it. Those who left not a trace he presented with a hundred p’ei
of pearls [50,000 pearls!]. Those who moved the fine powder were
ordered to eat and drink less in order that they might be lighter.39

Although he was not typical of his contemporaries, the South China Sea trade
had brought Shih fabulous wealth – fabulous in the sense that accounts of his
wealth no doubt grew in the telling. And yet Guangzhou and Hanoi derived
their wealth from the fact that these towns were collection points, rather than
centres of production – ‘prosperous frontier towns’, in the words of Wang
Gung-Wu, and the luxurious life of Shih Chong and his successors was
rendered possible by the remoteness of these provinces from the central
imperial government. As with other frontier regions, the area around
Guangzhou, Guangdong, was plagued by pirates and bandits who hoped to
set up their own fiefdoms along the coast. This held back the expansion of
trade across the South China Sea. One of these pirates, Lu Xun, was
resoundingly defeated at the start of the fifth century, a victory that ushered in
a period of quiet in Guangdong. Strife further south, along the coast of
Annam, left Guangzhou largely free to develop its trade across the South
China Sea, so that ‘the governor of Guangzhou need only pass through the
city gates of Guangzhou just once, and he will be enriched by thirty million
strings of cash’.40 By the sixth century AD Guangzhou was at its peak, and
the local officials operated a tax system that, for all its severity, did not slow
down the economy, was tolerated and became normal practice: the goods of
foreign merchants were bought at half the official price and then sold on at
the full price. It seems unlikely that the beneficiaries were anyone other than
the greedy officials.41
An early Chinese description of the sea route to India survives in the Qian
Hanshu, a compilation of Han history created in its present form after the fall
of the Han, but incorporating older material. It is very difficult to identify the
places in India whose ancient names, now imperfectly known, if known at all,
were rendered into Chinese sounds. That they included Barygaza and Muziris
is very likely. The Han history does contain the earliest surviving description
of Malaya, or at any rate the Kra Isthmus, in any language.42 But the voyage
towards India was slow, each stage taking months at a time, as one would
expect when the monsoons were blowing; what made the endless wait
worthwhile was the produce that could be found:

These countries are extensive, their populations numerous and their

many products unfamiliar. Ever since the time of the Emperor Wu
[141–87 BC] they have all offered tribute. There are chief interpreters
attached to the Yellow Gate [the Department of Eunuchs] who,
together with volunteers, put out to sea to buy lustrous pearls, glass,
rare stones and strange products in exchange for gold and various
silks. All the countries they visit provide them with food and
companionship. The trading ships of the barbarians transfer the
Chinese to their destination. It is a profitable business for the
barbarians, who also loot and kill. Moreover, there are the hazards of
wind and wave to be encountered and the possibility of death by
drowning. If these are avoided the outward and return voyages take
several years. The large pearls are at the most two Chinese inches in
circumference.43

The impression that had to be created was that of subject peoples, but the
pretence could not be maintained; much of this description is concerned with
trade for profit. Around the third century AD, the clear aim of the ‘chief
interpreters’ was to reach India; officially, at any rate, they were the
emperor’s agents sent on a diplomatic mission, but in reality they had gone
west to buy the rarest of luxury goods from far-off lands.44 Malaya was an
inconvenient barrier with nothing obvious to offer, whereas Indian products
were rare and unusual. The transformation of Malaya into a desirable
destination would be slow; but, even before that, Malay seamen had become
active. The essential point is that the Han Chinese remained wary of the open
seas, and everything suggests that the Malays were emerging as one of the
most active seafaring nations of east Asia. There is every reason to suppose
that they, not Indians and certainly not Chinese, sailed the boats that took
‘chief interpreters’ and other Chinese merchants from the west coast of
Malaya to eastern India; the historian Wang Gung-Wu, writing in 1958,
expressed puzzlement at the fact that his Chinese sources did not specify that
ships reaching the Indian Ocean were Chinese or Yueh or Indian, and the
answer that he missed is that they were operated by Malays. As will be seen,
we even have detailed descriptions of them, with their measurements (over
200 feet long, 20–30 feet high, and with four adjustable sails).45 In the fifth
century the ‘southern barbarians’ provided everything from rhinoceros horn
and kingfisher feathers to pearls and asbestos (then regarded as a
mysteriously wonderful mineral).46 For Malays who ranged further and
further across the ocean, as far as Africa, the journey across the Bay of
Bengal was nothing special.
For a few centuries Funan in southern Vietnam was the main intermediary
between China and India. It is thought to have been the largest kingdom lying
between China and India, and to have dominated the coasts of the Gulf of
Siam and the eastern shores of Malaya.47 Only the Chinese name of this
territory is known; but many of its inhabitants were probably related to the
Mon-Khmer people who later built the great temple cities in Cambodia.48
Funan’s maritime successes date to a period when the shipping that moved
through the South China Sea carried Chinese passengers, Indian monks, and
merchants and Malay sailors, with, no doubt, a good sprinkling of local
Vietnamese hands on board as well. By the middle of the third century Funan
was attracting admiring comments from Chinese travellers. At this period a
king of Funan named Fan-man or Fan Shiman by the Chinese expanded his
power over his neighbours and created a kingdom that combined lively
international trade with the successful exploitation of large tracts of land
suitable for rice and other foods. Funan’s cities were walled, they were rich in
libraries and archives, and its taxes, it was said, were paid in gold, silver,
pearls and perfume. Funan was also a centre of shipbuilding.49 In short, the
Funanese met Chinese criteria for being classed as reasonably civilized
barbarians.
The origins of Funan were said to have lain in the sea, so its vocation was
always trading. According to a legend recorded in China, at some time in the
first century AD a local queen sent a pirate raid to attack a merchant ship, but
those on board defended themselves well, and the ship was able to put in to
land. A passenger from ‘beyond the seas’ with the Brahmin name Kaundinya
set foot on dry land, drank some of its water (this symbolized taking
possession of the lands of the water queen) and married the queen. Thereupon
he became king of Funan, acting as overlord over a group of seven chieftains
in different towns around the Mekong delta. The marriage between a sky god
and a princess born, rather like Aphrodite, in the foam of the sea was a
longstanding motif of Malay and Polynesian mythology, and the story
presented here bears the imprint of these earlier legends.50 Even so, the story
has been interpreted as evidence that Indians arrived in Vietnam by sea and
inserted themselves into the highest echelons of local society, which they
increasingly indianized and indeed commercialized. The kingdom of Funan
was a joint enterprise of Indian merchants and colonizers, with an interest in
maritime trade, working alongside native Vietnamese with an interest in
harvesting the produce of the fields.51 However important the sea was to the
prosperity of Funan, the inland regions were also of great economic
importance, and the capital, which still needs to be identified, lay some way
inland.52 Its indianized character was acquired more by osmosis than by
colonization; and when colonization took place it occurred in the port cities,
and was the work of merchants and Brahmin priests who merged deliberately
with the local population, as will be seen. Indian culture fascinated the
Funanese, as it did later rulers of lands around the South China Sea; the
Khmer kings of Cambodia, the builders of the great temples at Angkor Wat,
claimed descent from Kaundinya and the kings of Funan. This does not mean
that the townsmen were all Indians. Rather, as in other port cities around the
world, the ports of Funan hummed with the bargaining of Indians, Chinese,
Malays, Indonesians, Vietnamese, Burmese and many other ethnic groups.
The remains of one of their trading ports, at Oc-èo at the top of the Gulf of
Siam, confirm Chinese reports; it had originated in the first century AD as a
Malay fishing harbour, but soon afterwards it underwent a spectacular
transformation, and it remained a great centre of trade until the early seventh
century. Just as no one knows the local name for Funan, no one knows the
original name of the town that has been excavated at Oc-èo, which lies not far
from Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon. Oc-èo is not simply one site among
many, though other Vietnamese ports of this period await discovery;
everything suggests that it was the earliest trading port of any significance in
the history of south-east Asia, and it is the first place in the region where
writing has been found, in the form of Sanskrit inscriptions, not just on stone
but on gold rings. The site itself is large, covering 450 hectares.53 The
inhabitants lived in houses partly built of stone and brick but raised on piles
above the ground, to avoid flooding, as is still so often the case in south-east
Asia. Larger palaces for the elite had two storeys.54 Oc-èo did not actually
lie on the seashore but twenty-five kilometres inland, and was connected to
the open sea by canals. These canals were a typical feature of the south
Vietnamese landscape; they ran through the waterlogged countryside and
serve as a reminder that the rulers of Funan were able to mobilize a
considerable labour force to construct and maintain a whole network of
waterways. It has been well said that one word describes the Funanese
environment: ‘watery’.55
Oc-èo tied the sea to the Funanese possessions that lay down the
watercourses of the Mekong River, and it had access to vast paddy fields
sown with rice that flooded naturally when the Mekong rose; if nothing else,
Oc-èo was a place mariners would want to use to resupply their ships on the
long haul from southern China to Malaya and back.56 Objects found there
have included coins of the Antonine emperors of Rome, from the second
century, Chinese bronzes of the first to sixth centuries, and polished gems
thought to have been brought from Sasanid Persia, though many of these
items would have been carried to Funan in stages and passed from hand to
hand over a long period. Imported materials were used to manufacture
ornaments, jewellery and utensils, including silver dinner plates: the people
of Oc-èo fashioned gems from diamonds, rubies, sapphires, topaz, garnets,
opals, jet and much else, and they imported gold, probably in the form of
gold wire, which they then melted down to make rings, bracelets and other
high-value objects. More modest metals moved around the South China Sea,
such as iron, which arrived from north-east Borneo.57 Interestingly, more
goods have been found that originated in the Roman Empire than from China,
even though China was much nearer and more accessible, so Oc-èo, although
it lay beyond the Indian Ocean, was certainly linked to those trade routes that
brought ‘Roman’ merchants at least as far as southern India – the question is
who then transported these goods to the South China Sea. But Funanese
relations with Wu China were constantly being sealed by embassies that
carried tribute to the imperial court. In the fifth century embassies to China
arrived again and again, bearing gold, sandalwood, ivory and incense.
During much of this century and the early sixth, contact between Funan
and China was especially lively. Not just state emissaries but monks were
sent back and forth between China and Funan; on one occasion the king of
Funan sent a Buddhist monk to southern China with the text of 240 sutras
that he wanted to share with the imperial court. Funan thus acted as a bridge
between the birthplace of Buddhism and the great empire that was at this
period enthusiastically embracing Buddhist doctrines. Even so, the Funanese
ambassadors were not always welcome, and occasionally, as in 357, they
were kept waiting and then sent back without the tribute being accepted,
perhaps because the emperor preferred other allies in the region, or perhaps
because the tribute itself was regarded as paltry. One reason the Wu emperors
cared about Funan was not because of an interest in the trade in fine
gemstones but their love for Funanese music, which was still greatly
appreciated at the Tang court in seventh-century China. Unfortunately neither
the instruments nor the sounds are known; but an ‘Office for Funan Music’
existed at Nanjing in 244, so the infatuation lasted many centuries.58
The ships of Funan were described by Chinese writers, and fell into two
categories. There were ships whose average length was said to be twelve xin,
or eight Chinese feet, which were also six xin broad. They would therefore
have been quite tubby in shape; a striking feature was the bow and stern, said
to look like fish, so the boards were evidently gathered together into
something like a point. They were powered by oars and the largest ones could
carry about a hundred people. Relatively small vessels of this sort would have
been suitable for carrying low-bulk, high-value goods such as jewellery, rare
spices and incense. Another account describes much larger vessels, able to
carry 600–700 passengers and crew and a very large cargo (more than 10,000
ho), and these ships were powered by four sails. They sound more like the
junks that traded along the coast of China, and may have been copied from
foreign ships by the shipbuilders of Funan. The Chinese texts call the
Funanese ships bo, which has been linked to a Malay word, perahu, that the
Chinese language would have struggled to turn into a manageable sound.
And this has led to the assumption that the ships and sailors were Malay,
which makes a great deal of sense, particularly bearing in mind the
description of the smaller ships, which have a strongly Malay feel. For the
descriptions that survive of the people of Funan suggest that there were many
Malays living in the area where the Chinese would have had contact with this
kingdom – the port cities. The Chinese texts speak of dark, curly-haired
people, whom they found ugly (though that was a common enough way of
expressing superiority over ‘barbarians’); they were big people who wore
their hair long at the back and went around virtually naked, with nothing on
their feet, and like many who display their flesh they adorned their bodies
with tattoos.59 They do not sound like the handsome Khmers who lived
further inland in Funan. Oc-èo in particular was a place where people of
varied origins came together – Khmers, Indians, Malays, Chinese, only to
mention the most obvious among the very many peoples of south-east Asia –
a large cosmopolitan port city whose identity was created by generations of
settlers and their descendants, and whose daily life was dominated by trade
across the seas and by the need to prepare goods, such as gems, that could be
sent on its ships to China and elsewhere.
A place of this significance could not be missed by commentators even as
far away as the Roman Empire. When Ptolemy mentioned Kattigara in south-
east Asia, visited by the Greek sea captain Alexander in the second century,
he may have had one or all of the ports of Funan, including Oc-èo, in mind,
but he set off a debate about where Kattigara lay that was to fascinate
scholars and explorers in sixteenth-century Europe. However, Ptolemy
confidently placed Kattigara on the Indian Ocean rather than near the South
China Sea.60 For Kattigara may well have been a name created by Greco-
Roman merchants out of a misunderstanding. An eleventh-century Brahmin
collection of tales is known as the Kathāsaritsāgara, meaning ‘ocean of
streams of story’, and an earlier version of that word, or Kathāsāgara
(‘oceans of story’) may well have been heard as ‘Kattigara’; the name would
then signify something like ‘fabled place across the seas’.61 Oc-èo and
Funan remained prosperous until the fifth century, with the peak of their
prosperity probably in the second century, under the warrior king Fan-man.
During the fourth century, the growing attractions of spices and resins from
the Moluccas and other parts of Indonesia gradually rendered the south coast
of Vietnam less interesting to sea traders; and this change in direction had
major consequences not just for the history of the region but, as will be seen,
for the history of the oceans and of the entire world.
Fan-man’s wars of conquest resulted in the creation of a land and sea realm
that encompassed large areas of Indo-China. His empire spilled over into the
Bay of Bengal after he led victorious armies into the Kra Isthmus, conquering
a Malay kingdom called Tun-sun (in Chinese); it lay in the innermost north-
west corner of the South China Sea, at the top of the Malay peninsula, where
it joins Thailand. Chinese commentators were impressed by this victory,
because they knew that the Malay peninsula was an inconvenient barrier to
access to India. Once Tun-sun was in Funanese hands, the journey to the Bay
of Bengal became a little easier; one could arrive in Tun-sun’s main port by
sea, and then trek across the isthmus through lands that were now all under
the sovereignty of the king of Funan. The Chinese were also impressed that
the main city of newly conquered Tun-sun was a port where ‘East and West
meet together so that every day great crowds gather there. Precious goods and
merchandise – they are all there.’62 There were 500 Indian families in the
town and 1,000 Brahmins, who were encouraged to marry local girls,
‘consequently many of the Brahmins do not go away’. Chinese observers
were dismayed by these parasites, as they saw them: ‘they do nothing but
study the sacred canon, bathe themselves with scents and flowers, and
practise piety ceaselessly by day and night.’63 The Indianization of Vietnam
meant, therefore, not just the presence of Indian traders and settlers, but the
arrival of Hindu and Buddhist cults, which spread in Indo-China from this
time onwards. An early Sanskrit inscription from Funan dates from soon after
Fan-man’s death, showing how the sacred language of India was beginning to
take root in Indo-China.

IV

Trade and religion were closely intertwined. Beyond Funan, the Brahmins
had their rivals. From the first century AD Buddhism began to take a strong
hold on China, and Chinese Buddhists regularly travelled to India to study
Sanskrit texts and acquire mementoes of the life of Buddha. Faxien (or in
older spelling Shih Fa-Hsien) was a Buddhist monk who spent about fifteen
years away from China at the start of the fifth century; he took an overland
route to India, and returned to Guangzhou by sea from some place in India.64
By now mariners were not interested in hugging the coast of Indo-China, and
Faxien was forced to confront the terrors of the open sea. His description of
how he reached China by sea from India is full of the dramatic images that so
many pilgrims included in their travel diaries. But, even allowing for
exaggeration, it offers precious details: there were 200 people on board what
he calls a large merchant ship, ‘astern of which there was a smaller vessel in
tow in case of accidents at sea and destruction of the big vessel’. That, at any
rate, was the theory. But after two days of good sailing eastward, propelled
by fair winds, they ran into a severe gale in the Bay of Bengal, and the main
ship began to take on water.

The merchants wished to get aboard the smaller vessel; but the men
on the latter, fearing that they would be swamped by numbers,
quickly cut the tow-rope in two. The merchants were terrified, for
 death was close at hand; and fearing that the vessel would fill, they
promptly took what bulky goods there were and threw them into the
sea. Faxien also took his pitcher and ewer, with whatever he could
spare, and threw them into the sea; but he was afraid the merchants
would throw over his books and his images, and accordingly fixed his
whole thoughts on Guanyin, the Hearer of Prayers, and put his life
into the hands of the Catholic Church [i.e. his Buddhist sect] in China,
saying, ‘I have journeyed far on behalf of the Faith. O that by your
awful power you would grant me a safe return from my
wanderings.’65

It took thirteen days for his prayers to be answered, whereupon they reached
an island, probably one of the Andamans, and were able to plug the leak in
the ship. Even so, he says, pirates abounded in the vast sea, for ‘the expanse
of ocean is boundless’, and navigation by the sun or stars was only possible
when the skies were clear; ‘in cloudy and rainy weather our vessel drifted at
the mercy of the wind, without keeping any definite course’. The sea was too
deep to cast anchor; and it was full of threatening sea monsters that showed
themselves, somehow, in the middle of the night.
Finally, after ninety days, the ship arrived in a land known as Yepoti,
thought to have been northern Borneo, or possibly southern Sumatra, which
was not bad navigation; they had evidently passed through the Strait of
Malacca and had followed the broken south and east coastline of the South
China Sea. Yepoti disappointed Faxien, because it was full of Hindus and
‘the Faith of Buddha was in a very unsatisfactory condition’. He did not
notice any Chinese merchants in this land, which suggests, yet again, that the
trade of the South China Sea was dominated by other peoples.66 Despite his
misgivings about this place, he stayed there for five months, and then
boarded a different merchant ship that was large enough to carry 200
passengers. They sailed for Guangzhou, but after a month they encountered
another tempest, and Faxien immersed himself yet again in prayer. This
nearly became Faxien’s involuntary Jonah moment. The Hindu Brahmins on
board (whose purpose in travelling to China can only be guessed at) decided
that it was precisely because a devout Buddhist was on board that the gods
had sent storms against the ship. They did not suggest throwing him
overboard, but had a more humane solution: ‘We ought to land the religious
mendicant on some island; it is not right to endanger all our lives for one
man.’ But Faxien had a protector on board who promised to report the
Brahmins to the ruler of China if they treated him this way; Faxien’s friend
insisted that the Chinese ruler was also a devout Buddhist who favoured
Buddhist monks. ‘At this the merchants wavered and did not land him just
then.’67 In any case, they were lost in a typhoon in the middle of the South
China Sea, so there cannot have been any islands upon which to abandon the
poor monk. For seventy days they wandered, even though they had
provisions for only fifty, the normal amount of time required to reach
Guangzhou. They had to cook their food in seawater. And when they reached
China it was far to the north of Guangzhou, way beyond Taiwan, closer to
Shanghai and Hangzhou than to the Wu domains in the south.
The stories of Faxien and other monks who followed the same route are
not just picturesque accounts of the terrors of the open sea. They are also
valuable testimony to the way the opening of sea routes stimulated the spread
of cultures and religions. Later, there will be a chance to examine how
Buddhism jumped across the relatively narrow space of the Japan Sea to
challenge and then co-exist with the native cults of ancient Japan. The
seaways from India eastwards played a particularly important role in the
spread of religious ideas, and the art associated with them, as Hindu texts and
practices struck roots in Indo-China and Indonesia (so that Bali remains an
isolated Hindu island to this day); and after that Buddhism and eventually
Islam spread eastwards along the trade routes, refertilizing China, which had
also received Buddhist texts along the Silk Road. In the third century over
500 monks lived in twenty or more temples by the Red River delta in
Vietnam, and this spot became a favoured halt for pilgrims and merchants
bound for and from China. Statues of the Buddha as Dīpamkara, ‘calmer of
waters’, have been found on many sites in south-east Asia, often dating from
this time.68 Chinese writers also spoke of the ivory images, painted stupas
and even a Buddha’s tooth, all of which arrived from the Malay peninsula
and the islands, notably from the land of Panpan in what is now southern
Thailand.69 These are excellent testimony to the spread of Buddhism along
routes favoured by the merchants.

V
By the sixth century the fortunes of Funan now began to turn dramatically: a
neighbouring ruler, the king of Zhenla (in whose temples human sacrifice
was said to be practised), invaded Funanese lands and shoved the local
economy further into decline; at its greatest extent Funan had exercised
suzerainty over Zhenla.70 Even allowing for the disappearance of Funan, the
increasingly important ties between India and China transformed the role of
Indo-China, Indonesia and Malaya in the maritime networks of the first half
of the first millennium. Their role was not reduced but enhanced by the
gradual decline of Roman trade in the Indian Ocean. Others began to enter
the ocean, notably the people the Chinese called the Po-ššu or Bosi, subjects
of the Sasanian emperors of Iran, who sailed down the Gulf and were present
in Ceylon, or Si-tiao, by the sixth century; their main interest was the trade in
silk. A Chinese text avers that ‘the Bosi king asked for the hand of the
daughter of the king of Si-tiao and sent a gold bracelet as a present’. Yet the
Persians did not penetrate further than this, and sense can only be made of
their undoubted success in Ceylon by deducing that others brought Chinese
silk to the island; and those others were, or included, the mariners of Malaya,
Sumatra and Java. This is apparent from the comments of Chinese writers
about the constant arrival at Guangzhou, several times a year, of foreign
ships, while the Chinese sent their own ships no further than western
Indonesia. These Indonesians managed at last to intrude their own produce
into the trading network between India and China that they so effectively
serviced; the first Indonesian product to be rated highly was camphor, used as
a perfume at the Sasanian court (rather an overpowering one, perhaps) and
later as a drug. Some unfortunate Arabs who were celebrating the sack of a
Persian-held city on the Tigris in 638 sprinkled camphor on their food,
thinking it was salt, and were taken aback by the taste.71
What might seem to be a curious footnote to the history of food takes on a
much greater significance when the gradual adoption of camphor by
merchants and their wealthier customers is seen as the first step in the
emergence of south-east Asia as the home of most of the world’s finest
spices. Already expert in the handling of pepper and other spices from the
coasts of India, and even perhaps the spices they garnered in Madagascar and
east Africa, the Malays and Indonesians were becoming the true masters of
the international spice trade. In the centuries that followed, they would
substitute their own resins and flavourings for those that had been handled by
the Greco-Roman traders. This would be the foundation of the wealth of the
great maritime trading kingdom of Śri Vijaya, with its capital at Palembang
on Sumatra. The ripples of its influence reached not just China and India but
the heartlands of Islam and even medieval Europe.
 8

A Maritime Empire?

At the eastern end of the Indian Ocean and in the South China Sea, the sixth
and seventh centuries saw transformations that turned the spasmodic contact
between lands bordering the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean into a two-
way traffic lane. This brought prosperity to lands on the southern fringe of
the South China Sea that had previously lain on the outer margins of the trade
routes. The kingdom of Śri Vijaya, based around Palembang in Sumatra, has
been mentioned already. Early in the twentieth century French archaeologists
and orientalists were convinced that they had brought to light a great trading
empire of the early Middle Ages, whose impact could still be felt in the
fifteenth century when the founders of Melaka (Malacca) traced their descent
to the ancient rulers of Palembang.1 The difficulty was that material remains
were few; on the other hand, literary references were rich, allowing for the
constant problem of the Chinese transcription of foreign place names.
Compared to Oc-èo, the physical evidence for a great trading station at
Palembang was virtually non-existent.2 It is therefore no great surprise that
more recent research into the history of early south-east Asia has cast doubt
on the very existence of this trading empire, which has been described by one
of its detractors as a ‘vague supposed thalassocracy’.3
That a kingdom existed in Sumatra, flanking the South China Sea, is not in
doubt; but how long it flourished, and whether it achieved such great wealth
as has been assumed, is now less certain. One of its first historians, Gabriel
Ferrand, admitted that ‘one will search in vain for the name of Śri Vijaya’ in
books of geography and history, while he also argued that the empire enjoyed
no less than seven centuries of prosperity; its reputation was carried across
the South China Sea to the Heavenly Kingdom. This place was visited by
Chinese travellers such as Da Qin, described as a master of legal study, who
followed in the tracks of a Chinese ambassador in AD 683, to reach the island
of Shili foshi (a Chinese attempt to transcribe Śri Vijaya), where,
interestingly, he immersed himself in Sanskrit books. Only six years later the
Buddhist monk Yijing (or I-Ching) set out from Guangzhou on a merchant
vessel, and coasted along the shores of Annam, eventually reaching Foqi,
evidently the same place, as is the Sanfoqi mentioned by a historian writing
for the Song dynasty between 960 and 1279.4 According to the Chinese
geographer Zhao Rugua, writing in the thirteenth century, this land lay
between Cambodia and Java, which fixes its location in Sumatra, the great
island to the south of the Strait of Malacca. Moreover, when he wrote of Arab
lands, Zhao Rugua noted that ‘the products of this country are for the most
part brought to Sanfoqi, where they are sold to merchants who forward them
to China’, making this place the intermediary between the trade of the Indian
Ocean and that of the South China Sea.5
Nor was this a remote place of mystery, to judge from continuing evidence
for the exchange of ambassadors, though we can be sure that the Chinese
treated the envoys of Śri Vijaya as supplicants. These embassies came laden
with gifts from Sumatra and further afield.6 In 724 the Śri Vijayan
ambassador brought two dwarves, a black African slave, a troupe of
musicians and a parakeet with feathers of five different colours. He received
in exchange a hundred bolts of silk, as well as a title of honour for his master
in Sumatra. Yet there were occasions when the Śri Vijayans made demands
of the Chinese authorities, and got their way, which was unusual in these
unequal relationships. Around 700 the Śri Vijayans ‘sent several missions to
the court to submit complaints about border officials seizing their goods, and
an edict was issued ordering the officials at Guangzhou to appease them by
making enquiries’.7 The Chinese authorities clearly valued their relationship
with Śri Vijaya, then. Nor were the contacts solely with the Chinese
mainland. An account of a voyage from Sri Lanka in 717 suggests that the
traffic heading back and forth across the Indian Ocean was also regular. The
monk Vajrabodhi arrived aboard a fleet of thirty-five ships, and then stayed
in Fo-chi for five months, while awaiting favourable winds.8 Śri Vijaya
benefited directly from the monsoons: the north-east monsoon that blew
throughout the winter prevented travel back from there to China for several
months, but the south-west monsoon that blew in the summer rendered the
journey swift and direct. Coming from China, equally, one had to take
advantage of the winter winds to head south and then west. As a result,
journeys towards Malaya and India were slow; there was little chance of
returning in one year if one wanted to do business in remote markets, and a
trip from India to China and back was a three-year affair; however, the monks
who took this route were in no hurry to return – Yijing spent eighteen years
in India.9
 This had important cultural repercussions. Not just a certain amount of
trade but the desire of Far Eastern Buddhists to gain access to fundamental
texts brought India, China and even Japan into regular contact. Lengthy
stopovers by Buddhist monks in Śri Vijaya as they moved back and forth
between China and India meant that their religion became well established in
Śri Vijaya; Yijing proudly recalled that the kingdom contained a thousand
monks who followed Indian Buddhist rituals to the letter. He also remarked
that the political reach of Śri Vijaya extended along the east flank of Sumatra,
even reaching Kedah in western Malaya. Kedah was by now an important
and prosperous link on the trade route tying India to the Strait of Malacca,
which, as will be seen, was one of the main props of the Śri Vijayan
economy; and Yijing had enough experience of the open sea not to take it for
granted; he described a voyage by another monk that took him down from
Hanoi or Guangzhou as far as Sumatra, where the overloaded ship sank in a
tempest.10 Much is known about these ships, as a result of underwater
excavations, and the remarkable evidence from their cargoes will be
examined shortly.
Śri Vijaya is certainly not a mirage. Inscriptions from its capital city,
Palembang, state the name of this kingdom and say a little about its political
structure. It is difficult to be sure how accurate Chinese or Arabic reports of
life in Śri Vijaya were; some of the most colourful detail was supplied by
Zhao Rugua in around 1225, by which time the kingdom had certainly passed
its peak. But his comments were in large part recycled from earlier material;
and even if they are not based on intimate knowledge, they testify to the
exotic reputation that Śri Vijaya obtained. He wrote of a kingdom with many
provinces or dependencies, though it is impossible to believe that they
included Xilan, Ceylon; more to the point, his reference to Ceylon is further
proof that the reach of Śri Vijaya extended far to the west, as Malay and
Indonesian mariners sailed back and forth to India and Sri Lanka. Reports
reached him of a sizeable capital city surrounded by solid walls, ruled by a
king who processed under a silk umbrella to the accompaniment of guards
carrying golden lances. The king, who only bathed in rose-water, was not
permitted to eat cereals, but only sago; the Śri Vijayans believed that if he did
eat cereals, this would bring drought and high prices. At grand court
ceremonies (assuming that his diet of sago brought him sufficient strength),
the king was expected to wear a very heavy crown adorned with hundreds of
jewels. The succession was decided by choosing from among his sons the one
who could bear its weight on his head; and the new king would dedicate a
golden statue of the Buddha, to which the king’s subjects would bring
offerings such as golden vases. The death of a king was treated as a national
calamity: the people shaved their heads and many courtiers even immolated
themselves in the royal funeral pyre.11
The Śri Vijayans used Sanskrit letters, in which one of the rare inscriptions
from Palembang was written (though in an early form of the Malay
language); but there were experts who could read and write Chinese
characters, required when writing to the Chinese court. The inhabitants of the
main city lived not within the town walls but around it in suburbs, and even
on riverboats – it will be seen that the Chinese writers were actually
describing a snake-like town that stretched for miles along the riverbank. The
image was conveyed of a state that was ready to go to war against
troublesome neighbours, with a competent army and brave soldiers. Rather
than adopting the currency favoured by the Chinese, the copper coins known
to Europeans as ‘cash’ that were threaded together through a central hole, the
Śri Vijayans made use of hack silver, pieces of silver that were cut into pieces
and weighed. (The term ‘cash’ is apparently derived from the Portuguese
word caixa, ‘cash-box’, and the Chinese word was wén.)12 They imported
both silver and gold, and also acquired – certainly from China – porcelain
and embroidered silk, as well as rice and rhubarb. Camphor, cloves,
sandalwood, cardamom, civet perfume, myrrh, aloes, ivory, coral and many
other spices and luxuries were for sale on the island. Its markets sold both
local products, including some of those spices such as aloe wood, and goods
brought from further afield, such as cotton goods carried across the Indian
Ocean by Dashi, Muslim merchants from Persia and Arabia; and one could
also find slaves brought all the way from Kunlun, the coast of Africa.13
There must have been a lively traffic from the smaller Indonesian islands
towards south-eastern Sumatra, bringing the resins and spices that the
Chinese and Arabs keenly sought. By about AD 500, the Chinese valued
benzoin resin from Indonesia as much as or more than Middle Eastern myrrh,
while pine resin from Śri Vijaya was used, honestly or dishonestly, as a
substitute for Arabian frankincense. One Chinese writer described the trade in
frankincense, some no doubt genuine, some adulterated, some substituted by
similar resins:

The Arabs bring their goods by ship to San-fo-chi and exchange them
for goods. Thus this perfume is usually found in great quantities at
San-fo-chi. Each year great ships leave San-fo-chi for Guangzhou or
Quanzhou. At these two ports the shipping officials examine the
amounts of perfume and establish its value.14

Zhao Rugua thought that Śri Vijaya and China began to make contact in the
Tang period, at the start of the tenth century; but it has already been seen that
contact can be traced back two centuries earlier. And the Song histories
mention a whole series of embassies sent to China around 960, which were
taken as recognition of Chinese overlordship; it is interesting to find sugar
listed among the gifts, for at this period sugar stocks were only slowly
becoming known in India and further west, and they are native to Indonesia.
These gifts were regarded as tribute, to be sure; but the ambassadors received
rewards for their efforts, including such wonders as yaks’ tails and white
porcelain. As well as official visits, which conformed to the Chinese idea of
what trade with the imperial court was all about, there were visits by
merchants of San-fo-chi: in 980 a Śri Vijayan merchant reached the south
coast of China after a sixty-day voyage, carrying rhinoceros horns, perfumes
and spices. This was a rather longer voyage than many experienced – a
month was normal, or even three weeks.15
One might ask why the Śri Vijayans were so keen to acknowledge the
distant ruler of China as their lord. Precisely because the emperor was so
distant, the chance of direct interference was slim, but imperial approval
would enhance the authority of the king of Śri Vijaya over sometimes
troublesome vassals; it might even be of some use in fending off claims from
independent neighbours with their own ambitions to create a commercial
network, such as the Javans, who invaded Sumatra in 992, and who sent a
particularly magnificent embassy to China the same year, conveying the
message that Java (rather than Śri Vijaya) was the place with which to
cultivate friendships and do business.16 So it hardly comes as a surprise that
in 1003 the Śri Vijayan king sent the Song emperor an embassy, declaring
that he had erected a Buddhist temple in his home town specifically to pray
for the long life of the emperor. Nor is it a surprise that the emperor sent
temple bells in return, as well as a title of honour for his faithful subject. A
few years later the favours of the emperor extended even further. Instead of
the belts adorned with gold embroidery that most ambassadors received on
taking leave of the emperor, the Śri Vijayan ambassadors were given belts
entirely covered in gold. In 1016 Śri Vijaya was granted the rank of ‘first-
class trading state’, though Java also received the same promotion.17
The value that the Chinese emperors placed on ties with Śri Vijaya
becomes more and more obvious; and the main motive, without a doubt, was
the desire to channel perfumes, spices and exotic goods from Sumatra to the
Tang court and its Song successor. In the best tradition of the Chinese
bureaucracy, officials such as the ya fan bo shih, or Superintendent of
Barbarian Shipping, were established in the ports along the Chinese coast;
they registered the goods being brought into the Heavenly Kingdom and
provided essential services such as translation to and from Chinese to the
‘barbarian’ merchants who flocked to these ports as early as the eighth
century. One term used for port superintendents, shiboshi, may be derived
from the Persian word shahbandar, with a similar meaning, providing further
evidence of the links between China and the western Indian Ocean. In one
Chinese port, ‘rhinoceros horns were so numerous that bribes were offered to
the servants and retainers’. The local governor was unimpressed by some of
the practices he observed. The goods of foreign merchants who died in China
were confiscated if they were not claimed within three months; but the
governor pointed out that it could take much longer to reach China, from
barbarian lands, so this practice was unfair and should be banned.18
All this supervision of trade does little to explain why Śri Vijaya was such
an important place in the early Middle Ages; and Zhao Rugua provided a
clear answer: ‘the country is an important thoroughfare for the traffic of
foreign nations, the produce of all other countries is intercepted and kept in
store there for the trade of foreign ships.’ This statement suggests a rather
aggressive policy on the part of the kingdom’s rulers, who were as careful as
the Chinese to check ships, cargoes and merchants that arrived in their
lands.19 Elsewhere, they blocked one of the straits that gave access to their
waters with an iron chain, to keep at bay pirates from neighbouring lands.
With the coming of peace, the chain lost its usefulness; it now lay coiled up
on the shore, and people travelling on passing ships treated the chain as a god
and sacrificed to it, rubbing it with oil until it glistened; ‘crocodiles do not
dare pass over it to do mischief.’ However, the Śri Vijayans too behaved no
better than pirates. Zhao Rugua accused them of attacking any ships that tried
to pass by without coming into port, for they would rather die than let
unaccounted ships through their domains.20 Yet it might be asked whether
their location was quite so perfect. The capital, Palembang, does not even lie
on the seashore, while the area of Sumatra in which it lies is some distance
from the strait that, in later centuries, would form the vital link between the
Pacific and the Indian Ocean: the Strait of Malacca. Somewhere like
Singapore, at the entrance to those straits, might seem a much better location
from which to control trade.21 Bearing all this in mind, it makes sense to
look elsewhere for clues to the special attraction of the kingdom of Śri
Vijaya.

II

The answer to the puzzle can be found in writings produced much further
west, in Arab and Persian lands. In the ninth and tenth centuries, Arabic
works of geography expressed wonder at the kingdom of Zabaj, which was
visited by the merchant Abu Zayd Hassan in the tenth century; he hailed from
Siraf on the coast of Iran, at a time when trade through the Persian Gulf, and
particularly Siraf, was very lively. This writer claimed that the normal sailing
time from Zabaj to China was one month.22 Although a Tamil inscription of
1088 uses the term Zabedj to describe the inhabitants of the camphor-laden
lands of north-western Sumatra, and accuses them of being cannibals, this
was a word whose meaning was much wider. Zabaj can best be translated as
‘East Indies’ or Indonesia, and is related to the name ‘Java’, while the name
Sribuza, obviously a corruption of Śri Vijaya, was used for the main island,
Sumatra. Arab travellers were impressed by a fiery volcano in the lands of
Zabaj, but they also noted that its king ruled over a considerable empire,
which included the trading emporium of Kalahbar, thought to have lain on
the western flank of the Malay peninsula, and therefore some distance from
Palembang.23 Zabaj’s other wonders included multilingual white, red and
yellow parrots that had no difficulty learning Arabic, Persian, Greek and
Hindi, and ‘beings in human form who speak an incomprehensible language’
and who eat and drink like humans – perhaps a description of the Orang-utan,
or perhaps another example of a common fantasy about lands over the
horizon.24 Around the same time, the maharajah of Zabaj, ruler of the isles,
was reputed to be the richest king in the Indies, thanks to his massive
revenues, derived in part from the extensive trade between Zabaj and Oman,
which had begun to flourish in the early tenth century.25 An earlier king had
been so rich in gold that a ceremony was concocted to prove the point: every
morning the head of his household stood before the king and threw a gold
ingot into a tidal inlet beside his palace. As the water receded a golden glow
would arise from the inlet. His successor had a more practical attitude, and
trawled every last piece of gold from the water; however, he then distributed
it to his family, his staff, the royal slaves and even the poor of his kingdom.
Arab writers also knew that Zabaj faced China, which could be reached by
sea in a month, or less when favourable winds blew. It lay midway between
China and Arabia. Not just its position but its own resources – large
brazilwood plantations, massive camphor trees, rich supplies of benzoin
resin, and so on – brought it great commercial wealth. In the Arabian Nights,
Sindbad the Sailor’s graphic description of how camphor was extracted has
its origins in tales told of Arab merchants who ventured across the Indian
Ocean to Indonesia, as the reference to rhinoceros horns (another very
desirable item) makes plain:

And on the morrow we set out and journeyed over the mighty range
of mountains, seeing many serpents in the valley, till we came to a
fair great island, wherein was a garden of huge camphor trees under
each of which a hundred men might take shelter. When the folk have
a mind to get camphor, they bore into the upper part of the bole with a
long iron; whereupon the liquid camphor, which is the sap of the tree,
floweth out, and they catch it in vessels, where it concreteth like gum;
but after this the tree dieth and becometh firewood. Moreover, there is
in this island a kind of wild beast, called ‘Rhinoceros’, that pastureth
as do steers and buffaloes with us … It is a great and remarkable
 animal with a great and thick horn, ten cubits long, amiddleward its
head; wherein, cleft in twain, is the likeness of a man.26

Arab writers were struck by the simple fact that the rich, fertile countryside
covered the whole of the island of Sumatra on which the maharajah resided.
There are no deserts! one of these writers exclaimed. The rare spices that
could be obtained from Zabaj included cloves, sandalwood and cardamom –
indeed, ‘more varieties of perfumes and aromatics than any other king
possesses’.27 Stories of Zabaj grew in the telling, and Mas‘udi, a tenth-
century traveller, asserted that two years would not be sufficient to visit all
the islands under the rule of the maharajah. By the tenth century the fame of
the maharajah of Zabaj had reached as far west as Muslim Spain. Al-Idrisi
from Ceuta in northern Morocco, writing at the court of Roger II, the
Christian king of Sicily, in the middle of the twelfth century, was an
enthusiastic geographer whose description of the world was more ambitious
than anything that had been attempted before. For sure, he knew about Śri
Vijaya, even if he had never been near there; he knew that the natural
resources of Sumatra attracted merchants keen to obtain its spices; but he also
knew why Śri Vijaya had become such an important market:

It is said that when the affairs of China were affected by rebellions

and when tyranny and disorder became too great in India, the Chinese
transferred their business to Zabaj and the other islands dependent on
it, and became friendly with its inhabitants, for they admired their
equity, their good behaviour, the agreeable nature of their customs
and their good business acumen. This is why Zabaj is so well
populated and why it is visited by foreigners.28

Yet this was only part of the story, as al-Idrisi also indicated. The inhabitants
of Zabaj were not simply passive recipients, who took advantage of their
geographical location to host visits by Chinese, Arab and Indian merchants,
and sold them the perfumes and spices of their islands. They were also busy
navigators, whose voyages reached as far as Sofala on the south-east coast of
Africa, where they bought iron that they carried back to India and to their
homeland. They were accompanied to these African markets by people from
Komr, Madagascar, which makes sense since, as has been seen, the first
settlers on the island were not of African origin but hailed from the islands of
Indonesia, whose language they carried with them.29
This rich evidence for a wealthy kingdom is derived almost entirely from
the writings of those who lived outside Śri Vijaya, though a few Arab
travellers did visit the kingdom and recorded their impressions. Its own
records are few – some inscriptions from Palembang and elsewhere that extol
the king of Śri Vijaya as a maharajah (literally, ‘great king’) above many
other kings, and records of conflicts with island neighbours in Java and with
mainland neighbours in the Khmer kingdom, whose greatest city was Angkor
Wat in Cambodia. One important inscription in Malay dates from the seventh
century, when Palembang already possessed ‘overseers of trades and crafts’;
it also mentions sea captains.30 And it has to be said that Arabic writers,
prone to repeat one another, can leave the impression that there was a wide
consensus about a fact or a place, when they actually go back to a single
rumour made real; in other words, they are not independent voices.
The capital, Palembang, has yielded rather few significant finds, though
the modern city stands on top of the ancient site, rendering very difficult any
attempt to identify its medieval buildings. After a team from Pennsylvania
declared that there was nothing on the site that was really ancient, further
investigation turned up Tang pottery and demonstrated that there were
wharves and warehouses all along the northern bank of the river on which
Palembang stood, the River Musi. These installations stretched across a
distance of twelve kilometres. The archaeologist John Miksic has pointed out
how similar this long, narrow town of wharves is to the extraordinary town
described in the nineteenth century by the great naturalist Alfred Russel
Wallace. What he found at Palembang was a ‘city’ about half as long as the
medieval evidence suggests, but one that consisted simply of a strip along the
river bank; the houses stood on stilts above the River Musi, and Zhao Rugua
had already pointed out that everyone in Śri Vijaya lived either ‘scattered
about outside the city, or on the water on rafts of boards covered over with
reeds’, which enabled them to claim exemption from government taxes.31 In
the nineteenth century, only the sultan and a couple of his chief advisers lived
on land, on low hills close to the river. The building material was wood,
which decays easily; however, it can be taken for granted that the maharajah
lived in some style, in a large wooden palace with finely decorated timbers,
the lineal ancestor to the fifteenth-century royal palace at Melaka described in
the Malay Annals and now handsomely reconstructed in modern Melaka.32
As for the extensive town walls described by Zhao Rugua, sections of earth
ramparts, probably from the seventh century, have been discovered. The use
of brick and stone was rare, though in 1994 the stone foundations of a
seventh-century temple were uncovered by French and Indonesian
archaeologists. And yet there was enough debris to indicate that Palembang
had trading links with both China and India; 10,000 fragments of imported
pottery were excavated in the centre of Palembang, though only 40 per cent
were actually of Śri Vijayan date. The temple contained sixty Chinese bowls,
admittedly from the twelfth century and therefore deposited after Śri Vijaya
had passed its peak; other sites have produced an impressive range of green
or white Chinese ceramics, though nothing dating earlier than about 800; the
Śri Vijayans particularly liked the glazed greenware fired in Guangdong, in
southern China. But another source of fine glazed pottery lay far to the west:
iridescent lustre-wares from Arab lands and turquoise pottery made in Persia
also arrived in Śri Vijaya during the ninth and tenth centuries. Several statues
of the Hindu god Vishnu have also been found, though that is not to say they
were actually made in India. A statue of a Buddhist divine being,
Avalokitesvara, may date from the late seventh century.33
This, then, was a city on the water, a city with length but no breadth whose
raison d’être was water traffic. Yet the river poses a problem: a significant
objection to tales of the great glories of Palembang is that the site lies some
way inland, beside a river, in what was a marshy area – the distance from the
coast is eighty kilometres, but more if river traffic had to wend its way
upriver – and arguments that the coastline lay much further inland in the early
Middle Ages have not won universal approval.34 Still, a major oceanic port
can develop some way inland. Seville is a perfect example, and neither
Canton nor London stands on the coast. The shores of Sumatra were no doubt
dotted with settlements that provided ready services to shipping that did not
come all the way up to Palembang itself. Śri Vijaya was not a myth, but that
does not mean that its period of efflorescence was as long as has often been
assumed. Palembang was at its peak in the seventh to ninth centuries. Later,
competitors in Java, Malaya and elsewhere blunted the power of the
maharajah.
That is to assume the power of the maharajah was in some sense
‘imperial’. Here too care is required. Rather than thinking of a centralized
empire stretching over hundreds of islands and as far as the Malayan
peninsula, one should think of a commercial hub at Palembang, a wealthy
and militarily powerful city ruled by a widely respected king; but whether, as
the oriental scholars who first translated Sanskrit, Chinese and Arabic texts
concerning Śri Vijaya assumed, these texts speak of empire and provincial
governors is a moot point. Maybe the term vanua Śri Vijaya on one of the
Sanskrit inscriptions from Palembang was intended to convey the impression
not of an ‘empire’, as once translated, but of a much more modest region
under the direct authority of the maharajah. Maybe too the idea that this
inscription talks of ‘provincial governors’ is a misconception, and it really
describes autonomous regional lords who, given half the chance, would reject
the authority of the maharajah, but were kept under sufficient pressure to
maintain their ambiguous and insincere loyalty. The Javanese rulers also
received tribute from lesser rulers in Borneo, the Moluccas and eventually
Malaya and northern Sumatra, while not neglecting the usefulness every now
and again of sending an embassy to the Son of Heaven in China and
acknowledging his remote and very loose overlordship.35
Sometimes, as in 853 and 871, embassies from Indonesia to China came
not from Śri Vijaya but from rival states, suggesting that Śri Vijaya did not
enjoy a total monopoly on trade with China. Malayu, later known as Jambi,
fell under the control of Śri Vijaya, according to the monk Yijing; and yet it
had earlier sent its own embassies to the Tang court. On Java, a number of
rulers did the same, and occasionally fought wars against Śri Vijaya.36 And
then there were parts of Sumatra and lands nearby that became rich because
of their association with the ruler of Palembang. Barus stood on the opposite
side of the island from Palembang, facing the Indian Ocean. Here, as at
Palembang, archaeologists have begun to unearth goods brought from as far
away as Egypt, Arabia, Persia and India, including not just ceramics but
pieces of glass in nearly all the shades of the spectrum, precious stones and
other beads, as well as coins, not forgetting 17,000 fragments of Chinese
porcelain from the late tenth century up to about 1150. The character of the
ceramics found at one of these sites in Barus is remarkably similar to the
character of the ceramics accumulated by the inhabitants of Fustat, or Old
Cairo, in the same period. So we could think of Barus as one of the links in
the chain connecting southern China to the capital of the Fatimid Empire on
the River Nile. Barus was also a centre of production, where one could buy
bronze caskets and statuettes, made locally from Sumatran copper and tin. As
for the inhabitants, they must have been a varied bunch of people, Sumatrans
alongside Arabs, Nestorian Christians from Persia and Tamils from India,
though many merchants and other travellers were temporary residents,
waiting for favourable winds. It would be good to know how Barus was
linked, politically and commercially, to Palembang; and the obvious, simple
answer is that ties varied in intensity as the power of the maharajah waxed
and waned.37
All this begins to make the ‘empire’ of Śri Vijaya look rather like a loose
feudal relationship, when it worked at all. It was a political network generally
dominated by Śri Vijaya, in which the maharajah had to accept the autonomy
of his neighbours, who for the most part recognized his general claim to be
their sovereign, but carried on as far as possible without allowing him to
interfere, and were perfectly prepared to challenge his authority at the first
sign of weakness – hence, indeed, his large armies and navies. In return, these
neighbours were allowed to take part in the trade that linked Śri Vijaya to
India and China, but in a subordinate role. And this explanation of how Śri
Vijaya functioned also makes sense because it shows how the greatest
resource of the maharajah, his prosperous riverside port at Palembang and the
region close by, kept him afloat politically and financially – it was an
enormous source of strength, backed up by his armies and, as will be seen,
his navies too. In this view, Śri Vijaya flourished and survived precisely
because it was not an empire, and not even a centralized state, but the focal
point of a trading network with offshoots around the southern edges of the
South China Sea and even as far west as Kedah on the Indian Ocean shores of
Malaya.38

III

This uncertainty about whether the Arabic and Chinese accounts of the
empire of Śri Vijaya are grossly exaggerated (for they are certainly
exaggerated in some degree) does not compromise the basic argument: that
Śri Vijaya flourished as a mid-point between China and India, looking in both
directions and servicing the trade of both great landmasses; and in doing so it
functioned both as an entrepôt where the goods of India and China could be
exchanged by visiting merchants, and as a place to which to turn in search of
the spices and perfumes that were native to Indonesia and Malaya. Yet there
is still an important element missing. Who were these merchants? Some were
clearly Indian and Arab, and Chinese also arrived as knowledge of these
waters grew. References in Chinese writings to the Bosi led the pioneers of
the history of south-east Asia to conclude that they were Persian, which is the
literal meaning of the Chinese term. Some certainly were Persian like Yazd-
bozed, a late eighth-century merchant whose name appears on a jar found in a
shipwreck off Thailand in 2013. But identifying merchants is never simple.
Cargoes of Bosi goods were carried across the Indian Ocean, and the term in
that context evidently meant not just the exotic produce of Persia and the
Persian Gulf, but goods from the Muslim world as a whole. Bosi was a
generic term for Arabs as well, since the Chinese often failed to distinguish
between these two sets of people, even though the Arab lands were also
known as Dashi and there were large settlements of Muslim merchants within
China itself.39
Ethnic muddles of this sort are exceptionally common, and the earnestness
with which scholars of the Orient have chased these will-o’-the-wisp terms
round and round provides more entertainment than enlightenment. However,
accepting that the term Bosi refers to Western goods, one then needs to ask
who actually carried them towards Śri Vijaya; and here, alongside Indian and
Arab merchants, a prominent place has to be found for Malays or Indonesians
who, as has been seen, ventured as far as Madagascar and east Africa at this
period, and were also found in China – in AD 430 an Indonesian embassy
took ship for China with gifts of cloth from as far away as India and
Gandhara. The king of Java wanted the emperor to promise not to interfere
with his ships and merchants.40 Indonesian and Malay sailors looked in the
other direction too, and the crucial link between the Indian Ocean and the
South China Sea, the Strait of Malacca, fell for a time at least under the sway
of the ruler of Śri Vijaya.41 Although it is not possible to describe the Malay
and Indonesian ships in any detail, it comes as no surprise that the inhabitants
of the peninsula and islands around the South China Sea should have taken to
the water, first to exchange goods among themselves, and then to range much
farther afield.42
Several shipwrecks discovered at the end of the twentieth century in
Indonesian waters have, in a very short period of time, massively enlarged
knowledge of how the connections between China, Indonesia and India
worked. The word ‘massively’ is doubly appropriate, since the quantity of
finds is staggering: 55,000 ceramic objects were recovered from the Belitung
shipwreck out of an estimated cargo of 70,000 pots weighing twenty-five
metric tons; and roughly half a million pots were raised from the Cirebon
shipwreck found off the north-west coast of Java. The estimated weight of the
cargo carried by this ship is as much as 300 metric tons.43 The shipwrecks of
the South China Sea compensate handsomely for the lack of finds on land,
especially at Palembang itself.
The Belitung shipwreck was found off the coast of an Indonesian island
midway between Sumatra, Borneo and Java.44 The wreck took place not far
from Palembang, but due east of the town; it is more likely, as will be seen,
that the ship was Java-bound. Its date can be established without much
difficulty: there is a mirror that carries the Chinese date equivalent to 759, a
bowl from Changsha in central China that carries the date 826, and there are
coins of a type minted from 758 to about 845.45 It lay in shallow waters,
where it was discovered by divers looking for sea cucumbers, and it had
apparently struck a reef about three kilometres offshore; since no human
remains were found in the shipwreck, it seems that the crew and passengers
managed to escape to dry land.46 It had not suffered violent damage; its
cargo of pottery was nearly all intact – the pots and bowls had been carefully
packed in larger storage jars by people who knew how to protect fragile
ceramics from the turbulence of the sea.47 It was constructed out of a variety
of woods, but some of this material came from east Africa, and the planks
were lashed together in the traditional Indian Ocean way.48 The ship was not
Chinese, but one passenger must have been Chinese, and perhaps a monk, for
an inkstone, engraved with the image of an insect, of the sort used in Chinese
calligraphy, was found in the wreck. Something too can be said about life on
board: bone dice and a board game filled idle hours.49
As revealing as the ship itself are the goods carried on board. The first item
to bear in mind is one that is too fragile to have survived centuries of
immersion in seawater, but one that is known from Chinese and Arabic
writers to have been a favourite import from China into the Indian Ocean:
silk cloth. An inscription from a Buddhist monastery at Nakhom Si
Thammarat, an ancient city in Thailand on the shores of the South China Sea,
refers to ‘banners of Chinese silk’, and dates from a period when the region
was under the influence, or possibly dominion, of Śri Vijaya; but Chinese silk
travelled much farther afield, and on occasion the covering of the Ka‘aba in
Mecca was made from Chinese silk.50 Turning to what has actually survived
on the site, the ceramics command immediate attention. The early ninth
century saw a vigorous expansion of trade in Chinese glazed ceramics, both
from northern China (whence they were ferried by river and canal down to
ports in the south, especially Guangzhou), and from Changsha in central
China, a city located a long way from the sea, but famous for its quite
massive industrial output of pottery. Demand for good-quality ceramics was
closely linked to the spread of a new and important fashion: tea-drinking.51
The Belitung wreck contains the largest collection of late Tang pottery ever
found: white pottery from northern China, green wares from southern China,
as well as gold and silver vessels and bronze mirrors. A single blue and white
bowl is the ancestor of the blue and white porcelain that came to dominate the
external trade of China over many centuries, and was imitated centuries later
in Portugal and Holland.52 Another unique bowl shows a ship being attacked
by a massive sea monster; this is the earliest depiction of an ocean-going ship
in Chinese art.53 The wreck contained several beautiful examples of the
Chinese goldsmith’s art, unquestionably objects of high luxury.54
The cargo is so impressive that it is easy to conclude that at least part of it
consisted of the return gifts sent by the Chinese court upon receipt of tribute
from the ruler of Śri Vijaya or from one of the Javanese kings – there were at
least six embassies to China from Java between 813 and 839. A Javanese
gold coin was found in the wreck. The ninth century was the golden age of
Java, the period during which the great temple complex at Borobodur,
decorated with more than 500 statues of Buddha, was constructed under the
Sailendra dynasty; it is the largest Buddhist temple anywhere.55 The
exchange of gifts, as has been seen, provided the official and very formal
framework for bilateral trade overseen by the imperial court, also intended to
demonstrate the submission of lesser rulers to the imperial throne. But the
quantity of goods, especially pottery, on board the Belitung wreck was so
vast that it is clear other interests were also involved: merchants, whether
Malay, Indian, Persian or Arab, who sent their orders for fine pottery to the
kilns of distant Changsha by way of agents in Guangzhou, and who took
advantage of the sailing of an important cargo vessel to book space on board
for their own consignments.
This vast cargo of Chinese ceramics has prompted the question whether the
ship was bound for the Indian Ocean, rather than Java or Śri Vijaya,
particularly since it is quite likely the crew was from there. Moreover,
demand for Chinese ceramics had reached such a fever pitch that Abbasid
potters in Iraq in the age of Harun ar-Rashid, the period when this ship sank,
began to imitate what they saw arriving from the Far East. Still, there was no
substitute for the real thing.56 Some of the pottery found on board was
clearly for everyday use, by passengers and crew, and is similar to the
turquoise glazed wares produced at this time in Iraq and Iran, which might
suggest that the ultimate destination was Siraf deep within the Persian Gulf.
Examples of this pottery have been found not just at Siraf but at Barus in
Sumatra and at Guangzhou, so it certainly travelled along the entire sea
route.57
The Belitung shipwreck is not unique. The Intan wreck, found off south-
eastern Sumatra, was probably heading to Java, laden with pottery and metal
goods, which included many tin ingots, which are likely to have originated in
Malaya. Coins found in the wreck date its voyage to between 917 and 942.
The combination of Chinese ceramics and Malayan tin suggests that the
goods were loaded in some great emporium that gathered together goods
from all around the South China Sea, or that the ship itself tramped around
the same sea. The variety of the cargo has been described by one of its
excavators as ‘astounding’: small bronze staffs that Buddhist monks used as
symbols of a thunderbolt; bronze masks representing the Demon of Time,
sometimes used as door fittings; some gold jewellery. It was common
practice for merchants from Śri Vijaya to bring copper to China and to have
temple decorations cast in bronze there. The presence of tin, the other
ingredient of bronze, in the hold of the Intan ship confirms the importance of
this movement of raw metal back and forth until it was transformed into
gleaming objects in bronze or other metals. For the ship also carried iron bars
and silver ingots, plus as many as 20,000 pots and bowls, some of a high
quality, and much of it from southern China. Fragments of resin indicate that
the ship had called in at a port in Sumatra, while the presence of tiger teeth
and bones suggests an interest in rare medicines. The ship itself was not
Chinese; but its construction differed from that of the Belitung ship, and it is
thought to have been Indonesian, with a displacement of roughly 300 tons
and a length of about thirty metres.58 Its circuit was most likely limited to
the South China Sea, whereas the Belitung ship, smaller in size, was better
suited to the long voyage that had brought it all the way from Arabia or
Persia. Yet another wreck, discovered in Chinese waters, is the so-called
Nanhai I, a very large vessel that contained 60,000–80,000 pieces of pottery,
mainly porcelain from the Song dynasty, as well as 6,000 coins, the latest of
which date from the early twelfth century, although some may be as old as
the first century AD. The impression given by the wreck is that this was a
Chinese ship and that it was bound from Guangzhou or another port in
southern China for a destination in the South China Sea.59
This evidence for goods being collected from different corners of the South
China Sea on sizeable ships affects how one might think about this space. It
has often been compared to the Mediterranean, but the Mediterranean is not
an ideal model, for three large continents meet there, while the southern and
eastern rims of the South China, Sea are chains of islands separating the sea
from the open spaces of the Pacific; and the mainland to the north has always
been dominated by China which, even when fragmented, has possessed an
economic and political weight far in excess of anything that rulers over Śri
Vijaya could hope to achieve.60 Yet the South China Sea has also been an
area in which the great power to the north has taken a relatively passive role
in the conduct of trade, compared to the inhabitants of Indonesia, Malaya,
Thailand and Vietnam. China, with its massive continental concerns, often
looked away from the South China Sea, and yet its rulers valued enormously
the produce of far-off lands that came through that sea. And this provided the
perfect opportunity for Malay, Arab and other traders to take charge of the
maritime trade routes. These, by the seventh century, were routes that
spanned vast distances, from the coasts of Arabia and Africa to southern
China, bringing together the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific more
intimately than had been the case even in the days when Greco-Roman
traders penetrated to India and transmitted some of their goods to the Far
East. In the era of Śri Vijaya, a network had come into existence that linked
together half the world.
 9

‘I am about to cross the Great Ocean’

Śri Vijaya lay at one end of a route that stretched from Alexandria through
the Red Sea and around Arabia and India to the Spice Islands. The Red Sea
lost and gained primacy during the early Middle Ages, because a rival
passageway, the Persian Gulf, also flourished for a while. Which of the two
narrow seas was the more important depended on the political convulsions
that were taking place within the Middle East, but the really significant point
is that the sea route, whether it passed Aden bound for Egypt or the Strait of
Hormuz bound for Iraq and Iran, remained busy, functioning not just as a
channel along which fine goods from East and West were passed, but as an
open duct along which religious and other cultural influences flowed:
Buddhist monks, texts and artefacts; and Muslim preachers and holy books.
Islam was a new arrival, but Buddhism too intensified its contact and
influence in south-east Asia during the early Middle Ages, as it became
increasingly fashionable at courts in India, Sri Lanka, Malaya, Indonesia and,
along the shores of the Pacific, in China, Korea and Japan. The crisis of the
Roman Empire within the Mediterranean during the fifth to seventh centuries,
even if it shrank the market for eastern perfumes and spices in the West, did
not fatally damage the networks that had come into being in the days of Pliny
and the Periplous, and the overall sense is of continuity of contact across the
seas.
In the decades before the emergence of Islam in the early seventh century
the southern Red Sea was a turbulent area.1 The opposing shores were the
seats of kingdoms with radically different religious identities. On the African
side, around Axum, a Christian kingdom, Ethiopia, warily watched
developments in Himyar, roughly corresponding to Yemen, where the rulers
had chosen to adopt Judaism, or possibly were descended from ancient
Jewish tribes. Yūsuf, also known as ‘he of the locks’ (Dhu Nuwas), was the
Jewish king of Himyar; he was accused of massacring hundreds of Christians
and of desecrating churches. As reports of these killings spread, enthusiasm
for a holy war against the Jewish unbelievers mounted. It is important to
stress that the accounts of the massacre are found in Christian writings, and –
despite the excitement of several modern historians at the sight of Jews
ruthlessly persecuting Christians, rather than the other way round – no one
really knows whether these reports were just a trumped-up charge to justify
an invasion of South Arabia that has been seen as nothing less than a
‘crusade’.2 For in 525 the Ethiopian ruler, encouraged by the Byzantine
emperor, invaded with an army said to number 120,000 men; a great navy
was constructed and the troops set out from Somalia as well as Ayla at the
top of the Red Sea. Yūsuf ordered a massive chain to be stretched across the
water, to prevent the enemy from landing; but this ruse did not prevent the
Ethiopians from penetrating into Himyar. The Christians gave as good as
they had got, not just destroying synagogues but apparently killing large
numbers of Himyarites in revenge. This and other campaigns back and forth
across the southern Red Sea must have greatly disrupted traffic; and the war
of 525 certainly destabilized the region, which became a battleground
between the great powers of the Middle East, the Byzantine Empire and the
Sasanian Empire in Persia.3
Despite these severe crises, there are enough references in Mediterranean
writings to traffic from Ethiopia and Yemen reaching as far north as Ayla to
suggest that contacts remained alive, added to which finds of Axumite coins
and pottery at Ayla confirm the literary evidence. This trade route would
have fed into the land routes that passed through the famous city of Petra.
Following his conquests in Syria and Palestine, in the early seventh century,
Caliph ‘Umar promoted Ayla as a centre of maritime trade, and a grid-shaped
new town was constructed next to the old Byzantine port. Ayla had easy
access to the minerals of Sinai and the Negev that had already captured the
interest of past rulers, maybe even King Solomon. By the mid-eighth century,
after some interruptions, trade through Ayla was once again in full flow, as
was the exploitation of copper mines in the region (the Negev Desert); there
was gold there as well. Fragments of textiles made from cotton, linen, goat’s
hair and silk have survived in the dry desert setting, and they testify to a
lively trade reaching Yemen and well into the Indian Ocean. An overland
route joined Ayla to Gaza, at this time a major port which functioned as an
intermediary between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.4 Even if the
sixth, seventh and eighth centuries appear to have been a relatively, but not
totally, quiet period in the trade of the Red Sea, the foundations were being
laid for the network linking the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean that is
clearly visible by the tenth century, and that would expand and expand (as
demand in the Mediterranean also expanded and expanded) throughout the
Middle Ages.5
 II

But it was not, to use an obvious cliché, all plain sailing. In the middle of the
eighth century, the dissensions and rivalries within the Islamic caliphate saw
a new centre of power emerge in Iraq, at Baghdad, not far from ancient
Babylon, where the Abbasid dynasty ruled in place of the Umayyads of
Damascus, the last of whom had fled to the very ends of the earth, to found
the emirate of Córdoba in al-Andalus, Muslim Spain. Damascus had been a
glorious city, drawing in luxuries from the Indian Ocean and artists from
Byzantium (such as those who decorated the Great Mosque with mosaics).
Nothing much survives of mud-built Baghdad from its early days, but the
new dynasty became even more exposed than the rulers of Damascus to
Persian cultural influence, and their court was observed and envied across the
world. This was particularly true around 800, in the days of Harun ar-Rashid,
whose reign coincided with that of Charlemagne, to whom he sent gifts of an
elephant and the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.6
The poet Horace wrote of Rome: ‘captive Greece captured her rude
conqueror’; and much the same could be said of the Arab invasion of Persia,
which did not displace the Persian language and took a long while to displace
the Zoroastrian religion.7 The scintillating couturier, hairdresser and choir-
master Ziryab brought the Persian fashions of the Abbasids all the way to
Spain in the eighth century, introducing underarm deodorant, bouffant
hairstyles and artichokes to the all-but-barbarian lands close to the dark ocean
of the West. Yet the rise of the Abbasids had even greater impact on the
Indian Ocean world. The Persian Gulf re-emerged as a lively passageway
bringing goods from the Far East; ‘Persian’ (Bosi) merchants were already
familiar in the coastal towns of China, though, as will become clear, this was
a catch-all term that must have included plenty of Jews, Arabs and even
Indians as well.8 This is not to deny that much of the silk and many of the
perfumes, precious stones and spices that reached Baghdad came overland
through Persia, beyond which, in Transoxiana and Uzbekistan, lay rich silver
mines whose ore was purified and minted as coin in Bukhara. These were
places that pointed towards the overland route, the Silk Road, leading across
the deserts of central Asia to Tang China, a network of interconnected routes
that at this period was still flourishing.9 Other routes led across western Asia
towards Scandinavia, taking vast amounts of silver and swatches of Chinese
silk through the empire of the White Bulgars and that of the Jewish Khazars
towards the gloomy and frozen lands of the Swedes and their neighbours.10
That there were links to China is plain from a statement by the tenth-
century Arab geographer ibn Hawqal. Here he is describing the port of Siraf
on the Iranian shore of the Persian Gulf:

Its inhabitants are very rich. I was told that one of them, feeling ill,
made his testament; the third part of his fortune, which he had in cash,
amounted to a million dinars not counting the capital which he laid
out to people who undertook to trade with it on a commission
[commenda] basis. Then there is Ramisht, whose son Mūsā I have met
in Aden, in the year 539 AH [AD 1144–5]; he told me that the silver
plate used by him was, when weighed, found to be 1,200 manns.
Mūsā is the youngest of his sons and has the least merchandise;
Ramisht has four servants, each of whom is said to be richer than his
son Mūsā. I have met ‘Ali al-Nili from the countryside of al-Ḥilla,
Ramisht’s clerk, and he told me that when he came back from China
twenty years before, his merchandise was worth half a million dinars;
if that is the wealth of his clerk, what will he himself be worth! It was
Ramisht who removed the silver water-spout of the Ka‘aba and
replaced it with a golden one, and also covered the Ka‘aba with
Chinese cloth, the value of which cannot be estimated. In short, I have
heard of no merchant in our time who has equalled Ramisht in wealth
or prestige.11
The same Ramisht appeared in letters written by Jewish merchants based in
Cairo and in India as the fabulously wealthy owner of massive ships, the sort
of businessman whose palatial style of life is celebrated in the Thousand and
One Nights (as in the case of Sindbad the Sailor, loaded with wealth after his
return from his voyages).
Sirafi merchants implanted themselves in many corners of the Indian
Ocean: some traded to Zanzibar, while the head of the Muslim community at
Saimur, near Bombay (Mumbai), was from Siraf.12 Other Arab writers
describe complex maritime routes carrying dhows laden with goods beyond
Ceylon to the Spice Islands and China itself. A ninth-century Arab merchant,
whose name was probably Sulayman of Basra, knew China particularly well,
and he reported that Siraf was the departure point for the ships carrying goods
all the way to China. Whether these were actually Chinese ships is very
doubtful, and whether they often went all the way to China is also uncertain,
despite a reference to a ship leaving Siraf for China. Very long voyages that
involved waiting out the monsoons were best conducted in stages, as the
same manuscript indicates later on (‘the trading voyages from Oman go,
these days, as far as Kalah, then return from there to Oman’). However,
Sulayman (or whatever he was called) insisted, against the other evidence,
that few Chinese goods reached either his home city of Basra or the Abbasid
capital at Baghdad, and that attempts to export cargoes from China had been
hampered by fires in the wooden warehouses in China, by shipwrecks and by
piracy.13
Another author, Abu Zayd Hassan of Siraf, added extra chapters to
Sulayman’s book, in which he complained that all maritime ties between
Siraf and China had been sundered after a rebel named Huang Chao seized
power in Guangzhou in 878: ‘because of events that occurred there, the
trading voyages to China were abandoned and the country itself ruined,
leaving all traces of its greatness gone and everything in utter disarray.’ His
conquest was accompanied by ruthless massacres: ‘experts on Chinese affairs
reported that the number of Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians
massacred by him, quite apart from the native Chinese, was 120,000.’
Moreover, the conqueror did the trade and industry of southern China no
favours when he cut down the mulberry trees that provided raw silk: ‘owing
to the destruction of the trees, the silkworms perished, and this, in turn,
caused silk, in particular, to disappear from Arab lands.’ The rebel leader was
defeated, but damage of this order could clearly not be repaired overnight.14
On the other hand, this writer was perfectly familiar with Chinese copper
cash which had turned up in Siraf inscribed with Chinese characters. He was
surprised that the Chinese had little interest in gold and silver coinage, but
relied instead on strings of vast numbers of very low-value coins; the Chinese
took the view that it was much more difficult to steal large amounts of money
if it consisted of heavy strings of copper coins, each of which was worth only
a tiny fraction of a gold dinar. He was also familiar with Chinese painting,
drawing and craftsmanship, which, he admitted, was the finest in the world.15
Siraf is especially interesting, because, in addition to the testimony of these
writers, there is the evidence from excavations conducted by the British
Institute of Persian Studies in the 1960s. Siraf turned out to be rather older
than had been assumed: inhabited by Zoroastrians, the town acquired the
distinctive red pottery of the Roman Empire, and a gold coin of a mid-
seventh-century Byzantine emperor, Constans II, was found as well. Its high
point was in the ninth to the tenth centuries, but it was already a lively centre
of business soon after AD 700. In the eighth century coins from Iraq,
Afghanistan, Persia and even Spain were buried in a coin hoard, only to be
rediscovered 1,200 years later. During the excavation of what had been the
platform of the Great Mosque, plenty of Tang pottery from the same period
was found. However, in 977 an earthquake damaged the town, and thereafter
merchants trading up the Persian Gulf concentrated their attention on the
island of Kish (or Qays), which became the seat of a small but successful
pirate kingdom, and by the end of the twelfth century Siraf had disappeared
off the map. Ramisht lived at a time when Siraf was long past its best.
Another factor, to which this chapter will return, was the increasing
importance of the rival route taking spices up the Red Sea, following a
political revolution in Egypt. At its peak, Siraf was rather less than half the
size of the circular inner core of Baghdad, but that actually speaks for its very
great size, given the vastness of the Abbasid capital. Shops and bazaars
stretched along the seafront for a kilometre or more, which was about half the
length of the town. Two-storey buildings with paved courtyards were
probably the residences of prosperous merchants and officials, but one
building, said to be larger than Hatfield House in southern England (an odd
comparison), was, one would imagine, the palace of someone like the
merchant-prince Ramisht.16 The town lay in an unpropitious setting, dry and
stony. It was not easy to produce food locally. But, as a citizen of another city
set in a rocky landscape, Dubrovnik, argued several centuries later, the very
sterility of the surrounding countryside made trade an imperative.17
While it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of the Persian
Gulf in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, changes further west stimulated
the revival of Red Sea commerce from the tenth century onwards. The
Abbasid Empire began to fragment; the greatest challenge came from the rise
to power of the Shi‘ite Fatimid dynasty, first in Tunisia (where they founded
the city of Qayrawan, ‘the caravan’, with its Great Mosque), and then in
Cairo, where they were able to compete for domination over the Levant.
Partly as a result of these political changes, the Mediterranean began to
reawaken, and this reawakening was further stimulated by the emergence of
Christian trading republics, first Amalfi and Venice, then Pisa and Genoa,
that eagerly bought the spices of the East and passed them across the sea to
Europe, and then along land and river routes that reached as far as Flanders,
Germany and England. And all of these developments had major
repercussions in the Indian Ocean as well. The sea routes across the
Mediterranean have already been traced in the accompanying volume on ‘the
Great Sea’.18 But now it is time to trace a sea route that leads all the way
from the Nile to Indonesia and China.

III

By 1000 Persia and Mesopotamia lost their primacy; the Gulf did not exactly
become a backwater, for it was home to the pirate kingdom of Kish, but the
old Greco-Roman routes down the other coast of Arabia were reborn. The
Red Sea revival is plain from the archaeological record along its shores. From
the late ninth century onwards, sherds of Chinese celadons and of white
porcelain from distant Jingdezhen appear in excavations as far north as
Ayla.19 Goldmining in Sudan began to produce handsome returns. Egyptian
emeralds were exported in the direction of India, and were traded by Chola
Tamils from there towards Sumatra and beyond. Further afield, Chinese
ceramics arrived in Cairo. An off-white ewer, decorated with an engraved
portrait of a phoenix, arrived there by 1000, but now lies in the British
Museum. Hundreds of thousands of sherds from shattered Chinese pots have
been found on medieval sites in Cairo. As time went by, the strong demand
for Chinese porcelain in Egypt prompted Egyptian potters to manufacture
their own imitations, but they never compared seriously with the genuine
article.20 Another sign of growing familiarity with celadons and white wares
from the Far East was the request to a rabbinical court to investigate whether
the impurity attributed in Jewish law to a menstruating woman would be
communicated to a porcelain cup were she to touch it. Different categories of
goods – earthenware, glass, metalwork – were deemed susceptible to
impurity in differing degrees, but what about fine glazed wares from the
East?21
This curious request comes from the mountain of papers, or rather
fragments of paper, that make up the Cairo Genizah documents, most of
which were sold to Cambridge University following their discovery in the
attic storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, or Old Cairo, at the end
of the nineteenth century. The Genizah is not an ordered archive, but a giant
rubbish basket, a random assortment of documents thrown away because no
one could be bothered to sort out those that might contain the divine name
(and thus need to be preserved with reverence, or buried if too dilapidated).
Precisely for this reason, the documents, including merchant letters, pages of
account books, rabbinic decisions, or responsa, magical, medical and
religious texts, shed a brilliant light on the daily life of Jews and also
Muslims in Egypt between the tenth and the twelfth centuries. In particular,
they expose the business affairs of Egyptian Jewish merchants who traded
westwards into the Mediterranean, particularly towards Tunisia and Sicily,
but who also had very substantial trading interests in the Red Sea and the
Indian Ocean up to the late twelfth century.22 The first scholar to conduct
intensive research on this material, S. D. Goitein of Princeton, rather assumed
that the character of the trade of these merchants was static, whereas the Red
Sea and Indian Ocean trade became increasingly important during the twelfth
century, in response to growing demand within the Mediterranean for exotic
eastern products used as food flavourings, dyestuffs and medicines. There is a
flipside to this argument: the increasing dominance of the Genoese, Pisans
and Venetians in the spice trade linking the Levant to Europe, and the success
of their navies in dominating the Mediterranean sea routes, prompted the
Genizah merchants to turn away from the Mediterranean and to look with
greater interest at the opportunities offered by the Red Sea and the route
bringing spices from India, where some of them even installed themselves.
The letters left by these merchants trading towards Aden and India permit an
intimate portrait that goes beyond their account books and reveals their daily
life, their contacts with Muslim and Hindu merchants, and the trials and
tribulations of those seeking to bring goods across what were for those times
vast distances.
In the late tenth century Fustat, long the nucleus of Cairo, was displaced by
a new city built a couple of miles away by the new Fatimid caliphs. The new
Cairo lay around the imposing citadel of Ptolemaic Babylonia. The creation
of a new capital transformed Fustat into a suburb inhabited by non-Muslims:
one of its Coptic churches was said to stand on the site where Joseph, Mary
and Jesus had taken refuge following their flight into Egypt. Competing
legends about the Ben Ezra synagogue went much further back in time, so
that it became known as the synagogue Moses had used when he was living
in Egypt. Be that as it may, it was certainly the synagogue where another
famous Moses, the philosopher Moses Maimonides, based himself after his
own flight to Egypt, which had taken him from Córdoba and Fez, both ruled
by the hardline Almohad caliphs, all the way to Egypt. Not surprisingly, then,
the Genizah documents contain several handwritten letters and discarded
notes from the great Maimonides. His brother David was one of the India
traders, and when he was drowned in the Indian Ocean in 1169 Maimonides
was plunged into despair for several years. David had set out on his journey
by sailing down the Nile and then crossing the desert in the company of a
caravan to reach Aydhab. Or, rather, that was the intention; David and
another Jewish merchant became detached from their companions, and had to
make their way to Aydhab without anyone to protect them from bandits.
David wrote back to Moses, admitting that everything had gone wrong
because he had acted in ignorance:

When we were in the desert, we regretted what we had done, but the
matter had gone out of our hands. Yet God willed that we should be
saved. We arrived at Aydhab safely with our entire baggage. We were
unloading our things at the city gate, when the caravans arrived. Their
passengers had been robbed and wounded and some had died of
thirst.23

Anyone reading those documents, or indeed this book, might well conclude
that robbers, pirates and typhoons made these long-distance journeys risky to
the point of foolhardiness.24 David ben Maimon seems to have thought that
when he wrote to his brother from Aydhab. He was also worried about how
the boat was built: the sight of an Arab dhow whose planks were tied together
by ropes, in the traditional way, could shock a traveller familiar with the
vessels that sailed the ‘Sea of Tripoli’, that is, the Mediterranean: ‘we set sail
in a ship with not a single nail of iron in it, but held together by ropes; may
God protect it with His shield! … I am about to cross the great ocean, not a
sea like that of Tripoli; and I do not know if we will ever meet again.’25
They did not, for, once out in the ocean, David’s ship went down with all
hands.
The Genizah documents have transformed knowledge of the India trade
and have shown how torn and discarded letters thought to be of no value can
shed more light on the conduct of trade than official records. Yet this
material, though quite plentiful, is not unique. And one is bound to ask
whether the Jews of Fustat were typical of a society in which, after all, Jews
were only a minority. It was obvious, for instance, that Jews were not
especially interested in the grain trade, but were very interested in flax and
silk. No one can say whether the family ties that bound together Jewish
trading families from Sicily, Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen were replicated
among Muslim trading families – probably not. That is why it was so exciting
when the excavators of the so-called Shaykh’s House at Qusayr al-Qadim on
the Red Sea found the remains of about 150 documents that had mostly been
torn to shreds, but could nonetheless be reconstructed.26 This material is a
little later than the vast bulk of the Genizah documents, but should be looked
at now, as the maritime route down the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean is
followed stage by stage. The Qusayr documents reveal the business affairs of
an early thirteenth-century merchant named Abu Mufarrij, and the
information they contain can once again be compared with the archaeological
record, including evidence that ceramics arrived in the Red Sea from as far
away as China, and gold probably came up the African coast from Kilwa and
Zanzibar.
The sheikh was very seriously interested in flour and other foodstuffs,
which marks him out from the Jewish merchants of the Genizah: ‘to be
delivered to Sheikh Abu Mufarrij from the south are: one and a quarter loads
of grain and an oil strainer, to be loaded on the vessel Good Tidings.’27
Qusayr was another place in a barren spot, so there was a constant need for
basic supplies. It is not surprising that wheat was much more expensive in
Qusayr than in the great Egyptian cities; it could cost four times what one
would expect to pay in Alexandria and twice what people paid in Cairo.28
The letters from Qusayr al-Qadim fill out our picture of trade in the region by
shifting the emphasis away from the spices and fine goods enumerated in the
Genizah documents towards humbler but more vital products such as wheat,
chickpeas, beans, dates, oil and rice, the staples of daily existence. The wheat
sometimes came in the form of grain, sometimes ground down into flour. The
quantities mentioned were considerable: as much as three tons in one
document, which was enough to feed four or five households for an entire
year.29 In view of the arid setting in which Qusayr al-Qadim stands, the
grain may well have been grown some distance away, whether in the Nile
valley, arriving by way of Qus, or in Yemen, in the corner of south Arabia
exposed to the monsoon rains. Qusayr was known to Arab writers as Qusayr
furda al-Qus, meaning ‘Qusayr the gateway of Qus’ (the word furda had
overtones of ‘government checkpoint’, a place where tiresome customs
officers would tax everything that came and went).30 Yemen was certainly
seen as an especially important trading partner; the geographer Yaqut ar-
Rumi, who was of Greek origin and who died in 1229, wrote of Qusayr:
‘there is a harbour for ships coming from Yemen’.31 Unfortunately it is often
hard to work out whether Abu Mufarrij was exporting or importing the
products he handled.
Using these documents, we can see what was happening in the upper
reaches of the Red Sea, in a port that gave access to the Egyptian trading
station at Qus on the Nile, and thence by way of the River Nile to Cairo and
Alexandria.32 Qusayr lay at the closest point to the Nile of any of the Red
Sea ports. This did not make Qusayr into a truly major centre of Indian Ocean
traffic, and some of its business was directed at other ports within the Red
Sea, including those directly opposite that led into the Arabian desert, and
pointed towards the holy city of Mecca, which – because of its barren
environment – drew in supplies of wheat and other basic necessities from
Qusayr and similar small ports. One constraint on Qusayr’s growth was the
lack of good-quality water; in the nineteenth century, drinking water was
brought from a well six miles away, although the water stank of sulphur,
while another spring in the area produced saline water laced with phosphorus,
which was only good for animals, if that.33 Still, one should not
underestimate Qusayr’s importance: fragments of ships have been found
there, sometimes used to line graves, and they were taken from both sewn-
plank and nailed-plank ships similar to dhows.34 Ships that arrived in Qusayr
would sometimes be taken to pieces and carried on the backs of camels
across the desert to Qus, where they would be reassembled and refloated, this
time on the Nile.
Sheikh Abu Mufarrij had the support of loyal servants who wrote to him
regularly, reporting on what they had despatched:

By God, by God! Anything you want, let me know. Whatever you,

the Master, need, write me a memo and send it through the porters; I
will ship off your orders. Upon the delivery of the crops as ordered
hereby, you should send us the full payment. Peace be upon you.
God’s mercy and blessings.35

Physical remains from Qusayr confirm the passage through the little town of
a great variety of foods brought from all around the Indian Ocean. Some
tubers of taro, which is a south-east-Asian vegetable, have been found, along
with coconut shells, as well as citron, the large lemon-shaped citrus fruit that
was much in demand in Jewish communities, for use during the rituals of the
Feast of Tabernacles. Dates, almonds, watermelons, pistachios, cardamom,
black pepper and aubergine all appear among the finds from Islamic
Qusayr.36 Archaeology fills out the picture that can be drawn from the
sheikh’s correspondence. Almonds and eggs comprised a third of one cargo
handled by Abu Mufarrij; the letters testify that the town bought fresh and
dried fruit, including watermelons and lemons, which were not for export,
except perhaps to supply ships in port. The sheikh’s overriding desire for
grain is nicely matched by the finds of seeds on the site of Qusayr al-Qadim.
The sheikh’s agents bought and sold humdrum items such as hawsers and
mattocks; but perfumes and pepper were also of interest. Thousands of finds
of fragments of cordage confirm that the sheikh’s interest in supplying ropes
continued over the centuries, and many were evidently used on board ship.37
So too were clothes, some quite ordinary, such as good-quality galabiyahs,
and others ‘decorated with gold and gems’, or woven from pure silk, or
‘Ethiopian gowns’. Slaves were not one of his strong interests. Like the
Jewish merchants, he was interested in buying large amounts of flax, and he
handled fine coral too, probably of Mediterranean origin, because that was
where very good coral, bright red in colour, could most easily be obtained.38
Abu Mufarrij ran something grander than the Qusayr General Stores, but his
interests were very eclectic, and he was evidently one of the town’s main
provisioners, whether in food (especially grain) or in what would have been
called fancy goods in the nineteenth century. And now and again he revealed
that he was interested in more ambitious trading enterprises. One letter sent to
the sheikh explained how some valuable Persian goods would soon arrive by
sea on a couple of ships: ‘semi-precious stones, pearls and beads’.39 Abu
Mufarrij was well versed in the commercial practices of his day, offering
credit and arranging transfers, which avoided the need to handle cash.40
The fascination of the Qusayr letters derives from their sheer ordinariness.
The sheikh was a wealthy man, at least by the standards of his small, hot,
dust-blown town, and the grand trade routes that linked Aydhab and Qusayr
to the Far East were not his real concern. Those routes produced great profits
for some people, but they had to be serviced, and Qusayr was a convenient
service station. It was not a place of high culture – even less so than its
ancient predecessors Myos Hormos, on whose remains it stood, or Bereniké,
with its profusion of temples to many gods. But eastern influences seeped
into Qusayr. These links to a wealthier and more exotic world are well
represented by an inscribed ostrich egg, bearing a funerary poem:

Leave your homeland in search of prosperity; depart! Travelling has

five benefits: dispelling grief, earning livelihood, seeking knowledge,
good manners and accompanying the praiseworthy. If it were said that
in travelling there is humiliation and hardship, desert raid and
overcoming difficulties, then certainly the death of the young man is
better than his life in degradation between the slanderer and the
envious.41

A pious pilgrim had perhaps died en route to or from Mecca, and was being
commemorated with high honour on a giant African egg – the egg being the
symbol of resurrection. Exotic links are also well represented by the
fragments of Chinese pottery recovered at Qusayr al-Qadim. The types of
pottery found are typical enough: green celadons and white or bluish white
wares, the sort of pottery that was becoming familiar on the streets of Fustat
in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. If anything, Qusayr produced
fewer Chinese objects than one would expect; most of the porcelain passed
through the port en route to the great cities – around 700,000 sherds of
Chinese pottery have been found at Fustat.42 However, one influence from
China was block-printing. A few Arabic texts have been found in Qusayr
which were printed from a carved wooden block, rather as Chinese printed
texts were created in this period, and the view has even been hazarded that
the blocks used for printing were made in China, and texts were then printed
off there and exported to Middle Eastern consumers. These printed texts were
used as amulets: ‘he who wrote this amulet, and he who carries it, will stay
safe and sound.’43 These amulets may seem banal: praying to stay safe and
sound was a natural reaction to the perils of the open sea. Yet they are a
reminder that the account books of Abu Mufarrij, or of the Genizah
merchants, only tell part of a human story of worries about how to survive in
a maritime world full of danger from storms, reefs, pirates and capricious
rulers.

IV

Heading down from Aydhab and Qusayr al-Qadim, the strait linking the Red
Sea to the Indian Ocean (the Bab al-Mandeb) was of crucial strategic
importance. Just beyond the strait, ships entered a small gulf that debouches
into the Indian Ocean. There the major centre of exchange was Aden, a
thriving town sunk in the crater of an extinct volcano that was well situated to
watch comings and goings through the strait.44 Aden possessed its own
resources, which were in part derived from the sea and the coastline: salt, fish
and the highly prized whale product ambergris, which was occasionally
washed up on the shore and was used in the production of perfume. Water,
however, was in short supply, and an ingenious feat of engineering exploited
the fact that the town lay within a crater by channelling water that had fallen
on higher ground into a series of cisterns. There were even filters that
removed some of the impurities from the water as it flowed downwards.45
Inland and further up the coast towards Oman, there were some fertile and
well-watered areas that in good years produced plenty of grain to feed not
just Aden but places further away such as Mecca.46 The overall picture is,
then, not vastly dissimilar from that of Siraf: the city flourished as a centre of
trade precisely because local resources were rather meagre; and Aden was
very well placed to supervise the traffic heading out of the Red Sea towards
India, as well as down the coast of east Africa.
This attracted the envy of rivals. The rulers of Kish, or Qays, just inside the
Persian Gulf, hoped to gain control of the trade routes not just through the
Gulf, which had withered by the mid-twelfth century, but along the southern
flank of Arabia, past Oman and Yemen. So in 1135 they attacked Aden,
hoping at the very least to seize the port installations and customs house;
Aden was already divided between two cousins, one of whom was in charge
of the port. The lord of the port offered to surrender and then plied the
attackers with so much food and wine that they were unable to resist when
the lord’s men waded into the staggering mass of invaders, and it was later
said that they beheaded so many of them that this district was henceforth
known as ‘The Skulls’. In reality, Aden was besieged for a couple of months,
and relief arrived in the form of two large ships that belonged to Ramisht of
Siraf; these were boarded by Adeni troops who were able to attack the
aggressors from the rear:

Finally, Ramisht’s two ships arrived. The enemy tried to seize them,
but the wind was good, so that they were dispersed on the sea to the
right and to the left. The two ships entered the port safely, where they
were immediately manned with troops. At this juncture, the enemy
could do nothing more, either in the harbour or in the town.47

So wrote a Jewish merchant based in Aden to a business partner in Egypt.

Its rulers were well aware that Aden was the jewel in their crown. There
were eagle-eyed customs officers who prodded and probed the merchandise
that passed through the government checkpoint, or furda; detailed records
were kept as every piece of cloth was patiently counted in front of the no
doubt impatient merchants. This was the sort of treatment Genizah merchants
were familiar with from the customs house at Alexandria, and all this acts as
a reminder that the high cost of spices was less the result of rarity or even the
long voyage that brought them to Aden and Alexandria, than of a sequence of
payments to one government after another, not to mention bribes and
sweeteners – it would be good to know how much smuggling took place, but
Aden looks as if it was the sort of walled and well-guarded city where that
was well-nigh impossible.48 Jews, Christians and other non-Muslims were
supposed to pay twice the taxes of the faithful, but the rule was rarely
applied. From the furda, one door gave on to the harbour front and the other
on to the city streets with their multi-storeyed merchant houses built of stone
– whether they were quite as tall as the town houses of modern Yemen is
uncertain, but the most desirable houses stood near the sea, from which
cooling breezes blew that could not reach the lower depths of the crater.49
The general impression is of communities of diverse origins living peacefully
side by side, but the atmosphere changed at the end of the twelfth century,
when the sultan insisted that all the Jews of Aden and the rest of Yemen must
accept Islam, though foreign merchants passing through seem to have been
exempt (presumably because they were the subjects of other rulers, whom the
sultan preferred not to annoy). A few Adeni Jews resisted and were
beheaded, but even the head of the Jewish community embraced Islam. This
event stirred the Jewish world. Maimonides wrote a famous tract in which he
counselled the Yemenite Jews to be patient; he saw this forced conversion as
a sign that the coming of the Messiah and the redemption of Israel were
imminent. However, the persecution waned and the community recovered.50
Aden was also a base from which the Cairo merchants sent letters
eastwards to India, with information about the state of the pepper market –
anticipating where prices would be profitable was fundamental to the
business practice of these merchants, who were not mere passive agents.51
The sailing season out of Aden was, by natural circumstances, well co-
ordinated with that of the Mediterranean, with ships setting out for India at
the start of autumn, which gave time for goods that were being carried down
the Red Sea to reach their eastern Mediterranean destinations from as far
away as Sicily, Tunisia and Spain. Aden was therefore a nodal point not just
in the Indian Ocean maritime networks, but in what can reasonably be called
(before the discovery of the Americas) a global network that stretched from
Atlantic Seville to the Spice Islands of the Indian Ocean. Broadly speaking
the port was very lively from the end of August to May of the following year.
Ships converged on Aden from India, Somalia, Eritrea and Zanj (east Africa),
so that Aden became a market where the produce of Africa, Asia and the
Mediterranean was exchanged.52

Moving deeper into the Indian Ocean, the Egyptian merchants who had
called in at Aden took advantage of the monsoons to head across the open sea
to India. At first sight, the chances of reconstructing the maritime world of
India in the tenth to thirteenth centuries might seem slim. Apart from some
inscriptions and occasional literary references, the lack of letters and account
books appears to be a fundamental obstacle. But this is not the case if the
letters of the Jewish merchants from Fustat are taken into account,
particularly letters to and from figures such as Abraham ibn Yiju, who
actually lived for a while on the coast of India. The Fustat traders had plenty
of contact with Indian princes, merchants and shipowners. For instance,
Pidyar was an Indian, or possibly Persian, shipowner with whom they dealt;
he possessed a small fleet, and employed at least one Muslim captain, of
whatever ethnic origin.53 There were also local Jewish and Muslim
shipowners, such as the head of the Jewish community in Yemen, whose
brand new ship named the Kulami sank five days out of Aden even though it
had set out with a sister ship, the Baribatani:

The sailors of the Baribatani heard the cries of the sailors of the
Kulami and their screams and shrieks in the night as the water
inundated them. When morning came, the sailors of the Baribatani
did not encounter any trace or evidence of the Kulami, because from
the time the two ships had left Aden they had kept abreast of each
other.54

Distressing as this was, it was a less disastrous fate than that facing a certain
ibn al-Muqaddam, whose religion is unknown; after several voyages from
Aden to the Malabar Coast he lost his ship at sea, replaced it, and lost the
replacement. These were not everyday occurrences; they are known from the
legal cases that then arose – it was very important in Jewish law to be able to
certify that those who had been shipwrecked had indeed died, so that any
widows could remarry without fear of the particularly severe but fortunately
quite rare bastardy that any new children would bear if the first husband were
still alive.55
Remarkable Indian inscriptions survive that shed light on the maritime
connections and town life of the Indian coast around this time. The light they
shed is obscured by the great difficulty in making sense of a series of copper
plates in the difficult Malayalam language. They are legal documents, such as
a royal grant of land and privileges to a Christian church, and they were
inscribed in the port city of Kollam, or Quilon, in the far south-west of India
not far from Ceylon, in AD 849. Important privileges were preserved in this
permanent form in order to express the intention that they would hold ‘for as
long as the Earth, the Moon and the Sun shall endure’. The simple fact that
the texts carry signatures in several scripts brings into focus the ethnic and
religious diversity of the major trading towns along the coast of India at this
period: twenty-five witnesses to these texts wrote their names in their
everyday alphabet and language, whether Arabic and Middle Persian (written
in Arabic script) or Judaeo-Persian (written in Hebrew script); some were
Jews, others Christians, Muslims, Hindus or Zoroastrians, who described
themselves uncompromisingly as ‘those of the Good Religion’. The copper
plates mention the two guilds that brought together merchants trading out of
Kollam; one, called ‘Manigraman’, specialized in Sumatra and the Malay
peninsula, and the other, ‘Ancuvannam’, looked in the other direction
entirely, towards Arabia and east Africa. While the Sumatra-bound merchants
were themselves south Indian Tamils, those trading towards Asia were Arabs,
Persians and Jews, the sort of people who signed the copper plates. The
guilds operated under royal supervision; as one of the plates states: ‘all royal
business whatsoever, in the matter of pricing commodities and suchlike, shall
be carried out by them.’ What this meant was that the guilds, on behalf of the
rajah, would collect taxes on the goods that came and went through the port
and out of the land-gates.56 This also shows that the rajah believed he could
trust both native and foreign merchants to act responsibly on his behalf; it
was only natural that he should show such a warm welcome to the foreign
traders, because without them Kollam would have been nothing, and his own
income would have shrivelled.
In 851, at almost the moment when these plates were being prepared, the
Muslim merchant probably named Sulayman placed on record his voyages
around the Indian Ocean and beyond, as far as China, to which he devoted
most of the space in his book. Sulayman knew about the place he called
Kûlam of Malaya (which here signified Malabar, not the Malay peninsula),
that is, Kollam; he placed it a month’s sailing beyond Muscat in south-east
Arabia. He knew that ships arrived here from as far away as China. He saw
Kollam as the major interchange point between the trade of the eastern and
the western Indian Ocean, which matches closely what is known about the
activities of the two merchant guilds.57 As far as he was concerned, the sea
route was the obvious way to China. No doubt different places along the
Malabar Coast enjoyed greater success at different times. In Sulayman’s time,
the route from Siraf and the Persian Gulf to India was particularly active; but
Sulayman was active before Fatimid Egypt took command of the maritime
routes across the western Indian Ocean. Therefore it is no surprise that the
copper documents mention Muslims and Jews of Persian origin, while the
Genizah letters survive from an era when Jews and Muslims of Egyptian or
even Tunisian origin were just as likely to be found in the coastal cities of
southern India.58
The risks of travel did not prevent ambitious Fustat merchants from
reaching India, rather than simply relying on the Indian and Muslim shippers
who reached Aden. The greater the risks, the higher the profits. In the mid-
twelfth century a group of Jews, including Salim ‘the son of the cantor’ and
several goldsmiths, set out from Aden to Ceylon in partnership with a very
wealthy Muslim merchant named Bilal. Ceylon was considered a good source
of cinnamon. A north African merchant who had been living in Fustat, Abu’l-
Faraj Nissim, went to India to buy camphor. He wrote to his family saying
the voyage had been a terrible experience, but he managed to buy plenty of
camphor, worth at least 100 dinars, and sent it to Aden, where it arrived
safely. Two years passed and nothing was heard of him, so it was time to
divide the profits from his shipment.59 A happier fate awaited the ben Yiju
family, very active in Mediterranean trade but also seriously interested in the
produce of the Indies. This family provides a marvellous example of how
spices were transmitted all the way from India to major Mediterranean cities
such as Palermo and Mahdia, a flourishing centre of exchange on the coast of
Tunisia. Abraham ben Yiju set out for India in around 1131, and one of his
correspondents commiserated with him for his difficult journey, but prayed
that God would ‘make the outcome good’, that is, bring him great profit.60
In 1132 Abraham found himself at Mangalore on the Malabar Coast. This
area was known as far away as China, where, in the early thirteenth century,
the geographer Zhao Rugua described the people as dark brown, with long
earlobes; they wore colourful silk turbans and sold pearls fished locally, as
well as cotton cloth; they used silver coins and they bought silk, porcelain,
camphor, cloves, rhubarb and other spices that arrived from further east, but
in his day (he claimed) few ships made the long and difficult journey from
China.61 This was a pessimistic judgement, echoing, consciously or
otherwise, the reservations of the ninth-century merchant Sulayman about
Chinese trade with Iraq, because the quantities of Chinese goods found in
Egypt and other parts of the Middle East prove that contact was intense and
continuous, and also very profitable. For Abraham ben Yiju prospered while
he was based in Mangalore. He bought a slave girl there; he then freed her,
which had the effect in Jewish law of converting her to Judaism (he gave her
the Hebrew name Beracha, or ‘Blessing’), and after that he married her and
raised a family. Meanwhile, he was sending goods up and down the coast of
western India; he made a lengthy visit to Aden around 1140, but he stayed
most of the time in India until 1149.
Abraham set up a factory where bronze goods were produced – trays,
bowls, candlesticks, sometimes quite intricate in design, to judge from a letter
from Aden ordering some custom-made metalwork from him. He imported
arsenic from the West, for he was told there was strong demand for it in
Ceylon, where it was used in medicine. He brought in Egyptian cotton, and
sent out iron, mangoes and coconuts, working with Muslim, Jewish and
Banyan, or Hindu, partners. The Muslim partners of ben Yiju included the
wealthy merchant of Siraf, Ramisht, whose large ships were well trusted; but
even then things could go badly wrong, for one letter says that two of his
ships were ‘total losses’, including valuable cargo belonging to Abraham ben
Yiju.62 Wealthy merchants needed some resilience; it was important not to
place all one’s eggs in the same basket. Not for nothing did they interest
themselves in a variety of goods, for one never knew what would prove most
profitable, however closely one read letters coming in from Palermo,
Alexandria, Fustat and Aden, with their information about prices, political
conditions and which merchants should be trusted.
Among the goods that Abraham ben Yiju appreciated most were
consignments of paper, which was in short supply in India and even in Aden,
for, as his correspondent in Aden wrote, ‘for two years now, it has been
impossible to get any in the market’.63 Foreign merchants such as ben Yiju
preferred using paper to writing on palm leaves or cloth, and ben Yiju had
special reason to want more paper, as he was something of a poet in his spare
time, and, even if his own poetry was not much good, he admired the great
Spanish writers who in his day were producing beautiful religious poetry that
was soon to be incorporated into the Jewish liturgy. He dabbled in Jewish law
and took part in a religious court of law, or bet din, in India – there seems to
have been another Jewish court at Barygaza, the ancient centre of the Indian
Ocean trade in the north-west corner of India.64 All this suggests that he was
far from alone in Mangalore; there were other Jews up and down the coast,
and there must have been even larger communities of Muslim merchants, not
to mention the Indian merchants who sailed westwards but also (along with
the Malays) ensured that connections to Malaya and Indonesia, and even
China, were maintained. The news network of which he was part extended all
the way from India to Sicily and perhaps Spain. Now wealthy, he had hoped
to settle for the rest of his days in Mahdia or somewhere near there; but just
after he left India for Aden he heard that the king of Sicily had conquered the
coast of Tunisia (he assumed that there had been massacres, but the conquest
was relatively peaceful).65 It is hard to recover a sense of what it was like to
live in Mangalore, so far from home; but the nostalgia for north Africa that
ben Yiju showed when he had made his fortune reveals that he saw his
trading career in India as just that, a career which would eventually, if luck
held, make him rich enough to return to the land of his ancestors, taking with
him his Indian wife and his children, for whom this would be a new world.
The Malabar coast looked in two directions, as it had in Roman times. The
Chinese geographer Zhao Rugua remarked that one could reach that part of
India from Śri Vijaya ‘in little more than a month’.66 Not very often, but
sometimes, Jewish traders ranged far beyond India. A tenth-century book
called Wonders of India was composed by a Persian author called Buzurg,
but written in Arabic. Buzurg told the ‘curious tale’ (his own words) of Isaac
the Jew who was sued by a fellow Jew in Oman and took flight to India
somewhere around AD 882. He was able to take his goods with him, and for
thirty years no one back in the West knew what had happened to him. In fact,
he had been making a fortune in China, where he was taken for an Arab (as
Jewish traders often were). In 912–13 he turned up in Oman once again, this
time aboard his own ship, whose cargo was estimated to be worth 1,000,000
gold dinars, and on which he paid a tax of 1,000,000 silver dirhams. This
may have amounted to a tax of about 12 per cent and it kept the local
governor happy, but it also aroused the jealousy of other merchants who had
no hope of supplying treasures of comparable quality. (Since a lower-middle-
class family could subsist quite well on twenty-four dinars per annum,
1,000,000 dinars can be thought of as comparable to nearly 1,000,000 pounds
sterling or more than a billion and a half dollars, though such comparisons
are not particularly meaningful.)67 Silks, Chinese ceramics, jewels and high-
quality musk were just some of the exotic goods he brought to Arabia. So
after three years he decided he had experienced enough hostility, and
commissioned a new ship, which he filled with merchandise, and sailed east
in the hope of reaching China once again. This meant that he had to pass
‘Serboza’, which must be the maritime kingdom of Śri Vijaya. Its rajah saw a
good opportunity to mint money, and demanded a fee of 20,000 dinars before
he would let him leave for China. Isaac objected and was seized and put to
death that very night. The rajah expropriated the ship and all the
merchandise.68
Later generations were more circumspect about making such ambitious
voyages. The Genizah merchants were generally content to stay in India or
even Aden, and to wait for Chinese goods to reach them; these included the
glazed porcelain bowls that aroused such concern about their ritual purity
should they be touched by a menstruating woman.69 India was the
interchange point between what at first sight appear to be two trading
networks, or even three: from Egypt via Aden to the Malabar Coast, and from
the Malabar Coast to Malaya and Indonesia, with a further extension to
Quanzhou and other Chinese ports.70 But when the goods traded come under
consideration this looks more like a single line of communication linking
Alexandria in the Mediterranean to China, along which silk, spices,
porcelain, metalwork and also religious ideas were transmitted, along with all
those humdrum materials – wheat, rice, dates, and so on – in which the
sheikh of Qusayr, among many others, mainly dealt.

VI

The twelfth century saw important changes in the character of the merchants
who passed up and down the Red Sea, even though the goods they carried
probably did not alter very significantly, except to increase in volume. The
increasing sensitivity of the Muslim rulers to the presence of non-Muslims in
the Red Sea was in large part the result of the attempt by a crusader lord,
Reynaud de Châtillon, to launch a fleet on the Red Sea during the 1180s, with
the aim of attacking Mecca and Medina, and of launching pirate raids on
traffic passing through the Red Sea. Although Reynaud’s activities were
suppressed, his pirates came dangerously close to Medina; this resulted in the
closure of the Red Sea to non-Muslims.71 A corporation of Muslim
merchants was created in Egypt who excluded the old generation of Genizah
merchants from the India trade. These karimi merchants, as they were known,
benefited from the goodwill of the government in Cairo, which saw how
profitable taxation of the spice traffic could be.72
Yet the intimate relationship between Egypt and India continued, and the
flow of precious metals that resulted from these exchanges can be likened to
a pair of rivers that converged on India. India was, as it always has been, a
land in which a rich elite lived a luxurious life far removed from the daily
grind of the poor, and the same picture can be painted of medieval China.
Payments for Indian luxuries continued to flood into the coffers of the rajahs,
in gold and silver, and some of this income was spent on courtly
magnificence and warfare. But the thésaurisation (to use a handy French
word) of bullion flowing in from the West and from China proceeded apace,
as the treasuries of Indian princes immobilized the precious metals that came
into the country; Egypt, Syria and north Africa found themselves short of
silver, which was needed for smaller payments, though expedients to solve
the problem included glass tokens and lead coins. They could obtain silver
from northern Iran, to some extent; but Iranian silver tended to drain towards
Baghdad. They could obtain silver from western Europe; and the growing
demand there for eastern spices, from the late eleventh century onwards,
meant that merchants from Venice, Genoa and Pisa were keen to establish a
presence in Alexandria and other Levantine cities, and to pay in white money
for prodigious amounts of pepper, ginger and other Indian or Indonesian
goods. It will be seen too that vast amounts of Chinese cash were being taken
out of the Middle Kingdom towards surrounding lands, including Japan and
Java. It is often said that the beating of a butterfly’s wings can affect the
climate of the whole world. It can at least be said that the transactions which
took place along a series of maritime trade routes that stretched from Spain –
and eventually the Atlantic – to Japan had knock-on effects capable of
reaching far down the line. Setting aside the Americas, still unknown to the
inhabitants of other continents (ignoring for the moment the Norsemen), a
global network existed, one that had gained in strength and permanence since
the days of the Greco-Roman trade towards India.
 10

The Rising and the Setting Sun

As well as merchants and travellers from the Far West, merchants and
travellers from lands further east – Japan and Korea – converged on China. It
has long been assumed that trade had little impact on daily life in Japan. A
classic account of Japan in the years around 1000 simply states: ‘trade and
commerce played a minimal part in the country’s economy.’1 In this view,
everything really depended on the cultivation of rice and other basic
necessities, and we see the gradual emergence of a society in which power
was exercised through control over landed estates, a system with many
similarities to the feudalism of medieval Europe. But this is greatly to
simplify a much more complex picture. At court, whether in Korea or Japan,
the desire for access to Chinese culture was overwhelming; and that contact
was effected by sea and was made real through the transfer of people, objects
and texts. Moreover, Chinese cultural influence became so powerful that
these neighbours started to imitate the Chinese imperial court and began to
see themselves as imperial powers in their own right. By virtue of his
mastery, real or imagined, over parts of Korea, the Japanese ruler asserted in
a cheeky letter sent to the Chinese emperor in 607 that ‘the Son of Heaven in
the Land of the Rising Sun sends this letter to the Son of Heaven in the Land
Where the Sun Sets’.2 Even so, the Japanese emperors were realistic: they
still sent occasional tribute to their supposed Chinese counterpart. The
Chinese paid no respect to these claims to equality, and the Japanese learned
that it was more diplomatic (in the modern sense of the word) to use a
Japanese term, sumera mikoto, ‘Great King who rules under All Heaven’, for
their own emperor in the credentials their envoys presented, which the
Chinese conveniently pretended was just his personal name.3
It is hardly surprising, then, that the history of Sino-Japanese relations
begins cordially, turns sour and ends with a break. The mariners who set out
from Japan towards Korea and China, across often difficult seas, were
Japanese and Korean; once again the Chinese took a passive role, and
embassies from China to Japan were a rarity.4 As Sir George Sansom
pointed out, ‘the phenomenon of Japan’s isolation is a comparatively late
feature in her history.’5 On the other hand, there is little to say about Japan’s
links to the Asian mainland before the first millennium AD. Japanese raids
across the sea afflicted Korea in the first century BC and are recorded in the
official Korean chronicles: ‘Year 8 [50 BC], the Wae [Japanese] came with
troops intending to invade our coastal region but, hearing of the Founder
Ancestor’s divine virtue, they withdrew.’6 There was some contact with the
Han Chinese at the start of the millennium, with embassies reaching China
and Korea in the first century, but Japan was not of enormous interest to the
Chinese: it was seen as a land of warring kinglets (which it would become
again in later centuries); its inhabitants ‘are much given to strong drink’, but
many of them live till they are a hundred, and robbery and theft are rare –
certain things have changed little in Japan.
 One important feature of early Japan was its great ethnic variety, with
native peoples in north and south (Hokkaido and Kyushu islands) refusing to
submit to central authority. Only in the late seventh century did the rulers of
much, though not all, of central and southern Japan begin to use the name
Nihon, or Nippon, ‘Land of the Rising Sun’, from which the Western term
‘Japan’ is derived; and even then the ancestors of the Ainu, now few in
number, dominated the cold expanses of Hokkaido. Korean culture had an
enormous impact on early Japan, and there were close, and not always
friendly, ties between the rulers of Japan and those of Silla, one of the Korean
kingdoms that lay close to Kyushu island. The small island of Okinoshima,
close to Fukoaka in northern Kyushu, was a cult centre visited by fishermen
and other sailors, for the produce of the sea has always mattered a great deal
in the Japanese diet (the sea was also a good source of fine pearls); since very
early times Japanese men (but not women) have gone there to pray for the
safety of those at sea. Archaeological finds from the island include artefacts
from Korea and even the Middle East, as well as many jade symbols in the
shape of an apostrophe, whose exact function is unclear. The great shrine at
Munakata was dedicated to the sea gods and now attracts travellers of all
sorts, including those who wish their cars to be blessed by the Shintō
deities.7 And then, beyond Okinoshima and halfway to Korea, the island of
Tsushima was regarded as the outer boundary of the Japanese Empire.8
Tsushima provided a base from which Japanese sea raiders repeatedly
attacked the coast of Korea during the fourth century.9
It goes without saying that the entire population of Japan had arrived from
elsewhere at some time, even though the Japanese themselves long believed
that their emperors were descended from the sun goddess Amiterasu, and
noble families claimed descent from lesser gods.10 A series of peoples
moved into various corners of the archipelago over several millennia.
Migration from Korea was easiest, across a relatively narrow stretch of water,
and a wave of refugees arrived from Korea in the fourth and fifth centuries
AD, a time of turbulence in their homeland; they were welcomed by the
Japanese court, for they brought skills that were lacking in Japan itself, until
then a largely rural society with a subsistence economy. The immigrants
taught the art of silk cultivation; they were experienced weavers; they were
metalworkers; they also brought the art of writing, though at this stage this
was Chinese writing, which was ill-suited to the polysyllabic language that
had taken root in Japan.11 Korean culture was itself heavily influenced by
that of China, so Korea was really a filter through which a more advanced
civilization moulded the culture of Japan. By the ninth century AD, though,
increasingly regular direct contact with China itself reduced Japanese
dependence on Korea as an intermediary. Japan’s maritime horizons took
many centuries to expand, as this chapter will show.
Cultural dependence on Korea was not matched by political dependence;
indeed, later tradition insisted that the three Korean kingdoms of Silla,
Koguryō and Paekche began to pay tribute to Japan in the sixth century, as
did some of the islands to the south of Kyushu. These tales grew in the
telling, and claims that early Japanese emperors ruled the territory of
Mimana, on the strait between Korea and Japan, from the third to the seventh
century, were used by early Japanese chroniclers to support the right of their
emperor to tax the inhabitants of southern Korea.12 This points to a
fundamental paradox in Japanese history: on the one hand, the island identity
of the Japanese reinforced the idea that Japan was an empire set apart by the
gods from the rest of humanity; and, on the other hand, the Japanese sought
to draw the nearest parts of mainland Asia under their influence. This sense
that Japan too was an empire was heavily compromised by an awareness that
China was the seat of a more ancient, powerful and sophisticated civilization
that the Japanese tried hard to emulate. This love–hate relationship has
endured over many centuries of Japanese history.
Korean contact with Japan was quite intense during the seventh century
AD. The Japanese even took sides in an armed struggle between the two
kingdoms in southern Korea, Silla and Paekche. The Tang dynasty in China
was wooed by Silla, and Paekche turned to Japan for help; in 663, a naval
battle between the Chinese and Japanese off the coast of Korea, known as the
Battle of Hakusuki, proved the decisive superiority of the Chinese fleet over
that of Japan, and henceforth Japanese aggression in these waters was limited
to pirate raids.13 The rulers of Silla succeeded in suppressing Paekche and
became a significant regional power in their own right. At first, they failed to
realize that the Tang emperor intended to absorb Silla once he had helped
finish off the other Korean kingdoms. However, between 668 and 700
twenty-three embassies arrived in Japan from Silla, which was now trying to
keep its distance from the rulers of China, and saw the Japanese as useful
allies. These diplomatic exchanges were an important conduit along which
mainland cultural influences reached the island empire. Handsome gifts of
Korean, Chinese and east Asian luxury goods could be understood as tribute
(though that was not the idea in the king of Silla’s mind); on one occasion, in
697, Emperor Monmu even invited the Korean emissaries to his New Year
audience, alongside the ‘barbarian’ peoples of northern Japan, and
presumably the envoys from Silla were not quite sure whether to be flattered
or embarrassed by what was obviously an attempt to flaunt Japanese imperial
authority. And when, in 752, the Sillan prince T’aeryŏm turned up with seven
ships and 700 men, the Japanese records insisted that his precise purpose was
to bring tribute to the empire of Japan, for he is said to have said:
 ‘The king of Silla addresses the court of the empress who rules
gloriously over Japan. The country of Silla has from long times past
continuously plied the waters with ships coming to serve your state …
There is nowhere under Heaven that is not part of the royal domain,
and no one on even the furthest shores of the realm who is not a royal
subject. T’aeryŏm is overcome with happiness to have been blessed
with the opportunity to come to serve you during your divine reign. I
respectfully present some small items coming from my own land.’14

Oddly, or perhaps not oddly at all, there is no mention of this voyage, or

other embassies to Japan, in the Korean annals of the Silla kingdom, which
are quite detailed. They only mention T’aeryŏm as a leader of a rebellion
against the king, in 768, which ended with the execution of the prince and
‘their three generations: paternal, maternal, and wife’s relatives’, clearly a
traditional method for dealing with opponents of the regime that is still
loyally maintained by the Kim dynasty in North Korea.15 However, the
Korean annals do mention Japan very occasionally: ‘the country of Wa
changed its name to Japan. They say they took this name because they are
near to where the sun rises’, which is indeed the meaning of Nihon.16 And
the Koreans noted embassies from Japan, even though they actually consisted
of protocol officers sent to accompany Sillan embassies to the Japanese
emperor back to their homeland. Nonetheless, the Sillans did not feel it was
beneath their dignity to admit that they were sending embassies to the Tang
court in China.
Most curious is the embassy from Japan that arrived in Korea in 753. This
was surely another visit by protocol officers accompanying Prince T’aeryŏm
back home, but the Sillans were upset at something – perhaps the long delays
in receiving T’aeryŏm at the Japanese court. The Korean annals state: ‘Year
12 [753], autumn, eighth month. An envoy arrived from Japan. As he was
arrogant with no propriety, the king did not receive him, so he returned
home.’ Relations were better in the ninth century when, we are told, the
Japanese presented the king of Silla with large amounts of gold, having
‘concluded an agreement for the exchange of envoys and friendly ties’ some
years earlier, in 803.17 Everything really depended on whether the Japanese
were friendly to other Korean kingdoms, and whether the Sillans were keen
to make friends with Tang China. Relations with Japan were based on the
principle ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’.
 The ‘small items’ conveyed by ambassadors were not in reality quite so
small. Descriptions of Korean embassies mention rather curious gifts: in 599,
Korean envoys presented a camel, a donkey, goats and a white pheasant from
the kingdom of Paekche; the Paekche embassy of 602 had a more lasting
effect, since this time a monk named Kwallûk brought exciting books that
dealt with exorcism, astronomy and the calendar; besides, Kwallûk remained
in Japan and trained three Japanese followers in his esoteric knowledge; he
was followed by other Buddhist monks from the different Korean kingdoms
who displayed an impressive range of knowledge – not just how to
manufacture ink, paper and colouring materials, but even how to build a
watermill. Embassies from Silla brought gold, silver, copper and iron, as well
as bronze statuettes of the Buddha. The northern Korean kingdom of Parhae,
which stretched beyond the present borders of North Korea towards present-
day Vladivostok, sent tiger-skins and other rare pelts to Japan, so that when
Japanese painters portrayed tigers and leopards they were not totally
dependent on Chinese artistic models. In 659 an envoy from Koguryō was
seen in the market trying to exchange a bearskin for silk floss, which for
some reason the Japanese thought was highly amusing. That, perhaps, was on
his private account, since gifts to the Koreans in return for tribute lavishly
demonstrated the growing wealth of the Japanese emperor: dozens of bolts of
silk in any number of forms and colours; hemp cloth, furs, axes and knives.18
Some, perhaps most, of the trade with Korea took place outside the narrow
confines of official embassies, and one ‘register of products purchased from
the Koreans’, of 752, lists products from all over east Asia, not just from
Korea itself: gold, frankincense, camphor, aloe wood, musk, rhubarb,
ginseng, liquorice, honey, cinnamon, lapis lazuli, dyestuffs, mirrors, folding
screens, candelabra, bowls and basins. A special feature of these imports is
that Japanese nobles were allowed to petition the court for permission to buy
goods brought by the envoys who accompanied T’aeryŏm. The petitions they
submitted were later used to line folding screens that have been preserved in
the remarkable eighth-century imperial treasury at the Shōsō-in, still kept at
the Tōdaiji temple in Nara. Their letters reveal a less stuffy world than the
highly formalized rituals of Japanese diplomacy might suggest, for the
official visits masked a more mundane reality: people traded on the side, with
the blessing of the imperial court.19 Their goods also helped shape Japanese
civilization – one has only to think of the white lead used in the face-paint of
court ladies in the era of The Tale of Genji.
 This relationship between Japan and Korea, of necessity conducted by sea,
did not, then, take the form of a continuous flow of shipping back and forth
across the strait between Japan and Korea. Embassies could be made to wait
months, even years, before being rudely told to go away. Permanent
diplomatic representatives based in foreign capitals simply did not exist.20
Nor was diplomacy the only way Korea and Japan came into contact. All
these accounts of embassies underestimate the scale of piracy and open
warfare in the seas between the two lands. Although not much can be said
about the ships that fought in these waters, Wa (later known as Japan), Silla
and other states in the region could mobilize navies when they wanted to do
so. Japanese raids on Korea had a long history, and Kyushu, the southern
island of Japan, was seen as a defensive barrier against Korean aggression; in
the seventh and eighth centuries, thousands of recruits known as sakimori
were based in Kyushu and on Tsushima to defend imperial territory against
invaders. The Japanese were worried that Kyushu was so easily accessible
from the continent: ‘various foreign countries come there to pay tribute, their
ships and rudders face to face with ours. For this reason we drill horses and
sharpen our weapons in order to display our might and prepare for
emergencies.’ An eighth-century poet described the agony of leaving home
and family (‘his mother of the drooping breasts’ and ‘his wife like the young
grass’), for:

A great ship is set with myriad true oars

In the royal bay of Naniwa
Where men cut reeds,
On the morning calm
They row out in cadence,
On the evening tide
Pull the oars till they bend.
‘May you who set off rowing
To the boatman’s chant,
Thread your way between the waves
And safely reach your port.
May you keep your spirit true
As ordered by our sovereign lord,
And when your time of sailing round
From cape to cape is done,
 May you come safely home,’
Thus his wife must pray,
Setting a jar beside the bed,
Folding back her white hemp sleeves,
Spreading out her seed-black hair –
Long days she waits with yearning.21

II

Prince T’aeryŏm’s visit to Japan took many months. These long, exhausting
and not very comfortable trips across the sea were frequent enough for the
Japanese court to set up a reception centre for foreign visitors in Hakata Bay,
within the precincts of the large modern city of Fukoaka (earlier known as
Hakata). No one knows what route T’aeryŏm followed towards Nara (Heijō-
kyō), the imperial capital, but the fact that he stayed at Naniwa, on the site of
modern Ōsaka, while returning to Hakata strongly suggests he travelled
mainly by sea. En route to Nara, ‘the guests must not be allowed to converse
with people. Nor should officials of the provinces and districts they pass
through be allowed to look at the guests and vice-versa.’22 His problem was
not so much getting to Nara as getting out of Hakata, where he and his
entourage were penned in the foreigners’ compound under the strictest
supervision.
This compound, whose site lies underneath an old baseball stadium, was
excavated in 1987–8, exposing structures from the late seventh to ninth
centuries, as well as massive quantities of Chinese ceramics, the latest of
which date from the eleventh century. It was known as the Kōrokan, and in
the eighth century, the ‘Nara period’ of Japanese history, a channel to the sea
probably reached as far as the building, before sedimentation spread Fukoaka
well beyond the early medieval shoreline. The Kōrokan contained two
quadrangles of the same size (seventy-four metres by fifty-six metres).
Presumably the VIPs stayed under cover while the great majority of the party
bedded down in the large courtyards, or even outside the gates and on board
the ships that had brought them to Hakata Bay. Analysis of latrines
discovered within the compound revealed that one latrine was used by people
who followed a diet not far distant from the traditional Japanese diet of fish
and vegetables, while two upper-class latrines showed high consumption of
pork, including wild boar. Even more pungent evidence was provided by
small wooden slats that had been attached to food shipments and that
indicated what was in each cargo and where it came from (they survived
because they were used to wipe one’s behind before being thrown away).
Here was proof that fish, rice and venison were carried to the Kōrokan from
northern and central Kyushu – the centre of the island, containing the vast
caldera of Mount Aso, offered rich volcanic soil. The sea provided an
important part of the diet of the inhabitants of eighth- and ninth-century
Kyushu: shellfish such as oysters and abalone, as well as jellyfish, tuna,
whale, salmon and, as now, seaweed such as kelp. Occasionally the more
distinguished emissaries would be summoned from the lodge and taken to
Dazaifu for feasts at which the governor of Kyushu was their host. Isolation
was not total.23 Yet the Kōrokan was different from the inns that existed in,
say, the medieval Mediterranean, which were situated within ports. Hakata
Bay was an empty area at this time; the Kōrokan was not simply a large,
enclosed quadrangle but an isolated, distant place; in this sense it was also
different from the more famous enclosure at Deshima, the island off Nagasaki
where Dutch merchants were permitted to trade in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.
The physical isolation of the lodge meant that the Japanese authorities had
to supervise the Kōrokan from their administrative centre thirteen kilometres
inland, at Dazaifu. This was the command centre for the defence of Kyushu
as well. All this points to the deep-seated fear that Kyushu would fall under
the sway of foreigners, and that it was a border region in constant need of
protection. Prince T’aeryŏm and other ambassadors came with more than 700
followers; and there was an uneasy feeling that several hundred foreigners
could just as well be warlike marauders as peaceful envoys. It was vexing for
the visitors to have to suffer the long wait as Japanese protocol officers
travelled back and forth between Hakata and Nara, bringing news of whether
the embassy was actually welcome at the imperial court.24 The fear of
contact was also fear of contamination. The Japanese court developed a sense
of the distinct purity of the Japanese race, which culminated in the purity of
the emperor himself. This was in part an elaboration of the Chinese attitude to
other peoples, who were seen as ‘barbarians’, but another source of these
ideas was the Shintō conception of pollution, often also associated with the
dead. One must distinguish these theories from everyday practice: in time
large numbers of Chinese would settle in Hakata and marry Japanese men
and women. But in dealing with official delegations the imperial court had,
by the eighth or ninth century, become aware of the distance separating the
emperor and his great nobles from foreign peoples, especially those of Korea,
who were regarded as a political threat as well as a source of pollution.25
By the end of the eighth century the Koreans of Silla had made clear their
rejection of any idea that their official trade with Japan consisted of tribute
payments to a greater power. The area that remained in regular official
contact with Japan was the kingdom of Parhae, in the north of Korea, spilling
over into what are now the borderlands of China and Russia, and surviving
until it was overthrown by marauders from the interior in 926. The
inhabitants of Parhae were of varied origins, some related to the Mongols,
some more closely related to the Koreans. They were useful allies when, as
happened early in the eighth century, the rulers of Silla decided to link their
fortunes to Tang China rather than Japan; but they had less to offer in gifts:
furs rather than silk, and none of the spices that Silla had obtained from
further south and west. Trade with Parhae was not exactly encouraged, at
least at the Japanese court: in the ninth century a mission from Parhae was
only allowed to visit every six years, an interval which was soon increased to
every twelve years, because the Parhaeans were bringing more than the court
really wanted. The king of Parhae was unhappy with this arrangement and
continued to send embassies even when they were unwelcome, whereupon
the Japanese authorities sent them back with their goods, which, in 877,
included two exceptionally beautiful sake cups made out of tortoiseshell and
carved in the ‘South Seas’ that some at court would have been delighted to
keep in Japan.26
The relationship between Korea and Japan soured, but not before the
peninsula had implanted some fundamental features of mainland Asian
culture in the islands, notably Buddhist beliefs. With the fall of Parhae,
however, Japan lost interest in attempting to assert its influence on the
mainland. Memories of the links with Korea persisted, and a Korean embassy
appears in the very first pages of the great tenth-century Japanese novel, The
Tale of Genji; there, a wise Korean physiognomist skilled in Chinese poetry
recognizes the great talent of the young boy who will one day become the
hero Genji.27 As will be seen, in the long term the cooling of ties with Korea
fostered a new type of relationship across the sea, based on everyday trade
rather than formal diplomatic exchanges, but in the meantime the weakening
of ties between Japan and its closest neighbours left the Sea of Japan and the
East China Sea open to pirates capable of operating their own fleets and of
preying on such merchant shipping as existed.
Early Japanese rulers appealed to the Chinese for help against local rivals;
and often these appeals were directed at Chinese governors of parts of Korea
that had fallen under Han control.28 But increasingly they turned to the
Chinese imperial court. This was with certain reservations: the journey there
was regarded as very risky – every embassy but one experienced serious
danger at sea or on land; and they were uneasy about Chinese claims to
superiority, since the Japanese preferred to think of themselves as the
civilized subjects of a sovereign empire comparable in status, if not in size, to
Tang China.29 The sea was an important part of a world view that was,
nonetheless, firmly centred on the Japanese islands. Most eloquent of all are
the dramatic scenes of ships amid the storm-tossed waves that appear in
medieval Japanese paintings.30 In the eighth century the embassies sent to
China were already elaborate affairs, with whole teams of participants: a
principal ambassador with two or three deputies; scribes and interpreters;
craftsmen such as carpenters and metalworkers; a specialist in divination –
always useful if one wanted to turn up at court on an auspicious day. A
hundred people would constitute a rather small embassy; in this period four
ships each capable of carrying 150 people might not be unusual (twelve
embassies are known in the years between 630 and 837). To guard against
illness a vast pharmacopoeia was carried on board, including pills made of
rhinoceros horn, plum kernels and juniper, more often of Chinese than of
Japanese origin.31
The route started in the bay of Ōsaka, through Japan’s Inland Sea, and
along the Korean coast, though a direct route to the mouth of the Yangtze
(close to the trading city of Yangzhou) became common as navigators gained
greater experience; moreover, sailing past Korea was risky when local rulers,
such as the king of Silla, were hostile. From Yangzhou, part of each
delegation would head much further inland to the imperial capital at
Changan, so their journey was by no means over when they reached
Yangzhou. However, Yangzhou was a collection point for goods that came
overland or along the coast from Canton (Guangzhou), so there they could
choose from the luxury goods of the Indian Ocean route and from those that
arrived along the Silk Road. They still had to face the horrors of the return
journey. On one occasion, in 778, the high seas washed a Chinese envoy
coming to Japan with gifts off the deck of his ship, along with twenty-five
members of his entourage and one of the Japanese ambassadors who was on
his way home. The same ship broke in two but each part stayed afloat, and
the exhausted survivors made land on Kyushu.32
With such experiences on record, Japanese travellers regarded sea travel
with awe, and made sure that they prayed to the gods of the sea before setting
out, celebrating with feasts if and when they managed to return. A litany that
used to be recited at an event known as the Ceremony of National
Purification conjures up a vivid image of Japanese seafaring: ‘as a huge ship
moored in a great harbour, casting off its stern moorings, casting off its bow
moorings, drives forth into the vast ocean … so shall all offences be swept
utterly away.’ In a prayer to the sun goddess the Shintō priest described the
lands bestowed on the emperor ‘by the blue sea-plain, as far as the prows of
ships can go without letting dry their oars and poles’.33
The dividends for Japan were enormous. The coming and going of monks
ensured that Japanese Buddhism was firmly rooted in Chinese and Indian
Mahayana Buddhism; the Lotus Sutra, a very lengthy lecture by the Buddha
on the theme of eternal bliss, was a particular favourite in China, and
consequently became one in Japan as well.34 Cultural influences across the
sea were not confined to Buddhism. Something was learned from
Confucianism about hierarchy and filial respect, though public examinations
for government service did not quite follow the Confucian model:
opportunities to be trained for office were confined to the sons of the well
born rather than being open to all talents. The Chinese model extended to
town-planning as well: the handsome new capital at Nara was constructed
around a grid, like the major Chinese cities. At the start of the eighth century
the imperial court began to issue silver and then copper coins, in imitation of
Chinese practice, but silk was used as the medium of exchange in high-level
dealings with Japan’s neighbours.35
The influence of China on the fine arts was incalculable, even if Japanese
artists developed their own sensitive eye. The texts that Buddhist monks
studied were in Chinese, and the creation of a workable Japanese script took
time; when it did come into being, it made use of a great many Chinese
characters, while also using syllabic signs better suited to the phonetics of
Japanese. Until then, Chinese was the language of administration, and
Chinese books on astronomy, divination, medicine, mathematics, music,
history, religion and poetry were eagerly devoured by civil servants, monks
and scholars in Japan; a ‘catalogue of books currently in Japan’ of 891 knew
of 1,759 Chinese works.36 At the same time, traditional cults, the ‘way of the
gods’ or Shintō, ensured that native traditions remained alive. Still, the
cultural flow was nearly all one way: in later centuries, as will be seen, there
were a few Japanese articles that attracted the attention of Chinese buyers,
especially high-quality paper, which was made according to a different
formula in Japan. But Japanese admiration for Chinese culture was not
matched by Chinese admiration for Japanese culture. The Japanese could not
escape from being classed as barbarians by those they sought to emulate; one
effective way of dealing with this was to treat others (such as the Koreans,
rather ungratefully) as barbarians in relation to themselves.
The evidence from the embassies to China is as good a way as any of
measuring the steady growth in Chinese influence, and the build-up of trade
as well as official exchange across the Japan Sea and the Yellow Sea. Yet
here, as with Korea, the tributary relationship did not last; after 838 no more
embassies were sent to Tang China. In any case, these embassies had been
sent at very long intervals. Twenty-seven years separate the embassy sent by
Emperor Kammu to the Tang court in 804 from its immediate predecessor,
and thirty-four years passed before the next embassy was sent to China, one
that is very well documented and that will be examined shortly. During the
rest of the ninth century, the Japanese showed no interest in sending an
embassy to the Tang emperor, and by the time they did decide to send one, in
894, the Tang empire was beginning to disintegrate. In the event, that
embassy was cancelled when Sugawara no Michizane, the notable who had
been chosen as ambassador, advised the Council of State to think again:

Last year in the third month, the merchant Wang No brought a letter
from the monk Chūkan, who is in China. It described in detail how
the Great Tang is in a state of decline, and reported that the emperor is
not at court [because of the rebellion] and foreign missions have
ceased to come … Investigating records from the past, we have
observed that some of the men sent to China have lost their lives at
sea and others have been killed by pirates … This is a matter of
national importance and not merely of personal concern.37

Maybe that final sentence should not be taken too seriously; the ambassador
evidently did not want to risk his life. He was perhaps the greatest Japanese
expert on Chinese culture, and a skilled poet who enjoyed exchanging verses
with the ambassador of Parhae.38 Yet his reluctance to lead an official
delegation masks the reality of day-to-day contact across the sea. In another
letter Michizane reported that ‘many merchants have told us of conditions in
China’, so there were more people crossing to China than the Wang No he
mentioned in his appeal to the Council of State. Private traders were coming
and going with ever greater frequency and, to judge from Wang No’s name,
many or most or even all were Chinese. As a result, at the end of the ninth
century the character of Chinese trade with Japan was changing decisively.
The cancellation of the embassy in 894 was not a sign of isolationism, but
rather the opposite: these very formal exchanges of goods by extremely large
embassies were not cost-effective. Japan was becoming more and more
integrated into the ‘Asian Mediterranean’ that stretched south beyond Taiwan
and joined the South China Sea to the seas around Japan itself.
Silk dominated the list of goods sent from the Japanese court to China,
while large quantities of silver also featured, and the distinctive silky paper
the Japanese manufactured also impressed the Chinese, though for the
moment it was more an object of curiosity than a common article of
exchange. The diplomatic team would also bring to China large quantities of
silk that each member had been awarded by the emperor of Japan, and would
use this to finance the voyage, selling goods in the ports and cities the envoys
visited. Chinese gifts, not just to the emperor of Nihon but to the envoys,
included suits of armour and books – one Japanese visitor to China, who
stayed there for eighteen years at the start of the eighth century, brought
home a handbook of court ceremonial, which must have had quite an impact
in his homeland.39 But the best evidence for the impact of China and east
Asia upon eighth-century Japan comes from the extraordinary collection of
artefacts still preserved at the Tōdaiji temple in the new capital of Japan,
Nara, which are placed on exhibition once a year. This collection was formed
in 756, when the widow of Emperor Shōmu presented his treasures to the
Great Buddha. Further gifts in the next few decades brought the number of
items in the collection to more than 10,000. Influences from the West can be
traced both in designs imitated from Persian, Indian and Chinese models (for
instance, in painted screens that recall Tang iconography), and in actual
objects brought across the seas (such as lapis lazuli belt ornaments from
Afghanistan). Musical instruments from the eighth century, including flutes
and lutes, Chinese board games, writing cases, brushes and inkstones,
furniture and caskets, armour, glass, ceramics and magnificent court robes
testify either to the quality of the gifts received and objects bought through
trade, or to the manner in which Japanese artists copied faithfully the models
they saw – over time modifying them in a distinctively Japanese way.40 The
more the Japanese studied Chinese art and customs, the more they were
inclined to stress their own special identity. Physical separation from China
meant that these powerful influences operated at a court level; movement
back and forth by sea, across difficult waters, constrained contact but also
sustained a regular flow of goods from the high culture the emperors in Nara
secretly envied, and never dared to despise.

III

The Japanese Buddhist monk Ennin (793–864) became an important religious

leader, and was later known to the Japanese as Jikaku Daishi, ‘Great Teacher
of Compassion and Understanding’. The diary of his pilgrimage, which took
place between 836 and 847, offers a unique record of the delicate relationship
between China and Japan in the early Middle Ages, and has much to say
about the journey across the treacherous waters between the two empires.
Only one medieval manuscript survives, finished in wobbly characters in
1291, and copied by a Buddhist monk named Ken’in when he was seventy-
two years old and was ‘rubbing my old eyes’, which was his way of
apologizing for the errors of transcription in the text he transmitted. These
errors were magnified because he was not copying his native Japanese, but a
text written in Chinese, which remained the literary language of the
intellectual elite at Nara.41 Ennin was already forty-one years old when the
imperial court appointed members of the diplomatic team it was sending to
China, which was to be led by Fujiwara no Tsunetsugu, a member of the
great Fujiwara clan. It was to set out in four ships under the direction of
‘Ship’s Loading Masters’; the title suggests that they were responsible for the
cargo of tribute. Two of the loading masters were of Korean descent and one
claimed to be descended from a past Chinese emperor, no less. However,
there were also skilled navigators who captained the ships while they were at
sea, as well as scribes and Korean interpreters, whose task was less to
translate from Japanese into Korean than from Japanese into Chinese.42 It
was a motley band of envoys that included a ‘Provisional Professor’ from the
government university, who was also a skilled painter and waited upon the
ambassador himself. Several archers who travelled in the convoy were of
good birth, one of them serving in the imperial bodyguard, though there were
also many artisans, including carpenters, porters and simple sailors who were
clearly of more modest origin. Altogether there were 651 people on board the
four ships, which, judging from the size of the earlier Korean embassies to
Japan, was the expected size of an embassy designed to create a good
impression. Alongside the diplomats and their support staff, another
important component of this great party consisted of the monks and laymen
who were travelling to China to deepen their knowledge of Buddhist beliefs
and practices and of Chinese art and letters. The monks represented various
sects of Buddhism that existed in Japan, for one feature of Japanese
Buddhism was the relative ease with which the different strands of
Buddhism, the ‘greater’ (Mahayana) and ‘lesser’ (Hinayana), co-existed side
by side, one stressing the role of Buddhism in society at large and the other
concentrating more on inner perfection.43
This team was put together from 833 onwards, but it took a few years to
set off on the voyage. For, in addition to those sailing to China, there was
another large team at work on land. The ships were not actually ready; Ship
Construction Officers were needed who could supervise their building. The
imperial court was also well aware that making a good impression on the
Tang emperor would depend on the rank of the people sent into the Chinese
ruler’s presence. Therefore in the New Year Honours List several of the
envoys were raised to higher ranks in the complex court hierarchy; the
ambassador himself now attained Senior Fourth Rank Lower Grade, which
was a little more than halfway up the cursus honorum. Previously he had held
the rank of Junior Fourth Rank Upper Grade. Solely while he functioned as
ambassador he was an acting member of the Senior Second Rank. Progress
up the ladder took place at a snail’s pace. There were handsome gifts of silk
and other cloths for the leading participants. One reason for this largesse was
the simple fact that the journey was thought to be perilous, which, as events
would prove, was an accurate judgement.44 If contrary winds blew, it was
quite possible that the ships would be blown on to the shores of Korea, so a
further embassy was despatched to the king of Silla, with whom relations had
been poor, to guarantee safe passage for the Japanese embassy to China. The
Koreans sent back this embassy with a flea in the ambassador’s ear. Silla was
full of tension at this time, as rivals contended for the throne and as fighting
spread into the palace compound itself. Meanwhile a pirate king named
Chang Pogo had established himself as master of the waters off southern
Korea, and Ennin mentioned the threat that he might pose to the ships
carrying the embassy – more of Chang Pogo shortly.45 It is not surprising,
then, that the Koreans had other preoccupations than the renewal of ties with
Japan.46 The Sillan court even suggested that the envoy who had arrived at
their court, Ki no Misu, was some sort of mischievous impostor, and he was
roundly blamed for his failure when he returned to Nara.47
The first part of the voyage, which began in the middle of 836, was easy
enough. The four ships set out from Naniwa, not far from Nara, and sailed
down the Inland Sea, reaching the coast of Kyushu after four days. Problems
began to mount when they set off from Kyushu for the coast of China, on 17
August 836. The weather had been calm, but the typhoon season was
imminent. Everything suggests that the Japanese mariners were hopelessly
optimistic about their chances of all arriving unscathed on the mainland, and
that their expertise was limited to navigation between the islands of their
home archipelago across small distances. The four ships were beaten back by
the fierce winds; three of them made land on Kyushu once again, but the
fourth was smashed to pieces, and a raft carrying sixteen survivors was
washed up on Tsushima island, followed by a few other survivors who
floated ashore later – a total of twenty-eight survivors. The story they told
was horrifying: its rudder broken, their ship had been at the mercy of the high
sea, and the captain had ordered his crew and passengers to break the ship to
pieces, so that they could escape on rafts; but nearly all these rafts were lost
at sea, with over a hundred men. When the emperor heard of these events, he
sent orders for the repair of the three remaining ships; Fujiwara no
Tsunetsugu assured him that he was still keen to make the passage, even
though he and his men felt half-dead after their experiences (this, in true
Japanese fashion, was expressed as a humble apology for failure, even though
the circumstances had clearly been well beyond Fujiwara’s control). A
second attempt to reach China, in 837, fared little better, for the ships were
blown back to Kyushu and to islands off Japan; the imperial court had sent
offerings to the shrine at Ise of Amiterasu, the sun goddess and notional
ancestress of the imperial family, but to no avail.48
With no obvious help from the Shintō gods, the opportunity was taken to
redouble spiritual efforts before sending the party to sea a third time. This
was achieved by bringing into play the Buddhist monasteries as well as the
Shintō shrines of Kyushu, while right across the Japanese Empire there were
to be daily readings of a Buddhist sutra, The Scripture of the Dragon-King of
the Sea, who was a cult figure in Korea, Japan and parts of China. The
envoys felt very doubtful about setting out yet again: they had witnessed the
perils of the sea, and had lost a ship on the first attempt. Takamura, the
deputy ambassador, fell sick with a diplomatic illness and – while Fujiwara
insisted that he was ready to die 10,000 times to serve the emperor – his
deputy and several other high-ranking envoys were sent into exile for
disobeying imperial orders, which was at least a better fate than being
strangled to death, the penalty the emperor could have imposed.49
What has been said so far is based on the reconstruction of events from the
Japanese official archives by the editor of Ennin’s diary, Edwin Reischauer.
But at this point the words of Ennin himself become audible, as he describes
the third voyage towards the coast of China, cutting across the open sea so
that the Japanese ships did not have to coast along the mildly hostile shores
of Korea. Off the coast of China, however, the ships encountered a fierce east
wind, and Ennin’s vessel was blown on to a shoal, whereupon its rudder
snapped in pieces. To add to their confusion, their Korean interpreter was
worried that they had already overshot the entrance to the canal that would
lead them down to the Yangtze River and towards Yangzhou, the first city
they hoped to reach en route to the Tang capital further inland. Ennin, the
ambassador and their fellow passengers were stranded offshore on a ship that
was breaking up. The ambassador managed to reached the shore in a lifeboat,
but Ennin was among those left on board: ‘The ship eventually fell over and
was about to be submerged. The men were terrified and struggled to climb on
to the side of the vessel. All bound their loincloths around them and tied
themselves with ropes here and there to the ship. Tied thus in place, we
awaited death.’50
The broken ship shifted back and forth in the mud, and Ennin and his
companions were forced to switch from one side to another as the waves
pushed it from side to side and as ‘the mud boiled up’. When a small Chinese
cargo vessel came alongside, the first act of those still on board was to pass
across the ‘national tribute articles’ destined for the emperor of China; but in
reality they lay very close to the shore and eventually they landed on terra
firma, dried out the tribute items that had been soaked in seawater, and made
their way upriver, finding out that the ambassador and his secretaries had
survived their own harrowing experiences and were heading in the same
direction. Two other ships experienced easier crossings, though one of them
did begin to break up, and several crew members died of mysterious and
sinister ‘body swellings’ before being rescued by more Chinese ships.51 Not
surprisingly, members of the party of monks were keen to present gifts of
gold to a monastery where they were lodged for a while, as thanksgiving for
surviving the perils of the sea, and as they travelled they offered simple feasts
of vegetarian fare to monks they visited.52
The disasters at sea prove that the Japanese had not mastered the art of ship
construction. Ennin’s terrifying account of his shipwreck is not the only
report he offers of a rudder that broke under strain, nor of ignorance of the art
of navigation. The Japanese were a maritime people, but the sheer proximity
of their islands meant that long journeys across the open sea were rare,
although there is good evidence that the Koreans could handle more
ambitious voyages. Ennin had come to China to make contact with fellow
Buddhists, and his travels along the rivers and roads of the Tang Empire took
him far from the sea, but he says that the crew of one Chinese boat, carrying
Fujiwara himself back to Japan in 839, was Korean, and the crew was
knowledgeable about the coastline of northern China and about the best
routes towards Japan.53 While it is no surprise that they prayed to the Shintō
and Buddhist gods on setting out on a voyage, the Japanese were willing to
rely on a soothsayer for information about weather prospects. Ennin
described how the sailors on board one ship lost all sense of direction once
they could not see the sun, and ‘wandered aimlessly’; when they saw land the
soothsayer first declared it was Silla and then decided it was China – the
matter was resolved when two Chinese were found who knew where Korea
actually lay.54 The Japanese attitude to the open sea can be summed up in
Ennin’s terse comment: ‘we saw the ocean stretching far and mysterious to
the east and south.’55 It was not an inviting place.
Following the disasters of the outward journey, from which only one ship
had survived, new ships had to be commissioned in Yangzhou, the great
commercial city that was China’s gateway to the open ocean. It was vital to
find people ‘familiar with the sea-routes’, and more than sixty Korean sailors
were hired, along with nine Korean ships.56 The larger fleet suggests that the
ships themselves were smaller, or that a rich cargo of gifts and surreptitious
purchases was now ready for loading. However, when members of the
delegation attempted to trade privately in the marketplaces of Yangzhou they
were arrested and held overnight; they had ‘bought some items under
imperial prohibition’; and other delegates were in such a hurry to escape the
market inspectors after detection that they left behind more than 200 strings
of cash, each made up of 1,000 copper coins and threaded together through
the hole in the middle. Unfortunately, there is no record of what they were
trying to buy, which may have included the rare medicines, spices and
incense that wealthy Japanese consumers craved. When they set out, the
crews underwent purification according to Shintō rites, praying to the sea
gods for a safe journey; and at one point a Japanese sailor was prevented
from boarding because he had polluted himself by having sexual relations
with another man. Once the ships were at sea, a sailor who was thought to be
dying was placed on land so that his dead body would not pollute the ship on
which he was sailing. The fearsome sea had to be treated with punctilious
respect.57
At the last minute, Ennin and a few of his fellow monks decided to stay in
China, with the approval of Ambassador Fujiwara but without permission
from the Chinese authorities; the ambassador tried to warn Ennin that the
Chinese authorities would be furious at his breach of the imperial order that
the delegation should now depart, but he understood that Ennin’s first priority
was to study Buddhist scriptures. So Ennin conspired with Korean merchants
to be left on the shore of the Shandong peninsula, which sticks out of China
to the west of Korea. A bribe of gold dust and a Japanese girdle helped; the
Korean response was a gift of powdered tea and pine nuts, which seems a
rather modest exchange.58 And yet thick matcha tea, widely known for its
use in the tea ceremony, was valued by Buddhist monks, as it kept them
awake through long hours of study and meditation; documents preserved in
the Shōsō-in at Nara show that it remained extremely costly in the late eighth
century, worthy of being brewed by the abbot himself before it was offered to
the emperor as he processed past the great temples of central Japan.59
Ennin felt it was important to send some Buddhist scriptures back to Japan,
which he asked to be placed on board one of the Japanese ships in a bamboo
box.60 But the embassy had not satisfied his craving for deeper knowledge of
Buddhist law and lore. He hoped to reach the holy places of Chinese
Buddhism, and he and his companions tried to pose as Koreans. How this
worked when they met some Korean sailors is a mystery – what language did
they speak? They had not gone very far when they encountered a village
elder called Wang Liang, who sent them a written message:
 You monks have come here and call yourselves Koreans, but I see
that your language is not Korean, nor is it Chinese. I have been told
that the ships of the Japanese tributary embassy stopped east of the
mountains to wait for favourable winds, and I fear that you monks are
official visitors to China who have fled to this village from the ships
of your own country. I dare not let official visitors stay.61

So in China, as in Japan, envoys from afar were expected to be tightly

controlled and shepherded from place to place. When the police arrived
Ennin claimed to have been suffering from beri-beri, and insisted that he had
come ashore with his companions because he felt so ill; but now they wished
to join the Japanese ships, which were said to be anchored not far away. They
were duly accompanied to one of the Japanese ships that stood close to a
temple of the Dragon King of the Sea, and put on board.62 Ennin was in
despair at the failure of his plans: ‘we have tried every idea, but we cannot
stay. The officials are vigilant and do not permit the slightest irregularity.’63
No doubt Ennin’s wish to stay was also prompted by fear of what lay before
him as he crossed the open sea once again. Once he was back on board ship,
fog rather than wind proved to be the greatest danger; becalmed, the
passengers found that supplies were running low, and Ennin made offerings
to the Shintō sea gods, an act which was seen as perfectly compatible with his
Buddhist faith. Then they faced storms that left the ships sheltering off the
Shantung coast. Still desperate to stay in China, Ennin made his way to a
Korean monastery and the ships carried on without him – seven reached
Kyushu within three weeks or so, though those aboard the ninth ship took
nine months to find Japan: ‘find Japan’ because, with a broken mast, it
wandered all over the western Pacific, and may even have floated as far south
as Taiwan, ‘the region of the southern brigands’.64 It is surely significant that
this ship was manned entirely by Japanese sailors, whereas the others carried
Koreans as well. After an attack by hostile islanders, new boats were
fashioned out of the ruined hull of the ship, and some of the exhausted
travellers eventually reached Kyushu.
Ennin’s difficulties with the Chinese authorities resumed. Fortunately the
Korean prior of the monastery on Mount Chi where he had taken refuge was
willing to support his request to stay in China; this monastery had been
founded by the great Korean warlord Chang Pogo, who had endowed it with
estates rich in rice.65 However, in Tang China, Confucian bureaucracy
reigned supreme, and Ennin had to battle with a sequence of officious
jobsworths before he could gain the credentials and travel permits he needed;
the fact that he wished to study Buddhism was at first largely ignored.66
Ennin would spend nine years in China, during which he witnessed a
fearsome persecution of Buddhist monks and nuns at the behest of Emperor
Wuzung, a fanatical supporter of the Daoist faith; the suppression of the
Buddhist monasteries by the ‘Commissioners of Good Works’ and other
imperial officials has even been described as ‘the most severe religious
persecution in the whole of Chinese history’.67 Ennin submitted requests for
an exit visa which were repeatedly ignored, until the persecution reached a
point where foreign monks were being expelled. At one point a ship was
being built on his behalf to take him back home, or so he claimed, but there
were endless bureaucratic obstacles. Ships came and went but he was not
aboard them.68 He finally left China in 847 and sailed back to Japan, where
he arrived at the imperial court the next year, to face a hero’s welcome. His
return voyage past Korea to Hakata Bay was uneventful compared to the
trials experienced on the way to China, and, predictably, the ship in which he
sailed was under Korean ownership.69
Ennin’s vivid account of his experiences not merely lights up the social
and religious history of Tang China, but helps one understand the distant yet
watchful relationship between Japan and China at this period. His simple
references to ships sailing back and forth between China, Korea and Japan
break through the silence of many official records to show that, despite the
infrequency of the Japanese embassies to Tang China, dedicated to the formal
presentation of tribute and to the receipt of handsome gifts, the waters
between the two empires were populated, if not exactly crowded, with
shipping. Much of it was operated by Korean sailors whose prime purpose
was undoubtedly private trade. These boats tramped up and down the coast
between Yangzhou or other towns in northern China and the coasts of Silla
and Kyushu. Nonetheless, these seas were not calm: not just the storm winds
and periodic fogs but the depredations of pirates made these waters
dangerous, and no doubt many of these Korean shipowners were happy to
turn to piracy when trade failed to pay. Among the pirate lords of the waters
off Korea the most famous was Chang Pogo, who appears several times in
Ennin’s diary, and also in the Korean chronicles.
 IV

Chang Pogo, or Jang Bogo, has become a national hero in South Korea, and
has even been made the hero of an adventure film; well before that, he was
worshipped as a god. His Korean name was Kangp’a, and his status at birth,
in a land very conscious of rank, is unknown; but he began his career as a
soldier in the service of the Tang Empire before returning to his native land in
828. By then he was already a wealthy man, and he set up a garrison said by
the Korean chronicler to have numbered 10,000 men (that is, a large number)
at Ch’ŏnghae-jin on Wando island, an important command post off south-
western Korea that lay alongside the sea routes linking Silla to Tang
China.70 In a thirteenth-century collection of legends about the Korean past,
he appears as Kungp’a, ‘a man of chivalrous spirit’.71 When he was living in
Tang China, he had witnessed the wholesale import of Korean slaves by
Chinese traders, and, with the approval of the king of Silla, he used Wando as
a base for attacking the slavers. The king appointed him his Commissioner at
Ch’ŏnghae-jin, so officially, at least, he acted as a crown agent. The problem
was that as his command of the sea grew so did his independence from the
king of Silla. He had taken up residence on Wando to suppress piracy; but his
role there had made him into the greatest pirate of all. This was an era during
which powerful local lords were intruding themselves into the turbulent
politics of the Sillan court, and Chang Pogo too was tempted to try his hand
there; what distinguished him was that his power was based more on the sea
than on land and that he managed to exercise such power in Silla, for a few
years that coincided with Ennin’s stay in China.
Ennin thought of him as an independent warlord who might well interfere
with his sea voyage. On the other hand, Ennin had plenty of reason to be
grateful to him, as the founder of the Korean monastery that gave him asylum
when he was trying to stay in China and to escape from the prying Chinese
authorities. Chang Pogo was a merchant-prince as well as a warlord; he tried
to set up a triangular trade linking China, Korea and Japan, but an attempt to
interest the Japanese court in 841 was rebuffed when his merchants were
accused of inventing tales about what was going on in Korea and were
refused permission to trade.72 However, he had his own commercial agent at
his monastery whose task, Ennin relates, was to sell goods in China. This
agent, Ch’oe, became a good friend to Ennin, and offered to provide transport
on a Korean ship so Ennin could travel south along the coast of China
towards the Buddhist centres he really wanted to visit. Ennin was
overwhelmed by this kindness, even if this did not actually come about. He
wrote a series of letters to Chang Pogo himself:

Although I have never in my life had the honour of meeting you, I

have for long heard of your great excellence, and I humbly respect
you all the more … I find it difficult to express in words anything but
great happiness … I do not know when I shall have the honour of
meeting you, but in my humble way I think of you all the more from
afar … In order to seek the Buddha’s teaching, Ennin has come here
from afar, moved by your virtue, and has tarried in your region. He
has been fortunate enough to enjoy your benevolence. Being a mere
nobody, he is overcome with gratitude.73

Ennin even suggested that he might call on Chang in Ch’ŏnghae-jin.

However, just at this moment, in 839, Chang Pogo was busy at the court in
Silla; he helped a royal ally seize the throne, declaring, ‘a person who sees an
injustice and does nothing is without courage’.74 According to Korean
accounts, he would have married his daughter to the king, had not the Korean
nobles vigorously opposed the wedding of the daughter of a mere ‘islander’
or ‘low-ranking commoner’ to a princess. He duly paid the price of being an
interloper and was assassinated in 841 or 846. A Korean tradition described
how he plotted a dastardly coup against the king, and then was deceived by a
refugee courtier named Yomjang or Kim Yang whom he had taken in, having
failed to realize that this man’s flight from the court was just a ruse intended
to win his confidence:

‘I have offended the king,’ Yomjang repeated, ‘and so I have come to

seek asylum under your command in order to escape death.’
‘You are lucky,’ Kungp’a [Chang Pogo] said. ‘Raise your cup. I
drink to your health and your successful flight.’
When Kungp’a was fairly in his cups, Yomjang suddenly drew the
long sword from the scabbard which hung at the rebel’s waist and cut
off his head with a single stroke. When they heard of this, all of
Kungp’a’s officers and men prostrated themselves before Yomjang in
fear and astonishment.75
Before long Yomjang had married his own daughter to the king and been
promoted to a high rank, for he was worthy whereas Chang Pogo definitely
was not, in the hierarchical society of early medieval Korea.76
The career of Chang Pogo offers another reminder that the commercial
networks across the sea have often been maintained by maritime nations that
stood between great empires, rather than by the inhabitants of those empires.
Silla in the north and Śri Vijaya in the south were home to skilled mariners
who effected links between great civilizations such as Tang China that looked
inwards away from the sea, but also saw opportunities across the sea to
obtain precious goods and flattering recognition of their political power. The
Koreans, Malays and Indonesians prove to have been the real pioneers in
crossing the open sea.
 11

‘Now the world is the world’s world’

The term ‘insularity’ conveys a sense of isolation and looking inwards.

Sometimes historians seize upon any word ending with -ity out of an
unbridled love for abstract terms that are supposed to bring sophistication and
‘theory’ to their writings. But much of what has been said so far in this book
demonstrates how lacking in that sort of insularity island societies were. Even
when contact with the mainland was restricted by order of a court or
government, ways were found to elude these rules, and such official contact
as there was could be both intense and productive. Japan provides the perfect
example of this apparent but unreal insularity during the early Middle Ages.
The nature of its ties across the sea changed significantly in the twelfth
century, and is richly documented. A new era of more open trade began, and
the continuous presence of foreign merchants, nearly all Chinese, became a
fact of life, especially around Hakata. Maritime trade within the Japanese
archipelago also flourished; the seat of government at Kamakura (from 1185
onwards) possessed a viable port and consumed so much sake that a decision
was made to ban its sale. 32,274 jars of the drink were confiscated, while
around the Inland Sea port towns mushroomed, serving the megalopolis of
Kyoto. The Japanese became much more expert shipbuilders too, although
this was a slow development and even in the early thirteenth century the
shogun only trusted a Chinese shipbuilder to construct a vessel capable of
reaching China.1 The government, or bakufu, became worried by the rapid
growth of trade from Hakata through the Inland Sea to Kamakura, partly
because there were government ships to which the bakufu wanted to give
priority; Chinese interlopers seemed to be winning the competition to
dominate this sea passage.2 Overall, contrary to the view of Japan as a
society that was not greatly involved in or influenced by its maritime links to
Asia, what emerges is a picture of a society that revelled in its outside
contacts, which were now mainly with China.

These contacts did not affect the lives of the very poor – the peasants who
planted rice for demanding masters, whether warlike nobles or wealthy
monasteries, or the fisherfolk or ‘People of the Sea’ whose livelihood
depended upon the sea, but who did not take part in the trade networks that
reached towards the great cities of China under the Song, Yuan and Ming
dynasties. The People of the Sea owed the imperial court tribute in seafood
and salt, for consumption of fish was much more common among richer
members of society, while Buddhist disapproval of killing animals for meat
made fish even more desirable. The People of the Sea operated boats up and
down the coast under the protection of emperors, nobles and abbots to whom
they owed allegiance. Under the patronage of nobles and abbots, guilds, or
za, became a feature of town life.3 All this was part of a process of
commercialization that transformed medieval Japan between about 1200 and
1400. Gradually, markets and fairs took on a more cosmopolitan character;
one could buy textiles, paper and metal goods, even luxury items and
weapons made in the big cities of Japan and, occasionally, in China.4
Mostly one bartered for goods in the market, but copper coinage was used
more and more often by more and more people, including peasants; a
delightfully painted scene on a temple scroll from this period portrays people
buying and selling in the market and holding strings of cash.5 This reliance
on cash can be traced back to the middle of the twelfth century, if not earlier.
The coins were themselves Chinese, for – despite a short-lived plan to mint
coins in the emperor’s name in the early fourteenth century – the Japanese
rarely produced their own coins. The Japanese government had its doubts,
because the massive influx of cash stimulated inflation; attempts to ban the
import of copper coins from China, at the start of the Kamakura period, had
no effect, and by 1226 the government was encouraging the use of coin rather
than pieces of cloth in everyday trade. Vases containing tens of thousands of
Chinese coins have been turned up by Japanese archaeologists.6 As
economic links were forged across ever larger expanses of Japan, bills were
settled and loans made in Chinese cash. As in contemporary Europe,
observers did not quite know whether to admire those who accumulated
wealth through moneylending or to condemn them as exploitative usurers
(though, interestingly, Buddhist monks and Shintō priests tended to favour
moneylending, unlike the Catholic Church in medieval Europe).7
The Chinese deplored the constant outflow of bullion to feed the growing
economy of Japan; Japanese traders were accused of hoovering up all the
coins in the coastal towns they visited within twenty-four hours of their
arrival. When China tried to limit the number of Japanese ships that could
trade in its ports to five each year, the decree was rendered useless by the
willingness of customs officers to accept bribes, so the number of ships was
closer to fifty. It was easy to hide coins in the hold or simply to wait for the
customs officers to disappear before taking the cash on board.8 This passion
for Chinese coins was stimulated by a simple, obvious feature of cash: copper
coins did not deteriorate, whereas payment in silk, common earlier, involved
the use of material that could be soiled, torn or burned; and an alternative to
silk was rice, which was far more bulky and no less likely to deteriorate. The
use of coin reduced transaction costs for itinerant merchants, as it was no
longer necessary to shift bulk goods around in order to make payment.9
Besides, there was a sense of connecting to Chinese culture when using
Chinese coins, and this was felt as much in Korea or Vietnam as it was in
Japan; these coins may have been plentiful, but they possessed prestige.
The Japanese court came to prefer private trade to formal exchanges of
tribute for gifts, but that did not mean they were keen to see foreign
merchants turning up all over their empire. In the tenth century, suspicion of
these outsiders led the government to control the number of times a merchant
could visit Japan – Chinese visitors were limited to one trip every three years
and trips overseas by Japanese traders were strongly discouraged. The
obvious way round this for Chinese merchants who were stopped by the
Japanese authorities was to claim that the fierce currents of the open sea had
carried them willy-nilly to Kyushu. And, once they had arrived, local
officials declared they could not go back until the winds turned, a polite way
of allowing them to stay without breaking out-of-date rules. Or Chinese
merchants might simply claim on tenuous grounds that they were acting on
behalf of a high official.10 Hakata Bay remained the point of contact with
China, and the government made up for the disappearance of handsome gifts
from the Tang court by insisting on the compulsory purchase of the luxury
goods it required, setting its own price.11
Chinese books were in special demand at court, including Buddhist
religious texts such as the Lotus Sutra and collections of Tang poetry; in the
early eleventh century the regent Fujiwara no Michinaga was given the Tang
anthology three times, and in 1010 he gave a printed copy, with commentary,
to the emperor. The first printed book to arrive in Japan was brought by a
monk named Chōnen in 986, and consisted of a collection of the main
Buddhist texts that had recently been produced in Chengdu after twelve years
spent laboriously preparing the woodblocks. Thereafter the Japanese fell in
love with printing.
 Buddhist rituals also demanded specific perfumes for different occasions,
so any chance to obtain these across the sea needed to be seized, while fine
perfumes appear again and again in The Tale of Genji.12 Admiration for
Chinese culture remained the key to Japanese trade with China. In the later
Middle Ages a more self-confident Japan became less embarrassed at
presenting itself as culturally the equal of its old teacher, while Japan
remained hungry for Chinese goods, so that trade burgeoned, achieving much
greater volumes than in the years around 900. Yet the appetite for Chinese
books, though strong, weakened somewhat as the Japanese began to produce
their own court literature, in their own script and language.
One of the most lasting influences across the sea was the popularization of
tea, which was originally a very special drink; the Zen Buddhists spread
knowledge of tea-drinking in the twelfth century, as an aid to contemplation.
Tea parties enhanced by a tasting of fine dishes made of rice, noodles, tofu
and exotic fruit, as well as poetry readings, became fashionable in high
society from 1185, during the Kamakura period. Japan began to produce its
own excellent tea (the imperial court demanded tribute in tea as early as 815);
but it was common to sample both Chinese and Japanese teas at these events,
and high-quality Jian bowls were imported all the way from southern China
for just this purpose. Rather later, in the eighteenth century, the tea lodge and
tea ceremony came into fashion, and the rituals were codified. At first, tea
was drunk after steeping the leaves, or part of a brick of powdered tea, in
water; tradition attributes the arrival of whisked matcha, powdered green tea
drunk thick and strong, to the traveller Eisai, who had tasted something
similar in China at the end of the twelfth century. Both documents and
material finds (Chinese tea bowls) show that this type of tea was known
earlier.13 Still, the crucial point is that the sea route from China continued to
bring ideas and practices to Japan. Tea, with its close links to Buddhism, had
a special impact, but there were other favourite luxuries that came across the
waves. Imported parrots had already fascinated the Heian court in the
eleventh century, especially since they seemed to be perfectly capable of
learning Japanese. Even while the imperial court in Tang China officially
disapproved of private trade across the sea, the desire for gold, in which (as
Marco Polo later pointed out) Japan was rich, richer than much of China,
made tolerance of this traffic inescapable; and the same applied to pearls,
whether from Honshu or from the island of Tsushima, a product that is still
the pride of Japan:14 ‘Their trade ships arrive on our shores by a north-
easterly wind, and they bring us all sorts of merchandise: products of high
value – gold leaf, gold dust, decorative pearls, pearls for medicinal use,
mercury, stag horn …’15 To these could be added lacquered boxes and
folding fans.16 All this testifies to the fact that not just Japanese merchants
but Japanese mariners were gaining in confidence after the disastrous China
voyages of Ennin’s time.
It proved impossible to control foreign traders once they began to arrive in
large numbers. At Hakata, a town began to develop where, in the early days
of the Kōrokan, there had been only very limited facilities. Moreover, Hakata
contained a large colony of Chinese settlers, some of whom married Japanese
women and produced a generation of mixed parentage, who could then claim
to be Japanese and exempt from any restrictions on foreigners. Good
connections helped; in 1150 just such a merchant exchanged Chinese books
for thirty ounces of gold dust from the Minister of the Left, the senior
minister at court, and was asked to bring even more Chinese books to his
patron. In the twelfth century 1,600 Chinese families are said to have lived in
Hakata Bay; meanwhile the Koreans gradually disappeared from the
maritime trade routes.17 During the excavation of the metro at Fukoaka, the
city on Kyushu which incorporates the medieval port of Hakata, 35,000
fragments of native and Chinese pottery were found, the latter coming mainly
from centres of production on the Chinese coasts. Some of this pottery was of
very high quality. The fragments included sherds of pale green celadon
wares, as well as the white pottery of Yuezhou which was known sometimes
under the name hisoku, or ‘forbidden object’, because it was originally
reserved to the Chinese imperial family alone, but here it was in Hakata on its
way, presumably, to the imperial court at Kyoto (also known as Heian, which
had replaced Nara as the seat of government several centuries earlier).18
Everyone tried to cash in on this trade. At the start of the eleventh century,
the Fujiwara clan were happy to obtain foreign goods such as furs, medicines
and perfumes by way of the estates they held on Kyushu, even though direct
contact with foreign merchants had until recently been officially prohibited.
Among these luxury imports were pigments such as verdigris, a by-product
of oxidized copper used to make green paint.19
This trade between Japan and the mainland underwent a series of distinct
phases in the Middle Ages. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, there is
fuller evidence for regular commercial exchanges. At least one well-laden
vessel a year reached Hakata full of luxury goods for the Japanese elite.20
This does not sound like very much, and the presence of Chinese settlers at
Hakata, not to mention the mountains of pottery, suggests that there was
much more movement back and forth to China. Some of the settlers were
keen to introduce their own artisan skills to Japan, whether in pottery,
metalwork or woodwork, and (as the objects in the Shōsō-in depository at
Nara reveal) the court collected both objects from distant parts of Asia and
local copies of them. Hakata stood at some remove from the centres of power
at Nara and Kyoto. Hakata stood even further from the new power base that
was created after 1185 at Kamakura, beyond modern Tokyo, following a
brief but violent civil war between the Minamoto and Taira clans.21 The
bakufu based at Kamakura was less well able to control the day-to-day affairs
of Kyushu island; provincial nobles gained greater power in areas far from
the centre, and towns and trade and fairs expanded under their patronage.22
The wreck of a Chinese junk found off the Korean coast, the Sinan wreck,
provides eloquent testimony to this commercial expansion. Over the
centuries, half the hull had been destroyed by the waves; but the area below
decks had become buried in mud, and beneath the hatch, within a hull divided
into seven partitions, there survived a treasure trove of Chinese goods, some
of which were still neatly packed in the wooden containers in which they had
been loaded on board. Twenty-eight metres long and about a quarter of that at
maximum width, the ship could carry up to 200 tons of cargo. Eighteen
thousand pieces of pottery, predominantly Chinese (including about 2,900
celadon wares), were found on board, along with thin-walled, high-quality
porcelain bowls made in China and vases with pedestals that had originated
in south-east Asia. The light-green celadons, from the period of Mongol rule
in China (the Yuan dynasty) include delightful jars with dragon-shaped
handles and with floral relief, as well as the classic plain bowls whose
trademark is their sheer simplicity. On the other hand, the lack of the famous
blue-and-white porcelain among the finds suggests that these wares were still
jealously confined to China itself, on the eve of the great expansion in their
production that would make them the favourite product of China, exported all
over the known world.23 Another impressive part of the cargo consisted of
eighteen tons of Chinese copper coins, generally strung together and carrying
a wooden tag with their owner’s name, making a total of more than 8,000,000
coins; this gives some idea of the sheer scale of the drainage of bullion out of
China.24 One chest had been packed full of pepper. Very few Korean goods
were found in the cargo, so it is unlikely that the ship stopped for any length
of time at a Korean port, even though it coasted past Korea itself. The ship
was apparently wrecked while it was sailing from Ningbo on the Chinese
coast to Japan, on the account of the Tōfuku-ji Zen Buddhist monastery of
Kyoto, whose name appears on several of the wooden tags, as does a date
corresponding to 1323, which is the probable date of the disaster at sea. This
was one of the great monasteries of Kyoto, but it had burned down a few
years earlier and was seeking to finance its rebuilding programme by
investing in a grand trading expedition.25 Korean experts think that the ship
was actually bound for Okinawa and south-east Asia after it called in at a
Japanese port, presumably Hakata.26
The private trade was increasingly compromised by the activities of the
pirates from Tsushima and western Kyushu known as wakō; this became a
particularly severe problem from the fourteenth century onwards, and
provides further evidence that trade was flourishing, since there was clearly
good business to be done by interlopers.27 Once they had seized other
people’s cargoes, these pirates would turn into merchants and sell the goods
for profit. Surprisingly, since it is such a narrow space that one would have
expected it to be easy to supervise, the Inland Sea through which shipping
had to pass to reach the outports of Kyoto from Hakata was a particularly
pirate-infested area. It had long been a lively zone of exchange where large
quantities of goods such as rice were transported from the islands of Shikoku
and Kyushu to the province of Kinai, where Nara and Kyoto lay; it has been
seen that the Japanese had excellent experience of short-range navigation, but
for a long time were hopeless navigators out in the open ocean. However, by
the late Middle Ages there is plentiful evidence of lively trade out of one of
those outports, Hyogo, in a customs register of 1445, which reveals that
nearly 2,000 vessels passed through one tollgate in a year, heading in the
direction of Kyoto.28 One historian speaks of the twelfth to the fourteenth
centuries as a time of active free trade, culminating in the fifteenth century in
a balance of trade that was favourable to the Japanese.
The end of the Middle Ages saw major political transformations in Japan,
Korea and China, as earlier dynasties were supplanted – the Mongol Yuan
were replaced by the longlasting, native Ming dynasty in 1368, and an even
longer-lasting royal house, the Li, took charge in Koryŏ (Korea). Fourteenth-
century Japan was a battleground between rival clans that sought political
power, though not the imperial throne, for the emperors had been pushed to
one side by the shoguns and had become ciphers. These conflicts within
Japan seem actually to have fostered trade; the shoguns encouraged trade
since they were keen to raise ever larger sums from taxation, and the land
alone could not meet the expense of maintaining the military establishment
they required. During this period, the coastal village of Sakai, on Ōsaka Bay,
with its ready access by road to Kyoto, grew into a commercial city trading as
far afield as China, and enjoyed the support of the Ashikaga shoguns. Sakai
grew and grew and in the early sixteenth century it was home to 30,000
people; it retained a degree of autonomy, while remaining dependent on the
favours of the warlords who controlled the area around Kyoto that Sakai was
well placed to service.29
Contact with China was not always peaceful, and the first Ming emperor,
Hung Wu-ti, delivered a severe telling-off to the Japanese when he sent a
messenger to Kyushu in 1369, carrying a letter that complained bitterly of
Japanese piracy. The sending of a mission was not a signal that Japan was
being treated as an equal: the Ming emperor was determined to reclaim
Chinese sovereignty over the entire expanse from Java and Cambodia to
Korea and Japan; and Hung was also conscious of his peasant origins and
therefore anxious to present himself as an emperor in the great Chinese
tradition. And yet, paradoxically, the Chinese emperor banned Chinese
merchants from trading overseas, preferring to revert to the old system of
tributary embassies – those from Korea were welcome to come several times
a year, and those from other kingdoms, such as Okinawa, much less often.
The Japanese rulers did not react kindly to the reproofs that kept coming from
their Ming counterparts, which even included hints that China would invade
Japan:

The Chinese Minister of Rites: You should look into the events of the
past thousand years for reference. Examine them carefully! … If you
really wish to find out who would win and lose and which of us is
right or wrong, and which side is the stronger or weaker, I am afraid it
would not be to your advantage. Examine this carefully!

Prince Kanenaga: Heaven and earth are vast; they are not
monopolised by one ruler. The universe is great and wide, and various
 countries are created each to have a share in its rule. Now the world is
the world’s world; it does not belong to a single person.30

Defiance, which was very rare, only made relations more difficult, and the
Japanese learned that the political price was an occasional admission that
even the Japanese emperor was a vassal of the Chinese one. However, this
admission could bring great dividends: at the time of the early Ming voyages,
around 1400, the Chinese sought to take tribute from a vast swathe of east
Asia and the Indian Ocean; but the Japanese were compliant and were
rewarded with gifts of silk, silver and lacquer, and were able to maintain their
exports of horses and armaments to the mainland. Later, in 1432–3, these
included over 3,000 sabres, and nearly 10,000 sabres in 1453. And then there
was the massive political dividend, for acceptance of Ming overlordship,
which involved no interference in the government of Japan itself, helped
secure the claims of the Ashikaga shoguns to rule Japan.31
This was a period in which control of the shipping routes off the Asian
coasts shifted away from the Chinese, who had dominated navigation for
several centuries, into the hands of other peoples, including the Japanese,
though many of these were wakō pirates. The ban on foreign travel that
applied to Chinese merchants and mariners left others free to ply the seas,
and opportunities were seized by all the peoples of the islands that flank
China, from Japan to Java. Japan was visited by ships from Siam and Java
around 1400. In 1406 a Javan ship bound for Korea was carrying parrots,
peacocks, pepper and camphor, and not surprisingly it was seized by
Japanese pirates; however, five years later a Javan mission reached Kyushu
safely.32 A particularly important role was played by the autonomous
kingdom in the Ryukyu islands, with its centre at Okinawa, on the southern
edge of this Japanese Mediterranean; this region provided southward links,
connecting the Japanese seas to some of the longer-distance trade routes as
far as the Malacca Strait (home to Melaka, Palembang and Temasek, the
modern Singapore), which had become once again a very significant centre
of the spice trade in the fifteenth century. Chinese withdrawal thus had the
paradoxical effect of opening up the seas.

II
Although there are occasional accounts of sea battles off Korea, and although
the wakō pirates became an increasing worry, the maritime history of the
waters between Japan, China and Java is mainly a history of relatively
peaceful relations. There were many tensions, revealed by the attempts to ban
private trade by Japanese merchants, or to prevent the export of coin from
China, but mass invasions were a rarity. The great exception is the Mongol
attacks on Japan, news of which reached as far as western Europe, thanks to
Marco Polo; indeed, his account of what happened furnishes valuable details
that have been corroborated, as will be seen, by marine archaeologists, and by
remarkable illustrated scrolls dating from between 1294 and 1316 that were
copied again and again over the centuries for Japanese scholars.33 The
Mongol attacks both were the product of the Mongols’ own insistence that
the Great Khan was appointed by Heaven to rule the world (and woe betide
those who opposed the divine command), and also betray the influence of
earlier Chinese ideas about the superiority of the Middle Kingdom over all
other territories. The Chinese ideas were adopted and adapted by Khubilai,
the member of the Mongol royal house who seized control of China and
established the Yuan dynasty, conquering the Southern Song capital at
Hangzhou in 1275.34 Khubilai also coveted Japan’s famed wealth in gold
and pearls. He proposed to tap into the wealth of Japan by exacting a large
tribute, if at all possible, but if that were to prove impossible, the single-word
answer any Mongol khan was bound to give was ‘war’.
Although doubt has been cast on the claim that Khubilai Khan and Marco
Polo even met, Polo’s account of Japan must reflect stories that he heard
somewhere out in the East:

I will tell you a wonderful thing about the palace of the Lord of that
island. You must know that he has a great palace which is entirely
roofed with fine gold, just as our churches are roofed with lead,
insomuch that it would scarcely be possible to estimate its value.
Moreover, all the pavement of the palace, and the floors of its
chambers, are entirely of gold, in plates like slabs of stone, a good
two fingers thick; and the windows are also of gold, so that altogether
the richness of this palace is past all bounds and belief. They have
also pearls in abundance, which are of a rose colour, but fine, big, and
round, and quite as valuable as the white ones. They also have
quantities of other precious stones. Khubilai, the Great Khan who
 now reigns, having heard much of the immense wealth that was in this
island, formed a plan to get possession of it.35

A contemporary Buddhist monk from Japan, Togen Eian, thought that the
Mongols were awestruck by the quality of Japanese armour and the
excellence of Japanese archers: ‘our armour makes even the gods tremble …
Once Japan’s warriors are under their control they will be able to conquer
China and India.’ He argued that ‘with the strength of Japan and the Mongols
combined, no country could resist. That is why the Mongols now desire to
subjugate Japan.’36
Even so, Khubilai might well have left Japan alone and might have
concentrated more on Vietnam (another obsession), but for the breakdown of
Mongol relations with Koryŏ, whose king was now master of all Korea. At
the start of the thirteenth century, as Mongol power spread over vast tracts to
east and west, the Koreans had co-operated with the Mongols, even sending
troops to help them subdue troublesome neighbours in northern China in
1219, though they had to agree to send a heavy tribute to the Mongol khan,
and the Mongol treatment of the Koreans swung between extremes. The
Koreans had their own grievances against the Japanese as a result of the raids
by the wakō pirates, which carried on until 1265.37 A Korean supporter of
the Mongols named Ch’oe-I fed information to Khubilai, who seems to have
been impressed by Ch’oe-I’s account of the sophisticated customs of the
Japanese. He suggested that Khubilai Khan might like to send an exploratory
embassy to Japan, and when a letter from the khan reached Japan, at the start
of 1268 (though it had actually been written in August 1266), the message
was unusually friendly from a Mongol perspective, even though the letter
threatened war if the Japanese did not agree to cordial relations, with the not
so diplomatically phrased question: ‘it will lead to war, and who is there who
likes such a state of things? Think of this, O king!’38 There was a second
letter from the king of Koryŏ begging the Japanese to take heed, and pointing
out that Khubilai had no intention of interfering with the running of the
Japanese Empire. At this stage Khubilai was not inclined to go further than
mild threats. He still had to take control of the lands of the Southern Song in
China’s deep south, and was building up his power in Korea. He may have
felt that he could not ignore Japan, because of its strong trade relations with
his Southern Song enemies; the Japanese were probably sending essential
supplies to the Song, such as weapons. Song refugees who reached Japan
included dozens of very influential Buddhist monks of the Zen school; in a
sense, the Japanese kept Song culture alive when China lay under Yuan rule,
for the bakufu, the Japanese military elite, wished to project an image of
themselves as refined followers of Chinese fashion able to compete with the
scholars and poets of the closeted imperial court at Kyoto. On the other hand,
Khubilai had no particular quarrel with Japan, which posed no direct military
threat.39
The shogun’s government was, however, wise to Mongol wiles; precisely
because there was now regular contact across the sea with the Song, the
shogun knew perfectly well what the Mongols demanded of their subjects,
notably punitive amounts of tribute. The islands themselves seemed safe. The
Mongols had never ventured across the sea. Why should one concern oneself
with empty threats? So the bakufu in Kamakura chose to send back the
envoys with no reply. There was the same reaction at Kyoto from the court of
the emperor, in whose name any recognition of Mongol superiority would
have been made, even though real power rested with the shogun and bakufu.
In 1269 seventy Mongols and Koreans turned up on Tsushima and demanded
an answer to the khan’s letters; once again the shogun did not deign to
answer and the mission returned home with a couple of captives, who were
allowed to visit Khubilai’s palace before being sent home, in the hope that
their reports of his power and grandeur would shock the bakufu into a
response; even then there was silence in Japan.40 But after rejecting the
khan’s approach and hearing rather more about Khubilai’s character and aims
the Japanese began to show signs that they were more rattled than they had
been willing to admit while the original envoys were in their midst. They
even drafted a reply at long last; but it was never sent. They required prayers
for peace to be recited, and they issued a ritual curse against the Mongols. In
addition, the Japanese laid plans for a raid on the coast of Korea, to knock out
whatever facilities were in place for building a fleet to attack Japan. When it
became more obvious that the Mongol threat was not an idle one, the
Japanese decided that attacking Korea would only make things worse.
In October 1274 the first Mongol assault duly struck Japan. In fact, it was a
joint attack by the Mongol khan’s army and navy and by the army and navy
of his vassal the king of Koryŏ. Nine hundred ships took the predictable route
past Tsushima island to Hakata Bay, the shortest direct route from the
southern tip of Korea.41 There were said to be nearly 30,000 men on board,
though this figure should be taken with a pinch of salt. To strike terror into
their foes, the Mongols are said to have nailed the naked corpses of Japanese
women to the thwarts of their ships.42 Hakata was set on fire, but the
Japanese put up a very tough resistance. The samurai Takezaki Suenaga
recorded in his illustrated scrolls how he encountered another Japanese
warrior who had had a productive day:

I met a warrior on a dapple grey horse at Komatsubara. He wore

purple armour with a reverse arrowhead design, and a crimson
billowing cape and, having just defeated the invaders at their
encampment, was returning with a hundred horsemen. The pirates had
fled. Two had been taken. He looked most brave and had two
retainers walking before him on his left and right carrying heads – one
pierced on a sword, the other on a naginata [rather like a halberd].
‘Who passes here looking so brave?’ I asked, and he replied:
‘I am Kikuchi Jirō Takefusa of Higo province. Who are you?’
‘I am Takezaki Gorō Hyōe Suenaga of the same province. Watch
me attack!’
Saying so, I charged.43

After a day of fighting against such highly motivated heroes, the Mongol–
Korean forces withdrew discomfited.44
Khubilai was even more determined to conquer Japan after the humiliation
of the rapid defeat suffered in 1274; but for the moment he concentrated on a
much more important target, the conquest of southern China. The year after
the Japanese fiasco he could take pride in the occupation of Hangzhou; in
1277 the great port of Quanzhou, which Marco Polo claimed to know well,
surrendered, after its leaders realized that any hope of maintaining its
prominent position in maritime trade would be left in ruins by a Mongol
assault on the city. In 1279 the Mongols proved that they could win a major
battle at sea: only nine Song ships escaped destruction or capture, out of a
fleet of 900; and the admiral not merely committed suicide by jumping into
the waves, but threw the child emperor into the sea as well. The Song dynasty
was extinguished.45
The second attack on Japan took place six and a half years after the first;
the Mongols conscripted large numbers of former Song soldiers into their
army for the new attack on Japan. This time the Great Khan intended not just
to impose Mongol overlordship but to settle the land, for the ships carried
farm tools as well as weapons. Those awaiting death sentences were released
so long as they agreed to serve in the vast army Khubilai Khan was putting
together. But the Japanese were once again confident, to what might seem a
foolhardy degree, in their ability to survive this assault. They decided to
admit the Mongol ambassadors to Kamakura, which must have seemed a
good sign; but once the ambassadors arrived, they were beheaded and their
heads were put on display, rendering attack inevitable.46 Painfully aware that
Hakata had been destroyed during the brief attack in 1274, the government
ordered a long stone wall, twelve and a half miles long, to be built around
Hakata Bay, bits of which still survive.47 And Hakata Bay became the scene
of intense fighting on sea and on land, as the Japanese ships and ground
troops harried the much larger invasion force that had come by way of the
islands of Tsushima and Iki, while a second wave of attackers gathered at the
western tip of Kyushu, off the little offshore island of Takeshima.48
Among acts of bravery those of Kawano Michiari stand out; he had already
helped resist the invaders in 1274, and this time he showed how brave he was
by standing outside the defensive wall and engaging directly with the
invaders. One day he saw a heron pick up an arrow and drop it on one of the
Mongol ships. This was surely an augury of Japanese victory; so he and his
uncle decided the time had come to strike a blow at the heart of the Mongol
fleet. They set out across the bay in a couple of small boats; they had no
difficulty penetrating the Mongol fleet, because the Mongols thought they
must be bringing an offer to submit; so they came alongside one of the
flagships whose astonished crew surrendered after Kawano had killed a
fearsome giant of a soldier.49 Kawano took one of the Mongol generals
prisoner, even though he was wounded in the shoulder, and even though his
uncle was killed. Kawano then had time to write a poem commemorating his
achievement while he was heading back to dry land.50 These exploits made
him a Japanese hero. Under the military rule of the bakufu, esteem for the
martial prowess of the samurai had risen to new heights; one or two
defenders of Japan against the Mongols were even worshipped as gods by
later generations.
All these efforts were not enough to hold back the waves of invaders.
Korean ships arrived in Tsushima; the islanders tried to escape to the hills,
but the cries of their children gave away their hiding places, and the Koreans
ruthlessly massacred the islanders. The invaders then bombarded the
inhabitants of Iki, the next island between Korea and Japan, with exploding
ceramic spheres launched from catapults. On the other hand, the cramped
conditions on board the Mongol navy helped disease to spread, with the loss
of 3,000 men, as Chinese sources admitted. The Mongol commanders found
it impossible to co-ordinate the actions of the different detachments arriving
from Korea and from much further south, and they realized that Hakata Bay
was well defended and not suitable for a mass landing. The naval
detachments that had arrived near Hakata Bay lashed their ships together to
create a continuous line of boats, a sort of counter-wall, facing off the
Japanese but without very clear objectives about what to do next.51 Small
Japanese boats pestered the Mongol fleet like wasps, crowding the waters.
Takezaki Suenaga described the chaos in Hakata Bay:

‘I am acting on secret orders. Let me on the boat!’

I brought my boat by Takamasa’s.
‘The shugo [provincial governor] did not order you here. Get your
boat out of here!’
Having no recourse I replied: ‘As you know, I have not been called
up by the shugo. I am the deputy shugo but arrived late. Heed my
command.’
‘Lord Tsumori is on the boat. There is no more room.’52

In the end, Takezaki was allowed to board, and fought with vigour, even
though he was wounded.
Nonetheless, all was going quite well for the Mongols, who managed to
hold a patch of land for a while, though they were beaten back to the offshore
islands. That was not the same as seeing them off; the threat remained real.
And then, in answer to the defenders’ prayers, ‘a green dragon raised its head
from the waves’, the sky darkened and suddenly a great typhoon struck.
Many ships, still fully loaded with soldiers, were tossed around the sea or on
to dry land, and others collided with one another. It has been suggested that it
was no more than an easterly wind that blew the Mongol ships back to the
Asian mainland just when they were inclined to withdraw anyway. Some
Japanese writers, notably the warrior Takezaki Suenaga, who was there, do
not mention this ‘divine wind’.53 Yet the hard physical evidence that will be
confronted in a moment tells a different, and more traditional, story.
Japanese, Chinese and Korean descriptions of what happened largely concur,
so the fact that this ‘divine wind’, or kami-kaze, became such a powerful
Japanese legend should not obscure its historical foundation. It is said
100,000 men drowned and 4,000 ships sank, for which read perhaps 10,000
men and 400 ships.54
One of the most fascinating accounts of the Mongol invasion was provided
by the Venetian Marco Polo. He was only aware of one attack on Japan, the
second one – he knew the name of one of the commanders of the second
invasion force, Abacan; Chinese whispers apparently transformed the name
of the other, Fan Wenhu, into Vonsainchin.55 According to Marco Polo,
these two ‘barons’ in charge of the expedition deeply disliked one another.
They were ‘able and valiant men’, and they set out as ordered from the ports
of Zaytun (Quanzhou) and Quinsay (Hangzhou), important centres of trade
towards south-east Asia. They landed in Japan, and Polo tells a vivid atrocity
story in which eight Japanese men were sent for execution, but it proved
impossible to cut off their heads or to inflict any wound whatsoever, as they
possessed a magic stone inserted under their skin; and as a result the cruel
Mongols beat them to death instead. Before long, however, a very great wind
came and the Mongols were forced to leave; many ships sank, but 30,000
men under the command of one of the barons took refuge on an uninhabited
desert island, hoping that the remaining fleet, which was under the command
of the other baron, would come and rescue them. They could see the fleet
moving ahead under full sail, but ‘the baron who escaped never showed the
slightest desire to return to his colleague who was left on the island’.
Thereupon the Japanese sent their own fleet to this island; the shipwrecked
army fled into the hills and, while the Japanese sought them out, the Mongols
crept down to the Japanese ships and commandeered them; they then sailed
with Japanese banners flying to what he calls ‘the Great Island’, where they
were greeted as returning Japanese heroes. So they landed and marched on
the Japanese capital, which they seized. The Japanese counterattacked and
besieged the capital, and after seven months the Mongols agreed to surrender,
‘on condition that their lives should be spared’. Meanwhile, the fate of the
two barons was much grimmer: they did manage to reach home, but they
were sent off to be executed, because one had fled and the other ‘had never
behaved as a good soldier ought to do’.56
It is obvious that Marco Polo’s stories of Japan are a mixture of truth and
fiction, as are his stories of other parts of east Asia. At some points in his
account of the Mongol attack he seems to inhabit the world of fairy tales,
with magic stones and a non-existent occupation of Kyoto or another city.
Polo’s account of the rivalry between the commanders is certainly credible;
and the Japanese chronicle mentions their disappearance, presumed lost at
sea. In the Japanese version a commander fell ill and the other did not quite
know what to do; the impression is of chaotic lack of leadership rather than a
falling-out between rivals. Polo should not be ignored, then, but the best
evidence for what happened comes from the physical remains of the Mongol
fleet and army. One clue was a bronze Mongol seal dating from 1277, the
property of an army commander, that was found on the island of Takashima,
visited by the second wave of Mongols en route to Japan. This seemed to
confirm that the anchors, catapult balls, pottery and other equipment
discovered offshore by a team of divers were the residue of the shattered
Mongol fleet. When pieces of wood were raised from the deep, it proved
possible to date them to the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, and the presence
of white porcelain from southern China also seemed to confirm that this was
the fleet the Great Khan had sent from there against Japan. These were very
large ships, as much as 200 feet long, and they were largely constructed out
of camphor wood. As proof that the archaeologists had not simply found the
shipwreck of a merchant vessel carrying fine ceramics, there were the
swords, arrows, crossbow bolts and bombs made of baked earth and packed
with shrapnel – and even part of the skeleton of a warrior surrounded by his
helmet and the remains of his leather armour. There were the anchors of ships
that had broken their cables, which pointed towards the shore, suggesting that
the ships had been hurled by the wind towards the coast, where those that had
survived so far had been smashed into pieces. The decision to lash the ships
together and to create a floating wall had proved utterly disastrous. As one
ship was picked up by the surging seas, it carried along its neighbours.57 But
the most telling evidence of all came from analysis of the wooden fragments
of the ships themselves. Rust marks showed that the planks had been nailed
together in a rather haphazard way. Either the ships had been poorly repaired
after previous outings, or they had been incompetently constructed from the
start. Preparing a vast fleet against a deadline had an inevitable consequence:
ships were approved for service when they had not been properly checked
(even though one piece of wood found underwater was an inspection
certificate issued after something, very probably a ship, had been repaired).
Many pots taken on board were poorly made, as if they had been rushed
through the kilns, and there are doubts about the efficiency of a large stone
anchor made in two pieces, again in apparent haste.58 The conclusion is that
the Mongol fleet may well have been overwhelmed by a storm, but that the
ships had much less chance of surviving a typhoon because they had been so
poorly constructed, and they fell apart under stress. The discovery of part of
the remains of the Great Khan’s fleet is one of the major achievements of
marine archaeology, and fits well with the narrative accounts.
When the second attack failed, Khubilai Khan turned his main attention to
Vietnam and Java, with no more success. Marco Polo knew that Khubilai’s
efforts to conquer Java had failed. Here again Khubilai’s interest was surely
prompted by the wealth of the island and its close trading links to China,
which Polo particularly stressed. In the case of Vietnam, his excuse for
conquest was that the kingdom of Đại Việt had offered refuge to leading
members of the Song government, while another Indo-Chinese kingdom,
Champa, was an important centre of trade and piracy. The defenders of Đại
Việt also witnessed the destruction of a Mongol fleet, during the battle of
Bạch Đằng, which was fought in a river mouth against tens, maybe hundreds,
of thousands of invaders in 1287; but this time the destruction of the fleet was
accomplished by human efforts, after the Vietnamese attacked the fleet with
blazing arrows and then sent burning bamboo rafts towards the ships.59
The Yuan dynasty not surprisingly played down the embarrassment of its
defeats at sea, in Japan, Vietnam and Java. Relations between China and
Japan recovered remarkably quickly after 1281. Trading ships moved back
and forth between the two countries as if nothing much had happened; the
Yuan government licensed regular visits to China by Japanese ships.
However, their victories against the odds became the subject of great pride
for the Japanese, who were convinced that their prayers to the gods had been
answered; at the imperial court in Kyoto, it was argued that the prayers of the
Shintō priests at the great shrine of Ise had persuaded the gods to send the
great black cloud that emerged out of a clear sky; out of it sped the arrow of
the gods that roared like a typhoon, while the sea rose up in a great mountain
of a tsunami and crushed the invasion fleet into splinters.60 The victory not
merely brought prestige to the imperial court and the Shintō establishment,
but confirmed the wisdom of the warrior bakufu in Kamakura, with their
links to the Zen Buddhists. Both sides in the complex system of rule therefore
benefited. More than that, continuing mobilization, made necessary by the
threat of a third invasion, justified the extension of Kamakuran authority over
larger areas of Japan, including tracts of the islands of Shikoku and Kyushu.
It has been argued that ‘the bakufu became a truly national power only after
this war’.61 And the ‘divine wind’ would be invoked nearly seven centuries
later by the kami-kaze pilots of the Japanese imperial air force.

III

The chain of the Ryukyu islands, of which the best-known is Okinawa, is a

perfect example of a small and apparently insignificant archipelago that
profited from its middle position to acquire wealth and influence. Its rulers
insisted that they lived on poor and barren islands, which was precisely the
reason that their subjects learned to make money by acting as intermediaries
with the rest of the west Pacific rim. In 1433 the king of Chuzan in the
Ryukyu islands wrote to the king of Siam: ‘this country is deficient in articles
of tribute’, and proceeded to send a ship to Siam loaded not with local goods
but with Chinese porcelain.62 There were a few local products that were
admired overseas: horses, mother-of-pearl and red dye, but the products of
Chinese and Japanese craftsmanship took priority when loading a cargo.63
What was distinctive about the people of the Ryukyu islands was that the
inhabitants took the initiative themselves, seizing the opportunity created by
the withdrawal from the sea of their mighty neighbour Ming China. The
Ryukyu islands were colonized from many directions in the very remote past,
but links to Japan have always been especially strong; one can sail in good
weather from the island chain towards Kyushu without losing sight of land,
and over the centuries settlers arrived in the islands from southern Japan.
Early in the seventh century AD the Chinese emperor, perhaps seduced by the
idea that these islands were the Land of Happy Immortals, sent an expedition
in this direction and carried off many prisoners, and Chinese coins from this
period prove that there was indeed contact with the mainland at this stage.64
Even so, it was only at the end of the seventh century that Japanese officials
began to take serious notice of their southern neighbours. No doubt a
particular reason for doing so was that the Japanese emperor was keen to
show that he, like the emperor of China, received tribute from subordinate
peoples.65
Bitter strife between the great noble clans of Taira and Minamoto in Japan
in the middle of the twelfth century spilled over into the Ryukyu island chain.
A keen opponent of the Taira named Tamemoto no Minamoto was a skilled
archer; he had been brought up on Kyushu and he joined a Minamoto assault
on Kyoto, only to be captured. He was lucky to escape execution, but his
punishment was still cruel: the sinews of his bow-arm were severed, and he
was sent to the Izu islands off the tip of Kyushu, where he spent fourteen
years of dull exile. From there, in one tradition, he is said to have been blown
across to Onigashima, ‘Devil’s Island’, which may be Okinawa, after his boat
was caught in a storm. He had only intended to travel the small distance
between two Izu islands, but now he seized the opportunity to make friends
with the king, and ended up marrying his daughter. A child, Shunten, was
born who would later rule the Ryukyus; but Tamemoto was always keen to
return to the fray, and so, leaving behind his wife and child, he sailed back to
Japan, where the Deputy Governor of Izu smashed his little army to pieces.
Rather than submitting, Tamemoto committed seppuku, better known as
hara-kiri, a ceremony that was coming into fashion about now. That, at least,
is the story, but it probably elaborates a less dramatic history of wandering
warriors who offered their services to the chieftains of Okinawa, of whom the
partly Japanese Shunten was one.
Japanese influence grew on the islands, marked by the arrival of a writing
system based on the syllabic signs of Japanese script. However, the
Ryukyuans did not adopt the additional and complex Chinese characters that
had become locked into Japanese script, and relied on the plain syllables only
– something most people staring at Japanese writing would consider a very
wise decision.66 The Japanese port of Sakai entertained very close trading
ties with Ryukyu in the fifteenth century, and contact was stimulated by tea-
drinking – this generated a passion for tea bowls and other tea equipment that
passed into the islands, while Zen vegetarianism seems to have brought new
fashions in food and new types of shredding bowl suitable for ascetic Zen
menus. In return, the Japanese could acquire Chinese paintings, pottery and
metalware, which also passed through the islands.67 Once again one has to
rely on late traditions, but Buddhism is said to have spread within these
islands only after a monk named Zenkan was shipwrecked there around
1270.68 Uniting the islands, which stretch over hundreds of miles, was
beyond the capacity of the chieftains of Okinawa, much the largest island,
which stands two thirds of the way down the chain and lies closer to Taiwan
than to Kyushu.
Further fragmentation of power in fourteenth-century Japan had serious
consequences in the Ryukyus. The Ashikaga shoguns recognized a noble
family from Kyushu as ‘Lords of the Twelve Southern Islands’, though they
had already been holding that office for a while. This did nothing to solve
internal problems in Okinawa (the ‘kingdom of Chuzan’), for Chuzan, like
Japan itself, was divided among competing warlords. One of these, Satto, had
seized power after the death of the king in 1349, and was dazzled by a
Chinese embassy that arrived in 1372 with the intention of asserting the
imperial authority of the Ming dynasty, which had launched a coup against
the Mongols four years earlier. Satto was evidently impressed with the gifts
he received, along with those that arrived following a trip to the Ming court
by his brother, who returned with a seal of investiture, as if the Chinese had
conferred the crown that Satto had usurped nearly twenty years before the
Ming revolution had even succeeded. The Okinawan ambassadors won praise
for their punctilious observance of the exacting rituals that tributary
embassies had to undergo, including the nine ritual prostrations known as
koutou (kowtow); they were the first people to accept Ming claims, before the
Vietnamese, Siamese and others, and they continued to pay tribute for many
centuries without complaint.69 Not for nothing did the king of Choson in
Korea write to the king of Chuzan in Ryukyu: ‘we reaffirm that every nation
washed by the oceans is under the influence of China.’70
The pay-off was the lively trade conducted through official channels, as
well as a certain amount of surreptitious trade: in 1381 the interpreter
attached to the Ryukyu mission was discovered attempting to smuggle a
sizeable cargo of spices out of China. Other prized products were porcelain
and silk.71 Yet the Okinawans did not simply look towards China; they could
offer little from their own resources, so the answer was to create a much
wider network that tapped into the supplies available in Korea and Japan to
the north, and the South China Sea to the south. The creation of this network
was deliberate; these words were inscribed on a bell which in 1458 was
deposited in a temple on the islands:

The kingdom of Ryukyu is a place of pure beauty set in the southern

seas. Gathered together there, the treasures from three countries,
Korea, the Ming Empire and Japan, are to be found. It is a fabled
island, which arose from the seas between China and Japan. Its ships
are a bridge between 10,000 nations.72
To cast this bell, metal had to be imported and the techniques of bronze-
casting to be learned. On the other hand, at the start of the sixteenth century,
when he was about to send off an expedition to Melaka, the king of Chuzan
reflected on the fundamental problem the Ryukyu islands faced:

This country’s products are meagre and inadequate as articles of

tribute, causing great inconvenience. For that reason, we are now
despatching Chief Envoy Kamadu, Interpreter Kao Hsien, and others
aboard a seagoing ship … with a cargo of porcelain and other goods,
to proceed to the productive land of Melaka in order to purchase such
products as sapanwood and pepper through mutually satisfactory
arrangements, and then to return to this country to make preparations
for the presentation of tribute to the Ming Celestial Court in a
subsequent year.73

The capital of Okinawa, Naha, became a flourishing and cosmopolitan centre

of trade, comparable to Hakata and Melaka, with a significant immigrant
population from Japan, though many Chinese preferred to live in their own
town, Kunemura, a little way off, and included mariners and scribes, who
were always chosen to compose diplomatic correspondence with China and
south-east Asia. Coins, copied from Ming examples, were produced as
Chinese metal flowed into the island, so that the economy was increasingly
monetized, rather as was the case in medieval Japan.74 Excavations on ten
sites in the islands have revealed a great variety of ceramics that arrived from
all directions: among the finest pieces there are pale green celadons, blue-
and-white pottery and whiteware, all from China, as well as Imari blue-and-
white from Japan, Korean celadon, and both Thai and Vietnamese pottery.75
At the northern end of the island chain, a base was created for commerce with
the Inland Sea in Japan; Ryukyuans brought the spices and other luxuries of
south-east Asia to Nagasaki in western Kyushu, obtaining a range of
delicacies for home consumption, some of which sound not very appetizing –
sea slugs, shark fins, abalone and seaweed – and also weapons and Japanese
gold.76
Meanwhile, the king of Chuzan was corresponding with neighbours in
Siam, Melaka, Indonesia (including Palembang) and Korea; the oldest known
letter in the Ryukyu archives dates from 1425 and reports an embassy to
Siam in 1419, though there is other evidence that links went back at least as
far as the reign of Satto.77 The Ryukyu archives once contained an
extraordinarily rich collection of correspondence, conducted in Chinese,
between the kings of Ryukyu and their neighbours; however, the letters were
destroyed in the Second World War during the American assault on Okinawa
before they had been closely studied. The patient reconstruction of the
documents from decaying photostats and scattered transcriptions has brought
to light a lively network of political and commercial contacts in which
Ryukyu functioned as a centre of princely demand and a hub for
redistribution.78 Porcelain, raw silk, Indian cloth and perfumed sapanwood
all reached Ryukyu, while gifts sent by the king of Ryukyu to the ruler of
Korea in 1470 included peacock feathers, glass vases, ivory, ebony, cloves,
nutmeg and one mynah bird.79 Siam was particularly attractive, since it
offered spices, perfumes, ivory and tin. The letter of 1425 told how the
Ryukyuans were chided by the Siamese for attempting to conduct private
trade in sapanwood and porcelain, which the king of Siam regarded as royal
monopolies. The affronted king of Chuzan requested that his merchants and
mariners should be treated equably: he hoped that ‘you will offer sympathy to
the men from afar who have to undergo the hardships of the voyage’, for ‘it is
enough of a difficulty to go through the winds and the waves’, before
discovering on arrival that they have to follow the strict instruction of
Siamese government officials.80 It was a dangerous route, as the Siamese
discovered when the Ryukyuans sent an embassy to Siam in 1478, losing
their ship, whereupon the next year the king of Siam ordered a new ship to be
prepared at his end: ‘when the ship approached Ryukyu, it again encountered
a storm and sank into the ocean, its men being lost and its property scattered
… Such is the will of Heaven.’81
As junks from the islands became more visible across the sea routes, the
Ming court issued letters of protection to ships of Ryukyu. The idea that the
royal court should monitor contacts with the outside world had some
attraction in Ryukyu as well, and the local rulers began to issue their own
voyage certificates, whose seals had to be reconciled with government
ledgers as proof that the voyage was officially approved. The court of Chuzan
also imitated the Chinese and Japanese by according special ranks to those it
sent abroad on government missions. This, it was hoped, would bring them
greater respect when they arrived at the court of Siam or wherever.82
Generally, the crews of Ryukyuan ships are thought to have included
Japanese and Chinese sailors as well as locals, reflecting the ethnic mix in the
islands themselves. During the fifteenth century, a lively trade network
encompassed Sumatra for a time and saw dozens of sailings between the
island chain and Siam.83 From 1432 onwards, the kings of Chuzan were in
contact with, and by 1463 they were sending trading expeditions to, lands as
far distant as Java and the newly established Malay trading centre at Melaka,
the gateway to the Indian Ocean, which could normally be reached in about
fifty days; however, out of twenty known journeys in this direction between
1463 and 1511, four culminated in shipwreck. They brought the sultan of
Melaka gifts of blue satin, swords, big blue vases, fans and similar objects,
begging him to ‘accept them with a smile’; they also brought flattery: ‘we
know well that the people of your country lead a rich life and that your
products are abundant. We ascribe these virtues to you, the Wise King.’84, 85
In 1439 the islanders were granted a permanent trading station at
Quanzhou in China, which included areas in which to store goods, to reside
and to receive visitors. Thereafter they stuck stubbornly to it, and it was last
used in 1875, a trading history of 436 years. This was the base where
Okinawan students absorbed Chinese culture, which was no mere veneer, and
their home islands developed a culture all of their own that was more
influenced by Chinese than by Japanese models. Okinawan textiles imitated
Chinese examples, and other influences on the design, colour and material of
Okinawan cloth came from Malaya and Indonesia. Important Buddhist texts
reached Ryukyu from Korea as well as China – between 1457 and 1501 the
Great Collection of Buddhist Sutras was presented to Ryukyuan envoys in
Korea on five occasions.86 Overall, the impression is of a society that was
open to outside influences, ruled by a royal court that was remarkably
cosmopolitan and that appreciated the importance of trade to the point where
the kings of Chuzan saw token tribute payments to foreign rulers not as
demeaning but as practical, profitable and prestigious.
The final voyage from Ryukyu to Melaka, licensed in September 1511, and
yet again carrying porcelain to be traded against pepper and sapanwood,
brought the islanders into contact with western European interlopers, the
Portuguese, for the first time. The Portuguese had only captured the town a
few weeks earlier, so that news of their victory cannot have reached the court
of Chuzan before their ship sailed. Disconcerted by the sudden change of
regime, the Ryukyuans sailed away, never to return.87
 Tomé Pires, a Portuguese chronicler of his nation’s conquests in the Indian
Ocean, reported that his fellow countrymen met some people called Guores
at Melaka; they hailed from islands known as the Lequíos, which sounds like
a corruption of ‘Ryukyu’, bearing in mind the way the letter ‘l’ is pronounced
in Chinese and Japanese. They sent three or four junks, the limit of their
small capacity, to trade along the Chinese coast, near Guangzhou, and they
also visited Melaka. ‘They are great draftsmen and armourers,’ he said,
famous for their swords, fans and gilt boxes – he obviously confused what
they brought with what they produced. They are truthful and dignified and
detest the slave trade. Even so, ‘the Lequíos are idolators; if they are sailing
and find themselves in danger, they say that if they escape they buy a
beautiful maiden to be sacrificed and behead her on the prow of the ship.’88
Probably this says more about the lack of direct contact with the Ryukyuans
than about his knowledge of their way of life.

IV

In late medieval Japan, a distinction remained between official and unofficial

trade, but by this period it was clearly impossible to prevent the movement of
unauthorized vessels. Under shogun Yoshimitsu, legitimate shipping bound
for China was provided with government seals, using different colours to
indicate whether the cargo was official or private, and under this scheme two
ships each year crossed to the mainland between 1401 and 1410. The shoguns
and the wealthy monasteries such as the Kōfuko-ji at Nara were great patrons
of such large-scale enterprises throughout the fifteenth century. Although the
focus of the Japanese trade in luxury items was the court and the great
monasteries, the impact of trade on the wider economy of medieval Japan
should not be underestimated. The French scholar of Japanese history Pierre-
François Souyri has shown how trade helped transform quite a conservative
society.89 To this should be added the overwhelming impact of Asian
religion and the exceptionally powerful influence of Chinese culture: books,
images, social values. All this had been carried across Japan’s Mediterranean,
and had been carefully filtered, in the formative period of the early Middle
Ages, by government control and by attempts to keep contact with the
mainland within carefully prescribed limits. The result was the creation of a
distinctive society that combined indigenous with mainland Asian features.
By the late Middle Ages, Japanese society was able to produce significant
quantities of goods that were in demand on the mainland and to reverse the
balance of trade, which was now in favour of Nippon.
 12

The Dragon Goes to Sea

When the rulers of China and Japan thought about trade they were constantly
aware of the distinction between tribute, received in exchange for gifts, and
private trade. Buddhism tended to encourage moneymaking, and even
Buddhist monasteries traded actively, including those in Kyoto. In ancient
and medieval China, attitudes were more complicated. From the perspective
of some of the most influential exponents of Confucian thought, as in ancient
Rome, trade was something inherently rather disreputable. Tribute, on the
other hand, expressed acknowledgement of the superiority of Chinese (or
Japanese) civilization over those who brought it, and fitted very well into
Confucian ideas of hierarchy and the respect of those lower down the social
and political scale for those higher up. Nations had to be ranked just as
courtiers were; and calling many of them ‘barbarian’ was a way of saying
that, if they knew their manners, they would pay tribute. Japan and Korea
were occasionally treated as civilized nations, but this was not automatic, and
the assumption that they were culturally inferior remained firm. The
condescending attitude to Roman envoys, which was mentioned earlier,
reflected both an awareness that there did exist another great empire far to the
west, and an unwillingness to treat it as the equivalent of the Heavenly
Kingdom ruled by the Chinese emperor. Tribute had another function beyond
the political: the imperial court genuinely craved exotic luxuries, either for its
own use or for redistribution to members of the ruling clan, great nobles and
the army of scholar-officials who had earned their place at court by passing
the most difficult examinations in human history. The imperial court was not
greatly interested in the availability of foreign luxuries to the wider
population, while the vast majority of the emperor’s subjects in any case
lived barely above subsistence level. For many of them, ship-borne trade
meant the thousands of large rivercraft that carried huge amounts of grain
from the estates where they toiled to the big cities that – particularly from the
tenth century onwards – were gobbling up the grain and rice they cultivated.
 All this should not be taken to mean that trade was outlawed when the
Chinese emperors demanded that exchanges should consist of tribute.
Embassies were large and their members carried goods that they traded
privately. Besides, there were plenty of opportunities to escape the
surveillance of the Chinese customs offices, or shibo, whether one was a
Chinese, a Japanese, a Korean, or even a Malay or Indian merchant. The
tribute/trade alternative was a fiction maintained at some periods at the
Chinese court and revived by historians who had perhaps read too many
official documents, and who did not yet have access to the rich
archaeological evidence showing that vast amounts of copper and porcelain
left medieval China by sea, to which one can confidently add goods that have
not tended to survive so well underground or under water, notably silk
textiles. In reality, there was no period in Chinese history when overseas
trade consisted solely of exchanges of tribute against gifts; nor did the court
want that to be the case, so strong was demand at court for exotic goods from
the Indian Ocean, the interior of Asia and beyond: emeralds, rock crystal,
lapis lazuli, only to mention a few types of precious stone. The best cobalt for
making the famous blue-and-white porcelain of the Ming period came from
Iran. Although some was produced in China itself, sugar, which was first
cultivated in Borneo, became a favourite import as well, for it still had great
rarity value, and was prized in the medicine cabinets of the Chinese nobility.1
Only at the start of the third millennium has China energetically begun to
build a large navy, at the same time as it has been reasserting long-forgotten
claims to rule over most of the South China Sea.2 Yet in the Song period,
from the tenth to the thirteenth century, China did turn towards the sea and
did encourage overseas trade; interest in trade became even stronger after
1126, when the north of China was lost by the Song and the ‘Southern Song’
reigned in their capitals first at Kaifeng and later at Hangzhou. Kaifeng is
famous as the major centre in China of Jewish merchants, who over the
centuries became quite assimilated into Chinese culture (while still avoiding
pork, like the Muslims, with whom they were often confused); these Jews
appear to have arrived from Persia and India, and continued for centuries to
speak a form of Persian among themselves, and some are thought to have
arrived by sea, since there were also communities in Quanzhou, Hangzhou
and other cities close to or beside the sea.3 This is just one example of the
different ethnic and religious groups that filtered into China as its trade to the
wider world opened up.4
Meanwhile, Chinese merchants established themselves in overseas ports as
far south as what is now Singapore; there, they were rather modest folk, and
rather than trading all the way to China they made it their business to wend
their way back and forth across the strait, visiting the Riau islands (now part
of Indonesia) and Johor (the southernmost province of mainland Malaysia),
working closely with Malay partners and with the big-time Chinese traders
who passed their way every now and again. A Chinese colony in Korea can
be traced back to 1128. Sometimes these expatriate Chinese married local
women, as in Japan. This also occurred in Champa, in Indo-China; there,
some of the Chinese women were wealthy enough to invest in trade, though it
is unlikely that they would have taken the risk of actually travelling long
distances on board ship.5
The Song dynasty presided over what has been called a ‘commercial
revolution’, during which a major international centre of trade emerged at
Quanzhou, which will be examined shortly; and it was a time during which
the central government reaped rewards in sizeable tax revenue.6 Still, the
scale of this revenue should not be exaggerated. It stood at less than 2 per
cent of total revenue from all the economic activities in lands under Song
rule.7 That said, the wish to foster overseas commerce reflected new
attitudes: the imperial dynasty did not simply require luxury goods for itself;
it also had to find the means to pay for its exceptionally heavy spending
programmes, which were consumed as much by grandiose projects at
Hangzhou and other centres of power as by constant warfare on the Song
frontiers, notably with the Chin dynasty that held on to power in northern
China. By encouraging trade and industry (including the production of silk
and porcelain, both of which were exported in large quantities), and by
building shipyards and harbours, the Song emperors moved a little way
towards closing the large gap between income and outlay.8
The turn to the sea took place gradually. The first Song emperor, Taizu,
had experience of naval warfare before he gained the throne in 960; he
maintained a war fleet and enjoyed staging mock sea battles, although most
of this force was deployed along the rivers and close to shore. Naval wars
against Annam and Korea took place during the tenth century, suggesting that
the knowhow for ocean voyages did exist; however, the major task of the
navy, which was treated as an auxiliary service lower in status than the army,
was the suppression of piracy. Piracy betokens trade. Trade was the motive
for the majority of sea journeys away from the coast of China in this period –
either that or pilgrimage, which accounted for much smaller numbers of
travellers.9 In 982 the imperial court gave way to pressure from Chinese
consumers, who were complaining that they could not buy the foreign
aromatics they craved. No doubt the need to use these perfumes in temple
worship influenced the decision to permit thirty-seven different perfumes to
be released from government control. Merchants could now trade in them
without having to take them to official markets. This did not bring about a
business revolution, but it marked the beginning of gradual relaxation of
control over the movement of goods. Within a few years, the government had
doubled customs duty from 10 to 20 per cent, while withdrawing further from
control of the markets. The imperial court now saw commercial taxes rather
than the direct management of goods as the best way to profit from trade.10
All this was accompanied by a shift away from reliance on tribute to an
acceptance that overseas trade was profitable not just for merchants but for
the government: foreign merchants were increasingly welcomed in ports
along the coast of the South China Sea, and, from 989 onwards, Chinese
merchants were given the freedom to sail abroad. They still had to register
their arrival and departure, and they were expected to return within nine
months to the port from which they had originally sailed, so that their goods
could be weighed and taxed. This meant that they could only be absent for a
single monsoon cycle, and that they could not range as far as they would have
wished, beyond the Strait of Malacca and into the Indian Ocean. A very
intense network of exchanges within the South China Sea came into
existence, as Chinese merchants with their substantial amounts of cash
boosted existing networks within the area, and as Song traders did business
alongside Malays, Thais and other non-Chinese peoples.11 At the start, only
two ports, Hangzhou and Mingzhou, were designated as departure points,
with Guangzhou added later; but it became obvious by 1090 that these
restrictions did more harm than good, and thereafter ships could set out from
any prefecture that was willing to issue permits. In the middle of the eleventh
century foreign products officially imported into China were said to be worth
over 500,000 strings of cash, and the amount continued to rise, reaching
1,000,000 before 1100. Meanwhile, in 1074 a century-long ban on the export
of copper cash was abolished, enabling Chinese merchants to satisfy strong
foreign demand for Chinese bullion; payment in cash became the normal way
to settle foreign bills, rather than barter and exchange, though every now and
again paper money was issued in the hope of stemming the flow of copper
outwards, and there were schemes to mint iron coins for the use of foreign
merchants.12 Liberalization of maritime commerce worked; a commercial
revolution was indeed under way. The fact that another commercial
revolution was under way in the Mediterranean and northern Europe
(particularly in Italy and Flanders) at the same time is a curious coincidence.
However, both commercial revolutions would have a similar effect in the
Indian Ocean and south-east Asia: demand for spices and perfumes grew
exponentially, and the produce of the Indies was sucked north to China and
west towards the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.
What has been described so far was not simply a change in economic
orientation. It was also a change in China’s attitude to the outside world. The
land routes that traversed the long and fragile Silk Road across Asia were too
vulnerable to withstand the pressure of nomadic raiders; their importance,
always overestimated by romantic historians, diminished still further, though
there was a revival later during the Mongol period (from the late thirteenth to
the late fourteenth century). But the sea was the great highway, and in the
Song period Chinese travellers as well as Malays and Indians followed its
routes. The Song period stands out as a period of three centuries during
which China remained more accessible, and took more interest in contact
with its neighbours, than at any other time. This openness, though only
relative, became more obvious after 1126, when the Song capital at Kaifeng
was captured by northern nomads, the Jurchen, who created an empire of
their own in large tracts of northern China, with the result that the Song court
decamped from Kaifeng and made Hangzhou its centre of operations.13 The
northern lands were the very areas that had been afflicted by floods, droughts
and wars, and their wealth seemed to be in sharp decline, while southern
China flourished: new irrigation works boosted the production of rice, and
stimulated population growth, while gold, silver and copper flowed into the
Song court from taxpayers in the southern provinces.14 This boded well for
the maritime traders, as Hangzhou lay near the coast and already functioned
as a licensing station for ships setting out across the South China Sea.
The imperial court was not blind to the opportunities that now loomed.
Honours (consisting of an official rank) were showered on merchants who
brought in foreign goods worth 50,000 strings of cash, and tax officials who
had managed to collect more than 1,000,000 strings from the massive trade in
frankincense were also accorded higher rank. Lists were compiled of the
types of goods that were arriving by sea, and differential rates of tax were
imposed, depending on whether they were regarded as high- or low-value
commodities. Reversing earlier decisions to cash in on trade by sea by
charging high customs rates, the imperial court pushed these rates down to 10
per cent, and to 6⅔ per cent for lower-value items in 1136; and, far from
depressing revenues, this acted as a stimulus to private shipowners, so that by
the middle of the twelfth century the imperial court could congratulate itself
on revenues of 2,000,000 strings of cash each year. Oddly, the rates on some
luxury goods required at the imperial court, such as rhinoceros horn, were
increased in 1164 and remained at the same level until the Mongols
overthrew the Song in 1279; but this only pushed the maritime traders
towards a greater emphasis on the lower-value goods, such as drugs and
perfumes, which were moving around in much larger quantities and which
were in demand beyond the narrow circles of the imperial court.15
The effects of urban growth reached much deeper into Chinese society. As
people moved towards the cities and as the balance between urban and rural
population changed, demand for foodstuffs in the cities soared. This led to
the development of commercial networks in the countryside as well, as
farmers produced for the urban market.16 Foreign demand for Chinese goods
stimulated the industries for which China was most famous: silk production
and the ceramics industry. Other exports to south-east Asia included Chinese
metalwork, iron ore (sometimes found in wrecks) and rice wine, contained in
ceramic jars.17 But copper, whether as ingots or as cash, was in constant
demand.18 One way to ensure that the outflow of copper cash did not drain
all the bullion out of coastal China was to dump vast amounts of ceramics in
foreign markets (though the term ‘dump’, favoured by economic historians,
should not be taken to indicate that what was dumped was rubbish – the
ceramics were much appreciated, but the quantities were massive).19
Commercialization proceeded rapidly. The coastline grew in importance as a
source of wealth for rulers and ruled. China was being transformed. All this
seems uncannily similar to what has been happening in China since the
1980s, even if the scale of economic growth in modern times is
immeasurably faster and vaster.

II

The great transformation that occurred under the Song was the emergence of
a large class of native Chinese merchants willing to brave the open seas. It is
important, though, to remember that the term ‘native Chinese’ has to be
understood very broadly, for some of the leading businessmen and
government agents entrusted with the care of commerce were of non-Han
descent. Several were of Muslim descent, of either Arab or Persian origin,
like the ruthless Pu Shougeng, who was superintendent of maritime trade at
Quanzhou when the city fell to the Mongols in 1276; an eager collaborator
with his new masters, he authorized the massacre of 3,000 members of the
Song imperial clan.20 As well as the favours shown to Chinese merchants, a
policy existed that encouraged foreign merchants to come to China. Early in
the twelfth century a Chinese businessman, Cai Jingfang, recruited foreigners
to the port of Quanzhou; he brought Quanzhou’s maritime trade office a
profit of 980,000 strings of cash over the six-year period from 1128 to 1134.
One of his recruits, Pu Luoxin (Abu’l-Hassan), was an Arab merchant
specializing in frankincense; he brought incense to the value of 300,000
strings to the port, and around the same time frankincense from Śri Vijaya
was imported that was valued at 1,200,000 strings; demand was insatiable.
Impressed by Cai’s success, the Song government enthusiastically offered an
official rank to Chinese merchants who persuaded foreign merchants to ship
large amounts of goods to China.21 Yet what this case shows is that private
initiative spurred the government towards the encouragement of yet more
private initiative. This was not a setting in which those in power deplored or
discouraged trade across the sea.
The sea had, then, come into focus as never before. Chinese and foreigners
worked side by side; China was not simply the passive recipient of goods
brought across the South China Sea. Much of the shipping that reached
Chinese ports was foreign, but there were also large Chinese junks; and this
was a period of technological innovation during which the Chinese developed
a type of marine compass using a magnetized needle suspended on a string:
‘the ship’s pilots are acquainted with the configuration of the coasts; at night
they steer by the stars, and in the daytime by the sun. In dark weather they
look at the south-pointing needle’, to cite a text from the start of the twelfth
century.22 Knowledge in China of magnetism and direction-finding went
back to around 500 BC, so that this was old knowledge that had taken a very
long while to be applied; in earlier centuries the main interest in direction-
finding lay in divination and in the doctrines of feng shui, so that a
magnetized piece of iron made it possible to align a building properly
towards north and south. The late development of the marine compass shows
that demand for navigational skills had grown as the Chinese became
accustomed to sea voyages. Contrary to the passionate beliefs of the famous
scholar of Chinese science, Joseph Needham (who managed to combine
Maoism, Daoism and High Anglicanism in his long life), the use of
lodestones by Vikings, sailors of Amalfi and others was almost certainly the
result of independent discoveries far to the west, and not the diffusion of
Chinese technical knowhow through the Islamic lands into Europe.23
Undoubtedly, the use of the compass resolved a longstanding problem in
Pacific navigation, for cloudy skies in the rainy seasons meant that it was all
too easy to become lost on the open sea. Even then, there is a hint in the
passage just cited that the Chinese still preferred to hug shores.
Many of these foreign merchants gathered in a port whose reputation was
to travel all the way to medieval Europe, where it was known under its
Arabic name of Zaytun, ‘Olive City’. However that name came into
existence, it was known to Chinese-speakers as Quanzhou (in older spelling,
Ch’üan-chou), and lies across the strait that divides Taiwan from the Chinese
mainland. The rise of Quanzhou was the result of a power vacuum in that
corner of China; its sustained role as a great centre of trade was the result of
its eventual incorporation into the Song Empire. For Quanzhou first emerged
as an alternative port where merchants could hope to escape the supervision
of Chinese customs officials, since during the mid-tenth century the region of
Quanzhou lay under the rule of an independent warlord. However, as this
area was brought forcibly under Song rule and as imperial power in the
region grew, so did the ability of the imperial court to supervise what was
happening there. This was all to the immense advantage of the central
government, which began to receive greater and greater tax income from
Quanzhou’s foreign trade: half a million strings of cash around 980, but
1,000,000 at the start of the twelfth century, rising to 2,000,000 by around
1150. Merchants could expect to pay about 40 per cent in taxes and were
expected to collect a certificate from the shibo official in charge of customs;
but even so they flourished as business boomed.24 Some merchants arrived
from as far away as Bahrain, though the majority of ships travelled to
Quanzhou from the shores of the South China Sea, including the Philippines,
Sumatra, Java and Cambodia, or from Korea, whose traders carried gold,
silver, mercury and their own silk cloth.25
Tamil merchants reached the city, and the Muslim community possessed
several mosques, the oldest of which, the Qingjing or Ashab Mosque, was
built soon after 1000 and still survives; it is the oldest mosque in China.
Tombstones recording visitors from far to the west survive not just in Arabic
but in Persian and Turkish.26 Satingpra, a Siamese port on the shores of the
South China Sea, enjoyed a brisk trade with Quanzhou, importing masses of
porcelain; it lay close to the narrow neck of the Malay peninsula, the Kra
Isthmus, thereby giving access to the Indian Ocean as well.27 It is not really
surprising that the ambitious rulers of the Khmer Empire in Cambodia should
have encouraged maritime trade with Song China; in the first half of the
twelfth century, King Sūryavarman II was himself a shipowner, and he was
also happy to receive silk and porcelain carried to his realms on Chinese
ships; Song pottery has been found at Angkor.28 Ceramics from the towns
around Quanzhou turned up in the Ryukyu island chain.29 Encouraged by
what they saw happening at Quanzhou, the Song emperors built harbours
elsewhere along the long coastline of China, for instance at Shanghai and
along the rocky shores between Guangzhou and Hanoi, where underwater
reefs were torn away to make the passage of shipping safer. These harbours
were also vital refuges when typhoons blew.
Quanzhou became the unrivalled centre of trade; it became a distribution
centre from which goods were transferred along the rivers and canals of
eastern China all the way to the great city of Hangzhou, now the Song
capital. Public works enabled this great economic boom to gain further
momentum: canals and rivers were dredged, breakwaters were built,
warehouses were put at the disposal of foreign and native merchants. As
more and more traffic crossed the sea, the temptation to pirates grew
exponentially, and convoy escorts were sometimes provided to protect
merchant ships; a navy came into being, and commanders such as Weng
Chao were given the task of clearing pirates from the waters around the
Yangtze estuary, while the corsair Zhu Cong, defeated in 1135, merged his
fleet of fifty ships and 10,000 sailors into the Song navy; he was rewarded
with the rank of admiral, and others followed the same course. A brief poem
circulated: ‘if you wish to become an official, kill and burn and accept a
pardon.’ One early twelfth-century official blamed the government for
actually stimulating piracy by offering such generous amnesties: ‘the officials
are incompetent and seek to placate the pirates by granting them amnesty
and, in more flagrant cases, by conferring on them rank and offices.’
Merchant ships had to register their departure and were expected to travel in
small convoys, and the government was careful to control the traffic to
different destinations. Officially, only two ships a year were supposed to go
to Korea, returning the next year, and the merchants trading there were
supposed to be extremely wealthy, possessing 30,000,000 strings of cash
(surely a mistake for 30,000 or 300,000); but there were colonies of
merchants from Quanzhou in Korea, and in Vietnam too.30
While 30,000,000 strings seems a gigantic amount, there is the story of
Wang Yuanmao from Quanzhou, who vastly enriched himself in the late
twelfth century. There were several Buddhist monasteries in the city, and the
sons of the well-to-do often took monastic vows. Wang, however, was a
servant or handyman, and of low social status. But the monks taught him how
to read ‘the books of the southern barbarian lands’, perhaps Indian Buddhist
scriptures, as well as Chinese books. He was sent on a mission to the
kingdom of Champa, in Indo-China. Champa was an old trading partner of
China: as early as 958 the Cham king had sent the Arab merchant Pu Hesan
(Abu Hassan or Husain) to the emperor with an explosive gift: flasks of an
inflammable weapon similar to Greek fire (in Champa, the expectation was
that the elite would be Hindu, the ordinary population Buddhist and the
merchants Muslim). Once in Champa, Wang came to the attention of the
king, who was so impressed that Wang could read both Chinese and foreign
books that he offered him a post at court and even married him to one of his
daughters; the trousseau was worth 1,000,000 strings of cash. After ten years
in Champa, ‘his lust for gain became still fiercer, and he next went trading as
the master of an ocean-going junk’. Before long senior Chinese officials
noticed him and married their own children into his family. He sent an agent
overseas for ten years between 1178 and 1188 on one of his ships, and when
his crew returned ‘they had obtained profits of several thousand per cent’.
But then an argument broke out after a sailor tried to cheat Wang of half the
profit; the sailor was murdered, though not by Wang, but Wang was blamed
and duly disgraced.31
Stories about Quanzhou merchants stress the extraordinary social mobility
that agile businessmen could achieve. Chinese tales from this period
emphasize again and again how people described as ‘serfs’ or ‘penniless’
could break free of their humble origins, accumulate great wealth and marry
into grand families. This is further testimony to the transformations that took
place in the society of the Quanzhou region during the Song period. And one
significant effect of this economic expansion was what has been called ‘the
generalisation of the consumption of luxury items’, as those who rose up the
social ladder became somewhat contemptuous of the simple life their
grandparents had led:

I would rather say that after three generations of holding government

office, the sons and grandsons are bound to be extravagant, and given
to the utmost indulgence. They will be unwilling to wear coarse
cotton, coarse silk, coarse padded garments, worn-out hemp quilting
or any clothes that have been laundered or patched, insisting on
openwork silk, thin silk, damask silk, crêpe silk, figured silk, natural
silk and fresh, fine and luxurious linens and silks … They will be
unwilling to eat vegetables and will look on greens and broth as
coarse fare, finding beans, wheat and millet meagre and tasteless, and
insisting on the best polished rice and the finest roasts to satisfy their
greedy appetites, with the products of the water and the land, and the
confections of human artifice, set out neatly before them in
ornamentally carved dishes and trays. This is what is meant by ‘being
able to dress up and dine’!32
Rice, tea and pepper, previously upmarket items, were increasingly seen as
three of the ‘seven necessities’ of life, along with more obvious items such as
firewood and salt.33
Yet Quanzhou did not lie in a particularly fertile or wealthy part of China.
Although some high-quality products such as lychees and oranges were
cultivated, the lack of extensive arable land and poor returns from the soil
made the region depend on imported supplies of rice and grain.34 Lack of
good local resources has often been a stimulus to commercial expansion, for
obvious reasons – in exactly the same period Genoa and Venice were
becoming great centres of trade, but relied on imported food as supplies
nearby were restricted. The parallels between the ‘commercial revolution’ in
Song China and in the medieval Mediterranean are quite striking.35 Trade
through its harbour created the Quanzhou phenomenon; but as the city grew,
so did its role in the most famous Chinese industries. Notwithstanding the
arrival of silk from Korea and Japan, Quanzhou became a centre of silk
production, but nothing compared in scale with the export of fine porcelain,
produced in the smaller towns in the hinterland behind Quanzhou and
exported en masse to clients as far away as the Middle East: beautiful celadon
wares carrying floral decorations in light relief, many produced in Dehua, a
town that lay just across the mountains to the north of Quanzhou.36

III

Shipbuilding was another industry that kept Quanzhou prosperous – many of

the ships built for Khubilai Khan came from there.37 A wreck found in the
approaches to the harbour of Quanzhou has been identified as a Chinese junk
and can be securely dated to 1277. Its cargo consisted in large part of
precious woods, but there were also ceramics on board that carried
inscriptions identifying the owners as the ‘Southern Family’, that is, the
branch of the Song imperial clan that governed this part of China on behalf of
the emperor.38 There was no evidence that anyone on board had drowned,
and its sinking remains a mystery. A reasonably cogent theory about this ship
is that it reached Quanzhou just as the Mongol armies overwhelmed the city,
and that its crew scuttled the junk rather than allowing it to fall into the hands
of the new masters of China or the bloodthirsty superintendent of trade, Pu
Shougeng. It was more than twenty-four metres long and more than nine
metres wide, and the hull contained thirteen cabins.39 Chinese junks did not
possess a pointed bow, and the stern too consisted of a flat end.40
The interest of this wreck lies not just in its physical remains but in its
similarity to what Marco Polo described in his book of travels in a chapter
that follows directly after his account of Zaytun/Quanzhou. There he spoke of
ships with as many as sixty cabins and two or three hundred sailors, capable
of loading up to 6,000 baskets of pepper; by contrast, the Quanzhou boat was
only of middle size, and could be an example of one of the ‘large barks or
tenders’ that he said travelled alongside the bigger ships. But in some
versions of his book he mentioned ships constructed around thirteen
compartments stacked with cargo, with the aim of affording greater strength
to the hull and of reducing the danger of sinking if the hull were pierced ‘by
the blow of a hungry whale’ or by a rock (a similar technique used on the
Titanic did not work). Other medieval travellers such as the Arab explorer ibn
Battuta, of the fourteenth century, offered very similar descriptions of these
large Chinese ships.41 But Marco Polo is helpful in other ways too. His
description of Zaytun does not match in enthusiasm his account of Hangzhou,
known in medieval Europe as Quinsay, but it does match quite neatly the
evidence from Chinese writers and from archaeology. Zaytun is ‘frequented
by all the ships of India, which bring thither spicery and all other kinds of
costly wares’; but the inhabitants of Manzi (that is, southern China) also flock
to the city, in search of precious stones and pearls, ‘and I assure you that for
one shipload of pepper that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere, destined for
Christendom, there come a hundred such, yes, and more too, to this haven of
Zaytun; for it is one of the two greatest havens in the world for commerce’ –
maybe he thought the other one was his native Venice. He knew that the
porcelain produced in a town nearby was not merely of superlative quality,
but very inexpensive. And he described a lucrative system of taxation
obviously inherited by the Mongols from that of the Song emperors.42
Even so, Quanzhou had reached its peak by the time the Mongols
overwhelmed the city in 1277. Khubilai Khan was not responsible for its
relative decline, though it remained a place of note under his Yuan dynasty as
well. Nor was this decline the result of pirate raids on the all-too-successful
merchant fleets of Quanzhou and other ports. War with the Chin or Jin
dynasty in northern China was certainly a factor, but not so much because of
the military outcome; it was more a question of the strain this constant
conflict, renewed in 1160, placed on state finances. The commercial policies
of the Mongol rulers of China may also carry some blame. In 1284 the Yuan
court tried to ban private foreign trade, reverting to the classic position
whereby contact with the outside world was carried out under state auspices.
But the ban, despite strict penalties, only lasted ten years; and then twenty
years later it was reimposed, only to be followed by its relaxation,
reinstatement and final relaxation (1323) – all of this generated great
uncertainty. Following the ban, Quanzhou did become the headquarters of the
Mercantile Shipping and Transportation Bureau, which oversaw government-
sponsored expeditions across the seas, but the freedom of Quanzhou
merchants to come and go as they pleased had been curtailed. Another
development was the creation of the Bureau of Ortaq Affairs, the Ortaqs
being a guild of traders from central Asia who were actively patronized by
the Mongol rulers, but who then, in the early fourteenth century, found
themselves challenged by factions at court that resented their tight hold on
Chinese trade. The Ortaqs hoped to create a shipping monopoly, but they had
no experience of the sea, and therefore relied to a significant degree on the
Arab and Persian merchants they encountered in Chinese ports. These
developments do suggest that the trading community of Quanzhou lay under
increasing pressure by 1300.43 However, most explanations of the decline of
Quanzhou stress the fiscal legacy of the Song dynasty, which had never
managed to ensure that revenues matched expenditure. In part this was
because the trading system they had helped to create contained some
fundamental flaws.
The very success of Quanzhou resulted in a massive outflow of copper
coinage; those figures of millions of strings of cash speak for themselves,
since constant demand for Indonesian spices and Indian Ocean jewels
percolated down to the urban middle class. By the middle of the twelfth
century the Song rulers tried to meet this deficit by taking advantage of their
mastery of the printing press, issuing a form of paper money. Marco Polo
described the paper money of the Mongol rulers of China, which was used as
currency throughout China and completely substituted for cash. But the Song
paper money took the form of IOUs, credit notes that could be exchanged at
some time in the future for hard cash. Merchants very much wanted to be
paid in cash, as copper had a stable value based on the fact that it was a
commodity in its own right, and in high demand in Japan and elsewhere;
merchants knew perfectly well how to smuggle it to small ports from which it
could be collected after their ships had been inspected in Quanzhou to see if
they were carrying bullion.44 Meanwhile, the temptation to print more and
more notes grew. The result was inflation, which comes as no surprise
nowadays, but which crept up on an unsuspecting Song Empire. The imperial
court had developed an intelligent economic policy when it improved
harbours and cleared rivers; but when it came to the effects of issuing paper
money it had no experience of what to expect. The long-term effect was to
dampen the enthusiasm of foreign traders. What were they supposed to do
with these printed chits that had no value outside China itself? But there were
other factors that made life more difficult in Quanzhou. A Mongol attack on
Korea at the end of the twelfth century damaged a profitable maritime link.
Champa was embroiled in power struggles with its famous neighbour, the
Khmer kingdom of Angkor, and disorder there made that part of Indo-China
a less attractive destination. Śri Vijaya had passed its peak by the mid-
thirteenth century, though there were good business opportunities for spice
merchants in Java.45 All this meant a contraction but certainly not a collapse
in the maritime network that had been dominated for nearly three centuries by
Quanzhou.
One unanswered question is how typical or exceptional Quanzhou was.
The Song capital at Hangzhou was a larger and grander city; but everything
suggests that Quanzhou was the prime gateway into China for people coming
across the sea with the luxury articles that the Song rulers were so eager to
obtain. Looked at in a much wider setting, taking one far beyond the shores
of China, Quanzhou can be seen as the command centre of a network of trade
and navigation that extended right across the South China Sea, the East China
Sea and into the Indian Ocean. At the start of the fifteenth century interest at
the imperial court in these waters was to revive with results as remarkable as
the rise of Quanzhou, though much more temporary.
 13

Light over the Western Ocean

It has been seen that the Chinese emperors tended to treat Japan as a
subordinate nation, while according it more honour than most other
kingdoms. The shogun Yoshimitsu was roundly condemned by his son and
successor for admitting that he was China’s inferior. When writing to the
Ming court at the start of the fifteenth century, Yoshimitsu had described
himself as ‘king of Japan’, and the term ‘king’ was understood to mean that
he accepted the sovereign authority of the Son of Heaven in China. After all,
the Chinese emperor, Jian-wen, wrote to Yoshimitsu:

You have sent envoys to come to the court, crossing over waves and
billows … You make tribute of precious swords, fine horses, helmets
and armour, paper and inkstones, together with pure gold, with which
We are well pleased … Keep your mind on obedience and loyalty and
therefore adhere to the basic rules.

And the shogun wrote a letter that, following the overthrow of Jian-wen, was
received with gratitude by the new emperor, Yong-le:

Your subject, the king of Japan, submits: your subject has heard that
when the sun rises in the sky, there is no dark place not lighted by it;
when the timely rain soaks the earth, there is nothing that is not
moistened … Thus the ten thousand directions come under his
influence, and the four seas adhere to his benevolence.1
This emperor, the third in the Ming dynasty, which ruled China from 1368 to
1644, is a figure of exceptional interest. Earlier known as Zhu Di, he took the
regnal name Yong-le (Yung-lo), meaning ‘Perpetual Happiness’; the name of
the dynasty, ‘Ming’, meant ‘light’, and had been chosen by his father. Yong-
le was a ruthless and extravagant ruler with grandiose plans – not just naval
expeditions and land campaigns, but the beautification of Beijing and the
active patronage of culture. He rebuilt the Grand Canal linking Beijing to the
Chinese rivers and assuring the capital of regular grain supplies.2 His
overseas expeditions, led by Admiral Zheng He (Cheng Ho) have attracted
attention not just in modern times but under later Ming rulers – a certain Luo
Mao-deng wrote a novel about the Ming voyages that was published in 1597
under the title The Grand Director of the Three Treasures Goes Down to the
Western Ocean, and, despite its obvious fantasy, including a visit to the
Underworld, attempts have been made to use it as a reliable source for all
those aspects of these voyages that are not recorded in the official histories
and inscriptions that survive.3 Precisely because of the sheer scale of the
Ming voyages, Zheng He has attracted most of the attention from historians
of Yong-le’s reign: there were 255 ships on the first voyage and 249 on the
second, and a total of seven voyages, according to his biographer, Edward
Dreyer, who counts 27,550 men on the final voyage, roughly the same as the
first. Some of these figures will be questioned later; but, when they read
about the voyages, later generations were astonished at the number and size
of the ships, the number of those on board and the distances traversed:
Chinese ships reached east Africa, Yemen, Hormuz, Ceylon and the lands
around the South China Sea, and Zheng He created a spacious Chinese base
at Melaka.4
 The Ming voyages have attracted comparisons with Christopher
Columbus, very much to the detriment of the latter, where the point is made
that Columbus’s flagship, the Santa María, was a small fraction of the size of
Zheng He’s treasure ships, and his initial fleet consisted of only three ships.
That is to assume that Columbus and Zheng He had similar objectives, which
was far from being the case. Nonetheless, the failure of the Ming emperors to
repeat these very expensive expeditions after 1434 raises that hoary question
in Chinese history: if Chinese technology was in many respects so far in
advance of that of western Europe in the late Middle Ages, why did China
fail to create a world empire, or have an Industrial Revolution, or indeed open
up to the world? This question lay at the heart of the Marxist-inspired account
of Science and Civilization in China composed by Joseph Needham.5
Needham speculated about visits to South America, Australia and around the
Cape of Good Hope towards Brazil in the Ming or some other period; his
enthusiasm for things Chinese was literally unbounded. However, the
voyages have also been unscrupulously exploited by a sensationalist writer
who has woven together a vast narrative in which Zheng He’s ships went
much further than Africa and Arabia, and supposedly discovered Antarctica,
Alaska, the Atlantic and just about every corner of the world long before the
arrival of the Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch or British; in addition Zheng He’s
arrival in Italy supposedly kick-started an Italian Renaissance that was
already well under way. Needless to say, this ‘research’ is utter nonsense and
pure fantasy, and the truth is far more interesting.6 Equally, the claim that
Marco Polo knew about, and perhaps even visited, Alaska, making him the
first European since the Vikings to set foot in North America (though the
other side), is unfounded, this time based on what may be sixteenth-century
manuscripts rather than modern-day fancy.7
The first question is why seven massive expeditions were sent out from
China between 1405 and 1434, when nothing on that scale had been tried
before. Yet there had been some seafaring activity before Zheng He. A
Chinese envoy, the eunuch Yin Qing, had visited Melaka in 1404, a year
before Zheng He set out; the town’s founder and rajah, Parameśvara, was
granted the title of king, legitimizing his position as master of the Malacca
Strait and of the trade route linking the Indian Ocean to the South China
Sea.8 Yong-le was as active in securing the submission of his neighbours in
central Asia by means of land embassies as he was in winning that of
maritime nations on the routes Zheng He followed. Landlocked kingdoms as
far away as Samarkand were expected to assimilate into Chinese culture.
However, its monarch proved less than happy at being treated as a vassal and
sternly insisted that Yong-le would be best advised to stop talking nonsense
about being ruler of the world and should instead become a Muslim.
The Middle Kingdom over which Yong-le directly ruled was supposed to
be surrounded by a ring of subordinate barbarian states. He was also
determined to recover lands that had once been ruled from China and to draw
them into the Chinese cultural world. Like the Mongol rulers of China in the
thirteenth century, he aimed to gain control of Annam, roughly northern
Vietnam, even though his father, the first Ming emperor, had warned against
ever trying to achieve this (and he gave the same advice about Japan and the
Ryukyu islands).9 Yong-le put together a large fleet, supposedly of at least
8,600 ships, captured from Annam, but he had to face tough resistance that
was accentuated by the policies he adopted after victory, such as the
requirement to wear Chinese dress.10 Another area best reached by sea that
Yong-le eyed was Bengal, where his ambassador intervened to head off a war
with the ruler’s neighbour; the king became a fan of the Chinese emperor,
sending rare animals such as one which was identified as the qilin known
from Chinese mythology, and which was a giraffe, obtained from distant
Africa by the ruler of Bengal.11 Yong-le did in fact describe his aims very
clearly during the very first year of his reign:

Giving and nourishing lives is the utmost virtue of the Heavens. A

humane ruler needs to learn from Heaven; hence, loving the people
 should become the principle of his rulership. The four seas are too
broad to be governed by one person. To rule requires delegation of
powers to the wise and the able who can participate in government …
My late father Hong-wu received the mandate of heaven and became
the master of the world. During the thirty years of his rule, there was
peace and tranquillity within the four seas. There was neither
catastrophe nor tumult.12

On the one hand, the Chinese emperor was master of the world; on the other,
he could not actually rule over the entire world – a difficulty all claimants to
universal imperial power have had to face. But that did not mean he should
pass by the opportunity to demand from countries right across the world
recognition of his superiority. Once again, what comes through powerfully is
the insistence of the Chinese on their superiority as a moral force – Confucian
ideas blended with those of Yong-le’s Mongol predecessors, with their
ruthless demands for recognition of their own ‘Mandate from Heaven’. Ming
court culture owed much to the Mongols, including many of the costumes
worn at court and the passion the Ming emperors showed for hunting and
archery.13
Sending fleets overseas under the command of Admiral Zheng He was,
then, a highly conspicuous and extremely expensive way of doing what
earlier Chinese emperors had long been trying to do. Some historians have
looked for quite different explanations. The most peculiar is that Yong-le was
trying to run to ground his predecessor and rival, Jian-wen, who, according to
one rumour, had escaped to a remote island across the sea.14 Other
arguments that have been advanced include the simple idea that Zheng He’s
voyages were motivated by curiosity. In other words, Zheng He was an
explorer, even more so than Columbus, who, after all, was certain of his
destination (China or Japan) and had read a book (by Marco Polo) that told
him what to expect.15 The arrival at court of the giraffe would have
prompted questions about the land from which it came, somewhere in the
outer reaches of the ‘western sea’.16 The emperor required exotic goods from
all over the known world, for tribute was supposed to contain things that
could be treasured – rare animals, precious jewels – as well as disposable
items such as spices and perfumes. That is not quite the same as curiosity
about the human and physical geography of the Indian Ocean. Chinese
advances in technology, such as the use of the maritime compass and of
woodblock printing, did not form part of a wider scientific endeavour built
around the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
Those who went on the voyages did have exciting experiences to
remember; and the short books left by two travellers on several expeditions,
Ma Huan, an Arabic and Persian interpreter, and the soldier Fei Xin, are rich
in details about the customs, religion, products and topography of the lands of
the Indian Ocean.17 Although Ma Huan claimed to come from a modest
background, describing himself as a ‘mountain woodcutter’, he knew his
Chinese classics and had read Buddhist literature. Yet his account of the
‘Western Ocean’ took several years to be printed and published (probably in
1451), and was little read. Fei Xin aroused more interest among sixteenth-
century Chinese scholars, which may reflect the continuing interest in Zheng
He, about whom Ma Huan said rather less, his main concern being the
countries he visited in the Indian Ocean. Fei Xin also paid attention to the
lands around the South China Sea, which, as near neighbours and past targets
of military campaigns, aroused special interest.18
The argument that the aim of the voyages was to create a trading network
is easy to challenge. Yong-le forbade private trade. Earlier attempts to ban
private trade had been widely ignored, all the more so when the imperial
throne was in contention.19 Yong-le was only interested in the exchange of
tribute for gifts, which was a political act in the first place. It is true that a
well-established custom existed that when the government had claimed its
share, members of a diplomatic mission could trade the remaining goods
placed on board ship for local produce, and this made participation in
overseas embassies very desirable – there were big profits to be made and
some prestige to be gained from bringing, say, Chinese ivory to the court in
Japan or Java. But the prestige Yong-le sought was his own prestige, as
emperor of the Middle Kingdom; he ‘wanted to display his soldiers in strange
lands in order to make manifest the wealth and power of the Middle
Kingdom’, and sent his ships ‘to the various foreign countries, proclaiming
the edicts of the Son of Heaven and giving gifts to their rulers and chieftains.
Those who did not submit were pacified by force.’20 Setting aside Vietnam,
which was seen as a borderland within range of Chinese areas of settlement,
this ‘pacification’ did not involve the sending of governors or sinicization.
Ports would only be visited if they acknowledged Chinese sovereignty, so
that those that failed to do so lost out on the chance to obtain Chinese goods
and to offload their own products.21 These are by no means the only
interpretations of the Ming voyages. Another view of the voyages, which
took place around the time of the conversion of the ruler of Melaka to Islam,
is that they stimulated the spread of Islam in what are now Malaysia and
Indonesia; but this is doubtful, and at best it would have been an accidental
effect of the voyages, and obviously not their intention. Buddhist hopes of
acquiring a sacred relic in Ceylon have also been brought into play, without
any real evidence.22
The role of Islam in Zheng He’s life is an interesting problem. The admiral
(though he did not actually hold such a title) was born a Muslim in 1371. He
hailed from south-western China, from the province of Yunnan, which had a
large Muslim population descended from traders who had been arriving
throughout the Middle Ages. His own family had rather distinguished
antecedents: they originated in Bukhara, making him more a son of the Silk
Road than of the Silk Route of the Sea, and had been in the service of the
early Mongol khans. His father and grandfather must have been quite devout
Muslims, as they were known as Hajji, ‘the pilgrim’, implying they had both
visited Mecca. As a boy, Zheng He was taken prisoner after his father was
killed resisting the Ming invasion of Yunnan. He was castrated and sent to
the Chinese imperial court; and there he rose among the ranks of the court
eunuchs, whose closeness to the emperor was often a great source of irritation
to the bureaucrats who expected to gain their ruler’s ear.23 He became head
of the Directorate of Palace Servants, a government office heavily involved in
building projects, and these, like shipbuilding, required the use of enormous
quantities of wood. It was his experience in organizing construction rather
than his experience as a naval commander, which was non-existent, that
made him a very suitable choice to take charge of the emperor’s fleet.24
All this time, his links to Islam must have been weakening, and, like the
Chinese around him, he became eclectic in his religious practice, joining his
crew in praying to the sea goddess Tianfei at the start of his expeditions. To
cite an inscription he laid down in 1431, ‘the divine majestic spirit of the
Heavenly Princess, who is entitled by imperial edict “she who defends the
country and shelters the people, whose miraculous spirit responds visibly to
prayers, and whose vast benevolence saves all”, spreads across the oceans’.
The goddess, also known in local dialect as Mazu, was said to have been the
daughter of a humble fisherman; she was born in AD 960 and possessed the
power of prophecy; she could therefore warn her brother that he was at risk
of being drowned at sea, and so saved his life.25 Zheng He became very
large, supposedly seven feet tall and ten feet around the waist, though the
Chinese ‘foot’ was shorter than the twelve-inch foot of today. He had a small
nose but high cheekbones and a broad forehead. There are a good many
pictures and statues of him, the product of imagination, as he was deified
after his death and has been worshipped by expatriate Chinese as their patron
ever since – his cult continues in the oldest surviving Chinese temple in
Malaysia, the Cheng Hoon Teng temple in Melaka, built in 1645.26

II

The story of Zheng He has grown in the telling, then, and the question that
needs to be asked is whether the size of the fleet and the number of those on
board have also been exaggerated. The novel by Luo Maodeng fantasized
about the size of the ships, but many of those who subsequently wrote about
the voyages assumed that Luo had access to precise information. Fei Xin,
who was there, wrote of ‘27,000 government troops’ aboard the fleet that set
out in 1409, and the numbers given for each expedition are broadly
comparable. Very large figures in the thousands were just a Chinese way of
saying ‘innumerable’; it is quite reasonable to insist on scaling down these
numbers, which represent a large medieval city on the move, and which raise
insoluble problems about how it was possible to feed all these people, even if
the fleet put into port every week or two. Interestingly, Fei Xin also
mentioned ‘48 sea-going ships’, and that looks a very tight fit for 27,000
troops and an entire storehouse of fine porcelain, silks and other gifts (even
bulkier on the return, when the tribute included a menagerie of lions, giraffes
and zebras).27 And yet other estimates for these fleets suggest that at least
250 ships set sail, so one could try to argue that Fei only counted the Treasure
Ships. One has to distinguish big junks from small sampans, lighters and
supply ships, including those filled with fresh water and towed behind larger
vessels. Marco Polo’s description of the largest Chinese ships insists that they
were manned by 200 sailors, even, in one text of his book of travels, by 300.
He describes tugs that were used to help these great junks along, with fifty or
sixty sailors at the oars. Ships were constructed out of fir wood, to the best of
his knowledge, though evidence from underwater archaeology and the
written sources we have indicates that cedar and camphor wood were often
used as well, and they would have lasted better; the Yuan shipbuilding
industry had denuded parts of China of tree cover, and Yong-le’s schemes, if
they were really on the scale that was reported, must have had the same
disastrous effect. Polo described capacious vessels, bigger than those that
sailed the Mediterranean, and others who saw or heard about them knew that
they contained many cabins for the wealthier or more important passengers.
They do seem to have been much more comfortable than European ships,
where everyone was crowded together under the open skies and living,
sleeping and cooking space was very confined.28
A reconstruction in print of the ships by Edward Dreyer sets the size of the
largest vessels in these fleets, the so-called Treasure Ships, at around 400 feet
long and about 170 feet broad, with nine masts.29 It is generally assumed
that those who built these ships adapted the design from the traffic that
regularly sailed up and down the Yangtze and the other broad Chinese rivers
and canals, where big ships were constructed with flatter bottoms than one
would expect to find at sea and with large numbers of masts. Detailed records
of shipbuilding survive from this period, and the sheer scale of the industry is
very impressive; even so, most vessels never ventured into saltwater.30 What
was suitable for the relatively calm and shallow waters of a river would
certainly not suit the open ocean, where a proper keel would be needed to
guarantee stability, and where too many sails could make ships more difficult
to manoeuvre in storms. A displacement of over 18,000, or even 24,000, tons
would make these ships into the very largest ones constructed out of wood,
setting aside one or two of the vanity vessels built for the Ptolemaic rulers of
Hellenistic Egypt that probably never ventured out of the harbour at
Alexandria.31
All this sounds incredible, especially since there are no references to the
loss of ships at sea during the expeditions, though that must have happened
occasionally. The arguments in favour of smaller fleets with fewer people on
board are compelling. At 200–250 feet in length, manned by about 200 crew,
these ships enter the realms of plausibility.32 This scaling-down of the size
of the ships and of the fleets and their crews should not suggest that the
arrival of a grand imperial navy in Melaka or Calicut or Aden was anything
less than an extraordinarily impressive event, as ship after ship came into
sight offshore, unfamiliar in its rigging, with dragon pennants flying. Even if
we reduce the size of the company to, say, 10,000 on each expedition, we still
have that sizeable medieval town on the move, with all the logistical
problems of supplying water and food and of maintaining discipline and
health on board during voyages that reached as far as Africa and Arabia.

III

The first expedition took place in 1405–7, soon after Yong-le had gained
power. The sixty-two Treasure Ships built in the Lonjiang shipyard in
Nanjing and floated down the Yangtze River to reach the sea stood at the
heart of the fleet; these were the ships on which the gifts to China’s vassals
were to be loaded. From Champa, which was happy to recognize Yong-le’s
authority as a defence against its neighbour and rival Annam, the first voyage
headed towards Java, where the local kings had been a source of trouble to
Hong-wu, but where a large community of Chinese merchants lived,
servicing the island’s booming economy based on spices and other rare
goods. The current king was ‘arrogant and disrespectful and wanted to harm
Zheng He. He heard about this and went away.’33 For the moment Zheng He
was content to parade his ships and awe the Javans, as his destination lay
through the Strait of Malacca, past Melaka itself and around the Andaman
islands (described by Marco Polo as a wild and dangerous place) and right
across the Bay of Bengal to Ceylon, where he expected no favours from the
local ruler, so he pressed on up the western coast of India to Calicut and
Cochin. Calicut made a good impression on Zheng’s officers, to judge from
positive comments by Ma Huan: ‘the people are very honest and trustworthy.
Their appearance is smart, fine and distinguished.’ He called Calicut ‘the
great country of the Western Ocean’, while Fei Xin noted that ‘it is also a
principal port for all the foreigners of the Western Ocean’. Ma Huan also
reported a garbled story about ‘Mou-xie who established a religious cult’ and
the Golden Calf that he heard in Calicut, not realizing that this was the same
person as the Musa, or Moses, revered by his fellow Muslims. And yet he
also recognized that there were very many Muslims in Calicut; a past king of
Calicut had said: ‘You do not eat the pig; I do not eat the ox.’34
After spending winter 1406–7 in Calicut, Zheng He made his way back
past Melaka, with an eye on the troubled situation in Sumatra, where a
Chinese pirate named Chen Zu-yi had taken control of Palembang. The old
capital of Śri Vijaya was no longer the great trading centre it had once been, a
role that was passing even now to Melaka, but the town had recovered
something of its lost importance at the end of the fourteenth century, as closer
ties with China were created.35 The Ming ban on private trade seems to have
caused no problems, for it was easy to ignore commands from Beijing in far-
off Sumatra. However, the presence of a powerful Chinese pirate threatened
this special relationship, and Zheng He was determined to assert Ming
authority over the South China Sea; as a result, the Chinese merchants in
Palembang greeted the Ming fleet with delight. However, Zheng was
unimpressed when Chen Zu-yi came to offer his submission. Suspecting that
this was simply a ruse to gain time before Chen and his pirate fleet could slip
away, Zheng He attacked the pirates, who had at least seventeen ships – no
match for Zheng’s fleet. An official history of Yong-le’s reign claims that
more than 5,000 pirates were killed, while Chen Zu-yi was carried back to
Beijing and beheaded by imperial order; ‘after this the seas were restored to
peace and order’.36 This was the one violent confrontation in what had
otherwise been a peaceful mission, or rather a display of Chinese power so
impressive that no one in his right mind would oppose the power of the Ming
emperor. The Ming navy had taken advantage of the monsoons to time its
journeys out and in, but even so on the final leg a great storm arose and the
sailors were struck with fear. They prayed fervently to Tianfei and were
rewarded with a miraculous light that settled on the top of the mainmast of
one of the ships and that they knew was a sign of the goddess’s protection (St
Elmo’s Fire, a common electric effect during storms at sea). To cite a later
inscription on which Zheng He recorded his memories of earlier expeditions:

We have traversed over a hundred thousand li of vast ocean and have

beheld great ocean waves, rising as high as the sky and swelling and
swelling endlessly. Whether in dense fog and drizzling rain or in
wind-driven waves rising like mountains, no matter what the sudden
changes in sea conditions, we spread our cloudlike sails aloft and
sailed by the stars day and night. Had we not trusted her divine merit,
how could we have done this in peace and safety? When we met with
danger, once we invoked the divine name, her answer to our prayer
was like an echo; suddenly there was a divine lamp which illuminated
the mast and sails, and once this miraculous light appeared, then
apprehension turned to calm.37
Zheng He’s fleet arrived back in Nanjing in October 1407, accompanied by
emissaries from around the South China Sea and from as far away as Calicut
and Melaka, who presented their tribute to the imperial court and were
rewarded with copper cash and paper money, though it is not clear what use
paper money would have had in far-off kingdoms.38
Aware that the gifts of money were not entirely what was expected, the
emperor began to plan Zheng He’s second voyage, of 1407–9, whose
declared function was to present letters of appointment to the king of Calicut,
including a silver seal of office, and to present gifts of silk robes, caps and
belts to the king and his chief advisers, who would be ranked in best Chinese
fashion. Similarly, the rulers of territories en route to Calicut, such as Siam,
Java and Melaka, were to be honoured with imperial letters.39 The
expedition probably split up into squadrons that visited different ports and
then regrouped. However, a particular show of force was needed in Java,
whose king had resisted Chinese authority in the past and was wise enough to
agree to a tribute payment and compensation for past offences.40
The wish to discipline those who were reluctant to accept Ming
overlordship was also apparent on the third voyage (1409–11), which this
time did not avoid Ceylon. The king of Ceylon, Alagakkonara, was accused
of insulting Zheng He and even of trying to assassinate him, luring Zheng
inland and plotting to send his own ‘bandits’ to raid the Chinese fleet.
Zheng’s way back to his ships was blocked by felled trees, though messages
were sent to his fleet via unblocked roads. Zheng led his soldiers into battle
across back roads and launched a surprise attack on the capital; he captured
the king, who was carried back to China, although the emperor decided he
was just an ignorant barbarian, and did not execute him. Instead, in a show of
Ming authority, he nominated a replacement for him from the royal family of
Ceylon, ‘in order to continue the sacrifices of the kingdom of Ceylon’.41 The
Sinhalese version of these events is rather different, and reveals that the court
in Ceylon was trying to save face: here, Chinese envoys arrived at the royal
palace loaded with gifts; but this was just a ruse, and once inside the
compound they seized the king and carried him off.42
It has also been suggested that the real aim of the attack on Ceylon was to
steal a tooth relic of the Buddha, one of the most important of all Buddhist
relics on the island. In 1284 Khubilai had already despatched ships to Ceylon
requiring this relic to be handed over; the king of Ceylon demurred. A later
account of the voyages does claim the relic was carried back to China, and
attributes the calm seas through which the fleet passed to its magical
power.43 The story is surely a fable; but this would fit well with the idea that
Yong-le’s political programme was moulded as much by Khubilai’s
ambitions as by those of his father. The nearest one can reach to the argument
that this expedition was a Buddhist project is the text of an inscription that
Zheng He left at Galle on the coast of Ceylon. The inscription uttered praise
to Buddha for watching over the fleet:

Wherefore according to the Rites we bestow offerings in recompense,

and do now reverently present before the Lord Buddha, the World-
Honoured One, obligations of gold and silver, gold-embroidered
jewelled banners of variegated silk, incense-burners and flower-vases,
silks of many colours in lining and exterior, lamps and candles with
other gifts in order to manifest the high honour of the Lord Buddha.44

But that was only the section in Chinese; the text was repeated in Persian and
in Tamil, and there it was Allah and a Hindu god who were invoked. Allah,
Buddha and the Hindu god are all offered 1,000 pieces of gold, 5,000 pieces
of silver, as well as silk, perfumes and temple ornaments. Taken as a whole,
we witness here ‘a co-ordinated imperial offensive to persuade the heavens
and their diverse deities to smile on Chinese maritime activities’.45 This
eclecticism was typical of Chinese attitudes to religion.

IV

The three first expeditions had happened in rapid sequence. After Zheng He’s
return in mid-1411 the emperor, distracted by plans for a land campaign
against the Mongols, waited until December 1412 before he ordered Zheng
He to set out once again, bearing gifts for sundry kings in the South China
Sea and beyond. Among the places visited were Palembang and its
replacement as the main trading centre near the Malacca Strait, Melaka, ruled
by Parameśvara. A lengthy inscription left there by Zheng He included an
eloquent poem:

The vast south-western sea reaches unto the Middle Kingdom,

 Its waves cresting high as the heavens,
Watering the earth, the same way for countless aeons …
Its righteous king, paying his respects to imperial
Suzerainty, wishes his country to be treated as one of
Our imperial domains and to follow the Chinese way …46

Melaka was developing into an important base for Zheng He’s activities,
thanks to its strategic position and to the creation of the Chinese settlement
there. Zheng He needed to find a place where the fleet could be serviced, and
Melaka was as much a naval base as a centre of Chinese trade.47 The rise of
Melaka thus owed a great deal to Chinese influence, and to the patronage of
Zheng He just at the moment when Rajah Parameśvara was bringing the city
into existence. Fei Xin saw Melaka when it was still ‘a single hill with few
people on it’, located in an unproductive area, with simple houses; but once
Zheng He had brought it under Chinese sovereignty and had raised it to the
status of an imperial county things clearly improved.48 Still, it had its rivals,
notably Semudera on the northern tip of Sumatra, ‘the most important port of
assembly for the Western Ocean’. On his return from the Indian Ocean,
Zheng He would display another rare show of force and send in his troops to
suppress a rebellion against the king of Semudera, thereby showing what
advantages could be gained from submission to the Chinese emperor.49 Yet
India was not the intended destination. The Chinese fleet majestically sailed
past the Maldive and Laccadive islands, but its target was a place the Chinese
must have heard about at length when they visited Calicut, Hormuz at the
gateway of the Persian Gulf.50 The voyage from Calicut to Hormuz took
thirty-four days, which was rather slower than the norm (about twenty-five
days), but this was surely due to the need to keep a fleet together and to the
less flexible manoeuvrability of the very largest ships, by comparison with
Arab and Persian dhows.51 The mystery is what Zheng He can have wanted
from a trading city so far from China. Perhaps, then, it would be wrong to
rule out curiosity entirely, or even the traditional Ming contempt for trade,
since the Chinese court was fascinated by exotic goods from the ‘Western
Ocean’ and beyond. The interpreter Ma Huan was impressed with the place
and took special interest in the jugglers, acrobats and street magicians, above
all by acrobatic goats that could balance on a couple of tall poles and dance a
jig up in the air.52
 One voyage generated another, as tribute was received, as ambassadors
from foreign kingdoms were received at court, and as Zheng He was ordered
to return to distant waters with letters of appointment and seals of office. He
departed on his fifth voyage by way of Quanzhou in summer, 1417, leaving
behind a tablet on which he recorded his offering of incense to the sea
goddess; he took on board a massive cargo of porcelain, of which more
shortly. He was now sent beyond Hormuz (‘Ho-ru-mo-ssu’) to a town on the
southern shores of Arabia called Lasa, thought to have been a port in Yemen.
In Luo Maodeng’s romanticized account of the voyages, Zheng He
encountered greater resistance as he ventured into uncharted waters, and had
to blast the walls of Lasa with his cannons, though there is no other evidence
for that happening.53 But a much more important destination was the Rasulid
kingdom of Yemen, whose capital, Aden, had for centuries been a control
centre for traffic heading up to Egypt, down the coast of east Africa and
across to western India, including Calicut. Its prosperity boomed in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, partly thanks to the lively India trade of the
Egyptian merchants of Cairo and Alexandria, but also thanks to its command
of a surprisingly fertile interior. It has been seen already that this was an area
where frankincense and myrrh were easy to obtain, and tribute paid in this
form would please the Ming court enormously, in view of the difficulties and
expense of obtaining these luxuries overland or by way of endless
intermediaries along the ‘Silk Route of the Sea’. It is hardly surprising that its
rulers were determined to protect their independence in the face of attempts
by the Mamluk rulers of Egypt and Syria to extend their power right down
the coasts of the Red Sea, and accepting Chinese claims to overlordship, and
subsequently sending a series of missions to Beijing, did not seem a
ridiculous idea, when Zheng He could come all that way with his grand
fleet.54 Ma Huan thought that ‘the people are of an overbearing disposition’
and noted that the sultan had a large, well-drilled army. He was impressed by
the wealth of Aden, visible for instance in large precious stones he called
‘cat’s eyes’, and in the fine filigree jewellery worn by women.55
Zheng He’s purpose was not, however, to intervene directly in the politics
of Yemen. His fleet was bound for Africa; the arrival at the Chinese court of
the giraffe sent by the king of Bengal had already alerted the Ming dynasty to
the extraordinary treasures of Africa, and on past expeditions there had been
plenty of chances to examine African ivory and ebony. Mogadishu in what is
now Somalia was named on the sailing instructions given to Zheng He, and it
was the first African town his fleet reached. The Chinese were unimpressed
by the arid setting of a city that lacked supplies of wood, and in stark contrast
to Chinese towns was entirely built of stone, even if the buildings were
several storeys high. The Chinese considered the Somalians rather stupid, and
were only interested in what they could bear away: frankincense, ambergris
and wild animals, including lions, leopards and zebras. Further south, at
Brava, they saw more of the same type of housing but were able to add
myrrh, camels and ‘camel-birds’, that is ostriches, to their booty, and as they
reached the Kenyan coast at Malindi they acquired African elephants and
rhinoceroses, as well as the much-vaunted qilin, or giraffes, so that the
returning Treasure Ships must have resembled Noah’s Ark.56
The Chinese were not totally ignorant of Africa. The earliest Chinese
reference to Africa so far identified dates from the ninth century; there, as in
the accounts of the Zheng He voyages, the Horn of Africa is presented as an
arid land, and the inhabitants are described as nomads who drain blood from
the veins of their cattle and drink it mixed with milk, rather as the Masai have
continued to do. By the thirteenth century, the Chinese had heard of
Zanzibar; in 1226, it was mentioned under the name ‘Cengba’ by the
geographer Zhao Rugua, who even understood that the name ‘Zanzibar’ was
derived from the term Zanj, which indicated black-skinned people. Zhao was
aware of the River Nile and of Alexandria (Egentuo) with its great
lighthouse, so anyone reading his work would have understood how Aden
was linked to a wealthy land to the north.57 By the fourteenth century, Egypt
had become a great consumer of Chinese pottery and metalwork, to the extent
of making reasonable imitations of Chinese bronzes in order to satisfy ever-
rising domestic demand.58 Large amounts of Chinese ceramics also reached
Zanzibar, as the archaeological evidence clearly shows. Zhao also looked at
the coastline south of Zanzibar and knew that black ‘savages’, as he
condescendingly called the inhabitants, were carried off by Dashi, that is,
Arab, slavers. He imagined that these black Africans lived on Madagascar,
which was an error (Madagascar was even now being colonized by people of
Malay and Indonesian origin); but he had time for stories about a great bird
similar to Sindbad’s rukh whose massive wings blotted out the sun, and
whose diet included camels swallowed whole. He knew too that this was a
land that produced rhinoceros horn and elephant tusks.59 One might
conclude from the Chinese coins that have turned up all along the coast from
Mombasa northwards that Africa was already the target of Chinese merchants
well before the arrival of Zheng He; a hoard discovered by a farmer in
Zanzibar in 1945 consisted of 250 Tang and Song coins, dated between 618
and 1295. At Mogadishu six coins of Yong-le have been found, so it is quite
possible that they arrived on board Zheng He’s fleet. As for porcelain, the
island of Pemba, like Zanzibar an important centre of trade, has yielded
pieces from the Song and Ming dynasty, and African demand for Chinese
pottery grew during the fourteenth century.60 But to say that they were
interested in African produce and that Chinese cash has been found along the
coast is not the same as saying that Chinese traders travelled as far as this.
Chinese cash remained in circulation long after it was manufactured
(normally by casting rather than striking); a Song coin might have arrived in
Ming times.
Once again Zheng He brought back to the Ming court ambassadors,
including representatives of Hormuz, but they were kept waiting a couple of
years for their return trip. Meanwhile, forty-one Treasure Ships were fitted
out from October 1419 onwards, setting out at some point in mid-1421.
However, the emperor was losing interest in the voyages, and concentrated
his energies on the construction of his new capital at Beijing and on war in
Mongolia instead. Around the same time he ordered the suspension of further
voyages, although he let this one depart. After they entered the ‘Western
Ocean’, the ships did not stay together; a eunuch named Zhou Man led part of
the fleet to Aden, but much of the fleet apparently stayed behind in India,
based at Calicut. By September 1422 the fleet had returned to China, bringing
envoys from Siam, Semudera and Aden. But, after spending so much on
Beijing, the emperor had run out of money to pay for these great worldwide
displays of Chinese magnificence. Then, in 1424, Emperor Yong-le sent
Zheng He on a further voyage, but this was a much more modest expedition
than those Zheng He had commanded earlier, and it went no further than
Palembang, a territory which happily acknowledged Chinese supremacy;
Zheng delivered the letter and seal appointing the head of the ‘Pacification
Commission’ at Palembang, the figure who was responsible for managing the
large Chinese community there. But by the time Zheng He returned home, his
patron was dead.61
This was not quite the end of Zheng He’s naval career. The new emperor,
Hong-xi, only lasted a few months, and he was hostile to these projects; on
the very day of his accession he abolished the expeditions to the ‘Western
Ocean’, and a day later he released an opponent of Zheng He from prison,
Xia Yuan-ji, who had been warning of the excessive cost of the maritime
expeditions.62 Hong-xi’s successor, Yong-le’s grandson Xuan-de, also had
other plans for Zheng He, including a military command at Nanjing and the
building of the great Bao-en Temple at Nanjing, also known as the Number
One Pagoda, which became a seat of Buddhist scholarship and the main
temple in the city. So a perhaps disconsolate Zheng He was sent back to his
duties as overseer of construction projects, and languished in prestigious but
not politically important tasks, while his foe Xia Yuan-ji held the emperor’s
attention and counselled against further expeditions; as Minister of Finance,
Xia could see no justification for the waste of money they involved.
However, Xia’s death in February 1430 prompted a rethink; Xuan-de became
worried that the prestige of his empire was suffering because ‘the foreign
countries, distantly located beyond the sea, still had not heard’ of the stable
and successful rule he had inaugurated. The ships built for the expedition he
launched bore names that set out the fundamental principles Xuan-de was
trying to broadcast: Pure Harmony was one, Lasting Tranquillity another.63
Once again Zheng He set out to proclaim Chinese overlordship across the
Western Ocean, and once again he left inscriptions that helpfully set out the
aims of the expedition. One of these inscriptions was carved on a tablet in the
Temple of the Heavenly Princess Tianfei at Liujiagang on the Yangtze River,
newly constructed by Zheng He in honour of his divine patron, while the
other was erected on the admiral’s behalf by the chief Daoist priest of
Changle, 400 miles from Liujiagang, just as the fleet was about to set off
from the coast of China. Both date from 1431, and both reveal how happy the
Muslim eunuch was to worship other gods (whether traditional Chinese ones
or Buddhist deities) rather than Allah: ‘if men serve their prince with the
utmost loyalty, there is nothing they cannot do, and if they worship the gods
with utmost sincerity there is no prayer that will not be answered.’64 Zheng
He commemorated his past voyages ‘to the various barbarians’ aboard ‘over
a hundred seagoing ships’, and carrying ‘several tens of thousands’ of
soldiers. Just to give an idea of how easily numbers were inflated, when he
mentioned the number of countries he had visited the figure for 3,000 crept in
where modern scholars believe the intention was to write ‘thirty’. Zheng He
had no objection to the lively trade between ‘barbarian’ peoples, and even
thought of himself as its protector: ‘the sea routes became pure and peaceful
and the foreign peoples could rely on them and pursue their occupations in
safety. All this was due to the aid of the goddess.’65 Yet the second
inscription makes abundantly plain the unique achievement (so it is claimed)
of the Ming dynasty, which has surpassed the Han and Tang dynasties in
encompassing the peoples of the world: ‘from the edge of the sky to the ends
of the earth there are none who have not become subjects and slaves’.66
Their reward has been not just material gifts but, more importantly, imperial
favour. For these voyages had a more important moral than material purpose.
The main fleet headed first for Champa and then across the South China
Sea to Surabaya on Java, which meant the Chinese had arrived in the
heartlands of the Majapahit kingdom. They arrived on 7 March and only left
Java after more than four months, suggesting the need for ship repairs as well
as politicking; they visited Sumatra next, calling in at Palembang, but they
only stopped there for three days, for they had had plenty of time to resupply
their ships in Java. At the start of August they were in Melaka, where they
halted for another month, and then on to Semudera, where they remained for
about seven weeks. No doubt they were also factoring into their calculations
knowledge of the monsoons and of the typhoon season, but that was not
enough to save them from severe storms as they headed through high seas
into the Indian Ocean. Zheng He’s boasts in the two inscriptions that
described how the goddess Tianfei had saved them on earlier expeditions
must have seemed like wishful thinking. But they found safe anchorage in the
Nicobar Islands and bought plenty of coconuts from the friendly natives.
Once calmer weather arrived, they headed straight for Cochin and Calicut,
and then on to Hormuz. Possibly detachments were sent further, as far as
Aden or even east Africa, but without Zheng He on board; ambassadors from
Arabia and Somalia travelled back with Zheng He after joining his fleet at
Hormuz, but someone must have been sent to fetch them.
Even earlier, several ships had been sent off to Bengal, which lay well to
the north of the route the Ming fleets always took towards India but which, as
has been seen, was ruled by kings who cultivated friendship with the imperial
court, and had even sent a giraffe as a present. Fortunately, the chronicler of
this voyage, Ma Huan, joined the Bengal-bound squadron; he admired the
country’s fertility and its fine textiles, but was less pleased by the heat. Fei
Xin enjoyed a feast of roast beef and lamb but was a little surprised that no
wine was drunk, ‘for fear that it might disturb someone’s character and
prevent him from conforming to the ceremonial’. So they drank sweetened
rose-dew or sherbet instead.67
 Yet the most remarkable connection was yet to be made. In Calicut the
Chinese found a ship bound for Mo-qie, that is, the kingdom of Mecca (by
way of the Red Sea port at Jiddah). Some Chinese, including Ma Huan, were
allowed on board, and returned in due course with plenty of wild animals,
some of which were oddly un-Arabian (giraffes and ostriches, though lions
still existed in the Middle East); these were marvellous things they had
bought rather than been given, but along with the animals came tribute-
bearing ambassadors, or so the Chinese sources claimed. Ma Huan, who was
himself a Muslim, also called Mecca Tianfang, or ‘Heavenly Cube’, referring
to the shrine of the Ka‘aba (which indeed means ‘cube’), and he described
the Great Mosque and some of the hajj ceremonies.68 However, he does not
give the impression of knowing a great deal about his religion, without being
quite as detached from Islam as Zheng He; he rather distanced himself from
the Muslims of Arabia by noting that they were punctilious in their religion,
‘not daring to commit the slightest transgression’.
In early July 1433 the fleet was back at Liujiagang. On board were
ambassadors from ten countries around the Indian Ocean. The official history
of the reign of Xuan-de quotes the words of the emperor himself, which, were
he not an emperor, one might describe as churlish: ‘we do not have any desire
for goods from distant regions, but we realise that they are offered in full
sincerity. Since they come from afar they should be accepted, but their
presentation is not cause for congratulations.’69 Indeed, having revived the
Ming voyages, Xuan-de sent no more expeditions to solicit submission from
the peoples of the Indian Ocean. A year or two after his return, Zheng He
died and around the same time Emperor Xuan-de also died, leaving a
vacuum, since his heir was only eight years old. The eunuchs, who are
usually supposed to have favoured lavish spending, lost influence at court,
and interest in maintaining a navy plummeted. Foreign ambassadors arrived
bearing gifts, but the Ming emperors received tribute from Siam, Java and
elsewhere without any longer sending their fleets to collect it.70 Once again
China looked away from the sea. Foreign adventures went out of fashion as
domestic difficulties accumulated. The sea voyages had always been
controversial, and even those who strongly believed in the special place of
the Middle Kingdom under Heaven were not necessarily convinced that they
brought much gain. Indeed, it is quite likely that the emperor’s words quoted
a moment ago were put in his mouth by a later chronicler, who wanted to cast
doubt on the wisdom of the Ming voyages without showing disrespect to the
emperor.
Modern Chinese historians like to insist that there was a great difference
between Zheng He’s voyages and those of the Portuguese and Spaniards
(which were just beginning in the 1420s and 1430s, in the case of Portugal):
the Iberian voyages aimed to conquer territory, if need be by force, and to
impose trade networks under their exclusive control, whereas the Ming
voyages were by and large peaceful – allowing for the eradication of pirates –
and aimed to show the flag rather than to create colonies. Zheng He is seen as
the potential star of a counterfactual history in which ‘Vasco da Gama and his
successors would have found a powerful navy in control of the Indian
Ocean’; and even ‘Christopher Columbus might have encountered Chinese
junks exploring the Caribbean’.71 This contrast between Europe and China
involves an oversimplification of Iberian aims, which evolved slowly; but
this view also underplays the imperial dimension to the Ming voyages.
Although the settlement of foreign lands by Chinese soldiers and sailors was
not on the Ming agenda, a Chinese compound was created in the new trading
town of Melaka, and support was offered to the sizeable community of
Chinese merchants in Java and Sumatra – indeed, the Chinese in Palembang
were governed by a Commissioner whose power clearly extended beyond his
own ethnic group. The emperor expected, demanded and received recognition
of his superiority. But this came at a price, for the tribute brought back did
not compensate for the cost of fitting out the expeditions, nor for the value of
the gifts generously bestowed on the emperor’s vassals in the South China
Sea, India, Arabia and Africa. Even if fewer and smaller ships than is often
assumed set sail, these voyages were an impressive technical achievement for
a navy that had little or no knowledge of the Indian Ocean.
 14

Lions, Deer and Hunting Dogs

At the centre of vast webs of trade and tribute, feeding their products into the
routes leading towards both China and the Indian Ocean – and beyond that to
the Red Sea and the Mediterranean – there lay what Marco Polo called ‘the
greatest island in the world’, 3,000 miles in circumference and ruled by a
great king who, he confidently asserted, paid tribute ‘to no one else in the
world’. Inhabited by ‘idolaters’, Great Java was of ‘surpassing wealth,
producing black pepper, nutmegs, spikenard, galingale, cubebs, cloves, and
all other kinds of spices’. It was visited by huge numbers of ships, and the
merchants who traded there, including many from Quanzhou and other
southern Chinese cities, made an enormous profit. But in reality, as the
exaggeration about its size implies, Polo was confused between the real Java
(Java Minor) and an imaginary landmass of great wealth lying to the south
(Great Java).1 In modern works Java tends to be subsumed into a large mass
of East Indian islands that were famous for the production of high-quality
spices, some of which ended up on tables in Venice and Bruges. The truth is
a little more complicated and rather more interesting, especially as it helps
explain the eclipse of the maritime state of Śri Vijaya and the emergence of
Singapore and Melaka as important links between the Indian Ocean and the
South China Sea. The success of Java was built upon its rivalry with Śri
Vijaya. The rulers and merchants of both kingdoms aimed to supply high-
grade spices to the Chinese to the north and the Indians, and little-known
peoples beyond them, to the west. At first, Śri Vijaya proved stronger than
Java. In 1016 the Śri Vijayans sent their fleet against Java, and scored a
notable victory. This was not a battle for territory but for command of the
trade routes across the South China Sea and of the many subordinate towns
that acknowledged the higher authority of the rajah of either Śri Vijaya or
Java.
However great the success of Palembang may have been in the heyday of
Śri Vijaya’s trade, by the time of its victory over the Javans its glory days
were coming to an end. One reason was that its very success had brought
upon Śri Vijaya the envious attention not just of the Javans but of a ruler
much further to the west, in southern India, whose subjects knew Sumatra
through their lively trade there, and the lively trade of the Indonesians in the
Tamil-speaking kingdom of Cōļa, or Chola. Chola had a long reach; objects
in the Chola style dating to the tenth and eleventh centuries have been found
in the Kra Isthmus, the narrow strip of land attaching the Malay peninsula to
the great landmass of Asia; and in 1025 the king of Chola launched a violent
attack on Śri Vijaya that has been credited with permanently disrupting the
kingdom’s trade. Śri Vijayan bases beyond the Strait of Malacca were also in
the firing line. After the Chola invasion, even though it did not result in
permanent occupation, Śri Vijaya was no longer able to count on its tribute-
bearing dependencies in northern Sumatra and the western Malay
peninsula.2 In addition, for whatever reason, the Śri Vijayans shifted their
capital away from Palembang towards another city, Jambi, that took
advantage of its position closer to the Strait of Malacca to become a new
centre of trade, though it too lay some way upriver (which in a time of raids
and counter-raids made good sense). The Chinese continued to write about
San fo-chi, their transliteration of Śri Vijaya, and both Jambi and Palembang
were still visited by Chinese merchants; but the kingdom had lost its
leadership to its rivals. That said, the rajah of Śri Vijaya made every effort to
foster good relations with China, sending tribute to the Song emperors in
1137, 1156 and 1178, while the Śri Vijayans also asked the customs
administration at Guangzhou to reduce the duty payable on frankincense
from 40 to 10 per cent, suggesting that the flow of aromatics from south-east
Asia continued to be managed in part from Jambi. In 1156 a native of Śri
Vijaya was invited to act as the official head of the community of foreign
merchants in Guangzhou, with five Chinese assistants appointed to serve
under him.3
Song liberalization of trade had allowed a hundred flowers to bloom: there
were now Chinese as well as south-east Asian competitors to Śri Vijaya’s
dominance of the sea routes. Among those who benefited from this were
sundry petty kings who had previously operated in the shadow of Śri Vijaya,
notably the rulers of Semudera – Pasai on the Indian Ocean tip of Sumatra,
with which, as has been seen, Zheng He had a sometimes difficult
relationship. According to legend, its first ruler chose the site of his new town
at Semudera when he saw one of his hunting dogs being attacked by a mouse
deer – apparently a good augury. However, similar tales explain the choice of
other city sites in virgin territory, notably Melaka; deer, lions and what may
be an orang-utan all appear in these stories.
 Semudera – Pasai, founded late in the thirteenth century, was a double
entity, with a port on the coast and a capital at Pasai a little way inland, but it
had developed in an area that once had fallen under the sway of Palembang.
Now, however, elaborate court ceremonials at an increasingly magnificent
court expressed the power of the ruler over subject tribes in the Sumatran
interior; and they were also intended to show that the sultan of Semudera –
Pasai could hold a candle to other petty kings in south-east Asia who might
have liked to gobble up his territories. The Malay Annals relate that the chief
minister of Pasai built a ship, bought ‘Arabian merchandise’, dressed in Arab
clothing ‘since at that time all the people of Pasai knew Arabic’, and went on
a visit to another kingdom on a secret mission; this says something about the
intensity of Pasai’s relations with lands at the other end of the Indian
Ocean.4 Its rulers may already have adopted Islam by 1300, although there is
no evidence that the rest of the population followed suit.
Semudera was a staging post for ships on their way deeper into the Spice
Islands, but it also provided pepper from its own hinterland as well as other
spices which it acquired from lands around the South China Sea; and it lay in
just the right position to provide basic supplies to ships bound through the
Malacca Strait or around the southern shores of Sumatra. Rice and grain for
sailors and their passengers, as well as fresh water, were as much the
foundation of its wealth as luxurious spices.5

II
There were plenty of rivals both to Śri Vijaya and to Semudera. A major city
emerged in the middle of the fourteenth century a little inland from Bangkok.
Ayutthaya, or Ayudhya, was formally founded by the king of Siam in about
1350 and for more than four centuries it was the capital of Siam, not just its
political capital but also a great centre of trade, well protected because it
stood in the midst of a river complex that ensured access to the sea but made
access difficult for raiders from the sea. Sometimes, admittedly, the maze of
waterways that led to Ayutthaya was itself the hazard – in the mid-sixteenth
century the ship on which the Portuguese poet Camões was sailing entered
the wrong river mouth when its captain tried to make headway towards
Ayutthaya; the ship then ran aground and broke up, so that Camões was
lucky to escape on some driftwood, all the time supposedly holding on to the
manuscript of the Lusiads.6 The flood plain on which it was constructed had
only risen out of the sea during recent centuries, so when the rivers were in
full flood the area around the city became completely waterlogged; but this
was exactly what the rice fields needed, since the heads of grain kept above
the level of the flood and the grain itself could be conveniently reaped from
boats. Villagers round about lived in houses built on stilts so that they would
be safe whenever the waters rose.
The town was not brand new – a massive golden Buddha was installed in
the area a quarter of a century before the city was founded, as a thank-
offering for the prosperity brought to the area by Siamese trade with China.
As with its neighbours, how it was founded soon became the stuff of legend.
In one version, the site had been visited by Buddha himself before it was
founded by Prince U Thong, who displayed his talents by eating iron and by
revealing that he was the reincarnation of a famous ant that had lived at the
time of the Buddha and had been praised by Buddha for carrying a single
grain of rice; that was all he could possibly do, whereas if a horse carried one
grain of rice this was a worthless act involving no effort. In another version,
recorded by a Dutch visitor, Ayutthaya was created by Prince U Thong, who
was really Chinese, and who had been disgraced at home after he seduced the
wives of the emperor’s courtiers. He turned up in Siam, where he also
supposedly founded Bangkok, a rather smaller settlement downriver from
Ayutthaya. But when he discovered the magnificent but empty site that was
to become Ayutthaya he was nonplussed. Why was it empty? He learned of a
great dragon that breathed noxious fumes and lived in the marshes; all the
inhabitants of an earlier settlement had been suffocated. Of course, U Thong
killed the dragon and drained the marshes, on which he built his city.7
This was a different sort of city to the great Chinese ports of Hangzhou,
Quanzhou and Guangzhou that hummed with officials and merchants.
Ayutthaya was vast, but it was also surprisingly empty: the perimeter of the
city was over eleven kilometres long. Much of the capital was given over to
temples and pavilions, with a few streets of merchants, and there were plenty
of open spaces, some still swampy.8 Ayutthaya was a seat of government
and the base from which the fourteenth-century rulers of Siam extended their
control over lands to east and west – as far to the east as Angkor, for the great
Khmer civilization had fallen on hard times. The Siamese kings were keen to
show the surrounding world that they were the masters, and they expected
those who came to trade with them, such as the inhabitants of the Ryukyu
islands south of Japan, to bring gifts which they saw as tribute. Like many
rulers in the region, they exercised close control over trade, imposing
monopolies on the most desirable items such as pepper and sapanwood. By
the seventeenth century, when the Dutch were active at Ayutthaya, Siam was
exporting formidable quantities of elephant ivory: in sixty years, the Dutch
sold 53,000 pounds of ivory to the Japanese, and the volume sent to Taiwan
was much the same. An exotic perfume was made from Thai ‘eaglewood’, a
type of aloe-wood that was scraped from rotting trees. Not surprisingly, given
its use in Chinese medicine, rhinoceros horn was another favourite export,
while millions of deer hides were also carried away by the Dutch. Tiger skins
and shagreen, that is, shark-skin, also had a place in this trade.9
It may sound anachronistic to make use of much later evidence from a time
when Dutch capital was being injected into the region, but the evidence for
close links to China is not simply the product of foundation legends. Lacking
a maritime tradition of their own, the Siamese kings were happy to employ
Chinese merchants and sailors, so that ‘Siamese’ ships were not actually
crewed by Siamese sailors. The readiness of the Chinese to serve is easy to
explain. So long as the Ming government in China itself forbade its Chinese
subjects to trade overseas, those who wished to do so ended up living in
settlements away from home, and away from the everyday interference of the
Ming government. So there were plenty of Chinese merchants in Siam, not to
mention neighbouring lands.10 In the 1370s the king of Siam sent several
embassies to China, loaded with remarkable gifts, such as six-legged turtles
and elephants. The Siamese king was not simply motivated by awe at the
might of the Ming, nor by the lustre that would accrue to him when the
Chinese emperor recognized him as a legitimate king; he also had
commercial instincts of his own since he would expect to receive silk cloth
and fine ceramics, and his agents would be able to pick up plenty of desirable
goods in the marketplace of Guangzhou as they made their way home. Some
of these were sold on to private traders for a handsome profit. Embassies
were sent year in, year out with only a few exceptions, during the last years
of the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth, and ties were
strengthened further when the large fleets of Chinese junks commanded by
the eunuch Zheng He made their appearance in the South China Sea at the
start of the fifteenth century.11
Ayutthaya would remain a centre of power and a focal point for the trade
of the South China Sea until it was sacked by the Burmese in 1767. Although
the documents tend to record the movement of exotic goods back and forth to
China and other western Pacific lands, its strength also lay in local resources,
notably its rice, which Thai boats (not this time manned by Chinese sailors)
carried up and down the coasts of Malaya and Indo-China. This too helped to
integrate Ayutthaya into a network of maritime routes that stretched towards
the Strait of Malacca in one direction, towards the East Indies in another
direction, and upwards towards southern China and even beyond – to
Okinawa and Japan.

III

Java was always a rival to Śri Vijaya, whether the kingdom’s capital lay at
Palembang or Jambi. In 1275 the ruler of Singhasari, a kingdom in eastern
Java, sent his forces against Jambi, which was sacked.12 Meanwhile, with
the Mongol conquest of the Song Empire, an outside power began to take an
unhealthy interest in the little states of south-east Asia. Even before the
Mongols launched their naval expedition against Java in 1292, they had been
issuing commands to the rulers of states such as Semudera, which were told
to send tribute to the Yuan emperor; the Mongols did not wait for their rajahs
to volunteer. Jambi, rebuilt after its sacking, sent three missions to the
Mongol emperor between 1281 and 1301, this time anticipating the demand
for tribute, rather than awaiting the command to deliver it; but if the Śri
Vijayans hoped to gain favour at the Yuan court there is no evidence that
they succeeded, for the Mongols, unlike the Śri Vijayans, were not as
interested in trade as they were in proclaiming the universal authority of the
Mongol khan. Mongol rule brought no obvious advantages to Jambi,
Semudera or any other towns around the inner edges of the South China
Sea.13 Another potent threat emerged in Siam, whose Thai rulers extended
their influence by land and sea as far south as an island that will feature
prominently later in this chapter: Temasek, soon to be known as Singapore. A
Sumatran tradition tells how a Thai army led by a renegade Śri Vijayan
prince sacked Jambi, while Sumatra’s own chroniclers praised the ports of
Semudera–Pasai for their efforts in repelling Thai attacks. The impression
that all this disorder conveys is of rampant piracy and of the fragmentation of
the Śri Vijayan political network. The Strait of Malacca was particularly
dangerous, according to an early fourteenth-century Chinese writer named
Wang Dayuan.14 Getting spices out into the Indian Ocean was therefore not
at all straightforward, and this was where the authority of the sultans of
Semudera was of some help. In the longer term, the answer would have to be
the foundation of a control centre within the strait itself.
The beneficiary from all this chaos was the rajah of Java. The Javanese
kingdom of Majapahit came into existence in the thirteenth century, around
the same time as Semudera. While Semudera’s success, though impressive,
was rooted in control of its own local area, Majapahit sought to replicate the
trading empire of Śri Vijaya. At its peak, its network of vassals extended as
far as Singapore.15 Its rulers favoured Hinduism and Buddhism, and they
liked to portray themselves to their awed subjects as semi-divine beings. But
they were also very pragmatic: untouched by the Confucian dislike for trade,
they enthusiastically fostered trade, as a means to support themselves and to
pay for their ambitious building programmes. For, although the great temple
complex at Borobodur had been built around AD 800 and had been abandoned
to the jungle a couple of centuries later, the royal passion for large-scale
building did not fade, particularly in eastern Java.16 Ports, markets and roads
carried the lifeblood of their kingdom, so much so that a Javan epic poem of
the fifteenth century celebrated the sacred character of a set of crossroads that
lay close to the royal palace.17 Among the documents that survive from this
kingdom is the ‘Canggu Ferry Charter’, dated 1358, which was a royal
privilege inscribed on metal plates; it offered protection to those carrying
goods up the River Brantas to the town of Canggu, which would later be
mentioned as a place of note in Ma Huan’s account of Zheng He’s visit to
Java. With this decree, the royal court detached the ferrymen of Canggu from
the noble lords on whom they had earlier depended, and placed them under
the direct protection of the royal court, which – of course – wanted to gain
special access to the goods they carried from the coast to the king’s palace.18
These road and river networks within Java are the key to the success of the
Majapahit kingdom. From the interior, rice was humped down to the ports
along the coast, loaded on boats and transported to other ports, often beyond
Java itself, in the easternmost Spice Islands such as Sulawesi, Bali and Irian.
There, it was exchanged for pepper, cloves and other exotic products, which
were carried back to what Marco Polo had called ‘Great Java’ and put on sale
in the ports along its north coast. In other words, the commercial system of
the Majapahit kingdom was very well integrated; and the ruler was well
aware of the advantages – some of the other royal charters preserved on metal
plates dealt with taxes payable to the crown, and royal interest in business
initiatives even included part-ownership of a fish farm.19
The kingdom of Majapahit was, then, wealthy; during much of the
fourteenth century it also remained quite stable. As with the Chinese rulers,
its success depended on the devolution of power in the provinces to local
nobles, often members of the royal family. But the internal tensions were
obvious when Zheng He visited the island during his first and second
voyages. At the start of the fifteenth century civil war broke out between a
nephew and a son of King Hayam Wuruk of Majapahit (d. 1389), who had
divided Majapahit between them, and several hundred Chinese merchants
were killed. During his first voyage, Zheng He had not even tried to intervene
in the conflict, though he had noted the rudeness of one of the kings towards
the Ming emperor.20 After one of the two Javanese kings had been captured
and beheaded by the other, Yong-le demanded 60,000 ounces of gold in
satisfaction from the victor.21 In fact, the king was hardly in a position to
make this massive payment.
Along the coast, merchant communities took advantage of the contest for
power to take charge of their own affairs. The faster these towns detached
themselves from the central government, the more royal revenues, which had
been so heavily based on trade, began to shrink, and royal troubles were
magnified still further when local nobles also exploited the chaos to insist on
their own independence; sometimes they worked with the towns, assuring
them of vital food supplies in return for help fighting their rivals, but just as
often the port cities waged war against the nobles in order to conquer the land
they needed for rice cultivation.22 What all this meant was that Java’s brief
ascendancy came to an end in the early fifteenth century. The authority of the
semi-divine kings was further eroded by the spread of Islam in Indonesia. As
disorder increased, the Chinese court began to wonder how it could secure
peace in the South China Sea. This attempt to bring stability helps explain
Zheng He’s voyages, and in particular the close connection that the Ming
court developed with the new town of Melaka. But before looking at the
rapid rise of Melaka it is necessary to examine its antecedents in Singapore,
which have been exposed to view by archaeological discoveries that have
transformed knowledge of the ‘Silk Route of the Sea’.

IV

Fort Canning Park consists of a hill in the middle of the colonial heart of
Singapore, rising above what one might imagine to be the buildings of old
Singapore – the Armenian Church, the synagogue, Raffles Hotel, and what
remains of the creeks and river that once connected this part of Singapore
island to the sea. From its paths one can look across at the cluster of giant
office buildings and hotels that delineate the skyline of new Singapore,
located next to land reclaimed from the sea. The history of this city is
commonly assumed to have begun in the early nineteenth century, when Sir
Stamford Raffles chose it from a shortlist as the site for a British trading
station commanding the entrance to the Strait of Malacca. Yet his motive for
settling on this site was not simply its convenient location; he was deeply
interested in the history of south-east Asia, and the fact that a trading city had
once stood here fascinated him, even though little or nothing remained of
medieval Singapore.23 Raffles acquired a copy of the most important
chronicle of the early history of Malaya, the Sĕjarah Mĕlayu; generally
known as the Malay Annals, the title should really be translated as The Malay
Genealogical Tree. Amid legends about the foundation of Singapore and then
Melaka, this chronicle wove together fact and fancy so as to extol the dynasty
that had brought both cities into existence. It has also served as a key text for
those in Malaysia who have, since the country’s independence, insisted upon
its predominantly Malay (rather than Indian or Chinese) identity, and on the
special place of Islam in Malaysian history. A constant theme is how the
resourceful and crafty Malays were able to outwit their rivals in Java and
Siam, and even in China. Although the text we have was written at the start
of the seventeenth century, the Sĕjarah Mĕlayu incorporated a great amount
of much older material, going back centuries – or indeed well over a
millennium, if one believes the claims the book makes.24
The legitimacy of the later rulers of Melaka could (according to the
Sĕjarah Mĕlayu) be traced right back to Alexander the Great, who appears as
‘Rajah Iskandar, the Two-Horned, son of Rajah Darab, a Roman of the
country of Macedonia’.25 This supposed fact betrays the strong cultural
influence of India and Islam on Malaya at the end of the Middle Ages; the
early stories in the book are about India, not south-east Asia. But gradually
the history of that area comes into focus. The author told how an Indian
prince called Rajah Chulan decided to attack China, for ‘the whole of India
and Sind was subject to him and every prince of East and West was his
vassal’ – every prince except the ruler of China, here cast not as an emperor
but as a weakling who pretended to be ‘Lord of the Earth’, but who knew that
if the army and navy of Chulan arrived, ‘assuredly this country of ours will
be destroyed’. The Chinese could not rely on greater military force, so they
had to rely on a ruse. When the rajah was already at Temasek (later known as
Singapore) a Chinese ship came to meet him; to the surprise of the Indians it
carried a crew of very old men, and on board they found a number of fruit
trees. The men claimed that they had boarded the ship when they were twelve
years old, when the trees were mere seeds. That was how long it took to sail
from China to the Strait of Malacca. The rajah reflected on this and decided
that ‘China must be a very long way away. When should we ever get there?’
Instead of advancing against China, he decided to explore the sea. He had a
sort of glass submarine made in which he visited underwater cities and was
received with honour at the court of one of the sea princes. The two rajahs
became good friends, and the sea prince offered Chulan the hand of his
daughter; they married, lived under the sea for three years and had three sons,
before Chulan decided he had to abandon his distraught family so that his
kingdom on earth would continue to be ruled by his dynasty. A winged steed
carried him out of the sea, and once back home he took another wife, who
came from Hindustan.26
Surprisingly, this fable does have some historical value. There is the
simple fact that the sea fascinated the Malays, in this and other stories in the
same book. More specifically, Rajah Chulan is thought to be a distant
memory of the same Chola king who launched an attack on Śri Vijaya in
1126; and this legend not merely mentions the site of Singapore but it
immediately precedes a story about the old capital of Śri Vijaya, Palembang:
‘formerly it was a very great city, the like of which was not to be found in the
whole country of Andelas [Sumatra]’. The three princes born under the sea
were adopted by the ruler of Palembang and became rajahs in their own right;
the youngest, blessed by a miraculous being who emerged out of sea foam,
took the name Sri Tri Buana, which has strong Buddhist overtones and means
‘Lord of the Three Worlds’ in Sanskrit; he took up residence in Palembang,
whose ruler abdicated in his favour.27 But one day he announced: ‘I am
thinking of going to the coast to find a suitable site for a city. What say you?’
He set out with a great navy:

So vast was the fleet that there seemed to be no counting it; the masts
of the ships were like a forest of trees, their pennons and streamers
were like driving clouds and the state umbrellas of the rajahs like
cirrus. So many were the craft that accompanied Sri Tri Buana that
the sea seemed to be nothing but ships.28

During his travels, Sri Tri Buana went hunting; and one day, while chasing a
deer, he climbed a high rock and found himself looking across a stretch of
water towards a pure white beach in the distance.29 He asked what that land
was and was told that it was called Temasek; archaeology confirms that a
white beach would have fringed the southern shores of what was then
Temasek island during the Middle Ages. The channel separating Temasek
from where he was (which would be one of the Riau islands, now under
Indonesian control) proved much more difficult to cross than he could have
imagined; a storm blew, and the rajah’s ship began to fill up with water. The
best the sailors could do was to throw overboard all the goods on board, to
lighten the vessel; but one item, the rajah’s crown, was kept on board. The
boatswain insisted that this too should be cast in the sea, and Sri Tri Buana
replied, ‘Overboard with it then!’ So over it went and the storm abated.
None the worse for this experience, Sri Tri Buana went on land and saw a
strange animal bigger than a he-goat that had a red body, a white breast and a
black head. Mystified by this, the rajah was told that it was some sort of lion,
though the description hardly matched that of a lion, and it has been
suggested that the author might have been thinking of an orang-utan instead.
Whatever the animal was, it was considered a good augury, and Sri Tri Buana
decided to build a city on that site, which he named ‘Town of the Lion’,
Singapura. Like Sri Tri Buana’s new name, this was a Sanskrit rather than
Malay word, and was intended to show that the ruler and his court were in
contact with the high civilization of the Buddhist and Hindu lands to the
west.30 ‘Singapura’ was a common name for towns in this region, but that a
new town came into existence on this site somewhere around 1300 cannot
now be doubted.31 The Sĕjarah Mĕlayu reported that ‘Singapura became a
great city, to which foreigners resorted in great numbers so that the fame of
the city and its greatness spread throughout the world.’32
In south-east Asia that was not entirely good news. The ruler of Majapahit
enters the story told by the Malay chronicler at this point. He had ‘heard that
Singapura was a great city but that its ruler did not acknowledge the Batara
[rajah of Majapahit] as its overlord’. This made him exceedingly angry. He
sent a strange gift to the rajah of Singapore, an extremely thin wood shaving
seven fathoms long, rolled up to look like a girl’s earring. At first confused
and irritated, Sri Tri Buana realized that he would have to show that his own
carpenters were just as skilled as those of Majapahit, and he ordered a
carpenter to shave a boy’s head with an adze rather than a razor, which
proved he was as adept with his adze as the Javan carpenter had been. On
hearing of this, the rajah of Majapahit jumped to the conclusion that the ruler
of Singapore was threatening to invade and to shave the heads of all the
Javans. He ordered a fleet of a hundred warships to be prepared, and
launched a vicious attack on Singapore. Nonetheless, he was beaten off.33 So
too were equally vicious garfish (a type of small swordfish) that leaped out of
the sea and stabbed anyone who was on the seashore; in modern times,
fishermen in the waters around Singapore have been attacked and killed by
these fish, which jump out of the water when they see the bright lights of
lanterns aboard the fishing boats, and woe betide anyone in their way. The
ruler was unable to work out how to stop these attacks, and thousands died
until a young boy suggested the Singaporeans should make a barricade out of
the stems of banana trees along the beach; after that, each time a garfish
jumped out of the water it buried its snout in the foliage, and could be cut
down and killed. However, the ruler was jealous of the boy who had come up
with a solution that had eluded him, and put him to death, after which ‘the
guilt of his blood was laid on Singapura’.34 The story therefore foreshadows
the fate of Singapore, which the rajah was soon to lose to his old enemies.
This event was an unpleasant interlude before the next Javan attack, which
was prompted by dissension at the court of the current ruler of Singapore,
Iskandar Shah. One of the king’s mistresses, who was the beautiful daughter
of the royal treasurer, was accused of carrying on with other men; the angry
rajah ordered her to be displayed naked in the town marketplace. Her father
would have preferred her to be put to death rather than let her face this
humiliation; and he wreaked revenge by sending a letter to the rajah of
Majapahit, promising his help if the Javans attacked again. So the Javans
made ready 300 large ships and countless smaller craft, bearing (supposedly)
200,000 soldiers. Soon after their arrival the treasurer opened the gate of the
fort that was supposed to protect Singapore, and the Javans streamed into the
city; the fort was flooded with the blood of those killed on either side.35 Yet
Iskandar survived, and fled from the city, which remained in the hands of the
ruler of Majapahit. The lesson of these events was that Iskandar had lacked
wisdom: he had been unable to deal with the garfish, and he provoked his
treasurer into treachery when he disgraced the daughter of a loyal officer of
the crown.
These extraordinary tales established not just a dynastic genealogy going
back, it was claimed, to ancient Macedonia, but a genealogy of cities:
Palembang was the mother city of Singapore, which itself, as will be seen,
was the mother city of Melaka. By the time the author reached the end of the
fourteenth century, his knowledge of the past became much more precise; the
magical atmosphere of his early chapters gave way to a more factual, though
not entirely credible, account of what happened, without underwater princes
and prophets born out of sea foam. The general picture of Singapore as a
thriving emporium in the fourteenth century can now be confirmed, thanks to
broken sherds, a shattered inscription, and bits and pieces of brick
foundations. Moreover, there is other written evidence, this time from far
beyond Singapore, that speaks of Temasek before it took its new name, and
that shows how it had already become a centre of trade and piracy by the
early fourteenth century.

V
Wang Dayuan was a merchant who was born in 1311 and who lived for a
time in Quanzhou. In the 1330s he set out twice across the South China Sea,
and recorded his impressions in a book entitled Description of the Barbarians
of the Isles. Although his style is considered poor, he enjoyed composing
poetry and was a keen geographer – writing from the perspective of someone
who had sailed the seas, he divided the world into two oceans, an eastern one
and a western one, corresponding to the Pacific and the Indian Oceans. Dan-
ma-xi (his transcription of Temasek) in his view marked the point where the
two oceans met. He described the people who lived there and whom he had
visited: they tied their hair in a bun and they manufactured rice wine; they
wore short tunics made of cheap cloth coloured dark blue; but this was a
place where one could trade gold, silk, metal vessels and fairly ordinary
ceramics. However, the goods they traded ‘were obtained by piracy’. Ships
sailing out into the Indian Ocean would be permitted to pass without
interference, because what the pirates wanted was for them to return laden
with goods. As these ships came back past Temasek ‘the sailors have to
install arrow guards and special cloth screens and sharpen weapons to prepare
for defence’. With a fair wind, one could sail straight through and escape
being attacked, but if the pirates did manage to seize a ship, they ruthlessly
killed those on board and took their possessions. The most dangerous place
was Longya-men, ‘Dragon’s Tooth Strait’, a narrow passage off the southern
tip of Singapore, separating a small skerry from the main island. And yet
Wang also described how the governor of Temasek insisted that everyone
should ‘live in harmony with the Chinese people’, or, in an alternative
translation, ‘men and women reside beside Chinese people’.36 In other
words, a Chinese settlement existed on Temasek in the early fourteenth
century, at a time when the town lay under Javanese dominion. Precisely
because it was so exposed, the town was very vulnerable and at the same time
in a good position to reap great benefits from the sea trade that passed its
doors – which, in the early days, it chose to do by piracy, although the
presence of pirates would also draw the armies and navies of Siam and
Majapahit towards the Malacca Strait. The people of Temasek, for their part,
tried to make friends in the region: there is evidence that they sent gifts to the
king of Vietnam.37 In the end, as will be seen, it was the Ming Chinese who
cracked this nut, and not at Singapore but at its replacement, Melaka.
Before that, however, the Ming dynasty set off a crisis in the region. The
accession of the first Ming emperor in 1368 was followed by tighter and
tighter restrictions on foreign trade, aimed at Chinese traders or Chinese
settlers overseas, who were ordered to return to their native land, but
evidently did not do so. Under the new regulations, Chinese worshippers
were expected to burn Chinese rather than foreign incense. This might have
greatly eased the outflow of bullion, which had been a serious problem under
the Song, but it also undermined the relationship that had been built up with
the rulers of Java and other lands around the South China Sea, as well as
Japan and Korea. By 1380 the relationship between Java and China had
worsened still further. The Javans intercepted and put to death Chinese
ambassadors who were on their way to Jambi to invest the maharajah of Śri
Vijaya as a vassal king. The ruler of Majapahit insisted that the rajah of Śri
Vijaya was his own vassal, and it seems that this rajah was hoping to free
himself from Javan tutelage by turning to China instead. The attempt
backfired; Java asserted its control over Sumatra. Following this outrage, the
Ming emperor wanted nothing to do with the peoples of Indonesia.38 This
left the Javans free to pursue their own aggressive policies.
Meanwhile Sumatra was in turmoil. At Palembang, a prince named
Parameśvara had taken charge; this is the figure the Malay Annals named as
Iskandar, although, to add confusion, the real Iskandar may have been his
son. There are as many versions of who was who and what happened as there
are accounts of Parameśvara’s stormy life. Palembang, as has been seen, was
no longer the great emporium that it had been in the glory days of Śri Vijaya,
but Parameśvara aimed to throw off Javan overlordship. The Majapahit navy
attacked Palembang; after only three years in charge there, Parameśvara fled
westward, landing in Singapore. His tenure of power there was brief: enemies
would unseat him in 1397, and he would acquire his third princedom with the
foundation of Melaka.39 Before looking at early Melaka, a close examination
of early Singapore is required.
The Malay Annals described how Sri Tri Buana was buried on the ‘hill of
Singapura’, and the author of the Malay Annals and other writers mentioned
additional royal burials in what is now Fort Canning Park.40 Memories of
these tombs remained alive, and the area came to be known to those living
there when Raffles arrived as the ‘Forbidden Hill’; it was a taboo area,
perhaps because of the graves, and it was also credited with being the site of
the royal palace. One story told how earlier rulers had forbidden anyone to
ascend the hill unless the king summoned them; and there was a stream
where the queen would bathe, and that too was forbidden ground. Here, in the
time of Raffles, the first antiquarians to take an interest in the remote past of
Singapore found tumbledown sections of ancient walls and brick foundations;
since most buildings, including the royal palace, would have been of wood,
and since many would have stood on stilts, the lack of extensive remains is
no surprise. But with the coming of British rule no one bothered to
investigate further; the sacred hill became the British headquarters, and the
ground was levelled.41 Over the years other discoveries have taken place, but
by accident: some elaborate gold jewellery in an Indian style, including a
bracelet and earrings, was turned up in 1928 and evidently belonged to
someone of very high rank.
One potentially important written record inscribed on stone (the so-called
Singapore Stone) was blown to smithereens by the British army, which
needed the site near the mouth of the Singapore River where it lay for a new
fort. No one has deciphered the writing on the small surviving fragment that
is proudly displayed in the Singapore History Museum.42 Here myth and
history once again become entangled. The Malay Annals mention a giant
named Badang who came to Singapore and challenged a rival strongman
from nearby Kalinga to a contest:

Now in front of the hall of audience there was a huge rock, and the
Kalinga champion said to Badang, ‘Let us try our strength in lifting
that rock. Whichever of us fails to lift it is the loser.’ ‘Very well’,
answered Badang, ‘you try first.’ Thereupon the Kalinga champion
tried to lift the rock but failed. He then put forth every effort and
raised it as far as his knees, then he let it down again with a crash,
saying, ‘Now it’s your turn, sir.’ ‘Very well’, said Badang, and he
lifted the rock, swung it into the air and hurled it as far as the bank of
Kula Singapura [Singapore River]. That is the rock which is there to
this day.43

The Kalinga champion had to hand over the seven ships laden with goods
with which he had arrived in Singapore, and, humiliated, he headed back
home. More importantly, perhaps, Badang was credited with stretching a
chain across the river mouth, to block free access to the port of Singapore –
evidence, for what it is worth, that efforts were being made to create a
working harbour, and one that could be closed off when pirates or enemy
navies threatened.44
 Only in the 1980s and after did serious investigation of what remained
under the surface of the hill begin, confirming that this was an important
fourteenth-century centre of trade.45 The evidence mostly consists of
fragments of pottery, in their thousands, though plenty of glass beads and
coins complement the pottery, and all point in the same direction: fourteenth-
century Singapore was an important trading emporium with links to China,
Java and the lands around the South China Sea, and westwards to the Indian
Ocean. The most striking feature of the discoveries on the hill is the
predominance of Chinese ceramics even over local ones; those from China
nearly all date from the Yuan dynasty, that is, before the Ming dynasty threw
out the Mongols in 1368.46 Chinese silence after then reflects the new Ming
hostility to foreign trade; there is simply not much early Ming porcelain to
show from the excavations. But before the trade with China dried up the
Singaporeans made much use of good-quality Chinese porcelain: light-green
celadon, some of it from Fukien province in the neighbourhood of Quanzhou;
white porcelain, very typical of the Chinese export trade and produced in
large quantities at Dehua not far from Quanzhou; the famous blue-and-white
porcelain, one piece of which is especially remarkable, as it carries the
Chinese characters for compass directions.47 This bowl is more likely to
have been used in divination, for feng shui, than at sea, but at least it is clear
that it arrived along the sea lanes. These good-quality bowls, vases and cups
were found in the area where the royal palace must have stood, so they give a
clue to the standard of living of the princely court during the fourteenth
century.
Bearing in mind that other small-scale discoveries of pottery, glass and
metalwork have been made on the flat ground below Fort Canning Hill, now
occupied by buildings of the colonial era and by the new parliament house, it
becomes clear that Singapore was a place of note, with a palace on a hill and
trading quarters down below by the river exit. Its rulers ably took advantage
of its excellent position astride the trade routes and – remembering Wang’s
slightly obscure words – Singapore seems to have started life as a pirate base
and then to have transformed itself into an honest trading settlement. As it
grew it attracted the envy of powerful neighbours in Java and Siam, while the
Ming ban on foreign trade had a dampening effect on its fortunes.

VI
The sixteenth-century Portuguese writer and traveller Tomé Pires described
in his Suma Oriental the foundation of Melaka by ‘Paramjçura king of
Palembang’, or Parameśvara. The word means ‘Supreme Lord’ in Sanskrit,
and was an epithet frequently attached to the Hindu god Siva, though there
was also a god called Parameśvara, and the name was often used by
royalty.48 Really it was not so much a name as a title, one that expressed the
link between a royal prince on earth and the Hindu gods in heaven. Stories
linking Palembang, Singapore and the new foundation at Melaka, which
Parameśvara ruled in succession to one another, bestowed a special
legitimacy on the later rulers of Melaka, creating a genealogy that in theory
stretched back to ancient Śri Vijaya and even to Alexander the Great, for the
Malay Annals call him not Parameśvara but Iskandar, an arabized form of
Alexander.49 However, Tomé’s Parameśvara does not emerge as a
particularly savoury character, any more than Iskandar does in the Malay
Annals. In the Portuguese version, apparently derived from tales current in
Java, Parameśvara was ruling Palembang when he rebelled against his
overlord, the Javanese ruler, at the end of the fourteenth centry. He was
soundly defeated and fled from Sumatra to Singapore, where he murdered the
rajah and seized power, which he held for only six years at most. During his
reign, Parameśvara relied on the support of the piratical ‘Sea People’, in
Malay Orang Laut. They did not actually live with him in Singapore, but on
an island that stands astride the strait between Sumatra and Singapore, and
therefore astride the main trade routes from the South China Sea up the Strait
of Malacca, a good location from which to prey on merchant shipping.50
Speculation about what happened at the end of Parameśvara’s brief reign
in Singapore, somewhere around 1396, ranges from a Javanese attack, which
fits with the Malay account, to a revenge attack by Malay allies of the Thais
who had been benefiting from a marriage alliance with the previous ruler.51
All this adds up to a picture of vigorous piracy and local conflicts, into which
every now and again more substantial powers – the rajahs of Majapahit and
the Thai rulers based at their lively capital, Ayutthaya – threw themselves,
because interference with their shipping was proving intolerable. No doubt
the Sea People entered into agreements with various neighbours to allow
them passage, in return for some material benefits, but the coming of
Parameśvara signalled a return to the piratical ways of the founders of
Singapore: ‘he had no trade at all except that his people plundered their
enemies.’52 Hunger for Chinese and other goods only increased as the Ming
emperors made it more difficult to obtain them legitimately.
The existence of two names, Parameśvara and Iskandar, in accounts of the
foundation of Melaka has caused endless confusion, and there are grounds for
believing that the real Iskandar was in fact the founder’s son and successor.
Further confusion results from the similarity between the account of the
foundation of Melaka and the accounts of the foundation of both Semudera–
Pasai and Singapore, all contained within the Malay Annals. But even if the
annals are fanciful they record the legends in which the inhabitants of Malaya
believed, which have influenced the way the early history of Melaka is
written even today. The Malay Annals, where he is called Iskandar, describe
his search for a new home after he was thrown out of Singapore. He edged up
the coast of the Malay peninsula until he came to a river mouth that looked
promising.

And as the king, who was hunting, stood under a tree, one of his
hounds was kicked by a white mouse-deer. And Sultan Iskandar Shah
said, ‘This is a good place, when even its mouse-deer are full of fight!
We shall do well to make a city here.’ And the chiefs replied, ‘It is
indeed as your Highness says.’ Thereupon Sultan Iskandar Shah
ordered that a city be made, and he asked, ‘What is the name of the
tree under which I am standing?’ And they all answered, ‘It is called
Melaka, your Highness’; to which he rejoined, ‘Then Melaka shall be
the name of this city.’53

What is not said here is that there were striking physical similarities between
the site of Singapore and that of Melaka, which has been described as a
‘mirror image’ of Singapore. Just as Fort Canning rises above the city of
Singapore, St Paul’s Hill – though smaller and lower – is the high point of
Melaka; these hills were defensible vantage points, and they were also good
locations for a royal palace. They were seen as sacred places to which access
had to be specially granted. Moreover, both towns were situated close to a
river mouth, which provided a convenient berth for shipping.54
The Malay annalist was well aware that ships transformed the fortunes of
Melaka. The book describes the success of the city’s rulers in fostering trade,
which also meant that it attracted many foreign merchants and settlers, who
were made welcome there.55 There were endless naval engagements with
neighbours in the strait, such as the rulers of Siak across the water in
Sumatra. After all, everyone wanted to gain control of the lucrative trade that
passed through the strait. Not just goods arrived from the other end of the
Indian Ocean. Rajah Tengah, who according to these annals would be the
grandson of the founder of Melaka, ‘showed in the treatment of his subjects
such justice that no other rajah of his time in the world could equal him’. So
it is little surprise that he was chosen to fulfil an important part of Melaka’s
destiny. He had a dream in which he was visited by none other than the
Prophet Muhammad, who taught him the Muslim declaration of faith, or
shahadah, and gave him a new name – appropriately, Muhammad. The
Prophet told him: ‘tomorrow, when it is time for the afternoon prayer, there
will come hither a ship from Jiddah; and from that ship a man will land on
this shore of Melaka. See that you do whatsoever he tells you.’ When he
awoke, he found that he had been circumcised. He spent the day repeating the
shahadah, and his ministers thought he had gone mad. They informed the
Bendahara, or vizier, who was reluctant to accept the miraculous
circumcision as proof, but who agreed that if a ship came from Jiddah at the
promised time he would know that the dream was true. Sure enough, the ship
did arrive, and one of the people who disembarked, the Makhdum (or teacher
of Islam) Sa’id ‘Abdu’l-aziz, began to invoke Allah on the quayside.

And all who saw him were astonished at his behaviour and said,
‘What means this bobbing up and down?’ And there was a general
scramble to see him, the people crowding together so thickly that
there was not a space between one man and another and there was
such a disturbance that the noise of it came to the ears of the rajah
inside the royal apartments of the palace. And straightaway the rajah
set forth on his elephant escorted by his chiefs and he perceived that
the Makhdum’s behaviour in saying his prayers was exactly as in his
dream. And he said to the Bendahara and the chiefs, ‘That is exactly
how it happened in my dream!’56

The Makhdum was invited to mount the elephant and was borne back to the
royal palace with the rajah. The Bendahara and the chiefs all became
Muslims, ‘and every citizen of Melaka, whether of high or low degree, was
commanded by the rajah to do likewise’.
 Whatever actually happened, Melaka was always, and remains, a city
inhabited by people of several faiths. But there is no reason to doubt that the
rajahs became Muslim early in the fifteenth century. Rather than a sudden
event, this conversion was the product of years of contact and of pondering
the advantages of such a conversion. Even before Tengah’s time, the rajahs
had flirted with Islam. Pasai, not far away, had a reputation as a beacon of
Islam in south-east Asia. Tengah/Muhammad had actually married a princess
from Pasai. In fact, earlier in his career he had quarrelled with the sultan of
Pasai over whether he should convert. He tried to draw towards Melaka
Javanese Muslim merchants who traded regularly with Pasai, but he found
that the sultan was unwilling to let them trade with Melaka unless Tengah
converted to Islam; after all, if they made heavy use of Melaka, these
merchants would contribute less to the tax revenue of Semudera–Pasai. For
the moment Tengah was reluctant to convert; but the quarrel did not last long,
and eventually Muslim merchants from Pasai went to live in Melaka as he
had hoped; they built the town’s first mosques. But Tengah’s ambitions
extended further: he encouraged Muslim merchants from Java itself to come
to his city. Islam and trade were two sides of the same coin. The Portuguese
writer Tomé Pires wrote: ‘trade began to grow greatly and the king derived
great profit and satisfaction from it … The Moors were great favourites with
the king, and obtained whatever they wanted.’57 The conversion of Melaka
marked a major step in the emergence of the city as the centre of commerce
in the region.58 The sultan of Pasai, allied to the newly renamed Sultan
Muhammad, acquiesced in the erosion of Semudera–Pasai’s commanding
position in the Strait of Malacca, where the upstart town of Melaka now
seized the initiative. After all, its location, actually within the strait, was
better, not just because it lay right along the direct trade route but because it
was better placed to challenge pirates.59
This is not to say that Tengah was uninterested in his new religion; his
conversion may appear opportunistic, but it may just as well have been the
result of a slowly dawning conviction that he wanted to become a Muslim.
Quite apart from the influence of his wife, Tengah had visited China, where
he met the ambassadors sent to the Ming court by Muslim rulers, including
the envoys of Pasai. The Melakans would have been perfectly familiar with
people ‘bobbing up and down’ five times a day. Yet the conversion of this
and other rajahs in south-east Asia changed the religious balance
significantly. Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as local cults, had become
interwoven, and religious syncretism was the general rule. Islam, as the
rajah’s supposed insistence on the conversion of all his subjects makes plain,
was exclusive; while there was still space for Hindus and Buddhists in these
lands, the Muslim population could not, officially at least, share their
festivals, customs and in certain cases their food. But to be seen as the patron
of Muslim merchants right across the region would greatly enhance the
prestige of the sultan of Melaka, and he could present himself as the
champion of all Muslims whenever the conflict between Melaka and Siam
flared up again.
The guarantor of Melaka’s security was Ming China. Contact was
established between Melaka and China within a few years of the creation of
the new town. Even before Zheng He set off on his great voyages, the
imperial eunuch Yin Qing arrived in Melaka in 1404 on a friendly visit,
offering Parameśvara a crown; and Parameśvara responded by sending tribute
to the Ming court.60 Here was an opportunity to throw off the overlordship
of Siam by accepting as new overlord a far greater power. But this was not
without risks: Siam was a local power, and China was very far away. The fact
that Zheng He’s voyages were on such a large scale – even if the scale has
been exaggerated – meant that for a time the Melakans could develop their
trade and send campaigns against local pirates without too much fear of
Siamese intervention. The Chinese came past Melaka again and again during
Zheng He’s voyages; but they also made it more secure by their actions in
cleaning up Palembang, suppressing Chinese piracy off Sumatra and holding
the Javans in check. The Chinese presence thus acted as a brake on the
rivalries that had, until the start of the fifteenth century, made the Strait of
Malacca one of the most dangerous sea passages in the region. Paradoxically,
then, the Ming emperor’s great distaste for overseas commerce resulted in
greater freedom of the seas, as the tribute-seeking expeditions of Zheng He
proclaimed a Chinese peace, a Pax Sinica, across the South China Sea and
beyond. The moment it was shattered can be identified easily enough. When
Xuan-de suspended further voyages, the sultan of Melaka was himself in
China, on the third visit by a Melakan ruler, and hoping to present tribute to
the emperor. He and other ambassadors, from as far away as Ceylon, were
embarrassingly stranded far from home; and in any case Xuan-de died soon
after. His successors were not interested in spending vast sums on fleets
bound for the ends of the earth.
 Looking back from the start of the seventeenth century, the author of the
Malay Annals was unwilling to admit that this was the real shape of things.
From a Melakan perspective, it seemed to be Melaka rather than China that
exercised thalassocracy:

When news reached China of the greatness of the rajah of Melaka, the
rajah of China sent envoys to Melaka: and as a complimentary gift to
accompany the letter he sent needles, a whole shipload of them. And
when the envoys reached Melaka, the king ordered the letter to be
fetched from the ship with due ceremony and borne in procession.
And when it had been brought into the palace it was received by a
herald and given by him to the reader of the mosque, who read it out.
It ran as follows: ‘This letter from His Majesty the Rajah of Heaven is
sent to the Rajah of Melaka. Of a truth there are no rajahs in this
world greater than ourselves, and there is no one who knows the
number of our subjects. We have asked for one needle from each
house in our realm and those are the needles with which the ship we
send to Melaka is laden.’61

Needless to say the rajah then sent back his own cargo, this time of grains of
sago, to make an identical point, so that the emperor had to admit: ‘Great
indeed must be this rajah of Melaka! The multitude of his subjects must be as
the multitude of our own. It would be well that I should marry him with my
daughter!’62 The annalist was well aware that a Chinese trading settlement
across the river from the hill on which the royal palace stood, known as Bukit
China, dated back to these times, and occasional finds of objects in that area,
around the Cheng Ho Museum that commemorates Zheng He’s voyages,
prove the point further: not just fragments of pottery but what seems to have
been a well used by the Chinese community.
Siam was a constant thorn in the flesh of the rajahs of Melaka, as it had
been to the rulers of Singapore. It is, as ever, difficult to disentangle the
involved stories in the Malay Annals, and it might make more sense to look at
what can be described as the received version of the history of Melaka, as it
is portrayed in the impressive displays of the Melaka Historical Museum on
St Paul’s Hill. The Siamese attacks of 1445 and 1456 are presented as a
response to the prosperity and commercial rivalry of Melaka. On the second
occasion, the Bendahara is said to have lit up the river mouth, deluding the
enemy into thinking that a massive force lay in wait. The enemy exclaimed:
‘What a vast fleet these Malays must have, no man can count their ships! If
they attack us, how shall we fare? Even one of their ships just now was more
than a match for us!’ After that the Siamese kept well clear of Melaka.63
Melaka’s own historians like to present the image of a heroic city whose
defence of its independence laid the foundations for an Islamic nation
consisting of Malay people, strict in their adherence to Sunni Islam but also
willing to permit Hindus and Daoists, among others, to settle and erect the
ancient temples in Melaka that still stand. In fact, the situation was not so
clear. Sometimes the Melakans found it convenient to pay tribute to Siam
(forty Chinese ounces of gold each year, at one point); sometimes they could
get away without doing so. A small but wealthy city surrounded by enemies
was not in a position to declare itself independent of all higher authority. It
was much safer to accept an overlord so long as he did not interfere greatly
with day-to-day business, which was what really mattered: ‘the ships, large
and small, were past counting in number; for at that time the rajah’s subjects
in the city alone numbered 90,000’, though the Malay annalist, who wrote
those words, then went on to claim that there were 190,000 people in the city
alone, not to mention the coastal areas it controlled, and foreigners also
flocked to the city.64
The sultan began to boost his standing in the world by introducing
elaborate protocol at court and by building a spacious and stately palace on
the present-day St Paul’s Hill. The wooden palace, with its beautifully carved
panels, no longer survives, but it has been reconstructed, partly from the
description in the Malay Annals. The ceremonies that were held there drew
on both Indian and Chinese models. There were strict rules about who might
wear yellow robes or be shaded by umbrellas, for yellow was the Chinese
imperial colour, reserved for members of the ruler’s family. Gold ornaments,
including anklets, were the prerogative of the sultan and his close advisers.
The sultan sat enthroned with ministers on either side, rather as the Chinese
emperors did; everyone who was permitted to attend upon the sultan knew
exactly where to stand or sit in the throne room.65 The pirate kingdom of
Parameśvara, for that is what Melaka had originally been, had been
transformed within a couple of generations into an emporium that linked the
Indian Ocean to the Spice Islands and to Ming China.66
If an outside force intruded itself into the Strait of Malacca, everything
would be set spinning once again. And this is what happened when the
Portuguese arrived at the start of the sixteenth century: ‘there came a ship of
the Franks from Goa trading to Melaka: and the Franks perceived how
prosperous and well-populated the port was.’ Those are, once again, the
words of the anonymous Malay annalist, but the Portuguese too were
impressed, as Tomé Pires bore witness and as the greatest Portuguese poet,
Luis de Camões, would write in his epic of his country’s overseas expansion,
the Lusiads: ‘farther on lies Malacca, that your countrymen will make known
as a great emporium for the wealth and merchandise of all the territories
bordering on this vast ocean.’67 Before long the Portuguese came back to
Melaka with an armada and captured the city, after a tough fight, in 1511. To
understand how they arrived there it is necessary to return to the far-off
waters of the eastern Atlantic.
 Part Three

T H E Y O U N G O C E A N : T H E AT L A N T I C ,
22,000 BC–AD 1500
 15

Living on the Edge

A history of the oceans might be expected to say little about the Atlantic
before Columbus, or at least before the Portuguese discovered and settled
islands out of sight of land in the fifteenth century, apart from a glancing
reference to Vikings who reached America after they were lost off the coast
of Greenland. ‘Atlantic history’ has become an entire industry, and it is
mainly concerned with connections after 1492 between the four continents
that border the Atlantic Ocean: North America, South America, Africa and
Europe.1 At first sight there is nothing in prehistoric and ancient times to
compare with the astonishing feats of the Polynesian navigators, nor with the
mastering of the monsoons by those who crossed the open Indian Ocean.
There are plenty of crackpot theories about ancient Egyptians or Phoenicians
who reached Central America, and the name of Thor Heyerdahl comes up
once again here. And yet, going back as far as the fifth millennium BC along
the European flank of the Atlantic, and, quite separately, as far back as 2000
BC in the Caribbean, people moved across parts of the ocean, and the sea
exercised massive influence on their social and economic life (the Caribbean
will be described within a later chapter). Reconstructing these worlds
depends on archaeology, but not just in one place – it is only possible to
make sense of what was happening by looking at the links between societies
separated by considerable distances, whether in the form of trade connections
or similarities in culture, including art and architecture. For several
archaeologists have identified a common north-eastern Atlantic culture that
was formed by the communities living along the edges of the Neolithic
Atlantic, from Orkney in the far north past Ireland and Great Britain to
Brittany, northern Spain, Portugal and even the Atlantic coast of Morocco, a
distance of about 4,000 kilometres. A spur leads down the English Channel to
Holland, Denmark and Sweden, bringing parts of the Baltic into this Atlantic
world, the world of what have been called ‘the Western Seaways’.2
 Still, there are several ways of interpreting the clear evidence that people
built similar monuments in Portugal to those that were built in Scotland and
Ireland. Traditional ‘diffusionist’ interpretations have gone out of fashion
among archaeologists, and there is much more emphasis among ‘processual’
archaeologists on the internal dynamics of society, so it might be argued that
similar physical conditions created similar solutions: pressed between the
rough seas of the Atlantic and rugged shores, the inhabitants of Galicia,
Brittany and northern Scotland found the same solution to the problem of
how to subsist. And when connections can be demonstrated between
communities hundreds or even thousands of kilometres apart, was this the
result of direct contact, or did artefacts and ideas seep slowly from one area
to another and another and another, in slow stages? Then there is the problem
of how contact might have been maintained, either locally between shore-side
settlements or over longer distances. Evidently sturdy boats were needed in
order to reach Britain and Ireland from Brittany, and there are good reasons
to assume that contact between Brittany and Galicia tended to be by sea.
Land routes cannot be ruled out; but the coastal communities that are going to
be examined here were not easily accessible by land: Galicia, with its deep
fjord-like rías and its steep slopes, as well as a similar environment in
Brittany or Wales. Even Cornwall was not as easily accessible as south-
eastern Britain, because its hilly landscape was cut off from the rest of Britain
by quite forbidding moorland. According to this view, travel across water
proved more rapid, while it was also possible to transport large quantities of
goods between one place and another with much less physical effort than on
land. The sea had its terrors; but as it came to be better known, and as
astronomical knowledge increased, even the unpredictable waters of the
eastern Atlantic were found to be manageable.3 Yet engagement with the
ocean varied over time. Dependence on seafood might be replaced by
reliance on pasture, agriculture and hunting. Trade connections familiar from
the New Stone Age and the Bronze Age might wither in the Iron Age. This is
not a history of ever-closer integration binding together this great arc of
coastline, but a history of connections created, sundered and re-created over
many millennia.
In order to understand the nature of the space that will be described here, it
is important to turn aside from a continent-based mental image of ancient
Europe, and to visualize long stretches of coast punctuated by massive
projecting promontories.4 Working up from the south, these include Cape St
Vincent in southern Portugal, Cape Finisterre in Galicia, Brittany, Cornwall,
and Cape Wrath at the northern tip of Scotland, an area also characterized by
a profusion of rocky islands and easy access to the granite that has ever after
been the chosen building material of many Scots. Strong winds from the
ocean brought heavy rainfall, which favoured those trying to produce crops in
low-lying corridors along the shoreline. When metalworking became
widespread in the Bronze and Iron Ages, the ready availability of good-
quality ores, including Welsh copper and gold, Cornish tin, and Iberian silver,
tin and copper stimulated the creation of trade networks linking these lands
and bringing in other lands, such as western Scotland, that were rather poor in
metals but sought to acquire them.5
Describing the resources only goes so far; finding out who the people were
who exploited them, and whether they were of common ancestry or culture,
is also important. Here even the most sober accounts of what has been found
in the soil become entangled with the idea that the inhabitants of this Atlantic
arc were ‘Celts’, whose ancestors had originated somewhere in central
Europe and had migrated stage by stage until they could reach no further. The
fact that classical writers used this term to describe peoples living in large
areas of western Europe does not mean that ‘Celt’ is a precise ethnic label. As
for the debatable question of what language they spoke, that will be
addressed in a later chapter.6 Nor, indeed, is there much agreement about the
role of the sea in drawing together prehistoric communities that were largely
self-sufficient. Some communities, even close to the sea, depended on food
they foraged from the land for their survival; but often their self-sufficiency
extended to the sea itself, which was a magnificent source of food, some
harvested along its shores, including the molluscs whose shells were dumped
in vast, mountainous middens that altered the seaside landscape, while
fishermen also used nets and hooks to catch large fish that swarmed in coastal
waters. This is, then, a rather different story to the great maritime adventures
of those who struck out across the open sea in the Pacific and, eventually, the
Indian Ocean. It begins as a series of histories of local connections.

II

The effects of falling and rising sea levels have been felt much more
dramatically in the Atlantic than in the Pacific or the Indian Ocean, and have
had a powerful influence on how the edges of Europe were settled in
Palaeolithic and Mesolithic times (the Old and Middle Stone Ages). About
11,500 years ago significant changes occurred, which geologists mark as the
start of the Holocene period that has continued ever since; ‘Holocene’ means
‘wholly new’, and yet the Holocene is understood as a temporary warm phase
in the middle of a continuing Ice Age that (in theory) should some day return;
temperatures were not consistent, and fell by about 2°C early in the first
millennium BC, at the end of what is regarded as the Atlantic Bronze Age.
These higher temperatures did not exactly make the climate in places such as
Orkney balmy, but they did facilitate crop production and hence the growth
of population.7 The changes that were taking place were geological as well
as climatic. Long before the Holocene, the massive accumulation of ice far
beyond the poles had sucked away water from the oceans and had lowered
sea levels by thirty-five metres or more, exposing the floor of what are now
shallow seas such as the North Sea. The Baltic began as a freshwater lake and
was only joined to the salt sea as water inundated the land bridge between
what is now Denmark and Sweden; the North Sea was partly blocked by the
large expanse of Doggerland that linked the east of Britain to the continent
before it sank beneath the waves to become what is now known as the
Dogger Bank. The end of the Ice Age saw seawater levels rise as melted ice
returned to the sea, and also made the climate more congenial for the limited
number of humans who inhabited Europe around 8000 BC; Doggerland was
one of the areas where they flourished.8 The process was more complicated
than that, however, since the sheer weight of the ice had pushed the land
hundreds of metres lower in some areas, such as Scotland, and as the weight
was removed the land itself began to rise; Great Britain is still slowly tilting,
with the result that the coast of East Anglia is gradually falling into the sea.9
Several islands around the British coast that were now clear of ice found
themselves joined to the mainland for several centuries; it is possible that one
could walk from Scotland to Orkney for a while, or at least wade across the
tidal waters.10 In other parts of Atlantic Europe, the glaciers had scored deep
gashes in the landscape, which remain in southern Norway and along the
deeply indented western coast of Galicia in north-western Spain, creating the
dramatic scenery of the Rías Baixas; their appearance was accentuated by the
Atlantic winds and waves that stripped away softer stones and left behind the
hard rocks of the Galician coastline. This area will be revisited shortly, since
Galicia has provided rich evidence for prehistoric communities that exploited
the sea and enjoyed ties to other parts of the Atlantic shoreline.
For the human population of Europe, the Ice Age had also been an era of
extinction and repopulation. By 8000 BC, the Neanderthals of the Upper
Palaeolithic, who had found a way to survive in the cold of Ice Age Europe,
were long extinct.11 In the early Holocene period the modern human
population remained very thinly spread around Europe, but some families
were beginning to reach the Atlantic seashore, beyond the current coastline of
France, Britain, Holland, Germany and Denmark. The cultures that were
emerging in these lands are broadly described as ‘Mesolithic’, or Middle
Stone Age, yet this is a troublesome term. It indicates that these people
retained many characteristics of the Palaeolithic lifestyle, notably their
reliance on hunting and gathering food, including, along the coast, seafood.
The term ‘Mesolithic’ recognizes some innovations in toolmaking, for much
of what is known about these societies depends on the close examination of
stone tools that were becoming smaller, even very small (microliths); blades,
harpoons, arrowheads and scrapers became everyday objects in the toolkit of
Mesolithic hunters. These changes took many centuries, yet they occurred
more or less in sequence across one area after another of western Europe,
which shows that technical knowhow was spread by contact between groups
of hunters. This improvement in the quality of tools in turn indicates that the
tasks being performed in Mesolithic societies were becoming more complex,
such as sewing together animal skins to make more effective clothing, and,
using the microliths, the creation of delicate secondary tools made of wood,
reed and bone. In some areas, simple pottery was created. It is a moot point
whether Atlantic Europe learned from or developed independently techniques
that can be observed in the Middle East in the twelfth millennium BC. In the
Middle East the Mesolithic inhabitants gradually developed an interest in
farming, by taming the wild grasses they had been gathering since time
immemorial; large villages and even fortified towns became home to more
and more of those who lived off the soil. But along the Atlantic coast of
Iberia around 5000 BC the relationship with the soil was different; grass seeds
formed part of quite a rich diet, but were still casually gathered as they grew
wild in fields and meadows, alongside berries, bulbs (notably onions) and
legumes.12
Each environment was different in detail, and each small pocket of
population exploited what was to be had without having the need to develop
close interaction with neighbours, or at any rate trade in foodstuffs – no doubt
other forms of interaction, such as the exchange of brides or warfare to gain
control of valleys rich in game, were quite frequent. During the Mesolithic
period, populations became more settled, and villages began to emerge; the
inhabitants would mark out the territory they exploited, though it is unlikely
they thought of this as rule over a chunk of land. They sought control of the
material assets of the land, not the land itself. A harsh winter or a boiling
summer could suddenly deplete resources to dangerous levels as the seasons
changed. From this point of view, living by seas and river mouths was a
sensible strategy; what mattered was variety, rather than reliance on a staple
foodstuff. The more diverse the habitat, the easier it was to survive, and that
made the coastal fringes of Europe the most attractive places to settle. In
addition, it was as far as one could go by land. By the fifth millennium BC
these areas hard by the shore were therefore quite densely settled, and as the
population rose pressure was placed on the food supply, which, again,
fostered movement – the voluntary or forced departure of superfluous people
for new lands. With time, migrants needed to search further afield for empty
spaces, whether by trekking along the coast or by braving the sea in boats
made from animal skins, wicker or felled trees – since the evidence for boats
comes from the Bronze Age, the design of their boats will be looked at
later.13
Unfortunately, much of the best information about these shore-dwellers is
now buried beneath the sea, for the shoreline that they knew has been
inundated, and the remains of what appear to be coastal communities often
come from settlements a little way inland. But this is not always the case,
since the melting of the ice also allowed landmasses in some areas to rise. For
that reason a good many archaeological sites from this period survive in
northern Scotland, including middens, mounds of food debris. Oronsay, to
the south of Mull, is a tiny island off western Scotland that already stood
offshore in the Mesolithic period; archaeologists have been able to deduce the
exact time of the year at which the type of pollock known as the saithe was
caught, because its ear-bone grows longer according to a strict schedule. This
shows that people moved around from midden to midden; these people were
either inhabitants of the island itself, who over the centuries gobbled down
gargantuan amounts of fish and shellfish, or, bearing in mind the minute size
of the territory, they came across from bigger islands nearby (Islay, Jura, and
so on) on seasonal visits, because they knew that its intertidal outcrops were a
perfect breeding ground for shellfish.14
Brittany too is a rich source of information, with plenty of middens
containing the remains of seafood that indicate how, by 5000 BC, the
inhabitants had become heavily pescatarian in taste. The fact that they neatly
deposited the shells in reserved piles indicates that they did not simply comb
the beach for throw-away snacks, but brought their catch to places where
their family could enjoy what they had found. They took up residence on
little islands off the coast such as Hoëdic, where there was not much hunting,
apart from netting birds or shooting at them, but plenty of food from the sea,
and the right sort of rocks from which they could knap their tools. These
early Bretons ate a great variety of shellfish: periwinkles, limpets, cockles,
mussels, as well as many types of crab. They exploited the Atlantic tides to
cross the sands and collect the rich harvest of the sea. Consumption of
seaweeds such as samphire and of plants that grow close by the seashore such
as sea kale made the seaside a very attractive place to live.15
In several parts of Atlantic Europe milder temperatures caused a spurt in
the growth of forests, and the opportunities for hunting declined as wild
animals such as deer were crowded out of their habitat by the trees. This
prompted people to move in ever greater numbers towards the coast, away
from impenetrable lands in the interior. In Denmark, at a place now known as
Ertebølle, the late Mesolithic inhabitants hunted any animals they could find,
even including lynx, wolves and pine marten. But they loved fish – herring,
cod and flounder were favourites – and they also exploited freshwater
supplies, taking eels and pike from rivers and lakes. They took seals from the
sea and ate them too. They paddled around in log-boats, which were
sometimes at least ten metres long, and they built fish traps out of
wickerwork; organic objects of this sort have survived in the marshy
conditions of Denmark, to be unearthed by Professor Glob (of Dilmun fame)
and his colleagues. And then there were the piles and piles of oysters,
cockles, mussels and periwinkles. It was, after all, much less work to go
beachcombing than to rely on catching deer, elk and aurochs, which might
escape the hunter for days at a time, a change ‘away from the high-risk, high-
yield, high-energy expenditure strategy of game hunting to a low-risk,
moderate-yield, low-energy expenditure strategy’, in the concise words of
Barry Cunliffe.16 One could go further: the dependence of these folk on the
produce of the sea must have affected their system of values, which would
place less emphasis on the martial skills associated with hunting (casting
spears, shooting arrows, and so on) and more on the nautical skills needed to
master even inshore waters.

III

By the fifth millennium, as new technology began to spread in Europe and

many other parts of the world, with the gradual domestication of animals and
the adoption of farming, not merely the diet changed. Although the term has
come into and gone out of fashion, this is often described as the age of the
‘Neolithic Revolution’; it turns out to have been a very slow revolution, and
it is increasingly obvious that many of its apparent innovations reached back
into the late Mesolithic period, particularly in the Middle East. Farming the
soil, if not the herding of animals, encouraged settlement in permanent
villages; this was often the case even when the early farmers followed the
widespread practice of slash-and-burn cultivation, which involved the
clearance of forest, the planting of the soil, and the cultivation of another
patch of cleared forest after the original piece of land had been exhausted of
nutrients. The new grain-based diet was not necessarily healthier: body sizes
appear to have shrunk from an average of 1.7 metres for men and 1.57 metres
for women in the Upper Palaeolithic period to 1.67 and 1.54 in the Neolithic
age. This may not seem a significant amount, but skeletal remains also reveal
a decline in dental health and an increase in diseases associated with
malnutrition, especially among children – infant mortality was high, life
expectancy was low.17 As tasks within society became more specialized,
political elites emerged who organized production and defended the
community’s territory. A distinguished archaeologist has spoken of
‘population stress’ along the Atlantic seaboard within the period from about
4800 BC to about 2300 BC.18
This leaves the important but controversial question of where the Neolithic
peoples of the Atlantic coast, and of western Europe in general, came from,
assuming they came from anywhere and were not just the descendants of the
old Mesolithic inhabitants who had learned new skills as these skills filtered
from one community to another and, higgledy-piggledy, were copied by the
existing population. The easiest way out of this dilemma, but also without
doubt the most accurate answer, is that both answers are correct in different
measure and in different places at different times.19 One could hardly expect
all the communities that had developed along the coastline from Iberia to
Scotland by the late Mesolithic age, say 8000 BC, to have responded in an
identical way to the arrival of farming, for each of these communities
exploited different resources in the sea, in the rivers and along the edges of
the forests. One case, at first sight surprising but in fact only to be expected,
is the shift in diet that took place in Brittany as the Mesolithic faded into the
Neolithic around 4000 BC. The people of Hoëdic, which has been mentioned
earlier, lost much of their interest in seafood and seabirds, which would have
left a strong signature in their skeletons, and became fashionably Neolithic in
their preference for grain, dairy products, meat and other non-marine
products. It is possible that these areas had been taken over by migrants from
the interior, which would explain their lack of interest in the sea.20
Even if these early Bretons were less interested in the harvests of the sea,
they may still have been keen to cross the sea, either to settle other lands or to
acquire objects they could not obtain or produce locally. The great triangle of
Brittany, standing in the way of direct passage by sea from south-western
France to the English Channel, looked in several directions. In the sixth to
fourth millennia BC sea contact along this coast becomes visible to
archaeologists, who would not exclude the strong probability that this is the
second or third chapter in a story of maritime connections that began in the
Middle Stone Age, or even in the late Palaeolithic. A marvellous example of
Breton links across the sea is provided by a small passage tomb in Scotland
from around 4000 BC; these passage tombs, entered by a corridor and lined
with stone, are characteristic of the ‘megalithic’ culture that will be discussed
shortly. It is located at Achnacreebeag, on the west coast not far from Oban.
Its most remarkable feature is that it contained pottery at a time when the art
of pottery was unknown in Scotland. The pots found in the tomb are from
Brittany and Lower Normandy, and they were carried at some point across
the open sea, most probably up the Irish Sea directly to western Scotland,
since a few fragments of similar pottery have turned up in north-eastern
Ireland. Among the scenarios that archaeologists then envisage is the
movement of a small group of Bretons around 4000 BC, just when tombs of
this type were becoming fashionable in Brittany.21 Some of these Bretons
reached as far as Scotland, others, whether at the same time or earlier and
later, made their landfall in Ireland, passing also through Cornwall, Wales
and the Isle of Man, all of which were inhabited by people using similar
‘Tardenoisian’ flint tools as early as the Mesolithic period.22
Meanwhile, objects from Iberia turned up in Brittany and were buried
alongside its inhabitants.23 While they may have filtered up the coast of
France overland, it is clear that early Neolithic travellers possessed the
knowhow to cross tracts of the Atlantic Ocean: if Bretons could reach
Scotland by sea, they could reach Spain. And Spain stands at the centre of a
bigger argument about Neolithic culture, the debate about the megaliths.24
The origins of the large stone structures found along the coast of Spain and
Portugal, as well as inland, and in great numbers in Brittany, not to mention
northern France and parts of Britain, have long been debated. They are best
described as large stone structures rather than structures made of large stones,
as not all the stones used were mega, or ‘large’.25 The most famous of these
structures, Stonehenge, is far from the sea; however, even setting aside the
more bizarre arguments about its use as a Neolithic computer, this and other
Neolithic structures reveal a knowledge of the heavens that was surely
exploited by sailors as well as the priests and rulers of Late Stone Age
southern England.
Most of the structures are classed as graves, though whether they really
were that, or just that, is a complex issue. The traditional assumption has
been that two distinctive types of tomb appeared over large areas of Atlantic
Europe during the Neolithic period: the passage grave, which consisted of a
corridor leading into an often circular inner chamber, all carefully constructed
out of large blocks of stone; and the gallery grave, which lacked the inner
chamber but was once again built of stone and often covered over with earth.
Elaborate theories were built on the argument that they represented different
cultural streams. Modern dating using Carbon 14 and other methods
established that the earliest passage graves so far identified are to be found in
Brittany, and go back to the fifth millennium BC. On the other hand, a series
of passage graves from southern Spain were built about a millennium later.26
This style of funerary architecture was not a passing fancy; passage graves
were constructed in northern Scotland, in northern, central and south-eastern
Ireland, in Brittany and along the coast south from there; and all around the
Iberian coast from Galicia to southern Spain; but they also appeared in
Denmark and northern Germany, with 7,000 identified in Denmark alone,
maybe one third of the number in existence 4,500 years ago.27 They range in
date from 4800 BC to 2300 BC, and none can be found more than 300
kilometres from the Atlantic or North Sea coasts.28 But they did not all
develop at the same time, and they originated in different places in different
ways – in Great Britain the custom around 4000 BC was to build
unchambered long barrows, still a feature of the British landscape; and these
developed into passage graves later. Meanwhile the Bretons constructed
grander graves ahead of everyone else. To say that knowledge of these
Breton monuments influenced the architecture of passage graves in England
or Iberia is not the same thing as claiming that the same people, of the same
ancestry and language, built all these monuments. There is general agreement
that different places developed this style of monument independently, with
Brittany coming first, and once the megaliths were a common feature of the
landscape along the shores of western Europe, different communities copied
details of the design and structure from one another, to make their own
monuments more perfect.29
When speaking of perfection, the megalithic settlement at Skara Brae in
Orkney has a special claim to attention. This is not just because it, and above
all the passage grave at Maes Howe, is very well preserved; it also sits in the
midst of other important Neolithic sites from the period 3600–2100 BC. The
first Neolithic settlers on Orkney (assuming they were not descended from
Mesolithic predecessors) arrived from the facing shore of Scotland around
3600 BC with their animals – cattle, sheep and deer – and took advantage of
the excellent fishing to be had around the islands.30 There were very many
deer on the Orkney island of Westray, and it is possible they were herded
rather than allowed to run completely wild. Catching birds and collecting
birds’ eggs was another way of ensuring a high-protein diet. The
consumption of shellfish, as elsewhere along the Atlantic coast of Europe,
was prodigious. The predominance of limpet shells can be interpreted in
several ways. Since this is a low-nutrition shellfish, reliance on limpets could
indicate that during periods of shortage or famine the islanders relied on this
second-class food. Or they may have been used as fish bait, a practice that
has not disappeared from the area. The fish the islanders caught was probably
used not just for human consumption but to produce fish meal, of the sort
already encountered in the Indian Ocean; and this would be fed to animals.31
This style of life was very stable and lasted for maybe half a millennium.
The islanders’ use of stone slabs, easily obtained, to construct their houses
means that there are some truly remarkable archaeological sites on Orkney,
which offer a very clear idea of how their occupants lived; for once, it is
possible to move beyond evidence about how people disposed of the dead
and to gain an intimate idea of how they lived from day to day. Half a dozen
or more stone houses, sunk a little into the earth, were constructed at Skara
Brae on the main island, and fitted out with stone cupboards and shelving,
most likely box beds, benches and hearths, and even what has been described
as a dresser, which may have served as a display cabinet, one of whose
functions was to impress visitors. Storage boxes were let into the floor – one
contained beads, pendants, pins and a dish containing red pigment made out
of one of the vertebrae of a whale. These houses formed a compact group,
linked by semi-subterranean passages.32 Another structure at Skara Brae was
evidently a workshop, where flints were knapped using sophisticated
techniques that involved the heating of the chert out of which stone tools
were manufactured.33
The inhabitants of the Orkney archipelago lived in small communities
scattered across the islands, and apparently obtained enough food and raw
materials to meet their needs. Many mysteries about their social and religious
life remain. One puzzle is why their chambered tombs so often contain vast
amounts of human bone from disarticulated skeletons, but many bones are
missing: at Isbister there were many foot bones but few hand bones, and
plenty of skulls. Bodies were allowed to decompose and then the bones were
collected and redistributed. This suggests the existence of elaborate rituals in
which bones were rearranged – perhaps a moderately efficient sorting process
so that individual chamber tombs specialized in particular parts of the body.
This surely demonstrates that the tombs were not places for the long-term
burial of individuals but were seen rather as part of a single greater funerary
monument that stretched across an entire island and in some sense embodied
the spirit of the island.
The houses at Skara Brae are remarkable enough, but the chamber tomb at
Maes Howe has been described as ‘one of the supreme achievements of
Neolithic Europe’. It even left a bizarre impression on the Vikings, who
covered the walls with runic inscriptions thousands of years later, and
mentioned it in the Orkneyinga Saga: ‘during a snowstorm Earl Harald and
his men took shelter in Maes Howe and there two of them went insane’.34
The quality of the craftsmanship was exceptional: stones were neatly fitted
together and were carefully dressed to create flat surfaces in the low corridor
leading to the core of the monument, as also in the central ‘hall’, even though
some of the stones used to line the walls weighed as much as three tons.35
The islanders were learned in astronomy, and carefully aligned the monument
at Maes Howe with the solstices, indicating that sun and moon rituals were
conducted here. This was not unusual – one of the greatest megalithic
monuments, New Grange in Ireland, was similarly aligned, and the
decoration on its stones matches that at Maes Howe, so connections between
Orkney and Ireland must have been close, with regular visits to Ireland by
Orcadians.36 The Orkney archipelago provides inherent evidence for the use
of the sea passages by Neolithic navigators: they crossed the sea to arrive
there in the first place, and all the evidence suggests that they prospered,
despite living on what is not the most welcoming climate in Britain. More
than that, Orkney, when compared with Ireland and elsewhere, provides
evidence for cultural contact between communities separated by the sea – not
just art but ritual was shared between communities. The communities on
these islands were reasonably self-sufficient, but they did not become cut off
from the outside world.
Away from Orkney we depend on the evidence from tombs, or structures
that at first sight appear to be tombs. That gallery and passage graves became
a widespread fashion is not in doubt, but what caused this change in burial
practices is far from clear. Archaeologists were tempted to compare evidence
from the eastern Mediterranean (some of it actually much later, but dating
methods have taken time to improve); they then concluded that the practice
spread from the east by way of Malta, Sardinia and the Balearic Islands, each
of which has its own impressive stone monuments. It was also tempting to
link this to the cult of the Mother Goddess or Earth Mother who may well
have been worshipped in the great stone temples of Malta around 4000 BC.37
Admittedly, the great stone towers, or nuraghi, of Sardinia are much later,
and a subtle distinction has resulted in the classification of the talayot, or
prehistoric stone monuments, of Minorca and its neighbours as ‘cyclopean’
rather than ‘megalithic’; but it was easy to draw lines on a map showing how
the megalithic culture of the Atlantic was diffused out of the Mediterranean
towards Iberia, and then out of Iberia towards Brittany and the British Isles.
British experts expressed polite differences of opinion with Spanish
archaeologists, who, with a nationalist flourish, were determined to show that
Galicia and northern Portugal were the obvious places to find the origins of
the megalithic culture of Neolithic western Europe. However, the dates of the
Spanish tombs were relatively late – the end of the fourth millennium BC for
the very earliest. To be sure, the grave goods found in southern Spanish
megalithic monuments show both Atlantic and Mediterranean influences; this
was a place where the Atlantic and the Mediterranean worlds converged.38
In the end, though, the old ‘diffusionist’ approach to Megalithic culture,
arguing that it was spread by migrants from the Mediterranean, was
abandoned even by its former champions such as Glyn Daniel, the
Cambridge archaeologist who also did much to promote archaeology in the
early days of television.39 Carbon 14 dating produced surprises and pushed
the date of these monuments much further back in time, so it made no sense
to see them as massively reduced imitations of the pyramids, not that it had
ever made much sense to do so. Yet these differences of opinion converged at
one point: the megalithic tombs were characteristic of the lands along the
Atlantic seaboard. Moreover, they do share some features. Plaques inscribed
with designs that seem to show boats, axes, snakes and undulating lines are
found in several areas, so that similar snake designs were used in Galicia,
Brittany and the Irish Channel, and there are similarities between snake
patterns found carved on slabs in passage graves from Anglesey and patterns
used by megalithic builders in Galicia, who were versatile builders, using
carvings and paintings in their structures.40 Rather than showing that the
megalithic tradition spread slowly out of the Mediterranean and into first
southern and then northern Spain, all this suggests that there was a good
amount of to-ing and fro-ing between Iberia, Brittany and Britain, so that the
north-west corner of Spain, the north-west corner of France and the Irish Sea
were linked by regular sea voyages. Brittany stood at the centre of this
Atlantic world, and was more precocious in its use of this architecture than its
maritime neighbours to north and south.
Were these monuments actually tombs? In some, no human remains have
been found. But even when there is evidence of burial this does not mean the
prime purpose of the megalithic mounds was to dispose of the dead with
honour. They may also, or primarily, have been used to mark out territory at a
time when a more settled Neolithic population was beginning to think of
ownership of the land itself and not just (as in the Mesolithic era) the
exploitation of its resources. This makes good sense because the coming of
farming tied humans to the land in a way that did not apply to a hunter-
gatherer society. These were small, localized societies, for there is no
evidence of great power centres nor of large settlements similar to the towns
that had emerged in the Middle East during the early Neolithic period. In
such a fragmented society, subject to constant pressure as agriculture and
pastoralism brought population increase, it was important to know who
belonged where. Monuments to, and often containing the remains of, the
ancestors of the leaders of the community acquired special importance. For
this reason it made sense to raise large mounds over the chambers these
people carefully constructed. Whether they stood at the edge of a territory, to
mark out borders, or at the centre, to function as cult centres and hallowed
places where the leaders of the community would announce important
decisions, they were places for the living as well as for the dead. When no
evidence can be found that they were used for burial, the likelihood still
remains that they were built to commemorate ancestors, sometimes so distant
in time that there were no bones to show for them; or sometimes the mounds
may commemorate people lost at sea whose remains were simply not
available for burial. Quite often, indeed, the corridor was left open so people
could come and go into the inner chamber.41 For us, they also open a door –
one into the political world of these early Atlantic societies.
 16

Swords and Ploughshares

The societies of the Neolithic Atlantic have left behind few signs of major
changes during the second millennium BC. This was the period when great
Bronze Age civilizations came into being in the eastern Mediterranean and
the Middle East: Minoans, Mycenaeans and Hittites in Greece and Anatolia,
not to mention the high civilizations of Egypt, Babylonia and the Indus
Valley. The Atlantic fringes of Europe remained dependent on high-quality
stone for tools, and consisted of village communities that did not compare in
size and sophistication with the cities, palaces and temples of the East.
Atlantic societies were not literate, although claims have been made that
signs incised on pottery found in France consist of a rudimentary type of
writing.1 Even the use of bronze did not greatly alter life in the Atlantic arc.
Between about 1200 BC and about 900 BC bronze objects filtered into the
coastal lands from the European hinterland, but the low level of finds of
foreign goods from this period indicates that they came through gift exchange
and were owned by members of the local elite, rather than being everyday
commodities.2 The trade routes of Bronze Age Greece had reached no
further west than Italy, though Mycenaean objects have occasionally surfaced
in southern Spain, and very occasionally as far afield as the British Isles: a
copper axe from Topsham in Devon has been identified as Mycenaean.3
Indeed, it would be surprising if some goods had not been handed on from
place to place until they reached the Atlantic, by which time they would be
seen as exotic curiosities from an unknown world. And then, as the Bronze
Age civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean experienced severe crisis in
the twelfth century BC, the opportunity to create links to their once prosperous
lands was lost.
The Atlantic Bronze Age was out of phase with that in the eastern
Mediterranean. According to the rough definition applied by archaeologists,
it lasted until around 600 BC, when iron technology spread more widely in the
Atlantic lands; its high point, the Late Bronze Age, can be dated to its last
300 years, beginning in 900 BC. It may or may not be important that the Late
Bronze Age was a period of cooler climate throughout Europe, after several
warmer and drier centuries, though the effects of a changing climate in
Atlantic Europe and in the Mediterranean were not necessarily the same.4
This is just when the discussion of ancient Italy or Greece adopts the label
Iron Age. Of course, this well-established way of defining societies by the
materials out of which their members made their tools is crude and one-sided.
One very good reason for preferring bronze was quite simply the ready
availability of copper in the Atlantic lands, along with tin; tin could be found
in the north-west of Iberia and copper in the south-west, while the area round
Nantes, where the Loire debouches into the sea, was a source of both metals,
and eventually of a distinctive type of sword.5 Although bronze implements
were not as strong as the best iron ones, early ironmaking was
unsophisticated, and in a duel between the two an iron sword was as likely to
shatter as a bronze one was to bend. Many other criteria, such as political and
social organization, cannot be used as labels because the evidence is so hard
to unearth. On the other hand, there is almost certainly a political dimension
to the appearance and diffusion of bronze weapons. Precisely because bronze
remained precious and because it provided material for sharper weapons, the
people who owned bronze goods were members of the warrior class, or
merchants who aimed to sell metalwork to the warrior class. This means that
the finds of bronze objects from Atlantic Europe, plentiful though they are,
speak much more loudly about princes and nobles, and occasionally about
traders, than they do about the vast majority of the population, who still relied
on their traditional stone tools.6
 Although a number of archaeologists have been keen to present the
Atlantic arc as a single interacting zone of culture and contact, there was
great variation between, say, southern Portugal, which was exposed to
influences coming out of the Mediterranean, and lands to the north such as
Brittany or Ireland. Broadly, Ireland, Wales and southern Britain display
differences but had much in common; Brittany had close relations with the
British Isles but a strong identity of its own; within Iberia one can distinguish
Galicia and northern Portugal from southern Portugal, but the Iberian
coastlands also had much in common; and, taken together, an Atlantic world
can be drawn on the map, stretching from the Scottish isles to Cape St
Vincent, though Scotland was less well integrated into this world than it had
been in the days of Maes Howe; western France, south of Brittany, was oddly
disconnected from this network.7 The linked areas shared styles of
metalwork, which was quite distinct in appearance from that produced in
inland France and western Germany, home to the Urnfield Culture, of which
more in a moment. Even so, weapons and implements brought into Britain
from the Continent were probably melted down and refashioned in the
specific shapes that had become traditional on the island.8 The important
question here is whether these societies remained in maritime contact with
one another or whether the deep dip in trade and contact within the
Mediterranean was matched by similar inward withdrawal among the
communities living beside the Atlantic.
Certain features of Atlantic Bronze Age society reveal new ritual practices.
The custom of casting precious bronze objects such as shields and swords
into rivers and lakes presumably had a powerful religious significance. These
were not objects that one would simply discard as rubbish. The abandonment
of the custom of building megalithic chamber tombs covered by great
barrows is equally mysterious, because it is not obvious how people now
disposed of the dead – cremation seems the obvious answer, but, in contrast
to the large number of urn burials in central Europe (which have given a
whole culture the name ‘Urnfield’), urns were not adopted and cremated
remains must have been scattered – most likely into rivers, along with some
of the bronze objects just mentioned. When rituals change significantly –
notably the shift from inhumation burial to cremation – it is tempting to
assume that this indicates that migrants have arrived, marrying into,
outnumbering or entirely replacing the existing population, but a moment’s
thought about religious change in more recent centuries (for instance, the rise
of Protestantism) should be enough to show that radical changes can occur
without a sudden shift in population. DNA tests suggest that a significant
proportion of the inhabitants of south-western England, specifically the area
around Cheddar, are descended from Neolithic forebears. And some experts
would like to claim that what united the Atlantic peoples was their use of
Celtic languages; but the lack of written texts makes this just a hypothesis.9
The period before 950 was a rather quiet phase of contact. The evidence
for contact before then has to be teased out of bronze objects as diverse as
Irish cauldrons and Portuguese or British flesh-hooks, while the exact design
of a sword handle often reveals significant long-distance contacts. The
cauldrons, whose weight and craftsmanship made them into highly prized
objects, turn up in south Wales, the lower Thames region and, interestingly,
Galicia and northern Portugal, though there they are often of a slightly
different design.10 Since rather few have been found in the French interior, it
is plain that they reached Iberia by sea, either by way of Great Britain or
directly, while swords of a type found frequently in the lower Thames area
quite often reached south Wales and Ireland. They are evidence for an
Atlantic society that took delight in noble feasting, as great hunks of meat
were stewed in cauldrons and the meat extracted with hooks that were
sometimes elaborately decorated with figures of birds that resemble swans
and ravens, their necks and beaks cleverly moulded to make them function as
the teeth of these hooks.11
Many of these cauldrons must have been offered by chieftains to one
another as magnificent gifts. Feasts at which gifts were exchanged speak of
contact between centres of power, and of warriors travelling short and long
distances to seek one another’s company. For this elite was not simply a local
aristocracy; the cauldrons are evidence of a shared culture along the Atlantic
arc. The voices of these warriors are silent, but what one sees in the literature
of Anglo-Saxon England, such as Beowulf, or in the Icelandic sagas, may
portray a similar sort of culture, given to braggardly display and, no doubt,
the consumption of large amounts of beer and mead. It was also a culture in
which fighting with a sword as well as a spear was the mark of a noble
warrior. Close combat also required good protection for the body, so armour,
more often of thick leather than of bronze, was an important part of a
warrior’s equipment. The expense of producing or acquiring these goods
increased the distance between those who could afford to do so and the wider
population. For swords became prestigious articles of trade. There were
distinct cultural preferences in the design of high-quality weapons, rather as
in much later centuries scimitars were favoured by Turks and straight swords
by Spaniards – in other words, there is a hint here of a common sense of
identity, at least among the warrior elites who used these fine weapons. In
order to be socially respectable, it was important to follow the traditional
British fashions. Unfamiliar continental ways were regarded as socially
unacceptable.
The best evidence for wide contacts comes from what are known as
‘Carp’s Tongue swords’, on the basis of a rather remote resemblance between
the ribbing along the length of these swords and the appearance of a carp’s
tongue. ‘The Carp’s Tongue sword’, it has been said, ‘is truly an Atlantic
armament.’12 This ribbing greatly strengthened the blade, so it had a
practical as much as an aesthetic purpose. Since these swords did not vary
very much in appearance, and were also regarded as a high-quality product,
there is a whole history to be reconstructed out of their first appearance in
north-western France, and out of their diffusion to other places, at first by
trade and subsequently through the spread of technology. Soon, such swords
were being produced in south-eastern Britain, though the design followed in
Iberia was not exactly the same as that used in northern Europe. Still, there is
enough similarity between Iberian and northern swords to suggest cultural
influences and maritime trade along the Atlantic arc, and the adaptation of a
model known through sea contact to local needs and conditions. In the late
eighth century BC, these contacts reached as far as the bay of Huelva, on the
Atlantic coast of south-western Spain, where a substantial bronze hoard was
found underwater in 1923. The hoard contains plenty of these swords and
may be the remains of a shipwrecked vessel carrying metalwork that was cast
in Spain and was being taken out to sea, rather than being delivered from
afar, although mixed in with this were cloak pins (fibulae) from distant
Cyprus; another view is that this was a sacred deposit, such as an offering to
the sea gods.13 The list of places where these swords have been found is
impressive: northern Germany, southern Portugal, but also within the
Mediterranean.14
Overall, there was an increase in, or rather renewal of, contact between
Brittany and Britain, on the one hand, and Spain and Portugal, on the other,
by 600 BC.15 The English Channel was regularly crossed by Bronze Age
boats, so that Brittany and Normandy (or Armorica) and southern England
(or Wessex) were in close and constant contact, without losing their cultural
individuality, made evident, for instance, in different burial rites. North-
western France had more in common with southern England than with
eastern France, well away from the ocean; Breton biconical urns turn up in
Wessex.16

II

Maritime trade across the English Channel was also fed by more remote
contacts. An extraordinary discovery from Langdon Bay near Dover, together
with a similar but smaller find at Moor Sand in Devon, sheds light on the
character of trade within and beyond Atlantic waters. The overwhelming
advantage of looking at evidence from wrecks is that one can see goods in
transit, gathered together, and clearly in these cases intended for trade. At
Langdon Bay, underwater archaeologists found forty-two ‘median-winged’
axes, thirty-eight palstaves (another type of axe-head), eighty-one dagger
blades and sundry other bronze goods; Moor Sand yielded seven French
bronzes, including four daggers.17 The axes would not have found their way
to the bottom of the bay had not a Bronze Age ship, most probably bound for
what is now Dover Harbour, foundered, perhaps in a gale that blew the boat
beyond its destination. By looking closely at the origins of these objects
archaeologists have concluded that the cargo was gathered together in the
mouth of the Seine, for it did not all originate in the same place – the winged
axes are typically eastern French, and yet the palstave axes are recognizably
Breton. The winged axes belong to a type not actually found in the British
Isles, so these axes were not imported to be used, even though they seem to
have been in good condition when the ships sank. Rather, the bronze objects
were valued for their metal content, and were melted down on receipt, so that
they could be turned into bronze objects of the sort Bronze Age Britons
preferred. The traders of Langdon Bay and Moor Sand were scrap metal
merchants – though in addition they doubtless carried all sorts of perishable
goods such as food and textiles that have decomposed.18 Among foodstuffs,
salt was being traded around the Atlantic shores, as it would be for many
centuries to come; and nothing of that can survive a shipwreck in saltwater.19
Some of the bronze goods moving around the Atlantic region may have
been used in payment as ingots of standard weight, rather than as tools and
weapons, for, as has been seen in the Indian Ocean, the history of money
does not begin with the invention of coinage. The modern history of these
ingots began in 1867, when a clog-maker called Louis Ménard discovered the
first great pile of them, which his friends thought were a hoard of gold, but
which he insisted on taking to the local museum.20 By now 32,000 socketed
axes of several standard designs have been discovered at sites not far distant
from the Atlantic, originating in Brittany and Normandy, and generally called
‘Armorican axes’ after the classical name for Brittany. They turn up in
southern Britain, in Ireland and along the shores of the Netherlands and
northern Germany, but not in Galicia and Portugal. By the late seventh
century BC they were being produced with a bronze alloy that used lead rather
than tin, and this would have rendered them extremely inefficient as tools or
weapons, strengthening instead the argument that they were a way of storing
wealth. Many have been found packed in cylindrical holes in the ground, or
in jars, and neatly arranged in circles, with the cutting edge pointing inwards.
Two hoards from Finistère contained 800 at a time, and at another site
archaeologists uncovered more than 4,000 axe heads in several deposits.
They have been described as ‘currency axes’, objects that were versatile
enough to be used as a form of money but also as ingots, and in some cases
as tools too.21
Evidence from settlements is scarce, but it enables archaeologists to reach
closer to the domestic life of these Atlantic people. Away from the coast,
banks and ditches divided up the land, indicating that ownership of territory
was now sharply defined. These field systems were created in areas close to
the Atlantic before this type of land division became widespread in
continental Europe. The availability along the Atlantic arc of copper ores and
of the tin needed to make the alloy bronze stimulated community life by
creating specialist activities: mining, smelting, manufacturing, exchanging
and selling. Just as political elites became more visible and more powerful
through their acquisition of deadlier weapons and stronger armour, smiths
and traders acquired a distinct place in these societies, which grew in
complexity.22 One expression of this complexity was the creation of soundly
built circular villages with dry-stone house foundations, themselves circular,
and strong perimeter walls. Circular stone houses were not themselves a
novelty – they have been encountered already at Skara Brae on Orkney. The
novelty lay in the spread of this type of structure from Britain and Ireland
down to the coasts of Iberia, though unfortunately the surviving remains from
Brittany are few. On the one hand, this type of village speaks for a sense of
insecurity, whether from warlike neighbours after one’s land or from
brigands after one’s goods; after all, this was, as the evidence from the
swords and spears reveals, a society dominated by warriors. On the other
hand, this type of settlement speaks for permanence, the intention to stay put.
Interestingly, these villages are characteristic of the Atlantic arc, while in
central Europe the preference was for oblong houses; so it is tempting to
think that they are the product of a common culture embracing the British
Isles and the Atlantic flanks of France, Spain and Portugal, a culture with
deep roots in Neolithic Europe that gave the settlements along the Atlantic
edge of Europe a different appearance and that expressed a distinct identity.
Whether that identity was expressed in a common language is less clear.23
Judging from the finds at Langdon Bay and Moor Sand, stretches of water
were crossed by several routes, including a route from Brittany to south-west
England and one from the mouth of the Seine north-eastwards to the Strait of
Dover; the English Channel is exposed to gales and strong tides, so the best
route across is not necessarily the shortest, and even these longer routes
would not generally follow a straight line.24 A few rock carvings from Spain
give some idea of the appearance of ships around this time, though they are
difficult to date and the outlines are crude: several images are of sailing ships,
and in at least a couple of cases sail power was combined with oar power.25
Sturdy watertight boats constructed out of a wooden shell covered in hides,
some quite sizeable, are attested from Iron Age Britain and are hardly likely
to be an Iron Age invention; the description of these ships by Julius Caesar
will be examined later.26 A number of log-boats found near Peterborough in
eastern England give a good idea of what sort of boat could be used along
rivers and in open water such as the Wash, and similar boats have been found
in France in a tributary of the Seine, dating right back to the Middle Neolithic
(roughly 4000 BC).27 How far out to sea such boats were wont to go is
unknown. Landing places lay within existing natural harbours, for at this
period there is no evidence that ports had been set up. Occasional rock
carvings from Denmark, Sweden or Galicia offer crude outlines of oared and
sailing vessels.
Once built, a ship was put to maximum use, for trade, fishing and
transporting people. And people were constantly on the move. Colin Renfrew
has listed eleven reasons why one might have travelled in prehistoric Europe:
to obtain goods; to sell goods; for social meetings; out of sheer curiosity or to
acquire exotic information; to a holy place as a pilgrim; to learn or train; to
find work; as a mercenary; to visit friends and relatives; as an emissary; and,
in his view one of the most important and most easily forgotten reasons, to
find a spouse.28 The fact that the British Isles were a distinct but not a totally
separate cultural world provides simple proof of the readiness with which
Bronze Age sailors traversed the English Channel over many centuries.

III

One element missing from this picture of the Atlantic world, already
fragmentary and tentative, is the connection between the ocean and the
Mediterranean. For although the eastern Mediterranean, during its own
Bronze Age, had experienced little or no direct contact with Iberia, in the age
of the Minoans of Crete and the Mycenaeans of Greece (who were hardy
navigators), the Mediterranean network of trade and settlement that the
Phoenicians created from about 900 BC onwards stretched right across, and
beyond, the Mediterranean; legend attributed the foundation of a Phoenician
trading settlement on the island of Cádiz to 1104 BC, which is certainly too
early, but there can be no doubt that Cádiz, or Gadir as the Phoenicians called
it, was up and running in the ninth century BC, well before the Iberian ship –
if it was Iberian – foundered in the bay of Huelva with its bronze cargo. It is
no surprise that the Phoenicians were attracted to this area. It gave access to
the silver-rich realm of Tartessos in the southern Iberian hinterland; and
around the bay of Huelva lay several settlements that had flourished since at
least the end of the Neolithic era, attracted by rich supplies of salt and fish,
while the Phoenicians were attracted by sources of tin in Iberia and in further
reaches of the Atlantic; whether they reached Cornwall, as is often
maintained, is far from clear. They still had to meet the considerable
challenge of battling their way against contrary currents and often strong
winds as they made the passage past Gibraltar (coming in was always much
easier). Some Phoenicians stopped at Gorham’s Cave, a fissure in the Rock
of Gibraltar, to invoke the gods before daring to enter the open ocean, leaving
behind pottery and votive objects.29
Phoenician traders made their way down the coast of Morocco as well as
northwards. Their objectives included the collection of murex shellfish,
which provided them with the purple dye after which the Greeks had named
them Phoinikes. As was their custom, they established themselves on a small
offshore island, taking charge of Mogador, or Essaouira, which provided a
base from which to trade with the native Berber population. It lies 1,000
kilometres south of Cádiz and it apparently marked the furthest limit of their
regular trade. Mogador was probably visited seasonally by traders coming
down from Cádiz or out of the Mediterranean, and was as much a camp as a
settlement; the traders feasted on shellfish and even whale meat, and left
plenty of debris behind. It was very possibly the place named Kerné by Greek
writers; if so, we have a credible description of how these merchants
operated: they arrived in their big merchant ships, set up booths in which to
live, and unloaded the pottery, perfumes and other fine goods they had
brought south. These they loaded on to smaller boats, which took the traders
and their wares to meet the ‘Ethiopians’ on the African mainland. They
bought ivory and the skins of lions, leopards and gazelles in exchange for the
products they carried down from Gadir. It was assumed that one simply could
not travel beyond Kerné.30
Mogador flourished in the late seventh and early sixth century, but it never
proved as successful a settlement as the towns the Phoenicians founded on
either side of the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, at Gadir/Cádiz and at
Lixus near modern Larache. Yet goods filtered through from as far away as
Cyprus and Phoenicia itself; Greek and Phoenician jars arrived in quantity,
trans-shipped through Gadir; several carry the name ‘Magon’, who was no
doubt a wealthy merchant.31 Gadir, then, was the capital of a network of
trade dominated by Phoenician merchants who flourished in the years up to
about 550 BC. After that, pressure in the East, from Persians and Assyrians,
damaged the trade of the Phoenicians within and beyond the Mediterranean,
though this enabled the Carthaginians, themselves of Phoenician origin, to
pick up the pieces and create their own flourishing network. However, the
Moroccan settlements did not recover.
Mediterranean artefacts did occasionally reach sites in Atlantic Spain other
than Gadir, and since what has been found can only be a fraction of what
remains to be discovered, which itself must be a fraction of what was
originally there, this contact, even in the Mediterranean Bronze Age, should
not be ignored. Several sites in Spain and Portugal where Mediterranean
goods have been found – Villena, Baiões, Peña Negra – lie inland and could
have been reached by following rivers upstream, whether in a boat or along a
land trail. And a burial at Roça do Casal do Meiro just south of Lisbon brings
us up to the water’s edge. This vaulted tomb contained two people, who were
surrounded by grave goods from the Mediterranean, such as an ivory comb
and a cloak pin. The date is uncertain and could be as early as the eleventh or
as late as the eighth century BC. The tomb may have been a memorial to
Mediterranean traders who had reached this far when they died as it is hardly
representative of the burials in Bronze Age Portugal. Baiões lies further
inland in an area quite rich in tin, which would have attracted Phoenician or
other visitors; a hoard found there, and unfortunately hard to date precisely,
once again reveals links with the Mediterranean, including bronze wheeled
vessels similar to those found in Cyprus and an iron bit attached to a bronze
chisel. The chisel is of Atlantic origin, but the bit is Mediterranean, so
someone created this composite tool, even before iron-working had begun to
spread in Iberia. Nor was this traffic one way. An Atlantic roasting-spit has
turned up in Cyprus.
The main candidate for the role of intermediary is the island of Sardinia,
because ships entering the Mediterranean from the Atlantic could take
advantage of prevailing winds carrying them in that direction. Sardinia, the
home of the rich but enigmatic ‘nuraghic’ culture in the Bronze and Iron
Ages, looked both west to Spain and east as far as the Levant in the years
around 1000 BC (the term ‘nuraghic’ derives from the thousands of
prehistoric castles, known as nuraghi, that still dot the island). The typical
heavy sword of nuraghic Sardinia followed Atlantic models, even if it was
made locally using the plentiful copper of the island; thus the ‘Carp’s
Tongue’ extended as far as Sardinia, and Atlantic sickles appear in
Sardinia.32 But though much of the copper used in Sardinia was local, the tin
was not: they had to obtain it in places such as Spain and southern France,
and this would explain the intensity of contact, commercial and cultural,
between this part of the Mediterranean and Iberia.
Other Sardinian similarities to the Iberian cultures of the Neolithic and
Bronze Ages include stone tombs not vastly different in structure from the
Atlantic megaliths – as also in the Balearic islands – and walled villages
composed of circular houses arranged in a similar way to the castros and
citânias of Atlantic Spain and Portugal, of which more shortly.33 To suggest
that the Strait of Gibraltar was not an impenetrable barrier and that the
Atlantic world spilled over into the Mediterranean makes sense. Whether this
Atlantic world also encompassed the Atlantic coast of Morocco is, however,
uncertain, in the present state of knowledge. But it is hard to imagine that
Atlantic Morocco, which the Phoenicians penetrated without great difficulty,
escaped close contact with the Atlantic culture of Iberia and the great arc
stretching up to the British Isles. The idea of Bronze Age Atlantic Europe as
an area joined together by a common culture makes good sense; but it is also
an unnecessarily Eurocentric approach. Those living in southern Iberia had
no concept of Europe, and it was easier to sail back and forth to Morocco
than to Sardinia.
One might, and should, dispute the usefulness of the terms ‘Neolithic’,
‘Bronze Age’ and ‘Iron Age’, at least in the Atlantic, for the life of those
living along the ocean’s edges changed gradually; the coming of copper and
then bronze did not bring traditional stone-cutting to an end by any means.
There were changes in burial practices, there was the abandonment of
megalithic architecture; there was a new warrior elite, though whether native
or immigrant is still far from certain. All the time, though, the awareness that
the picture we have is built on little bits of evidence – first funerary, then
about bronze weapons – troubles anyone who hopes to understand these
societies in the round. Maritime communication was certainly an important
feature of life along the Atlantic arc. However, it is only in the Iron Age,
roughly from 600 BC onwards, that there is a little more clarity – though not a
great deal of clarity – about who the people living along the edges of the
Atlantic were. Here at last there is evidence from travellers that bears
comparison with the Periplous of the Indian Ocean; and there is the much
disputed evidence of inscriptions found in Iberia, as well.
 17

Tin Traders

By the second half of the first millennium BC the Atlantic arc had ceased to
function as a lively network binding together distant parts of the west
European coastline; it became the outer margin of a new world whose main
centres of activity lay in the heartlands of continental Europe. This was the
age of the two successive cultures known as Hallstatt and La Tène that
interacted strongly with the peoples of the Mediterranean, such as the
Etruscans, and became masters of iron production. Iron remained largely out
of favour along the Atlantic edges, probably because it was not as readily
available as it was in central Europe; but this itself indicates how the
coastline had become disconnected from developments in the hinterland.1
When Etruscan bronze figurines turn up in Devon, Greek coins appear in
Brittany or Iberian pin-brooches (fibulae) are found in Cornwall, this is an
exciting event in archaeology, for after 500 BC such exotic items had become
increasingly rare; and it has been seen that the apogee of the Phoenician
penetration into the Atlantic, judging from the case of Mogador, can be dated
to the sixth century BC.2
Sea traffic certainly did not cease; but some of the most impressive
connections, such as that linking Orkney to the Irish Sea and beyond, either
were sundered or became much less regular, to judge from the very limited
finds of ‘foreign’, that is, non-Orcadian, goods on Iron Age sites within the
Orkney archipelago. As along the shores of the Scottish mainland, the coasts
of these islands were now dotted with small castles, or brochs, whose
function is as much a mystery as the Sardinian nuraghi, to which they bear an
outward resemblance.3 Like the nuraghi, they were often surrounded by
small outhouses, and became the nucleus of village settlements. Indeed, stone
roundhouses, not quite as imposing as the broch towers must have been,
characterized settlements all along the Atlantic arc, from Portugal to
Shetland.4 More generally, there is a sense that society was turning inwards,
and that local communities lived off both the land and sea. In the British Isles
these communities based themselves in small settlements that it would be
hard to dignify with the title of town, though that would be a suitable
description of several of the large settlements that have been discovered
along the maritime edges of Galicia and northern Portugal. Brittany may also
have possessed a few imposing settlements close to the sea. Writing about his
invasion of north-western Gaul, Julius Caesar described the settlements of the
Veneti in Brittany as ‘towns’, but he wanted to impress his readers with the
scale of his conquests. It would not have sounded quite right if Roman armies
had had to struggle to master scattered seaside villages.
 Evidence for exchange of goods across the sea is so sparse that the
argument for contact up and down the coasts of Atlantic Europe has to
depend on cultural similarities all the way from Portugal to northern
Scotland. There were broad similarities in the decoration of pottery; there was
the common practice of building villages made up of roundhouses
constructed on stone foundations. The similarities between the culture of
Brittany and Cornwall, and their difference from the rest of France and
England, suggest that the links across the sea should not be underestimated.5
Between about 600 and 200 BC, a striking common feature across great
swathes of the Atlantic coastline was the construction of promontory forts
overlooking the sea; these were lines of walls, generally double or triple
lines, that cut off the tip of a small promontory. There is no certainty about
their function. It is unlikely that they marked out trading centres, because
they are by and large in elevated positions and not close to an obvious
harbour. Excavation of the promontories has produced little evidence that
they were continuously inhabited. More likely, they were places of refuge
and strongpoints to which warriors and their dependants could retreat in times
of war. Julius Caesar described the defensive use of promontories in Brittany
in his Gallic Wars:

The positions of the strongholds were generally of one kind. They

were at the end of tongues and promontories, so as to allow no
approach on foot, when the tide rushed in from the sea – which
happens every twelve hours – nor in ships, because when the tide
ebbed again the ships would be damaged in shoal water.6
On the other hand, they could not all benefit from the tide this way. They
generally looked out to the west, from western Ireland, Galloway in south-
west Scotland, or the Pembroke peninsula in Wales; they were abundant in
Cornwall and Brittany, and they appear on the islands of the north Atlantic:
Shetland, Orkney, the Hebrides and the Isle of Man.7 This suggests that they
may sometimes have had a religious rather than a defensive use, as points of
land on which to propitiate a god of the sea or of the winds, bearing in mind
that the prevailing winds came from the west. Another common feature of the
northern Atlantic coastal communities was what are known as souterrains,
underground corridors built out of stone with some care; and, once again,
their function is unclear – maybe they were for storage, maybe for shelter,
though they would have been clearly visible above ground, so it is hard to see
what advantage that would have brought. Once again, it is the presence of the
same subterranean architecture on both sides of the English Channel that
suggests mutual influences, rather than any objects found in the ground.
Settlements of varying size made up of roundhouses could be found as far
south as Iberia. The castros or citânias of Galicia and Portugal were often
substantial settlements occupying good strategic locations. One example is
the very substantial citânia at Santa Luzia, high above the modern Portuguese
town of Viana do Castelo; unfortunately, a large part of the site was
destroyed early in the twentieth century in order to build a luxury hotel, but
more than enough remains to indicate that the term ‘town’ rather than
‘village’ would be appropriate here. It overlooked the River Limia where it
debouches into the Atlantic; this was a superb defensive position. Whether
the inhabitants made much use of their access to the Atlantic is unclear. The
site at Santa Luzia eventually acquired three lines of walls; the area within
the walls contains dozens of circular houses closely packed together, as well
as solid towers built into the retaining walls. The houses, several of which
contained vestibules, were entered from the south-west or the south-east,
since a southerly entrance was better sheltered from the winds and rain that
tended to strike from the opposite direction. While the walls were of stone,
the conical roofs of these houses would have been built of wood covered with
straw. Loom weights have been found, indicating that weaving was a local
industry, as one might expect; otherwise, the main sources of livelihood were
agriculture and stock-raising.8
Bearing in mind the cultural similarities between the roundhouse
settlements all the way from Portugal to the Scottish isles, the question then
arises whether the inhabitants of these places possessed a common origin.
Some archaeologists and philologists have seized on the idea that what united
these people was a ‘Celtic’ identity. Language and race are quite different
things, and people of similar ancestry switch languages, so that it becomes
impossible to identify the ‘original’ language of those groups. Indeed, the
term ‘Celts’ has several plausible meanings: the peoples called Keltoi by the
ancient Greeks, and Galli by the ancient Romans; the assumption that the
Hallstatt and La Tène cultures in central Europe were essentially ‘Celtic’ in
character; the peoples who spoke Celtic languages, several of which survive
to this day.9 A case has been made for the use of Celtic dialects not just in
Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Brittany but in Galicia. Its modern inhabitants
have seized on their ‘Celtic’ identity in the struggle to gain greater autonomy
from the government in Madrid, though whether a modern-day fondness for
bagpipes proves Celtic identity is a moot point. Beyond that, in south-western
Iberia, in the lands rich in silver visited by the Phoenicians, lay the area
known to the Greeks as Tartessos.
A significant number of Tartessian inscriptions survive, written in a
distinctive script whose remote origins probably go back to the same
Phoenicians. If, as John Koch has controversially maintained, they are written
in a Celtic language, that only mildly reinforces the argument that the lands
of the Atlantic arc shared a number of cultural traits, as well as being
somewhat isolated from the cultures of the rest of western and central
Europe. It would be good to know that talainon really does mean ‘the country
of the blessed headland’, an ambitious extrapolation from a proto-Celtic term
assumed to mean ‘having a fair brow’, but with such limited material these
efforts at decipherment appear far-fetched.10 On the other hand, a general
case can be made for the archaic character of the form of Celtic, known as Q-
Celtic, spoken in Ireland and then, partly as a result of later Irish settlement in
Scotland, in the far north of Britain as well; and this would imply that in the
first millennium BC an ‘Atlantic proto-Celtic lingua franca’ was a feature of a
common culture that flourished around the Irish Sea and at least as far south
as Brittany, only to be overtaken in Wales and Cornwall, and later on in
Brittany, by more recently formed languages that are known as P-Celtic and
that were closer to the languages spoken by the ancient inhabitants of Gaul.
Knowing who these people were is certainly desirable. To what extent they
saw themselves as people wedded to the sea is uncertain, but it is interesting
that the term ‘Armorica’, a latinization of the ancient name for Brittany,
means ‘dwellers by the sea’. Some of the peoples encountered by Julius
Caesar during the Roman war of conquest in Gaul (58–50 BC) were excellent
navigators. A famous passage in Caesar’s boastful memoir of his victories,
mentioned already, describes the ships of the Veneti of Armorica, which he
encountered in 56 BC. They are said to be built quite differently from Roman
ships: they have much flatter keels, because they have to deal with tidal
waters where the water level changes significantly; they have high prows and
sterns, to carry them through rough seas and storms; they have strong cross-
beams bolted together with thick iron fastenings; they are made of stout oak
that can tolerate the violence of the open sea; they have anchors suspended
from iron chains; their sails are made of hides; altogether they are much
better suited to the mighty winds and waves of the open ocean than Roman
vessels.11
There were also smaller vessels that were strong enough to withstand the
waves. At the end of the nineteenth century an Irish farmer ploughing his
field at Broighter in County Derry turned up a hoard of gold artefacts dating
from around the time of Caesar’s wars in Gaul, or maybe a little later. The
most remarkable piece the farmer found was a miniature boat, twenty
centimetres long, and modelled in gold with loving detail. The model
contains nine benches for oarsmen, and eighteen delicate oars, as well as a
steering oar at the stern, a mast and an anchor (or grappling hook). It has been
estimated that a boat built to this specification would have been 12–15 metres
long.12 Boats of this type were constructed out of wickerwork that was fitted
around a wooden frame; all this was then covered with skins and coated with
animal fat to create a solid waterproof vessel. They have been constructed
around the world from prehistoric times to the present day, and include
circular Mesopotamian rivercraft, Welsh coracles (also circular) and Irish
currachs, of which the gold model is a very ancient example.13 Caesar’s
description of the sturdy Venetic ships offers powerful evidence that the
Atlantic coastline was indeed connected by sea. And to the evidence of
Caesar can be added that of Greek travellers, notably the intrepid Pytheas of
Marseilles.

II
It is no surprise that the Greek travellers who became interested in the
Atlantic should have had close links to Massalia, the port now known as
Marseilles that had been founded by migrants and merchants from Phokaia in
Asia Minor. They had, according to rather dubious accounts, fled from the
conquering army of the Persian Great King, and then from a colony they had
established in Corsica, out of which the Etruscans and Carthaginians flushed
them in a great naval battle in 541 BC. Southern France was already the target
of Etruscan traders, who made contact with the Gauls in the interior, selling
them prodigious amounts of wine from the mid-seventh century onwards.
Massalia experienced a golden age in the sixth century, because it was able to
service demand in central France for wine and other Mediterranean goods, in
the lands characterized by the so-called Hallstatt culture, which was
dominated by powerful princes wealthy enough to acquire Mediterranean
goods, long seen as a great marker of status. But then the focus of economic
activity, and presumably political power, shifted eastwards within central
Europe towards the scattered villages of the La Tène culture, around 500 BC,
and Massalia lost its special advantage, though it has never ceased being a
significant centre of trade.14 While the Massalians certainly exploited the
land routes across Gaul and the river route up the Rhône, their skill at
navigation made them curious about the lands that lay beyond the Strait of
Gibraltar and the Phoenician base at Gadir; and what attracted them above all
was the possibility of gaining privileged access to tin, which was required for
the production of bronze goods – bearing in mind that the coming of iron had
in no way depleted demand for bronze, as can be seen from the large number
of bronze figurines and utensils being produced at this time within the
Mediterranean (such as the massive Greek crater which arrived at Vix on the
Seine in central France, perhaps as early as 530 BC).
Around this time an unnamed Greek sailor compiled a sailing manual, or
Periplous, that described the coasts of Spain from Galicia through the Strait
of Gibraltar along the coast all the way to Massalia. Today, it is a major
source of information about Greek knowledge of the Atlantic, just as in its
own day it was evidently treasured for its account of both Atlantic and
western Mediterranean waters. Indeed, it was still being read in the late fourth
century AD, when Avienus, a very indifferent pagan poet living in north
Africa, based much of his work entitled The Maritime Shores (Ora Maritima)
on this Periplous; and without Avienus, whose work was published by a
Venetian printer in 1488, the text would now be lost.15 It is a sort of
palimpsest, as one has to scrape beneath the clumsy Latin to ascertain the
views of the ancient Greek traveller. This is not too difficult, as he omitted
several places that later became important, which inspires confidence in the
very early dating; at the same time, his insistence that several ports were
already in decay provides evidence, confirmed by archaeology, that the
Phoenician network in the Atlantic had already passed its apogee.16
The original Greek author’s account of the lands where tin could be
obtained was especially precious to the inhabitants of Massalia in the sixth
century BC.17 Avienus spoke at length about Tartessos, which had also
passed its peak by the fifth century BC, and confidently and incorrectly
identified it with Cádiz (‘here is the city Gadir, formerly called Tartessos’),
while insisting that ‘now it is small, now it is abandoned, now a heap of
ruins’;18 he described how the Tartessians traded with their neighbours, and
how the Carthaginians reached these waters; he pointed out a glittering
mountain rich in tin which would have greatly interested early traders.19
Tin and lead, Avienus related, were also the great asset of a group of
widely scattered islands known as the Oestrymenides that lay beyond a great
promontory and that some commentators have identified with Great Britain
and Ireland. However, a good case can be made for identifying this place
with Galicia, which is surrounded by a number of offshore islands and was, it
has been pointed out, ‘the most prolific tin-producing region in Europe’.20
Most probably, Avienus was drawing together disparate material and, having
heard about tin supplies coming from Cornwall, Brittany and Galicia, was
conflating all these into the Oestrymenic islands and mainland. Avienus’
traveller was impressed by the inhabitants:

There is much hardiness in the people here, a proud spirit, an efficient

industriousness. They are all constantly concerned with commerce.
They ply the widely troubled sea and swell of monster-filled Ocean
with skiffs made of skin. For these men do not know how to fashion
keels with pine or maple wood. They do not hollow out sailing
vessels, as the custom is, from fir trees. Rather they always
marvellously fit out boats with joined skins and often run through the
vast salt water on leather.21

The poem also described how the ‘holy island’ inhabited by the Hierni lay a
two-day journey from the tin islands, while ‘the island of the Albioni’ stood
close by as well – these were evidently references to Ireland and Great
Britain, and Avienus believed that the Carthaginians and the Tartessians used
to trade as far as the Oestrymenides.22 Particularly mysterious is what then
follows, an account of the wider spaces of the Atlantic Ocean that had
supposedly been explored by a Carthaginian navigator, Himilco; Avienus
described sluggish seas and windless days, as well as waters blocked with
masses of seaweed. In general, though, Avienus’ account of the Atlantic, as
one might expect from a Mediterranean author, emphasized the high waves,
the strong winds and the marine monsters that would be encountered by
anyone daring to venture into the ocean. There were inhospitable islands and
there were miraculous places such as the isle of Saturn, which was thickly
covered in grass but possessed a strange natural force: if any ship
approached, the island and the sea around it would quake violently.23
Avienus did know of a route down the coast of Portugal, past Cape St
Vincent: ‘rising high where the starlight sets, this extremity of rich Europe
extends out into beast-filled Ocean’s salt water.’24 ‘That’, Avienus said, ‘is
the Ocean which pounds the far-flung world. That is the great deep, this is the
swell that encircles the shores. This is the supplier of the inner salt water, this
the parent of our sea.’25 This was a Mediterranean perspective on the stormy,
tidal Atlantic. The sailor from whom Avienus derived his material had
evidently experienced a frightening but highly educative voyage towards the
lands of tin. He deserves the title pioneer at least as much as the better-
known, but not much better-recorded, fourth-century Massalian who
followed in his footsteps and then ventured even further, Pytheas of
Marseilles.

III

Pytheas was both an explorer and a writer. Since they had to rely on his own
words, composed around 320 BC, later Greek authors whose description of
the world ventured into the Atlantic felt themselves free to scorn what he
said; they included Polybios, a serious historian who wrote in the second
century BC, and Strabo, an equally serious geographer, who wrote in the early
first century AD. Much that needs to be said about Pytheas has to be filtered
through their hostile comments, and through remarks by Pliny the Elder,
active a little later than Strabo.26 In the face of his classical critics, two
modern historians of ancient exploration have boldly claimed that Pytheas
‘has the best claim among ancient travellers to rank with the great discoverers
of modern times’.27 He has even been described as ‘the man who discovered
Britain’, though Avienus’ traveller knew about Britain centuries earlier.28
The problem is that Pytheas’ own writings have vanished; too many people
simply refused to take him seriously. He was accused of ‘errant deception’.29
Strabo and Polybios agreed that Pytheas’ voyage was simply implausible:
‘how could it happen that a private individual, and a poor man at that, could
cover such distances by ship and by foot?’ Pytheas claimed to have reached
the ‘limits of the cosmos, which a person would not believe if Hermes
himself were speaking’.30
Pytheas’ motives for travelling as far as Britain, and maybe still further,
might seem obvious. He shared a curiosity about the shape of the habitable
world with his later rivals Eratosthenes and Strabo. This was the age of the
great Alexandrian cosmographers. Even in faraway Massalia some of the
major Greek works of historia (meaning ‘enquiry’) must have been known
and read, not least Herodotos’ account of the Persian Wars, which also
contained rich descriptions of barbarian lands, such as the territories of the
Skythians to the north of the Black Sea. Then there is the possibility that
Pytheas was keen to promote trade, or at any rate to identify places where
useful trading connections could be made. It has been seen that, with the rise
of the La Tène culture north of the Alps, trade routes carrying Greek and
Etruscan goods through southern France had shifted eastwards, to the
advantage of Etruscan and Greek towns in northern Italy and the upper
reaches of the Adriatic. There was still strong demand for their goods in
continental Europe, but the problem was that it was the wrong part of
continental Europe from the perspective of Massalia. It has therefore been
suggested that Pytheas set out with a grand fleet to break the Carthaginian
monopoly on the Atlantic tin trade; but it seems much more likely that he was
a lone traveller, and it was precisely because he was alone that he could range
so far and wide and collect information about places, distances and products
that would be precious to his compatriots.31 Moreover, there was always a
question about where to turn for supplies of tin. The rocky promontories of
northern Europe, in Brittany and Cornwall, beckoned.32
Despite the chorus of disapproval led by Polybios and Strabo, there is no
reason to doubt Pytheas’ claim to have travelled at least as far as the British
Isles during the fourth century BC, setting out from Marseilles. Nor is there
reason to doubt that he made use of local ships rather than fitting ships out at
his own expense. Ships powered by sail and oar were well suited to coastal
navigation in the Mediterranean; but it is impossible to imagine a trireme
battling against the high seas of the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel
without it being rapidly swamped and sunk.33 A further complication was
that during the fourth century BC the Carthaginians controlled key points
along the coastline of Mediterranean Spain, and it is unlikely they would
have waved a Greek ship past the great rock of Kalpe, later known as
Gibraltar.34 Although Pytheas apparently knew about Kalpe and
Cádiz/Gadir, whose existence was common knowledge in Massalia, it is
much more likely that he followed a mainly overland route from Massalia to
the Atlantic coast of Gaul, and went on board a Gaulish vessel there. After
all, these land routes out of southern France were as much a part of
Massalia’s rationale as the sea routes linking the city to Italy, Spain and the
Mediterranean islands. Barry Cunliffe has suggested that he did indeed set
out by sea from his home town, but only travelled a short distance: in his
view, he passed the Greek settlement at Agde in what is now southern
Languedoc and then arrived at Narbo (Narbonne), a ‘native port’; from there
he would have headed to the river system that debouches into the ocean near
the Gaulish settlement of Burdigala, or Bordeaux. The journey this far might
only have taken a week.35
After three days at sea he reached Ouexisame, or Ushant, off the western
tip of Brittany, but what he did there, or even whether he stayed for any
length of time there, is pure speculation. Cunliffe places him on the north
shore of Brittany, in the handsomely defended Iron Age port of Le Yaudet, at
the point where the River Léguer joins the sea; this was a centre for trade
across the Channel to southern Britain.36 There is no evidence Pytheas ever
went there, but, if he had done, he would have experienced a strong contrast
between his bustling home city of Massalia, with its imposing stone temple
façades and its grand covered marketplaces, and any port along the coast of
northern Gaul or southern Britain. This puzzlement at the more primitive life
of the northern peoples is reflected in a romantic account of the simple lives
of the early Britons, written by the Greek author Diodoros the Sicilian in the
first century AD and possibly derived from Pytheas’ own book, On the Ocean.
‘Far removed from the cunning and knavishness of modern man’, they lived
in wattle-and-daub huts and ate a thick gruel made from the ears of the grain
they grew. Diodoros’ image of simple innocence formed part of a great
literary tradition celebrating poverty rather than the corruptions of wealth that
survived into the Middle Ages and Renaissance.37 The peoples encountered
on these Atlantic travels were not derided for their simplicity, which was,
rather, seen as very praiseworthy.
The Channel ports were a vital link in the tin trade that reached all the way
from Britain to the Mediterranean. An account of the tin trade in south-
western Britain also survives, once again from the hand of Diodoros, and
possibly echoing the lost words of Pytheas.38 Diodoros described a
promontory called Belerion where seams of tin could easily be quarried. The
tin was worked into the shape of knucklebones, and then it was carried to an
offshore island named Ictis that was linked to the mainland by a natural
causeway which flooded at high tide. Whole wagonloads of tin were taken
across to Ictis at low tide and the tin was sold to merchants, who brought it
first across the Channel to Gaul, and then overland all the way to the mouth
of the River Rhône, whence it would presumably have been ferried to
Massalia. Pliny provided slightly different information, calling the island
Mictis, and stating that the Britons took their goods there in wicker boats
covered in skins rather than across a causeway. One possible location for Ictis
is St Michael’s Mount, off the coast of Cornwall, though no remains from
that period have been found that might confirm the story.39
Even more speculative is Pytheas’ route northwards along the coasts of
Britain as he island-hopped his way towards the edges of the known world on
British boats. In trying to work out where he went, everything depends on
measurements of the height of the sun at midday, cited (often scathingly) by
his later readers such as Strabo. Strabo himself misjudged the orientation of
the north European lands, even placing Ireland to the north of Great Britain,
whose east coast in his view lay parallel to northern France and the
Netherlands; but Strabo had an eccentric view of Ireland, which he saw as the
very edge of the world, ‘just barely habitable’.40 The difference between
Pytheas and Strabo, of which Strabo was keenly aware, was that Pytheas had
visited most of the lands he described, while Strabo was an armchair
traveller. One good candidate for a stop on Pytheas’ route is the Isle of
Lewis, off the north-west shore of Scotland; and Pliny offered a very brief
description of the Orcades, or Orkney archipelago, which he perhaps derived
from Pytheas.41 But the big question is how far he travelled beyond that.
Pliny repeated Pytheas’ claim that an island called Tyle lay six days’ voyage
north of Britain, in a part of the world where the sun was hidden from view
for half the year and continuously in view for the other six months (rather an
overstatement of the phenomenon of the Midnight Sun).42 No part of
Pytheas’ journey has attracted as much attention as his visit to what the
dramatist and thinker Seneca would later call ‘Ultima Thule’, conjuring up
the image of a remote and uninhabited land at the very edge of the world.
Strabo refuted the claim that Pytheas had reached this place, declaring that
this was a tissue of lies.43 On the other hand, early medieval writers such as
the Irish monk Dicuil would associate ‘Thule’ with Iceland; Dicuil was a
keen cosmographer and he wrote his On the Measurement of the Globe of the
Earth in the early ninth century at the court of the Frankish emperor, Louis
the Pious, Charlemagne’s son. By this time, his fellow monks from Ireland
were visiting Iceland, where some of them were found by the first Norse
settlers in the ninth century.44 However, there are other good candidates for
Thule, such as Shetland or the Faroe islands, for there is no indication that
Pytheas’ Thule is an island on the scale of Iceland.
More significant, really, is the question whether Pytheas circumnavigated
Britain and entered the North Sea. All this depends on glancing references –
one that may concern Kent, which would suggest he passed through the
Channel from the east. There is Pliny’s striking description, derived from
Pytheas, of an island called Abalus where amber dumped by waters flowing
out of a great estuary accumulated. The inhabitants had no interest in amber
and used it in place of firewood; still, the Teutoni who lived a day’s journey
away on the mainland valued it, and were happy to buy it from them.45 Pliny
understood that amber was a resin and that it was found washed up on the
shores of parts of northern Europe.46 At this point, speculation is once again
let loose, and debates rage as to whether this was Baltic amber or Jutish
amber, which certainly seems more likely, and whether the great river was
the Rhine or, more probably, a number of rivers that all flow into the North
Sea along the coast between the Low Countries and Denmark. It appears that
by Pytheas’ time supplies of Jutish amber were diminishing; and, just as he
searched for sources of tin, he may have intended to gather information about
sources of amber. Baltic amber, which is still strongly dominant, was already
filtering southwards in payment for bronze goods from as far away as the
Etruscan cities of the Mediterranean. Some of it reached modern Slovenia,
suggesting that the routes carrying amber were overland ones and that they
lay well to the east of the routes to which Massalia had access. It was the old
problem of the displacement of the centres of demand for Mediterranean
products eastwards, leaving Massalia high and dry.47
Maybe, then, Pytheas was really a commercial spy. But, by way of
Diodoros and Pliny, he offers brief glimpses of the Atlantic world, and above
all of its unfamiliarity compared to not just the Mediterranean but the Black
Sea, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. For the Atlantic coastline of Europe
was still the outer edge of the known world, whereas the Indian Ocean was
already functioning as the link between the Mediterranean and the South
China Sea, between the high cultures of the Roman Empire and those of the
Far East.
 18

North Sea Raiders

Descriptions of northern waters by Mediterranean travellers ignore the

perspective of its own inhabitants. Although writing spread northwards
across the Alps, in the form of the runes, which may be derived from
Etruscan or another north Italian script, no texts survive from the shores of
the Atlantic in the first centuries AD. Archaeological evidence is patchy: it is
richest in those areas where waterlogged and boggy soil has preserved the
remains of wooden boats and even sacrificial victims, such as the ‘Bog
People’ studied by Professor Glob in Denmark. Denmark provides some of
the richest evidence, with its many islands and its profusion of inlets that
could be used as harbours; the land had lifted out of the sea in the seventh
and sixth millennia BC as Arctic ice had melted and sea levels had risen.
Setting aside the interior of Jutland, this was a land that was best traversed by
sea, with easy connections across to the Scandinavian peninsula as well. The
first boats were made out of limewood, alder or oak tree trunks, hollowed out
and turned into small fishing boats, maybe only suitable for a handful of
passengers; but by the middle of the fourth millennium BC boats were
heading out into open waters, to judge from a jar fished out of the Baltic
twenty kilometres off the outlying Danish island of Bornholm.1
As well as fish, these boats carried amber, ‘the gold of the north’, which
was used as jewellery but also for offerings to the gods – a pot from the
fourth millennium BC contained 12,849 amber beads, though none was large
(the total weight of all these beads was only four kilograms). It has been seen
that Jutish amber supplies were diminishing by the first century AD, but this
stimulated a greater interest in Baltic amber instead; the Baltic was stirring
into life, after long centuries as a backwater. Amber was the gift of the sun,
and by the second millennium it had become a favourite article of trade along
overland routes that, stage by stage, carried goods back and forth between the
Mediterranean and northern Europe.2 Denmark and the Baltic world would
long be tied to lands far to the south by way of the central and east European
rivers as much as, or more than, by long-distance sea routes; this was still the
case in Viking times.3 Roman goods did seep into ancient Scandinavia, with
Denmark receiving well over half of what has been found, Norway just over
a fifth and Sweden a little over a sixth; however, these goods did not travel
very far by sea: they were brought northwards from major Roman cities such
as Trier and Cologne.4 But within the Baltic the island of Bornholm,
conveniently situated astride sea routes that linked eastern Denmark to lands
further east, was a notable centre of shipping, to judge from the practice of
burying local notables in boat-shaped graves.
 Around the time of Pytheas’ voyage evidence comes to light for the use of
small ships in warfare. That is not the same as naval warfare, which even in
the age of the Vikings was rare: in this part of the world, ships were used for
transport, whether of warriors or merchants, or they might be used in the
pursuit of enemies (a task entrusted to the disconcertingly named Ulf the
Unwashed in one of the greatest works of medieval Icelandic literature,
Njál’s Saga), but they did not often engage in battle at sea.5 A battle took
place on the island of Als in the late fourth century BC following a raid that
may have been launched from northern Germany (Als lies on the eastern side
of Denmark, just north of the modern German border); at least three, and
maybe as many as six, war canoes about twenty metres in length pounced on
the Danish coast, each carrying twenty or more warriors, all armed with
spears, lances, javelins and swords, and some dressed in chain mail armour. It
is likely that the invaders were soundly defeated, because what survives from
the battle is a mangled pile of their weapons, sacrificed in a bog into which
one of their boats was also dragged.6 Owing to the physical configuration of
the region, boats were an important feature of everyday life in early
Scandinavia; carvings showing long and narrow boats survive from the
second millennium BC, and sometimes, as an example from Östergötland in
Sweden shows, the figures on board seem to be engaged in sexual intercourse
– what this signifies is a mystery, and these scenes may be drawn from myths
about the gods.
The impression remains that even in the earliest centuries AD sail power
was little used and not very effective, and power was generated by oars or
paddles. In the first century AD Tacitus refers in his Germania to the boats of
a people called the Suiones, apparently living somewhere around southern
Sweden and Denmark; these boats were paddled:

Next come the communities of the Suiones, situated in the Ocean

itself, who, besides their strength in men and arms, also possess a
naval force. The form of their vessels differs from ours in having a
prow at each end, so that they are always ready to move forward.
They make no use of sails, nor do they have regular benches of oars at
the sides: they row, as is practised in some rivers, without order,
sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, as occasion requires.
These people honour wealth.7

Only with the development of higher freeboards, stronger keels, and the
larger masts and sails that the new keels could support did wind power fully
come into its own, possibly as late as the Viking age. But ship design was
certainly changing in the early centuries AD. A warship found at Nydam in
Denmark (very close to Als) was sunk as a sacrifice, along with plenty of
weapons, by about AD 350, after several decades of service; it was made out
of oak and possessed an anchor. Its prow and stern were less steep than those
of the famous Viking ships built five centuries later, but this was no longer a
hollowed out tree-trunk: as was so often the case in northern waters, the boat
was clinker-built, constructed out of overlapping strakes of wood; it is the
oldest clinker-built boat to have survived. It was twenty-three metres long,
and four metres wide at its widest point, and was constructed using five large
strakes of wood on each side, each about fifteen metres long. Iron nails were
used to fix the strakes to one another, though the strakes, rib and keel were
bound together by fibre, which created greater flexibility in the hull. The
vessel had space for fifteen pairs of oars and a side rudder.8 There is no way
of knowing whether the sinking of the ship indicates that the vessel was
captured in war, or whether this was seen as the best way to dispose of a
worthy sea companion after years of loyal service; but it had been built not
far away around AD 320, for it was made of local wood, from Jutland or
Schleswig.
A second ship, made from pinewood, was found only in fragments, and
this too appears to date from the fourth century AD; it was not quite as long or
broad, and it may have arrived from Norway, Sweden or even Britain, since
fir trees were few in the area surrounding Als.9 On the other hand, it would
be a mistake to assume that, just because the inhabitants of the Danish
marshes did not make much use of sails, no one did so. A flat-bottomed boat
found at Bruges, dating to the second or third century AD, was most probably
a merchant vessel, well suited to North Sea conditions, with plenty of room
for cargo and a large central sail; its lack of a keel made it suitable for sailing
over sandbanks, where it would rest when the tide was out. The remains of
Rhine barges from this period often include stepped beams into which a mast
was inserted, and the Romans certainly used sailing vessels in their Rhine
fleet based at Cologne.10 The problem with wind power was that it was more
difficult to control when one could set out and where one could go. The use
of paddles or oars made more sense if the aim was to launch an unexpected
raid.
The finds at Als and Nydam conjure up a world in which raiding across the
sea was a frequent scourge. The question that then arises is whether these
were, by and large, local raids or much more ambitious expeditions that could
range right across the North Sea. And this takes one into the vexed question
of the identity of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who crossed from the region
where these ships have been found to settle the land that became known as
England. They themselves were the successors to Germanic raiders who were
active from the first century AD. Indeed, the first references to Germanic
pirates come from Tacitus’ account of the pacification of Britain by the
Roman general Agricola; some rebel Germans, from the tribe Tacitus called
the Usipi, mutinied, seized some galleys, and fled northwards,
circumnavigating Britain, clashing with other Germans and ending up
somewhere near their native territory, which lay a little way down the Rhine
in Frisian territory. The Frisians enslaved those whom they spared. But the
Usipi were not skilled navigators, and it had been a miserable journey; they
ran out of food and ended up eating one another.11 The mouth of the Rhine
had a very different configuration to later centuries, with many inlets poking
deep into what are now Belgium and the Netherlands; and to the east of that,
all the way to the borders of Denmark, stretched sandy shores and lines of
small islands. These wetlands could only be made habitable by building up
mounds, or terpen, above the likely floodline, and some of the villages along
this coast prospered not just as fishing ports but as trading centres that
received Roman glassware and metalwork – after all, one of the major
Roman cities in northern Germany, Cologne, lay on the Rhine, and Roman
Britain also lay a short distance away across the North Sea. This was an area
where the Frisians, who became very active in North Sea trade during the
early Middle Ages, lived side by side with other Germanic groups, notably
those whom Tacitus called the Chauci.12
What tribal labels such as ‘Chauci’ really signified is a puzzle that ancient
and medieval historians have enjoyed chewing over, but it is likely that the
Chauci were one of the groups that eventually became part of the still larger
wave of migrants we know as the Angles and the Saxons. In the first century
AD their piracy was an irritant and Roman fleets were sent against them – the
Romans even mobilized their shipping based at Cologne. For a time the
Chauci were led by an ambitious Germanic warlord named Gannascus,
whose bold sea raids against the province of Gallia Belgica culminated in his
capture and execution by the Romans in AD 47.13 However, his defeat stirred
the emotions of the Chauci still further, and trouble in the lands bordering
Gallia Belgica flared up again and again in the second half of the first
century; nothing is heard of them after raids in 175, no doubt because they
were now subsumed in the general category of ‘Saxons’. In one engagement
the Germans arrived aboard a medley of different ships, some captured from
the Romans, some powered by oars in the traditional German fashion; but
they also strung up their colourful cloaks to convert their vast array of boats
into simple sailing craft.14 Tacitus, who tells us about these events, took a
not very secret delight in the energy and freedom of the Germanic peoples,
and in the failure of the Roman emperors and their generals to tame them.
Nonetheless, there is no reason to disbelieve his insistence that the Romans
were time and again defeated by Batavians and other peoples living on the
edge of the Roman Empire, often following the defection of Germanic
auxiliaries to the naval forces opposing Rome.15 The simple reality was that
by about AD 200 it was not safe to live by the sea. Villas in Brittany that were
burned to the ground, coin hoards buried at spots along the Breton coast, and
severe damage to Chelmsford and to nearby villages in the part of Britain that
the Saxons would call Essex all strongly testify that raids from the sea, rather
than internal strife, rendered the coastlines unsafe.16
By the third century, raiding had become severe enough for forts to be
constructed along the coast of eastern Britannia and along the shore of Gallia
Belgica. The ‘Saxon Shore’, under its commanders, or counts, was the first
line of defence against Germanic raiders who came by sea, although there
were plenty too who raided across the limes, the frontier dividing Roman
Germany from neighbouring peoples. These raiders might sometimes be
persuaded to become confederate allies of the Romans, but might instead
become confederate allies of one another, notably the large groups known in
later history as the Franks, or ‘free people’, and the Saxons. The Saxons were
then living close to the North Sea, and their confederation (including the
Chauci) came into existence after Tacitus wrote his Germania in the first
century AD, since he mentions a great many tribes but omits the Saxons, who
were, however, known to Ptolemy in the mid-second century. Whether or not
these tribes had become greedy for the wealth of the Roman lands across the
border in Gaul and across the sea in Britain, they were under constant
pressure from the third century AD onwards: rising sea levels were eroding
their habitable lands along the shores between Flanders and Frisia, a
phenomenon of uncertain cause grandly known as the Dunkirk II Marine
Transgression. The loss of land prompted migration out of the territories that
had been settled by the Chauci and their Saxon descendants; meanwhile the
emergence of swamps and marshes encouraged the Romans to pull back from
their forts in Gallia Belgica, allowing what land there was to be occupied by
Frankish tribes.
Piracy became a means to a livelihood for those who were increasingly
forced to depend upon the sea for their existence. Sometimes land raids and
sea raids were combined, as during the first major Frankish raid on the
Roman Empire in the mid-third century, when Franks reached as far as
Tarragona in Spain and then appropriated the ships they found in the harbour,
after which they raided north Africa. Later, another Frankish party even
reached the Black Sea. These people were certainly highly adaptable. Such
high-profile adventures captured the imagination of Roman writers, but what
really affected the North Sea and the English Channel was the sequence of
raids on Brittany and Gallia Belgica that saw the continuing destruction or
destitution of dozens of villages, or vici, traceable in the archaeological
evidence.17 How effective the forts built along the shoreline at places such as
Portchester in southern Britannia and Nantes in western France actually were
is a moot point. What is striking is the sheer range of the raids, if they could
penetrate as far as Nantes. Admittedly, the purpose of these forts was not
simply to act as watchtowers: they were bases from which Roman fleets
could be launched against attackers, and from which the neighbouring seas
could be policed. All the same, large stretches of the eastern flank of
Britannia lay exposed to lightning raids, and it has been suggested that only
in the Strait of Dover could anyone realistically expect to control movement
across the sea, and even then not very successfully: the construction of the
great fort at Pevensey near Hastings in the early to mid-fourth century
indicates that stronger defences were needed to protect southern Britain.
Defence of the sea was, however, a matter of deep concern: when an
experienced naval commander named Carausius set up active patrols in the
North Sea and seemed to have stemmed the threat from piracy, the emperor
turned against him in a fit of jealousy, even accusing him of collaborating
with the Franks (and no doubt diplomacy as well as warfare was used to
achieve such good results). Carausius responded by declaring himself
emperor in Britannia and northern Gaul in 286, and the Roman army and
navy struggled hard to reconquer Britain during the next ten years. This did,
however, prompt the Romans to build a substantial fleet, and they seem to
have kept it in operation after the recovery of Britannia, since piracy ebbed,
though it did not disappear – around this time the inhabitants of
Godmanchester, near Cambridge, were massacred by raiders who must have
penetrated the river network of East Anglia from the sea.18 By the late fourth
century there was no let-up in raids on Britain launched by the Saxons and
their neighbours, while overland raids by the Picts and the Scots increased
still further the misery of the inhabitants of Britannia; Ammianus
Marcellinus, the late Roman historian, wrote of the ‘continuous vexation’ of
the borderlands of the entire Roman Empire, including Britannia; and once
the raiders began to work together in 367, in what Ammianus saw as a great
‘barbarian conspiracy’, Roman authority in Britain was stretched to breaking
point.19
There are grounds for believing that Saxons arrived as settlers as well as
raiders, and, with the help of fragments of pottery in a Saxon style, it has
even been suggested that the title ‘Counts of the Saxon Shore’ conferred on
the commander of the defence network against the sea raiders reflects the fact
that this was a shore inhabited by, rather than attacked by, Saxons.20 In
reality, though, Roman power was crumbling and the Saxons were raiding
with greater and greater impunity, even reaching the Orkney islands some
way beyond the borders of Roman Britannia. So with the withdrawal of
Roman legions in 410, and the recognition that Rome could no longer control
the destiny of Britannia, the door was left open: Angles from the south of
Denmark and the north of Germany, as well as Jutes from Jutland, joined the
Saxons in colonizing Britain, a process that was accelerated by the continuing
depletion of their own lands as the sea claimed more territory along the coasts
of northern Europe.21 There are still many unanswered questions about the
Anglo-Saxon settlement of what became England, and evidence from DNA
suggests that the invaders often took British wives or perhaps had children by
enslaved British women, while an underclass of British slave workers known
as wealhas persisted for some centuries – the term wealhas meant
‘foreigners’ and was applied by speakers of Germanic languages to any
number of outsiders, notably the inhabitants of what became known as
Wales. But, outside the areas in the west and far north that became Celtic
refuges, the invaders were numerous enough to impose their Germanic
language and pagan religious beliefs on what had been a Celtic-speaking and
increasingly Christianized population.
Anyone who knows anything about the Viking raids is likely to see
striking similarities between the attacks by the Saxons and their neighbours
on late Roman Britain, followed by their conquest of parts of Britain, and the
activities of the Danes and Norsemen in the ninth and tenth centuries.
Although, as will be seen, Viking ship construction had developed rather
further, the combination of piracy, violent attacks on the shoreline and
subsequent settlement were a continuing feature of the North Sea world over
many centuries. The Viking age marks an accentuation of something long
present. Moreover, Scandinavia was often the source of the fleets that
ravaged the shores of northern France, and sometimes penetrated a good way
down the complex river system of the Rhine delta as well. The best-
documented attack was that of a Danish king called Hygelac, which occurred
between 516 and 534, targeting the territories of the Franks; the raiders
carried away goods and people, but the Frankish king, Theodoric of the
Merovingian dynasty, despatched his son with an army that attacked the
Danes, apparently at sea; the Franks were victorious and Hygelac was killed,
and all the booty and captives were supposedly recovered.22 This conflict
was long remembered, for it featured in the great Anglo-Saxon poem
Beowulf, written at least a hundred and maybe 400 years after Hygelac’s raid:
after killing the monster Grendel the hero Beowulf was presented with the
neck-ring worn on his last raid by Hygelac, who had been his kinsman: ‘I am
Hygelac’s kinsman, one of his hall-troop. When I was younger, I had great
triumphs.’ The poet recalled the tragedy of Hygelac’s death in ‘Frisia’, in a
battle where Beowulf fought as well, escaping from danger by swimming
away loaded with a great pile of armour that he had seized as booty (all his
achievements verged on the superhuman).23
Something is missing from this account of contacts across the North Sea.
What has been presented so far is a history of violent contact followed by
settlement on a scale sufficient to wipe out most traces of the culture of
Roman Britannia. Even the boats that have been unearthed are generally
warships. Yet, as the ship from Bruges indicates, despite its early date,
cargoes moved back and forth as well as raiders. The raiders themselves often
passed the goods they had seized through markets. Indeed, it was because
they craved products which they could not easily obtain at home that they set
out on pirate raids. Some of their grave goods indicate how much they valued
the manufactures of the Roman cities.24 A commercial network linking the
lands facing the North Sea did, as will be seen, emerge by the seventh
century, but it would be hard to argue that such a network already existed in
the age of the Saxon raids, a period that saw the decline of towns as centres
of trade and industry or, to put this more dramatically, the fall of the Roman
Empire in the West.25

II

The arrival of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes in Britain not surprisingly saw
the introduction of their practice of ceremonial boat burial. The most
impressive example, even though all that remained of the boat’s fabric were
its nails, is the lavish Sutton Hoo ship burial, excavated in Suffolk in 1939.
The burial took place in the early seventh century, and shows traces of
Christian influence, so it seems to document a period when Christianity was
gradually impregnating a society that still abided by pagan values – indeed,
the lavish ceremony of ship burial is a clear indication that pagan practices
still prevailed. The site was probably the tomb of the powerful East Anglian
king Rædwald; by the time of his death he appears to have established
himself as the leading Anglo-Saxon king among the many competing for
power in southern England. Some years before he died, he did receive
baptism, but he also maintained a pagan shrine, so that his attachment to his
new faith seems to have been opportunistic, an attempt to curry favour with
the Christian king of Kent, not far away. Among the grave goods was
Byzantine silver plate. Twenty-seven metres long and four metres wide, this
was a large ship that had undergone repair in the past, to judge from the
impressions left in the soil by its timbers. The strakes used in its clinker
construction were not single planks of wood but were composite strips made
out of several lengths of wood bonded to one another, a technique that
appears here for the first time in northern Europe, though there is no way of
knowing at what stage between the Nydam boats and Sutton Hoo the method
was introduced. The bow and stern posts were raised an impressive four
metres above the level of the keel. If there was a mast step it was apparently
taken away, to allow for the insertion amidships of a burial chamber for the
king. Unfortunately other finds from the same period, in Jutland as well as
East Anglia, still leave the question of propulsion up in the air. But it is hard
to avoid the conclusion that sails were used at least as an auxiliary source of
power when wind conditions were suitable. Since the use of wind would have
made journeys much shorter, the presence or absence of sails raises
significant questions about the ease of contact between the new lands settled
by the Anglo-Saxons and their original homeland. It is even possible that
sailing skills known to earlier generations were lost, because the need for
cargo ships powered by the wind was much reduced as Roman power and
Roman cities contracted, and as demand for luxury goods plummeted; one
result of the collapse of Roman authority was the abandonment of carefully
constructed harbours with quaysides, and the use instead of beaches for
loading goods and passengers. And ships drawn up on sand would need to be
constructed differently from those that remained afloat – their keel, for
instance, should not be too prominent or else they were likely to
overbalance.26
The history of Anglo-Saxon shipping can be reconstructed from evidence
other than ship burials. One notable feature of Anglo-Saxon literature is the
survival of written accounts of journeys at sea. Allusive, alliterative poems
celebrated voyages and voyagers. In ‘The Wanderer’ an exile recounts the
hard life of one who could not return home:

Ond ic hean þonan wod wintercearig ofer waþema gebind …

Wretched I went thence,
winter-wearied, over the waves’ bound;
dreary I sought hall of a gold-giver,
where far or near I might find
him who in meadhall might take heed of me,
 furnish comfort to a man friendless,
win me cheer.27

Another powerful poem, ‘The Seafarer’, one that moved Ezra Pound to
produce his own eccentric version, tells of the fear every traveller must
experience before setting out:

Forþan cnyssaðnu heortan geþohtas þæt ic hean streamas …

Now come thoughts
knocking my heart, of the high waves,
clashing salt-crests, I am to cross again.
Mind-lust maddens, moves as I breathe
soul to set out, seek out the way
to a far folk-land flood-beyond.
For no man is so mood-proud,
so thoroughly equipped, so quick to do,
so strong in his youth, or with so staunch a lord
that before seafaring he does not fear a little
whither the Lord shall lead him in the end.28

Whether this poem records a real sea voyage, as has been claimed, or whether
it conveys an underlying Christian message, awareness of the sea and its
dangers became a common theme in the lively literature of the Anglo-
Saxons. They remained conscious of their maritime heritage.
The Beowulf poet was also well acquainted with the sea, and with the
Danish lands from which Hygelac hailed; Beowulf was a ‘Geat’, the term the
author used for the Danes, for the oldest English epic poem is not a poem
about England. The story begins with a boat burial, though, unlike those that
have been excavated, this one took place at sea; and for all one knows this
was the favourite way of honouring someone whose grand status earned him,
or her, a boat burial:

A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour,

ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.
They stretched their beloved lord in his boat,
laid out by the mast, amidships,
the great ring-giver. Far-fetched treasures
 were piled upon him, and precious gear.
I never heard before of a ship so well furbished
with battle-tackle, bladed weapons
and coats of mail …
And they set a gold standard up
high above his head, and let him drift
to wind and tide, bewailing him
And mourning their loss.29

There are also eloquent descriptions of warships ready to leave harbour, ‘their
wood-wreathed ship’ and ‘steep-hulled boat’, in Seamus Heaney’s sensitive
translation, which ‘flew like a bird until her curved prow had covered the
distance’.30 And these vessels carried sails:

Right away the mast was rigged with its sea-shawl;

sail-ropes were tightened, timbers drummed
and stiff winds kept the wave-crosser
skimming ahead; as she heaved forward,
her foamy neck was fleet and buoyant,
a lapped prow loping over currents,
until finally the Geats caught sight of coastline
and familiar cliffs. The keel reared up,
wind lifted it home, it hit on the land.31

Then a harbour master came to greet the ship and ensured that it was fastened
to the beach with its anchor cables, ‘in case a backwash might catch the hull
and carry it away’. This was a world in which fear of the sea was countered
by a sense that the sea could be mastered, with the help of the great wooden
seabirds that the English and the Danes knew so well how to build – and how
to describe. It was also a society in which the exchange of gifts between
people of high status sealed personal relationships – Beowulf’s neck-ring was
a gift from a queen. And it was a society in which raiding was an accepted
reality, and showing prowess in a raid was a way to win wealth but also a
way to win honour.

III
Movement across the North Sea was not conducted solely by warships. As
early as the sixth century, ship-borne merchants were setting out from an area
broadly defined as ‘Frisia’, stretching from southern Jutland down the
marshy, boggy coasts of northern Germany and the Netherlands. It was not
an area that an army could easily hope to conquer, with its creeks and inlets,
its rivers and streams, and its patches of land that lay perilously close to sea
level; land was lost and gained, for the delta was in constant flux as riverbeds
moved across space and as new waterways carved themselves into the
shifting alluvial soil. The best hope for anyone trying to live there was to
settle in the terpen, the mounds that rose above the waters, and some of these
evolved into ports, or vici, from which archaeologists have recovered gold
and silver coins that reveal how the terpen were by no means isolated
communities. ‘The sea’, it has been observed, ‘was omni-present’: water,
water everywhere. Yet the water offered valuable resources, such as salt and
fish, while the use of what dry land there was for pasture enabled the Frisians
to trade in the wool and leather that became standard cargo aboard their ships.
Cattle were as important to them as boats, for they followed a diet rich in
meat and milk. The Frisians were both merchants and peasants, exploiting
such local resources as there were, while building links that extended further
and further afield.32 To build their ships they required plenty of wood, and
that had to be brought down from the Rhine, along with grain and other staple
goods they found it hard to produce. Thus the early Frisians provide an
excellent example of the way that an unbalanced local economy and the
necessity of specializing stimulate trade. They began to trade not in order to
accumulate wealth and to live in luxury, but in order to ensure their day-to-
day survival. Their success in guaranteeing survival provided the basis for
more ambitious trading voyages that, as will be seen, offered wine, textiles
and other finished products to consumers around the North Sea.33
This was the obstinate land, unwelcoming to conquerors, in which King
Hygelac had met his death. This region had earlier been the home of Angles
and other peoples who had invaded what became England, and the Frisian
language remains the closest Germanic language to Anglo-Saxon and indeed
modern English. The inhabitants, up to and beyond their conversion from
paganism, were regarded as ‘ferocious’ and lived largely free of outside
interference until the Frankish ‘Mayor of the Palace’ (and to all intents the
ruler of the Merovingian kingdom), Charles Martel, launched an ambitious
campaign against that ‘most fearsome race’, the Frisians.34 But Christianity
was already gaining a purchase in Frisia, for the inhabitants were evangelized
by an early archbishop of York, Wilfred, late in the seventh century, while
another missionary, Willibrord, set out from Ireland to complete the
conversion of the Frisians at the very end of the century. The fact that the
missionary campaigns were initiated in the British Isles already provides
proof that there was traffic between Frisia and lands across the North Sea.35
The traffic went both ways: the Venerable Bede, writing in the north of
England, knew that in 678 a noble war captive from Northumbria named
Imma had suffered the ignominy of being taken down to London to be sold to
a Frisian trader. The merchant was kind-hearted enough to allow him to go
and seek ransom money in Kent, which Imma managed to do. This way the
Frisian was not left out of pocket when Imma was released.36 By the late
eighth century, on the eve of the first Viking attacks, there were plenty of
Frisian merchants living in England, notably at York, Ipswich and Hamwih,
now known as Southampton, as well as across northern France and along the
lower Rhine. Silver coins minted in Frisia have turned up repeatedly in
eastern England and gold coins minted in Frisia have been found at Kaupang
near Oslo and Jelling in Jutland; these date from the 670s. Brooches from
Scandinavia have been found in Frisia, and brooches from Frisia in
Scandinavia.37 A particularly important centre of Frisian trade lay at
Dorestad near Utrecht, within the Rhine delta, and another major trading hub
existed by about 600 a few miles upriver beyond Boulogne, at a place known
as Quentovic. Some of the Frisian bases in and around Flanders had been
Roman trading centres, while others were new, or at least revived, ports of
trade. Here one could buy wool and woollen cloth, hides and slaves; down
the rivers feeding into the North Sea came high-grade Rhenish pottery,
glassware and good-quality millstones.38
No country can match the Netherlands for the intermingling of sea and
land, and the major Frisian port at Dorestad linked the maritime to the
terrestrial world. Although it already existed in some form in the late Roman
period, Dorestad experienced particularly fast growth during the early Middle
Ages, so that it encompassed 250 hectares by the end of the eighth century.
Its merchant houses, long, hall-like structures surrounded by a palisade
containing a well and a refuse pit, were joined to the rivers that flowed past
the town by lengthy wooden jetties, and here barrels or jars filled with
Rhineland wine were loaded for transit to small ports along the coast that
stretched northwards towards Jutland and into the Baltic as far as Gotland
and eastern Sweden, where fragments of Rhenish pottery and glass abound.
Eighty per cent of the pottery recovered at Dorestad is not local but foreign,
predominantly Rhenish. Nonetheless, the Frisian towns, including Dorestad,
were modest-looking places, for all their wealth: ‘monumentally they were
far from impressive; Dorestad would have looked very utilitarian to a visitor
from Cologne, or maybe even one from Tours, though it was more active as
an urban centre than the latter by far.’39 Ships travelling from Cologne to
Denmark in the early ninth century passed through Dorestad, which
functioned as the key link between the Rhineland and the open North Sea.
Dorestad was also the home of an exceptionally important mint during the
eighth and early ninth centuries, which makes sense, as its prominence in
trade brought plenty of bullion to the town; indeed, it became the most
important mint in the realms of Charlemagne, who reformed the currency of
his empire, abandoning the minting of gold in favour of silver, which was
much easier to obtain.40 Dorestad, Quentovic and other towns benefited from
the presence of Frankish royal officials once Carolingian power had been
imposed on the region; and the high point of their fortunes coincided with the
high point of the fortunes of the Carolingian dynasty. As, towards the middle
of the ninth century, the Carolingian empire fragmented, the importance of
these towns waned.41 This suggests that one of the best sources of profit was
the court of the Carolingian rulers themselves, who are known to have
welcomed other merchants, such as Jews from the Mediterranean, and whose
attempts to project themselves as a new generation of Roman emperors were
expressed through luxury and magnificence.
The Frisians were not just masters of the trade networks of northern
Europe; they were also expert navigators. Judging from their coins, they built
round-bottomed ships that lay low in the water but were suitable for medium-
range voyages across the open sea, all the way to England. These were
possibly the ancestors of the late medieval cargo ship known as the hulk.
Ships sailing closer to the shore or up and down the rivers were flat-bottomed
and had higher sides, resembling another type of late medieval cargo ship, the
cog. Beyond the schematic images on coins, there is the evidence of a Frisian
ship that was unearthed at Utrecht in 1939; it has now been dated to the high
point of Frisian commercial activity, around 790, using Carbon 14 analysis.
This ship, which resembled the banana-shaped boats shown on Frisian coins,
was built out of oak, and it was nearly eighteen metres long; its maximum
width was four metres, with a displacement of about ten tons. What sort of
mast and sail it possessed has been much debated, and without an answer to
this question it is impossible to be sure that this ship could cope with the open
sea.42 This, then, was a proto-hulk. But Frisian coins found in Birka, in
Sweden, also portray flat-bottomed cogs with big central masts, rigging and
large square sails. Whichever types of ships Frisian sailors used, they
preferred to hug the shore as much as possible, taking shelter in the Wadden
Sea amid the North Frisian islands when bound for Denmark and beyond.
This way they could make the voyage all the way to Ribe in south-western
Denmark without heading further out to sea than Heligoland. Heading west
too there was the shelter of islands that have now become part of the
European landmass, in what is now the Dutch province of Zeeland; following
this course, they could travel from Dorestad almost all the way to Quentovic.
They seem to have travelled in convoy when they were out on the open sea,
and they would not set out in winter: sea journeys were strictly seasonal.
Their dominant position in the trade of the North Sea led contemporaries to
call the waters between Frisia and England the ‘Frisian Sea’.43
Although the Frisian merchants obviously worked together (as the use of
convoys suggests), there is no hard evidence for the existence of trading
companies; individual merchants apparently traded on their own account. It
has been suggested that their palisaded houses expressed their strong
individualism: at Dorestad, ‘the houses by the Rhine were packed closely but
each made itself into an island’, so that they possessed ‘all the connection and
the isolation of the terpen’.44 At any rate, the fact that they stored their goods
in their own houses rather than using communal stores indicates that they had
a strong sense of private property. On the other hand, they may have been
pioneers in the creation of guilds of merchants, which formed the basis for
the famous urban guilds that flourished in Bruges, Ghent and other Flemish
cities.45 Whether or not that degree of continuity existed, the most important
point about the Frisian merchants is that they did lay the foundations for the
great trading network of medieval Flanders; they operated from towns that
lay well within the borders of what later became the county of Flanders, and
they were open to new opportunities. Their towns absorbed immigrants from
Frankish lands, from England and in due course from Scandinavia; and they
set up their own trading stations far from Frisia, in places such as Kaupang,
in the Oslo fjord, and Birka, beyond Stockholm, about which more will be
said later. They were open to the excellent new opportunities that arose on the
other side of Jutland, in the Baltic, at the start of the ninth century, around the
same time that Viking marauders began to exploit the wealth of the Frisian
and Anglo-Saxon trading world. By the tenth century the term ‘Frisian’ had
become a generic word for merchants, just as in Merovingian Gaul the terms
‘Syrian’ and even ‘Jew’ had conveyed the same idea. So, although the
Frisians originated among their terpen, the world they explored and the
experiences they underwent far from home generated a cosmopolitan identity
that enabled them to act as intermediaries between the peoples living by the
shores of the North Sea.
This chapter has set alongside one another the peaceful traders of eighth-
century Frisia and the aggressive invaders who set out from Jutland and
northern Germany, transforming large parts of Roman Britannia into Anglo-
Saxon England. But the line between pirates and honest merchants has
always been fuzzy; with the irruption of a new wave of Scandinavian raiders
into the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean the distinction between raiders and
traders becomes even more difficult to sustain. In some respects, as will be
seen in the next chapter, the Vikings represented more of the same; but in
other respects – the scale of their assaults and the development of new
shipping technology – the Viking world differed dramatically from what had
come before.
 19

‘This iron-studded Dragon’1

Changes in ship design elevated the level of threat posed by the Scandinavian
raiders to a new level. This can be seen thanks to the remarkable excavations
in Norway and Denmark that have brought to light both sunken and buried
ships, while memorial stones from the Swedish island of Gotland carry
images of ships that are rich in information about the parts that do not survive
– sails and rigging. Then there is archaeological evidence for the towns and
trading networks of the Scandinavians, extending far from their homeland,
which helps answer the question whether these attacks had economic
motives.2
The other evidence that has attracted continuous attention comes from the
written texts that describe the first arrival of the ‘Danes’ on the shores of
England, and the horror of monks and others at the first appearance of
‘heathens’ and ‘Danes’, a generic term that also included raiders from ‘the
Northern Road’, the meaning of the name ‘Norway’, and occasionally from
Sweden as well. These accounts of murder and theft are interspersed among
accounts of equally bloody conflicts among the competing kings of Anglo-
Saxon England, so that the main source of information, the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, which in any case survives in several versions, leaves the reader
puzzled as to how England could have become the prosperous and well-
ordered state that it eventually did become under Anglo-Saxon rule: in 878,
we are told, a ‘great part of the inhabitants’ of Wessex fled across the sea,
while the English king, Alfred, took refuge in the woods and marshes.3
England’s prosperity was one of its attractions, as far as the Vikings were
concerned. They perhaps realized that they should not kill the goose that laid
the golden egg, though some accounts of Viking devastation give the
impression that great swathes of territory were ‘harried’ to the point of ruin.
The Viking raids on England began, according to the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, in 789, with a small Norwegian, or possibly Danish, raid on
Portland in Dorset: ‘these were the first ships of the Danes to come to
England.’4 But terror struck in 793, when, amid great portents (‘fiery
dragons were seen flying in the air’) and severe famine, heathens came and
laid waste the monastery at Lindisfarne on the coast of Northumbria, the
pride of the Northumbrian Church. The next year the monks of Jarrow were
attacked, though the chronicler recorded with satisfaction that some of the
Danish ships were wrecked in stormy weather and that a good many Danes
were drowned or killed.5 The Viking raids became intense by the 830s, and a
striking feature was their range: the Isle of Sheppey, off Kent, was a target in
835, and a group of Vikings wintered there in 855; but they also appeared
close to Plymouth, where the Danes entered into an alliance with the Cornish
Britons, and where King Egbert of Wessex scored a victory in 838; and this
victory was all the sweeter as the year before Egbert had been defeated by a
Danish warband that had arrived off Somerset aboard thirty-five, or possibly
twenty-five, ships.6 How big these warbands were has been a topic of
controversy. The authors of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle referred several times
to the mycel hæþen here, ‘the great heathen host’, that arrived in 865,
although massive Danish fleets were recorded earlier too, as in 851, when
350 Viking ships penetrated the Thames, ravaging London and then marching
inland, where they were soundly defeated. This is exactly ten times as many
ships as were recorded in 843, so either the scale of the attacks had changed
dramatically, or the monks who wrote about the attacks became more and
more prone to exaggeration.7 The Vikings had learned what rich pickings
were to be found in England, as also along the northern coasts of the Frankish
Empire, and their ambitions began to expand in new directions: in Kent the
Vikings were promised money in the hope that they would remain peaceful,
but this was to underestimate the lure of war booty, and they devastated
eastern Kent nonetheless.8
 Danish ambitions became ever greater, as groups of Scandinavian settlers
arrived, and as plans evolved for the conquest of parts of England. The
individual raids of the early ninth century, where a group of like-minded
warriors set out in search of booty and adventure under a war-leader, often in
just a few ships, gave way to much larger expeditions led by kings and other
great lords, although as early as 810 the Danish king, Godfred, invaded
Frisia, nearby, with 200 ships and carried off 200 pounds of silver as tribute
from one of the most prosperous provinces of Charlemagne’s great empire.
No doubt the idea of earning a pound of silver for each ship had a certain
attraction, quite apart from helping to cover the cost of putting together such
a large fleet. This, however, has to be understood from the perspective of
regional politics, as a conflict between neighbours. Still, it provides evidence
that Danish kings could mobilize large fleets if they chose to do so; further
away, in Norway, royal control was yet to be imposed, and individual
enterprises were the norm.9 A Scandinavian kingdom was established at
Jorvik, or York, while King Alfred, later in the ninth century, agreed to
divide much of England between himself and the Viking ruler Guðrum, who,
however, did accept baptism. On the English side, there was some awareness
that preventive action at sea would be more effective than attempts to
overwhelm the mycel here on land, and Alfred’s newly formed fleet managed
to defeat a small Danish squadron in 882; one result was that the ‘great host’
was deflected away from Alfred’s realms and travelled instead up the River
Scheldt, to make a nuisance of itself in northern France and Flanders.10 So,
by 896, King Alfred built up his naval defences, and in some accounts of
British naval history this was the moment when the English navy was
founded: the king

ordered warships to be built to meet the Danish ships: they were

almost twice as long as the others, some had sixty oars, some had
more; they were both swifter, steadier, and with more freeboard than
the others; they were built neither after the Frisian design nor after the
Danish, but as it seemed to himself that they could be most
serviceable.11

Exactly what these ships looked like remains a mystery, as we are only told
what they did not look like, although their size sounds impressive. Thereafter,
well into the reign of King Athelstan, an English navy was able to defend the
shores of the Anglo-Saxon realm. However, one difficulty was that raids did
not simply start in Scandinavia.12 Even after 911, when the Frankish ruler
conceded control of what would henceforth become Normandy to the
Northmen from whom it took its name, sea raiders arrived in southern
England from northern France, sailing up the River Severn; they also raided
the Welsh coast, for the Celtic lands, notably Ireland, were constant targets of
Viking attacks and, in the case of the area around Dublin, long-term
settlement.13
A detailed chronicle of Viking raids on England would show how, even as
the Christianization of Scandinavia was under way, the raids did not cease;
the arrival of Svein Forkbeard and his son Cnut in England early in the
eleventh century, followed by the submission of England to these rulers and
by the creation under Cnut of an empire that embraced England, Denmark
and Norway, did not mean the end of Scandinavian raids.14 In 1066 the
Norwegian king, Harald Hardraða (‘hard ruler’), brought the claimant to the
English throne, Tostig, across the sea to northern England, where both were
defeated and killed by Tostig’s half-brother king, Harold Godwinsson, just as
Duke William of Normandy (himself of Scandinavian descent) launched his
own combined assault on southern England.15 Viking raids only gradually
petered out, for when conquest was not the motive there was always the lure
of being paid off with handsome bribes. Like all forms of blackmail, a gift of
what came to be known as Danegeld simply acted as an invitation to return
later and to demand more.
 So far, then, a bare chronicle of some of the most vicious Viking raids tells
a story of murder, theft and eventual partial conquest. But this does nothing
to explain who the raiders were and why the attacks were launched in the first
place. Even the word ‘Viking’ has been the subject of debate. The most
reasonable explanation is that it means ‘men of the vik’, that is, the inlets
from which raids were launched, whether the majestic steep-sided fjords of
Norway or the low-lying creeks of Denmark and southern Sweden. The term
víkingr was used in Scandinavia to mean a pirate; these people went í víking,
that is, raiding across the sea, and were celebrated for doing so on the
runestones that commemorated their life.16 This term has been applied rather
too widely, so that even the Scandinavian settlements in late medieval
Greenland (of which more later) are often presented as ‘Viking’, a term best
applied instead to the raiders who have been described in this chapter. Within
the Baltic, the Swedish Vikings who raided the southern coasts and sent their
ships down the river systems of eastern Europe, to reach Mikelgarð, ‘the
Great City’ (Constantinople), are often described as Varangians, another term
of uncertain origin, derived from the Greek word Varangoi, which was
applied particularly to the Scandinavian and also Anglo-Saxon mercenaries
who were greatly valued by the Byzantine army. Raiding within the Baltic
did not cease in the late eleventh century, and later Swedish wars of conquest
along the shores of what are now the Baltic states had much in common with
the Varangian raids of earlier centuries, even if a strong element of Christian
mission sometimes intruded.17
It is already obvious that the raids did not have a single cause, and that
attempts to ascribe them to overpopulation or political strife within
Scandinavia (leading to an exodus of dissenters) may fit some of the
evidence, but fail to account for the great variety of Viking attacks: lightning
strikes from the sea, aiming at wealthy monasteries where the raiders could
seize great treasures in gold and silver; attempts at political conquest;
migrations in which women as well as men crossed the sea (as in the case of
Iceland and the lands beyond); to which should be added peaceful trading
expeditions in the sort of ship that will be described shortly.18 The
colonization of Iceland was apparently launched after King Harald Fairhair
gained control of large swathes of Norway in the late ninth century and
demanded the payment of new taxes, so that discontented Norsemen who had
lived free from royal interference set off to create their own new
commonwealth in a virtually empty land across the ocean.19 But it is
impossible to ignore one very distinctive feature of Viking society (using the
term to mean the select group of those who went raiding). Far from
possessing a sense that stealing treasure and murdering one’s victims was
disgraceful, the Vikings gloried in their achievements. They expounded a cult
of the violent hero:

Cattle die, and kinsmen die,

And so one dies one’s self;
But a noble name will never die,
If good renown one gets.20

A good name was to be won through heroic deeds, and death in battle
brought the glory of fame, which was more valued than life itself.
The greatest glory was to be found through winning a reputation not just as
a great war leader but as a generous host. Indeed, it was impossible to
become a generous host without raiding. Arriving back at home laden with
booty and distributing prizes to one’s followers marked the high point in the
Viking year. The Orkney Saga describes an eleventh-century Viking named
Svein Asleifarson who used to take Hakon, whose father was earl of Orkney,
on raids ‘as soon as he was strong enough to travel with grown men … doing
all in his power to build up Hakon’s reputation’. Svein would spend each
winter in Orkney, ‘where he entertained some eighty men at his own
expense’. After a winter of hard drinking and carousing, and a spring spent
sowing the soil, he would go off raiding, once in late spring and again in the
autumn, reaching the Hebrides, the Isle of Man and Ireland. As well as
raiding on land, Svein and his men would attack merchant ships, such as two
English vessels they found crossing the Irish Sea; these ships carried a rich
cargo of fine cloths, which the Vikings seized, hoisting some brightly
coloured pieces of sailcloth as a visible boast of their success.21 Piracy and
plunder sustained an aristocratic lifestyle, and one’s greatness was measured
by one’s generosity as well as by deeds in war, but that generosity could only
be funded through war.
The Vikings shared their culture of warfare and feasting with neighbours
around the North Sea, including the Anglo-Saxons and the Celtic peoples of
Scotland and Ireland, with whom they often intermarried. Scandinavians
based in such places as the Orkney Islands were as content to plunder
Norway as they were willing to raid the Scottish isles or Ireland.
Scandinavian Vikings shared a language (already fragmented into mutually
comprehensible dialects), though they could probably make sense of Anglo-
Saxon speech as well. The major distinction between Vikings and their
neighbours was not so much ethnic origin or the culture of feasting and
warfare; it was their paganism – for their victims, the most important feature
of the raiders who attacked Lindisfarne in 793, and Irish monasteries in later
decades, was not that they came from Scandinavia, but that they were
heathens, lacking all respect for Christian holy places and for the
accumulated treasures of the Anglo-Saxon and the Irish Church.22 Yet the
Viking raids continued even in the eleventh century, when the Scandinavian
kings had adopted Christianity (which is not to say that all their subjects had
abandoned paganism). The Orkney Saga saw no contradiction between belief
in Christ and a life of raiding; indeed, the twelfth-century earl of Orkney,
Rognvald, went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, travelling out by sea, and
returning home by way of Rome. The culture of raiding was very deeply
ingrained.

II

One question is whether larger changes in economic relationships across

Europe and western Asia stimulated the Vikings into action. So long as the
routes across the Baltic and down the river systems were open, the
Varangians managed to make contact with prosperous, urbanized societies in
the Steppes, and conveyed large quantities of silver northwards, either in the
form of coin or as silver bullion (including hack silver, silver objects cut into
pieces and valued by weight); Varangian merchants reached as far as the
shores of the Caspian Sea, while several widely read Arab writers noted their
peculiar ways, including boat burials and the custom of sacrificing a slave
girl at the funeral of her master, after her master’s companions had one by
one taken advantage of her.23 More than 100,000 Islamic coins have been
unearthed in Scandinavia, and the number of finds is still growing.24 The
Caspian gave access to northern Iran, with its silver mines, and beyond that to
the Abbasid empire in Iraq.
All this coincided with the emergence of the first towns in Scandinavia.
Sweden’s oldest town was Birka, which lay on a small island in Lake
Mälaren, the large island-studded lake that extends westwards from present-
day Stockholm; in this period, many of its islands had not risen out of the sea
or were much smaller (Birka’s own island was half its present size), while the
lake consisted of saltwater and was in effect an extension of the Baltic Sea.
Across the many thousands of islands of the Stockholm archipelago small
settlements came into being that were linked to one another by boat traffic,
and every community had its little fleet of boats, from small fishing vessels to
larger ships suitable for Viking raids or longer-distance trade. All this meant
that Birka was quite easily accessible from the open sea by boat. The town
benefited from the protection of the king of central Sweden, who maintained
a manor house just across the water on the larger island of Hovgården.
Without royal protection, who would ensure the safe passage of Birka’s boats
through a dense network of islands, stretching far beyond the coast of
Sweden, each of which might provide a base for Viking pirates? On the other
hand, if one could make the journey across the Baltic in safety, the riches that
were now to hand were the stuff of fable: furs from Russia and the silver of
the Orient, accessible in such places at Staraya Ladoga only a little distance
down the rivers that led towards the principality of Kiev, also known as Rus.
By the tenth century, Birka was home to about a thousand people, boat-
builders, artisans, sailors and merchants, who lived in sturdy wooden houses
on little plots of land. A similar story can be told of the nameless trading
centre not far from modern Oslo that looked out towards the North Sea;
known to archaeologists by the convenience name of Kaupang (‘trade
centre’), it was the first town to emerge in Norway.25
The history of another town, the port of Hedeby, or Haithabu, situated on
the Baltic side of Schleswig where Denmark and Germany meet one another,
helps us connect the Baltic to the North Sea world. It has been said that ‘the
remains of Haithabu lie in one of the richest archaeological zones in all of
Europe’.26 Although an earlier and much smaller trading settlement may
have existed nearby, the foundation of Haithabu can be securely dated to the
war between King Godfred of Denmark and his neighbour Charlemagne
around 810, since timbers found on the site date from 810 or soon after.
While campaigning on the eastern side of Denmark against Charlemagne’s
allies, Godfred raided a port established by the Slav people known as the
Obodrites close to present-day Lübeck, and deported its merchants to his own
new town of Haithabu. The Obodrites had obligingly provided the Frisian
merchants from the North Sea, and their customers in northern France, with
goods that came through the Baltic, most importantly furs and amber.27
Godfred’s idea was, then, to create a Danish entrepôt that would dominate
traffic between the Baltic and the North Sea. Charlemagne regarded this as
intolerable interference and set off with an army (accompanied by the
elephant that Harun ar-Rashid, caliph of Baghdad, had presented to him).
Godfred built up his defences, but there was rivalry at court and he was
murdered by Danish foes.
All the same, Haithabu survived and flourished, particularly between about
850 and 980. It was a centre of amber crafting, and its mixed population
included Scandinavians, Slavs and Frisians, who found the town’s location
much better than anything that had existed before: it lay on an inlet as close
as one can get to the western flank of Jutland, so that goods unloaded in the
North Sea could be funnelled through to Haithabu very easily – the analogy
in the ancient Mediterranean would be with two-facing Corinth. Haithabu
was surrounded on its land side by a strong defensive wall, while its harbour
offered plenty of jetties to incoming boats. Among goods that reached this
port were tin and mercury that may have originated in Spain or England.28 A
canal ran through the middle of the town and, rather as at Dorestad, the
houses were built of timber and wattle, on their own little plots of land
connected to one another by narrow pathways. The expansion of Haithabu
marked the first stage in the creation of commercial networks that linked two
regions which were experiencing exponential economic growth: the North
Sea and the Baltic.29
The Baltic was coming alive. Its many chains of small islands fostered sea
traffic by their very nature. The Åland Islands between Sweden and Finland
became a meeting point between Scandinavians from the west and Finno-
Ugrians from the east; many of the stories in the Finnish national epic, the
Kalevala, only recorded in the nineteenth century, probably originated in the
watery world around these islands.30 Nowhere was the liveliness of Baltic
networks more obvious than on the island of Gotland off the southern coast
of Sweden. The decline of Birka brought Gotland to the fore, for the island
was beautifully situated with easy access across the sea to all the shores of
the Baltic. Silver dirhams from the Abbasid caliphate have been found at
Paviken on Gotland, which was only one centre among many for the trade of
the Gotlanders.31 The Gotlanders hoarded even greater quantities of German
and other continental coins, and this thésaurisation of bullion that flooded
into the region, whether it was acquired through trading or raiding, must have
placed quite a severe strain on the economies of both western Europe and
western Asia. Exotic luxuries sometimes reached Scandinavia along with the
silver – the most famous example is a small Buddha cast in Kashmir that
turned up in central Sweden.32
Generally, the fate of Islamic dirhams was to be melted down, for the only
Viking coins before the end of the tenth century were some imitations of
Carolingian money made in Haithabu soon after it was founded.33
Sometimes, as the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf poet shows, precious metals were
deployed in gift exchange, as kings and famous warriors conferred armbands
and other signs of status on one another. Often too European coins were sent
back to Germany as payment for Rhineland wines, for one constant feature of
the Viking world was its love for strong drink, confirmed by the mass of
fragments of Rhenish wine jugs found in Scandinavia. What the merchants of
Haithabu, Birka and Gotland knew was that there was persistent demand for
the goods they sent out of the Baltic and brought into the Baltic, demand that
extended to England, France and beyond, and that servicing this demand
provided them with a good livelihood.
That this trade was conducted by sea goes without saying, but the
connections with the Muslim world were only rendered possible by the
penetration of the river systems that flowed south towards the Steppes, and
by the creation of a Varangian-ruled polity based at Kiev, the principality of
Rus; Scandinavian merchants trading towards Staraya Ladoga and Novgorod
pioneered routes into the interior that gave access to seemingly limitless
supplies of furs and that were once again to become important in the heyday
of the German Hansa.34 One important town that linked the Baltic to the
Eurasian landmass was Wolin, whose site lies just across the present-day
German–Polish border; it flourished from the tenth to the twelfth century,
and, like Haithabu, it was no mere village: its houses were strung along four
kilometres of wooden pathways, and they were impressive structures,
sizeable and handsomely decorated. Wolin supplied the Baltic and areas
beyond with goods from the interior, and vice versa, but it also had its own
lively potteries, amber workshops and glass-makers. Adam of Bremen, who
wrote in the late eleventh century, claimed that ‘it is truly the largest of all
cities that Europe has to offer’, and insisted that the inhabitants even included
Greeks. But the local population ‘all still remain captive to their pagan
heresies’, which he regretted, as they were in all other respects as trustworthy
and friendly as it was possible to imagine. Christians were best advised to
keep their beliefs secret.35 Adam of Bremen wrote a history of the
archbishops of Hamburg, and he played up the success of the Christian
Church in defeating the heinous pagan beliefs of its opponents – he wrote
with lurid fascination of Viking human sacrifice at Uppsala. The fact that he
lived not very far away should not mask his delight in exaggeration; but there
was an underlying truth about the importance of Wolin.

III

Ships were a matter of exceptional pride to the Vikings. Memorial stones for
dead warriors often depict Viking longboats, carrying a complement of
warriors, with their big square sail fully set. The island of Gotland has
yielded large numbers of these stones, portraying the entry of the warrior into
Valhalla and scenes from Norse mythology, as well as one stone showing a
majestic ship, battle scenes and the sacrifice of a human victim on an altar – a
brief Swedish history of Gotland known as the Gotlanders’ Saga also tells of
human sacrifices conducted by a supreme council of the entire island.36 The
evidence from the Gotlandish picture stones goes back before the Viking
period, beginning around AD 400; the Gotlanders at first used these stones as
grave markers, but, as with the inscribed rune stones found across Sweden,
they were increasingly set up at the roadside to draw attention to the person
they commemorated. In the Viking world it was entirely appropriate that the
journey to the next world should be aboard a ship, even if not everyone
merited the elaborate ship burials that were already conducted by the Angles
in England. If one could not be buried in a ship, then to be buried under or
near a stone that displayed a ship in bright colours was the next best option.
In the Bronze Age (before about 500 BC), the Gotlanders already buried their
dead in boat-shaped graves lined with stone, and there and on the mainland
carvings on rock showing oared ships were common currency. The picture
stones from the Viking period include sails and rigging, and are detailed
enough to show that sails were being made out of strips of cloth plaited
together, because local looms could not produce single pieces of cloth wide
enough to serve as sails. Plaiting was a more efficient way of bonding the
strips than sewing, because it meant that there were no seams and the wind
would not tear the sail apart; in the 1980s a replica Gotlandish boat was built
and sailed all the way to Istanbul, and its plaited sails, though heavy, were
well up to the task and did not disintegrate. The strips out of which sails were
made were of different colours, arranged in a lozenge or chessboard pattern;
the striped sails beloved of modern film-makers did exist, but appear less
often.37 More importantly, the masts that carried these sails were now sturdy
enough to function as the main source of propulsion when the wind was
favourable.
Such advances in shipping technology rendered possible the great Viking
voyages in the North Sea and the Atlantic. The Vikings continued the
tradition of clinker-built ships, constructing the hull out of overlapping
strakes before they inserted a relatively light frame which was bonded to the
hull by rivets or nails.38 As has been seen, this method of shipbuilding
produced flexible boats that were well suited to the high seas of the Atlantic.
Fortunately, several magnificent examples survive, of which the oldest is the
Oseberg ship from Norway, built out of oak around 820 and used for a ship
burial roughly fourteen years after that; one of the two skeletons found in the
boat was that of a woman who died around the age of eighty, and must have
been either a queen or a high priestess.39 The Oseberg ship was excavated at
the start of the twentieth century, and nearly all the original boat survives; in
addition to superb carvings decorating the prow and stern, it contained a
burial chamber with a wonderful assortment of grave goods. On the other
hand, its mast cannot have been particularly strong, and its low sides made it
unsuitable for journeys across the high seas. It has been suggested that it was
a ‘royal yacht’, used for display, but rarely sent out to sea. It is 21.5 metres
long and a maximum of 4.2 metres wide, and there were fifteen oar-holes on
each side, as well as a steering oar, so the size of its crew can easily be
calculated.40 Another very fine ship, the Gokstad ship, unearthed around the
same time, is a little longer and wider, with one more oar-hole on each side;
this was constructed towards the end of the ninth century and buried around
910; its sides were built up rather higher, and the fact that little round shutters
were attached to each oar-hole, so they could be closed off in high seas,
suggests that this vessel did venture across the ocean. The mast and keel were
strong enough to take the strain of a large and heavy sail.41 But whether its
greater seaworthiness compared to the Oseberg ship reflects increasing
sophistication in shipbuilding, or whether it reflects different use, cannot be
said for certain.
In the early ninth century, it is quite likely that Viking ships were used
indiscriminately for raiding and trading. The Oseberg, Gokstad and other
ships offered plenty of space in their hull for the storage of goods, whether
obtained by trade or seized as booty. The ‘longship’ was well suited to quick
and devastating ventures across the open sea, and it could penetrate deep into
rivers such as the Thames and the Seine, allowing its crew to wreak havoc far
inland. The sturdiest Viking warships reached Spain and entered the
Mediterranean. The geographer az-Zuhrī, who wrote in Muslim Spain (al-
Andalus) in the mid-twelfth century, knew of Viking raids by Viking ships in
earlier times:

There used to come from this sea [the Atlantic] large ships which the
people of al-Andalus called qarāqīr. They were big ships with square
sails, and could sail either forwards or backwards. They were manned
by people called majūs, who were fierce, brave and strong, and
excellent seamen. They only appeared every six or seven years, never
in less than forty ships and sometimes up to one hundred. They
overcame anyone they met at sea, robbed them and took them
captive.42

The term qarāqīr passed into European languages as ‘carrack’, though

carracks were late medieval cargo ships that looked quite different to Viking
longships. The fearsome nature of these people was further emphasized by
the use of the term majūs to describe them; originally applied to Zoroastrian
magicians (or Magi), it was now being applied to ruthless heathens from the
edges of the known world. The terror they brought with them extended as far
as southern Spain.43 In 844 they sailed by way of Lisbon and Cádiz to the
mouth of the Guadalquivir River, and then made their way, still aboard their
ships, to Seville, where they are said to have looted the city for a whole week,
enslaving or killing men, women and children – modern research shows,
however, that the often lurid descriptions of the havoc they created are
embroidered accounts of embroidered accounts of embroidered accounts of
an attack that did, for sure, take place.44
This ability to reach southern Spain, and on later occasions the
Mediterranean as well, speaks for advanced skills in navigation, although the
leiðarstein, or lodestone, a very basic form of compass, is only mentioned in
texts from the fourteenth century or later. It is a little more likely that
Norsemen navigated with the sólarstein, also, however, first mentioned in
texts from the late Middle Ages: these were light-sensitive crystals of
cordierite that enabled sailors to locate the sun even through thick cloud; an
Icelandic saga relates how a king challenged a certain Sigurð to tell him
where, above snow-laden clouds, the sun actually stood. Sigurð was sure he
knew, and so the king asked for the ‘sun stone’ to be brought, which enabled
him to verify Sigurð’s claim: ‘then the king made them fetch the solar stone
and held it up and saw where light radiated from the stone and thus directly
verified Sigurð’s prediction.’ Viking navigators were helped on their way at
night by close observation of the Polar Star, while in the Faroes the
inhabitants developed a system for measuring the declination of the sun over
the year, though, once again, it may not have been known to their Viking
ancestors.45
The discovery of a group of ships at Skuldelev near Roskilde in Denmark
has enlarged our understanding of the types and functions of the vessels used
in this period. Roskilde lies at the end of a short and shallow fjord, and at
some point in the Viking age several ships were scuttled to block sea access
to Roskilde itself.46 These ships, which survive in a much more fragmentary
state than those preserved in Oslo, were built rather later than the Oseberg
and Gokstad ships, and several date roughly from the time of the Norman
Conquest of England – the Bayeux Tapestry includes images of ships not
very different from the Roskilde ones, though one especially large longship
from Roskilde may have been constructed somewhat earlier in the eleventh
century for King Cnut, ruler of Denmark, Norway and England, or for one of
his successors.47 Cargo ships, less obviously associated with the image of
Viking marauders, have received less attention, but one of the ships found at
Skuldelev was a cargo boat, eleven metres long, and built in western Norway
in the early eleventh century. It is thought to have been manned by only a
dozen oarsmen, though it also had a mast, and its shallow draft was well
suited for navigation around the sandbanks and creeks of the Danish and
Frisian coasts. Another, rather larger, Skuldelev ship built out of Norwegian
pine in the early eleventh century had a carrying capacity of about twenty-
five tons, and sat lower in the water, so that it would have needed to make
use of the jetties at Haithabu or other ports it might have visited; and
Haithabu has yielded fragments of a trading vessel that might have been able
to load as much as sixty tons of cargo. This is the type of ship that would
have been described as a knǫrr; they were ocean-going cargo ships that were
well suited to voyages to Iceland and beyond, carrying not just colonists but
cattle and even household furniture. The deeper draught of the knǫrr made it
much safer in unpredictable seas.48 Scandinavian ships, whether they were
built for war or trade, possessed flexible shells of a sort that seems not to
have been perpetuated in later centuries. As ships grew in size, so did it
become necessary to make them sturdier. Lightness gave way to solidity.
In the early days of the Viking raids, then, light longships best suited the
tactics of hit-and-run raiders who swooped down on the monasteries of
Northumbria or the little ports of northern France. With the growth of
Haithabu and the emergence of a lively trading network which in some
respects replicated that of the Frisian merchants, it became more likely that
the colourful Scandinavian sail poking over the horizon belonged to a rather
tubby cargo boat whose passengers proposed to pay for what they wanted,
rather than seizing it, and who were Christian rather than pagan. Moreover,
these ships, whether longships or cargo vessels, were making more and more
ambitious voyages, carrying them over the top of Scotland and out of the
North Sea, towards Orkney, Shetland, the Faroes, Iceland, and far beyond.
This was the ocean that, in Norse mythology, was encompassed by the vast
body of the Miðgarðr serpent; when the monster released its tail from its
mouth, the world would come to an end. These were risky waters.49
 20

New Island Worlds

It has been seen that the attack on Lindisfarne Abbey in 793 attracted special
attention because it was the work of heathen raiders who desecrated a
Christian shrine. That does not mean that the history of Viking raids began on
the north coast of England. Quite probably raids across the North Sea reached
Orkney and Shetland before they penetrated England, and it is even possible
that the raiders of 793 arrived from the Scottish isles, rather than from
Norway. Heading westwards, Vikings began to harass the Hebrides and to
work their way into Irish waters, as far south as the Isle of Man and western
Ireland. Under the year 794, the Annals of Ulster state that there was ‘a
laying waste by the heathen of all the islands of Britain’. Viking graves on
Orkney and Shetland, and a hoard of silver found in the Shetlands, can be
dated back to about 800, while the Scandinavian settlement at Jarlshof in
Shetland included a substantial farmhouse that dates back to the early ninth
century.1 This does not prove that the northern isles were settled before raids
on England began, but settlement is very likely to have followed a period of
raiding and exploration, so we can safely say that it was at the northern tip of
the British Isles that the Vikings first arrived; and their descendants would
remain loyal to the Norwegian Crown right up to the fifteenth century. They
created a maritime empire, if that is not too grandiose a term, that stretched
down into the Irish Sea, and that was ruled at various times by earls, or jarls,
of Orkney and by kings of Man.
Neolithic Orkney, with its rich archaeological sites, lay towards the end of
the ‘Atlantic arc’ that stretched all the way down to the coast of Portugal. In
the early Middle Ages, the importance of Orkney lay not in its position at the
end of a line, but its position in the middle of a line; this line linked Norway,
Scotland, Ireland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland and lands even beyond that. The
islands offered plenty of pasture, and sheep-rearing rather than fishing or
agriculture was probably the main activity. Still, as one can see from the
career of Svein Asleifarson (mentioned earlier), Vikings living in the
Orkneys took care to sow grain and to reap the harvest, in his case between
his spring and autumn Viking raids: ‘he stayed till the cornfields had been
reaped and the grain was safely in. After that he would go raiding again.’2
With the extension of rule from the Orkneys and Shetland to parts of the
Scottish mainland, the supply of food must have been adequate, while heavy
cloth could be produced from the wool of local sheep. In Orkney and
Shetland, the production of oats increased significantly when the Norse
colonists arrived, reflecting its use both as food for humans and as fodder for
animals; it is a hardy grain, well suited to a northerly environment. Shellfish
were sought out as food, and cod became ever more popular, to judge from
finds of fish bones. Linen too was hardy enough to flourish this far north, as
archaeological evidence from Quoygrew in the Orkney Islands has
revealed.3 The great virtue of the islands was their strategic position, both
from the perspective of naval power and from that of commercial networks –
under Norse rule trade links developed towards Ireland and Iceland, Norway
and York.4
The early history of the Orkney Islands was recorded, with a good amount
of elaboration, in the Orkneyinga Saga, one of the liveliest of all the Icelandic
sagas. There, of course, is the problem, for it was written a long way from
Orkney around 1200, which means that its coverage of events in the twelfth
century, such as the pilgrimage of Earl Rognvald, is based on exact
knowledge; but its account of the ancestors of the first earls of Orkney
conjures up fantasies of a half-remembered pagan world in the far north
inhabited by Finns and Lapps as well as by Norsemen. Yet the story of how
the kings of Norway gained overlordship in the Scottish isles is plausible. In
the ninth century King Harald Fairhair became irritated by Viking raiders
who set out from Orkney and Shetland, their winter base, and reached as far
as Norway itself. Determined to teach these raiders a lesson, the king seized
control of lands much further to the west than any of his predecessors, right
down to the Isle of Man. He agreed to install a certain Sigurð, whose nephew
Rolf later became the first Norse ruler of Normandy, as earl of Orkney and
Shetland, and Sigurð then pressed ahead with his own local empire-building;
the result was that the shores of Scotland to the south of Orkney, Caithness,
fell under Norse rule.5 Over time, the earls of Orkney would acknowledge
the king of the Scots as their overlord in Caithness, while continuing to
accept the king of Norway as their overlord in the islands; and this was easier
to do as the Scots and the Norwegians sealed their own relationship in
marriage alliances – the real problem was not so much rivalry between those
two kings, though that did break out, as the internal strife within Scotland
whose ripples sometimes reached as far as the Orcadian realm. The word
‘realm’ is appropriate, since the authority of the Norwegian king was
exercised through what has been called ‘indirect lordship’, leaving Sigurð’s
descendants largely free to conduct their own affairs so long as they
acknowledged Norwegian supremacy. This continued until 1195, when the
king took the islands under direct control. The title jarl, or earl, can be
translated as ‘chieftain’ or even ‘prince’, and a jarl was not very different in
status from a king. The earls of Orkney, like the kings of Norway, waged
gruesome struggles against rivals to gain and hold on to power, and being
burned to death in one’s house was an occupational hazard, as in other parts
of the Norse world.6
 Sigurð’s mainland conquests generated tension with Mælbrigte, earl of the
Scots (as the Orkney Saga calls him), and the dispute could only be resolved
by battle. Sigurð, victorious, decapitated Mælbrigte and attached his head to
the saddle of his own horse. While he was riding around with this ghastly
trophy, his leg was grazed by Mælbrigte’s tooth, and sepsis set in. Sigurð was
soon dead, and although the succession was sorted out, Orkney fell prey to
groups of marauding Danes and Norwegians with nicknames such as Tree-
Beard and Scurvy who would take up residence on the islands and launch
their Viking raids from there.7 Once order was restored, the Norsemen in
Orkney established their own reputation as raiders: ‘Earl Havard had a
nephew called Einar Buttered-Bread, a respected chieftain with a good
following. He used to go plundering in the summer.’8 At the end of the tenth
century the earl of Orkney became involved in bigger issues than control of
northern Scotland, as the warlord Olaf Tryggvason went on the rampage in
the British Isles, partly on his own account and partly in support of Svein
Forkbeard, king of Denmark, who eventually overwhelmed the Anglo-Saxon
kingdom and handed it on to his more famous son Cnut.
Olaf was baptized (in the Scilly Isles, if the Orkney Saga is to be believed)
and suddenly decided to insist on the baptism of his putative subjects as well.
During Olaf’s own bid for the crown of Norway, which he held until 1000,
his five longships reached Orkney, where they encountered three ships that
the current earl of Orkney (another Sigurð) was leading on a Viking raid.
Sigurð was summoned to Olaf’s ship. ‘I want you and all your subjects to be
baptized,’ Olaf demanded. ‘If you refuse, I’ll have you killed on the spot, and
I swear that I’ll ravage every island with fire and steel.’ ‘After that,’ the
Orkney Saga tersely relates, ‘all Orkney embraced the faith.’ This must have
made it possible for Sigurð to marry the daughter of Malcolm, king of the
Scots; Sigurð’s mother was an Irish Christian, and such mixed marriages
between Scandinavians and Celts were common in Ireland as well – further
evidence that the Viking raiders were often a mixture of Scandinavians, Celts
and Celto-Scandinavians. Sigurð’s mother, described in the Orkney Saga as a
‘sorceress’, did not close her mind to magic, and bestowed a magical raven
banner on her son; it would bring victory to the person in whose honour it
was carried, but death to whoever carried it. Sigurð, on campaign in Ireland
following his baptism, found that none of his followers would carry it; so he
decided he would have to do so himself, whereupon his mother’s prophecy
came true, and he was cut down.9
Naval power enabled the lords of the isles to hold their own, and to extend
the long arms of their reach as far as Man. An eleventh-century earl, Þorfinn,
defended his territory in Caithness with ‘five well-manned longships’,
described in the saga as ‘a considerable force’. Unfortunately the king of the
Scots, Karl Hundason (possibly the king who is also known as Macbeth),
came upon his fleet with eleven longships, and their navies engaged:

Confronting the foe, Þorfinn’s

fleet of five ships
steered, steadfast in anger
against Karl’s sea-goers.
Ships grappled
together; gore, as foes fell,
bathed stiff iron, black
with Scots’ blood;
singing the bows spilt
blood, steel bit; bright
though the quick points quaked,
no quenching Þorfinn.10

This was a real sea battle, with the ships coming up close to one another and
catching hold of the enemy’s ships with grappling hooks; after a tough fight,
Þorfinn’s men tried to gain hold of the king’s ship and Þorfinn followed his
banner on to the deck of King Karl’s longship – Karl escaped, but most of his
crew were killed.
Even allowing for some artistic flourishes in the saga’s account of this
battle, the description of a fight at sea is important, because it proves that
warships were not simply used for the rapid transport of warriors and their
booty, but were used as platforms on which to fight bitter contests in open
waters. If we take the size of the Oseberg ship as a very rough guide, we can
expect that about thirty oarsmen powered each vessel, though there must
have been other troops on board as well, ready to change shift. This might
leave us with a figure of about 300 warriors in Þorfinn’s company, with more
than twice as many in King Karl’s fleet, so it is possible that around 1,000
troops were involved in this sea battle, and at the very least half that number.
Þorfinn became one of the most successful and most powerful earls of
Orkney, exercising control in the Hebrides and even in parts of northern
Ireland. His career demonstrates how the Orkney islands were very well
situated as bases for control of much wider spaces of ocean.
The strategic significance of Orkney was not lost on the kings of Norway.
In 1066 Harald Hardraða decided to support the claims of Tostig, who was
challenging the right of his half-brother Harold Godwinsson to the throne of
England. The Norwegian king took ship for Shetland and Orkney, collecting
new recruits to his army there, before edging his way southwards to defeat
and death at Stamford Bridge in October 1066. At that time power in Orkney
was shared between two brothers; they too had accompanied Harald to
Yorkshire, but they survived the invasion, only to find themselves
outmanoeuvred by a later king of Norway, Magnus Barelegs (d. 1103), who
decided to impose Norwegian rule over a wide swathe of territory stretching
as far as Anglesey; he set out with a fleet in 1098. He deported the two earls
from Orkney and installed his young son in their place, though he placed the
government of the islands in the hands of regents. His reversal of earlier
policy, which had left the earls responsible for the day-to-day running of
Orkney and Shetland, formed part of these wider ambitions, for he needed a
naval base from which he could control lands further away. Meanwhile he
took with him to Wales the heirs to the earldom, one of whom, Magnus
Erlendsson, proved irritatingly unco-operative:

When the troops were getting their weapons ready for battle, Magnus
Erlendsson settled down in the main cabin and refused to arm himself.
 The king asked him why he was sitting around and his answer was
that he had no quarrel with anyone there. ‘That’s why I have no
intention of fighting,’ he said. ‘If you haven’t the guts to fight,’ said
the king, ‘and in my opinion this has nothing to do with your faith, get
below. Don’t lie there under everybody’s feet.’ Magnus Erlendsson
took out his psalter and chanted psalms throughout the battle, but
refused to take cover.11

This was an early sign that Magnus was destined for sainthood; in Orkney
some years later, as disputes with his co-earl flared, his rival’s chief cook
stove his head in, and he became a martyr for the faith, capable of working
miracles. Whether or not his life was as holy as his supporters insisted, the
cathedral that was built in Orkney was named in his honour, and his wrecked
skull has been unearthed in the church.12 Magnus Barelegs ‘took an intense
dislike to him’, even though young Magnus was his cupbearer. As the fleet
moved northwards past Scotland, Magnus Erlendsson was able to sneak away
at night and swam to shore. He was in his night clothes, and he scratched his
bare feet badly as he stumbled through the undergrowth. That morning at
breakfast the king noticed his absence and sent a man to his bunk to find him.
When they discovered that he was no longer on board they sent a search party
out on land, supported by bloodhounds; but young Magnus was up a tree and
he scared off the one dog that had found him. He made his way to the
Scottish court and to England and Wales, where he was made welcome, and
awaited the news of King Magnus’ death.13
The king was more interested, however, in gaining Anglesey, ‘which lies
as far south as any region ever ruled by the former kings of Norway and
comprises a third part of Wales’ – that, at least, is what the anonymous saga-
writer believed.14 Magnus’ intervention in the Isle of Man formed part of a
wider contest for control of this small but strategically valuable territory, with
its command over access to central and southern Ireland; there was a local
king, Guðroð Crovan, who reigned from 1079 to 1095, and who was of
mixed Norse and Irish descent, while enough Gaelic names have been found
on inscriptions from the island to indicate that either the old population or
Irish settlers played a large part in the life of Man. After his death, Magnus
saw an opportunity to gain control, but his plans were challenged by Irish
rivals, and by 1103 Guðroð’s son was in charge, founding a line of
succession that lasted until 1265.15 However, Man was only the key to a
vaster space, and King Magnus of Norway had limitless ambitions. It was
even alleged that the king was being urged to avenge the death of his
grandfather Harald Hardraða by invading England. Later, in 1103, he was to
die in battle in Ulster.16 Magnus Barelegs was one of a series of Norwegian
kings who, during the eleventh century, transformed the predatory and
diffuse raiding of the Vikings into a co-ordinated project: there were still
plenty of opportunities for booty and glory, but control of the Norse
expeditions was becoming centralized, and raids were now a means by which
royal power was extended across the north Atlantic, though with questionable
success: after Barelegs was killed the Orkney islands reverted to rule by local
earls.
How Norse rule affected these islands, and other British islands that came
under Norwegian sovereignty such as the Hebrides, is not entirely clear. The
pre-existing native population may well have been enslaved or absorbed
through intermarriage. Ancient Celtic systems of land division were
perpetuated. On the other hand, there is no evidence for the survival of Celtic
Christianity in these islands after the Norse conquest; as with the Anglo-
Saxon conquest of England, paganism triumphed for a while, and the
conversion of Sigurð is not likely to have brought the old cult to an end –
more important in that respect was the spread of the cult of St Magnus, which
gave Orkney, and the Orcadians, a distinct religious identity. That the Norse
character of the Orkneys and Shetlands is not a modern affectation should be
clear from the long survival of a Norse dialect, Norn, in the islands; it only
died out in the mid-nineteenth century, and appears to have been spoken
across the water in Caithness during the Middle Ages, in the mainland
territories under Orcadian rule.17
The distinctive mixture of Norse and Celtic culture can be seen most
clearly in Ireland, whose very name was forged by the Vikings.18 Rather
than chronicling the successive waves of Viking attacks on Ireland, it makes
sense to look at the pattern of Norse penetration into that country. It is
striking that the early raids, at the very end of the eighth century, came down
from the north, as Viking ships swept down the great arc linking the fjords of
Norway to Orkney, the Hebrides and then down to Ulster and as far south as
the Isle of St Patrick (Inispatrick), close to the site of what would become the
major seat of Norse power in Ireland, Dublin. Not surprisingly, early targets
included monasteries, even though the Vikings also carried away women and
children, whom they enslaved; many of these women gave birth to a new
generation of Vikings who were of mixed ancestry. A major settlement lay at
Duibhlinn, ‘Blackpool’, but other towns as well as Dublin, right across the
island, owe their origins to the Vikings. They were thus creators as well as
destroyers. Endemic warfare between the different Irish kings was
complicated by the involvement of Scandinavian settlers, who were
sometimes the target of Irish attacks, but who were increasingly active
alongside Celtic armies. In 871 a boastful Scandinavian warlord named Ivar
styled himself ‘king of the Norsemen of all Ireland and Britain’. Yet by the
middle of the tenth century the Norse in Ireland were at each other’s throats,
even though Dublin flourished as a great centre of trade within the Irish Sea –
some of this trade being fed, to be sure, by plunder from continuing raids
deep into the island and across the sea towards Wales, for Welsh captives
were in good supply in its slave market.19
The Viking raids caused great damage to the flourishing Celtic Church on
the island, even though the Scandinavians learned something from the
intricate styles of decoration in the fine manuscripts they pillaged; ‘Viking
art’ was not immune to Celtic influences. When the Irish king and ‘high
priest’ Brian Boru led his armies to victory over the Norsemen at Clontarf in
1014 (though he himself died in the battle), the Norse were not expunged
from Ireland. They continued to meld into Irish society, and one of the most
significant markers of their assimilation was the adoption of the religion they
had so mercilessly pillaged: Christianity was restored throughout the island,
but it also needs to be said that Irish kings had seen the rich monasteries of
Ireland as fair game, and the devastation reported in the Irish annals was as
often the work of Celtic as of Norse armies.20

II

It is a moot point whether one can seriously use the word ‘Viking’ to describe
the complex maritime world that was brought into being across the northern
Atlantic by Norse settlers in long-inhabited lands such as Orkney and in
barely inhabited lands such as Iceland and Greenland, where the Norse
created brand new societies on virgin soil. The age of the marauders was still
far from over when Greenland and North America were discovered; but
Greenland was inhabited by the Norse for over 400 years, long past the time
when violent Viking raids occurred. Moreover, the term does harm by
emphasizing images of violence that appeal to those who like their history
well spattered with blood. In Iceland, certainly, bloody conflicts between
neighbours, conjured into the vivid tales of the sagas, show that Norse men,
and indeed Norse women, were perfectly capable of creating havoc at home,
without needing to take their weapons across the open seas. But settled
societies did emerge out in the Atlantic, prospering through trade: in the
Faroes, in Iceland and in Greenland.
The colonization of the Faroe Islands is said to have begun under Harald
Fairhair at the end of the ninth century, a good hundred years after the first
raids on England, so it probably resulted from King Harald’s attempt to
impose rule across great swathes of Norway, and from the decision of unruly
Norsemen to escape from the taxes he was trying to impose.21 On the other
hand, the first colonist mentioned in the admittedly jumbled saga record was
a certain Grim Kamban, whose second name is Gaelic, which suggests once
again that there had been a continuous injection of Celtic blood into the
Norse community ever since the Scandinavians entered British waters. The
other implication is that many of the early settlers came not from Norway but
from the Scottish isles, Ireland and the growing ‘Viking diaspora’. The
obvious attraction of this chain of rocky islands was pasture, and the meaning
of the name Faroe is ‘sheep island’, Færeyjar.22 Cultivable land is very
limited, amounting to only 5 per cent today, but there was plenty of driftwood
available, which was carried across from America, while better-quality
timber had to be brought from Norway or Britain. There was nothing to take
away as Viking booty. The climate was milder than one might expect so far
north, as the Faroes are bathed by warm currents coming across the
Atlantic.23
Whether or not these islands had been seen by Pytheas centuries earlier,
the only regular visitors when the Norse settlers began to take an interest in
them were Irish hermits, who may already have been living in the Faroes by
700. It is now known, from the carbon-dating of some peat ash and burnt
barley grain, that there were settlers there in the fourth to sixth centuries, and
again in the couple of centuries thereafter, but their presence was almost
certainly spasmodic – conceivably they were seasonal migrants moving north
from Shetland.24 They were not sitting on the spectacular wealth that had
been accumulated in abbeys such as Lindisfarne. According to the Irish monk
and geographer Dicuil, the monks still felt threatened by the occasional
Viking visits to their remote hermitages:
 On these islands hermits sailing from our country Scotia [Ireland]
have lived for nearly a hundred years. But just as they were always
deserted from the beginning of the world, so now because of the
Norse pirates they are emptied of anchorites and filled with countless
sheep and a great variety of sea fowls.25

The anchorites would have brought sheep to the islands, and these, along
with seabirds, eggs and fish, provided them with a rich diet; moreover, just
about every part of a sheep can be used for some purpose, whether making
cloth, fashioning tools out of bone, manufacturing cheese, butter and tallow,
or (less likely among the monks) a feast of roasted lamb. Whales were driven
ashore, a thirteenth-century Faroese law code says, but once they were above
the high-water mark the owner of the land could claim a large share of the
animal, and the hunters would only receive one quarter.26
These references to ancient anchorites raise issues concerning the voyages
of the Irish monks, which have generated an interest out of proportion to their
real significance. One of them, St Brendan, has been presented as the first
navigator to cross the Atlantic, so that the Irish voyages have become
entangled with the hoary, and in many ways unenlightening, question of who
reached America first. Irish saints’ lives tell of adventurous monks who, in
their wish to escape normal human company, set out in small leather-hulled
currachs for islands in the open sea, from at least the sixth century onwards:
‘thrice twenty men who went with Brendan to seek the land of promise’, to
cite an ancient document known as the Litany of Oengus. St Brendan became
associated with a good many points along the western flank of Ireland and
Scotland which he is said to have visited in the early sixth century. The list is
so long that it sounds as if it was formed out of ‘the collective sea experience
of successive generations of Irish mariners’, which suggests that one or
another Irish saint did indeed set foot at these places.27 In other words, St
Brendan the Navigator was not one person but several, based on the image of
a real Brendan of Clonfert (the home of a monastic school), who inspired his
followers to take ship with him and sail into the open ocean. Brendan was of
noble birth – indeed, his birth in the Irish kingdom of Munster was
accompanied by miracles and prophecies.28
Brendan’s search for paradise is recorded in the short text known as the
Navigatio Brendani, which tells how Brendan was inspired by the stories of
the adventures at sea of a fellow monk to find some of the communities that
were said to be scattered across the open ocean. He decided to take fourteen
monks on his own expedition to find the ‘Land of the Promise of the Saints’,
but all the detail in the text is generic: rocky islands with steep cliffs; islands
crowded with flocks of pure white sheep; a barren island that proved to be the
back of a whale; an island where the birds sang psalms in praise of Jerusalem
for an hour; but also an island inhabited by devout monks who never suffered
from illness and never grew old, and another one inhabited by three classes,
boys, young men and old men – the absence of women does make one
wonder where all the boys came from. The Navigatio Brendani eloquently
portrays the dangers of the seas, such as fogs and waterspouts, not to mention
battling sea monsters and angry savages on remote shores, as well as ‘Judas
the most miserable of men’, who was given a day’s rest from the torments of
Hell every Easter Sunday.29 It is hard to see how anyone can read the
description of Brendan’s voyage as an account of a real journey across the
Atlantic, rather than a series of exhortations about the life a devout monk
should lead.
Monks did set off across the open sea without much idea of where they
were heading, other than a desire to find ‘a desert in the ocean’ (sought out
by a certain Baitán), or Cormac ui Liatháin, who repeatedly set out in his
currach on a voyage that took him from Ireland up to Orkney; Cormac also
penetrated far into the ocean, without finding land, but turned back when he
was confronted by a great shoal of red jellyfish.30 Another intrepid monk, St
Columba, sailed ‘through all the islands of the ocean’, according to his Irish
biographer, and once again communities of monks came into being on the
spurs of rock and offshore islands that he visited, including the windswept
Aran Islands off the coast of Galway and Skye off western Scotland. These
achievements are certainly more credible than those attributed to St Brendan;
and the voyages were the work not just of the famous monks celebrated in the
saints’ tales but of their crews (presumably monks) as well, for,
paradoxically, the foundation of solitary hermitages on remote islands had to
be teamwork. On the other hand, through its popularity the tale of St Brendan
stimulated speculation about what lay out in the Atlantic Ocean, and ideas
about Islands of the Blessed, which were fed by classical as well as by
Christian writings, continued to fascinate medieval navigators throughout the
Middle Ages; the isles supposedly visited by St Brendan were freely
confused with the Canary Islands, for instance.31 Rather than those sunny
islands, which were already inhabited by Berbers, the Irish monks found
distinctly cooler places in the north Atlantic: first the Faroes, and then
Iceland.
Settlement by monks was obviously incapable of generating permanent
colonies, unless there was a constant stream of new arrivals (rather as the
monastic houses on Mount Athos are sustained to this day). Unfortunately for
the monks, the new arrivals, who did bring women with them, were pagan
Scandinavians. The paganism of the first Norse settlers in the Faroes is
reflected in the name of the capital, Torshavn, ‘Thor’s harbour’. However,
the islands had accepted Christianity by the early eleventh century, possibly
at the insistence of the same Olaf Tryggvason who had engineered the
Christianization of the Orkney Islands. They eventually fell under the
ecclesiastical control of the archbishop of Niðaros (modern Trondheim),
which was the northernmost archdiocese in the world. This encroachment
reflected the growing power of the Norwegian monarchy in the north Atlantic
during the late twelfth century, but until then the Faroe islanders managed
their own affairs at the annual parliament, or Þing, which was dominated by
the wealthiest local families. These islands did not possess the strategic
advantages that had made possession of the Orkneys a matter of close interest
to the Norwegian court. Even when shipping from Norway to Iceland became
very regular, the direct route bypassed the Faroes, although once a route from
Norway to Greenland had become established ships did stop there. All this
may lead to the conclusion that the Faroes were not of major significance; but
their interest lies in the creation of a brand new society on what was to all
intents empty land (the sheep apart), a social experiment that was to be
repeated on a much larger scale in Iceland.32

III

Iceland has been described as the ‘highest point’ of Norse civilization, not
just because there were virtually no previous inhabitants to disturb, but
because of its cultural achievements, represented by the remarkable saga
literature, recited in dark winters when Icelanders took the opportunity to
recall and to embroider their past history, and that of their ancestors in
Scandinavia. The sagas are one of the great literary achievements of the
Middle Ages, and all the more extraordinary for having been produced
almost at the limits of the world then known to Latin Christendom.33 Iceland
was probably discovered from the Faroes. The stories that survive about the
discovery of Iceland tell one more, no doubt, about the twelfth, thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, when they were recorded, than they do about the ninth
century – more about an island under increasing threat of a takeover by the
Norwegian crown than about an earlier community of independent farmers
and sailors. Thus there is an emphasis in many of the texts on the tyranny of
Harald Fairhair, king of Norway, but perhaps the Icelandic authors had
contemporary Norwegian kings in mind instead.34
In one reasonably plausible version, preserved in an Icelandic history of
the ‘land-taking’, or Landnám, a settler in the Faroes named Naddoð was
swept off course early in the ninth century and came upon a land in the far
north; noticing snow on the mountains, he named it Snæland, ‘Snowland’.
Another story tells of a sea-roving Swede named Garðar Svávarsson who
lived on the Danish island of Sjælland (Zealand), although his wife came
from the Hebrides; he had heard about ‘Snowland’, and his mother, a
sorceress, urged him to go and look for it. He sailed all round Iceland,
proving that it was an island, and then he spent what must have been a tough
winter there in a roughly built house. Later, his son travelled to Iceland,
hoping that the Norwegian king would make him its earl, rather as earls had
been appointed in Orkney, but this idea did not meet with the approval of the
other settlers, who had arrived with him and who were careful to keep
Norwegian power at arm’s length.
Both Naddoð and Garðar thought very highly of the land they had
discovered. This was not true of a ‘great Viking’, Flóki Vilgerðarson, whose
visit to Iceland ended in disaster when his men failed to make hay and all his
sheep died from lack of fodder; meanwhile he and his companions had been
happily living off fish and had failed to think about their animals. ‘When
asked about the place, he gave it a bad name.’ That name, Iceland, is the one
that stuck. Finally, according to Icelandic writers, a certain Ingolf Arnarson
was inspired by news of Flóki’s discovery to look for Iceland, and when he
had scouted out the south coast he returned to Norway, and then went back
with his foster-brother, a Viking raider named Hjǫrleif, some time around
870; Ingolf took care to sacrifice to the gods before setting out, and once he
was close to shore he threw into the sea the high-seat pillars that had been set
up in his house back home. These were pillars that were placed either side of
the ceremonial seat of the head of a Norse household, and they would
probably have been carved with images of Thor and other gods. He watched
to see where they would land, for this would reveal where the gods were
sending him (they ended up at the spot that is now the capital of Iceland,
Reykjavík, ‘Smoke Inlet’, named no doubt after the steam rising from its hot
springs). His brother had not bothered to sacrifice and was set upon by his
slaves. They were furious because he had yoked them to his plough, for lack
of enough oxen – he had only brought one along with him. They seized the
women and goods in Hjǫrleif’s ship; but when his own slaves found
Hjǫrleif’s battered body, Ingolf was horrified at what had happened, chased
after the slaves, and killed all of them.35 It is impossible to prove that events
unfolded in quite this way, but the image of a ship arriving loaded with some
farm animals, supplies, slaves and women (whether free or enslaved) is
credible.
The land they had discovered lies athwart the tectonic North American and
European plates, though this does not mean that half of Iceland is
geologically part of America, since the island was spewed out of the sea (as
were the Faroes) by volcanic eruptions that continue to this day. Unlike other
volcanic areas, it is not particularly fertile, owing to its location just below
the Arctic Circle; but much more pasture land existed when the Norse settlers
arrived than can be found nowadays, and the effects of overgrazing were
soon felt – sheep grazed lands that had little time to recover from the harsh
island winters. Farmers harvested grass and made it into hay; some barley
was produced, but the islanders had to import grain, or else had to feed
themselves from their sheep and from the rich local wildlife: seabirds and
their eggs; seals; whales too – ‘Þorgils worked hard at acquiring provisions,
and every year he went out to the Strands, an area on the northern tip of
Iceland. There he collected wild foods and found whales as well as other
driftage.’ One summer he found a beached whale, but a pair of dishonest
traders, landless men, arrived in their cargo ship and tried to take control of
the parts of the whale that Þorgils and his companions had not already cut up.
A fight broke out and Þorgils was killed.36 Whales were valued for their
blubber as well as their meat, while walrus had the additional advantage of
ivory.37
The first settlers left Norway not in Viking longboats but in tubby knǫrrs,
sailing vessels that were capable of carrying thirty tons of goods, sheep and
whatever else the colonists required to build a life from scratch. For they
were leaving their old home for good. Some of the settlers came on ships they
already owned, so these people were not impoverished refugees; rather, it
seems, they were escaping the tough regime of Harald Fairhair.38 Maybe
20,000 people, and certainly more than 10,000 people, migrated to the island
between about 870 and about 930, principally from Norway, although the
colonists also included Swedes, Danes and people of mixed Norse and Celtic
origin. DNA testing has revolutionized our understanding of the ancestry of
the Icelanders, particularly now that it is possible to trace both matrilineal and
patrilineal ancestry (through analysis of mitochondrial DNA and Y-
chromosomes respectively). About two thirds of modern male Icelanders
appear to be of Norse descent, and one third of Celtic descent; but when one
looks at the matrilineal line the proportions are reversed. This confirms how
very substantial the Celtic element was, represented by female slaves whose
children by free parents were accepted into Icelandic society, as well as by
the Celtic wives of Vikings from the Scottish isles and Ireland. A similar
picture can be drawn in both the Faroes and the Western Isles of Scotland
(but not in Orkney and Shetland, where matrilineal and patrilineal lines are to
an equal extent of Norse origin, suggesting that entire families migrated from
Norway, not just warrior males).39 The name of the hero of one of the finest
of the Icelandic sagas, Njáll, is of Irish origin (Niall, Neil). The Icelandic
records of settlement from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries also mention
Irish settlers, Iskr, such as a certain Ketill; and most of the slaves who arrived
against their will were probably Celtic too.40 It is generally accepted that by
the end of the eleventh century there were about 40,000 people living in
Iceland, and maybe even twice that number. They could benefit from the fact
that the climate was relatively benign in this phase of the Middle Ages, but
even so there were occasional famines caused by volcanic ash, a bad summer
and the failure of supplies to arrive from Norway. The life of the Icelanders
was not exactly precarious, but (as in much of western Europe) it was all too
easy to run out of basic food supplies.41
As in the Faroes, the first settlers found some inhabitants, people they
called the papar, and these too were Celts, more Irish hermits who left their
imprint on the island not in the bloodline but in place names such as Papey, a
small island off southern Iceland. Some of them migrated back and forth each
year in their simple leather boats, avoiding the Icelandic winter, and probably
guided by their faith more than by sophisticated navigation. Dicuil, the Irish
monk whose description of the Faroes has already been cited, marvelled at
the midnight sun: ‘a man could do whatever he wished as though the sun
were still there, even remove lice from his shirt, and, if one stood on a
mountain-top, the sun perhaps would still be visible to him.’42 Irish monks
returning from Iceland may have carried with them tales of a land of fire and
ice that fed the appetite of Irish listeners, and it has been suggested that the
Irish monks first learned of the existence of Iceland when Arctic mirages
projected an image of the coast of Iceland as far south as the Faroes, which
can happen soon after dawn at that latitude.43
The landnám, the Norse settlement of the land, was recorded with great
care in later Icelandic tradition. For the land was divided up according to
strict rules; and a curious tradition attributes the division of the land to the
king they were trying to escape, Harald Fairhair. He is said to have persuaded
the settlers that ‘no man should take possession of an area larger than he and
his crew could carry fire over in a single day’, although female settlers, who
were also welcome, could only claim the area they could walk around during
a spring day, with a two-year cow in tow.44 The fundamental principle was
that each landowner should be free to run his or her own affairs, subject to
the laws that were agreed in the Alþing, the parliament that met every June
from the year 930 onwards, when there was plenty of light in the sky, and
that was attended by the wealthy and powerful landowners known as the
gǫðar (literally, ‘gods’); they were not just political leaders but priests,
charged with maintaining sacrifices and other rituals on behalf of the
community over which they presided. It was not the democratic people’s
assembly that many would like to imagine, but it enabled this distant island to
govern itself according to laws its own inhabitants made, without any but the
loosest recognition of the authority of the Norwegian king. To describe
Iceland as a ‘republic’ or ‘Commonwealth’ is therefore quite acceptable.45
Most Icelanders were pagan during the first century of the island’s history;
but there were also Christians who lived there, including many of the settlers
and slaves who had come from Ireland. One Norse Christian was Ketill the
Fool, so named because his pagan neighbours ridiculed his beliefs. He lived
on Church Farm (Kirkjubœr), which had earlier been an Irish hermitage. The
story went about that pagans could not live there, and after Ketill died a
pagan arrived to occupy his farm. No sooner had he crossed the boundary
than he fell dead.46 With the conversion of Iceland to Christianity in 1000,
the gǫðar were not displaced; the landowners built their own churches,
seeing them as private property in just the way their pagan shrines had also
been their personal possessions. King Olaf of Norway knew that Iceland
depended on trade with Scandinavia to keep itself fed, and he banned trade
with the island so long as it remained staunchly pagan. This, as much as the
longstanding presence of Christians on the island, prompted urgent
discussion in the Alþing, where the winning argument was that the refusal of
pagans and Christians to live together would destroy the entire community.
The Alþing declared law; but there could only be one law. So it was agreed
that baptism would be universal and compulsory, although individuals could
still continue to worship the pagan gods privately; they could also carry on
eating horsemeat, which was one of the few forbidden foods of the Catholic
West. A bishop only arrived in the middle of the eleventh century, and until
then the gǫðar retained religious functions, serving the new religion. As in
other parts of the world, religious ideas moved across the sea and helped
transform the societies they penetrated. That did not make the Icelanders
more peaceful, as one can see from the tales of feuding and violence in the
sagas, which hailed from a world that was, by now, Christian, but still well
aware of its pagan past and still fascinated by the stories of the Norse gods.47
The Faroes and Iceland are precocious examples of a phenomenon that
would become widespread in the Atlantic by the end of the Middle Ages: the
creation of a brand new society on uninhabited (or virtually uninhabited)
islands. In the fifteenth century, the Portuguese became pioneers in exploiting
virgin islands. Both the Scandinavians and the Portuguese brought into being
societies that were in some respects similar to the mother country, but that all
possessed very distinctive features – they were not clones of the Old World.
The political structure of Iceland, built around the principle of local
autonomy under powerful gǫðar, expressed a conscious rejection of royal
interference; the islanders were trying to create an idealized society, based on
the Norway they would have liked to inhabit, and perhaps imagined that their
forebears had inhabited before royal power began to intrude into the fjords.
Even so, they learned that an annual assembly and a common system of law
was necessary to ensure a degree of order among communities riven by
feuding and competition for territory. Although they were proud of their
autonomy, the Icelanders were also obsessed by the history of the Norse
ancestors, to the point where they celebrated Viking raiders and their pagan
cult, long after Iceland had accepted Christianity. They told tales about the
Norwegian kings and their mental horizons extended as far as
Constantinople, Spain and the Baltic. As the next chapter will show, these
mental horizons also extended westwards, right across the Atlantic Ocean.
 IV

The sea provides a constant backdrop to many of the Icelandic sagas, whether
they are concerned with events in Norway and Europe, or with the affairs of
Iceland and the lands to the west. Since they were written down in the
thirteenth century and after, the sagas tell us more about how Icelanders of
the central and later Middle Ages viewed their relationship with the sea than
they do about conditions at the time of the first settlement. One of the best-
known sagas, Egil’s Saga, was written down in the early thirteenth century,
and is full of tales of bloodthirsty treachery set alongside honourable displays
of loyalty. Woven into its fabric are matter-of-fact accounts of conditions at
sea as its main characters journeyed from Norway to Iceland, supposedly at
the time when Harald Fairhair was imposing his will on the Norwegians,
leading his opponents to seek their fortune in distant lands. Thus Kveldulf, a
sea captain, dies on board his ship and his body is cast overboard in a coffin.
The ship approaches Iceland with an accompanying vessel and enters a fjord,
but before the crews can steer to land heavy rain and fog separate the two
ships and they lose sight of one another. Then when the weather turns better
they wait for the tide and float their ships upriver, beach their boats and
unload their cargo. As they explore the shoreline they find Kveldulf’s coffin
where it has washed ashore and place it under a mound of stones.48 This
series of events, told to add local colour to a much bigger story of rivalries
among the settlers, surely reflects the everyday experiences of travellers from
Norway to Iceland.
Notable too is a casual account of how a ship bound from Shetland to
Iceland, with a crew of men who had not sailed the route before, was blown
quickly across the ocean towards its destination, but was then caught by a
contrary wind and sent westwards beyond the island.49 These contrary winds
or dense fogs would, as will be seen, lead to some extraordinary discoveries
in the waters to the west of Iceland. An image that must be from the
thirteenth century shows how trading ships would arrive and be berthed in
rivers, channels and streams.50 Another image, perhaps from earlier
centuries, presents Egil as a Viking who goes plundering and killing as far
away as the Baltic, along the coast of Courland, in present-day Latvia, though
by the thirteenth century Scandinavians (mainly Danes and Swedes) were
still raiding the Baltic coasts, now under the banner of crusades. Egil is said
to have burned down the house of a prosperous Courland farmer who was
drinking with his companions, and thought nothing, apparently, of killing all
these people; he had, however, seized a treasure chest which turned out to be
full of silver. After that he decamped to Denmark: ‘they all sailed to Denmark
later that summer and sat in ambush for merchant ships, robbing wherever
they could.’51 On another occasion, Egil visited the English king, Athelstan,
who presented him with ‘a good merchant vessel, and a cargo to go with it.
The bulk of the cargo was wheat and honey.’52 This and other Icelandic
sagas are impregnated with the smell of the sea.
Yet Iceland did not, at this period, possess any towns; nor did there exist a
distinct group of merchants whose livelihood was derived solely from trade,
even though those who raided also traded, sometimes to sell their plunder,
and sometimes to make some profit on the side.53 Norway, it is true,
possessed very few towns in the Viking period – the foundation of Niðaros
on the site of present-day Trondheim was a deliberate royal act, providing an
opportunity to detach the Church in Norway from the oversight of the see of
Lund, which (though now part of Sweden) then lay in Danish territory. There
were one or two trading stations, such as that at Kaupang, near Oslo, which
was well situated for access to the silver and other fine items coming up
through the rivers of eastern Europe in the early Viking age. By the thirteenth
century, though, Bergen had become an important centre both of royal power
and of North Sea trade, with 5,000–10,000 inhabitants, and it established
itself as the major port for the Iceland trade.54 This trade had several
peculiarities. The Icelanders did not mint coins, though they were happy to
use hack silver. If you wanted to buy goods on the island, you normally
resorted to barter. But as trade with Norway took off in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries it became obvious that some sort of standard of value was
needed. Since the major Icelandic product that was in demand in Scandinavia
was the heavy woollen cloth known as vaðmal that is still the most prized
export of the island, this was chosen. Vaðmal made up in warmth for what it
lacked in softness. The ell, or ǫln, was adopted as the standard measurement
of cloth; it is said to have been based on the length of the arm of King Henry
I of England, from his elbow to his fingertips. Two ells made a yard. The
Alþing decreed that all vaðmal woven in Iceland would be two ells broad; a
piece of cloth measuring two ells by six counted as a ‘legal ounce’ of silver,
though over time there were changes in ratios and different types of ells as
well – the fundamental point is that the ‘money’ of early Iceland consisted of
pieces of woven cloth. Documents sometimes speak of vaðmal cloth as a
monetary unit, and sometimes as a physical article of trade.55 Overall, the
system seems to have worked well – better, anyway, than having to depend
on imported (or plundered) silver. Sheep were Iceland’s silver mines.
Cargo ships of the knǫrr type found near Roskilde (Skuldelev I) could
carry about three tons of vaðmal, thirty tons of fine meal grain or five tons of
coarse unmilled barley, and grain was one of the European products that the
Icelanders craved, for lack of suitable soil at home. The Icelanders were
familiar with a variety of ships, operated increasingly by Norwegians rather
than by islanders; after all, wood was in poor supply on the island, as was
metal for nails and rivets and much else that was needed in shipbuilding. As
well as the knǫrr they were visited by the búza, or buss, a ship with high
gunwales that was better suited to rough seas, and that came into fashion in
the early eleventh century; its high sides meant that there was a deeper hold,
with more space for cargo, but its deeper draft, accentuated by its heavier
cargo, made this type of ship slower and less well suited to the shallow
waters in which the knǫrrs tied up. Still, the use of bigger ships shows that
this trade was growing in value.56 Above all, this was entirely licit trade, in
an age when piracy was rampant, and it took place under the protection of the
king of Norway, who had his uses even for republican-minded Icelanders.
Around 1022 the king of Norway entered into a commercial treaty with
Iceland, to guarantee the arrival of woollen cloth in return for grain.
Icelanders visiting Norway were to be granted the same privileges as free
Norwegians; they could even take wood and water from the king’s forests;
the interests of Norwegians visiting Iceland were also protected, for instance
their property was to be kept safe if they died there. Admittedly, the
Icelanders did have to pay quite heavy landing fees in Norway (in vaðmal
should they so wish); but the king would not interfere even when they traded
with third countries. This agreement remained in force for a couple of
centuries, and its origins no doubt lay in an attempt by the king to
demonstrate his authority over Iceland, though in the most benign way.57
Providing grain to Iceland became less attractive as Norway’s population
grew, and as its new towns placed pressure on food supplies. The English,
who exported grain to Norway, came to the rescue; Egil’s going-away
present from the king of England was, as has been seen, a boat loaded mainly
with wheat.58 In 1189 a priest turned up in Bergen aboard a ship that had set
out from England loaded with grain, wine and honey, and the intention was to
sail on all the way to his native Iceland; but it turned out that the cargo had
been stolen.59 Norway could obtain heavy cloth from many sources; the
relationship with Iceland was vital to the islanders but hardly essential for
Norway. However, there were other items that made it worthwhile to brave
the seas on the route to Iceland (a route that could only be taken in the late
spring and throughout the summer). Iceland was the only source of sulphur
for northern Europe, and its falcons, along with those of Greenland, were in
demand at the great courts of Europe.60 It has been suggested that polar
bears sometimes arrived off Iceland on ice floes, were captured and were
taken to Europe – the charming tale of the white bear that Auðun wanted to
present to the king of Denmark will be examined shortly. Walrus tusks were
probably brought from Greenland by this stage, since the Icelanders appear to
have exterminated what walruses there were around the shores of the island
within a few decades of their arrival. Since Iceland lacked reliable sources of
iron, this was imported from, or by way of, Norway, along with all sorts of
implements and articles of clothing.61
The maritime route from Norway to Iceland formed part of a remarkable
trading network that survived long after the Vikings had become a memory,
though, as it was expressed in the Icelandic sagas, a very powerful one. For
this network extended still further afield, however, right across the north
Atlantic, all the way to the shores of North America.
 21

White Bears, Whales and Walruses

Greenland is often described as the world’s biggest island.1 Geologically,

though, it forms part of North America, and to include Baffin Island as one of
the American discoveries of the Norse navigators, while excluding
Greenland, is another example of what might portentously be called ‘the
social construction of continents’. Even in the sixteenth century it was
sometimes assumed that Greenland was somehow linked to Asia, which had
already been the view of Adam of Bremen in the late eleventh century, while
around 1300 an Icelandic geographer remarked that ‘some people think’ the
American continent must in reality be part of Africa; Adam, on the other
hand, took the view that it was part of Asia, a view that survived up to and
beyond the days of Columbus and Cabot.2 This was hardly the issue that
worried navigators, however. The seas that lap Greenland are as unsafe as the
environment, dominated by a truly vast ice cap, is hostile and impenetrable.
Only a small part of the island was suitable for settlement, and it is a tribute
to the persistence of its first Norse explorers that they searched out the fjords
that gave access to grasslands, even though they lay on the western flank of
the island.
To reach these distant lands in the types of ship that the Norse operated
was a challenge of endurance: when Eirík the Red led the first settlers across
the sea to Greenland in around 986, he set out from Iceland with a fleet of
twenty-five ships, but only fourteen reached Greenland, some sinking and
others having to turn back.3 Although an awning would be spread over the
crew and passengers at night, space was tight in the hold, especially when it
was as crowded with animals as it was with humans. The journey from
Norway to the east coast of Iceland was estimated at seven days’ sailing, and
from western Iceland to the Norse settlements in Greenland took four days,
while from Iceland to Ireland was a five-day voyage. By the thirteenth
century, Norse ships had discovered lands even further north than Iceland,
reaching Jan Mayen Island and Spitsbergen (which lay four days’ travel north
of Iceland), though these were not places the explorers tried to settle – the
environment was too hostile. Another very hostile environment was the east
coast of Greenland, even though it took a single day to reach it from the
nearest point in Iceland. Once traffic was moving regularly towards
Greenland, Norwegian captains also learned to bypass Iceland entirely, taking
a course due west from a place in Norway called Hernar, and sailing straight
on between Shetland and the Faroes, ‘so that the sea looks halfway up the
mountainsides’, and then on to Greenland without calling at any ports in
Iceland.4
 Judging from the sagas, Greenland was discovered by accident; bearing in
mind stories of ships that were swept westwards by the winds, this makes
perfect sense. Early in the tenth century a nephew of Naddoð, one of
Iceland’s discoverers, named Gunnbjorn Ulf-Krakuson, was blown off course
on a voyage from Norway to Iceland, and saw a group of skerries west of
Iceland, together with a landmass beyond; it is now thought that what he
actually saw was an Arctic mirage, but even if he did see Greenland he would
have found its steep east coast extremely forbidding.5 Although he did not
explore further, and was not interested in founding a settlement, Gunnbjorn’s
family seem to have been proud enough of what he had achieved to continue
to talk about the land that lay to the west; and in the 970s one settler in
Gunnbjorn’s neighbourhood, Eirík the Red, clearly listened attentively to the
story. Eirík and his father had been outlawed from Norway and had arrived in
Iceland in the vain hope of obtaining the sort of broad estates that earlier
Norse settlers had acquired. But by the time they reached the island the best
land had long been occupied by the gǫðar and their followers.6 Eirík had
killed one man in Norway, and before long he was sucked into feuds in
Iceland. By 983 he was an outlaw there too; the sentence was for three years,
but if he appeared in public any of his foes could attempt to kill him with
impunity.
Leaving Iceland was the obvious option and, since he required land, Eirík
chose not the Norse lands in the British Isles but the far-off ice-bound land
that Gunnbjorn had sighted. The east coast, with its towering ice-covered
cliffs, was quite unsuitable for settlement. Many tales survive of Norse sailors
washed up on this shore, some of whom were lucky enough to be found,
some of whom tried to trek across country to the settlements but were
defeated by the cold, their bodies being found and identified as much as
fourteen years later. In one case wax tablets were also found on which a
traveller from Bergen recorded how his journey to Iceland had gone awry.7
Eirík avoided these ‘unsettled wilds’, as they came to be known, and worked
his way beyond the southern tip of Greenland, identifying two areas suitable
for settlement: to the south, following watercourses away from the rocky
coast, and navigating past islands teeming with bird life, he found the
grassland of the so-called Eastern Settlement (though it might better have
been called the Southern Settlement). Four hundred miles to the north he
identified another area, much cooler, which he thought would make a good
base for hunting expeditions, and this became known as the Western
Settlement, and was always smaller than the main base further south. It is
likely that he returned from this area laden with sealskins, walrus tusks and
other polar prizes, all of which advertised the wealth that skilled hunters
could draw from the region. The promise of the Eastern Settlement, with its
green fields, led him to name the territory Greenland, ‘for he argued that men
would be drawn to go there if the land had an attractive name’.8 It was not
really dishonest to use the name Greenland, for the part he proposed to
colonize was indeed green, and a global rise in temperatures made the land
even greener. After three years he returned to Iceland, no longer an outlaw; a
severe famine in 976 had demoralized the Icelanders, and, with his brightly
painted oral prospectus for Greenland, he had little difficulty in recruiting
somewhere around 400 settlers from Iceland.9
Following convention, as he approached the lands marked out for the
Eastern Settlement, Eirík threw his high-seat pillars overboard, watching to
see where they would be washed ashore; he thus relied on the gods to show
him where to settle. The place he chose, Brattahlíð, has been identified and
excavated, for it was occupied for hundreds of years; it lay some way back
from the water, in a broad plain that led down to a fjord giving access to the
sea. The settlements were not real towns, any more than the Icelandic
settlements were; they consisted of a scattering of nearly 200 farms in the
Eastern Settlement, while the Western Settlement possessed ninety. Some of
these farms were occupied by later waves of settlers who had heard good
reports of the opportunities this new land offered.10 The Eastern Settlement
also contained a cathedral at Gardar, following the Christianization of the
Norse settlers, and there were several churches in the other settlement too.
The hardy inhabitants of the two settlements would sometimes head north in
small six-oared boats, which many of the farmers owned. They might go as
far as Disko Island (70°N), in search of walrus, polar bears and narwhal,
whose spikes were often believed in Europe to be unicorn’s horns. The
famous Lewis chessmen were made out of walrus ivory, though they are
thought actually to have been made in Niðaros on the coast of Norway.
In the mid-fourteenth century this commerce in walrus tusks began to fall
away, and one can only wonder whether the exploitation of these resources
had reached such a fever pitch that the walrus population had begun to
vanish. Another explanation that has been mooted is the increasing ease of
access within Europe to elephant ivory, by way of west Africa and the Red
Sea, but, at least as far as west Africa is concerned, this was a development of
the fifteenth and not the fourteenth century. Walrus hide was valued in
northern Europe because it could be twisted into tough rope. Two tiny
amulets preserved in the National Museum of Denmark are in the form of a
polar bear and a walrus.11 A Greenland falcon made a perfect gift for the
falcon-crazy Emperor Frederick II in thirteenth-century southern Italy; twelve
Greenland falcons are said to have constituted the ransom paid for the
crusading son of the duke of Burgundy when he was captured by the Turks in
1396.12 Greenland did, therefore, play a role in the international trade of the
Middle Ages, and was by no means a disconnected territory inhabited by
Norse exiles. A thirteenth-century Norwegian writer explained that there
were three good reasons to sail to Greenland: curiosity; the search for fame;
and the search for wealth – precisely because Greenland was so remote, and
was visited less often than other lands, it offered ‘a good profit’. This was not
just because it was a source of rare Arctic products; traders could also exploit
the shortage of iron and timber, for ‘everything that is needed to improve the
land must be purchased abroad’.13
The great difference between Greenland and Iceland was the fact that part
of the western coast of this vast land was already inhabited, not, as in Iceland,
by a handful of chaste priests but by Eskimo peoples. The term ‘Eskimo’ has
gone out of fashion, because it was a native American word meaning, rather
contemptuously, ‘raw-meat eaters’; but it is used here as a blanket description
of different people with different cultures: the so-called Dorset people, named
after a small island off Baffin Island, and then the more familiar Inuit, who
still inhabit Greenland and who have sometimes been called ‘Neo-Eskimos’
instead. The term ‘Inuit’ simply means ‘human beings’, for (not
unreasonably) many peoples have no name for themselves other than
‘ourselves’.14 The Dorset Eskimos may have been clinging on to Greenland
at the time of the Norse discovery, for the ‘Iceland Book’, the Íslendingabók,
relates that Eirík and his companions ‘found many settlements, towards the
east and towards the west, and remains of skin boats and stone implements’;
and the author assumed that the people who had lived in these places were of
the same origin as the troublesome inhabitants Eirík would later encounter in
Vínland, some way down the eastern flank of America.15 Archaeological
evidence is less secure, and the ‘Iceland Book’ may well have been
embroidering the account of Eirík’s discoveries with information gathered
much later; still, Dorset Eskimos may have been present in Greenland up to
about 1000, though further north than the two areas settled by the Norse
migrants. Legends circulating among the next wave of Eskimo settlers, the
Inuit, recorded seal-hunting landsmen who had been pushed southwards as
the Inuit entered Baffin Island, between Greenland and the Canadian
mainland; these predecessors of the Inuit would have crossed over to
Greenland in kayaks, but they were not really a maritime people, and they
were defeated by conditions in Greenland: they lived in lightly constructed
houses warmed by open hearths, and fuel was hard to find in a land so poor in
timber as Greenland.16
The Inuit, on the other hand, learned to work the waterways of the Arctic
in increasingly well-constructed kayaks, and made their way from Siberia and
Alaska along the far northern coasts and islands of Canada into north-western
Greenland, which they entered by about 1000, that is, at the same time as the
Norse settlements took hold. By about 1200 these Inugsuk Inuits (to give
them their exact name) had made themselves known to the Norse
Greenlanders. Contrary to the popular image of Eskimos living in igloos built
out of ice-blocks, the Inuit lived in slightly sunken houses entered through
narrow passageways, and made out of piled-up stones, stone flakes, turf and
whalebone; like the Norse, they hunted walruses and seals, and they were
very active whalers who were armed with heavy but handsomely crafted
harpoons and who could even capture massive baleen whales. Objects of
Norse origin found on Inuit sites in Greenland – a piece of tusk with
symmetrical decoration, a fragment of a bronze spoon and of a bronze pot,
and so on – indicate that trade (or possibly plunder) connected the Norse and
Inuit communities. Contact became much more frequent as the Inuit moved
slowly southwards, and as Norse explorers searched ever further north; on the
other hand, very few Inuit articles have turned up on Norse sites in
Greenland.17
In the larger Eastern Settlement, there was more of an attempt to create a
self-sufficient community. As in Iceland, this was not really possible, as there
was no hope of sowing large areas with grain, and the mainstay of the
Greenland settlers was their flocks. A thirteenth-century Norwegian text, the
King’s Mirror, described how the settlers were rich in cheese and butter, and
raised cattle for meat, as well as hunting reindeer, whales and seals, which
they turned into meat or fat, as well as local fish (notably cod) and Arctic
hares. The milky drink known as skýr was a favourite food. Timber was
sparse and of poor quality; even the driftwood that came down from Siberia
along the ocean currents was not suitable for building ships, though it burned
well as fuel. They would have to go in search of wood – which, as will be
seen, took them still further west. But they, like the Icelanders, produced
heavy woollen cloth that found its way along the trade routes; a warp weight
found in Greenland was decorated with a hammer, the symbol of the god
Thor, suggesting that the pagan gods still had their attraction among the
Norse settlers. So little grain was grown that (if the King’s Mirror is to be
believed) most Greenlanders had no idea what bread was.18 The settlers were
tough: when Eirík the Red called on his cousin Þorkell the Far-Travelled,
Þorkell needed to offer him dinner but realized he had no boat available to
travel to the island a mile away across the water where his sheep were
pastured. So he swam to the island and killed a ram, which he then heaved on
to his back, before swimming the whole way back and serving a meal of roast
mutton.19
The first settlers were pagan, and the circumstances of Greenland’s
conversion to Christianity are not clear. According to the Saga of Eirík the
Red, the founder remained a convinced heathen, and was disconcerted to find
that his family was keen to adopt the new faith. His son Leif the Lucky had
spent some time at the court of Olaf Tryggvason in Norway, and the king
urged him to go back to Greenland and to spread Christianity there; Leif was
no doubt thinking of his father when he objected that this would be a difficult
task, but the king was persistent, and on his arrival (having first been blown
to North America) he immediately converted his mother, whereupon she
refused to live with Eirík, and ‘this annoyed him greatly’. The annoyance was
magnified when his family built a small church, only six metres long by three
metres broad, that has been excavated at Brattahlíð.20 It is probably an
exaggeration to suppose that King Olaf added Greenland to the list of
countries he converted, and the story of his involvement was intended to
boost still further the reputation he developed by the thirteenth century of
being the father of Norse Christianity. No more than he succeeded in
imposing the new religion on the more remote corners of Norway did he
succeed in stamping out paganism in Iceland and Greenland; but gradually
the population was won over, and the effects can still be seen in the remains
of the cathedral at Gardar and in the intermittent line of succession of bishops
of Greenland, sent out to the Eastern Settlement from the early twelfth
century onwards. The church at Brattahlíð was built, for lack of good timber,
out of chunks of turf set around a sparse wooden frame in the same way as
the farmhouses of both Greenland and Iceland.21 For a long time, Greenland
was not a dependency of Iceland; its system of government was closely
modelled on that of Iceland, with a Þing that brought together the leading
inhabitants and that passed laws under the direction of its Law-Speaker. This
territory had the same ambiguous relationship with Norway as did Iceland,
and by 1261 it, like Iceland, had accepted the authority of the king of
Norway, not that he was able to do much to control its affairs.
A charming tale from medieval Iceland recounts the career of an Icelander
named Auðun, who travelled all the way from Norway to Greenland, where
he bought a bear, ‘an absolute treasure’, with all the money he possessed. He
decided to return to Norway and then to travel south, with the aim of
presenting his bear to Svein, king of Denmark. But when he reached Norway
the Norwegian king, Harald, a rival of the Danish one, heard that Auðun had
arrived and summoned him to his court. The king courteously asked Auðun,
‘You have a bear, an absolute treasure?’ Auðun gave as non-committal an
answer as he could, because he could guess what was coming next: ‘Are you
willing to sell him to us for the same price you gave for him?’ Auðun politely
but firmly refused. So the king asked what he did propose to do with the bear,
and when he heard that Auðun wished to present it to the king of Denmark he
expostulated: ‘Is it possible that you are such a silly man that you have not
heard how a state of war exists between our two countries?’ Still, King
Harald was polite enough to let him go on his way, so long as he promised to
tell Harald on his return about the reward King Svein would give him. As he
travelled south, Auðun realized that he had no money left and no way to feed
either himself or his bear. He persuaded the steward of the Danish king to sell
him some food, but the price was half-ownership of the patient bear. After
all, the steward pointed out, if the deal was not struck the bear would die of
starvation, and what profit would that bring to Auðun? ‘When he looked at it
that way, it seemed to him that what the steward said went pretty close to the
mark, so that was what they settled on.’
Auðun entered the royal presence with the steward, and explained why he
had come, and that there was now a new problem: he could not present the
bear to the king, because he only owned half of it. The king scolded the
steward for his lack of generosity to a traveller who had come to court with
such a fine gift, when even Svein’s enemy King Harald had let him go on his
way in peace. The steward was exiled forthwith, while Auðun was invited to
stay at court as long as he wished. After a while, Auðun’s love of travelling
reasserted itself, and he decided to go to Rome with a group of pilgrims; the
king offered him every support. But by the time he returned to Denmark he
was once again destitute, and he skulked around outside the feasting hall, not
daring to show himself in his rags. Eventually the king realized that there was
someone who was hanging back, and worked out who he was. Yet again
Auðun was invited to stay for the rest of his days. Once again Auðun’s wish
to be on the move triumphed: ‘God reward you, sire, for all the honour you
would do me, but what I really have in mind is to return to Iceland.’ He was
worried that his mother was living in poverty on the island while he might be
carousing at court.

One day, towards the end of spring, King Svein walked down to the
jetties, where ships were being overhauled in readiness for voyages to
many lands, to the Baltic and Germany, Sweden and Norway. He and
Auðun came to a very fine ship which men were making ready, and,
‘What do you think of this for a ship, Auðun?’ asked the king. ‘Very
fine, sire,’ was his answer. ‘I am going to give you this ship,’ said the
king, ‘in return for the bear.’

But the Danish king was worried that the ship might be wrecked on the
dangerous shores of Iceland, so he gave him a purse full of silver and a gold
arm-ring that he himself was wearing, charging him only to give it to
someone to whom he found himself under a very special obligation.
First Auðun sailed to the court of King Harald, and received a hearty
welcome. He told the king how his rival had willingly accepted the bear and
had given such handsome gifts in return. Auðun said: ‘You had the
opportunity to deprive me of both of these things, my bear and my life too;
yet you let me go in peace where others might not’, and saying this he
presented the Danish king’s arm-ring to King Harald, and then set off for
Iceland, where ‘he was thought to be a man of the happiest good fortune’.22
Alas, the tale does not relate what happened to the bear. However, the story
of Auðun does not simply present evidence for the capture of Greenland
polar bears, which were carried all the way to Scandinavia; it also conjures up
a trading world that linked Greenland to Norway, sometimes by way of
Iceland and sometimes directly. The story of the gift of a polar bear to a great
prince is corroborated by evidence that both the eleventh-century German
emperor Henry III and King Sigurð of Norway, known as ‘the Jerusalem
Traveller’, who went on crusade to the Holy Land early in the twelfth
century, received just such a gift. The idea behind the gift to this Norwegian
king was that he would support the creation of a Greenland bishopric.23

II

Contact between Greenland and Europe began to diminish in the fourteenth

century. Even so, contact was maintained to a greater degree than used to be
supposed, proving that over a period of more than 400 years Greenland was
linked to Europe by regular trade; by the late Middle Ages only one knǫrr a
year was reaching Greenland, and maybe not even that, for no ships are
known to have reached Greenland between 1346 and 1355, which was just as
well, since Greenland was out of touch with Norway just at the time when
Europe was being ravaged by the Black Death. By the fourteenth century,
only ships granted a royal licence were permitted to trade towards Greenland.
If anything, though, this proves that the king of Norway saw real value in the
Greenland trade, and was keen to hog a large share of the proceeds. The
arrival of ships from Greenland tended to be noted down in Norwegian
annals, as was the case in 1383 when a ship loaded with Arctic goodies
reached Bergen directly from Greenland (the ship itself was owned by an
Icelander); it brought news that the bishop of Greenland had died a few years
earlier, which suggests contact was intermittent. It turned out that the captain
had never obtained a royal licence to trade in Greenland; but the crew insisted
that the ship had been blown accidentally towards Greenland, and that no one
had really intended to go there. The tax authorities preferred to believe what
was probably a tall story – the cargo was too interesting for the Norwegians
to complain. This sort of thing happened several times, and was conveniently
overlooked; another Icelander turned up in Greenland in 1389 with four ships
full of Norwegian cargo, and the Icelandic merchant breezily claimed that the
Greenlanders, led by the king’s agent in Greenland, had absolutely insisted
that he unload his cargo and take on board Arctic goods.24
Still, the very insistence of the Greenlanders on their need for European
goods shows that contact was less intense than it had been. The last bishop of
Greenland officiated there from 1365 to 1378. There are several possible
reasons for the decrease in contact: the end of the Middle Ages may have
seen a cooling of temperatures, with the result that pack ice appeared ever
further south, so that the voyage to Greenland became increasingly perilous;
the Greenlanders themselves were more and more reluctant to pay the papal
tax known as Peter’s Pence (paid in vaðmal cloth or walrus products); the
king of Norway faced a cash crisis and became heavily dependent on the
merchants of the German Hansa, who had not been involved in the past with
the ambitious route across the north Atlantic; the Black Death reached
Iceland in 1402 – much later than in Scandinavia – and sailings to Greenland
were at least for a time suspended.25 The warm period stretching from about
800 to about 1200 was at an end. Drift ice certainly was an increasing
problem: around 1342 the Norwegian priest Ívar Bárdarson, who had been
sent to Greenland to look after the lands of the bishop of Garðar, described
the sea route from Iceland to Greenland. He took as his point of reference the
skerries Gunnbjorn had discovered when he accidentally came across
Greenland centuries earlier. The priest knew of an old set of sailing
instructions, for he went on to say: ‘This was the old course, but now ice has
come down from the north-west out of the gulf of the sea so near to the
aforesaid skerries, that no one without extreme peril can sail the old course,
and be heard of again.’26
The Western Settlement succumbed to a combination of worsening
weather and to competition between the Inuit and the Norse for access to
hunting grounds; the Inuit had been moving south as the seals they hunted
tried to escape the bitterly cold weather of the very far north. When the
Norwegian priest Ívar Bárdarson visited the Western Settlement in 1342, he
found that it contained only ‘horses, goats, cattle and sheep, all wild, and no
people, either Christian or heathen’, though he had heard rumours that the
Skrælings, that is, the Inuit, had been harassing the inhabitants of the
settlement.27 Its rationale had always been the supply of walrus ivory and
other Arctic products to Europe. It has long been assumed that the smaller
settlement had therefore ceased to exist by 1342. Rather different, though, is
the evidence from archaeology. The ‘Farm beneath the Sand’, excavated after
its discovery by Inuit in 1990, survived all the way from the eleventh to the
fifteenth century. No evidence was found of furniture, suggesting that the last
human inhabitants had taken most of their possessions away when they left.
However, animals continued to roam the farmhouse, for an unburied goat was
found beside an inside wall, having starved or frozen to death when its
owners left it behind.28
Although a papal letter from 1492 proclaims that ships had ceased to travel
to Greenland since the early fifteenth century, archaeological evidence
suggests otherwise: fragments of fifteenth-century Rhenish pottery have been
found in the walls of a Greenland church. The Eastern Settlement, or at least
some of the homesteads, kept up contact with the outside world well into the
fifteenth century, as the remarkable costumes excavated in graves from a
farm at Herjólfsnes prove: late fifteenth-century Burgundian fashion is
reflected in a headdress, and more generally the cut of the clothes accords
with fifteenth-century European styles. The harbour at Herjólfsnes was the
first port of call that ships were likely to encounter as they approached the
Eastern Settlement, for it lay, unusually, directly on the sea coast, and further
south than the other homesteads.29 A small silver shield from the early
fourteenth century carries the coat of arms of Clan Campbell, suggesting
some sort of connection between Greenland and the British Isles. The
obvious conclusion is that, even when Norwegian shipping failed to set out
for Greenland, and even when contact with Iceland was lost for years at a
time, there were other visitors to Greenland, most probably English and
Basque sailors who by the end of the Middle Ages were exploring the
superbly stocked fishing grounds of the northern Atlantic. By 1420 English
ships dominated the approaches to Iceland.30
Still, this was not enough to save the Norse settlements from extinction. A
mass grave at Herjólfsnes may be evidence that when, as was almost bound
to happen, the Black Death spread from Norway and Iceland to Greenland it
wiped out a large number of people. Amid all the explanations that have been
offered – the Black Death or other disease, famine and malnutrition, climate
change, Inuit attacks, a European preference for elephant ivory, sheer lack of
interest in sending supplies from Europe – nothing quite explains the
evidence, which has all the character of an Agatha Christie mystery.31 In
1769 a Lutheran minister from the north of Norway named Niels Egede
recorded a legend he had heard in Greenland. This told of Inuit who came to
trade with the Norse settlers, and of how one day three small boats arrived
carrying men who attacked the Norsemen, though they managed to fend them
off; meanwhile the Inuit fled in terror. Then a year later a fleet came over the
sea; the raiders massacred the Norse inhabitants and carried off their cattle.
After another raid the following year the Inuit returned to the coast and saw
that the settlement had been ravaged; the Inuit found some Norse women and
children and took them away; the women married into the Inuit community,
and harmony prevailed. After a long while an ‘English privateer’ arrived in
the same region, but the Inuit were happy to find that all he wanted to do was
to trade with them. Since the settlement that is described here lay right on the
coast, it is once again assumed that it must have been Herjólfsnes. This is
very late testimony from an oral source that could have been embroidered
over the centuries, and further embellished by Niels Egede, who must have
been influenced by conditions in his own day, when English pirates were
known to be roaming the Atlantic.32 Even so, the idea that a third party,
neither Inuit nor Norse, had a role in the downfall of the Greenland settlement
is an interesting solution to the mystery.
The mystery is compounded by archaeological finds at a farmhouse at the
end of one of the fjords that led down to the main part of the Eastern
Settlement. This was a sizeable building, with fifteen rooms; in a passageway
a skull and human bones were found, leading to the unprovable claim that
maybe this was the last Norse Greenlander, who had no one to bury him – the
skull has been identified as that of a Norseman. The evidence is made still
more mysterious when one takes on board the report of Jon Grønlænder, from
Iceland; he had taken passage on a German ship bound for his home in about
1540, but the ship was blown off course towards Greenland. There, deep
within a fjord, he saw houses ranged along the beach, as well as huts for
drying fish; then he found the body of a man dressed in woollen cloth, a fine
hood and sealskin, who seemed to have collapsed and died right there.33 So
here is another candidate for the title of last Norse Greenlander, though he
could have been a lost visitor from somewhere in Europe, or even an Inuit
who had managed to acquire Western clothes. For the Inuit certainly raided
Norse farmhouses, which was easily done since the settlers continued to live
in scattered homesteads rather than in a town. In 1379, for instance, the
Skrælings killed eighteen Norse Greenlanders and enslaved two boys.34
A simple but important question is why the Inuit survived and flourished,
while the Norse population disappeared. The Inuit proved much more
adaptable than the Norse; they had the whole coastline of western Greenland,
and the Arctic islands beyond, as their domain, whereas the traditional
economy of the Eastern Settlement was based more on pastoralism within the
small area of what was truly green Greenland than on hunting and fishing.35
It was long assumed that the Norse colonies in Greenland died out because
the unbalanced diet left the population physically weak, a sign of which was
the poor state of several skeletons recovered at Herjólfsnes. This
degeneration was supposedly visible in the small size of the skulls of the
Greenlanders (457 skeletons having been analysed). Much of this research
was based on questionable assumptions, not just about the date of the bodies
but about how representative they were of the wider population, and about
the imagined difference between six-foot-tall Viking warriors and the shorter
folk actually dug up from the ground. After all, one would expect to find
similar evidence of physical ill-health in any medieval European cemetery,
without assuming there was a process of constant degeneration. On the other
hand, the high proportion of young women found in the graves suggests that
death in childbirth was higher than in western Europe, or maybe that women
stayed put while men went further afield – more of this in a moment.
Evidence for malnutrition in the bones is very slender. The most convincing
demographic explanation for the extinction of the Greenland colonies is a
slow but steady trickle of emigration, as the inhabitants, particularly young
males, went to search for a more profitable livelihood in Iceland or
Norway.36 In that case, the ships carrying Arctic products back to Europe
were also, very probably, carrying Greenlanders who had no intention of
returning to the land where their ancestors had lived since the year 1000.
Moreover, these Arctic products were more difficult to obtain as access to the
hunting grounds was cut off by the Inuit, who were happy to trade bearskins
and walrus tusks but expected more in exchange than curdled milk and
woollen cloth. Meanwhile, manpower became a major problem: the fields
around Brattahlíð, Eirík the Red’s original settlement, were allowed to revert
to meadow, suggesting that there were fewer people around to work the soil,
and perhaps fewer mouths to feed. Some Greenlanders may have merged into
the Inuit population, for it has been seen that the Inuit themselves preserved
tales of intermarriage. Some, it has been suggested, went in search of pastures
new in America, an opinion that can be traced right back to a seventeenth-
century Icelandic bishop, who insisted they all turned pagan as well.37
The routes from Iceland to Greenland and then from Norway to Greenland
had been in regular use during the summer months throughout the eleventh to
fourteenth centuries; there was an occasional hiatus, but the fact that Pope
Alexander VI wrote about his spiritual concern for the Greenlanders in the
year that Columbus reached the Caribbean indicates that memory of this vast
island did not evaporate: ‘the church at Gardar is situated at the world’s end’,
he stated.38 By 1492 the Greenland settlements were deserted. But, if they
ended around then, they had been in existence for half a millennium, about as
long as the period between the Portuguese rediscovery of Greenland at the
start of the sixteenth century and the writing of this book.

III

The volume of European trade with Greenland and the size of the Norse
colonies that were established there may have been small, but knowledge of
the north Atlantic was widely diffused, in works of geography produced in
northern Europe, and the discovery of Greenland and of lands beyond was
narrated in two sagas, the Greenlanders’ Saga and the Saga of Eirík the Red,
both of which were copied and edited over the centuries, with the unfortunate
effect that it is difficult to recover the original story amid later
embellishments.39 These sagas are richer in information about the Norse
discovery of what came to be known as America than they are in information
about Greenland. Even so, they only reveal the first phase of contact; Norse
mariners certainly continued to visit Labrador long after Leif Eiríksson sailed
down the coast of North America around the year 1000, in search of timber
and other raw materials. But, whereas the settlement in Iceland proved
permanent, and that in Greenland lasted for centuries, it proved impossible to
create anything more than temporary settlements in North America. The
Norse voyages to America testify to the skill of these navigators, but they
proved to be a dead end.
Before looking at the much more famous voyages to the east coast of
America, to the lands the Norse called Helluland, Markland and Vínland, a
word needs to be said about voyages northwards from Greenland that brought
the Norse to the edges of the Canadian Arctic. Here, a mass of islands vast
and small, from Baffin Island and Ellesmere Island to tiny Dorset Island,
offered opportunities to Greenlanders of the Western Settlement in search of
narwhal and walrus ivory, polar bears and seal or whale blubber (used in
lighting as well as in food). On at least one occasion in the thirteenth century
or later Norse Greenlanders penetrated as far as 72°55′N, leaving a runic
inscription: ‘Erling Sigvaðsson and Bjarni Þordarson and Enriði Ásson on the
Saturday before the minor Rogation Day [25 April], built these cairns.’ In
1266 an expedition to the north saw Inuit houses but was frightened off by
the large number of polar bears, which prevented the Norsemen from
landing; and a couple of small Inuit carvings from sites in western Greenland
are thought to portray a European with whom the Inuit came into contact.40
An arrowhead found on a farm in the Western Settlement was manufactured
out of meteoric iron obtained in north-western Greenland, which suggests
that the Norse traders sometimes obtained iron from the Inuit, not just from
Norwegian merchants.41 A case has been made for Norse visits to an
improbably welcoming environment, Ellesmere Island, at 83°N, one of the
northernmost large islands in the world, which turns out to be largely free
from snow (though not from ice), and in past times hosted a large population
of musk oxen, as well as plenty of plants and lichens on which they can
graze; in some areas, summer temperatures hover between 10 and 15°C.
Fragments of Norse chain mail and an iron rivet have been found there,
underneath the remains of an Inuit house; but, despite the enthusiastic
assertions of some writers, these and other bits and pieces do not prove the
Norse went there – rather, they suggest that Norsemen traded with Inuit who
travelled up to Ellesmere Island.42 There were no doubt extreme cases where
adventurousness carried Greenlanders beyond their normal hunting grounds,
but trips to Disko Island were much more regular: here a great amount of
driftwood would arrive, carried down from Siberia.43
A tiny fragment of larch assumed to be from a ship tells a story that is in its
own way as rich as the two sagas. Found in Greenland, it comes from a tree
that did not grow in Greenland, Iceland or Norway, but existed in profusion
in north-eastern Canada.44 It is not driftwood: that was not of sufficient
quality for building anything large and strong, and it degrades in the water.
Then there are the tiny traces found at the ‘Farm beneath the Sands’ on the
Western Settlement in Greenland: fragments of bear fur, not from local polar
bears but black or brown bears, of the sort that inhabit northern Canada, as
well as bits of bison hair. An arrowhead found near graves in the same area
originated somewhere around Hudson Bay. Moreover, two sets of Icelandic
annals tell of a ship that arrived unexpectedly from a place beyond Greenland
called Markland; this was in 1347, and it had been blown off course: ‘There
came also a ship from Greenland, smaller in size than the small Icelandic
boats; she came into the outer Straumfjord, and had no anchor. There were
seventeen men on board. They had made a voyage to Markland, but were
afterwards storm-driven here.’45 The assumption is that the ship had sailed to
Markland in search of timber. The place name would have been familiar to an
Icelandic, and indeed a Scandinavian, audience.
The geographical treatise from Iceland which suggests that Africa
somehow embraced lands to the west of Greenland seems to go back to the
twelfth century, even though the surviving text dates from around 1300. This
states:

To the north of Norway lies Finnmark [Lapland]; from there the land
sweeps north-east and east to Bjarmaland [Permia], which renders
tribute to the king of Prussia. From Permia there is uninhabited land
stretching all the way to the north until Greenland begins. To the
south of Greenland lies Helluland and then Markland; and from there
it is not far to Vínland, which some people think extends from
Africa.46

This describes a closed Atlantic (rather in the way that Ptolemy had assumed
there existed a closed Indian Ocean), with Greenland linked to Europe by
way of an Arctic landmass. The statement may be even older than the
Greenlanders’ Saga, of about 1200, and the Saga of Eirík the Red, written
down in the mid-thirteenth century. Of these, the Greenlanders’ Saga claims
to record the memories of one of the key participants in the discovery of the
three territories of Helluland, Markland and Vínland, Þorfinn Karlsefni, while
the Saga of Eirík the Red is richer in obvious fantasy, such as an attack
launched on Norse visitors to these new lands by a Uniped, a single-footed
humanoid who was supposed to inhabit Africa – hence, in part, the
assumption that Vínland was linked to Africa. And this betrays the influence
not just of medieval bestiaries and other imaginative literature, but of
classical writers since, as has been seen, the Icelanders were devouring Latin
texts from Europe with an enthusiasm barely matched anywhere else (a
possible source is Isidore of Seville, writing around AD 600).47
Medieval fantasies about lands to the west are well matched by modern
fantasies about who ‘discovered’ America. That the Norse reached North
America is not in doubt. But, in one version, Norsemen reached as far as
Minnesota, where a bogus rune-stone clearly manufactured in the nineteenth
century proves their presence in 1362. In another version, a forged fifteenth-
century map bought in an uncritical moment by Yale University supposedly
demonstrates that exact knowledge of parts of North America was circulating
in Europe in the fifteenth century, information that might have reached the
ears of Columbus, who probably visited Iceland as a young man. A little
more attention might attach to a late eleventh-century Norse penny found on
a native American site in Maine in 1957; it has excited great interest, but it
had been perforated for use as jewellery and had almost certainly worked its
way south along the existing trade routes, passing from hand to hand.48 It is
better to turn to the sagas and to try to make sense of what they say and of
how it fits with archaeological evidence from North America.

IV

In the Greenlanders’ Saga we learn that new land to the west of Greenland
was first spied out by Bjarni Herjólfson, who was trying to reach Greenland
from Iceland in around 985 but was blown off course. He realized that the
hills and woodland that came into view could not be craggy, icy Greenland
and refused even to land to take on water and wood. He also saw what he
called a ‘worthless’ land, with mountains and a glacier, before putting in at
Herjólfsnes, which was named after the farm of his father, Herjólf. ‘People
thought he had showed great lack of curiosity, since he could tell them
nothing about these countries’; on the other hand, ‘there was now great talk
of discovering new countries’.49 The most enthusiastic Greenlander was Leif
Eiríksson, the son of the colony’s founder, Eirík the Red, who was by now
too old and tired to take part in new adventures. Leif has been described as ‘a
tremendous sailor, and the first skipper reported to have made direct voyages
between Greenland, Scotland, Norway, and back again’.50 The sagas
disagree whether there were six or three expeditions to the new lands, and the
Saga of Eirík the Red does not even mention the incurious Bjarni.
 Leif and his men came first to the land Bjarni had considered worthless,
and they agreed with that view; it was given the name Helluland, meaning
‘the land of slabs of rock’. Further south, though, they discovered white
sandy beaches that fringed a flat, forested interior; this land they called
Markland, ‘the land of forests’. After another two days at sea they reached an
island and a headland; ‘in this country, night and day were of more even
length than in either Greenland or Iceland’, and the river they saw teemed
with salmon. There was an abundance of rich grass, and when one day a
German slave named Tyrkir staggered back to their camp drunk from eating
too many wild grapes they decided to call this land Vínland, ‘the land of
wine’. They built some large houses, and wintered in Vínland.51
At this point one can see how the saga-writer or his source added colour to
the story. Eating grapes does not make one drunk, though those living so far
north of wine-producing lands might be forgiven for imagining that this could
happen. The naming of the land and the story of Tyrkir have set off a debate
about where the Norse explorers landed and whether vín in Vínland really
means ‘wine’; the term vin for ‘fertile land’ is sometimes presented as the
true etymology, but in Old Norse the vowels i and í were quite distinct, and it
really does seem that the travellers reached a land where fruit that at least
looked like grapes grew in profusion. One suggestion is that they actually
found gooseberries, which do resemble a rather hairy grape, or that Old
Norse confused currants and grapes. If, on the other hand, they did find wild
grapes, they must have arrived in southern Nova Scotia or the borderlands of
Canada and the United States, while it is possible they reached as far south as
modern Boston.52
A second expedition, led by Leif’s brother Þorvald, returned to Leif’s
houses in Vínland, and the prospects for settlement seemed good, until they
found three skin-covered boats that lay upturned on a beach, with three men
underneath each boat. There is no evidence these men meant any harm, but
they killed eight, though one escaped; and then they realized that there was
some sort of settlement not far off, and before long they came under attack
from a swarm of skin-boats, manned by people they called ‘Skrælings’, a
term that they also came to apply to the Inuit. Its meaning was something like
‘wretches’.53 Leif was known as ‘Leif the Lucky’ after he rescued a
shipwrecked crew off Greenland; but Þorvald might have been called ‘the
Unlucky’, because, while he was away from Leif’s camp, he was hit by an
arrow that passed through a narrow opening between the gunwale of his ship
and his shield. Þorvald died in Vínland; and this was a portent of future
trouble between the Greenlanders and the native Americans.54
Soon after, back in Greenland, Þorfinn Karlsefni, a successful Norwegian
trader, went to stay with Leif Eiríksson and fell in love with the beautiful
widow Guðrið, whom he married. They became a formidable pair; stories of
Vínland continued to be told, and Guðrið urged her husband to fit out an
expedition – in the end he recruited sixty men and five women. ‘They took
livestock of all kinds, for they intended to make a permanent settlement there
if at all possible.’ They based themselves at Leif’s camp, cutting a cargo of
timber and living comfortably off the land. Only after one winter did they
encounter the Skrælings. At first things went badly. The Norse settlers had
brought a bull that became excited by the great number of Skrælings who
suddenly appeared out of the woods. Bellowing at them and charging, the
bull frightened many of them away.
Curiosity and the wish to trade (rather than fight) gained the upper hand,
and the Skrælings returned, offering furs and pelts in return for weapons.
Karlsefni, sensibly anticipating the trouble that trade in weapons would bring
to much later generations of settlers in North America, insisted that the Norse
could only offer milk, which the women in the colony carried out to the
Skrælings, who were delighted by this – ‘the Skrælings carried away their
purchases in their bellies.’55 Just in case relations turned sour, Karlsefni had
a palisade built around the settlement, and Guðrið gave birth to the first
European known to have been born on American soil. However, the
Skrælings were turning troublesome; they were caught trying to steal
weapons, and before long a battle broke out between the Norse and the
Skrælings. Karlsefni decided that the time had come to load his rich cargo of
furs and pelts on his ship and return to Greenland; his instincts as a trader
came to the fore. Eventually he took his cargo all the way to Norway, where
he sold his wares, ‘and he and his wife were made much of by the noblest in
the country’.56
As he was about to sail back towards Iceland a German from Bremen
called on him. He wanted to buy a decorative wooden carving that was
displayed on Karlsefni’s ship. ‘I do not want to sell it,’ Karlsefni replied. ‘I
shall give you half a mark of gold for it,’ said the southerner. Karlsefni
realized what a good offer this was and agreed. But he did not know what
type of wood it was; however, ‘it had come from Vínland’.57 Maybe it was
the work of a native American, and that was why the Bremen merchant
thought it so remarkable.
Another attempt at settlement in Leif’s camp followed later, and now
Freydis, the illegitimate daughter of Eirík the Red, went out with the
colonists. However, this time the trouble that flared was between the settlers
themselves, with one group being reproved for storing their wares in the
houses Leif had built. They went off and set up their own settlement not far
from Leif’s original one, but Freydis, whose brutality places her at the other
end of the spectrum from the firm but good-natured Guðrið, had them killed,
and when she found that none of her male companions would kill her
victims’ womenfolk, she took an axe and murdered five women as well, a
‘monstrous deed’ for which she was never punished in Greenland, but which
brought her disgrace. Maybe one reason she escaped punishment was her
heroic behaviour diring a Skræling attack, recounted, perhaps fancifully, by
the Saga of Eirík the Red: ‘when the Skrælings came rushing towards her she
pulled one of her breasts out of her bodice and slapped it with the sword. The
Skrælings were terrified at the sight of this and fled back to their boats and
hastened away.’ She was a latter-day Brünnhilde. However, the saga says,
‘although the land was excellent they could never live there in safety or
freedom from fear, because of the native inhabitants. So they made ready to
leave the place and return home.’ On the way they captured a couple of
Skræling boys in Markland and took them home, learning something about
the ways of the people they had encountered. These boys may well have been
Inuit, but further south they had probably met the Mic-Mac Indians, who
would see Europeans once again when John Cabot landed in Newfoundland
in 1497.58 Guðrið had a much more honourable life than Freydis, and
eventually went on pilgrimage to Rome, and the longhouse where she lived
after her return from Vínland and Greenland has been plausibly identified.
She ended her life as an anchorite living in Iceland, celebrated for her
Christian piety. Through her American son, Snorri, and another child, she
was also the ancestress of generations of distinguished Icelanders.59
So much for the information contained in the Greenlanders’ Saga, and to
some extent the Saga of Eirík the Red. Even so, the fantastic elements throw
the reader off balance. Did Þorstein Eiríksson and his wife, Grimhild, really
sit up in bed after they had died of a plague that ravaged Þorstein’s crew –
maybe some disease they had picked up in America?60 And that is a story
from the less fanciful of the two sagas about Vínland. This is where
archaeology has once again come to the rescue, even if the physical remains
are rather less impressive than those still standing in Greenland. In 1960
Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, who had spent many years scouring the areas
of North America within reasonable range of Greenland, identified a site on
the northern tip of Newfoundland as a Norse settlement, even though it
became obvious that it was only occupied for a score of years at the start of
the eleventh century. It would be tempting to identify L’Anse aux Meadows
as the place where Leif Eiríksson struck camp, although the location does not
match the description in the sagas: this is some way north of the area where
wild grapes can be found, and questions have been raised about its suitability
as a harbour and about the mildness of winter weather, which was a point
made in the saga description of Leif’s camp. A harbour it must have been,
though, as the finds included boat sheds in which rather small boats could be
stored, the sort of vessel that, as has been seen, was often used by Norse
hunters travelling north from the Western Settlement in Greenland.
There can be no doubt that this was a Norse site. As well as a bathhouse,
there was a charcoal kiln and a forge; the site contained a deposit of bog iron,
which may be why the Norse stopped here – this was certainly something the
native population never used, and yet access to iron and to smelting facilities
would make a settlement much more viable: ships could be repaired, tools
could be made, altogether the settlers would become less dependent on
Greenland, which in any case could not offer them iron. A spindle whorl
indicates that women inhabited the site, as spinning was women’s work. It is
certainly possible that the buildings were constructed by another group of
Greenlanders than those we hear about in the sagas; but the best bet is that the
sagas were optimistic about the resources of Vínland, or at least the area
around Leif’s settlement, and that this was indeed where the explorers created
a base. From this base they did travel further south, as remains of butternut
squash, which does not grow at such a high latitude, were found on the site.
Thus, even if it originated as Leif’s camp, it became a service station on the
route south; but whether the Norse built other settlements in the south, or
simply travelled down for trade (as they travelled up Greenland for hunting)
is an open question, as is the question whether they would have counted this
area as Markland or Vínland.61 The obvious conclusion is that, for a brief
period, there did exist trade in American furs and pelts, against which the
Norse increasingly preferred to offer strips of cloth (according to the sagas);
but dealing with the Skrælings was not straightforward, and the risks were
rapidly seen to outweigh the advantages. On the other hand, the Norse stay
was so short that there was no need to create a cemetery: no skeletons have
been found on the site.
Whether or not Norsemen reached as far north as Ellesmere Island, it is
certain that Markland supplied the Greenlanders with wood. It was easily
reached by following currents that headed north from the two Greenland
settlements and then curved round, taking ships themselves built out of
Markland wood past Baffin Island to the coast of Labrador and, eventually,
the forested areas close to the sea. Unlike the voyages linking Greenland to
Iceland and Norway, then, the Norse voyages to Vínland and Markland did
not become regular, and settlement among hostile native inhabitants was not
an option. The Norse traders’ presence in America did not transform the
maritime world in the way that the expeditions of Columbus, Cabot and
Vespucci would do 500 years later, yet links to North America did not cease.
This is not to claim that the Norse traders knew that Markland and Vínland
were anything but large islands comparable to Iceland and Greenland – or
maybe part of Asia, but this was not something about which they greatly
cared.
 22

From Russia with Profit

During the centuries of the Iceland trade and the Greenland trade, much more
intensive maritime networks were developing further to the east, in the
connected space of the Baltic and the North Sea, the ‘Mediterranean of the
North’, into which, by way of Bergen, the Arctic luxuries discussed in the
previous chapter were fed.1 This became an organized space; that is to say,
the activities of merchants were controlled with increasing attention by a
loose confederation of towns that had itself emerged out of corporations of
merchants. During this period, from about 1100 to about 1400, the
Mediterranean became a theatre for contest between the Genoese, the Pisans,
the Venetians and eventually the Catalans, who were often as keen to
challenge one another as they were to join campaigns against the real or
supposed enemies of Latin Christendom in the Islamic lands and in
Byzantium.2 In the ‘Mediterranean of the North’, by contrast, the unity of
purpose of the merchants is striking – there were, of course, rivalries, and
efforts were made to exclude outsiders from England or Holland, but co-
operation was the norm.
This confederation of merchants from towns along the shores of the Baltic
and the North Sea, and across great swathes of the north German hinterland,
is known as the German Hansa. Hansa or Hanse was a general term for a
group of men, such as an armed troop or a group of merchants; in the
thirteenth century the term Hansa was applied to different bodies of
merchants, German or Flemish, from a variety of regions, for instance the
Westphalian towns that gravitated around Cologne, or the Baltic towns that
were presided over by the great city of Lübeck; but in 1343 the king of
Sweden and Norway addressed ‘all the merchants of the Hansa of the
Germans’ (universos mercatores de Hansa Teutonicorum), and the idea that
this was the Hansa par excellence, a sort of super-Hansa embracing all the
little Hansas, spread thereafter.3 The phrase dudesche hanze (Middle Low
German – Deutsche Hanse in Modern High German) was used informally;
but the official term that the early Hanseatic (or, as they are sometimes
called, Hansard) merchants used for themselves in places where they
successfully installed themselves, such as Bergen in Norway or the Swedish
island of Gotland, was rather different: in Latin mercatores Romani imperii,
or in Low German coepmanne van de Roemschen rike, both meaning
‘merchants of the Roman Empire’.4 For, even in German lands far beyond
the Rhine and the Danube that had never fallen under Roman rule nobles,
knights and merchants took pride in the imperial authority of the medieval
German kings, most of whom received the crown of the Holy Roman Empire.
The major Hansa city in the Baltic, Lübeck, was elevated to the special status
of a free imperial city by Emperor Frederick II in 1226, having already
received privileges from his grandfather Frederick Barbarossa in the twelfth
century. Since the Danish king had been making his own bid to gain control
of Lübeck and the neighbouring lands of Schleswig, the German ruler
understood how important it was to win the loyalty of the Lübeckers.5
 To a striking degree, accounts of Hanseatic history have been moulded by
modern political concerns. In the late nineteenth century, Bismarck and the
Kaisers dreamed of making Germany into a naval power capable of
confronting the British at sea. The difficulty was that Great Britain appeared
to possess a naval tradition that Germany lacked; with a little probing,
however, just such a tradition was discovered, in the fleets of the Hansa
cities. That the Hansa was a German, or at least Germanic, phenomenon was
easy to demonstrate: there were, it was true, Flemings, Swedes and other non-
Germans whose towns took part in Hanseatic trade, but these people shared a
common Germanic ancestry, and German merchants in such centres as Visby
and Stockholm formed the core of the original merchant community. Such
ideas were taken still further by historians writing under the Third Reich. By
now the Hansa was associated not just with racial purity but with German
conquest, because the cities founded along the shores of the Baltic by
merchants and crusaders, of which more shortly, could be presented as
glittering beacons of the ‘Drive to the East’ that had subjugated, and would
once again subjugate, the Slav and Baltic peoples. Even after the fall of the
Third Reich, the politicization of Hansa history continued, though in new
directions. Since several of the most important Hanseatic towns, such as
Rostock and Greifswald, lay along the shores of the now vanished German
Democratic Republic, East German historians took an interest in the Hansa.
They were wedded to Marxist ideas about class structure, and they made
much of the ‘bourgeois’ character of these cities, which were by and large
self-governing communities, able until the fifteenth century to fend off the
attempts by local princes to draw them into their political web. East German
historians also laid a strong emphasis on evidence for political protest among
the artisan class in the Hansa towns, and they asked themselves whether these
were places where a precocious proto-capitalism came into existence
(whatever that term might mean).6
Following the collapse of the discredited East German regime,
interpretations of the history of the Hansa have swung in a different direction,
with German historians once again taking the lead. The Hansa is now held up
as a model of regional integration, an economic system that crossed political
boundaries by linking together Germany, England, Flanders, Norway,
Sweden, the future Baltic states and even Russia. Andrus Ansip, Prime
Minister of Estonia, celebrated the entry of his country into the Eurozone by
declaring: ‘the EU is a new Hansa’. Modern German accounts of the Hansa
barely conceal their authors’ satisfaction that German economic dominance
within Europe has what appear to be inspiring precedents going right back to
the Middle Ages: the German Hansa encouraged free trade among its
members and constituted a ‘superpower of money’.7 There was even a
degree of political integration, since commercial law followed a limited
number of models; at first many maritime cities followed the sea law of
Visby in Gotland, but over time the commercial law followed in Lübeck
became standard. However, a leading French historian of the Hansa, Philippe
Dollinger, took exception to the common term ‘Hanseatic League’, because
the German Hansa was not one league with a central organization and
bureaucracy, like the European Union, but a medley of leagues, some created
only in the short term to deal with particular problems. He very sensibly
suggested that the term ‘Hanseatic Community’ fits best of all.8
All these ways of reading the history of the Hansa distort its past in a
broadly similar way. The German Hansa was not simply a maritime trading
network. By the fourteenth century it had become a major naval power, able
to defeat rivals for control of the waters where its members traded. Less often
noticed is the significance of the inland cities that played a very important
role in Hanseatic trade with England, operating under the leadership of
Cologne.9 Of its three major trading counters outside the network of
Hanseatic cities, places where the Hanseatics were permitted to create their
own towns within a town, one, Novgorod, lay inland, though the other two,
Bergen and London, were only accessible by sea. The Hansa was a land
power (or maybe one should say river power) as well as a sea power, and its
ability to draw together the interests of cities in the German hinterland and
cities that gave access to the sea lent it enormous economic strength. It was a
source of supply for luxury goods such as furs from Russia, spices from the
Levant (by way of Bruges) and amber from the Baltic; but its members were
even more active carrying uncountable barrels of herring, vast supplies of
wind-dried cod, or the rye produced along the shores of the Baltic on the
lands of the Teutonic Knights. Indeed, the link to this crusading order of
knights, lords of large parts of Prussia and Estonia, was so close that the
Grand Master of the German Order, to give the Knights their correct name,
was a member of the Hanseatic parliament, or Diet. As well as supplying a
good part of the food the Hansa cities required if they were to survive and
grow, the Grand Master was overlord of several towns that the German
merchants had set up along the southern shores of the Baltic.10
The presence of a crusading Military Order in the deliberations of the
German Hansa acts as a reminder that the medieval conquest of the Baltic
was not simply the result of merchant endeavours. Just as the Genoese,
Pisans and Venetians took full advantage of the crusades in the
Mediterranean to install themselves in the trading centres of the eastern
Mediterranean, the arrival of German merchants in Prussia, Livonia (roughly
Latvia) and Estonia was rendered possible by the victories of the ‘northern
crusades’, wars against pagans and sometimes against the Orthodox Russians
in which two German Military Orders, the Sword Brethren and the Teutonic
Knights, played a leading role, as did the Danish and Swedish kings. The
Sword Brethren came into existence at the start of the thirteenth century,
when Albert von Buxhövden, an enterprising cleric with close family links to
the archbishop of Hamburg–Bremen, arrived in Latvia with twenty-three
ships, carrying 500 crusaders. His aim was always to create a permanent
German presence in the area, and so he established a trading centre at Riga in
1201. This also became the base for the crusading brethren, whose mission
was to convert the local Livs (a people related to the Finns and the
Estonians), if need be by force. The ‘northern crusades’ borrowed concepts
and vocabulary from the more celebrated crusades to the Holy Land,
portraying their wars as the defence of lands dedicated to the Mother of God,
just as the expeditions to Jerusalem were conducted in defence of the
patrimony of the Son of God; in due course the Teutonic Knights would
name their command centre in Prussia Marienburg, ‘the fortress of St Mary’.
Without constant supplies of state-of-the-art weaponry brought across the
Baltic on Hansa ships, these campaigns against wily, well-trained, obstinate
native peoples had little chance of success; as it was, the ferocity of the
German onslaught did more to unite the opposition than to break it down.11
Very soon the conquest of Livonian territory became an end in itself, and
interest in the spiritual life of the Livs waned, if indeed it had ever been
strong. A contemporary writer named Henry, who wrote a chronicle of the
conquest of Livonia, insisted that all the violence against the Livs was in a
good cause; as pagans, they had robbed, killed and committed sexual
depravity, including incest, but after baptism they were subject to holy
correction, which often seemed to work. On one occasion Sword Brethren
fighting Estonian pagans maintained a siege of a heathen stronghold for
several days, calmly killing their prisoners in sight of the besieged, until the
Estonians had had enough: ‘we acknowledge your God to be greater than our
gods. By overcoming us, he has inclined our hearts to worship him.’ As at the
time of the conversion of the Scandinavians, the message was that Christ was
a warrior to be respected above all other leaders.12 The Brethren formed part
of the bishop of Riga’s entourage until they began to interfere in the Danish
lands that had been carved out of Estonia, including the trading city the
Danes had created there – Reval, or Tallinn (which may mean ‘castle of the
Danes’).13 By 1237, this and other scandals had reached the ears of the
papacy, with the result that the Sword Brethren were incorporated willy-nilly
into the larger and better-organized Teutonic Knights; but by then the Sword
Brethren had already extended the German military presence, and by
extension the German trading presence, far along the southern shores of the
Baltic.14
As the foundation of Tallinn suggests, the thirteenth-century conquest of
the Baltic was not solely achieved by Germans. The political ambitions of the
Danish and Swedish kings, often in competition with one another, also
transformed this area, and offered yet more opportunities to German
merchants. From the foundation of Stockholm, around 1252, German
merchants were made welcome in the island city, because the Swedish rulers
understood that the resources they needed for their wars of conquest had in
large part to come from the profits of trade. Scandinavian raids brought the
Finnish coast under the rule of the Swedish kings, and Estonia fell under
Danish rule for a time, until it was handed on to the Teutonic Knights.
Without violence to the evidence, these attacks can be seen as a continuation
of the wars fought by earlier Danish and Swedish rulers, and by Viking
raiders, in the days when Haithabu and Wolin were major trading bases
perched on the edge of pagan principalities.
The history of this period, known largely from German and Scandinavian
writings produced by Christians who were fiercely critical of their pagan
neighbours, is too easily presented as a one-way movement of ruthless
crusading armies and navies eastwards into the Baltic lands. The reality on
the ground was more complex. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the
Slavs, Balts and Finno-Ugrians who inhabited the Baltic shores, mostly
pagan, were launching their own Viking-style raids against German and
Danish ships and settlements. Just as the Anglo-Saxons had once prayed for
deliverance from the wrath of the Northmen, so in medieval Denmark prayers
were uttered beseeching deliverance from Curonian raiders, the pagan
inhabitants of what is now the west coast of Latvia; in 1187 Estonian raiders
reached as far as the important trading base of Sigtuna, on Lake Mälaren,
which they sacked, having outwitted the Swedish defences. It was a feat
worthy of those Vikings who in earlier centuries had navigated down the
Seine or the Guadalquivir with the aim of sacking the rich towns of France
and Spain.15 Looking further ahead, the Swedish king, Birger, informed the
Hansa in 1295 that he had conquered the Karelians, in southern Finland, and
had converted them to Christianity; this was perfectly just, he argued, since
they had been launching pirate attacks on Christian shipping, and had
routinely disembowelled their victims. He had also constructed a castle at
Viborg ‘to the honour of God and the glorious Virgin, both for the protection
of our kingdom and for the safety and peace of seafarers’. From Viborg, King
Birger proposed to keep a watchful eye on trade towards Russia, even
limiting the number of Russian merchants who could board Baltic shipping.
What he really wanted was a stake in the fur trade out of Russia, and to
extend his political control over the southern shores of Finland.16 As trade
across the sea grew in volume, German and Scandinavian ships became more
obvious targets for raiders of all descriptions. Imposing order on these
dangerous seas would, however, produce handsome returns. Trade and
crusade were intimately entangled, whether in the Baltic or in the
Mediterranean; but political ambitions also counted for much in the
calculations of the crusading kings of Sweden.

II
Why the Germans became dominant in the Baltic and the North Sea is a good
question. After all, around 1100, German ships were not seen as often in the
North Sea or the Baltic as Scandinavian ones, while the Flemings were a
notable presence on the river routes of northern Europe, and further south in
Germany there were busy communities of Jewish merchants, especially
active in the wine trade; whether deliberately excluded or simply not
interested in the far-flung north, the German Jews took no part in the
transformation of the Baltic and the North Sea led by the Hansa.17 Until
Lübeck began to flourish in the twelfth century there were no German towns
on the Baltic, and the area that became the German Democratic Republic did
indeed have a different identity to the rest of Germany: its inhabitants were
pagan Slavs, notably the Wends, or Sorbians, who still survive in the
Spreewald near Berlin. The predecessor of Lübeck, Liubice, or Alt-Lübeck,
consisted of a fortress established by a knes, or prince, of the Polabian Slavs,
while not far off another very small Slav settlement lay at Rostock, in
Abotrite territory; beyond lay Rugians, Wagrians, Pomeranians – Szczecin
(Stettin), close to the modern German–Polish border, was famous for its three
pagan temples and its strong walls.18 There was an enormous variety of
different peoples speaking different languages or dialects, and the
fragmentation into small groups rendered all of them much more vulnerable
to the organized onslaughts of the Germans and the Danes. But there was
plenty of peaceful contact too; several of these Slavonic peoples were happy
to trade across the sea, which was also visited by Russian merchants, who
were arriving in Gotland off Sweden, and reaching Schleswig in 1157. There
can be no doubt that they were arriving much earlier, because links to Russia
went back to the period when Scandinavian princes had become rulers of
Kiev; Varangian merchants from Sweden had long been familiar with the
river routes that extended far to the south, through Ukraine and, with a short
hop overland, to the Black Sea. However, the twelfth-century Russian
merchants came from Novgorod rather than Kiev, selling furs and pelts from
the edges of the Arctic that had filtered down to Novgorod itself.19
The transformation of this region was, however, the work of Germans, by
which one means speakers of a group of languages which (in their late
medieval written form) goes under the name of Middle Low German, and
which, at first glance, looks more like Dutch than the High German of further
south, meaning that relations with Flemings and Hollanders were easy to
maintain. Two places dominated the Baltic in the early days of the Hansa:
Gotland, particularly its largest town, Visby; and Lübeck. It might seem odd
that one of these places was not in German territory at all, but on a Swedish
island; but, as has been seen, Lübeck too was barely in Germany, if by
Germany is understood the area inhabited by German-speakers. Lübeck was
not on exactly the same site as the old town of Liubice, which was more
exposed.20 The foundation of the new city happened in stages, first with the
destruction of Liubice in wars between Slavs and Germans, and then with the
creation of a new town by the ruler of Holstein, Adolf von Schauenburg, in
1143. This was a bad moment, since soon afterwards the papacy declared a
crusade on three fronts – not just the Second Crusade, which took the French
and German kings off to Syria in the vain hope of conquering Damascus, but
encouragement to the Christian armies fighting the Muslims in Spain, and a
war against the pagan Wends which the pope would have preferred the
German king to join.
The pope was rightly worried that two kings on crusade to the East would
only obstruct one another, which is exactly what happened. In 1147, during
the war against the Wends, the Abotrite ruler, Niklot, attacked Lübeck; but it
was already well enough defended to resist him. On the other hand, it proved
more difficult to resist the growing power of Henry the Lion – the duke of
Saxony and one of the greatest princes in Germany – who refounded Lübeck
in 1159, and granted it the iura honestissima, ‘the most honourable charter of
town rights’, rights that were confirmed by the German emperor, Barbarossa,
even after he had destroyed the power of his rival Henry in the 1180s. This
gave the leading citizens power over law-making, and established them as the
city elite.21 A German chronicler, Helmold von Bosau, was strongly of the
view that Henry was only interested in making money, and did not really care
whether the Slavs in the surrounding countryside turned Christian; but Henry
certainly had a good sense of what was needed to make his new city flourish:

The duke sent envoys into the northern towns and states, Denmark,
Sweden, Norway and Russia, offering them peace and free right of
access through his town of Lübeck. He also established there a mint
and a market and granted the town the highest privileges. From that
time onwards there was ever-increasing activity in the town and the
number of its inhabitants rose considerably.22
He was particularly keen to attract merchants from Visby, for he understood
that a network linking Gotland, situated right in the middle of the Baltic, and
Lübeck, with its access to the interior, would be extremely profitable. From
1163, Gotlanders were allowed to come to Lübeck free of tolls, though Henry
expected reciprocal rights for Lübeckers visiting Gotland. Lübeck grew and
grew; although the size of its population before 1300 is pure guesswork, the
city is thought to have had 15,000 inhabitants at the start of the fourteenth
century, and in the late fourteenth century – a time when plague had
depopulated much of Europe – the population may have reached 20,000.23
Lübeck looked in two directions. Westwards, a short overland route
connected the new city to Hamburg, giving access to the North Sea, and this
was guaranteed by a formal agreement between the towns in 1241; by the
fourteenth century, the narrow sea passage through the Øresund, or Sound,
between Denmark and what is now southern Sweden, took priority.
Naturally, use of that route depended on the approval of the king of Denmark,
and relations between Lübeck and the Danes were not always easy. In the
very early days, Henry the Lion boosted Lübeck by working closely with
King Valdemar of Denmark to conquer the coastline that stretched east from
Lübeck towards the large island of Rügen, where the statue of the Slav god
Svantovit was ‘hacked to pieces and cast into the fire’. That done, the Danish
king seized the temple treasures he found there. There was always the danger
that the king of Denmark would come to regard these shores as his own little
empire. One important result of these conquests was the foundation of
satellite towns within the commercial orbit of Lübeck, towns that followed
the Lübeck legal code; Rostock has been mentioned, established at the start
of the thirteenth century, and a similar story of foundation, with the blessing
of local territorial lords, applied at Danzig and elsewhere. These princes,
whether German or Slav, were keen to draw in the profits of expanding trade;
but the new towns acted as agents for the growing population of the German
heartlands, who took the opportunity to settle the countryside alongside or in
lieu of the existing Slav population – Netherlanders arrived as far afield as
the Upper Elbe, where they introduced drainage schemes they had learned in
their own boggy homeland, and left behind Dutch dialects that were still to be
heard at the start of the twentieth century. This ‘Drive to the East’, Drang
nach Osten, was both maritime and terrestrial.24
Only defeat in 1226 checked the apparently irresistible rise of the Danish
coastal empire, which for a time even included Lübeck. The German
emperor, Frederick II, looked on, but those who led the assault were the
count of Schwerin, one of his often troublesome subjects, and the Lübeckers
themselves.25 However, the Danes refused to stop interfering, and the
ambitions of Valdemar IV Atterdag, the Danish king, who reigned from 1340
to 1375, drew together the Hansa cities. His relentless attempt to overwhelm
Visby and Gotland, and to create a base there for Baltic expansion, was
checked amid massive slaughter in 1361; the hideously wounded skeletons of
the besiegers are a ghoulish motif of Swedish museums.26 When they at last
made peace with the Danes at Stralsund in 1370, the Hansa cities were even
able to insist that Valdemar’s successor would need to meet with their
approval before he could be crowned king. That was a prestigious prize; but
there were other prizes that were more valuable still: the Danes were forced
to cede to the Hansa the towns that controlled traffic through the narrow
passage of the Øresund – Helsingborg, Malmö and other places.27
This, then, was a glorious future, whose triumphs were expressed in the
handsome Gothic buildings that the Lübeckers constructed at huge expense
out of brick; there were grand churches, such as the Marienkirche and Sankt
Petri in Lübeck, but also streets of gabled merchant houses, and these became
the model copied by the masons of Rostock, Greifswald, Bremen, and of city
after city along the great arc that stretched from Bruges to Tallinn. The design
of these houses was determined by the simple need to incorporate a
warehouse as well as an office and living quarters, because the Hanseatic
merchants looked after their own goods rather than depositing them in central
warehouses, as often happened in the Mediterranean. Yet the most successful
merchants also sought to show off their wealth with Gothic frills and other
touches of grandeur, such as a façade coated in imported stone to distinguish
their home from the frontages on either side.28 Artists from Lübeck such as
Bernt Notke and Hermen Rode, the creator of massive carved altarpieces,
were in great demand as far away as central Sweden, so that cogs sometimes
carried not just rye and herrings but carefully wrapped masterpieces destined
for the churches of Stockholm and elsewhere.29 A common legal standard,
the maritime law of Lübeck, ensured that commercial disputes would be
solved by similar means in places very far apart. A common language, Low
German, took over from Latin as the medium in which to record business
transactions. The middle classes in the Hansa towns did not learn letters in
order to dispute the ideas of St Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, even though
Lübeck and other cities had their share of wealthy convents, and both
Rostock and Greifswald acquired universities that still survive, founded in
1419 and 1456; an ability to read and write oiled the wheels of commerce.30

III

Late medieval Lübeck gloried in the title Caput Hanse, ‘head of the Hansa’,
but in the early days of what was to become the German Hansa, Visby
exercised more influence than Lübeck, benefiting from its excellent position
in the middle of the southern Baltic.31 A self-governing community of
German traders began to coalesce; on its seal it proudly proclaimed itself to
be the universitas mercatorum Romani imperii Gotlandiam frequentantium,
‘the corporation of merchants of the Roman Empire visiting Gotland’. This
word universitas had not yet become a term of art for places of advanced
learning, and retained its generalized meaning of ‘community’, ‘corporation’,
not so different from the vernacular term Hansa. In the thirteenth century,
enough Germans had settled permanently on the island to form a second,
parallel, self-governing group, using a similar seal, but with the word
manentium, ‘remaining in’, replacing frequentantium, ‘visiting’. The
Germans had their own very magnificent church, St Mary of the Germans,
which now serves as Visby cathedral; the Germans also, as was typical at the
time, used it as a safe place to store goods and money. In addition to a quite
formidable line of walls, more than two miles (about 3.5 km) in length, Visby
contains over a dozen sizeable medieval churches, but following the city’s
decline at the end of the Middle Ages all but St Mary’s fell into disrepair.
Birka may have been the first town in Sweden, but Visby was its first city.
One of Visby’s grandest churches, Sankt Lars, betrays the influence of
Russian architectural styles, and a small church in the south of the island
contains frescoes in a Byzantine–Russian style; there was also a Russian
Orthodox church in Visby, though this is now buried underneath a café. For
Gotland was the great emporium where Russian goods such as furs and wax
were received, having travelled part of the way by river, through Lake
Ladoga and up the Neva into the Baltic, and then across what could be
dangerous waters to Gotland itself. At the other end of the route, in
Novgorod, the Gotlanders possessed their own trading colony, or ‘Gothic
Court’, which included a church dedicated to the Norwegian king, St Olaf, in
existence by about 1080.32 Novgorod was not an ancient city, as its name,
‘New City’, suggests: tests carried out on the wooden streets of medieval
Novgorod, excavated in the 1950s, take the city’s history no further back than
950.33 The Baltic connection was thus of great importance to Novgorod, just
as the Russian connection was of great importance to Gotland; and Henry the
Lion and the Lübeckers were keen to tap into that. At first, the Germans rode
on the backs of the Gotlanders. In 1191 or 1192 Prince Yaroslav III of
Novgorod entered into a treaty with the Gotlanders and the Germans, but it
mentions an earlier treaty, now lost – whether this included the Germans is
unknown.34
Within twenty years another prince of Novgorod, Konstantin, granted the
Germans the right to operate from their own courtyard, dedicated to St Peter
– the Peterhof. Actually they had already set themselves up there, and had
built a stone church. The use of stone was a necessary luxury, since the
merchants stored their wealth here. Then they would go back to Visby at the
end of each winter, carrying the chest containing the funds of the community
until their return in the summer. Between the winter, when trade in ermine
and other Arctic goods was brisk, and the summer, which was a good time to
collect wax or buy the luxury goods arriving circuitously from the Black Sea
and beyond, German merchants would be absent from Novgorod. Attempts
were also made to build ties to other Russian cities, but they were never as
successful as the links to Novgorod, which had the advantage of lying not too
far inland. Once again, the sea is only part of a bigger story, since Cologne
absorbed many of these Russian goods before they were sold on to Flemish
and English businessmen.35 There was enormous demand throughout Europe
for high-quality Russian wax, most of which evaporated into the atmosphere
when it was used in church ceremonies; and the range of furs that could be
obtained from Russia and Finland was unmatched: not just plenty of cheap
rabbit and squirrel furs, but pine marten, fox, and at the top of the scale white
ermine (de rigueur at princely courts).

IV

Benefiting from their links to German cities as far away as Cologne, the early
Hansa merchants could raise the capital they needed for ambitious ventures
into Russia, carefully managed through legally binding contracts. This gave
them an advantage over traditional Scandinavian traders, who operated with
less sophisticated methods. The purchase of shares in ships rather than
ownership of an entire ship meant that one could spread the risks associated
with sea voyages across a number of investments. Contact with Russia
provided essential priming for the rise of the German Hansa; but the Baltic
and the North Sea became increasingly important to the Hanseatic traders, as
England and Norway became the focus of their longer-distance sailings,
while within the Baltic rye, herrings and other basic foodstuffs became ever
more important as the German cities grew, and as their persistent demand for
food outstripped local resources. These towns had been founded as centres of
trade and industry, but their very success turned them into major consumers
of agricultural goods. This was greatly to the advantage of those who
produced such food, above all the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, who
was also master of extensive estates where subject Prussians and Estonians
laboured on behalf of the Christian conquerors in slave-like conditions. Trade
in grain, principally rye, became the lifeline of cities as far afield as Flanders
and Holland, and this dependence would only increase over the centuries,
long after the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order had become a distant
memory in Prussia and beyond.36
The ships that the Hansa merchants used were, in the early days, mainly
cogs, with their shallow draught but generous cargo capacity; they had
developed in the North Sea and the Baltic over several centuries. A late
fourteenth-century example was found in the mud of the River Weser in 1962
and has been carefully restored for the German Maritime Museum in
Bremerhaven. Her timbers can be securely dated from their tree rings to
1378. She was twenty-four metres long, three times her maximum breadth,
and her capacity was somewhere in the region of 100 tons. She originally
possessed a square sail and a rudder at mid-stern. But she never went to sea,
to judge from the fact that not much was found on board apart from the tools
of a shipwright, so it is likely she was dragged underwater during a tidal
surge. Her construction was slightly odd (carvel planking around the keel,
with planks laid flush, rather than the clinker planking one generally expects
in northern Europe); but this was a fairly old-fashioned type of ship by 1380:
the Hansa fraternity were making increasing use of larger vessels, mounted
with ‘castles’ at each end, the ‘hulks’ that appear on many a medieval town
seal from this part of the world.37 All this has set off technical arguments
about when a cog is really a cog, though quirks of construction are only to be
expected; the term kogge was a generic description, and these ships were not
produced on an assembly line, unlike the big Venetian galleys of this period.
They were no more uniform than modern city trams, but were perfectly
recognizable as the same object; and what mattered was their seaworthiness
first and their capacity second.38
Typical or not, the Bremen cog represents the humble realities of Hansa
seafaring; silk and spices certainly reached the ports of northern Germany,
whether they had been carried all the way from the Mediterranean down
elongated sea routes favoured by the Venetian, Catalan and Florentine galleys
of the late Middle Ages, or humped overland from the warehouse of the
Germans (Fondaco dei Tedeschi) in Venice, past Bolzano and over the
Alpine passes until they reached the rich cities of southern Germany –
Nuremberg, Augsburg, Regensburg – and then embarked on further travels to
reach Lübeck and its neighbours. A modern visitor to Lübeck who did not
visit the famous marzipan emporium of the Niederegger family, founded in
1806, would be missing a great treat; but before Niederegger the city
attracted ginger, sugar and cloves as well as almonds, and – most probably
during the golden age of the Hansa – the north Germans discovered how they
could manufacture sweetmeats and spicy sausages from the exotic trade
goods that reached their cities. Fine Wurst is a Hanseatic legacy.
The fortunes of the Hansa were not, however, built out of marzipan and
gingerbread. Fish, grain and salt, apparently humble animal, vegetable and
mineral staples, were not quite such modest sources of profit as might be
supposed when they were traded in the astonishing quantities handled by the
German Hansa. Herrings had a special place in the diet of European
Christians, as far away as Catalonia: when Lent arrived, they provided the
perfect substitute for forbidden meat, all the more because methods of
preserving them became more sophisticated. The difficulty with herring is
that it is a very oily fish, and oily fish rot much faster than those with a very
low fat content, notably cod. For this reason it was possible to produce wind-
dried cod, which remained edible for a good many years (after soaking),
whereas herring had to be salted and pickled as quickly as possible after it
was caught.39 Tradition records that a Dutch sailor, Willem Beukelszoon
from Zeeland, transformed the future of the herring fisheries in the fourteenth
century, when he devised a method of pickling partly eviscerated herrings
and placing them between layers of salt in great barrels, which had to be done
immediately after they were brought on deck (the secret was to leave the liver
and pancreas in place, which improved the flavour, while removing the rest
of the guts). This seems already to have been standard Hanseatic practice, and
it was adopted in Flanders only around 1390, when fighting in the North Sea
interrupted the flow of herrings to Flanders.40 Pioneer or plagiarist,
Beukelszoon has been rated as the 157th most important Dutchman in
history, not surprisingly in a nation that loves its Nieuwe Haring so much, but
also in tribute to the fortune that the Dutch made out of exporting this humble
fish in later centuries.
Nothing, though, compared to the quantities of herring to be found in the
Baltic when the fish spawned off the coast of Skania, now the southernmost
province of Sweden but during the Middle Ages generally under Danish rule.
It was said that you could wade into the sea and scoop them out of the water
with your hands; rather than sea, there was a mass of wriggling fish: ‘the
entire sea is so full of fish that often the vessels are stopped and can hardly be
rowed clear through great exertion’, to cite an early medieval Danish
writer.41 All this gave great impetus to the fair held on the shores of Skania,
which dealt in many goods, but was most famous for its herring market;
temporary shacks were set up as housing for the thousands of people who
came to the fairs, also providing factory space for the labour force that cured,
dried and, in a myriad of other ways, treated the fish. The fairs became an
ever more attractive centre of trade as demand for these fish expanded and as
the reputation of Skania as the unsurpassed centre of this business became
known: visitors arrived from northern France, England and even Iceland.42
In the course of the fifteenth century, the herrings began to gather further
north, for an unexplained reason (maybe connected with climatic conditions),
and the glory days of the Skania fairs came to an end. But at its peak it was
not unusual for 250 ships all loaded with herring to come into port at Lübeck
alone, as happened in 1368. Annual totals just for Lübeck may have reached
70,000 barrels.43 Yet none of this could have happened without the
availability of salt to preserve the silver harvest of herrings – indeed, some
Dutch observers went further, and less poetically called it a ‘gold mine’. Here
lay Lübeck’s great advantage. Not far away, near Lüneburg Heath, lay very
extensive supplies, consisting of strong brine that was boiled down to
produce salt; this was not the cheapest process, and when in the early
fifteenth century rivals in western France began to flood the market with their
own cheaper salt (sometimes half the price, even after long-distance
transport), Lüneburg fell into decline, and Hansa merchants proved happy to
range much further afield, all the way to the Bay of Bourgneuf or even
Iberia.44
This Hanseatic world, at once contentious and co-operative, thus extended
its sights far beyond the Baltic and the North Sea. It has been seen that the
search for cheap salt took German ships all the way to western France. There
they might encounter ships from another land that were learning their way
around the Atlantic: the Portuguese, whose own base in Flanders lay at
Middelburg, close to the modern Belgian–Dutch frontier. But by the fifteenth
century the Hansards were travelling even further, reaching Portugal itself,
which they recognized as another source of salt (including the flat lands
around Lisbon); and they also recognized that Portugal was short of grain,
which they could easily supply from the rich reserves of the Baltic. They
brought all sorts of other foods to Portugal, including beer and beetroots, and
even salted fish, which was something the Portuguese could supply to
themselves in vast quantities. After the Portuguese captured the Moroccan
port of Ceuta in 1415, in the campaign where Prince Henry the Navigator
won his spurs, German ships began to bring grain as far south as Ceuta itself,
which was desperate for supplies as it was cut off from the rich grain fields
that still lay under Muslim rule. Nor was this a casual relationship: Hansards
interested in Portugal included prominent burghers of Danzig experienced in
trade with Scotland, England, Flanders and France.45 As Portugal emerged
as a significant maritime power in the fifteenth century, its Hanseatic
connections gave it access to a much larger world than the waters off Iberia.
 23

Stockfish and Spices

The calamity of the Black Death struck first the Mediterranean and then
northern Europe from 1347 to about 1351, followed by further periodic
visitations of bubonic and pneumonic plague. The heavy toll on human life –
as much as half the population in some areas – reduced pressure on supplies
of the most basic foodstuffs, notably grain, but had distorting effects on the
production and distribution of food. Land went out of cultivation as villages
lost their manpower and became unviable; migration to the towns, where
artisans were in short supply, shifted the balance between urban and rural
population, so that it was no longer broadly true that up to 95 per cent of the
population of western and northern Europe lived and worked in the
countryside; and even those peasants who remained in the countryside often
managed to cast off what remained of the shackles of serfdom. This was the
beginning of a great economic transformation, but the reconfiguration of the
economy depended on the easy movement of large quantities of food. Here,
transport by sea was of crucial importance, since it rendered possible the
movement of really substantial quantities of grain, dried fish, dairy goods,
wine, beer and other necessities or desirables, and the ability of the Hansa
merchants to exploit these opportunities meant that the years around 1400,
often characterized as a period of deep post-plague recession, were for them,
as for merchants in many other parts of the Atlantic and Mediterranean, a
time when it was possible to reap handsome profits and to answer back to
rulers who up to now had seen them as rather troublesome creatures, valuable
only as suppliers of prestige items, and greedy and unreliable.
It comes as no surprise, then, that within a few years of the Black Death
the Hansa merchants began to organize themselves much more tightly,
holding regular Diets, or Hansetage (which were also an opportunity for
Lübeck and some other leading cities to throw their weight around). This has
generally been interpreted as a shift from the ‘Hansa of the Merchants’ to the
‘Hansa of the Towns’, even the creation of what one might call a ‘Hanseatic
League’, which (in this view) would be one of a great many city-leagues that
were emerging in the fragmented territories of the German Empire at this
time, of which the most famous, because it still exists, is the league of cities
and peasant communities in southern Germany that we know as Switzerland.
Still, these leagues had no pretensions to what might be called statehood, not
that the concept of statehood would have meant much to the Hansa
merchants. Moreover, the Hansa was different from other leagues since it
included a large number of places that lay outside the Holy Roman Empire,
such as Riga and Tallinn.1 The first Diet was held at Lübeck in 1356,
following pirate attacks, unsatisfied demands for indemnity, and the
breakdown of relations with the counts of Flanders and with the city of
Bruges; solidarity between cities was the best way to force the Flemings to
restore the rights of the Hansards.2 As will be seen, the relationship between
the Hansa and Bruges was always a delicate one, because each side needed
the other, while complaints about the abuse of existing rights abounded, and
the Hansards again and again threatened to move their business to one of
Bruges’s lesser rivals. Issues of this order bound the Hansa cities together,
and by 1480 seventy-two Diets had been held. It is no surprise that fifty-four
of these gathered in Lübeck; and, apart from a single meeting in Cologne,
they were always held in towns next to or quite near the sea, such as
Bremen.3
This development did not mean that the Hansa had become a state-like
body; it remained a loose super-league, bringing together groups of allied
cities from regions as diverse as the Rhineland, where Cologne dominated,
the southern or ‘Wendish’ Baltic, which was Lübeck’s informal imperium,
and the newer cities of the eastern Baltic, of which Riga was the most
important. Minutes of the Diets were kept; but there was no administrative
superstructure, and there were no formal treaties that members signed to gain
entry to the Hansa. Maybe, indeed, this was one of its sources of strength. On
the other hand, the lack of a constitution allowed the citizens of Lübeck to
turn their de facto leadership of the Hansa to their advantage, and, despite
grumbles from Danzig and Cologne, the special status of Lübeck was never
really in doubt; its size, wealth and location gave it formidable advantages.
Including every city that at some stage was regarded as a Hansa town, the
total comes to about 200, too many to fit into the assembly hall provided by
the good burghers of Lübeck; most members were far too small to exercise
any political influence, and what they sought was tax advantages and trading
opportunities. This was particularly true of the horde of inland towns, such as
Hamelin of Pied Piper fame, or Berlin, not as yet a place of great
significance. The sections consisting of Baltic members were much smaller in
number, but their importance was out of all proportion to their slight
numbers, given the presence of Lübeck, Danzig, Riga and Visby.4 In
addition, the member cities lay under very different political regimes. Further
east, the Teutonic Knights exercised overlordship, and the host of inland
cities that occasionally sent representatives to the Hansa Diet were by and
large subject to a local duke or count, which was not a great problem around
1400, when princely power in Germany was very weak, but did become more
problematic once the princes began to claw back their power in the middle of
the fifteenth century, sometimes forbidding towns from sending
representatives to the Hansa Diet.5
 After 1356 the Hansa showed much more muscle, resisting not just the
Danes but predatory pirates known as the Vitalienbrüder, who made a
nuisance of themselves at the end of the fourteenth century; they probably
earned their strange name, the ‘Victual Brothers’, from their role as privateers
who kept Stockholm supplied with food during a Danish siege in 1392. This
siege was a dramatic moment in a war of succession that would, by the start
of the fifteenth century, see a personal union of the three Scandinavian
kingdoms; but the war spilled over into the Baltic, since the major actors
included the duke of Mecklenburg as well as an exceptionally capable and
determined royal consort, Queen Margaret of Denmark; one of the issues in
the Swedish succession was the fear that the arrival of a north German duke
as king would extend still further the powerful German influence in the
country, which was already strongly expressed through the sizeable German
community living in the boom city of Stockholm. Queen Margaret was,
however, canny enough to realize that she should cultivate the Hanseatic
cities, which were reluctant to be drawn directly into a conflict that was likely
to redraw the political map of northern Europe. She had already extended
Danish authority over southern Sweden (Skania), the area that had been ruled
from Denmark for most of the past centuries.6 Once the siege of Stockholm
was over, the Vitalienbrüder held on to their ships and preyed on Hanseatic
and other vessels in the Baltic. The herring fisheries fell under threat, and for
a few years supplies to the rest of the world faltered. Queen Margaret even
appealed to King Richard II of England for naval aid, to help clear the Baltic
and reopen the supply lanes. This appeal failed, and if anything the result was
to stimulate the search for good-quality herring in the North Sea – admittedly,
the quality was never quite as good as that in the Baltic, but thanks to the
methods attributed to Beukelszoon the fish could be competently preserved.
Queen Margaret gained what she sought, mastery over the three
Scandinavian kingdoms, and saw her son Erik, duke of Pomerania, crowned
as ruler over this Nordic union in 1397. Even then, everyone wanted to fish in
Baltic waters: the Teutonic Knights, not Queen Margaret, expelled the
Vitalienbrüder from Gotland in 1394, although fifteen years later they sold
the island to the Nordic queen and Erik. These were years when the Teutonic
Knights were at a loose end: the ruler of the great Lithuanian duchy,
extending all the way across Belarus and much of Ukraine, at last accepted
Christianity in 1385, as part of a marriage treaty with his Polish neighbours,
and the Knights found themselves with fewer excuses for the conquest of
pagan territory in the east, though Orthodox Russia now came within their
line of sight as a land of heretics. The Nazis made heroes of the medieval
Teutonic Knights, but over the centuries the Vitalienbrüder have acquired a
more romantic image; plenty of novels and films present one of their pirate
leaders, Klaus Störtebeker, in a better light than he deserves. When
conditions in the Baltic became too risky, they decamped to the East Frisian
islands in the North Sea and carried on marauding there. Störtebeker was
captured, and in about 1400 he and dozens of his companions underwent a
grim execution at the hands of the resentful citizens of Hamburg. Even so,
piracy remained a major worry in the North Sea, and the next generation of
pirates were making a nuisance of themselves as far north as Bergen in
1440.7
All this meant that the Hansa Diets did have matters of real political and
military (or rather naval) importance to discuss.8 The Hansa Diet expected to
make its decisions unanimously, but delegations would often insist that they
had no authority to support a particular position; the Diet was not a
parliament where common problems were aired, discussed and resolved, but
a place where decisions (often those of Lübeck and its allies) were recorded
and announced – that was how late medieval parliaments functioned. Cities
might not bother to send delegates to the Hansetag, though not surprisingly
the larger and more powerful ones were more careful to do so. Still, it must
have seemed that this was Lübeck’s opportunity to show off its commanding
position. The effectiveness of the Hansa lay in the expertise of the merchants
who inhabited its cities rather than in its institutional structure, which
remained fragile.
 II

The different communities that made up the Hansa were bonded together by
the presence of travelling merchants, some passing through briefly and others
settling alongside their fellow Hansards. Hansards felt at home in the ports of
a great swathe of northern Europe. In the early fifteenth century, two
brothers, Hildebrand and Sivert von Veckinchusen, worked with family
members and agents in London, Bruges, Danzig, Riga, Tallinn and Tartu
(also known as Dorpat), as well as Cologne and distant Venice, sharing the
same work ethic, business methods and cultural preferences. In 1921, a pile
of over 500 letters between members of the family was found buried in a
mass of peppercorns within a chest that is now in the State Archives of
Estonia at Tallinn. In addition, their account books survive. No other
Hanseatic family is as well documented. The Veckinchusens are of interest
precisely because they were not always successful, and their careers show
clearly the risks that needed to be taken if the trade routes were to be kept
alive at a time when piracy remained a constant threat, when the Danes were
still flexing their muscles in the Baltic, when English sailors were trying to
carve out their own niche in the market, and when internal tensions within the
Hansa towns threatened to upset the apple cart.9
The Veckinchusen brothers originated in Tartu in what is now Estonia,
although they eventually became citizens of Lübeck.10 They are known to
have been based in Bruges in the 1380s. They therefore operated between the
two most important trading centres of northern Europe, which were linked by
the Hanseatic sea route through the Øresund.11 The Hansa community in
Bruges operated rather differently from Novgorod, London and Bergen,
where the German merchants possessed a reserved space and were closely
concentrated together. As befitted a cosmopolitan centre that attracted
businessmen from all over western Europe, notably Genoa and Florence, as
well as from the Baltic, the Hansards were dispersed across the city, living in
rented accommodation, though they did hire a meeting space in the convent
of the Carmelite friars, whose church they attended. In 1478 the Hansards
began building the handsome ‘House of the Easterlings’, or Oosterlingenhuis,
that can still be seen (though much rebuilt) in the heart of the old trading area
of Bruges. It possessed its own courtyard and stood on a plot of land that the
city fathers had assigned to the Hansa several years earlier. Now they had a
base for meetings, and some office space, situated close to the house of the
great Florentine trading firm of the Portinari (patrons of Jan van Eyck), and
to the Genoese consulate, a fine Gothic building that has been raised to new
glories as the Belgian national fried-potato museum. Everyone wanted a base
in Bruges, and around 1500 the English, the Scots, the Portuguese, the
Castilians, the Biscayans, the Lucchesi, the Venetians, the Genoese, the
Florentines and no doubt others as well also possessed business houses in the
centre of the city.12 Many of these communities, including most of the
Hansards, were to decamp to Antwerp only a few years later; Bruges became
less attractive for business as the water channels leading to the open sea silted
up and as international politics (the ascendancy of the Habsburgs) favoured
the growth of the more accessible port of Antwerp.13
Until then, the concentration of merchants of different backgrounds
provided Bruges with its raison d’être. Bruges was a very large city by
medieval standards, with up to 36,000 inhabitants on the eve of the Black
Death; but it was not the prime target of all those traders who came there,
even though the arrival of large amounts of Baltic rye and herring did help to
keep the citizens well fed. In the fifteenth century, one of the main functions
of the merchant communities in Bruges was quite simply to settle bills. The
city became the major financial centre in northern Europe, which meant that
even as its port silted up and fewer goods passed through the city, there was
still plenty of work for those well practised in the art of accounting. The
Veckinchusens were primarily dealers in commodities, but currency
exchange and the provision of letters of credit was a source of profit for them
and their peers, even though the Hansards left the creation of international
banks mainly to the Italians – the Medici had an important branch in
Bruges.14 Generally, the Hansards showed a suspicion of reliance on credit
that meant their financial methods never reached the sophistication of those
achieved by the Florentines and Genoese. Even so, late medieval Bruges was
to the economy of large swathes of Europe what modern London has become
within the global economy.15
From the Hansa perspective this had both advantages and disadvantages.
The usual pile of grievances – confiscations of goods, quarrels over tax
exemptions, the rights of the resident community, interference by the counts
of Flanders and their mighty successors the Valois dukes of Burgundy –
soured relations between the Hansa and Bruges, and during the late
fourteenth century the Hanseatic merchants were thinking seriously about
moving their business away from Bruges, northwards towards Dordrecht. In
the 1380s the Hansards lost not just property but lives in Bruges, during a
period of revolutionary disorder that ended with the assumption of power by
Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy. Yet Philip was not willing to meet their
demands for compensation, so in 1388 the Hansards did decamp to
Dordrecht. This was not the back of beyond: in 1390 Hildebrand
Veckinchusen was there, sending Flemish cloth and a fair amount of wine all
the way to Tallinn. After a couple more years, relations with Bruges had been
restored, and Hildebrand had become an Alderman of the Hansa community
there; he had earned enough trust to be appointed an inspector of weights and
measures, a task that was performed jointly with local officials.16 For, in
reality, the Hansards and the citizens of Bruges were happiest working
closely together.
The Veckinchusens were not wedded to Bruges. Indeed, when Hildebrand
found a bride, she was a young woman from a prosperous Riga family.17
Going to Riga for his wedding, which had been arranged by one of his
brothers, gave him the chance to experience the route to Novgorod, where the
Hansa Kontor, or ‘Counter’, continued to flourish, and where he brought for
sale thirteen bolts of cloth of Ypres, in other words a sizeable quantity of
some of the best woollen cloth Flanders looms were then producing; each
bolt would have been twenty-four yards long and one yard wide
(approximately 22 by 0.9 metres). These he sold for 6,500 furs, which gives
some idea not just of the high value of Flemish cloth but of the easy
availability of squirrel, rabbit and finer skins in fifteenth-century Russia. On
another occasion his brother Sivert forwarded 15,000 furs from Estonia to
Bruges, where Hildeband had re-established himself – by 1402 he was
renting a building in the city that included storage space as well as an
apartment for his wife and his seven children.18 In good years, the
Veckinchusens could hope for profits in the range of 15–20 per cent.19
Meanwhile his brother Sivert, now living in Lübeck, warned him that he was
taking too many financial risks – ‘I’ve warned you again and again that your
stakes are too high’ – which led him to send his wife and children to live in
Lübeck; but he was convinced he could make money by staying put in
Bruges.20 This obstinacy in his business dealings was to cost him dear over
the next few years.
Despite his warnings to his brother, Sivert also faced an uncertain future.
His reputation in the city stood high, for he was invited to join the Society of
the Circle, an influential club to which only members of the merchant elite
were admitted. However, Lübeck was facing the same sort of political strife
that was creating turmoil in Bruges, Barcelona, Florence and many other
European cities in the years either side of 1400.21 Lübeck’s butchers, for
instance, had already led two revolts, the ‘Bone-Cutter Rebellions’, in the
1380s, neither of which was successful. Much depended on the solidarity of
the rebels, and in 1408 a New Council, on which the city’s guilds were
heavily represented, challenged the authority of the existing city council,
which was seen as a high-spending and closed elite that spoke more for the
Society of the Circle than for the city, and had failed to respond to the
economic changes of the late fourteenth century. The increasing prosperity of
the urban middle class in the decades after the Black Death, when reduced
pressure of population gave access to better food and a higher standard of
living, needed to be reflected in the government of the cities. The New
Council attempted to keep its membership broad, so Sivert Veckinchusen,
whose natural sympathies lay more with the old order, found himself elected
to it; but he then followed many of the members of the Old Council into exile
in Cologne. The Holy Roman Emperor, Sigismund of Luxembourg, had the
unenviable task of sorting out who should govern the Imperial Free City of
Lübeck, which was a matter of great importance to the rest of the Hansa, in
view of its role as honorary head of the league. Sigismund ignored principles
and was inclined to favour whichever side in Lübeck could offer him more
money; when the New Council failed to satisfy his insatiable demands
(24,000 florins), he sided with the Old Council, although its members had the
sense to include some of their rivals in a government of reconciliation that
came into being over the next few years; this helped restore much-needed
stability to Lübeck.22
Meanwhile, Sivert turned his attention to landward connections between
Germany and Italy, setting up a venedyesche selskop, or ‘Venice Company’,
in Cologne that supplied the Italians with furs, cloth and rosaries made from
Baltic amber (a monopoly of the Teutonic Knights). His brother Hildebrand
joined the company; for a time everything looked very promising, but then
things began to go awry: they were cheated of money that was owed to the
firm, as well as making unwise choices about what to bring to Lübeck and the
north (both by sea and overland), and what to send down to Venice, where
they proved to have misjudged the appetite for furs and amber. Sivert had to
report to his brother that the family should really have stayed with what it
knew best, the sea trade from Bruges to the eastern Baltic; ‘I wish I had never
become involved in Venice,’ Sivert complained.23 But even the Baltic trade
of the Veckinchusens fared less well than expected: woollen cloth despatched
to Livonia was found to be riddled with moth-holes; and rice carried from
Bruges to Danzig became waterlogged. For whatever reason, market
conditions were poor in the years around 1418, whether in Danzig, Novgorod
or the inner German cities, so the Veckinchusens were not the only ones to
suffer; it seems the markets were saturated with goods, and that the whole
decade from 1408 to 1418 saw poor profits.24 In 1420 Hildebrand heard that
the salt normally collected in the Bay of Bourgneuf was not available, so he
thought he could restore his fortunes by snapping up the salt supplies of
Livonia and sending them westwards towards Lübeck; but poor information
about where in Livonia he should buy the salt and the simple fact that other
merchants had the same idea meant that the attempt to corner the market
failed.25
Hildebrand returned to Bruges and tried to keep himself afloat with Italian
loans, but he could not repay them, and fled to Antwerp in the vain hope of
escaping his creditors. Lured back to Bruges by promises that his friends
would help him sort out his affairs, he was thrown into the debtors’ prison,
where he lingered in misery for three or four years, during which even Sivert
was unwilling to offer any help; meanwhile Sivert was doing rather well, and
was elected to the Lübeck Society of the Circle, the club of the wealthy and
powerful that had honoured his brother some years earlier.26 Conditions in
the prison were not too bad, if means could be found to pay for food and the
rent of a private room; but by the time he was released, in 1426, Hildebrand
was evidently a broken man. One of his old partners wrote in pity: ‘God have
mercy on you, that it has happened to you this way.’27 He set out for Lübeck
but he died within a couple of years, worn out by his trials.28 His ambitions
had never been matched by his success.
Hildebrand was let down by his family, and family solidarity was the key
to the success of these Hanseatic trading families. There is no reason to
suppose the Veckinchusens’ rise and fall was unusual; trade was about risks,
and in an age of piracy and naval wars the chances of always making a profit
were slim. The places that attracted the strongest interest of the Veckinchusen
clan were cities on or close to the sea, with the exception of the Hanseatic
outlier Cologne and their mistaken ventures overland through the south
German cities to Venice. This suggests that the routes across the sea carried
the lifeblood of the Hansa, and that the many towns of northern Germany
which became members were mainly interested in the goods that traversed
the Baltic and the North Sea. When the Kaiser’s historians laid all the
emphasis on the Hansa fleets and ignored the inland towns, they were not
completely distorting the character and history of the German Hansa.

III

The cod fisheries of northern Norway, and the opportunities for catching the
same fish out in the open Atlantic off Iceland or even Greenland, brought
prosperity to the Hansa and to the Norwegian rulers. There were several types
of dried and salted cod, but the development of wind-drying in little harbours
along the coast of Norway, where Atlantic winds turned the supple flesh of
these large fish into leathery triangular slabs, created an article of trade that
lasted for years without rotting, and that satisfied the increased demand for
high protein foodstuffs that the smaller post-Black Death population found
itself able to afford. Norway also became a good source of dairy goods, for
grain production was poor, while mountain pastures were abundant, and dairy
products were exchanged for imported rye and wheat. As diet improved, so
did the revenues of the Hansa merchants and the king of Norway. The
German merchants had long identified Bergen as the obvious centre in which
to concentrate much of their North Sea business. It was the seat of a royal
palace, and not much could be achieved without the king’s protection. The
town had emerged by the twelfth century – tradition recorded its foundation
by King Olaf the Tranquil in 1070, but evidence from excavations shows that
the wooden structures that lined the shore began to be constructed around
1120, though again and again (even in very modern times) fire has laid waste
this cluster of buildings, the Bryggen, or ‘wharves’, that became the home to
the Hansa merchants in the city. Yet the prosperity of Bergen was not created
by the German merchants; they chose this site as their base because it was
already a flourishing centre of exchange for furs, fish, seal products, and all
the other products of the forests, fjords and open sea further to the north; it
was already the harbour to which ships moving back and forth to Iceland
would come, a ‘natural gateway’ and ‘nodal point of trans-shipment’, to cite
a Norwegian historian of the city’s origins.29
 Unexpected evidence for the vitality of Bergen as a centre of Norwegian,
rather than just German, trade has been revealed following the discovery of
many dozens of strips of wood dating from the fourteenth century and
inscribed, surprisingly, with runes, which runologists had thought long
extinct by this time. Some were just tags, not so very different from modern
luggage labels, and in two cases the tags state that they were attached to bales
of yarn. One inscription even appears on a walrus skull, pithily stating ‘John
owns’; even if the skull was just a curiosity, this can be taken as evidence that
a couple of tusks, which would have had real value, had arrived from the Far
North, most likely from Greenland. There are also carefully checked receipts
marked (in runes) uihi, which is thought to be a corruption of the Latin vidi,
‘I have seen’, the origin of the modern sign ✔. And there are a few longer
letters, in one of which Þorer Fair despondently writes from southern Norway
to his partner, Havgrim: ‘things are bad with me, partner. I did not get the
beer, nor the fish.’ He is worried that a certain Þorstein Lang, presumably his
backer, will hear about his failure; he seems to be suffering from the cold –
‘send me some gloves!’ he adds. But the Bergen runes also contain short love
letters: ‘the belt from Fana makes you still prettier’. A few fragments of Latin
poems also survive, written in runic script. All this suggests that the art of
writing was not confined to a small network of merchants; plenty of people
read and wrote runes, taking advantage of the ease with which the mainly
straight strokes could be carved into slivers of wood. The vitality of the
Norwegian community in Bergen should not be underestimated, even if we
know much more about the Germans in their Kontor, and even if the
Germans were becoming more and more dominant in the Bergen economy.30
In the years before the Black Death food supplies were under increasing
pressure as Europe’s population grew, peaking by about 1315. In the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries English wheat and barley were regularly exported to
Bergen. King Sverre of Norway gave a speech in Bergen in 1186 in which he
said: ‘We thank all Englishmen because they came here, those who brought
wheat and honey, flour and cloth. And we further thank those who have
brought linen and flax, wax and kettles.’ At the same time he thanked
everyone who had come from all the north Atlantic islands, such as the
Faroes and Orkney, ‘who have brought here to this country such things as we
cannot do without and which are of great use to this country’. He was much
less positive about the Germans: ‘the German men who have come here in
great numbers and in great boats wish to take away butter and codfish and
their export is of great ruin to the country.’ The reason the king resented this
German intrusion was not just that they grabbed hold of the best that Norway
could offer, but that they brought dangerous produce in the holds of their
ships: wine. The people of Bergen have taken to drink; ‘many have lost their
lives, some their limbs, some are damaged for their entire life, others have
suffered disgrace, have been wounded or beaten, and all this comes from too
much drink.’31 It is difficult to know how seriously to take a colourful
speech that was recorded in an Icelandic saga (even though the author knew
the king personally), but there is an interesting hint here that the German
network extended down to the vineyards of central Germany; Cologne and its
neighbours would have ferried the wine downriver, where it would have been
pumped into the North Sea networks of the early Hansa.
However, England too began to feel the pressure of rising population, and
there was greater reluctance to export grain across the North Sea when
supplies at home were frequently stretched to the limit. The Norwegian kings
became more generous to their German visitors as they began to see how
essential their presence had become. Baltic rye was turning into black gold.
In 1278 King Magnus assured the Germans – represented by two merchants
of where else but Lübeck – that they were welcome to come to Bergen, and
encouraged them to buy hides and butter. The German merchants were
brought under the protection of the crown; the king insisted that ‘the Lübeck
citizens are shown all possible favour and goodwill’.32 Even so, the Hansa
merchants were not given an entirely free hand. By 1295, alongside further
guarantees of immunity, they were forbidden from travelling north of Bergen
into the land where Norwegian traders obtained their wares, and they were
forbidden from exporting fish during part of the year unless they had carried
grain of similar value to Bergen: ‘such foreigners as sit here during the winter
and do not bring flour, malt or rye, shall purchase neither butter, furs nor
dried fish between the Cross Masses’ (14 September to 30 May).33
By 1300 the German community in Bergen consisted not just of those who
arrived by sea each spring, but the ‘winter-sitters’, and alongside them there
were shoemakers and other German craftsmen who had been settling in the
town since at least 1250. By 1300 the Hansa merchants in Bergen had learned
how important it was to work together in the face of the combination of
suspicion and welcome that they faced in their dealings with the kings of
Norway. Within Bergen, a corporate identity emerged, and this was
recognized by the crown: in 1343, for the first time, the Hanseatic traders
were described as ‘the merchants of the Hansa of the Germans’ (mercatores
de Hansa theotonicorum). What came into being over the next few years
(certainly before 1365) is known as the Kontor, or ‘Counter’, a tightly
controlled organization that negotiated for and managed the lives of the
German merchants trading through Bergen. It was, in effect, a body of
Lübeckers, operating under the commercial law of Lübeck, though there were
also members from Hamburg, Bremen and elsewhere: ‘the counter was a
branch office of Lübeck’, in effect an extra-territorial enclave.34 The fact
that the Germans lived under their own law is just one sign of their separation
from the other inhabitants of Bergen, but after the middle of the fourteenth
century the great majority of Hansa merchants lived in Bryggen, in the
closely packed wooden houses right by the harbour that formed a German
enclave.35
Such enclaves were a common feature of the medieval trading world (and
probably provided a model for Jewish ghettos); the example of the Peterhof
in Novgorod has already been encountered, and that of the Steelyard in
London will be examined shortly. They enabled rulers to keep an eye on
merchant communities; but they also provided an opportunity for the mother
city of the merchants, in this case Lübeck, to set up an administration,
ensuring that the running costs of the community were covered by internal
taxes, and offering justice according to the legal system with which the
members were familiar. Above all, the members of these communities could
form a united front whenever they believed their interests were being
threatened by the local ruler, as often happened in Bergen.36 In the
Mediterranean, these enclaves were usually created by order of kings and
sultans, but the creation of the Hansa enclave in Bergen was a gradual
process, as the German merchants acquired more and more houses within the
wharfside area; and for at least a hundred years there were houses that
remained in Norwegian ownership within the area. Besides, the plots of land
on which the German warehouses stood were rented from local nobles or
from the Church.37
The Bryggen area was a tight fit; around 1400 there were about 3,000
Germans in a city of 14,000 inhabitants. Many were quite young apprentices
and journeymen who faced a tough life during the seven to ten years that
carried them up a strict hierarchy from the modest status of Stubenjunge to
the honourable status of Meister. Living conditions were strictly controlled,
and for part of the year apprentices were largely confined to the house where
they resided. They were male-only settlements, and the apprentices lived in
narrow dormitories, working a twelve-hour day, excluding mealtimes. Many
crept out at night, finding their way to the red-light district that lay just
behind the Hansa quarter; but to do so meant avoiding massive guard dogs
that were placed around the outer edges of the Bryggen houses, to deter not
just intruders but escapees. Fear of liaisons with Norwegian women stemmed
from the notion that people living in the Kontor would give away to local
wives or to whores all the trade secrets they had learned: they might ‘tell the
native woman under the influence of her charm, as well as that of liquor,
things she had best not know’. On the other hand, the fine for being found
with a ‘loose woman’ was a keg of beer – the woman suffered much worse,
by being thrown into the harbour. Journeymen were subjected to brutal
initiation rituals, which might include such wholesome entertainment as
being roasted by a fire while suspended in a chimney, being half drowned in
the harbour and being ceremonially flogged, though a little mercy was shown
by making sure that they were already drunk.38 These, admittedly, are
negative images of life in the community, and back home in Lübeck there
was, by the mid-sixteenth century, some concern that the initiation rituals
were now out of control. Allowing for feast days and periods when trade was
slack, and allowing for the strong sense of community that was created within
the Hansa community, life in the Kontor can best be described as harsh and
hard, but not insufferable. The Kontor was a place where German merchants
learned the art of honest trade, and where they were made fully conscious of
the fact that they were Hanseatics (mainly Lübeckers) first, and inhabitants of
Bergen second.
 24

The English Challenge

In the fifteenth century, two challenges to the ascendancy of the Hansa

emerged, one from within the area where some Hansa towns already existed,
the Netherlands, and one from a kingdom that had already become one of
their favourite trading destinations in the North Sea, England. The Hansa
monopoly, such as it was, was being slowly broken, even though it had
already suffered from strains when Cologne or Danzig challenged Lübeck, or
when the Vitalienbrüder harassed shipping in the Baltic and the North Sea. In
order to understand the new challenges, it is best to stay for the moment with
the Hansa, and to look at the bases that they created in England, not just in
London but in Lynn, Boston, Hull and Ravenser, a port near Hull that long
ago was washed away by the waves.
London, by far the largest city in England, was, not surprisingly, their
headquarters. There, they operated from their Kontor next to the Thames at
what was known as the Stahlhof, or ‘Steelyard’. The name seems to be a
corruption of the term Stapelhof, ‘courtyard for trading staple goods’, and has
nothing to do with steel. The site of the German Kontor in London has been
covered over by Cannon Street Railway Station, constructed in the middle of
the nineteenth century; the builders swept away the entire Steelyard, down to
its foundations. Very little was found during excavations in 1987 (even the
pottery turned out mainly to be English). However, some plans and
descriptions survive from the sixteenth century. There were three gateways,
and there was a great hall; there were warehouses and sleeping quarters, as
well as administrative offices. Nonetheless, the Steelyard was not a
particularly imposing place, compared to the courtyards and quadrangles that
existed elsewhere in London, such as the Inns of Court, by now an enclave
for lawyers. Rather, the Steelyard was a packed space, a business quarter
where hardly an inch of space was wasted. The Hansards wanted privileges,
not fine buildings.

As in Bergen, the London Kontor formed a privileged enclave, enjoying

both royal protection and self-government, and, like the settlement in Bergen,
it took time to coalesce. In London, recognition of the special status of the
German merchants did not take place as a result of the efforts of the
Lübeckers, but through the activities of merchants first of Cologne and then
of Gotland; in the thirteenth century the English royal administration talked
of several hanses, applying the term to groups of Flemings, as well as to
those who would eventually become the Hansards. England was a highly
desirable market for both Flemish and German traders. The country supplied
excellent wool, which was hungrily consumed by the looms of the Flemish
cities, while the English had long ago developed a taste for Rhineland wines.
Yet wine was by no means the most important item to cross the North Sea
from Germany. So strong was demand for English produce that silver flooded
into the kingdom, which was able to maintain a high-quality silver currency
in the thirteenth century while other parts of Europe constantly devalued their
silver coinage by adding base metals. No other European kingdom was as
rich in silver and of no other kingdom can it be said that the silver content of
its coinage remained stable all the way from the ninth century to 1250. By
1200 the influx of silver, mainly from the rich mines that had been opened up
in Germany, led to quite serious price inflation that affected basic
commodities such as foodstuffs.1 ‘Sterling silver’, today set at a standard of
925‰, has a long history. It comes as little surprise that the one place in
northern Europe to match the quality of English coinage was the mint of
Cologne, for this was the distribution centre from which English goods
fanned out across the Continent; even the availability of local silver supplies
could not prevent a serious decline in the quality of the coinage elsewhere in
Germany.
The English kings rather took the silver imports for granted, and when they
extended their favours to the merchants of Cologne it was in recognition of
their accomplishments as dealers in good wines. By the middle of the twelfth
century, the men of Cologne lay under the protection of the English Crown,
and they were assured of the right to sell their wine on the same terms as
French wine merchants; they already possessed a domus, or operations
centre, later described as their gildhalla, ‘guildhall’, implying that this was
not a random group of visitors but an organized body of men; exactly where
this guildhall lay is not clear. Circumstances outside their control brought
new advantages to the German merchants in London. King Richard I had
been imprisoned by the German emperor, Henry VI of Hohenstaufen, while
he was trying to make his way home after the Third Crusade failed to recover
Jerusalem. One of the German princes who was willing to give him help was
the archbishop of Cologne. The grateful king of England therefore extended
the privileges of the Cologne merchants in 1194, so that they would
henceforth be free of taxes and tribute. They could operate their own internal
customs system among themselves, which would be important if the costs of
running their guildhall were to be met. Admittedly, the attitude of later kings
to this generous grant wavered, but the political motives never went away:
King John also relied on an alliance with the archbishop of Cologne, who
supported the same claimant to the German throne after the death of Emperor
Henry as did John (with disastrous consequences for the English king). So
even the money-grubbing King John was minded to let the Cologne
merchants retain their special privileges. These Cologne merchants possessed
their own seagoing ships, and they also hired Flemish vessels, acting as
intermediaries in the wool trade linking England to the Flemish cloth towns.2
Gradually, the German community broadened its character, as visitors
arrived from Visby, Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg; they came not just to
London but to accessible places on the east coast, such as Lynn and Boston,
where Lübeckers could be found buying wool in 1271.3 When Emperor
Frederick II gave Lübeck its special privileges in 1226, he insisted that its
merchants trading in England should be exempt from taxes imposed on them
by the merchants of Cologne, and over the next few years King Henry III,
who was related by marriage to the German emperor, also took the Lübeckers
under his protection.4 The Cologne merchants took umbrage at the presence
of these rivals, which serves as a reminder that family disputes often
disrupted Hansa brotherhood. These groups were granted their own
corporations, or Hansas, so that during the thirteenth century there was not
one consolidated group of Hanseatic merchants, but several sub-Hansas
vying for royal favour. The citizens of London complained that the Germans
had greater freedoms in their own city than they did.
Then, when King Edward I attempted to rationalize all the past grants to
merchants visiting his kingdom, the Hansa gave him vocal support; in 1303
he issued the Carta Mercatoria, legislation that levied higher taxes on foreign
than on native merchants, but the Germans saw it as a relatively good deal;
they wanted guarantees, they wanted stability, and they understood by now
that it was more important to work together than to feed the pride of Cologne,
Lübeck and other rivals. Unfortunately that was by no means the end of the
story, as the next king, the unfortunate Edward II, suspended his father’s law
in 1311. The Hansards insisted on their exemptions, and Edward II wanted as
much money as he could squeeze out of his subjects for wars in Scotland.
Nonetheless, in bits and pieces, and subject to all sorts of temporary
reversals, by the middle of the fourteenth century they had clawed back many
of the rights they had obtained in 1303.5
It was not all plain sailing thereafter. Once Edward III had taken charge of
his kingdom, he launched vastly ambitious wars in France that frequently
disrupted movement across the sea. Flanders might be cut off; ships might be
pounced upon by rival navies. The English Channel and the North Sea
became important, and dangerous, theatres of war.6 Fortunately for the
merchants, he needed to borrow funds and, having drained the great
Florentine banks of capital in the 1340s, he turned to German bankers,
pawning his Crown Jewels; and this meant that he had to be polite to
merchants from that part of the world (interestingly, his creditors included
Jewish bankers, excluded from England for the past half-century). There were
ugly moments when Germans were accused of piracy against ships bearing
English wool across the North Sea, leading to exemplary confiscations of
German property in the kingdom. The relationship between the Hansa and the
English Crown was not, then, a smooth one, but on balance the two sides
needed one another. Not just silver but furs, wax and stockfish were in high
demand. By 1400 the English had begun to realize how desirable Baltic
herrings were; ships were reaching Hull that carried nothing but herrings,
loaded at the expense of English importers. In the past, many of these goods
had been supplied by Norwegians, but the Germans increasingly muscled in
on this business: by 1300 they had already acquired a commanding position
at Bergen. And much the same was true of Flanders, as Hansa cogs plied
back and forth between the Flemish coast and England – the Flemings
tending to concentrate more on producing cloth.
In the fifteenth century the entire space between England and the eastern
Baltic was abuzz with trade. Ties were built to Danzig and the towns along
the coast of Prussia (which then included Danzig), and direct contact between
eastern England and the further reaches of the Baltic became common. Nor
did this simply consist of visits by enterprising citizens of Danzig or Elbing
to England, for a constant complaint of the Prussians was that their towns
were being invaded by English cloth merchants.7 This reflected an important
change in the character of English trade at the end of the Middle Ages.
Although England had always exported some finished cloth of very high
quality, its real speciality in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had been the
export of raw wool, leaving others, in Flanders and elsewhere, to turn it into
the fine woollens for which northern Europe was famous, goods that might
find their way to Morocco and Egypt. Trade wars with Flanders during the
early fourteenth century occasionally blocked the import of Flemish cloth,
and even after the trade wars were at an end high tariffs made the import of
this cloth unattractive. This created a strong incentive to manufacture cloth at
home and not to rely on imports. Flemings were encouraged to come and
settle, importing the secrets of Flemish cloth-making; the wealthy towns of
East Anglia became home to many Flemish weavers. By the late fourteenth
century enterprising Englishmen had, then, stimulated their own cloth
industry into new life, and English woollen cloth rather than unprocessed
wool became the export of choice. England was transforming itself from a
country that concentrated on the export of raw materials into one that
concentrated on the export of finished goods – a process of what might
loosely be termed proto-industrialization.8
Just as Flemish cloth had been sent deep into the Baltic and all the way to
the Mediterranean, English cloth could increasingly be found in places very
far from the wool towns of East Anglia and the Cotswolds. The presence of
growing numbers of Englishmen in Prussia is not as surprising as it may
seem; when things were working well, Englishmen from Lynn and Boston
rented Hanseatic ships and carried the cloth of England all the way to Danzig
and beyond. Richard Schottun from Lynn was the sort of character who gave
English merchants a bad name in Danzig. He boasted about ignoring the tax
regulations, and he brought back poor-quality timber known as wrak et wrak-
wrak, probably taken from rotting hulks and driftwood, while pretending that
he only obtained his timber from Danzig itself. He and three other
Englishmen bought a ship, the hulk Krystoffer, in Danzig, but he
overextended himself, for he then found himself being pursued for debts
there. Even so, his links with Danzig lasted a good ten years, so his reputation
was not bad enough to force him out of the city. By 1422 fifty-five English
merchants were frequenting the port of Danzig, to judge from existing
records. Ordinary folk in England built marriage ties as far away as Prussia;
the son of the celebrated English mystic Margery Kempe married a woman
from Danzig, and Margery herself visited the city.9
Prussia was also a favourite destination for English crusaders, and joining
the Teutonic Knights on one of their sprees into pagan territory was regarded
as good military entertainment, whether or not it was also good for the soul.
Among the participants was Henry, earl of Derby, who after his return would
seize the English throne from the increasingly tyrannical Richard II; he
arrived in Stettin (Szczecin) with up to 150 servants and recruits, so keeping
him supplied was big business for those who carried him over the waves.
Indeed, during the 1420s the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order remained
friendly to the English, even when the Prussian members of the Hansa sternly
demanded their arrest in return for alleged insults against German merchants
in England.10 Relations between the Hansards and the Teutonic Order had
plummeted following the massive defeat of the Knights at the Battle of
Tannenberg in 1410, when the Knights paid for their folly in turning against
what was now, officially at any rate, a Catholic kingdom embracing Christian
Poland and newly converted Lithuania. A three-cornered contest for power
was taking place between the king of Poland–Lithuania, the Teutonic Knights
and the Prussian members of the Hanseatic League. It is hardly surprising
that outsiders sometimes found themselves caught up in rivalries that they
had no part in creating.11
Between 1469 and 1474 relations deteriorated to the point where England
and the Hansa found themselves at war with one another, although
predictably Cologne was opposed to action, and the warmongers were
Lübeck and Danzig, both of which had suffered from English piracy. The
problem was English intrusion into the Baltic, which was of little interest to
Hansa cities more connected to the North Sea.12 Underlying all this is a
simple fact: there was a greater will for peace and the restoration of good
relations than for conflict, and if that involved compromise over the rights of
access of the English to the Baltic, it would simply have to be accepted. Once
peace was signed between the Hansa and the English Crown in Utrecht in
1474, a decade of peace followed. In reality, though, the English had found a
place for themselves on the sea, and were now impossible to shift; the men of
Bristol, in particular, had become familiar figures who sailed with impunity
across broad swathes of the North Sea and the Atlantic.13 By the 1490s it
was obvious that the great age of German trade with England had come to an
end. Not just the economic climate was difficult: the complications of early
Tudor politics made merchants from the Holy Roman Empire, the subjects of
Henry VIII’s rival Charles V, wonder whether they were still welcome on
English shores.14
Something remained, all the same. The Steelyard, briefly confiscated, was
restored to the Hansards in 1474, and was only closed down by Queen
Elizabeth I in 1598. Indeed, the Utrecht treaty for the first time assigned full
ownership of the site in London to the Hansa, along with property at Lynn
and Boston. The management of the new Steelyard at Lynn was entrusted to
the merchants of Danzig, because, the Hansa Diet insisted, ‘your merchants
frequent Lynn more than any other Hanseatic merchants, and therefore this
matter is of more concern to you than anyone else’.15 The building the
merchants received still stands, though it was converted into dreary local
government offices. Still, enough of its wooden framework survives outside,
and enough of its beams inside, to justify its claim to be the only Hanseatic
structure still in existence in England. The building originally contained a
kitchen, hall and courtyard, and the property was formed out of seven houses
joined together. The great advantage of using Lynn was that it gave access to
the riches of East Anglia, which, as has been seen, was drawing great wealth
from the production of woollen cloth. The great wool churches of Lavenham
and Long Melford stand testimony to the prosperity of the region, and this
prosperity depended in significant degree on the sea trade out of the east of
England.

II

Wool attracted many besides the Hansards to medieval England. The opening
of a sea route from the Mediterranean to the North Sea at the end of the
thirteenth century was closely linked to the surge in demand for fine wool in
Italy. Florence emerged from relative obscurity during the thirteenth century,
making itself famous through the quality of its cloth, and then through its
ambitious decision to launch a gold coinage in 1252. As the cloth industry
developed, moving from the finishing of other people’s cloth (the cleaning
and dyeing of cloth from Flanders and France), to the manufacture of cloth
from raw wool, the Florentines understood that they could only rival the
high-quality output of Flanders by obtaining the very best wool, even if that
meant looking all the way towards England. They lacked a fleet of their own;
but by 1277 Genoese ships had learned how to pass out through the
dangerous waters of the Strait of Gibraltar and sail on towards Flanders.
From 1281 onwards Majorcan as well as Genoese ships began to reach
London from the Mediterranean, breaking open a route that, on and off,
would be maintained by the Genoese, and later by the Venetians, the Catalans
and the Florentines themselves, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The ships that stood in the Port of London in 1281 are known to have been
loaded with wool before they departed. This new route enabled much greater
quantities of English wool, or, for ships sailing from the outports of Bruges,
many more bolts of fine cloth, to be carried into the Mediterranean; large
galleys sent from Venice and Pisa, the port of Florence, in the fifteenth
century brought sugar, spices, fine ceramics and exotic silks to northern
Europe, including goods that were collected in the ports of the Muslim
kingdom of Granada, or in the outports of Seville, which had become the
lynchpin linking the trade of the Mediterranean to that of the Atlantic. Italian
bankers, from Lucca, Florence and elsewhere, established themselves in
England late in the thirteenth century, and until a great crash occurred in the
1340s – partly the result of the bad debts of the English king incurred during
his wars against the French – the Italians acquired considerable leverage at
the English court.16
London was one target of the Italians; but it made more sense for those
who also wished to visit Flanders to stop somewhere on the south coast
instead, and this stimulated the development of a town that already had a
history of close contact with France (commemorated in its ‘French Street’):
Southampton.17 By comparison with the cities of the Mediterranean, or with
the greater Hansa cities, Southampton was tiny: its population stood at
around 2,500 in 1300, and in the wake of the Black Death it had dropped to a
mere 1,600 in 1377.18 Just at this point a distinguished Genoese emissary,
Janus Imperiale, came to the court of Edward III with the proposal that
Southampton should be declared a staple port, the only point of access for
foreign merchants seeking wool. The Genoese clearly hoped to corner the
market, but Janus’s body was found outside the front door of his lodgings in
London on the night of 26 August 1379. He had been assassinated by his
English rivals. For the king had already established Calais, which he had
brought under English rule, as the staple port for wool exports, and his
assassins could see that the Genoese project would undermine their own
ascendancy.19 However, Italians continued to flock to Southampton in the
late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. Fifty to a hundred Italians took up
residence in the town, though they lacked a quarter reserved for their use.
Sometimes, as in the case of the Florentine agent Christopher Ambrose
(Cristoforo Ambruogi), the Italians decided that their future lay in the colder
climes of England, and they applied for English citizenship, though there was
also a middle status, giving them the right of abode as ‘denizens’, that suited
a great many. Ambrose even became mayor of Southampton.20
London hosted Spaniards as well as Italians. Catalans arrived on galleys
from Barcelona and Majorca, but pirate attacks often discouraged them.21
Most of the Iberian visitors came from the northern coast of Spain, bringing
iron, woad and leather, rather than the sugar, ceramics and silk collected by
the Italian galleys as they passed the kingdom of Granada.22 Cantabrians,
Galicians and Basques from Atlantic Spain plied the waters around Iberia,
also penetrating into the Mediterranean; and they worked their way up the
western flank of France towards Bourgneuf, Normandy and Bruges.23
Spaniards such as Andrés Pérez de Castrogeríz arrived in London from
Burgos as early as 1270, and he also traded in Gascony, which lay under
English rule and was the major source of wine for English markets; he had
many successors. The reward for their hard work came in the form of royal
privileges that offered tax exemptions in London and Southampton – the
English kings wanted them to keep coming.24 In the early fifteenth century a
doggerel poet, the author of the Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, a tract in verse
that extolls the foreign trade of England, wrote that:

Bene fygues, raysyns, wyne, bastarde and dates,

And lycorys, Syvyle oyle and also grayne,
Whyte Castell sope and wax is not in vayne,

and went on to praise the iron, saffron and mercury that Spain also offered
(grayne does not mean wheat but grana, a red dye made from crushed
insects, and a Spanish speciality).25
The most prominent communities of foreign businessmen in London were
the Genoese and the Germans, but the fifteenth-century city was quite
cosmopolitan. From faraway Dubrovnik, Ragusan merchants arrived on their
own ships or those of the Venetians, bringing sweet Malmsey wines from
Greece. One particularly enterprising Ragusan was Ivan Manević, who
became a naturalized subject of the Crown and a landowner, and also farmed
the taxes due to the Crown from the textile workshops of a large area of
southern England. By the early sixteenth century, the Ragusans became the
masters of the English cloth trade towards the eastern Mediterranean,
benefiting from their cosy relationship with the Ottoman court in
Constantinople.26 The impression all this might give is that the English
played a rather passive role, welcoming the Hansards, the Genoese and the
Spaniards (up to a point), while not themselves being very active on the
water. If that was ever true, it was certainly not the case in the late Middle
Ages, as the examples of Winchelsea and Bristol clearly show.

III

Winchelsea was one of the ‘Cinque Ports’ that had been entrusted with the
defence of the eastern end of the English Channel since the eleventh century.
Now some way inland, Winchelsea stood alongside an irregularly shaped,
shifting, marshy coastline. In the 1280s the town was moved at royal
command to a higher site away from the encroaching waves, which meant
that it could still function as a port. The new town, with its square street
pattern, was modelled on the bastide towns, defensive positions built by the
English and the French in the contested lands of south-western France, with
which King Edward I was very familiar.27 Its inhabitants and those of Rye,
nearby, made use of relatively peaceful times to launch raids on shipping in
the English Channel, so that piracy as well as trade created the wealthy
community that emerged on the new site. William Longe was a Member of
Parliament early in the fifteenth century; he was also one of the Rye officials
appointed to keep an eye out for pirates by patrolling the Channel, and yet he
himself turned pirate, attacking Florentine and Flemish ships. The courts
could not ignore this, and Longe was sent to prison for a while, but his
popularity only grew, and he was re-elected to the House of Commons time
and again.28 As ever, the borderline between piracy and officially sanctioned
warfare was easily crossed.
Outrages were committed on both sides. In 1349 a surprise attack by a
Castilian admiral, who had seized English ships loaded with wine off
Gascony, created consternation in England; the time for revenge came a year
later when a Castilian convoy laden with Spanish wool passed through the
Channel on its way to Flanders. This was understood in England to mean that
the Castilians were cocking a snook at the English and their commanding
position in the wool trade towards Flanders. Led into the fray by a very large
cog from Winchelsea, the Thomas, the English pounced on the Castilian fleet
as it returned from Flanders. The battle of Winchelsea, as it is known, though
ships from Sandwich, Rye and elsewhere also took part, was a resounding
victory for the English, even though the Castilian ships were larger than the
English ones. This was possibly the first naval battle in the west in which
cannon were used. The battle was won, but, to use the old cliché, the war was
not: the English Channel remained an unsafe area, and to avoid capture by
the French or their Castilian allies the English had to sail in convoy. This was
not enough to protect the town, though. In 1380 Winchelsea was sacked by
Castilian raiders.29
No doubt the stone-lined cellars that still exist in Winchelsea were often
used to store the proceeds of piracy; but this was not a nest of pirates – there
was plenty of licit trade. The citizens of Winchelsea were wine merchants; in
1303–4 twelve ships from Winchelsea went to Bordeaux, where they
collected 1,575 tuns of wine, very roughly 4,000 gallons. Winchelsea had the
most successful wine trade of any of the towns along this coast, and its
shrunken state today makes it hard to imagine the thriving, well-connected
port that it once was.30 But the town that was best placed to handle the traffic
in wine had a much brighter future: it was Bristol, soon to become the third
greatest city in the English realm.

IV

Bristol, originally Brig-stowe, ‘the place of the bridge’, is one of the most
unusual harbours in the world. It lies beyond the gorges of the River Avon,
which narrow where the Avon meets the majestic River Severn. When the
tide is in, the water level rises alarmingly, sometimes by as much as twelve
metres, or forty feet; ships bound for Bristol would await the high tide and be
swept up towards the city. At low tide, the muddy bottom of the harbour was
exposed, and ships would balance their keels on the soft ground.31 Bristol
lay in a fertile part of England, and in the early days its trade with Wales and
Ireland brought the town some wealth; but even in the fourteenth century
ships trading with Ireland remained small, reflecting the relatively low
volume of business (their capacity was generally around twenty to thirty
tons). As the Irish linen industry took off at the end of the Middle Ages,
opportunities along this route did improve; but the ships themselves were
mainly Irish-owned, and the real prosperity of Bristol was the result of
contacts much further afield.32 One reason for the port’s increase in trade
was the rise of the English cloth industry, for when it came to the
manufacture of fine cloth, the Cotswold villages east of Bristol were keen
rivals to the wool towns of East Anglia, while objects carved in alabaster, the
waxy stone out of which the English sculpted highly decorated altarpieces,
were brought down from Coventry and sent abroad from Bristol. Bristol
dealers also kept up their links with Southampton, so that even when they
were not sending their cloth through the home port, they despatched it across
Salisbury plain towards Italian galleys waiting there, while Bristol cloth was
also carried on the roads to London, to be sold to Hansa merchants, who were
said to offer better terms than their English counterparts.33
The real reason for Bristol’s success, however, lay with the wine trade.34
This success was built on political as well as commercial links: the
acquisition of English rights in Gascony following the marriage of King
Henry II to Eleanor of Aquitaine in the twelfth century. Even then, the
reputation of Gascony for wine took time to be established. By the end of the
thirteenth century, encouraged by the businessmen of Bordeaux, the flat lands
of the Bordelais were given over almost entirely to vineyards. This was made
possible not just because the soil was suitable for wine production, but
because of the ease with which wine could be transported down the little
tributaries of the Gironde towards Bordeaux. The merchants of Bordeaux
carved out a monopoly for themselves, ensuring that they could tax the wine
to their heart’s content as it passed through the city. Since the administration
of Gascony was autonomous, despite English rule, the English merchants had
to put up with these taxes despite their objections, which reached the House
of Commons in 1444; these objections were a little exaggerated, since
English merchants did not pay any dues on the goods they imported into
Gascony, and the great majority of the ships that plied back and forth
between England and Bordeaux were English. At the start of the fifteenth
century, something like 200 ships each year could be expected to set out from
Bordeaux loaded with wine, arriving in autumn or early spring and leaving in
December or March; the voyage normally took about ten days.35
The fortunes of the Bordelais depended on reasonable harvests and,
crucially, on the possibility of exchanging these vast quantities of wine for
staple foodstuffs. At a time when grain was the staple foodstuff and rising
population was placing increased pressure on supplies, the Bristol connection
offered a lifeline. There was grain to be had from southern England, and
English merchants made every effort to send it to Gascony, even when there
were shortages at home, which was common in the early fourteenth century.
The size of the wine cargoes grew and grew, right up to the final war that
culminated in the French occupation of all of Gascony in 1453. In autumn
1443 six Bristol ships carried almost as much wine out of Bordeaux as
would, near the start of the century, have been loaded in a whole year. As
English cloth cornered the market in northern Europe, this too became a
prized export bound for Gascony, and the Gascons reciprocated by supplying
Bristol with large amounts of woad, the blue dye that was a speciality of
south-western France.36 English defeat did not bring this wine trade to an
end, for the French king, Louis XI, was not the sort of person who would turn
away the opportunity to rake in taxes. By the end of the fifteenth century, as
many as 6,000 English merchants are said to have flocked to Bordeaux to buy
wine, even though the wine trade had now passed its peak, as had Bordeaux
itself.
Other opportunities beckoned for the mariners of Bristol, or for foreign
mariners hoping to sell their produce in Bristol. Basque ships, and ships from
further along the coast of northern Spain, came to Bristol in growing numbers
during the fifteenth century, and Bristol merchants recognized the quality of
Basque seamanship by sometimes loading their own goods on Basque
vessels; Basques and Bristolians shared curiosity about the open Atlantic and
its fish stocks, while the Basques, whose native lands were poor in resources,
looked outwards to the open sea and developed an expertise in whaling that
made them the unrivalled masters of the sixteenth-century whale industry – a
sixteenth-century Basque whaling vessel has been meticulously excavated off
Labrador.37
The hull of another Basque ship, from around 1450, has been found
underneath the Welsh city of Newport across the estuary from Bristol; it is
said to be the largest fifteenth-century hull yet discovered, with a capacity for
160 tons of cargo (quite likely wine). Coins and pottery found on site indicate
that it travelled as far as Portugal, which in the mid-fifteenth century was one
of England’s closest trading partners. For a time it may have been operated
by a mainly Spanish or Portuguese crew; but it was probably owned by
English merchants (possibly even by an English nobleman) by the time that it
toppled over and sank in the shipyard at Newport, where it was undergoing
repairs, around 1469.38 For a while, English merchants had the good sense to
try out the wines of northern Spain, which this ship almost certainly carried.
But traffic to northern Spain was not all concerned with trade, and the Bristol
ships that set out for its north-west corner, Galicia, carried passengers –
pilgrims bound for Santiago de Compostela who preferred not to trek
overland on the famous Camino. Beyond the lands that lay under Castilian
rule, there were good opportunities in Portugal, whose dynasty was related by
marriage to the royal house of Lancaster. As Portugal itself emerged as a
maritime power the English were able to take advantage of its successes,
importing wine from mainland Portugal, and eventually buying grete salt,
that is, sugar, from Madeira, though by way of intermediaries.39
All this generated great wealth, displayed to this day in the great church of
St Mary Redcliffe, in which the wealthy shipowner William Canynges built
chantry chapels and a tomb for himself and his wife. His endowments
resulted from a sad fact: his sons predeceased him and left no heirs. The city
of Bristol became his heir instead. He was a member of a trading dynasty
whose members had been making their money out of cloth since the late
fourteenth century (a much later member of the same family was George
Canning, the nineteenth-century British politician). The Canynges traded at
first with Bayonne and Spain, but by the middle of the fifteenth century,
when William Canynges was in his prime, they were looking much further
afield: he despatched ships to the Baltic and to Iceland, as well as Portugal,
Flanders and France.40
Another Bristol merchant is remembered for his failures rather than his
successes. Robert Sturmy enriched himself by supplying the English army in
Gascony with grain. In 1446, his ambitions turned in an entirely new
direction, the Mediterranean.41 By the mid-fifteenth century Bristol had
become a place where shipowners and seamen planned voyages to the limits
of the known world – to Prussia, Portugal, Iceland and eventually right across
the Atlantic. The Mediterranean was a better-known area; Sturmy had
received news of the expulsion of the prosperous Venetian colony from
Alexandria, and he hoped to capitalize on that by creating a direct spice trade
from the Levant to England. He had a ship, the Cog Anne, and was prepared
to risk it on this venture. He obtained a licence to export wool all the way to
Pisa, for the looms of Florence, with the intention of then moving east to the
Holy Land. His crew consisted of thirty-seven sailors, but there were 160
pilgrims on board as well, on one-way tickets, since his idea was that on the
return journey the hull would be filled with the spices of the East rather than
with human beings. The pilgrims disembarked at Jaffa, and made their way to
Jerusalem. But his crew showed their inexperience by attempting to cross the
eastern Mediterranean as Christmas approached. No doubt they imagined that
Mediterranean squalls could never match the high seas of the open Atlantic.
As they approached the Venetian naval base at Modon, on one of the
southern tips of the Peloponnese, a storm began to blow; they lost control of
the Anne and it was torn to pieces on the rocks. Not a soul survived.42
Sturmy had stayed at home, and his wealth had not been lethally dented.
Over the next few years, he held high office in Bristol, and was elected
mayor. When Parliament asked for help in the war against piracy, Sturmy
funded the building of a new ship. All the while, he was listening to news
from the Levant, which included the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in
1453. He hoped that, with this new political configuration in the eastern
Mediterranean, he could at last break his way into the highly profitable
Levant trade. So in 1457 he put together another cargo bound for Italy and
the Levant, including wheat, tin, lead, wool and cloth; the cloth alone was
worth an enormous amount, £20,000. All these goods were to be sent
‘beyond the mountains by the straits of Marrok’ on the ship Katharine
Sturmy, which had already proved itself the year before by sailing all the way
to Galicia with pilgrims for the shrine of St James. The Katharine reached the
Levant, where not just spices were loaded aboard but the seeds of green
pepper which, it was hoped, would be made to sprout on English soil. On the
way back, however, in 1458, his ship was seized by Genoese sailors off
Malta and his goods were stolen. Back in England, the news of the outrage
stirred up ever-present hostility to the Italians; the Genoese community in
London was arrested en masse. Sturmy was never fully compensated for his
losses and died towards the end of the year.43 English merchants realized
that attempts to penetrate beyond Portugal were simply too risky, and it was
another half-century before regular traffic from England to the Levant was
established. That still left vast swathes of the Atlantic, up to and beyond
Iceland, open for exploration and exploitation.

During the fifteenth century the English, particularly the merchants and
shipowners of Bristol, became determined to break into the Norwegian
monopoly of trade with Iceland, taking advantage of its increasing isolation.
Sheer distance meant that the Norwegian king was hardly in a position to
maintain tight control of what happened in Iceland, even though it had
submitted to his authority in 1262 on condition that the Norwegians send six
ships a year to the island; again and again the Icelanders complained that this
was not happening.44 The Hansa merchants based in Bergen, who conveyed
Icelandic goods further into Europe, were not themselves supposed to enter
Icelandic waters. Occasionally, though, they did venture to Iceland, since no
one seemed very interested in stopping them.
In these circumstances, the Icelanders had no compunction about
welcoming ships loaded with the foodstuffs and other supplies they needed
that had arrived from elsewhere than Bergen. King Erik wrote to the
Icelanders, grumbling that they were trading with ‘outlandish men’; he might
have added that the English found it easier to fish in Icelandic waters because
the hirðstjóri, or governor, of the island had started issuing his own licences
for fishing and for trade on the island itself. The governor carried this letter to
the court of King Erik:

Our laws provide that six ships should come hither from Norway
every year, which has not happened for a long time, a cause from
which your Grace and our poor country have suffered most grievous
harm. Therefore, trusting in God’s grace and your help, we have
traded with foreigners who have come hither peacefully on legitimate
business, but we have punished those fishermen and owners of fishing
smacks who have robbed and caused disturbance on the sea.45

His justification cut no ice; he was not sent back to Iceland. Forbidding this
trade would hardly help the islanders to survive, particularly if, as is often
argued, harsh weather conditions were making access to Iceland (and
Greenland) more difficult in the fifteenth century. English ships were ready to
face these risks, even when twenty-five vessels sank in storms in one day. At
Lynn there was an association of English Iceland merchants.46 What
attracted them was the swarms of codfish that had migrated towards the
waters off Iceland.
By 1420 the situation had become critical. A German merchant went to
Iceland to spy for the Hansa and for King Erik, and insisted that Iceland itself
would be lost to the English if the king did not take decisive action. This may
sound like exaggeration, but English freebooters did invade the island, ‘in full
battle array with trumpets and flying ensigns’. One of their targets was the
Danish governor King Erik had appointed; his attempts to maintain tight
control of the island’s economy aroused deep resentment, and he catalogued
the sins of the English traders, who had been seizing the islanders’ sheep and
cattle and even wrecking the island’s churches. The grumbling governor was
captured and carried off to England, where he registered a lengthy complaint
about the conduct of the English visitors to Iceland, leading to embarrassment
at court and, in 1426, official attempts to ban the Iceland trade, a move that
went down badly with the merchants of Lynn. The sailings to Iceland simply
continued. English smugglers, because in a sense that was what they had
become, enjoyed outwitting port officials, and the occasional confiscation of
Icelandic goods in English ports did not dent the Iceland trade, which often
used out-of-the-way ports like Fowey in Cornwall, though Icelandic stockfish
also turned up at Bristol, Hull and elsewhere. Moreover, it was still possible
to obtain official approval. An application to the Crown for a licence would
cost money, but could be seen as insurance against forfeiture. The
Scandinavian king could also be approached in the same spirit. So in 1442,
for instance, fourteen English ships were licensed to travel to Iceland; they
carried just about everything, from kettles to combs, from beer to butter, from
gloves to girdles.47 Over the next few decades, the arguments between the
English court, the English merchants, the Danish court and, increasingly, the
Hansards continued. It was no help that English raiders killed the governor of
Iceland in 1467. King Richard III complained to the city of Hamburg that
three English ships had been seized in Iceland by Hanseatic rivals; but the
Hansards could tell their own stories of attacks by sailors from Bristol in the
very same waters.48
One way of dealing with this constant turmoil was to turn one’s back on
Iceland, however desirable its fish might be, and to look for other stretches of
the north Atlantic that teemed with cod. In the 1480s, the shipowners of
Bristol sought out these waters, and the big question is whether, in the
process, they crossed as far as the fishing grounds off Labrador. The claim
that English sailors reached America in the 1480s is not simply speculation.
An Englishman named John Day addressed a letter to an Admiral of Spain,
probably Christopher Columbus, soon after John Cabot’s voyage to
Newfoundland in 1497; he wrote:

it is considered certain that the cape of the said land [Newfoundland]

was found and discovered in other times by the men of Bristol who
 found ‘Brasil’ as your Lordship knows. It was called the Ysle of
Brasil and it is assumed and believed to be the mainland that the
Bristol men found.49

(‘Mainland’ does not mean an entire continent, and could just mean a large
island.) This name ‘Brasil’ should not be confused with that of modern
Brazil, discovered by the Portuguese in 1500, which became attached to the
area because it was rich in brazilwood, much prized as a dyestuff. Rather,
‘Brasil’ was one of the legendary islands of the Atlantic that featured in late
medieval maps, and can be traced back to stories of an island out in the ocean
woven by Irish mariners in the early Middle Ages.
More important than the name is the evidence that sailors from Bristol
were setting out on journeys deep into the Atlantic in the 1480s.50 On 15
July 1480, John Jay sent a ship out from Bristol; its master was a highly
reputable mariner named Thloyde, or Lloyd, and its destination was ‘the
island of Brasylle in the western part of Ireland’. But after nine weeks at sea
it was forced back to Ireland by bad weather and found nothing.51 John Jay
or his namesake (this was a prominent trading family) had been importing
stokffish from Norway in 1461.52 In 1481, just under a year later, the Trinity
and the George, also from Bristol, set out ‘to serch & fynde a certain Isle
called the Isle of Brasile’.53 Although their owners also insisted this was not
a trading voyage, the ships were loaded with salt, which makes one think that
the aim was to catch fish, which would have had to be preserved without
delay. There is no evidence that these ships found whatever they were
seeking. The master of the Trinity and other ships bound for ‘Brasil’ would
not be the first or last to mask their real destination behind a fanciful one. In
1498 the king and queen of Castile, Ferdinand and Isabella, received a report
from their agent in England which stated that for seven years the men of
Bristol had been sending from two to four ships in search of Brasil and the
‘Seven Cities’, another mythical territory out in the Great Blue.54 If fishing
was the aim, then they had very different ambitions to John Cabot, who set
out in 1497 to gain access to the fabulous wealth of China and the East,
sharing with Christopher Columbus the assumption that Asia could be
reached by sailing westwards. Myths of lands such as the Isle of the Seven
Cities, inhabited by Christian refugees fleeing from the Muslim invasion of
Spain, remained potent, and there were romantic dreams of making contact
with long-lost Christian brethren. In the same decade, Ferdinand van Olmen,
a Fleming in the service of the Portuguese king, set out from the Azores in
the hope of finding the Seven Cities; he was never heard of again.55
There are other possibilities. The Bristol ships may have made their way to
Greenland, of which knowledge certainly survived, even though the Norse
population had probably vanished by now; they might then have realized that
following the currents down the Labrador coast would net them much bigger
catches. The explanation might also be more humdrum. Only in 1490 did the
king of Denmark relax his ban on direct English trade to Iceland. Some ships
did set out from Bristol bound for Iceland in 1481, as the city’s customs
records reveal; but there were still people who preferred not to pay for formal
licences.56 Even if they did reach Labrador, a secret discovery by men of
Bristol was no discovery at all. Another Atlantic destination that was within
the sights of Bristol merchants was Portuguese Madeira, with its abundance
of fine sugar, to which they were sending goods on Breton ships in 1480, and
beyond that the Azores; there were plans to create a route to Morocco, but the
Portuguese objected, as they did when English merchants contemplated a trip
to west Africa in 1481.57 It is time to see what the Portuguese were doing in
Atlantic waters, and how their little kingdom became the seat of a great
empire.
 25

Portugal Rising

The north-east Atlantic was becoming a well-integrated maritime region by

the end of the Middle Ages. The history of the early Atlantic cannot,
however, be written without paying attention to the shorelines further south.
Even so, the vast expanse from the Canary Islands to the southern tip of
Africa remains blank. The Canary islanders, whose ancestors had
unquestionably arrived by sea, had lost the art of navigation by the time that
European explorers chanced on their islands, in the fourteenth century. The
peoples of sub-Saharan Africa did not venture out to sea, and long-distance
sea routes down the coast of west Africa were first developed by Europeans –
by the Portuguese in the second half of the fifteenth century. The ambitious
voyages of the Portuguese southwards along the coast of Africa and
westwards towards the Atlantic islands have overshadowed the earlier
maritime history of Portugal and Atlantic Spain, for when Prince Henry the
Navigator launched the first expeditions southwards the major interest of
Portuguese sailors lay in northern waters, in Bruges, Middelburg and
England.1 The first aim of this chapter is to see whether the maritime history
of Portugal really began well before the fifteenth century.
Even before the Portuguese and the Castilians launched fleets in the
Atlantic (having secured the service of highly competent Genoese admirals),
the ocean waters off Iberia were far livelier than is generally supposed. The
Viking raids on Spain prompted the rulers of al-Andalus to create an Atlantic
fleet, and to take more seriously the dangers that might threaten from the
open Atlantic. In 859 Muslim fleets set out to challenge the Viking raiders,
carrying on board flasks of Greek fire and teams of archers; they scoured the
seas as far away as the northern coast of Spain, so that the presence of these
‘Moors’ (Mauri) alarmed the Christians who ruled there as much as did the
arrival of the Vikings. But Muslim fleets kept up the chase and scored a
series of successes, culminating in the destruction of fourteen Viking ships
near Gibraltar; in 966 a Muslim fleet from Seville scared off Vikings who
had penetrated right up to Silves, an important town that lay a little way
upriver in what is now the Portuguese Algarve.2 All this shows that the
Muslims were perfectly capable of launching fleets in the Atlantic, often
based upriver at Seville; moreover, since the Viking raids were lightning
attacks, these fleets were not specially built for the occasion, but were clearly
part of the standing forces of the emirs and caliphs of al-Andalus.
 The problem with tracing the activities of the Muslim fleets, and still more
of Muslim traders, in Atlantic waters is that the evidence is very sparse,
mainly consisting of stories about battles that have been reported at second or
third hand, or references to rare goods brought to the heartlands of Islam
from al-Andalus al-Aqsa, the furthest reaches of Spain.3 Seville, it is true,
looked eastwards, and sent the olive oil of southern Spain through the Strait
of Gibraltar to the eastern Mediterranean; but this did not mean that the
resources of the Atlantic were neglected. In the Muslim period, up to the
early thirteenth century, the shores of Portugal and Atlantic Andalusia were
scoured for the whale vomit known as ambergris, which, despite its
inauspicious source, has long been an expensive ingredient in perfumes, and
which could be found washed up on the shore in fatty lumps; this, along with
Atlantic coral, was forwarded all the way to Egypt, while the ocean was also
exploited for its fish, sold in local markets; the tunny caught off Cádiz and
Ceuta was specially prized. The fishermen were both Muslims and Mozarabs,
that is, arabized Christians largely descended from the pre-Islamic population
of Spain and Portugal. Wood suitable for shipbuilding could be found in the
Algarve. The inhabitants of Silves sold their elegant ceramics far afield, and
the town possessed its own arsenal in the eleventh century, when it was ruled
by the Muslim kings of Seville.4 Nor did the inhabitants of al-Andalus
ignore the coast of Morocco, for they sailed down to Salé opposite Rabat in
the twelfth century; and other ports along the Moroccan coast, including
Arzila and possibly Mogador, were being visited in the ninth century.5 While
the waters off Atlantic Iberia did not match the Mediterranean for intensity of
contact, the Atlantic was not a sea of darkness for the Muslims.
The relative quietness of the coastal waters off Morocco and Mauritania
contrasts with the increasing liveliness of contact between Christian and
Muslim in the waters off Iberia itself. In the twelfth century, as the Christian
county (later, kingdom) of Portugal carved out territory in western Iberia
around Porto and Coimbra, the Muslims found they had to face a challenge
on the sea as well as on land. This was just when Muslim power in Iberia
seemed to have recovered under the fundamentalist Almohads, whose radical
revivalist movement originated among the Berbers of the Atlas Mountains.
The first shock that the Almohad caliph faced was a surprise attack on Lisbon
by a substantial navy, said to have numbered 164 ships or more, which had
set out from Dartmouth in England en route to the Holy Land in 1148,
following the call to arms of the Second Crusade. When they arrived in Porto
the city’s bishop eloquently reminded the English, Flemish and German
sailors on board the crusading fleet that they would be coasting past Muslim-
held territory even before they entered the Mediterranean. Convinced that an
attack on Lisbon would serve the purposes of a grand crusade which was
being fought not just in Syria but in the Wendish lands bordering Germany
and in the Muslim lands bordering Catalonia, the crusaders eagerly joined a
Portuguese expedition against Lisbon and, after great violence, forced the
city’s surrender; predictably, this was followed by its sack, and even the
bishop of the Mozarabic Christians whom they found within its walls was
slaughtered.6 The capture of Lisbon gave the Portuguese a superb base in
southern Iberia; in the thirteenth century the weakness and then collapse of
the Almohad Empire in Spain and north Africa left them free to chip away at
the Algarve, and they were masters of Silves by 1242.
Portuguese sea captains were already harrying Muslim ships and shores
well before that date. A Portuguese fleet was built in response to constant
raids on central Portugal by the Almohad navy, so it seems that Almohad
policy had backfired: the Portuguese began to organize themselves as never
before. By the late 1170s an intrepid admiral named Dom Fuas Roupinho was
launching his ships into the Atlantic and led attacks on Almohad al-Andalus,
all the way down to the coastline near Seville, as well as attacking Ceuta on
the northern tip of Morocco. Between 1177 or 1178 and 1184 the two sides
fought what a French historian has called ‘a veritable battle of the Atlantic’,
marked by dramatic episodes such as the capture of the Almohad flagship
and eight other vessels in 1180. In the long term, though, things did not
always go well for the Portuguese: in 1181 the Almohads captured twenty, or
maybe forty, of Dom Fuas’s ships, and he was killed, while three years later
the Almohads attacked Lisbon from the sea, though they were unable to
repeat the success of the crusaders thirty-six years earlier.7 Almohad power
in Spain was only broken in 1212, in the land battle of Las Navas de Tolosa,
in which – uniquely – the kings of Castile, Aragon, Navarre and Portugal set
aside their differences and launched a joint attack on a Berber empire that
was already suffering from the strains of overextension and abandonment of
its founders’ rigid principles.

II

Lisbon benefited from growing interest in routes linking the Mediterranean to

England and Flanders at the end of the thirteenth century, as did the ports of
northern Spain: Basque sailors become more and more noticeable in the
records from this time onwards, while the pilgrim traffic to Santiago, which
lay under Castilian rule, brought increasing numbers of pilgrims across the
sea. Inland, Portugal remained poor in resources, though demand for its
wines grew during the Middle Ages. The ports, notably Lisbon and Porto, but
also smaller places such as Viana do Castelo in the north of the country, were
the real hives of economic activity. And the Portuguese kings recognized the
importance of these places in one privilege after another: royal letters of 1204
and 1210 mention a ‘commander of the ships’ (alcaide dos navios), and
around the same time Portuguese merchants were being made welcome in
England by a ruler who was always on the lookout for sources of revenue,
King John; his son Henry III was prodigal in safe conducts for Portuguese
merchants, dispensing more than a hundred of these privileges in the single
year 1226.8 Following the grant of the Carta Mercatoria to all foreign
merchants by King Edward I in 1303, the Portuguese, like everyone else, had
to pay higher customs dues, but England became even more attractive than
before, because the merchants now lay under the protection of the Crown.
That was something worth paying for. A commercial treaty in 1353 was
followed by the Treaty of Windsor in 1386, a political alliance that reflected
the common interests of the two kingdoms during the Hundred Years War,
and English support for the dynasty of Aviz that had seized the throne in
1383 (largely to prevent it from falling into the hands of their hated
neighbours, the Castilians). Marriage ties also bound the kingdoms together,
after Philippa of Lancaster married the king of Portugal; her sons included the
pioneers of Atlantic exploration Henry the Navigator and Prince Pedro.9 So
began an alliance that both sides in later centuries liked to think had never
been sundered.
The Portuguese kings were, not surprisingly, even keener to promote
Portuguese trade than foreign partners; King Dinis established an innovative
mutual insurance scheme in 1293, whereby risks at sea were shared among
the trading community. He understood that an effective fleet was needed in
troubled times, and in 1317 he hired Manuel Pessagno, a Genoese admiral, to
organize the construction of a fleet – the Castilians and even the French also
relied on Genoese talent in their fleets.10 Well before then, by 1200,
Portuguese products were flowing into Bruges: a burgher of the city wrote
that ‘from the kingdom of Portugal come honey, skins, wax, hides, grain,
ointment, oil, figs, raisins and esparto grass’.11 By 1237 there was a royal
arsenal in Lisbon, though it had surely existed for some time already. No one
could have claimed that Portugal was already a major maritime power, and
one should be wary of assuming that these achievements led in a straight line
to the successes Portugal was to enjoy in the fifteenth-century Atlantic, but
without the groundwork of King Dinis and others it is hard to see how
Portugal would have emerged as a naval power on a scale out of all
proportion to the size and natural resources of the country.
If Portugal was to flourish as a centre of business, it was vital to attract
capital to Lisbon; and the obvious source of capital lay in the north Italian
cities. The Crown was therefore keen to make the Italian merchants feel
comfortable in the capital. In 1365 the Portuguese king generously exempted
merchants from Genoa, Milan and Piacenza (a major centre of banking) from
the authority of the royal officials who supervised the loading of goods on
ships. It would not do to discourage the wealthiest businessmen in Portugal
from trading through Lisbon. A few years later another king of Portugal
found himself apologizing to the Genoese for Portuguese pirate raids on their
ships, which had been seized along with a precious cargo of Flemish and
French cloth. These kings offered special privileges for the Genoese and
others in Lisbon, without extending them to other ports in the country. The
city became home to branches of several of the most powerful Genoese
families, such as the Lomellini and the Spinolas.12 Lisbon was being slowly
transformed into a major port city.
Notwithstanding these initiatives by the Portuguese Crown, interest in the
sea depended on the initiative of the shipowners, sailors and merchants who
set out from Lisbon and other ports, bound for Flanders and England in one
direction, but also for warmer waters further south. By the fifteenth century
Portuguese shipping was making regular appearances in the Mediterranean,
bringing dried fruits and other relatively modest goods through the Strait of
Gibraltar, over which the wealthy Muslim city of Ceuta, on the northern tip
of Morocco, majestically presided.13 The presence in the Mediterranean of
ships from Atlantic Iberia – not just Portugal but Galicia and Cantabria,
including many Basque vessels – demonstrates how the Strait had ceased to
function as a barrier, and had become a link in the chain connecting the
vigorous trade of the Mediterranean world with Atlantic networks.14 From
the eastern end of the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea, from Egypt and Syria to
Venice, Genoa and Barcelona, from there out through the Strait to Atlantic
waters all the way to Bruges, and from Bruges to Lübeck, Danzig and Riga,
goods were conveyed stage by stage; and the ports of Portugal were
especially well placed to benefit from these world-encompassing connections
(world-encompassing at least in an age when the existence of the Americas
was not suspected). One stimulus to their interest came from the increasing
concern of mapmakers to sketch accurately the shores of Europe and the
lands beyond. By the middle of the fourteenth century, maps were being
drawn in Majorca, Genoa and elsewhere that showed interesting-looking
islands out in the Atlantic, as yet unsettled: certainly Madeira and possibly
also the Azores, which lie so much farther out that this would speak for quite
bold attempts to sweep the eastern Atlantic in the search for lands to exploit,
whether by conquest or trade.
Exploration of the coast of Africa had begun by 1291, when the Vivaldi
brothers from Genoa set out by way of Majorca and the Strait of Gibraltar to
find a sea route all the way to India. They disappeared somewhere off the
coast of Africa, no doubt overwhelmed by waves or wrecked on sandbanks
along shores that were still unmapped and therefore extremely treacherous.
The idea that they were precocious predecessors of Columbus, bound
westwards for the opposite shores of the Atlantic (and for what they supposed
would be China) holds no water. Still, their unfinished exploits remained the
subject of wonder and speculation in Genoa even 200 years later, in the days
of Columbus. The sense that there was something out there was reinforced
when ships began to edge their way past Ceuta to ports along the coast of
Morocco. As early as 1260 the king of Castile launched a fleet against Salé,
the port opposite modern Rabat that for centuries was seen as a hive of
pirates. King Alfonso failed to capture the port or to make inroads into
Morocco, but peaceful visits by Catalan ships showed that there were good
opportunities to make money along this coast. Around Fez, vast amounts of
grain were cultivated, and this explains the arrival of ships from Barcelona
and Majorca in Moroccan ports. Then the question beckoned: what lay
beyond? Visitors to Morocco could not fail to see that this country had close
ties with lands much further south, to which it was linked by caravan routes
carrying gold and slaves from sub-Saharan Africa. Catalan mapmakers
speculated that a ‘River of Gold’ stretched across the Sahara and might be
reachable by ships that carried on along the African coast. A Genoese
explorer named Lançalotto Malocello apparently reached the Canary Islands
in 1336, and his name is commemorated in that of one of the easternmost
islands – Lanzarote.15
The Canaries had been vaguely known for centuries as the ‘Happy
Islands’, Insulae Fortunatae, but they were rarely visited. The twelfth-
century geographer al-Idrisi, who came from Ceuta but had taken refuge at
the court of Roger II, the Norman king of Sicily, mentioned failed attempts
by the Muslims to conquer the Canary Islands, which were, however, still
largely the stuff of myth: he reported that there existed a strange and
magnificent temple in the islands, and that the inhabitants sold amber to the
Lamtuna Berbers of north-west Africa, who came to trade.16 The islanders,
also of Berber origin, had arrived long before Islam swept into north Africa,
and had lost the art of navigation, leaving them isolated in their (to all intents)
Stone Age existence on all seven major islands, which probably did not even
have contact among themselves. The most famous group were the warlike
Guanches of Tenerife, whose massive volcano, Mount Teide, was visible
from afar and was even mentioned by Dante in the Divine Comedy.17
Lançalotto Malocello must have encountered the Majos and Majoreros of
Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, who were just as capable warriors as the
Guanches, despite the reliance of all the Canary islanders on weapons made
of hardened wood and stone.18
After Malocello’s visit, the race for the Canaries began. In July 1341 an
expedition set out from Lisbon, apparently funded by Italians and consisting
of three vessels manned by a motley crew of Portuguese, Castilians, Catalans
and Italians. An extraordinary survival, a letter by the great writer Giovanni
Boccaccio based on a report he had received from Florentine contacts in
Lisbon, describes what happened.19 The explorers took horses and heavy
armaments on the ignorant assumption that they would be waging war against
well-defended towns and fortresses. When they first saw the islanders they
were astonished: they found rocks and forests inhabited by naked men and
women, whom they described as ‘rough in manners’. They obtained some
modest goods: goatskins, sealskins, fats; but they were not tempted to create
a base there, so they sailed on. What they really wanted was access to the
gold of sub-Saharan Africa, which featured prominently on the world maps
that were being produced around this time in Majorca and elsewhere. Any
delusions they may have had about gold-rich Canary Islands soon vanished.
Moving on, the little fleet reached a second, rather larger island, Canaria,
the island now known as Grand Canary. Standing close offshore, their ships
attracted the wonder of the natives. The explorers saw a great gathering of
men and women, who had come to watch them; most were naked, including
unmarried girls, though some wore dyed leather kilts and were obviously of
higher status. The islanders seemed welcoming enough, so twenty-five armed
sailors went to shore; showing the sort of tactlessness that would be repeated
again and again in the history of European overseas conquests, they broke
into some stone houses, one of which proved to be a temple made of dressed
stone blocks, from which they stole a statue of a naked man. Boccaccio
evidently assumed this idol was similar to the classical statues he knew from
his native Tuscany, which is hardly likely. The explorers also persuaded or
coerced four young Canarians into travelling back to Portugal with them;
they were handsome and gracious, and, judging from their kilts, must have
been members of the Canarian elite. On board ship, it became obvious that
they had never encountered bread or wine, and – to the disappointment of the
explorers – they had never seen gold and silver; this suggested that the ‘River
of Gold’ was beyond their reach. ‘These do not appear to be rich islands,’
Boccaccio reports, and those who had planned the expedition found that they
had to recoup their investment from the sale of goatskins, tallow and
dyestuffs picked up on the islands.20 The disappointing outcome of the
Portuguese voyage failed to deter the Catalan king of Majorca, James III, a
mentally unbalanced ruler who dreamed of creating an island empire
embracing both the Balearics and the Canaries. James sent his own heavily
armed expeditions to the islands; and then, after 1343, when he was thrown
off his throne by his cousin the king of Aragon, further visits by Catalan–
Aragonese ships resulted in the creation of a missionary bishop on Grand
Canary.21
The voyage of 1341 marks the first time medieval western Europeans had
come into contact with isolated Stone Age societies, and Boccaccio’s account
wove together an idealized view of a society that lived in a prelapsarian state
of innocence, of which their unashamed nakedness was a clear and beautiful
sign. On the other hand, there was also a darker image: of peoples living in
the Canaries as wild men (and women) of the forest, in a state of primitive
and naked brutishness. This was the view of Boccaccio’s friend and fellow
littérateur Petrarch, and it could be used to justify European conquest both in
the islands and, in due course, on the American mainland.22 Another dark
aspect of the Portuguese voyage of 1341 was that it planted in the mind of
European merchants the notion that these primitive folk could be carried
away without compunction and enslaved. Nothing is known of the fate of the
four Canarians who were brought back to Lisbon; but documents from the
late fourteenth century often speak of Canary islanders who were working as
slaves on estates in Majorca, beginning in 1345, only three years after the
first Majorcan expedition. In the decades after the Black Death, which hit
Europe in 1347 and killed perhaps half the population, manpower shortages
stimulated an active slave trade out of the Canaries, operated by Catalans and
Castilians who kidnapped islanders without compunction. Intensive raids on
the archipelago depopulated Lanzarote, a situation made far worse when
Norman adventurers seized Lanzarote and Fuerteventura around 1400, with
the intention of setting up an independent lordship there. By the early
fifteenth century the papacy was seriously concerned about attempts to carry
off islanders who had accepted baptism from the missionary friars in the
islands.23
European explorers were much more interested in finding a sea route to the
‘River of Gold’ and in bypassing the camel routes across the Sahara and
towards Timbuktu that were off-limits for Christian merchants.
Understandably, they cared rather less about low-profit voyages to remote
islands that were a source of truculent slaves and a not very interesting violet
dyestuff – orchil, which was made from lichens found across the Canaries.
An expedition by the Majorcan explorer Jaume Ferrer, in 1346, may well
have reached some way down the African coast, anticipating Portuguese
efforts to pass the supposed obstacle of Cape Bojador in the fifteenth century.
However, nothing is known for certain, apart from the fact that Ferrer was
commemorated on one Catalan map after another, beginning with the
beautifully illuminated atlas presented to the king of France in 1375,
preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. This shows his solidly
built ship, of the type known as an uxer, making headway southwards,
carrying on board not just merchants and soldiers but priests ready to spread
the word of Christ.24
All this demonstrates that the fascination of later generations of Portuguese
with African gold formed part of a longer and wider tradition of thinking
about ways of reaching the sources of gold by sea. Even so, it would be
wrong to conclude that Portugal was turning away from colder Atlantic
waters towards the coast of Africa. Links to England and Flanders, sealed by
treaties and strengthened by marriage alliances, were intended to confirm
Portugal’s growing importance within the politics and trade of the northern
Atlantic. But political convulsions in Portugal during the 1380s brought to
power a new dynasty, that of Aviz, and during this turmoil there was little
opportunity to challenge the Castilians, Catalans and Normans who were
interfering in the waters off Africa. Only after about 1400, as the new dynasty
in Portugal gained wide acceptance, not least among townspeople, did new
schemes emerge that revealed how a royal family poised on the edges of
Europe had begun to dream of grander achievements in the name of God and
profit.

III

Ceuta occupies a narrow neck of land that joins the lesser of the Pillars of
Hercules, a hill now known as Mount Hacho, to the mainland of Africa.
Ceuta still preserves an impressive set of walls, parts of which date back to
the long period of Arab domination, from the late seventh century to 1415;
and Mount Hacho was also well defended, serving as a beacon (or hacho)
overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar. On either side of the tiny isthmus lively
harbours could be found, offering shelter to ships depending on whether the
winds were easterly or westerly. Many of these ships plied down the coast of
Morocco, making headway through the difficult waters of the Strait and then
putting in at ports such as Salé, where they loaded with grain from the plains
around Fez – Ceuta brimmed with granaries (there were forty-three mills in
and around Ceuta), and some of the keenest clients who came to buy this
grain were the merchants of Genoa and Barcelona, who would face severe
shortages at home if they did not supply their cities with wheat from Sicily,
Sardinia and Morocco.25 As early as the twelfth century, whenever political
crises, which were frequent, shut off access to the rich wheat fields of the
Norman kingdom of Sicily, the Genoese headed for Ceuta to make up the
shortfall.26 Fine wool and hides from the Merino sheep, who derived their
name from the ruling dynasty of Morocco, were other powerful attractions,
though these sheep were eventually bred in vast numbers in Castile.27 In the
past – though it is less certain that this was still true around 1400 – Ceuta had
been an important terminal for the camel caravans that carried gold dust
across the Sahara in exchange for European textiles and Mediterranean salt.28
During the late thirteenth century and early fourteenth, Ceuta enjoyed a
period of virtual independence as a city-state controlled by a local family, the
‘Azafids; these ‘Azafids helped keep the Castilians at bay when they tried to
conquer Algeciras next door to Gibraltar, but they also, for several decades,
managed to steer an independent course between the Marinid dynasty that
took control of Morocco during the thirteenth century and the Nasrid dynasty
that ruled over Granada, which included the other Pillar of Hercules, the
Rock of Gibraltar.29 Fragments of wooden decoration from its public
buildings suggest that Ceuta’s palaces and mosques were quite luxurious;
besides, the city is said to have contained dozens of madrasas and was home
to scholars of high repute, such as the great twelfth-century geographer al-
Idrisi (before he went off into exile on Sicily), and ibn Sab’in, a philosopher
who corresponded (in a rather condescending way) with the thirteenth-
century Holy Roman emperor and king of Sicily, Frederick II.30
The strategic value of Ceuta was obvious, and it had been targeted by
European navies as well as by the Marinids and the Nasrids. By 1400, when
traffic heading from Italy and the Catalan lands through the Strait towards
Flanders and England had become quite regular, the city was booming, and
was seen as a wealthy prize. Even so, the decision by the Portuguese court to
make Ceuta the target of a massive naval crusade took Europe and the
Islamic world by surprise. Portugal did not seem to possess the resources for
a campaign across the water against a well-fortified city that others had failed
to conquer. But the surprise was all the greater because the Portuguese court
kept its destination a closely guarded secret. From 1413 onwards it was
obvious that something was being planned in Lisbon. A sign of what was in
the air that no one seems to have understood was a ban that the Portuguese
king, João I, imposed on trade with north Africa, targeting not just the export
of weapons to Islamic lands, something that the papacy had long, and often
fruitlessly, been forbidding, but the export of the dried fruit and other
humbler products that Portugal regularly placed on the market.31 This was
hardly likely to shake Ceuta, Tangier or any other trading partner of the
Portuguese to their foundations, though it would at least discourage
Portuguese merchants from being stranded in Moroccan cities when an attack
was launched.
Some speculated that the Portuguese intended to launch a raid in the
northern Atlantic, as far away as Flanders or northern France, conceivably in
conjunction with King Henry V of England, who was about to launch the
Agincourt campaign. More probable was an attack on the last Muslim
kingdom in Spain, Granada, though there existed a longstanding agreement
among the Iberian rulers that Granada was reserved as a future prize for the
kings of Castile. Indeed, the Portuguese had signed a treaty with the
Castilians in 1411, despite a history of hostility between the two kingdoms
that had culminated in a Castilian siege of Lisbon in 1384.32 Letters passed
back and forth between the Portuguese and the Castilian court, in which the
Portuguese proposed to help in campaigns in Granada, while the Castilians, at
that point preoccupied with other matters, gave them no encouragement.33
On the other hand, there were those at court, notably Prince Henry, who
remained deeply suspicious of Castilian intentions, and the treaty of 1411
lessened but failed to dissipate tension; to cite a fifteenth-century Portuguese
king: ‘after twenty years of bitter war between the two kingdoms treaties of
peace cannot remove from the hearts of men so great a foundation of hatred
and ill-will.’34 Henry and his brothers, imbued with passion for the crusade
and chivalric achievements, were determined to prove themselves on the field
of battle, and constantly pressed for action.
The expedition of 1415 cost 33,600,000 reais brancos (‘white royal
coins’), and though this was a heavily devalued currency, equivalent to about
280,000 golden dobras. That is still a mountain of gold. This was just the
immediate outlay, but there were also loans and purchases on credit that
inflated the cost much further. In part the money was raised by demanding
that anyone with reserves of silver or copper, the ingredients of the white, or
rather off-white, coins, should surrender their bullion to the Crown; the
Crown also bought in vast quantities of salt at an artificially low price and
sold it on at much higher prices, which was a classic way for medieval kings
to make money quickly. Even so, it is hard to believe that such orders can
have had much effect; the king was scraping the barrel.35
Then there was the problem of finding a fleet. This involved the
expropriation of ships in harbour in Portugal. Half the fleet that set out in
August 1415 consisted of non-Portuguese ships. There were many vessels
from north-western Spain and from the Bay of Biscay, because Galician and
Basque sailors used Lisbon and Porto as stopping points on their way towards
the Mediterranean. But there were also twenty-two Flemish and German
ships, for it has been seen that the German Hansa had quite close ties to
Portugal, and these included a ‘great ship’ from Flanders that displaced 500
tons; there were ten English vessels. As well as the ships themselves, there
were the mariners, several hundred of whom were not Portuguese. Among
the fighting force there were, again, some north European knights, though the
English, despite their alliance with Portugal, were distracted by Henry V’s
war in France – Henry landed in France during the very days when the
Portuguese fleet was beating its way towards its own destination.36
The participation of knights from outside Portugal exposes one motive for
the campaign. Capturing a wealthy city was certainly an objective, but this
war was a crusade, a continuation of the conflict between Christians and
Muslims in Iberia (the so-called Spanish Reconquista) that was nearing
completion now that the small kingdom of Granada was the only Muslim
state left on Spanish soil; the conquistadores had long intended to continue
their campaigns in Africa once, or even before, all Iberia lay under Christian
rule. The problem was that Castile had reserved Morocco for itself, and
Aragon had reserved Algeria. This left no space for the newcomer, Portugal.
And yet, lacking a frontier with Muslim territory, the kings of Portugal were
forced to seek glorious victories in Christ’s name away from their own
frontiers. So the army and navy were entertained with crusading sermons
from the king’s confessor while they stood off the Algarve, presenting the
campaign as King João’s act of repentance for shedding so much blood in his
wars – wars with Castile, which shed Christian blood, whereas war against
the Infidel was quite another moral issue.
In early August the Portuguese fleet moved south-east from the Bay of
Lagos in the Algarve and headed into the troublesome waters of the Strait of
Gibraltar. Scattered by the winds and currents, only part of the fleet was able
to draw near to Ceuta, and before long a storm blew the fleet back towards
the bay of Algeciras, the western part of which lay under the rule of the
Castilian king, who had become suspicious enough of Portuguese plans to
forbid his officials to offer any help. Discouraged by the hostile weather,
some of the Portuguese commanders argued that Gibraltar was just across the
bay and, since it was in Granadan hands, was a much more accessible target.
But others, notably Prince Henry, were fixated on Ceuta; besides, the failed
attempt a few days earlier had given the fleet a chance to inspect its
fortifications on Mount Hacho and to see what sort of land-walls the city
possessed. And by now it was so obvious that Ceuta was the intended target
that the Portuguese would have looked silly in the eyes of their Christian
neighbours if they had chosen any other target. One advantage of which they
were not aware was that the qadi, the governor of Ceuta, had decided that the
threat from Portugal had receded once the fleet was blown back towards
Spain. He dismissed troops he had brought in from Morocco, and no effort
was made to ring the city with Marinid warships. The Portuguese certainly
made mistakes in the early stages of their campaign; but the Ceutans made
even more serious ones. On 21 August 1415 the Portuguese returned, and the
qadi brought his troops down from the battlements to prevent them from
landing. He failed to stop them, and left part of his defences exposed.
The battle for the city lasted a whole day, but by evening Ceuta was in
Christian hands. So it has remained ever since, allowing for a change from
Portuguese to Spanish rule in the seventeenth century. But if the Portuguese
expected to take charge of a prosperous and well-connected city they were at
once disappointed. The attack had already prompted the great majority of
Ceutans to flee into the Moroccan hinterland; maybe they expected to return,
but Portuguese victory scared them away – after all, the Great Mosque was
converted into a cathedral. Not just the Muslims but the Genoese, who had
played such an important part in the business life of the city, disappeared.
They were hardly encouraged by what they saw: a Portuguese noble seized
all the grain owned by a Sicilian merchant who was residing in Ceuta, and
then tortured him until he signed a deed handing over gold coins he had
stored away in distant Valencia.37 The Portuguese made Ceuta into a
garrison city inhabited by 2,500 soldiers, and sent there all sorts of
undesirables, so that it became Portugal’s Siberia; what had once been one of
the great cities of the Maghrib had to all intents ceased to exist as a city, and
it never recovered its past glories. Lack of access to the interior meant that
Ceuta had to be supplied from Tavira in the Portuguese Algarve, which was a
constant drain on public finances.38 This victory infuriated the Castilians,
alarmed the Moroccans, and boosted the prestige of the royal house of
Portugal, and especially that of Prince Henry, the king’s third son, who had
displayed bravery to the point of foolhardiness on the streets of Ceuta – even
at one point becoming trapped among Muslim soldiers, from whom he was
rescued by a loyal knight who lost his own life in the process. Henry was
knighted when the fleet returned to Tavira and was made absentee governor
of Ceuta as a reward for his bravery. His obsession with chivalry and crusade
lasted throughout his life, as his biographer, Sir Peter Russell, showed, to the
consternation of the old generation of Portuguese historians, who saw him as
the first builder of what became the worldwide Portuguese empire.
The big question, though, is whether the events of 1415 really mark ‘the
origins of European expansion’, to cite the title of the conference held in
Ceuta to mark the 600th anniversary of its conquest – a rather low-key affair,
given the sensitivities in Morocco about the two, now Spanish, cities on the
coast of north Africa. It has not been easy to shake off the assumptions about
Portugal’s imperial destiny that are enshrined in the greatest work of
sixteenth-century Portuguese literature, Luis Camões’s Lusiads:

A thousand swimming birds, spreading

Their concave pinions to the winds,
Parted the white, turbulent waves
To where Hercules set his pillars.39

Yet a strong case can be made that the Portuguese hoped to expand not across
the world, but from this foothold on the northern tip of Morocco down the
coast to Tangier and other cities close to the Strait. An attack on Tangier in
1437 proved a total disaster, and Portugal was almost cornered into a position
where it would trade Ceuta for one of Henry’s brothers, who had been taken
captive; but Henry preferred to let him die in a Moroccan jail – he loved
Ceuta more than his brother. Yet the Portuguese kept coming back to
Morocco, well into the late sixteenth century, leading to the extinction of
their dynasty when King Sebastian, leading a crusade against Islam with
Messianic fervour, died in the Battle of the Three Kings in 1578.40 The
Moroccan crusade lay right at the top of Portuguese foreign-policy
objectives.
The traditional view of Prince Henry was that he fostered the science of
navigation, making him in matters maritime the equivalent of the great
cultural figures of the Italian Renaissance. He supposedly established a
revolutionary school of navigation in his palace at Sagres, near Cape St
Vincent on the southern tip of Portugal, enlisting the help of a certain Jaume
de Mallorca, a Majorcan Jew or convert from Judaism, who brought to
Portugal the cartographic and astronomical knowledge that Majorcan Jews
had been cultivating since at least 1300. It is just possible that he did bring a
member of the famous mapmaking family of Cresques to Portugal, but the
myth of a fully fledged academy at Sagres does not hold water.41
Thoroughly modern Henry is a myth. The statue of Henry that looms over the
quayside at Belém, near Lisbon, pointing the way of his navigators out into
the far ocean, was built for an exhibition in 1940 and reconstructed for the
500th anniversary of Henry’s death in 1960. It says more about the imperial
myths of Portugal under Dr Salazar than it does about Portugal in the days of
Prince Henry.
 26

Virgin Islands

To deny the capture of Ceuta its accustomed place as the starting point for the
‘Expansion of Europe’ is not to deny Prince Henry a central role in the
opening of Atlantic waters. His ambitions stretched in many directions; in
1424 he launched an assault on the Canaries that was rebuffed by the
islanders, and he was probably well aware of the Portuguese expedition to the
Canaries in 1341, and the claim to the islands that followed. It is certain that
he was looking for lands over which he could rule in his own right under
loose Portuguese dominion. Throughout his long career (he died in 1460), he
juggled the crusade in Morocco, ambitions in the Canaries, the management
of newly colonized Atlantic islands and the exploration of the west African
coast in search of gold, though he himself never sailed further than Ceuta.
These objectives were not separate from one another: gold would pay for
crusades; so would the profits from the sugar industry that began to flourish
in the Atlantic islands. As governor of the Order of Christ he administered a
crusading Military Order that had come into being when the disgraced Order
of the Temple was disbanded early in the fourteenth century; its Portuguese
properties were handed over to the new order, in whose name the Atlantic
voyages were conducted.
The uninhabited Atlantic islands that fell under Portuguese rule have a
special claim to attention. As with the Pacific islands, they were places where
the human presence decisively transformed the environment, exploiting or in
some cases destroying their fertility. They were places where settlers, living
far from home in simple conditions, had to create a society that could
function effectively despite the inability of the royal government back home
to keep an eye on day-to-day affairs. They were also places where different
social mixes came into being, whether through the arrival of Genoese in
Madeira and Flemings in the Azores, or the presence of Jewish converts,
black slaves and Portuguese convicts in the remotest island, São Tomé. They
also offer insights into the very earliest phases of the European slave trade
out of Africa, insights that can now be developed further following
excavations in the Cape Verde Islands. For this was a clean New World, the
first New World, newer than the New World that was soon to be discovered,
because all the island groups in the eastern Atlantic apart from the Canaries
were uninhabited. The rape of this virginal world by greedy Europeans is one
of the themes of this chapter.
 Geographers have given these scattered islands the common name of
‘Macaronesia’, derived from the Greek term ‘Fortunate Isles’ (Mακάρων
Nῆσοι, Makarōn Nēsoi), which was used in antiquity to describe the
Canaries; this has too much of the flavour of macaroni and has often been
shortened to ‘Macronesia’, by analogy with Micronesia in the Pacific. Some
historians have preferred to use the term Méditerranée Atlantique, seeing the
eastern Atlantic archipelagoes as an interconnected world that came into
existence as merchants and migrants expanded beyond the familiar waters of
the Mediterranean and the eastern Atlantic shoreline into open seas that had
rarely been navigated before the fourteenth century.1 The first of the Atlantic
islands to be colonized were those in the Madeira archipelago. Although later
legend told of a pair of storm-tossed and star-crossed English lovers who had
been swept towards Madeira, the islands were uninhabited when the one-eyed
João Gonçalves Zarco and his colleague Tristão Vaz, squires of Prince
Henry, explored them in 1420. The low-lying island of Porto Santo close to
Madeira was placed under the authority of another sea captain, named
Perestrello, whose family had originated in Piacenza in northern Italy but
settled in Portugal; later, Christopher Columbus would marry into this family
and quite possibly gained knowledge of Atlantic waters by studying
information the family had kept to itself.2
The islands were already known to Italian and Catalan navigators of the
fourteenth century: Madeira appears on the portolan charts as the ‘Isle of
Wood’, Legname, which is exactly the meaning of the Portuguese word
‘Madeira’; and anyone sailing back from the Canaries after a slave-raid
would have known how to catch the prevailing winds by swinging out north-
westwards, which would have brought them in sight of Madeira, while an
even greater swing might bring navigators to the Azores. It is an
extraordinary fact that the colonization of the Pacific had already been
completed with the settlement of New Zealand about a century earlier, while
colonization of the Atlantic islands lagged far behind. In part this was
because the Atlantic islands were fewer and more scattered; in part it was the
result of relatively slow advances in shipbuilding. Eventually the Portuguese
caravel became the trademark ship of the early Portuguese explorers. This
versatile lateen-rigged ship, of around fifty tons, had a shallow keel that made
it suitable for travelling upriver, an important advantage for those seeking the
‘River of Gold’ in west Africa. There were other advantages in its small size,
compared to the great naus and cogs that visited Lisbon on their way to and
from northern waters, or the ocean-going galleys of the Venetians and the
Florentines that linked Flanders to Italy. For Portuguese timber resources
were limited, and (as it turned out) the best timber was not to be found in
Portugal itself, but out in the Atlantic.
The colonization of Madeira really took off after 1433, when the old king,
João I, died, and Henry found himself in full charge of the island; even then,
he arrogated to himself greater powers than the Crown was willing to
concede, and tussles between Henry and the kings of Portugal over
jurisdiction in Madeira were still going on in 1451.3 Yet it was thanks to
Henry, if his biographer is to be believed, that this small island became an
economic powerhouse. According to Zurara, Henry supported the first
settlers by sending them seeds and tools. His interest in the island grew as his
attempts to gain a further foothold in Morocco met with complete failure;
following defeat at Tangier in 1437, he turned his attention to the Atlantic
islands. Although he saw these islands mainly as a source of revenue, he also
boasted to the pope that he had freed the inhabitants of Madeira from Muslim
rule and had brought them back to the Christian faith – a nonsensical
statement that reveals more about his love for self-promotion than about the
crusade against the Muslims.4
Madeira lies 350 miles from Morocco and about the same distance from
the Canaries. The island’s abundant hardwood became one of its best exports;
it was said to be so strong that the inhabitants of Lisbon could use it to build
new storeys on their houses.5 It was of great value to the growing Portuguese
fleet; Madeira as well as Lisbon became a centre of shipbuilding. The
discoverers divided up the territory, and one-eyed Zarco made his base at the
‘place of fennel’, O Funchal, now the island capital, where he and his
followers flourished. The fertile, well-watered soil, left untended since the
island rose out of the sea, yielded vast quantities of wheat; since the settler
population was small (150 households in 1450, according to Zurara), Madeira
offered a lifeline to Lisbon, which was suffering from lack of access to
Moroccan grain now that the Portuguese were launching campaigns against
the Marinid sultanate. Prince Henry’s Venetian captain, Alvise da Cà da
Mosto (or Cadamosto), stated that around 1455 Madeira produced 68,000
bushels of wheat each year. All this meant that the ecology of Madeira
underwent massive transformations following the arrival of the first human
settlers, and the same applies to the other Atlantic islands that the Portuguese
colonized.6
Nonetheless, flat land suitable for wheat production was not easy to find on
such a mountainous island, and Henry had grander plans. Da Mosto was
travelling past Cape St Vincent on a Venetian galley bound for Flanders; the
ship had to put in, and Prince Henry lured da Mosto into his service by
showing him samples of sugar grown in Madeira, something that would
tempt any Italian merchant.7 Demand for sugar was booming, just as
supplies of sugar from the eastern Mediterranean were threatened by the
Turkish advance to Constantinople; princely courts and prosperous merchants
were enthusiastic consumers of luxury foodstuffs, including crystallized fruits
and little caskets containing blocks of white sugar.8 Sicily, Valencia and
Muslim Granada were among the great sugar centres of the Mediterranean,
and Madeiran sugar was cultivated from either Sicilian sugar stocks or
southern Portuguese ones recently set up by Genoese entrepreneurs in the
Algarve. But to produce sugar in the subtropical climate of Madeira was an
inspired idea; Madeira was superbly equipped for this, with its vast amounts
of wood (needed for the boiling of the cane) and of water, running down the
steep hills. Its sugar could then be supplied to Flanders via Lisbon, or, before
long, directly – many of the splendid Flemish paintings in the Museum of
Sacred Art in Funchal were acquired as payment for sugar by Madeiran
merchants of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century.
Da Mosto thought that the island was already producing 1,600 arrobas, or
about 24,000 kg, of sugar by 1456. But these were small beginnings: by 1498
something like 600,000 kg of sugar were being sent to Flanders alone, with
225,000 bound for Venice and only 105,000 for consumption in Portugal –
the total for just these places approaches 1,000,000 kilograms, but that year a
decision was made to limit the quantity exported to 1,800,000 kg (120,000
arrobas), which was just as well, as the sugar cane was beginning to exhaust
the land.9 Europe had developed a sweet tooth. And the quantity being
produced grew and grew. The Portuguese Cortes, or parliament, of 1481–2
noted that twenty large ships and forty to fifty smaller ones were loading
sugar and some other goods, ‘for the nobility and richness of the merchandise
of great value which they have and harvest in the said islands’. Pope Paul II
praised Zarco and his colleagues for all they had done to supply the Iberian
kingdoms with sugar, wheat and other ‘comforts’.10
Administering places a long way from Lisbon was a challenge. The ‘sub-
donatories’, Zarco and Vaz on Madeira and Perestrello on Porto Santo, who
had discovered the islands and were Henry’s agents there, were authorized to
operate local courts; they received one tenth of the revenues from their lands,
passing the remaining nine tenths to Henry, or rather the Order of Christ.
Their share might seem paltry, but it was not paltry so long as the Madeira
archipelago continued to export its sugar and wheat on such an enormous
scale. Madeirans at large benefited handsomely from exemption from trade
taxes on goods sent to Portugal, which the Crown renounced in 1444 to
encourage trade. It is no wonder, then, that, by the end of the fifteenth
century, Madeira was attracting settlers from Portugal, Genoa and Tuscany;
others arrived from Flanders and Germany, given the close links between
Madeira and the sugar trade to Flanders. In 1457, some German settlers were
allowed to plant vines and sugar and to build a chapel and houses. The
Portuguese imposed few restrictions on settlers, though the Madeirans were
keen to expel the enslaved Canary islanders who had been imported to work
the sugar mills, and were proving extremely truculent.11 The Genoese
brought capital and enterprise, and helped kick-start the sugar industry.
Among them was Christopher Columbus, who visited the archipelago in
1478, aiming to buy sugar in exchange for cloth; and his business partner in
Madeira was Jean de Esmerault, a Fleming. This mixed population had
reached about 15,000 by 1500, which included the full panoply of priests,
merchants and artisans as well as the descendants of the original cultivators
of the soil. Of this total, some 2,000 were slaves, either from the Canaries or
from west Africa. This is a surprisingly low figure, since the sugar industry
demanded plenty of cheap labour for back-breaking work; the main labour
force was Portuguese and Italian.
 Another source of stability was the simple fact that the first European
proprietors lived a long time, Zarco remaining in charge of southern Madeira
for about forty years. It is not hard to see why they lasted so long. They lived
far from the centres of plague and other disease in western Europe; their diet
was a plainer but healthier one than that of minor nobles in Iberia or Italy; the
water was clean; they fought few or no wars. Nature could be remoulded:
whether by the planting of sugar stocks or by the cattle and sheep that first
populated the Azores. Sometimes, admittedly, this did not work well: when
rabbits were introduced to Porto Santo they gobbled up the vegetation and
turned the island into a semi-desert; it has never recovered. Madeira lost part
of its tree cover as its timber was sent for export or burned in the furnaces of
the sugar mills.12

II

The Azores too were evidently known to mapmakers before their

colonization; they are recognizable in fourteenth-century Majorcan portolan
charts.13 Lying between 800 and 1,000 miles due west of Lisbon, these nine
volcanic peaks gradually became valued for themselves, rather than any
notional value in the fight against Islam in north-west Africa. Although they
lie much further out from Portugal than Madeira, ships returning from
Madeira or the Canaries would have taken advantage of the prevailing winds
to follow a great curve that took them towards the Azores before they turned
eastwards in the direction of Lisbon; the story grew that the Portuguese had
reached the legendary ‘Isle of Brazil’ that was said to lie out in the Atlantic,
or possibly the ‘Isle of the Seven Cities’, inhabited by refugees from the
Muslim conquest of Spain more than 700 years earlier.14 Impressed by the
hawks that hovered over the islands, the Portuguese gave them the name
‘Hawk Islands’, Açores. These islands were completely uninhabited by
humans, and attempts to argue that the Phoenicians knew the islands or that
stone structures on the island date back to Neolithic times are based on very
flimsy evidence. In 1439 Henry the Navigator received permission from the
Crown to settle ‘the seven islands of the Azores’, so they already had their
name and a number; and, though it was the wrong number, it was the number
of units in the Isle of the Seven Cities.
 In the 1450s, Henry claimed, with typical bravado, that the Azores ‘had
never known any lordship but his’. This was a blatant lie, as the king had
earlier insisted he must share the lordship with his brother Dom Pedro, but by
the time Henry made his claim Dom Pedro had rebelled against the Crown,
had been defeated and had died, so his rights could be ignored. As at Ceuta,
convicts were regularly dumped here, though in 1453 one convict was able to
argue that he should not be transported to the Azores for the rest of his life,
because conditions on the islands were still so primitive. No doubt he had
friends in high places, for his argument, which succeeded, hardly stands up –
solid buildings existed and dairy products and wheat abounded. The main
concern back in Lisbon was not how to punish criminals but how to populate
far-off islands and make sure the settlers stayed put.15
Wetter and windier than Madeira, though still blessed with a benign
climate, the Azores seemed ideal terrain for cattle rather than for people, and
as the islands were opened up to settlement ships would arrive carrying cows,
sheep and horses rather than human beings, leaving them awhile until they
had bred, spread and cleared some of the meadows. The Azores are still a
major source of dairy goods in Portugal, and are famous for their butter and
cheese; there was some attempt to produce sugar, but the climate was not
quite warm enough and manpower was in short supply – the inhabitants of
one island, Santa Maria, had to send their canes to São Miguel across the
water for processing, since they did not have the machinery themselves. In
1510 the Azores exported only about 6 per cent of the sugar exported by
Madeira, and sometimes it was even less than that.16
The Flemish connection was as important as the Portuguese one.
Enterprising Flemings came and colonized, but not, as in Madeira, because of
a sweet tooth. On the third island to be settled, appropriately known as
Terceira, or ‘Third Island’, James of Bruges established a dominion around
the little beach of Praia da Vitória in the north-east, building an elegant
church with a Gothic gateway and stone-vaulted side chapels, out of
materials that were brought all the way from Europe. Henry sent him a
charter urging him to settle the island, ‘which had never before been settled
by anyone in the world’, with good Catholics, and in the wake of this so
many Flemings arrived that the whole group of islands was often called the
‘Flemish Isles’ rather than the Azores.17 The products they cultivated
included the dark-blue substitute for indigo, woad, much in demand in the
Flemish cloth workshops; by 1500, up to 60,000 bales of cured woad leaves
were exported annually. Gradually, an intertwined network of islands
emerged, as the Azores, Madeira and the Canaries exchanged goods and
manpower: native Guanches from Tenerife were settled against their will in
Madeira; Portuguese labourers emigrated to the Canaries; Genoese and
Flemings arrived in all the islands. This network was itself tied to the
emerging emporium of Lisbon, no longer a city of moderate size and
importance, but the centre of a maritime trading world that stretched across
great swathes of the eastern and northern Atlantic.18 By the late sixteenth
century, the Azores became the strategic centre of a network of trade routes;
ships arriving from South America and round the Cape from India gathered at
Angra on Terceira, before proceeding in convoy to Portugal, in order to
escape predators such as the English pirates who lurked in those waters. They
were also important resupply centres for long-distance shipping.19

III

The exploration of the coast of Africa, the subject of the next chapter,
resulted in the discovery of yet more uninhabited islands, west of Senegal.
The debate about who first sighted the Cape Verde Islands, around the time
of Henry the Navigator’s death in 1460, is not very instructive – maybe it was
the Venetian captain of Prince Henry, Alvise da Mosto, maybe a Genoese
named Antonio da Noli, maybe a Portuguese named Diogo Gomes, but the
fact that two of the three were Italian says something about the reliance of the
Portuguese on Italian navigational know-how. After their discovery, the
islands were placed under the command of Antonio da Noli as captain-
general. He proved to be yet another long-lived colonial master, and he held
on to power even though for a brief period in 1486–7, when Castile and
Portugal were at war, he was carried off to Spain, where he apparently
abandoned his loyalty to the king of Portugal and recognized Ferdinand and
Isabella as his overlords.20 He probably never returned to the islands; but
neither Spain nor Portugal could really maintain control of such distant
possessions, and once Castile and Portugal were at peace again, and once the
pope had adjudicated these islands to Portugal, as he did in 1493/4,
Portuguese claims to rule the islands could no longer be challenged from
Spain.
 Like the Azores, these islands were stocked with animals, not so much to
feed the exiguous population as the sailors who passed by, heading from
Europe to the west. However, when livestock was introduced to the Cape
Verde Islands goats and sheep uprooted the plants, the soil no longer retained
such water as there was, for rainfall is low; and the landscape became even
more parched and bare than it was already. The animals somehow survived;
but hopes of making the islands into a second Madeira were foiled. The royal
privilege establishing Portuguese settlement in the Cape Verde Islands, dated
1462, grandly talked of the rivers, woods, fisheries, coral, dyes and mines,
but the reality was that these islands could offer very little apart from the
ubiquitous lichen orchil, used to make purple dye, and salt from the island
appropriately known as Sal, which could be used to salt the meat sold to
passing ships. One island was being used as a leper colony by the time of
Christopher Columbus, and others, including Sal, were left unoccupied.21
Limited resources on the islands themselves were not an overwhelming
problem; if anything, these sparse resources stimulated close interest in trade
with west Africa as a much more viable source of profit, and the king
permitted islanders to trade freely on the Guinea coast opposite, with the
result that slave-trading and slave-raiding became their speciality (the arrival
of the Portuguese in west Africa will be explained in the next chapter).22 It
cannot, therefore, have been easy for the islanders when, during the 1460s,
the Crown insisted that only Caboverdean goods, including foodstuffs, could
be used in payment if the settlers visited the Guinea coast for trade, but one
effect of this regulation was that it stimulated the cultivation of cotton and the
weaving of cotton cloth in the islands.23 Horse-breeding became another
speciality – mounted troops were a familiar sight in African armies, but
obtaining good horses was a headache everywhere.
The main article of trade through these islands was quite simply, and quite
horribly, human beings young and old, male and female.24 As the coast of
west Africa became a major source of black slaves, the Cape Verde Islands
began to be used as a way station for slaves exported from Africa to Europe
(and, in the sixteenth century, to Brazil and the Caribbean).25 Although
Portuguese merchants penetrated into west Africa, and even set up home
there, there were great advantages in using the islands as a base. In Africa,
there was always the delicate problem of dealing with the local rulers, and
convincing them that the presence of these outlandish Europeans, with their
bizarre clothes, was worthy of attention. Living on Portuguese territory and
visiting the Guinea coast solely for business was a much more practical
option; one might have to pay taxes to Portuguese officials, about whom the
merchants naturally grumbled a good deal, but the protection of the
Portuguese king, even so far from Lisbon, was preferable to that of African
rulers who were often at war with one another – indeed, these wars were the
major source of slaves for European buyers. In the three years 1491, 1492
and 1493 around 700 slaves were brought to the island of Santiago, or, at
least, that number was recorded; in reality there must have been many more
who were sneaked past the royal tax officials, and it is likely that as many as
25,000 African slaves passed through the island between 1500 and 1530, as
demand for labour grew not just in Europe but in the newly discovered lands
across the Atlantic.
Most of the population lived on the main island, Santiago, and a town
called Ribeira Grande, later sacked by Francis Drake, was founded in about
1462; after it was abandoned for the present capital, Praia, it became known
by its present-day name of Cidade Velha, ‘the old city’. Taking advantage of
the ‘Great River’ that gave the town its original Portuguese name, and that
ensured an unusually lush setting in an otherwise arid island, the Portuguese
were quick to develop their trading base. They built stone houses, which have
now vanished, and churches, beginning with Nossa Senhora de Conceição,
whose construction probably began only a few years after the islands were
discovered. The foundations of this church have been unearthed by a team of
archaeologists from Cambridge University, marking the site of the earliest
European building in the Tropics.26 Only one of the churches in the old
capital survives intact, Nossa Senhora do Rosário, built in the 1490s close to
the earlier church. It was reputedly visited by both Vasco da Gama and
Christopher Columbus, who passed through the Cape Verde Islands in 1498
on his third voyage. Today much of the church has been remodelled, but
there are still clear traces of the original building: a side chapel has retained
its ribbed Gothic ceiling, manufactured in Portugal for reassembly in Ribeira
Grande; for it was common Portuguese practice to send dressed stones to
overseas settlements, and the vaulting of James of Bruges’s church in the
Azores, also brought from Portugal, is quite similar.
Half a century later Ribeira Grande was still tiny: in 1513 it contained 58
Portuguese citizens, or vezinhos, 56 visitors or foreign settlers, 16 free
African males, 10 free African women and 15 churchmen, who were all
outnumbered by the uncounted slaves; and the foreigners included Genoese,
Catalans, Flemings and even a Russian. (By 1600 it may have risen as high as
2,000, though never higher.)27 The Town Council of Ribeira Grande saw
slaves as the foundation of the islands’ prosperity, and stated in 1512 that
‘merchants from Castile, Portugal and the Canary islands would not come to
the Cape Verde islands if they were not able to purchase enslaved Africans’;
by this time the slavers were already sending captives across the Atlantic to
the Caribbean, to replace the native population of Hispaniola and other
islands, which was heading towards rapid extinction.28 In 1518 the Spanish
king arranged the purchase of 4,000 slaves from Portuguese merchants, to be
sent to the Caribbean.29
Ships put in at Ribeira Grande and at a rival town called Alcatrázes, whose
location remained unknown until the archaeologists from Cambridge
identified the site at the start of the twenty-first century. Archaeology has also
come to the rescue of historians of the Atlantic by showing that large
numbers of slaves lived in Ribeira Grande just after 1500, many of them
apparently converted to Christianity. To judge from the graves found by the
same team from Cambridge, there may be as many as 1,000 burials under and
close to the church of the Conceição, and the simplicity of many of the
burials, along with preliminary DNA analysis, suggests that half or more
were slaves. There were also some free black inhabitants, and they eventually
merged with the European settlers to create the Creole, or Krioulu, society
that persists. For long, though, a white elite dominated the islands, including
New Christians of Jewish descent who hoped to keep the Inquisition at arm’s
length; their blood also runs through the veins of many modern
Caboverdeans.30
Millet and rice were imported from Guinea, mainly, it seems, to feed the
African slaves.31 The islands depended on the income from the sale of slaves
and other goods, which provided the cash to buy in the most basic supplies.
The manifest of a single ship that carried 139 slaves and a quantity of hides
back to Europe in 1513 is very revealing. The Madanela Cansina was a
Castilian caravel under the command of Diego Alonso Cansino. It carried a
vast variety of products to Santiago in 1512: linen cloth, dark-green Castilian
cloth, Flemish cloth, figs, flour, wine, biscuit, raisins, almonds, cheeses,
saffron, wheat, olive oil, beans, soap, shoes, tablecloths, bowls, brooms, just
to cite selected items.32 In addition, the new excavations at Cidade Velha on
Santiago have brought to light pottery from Portugal and Africa (and, rather
later, from China), building materials, especially marble, tiles, coins, nails
and buckles, once again indicating how dependent Santiago was on finished
goods, particularly those from Europe. African ceramics arrived from
Senegal and from Berber areas of north-west Africa; European ceramics
included small drinking cups and other everyday wares from Portugal,
‘giving’, according to the archaeologist Marie Louise Sørensen, ‘a sense of
the attempt to maintain a similarity in daily life routines’ among the settlers.33

IV

There is no reason to doubt the misery of the African slaves who either
languished labouring in the Cape Verde Islands or were sent on to Portugal,
and from there across Iberia to Valencia and other slave-trading centres in the
western Mediterranean.34 As Portuguese expeditions reached further south
and east, they made contact with local rulers who were happy to sell them
slaves from the Gulf of Benin and from the areas they knew as Kongo and
Angola, a little to the north of the present-day country of Angola. Once again
the Portuguese made use of uninhabited islands off the coast of Africa as
collection points for slaves, while at the same time they tried to work out how
they could capitalize on the resources of these fresh territories. In 1472
Portuguese ships reached the island of São Tomé, tucked into the corner of
Africa and lying right on the Equator. Within ten years it had become the
collection point for the thousands of slaves who were brought (and bought)
from Ghana, while the nearby island of Príncipe was the major Portuguese
base for trade with the Benin coast.35 When they discovered that the third
island in the Gulf of Guinea, Fernando Pô (modern Bioko), was already
inhabited, the Portuguese held back from settling the island. For what they
wanted was territories they could mould exactly to their own uses.
It took some years for the Portuguese Crown and Portuguese merchants to
express much interest in São Tomé, whose thick tropical forests left them
wondering what they could hope to extract from the island. Its usefulness
only became obvious as the slave trade out of Ghana took off in the 1480s.36
Unlike the Cape Verde Islands, this island played an insignificant part in the
trade towards the Indies that developed after 1500, lying as it did well away
from the great parabolas that carried ships around the southern tip of Africa
or up to Portugal from Brazil. Gradually, though, the Portuguese attempted to
cash in on the island’s own resources. At the end of the fifteenth century they
tried to make São Tomé into a centre of sugar production.37 Labour was
cheap, consisting of Kongo slaves and, as will be seen, Jewish children from
Portugal, although São Tomé offered its first inhabitants little apart from
palm oil and yams, leaving them hungry, so that, at the start, staple goods
such as flour, olive oil and cheese had to be imported from Portugal and the
nearby, better-endowed, island of Príncipe. That said, the Portuguese made a
great effort here, as in other Atlantic islands, to transform their colony into a
place suitable for settlement. They brought in all sorts of domestic animals,
figs, citrus trees, plantains, and, in due course, American varieties of coconut
and sweet potato. By 1510 there was a surplus and they were now feeding,
rather than being fed by, the colonists at Elmina, the main Portuguese base in
Ghana.38
Sugar came to dominate the economy of the island, along with the
handling of slaves brought from the mainland. One item, essential for sugar
manufacture, was plentiful: water. São Tomé has high rainfall as well as
plenty of wood for burning; and there are steep slopes off which the water
runs. Water was also a problem. It was needed while sugar was being
manufactured; but the finished product had to be allowed to dry out, and the
humid climate made this much more difficult. What the São Toméans put on
sale was far inferior to the highly prized sugar of Madeira. Sugar from São
Tomé was described as ‘the worst in the world’; it often contained live
insects that survived transport to Portugal. Moreover, mortality from malaria,
overwork and generally unhealthy conditions was extremely high,
particularly among Portuguese settlers unused to the tropics; it is hardly
surprising that Portuguese churchmen appointed to serve on this island made
every effort to avoid setting out. At a rough estimate half of those who came
to São Tomé died from disease and other factors within a few months of their
arrival.
The population remained small at the start of the sixteenth century, when
about 1,000 heads were counted by a German geographer and printer based in
Portugal named Valentim Fernandes. But these were just the settlers; 2,000
slaves resident on the island and 6,000 slaves destined for export have to be
included as well. The free settlers included liberated slaves, among whom
there were women who bore children to Portuguese men, so that a free
mulatto population emerged quite early.39 Like other Atlantic islands, São
Tomé was considered a suitable place of exile for the so-called degredados,
people convicted of crimes in Portugal.40 São Tomé, as a place of exile, had
one very special feature to its early population. In 1493 King João II decided
to settle the island with Jewish children, forcibly taken from their parents in
order to ensure that they were baptized and brought up as Catholics. These
were Jews who had fled from Spain to Portugal in 1492, at the time of the
expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and who had overstayed the eight-month
period the king had reluctantly allowed them to remain. This was one stage in
a process that culminated in the mass conversion of all Portuguese Jews in
1497.41
The Jewish settlement of São Tomé is described in several Jewish and
Christian sources. The court chronicler Rui Pina wrote soon afterwards of
João II:

The king gave to Alvaro de Caminha the Captaincy of the island of

São Tomé by right and inheritance; and as for the Castilian Jews who
had not left his kingdom within the assigned date, he ordered that,
according to the condition upon their entry, all the boys, and young
men and girls of the Jews be taken into captivity. After having them
all turned into Christians, he sent them to the said island with Alvaro
de Caminha, so that by being secluded, they would have reasons for
being better Christians, and the king would have a way for the island
to be better populated, which, as a result, grew rapidly.42

The Christian writer Valentim Fernandes thought there were 2,000 children,
while the estimates of numbers among Jewish authors varied between 800
and 5,000. It appears that they were mostly very young, from two to ten years
old, so that they were placed with foster parents, mostly convicted
degradados.43 According to the Portuguese Jew Samuel Usque ‘almost all
were swallowed up by the huge lizards on the island and the remainder, who
escaped these reptiles, wasted away from hunger and abandonment’.
Fernandes said only 600 were still alive in 1510.44 The harsh conditions –
the searing heat, the uncleared jungle, the heavy manual work involved in
sugar production, along with diseases such as malaria – killed many of the
settlers, whatever their origin; and it was for that reason that black slaves
began to be imported to work the sugar estates. In the sixteenth century,
Portuguese New Christians, descended from Jews, did settle in the island, but
the Jewish children were by then long dead, or had merged with the other
Portuguese settlers and with the African slaves. Memories of the Jewish
connection survived: one bishop reported, as late as the seventeenth century,
that he had been awoken by a ‘Jewish’ procession, in which a Golden Calf
was being carried along the street underneath the windows of what passed for
his palace. His knowledge of Judaism, or indeed of the biblical story of the
Golden Calf, was evidently very limited.45
Valentim Fernandes noted that there were about 250 wooden houses in the
main town, and that there were stone churches, constructed out of materials
sent in 1493 with those early Jewish and Christian settlers. Despite the
miserable conditions, the island proved a lucrative source of income, from
which the Crown could hope to draw as much as 10,000 cruzados a year at
the start of the sixteenth century.46 A privilege to Fernão de Mello and the
inhabitants of São Tomé, dated 20 March 1500, explains the Crown’s
thinking:

Since the said island is so remote from these our kingdoms, people are
unwilling to go there unless they have great privileges and franchises;
and we, observing the expenditure we have ordered for the peopling
of the said island and likewise the great profits which would come
from it to our kingdoms, if the island were peopled in perfection, as
we hope with the help of the Lord it will be, have resolved to grant
him certain privileges and franchises, whereby the people who go
there, may do this more willingly.47

The basis of this success was initially trade towards the African mainland,
using home-made ships, which were quite small (thirty tons) and simple, and
which were supplied with cowrie shells rather than metal currency for
payments in Angola and Kongo.48 The regular traffic in slaves between São
Tomé and Elmina reached its peak in the thirty years after 1510, when up to
half a dozen vessels moved back and forth almost continuously between the
two points, laden with African slaves when bound for Elmina. The journey
normally took up to a month and departures from São Tomé occurred about
every fifty days; some ships were large enough to carry one hundred slaves,
others only about thirty.49
 V

The Portuguese began to see the Atlantic as an island-studded ocean. In 1469

and 1474 the king of Portugal had already made generous grants of islands in
the far west to two of his knights. One was granted two islands, which
suggests some vague reports had arrived of specific places; the other was
simply granted the isles ‘in the parts of the Ocean Sea’, which implies little
more than a general assumption that there were more places like the Azores
to be found. If there were islands, these might well be the islands that were
known to lie off the coast of Asia, notably Cipangu, Marco Polo’s Japan, or
bits and pieces of the Spice Islands whose costly products were on sale in
Alexandria and Beirut.50 The best authorities, such as Admiral Morison,
have rejected modern Portuguese claims that there was real knowledge of
land to the west, kept secret in Lisbon for fear of Spanish or other
competition.51 A good reason for this doubt is the fact that the Crown was
not willing to pay the costs of an expedition to find new land. If individual
entrepreneurs wanted to apply for a licence to look for land, that was another
matter, so long as they reached into their own pockets.
King João II therefore had no objection when the Flemish sea captain
Ferdinand van Olmen approached him in summer 1486 requesting permission
‘to find for him a large island, or islands, on the coast of a continent, situated
where it was thought the Island of the Seven Cities was to be found, and that
he would undertake this at his own expense’, winning in return hereditary
rights of jurisdiction. He would travel in the company of a Madeiran named
Estreito, who would provide two caravels; if the land was found and the
natives resisted, the king airily promised that he would despatch an armada to
keep them in check. Van Olmen thought that the journey could be
accomplished in less than forty days. He set out from the Azores full of hope,
probably in spring 1487, heading north-west, only to disappear from history.
For, even if he had heard rumours of distant lands, vague reports of
Greenland or of Bristol fishermen off Labrador, he knew little of the winds
and currents out in the open ocean, and he almost certainly sailed into storms
he could not manage.52 If anything, van Olmen’s disappearance proved that
this route led nowhere. It might indeed be possible to reach the Indies, but the
obvious routes were down the ‘River of Gold’ that in some accounts crossed
the waist of Africa, or even around the southern tip of Africa – assuming, that
is, that it had a southern tip and that the Indian Ocean was not a closed-off
Mediterranean completely surrounded by land, as Ptolemy had maintained,
and who could quarrel with such a great authority?
 27

Guinea Gold and Guinea Slaves

The different groups of Atlantic islands participated in the slave trade in

different ways: the Canaries as exporters of native slaves, and eventually as
importers of black slaves to replace the depleted population; Madeira and the
Azores as consumers, especially in the growing sugar industry; Cape Verde
as a base for the despatch of slaves first to Portugal and later to the Caribbean
and Brazil; São Tomé as another consumer of slaves, another point of
despatch, and as the last home of captive Jewish children of Spanish descent.
It is difficult to read the bare documents listing slave exports out of Cape
Verde without a feeling of deep sadness and disgust. Children as young as
two or three years old were transported through Santiago to Portugal
(assuming they survived the journey); families were split up, as the slaves
were divided into equally numbered groups and as one fifth of these animate
trade goods were assigned to the Crown, with another share for the crusading
Order of Christ. Prince Henry’s biographer, Zurara, described the misery of
slaves arriving at Lagos in the Algarve in 1444:

It is not their religion but their humanity that makes me weep in pity
for their sufferings. If the brute animals, with their bestial feelings,
understand the sufferings of their own kind through natural instinct,
what would You have my human nature do when I see before my eyes
that miserable company and remember that they too are of the
generation of the sons of Adam? … To increase their sufferings still
more, there now arrived those who had charge of the division of the
captives, and they began to separate one from another in order to
make the shares equal. It now became necessary to separate fathers
from sons, wives from husbands, and brothers from brothers … You
others, who are so busy in making that division of the captives, look
with pity upon so much misery and note how they cling to one
another so that you can hardly separate them!1
In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas had insisted that slave-traders must
not break up families, which would be contrary to natural law; but Prince
Henry and his successors let this happen without a second thought. Zurara
was not, however, alone in reasoning that enslavement also brought an
inestimable advantage to these miserable people; they were given the
opportunity to become good Christians, so captivity was in fact their road to
salvation – a notion that was still in the air in the southern United States in
the nineteenth century. Zurara had his prejudices too. He believed that black
races were condemned to slavery because of sin – specifically the sin of their
supposed ancestor, Ham, who mocked his naked and drunken father, Noah.2
Zurara complained that the black slaves he saw were very ugly, like monsters
from Hell. Physical difference had not been an issue while the slaves traded
in Iberia and the Mediterranean were white or light brown, and similar in
colour and facial characteristics to southern Europeans – descriptions of
Canary islanders stressed that their physique was similar to that of
Europeans, that they were intelligent, and that, if anything, they were taller,
though sometimes a little darker.3 No one was very interested in the
intelligence of the black slaves, even though, as will be seen, many of them
came from sophisticated, partly urbanized societies whose technology far
surpassed that of the Neolithic Canary islanders.
The slaves delivered to Portugal were callously seen as commodities, for
all the talk of Christian salvation. Portuguese trading documents from around
1500 never name the slaves, any more than they would have attached names
to the pieces of ivory that they also sent towards Portugal. No questions were
asked about how these people were obtained. In one bare list from 1513 four
‘lots’ of African slaves are mentioned, consisting of two men in their early
thirties, a teenage boy, two mature women and five children, one of whom, a
girl of between ten and twelve years of age, was retained as a tax payment to
the king’s officials; and this composition of a slave cargo was fairly typical of
the time.4 The bare facts do not explain how the slave trade came into
existence, what needs it was thought to satisfy, or where the slaves
originated. But it is important to understand the origins of the transatlantic
traffic in human beings that lasted for another 400 years and that, amid
massive misery, reshaped the ethnic map of large areas of North America,
South America and the Caribbean. This takes one back to the early history of
Portuguese exploration in the Atlantic – exploration this time of coastlines
rather than islands.

II

The challenge of Africa was of a very different order to the challenge posed
by the occupation of uninhabited islands. Broadly, there was a difference
between the lightly islamized peoples of the savannah, who controlled the
great rivers, notably the Niger, and the peoples of the forests, who were
animists, and who often became the target of the Muslim jihad against
pagans. The pagan Serers, for instance, lived in present-day Sierra Leone and
were flanked entirely by Muslim principalities or by the sea; not surprisingly,
they would find common cause with the Portuguese. West Africa was known
to be inhabited by people of high culture, many of them Muslim, many also
living in large towns. These towns were the home of leather, cloth and other
industries; payments were often made in cowrie shells, individually worth
very little, so that a piece of cloth might cost tens of thousands of units. Many
west African kings relied on cavalry; even when they were pagan, their courts
welcomed Muslim merchants from the north, who lived in reserved areas not
far from the court itself. Although war captives were enslaved, slavery in
much of west Africa had many similarities to the serfdom of medieval
Europe: slaves were occasionally sold, for instance to buy war horses; but the
main task of slaves was to cultivate the land on behalf of their masters. Many
features of these societies were therefore familiar to western Europeans.5
 Reports reached Europe of wealthy courts, such as that of Mansa Musa,
king of Mali, whose fabulous wealth in gold was no fable; he continued to be
shown on Catalan world maps well into the fifteenth century, and memories
of his visit to Egypt, where he had scattered gold in the streets of Cairo and
had set off rampant inflation, increased the certainty that the gold of Africa
was within reach if only it were possible to bypass the caravan routes of the
Sahara, dominated by Muslim Tuareg Berbers. Europeans were unaware that
the power of the Mali empire had peaked by 1400; in 1431 the Tuaregs even
managed to take control of Timbuktu, holding it for thirty-eight years.6 It has
been seen that adventurers such as the Majorcan Jaume Ferrer, who vanished
off the coast of Africa, were already heading out in search of the ‘River of
Gold’ in the mid-fourteenth century. Around 1400 demand for gold was very
high in Europe, and western Europe was experiencing a bullion famine, as
gold and silver leaked out in payment for spices and eastern luxuries, targeted
by an increasingly prosperous urban middle class as well as by princely
courts that often spent beyond their means.7 Availability of sugar in southern
Spain and the Atlantic islands helped ease the outflow of bullion to the
Islamic world; the jury is still out on the question of whether this bullion
famine was as severe and universal as some have argued. Economic warfare
against Islam was an integral part of the grand strategy of late medieval
crusaders; if the gold that north Africa and the Middle East received from
sub-Saharan Africa, by way of Timbuktu and its neighbours, could be
diverted to Christian Europe, a double blow would be struck: Christendom
would be enriched and Islam would be impoverished.8
In 1444 a Genoese spy, Antonio Malfante, penetrated deep into the Sahara
in search of the sources of gold; but, if his trek proved anything, it was that
an overland route managed by European traders was out of the question.
Then the occupation of the Canary Islands opened up the prospect of
European bases being created along the flank of Africa, but as it turned out
the islands lay a long distance north of the sources of gold; moreover, the
islands, being already inhabited, proved difficult to tame (Tenerife was only
conquered in 1496, and Gran Canaria in 1483). It made more sense to see
what could be found on the coast of Africa itself. The traditional date for the
breakthrough into west Africa is 1434, when, under the patronage of the
Order of Christ (and therefore of Prince Henry), Gil Eanes worked his way
past the reefs of Cape Bojador into what were thought to be unknown waters,
though it is quite possible pioneers such as the Genoese Vivaldi brothers in
1291 and Jaume Ferrer in 1346 had already gone beyond. However, Eanes
not merely went beyond – he returned home. And he returned home a year
later from a second expedition with reports of footprints left in the sand by
human beings and their camels, as well as of rich fishing grounds, for, as
ever, the Portuguese were on the lookout for good fish.9 Gradually the
Portuguese gathered information about who lived along the outer shores of
north-west Africa; these were lands inhabited by Sanhaja Berbers, or
Aznaghi, some of whose ancestors had formed the mainstay of the terrifying
Almoravid armies that invaded Iberia in the late eleventh century.
The Portuguese did not involve themselves in any depth with the
complicated politics of western Africa. Their aim was to find allies with
whom they could trade, preferably in gold or ivory. Henry’s resources were
far from limitless, although he made a handsome profit out of Madeiran
sugar; and the Ceuta garrison was a constant drain on the resources of a
kingdom that was only now lifting itself out of relative poverty. Alternative
sources of revenue had to be found by Henry’s explorers. This led to the
foundation of an offshore trading base at Arguim, on an island off the coast
of modern Mauretania. The choice of a small island made excellent practical
sense. No one lived there apart from a few Sanhaja fisherfolk. No ruler’s
sovereignty was being challenged. The island was easily defensible. Offshore
islands and defensible promontories had again and again been chosen by
merchants in the Mediterranean, at least since the time of the Phoenicians, as
safe places from which to penetrate the hinterland opposite.10 The
Portuguese also briefly occupied the islands off Mogador, which had
themselves been Phoenician bases in the days of the trade in purple dye.11
It was all very well to create a base; but there were no big profits to be
made out of sealskins, orchil dye or even fish. Ten years after the rounding of
Cape Bojador one of Henry’s Genoese captains brought back to Lagos
caravels crammed with 235 Berber (or ‘Moorish’) slaves he had captured
along the coast of west Africa. They were put on show in Lagos, where
Prince Henry and Zurara saw them, one taking pity and the other not.12 The
first slaves to arrive en masse from Africa were therefore white or brown, not
black; the trickle of Canary islanders towards Spain and Portugal had
continued for a century already. But what Henry wanted to prove was that he
could obtain more and better slaves with greater ease. In the years that
followed, raids penetrated further south, and the expeditions returned with
black slaves as well as brown ones; and eventually they came only with black
slaves. Arguim and later the Cape Verde Islands served as way stations from
which the captives were sent on to Portugal.13 Raiding was not the most
satisfactory way to achieve this; trading was more effective. This required the
Portuguese to make treaties with local rulers who might see some advantage
in an alliance – whether the provision of trade goods, armaments or even
mercenaries willing to fight on their behalf and to train local warriors in
skilled horsemanship. This happened when the Portuguese made contact with
the Serer people, animists who made no use of horses, but who realized how
useful they would be in fending off the cavalry of the Muslim Mandinga and
Wolofs on their borders. As a result the Cape Verde Islands became an
important centre of horse-breeding within easy sailing distance, able to
supply Serer needs. Even so, the islanders had to import a great amount of
basic equipment such as bridles, bits and spurs from Portugal, before passing
them on to their African allies.14
The Portuguese were not dealing with maritime peoples. The boats they
encountered as they crept down the coast of Africa were either rivercraft or
vessels that kept close to shore, like the boats used by the fishermen of
Arguim. There were no ports along the coast, although it was not too difficult
to find safe harbours in river mouths. All this meant that it was much easier
to make contact with local rulers inland than along the coast. However, by
making full use of the virtues of the caravel, the Portuguese could navigate a
long way upriver, whether in search of African towns and villages, or in the
hunt for the ‘River of Gold’. In 1455 the Venetian nobleman in Prince
Henry’s service, Alvise da Cà da Mosto, took his caravel up the Senegal
River and reached the court of Budomel, an African king who extended a
hearty welcome to the insatiably curious traveller, although one of his
motives for doing so was his wish to increase his sexual potency still further
– he already, as da Mosto discreetly wrote, ‘has a different dinner each
night’.15 These river journeys continued: the Portuguese would travel as
much as sixty miles up the river from their base at Cacheu-São Domingos,
which was their largest base on the African coast by the end of the fifteenth
century, trading in honey and fine-quality beeswax with the Mandinga in the
interior.16 By 1500 too the Portuguese were not simply living in the Cape
Verde Islands, Arguim and Cacheu. Some, the so-called lançados, or ‘thrown
ones’, by and large people who had good reasons for not wishing to return to
Portugal, were living among the Africans and had taken African women to
their bed, with the result that a mulatto generation came into being.17 These
good reasons included being under suspicion as New Christians who had not
abandoned their Jewish religion. The lançados played an important role as
cultural intermediaries, inspiring African ivory craftsmen to produce the
extraordinary carvings of Portuguese soldiers and merchants that started to
appear towards the end of the fifteenth century.
This still leaves in the air the controversial question of how the Portuguese
obtained the thousands of slaves they were exporting. Modern politics
dominate discussion, and admitting that black rulers sold slaves to white
merchants has not come easily to historians of the slave trade. The idea that
these rulers sold their own people is certainly an oversimplification. The
Serers did not enslave fellow Serers. War captives were another matter, and
the intense struggles for power on the frontier between the savannah and the
forest made sure that there were plenty of such captives. Further south, in
Kongo and Angola, the situation was more complicated, and at the start of the
sixteenth century the Portuguese leaned on local rulers to ensure that they
delivered large numbers of slaves, even from their own population. The truth
is that the slave trade could only come into being because plenty of different
people collaborated: back in Portugal, Prince Henry and then the Crown;
merchants of various origins, including Spaniards and Genoese as well as
Portuguese; settlers living in the Cape Verde Islands; lançados living in west
Africa; local African rulers; and even parents who imagined that selling their
sons and daughters to the Portuguese would offer them new opportunities in
rich lands far away. Payment often came in the form of manilhas, brass
bracelets that could be worn or melted down to satisfy the craving of the
African elite for copper and brass goods, for which they generally depended
on imported raw materials. One slave might be worth forty to fifty bracelets.
A ship called the Santiago that set out for Sierra Leone in 1526 carried 2,345
manilhas, which might be enough to purchase fifty or sixty slaves; and
slaving in Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau before returning to Portugal by
way of the Cape Verde Islands and Terceira in the Azores was the main aim
of the voyage.18 Not every ship was carrying slaves; one Flemish ship
captained by a well-born Portuguese sailor was only interested in ivory and
raw cotton. The peoples who lived upriver were keen to receive raw cotton,
which grew quite well in the Cape Verde Islands; and these peoples then sold
cloth made out of this cotton.19
 III

So long as the sources of gold lay out of range, the Portuguese continued to
trade in slaves and ivory along what became known as the Guinea Coast, and
the king of Portugal adopted the grandiose and not totally empty title ‘lord of
the navigation of Guinea’. The discovery of a hot spice, named Malagueta
pepper after the stretch of coast where it was first found, increased the
attraction of the Guinea trade, even though this pepper did not compare in
quality with the true pepper that continued to arrive in the eastern
Mediterranean along the Indian Ocean sea routes; Malagueta pepper is not
actually a botanical pepper, but a member of the ginger family. However, the
Crown waited a while before it took direct control of traffic along the Guinea
coast; a wealthy merchant and shipowner, Fernão Gomes, was granted
licences that permitted him to trade beyond Sierra Leone. Gomes not merely
had to pay a handsome sum each year for his special privilege; he had to sell
all his ivory to the king at a knock-down price (before resale at a grand profit
by the king) and promise to explore 100 miles of coast each year. Even
without the gold, the profits were attractive enough for King Afonso to keep
increasing his share of the Guinea trade, claiming a monopoly, for instance,
on the import of civet cats, whose anal gland produced a foul-smelling
excretion that perfumiers knew how to turn into one of the most prized scents
in the world.20
The more attractive Guinea became, the greater became the danger of
interlopers, especially since the Canary Islands were occupied (as yet only
partly) by Castilian forces, and provided a good base for pirates looking for
business on the Guinea Coast. This problem became more serious still when
the Portuguese king set out his claim to the crown of Castile following the
death of King Henry ‘the Impotent’ in 1474 – he was not really impotent, but
his half-sister, Isabella, who had married the heir to the throne of Aragon five
years earlier, took the view that anyone accused of homosexuality must ipso
facto be unable to father a child. So she pushed aside the claims of Henry’s
daughter Juana and seized the throne; thereupon Afonso, already Juana’s
uncle, married her and invaded Castile. The contest was settled on Iberian
soil, with the victory of Ferdinand and Isabella; but events in the Atlantic,
even if they were a small sideshow, had lasting effects too.21 These were the
circumstances in which the Castilians gained control of the Cape Verde
Islands for a while, in the hope that they could establish a Spanish stake in
the Guinea trade.22 Ferdinand and Isabella hoped to intercept Portuguese
fleets bringing Malagueta pepper, ivory and maybe even gold, while claims
to Castilian dominion over the Guinea Coast were also put about, though it is
hard to see what they might have been based upon, since by now the
Portuguese could wave several papal bulls that confirmed their possession of
the Guinea Coast. Meanwhile, Spanish traders arrived aboard three caravels
at the mouth of the River Gambia, and started trading with the local ruler,
buying slaves in return for brass bracelets and other goods. The king had no
reason to suppose these Europeans were anything other than Portuguese.
Tricked into visiting one of the ships, he and 140 of his best men were seized
and carried off to Spain; King Ferdinand thought the capture of a king was a
disgrace, and in solidarity with his fellow prince he sent him back to Africa,
but several of his companions were less fortunate, and were sold as slaves in
Andalusia.23
This conflict was resolved fairly amicably in the Treaty of Alcáçovas of
1479: the Portuguese retained their rights in the Atlantic islands, including
those yet to be discovered, and along nearly all the Guinea Coast, while
Castile was allowed to keep hold of the Canary Islands and a notch of the
mainland opposite. This was a less generous concession than it might seem,
since Grand Canary and Tenerife, the two largest islands, were still
unconquered.24 The Treaty of Alcáçovas was the first step to the more
ambitious division of the world between Spain and Portugal by drawing a
line down the Atlantic that followed Columbus’s discoveries in the
Caribbean.
By now Portuguese (and rival) ships had rounded Cape Palmas, which lies
on the present-day border between Liberia and the Ivory Coast, and which
marks the beginning of the roughly horizontal coastline of the southern shore
of west Africa, several degrees north of the Equator. At the western end,
along the ‘Ivory Coast’, there were swamps and lagoons, so obtaining ivory
there was not as easy as the name given to this area suggested; still, it was
elephant country, and when one did reach land, tusks were there for the
asking. Moving ever eastwards, a further stretch of coast was discovered in
1471; here the Portuguese found villages whose inhabitants hardly gave a
second thought to adorning themselves with gold ornaments. The story grew:
it was assumed that there must be a massive gold mine somewhere near these
villages, so this stretch of the shore was baptized ‘Mina’, or ‘mine’.25 In
reality this was the steamy environment in which the Portuguese eventually
made contact with rulers who would supply them with gold that had been
brought down from the River Niger through the thick belt of forest that
separates the savannah from the sea. These were also lands into which Islam
had not yet penetrated; they included the seat of wealthy kingdoms such as
Benin, famous nowadays for its ivories and bronzes; ruled over by its Oba, or
king, Benin contained a massive city but, like the other towns of west Africa,
it lay nowhere near the Atlantic Ocean.26 For the moment Benin City was
beyond reach; but Portuguese ships reached the sharp bend of Africa by
1472, discovering the uninhabited islands that were to become major bases
later on – São Tomé and Príncipe, on the Equator.
Finding the route to gold was more difficult than the optimistic first
generation of Portuguese explorers had ever imagined; but with the discovery
of the Mina coast Fernão Gomes became wealthier than ever – and the king
began to think about what would happen when Gomes’s licence expired in
1474, which would provide an ideal opportunity for the Crown to take charge
of such a lucrative sea route. Observing the ever-increasing flow of gold from
Mina, and aware that the Castilians and others would like to muscle in on the
success of the Portuguese, King Afonso decided that Gomes’s contract
should not be renewed; but Gomes would be rewarded for his service with a
grant of noble status and of a coat of arms bearing the heads of three black
slaves.27 Thirty-seven years had elapsed between the rounding of Cape
Bojador and the discovery of the gold-rich villages. The Portuguese advance
along the coast of Africa looks rapid in retrospect, and was certainly
purposeful; but the speed of advance only increased rapidly from 1469
onwards, and then slowed down again in the decade before Vasco da Gama
left for India (in 1497).
Under Gomes, and still more under the Crown, the Portuguese assumed the
right to a trading monopoly in Guinea. Still, both the Portuguese and the
Spanish interlopers did begin to obtain gold along the Mina coast; in 1478
Joan Boscà of Barcelona visited Mina, exchanging gold for cowrie shells,
brass and other sundry goods; he thought things were going well until the
Portuguese sent out ships to intercept him – in 1479 his treasure of gold was
seized; but even after the Treaty of Alcáçovas Spanish ships kept trying to
intrude.28 Even more interesting is the presence of Flemings so very far from
home; the North Sea and the southern Atlantic were beginning to connect
well before the end of the fifteenth century.29 Eustache de la Fosse from
Tournai in Flanders was one of several north European merchants and
travellers who penetrated this region in 1479, setting out from Bruges and
conducting business in northern Spain before moving down to Seville, where
he collected the merchandise he would be taking for sale at la Minne d’Or.30
It is obvious from the account he left of his voyage that precise knowledge of
the geography of west Africa had spread all the way to northern Europe, with
which, after all, Portugal had close commercial and political ties. En route to
the Mina coast his ship not surprisingly had to dodge Portuguese caravels.31
As he travelled down the coast of Africa, Eustache marvelled at the sight
of Malagueta pepper, or ‘grains of Paradise’ as he called them; he also
marvelled at the naked inhabitants of the Guinea Coast, but not enough to
dissuade him from buying several women and children in return for brass
bracelets and other metal goods; however, he and other merchants had it in
mind to sell the slaves along the Mina coast in return for gold. This shows
that there was a market for black slaves among the black population further
east; it has been seen that there was reluctance to enslave one’s brethren, but
less reluctance to own or sell slaves from neighbouring ethnic groups. In due
course, Eustache was delighted to find a place where he and his partners
could buy gold – as much as twelve or fourteen pounds of it. All seemed to
be going well in what was, after all, a fairly deserted area of ocean until his
ship was pounced upon by a Portuguese squadron of four ships commanded
by Fernando Pô and Diogo Cão, an intrepid explorer who would before long
be travelling very much further along the coast of Africa; ‘we were pillaged
of everything’ – fumes tout pillez.32 Taken back to Portugal, Eustache and
his colleagues were clapped in prison; the penalty for unlicensed trade on the
Mina coast was death, for it was seen as a pure act of piracy. Eustache bribed
his jailer with 200 ducats and was able to sneak out of prison at night-time,
escaping to Castile.33
Everyone wanted to cash in on the Guinea trade. In 1481 there were plans
afoot in England to send ships to west Africa. The Portuguese king prevailed
upon his English ally, Edward IV, to forbid the English ships to sail, though it
has been suggested that the ringleaders, John Tintam and William Fabian,
may have visited Africa a year or so earlier, and that an English expedition
far into the Atlantic just now should come as no surprise: as has been seen,
this was the period when English ships were ranging deep into the Atlantic in
other directions too.34
 IV

Trading with villagers by anchoring offshore was one way of doing business;
but what appealed much more to the Portuguese Crown was the creation of a
permanent base on the Mina coast, comparable to Arguim and Cacheu.35 For
the Portuguese kings were claiming to be masters of ‘the navigation of
Guinea’, rather than planning to build an empire on the African mainland,
even if an occasional African king loosely acknowledged their overlordship.
The so-called Portuguese empire began as a network of trading stations, and
for much of its early history it would continue that way, as it spread into the
Indian Ocean and Pacific, as far as Goa, Melaka, Macau and Nagasaki. But
trading stations needed a patch of territory and a guarantee of safety, which
made negotiation with local rulers essential. The decision to build a fort at
what became known as São Jorge da Mina, or Elmina, followed logically
from the success of the Portuguese in buying impressive amounts of gold
along the Mina coast; they had been trading through an African village called
Shama, but its water supplies were limited and the Portuguese caravels,
standing offshore, were sitting ducks so long as there were no defensive walls
behind which the merchants could hide and so long as interlopers continued
to evade Portuguese patrols.
In 1481 King João II of Portugal put together an expedition under the
leadership of a faithful and experienced commander, Diogo de Azambuja.36
The king even obtained a crusading privilege from the pope, promising a
plenary indulgence to anyone who might die in the castle of ‘Mina’: its name
preceded the choice of its exact site, let alone its construction. The pope was
terribly confused about who lived in this part of Africa, speaking of
‘Saracens’ ripe for conversion, but also permitting trade in weapons with
them – the term ‘Saracen’ often being applied to pagans as well as Muslims.
Oddly, given papal approval, the expedition made no attempt to spread the
Gospel in Mina; the priest or priests who accompanied the voyage ministered
to the Portuguese alone. Although the Portuguese did not lose sight of
missionary opportunities, they were already placing the lure of gold higher
than the lure of souls; they would have argued that all this gold would
eventually pay for victorious wars against the Muslim Infidel, even though
the people of the Mina coast were not Muslims. In the sixteenth century an
influential Portuguese chronicler, João de Barros, insisted that the real plan
was to tempt the Africans with trade goods, and then to tempt them still
further with the inestimable goods of Heaven, but this was a much later
rereading of the evidence.37
Ten caravels were assigned to the expedition, carrying 500 soldiers as well
as 100 stonemasons and carpenters, but two further ships, sturdy urcas, were
sent ahead, loaded with dressed stone prepared in Portugal, so that
prefabricated windows and gateways could be fitted quickly on site; and there
were plenty of tiles, bricks, timber joists and other essential supplies that
would not be available along the Mina coast. The big urcas were to be broken
up when the fortress was built, which would put to good use the mass of
timber they contained.38 Early in 1482 the ideal spot was identified about
twenty-five miles beyond Shama, at a place called the Village of the Two
Parts, perhaps because the village lay on the boundary between two tribes;
this offered a rocky promontory, some high ground and access to the river
that led inland, and it was already known to be a good base for trading in
gold. This was not the gold that had for centuries been traded through
Timbuktu and other towns and then carried northwards across the Sahara;
sources were local, in the thickly forested interior that was cut off from the
goldfields the Portuguese had so long hoped to reach – still, it was gold, and
there was plenty of it.39
On 20 January, after only a couple of days at the site, Azambuja was ready
to hold an interview with the local ruler, who is known to history as
Caramansa, though this was probably his title rather than his name. This
interview was a comedy of errors: Azambuja, like many an explorer of his
day, chose to meet the king dressed up to the nines, with a bejewelled golden
collar around his neck; his captains wore festive costumes. Caramansa was
not to be outdone. He arrived with his soldiers, accompanied by drummers
and trumpeters who (Barros related) produced music that ‘deafened rather
than delighted the ear’. Whereas Europeans imagined that fine clothes (hardly
suitable for the tropics) were the way to display power and prestige,
Caramansa and his followers arrived naked, their skins shining from the oils
they had rubbed into them; all that was covered was their genitals, though the
king wore gold bracelets, a collar from which little bells dangled, and gold
bars in his beard, which had the effect of straightening the tightly curled
hairs.40
Barros piously but implausibly insisted that Azambuja did raise the
question of conversion at the start; but the conversation mainly turned on the
question of building a Portuguese fort on the site of the meeting. Caramansa
was promised that this would bring him power and wealth, and that, rather
than religion, was the argument which convinced the king. However,
Caramansa was also aware that the Portuguese had considerable firepower,
and he was anxious to avoid a clash with the hundred well-armed soldiers
aboard the caravels. He did complain that previous European visitors to his
village had been ‘dishonest and vile’, but graciously conceded that Azambuja
was not of that ilk – indeed, his lavish clothes proclaimed that he too was the
son or brother of a king, a statement that the overdressed commander had to
refute with embarrassment.41 So building was allowed to begin; there were
hitches, when the Portuguese began to cut into a sacred rock, because they
still needed some local stone in addition to what they had brought. Fighting
broke out, but Caramansa’s subjects were appeased with extra gifts. A fort
was thrown up in three weeks, and, once a secure area had been created for a
Portuguese garrison, it was extended to include a courtyard and cisterns. All
that was built outside the walls was a small chapel. Sixty men and three
women stayed behind after the fort was built, and the rest of the Portuguese
went back home.42
Just as important as the creation of the settlement, which lasted for many
centuries first under Portuguese and then under Dutch rule, was the creation
of a set of rules controlling trade from the Castelo de São Jorge (generally
known simply as Elmina, ‘The Mine’). Trade was conducted in the courtyard
of the fortress, not within the African village that developed beneath the
castle walls.43 These rules were refined over the next few decades, but they
testify to the difficulty in keeping control of movements over the
unprecedented distances (by European standards) that the Portuguese ships
were now sailing. The most important rule was that ships had to sail directly
from Lisbon to Elmina, a journey that would normally take a month.
Everything was carefully regulated: the provisions on which the sailors
would depend during their long voyage included prescribed amounts of
biscuit, salted meat, vinegar and olive oil, not just to make sure the crew was
fed but to make sure they did not load surplus goods and sell them in Elmina
at a profit. On leaving Lisbon, special pilots stayed on board until the ship
left the Tagus; their job was to check that no skiffs came alongside, loading
contraband out in the estuary. On arrival in Elmina there were further strict
rules about signalling arrival by raising a flag and waiting for the Elmina
garrison to answer back with their own flag. These rules applied not just to
the ships coming in from Lisbon, but to the small craft that plied between São
Tomé and Elmina, bringing fruit, fish and above all slaves who had been
taken off the shores of Kongo and Angola or were bought in the kingdom of
Benin.
Ships were supposed to be sent out from Portugal once a month; in most
years fewer ships came from Lisbon – in 1501 only six ships arrived from
there, although the slave ships from São Tomé kept coming even in years
when nothing at all arrived from Portugal. Whereas single ships set out from
Lisbon in the early days, from 1502 onwards the Portuguese sometimes put
together a small convoy, which was a much safer way to travel. On the return
journey the chests containing gold were sealed and the sailors’ own sea
chests were often closely inspected for contraband gold, which was easy
enough to carry, as the gold took the form of small nuggets and gold dust.
The value of these cargoes was out of all proportion to their weight, so on the
return journey ships had to be weighted down with rock ballast.44 Coming
out to Africa, the Elmina caravels brought textiles, not just European ones but
striped Moroccan ones which were in strong demand in west Africa; they
brought brass goods, as elsewhere; they brought cowrie shells. Paying for the
gold was not a problem. Relations with the local inhabitants were
increasingly cordial, and African soldiers helped to man the battlements of
the fort from 1514 onwards; the Portuguese and their African neighbours
came to depend on one another.45 There were also Portuguese private traders
who travelled into the interior and made sure that Elmina was well supplied
with food, as the settlement could not simply rely on Lisbon for sustenance.46
Meanwhile slaves brought through São Tomé were assigned menial tasks
in the fort, including the unloading of goods from the supply ships. Many
slaves were sold to black African masters in Caramansa’s kingdom, and
Caramansa’s subjects preferred to be paid for their gold not in cowrie shells
or cloth but in slaves.47 Ships plied back and forth between São Tomé and
Elmina, carrying up to 120 slaves on each four-week voyage to Elmina; a
rough calculation would suggest that somewhere around 3,000 slaves were
coming through Elmina each year.48 Even so, Elmina was not seen as a
centre of the Portuguese slave trade. The Portuguese king was determined to
extract literally every ounce of profit from the gold trade. By 1506 Elmina
was bringing in a revenue of nearly 44,000,000 reis, more than ten times the
revenue from Guinea slaves and Malagueta pepper.49 This was what funded
the imperial expansion of Portugal as the little kingdom’s fleets broke their
way into the Indian Ocean.

Reaching the Indian Ocean had always been on Portugal’s agenda. The
search for the ‘River of Gold’ had been based on the assumption that the river
flowed right across Africa, linking the oceans, as if any known river did such
a thing. But the aim was to gain mastery over gold; slaves were a convenient
substitute when gold was not to be had; Malagueta pepper whetted the
appetite for the real pepper of the Indies. The pioneer who was entrusted with
the exploration of further stretches of the African coast was Diogo Cão, who
first appears in the record as captain of a caravel that became involved in the
arrest of the Flemish interloper Eustache de la Fosse. For de la Fosse, Cão
was ung bien rebelle fars, ‘a very bad sort’, who bought de la Fosse’s ship
from his captors, forced de la Fosse to sell his own expropriated goods up and
down the African coast, and then made him render an account of his sales
each evening.50 The Portuguese explorers possessed the ruthlessness of
pirates even when they were serving their king.
Cão’s commission from King João II was described by a sixteenth-century
writer, Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, as the discovery of ‘the dominions of
Prester John of the Indies of whom he [the king] had report; so that by that
way it would be possible to enter India and he would be able to send his
captains to fetch those riches which the Venetians brought for sale’.51 Since
the term ‘India’ was used to describe any lands along the shores of the Indian
Ocean, including east Africa, it seems more likely that the king of Portugal
aimed to send his men to Ethiopia rather than to India, hoping that he would
find a Christian ally willing both to satisfy his craving for gold and spices and
to join when appropriate in the war against Islam. This ‘Priest John’ had
surfaced in the twelfth century and appeared to live for ever, while his
kingdom moved around in the medieval imagination from India to further
Asia to Africa. However, the assumption that a Christian kingdom existed in
east Africa was perfectly well founded, and João was not alone in seeking out
the ruler of Ethiopia. During his long reign (1416–58) King Alfonso V of
Aragon sent friars to Ethiopia and even dreamed up a plan for a marriage
alliance between an Aragonese princess and an Ethiopian prince.52
 Cão was not offered very large resources. Most probably he set out with
just two caravels. But the fact that these ships carried stone columns known
as padrões provided a clear sign that the expedition intended to mark out new
land. These padrões were inscribed and decorated with the royal coat of arms
and installed on headlands, where many of them still stood until the late
nineteenth century, when they were carried back to museum collections in
Europe. Part road signs, part statements of Portuguese sovereignty, the
padrões did not signify control of the African interior: the king remained
‘lord of the navigation of Guinea’, and he charged Cão with making the
Guinea coast still vaster than it already was. Cão moved smoothly beyond
São Tomé down the southward-pointing coast of central and southern Africa,
erecting his first padrão at the mouth of the Congo; uniquely, this padrão
was inscribed in Arabic as well as Latin and Portuguese, even though Cão
had passed some way beyond the lands of Islam. The use of Arabic suggests
that the Portuguese navigators thought it would not be long before they
reconnected with the Muslim world.53
Cão was not convinced that the River Congo was the ‘River of Gold’; he
sent a detachment of men upriver to greet the local king, promising to wait
for them; when they failed to reappear he kidnapped four of the most
prominent villagers, thinking of them both as hostages and as potential
sources of information. Reaching a large bay off Angola that extends a long
way eastwards, Cão wondered whether he had reached the southern tip of
Africa, erecting his second stone padrão with the inscription:

In the year 6681 of the creation of the world, and 1482 of the birth of
Our Lord Jesus, the very high, very excellent and mighty prince King
Dom João II of Portugal ordered this land to be discovered and these
padrões to be erected by Diogo Cão, squire of his household.54

Having displayed the royal coat of arms far beyond the Equator, Diogo Cão
was granted his own coat of arms on his return in spring 1484, as well as an
annual pension, for what the king evidently saw as a very worthwhile
expedition.55 Later that year, the Portuguese ambassador at the papal court
extolled his countrymen’s achievements in a speech before Pope Innocent
VIII, and boasted that Portuguese ships had reached the very edges of the
Gulf of Arabia, by which he meant the Indian Ocean.56 By insisting that it
was possible to break into the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic, the speaker,
the learned Dr Vasco Fernandes de Lucena, was openly challenging the
Ptolemaic orthodoxy that continued, in maps being copied at this very time,
to show the Indian Ocean as a vast closed sea, with the southern tip of Africa
merging into a long southern continent that reached as far as the Spice
Islands.
The claim that Cão had already reached the southern tip of Africa was
hopelessly optimistic; but it tempted King João to offer him a second
commission in 1485, once again with two caravels; and aboard the caravels
were his four captives, now conversant with Portuguese customs and willing
to act as King João’s emissaries to the king of Kongo. When Cão reached the
village from which they had been kidnapped, everyone there rejoiced; but
Cão cannily sent only one of the hostages to the African king, for he was
determined to secure the release of the Portuguese men he had sent inland
during his first voyage. The presents carried by the released hostage helped
convince the African king that he should send the Portuguese men back to
their captain, and after they arrived Cão himself headed inland to meet the
king. This time Cão and his colleagues clearly hoped to find a river route
deep into Africa; they sailed right up to the limits of navigation of the River
Congo, and, seeing they could go no further, carved a surviving record of
their extraordinary journey on the rocks that now prevented them from
penetrating any further: ‘Here reached the vessels of the distinguished King
Dom João II of Portugal: Diogo Cão, Pero Añes, Pero da Costa’.57 After
that, Cão pressed on to meet the king of Kongo, returned to his ships, and
managed to explore further stretches of the coast of southern Africa.
Cão’s expeditions have been rather overlooked, even if Portuguese
historians living under Dr Salazar around 1960 extolled him as one of the
founders of an empire that eventually controlled large swathes of southern
Africa.58 Cão had shown that it was possible to press on beyond the new
Portuguese bases in Elmina and São Tomé, and to find a welcome in lands
untouched by Islam that should be the gateway to the Indian Ocean.
However, that gateway lay much farther to the south than Henry the
Navigator, João II, or their cartographers and navigators had supposed. It
made obvious sense to fit out a third expedition, this time under the
leadership of Bartomeu or Bartholomew Dias. A third ship, loaded with
supplies, was now added to the flotilla, with the notion that it could be parked
somewhere off the coast of Africa and could be used to resupply the other
caravels on their return from a journey that might well stretch their own
supplies to the limit. Setting out in 1487, Dias’s ships were eventually caught
in storms off southern Africa; they headed out to sea, moving south-
westwards, and in the process made as important a discovery as the discovery
of land: the strong winds blowing from west to east could be harnessed to
propel their vessels back towards Africa and a more southerly latitude. This
led Dias to the coast that stretches beyond the Cape of Good Hope (not in fact
the southernmost point of south Africa), reaching hundreds of miles further,
as far as the bay in which the modern town of Port Elizabeth stands. By this
point it was obvious that the winds and currents continued to trend eastwards
and that the ships had rounded the bottom of Africa, entering the Indian
Ocean by a brand new sea route.59 Dias set up a padrão, which vanished
from sight over the centuries, until a young South African historian, Eric
Axelson, scrabbled in the sand on a headland at Kwaaihoek, where he
thought it was most likely to be, and found many fragments of it –
confirmation of the not always reliable stories in the sixteenth-century
narratives.60 Dias’s voyage was a tremendous achievement, and Dias would
have liked to carry on further; but his crew was worried at the lack of
supplies on board – the next voyage in these waters, by Vasco da Gama, had
no great difficulty in obtaining supplies from the local population – and were
determined to work their way back to the supply ship. In the process they
mapped the parts of the coast they had missed when they had swung out to
sea. Dias was back in Lisbon towards the end of 1488, and Christopher
Columbus recorded that he saw and was impressed by Dias’s map of Africa,
though he remained attached to his own theories. But the king of Portugal
failed to reward Dias with either the honours or the money that Cão had
received. He had returned to Portugal without exploring the Indian Ocean.61
Suddenly, though, the search for routes to the East acquired much greater
urgency. A Genoese mariner, as boastful as he was learned, was washed up
on the shores of Portugal in 1493, claiming to have discovered a new route
across the oceans all the way to China and Japan.
 Part Four

O C E A N S I N C O N V E R S AT I O N ,
AD 1492–1900
 28

The Great Acceleration

So far this book has been concerned with separate oceans. Admittedly, the
western Pacific rim and the Indian Ocean enjoyed close ties through maritime
trade during the Middle Ages, whether by means of Tamil and Malay or
Chinese navigators; but these sailors never targeted the wide-open spaces of
the island Pacific. Links between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic were
mediated through the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, after the opening of a
regular sea route from Italy to Flanders and England at the end of the
thirteenth century. The 1490s, however, saw a great acceleration in contact
between western Europe and what were fondly imagined to be the Indies, for
in the case of two discoveries they were not the Indies at all, even if
Columbus’s voyages resulted in the term ‘Indies’ being applied to the great
landmass of the two American continents, whose inhabitants were classed as
‘Indians’. The three European attempts to reach the Indies were those of
Christopher Columbus, whose four voyages to the New World spanned the
years from 1492 to 1504;1 John Cabot, who sailed west in search of China
and the Indies in 1497;2 and Vasco da Gama, whose first expedition to the
real India departed the same year. Amerigo Vespucci, sailing in the wake of
Columbus, wrote about the lands to the west, often tendentiously, but his
name, not that of Columbus, became attached to the Americas.3 The second
Portuguese expedition to India should also be added to this list, as it resulted
in the accidental discovery of Brazil in 1500 – a voyage that linked four
continents. This linking of the oceans was completed remarkably quickly
during the sixteenth century, once the routes from the Atlantic to the Pacific
had been mapped out by pioneers such as Ferdinand Magellan, the
Portuguese captain in the service of Spain, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, the
Spanish discoverer of California, and Francis Drake, sailing in the service of
England. The world, as a book describing Drake’s voyages proudly
proclaimed, had now been ‘encompassed’.4 The linking of the oceans
culminated in 1565 with the despatch of the first Manila galleon tying the
western Pacific (and, beyond that, China) to Mexico and, ultimately, the
Atlantic trade networks. Bearing these developments in mind, the chapters
that follow will concentrate mainly on the navigators, routes and goods that
passed between different oceans, rather than continuing to portray the history
of three separate oceans. It may then seem odd to begin with Columbus and
Cabot, whose expeditions were confined to a single ocean; but they assumed
that the waters off Europe and Africa and the waters off China and Japan
were part of one great ocean, in modern terms the Pacific combined with the
Atlantic.
 It is often pointed out that the Canary islanders, the Taíno Indians of the
Caribbean, the Tupinambá Indians of Brazil and all the other peoples
previously unknown to the Europeans were perfectly well known to
themselves; their ‘discovery’ was a two-way process. The Arab traders who
already knew the Swahili coast far down the flank of east Africa were
surprised to encounter Vasco da Gama as he worked his way into the Indian
Ocean in 1498; but they were aware that Christian lands existed beyond the
frontiers of Islam, and da Gama even met traders who knew the
Mediterranean. ‘Discovery’ was not a purely European phenomenon, but
those who were carving out new routes across the oceans were Europeans.

II

So far, the history of the Atlantic has been presented as the history of the
north-eastern Atlantic, and (by the end of the Middle Ages) the history of
navigation all the way down the Atlantic coast of Africa. Another maritime
network existed in the Atlantic, within and a little beyond the Caribbean, a
‘New World’ that would be exposed to European view by Columbus’s
voyages. It was in reality a very old world, first settled in the fifth millennium
BC, with new waves of settlers arriving periodically from South America.5
Unlike the Canaries, seven isolated islands that seem not even to have been in
contact with one another, let alone the African mainland, the Caribbean and
Bahama chains were lively places of interaction; the analogy, not that
Columbus would have been aware of it, is with the small Pacific islands that
were linked together by a constant flow of travellers bringing goods back and
forth.
Who these inhabitants were has been much discussed, and it has become
increasingly clear that archaeologists have underestimated the ethnic
complexity of the pre-Columbian Caribbean. They have generally been
content to divide the population into two groups described by European
observers, the warlike, cannibalistic Caribs and the more peaceful inhabitants
of the large islands, especially Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, some of whom
have come to be known as the ‘Taínos’, meaning ‘noble people’ in the
principal language of these islands.6 The name ‘Carib’ was derived from a
mythical island of Caribe said to be inhabited solely by men (another island
was supposedly inhabited solely by women). The Taínos at first wondered
whether Columbus and his crew had come from there. But the Spaniards
seized upon the negative image of islanders from Caribe and collectively
labelled all islanders who paddled their large canoes northwards to
Hispaniola in the fifteenth century man-eating ‘Caribs’; that they did
occasionally eat human flesh is very likely. These ‘Caribs’ represented a
further wave of migrants of Arawak descent, warriors seeking to establish
themselves in the lush islands of the Greater Antilles; it is likely that the
Lesser Antilles, the line of islands stretching from the South American coast
towards Puerto Rico, were becoming overpopulated, and they were looking
for new lands to settle. The problem was that some of these lands, notably
Hispaniola, were already very densely settled. This set off violent
confrontations.
While it suited the Spaniards to distinguish between those who were
regarded as legally free subjects of the king and queen of Castile, and hostile
cannibal invaders from the south, who could legitimately be enslaved, the
reality on the ground was rather different. On the largest island, Hispaniola, a
variety of languages could be heard, reflecting different waves of
immigration from South America.7 Jamaica was only settled in around AD
600, as also the Bahamas, at the end of a period known to archaeologists as
the ‘First Repeopling’. Although there are uncertainties about the route that
the very earliest settlers might have taken, evidence from pottery suggests
that the main route taken during this phase was a south-to-north one, along
the line of the Lesser Antilles. As in the Pacific, movement was slow, and
just as ‘Melanesians’, ‘Polynesians’ and ‘Micronesians’ overlapped and
intermingled, here the very earliest settlers were eventually outnumbered by a
wave of migrants related to the Arawak population of northern South
America, who created a particularly elaborate group of societies on
Hispaniola by the time of the arrival of the first European explorers. The
Taíno idols, or cemís, often carved out of stone, survive as evidence of a
lively culture, dependent on a reasonably nutritious food starch, cassava, and
organized into small political units that jostled for power on the main
islands.8
This was a well-connected world. The sea lay at the centre of their
elaborate myth-making, which included strange stories about all the fish and
all the water in the seas raining down from a great gourd, recorded by a
puzzled friar named Ramon Pané whom Columbus had sent into the interior
of Hispaniola to find out about the islanders’ religious beliefs.9 Hispaniola is
a fairly large and mountainous island, and there were certainly Taínos and
other groups who lived in the interior and did not have much to do with the
sea. Their aim was to achieve self-sufficiency, and this they did by and large
manage to do, which led occasional admiring Europeans to speak in glowing
terms of their societies: ‘theirs is a Golden Age’, an Italian scholar at the
court of Ferdinand and Isabella opined, describing a society where envy and
property were absent, and there was no need for laws and judges – the writer
Peter Martyr never actually went to see for himself, but his words set off
some fantastic ideas in the mind of Thomas More, recorded in his Utopia.10
But that is not to say that there was no trade. The inhabitants of the Bahamas,
which they called the Lucayos, were familiar with the bigger islands to the
south, trading goods such as coloured stones, foodstuffs, cotton thread and
carved cemís: Columbus was amazed to find that glass beads and coins traded
by his men on 13 October 1492, the day after he arrived in the New World,
were already being taken south in a native boat he encountered off Long
Island (Fernandina) on 15 October, along with some dried leaves and food.
Not just European goods but reports of the coming of the strangely attired
visitors in their flying boats were diffused at top speed throughout the island
chain.
A maritime highway ran all the way from Cuba to Trinidad and the South
American mainland. Inter-island trade was conducted using the dugout
canoes, propelled by paddle power, which attracted Columbus’s attention
from the moment he made contact with the Lucayan Taínos. The largest of
these canoes, made from a massive felled tree trunk, could seat as many as a
hundred Taínos, and the chieftain’s boat might be specially painted and carry
on board a canopied area. The process of making these boats was long and
complex, involving a massive collaborative effort by the village. The tree
trunk had to be split open and hollowed out, by burning away the wood and
chopping away at the residue. The outside of the boat was trimmed and
‘marvellously carved in the native style’, to cite Columbus’s first reaction.11
The smallest, carrying a single person, were also very seaworthy, skimming
back and forth between the islands. Not for nothing was the native word
canoa adopted in western European languages. In 1492 the Caribbean was
not home to static cultures rooted in centuries of unchanging traditional
practices; it was a little world on the move.12

III

Yet this Caribbean world could only be the outer edges of the luxurious
empires crowded with great cities described by Marco Polo. From the
European perspective, da Gama’s voyage to India was the true success story.
Columbus and Cabot were convinced that they had reached the edges of Asia,
and yet Columbus’s first voyage did not reveal the silks and spices of China
and Japan, as he so confidently promised Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of
Castile. Instead, he brought back some strips of gold foil (though not a
shipload of gold), some attractive feathers and some interesting but puzzling
inhabitants of the Caribbean, who, he had to admit, were little more advanced
in technology than the Stone Age Canary Islanders being conquered at the
same time. It seemed that the islands he had reached were richer in cotton
than in gold; and the mystery remained: where were the teeming cities whose
harbours were crowded with massive junks, ruled over by the Great Khan, of
whom Marco Polo had informed western Christendom two centuries earlier?
13 Cabot’s voyage in 1497 was even less satisfactory: he was almost
certainly aware that Bristol ships had strayed towards distant coasts
somewhere near Newfoundland, but once he returned home he had to admit
that the best chance for profit came not from rich ports and courts but from
codfish – it was so plentiful that English fishing boats would no longer need
to sail to Iceland.14
It is important to keep remembering that the first American voyages were
conceived as voyages to Asia and as ways of opening up access to the spices
of the East. They were planned according to exact expectations of finding
gold and spices. The waters they reached were deemed to be part of what
would now be regarded as the western Pacific. Some gold and spices were
indeed found, though not by Cabot. Oddly, therefore, it makes sense to play
along with the geographical assumptions of Columbus, and to assume that the
routes they had found did lead to Asia, and that the goods the Spaniards
acquired in the Caribbean were from the ‘Indies’. Only then can one
understand how more and more Spanish efforts were pumped into the
transatlantic voyages, which became quite regular within ten years of
Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean. Even the discoveries claimed by
Amerigo Vespucci at the start of the sixteenth century did not definitively
disprove the idea that South America was somehow connected to Asia; the
idea that there might be a land bridge between the continents was only
decisively rejected in the late nineteenth century. The Americas and Asia and
indeed eastern Africa were all las Indias, ‘the Indies’. After he had heard of
da Gama’s success in reaching Calicut, Columbus even speculated about
carrying on westwards to meet the Portuguese in India. What discouraged
him from an attempt to circumnavigate the globe, according to his son (and
biographer) Ferdinand, was the lack of supplies on board his ships, rather
than any notion that this was an impossible achievement.15
Just like the Portuguese, Columbus and Cabot were guided by the grand
strategy of bypassing the Red Sea and eliminating dependence on the dhow
traffic carrying spices across the Indian Ocean. The aim was not simply to
make a grand profit: Columbus shared with the Portuguese the ambition of
undermining the economy of the Muslim world by diverting the spices of the
Indies directly to Christendom; and he shared with King Manuel (and with
Ferdinand and Isabella) the messianic expectation that the discovery of a new
route to the Indies would fund a massive attack on Islam that would
culminate in the reconquest of Jerusalem by the greatest crusade of all time,
in which, it was fervently hoped, various Christian kings of the East would
also take part – Prester John was never far from the thinking of these new-
style crusade strategists. Ideally, Christian navies would force open the Red
Sea and clear the way to the Mediterranean – the spice route, but also the
route to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Columbus’s apocalyptic thinking
dipped and soared depending on circumstances, and he was generally most
obsessed by his sense of a divine mission when he found himself in a tight
corner, but his combination of materialistic greed and the conviction of
having been chosen by God never left him. Whatever riches he acquired in
the ‘Indies’ were also to be understood as God’s gift; the material and the
spiritual were intertwined like the strands in a rope.16
At no stage did Columbus express serious doubts that he had reached Asia,
even if the geography of the Indies had proved far more mysterious than his
reading of existing maps had led him to believe it would be. This is not to
deny that Columbus had private doubts: when he made his sailors swear that
Cuba was part of the Asian mainland, subject to a penalty of 10,000
maravedís and excision of the culprit’s tongue, he was unconsciously
expressing his own uncertainty about where on earth he had arrived.17 But
such evidence as existed for lands across the Atlantic seemed to confirm the
assumption that Asia was within reach. The bodies of strange people had
been cast up on the shores of Ireland, and their features were rather like those
of Tartars, in other words, the ‘Orientals’ with whom westerners were
reasonably familiar through political contact and through the trade in slaves
from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean. Almost certainly these were the
bodies of native North Americans which had been washed out to sea. If, as is
possible, the young Columbus travelled to Iceland he might well have heard
tales of lands to the west visited by Norse sailors in the past. In Bristol he
could also have picked up rumours of lands to the west, because several
Icelanders had taken up residence there, and because English expeditions had
penetrated deep into the Atlantic in the 1480s. Besides, he seems to have read
some mysterious papers in the possession of the Perestrello family of Porto
Santo near Madeira (into which he married), which provided further evidence
of land to the west.18
Building into their work the mass of rumours that circulated throughout the
Middle Ages, several fifteenth-century cartographers liberally sprinkled the
Atlantic with imaginary islands. One such mapmaker was Andrea Bianco, a
citizen of Columbus’s own home town of Genoa, who made charts in 1436
and 1448. Still, the distances looked formidable, unless one followed the
argument presented by the Florentine geographer Paolo Toscanelli, who
shrank the distance between western Europe and the Far East by arguing for a
narrow Atlantic that separated the continents, a judgement that also stretched
the distance overland from Portugal to China, making it greater than Ptolemy
had assumed.19 Columbus conveniently slotted Toscanelli’s version of the
Atlantic into Marco Polo’s description of Japan to show that Cipangu, or
Japan, was within relatively easy reach of Europe. Moreover, it was virtually
paved with gold:

The people are white, civilized, and well-favoured. They are Idolaters,
and are dependent on nobody. And I can tell you the quantity of gold
they have is endless; for they find it in their own Islands, and the King
does not allow it to be exported. Moreover few merchants visit the
country because it is so far from the mainland, and thus it comes to
pass that their gold is abundant beyond all measure [passages in
italics appear only in some manuscripts].20

The emperor of Japan was said to have a palace roofed with gold, ‘just as our
churches are roofed with lead’, with golden floors made of great golden
slabs, ‘so that altogether the richness of this Palace is past all bounds and all
belief’.21 Conceivably this description was based on Chinese whispers about
the Golden Pavilion and other beautifully decorated temples in Kyoto.
The assumption that Japan lay across his line of travel was not unique to
Columbus and Toscanelli. Martin Behaim, a German cartographer who had
made the lucky decision not to join van Olmen’s ill-fated voyage west of the
Azores in 1487, produced the first proper globe that has survived; now in the
Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, it dates from around the time
of Columbus’s first voyage, and does not include any of his discoveries.
However, the globe shows Cipangu athwart the western Atlantic, about two
thirds of the way across; superimposed on a modern map that would place
Japan just above the Guianas, while to its south-east a scattering of smaller
islands leads down to ‘Java Minor’ and ‘Seilan’, or Ceylon, the Bay of
Bengal having evaporated. Even though there is no evidence Columbus and
Behaim knew one another, the similarity between their view of what lay out
there in the western Atlantic is very striking. In that sense, Columbus was not
quite the eccentric fantasist he might at first appear.22
He was, after all, a citizen of Genoa, a port whose inhabitants had saltwater
in their veins – despite many counterclaims there is no doubt about that, for
the Genoese archives prove that he was the son of the weaver Domenico
Colombo; he was an imposing figure, six feet tall and red-haired, capable of
great charm as well as great fury.23 It is certainly striking that three of the
pioneers who opened up the Atlantic on behalf of kings in Spain, Portugal
and England were Italian. John Cabot appears to have been Genoese by birth,
but he lived long enough in Venice to acquire Venetian citizenship, always a
long process.24 Amerigo Vespucci was a well-connected Tuscan who lived
in Florence and Piombino, a little maritime state on the coast. It has been seen
that the Genoese were very active in the colonization of the Atlantic islands,
which explains why Columbus was made so welcome when he called on the
Perestrello family in Porto Santo.25 At that stage in his career, the young
Columbus was interested, like many of the Genoese who sailed the Atlantic,
in the sugar trade.
Wealthy Italian businessmen based in Lisbon and Seville were of crucial
importance in funding both the transatlantic voyages and the Portuguese
expeditions. Columbus came to depend on Florentine backers, since the king
and queen insisted they had run out of money after spending all they had on
the war to conquer Muslim Granada. The solution was to combine their
financial support, over a million maravedís (less than it sounds, as this was a
low-value coin), with backing from Italians in Seville, notably a certain
Giannetto Berardi; this way Columbus was able to inject half a million more
maravedís into the preparation of his tiny fleet.26 John Cabot received
monetary support from the London manager of a bank operated on behalf of
an ancient and illustrious Florentine family, the Bardi, with the intention of
seeking out ‘the new land’ (the fact this land is preceded by the word ‘the’
rather suggests prior knowledge of its existence, but may simply refer back to
knowledge of Columbus’s discoveries much further south).27 As for
Amerigo Vespucci, he was for a time an agent of Berardi’s bank, which
brought him into contact with Columbus, and they held one another in
respect.28
Why then did these Italians not set out across the ocean on their own
initiative? Political power was an important issue here. By the 1470s the
Portuguese and the Spaniards were already sparring for control of Atlantic
waters, so lone interlopers travelled at their own risk. And in delivering
grandiloquent letters to the Great Khan, of the sort Columbus carried on his
first voyage, it would surely make a difference if they were written in the
name of Europe’s greatest monarchs, the king and queen of Castile and
Aragon, rather than the tiny, if highly influential, republics of Genoa or
Florence – even though they were addressed to the ‘dear friend’ of the king
and queen, the letters Columbus carried contained blank spaces so that he
could fill in the unknown name of whatever ruler he managed to visit.29
Besides, the Italians living beyond Italy were probably better placed to raise
funds and take risks; the 1490s were troubled years in Italy, marked by a
massive French invasion of the peninsula and by Savonarola’s revolution
within Florence. Finally, there was the fact that the Italians had for hundreds
of years been selling their nautical skills to the kings of Portugal and Castile.
Neither Cabot nor Vespucci shared Columbus’s apocalyptic vision. Cabot,
at the court of the money-hungry King Henry VII, well understood that the
king expected good financial returns from whatever lands Cabot might find.
Vespucci was a cultured product of Renaissance Florence, and, though he
enjoyed exaggerating his achievements, he did not boast about how his
discoveries would end the Turkish threat or usher in the Last Days before the
Second Coming of Christ. While Columbus fantasized about how he had
discovered the source of all the world’s great rivers and was closing in on the
Garden of Eden, Vespucci, even in his most extravagant moments (describing
cannibal feasts, for instance), was keener to shock than to moralize.
Columbus saw himself as a crusader; Vespucci did not.

IV

Columbus’s first voyage, conducted by two caravels and a slightly larger nao,
the Santa María, set out in August 1492 from Palos de la Frontera in
Andalusia, passed through the Canary Islands, and reached its first stop in the
Bahamas on 12 October.30 His crew included at least one convert from
Judaism, Luís de Torres, whose great virtue was that he knew both Hebrew
and Arabic and would surely, therefore, be able to communicate with the
peoples of the East. Oddly, there was not a single priest or friar on board,
although Columbus claimed in his own logbook (which survives in a heavily
re-edited edition) that one of his aims was to ‘determine what method should
be undertaken for their conversion to our holy faith’; but if anything the lack
of a priest made Columbus even more conscious that he himself was God’s
agent on board the voyage. Also lacking were impressive trade goods that
could be offered to the Great Khan; however, the native population of the
Bahamas and the Caribbean was only too happy to be given beads, little red
caps and other items of truck, which, as has been seen, immediately passed
into the trading networks of the Taínos.
Over the next few months Columbus explored the Bahamas and the coast
of Cuba, but decided that the large island he called Hispaniola (modern Haiti
and the Dominican Republic) would be most suitable as a base. Although his
initial relations with the Taíno population of these lands were by and large
friendly, and he wrote very positively about how sweet, docile, good-looking
and innocent they were, he had great difficulty fitting them into his world
view; they were, for one thing, naked, which was not what one expected of
the subjects of the Chinese or Japanese emperor, who would surely be clad in
silk. The closest parallel he could find was with the Canary islanders: they
too were naked island people, ignorant of metal tools (although the Taínos
were, he was glad to report, familiar with a gold and copper alloy called
guanín); and they too were pagans who lived without any ‘law’, by which he
meant that they were not Christians, Muslims or Jews. Some early accounts
and maps show the newly discovered islands as Novas Canarias, ‘New
Canaries’, reflecting the view that he had found more of the same on the
same latitude, but much further away.31 He attempted to found a small
settlement in the north of the island. He returned to Europe in March 1493,
after a difficult voyage through the Azores that washed him up in Lisbon,
where King João II was deeply disconcerted to learn of his discoveries,
having previously ignored him as a fantasist.32
Had he really reached India? Evidently there was something out there, and
after Columbus had presented himself, and the Taínos he brought back with
him, to Ferdinand and Isabella at court in Barcelona he received a second
commission, setting out in September with a much more impressive armada
of seventeen ships; and this time there were priests on board. Much of his
energy was spent trying to subdue the interior of Hispaniola, as he became
sucked into rivalries between the different chieftaincies on the island. He
established a new centre of operations at La Isabela in northern Hispaniola, of
which more later; and the Taíno Indians were subjected to harsh demands for
tribute in gold. Accusations of incompetence reached the court in Spain
When the first inspector, named Juan Aguado, was sent out to Hispaniola
in 1495, Columbus was deeply resentful. Normally such inspections took
place when a governor demitted office, but the king and queen had appointed
him ‘Admiral of the Ocean Sea’ and governor of all newly found lands for
life. Columbus, an agile social climber, expected to make a fortune out of the
share of the wealth of the Indies that the king and queen were willing to
assign to him. His pretensions did not endear him to people back at the court
of Castile. The Genoese were not popular, even though their contribution to
the Castilian economy, notably in Seville, and to the creation of a Castilian
navy had been crucial; some of the hostility that had been building up against
the Jews, expelled as Columbus set out on his first voyage, was redirected
towards the Italians. Columbus was also accused, with good reason, of
attending too much to the interests of his family, promoting his brothers and
his son to high office in Hispaniola and exploiting the resources of
Hispaniola to enrich himself – there was a real issue as to whether he was
legally entitled to one tenth of the value of goods sent back to Spain, or
merely one tenth of the tax of one fifth that the Crown would receive on
goods sent back to Spain, in other words one tenth or a mere fiftieth.33
The result of all this was that Columbus hurried back to Spain in 1496.34
He had a difficult time making his case to the Catholic Monarchs, but –
taking into account his undoubted skill as a navigator – he was allowed to go
out a third time in 1497, and now he headed further south, through the Cape
Verde Islands, in the hope that he would find a route to the Far East
somewhere to the south of Hispaniola. He discovered ‘a very great continent,
which until today has been unknown’, the north coast of South America, but
not too much should be made of this: the term ‘continent’ simply meant a
large area of mainland, which could still be connected to, or lie just offshore
from, Asia. Still, the mystery of what was out there deepened further.
Columbus was convinced that he had reached the outskirts of the Garden of
Eden, which, as the Book of Genesis explained, was guarded by angels
bearing flaming swords and could not be entered. He decided that the garden
stood at the top of a great protuberance ‘something like a woman’s nipple’ –
the earth was not round, but pear-shaped.35 Sometimes he insisted that these
were not just the Indies; he had discovered Paradise – even its Taíno
inhabitants, tame and beautiful, unashamedly naked, seemed to live in
prelapsarian innocence.
Back in Hispaniola, reality intruded: trouble with the Taínos was
compounded by trouble with his fellow Europeans, and he faced a series of
rebellions by his Spanish lieutenants. These culminated in the despatch of yet
another official investigation under a somewhat dubious figure, Bobadilla,
and in the arrest of Columbus. In 1500 he was sent back to Spain in chains
that he refused to have removed until he stood in the presence of the king and
queen, whom he was still, remarkably, able to charm.36 Even so, it is
surprising that he received a fourth commission, hedged about with
conditions about where he could put in, since his presence in Hispaniola was
rightly seen as a source of trouble. He was only able to raise funds for four
ships, while the governor of Hispaniola, Nicolás de Ovando, sailed out to the
Indies ahead of him with thirty.37 In June 1502 Columbus’s ships stood off
Santo Domingo, the third attempt at European settlement in Hispaniola and
now the island’s capital; but they had to sit out a hurricane, as he was not
supposed to set foot on the island that he had discovered and ruled.
The conviction that he was called by God to make ever greater discoveries
became still more powerful during his final voyage. His knowledge that he
was God’s agent was confirmed even more strongly at a low point in 1503,
during his fourth voyage, when his men were beaten back by the Indians of
Panama, where he was hoping to found a colony. Suffering from a high fever
and deeply depressed by his failures, his troubled sleep was disturbed by a
voice from heaven that said:

‘O fool and slow to believe and to serve your God, the God of all!
What more did He do for Moses or for his servant David? Since you
were born, He has always had you in His most watchful care. When
He saw you at an age with which he was content, He caused your
name to sound marvellously in the land. The Indies, which are so rich
a part of the world, He gave you for your own; you have divided them
as it pleased you, and He enabled you to do this. Of the mighty
barriers of the Ocean Sea, which were closed with such mighty
chains, he gave you the keys.’38

On the coast of Panama and Costa Rica, he gathered information about a

rich civilization in the interior, probably a mixture of memories of Maya
glories from centuries earlier (his men found what were almost certainly
some Maya buildings), and vague knowledge of the Aztec empire in Mexico.
The evidence was there in solid gold ornaments worn by the local Indians,
some of which must have been traded from the interior. This gold awakened
yet again the greed of Columbus and his followers. He once again tried to
found a settlement in lands he suspected were genuinely rich in gold; but
when he was beaten off by the locals and when his ships were tossed to and
fro in another hurricane, he found himself washed up on the shores of
Jamaica, an island he knew vaguely but had never tried to conquer. For a
whole year from June 1503 onwards he was allowed to languish there, since
the Spanish governor of Hispaniola rather enjoyed leaving him to rot, but one
of his companions who had already escaped from Jamaica sent him a ship,
and in early November 1504 he was back in Spain, only to discover that his
eager patron, Queen Isabella, was on her deathbed; her husband had other
priorities, mainly in Italy (following his conquest of Naples a year earlier), so
now Columbus was stranded once again, but at least it was in his adopted
country; and he himself died there a year and a half later.39
As has been seen, Columbus saw the Taínos as innocent and beautiful
creatures quite different from the dog-headed monsters some had predicted
would be found in southern climes; in his logbook Columbus wrote: ‘on these
islands until now I have not found any monstrous men, as many expected;
rather, they are all people of very beautiful appearance.’ Occasionally he
looked over his shoulder at what the Portuguese were doing in Africa (he had
visited Elmina), and speculated that they were so docile that they would make
excellent slaves or servants, but Queen Isabella was adamant that they were
her free subjects and must not be enslaved.40 Attempts to convert the Taínos
were half-hearted; a friar was sent into the interior of Hispaniola to learn
about their ways, but evidence revealed as recently as 2006 shows that
Columbus was unhelpful over conversion, to the point of being
obstructive.41 These ambiguities and inconsistencies in his attitude occur
again and again. He still had room in his thinking for monstrous peoples,
especially when he heard tales of man-eating Caribs (whence the term
‘cannibal’, whose first letters echo the Latin canis, ‘dog’); these Caribs were
said to be invading Taíno lands from the south, coming up in their war canoes
and seizing boys, whom they castrated and raised for the pot, or women, who
bore them children that faced the same terrible fate.42
Whether they, or indeed the Taínos, occasionally feasted off human meat
has become a controversial question. Historians and literary scholars who
claim the label ‘post-colonial’ argue that cannibalism was a European
invention, employed to justify the subjection of the American Indians. On the
other hand, it is surely the height of colonial condescension to assume that
the Caribs or indeed the Taínos must have had the same moral values as
western Europeans either now or in the sixteenth century; there is no serious
reason to doubt that some American Indians, whether in the Caribbean or in
Brazil, did occasionally eat their captives.43 Such stories of monstrous
conduct led Columbus to divide the inhabitants of the New World into good
Taínos, whom he had made into notionally free subjects of the king and
queen, and evil Caribs, who were fair game for slaving expeditions: ‘when
your Highnesses order me to send you slaves, I expect to bring or send the
majority of them from these people.’
However, the Taínos could not produce nearly as much gold as he had
hoped, and as he continued to promise to the Catholic Monarchs in Spain. He
therefore put them to work sifting and mining for gold in increasingly
oppressive conditions, laying the foundations for the encomienda system that
effectively enslaved the Indians not just of the Caribbean but, in later
generations, of Mexico and Peru as well. Rather than being actually slaves,
the Taínos were understood to be legally free; but like other subjects they had
to render some service to their rulers, which for Columbus meant tribute in
gold dust, an amount per head sufficient to fill a hawk’s bell. The Crown did
occasionally try to improve the conditions under which they lived, but
European slavers made no effort to distinguish between ‘good’ Taínos and
‘evil’ Caribs. The first major legislation in favour of the Taínos, the ‘Laws of
Burgos’, dates from twenty years after Columbus first reached the Caribbean;
by then it was far too late to save them. Unaccustomed to heavy labour and
corralled into settlements, with families often broken apart for months at a
time, the Taínos began to disappear: falling birth rates, ill-treatment by
Spanish masters, even massacres, resulted in their rapid extinction. Demand
for labour in the gold fields of Hispaniola led to the depopulation of outlying
islands, so that the Bahamas were largely deserted by 1510. As will become
clear, the disappearance of the Taínos led to the importation of cheap labour
from Africa, black slaves who were not even notional subjects of the Spanish
rulers and had even fewer benefits of protection. The economic viability of
the West Indies was only sustained by a radical transformation in population,
both African and European.
Columbus, torn between his duties as governor of the new Spanish lands
and his sense of mission as bearer of God’s word, neglected the people of
Hispaniola because he was still convinced that he stood on the edge of the
Fabulous Orient and that he would unlock the door that would lead Christian
armies and navies to Jerusalem. He had radically different views about how
to reach Asia from most of his contemporaries; but that does not make him
into an example of ‘Renaissance Man’. When he used the classical writer
Seneca to demonstrate that Europe would overwhelm the Indies which lay
not too far to the west, he read Seneca as a prophet, indeed as a Christian
prophet, for it was often argued that he had been a secret Christian at the
court of the Christian-hating Emperor Nero.44 His thinking was rooted in
medieval ideas of crusade and Christian redemption as much as it was rooted
in the commercial outlook of medieval Genoa.

Columbus set out on his first voyage with three ships; John Cabot only had
one, the ‘shippe of Bristowe’ named the Matthew, a medium-sized boat of
around fifty tons. This was not even a new ship, but a commercial vessel that
had probably traded towards Ireland and France before Cabot took charge.45
One has to say ‘probably’ because the evidence about Cabot is very
fragmentary. His early career was punctuated by failure and scandal: he
seems to have fled from Venice to avoid his creditors, and in both Valencia
and Seville he offered his services as a harbour engineer, but his projects
were never brought to a finish, raising doubts about his competence.46 A
respected British historian announced that she was writing a radically
revisionist life of Cabot that would, it seems, have brought to light not just
his connections with Italian bankers but his attempts to explore large tracts of
the North American coastline and even to settle friars and others along that
coast. However, she died before her work was complete and left adamant
instructions that all her notes and drafts were to be destroyed.47 So there is
still plenty of speculation about his origins, his career and his impact,
speculation that is further muddied by the insistence that he was the real
discoverer of America, because Columbus only reached the mainland of
America (South rather than North) in 1498, and felt too ill to set foot there,
though he did send his men ashore. In reality, the discovery of America was a
gradual process of working out that two large continents blocked the way to a
further ocean which would present an even greater challenge to navigators
than the Atlantic.
Cabot knew perfectly well that Columbus had found land in the west, but
his voyage was designed to show that the Spaniards had been sailing too far
to the south in their search for Asia, a route partly determined by the lust for
the gold that the sun was believed to have generated in hot latitudes.48 The
Milanese ambassador in London reported that Cabot was searching for the
real Cipangu, for he was unconvinced that Cuba or any other land Columbus
had found was Japan; Cabot, he said, ‘believes that all the spices in the world
have their origin’ in Japan, and Cabot supposedly knew about this because he
had intrepidly journeyed to Mecca as a young man and had asked where
spices originated.49 If Cabot’s hunches were correct, London stood to
become an even more important spice market than Alexandria. In March
1496 King Henry blithely granted John Cabot extensive rights of conquest,
trade monopoly and dominion in the lands he would discover: ‘whatsoever
islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in
whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to
all Christians’, though King Henry left it to others to finance the expedition,
and evidence collected in the last few decades shows that the Bardi of
Florence provided essential backing.50 The fact that the king specified these
were to be previously unknown lands avoided a direct clash with the interests
of Columbus and the Crowns of Castile and Portugal.51 It was simply
assumed that Christian discoverers could raise the flag of England in
whatever non-Christian land they visited, without reference to the native
inhabitants or to the papacy, which, as will be seen, had already divided the
globe into Spanish and Portuguese hemispheres.
After a first try in 1496, when he was defeated by the weather and the
pessimism of his crew, his first full voyage, in 1497, apparently took him to
the ‘New-found-land’, and possibly to Labrador.52 As has been seen, spices
were not to be had; but there was an astonishing amount of cod. It was widely
assumed that Cabot had found more islands, rather than a continent – the
duke of Milan was told by his agents that Cabot had found the Island of the
Seven Cities.53 The Englishman John Day wrote to ‘the Lord Grand
Admiral’, almost certainly Columbus (then back in Spain, between his
second and third voyages), with a description of Cabot’s voyage; he
patriotically claimed that ‘the cape of the said land was found and discovered
in the past by the men from Bristol who found “Brasil”, as your Lordship
well knows’; what Columbus made of any of this is unknown, and he was
never tempted to try a northerly route across the Atlantic. Day reported that
Cabot reached land in late June, but there were only a few clues that any
humans lived there.54 So the claim that this was Japan or China did not fit at
all well.
 Another, larger expedition set off under John Cabot, in 1498. This time he
was more willing to take into account Columbus’s discoveries, for as far as is
known he headed towards Newfoundland, with the idea that the ships would
strike southwards towards the tropics, in search, perhaps, of a route to India,
or at least Japan and China. John Cabot himself disappeared, though it is
possible that some sailors made their way back to Europe with three
Indians.55 For the Great Chronicle of London reported that in 1501 or 1502
there ‘were browgth unto the kyng iij men takyn In the Newe ffound Ile
land’; ‘These were clothid In bestys skynnys and ete Rawe fflesh and spak
such spech that noo man cowde undyrstand theym, and In theyr demeanure
lyke to bruyt bestis.’56 John Cabot’s son Sebastian, himself an explorer of
North America, warned of a ‘very sterile land’, inhabited by polar bears,
moose (‘large stags like horses’), sturgeon, salmon, soles a yard long and an
infinity of codfish.57 It was not, then, the semi-paradise about which
Columbus enthused so poetically, in which seasons were of little importance
and crops almost shot out of the soil. The ocean and the rivers, not the land,
were the greatest assets of this new-found-land.
There are hints that Cabot or later visitors from Bristol travelled very far to
the south. In June 1501 one of Columbus’s rivals, Alonso de Hojeda,
received a commission from Ferdinand and Isabella, instructing him to
‘follow that coast which you have discovered, which runs east and west, as it
appears, because it goes towards the region where it has been learned that the
English were making discoveries’. He was to set up the Spanish equivalent of
padrões, to make public the Castilian claim to this shoreline, ‘so that you
may stop the exploration of the English in that direction’.58 This was despite
the marriage alliances that bound the house of Tudor to Spain through
Catherine of Aragon. These explorations were probably conducted by Bristol
merchants; in 1527 Hugh Elyot and Robert Thorne were both credited with
the discovery of Newfoundland some years earlier, which may have been not
so much a snub towards the Cabot family as a recognition that further new-
found-lands were reached around 1500, and the American Indians brought
back to the court of Henry VII may have arrived on one of these later
sailings, which seem to have continued until 1505 or thereabouts.59
Although a patriotic English historian has claimed that Cabot made entirely
clear the fact that North America was not Asia, in reality the
discombobulation continued – this was both a New World, of previously
unsuspected existence, and at the same time somehow attached to the Old
World. Its inhabitants lived so far from the Old World that they might even
have been created separately by God; yet they were also ‘Indians’, sharing
ancestry with the peoples of the Old World. None of it made much sense.
How hard it was to connect the mass of new information to existing
knowledge became apparent when Greenland once again entered the
consciousness of western Europeans. King Henry VII was interested to hear
of the rediscovery of Greenland by Gaspar Corte Real, from the Azores, in
1500, news brought to his court by a Portuguese sailor named João Fernandes
Lavrador (‘the Farmer’) from Terceira in the Azores. Lavrador received a
privilege from the English king and set up an Anglo-Portuguese syndicate
that explored the western Atlantic out of Bristol.60 The Corte Reals
subsequently, at the cost of their lives, explored the coast of Labrador right
down to Newfoundland – confusingly, they applied the name Labrador not to
the Atlantic coast of Canada, meant here, but to Greenland.61 A map of
1502, the Cantino Map, drawn in Lisbon, attached a caption to Greenland
describing it as the land ‘discovered by licence of the most excellent prince
Dom Manuel king of Portugal, the which is believed to be the peninsula of
Asia’.62
Enough reports filtered back to Portugal to confirm that this stretch of sea
was good for fishing, but the land had little to offer beyond ice.63 It has been
suggested that the real motive of these explorers was to find a North-West
Passage to Asia over the top of Canada, which would become a longstanding
obsession of navigators; however, it is more likely that they were curious to
look further at whatever Cabot had found, and that they concurred with the
general view that Greenland was a spur sticking out of Asia.
 29

Other Routes to the Indies

It took nine long years to capitalize on Dias’s rather amazing discovery that
Ptolemy was wrong, and that the Indian Ocean has an open bottom. One
factor that delayed action was that the Portuguese once again became
interested in campaigns in Morocco, though their meddling continued to
irritate the Castilians, who sent an expedition to Morocco’s Mediterranean
coast, capturing Melilla in 1497, and holding it ever since. The Portuguese
king was surrounded by doubters who pointed out that the monarchy did not
have unlimited resources, even with the profits that accrued from gold, sugar
and slaves; surely it made more sense to concentrate on maximizing these
profits? It was easy too to insist that little was really known about political
conditions in and around the Indian Ocean. Quite apart from the difficulty in
keeping such elongated trade routes open, little was known about the
Christian prince who was supposed to come to the aid of the Portuguese,
Prester John, who had been cited again and again for four centuries.
In preparation for new voyages, spies were sent into Muslim lands, in the
hope that they could penetrate still further, all the way to both India and
Ethiopia. Between 1487 and 1491 an agent of King João, Pero da Covilhã,
explored the land route to India and ended up in Ethiopia, where he saw out
his days. His account of conditions in India was sent back to Lisbon via
Portuguese Jews trading in Cairo.1 The Portuguese court also applied the
knowledge of the skilled Jewish astronomer Abraham Zacuto, who had
taught at Salamanca University before being exiled from Spain in 1492.2
Zacuto was a great specialist in astronomical tables, vital for long-distance
sailing; for the aim in sending Covilhã to India was not to create a land route,
which was obviously impossible while Turks and Mamluks stood in the way,
but to spy out the cities of India, find out what could be bought there, and
obtain some sense of the geography of the lands bordering the Indian Ocean.
Portuguese interest in a westward route across the Atlantic was limited.
Columbus had not been taken seriously when he delivered his sales pitch
about a short transatlantic route to Asia, still less after Dias rounded the Cape
of Good Hope and gave the Portuguese good hope of a route to the Indies;
Columbus’s calculation of the size of the earth was simply not credible, and
his idea that Cipangu (Japan) was within easy reach of the Canary Islands
made no sense.3 The Crown had given its blessing to Ferdinand van Olmen’s
expedition westwards in 1486, but had invested nothing in it, and, after all,
van Olmen never reappeared.4 King João was therefore shocked when
Columbus returned from his first voyage to the Caribbean in 1493, carrying
Taíno Indians on board. One issue was which newly discovered lands should
fall under the dominion of which kingdom; the solution agreed in the Treaty
of Tordesillas, in 1494, was to divide the Atlantic, and by extension the
globe, vertically down the middle of the ocean; the treaty was mediated by
the pope, Alexander VI Borgia, who took the opportunity to express his own
overarching authority across the entire world. Spain was granted rights to the
west of the line of division, Portugal to the east. The Portuguese therefore
remained confined to the eastern flank of the Atlantic during the 1490s.
Seen from a maritime perspective, this was the lull before the storm. A
new king succeeded to the throne late in 1495; Manuel I was the cousin of
João II, and he was driven as much by messianic ideas of Portugal’s role in
the struggle against Islam as he was by his support for the now wealthy
trading community of Lisbon; he had been educated by Franciscan friars who
imbued him with his sense of a messianic mission, which was accentuated
when, against the odds, he found himself heir to his cousin’s throne.5
Manuel’s decision to expel both Jews and Muslims from his kingdom in 1497
reflects his apocalyptic view of human history: Christ would return when the
Jews became Christians and when the Infidel Moors were defeated at home,
as far east as Jerusalem, and in Asia. (In the event, most Jews were forced to
convert to Christianity when Manuel closed the ports to prevent them
leaving, with the result that a large and prosperous community of New
Christians, often secretly loyal to their old religion, came into existence.)
Voyages to the heart of Asia would divert the gold and spices of the East
away from the Islamic heartlands, and help to undermine the power of the
Mamluks in the Middle East and of the Ottomans in Turkey and the Balkans.
So, amid great celebration, in July 1497 Vasco da Gama set out with four
ships, at first following the classic Portuguese route along the west coast of
Africa and past the Cape Verde Islands.6 Two of these ships were not
caravels; much energy had gone into designing a sturdier type of ship, with
square sails, that would be better suited for the bold route Dias had identified.
This route would take the ships through powerful winds across open ocean
well out of sight of land, rather than the coastal route Cão had taken, which
took advantage of the ability of caravels to sail a good way upriver. Dias
advised on the design of the new ships, but the king mysteriously chose da
Gama, a minor nobleman with no experience of command at sea, to lead the
expedition; Manuel was more interested in placing someone who might be
able to negotiate with foreign rulers at the head of the expedition, rather than
an old sea dog like Dias.7 Bearing in mind Dias’s advice, da Gama swung
far out into the ocean once past the Cape Verde Islands, describing a route
that traversed three times the distance covered by Christopher Columbus in
1492. His ships were swept along, arriving somewhere along the coasts of
modern Namibia and South Africa. There they met naked, tawny-coloured
Bushmen who were disappointingly ignorant of spices, gold or pearls;8
further south, Vasco da Gama’s chronicler described people who looked and
acted more like the black Africans known from much further to the north.9
The Portuguese bought an ox for three bracelets from these people and dined
well off it, for it was full of fat and as tasty as anything back home – a great
joy after weeks of salt pork and hard biscuit.10 The good news was that, as
they rounded southern Africa, the Portuguese began to realize that the
inhabitants were not isolated from the world; they were ‘handsome and well-
made’ and they knew iron and copper, and the Portuguese met one man who
told them about his travels far up the coast, where he had seen big ships.
 The further they coasted into the Indian Ocean the more the Portuguese
were reminded not of the Christian but of the Muslim world, and this made
sense because Arab merchants had been trading up and down the east African
coast for centuries in their dhows.11 Many of the inhabitants spoke Arabic,
whatever the colour of their skin (for there had been plenty of intermarriage
between the Arabs and the Africans). These people dressed finely in linen
and cotton and wore silk turbans; they were active in trade with the ‘white
Moors’ to the north, and Arab vessels were in port, piled with the gold, pearls
and spices about which the Portuguese had been asking everyone they
encountered, including the pepper of the Indies. The merchants boasted that
pearls and jewels were so abundant in the lands towards which the
Portuguese were heading that one simply gathered them, without any need to
offer goods in return.12 The Portuguese absorbed all the rumours they heard
like sponges: there were Christian kingdoms to the north, at war with the
Moors; there was the Ethiopian realm of Prester John, still busy in defence of
Christendom after three centuries. It was all too good to be true. By the time
he reached Mombasa in what is now southern Kenya, da Gama had entered a
much more familiar world of princes and traders. He even convinced himself
that he had met some Christians when two merchants of Mombasa proudly
showed the Portuguese what the newcomers believed was an image of the
Holy Spirit drawn on paper.13 With the help of a willing pilot, often though
wrongly assumed to have been ibn Majid, the Muslim author of several tracts
on navigation, da Gama was at last able to make his way to Calicut in India,
where he arrived on 20 May.14
Here he was entering a world which had close links to home. He found a
couple of Moors from Tunis, who spoke Spanish and Italian, and who
unenthusiastically greeted the Portuguese with the words: ‘May the devil take
you! What brought you here?’ The Portuguese were, nonetheless, convinced
that they had reached a Christian land. It was certainly not a land under
Muslim rule. The Portuguese were mightily impressed by a building they
identified as a church; it was made of stone, and was the size of a monastery,
with a great bronze pillar at the entrance. Within the church there was an
imposing chapel, and ‘within this sanctuary stood a small image which they
said represented Our Lady’. The figure carried a child, so the identification
was as certain as could be. Therefore Vasco da Gama entered the compound
with some of his companions, and they said their prayers. The local priests
threw holy water over the Portuguese visitors and presented them with ‘white
earth’ made of cow dung, ashes and sandalwood, with which the local
Christians were accustomed to anoint themselves. The local Christians were
also devotees of any number of saints, whose images were painted on the
walls of the church, some with several arms or with giant teeth.15
It was all, of course, a great mistake. Their first encounter with the Hindu
gods was transmogrified in the fertile imagination of the Portuguese into an
encounter with the Virgin and Child. The panoply of gods painted on the
walls was read as a cycle of Christian saints.16 The Virgin and Child was
probably an image of Krishna being suckled by his mother Divaki. The
Portuguese knew these people were not ‘Moors’, whose places of cult had no
images and whose language and practices were easily recognizable – as has
been seen, Islam was banned in Portugal only in the year when da Gama left
home.17 But India was a land of kings, of scheming Moors, of undoubted
wealth, in which the Portuguese were not really welcome. Da Gama’s
attempts to negotiate with local rulers were frustrated at every turn, and his
constant recourse to violence, which became the trademark of Portuguese
conquerors, made it more difficult still to win the respect of local rulers and
establish trading stations. Still, da Gama was able to leave loaded with
samples of pepper and other goods, and to reach Lisbon again in September
1499.
The king of Portugal optimistically began to call himself ‘king of Portugal,
lord of Guinea, lord of the conquest and navigation and commerce of
Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India’. This title was not quite as empty as it
may sound: within five years an astonishing eighty-one ships were
despatched from Lisbon to India. A second fleet was put together under the
command of Pedro Álvares Cabral, setting out in 1500; this fleet consisted of
thirteen ships and swung so far out into the Atlantic that it made landfall in
South America, in what the Portuguese called the ‘Land of the Holy [or True]
Cross’, soon to be rechristened Brazil. This land happened to fall on the
Portuguese side of the line of demarcation that had been established by the
Treaty of Tordesillas six years earlier. Although it has often been suggested
that the Portuguese already possessed secret knowledge of Brazil, and that
Cabral knew where he was heading, contemporary reports indicate that this
was an accidental discovery. The Portuguese took a long time to capitalize
upon it.18
Cabral took care to carry along Arabic interpreters, including a certain
Gaspar da Gama, named after his godfather Vasco, who was an enthusiastic
and well-informed Jew of Polish descent da Gama had found wandering in
India and had brought back to Portugal. Cabral’s method for convincing the
Samudri, or king, of Calicut to do business was crude in the extreme: ships
with hundreds of passengers aboard were sunk; the town was bombarded by
cannon; no quarter was given; elephants as well as people were massacred
(and the elephants were eaten); but in the end permission was given for spices
to be loaded, though not enough to fill all the holds. These goods were only
acquired because Cabral was able to take advantage of the intense rivalry
between the ruler of Calicut, whose town he had ravaged, and the rajah of
Cochin, better disposed to the interlopers because he saw them as well-armed
allies.19 Seven of the ships finally returned to Lisbon, but only five carried
merchandise; one ship wandered off and reached Madagascar, the first
European landing there. In June 1500, along the coast of Africa Cabral’s
ships encountered a fleet carrying the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, a
sign that this vast world was in some respects still a small one – in these
enormous spaces Europeans somehow managed to find one another.
Vespucci was bound for the north coast of South America; but he was fully
alive to the implications of these Portuguese voyages. He sent a long letter
back to Florence, recounting the achievements of Cabral’s fleet and
describing the geography of maritime Asia to his patron, a member of the
Medici family; he thought that the lands Cabral had visited in South America
were an extension of those Columbus and others had been revealing under
the Spanish flag, whereas the Portuguese view was that Brazil was a large
island.20
King Manuel was so carried away by enthusiasm that even before Cabral
had returned he sent out yet another fleet, in March 1501, under the Galician
commander João de Nova. Nonetheless, de Nova managed to learn what
Cabral had been doing: Cabral left a message in a shoe suspended from a tree
near the southern tip of Africa; astonishingly, the message was found, and de
Nova was warned that he should stay wary of the hostile Samudri of Calicut.
De Nova was able to use his cannon to fight off attacks by ships from
Calicut, and he captured several cargo vessels, one of which belonged to the
embattled Samudri. Cochin and Cannanore proved good sources of spices,
although the downside was that the Indians had only limited interest in the
goods the Portuguese had brought. Still, de Nova managed to establish a
‘factory’, that is, a warehouse and office, for the Portuguese at Cannanore;
this is what da Gama had aimed to achieve at Calicut, but his bloodthirsty
behaviour there made the creation of a permanent base impossible. So de
Nova was able to return to Portugal in September 1502 with hundreds of
thousands of pounds of pepper, cinnamon and ginger. Some of the cargo was
without doubt loot from captured Cochin ships. The Portuguese would long
appear to many of the inhabitants of the shores of the Indian Ocean as pirates
and interlopers, and it is impossible to disagree.21
In 1502 da Gama went out to India for a second time, departing just as de
Nova left Indian waters. Twenty ships set out, divided into three squadrons:
one squadron of ten ships to collect cargoes of spices, one to clean the sea of
Arab traders hostile to the Portuguese, and one to stay in India, protecting the
Portuguese who were taking up residence there. The self-confidence of the
Portuguese is impressive: they assumed that the ships that went out would –
with some losses – eventually return, despite the danger of war with the ruler
of Calicut and the sheer difficulty of a journey through stormy seas and past
many potentially hostile towns in east Africa. The tone of the expedition was
set by a visit to Kilwa, long an important port on the east coast of Africa,
where the threat of unleashing his firepower on the town convinced the local
ruler to declare himself a vassal of the king of Portugal and to offer a
substantial tribute in gold.22 The message that Portugal would achieve its
aims by force was never allowed to fade from sight. Once off India, the level
of violence increased to horrific levels: the burning of a merchant ship full of
men, women and children returning from Mecca was only one ghastly
episode, as da Gama bombarded towns and rejoiced in Portuguese firepower,
ever intent on humiliating the Samudri of Calicut and of forcing his way into
the spice markets of India. Potential friends were harassed too, like the rajah
of Cannanore, who was found to be in cahoots with Muslim merchants and
had to be warned that in no circumstances must he interfere with the
Portuguese agents based in his port.23
These actions even stirred da Gama’s enemy, the ruler of Calicut, to begin
negotiations, though in the hope of trapping da Gama and destroying his
fleet; early in February 1503 the Portuguese and the navy of Calicut clashed,
and da Gama won a handsome victory. One reason for the defeat of Calicut
was that the Samudri was unable to persuade the Arab merchants to lend him
their ships, so his navy consisted of a few dozen ships provided by his Indian
subjects. The Portuguese took home an extraordinarily rich cargo of over
3,000,000 pounds’ weight of spices, mainly pepper but also plenty of sweet-
smelling cinnamon. Brightly coloured parrots were brought back, described
as ‘marvellous things’. If this could be repeated year in, year out in more
peaceful conditions, the trade routes of the world would be radically
transformed.24
Even when these pioneers were able to fill their ships with pepper, the high
risks of these voyages, with the loss of up to half the ships, began to raise
doubts back home about their viability; the wreck of what may well be one of
da Gama’s ships, the Esmeralda, which foundered off the coast of Oman, was
first identified in 1998, although its location was kept secret until 2016. It is
the earliest known wreck of a European ship from the age of discovery. This
is one of those cases where archaeological evidence and the documents
converge neatly, for the story of this shipwreck is well known, thanks to
reports in contemporary chronicles and in a letter sent to King Manuel.25
The sinking of the Esmeralda and its sister-ship, the São Pedro, was even
illustrated in a manuscript of 1568, such was the fame of these events. These
vessels had been sent to hunt down Arab ships off Arabia, but unfamiliarity
with the winds and waves did the Portuguese vessels far more harm than
clashes with Arab dhows – the Esmeralda was torn from its anchorage close
to an offshore island by a storm and hurled against the rocks. The name of its
captain, Vicente Sodré, was commemorated in the inscription ‘VS’ carved on
to the stone shot kept on board for use in battle; Sodré was da Gama’s uncle
and was to be his substitute if da Gama died on the expedition. A bell
carrying the number ‘498’, that is, 1498, and some gold cruzado coins minted
in Portugal help to confirm the ship’s identity; one coin, a silver indio of
King Manuel I, is only known from one other surviving example, but it was a
famous coin in its day, minted for trade with the Indies.26 Among the most
recent finds is a mariner’s astrolabe, of which very few other examples
survive, and none this early.
Growing experience of these waters reduced these dangers, and growing
profits increased their attractiveness to those trying to make their fortune.
Venetian writers began to panic, fearing (wrongly) that all the pepper they
had been buying through Alexandria would disappear; they were also
disconcerted to learn that ‘it is impossible to procure the map of that voyage.
The king has placed a death penalty on anyone who gives it out.’27 In his
diary the Venetian Girolamo Priuli kept repeating his fears about the future:

Some very wise people are inclined to believe that this thing may be
the beginning of the ruin of the Venetian state, because there is no
doubt that the traffic of the voyage and the merchandise and the
navigation which the city of Venice made each year thence, are the
nutriment and milk through which the said republic sustained itself …
With this new voyage by the king of Portugal, all the spices which
should come from Calicut, Cochin and other places in India to
Alexandria or Beirut, and later come to Venice … will be controlled
by Portugal.28

Venice was quick to act, and sent its own galleys out of the Mediterranean to
Flanders, dumping the spices it had obtained in the Levant and trying to head
off Portuguese competition.29
Portuguese pepper was plentiful, but by the time it reached Europe it was
often waterlogged, and Portugal did not gain supremacy in the spice trade
overnight. The Venetians were relieved when the Portuguese king failed to
make much money from the pepper brought back in 1501. It took a few years
for the effects of da Gama’s breakthrough to be visible. After 1503 the price
of spices in European markets fell, reflecting the presence of spices brought
by the Cape route. Venice did suffer, but a sudden and catastrophic collapse
did not occur, and there was even a Venetian recovery in the late sixteenth
century.30 Portugal’s success depended on the strength of demand in north
European markets; Antwerp was to be Portugal’s salvation, a market close to
the cities and courts of northern Europe where Portugal could unload its
goods and undercut the Venetian galley trade out of the Mediterranean. That
said, it is important to remember that the major overseas market for Indian
spices lay eastwards, not westwards, in China, which was a voracious
consumer even in the face of Ming attempts to concentrate production at
home; and India itself consumed far more spices than the whole of Europe –
even before the Mughals brought their cuisine to the subcontinent, there was
plenty of spicy food to be had in India. European demand for spices did not
have much effect on the price of spices in the Indies. The opening of the
route to India and beyond by Portugal was of massive importance, laying the
foundation of the first of the great European maritime empires; yet it is
important not to exaggerate the effect of the European spice trade on the
economy of Asia.
Some Italian businessmen did, however, benefit from the new
opportunities. Bartolomeo Marchionni was a very wealthy Florentine
businessman who had been based in Lisbon for nearly thirty years when da
Gama first set out; he traded in sugar, slaves and wheat and built up interests
in both Madeira and the Guinea Coast before he became an enthusiastic
backer of the India project. He was a naturalized Portuguese subject, and he
believed that his family’s future lay in the booming city of Lisbon, where, by
about 1490, he was the richest merchant in the city. He had a long history of
supporting India ventures even before da Gama; he had provided the letters
of credit that Pero da Covilhã cashed as he travelled eastwards on his spying
mission. Marchionni was the proud owner of the Annunciada, one of Cabral’s
ships, which returned carrying gems obtained in India, and he also funded de
Nova’s expedition.31

II

The Swahili coast also entered the consciousness of the Portuguese. Although
the Swahili population was not much interested in taking to the sea, the
Portuguese could hardly prevent Arab dhows from carrying on their trade
down the east African coast; Arab, Indian and quite probably Malay ships
used to visit the ports along this shore, stopping at Kilwa, Mombasa and other
towns, whose faraway links extended, according to Tomé Pires, the early
sixteenth-century Portuguese writer, all the way to Melaka.32 The main aim
of the Portuguese was to intimidate local Muslim rulers, so that they had free
passage through their waters; they needed stopping points where ships could
be careened and leaks could be plugged; and above all they hoped to
blockade the Red Sea, cutting off the supply routes that brought the spices of
the Indies to Alexandria. There was one place along this coast that really did
attract them: Sofala, in modern Mozambique, which was a terminal point for
the gold that was brought from the African interior towards the coast. By
controlling the coast of Mozambique, the Portuguese would be able to block
Arab access to Sofala, while the region was within surprisingly easy sailing
distance of India, once the monsoon winds were blowing in the right
direction. Otherwise, they were not enormously interested in what they could
buy and sell along this coast: the aroma of Indian spices was addictive.33
Most histories of da Gama and his successors pay rather little attention to
Portuguese projects in east Africa, but success there was vital if the
Portuguese were to master the route to India and gain some degree of control
over an ocean so far from home. There was no point in creating bases in
India, at Cannanore and Cochin, and later at Goa and Diu, if the route past
Africa was not protected by strong alliances and by impregnable forts that
would remind local rulers how important it was not to irritate the Portuguese;
much the same policy had guided them down the coast of Morocco and all
the way to Elmina, so fortress-building far from home was in their bones.
This understanding of how east Africa fitted into their wider plans was
apparent as early as 1503, when Manuel sent António de Saldanha into the
Indian Ocean with three ships. Such a tiny squadron might seem laughably
small, but the firepower of the Portuguese was terrifying; the cannons on
board were the weapons of mass destruction of the early sixteenth century, as
one of Saldanha’s captains showed when he seized some ships based at
Mombasa and then blockaded Zanzibar. However, the attack on Zanzibar is a
perfect example of the repeated failure of the Portuguese to think their actions
through. The sultan of Zanzibar had never opposed the Portuguese. When the
Portuguese bombarded the beach they killed the sultan’s son; they also
captured three ships standing in Zanzibar harbour, whereupon the sultan felt
obliged to make a humiliating peace agreement, consisting of a large tribute
in gold and thirty sheep each year, as well as a hefty ransom payment for one
of the ships that had been seized.34
Local rulers hoped that the Portuguese would go away within a few years,
once they discovered how unwilling the Muslim and Hindu rulers were to
host them, after which they would leave the Indian Ocean in relative peace.
Yet they kept returning for more, and began to dig themselves into east
Africa by constructing Portuguese forts at Sofala and Kilwa. The commander
who was sent out to build these forts, Francisco de Almeida, exploited the
fact that the local sheikhs had accepted the overlordship of the king of
Portugal, but it was clear that they would only be permitted to stay in power
so long as they continued to pay tribute and to help the Portuguese.35 This
type of relationship was inspired by the surrender treaties that the Christian
rulers in medieval Spain and Portugal had forged with Muslim princes: a
combination of an alliance, into which the Muslims had been coerced, with
loosely defined submission.
Almeida, who became the first Portuguese viceroy in the Indian Ocean,
was sent to the Indian Ocean with the largest Portuguese fleet so far: there
were 1,500 men aboard twenty-two or twenty-three ships, and those on board
included many high-ranking Portuguese and captains with experience of
these waters (such as João de Nova), because the aim, set out in a 30,000-
word set of instructions, was to gain mastery over the western half of the
Indian Ocean.36 When he found that the sheikh of Kilwa was less than
welcoming – the sheikh argued that he could not meet Almeida as a black cat
had crossed the road in front of him – Almeida’s willingness to compromise
turned into fury at obvious delaying tactics, and Portuguese troops were
unleashed on the town. Almeida’s men overran the town, the sheikh fled
through a postern gate, and the next day the victorious Almeida began to
build the promised fort. Still, he had to sort out the government of what could
become a restive city. A compliant Muslim leader whom the Portuguese
knew as Anconi was installed as king of Kilwa; conveniently, Almeida had
brought along a crown that Manuel was sending to the rajah of Cochin, and
this was used in Anconi’s lavish coronation ceremony, which was attended
by the Portuguese commanders all dressed up to the nines.37
A similarly revolting story can be told of the attack that was now launched
against Mombasa: intimidation followed by ruthless bombardment, the
landing of troops, the looting and burning of the city, and the massacre of
many of its inhabitants. The sultan wrote to another Arab ruler: ‘in this city
the stench of death is such that I dare not enter it.’ The victors divided up
loot, some of it from as far away as Persia, that included gold, silver, ivory,
silk, camphor and slaves, as well as a carpet so magnificent that it was set
aside as a gift to King Manuel. So much was seized that loading the ships
took a fortnight.38 The Portuguese preferred to be feared rather than loved.
They were particularly interested in Sofala, with its reputation as a centre of
the gold trade, even though its harbour was difficult to enter, making it less
suitable as a supply station. Their reputation had preceded them, and the
sheikh, aged about eighty and blind, was hardly in a position to resist them,
especially when they offered to defend Sofala against attacks by African
raiders from the interior. They were allowed to build a fortress and
commercial base, which they created from scratch in a couple of months
during the autumn of 1505. This gave them charge of the gold trade out of
Sofala, from which the Arab traders were now excluded.
The Portuguese also began to eye the great inland empire of Monomotapa,
the source of much of the gold they craved; in 1506 a report by a Portuguese
agent demonstrated that the gold lay in a kingdom ruled from a place called
Zimbaue, which it took about three weeks to reach – the first European
reference to a successor kingdom to the empire of Great Zimbabwe, whose
rulers had once dominated large stretches of south-east Africa. Clearly, the
more gold they could extract from this area (later the Portuguese colony of
Mozambique), the more easily they could pay for the spices of the Indies, and
a lively exchange network developed, linking Portuguese Sofala with India
and importing into Africa Indian cloths and carpets, ranging from the finest
silks to linen shirts.39
One of the most striking features of this Portuguese takeover in the Indian
Ocean is that they were confidently seizing control while they still knew little
about the geography and resources of the lands where they were building
their forts. One of the ships in da Cunha’s fleet landed by chance in
Madagascar, which had already been discovered by the Portuguese, but was
still unknown territory. When they saw that young men on the island wore
silver bracelets, and realized that cloves and ginger could be found there as
well, the Portuguese became very excited. Maybe there was no reason to go
all the way to India and fight wars against the Muslims and Hindus, when the
spices and precious metals of the Indies were accessible on this massive
island inhabited by generally friendly inhabitants. João de Nova informed
King Manuel that ‘great ships’ arrived every other year in Madagascar from
further east, and that it would therefore be possible both to exploit the
island’s own riches and to tap into the trade between Madagascar and Melaka
in the Far East; as one historian has said, ‘it would be a case of large profits,
quick returns’. Manuel became very excited. In 1508 an expedition was sent
out to see if these expectations were realistic. But no silver and no cloves
were found; interestingly, the Portuguese came to the conclusion that the
cloves they had been shown had been collected from the wreck of a Javanese
junk. In the years around 1500, traffic continued to ply between the East
Indies and south-east Africa, especially Madagascar, which had not lost its
connection to the islands far to the east from which its own population had
originated.40
The Portuguese had scored remarkable successes in east Africa and India.
Yet the waters of the Indian Ocean could never be entirely theirs: not just
Javanese junks but Arab dhows and Ottoman war galleys had to be taken into
account, for, as will become clear, the Turks had their own ambitions in this
vast arena.
 30

To the Antipodes

It seemed that Asia could be reached in two directions. But gradually doubts
began to accumulate. Amerigo Vespucci’s writings were distributed and
translated even more widely in Europe than those of Columbus, thanks to
ever more energetic printing presses; they suggested that there really was a
New World that might not even be connected to Asia. Vespucci’s claim to
have taken part in four transatlantic voyages does not have to be taken at face
value. His letters describing the New World, some of which survive in
manuscript and some in print, combine the tendentious with the factual, for
he had a very good eye for his market, which consisted of readers as
interested in feasts of human flesh as in the geography of the world. The
printed versions, which play up this theme in especially lurid detail, may well
have been rewritten by his editors, and the real question is not whether
Vespucci saw what he claimed, so much as how his works influenced
Europeans at a time when awareness was growing that access to Asia through
the Atlantic was blocked by massive continents. One of his admirers was Sir
Thomas More; the fictitious narrator of his description of an ideal society
somewhere out in the Atlantic was Raphael Hythloday, who ‘accompanied
Amerigo Vespucci on the last three of his four voyages, accounts of which
are now common reading everywhere’.1
Vespucci claimed that he joined a Spanish expedition across the Atlantic in
1497, led by Alonso de Hojeda, who had been entrusted with the command of
the first small fleet to break Columbus’s monopoly on exploration.2 These
ships were heading into areas which lay beyond the area opened up by
Columbus’s first two voyages, and were therefore not automatically part of
the massive grant of dominion and rights of exploration that had been made
to him by the Catholic Monarchs. The rival voyages gave rise to lawsuits
between the Columbus family and the Crown that lasted a generation; the
Columbuses saw the newcomers as interlopers in their own Caribbean. It is
quite possible that Vespucci did not actually accompany Hojeda, and that he
first crossed the Atlantic two years later; however, whether his first voyage
took place in 1497 or 1499, he was drawn across the Atlantic by news that
there were pearl fisheries in the southern Caribbean, and he may have fancied
himself as a jewel merchant.3 But it became clear that the real source of
profit was to be found not in pearls but in human bodies: the crew carried off
more than 200 slaves.4
 As Hojeda’s ships coasted along the southern shores of the Caribbean, they
entered a land where the natives lived in villages built above the water, just
like Venice; this was the origin of the name ‘Venezuela’, which means ‘little
Venice’.5 Admittedly, the houses were not Venetian palazzi but huts raised
on stilts and linked to one another by drawbridges which could be raised in
times of danger – as on this occasion.6 When the Indians turned hostile,
Vespucci blandly reported that it had been necessary to massacre them,
though the explorers resisted the temptation to burn down the village, ‘since
it seemed to us something that would burden our consciences’.7 The goods
they found in the village were not worth much, and they pressed on.8 By and
large, though, the people in this area were friendly, offering food, performing
dances; ‘there we spent the night, where they offered us their women, and we
were unable to fend them off’.9 These people did suffer from raids by
aggressive neighbours, who also attacked the Europeans, and Hojeda decided
that he had seen enough and that the time had come to return home with his
cargo of slaves.
How new this New World was to Europeans became obvious when they
studied the flora and fauna they saw. For this was a fertile land, rich in wild
animals such as ‘lions’ (that is, jaguars), deer and pigs, even though they
were rather different in appearance to the animals of the Old World.10
Knowledge of the southern hemisphere was only acquired piecemeal during
Vespucci’s seagoing career. On his second, or maybe his first, trip, in 1499,
Vespucci probably still thought that the mainland was simply an extension of
Asia; his sense that the New World was physically separate developed over
the next few years. His third (or was it really his second?) voyage apparently
took him very far down the coast of South America, giving him the chance to
admire the Southern Cross hanging in the night sky. If he reached as far as he
claimed, then it was with a mixed sense of achievement and disappointment.
He had visited lands no one suspected were there, full of people living a
simple life on the edge of what seemed to be impenetrable forests. But there
were no great cities. And where was the route to China and Japan? Where
was the gold that always seemed to come from over the hills and far away?
Eventually Vespucci concluded that this was the southern continent. ‘We
learned that the land was not an island but a continent, both because it
extends over very long, straight shorelines, and because it is filled with
countless inhabitants.’11 As has been seen, the term ‘continent’ did not have
quite the meaning it has now, and in a general sense indicated a large area of
mainland that could be part of Asia, Africa or Europe, the three known
continents in the modern sense of the term. However, Vespucci concluded
that this was indeed a separate landmass; he was convinced these were the
‘Antipodes’, the southern continent that had occasionally been mentioned by
geographers but that were assumed to be not just uninhabited but
uninhabitable, in view of the torrid heat of southern climes: ‘I have
discovered a continent in those southern regions that is inhabited by more
numerous peoples and animals than in our Europe, or Asia or Africa.’12 So
how had the people arrived there? As the puzzle grew, later commentators
would sometimes suggest that God must have created them separately, and
that even if they were somehow descended from Noah, the common father of
all mankind, they were not fully rational beings but were destined to serve
their European masters as ‘natural slaves’. These views were still being
promoted in the seventeenth century.13 Vespucci’s descriptions of cannibal
peoples reinforced the idea that the inhabitants of the southern continent were
human in shape, but monster-like in behaviour.
Others came to the conclusion that these lands were not Cathay or Cipangu
with the help of their mercenary instincts. The silks and spices of the East
were not to be had; but slaving expeditions became more and more frequent.
Vicente Yáñez Pinzón had captained the Niña on Columbus’s first voyage; in
1499 he set out under royal licence for the New World. He was ordered not to
bring back Caribbean natives as slaves, though Africans were acceptable if he
entered eastern Atlantic waters; in fact he took thirty-six slaves from the New
World.14 But the most persistent slavers were the Guerra brothers. Luis
Guerra and a colleague went to Brazil in 1500–1501, taking slaves from
‘Topia’, the land inhabited by the Tupí Indians; they sold one girl named
Sunbay in Spain for 6,000 maravedís, though this was an exceptionally high
price, and it was not a good deal – Sunbay fell ill. The Guerras raided into
Topia with impunity, because this land lay in the Portuguese sphere, and
therefore the natives had no right to the protection of the Spanish
monarchs.15 These captives were called indios bozales – the term bozales
indicated that they were primitive, even savage, and was also used of
untrained black slaves from west Africa. In 1504 the Guerra brothers were
allowed to go slaving anywhere except the lands of Columbus and the king of
Portugal, which concentrated their efforts on Carib territory in the southern
Caribbean; the Spanish historian Oviedo wondered about this: ‘I do not know
if these merchants were authorised to enslave the people of that land because
they are idolaters, savages, sodomites, or because they eat human flesh.’16
Thus, a sad routine of slave-raiding developed.
 Linked to the slave-raiding was the incessant search for sources of gold;
one Spanish explorer, Juan de la Cosa, met people along the coast of South
America who went around naked, though the men wore penis sheaths,
sometimes made of gold.17 The explorers begged some gold off them, but
when the natives asked for it back they wisely agreed; rumours reached the
Europeans of a great temple with gold-plated idols, suggesting that the real
riches lay a little further inland. These rumours coalesced into the story of El
Dorado, the kingdom awash with gold. De la Cosa had accompanied
Columbus, Hojeda and Vespucci on voyages to the New World, and is best
known for his remarkably well-informed world map of 1500, showing great
stretches of the South American coast and daring also to include what looks
like the coast of Texas and areas still further north. Without engaging in the
argument that Hojeda or others penetrated that coastline to keep the English
at bay, as defenders of Cabot’s reputation like to think, one can still see that
de la Cosa had clever intuitions: he realized that Cuba was not Japan nor part
of the Asian mainland, showing it as a humpbacked island looking not vastly
different from its real shape.
These uncertainties stimulated further expeditions that gradually mapped
out parts of the North American as well as the South American coast.
Inevitably, the presence of European ships on the coast of what much later
became the United States of America has created a whole industry built
around the nonsensical question: ‘Who discovered the USA first?’ The credit,
if that is the right term, for landing on future United States soil is usually
granted to Juan Ponce de León, one of the more attractive figures in an age of
brutal Spanish conquistadores, although there is not much doubt that slave-
raiders had arrived first.18 The great defender of Indian rights, the
Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, told of the disappointment of
Spanish slavers that they could not find any victims in the now-deserted
Bahamas, already emptied of their population by earlier raids; so they
travelled further north to the land las Casas knew as Florida, and brought
back from there the first slaves captured on the North American mainland,
who would have belonged to the relatively sophisticated Calusa or Timucua
peoples.19
The oldest wreck found in the western hemisphere was found off the Turks
and Caicos Islands, close to the Bahamas; it was very probably manned by
slave-raiders. Although its exact date is unknown, let alone the name of the
ship, of which only a small part of the hull survives, the pottery and firearms
found on board indicate that the ship hit a reef within the period 1510–30.
The lack of personal equipment belonging to the sailors suggests that they
survived and salvaged their own possessions. Life on board was evidently
very simple, to judge from the coarse tableware. Tiny glass beads found in
the wreck would have been used in trade with the Taíno Indians. A more
sinister aspect of Spanish trade is represented by a number of leg irons, used
to restrain captives. The ship’s ballast, in the form of big stones placed at the
bottom of the hull during construction, is especially revealing. Analysis
shows that the stones originated in various places: near Bristol; from the mid-
Atlantic islands; and above all from Lisbon. This does not prove that the ship
visited those places, but it does show how bits and pieces of ships were
recycled, and what sort of maritime connections dominated the trade of the
eastern Atlantic around 1500.20 The Casa de Contratación in Seville that
took charge of trade with the New World was founded in 1503. The fact that
the Crown took an intense interest in these routes does not mean that its
supervision was very effective. There were plenty of interlopers, and not just
Spanish ones.21
Ponce de León represents the official side of trade with America. His
career was moulded by the changing fortunes of his principal backer, King
Ferdinand of Aragon, who was spending his money on Italian wars that
brought him control of Naples but also deeper and deeper immersion in the
quagmire of Italian politics. At the same time, he was trying to maintain his
influence in the politics of Castile, which had been checked by the death of
his wife, Isabella, in 1504, whereupon he had to cede control of Castile to his
short-lived son-in-law, Philip of Burgundy, and his unbalanced daughter,
Juana, later known as ‘the Mad’. As if these developments were not enough,
he also knew that the situation in Hispaniola was deteriorating, as the
governor, Ovando, struggled to keep the claims of the Columbus family at
bay; every move the Spanish government made in the Caribbean seemed to
be challenged by Christopher’s son Diego Colón, on the basis of the
exceptionally generous grant of rights conferred on the admiral by the
Catholic Monarchs way back in 1492.22
If Hispaniola was such a nightmare, the answer was to capitalize on the
opportunities for finding gold in the other large Caribbean islands, beginning
with Puerto Rico; Cuba was only invaded in 1511. Ponce was in Puerto Rico
by 1508, if not sooner; he built a Spanish town and his stone house still
survives. He tried to encourage the Taíno Indians to work with their new
masters, and began to collect gold, providing the king with 10,000 pesos of
tribute in 1511. But the chance that he would avoid the interference of Diego
Colón was slim. In a great show of its independence from Ferdinand, the
Royal Council in Castile decided that Ponce was treading on the legal rights
of Diego Colón, and Ponce realized that he now had little chance of carving
out a dominion in Puerto Rico. He must have known of previous attempts to
explore a mainland to the north of Puerto Rico, and he was aware of legends
about an island called ‘Bimini’ somewhere to the north. When in 1511
Ferdinand’s commissioner based in Hispaniola invited him to sail north, this
seemed the golden opportunity to break free from the tortuous political
struggles dividing supporters of the Crown, supporters of the Columbus
family and the Indian chieftains that were ruining Hispaniola and had spilled
over into Puerto Rico.
More controversial is the idea that Ponce de León was sent by the ageing
king of Aragon to search for the ‘Fountain of Youth’.23 This fountain would
restore his virility and offer him the chance to father a child by his second
wife, Germaine de Foix, giving him an heir in Aragon (though not Castile,
which would pass to Juana the Mad’s son, the future Habsburg emperor
Charles V) – better Aragon without Castile than a Habsburg Spain. That was
the practical dimension to a fantasy about the ‘Fountain of Youth’ that drew
on both Indian and European myths, and acts as a reminder that the
miraculous and strange were still an important part of European ideas about
the New World.

II

Meanwhile, demand for maps of the lands Vespucci described grew and
grew. A small coterie of scholars interested in geography gathered in the little
town of Saint-Dié among the hills of Lorraine, under the patronage of their
duke, René II, titular king of Naples. They reprinted one of Vespucci’s most
popular pamphlets and added to it a massive world map by Martin
Waldseemüller, published in 1507, which portrayed the New World as a
separate pair of continents to the linked-up continents of Europe, Asia and
Africa. A small part of the southern continent was labelled AMERICA in
honour of Amerigo Vespucci.24 Although the west coast of South America
was drawn as a straight line, for want of any information about it, only a
fragment of North America was shown, and on the main map (though not in a
miniature version in the margins) North and South America are separated by
a short stretch of water close to the land Columbus had explored on his fourth
voyage, without, obviously enough, finding such a channel. Vespucci’s
explorations southwards had revealed plenty of large rivers but no seaway
that would take one towards Asia. It was becoming more and more obvious
that the transatlantic routes tried so far did not and could not reach the true
Indies. Waldseemüller optimistically assumed that Japan lay close to South
America; he had no conception of the vastness of the Pacific. At least his
judgement was more accurate than that of the maker of the small globe now
preserved in the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and thought to date from
around 1510. There, a transatlantic continent resembling South America is
labelled as ‘New World’, ‘Land of the Holy Cross’ and ‘Brazil’, while an
irregular chunk of land in the eastern Indian Ocean becomes ‘Newly
Discovered America’; here is the work of a cartographer who was thoroughly
puzzled by the news that Vespucci had been exploring unknown lands in the
Indies.25
Amid all this confusion about how to reach the Indies, John Cabot’s son
Sebastian set off with two ships and a royal licence, in 1509, right at the start
of the reign of Henry VIII, on a voyage to Labrador and, he hoped, the route
to the wealth of Asia. He reasoned that Newfoundland was blocking the way
to Asia, but the strait that he found north of the island, which was probably
the entrance to the large sea that became known a century later as Hudson
Bay, was full of ice and his crew refused to take the ships any further.26 In
any case, Henry VII was not really interested in the sea, and his son Henry
VIII was much more interested in building a fleet which would outrank that
of France – one can imagine his annoyance when the French king built a ship
with a tennis court and windmill on board, and his delight when it proved too
heavy to float. In England, the American lands only came into focus in the
second half of the sixteenth century, when Spain was a bitter enemy, and
serious colonization only began when Jamestown was founded in 1607. By
then Protestant England had no reason to accept the pope’s division of the
world between Spain and Portugal.
The French also attempted to join the race to reach the spices of the Indies
by choosing a westward route. The first reported journey across the Atlantic
by a French ship happened, rather like Cabral’s voyage, by accident; and like
Cabral its captain, Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, was not trying to reach land
across the Atlantic but the ports of India. The phrase ‘reported voyage’ is
important, because sceptics have argued that the surviving narrative of this
voyage was cooked up in the seventeenth century to bolster French claims to
authority in Madagascar, or South America, or some other land such as the
massive, temperate ‘southern continent’ that was believed to encompass the
bottom of the world, counterbalancing the continents of the northern
hemisphere. After he published the account of Gonneville’s voyage, one of
the captain’s descendants received the reward he craved and in 1666 was
nominated as Papal Vicar in the southern continent.27 What follows can
therefore be treated as fact or fantasy.
The Espoir, of 150 tons, is said to have set sail in 1503; its captain came
from Normandy and was named Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, and before
then the furthest the Espoir had ever travelled was to Hamburg. This was a
private expedition, not a royal one, but Gonneville was well connected and
had persuaded a group of businessmen from Honfleur to invest in his risky
venture.28 Gonneville knew a certain amount about what the Portuguese had
achieved in India, and he even secured the services of two Portuguese pilots,
who had been out to India and who might well have been executed had they
fallen into Portuguese hands.29 Nevertheless, the ship was loaded with a
good supply of armaments, to fend off enemies in the Atlantic or the Indian
Ocean, including cannon, harquebuses and muskets; there were enough salted
fish, dried peas, local cider and water for over a year, and enough ships’
biscuit for two; and then there was the merchandise – scarlet cloths, fustians,
a velvet cloth, a cloth embroidered with gold, but also simpler goods such as
fifty dozen little mirrors, knives, needles and other hardware, as well as silver
coins.
Claims have often been made that Norman sailors (particularly from
Dieppe) knew as much about the Atlantic – or more than them – as the men
of Bristol, even that they reached America a few years before Columbus in a
ship commanded by a certain Jean Cousin; but like all these claims it is based
on an optimistic reading of very vague evidence – in the case of Cousin the
so-called evidence dates from 1785.30 More to the point – bearing in mind
that Gonneville in any case was trying to round Africa – is the simple fact
that the ports of Normandy were undergoing a lively revival in the late
fifteenth century now that war with England was at an end, and now that the
western European economy was returning to stability after a century and a
half of plague and disruption.31 A school of mapmakers existed in Dieppe by
1540, though one can assume there were earlier mapmakers in the town,
simply because it was home to ambitious merchants and mariners. Many of
the maps seem to have been plagiarized from Portuguese models, despite the
extreme reluctance of the Portuguese to permit others to peruse their charts.32
According to the surviving narrative, the Espoir set out from Honfleur on
24 June 1503; avoiding a landfall in the Spanish Canaries, the ship hugged
the African coast and was fortunate to pass the Portuguese Cape Verde
Islands without challenge. The crew spent ten days at Cape Verde itself, on
the African coast; there, they traded some of their iron goods with the native
Africans, buying chickens and couchou, ‘a sort of rice’, in other words the
thick couscous still eaten there. The ship then swung out to sea, hoping to
catch the Trade Winds and to be swept eastwards in the wake of da Gama.
Instead, it was caught by fierce gales, and was swept westwards, as Cabral
had been, though the crew were convinced that they were in the right latitude
to pass the Cape of Good Hope – they saw Manche-de-velours, ‘velvet
sleeves’, or penguins, which someone, no doubt the Portuguese pilots,
identified as birds that lived on the southern tip of Africa. For weeks they
were tossed about, and then drifted. However, on 5 January 1504 ‘they
discovered a great land’, which reminded them of Normandy itself.33 The
sailors felt they had gone far enough and that the ship would bear no more;
they persuaded Gonneville that it was pointless to try to recover their route to
India.
The inhabitants of this land were fascinated by everything they saw in the
ship: ‘had the Christians been angels who had come down from heaven, they
could not have been more loved by these poor Indians’. Simple items of truck
like knives and mirrors meant as much to them as gold, silver or even the
philosopher’s stone meant to Christians. They were particularly fascinated by
the sight of written words on paper, for they could not understand how paper
could be made to ‘speak’. But the spiritual dimension was not neglected by
Gonneville. The Normans built a great wooden cross in time for Easter 1504,
and this was carried in barefoot procession by Gonneville and his senior
crew, joyously accompanied by the Indian king, Arosca, and his sons, one of
whom would later join Gonneville’s ship, be taken back to Europe and marry
Gonneville’s daughter. Gonneville inscribed his cross with the names of King
Louis XII of France and of the pope, thereby staking some sort of French
claim to these lands.34
 The Espoir had no better fortune on its return journey than on its outward
journey. Foul weather forced the ship to put in twice on the coast of Brazil
before it was able to cross the Atlantic. They found Indians whom they
regarded as more primitive than Arosca’s followers. They were cruel eaters
of human flesh: au reste, cruels mangeurs d’hommes. This accusation was
not levelled against Arosca’s people. No less extraordinary was evidence that
these man-eaters had had some contact with Christians in recent times; they
possessed some trinkets that must have come from Europe, and they were not
very surprised to see the ship, though they were well aware of the threat
posed by European artillery. Gonneville had probably arrived in the areas
visited by the slave-raiders in the last few years. The Normans were desperate
to leave, and sailed off as soon as they could; the voyage home past the
Azores was slow, but it was easy enough until they came within sight of
home. For as they entered the waters off Jersey and Guernsey the ship fell
prey to two pirates, Edward Blunth of Plymouth and Mouris Fortin, a Breton
corsair. After such a long voyage the Espoir was in no condition to escape.
The pirates caught up with, pillaged and sank the ship; many of the sailors
were massacred. Only twenty-eight men reached Honfleur alive; but among
them were Gonneville and his future son-in-law, Essomericq, who aroused
considerable wonder, ‘since there had never been anyone in France from such
a distant land’.35 However, the logbook went down with the ship, and only
in the nineteenth century was a detailed narrative of the voyage discovered in
the archives. Gonneville had promised King Arosca that he would return after
‘twenty moons’, but he never did so, and Arosca was left wondering what
had happened to his long-vanished son.
Without the backing of the French king, who was more interested in laying
claim to Milan and Naples, Gonneville was unable to set in train a French bid
for whatever parts of Brazil he had reached. For the time being, Portugal’s
priorities remained in Africa and India and colonization was slow.
Nevertheless, a small series of commercial ventures was aimed at Brazil. An
expedition in 1501 reported that, frankly, there was little to be loaded apart
from brazilwood. But this was a prized dyestuff that produced a rich reddish
colour, so the next year a royal licence was granted to Fernão de Noronha or
Loronha, a wealthy New Christian merchant, who agreed to send six ships
each year to Brazil to collect brazilwood; in 1504 he brought back some
parrots as well, and we also hear of monkeys being sent back to Lisbon.
Noronha already knew the eastern Atlantic, trading in gold and slaves
through São Tomé and Elmina, and he was thus a pioneer in joining together
the three continents of Africa, Europe and South America. On his first
journey to Brazil, Noronha discovered a beautiful offshore island that still
carries his name.
King Manuel also wanted to know more about what had been discovered.
It had become obvious that the assumption made by Cabral that the ‘Land of
the Holy Cross’ was just a fairly large island did not match the news that was
filtering back by way of Vespucci and others. The shoreline went on and on.
So Vespucci was commanded to explore 300 leagues of the coast each year,
and the Portuguese decided to set up a small fort, subject to a sliding scale of
royal taxation, from zero in the first year to one quarter in the third year. In
1503–4 just such a fort and factory were built at Cabo Frio close to modern
Rio de Janeiro, which already lay to the south of the areas Cabral is thought
to have visited. It was staffed by twenty-four men.36 These ships were soon
bringing back about 30,000 logs (about 750 tons) each year. The ships often
carried black slaves and other labourers, whose task was to trim and cut the
brazilwood. Brazil’s African connection therefore can be traced back to the
very origins of Brazil itself. Here Noronha, with his interest in the African
slave trade, played a crucial role. It turned out that the Tupí Indians were
willing helpers too. In exchange for small items of truck, such as little
mirrors, combs and scissors, they were happy to load logs on the Portuguese
ships.37 A small-scale trade in Brazilian slaves also developed, war captives
of the Tupís for whom the expected fate was that they would be
ceremoniously killed and eaten at a cannibal feast. What they thought about
escaping the cooking pot, or rather griddle, for a life of captivity is not
recorded.38
In February 1511 a ship named the Bertoa set out for the factory at Cabo
Frio in Brazil, where it spent two months before heading back home,
reaching Lisbon in October of the same year. By good fortune a manifest
listing what was on board still survives. Everything in the account of the
voyage suggests that trips to South America were becoming routine: the
Bertoa set out via the Canaries and returned via the Guinea coast and the
Azores, making the best use of the prevailing winds. By now it will be no
surprise that the principal investors included, among the Portuguese, Fernão
de Noronha, and, among the Italians based in Lisbon, Bartolomeo
Marchionni, although they did not travel out with the ship. One of
Marchionni’s servants was aboard, however, as was one of his black slaves.
The Crown also took a strong interest in the voyage, which was being
conducted under royal licence, and this meant – as with the contemporary
voyages to Elmina – that every stage of the journey was tightly managed and
recorded. The instructions were very clear: every inch of available space was
to be filled with logs of brazilwood, which seems to have left little room for
the slaves, wild cats and parrots that were also to be brought back. In the end
5,008 logs were loaded, as well as thirty-six slaves, one of whom was
acquired by Marchionni’s servant, who also brought back cats, monkeys,
parrots and parakeets. The Bertoa was ordered not to dally in the islands or
along the coasts that lay on its route back home, but to head straight for
Lisbon. No harm was to be done to the natives of Brazil. Indians who insisted
they wanted to come to Portugal were under no circumstances to be allowed
on board; were they to die in Europe the Tupís would assume they had been
eaten by the Portuguese, ‘just as they have the custom of doing among
themselves’. Sailors who blasphemed were to be carried off to prison in
chains when they returned to Lisbon, until they paid a hefty fine.39
Brazil was, then, a sideline, valued up to a point but not able to compare
with Elmina or the India trade as a source of profit. Still, the arrival of
loggers in Brazil was the first stage in the binding together of this corner of
the Portuguese Empire with lands in Europe, Africa and Asia; after 1500
Portugal had a stake in four continents and two oceans.

III

It has been seen that French interlopers planned to reach the Indian Ocean but
arrived in Brazil instead. By 1500 the reach of Dieppe extended as far as
Seville in one direction and the Danish Sound in the other; among the
products that reached Dieppe in this period was Madeiran sugar, brought
from Portugal, while Norman ships even edged their way into the trade out of
Morocco and Guinea, which the Portuguese were unable to seal off
hermetically. Gonneville’s expedition, if it really took place, was an
exceptionally ambitious example of this constant attempt to break the
Portuguese monopoly on movement across the ocean. The Normans were as
adept at piracy as they were at trade, exploiting the rivalry between the
French king and the duke of Burgundy in the 1470s to prey on ships trading
with Burgundian Flanders. The Portuguese often thought of the Normans as
‘thieves’, accusing them of greed and jealousy towards the ever-growing
wealth of Portugal.40 Meanwhile the Bretons established a reputation as
hardy fishermen, leaving open the possibility that they, like the Bristolians,
occasionally crossed to the Newfoundland Grand Banks in search of cod even
before Cabot’s first voyage; and they were certainly there by 1514, when the
monks of Beauport were levying a tax on cod brought back to Brittany from
Newfoundland. In 1508 a Norman, Jean Aubert, sailing out of Dieppe,
reached as far as Newfoundland and brought back seven Mic-Mac Indians,
the first north Americans to be seen in France.41
One family, the Angos of Dieppe, played a particularly prominent role in
the creation of the French merchant marine. Jean Ango the Elder was a fairly
typical merchant, dealing in herrings, barley and other humdrum products
(though also some sugar) during the 1470s and 1480s. However, his son, also
Jean, greatly enlarged the family business; his interest in the sea was
intellectual as well as commercial, for he seems to have received a rich
education in geography, hydrography, mathematics and literature. His trade
in England and Flanders brought him great wealth – he was still alive in
1541, when a report on his activities was sent to no less a person than the
Holy Roman Emperor, describing Ango as ‘a most rich person’, and noting
that ‘because of his trading affairs, people call him the Viscount of Dieppe’.
This also made his ships obvious targets for attack by the Portuguese: he lost
boats to them off Guinea, but it is hard to see how he could complain, as his
way of tapping into Portuguese trade with the Indies, or the sugar trade out of
Madeira, was to launch pirate attacks on ships returning from those parts
loaded with precious cargoes. The booty included Chinese silk and jewels
that originated in Bengal and China. At least a million ducats’ worth of loot
was seized by Ango’s pirates between 1520 and 1540.42 Ango was presented
to the king and became a favourite of the king’s sister, Marguerite of
Navarre, the famous author of the Heptaméron.
The king took an increasing interest in the possibilities for trade in Asiatic
spices by way of the western Atlantic. By the 1520s Francis I was determined
to receive a cut of transatlantic trade and gave his backing to the plans of
Giovanni da Verrazano, a Florentine navigator who also had the support of
Jean Ango and – not surprisingly – of Italian merchants, though from Lyons
rather than Dieppe; and he made use of the new and successful Norman port
of Le Havre as departure point.43 Verrazano’s name is now commemorated
in a bridge linking Brooklyn to Staten Island, although the aim of his
expedition was not to explore the coast of North America but to find a way to
Asia: ‘my intention on this voyage was to reach Cathay and the extreme
eastern coast of Asia, but I did not expect to find such an obstacle of new
land as I have found.’44 He concluded that the continent he reached in 1524
was bigger than Europe or Africa, and maybe even Asia. He had hoped that
he could find a route round the top of the newly discovered continent, the
North-West Passage; he may well have known that Magellan had recently
explored the southern tip of the Americas, which did not seem to offer a
promising route to the Indies; a big ocean west of America had already been
spied out by the Spanish commander Balboa standing on his ‘peak in Darien’
in 1513.45 But if one could go round the bottom, maybe one could go round
the top, an idea which shows that the assumption that the Americas were a
gigantic isthmus sticking out of Asia was beginning to lose its power.
Verrazano was chapitano dell’Armata per l’India, ‘captain of the India
Fleet’, engaged on a voyage to the espiceryes des Indes, ‘the spice-lands of
the Indies’, and as far as can be seen the idea of taking this route was his
own.46
Verrazano has divided historians. In 1875 Henry Murphy looked closely at
the documents and concluded that Verrazano’s description of his voyage was
a fiction built out of earlier descriptions of the coasts and peoples of the New
World.47 For a time that seemed to be the end of the matter, and Verrazano
dropped out of history. That his systematic demolition of the story Verrazano
told was rather too enthusiastic was proved when a new manuscript came to
light in 1909; it is now impossible to doubt that the voyage of 1524 took
place. But that is not to say that his letter contains accurate information; he
may well have inflated his account, rather as Vespucci did, in order to
impress his audience, especially if the audience included the vain King
Francis. Murphy may not have been completely wrong. What is clear is that
Verrazano sailed out on a second voyage in 1526. His fleet of four ships was
scattered, and he reached Brazil, where he loaded brazilwood; but one of his
ships entered the Indian Ocean, apparently trying to reach Madagascar.
Instead it was blown towards Sumatra and then made its way back past the
Maldives to Mozambique, where the Portuguese governor took charge of the
crew and reported back to Lisbon in alarm.48 Verrazano had apparently
abandoned his idea of looking for a North-West Passage, and the obvious
alternative was to break the Portuguese monopoly on the spice trade linking
the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. But the voyage can hardly be called a
success. On his third voyage, in 1528, Verrazano is said to have been eaten
by cannibals, though this did not deter his brother from making another
remarkable voyage the next year, from Le Havre to Brazil, then through the
Mediterranean to Alexandria and back to Le Havre.49 Long and ambitious
voyages in search of spices had become the trademark of the Verrazanos.
The story of the Verrazanos takes one well into the sixteenth century.
However, they built cleverly on the information acquired by an earlier
generation, that of Jean Ango the Elder, which was also the generation of
Columbus and Cabot. They shared with Columbus and Cabot the backing of
Florentine businessmen who were willing to chance several thousand ducats
on the possibility – and, increasingly, the likelihood – that these voyages
would produce valuable returns. In the three decades after Columbus first
arrived in the Bahamas, roving explorers were increasingly outnumbered by
fleets of merchant ships that knew exactly where they were going and had a
good enough understanding of the seasons (vital in the hurricane-ridden
Caribbean) to reach their destination safely. Although it has been suggested
that in these decades roughly one fifth of the ships on the India route
eventually foundered, this figure does not mean that one in five voyages
ended in disaster, as ships were reused, repaired and given new life. Many
ended their days being broken up so their timbers could be recirculated. The
transatlantic crossing had become a trade route.
 31

The Binding of the Oceans

And then there was the third great ocean. The first person to set eyes on it and
to realize that another expanse of water separated the newly discovered
continents from Cipangu and Cathay was Juan Núñez de Balboa, a Spanish
conquistador who in 1513 was trying to create a Spanish settlement on the
coast of Panama. His discovery was commemorated, under the wrong name,
by John Keats:

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.1

Advised that Balboa, not Cortés, had stood upon that peak, Keats retained the
name of Cortés, so that the scansion would not be ruined. Yet Cortés,
conqueror of Mexico, also enters the story: at this point he was secretary to
the governor of Cuba, which the Spaniards had invaded in 1511, and, as
voyages to the coast of Central America became more frequent, news of a
civilization rich in gold somewhere in the interior began to spread.2
Moreover, Ponce de León’s discovery of Florida suggested that the big
continent to the north was probably connected by land to the big continent to
the south.
If there was no route across Central America, there were three options. An
icy North-West Passage over the top of America might be accessible if Asia
and North America were not joined together, as they were often thought to
be. This was an idea that motivated Sebastian Cabot as he tried to follow up
his father’s discoveries, and it was still alive in 1845, when Sir John Franklin
led his ill-fated expedition into the ice floes of northern Canada.3 Another
Arctic route entered the calculations of mid-sixteenth-century English
explorers, who wondered whether a North-East Passage over the top of
Russia all the way to China was feasible.4 Both of these ideas, or rather
fantasies, will be examined in another chapter. But there was a third
possibility, based on Vespucci’s observations, accurate and otherwise, about
the extended coastline of South America. Just as Catalan and Portuguese
explorers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had imagined that a
channel or river might cut right across Africa, Spanish explorers now held out
hope for a more direct route to the Spice Islands rather than the long haul
around south Africa through hostile waters in which, as will be seen,
Ottoman navies contested control with the sparse and scattered fleets of
Portugal. A route round South America might offer Spain its chance to
dominate the spice trade, by taking the spices eastwards out of the Indies
towards America and then Europe.

At the end of his life King Ferdinand of Aragon was playing with several
ideas about how he might challenge Portugal’s dominance of the oceanic
trade in spices. It makes sense to use the adjective ‘oceanic’ because there
were still spices to be had in the eastern Mediterranean, though the conquest
of Egypt and Syria by the Ottoman Turks had only increased the risks of
going to Alexandria and Beirut to buy them. In 1512 Ferdinand gave his
support to a plan to send ships round the Cape of Good Hope, in the wake of
Portuguese ships; the target was to be Maluco, the Moluccas, ‘which lie
within our demarcation’, and ultimately China, but the challenge to the
Portuguese in the Indian Ocean was too obvious, and the scheme never
materialized. Three years later he commissioned the same commander, Juan
de Solís, to lead a voyage westwards that would find a way round the bottom
of, or through the middle of, South America. Solís discovered the River Plate
in 1516, and thought it was a freshwater sea that would take him to the Spice
Islands. However, Solís fell out with the Indians and was killed, so the
survivors turned back to Spain.5

II

The same idea motivated Ferdinand Magellan when he approached the

Spanish court with a proposal to reach the Spice Islands by way of a South-
West Passage. He was born as Fernão de Magalhães in Portugal and was a
member of the minor nobility; he also had close experience of Indian Ocean
waters, for he sailed out to India in 1505 under the Portuguese commander
Francisco de Almeida, visiting Mombasa, where the local ruler was
summarily deposed; Kilwa, which was sacked; and Cochin, where he saw the
spices of the East being loaded on board. He went out again in 1507, and
apparently stayed in the Indian Ocean for several years. The fleet on which he
was serving visited Melaka, which Portugal seized in 1511. He acquired a
Sumatran servant, whom he baptized under the name ‘Enrique’, and whom he
brought back to Europe in around 1512.6 One of his companions was
Francisco Serrão, a Portuguese officer, who made quite a reputation for
himself in engagements with hostile forces on the ground.
Lured eastwards by his wish to penetrate deep into the Spice Islands,
Serrão reached the Molucca chain, finding islands almost unbelievably rich in
nutmeg. The Moluccas lie at the eastern end of the Spice Islands, to the west
of New Guinea, north-east of the eastern tip of Java and south of the
Philippines; even by the standards of the ancient trade routes of the East
Indies they were remote. But remoteness did not erode their fame – rather the
opposite; these were seen as the most desirable of all the Spice Islands. After
a number of adventures, during which he lost his ship and took over a pirate
vessel that had been chasing him, Serrão sorted out a bitter dispute between
the rival Moluccan sultans of Ternate and Tidore, both of whom were
Muslim. The sultan of Ternate was so impressed that he appointed this
Portuguese Christian as his vizier. Serrão sent letters to Magellan in Melaka
in which he told of his luxurious life at the court of the sultan of Ternate, and
described the lush lands full of precious spices in which he now lived: ‘I have
found here a New World richer and greater than that of Vasco da Gama.’7
India was already an extraordinary distance by sea from Portugal, Melaka
another great leap, but reaching the Moluccas meant making a half-circle
around the world. Serrão was very possibly the first European to find his way
to the Moluccas, and it is one of those constant ironies of the age of
exploration that his extraordinary career has received so little attention. (A
rival case can be made for the Italian traveller Ludovico di Varthema, who
travelled extensively in Asia between 1503 and 1508 and claimed to have
seen cloves growing in a place he called Monoch, which may be one of the
Moluccas.)8 Serrão showed that it was all very well to control Melaka, but
Melaka was itself the main point of trans-shipment for the spices that came
from still further to the east; and, while the pepper of south India was a great
prize, the cloves, cinnamon and camphor of the Spice Islands might be
accessible at their point of origin. This would be the culmination of all those
schemes to reach the source of spices, for the Portuguese still relied on
middlemen to obtain the spices they bought in Melaka.
Magellan therefore knew a great deal about the lands he was trying to
reach from personal experience and from his friend’s enthusiastic letter; and
Varthema’s book of travels had been published in 1510. However, despite his
rich experience, Magellan was not made welcome at the Portuguese court,
where he was accused of trading illicitly with the Moors in north Africa; and
King Manuel was determined to press on with what had already been
achieved by breaking into the Indian Ocean.9 The Portuguese capture of
Melaka in 1511 seemed to guarantee access to the Spice Islands through the
traditional routes followed by Indian Ocean navigators over many centuries.
There was no obvious reason to look for a westward route, especially because
this would dissipate precious resources that needed to be spent on keeping
open the supply lines through Guinea, south Africa and the Indian ports
where Portuguese factories had been established.10
 Selling the scheme to the new king of Castile, Charles of Ghent, was
therefore somewhat easier than selling it to King Manuel. It is important to
realize that Magellan never had it in mind to circumnavigate the globe, for all
his extraordinary achievements.11 The purpose of his expedition was to
reach the East Indies, to load his ships with spices, and to return the way he
had come; the fundamental error, which he shared with Columbus, was to
assume that the distance between Europe and Asia, sailing westwards, was
much smaller than it actually is. Moreover, Magellan was killed in the
Philippines at a point 124°E, and did not enter the Indian Ocean. (He had,
however, sailed as far east as 128°E earlier in his career, so that he went
round the world in separate journeys.)12 The captain who did leave from and
return to Seville was the Basque Juan Sebastian Elcano, who took command
of the expedition after Magellan was killed and managed to steer one leaky,
rotten hull back to Spain through the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic,
travelling through four oceans, since he sailed through the Atlantic twice. Nor
did Magellan open a regular route linking Spain to its Pacific Ocean
possessions in the Philippines; as will be seen, the solution to the question of
how to reach those islands was quite different. None of these reservations
undermines the claim of the Magellan–Elcano voyage of 1519–22 to be the
most ambitious and impressive act of seamanship in the age of discovery.
But, as with Columbus, what was planned and what was achieved were very
different.
The basis for Magellan’s expedition had to be the past agreements between
the kings of Castile and Portugal, mediated by the pope. But one can also see
the influence of past agreements at a lower level: as in the case of Columbus,
Magellan and a cartographer named Faleiro were to enjoy a monopoly on
trade to the lands they found, but the Crown had learned a little from its
mistakes, and this monopoly was limited to ten years, to avoid the endless
lawsuits that were still being pressed by Columbus’s heirs. They also
received handsome tax privileges, 20 per cent of the profits from the first
voyage, and the hereditary office of governor of the lands they brought under
Spanish rule, always bearing in mind the need to avoid interfering in lands
that lay under Portuguese rule. This, however, was the real complication:
Magellan and Faleiro had managed to persuade King Charles that the
Moluccas lay within the Spanish half of the world, assuming one could
extend the Tordesillas line through the North and South Poles and wrap it
round the world, but there was no chance the Portuguese court would accept
that. Faleiro has been described as ‘something of a madman’, ‘a brilliant but
deranged man’, who encouraged Magellan to underestimate the breadth of
the Pacific, rather as Columbus had underestimated the distance to Cipangu
and Cathay.13

III

Charles agreed to send five ships under Magellan’s command in search of the
passage to Asia. When they set out from Seville in 1519 they carried a motley
crew of 260 men that included forty Basque sailors, among them the future
commander, Elcano, although there were also Portuguese, black Africans,
Germans, Frenchmen, Flemings, Irishmen, Italians and Greeks, as well as a
single Englishman, Andrew of Bristol, who was chief gunner, plus
Magellan’s Sumatran servant, Enrique.14 The identity of the crew serves as a
reminder that the voyages of discovery were not simply the work of
Portuguese, Castilians and the occasional Italian. But aboard Magellan’s
ships was one of those occasional Italians: a patrician from Vicenza, Antonio
Pigafetta, signed up as a passenger, adding his name to the list of curious
Italians who were prepared to risk their lives to see unknown parts of the
world, a successor to Vespucci and Varthema. He wrote an account of the
entire voyage, which remains the principal source of knowledge about what
happened.15 He was a great admirer of Magellan, which skews his account in
one direction; but he survived the entire voyage, carrying on westwards under
the command of Elcano, whom he disliked so much that he never even
mentioned him by name in his narrative.
The challenge Magellan faced was not simply that of keeping a hostile
crew (Pigafetta apart) under control; nor was it simply that of finding an
unknown passage to India. He also needed to sail clear of his own
compatriots, for Portuguese patrols were looking out for Spanish and other
interlopers, and news of his plans had infuriated the Portuguese court, even if
King Manuel had never believed in Magellan’s scheme. The journey across
the Atlantic followed a peculiar route, staying close to the Guinea shore in
worryingly calm waters before the ships were tossed about in November
storms as they attempted to reach South America. Magellan’s unorthodox
route down the African coast irritated his Spanish officers, who had expected
to strike out for the New World from Spanish-controlled Tenerife. The lack
of trust between them and Magellan was a constant problem, fed by the
traditional dislike of Castilians for their Portuguese neighbours. There was
some comfort in the safe arrival of the little fleet off Rio de Janeiro in
December 1519, which was high summer in the southern hemisphere, but
lack of faith in Magellan’s abilities revived when the estuary of the River
Plate was decisively shown not to offer a route through South America to
Asia. Travelling south from there in February 1520 the ships met late summer
storms, and the slower they progressed the greater became the danger that
food supplies would be exhausted. The crew were put on short rations. The
officers demanded that Magellan should keep them properly informed about
what route he planned to take. The frustration of blindly following orders
without knowing the why and the wherefore of Magellan’s decisions
undermined still further their belief in his abilities.
All this led to mutiny, with Elcano among those condemned to death,
though in due course he was pardoned and even promoted.16 Magellan was
perfectly well aware that he could not execute forty of his own crew as
mutineers. The main punishment was symbolic; the mutinous captain of the
ship Victoria had already been killed in fighting between Magellan’s
supporters and the mutineers. His body was hung upside down from the
yardarm as a warning to all who dreamed of opposing the admiral. The
rebellion gave Magellan the excuse to appoint Portuguese officers to the
command of his ships – one of them, João Serrão, was the brother or cousin
of his old friend Francisco Serrão, who had ended up as vizier of the sultan of
Ternate, and whom Magellan was determined to meet when he reached the
Spice Islands. Pigafetta, meanwhile, was fascinated by the Patagonian
‘giants’ whom the sailors met as they penetrated further and further south.
Their ability to live almost naked in such a cold climate was only one of their
remarkable features; tall and thin, the Patagonians had adapted well to the
cold, since their body surface was actually smaller than that of the more
compact but relatively tubby population further north. Their willingness to
eat rats found on board ship, unskinned, surprised and rather disgusted the
explorers.17
The greatest challenge of all, however, came when Magellan’s fleet
reached the strait that he correctly identified as a passage through the
southern tip of South America, later known as the Strait of Magellan.
Pigafetta claimed that Magellan knew all about the strait already because he
had seen a chart in the treasury of the king of Portugal made by ‘Martin of
Bohemia’, who must be Martin Behaim, the creator of the globe made in
around 1492 that still survives in Nuremberg and does not show any part of
America. Behaim died in Lisbon in 1507, so Magellan may well have met
him. However, a German globe of 1515 did speculatively include a channel
between South America and a great southern continent. This globe was
created by Johannes Schöner, who, like Behaim, hailed from Nuremberg; it
also included a channel between North and South America and placed Japan
only a few degrees west of America.18 It was not obvious to Magellan that
the land on his southern quarter, which became known as Tierra del Fuego
(owing to the fires he saw there, possibly lit by Patagonian inhabitants), was
simply a medium-sized island that ended at a great cape, Cape Horn. To him
it seemed to be another vast landmass. This idea persisted, so that the first
world map of the famous cartographer Mercator, of 1538, marked the
Magellan Strait as the channel between two continents, one of which, the
Terra Australis, covered the entire southern tip of the world, like a great
enlarged Antarctica.19
Navigating these stormy waters, through channels that led in different
directions, and that were constantly buffeted by the so-called williwaw
winds, cold blasts that seemed to explode from nowhere, depended on a
combination of intuition and luck, and one of his captains decided to turn
back to Spain. The desertion of the San Antonio reduced his fleet to three
ships, as one had already been wrecked while exploring the South American
coast. By the end of November 1520 he had entered a new ocean. Pigafetta
remarked: ‘during these three months and twenty days, we sailed in a gulf
where we made a good four thousand leagues across the Pacific sea, which
was rightly so named. For during this time we had no storm.’20 The
experiences of later navigators would give the lie to the name ‘Pacific’, but at
last the greatest of all oceans had a European name and – more importantly –
it became obvious how gigantic this sea is: leaving Tierra del Fuego on 28
November 1520, Magellan only reached Guam on 6 March 1521. This was
the first proper landfall, for, oddly, the three ships did not encounter the
islands and peoples of Polynesia and Micronesia as they headed for what they
hoped were the Moluccas. Nor, apparently, did they meet any Pacific
islanders in their splendid outrigger boats until they arrived at Guam. This is
testimony to the sheer vastness of the Pacific Ocean, but it also shows that the
land-sighting skills of European navigators accustomed to the very different
waters of the Atlantic Ocean were quite different to those of the Polynesians,
who could find needles in the Pacific haystack without great difficulty.
The real difficulty that Magellan’s crew faced as they crossed the Pacific
was not the weather but the lack of supplies of fresh food that left the sailors
trading in rat meat and chewing rehydrated oxhides for their dinner, so long
as they could chew anything. The scourge of scurvy made these long voyages
a deathtrap, not just because of the dramatic effects of this disease on skin,
bones and blood vessels, which to all intents fall apart, but also because of its
side effects: it was impossible to eat what food there was with massively
swollen gums. Thirty-one men died of scurvy or other illnesses during the
Pacific crossing, including a Patagonian giant and a Brazilian Indian. When
the ships at last reached land, islanders swarmed aboard, robbed the ships and
were fought off; the sick sailors asked for the entrails of the islanders who
had been killed in this engagement, in the belief that by eating them
‘immediately they would be healed’. The true solution was there to be seen:
when the crew started to eat fresh fruit and vegetables, the swelling shrank
away. Moreover, the officers on board, with a more luxurious diet, by and
large escaped from the disease, so that Pigafetta, for one, ‘being always in
good health’, observed scurvy without suffering from it: ‘yet by the grace of
our Lord I had no illness’, which was still the case when he returned to
Spain.21 The discovery that lemons or limes kept scurvy at bay was the result
of trial and error between 1746 and 1795, when the Royal Navy began to
include lemons or limes in the diet of British sailors, and only the
identification of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) in the early twentieth century
explained how and why limes worked so well.22

IV

When Magellan reached the islands of the western Pacific, he encountered

lands very different in culture and social structure to those he had left behind
in Patagonia. Admittedly, the first islands he reached, around Guam, revealed
societies that made no use of metal and where people walked around almost
naked; because the islanders had run amok on board the Spanish ships,
seizing everything they could carry away, Magellan’s men called this place
the ‘Island of Thieves’. Pigafetta thought that the islanders believed that they
were the only people in the world, but he was relying, as he admitted, on sign
language, and what they were no doubt expressing was their disbelief that the
shaggy-looking sailors on their vast wooden ships were of the same genus as
themselves. They were people of the sea, whose boats decorated with palm
leaf sails and outriggers ‘are like dolphins jumping from wave to wave’.23
Gradually, though, the ships navigated their way through islands blessed
with an abundance of chickens, palm wine, coconuts and sweet oranges (a
novelty, as the oranges known in the west were the bitter Seville oranges
introduced to Spain by the Arabs). There was even some gold, which was
used to decorate the islanders’ daggers. As the ships penetrated deeper into
the Philippine chain in March and April 1521, they found new friends among
the local rajahs; it was a great help that Magellan’s Sumatran servant,
Enrique, was able to speak with one of these rajahs in Malay and make
himself understood. The rajah presented Magellan with porcelain jars filled
with rice, and offered presents of gold and ginger; Magellan gave the king a
red-and-yellow robe, ‘made in the Turkish fashion’. The rajah organized a
reception for the officers, and Pigafetta found himself eating meat on Good
Friday, ‘being unable to do otherwise’; on the other hand, it was a relief to
discover that the rulers of these islands were ‘heathens’ and not ‘Moors’. An
even greater luxury than dinner with the rajah was the chance to sleep in a
soft bed made out of a mat of reeds, with cushions and pillows.
In the spirit of previous explorers under the Spanish flag, Pigafetta noted
that this rajah had a brother who ruled over a neighbouring island that
contained ‘mines of gold, which is found by digging from the earth large
pieces as large as walnuts and eggs’, with the result that the king dined off
gold plates as a matter of course.24 The sight of Chinese porcelain here, and
on islands they visited later, was a sure sign that they were not far from the
luxurious empire that a generation of explorers had been trying to reach:
‘porcelain is a kind of very white earthenware, and is fifty years underground
before being worked, for otherwise it would not be fine. And the father buries
it for the son. And if poison or venom is put into a fine porcelain jar, it will
immediately break.’25 This was evidence for trade between the Chinese ports
and the Spice Islands, but Magellan preferred to find a route to the clove-
scented Moluccas; after all, his fleet was the Armada de Molucca.
All this promised good results; yet the deeper Magellan’s ships penetrated
into this island world, the more the captain-general became aware of the
difficulties he still faced in winning the confidence of the rajahs. The rajah of
Cebu expected to receive tribute or taxes, which he levied on all boats that
called at his shores. A iunco, or junk, had come in from ‘Ciama’, either
Vietnam or Java, four days before Magellan arrived; the rajah introduced one
of Magellan’s officers to a Muslim merchant who had reached Cebu aboard
the junk, and the merchant not very helpfully warned the rajah:

‘Have good care, O king, what you do, for these men are of those who
have conquered Calicut, Malacca, and all India the Greater. If you
give them good reception and treat them well, it will be well for you,
but if you treat them ill, so much the worse it will be for you, as they
have done at Calicut and at Malacca.’26

Fortunately Enrique, the Sumatran interpreter, understood what was being

said, and ‘told them that his master’s king was even more powerful in ships
and by land than the king of Portugal, and he declared that he was the king of
Spain and emperor of all Christendom’, a fair point since Charles had already
been elected to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. This riposte was
combined with threats of a Spanish invasion which cannot have made Charles
of Spain sound a better friend than Manuel of Portugal.
These threats did not destroy increasingly warm relations between
Magellan and the rajah. If Pigafetta is to be believed, he swore fealty to the
king of Spain and joined in the mass baptism of hundreds of islanders, as well
as the querulous Moorish merchant. It hardly needs to be said that this did not
result in the Christianization of Cebu, and that the inhabitants slipped back to
their ‘heathen’ ways when the ships departed, just as loyalty to King Charles
was easily forgotten. However, the insistence on conversion is something that
can easily be lost to sight when looking at the voyages of discovery. There
was a genuine desire to spread the faith; at the same time, the conversion of
the rajahs of these islands would help bond them closer to the Spanish
masters to whom they were nominally subject.27
Cebu brought disaster upon the little fleet. A number of outlying islands
refused to accept Magellan’s demand that they should place themselves under
the control of the rajah of Cebu, who was henceforth to be the Spanish king’s
representative. In other words, the real issue was not the authority of the king
of Spain, about which the islanders cannot have cared, but the authority of an
overweening rajah whom Magellan was enthusiastically supporting. In April
1521 Magellan, against the advice of João Serrão, insisted on joining an
armed attack on one of these islands, Mactan. There, the invaders faced stiff
resistance, and Magellan was killed.28 Soon after, the rajah of Cebu turned
against the Spaniards and massacred twenty-seven men whom he had invited
to a feast; they included João Serrão. This was a world of which the
Spaniards knew very little indeed, apart from the existence of spices, and it
had been a foolish mistake to become embroiled in local rivalries; after all,
Magellan did not think of Cebu as his destination; he was still searching for
the fabled Moluccas. Clearly it was time to move on, and in July 1521 the
ships visited Brunei in Borneo, with their captains still determined to find a
route to the Moluccas. Then as now Brunei had a wealthy court, and Elcano,
soon to be the leader of the remnant who returned to Europe, found himself
riding an elephant and being instructed in the elaborate protocol required
when one entered the presence of the rajah. One was not allowed to address
the ruler directly; instead one told a courtier, who told a brother of the ruler,
who whispered the message to the rajah through a speaking tube, which
cannot always have resulted in very accurate messages reaching his ear. The
Spaniards were not at all awestruck by the solemnity of their interview and
found these rules quite comic.29
They set sail for the marvellous Moluccas, and reached the islands in
November 1521. The sultan of Tidore, Rajah Sultan Mansur, told his visitors
that he had had a strange dream a long time ago which foretold the arrival of
ships sailing to the Moluccas from far-off lands. He was friendly, to the point
where he proposed renaming Tidore ‘Castile’ out of love for the Spanish
king. Pigafetta took great delight in the clove trees and learned how the
spices were harvested, and was interested to see how the inhabitants made
bread out of sago, a starchy food extracted from palm stems that was the
staple crop in the Moluccas and remains a firm favourite in south-east Asia.
But there was bad news about Francisco Serrão. He had become the
commander of the troops of the rival ruler of Ternate, and during a struggle
between the two sultanates he had carried off many of the chief men of
Tidore as hostages. After peace was made, he visited Tidore to buy cloves.
But he was deeply resented; he was given poisoned betel leaves to chew and
died within a few days. This had happened only eight months earlier; Serrão
had still been alive when Magellan set out from Spain.30
The Armada de Molucca had now reached waters that were also being
probed by Portuguese based in Melaka, even if their appearances were
spasmodic and their expeditions unofficial. The Spaniards met a Portuguese
merchant named Pedro Afonso de Lorosa in Tidore; he arrived in a local
boat, or prao, and he, like the late Serrão, lived in Ternate. He claimed to
have spent sixteen years in India and ten years in the Moluccas. He knew of a
‘great ship of Malacca’ that had reached the Moluccas just under a year ago,
commanded by a Portuguese captain, Tristão de Meneses, who had already
heard that the Spanish king had sent a fleet out of Seville towards the
Molucca Islands. Pedro Afonso was delightfully garrulous and quite
incapable of keeping a secret. He told the Spaniards that the king of Portugal
had reacted furiously to reports of Magellan’s voyage. He sent ships to the
River Plate and to the Cape of Good Hope to block Magellan’s armada, since
he did not know which route it would actually take. He also encouraged one
of his captains in the Indian Ocean to sail to the Moluccas in search of
Magellan with six heavily armed ships; however, when this commander
heard that the Ottoman Turks were planning an expedition against Melaka he
headed westwards instead, towards the coast of Arabia, sending a smaller
convoy, which was forced back by contrary winds. Pedro Afonso claimed
that the Moluccas were already loyal to Portugal, and that the ever-secretive
court in Lisbon had simply not wanted anyone to know of its success out
there.31
Maybe he imagined that all this would deter Elcano; far from it. He loaded
one ship, the Victoria, with cloves and set out for Spain by way of the Indian
Ocean, carrying a crew of forty-seven sailors who had endured the voyage so
far, but sixty in all as they had taken on board some native inhabitants during
their travels. A handful of sailors were left in Tidore so that they could set up
a Spanish base there. The other seaworthy ship, the Trinidad, would take the
trans-Pacific route home with a crew of fifty-three men and nearly fifty tons
of cloves, but not by way of the Strait of Magellan; the idea was to send it to
Panama and then trans-ship its cargo across Central America and into the
Caribbean, always assuming it could find its way and that there was anyone
in Panama waiting to greet its arrival. The Trinidad struggled to find a route,
ending up in the latitude of Japan and then turning back to Tidore. Alas for
her, Tidore had already been visited by a Portuguese squadron which was
searching for the Spanish flotilla; the Portuguese closed down the Spanish
station, set up their own on Ternate, and found the Trinidad, from which they
seized the cargo. Just as importantly, they seized the charts they found on
board; the Portuguese were quite determined to keep knowledge of these
waters a secret. If anything, the Spanish expedition had drawn the Portuguese
deeper into the Spice Islands. Eventually one survivor escaped and three were
sent back to Lisbon, where prison awaited them – one found that his wife had
remarried, assuming he had died at sea.32 Yet the idea that the only way for
Spain to maintain contact with the East Indies across the Pacific was by way
of Central America, rather than through the Magellan Strait, was a sound one,
as later events would show.
Elcano also faced a Portuguese threat. His route home would take him
right through the waters that the heirs of da Gama were now trying to
dominate. He could expect to pass Portuguese patrols, and calling in at
coastal stations to take on water and food was beyond consideration. His
voyage did start well, though, with a useful visit to Timor, where excellent
sandalwood was to be had. Between early February and early May he was at
sea between Timor and the southern tip of Africa, sailing far to the south,
avoiding Java and Sumatra, where the Portuguese were known to trade; meat
taken on board turned rotten, and a landfall in south Africa took them to
sterile land where no food was found: as Elcano wrote to the king of Spain
after his return, ‘when we had left the last island behind, we subsisted for five
months on nothing but corn, rice and water’. Fifteen Europeans and ten
inhabitants of the Spice Islands died on this stretch. Worse was to come, as
the Victoria still had to wend its way past the Portuguese bases in west
Africa. The only solution to the lack of supplies was to put in at Ribeira
Grande, the capital of the Cape Verde Islands. The crew told the Portuguese
customs officials that they had got lost on their return from the Caribbean,
but when an attempt was made to pay with cloves for food and slaves
(needed as extra hands), it became obvious that the ship had been poaching
on what the Portuguese regarded as their part of the world. Elcano was alert
enough to realize that he must set sail at once, but he still had to cope with
the prevailing winds, which demanded he should take a convoluted route past
the Azores to reach Iberia. On 4 September his lookout spied Cape St
Vincent and by 8 September the worm-eaten hulk of the Victoria was tied up
on the quayside at Seville. Eighteen Europeans had survived the trip.33
Elcano had brought specimens of the crops he had found in the Moluccas
and Philippines as well as descriptions of crops he had seen and their
location; the emperor was impressed enough to write to his aunt, Margaret of
Austria, that ‘one of our ships has returned laden with cloves and with
specimens of all the other spices, such as pepper, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg,
and also sandalwood. Further, I have received tokens of submission from the
rulers of four of the islands.’34 Elcano also brought home something much
more valuable than a large cargo – intelligence about what could be found in
the eastern extremities of the Spice Islands. The actual weight of the cargo he
brought has been estimated at about 20,800 kg, of which more than a
twentieth belonged to Elcano. This meant that the costs of the expedition
were met, with a small profit – very roughly the same amount as Elcano’s
share. A return of 5–6 per cent was rather feeble, but it was also obvious that
the profit would be very much higher if this could made into a regular sea
route.35

How to create such a sea route was the problem. The Portuguese would
continue to stand in the way, denying that the large western Pacific islands
fell within the Spanish half of the world. Discussions with Portugal about
where the lines between the Spanish and the Portuguese hemisphere should
be drawn achieved nothing, because it was impossible even to agree on where
the line sliced through the Atlantic; for a start there were conflicting views
about which of the scattered Cape Verde Islands should be used as marker.36
In addition, not everyone was happy about Elcano’s conduct as captain, and
still less about Magellan’s, so that commissions of enquiry delayed plans for
a second expedition along the same route round South America. Elcano’s
fears for his life, which led Charles V to assign a bodyguard to him, were
mainly prompted by the knowledge that the Portuguese would happily kill to
reserve their monopoly.37 A new expedition set out in July 1525 under the
leadership of Garcia Jofre de Loaísa, who was no sailor and who would
therefore depend on his pilot-major – Elcano. The fleet consisted of seven
ships, carrying 450 men, including four gluttons for punishment who had
served with Magellan. But these men had seen what the Far East had to offer
and were eager bounty hunters. Moreover, the great Augsburg banking house
of the Fuggers, the wealthiest bank in Europe, was willing to invest in the
expedition. No doubt this was an opportunistic throw of the dice; the Fuggers
can have had few illusions about the dangers involved, whether from natural
hazards or enemy attacks, but they were rich enough to be able to take a
chance and threw 10,000 gold ducats into the pot. The Spanish dream was to
make A Coruña in Galicia the new Lisbon, the base from which the spices of
the East Indies would be shipped on to Antwerp and from there into the wider
European market.38
Though much was gained from past experience, only four ships out of
seven actually reached the Strait of Magellan, and Loaísa himself died, with
the result that Elcano once again found himself in charge – for a week. For he
too did not survive the journey across the Pacific, and three of his brothers
also died on the voyage. He had been hoping to achieve the great ambition of
Christopher Columbus: to find the route to Japan. The plan was to head for
Japan and then to turn southwards towards the Moluccas. The crew of the
ship on which Loaísa and Elcano had been sailing did reach Tidore, only to
find that the Portuguese were now installed nearby in rival Ternate, and had
recently sacked Tidore. Disaster struck another ship, which struggled to reach
Mexico and made contact with the conquistador Hernán Cortés. Finding
Cortés was the salvation not just of these Spanish castaways but of Loaísa’s
ship, which had ended up in Tidore, where the survivors spent their time
fending off the Portuguese; little did they realize that they would end up
spending more than a decade in these islands before being sent home.
Cortés had already been corresponding with the Spanish court about routes
to the Indies, and the court was keen for him to find out what had happened
to Loaísa’s ships. With an eye on the profits he could make as an
intermediary in the spice trade, he saw that a route from Mexico to the Spice
Islands made much more sense than the elongated route around the bottom of
South America, which risked capture in Portuguese waters off Brazil. What
the Spaniards really wanted was to carry off some clove bushes and replant
them in Mexico, which would render the Portuguese spice route around
Africa redundant. Somehow Cortés launched three ships on the Pacific, under
the command of his cousin Saavedra, who then set off for Tidore with the
aim of carrying off the survivors from Loaísa’s ships (about 120 people in
all). Two ships went down near Hawai’i. But in an all too typical act of the
time, the crew of the third ship, the Florida, reached Tidore, looked at what
was going on, decided there were too many people to take off the island, and
filled its empty spaces with a cargo of cloves instead. Trying to beat its way
back to Mexico, the Florida made no progress and was forced to return to
Tidore. Several attempts to sail away were frustrated by the winds, and all
these Spaniards languished in the East Indies for years as unwilling guests of
the Portuguese, who were not clear what to do with them; eventually, in
1534, most of them were sent back to Lisbon. Andrés de Urdaneta, who was
on board keeping the ship’s accounts, did not reach Spain until 1536, and will
be met again in a later chapter.39
The Spaniards were keen to find out much more about the ocean Magellan
had entered, with an emphasis on the Pacific shores of their growing
American empire that now embraced not just Mexico but Peru. Cortés and
the viceroy of New Spain, Mendoza, were eager patrons of voyages up and
down the American coastlines as well, leading to the mapping of the coast of
Lower and parts of Upper California between 1539 and 1542. The name most
closely associated with the opening up of Upper California to Spanish
shipping is that of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo (although the Chumash Indians
around Santa Barbara are still there to object that they knew about the coast
all along). Cabrillo set out with three ships, the largest of which was a small
galleon named the San Salvador, of about 200 tons’ displacement. In many
ways his most impressive achievement was the construction of these ships, as
well as ships for other explorers, in an inhospitable river mouth on the Pacific
coast of America. He brought in Spanish artisans and used native labour, and
African slaves for the most unpleasant work: hauling objects as heavy as
anchors from the Atlantic coast across to the shipyard in Guatemala. The
great advantage of this site was that there was plenty of good, hard wood to
be had.
Cabrillo tested the San Salvador, and the quality of his crew, by taking the
galleon on a trading voyage to Peru, where he sold horses at the highly
inflated prices they then fetched in a land where they had been unknown until
the arrival of Pizarro’s conquering armies a little more than a decade
earlier.40 Traffic continued to grow along the stretch of coast linking Central
America to Peru, so that even before the Spaniards had mastered the art of
sailing right across the Pacific, they were adept at navigation along the
eastern shores of the ocean. Cabrillo’s Californian voyage reached as far
north as San Francisco Bay, without discovering what they had hoped to find:
a channel that would enable ships to pass through the North American
continent, which had a name, the Strait of Anían, but no existence. Even if
they did not find the strait, there was the lure of a mythical kingdom, that of
Queen Calafia, who ruled over a population of black Amazons. It was rich in
gold, and man-eating griffins were used to carry heavy goods around.41
Elcano and the Victoria had crossed three oceans. A few Portuguese had
already passed all the way through the Atlantic, had crossed the Indian Ocean
and had penetrated the Pacific as far as the eastern Spice Islands. But the
sheer stamina, determination and fortitude involved in bringing one ship the
whole way around the world continues to astonish. It might seem odd, then,
to finish this chapter on a negative note, not just because Magellan, Elcano
and Loaísa were not thinking of circumnavigating the world when they
planned their expeditions, but because the route taken by the Victoria was
proved not really to work. More thought was needed about how to extend
Spanish dominion across the Pacific, and about how to use a route from
Mexico to the Spice Islands in order to ferry silks, spices and porcelain from
the Far East to America and Europe.
 32

A New Atlantic

Even though Columbus took a long while to set foot on the American
mainland and even though he soon became persona non grata in Hispaniola,
his voyages completely transformed Atlantic navigation. Spanish sailors
seized the opportunity to look for profit in the New World with enthusiasm.
The constant warnings from Queen Isabella that they must take care not to
enslave the native population, at least on those islands that were claimed by
the Spanish Crown, provides clear evidence that this did happen on an
increasing scale by 1500, as does the complete depopulation of the Bahamas
by about 1520, after their inhabitants were carried off to work in the gold
mines and sugar plantations that were the main attraction of Hispaniola, or
were captured by slavers. The history of European relations with the Taínos
of Hispaniola and neighbouring islands offers a devastating indictment of
Spanish policy in the New World, even if no one could have predicted that
the arrival of European diseases such as smallpox would wipe out tens, and
maybe hundreds, of thousands of Taínos before these diseases wreaked even
worse havoc on the American mainland. The increasing demands laid upon
the Taínos by Columbus and his successors also destroyed their communities:
backbreaking work in the gold fields demanded more energy than their
simple diet of cassava bread could supply; the separation of males from their
families meant that the birth rate fell – these and other changes wiped out the
Taínos within thirty years of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. The
persistent pleas of the Dominican friars Montesinos and Las Casas, enriched
by terrifying stories of the mistreatment of the Indians (treated like
‘excrement’ according to Las Casas), fell on deaf ears in the Caribbean.
Eventually, it is true, Las Casas gained an audience among conscience-
stricken courtiers back in Spain. By then it was too late. Isabella’s great-
grandson Philip II sat on the Spanish throne. The Taínos had long ago
disappeared.1
 Today, the genetic profile of the inhabitants of the Dominican Republic,
constituting the greater part of Hispaniola, reveals how massive this collapse
in population actually was: taken as a whole, modern Dominicans are 29 per
cent southern European in ancestry (including 0.5 per cent Neanderthal), and
only 3.6 per cent Taíno. The largest single element in Dominican DNA is
west African, accounting for nearly 45 per cent, with a further scattering of
DNA from central and southern Africa.2 Denuded of native workers, the
Spanish lords of the Caribbean began to import thousands of west Africans,
easily available by way of the Portuguese trading stations on the other side of
the Atlantic. The Spaniards were already perfectly familiar with slaves from
sub-Saharan Africa, many of whom could be found on the streets of Seville
around 1500; indeed, if there was one city where black slaves abounded, it
was this great port with its ready access to both the Atlantic and the
Mediterranean trade routes.3 Still, the Africans of Seville were by and large
domestic slaves, in a longstanding Mediterranean tradition.
After 1500 the purchase of slaves for hard work in mines and plantations
became ever more widespread. Those slaves who survived the ‘Middle
Passage’, the journey across the Atlantic, were likely to be robust and
resilient, and the constant flow of African labour into the Caribbean, and,
once the Portuguese decided to capitalize on its resources, into Brazil, meant
that high mortality among the African workers was not seen as a problem:
they could be replaced, since the source of labour seemed to be bottomless:
African war captives and other victims of internecine conflict in west Africa.
For much of his career, Las Casas was so obsessed (with good reason) by the
fate of the American Indians that he failed to register the appalling realities of
the slave trade out of Africa. He was aware that the Indians were, legally, free
subjects of the Crown, and had less sympathy for those who arrived as slaves
in the New World, people who had never been subjects of the Spanish kings
but had already lost their freedom before they were passed along the trade
routes by the Portuguese.
The infrastructure for this shameful trade was in place now that the
Portuguese had established their bases in west Africa. Elmina in Ghana
became a centre for the trade in gold and slaves ten years before Columbus
reached the New World. War captives were sent down to Elmina and trading
stations on the west coast of Africa by the African allies of the Portuguese –
noble prisoners of war, peasant farmers, women and children. Elmina itself
had only limited holding facilities; but the Cape Verde Islands were the
perfect base for a transatlantic slave trade, a collection point that lay astride
one of the obvious routes to the Caribbean. Thus there was no need to go to
the slave market in Lisbon or Seville to buy slaves. The economy of the Cape
Verde Islands was transformed by the growing demand for African slaves.
Originally, many of them had been kept on the islands in the hope that they
could conjure life out of the poor soil of the islands. This was not a success.
The transit trade to the Americas began in earnest in 1510. After that, the
islands’ slaves fell into three categories: ‘trade slaves’, destined for the slave
market in Portugal or, increasingly, America; ‘work slaves’, for sugar and
other plantations on the Cape Verde Islands; and domestic slaves, bought to
serve in settler households, who were certainly the most fortunate. In
recognition of its growing importance, Ribeira Grande – which was not at all
grande – was granted city status in 1533, when it became the seat of the
Portuguese bishop responsible for west Africa. Even so, most of those who
slept in the little city were merchants and slaves who were passing through
the islands. Even towards the end of the century there were probably only
about 1,700 settlers in the whole archipelago, and about six times as many
slaves.4
The towns of Hispaniola had a different character. For the moment, until
Cortés and his successors conquered vast tracts of the American mainland,
this was the end of the line. Columbus had not had much luck with his town
foundations. The inhabitants of La Navidad, constructed out of the timbers of
the Santa María on Christmas Day, 1492, had met with disaster – all the
Spanish settlers were dead, turned on by the Taíno chief and his men, by the
time Columbus returned to Hispaniola. The next settlement on the north of
the island, named after Queen Isabella, was founded a year later, but the site
was unhealthy and the settlers quarrelled among themselves. La Isabela had
slightly better fortune than La Navidad: it lasted four years. Columbus did not
see the town as the capital of a new Spanish province, so much as think of it
as a trading station, or feitoria, modelled on Elmina in west Africa. Just as
Elmina functioned as a funnel through which great quantities of gold from
the interior were channelled to Portugal, so La Isabela would be the
collection point for the gold and spices of the Indies.5
The settlers needed to eat as well as to trade, and their numbers were much
larger than the small team who kept Elmina in business. Excavations at La
Isabela show that it was built with defence in mind, as one might expect after
the experiences at La Navidad; it was constructed mainly of packed earth, but
the builders used a limited amount of stone as well, and what was probably
Columbus’s own house had a stone doorway. Many colonists had to make do
with thatched huts not totally dissimilar to the houses of the Taínos. But the
Spaniards tried to be as self-reliant as possible: there was a sizeable
community of artisans, not just masons but workers in wood and metal,
makers of tiles and bricks and boat-builders. Some people lived on a second,
satellite, site at Las Coles, on the opposite side of the river, which, it was
hoped, would help feed the new town, for the main business there was
agriculture, along with pottery-making. The Spaniards were none too happy
with the Taíno diet of cassava bread, along with the occasional iguana,
manatee, conch and large rodents. Las Casas thought the Spaniards ate in a
day what the Taínos would eat in a month, adding, ‘just think what 400 of
them would consume!’ The Indians marvelled at the voraciousness of the
settlers, and wondered whether they were so hungry because they had run out
of food at home.6
The Spaniards within La Isabela and the Indians outside its stockade kept
apart; yet children of mixed origins must have been common, because there
were so few Spanish women in early Hispaniola. For the moment, though,
sharp lines were maintained between the communities. The Spaniards had
little interest in Taíno products, and made only limited use of Taíno pottery.
The proportion of Spanish pottery found on the site of La Isabela is actually
higher than one would expect to find on a contemporary archaeological site
in Spain, where plenty of Italian and other foreign goods normally appear.
The style of Spanish goods found on the site is typical of the arabized culture
of southern Spain, and includes plenty of glazed maiolica that was brought
from Seville and its sister ports during the brief life of the town.7 Columbus
attempted to place all trade with the Indians under his own control, acting in
the name of the Crown. No gold objects have been found; any golden
artefacts or nuggets of gold passed quickly through the colony to the Old
World. On the other hand, over a hundred Spanish coins have been found,
mainly low-value coins made of the heavily debased silver alloy known as
billon; real silver coins were a rarity. The coins themselves were not just from
Spain but from Genoa, Sicily, Portugal and elsewhere, palely reflecting the
trading world of latemedieval Seville.8 So it is clear that the residents did
business among themselves, operating a modest money-based economy, but
mixing little with the Taínos.
 II

In 1498, as it became more and more obvious that La Isabela was never going
to flourish, Bartholomew Columbus, Christopher’s brother, made the fateful
decision to move the centre of Spanish operations right across the island to
the shores of the Caribbean. In deference to his brother he at first called his
new capital Nueva Isabela, but Santo Domingo was the name that stuck until
1936, when the ruthless Dominican dictator Trujillo modestly renamed it
Ciudad Trujillo – it has been Santo Domingo again since his fall. Even then
the Columbuses did not get it quite right. The city lies on the River Ozama, in
those days a broad passageway offering a reasonable harbour for ships
arriving from Seville; but Bartholomew’s town was blown to smithereens by
a hurricane, and within a few years the town was moved across the river to
what was thought a better-protected site.9 There, Nicolás de Ovando, who
had replaced Christopher Columbus as governor of the Indies in 1502,
decided to build a true Spanish city, so Spanish that he and his successors
brought stonemasons and carpenters from northern Spain to construct
monumental palaces and churches in the latest Iberian styles. A longstanding
rival of Columbus, Ovando had arrived in the New World accompanied by
the largest number of sailors, soldiers and settlers yet seen there, well over
2,000.10
 Ovando’s aim became the creation not just of a Portuguese-style feitoria,
but a city with broad streets, stone houses and, above all, a permanent
population. The Zona Colonial of Santo Domingo is the oldest, largest and
best-preserved colonial quarter anywhere in the Americas. Ovando’s palace,
now a luxury hotel, still survives as testimony to his sense of grandeur, and
he built at least fourteen more substantial stone houses. His immediate
successor, Diego Colón, son of Christopher Columbus, who took up office in
1509, constructed a particularly imposing residence with an excellent view
over the harbour and out to sea. These governors of the Indies, later graced
with the title of viceroy, were keen to place their capital at the centre of the
New World. At first they could only see as far as Spain; but as new
explorations and conquests opened up first Cuba, in 1511, and then Mexico,
whose capital fell to Cortés (an old Santo Domingo hand) in 1520, Ovando’s
city seemed poised to become the nerve centre of an entire western Atlantic
trading network.
 Making Santo Domingo work would present many challenges. In the early
days food supplies were scarce; the Spanish settlers came to rely on imported
grain brought all the way from Spain, though this was good news for Spanish
businessmen, since they needed to fill the outbound ships with something
saleable. Wheat was the food of the rich, maize the food of the relatively
poor, and cassava was left for those at the bottom of the social pile, who, by
definition, were not Spaniards.11 Royal officials were set in place in Santo
Domingo, where an imposing headquarters was built; their function was to
record what passed through the port, especially the gold brought from the
mines, while keeping an eye out to make sure that the Crown received its fair
share of the profits. Columbus had pointed out that the areas poor in gold
were very rich in cotton; but no one in Europe was terribly interested in New
World cotton, since there were plentiful supplies that arrived from the
Mediterranean. Even Columbus realized this and began to argue that the
inhabitants of Cathay and Cipangu, China and Japan, would surely snap up
the cotton of the Indies – a good example of the fantasies that often wandered
across his brain.12 Rather later, salt would become a prized asset of northern
Hispaniola, picked up by Dutch ships that were not really supposed to visit
Spanish territory; but for now gold, gold and more gold was what people
sought.
By 1508 forty-five ships were coming each year to the island, and Santo
Domingo was firmly established as the prime port of call in the Spanish
Indies. Some of its settlers came from well-connected families, such as the
Dávila of Segovia, and it is no coincidence that many of the stone buildings
recall those of Segovia itself.13 Santo Domingo attracted the attention of the
two busiest men of affairs in Seville, who were of Genoese origin, Juan
Francisco de Grimaldo and Gaspar Centurión. In 1513 and 1517 their loans to
merchants and ship’s masters sailing to the new port mounted higher and
higher, one loan being worth 214,000 maravedís. Admittedly, the sort of
product the settlers required was at first relatively modest, as had been the
case when the Canaries or the Cape Verde Islands had first been settled:
chickpeas, vinegar, paper, coarse cloth. But there was every hope of bringing
back gold by return. By the middle of the sixteenth century, demand for
luxury goods in the new colonies had begun to rise, including fine cloths
from all over Europe, and increasing numbers of African slaves, all of which
(or whom) helped to make the fortune of yet more Genoese families. One not
very popular imposition by King Ferdinand was a tax of 7½ per cent on
imported European goods, which included silk shirts, velvet hats and other
luxuries for the Spanish elite. If one compares the excavated remains of La
Isabela with the grandeur of Ovando’s city of Santo Domingo, one can see
how the standard of living of the colonial elite was beginning to soar.
In the early days, the Taíno Indians had simply panned for gold in river
beds, but the point came when the large lumps had, by and large, been
collected, while other lands across the Caribbean began to look much more
promising as sources of gold – on his final expedition Columbus had
uncovered evidence of gold-rich peoples some way inside Central America.
The Spaniards now resolved to transform the island economy in new ways,
always with an eye on demand from Europe: just as Madeira, the Canaries
and São Tomé had become major sources of sugar, there seemed to be no
reason why the same should not happen in Hispaniola.14 The tropical climate
guaranteed heavy rainfall, and water was essential in sugar production. The
newly arrived African slaves were thought to be better suited than the
vanishing Taínos to the exceptionally harsh conditions within a sugar mill:
punishingly high temperatures as the sugar was boiled, not to mention very
demanding work in the fields cutting the thick and fibrous stalks of the sugar
cane with knives or machetes. Even so, the history of sugar production in
Hispaniola is a story of mixed success. In 1493 Columbus apparently took
sugar cane from La Gomera in the Canaries to Hispaniola, though several
attempts were necessary before the Caribbean sugar industry took off.
The first serious attempts to start sugar production in Hispaniola began in
1503, and the first proper mill was only built in 1514, on the initiative of a
Spanish landowner named Velloso; growth was slow, depending as it did on
securing experts who could advise on the machinery needed in the mills,
some of whom Velloso brought over from the Canaries.15 An even more
important problem was lack of capital, in short supply before the Genoese
and the Welsers became involved. A state-of-the-art mill could cost as much
as 15,000 gold ducats, way beyond Velloso’s modest means; however, he did
enter into a partnership with wealthy local officials, and his project was soon
under way. More money was pumped into this industry by the Jeronymite
friars, who had become a major influence in the government of Hispaniola by
1518 and who petitioned the Crown for investment in what they advertised as
a golden opportunity. Royal loans enabled dozens of settlers to build sugar
mills in the years around 1520, and they made little effort to pay the money
back; the whole sugar industry was littered with debt to the Crown, to
Genoese investors and to merchants in Seville.16 Thereafter sugar mills
spread across the island and the income from sugar was, for a while,
handsome: over half a million pesos each year in the 1580s, from about 1,000
tons of exported sugar. Labour supply remained a problem because the
African slaves rarely lived much longer than seven years before overwork
and disease took their toll. The answer was to increase the number of
imported slaves; some of the largest estates had a workforce of 500 slaves,
and many had 200.17
Among the pioneers of the Caribbean sugar industry were pioneers of the
sugar industry in the Canaries, such as the Genoese businessman Riberol (a
victim of local xenophobia), and the Welsers, a German banking family from
Augsburg that was keen to profit from the new discoveries across the
Atlantic, and that would eventually send expeditions deep into Venezuela in
search of the gold-rich kingdom the Spaniards called ‘El Dorado’. For the
moment, in 1526, the Welsers were content to set up a branch of their bank in
Santo Domingo managed by two Germans, one of whom would go on to
become governor of Venezuela. They valued Santo Domingo not just as a
source of goods such as sugar, but as the capital of the Spanish Indies, the
place where they would be able to work side by side with the viceroy and the
king’s other agents.18
European participation went much further, thanks to the presence on the
Spanish throne of a king who was also ruler of the Holy Roman Empire,
Charles V; he was in hock first to German bankers and later to the Genoese.
The Welsers of Augsburg responded with enthusiasm, even though this
stretched their existing resources to and beyond wise limits. In the seventeen-
year period beginning in 1518, 1,044 ships sailed from Seville to Santo
Domingo, an average of sixty-one each year, and of these ninety-three were
owned by the Welsers – a number were then put to use in intra-Caribbean
trade towards Venezuela.19 They overextended themselves both in
Venezuela and in Hispaniola, and when it became obvious that they would
never find El Dorado and be able to use its fabulous wealth to pay off their
mounting debts they closed up shop in both places in 1536.20
Then the conquest of Mexico and Peru pulled the centre of gravity of the
Spanish Indies much further westwards, so that by mid-century Santo
Domingo had become a seat of government but had lost its pre-eminence in
trade – not just to Mexico but, as will be seen, to newly subdued Cuba. Santo
Domingo was no longer the focal point of the Spanish Empire in the Indies;
its governors were looking for new ways to maintain the status and wealth of
Hispaniola, and another option was to import cattle and to try to make a profit
from ranching.21 The sale of hides from Hispaniola on the other side of the
Atlantic became big business, but turning the land over to cattle also spelled
the end of the old intensive cultivation practised by the Indians (of whom, in
any case, there were now very few), and generated increasing dependence on
food supplies, other than meat, from outside the island. Had the Spaniards
been willing to change their diet things might have turned out differently; but,
rather like British colonial officials in India who expected to be served
English food, the Spaniards were slow to adapt to Caribbean tastes. Once the
ranches were in place, meat and more meat became the daily diet of the entire
white population – it has been suggested that in Hispaniola a plate of beef
cost one hundredth of what one would have paid in Spain. Before long there
were forty cattle for every person on the island. Since Spain required leather,
not fresh meat, which would hardly survive an Atlantic crossing (although
some was taken on board to feed the sailors), there was a glut of beef in
Hispaniola. Nearly 50,000 hides were exported in 1584, though that was
about a quarter of the number of hides exported from the Caribbean islands,
for the passion for ranching went far beyond Hispaniola.22
The city of Santo Domingo stood frozen in time. Its magnificent Gothic
cathedral was completed just as the downturn was beginning. The remarkable
survival of its buildings is testimony to decline, not to success. Other ports
were seizing the lead: Veracruz in Mexico and Nombre de Díos in
Panama.23 So long as Santo Domingo was the redistribution point for the
goods being sent to Europe, it had some role to play, but a powerful rival
emerged that was better placed to handle the wealth of Mexico: the new
capital of Cuba, Havana.

III

The pre-eminence of Havana within the Spanish Indies was clear by 1571,
when an English observer wrote:

Havana is the principal and most important port of all the king of
Spain has in the Indies: because all the ships coming from Peru,
 Honduras, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Jamaica, and other parts of
the Indies, touch there upon their return to Spain, this being the port in
which they take food and water, as well as the largest part of their
cargo.24

This was not the result of any great resources that Cuba could offer; indeed, it
was slow to develop the sugar industry for which it eventually became so
famous, and was generally a tardy developer within the Spanish world, for it
had only been conquered twenty years after its discovery by Columbus – if
Las Casas is to be believed, the conquest was accompanied by hideous acts of
violence. Even so, the conquistador Diego Velázquez seems to have been an
urbane man who made some attempts to treat the native population with
consideration; after all, it was by now obvious that the treatment of their
cousins in Hispaniola had led to utter disaster and population collapse.
Realizing that the island had little gold to offer, Velázquez tried to introduce
cattle and pigs, in the hope of re-creating Mother Spain on its soil. The
production and export of hides exceeded even that of Hispaniola, but the
price that had been paid was the same: nothing could protect the Taíno
Indians from disease, and they too disappeared within a few decades.25
Havana was founded in 1519. Its real strength lay in its position astride the
Gulf Stream, which made it the ideal transit point between the two American
continents and Europe.26 Settlers were attracted by the excellent natural
harbour and by the quality of fresh water in the nearby river. Havana was
able to supplant the original capital of Cuba, at Santiago, which lay well
within range of Santo Domingo but shrank rapidly in the face of
competition.27 This was the point where fleets coming from all over the
Caribbean, including those bringing the silver of Mexico and Peru,
converged, which also made it a very attractive target for pirates. As early as
1538 a French pirate had a go at Havana, and in 1555 another one managed
to sack the town; old Havana had been built by Taíno labour, but new Havana
was built by African slaves, for lack of native manpower.28 And then it
flourished: it was the great centre of inter-colonial shipping, that is, trade
within the Spanish Indies, with ships arriving from the Yucatán peninsula,
Florida, Honduras, Colombia, Trinidad and Hispaniola; but it also received
goods (some in human form) from Africa, the Canaries, Spain and Portugal,
and the inter-colonial trade fed and was fed by the transatlantic connections –
literally in the case of the Canaries, which in those days were celebrated for
their wines, and which were also the home base of some of the liveliest
merchants trading through Havana. In the last fifteen years of the sixteenth
century, the volume of trade conducted by Francisco Diáz Pimienta of La
Palma in the Canaries reached 1,800,000 reales. He was mainly a wine
merchant but he did not scorn the slave trade out of Angola.
Mexico was Havana’s second most important trading partner, after Seville;
in a later chapter it will be seen how Chinese goods reached Mexico all the
way from Macau and Manila, and some of these found their way to Havana,
from where they could be passed on to Spain. Sometimes they were just plain
ceramics used as much as ballast as they were used as sale goods, but
sometimes they were fine silks or delicate porcelains. Havana was a centre of
shipbuilding too.29
Havana, then, was a city that lived from servicing international trade; it
was more closely integrated into the commercial world of the Spanish
Atlantic than it was into the narrower and poorer world of early colonial
Cuba. A local elite of Spanish landowners, office-holders and merchants
emerged, tightly bound together through marriage and common financial
interests. All stoutly denied any Jewish or Moorish ancestry; if you wanted to
heap the worst possible insult on someone you called him a puto judío
toledano, ‘a fucking Toledan Jew’. But there were Portuguese businessmen
who were strongly suspected of being secret Jews, settlers who chose Havana
in order to escape as far away as practicable from the Inquisition. Still, the
total population was much smaller than one might expect in a town of
considerable strategic and economic importance: sixty citizens in 1570, 1,200
in 1620. And then there were high-status slaves, for not all slaves toiled in the
sugar plantations or in construction projects: as in ancient Rome, some were
sent abroad on business by masters who trusted them and recognized their
talent.30 In 1583 royal slaves, many of whom were set to work on the city’s
fortifications, numbered 125. They were mostly brought, via holding stations
in the Cape Verde Islands, from Upper Guinea, which supplied the great
majority of slaves before 1600. Other royal slaves reached Santo Domingo
and Havana from Luanda in Angola, so that the slave trade out of south-
western Africa towards the Caribbean had the dual effect of strengthening
Portugal’s grip on Angola and reinforcing Spain’s control of the Caribbean,
particularly after 1580, when the king of Spain held the throne of Portugal as
well. Not all the Africans were kept in permanent slavery: a free black
population gradually came into existence in the islands, among whom there
were black ranchers who possessed their own slaves.31
All told, the Caribbean was quite unlike the world Columbus had so
confidently expected to find. A new series of relationships emerged within
the Atlantic. The sugar islands of the eastern Atlantic, notably Madeira and
the Canaries, taught the sugar islands of the western Atlantic the necessary
skills. There was constant to-ing and fro-ing between these groups of islands.
The Caribbean towns, notably Santo Domingo and then Havana, functioned
as supply stations for shipping bound from one great continent to another,
just as the Cape Verde Islands and the Azores kept ships stocked with meat
and dairy goods. In that sense, the claim that Columbus had discovered ‘New
Canaries’ in the Caribbean was not totally mistaken. The slave trade and
slave labour kept these islands afloat, not just under Spanish rule but in later
centuries when the English, the Dutch, the French and the Danes staked out
their own claims in the Caribbean. This New Atlantic was constructed out of
the resources of the Old Atlantic.
 33

The Struggle for the Indian Ocean

The richness of the evidence in the archives of Lisbon and Seville has made
the maritime history of the sixteenth century appear to be a story of ever-
expanding overseas empires that would inevitably create well-functioning
and profitable trade networks stretching right around the globe. The
challenges the Portuguese faced are usually, therefore, listed as the Spaniards
in the first place, and later on the French, the English and, in particular, the
Dutch. However, the major challenge that the European merchants and navies
faced in the Indian Ocean during the early sixteenth century was that of
another partly European political power that was already heavily involved in
the Mediterranean and that was beginning to turn its attention to the Red Sea
and the Indian Ocean as well: the Ottoman Empire.1 The capture of
Constantinople in 1453 had transformed the Ottomans from doughty warriors
of Islam on the western fringes of the Muslim world into Sunni emperors
who saw their mission as not just the extension of Turkish power into Italy
and western Europe but as the imposition of Ottoman rule over neighbouring
Muslim states as well. In 1516 the Ottomans overwhelmed Syria, ruled since
the late thirteenth century by the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, and the next year
they brought Egypt too under their authority. They were careful not to
dismantle completely the Mamluk state, with its elaborate tax system geared
to the exploitation of the spice trade through the Red Sea; but their presence
in Egypt and Syria caused as much concern to the Venetian merchants buying
spices in Alexandria and Beirut as did the penetration of the Portuguese into
the Indian Ocean. The reaction of the Indian and Arabian inhabitants of the
ports along the coasts of the Indian Ocean is much more difficult to judge,
since much of what is known is derived from Portuguese or occasionally
Ottoman reports.
During the twenty years after da Gama first set out from Lisbon the
Mamluks were still trying to control the Red Sea, facing political challenges
from not just the Ottomans but rebels in Yemen, as well as the danger that
Portuguese fleets would break through beyond the Bab al-Mandeb strait and
threaten Jiddah and even Mecca. These difficulties were compounded by the
fact that revenues from Venetian trade, which was protected by a whole
series of Venetian–Mamluk treaties, were an important source of revenue for
the Egyptian sultans, whose political grip on the lands they had ruled for two
and a half centuries was slipping even before the Ottomans invaded their
lands: in 1505/6 Bedouin raids were so persistent that the pilgrimage route
through Syria to Mecca had to be suspended. And this had a knock-on effect
on trade, since the raids undermined confidence in the ability of the Mamluks
to keep the commercial routes open. The Venetians were canny enough to
look in other directions, making eyes at the Ottomans, with whom in any case
they had enjoyed quite good commercial relations since the fall of
Constantinople; but for the moment only the Mamluks could ensure large-
scale access to the spices Venice sought. Rather than tightening control, the
Mamluks tried to raise funds for their campaigns against the Bedouins and
other enemies by increasing taxes in Alexandria, and by constantly bending
the rules – Mamluk officials, whether for themselves or for the government,
would add arbitrary levies, impound goods, and generally make life difficult
for Italian merchants. In 1510 the Venetian consul was thrown into prison
and accused of plotting against the Mamluk state. As early as 1502 an
Egyptian historian, ibn Iyas, took the view that these policies were ruining
Alexandria, that is, even before the effect of the Portuguese breakthrough into
the Indian Ocean was measurable.2 However, his pessimism may have been
the result of naval warfare in the Aegean which led to a suspension of the
Venetian spice convoys between 1499 and 1503. If anything, the suspension
of the convoys confirmed that the prosperity of Alexandria depended on the
spice trade towards Europe.
Still, the Venetians knew that they had to work with the Mamluks, at least
for the moment, so when in 1504 they heard that the Portuguese had started
to bring back Indian pepper they sent a messenger named Teldi to the sultan
in Cairo, where he arrived posing as a jewel merchant. He wormed his way
into the palace and warned the Mamluk government about the danger Egypt,
along with Venice, faced following the Portuguese entry into the Indian
Ocean. Teldi had a whole armoury of arguments: if the Mamluks did not help
to suppress the Portuguese, Venice would turn its spice trade westwards,
sending its ships to Lisbon instead of Alexandria (a vain boast as what
Venice sought was a near monopoly over distribution within Europe, which it
could never obtain in Lisbon). At the very least, Teldi insisted, the Mamluks
could send ambassadors to Cochin and Cannanore, ordering their rulers, who
were also Muslims, to have nothing more to do with the Portuguese, who
before long would surely be threatening the holy cities of Islam by way of the
Red Sea.3 The Mamluk sultan slowly took action: in 1505 he built up the
defences of Jiddah, so as to protect Mecca, and in 1507–9 a Mamluk fleet at
last ventured out against the Portuguese. It was well advised to do so, as the
Portuguese had thought up a plan to seize Socotra, the island to the south of
Yemen that, since the days of Greco-Roman trade, had functioned as a sort of
commercial watchtower for traffic leading to Arabia, the Red Sea and east
Africa, making it seem a perfect acquisition if only it could be taken.
However, the Portuguese soon discovered that it was a barren wasteland and
that it lay too far from the Red Sea entrance to give them the strategic
advantage they sought, so they abandoned it after four years.4 The real
importance of Socotra is not its brief Portuguese occupation but the magnetic
force the island exercised upon the Mamluks, who saw how crucial the
defence of the waters off Yemen had become.
 The son of the ruthless Portuguese admiral Afonso de Albuquerque had
noted that there were three places that command the markets of the Indian
Ocean: Melaka, Hormuz and Aden.5 By this point the Portuguese threat was
becoming more intense and the flashpoint was Hormuz. Hormuz, lying on an
island on the Iranian side of the narrow passageway into the Persian Gulf,
was a first-class strategic objective of both sides.6 The town itself was a
dust-blown port with no natural resources but a large population, maybe as
many as 40,000 inhabitants in the early sixteenth century, even more than
densely populated Aden. Ralph Fitch, an English traveller who came there in
1583, wrote: ‘there is nothing growing in it but only salt; for their water,
wood or victuals and all things necessary come out of Persia, which is about
twelve miles from thence.’ But he also saw piles of spices, a ‘great store of
pearls’ brought from Bahrain, silk and Persian carpets.7 Hormuz commanded
the traffic along the shores of the Indian Ocean linking what are now Oman
and Pakistan, as well as the traffic through the Strait of Hormuz up to Basra
in Iraq, from which overland routes stretched as far as Aleppo in northern
Syria. Its ruler extended his power along the Arabian coast as far as Muscat
and up the Gulf as far as Bahrain.
In 1507 Afonso de Albuquerque bullied Hormuz into submission by
raiding some of its outstations along the coast of Oman with the usual
terrifying violence that spared neither women nor children; he was
accompanied by 460 men aboard six ships. Albuquerque formally granted the
crown of Hormuz to the twelve-year-old nominal ruler Sayf ad-din, taking
care to nominate a vizier and a guardian for the young king as well. This,
along with a tribute payment, did not amount to much more than a formal
acknowledgement of Portuguese supremacy in a kingdom that was already
being torn apart by power struggles within its royal family, quite apart from
the fact that the shah of Persia was meddling in its affairs. The shah sought an
outlet to the sea, and he even sent the king of Hormuz a ceremonial bonnet
indicating Persian suzerainty over Hormuz.8 At the time there was some
prospect of an alliance between the Portuguese and the Persians, whose
Shi‘ite shah was said to have his own ambitions to capture Mecca. He was
known in the West as the ‘Great Sophy’, meaning Sufi, and the idea of a
Persian–Catholic alliance had been bruited about since the late fifteenth
century, in the awareness that the Sunni Turks could not abide this Shi‘ite
rival. The Portuguese mooted a project whereby spices would be sent through
the Persian Gulf rather than up the Red Sea, with the help of the shah, and
encouraged the shah to march all the way to Cairo, at which point,
presumably, the Red Sea route would come back into operation.9 This was
an agreeable fantasy, no doubt, but the Portuguese began to have their doubts
about the Great Sophy when the Ottomans scored a great victory over the
Persians at the battle of Çaldıran in 1514.
Determined to strengthen the Portuguese position in the Indian Ocean,
Albuquerque was back in 1515, having now become ‘governor of India’; this
time he had 1,500 Portuguese troops with him, impressive testimony to the
scale of Portuguese penetration into the Indian Ocean. No rewards were on
offer for the earlier submission of Hormuz; the vizier was killed, the fortress
of Hormuz was garrisoned, and even the shah of Persia, who was shocked
that the Portuguese had seized what he regarded as one of his vassal states,
had to accept the new reality, especially when Albuquerque made soothing
noises and talked of an alliance between Persia and Portugal against their
common enemies, the Mamluk sultan in Egypt and the Ottoman sultan in
Turkey.10 Soon after that the dreaded Albuquerque died, but the Portuguese
held on to Hormuz for over a century. They did Hormuz some favours,
though: in 1518 the Portuguese sent a fleet up the Persian Gulf to defend the
claim of the sultan of Hormuz to suzerainty over Bahrain. The Portuguese
were faithful to their vassal in Hormuz.11 Its acquisition enabled Portugal to
create a line of ports and forts defending its route towards India; the coastline
of Fujairah, the part of the UAE that faces out towards the Indian Ocean, is
dotted with pinkish-brown Portuguese forts of impressive solidity. Creating
this line of forts was especially important once the decision had been made to
make Goa, captured in 1510, the seat of Portuguese government in India.12
The Portuguese relied, quite simply, on brute force. They were well aware
that their spice trade would never flourish if they had to compete with rivals.
Although they were successfully bringing large cargoes of pepper and other
spices to Europe, for sale in Lisbon and Antwerp, the quality did not compare
well with spices carried through the Red Sea – the long journey in ships
filling up with bilge water did not improve the quality of their goods.
Therefore they sought as total a monopoly as possible, an enormously
ambitious aim in view of the logistical difficulties they faced in maintaining
contact across the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. As far as the spice trade
was concerned, the struggle against first the Mamluks and then the Ottomans
in the Indian Ocean was a life-and-death struggle. They were well prepared
for naval engagements, but the results were mixed. One Mamluk victory,
over the fleets of Almeida, the first Portuguese governor of India, in 1508,
was followed by humiliation of the Mamluk navy at Diu in northern India,
even though several Indian princes had sent aid to the Mamluks.13 In 1511
the Venetians even urged the Mamluks to make common cause with the
Ottomans against the Portuguese, for they could see that the lack of wood for
shipbuilding was, as ever in Egyptian history, causing problems; so they
invited the Mamluks to obtain wood from the Turks, while offering supplies
from Venice as well.14
There were two issues here: the exclusion of the Portuguese from the spice
trade, but also the defence of the Red Sea, for it was becoming increasingly
obvious that the Portuguese hoped to force their way into the Red Sea and
gain mastery over the spice trade through Alexandria via the back door. The
route around Africa was only an expedient. Once they had conquered the
Indian Ocean – as if that were at all possible – the Portuguese dreamed of
restoring the Red Sea route, abandoning the costly and dangerous Cape route,
and becoming lords of not just Alexandria but Jerusalem. In going after
pepper, the Portuguese did not forget their crusading past.15 Whenever the
Portuguese sent fleets into the Red Sea they tried to make contact with the
emperor of Ethiopia, whom they recognized as the real Prester John, the
Christian king who would join their great crusade. An attempt to send two
caravels to what were assumed to be the coasts of his empire met with
disaster when one of the captains was killed even before his skiff reached the
shore. But in 1518 there was some direct contact, generating the recurrent
dream of uniting with him in the conquest of not just Egypt but Jerusalem.16
The redoubtable and violent Portuguese commander Albuquerque already
had it in mind to force his way into the Red Sea in 1510. His plan was to sail
all the way to Suez and destroy the Mamluk fleet anchored there; but in the
end he turned against Goa. The Red Sea remained a priority all the same, and
was Albuquerque’s target in 1513, when he once again attacked Aden, this
time with twenty-four ships, 1,700 Portuguese troops and 1,000 Indian
troops. He aimed to set up a blockade preventing shipping from reaching the
spice markets of Alexandria. The Portuguese occupied Kamaran Island, much
closer to the Red Sea entrance than Socotra, though they were unable to hold
it for very long.17 That was the central problem: the Portuguese had to find a
way of maintaining the blockade year in, year out if they were to establish the
monopoly they sought. Even when they failed to achieve their objectives in
the Red Sea, the Portuguese wreaked havoc: in 1517 an armada of thirty-
three warships carrying 3,000 troops attacked Jiddah; the threat to Mecca was
now real. The Portuguese were thrown back with the loss of 800 lives and
several ships.18 Still, the spice markets of Cairo, Alexandria and Beirut were
said to be empty in 1518 and 1519. During his campaigns Albuquerque took
detailed notes on the layout of the Red Sea, and convinced himself that,
following its defeat at Diu, there was no Mamluk fleet left to challenge his
supremacy – just fifteen pinnaces at Suez. He told the king of Portugal: ‘if
you make yourself powerful in the Red Sea you will have all the riches of the
world in your hands.’19

II

In the event, neither the Persians nor the Portuguese gained control of the
Red Sea, which fell under Ottoman sovereignty following the Turkish
invasion of Egypt in 1517. Historians have made rather a meal of the
question why the Ottomans seized Egypt at a time when they were actively
competing with the Persian shah in the Middle East. But the Ottoman claim
to world dominion had already been made plain by Mehmet II when he
conquered the Byzantine Empire and attacked Italy. To occupy a wealthy and
populous country that stood at the very heart of the Islamic world was an
obvious step.20 The Ottoman conquest of Egypt encouraged the Venetians to
continue to work alongside the Turks, who by and large had been willing to
protect their shipping; the Venetians traded through Constantinople as well as
Alexandria, and the Ottomans enthusiastically fostered the economic revival
of their capital, which had shrunk to a collection of villages under late
Byzantine rule. The main impulse for the invasion of Syria and Egypt came
from an increasingly powerful sense of the role of the Ottoman sultan as a
world ruler, ideas derived from Byzantine conceptions of the ruler as Roman
emperor, from Turkish ideas of the ruler as Great Khan and from Muslim
ideas of the ruler as caliph, a title the sultans began to use with increasing
frequency, even if their descent from the Companions of the Prophet was, to
say the least, hard to prove. The sultan began to add to his already long list of
titles claims to Yemen, Arabia, Ethiopia and Zanzibar, at a time when his
direct control of waters connected to the Indian Ocean was limited to the Red
Sea port of Jiddah. This was surely a rebuke to King Manuel of Portugal,
who had also appropriated a grand array of titles to lands and coasts he did
not control. Strategically, though, the move into Egypt made sense: it gave
the Turks access to Mecca and Medina, of which they could now claim to be
the protectors, and it gave them control of the Red Sea in the face of
Portuguese incursions. As masters of the Red Sea they were sucked into the
struggle for mastery over the spice trade as well, whose profits accrued to
them as rulers of Egypt – so long as the spices actually reached Egypt.21
This reorientation was encouraged by allies in the Indian Ocean; the
Muslim kingdom of Gujarat played a central role in the politics and trade not
just of north-west India but of the entire Indian Ocean, because its main port,
Diu, had become one of the great commercial centres of the entire region and
a key ally of first the Mamluks and then the Turks.22 Malik Ayaz, the
governor of Diu, a man of uncertain origins (it is even possible he was born
in Dubrovnik), had witnessed the failure of the Mamluks to follow through
their victory over the Portuguese in 1508, and had witnessed the victory of
Almeida’s fleet over the Mamluk navy at Diu the next year. He was a
businessman as well as as political leader, so he took a strong interest in the
spice trade. He was fortunate that the Portuguese commander, Almeida, was
not interested in capturing Diu; one of Almeida’s main demands was the
surrender of Muslim mercenaries, who were subjected to the most ghastly
punishments: having their hands and feet lopped off before being thrown on a
massive funeral pyre; being forced to kill one another; being bound to the
mouth of a cannon and then blown to smithereens.23 This was yet another
example of the ruthless terror that da Gama, Cabral, Almeida and after him
Albuquerque spread in the belief that it was the best way to subdue the cities
of the Indian Ocean.
These methods only encouraged Malik Ayaz to look in a different
direction: the Mamluks were a failure and their state was in disarray, while
the Ottomans must surely be the great power of the future not just in the
Mediterranean but in the Indian Ocean. Moreover, following the Ottoman
victories, the new governor of Jiddah on the Red Sea coast wrote to Malik
Ayaz and to the ruler of Gujarat (who was Malik Ayaz’s superior) informing
them that twenty ships from the former Mamluk fleet were now in Jiddah and
that the Ottoman sultan, Selim, had ordered the construction of fifty more: ‘if
God so wills, with numberless troops he will soon undertake to push these
perfidious troublemakers towards a destiny of blackness.’24 Albuquerque
even warned the king of Portugal that the Ottomans might be about to invade
India; he said that the whole Indian Ocean was in turmoil now that the
Ottomans had marched into Egypt, even though just a few years before, when
he had captured Melaka (in 1511), everything had been peaceful. More
Portuguese fears were realized when Sultan Selim made peace overtures to
Venice and Dubrovnik. He also sent an expedition to Yemen, hoping to bring
the mouth of the Red Sea under his control, but his death in 1520 put an end
to this project. He clearly had every intention of restoring the Red Sea pepper
route.25
Under Selim’s successor, Süleyman, known to history as ‘the
Magnificent’, these steps into the Indian Ocean were taken further. Süleyman
relied on his closest friend, Pargalı Ibrahim Pasha, who had been born to a
Greek Orthodox family in the Greek–Albanian borderlands, and had been
carried off to Constantinople as a slave while still a young boy. There
Süleyman had befriended him (they even slept in the same bedroom, which
raised the eyebrows of many a courtier); Ibrahim attained great power at
court, becoming Grand Vizier, and masterminded Süleyman’s policy in the
Indian Ocean and beyond (he was involved in negotiations with the king of
France that led to the notorious Franco-Ottoman alliance in the 1530s).26
Ibrahim simplified the commercial taxes levied in Egypt so that merchants
were no longer compelled to buy a set amount of pepper at inflated prices
from government agents. A basic 10 per cent tax was to be levied instead.
The aim was to make Egypt an attractive place to trade in spices, now that
Europe was receiving eastern spices via the Cape route as well as through the
Red Sea. As a result income from the spice trade held up well, and even in
1527 the Ottoman administration in Egypt seems to have been making more
money out of this trade than the Portuguese Crown. The idea that from da
Gama’s time onwards the spice trade through the Red Sea dried up, and that
Portugal seized a commanding lead at the very start of the sixteenth century,
is a myth.27
Lower taxes were a wise means of attracting business; but first of all one
had to make sure the goods reached Alexandria. So Ibrahim revived the plans
for the conquest of Yemen. In 1525 a corsair in Ibrahim’s service, Selman
Reis, reported that

at the moment Yemen has no lord – an empty province. It deserved to

be a fine sancak [province]. It would be easy and possible to conquer.
Should it be conquered it would be possible to master the lands of
India and send every year a great amount of gold and jewels to the
Sublime Porte [Constantinople].28

Securing Yemen proved far more difficult than Selman had supposed; its
lawlessness and lordlessness returned as the Ottoman commanders, including
Selman, became immersed in quarrels among themselves about who was
really in charge; this was a regular problem in Ottoman armies and navies.
The result was that by the time Selman’s rivals assassinated him in his tent, in
1528, Yemen had been lost and the Portuguese were able to raid into the Red
Sea once again. The Portuguese had the added advantage that Süleyman the
Magnificent had been focusing on a massive land campaign in Europe that
took him to the gates of Vienna. It hardly seemed possible to flush the
Portuguese out of the Indian Ocean, and the Ottomans had to concentrate on
the defence of the Red Sea, not just as a trade route but as the route to Mecca
and Medina.29 In 1531 spices were so hard to find in Alexandria and Beirut
that the Venetians ended up filling the holds with grain and beans.30 But
there was constant flux. In 1538 the Ottomans at last captured Aden, securing
control of access to the Red Sea, and in 1546 they took Basra, leading to
control of the Persian Gulf. Six years later, though, they failed to capture
Hormuz, the gateway to the Gulf, which the Portuguese had been ruling
continuously since 1515; after their defeat at Hormuz, the Ottomans
temporarily lost interest in naval campaigns in the Indian Ocean. Süleyman
was now looking in other directions: he was increasingly anxious to lay his
hands on Cyprus and to challenge Habsburg naval power in the
Mediterranean, and relations with Persia continued to fester.31
Just as it makes no sense to consider the Portuguese successes in the Indian
Ocean without bearing in mind the Mamluk and Ottoman counterattack, it
makes no sense to concentrate on the Turks and the Egyptians to the
exclusion of native Indian merchants who also challenged the Portuguese, but
more by means of trade than by launching armadas. Gujaratis had been
enjoying great success along the trade routes of the Indian Ocean until the
Portuguese came along, mainly through their flourishing port at Diu. When
Melaka was seized by Albuquerque in 1511, it became more difficult to
maintain their links with the spice trade to the east; but there was still plenty
of profit to be made by looking westwards towards the Red Sea and
Alexandria, so long as Portuguese blockades remained intermittent. Every
now and then the Portuguese raided the shores of Gujarat, but Diu on its
island in the Bay of Cambay was too well fortified to be taken, and an
ambiguous relationship between the rulers of Gujarat and the Portuguese
‘State of India’ became the norm.
Only in the 1530s did Portugal acquire first a small port on the coast,
including the fishing harbour of Bombay, and then Diu itself. In 1535 the
ruler of Gujarat granted the Portuguese control of the Diu customs house and
they were allowed to build a fortress in Diu. His motive was self-
preservation: he had already been defeated by Mughal armies invading India
from the north, and had taken refuge in Diu. But he really wanted neither the
Mughals nor the Portuguese, ‘Mongols by land and infidels by sea’, to be his
masters. Once the Mughal threat had diminished, he appealed to Süleyman to
send his navy and recapture the fort at Diu. Süleyman took the request
seriously, not simply because the Gujarati envoy offered him a magnificent
bejewelled girdle and 250 chests containing 1,270,600 ‘measures of gold’.32
He was turning his attention back to the Indian Ocean after ten years during
which the Ottomans had looked away while the Portuguese took charge of
the coasts. The Ottomans fitted out their largest-ever Indian Ocean fleet,
made up of ninety ships and 20,000 soldiers. Attempts, not always successful,
were made to create a pan-Arabian alliance that would knock out Portuguese
power for ever (the ruler of Aden was so terrified by the choice between the
devil and the deep blue sea that he fled from the city). The aims were clear
and simple:
 Since Diu is the centre of all the maritime trade routes of India, from
there war can be made against all the principal strongholds of the
Portuguese at whatever time desired, none of which will be able to
resist. The Portuguese will thus be expelled from India, trade will
once again be free as it has been in times past, and the route to
Muhammad’s sacred residence will once again be safe from their
depredations.33

It was hard to see how they could fail to win Diu, which was defended by a
small garrison. The problem with sending out such a large expedition was
that it had to be kept watered and fed, and there was no longer any support
from the current ruler of Gujarat, his troublesome predecessor Bahadur
having been disposed of by the Portuguese. Rumours began to spread that a
Portuguese fleet was arriving from Goa any day to relieve Diu. Within twenty
days the Turkish commander, Hadım Süleyman Pasha, decided that his siege
of Diu was futile and turned back to port in Suez.34 Amazingly, Hadım
Süleyman was not beheaded when he returned home after this humiliation,
but lived to fight another day. Even after this upset and another failed siege of
Diu in 1546, Portuguese relations with Gujarat did not completely
disintegrate: in 1572 there were about sixty Portuguese living in the Cambay
region, many of whom had become involved in local trade and had
intermarried with local women, in the same way that Portuguese settlers in
west Africa took local wives.35
The Portuguese began to see that they could not actually create the
complete monopoly over the spice trade of which they dreamed. The
Ottomans would not let go of the Red Sea; they had trumped the Portuguese
by taking Aden in 1538, which ensured that some traffic continued to pass up
the Red Sea to Egypt; after about 1540 the Red Sea spice trade underwent a
revival. When the Turks took Basra in 1546 they acquired a base in the
Persian Gulf, though at the wrong end – what they really needed was control
of the passage past Hormuz. Still, with ever-expanding demand for spices in
Europe and increased production of spices to meet this demand there was
room for more than one route linking the Indian Ocean to Lisbon, Antwerp
and other Atlantic ports.36 The Portuguese compromised with the Indian
merchants: they allowed local shipping to carry goods back and forth so long
as those on board had bought a licence, or cartaz, and they insisted that
customs dues were paid at the three major Portuguese stations in the Indian
Ocean, Hormuz, Goa and Melaka. They well knew that they were unable to
control movements east of Melaka, despite a signal victory over a navy of
Javanese junks in the Malacca Strait in 1513. This victory helped guarantee
free passage for Portuguese ships as far as Ternate and Tidore, the places
Francisco Serrão had identified as centres of the trade in cloves and other
costly spices; but, to cite Charles Boxer, ‘Portuguese shipping in this region
was merely one more thread in the existing warp and woof of the Malay–
Indonesian interport trade.’37
The conquest of Melaka by Albuquerque in 1511 did not bring Portugal
mastery over the Malacca Strait, since the expelled sultan still held lands
right opposite Melaka in Sumatra; Portuguese territory was limited to a
densely populated town and its harbour. As time went by, Indonesians
learned to avoid the strait completely, sending spices round the bottom of
Sumatra by way of the Sunda Strait, the opening between Sumatra and the
next big island, Java. A modus vivendi was reached in the Spice Islands:
there was no Portuguese monopoly, but there were enough advantages in
letting the Portuguese come and pay for spices to allow them access to the
islands. Local rulers learned how to play the Portuguese off against the
Spaniards once Spain had gained access to the Moluccas and the Philippines.
Generally the Hindu rajahs were more open to contact with the Portuguese,
while the Muslim sultans were deeply suspicious of them, with good reason.
In many ways the biggest worry back at home in Lisbon was not competition
from native merchants so much as the constant attempts by Portuguese
merchants to break the Crown monopoly on trade in the most precious spices.
Many a Portuguese ship in the South China Sea and the Moluccas was
privately owned; and, once again, the Crown had to put up with the situation.
The Portuguese also had to face the simple reality that most of the spices
garnered in the East Indies were sent not into the Indian Ocean but across the
South China Sea to China, as had been the case for centuries. Admittedly,
few Chinese ventured out across the waters a century after the Ming voyages
had come to an end, but junks from Java kept up the connection instead.38
All this, as will be seen, acted as an allure to the Portuguese as they attempted
to build ties to China itself and even to Japan.
The effects of the Ottoman–Portuguese encounter could, then, be felt as far
away as the south-western corner of the Pacific Ocean, in the Spice Islands.
In the second half of the sixteenth century Ottoman-led fleets even
challenged the Portuguese in the East Indies; Melaka came under attack in
1581.39 Although the conflict with the Spanish Habsburgs in the
Mediterranean took priority (culminating in the massive defeat of the
Ottomans at Lepanto in 1571), a parallel conflict between the Ottomans and
the Portuguese continued in the Indian Ocean, and both sides saw themselves
as warriors of the faith, even when they were battling for control of lucrative
trade routes.

III

At the start of the sixteenth century the Turks were not as well informed
about the Indian Ocean as one might expect. Selma Reis, writing in 1525,
asserted that ‘the accursed Portuguese’ had captured Melaka ‘from Hindu
infidels’, whereas it had been under Muslim rule for many decades.40 One
man, however, had the curiosity and the connections that enabled him to
situate the Ottoman Empire in the wider world: Piri Reis, corsair, admiral,
cartographer and geographer extraordinary.41 Born not later than 1470, in
Gallipoli, the seat of a major Ottoman naval arsenal, he began his career
while still a boy in the fleet of his uncle, Kemal. Kemal was one of the most
successful Barbary corsairs of his day, raiding the Balearic Islands, Sardinia,
Sicily, Spain and France with the blessing of the Ottoman sultan.42 Piri took
command of his own vessel in a squadron led by his uncle during a bitter war
with Venice between 1499 and 1502 that saw key fortresses in the eastern
Mediterranean fall to the Turks. After serving briefly under the most feared
of all corsairs, Hayrettin Barbarossa, Piri returned to Gallipoli and in 1513 he
prepared a world map, of which more shortly.
Next, seeing the direction world affairs were taking, he gravitated towards
the Ottoman court, sailing with Ibrahim Pasha, who has been met already, to
newly subdued Egypt, where he presented his world map to Sultan Selim.
But he had grander ambitions as a geographer; in 1521 he completed the first
version of his Book on Navigation, whose importance was rapidly
appreciated by Ibrahim Pasha.43 During a storm Ibrahim saw that Piri was
consulting his piles of notes and was duly impressed. ‘Finish the book and
bring it to me, and we will present it to the Great Ruler of the World, Sultan
Süleyman the Lawgiver’ (Selim having died by now). Piri presented
Süleyman the Magnificent with a revised edition in 1526, followed by a
second world map two years later. He was still active in his seventies, taking
command of the Red Sea fleet anchored at Suez, and in 1552 he launched a
long-expected attack on Hormuz. At first everything went well: Turkish
forces landed on Hormuz Island and surrounded the citadel, which proved to
be so impregnable that Ottoman cannons had little effect. When he heard that
a Portuguese fleet was heading his way he prudently took refuge deep within
the Persian Gulf at Basra, but this was seen as an act of cowardice. The
charge of treason was strengthened when he sailed off to Suez on his own
with a pile of booty, even though the Ottoman governor of Basra forbade him
to do so. Now, without Ibrahim to protect him, his enemies at court turned
against him. Earlier in the century Hadım Süleyman had been spared after
making a mess of Ottoman naval plans, but Piri Reis was not so lucky;
everything depended on the sultan’s whim, and in 1554 he was beheaded in
Istanbul.44
At least twenty-six copies of the first version of Piri’s book are known,
most of which were copied in the seventeenth century, but one manuscript,
now in Dresden, dates from 1554, and another, in Oxford, from 1587. Of
sixteen copies of the revised version, several once again are late in date; they
are thought mainly to be presentation copies, whereas it has been suggested
that the copies of the first version, which are less grand in appearance, were
aimed at mariners and used at sea.45 This would make one think that the text
was read and had influence over many decades. But, surprisingly, his maps
and his book had a limited afterlife; it is not clear that they moulded Ottoman
thinking about the world, and this may have been the result of a curious
feature of Ottoman civilization: the refusal to permit printing in Turkish and
Arabic for several centuries, although Jews and Christians were allowed to
set up printing presses in places such as Safed in Galilee.46 At a time when
printed versions of Ptolemy’s admittedly incorrect Geography were being
widely disseminated, not to mention the enormous world map of
Waldseemüller depicting ‘America’, information about the rest of the world
was failing to reach a wider Turkish audience. Oddly, by writing in Turkish,
Piri Reis cut himself off from the more exalted readers who might have been
able to put his information to some use; the languages of high culture in the
Ottoman world at this time were Arabic and Persian, and it is not even clear
that Piri could write Arabic – it is likely that his second language was the
lingua franca, the mix of languages with a base in Spanish and Italian that
was used on the seaways of the Mediterranean to communicate with
merchants and slaves.47
 Since the time of Mehmet the Conqueror, in the mid- to late fifteenth
century, the Ottoman court had taken an interest in Western art and letters;
but Piri Reis’s connections went deeper, since he had access to secret
information. He drew on a very wide range of sources, not by any means all
Islamic; the Ottomans were well acquainted with the portolan charts
produced by the Catalans, Genoese and Venetians, and a good number of
Turkish versions of these maps survive from the period of Piri Reis.48 Piri
would have been perfectly familiar with this type of map from his time as a
corsair in the western Mediterranean. He said that he used twenty individual
maps as well as several world maps to complete his map of 1513; these
included an Arab map of India and a Portuguese map of both India and
China.49 How he obtained these is a puzzle, especially since the Portuguese
were so careful to embargo any information about their discoveries,
particularly maps. Further evidence that the Ottomans gained access to
western European maps comes from an extraordinary world map of 1519
made in Portugal but preserved in the Topkapı Palace Library in Istanbul.
The map shows a circular projection with the South Pole at the centre; it is
thus a global map of the southern hemisphere, conceivably created in Lisbon
by the court cartographer, Pedro Reinel, and anticipating the route taken by
Magellan and Elcano – Magellan would have displayed similar maps while
attempting to gain attention first at the court of King Manuel and then at that
of Emperor Charles.50 Quite how such a map reached the Ottoman court is a
great mystery. The finger has been pointed at Venetian spies, or one could
think of Portuguese New Christians of Jewish origin who fled their homeland
for the safer setting of the sultan’s capital city. Its apparent theft and its
arrival in Istanbul would certainly make an ideal topic for a novel by Orhan
Pamuk.
The surviving maps of 1513 and 1528 are just fragments of larger charts
showing the entire world, maybe one quarter and one sixth of the total,
preserved by accident – most likely they were the parts of the bigger chart
that were thought to be not very interesting, while the other parts, showing
the Indian Ocean, were worn to bits.51 For these fragments both show the
New World, but in a way that would have removed any Turkish fears that
Spanish or Portuguese navigators had found a back door into the Spice
Islands by taking a westward route across the Atlantic. South America slants
south-eastwards and joins a massive southern continent, and there is no break
anywhere along the Atlantic coast letting ships pass through somewhere
around Panama.52 The 1513 map shows a number of beautifully drawn
ships, such as the ship of ‘Mesir Anton the Genoese’, Antonio da Noli,
discoverer of the Cape Verde Islands.53 One ship, standing off the coast of
South America, carries this label: ‘this is the barque from Portugal that
encountered a storm and came to this land’, and another label on the map
describes how a Portuguese ship bound for India was blown on to the shores
of a new land. Piri knew, correctly, that a ship had been sent back to Portugal
with news of the discovery of Brazil, although he did not know that there was
a larger fleet that carried on to India. Another label, placed over the point
where South America merges into the great southern continent, begins: ‘it is
related by the Portuguese infidel that in this place night and day are, at their
shortest period, of two hours’ duration’, which shows that Piri Reis was using
Portuguese sources of information, and very early ones at that – Magellan
had yet to sail, but Vespucci claimed to have reached a long way down the
South American coast.54
Piri Reis was aware of the importance of Columbus, to whom he devoted
another label, much the longest on the map. There were quite a few crossed
wires: he told how ‘Qulunbu’ had presented his idea about crossing the ocean
to ‘the eminent men of Genoa’, who replied: ‘O foolish man, the end and
boundary of the world is to be found in the West. It is full of the mist of
darkness.’ But Piri’s uncle, Kemal Reis, had a Spanish prisoner who claimed
to have travelled to the newly discovered land with Qulunbu on three
occasions. After a long description of the lands Qulunbu visited, Piri Reis
remarked: ‘now these regions have been opened to all and have become well
known … The coasts and islands on this map are copied from the map of
Qulunbu.’55 Piri tried to reproduce the names of places all along the shores
he was mapping, and in the Atlantic islands in between. He understood the
importance of this information not just in the grand strategy of the Ottoman
Empire face to face with Spain and Portugal, but also as valuable knowledge
about the world. In that sense he was the intellectual kinsman of the
geographers of Renaissance Spain and Italy, even if he wrote in the Turkish
vernacular. This does not mean that he was any the less agitated about the
intrusion of Christian infidels into the Indian Ocean or that he had any
positive feelings towards the Portuguese whose maps he had been exploiting:

Know that Hormuz is an island. Many merchants visit it … but now,

O friend, the Portuguese have come there and built a stronghold on its
 cape. They control the place and collect the customs – you see into
what condition that province has sunk! The Portuguese have
vanquished the natives, and their own merchants crowd the
warehouses there. Whatever the season, trading cannot happen now
without the Portuguese.56

Piri Reis understood, then, that the European irruption into the Indian Ocean
had dramatically changed the political and commercial relationship between
the Ottoman lands and the rest of the world. Yet, paradoxically, his warnings
about the Portuguese were based on knowledge he had derived in part from
Spanish and Portuguese maps. Both the Ottomans and the Iberians had
acquired a much larger view of a world joined together by maritime
connections.
 34

The Great Galleons of Manila

The Ottomans were not alone in wishing the Portuguese ill-fortune in the
Indian Ocean. When Andrés de Urdaneta reached the court of Charles V at
Valladolid in 1536, after more than eleven years spent stuck in the East
Indies under Portuguese detention, he was not discouraged by his
experiences. He was still young, twenty-eight years old. He could only
deliver a verbal report, after the Portuguese had confiscated all his maps and
papers, but ‘he was very well informed, and able to relate, stage by stage, all
that he had seen’, according to the polymath natural historian Oviedo, who
witnessed his performance.1 Forty-four years had passed since Columbus
had set out for the Spice Islands by the western route, and Urdaneta was keen
to show that a western route was still feasible, even with America in the way
and the Pacific to be mastered. He told the emperor: ‘If Your Majesty were
pleased to order commerce to be maintained with the Moluccas, there might
be brought from there every year over 6,000 quintales of cloves [roughly
600,000 lb], and there are years when there is a harvest of more than 11,000
quintales.’ In addition, gold, nutmeg and mace could be found there; ‘there
are many rich and valuable conquests to be made round the Moluccas, and
many lands with much trade, including China, with which communication
might be made from the Moluccas.’2 It was still unclear whether the
Moluccas lay in the Spanish or Portuguese half of the world, as defined by
the treaty of 1494, but seven years earlier Charles had renounced Spanish
claims in return for a cash payment from Portugal of 350,000 ducats, which
was much-needed money at a time when Charles was busy with his Italian
wars.3 As the Spaniards consolidated their hold on Mexico, under Cortés,
and Peru, under Pizarro, it became clear that vast amounts of silver could be
extracted from the New World, and the Genoese were willing to advance
money in anticipation of the arrival of the silver fleets from America.4
Charles therefore had reason to believe his money worries would come to an
end.
 This explains the rather slow progress the Spaniards made in marking out
those parts of the western Pacific that they wanted to take under their control.
Gradually they learned that the Pacific was studded with islands, but they
took little interest in them – an expedition in 1536 headed into the south
Pacific and saw the Kiribati Islands, but the captain, Grijalva, decided he
would rather return to South America than press on to the Spice Islands.
However, his crew mutinied and killed him. Grijalva had had cogent reasons
for avoiding the Moluccas: he knew that Charles V had ceded the islands to
the Portuguese, and engaging with the Portuguese was always the great fear
of Spanish commanders en route to the East Indies. The sailors reached the
Moluccas after all and most were massacred by irate islanders, but two fell
into the hands of the Portuguese, with the result that their unsavoury story
can be told.5 Still, the gaps in the Spanish map of the Pacific were gradually
being filled in. In 1542 the Spaniards extended their ambitions all the way to
the Ryukyu Islands, which, as has been seen, were lively centres of trade with
China and Japan. The idea that was germinating in the minds of the Spaniards
was that they could use the Philippines (not as yet known by that name) as a
base from which to trade with east Asia. They did not rate the Philippines
themselves very highly; greedy for cloves and nutmeg, which fetched
startling prices in the Antwerp market, they were disappointed to find that the
Philippines could not offer them either spice.
In 1542 the viceroy of New Spain (that is, Mexico) despatched his brother-
in-law, Villalobos, to the Philippines, where his crew was at first discouraged
to find that the inhabitants did not bother, or need, to produce a surplus and
had no food to offer. Before long they were reduced to a diet of grubs,
psychedelic crabmeat and luminous but poisonous lizards. Yet the Spaniards
could see the potential of these islands not as sources of wealth in their own
right but as a strategic location looking towards Borneo, China and Melaka,
and they were impressed to find a market on the island of Sarangani, where
the Spanish crew spent seven hungry months; here, silk, porcelain and gold
were to be had. When a local king based on a neighbouring island offered the
Spaniards plenty of food and water, and showed them his wooden palace with
its collection of Chinese pottery and silk, Villalobos decided that, henceforth,
the island group would be known as the Philippines in celebration of the heir
to the throne of Castile, the future King Philip II, an honour that meant far
more to the Habsburg dynasty in Spain than to this king.6 But once again the
explorers were stymied by their ignorance of the prevailing winds in the
Pacific; when they tried to reach Mexico, they could not make any headway,
and Villalobos died on Amboyna, an island west of New Guinea, in 1544.
The Spaniards began, however, to see that the Philippines were not a
complete desert, even if they were less sophisticated than some parts of the
East Indies. The native peoples wore gold ornaments made out of local metal;
there was cinnamon bark; and ginger, long the second most popular eastern
spice, grew in the islands. The inhabitants were drawn from several peoples;
the area had been settled in the remote past by Malay navigators, and the
different languages spoken in the Philippines were related to Malay and the
Polynesian languages. The coastal peoples had often retained the skill in
seamanship for which the Pacific peoples are famous.7
The problem was that the Philippines seemed so inaccessible. Only in the
1550s did the Spanish king, now Philip II, decide that the time was ripe for a
new expedition, and his decision may have been influenced by short-term
inflation in the spice market: between 1558 and 1563 spice prices nearly
trebled in Old Castile, and cloves and cinnamon were particularly badly
affected. Quite why this occurred is not clear – one explanation is runaway
speculation in the spice market of Antwerp.8 The plan to reach the
Philippines was all very well, but the question remained whether there was
anyone who knew enough about the Pacific to guide a new venture across the
ocean. There was one person: Andrés de Urdaneta, who, moreover, was
conveniently convinced that the Philippines lay within the Spanish
hemisphere of the world. However, Urdaneta was well into his fifties and had
entered a convent of Augustinian friars; no one in his right mind wanted to
join such a risky voyage, which ensured that many of the crew were not
Spanish at all but Portuguese, Italian, Flemish and even Greek. But a personal
appeal from the king of Spain to Urdaneta persuaded him to leave his convent
and take up the position of senior pilot, advising the captain-general, Miguel
López de Legázpi.9
The fleet was to consist of two galleons and three smaller vessels, and the
first problem was that no shipyard capable of building large galleons existed
on the Pacific shore of Mexico. Everything had to be created from scratch,
including a workforce; and the right sorts of wood had to be obtained and
hauled down to the coast. The cost of building this tiny fleet was 7,000,000
pesos.10 It set out from Navidad, a port on the Pacific coast of Mexico, late
in 1564.11 One of the small ships, of a type known as the patache, or
pinnace, became detached from the rest of the flotilla but reached Mindanao
in the Philippines on its own; after patiently waiting for the other ships,
which had headed off elsewhere, its captain, Arellano, decided that he did not
have enough food to stay any longer and returned to Mexico, having spent
eight and a half months away from Navidad. This was the first really
successful return journey, because Arellano had the good sense to seek out
the east winds that would blow his ship back to the Americas. In the process
he discovered a route back from the Philippines, ignorance of which had
frustrated previous attempts to reach Mexico. There was a Kafkaesque finale,
though: he was accused of abandoning his commander and avoiding any
attempt to find him in the Philippines. After his own return to Mexico,
Legázpi submitted a request to the Audiencia, the highest court in New Spain,
demanding that Arellano be put on trial. Arellano was forced to defend his
conduct before the Audiencia but he was never actually punished for his
supposed crime.12
As for Legázpi, he made good progress in extending Spanish dominion
over the Philippines. Local rulers, including Muslim ones, were willing to
enter into pacts with him when they saw the glitter of American silver,
invaluable in trade with China. When the Filipinos objected, Spanish
firepower proved irresistible. Less blood was spilled than during the
Portuguese entry into the Indian Ocean, but Legázpi could be ruthless when
he thought occasion demanded a show of strength. His expedition was not all
about conquest, however; he informed King Philip that Chinese and Japanese
merchants came to trade in the big Philippine islands of Luzon and Mindoro
year in, year out; but he was also aware that he had come into an area where
Portuguese merchants occasionally wended their way. To keep them at bay
he really needed a base in the islands, and he needed to convince the local
sultans, even if they were Muslim, that Spanish overlordship was a good
thing.13
Like Arellano, Legázpi’s men found their way back to Mexico. Urdaneta
once again proved to be an able pilot, and the maps he made were not, this
time, lost to the Portuguese but were copied for generations. He found a
much better route than Arellano, but even so the voyage from the Philippines
to Mexico proved to be much longer than the journey outwards; the south-
west monsoon took the galleon San Pedro (sometimes referred to as the San
Pablo) up to the latitude of Japan, and then into the wind system of the
northern Pacific, which drove the ship eastwards in a great arc until it reached
the Santa Barbara Channel off California.14 It took a little over four months
for the galleon to reach Acapulco, in October 1565. The bare recitation of the
route taken does not do justice to the misery the sailors experienced on the
long homeward run. As with da Gama’s fleets, scurvy took the lives of
several men (sixteen died en route, but the crew numbered more than 200, so
the ratio of deaths was much better than on many earlier voyages). The
Legázpi expedition is generally taken to mark the beginning of the Manila
galleon trade, which lasted for 250 years from 1565 to 1815, punctuated by
occasional interruptions during periods of conflict or following the shipwreck
of a galleon.15 These galleons frequently displaced 1,000 tons and were
perhaps the largest trading ships afloat at the time.
Once they lay under Spanish rule the Philippines were treated as part of the
viceroyalty of New Spain, in other words as an extension of Mexico; and the
inhabitants, like the native Americans, were indiscriminately called ‘Indians’,
Indios, or, in the case of the large number of Muslims in some parts of the
archipelago, they were called ‘Moors’, Moros. These were the traditional
broad-brush ethnic categories into which the Spaniards divided much of
humanity.

II

While the circumnavigators, notably Magellan and Elcano and then Drake,
have attracted a great deal of attention, the really important circumnavigation,
conducted in stages, was that which was created following the opening of the
Manila galleon route, and this has been oddly ignored by historians.16 The
Philippines were linked to China and Japan, but also to Mexico and Peru;
goods transported across Central America reached Veracruz on the Gulf of
Mexico, were ferried to Havana and were then carried across the Atlantic to
Seville and Cádiz. And in the opposite direction, despite the longstanding
hostility between the Spanish colonizers and the Portuguese, goods filtered
from Manila to Macau, Melaka, Goa and then into the Portuguese spice
trading network all the way to Lisbon and Antwerp. The oceans had been
joined together, and the nails that held the network together were all these
cities. Chinese silk and ceramics might reach a table in Spain by way of
Mexico or the Cape of Good Hope. Spanish hidalgos in Mexico, and the
native elite, could dine off Chinese porcelain and dress in fine silks brought
by galleon once a year from Manila.17 For, as the Spaniards and their
Portuguese rivals penetrated deeper into the trade networks of the South
China Sea, the search for ever greater quantities of spices was matched by a
passion for the exotic products of both China and Japan. These ambitions
were independently boosted by the decision of the Ming emperor in 1567 to
permit Chinese merchants to trade abroad, after a century and half during
which the Ming court had strongly discouraged foreign trade.18
To achieve their aims the Spaniards would have to identify the best-placed
harbour from which they could conduct their trade. An expedition sent out in
1570 had the pleasing result that the sultan of Manila, a settlement on the
island of Luzon, entered into a pact of blood brotherhood, in the traditional
way (which involved drinking a liquid containing drops of the blood of the
parties to the agreement). However, there is a difference between sworn
amity and submission, and Sultan Soliman was upset when he realized that
the Spaniards now thought he was their subject and owed the king of Spain
tribute. This meant that the Spaniards resorted to force, but in 1571 they
formally established Manila as the capital of their Philippine colony, a title
confirmed by King Philip in 1595, when the city, now booming, was
recognized as Cabeza, head, de Filipinas.19 The Chinese had their own story
about the foundation of Manila:

When they perceived that the country was weak and could be
occupied, they bestowed rich presents upon the king and demanded a
plot of land as big as an oxhide for building houses and living there.
The king did not suspect any trickery and assented. These men
thereupon cut the hide of an ox into narrow strips, pieced these
 together until they extended the length of a thousand fathoms, and in
this way encompassed the whole land of Luzon, which they then
claimed, in accordance with their agreement.20

This was the story of how Dido founded Carthage, which had found its way,
perhaps in the storytelling of Portuguese travellers, all the way to China.21
Yet the gloomy view of Legázpi was that ‘this land cannot be sustained by
trade’, by which he meant not that the creation of a trading base there would
fail, but that the resources of the Philippines were not sufficient to keep
Manila alive. Its future depended on becoming the hub for Pacific trade –
which is what did happen.22
Remarkably, the Manila galleon – often just one very large ship – was the
main source of income for the Spanish population of Manila. The lifeline
linking Manila to Mexico was fragile and was easily snapped. Even so,
sailors and settlers were prepared to risk taking this route in the search for
profit or sometimes out of curiosity. A vivid account of a journey to Manila
survives from the hand of Francesco Carletti, a Florentine merchant who set
out across the world in 1594, when he was about twenty-one years of age. He
had been living in Seville with his father, learning ‘the profession of
merchant’, and after three years there his father suggested that they should
hire a small ship of about 400 tons, sail to the Cape Verde Islands, load the
ship with black slaves, and transport them to the West Indies. This was (it is
sad to say) a normal enough operation, apart from the fact that the Carlettis
were Italian, and only subjects of Spain were permitted to ply these routes. It
was therefore essential to find a Spanish backer; this was a woman from
Seville who had married a Pisan businessman, and who agreed to front the
expedition.23 The Carlettis arrived in the Caribbean safely, mourning the loss
of slaves thrown into the sea after they died (so they said) from eating fresh
fish, and on a whim they penetrated deeper and deeper into the New World,
reaching Panama and Peru, and then up to Mexico, visiting Acapulco and
next trekking up to Mexico City with a load of silver, buying and selling, and
recording the wonderful sights they saw, for Francesco had decided that his
account of the voyage was to be sent to Ferdinando de’ Medici, the Grand
Duke of Tuscany and an enthusiast for the promotion of trade – he showered
the free port of Livorno with privileges that enabled Armenians, Jews and
others to settle in the city.
 The Carlettis had it in mind to buy goods and take them back to Lima. The
maritime route along the coast from Peru to Mexico was now fully
functioning; it was a Spanish creation, for the Aztecs and the Incas had barely
been aware of one another’s empire. But the longer they spent in Mexico, the
more Carletti’s father was convinced that this was only halfway to where he
needed to be: the Philippines. Once again they had to find a way of being
taken on board when only Spaniards were allowed to buy passage to the
islands. However, those who served on board were exempt from this rule –
after all, the crews included large numbers of Filipinos, Chinese and even
black Africans. The Carlettis were appointed as officers on board, though the
captain agreed to find two sailors who would perform their duties so long as
they renounced their officers’ pay. There was also an official limit of half a
million golden escudos (converted into silver) on the amount of silver, mined
in Peru and Mexico, that could be taken to the Philippines to pay for the
goods available there. The Crown wanted to treat the Manila trade as a royal
monopoly, but in reality there was plenty of opportunity to smuggle money
into the islands, and goods out of them; the captain was fully complicit, for
‘he was used to carrying such things for various people who shipped money’,
with the result that the amount of bullion on board was worth 1,000,000
escudos. Out of this, the captain was entitled to take 2 per cent as a fee, so
one can see why he was perfectly willing to defy the Spanish authorities
despite threats of confiscation and worse.24
The outward journey was generally less of a trial, and after setting out in
March 1596 the Carlettis enjoyed a ‘prosperous and very happy navigation’;
there was always a following wind, so that the journey lasted sixty-six days,
compared to the six months that a return trip might take. The ships took on
fresh water in the Marianas, the islands Magellan had called the ‘Islands of
Thieves’; it was loaded in the form of very stout lengths of bamboo cane,
filled with water. All the inhabitants wanted was bits and pieces of iron,
which were prized more than gold: ‘they were asking in the friendliest way,
rubbing the palm of their hands along the side of their hearts, saying
“Chamarri, her, her,” which means “Friends, iron, iron.”’ Francesco Carletti
was especially impressed by the boats the islanders built, ‘so well made of
the thinnest boards painted and worked with various colours, these mixed
with much artistry, and sewed together without nails in a capricious and
beautiful way and style, so light that they appeared to be birds flying over
that sea’. He admired the outriggers that made sure the boats could never
capsize or sink, because they buoyed up the boats, and the long, narrow sails
‘made in the manner of rush mats’.25 He was less impressed by the
‘barbarians’ themselves, whose men went around shamelessly naked.
In many respects, the approach to Manila was the most dangerous part of
these voyages. Manila lies on the western side of the large northern
Philippine island of Luzon, and to reach it ships had to pass through the
Luzon Strait between Taiwan and Luzon, and then manoeuvre through
narrow channels and past shoals into Manila Bay. Even before the galleon
carrying Carletti had passed Taiwan, a typhoon started to blow, and at that
point the sails were at last lowered, and the galleons were immobilized for
eighteen days, running short of fresh water. Carletti described how water was
rationed and orders were given not to cook any food, on the grounds that this
made people drink more (the meat taken on board was heavily salted); all one
was allowed was ship’s biscuit moistened in water and oil, and sprinkled with
sugar. These privations seemed distant memories once the storm abated and
the ships anchored off Luzon, taking on fresh fish and marvellous fruits:
‘truly those bananas in that region seemed to me one of the most delicious
fruits to be found anywhere in the world, and in particular certain ones that
had a very subtle odour, so that one could desire nothing more welcome or
more flavoursome.’26
Carletti was not as overwhelmed by Manila as he was by Philippine
bananas. He recognized that its layout and the style of its houses were similar
to what he had seen in Mexico City, which was much larger, though he
thought Manila was better defended by its thick walls and a garrison of 800
Spanish soldiers, which made sense as they faced many enemies in a sea that
contained, he said, 12,000 islands. But he was impressed by the profits that
the Spanish settlers were able to make: ‘from the merchandise brought there
by the Chinese and then transported to Mexico, they still earn 150 and 200
per cent.’

Whatever those islands lack is brought there from outside. From

Japan comes the wheat flour from which they make bread to serve to
the Spaniards; from there also come divers other things that they bring
on their ships and sell. And the Chinese – that is, those from the
province of China – also come there each year with some fifty ships
laden with raw silk that has been spun and woven into pieces of
velvet, satin, damask or taffeta, as well as much cotton cloth and
 musk, sugar, porcelain, and very many other sorts of merchandise,
from all of which they make very noble trade with the Spaniards, who
buy it from them to take it to Mexico in New Spain.27

The year Carletti arrived there were only about a dozen of these junks in port,
and everything was snapped up quickly. Carletti attributed the lack of
Chinese goods to a big fire in the Chinese quarter of the city; but, as will be
seen, there were other interruptions: pirate raids, riots by Chinese settlers, and
so on.
Carletti did not simply report on business opportunities; he was also
fascinated by the Filipinos themselves: the Moros, who enjoyed gambling on
cockfights, and the heavily tattooed Bisaios, the pagan population, whose
men pierced their penises with studs, which somehow increased their ‘lustful
pleasure’, though at first, at any rate, the studs made their female partners
extremely uncomfortable. But he was full of praise for the islands –
‘everything is good in those islands.’28 Aware that the Spanish government
made it very difficult for foreign merchants to trade out of Manila, the
Carlettis next conceived a plan to sail by way of Japan to China, the East
Indies, Goa and Lisbon. This was no more straightforward than attempting to
load merchandise on ships bound for Acapulco. Castilians were forbidden to
enter the Portuguese area of trade, under pain of confiscation of goods and
imprisonment. This rule still held even though Philip II of Spain had
succeeded to the throne of Portugal in 1581, following the death of King
Sebastian in battle against the Moroccans and of his childless heir shortly
afterwards. It was a way of keeping the peace between enemies who had a
common monarch but not a common purpose.
The answer to the problem the Carlettis faced was to steal out of Manila at
night carrying their bars of silver on board a Japanese ship, for Japan was ‘a
free region in which neither the Portuguese nor the Castilians rule’. This ship
was similar to a junk, and Carletti was fascinated but not entirely convinced
by the sail, which, he said, folded up like a fan but was really quite weak, and
he was intrigued also by the fragile rudder.29 Portuguese ships arrived each
year at Nagasaki, sailing in from Macau on the coast of China, so that there
would be no great difficulty in heading for the South China Sea after looking
around parts of Japan, which was not yet closed to foreign traders, and where
Carletti encountered a leaf called cha, or tea, and warm rice wine – his
experiences in Japan will be examined later.30 Carletti’s account of Manila
clearly demonstrates the city’s place at the hub of networks linking the
Spanish Philippines not just to Mexico, and through Mexico to Spain, but
also to China (when the junks arrived) and northwards towards Japan; nor in
reality were the Portuguese always unwelcome in the city. As a centre of
exchange, Manila was connected to the maritime trading centres of the entire
known world.

III

Manila, with its fine harbour and its fertile hinterland, was a cosmopolitan
city, though that is not to say that relations between its many different
peoples were always cordial. The Spanish presence was complicated by the
fact that the conquerors were Catholic and that they were in constant contact
with Muslims, Buddhists, Daoists and pagans. While the Spanish settlers in
Manila, numbering 7,350 in 1650, confined themselves to a fortified city,
which came to be known as Intramuros, ‘within the walls’ (still the name of
old Manila), the suburbs of Manila teemed with Chinese, Japanese and
Filipinos.31 There had been a settlement at the site the Filipinos called
Maynila for some time, and the Spaniards thought of calling the city ‘Sweet
Name of Jesus’, but somehow a hispanized version of the old name seemed
simpler.32 The Chinese presence in the Philippines already had a long history
when the Spanish conquerors arrived. In the Song period, from the mid-tenth
to the late thirteenth century, Chinese junks regularly visited the islands, for
this was a period when the imperial court encouraged private trade. But
private trade continued unofficially even under the sterner policies of the
early Ming emperors; the Philippines were among the places visited by
Zheng He’s fleet, since the Yung-lo emperor was keen to draw the islands
under his overlordship and had already sent an official to the island of Luzon
in 1405 in the expectation that he would take charge of the place.33 Two
years later Zheng He’s fleet arrived, and then and on other occasions tribute
reached China from the islands, including gold, precious stones and pearls,
but Filipino boats continued to come to China, and spices from Java and the
Moluccas were collected in the Philippines by Chinese merchants who
evaded the official ban on private trade. The clearest evidence for intensive
contact between China and the Philippines before the arrival of the Europeans
comes from the description of local chieftains dining off porcelain in
Pigafetta’s account of Magellan’s voyage, while archaeological finds even in
the Philippine uplands, away from the coastal areas visited by shipping, show
that gifts of Chinese ceramics were used to bond the highland chiefs to the
powerful datus, or petty rulers, of low-lying regions. Admittedly, the datus
kept the finest porcelain for themselves.34
It rapidly became clear that Manila could not live without China, just as it
could not live without Acapulco. After a great massacre of the Chinese in
1603, a Spanish commentator complained that the city ran out of food, even
out of shoes, for the Chinese were not just traders but artisans: ‘it is true that
the city can neither go on nor maintain itself without these Chinese’.35 The
Spaniards knew the Chinese as Sangleys, a corruption of the term seng-li,
which in the Amoy dialect of Chinese meant ‘trade’.36 The Sangleys arrived
on big junks that carried up to 400 passengers, some of whom could be
expected to stay put in Manila, settling in the Parían, or Chinese quarter. The
junks were quite unlike European or Filipino vessels; each end was square,
and the deck was covered with little huts roofed with palm leaves, while the
hold was divided up by partitions, so that if the ship sprang a leak only one
partition at a time would be flooded. Merchants rented space in these
partitions, storing their cargo for a fee of 20 per cent of the price the goods
fetched; another 20 per cent or more went to the Chinese brokers in Manila
who helped manage the sales, if need be by handing out bribes to Spanish
officials, although officially goods were sold through a system of wholesale
bargaining which met the needs of Spanish merchants – with little or no
knowledge of Chinese, they remained suspicious of the bargaining ability of
the Chinese.37 Already familiar with old Maynila, the Chinese junks came in
ever greater numbers once the Spanish city had come into being, recorded
arrivals rising from only six in 1574 to forty or more each year by 1580, and
generally at least thirty could be expected to arrive, so long as the Chinese
knew that the Manila galleons had come into port with the silver needed for
settling bills. The visit was brief, to allow for the monsoons and the danger of
typhoons: out from China in March, and leaving Manila by early June.38
This trade was dominated by silk and porcelain. At first some of the
Spaniards were rather dismissive when talking about the quality of the silk
coming from China, but once the Chinese had a good sense of the distant
markets they were trying to reach all this changed. They imitated the silks of
Andalusia, and opinions differed about which was better, Chinese or
Andalusian silk cloth. The business community of Seville looked with
disapproval on the expansion of the silk trade from China to Manila and from
Manila to Mexico, having assumed that Mexico would be their own special
market. Chinese kilns showed similar adaptability to Chinese looms. In the
seventeenth century Chinese potters knew what the Europeans and the
Japanese wanted, and modified their designs accordingly. What resulted was
a European and Spanish colonial taste for Chinese goods, subtly altered to
meet the cultural preferences of the purchasers; this was an important
moment in the encounter of Chinese civilization with the West. Antonio de
Morga, president of the high court, or Audiencia, at Manila late in the
sixteenth century, itemized the goods that arrived on these junks:

Raw silk in bundles, of the fineness of two strands, and other silk of
coarser quality; fine untwisted silk, white and of all colours, wound in
small skeins; quantities of velvets, some plain and some embroidered
in all sorts of figures, colours and fashions, others with body of gold
and embroidered with gold; woven stuffs and brocades, of gold and
silver upon silk of various colours and patterns, quantities of gold and
silver thread in skeins; damasks, satins, taffetas and other cloths of all
colours … 39

That was only the silk; they also brought linen and cotton cloth, hangings,
coverlets, tapestries, metal goods including copper kettles, gunpowder, wheat
flour, fresh and preserved fruits, decorated writing cases, gilded benches, live
birds and pack animals – each junk must have been the sixteenth-century
equivalent of a floating department store. So responsive were the Chinese to
the demands of the market in Manila and Mexico that they sometimes
jumped to the wrong conclusion. A Spaniard had lost his nose, probably from
venereal disease, and he commissioned a wooden nose from a visiting
Chinese craftsman, whom he paid very generously. On his next trip to Manila
the craftsman thought he had worked out how to make himself a small
fortune, and brought a whole cargo of wooden noses, only to discover what
he should have noticed earlier: that the Spaniards in Manila already had noses
of their own.40
All this was paid for with enormous quantities of Peruvian, and to a lesser
extent Mexican, silver shipped out from Acapulco on the annual galleon
voyage. One estimate for the quantity of American silver mined between
1500 and 1800 is 150,000 tons; only some of this was carried west on the
Manila galleons (apparently 12,000,000 pesos of silver were sent to Manila in
1597, 5,000,000 in most years), but even so the export of American silver had
a dramatic effect on the silver-starved Chinese economy.41 The Ming
emperors had tried to deal with the shortage of silver within their empire by
continuing the Mongol practice of issuing paper money. Foreign rulers who
received gracious gifts of paper money in exchange for their tribute may well
have wondered whether this was fair exchange, especially when (as in 1410)
an embassy from the Philippines brought the emperor a present of gold.42
Another possibility was to collect taxes in grain, but Chinese officials
responded to the influx of bullion by accepting payments in silver instead, as
it was easier to transport; and then a decision to rationalize a whole series of
taxes into what was evocatively called the ‘Single Whip’, in about 1570,
made silver payments the norm. In the very long term the gold:silver ratio in
China became less extreme; it stood at 1:5.5 in Canton around 1600, but
could be as high as 1:14 in contemporary Spain. In China as in Europe, the
arrival of large amounts of bullion pushed up prices, leading to a ‘great
inflation’; on the other hand, the arrival of so much silver drove economic
expansion within Ming China by vastly boosting the money supply.43
Meanwhile visiting merchants could buy gold cheaply with silver so long as
the Chinese exchange rate was much more favourable than elsewhere. There
were opportunities to make a considerable fortune by shifting bullion around
the world from places rich in silver to places poor in silver, something the
Genoese and Venetians had known in earlier centuries.44 A Portuguese
merchant commented in 1621: ‘silver wanders throughout the world in its
peregrinations before flocking to China, where it remains, as if at its natural
centre.’45
Chinese trade brought people as well as goods to Manila. The Chinese
quarter, the Parían, had been set aside by a late sixteenth-century governor of
the Philippines as a sort of Chinese ghetto; the name was a corruption of the
Chinese word for ‘organization’.46 This lay outside the walled area of
Intramuros inhabited by the Spanish settlers, and it grew very rapidly, so that
by 1600 there were more than 400 shops in the reserved area and the Chinese
population of Manila is thought to have reached 12,000, mainly men, as they
tended to arrive from China without women, though many took Filipino
wives. The Spaniards were deeply suspicious of the inhabitants of the Parían.
Some became Catholics, but on one occasion the ringleader of Chinese
opposition to the Spaniards was a disillusioned Christian. King Philip III
believed that they were a ‘great peril’.47 Tensions increased when Manila
was under threat from Chinese ships, as occurred in 1574; that year Chinese
pirates aboard seventy large junks commanded by Lin Feng, or Limahon,
overran large parts of Manila, and were only beaten back with great difficulty
after Spanish reinforcements arrived by sea under the able command of Juan
de Salcedo, who was the grandson of the pioneer of the Philippines, Legázpi.
Once Limahon and his men had been chased away from Manila, the Spanish
ships caught up with the pirates and annihilated their fleet. But there was also
trouble inside the colony. In 1593 the Spanish governor and Spanish
members of his crew were assassinated by Chinese oarsmen aboard his
galley. The governor’s son and successor sent out an appeal as far as Macau
and Melaka in the hope of tracing the culprits and arresting them, and a few
Chinese sailors were sent from Melaka to Manila for execution, though they
may just have been scapegoats. Meanwhile (a Chinese account says) the
Chinese, from love of trade, continued to live in Manila.48
Tension boiled over every fourteen years, on average, during the late
sixteenth and seventeenth century. The most bizarre example of Chinese–
Spanish tension took place in 1603, and even at the time the Spaniards
wondered whether they were witnessing a farce or serious political
negotiations. Three mandarins arrived in Manila, and were ceremonially
carried to the governor’s palace, where they said that they were looking for
the gold-bearing island of Cabit, which was not far off and belonged to no
ruler. There was indeed a place called Cavite near Manila, a port that served
as a gateway to the capital, and the mandarins were taken there and were
shown that it was not full of gold.49 It did possess a naval shipyard, and that
was surely what the mandarins hoped to inspect. The arrival of the mandarins
set off rumours about their real intentions. The Spanish settlers became
convinced that they were spies and that a large Chinese fleet was being
prepared, bearing 100,000 soldiers who would flush the Spaniards out of the
Philippines. On top of this, rumours spread that the Chinese in the Parían
district were about to rise in revolt. The mistrust between Spaniards and
Chinese was nothing new, but Chinese grievances mounted as Japanese
mercenaries who formed part of the Manila garrison threatened to head off
rebellion by massacring the Chinese. October 1603 saw a series of terrible
events, as the Chinese rose in revolt, burned the outskirts of the city and
killed the elite soldiers of Spain, including the governor; on another occasion
they were able to scatter the formidable Japanese mercenaries. The rebels
even massacred fellow Chinese who were not interested in joining the
rebellion. The rebellion could only be put down when Spanish reinforcements
arrived from elsewhere in the islands; they pursued and killed Chinese rebels
everywhere they could find them, and a Chinese chronicle states that the
death toll was as high as 25,000.50
Even the massacre of thousands of Chinese did not lead to a rupture with
China: trade continued and 6,000 settlers came back to the Parían within the
next two years. The new governor told King Philip III: ‘this country has been
greatly consoled at seeing that the Chinese have chosen to continue their
commerce, of which we were much in doubt.’ The Chinese view, not
surprisingly, had a slightly different emphasis: ‘after that time the Chinese
gradually flocked to Manila; and the savages [the Spaniards], seeing profit in
the commerce with China, did not oppose them.’51

IV

King Philip had even grander plans, going far beyond a trading relationship
with the Chinese. As early as 1573 the idea of a Spanish invasion of China
had been mooted. The examples of Mexico and Peru seemed to prove that
compact Spanish armies, well supplied with arms, could overwhelm mighty
empires. The Japanese were known to hate the Ming and could be persuaded
to join the invasion. The Ming Empire was dismissed as fragile and ill-
defended. As with the other Iberian conquests, the mercenary and the
spiritual were intertwined. One only needed to think of the great benefit to
Christendom of conquering this heathen land and converting its inhabitants to
the Catholic faith. An expedition set out from Manila in June 1575, and many
of those on board imagined that they were conquistadores who would win
control of the legendary wealth of China. However, the first priority was to
persuade the Ming emperor that Spanish friars should be allowed to preach
the faith in China. Another topic for discussion was the creation of a Spanish
trading base on the Chinese coast opposite Taiwan, which the Chinese were
quite happy to permit, especially if the Spanish fleet would help clear the
waters between the Philippines and China of pirates – one troublemaker,
Limahon, was as much of a nuisance to the Chinese as he was to the
Spaniards.52 Over the next few years schemes to invade China were
presented again and again at Philip’s court, and – though they looked
attractive – the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English navy in 1588
brought Philip down to earth. Hugh Thomas wondered whether these
schemes might have been brought to fruition had Philip not lost his fleet that
year, while the increasingly bitter rebellion in Philip’s north European
possessions, the Netherlands, was another drain on resources.53
Philip understood that his priority would have to be the promotion of
Spain’s commercial interests in the western Pacific, rather than dreams of
conquering another exotic empire. His Spanish subjects, not just in Manila
but in Mexico, Peru and even Europe, were fascinated by Chinese goods.54
Behind their commercial ambitions lay the old question of rivalry not with
Chinese merchants but with Portuguese ones. The Spaniards were aware that
their Portuguese rivals had managed to camp on the very edge of China,
where, at the mouth of the Pearl River, which leads to Guangzhou (Canton),
they had created the outpost of Macau, whose foundation will be examined in
the next chapter.55 After 1580, and Philip’s accession to the throne of
Portugal as well as Castile, opportunities seemed to beckon for Spanish trade
through Macau. The king was not keen, however, banning Spanish visits to
Macau in 1593. A few years later he did permit the Spaniards to visit the
coast of China, and they tried to copy the Portuguese by setting up their own
base at a place they called El Piñal, which also lay close to the Pearl River; it
probably stood somewhere in the territory of modern Hong Kong. Not
surprisingly, the Portuguese complained vociferously, while a Spanish
official who had to endure a freezing winter in El Piñal in 1598 grumbled that
not just the Portuguese but the Chinese were an endless source of trouble –
rather than robbing the Spaniards by violence they found more subtle means
of robbing them ‘by other and worse methods’, in other words clever trading
practices.56 El Piñal did not survive much longer. Over time, contact
between Macau and Manila grew; Manila learned to look westwards as well
as eastwards, and the value of goods sent from Macau to Manila reached
1,500,000 pesos by 1630.57 From the perspective of the Manila settlers, what
counted was that the Chinese junks kept coming, accompanied by Filipino
outrigger craft, Portuguese ships and, importantly, Japanese junks.

V
The Japanese connections of Manila were not as important to the city’s
prosperity as its Chinese connections, but they were nonetheless significant.
It would be wrong to think that Japan always cut itself off from contact with
Europeans, once the Portuguese, Spaniards and finally the Dutch had
penetrated into their waters. The closure of trade to European merchants for
more than two centuries, except through Nagasaki (where the Dutch
established a small trading station in 1641), followed a period of close but
wary engagement with these visitors from the other side of the world, who
were as puzzled by the Japanese as the Japanese were by them. Until 1639
the Portuguese enjoyed an active trade in Japanese silk; problems arose,
however, when Jesuit missionaries, also Portuguese, began to proselytize
actively in southern Japan, and the shoguns decided that not just they but
converted Japanese were a political threat. A Spanish pilot who reached
Japan had brought with him a world map on which the many lands of the
Spanish Empire were marked. The Japanese were curious to know how these
conquests had come about.

‘Nothing is easier,’ the pilot answered. ‘Our kings begin by sending

into countries which they desire to conquer some friars, who engage
in the work of converting the people to our religion. When they have
made considerable progress, troops are sent in who are joined by the
new Christians. They then have little difficulty in settling the rest.’58

News of this tactless conversation is said to have prompted the regent,

Hideyoshi, to begin the first of a series of persecutions of Christians in Japan.
In the late sixteenth century, as the example of Manila has already shown,
Japanese mercenaries were a familiar and frightening sight, and the high
quality of their training and armaments, as well as their reputation for
ferocity, made them the prime choice of anyone looking for paid military
help. Japanese mercenaries were readily available, following the unification
of much of Japan by the regent and chancellor, Hideyoshi, ten years earlier,
capped by the success of Tokugawa Ieyasu in defeating his enemies in 1600.
There was not much for them to do in Japan itself, so foreign opportunities
beckoned. Occasionally, this admiration for the Japanese could take an
awkward turn. Maybe they were such skilled soldiers that they would be
tempted to launch an invasion of the Philippines? After all, there were plenty
of Japanese merchants in Manila by the 1590s.
 For this reason the Spanish governor decided that the Japanese, like the
Chinese, needed their own quarter, known as the Dilao: ‘to relieve our
anxiety regarding so many Xaponese traders in the city, it would be advisable
to assign them a settlement located outside the city, after first taking away all
their weapons’. By 1606 there were more than 3,000 Japanese living in the
Dilao; later, it attracted large numbers of Japanese Christians, for whom life
in Japan was becoming increasingly difficult; it was the largest Japanese
settlement outside the homeland. Only in the 1630s, with the decline of direct
trade between the Philippines and Japan, did this community pack its bags
and leave. The governor was also worried by the large number of Japanese
servants living in Manila, who had free entry into houses within the city and
might set fire to Manila. Antonio de Morga, who has been met already in his
capacity as president of the high court, wrote in 1609 that the Japanese are ‘of
good disposition and courageous … of noble bearing and carriage, and much
given to ceremony and courtesies’, and he insisted that ‘the maintenance of
friendly relations between the islands and Japan is advisable’.59
Admiration was, then, combined with fear. This meant that Japanese ships
were by and large untouchable. In 1610 a Japanese trading ship that carried
the ‘vermilion seal’, guaranteeing the shogun’s protection, reached Manila
just as the Spanish and Dutch fleets engaged in battle with one another
offshore. The Europeans suspended action while this ship serenely passed
through their ranks, and no attempt was made by either side to come on
board. This was not because anyone was afraid of Japanese firepower;
trading vessels of this sort would not have carried guns. Both the Spaniards
and the Dutch knew that the Japanese were under orders to report any
interference to the shogun’s court, where reprisals would be launched against
the nation that had insulted the empire’s subjects. The seizure by a Spanish
captain of a Japanese ship off Siam in 1629 showed how things could go
wrong if the government, or bakufu, was offended. The Japanese seized a
Portuguese ship at Nagasaki in retaliation, drawing the Portuguese (then still
subjects of King Philip) into the quarrel. An embassy from Japan to Manila,
two years after the incident, failed to soothe either side, and contact with
Japan withered, while the Christians in Japan underwent further persecution.
The Spanish and Portuguese attempts to spread Christianity in Japan did
nothing to help the situation. The governor of the Philippines complained in
1636 that ‘the trade with Japan has been spoiled by the indiscretion of certain
religious’.60
 Japan was attractive for other reasons than its formidable mercenaries. The
sixteenth century saw the extension of silkworm cultivation, and new centres
of silk-weaving also emerged, with the encouragement of the feudal lords
who dominated during the age of the shoguns, and who saw good
opportunities for profit in the silk industry, as well as wanting to clothe
themselves in magnificent fabrics. They encouraged the creation of markets.
The regent Hideyoshi cleared the land of bandits and cleared the sea of
pirates, as well as encouraging the free movement of goods by abolishing
internal customs stations. He also tried to take control of the production of
silver and gold wherever he could. Hideyoshi also supported foreign trade,
encouraging a trading expedition to Korea and taking charge of the key port
of Nagasaki. He snapped up (for honest payment) all the raw silk on board
when what was described as a foreign ‘black ship’ reached his coast, and
acted much the same way when a Spanish ship came in from the Philippines
loaded with ceramics, or when Portuguese ships arrived bearing gold. His
successor, Ieyasu, was so keen to promote good relations with the Spaniards
that in 1604 the governor of the Philippines felt able to tell King Philip III
that ‘peace and friendship with the king of Japan goes on continuing’ (though
the shogun was not in fact king).

VI

Ieyasu was thoughtful and observant, and he realized how important to

Manila was the link to Acapulco. He too wanted a stake in trade with
Mexico. He wanted Japanese merchants to have rights of access in New
Spain, and he wanted the Manila galleons to make a short detour and put in at
a Japanese port en route to Acapulco. The Spaniards prevaricated, but Ieyasu
was able to seize his opportunity in 1609 when the San Francisco, bearing
the ex-governor of the Philippines, foundered on his shores. This official
made a treaty with Ieyasu, although his authority to do so was very doubtful;
and Ieyasu even promised to permit missionaries to preach in his islands.61
In 1610 the ex-governor was ferried back to Mexico on a ship provided
(partly thanks to a loan from the shogun) that had been built in Japan but
according to European standards. Ieyasu was well aware that Japanese
navigational skills lagged behind those of the Europeans, and would dearly
have liked to create a shipyard on the European model. However, this ship
was built under the direction of an English shipwright and merchant, or
perhaps one should say pirate, who had managed to reach Japan, William
Adams, known in Japan as Miura Anjin. Adams’s story was another tale of
shipwreck, this time aboard a Dutch vessel out of Rotterdam, De Liefde (‘The
Beloved’), that had ambitiously set out in 1598, taking an elaborate route by
way of the Cape Verde Islands, west Africa and the Strait of Magellan before
the ship was washed up on the shore of Japan. The expedition was better at
marauding than at trading. In the Cape Verde Islands, where the crew hoped
to take on food and water, they occupied Praia, on the main island, Santiago;
the unsurprising result was that the Portuguese governor sent them packing
without new supplies, after telling them that he would have sent supplies but
for their awful behaviour (memories of Francis Drake’s sacking of the then
capital, Ribeira Grande, in 1585 were still powerful). They reached
Patagonia, and there were altercations with Patagonian Indians, supposedly
eleven feet tall. Passing through the Strait of Magellan, they decided that it
was too difficult to return the way they had come, and settled on Japan as a
destination, since they were carrying heavy Dutch broadcloth which they
realized, belatedly, was not the sort of cloth anyone in the tropical East Indies
would want to buy.62
Ieyasu met Adams and took a liking to him; but he was suspicious about
the intentions of the Dutch and English visitors, and for a time clapped him in
prison. These suspicions were justified, since the Dutch crew had probably
been more interested in finding Spanish treasure ships, as Sir Francis Drake
had managed to do several years earlier, than in creating a new route to the
Spice Islands or indeed Japan. Fortunately, Ieyasu concluded that Adams
possessed the skill needed to build a ship in the Western style. Adams
protested that he did not know a great deal about shipbuilding, but even so he
and his colleagues put together a seaworthy vessel.63 The ship set sail along
with an official ambassador and Japanese merchants, and it returned in 1611
bearing a Spanish ambassador, who, however, was as discouraging as he
dared to be. Ieyasu was, in any case, having doubts about Spanish ambitions.
All the same, a few attempts were then made to set up a Japan–Acapulco
route, manned by Japanese ships, but mutual hostility made sure that direct
contact soon came to an end; a final voyage to Acapulco took place in 1616.
Nothing, however, compared with the experiences of an official Japanese
party that travelled all the way to Europe, by way of Mexico, setting out from
Japan in 1613 and only returning home in 1620. Their journey continues to
fascinate readers of Japanese literature, thanks to Shusaku Endo’s book The
Samurai.64 The travellers reached Seville, where they brought a letter
proposing a Japan–Seville trade route, and even promising that Japan would
accept the new faith. Their arrival caused great excitement. They moved on to
Madrid, where (given the Japanese obsession with rank) they probably
understood the consternation of the royal court at the fact that the letter had
not been written by either the emperor or the shogun, but by a lower official;
so they were offered the same honours as would be provided for the
ambassadors of an Italian duke. Their leader, Hasekura, was baptized by the
royal chaplain in Spain before the embassy moved on to Rome, where
Hasekura was given the title of patrician and senator and was granted an
audience by the pope. Ironically, all this was happening just as Ieyasu
embarked on another persecution of Christians in Japan; the promise that he
would turn Japan Christian was an empty one.65 By the end of their
extraordinary journey, they had not achieved much beyond knowledge of the
New World and Europe, and if anything their immersion in the society of
Philip III’s Christian empire made them more suspicious of the Catholic
world, and less inclined to encourage the building of close relations between
Japan and either the New World or Spain.66
The issue of ‘vermilion seals’ by the government to Japanese ships trading
southwards was another aspect of the vigorous economic policy the shoguns
were pursuing. Roughly fourteen ships set out year after year, visiting
eighteen countries, with a preference for Vietnam. At the start of the
seventeenth century the most frequent visitors to Japan were the Portuguese,
but the first Dutch vessel arrived in 1609, and four years later an English ship
came to Japan; both nations aimed to set up trading stations on the island of
Kyushu.67 But as tension grew, particularly over the Catholic missions, the
Japanese government turned against the foreigners, banning the Dutch and
English in 1616, so their stay was very short indeed. And then the shoguns
turned against Japanese traders who ventured beyond their homeland. In 1624
the Japanese were ordered to stop trading in Manila, and such foreign trade as
there was became concentrated in Nagasaki and Hirado. The vermilion seal
was granted to fewer and fewer merchants, members of a small elite with
access to the bakufu; remarkably, they included William Adams, indicating
the value Ieyasu placed on his ability and knowhow – in 1613 Adams was a
useful intermediary between Ieyasu and an English captain, Saris, who hoped
to create a trading base in Japan.68 Gradually, though, prohibitions against
foreign trade became stricter: the Spaniards were banned from Japanese soil
in 1638, under pain of death, and a ban on the Portuguese followed a year
later.69
While it lasted, this trade was profitable. Ships carried grain, salted meat,
fish and fruit to Manila, all vital supplies; they also carried military supplies,
both horses and armaments; beautiful products of Japanese craftsmanship
included lacquered boxes and painted screens and high-quality silks. The
value of trade in silk alone was estimated at 111,300 pesos in 1606. In the
other direction, Chinese silk, tea jars, glass, even Spanish wines, as well as
spices brought from the East Indies, passed north to Japan. The fact that the
Japanese came to Manila to obtain Chinese products underlines the
importance of Manila as a trading hub attracting goods from all directions.
The eclipse of trade with Japan and the disappearance of the Japanese
community in Manila were easy to bear so long as Manila could continue to
function as a channel through which Chinese goods passed to Mexico, as it
continued to do until early in the nineteenth century; the last return trip to
Manila by galleon took place in 1815. By then, the Spanish government had
relaxed restrictions on the movement of goods between Asian ports and
Mexico, so that Manila lost its central importance and smaller ships than the
galleons, sometimes flying the flag of other nations (including the United
States of America), were now plying between the western Pacific, including
Manila, and various ports along the Mexican coast. The Manila galleons had
survived for as long as the Spanish monopoly held, but once it was broken
the galleons ceased to sail.70
 35

The Black Ships of Macau

One of the constant and in many ways justified complaints about histories of
the seaborne empires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that they
are Eurocentric, even when the subject matter is Goa, Melaka, Macau or
Manila. This partly reflects the richness of the archives in Lisbon, Seville,
Amsterdam and other European cities compared to what can be found in
Asia; and it partly reflects an assumption that the Portuguese and their
successors were able to dominate the long-distance movement of goods to the
exclusion of any serious rivals. But that was not the case. At best the
Portuguese could only blockade the Red Sea, for, as has been seen, they were
unable to force their way into it, and much the same applied to the Persian
Gulf, where they could control movement through the narrow Strait of
Hormuz. But the trouble with a blockade was that it cost a good deal of
money to maintain and produced no revenue. It made more sense to treat the
Portuguese forts as customs stations through which the Asian merchants
would have to pass. The Red Sea did remain open. So long as Gujaratis,
Malays and others paid for their trading licences, they were able to carry on
their business without further interference from the Europeans, who were
more likely to confront one another (once the Dutch arrived in the Indian
Ocean around 1600) than to interfere with local shipping. Indeed, paying for
one’s licence brought a certain amount of protection. It has been well said
that ‘the Portuguese forced their way into an established trading world; they
did not revolutionise Euro-Asian trade.’1
Portuguese methods were rooted in traditional medieval practices: they
created trading bases, the nodal points of their Asian trading world being
Hormuz, Goa, Melaka and Macau, which were backed up by coastal forts and
by the Portuguese fleets that moved across the Indian Ocean and into the
South China Sea. The Spaniards, on the other hand, did conquer entire
territories, as happened in the Philippines, and as had already been happening
in the Caribbean, Mexico and Peru. Their interest in commercial connections
across the oceans grew as the silver mines of Peru and Mexico delivered vast
amounts of bullion to Manila and Seville, and their conquistadors had been
attracted by stories of the gold of the Aztecs and Incas. So the two Iberian
empires had very different profiles, one more sea-based, the other more land-
based. In reality, the Portuguese made more money out of the taxes they
imposed on Asian shipping and out of their own intra-Asian shipping routes
than they did out of the spice trade linking the Indies to Lisbon and Antwerp.
Rather than pepper, nutmeg and cloves, the source of profit was cotton and
calico cloth from western India, carried eastwards to what is now Indonesia
(enabling the Portuguese to buy spices with the proceeds), while in the other
direction they took these goods to east Africa, exchanging them for ivory and
gold.2 This ability to carve out a role for themselves as intermediaries
between Asian (and even African) ports was most clearly demonstrated in the
trade route they created between Macau and Japan.
 The Portuguese became aware of Japan in stages. The traditional
description of ‘Cipangu’ by Marco Polo placed the Japanese Empire much
too far from the coast of Asia, and the major interest of the Portuguese
following the capture of Melaka in 1511 lay in trade with China; even when
they arrived in Japan, the Portuguese may not have realized that they had
reached the land described by Polo. Until the 1540s the Portuguese remained
vague about the layout of the western Pacific. The ambassador the
Portuguese sent to China, Tomé Pires (who wrote a magnificent account of
the Far East, the Suma Oriental), arrived in Nanjing soon after Albuquerque
seized Melaka, aware that the links between Melaka and the outside world
pointed in three directions: towards India, towards the Spice Islands, and
beyond those islands towards China, for Chinese junks were a familiar sight
in Melaka. It has been seen how Zheng He’s voyages, among other visits,
brought fifteenth-century Melaka under the notional sovereignty of the
Chinese emperor. After Albuquerque seized the town, its deposed sultan
urged the Chinese to help him recover control of Melaka. All this created
panic among the Portuguese: would the Chinese emperor sit back and permit
the Portuguese to hold on to such a valuable possession? Tomé Pires had a
frustrating time in China – he played board games with Emperor Zhengde in
Nanjing, and he moved on to Beijing ahead of the emperor, hoping to
negotiate a trade deal, but the emperor died almost immediately after
returning to his capital. The new emperor was much less interested in these
barbarians and sent them back to Guangzhou. Once again the Portuguese
began to worry about Chinese intentions.3 No Chinese fleet materialized,
and the Portuguese tentatively made their way deeper and deeper into the
Pacific, by way of the South China Sea. They began to realize that there was
profit to be made not just out of the spices of the East Indies but out of the
lands that lay off the coast of China. First, they took an interest in the Ryukyu
island chain, which, as an earlier chapter showed, possessed its own lively
culture and functioned as the crossroads of the trade routes of the western
Pacific. The Portuguese heard that these islands were rich in both precious
and base metals, and Tomé Pires offered a description of the islands in his
book, though he knew very little about Japan.4
The Portuguese discovery of Japan (insofar as it makes sense to use the
term ‘discovery’) was unplanned, though not, surely, unexpected. To
understand what was happening it is necessary to begin with a series of
Portuguese attempts to penetrate the markets of China. Following the capture
of Melaka, Portuguese merchants began to fit out junks, or occasionally
(from 1517 onwards) European ships, and reached the south coast of China.
The squadron of eight ships that set out in 1517 with Pires aboard was
allowed to sail up the Pearl River and to dock at Guangzhou (Canton), where
they were able to observe how the city acted as a magnet for ships coming
from all over the region, including Japanese junks; unfortunately these
peaceful Portuguese were followed by others who disregarded royal
instructions not to interfere with other ships, and ‘captured islands, robbed
ships and terrorised the population’; they were, this Chinese writer continued,
‘a crowd of riff-raff’ who set up ‘boundary stones’, which must be more of
the padrões the Portuguese had been erecting all the way from west Africa to
Asia. Skirmishes between the Portuguese and the Chinese in the waters off
Hong Kong kept recurring; the Chinese made clever use of fireships, tactics
they owed to a certain Wang Hong, who is still worshipped as a minor god in
Castle Peak, Hong Kong.5 Other troublemakers along this coast included the
wakō, who have been met already; this term was used mainly for Japanese
pirates. The Portuguese had some contact with them and would therefore
have known something, though not very much, about who the Japanese
were.6
In 1543 three private traders from Portugal were on their way from
Ayutthaya in Siam to Quanzhou aboard a junk loaded with hides; they took a
long way round because they knew that the Portuguese were ‘detested and
abhorred’ in Guangzhou after events earlier in the century – a Portuguese
ambassador had had the temerity to flog a mandarin.7 A Portuguese writer
described their unexpected arrival in Japan:

As this junk was making for the port of Chincheo [Quanzhou], it ran
into a fearful storm of the kind the natives call typhoon [tuffão],
which is fierce and appalling, and makes such bravado and quaking,
that it seems as if all the spirits of Hell are whirling the waves and the
sea, whose fury seems to cause flashes of fire in the sky, whilst in the
space of an hour-glass, the wind boxes all the points of the compass.8

They were blown on to the shores of Tanegashima, a small island off

Kyushu, the southernmost landmass of Japan, where the inhabitants looked
after them well. They had arrived in ‘Nipongi which we usually term Japão’.
The Japanese were fascinated by the weapons the Portuguese carried, and
now or subsequently they acquired some firearms and began to copy them;
the term for a wide range of guns made in Japan became tanegashima,
because that was where the lessons had been learned and where the guns
were often made.9 In other respects the Japanese were mystified by the
Europeans; a Japanese chronicler recorded the opinion of the Chinese
interpreter who had acted as go-between between the islanders and the
surprise visitors:
 They eat with their fingers instead of with chopsticks such as we use.
They show their feelings without any self-control. They cannot
understand the meaning of written characters. They are people who
spend their lives roving hither and yon. They have no fixed abode and
barter things which they have for those they do not, but withal they
are a harmless people.10

Apart from anything else, this passage reveals a very particular Chinese and
Japanese attitude to literacy. And harmless they were not.

II

Macau (as Macao tends to be spelt nowadays) became the conduit for trade
between Japan and the wider world in the second half of the sixteenth
century. Its foundation in 1557 was the culmination of failed attempts to
secure a base in the Pearl River, not helped by the all too typically aggressive
stance of the Portuguese in the first half of the sixteenth century. Now
avoiding the Pearl River, the Portuguese crept into other ports than
Guangzhou, such as Quanzhou and Ningbo, near Hangzhou, and even
unloaded their goods on to Chinese junks out at sea.11 Their difficulties in
gaining free access to China encouraged them to seize a new opportunity,
trade with Japan. Japanese soil contained rich veins of silver, and the
Japanese were voracious consumers of Chinese silk, insisting that it was
superior to their own excellent products.12 But the Portuguese knew that they
needed a way station between Melaka and Japan, somewhere where they
could break their journey, take on Chinese goods bought with Japanese silver,
and refit their ships. Tentatively, therefore, they installed themselves about
fifty miles from the mouth of the Pearl River, bribed the local officials, and
set up their encampment on what they called the ‘Island of St John’. At first
the imperial court tried to exclude European ships, because the Ferengi, or
‘Franks’, were ‘people with filthy hearts’, and pirates. But a spice shortage
and the loss of revenue from trade were beginning to worry the emperor’s
courtiers. So by 1555 the Portuguese were at last able to visit Guangzhou so
long as they paid their taxes.13
St John Island did not satisfy the Portuguese. It was too distant from the
Pearl River, so they left after three years. The traditional account of the
foundation of what became their base, the future city of Macau, tells how the
Portuguese won the approval of the Chinese authorities by defeating a
dangerous Chinese pirate. Wakō pirates had been making a thorough nuisance
of themselves in the 1550s.14 But the permission granted to the Portuguese
also generated a difficult question. The Chinese Empire could not really
allow the Portuguese to treat this patch of territory as its own. Equally, the
Chinese were perfectly aware that the king of Portugal had no intention of
submitting to the Heavenly Emperor. The solution was to keep Chinese tax
officials in place whose special (but not unique) concern lay with the taxation
of Chinese visitors to Macau. The fact that no formal grant of the territory
was made, as did indeed happen with parts of Hong Kong, left Macau
vulnerable to China’s claim that the territory should be returned to China, as
happened in 1999; in the case of Hong Kong, by contrast, the argument for
cession of the territory to the People’s Republic turned on whether the treaty
granting it to Great Britain had been unjustly imposed. The Portuguese
appear to have received a scroll commemorating their help in defeating
pirates and a document permitting them to set up their trading station; a
version inscribed on wood and stone was kept in the Senate House of Macau,
but the Senate House burned down and no one kept a record of what the
inscription said. Macau was allowed to exist ‘completely outside the rules
and precedents of the tribute system’; in other words the solution to the
problem of its status was for the Chinese largely to ignore the problem.15
The name Macau was derived from a Chinese term, A-ma-ngao in
Cantonese dialect, meaning ‘Bay of Ama’, a goddess whose temple, pre-
dating the arrival of the Portuguese, still stands by the site of the original
inner harbour. This became Amacao and Amacon in Portuguese documents,
although the Portuguese had, typically, intended to give their settlement a
Christian rather than a Chinese name: La Povoação do Nome de Deos na
China, ‘The Town of the Name of God in China’, later elevated to the status
of Cidade or ‘City’.16 Initially the settlement consisted of quite simple
buildings made of wood and straw – what are called matsheds in the Far
East.17 The Florentine traveller Carletti, who visited Macau in 1598 aboard a
Japanese ship, described it as ‘a small unwalled city without fortresses, but
having a few houses of Portuguese’; the imposing fortress that now
dominates old Macau was built around the Jesuit College after his time, more
as a defence against the Dutch than as a defence against local powers.18 The
population stood at 800 in 1562.19 As the settlement grew, the ever-watchful
Chinese authorities tried to ensure that fellow Chinese did not stay overnight,
though there were ways of hiding away and there were Chinese servants
living in Macau. The Chinese authorities worried that trade relations between
Macau and Japan were making the Portuguese too friendly to the Japanese,
nearly a hundred of whom were expelled from Macau in 1613 at Chinese
insistence.20
The Portuguese were not permitted to cross the wall into China proper,
which meant that the growing town possessed no hinterland from which to
draw its food. This suited the Chinese merchants who profited from
supplying Macau with essentials, and it suited the Chinese officials who
knew they could blockade Macau if trouble with the Portuguese loomed.21
The great age of building that threw up the magnificent Church of St Paul
(partly built by Japanese craftsmen) and the substantial Dominican church
was yet to come, but even before 1600 there existed a cathedral and convents
for the three great orders of friars, the Dominicans, the Franciscans and the
Augustinians, as well as the Jesuit College from which missionaries passed
into China and Japan.22 A charitable foundation, the Santa Casa de
Misericórdia, came into existence in 1569, following a model established
elsewhere in Portuguese Asia – the first of these houses had been created in
Cochin as early as 1505. This was a sign that the Portuguese saw Macau as a
stable base for their operations, as well as a recognition of the need to cater
for widows, orphans and others who fell on hard times so far from their
original home.23
Macau had first of all to make its money, and it did so very successfully.
Guangzhou was the source of the silk the Macanese (the term for Macau’s
inhabitants) sent on to Japan and elsewhere; Carletti believed that up to
80,000 pounds of silk were carried down from Guangzhou twice a year, as
well as mercury, lead and musk. Only a select group of Portuguese from
Macau were permitted to land in Guangzhou, and they had to travel up the
Pearl River in Chinese boats. Carletti was excited by what they brought to
Macau, and eagerly bought silk, musk and gold, which, he observed, ‘is
really another sort of merchandise and is used more for gilding one or another
kind of furniture and other objects than as a kind of money’, so that its price
fluctuated according to seasonal demand. Carletti resolved to send all his
goods on to distant Middelburg in the Netherlands and to sell them there.
Among these goods were two enormous porcelain vases filled with branches
of ginger; the vases were ‘perhaps the largest that ever have been brought to
Europe from those lands’, and the Middelburg merchant who bought them
forwarded them to the duke of Tuscany. The very best porcelain was reserved
for the emperor, ‘but the most beautiful is what one sees ordinarily, white and
decorated in blue’. Carletti bought something like 700 pieces of Chinese
blue-and-white, all at low cost, a mixture of plates, bowls and other pieces. It
is no coincidence that Portuguese tiles (azulejos), and later on Dutch ones,
also came to be decorated in blue and white, even though the Iberian
peninsula had its own long tradition of more colourful tile-making based on
Islamic designs.
The English traveller Ralph Fitch was in Macau in around 1590, and he
explained the simple strategy of the Macanese:

When the Portugales goe from Macao in China to Japan, they carrie
much white silke, Gold, Muske and Porcelanes: and they bring from
thence nothing but Silver. They have a great Carake which goeth
thither every yeere, and shee bringeth from thence every yeere above
600,000 crusadoes [ducats]; and all this Silver of Japan, and 200,000
crusadoes more in Silver which they bring yeerly out of India, they
imploy to their great advantage in China: and they bring from thence
Gold, Muske, Silke, Copper, Porcelanes, and many other things very
costly and gilded.24

One writer after another confirmed that the profit to be drawn from the ‘great
carrack’ or (as the Portuguese called it) the ‘ship of trade’, Não do Trato, was
truly vast, ‘a million in gold’, as Diogo do Couto hyperbolically asserted in
around 1600. In 1635 an English visitor to Macau believed that one could
make a 100 per cent profit on the return voyage between Macau and either
Japan or Manila.25 And yet the Portuguese showed little interest in the
beautiful objects produced by Japanese artisans, buying a few writing boxes
and an occasional decorated weapon; they craved instead the silver extracted
from deep mines. Estimates of the amount of silver exported from Japan on
board native, Chinese and European ships during the early seventeenth
century reach as much as 187,500 kg per annum.26
These carracks were rather different to the galleons that crossed the Pacific
from Manila. They tended to be larger, broader and slower, starting, in the
middle of the sixteenth century, at 400–600 tons’ capacity, and rising by
1600 to as much as 1,600 tons, with occasional ‘monsters’, as Charles Boxer
called them, of 2,000 tons; ‘a shipping ton,’ he explained, ‘was a unit of
capacity and not of weight’, roughly sixty cubic feet, so that a 2,000-ton
carrack had space for 120,000 cubic feet of cargo. They had fewer guns than
the galleons, and the disadvantages began to tell once Dutch competitors
entered the waters off China and Japan, leading to substitution by smaller and
faster vessels known as galiotas, ‘galliots’, and occasionally small frigates
and pinnaces as well.27 All these ships descended from the same basic
model, the late medieval galleass, with its lateen foremast and its array of
square sails, as well as officers’ living quarters at the stern, though the
carrack retained the large forecastle of medieval ships. The Japanese made
fewer distinctions between the carracks and the galleons than the Portuguese;
they looked very different to their own junks, and were simply described as
‘black ships’, kurofune, while the word galiota was transmogrified into the
Japanese term kareuta-sen; the Japanese language has always been very open
to foreign terms, and the Japanese word for ‘thank you’, arigato, is said
(mistakenly, it seems) to be a corruption of the Portuguese obrigado.
Japanese fascination with the ‘black ships’ went much further than their
name. A popular way of decorating the silk screens that were required in
prosperous Japanese homes was to portray the arrival of a massive black ship,
with the crew (occasionally displayed as monkeys) swarming over the
rigging, Portuguese merchants strolling along the quayside in their western
garb, and sometimes a Jesuit missionary to add further verisimilitude.28
Nonetheless, the Portuguese were keen to exploit every opportunity to fill
their hold with Japanese silver, and often they hired large junks, manned
mainly by Chinese sailors.29 The Portuguese did not insist on using
European ships – which in any case were not made in Europe but in
Portuguese bases along the shores of the Indian Ocean, where good, hard teak
was ready to hand.
As in the case of Manila, the raison d’être of the town was its intermediary
role, rather than anything it could offer from its own limited resources. The
secret of Macau’s success was that it was not a royal foundation, but had
been created by private initiative. It never cost the king of Portugal anything.
Macau was governed by its own ‘Loyal Senate’, or Leal Senado, whose
members, mainly interested in profit from trade, took advantage of the
distance separating Macau from Lisbon to manage the town’s own affairs.30
The accession of Philip II of Spain to the throne of Portugal did not, as has
been seen, lead to a merger of the Spanish and Portuguese trading networks
in the Pacific or anywhere else. From 1581 onwards the governors of both
Goa and Manila deplored what still counted as illicit trade across the
imaginary line dividing the Spanish from the Portuguese hemisphere, but in
the vast spaces of the Pacific it continued. Wealthy Mexican merchants
obtained Chinese silks from Guangzhou by way of Macau and Manila, where
the Portuguese sold their silk at a very respectable profit, before the goods
were ferried along the galleon route all the way to Acapulco.31 The route to
Japan was the foundation of Macau’s fortune, and had the great advantage of
being relatively short, compared to the routes from Melaka westwards, or
from Manila eastwards.
As the Portuguese became more familiar with the coasts of Japan, they
realized that they needed a base there, just as they now had a base in southern
China, and the obvious place to look was the south-west of Kyushu island,
not too far from important ports such as Hakata. One very promising location
was a fishing village within the lands of a great landowner sympathetic to the
Christians, Omura Sumitada. A Jesuit priest had turned up there in around
1569 and, having kindly been offered accommodation in a Buddhist temple,
he proceeded to demolish it and to build a parish church out of its planks; he
managed to convert the entire population, including Omura. There was a
large bay that would provide excellent anchorage for a great black ship. Local
wars brought refugees to the village, and it grew and grew – all the more so
when the Portuguese chose it as their port of preference in 1571. The name of
this place is Nagasaki, meaning ‘Long Cape’.32 Within a couple of years the
risks in sailing seas that were still little known became obvious when a
massive carrack bound for Nagasaki and weighed down by a very heavy
cargo foundered in a matter of minutes after being violently struck by a
summer typhoon. There were a good many Jesuit missionaries on board and a
large part of the cargo consisted of Chinese silks the Jesuits were bringing to
Japan, where they planned to sell the goods and use the profit to fund their
missionary campaigns.33 Two survivors were pulled from the sea by a
passing Melaka junk, under Portuguese command; they were Arabs or
Indians, and one soon died.
The constant problem with any attempt to explain the lively maritime
connections linking such places as Malaya, Siam, Cambodia, China, the
Philippines and Japan is that it easily develops into an account of the links
between Melaka, Macau, Manila and Nagasaki, in other words the places
where the Portuguese or the Spaniards created their bases. Yet it is obvious
from (say) Carletti’s account of his voyage round the world that he saw and
sailed in non-European ships, and that the Siamese, the Javanese and others
were in constant movement back and forth, while far more spices were
absorbed by China than ever reached Europe.34 For under the Ming China
was the big economy on the planet. Its own sailors were still discouraged
from venturing on to the open sea, but that did not stop them from doing so,
nor did it prevent the large Chinese settlements all around the South China
Sea from coming into existence. China’s hunger for silver shaped the
economy not just of the Ming Empire but of much vaster spaces, including
Japan and Spanish America. Trade with China from nearly all directions
continued to flourish until the 1640s, a decade marked by the collapse of the
Ming dynasty and a period of cool weather that damaged production across
the globe.35
What made the Spanish, Portuguese and later Dutch ships that entered
these waters different – even ships constructed in India or in Mexico – was
that they formed part of a worldwide network that linked Antwerp and
Amsterdam to Melaka, the Moluccas and Mexico. They were the agents of
empires that stretched across distances never matched in human history,
whether one is thinking of the Portuguese seaborne empire, largely consisting
of trade stations and subject ports, or the territorial empire of the Spaniards
that encompassed the Americas and saw the Philippines as a dependency of
Spanish America. A particularly important aspect of the creation of
transoceanic links was the arrival of alien plants in new continents. Obvious
cases include the arrival of maize and tobacco in Europe, from Spanish
America, but the Portuguese presence in Macau introduced ‘the vegetables of
the western seas’ into Ming China: lettuce, watercress, bell peppers, new
types of bean. Several of these new fruits and vegetables, such as the papaya
and the guava, were not European at all, but they were still brought by
Europeans; both the papaya and the guava were Mexican fruits, and the
papaya was native to the area around Veracruz, from where the Manila
galleons headed westwards.36 More sinister arrivals in the Far East were
European weapons, not that the Chinese or Japanese lacked firearms of their
own; however, they admired European ones, and the existence of their own
advanced technology meant that it proved easy to copy what the Portuguese
and their rivals showed them. The same applied to navigation, where the
superior charts and handbooks carried by the Portuguese gave a distinct
advantage; Portuguese sailing manuals, or roteiros, were translated into
Japanese.37

III

Nothing could be achieved in Japan without the consent of the rulers of the
empire. However, identifying who actually exercised power was not
straightforward. In the mid-sixteenth century the emperor was a cipher, and
the power of the daimyo, local warlords, remained formidable; occasionally
they would send messages to Macau asking for help against their enemies:
Omura Sumitada wrote asking for a supply of saltpetre, which was a vital
ingredient of gunpowder, while showing due deference to the Catholic
Church.38 The great weakness of the daimyo was that they spent all their
resources on the maintenance of their samurai, whom they paid in kind with
supplies of rice from their estates, and without whom they could not hope to
stay in power. By and large, both daimyo and samurai had little money to
spare, and lived simply off rice, vegetables and fruit. The opportunity to
make money from the Great Ship of Amacon was too good to miss.39
However, by 1600 a succession of capable and ruthless shoguns managed to
impose control from the imperial capital at Kyoto and their own headquarters
at Edo (now Tokyo) over large areas of the country, and they were the people
with whom the Portuguese would most need to curry favour, even though the
daimyo remained a force in the outlying regions. The relationship between
the Portuguese and the shoguns was complicated by the attempts of the
Jesuits to introduce Christianity into Japan, and the increasing alarm the
shoguns felt at their success; this was exactly the area where the policy
followed by sundry daimyo often diverged from that of the central
government. An example of this divergence was the daimyo Omura
Sumitada, who vigorously encouraged conversion to Christianity.40
Much has been written about the Jesuit attempts to bring Christianity to
China, and the way the Jesuits tried to make Christianity palatable to the
Chinese by themselves adopting Chinese ways of life, and by adapting their
teachings to the assumptions of a society dominated by Confucian ideas
about rank and honour. Macau, where Jesuits had been residing from the start
of its history, and where they built the imposing Church of St Paul, whose
façade is now the symbol of the city, was the base from which Matteo Ricci
and others launched their missions into China. Before he reached Macau,
Ricci had already spent some time in Goa, the major Jesuit centre in Asia,
with a Jesuit college containing over a hundred members, so that his Chinese
mission can be seen as a spin-off from the creation of the Portuguese trading
network.41 However, from the perspective of maritime history the Jesuit
campaigns in Japan, rather than China, have particular interest, because the
silk trade from Macau and the missions became closely intertwined in what
sometimes proved a very dangerous operation.42
The missionaries were well aware that conversion took place by command.
An Italian Jesuit, Alessandro di Valignano, who for thirty-two years led the
Jesuit mission in Japan, saw a direct link between the Christianization of
Japan and the arrival of the Great Ship of Amacon in Kyushu. He suggested
that the Pope should ban, under pain of excommunication, visits by the Great
Ship of Amacon to ‘the ports of lords who persecute Christianity or who are
reluctant to allow their vassals to be converted’.43 Valignano was keen to
promote the trade in silk towards Japan because the Jesuits invested heavily
in it; from the profits of this trade they funded their operations, and unless
someone else could come up with 12,000 ducats per annum they would have
to continue to pursue profit, whatever the Franciscans, with their vows of
poverty, or the Protestants, with their accusations of hypocrisy, might say.44
In a text he wrote in 1580 Valignano showed how important the Great Ship
had become in the great project of turning Japan Christian:

The greatest help that we have had hitherto in securing Christians is

that of the Great Ship … For as the lords of Japan are very poor, as
has been said, and the benefits they derive when the ships come to
their ports are very great, they try hard to entice them to their fiefs.
And since they have convinced themselves that they will come to
where there are Christians and churches, and whither the padres wish
them to come, it therefore follows that many of them, even though
they are heathen, seek to get the padres to come thither and to secure
churches and convents, thinking that by this means the ships will [in
their turn] secure other favours they wish to obtain from the padres.
And since the Japanese are so much at the disposal of their lords, they
readily become converted when told to do so by their lords and they
think it is their wish.45
Valignano opined that, being ‘white’, the Japanese were ‘of good
understanding and behaviour’, the whiteness of the Japanese being a common
motif in European writings at the time. Whiteness might be thought of as a
metaphor for the rational behaviour that some contemporaries denied to
American Indians, black Africans and other peoples. Valignano expounded a
racial hierarchy in which white-skinned Christian Europeans naturally stood
at the apex, but his respect for Japanese culture and manners led him to place
his hosts very high up his scale.46
The dominant figures in Japan during the 1580s, the shogun Nobunaga and
his successor, the regent Hideyoshi, were worried that the Jesuits were the
secret vanguard of a Portuguese takeover of their islands. Their hostility to
the missionaries was demonstrated in 1587 and again ten years later. On the
first occasion they ordered the priests out of Japan, but within a few years the
Jesuits had argued their way back in; on the second occasion Hideyoshi
unleashed a brutal persecution of Japanese Christians, resulting in mass
crucifixions of men, women and children in and around Nagasaki. Yet the
suspicion remains that Hideyoshi’s prime aim was to bring the daimyo of
Kyushu, often sympathetic to Christianity, under his control, rather than a
deep-seated hostility to the religion itself, for he could also show the
Christians favour when it suited his interests. This interpretation is bolstered
by the fact that Hideyoshi vigorously persecuted Buddhist monks of various
sects, since he regarded the Buddhist monasteries as political rivals,
institutions that stood outside the centralized state he was trying to create.
Valignano observed that Buddhist monasteries of around a hundred monks
were reduced to only four or five after these persecutions. On one occasion
Hideyoshi even rejected a plea from Buddhist monks who suspected that the
local daimyo, a Christian, planned to destroy the images in their temple; far
from supporting them, even though his wife pleaded with him to do so,
Hideyoshi had the images brought to Kyoto and chopped up for firewood. On
another occasion Hideyoshi visited a church and declared that all that was
stopping him from becoming a Christian was the ban on having many
concubines: ‘if you will stretch a point in this, I will likewise become a
convert.’ A further reason for his friendly attitude in the years around 1586
was that he was planning the conquest not merely of Korea but of China; he
wanted to hire two Portuguese carracks and he promised the Jesuits that he
would build churches right across China were his campaigns to succeed.
When a Jesuit emissary agreed to obtain the ships Hideyoshi’s enthusiasm
knew no bounds, and he offered the Jesuits the right to preach throughout his
lands and a bundle of privileges greater than those enjoyed by the Buddhists.
No doubt all this was made easier by the gifts of Portuguese wine that
Hideyoshi greatly enjoyed. One night in 1587, while Hideyoshi was in his
cups, his physician persuaded him that the Christians were up to no good,
since they destroyed Buddhist temples and Shintō shrines, ate cows and
horses (which could be put to better uses), and carried overseas Japanese
servants whom they had enslaved. Literally overnight, if accounts of these
events are to be believed, Hideyoshi transformed himself from a friend of the
Christians into their bitter enemy. All of a sudden he banished the
missionaries, but emphatically not the Great Ship: ‘as the Great Ship comes
to trade, and this is something quite different, the Portuguese can carry on
their commerce quite unmolested.’ Yet the Jesuits continued their work in the
lands of Christian daimyo beyond the regent’s control, and few left the
country; before long, the Japanese authorities tolerated the Jesuits as much-
needed intermediaries between themselves and the Portuguese merchants,
who could not speak Japanese and knew little about the way of life in
Japan.47 Alessandro di Valignano wrote that Hideyoshi was persecuting the
Jesuits ‘not for love of the false gods of Japan, for he believes nothing, and
has done more to destroy their temples and bonzes [religious teachers] than
we have’.48 The fact was that both Jesuits and bonzes appeared to undermine
central authority. The testimony of the Florentine traveller Carletti confirms
Valignano’s view: ‘this king did not believe in any sect, and he often used to
say that laws and religions had been founded only to regulate men and to
force them to live with modesty and civility’; Carletti sternly reminded his
readers that Hideyoshi’s lack of a belief in an afterlife was at this very
moment being disproved to him, while he burned in the fires of Hell.49
At the same time, Nobunaga and his successors brought a greater degree of
peace to Japan, and they valued the trade between Japan and the outside
world. They saw the Portuguese, and later the Dutch, as useful sources of
luxury products that were especially valued at their own courts, but also
across the country (which meant that they generated useful tax revenues).
Silver was easy to come by under the soil of Japan, so that the outflow of
bullion towards China, whether on Portuguese or Asian ships, does not seem
to have placed a strain on the Japanese economy, even though, understood in
modern terms, the balance of payments was extremely unfavourable to Japan.
Japan had not sealed itself off from the outside world, and the European
merchants formed only a small part of a much wider trading network
dominated by Japanese, Korean and Chinese merchants that tied the islands
to neighbouring lands.
For the Florentine traveller Francesco Carletti the sea held few fears. He
described the routes across the Pacific, linking Acapulco to Manila, Macau
and Nagasaki, and beyond the Pacific to Goa and Lisbon, as if the movement
of ships was entirely regular and safe.50 Just as Hideyoshi was turning his
ferocity upon the Christians, Carletti set foot in Japan. His curiosity took a
morbid turn at the very start of his visit: as soon as his ship reached Nagasaki
‘we went immediately to see the spectacle of those poor (as regards this
world) six monks of St Francis … who had been crucified with twenty other
Japanese Christians – among them three who had donned the habits of the
Jesuits – on the fifth of the month of February of that same year, 1597’. He
described in intricate detail the design of the cross used in Japanese
crucifixions, and he noted how a whole family might be executed for the
mistakes of a relative or even a neighbour.51
Carletti brought back to the duke of Tuscany an elaborate report on the
food, manners and products of Japan. It is striking how much has remained
the same to this day: he wrote about the Japanese writing system, tatami
mats, Japanese screens and many other features of Japanese houses. He was
particularly fascinated by the food the Japanese ate, including warm rice wine
and a sauce that he called misol, made out of fermented soya beans, ‘taking
on a very sharp, piquant flavour’. ‘They eat everything by using two small
sticks’, and when they eat they bring their bowl close to their mouth ‘and
then, with those two sticks, are able to fill their mouth with marvellous agility
and swiftness’. Rice, not bread, was their staple food, and most of the wheat
they produced was turned into flour and sent to the Philippines, where the
Spaniards baked it into bread; Japanese traders made a profit of up to 100 per
cent on these transactions. He noted that the Japanese did have copper coins,
used in trade with China, but that many payments were made with weighed
chunks of hack silver. Some of this silver was used to pay for the woven and
raw silk that was brought each year from Macau aboard a Portuguese ship.52

Most Serene Prince, I say that Japan is one of the most beautiful and
best and most suitable regions in the world for making profit by
voyaging from one place to another. But one should go there in our
vessels and with sailors from our regions. And in that way one would
 very quickly make incredible wealth, and that because of their need of
every sort of manufacture and their abundance of silver as of the
provisions for living.53

Carletti does not portray a closed-off Japan but an island empire whose elite
took great delight in perfumed woods and shagreen, or shark-skin, from Siam
and Cambodia. His ambition, which the duke of Tuscany was not in a
position to satisfy, was to see his fellow Florentines flocking to make profit
out of the trade of Japan.
Some of the most eloquent evidence for day-to-day contact between Japan
and its neighbours comes from ceramics rather than chronicles. The Japanese
taste for tea dates back to the eighth century, and by the end of the Middle
Ages not just Buddhist monks but members of the lay elite consumed delicate
teas in carefully chosen cups. Korean tea bowls were in fashion from the
fourteenth century onwards, and among the remains of a ship that foundered
in 1322 off the coast of Korea during a violent storm were about 15,000
pieces of Chinese pottery, destined for the Japanese market. As demand for
tea continued to develop, so did the fashion in tea bowls, but the interest in
exotic pieces was constant, so that ‘found objects’, rustic ceramics made for
other purposes in Korea and elsewhere, became specially desirable. This shift
in taste took place at the end of the sixteenth century under the influence of
Takeno Jôô, a merchant from the port of Sakai, and his protégé Rikyû, tea
instructor to both Nobunaga and Hideyoshi and an enthusiast for the strong
‘whipped tea’ that still features in tea ceremonies. Both rulers made use of tea
gatherings to draw around themselves a group of political allies. In the
sixteenth century samurai warriors, though often short of resources, dined off
Chinese porcelain, and Buddhist temples also possessed porcelain dinner
services. By the 1620s Japanese merchants were ordering consignments
directly from the porcelain factories at Jingdezhen deep inside China, and
within ten or twenty years new styles were being developed specially for the
Japanese market, the cobalt-blue porcelain known as Shonzui.54
In the early seventeenth century the Japanese learned to make their own
porcelain, but the high-volume trade in ceramics from China and other lands
continued, and the development of Japanese pottery bears witness to the
importance of the sea route across the Yellow Sea in the transmission of ideas
and technology as well as hard goods. Stories circulated about a Korean
potter whom the Japanese knew as Ri Sanpei; he was brought to Japan in the
1590s during the Japanese war in Korea, of which more in a short moment. It
is difficult to disentangle legend and fact, but excavations at the site where Ri
Sanpei is said to have introduced the manufacture of porcelain in 1616 reveal
that its porcelain is slightly later in date than that, and it seems that others
were busy making Chinese- and Korean-style porcelain before Ri set to work.
A document concerning a master potter whose grandfather had made
ceramics for Hideyoshi shows that a porcelain kiln was up and running some
years before 1616. Maybe, then, Ri was a merchant rather than an
industrialist. But he has become a national hero in Japan and Korea, and the
symbol of the creation of the Japanese porcelain industry, which depended on
the discovery of kaolin in Japan, since it was impossible to import vast
amounts of China clay. Out of these innovations developed the beautiful
Imari wares which in due course would be carried out of Japan by Dutch
merchants.55 In all of this, it is hard not to notice how often the name of
Hideyoshi crops up. Cruel and temperamental he may have been, but his
vigorous promotion of a wide range of economic activities both at home and
overseas marks his period of rule as a golden age in the economic history of
Japan.

IV

Hideyoshi was interested in more than trade. Having mastered many of the
daimyo, he imagined that he could achieve similar results across the water.
He still dreamed of conquering Korea and ultimately China, and launched a
massive naval expedition to that end in 1592/3. Carletti said that the army
was 300,000 strong.56 During the land campaign that followed, Seoul and
Pyongyang fell to the Japanese, though a Ming-led army flushed them out of
Pyongyang and they proved unable to hold Seoul after the Chinese threatened
to unleash an army of 400,000 men against them: ‘Stay here in Seoul and you
will be slaughtered.’57 A second invasion was unleashed in 1597, following
the defeat of the Korean navy at sea. Hideyoshi ordered his army to ‘mow
down everyone universally, without discriminating between young and old,
men and women, the clergy and the laity – high-ranking soldiers on the
battlefield, that goes without saying, but also the hill folk, down to the
poorest and meanest – and send their heads to Japan’.58 Rather than
collecting heads, the Japanese preferred to send back mountains of noses
sliced off the faces of their dead victims. Just as the ancient Egyptians used to
cut off the penises of dead invaders, this was a useful way of counting the
enemy dead: ‘To: Kuroda Nagamasa. Total number of noses taken verified as
3,000. 1597, ninth month, fifth day.’59 On land, Japanese troops penetrated
deep inside Korea, though not this time as far as Seoul, and they engaged
with both Korean and Chinese armies; they also set up bases along the
Korean coast, but they failed to achieve the breakthrough they sought. The
Ming emperor’s support for his Korean vassals made the Korean nut
impossible to crack. At sea, the Japanese needed to keep the supply lines
open, as the Korean fleet was well aware.
Hideyoshi gravely underestimated the abilities of the Korean navy. He
assumed that size was all that mattered. In September 1597 thirteen ships
under the Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin proved capable of holding back the
entire Japanese fleet of over 200 ships at the battle of Myongnyang. In the
fifteenth century the Koreans had developed a type of fortified ship known as
‘turtle ships’, with strengthened sides and spiked roofs, making them all but
impregnable; they had gone out of fashion, but Yi had new ones built,
adorned at the bow with an impressive dragon’s head, through which the
muzzles of heavy guns poked. Generously provided with additional firepower
at port, starboard and stern, they were rather like floating armoured tanks.60
These ships were also used as rams, because the lighter ships of the Japanese
were no match for their heavy prows. Guns blazing, the tiny Korean squadron
abandoned all thought of coming out alive and charged the Japanese fleet.
The Koreans targeted the Japanese flagship, which was set ablaze and sank;
Admiral Yi had the satisfaction of seeing the corpse of the Japanese
commander dragged from the water: it was cut in pieces and hung from the
mast, so the Japanese could see what had happened to their leader. This was
Korea’s battle of Salamis, fought in a narrow channel, from which the
Korean ships emerged unscathed, but the Japanese lost thirty-one ships.61
By 1598 the struggle had become a matter of honour for Hideyoshi. By
then, his real intention was not so much to subdue Korea, which now seemed
impossible, but to humiliate the Ming emperor, by showing that Korea, a
tributary state of China, was open to the armies of the other great empire, that
of Japan.62 After a glittering career of naval victories, punctuated by a period
when his jealous rivals had him imprisoned, Yi Sun-sin died in his final battle
at the end of 1598, struck down by a bullet in much the same way as Lord
Nelson, with whom he is often compared. Estimates of the number of
Japanese ships destroyed in this battle hover around 200, with another
hundred captured and 500 Japanese killed, quite apart from a great many who
drowned. He even became a hero in the modern Japanese navy. A Japanese
admiral who scored a great triumph over the Russians in 1905 objected when
he was compared at his victory celebrations to Nelson and Yi. ‘It may be
proper to compare me with Nelson,’ he said, ‘but not with Korea’s Yi Sun-
sin. He is too great to be compared to anyone.’63

These events in Korea might seem to have had nothing much to do with the
links between Japan and Macau. However, having spent so much time and
money on his futile invasion of Korea, Hideyoshi was all the more inclined to
favour trade, in the hope of generating more income. Trade within the Inland
Sea was already lively, carrying not just goods but pilgrims between the
islands of Japan. With the rise of the new administrative centre at Edo in
Tokyo Bay, a new centre of consumption for rice and its much-appreciated
by-product, sake, became prominent, and in the early seventeenth century the
so-called ‘barrel ships’, named after their barrels of sake rather than their
shape, moved back and forth to Edo following a regular timetable.64
Hideyoshi was also interested in much more distant connections. He
enthusiastically issued ‘vermilion seal’ passports which allowed Japanese
ships to travel back and forth to his lands. As early as 1587 he sent an
expedition into Kyushu island consisting of 300,000 troops and 20,000
horses, and both Hakata, the ancient port, and Nagasaki, the new one, were
brought under his direct control, which meant that he possessed windows on
the world a good distance from Edo and Kyoto. Hideyoshi listened carefully
to news of foreign ships, buying Portuguese gold and on one occasion
offering to buy all the pottery brought from the Philippines on a Spanish ship
– Luzon ceramics, though rather rough, were much appreciated by Japanese
tea-drinkers.65 Japan was not isolated from the outside world, but its rulers
were selective about the contacts they were willing to encourage. The
importance of the Portuguese lay in the access they gave to fine Chinese silks
and the links that extended beyond Macau all the way to Melaka and Goa.
The rulers of Japan also became aware that Spaniards were taking an
interest in their dominions. These were not just merchants, whose attempts to
integrate Japan into the Manila galleon route have been discussed already. A
remarkable Dominican friar, Juan Cobo, had travelled from Mexico to
Manila in 1588; he quickly learned 3,000 Chinese characters before moving
on to Satsuma in Japan in June 1592. He came as much to spy out the land as
to build friendly relations with the regent’s court on behalf of King Philip of
Spain; Spanish dreams of conquering China could only be realized if
Japanese troops came to King Philip’s aid. In Satsuma, Cobo encountered a
merchant from Peru who claimed he had been cheated by the Portuguese, so
together they made their way to the military camp of Hideyoshi, who was on
campaign near Nagoya. Hideyoshi was intrigued by a globe that Cobo
produced, on which the friar traced the extent of the Spanish empire; but he
was not convinced that Cobo’s boasts were to be taken seriously, for he was
disappointed by the modest presents Cobo had brought from the Philippines,
which, in any case, he chose to treat as tribute. Hideyoshi sent a letter to the
governor of the Philippines, full of exaggerated boasts about his conquests in
Korea and his victories over Chinese armies. He insisted that the Philippines
were ‘within my reach’. He concluded with a message that mixed
appeasement with threats: ‘Let us be friends forever, and write to that effect
to the king of Castile. Do not, because he is far away, let him slight my
words. I have never seen those far lands, but from the accounts I have been
given I know what is there.’ Cobo was shipwrecked off Taiwan and was
killed by local headhunters.66 Spanish Franciscan friars began to compete
with the Jesuits in Japan, and one of them, Fray Jerónimo de Jesús de Castro,
was thrown out of Nagasaki in autumn 1597, only to bounce back into Japan
the next summer; this time the shogun, Ieyasu, who had just come to power,
decided that the presence of a Spanish friar in his lands might encourage the
Spaniards to strike a trade deal, and Fray Jerónimo was allowed to build a
church in Edo in May 1599, even though Ieyasu did not grant him permission
to convert his subjects to Christianity. The Jesuits became as busy fending off
their Franciscan rivals as they were currying favour at the court of the
unpredictable shogun.67
The complications in dealing with Ieyasu were clearly demonstrated in
1599. A Portuguese sea captain based in Nagasaki named Francisco de
Gouvea got it into his head that he could enrich himself by coming to the aid
of the king of Cambodia, who was fighting his neighbours; he recruited a
mixed force of Japanese and Portuguese and sailed by way of Macau to
Cambodia, where his ship was joined by two Spanish vessels from Manila.
Gouvea never made himself rich and was killed in Cambodia, but many of
his followers escaped from Cambodia aboard his ship. Still hoping to make
some money out of the expedition, they seized a boat heading across the
South China Sea from Malaya, and took it with them to Nagasaki. Their
exploits were deemed to be acts of piracy; all the Japanese soldiers as well as
many of their wives and children were arrested and crucified, with Fray
Jerónimo brought in as a witness. Only the intervention of the Jesuits
prevented an even worse massacre – the wife and children of Gouvea had
also been arrested but in the end were spared.68 The arbitrary nature of
Ieyasu’s rule became very obvious, particularly after he defeated his Japanese
foes in 1600.69 Soon after that Fray Jerónimo died of dysentery and his rival
Valignano spat out the comment: ‘the Lord taught him a lesson!’ At the root
of the disagreement between the Franciscans and the Jesuits was a sense
among the Franciscans that the Jesuits were too willing to respect the strict
limits placed on their activities by the regime in Edo: ‘they therefore go about
in Japanese dress, and they say Mass and administer the sacraments behind
closed doors.’ Meanwhile the Jesuits, who certainly knew Japan much better,
were convinced that the open evangelization favoured by the Franciscans was
placing Japanese Christianity in jeopardy.70
In 1614 Ieyasu banned Christianity in Japan. By then hundreds of
thousands of Japanese had already accepted the faith, mainly in Kyushu. The
daimyo were expected to conform and to abandon Christianity for Buddhism.
Over the next quarter of a century, horrific persecutions took place.71 What
has been called Japan’s ‘Christian Century’ came to an end in the middle of
the seventeenth century. The Portuguese found it more and more difficult to
trade, and were thrown out in 1639; an embassy set out the next year from
Macau, hoping to restore ties, but the uncompromising attitude of the
authorities was made absolutely clear when most of the diplomats were
beheaded.72 This was not simply the result of the ban on Jesuit
proselytization and the withdrawal of the Jesuits from the lucrative trade in
Chinese silk. Other forces were at work: the Portuguese had new European
rivals in these waters who, like them, had once been under the rule of the
dour King Philip II of Spain, but had been more successful in throwing off
his rule: the Dutch. The English too had resisted King Philip, who had also,
briefly, been their own king while he was married to Queen Mary. In
England, and then in the Netherlands and Denmark, new ideas were being
propagated that suggested there were previously unexplored ways around the
seas patrolled by Spain and Portugal, routes that were investigated with
extraordinary persistence in the late sixteenth and early century seventeenth.
 36

The Fourth Ocean

So far this book has looked at three great oceans. Yet most atlases would
show that there exist five oceans. One of them, the Southern or Antarctic
Ocean, is really a southward extension of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian
Oceans, and might or might not embrace the bottom of Australia and New
Zealand, its northern limits being as arbitrary as those laid down by the
Spanish and Portuguese treaty that divided the world in 1494. The other, the
Arctic Ocean, has barely featured so far, because even the Norse voyages to
Greenland were confined to Atlantic waters. An occasional trip northwards
up the Davis Strait, or (at the other end of the Norse maritime world) voyages
as far as Spitsbergen, brought Norse ships above the Arctic Circle, although
the Davis Strait, separating Greenland from Baffin Island, is clearly an
extension of the Atlantic. Even before the discovery of North America, the
question of what lay far to the north gave rise to fanciful speculation, based
on snippets of knowledge about the Sami (or Lapps). Martin Behaim’s globe,
created around the time of Columbus’s first voyage, imagined that the North
Pole consisted of a circular island surrounded by ocean, and betrayed the
usual confusion about what Greenland was, making it an extension of Eurasia
beyond Norway.1 Before 1555 the Swedish cleric and geographer Olaus
Magnus reached the north of Norway and wrote about the midnight sun as
well as the fur trade and Sami customs.2
The lure of the Arctic to sixteenth-century sailors consisted not of lands
within the Arctic Circle but of seas that would take them across the Arctic
into warmer waters studded with spice islands. Only at the start of the
twenty-first century has the melting of polar ice made the passageways
around the top of North America and around the top of Russia look viable.
Magellan had shown that a route round the bottom of the Americas did exist;
but it was almost beyond human endurance, and the opportunity to find a
passageway to the north of either the Americas or Russia that would bring
European merchants to Cathay and the Indies could not be passed by – not, at
any rate, by the English and later on the Dutch, who hoped to avoid territories
over which Spain and Portugal exercised or claimed to exercise dominion.
Now and again, it is true, the English could take advantage of close relations
with Spain and claim access to Spanish markets as far afield as Hispaniola.
But the relationship between England and Spain was bumpy. Henry VIII’s
alliance collapsed in acrimony over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon,
and Philip II’s brief period as king of England, through his marriage to
Catherine’s daughter, Mary, was followed by a Protestant succession.
 This was not simply a matter of commercial and political alliances. English
merchants trading in Andalusia had established a base at Sanlúcar de
Barrameda, an outport of Seville, under the patronage of the dukes of Medina
Sidonia, who were something of a law unto themselves and had all sorts of
creative ideas about promoting prosperity (including the settlement of
Gibraltar with converted Jews in 1474). Now the English claimed that they
had become the target of the Spanish Inquisition, which had extended its
persecutions beyond crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims to embrace those who
rejected papal supremacy: ‘many of our nacion be secretly accused and know
not therof so that all the hole company daylly dotth live in great feare and
daunger.’3 Yet the English craved access to the products of the Indies, all the
more so as the economy began to expand. One possibility was to create warm
ties with the rulers of Morocco, which, it was hoped, would satisfy English
hunger for sugar, while an alliance with its rulers would box in the king of
Spain close to home and would maintain pressure on the Portuguese, who
still controlled several Moroccan ports. So, from the 1550s onwards, a
‘Barbary trade’ developed, and from the 1580s it was managed by a Barbary
Company licensed by Queen Elizabeth and based in London.4
Sugar was one thing; but there was a whole pharmacopoeia of drugs and a
larder of spices that the English wanted to acquire. Here the twin notions of a
North-West and a North-East Passage around either the top of North America
or the top of Russia came into play. It is no surprise that the initiative lay with
Bristol merchants who had already been heavily involved with first John and
then Sebastian Cabot, particularly the Thorne family, wealthy merchants and
benefactors (the school founded by Robert Thorne the Elder still survives, as
Bristol Grammar School). In 1530 his son, also Robert, wrote at length to
King Henry VIII, arguing that the king should seize the opportunity to
increase his power and influence by sending expeditions to ‘divers New lands
and kingdoms, in the which without doubt your Grace shall winne perpetuall
glory, and your subjectes infinite profite’. The younger Thorne was now
based in London, but had lived for a while in Seville with, it is said, his
Spanish mistress; and the advantage he placed second – ‘infinite profite’ –
was the one that mattered more to him. Thorne underplayed the dangers from
ice and cold, and emphasized instead the fact that one could keep sailing
during the perpetual daylight of an Arctic summer, ‘which thing is a great
commoditie for the navigants, to see at all times round about them’. He seems
to have assumed that the best route would take ships close to the North Pole
itself, right over the top of the world. All this led Robert Thorne to an
extravagant account of how English ships could then choose to return by way
of the Magellan Strait or the Cape of Good Hope, having in the meantime
visited ‘the richest lands and Islands of the world of golde, precious stones,
balmes, spices, and other thinges that we here esteem most’.5
These plans were not followed through, and by 1569, when Gerard
Mercator published a new version of his very influential world map, the view
began to spread that a direct polar route was probably impossible, because the
North Pole was supposedly surrounded by four closely packed islands;
however, that still left the passages to the north-west and the north-east open,
assuming they were not blocked by ice. ‘No other map in the Atlas proved to
be so erroneous,’ it has been remarked, all the more so as Mercator
credulously included information from a bogus account of the travels of a late
medieval Venetian named Zeno, who was supposed to have been washed up
on the shores of the mythical Frisland and Estotiland, said to be well-
populated mid-Atlantic islands. However, this map did assume the existence
of what is now known as the Bering Strait, opening up the route to China
around the top of Eurasia.6
Thorne’s friend Sebastian Cabot was an even more enthusiastic supporter
of the idea of an Arctic route, patiently awaiting the day when it would
become obvious that this was an opportunity not to be missed. He was still
arguing the case half a century after his father had discovered Newfoundland
but had failed to open up the promised route to Cathay. Sebastian had
explored waters off Canada (and had possibly entered Hudson Bay) while in
English service in 1509, and he had returned to the English court by 1548,
after spending thirty-four years working for the king of Spain.7 This time,
though, the target of his expeditions was left vague: he took charge of a
newly formed ‘Companie of the Marchants Adventurers for the Discoverie of
Regions, Dominions, Islands and Places Unknowen’. In Richard Hakluyt’s
remarkable collection of sixteenth-century travel narratives the planned
voyage is aptly described as ‘a newe and strange Navigation’. Funds were
raised by inviting subscriptions of £25, which brought in £6,000, enough to
buy and fit out three ships. Given the choice between a north-eastern and a
north-western route, the consortium decided in 1553 that the best prospects
lay in the direction of Russia; after all, several expeditions already sent
towards the American north-west had found no passageway. Sir Hugh
Willoughby and Richard Chancellor were to lead the expedition, armed with
letters from the young King Edward VI addressed, in time-honoured fashion,
to sundry ‘Kings, Princes and other Potentates’; the ships attracted enormous
attention when they sailed downriver and passed the royal palace at
Greenwich: ‘the Courtiers came running out, and the common people flockt
together, standing very thicke upon the shoare: the Privie Counsel, they lookt
out at the windows of the Court, and the rest ranne up to the toppes of the
towers.’8
The optimism that had led to the creation of the consortium was certainly
misplaced. Off the coast of northern Finland, storms dispersed the ships and
Willoughby’s ship along with one other pressed on into the Barents Sea,
which lies between Spitsbergen and the long and desolate pair of islands
simply known as Novaya Zemlya, ‘New Land’, before icy conditions forced
the ships back to the Kola Peninsula at the very top of Scandinavia. Forced to
spend the winter there, all sixty-three sailors and merchants were in no
condition to survive the freezing conditions. A couple of years later the
Venetian ambassador in London told how the crews had been found by
Russian fishermen, literally frozen to death and still sitting at dinner, or
writing a letter, or opening a locker.9 No doubt these details were
embellishments; but the challenge of the north-east route became much
clearer, and the Venetian ambassador must have combined satisfaction with
horror, aware that his native city already faced quite enough competition in
the spice trade from the Portuguese. Better news came from the third vessel.
Chancellor’s ship ended up on the coasts of the White Sea, from where
Chancellor set out on an ambitious but successful overland journey to
Moscow, laying the foundations for a successful fur trade between England
and Russia which came to be handled by a licensed Muscovy Company.
Quite apart from the fascination English reports show at the customs and
beliefs of the Russians, and quite apart from the friendly relations that
developed between Ivan the Terrible in Moscow and Elizabeth I in London
(even extending to a marriage proposal from the psychopathic tsar), the
Muscovy trade opened up other possibilities: the road was now open to
Persia, but overland, and a trickle of exotic eastern goods reached England by
this long and roundabout route. Unexpected success in Muscovy deflected
attention from the North-East Passage, and the sense that the north-eastern
route was not viable was strengthened when a second expedition, in 1555,
was guided some of the way by Russian sailors and reached Novaya Zemlya.
However, the ship, a small pinnace, had to turn back because of the frightful
conditions at 70°N – not just the ice floes but the unwelcome attention of a
massive Right Whale that ‘made a terrific noyse in the water’ and swam
within a few feet of the ship.10
The Muscovy Company continued to raise money for expeditions; these
reverses did nothing to dampen enthusiasm for voyages across the Arctic, and
the Muscovy Company was fortunate in its choice of commander: Anthony
Jenkinson, who set out in 1557, proved to be an indomitable explorer of
central Asia, reaching Persia and Bukhara, and acting as Queen Elizabeth’s
representative at the court of the highly temperamental tsar. What Ivan really
sought was a military rather than a trading alliance, in the hope of extending
his power in the Baltic and keeping the Swedes at bay. Although the
privileges to the English also included trading rights along those parts of the
Baltic that lay under Russian control, it is hard to see what real benefit a
military alliance would have brought England, apart from the opportunity to
sell armaments. In 1572 Jenkinson managed to negotiate the restoration of
English trading rights when Ivan the Terrible, in one of his all-too-frequent
spasms of rage, had abolished them, and he worked his charm on the tsar so
successfully that he was sent back to England bearing ‘our hearty
commendations to our loving sister, Queene Elizabeth’.11 The English
merchants established a base at Kholmogory, about fifty miles upriver from
the White Sea: ‘in this town the English men have lands of their own, given
them by the Emperour, and fair houses, with offices for their commodity,
very many.’12
Not deterred, the Muscovy Company tried yet again in 1580, even though
the ships the company sent were apparently tiny – a crew of ten on one
barque of forty tons and a mere six on the other, perhaps in recognition that
passage through the ice would be even more difficult with large vessels of the
sort that had been used by Willoughby and Chancellor. The real interest of
this voyage lies in its manifest: confident of reaching China, the cargo
included a ‘large Mappe of London to make shew of your Citie’; plenty of
English clothes, including hats, gloves and pantophles, or slippers, not to
mention glassware from both England and Venice and a great assortment of
ironmongery, which makes one think that among the investors were
manufacturers of locks, hinges and bolts. In return the explorers were
expected to obtain not just plenty of seeds, in the hope that Chinese herbs
could be cultivated in Europe, but a map of China. They were also supposed
to spy on the Chinese, carefully noting fortifications and naval activity in the
places they visited. Needless to say, they did not reach China, although they
did penetrate a little way beyond Novaya Zemlya before the ice of the Kara
Sea forced them back. Yet Russian sailors already knew how to navigate
further along the northern coast of Eurasia right up to the great River Ob.13
The English were frozen out of the Arctic; but others were not
discouraged. At the end of the sixteenth century Dutch navigators also saw a
route across the top of the world as a way to keep their trade in exotic goods
alive while immersed in conflict with Spain. They had the support of Prince
Maurits, the Stadhouder, who occupied a sort of presidential role in the
United Provinces of the Netherlands and who in 1593 ensured that money
was invested in this route. Here was an opportunity to strike sharp blows
against Catholic Spain that appealed to Calvinist ministers of religion such as
Petrus Plancius, a forceful hardliner who took an especial interest in
geography and navigation, lecturing and publishing on the subject, including
maps that outlined a route through the Arctic Ocean.14 Mapmakers, though,
could only go so far, which was not very far at all. What was needed was an
expedition. Doing it the hard way, the great Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz
sailed into Arctic waters and mapped out parts of the sea that now bears his
name, as well as the islands of Novaya Zemlya on its eastern edge; but even
he confused Spitsbergen with Greenland, and in 1596–7 he and his crew had
to endure a harsh winter immured in a wooden house built from driftwood
and parts of their ship. The ship itself was completely trapped in ice, so they
were forced to travel in open boats all the way from Novaya Zemlya to the
Kola Peninsula. Barentsz died en route; how anyone survived is the real
surprise, although Russian sailors occasionally came to their aid. A
bestselling account of this dramatic voyage was in the bookshops as early as
1598. Normally one expects these narratives to be embellished, but, when in
1871 a Norwegian skipper chanced upon the remains of a wooden hut in this
remote corner of the Arctic, it became obvious that the basic facts at least
were true: the hut was still stocked with all the paraphernalia of the voyage,
from spoons and knives to an iron chest with an elaborate lock, to pewter
candlesticks, to a ‘pitcher of Etruscan shape, beautifully engraved’, to small
weapons, to Dutch books and engravings (so many of these that they were
clearly taken to be put on sale in China), and much else.15 Nor did Dutch
expeditions end at this point; the lesson of the attempts to find a North-East
Passage was that failure only increased the appetite. The realization that
Arctic waters teemed with whales, including the enormous Arctic Right
Whale, attracted the Dutch ‘North Company’ into the seas to the north of
Russia. A Right Whale could be as much as sixty or seventy feet long, and at
least 2,000 pounds of baleen plates could be extracted from the carcass, as
well as a mountain of blubber.16

II

If, as Mercator’s atlas and other maps showed, North America was physically
separate from Asia, then the North-West Passage was also worth considering.
Maybe the world was constructed in such a way that the route did not
actually pass through the Arctic: after all, when the French king sent
Giovanni da Verrazano on the journey that took him past what became New
England, in 1524, Francis I hoped he would find a way through to the Pacific
somewhere in those latitudes, and the same idea motivated his support for
Jacques Cartier’s exploration of the St Lawrence River in Canada.17 A
woodcut of around 1530, made in Nuremberg, seems to reflect Sebastian
Cabot’s assumption that a long, reasonably wide and accessible Fretum
Arcticum, or Arctic Passage, passed between Greenland and northern China –
on the woodcut Greenland was shown as a peninsula sticking out of Asia, so
that Asia was made to reach right across the top of a stunted and much-
reduced North America. Some maps and globes of this period followed this
model and attributed the discovery of a North-West Passage to the Corte Real
brothers from the Azores, who had rediscovered Greenland and Labrador
around 1500. The assumption that the route existed became more and more
widespread, especially since the idea had the imprimatur of Sebastian Cabot:
‘one Sebastian Cabota hath bin the chiefest setter forth of this journey or
voyage.’
The Muscovy Company kept its options open, concentrating at first on the
north-eastern route but holding a monopoly on the exploration of the north-
western one as well. Humphrey Gilbert, Walter Raleigh’s half-brother,
argued the case for a new route to Cathay, or China, with determination in a
tract of 1566 entitled A Discourse of Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia:
‘you might justly have charged mee with an unsettled head if I had at any
time taken in hand, to discover Utopia, or any country fained by imagination:
But Cataia is none such, it is a country, well knowen.’18 Gilbert presented
his arguments to Queen Elizabeth, whose court he attended, and accompanied
his tract with a map showing how the two American continents, joined to one
another, were still separated by water channels from a large southern
continent and from an Asian landmass that did not, this time, include
Greenland. He had a vision of large spaces of open water giving access to a
channel into the Pacific. No less significantly, he urged the court to think of
the advantages exploration of this route would bring England, as its relations
with Catholic Spain steadily deteriorated following the death of Queen Mary
and Philip’s loss of recognition as king of England.19
Queen Elizabeth did not act on Gilbert’s optimistic advice for several
years. Then, in 1576, Martin Frobisher set out to explore the North-West
Passage, and Gilbert’s advice was printed and distributed as a sort of
prospectus for Frobisher’s voyage. Frobisher had some experience of the
west African trade, but he was, in essence, one of those adventurous and
unscrupulous privateers who often received tacit support from the queen.20
This made him all the more suitable as a challenger to Spanish and
Portuguese mastery over the spice trade. A ‘Company of Cathay’ came into
being, but it only raised £875, enough to equip two thirty-ton barques and a
small pinnace, total crew thirty-four men, ‘alarmingly small vessels’ engaged
on a ‘madcap venture’, in the words of the leading historian of this route.21
The tiny fleet set out in summer 1576; the pinnace sank with all hands in a
storm west of Greenland, and one of the barques, the Michael, headed back
home.22
Frobisher steered his own ship, the Gabriel, towards the southern shores of
Baffin Island, where the crew encountered their first Inuit out at sea paddling
their kayaks. Having assumed that the northern shores of this stretch of water
were part of Asia, and the southern shores part of North America, Frobisher
knew this to be absolutely correct when he saw the Inuit at close quarters; his
colleague the Master of the Gabriel reported: ‘they bee like to Tartars, with
long blacke haire, broad faces, and flatte noses, and tawnie in colour.’23 This
was a similar mistake to that made by observers of Columbus’s generation,
who had also identified the native peoples of the Caribbean and Central
America with Asia.24 At first, relations with the Inuit were quite good; the
Inuit offered the crew salmon and other fresh fish. Five sailors who were
taking an Inuit back to the shore to collect his kayak, after he offered to lead
the Gabriel back to the open sea, disappeared from sight, though memory of
them remained remarkably strong among the Inuit, for whom, after all, this
was their first encounter with English explorers:

Oral history told me that five white men were captured by Innuit
people at the time of the appearance of the ships a great many years
ago; that these men wintered on shore (whether one, two, three, or
more winters, could not say); that they lived among the Innuit, that
they afterward built an oomien [large boat], and put a mast into her,
and had sails; that early in the season, before much water appeared,
they endeavoured to depart; that, in the effort, some froze their hands;
but that finally they succeeded in getting into open water, and away
they went, which was the last seen or heard of them.25
The Inuit even remembered that there were three separate visits by
Frobisher’s ships. However, an English narrative of the voyage paints a less
positive picture: some English clothes were found in an Inuit camp overrun
by Frobisher’s sailors on his second expedition, of 1577, and they can only
have been left behind, or taken from, the five sailors who disappeared.
Frobisher was inclined to think that the omnivorous Inuit had eaten the men
rather than looking after them, for by this time relations with the Inuit had
deteriorated badly and there were frequent clashes between the Europeans
and the native population; besides, the image of the cannibalistic native
American was widely diffused during the sixteenth century.26
Missing the entrance to Hudson Bay, Frobisher sailed some way down a
fjord on Baffin Island, which became known as Frobisher Bay, and decided
that this must be the passageway he sought. But in the event he turned back
before winter could set in, reaching London with not much to show for his
voyage apart from a fairly small piece of black rock, which, on close
examination, seemed to contain fragments of a bright metal that the London
assayers optimistically thought was gold, estimated to be worth £240 per ton
of rock. This raised hopes to such a pitch that Queen Elizabeth was willing to
invest £1,000 in a second expedition by the same two ships, while the
Flemish geographer Abraham Ortelius is said to have made a jealous trip to
London to see if he could steal some of the secrets of the north-western route,
which would certainly have interested the Spanish masters of Flanders.
Aware that the ships were venturing into lands that would never keep them
supplied with the food they needed, the second expedition carried five tons of
salt beef, sixteen tons of ship’s biscuit, two tons of butter (enough for half a
pound per man per day) and over eighty tons of beer, which would provide
eight pints (four and a half litres) per man per day – even so, the ships
managed to sail in a straight line when so required.27 However, there was a
subtle change in emphasis, as the Cathay Company now charged Frobisher
with collecting many more samples of rock; collecting it in Arctic conditions
out of what even in August was frozen ground was no light task, and the
ships had to set sail before the end of the month because the Arctic summer
ended early and the ice began to close in.28 Still, the queen was gratified,
and, showing off her skill in Latin, she even gave the territories Frobisher had
visited a new name, Meta Incognita, ‘The Unknown Limits’ – meaning that
this was an unclaimed land to which neither Spain nor any other power had a
prior claim.29
 In a third, massive expedition, of 1578, consisting of eleven ships and 400
men, Frobisher collected still more of the rock, and happened upon the
entrance to Hudson Bay. The aim was to create a permanent settlement,
dedicated to the extraction of gold-bearing rock.30 He realized that this was
very possibly ‘the passage which we seeke to find the rich country of
Cathaya’, but everyone’s attention had turned to the pieces of black rock.
Investment in Frobisher’s project boomed, as a mineral-processing plant with
furnaces and mills was built at Dartford at great expense to render down the
rock and extract the gold. The plant was supplied with 1,250 tons of rock
when those of Frobisher’s ships that had survived the Arctic ice returned –
only Frobisher’s flagship, the Michael, had been provided with a
strengthened hull, and other vessels risked being crushed to pieces by the
weight of the ice floes.31 Once processed, the rock mainly delivered iron
pyrites, ‘fool’s gold’. Although iron pyrites tend to occur in places where real
gold can be found, it remains astonishing that, in an age when alchemy was
the rage, and learned figures such as John Dee gravitated around the royal
court, such an elementary mistake was made. So, all too quickly, the bubble
burst and the investments evaporated into thin air. Frobisher emerges with
more credit than the assayers: he had not set out to find gold in North
America, and he seems to have been a demanding but inspiring leader of his
men; when digging up rocks became the business of the day, he somehow
managed to convince them to put all their limited energy into hard physical
labour; and by his third expedition he had recruited hundreds of volunteers.
Like the search for a North-East Passage, the search for the North-West
Passage continued despite setbacks. After all, the saga of the false gold could
be dismissed as a distraction from the real purpose all along, which had been
to reach China. In the 1580s John Davis followed in the wake of Frobisher
but then headed off into the strait now named after him between Greenland
and Baffin Island.32 The early seventeenth century saw the heroic
endeavours of Henry Hudson (who had already explored the North-East
Passage) to work out the nature of the great sea that carries his own name and
the all-too-modest qualifier ‘bay’. His efforts ended in disaster in 1611 when
the crew mutinied, placed him, his son and a handful of crew members in a
small boat, and cut them adrift in James Bay, the southernmost part of
Hudson Bay. It is unlikely that the captain and his friends survived; they were
given neither food nor warm clothing.33
 A footnote to these expeditions is provided by the circumnavigation of the
world led by Sir Francis Drake in 1577 to 1580 aboard the Pelican (later
renamed the Golden Hind).34 He decided to follow the Pacific coast of not
just South but North America a long way northwards, beyond the trajectory
of the Manila galleons operated by Spain upon which he planned to prey. He
also captured and rifled a number of Spanish ships whose route took them up
and down the coasts of South America and Mexico, for the Spaniards were
building towns along the shoreline, and the ‘wine of Chili’ was a fond target
of Drake’s men.35 One explanation that has been offered for his insistence
on sailing northwards into cooler climes is that he too was looking for a
channel linking the Pacific to the Atlantic.36 Apart from anything else, the
discovery of this legendary passage would offer a quick way back to England
– his aim was not actually to circumnavigate the globe, but to harass the
Spaniards in their own waters, first in the Caribbean and then in the Pacific;
once in the Pacific, there was a good chance of capturing Spanish treasure
ships where they least expected to face any challenges. Finally, when Drake
realized that he could not return by way of the stormy Magellan Strait, he
aimed for the Cape of Good Hope instead.37
More than ten years later, having been defeated by the Arctic, John Davis
led an expedition into the Pacific by way of the Magellan Strait in 1591–2,
hoping to resolve the problem of the North-West Passage ‘on the backe syde’
by following Drake’s route up the American coast until he found the way
through. Disagreements with the joint leader of the expedition, combined
with foul weather, forced Davis back to England before he had reached far
beyond the southern tip of the Americas.38 Had he reached Alaska from
Tierra del Fuego his expedition would surely be ranked as one of the greatest
sixteenth-century voyages. As it was, Davis may have been the first to land in
the Falkland Islands, where his crew were forced to live off penguin meat, on
their way home. Inevitably, those mapping the shores of unknown seas kept
an eye out for the express routes across continents that had first been
postulated as a way to cross Africa and now were being postulated as a way
to cross North America.

III
England and the Netherlands were not alone in eyeing these Arctic routes
with interest. The Danes were well aware of the long history of Norse
involvement in far northern waters, and at the start of the sixteenth century
they were already operating a customs station on the northern tip of
Scandinavia, at the place they called Vardø and the English called
Wardhouse, ‘a haven or castel of some name in the kingdome of Norway’; it
had been chosen as the meeting point for the ships of Hugh Willoughby and
Richard Chancellor on their ill-fated expedition into the Arctic Ocean.39
Shipping bound for the White Sea stopped there and dues were paid to the
Danish king, who was ruler of Norway as well; meanwhile the Danish kings
laid down plans to gain control over Greenland: King Frederick II hoped to
persuade Martin Frobisher to lead an expedition there, and King Christian IV
hired Scottish and English captains to assert Danish rule over the vast icy
island. Once he thought he had achieved his aims in the north-west Atlantic,
he turned his attention to the North-East Passage. He sent an enterprising and
experienced seaman, Jens Munk, as far as the ice would permit. Once this
route proved to be impassable, Munk was reassigned to the North-West
Passage instead, dreaming, as had the English, of opening a route to China. In
1619 Munk set off with a frigate and a sloop in the direction of Baffin Island
and Hudson Bay. Described as ‘one of the most vivid and poignant works in
the literature of the Arctic’, Munk’s diary of his voyage still exists, only
because he, with two other members of the crew of sixty-four, survived the
terrible conditions of a long winter on an inadequate diet which created an
epidemic of scurvy: ‘the stomach was ready enough,’ Munk wrote, ‘and had
appetite for food, but the teeth would not allow it.’40 Much of the time, the
ground was too hard even to bury their dead companions – in 1717 an
English expedition arrived at the same spot and found it littered with the
skeletons of unburied Danish sailors. The ships had arrived in Hudson Bay in
late August, not realizing that this was actually the time to leave before the
ice set in. In the end, Munk and two of his companions steered their sloop
back to Denmark, where the king showed his immense gratitude by ordering
him to set out again, find the frigate that had been left behind, and map the
rest of Hudson Bay. No doubt Munk was very relieved that no one could be
persuaded to join the crew for this journey into a frozen hell.41
Danish ambitions in Arctic waters were arrested, although these were also
the years in which a Danish East India Company came into being, eventually
followed by a Danish West India Company, a reminder that the battle for
control of maritime trade was not confined to Spain, Portugal, Holland,
England and France, not to mention the Ottoman Turks in the Indian Ocean.
Among all these powers and nations, however, the Dutch proved to be the
most determined and ruthless challengers of the Spanish and Portuguese
supremacy over the ocean routes.
 37

The Rise of the Dutch

Before looking at the history of the Dutch presence across the oceans,
something needs to be said about the emergence of the Dutch merchant fleets.
Their success in supplanting the Portuguese was one of several extraordinary
triumphs over the old order – over the Hansards in the Baltic and over
Antwerp in their own neighbourhood. All these victories were intertwined.
Antwerp played a vital role in the Asiatic trading system created by the
Portuguese, funnelling silver into the Portuguese network in return for
prodigious quantities of eastern spices. But Dutch maritime history begins
with herrings rather than spices. It has been seen that the Hansa began to lose
its grip on the trade of the Baltic and the North Sea as competition from both
the Dutch and the English became more lively. Meanwhile German princes
were attempting to re-establish their much-weakened territorial power and to
rebuild their finances, and were often reluctant to permit subject-towns to
participate in the German Hansa, all the more so when the Hansa developed
its own foreign policy and sent its fleets into battle against the Danes or the
English.
These conflicts, and political struggles taking place within Flanders, had
serious effects on Bruges, which lost its position as the great clearing house
of maritime and terrestrial trade in the late fifteenth century. The citizens of
Bruges stood up to the centralizing policies of the Habsburg regent,
Maximilian of Austria, and Maximilian riposted with the instruction that all
foreign merchants evacuate the city, issued in 1484 and 1488. Although he
made peace with Bruges before long, the expulsion of the foreign merchants
prompted many of them, including wealthy Italians, to move their business to
Antwerp, which was better situated for access to the sea – the channels
linking Bruges to the open sea had been silting up. Moreover, Maximilian
encouraged the merchants to choose Antwerp because the city had stood by
him during his conflict with the Flemish towns.1 When Maximilian
permitted the foreign business houses to return to Bruges, they demurred.
The Portuguese established an agency in Antwerp as early as 1498, even
before they knew the outcome of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage to India.
They aimed to sell the goods they had acquired along the Guinea Coast,
including Malagueta pepper; in the event they were laying the foundations for
the ‘golden age’ of Antwerp. Another Portuguese product was sugar, brought
over from Madeira and later from São Tomé in vast quantities; some of this
came to be processed in refineries close to Antwerp. In 1560 Portuguese
sugar imports into the Low Countries were worth 250,000 guilders, though
this accounted for only 1.4 per cent of all imports (other Portuguese spices
were worth 2,000,000 guilders, nearly 11 per cent).2 Unlike the other foreign
communities in Bruges and Antwerp, which were mostly branches of banks
or private trading companies, the Portuguese feitoria, or ‘factory’, in Antwerp
was set up by the Crown, which continued to appoint agents there. By 1510
the city had officially recognized the Portuguese community – indeed, by that
date other nations, including the Genoese, the Catalans and the Florentines,
watched the peppercorns flowing through Antwerp and established their own
agencies. Immigration boosted the population, which reached about 100,000
at its peak in the mid-sixteenth century.3
The English Merchant Adventurers were very visible on the streets of
Antwerp, as a result of generous privileges enshrined in the treaty grandly
entitled the Magnus Intercursus, an agreement between the English Crown
and the Habsburg rulers of Flanders. They had been active in Antwerp since
1421, when they established a staple there; in other words, all their textiles
were to pass through this port alone.4 The canny Henry VII obtained
excellent terms for his subjects, who channelled English cloth into Europe
just as England was expanding its cloth production and Flemish cloth
production was faltering.5 The Merchant Adventurers included a large
number of Mercers, members of the elite cloth-trading guild, and one of the
most prominent English dealers in Antwerp was Sir Thomas Gresham,
himself the son of a Mercer, who combined a first-class education at St
Paul’s School and Gonville Hall, Cambridge, with outstanding business
talent. It has been said that he also combined ‘political influence and
diplomacy with a grasp of finance and a lack of scruple almost equally
breath-taking’.6 His experience of the Antwerp Bourse led him to found the
Royal Exchange in London, and he also founded Gresham College, where
lectures on the practical skills a merchant or navigator might need were
encouraged.
The Venetians had, until now, been sending their Flanders galleys to
Antwerp, loaded with spices brought through Alexandria and Beirut, as well
as Mediterranean luxuries. In 1501 the first shipment of Asian, rather than
west African, spices reached the port from Lisbon, and after this the
quantities brought to Antwerp by the Portuguese traders grew and grew.
Venetian galley sailings stopped for a few years, though they did resume in
1518, when the spice trade had recovered some equilibrium.7 Antwerp now
became a magnet for south German businessmen keen to buy these goods for
consumers in Nuremberg, Augsburg and elsewhere – the great banking
houses of the Fuggers, the Welsers and the Imhofs, among others, who
enriched themselves greatly from the spice trade, although a modern historian
has written of their ‘appalling reputation as leeches’.8 They paid in silver and
copper, which was mined in central Europe and now flowed, via Antwerp,
towards Portugal. These metals had traditionally been funnelled southwards
over the Alps to Venice, so the switch from Venice to Antwerp as the major
trading port for spices had wide ramifications, threatening the money supply
of the Most Serene Republic. As early as 1508 the precious metals trade was
worth 60,000 marks. Having built one Bourse in which businessmen could
make their deals in 1485, Antwerp had to construct a larger one in 1515 and a
New Bourse in 1531, to cope with expanding trade.9
 The Antwerpers could not rest on their laurels. Habsburg rivalry with
France disrupted maritime trade; in 1522 and the next year the city was
deprived of spices as ships failed to reach Flanders from Portugal, Italy and
Spain. The Venetians bounced back in the 1530s, for, as has been seen, the
Portuguese proved unable to cut off the Red Sea routes, along which spices
continued to filter. For Portugal, silver had always been Antwerp’s selling
point, and once large quantities of Peruvian silver began to arrive closer to
home, in Spain, in the 1540s, Antwerp lost its attraction to the Portuguese,
who closed down their offices in the city in 1548. On the other hand, the
native Flemings took up some of the slack, dealing not just in the produce of
the soil but in tapestries, paintings, jewellery and other upmarket goods that
belonged in the house of any respectable citizen of means. Antwerp also
became an important centre of printing, thanks to the initiative of Christoffel
Plantijn. He explained why he had come to Antwerp from France:

No other town in the world could offer me more facilities for carrying
on the trade I intended to begin. Antwerp can easily be reached;
various nations meet in this marketplace; there too can be found the
raw materials indispensable for the practice of one’s trade; craftsmen
for all trades can be easily found and instructed in a short time.10

And there were still plenty of foreign merchants in the city, including
Protestants from Germany and England, and New Christians of Jewish
descent from Portugal. In 1550 the city offered the English Merchant
Adventurers an extensive range of buildings with an orchard, garden and four
inner courtyards. The Hansards did just as well: the magnificent
Oosterlingenhuis of 1568 lay close to the River Scheldt and contained 130
chambers for visiting merchants, though they rattled around in the building,
as only a few Germans made much use of it.11
In reality, Antwerp was struggling to keep its head above water. Emperor
Charles V had been relying heavily on loans raised through banks based in
Antwerp. His debts rose from 1,400,000 guilders in 1538 to 3,800,000
guilders in 1554. In the 1550s the rulers of France, Spain and Portugal made
it plain that they were unable to repay the capital of loans raised from
business houses based in Antwerp, though they were graciously willing to
pay 5 per cent interest for ever. This bankrupted the Fuggers of Augsburg, the
greatest bankers of their day and pillars on whom the prosperity of Antwerp
rested (even if the Genoese were able to fill the gap to some extent).12
Tussles between English and Spanish sailors disrupted trade with England.
The English had seized Spanish treasure ships en route to the Low Countries,
carrying the pay of the Spanish soldiers. The Merchant Adventurers decided
that Hamburg was a more amenable base, and upped sticks for a while in
1569 and again in 1582. Trade was declining even before the next shock hit
Antwerp. This was the persecution of Protestants by the governor of the
Netherlands, the infamous duke of Alva, and was one cause of the great
Revolt of the Netherlands that erupted in 1572. From 1572 onwards the
Dutch ‘Sea-Beggars’, privateers licensed by the house of Orange, blockaded
the River Scheldt and forced Antwerp to find other export routes, as well as
scoring victories against Spanish shipping. In 1576 Spanish troops unleashed
their fury on Antwerp, in resentment at not being paid for their services.
Then, in 1585, after besieging the city for more than a year, Spanish troops
captured it. This was the final signal to the foreign merchants to leave,
notably the Portuguese New Christians, who would be at constant risk from
the Inquisition if they stayed behind (there were 97 Portuguese merchants in
the city in 1570, not counting their dependants). It was also the signal to
regather in a new port, and attention gradually focused on a city that seemed
to have good natural defences and adequate access to the sea: Amsterdam.13

II
The rise of once impoverished Portugal and the creation of a Portuguese
commercial network stretching round half the world, from Brazil to the
Moluccas, is already a surprise. Even more of a surprise is the rise of Dutch
naval and commercial power. It has been claimed that ‘the impact of this on a
small country was overwhelming, even unparalleled in history’, since one
outcome was the emergence of a vigorous urban civilization expressed in the
art and culture of seventeenth-century Holland.14 The surprise comes not so
much from the muddy, unpromising environment in which the Dutch
operated as from the rapidity with which they supplanted the Portuguese in
Asia and even for a time in South America. After all, other great trading
powers had grown up in equally marginal settings, most obviously Venice.
Going far back in time the Frisians had set out from their trading towns that
rose above the waters of the same broad region as the Dutch and had
mastered the trade of the early medieval North Sea, but had explored no
further. And yet, at the end of the sixteenth century and throughout the
seventeenth, Amsterdam and its neighbours became the base for operations
on a truly worldwide scale. Amsterdam became the greatest trading city in
Europe, and it derived its success from the fact that its ships had penetrated
into the furthest reaches of the oceans. As Jonathan Israel has written, ‘a fully
fledged world entrepôt, not just linking, but dominating, the markets of all
continents, was something totally outside human experience.’15 For the
Dutch did not simply link Europe to Africa, Asia and the Americas. They
were also active in intra-Asian trade, more successfully than the Portuguese.
Any attempt to explain how the Dutch established mastery has to begin a
century and a half before they founded their most famous trading institution,
the East India Company. In the fifteenth century several Dutch towns were
challenging the Hanseatic hegemony in the North Sea, but they were not yet
ready to compete with the Lübeckers and Danzigers in what would later be
called the ‘rich trades’, commerce in silks, spices and the other products
bought in Bruges or further afield and shipped by the Germans through the
Danish Sound into the Baltic. They had to be tolerated, even if they came
from ports that had not joined the Hansa (as some did for a while), because
they carried humdrum goods that were needed within the Baltic, especially
the salt of northern Europe. Without salt there were no edible herrings, for, as
has been seen, herring deteriorates rapidly once out of the water. The North
Sea herring fisheries were completely dominated by the Dutch by the middle
of the fifteenth century, and a century later the Dutch ports were home to
about 500 herring ‘busses’, a type of ship adapted to herring fishery. Baltic
herrings were generally considered better in quality but, even so, those from
the North Sea found a vast market. Without herrings, a whole area of Hansa
business would be placed in peril, not to mention the food supply of large
tracts of Europe, especially in Lent. Once within the Baltic, Dutch ships were
also welcome because they loaded their holds with grain, much of it rye.
Often the ships sailed empty into the Baltic, carrying only ballast, though by
the 1590s the Dutch had learned how much Moselle wines were appreciated
along the north German shore, not to mention French wines, which passed
through Middelburg. The Spanish government in the Netherlands appointed
this town, already a favourite of the Portuguese, as the official staple port for
French wine in 1523, although this was merely to confirm its status as a great
wine emporium since the middle of the fourteenth century.16
All this led the Dutch to build hefty, strong ships suitable for bulky goods
that needed sizeable crews, a good source of employment in the Dutch towns
as population recovered from the ravages of plague. The nature of the goods
these ships carried meant that insurance rates were low. By the end of the
sixteenth century these ships had evolved into the lightly built fluyts, efficient
sailers with a simple rig but a large hold.17 Taking advantage of the middle
position of Holland, it was possible to zip down to Iberia to collect salt and
then go straight to the Baltic without returning home. All this was combined
with a shift in the economic centre of gravity within Germany from the
Hanseatic coastline in the north to the banking centres of the south, such as
Nuremberg and Augsburg, which had ready access to the spices that were
humped over the Alps from Venice. The result was that by 1500 the Dutch
found their niche in the North Sea and the Baltic, while the Germans by and
large ceded these areas of activity to them. Some simple statistics prove the
point. In 1497, 567 Dutch ships passed through the Danish Sound, and 202
German ones. Thereafter German numbers recovered but the Dutch remained
well ahead – 890 as against 413 in 1540, so that the Germans only rarely
overtook the Dutch, and then it was because of the looming political crisis in
the Netherlands created by Spanish attempts to impose authority there.18
These advances laid the basis for growth at home and conquest overseas.
At home, the Dutch towns enjoyed easy access to large quantities of imported
fish and grain, which enabled them to absorb a booming population and to
develop their own textile industries. The population balance had already been
shifting away from the countryside and towards the towns after the Black
Death, but more and more of the population was released for non-agricultural
activities as land was turned over to cattle; the dairy industry, already strong
in the late Middle Ages, went from strength to strength, offering the cheese
and other dairy goods that have almost become a symbol of the modern
Netherlands. The drainage of waterlogged land to create the polders enabled
Dutch farmers to grow vegetables and fruits, such as plums and strawberries
(previously a rarity), or to keep their animals on land that was not suitable for
grain production, since it had only recently emerged out of the salty sea.19 A
well-fed population was a strong and healthy one, capable of providing
perhaps 30,000 mariners by the 1560s.
For centuries the Baltic remained an important focus of Dutch business.
Far from abandoning their ancient concerns, the Dutch integrated them into
the world system that they created around 1600. They extended their range by
taking rye into the Mediterranean and establishing themselves at Livorno,
Smyrna and other nodal points of Mediterranean trade.20 Even so, the Dutch
were in a difficult position during the 1570s, as opposition to their Spanish
overlords intensified. The city that would become the commercial capital of
the free Netherlands, Amsterdam, stood aloof from the Dutch Revolt, and its
own Baltic trade contracted as a result of its isolation. Antwerp even seemed
to be bouncing back, having extended a welcome to those of all faiths who
were willing to return to the city and rebuild its fortunes. But once Antwerp
had been captured by the Spaniards in 1585 its fortunes rapidly reversed.
Dutch pirates still guarded the mouth of the River Scheldt so that its ships
could not escape into the open sea. The business community dispersed, not
just into the northern Netherlands but as far west as Rouen, down the Rhine
to Cologne, up to Hamburg, Bremen and the other Hansa towns of northern
Germany, down to Venice and Genoa, and even into the lion’s den, taking up
residence in Seville and Lisbon, where a certain Louis Godijn, formerly of
Antwerp, built up a profitable business sending South American brazilwood
and sugar to northern Europe.
Antwerp was not the only place to suffer. In 1585 King Philip II imposed
an embargo on Dutch shipping bound for Spain and his newly acquired
kingdom of Portugal. In the past, as has been seen, Dutch ships would load
salt in Iberia and head straight for the Baltic. This was now virtually
impossible – as the embargo began to bite, the number of Dutch ships taking
this route fell dramatically, from seventy-one the year before the embargo
was imposed to three in 1589, the main beneficiaries being the Hansards,
who took up the slack.21 On the other hand, the English defeat of the
Spanish Armada brought hope that Philip II would abandon his overweening
ambitions in northern waters, and by 1590 he was becoming dangerously
entranced by civil conflict raging nearer home, in France. Were the Huguenot
Henry of Navarre to become king of France, Philip might have a powerful
Protestant-ruled kingdom on his very doorstep, his worst nightmare. The
Dutch were no longer King Philip’s top priority, and the Spanish king had to
abandon his embargo on Dutch ships in Spanish waters, because there was no
other way he could acquire the grain and ship’s stores he needed for his own
fleet. Oddly, then, the Dutch found themselves supplying their own enemies,
a feature of trade in wartime that has never really disappeared. Many of these
goods came from the Baltic, and the Netherlands merchants seized the
opportunity to load goods in Seville, Lisbon and elsewhere that had filtered
through to Europe all the way from the East Indies and Central and South
America.22
It is hardly surprising, then, that the upsurge in Dutch commerce was
accompanied by a flood of immigrants into Amsterdam and other Dutch
cities that had freed themselves from the Spanish yoke. The increasing
concentration of the migrants in Amsterdam is surprising, for its location is
unpromising; this may explain why many other Dutch towns also became
important maritime centres and were closely involved in the foundation of the
Dutch East India Company. Amsterdam faced the Zuider Zee rather than the
open North Sea, and the marshy setting led to a Venetian solution: the town
was built on piles and (like several of its neighbours) riddled with canals,
which were good for distributing goods to the warehouses that lined their
banks, but only in part compensated for its poor access to the sea. On the
other hand, the complex waterways of the Rhine–Maas estuary offered routes
into the interior, so that Amsterdam benefited from the fact that it was a
middleman between a rich hinterland and the seaways that now stretched
right across the world. By the middle of the sixteenth century ships were
sailing regularly to Norway, which accounted for 7 per cent of its trade in
1544–5; but Lisbon accounted for more than twice as much, so its long-
distance connections were already flourishing. Rye and textiles went to
Portugal, and spices came back the other way. The Baltic was always within
the line of sight of the Amsterdammers, who took advantage of the so-called
Twelve Years Truce with Spain, from 1609 onwards, to achieve more than
2,000 movements through the Danish Sound each year.23
 The striking feature of the years after 1590 is the speed with which the
Dutch in Amsterdam and elsewhere began to commission voyages to much
more distant destinations as well. This reflected the increasing concentration
of capital in the city as the wealthier migrants decided to settle there. The first
new destination was Russia, but not by way of the Baltic route that the
Hanseatic merchants had been exploiting for centuries. Having conquered the
Baltic port of Narva, the Swedes stood in the way of reviving the old route to
Novgorod; besides, under Ivan III and his successor, Ivan the Terrible,
Moscow had emerged as the capital of a vigorously expanding Russian state.
Ivan IV decided to develop the site of what became Archangel on the White
Sea as a terminus for shipping arriving from western Europe. As has been
seen, at first much of this shipping was English, and the motives of those who
came were mixed. A more immediate attraction of the Arctic route than the
hope of finding a shortcut to China was the availability of Russian forest
products, including wax, tallow and furs.24 Once Archangel had been
founded, the Dutch began to edge out the English, who by 1590 were sending
up to fifteen ships to Muscovy each year. By 1600 the Dutch had overtaken
the English. Thirteen Dutch ships arrived that year, and twelve English ones,
and over the next decade the Dutch pushed forward ever more decisively,
marketing the pepper they had begun to bring from the East, or at least from
Lisbon, as well as their own cloth. They were so hungry for Russian products
that they had to make up the balance by paying in the silver of Peru. Thus
metals mined on the Pacific side of South America were being used in
payment in the most remote port in northern Europe.25
At the same time, the Dutch dreamed of using a route through the Barents
Sea, past the barren archipelago of Novaya Zemlya, and round the top of
Siberia to reach the Indies, just as the English had hoped to do. As has been
seen, Barentsz and his colleagues left their names and sometimes their bodies
in these frozen realms of the polar bear. Ever-present, then, was the hope of
binding together the places that the Dutch were marking out on the world
map, and encompassing the entire globe with interlinked and profitable trade
routes. And yet if they were to achieve a breakthrough in Asia, or indeed in
west Africa and South America, much would depend on their ability to
displace the current masters of European traffic to those lands, the
Portuguese.
 38

Whose Seas?

Who has mastery over the sea itself? The question was posed in 1603 after a
Dutch ship despoiled a heavily laden Portuguese carrack, the Santa Catarina,
in the strait near Singapore, and carried its magnificent cargo of bullion and
Chinese goods off to Amsterdam, where it sold for more than 3,000,000
guilders. The Portuguese appear to have been betrayed by the king of Johor
(the southern tip of the Malay peninsula), who told the Dutch that the carrack
was on its way and unprotected. Claims and counterclaims went back and
forth. But the Dutch challenge to the Portuguese was theoretical as well as
practical.1 The question that the Dutch raised has still not gone away: in the
twenty-first century the South China Sea has become the focus of intense
legal debates in which theoretical claims and practical realities are closely
intertwined.2 In 1609 the Dutch scholar and lawyer Hugo Grotius argued
learnedly and forcefully that the seas were free spaces where all had the right
to come and go.3 Admittedly, he began with the argument that ‘it is lawful
for the Hollanders … to sail to the Indians as they do and entertain traffic
with them’;4 and his views ran up against opposition in Great Britain, where
the argument that English or Scottish seas were an English or Scottish
preserve was forcefully advanced, notably by another writer on the law of the
seas, William Welwod, professor of civil law at St Andrews University.5
Even so, Grotius’s tract, written when he was a young man and first
published anonymously, established itself as the starting point for discussion
about claims to maritime dominion and continues to exercise influence. No
one, Grotius argued on the basis of classical and biblical sources, had the
right to forbid free passage, and refusal to do so had justified wars between
the ancient Israelites and the Amorites as they attempted to pass through their
lands on the way to the Promised Land.6 The Portuguese had arrived in the
Indies not as masters but as supplicants, their presence dependent on the
willingness of local rulers to let them live there ‘by entreaty’ (this
underestimated the bludgeoning that the Portuguese applied to anyone who
resisted their attempts to create trading stations).7 They maintained forts and
garrisons, and did not control entire territories. Besides, the Portuguese could
not even claim to have discovered India – it was known to the Romans.

Citing Thomas Aquinas, from the thirteenth century, and the eloquent
Spanish writer of the early sixteenth century Vitoria, Grotius insisted that
Christians have no right to deprive infidels, such as the Indians, of dominion
unless they can show that they have suffered some injury from them. As a
Dutch Protestant, Grotius gave no credit to the pope for dividing the world
between Spain and Portugal, insisting that papal authority did not extend over
those who were not members of his Church. As for the sea, this is a common
or public domain: ‘it can no more be taken away by one from all than you
may take away that from me which is mine.’8 It is not as if you can build
upon the sea. No part of it belongs to any people’s territory; when you take
fish from the sea, you draw from the common resources that the seas provide;
he ticked off William Welwod, whose prime concern was the rights of
Scottish fishermen to have unchallenged use of their own waters, with the
words: ‘the use of that which belongs to no one must necessarily be open to
all, and among the uses of the sea is fishing.’9 Grotius emphasized that he
was speaking about the wide oceans rather than inland seas or indeed rivers,
for the ocean encompasses the whole earth and is subject to the great tides
that man cannot control – this ocean ‘more truly possesseth than is
possessed’.10
Grotius’s arguments were not simply concerned with theoretical issues
concerning sovereignty over open seas. He was keen to press the case for free
navigation and free trade, arguing that the Dutch had a perfect right to enter
and trade in Spanish and Portuguese waters.11 Although Grotius’s tract on
the free seas became a standard point of reference in what later developed
into international law, one should not blind oneself to the simple fact that
Grotius was arguing his own partisan case in favour of his compatriots who
had not merely challenged the Spaniards on land, but were now challenging
them and the Portuguese (who were ruled by Philip III of Spain). In his other
writings, Grotius could show himself to be a tenacious defender of Dutch
trading rights in the Indies, insisting that where European nations had planted
their flag they had established their individual and exclusive right to
dominion. Moreover, it is hard to describe the capture of the Santa Catarina
off Singapore as anything but an outrageous act of piracy. So there was
something opportunistic about his tract on the free sea, which was moulded
as much by circumstances as by logic or idealism.

II

The last decade of the sixteenth century and the first decade of the
seventeenth century saw the Dutch entry on to the world stage. Both the
Dutch and the Flemings began to show their face in the Mediterranean, filling
gaps in the market when grain was in poor supply. In the early 1590s up to
300 Dutch ships were unloading grain in Italy each year. How much the
Italians appreciated Baltic rye is a moot point; this was not their preferred
grain. But the Dutch brought other goods into Italy all the way from
Archangel, including beeswax and caviar. They made deals with the
merchants of Genoa, Venice and Tuscany (where the newly enhanced port of
Livorno welcomed people of all nations), enabling them to bring currants
from the Ionian Islands and exotic goods such as Turkish mohair back to
Amsterdam. It would be a mistake to exaggerate the impact of the Dutch,
who were only at the start of their remarkable ascent, and were not always
welcome. Conflating Dutch and Flemings, English merchants in the Ottoman
Empire complained that ‘Flemings merchants doe beginne to trade into these
countryes which will clean subvert ours’; the English already saw the Dutch
as rivals on the international trade routes, and their sympathy for the Dutch
revolt was muted by the awareness that the Dutch were, unexpectedly,
making themselves into a world force. Another sign of success was the way
they increasingly cornered the market for spices in Lisbon, turning
themselves into major suppliers across northern Europe. Hopes for the future
were soon dashed. At the end of the century King Philip III renewed the ban
on trade between his Iberian kingdoms and Holland, with the result that the
number of visits to Lisbon plummeted. In 1598, 149 Dutch ships visited
Portugal. The next year there were only twelve. Just as telling is the sharp
decline in Dutch traffic heading straight into the Baltic: over 100 in 1598, and
twelve the next year. The Hanseatic merchants enjoyed something of an
Indian summer as they eagerly filled the gap, sending 153 ships along that
route in 1600.12
The lesson of the conflict with Spain was that the Dutch would have to
extend their ambitions a long way beyond either the Baltic or the
Mediterranean. One of the peculiarities of the Spanish and Portuguese
embargo on Dutch ships was that it did not seem to apply to Portuguese
possessions overseas, and the Dutch were sending about twenty ships each
year to the Portuguese trading stations in west Africa at the start of the
seventeenth century. The Portuguese had done them the favour of creating
the infrastructure they needed, so that when Dutch ships put in at São Tomé
there were sugar plantations in place, and plenty of Portuguese settlers keen
to shift their sugar.13 Meanwhile, the near impossibility of loading
Portuguese or Spanish salt so long as the embargo obtained prompted the
Dutch to look ever further afield. Without salt, there would be no edible
herrings. It had to be the right type of salt – French supplies often contained
manganese, which turned the herrings black and damaged their flavour.
There was plenty of salt on the island of Sal in the Cape Verde archipelago,
Portuguese colonies, it is true, but the inhabitants, such as they were, were
quite willing to shift it. Better still, the Dutch thought, might be the seizure of
some of these islands. They attempted to capture the Cape Verde Islands
towards the end of the sixteenth century, and São Tomé in 1600.14
The search for salt took the Dutch all the way to the coast of Venezuela,
and over six and a half years, starting in the summer of 1599, 768 Dutch
ships sailed to the salt lagoons of Punta de Araya; many of these ships sailed
out on ballast, simply aiming to load up with salt and take it back to Holland.
The outer edges of the Spanish and Portuguese empires were safe enough and
the Dutch even carried on business in Cuba and Hispaniola, anchoring well
away from Havana or Santo Domingo and carrying away large numbers of
animal hides, but discretion was the rule; woe betide interlopers who were
captured near the major Spanish settlements. They were likely to be
slaughtered without mercy.15
These initiatives, and attempts to create small settlements in the Caribbean,
would eventually lead to the foundation of the Dutch West India Company
(WIC), but the most lucrative breakthrough that the Dutch achieved lay in the
East, beginning at the end of the sixteenth century with the establishment of a
‘Long-Distance Company’ in Amsterdam in 1595. Nearly all of those who
set up this company were actually Dutch, even though the immigration of
large numbers of businessmen from Flanders, Portugal and elsewhere was
gradually transforming the face of what was fast becoming the economic
capital of the United Provinces. Just as the search for Venezuelan salt was
prompted by exclusion from Iberia, the search for markets in the East was the
result of exclusion from the spice market of Lisbon. In the beginning, this
seemed to be a very profitable business, and the Portuguese were being
pushed into a corner by their aggressive new rivals. Having been excluded
from Lisbon, the Dutch went one better and blockaded Lisbon in 1606,
preventing Philip III from sending out his spice fleet that year. This was more
than the Dutch could hope to do every year, but when the Portuguese, along
with the Spaniards, tried to force the Dutch out of the East Indies they soon
found that the Dutch were no weaklings and could not be budged.16
If there was ever an example of an economic policy that backfired, it was
surely the decision to place a trade embargo on the Dutch. By 1601 sixty-five
ships had reached the East Indies from Holland, divided up among fourteen
separate expeditions launched not just by the Long-Distance Company but by
several rivals. Everyone wanted pepper, with the result that suppliers in the
East Indies were able to double their prices. However, so much pepper was
reaching Holland that the opposite effect was felt: prices began to fall within
Europe, and it became obvious that the East Indies trade was already in crisis,
producing negligible profits. Investors were bound to pull out of the pepper
trade, and what had begun so gloriously would simply peter out. The answer
was to consolidate the efforts of all the different companies, and, with plenty
of prompting from the States General of the United Provinces, one company,
in which representatives from Amsterdam had a near majority, was at last
formed: the United East India Company, generally known by the Dutch
acronym ‘VOC’, standing for Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie. From
1602 onwards the VOC became the official arm of the government of the
United Provinces in the East Indies, and (taking into account the rivalry with
Spain and Portugal) it was encouraged not just to conduct trade but to patrol
the seas and to set up forts in the Far East. Within three years the Dutch had
occupied Tidore and Ternate in the Moluccas, the source of cloves, nutmeg
and mace, and much-prized possessions of the Portuguese.17 The assault on
and occupation of Portuguese bases across the world followed throughout the
first half of the seventeenth century. Portugal only had itself to blame for
closing its own spice markets to the Dutch. And, although they were not
founders of the VOC, the growing community of Portuguese merchants in
Amsterdam and other Dutch cities, often refugees from the Inquisition, gave
active support to the creation of a Dutch overseas empire. This group will
deserve separate examination later.
Early successes were not easily maintained. The Dutch conflict with Spain
was renewed in 1621, with turbulent effects on the Dutch merchant navy.
Once again the Dutch had to look far afield for salt and for the dried fruits
that had become a staple of the middle-class diet across northern Europe; and
the Spaniards were alert to this, building a fort to block access to the salt pans
the Dutch had been using in Venezuela and swamping salt pans in Haiti that
the Dutch hoped to use. Once again the Catholic Flemings became a serious
nuisance, as the struggle with Spanish power was brought home to the very
coasts of the Low Countries. In 1628 privateers from Dunkirk sent 245 Dutch
and English ships to the bottom of the sea, or seized them. It is no surprise
that the cost of insuring ships and cargoes rose steeply. As before, the main
beneficiaries were the Hansa merchants. In 1621 they sent twenty-two ships
from Iberia to the Baltic, and the Dutch sent thirty-six. The next year they
sent forty-one and the Dutch managed to sneak out two ships (in several later
years, none at all). For a time the Danes also did well out of this situation,
bringing goods from Iberia through the Sound, which, after all, they
controlled. As the conflict with Spain deepened, the Dutch found themselves
short of herrings – no salt, no herrings. This was not just a problem for the
Dutch, as consumers further afield who had relied on them were also badly
hit, for instance the burghers of Danzig. Difficulties were compounded by the
decision of the king of Denmark, in 1638–9, to increase the Sound toll levied
on ships passing through the narrows at Helsingør. The Danes entered into an
understanding with Spain, Protestant and Catholic working together to
suffocate the Dutch. Only a Swedish invasion of Jutland in 1643 distracted
the Danes from their hostility to the United Provinces. The Dutch decided
that the time had come to face the Danes, and sent an imposing fleet of forty-
eight naval vessels plus 300 merchant vessels into the Baltic past Helsingør
Castle, where the king had taken up residence. King Christian was hardly in a
position to stop them, and before long the Dutch had made an agreement with
him that offered lower tolls on shipping passing through the Sound.18
One group of people who were willing to act on behalf of the Dutch were
the Portuguese settlers in Bayonne, in south-western France, New Christians
of Jewish origin who found their new home a good place in which to escape
the ministrations of the Inquisition, although they also kept up contact with
fellow Jews who remained welcome at court in Madrid, so long as they led
Catholic lives in public. Large quantities of goods were smuggled through the
Pyrenean passes to Bayonne. No embargo in this period was watertight. The
inhabitants of Viana do Castelo in northern Portugal had prospered from
Dutch trade and were not going to enforce the rules now. The Spanish
government tried to improve its supervision of visiting ships, arresting
vessels found in Spanish ports on the grounds that their voyage had been
financed by the Dutch, and entering into agreements with Denmark, England
and Scotland to make sure that their ships did not carry Dutch goods. They
seem to have found it difficult to distinguish between the Danes and the
Dutch, confiscating goods that had already been approved by their own
officials based in Danish territory close to Hamburg.19 Still, it cannot have
been easy to determine who was in the pay of the Dutch merchants, with so
many Portuguese milling around, a mobile population moving constantly
between Iberia, south-western France, Holland, and, in due course, England
and Hamburg.
For a time it seemed that the rise of the Dutch had been a mere flash in the
pan. According to Jonathan Israel, ‘the Dutch lost an eighth of the Baltic
traffic’ in the 1620s and 1630s.20 However, the economic crisis was by no
means limited to Holland. This was a period of internecine warfare in
Germany; later, England and France would experience severe tumult. In
reality, the Dutch were able to make advances, but they took place far from
home. They consolidated their position as masters of bits and pieces of the
Portuguese trading empire, even installing themselves for a time in Brazil;
they were pushed out in 1625, but this was a harbinger of better things to
come. When Piet Heyn captured the Spanish treasure fleet carrying bullion
from Mexico to Spain, the West India Company found itself 11,000,000
guilders richer, and other great prizes included 40,000 chests of Brazilian
sugar, which were said to be worth 8,000,000 guilders. The Dutch were a
significant presence on the Gold Coast of Africa, and even (though not for
long) held Elmina. Considering that Elmina had been the jewel in Portugal’s
African crown, or rather the source of gold for that crown, this was an
impressive achievement. With this temporary conquest the Dutch served
notice that they were serious competitors on both sides of the Atlantic. The
West Indies Company, it is true, was overspending, which is hardly
surprising: they had to maintain a fleet, forts, foot soldiers and a whole
trading network, and the value of shares in the WIC dipped and dived during
the 1630s and 1640s; they were a bad short-term investment. And yet from
the Moluccas to Brazil the captains and merchants of the United Provinces
were steadily taking charge of the most precious territories in the Portuguese
seaborne empire. The awareness that their empire was being whittled away
was one factor in the uprising that brought Portugal renewed independence
from Spain in 1640.21 Thus the Dutch advances were not simply important
for the global economy; they were also very important in global politics.

III

Many histories of early modern maritime trade and exploration neatly

separate the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch, the English, the French
and other rivals into parallel histories. In reality, though, one cannot
understand the rise of the Dutch without weaving into that story the rise of
English trade in the same period, aiming at the same objectives: trading bases
in lands as remote as the Moluccas, Japan and the coast of India. At first, the
English attempted to reach the Spice Islands by way of a western route.
Francis Drake’s circumnavigation, on which he set out in 1577, was planned
in part as a sustained assault on Spanish shipping in the Caribbean and along
the Pacific coastline of the Americas. A second voyage, led by Thomas
Cavendish, or Candish, circumnavigated the globe between 1586 and 1588,
but these two voyages only confirmed that the Strait of Magellan was
difficult water, a maze of icy and stormy channels. That was the bad news;
but the good news was that Cavendish returned home with the spoils of an
entire Manila galleon, including 122,000 gold pesos, a rich store of silk and
spices and two Japanese boys who could read their own language – this
implies that he was thinking of trying to reach Japan and of opening up trade
there, though in the event he headed for the Moluccas instead. It is said that
on their arrival in Plymouth the English sailors were arrayed in silk doublets
seized from the enemy. Cavendish was clearly an honourable man, since he
set the crew and passengers of the galleon onshore in a place called Porto
Seguro, and gave them supplies, including enough wood to make a small ship
of their own. Some of his contemporaries would, instead, have been after
their blood.
The next English attempt to reach the East Indies, by James Lancaster in
1591, took what contemporaries called the Portuguese route, round the Cape
of Good Hope and then across the Indian Ocean.22 Lancaster decided to
follow up rumours that the Portuguese were close to discovering a North-East
or North-West Passage above China, which remained an obsession. But his
crew was worn down by scurvy and his pilot (picked up in the Indian Ocean)
had obviously lost his way, with the result that Lancaster failed to penetrate
beyond Penang in western Malaya. Lancaster’s one great prize was ‘the ship
of the captain of Malacca’, a Portuguese vessel travelling from Goa to
Melaka, loaded with Canary wine, palm wine, velvets, taffeta, an ‘abundance
of playing cardes’ and Venetian glass, as well as a ‘false and counterfeit stone
which an Italian brought from Venice to deceive the rude Indians withal’, but
there was no trace of the treasure the English sailors confidently expected to
find on board. After that the English lay in wait for the Portuguese fleet due
to arrive from Bengal, which was said to carry diamonds, rubies, Calicut
cloth ‘and other fine workes’, but before long, with their captain now sick,
the crew insisted on waiting no longer and on returning to England.23
Only the news that the Dutch were sending ships to the East Indies revived
English plans to carve out a place for their kingdom in the spice trade. It was
particularly galling that the Dutch lured the English explorer John Davis into
their service as expert navigator; they also began to bid for the purchase of
English ships to increase their capacity. Here was a man who could be relied
upon to make an accurate record of the route to the East and of the
characteristics of the islands the Dutch visited. Mapping out which islands
were rich in cloves and nutmeg became an obsession, since these products
could only be obtained from a small area, and the Dutch – as also the English
– planned to penetrate right into those areas and gain control of them, rather
than relying on local merchants to bring them to bases on Sumatra, Java or
other, more accessible places. Within a few years of Lancaster’s first
expedition, the Dutch had established a ‘factory’ at Bantam in Java, and then
they penetrated as far as Neira, which has been called ‘the nutmeg capital of
the Moluccas’.24 In response, a ‘Company of Merchants of London trading
into the East Indies’ came into being, and its first expedition to the East
Indies was, perhaps surprisingly, entrusted to Lancaster. His attempt to reach
the East Indies had whetted the appetite of the London investors, rather than
being seen as a costly disaster. That was the immediate outcome of the
formation of what would eventually develop into the English East India
Company, but the long-term outcome was a long tussle between the Dutch
East India Company and the English one.
Scurvy had wreaked havoc on Lancaster’s first voyage. On a second
expedition to the East Indies, in 1601, Lancaster foresightedly insisted that
each sailor was to be fed three spoonfuls of lemon juice every day, but only
aboard his flagship; on the accompanying ships scurvy was rampant. By the
time his four ships reached southern Africa, Lancaster had lost over a
hundred men to disease, which equalled the complement of one ship.25 The
curative role of fresh fruit was understood, but its preventative role was not
noticed. Yet an important observation did result from Lancaster’s second
expedition, though it was something the Portuguese had known for a century.
On arriving at Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra, facing the Indian Ocean,
Lancaster found ‘sixteen or eighteen sail of shippes of diverse nations’; these
were Gujaratis, Bengalis, Malabaris (from southern India), Pegus from
Burma and Patanis from Siam.26 Lancaster had several productive interviews
with the sultan, Ala-uddin, to whom a letter from Queen Elizabeth was
carried by an elephant twice as high as a tall man, ‘which had a small castle
like a coach upon his back, covered with crimson velvet. In the middle
thereof was a great basin of gold, and a peece of silke exceedingly richly
wrought to cover it, under which Her Majestie’s letter was put.’27 Ala-
uddin’s feasts were sumptuous, and he paid no attention to the Islamic
prohibition of alcohol; but one of his requests was not easy to satisfy, his
wish to be sent ‘a fair Portugall maiden’. Moreover, the price of spices in
Aceh was higher than Lancaster had bargained for. If one wanted to obtain
spices cheaply the answer was to penetrate to the lands where they grew.
Even in Bantam, on the western tip of Java, spices could be bought much
more cheaply than in Aceh.28 In both places the English secured the right to
a factory and other trading concessions, so that the investment made by
members of the East India Company seemed likely to earn good returns over
the years, so long as rivals could be kept at bay. Lancaster returned home
very satisfied with pirate raids on Portuguese shipping, but he left behind a
small pinnace and instructed its crew to search deeper into the East Indies, all
the way to the sources of the best spices.
This brought the English, even if only a small number of them, into
conflict with the Dutch. It was an odd situation: the Dutch sometimes
declared how grateful they were for the support England had (though not
consistently) given the United Provinces in their struggle against Spanish
rule, but the fact that they were at peace in the North Sea did not mean that
the English were automatically welcome in the South Seas. They saw them as
interlopers; as an English factor in the East Indies named John Jourdain
wrote:

The Hollanders say we go aboute to reape the fruits of their labours. It

is rather the contrarye for that they seem to barre us of our libertie to
trade in a free countrye, having manie times traded in those places,
and nowe they seeke to defraud us of that we have so long fought
for.29

So much for Grotius. Jourdain would die in a skirmish with the Dutch out in
the East Indies in 1619, in what has been called ‘flagrant disregard’ of yet
another Anglo-Dutch truce.30 The Dutch scored major successes against the
Portuguese, gaining control of the island of Amboyna in 1605. The Dutch
intended to keep the proceeds for themselves, and on island after island they
resolutely sought a monopoly. English adventurers attempted to secure the
tiny island of Pula Run for the English Crown, so that King James I was
described as ‘by the grace of God, king of England, Scotland, Ireland, France,
Puloway and Puloroon’, these being the spice islands of Ai and Run.31 This,
however, set off a dirty battle for control of Run in which the Dutch
shamelessly cut down all the nutmeg trees on what was the nutmeg island par
excellence; it was better no one should have the nutmeg of Run than that the
English should. The main English defender, Nathaniel Courthope, was shot
and killed in 1620, and the Dutch took charge of the island, expelling the
native population for good measure; but negotiations about its future dragged
on for forty-seven years, until the Dutch and English governments finally
agreed that the Dutch could keep Run if the English were allowed to hold on
to Manhattan island far away in North America, which they had seized from
the Dutch three years earlier.32 To the inhabitants of the East Indies one lot
of Western barbarians was much the same as another, and they easily
confused the Dutch with the English.33
Even after they captured Run, outrageous acts of violence were still being
committed by the Dutch, to intimidate all English interlopers present and
future: in 1623 a group of innocent traders based at the English factory in
Amboyna were arrested, tortured within an inch of their lives and then
executed, on the specious grounds that they had been conspiring with
Japanese mercenaries, who met the same fate, to take over this island.34 The
‘Massacre of Amboyna’ soured Anglo-Dutch relations, as did the high-
handed manner of the Dutch governor-general of the Indies, Jan Pieterszoon
Coen, a singularly unattractive figure who had no compunction about wiping
out native peoples, European rivals or anyone who stood in his way, and
sometimes ignored the instructions of his own government in the
Netherlands. Coen rejoiced in the killing of his old foe Jourdain. Such
methods did, however, greatly strengthen the Dutch position in the East
Indies, particularly after the transfer of their headquarters to the well-placed
town of Jakarta, renamed Batavia, the Latin name for the Netherlands.
English attention turned away from the East Indies towards the Indian
subcontinent. In part, it is true, English interest in India was generated by the
need to find products that would appeal to the inhabitants of the East Indies,
because heavy English woollen cloths were not exactly what the near-naked
inhabitants of these islands craved. Indian calicoes, though, were lighter and
could find a market. Thus the English, like the Portuguese before them,
became intermediaries between the far-flung coasts of what they broadly
called ‘India’. There was already a lively inter-regional trade by sea, and it
was not just clever but necessary to insert themselves into it if they were to
make themselves welcome in the Indian Ocean and beyond.35
 The human cost of conflict with the Dutch was high enough; but the
financial cost was also difficult to bear. The East India Company already
functioned in a rather different way to the other English trading companies,
such as the Muscovy Company and the Levant Company, which was active
in Smyrna and other parts of the Mediterranean. Whereas the other
companies were, in essence, umbrella bodies facilitating and licensing trade
by syndicates of members, the East India Company traded as a single
operation, ‘one body corporate and politick’, to cite Queen Elizabeth’s
charter of 1600. The board made the decision when and where to trade, and
investors were not permitted to fit out their own expeditions in parallel with
official ones.36 Over time, and following a number of crises, it evolved into a
joint-stock company, much strengthened after 1657 by a generous new
charter granted by Oliver Cromwell that attracted record investments,
exceeding £700,000.37

IV

The most remarkable success achieved by the Dutch was not their series of
victories over the Portuguese, for the Portuguese trading empire was already
under severe strain by 1600, or their victories against the English, but their
installation in Japan. Between 1641 and 1853 the Dutch merchants based in
Nagasaki were the only European merchants present on the soil of Japan, and
even then they were based on the offshore island of Deshima.38 Their
presence there around 1800 has been beautifully portrayed in a work of
fiction by David Mitchell.39 The idea that this was the channel through
which the Japanese acquired scientific knowledge, dealing with navigation,
medicine and much else, has been much discussed; the Japanese knew this
western knowledge as Rangaku, ‘Dutch learning’, which implies that it was
seen as a coherent system, though the tendency nowadays is to stress the
higgledy-piggledy nature of the acquisition of Western science and
technology over more than 200 years.40 This seems much more
characteristic of the way knowledge was transmitted along maritime trade
routes: a slow osmosis, as one can also see with the spread of religious ideas,
whether Christian, Muslim or Buddhist.
The Dutch presence in Japan can be traced back to 1600, to the voyage of
De Liefde, whose pilot was William Adams, the Englishman who later won
the trust of the Japanese shogun.41 Other English merchants managed to win
privileges from the shogun, and there was an English factory in Hirado from
1613 to 1623; however, it was regarded as unprofitable, a source of copper to
be sure – but taking copper to England was like carrying coals to Newcastle.
Later, the Dutch would realize that good profits were to be made by hawking
Japanese copper round Asian seas.42 Since the Portuguese and Spaniards still
had some influence in Japan, they did all they could to poison the relations
between the first Dutch visitors and the Tokugawa administration. But the
Dutch had a particular selling point: they explained how they had thrown off
the shackles of Catholic Spain, which, in the eyes of the Japanese, made them
into non-Christians. This was enormously helpful just when the Japanese
government was becoming increasingly hostile to Jesuit and other
missionaries. Prince Maurits, the Stadhouder, sent a polite letter to Ieyasu,
which arrived in 1609; and a remarkable correspondence between the
Stadhouder and the shogun continued for a while – the Stadhouder took the
opportunity to berate the Portuguese and the Spaniards for their ‘cunning and
deceit’, and portrayed King Philip as a power-crazed megalomaniac who
planned to use the Christian converts to spearhead revolution in Japan.
Oddly, Ieyasu did not respond to the damning indictment of King Philip and
his subjects, but diplomacy worked and the Dutch secured trading rights at
Hirado.43 Even so, the Dutch presence remained precarious during the next
thirty years: a hasty request for the renewal of their rights following the death
of Ieyasu was viewed with deep displeasure at court, since it implied that his
son and successor was so disloyal to Ieyasu’s memory that he would quash
his father’s decisions. The Dutch clearly needed to be taught a lesson, and the
shogun began to restrict their freedom to trade in raw silk. The governor-
general of the VOC, based at Batavia, had a good understanding of how the
Dutch should behave:

You should not get into trouble with the Japanese, and you have to
wait for a good time and with the greatest patience in order to get
something. Since they cannot stand being retorted, we should pretend
to behave humbly among the Japanese, and to play the role of poor
and miserable merchants. The more we play this role, the more favour
and respect we receive in this country. This has been known to us
through years of experience.44
He wrote these words in 1638, by which time he could see clear proof that it
paid to be patient. By 1636 the Portuguese had been cleared out of Japan,
apart from the trading station at Nagasaki on Deshima Island. This was not a
permanent factory: the Portuguese were to bring their goods, do their
business, and leave, until they came back the following year. At the same
time the Japanese were banned from sending ships overseas. The penalty for
doing so was execution. Care was also taken to prevent Portuguese travelling
on Dutch passports, which by this time was happening all the time – the New
Christians of Amsterdam were well installed in Macau and even Manila.45
In reality, the Japanese did want to keep a door open, but only by a small
crack. They were deeply insulted when the commander of the Dutch fort on
Formosa, or Taiwan, Pieter Nuyts, impounded some Japanese ships; rather
than breaking off all relations, the Japanese demanded that Nuyts should be
sent to Japan, where he was held hostage until 1636. But the shogun was
careful not to cut himself off completely by expelling the Dutch. Equally, the
Dutch were perfectly aware that they needed to prove that they were nothing
like the Portuguese. In 1638 they were happy to support the shogun against
rebels, including many Japanese Christians, backed by the Portuguese, and,
since the defeat of the rebels culminated in the massacre of maybe 37,000
victims, the Dutch were for ever after blamed for their cynical betrayal of
their fellow believers. Yet this confirmed the belief at court that the Dutch
were not really Christian, or at any rate were a very different sort of Christian
who would not try to spread their faith. In Gulliver’s Travels, the hero visits
Japan, pretending to be a ‘Hollander’, and in Edo (Tokyo) he witnesses the
Dutch trampling on a crucifix, a standard ritual for the Japanese, but
obviously rather more questionable for a Dutch Christian.46 The shogun was
shocked to learn that the newly built and elegantly gabled Dutch warehouse
at Hirado carried a date on its façade according to the Christian calendar.
Forewarned of a plot to massacre the Dutch merchants in Hirado, the Dutch
quickly demolished the offending building, while the government, anxious to
keep all traces of Christianity at bay, forbade the Dutch merchants from
observing the Sunday rest that had become part of the Calvinist religious
routine.47
In the end, the stand-off was resolved when the Dutch were ordered to go
and occupy the former Portuguese base at Deshima. Once again the Japanese
government spoke dismissively of the Dutch presence in Japan, in language
that, if anything, betrays that the Japanese did value having some access, but
mainly for the court, to the exotic goods of the world beyond – whether
European guns or Chinese silk:

His Majesty [the shogun] charges us to inform you that it is of slight

importance to the empire of Japan whether foreigners come or do not
come to trade; but in consideration of the charter granted to them by
Ieyasu, he is pleased to allow the Hollanders to continue their
operations and to leave them their commercial and other privileges,
on the condition that they evacuate Hirado and establish themselves
and their vessels in the port of Nagasaki.48

Deshima means ‘Fore island’, since it lies in front of Nagasaki proper,

although the modern extension of the city has completely enveloped it in
metropolitan Nagasaki. The island was an artificial one, a curved trapezoid
shaped like a fan, supposedly because the shogun replied to the question of
what shape it should be by snapping open his fan. No larger than Dam Square
in modern Amsterdam, Deshima measured 557 feet at the top and 706 feet at
the bottom, while the sides were 210 feet long.49 Such a confined space was
rendered even more claustrophobic by its railings of iron spikes and the
sentries posted on the stone bridge that linked Deshima to the mainland,
checking every entry and exit. The Dutch tried to build houses as similar as
possible to what they knew from home, and, being Dutch, they naturally
found space for a flower garden on their tiny island. There were few
permanent residents: some Japanese officials, and the Dutch captain, the chief
merchant, a secretary, a bookkeeper, a doctor and other essential support
staff, and a few black slaves and white artisans. They were vastly
outnumbered by the Japanese officials, not just guards but a vast horde of
interpreters – around 150 at the end of the seventeenth century. The numbers
were so swollen because the Dutch had to pay for the upkeep of the Japanese
officials. Not surprisingly, then, there were many sinecures. On the other
hand, there were other officials who took their job extremely seriously,
carefully inspecting all goods that arrived, with special attention to Christian
literature – the Dutch were not even permitted to hold church services on
Deshima. Meanwhile Nagasaki flourished on the back of Dutch trade and
maritime trade within Japan itself – around 1700 the city possessed about
64,000 inhabitants.50
 Why, it might be asked, did any Dutch merchants agree to live there? The
answer lies in the profitability of trade with Japan. During the late
seventeenth century Nagasaki proved more profitable than any other VOC
base in the Dutch trading world: during the decade 1670–79 Dutch merchants
were making a 75 per cent profit on their trade through Japan, though this
was a high point. For no one else was on hand to offer everything from sugar
and shark-skins to buffalo horns and brazilwood to microscopes and
mangoes, not to mention pickled vegetables, lead pencils, amber and rock
crystal; but the greatest demand was for Chinese silk. All these paid for gold,
silver, copper, ceramics and lacquer-ware, though the Dutch did not neglect
sake or soy sauce too. And one can see from the nature of the goods they sold
in Japan that the Dutch were by no means specialists in European goods.
They brought together goods from India, the Spice Islands, east Africa and
the Atlantic – that was the source of narwhal tusks, which had a similar
fascination to rhinoceros horns, another product that they eagerly sold
through Deshima.51 So Deshima gave them a Japanese monopoly, and they
were prepared to put up with the humiliation of living in a virtual prison in
order to maintain access to the court of the shogun.
One of the many curiosities of life in Deshima was that the Dutch captain
was treated as an honorary daimyo, or high vassal of the shogun, and was
expected to make an annual visit to the court at Edo, bearing presents and
conducting himself with meticulous attention to the exacting etiquette of the
Japanese court. Once he had reached the ceremonial hall and been sonorously
announced as the Oranda Kapitan, ‘captain of Holland’, the Dutch captain
was required to crawl past the piles of gifts his embassy had brought towards
the platform on which the shogun was seated (though behind a lattice, so he
could not actually be seen); that done, he crawled back ‘like a lobster’ as a
European observer wrote – although later in the day a relatively informal
session often took place in which the shogun and his courtiers, still out of
sight, cross-examined their exotic visitors about the world they had come
from.52 Historians have debated whether the treatment of the Dutch
embassies at Edo was a humiliation or a sort of honour, since the VOC had
received favours from Ieyasu, and his successors were keen to see those
privileges continue. Moreover, the chance to learn about Western science was
too good to miss. Intellectual contact was also maintained through the work
of interpreters and translators, and this contact became more intense over
time, so that by the late eighteenth century Japanese authors were expounding
Western medicine in their own books.53
A Japanese historian has made the valid point that Japan was not alone in
closing off access to European merchants, and in trying to suppress the
spread of Christianity. Similar moves can be seen in China, the Ryukyu
Islands, Vietnam and Korea.54 The violence of the Portuguese, the Spaniards
and the Dutch had earned them poor reputations. The arrival of the Dutch
while the Portuguese were at a weak point in their fortunes and under the rule
of the Spanish king gave the Japanese the chance to maintain limited links
with European trade. Contrary to common assumptions, they did not cut
themselves off completely from the outside world; rather, they chose exactly
what sort of contact they wanted, and confined it within narrow parameters.
 39

Nations Afloat

The complex rivalries among those who aspired to control the ocean routes
(whatever Grotius might say about free trade and navigation) can too easily
be reduced to an image of national empires in conflict with one another. In
public, noble Spaniards scorned trade, as if they were ancient Roman
patricians, and left the dirty business, officially at least, to the Genoese and
German financiers without whom not just the Crown but the city of Seville
would have found themselves short of resources. In reality, financiers and
aristocrats were keen to form powerful teams, whose links were strengthened
by marriage alliances. This was visible in the close links tying the New
Christian families of Spain and Portugal to the Iberian noble houses. When
money began to run dry, an injection of funds from wealthy families of
Jewish origin made sense, until the doctrine of limpieza de sangre, ‘purity of
blood’, began to spread in the sixteenth century, making such marriages
undesirable; every attempt was then made to cover up evidence of Jewish or
Muslim ancestry.
Frontier regions tend to attract chancers, hustlers, ne’er-do-wells, but also
those looking for new and potentially lucrative business opportunities. In the
late sixteenth century the Spanish and Portuguese empires acted as hosts to a
myriad of different ethnic groups: there were Bretons and Basques, Scots and
French Huguenots, Galicians and Corsicans; Basques are found as far away
as Potosí in Peru, the source of the apparently endless quantities of silver that
were sent to Spain and China. Some, such as the Huguenots, were refugees,
leaving their native country to avoid religious conflict. Others were looking
for new economic opportunities. Some left their homeland en famille, while
Portuguese migrants tended to be male and were drawn from a wide range of
backgrounds and social classes. It was the classic combination of those
fleeing persecution and economic migrants, with a fuzzy boundary between
those two groups.1 However many they were, the European migrants did not
come alone – shiploads of slaves diffused black Africans right across the two
Iberian empires, in places as far from home as Lima and Manila.2 By the late
seventeenth century, so many slaves were delivered to the Americas as
contraband that no one was bothering to buy the asientos, or licences, that
had long been required in this revolting trade.3 The European colonization of
the lands claimed by Spain and its rivals was not, then, an orderly imposition
of authority, though Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats and soldiers
abounded, but a haphazard movement of merchants, religious dissidents,
criminals fleeing justice, impoverished peasants and artisans, and slaves. Yet
it was hard to find a safe haven: an apparently settled life in the smaller
Canary Islands could not guarantee immunity from attention, as those
accused of secret adherence to Judaism in the seventeenth-century Canaries
were to find.4
Solidarity within migrant groups was often maintained by the existence of
a community church, typically, in the Portuguese case, dedicated to St
Anthony of Padua, a companion of St Francis, who was and is much
venerated in Portugal, having been born in Lisbon. These were not just places
of worship – after all, some of the Portuguese were more sympathetic to
Judaism than to Christianity – but sources of charitable support, and places
where one could exchange news and make useful contacts. In Cartagena de
las Indias, in what is now Colombia, the Portuguese were prosperous enough
to build a substantial hospital.5 The Genoese and the English tended to name
their churches overseas after their common patron saint, St George, and the
Huguenots built Protestant chapels wherever it was safe to do so.
In the final analysis, trade generally trumped distaste towards other
religions: the Portuguese monarchy tolerated the existence of Jewish
communities in the Moroccan towns over which it ruled, even though the
open practice of Judaism had been banned in Portugal in 1497.

II
Portuguese settlers had helped set up sugar industries across the Atlantic from
the fifteenth century onwards. But the Portuguese diaspora of the late
sixteenth and early century seventeenth had a distinctive character. The
Portuguese merchants in the Atlantic, Indian Ocean and Pacific attracted
suspicion because a high proportion – exactly how many it is impossible to
say – had Jewish forebears. That does not mean they were Jewish in both the
patrilineal and the matrilineal line; and, whereas the leading Sephardic
families, like the Arab elites of al-Andalus and the hidalgos of Castile,
carefully preserved their genealogies going back very many generations, this
was only worth doing if one could live as a Jew and take pride in one’s
Jewish ancestry – the image of past times in Spain and Portugal as a golden
age in which Sephardic Jews had risen to eminent positions at court was too
attractive to be easily forgotten. For the New Christians, most of whom had
adopted Portuguese or Spanish names, often as inconspicuous as López or da
Costa, Jewish ancestry was better not advertised. By the middle of the
sixteenth century, the practice of Judaism in secret within Spain had largely
disappeared, under pressure from the Inquisition. But in Portugal the king had
promised the Jews that he would wait for a whole generation until the
Inquisition was unleashed, when he forced the great majority to convert in
1497 – these were not just native Portuguese Jews but Spanish Jews who had
arrived as refugees only five years earlier after the Jews were expelled from
Castile and Aragon. Portugal therefore became fertile ground for the practice
and dissemination of crypto-Judaism. Then, as the Portuguese New
Christians became more and more involved in trade and finance, they turned
up at the court in Madrid and elsewhere in Spain, seeding a revival of interest
in the religion of their ancestors among Spaniards of Jewish descent.
 Even though the Portuguese merchants were by no means all of Jewish
descent, contemporaries sometimes assumed that all Portuguese merchants
were really Jews, and in the seventeenth century those who wrote about the
Nação, or ‘Nation’, of the Portuguese might even add the adjective hebrea.6
By then the term made some, though not total, sense, because increasing
numbers of New Christians were openly returning to their ancestors’ religion
in Livorno, Amsterdam and London, and there existed a strong sense of
brotherhood binding together these scattered communities that had managed
to defy the Inquisition. To this day the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in
London, founded by members of the Nação, offers prayers in Portuguese
each Day of Atonement for os nossos irmãos prezos pella Inquisição, ‘our
brethren taken by the Inquisition’.
The new Portuguese trading network came into being after the extinction
of the native Portuguese dynasty and the succession of Philip II of Spain to
the throne of Portugal in 1581. The shock of losing King Sebastian in the
sands of north Africa while he pressed ahead with a vain attempt to conquer
Morocco was commercial as well as political. Portugal had benefited for two
centuries from its close trading relationship with England, and now the
country was hitched to England’s most potent enemy. Yet the Portuguese hit
the ground running: earlier generations had already accumulated handsome
profits from the trade in spices, sugar and slaves, and so they were as well
placed as the Genoese to invest in voyages across Spanish waters. Portuguese
merchants, who had already been supplying large numbers of slaves to the
Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and the American mainland, diverted
their attention towards the well-developed trading empire of the Spanish
Atlantic. This occurred with the approval of King Philip: ‘the entire traffic of
all that has been discovered, in the East as in the West, will be common to the
two nations of Castile and Portugal.’7 The Portuguese also became masters
of the contraband traffic that brought Peruvian silver down from the mines at
Potosí in the Andes and across the plains of South America to a small but
bustling Atlantic harbour at Buenos Aires. After all, it was cheaper to trade
without having to pay for asientos, or licences, if one could get away with
that. On the other hand, this did not make the Spanish officials love the
Portuguese, particularly in the early seventeenth century, when competition
from European rivals such as the Dutch led to a noticeable reduction in
Spanish trade across the Atlantic.8 There was still the sense that they were
foreign interlopers, chancers skilled in exploiting loopholes, never really
loyal to the Habsburg monarchy both as Portuguese and as secret members of
another faith – exactly what one might expect, in the anti-Semitic language of
early modern Spain, of the Jews.
In this way, Jewish or not, they were often seen as Jews; in any case, there
was plenty of intermarriage between New Christians and members of Old
Christian trading families, which meant that defining who was a Jew was not
straightforward.9 The Sephardic rabbis in Amsterdam and London were not
too worried if the new members of their community could not prove Jewish
ancestry in the female line, as orthodox Jewish law requires, or if they knew
next to nothing about Jewish practices. The sense of common experience as
members of La Nação was good enough. Their observance might be limited
to the avoidance of pork and shellfish and the occasional fast, practices that it
would be possible to keep alive without attracting too much attention.10 And
what is one to make of families such as the Nunes da Costa, where one
brother died in Safed, the great centre of Jewish mysticism in Galilee, and
another brother, Fray Francisco de Vitoria, became archbishop in Mexico
City?11 The New Christians crossed a fuzzy boundary between Judaism,
crypto-Judaism and Catholicism, and the beliefs of the crypto-Jews were
often an apparently unholy mix of prayers, observances and theologies drawn
from both Judaism and Christianity, generated in part by their movement
back and forth between lands where they had to pose as Christians and lands,
such as Holland and Italy, where it was possible to live as Jews if they so
chose.12
Jewish or not, these Portuguese merchants created worldwide networks
that linked all three great oceans. Manuel Bautista Pérez made his fortune
after he transported hundreds of slaves from southern Africa to Peru in 1618,
thanking God and his uncle (a co-investor) for the fact that he made a profit
of over 50,000 pesos. Although his centre of operations lay in Lima, he did
business with correspondents in Panama, Mexico City, Cartagena de las
Indias, in the Americas; in Luanda in Angola; in Lisbon, Madrid, Rouen and
Antwerp. In Peru he handled Chinese silk, European textiles, Caribbean
pearls and even Baltic amber.13 These contacts were by no means unusual.
Around 1630 Portuguese merchants were also doing business in Acapulco
(linking them to the Manila galleons), Havana, Bayonne (an important centre
of New Christian settlement) and Hamburg, whose citizens had begun to
welcome Portuguese Jewish merchants into their midst.14 There they built
relations with the rulers of Denmark and Sweden, to whom the Teixeira
family provided credit; and eventually a Sephardic settlement sprang up in
Glückstadt, a royal foundation in the contested territory of Schleswig–
Holstein, and after that in Copenhagen too. That is just to speak of their local
business, which extended into the Baltic; but in the seventeenth century the
Hamburg Sephardim had links with the Portuguese possessions in India, with
Mediterranean ports such as Venice and Smyrna, with Ceuta and the other
Portuguese possessions in Morocco, not to mention Barbados, Rio de Janeiro
and Angola.15
The wealthier Portuguese merchants settled comfortably into the urbane
business worlds of Amsterdam and Hamburg, dressing like the local elites
and living in equally gracious homes. But the Portuguese network brought
their partners to very different societies across the globe. The Portuguese
Jews who settled in Porto de Ale, near Dakar in west Africa, from 1606
onwards also took note of local habits and customs, and, just as they managed
to win favour at European courts, they gained the protection of Muslim kings
in and around Senegal. They were mainly a male community, so they took
local women as their wives, and managed to convince the rabbis of
Amsterdam that their families should be accepted as Jewish; they observed
Jewish rituals and received advice from a Portuguese rabbi sent out from
Amsterdam to minister to their needs. Their open profession of Judaism
alarmed the other Portuguese in west Africa, who supposedly threatened to
kill them; but the king told their enemies ‘that his land was a market where
all kinds of people had a right to live’, and those who caused trouble would
have their heads cut off. Just like the Portuguese merchants elsewhere, they
rapidly built ties across the trading world of their ‘Nation’, as far afield as
Brazil.16 By the seventeenth century the New Christians were in the
ascendant both on the Guinea Coast and in the Cape Verde Islands. Some
became involved in one of the major activities on these dusty islands: the
collection of slaves sold by African rulers to Portuguese merchants, and their
transmission via the islands to Brazil or the Caribbean. But it would be a
grave mistake to treat this as in some way a Jewish speciality.17

III

Historians who have written about the Portuguese merchants, particularly

those of Jewish origin, have generally concentrated on one ocean or another.
Even though this reflects the way historians have divided themselves into
Atlanticists, Pacificists, Indian Oceanists and Mediterraneanists, this is a pity,
because the really impressive feature of their network is the way it embraced
the entire globe. Portugal itself recedes from view as ships move between
Africa and South America, or goods are sent up the coast of South America
for trans-shipment to Macau. Maybe half the Portuguese traffic in the Indian
Ocean was operated on behalf of New Christians. The royal monopoly on
trade in this region proved to be only theoretical. The wealth and influence of
the New Christians increased exponentially as private trade in the hands of
merchant houses became the mainstay of Portuguese prosperity – with
effects, as will be seen, on the prosperity of the Habsburg monarchy as
well.18
All this happened despite attempts to stamp on the New Christians in
precisely this area. The mass conversion of 1497 left former Jews free to
engage in overseas trade, their involvement having been tightly
circumscribed while they were still practising their old religion. Yet in 1501
King Manuel was already trying to exclude New Christians from positions of
responsibility in the new trading stations that were being established in Asia,
and the decrees became ever harsher – eventually they were banned from
travelling there in any capacity, but they continued to arrive nonetheless,
giving the Inquisition in Goa a fierce headache. Risks were worth taking
when the proceeds were so impressive: the annual trade around the Cape was
worth about 5,000,000 cruzados by 1600, and the king realized which way
things were going, so he levied especially high customs dues on the most
precious spices carried along this route, nutmeg, cloves and mace. But the
private trade also brought diamonds from India, fine eastern cloths, lacquered
boxes and porcelain. Needless to say, all this was managed by very effective,
well-connected networks, by and large constructed around families and
marriage alliances. There were New Christians in Mexico City such as the
brothers Vaaz, who dominated trade to Manila around 1640. Then, in Manila,
there were other New Christians who maintained close contact with fellow
New Christians in Macau and Melaka.19 These operations were conducted
on behalf of investors far away in Lisbon and Seville.
The Portuguese diaspora included, importantly, Madrid, even though Spain
was hardly a safe place for anyone who did attempt to practise Judaism. The
Spanish monarchy, having relied heavily on German and Genoese bankers in
the past, began to see the Portuguese as ideal financial agents. As with the
Genoese bankers, the Crown required advance payments against the income
it could expect to receive further down the line, largely from the silver mines
of the Americas. In the 1570s the funds advanced by the Genoese had been
used to pay the salaries of soldiers serving in Flanders, and an attempt to
write them out of existing contracts by Philip II, in 1576, left the troops bereft
of funds and sparked a mutiny among the Spanish troops in Flanders.20
Genoese capital could not appear out of thin air, and as the transatlantic trade
between Seville and the Americas declined at the start of the seventeenth
century, the ability of the Genoese to service the needs of the Crown also
declined. The Genoese were overstretched; they already dominated the
banking of the kingdom of Naples, another Spanish possession of great
strategic importance where the Habsburgs could not let their control slip.21
As the Portuguese also found, the role of bankers to the king engendered
xenophobia, which in the case of the Genoese was already visible in the age
of Columbus. Genoa did develop an interest in the Indian Ocean, but only
from the 1640s onwards, and attempts to fund a Genoese East India Company
came far too late to enable them to challenge the Dutch or the English.22 By
contrast, Portugal had become master of trade routes in all the oceans, and the
political link to Spain meant that the Portuguese had been able to intrude
themselves in the Spanish trading world as well. For anyone looking for a
source of large amounts of capital, this was where to turn.
 However, there were suspicions about the political loyalty of the
Portuguese towards the Habsburgs and about their religious loyalty towards
the Catholic Church. When it came to politics, the Portuguese merchants
doubted whether spending vast sums on a war with the Dutch rebels, renewed
in 1621, made sense; from a commercial perspective war with the Dutch
rendered contact with their fellow Portuguese, the Sephardim of Amsterdam,
much more difficult. Worse still, the existence of sugar-rich Portuguese
colonies on the coast of Brazil acted as a magnet drawing Dutch naval forces
towards South America. The feitorias and little towns in Brazil, as well as
Portuguese shipping out of Africa, were much more exposed than the Spanish
treasure fleets, for the Spaniards had learned some lessons from Francis
Drake and his friends, and made sure their fleets were well armed. Even so,
the Portuguese were so keen to gain the contracts offered by the Spanish
Crown that they managed to reach an agreement in 1626, and the king’s
favourite, the Count-Duke Olivares, was not seriously worried about
employing New Christians. Indeed, he took the view that Spain should
openly encourage wealthy New Christians to settle in what for many was the
land of their Spanish Jewish ancestors.
The Portuguese who worked with Olivares in the financial offices of state
in Madrid were not all New Christians, but many were: Manuel Lopes Pereira
was born in Lisbon to a New Christian family and went to live in Seville in
1621, before Olivares’s rise to power; and then he worked under Olivares as
contador, or auditor, during the 1630s, which left him little time for
commercial business of his own.23 In many respects the New Christian elite
replicated the role that the Jewish elite had played in medieval Castile and
Aragon, as royal financial advisers and as tax farmers. Public display by New
Christians aroused envy, and the fact that some of them lived in the most
fashionable parts of Madrid was not appreciated by their often virulent critics,
who included the poet Francisco de Quevedo and the playwright Lope de
Vega. Despite its heavy dependence on them, the Crown was reluctant to
offer leading bankers noble titles or membership of the great Military Orders,
for these positions were supposedly reserved for Old Christians of pure
blood; but even here exceptions were made. Inevitably there were constant
complaints about their political and financial influence, heavily coloured by
traditional antipathy to those of ‘impure’ blood, even where there was no
evidence that these people had an interest in the Jewish religion; and the New
Christians themselves did not like to be called by that name – still less by the
common nickname Marranos, which meant ‘pigs’.24
As with the Genoese and the Germans, these intimate ties to the royal court
could not be maintained in the face of constant crisis. Olivares fell from grace
in 1643, meaning that the Inquisition was once again able to stake out
powerful victims who lacked a protector. Moreover, Portuguese rebellion
against the Habsburgs and the re-establishment of a national monarchy in
Portugal in 1640 undermined the strong economic base on which the
relationship between the New Christians and the Crown had rested. Portugal
found itself under increasing pressure from the Dutch, especially in Brazil,
and lacked the resources to defend its empire effectively.25 The Portuguese
merchants had moved beyond maritime trade into public finance, but their
capacity to keep the Spanish Crown in funds depended on the operation of
the Portuguese trading network that encompassed the globe. The collapse of
their influence was hastened by the decline in influence of Portugal itself, in
the face of Dutch and other competition. Many of the most talented
Portuguese businessmen now lived in the Dutch United Provinces. As
members of this diaspora in many cases found their way back to Judaism, the
Portuguese diaspora began to revolve around Amsterdam rather than Lisbon,
Seville or Madrid.

IV

Trading diasporas are found across the world, and they often consist of
people distinctive by religion as well as ethnic origin. Another example of a
religious and ethnic minority is the Armenians, though it too is a complex
one, as the Armenians were split between those who had, since around 1200,
accepted loose papal authority and those who rejected it. As exotic Christians
within Muslim and Christian states they were able to avoid being sucked into
the internecine strife between Sunni and Shi‘a or Catholic and Orthodox.26
Their trading networks were less exclusively maritime than those of the
Sephardim, reflecting their very long history of both deportation and trading
enterprise. Their major base was at New Julfa, a suburb of Isfahan in the
Iranian hinterland. Shah Abbas, the great Safavid ruler of Persia, invited them
there in 1605, after he deported about 300,000 Armenians from territories he
had conquered during one of his wars with the Ottomans. Many of those who
settled in Isfahan came from a town in the Caucasus already called Julfa, and
the Julfans had traded in silk as far as Aleppo and even Venice, where the
Armenians were so well installed that they were able to set up their own
monastery that can still be visited on the island of San Lazzaro.27
From New Julfa, Armenian merchants had access to the Persian court,
while the relative proximity of the Indian Ocean drew them towards the trade
of India – there Madras (Chennai) was their most important centre of
operations. The shah conferred commercial privileges on the New Julfans,
knowing that they were heavily dependent on his goodwill; particularly
valuable was the right to export Persian silk. However, the New Julfans
diversified into Indian textiles and jewels. Although they did not ignore other
opportunities, such as the cinnamon of Ceylon or the coffee of Arabia, silk,
textiles and jewels dominated their activities, with the result that their trading
network, despite its impressive physical extent, was always narrower in its
focus than that of the Sephardim, who handled spices, sugar and hides among
many other goods. All the same, Shah Abbas achieved his aims, which made
New Julfa into ‘one of the most important mercantile centres in Eurasia’.28
The geographical spread of their interests is impressive: by sea, as far west
as Cádiz, and as far east as Mexico; by land, as far north as Archangel,
London and Amsterdam – overland connections to Russia were generally
manageable, as the Englishman Anthony Jenkinson had discovered while
travelling on behalf of Queen Elizabeth; they even appeared in Tibet in the
1690s.29 At the start of the sixteenth century, Tomé Pires had already found
Armenians who traded in Melaka by way of Gujarat.30 Burma and Siam
were also familiar ground; they could hardly ignore the commercial
attractions of the great Siamese trading city of Ayutthaya. New Julfans turned
up in Guangzhou in the 1680s, at a time when India was thirsty for China tea,
which they exported to Madras. Mateos ordi Ohanessi, who died at
Guangzhou in 1794 (half a century after the New Julfa network had largely
fallen apart), took a Portuguese passport and based himself in Macau; he was
said to be so wealthy that the annual budget of Macau represented a fraction
of his resources. From Macau, New Julfan merchants looked eastwards
towards its great trading partner, Manila, and made use of the Manila
galleons plying towards Acapulco. In 1668 an Armenian merchant named
Surat sent his ship the Hopewell to Manila on its maiden voyage.
These Manila voyages were something of a scam. The Armenians sent
their own ships across the waves, flying the red, yellow and red flag of the
Armenians, decorated with an image of the Lamb of God. This was in effect a
neutral flag, respected by the Spaniards and the Portuguese. Indeed,
Armenian-owned ships as a rule travelled without cannon, which may sound
like folly, when one takes into account the violence between the colonial
powers and the widespread piracy in the Indian Ocean, but this practice was
understood as a guarantee of their inviolability. Sometimes the English took
advantage of this neutral status and used the Armenians to negotiate on their
behalf with tricky parties such as the Safavid shahs or the Mughal rulers of
India. Yet these Armenian ships were often trading on behalf of the English
or the French – the English East India Company entered into an agreement
with the New Julfans in 1688, in the hope that the Armenians would send
their silks to London around the Cape of Good Hope, rather than using a
route through Turkey and the Mediterranean, in return for which Armenians
were encouraged to settle in English forts and trading stations in India, ‘as if
they were Englishmen born’, to cite the agreement. In 1698 an Armenian
khwaja, or merchant, named Israel di Sarhat, arranged for the English East
India Company to receive a rent farm in south-western Bengal; this
eventually became the site of Calcutta (Kolkata); and they performed similar
services for the French, as well as using the longstanding French base at
Pondicherry in their south Indian trading operations – these were particularly
lucrative, because they opened up the route to the diamond mines of
Hyderabad.
The Spaniards had already got the measure of the Armenians and
attempted to crack down on what they saw as contraband trade conducted on
behalf of the English and other rivals. They confined the Armenians living in
Manila to the area outside the city walls given over to the Chinese, the
‘Moors’ and others they wished to keep at arm’s length. Probably there were
never many Armenians in Manila, but they did make use of the port to reach
Mexico, where the distinctive nature of Armenian Christianity attracted
unwelcome attention from the Inquisition. Silver drew them to Mexico: by
selling their goods there and acquiring American silver, they could fund their
purchases of Chinese silk in Macau or Manila. Occasionally too international
rivalries made things awkward; rather than being treated as neutral, the
Armenians were classified as Persian, or in some cases Turkish, subjects; if
the latter, they were banned from bringing silk to Marseilles in 1687, but the
answer was to pose as Persians, since the French had no quarrel with the
shah.31 Ultimately, what counted was the hunger of consumers in western
Europe and other markets served by the New Julfans for the goods they
brought from India and beyond.
In their vast diaspora, nowhere compared with Madras in importance; the
New Julfan merchants were there by 1666, and they had their own church in
Madras from 1712 onwards, even providing aldermen who helped run the
city council. They could not set up a church everywhere, for fear of arousing
the suspicion of the Christian authorities or because of scanty numbers; on
the other hand, they seized what opportunities they could; in the eighteenth
century they possessed several churches in Burma, and they also acquired the
right to use a chapel in one of the churches of Cádiz, testimony to their ability
(at the best of times) to convince Spanish Catholics that they were not
heretics, just very different in their practices. And, although the Calvinist
Dutch placed tight limits on Catholic worship, the Armenians of Amsterdam
were able to exploit their distinctive identity, acquiring a church of their own
in 1663–4 – in this period the Amsterdam authorities were keener to allow
Jewish worship than Catholic. Most of the Amsterdam Armenians were New
Julfans, and they are thought to have numbered only about a hundred people,
with a similar figure for other major Armenian bases around the world. Their
strength did not, therefore, reside in numbers; but the fact that this rather
small number of merchants and their dependants could build a church, and
rebuild it early in the next century, suggests no lack of resources. In the same
years they set up an Armenian printing press in Amsterdam; setting up these
presses was a trademark of the Armenians, as it was of the Sephardic
diaspora, and Armenian printing houses were found across the Julfan world,
in Venice, Calcutta, even Lvov.32 However, the Armenian communities
were predominantly male, so one reason it was often an advantage to accept
normative Catholicism, in Catholic cities such as Venice, was that they could
then take local wives.33
Looking at the Sephardim and the Armenians, one can see that these
diasporas did not conform to a strict model. The Portuguese could bury
themselves within a host society when it was safer to do so, notably when the
Inquisition was stalking outside; the Armenians were conspicuous in their
identity, because they faced less severe threats. Even so, when given the
chance to come out into the open, a good number of Portuguese New
Christians, even many of mixed ancestry, did declare themselves to be
Jewish, in the safety of Amsterdam, London and other places of welcome –
even in far-off Senegal. Yet by far the largest diaspora was that of African
slaves, a very diverse mix of peoples, mainly from west Africa and Angola,
who were to be found not just within the Atlantic world but on the shores of
the Pacific. At the same time, there were plenty of other diasporas that added
to the variety and enterprise of trading cities around the shores of the oceans
that were not particularly exotic: Bretons and Basques and Scots, all (apart
from the slaves) seeking the opportunities that the emergence of the great
trading empires of the early modern world had brought into being. Willingly
and unwillingly, the peoples of Europe and Africa were on the move across
vast tracts of sea.
 40

The Nordic Indies

The history of western European contact with the Americas and with the
Indies has been written largely from the perspective of the Portuguese, the
Spaniards, the Dutch, the English and the French, and with good reason: their
imprint can still be felt in ports as diverse as Melaka, Macau, Santo Domingo
and Curação. By the late seventeenth century, other European powers also
wanted their share of the products and profits that could be drawn from long-
distance maritime trade. The Danes and the Swedes created global networks
of their own, although their importance does not lie in the scale of their trade,
for the Danish slave trade at the end of the eighteenth century accounted for
not more than 3 per cent of the European total, while their trade with China
accounted for just over 5 per cent of the European and American total – the
figures for the fledgling USA are closely comparable, while Great Britain
stood highest, with well over one third of Canton trade, followed by France.1
Nonetheless, looking at the maritime achievements of the Danes and Swedes
offers a valuable, oblique slant on the activities of the Portuguese, the
Spaniards, the Dutch and the English, with whom, neutral or not, the Danes
found that their affairs were closely intertwined.
The Danes and the Swedes bore witness to significant changes in maritime
commerce, notably the explosion in the consumption of tobacco, tea and
coffee in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They did not stand on the
sidelines but participated in the transformation of the maritime world in those
centuries. Their involvement in the tea trade was particularly important:
Great Britain consumed about three quarters of the tea imported into Europe
from China in the late eighteenth century, and around one third of that tea
was handled by Swedish merchants based in Gothenburg or by their Danish
rivals. The tea trade is not just interesting because it was massive and a good
source of profit. It also says much, if the pun can be excused, about taste and
the revolution in consumption that was taking place in eighteenth-century
Europe, amply revealing the imprint of maritime trade: the passion for
chinoiserie; the attempts to develop porcelain or its substitutes in Europe;
attempts to replicate Chinese silks and their much-admired colours in Europe,
whether by natural or by artificial means. Just as medieval spice-handlers in
France or Italy had adulterated and fabricated eastern condiments, fake tea
became all too common in Britain, Holland and other centres of consumption.
The inclusion of such tasty ingredients as sheep’s dung did nothing, of
course, to satisfy the craving for caffeine that the tea, and also the coffee,
trade had brought into being.2

Scandinavia was the centre of interconnected global operations.3 By

looking at the maritime ambitions of the Nordic peoples in these centuries,
one can see how what happened in the West Indies was entangled with what
happened as far away as Guangzhou and southern India – how, for instance,
many of the cloths carried on Danish ships to the West Indies had arrived in
Danish ports from India and even China before being passed on down the
Danish maritime trade routes. In the case of the Danes, their insistence that
they were a neutral power enabled them to act as intermediaries for other
Europeans who were officially in competition with, even at war with, one
another, so that Danes could be found supplying goods on behalf of English
merchants to the French inhabitants of Mauritius during the Napoleonic
Wars.4 From the very earliest days of Danish operations, intimate ties to
other nations came into being: among the founders of the Danish East India
Company were Dutch businessmen with past links to the VOC; and later on
Copenhagen attracted Portuguese New Christians, who were allowed to set
up a small Jewish community there, as they had done in Hamburg and the
Danish town of Glückstadt.5
Denmark became home to a great many trading companies, eighteen of
which were founded between 1656 and 1782, which is something of a
European record: an Africa Company based in Glückstadt, close to Hamburg,
in 1651; a Morocco Company in 1755; companies trading to and beyond
Iceland; the United East India Company of 1616, which evolved into the
Danish Asiatic Company, under direct royal control, in 1732.6 The West
Indies and the Guinea coast were also the focus of attention, and Denmark
won control of three Caribbean islands, to which its companies exported
African slaves.7 Denmark lost its slice of what is now Sweden, the region of
Scania, in 1658, although attempts to recover it continued for many decades;
but Denmark was not the small north European state that it became following
the loss of Norway and Schleswig–Holstein in the nineteenth century. One
should really write not of Danish merchants but of Danish–Norwegian ones,
since the Norwegians took part in the enterprises of the Danish trading
companies. As overlord of those territories, which in the case of Norway
gave access to fishing grounds, furs and other Arctic products, as well as the
Faroes, Iceland and (at least in theory) Greenland, Denmark was a significant
maritime power even before it acquired colonies and trading stations in the
Caribbean, in Guinea and in India.
The Danes made full use of the north Atlantic when sending their ships out
to India and China, generally sailing round the top of Scotland, between
Shetland and the Faroes, to reach the open ocean – indeed the Atlantic leg
was the most dangerous part of a journey out east that could take seven
months, for ships set out around December, not the best time to face Atlantic
storms. Even so, the Danes lost few ships once they had mastered the routes
through the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean – sixty-three ships were sent to
China after 1772, and all survived the voyage.8 Maritime trade was the
foundation of the Danish kingdom’s prosperity. The royal castle at Helsingør
was world-famous as the gateway to the Baltic even before Shakespeare put
‘Elsinore’ on the stage, for it was a magnificent source of revenue from ships
passing through the narrow opening of the Sound.9 Within the Baltic, the
Danes enjoyed close links to the inhabitants of Brandenburg–Prussia, who
muscled in on their West Indies trade. Finally, one of the distinguishing
features of Danish trade in India was its strong emphasis on local networks,
so-called country trade, reducing dependence on European supplies of silver
to pay for goods purchased in India and also in China, which became an
increasingly important focus of interest. The main Danish possession in
India, Tranquebar in the south-east, was able to carry on its business
independently of Europe, inserting itself into the maritime networks of the
Indian Ocean peoples and therefore enabling one to glimpse what is often
invisible, the magnitude and profitability of maritime trade outside the
monopolistic spheres of the Dutch and the Portuguese. There was a twenty-
nine-year period when no ships reached Tranquebar from Copenhagen; even
so, business carried on, because the colony simply did not depend on
metropolitan Denmark for its survival.10

II

In 1616 King Christian IV issued the first licence for Danish voyages to the
East, which were to be led by the Dutch entrepreneurs Jan de Wilem, from
Amsterdam, and Herman Rosenkrantz, from Rotterdam. The king wanted to
make full use of Dutch experience. They set out at the very end of December
1618 en route to Ceylon, cheered by the offer of exemption from customs
dues on the voyage. These two provided around 12 per cent of the initial
capital of the Danish East India Company, whose organization was quite
closely modelled on that of the VOC; this was more than the king put up.11
Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the bloodthirsty governor-general of the Dutch Indies,
issued a ban on French and Danish traders even before the ships had left
Copenhagen, and this hostility continued for several years, as the Dutch
watched the success of the Danes with growing alarm. They were irritated
that local rulers seemed to have taken to the Danes. The less aggressive
stance of the Danes towards the native peoples of the Indian Ocean,
compared to the Dutch, made them not just easier to deal with but genuinely
more popular. A VOC agent in Trincomalee, an important port on the east
coast of Ceylon, reported with alarm on the willingness of one ruler to assign
the Danes a fort at Tranquebar, only twelve miles from the well-known
trading station of Negapatnam.12
Well might he feel alarm: the Dutch had still not seen off the English, and
here was a new threat; besides, the Danish voyages to Ceylon were proving
profitable: news spread, and a Latin chronicle from the German–Danish
borderland concisely stated that ‘in the same year [1622] the king of
Denmark received two ships from the island of Ceylon in the Indies, loaded
with ebony and spices’. After buying a great deal of pepper, the Danes set
their sights on cloves, and an expedition of 1624 managed to obtain 9,600 kg
of cloves, trumping the English, who just at this point were suffering
humiliation at Amboyna and on Run.13 If the Danes could make their own
capital city into a redistribution centre sending the luxuries of the East across
northern Germany and beyond, the Dutch might have cause to worry. The
Danes were well aware that their core possessions of Denmark, Schleswig
and Norway could not absorb all that they brought. By the end of the
eighteenth century 80 per cent of what they brought from India and 90 per
cent of what they brought from China was re-exported from Copenhagen,
often deep into the Baltic.14
The English began to worry about their own access to southern India. An
English captain named John Bickley was already complaining in 1624 that
the Danes ‘had formed [farmed] all the seaports of the Kinges between
Napagapatan and Pullacatt for use and benefit of the Kinge of Denmarke;
therefore willed us agayne to bee gone, or else they would send us awaye in
haste’. For when it came to relations with the other Europeans, the Danes
proved rather less charming than they were towards Indian kings: ‘moste of
all Danes were our deadly and most cruell enimyes.’ The value of their trade
along the Coromandel coast in the late 1620s was the same as that of the
English East India Company, roughly 30,000 rikstalers in the best years.15
In the event, there were interruptions, as Denmark became sucked, like its
neighbours, into the Thirty Years War that devastated Germany. Investors
were not, in any case, impressed by the returns, since only seven ships came
back from the East between 1622 and 1637, so about one every two years.16
Trying to help with making ends meet, the king pumped more and more
money into the Danish company; by 1624 he was already owed over 300,000
rikstalers. This was unsustainable, and the first East India Company was
wound up in 1650, but a new one was up and running from 1670. This did
not mean the end of the Tranquebar colony, for, as has been seen, there were
excellent opportunities to pick up Indian calico cloths and carry them from
Tranquebar as far as the Moluccas – this was already happening in 1625.
There was a very lively spice trade within as well as beyond the Indian
Ocean, notably in cloves, nutmeg and other products that could only be
produced in a restricted area – only Indian cuisine cleverly combines spices
from all over the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. The Danes were as
good at shifting different spices around as they were at moving cloth.17
However, they worked a standard set of routes and, after gaining Tranquebar,
they did not manage to break into new markets. An attempt by the Danish
‘President’ in Asia, Pessart (who was in fact Dutch), to follow his former
compatriots into Japan in the 1640s ended in disaster when the Dutch
dissuaded him; he travelled instead to the Philippines, and was killed there.18
Paying for eastern goods, as everyone knew, used up silver. Those who
followed the mercantilist doctrines popular in contemporary Europe argued
that the conservation of silver was vital to national prosperity but that
national prosperity would be fostered by vigorous foreign trade. New
opportunities offered themselves, now that vast amounts of silver were
pouring out of the Peruvian mines, some of it destined for Macau and Canton
in payment for the Chinese silks that came via Manila. The pause in trade
between Copenhagen and Tranquebar actually did the Danes a favour,
because it stimulated the country trade in India, and at the same time the
Danes became less interested in obtaining their pepper and spices from their
own factory out in India, and began to see that Indian cotton cloths were a
better source of profit, whether they were sold in China or taken back to
Europe. By the start of the eighteenth century, Danish trade with the East
diversified further: increasing demand for Chinese porcelain was
accompanied by a passion for tea and coffee. The Danish tea trade became
very big business by 1800. A landing document of 1745 from Canton lists
seven different types of tea, including Pecco, Pekoe tea, as well as sugar,
sago, rhubarb and 274,791 teacups with saucers (who counted them so
precisely?, one might ask), tens of thousands of coffee cups, and thousands of
butter dishes and chocolate cups, plus more than 1,000 teapots.19 The Danes
were not the only Europeans to find this happening. Chinoiserie was now in
vogue throughout northern Europe, and the presence of the European trading
companies was barely able to satisfy demand for porcelain and other exotic
goods – so much so that attempts were being made to imitate Chinese and
Japanese pottery in English and continental kilns.

III

The trade to India and China was only part of wider Danish ambitions. By
working closely with colleagues in Brandenburg–Prussia and in Kurland,
roughly corresponding to modern Latvia, the Danes hoped to become masters
of the Baltic trade in exotic goods. For the Danish presence was far from
insignificant. The Danes occupied parts of the Guinea coast for longer than
the Portuguese, and for a time it appeared that their control would extend
some way beyond their main trading stations into the hinterland of what is
now Ghana. In the seventeenth century the Danes operated fourteen trading
stations in Guinea, the English seven, the Brandenburgers three and the
Swedes three, though the Swedish ones were all taken by the Danes; by 1837,
thirteen years before the Guinea forts were sold to Great Britain, the Danes
ruled over an African population of about 40,000 people.20 Danish
entrepreneurs were involved in the sordid slave trade, though to a lesser
degree than the Dutch or the English, as their main aim was to provide labour
for their three West Indian islands rather than to supply the plantations of
Virginia, the wider Caribbean or Brazil; and Denmark was the first nation in
Europe to abolish the slave trade. Even so, in 1696 the governor of St
Thomas, one of their Caribbean islands, boasted that ‘all other trade is
nothing compared with this slave trade’.21
Their ability to obtain slaves depended on the willingness of local African
kings to supply them; many were the subjects of rival kings and had been
captured in war, while others were enslaved for debt. The cruelty began well
before the slaves had even reached the Danish or other forts where they were
sold to Europeans and packed away in the hold of a ship for transport to the
New World, for many died during the arduous trek across country to the
coast – by definition the slaves were not inhabitants of the areas closest to the
European forts, whose rulers would not normally sell their own subjects to
the slave-traders. Most captains, with an eye on profit rather than humane
treatment, wanted to deliver as large and healthy a human cargo as possible.
Therefore they did not make the conditions so absolutely dreadful that their
captives died en masse; some time was allowed on deck and the slaves were
generally fed well enough to keep them alive; if the conditions below deck
were intolerable, disease would spread, infecting the crew as well. Yet some
practices such as throwing live slaves overboard when the ship had been so
long becalmed that food and water was running out only deepen the sense of
horror the modern reader feels.22
The foundations of the Danish network in west Africa were in fact laid by
the Swedes, their rivals, during the Thirty Years War. At this time the hyper-
ambitious Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, imagined that, in addition to
conquering vast tracts of Germany, he could draw income from a ‘General
Commercial Company for Asia, Africa, America and Magellanica’, the last
term signifying a supposed southern continent below Cape Horn. This
company was the brainchild of a Flemish entrepreneur from Antwerp named
Willem Usselinx who had traded out to Iberia and the Azores, and had been
involved with the VOC since its early days but had been dismissed. He
looked first to King Christian IV of Denmark, but did not find approval, so he
approached the Swedish king instead. The company was chartered in 1626. It
operated out of Gothenburg, which had only been founded in 1621, as a
Swedish base on the North Sea; Gustavus Adolphus welcomed Dutch and
German merchants to the city, and relied on Dutch architects to lay out its
network of canals and streets.23 Usselinx’s company set up a colony in the
Delaware River which kept going for seventeen years from 1638 onwards,
until the Dutch overran it; it was acquired by England, along with New
Amsterdam, in 1667.24 Aware no doubt of what Gustavus Adolphus was up
to, Christian of Denmark did issue a charter to Danish merchants in 1625, but
then and again a few years later the projects did not get off the ground.
This left the Swedes in pole position. Louis De Geer, a merchant of Liège,
trading under the Swedish flag, brought an assortment of goods back to
Sweden from a voyage to Guinea in 1648: tobacco, sugar, indigo, ivory,
calico cloths and some gold – all very promising, except that some of the
goods had been bought not in Africa but in Lisbon.25 De Geer relied very
heavily on the Dutch for both ships and sailors, and he had family in
Amsterdam who helped him run his business. The advantage for the Dutch
shipowners in this case was that they were able to carry on business overseas
under a foreign flag, free from the monopolistic policies of the VOC and its
West Indian equivalent. Under the terms of the Swedish king’s charter, De
Geer was able to run his own business with very little interference, though he
did set up a fort named Carlsborg for the Swedish government, on the Guinea
coast – oddly, the cornerstone was laid by a Swiss merchant, something of a
rarity along these maritime trade routes. The site had been used in the past by
the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English, but they had left it empty: there
was no proper harbour and ships had to stand out at sea while goods were
laboriously brought to and fro from the shore on lighters or in African
canoes.
The Danes riposted in several ways. They too had a port which had been
founded as an outlet into the North Sea. This was Glückstadt, which lay in
Holstein, so it is now part of Germany, and it was founded in 1615. Among
its most important settlers were Dutch and Portuguese Jewish merchants. One
of the Portuguese Jews even helped to negotiate a trade treaty between
Denmark and Spain, and the Crown welcomed Sephardic Jews from both
Iberia and the Mediterranean, ‘but no German Jews’, for the fundamental
principle was not toleration but profit, and the Sephardim were seen as better
businessmen. In the 1640s and 1650s a group of sea captains from Glückstadt
set up their own company to trade in Africa, while two Portuguese Jews
opened up a route across the ocean to Barbados, so business out of
Glückstadt began to take off. Plans were laid for a company that would
embrace all the lands, including Magellanica that the Swedes had already
shown they hoped to penetrate, added to which was the Terra Australis, or
‘Southern Land’ – both being blanket terms for that vast southern continent
that was assumed to reach almost as far as South America, and perhaps
included Tierra del Fuego. Some of these activities did produce a return, and
when a large cargo of sugar arrived in Copenhagen in 1658 a sugar refinery
was built in the expectation that this was the beginning of something big.
However, the most satisfying success was the capture of the Swedish forts on
the Guinea coast, beginning with Carlsborg, even though it was ceded to the
Dutch; they had offered their help to the Danes, more in the hope of expelling
the Swedes than in the hope of creating a Danish network of forts.26
The Danes did, however, want to create their own bases, and the
Glückstadt Company that now ran Danish operations across the sea
established a fort at Frederiksborg in what is now Ghana at the end of 1659,
with the assent of the local king of the Fetu people. It is no surprise that the
Dutch were soon at the throats of the Danes, claiming that they had once
controlled that patch of territory – so much for past friendship.27 But the
Danes by and large managed to placate both the Dutch and the English, and
their ability to do so reflected the fact that they were seen as only minor
rivals. The history of Frederiksborg is a story of constant skirmishes for
control, mainly with the Dutch, the effect of which was to soak up funds that
would more profitably have been spent on commerce. It is also a history of
disease, early death, and mismanagement by governors who were thought by
observers to be far too fond of drink and of parties. When the money ran out
the fort was pawned to the English, who had no great interest in it and let it
decay. Reaching Guinea also meant running the gauntlet of the Salé Rovers
and other Barbary corsairs off the coast of Morocco, as well as English
pirates who considered that the Danes were fair game, even though they
increasingly tried to present themselves as politically neutral.
A similar history can be written of what became the major Danish fort,
Christiansborg, founded in 1661 in the region of Accra. One of its
commandants held office for eleven days, which were given over to a
spectacular feast during which he married a part-African woman; but the Fetu
king was disgusted and had him removed from office (this is less surprising
than it sounds, as the forts were not sovereign territory, but were at least in
theory rented from local kings against a small tribute payment). The
Portuguese were deeply irritated by these northern interlopers in what they
still liked to think was their Gold Coast, even though fellow Portuguese were
active among the Danish merchants – Moses Josua Henriques traded between
Guinea and the West Indies around 1675 and became royal factor for trade
between Glückstadt and Guinea. Meanwhile the Danish West India
Company, like the African kings, expected its share of the proceeds from the
Guinea trade. A ‘recognition’ had to be paid, taking the form of a percentage
of profits. For instance, Portuguese Jews based in Holland were permitted to
pay a 2 per cent ‘recognition’ if they sailed under the flag of Denmark to the
Danish bases in Africa.28

IV

The great scramble for Africa took place in the nineteenth century; but the
seventeenth century also saw a scramble, this time for Guinea and the West
Indies. Part of the impetus to develop colonies in the West Indies came from
an unexpected quarter, soon after the Thirty Years War came to an end with
the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. This was Kurland, where Jakob Kettler was
duke, and he was determined to promote the economy of his small but
strategically important territory. He had spent some time in Amsterdam and
had been inspired by the maritime glories of what was, after all, still a small
nation. The Swedish king once described Jakob as ‘too poor for a king, too
rich for a duke’. Kurland was rich in wood and other naval supplies, and
Jakob could not be ignored; but his schemes proved overambitious. He could
afford to build a fleet of forty-four men-of-war and sixty merchant ships, and
from 1650 onwards he began to plant settlements across the Atlantic: in 1651
he established a fort in the Gambia River, and three years later he completed
the purchase of Tobago, off the coast of South America, from its
impoverished owner, the Englishman Lord Warwick. In one of the most
curious episodes in the colonial history of the Caribbean, he sent Latvian
peasants, as well as German and other settlers, to this island. This almost
inevitably set the Dutch against him, while the English, then under the rule of
Oliver Cromwell, proved to be better disposed and entered into a treaty that
recognized Gambia as a Kurlander possession. In the end, the Kurlanders
were unable to hold back their Dutch and French enemies, who were
determined to flush them out of Tobago, setting up their own colonies on the
island. First the Dutch seized the Kurlander fort, and then the Kurlanders
managed to recover it; but their hold was precarious, and Tobago became a
battleground between the Dutch and the English, putting to an end the dreams
of this Baltic duke, who died not long afterwards.29
Meanwhile the Danes were having only limited success as they attempted
to create colonies further north, just to the east of Puerto Rico, in what
became the American Virgin Islands after the Danish possessions were sold
to the United States in 1917.30 The Danish West India Company had been
revived in 1670 and received its royal charter in 1672, and an unoccupied
island in the Caribbean suitable for settlement had already been identified, St
Thomas, which the English had briefly held but had abandoned only a few
weeks before a Danish–Norwegian ship arrived from Bergen in May 1672.
The English were quite co-operative, letting the Danes (or rather their slaves)
cut sugar cane on one of their own small islands nearby, a free gift that
proved to be the foundation of St Thomas’s prosperity, such as it was.31 The
truth was that there were plenty of small islands, at most inhabited by a few
Caribs, and (so long as they ignored the native peoples) the Europeans could
pick and choose – Jakob Kettler had perhaps been overambitious in setting
his heart on Tobago rather than a smaller territory. St Thomas, true to the
style of Danish colonization, became home not just to Danes but to Dutch,
German, English and Portuguese settlers, the last being mainly of New
Christian origin. There were so many Dutch that the islanders mainly used
their language.
Inevitably, the arrival of the Danes set off tensions with other colonists in
the Caribbean. The English had been hospitable at the start, but gradually
became troublesome, though King Charles II, anxious to maintain good
relations with the Danish court, sacked the English governor of the Leeward
Islands after he laid claim to Danish St Thomas. The French were more
dangerous, for when Denmark went to war against Louis XIV in 1675 (in
support of the Dutch) St Thomas was seen as a fair prize, and the island was
raided; the fortifications were still unfinished, but the French did no more
than capture some free and enslaved Africans, and if anything their raid acted
as a spur to the completion of the fort.32 Yet there were also deep internal
rivalries, accentuated by the failure of the West India Company to make
much money out of its miniature West Indian empire. In 1684 the king
deposed the quarrelsome governor of St Thomas and sent out Gabriel Milan
as his replacement; he was of Portuguese Jewish descent, an experienced
soldier who had served under the French minister Cardinal Mazarin, and had
then traded through Amsterdam, becoming Danish factor there. By the 1680s
he insisted that he was a loyal Lutheran, but his sixteen-month career in the
Caribbean showed little evidence of piety. He arrived with a large entourage,
including six or seven dogs, and carrying 6,000 rikstalers given to him by the
king of Denmark to cover his expenses. However, he regarded St Thomas as
a private kingdom, treating the African slaves especially harshly: one
runaway was impaled, another had his foot cut off. The Danish settlers
complained to the government in Copenhagen, and he was arrested and sent
back to Denmark for trial. Condemned to death for abuse of power, he
received the good news that the king had agreed to mitigate his sentence:
instead of having his hand cut off before being beheaded, whereupon his head
would be impaled on a stick, he would simply be beheaded, and this duly
happened in March 1689.
Just as Denmark’s Asiatic trade had been restructured time and again
because of its relatively limited success, none of these activities in Africa or
the Americas proved to be as lucrative as the companies or indeed the Danish
kings hoped, and in the 1750s the affairs of the West India Company reached
the point where the Crown felt obliged to take over the company’s assets, as
well as the forts of Christiansborg and Frederiksborg (which had been back in
Danish hands for quite a while). Admittedly, there were some notable
successes: in the late seventeenth century several successful trading
expeditions were despatched from Bergen by a wealthy merchant; the
acquisition of the island of Sainte-Croix from France in 1733 gave the Danes
a stronger base in the West Indies close to the two islands they already held.
On the other hand, Danish and Norwegian cargoes sent directly across the
Atlantic (thereby excluding the slave traffic out of Guinea) were made up of
basic necessities rather than costly goods: tallow from Iceland, Baltic pitch
and tar, whale oil from the Faroes and Greenland, base metals and,
importantly, all the equipment needed for the manufacture of sugar, such as
copper boilers. This does show how Copenhagen, Bergen and Glückstadt
were functioning as centres for the redistribution of goods from right across
the Danish colonial empire. Guinea, on the other hand, mainly received
textiles, foodstuffs and weapons such as muskets; half of the textiles were not
European at all, but had been brought all the way from India or even China.
The Danes had put together a maritime trading network that tied together
their Indian Ocean operations with their Atlantic ones.33 What came back
from the West Indies was, in the first place, sugar, the colonial product par
excellence, though a few other products gradually made inroads, notably
tobacco, coffee and cocoa.34
There were several attempts to reinvigorate West Indian and African trade
by forming new companies, such as the ‘Royal Danish Baltic and Guinea
Trading Company’ at the end of the eighteenth century, which was supposed
to tie together the Baltic trade of Copenhagen and its trade in the Atlantic,
including even the Greenland Trade Office. It was an ambitious project: this
company operated thirty-seven ships and did very well in the years around
1780 as a result of the American Revolution, which left a neutral trading
power in a strong position while the British battled against the Thirteen
Colonies. However, when the Danish government banned the slave trade in
1792 (admittedly with a ten-year delay before implementation) the Baltic–
Guinea Company declared that it could see no point in maintaining the
overseas settlements. As a result, trade was opened up as never before to all
Danes and to foreigners.35 But the Baltic–Guinea Company pointed to a
special characteristic of Scandinavian worldwide trade. Well managed, the
Scandinavian ports could serve as distribution centres for large swathes of
northern Europe. The Danes never quite succeeded in that ambition;
however, the Swedes, making intensive use of Gothenburg, had a very slow
start but in the long run proved more successful.

Others came up with schemes that would, they hoped, transform the fortune
of small, marginal states; from 1715 onwards, the newly created Ostend
Company took advantage of the transfer of the southern Netherlands from
Spanish to Austrian Habsburg rule, and had grand ambitions in both west and
east Africa; but it crashed in 1727 partly thanks to the hostility of the Dutch –
they hated the idea of an economic renaissance in Flanders when their own
world trade had passed its peak. The Austrians agreed to wind up the Ostend
Company as a condition for British and Dutch recognition of the claims of
Maria Theresa as heir to the Habsburg throne.36 The Scottish Company of
the Indies was chartered in 1695; in its reincarnation as the ‘Darien
Company’ it was responsible for the disastrous Darien Scheme that pumped
its funds into a failed colony on the Panama isthmus. Panama was not an
absurd place to choose, since Pacific goods coming up from Chile and Peru,
and potentially from the East Indies, were trans-shipped into the Caribbean at
that point; but the architect of the scheme, Paterson, had not taken the trouble
to find out what sort of place it was; in the words of Lord Macaulay:

Let but that precious neck of land be occupied by an intelligent, an

enterprising, a thrifty race; and, in a few years, the whole trade
between India and Europe must be drawn to that point … It was true
that the region which Paterson described as a paradise had been found
by the first Castilian settlers to be a land of misery and death.37

It is the most famous, and in many ways the most important, of these minor
companies, because the catastrophic financial collapse that then followed led
Scotland into full union with England, and the Darien Scheme still features in
debates about whether an independent Scotland is viable.38 These and other
schemes were based on the assumption, which was by no means stupid, that
there was always room for companies that were willing to carry the goods of
nationals of other countries while those countries forced merchants to trade
through monopolistic enterprises such as the VOC and the English East India
Company. The Flemish and Scottish companies just mentioned are, however,
important in other ways: the Ostend capitalists helped create the Swedish
East India Company; and the Swedish company depended heavily on the
expertise of Scottish entrepreneurs whose imprint on eighteenth-century
Gothenburg was at least as heavy as that of the Dutch on seventeenth-century
Gothenburg. Many of the Scottish settlers in Gothenburg were Jacobites,
sympathetic to the rebellions of the Old Pretender, son of James II of
England, and his own son, Bonnie Prince Charlie. This did not mean that they
were Catholics: Colin Campbell, a Scot, founded a Reformed Church in
Gothenburg. And there were also English investors; the British presence was
strong enough to earn Gothenburg the title ‘Little London’.39
The Ostend Company left its imprint on what became the Swedish East
India Company in several ways. Between them, the English and the
Ostenders commanded 80 per cent of tea imports into Europe. In 1731 the
king of Sweden granted the newly formed Swedish East India Company a
monopoly on trade beyond the Cape of Good Hope; this charter was valid for
fifteen years, and it was renewed four times, the last time in 1806.
Gothenburg was to be the centre of operations. The Swedes had one
advantage over the English that both reflected and compensated for the fact
that they were newcomers: they had no Indian Ocean factories whose support
ate up a significant part of their income and that would have propelled them
into rivalry with the Dutch, the French, the English and the Danes, all well
installed on the coast of India by the early eighteenth century.40 It was touch
and go around 1730 whether the Ostend traders would switch their attention
to Copenhagen or to Gothenburg, but one or two of them, notably Colin
Campbell and his fellow Scot Charles Irvine, built up their interests in
Gothenburg, and helped to set the Swedish Company on its remarkably
successful course. They focused on the trade route to Guangzhou, knowing
that the Swedes would be only one of several nations trading there, but
knowing too that the Chinese operated strict controls on access, and that they
could count on the protection of the Chinese authorities once they reached the
Pearl River.
Campbell took passage on the first Swedish voyage out East, as ‘first
supercargo’, an important position, second only to the captain (whom he
detested), with rights of supervision over the cargo on board. He also carried
a letter announcing that he was the Swedish king’s ambassador to the
emperor of China; however, on the return voyage his ship encountered seven
Dutch vessels in Indonesia, and the Dutch were unimpressed by the claim to
diplomatic immunity. Only his persistence convinced them that it would be
wiser to let him, his ship and his crew continue their journey, and in due
course the Dutch governor-general in Batavia handsomely apologized.41 One
factor that may have made the Dutch very suspicious was that the other
supercargoes were British, and there was every reason to suppose that, as had
often happened in the Danish merchant fleet, the Swedes were acting as cover
for more serious rivals. The second company ship to leave Gothenburg,
which left even before the first one had returned, was built in England and
carried four British supercargoes. This ship brought back a profitable cargo,
including pepper, silk and cotton cloth, but made the mistake of attempting to
trade in India and Ceylon, and, if anything, this voyage made clear the
advantages of heading straight to Macau and avoiding waters that teemed
with more powerful European merchants. For when the Swedish ship reached
Ceylon the Dutch denied the Swedes fresh water for the long haul back to the
Cape of Good Hope. Fortunately they had a more humane welcome from the
French in Mauritius, when they arrived there panting with thirst in June
1734.42
It became more and more obvious that tea, not pepper, was the commodity
Europeans wanted to buy, in all sorts of different types and qualities, and by
concentrating on that the Swedish companies kept afloat financially.
Gothenburg was much less important than Copenhagen, a much larger city
serving a whole Danish empire that stretched from Greenland into the Baltic,
plus the West Indies and west Africa. And yet the more modest status of
Gothenburg, and the less advanced economy of Sweden as a whole, brought
advantages: the domestic market was small, but there was an incentive to
serve the lands around the North Sea, and, as has been seen, Great Britain
was a marvellous target, with its thirst for China tea.
One apparent problem was the lack of interesting products that Sweden
could offer the world, particularly the Chinese. But this too could be
resolved. Swedish raw materials – Finnish timber, Swedish iron, and the like
– were in heavy demand in the shipyards of southern Spain. Cádiz became
the preferred port of call on the way out to China, for its streets were paved
with the silver of Peru. By selling Swedish goods in Spain, the Swedes
acquired the American silver that the Chinese craved.43 The silver of the
Swedes had been carried up the Pacific coast of South America, had passed
through Panama or Mexico, across the Atlantic, and would then be taken
down the eastern Atlantic, through the Indian Ocean (generally bypassing
India entirely), to reach Macau and Guangzhou in the western Pacific. At the
end of the eighteenth century, the proportion of silver in the cargo of Swedish
ships bound for China reached as high as 96 per cent (figures for Danish
trade in China are not very different). If one arrived with cash in hand, no
time was wasted trying to sell European goods in the hold of one’s ships.
Scandinavian businessmen could go straight to the tea and silk markets and
snap up the best teas, such as the variety known as Bohea, before their rivals
had a chance to do so. The Dutch often ended up mixing this tea with inferior
teas to fill their tea chests.44 Importing this tea into Britain was not
straightforward: taxes on tea often exceeded 100 per cent, as the British
government tried to take full advantage of demand. Inevitably, this created an
unofficial tea trade – the word ‘smuggling’ conjures up a dramatic, even
romantic, image, but the Swedes certainly knew how to dump their tea on the
English.
A similar story can be told for silks and ceramics. In the eighteenth century
30,000,000–50,000,000 pieces of Chinese porcelain passed through
Gothenburg. Admittedly, one reason for carrying so much of it in the cargo of
European ships was that it provided ballast, but it was not all needed in
Sweden. A Swedish expert who has also thought about rival sources of
Chinese ceramics in Europe has pointed out that ‘the company brought home
the largest quantity of Chinese porcelain not only in relative but even in
absolute terms’.45 Even the very first voyage to China, which set out in
1732, brought back 430,000 pieces of porcelain, including over 21,000 plates
and six chamber pots, which were put up for auction in Gothenburg; the ship
also carried 165 tons of green and black tea and over 23,000 silk cloths.46
On each voyage, much of the return cargo took the form of teacups and other
paraphernalia for the tea and coffee consumers of Europe, who now
encompassed not just crowned princes but city-dwellers of quite modest
means – a consumer revolution was taking place in eighteenth-century
Britain and elsewhere, and Chinese blue-and-white pottery was a universal
obsession.47 Attempts to imitate Chinese ceramics were matched by attempts
to imitate Chinese silks, and a village called Kanton was built outside
Stockholm in the hope that the Swedes could develop their own silk industry.
This was influenced by a set of attitudes known as ‘cameralism’, which
argued for the creation of self-sufficient national economies. Maybe, indeed,
tea could be planted in Sweden; the great Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus,
who died in 1778, tried various experiments over a period of twenty years,
but there was no substitute for the teas of the Far East, as the tea bush could
not be persuaded to grow in a cold climate.48
During this period 132 ships were sent east, all but a few to China; most
returned, for the Swedes had a very good safety record compared to other
European nations. Accidents were much more likely to occur in the North
Sea on the way out from Gothenburg, in winter, or on the way back, than in
warmer ocean waters. One ship foundered on rocks in the Gothenburg
archipelago in 1745 when it was almost within sight of home; it is quite
possible that this was a deliberate insurance scam.49 What brought the
Swedish expeditions to an end was a combination of factors: a reduction in
the heavy tax on tea imposed by the British government, which created a
free-for-all in the tea trade; competition from new rivals, the Americans; bad
financial management around 1800; the accumulation of vast amounts of
unsold tea. But the Swedish East India Company had been, until the start of
the nineteenth century, a remarkable success story; more than that, it had
helped shape not just Swedish but European culture and society, with its
massive imports of tea and tea services.
 41

Austrialia or Australia?

The idea that a great southern continent existed can be traced very far back in
time. It has been seen that the Romans understood Ceylon to form the
northern tip of this mysterious continent, in accordance with Ptolemy’s view
that the Indian Ocean was an enclosed sea whose southern shores connected
Africa and south-east Asia. Even when it became obvious that Ptolemy was
mistaken, the assumption that a southern continent existed led mariners
sailing in the wake of Magellan to think that Tierra del Fuego was the tip of
this southern continent. The sixteenth-century English circumnavigators,
Drake and Cavendish, travelled through the Magellan Strait, but their
explorations suggested that Tierra del Fuego was a large island; even when
the route round Cape Horn was discovered, its high winds and violent seas
long discouraged navigators. It was believed that the world needed to be in
balance to occupy its position in the middle of the firmament. Therefore a
southern land as weighty as the continents in the northern hemisphere must
exist. Moreover, once one had crossed the torrid regions, where human
survival had long been assumed to be impossible, one would find lands that
were ‘as fertile and habitable as the northern hemisphere’, rich in precious
stones, pearls and fine metals, as well as abundant flora and fauna. These
lands were sometimes known as Magellanica, though this term was quite
flexible, and could mean Pacific islands or even South America.1
There was plenty of evidence towards which sixteenth-century
geographers could confidently point: biblical texts, of which more in a
moment; classical texts, culminating in Ptolemy’s world map; and also
Peruvian legends of an Inca ruler named Tupac Inca Yupanqui who set out
across the sea and discovered lands of great wealth; he supposedly brought
back gold and slaves, as well as providing encouragement, centuries later, to
the bizarre theories of Thor Heyerdahl about trans-Pacific navigation.
Although the first map to name America, by Waldseemüller, showed no
southern continent, certainty that it existed grew in the next thirty years.
Mercator’s first world map, from 1538, included a massive southern
continent, of which he could only say: ‘that land lies here is certain but its
size and extent are unknown’; however, its northern tip reached as far as the
Magellan Strait, and when he issued a more famous world map in 1569 he
had not changed his mind. When Abraham Ortelius published his own world
map in 1570 he could not improve on this. For him this was the ‘Southern
Land not yet known’, Terra Australis Nondum Cognita.2
 The series of Spanish voyages across the Pacific that followed the Spanish
capture of Mexico and Peru brought European ships deep into the Polynesian
islands. In 1542, for instance, the commander Villalobos set out from
Navidad, which lay along the Pacific coast of Mexico, a little to the north of
Acapulco, searching for the islands visited by King Solomon – the distant
land of Ophir mentioned in the book of Kings. The idea grew that the gold
vessels of Solomon’s Temple had been made out of beaten gold from
Ophir.3 Villalobos’s journey took his ships towards what therefore became
known as the Solomon Islands, amid many hazards: a whale swam
underneath the flagship, almost heaving the galleon out of the water before it
swam on and the galleon rocked back to normal. In the event, the voyage
ended up in the Philippines, and only the fringes of Polynesia had been
penetrated. Back in Seville the notion that Ophir lay not somewhere in the
Red Sea or western Indian Ocean but across the world in the southern Pacific
had gained a certain amount of purchase; Columbus, in his Book of
Prophecies, which was really a scrapbook of biblical, classical and patristic
quotations, had been dreaming of finding Solomon’s islands by sailing west.
The learned introduction to a Spanish translation of Marco Polo’s book of
travels, widely circulating by 1530, placed Ophir somewhere in that vast
space between Japan and the Moluccas that was still a matter of pure
conjecture. A series of Spanish voyages set out from 1567 onwards, looking
for a great southern land, or rather for a series of islands that were believed,
rather like the West Indies, to lie close to the unknown continent and to offer
great riches. The spirit of scientific enquiry was clearly subordinate to the
greedy search for gold and spices, though there may have been some hope of
bringing the Catholic faith to heathen peoples. The whole enterprise was
strikingly reminiscent of that of Columbus over seventy years earlier. As in
the Americas, the assumption was that Spain would lay claim to this land,
whether it was populated or not, and establish a colony there.
The commander of the first expedition, Álvaro de Mendaña, took his two
ships on a conservative route out from Callao, in Peru, and then across a wide
space of water until he reached what are now Tuvalu and the Solomon
Islands. Mendaña had to face the hostility of the islanders, and just as bad as
that was the hostility of his colleague Sarmiento, a military man who had
been pressing for the expedition to be launched, and resented being passed
over as commander; Mendaña was the viceroy of Peru’s nephew, though the
viceroy hoped to use this expedition to send away many of the young
adventurers who were clogging the streets of Callao. In the event, the ships
carried a motley crew of Spanish, mixed-blood and African men, for slaves
who had already crossed the Atlantic were arriving as far away as Peru.4
Sarmiento went along on the voyage, although his exact position on board is,
and probably was at the time, unclear. Not much was achieved, apart from
planting in Mendaña’s mind an obsession with the southern continent and
with the supposed riches of the islands he had visited. Mendaña’s detailed
report on his voyage was not entirely encouraging: the explorers had not
always found it easy to obtain food, although they had managed to trade
small amounts of truck with the islanders. They had been taken aback by the
evidence that the islanders consumed human flesh, not least when a friendly
chieftain offered Mendaña a piece of meat that he identified as the shoulder
and arm of a boy (the hand was still attached). The islanders were taken
aback when Mendaña declined to eat the arm:

I accepted the present, and, being greatly grieved that there should be
this pernicious custom in that country, and that they should suppose
that we ate it … I caused a grave to be dug at the water’s edge and
had the quarter buried in his [the native leader’s] presence … Seeing
that we set no value on the present, they all bent down over their
canoes like men vexed or offended, and put off and withdrew with
their heads bent down.5

Although the practice of both cannibalism and human sacrifice could be used
as an excuse to justify European hegemony, the revulsion of the Spaniards
was genuine. As Montaigne was aware, they forgot that their own form of
human sacrifice, practised in the fires of the Spanish Inquisition, was in some
respects comparable.6 Other types of food were hard to come by, and by the
time they had returned to America they had even had to consume the white
cockatoo which was, perhaps, the only prize they had obtained during their
arduous journey.7
Unfortunately the new viceroy, Toledo, was much better disposed to
Sarmiento and much worse disposed to Mendaña than his predecessor, so
Mendaña trailed across the world to the court of King Philip II, to whom he
had already written a Columbus-style letter exaggerating the attractions of the
Solomon Islands. He did not secure what he wanted until 1574, and even then
he had to learn patience on an unusual scale. He arrived in Panama a couple
of years later, ready to launch his voyage into the unknown corners of the
Pacific, armed with an exceptionally generous royal privilege. The king
graciously permitted him to take office as governor and marquis of a new
colony in the Pacific, with the right to pass these lands on to his heir, and to
recruit a native labour force (for distribution among his followers). He could
even mint his own gold and silver coins, presumably out of metals mined by
his new subjects – as if the tragic lessons of what had happened in Hispaniola
had never been learned. He would be provided with sheep, goats, pigs, cattle
and horses, as well as Spanish settlers, male and female. He would have to
found three cities, though, and he had to post a bond of 10,000 ducats to
make sure that he did not renege on his promises.8
Drake’s entry into the Pacific in 1578 put a spoke in the wheels of
Mendaña’s ambitions. The Spaniards had assumed that the wide spaces of the
Pacific east of the Spice Islands were Spanish waters, granted by the pope in
his division of the world as long ago as 1494. Protestant English privateers
had no place in this vast space. The priority became not the launch of a new
expedition westwards across the ocean, but the despatch of an armed fleet
southwards to prevent foreign ships from slipping into what was still an
unguarded space. Sarmiento was sent to the Magellan Strait to bar the way to
English shipping. Far from keeping the English out, he was taken prisoner
and carried off to London, where he, Queen Elizabeth and Walter Raleigh
discoursed together in Latin on the geography of the Pacific Ocean.9
The infinitely patient Mendaña was not able to leave Peru until 1595, by
which time fortune’s wheel had turned again in his favour – there was a new
viceroy, who was excited by the plans, and the royal letter of approval made
it hard to refuse Mendaña’s requests for help. Mendaña’s first expedition was
a failure; this expedition was a disaster. One fundamental problem was that it
was easy enough to determine latitude, with the help of the sun, but
impossible to fix longitude until precise chronometers were invented in the
eighteenth century.10 As a result, he was none too clear where he had
arrived, and, after passing through the Marquesas Islands, he installed himself
on the outer edges of the Solomon Islands, setting up the colony of Santa
Cruz, where his followers managed to hang on for a while until they were
defeated by disease and by the hostility of the islanders. Disease carried off
Mendaña. In the end the remnant of his settler population sailed off to the
safety of the Philippines. The new commander, a capable Portuguese named
Quirós, was, however, still impressed by the argument for the existence of a
great southern continent. Where, he argued, could the inhabitants of the
Pacific islands have come from, if not from some great landmass nearby?
South America was too far away. The southern continent must be just over
the horizon. This was a gross underestimate of the seagoing capacity of the
Polynesian canoes that they kept seeing in the Solomon Islands and
elsewhere. They arrogantly assumed that European methods of shipbuilding
and navigation were infinitely superior to local ones, seeing local craft as
impossibly small and light and failing to understand the extraordinary
sophistication of Polynesian knowledge of the seas.11
Undeterred by failure, Quirós set out again in 1605, accompanied by
another explorer, the Spaniard Torres. With Franciscan friars on board,
Quirós made plain his desire for evangelization. Once they had left Callao, he
and his companions experienced first the emptiness of the broad tracts of
open ocean, and then skimmed past uninhabited islands where they deemed it
pointless to try to find food and water, let alone people who might direct
them towards the great southern continent. Heavy clouds betokened the
mainland they sought, or so they imagined at the end of January 1606. Finally
they were forced to anchor close to islands thick with foliage, but still
uninhabited, where at least they could find fruits and herbs that Chinese
sailors on board knew were edible. Water remained the critical problem,
though. While up to fifteen jars of water were used each day in normal
conditions, Quirós had to cut the quota to three or four.12 Fortunately early
February saw them reach inhabited islands where, at the start, they were
welcomed by Polynesians consumed by curiosity at their white skins. As
always happened, relations with the native people deteriorated, and the
voyage through the islands of eastern Polynesia and Melanesia was not easy,
a sequence of good and bad encounters with the inhabitants.
By May 1606 they had reached what is now called Vanuatu, where they
found what seemed to be a suitable port, a place that could surely function as
the headquarters of a Spanish settlement in these remote islands. The name
chosen for the harbour was Vera Cruz, but the name given to the island
combined the sacred with the secular: Austrialia del Espiritú Santo. Maybe
there was a play on words here, but this was not a direct reference to the
Terra Australis, the southern continent. Austrialia commemorated not the
Land of the South but the Land of the East, Austria or Österreich, the
dynastic home of the Habsburg dynasty, still called las Austrias, ‘the
Austrians’, in Spanish history books. Quirós went on to proclaim formally
that this land was now in the possession of King Philip II of Spain, after
which he appointed a government and founded his own bizarre ‘Order of the
Knights of the Holy Ghost’. In the ceremonies that followed, two African
cooks were publicly freed from slavery, an act of conspicuous generosity that
did not please their owners, so they were made to return to their masters once
the festivities had come to an end.13
It is not surprising that Quirós was keen to celebrate what he was
convinced was a great discovery. Otherwise, though, it was the usual story of
lots of killing, an occasional baptism, the carrying off of a few young men
destined to be baptized, and departure to find other islands, before returning
home with the news that the outer edges of a new continent had supposedly
been discovered. It was also the usual story of the officers and crew
grumbling at Quirós’s behaviour, complaining about his decisions, and trying
to get him into trouble on his return, though in the event he was able to travel
to Madrid and urge the king to follow up his voyage with new ones, begging
him in the name of Christ to do so, since his priority was no longer the
discovery of great wealth but the salvation of the souls of the miserable and
naked people he had encountered in Austrialia. Polite noises were made
about plans for a new expedition, and he headed west to Panama, but died
there in 1614 or 1615, with his dreams unfulfilled.14
Quirós’s colleague Torres did not follow his commander back to Peru;
rather, he decided that the search for a southern land had only just begun. He
set out westwards and passed to the south of New Guinea through the strait
that still bears his name. Australia lay close by, and he saw ‘very large
islands, and more to the south’, but he pressed on; he wended his way
through the strait and headed through the Moluccas towards Manila. He was
satisfied that he had now brought New Guinea under King Philip’s
sovereignty, although if he thought the headhunting inhabitants would accept
that he was deluding himself.15 From the far-flung islands of Polynesia he
and his men had now entered the battleground, for that is what it was, where
the Portuguese and the Dutch, not to mention the Spaniards and the English,
fought for access to the finest spices of the East, islands far richer in the
goods the Europeans sought than those Quirós and Torres had so far
discovered.
The southern continent remained elusive. Mendaña and Quirós had cast
themselves in the mould of Christopher Columbus. This was not the best
model to follow. What was different was the insistence that there were more
continents out there, that the wealth of the East Indies was only a pale
reflection of the wealth to be obtained from a temperate Antarctic continent.
A southern continent was finally reached at the start of the seventeenth
century. However, it took nearly 170 years for its edges to be properly
mapped out; and the earliest contact was the result not of deliberate
searching, in the wake of Villalobos, Mendaña, Quirós and Torres, but of a
series of accidents.

II

‘Captain Cook,’ Graham Seal has pointed out, ‘did not discover Australia,
despite what generations of school children were once taught and many still
believe.’ He adds that ‘modern Australia was not discovered at all. It was
revealed.’16 Obviously the term ‘modern Australia’ needs to be emphasized,
since the claim that it was a Terra Nullius, a land with no inhabitants, or at
least no inhabitants who could claim rights over its possession, was used in
the nineteenth century to justify its acquisition by Europeans, and the denial
of rights to the native population – Aborigines were only allowed to vote in
all the Australian states and territories from 1965 onwards.17
The Dutch were the first to reveal that they knew about the existence of
what they came to call ‘New Holland’; but the Portuguese had almost
certainly seen its shores before them. The debate about which Europeans first
reached Australia has not aroused quite as much passion as the debate about
which Europeans first reached the Americas, but it is mired in often
credulous interpretations of roughly drawn maps. The sixteenth-century
Dieppe maps did show an extensive southern continent below South
America. One historian of cartography has observed that the southern
continent was ‘a special favourite of the Dieppe school’, and that ‘fantasy
outweighs reality’ in many of the charts.18 These maps were often
beautifully decorated with images of local flora and fauna, or even of native
villages in South America and Africa. The warning that the coastlines traced
on these maps become less reliable the further they are from anywhere
Europeans had adequately explored has not always been heeded. A lively
attempt to prove that the Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach
Australia was published in 1977 and became standard teaching in Australian
schools. The argument was straightforward: early maps, ultimately of
Portuguese pedigree, show the coast of Australia. What may be one of the
earliest Dieppe maps, the Dauphin Map, most probably dating from the
1540s, was clearly based on Portuguese sea charts. The claim that it shows
part of Australia in some detail is based on the appearance of a large chunk of
land described as Iave la Grande, ‘Greater Java’, which is shown
immediately to the south of plain Iave, Java, separated from Java by a narrow
channel, and lying close to spice islands such as Timor. Along its coastline
appear such vaguely named places as Coste Dangereuse and Baye Basse.
There are some agreeable images of scattered huts and of naked
inhabitants.19 Other maps too showed a landmass south of Java or New
Guinea. It was simply assumed that the great southern continent reached up
towards tropical climates. And as for ‘Greater Java’, this had already featured
in Marco Polo’s account of the East Indies, as part of the confused
description of lands he had certainly not visited, whether or not he really
lived for a time in China – he muddled up Java and Sumatra, and then he
talked of Greater Java as the largest island in the world.

III

One way of resolving this issue is to state baldly that the Europeans knew
Australia existed even before they had actually touched its shores. Arising
out of their theories about a southern continent, and anchored in Marco
Polo’s certainties, they were as convinced that a large landmass must exist
somewhere south of the Spice Islands as Columbus had been that no
landmass could exist between Europe and the Far East; and maybe it was a
massive island rather than the world-encircling continent that mapmakers
generally preferred to show. A sort of mental discovery actually preceded
physical discovery, odd as it may sound. After all, much the same might be
said about modern cosmology – dark matter and dark energy, it is claimed,
must be there, partly to solve the mathematical equations, despite the fact that
nothing has, if the pun can be excused, come to light. The universe has to be
in perfect balance, just as the assumption in 1600 was that the earth could
only be in balance if the southern continent weighed down the Antarctic pole.
Discovery, as has been seen in other cases, such as the Norse arrival in
America, was a gradual process that could result both in knowing things and
in largely forgetting them; and the European discovery of the world beyond
depended crucially on gaining some understanding of what has been found,
and on making use of it. The problem with Australia, it will become clear, is
that no one was terribly interested in what had been found, for no one had
much use for what was there.
The finger is usually pointed at a certain Cristóvão de Mendonça, who (it
is argued) explored the waters south of Indonesia as early as the 1520s. He is
known to have taken fourteen ships to south-east Asia, setting out from
Lisbon in 1519; the theory that he was sent to block Magellan’s Spanish fleet
from passing through Portuguese-dominated waters does not stand up, since,
as has been seen, Magellan had not intended to return to Spain by way of the
Indian Ocean. No one really knows why Mendonça was sent on his voyage or
where his ships went.20 But it has long been argued that a shipwreck found
in 1836 on a remote Australian beach on the coast of Victoria by two men
who had gone out to catch seals was none other than one of Mendonça’s
ships; supposedly made of mahogany, its timbers had disappeared by 1880.
Mendonça has been found everywhere, but nowhere does the identification
convince: a stone hut well to the south of Sydney, a set of iron keys found
near a bay in Victoria, and so on. South-eastern Australia is surely the wrong
place to look; later, Dutch ships would sometimes be shipwrecked off
western Australia, as they tried to cut across the Indian Ocean to the East
Indies, although a swivel gun found in the sands near Darwin, in the north of
Australia, might well be from a Portuguese ship, date unknown.21 These
reports, like the discussions of the Dieppe maps, offer plenty of opportunity
for semi-informed fantasy. Perhaps the most bizarre of the claims is that a
sixteenth-century Portuguese manuscript carried an illustration of a kangaroo.
That said, it is highly likely that Portuguese ships were occasionally blown on
to these shores, though if they were wrecked it is quite possible that their
crews went down with their ships, or died on land, and news of these chance
encounters failed to reach the Portuguese bases in Java and elsewhere.
Speculation about a great southern land turned into reality when the Dutch
began to take a shorter route across the Indian Ocean, allowing the Roaring
Forties, which had carried their ships out of the Atlantic and past the Cape of
Good Hope, to blow the ships still further eastwards, so that somewhere
below the underbelly of Java they could wiggle through the Sunda Strait and
arrive in Batavia (Jakarta), the Dutch centre of operations. This became
regular practice after 1611, after Hendrik Brouwer sailed 4,000 miles across
the ocean to reach Java directly from southern Africa.22 In many ways this
was a safer route than one further to the north, since the Malacca Strait was a
notorious haunt of pirates, besides which the Portuguese still controlled
Melaka until 1641, when it fell to the Dutch (the red-coloured Stadthuys, or
town hall, is the oldest Dutch building in the Far East).
Speculation about who reached Australia first from Europe comes to an
end with the Dutch. The Duyfken, or ‘Little Dove’, is the first of the Dutch
ships known to have arrived in Australian waters. Twenty metres long, this
was what the Dutch called a jacht, or yacht, and she would have carried no
more than twenty sailors. After a successful trip to the East Indies under the
patronage of the VOC, during which she had engaged in battle with a
Portuguese flotilla off the island of Bantam in December 1601, she already
had a record of trading successfully in eastern spices. Her captain was
Willem Jansz, or Janszoon, and he took her back to the Indies in 1603, from
where she was sent south to see what might lie underneath Indonesia. Along
the coast of New Guinea there were some ugly encounters with the
inhabitants, and the same happened when the ship turned south and landed
off the shore of Australia – a sailor was killed after being stuck through with
an Aborigine spear. Legends that circulate among one of the native peoples,
the Wik, tell of a large wooden ship and of their encounter with those on
board, who needed help in digging a well, and who showed the Aborigines
how to use metal tools. It seems the Dutch interfered with local women, and
then the Wik decided they were unwelcome, so they watched until the
Dutchmen had climbed down into the wells they were making, and then set
upon them and killed them. Clearly this is a confabulation drawn from many
tales and visits, but the story is widespread in several versions.23
It became increasingly obvious that the, or a, southern continent had been
discovered, as more and more ships, travelling in the wake of Brouwer, ended
up willy-nilly on the shores of western Australia or its offshore islands and
kerries. The VOC ship the Eendracht, captained by an old Baltic and
Mediterranean hand named Dirk Hartog, was one of the lucky ships whose
landfall in October 1616 took place in relatively calm conditions. Hartog
even inscribed a flattened pewter dinner plate with the date and the names of
the senior crew and supercargo and left it on an island near the westernmost
point of Australia. The plate was seen by another Dutch visitor in 1697; he
replaced it with his own, which is now in a museum in Fremantle, Western
Australia.24 Yet a claim to Dutch lordship was not thought worth pursuing.
As reports came back of the desolate land (most of the ships visited the bleak,
dry edges of Western Australia), it became obvious that this southern
continent could supply neither gold nor spices. It was searingly hot and
inhabited by unfriendly people whose technology was the simplest one could
imagine, in modern terms Palaeolithic peoples, ‘a dry cursed earth without
foliage or grass’.25
The Dutch were not alone in being cast upon these shores. The English
traders who were trying to insert themselves into the spice trade took the
same risk, crossing the Indian Ocean and occasionally striking land too far
south, in Australia rather than in the Indonesian islands. They knew of the
new route across the Indian Ocean, tried it successfully and thought that they
could repeat the crossing in a straightforward way; but in May 1622 the
Tryall, or Trial, a newly built English East India ship, still out in what
seemed to be open water off Australia, ran aground on sharp rocks concealed
beneath the waves, and began to break up. About two thirds of those on
board, who may have numbered 150 souls, had to be left to their dismal fate
after the captain and other crew members used the ship’s two small boats to
reach Java. Trial proved to be an appropriate name: its captain, John Brookes,
was accused of negligence – of failing to post a watch, of concealing the
evidence that the ship was off course, and of abandoning most of the crew to
a certain death. It seems that he lied about the location of these rocks, which
meant that they remained a hazard to shipping for a couple of centuries.
Disputes about what had happened and about how far Brookes was liable
generated vast reams of paper, and reached the highest court in the land, the
House of Lords. However, the evidence is even richer than that: a wreck
found off Western Australia in 1969 by not terribly scrupulous treasure-
hunters is probably that of the Tryall, and exploration of the site, sometimes
conducted with explosives rather than with a trowel, yielded anchors and
cannon. If this is another ship, then it only proves that Brookes’s refusal to
indicate exactly where the dangerous rocks lay had further tragic
consequences long after his own death in poverty and obscurity. The leader
of the team who found the wreckage, Alan Robinson, became known as the
‘gelignite buccaneer’. He was arrested for interfering with the site of the
Tryall, found not guilty, and later arrested again for murder; by then he had
had enough of life, and hanged himself in gaol.26
Knowledge of the continent gradually grew, as stretches of its northern
coasts, around the Gulf of Carpentaria, were sketched; but none of the
European visitors saw any profit in a desolate land inhabited by often hostile
people who entirely lacked the luxurious sophistication of the native rulers
encountered in Java. The most famous shipwreck, because of the high drama
that followed, remains that of the Batavia, a VOC vessel that set out from
Holland in October 1628, in a fleet of eight ships bound for Java. On board
was the supercargo François Pelsaert, who was the brother-in-law of
Brouwers, the man who had discovered the fast route to Java and was now a
much-respected director of the VOC; and the ship carried 600 tons of cargo,
including twelve chests full of silver with which to pay for the spices of the
East Indies. Pelsaert was on his way to join the cabinet of the governor of
Batavia, the irascible Jan Pieterszoon Coen, and there were whole families on
board – about 300 people.27
The Batavia had become separated from the rest of the convoy, but the
ship was confidently ploughing through the seas en route to Java in June
1629 when, during a night watch, the ship’s lookout saw what he thought was
surf spray. Since he knew they were nowhere near land, the captain decided
that this was just an effect of the moonlight and that they should carry
straight on – which bore the Batavia on to a coral reef. Pelsaert felt the keel
and rudder grind against the reef; ‘I fell out of my bunk,’ he reported.28
There was no hope for the ship; it could never be refloated or repaired, but it
was not heading for the bottom of the sea quite yet, so there was time to
prepare a proper evacuation of those who had not been washed overboard
already, using the ship’s boats. And the good news was that, with the dawn,
scattered coral islands came into view, so that the whole day was spent
ferrying the crew and passengers towards a couple of these islands. It was a
slow process, and by the evening seventy people were still stuck on board the
disintegrating ship. A few saved themselves by swimming to the coral
islands, but many drowned; and the islands did not, in any case, have much to
offer: there was wildlife, including both wallabies and pythons, but no water.
Desperate for a supply of water, Pelsaert and Jacobsz, the captain of the
Batavia, spied out what seemed to be mainland, and took a longboat across to
what was the western shore of Australia. They saw a few Aborigines, but
found virtually nothing to drink:

We there began to dig in various places, but the water was salt; a
party went to the high land, there by luck they found some holes in a
rock, where sweet water from the rain had been left … Here we
quenched a little our great thirst, since we were almost at the end of
 our endurance, and since leaving the ship had had only one or two
small measures a day.29

The problem was that the captain, the supercargo and their small group of
men were moving further and further from the survivors camped near the
wreck of the Batavia. They decided that they would head for Batavia, rather
than the Batavia, in their longboat, report to Governor Coen and request help
for the survivors. Coen, unimpressed by what had happened, flung the
captain in gaol and sent Pelsaert back; the issue was not simply human lives,
for the cargo of silver had been huge, and could not be left lying around for
anyone in the world to pilfer. But Pelsaert and Jacobsz had deliberately put
the recovery of people above the recovery of cargo; invoking God’s name,
they had drawn up an agreement in which they stated their ‘utmost duty to
help our poor companions in their distress’, by appealing to the governor.30
Pelsaert’s ship took a couple of months to find the survivors, arriving at the
coral islands in September 1629. Pelsaert was not clear in his mind where the
wreck lay, and the weather did not help. Remarkably, some of the crew and
passengers were still alive. However, the conditions under which they lived
were alarming, not just because of the inadequate supply of food and water.
Pelsaert’s deputy, Jeronimus Cornelisz, had taken charge and had gathered
together on the largest atoll those he thought most reliable. Others were sent
to outlying coral reefs, where the chances of surviving were thought to be
slim (though some of them found quite generous supplies of food and water
before long). That left him with 140 men, women and children under his
command. Cornelisz saw every mouth that had to be fed as a liability. He
unleashed a psychopathic reign of terror. It has been suggested that his fury
stemmed from the fact that he belonged to an extreme wing of a dissident
Protestant sect, the Anabaptists, and that he believed that the murder of
ungodly folk was licit.31 But this seems a weak explanation of his crazed
behaviour. He would dress up in fancy robes, stolen from Pelsaert’s sea chest,
as if he were king of his little realm, while his followers adopted a uniform of
red cloth trimmed with gold lace, all of which had been recovered from the
hold of the wrecked ship.
Cornelisz’s followers happily executed anyone who resisted his orders. A
Dominee, or minister, of the Dutch Reformed Church was travelling out on
the Batavia with his wife and seven children; most were massacred by
Cornelisz’s men, though the Dominee and one daughter were allowed to live,
so long as they did not show any grief at what they had witnessed. The
daughter was forced to enter into a mock marriage with one of Cornelisz’s
toughs, which at least guaranteed her survival; other women were made the
common property of the gang, but the number of murders is thought to have
reached 115. When Cornelisz discovered that about fifty of those he had sent
to another island (now known as Hayes’ Island) were surviving quite well, he
launched an invasion, though he was captured and his men were nearly all
killed. This did not stop his followers from waging war on the defenders of
the other island. So when Pelsaert arrived he found chaos, death and stories
of horrifying barbarity.32
It was not difficult to establish the truth. Cornelisz himself was recovered
from captivity on Hayes’ Island, where he was still wearing the grand robes
that Pelsaert had brought along on the voyage. However, they were filthy by
now: he had been kept in a hole in the ground, and was forced to pluck the
feathers off birds captured for their food. As a result the beautiful robes were
now covered in guano and bits of feather. He was sentenced to be executed,
after his hands had been chopped off, and most of his troop of followers were
hanged. Seventy-seven people deemed loyal to the VOC remained, to be
taken to Batavia. There was another task to perform: Pelsaert set to work
recovering the cargo of silver, and, remarkably, ten of the twelve chests were
brought up from the sea. A couple of offenders, Pelgrom and Loos, who were
guilty of appalling crimes, had somehow gained Pelsaert’s mercy, perhaps
because he wanted to show that he was quite unlike the vengeful and violent
Cornelisz, and they were put ashore on the mainland, along with items of
truck – bells, beads, wooden toys, mirrors – to be used in trade with the
native population. They were ordered to search for information about sources
of gold and silver, and to watch for any VOC ships that were passing, so they
could send smoke signals and be picked up. This confirms that there was
already regular traffic along the shores of Australia; it was just that the Dutch
did not believe there was any profit to be found in the new continent.33 His
handling of the situation should have earned Pelsaert some credit, but instead
he lost his place on the governor’s council, and went off to fight the
Portuguese in Sumatra, dying soon afterwards. As for Pelgrom and Loos,
they never managed to hitch a ride on a VOC ship, and must have died
somewhere along the coast of Western Australia, the first Europeans to
inhabit this strange land.
 The Batavia had an afterlife: its wreck was found in 1963, and the islands
were explored, leading to the recovery of guns, coins and other bits and
pieces from Hayes’ Island, where a simple stone ruin is now celebrated as
‘Australia’s earliest European structure’. A number of skeletons have also
been found, mostly in mass graves, and many of the bodies bear witness to
the extreme violence of Cornelisz and his cronies: one victim was hit over the
head with a sword by a right-handed attacker who stood directly in front of
him. The sword left a two-inch mark on the victim’s skull. The victim was
unable to defend himself by raising his arms, which showed no cut marks,
suggesting that he was tied up and awaiting execution. The preferred method
of execution was to smash open the skull of the victim.34 These remains of a
ship and of murdered people stand as testimony not to an act of colonization,
but to the passionate hope of those who resisted Cornelisz that before long
they would be taken as far away from Australia as possible.

IV

The wrecking of the Batavia and other early experiences of Australia did
nothing to encourage interest in a continent that would, nonetheless, soon
become known as ‘New Holland’. There was, on the other hand, quite a
strong interest in mapping the shores of Australia, and in identifying reefs
and shoals that could threaten ships plying along Brouwer’s route; and that
would mean more expeditions along its shores. Dutch ships even penetrated
along the southern shores of Australia; in 1626 the ship beautifully named ’t
Gulden Zeepaert, ‘The Golden Seahorse’, reached what is now the state of
South Australia, and its course was duly noted on VOC charts. This meant
that half of the southern shoreline of Australia had been mapped.35
Moreover, the assumption remained that a great southern continent would
surely lie to its south, and would be a far more attractive place, with a
temperate climate and plenty of riches worth exploiting. Australia, however,
was seen as the very negation of the type of place that the Europeans hoped
to exploit and colonize, a nightmare world inhabited by black folk who were
caricatured as less than human, cannibalistic and (this at least was true)
lacking any knowledge of the advanced technology that could be found in the
East Indies, or even in the relatively undeveloped societies of the Polynesian
islands.
 Not surprisingly, then, the aim of two famous expeditions to Australia in
the mid-seventeenth century was not the further exploration of the barren
continent, but the continuing search for places where the Dutch could trade
profitably, particularly a land supposedly rich in gold that had come to be
known as ‘Beach’, a name whose origins went back to Marco Polo’s fantasies
about the Indies.36 Abel Janszoon Tasman was a forty-year-old Calvinist
who set out from Batavia on a wide sweep of southern latitudes in 1642. He
enjoyed his drink; later in his career he was deprived of his command after he
hanged a troublesome sailor while he was drunk, not bothering to go through
the due process of a trial.37 He came in sight of Tasmania, not realizing that
it is a large island lying off the coast of Australia, and sailed around the
bottom, demonstrating that this was not, alas, part of the great southern
continent. He was keen to honour the governor-general of the Dutch Indies,
so he named this land ‘Anthonio van Diemens Landt’ after him. He also
claimed it for the Netherlands. There was no sight of the inhabitants, the
Tasmanian Aborigines who were eventually wiped out by white Australians,
but there was good evidence that the land was inhabited: sailors set on shore
reported thick smoke rising out of the forest, and for some reason Tasman
concluded that ‘there must be men, of unusual height’ – the usual tropes
about giants, monsters and savages were being wheeled into place.38
Southern Australia, like western Australia, was, frankly, a disappointment.
Slightly more promising was an accidental discovery further east, the other
side of what has come to be known as the Tasman Sea. At the end of
December 1642 his little fleet reached the northern tip of the South Island of
Aotearoa (New Zealand). As soon as the Dutch ships arrived, two Māori
canoes drew near; the Māori warriors on board kept challenging the Dutch,
calling out to them and blowing on shell trumpets; the Dutch responded in
kind, shouting, blowing their own trumpets and attempting to scare the
Māoris by firing a cannon. Overnight things remained quiet, but the next
morning a Māori catamaran set out to investigate the Dutch ships. Before
long eight Māori boats were circling the ships. The first catamaran carried
thirteen naked men; they must have been a formidable sight, covered in
tattoos and clearly very hostile. The Dutch did try to send a small boat to
shore, but one of the Māori canoes headed straight for the Dutch boat,
ramming it; the Māori crew tussled with the Dutch sailors, clubbing and
killing four Dutchmen, and carrying off their bodies. The Dutch would have
assumed that the bodies were taken to be eaten, which is not impossible. The
bay where these events happened was given the name ‘Murderers’ Bay’ by
an irate Tasman, though it is now known more politely as Golden Bay.39
This bloody reception had the effect the Māoris had hoped for: the strange
visitors in their massive boats left and headed north, not bothering to explore
Aotearoa in any depth.
Tasman had been made aware that the people he was dealing with now
were very different in appearance and style of life from the native
Australians; but he failed to work out the shape of the two great islands of
Aotearoa, and imagined that Cook Strait, which divides North from South
Island, was simply a large inlet; but he did realize, on sailing north all the
way to Fiji and Tonga, that wide watery spaces separate Australia from New
Zealand, and therefore Australia must have an east coast that would link up
with the areas already discovered by the Dutch. In other words, Australia is a
continent, not a protrusion out of the southern continent. Tasman had no idea
of the shape of New Zealand, since he only saw a little of South Island and
the west coast of North Island, and his bitter experiences there did not
encourage him to stay longer.40 Even so, the islands began to be marked on
Dutch maps by the middle of the seventeenth century, patriotically named
after the Dutch province of Zeeland. Tasman took the view that he had
arrived on the shores of the southern continent, and that the coastline further
south trended all the way to South America, but somehow his reports did not
convince the VOC that the Company needed to probe deeper. The VOC was
apparently more struck by the similarities between Australia and New
Zealand than by the differences between the two lands and the two sets of
inhabitants.
These mediocre results were not disappointing enough to stop the VOC
from commissioning a second voyage, in the hope of understanding how all
the different pieces of coast that had been identified linked up, if at all. At the
end of another uninspiring trip the verdict was confirmed:

Thus they secured nothing advantageous, but only poor naked beach-
runners, without riches, or any noteworthy fruits, very poor, and at
many places bad natured men … Meanwhile this great Southland has
been gone round by the aforesaid Tasman in two voyages and is
reckoned to contain in it 8,000 miles of land as the charts drawn
thereof, which we send to your Worships, make known. That such
 great land lying in various climes … shall have nothing of profit to
find is scarcely acceptable.41

The attitude of the VOC was, then, entirely materialistic. Indeed, one of the
tasks assigned to Tasman was the recovery of a treasure chest that had gone
down with the Batavia – not that he managed to find the wreck or the
castaways who had disappeared on land. The verdict of the VOC was
typically ungenerous: thanks to Tasman and his predecessors the Dutch now
had a fair idea of the dimensions and shape of Australia, the problem being
that it was the wrong continent. There was still confusion, long after Torres’s
voyage, about whether Australia and New Guinea were joined together. A
map of around 1690 drawn on fine Japanese paper and preserved in Sydney,
known (through its provenance) as the Bonaparte map, reveals that the Dutch
voyages to Australia did result in the mapping of its western, northern and
southern coasts, and there was clearly an assumption that the eastern coast
was not too dissimilar.
Tasman’s voyages were important in the mapping of the south Pacific and
the northern edges of the Southern Ocean, but they were based on false
premises about the southern continent, and the discovery of both Tasmania
and Aotearoa was in many respects accidental: Tasman simply came upon
these places. There is a striking contrast with the voyages of Captain Cook
well over a hundred years later. Cook’s voyages were seen as scientific
endeavours: Joseph Banks and other scientists were on board; observation of
the transit of Venus across the Sun was one aim, but accurate mapping of the
Pacific was another. Cook carefully identified areas along the coast of
Australia that had been neglected ever since the Dutch had arrived in that
continent. He established that Aotearoa was not a spur sticking out of a vast
Antarctic continent, but two large islands inhabited by a substantial Māori
population. Although one motive was to search out land for British
colonization, Cook was also commanded to look for the southern continent,
even if many of the dreams of finding the golden realm of Beach had long
ago evaporated.42
The story of the first European encounters with Australia and New Zealand
differs markedly from the history of European encounters elsewhere in the
world. Greed remained a powerful motive for exploration, and yet this was
greed that neither country could satisfy – Aotearoa because of the hostility of
its Māori inhabitants, and Australia because the land was too poor, dry and
unproductive to attract interest. But in sailing as far as Aotearoa, Tasman had
reached the last significant inhabited coastline as yet unvisited by Europeans.
There were still icy lands empty of people to discover further to the south,
and coastlines to map, but Europeans had now truly encompassed the entire
world, even if the Māoris had no reason to feel grateful for their presence.
 42

Knots in the Network

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps exaggerated the size of the mid-

Atlantic islands. It was hard to believe that places such as the Cape Verde
Islands, the Azores and St Helena were mere dots on the ocean, when they
possessed such importance as resupply stations for fleets crossing the
Atlantic, or passing between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. As a result,
Madeira might appear to be the same size as the area that now makes up New
York State. Yet from a maritime perspective these were not such small
territories: the Azores stretch across 360 miles, or 580 kilometres, so that
ships in search of shelter were not exactly looking for a needle in a haystack.
The islands were also places where it was not too difficult to collect goods
from right across the world. Sailors expected to make a little money on the
side by buying and selling the spices of the East as they travelled back home
from the Moluccas or India by way of the Cape of Good Hope and the
Portuguese islands of the Atlantic. In this way the Azores became an unlikely
but useful source of tropical spices that the temperate islands themselves
were incapable of producing; Brazilian sugar too was easy to obtain in the
archipelagoes, as Brazil became the dominant source of high-quality sugar
after 1600. Complex trade networks were created by Dutch and Portuguese
merchants that exploited all the loopholes in the relatively light Portuguese
system of control; Portuguese ships out of Brazil would arrive in the two
major Azorean islands, Terceira and São Miguel, pleading that they had been
forced into port by storms, or that they were fleeing from pirates. Then they
would unload their sugar and despatch it directly to the Low Countries on
other ships, without being subject to the customs duties they would have had
to pay in Lisbon.1
The islands were home to very diverse communities: as well as Portuguese
and Spanish settlers, the Atlantic islands were host to English, Scottish, Irish,
Dutch, Flemish, Italian, German and west African inhabitants, the last group
consisting mainly of slaves, although in the Cape Verde Islands they mixed
with the Portuguese and others to form a partly free mulatto population.2
However, the development of large-scale sugar plantations in Brazil, and then
in the Caribbean, took the wind out of the sails of Madeira and other Atlantic
islands. The slave economy of Brazil suited the back-breaking work that took
place in the fields and furnaces of the sugar estates. Transport costs were kept
low by relying on mass-produced Portuguese caravels for the shipping of
Brazilian sugar. The Dutch took a share of this trade, operating alongside the
Portuguese, and again making use of cheaply built ships to reduce overheads.
Brazil therefore became a perfectly viable alternative to Madeira or São
Tomé, with its notoriously bad sugar. One measure of the decline of sugar in
Madeira is that slaves disappeared from the island, for their presence was a
sure sign, within the Atlantic world, that sugar or other highly intensive
production was under way.3
 In Madeira, the hunt began for alternatives, but the rich soil of the island
was becoming exhausted after two centuries of intensive exploitation by
sugar-planters. What saved Madeira was the product for which the island
remains famous: its wine. Seventeenth-century Madeira wine was rather
different to the rich dessert wine that is produced nowadays. It was neither
fortified nor nurtured for years into a fine vintage wine; most of it was red
plonk, drunk within a year of the harvest, but it was very popular with sailors.
There were some superior wines made in small quantities from Malvasia (or
Malmsey) and other grapes; but these were hard to obtain. Yet Madeira wine
had some remarkable characteristics. It seemed to be unaffected by heat or
transportation; if anything, they were thought to improve the wine, and
nineteenth-century English Madeira enthusiasts would often demand wine
that had been carried first of all to the Caribbean or South America.4
Besides, there were plenty of willing consumers in Brazil and the West
Indies, whom English merchants supplied not just with slaves but with wine.
Barbados was especially thirsty for Madeira wines, while English settlers in
Jamaica became major consumers after the island fell under English rule in
1655.5
The Madeira wine trade was boosted by the fact that the island lay within
easy reach of England, but was also well situated along the Atlantic trade
routes, making it a useful loading point for ships bound for either North or
South America. So began the intimate relationship between Madeira and
England that remains unbroken. English business houses began to flourish on
Madeira, beginning in the late sixteenth century with Robert Willoughby,
whose safety on the island was guaranteed since he was a Catholic – indeed,
he became a Knight of the Portuguese Order of Christ. The seventeenth-
century English colony included a good number of Protestants. There were
frequent brushes with the Inquisition; however, it was obvious to the
Portuguese authorities that the English colony was a valuable asset, so the
Protestants mainly suffered insults.6 In many ways their position was similar
to that of the Portuguese New Christians, whose Jewish identity could
conveniently be ignored when doing business. These English merchants often
lived in some style, possessing agreeable quintas, or estates, away from the
capital at Funchal. The bonds became closer as the English brought in cloth,
which helped balance the cost of the wine they were taking out of the island.
The looms of Devon and Essex hummed as English cloth displaced French
and Flemish. A firm mutual relationship came into being.7
The English presence in Madeira is illuminated by the chance survival of
letters written by a merchant from Warwick who traded actively between
Madeira and the West Indies, as well as towards England, around 1700.
William Bolton was the agent in Madeira of Robert Heysham, a London
banker and merchant who had interests in Africa and who also owned lands
in Barbados, where his partner and brother, William, functioned as official
agent for the British planters.8 ‘African trade’ in this period meant, above all,
the trade in slaves, imported into the West Indies to work on sugar
plantations. That, however, was not Bolton’s speciality, even if the goods he
sent to Barbados and Jamaica were no doubt paid for with profits from the
sugar mills and the slave trade. Bolton’s career shows how Madeira was
locked into a much larger world than that of the eastern Atlantic. Quite apart
from his connections with the Heyshams and Barbados, he found customers
in Boston, New York, Rhode Island and Bermuda, and he loaded Madeira
wines on to ships that passed the island bound for Brazil, India and the East
Indies.9 His activities also reveal how dependent Madeira had become on
Europe for basic supplies, for the shift first to sugar and then to wine had
turned the island into a place of monoculture, drawing its wheat from
Holland, England, North America and the Azores, its meat and dairy goods
from Scotland and Ireland, its fish from Scotland and Newfoundland, its
woollen, silk and cotton goods from England. Particularly astonishing is the
dependence of Madeira on the West Indies for supplies of the very product
that had catapulted Madeira to fame in the fifteenth century, sugar; and
timber, another prized export from the island in the days of Henry the
Navigator, was now brought from the English colonies in North America.10
In mid-December 1695 William Bolton reported on the ships that stood off
Madeira. A Portuguese vessel was loading plenty of wine for delivery in
Brazil, and a Bristol ship was heading for the West Indies also carrying wine;
a ship from New York was ‘bound home with about 100 Pipes’,
approximately 5,700 litres.11 In July 1696 Bolton described how ‘a strang
[sic] revolution in my affairs’ took place: ‘I was seized upon and putt into a
wett dungeon’; and the complaints against him tell something about the
priorities of the Portuguese government of Madeira – he was told by the
governor himself that the English ships had stayed for too short a time during
a recent visit, with the result that not enough wine could be shipped: 2,000
pipes remained unsold. But, he objected, some of these ships were West
Indian and simply did not have the capacity to carry large amounts of
wine.12 In July 1700 he was already thinking ahead and keeping his partners
in London well informed: ‘We are like to have a plentiful Vintage: the
weather is good and above half the vines are out of danger, soe that it wil be
your advantage to send a ship to be here the latter end of December, or the
beginning of January.’ He insisted that ‘our Vintage wil be large. The
weather cannot be better. Now our hopes is only upon a good season to
gather it.’13 One visitor Bolton observed was the great astronomer Edmund
Halley: a ship arrived in January 1699, and ‘on borde her was M Halley, the
r

Mathematician, bound to the coast of Brazil and to the southward of ye Cape;

his designe is to observe the variation of ye Compass’.14 Bolton’s letters thus
expose to view a whole network of contacts mediated through Madeira,
which became the meeting point for ships travelling to and from Portugal, the
Netherlands, England, North America, the West Indies and Brazil.

II

Like Madeira, the Azores were particularly favoured by the English. Between
1620 and 1694, 279 ships are known to have put in at São Miguel, now the
capital of the Azores. Well over half were English, while fewer than 10 per
cent were Portuguese. Not just the ships were English: the major routes
pointed to and from England, for the Azores, even more than Madeira,
depended on the cloths of south-west England, such as the Taunton cottons
that, despite their name, were made of wool.15 The Azorean ports, such as
Angra on the island of Terceira, could handle large merchantmen and men-
of-war much better than Funchal in Madeira, where there was barely a
harbour to speak of. Nor was this simply the story of a close relationship with
Great Britain. England’s American colonies benefited greatly from access to
these Atlantic islands. Horta, on the island of Faial, developed intimate ties
with the English possessions in North America during the seventeenth
century. The wine of the neighbouring island of Pico, grown on the steep
slopes of its volcano, and comparable to Madeira wines, was a great
attraction. As Horta grew, so did its contacts with New England, and it was
on its American business, rather than its European, that its flourishing
economy was based, since the Bostonians often bought more Azorean than
Madeiran wine, and then made a handsome profit redistributing it across the
English colonies just at the moment when these colonies were being
established along the east coast of North America – in Maine, New York,
New Jersey, Delaware, North Carolina and South Carolina. The early
newspapers of New York and Boston carried advertisements for wines
brought from the Azores. Horta was also a vital stopping point for shipping
bound from England to the West Indies.16 One cannot understand the
success of the English in creating a transatlantic network of maritime routes
without taking into full account the role of the Azores.
There was, however, a fly in the ointment. East Indiamen would arrive
ready to be resupplied with food before making the final leg of their long
journey to Lisbon. As has been seen, Portuguese law forbade those on board
from unloading their eastern spices and luxury goods, which were supposed
to be sent all the way to Lisbon and then re-exported, if the Azoreans still
wanted them. Naturally there were ways around this – smuggling, bribery,
open defiance of the law. In 1649 a big, heavy ship called the Santo André
was escorted into the port of Angra, on the island of Terceira, by English and
Dutch allies of the Portuguese, since it was under threat from pirates and was
carrying a very valuable cargo of cinnamon. Special permission was given to
unload the spices but this cargo still needed to get to Lisbon, and the Santo
André was twenty-six years old and not very seaworthy after its long voyage
from the East Indies; besides, there were strong winds against which she
would make little headway. The Portuguese therefore hired two English
ships, and the precious cargo was divided equally among all three boats.
They reached the mouth of the Tagus safely enough, but once again the wind
was the obstacle. The English ships were small enough to work their way into
Lisbon harbour, but the Santo André was a cumbersome galleon, and its
master fled before the winds to the inlets off the coast of Galicia, the famous
rías. But this was Spanish territory, and the Spanish king was still fighting
what he regarded as an impudent rebellion by the Portuguese, who had
broken free from the Habsburg dynasty nine years earlier. As a result, the
galleon and its cargo were impounded, meaning that a good third of the
cinnamon was lost to the enemy.17
Portugal was able to face up to its Spanish enemy thanks in part to the
support of the English and the Dutch. Angra became the base for merchants
from all over Europe; the Dutch consul acted on behalf of other nations as
well, including Denmark, Sweden and Hamburg. Seventeenth-century Angra
has been described as ‘one of the nodal points of Atlantic maritime
commerce’.18 With its spacious harbour, overlooked by a massive
promontory that had already been heavily fortified by the Spanish Habsburgs,
it was a safe retreat in times of tension and a much valued port in times of
peace.

III

There is a stark contrast between the lush Azores and the barren Cape Verde
Islands. Yet the existence of both archipelagoes made long-distance oceanic
navigation possible in an age when supplies of food were liable to be
exhausted in mid-voyage – no one could predict the time it would take to
battle against the winds and the waves until the coming of the steamship. The
Cape Verde Islands provided goat meat, the flesh of the very animals that had
done most to strip the islands’ vegetation bare; there were cheese and butter
made out of goat’s milk; they offered salt in great quantities, at virtually no
cost; there were citrus fruits, even though European sailors were slow to
make the connection between limes or lemons and a cure for scurvy. These
islands also played a significant role in the transmission of African and
European plants to the New World, including yams and rice; the links
between the Cape Verde Islands and Brazil had been forged as early as the
first half of the sixteenth century. The movement of plants went both ways:
arriving by way of the Cape Verde Islands, American maize became a
favoured crop in west Africa, along with manioc. It has been pointed out that
this transmission took place within the space of just a few years; but ‘once a
certain amount of diffusion had taken place, it was self-perpetuating’.19 It
was also irreversible, part of a wider process that transformed the domestic
economy of each continent bordering the Atlantic – the example of the potato
and its importance in the nineteenth-century Irish economy hardly needs to be
stressed.20
By the 1680s enterprising English merchants were selling Azorean wheat
and Caboverdean salt to settlers in Newfoundland, who then used this salt to
process the cod in which that part of the Atlantic was so rich, before the
salted cod was passed back across the Atlantic to Spain and Portugal, where
bacalao remains a national dish to this day. The Cape Verde Islands were
also visited by East Indiamen, whose crews would stock up with supplies
before making the long haul around the Cape of Good Hope to the Indies.
From the sixteenth century onwards, this gave the islands a certain strategic
interest; Francis Drake arrived in Santiago, the main island, in 1585, and
ravaged its tiny capital, Ribeira Grande.21 The Habsburg rulers of Portugal
reacted by building the Fort of São Felipe, an imposing structure that still
hangs high above the remains of the old town, looking far out to sea.22 This
did not protect the bays further east along the coast of Santiago, and other
predators arrived, notably the Dutch, who briefly occupied Praia. However,
there was not much to occupy. The islanders relied on imported knick-knacks
from Europe, cheap ceramics and textiles, simple metal goods, as well as
African pottery, some produced locally and some carried across from the
Portuguese trading posts on the west coast of Africa.
The real source of prosperity for the Europeans living in or trading through
Santiago remained African slaves.23 As the sugar industry of Brazil took off
in the late sixteenth century, the importance of the route past Santiago was
magnified. In 1609–10 thirteen ships took something like 5,900 African
slaves out of Ribeira Grande to a variety of destinations, Cartagena, in
modern Colombia, being the favourite. However, this was just the official
trade, and we can be sure that many more Africans were loaded on ships and
sent across the Atlantic; the islands remained a useful entrepôt where slaves
could be held for a while until slave-merchants came to collect them. Proof of
this comes both from the fact that recorded numbers of slaves arriving in
Santiago are lower than the numbers of those leaving, and from the fact that
the slave cemetery excavated by archaeologists from Cambridge in Ribeira
Grande contains the skeletons of so very many slaves who died on the island
before being re-exported.24 By the end of the seventeenth century some
attempts had been made to protect slaves from abuse. They were to be
baptized within six months of arrival, or else they would be forfeited, and
they were to have time off on Sundays. Slaves bound for the Americas were
to have a certain minimum space on board, and time for exercise on deck, as
well as for instruction in their new faith. The Portuguese view was that their
souls had a chance of salvation, so that being a Christian slave had clear
advantages over being a free pagan.25
There were distinct advantages in picking up slaves in the islands rather
than on the African coast. The Portuguese trading bases in west Africa such
as Cacheu, inhabited by the so-called lançados, Portuguese often suspected
of crime or heresy, built close ties to the courts of African rulers. Many were
well assimilated into African society, with African mothers or wives and a
good knowledge of both European and African culture. Some were of New
Christian descent; local Muslim rulers and their economic usefulness to
Portugal protected them from the long arm of the Inquisition. Since many of
the Portuguese settlers in the Cape Verde Islands were also New Christians,
there existed a natural kinship between the colonists on the islands and on the
coast, a network of trust that helped to foster trade.26 The lançados obtained
trading privileges and knew what sort of gifts the African kings expected to
receive in return for favours, for the kings could be very specific in their
demands for weapons or brass goods. This was an art that the slave-
merchants and sea captains, who were only transient visitors to these waters,
could not be expected to develop.
Dealing with the lançados brought another benefit: they supplied the
islands with the basic goods that the islands found it hard to produce, such as
palm wine and millet. These were required at least to feed the slave
population. And the lançados were happy to send these goods in payment for
the worldwide manufactures that were popular among the west African elites:
Europe sent red cloth of Portugal, metal bracelets, buttons, Venetian glass
beads; the New World sent silver coins; the Indies sent coral, cloves and
cotton, though these were often re-exported through Lisbon.27 All these
goods passed through the Cape Verde Islands, reinforcing their role as a key
entrepôt between Africa and the rest of the world. Islanders of African
descent began to weave cotton cloths in the African fashion, often coloured
blue and white and copying traditional African designs. These cloths, or
barafulas, were similar to but often better in quality than west African ones;
they were produced for the African market, making it possible to exchange
Caboverdean products for the captive humans of west Africa. The whole
process was helped further by the planting of indigo in the islands, where it
flourished. The barafulas were used as standard currency (the American
silver coins were melted down and turned into jewellery in west Africa). The
use of cloths as currency defeated the bureaucrats of Lisbon, who expected
customs dues to be paid in coin, with the result that many merchants simply
failed to pay their taxes.28
The Portuguese rebellion against Habsburg rule in 1640 posed the usual
problem that political freedom was one thing, but the risks to prosperity were
quite another. The solution was simple: that year, the Portuguese government
decreed that Spanish ships could continue to visit both the Cape Verde
Islands and Guinea, so long as they arrived from the New World, so long as
they deposited a financial guarantee in Lisbon and so long as they paid for
the slaves with American silver. This led to a lucrative trade with places such
as Havana. Either side of 1640 the slave trade continued to bring profit (and
to inflict massive misery): taking the seventeenth century as a whole, 28,000
slaves are known to have passed through the Cape Verde Islands, which is
definitely not the full total.29
These archipelagoes were not simply part of a Portuguese network but part
of a global one. Without the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands it is hard to
see how not just the Portuguese but the Spanish and English commercial
networks would have functioned reasonably efficiently during the
seventeenth century. At the same time, one cannot close one’s eyes to the
horrors that this trade inflicted on the innocent human cargoes that passed
through the Cape Verde Islands towards the Americas.

IV

Far beyond the Cape Verde Islands lay other isolated peaks sticking up out of
the southern Atlantic Ocean, uninhabited by humans or by mammals until the
arrival of the Europeans: St Helena, Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha.
Historians of St Helena in particular have noticed that this island, mainly
known to history as the last abode of Napoleon, had an importance out of all
proportion to its size, for what really mattered was its location on the sea
routes to and from India; the takeover of the island by the English East India
Company reflected a carefully constructed policy of creating stepping stones
across the oceans, in the awareness that without resupply the routes across the
high seas were quite simply unmanageable. Oddly, the island had been
known to European navigators since the Feast of St Helen in May 1502, and
it was visited again the next year by Vasco da Gama on his return from his
second Indian voyage. St Helena may be tiny; but it was impossible to miss:
heading out across the Atlantic from the Cape of Good Hope ‘the wind is
very constant and carries you in sixteen days into St Helen’s road’.30
The Portuguese realized that this island could serve its India fleets well,
without the need to create a colony there on the model of Madeira or the
Azores; they actually discouraged long-term settlement, for they knew that
such a remote place would be impossible to control from Lisbon. They
wanted to keep St Helena out of the public eye, all the more so as the English
and the Dutch began to navigate to and from the Indies. They had not learned
from their experiences in the Cape Verde Islands, for they populated the
island with goats. At least one Portuguese resident settled there voluntarily in
1516. Fernando Lopez was well born, but was arrested in Goa for desertion
and was brutally punished by having his ears, nose, left thumb and entire
right hand cut off. Understandably he avoided human company, preferring
his pet chicken, but he did some business with visiting ships, selling the skins
of the goats he had captured for his dinner with his four remaining fingers.31
Aware of the value of this island as a source of fresh food, the Dutch began
to prey on Portuguese shipping off St Helena at the end of the sixteenth
century. The Witte Leeuw, or White Lion, a Dutch East Indiaman, attacked
Portuguese ships off St Helena in 1613. This proved to be an act of hubris: a
cannon exploded on board, and the powder room then blew up, leading to the
loss of a hundred tons of pepper and a large cargo of fine Chinese porcelain,
some of which has been recovered from the sea and is preserved in the
island’s museum.32 This was the prelude to Dutch attempts to push the
Portuguese out of the island, without, however, taking direct control. The
idea that it could continue to function as a resupply centre, to all intents a
neutral territory, still found favour. This was not the view of the English. In
1656 Oliver Cromwell was persuaded by the English East India Company
that the Company’s trade with the Indies would take off once England took
charge of St Helena – ‘a halfway house in the midst of a great ocean’, as a
French traveller described it in 1610. St Helena had already been visited by
Cavendish as he headed back into the Atlantic on his round-the-world cruise.
He was greatly impressed, for by now he was glad to see melons, lemons,
oranges, pomegranates and figs, streams of fresh water, big fat pheasants and
partridges, and goats and pigs brought there by the Portuguese.33 Oliver
Cromwell’s son and momentary successor, Richard Cromwell, granted the
EIC a charter giving it authority to ‘settle, fortifie and plant’ the island. The
EIC thought of St Helena as a base from which to launch expeditions towards
the far-distant Moluccan island of Run, which they still dreamed of
recovering from the Dutch right up to the exchange agreement of 1667 that
sacrificed Run for Manhattan.34
Defeated in the Moluccas, the EIC was nonetheless disinclined to let go of
St Helena, for the island was thought to have real potential. The quality of its
fresh water attracted wonder, making the island ‘an earthly paradise’.35 It
was assumed that ‘plants, rootes and grains and all other things necessarie for
plantation’ would transform its lush but wild environment, while fish
swarmed in the waters round about, and even the wild grasses provided
wondrous cures for ‘sailors just dead with scurvy’, who would ‘recover to a
miracle’ and bounce back into life. Using plants brought from the Cape
Verde Islands, St Helena became a garden island where fruits and roots from
across the world were cultivated: from the Americas cassava and potatoes,
from Europe oranges and lemons, from Africa plantains, from India rice, all
intended to make the island self-sufficient, since a settled population would
require rather more than the limited list of items needed for the resupply of
passing ships. The animal population was boosted by sending cattle and
sheep as well as chickens. Even so, at the start of English colonization, it was
difficult to obtain agricultural knowhow. Four free planters could be found on
the island in the 1660s; inevitably, the hard work planting and harvesting the
new crops was carried out by black African slaves, who were permitted to
cultivate their own plots of land, and produced promising yields. This was an
island that suffered from underpopulation, not overpopulation: in 1666 there
were fifty male inhabitants, twenty women, and six slaves. Male and female
slaves were regularly brought from the Cape Verde Islands; Madagascar
slaves were specially prized by the English and were taken as far as
Barbados, where they trained as highly skilled artisans. It was hoped they
could be equally useful on St Helena.36 In 1673, 119 colonists set out from
England, following an abortive Dutch invasion of the island. Some of them
were reasonably well-off, with servants of their own, or black slaves. By
1722 the population had reached 924, more than half of whom were free; and
of those the majority were women and girls.37
The settlers were not a passive body of people, willing to take orders from
the EIC. St Helena was a turbulent place in the late seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, as its governors, its garrison, its free planters and its
slaves clashed with each other. The colonists held a majority on the island
council for a few years, but from the moment the English took control of the
island its governors were not inclined to pay the council much attention, and
back in London the directors of the EIC were well aware that this high-
handed treatment of the settlers was counterproductive. In 1684 the governor
responded to an uprising by the settlers by ordering his soldiers to shoot at
the rebels, killing some of them; and then others were taken prisoner and
executed. Another governor was assassinated. The slaves rose up in rebellion.
The leading historian of this island has pointed out that it was only ever a
Utopia on paper; theory and reality stood far apart.38
The East India Company wanted to keep St Helena for its own exclusive
use, and that did not simply mean defending the island against the Dutch or
other foreign rivals. Even other English companies were discouraged from
making use of the island. This was the EIC’s link to India, not England’s link,
even if it had been established by a charter of the Lord Protector himself. Not
for nothing was St Helena known as ‘The Company’s Island’. In 1681 the
EIC resolved that slave ships coming from Madagascar or the adjacent coasts
of Africa would be made welcome, if they touched at the island for supplies
or were in distress. However, the governors discouraged non-Company ships
from attempting to trade. The Roebuck, an English slaver, reached St Helena
in spring 1681, having lost forty of its 346 slaves to disease; sickness had also
taken hold of the crew. Medical help was offered, but the governor forbade
the sailors to carry on any trade, to the intense annoyance of the planters.39
Yet this policy was consistent with the monopolistic outlook of the Company.
The EIC hoped to extend its monopoly even further by taking control of
another remote south Atlantic island, Tristan da Cunha, although the weather
there was worse even than on St Helena and the island was even more
barren.40 The motive was control of the sea routes into the Indian Ocean, and
also looking westwards towards Brazil, though Tristan da Cunha stands a
little south of the latitude of the Cape of Good Hope, a long way down from
St Helena, which lies roughly on the latitude of the border between modern
Angola and Namibia. Tristan was not occupied by the British until 1816,
although the first attempt to colonize the island took place in 1684, when the
English ship Society was despatched there with orders to conduct a survey;
the East India Company was keen to learn how good its harbours might be.
There, or on other promising but empty islands, the ship’s captain was to
leave a boar and two sows and a letter in a bottle, which was deemed
sufficient evidence to establish an English claim to the territory. By the early
nineteenth century British enthusiasm for this utterly remote volcanic island
had reached the point where it was compared favourably to Funchal, the main
town of Madeira, ‘from the circumstance of its being a straight shore’; there
was sufficient land for cultivation and there were good supplies of fresh
water.41
St Helena and Tristan da Cunha, and even the archipelagoes much further
north, were not simply Atlantic bases. They were tied as closely to the Indian
Ocean as to the Atlantic. Just as the oceans flowed into one another, their
trade routes were inextricably intertwined.

It may seem strange to include the fourth largest island in the world,
Madagascar, among these dots on the map, but there are good reasons for
doing so: a few points along its coasts were initially seen as potential points
for the resupply of ships; and, although it does not lie in the Atlantic, it was
seen as a valuable link between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic,
reinforcing the sense that merchants, pirates and indeed governments did not
employ the rigid divisions between oceans that tend to be applied nowadays,
above all among historians.42 Later, as the idea of settling larger tracts of the
island took hold, the assumption grew that this was a more attractive version
of Asia, rather than Africa; the full title of a widely circulated pamphlet by
‘Richard Boothby, merchant’, published in London in 1646 and reprinted the
next year, was A Breife Discovery or Description of the Most Famous Island
of Madagascar or St Laurence in Asia neare unto East-India; with relation of
the healthfulnesse, pleasure, fertility and wealth of that country, also the
condition of the natives: also the excellent meanes and accommodation to fit
the planters there. Another tract by an Englishman who knew the island well
was enthusiastically entitled Madagascar, the Richest and most Fruitfull
Island in the world; and the author was especially charmed by the ‘loving and
affable condition’ of the people – indeed, in another pamphlet he called them
‘the happiest people in the world’.43 These were some of the many
manifestos that praised an island that, in truth, the Europeans did not know
well, but one that was much more easily accessible by way of the Cape of
Good Hope than Sumatra, let alone the Moluccas. The hope was raised that
Madagascar could be a substitute for the East Indies, a new Asia away from
Asia proper. As usual, optimism turned to disappointment when the
Europeans encountered areas of dry, red earth that seemed to extend for ever.
On the other hand, there was truth in the idea that this was a world apart from
Africa – a miniature continent, with its own extraordinary wildlife and its
historical links right across the Indian Ocean.
The Portuguese had reached Madagascar in 1500, and they found that the
island lay under the authority of several different kings. They also found that
it was already well connected with the outside world through major east
African ports such as Mombasa. In 1506 they conducted a raid on a Malagasy
port; it did not produce gold or ivory, but there was so much rice that it would
fill twenty ships. These contacts brought Islam as well as goods to
Madagascar, but Islam failed to make a strong impact on the island, even
though some Muslim practices, such as circumcision and avoidance of pork,
became quite widespread. The same applied to Hinduism, whose influence
trickled along the trade routes that had brought the first Malay sailors to the
island during the Middle Ages; but again it remained weak, and the main cult
consisted of ancestor worship (which could, according to some accounts,
involve the ceremonial display of ancestors’ corpses and even their
consumption).44 Although it became obvious that conquering the island was
out of the question, the Europeans exploited the wars between local kings,
just as they always had in west Africa, to secure a supply of slaves, which
they exchanged for European textiles and cattle. Some of the kings had more
upmarket tastes: Dian Ramach had been educated in Portuguese Goa, so it is
not surprising that he showed off a lacquered throne made in China, a
Japanese vase and both Persian and European robes.45
Slaves were the main ‘product’ of the island in which the Europeans took
an interest. As in west Africa, there was a world of difference between the
harsh regime to which the great majority of exported slaves would find
themselves subjected, whether in Indian Ocean colonies or across the
Atlantic, and the much looser style of slavery on the island, a light version of
serfdom that only turned vicious when rulers and nobles decided to sell their
unfree subjects to the Europeans.46 Malagasy slaves accounted for a small
percentage of the number of slaves who were carried across the high seas by
European merchants, less than 5 per cent of slaves traded by Europeans in the
Indian Ocean, and a small fraction of those traded in the Atlantic. By
comparison, over 2,800,000 slaves are believed to have been transported out
of west and central Africa just on English ships during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.47 However, the Malagasies were valued for their
intelligence and skills (while their distant relatives, the Malays, were deemed
to be too lazy and unreliable); in Barbados, English planters took the view
that Malagasy slaves were the ‘most ingenious of any Blacks’, well suited to
be trained as carpenters, blacksmiths or coopers. The East India Company
sought ‘lusty well-grown boys’ on Madagascar – the term ‘lusty’ being used
here without sexual connotations.48
However, there was another advantage to Madagascar beyond resupply
and the slave trade: piracy. At the end of the seventeenth century, local kings
actively tolerated the presence in coastal ports of European pirates, as well as
pirates from the English colonies in North America. Well-armed pirates could
be recruited to take part in wars between rival kings. And the reason they
were well armed was that far away in the Atlantic – as far away as New York
– friendly merchants could be found who were keen to supply them with
arms as well as strong drink. Casks of beer and spirits were sent all the way
from America, despite the objections of the East India Company and the
Royal African Company in London. Meanwhile the pirates, who were
variously of English, Dutch, French and – interestingly – African descent,
supplied Malagasy slaves to willing buyers.49
The American backers of these pirates were men of significance back in
New York. Frederick Philipse, of Dutch descent, was one of its wealthiest
citizens; and, hearing that a pirate named Adam Baldridge had abandoned his
old business, piracy in the Caribbean, and had taken up residence on St
Mary’s Island, off the north-east coast of Madagascar, he saw a golden
opportunity to send him supplies in return for Malagasy slaves. Philipse and
Baldridge had bought a winning ticket: once the base on St Mary’s was up
and running, with hundreds of people living in the settlement, all the pirate
vessels active in the western Indian Ocean began to call in there for supplies.
Baldridge did particularly good business by selling on rum and beer at an
appreciable mark-up. Yet he also imported bibles from North America, a
reminder that many pirates saw no contradiction between robbery on the high
seas or the enslavement of fellow humans and the Christian life. As the
settlement expanded, so did the Malagasy population; and while Baldridge
was away from St Mary’s late in 1697, on a local slaving expedition, the
islanders living in the town rebelled, tearing down the fort he had built and
killing about thirty of the pirates. Baldridge abandoned St Mary’s, and later
he would complain that the revolt had taken place because the Europeans had
no idea how to treat the islanders gently. But William Kidd, a famous
Scottish pirate who was later to hang for his crimes, thought that Baldridge
was making excuses for his own mistreatment of the Malagasy inhabitants of
his little town, since he would inveigle men, women and children on to his
ship, before taking them captive and selling them as slaves to the Dutch in
Mauritius and the French in Réunion (then known as Île Bourbon), the two
Mascarene islands to the east of Madagascar which were being colonized just
at this period.50 Maybe, then, there were other pirates like Kidd who did read
their bibles and did have a conscience.
Some pirates valued their Malagasy slaves highly and appointed them as
cooks on board ship, where they occupied positions of some responsibility;
making sure that food did not run out and that as much fresh food as possible
was served was an important task. One such cook was Marramitta, who was
appointed by his master, none other than Philipse, as cook aboard the
Margaret. His real name is unknown, for ‘Marramitta’ appears to be a
corruption of the Malagasy word for ‘cooking-pot’, marmite in modern
French. Malagasy slaves were dispersed across the world. The English East
India Company made use of Malagasy labour when it built a fort at its pepper
factory in Sumatra, at Bencoolen, towards the end of the seventeenth century.
Once there, quite a few headed off into the jungle, no doubt able to take
advantage of the fact that they spoke a language not too dissimilar to Malay–
Indonesian. But the Atlantic also received increasing numbers, often via a
holding station on St Helena.51 As early as 1628 a slave from Madagascar
arrived in the new French colony of Quebec; and at the end of the century
ships loaded with slaves were regularly reaching New York. However, the
growing cities of North America were less frequent destinations than the
islands of the Caribbean, particularly Barbados and Jamaica, or the English
settlements in Virginia and the Carolinas. In 1678 three ships out of
Madagascar delivered 700 slaves to Barbados, where the intensification of
sugar production (with the high mortality this industry produced) led to
greater and greater demand for slaves not just from west Africa. By 1700
something like 16,000 slaves on Barbados were Malagasy, about half the
total; and just one port in Madagascar is thought to have exported between
40,000 and 150,000 slaves during the seventeenth century.52 The good news,
if it can be called that, is that mortality on English ships carrying Malagasy
slaves was low.53 This may reflect the quality of supplies they were fed,
loaded in Madagascar, at the Cape or in St Helena; and it may also reflect the
fact that they were often transported in relatively small ships, which reduced
the danger of epidemics: average cargoes in the eighteenth century were
sixty-nine slaves. In 1717 the Board of Directors instructed the East India
agents on St Helena to treat slaves ‘humanely’, pointing out that ‘they are
Men’.54 And, after all, slavers wanted to deliver their human cargo alive; a
dead slave meant financial loss.
 43

The Wickedest Place on Earth

When looking at the centuries after Columbus and da Gama, this book has
laid an emphasis on the links between the oceans. The flow of people and
goods from one ocean to another created a series of connections, wrapped
right around the world, that can justifiably be described as a global network.
Whether one would want to call this a global economy is a less
straightforward question, since the term ‘global economy’ might indicate an
economy in which global connections moulded the activities of a high
percentage of merchants, craftsmen and consumers in all the major centres of
economic power, from China to England to the Spanish cities in the New
World. The careers of the English and other pirates who plagued the
Caribbean in the middle of the seventeenth century may seem a rather
unimportant issue, despite the enormous fascination that pirates of the
Caribbean have generated among film-makers and film-goers. However, the
passage of treasure ships through the Caribbean is not simply a story of
Caribbean, or at best Atlantic, history. Bearing in mind the origin of much of
this bullion, the Potosí silver mines in Peru (now in Bolivia), and the route
the silver had already taken along hundreds of miles of Pacific water to reach
the isthmus of Panama, the history of the silver routes shows clearly how the
different oceans were bound together by the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Nor should it be forgotten that much of this silver was being sent
westwards, reaching Macau by way of Manila. In the seventeenth century,
though, production was declining and Spain was financially overstretched
thanks to its heavy involvement in European and Mediterranean conflicts.
The failure of a treasure fleet to arrive, following raids by English pirates,
was a bruising blow to a failing empire.
These pirates certainly existed, although many of them are better described
as privateers, armed with official letters of marque entitling them to attack the
ships of enemy powers, than as freebooters.1 The term that came into use to
describe the Caribbean pirates was ‘buccaneers’, derived from the French
word boucan, which meant the grill on which they would smoke large slabs
of meat, often cut from the sides of animals they had rustled in Hispaniola
and other Spanish islands, which were now depopulated of Taíno Indians and
heavily populated instead with roaming cattle, easy to find and wholesome to
eat. The term ‘corsairs’, derived from corso, ‘journey’, is usually reserved for
a quite different class of pirate, the Barbary corsairs who infested the western
Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic waters.2 It is true that the pirates of the
Caribbean tied red cloths around their heads, wielded cutlasses and drank
plenty of rum, and that they preferred a rather democratic system of
command according to which the ship’s captain lived and slept among his
men, and decisions were made by consultation.3
 Nonetheless, the pirates and privateers served the interests of higher
powers even when, like Henry Morgan, famous for his raid on Panama, they
went about their business without taking direct instruction from above. They
were valuable instruments in the creation of a permanent English presence in
the Caribbean from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards; they
shared with the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, and then the king, Charles
II, the ambition of interrupting the Spanish treasure fleets bringing silver
from Veracruz in Mexico and Porto Bello in Panama to Cádiz and the coffers
of the Habsburg kings of Spain. Successful piracy depended, however, on
maintaining a watchful balance between the capture of treasure ships and
their free passage through the Caribbean. The principles underlying this
approach were once explained by an economist who developed ‘The Pure
Theory of the Muggery’. Just as a fishing fleet has to take care not to overfish
so that no resources are left behind, a mugger, or equally a pirate, has to
ensure that streets or seaways are sufficiently clear to permit most people to
pass. Winning too many prizes results in abandonment of the route by those
the pirate hopes to despoil. If the route is too dangerous, like Central Park,
New York, at 3 a.m., it will be abandoned entirely by potential victims.
Equally, the pirate, or the mugger, or indeed the fisherman, has to ensure that
competitors are kept at bay.4
The idea that piracy remained a constant scourge in the Caribbean needs to
be qualified. Licensed piracy aimed at Spanish ships was a serious problem
between 1655 and 1671, but after that the problem receded, partly because
the English and the Spaniards had hammered out a peace agreement, and
partly because the passage of the treasure ships had become intermittent, with
several years at a time going by during which no silver ships left Mexico or
Panama. The Spanish navy was by now so poorly supported at home that
Spain could not always provide ships to carry the bullion to Spain, and there
were even occasions when Dutch ships had to be hired to do the job. Returns
from raids on treasure ships were, therefore, sinking. Moreover, the major
English base in the Caribbean, at Port Royal on the coast of Jamaica, was
largely destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in June 1692. This is not to
deny that outbreaks of piracy recurred. Piracy was rather like the plague: it
came in waves, but was generally a low-level threat. To give one example: in
the first few years of the eighteenth century, the Bahamas became a nest of
pirates, what has been described as a ‘buccaneer republic’. But once a British
governor was in place (himself a former privateer) he offered an amnesty to
those who were willing to change their ways, and set them against those who
were not. Within a few years the pirate plague was at an end.5

II

The acquisition of Jamaica by the English is a good example of Sir John

Seeley’s dictum that the British Empire was acquired ‘in a fit of absence of
mind’. Yet it was not the first English colony in western Atlantic waters, even
if it became one of the most important ones. Sir Walter Raleigh’s attempt to
create a colony at Roanoke on the coast of North Carolina during the 1580s
had ended with the mysterious disappearance of its settler population.6 More
enduring was the Jacobean colony at Jamestown, founded in 1607 in
Virginia, which gave the English their first permanent foothold in North
America, over a century after Cabot’s first voyage, but only a year after a
legal ban on the right to emigrate was abolished.7 One accidental spin-off
from the establishment of Jamestown was the settlement of Bermuda, briefly
visited a century earlier by a Portuguese seaman named Bermudez. In 1609
an English ship caught in a hurricane while bound for Virginia collided with
rocks off Bermuda; no one drowned but some of the sailors and passengers
kept insisting that they would rather stay there than return home once their
ship had been repaired – there was even a meat supply, since wild pigs
infested the island, having survived an earlier shipwreck. When the Virginia
Company back in England heard about this, they seized at once on the
attractions of an island that had no previous inhabitants (unlike Virginia) and
whose contours had been carefully mapped by the castaways, whereas much
of the Virginian hinterland was still terra incognita.
It took three years, starting in 1612, to despatch 600 settlers to Bermuda,
aboard nine vessels. Bermuda proved to be very suitable for tobacco
cultivation, and lumps of ambergris, the enormously valuable secretion from
the bile duct of whales, were sometimes washed up on its shores. Soon after
settlement began, a large lump worth £12,000 secured the financial future of
the new colony. It became the first English colony to make use of African
slave labour. However, planters on other English islands learned how to
produce far superior tobaccos, and the islanders on Bermuda shifted their
attention to food production, first cattle and then sugar. Out of that, by the
early eighteenth century, a lively exchange market sprang up, with North
American grain and timber passing through Bermuda to the Caribbean, and
Caribbean sugar and rum passing the other way. The ships the Bermudians
used were put together on the island, built and sailed by slaves as well as free
men. These mainly small but fast sloops became a familiar sight in North
American ports, which, rather than Great Britain, were before long the focus
of the island’s trade; the Bermudians also ran their ships down to Dutch
Curaçao and all around the Dutch Caribbean. Bermuda’s success as a centre
of exchange was extraordinary: its ship movements compared well with those
of New York and Jamaica, though they fell some way behind Barbados, of
which more shortly.8
James Evans has pointed out that during the seventeenth century almost
380,000 Englishmen and women migrated to the Americas; a majority,
200,000, headed for the Caribbean. This far exceeded migration by rivals:
Spanish migration to the Americas reached about half that of the English,
while the number of French migrants was minute, one fortieth of those from
England. The figures are all the more remarkable because there was a similar
flow out of England towards Ireland.9 These figures are also greater than
those from the eighteenth century. There were many factors driving people
across the Atlantic: poverty at home, the wish to practise one’s faith without
interference, the search for wealth, as rumours of gold continued to spread,
notwithstanding Frobisher’s fiasco with fool’s gold. The sailing of the
Mayflower with 100-odd passengers has become part of the American
national myth, so it is important to remember that most colonists were not
Puritan idealists; those in Britain and Europe who remain mystified by the
American cult of ‘Thanksgiving’ are right to wonder how important this
voyage really was.10
In Virginia, moneymaking opportunities opened up for reasons quite other
than gold-digging: the fashion for tobacco had created a seemingly
inexhaustible demand for a product that was supposed to have impressive
health-giving properties.11 At first the labour force consisted of indentured
servants, English migrants who sought a route out of poverty by signing away
their freedom in return for food, clothing and a roof over their head, so that
one third of the settler population in Virginia consisted of these people in the
middle of the century. The notoriously cold seventeenth century saw several
severe famines, particularly in the 1630s, encouraging emigration. This
‘Little Ice Age’ was a global phenomenon, however: on arrival in North
America, conditions were also still unusually cold at this period. Even so, the
risk of crossing the sea and of living in a land where unfamiliar and untamed
diseases wiped out perhaps half the settlers within a few years of their arrival
could seem a risk worth taking.12
The Caribbean was a different sort of success story to Virginia. England
acquired Barbados, on the outermost edges of the Caribbean, in 1625 after
Captain John Powell arrived there and planted the English flag in what had
once been a flourishing native settlement, but was now empty of people: the
Spaniards had not bothered to occupy the island, and had used it as a source
of slaves, since the warlike and probably cannibalistic people they knew as
Caribs were treated as legitimate foes of the Spanish Crown; the exasperated
inhabitants decamped to other, less exposed points in the Lesser Antilles
where they could defend themselves better.13 That did not solve their
problems, as the English had already installed themselves on St Kitts in 1624,
at the price of having to fight a war with the Caribs for mastery over the
island, which was given over to tobacco plantations. There was much to
learn: a hurricane wrecked the first crop. Then England took charge of
Antigua and Montserrat eight years later. Meanwhile the French occupied
Guadeloupe and Martinique, as each European nation that followed in
Spain’s wake took advantage of the Spanish failure to establish control of the
smaller islands; inevitably this led to bitter battles with the warlike Caribs,
and the ruthless extinction of Carib communities.14
In Barbados, on the other hand, attempts to grow tobacco were not
particularly successful. The economy took off when Sir James Drax observed
the success of the sugar plantations that were spreading across the Dutch and
Portuguese colonies in South America. Drax brought Sephardic Jews from
Dutch Brazil to help him set up the industry. The result of the sugar boom
was that the island attracted plenty of English settlers, 2,000 by 1657 just in
the new capital, Bridgetown, which attracted admiring comments from a
French Catholic missionary: the houses ‘have an appearance of dignity,
refinement and order, that one does not see in the other islands and which
indeed it would be hard to find anywhere’.15 In this period, Barbados was
already able to export 8,000 tons of sugar to England each year; in the early
eighteenth century the sugar output of the small Caribbean islands under
English rule exceeded that of Brazil. Barbados became England’s sugar
island, just as Madeira had once been Portugal’s. In the early days, the human
cost was lighter than it became. About half of those who arrived from
England were indentured servants; there were 13,000 servants, mostly young
men but also some women, in Barbados in 1652, with an annual flow of
roughly 1,500 to 3,000 into the island. It cost up to £8 to bring a servant
across the Atlantic, which in mid-century was a cheaper option than buying
slaves, the price for which hovered somewhere around £35 – although
indentured servants were not slaves and were treated much better than black
slaves. As slave prices fell and the numbers volunteering for indentured
labour also fell, the slave plantation became the norm, and a new elite of
planters emerged, seventy-four of whom appeared in an official list submitted
to London in 1673.16
Throughout the eighteenth century Barbados continued to satisfy Britain’s
craving for sugar – and continued to import the enormous numbers of slaves
who made that possible, in unspeakable conditions. The English taste for
sweet tea helped fuel the expansion of production. Thus the Barbadian sugar
producers were in part responding to demand created by the tea trade out of
China, another example of the way what happened in one ocean could have a
powerful impact on what happened in another. Barbados became the model
for other sugar-producing islands: for English Jamaica, but also for the
French settlement that was established in 1665 at the western end of
Hispaniola, known as Saint-Domingue, the lineal ancestor of modern Haiti.
Curiously, these cases apart, the ‘sugar revolution’ in the Caribbean took off
not in the islands settled by Columbus but in the new colonies of the English,
the French and the Dutch – Columbus’s attempts to cultivate sugar on
Hispaniola had faltered once the Portuguese brought sugar to Brazil. Spanish
Cuba and Puerto Rico only became major producers much later, during the
nineteenth century (though still thanks to slavery, which continued to exist on
the islands).17 In each of the islands, slave labour became the source of the
colonists’ prosperity. Yet the slaves were not politically passive. In 1675 and
again in 1692 slaves plotted to seize Bridgetown and take control over the
island and over the ships in its harbour. Both conspiracies were discovered in
time, and ninety-three conspirators were executed in 1692.18

III

The short but turbulent history of Port Royal began as a result of a series of
mistakes. In 1655 Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of
England, Scotland and Ireland, agreed to support an English expedition
against the capital of Hispaniola, Santo Domingo.19 As ruler of Great
Britain, Cromwell had an extraordinary ability to swallow his profound
religious convictions and to make friends, if necessary, with Catholic powers
such as Spain, and enemies with Calvinist ones such as Holland. It was
therefore in a spirit of mild threat that he summoned the Spanish ambassador
a year earlier, requesting free passage for English trading ships bound for the
New World in return for continuing friendship. The ambassador flatly
rejected the proposal; but Cromwell was prepared for this already, as he had
been thinking for a while that he could exploit Spain’s weakness by sending a
fleet into the Caribbean. Among those urging the Lord Protector to take this
course was supposedly a Portuguese merchant named Carvajal who had taken
refuge in London after the Inquisition had run him to earth in the Canary
Islands. He is said to have been another of those crypto-Jews who had
managed to move around the Iberian lands from which Jews were banned,
and he continued to trade in American silver, importing silver bars into
England from Seville. In this reading of the very fragmentary evidence,
Carvajal is portrayed as a key figure in Cromwell’s willingness to permit the
Portuguese New Christians living in London to live openly as Jews – though
Cromwell’s support for the readmission of Jews to England had to face bitter
opposition from such prominent but disruptive figures as William Prynne,
already punished for his constant abuse of his foes by the loss of both ears. In
one highly exaggerated account, based on the testimony of an English boy
captured by the Spaniards in the Caribbean, Cromwell had promised to turn a
London church into a synagogue, in return for the funding provided by
Portuguese Jews keen to support this expedition.20
Cromwell cited the cruelty of the Spaniards towards the native inhabitants
of the Caribbean and towards people of other nations when he issued his
instructions to the admiral in charge of the English fleet, William Penn (the
father of the founder of Pennsylvania), in October 1654. By ‘other nations’
he also meant those like the English who were trying to trade in the Spanish
Main. (He had evidently forgotten his own harshness towards the inhabitants
of another English colony, Ireland.) Cromwell was strongly encouraged in his
view by pamphleteers who insisted on the weakness of the Spanish Empire,
among them John Milton. One theme that was taken up by the English
invaders was the promotion of evangelical Protestantism in the face of the
papist Spaniards – and the Spaniards regarded their fight with the English in
the opposite way. The English position was that ‘just as the Spaniards had
taken Jamaica from the Indians, so we English have come to take it from
them. As for the pope, he could neither grant lands to others nor delegate the
right to conquer them.’21
No doubt some of the New Christians were keen to punish Spain for the
continuing persecution of Portuguese merchants by the Inquisition. But
Cromwell’s plans went askew. He sent sixty ships and 8,000 men against
Santo Domingo, ‘a genuine riff-raff of criminals and vagabonds’, according
to a modern Spanish historian, only to find that the campaign was seriously
mishandled. For whatever reason, the English camped some way from the
city and were soon flushed out of Hispaniola. There was no easy repetition of
Sir Francis Drake’s triumphant occupation of Santo Domingo several decades
earlier, when he had only 1,000 men at his disposal.22 But the English
commanders, who had not helped the campaign by their quarrels, were
determined not to return home with nothing. It was the old story, repeated in
many armies and navies, of discord between the man in command of the
fleet, Penn, and the general in charge of land forces, Robert Venables. They
redirected their energies to Spanish-held Jamaica, a poorly defended and
neglected island, whose strategic position south of Cuba and west of
Hispaniola was, as the Spaniards would learn, much more valuable than they
had ever suspected. Cromwell, meanwhile, had no idea what was going on
and can at best have had only a hazy notion of Jamaica’s existence.23 When
news of the disaster in Hispaniola reached England, it caused deep
consternation among the Godly elements of society close to Cromwell:
maybe the Almighty had not deemed England virtuous enough to defeat
Spanish Catholic power in the Caribbean? But, if so, surely this was a divine
test, an opportunity to increase the effort to achieve God’s Design, the defeat
of popery. The Spaniards were cast in the role of the Philistines, while the
English were likened to the ancient Israelites, whose bad ways had led them
to well-deserved defeat at Ai, as the biblical book of Samuel recorded.24
Yet Divine Providence seemed, on later reflection, not to have abandoned
the English. Jamaica was not a negligible prize. No one had previously given
much thought to the strategic position of this neglected island – no one, that
is to say, of consequence, but a Spanish priest had shown great prescience
when he wrote a few years before the conquest:

The defence of the island is very poor … If the enemy takes

possession there can be no doubt from it he will quickly infest all
parts, making himself master of their trade and commerce. As it lies
in the way of the fleets voyaging from these kingdoms to New Spain
and the plate galleons to Havana … it can be gathered how harmful it
would be for ships in that trade if the enemy should take possession of
this island.25

So weak had Spanish interest in Jamaica been that the island was granted as a
perpetual domain to the descendants of Columbus, who notionally ruled it as
a Marquisate, although the benefits were financial – there was no need to go
there very often. Columbus’s grandson, Don Luís de Colón, was accused of
involvement in contraband trade; he managed to stop further investigation in
1568, which seems to provide perfect proof that he was guilty.26 The lack of
rich gold or silver mines was recognized early on, and its sugar industry
remained small under Spanish rule, with only seven mills in operation at the
time of the English invasion.27 ‘Fulfilling no specific need,’ it has been said,
‘Jamaica nonetheless had to be kept out of the hands of others.’28
From the moment that English troops landed in Kingston Bay, the
Spaniards found themselves on the defensive, for their Jamaica garrison was
small, and resistance to the English from forts inland was not effective: the
English had what they wanted, a base on the coast in what is now Kingston
Bay, where they occupied the Spanish forts and were able to interfere with
shipping heading across the Caribbean. In any case, the Spaniards assumed
that the English had come to raid the island and resupply their ships, after
which they would surely up-anchor and sail away.29 Hearing of the
humiliating defeat near Santo Domingo, Cromwell was not particularly
impressed with the news from Jamaica; Robert Venables was disgraced and
briefly locked up in the Tower of London on his return to England, while
Penn fled from the wrath of the Lord Protector to Ireland.30 Not surprisingly,
it took a while for the English to work out the implications and advantages of
this conquest. Cromwell was being advised by a committee of West Indies
commissioners, and they immediately saw that the island would need to be
properly defended and populated; they suggested that as many Scottish
Highlanders as possible should be sent over there – but as servants, for many
or most would be prisoners taken in Cromwell’s Scots campaigns.31
In the long term, this failure to establish Spanish mastery over the entire
Caribbean left interlopers such as the English, the French and the Dutch free
to occupy the small islands of the Lesser Antilles. In 1623 Dutch raids on the
Caribbean islands disrupted the trade of Cuba. With an eye, no doubt, on the
English occupation of Barbados, the Dutch gained control of Curaçao in
1634, and there too they faced no opposition from the Spaniards; many of
those involved in its settlement were Portuguese Jews, active also in the
colonization of the parts of Brazil seized by the Dutch between 1630 and
1654. And it has been seen that the Danes too intruded into the area by the
1670s.32 Spain had become too feeble to stand in the way of any of these
maritime powers.

IV

Most of these islands were exploited for sugar and tobacco; but from being a
backwater Jamaica was transformed into one of the major commercial centres
of the seventeenth-century Caribbean. With an eye on the success of other
trading centres such as Livorno and Amsterdam, where people of all religions
had been welcomed, Jamaica was thrown open to settlers of all religions and
nations, Protestants, Quakers, Catholics alike; and, just as Amsterdam and
Livorno, the new colony attracted settlement by Portuguese Jews, whose
presence brought Jamaica into a network that embraced London, the Dutch
cities and Brazil.33 These Jewish settlers, who had shrugged off their
supposed Catholic identity and operated their own synagogue, have been
labelled the ‘Jewish pirates of the Caribbean’; but here, once again,
sensationalism has corrupted the reading of the evidence. They funded the
privateers; they invested in trade, and that trade included contraband goods
smuggled past the Spaniards; they built a warm relationship with the English
Crown, which protected them from hostile rivals among the other settlers in
Jamaica; but the idea that a kosher version of Captain Morgan plied the high
seas is fantasy.
What Charles II hoped for was the discovery of mines bearing gold, silver
or copper on Jamaica, and some of the Jewish entrepreneurs optimistically
built up his hopes. Benjamin Bueno de Mesquita, also known as Muskett,
arrived on board the Great Gift in March 1663 with a number of Portuguese
Jewish colleagues keen to find the mines; he may have been sincere about the
mines, but filled his time with contraband trade in ammunition across the
straits to Cuba. What was probably a stolen Spanish treasure chest, bearing
on its keyhole the royal coat of arms, has been excavated close to a house he
owned in Port Royal. King Charles II had high hopes for developing the
island’s economy, and he was angry when no mines were found, and thought
of expelling the Jews from Jamaica (though he was too dependent on
Portuguese Jewish loans to think of expelling them from England).34
Although Jamaica became an important centre of sugar production, the hopes
of mineral wealth raised by its conquest had not been realized. It was
therefore a relief to find that it was still very prosperous; and the reason for
that was not its own resources but its proximity to the main shipping lanes of
the Spaniards. Jamaica successfully challenged the Spanish monopoly on
trade through the Caribbean. The English sought more than an occasional
boost to their fortunes from the capture of a treasure fleet; they wanted rights
of navigation on the high seas that (as Grotius had already assured the world
of lawyers) should be free to all.35
 Within four years of its occupation by the English, Jamaica had become
the base for successful raids on Spanish shipping. At first the major role was
played not by pirates but by the English navy. Gradually the involvement of
privateers became greater and that of the navy smaller. The assumption that
this was an unlicensed pirate war is based on the constant and contemptuous
use of the term pirata by the Spaniards, who eagerly dismissed all their foes
in the Caribbean as enemies of mankind. This assumption has provided the
basis for popular ideas of reckless and bloodthirsty ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’,
whose existence at various times is not in doubt, but whose presence at this
period has been greatly exaggerated, especially since the seas around Jamaica
were policed by the English navy, which committed its resources to Jamaica
even while it was very strapped for cash.36 So the picture is much more
complicated: Cromwell was content to encourage buccaneers to come to
Jamaica, so long as they remained under some sort of English command. He
could see that they would be the ideal force to deploy against Spanish ships:
their relatively small vessels rendered them much more mobile than the
heavy treasure ships; they were accustomed to finding hiding places among
the creeks and coves of the Caribbean islands; they were strongly motivated
and self-sufficient, even if that made them, from the point of view of the
English governor, unruly. They were not all English; the first buccaneers in
Jamaican service were drawn from the island of Tortuga, off Hispaniola,
which had become a nest of pirates of the most varied origins, English, Irish,
Scots, French, Dutch, with a smattering of Africans and native Indians as
well.37
The first privateer to make his mark was Christopher Myngs, who had very
modest origins – his father was a cobbler – but he was (literally) a
commanding presence, and captained a fleet that sacked four Spanish towns
in the Caribbean in 1659, returning to Port Royal with 1,500,000 pieces of
eight. He proved to be more of a pirate than a privateer, refusing to hand over
part of the proceeds to the governor of Jamaica, which led to his arrest, his
despatch back to England and his release by the newly installed king, Charles
II, who thought he could tame such a talented sea captain. The king’s
confidence in him was justified: in 1662 he led what seemed an impossibly
foolhardy attack on the second city of Cuba, Santiago, which lay just across
the water from Jamaica, an obvious, tempting but well-defended target. He
managed to scatter the Spaniards, march his men into the heart of the city and
leave them there for five days of wanton pillaging. His crew included a
young Welsh privateer, Henry Morgan, who would terrorize the Spaniards
even more effectively in the coming decades, and who would also manage to
switch back and forth between licensed and unlicensed raiding.38
Morgan, who was born in 1635, came from a more prosperous background
than Myngs. This casts doubt on the romantic version of his career, which
was told during his own lifetime by his Dutch biographer, Exquemeling: that
he had run away to sea at Bristol, apparently hoping to make his fortune in
Barbados. There he supposedly ended up not as a rich planter but as an
indentured servant, at a time when English servants still carried out much of
the backbreaking work on the sugar plantations. This led him to run away to
sea again, when Cromwell’s fleet arrived in Barbados bound for Santo
Domingo.39 It is more likely that he made his way across the sea after paying
for a gentleman’s passage on a boat bound for Barbados. He did take part in
the Hispaniola campaign, and before long he was sailing aboard Myngs’s
ships.40 In 1666 he sailed in a substantial fleet of fifteen ships under the
command of an English privateer named Mansfield, en route to Porto Bello
and the treasure-laden ships bringing the silver of Peru across the Atlantic.
Mansfield realized that the Spanish governor had wind of his arrival, and the
privateers selected another, lesser target in what is now Nicaragua. However,
Morgan’s appetite for an attack on Panama had been whetted. In 1668,
following successes in other theatres, notably Cuba, Morgan led an attack on
the surprisingly ill-defended silver station of Porto Bello. The loot amounted
to around 250,000 pieces of eight, though there was also profit to be made
from merchandise and slaves seized during the raid. Ordinary crew members
might expect to receive around one thousandth of the haul of silver, which
was enough to lead a comfortable life, or to spend their loot over many
months in the bars and whorehouses of Port Royal.41 His most famous
expedition was once again sent against the Spaniards in Panama, three years
later. This time he marched his men across the isthmus and burned Panama
City, though the booty was smaller than Porto Bello had delivered. The
problem was that this happened just as Spain and England made peace, so he
was sent back to England, notionally in disgrace, but the king could not resist
the opportunity to grant him a knighthood.42 And before long he was back in
Jamaica, concentrating on the suppression rather than the promotion of
buccaneering.
 Morgan is a good example of the pirate who, on close examination, does
not look much like a pirate. It has been pointed out that he stayed married to
his wife for two decades; that he never led an expedition without obtaining a
letter of marque from the Jamaican governor; that he won the strong approval
of the English Crown despite the destruction of Panama; and he even became
lieutenant-governor of Jamaica; he is known to have joined only one
expedition, in 1661, whose members were accused of piracy.43 In addition,
he spent the years after 1671 ensuring that piracy was held in check within
the Caribbean, to honour peace with Spain and to assert the authority of the
English Crown in its Jamaican colony; he saved rather than squandered his
money and became a prominent planter on Jamaica.44 Attempts to argue that
he did not torture his captives, as Exquemeling’s colourful contemporary
account of his career claimed, are less convincing, though if he did so he
surely had in mind the methods of the Spanish Inquisition, which were
sometimes applied to Protestant sailors. When he read Exquemeling’s
biography, which had appeared in two competing English translations in
1684, Morgan tried to suppress it; he even won a libel case and £400 in
damages from two publishers. He was as angry at being described as an
indentured servant as he was at accusations of torture.45 On the other hand,
the wide diffusion of Exquemeling’s book, including Dutch, Spanish and
German editions, proves that Sir Henry Morgan had acquired a powerful
reputation; and it was inevitable that his days as a privateer would be given
all the emphasis, rather than his more respectable career spent clearing the
Caribbean of buccaneers.
The connection between licensed raids and Jamaica is made crystal clear
by the fact that the word ‘privateer’ only came into use in the English
language following the seizure of Jamaica. The specific circumstances of the
English presence in the Caribbean and the raids on the Spanish treasure fleets
generated this term, which described an old practice but now gave it legal
form – in 1671 the English Parliament passed An Act to Prevent the Delivery
up of Merchants Shipps, and for the Increase of Good and Serviceable
Shipping, which included clauses dealing with the distribution of ‘Prize
Money as in cases of Privateers’.46 However, privateering had already
passed its peak. The successful raids of the 1660s had left fewer prospects for
profit within the Caribbean. The rule that muggers must not over-mug if they
are still to find people to mug came into play. Even before Spain and England
made their peace in 1671 privateers started to abandon raids on the Spanish
towns, choosing instead voyages to empty coastlines where they could load
logwood without interference. They were turning themselves into boring but
honest merchants.47

Prize money spent indiscriminately and smuggling allegedly made Port Royal
into the ‘wickedest city on earth’. Its businessmen were involved in several
enterprises that were barely legal or were outright illegal. Contraband trade
with the Spanish islands has been mentioned already. In the 1670s and 1680s,
as privateering went into decline and overt piracy was suppressed, the best
opportunities were provided by this contraband trade. Probate documents
from Port Royal not long before the great earthquake of 1692 describe about
half of the deceased as merchants, even though at this stage Jamaica was
producing much less sugar for export than Barbados.48 It was easy to
smuggle as there were so many inlets and channels that were left
unsupervised by the Spaniards after they had turned Hispaniola into a vast
ranch from which cattle and meat products could be obtained for little
trouble. Then there was the resale of ships seized at sea, assuming they were
not simply kept by the privateers. Prize vessels, even those captured by
licensed privateers, were sold at Port Royal under the watchful eye of the
governor, and not sent back to England. They could be obtained quite
cheaply: when Myngs returned from his campaign in 1663, he had nine ships
for sale, at a total price of £797, an average price of £89 – in London one
might have to pay £2,000 per ship.49 Salvaging operations also occupied a
good deal of energy. The islanders were adept at identifying shipwrecks, and
managed to raise large amounts of Spanish gold and silver from the sea, to
the frustration of their Spanish neighbours. One ship was the focus of so
much attention that it was simply known as ‘the Wreck’; it had foundered off
Hispaniola several years before the English arrived in Jamaica, but had lain
undisturbed on the seabed until one privateer after another found something
worth taking away from the site.50
One unusual feature of Port Royal was the amount of silver coin that
circulated (coins from Peru have been found on the site of Port Royal).51
Other English colonies still relied heavily on barter, but even when the
English no longer raided Spanish galleons there was plenty of coin in
people’s pockets, because it was easy to sneak into the smaller harbours near
Porto Bello or either side of Cartagena, on the coast of Colombia, and do
semi-secret business there. Jamaica became an important source of silver for
both England and the growing English colonies in North America, for ships
plied back and forth between Jamaica and the American colonies – 363
arrived in five years (1686 onwards). These were relatively tiny ships
averaging about twenty-five tons, but the number of these little ships was
rather higher than the number of larger vessels that arrived within the same
period from the other side of the Atlantic, from England and west Africa.52
The ships brought everything and everyone: convicts who had been spared
execution by Judge Jeffreys and his colleagues after the rebellion of the duke
of Monmouth against King James II; African slaves who stayed on the island,
though most were re-exported; and goods aplenty: every alcoholic drink on
the market, from Madeira and Canary wines to naval stores, firearms, tiles,
bricks, pots and pans, as well as preserved meat, cheese and cereals, though
the islanders preferred fresh turtle meat they could obtain locally to salt
pork.53
Jamaica became an important source of slaves for the Spanish colonies in
central and South America. Spain did not have a direct source of supply for
slaves, because the trading stations along the coast of west Africa were held
by the Portuguese, later joined by the Dutch and the Danes. The Spanish
lands in the Americas therefore depended on intermediaries, who held
contracts (asientos) to supply slaves. The Genoese normally stood at the top
of this chain, but they did not have the ships and slave stations that would be
required, something that the English Royal African Company could supply.
Spanish slave-merchants were happy to come to Jamaica to buy slaves
brought across the Atlantic by the African Company, at a mark-up of 35 per
cent; it made the whole business easier for the Spaniards. So far, demand for
slaves on Jamaica itself was still quite limited, as the sugar industry had not
taken off.54
Some of the profits were ploughed back into the island, for, remarkably,
there was very little investment from England. The slow but sure
development of its sugar plantations was financed from the proceeds of
contraband trade and other local activities, licit or illicit. The autarky of the
Jamaican economy is striking. And yet all this was sufficient to make Port
Royal into the most important harbour in the English colonies, indeed the
most important harbour in the Caribbean, to the horror of its Spanish
neighbours, who could see that its wealth was not all honestly derived.
Contemporary accounts describe how splendidly the richer merchants lived,
so that even their slaves were dressed in fine livery, and there was never any
lack of meat and fruit. The standard of living was said to be higher than in
England, even for artisans. Plenty of luxuries were on sale – archaeological
finds at Port Royal include Chinese porcelain that must have arrived by way
of Macau, Manila and Mexico, as well as English Delftware with blue-and-
white decoration in imitation of Chinese ceramics.55 The better-off
Jamaicans were also well supplied with silver plate off which to dine – a
silver wine taster was excavated on the site of one of the town’s many
taverns, and imported English tableware made of brass and pewter turned up
in abundance.56 Against this must be set the dangers of living in a tropical
climate where malaria and other diseases were widespread; the first English
invaders had died like flies during the campaign that failed to capture Santo
Domingo. Contrary to Columbus’s claims, Jamaica was not a branch of
Paradise.
To some observers, indeed, it was a branch of Hell. The more colourful
accounts of Caribbean pirates enjoy describing it as ‘a rollicking town, where
rum-drinking was so common that it seemed to flow through the town’ – not
to mention whores such as Mary Carleton, with her frank statement that ‘they
have almost delug’d this place in liquor’. She was hanged in 1673 in London,
and her notoriety became attached, perhaps unfairly, to Port Royal, which
may not have been much worse than other port cities where strong drink and
‘hot Amazons’ abounded. In reality the large number of places of worship,
from a Quaker meeting hall to a synagogue, suggests that a fair number of
inhabitants tried, at least outwardly, to lead respectable lives in the sight of
God.57
Port Royal stood on a low-lying island at the tip of the narrow peninsula
that closed off Kingston Harbour. The harbour itself was excellent, though
strong winds and earth tremors were always a source of concern. Houses
were crowded together in this confined space: 200 in 1660, 400 in 1664 as
the town boomed, maybe 1,500 by 1688, containing a population that peaked
at about 6,500 people in 1692, including 2,500 slaves.58 Despite the accounts
of luxurious living, there were no truly grand buildings and the streets were
unpaved, simply covered with sand; but there were strict building regulations,
which required stone foundations and brick walls. As a result the town
resembled nothing so much as the English West Country towns from which
many of its inhabitants hailed.59 On its exposed site, Port Royal lay at the
full mercy of the elements; and just before noon on Wednesday, 7 June 1692,
these elements proved fiercer than anyone could have imagined: a violent
earthquake brought down the tower of the Anglican church, as buildings
crashed to the earth and people were swallowed up in the great cracks that
opened as the entire earth heaved apart. That was only the beginning: a vast
tidal wave crashed into Port Royal, sweeping away people, buildings and
objects. Even the town cemetery was torn apart, so that decayed corpses were
seen floating on the water alongside those who had just drowned. Stone and
brick had not been enough to protect the inhabitants of this fragile spit of
land, much of which remains submerged to this day. At least 90 per cent of
the buildings of Port Royal were wiped out. About 2,000 lives were lost on 7
June, and an equal number in the days that followed, as disease spread among
the survivors.60
This was not the end of Port Royal. Reconstruction of part of the town,
notably its forts (in view of the danger of Spanish or French attack), took
place; and trade resumed. But it seemed to make more sense to govern the
island from a place a little further inland, Kingston, for no one could guess
when another earthquake and tsunami would strike. In any case, Port Royal
had already passed its true peak. The days of privateering had come to an
official end in 1671, following peace with Spain; even its entrepôt trade
began to tail off, as English residents gradually switched their interest from
shipping to the exploitation of the island itself. In the eighteenth century
Jamaica would be reborn as a full-scale sugar island. Those who really paid
the price for this were the many thousands of African slaves carried across
the ocean in abominable conditions to work in the equally abominable
conditions of the sugar factories and plantations.
 44

A Long Way to China

Just as the inhabitants of Amsterdam, London or Copenhagen developed a

taste for the spices of the East and took pleasure in exotic objects brought
from China and the Indies, a passion for Chinese and Indian imports
developed in the colonies that the Europeans were establishing across the
Atlantic. It has been seen that English settlers along the east coast of North
America were trying to tap into Indian Ocean trade by way of Madagascar in
the late seventeenth century, whether by fair means or foul, although the
main outcome was the development of a slave trade carrying Malagasy
captives to the West Indies.1 During this period, as Boston, New York and
Philadelphia grew into compact but busy trading cities, with populations
barely in the tens of thousands, their citizens acquired large quantities of
Chinese porcelain, used day to day not just by the rich elite families such as
the Philipses of New York but by middle-class townspeople. Around one
third of estate inventories from New York at the end of the seventeenth
century mentioned Chinese porcelain, and the figure rises to three quarters in
the decade before the American Revolution. Chinese silks, already familiar to
the inhabitants of Spanish Mexico by way of Manila, reached the north
American colonies by way of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic instead. For,
by and large, the American settlers had to rely on imports of these goods
either from London, Amsterdam or the West Indies (in which case they had
in any case been transported from Europe). The requirement of the
Navigation Act of 1651 that the colonies should acquire their eastern goods
through London, to which the goods were brought by the East India
Company, kept the Company in business, but on the other side of the Atlantic
it increased the cost of goods, since the Americans were dealing through
middlemen who expected their share of the proceeds.2
Early in the eighteenth century goods advertised for sale on Rotten Row in
New York included: ‘Fine Heyson, Green, Congoe and Bohea Tea; Coffee
and Chocolate; single and double Refined Sugar; Powder and Muscovado
ditto; Sugar Candy … Cloves, Mace, Cinnamon, and Nutmeg; Ginger, Black
Pepper and Allspice …’ As its position at the start of this list suggests, there
was one product of east Asia that held sway in every household: tea, in a
variety of types and grades. It was already being drunk right across New
England in the 1720s. Among the customers were not just the citizens of New
York or Boston but the Mohawks and their native-American neighbours, who
were sold tea by the enterprising Philadelphia trader Samuel Wharton.3
The monopolistic East India Company was determined to control the
movement of these exotic products, in the face of constant challenges. These
challenges were not just from European rivals; the Chinese themselves,
despite imperial ukases forbidding precisely such activities, sent their junks
to Melaka and beyond. As they became familiar with Western taste, Chinese
potters adapted their own designs to suit the preferences of far-away peoples
they regarded as barbarians.4 In America, however, there still existed
confusion about what came from where. The term ‘East Indies’ was a catch-
all that described the entire Indian Ocean and the western Pacific; Americans
called China tea ‘India tea’, while the porcelain was known as ‘India china’,
and the colonists had little understanding of the message that Chinese potters
were trying to convey in the images of dragons, flowers or rural scenes; this
was a language that clients in and near China could follow, particularly if
they knew Chinese legends or had read the most popular Chinese classics.
Eventually the richer sort of American would opt for custom-made pottery
with family monograms or other decorations that had nothing to do with
Chinese culture – within a few years of the break from Britain these pieces
might be decorated with the coat of arms of the United States and the
inscription E PLURIBUS UNUM.5 Well-heeled Americans would buy
porcelain in standard sets of 270 pieces for a dinner service and 101 for a
‘long’ tea set, forty-nine for a ‘short’ one.6 As time went by coarser
porcelain, poorly decorated, chunky and cheap, arrived in massive quantities;
its function was as much to provide ballast when the ship’s cargo consisted of
light chests full of tea as to satisfy domestic demand, and these bulk wares
were often sold at a loss.7
In the growing literature on the opening of America’s trade with China
there is a tendency to begin the story with the expeditions sent out after
British recognition of the independence of the United States in 1783. That is
when direct contact was established between North America and Chinese
ports. However, American ‘Red Sea men’ were bringing exotic goods to
North America a century earlier – by ‘Red Sea’ was meant the Indian Ocean.
Five or six ships reached Pennsylvania from the ‘Red Sea’ in April 1698, and
others arrived at the same time off Connecticut. Among those sending out
ships was the wealthy Jacob Leisler, a smart operator with a murky record of
contraband trade and privateering, who had manoeuvred himself into the role
of lieutenant-governor of New York. He sent the modestly named Jacob to
Madagascar and India in 1689. Leisler was born in Germany, and he had
more experience of the Atlantic than he could have wished: in 1678 he and
his ship were seized by Barbary corsairs in one of the Atlantic archipelagoes,
where he had been loading wine, and he found himself paying a vast ransom
of over £2,000.8 The Jacob was still at sea when his tumultuous career ended
with his execution for treason against William and Mary in 1691, but the
sailors, who came back to America in 1693, handed out dozens of bribes in
gold and silver to ‘prevent them from being put to trouble’ by the new
governor of New York. The crew told the tale that they had thrown their
eastern goods overboard when they heard what had happened to Leisler, but
no one can have believed that then and no one does so now.
 It was standard practice to unload goods on a deserted American beach,
letting most of the sailors disappear with their share, and then to sail into
harbour where officials could be, and expected to be, bribed to ignore this
contraband trade. The bribe would be made up of silver coins already
collected in a whip-round of the sailors before they went their separate ways.
Many cargoes contained large consignments of tea, which was easily
available in the Dutch West Indies for those willing to circumvent the
customs regulations imposed by Great Britain – the Dutch had no qualms
about selling to American smugglers, and they sold plenty of Chinese
porcelain to the Americans, for that too was smuggled in via the West
Indies.9 More tea arrived by these unofficial routes than through the customs
houses of Boston, New York or Philadelphia. When smuggling was so
widespread it may seem odd that tea became the catalyst for revolt against
British taxation, and ultimately against British rule.
The China trade was an issue from the moment that rebellion against
British rule broke out in the Thirteen Colonies. The Boston Tea Party, during
which 342 chests of tea were dumped in the town’s harbour in December
1773, was the culmination of a long series of protests against British taxation
of tea, and the monopoly exercised by British firms in the tea trade. In the
weeks before the Tea Party, British ships loaded with 2,000 chests of tea, or
approximately 90,000 pounds of tea, had arrived in North America, where
consumption of honestly acquired tea amounted to about 200,000 pounds of
tea a year by 1770. The complex history of these events goes right back to the
restrictive Navigation Act of 1651 and to the adjustments to the taxation of
tea made by the British Parliament in the years before the Tea Party. This
legislation culminated in the Tea Act a few months before the Tea Party,
which assigned a monopoly on tea exports to America to the East India
Company at a time when the EIC was in increasing financial difficulty, and
facing increasing competition on the routes to the East; it urgently needed
help from the British government. American opposition to the new tea taxes
took several forms: customs officials were beaten up; rumours spread that
English tea had been poisoned with smallpox germs; and a tea temperance
movement recommended herbal teas made out of all-American raspberry
leaves. In the event, herbal teas made only a slight dent in the tea market.
Caffeine was queen.10
The British government’s new tax regime reduced the price of tea in the
American colonies. But if prices fell below a certain point contraband tea
traders would suffer, since legally imported tea would be available more
cheaply than the tea they picked up in Holland or the Dutch West Indies.
Unhelpfully, the EIC produced a list of partners in the North American ports
that left out some tea brokers, for whom exclusion spelled ruin. Boston and
the other coastal ports had become caught up in manoeuvres whose main aim
was not to squeeze the American colonies, but to save the East India
Company. In that way, what was happening in the Indian Ocean and along
the routes to Macau and Canton was having an effect on what was happening
right over the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.11
Tea was still on the menu once peace with Britain was signed: the
Americans immediately seized the opportunity to explore the sea routes to
China. The ambitions of the new nation were clearly expressed by Ezra
Stiles, President of Yale College, in 1783 in an early example of the
celebration of the Stars and Stripes (though at that time the stars were
arranged like the flag of the European Union): ‘Navigation will carry the
American flag around the globe itself; and display the thirteen stripes and
new constellation at Bengal and Canton, on the Indus and Ganges, on the
Whang-ho and the Yang-tse-kiang.’12 So determined were the Americans to
reach China directly that the first of their ships to be sent to China, the
Empress of China, left New York in February 1784 at the same time as
another vessel slipped out of the city bound for London and carrying ‘the
definitive articles of peace’ between the United States and Great Britain. Yet
the prospects were not quite as bright as the optimistic President of Yale
averred. Great Britain continued to block trade between the United States and
its own valuable possessions in the Caribbean, which were a prime source of
contraband goods from the Far East. It was far from clear that wider
European markets would be open to the Americans, and that might well
include European colonies in Africa, Asia and South America as well. The
answer was to go global, taking advantage of the simple fact that the
Americans were now free from the authority of the East India Company.13
Sending a ship to China was a dangerous and expensive business. The
Empress of China was built in Boston, and was about a hundred feet in
length, displacing 360 tons. The bottom of its hull was coated with copper, to
keep at bay the barnacles and sea slugs that would eat into the wood during a
long voyage. But this was only one of the ships that the investors, led by
Robert Morris (English-born) and Daniel Parker, intended to send to China;
the value of the goods and money on board was said to be £150,000. They
were to sail on the riskiest route of all, around Cape Horn and into the Pacific
Ocean, whereupon two ships would travel along the coast of South and North
America until they reached the islands and ice floes on which seals and sea
otters were known to congregate. The aim was to kill and skin as many
animals as possible, and take their fur to Canton, where the third ship should
already have arrived.
Everything indicated that Chinese traders would leap at the opportunity to
buy all this fur: Morris and Parker were relying on information from an
American named Ledyard who had taken part in one of Captain Cook’s
voyages, and had seen what happened when the English ships arrived in
Canton carrying the pelts that the Chinese craved. It might be possible to take
advantage of the doubts the English had about developing a fur trade in the
far north of the Pacific. Captain Cook recorded his thoughts in the journal of
his third and final Pacific voyage, in 1778, as he made his way along the
coast of Alaska: ‘There is no doubt but a very beneficial fur trade might be
carried on with the Inhabitants of this vast coast, but unless a northern
passage is found it seems rather too remote for Great Britain to receive any
emolument from it.’14 The English sailors discovered that there was intense
demand for the sea otter furs, which contain an enormous number of hairs per
square inch, making them the warmest furs anyone in China had ever found;
besides, the type of fur one wore was an indication of status, sea otter fur
being a sign of wealth and distinction. Traditionally, the Chinese relied on
Russian fur-traders to supply pelts from the northern Pacific – the Russians
could even be found on Vancouver Island, and they ventured right up to the
Kamchatka Peninsula and to the Aleutian Islands strung out to the west of
Alaska.15 If the Americans could break into this traffic, they would have
something valuable to sell to the Chinese, since it was not obvious what else
the Chinese might be willing to buy from the United States.
Morris and Parker dreamed of sending another three ships to China by way
of the Cape of Good Hope, but they could not arouse much interest in the
idea, and the plan to send ships to seal country in the northern Pacific began
to pall. The early optimism of the first investors was soon dissipated. The
funds available were only sufficient for one ship after all, the Empress of
China, and the idea of sending it through the Pacific had to be abandoned; the
safe route around the bottom of Africa, created by the Portuguese, was
chosen instead. The ship was loaded with thirty tons of ginseng, a product of
the Appalachian mountains known to be in high demand in Chinese
medicine; $20,000 in Spanish coin; also furs and other goods.16 Even though
the original plans had to be scaled back, the departure of the Empress of
China was celebrated as the great event that it was, with a thirteen-gun salute
representing the thirteen states of the Union.17
One New York newspaper printed a poem by a prolific poet, Philip
Freneau, that made plain the political as well as the commercial significance
of the voyage, invoking the Roman goddess of war at the very start:

With clearance from Bellona won

She spreads her wings to meet the Sun,
Those golden regions to explore
Where George forbade to sail before …
To that old track no more confin’d,
By Britain’s jealous court assign’d,
She round the stormy Cape shall sail
And eastward, catch the odorous gale.
To countries plac’d in burning climes
And islands of remotest times
She now her eager course explores,
And soon shall greet Chinesian shores.
From thence their fragrant TEAS to bring
Without the leave of Britain’s king;
 And PORCELAIN WARE, enchas’d in gold,
The product of that finer mould …18

Freneau had served at sea during the Revolutionary War. He and other
Americans keenly awaited the outcome of a voyage during which the ability
of the United States to break into new markets was being tested – an
outcome, in other words, of significance for the whole of the new country,
and not just for Morris, Parker and the other investors.

II

The voyage passed through mainly calm seas of the sort that irritated diarists
and letter-writers looking for drama on the high seas. The ship’s purser
complained that ‘it has been one dreary waste of sky & water, without a
pleasing sight to cheer us’. One went to sea for excitement, and all that
happened was that the captain fell against a railing and bruised his head and
arm.19 When the Empress of China reached the Sunda Strait leading into the
South China Sea, the Americans found a French ship at anchor whose crew
were delighted to hear stories about the American Revolution, which France
had supported; so this ship, the Triton, agreed to accompany the Empress to
Macau and Canton, showing the way and helping to fend off any attacks. In
Macau the Portuguese welcomed the new arrivals, even though they had
never seen their flag before. The Americans had little to fear: as they made
their way up the tangled waterways of the Pearl River towards Canton in
August 1784 they were greeted not just by the French, the Dutch and the
Danes but by the British. The American supercargo, Samuel Shaw, was
impressed by the polite conduct of the British, which is all the more
impressive as he had served with distinction in the Revolutionary army:

The behaviour of the gentlemen on board was perfectly polite and

agreeable. On board the English it was impossible to avoid speaking
of the late war. They allowed it to have been a great mistake on the
part of their nation, – were happy it was over, – glad to see us in this
part of the world, – hoped all prejudices would be laid aside, – and
added, that, let England and America be united, they might bid
defiance to all the world.20
 Meanwhile the French let the Americans use their storehouse, or ‘factory’,
until an American warehouse was made ready. Relations between the
representatives of the European nations were very harmonious; they knew
that their safety depended on mutual support, and that negotiations with a
sometimes unpredictable Chinese government could be delicate. So, when a
Chinese subject was accidentally killed by a ceremonial cannon shot from the
Lady Hughes, a British ship that plied between India and Canton, its
supercargo, named Smith, was arrested, and all the foreign supercargoes
lodged a protest – but the Americans alone stood by the British even though
the Chinese briefly suspended trade with them at the height of the row.21 The
Chinese were perplexed that these new arrivals came from a state of which
they had not heard, and needed to be shown a map before they were
convinced it existed; everything seemed to suggest that they were just more
Englishmen, though eventually the Chinese called them ‘New People’ and
later still ‘Flowery-Flag Devils’, since they thought the stars on the American
flag were flowers. The Americans had thought ahead, and the captain of the
Empress was supplied with a letter that was indeed flowery, addressed to
whatever ‘Emperors, Kings, Republicks, Princes, Dukes, Earls’, and so on ad
infinitum, he might meet; it was made plain that he was a citizen of the
United States of America and Congress, no less, requested that he should be
treated ‘in a becoming manner’ and be allowed to trade freely.22
In accordance with closely prescribed Chinese policy, the Empress of
China had anchored at Whampoa Island, a dozen miles from Canton, rather
than in the teeming city itself. The supercargo Smith described the conditions
the foreign merchants had to endure:

The factories at Canton, occupying less than a quarter of a mile in

front, are situated on the bank of the river. The quay is enclosed by a
rail-fence, which has stairs and a gate opening from the water to each
factory, where all merchandise is received and sent away. The limits
of the Europeans are extremely confined; there being, besides the
quay, only a few streets in the suburbs, occupied by the trading
people, which they are allowed to frequent.23

As in the merchant fonduks of the medieval world, the ground floor was
given over to the goods themselves; the first floor contained parlours and
offices where deals were struck; and above that was the hostel where the
merchants lived.24 They were not supposed to bring in women, but
occasionally smuggled wives or mistresses in nonetheless. Sometimes
Chinese merchants did invite their European counterparts to dinner, but it
was impossible to squeeze any useful information out of them; and the
tedium of life along the hot and humid riverbank, with a working day of up to
fifteen hours, was eased by trips up and down the river to nearby pleasure
gardens, and even, in the early nineteenth century, by yacht races along the
river, despite official attempts to forbid this.
By the end of the eighteenth century the Europeans decided to advertise
their existence more visibly. Individual merchants claimed that they were
consuls who represented their home power, and the consuls made sure to run
up their flag, so that the factory area became a blaze of colour, beginning
with the Austrian consul (who was in fact a Scot) in 1779. The Prussians,
Danes, Genoese and Swedes followed suit, and paintings of the European
factories were livened up by many of these countries’ colours. The trading
community also contained people of non-European origin: Armenians,
Parsees, Bombay Muslims, although in the early nineteenth century the
largest groups were the British and the Americans – after 1812 and the end of
a brief spat with the British Navy, the Americans had taken advantage of their
neutrality during the Napoleonic Wars to transport tea back to Europe
without the interference that every European nation faced as alliances were
forged and broken with dazzling speed.25
Despite these pretensions, what really mattered was a good relationship
with the Hong merchants, members of the Co-hong guild which had been set
up in the mid-eighteenth century (on much earlier foundations) to manage
trade with the foreigners. By 1831 a complex set of rules, often honoured in
the breach, had been imposed in the name of the emperor. Foreign merchants
were not supposed to reside permanently in Canton; they were not allowed to
bring women into the factories; they were not to take trips in sedan chairs;
they could only communicate with the government through the Hong
merchants.26 A ‘Canton System’ came into being, supervised by a powerful
agent of the emperor, known as the Hoppo, whose office went back to 1645.
One of the most memorable moments in a voyage up the Pearl River was the
elaborate measuring ceremony, when the Hoppo would come on board and
check the size of the incoming vessel with long silk tapes. But this was not
just a matter of recording length and breadth. The Hoppos were flattered with
gifts, and gave gifts in return, consisting of a couple of cows, a store of wheat
and some strong drink; these practical gifts were a sign that the emperor
cared about the welfare of the foreign barbarians who came to his lands,
although the Europeans were known to complain among themselves that the
animals were too old or scrawny to be edible. The Europeans would lay on
music, make lengthy speeches and dispense plenty of wine; gun salutes
would be fired time and again. Doing this again and again became tedious, so
the Hoppos would save up ships and try to measure six or seven in one day.27
Relations with the Hong merchants were often cordial. Both sides knew
that their relationship could be very lucrative. One, Howqua (1769–1843), is
said to have become the richest man on earth, worth $26,000,000 by 1824 –
he had no trouble in generously abandoning a claim for $72,000 against a
Philadelphia opium-trader to whom he had taken a liking. One wonders how
credible the account of their conversation is: ‘You and I are Number One, olo
flen [old friend], you belong honest man, only got no chance.’ But pidgin
English was a standard way for the foreigners and the Chinese to
communicate. Howqua fascinated the Americans and was commemorated in
countless paintings sent back to America which show an ascetic-looking,
painfully thin man wearing silken robes. His investment policy was wise:
protecting himself against the ups and downs of the international tea trade, he
became a property magnate as well as a tea-trader, owning some of the land
on which the foreign factories stood; and he went straight to the tea-growers
or even grew the tea himself, cutting out costly middlemen. He entered into
close partnerships with his friends from Boston and invested in the new
American railway network; he relied on American businessmen to write
whatever letters he needed to send abroad. It is not an exaggeration to speak
of his American friends: he sent off one American trader, Warren Delano (an
ancestor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt), who had spent ten years trading
through Canton, with a spectacular fifteen-course dinner that included bird’s
nest soup, shark’s fin, sturgeon’s lip and other Chinese delicacies. Some
Americans made a fortune in China: John Cushing went back to the United
States in 1831 $700,000 richer, though no one could quite compete with
that.28
The Americans adapted quickly to all this, selling and buying in the
Chinese markets through the Hong merchants. When the Empress of China
set out on her return voyage she was loaded with tea, silk, porcelain and the
yellow cotton cloth known as nankeen, named after Nanjing in northern
China, which was very popular in North America. She arrived back in New
York in May 1785, bringing her investors a profit of at least 25 per cent,
which was less than they had hoped but still a good augury for future trade in
China. The next year five ships, including the doughty Empress, set out for
China, and this time Philadelphia and Salem sent ships; by 1790 Canton had
been visited by twenty-eight American ships, although they were often only a
third of the size of the ships the East India Companies sent out from Europe.
In the early nineteenth century the Americans were sending more (but
smaller) ships to Canton than the British. Their fast, light vessels could cope
more easily with the risks in sailing through poorly charted seas. The turn-
around for American ships was quicker, though they had further to go –
which raised the question once again of whether they were following the best
route to China, especially if the Chinese wanted them to bring furs from the
Pacific or, as will be seen, the far south of the Atlantic.29

III

The search for furs in the north-eastern Pacific opened up new worlds to the
citizens of the United States who explored the shores of what would become
Oregon, British Columbia and Alaska; they also provided the Americans with
a launching pad for expeditions to Hawai’i, Fiji and other Polynesian islands,
where they collected sandalwood, a dyestuff that was in demand in China.
The challenge was to find goods that the Chinese were interested in buying,
so that one did not have to pay in silver, for silver was in short supply in the
early United States, with the effect that the volume of transactions fell and a
severe economic depression took hold of the new country, with a heavy
impact on merchant shipping.30 Other sources of credit were therefore
essential, and the enormous attraction of fur trapping was that the seals did
not need to be bought, although the less said about the revolting methods
used to kill them the better. They could be found elsewhere than the Pacific,
but the Chinese market was what attracted the Americans there, both to the
far north and to the island of Más Afuera off Chile, which was a major
sealing station, ‘the mecca of the fur seal’. This did not prevent them from
looking for seals elsewhere: Captain Cook already knew that the Falkland
Islands, not long discovered, were a good source of skins. Captain Cook’s
journals were printed in London in 1785 and in a shortened version in
Philadelphia eight years later. A year before the American publisher went
into print, American ships had already begun to exploit Falkland furs.31
There were two major obstacles to operation in the eastern Pacific
(generally called, from the American perspective, the ‘Pacific north-west’).
One was the presence of ships flying the flag of other powers: Russians along
the coast all the way down to what would become known as Vancouver
Island; Spaniards all the way up the coast of California, also very interested
in Vancouver Island; and the British, who had come to know these waters
after the third voyage of Captain Cook, and once again saw attractive
possibilities on the very same island, while reports reaching the United States
also made the island sound the ideal base for fur-trapping. The other obstacle
was the route around Cape Horn. The Empress of China had avoided this
route in the end. Its terrors and perils were nowhere better described than in
Richard Henry Dana Jr’s best-selling account of Two Years before the Mast,
recounting a journey out of New York in 1840:

Wednesday, November 5th … Just before eight o’clock.

Then about sundown (in that latitude) the cry of ‘All hands ahoy!’
was sounded down the fore scuttle and the after hatchway, and,
hurrying upon deck, we found a large black cloud rolling on toward
us from the southwest, and darkening the whole heavens. ‘Here
comes Cape Horn!’ said the chief mate; and we had hardly time to
haul down and clew up before it was upon us. In a few minutes a
heavier sea was raised than I had ever seen, and as it was directly
ahead, the little brig, which was no better than a bathing-machine,
plunged into it, and all the forward part of her was underwater; the sea
pouring in through the bow-ports and hawse-holes and over the
knight-heads, threatening to wash everything overboard. In the lee
scuppers it was up to a man’s waist … The brig was laboring and
straining against the head sea, and the gale was growing worse and
worse. At the same time sleet and hail were driving with all fury
against us … At daybreak (about three, A.M.) the deck was covered
with snow.32

And this was summertime in the southern hemisphere.

The ship on which Dana sailed had many American precursors. In 1787 the
Lady Washington and the Columbia had set out from Boston, in the hope of
loading furs along the Pacific coasts of North America. News of the
impending voyage set off enormous enthusiasm. Around 300 pewter medals
were struck in the newly founded Massachusetts mint to commemorate the
two ships, along with silver and copper versions intended for grandees such
as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The pewter medals were
mainly intended to be gifts to the native inhabitants of the regions the ships
were expected to visit, though what they would make of them is a mystery.
Captain Cook had also received the accolade of having medals struck in his
honour by the Royal Society of London. But that happened after, not before,
the voyage.33
This voyage contained plenty of high drama, from the moment the ships
reached Praia in the Cape Verde Islands and the surgeon of the Columbia, Dr
Roberts, decided he had had enough of the tough rule of Captain Kendrick.
He left the ship and could not even be persuaded to go back on board when
Kendrick found him in the street and threatened him with his sword. Roberts
insisted that without a promise from Kendrick not to have him flogged for
deserting the ship he would stay in Praia. Kendrick refused to make this
promise, oddly acting as if he did not really need the surgeon on his ship, and
let him go. This and other quarrels kept the ships in the Cape Verde Islands
too long: if they did not leave soon they would face the seasonal hurricanes
that plague the waters off Cape Horn – that, at any rate, was the prediction of
Captain Gray, who commanded the smaller ship, the Lady Washington. Once
they were under way, an officer named Haswell struck a sailor who had
disobeyed an order to come on deck. Kendrick took the side of the sailor and
threatened Haswell with being shot if he ever again set foot on the quarter-
deck (reserved for officers); he would have to sleep in the common
quarters.34 These events, recorded by Haswell himself, confirm that
Kendrick was a tough captain, though perhaps no tougher than many of his
contemporaries, who took the view that keeping order on board demanded
ruthless decisions, all the more so when a ship was following an unfamiliar
route that exposed it to natural dangers as well as danger from rivals.
The ships rounded Cape Horn by heading hundreds of miles to the south of
the cape, experiencing the full diet of gales and sleet before entering what
Haswell called ‘a perfect hericain’. The two ships were driven apart, and
Gray’s opinion that time had been wasted in Praia seemed to have been
confirmed.35 The ships would travel separately for many hundreds of miles
before they arrived at Nootka Bay on Vancouver Island; and in the meantime
they faced constant harassment from Spanish ships along the coasts of Chile,
Peru and Mexico. In August 1788 the Lady Washington reached the shores of
North America and started trading with the native Americans, only to find, as
so often happened, that a friendly reception turned sour: at first the Indians
brought cooked crabs, dried fish and berries, and were happy with the small
items of truck, buttons and bells, that the Americans offered in payment.
Captain Gray was also happy, as fresh food was the best cure for the scurvy
that raged on board. But when an Indian stole a cutlass that Captain Gray’s
servant, an African who had boarded at Praia, had left stuck in the sand, the
mood changed. The servant, Marcus Lopius, tried to recover the cutlass and
was seized; the Indians unleashed their arrows against the American intruders
and skewered Lopius with their knives and spears. Even when the Americans
scrambled back on their ship, their troubles were not at an end, because the
Lady Washington was stranded on a sandbank and had to await the tide
before it could float out to sea.36 But the ship and its crew survived, and
managed to meet up at long last with the Columbia off Vancouver Island.
All this was happening just as the Spaniards pressed further and further
north along the same coast, reaching Kodiak Island in late June 1788, while
another Spanish ship coasted along the Aleutian Islands in the far north of the
Pacific, and met the sole Russian inhabitant of Unalaska Island, Potap
Zaikov, who relied on local Aleut hunters to obtain the skins he traded.
Isolated he may have been, but somehow he knew, or thought he knew, a
great deal about his country’s plans: four Russian warships were expected to
arrive by way of the Cape of Good Hope. The Russians too were determined
to stake their claim to rule this coastline – literally, for the ship Trekh
Sviatitelei was carrying stakes and copper plates that could be hammered into
place as a formal sign that Imperial Russia laid claim to these lands.
Moreover, the Russians knew that British ships lay not far off, and they were
determined to stop them from establishing a settlement of their own.37
The flashpoint was Nootka Sound, which everyone identified as good seal-
hunting country; and when the Americans arrived they found a British
settlement under construction, with a partly imported labour force – there
were Chinese carpenters at work. The Americans also witnessed the arrival of
irate Spaniards, who claimed Nootka Sound for themselves, and managed to
impound four British ships, as well as arresting all the Chinese workers.
These events could easily have set off a war between Great Britain and Spain,
but everyone’s attention was turning elsewhere at the moment, as the political
crisis in France turned into revolution. The Spanish commander was less
worried about the Americans than about the British. It seemed extremely
unlikely that the Americans would try to create their own settlement on the
west coast of this continent; the United States was patently an east-coast
entity. When the Boston newspapers reported the friendly encounter between
the Spanish and the American commanders at Nootka, they rejoiced in the
‘protection and respect of the European Lords of the Soil’ for their flag and
took wicked delight in the fact that the flag ‘of another nation hath been
forbidden to be unfurled on the coast’.38 In the event, the British preferred to
make their peace with Spain, signing the Nootka Convention in October
1790, which was a victory for diplomacy (and for Spain) over war – even so,
in the long run, this area would fall under British rule, when the boundary
between Canada and the USA was fixed in 1846.39
The Americans seized the opportunity to find the sea otter skins they knew
the Chinese craved. Captain Gray sold his furs in Canton and decided to
continue round the world, returning to the United States via the Cape of Good
Hope, which made him the first American captain to circumnavigate the
globe, after a journey of three years. Kendrick, on the other hand, was killed
in a tragic accident while still in the Pacific: a gun salute went wrong and the
shot pierced his cabin and blew him to bits.40 Meanwhile interest in the
Nootka Sound continued to grow, but in more peaceful ways. A question that
had been raised many times in the past was whether a channel could be found
around the top of North America. Looking for the North-West Passage from
the Pacific side made sense after so many failures on the Atlantic side, and
was not a new idea – it has been seen that Francis Drake may have been
looking for such a route when he sailed up to California on his round-the-
world voyage. This was also a reason why British and other ships poked
around the waters off Alaska and western Canada. Alejandro Malaspina, an
Italian in Spanish pay, led two large ships into these waters in 1791. His
expedition set out just as a Spanish publisher issued a specious account of a
journey from the Pacific to the Atlantic in 1588 by a certain Maldonado. So
Malaspina was sent on a wild-goose chase; even so, he mapped unknown
stretches of coast, studied the life of the local Indians, and drew up elaborate
and intelligent proposals for the creation of an integrated trade network in the
Pacific, involving Russia and China as well as Mexico and the Philippines;
but no one at court expressed much interest. After all, he had not found the
gateway to the Pacific, and was seen in Madrid as a failure.41
 The merchants of this new nation were bringing furs from the south
Atlantic as well as from the Pacific north-west. In 1792 Captain Daniel
Greene led the Nancy to China by way of the Falklands. When he came back
to the Falklands five years later, he loaded around 50,000 skins, and then
added some more at Más Afuera in the south-eastern Pacific. The Falklands
were at that time a largely unclaimed space. A French settlement on East
Falkland, founded in 1764, had been matched a year or two later by a British
settlement on West Falkland; and then the French agreed to hand over the
islands to Spain, which sent two priests ‘who, beholding their settlement,
were overwhelmed with grief’. As a result of these claims, the two islands
were known to sailors as the ‘English Maloon’ and the ‘Spanish Maloon’, a
corruption of their Spanish name, Las Malvinas.42 But the people who did
most to exploit the islands at this stage were the Americans, with their raids
on the seal population. Meanwhile, first the British and then the Spaniards
withdrew from the Falklands early in the nineteenth century, and, although
they were eventually reoccupied by Great Britain, the question of their
ownership has festered ever since. Beyond the south Atlantic, American ships
regularly went in search of seals in the southern Indian Ocean, on islands
such as St Paul. Places uninhabited by humans were ideal, as the seals had as
yet no reason to fear humans and lay passively on the rocks while the hunters
did their bloody work. Later, seals did sometimes grow wise to what was
happening, but escaping on land was almost impossible – these are animals
made for the sea.43
Furs from as far away as Alaska thus fuelled the maritime links between
the early United States and China. The fur trade of the United States was
truly global, stretching in both directions towards China, around both
southern capes. The profits from this trade, and from the China trade more
generally, fuelled the recovery of the American economy and the prosperity
of great business houses such as that of the German immigrant John Jacob
Astor. The first generation of American millionaires came into being, an
aristocracy of wealth rather than blood whose prosperity had been created by
the China trade and all the other business that was intertwined with it: trade in
furs, trade in sandalwood and – as will be seen – trade in opium.44
 45

Fur and Fire

One of the difficulties in dividing up the maritime history of the world

between the three great oceans, and several smaller seas, is that the oceans
are themselves composite seas. The Atlantic embraces the North Sea and the
Caribbean, icy waters off Greenland and warm waters off Brazil; the Pacific
is even more complex, which is hardly surprising since it covers about one
third of the globe: the South China Sea, and at times the Yellow Sea and the
Japan Sea, acted as corridors linking east Asia to the Indian Ocean, rather
than looking eastwards into the open ocean; the island worlds of Polynesia,
Melanesia and Micronesia were connected across great distances, and yet
they had few or no links with the great continents surrounding the ocean; and
in the far north another partly island world existed, inhabited by Ainus (the
original inhabitants of northern Japan), Aleuts and other peoples, many of
whom had adopted a style of life broadly similar to that of the Inuit of
northern Canada and Greenland – a life heavily dependent on the resources of
the sea, which provided them with food (fish), oil for lighting their homes
(seal blubber), clothing (cormorant skins) and even warm overcoats
(stretched seal intestines).1 In the Kuril Islands and the Aleutians, a certain
amount of trade was carried on by boat. Along the coast of Alaska, the art of
canoeing was taken to a very high level, and the inhabitants could handle
choppy seas, strong winds and ice floes with assurance. Yet this maritime
world was isolated from the rest of the Pacific. The Japanese and the Koreans
did not, as far as is known, explore these waters. Only with the arrival of the
Europeans in the seventeenth century did this area begin to arouse interest.
 There were several reasons why this remote corner began to attract
attention. The most important was the availability of furs, in order to pay for
the tea of China. But the first group of Europeans to make their presence felt
in the far north of the Pacific had not arrived by sea, even though they began
to float their ships on the ocean. Russian expansion eastwards, in massive
leaps and bounds across Siberia, brought to the shores of the Pacific fur
traders who originated as far west as Suzdal, the ancient mother city of the
principality of Muscovy. Curiosity about how these newly conquered lands
were linked to the oceans grew along with increasing knowledge of the
shoreline of eastern Siberia. The Russian rulers, above all Peter the Great,
were keen to know whether the much-vaunted sea route around the top of
Siberia into the Pacific Ocean was viable. The North-East Passage, which the
English had tried to sell to Ivan the Terrible, was still a lure, all the more so
as the Russians came close to the American landmass. Was there a
passageway between Siberia and North America? If so, was it navigable? The
benefits the Russian Empire might derive from a regular sea traffic towards
China and Japan were incalculable.
 How and when the coasts of Siberia were explored remains a mystery. A
Cossack named Semen Dezhnev claimed to have travelled by sea along the
Pacific shores of Siberia, as far back as 1648.2 A patriotic Soviet historian
wrote of the ‘exceptional bravery and fearlessness’ he showed, throwing
aside any doubts about veracity, and sending him through the Bering Strait
into the Arctic Ocean.3 He certainly went somewhere, though probably not
so far; and he wrote to the tsar from Yakutsk in 1662 begging to be
recompensed for his efforts. He would have used a flat-bottomed boat at most
seventy feet in length, with sails made of reindeer skin, held together by
ropes, straps and pegs, since the native peoples of eastern Siberia did not
have iron. Even the anchor was made of wood. In the eighteenth century this
was the standard type of boat used by the Russians in the northern Pacific.
These boats were manned by up to forty Russians and locals, and were
known as the shitik, or ‘sewn boat’, from the verb shit’, ‘to sew’.4 Whether
they were quite as ‘rickety’ as historians suppose is not clear: sewn boats had
plied the Indian Ocean since time immemorial and in certain types of heavy
sea their pliability was exactly what made them strong. Dezhnev attempted to
gain the ear of the tsar’s advisers, and may have influenced Vladimir Atlasov,
another Arctic explorer, who had lived in Yakutsk and was in Moscow with
Dezhnev; Atlasov is said to have discovered the Kamchatka Peninsula that
reaches southwards, pointing towards Japan; and Kamchatka became a
source of furs and other tribute by 1697, when Atlasov mapped it out and
wrote a detailed description of its inhabitants. He also won the admiration of
Peter the Great for his description of Japan, though it had to be based on
hearsay.5 Even if some of the accounts of these early voyages are not
trustworthy, they do reveal a growing curiosity about the routes to the
Pacific.
The galloping expansion of Russia’s empire also brought Russian officials
and colonists to the northern borders of the Qing Empire, which had taken
control of China following the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644. At first
the advantages for Russia seemed to lie in tribute payments imposed on the
native peoples of Siberia, although there were rumours of silver mines
somewhere along the river routes beyond Yakutsk.6 But the advantages of
trade with China were also clear: if the Cossacks (the main colonists) could
break into the Chinese market, they would make great profits for themselves
as well as for the tsar. As far back as the 1650s clashes were occurring along
the Amur River, which ever since then has been a source of tension between
Russia and China; native peoples appealed to the Chinese for help, and
Chinese armies advanced into the field. The Russians found it difficult to
hold their own.7

II

In 1714 an influential adviser of Peter the Great, Fedor Stepanovich Saltykov,

who was an expert on maritime affairs and was then living in London, wrote
a series of Propozitsii (‘Propositions’), which he sent to the tsar in St
Petersburg. Saltykov had travelled in Siberia with his father, and he was clear
in his mind that an opportunity now existed to create a Russian empire in the
Far East. He imagined that it would be possible to build a fleet of ships near
the mouth of the Ob and Yenisei Rivers, which debouch into the Arctic Sea
in central Siberia, and then to send the ships around Siberia looking for
islands that could be brought under Russian sovereignty. Russia too was
succumbing to the lure of eastern spices and gold:

If an open passage can be found to the coasts of China and Japan,

your empire will receive great wealth and profit for the following
reason. Ships are sent to eastern India from all realms such as England
and Holland and others, and must cross the Equator twice, when they
go out and when they return. Because of the great heat in those places
many of their people die and there are severe food shortages if they
 are on their voyage for a prolonged period of time. Thus upon the
discovery of a [northern] sea route such as this, they will all wish to
use it … For trading purposes your empire is closer than any other
realm.

Foreign shipping using this route should be monitored, and of course taxed,
as it passed Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean; Saltykov observed how
much income this type of tax produced at both the Danish Sound and
Gibraltar. Silver was to be had both in Japan and in Siberia, where Saltykov
had actually seen abandoned silver mines. Trade ‘by water’ would be
possible with China and the East Indies, bringing gold, porcelain, silk and
many other luxury products to Russia, which would become as wealthy as
Holland or England. The tsar certainly gave thought to these proposals,
saying in 1711 that:

as soon as he has peace and leisure to apply his mind to it, he will
search out whether it is possible for ships to pass by way of Novaya
Zemlya into the Tartarian Sea; or to find out some port eastward of
the River Ob, where he may build ships and send them, if practicable,
to the coast of China & Japan.8

The illusion persisted that Arctic waters were safer and easier to suffer than
the tropical waters through which European ships passed en route to the
Indies.9
Peter the Great did find the peace and leisure to apply his mind to all this,
but only at the very end of his life. One of his very last acts before he died in
1725 was to order Vitus Bering, a Danish captain in his service, to build
boats in Kamchatka and ‘to sail on these boats along the shore which runs to
the north and which (since its limits are unknown) seems to be a part of the
American coast’. The aim was ‘to determine where it joins with America’,
and if possible to visit a European settlement along the American coast, in the
hope of learning more about the geography of the region and drawing an
accurate chart. Typically, Tsar Peter also ordered the Senate ‘to find among
the apprentices or assistant master-builders one who could build there a deck
ship along the lines of the big ships here’; and, should there be no navigators
in Russia with experience of the Pacific, two men should be brought from
Holland ‘who know the sea in the north and as far as Japan’. As it happened,
Bering had experience of the East Indies, having served in the VOC, and was
strongly recommended by the Senate and by two admirals.10 This, after all,
was the remarkable tsar who had reputedly laboured in (and had certainly
observed) the Dutch shipyards in the hope that he could make Russia too into
a great naval power.
That said, the focus of Peter’s maritime ambitions remained far from the
Pacific. The Black Sea was one area where he hoped to extend Russian naval
power, but his major interest lay in the Baltic, which became his home when
he established his new capital at St Petersburg. More than anything, he was
determined to push back Swedish control of large tracts of the Baltic, and the
Great Northern War at the start of the eighteenth century eventually – after
some checks – brought Russia dominion over the Baltic.11 Bering had served
in the Great Northern War, but being sent to Siberia, even as captain of a
minuscule fleet, was not the reward he sought. Still, he obeyed orders even
after the tsar died and even though the first, and in some respects most
arduous, part of his journey was the interminable trek across Siberia to the
newly established Russian fort and trading station at Okhotsk. The trading
station had access to the Sea of Okhotsk that lies west of the Kamchatka
Peninsula, and is bounded by the Kuril Islands, strung out north-eastwards
from the northern tip of the Japanese island of Hokkaido.12 It also had
enough facilities to build a shitik, of the type mentioned earlier, and a second
boat was built in Kamchatka. Considering that the number of Russians in the
trading stations was still very small, just a few hundred, the ability to put
ships together, even if they would hardly have won praise from a Dutch or
English captain, was impressive. Bering did manage to sail some way into the
strait that bears his name, but he was still unsure whether he had identified a
passageway into the Arctic Ocean, or simply a large inlet set into a
continuing coastline that linked Asia to America. Fog made progress difficult
and he turned back, against the advice of his Russian deputy, Chirikov, who
has therefore won the plaudits of Soviet historians for being the man with
true vision. A second expedition in 1729 was no more successful, although
the work of his crew, including the mapping of previously unvisited shores,
should not be underestimated.13
There was still an enormous amount to learn about the configuration of the
northern Pacific, which remained well into the eighteenth century one of the
least known areas of the oceans. One of Bering’s deputies, Captain Spanberg,
was invited to explore the chain of islands leading towards Japan, which was
still unwilling to open its doors to any foreign traders apart from the Dutch.14
Spanberg was in Okhotsk in 1735, building a pair of ships and making ready
a third, older one. Setting out in June 1738, Spanberg’s flotilla stood off
Japan a year later. Despite official hostility to foreigners, both the locals and
the officials who came on board were quite friendly, and the Russians were
able to obtain gold coins, rice, fish and tobacco. The officials took Japanese
politeness to an extreme, bowing and kneeling – indeed, they stayed on their
knees so long that the captain finally felt he had to tell them to rise. Once in
Spanberg’s cabin, the officials were impressed by the Russian food they were
offered and quaffed Russian brandy with pleasure. But Spanberg knew how
these brief encounters could turn from friendship to violence, and soon set
sail for Kamchatka.15 Although a further attempt to reach Japan failed,
Spanberg had added a great amount to Russian knowledge of the northern
Pacific, making it possible to lay more precise plans for the creation of a
Russian dominion over the Kuril Islands and beyond.
Since the Pacific was not a high priority back in St Petersburg, Russian
penetration of the northern Pacific in the second half of the eighteenth
century depended in high degree on the initiative of individual merchants,
some of them Russians of modest origins, born as peasants or into Cossack
military families, who had managed to heave themselves up the social ladder,
some of them Greeks who had taken up residence in Muscovy.16 Small
companies acquired ships and sent them out from the Pacific coasts of Siberia
in search of furs; the Russian Senate became increasingly interested in the
taxes that could be obtained from the fur trade, and by 1748 merchants were
petitioning the Senate for monopolistic rights over patches of territory rich in
furs. The Senate was only too happy to fall in with these plans, some of
which proved very lucrative: one expedition produced nearly 22,000 roubles
for the imperial treasury, one third of the value of the fur cargo.17 Most
expeditions produced more than 1,000 roubles for the treasury, and they
penetrated deeper and deeper into areas not previously visited by Europeans,
all the way to Alaska. Plenty of ships were wrecked in the difficult conditions
of the Far North, but by 1770 the profits were getting larger and larger. This
was partly the result of the policies of Empress Catherine II, who encouraged
free trade from the 1760s onwards. The Soviet historian of these merchants
saw in this ‘the power of bourgeois economic development’, though she
admitted that private trade was already well established before 1760. After
all, eastern Siberia, mainly inhabited by native peoples who were not reduced
to serfdom, was a very long way from the centres of government power or the
estates of the great aristocratic families. The remote frontier offered freedom
and the chance to carve out wealth, whether from land or trade.18
Not just demand but confidence was growing. One ship that spent several
years at sea was the Sveti Pavel or St Paul, operated by three merchants; it
travelled to the Kuril Islands in 1770 and to the Aleutians in 1771, where the
Russians befriended the native Sannakh islanders, with whom, as so often,
relations were good at first, but then turned sour. The Russians’ interpreter
was found dead in his yurt. The islanders attacked. The ship’s captain,
Solviev, hurried off deeper into the Aleutian Islands, where the crew gathered
information about the many furry animals to be found – beavers, bears, deer,
wolves, squirrels and otters. The crew were back in Okhotsk in July 1775,
carrying 150,000 roubles’ worth of furs, though thirty out of seventy-one fur-
hunters who had set out had not survived the voyage.19 These experiences
were replicated again and again, puncuated by special moments such as an
encounter between Captain Cook and the Russians, when Cook gave the
Russians a telescope as a special ‘token of their visit to those islands’.20

III

Rather as the Spaniards had originally seen their American empire as a source
of funds for the struggle against the Turks, the tsars saw their assertion of
sovereignty over the many peoples of eastern Siberia, and beyond that the
Aleutian Islands and Alaska, as a way of funding their dreams of empire
within Europe. There was a certain attraction in claiming to rule over parts of
Europe, Asia and America, placing Russia notionally on a par with the multi-
continental empires of Spain and Portugal. A memorandum by Counts
Vorontosov and Bezborodko, of 1786, made the point explicitly: ‘The north-
west coast of America and the islands in the archipelagoes between there and
Kamchatka, and from that peninsula to Japan, were discovered long ago by
Russian seafarers … According to a generally accepted rule, the first nation
to discover an unknown land has the right to claim it.’21 The great advantage
the Russians possessed was that they were the pioneers in European
penetration into the region; the great disadvantage was that overland trade
was slow and cumbersome, and better suited to carrying tribute and tax
receipts than vast amounts of goods, while maritime routes seemed
impractical until the North-East Passage was brought into being – if it ever
would be. Still, a ‘United American Company’ came into existence in 1797,
and was transformed into the ‘Russia–America Company’ two years later.22
It lay under ‘imperial protection’, with the full approval of Tsar Paul I, but
the basic model was that of the many East India Companies that the Russians
knew well from contact with their Baltic and North Sea neighbours. In view
of the autocratic system of government in tsarist Russia, the freedom of
action of the merchants taking part in this venture was counterbalanced by
the supervision of a government department.
The merchant who did most to bring it into being, Grigory Ivanovich
Shelikov, had already died by then, but he had been a fur-trader in the
Pacific, living for some years on Kodiak Island, which is now part of Alaska.
Of course, Alaska was not understood as the roughly square chunk of icy
land that now forms a state within the Union; what interested the Russians
was the opportunity to hunt sea otter along the coastline down to and beyond
Sitka, a 600-mile strip of land that still acts as a barrier between Canada and
the Pacific. Shelikov astutely described his plans to a colleague while
Catherine the Great sat on Russia’s throne:

The main end of my enterprise has been to bring newly discovered

waters, lands and islands into our empire before other powers occupy
and claim them, and to undertake new ventures to augment the glory
of our empress and bring profit both to her and our fellow-
countrymen.23

Catherine, and then Paul, were far more occupied with relations with western
Europe than with the Pacific; but they were aware that what happened in the
Pacific might have significant repercussions in the West: the presence of the
British and the Spaniards along the coast of California made it certain that
contact would be made with European ships and trading stations as Russia
consolidated its hold on the north and on supplies of high-quality fur for the
Chinese and other markets. By 1800 traders from Great Britain and the
United States were pumping vast numbers of skins along their maritime
pipeline to Macau, while the Russians were still trying to trade with the
Chinese through stations along the Amur River. But the cost of transport
from Alaska to the Amur trading stations proved prohibitive; it made more
sense for fur merchants in northern China to trek all the way down to Canton
to obtain furs because the British, the Americans and the Spaniards were
flooding Canton with sea otter skins, with the result that prices were forced
down. Moreover, the cost of sending tea to Europe by sea was a small
fraction of the cost of sending it to St Petersburg overland.24
Much would depend on the quality of seamanship available out east; yet
the hopes that had brought Okhotsk and other settlements into being were
disappointed. One Russian admiral complained bitterly that the sailors based
at Okhotsk knew far too little about the character of the difficult seas they
were supposed to navigate, whose difficulties began at Okhotsk itself, where
shifting sands and shallow waters made entry into the harbour a challenge.
The quality of shipbuilding was also, he said, well below the standard of the
Baltic or the Black Sea. About fifty vessels had been built at Okhotsk by the
1790s, and by then it was possible to find iron nails to bolt the planking
together, but these were not to the standards that Peter the Great had been
trying to establish. By the start of the nineteenth century the shipyards at
Okhotsk contained rotting ships – a Russian commentator likened Okhotsk to
a naval museum.25
Creating a merchant navy out in the Sea of Okhotsk seemed beyond
Russian capabilities. Perhaps, then, the Russians would have to bite the bullet
and send ships all the way from the Baltic to the northern Pacific by way of
the Atlantic. Fortunately the Russian Admiralty identified a man of unusual
skill and experience to lead an expedition to the Far East. Johann-Anton von
Kruzenshtern was a Baltic German from Estonia who had been seconded to
the British Navy, fought the Revolutionary French and sailed under the
British flag to the Caribbean. But the more he heard about the ocean world
the more his attention turned to the Far East. He wrote:

During the time that I was serving with the English Navy in the
revolutionary war of 1793–9, my attention was particularly excited by
the importance of the English trade with the East Indies and with
China. It appeared to me by no means impossible for Russia to
participate in the trade by sea with China and the Indies.26

Setting out on a British ship in 1797, Kruzenshtern called in at Calcutta and

Canton, reinforcing his sense that the Russians would never make a success
of their fur trade without access by sea to China’s window on the world.
Once he was back in Russia, Kruzenshtern’s voice was finally heard, and he
was commissioned to take a pair of ships all the way from the Baltic to the
Pacific. The first problem, though, was to find suitable ships. Russia could
offer nothing capable of such a long voyage. Even Hamburg and Copenhagen
had nothing available. Finally two suitable vessels, the new Leander of 450
tons and the even newer Thames, of 370 tons, were found in England. They
were renamed the Nadezhda and the Neva and sent to the Baltic naval base at
Kronstadt, to be prepared for a voyage that, it was hoped, would reach as far
as Japan, carrying on board a certain Rezanov, gloriously appointed as
Russia’s ambassador to the imperial court at Edo.27
Kruzenshtern’s route took the ships along the coast of Brazil and round
Cape Horn, which proved quite manageable, although soon after that the two
ships were driven apart; the Neva found its way to Easter Island, while the
Nadezhda pressed on to the Marquesas. These were not, of course, new
discoveries, and Kruzenshtern had read Captain Cook with close attention;
but it was the first time Russian shipping had entered the south Pacific.
Kruzenshtern was determined that relations with the native islanders should
remain cordial, and his aim in calling in at the Marquesas was to take on
supplies. He permitted his men to barter for local goods, so long as they did
not do so on board the ship. This did not prevent naked women from
climbing on board who had, as a modern historian coyly observed, ‘more
than fruit to sell the Russians’.28 The two ships managed to find one another
in the Marquesas and made their way via Hawai’i into the far north of the
Pacific, bypassing Japan for lack of time – Kruzenshtern had promised to
deliver a cargo of iron and other naval stores to Petropavlovsk on the
Kamchatka Peninsula, while the Neva sailed towards Kodiak Island and the
new Russian settlement at Sitka on the Alaskan coast.
When they arrived, the Russians were horrified to discover that Sitka had
been sacked by the Tlingits, the native population of the region. The Russia–
America Company had made a fundamental error: by settling on the Alaskan
coast and displacing the Tlingits, the Russians had created what a
contemporary observer called ‘an unalterable enmity against the Russians’.
The Tlingits had been living off the resources of the coastline, including not
just its fish but its sea otters, whose furs the Russians were now trying to
monopolize. By contrast, the British and the Americans took care not to settle
the area, but preferred to come on seasonal trading visits. The Tlingits were
formidable warriors, who went into battle wearing armour made of leather
and bone, capable of stopping a musket shot in its tracks; before long they
acquired firearms of their own. The Neva therefore sailed straight into a battle
zone, where the Russians and the Tlingits were literally at each other’s
throats. The Russians concluded that they would need to arm themselves well
if they were going to gain control of the coastline and its furs.29 For if they
did not establish settlements, they left the door open to the British, the
Americans and the Spaniards, who still had a significant presence in
California and further north.
Another setback, this time for those aboard the larger ship, the Nadezhda,
followed its arrival at long last in Japan, after setting out from Kamchatka in
September 1804. The Russian ambassador, Rezanov, landed in Deshima,
only to be berated by the Japanese for poaching on the territory, tiny though it
was, that had been assigned to the Dutch; he was also criticized for arriving
in a well-armed warship rather than a trading vessel. He hung around for
three months before a curt message arrived from the shogun: ‘it is our
government’s will not to open this place. Do not come again in vain. Sail
home quickly.’ To encourage him to go, the Japanese authorities sent a
massive quantity of rice, salt and other foodstuffs, but Rezanov refused to
accept the gift and made plain his anger at rejection, which the Japanese
officials saw as a highly embarrassing breach of etiquette. They did explain
that they would have to take the blame if he left the gifts behind, and would
feel obliged to commit a mass act of hara-kiri. Rezanov had the good sense
to take the gifts and leave, in April 1805.
Kruzenshtern had other plans, now that the embassy to Japan had failed so
completely. After mapping the island of Sakhalin, to the north of Japan, he
headed for Macau, which he knew from his earlier sojourn in Canton. There
he was joined by the Neva, which had turned its back on the frightening
Tlingits. But breaking into the Canton market was not straightforward. The
other nations had their consulates and warehouses. Kruzenshtern was
eventually able to convince an English merchant named Beale to negotiate on
his behalf with a Hong merchant, Lucqua, and the cargo of the two ships was
sold, apart from the best sea otter skins, which were known to fetch
extortionate prices in Moscow. The ships loaded tea, nankeen cloth and
porcelain. This time they would head westwards, through the East Indies and
round the Cape of Good Hope, with one ship calling in at St Helena. The two
ships were back in Kronstadt in August 1806, after a voyage lasting just over
three years.30 The profits were meagre, but there were grounds for rejoicing:
Russian ships had circumnavigated the globe for the first time, and valuable
information had been gathered about the Sea of Okhotsk and the coast of
Alaska. It was understood that a pioneering expedition of this sort was bound
to produce mixed results, but that any future successes would be built on the
information gathered by these two ships.
The information these ships gathered is what historians tend to call the
‘scientific’ aspect of this and other voyages, such as those of Captain Cook
and the Frenchman La Pérouse. However, it masks the more prosaic reality:
even if the information about the daily life of the Tlingits in Alaska or the
Ainu in Hokkaido aroused genuine interest, the prime purpose of these
voyages was to uncover sources of wealth, and to reach them before rival
European powers did so. This was especially important for the Russian tsars,
who were constantly in need of sources of funds for ambitious campaigns
around the Baltic and the Black Sea. The Russians failed to gain the lion’s
share of the Pacific fur trade, but the importance of their presence lies in the
way that Russian pioneers penetrated ever deeper into unknown waters,
building ships of questionable quality in unpromising locations very far from
the Russian homeland, and setting out year after year into frozen islands.

IV

The Russians were the first to recognize the potential of the northern Pacific,
even if their most important motive was to promote trade links with China.
The period in which they were making these remarkable advances also saw
closer contact between Europeans and the inhabitants of the Polynesian
islands, particularly during the 1760s and 1770s. Here too there was a
question mark. Did these islands have anything to offer? Coconuts were not
going to draw in vast numbers of trading ships. The reputation of the
islanders for cannibalism and human sacrifice was counterbalanced by the
image that survived to and beyond the time of Gauguin, of islands where free
love and a simple life without wants were to be had. This too was part of the
Polynesian reality: European sailors were astonished and generally delighted
by the readiness of local women to offer their bodies, as much for courtesy as
for ecstasy. Tahiti became ‘the island which encapsulated European images
of the south Pacific, whether benign or malign’.31 On the other hand, these
islands lived largely from their own resources, and their subsistence economy
found it hard to meet the demands of European sailors for food and other
basic supplies, quite apart from the lack of luxury products on offer.
It is clearly a mistake to talk, as one otherwise illuminating book has done,
of ‘the discovery of Tahiti and Hawai’i’ in this period.32 What the Europeans
discovered had been discovered centuries before by Polynesians. The arrival
of the Europeans in the Polynesian islands led to vigorous exchanges of
information, as each side began to see that they could learn from the other; in
some areas, such as Hawai’i, this happened with startling rapidity, as the
islanders adopted European clothes and even shipping. The Polynesians
looked for similarities at least as much as they noticed differences; an
extreme case was the experience of a Tahitian who travelled to the court of
King George III in England, and who, while on board ship, had to be
persuaded that the Christian rituals he witnessed on board would not
culminate in human sacrifice – not that he was opposed to the practice, but he
was afraid that he would be chosen as the victim. He was more comfortable
with what he saw in Cambridge, where the sight of dons processing through
the Senate House in their scarlet gowns brought to mind the processions of
high priests back home.33
The best word to use to describe the first encounters in Tahiti is
‘serendipity’. Captain Samuel Wallis, from Cornwall, in charge of the
Dolphin, arrived there in June 1767 in the expectation that what was
(relatively speaking) so large an island, with mountains looming out of fog in
the distance, must be the long-sought Southern Continent for which he was
seeking. The natives, who crowded around in hundreds of canoes, seemed
friendly, ‘particularly the women, who came down to the beach, and stripping
themselves naked, endeavoured to allure them by many wanton gestures, the
meaning of which could not possibly be mistaken’.34 But it was unclear
whether their attempts to attract sailors to land were a ploy to lure them into a
trap and kill them. An attempt was made to conduct ‘silent trade’, with each
side leaving goods on the beach, but the English sailors only took what they
wanted (some pigs) and left behind the bark cloth they had been offered. For
their part, the Tahitians ignored the axes and nails the English had left
behind. The English realized that they had somehow offended the Tahitians,
and on a second visit they collected the bark cloth and everything else the
islanders had put out for them.
Even so, relations were at first difficult. Faced with an armada of boats, the
Dolphin fired on the crowd that had gathered on the beach, which fled into
the forests; after that, more than fifty canoes left on the shore were hacked to
pieces by carpenters sent out from the ship under armed guard. The
carpenters had good reason to be in a bad mood: women had in the end been
allowed on board, but they had raided the boxes of nails they found lying
around, and even pulled nails out of the ship’s beams, which threatened to
make her unsafe. Facing European violence, the Tahitians assumed that they
were being treated to a display of the wrath of their gods, and the gift of a pig
and a plantain leaf was intended to signify submission to a superhuman
power. This was transformed into an acceptance that, even if the British, and
later on the French, were made of the same flesh and blood as themselves,
they still had to be appeased, since the alternative was that the newcomers
would unleash destruction far worse than anything their own warring bands
were capable of achieving.35 In the end Captain Wallis struck up a friendship
with the local queen, and they exchanged visits – he was impressed by the
meeting house to which he was taken, which was about 100 metres long.
Queen Obearea wept when the Dolphin set sail.36
Gradually, though, it was understood that this was not actually part of the
Southern Continent, though surely it must be an island lying off its coast,
rather like Hispaniola or Cuba in relation to the Americas? A year after
Wallis arrived there, Louis de Bougainville, a high-born French captain,
reached another part of Tahiti, knowing nothing of the arrival of the English.
Bougainville was well read in classical literature, and, remembering the story
of how Venus had been born in the sea and had been washed up on the island
of Kythera, he called the island Nouvelle Cythère.37 Bougainville titillated
his male readers by describing how a Tahitian girl uncovered herself on deck
and insisted that ‘here Venus is the goddess of hospitality’. The nakedness of
the Tahitians recalled the nakedness of ancient Greek athletes. For
Bougainville what had been discovered was not just a paradise, but a classical
paradise; he had, in effect, travelled back in time to experience ‘the true
youth of the world’. His experiences were much better than Wallis’s: the
Tahitians had learned that European firepower was irresistible, so they
eagerly co-operated with the next lot of Europeans, probably unaware of any
real difference between the British and the French. The peaceful nature of
Bougainville’s experiences in Tahiti led his readers, including Diderot, to
enthuse about the grace and innocence of the islanders. As Matt Matsuda has
observed, ‘even theft seemed a sign of innocence in a world where all things
were shared’, not just objects but sexual relations. The impact of this voyage
was all the greater, as Bougainville brought a Tahitian prince named Ahutoru
back to Paris, where he became a favourite of Bougainville’s backer, the
powerful politician and courtier the Duc de Choiseul, and showed himself to
be an opera lover.38
Choiseul had additional, less romantic, motives in supporting
Bougainville’s expedition. France could not permit itself to lag behind
Britain. Both countries were keen to identify the resources of the Pacific
islands, and both were still obsessed by the idea of the Southern Continent.
Interest in unfamiliar plants was genuine: the late eighteenth-century French
explorer La Pérouse had naturalists on board; Cook’s companion Joseph
Banks hungrily collected Pacific artefacts and kept filling up the South Sea
Room which had been set up in the British Museum in 1775, forcing the
museum authorities to enlarge the room within a mere six years.39 Cook was
not just looking for new lands, though: he was also checking reports of
discoveries by the French, even if some of these discoveries, such as the aptly
named ‘Desolation Island’, could be dismissed as of little interest.40 The
curiosity of the British took a more practical turn: rather than speculating
about ‘noble savages’, Captain Cook and his men were requested to watch
the expected transit of Venus across the sun from Tahiti, and to carry on the
search for the Southern Continent. He was instructed to bear in mind ‘the
Honour of this Nation as a Maritime Power’, which ‘may tend greatly to the
advancement of the Trade and Navigation thereof’.41 One important feature
of Cook’s second and third voyages, of 1772 and 1776, was the testing of
John Harrison’s chronometer, a clock that was to prove accurate enough to
make it possible to measure longitude; latitude was a much more
straightforward problem, but dealing with the measurement of distance in the
direction the earth turned was far more complicated. His use of Harrison’s
timepiece allowed him to chart the South Sea islands with impressive
accuracy. It is said that at the moment Captain Cook was struck down and
killed in Hawai’i the clock stopped.42 But here again it is important to
remember that science was being deployed in the service of trade and empire.
Cook, like Bougainville, appreciated the skills of Polynesian navigators.
He persuaded Tupaia, a highly skilled navigator, priest and local nobleman,
to come on board, and Tupaia accompanied Cook around the Polynesian
islands, even drawing a famous map of large tracts of the Pacific from
memory, sketching in such places as the Marquesas and the Cook Islands;
Tupaia was just as helpful as Harrison’s chronometer. Banks thought of
Tupaia as another specimen, even if he was a highly intelligent one. Cook
was less interested in playing that game, and was impressed by what Tupaia
knew: ‘we have no reason to doubt his veracity in this, by which it will
appear that his Geographical knowlidge [sic] of those Seas is pretty
extensive.’ Tupaia knew the names of seventy-four islands, and his map
covered a vast area of the Pacific roughly equal in size to Europe (including
Russia-in-Europe). Most importantly, he explained the complex wind system
of the Pacific, still poorly understood after several centuries of a European
presence in this ocean.43
The adaptability of the Polynesians to European ways was striking. They
were particularly adept at commercial deals. In the early nineteenth century,
Pomare I, the ruler of Tahiti, traded with the British settlement in New South
Wales and joined forces with the London Missionary Society (having
converted to Christianity in 1812), sending a ship to Port Jackson, the bay
that includes Sydney Harbour, in 1817; Pomare loaded pigs and sandalwood
as the main cargo, and on later sailings by Pomare’s merchant fleet pearls
were gathered in other islands and forwarded to Sydney. The crews were
largely Tahitian.44 Both Ahutoru and Tupaia had already shown a
willingness to work with people from a strange world and a fascination with
European culture that was to develop in surprising ways once the Europeans
(including the Russians) and the Americans developed an interest in Hawai’i.

Tupaia did not include the farthest-flung parts of the Polynesian world,
Hawai’i, New Zealand and Easter Island, in his sailing directions.45 His
knowledge about the Pacific was an accumulation built up over many
centuries and handed down by word of mouth, so that much of the detail was
in place long before Hawai’i, Aotearoa and Rapa Nui were settled by
Polynesian navigators. Just as it had taken these navigators a long while to
cross the band of winds that separated the southern from the northern Pacific,
so the arrival of the Europeans in the remote volcanic islands of Hawai’i took
a long while, though the Manila galleons or other Spanish ships may well
have passed through the archipelago when blown off course, or been attracted
by plumes of smoke and fire from the still active volcanoes on Hawai’i
Island. A handful of archaeological discoveries, including a piece of woven
cloth found in a late sixteenth-century grave, suggest occasional outside
contacts with Europeans.46 In 1777 Cook’s target was no longer the
Southern Continent but that other persistent obsession of European
governments keen to carve out fast and profitable trade routes: the North-
West Passage. The British Parliament offered a prize of £20,000 to the crew
that would find this route. Cook’s trajectory northwards from Tahiti, across
3,000 miles of open ocean, took him to O’ahu and Kaua’i, on the second of
which he made landfall in January 1778. As in Tahiti, the obvious conclusion
to be drawn from the arrival of the British was that these were not ordinary
humans but the gods who lived far beyond the horizon.47
The story of the first encounter is a familiar one: women offered
themselves to the sailors, fresh food was taken on board. Cook sailed off after
a couple of weeks, returning to the islands from his icy and fruitless search
for the North-West Passage in November of the same year. The king turned
up to greet Cook on the main island, Hawai’i, and offered the captain
feathered headdresses and a magnificent cloak, now preserved in the Te Papa
National Museum in Wellington, New Zealand. This was a sign of
exceptional respect: a royal cloak required 400,000 tiny red and yellow
feathers, taken from 80,000 birds. One of the crew reported that ‘we live now
in the greatest Luxury, and as to the Choice & number of fine women there is
hardly one among us that may not vie with the grand Turk himself’.48 Yet
the gifts of food placed a strain on the Hawai’ian economy, a subsistence
economy that was not well suited to the extra demand generated by Cook’s
ships. After the British ships left the king placed a taboo on the land around
the bay where Cook had anchored; this was normal practice when the land
was exhausted and needed to revive, rather like the biblical sabbatical year.
Forced back by bad weather, Cook re-entered the bay and found he was not
welcome; the Hawai’ians began to steal from the British ships, and even
sneaked away with the cutter attached to the Discovery, leaving Cook’s main
vessel without a lifeboat. Cook went on land, hoping to make peace with the
increasingly fractious crowd of islanders, but guns and daggers were drawn
and Cook was clubbed to death – not, however, at anyone’s orders, for this
was a fracas that had got badly out of control. The grief of the British crew
was compounded by disgust when Cook’s body was returned, in the form of
de-boned hunks of flesh.49
 The sudden and violent death of Captain Cook was his passport to eternal
fame in Great Britain, one of those national heroes, like Lord Nelson, who
did not live to see the results of his achievements. The islanders came to
terms with the fact that the British were not after all divine by involving
themselves in their trade from a very early date. In 1787 Captain John Meares
came to the island of Kaua’i and agreed to take one islander, a prince named
Kaiana, to China. Kaiana impressed the British by his build – he was six and
a half feet tall – and was showered with presents by the English merchants in
Canton, the most valuable in many ways being firearms. These he deployed
to his advantage on his return to Hawai’i aboard another British ship; he
learned that a coup had taken place on Kaua’i, so he placed himself at the
service of the king of the main island, Hawai’i. King Kamehameha I had
grand ambitions of his own: he had brought Hawai’i Island under his single
rule, and now he aimed to conquer all the lesser islands. Kaiana would be a
powerful ally, but no less useful would be the British, with their massive
ships armed with deadly cannon, which were also capable of carrying many
more warriors than he could pack on to even the longest Polynesian craft.50
So began one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of Pacific
navigation. The king needed more ships than could be obtained from
reluctant British traders either by bargaining or – in some cases – by sending
a squad of men on board to seize the ship. Kamehameha would therefore
create his own fleet. In 1789, after a bloody confrontation with the crews of
two American vessels in search of supplies, Kamehameha acquired the ship
Eleanor and an accompanying schooner, and he appointed a couple of the
officers to chiefdoms, which made sure that he kept hold of their nautical
talent. Then, in 1792, his subjects built a vessel in the European style, under
the guidance of an American ship’s carpenter. By 1803 he was the proud
owner of at least twenty ships, some of which had their keel sheathed in
copper, the most modern defence against worms. As he became more
involved in the sandalwood trade with China, he ordered more and more
ships to be constructed. So to the British, French, American, Russian and
Spanish fleets in the Pacific a European-style Hawai’ian fleet needs to be
added. Three ships are known to have traversed the entire route from the
American north-west to China regularly between 1800 and 1832, though
most of the Hawai’ian ships set out for Vanuatu or other island groups, to
pick up sandalwood, hogs and pearls that could be fed into the networks of
not just Polynesia but the wider Pacific. However, the China voyages were
financial disasters, because the Hawai’ians were dependent on unscrupulous
agents in Canton who saw a good opportunity to exploit innocent
newcomers.51
A new generation of Polynesian navigators familiarized themselves with
European rather than Pacific shipping, and became an essential element in the
crew of foreign ships as well as Hawai’ian ones. When American ships
passed through the islands, they were often obliged to carry Hawai’ian
supercargoes. The New Hazard, a 281-ton brig, carried a cargo of firearms,
Indian cotton cloth, metal goods, tobacco and sugar, among other items,
setting out from its home port of Boston in October 1810, rounding the Horn
and reaching Hawai’i late in February of the next year. Most of this cargo
was intended for the people living along the west coast of North America.
However, sandalwood, potatoes, plantains and the inevitable willing young
women were brought aboard in Hawai’i, and in due course it headed for
Vancouver Island, in search of native American slaves as well as furs. Its job
done, it returned to Hawai’i, where the reports wearily emphasize, once
again: ‘not much work done this afternoon being girls on board’. The
culmination of its voyage was the crossing to Macau and Canton, anchoring
at Whampoa, where the ship stood for four months, and where $300,000
worth of tea, nankeen cloth and porcelain was loaded. So, by way of repeated
calls at Hawai’i, the routes linking the Atlantic seaboard of North America
with the Pacific north-west of America, and China as well, were bound
together.52
Kamehameha placed himself under the British Crown, for he saw that this
would not weaken but rather strengthen his authority so far from London. At
the start of the nineteenth century he decided that he could make a profitable
deal with the Russians in Alaska, who were always short of supplies. The
Hawai’ian king sent a letter to Alexander Baranov, who was running Russian
operations in Alaska, suggesting that Kamehameha could solve his
difficulties by sending a consignment each year from Hawai’i. Later,
Kamehameha allowed the Russians to build a trading base on O’ahu.53
Kamehameha was careful not to put all his eggs in one basket. As well as the
British and the Russians, he had to deal with United States shipping. By 1800
the Americans, not the British, were the most frequent visitors to his islands.
This reflected their involvement in the fur trade on the eastern and northern
shores of the Pacific, and the tea and silk trade on its south-western shores,
by way of Canton. He noted with interest the strength of the trade in Pacific
sandalwood towards China, and he decided not just to create a royal
monopoly but to encourage sandalwood production at the expense of food
production. This resulted in occasional famines, while supplies of
sandalwood in Hawai’i became so depleted that he had to issue orders that
young trees were subject to taboo, until they had grown sufficiently. These
measures were revolutionary: the subsistence economy of the islands was
being transformed into a commercial economy, placing heavy demands on a
native labour force that had traditionally lived easily off the natural produce
of the land.54 Further difficulties were created by Kamehameha’s willingness
to accept American imports on credit. Many of these imports were grandiose
luxuries used to decorate the royal residences, such as Chinese porcelain,
European crystal and American silverware, not to mention the fine Western-
style clothing in which the king enjoyed being portrayed.
Difficulties accumulated after Kamehameha I died in 1819. His son,
Kamehameha II, thought that the solution was to carry on expanding. His
first new ship was a tempting and beautifully appointed yacht named
Cleopatra; it was horribly expensive, was used for royal pleasure cruises
around the islands, and was said to have been ‘manned by a drunken,
dissipated, irresponsible crew from the captain down to the cabin boy’. This
crew managed to wreck the boat beyond repair in 1825.55 Over the next few
years the royal family attempted to restore its fortunes and those of Hawai’i
(now denuded of sandalwood) by way of the sandalwood trade in Vanuatu,
but that proved to be another disaster when the ship they had sent out
disappeared without trace.56 By the middle of the nineteenth century the
Hawai’ian kings had given up trying to operate a fleet; but there had been a
glory period under Kamehameha I during which Hawai’i had managed to
assimilate European business practices with remarkable speed.
The most powerful economic force in the islands was fast becoming the
United States, not Great Britain or Russia, even though the USA would only
become master of these islands at the end of the nineteenth century. The
success of the American traders partly reflected the fact that the shipping of
the United States was unrestricted by Company rules, which stood in the way
of English and Russian trade in the Pacific Ocean so long as the East India
Company and the Russia–America Company insisted on licensing movement
around the Pacific.57 At least thirty-one American ships arrived in the
Hawai’ian islands between 1778 and 1818, maybe as many as forty-three,
while British numbers (including warships as well as trading vessels) stood at
thirty-nine, and the Russians at eleven.58 Hawai’i was well placed
geographically to act as a supply station in the middle of the north Pacific; its
role as middleman between the Asian and the American shores of the ocean
provides a neat demonstration of how the entire Pacific was being drawn
together into a complex network of maritime connections from the end of the
eighteenth century onwards.
 46

From the Lion’s Gate to the Fragrant Harbour

Competition for access to the markets of the Far East did not wane in the
early nineteenth century, even though the nations that had created the first
links to China and the East Indies no longer dominated the trade of the East.
Having won Melaka from the Portuguese in 1641, after a series of attempts,
the Dutch had to cede the city to Great Britain in 1795, and Britain took
advantage of its war with Napoleon, and the incorporation of the Netherlands
into the Bonaparte empire, to keep hold of the place for a while, without quite
knowing what to do with it.1 The Dutch had never based their government of
the East Indies there, preferring Batavia (modern Jakarta), which lies on Java
and was therefore closer to the Spice Islands. And yet the idea of creating a
base on the Strait of Malacca made good sense for any European power keen
to trade through the South China Sea: it was the best place to watch for the
switching of the winds as one monsoon season gave way to another, and a
safe route back west opened up to shipping.2
Melaka had been founded, at least according to legend, by a refugee prince
from Temasek, or Singapura, generally translated as ‘the Lion’s Gate’.
Fragments of sixteenth-century blue-and-white porcelain recovered from the
Kallang River in Singapore reveal that the foundation of Melaka did not spell
the end of Singapore; indeed, the sultan of Johor, the southernmost kingdom
in Malaya, established a shahbandar, or overseer, of customs at Singapore,
who was in his post by 1574. A few years later, in 1611, the Singapore
settlement was burned to the ground; the entire region had become sucked
into wars between the Portuguese and competing Malay and Indonesian
rulers, into which the Dutch eventually inserted themselves as well. Probably
there was not much to show on Singapore Island in 1703 when the sultan of
Johor, who approved of the English, offered the site of the old settlement to a
Scottish captain named Alexander Hamilton. Even when it was offered for
free, Singapore was beyond Hamilton’s means, as he was expected to
develop the site from his own limited resources. However, the East India
Company began to recognize that Singapore lay in a perfect position
overlooking the entrance to the main passageway between the Indian Ocean
and the South China Sea; the islands opposite Singapore, which are now part
of Indonesia, were the haunt of the Bugi pirates, who needed to be kept quiet
– the surprise is that it took so long for Great Britain to create a base at
Singapore.3
 That Great Britain did so was the result of the vision and endeavours of
two employees of the East India Company, Thomas Stamford Raffles and
Major William Farquhar. Farquhar administered Melaka for a while before it
was returned to the Dutch at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and had a talent
for winning the trust of local rulers, which was crucial in the foundation of
British Singapore. Raffles, however, is much better documented; he is one of
the most extraordinary figures in British imperial history, and is generally
seen as a more attractive personality than the great majority of empire-
builders.4 He was born in 1781, and his origins were quite modest; he spent
his early career in the gloomy offices of the East India Company on
Leadenhall Street in London, joining as a clerk when he was only fourteen
years old. But he was an exceedingly quick learner, and he won the attention
of his superiors, so that he was sent off full of enthusiasm to Penang on the
Indian Ocean coast of Malaya in 1805, as Assistant Secretary in the British
administration of what, it was hoped, would become a British base to rival
Calcutta and Bombay. Raffles took the trouble, unusually, to learn basic
Malay; he also took a serious interest in the history and culture of the lands
where he had been sent, and realized that new opportunities now existed for
the British in the Far East, which would take the East India Company some
way beyond its current obsession with relations with Indian princes, and
might even bring the Company control of the spice trade through the East
Indies, if the Dutch and their French allies could be dislodged. When Britain
succeeded in gaining control of Dutch Java, Raffles found himself appointed
lieutenant-governor, in 1811, but his attempts to introduce land reform failed
to work, partly through lack of support. An important clue to his thinking is
Raffles’s insistence that ‘Government should consider the inhabitants without
reference to bare mercantile profits and to connect the sources of revenue
with the general prosperity of the Colony.’5 This was a man who deeply
deplored slavery, and who insisted that ‘all kinds of servitude should be
abolished’. But social reform so far away was of no interest to the EIC in
London. He was summoned back to London, and was disillusioned by the
return of the East Indies to the Dutch in 1816, following the fall of Napoleon.
Raffles redeemed his reputation back home – his scholarly interests were
acknowledged when he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and received a
knighthood, thanks to the support of Queen Charlotte. He used his time after
his recall to London well, writing a History of Java in two volumes, which
was as much a compendium of geography, natural history, ethnography and
archaeology as a somewhat higgledy-piggledy history in the traditional sense.
Dedicated, with his permission, to the Prince Regent, it was nonetheless an
extraordinary work of scholarship, based on almost obsessive research and
limitless curiosity.6
Still, there was work to be done out East, and Great Britain still retained a
small and rather neglected post at Bencoolen in Sumatra, which the Dutch
had tolerated for many years. Sent there in 1818, Sir Stamford Raffles, as he
now liked to be known, was disappointed to find that the Dutch were
vigorously rebuilding their network in the East Indies, while Great Britain
had paltry resources east of India:

The Dutch possess the only passes through which ships must sail into
the Archipelago, the Straits of Sunda and Malacca; and the British
have now not an inch of ground to stand upon between the Cape of
Good Hope and China, nor a single friendly port at which they can
water and obtain refreshment.7

To be sure, this was an overstatement (Penang was still in British hands), but
Raffles managed to convince the governor-general of India, Lord Hastings,
that some sort of base was needed close to the Malacca Strait. However, the
only way to achieve this was by delicate negotiation with the Malay princes;
and the view in Britain was that it was important not to offend the
government of the Netherlands, which was now an ally, meaning that Raffles
found himself treading on eggshells. The Dutch noted how Raffles was trying
to extend British influence beyond Bencoolen to the other, more valuable,
side of Sumatra – Raffles had Palembang, the old capital of Śri Vijaya in his
sights; they complained to the EIC in Calcutta, and Raffles was warned off.
Lord Hastings insisted that Raffles should only try to obtain a patch of land
for a trading base, ‘not the extension of any territorial influence’; should the
Dutch have established themselves nearby, he was to go elsewhere.8 In fact,
the Dutch did establish themselves a very short distance away, in the Riau
archipelago, but this did not deter Raffles and his close companion, Major
Farquhar (who was to become governor of the new settlement). Fascinated by
the evidence that Singapore had a distinguished history many centuries
earlier, Raffles retained the traditional name of the site, when standard British
practice was to choose a royal name or something recalling the past history of
Great Britain.9 This interest in the past only in part explains his choice of
location. It was quite simply an ideal spot at which to park an EIC garrison;
and the harbour, in the mouth of the Singapore River, was as good as or
better than that of Melaka.
Farquhar was already on good terms with the sultan of Johor, Hussein, and
in 1819 a first treaty allowed the British to create a base on a small piece of
land they had leased at Singapore. The event was celebrated with great pomp
and ceremony as the officers and soldiers of the EIC, with Sir Stamford
Raffles in charge, received the sultan of Johor in a magnificently decorated
tent, its floor covered with scarlet cloth. British observers were unimpressed
by the sultan: he was half-naked, and his bulging stomach and sweaty face
were sharply criticized, even though it is hard to imagine that there was
anyone, Malay or British, who was not perspiring heavily in that humid
environment. This agreement brought the sultan a handsome rent of $5,000 a
year, in Spanish coin; it was followed a few years later, in 1824, by another
treaty, by which the sultan ceded the sovereignty of Singapore entirely to
Great Britain. For the sultan’s claim to rule was contested by his half-brother,
and Hussein needed the British. Finally, the same year, the Dutch and the
British agreed to divide and rule, with Britain taking Malaya (the ‘Straits
Settlements’) and the Netherlands keeping the East Indies, though they had
long been one world, culturally, economically and politically, and still use
variants of the same Malay-Indonesian language.10
It was a challenge to make the new settlement flourish. While the Dutch
enthusiastically quoted their compatriot Grotius to assert the freedom of the
seas, that generally meant their freedom of the seas. Raffles saw that the
future of Singapore would depend on its role as a free port: ‘one free port in
the seas must eventually destroy the spell of Dutch monopoly.’ Having
instructed Farquhar that ‘it is not necessary at present to subject the trade of
the port to any duties’, Raffles sailed off to Bencoolen without any
suggestion about how to make the new settlement pay its way. He would
need to find the means to keep the Dutch away; they blockaded Singapore
harbour. But none of this prevented a remarkable community from coming
into being.11 The trademark of Singapore has always been the mixture of
peoples who live there, and by the time of the second treaty with Hussein the
population had already reached around 5,000, many of whom had moved
down from Melaka, thereby reversing the original migration over 400 years
earlier that had brought people from medieval Singapore to newly founded
Melaka.
Raffles came on a visit in 1822 and exclaimed: ‘here all is life and activity;
and it would be difficult to name a place on the face of the globe with
brighter prospects or more pleasant satisfaction.’ Taking charge of the town
plan, he assigned quarters to the Chinese, Indians and other ethnic groups and
mapped out where government buildings should be built. Raffles divided his
town between a government area on the right side of the harbour, still the seat
of power, that stretched towards Fort Canning Hill, on which his own villa
was built; while on the left side the ‘godowns’, or warehouses, of the traders
were put up, with a view to attracting Chinese, Indian and Malay traffic. He
thus had a vision for the future of the city – an exaggerated one, for when he
died in London in 1826 Singapore still had many difficulties to overcome.12
The colony continued to attract a great mix of people, but early on
Singapore became a largely Chinese city, and by the 1830s it had already
become the hub of the Chinese trade networks in the South China Sea and
beyond, to the consternation of the Dutch in Batavia, which had been the
main centre until then. In 1822, 1,776 ships visited Singapore, most of which
were Asian.13 Home to only 1,000 people in 1819, it grew massively from
1824 onwards and was home to over 97,000 people in 1871. In 1867, before
the town had existed for half a century, it was already host to 55,000 Chinese,
mainly from the south of China, and they accounted for 65 per cent of the
population. To this must be added the Chinese in transit through Singapore,
many of whom became coolies in other parts of south-east Asia, or in the
case of women became domestic slaves or prostitutes – a human traffic that
Raffles would not have wished to see develop.14 At the other end of the
social scale were the wealthy, multilingual ‘Baba’, or Peranakan, families, of
mainly Chinese descent but long exposed to Malay culture – the term
‘Peranakan’ means ‘local-born’. This placed them securely in the position of
middlemen, often able to make a great fortune and to live in considerable
style. Baba Tan Tock Seng was born in Melaka but arrived in Singapore with
the stream of Melakan Chinese who had arrived during Farquhar’s
governorship. Originally a trader in chickens and greengrocery, he became
the business partner of British traders, which brought him to the top of the
ladder of wealth by the 1840s. Well-placed marriage alliances with mainland
Chinese further enhanced his wealth and influence. He was as happy to spend
money on worthy projects as to make it: in 1844 he founded the Tan Tock
Seng Hospital, still in existence, at a cost of $7,000; he gave vigorous support
to one of the main Chinese temples (helping to pay for the installation of a
statue of the sea goddess Mazu after a lavish public ceremony); and he was
appointed Justice of the Peace by the British authorities, the first Asian to
hold this role not just in Singapore but in Malaya.15 Tan and his peers, partly
through their philanthropy and partly through their trade, did much to create
the thriving city that Singapore gradually became.
The contribution of other ethnic groups was also very substantial. Malay
sailors criss-crossed the waters around Singapore, linking the new colony to
the islands on the other side of the Malacca Strait and to the Malayan
mainland, and helped keep the city supplied with the necessities of life,
because from its own resources it could offer little apart from fish.16 One
particular group of Malays, the piratical Bugis, based in the Riau islands just
a short boat ride away from Singapore, upped sticks in 1820 after a quarrel
with the Dutch masters of Riau, and 500 of them settled in British Singapore
instead.17 During the nineteenth century Singapore attracted Tamil Indians,
Armenians (whose little church is a notable monument in the modern city),
oriental Jews such as the Sassoon family of Bombay, and Arab settlers such
as the Alkaff family, who arrived from southern Arabia in the middle of the
century and owned a good number of the warehouses along the Singapore
River. These Arab traders were already active in the waters off Melaka and
Java, and the fact that some of them chose Singapore as their centre of
operations is proof that the idea of creating a free-trade zone there was the
key to success. By the 1880s there were already about 800 Arabs living in the
city.18 For Raffles understood that the prosperity of Singapore would depend
on its role as an entrepôt through which goods flowed and where they were
exchanged; and in the longer term, as steamships came into use, it became a
resupply station, offering coal as well as food, for the early steamships were
extremely voracious consumers of fuel. In the long term too Singapore would
flourish as a centre for the redistribution beyond Malaya of Malay goods,
most famously the rubber produced on the plantations introduced by British
colonists.

II

The ‘Lion’s Gate’ was indeed a gateway to the East, but it still lay a good
distance from the source of the goods that Britain wanted to acquire out there.
A base much closer to Canton was surely needed, so that Great Britain – or
rather the East India Company – would be able to steal a lead over the old
rivals, the Portuguese in Macau, the Dutch and the French. Moreover, British
businessmen were looking for an easier way to pay for Chinese goods than
the silver China craved and that the EIC was finding it increasingly difficult
to supply. The EIC had reason to be worried about its future: it had lost its
monopoly on the trade of the East in 1833, since Parliament decided that the
key to Britain’s prosperity lay in free trade; and in any case the EIC had
become so embroiled in the internal affairs of India that it was no longer
simply a great trading cartel.
With the cancellation of the EIC monopoly, the factory premises in Canton
it had occupied were filled instead by private merchants. Several of the
private merchants would later dominate the business affairs of Hong Kong:
William Jardine, in conjunction with James Matheson; Thomas Dent;
Framjee Cowasjee, a Parsee from India who dealt in opium. Jardine was a
perfect example of the enterprising British businessman in search of
opportunities. He was a Scot and a graduate in medicine from Edinburgh
University, but when he took passage out East as surgeon’s mate on an East
Indiaman he began to realize how easy it would be to make his fortune out of
the spice trade; he became active in the country trade between Bombay and
Canton.19 This enthusiasm for free trade had already spurred Raffles on to
the refoundation of Singapore; and it was rooted in the thinking of the British
pioneers of economics, the Scot Adam Smith and the Sephardic Jew David
Ricardo. Among the readers of both these authors was James Matheson, who
had their books sent to him in China and became an apostle for free trade, a
philosophy that he and his colleague William Jardine took to an extreme.
Jardine carried his Calvinist principles to the furthest limit, so that his office
contained a single chair, and anyone who came to see him had to remain
standing, which meant that business was conducted rapidly.20
Facing these difficulties, the EIC turned to the trade in opium. The source
of opium was, to start off with, southern Arabia, but the poppy fields of
Bengal were much closer and lay under the control of the East India
Company, which was happy to send out the goods through Calcutta. Thus the
‘country trade’ that had enabled Europeans to maintain their commercial
empires in the Indian Ocean reached a new level of intensity. While 5,000
chests of opium, containing up to forty balls of the drug, were exported in
1820, eleven years later the EIC was handling nearly four times as many. At
that point, 5,000 chests were worth somewhere around $8,000,000. William
Jardine believed that opium was far preferable to alcohol; but what had been
treated at first as an exotic recreational drug spread down through society as
prices fell (partly in response to competition from poppy fields in western
India). The result was the creation of opium dens frequented by all sorts of
Chinese. The image of the Chinese at this period as semi-conscious addicts
living in a haze of opium smoke was a European image that was completely
at variance with Chinese official policy; but it was an image that fitted the
condescending attitude of the British to another, far older, imperial power.
From a British perspective what really mattered was the access opium offered
to all the products of an empire that had been (in their view) far too isolated
from trade with the rest of the world. This led to the paradox with which the
Dutch had lived quite comfortably for a couple of centuries: free trade was
conducted most easily when one’s nation possessed its own port and did not
have to depend on the favours of local rulers or European rivals. This had
become an especially acute problem in Canton, where customs officials
interfered with merchants and their cargoes, though no doubt with good
reason, in view of imperial displeasure at the opium traffic.21
This trade continued to boom despite the insistence of the Chinese
authorities that they did not want it and that it had a potentially devastating
effect on those who used it: ‘its obnoxious odour ascends, irritating heaven
and frightening the spirits.’ These were the brave words of the Chinese
imperial commissioner in Canton, Lin Zexu, who was stirred to send a
complaint all the way to Queen Victoria, and who confiscated 20,000 cases
of opium as well as imprisoning the foreign merchants in their factories. His
actions, regarded in London as outrageously high-handed, set off a conflict
with Great Britain, the First Opium War, which saw British troops capture
port after port along the coast of China – Amoy, Ningbo, even Shanghai.
British naval power proved unstoppable. This was a navy equipped with
ironclad steamships, carrying thousands of troops, and determined to show
that Great Britain would never ever suffer humiliation at the hands of a
Chinese official. The short but sharp conflict was ended by the Treaty of
Nanking in 1842, overwhelmingly favourable to Great Britain, in which
perpetual British rule over a brand new settlement on Victoria Island was
recognized.22
The British were convinced that they needed a permanent base at the
mouth of the Pearl River where they would be entirely free from Chinese
interference. Victoria Harbour was well sheltered; the island, with its steep
mountain known as the Peak, offered little space for building compared to
flat Singapore, but what was planned was a commercial station, not the
teeming city that did emerge. Sir Henry Pottinger, who negotiated the Treaty
of Nanking, declared that he ‘had no predilection in raising a colony at Hong
Kong’, but simply wanted to gain ‘an emporium for our trade and a place
from which Her Majesty’s subjects in China may alike be protected and
controlled’.23 British ships were already poking into the creeks and islands
that lay on the opposite side of the estuary to Macau in 1829, when the EIC
sent at least half a dozen vessels into what would become Victoria Harbour.
The legal status of Macau had never been fixed; Hong Kong was to be
different – a perpetual possession, with the advantage that its native
population was small, maybe 7,500 people, mainly engaged in fishing, and
with no sign of interest by the Chinese authorities.
Charles Elliot, the captain who planted the British flag there in January
1841, was another enthusiast for free trade. He had been entrusted with
finding a suitable island or other perch along the coast of China, and, as a
naval man, he was attracted primarily by the harbour, though back in London
there were many doubts; Lord Palmerston was nonplussed, for it was ‘a
barren island with hardly a house on it’, and ‘it seems obvious that Hong
Kong will not be a Mart of Trade’, but simply a pleasure resort for British
merchants who would still be tied to Canton. Queen Victoria was no more
impressed, even though her name was attached to the territory. And yet had
they seen Hong Kong they might have reacted differently: early visitors were
also enthusiasts for the place itself, for – despite its humidity in summer –
they were impressed by its lush natural beauty, its mountains and its
waterways, which several writers compared to the Scottish highlands.24 In
keeping with this, the name Hong Kong means ‘fragrant harbour’ in
Cantonese, although the origin of the name is uncertain.
Just as at Singapore, land was earmarked for godowns, though strict
conditions were attached to anyone who bought land: leases were limited to
seventy-five years, and within six months the leaseholder had to spend
£1,000 on construction, which guaranteed the mushroom growth of the new
settlement. Sharp protests led to a change in policy: leases were extended to
999 years in 1847, but the only freehold property remains the Anglican
cathedral. Jardine, Matheson & Co. were particularly active, building
godowns for trade and houses for the settlers; they owned a godown ‘so
extensive, as to form almost a town’. The Chinese bazaar was said to be
bigger than that of Macau within a year of the colony’s foundation.
Something of the tone of the colony can be gathered from the fact that one of
the first buildings was that of the exclusive Hong Kong Club, at that time
reserved for white British settlers, among whom Jardine and Matheson were
the most prominent businessmen. Frederick Sassoon, who sat on the
Legislative Council of the colony, was so worried that he would be excluded
as a Jew that he did not apply for membership.25
 From 1843 onwards Chinese settlers were also encouraged to come and
live under the British flag, and there were at least 30,000 of them by the
middle of the century, which was seventy-five times the number of
Europeans, Indians and Americans. As in Singapore, the richest Chinese were
often also the most generous philanthropists. All this resulted in a pleasing
flow of trade: in 1844, only three years after the colony was established, it
was visited by 538 recorded ships. Although the Treaty of Nanking had
brought much-valued access to Shanghai and other ‘Treaty Ports’, Hong
Kong rapidly seized the role of centre of operations, benefiting from its
special status as a Crown Colony in which, unlike the concessionary areas of
the Treaty Ports, Chinese officialdom had no influence at all. Moreover,
having won the Opium War, Great Britain did not need to worry about its
involvement in the opium trade, which completely dominated the trade of
early Hong Kong, so much so that people used cakes of opium as currency
and Macau lost its own opium business to Hong Kong. So firm was British
ascendancy along the coast of China that the opium-traders had no difficulty
in distributing the drug to buyers on the mainland.26 This ascendancy was
consolidated by the Second Opium War, which broke out in 1856 after
Chinese troops mugged the captain of a British schooner out of Hong Kong.
Canton was occupied (with French collaboration), Beijing was raided, and
the Chinese were forced once again to make a humiliating peace. This gave
the British access to yet more Treaty Ports, as well as the right to trade
inland; and it brought part of Kowloon under British rule, the beginning of a
gradual extension of British rule over the southern tip of the Chinese
mainland.
Hong Kong and Singapore became essential links along the chain
extending all the way from London and Liverpool to the Far East. The
idealism of Raffles and Farquhar stands at some distance from the
materialism and cynicism of those who promoted the opium trade through
Hong Kong. Their continuing role as major international centres of trade and
their transformation from cities marked by both extreme affluence and
extreme poverty into two of the wealthiest cities in the world are excellent
examples of the way in which maritime trade has fundamentally altered the
world.
 47

Muscateers and Mogadorians

Historians have rightly insisted that a strongly Eurocentric view of the

world’s history distorts reality; we are prisoners of our sources, but it is
sometimes possible to break free and say something about less well-
documented activities among non-European peoples. Even there, though, the
shadow of Europe often hangs over what at first sight appear to be
autonomous networks of maritime trade. An important example is provided
by the history of the sultans of Oman, whose political and commercial power
extended at its peak from points south and west of Zanzibar in east Africa,
past their old capital at Muscat in Oman, and along the shores of what are
now Pakistan and India, including the trading station at Gwadar, which the
rulers of Oman only ceded to Pakistan in 1958, for a handsome fee of
5,500,000,000 rupees. The Omani ‘empire’ largely consisted of a string of
pearls stretched across a vast expanse of the western Indian Ocean. By the
middle of the nineteenth century the most valuable of these pearls was the
small island of Zanzibar, previously a place of no great importance. This,
then, was another of the newly successful trading towns of the era and,
despite the involvement of the British and the French in its emergence, the
real initiative came from the sultans themselves. Their success was based on
three commodities: cloves, ivory and slaves, and their slave trade boomed
just as the slave trade in other parts of the world was being vigorously
suppressed by the British Navy.
Oman was already a lively centre of naval activity in the seventeenth
century. By the middle of the century the Omanis had recovered Muscat from
the Portuguese, and, once free from foreign shackles, the Omanis established
a reputation for themselves as fearsome pirates. They raided the Portuguese
bases along the coast of east Africa, as far south as Mozambique, beginning
with an attack on Zanzibar in 1652, on Mombasa in 1661 and culminating in
the capture of Mombasa in 1698. They also looked eastwards, sacking the
Portuguese trading station at Diu in India in 1668.1 The rise of Oman was
not all plain sailing, though, as there were endless civil wars and contests for
the throne; this left Mombasa for a long time under a different ruler, but the
Omanis compensated by acquiring Zanzibar and its neighbour Pemba during
the next century, thereafter extending their control over much of the Swahili
coast and building commercial links through Arab merchants some way into
the African interior. From there they acquired not just the ivory for which
demand in western Europe was constantly growing but the slaves whom the
French were using as a labour force in their sugar plantations on Mauritius
and Réunion.2
 Meanwhile Oman flourished as its ships inserted themselves successfully
in the trade in coffee out of Yemen. By 1774, according to a British witness,
most of the Mocca coffee carried up the Persian Gulf to Basra arrived on
board Omani ships based in Muscat. The British were never far away: there
was a British ‘resident’ in Basra who was entitled to a share of the import
duties on coffee, by agreement with the Ottoman government of Iraq. The
British praised ‘the friendship which subsisted betwixt us and the
Muscateers’. As their involvement with the European trade networks
deepened around 1780, the ‘Muscateers’ penetrated markets in India as well,
as far south as Mangalore, bringing the produce of Arabia – pearls, incense,
dates, sold in exchange for sugar and spices which they bought from the
Dutch, including products of the East Indies. As they became more involved
with India, the Omanis attracted Indians, or ‘Banyans’, to their own shores,
and communities of Indian merchants began to form in Muscat and, in due
course, all the way down the coast of east Africa in the Omani-ruled ports.
Around 1800 an Indian named Mowjee was customs farmer in Muscat: ‘a fat
cunning Man and the richest Subject in the Place’, according to an English
witness.3 In 1762 the British in Bombay decided they needed plenty of
slaves, who were to be sent to the new East India Company base that was
being set up in Sumatra. The EIC turned to an Indian merchant in Muscat,
and he provided a batch of African slaves for 10,000 rupees. Muscat began to
acquire a reputation for its safety and its sheer convenience, particularly
compared to ports within the Gulf that the Europeans had been using in the
past; thieves suffered the Koranic penalty of losing their hand, so that
‘merchandise lye constantly in the Streets, without the least fear of
Pilferage’.4
The Omanis did not simply rely on traditional dhows, large and small, in
all their variety. By the end of the eighteenth century the sultan was
commissioning square-rigged ships of European design in India; in 1786 he is
said to have possessed eight men-of-war, for alongside peaceful trade the
sultan engaged in naval wars with his rebellious subjects, and the size of the
fleet doubled in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, as did the volume
of coffee handled by the Muscateers.5 Before 1800, then, the Omanis had
established themselves as valuable middlemen between the European
colonies in India and Indonesia and lands ruled by the Ottomans, the
Persians, African rulers and themselves. Their range extended as far as
Calcutta, the new British base in India, even though this meant they had to
sail their ships right round the subcontinent; but there they could mix with
merchants and sailors from almost every maritime nation under the sun.6
They could also take advantage of the steady reduction in importance of the
Portuguese, in the Indian Ocean, both politically and commercially, and
exploit the rivalry between other Europeans to insert themselves successfully
into the maritime trade of the Indian Ocean.7
The rise of Muscat is only part of the remarkable story of the Omani
maritime empire. Like the commercial empire of the ancient Phoenicians, it
was built around ports, islands and trading counters; and like the Phoenician
trading empire its centre of gravity shifted from its place of origin to a far-off
base: Zanzibar was the new Carthage. Around 1800 Zanzibar was still
‘composed of some few houses, and the rest are huts of straw mat’, in the
eyes of a British visitor. Yet it had already become the main meeting point in
the western Indian Ocean for Europeans, Arabs, Indians and Africans,
famous for its supplies of ivory.8 By 1744 an Omani governor operated from
Zanzibar, and by 1822, when the sultan signed a treaty with Captain Fairfax
Moresby, representing Great Britain, in Muscat, the Omani ascendancy was
clear. Under the terms of this agreement the Omanis promised to cease
selling slaves to the western Europeans or in India, as part of the great British
crusade against slave-trading across the world.9
This had the unexpected result of stimulating the Omani trade in east
African slaves, as other sources of supply dried up, for there were still
swathes of territory where slaves could be bought and sold, in their tens of
thousands, including the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba. The worst form this
already horrible trade took was the callous, indeed murderous, treatment of
African boys in a Coptic monastery on Mount Jebel-Eter in Sudan that
specialized in castration. Clamped to a table, the victims had their penis and
scrotum removed in one quick swipe, leaving ‘a large, gaping sore that does
not heal kindly’, all the more so since there was little attempt to staunch the
flow of blood. The boys were then buried in packed sand to keep them
immobile; ‘it is estimated 35,000 little Africans are annually sacrificed to
produce the Soudanese average quota of its 3,800 eunuchs.’10 Even if the
assumption that mortality approached 90 per cent is an exaggeration (and it is
impossible to say), demand for eunuchs in princely courts around the Indian
Ocean did not slacken.
The attractions of Zanzibar became more and more obvious to the sultans.
One practical advantage was the quality of its well-protected deep-water
harbours, and another was the excellent supply of fresh water, while the fact
that it was a small island close to the African shore provided natural
defences.11 Sayyid Said bin Sultan made the decision to transfer his centre of
government from Muscat to Zanzibar. He was a great traveller, visiting
Zanzibar in 1802, aged only eleven, and again in 1828, while the Omanis
were once again trying to conquer Mombasa. At this point he seems to have
laid plans for the move, building a new palace and finally settling there in
1832; according to tradition he set sail on a ship owned by one of his
favourite Banyan, or Indian, merchants. He lived another twenty-four years,
so he had plenty of time to consolidate his interests in east Africa, as well as
presiding over the growth of Zanzibar City. That became his preferred
residence, but he continued to travel back and forth between his domains,
dying while en route to Zanzibar on what would have been his ninth trip.
Thus he took care not to neglect his ancestral lands just because his main
base was now far away in east Africa.12
By now the Moresby Treaty was beginning to bite; but that did not prevent
the sultan from devising a new way to make a fortune. The great
transformation that now took place was the development of clove plantations
in Zanzibar and Pemba, the most successful attempt so far to create a major
source of this spice outside the Moluccas; it is said that he ordered his
subjects to plant three clove trees for every one coconut palm on their land,
subject to a penalty of confiscation of their farm if they failed to comply.13
Transplanting cloves to soil closer to Europe had been the dream of colonists
in Madagascar, Mauritius and elsewhere. In addition, vast numbers of
elephants were slaughtered in the African hinterland to supply European
demand for high-quality ivory; Arab and Swahili merchants penetrated deep
into the interior, as far as Lake Nyasa, in their search for African goods. A
very active market for ivory emerged in the United States, as elephants were
sacrificed to manufacture piano keys, combs and billiard balls, while
Zanzibaris hungered for American cotton cloths. In 1828, while Sayyid Said
was in Zanzibar, he received an American merchant named Edmund Roberts
and encouraged him to ask the US government to enter into a trade treaty.
This was duly signed, and the benefits for the Omanis went beyond simple
sales of raw materials: in 1840 an Omani ship, the Sultanah, sailed all the
way to America, with the sultan’s ambassador on board. Ivory prices
continued to rise, and at the same time the cost of manufactured goods sent
from Europe and America continued to fall. This placed Zanzibar in a very
advantageous position. Indeed, Sultan Said was receiving more than 500,000
Maria Theresa silver dollars (MT$) from customs dues and taxes levied in
east Africa and Oman by the time of his death in 1856. By 1890 revenues
from Muscat were in steep decline, but for Zanzibar this was only the
beginning as revenues soared to reach MT$800,000.14

II

The patronage Sultan Said and his successors extended to Indian merchants,
in many cases Hindu or Parsee, has intriguing parallels on the other side of
Africa. Religious outsiders might suffer discrimination, but they could also
build especially strong bonds to a ruler who cared for them. In the far north-
west of the continent another dynasty of Muslim rulers anxious to make big
profits out of trade extended its protection to Jewish merchants, and there too
the result was the flowering of a new city.15 Today Essaouira in south-
western Morocco makes its money from tourism (the strong winds attract
plenty of surfers) and from argan oil, of which it is the world’s only source.
However, before the First World War it was Morocco’s window on the
world, a place where merchants from England, France and Spain, along with
Sephardic merchants from Morocco itself, and the sultan’s watchful
government, collaborated in a largely successful attempt to make it the richest
port in Atlantic Morocco. Generally known, until Morocco recovered its
independence in the 1950s, as Mogador, it will be called by that name in this
chapter.
Like Hong Kong, Singapore and Zanzibar, Mogador was to all intents a
new town, although the Phoenicians had traded from the rocky offshore
island of Mogador, and the Portuguese and other foreign powers briefly
occupied the site. Mogador’s advantage was that there was a straight run
across country to Marrakesh, which vied with Fez for the role of capital of
Morocco, and which was the gateway through which much of the trans-
Sahara caravan traffic passed. While it never rivalled in size Alexandria or
Beirut, the intermediary role of Mogador gave it an importance out of all
proportion to its physical size and population – up to 20,000 inhabitants
towards the end of the nineteenth century, of whom at some points as many
as half were Jews. The growth of this trading centre transformed the society
and economy of the entire region, resulting in the creation of a ‘capitalist’
class of landowners and merchants, as well as increasing dependence on
foreign rather than locally produced goods; and the ripples were felt as far
away as sub-Saharan Africa, England and even China.16
Sidi Muhammad ibn Abdallah, the sultan of Morocco, founded Mogador in
1764 with the specific intention of making it into the prime centre of trade
with Europe, which also meant that it could tap into Europe’s trade across the
oceans. The Danes had received generous concessions all along the Atlantic
coast of Morocco in 1751, giving them a monopoly on foreign trade, and the
sultan now realized that it was more in his interests to take charge of foreign
trade himself: he wanted control of the revenues, and he wanted to increase
his authority in southern Morocco. Despite the strong winds, the harbour was
thought promising, better than others along an otherwise rather desolate
coastline. Sidi Muhammad was happy to invest heavily in this port,
commissioning buildings by foreign architects, who laid out the streets,
squares and major buildings of the town on a square plan similar to that of
new European cities – its elegant ‘Portuguese’ fort supposedly of the
sixteenth century was in fact built by the Genoese in the eighteenth
century.17 But Sidi Muhammad also needed to populate Mogador, and the
local Berbers could not provide the experienced mercantile class he was
seeking. So, on the advice of a Jewish adviser at his court, Samuel Sumbal,
he nominated members of ten wealthy Jewish families from across his
realms, several from his own capital at Marrakesh – families such as Corcos,
Macnin and Sebag, who would play a vital role in the success of nineteenth-
century Mogador, while several of these names became well known in
business circles in London and Paris, as the families set up trading houses in
Europe. Many of them were drawn from families that had arrived from Spain
and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century, for Moroccan Jewish society
was sharply divided between a closed group of wealthy families claiming
Spanish origins and a large mass of poorer Jews, living in their towns and
villages since time immemorial, and sometimes descended from ancient
Berber converts to Judaism.18
 A crucial aspect of the sultan’s relationship with the Jews was that they
were, to use his own phrase, his Jews. This did not mean that they were his
property, any more than the use of similar phrases in medieval Europe had
meant that Jews were the slaves of Christian kings. But Islam prescribed a
particular relationship between Muslim governments and Jews (or Christians
– but native Christians were absent from Morocco). They were accepted as
part of the fabric of society, ‘second-class citizens – but citizens’ in Bernard
Lewis’s concise formulation. They were dhimmis, meaning ‘protected
persons’, but they were not to exercise direct authority over Muslims. When
fully applied, the restrictions imposed on the main mass of Moroccan Jews
were often humiliating and severe: if a Muslim struck a Jew, the Jew had no
right to reply in kind; they were ordered to wear dull black clothes; and so
on.19 However, they were free to practise their religion; and the leading
families found ways to avoid or claim exemption from the disabilities.
Precisely because they stood outside the political jungle of tribal and
factional politics, rulers saw them as neutral but dependent and dependable
agents, and nowhere more so than in the world of trade, where their
knowledge of languages and family connections across wide spaces qualified
them extremely well for the sultan’s patronage.
So it was that families such as the Corcos, descended from Spanish
refugees who had arrived in Marrakesh by way of Portugal and Fez, found
themselves the intimates of the Moroccan sultans, advising the royal palace
on political developments in the countryside, which their agents observed as
they travelled between Mogador and their markets in the interior.20 They and
a few other leading families became the ‘merchants of the sultan’, tujjār as-
Sultān; but this was more than a title, for they actually traded on the sultan’s
account, theoretically at least with his rather than their money; ‘the sultan
was in effect the pre-eminent merchant of the country.’21 The underlying
reality was that the sultan’s own resources depended significantly on loans,
taxes and gifts from the tujjār. All this was arranged carefully, since Islamic
law forbids the direct payment of interest, with the result that the merchants
paid a share of their profits to the sultan, rather than paying him interest on
the sums that the government had entrusted to them for trade. When the
father of Abraham Corcos died in 1853, the sultan sent letters to Corcos
stating that ‘your father was our friend and was one of us – his death has
greatly distressed us’. A few years later, a letter arrived from the sultan’s
palace, reminding Abraham’s brother Jacob that the sultan had ordered
American linen cloth for his army, and asking for still more to be supplied to
make covers for army horses. The supply of uniforms for his army depended
heavily on the Corcos family’s links to the outside world.22
With the sultan’s blessing, then, the Jewish merchants dominated and
looked outwards from Mogador. They were permitted to live in the fortified
casbah, the royal quarter, while poorer Jews were ordered to live in the
Jewish quarter, or mellah, established in Mogador in 1806.23 At the end of
the nineteenth century the right to live in the casbah was a special mercy, as
immigration from the countryside by poor Jews led to severe overcrowding in
the mellah, which became notorious for disease. The casbah, at the other end
of town, contained handsome town houses built around shady courtyards in
the traditional Moroccan style, several of which have now been converted
into riyad hotels for tourists.24 From the houses overlooking the royal square
the sultan’s merchants were able to look down on the harbour, barely five
minutes’ walk away, and see their goods being unloaded. Their own
partnerships mirrored those of the Cairo Genizah a millennium earlier: they
entered into written contracts where a sleeping partner put up funds and sent
a travelling partner off on business, looking forward to a division of the
profits on his return. These partnerships also took another form, as the
leading business families married among themselves, or occasionally made
marriage alliances with Sephardic families with whom they traded in London,
Livorno or Lisbon, in Gibraltar, Marseilles or Amsterdam.25 It was a tightly
knit community and yet it was also a widespread one.
 Foreign contacts took another form too. Abraham Corcos became vice-
consul for the United States in Mogador in 1862. He extended US consular
protection to his agents trading across Morocco; this unsettled the Moroccan
authorities, because placing Jews under foreign protection undermined the
claim of the sultan to be their protector. Corcos’s initiative was followed by
other honorary consuls in Mogador, as also happened in Alexandria, Salonika
and Smyrna. It is not clear that Corcos’s English was at all good, but what the
foreign powers wanted was someone who could communicate on the ground.
A photograph of him from 1880 shows an elderly bald figure in a frock coat,
which increasingly became the uniform of the Mogador Jewish merchants.26
This was part of a wider process of acculturation not to Moroccan but to
European habits. Although the merchant houses were splendid examples of
traditional Moroccan domestic architecture, the life lived within their walls
took on an increasingly western European character, for the Mogador elite,
like the Sephardic elite in Salonika or Alexandria, became fluent in French
and English, and even established an English-speaking school.
The Sephardic diaspora, out of which early generations of Portuguese
merchants trading in Italy, Turkey, the Atlantic islands, the Caribbean and
even India had emerged, continued to hold together as Mogador came into
existence. There were also some wealthy Muslim merchants in Mogador,
with whom relations seem to have been perfectly cordial, but the significant
business community other than the Jews consisted of the foreign merchants
from England, Holland, Denmark, Spain and elsewhere. They were
particularly important before 1800 – there was a Franciscan church to cater
for the needs of the Spanish merchants. For more than forty years, from 1845
to 1886, a British consul, John Drummond Hay, exercised great influence in
Mogador.27 Great Britain was the biggest trade partner of Morocco by 1800.
This meant that the Jews of Mogador and other Moroccan towns, who
possessed close ties with the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in London,
and who often had relatives in Gibraltar, were ideally placed to serve his
needs.28 A series of trade agreements between Morocco and Great Britain
culminated in a treaty signed in 1856 that abolished or lowered many taxes
and set a standard for future British trade agreements elsewhere in the world.
The treaty acted as a spur to the vigorous development of trade through
Mogador, in tea, sugar and Western manufactures.29
It has been seen that the sultan was keen to buy American cloth, but
English cloth was in greater demand, woven in Manchester, where the Jewish
families of Mogador often had agents, relatives and investments. Aaron
Afriat set himself up in business in England in 1867, and specialized in tea
and cloth. Indeed, at-Tay Afriat, ‘Afriat Tea’, was the Moroccan equivalent
of Twinings or Tetley, available all over Morocco by way of Mogador, while
Afriat’s linen cloth was sold right across the Sahara.30 Tea was the greatest
contribution of the Mogador Jewish traders to Morocco – indeed to Moroccan
civilization. Here was a product of India and China that had been carried
from the Pacific, or at least the Indian Ocean, all the way to England, before
being re-exported to north Africa. Although it was brewed and drunk in
different ways to England (no milk but several sprigs of fresh mint), tea
captured the markets of the Maghrib as successfully as it had already
captured the markets of England, Sweden or the United States. Linked to the
tea trade was the sugar trade out of the West Indies, since the Moroccans
preferred their tea very sweet, generally placing a large lump of sugar in the
mouth of the teapot, over which they poured hot water. The use of boiled
water improved health across the north African population. As the tea craze
gripped Morocco, demand for Chinese and Japanese porcelain grew in
wealthy households, and it was brought in by way of London or
Amsterdam.31
Morocco had much less to offer to the outside world. When Meir Macnin,
who dubiously claimed to be the sultan’s ambassador to the Court of St
James, sailed to London in July 1799 aboard the Aurora there was nothing
very exotic about its cargo of goatskins, calf hides, almonds and gum arabic.
Morocco leather was the most famous product, and reached markets as far
afield as Russia, by way of English or other intermediaries. Mules were sent
to the West Indies. The sultan occasionally banned the export of potentially
lucrative products such as olive oil and honey. There was, though, active
demand for Moroccan cattle in Gibraltar, primarily to feed the British
garrison, and the sultan had a consul there from 1796 or earlier. This trade,
largely out of Tetuan rather than Mogador, netted the sultan a nice income.32
However, the sultan’s interest in Gibraltar was not simply economic: there
were times when Sidi Muhammad imagined he could earn the trust of Great
Britain and win support for his attempts to gain control of the Spanish
presidios of Ceuta and Melilla. Moreover, the trade with Gibraltar had a
military dimension: he obtained gunpowder and naval stores through the
Rock.33 Signs that Morocco might have more to offer were visible in 1784,
just after the Great Siege of Gibraltar, when some merchants based on the
Rock mentioned in a report that gold dust, ivory and ostrich feathers were
now arriving. Later, by way of Mogador, the trade in ostrich feathers to
England, France and elsewhere was to develop into a very lively business
during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, driven by changing
fashions in Europe. Yet what is also significant about these three products is
that they were drawn from sub-Saharan Africa, carried on camel caravans all
the way to the Atlantic coast for trans-shipment to western Europe. Just as
Zanzibar was the gateway to the produce of south-eastern Africa, Mogador
was the gateway to the produce of large tracts of west Africa.

III

Further proof that the Sephardic trading network had not lost its vitality
within the Atlantic is provided by the way Moroccan Jews seized new trading
opportunities across the Portuguese island world. Lisbon, already home to
New Christians who practised their old religion out of sight, attracted settlers
from Mogador and other Moroccan towns, and in 1816 the Portuguese
government agreed to readmit those living openly as Jews.34 Jews from
Portugal and Morocco struck out across the Atlantic. Important economic
initiatives were begun in the Portuguese Azores during the nineteenth
century, thanks to the Bensaúde family, one of whom became a leading
figure in Portuguese academic life (and an expert, among other things, on the
voyages of discovery), while their company still dominates the economy of
the archipelago. They arrived in 1818, and they exploited business contacts
with England to tap into the shipping lines linking the Azores not just to
Portugal, Great Britain and Morocco, but to Newfoundland and Brazil. One
particularly prominent Jewish businessman was Elias Bensaúde, who
possessed an enormous variety of interests, including a tobacco factory and
inter-island trade. He had a penchant for oranges, which he sent in all
directions, thanks to his close collaboration with partners in London,
Manchester and beyond, from where he obtained ironmongery and other
essentials that he sold in the islands. Although his family did much to
transform the Azores from a sleepy outpost of Portugal into an Atlantic hub,
the Bensaúdes were by no means alone, and there was a steady stream of
Jewish immigrants from Morocco, so that in mid-century fifteen out of 167
members of the Commercial Chamber in Ponta Delgada, the capital of the
Azores, were Jewish immigrants.35
Looking even deeper into the Atlantic, Moroccan Jews settled in the Cape
Verde Islands, which had once been the haunt of New Christians. As Great
Britain placed increasing pressure on its ‘oldest ally’, Portugal, to abolish its
all-too-active slave trade, from 1818 onwards the Cape Verde Islands came
under increasing scrutiny, as Portugal’s main holding station for African
slaves despatched to the West Indies. Looking for a source of income other
than slaving, the Portuguese colonial regime installed coal depots in the
islands, notably at Mindelo on São Vicente in 1838; the rise of the steamship
created new opportunities for anyone prepared to maintain massive stocks of
coal. But that meant importing coal; these are volcanic islands totally lacking
in coal mines. In 1890, 156 ships are said to have unloaded more than
657,000,000 metric tons of coal, in a year when 2,264 ships visited Mindelo.
It is hard to believe this figure, but even if it is exaggerated the fact remains
that these ships carried nearly 344,000 people and that their cargo (other than
coal) amounted to well over 4,000,000 tons.36 Whatever the correct figures
may have been, Mindelo attracted Jewish merchants from Tangier anxious to
service this trade alongside coal merchants from England.37
The two examples of Zanzibar and Mogador are of special interest as
success stories in which non-European rulers took important economic
initiatives, making full use of the non-Muslim communities in and beyond
their borders. That said, the European and American connections were vital
to the success of these ports, and in both cases their rulers understood the
importance of trade treaties with European powers. Similar stories of success
can also be told about other marginal groups whose members took advantage
of the expansion of commerce across the oceans to set up trading counters in
improbable places: Armenians, Syrian Christians, Greeks (some of whom
penetrated deep into central Africa), Indians (in South Africa). Sailors too
came from many backgrounds. The Indian Ocean had provided manpower on
board European ships since the sixteenth century; the ‘Lascars’ who helped
sail European ships originated in lands as diverse as Somaliland, Yemen,
India, Ceylon, Malaya and the Philippines, though in their case ill-treatment
sometimes gave rise to mutiny against European captains. Still, without them
it is hard to see how the routes across not just the Indian Ocean but all the
oceans could have been maintained.38 Another group of Jews, not Sephardim
of Spanish and Portuguese descent but Mizrahi (‘eastern’) Jews from
Baghdad, played a prominent role in the economic development of Hong
Kong. In the age of the steamship the opportunities were endless and
distances somehow seemed more manageable. Maybe, indeed, they could
become more manageable still if ways through Suez and Panama could be
created.
 Part Five

T H E O C E A N S C O N TA I N E D ,
AD 1850–2000
 48

Continents Divided, Oceans Conjoined

The search for more direct routes from Europe to the Far East had continued
without interruption since the days of Columbus and Cabot. The possibility
of an Arctic route was still being mooted when Sir John Franklin led his
disastrous and long-lamented expedition to the icy wastes north of Canada in
1845.1 The increasing role in international trade of the east-coast ports of the
United States also stimulated thinking about new routes to the riches of the
Orient, since the voyage around Cape Horn and the voyage past the Cape of
Good Hope were long and sometimes dangerous. In addition to the Pacific
fur trade, the Americans were heavily involved in whaling, sending ships out
from Nantucket and into the Pacific by way of the Indian Ocean. Ships
suitable for whaling began to be constructed in Nantucket in 1694, and other
New England towns followed suit: New Bedford had eighty large whalers by
1775. At first these ships hunted whales in cold northern waters or (when
searching for sperm whales) in the warmer waters of the central Atlantic, but
they began to penetrate the Pacific as well, by way of Cape Horn; in 1850 the
whaler Hannibal sailed all the way to the still impenetrable north-west coast
of Japan, three years before Commander Perry’s famous attempt to break into
Japanese trade.2 Herman Melville enthused about the Pacific in his tale of
American whalers, Moby-Dick:

To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld,

must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters
of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The
same waves wash the moles of the new-built California towns but
 yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but
still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all
between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless,
unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this
mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world’s whole bulk about; makes
all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth.3

After the United States acquired California from Mexico in 1848,

American interest in the Pacific grew further; but a transcontinental railway
was still a dream, and it was far easier to send Asian goods to New York by
way of Mexico or the isthmus of Panama than across the Rocky Mountains
and through the large expanses inhabited by native Americans. On the other
hand, rumour had it that Japan was rich in coal, and naval strategists could
see that it was vital to create coaling stations around the globe now that the
steamship was coming into its own, as Great Britain had managed to do in
Mindelo and elsewhere. Coal rather than silk brought the Americans to Japan.
The Japanese were startled by Commander Perry’s ‘black ships’, belching
smoke, when the Americans reached Edo Bay in 1853, in an episode that is,
rather exaggeratedly, seen as the moment Japan opened up to the wider world
after centuries of near seclusion.
Like Ishmael in Moby-Dick, Perry had set out from the east coast of
America, not from California. Perry travelled most of the way on a steam-
powered paddleboat that took him around the bottom of Africa to Macau,
Shanghai and the Ryukyu Islands, before he brazenly forced his way into Edo
Bay (now known as Tokyo Bay), parading his ironclad steamboats and his
firepower and flatly refusing to follow Japanese instructions: as far as the
Japanese were concerned, there was a single place, Nagasaki, where
foreigners could trade. Although he managed to secure a treaty on a second
visit, in 1854, the agreement focused on consular representation for stranded
sailors rather than trade, and powerful interests at court remained very hostile
to the idea of opening up the imperial ports. In the short term, the main effect
of Commander Perry’s visit was that the Dutch argued for more generous
terms of trade through their base at Deshima, and the Russians and the British
obtained similar rights to the Americans.
It was not much; but the door to Japan was open a crack, and a commercial
treaty was signed in 1858, permitting the Americans to trade through
Yokohama, near Edo. From the American perspective the advantages of
trading directly with Japan remained limited while the route to Japan was so
arduous. From the Japanese perspective, trade with the outside world was at
best a mixed blessing. The Americans might not yet account for much, but
taken together foreign trade had a massive impact on the economy of Japan.
Foreign goods began to compete with domestic products; powerful foreign
demand for silk, tea and copper forced up prices for Japanese consumers; the
low price of gold in relation to silver within Japan created strong foreign
demand for its gold, which flowed out relentlessly and was replaced by
foreign silver. These changes were not easy to absorb: they happened fast,
and on an alarming scale; between 1854 and 1865 the price of raw silk
trebled, and the price of tea doubled; even the price of the staple foodstuff,
rice, shot up.4 Not surprisingly, then, the arrival of the ‘barbarians’ opened
up new controversies within Japan: should the intruders be welcomed, as one
party more loyal to the shoguns insisted, or should they all be expelled, as the
first stage in a return to traditional values, including proper reverence for the
emperor rather than the shogun – to cite the much-read author Kamo
Mabuchi (d. 1769), ‘the Way of the gods is superior to the Ways of foreign
lands’? The debate about the ‘barbarians’ and other arguments about the
reform of government in Japan culminated in the abolition of the shogunate
in 1868 and the creation of the emperor-centred Meiji regime, dedicated to
modernization on Japanese terms. As Macpherson noted, ‘Perry’s black ships
symbolize the challenge of possible western colonization. The response was
not to withdraw further into an isolationist posture but to emulate and catch
up with the West.’ The encounter with Perry and with other foreign ships
helped create a curious amalgam combining Japanese civilization with
European technology. Vigorous and imaginative reforms attempted, with
varying success, to adapt Japanese society to its new outward-facing
existence, notably the creation of a Ministry of Commerce which made
government loans available to producers.5
The foreigners were not expelled and the Americans became keen to
capitalize on their new opportunities. Reaching Asia would become much
less difficult if transit through the narrow neck of Central America could be
made easier. Panama had long been a transfer point for goods brought from
China and the Philippines. The name Panama meant ‘the place where many
fish are taken’. It was originally applied to a little town on the Pacific that
was wrecked by Henry Morgan in 1671, whereupon a new settlement was
created on the site of modern-day Panama City. Both gave access to a ‘royal
road’ that was barely a mule track, across which goods were humped to
Nombre de Dios, a very modest little port on the Caribbean, founded as far
back as 1510. It failed to flourish since the larger town of Veracruz, in
Mexico, was adopted instead as the main departure point for the ships
carrying Asian goods, as well as Central American ones, towards Europe.
But, in the eyes of nineteenth-century observers, the location looked just right
for a railway linking the two oceans, or even – maybe an impossible dream –
a canal cutting right through Central America.6

II

Although, after many frustrating decades, the Panama Canal was eventually
built by the United States, the pioneers of this great project, the largest
engineering project in human history, before the late twentieth century, were
not American but French. Their enthusiasm for a canal through Central
America was generated in part by their success in promoting what, on the
surface, seemed a similar scheme, the Suez Canal.7 Ambitious canal projects
across large areas of land were in vogue in the middle of the nineteenth
century: other examples of massive, and very successful, canal projects
included the Erie Canal linking the Great Lakes in North America to the
Hudson River and the sixty-mile Caledonian Canal across Scotland.8
Actually, the digging of a canal between Africa and Asia was a lesser
challenge than the building of the Panama Canal: the land was fairly flat; it
was not crossed by powerful rivers; heavy rains did not interfere with the
project; there were saltwater lakes through which a route could be dredged;
there were traces of much older canals that proved such a route was possible;
a labour supply was available among the Egyptian fellahin. There was, it is
true, some anxiety about the lower level of the Mediterranean compared to
the Indian Ocean; and, as at Panama, there were political and financial
challenges that had to be met in addition to the technical problem of actually
digging the canal.
The building of a canal through Suez excited romantic ideas of the
‘conjoining of East and West’ in ways that the building of a canal through
Panama did not. In the 1830s Barthélemy-Prosper Enfantin became the self-
appointed apostle of a new world order in which East and West would join in
a single ‘nuptial bed’, consummating their marriage ‘by the piercing of a
canal through the isthmus of Suez’.9 Enfantin was by any standards a
colourful eccentric, with his sky-blue cloak and his exaggeratedly pseudo-
oriental costume; but the Parisians took him to their heart, and his insistence
(guided by the thinking of Saint-Simon) on the urgent need for both material
and moral improvement appealed not just to the French but to the rulers of
Egypt, beginning with the redoutable Muhammad Ali. But Ali was less
impressed by the argument for a canal than he was by the arguments for
modernizing, even attempting to industrialize, Egypt: trade through
Alexandria and other ports produced much-needed revenue for the treasury;
and Ali was, nominally at least, only the viceroy of the Ottoman sultan in
Constantinople, who was opposed to the plan, as, initially, were the British,
who valued the existing link between Alexandria and England – a steam
packet set out from Falmouth in Cornwall every month, bound for Malta and
Alexandria. The last thing Great Britain wanted was France fishing in its own
waters within the Indian Ocean, which would become much easier if a canal
carried French shipping from Marseilles to India.10
Once Muhammad Ali had died, French attempts to convince the viceroy of
the financial benefits Egypt, or rather the rulers of Egypt, could draw from a
canal began to succeed. Its great proponent, Ferdinand de Lesseps, turned his
charm on the new viceroy, Said, whose passion for macaroni had made him
thoroughly obese; but he was a clever enough political operator, and he fell in
with de Lesseps’s attempts to sell shares in the scheme. This did not work out
well for Said: when the shares offer was undersold, Said had to pick up the
remaining shares, but at least the project was well under way by the time that
Said died in 1863, and the viceroy received a special bonus: the new port at
the northern end of the canal, where work had begun, was named Port Said in
his honour. Said raised a labour force through a corvée imposed on Egyptian
peasants, which was deeply unpopular with his subjects. His successor,
Ismail, had never much liked the use of corvée labour, and its abolition left
de Lesseps in a dilemma. The solution was to use machines rather than men,
and a French machine-tool factory jumped at the opportunity to design a
whole range of diggers and dredgers suitable for different soils, so that, by
the time work was completed late in 1869, most of the hard work had been
done by machine.
The financial situation was less satisfactory. Ismail spent 240,000,000
francs on the canal, and the political price was high: the Suez Canal
Company assumed ever greater powers over the project and over the affairs
of the Europeans living in the canal zone, to Ismail’s consternation. The
viceroys were promised 15 per cent of the profits, but by the time the canal
was open Ismail had run out of money, and was paying hefty rates of interest
on loans that de Lesseps had secured in Paris. Looking back, what is
astonishing in the case of this canal and the Panama Canal is the willingness
of investors to place money in projects which would, at best, produce returns
far in the future, assuming the project proved viable. This reveals deep-rooted
optimism about the desirability, even inevitability, of progress, and of man’s
mastery over nature. Traffic took time to pick up: although just under 500
ships passed through Suez in the first full year of operations, 1870, they
accounted for less than 10 per cent of the cargo Ismail had expected to see;
and the financial outlook was grim enough for the Suez Canal Company in
Paris to declare no dividend.11 Nor is this surprising: shipping companies
had to adapt to the novelty of a route out East that was almost entirely
different to the Cape route. Sadly, Ismail did not reap the rewards he had
been promised. Ever deeper in debt, spending more on servicing his debts
(roughly £5,000,000 per annum) than he was receiving from the canal, the
khedive, to give him the grand title conferred by the Ottoman sultan, made
the reluctant decision to sell his shares, upon which Benjamin Disraeli stole a
march on his French rivals and bought up 44 per cent of the canal for
£4,000,000 in 1875. He understood perfectly the importance of the canal in
assuring quick access to British India, and assured Queen Victoria that ‘it is
vital to Your Majesty’s authority and power at this critical moment, that the
Canal should belong to England’.12 Ten years later the number of ships
peaked, with, on average, ten a day passing through the waterway, and the
tonnage easily exceeded the 5,000,000 Ismail had been told to expect.
 The Suez Canal was, then, much more than a link between the
Mediterranean and the Red Sea – it was a new and shorter route from the
Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and Pacific. The route from Britain to the Far
East became more than 3,000 miles shorter in distance and ten or twelve days
shorter in time.13 The principal beneficiary was Great Britain, not just
politically but commercially: in 1889 more than 70 per cent of the goods sent
through the canal were carried in British bottoms, while the French accounted
for roughly 5 per cent. In London, the Board of Trade reported that ‘the trade
between Europe and the East flows more and more through the Canal, and
the British flag covers an ever increasing proportion of this trade’.14 Whether
the cities around the Mediterranean benefited much from the canal is a moot
point: Trieste, then under Austrian rule, did send ships through the canal, but
the number was tiny by comparison with British numbers; and Alexandria
lost its importance as a bridge between the Indian Ocean and the
Mediterranean now that it could be bypassed through Port Said. Britain
expanded its power and influence in the Mediterranean, but always with an
eye on its route to India, along which its colonies of Gibraltar, Malta and
eventually Cyprus became stepping stones. For British, German and other
northern European ships, the Mediterranean became a passageway between
two oceans, rather than a sea of interest in its own right.

III

The Panama Canal too was not created to service the needs of the local sea,
the Caribbean, that lay on its Atlantic side, but to meet the interests of trading
companies in Atlantic North America and Europe with ambitions in the Far
East. Travelling by way of Cape Horn, the journey from New York to San
Francisco would cover 13,000 miles, and it could take several months. By
way of Panama, the journey covered only 5,000 miles.15 However, war
between Spain and Britain rendered Panama unsafe, even less safe than the
Cape Horn route that Spanish treasure ships began to use from 1748 onwards,
in the hope of avoiding British predators in the Caribbean. Meanwhile the
French had been thinking that it might be possible to carve a waterway
through Central America ever since 1735, when an astronomer was sent out
in the hope that he could identify a suitable route. What he suggested, after
five years of exploration, was a passage upriver through Nicaragua, then
across Lake Nicaragua itself. This would have minimized the need to cut
through difficult terrain, but it was a long way to go, assuming the river could
carry ships all the way; and as the British built up their interests along the
Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua, in competition with Spain, political
sensitivities made this plan unworkable. A British alliance with the Indians
who lived around the mouth of the river killed the project. The future Lord
Nelson was given command of a small squadron whose task, he wrote, was
‘to possess the Lake of Nicaragua which, for the present, may be looked upon
as the inland Gibraltar of Spanish America’. Not for the first time, tropical
diseases rather than a human enemy frustrated British attempts to hold on to
Nicaragua.16 Still, it was generally agreed that the best route across Central
America lay through Nicaragua, and this opinion was confirmed when, in
1811, the great German geographer Alexander von Humboldt declared that
there was no suitable alternative. He was taken seriously because he knew
South America so intimately, but the truth was that he had never visited
either of the two sites.17
Political conditions proved to be crucial in solving the problem of where to
place a route between the oceans. In the years around 1820 Spain lost control
of its colonies in northern South America, resulting in the creation of ‘Gran
Colombia’, known for a time as New Granada, which included the narrow
neck of Panama as well as modern-day Colombia and several of its
neighbours. Its inhabitants, and the government of New Granada, were keen
to see a canal built through the isthmus. Licences to explore were put up for
sale. Among the bidders were the Americans, encouraged by Andrew
Jackson, the president, even though Jackson preferred them to bid for a
Nicaragua route. And, while a canal would obviously take a good many years
to plan and build, a railway across Central America could be constructed
much more quickly.
Here the French, the British and the Americans jostled for position. The
United States was keen to keep the British, the French and the Dutch out of
Central America, and made a treaty with New Granada in 1848 that granted
the Americans the right to send troops to Panama if other foreign forces
began to interfere. The Americans avoided all foreign entanglements, and the
decision, uniquely, to go ahead with the New Granadan treaty showed how
greatly the United States valued the potential of Central America as a
strategic route into the Pacific. Finally, in 1849, Lord Palmerston, as Foreign
Secretary, accepted that tension with the United States had risen to a
dangerous point and negotiated a deal with the USA under which neither side
would try to gain exclusive rights over a canal across Central America. But
the effect of this agreement was that neither side was really able to move
ahead with its own project. That did not prevent an American businessman,
William Aspinwall of New York, from buying the right to build a railway
(and possibly a canal) between Panama City and the Caribbean. His plan was
to meet the needs of passengers aboard his new shipping service from San
Francisco to Panama, which would connect to shipping bound for New
England.18
Events rushed ahead of Aspinwall. In 1848 news reached the eastern
United States that gold had been discovered in California, which had only
just been acquired from Mexico. By the end of the year a steamboat, the
Falcon, was heading south by way of Louisiana, bound for the isthmus of
Panama, where a couple of hundred passengers were to be transported across
land in dreadful conditions that they had not stopped to consider before
sailing. This was only the first wave of a flood of people who imagined that
they could enrich themselves at a stroke in the goldfields of California. Even
the sailors who had manned the boats that took gullible Americans from
Panama to San Francisco often abandoned ship when they reached California,
which left a great many rotting ships in San Francisco Bay, and fewer and
fewer ships ready for boarding in Panama. Meanwhile Panama City
mushroomed much faster than its very limited infrastructure could manage. It
became a shanty town of brothels and bars, with plenty of violence on the
streets. One of its good-natured pioneers was the British widow Mary
Seacole, partly of West Indian extraction, who set up the ‘British Hotel’ and
tried to offer acceptable food while also ministering to victims of shootings
and stabbings, not to mention the many victims of yellow fever and
malaria.19 Yet all this greed and gore showed ever more clearly that a
manageable route across Central America was badly needed if the United
States were to make full use of the opportunities created by the acquisition of
a western seaboard.
 So the railway did come into being, after a route was hacked through the
jungle by thousands of navvies, very many of whom had arrived from
Jamaica, where jobs were few and pay was low. Physical conditions in the
isthmus were far worse than back home, but the West Indians had more
natural immunity to yellow fever and were generally regarded as good
workers, even though they were treated less well than whites. The railway
was opened in February 1855. One historian of the Panama Canal has
observed: ‘Panama was the railway.’ European governments, especially Great
Britain, wondered if the United States had become too powerful in the
isthmus, not just because of the heavy capital investment in the railway but
because an American elite had installed itself there, and the new town of
Colón, long to remain the principal American base there, was to all intents an
American settlement, even if it had an extreme Wild West flavour. The
cutting of the railway proved that Humboldt had been wrong: the mountains
were not impassable, even if building a waterway was vastly more
complicated than building a railway track that could handle reasonably steep
gradients.20 And, although the line had been laid mainly by sheer human
muscle power, the railway, like the shipping routes from New England to
Colón and from Panama City to San Francisco, made use of steam power,
which was transforming communications in these decades.
The fact that a well-functioning railway now existed through Panama did
not dent enthusiasm for a canal taking a completely different route. Nicaragua
did seem to make good sense, and on the decision to go for Panama turns not
just the future history of Central America but that of the United States as a
world power. The wealthy American Cornelius Vanderbilt had it in mind to
build a Nicaraguan canal in 1851, but he could not raise sufficient capital. A
quarter of a century later the US government received a report that insisted
Nicaragua was the only suitable route, and Nicaragua, not Panama, became
the agreed way forward.21 This left the Panama route available to
interlopers, with the French at the head of the queue, inspired by de Lesseps’s
rhetoric and his sense that anything was possible – he even thought it should
be possible to flood the Sahara by creating a channel through Tunisia.22
With the Americans still talking of Nicaragua but not actually doing
anything, the French were able to send their own explorers into Panama in
1876, led by the youthful Lucien Napoleon Bonaparte Wyse, a relative of the
French emperors. Wyse’s first discovery was how awful the conditions were
in the isthmus jungle, where malaria was rampant and constant downpours
meant that it was very hard to survey the land; much of his report was
guesswork. Yet Wyse managed to win over the Colombian president, whose
republic at this point still included the isthmus – not that it would if the
French plan went ahead, as France was to be granted a 99-year lease on the
canal, while Colombia would reap a 5 per cent profit on gross revenue from
the canal. His clear preference was for a sea level canal, which would mean
cutting right through the mountains, and one idea was to run the ships
through a massive tunnel. Then there would be the literally overwhelming
problem of the rush of water as the canal met the River Chagres, which
flowed into the Caribbean close to Colón, and in full flood would sweep
away anything that stood in its way.23 But the superhuman nineteenth-
century engineers of the generation of Brunel assumed they could achieve
anything.
That is why the story of the French attempt to build a canal across the
isthmus, mainly alongside the railway, is so tragic. No account was taken,
even after Europeans had been poking around the area for several decades, of
the threat of disease, particularly yellow fever, with its 50 per cent mortality.
Enthusiasm for the scheme ensured that capital could be raised, reaching
700,000,000 francs by 1883, by which time 10,000 workers needed to be
paid, a figure that doubled within fifteen months. Jamaicans still dominated
the work force, attracted by good pay; ships reached Colón every four days
carrying Jamaican labourers; back home in Kingston they fought to get a
place on board.24 Meanwhile the engineers faced a terrible fate as they saw
their families die of yellow fever, like the wife, daughter, son and would-be
son-in-law of the director-general of operations, Jules Dingler. Dingler
expressed his despair by ordering the execution of his beloved horses.25
French officials often brought their own coffin to Panama so that their
remains could be repatriated if they caught one of the rampant diseases of
Central America.26 Observers increasingly wondered whether the plan for a
canal was viable. In Paris, the mood was made darker still by the vicious anti-
Semitic attacks launched by the publicist Drumont against Baron Jacques de
Reinach, a wealthy Jewish banker who had been advising the Canal
Company. As much as the Dreyfus Affair, the Panama Affair fuelled French
anti-Semitism. Reinach died just as he was coming under investigation
following accusations of bribery and corruption; he may well have committed
suicide.27 But by 1890 it was obvious that the project had failed, despite the
considerable amount of investment and sheer physical work that had gone
into it. The collapse of the Canal Company was the largest financial crash in
the entire century.28

IV

The financial disaster in France brought the canal project to an end, even
though channels had been dug, machinery had been sent to Panama and a
great many labourers were now left without work or wages. An American
journalist visited the remains of the canal in 1896 and described the all-but-
abandoned machinery, which was still, oddly, oiled and maintained in
otherwise deserted yards.29 Yet the disaster did not kill the idea of building a
waterway between the oceans. The French had no appetite left for the project;
but the Americans were keenly examining their own strategic interests in the
Caribbean and the Pacific, and the argument for a direct link through Panama
or Nicaragua now became overwhelmingly attractive. At the end of the
nineteenth century American naval power grew prodigiously. The United
States went to war with Spain in 1898 in defence of Cuban revolutionaries
seeking independence. The casus belli was an explosion that destroyed the
American battleship the USS Maine while it stood in Havana harbour. Nearly
300 sailors were killed, and, even though the reason for the explosion
remains a mystery, this was enough to energize President McKinley. The
outcome of the short conflict, which Spain was bound to lose, was that the
United States occupied Cuba for several years and then imposed a treaty that
seriously limited the new republic’s sovereign powers. Another acquisition,
one that remains in American hands, was Puerto Rico.30
Just as significant were gains in the Pacific. The United States occupied the
Philippines following the defeat of the Spanish navy in Manila Bay in May
1898, during the same war. Hawai’i and Guam were also acquired. These,
along with the Caribbean acquisitions, marked a significant change in
American foreign policy, the beginning of a process of empire-building that
would culminate in the acquisition of the Panama canal zone. Of course, the
Americans denied that this was empire-building, but it is hard to see it as
anything else. Theodore Roosevelt, a rising star, governor of New York,
announced: ‘I wish to see the United States the dominant power on the shores
of the Pacific Ocean.’ At the same time, he emphatically denied that his
views smacked of imperialism. As one American historian has pithily
explained: ‘expansion was different; it was growth, it was progress, it was in
the American grain.’31 Roosevelt cannot be accused of ignorance about
naval affairs: he was the author of a book on the war of 1812 between Great
Britain and the United States, and a great admirer of the prophet of a new
naval policy, Alfred Thayer Mahan.
Captain, later Admiral, Mahan’s The Influence of Sea-Power upon History,
1660–1783, a work first published in Boston in 1890, had a powerful
influence on strategic thinking in London, Berlin and Washington on the eve
of the First World War; it was required reading in naval academies both in
the United States and in Europe. Mahan’s aim was to reveal the importance
for the United States of an active naval policy at a time when isolationism
had long been the order of the day, and when even American merchant fleets
were, he said, playing only a modest role in world trade. He pointed to the
three maritime frontiers of the greatly expanded United States of his day: the
Pacific, the Atlantic, and the vast area of the Gulf of Mexico and the
Caribbean.32 Yet one of his most revealing comments about the future
direction of policy appears at first sight to concern the Mediterranean rather
than the oceans:

Circumstances have caused the Mediterranean Sea to play a greater

part in the history of the world, both in a commercial and a military
point of view, than any other sheet of water of the same size. Nation
after nation has striven to control it, and the strife still goes on.
Therefore a study of the conditions upon which preponderance in its
waters has rested, and now rests, and of the relative military values of
different points upon its coasts, will be more instructive than the
amount of effort expended in another field. Furthermore, it has at the
present time a very marked analogy in many respects to the Caribbean
Sea, – an analogy which will be still closer if a Panama canal-route
ever be completed.33

He had a good understanding of the strategic importance of the choke-points

at the edges of the Mediterranean: the Strait of Gibraltar, the Dardanelles and
now the Suez Canal as well. All this pointed to the obvious conclusion that
America needed its own canal through Panama. Mahan’s approach was
founded upon a particular view of international relations as a great game in
which nations competed for power and influence, expressing their power
through control of the sea routes and using their power to promote trade.
Rivalry was the fundamental concept. His book was a call to the United
States administration to wake up to global realities, after a century of
slumber.
Mahan’s arguments were backed up by events. The USS Oregon had been
sent from San Francisco to join the fray in the Atlantic when news arrived of
the destruction of the Maine in Havana. The painfully slow voyage round
Cape Horn to Palm Beach, Florida, took sixty-seven days. What more needed
to be said in defence of a canal through Central America? On the other hand,
Roosevelt, now Assistant Secretary of the Navy, wrote to Mahan in 1897
saying that he believed in the Nicaragua route. Congress was still
enthusiastically discussing this option when Vice-President Roosevelt
suddenly became president in 1901 following the assassination of McKinley.
But new reports on the feasibility of different routes, along with the chance to
buy out the property of the rump company in France that had taken over the
now dormant Panama Canal project, led to a sudden change of policy in
Washington. The Colombian government was also well disposed to the idea.
The cost would be up to $40,000,000, but the big prize was to be the
concession of permanent control over a canal zone either side of the
waterway all the way across Panama.34 Here was an opportunity to make
real Mahan’s insistence that the United States needed to assert its dominance
within its maritime backyard, the Caribbean, while creating an express route
to its new possessions in the Pacific, and to markets in the Far East. And yet,
while we may read this as proof of the will to create an American overseas
empire, the canal project was not seen in those terms; rather it was proof that
the United States, an inherently virtuous nation, was acting on behalf of all
mankind, ‘something bigger and better than empire’, for how could the
perfect republic be imperialist?35
This was the beginning, not the end, of over a decade of high drama,
during which the USA gave its support to a revolutionary regime in Panama
and the isthmus broke away from Colombia, still leaving the Americans with
full authority over the canal zone, expressed before long in the despatch of
American ships and the landing of American troops in order to secure the
railway line across the isthmus. It was also a period of continued argument
about the best route, as it became obvious that the French had made too many
mistakes: the taming of the River Chagres was one of the most important and
difficult issues, but it was managed by the building of a great dam and the
creation of the Gatun Lake, spread across a large area of the canal zone, while
a series of locks brought ships over the Panamanian ridges through which
earlier excavators had somehow imagined they could slice their way.
Meanwhile the US government constructed the all-American towns of Balboa
and Colón to service their needs in the canal zone. The zone required and was
provided with schools, hospitals, post offices, churches, prisons, public
restaurants, laundries, bakeries, street lamps, roads, bridges. Much of the
female labour was employed within the newly built hospitals.36
The implantation of the Americans in Panama is sometimes seen as the
crucial moment when the United States became committed to a world role,
although there were earlier imperial acquisitions in both the Caribbean and
the Pacific, and the acquisition of the canal zone was in many ways the
consequence of these new responsibilities and ambitions. Roosevelt’s view
that the building of the canal was a dramatic step forward in the progress of
humanity proved to be true in an important respect: hard work on the ground
identified malaria and yellow fever as insect-borne diseases, and a massive
effort to eradicate mosquitoes and other carriers of disease by thorough
fumigation and by the removal of tainted water had impressive results; simple
acts like removing ornamental trees that were growing in water-filled pots
destroyed the breeding ground of the insects.37 The building of the canal was
a key moment in the medical history of mankind.
Roosevelt saw the acquisition of the canal zone as the greatest achievement
of his first administration, a decade before the canal itself was even
completed. In November 1906 he became the first US president to leave the
country while in office, when he sailed down to Panama aboard the grandest
American battleship, the USS Louisiana. It was a remarkable visit for other
reasons. He chose to come when conditions would be bad, during the rainy
season, so he could witness the difficulties the engineers and labourers were
facing. He visited the sick, unannounced. He was able to report optimistically
to Congress, while greatly enjoying the positive publicity his visit had
generated.38 All this work was being carried out at the expense of the
American government, at a cost of $352,000,000, four times the cost of the
Suez Canal.39 The American government invested hugely in massive new
machinery able to run on newly constructed rails, as well as a vast labour
force, in which this time not Jamaica but Barbados provided many of the best
workers. The labour force was divided into ‘gold’ and ‘silver’ categories,
American citizens counting as ‘gold’, although Americans of colour often
found themselves demoted, at least unofficially, and the many Barbadians
were relegated to ‘silver’. ‘Silver’ was clearly a euphemism, but conditions
did improve with time.40 The fearful mortality of the days when the French
were trying to build the link was a distant memory by the time the canal
opened on the eve of the First World War. The outbreak of war limited its
takings, with only four or five ships a day making the crossing, but after the
war ended the boom began, catching up with Suez and eventually taking the
annual figure to over 7,000 ships on the eve of the next world war.41
As with the Suez Canal, there had been last-minute blockages, and the new
lake had to be filled with a massive Atlantic in-flow; but by April 1914 light
cargo traffic was being towed through, beginning with a consignment of
tinned pineapples from Hawai’i, another important if outwardly modest
symbol of the new technology of the industrial era. The opening ceremony
was quite muted, not nearly as grand as the opening of the Suez Canal, which
had been attended by Empress Eugénie of France and Emperor Franz Joseph
of Austria. Nonetheless, the ceremony featured not merely the president of
the United States but the USS Oregon, which was recognized, justly enough,
as the ship whose voyage from California to Florida by way of Cape Horn in
1898 had done most to demonstrate that a canal was urgently needed.42 With
the building of the two canals, Asia and Africa had been divided by a
waterway, and North and South America were also physically divided; but
the oceans were now joined together.
 49

Steaming to Asia, Paddling to America

The building of first the Suez Canal and then the Panama Canal, along with
the increasing use of steamships, did not bring to an end more traditional
ways of crossing the oceans. Clippers and windjammers continued to sail vast
distances carrying tea, grain and other basic goods. The wind was free, but
coal had to be bought. Nonetheless, by the late nineteenth century massive
changes in the use of ships had become visible. Passenger traffic across the
Atlantic, increasingly carried on large ocean liners, grew prodigiously as
migrants, fleeing famine in Ireland, poverty in Italy or persecution in Russia
queued to be allowed past the newly dedicated Statue of Liberty into New
York with its welcoming inscription by Emma Lazarus. The statue itself was
cast in France, not America, and was carried in pieces to New York in 1885,
aboard a French steamship. It goes without saying that the scale of this
migration far exceeded the earlier trickle of Europeans across the Atlantic.
Accompanying the stream of migrants, though generally in much more
comfortable parts of the ship, could be found businessmen, along with more
leisured visitors to the USA, willing to spend a week or so aboard a vessel
that would adhere to a reasonably reliable timetable, and that would have a
high standard of comfort and safety. Standards of safety proved less good
than the public had been led to believe when the ‘unsinkable’ RMS Titanic
foundered in 1912; but the inevitable response to the disaster was to look
more closely at those standards, particularly lifeboat provision.
Early steamships ran risks: in 1840 Samuel Cunard was granted a contract
for transatlantic shipping thanks to his insistence on ‘safety first, profit
second’; a shipping company lost two steamships because (so it seemed) their
captains had tried to prove how fast they could cross the ocean.1 In 1866 the
steamship the London went down not far out of Plymouth, with the loss of
270 people, at the start of a long run to Melbourne As well as sixty-nine
crew, the ship carried 220 passengers who were looking forward to a new life
in Australia. It also carried far too much heavy cargo, maybe as much as
1,200 tons of iron and 500 tons of coal, so that her deck stood only three and
a half feet above the surface of the water – in calm conditions.2 This was just
one scandalous example of a much wider problem: one in six ships carrying
passengers from Europe to America around this time eventually sank (which
is not the same as saying that one in six voyages ended in shipwreck), and
over 400 ships are said to have foundered off Great Britain in 1873–4.3 As
twenty-first-century migration across the Mediterranean shows, people are
only too willing to entrust their life to unseaworthy vessels; and this applied
just as much to the migrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century. The enormous growth of maritime traffic during the nineteenth
century, particularly across the Atlantic, resulted in more and more maritime
disasters; rapid industrialization brought both new benefits and new dangers.
Critics insisted that unscrupulous shipowners were only too happy to claim
on their insurance policy with Lloyd’s: ‘the wealthy merchant thrives, but
what about the priceless freight of precious human lives?’4
Britain, set fair to become the greatest naval power on earth, mistress of an
empire across the three great oceans, and heavily dependent on maritime
trade, could not tolerate this state of affairs. It became obvious that
Parliament needed to look closely at maritime safety, and the leader of the
campaign was Samuel Plimsoll, who had started life as a coal merchant and
had no naval background at all. He managed to win a seat in the House of
Commons for the Liberal Party, and campaigned long and furiously for
improvements in sailors’ safety. He gained a huge popular following: a wool
clipper had been named after him in 1873, and songs and poems were
composed in his honour:

A British Cheer for Plimsoll

The sailor’s honest friend
In spite of opposition
Their rights he dares defend
Tho’ wealth and pow’r united
To put him down have sought
 His valour has defeated
The forces ’gainst him brought.5

Benjamin Disraeli, accused of bending to the will of shipping magnates,

was at first hostile to Plimsoll’s demands for legislation, while Plimsoll’s
unrestrained and vigorous attacks on a shipowner named Bates, whose boats
had a dismal safety record, almost landed him in court.6 But of course
Plimsoll was right. Finally, in 1876, the British government acknowledged
the need for change, ten years after the wreck of the London. Clause 26 of the
Merchant Shipping Act passed that year demanded that (with a few
exemptions for small vessels and yachts):

The owner of every British ship … shall, before entering his ship
outwards from any port in the United Kingdom upon any voyage for
which he is required to enter her, or, if that is not practicable, as soon
after as may be, mark upon each of her sides amidships or as near
thereto as is practicable, in white or yellow on a dark ground, or in
black on a light ground, a circular disk twelve inches in diameter with
a horizontal line drawn through its centre. The centre of this disk shall
indicate the maximum load-line in salt water to which the owner
intends to load the ship for that voyage.7
Even so, it was another thirty years before foreign shipping visiting British
ports was obliged to follow suit, and the Plimsoll line, as it came to be
known, was only adopted as an international standard in 1930. In the USA,
Congress was hesitant, and the Plimsoll standard was applied only in 1929
for international shipping and in 1935 for domestic shipping – not a unique
example of the United States going its own way for a good while. Plimsoll
Days were long celebrated in a number of British towns, in gratitude for what
Samuel Plimsoll achieved for British sailors.8 He deserves to be remembered
as a great national and indeed international hero.
Meanwhile, new technology was transforming the world, and its effect on
the oceans was felt in another way too: the first transatlantic cable was laid in
1858, although it soon broke, and only in the 1860s were cables laid that
worked reasonably well (using in part Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s
magnificent steamship the Great Eastern, which was twice the size of the
already impressive Great Britain now preserved at Bristol). Even so, contact
was painfully slow by later standards, since Morse code was the only
practicable way to send pulses down the cable. The manufacture of thousands
of miles of coiled cable was an achievement in itself, and the sense that
England and America were now linked in a new way was marked by an
exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and the American president
on the first day of operation. Other cables were laid in the Mediterranean and
the Red Sea, while London remained the global centre of operations: this was
a means to communicate with the Empire, as well as with the United States,
and the days when messages to viceroys were out of date before they arrived
were coming to an end. Later, when Marconi demonstrated that contact could
be made by radio waves rather than by cable, contact across the oceans
became even more rapid and communications could reach just about
anywhere.

II

It has been seen that the Suez route from northern Europe to the Far East was
shorter and quicker than the route around the Cape of Good Hope, and the
chance to make the journey even quicker arose with the development of
sturdier types of steamship just as the Suez Canal opened. A pioneer of these
new steamship routes was Alfred Holt, whose Ocean Steamship Company
operated out of his native city, Liverpool. As he built up his fleet of trading
ships he studied iron hulls, steam boilers and screw propellers, convinced that
he could push down the cost of long-distance transport aboard steamships
below that of sailing vessels. Perfecting the steamship had to be achieved by
trial and error, sometimes at great cost – ships went down, taking goods and
men with them. His idea that steam pressure could be raised to 60 lb per
square inch took the technology of the time to its limits. His decision to build
longer iron ships promised to increase cargo capacity, ‘as it is the middle that
carries and pays’.9 Iron was certainly much stronger than wood, but making
sure the rivets held the ship together was a problem. In the early days, iron
steamships sometimes split in two. Holt therefore took the trouble to send the
ship he had fitted with an experimental high-pressure engine as far as Brazil
and Archangel.10
Holt’s Liverpool was a city that had transformed itself from being a major
base of the slave trade and sugar trade, in the eighteenth century, into the
export hub of northern England, taking full advantage of the rapid
industrialization taking place in Lancashire. Railways connected its wharves
to Manchester, Chester and beyond. Its harbour was large and well situated.
Its often infamous trade of earlier years had created a capital base for
diversification into shipping business other than the trade in human beings.
The links to slavery did not vanish after Parliament forbade the slave trade in
1807: the city continued to trade intensively with west Africa, and a mainstay
of the city’s business was the import of American cotton, produced on the
slave plantations of the Deep South.11 Like other port cities, Liverpool
became home to a mixed population that included plenty of Irish, Welsh and
Scots, but also Africans and Chinese, many of whom had arrived on the ships
of Alfred Holt.12 Liverpool did face local challenges: Manchester became a
rival with the construction of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1894, but the
main brokers dealing in imported cotton remained in Liverpool.13 By the
start of the twentieth century Liverpool businessmen were confident enough
of the city’s primacy to build the imposing Edwardian office buildings that
are the city’s great architectural glory.
In 1866 Alfred Holt announced the launch of his steamship company, with
three sister ships, the Agamemnon, the Ajax and the Achilles, each over 2,000
tons. In April the Agamemnon set out for Shanghai, by way of the Cape,
Mauritius, Penang in Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong. Holt’s first
published timetable estimated the length of the outward voyage at seventy-
seven days, with a slightly longer return schedule of ninety days, as the ships
were to stop in south-eastern China to load the most important part of their
cargo – tea. But this was still much better than the four months a sailing ship
would require. Subtract from this the ten days or so that would be saved once
the Suez Canal was in operation, and Holt’s company seemed bound to
succeed. On the other hand, Holt had to charge higher freight rates to cover
his costs, for steamships cost more to build and to operate; and there were
still doubts about their reliability, since they could be stopped in their tracks
if coal supply stations were not created and maintained, though in the early
days they did carry large amounts of sail, just in case.14 But a long sea
voyage by steamship was, at least before permanent coaling stations were
created, complicated. When the rival Peninsular and Oriental Steam
Navigation Company (P&O) sent the Hindostan to Calcutta in 1842, coal
supply ships awaited her at Gibraltar, Mindelo in the Cape Verde Islands,
Ascension Island, Cape Town, Mauritius and Sri Lanka.15 In the eyes of
many traders, the traditional sailing ship was familiar as well as beautiful.
This became even clearer when the tea clippers, of which the Cutty Sark, still
preserved at Greenwich, is the most famous, came into operation; by the
1850s sailing ships crept back into fashion. As early as 1828 the First Lord of
the Admiralty had expressed himself decisively: ‘the introduction of steam is
calculated to strike a fatal blow at the supremacy of the Empire.’ But the
Royal Navy, unlike the Merchant Navy, was not interested in creating
timetables and schedules for passengers and freight.16
The canal made all the difference, therefore, and it also opened up the
route East to smaller ships that could not have coped with the Cape route.
Holt charged ahead, smashing competition by building steamships at a
furious rate. This paid off: by 1875 his managers insisted that they had run
out of space for cargoes yet again, so that they needed three more ships; these
cargoes were dominated by Lancashire cotton and woollen cloths (the cotton
cloth being made largely out of imported Indian fibres, now re-exported as
finished goods). Passengers were also carried: on the return leg, Muslim
pilgrims were picked up and conveyed to Jiddah, from where they could
reach Mecca for the haj, and this became big business for several British
shipping companies; well over 13,000 Muslim pilgrims sailed on Blue Funnel
ships in 1914, setting out from Singapore and Penang.17 Journey times were
slashed, falling as low as fifty-five, even forty-two, days out from England.
The advantages of steam navigation became most obvious when Holt’s ships
joined the annual tea race, bringing the fresh crop as fast as possible to
London. They not merely outpaced the tea clippers, which was to be
expected, but they beat the steamships of rival companies. In 1869 his ships
carried nearly 9,000,000 lb of tea to England, and, having beaten all
competitors, Holt was able to take advantage of a seller’s market and dispose
of his tea at 2d per pound more than his late coming rivals.18 In 1914 the
Blue Funnel Line, as Holt’s company came to be known, used more berths in
Liverpool docks than any other cargo line and was the most frequent user of
the Suez Canal, dominating the export of British textiles to east Asia.19
Holt’s operations in China were boosted by his decision to work alongside
a British merchant company based in China, Butterfield and Swire, which set
up an office in Shanghai on 1 January 1867, and specialized not just in tea
but in raw American cotton, which formed the bulk of the cargo of the
Achilles when it left Shanghai a couple of weeks later.20 The relationship
with John Swire enabled the Blue Funnel line to draw goods from deeper
inside China, as Swire’s steamboats penetrated down the Yangtze River,
bringing Chinese goods to Shanghai for trans-shipment. Swire was a great
advocate of the Conference System, an agreement among competing shipping
firms that they would set the same freight rate on outward cargoes, which left
Holt uneasy, as there were pluses and minuses to this, especially after
competition from faster ships than his own became a problem. After their
pioneering start, the managers of the Blue Funnel Line sometimes displayed
the conservatism that had delayed the introduction of steam power to other
shipping companies: they were slow to follow the move over to steel from
iron, and new types of engine were ignored.21 Although the Blue Funnel
Line is long gone, the Swire family remains a powerful force in the trade of
China, Taiwan and Hong Kong to this day, though its best-known fleet now
consists not of ships but of the aeroplanes of Cathay Pacific.
Holt was unnerved by competition from P&O. The company had come
into being to serve routes towards Spain, Gibraltar and the eastern
Mediterranean, and began to deploy its paddle-driven steamships either side
of Suez even before the canal was built. This enabled the shipping line to
gain the contract to run a mail service from Great Britain to India and Ceylon.
A pride of the fleet was the Hindostan (mentioned above), which was sent
out to the Indian Ocean in 1842 to service the route between Suez and British
India. She even offered showers, hot or cold, for the passengers, which was a
marvellous innovation. And she could cope with monsoon showers as well,
blithely sailing from Calcutta to Suez through the thick of the monsoon in
1845, in just twenty-five days. The building of the Suez Canal should have
made it still easier to send mail to and from India, but the mail contract
insisted that letters had to be sent overland from the Mediterranean to the Red
Sea: the mail was unloaded at Alexandria, sent overland to Suez, and
reloaded there, or vice versa. Despite the objections of P&O, this bizarre
comedy was maintained for several years until the bureaucrats realized how
pointless it was.22
One major difference between P&O and Cunard was the quality of food. In
January 1862 the menu aboard the P&O Simla bound from Suez to Ceylon
included almost every variety of meat one can imagine – turkey, suckling
pigs, mutton, geese, beef, chicken – all prepared, with the exception of curry,
in a stalwart British fashion, but oddly no fish. Live animals were kept on
board so that fresh meat could be served. The range of clarets brought a glow
of pride to the cheeks of P&O officials.23 P&O understood the need to
diversify, in the face of competition. Ancillary short-distance routes were
developed: the Canton ferried goods up and down the Pearl River between
Hong Kong and Canton itself, though it was also put to good use in 1849
fighting Chinese pirates who attacked European ships from their junks – the
waters around Hong Kong, and the new town on Victoria Island too, were
notoriously unsafe at this period, and pirate raids on shipping slowed the
growth of Hong Kong.24
Another side to P&O’s activities that produced handsome revenue in its
early days was cruising. The company’s historians have claimed that P&O
invented deep-sea cruising in 1844. These included trips from the Atlantic
into the Mediterranean, as far as the coast of Ottoman Palestine, though this
came to an end with the Crimean War. Then, towards the end of the century,
a number of shipping lines took cruise passengers on trips as far away from
England as the West Indies: the Orient Company advertised a Caribbean
‘Pleasure Cruise’, departing in January 1898, and spending sixty days afloat
while the ship called in at Madeira, Tenerife and Bermuda; and it also ran
cruises to the Norwegian fjords. Once again the use of steamers meant that
one could keep, or try to keep, to a timetable, and this made cruises viable.25
The ironclad steamship transformed business in other parts of the Far East
than China. Penang, under British encouragement, emerged as the new port
of call in the approaches to the Malacca Strait. As it drew in ships that, in the
days of sail, might have rounded Sumatra and entered the South China Sea
through the Sunda Strait, business was diverted from the Dutch East Indies
back to the traditional route past a now sleepy Melaka to the flourishing port
of Singapore. In 1870 a ship reached Singapore from Marseilles by way of
Suez in twenty-nine days. This is not simply a history of express voyages
from Europe to the Far East, for within the Indian Ocean the British India
Steam Navigation Company linked Singapore to Batavia in Java, and linked
India to the Persian Gulf; steamships now ploughed their way along the route
that 4,000 years earlier had tied Mesopotamia to the Indus cities.26 To all
this can be added the business that Holt conducted in Malaya, which was
emerging as the great centre of rubber production, following the introduction
of rubber trees by the British, as well as being a valuable source of tin.

III

Looking westwards, Liverpool was also the base of Samuel Cunard’s British
and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, established in
1840, with four ships linking England to New York, Boston and Halifax.
However, Cunard began in the days of wooden-hulled paddle boats, and tried
to improve their performance, before finally accepting the inevitable and
moving over to screw-driven ironclad steamships from 1852 onwards. Like
Holt’s, Cunard’s company fell prey to a Conference System, designed to
standardize transatlantic fares and freight rates. Here the issue was not so
much cargo as passengers. Steerage fares were cheap, but they were good
business, given the numbers wishing to set sail for New York. In the early
days, Cunard ships were the Ryanair option for travel: the assumption was
that passengers would always choose the cheapest fare, but facilities were
basic, even for those travelling in cabin (or first) class. Food was provided,
but in first class it was nothing special, and in steerage it was especially dire.
But no modern airline could get away with Cunard’s failure to implement
Board of Trade standards that even the shareholders felt were being
shamefully ignored. At the start of the new century an effort was at last made
to improve the third-class accommodation, which became notorious for
overcrowding and lack of hygiene. Cunard just about balanced the books on
its voyages to America, while the cost of commissioning new ships was
always a drain on company funds. In 1886 one of the faster ships, the Etruria,
made a profit of over £7,000, but that was exceptional, and on some of the
less prestigious ships only the profit from carrying freight kept the voyage
financially above water.27
This issue became more and more significant as the volume of traffic
increased at the end of the nineteenth century: Poles, Swedes, Russian Jews,
Irish, Italians. The evil human traffic of past times had been replaced by a
humane traffic of refugees escaping persecution and migrants looking for a
better condition of life. With the rise in migration out of eastern Europe,
speeded further by pogroms and economic misery, Cunard was faced with
energetic rivals, the German shipping firms. In 1891 the Hamburg–Amerika
Line carried nearly 76,000 steerage passengers across the Atlantic, 17 per
cent of total numbers, and Cunard carried 6 per cent, over 27,000 people.28
The scale of migration to North America dwarfed the scale of passenger
traffic out of Europe in other directions, such as Australia and New Zealand,
all the more so as it came by 1900 to embrace just about every European
nationality. This formed part of a wider development, as passenger traffic
became more important, whether migrants, businessmen or tourists, and
freight (even if it made all the difference to the Cunard profits) was less often
the motive for setting up a new route. In the age of the steamship, these
routes were serviced by ‘liners’, a term that expressly meant that they
followed a regular line according to a timetable; and in time this term would
become attached to the big ocean-going steamships of the great international
shipping lines.
In the British Isles, the boom in shipbuilding that followed the
development of metal-hulled steamships transformed the economy of regions
such as Clydeside, downriver from Glasgow, which became a major
shipbuilding centre, as did Tyneside, in north-eastern England. But the most
remarkable success story was Belfast, already established as the linen capital
of the world and the only industrial boom town in Ireland. But one cannot
construct ships out of linen, and old Belfast could only offer mediocre
shipbuilding facilities until the 1840s. Its shipbuilders understood that their
craft was turning into a major industry, as shipbuilders made more use of iron
and steel and added steam engines to their vessels. This advanced thinking
gave Belfast a lead, despite the lack of local supplies of either iron or coal,
and despite the lack, at the start, of the skilled labour force that the new
shipbuilding techniques required.29 One company was dominant. Edward
Harland had acquired his first Belfast shipyard in 1858, and three years later
combined forces with his deputy, Gustav Wolff, who was of German Jewish
origin. They established a company whose massive gantries have become the
symbol of Belfast. The great trio of RMS Titanic, RMS Olympic and RMS
Britannic were the largest ships ever built, and required brand new
dockyards. Even when disaster struck the Titanic, this did not hamper
business at Harland and Wolff, any more than the political troubles that were
tearing Ireland apart, though the company did set up additional dockyards in
Great Britain as Ireland became more unstable. The introduction of new
safety standards meant that there was plenty of work to be done in Belfast
bringing existing ships up to scratch, and the dockyard was busier than ever
on the eve of the First World War, producing nearly 10 per cent of British
merchant shipping, while commissions from the Royal Navy kept it very
active during the next war as well – and made Belfast a target for German air
attacks.30

IV

One of the interesting features of the history of shipping and maritime trade is
that apparently small players sometimes prove to have been rather more
important actors than is easily assumed. Lack of resources at home sent
Norwegians and Greeks far from their homeland, and led to the creation of
merchant fleets out of all proportion to the size and political or economic
importance of their home nation. Population outstripped home resources, so
labour costs were low, while both Norway and Greece had age-old
connections with the sea, generated by the geography of their countries: the
jagged, mountainous coasts of Norway and the scattered islands of Greece,
which in each case made the inhabitants heavily dependent on travel by
sea.31 One way of measuring which are the largest maritime nations is to
calculate deadweight tonnage (dwt) for every thousand inhabitants. In 2000
Norway and Greece were at the top of the scale, with a figure of over 12,000
dwt; the world average was a mere 121 dwt. But in 1890 Norway could
already boast a figure of 1,100 dwt, twice the next largest figure, for the
much more heavily populated United Kingdom, and seven times the figure
for the country next door, which, at the end of the nineteenth century, was
Norway’s overlord, Sweden.
 It has been seen how the Swedes became very active in the international
tea trade by the nineteenth century. The Norwegian subjects of the kings of
Sweden benefited especially from the presence of Swedish consuls out in
Asian ports, and slowly and without ostentation built their own impressive
network of shipping routes. Ancient links with Great Britain continued – the
standard route followed by Scandinavian migrants to America brought them
across the North Sea to Hull before being packed on to trains bound for
Liverpool.32 But the secret of Norway’s success lay in the fact that it was a
global operation. Following the opening of the Suez Canal, Norwegian ships
began to appear in the Far East. By 1882 their ports of call included Java,
Singapore and Rangoon; within twenty years their ships were appearing in
the Philippines and Shanghai, as the axis shifted from Malaya and Indonesia
towards China. The domestic market back home did not count for a great
deal, so they inserted themselves in the carrying trade, ferrying rice from
Vietnam to Hong Kong and along the coast of China. Their role in this trade
has been described as nothing less than a ‘stranglehold’; by 1902 this intra-
Asian business accounted for more than 50 per cent of Norwegian trade in
Asia.33 Their ability to achieve this depended on their quick understanding
of the radically new conditions under which maritime trade was now being
conducted, following the opening of the Suez Canal and the introduction of
long-distance steamer services.
By the end of the nineteenth century Norwegian ships were a familiar sight
in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and the re-creation of the Norwegian
kingdom in 1905 accelerated this development. The achievements of
Amundsen and Nansen in polar exploration further strengthened the special
reputation of the Norwegians. As profits grew, a new business elite back in
Norway commissioned brand new boats and gained the confidence of the
western Pacific powers, Russia, Japan and China, all jostling for position in
the western Pacific, and all anxious to find different commercial partners to
the traditional, and often menacing, European intruders led by Great Britain.
Norway was neutral, but it was not exactly unimportant: by the start of the
twentieth century it ranked third in the world in tonnage.34 There was an
enormous spike in business at the very start of the new century, stimulated by
the brief Russian–Japanese War of 1904–5, which was a disaster for Russia.
Instead of gaining a year-round port on the Pacific, as the Russians had
intended at the start of the campaign, the Russians lost much of their fleet, as
well as control of Port Arthur, and they even lost half the island of Sakhalin,
to the north of Hokkaido. Such conflicts provided the perfect conditions
under which a neutral body of traders could insert themselves into the
region.35
One of those who took advantage of the new opportunities was Haakon
Wallem, a giant Norwegian born in Bergen who arrived in the Russian port
of Vladivostok in 1896, made his way to China, and then established himself
in Shanghai, buying his first ship, the Oscar II, in 1905. Wallem hit the
jackpot during the Russian–Japanese War, because freight rates shot
upwards, and also because the Japanese were so grateful for the unspecified
and mysterious help he had given them that they awarded him a prize of
¥100,000 or, if he preferred, a grand decoration; but, businessman that he
was, he took the money rather than the medal. He showed extraordinary
resilience, keeping his company afloat in what were increasingly difficult
times: he survived revolution in China and the loss of his first ship, becoming
not just a prominent shipowner but a leading shipbroker, buying vessels for
clients, and managing to carry on business during the First World War,
during which Norway remained neutral.36 His business career had many ups
and downs, but its main characteristic was his constant determination to get
back on his feet whenever there was a setback (notably during the post-war
depression). He was, as his biographer concisely states, ‘a survivor’, but so
was the entire Norwegian shipping industry.37
Another remarkable example of vigorous participation in maritime trade is
provided by the Greeks. In the nineteenth century the term ‘Greek’ is best
used as an ethnic label, or rather as the ethnic descriptor of groups of families
from quite restricted areas within what would now be called Greece, since
some regions, such as the Ionian Islands, did not belong to the emerging
Greek state, and Greeks were active in ports far beyond Greece itself, notably
Odessa in the Black Sea. This is part of a longer and very remarkable story:
in 1894, 1 per cent of world shipping was owned by Greeks, and by the end
of the twentieth century that figure had reached 16 per cent (3,251 ships),
making the Greek-owned merchant fleet the largest in the world, bearing in
mind that the great majority of ships sail under flags of convenience –
Liberia, Panama, and so on – rather than the Greek or Cypriot flag.38
In the early nineteenth century, as Greek merchant shipping grew in scale,
its focus was very much upon the Mediterranean, including Marseilles,
Alexandria, Trieste and Livorno, and the leading families came from Chios,
whose position in the eastern Aegean helps explain why the trade in Black
Sea grain out of Odessa and other ports became a major interest. London was
certainly on their radar, and the Chiot trading families had agents there, often
bringing goods such as currants to Liverpool first of all, and taking
Manchester cotton cloth out of the country for distribution across the world.
But that is not to say that these goods travelled on Greek-owned ships; the
most powerful Chiot business family, the Rallis, with agents in New York,
Bombay and Calcutta, in Odessa, Trebizond and Constantinople, were
dealers rather than shippers, and to move goods around they would often
charter ships from outside their circle – indeed, they often took Austrian or
French or British citizenship and played the role of consuls for various
nations, just like the Jewish merchants of Mogador. Their business partners
were as likely to be Odessan Jews or Lebanese Armenians as other Greeks.
The Rallis, who claimed descent from Raoul, an eleventh-century Norman
knight in Byzantine service, operated out of Syros, a small and nowadays
rather dull Aegean island whose modern claim to fame is its sticky nougat,
but which once (as its opulent nineteenth-century town hall suggests) lay at
the very heart of the Greek trading world. In the years after 1870 power and
influence shifted to shipowners based in the Ionian Islands, and they looked
further beyond the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In the years up to the
First World War the tonnage of Greek-owned ships overall grew quite
gradually, but the number of steamships grew more rapidly – from just four
back in 1864 to 191 in 1900 and 407 in 1914. Moreover, tonnage grew
prodigiously in the first years of the twentieth century, from 327,000 tons in
1900 to 592,500 in 1914; in 1910 the Greek fleet was already the ninth
largest in Europe, measured in tonnage, with Great Britain enjoying a
massive lead – 45 per cent of world tonnage.39 After recovery from the
chaos of the First World War, in which Greece was only lightly involved,
there was sufficient infrastructure and knowhow in place to enable the Greek
shipowners to spread their wings, and become a global phenomenon, while
other merchant fleets, such as the British one, had a much harder time trying
to recover. This left a vacuum that Greek shipowners, along with the
Norwegians and to some extent the Japanese, were very content to fill.40 At
the root of Greek success lay a willingness to act as a tramp fleet, picking up
miscellaneous cargoes here and dropping them there, as they moved across
the sea.
 V

In some corners of Europe even more old-fashioned types of shipping than

Cunard’s paddle boats still flourished in the late nineteenth century and
beyond. The best example of this is the Åland Islands, lying between Sweden
and Finland, and, since 1921, an autonomous territory under Finnish
sovereignty. The capital of these islands, Mariehamn, was founded in 1861,
while the territory lay under Russian rule – a quiet place for most of its
history, but blessed with a deep port, and good supplies of wood for
shipbuilding in the interior. Between 1850 and 1920 nearly 300 ships were
built in the islands, and sixty more were bought from shipyards in Finland.
The largest of these were tall sailing ships: in 1865 the Ålanders sent their
first ship to America, and in 1882 an Åland ship circumnavigated the world,
loading goods in Samoa. Meanwhile the islanders seized the opportunity to
buy sailing ships cheaply on the international market, taking advantage of the
shift away from wind power towards steam power, which meant that there
were plenty of cheap sailing vessels (with modern iron or steel hulls) to be
had at ship-breaker’s prices, all the more so once the opening of the Suez
Canal created a new and fast route from Europe to the Indies; these ships had
been built in as varied places as Glasgow, Bremerhaven, Liverpool and Nova
Scotia.41 The result was the creation of a remarkable network of shipping
routes managed by island-based companies, trading under the Finnish flag in
timber, grain and other basic commodities as far afield as Chile, Canada,
Australia and South Africa.
These companies were not created by big-time capitalists. By far the most
successful was Gustaf Erikson. He was born in 1872, had started his career at
the age of ten as a cabin boy, then cook, eventually bo’sun, second mate and
master, and he shared ownership of the first ship he operated, the barque
Åland – this sank after striking a coral reef in the Pacific, because the captain
did not realize that a lighthouse nearby was not functioning. Erikson bounced
back from this disaster, and never actually believed in insuring his ships:
‘with so many ships it will be cheaper losing one a year than paying
insurance premiums for all of them.’42 During his career he owned twenty-
nine ships, and was operating twenty of them around 1930. He knew his ships
intimately and kept control of every aspect of the voyage from his office in
the Åland Islands, specializing in grain shipments. He had no interest in
being liked, paid the lowest wages he could, and was dedicated to making his
business succeed; but for a couple of decades he was the respected head of a
remarkable, worldwide, operation linking the Baltic to the Atlantic, the
Indian Ocean, the Pacific and the Southern or Antarctic Ocean.
Shipping grain from the opposite side of the world on sailing vessels might
not seem to be sound business, especially since many ships sailed out on
ballast, for lack of goods to sell in Australia. But the prevailing winds
enabled sailing ships to cover the distance to Australia at a comparable speed
to steamboats, wafted straight through the oceans without the need to refuel
that the steamships faced. These journeys are especially impressive because
they were voyages right round the world with just one major stop, in
Australia: the normal route took the windjammers round the top of Scotland
and out across the Atlantic, past the Cape Verde Islands and towards the
coast of Brazil, from where, in classic mode, they sought out the winds that
would carry them past the Cape of Good Hope and across the wide expanse
of the southern Indian Ocean to Spencer Gulf in South Australia. This stretch
of water is separated from Adelaide Bay by a neck of land, and port facilities
were very basic, a far cry from the bustle of Melbourne, Sydney or even
Adelaide. On the other hand, Spencer Bay lay much closer to the sources of
grain, and using sailing vessels, which comfortably negotiated the winds and
currents of the bay, avoided the nuisance of having to hump the grain a
hundred miles or so to Adelaide for collection by steamers. Loading their
grain there, they then headed south of New Zealand towards Cape Horn,
which was generally much more manageable when travelling eastwards out
of the Pacific than in the other direction: Eric Newby reported rain and snow
as he rounded the cape aboard Erikson’s fast windjammer the Moshulu in
1939, but he also says that ‘the sea was not rough but there was a tremendous
see-saw motion of the water’, and it was ‘bitterly cold’. After that the
windjammers wended their way along a twisting route north through the
Atlantic to Falmouth in Cornwall or Cobh (Queenstown) in southern Ireland.
These were the ‘ports of orders’, where the captain would receive instructions
about who had bought the grain (for it was sold in advance, and sometimes
resold and re-resold) and where he should take the ship for unloading. This
could be Bristol, Liverpool, Glasgow, Dublin or another British or Irish port.
On final arrival they unloaded their cargo of grain, which was a slow process
as the grain was loaded in bags – as many as 50,000 on one windjammer.43
The Ålanders took great pride in these voyages: during the 1930s the
windjammers raced one another from Australia to the British Isles, the record
being eighty-three days in 1933, with the wooden spoon going to another ship
which took almost twice as long.44 There was also a practical side to these
races: late arrival would mean that there was no time to return to the Åland
Islands and see one’s family before the ship had to set out yet again for
Australia. Ships in Erikson’s fleet were known for the relatively good quality
of food aboard, and even attracted a small number of passengers.45 Although
there were competitors, including German and Swedish windjammers, the
success of Erikson’s trading fleet marks it out as something special.
These operations came to an end with the outbreak of war in 1939, and
only revived briefly after the war ended. Overall, what is impressive about
the Ålander shipping network is the way the islanders were able to insert
themselves in the grain trade of Britain and Ireland, coming in as complete
outsiders with old-fashioned technology that proved its true worth. Little
remains today: one impressive and lovingly preserved windjammer, the
Pommern, forms part of the Åland Maritime Museum in Mariehamn, while
the German-built Passat, acquired by Erikson in 1932 and kept in use until
1949, is now used as a training ship for young people, standing immobilized
in the river mouth that leads from Travemünde to Lübeck.
 50

War and Peace, and More War

Historians only began to write about ‘globalization’ from the 1990s onwards,
and they by no means agree about its meaning and applicability. It is hard to
dissent from those economic historians who see the concept as a red herring:
if it can mean so many things, it is hardly likely that a debate about ‘when did
globalization begin?’ will produce satisfactory results.1 Was the Greco-
Roman trade route that linked Egypt to south India and beyond a sign that
some form of globalization could be found as early as the first century AD? It
makes most sense to apply the term when one can see how the economy of
regions very far apart physically became interdependent, as, for instance,
when potters in central China went out of their way to meet the requests
made by purchasers of their goods in Holland or Denmark for specific
designs. Even then, some trades were more ‘global’ than others: the vast
scale and reach of the Roman pepper trade, the Chinese porcelain trade, the
sugar trade or the tea trade are good examples of how trading connections
were all-encompassing, affecting not just elites but people of modest station,
including artisans and slaves. This might be described, then, as a process of
economic integration across large spaces. And yet, whatever claims are made
for the centuries before the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, the global integration of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries is an altogether more complex phenomenon. Early in the twentieth
century observers insisted that ‘the railway, the steamship and the telegraph
are rapidly mobilizing the peoples of the earth’.2 The revolution in
communications took place not just at sea, but in ways of reaching the
seaports from which the steamships set out; and it was accompanied by other
ways of communicating across the sea, beginning with the intercontinental
cables that have already been mentioned.
For the economic historian Kevin O’Rourke, ‘one indication that markets
are integrated is when they have prices that are correlated with each other.’
Looking at the transatlantic wheat trade around 1900, and analysing the gap
in prices between wheat put on sale in Britain and wheat put on sale in North
America, he has concluded that a remarkable degree of globalization can be
observed at the start of the twentieth century. Partly, this was the result of the
use of steamships to transport goods, and a fall in overall shipping costs.
British demand for American wheat ‘exploded’ (he says) at the time of the
First World War. The war, however, marked the end of a period of
worldwide economic convergence, and only after the next world war did the
process of integration resume successfully, as controls on the movement of
capital were relaxed under pressure from markets. From the human
perspective the late nineteenth century was a period of free movement,
another possible indication of globalization, but early in the twentieth century
this was challenged by restrictions imposed – not necessarily for economic
reasons – by a number of governments, notably that of the United States,
which forgot the words written on the Statue of Liberty.3 These arguments,
cogent as they are, do depend on a particular definition of globalization, and
the new globalization of the years around 2000, based on the astonishing
technological achievements of the computer age, undoubtedly has a different
character to the globalization visible around 1900.
 Yet the twentieth century saw a complete transformation in the character of
ocean shipping, with the development of cruise lines at the start of the
century, the loss of passenger services once jet traffic across the oceans had
become safe, and, most importantly, the container revolution, which made it
possible to send goods through ports without any need to unload them there,
one consequence of which was the rise of new or revived ports such as
Rotterdam and Felixstowe and the eclipse of old ones such as Liverpool and
London. As the scale of maritime trade grew exponentially, the lives of
people all around the world, mostly far from sea coasts, were decisively
transformed.
These changes cannot be understood without taking into account railways
as well as ports. The increasing ease with which goods could be transported
from the interior, added to their position near the mouth of river systems that
reached deep into Europe, gave Hamburg, Antwerp and Rotterdam distinct
advantages at the end of the nineteenth century, all the more so when the
Dutch built a new channel out to the sea. The Belgian solution was to create
what is still the densest railway network in Europe.4 Not for nothing is one
of the most magnificent buildings in Antwerp its railway station. The benefits
for Belgium and Holland were almost immeasurable, as they became, along
with Hamburg, the exit points for the products of German heavy industry – as
Rotterdam still remains. Two small and, by this time, not particularly
prosperous countries were thus given an enormous economic fillip.5
Rotterdam was better placed for access to the urban centres and factories of
western Germany, whereas Hamburg was more dependent on eastern
Germany, and lands beyond that were more lightly industrialized, or not
industrialized at all. However, Hamburg was a busy industrial centre in its
own right, with a busy smelting industry and a population that approached
2,000,000 around the time Hitler came to power.
The trading links of Hamburg reached as far as Chile, where the trading
company of Vorwerk was already doing business in 1847, while there were
also very intense links with Brazil and Argentina. In 1924 a substantial office
block known as the Chilehaus was built in Hamburg in the avant-garde style
known as Brick Expressionism.6 Not to be outdone, the Dutch invested very
heavily in Rotterdam, dredging new channels and constructing large basins
where ships could moor and unload.7 Intensely competitive, the three ports
improved their facilities in leaps and bounds, determined to attract the largest
volume of traffic possible; and ever greater port capacity stimulated
companies such as Vorwerk as they worked hard to increase the volume of
trade with South America, South Africa and the Far East.
Although New York was also a very successful port, handling a
comparable quantity of goods, the northern European ports, taken together,
dominated maritime traffic around the world. This becomes even clearer
when the role of Great Britain is taken into account: over 8,500 steamships in
1914, 19,000,000 gross tonnage, two fifths of world tonnage. London
retained its role as the largest port in Europe throughout the first half of the
twentieth century, but the measuring stick is the physical extent of the port
rather than the volume of goods it handled. Still, at the start of the century,
especially when Liverpool is brought into the calculations, the dominance of
Great Britain at sea was impossible to challenge. It had the largest and most
effective navy; it had the largest and most successful merchant marine; it was
home to extremely prestigious passenger lines, notwithstanding the growth of
the Holland–Amerika Line and German firm HAPAG, which was larger than
any other shipping company anywhere in the world on the eve of the First
World War, boasting a million-ton fleet.8 All this already disturbed the
Germans in the decades before war broke out. Admiral von Tirpitz was
determined to build a fleet that would outclass the British one, declaring in
1897 that ‘for Germany at the moment the greatest enemy at sea is England’
– für Deutschland ist zur Zeit der gefährlichste Gegner zur See England.9
However, it might be argued that England only became an enemy because
Tirpitz wished it so.

II

One can look at the maritime history of the two world wars from many
perspectives, most obviously that of naval warfare. The perspective that will
be adopted here is that of the shipping companies, particularly those based in
Britain such as the Blue Funnel Line, Cunard and P&O. This enables one to
see how war brought the shipping industry both disaster and profit; and a
comparison with what came before and what came after conflict helps
explain the survival, crises and regeneration of these firms. Although the First
World War massively disrupted Britain’s overseas trade, the attacks by U-
boats on British shipping had less effect than the continuing command of the
seas by British fleets, which left Germany struggling to obtain the goods it
needed for its war effort; Germany was in effect subject to a maritime
blockade; and Britain, a country whose ability to supply itself depended even
more heavily on access to the sea, continued to rule the waves; Britain
imported 79 per cent of its grain and 40 per cent of its meat in 1914, while
some products such as sugar were still produced entirely overseas. The
British government reserved the right to requisition merchant ships for
military use, and gradually applied this rule more stringently, but it was
obvious that the major role of merchant shipping would have to be the
provisioning of Great Britain, including the carriage of large quantities of
wheat from Canada and the United States. If anything, the shipping
companies were accused of making excessive profits out of the war, partly
through the increased freight charges they began to apply. Some companies,
such as the Blue Funnel Line of Liverpool, saw their profits soar and suffered
relatively minor losses; Cunard doubled the tonnage of its fleet between 1909
and 1919, and its assets soared towards £15,000,000. Even so, one third of
Britain’s tonnage disappeared under the waves, particularly after the Germans
developed effective U-boats, the carriers of deadly torpedoes. ‘Damned un-
English’ was the verdict of a British admiral on the use of boats that hid
under the surface of the sea. They were not the only threat: enemy mines
stood in the way of merchant shipping.10
 Naval historians might argue about which side gained the upper hand in
the Battle of Jutland at the end of May 1916, but the crucial consideration is
the outcome: Germany proved unable to break British ascendancy at sea. It
could neither gain a stranglehold on the British Isles nor open up Atlantic
waters to its own imperial fleet and merchant navy. Where the Germans
needed to think carefully was the threat they posed not just to British but to
American shipping. Attacks on its ships would surely bring the United States
into the conflict, however reluctant Woodrow Wilson was to commit his
country to what might too easily be classed as a European war. The sinking
of the Lusitania off Ireland in May 1915, with the loss of over 1,000 lives,
many of them American, hardened opinion in the United States; the German
counterargument was that the Reich had declared most of the open Atlantic a
war zone and that it had warned American citizens that their safety could not
be guaranteed. Even so, it took another two years for the USA to join the
fray. And American fears were realized: merchant ships had never in human
history been subjected to such relentless attacks. In February to May 1917,
2,500,000 tons of shipping were sent to the bottom of the sea, while P&O lost
forty-four ships that year. The Atlantic was the most dangerous ocean,
plagued by German U-boats, and British companies that operated in the
Indian Ocean and Pacific waters stood to make respectable profits during the
war.11 Meanwhile the Germans suffered from the lack of vital metals such as
tungsten and nickel, forcing them to leave machinery idle; and the food
intake of ordinary Germans, though just about sufficient, was balanced more
towards turnips and less towards Wurst, which, if nothing else, demoralized
the population.
The First World War demonstrated that a global economy, of which
Imperial Britain was the example par excellence, was also a fragile one in
time of war. It demonstrated too that heavy steelclad battleships were still
very vulnerable, once the art of building submarines had been mastered. And
for Germany the maritime disaster was catastrophic. Having lost half its
merchant navy during the war, it lost much of the rest under the draconian
terms of the Treaty of Versailles. A few years after the war ended not even 1
per cent of the world fleet flew the flag of the Weimar Republic. Yet these
figures also served as a reminder to Great Britain that its own losses had been
devastating: 37 per cent of the merchant fleet, a gross tonnage of at least
7,000,000, maybe 9,000,000 units.12 From this perspective, it is no surprise
that economic historians have argued that the post-war period was less
‘globalized’ than the period leading right up to the outbreak of war. In 1920
the total volume of maritime trade around the world had fallen to a level one
fifth below the pre-war level.13

III

The post-war picture is not all bleak. Slow recovery did take place, even
though it was badly punctured by the Great Depression. One country that
benefited was Japan: an ally of Great Britain during the war, it had even sent
warships to the Mediterranean, but the importance of the First World War for
Japan also lay in the experience it brought to the Meiji Empire: its fleet not
just of warships but of merchant vessels continued to grow, rising from
1,700,000 tons on the eve of the war to almost 3,000,000 tons at war’s end.
Over the next twenty years the scale of the Japanese merchant marine grew
exponentially; by 1939 Japan accounted for 13 per cent of world tonnage.14
Others fared much less well: around a third of the German and Dutch
merchant fleets was immobile in 1932. One or two places even boomed
during the Depression: Hong Kong received ships totalling 20,000,000 tons
when the Depression was at rock bottom, and Singapore also prospered,
helped by the continued expansion of the Malay rubber industry. Those
involved in the shipping industry, including governments as well as
companies, strained every nerve to invest in new port structures and even, as
will be seen, to stimulate the shipping industry by ordering and building new
ships for cargoes and passengers.15
From the perspective of the British shipping companies, there were some
significant changes. Shipping companies merged and the new enterprises
operated gigantic fleets: Kylsant Royal Mail had more than 700 ships afloat
in 1929, adding up to more than 2,500,000 tons – in the process the company
had overextended itself. Kylsant Royal Mail collapsed the next year amid
scandal: Lord Kylsant was accused of fixing the books to make the company
appear a much better investment than it was, and after a sensational trial he
became an involuntary guest of His Majesty the King in a British prison. He
was as much the victim of the worldwide slump in business as a misguided
chairman with exaggerated ambitions. For the storm clouds were gathering,
and the enormous overcapacity of the world’s merchant marine made the
shipping industry particularly vulnerable. Problems were accentuated by the
slump in business that heralded the Great Depression. In November 1931
Lord Inchcape, chairman of P&O, wrote: ‘I have never known such a period
of depression as that through which we have passed in the last 18 months. It
has been heart-rending to see the steamers leaving London, week after week
… with thousands of tons of unoccupied space – so different from the old
days.’16
One positive development concerned shipping technology. Oil-fired diesel
engines were introduced, which used less fuel, even though the fuel was more
expensive. Still, this reduced reliance on the scattered coal bunkers found all
around the globe. There was no rush to oil: the Danish East India Company
had introduced motor ships before the First World War, but the temptation to
carry on using coal was particularly strong in Britain, given the ready
availability of cheap Welsh coal. In 1926 the management of Cunard
wondered whether it would have to convert some of the company’s ships
back to coal, if oil prices continued to rise. One way to reduce costs on oil-
fired ships was to employ Chinese or other Far Eastern labour in the engine
room, since one could pay these workers about half what European hands
would be paid – a situation that still prevails aboard cruise liners.17 Another
possibility was to load oil in places where it was especially cheap, such as
Aden.
Then there were sectors of the shipping industry that were hit by political
changes in the post-war world. One of the most serious developments that
Cunard faced was the increasing restrictiveness of United States policy
towards immigrants. This nation whose very foundation lay in the fact that all
its citizens (excluding the much-ignored native Americans) were of
immigrant descent became mired in what can only be described as racist, and
in their fullest form anti-Semitic, policies: in 1921 Congress decreed that
immigration would be limited to 3 per cent of the number of each national
group living in the USA at the time of the census of 1910. This had the effect
of restricting immigration from parts of eastern Europe from which the flow
to the tenements of the East Side, New York, had become increasingly
strong. In 1923 Congress enacted a new law according to which the criteria
would be set not by the census of 1910 but by that of 1890, which had the
effect of further restricting numbers from eastern Europe. The result for the
shipping companies was that passenger traffic, long dominated by the
migrants in steerage, plummeted: in 1921 Cunard had the satisfaction of
carrying nearly 50,000 passengers in third class from the British Isles to the
United States; the next year there were not even 35,000 steerage passengers,
and it was reported that ‘third class space on many of our voyages went
comparatively empty’. Needless to say, the shipping companies pressed the
British government to argue in Washington for less restrictive measures, and
in fact the reversion to the 1890 census meant that a slightly larger number of
British and Irish immigrants could be admitted. Then, in 1929, Congress
thought again; this time the 1920 census was to be the measuring rod, which
greatly favoured migrants from the United Kingdom but slashed the numbers
allowed to arrive from the newly constituted Irish Free State and from
Germany. Still, Cunard had always carried not just migrants from the British
Isles but a great many others who had arrived from continental Europe and
Scandinavia in transit to America. The company therefore had to think of
ways to diversify – as, indeed, did rival companies in other countries, notably
German HAPAG, which developed a tourism department. Earnest German
tourists could sail out to the USA, Cuba or Mexico on adventure and study
tours, while the French company CGT began to invest in hotels in the vast
swathe of the Maghrib that lay under French rule.18
Cunard looked over its shoulder and understood that its rivals had a clear
advantage in another form of passenger traffic across the Atlantic: the express
liner services that specialized more in first- and second-class accommodation
and services. So the decision was made to start building, which also meant
that there was an opportunity to adopt oil-fired engines in place of coal. This
building programme was already well under way in 1922, and within three
years the company was running ten routes, linking Southampton, Liverpool,
London and Bristol to the United States, and even services from Hamburg
and the Dutch ports to America. Old Cunard ships, including the former
German Imperator (a great hulk now known as the Berengaria), had their
first-class accommodation refitted, so that passengers could enjoy private
baths and as much running hot water as they wanted; but competition on the
Atlantic routes remained tough. Nor did the company neglect the less affluent
passengers who traditionally had endured steerage class accommodation in
dormitories deep in the hull of these liners. A new version of third class,
‘tourist class’, came into being, aimed in part at the increasing number of
people visiting the United States for pleasure. This was intended to provide
better accommodation, in cabins, than was offered in third class; the
equivalent on a modern aeroplane would be premium economy.19
 Cunard was still sailing in choppy waters after the Great Depression drew
to an end. It was saved by what had seemed at first a potential disaster of the
first magnitude, the building of the RMS Queen Mary, which began its career
in 1936, though construction of what was then known as ‘Hull no. 534’ had
begun at the end of 1930. The plan was to launch a ship unlike any other: it
would be larger, faster, more luxurious and more powerful than any of its
competitors, and it would, in conjunction with a sister ship, make possible a
weekly service between Southampton, Cherbourg and New York (the second
ship, the Queen Elizabeth, was still unfinished at the outbreak of the Second
World War). Using one large ship rather than a couple of smaller ones could,
in the long run, be economical, and the French shipping company CGT had
the same idea when it launched its own mega-liner, the Normandie. Work on
the Queen Mary was halted during the Great Depression, and it was only
resumed thanks to a loan of up to £4,500,000 from the British government,
which saw this as a prestige product that would enable Cunard to outclass its
German and French rivals on the transatlantic passenger route. However,
there was one important condition: Cunard was to merge with the White Star
Line, its old rival, and operator of the doomed Titanic. White Star was in
financial trouble, and work on its own rival to Hull no. 534 had also been
suspended. The merger took place in 1934, the year that the Queen Mary was
launched on the Clyde.20 This degree of government intervention was not
unique: Dutch and German shipping companies were also shored up by the
state, and in Germany government interference went a stage further, as Jews
were forced out of their positions in the HAPAG company: ‘Jewish identity
was purged from the collective memory of the firm, although the firm would
have had no meaningful history without it.’21
Sir Percy Bates, chairman of Cunard White Star, looked back on the
performance of the Queen Mary in 1941, when it and the Queen Elizabeth
had been converted into troop ships, with proud nostalgia for its brief but
brilliant pre-war career:

I think the time has come for me to be more particular on the financial
performance of Queen Mary. She is widely known as a masterpiece of
British construction; it may not be equally appreciated that financially
she has been very successful from the start, as the progress made in
marine engineering has focused in Queen Mary a new economy in
transportation across the Atlantic. Since 1922, when the full effect of
 the U.S. Immigration Quota Law first made itself felt, no steamer has
ever made so much money in successive twelve months, as Queen
Mary has done since being commissioned.22

It was not, though, simply a matter of profits. The Queen Mary displayed the
prestige of the maritime nation that had built it and that sailed it. This too was
what had prompted the British government to sink so much money into its
construction – not to mention the stimulus that the building of the two
Queens gave to the economy of western Scotland. Not just in Great Britain
but in France, Germany and elsewhere, sterling efforts were made to climb
out of the pit of economic depression, and by the eve of the Second World
War they were having some effect. Liverpool, it is true, was slowly losing its
pre-eminence as a British port, but that meant business was being dispersed
elsewhere around Great Britain, for instance to Southampton and Bristol.23
How the outbreak of another world war, one that really did encompass almost
the entire globe, would affect this now needs to be examined.

IV

The Second World War presents a paradox in maritime history, compared to

the First. Even if the earlier conflict grew out of events deep within the
Balkans, sea power had been a major concern of the Germans on the eve of
the First World War, as Tirpitz’s statement about the British threat makes
plain. And yet the conflict at sea was largely limited to the Atlantic, despite
the heavy losses of merchant marine. The Second World War originated in
Germany’s ambitions on land, in eastern Europe, and in 1939 British
Appeasers were arguing that Great Britain should seize the opportunity to
leave Hitler to his designs within Europe, in which case he would not
interfere with British control of the seas. When war with Germany did break
out, and when Japan joined the conflict on Germany’s side, the conflict
became a truly global one that embraced the three great oceans, and saw the
fall of several of Britain’s most precious bases in the Far East, notably Hong
Kong (on Christmas Day 1941) and Singapore (on 15 February 1942).
Whereas the trading networks of the British shipping companies that operated
in the Far East had often prospered during the First World War, they were
completely shattered during the Second World War, when even Australia
came under Japanese attack. The Blue Funnel Line lost its Far Eastern bases,
the longstanding sources of its success.24
The conflict at sea was also even more vicious than it had been in the days
of the first U-boats: not merely had submarine technology advanced in leaps
and bounds, but the addition of effective air power meant that attacks on
ships were no longer being launched solely by other ships, above or below
the waterline. The merchant marine not just of the Allied Powers but of
neutral nations, including, until its belated entry into the war, the United
States, was massively exposed to German and Japanese firepower. This also
meant that the threat to Britain’s supply of food and essential industrial goods
was constant and serious, to a far higher degree than between 1914 and 1918.
Some well-established supply routes were not accessible: sending troops to
Egypt involved a massive circumnavigation of Africa.25
After the fall of France the Germans commandeered most of the French
merchant navy. The fate of merchant navies in other lands conquered by the
Germans was complicated. Much of the Norwegian merchant navy moved
over to Britain after Hitler invaded Norway, as did many Dutch ships; after
all, sailors had the advantage of mobility. To some extent, Allied losses at sea
were compensated by the United States, first in helping to keep the supply
lines to Britain open and then, after Pearl Harbor, in the loan of shipping
which was being furiously constructed in American shipyards. This did not
prevent the destruction of 21,000,000 tons of Allied merchant shipping
during the Second World War, with about 15,000,000 tons the victim of U-
boat attacks – nearly 4,800 ships. Showing exceptional bravery, merchant
sailors were fully aware of the enormous risks as they zig-zagged around the
oceans, trying to avoid German submarines.26 In the Pacific, the struggle for
control of the sea lanes took on a different character. Here the US fleet was
determined to block Japanese trade within the forcibly created ‘Greater East
Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ that, by the time of Pearl Harbor, included vast
swathes of the coasts of China and south-east Asia under Meiji rule. The
Americans, using submarines and air power, destroyed Japanese ships
carrying iron, coal and oil from China to Japan, or rubber from occupied
Malaya, and they also attacked long-distance shipping sent all the way to
Japan from Germany loaded with machinery and chemicals.
The British shipping companies played an important role in the war, even
if their ships were now under the operational control of the government,
following orders issued on 26 August 1939, more than a week before war
actually broke out, that permitted the Admiralty ‘to adopt compulsory control
of movements of merchant shipping’, initially in the North Sea, Baltic,
Mediterranean and Atlantic. The Germans were also prepared; they had
already sent the pocket-battleships Graf Spee and Deutschland to the
Atlantic, and had positioned thirty-nine U-Boats out of a submarine fleet of
fifty-seven around the coasts of the United Kingdom. A lethal U-boat attack
on a British liner on the very first day of the war made the British
government realize that the Germans were not planning to abide by any rules
of war protecting non-combatants. This led to the immediate organization of
armed convoys, but Britain lacked sufficient resources to accompany ships
deep into the Atlantic, a problem compounded by the abandonment of two
British naval bases on the coast of the Irish Free State the year before, which
meant that ships were sailing unprotected through a dangerous stretch of Irish
waters. German mines, some of them magnetic ones that clamped themselves
to the hulls of ships, were an even greater danger than the submarines; in
1939 alone seventy-eight ships were blown apart by German mines, adding
up to more than 250,000 tons.
When the Luftwaffe began to attack British shipping in December 1939,
the Admiralty stepped up its efforts to provide merchant shipping with anti-
aircraft guns; and, again, there had been advance thinking – but the really
useful guns had been ordered from Switzerland, and after the fall of France
they were unobtainable. That meant Britain had to make its own, or buy them
from the United States, but the situation was so bad that some ships were
only supplied with fireworks, manufactured by the well-established firm of
Brock’s, in the not entirely vain hope that German planes, never very good at
identifying what was floating on the sea, would take them more seriously
than they deserved. A further problem was that the Royal Air Force did not
seem to be keen to co-ordinate its activities with the Admiralty; traditional
service rivalries came into play here. This meant that British planes were not
available to provide cover for ships beyond Britain’s shores. On the other
hand, advance thinking about the Merchant Navy ensured that there were
sufficient ships to ferry the British Expeditionary Force across the Channel to
France from 9 September onwards. Moreover, Britain enjoyed some success
in hunting down and destroying U-boats, even if they were being replaced
over and over again, with almost Satanic fury, in German shipyards.27 And
then part of the Royal Navy had to be redeployed into the Mediterranean to
face Mussolini, who had taken opportunistic advantage of the defeat of
France to join Hitler.28 That is just to mention the difficult conditions at the
start of the war; the fortitude of the Merchant Navy in the face of what must
often have seemed overwhelmingly strong opposition is a story of endurance
without parallel in the maritime history of the world.
The experience of four shipping companies, three fully British and one of
Norwegian origin, illustrates the difficulties shipping companies now faced.
It has been seen that the British government requisitioned the two Queens as
troop carriers; in fact, the government had already requisitioned ten smaller
Cunard ships before war even broke out; the problem with the Queen Mary
was that she was stuck in New York, while the Queen Elizabeth was still in
the builder’s yard outside Glasgow, awaiting plenty of work on her cabins
and public spaces. Her maiden voyage was an extraordinary event: she was
sent to New York to be fitted out, and then on to Sydney, joining the Queen
Mary. Both ships transported hundreds of thousands of troops, beginning
with Australians bound for the Middle East, and continuing, from 1942
onwards, with American GIs en route to Europe – what the historian of
Cunard has called ‘an achievement in transportation without parallel in the
history of trooping’. By the time they were working the Atlantic crossing
each ship had space for 15,000 men, half an infantry division, so it is no
surprise that U-boat commanders competed to catch these mighty ships, and
enemy agents plotted to sabotage them.29
P&O was also obliged to hand over shipping which was adorned with eight
or so six-inch guns from the days before the Boer War – not much use against
German submarines. By the end of the year one of the first P&O ships to be
requisitioned, the Rawalpindi, had bravely attempted to sink the powerful
German cruiser Scharnhorst in a hopeless encounter between Iceland and the
Faroes – hopeless but not futile, as the Prime Minister rose in the House of
Commons to praise the sailors on board as ‘an inspiration to those who will
come after them’, of whom, alas, there were a great many from the P&O fleet
alone. P&O troopships were heavily involved in the north African landings
which took place in November 1942, ‘Operation Torch’. But clearly the
company’s Far Eastern business had come to standstill.30 This was even
truer of those companies that operated from British bases in the Far East.
The Wallem shipping company, operating in Hong Kong and Shanghai,
was forced to hand over six ships to the Japanese, although others escaped to
India or Australia; its Norwegian origins, and its partly Norwegian staff,
proved an advantage, as the Norwegians were at first left free to go about
their business – but of course there was now much less business. The Wallem
office in Hong Kong closed, and several of its staff were captured by the
Japanese. The chief accountant, Kenneth Nelson, was a lucky survivor: he
was placed on board a ship carrying more than 1,800 prisoners, but the
Japanese had not painted Red Cross markings on the boat, and it was
torpedoed by the Allies. Nelson broke out of the sinking ship through the
gash left by the torpedo, swimming ashore only to find that he was in
Japanese-occupied territory. He was sent back to Hong Kong, escaped from
prison there, was shot by a Japanese patrol, but still managed to find his way
to his favourite bar, where he ordered his favourite drink with the extra
request: ‘Make it a double!’31
Blue Funnel ships were scattered across the globe in Allied service; the
fleet of eighty-seven ships managed by Alfred Holt & Co. of Liverpool in
1939 was whittled down to a fleet of thirty-six by war’s end. Losses occurred
in all three oceans – one ship was torpedoed off Brisbane, Australia, while
German torpedoes finished off one Blue Funnel ship after another off west
Africa or in the north Atlantic. For all the advantages of sailing in convoy,
the first of Alfred Holt & Co.’s losses at sea occurred when a convoy broke
up in strong winds in February 1940, leading to the sinking of the Pyrrhus by
a U-boat lurking in high seas off Galicia.32 However, as suspicions grew
(more among the British than among the Americans) that Japan was about to
attack Pearl Harbor, the company began to move its ships out of Hong Kong,
presciently realizing that the threat was not just to the United States but to
Germany’s existing enemies. The speed at which the Japanese advanced
across the Pacific left some Blue Funnel ships in the firing line. The Tantalus,
which had been laid up in Hong Kong harbour for refitting, was spirited
away, but its captain wrongly assumed that the Philippines, then under
American rule, would offer a safe haven. The Japanese were in fact
mercilessly bombarding Manila, and the ship was blasted to pieces, though
fortunately the crew was by then on shore – however, the sailors were
arrested by the conquering army and sent to a prison camp.33
The damage to shipping is only part of the story. Ports suffered immensely
as well. Air raids on the Port of London and on Liverpool in autumn 1940
were directly aimed at the shipping industry, as were attacks on Bristol,
Southampton and the great shipbuilding centres on the River Clyde: the Blitz
was about much more than demoralization. Winston Churchill saw the
attacks on the Mersey and the Clyde as the most significant moments of
1940. After London was knocked out, Great Britain became more dependent
on Liverpool, so the fury unleashed against the city knew no bounds: the
attacks in 1940 were only the beginning. Liverpool had lost 70 per cent of its
port capacity by summer of the next year, by which time the German attacks
ceased. The headquarters of Blue Funnel, which had only been in use for nine
years, went up in smoke in May 1941. Once the docks were gone, it must
have seemed an impossible task to keep the port open, but the Liverpudlians
managed to do so; by the end of the war the tonnage passing through
Liverpool had returned to the level of 1939. As the balance in the conflict
shifted towards Britain, massive destruction occurred on the other side of the
North Sea: Hamburg was bombed into near oblivion, while Rotterdam was
wiped out following repeated attacks, first from invading Germans and then
from the Allies. By the end of the war, HAPAG possessed one insignificant
boat.34
The years that followed would, therefore, have to see massive
reconstruction if maritime links across the globe were to be restored – ships
had to be built, ports had to be repaired, finances had to be arranged. It was a
moot point whether Britannia could continue to rule the waves in the new
political and economic climate of the 1940s and 1950s.
 51

The Oceans in a Box

By the end of the war, not just many ships but many ports had turned into
wreckage – the Port of London, Liverpool, Rotterdam, Hamburg, but also
Singapore, Hong Kong, Yokohama. Lifting world trade out of this trough
was a challenge that was indeed met. As new tensions began to preoccupy the
world, questions about the continuing supply of vital raw materials such as
rubber acted as a stimulus to recovery. The Far East is a good place to look
for evidence that the road to recovery was strewn with obstacles. British-
owned firms were mapping out the sources of Malayan rubber within four
months of the defeat of Japan. The board of the Sarawak Steamship
Company, with no ships left out of its tiny pre-war fleet, began its meeting on
13 December 1945 by solemnly confirming the minutes of its session on 4
December 1941, as if all the misery in between had never occurred. P&O
discovered that their Singapore office had been obliterated but their Hong
Kong office had actually been smartened up by the Japanese.1 The situation
in the Far East was complicated by the withdrawal of the Dutch from
Indonesia, a major evacuation involving tens of thousands of Europeans who
had been stranded in Japanese-held territory for years; ships were summoned
from all over the world, and somehow these survivors were transported up
the Red Sea, where the Dutch government created a mock-up of a department
store that even offered Dutch delicacies to the often emaciated migrants.2 In
the longer term, though, as the countries of south-east Asia gained their
independence, the European producers tended to pull out. It was obvious that
Malayan rubber would become a concern of the Malaysian government,
which was not expected to be especially well disposed to the European
companies.
The situation in China was a further serious complication, leaving Hong
Kong in a parlous position, although both the People’s Republic of China,
founded in 1949, and the rival Republic of China, now based in Taiwan,
appreciated the value of the colony as a listening post in their conflict with
one another. From the British perspective, Hong Kong was also a valuable
bulwark against Communist Chinese expansion towards Malaya; the plain-
speaking Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, said he wanted the colony to serve
as ‘the Berlin of the Middle East’, though (oddly for someone so involved in
the affairs of Palestine) he seems to have confused the Middle East with the
Far East. The recovery of Hong Kong was held back by two factors. One was
the massive number of refugees flowing into the colony from revolutionary
China. The authorities could not cope with the influx. The other factor was a
downturn in trade through Hong Kong during and after the Korean War,
partly led by the United States, which attempted to impose a total trade
embargo on the People’s Republic, while the United Nations banned the
import into China of strategic goods. If anything, Hong Kong had stood to
gain from the closing down of the European offices in Shanghai and other
trading bases along the Chinese coast, so that trade out of China had been
funnelled through Hong Kong. But this did not last in the new political
conditions of the early 1950s. American embargo officers arrived in the
colony. They went to work with unstoppable zeal. Shrimps found their way
on to the list of banned goods, because it was not clear that they had
originated in the colony; maybe they had lived their lives in the Chinese-
controlled waters of the Pearl River.3
The other trading base of the British, Singapore, was not expected to stay
under colonial rule for very long. There was plenty of sympathy in London
for the independence movement in Malaya, but the emergence of guerrilla
forces within Malaya, among whom were many ethnic Chinese who were
also Communist, complicated the picture greatly. Moreover, the population
of Singapore shot up, soon reaching a million (double the pre-war figure), for
this colony, like Hong Kong, acted as a magnet to poverty-striken
mainlanders. As in Hong Kong, the result was that impoverished, disease-
ravaged and crime-ridden shanty towns grew up around the handsome
colonial core. Economic recovery was hindered by the lack of adequate port
facilities: a great floating dock had been sunk. The colony pulled itself up by
its bootstraps over the next few years, seizing the opportunity to become the
world’s biggest market for rubber, and drawing its rubber not just from
Malay but from Indonesian trees. It was, then, well able to take advantage of
its superb position between the Asian mainland and the former East Indies,
and between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, even if it took a much longer
time to convert the squalor of post-war years into a prospering and peaceful
powerhouse. When the Federation of Malaya came into existence, the rival
Indonesian Republic tried to place an embargo on the export of rubber to
Singapore, in the hope that this would strangle the trade of the city’s still
precarious economy; but exporters rapidly learned that all one needed to do
was to set out from Indonesia bound for Hong Kong, and then change
direction once far enough out in the South China Sea. Smuggling therefore
became good business.4

Still, Singapore could not survive on what was in effect a pirate economy;
real doubts were expressed about the possibility of making Singapore work.
In 1960 the United Nations, seriously worried about the future of Singapore,
sent a team to the island, led by a Dutch economist with plenty of experience
of the shipping world, Albert Winsemius. He was very gloomy, expressing
the view that ‘Singapore was going down the drain’. He was unimpressed by
the port facilities. But he was just as much the saviour of Singapore as its
charismatic leader, Lee Kuan Yew: he saw that Singapore could seize the
initiative if it learned to handle a new type of cargo, the container. Much
more will need to be said about containers; but Winsemius was clearly a man
of great vision. Another route to success was ship repair, taking advantage of
the prime position of Singapore between the oceans; and this made it a
favourite port of Japanese, Norwegian and Greek shipowners, who were
exactly the sort of people the port needed to attract if it was to become a
major centre of maritime trade.5 Independence in 1965, following
Singapore’s expulsion from the Malaysian Federation (in which, as a
Chinese-majority territory, it had not sat comfortably), created frightening
new challenges. Attempts to develop local industries were now hampered by
greater difficulty of access to raw materials on the mainland. The answer was
to build on the ideas put forward by Winsemius and to turn the city into a
commercial and financial middleman – one of Asia’s greatest success
stories.6

II

A full account of the recovery that took place in Europe would examine a
great many factors, also present in the Far East, that sometimes slowed the
recovery: massive damage to infrastructure, notably in the Port of London;
external competition, as Japan in particular became a major centre of
shipbuilding and re-created its merchant fleet on an ever larger scale;
accompanying that, the decline of the shipbuilding industry in Great Britain.
Poor labour relations, particularly the pay of seamen and the role of
dockworkers in an increasingly mechanized world, were another factor,
becoming more important as ports became less reliant on human labour
(more of this shortly); in 1955, 1960 and 1966 seamen’s strikes, each more
damaging than its predecessor, seriously disrupted Britain’s trade. P&O lost
£1,250,000 as a result of the 1966 strike, which left five of its ships stranded.7
Events such as the closure of the Suez Canal in November 1956, following
the disastrous Anglo-French attempt to restore European control over the
canal following its nationalization by the Egyptian government, threw British
shipping firms off balance; and the experience was repeated when the army
of Israel roundly defeated the Egyptian army and occupied Sinai again in
1967.8 However, not just the low-paid suffered. New ways of doing business
no longer favoured the merchant middlemen who had played a key role in
earlier decades. Middlemen in shipping agencies were being squeezed out as
foreign clients tended increasingly to conduct business directly with
producers within the United Kingdom; in part this refected the increasing
technological sophistication of industrial goods (such as heavy machinery)
that middlemen were not best placed to understand and explain.9 British
companies too might prefer to go straight to the tea estate, or wherever, from
which they acquired their raw materials, making for proud boasts in the
television advertisements of the 1950s and 1960s. Still, looked at globally,
the post-war years saw a remarkable bounce back to prosperity. During the
war P&O had lost just over half of its pre-war fleet of 371 ships, of 2,200,000
tons, but by 1949 it was already operating as many cargo ships as in 1939; as
for passenger ships, it owned fewer, but they were larger. Moreover, P&O
recognized that the future also lay in oil tankers, and in 1955 orders for this
type of ship, which it had not operated before, were placed in British
shipyards.10 Within twenty years London had restored its own maritime
business to a level one and a half times that of 1939; the 1950s saw the
Liverpool shipping companies recover reasonably well too, after a slow start,
though these successes were punctuated by the seamen’s strikes, and
contraction gradually began; unemployment grew as container ships headed
for other ports, much better adapted to their needs. This, as will be seen, was
one of the truly great transformations of the late twentieth-century maritime
world.11
The most impressive European success story was Rotterdam, whose almost
total obliteration was the spur to ever more ambitious rebuilding and
expansion. Rotterdam proper lies a good fifty kilometres inland and upriver,
but the port, including the massive new ‘Europoort’, now extends as far as
the North Sea – indeed, with typical Dutch enterprise, it includes the multiple
basins of Maasvlakte, built well out into the sea, and capable of handling the
vast oil tankers that have been part of Rotterdam’s success story. As a
container port it has achieved within Europe what Singapore has achieved
within south-east Asia; another secret of success has been its pivotal role in
the oil industry. In the 1960s its business was dominated by the oil that was
delivered to and refined in Rotterdam and by the pipelines carrying oil deep
into Europe, on behalf of Royal Dutch Shell and other companies.12 The
story is not so different from that of Singapore, in the sense that Rotterdam is
able to play a vital role as a well-situated entrepôt: its port is perfectly
situated at the mouth of the long and complex river system of the Rhine, the
Meuse and the Scheldt that reaches deep into Germany, France and
Switzerland. The Europoort is not just part of the largest port in Europe (and
for a time of the world); it is also a truly European port, meeting the needs of
European countries within and beyond what has become the European Union.

III

Rotterdam, like Singapore, had seen the future and adapted itself to it, as
Liverpool did not. During the twentieth century every aspect of transoceanic
travel was changing. It was no longer necessary to travel by boat to cross the
oceans. In the 1930s Pan American Airways was just that, a pan-continental
airline operating in North and South America and offering links between the
United States and Panama, Lima, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio
de Janeiro and the Caribbean. That is a list of ports; yet they could now be
reached much more quickly by air. There was also a service from San
Francisco to Hawai’i and on to Manila, both destinations being American
colonies. On the other hand, the German transatlantic air service, provided by
airships, often began from Friedrichshafen, on Lake Constance, deep in the
heart of Europe, and some services crossed the United States, to reach Los
Angeles. Here was a new way of linking the oceans and landmasses, though
the project went up in flames with the crash of the Hindenburg in 1937;
thereafter aeroplanes took charge of the skies.13 In any case, the numbers
able to travel on the airships were minute: the Hindenburg carried fifty
passengers (later on, seventy-two), and that was a record figure; some early
KLM flights were full when six passengers were on board.14 Before the
Second World War, few passengers travelled by air, and the journey from
Europe to Asia with Imperial Airways or Deutsche Lufthansa would often
involve stops overnight in hotels.
Some long-distance aircraft, such as the Empire Flying Boats jointly
operated by Imperial Airways and QANTAS, were seaplanes, fitted out rather
like a small ship, with bunks for passengers; these planes would settle down
in the water off Mozambique or Crete, or even in the Nile at Cairo, en route
to the Far East and Australia. Similar American planes, the Boeing 314
Clippers, could carry up to seventy-four passengers in some comfort; they
were miniaturized luxury liners, with seats that converted into beds and a
standard of service only perhaps captured in the best first-class cabins of the
twenty-first century. Needless to say, this was also an exceptionally
expensive way to travel: a return ticket from London to Hong Kong or
Brisbane would have cost £288 in 1939, more than an entire year’s salary for
a great many people, and the airline made much of its limited profit from
carrying the Royal Mail. Rather as with business class on modern aeroplanes,
a high proportion of travellers were on expense accounts, for instance
colonial civil servants of high or at least middling rank.15 Ferrying such
people to their destination much faster than could be done on a steamer made
sense if the Empire was to be administered reasonably effectively.
By the early 1950s, with the formation of the British Overseas Airways
Corporation, which specialized in flights beyond Europe, intercontinental
travel by air was becoming more widely accepted, and that ate into the profits
of the shipping companies. Air travel was also becoming much safer. The
great breakthrough was the introduction of passenger jets. British technology
produced the first Comet aircraft; they began flying in 1952, but they proved
to have fatal design flaws, and were withdrawn, so it was only in 1958 that
the Boeing 707, built in Seattle, began to provide regular transatlantic
services for Pan-American Airways; it was soon followed by the Comet 4,
operated by BOAC. These planes were not just fast but smooth, and the more
comfortable travellers felt while in the air, the less they were inclined to use
even the finest ships – the two British Queens had a reputation for rolling in
high seas, so that a voyage was not necessarily five days of bliss. As
travellers shifted skywards, one option for shipping companies was to build
close ties to the airlines. P&O began to buy airlines, including the somewhat
bizarre Silver City Airways, which ferried holidaymakers and their cars
across the English Channel in its bulbous little planes.16 From 1962 Cunard
jointly operated air services across the Atlantic with BOAC, and passengers
had the option to fly out one way, travelling by ship the other way. Travelling
by sea between European ports and New York was still seen as a perfectly
sensible way to go, if there was no great hurry. But air travel became more
common, and as it became more common it became cheaper, and as it
became cheaper it rendered sea travel across the Atlantic less profitable by
taking away customers. In 1966 the link between Cunard and BOAC came to
an end.17
Cunard placed their hopes in another Queen, the Queen Elizabeth 2, which
was built on the Clyde, went into service in 1969 and was only
decommissioned in 2008; like the Queen Mary it was a statement of prestige
as much as a sound economic proposition. When it entered service, Cunard
was only operating three passenger ships, and the company had even sold its
impressive old headquarters in Liverpool. The modern design of the QE2 did
not convey the sense of late imperial luxury of the old Queen Mary, but it
was used for passenger traffic to and from New York throughout its career –
without, however, the possibility of a regular weekly service, since it had no
sister ship. In fact, as Cunard realized, its main business was bound to lie
elsewhere, in the cruise industry, and even before the QE2 first slid into the
sea the two old Queens were pottering around the Bahamas and the
Mediterranean.18 Similarly, the handsome SS Canberra was built at the
Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast at a cost of £16,000,000. P&O
originally planned to sail her on passenger routes linking Great Britain to
Australia, but by 1974 the competition from air travel had begun to bite, and
she became a cruise liner.19 The world of passenger shipping had changed
profoundly: cruises had long existed, but only towards the end of the
twentieth century did they come to dominate all long-distance passenger
movements by sea. Even then, they were often associated with air travel, as
they might involve a flight from, say, London to Miami to board the ship.
The modern cruise industry has been traced back to Ted Arison, an Israeli
chancer who, in 1966, seized the opportunity to acquire control of a
Norwegian ship, which he moved across to Miami. He gradually built up his
fleet under the name of Norwegian Caribbean Lines, though most of the ships
were adapted ferry boats, and he deftly used the lower deck for a roll-on, roll-
off cargo service between Miami and Jamaica. Arison had space on all his
ships together for about 3,000 passengers, more space than Florida in those
days was likely to fill; but the answer was to advertise across the United
States, and to make Miami into the cruise capital of North America. His own
success prompted others, notably the real Norwegians, to enter the market,
making use of purpose-built ships, and further strengthening the role of
Miami in the cruise business. One rival, Costa, decided to make Puerto Rico
its main base, and began to fly passengers out there, including air tickets in
the price of the cruise. The cruise was thus becoming an entire package. Even
better than advertising was the effect of a television series, The Love Boat,
that ran for nine years from 1977 onwards, was shown across the world, and
cast the cruise industry in a rose-coloured romantic light.20
All this cast doubt on what cruises were really for. Is a tour of the
Caribbean a chance to see the wonders of sixteenth-century Santo Domingo
and to visit the Bridgetown Museum in Barbados, which, according to
Wikitravel, one is likely to have all to oneself? That fact suggests that most of
those who are daily decanted from cruise ships on to Caribbean shores will
go shopping, or maybe try out the local cuisine. Specialist companies such as
Swan Hellenic made their name as organizers of high-quality tours by sea,
specializing in both human and natural history and expecting passengers to
listen to what could be either exciting or boring lectures. That is feasible on a
boat carrying 300 passengers or fewer; but the vast Leviathans that now
prowl the oceans, bearing 3,000 passengers or more, are to all intents self-
contained holiday centres, detached from the world around them, places to
eat, sunbathe, sleep and enjoy light entertainment. The largest cruise ship
afloat in 2017, the Allure of the Seas, operated by Royal Caribbean Lines, can
house 7,148 passengers at peak capacity; it was launched in 2010, and with
its two sister ships the total at sea rises to about 21,000 passengers. The
company was founded by Norwegian rivals of Arison, and operates several
other very large vessels, as does Norwegian Cruise Line. Norway’s
outstanding role in the cruise industry is not matched by Cunard, whose
Queen Mary 2 is a mere tiddler by comparison with the Norwegian giants,
carrying at most 3,090 passengers. The damage these large ships inflict on
the environment – a sore point in Venice – is matched by the inability of little
towns or historic sites to cope when maybe 6,000 people arrive off cruise
ships all at the same time. Setting aside the cruise ships, though, long-
distance passenger travel by sea across and between the oceans has come to
an end.

IV

The triumph of the aeroplane was not total. As cargo vessels, planes are
expensive to use, even if they can deliver some fresh goods that ships cannot
handle (such as flowers grown in Israel on sale within twenty-four hours in
British marketplaces). In our own day, the vast majority of goods exported
over long distances travel in container ships between continents and oceans.
UNCTAD (the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development)
estimates that 80 per cent of world trade by volume (nearly 10 billion tons)
and 70 per cent by value is conducted by sea. The cost of bringing a can of
beer from Asia to Europe on a container ship is roughly one US cent per can,
five cents for a packet of biscuits and a mere ten cents for each television.
 This came about through containerization. The history of the container
reaches back into the 1920s, when American railroad companies
experimented with steel containers that could be transferred back and forth
between lorries and freight cars, using powerful forklift trucks. An obvious
constraint on the use of containers to load ships was that the longshoremen
were a powerful, unionized group of workers who understandably saw a
threat to their own jobs in further mechanization. In the early 1950s this was
not a major problem, since what containers there were had to be carefully
fitted into the hold alongside loose cargo, which meant that the skills of the
longshoremen were still in great demand. The cost of port-side labour might
be as much as three times the cost of actually moving a cargo ship across the
Atlantic, especially at the American end, since in the 1950s American
dockworkers earned about five times what German ones could expect to be
paid. Besides, the use of containers did not seem to be economical: containers
were by and large not absolutely full, so that shippers who used them were
packing empty space on board; by contrast, loose cargo could be slotted into
every available nook in the hold.21 This meant that the container could only
become the standard form of transport when ships were built or adapted
primarily to carry them rather than loose freight.
Traditionally, the creation of the container is linked to one inventive
businessman, Malcolm McLean, who had long been frustrated by the
cumbersome way that goods brought from the American hinterland had to be
unloaded by longshoremen and then carefully replaced in the hold of a ship, a
process that then had to be repeated back-to-front when the ship reached its
destination. He is often credited with a sudden flash of genius that produced a
prophetic vision of the container revolution, but his involvement in the
creation of container traffic was more gradual, though it was certainly the
product of successive insights. The basic idea of the container was not brand
new, but the standardization that followed from his initiatives set in train a
massive revolution in sea transport. He started on land: he owned a trucking
company with over 600 trucks by 1954, and in the 1950s he worked hard to
cut costs and to undercut his competitors. A constant innovator, he built an
automated terminal in North Carolina, introduced diesel engines and
redesigned his trucks so that they had crenellated sides, to reduce wind drag.
His truck services along the east coast, often carrying prodigious amounts of
tobacco, were, however, threatened by a different sort of competition. There
were plenty of cheap cargo vessels on the market, left over from war service.
Moving goods from the Deep South northwards by sea made sense, since the
roads were often blocked, especially around the big New England cities – the
long-distance highways had not yet been built.22 Rather than attempting to
fight a war against the cargo vessels, he would integrate them into his own
system. In 1953 he mapped out plans for harbour terminals that would handle
truck trailers, which could be driven straight on board, detached from the cab,
carried to their destination (wheels and all), and then driven off again at the
other end. The New York Port Authority was worried at the fall in domestic
cargo and was keen to co-operate.
His fundamental insight was that shipping cargo was about moving goods,
not moving ships. Indeed, part of the problem was that with old-fashioned
loading ships did not move when they could and should: ‘a ship earns money
only when she’s at sea. Where costs rise is in port,’ McLean explained.23 It
made perfect sense to take goods trucked in from deep inside America, or
brought to the coast by rail, and to send them to some other hinterland
without having to unpack them. Still, the days when this would become an
international operation were some way in the future. First, a uniform system
had to be created. McLean devised an even more efficient way of conveying
goods: instead of trailers, the ships should carry the detached bodies of the
trailers. This meant that these large boxes could be taken to the side of the
ship, lifted on board and – something impossible with wheeled trailers –
stacked on top of one another and locked in place. His company analysed the
cost of sending beer from Newark, New Jersey, to Miami. Traditional
handling at both ends would cost $8 per ton, whereas container handling
would cost 50c. It took time to acquire a suitable if ancient tanker and to
obtain permission to send it to sea as a refitted and very special cargo ship.
Only in 1956 was McLean able to launch his service under the flag of his
Pan-Atlantic Steamship Company. Towards the end of April the Ideal-X was
loaded with fifty-eight aluminium boxes taken off truck trailers and sent from
Newark down to Houston, Texas. In order to do this McLean had had to
order the boxes (he asked for 200, such was his confidence), and even had to
redesign the cranes that would be able to lift the containers in one quick
movement from shore to ship. They were so large and heavy that the rails
along which they moved also had to be strengthened. This was not a simple
operation, but a massive commitment that soon proved its worth: the cost of
loading the Ideal-X was one thirty-seventh of the cost of traditional loading.
With a sister ship, the Ideal-X provided a weekly service between New Jersey
and Houston, which soon increased to a service every four days, as additional
ships were acquired.24
Containers were, it was argued, preferable from the point of view of
security. In high seas, cargo on traditional boats could shift around over much
bigger spaces and suffer damage; besides, sealed boxes were much less likely
to suffer from theft.25 It was also possible to place refrigeration units in
containers and to stack these containers along with all the others. McLean’s
own containers were thirty-five feet long; but, as it became more and more
obvious that this was the way of the future, new standards were applied –
from 1958 onwards (very soon, then, after the voyage of the Ideal-X) the
American Standards Association pondered this question, and in due course
international agreement emerged setting the length of containers at multiples
of ten feet, the standard Trailer Equivalent Unit (TEU) being twenty feet.26
The very fact that this name is used harks back to the origins of the container
as the tail-end of a massive American truck. By 1960 other transport
companies in the United States were beginning to eye McLean’s operation
enviously. The Hawaiian Citizen, with space for 356 containers, started to
operate between San Francisco and Honolulu that year. It was not all plain
sailing: longshoremen in Puerto Rico refused to unload McLean’s containers,
and McLean’s company had to agree that large teams of dockworkers would
be employed on tasks that, more realistically, could have been completed
mechanically with far fewer men. This was only the beginning of a long saga:
in New York and other mainland ports, the opposition to containerization
within the unions was at times visceral. The threat to jobs was real, and along
with the jobs traditional skills in handling loose goods disappeared.
Eventually mediation by Kennedy, Johnson and government representatives
achieved compromises that did something to protect jobs.27
McLean’s company, renamed Sea–Land Service, extended its range to the
Pacific and even Alaska. At first there was hesitation about crossing the
Atlantic, if not the Pacific, and it took ten years from the sailing of the Ideal-
X for a McLean ship to reach Rotterdam, with 226 boxes on board. On its
return it obligingly put in at the Scottish harbour of Grangemouth to load
Scotch whisky, for the first time despatched by container. McLean believed
that the sight of all this whisky reaching America by container convinced the
world of shipping that the future lay with containers. At any rate, the
transatlantic route was now open, and rapidly flourished, with European
companies such as HAPAG soon taking part as well. HAPAG became a giant
operator of container ships.28 Meanwhile one special route did even more
than the whisky bottles to convince the world of the usefulness of containers:
during the Vietnam War. McLean became a regular supplier of the American
army, arguing that containers were perfect for the delivery of vital supplies
that otherwise were seeping from the ports of Vietnam into the hands of the
Viet Cong. He also showed that the containers could be put to many uses, for
example as offices and storage bunkers. In 1968 a fifth of the military
supplies sent across the Pacific was sent in containers. It became obvious too
that costs could be cut dramatically by making use of containers to supply the
American troops in Vietnam, though the US High Command was slow to
recognize the fact. Soon, though, the USA was sending half the military
supplies it despatched to Europe in container ships. No doubt this made it
even easier for American bases in Europe to supply the troops with half-and-
half milk, American pizza, doughnuts American-style and other wonderments
that astonish European visitors to these bases to this day – but it was also an
important step towards global containerization.
By the 1980s McLean’s operations spanned the world, including South as
well as North America. What had begun as a medium-sized trucking
company had become an international giant; more than that, its innovations
decisively shaped the way in which international trade was conducted. The
capacity of modern container ships was at last matched by the capacity of
vast container ports such as Rotterdam, Singapore and Hong Kong. Among
American beneficiaries of the shift to containers was Oakland, opposite San
Francisco – 3,000,000 tons of movements in 1969, excluding what was being
sent to American troops across the ocean. This was eight times the container
traffic Oakland had handled four years earlier; the downside was that San
Francisco saw its own maritime traffic shrink, as did Boston on the other side
of the continent. Similarly, in Britain new ports displaced old ones; the
London docks closed and only after years of desolation and decay were the
Docklands regenerated, but as a financial centre, Olympic arena and even – a
sign of how things have changed – an airport. Meanwhile, Felixstowe,
previously a small and uninteresting coastal town, became the major British
centre of container traffic, with an enormously long quayside and a deep port
suitable for the largest cargo ships; by 1969 its annual tonnage was
approaching 2,000,000. Its owner, Hutchison Ports, which traces its origins to
the nineteenth-century Hong Kong and Whampoa Dock Company, also owns
or has interests in a vast number of container ports across the world,
including Hong Kong; its market share stands above 8 per cent and it was
handling over 33,000,000 TEU (standard container units) in 2005. One
beneficiary is Trinity College, Cambridge, which owns some of the land at
Felixstowe and has increased its already enormous financial portfolio
accordingly.29 The largest container ship in the world in 2017, the CSCL
Globe, owned in China, has put in at Felixstowe and can carry an astonishing
19,100 standard-size containers. Meanwhile, Maersk, the largest container
shipping company in the world, which is a Danish enterprise, operates 600
ships; added together, its containers have a capacity well over 3,000,000
TEU. This is only the beginning: the future may well lie with a great power
in the East which has a new vision of its place in the world. The era of
Western dominance that began with Columbus and da Gama, and came to
embrace North America as well, is coming to an end.
 Conclusion

The heading ‘Conclusion’ is normally no more than a way of bringing a book

to an end. But the word ‘conclusion’ has additional force when looking at the
history of the oceans. Not just this book but ocean history is coming to an
end, at least in its traditional form. In today’s world, the nature of contact
across the sea has been radically transformed, even allowing for the massive
volume of maritime trade, beginning with the laying of telegraph cables, their
partial and then total substitution by radio contact, and culminating in the
triumph of air travel. Coasts are no longer the defining points in travel
between Britain or Italy and the United States: the classic ports of past times
have been displaced by container ports, many of which are not centres of
trade inhabited by a colourful variety of people from many backgrounds, but
processing plants in which machinery, not men, do the heavy work and no
one sees the cargoes that have often been brought from far away and are
sealed inside their big boxes. Felixstowe is, in effect, a great machine, not the
humming hub of commercial give-and-take visible in early Aden or Melaka,
or even Boston and Liverpool in more recent times. Cruise liners drop in on
places but are not a way of travelling purposefully from place to place;
ultimately those on board intend to return to their home after travelling
around in a loop.
Most ships, though, carry cargo. The scale of trade through the container
ports is now astonishing. Hong Kong sees a thousand ships pass through its
nine container terminals each day; the harbour handles 20,000,000 containers
each year, each weighing a maximum of twenty tons. Overall, 300,000,000
tons of goods pass through Hong Kong annually, mainly to and from the
People’s Republic of China. But Hong Kong is only one element in a much
larger conurbation of 68,000,000 people: as well as Macau, which makes
much of its money from gambling, there is the industrial city of Shenzhen,
until 1980 a little town of small significance with 30,000 inhabitants and now
a massive city of 13,000,000 people dedicated to hi-tech industries that
presses right down on the border with the former British colony. All the way
to Guangzhou (Canton) industrial development has transformed the
countryside. The Pearl River, long China’s main window on the world, has
become more important than ever not just to China but to the world economy.
The People’s Republic has begun to look out towards the sea with an
enthusiasm not seen since the days of the Song Dynasty or Zheng He’s
voyages, and has staked its claims in the South China Sea in the face of
opposition from the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam and other neighbours. The
‘One Belt, One Road’ project, re-creating the overland silk route by rail, as
well as long-distance sea routes between China and Asia, Africa and Europe,
will give China increasing control over the movement of the industrial goods
it now produces in such vast quantities. This is not just a question of catching
up with the West, and with nearby economies in Japan, South Korea and
Taiwan; it is now a question of overtaking the West and China’s neighbours.
Global warming is making journeys around the top of Canada and Russia
feasible, linking the Pacific to the Atlantic in ways dreamed of in the days of
Queen Elizabeth I. Not content with the historic silk routes, the State Council
of the People’s Republic announced in January 2018 that it would conduct
trial voyages along a ‘Polar Silk Route’, corresponding to the North-East
Passage, along which a Russian tanker had managed to sail all the way from
Norway to South Korea in 2017. If receding ice permits regular traffic to flow
along this route, the time taken to travel from the Far East to Europe could be
reduced by 20 per cent. But this and the route over the top of Canada will be
routes for container ships, or occasional cruise ships whose passengers prefer
ice to heat. Meanwhile humans have inflicted severe environmental damage
upon the oceans, threatening marine life by the dumping of plastics, some of
which enter the fishy food chain, leading to depletion of fish stocks that are
already threatened by overfishing – not to mention the massive decline in the
numbers of several species of whale.1 UNESCO rightly nominates World
Heritage Sites in most of the countries of the globe. But there is one vast
World Heritage Site that also needs to be nominated: the world-
encompassing ocean sea, whose history is entering an entirely new phase. By
the beginning of the twenty-first century, the ocean world of the last four
millennia had ceased to exist.
1. Polynesian boats used several shapes of sail. This boat is equipped with a claw sail, and an
outrigger is attached, adding greatly to its stability. Such boats have sailed the Pacific for
millennia.
2. By the ninth century AD Polynesian navigators had settled the Hawai’ian archipelago. This
early image of a boat with a claw sail, carved on a rock in Maui, may date back to the early
settlements.
3. Around 1450 BC the female pharaoh Hatshepsut sent a fleet down the Red Sea to collect
myrrh, ivory, ebony and exotic animals from the ‘Land of Punt’. Her expedition was
commemorated in her funerary temple near Luxor, which contains inscriptions describing her
fleet as the first to have been sent out since ‘the olden days’.
4. The detail, showing men loading two ships with sacks of goods and entire frankincense
trees, is clearer in the line drawing.
5. Four gazelles on a seal of the late third millennium BC from the trading centre of Dilmun
(Bahrain).
6. An Indian seal of the fourth or fifth century AD showing a sewn-plank ship. Similar ships
were probably sailing the Indian Ocean two millennia earlier.
7. A coin of the Roman emperor Victorinus minted in Cologne c.AD 270, found in Thailand.
8. Head of a Persian or Arab merchant, seventh or eighth century AD, from Thailand.
9. White porcelain ewer, decorated with the image of a phoenix, that reached
Cairo from China c.AD 1000.
10. Sixth-century intaglios from Oc-èo in southern Vietnam, the meeting point of traders
from China and Persia.
11. Multilingual copper plates from Kollam, in south India, of AD 849 testify
to the presence of Zoroastrian, Jewish and Muslim merchants.
12. Reconstruction of a typical Arab sewn-plank ship based on the ninth-century Belitung
wreck from Indonesia. The ship may have been travelling from the Chinese imperial court to
an Indonesian ruler carrying gifts in return for tribute.
13. The Belitung wreck contained 70,000 pots, the largest collection of late Tang pottery ever
found, including many pieces from Changsha in central China. It probably carried silk as
well, but that has disintegrated.
14. In 1323 a Chinese junk was wrecked off the coast of Korea, carrying more than
8,000,000 coins to Japan. Tags such as these were attached to bundles of coins, indicating
that the voyage was carried out on behalf of the Tōfuku-ji monastery in Kyoto.
15. The same wreck contained a large cargo of top-quality celadon decorated
with animal motifs.
 16. Medieval Chinese currency consisted of low-value copper coins strung
together. Drainage of bullion out of China led the Song and Yuan emperors to
create a paper currency.
17. An early fourteenth-century scroll commemorating the heroism of the warrior Takezaki
Suenaga in the wars against the Mongols. Here a Mongol ship is under attack from Japanese
warriors in 1281.
18. A seventeenth-century printed map of the voyages of Admiral Zheng He at the start of
the fifteenth century. His ships reached east Africa and the Red Sea.
19. A late medieval image of a sewn-plank ship bound from Basra in Iraq. Black slaves bail
out water and work on deck, while Arab, Persian and Indian passengers sit below.
20. Irish legend told of the intrepid navigator St Brendan, who sailed into the Atlantic with
his monks looking for remote islands where they could live far from ordinary human
company.
21. A golden model of a boat, twenty centimetres long, from Broighter in Northern Ireland
dating from the first century BC or AD. Early Irish ships were made of wicker frames covered
in skins.
22. Overlooking the Atlantic, this Iron Age settlement at Viana do Castelo in northern
Portugal contained dozens of roundhouses and was ringed by walls with watchtowers.
23. A bronze hoard from the Bay of Huelva in south-western Spain contained several ‘Carp’s
Tongue’ swords fashionable along the Atlantic coasts around 800 BC.
24. The Oseberg ship from Norway, of c.AD 820, was superbly carved out of oak. It was used
for the burial of a queen or high priestess and carried an array of grave goods.
25. Viking sails were made of plaited strips of cloth, producing a lozenge effect. Viking
picture stones often portray the journey to the next world aboard a ship.
26. A coin from Haithabu in southern Denmark found in Birka in central Sweden provides
evidence for trade between these early Viking towns.
27. Inuit carvings from Greenland, thought to show the Norse inhabitants with whom they
made contact.
28. The crozier of Bishop Olafur of Gardar (d. 1280), brought to Greenland
from Scandinavia.
29. Fifteenth-century clothing from Greenland, reflecting current European fashions.
30. In the thirteenth century or later two Norse Greenlanders sailed as far north as 72°55′N.
and left this record of their visit in runes.
31. Wealthy Lübeck merchants built fine houses along the waterfront, containing offices,
storerooms and accommodation.
32. Jonah and the Whale from an early fifteenth-century Dutch manuscript. The ship closely
resembles the Hanseatic cogs of this period.
33. The Catalan World Atlas of 1375 commemorated the voyage in 1346, in search of gold,
of Jaume Ferrer of Majorca, past the Canaries, which are shown, and down the coast of
Africa, from which he never returned.
34. A late sixteenth-century image of a noblewoman from La Gomera in the Canaries. The
pagan islanders, mostly naked and ignorant of metal, were a surprise to explorers.
35. A magnificent glazed bowl from fifteenth-century Málaga, in the Muslim kingdom of
Granada, showing a Portuguese caravel under sail.
36. A Venetian atlas of the early fifteenth century shows a scattering of Atlantic islands,
including Madeira (south-west of the central compass), the Canaries and several imaginary
ones.
37. The Portuguese fort at Elmina in Ghana was a centre of trade in gold and slaves, founded
in 1482 and built out of stones brought from Portugal.
 38. In 1894, following the German colonization of Namibia, this padrão
marking the arrival of the Portuguese at Cape Cross in 1486 was carried off
to Berlin. In May 2019 Germany agreed to return it to Namibia.
39. Portuguese padrões also appear on Martin Waldseemüller’s massive world map of 1507,
along the coasts of southern Africa.
40. Martin Waldseemüller celebrated Amerigo Vespucci’s voyages by labelling part of the
New World ‘AMERICA’.
41. A globe of c.1510 in the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, mistakenly labels an
imaginary continent south of Ceylon ‘Newly Discovered America’.
42. Martin Behaim’s globe of 1492 assumes that Japan, China and the Spice Islands can be
reached by sailing westwards from Europe, a view shared by Columbus.
43. In 1503, on da Gama’s second Indian voyage, the Esmeralda was torn from its moorings
during a violent storm and foundered off the coast of Oman. The wreck was discovered in
1998.
44. The Spanish seat of government in early sixteenth-century Santo Domingo forms part of
the oldest, largest and best-preserved colonial quarter in the Americas.
45. Seville c.1600. Atlantic shipping worked its way up the Guadalquivir River to the
wharves of Seville. The Moorish Giralda Tower looms over the city.
46. An early seventeenth-century Indian portrait of the ruthless Portuguese commander
Afonso de Albuquerque (d. 1515).
47. Portuguese watchtower at Badiya on the Gulf of Oman, overlooking a fifteenth-century
mosque.
48. The first map by the Turkish corsair Piri Reis, of 1513, reveals detailed knowledge of
Iberian voyages to the New World, partly acquired from a Spanish captive.
49. In 1642 Abel Tasman’s fleet reached the South Island of New Zealand and was met by
hostile Māoris who killed four Dutch sailors.
50. Founded in 1350, Ayutthaya in Thailand was an important trading centre linking the
Indian Ocean to the South China Sea, from which the Dutch acquired enormous quantities of
elephant ivory and rhinoceros horn.
51. Map of Macau showing the imposing façade of St Paul’s Church a little to the left, with
the fort and Jesuit College behind it. The main port, at the bottom, lay on the western side.
52. In 1597–8 the great Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin successfully deployed ‘turtle ships’
against a much larger Japanese navy.
53. The regent Toyotomi Hideyoshi blew hot and cold towards Jesuit missionaries and
Japanese Christians.
54. Mercator’s world map imagined that the North Pole was surrounded by four large
islands, and that a route to China through the Arctic Ocean was impossible. This version
dates from 1595.
55. In 1596–7 Willem Barentsz and his crew endured a freezing winter in the Arctic, leaving
behind pewter candlesticks and merchandise rediscovered by a Norwegian skipper in 1871.
56. A Japanese bowl of c.1800 portrays Dutch ships and merchants, at that time the only
foreign traders permitted to visit Japan. They are still shown as they would have dressed 150
years earlier.
57. The Dutch settlement at Deshima, off Nagasaki, resembled a miniature Dutch town, with
a flower garden but no church, as that was banned by the Japanese.
58. At midday on 7 June 1692 a huge earthquake and tsunami demolished the capital of
English Jamaica, Port Royal, resulting in 4,000 deaths.
59. In the early seventeenth century the Danish East India Company acquired Fort
Tranquebar from a south Indian ruler. Much of its business consisted of ‘country trade’
within the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
60. The Polynesian navigator Tupaia accompanied Captain Cook around the Pacific islands.
His very detailed map was drawn from memory, but he had no knowledge of Hawai’i and
New Zealand.
61. In 1791, King Kamehameha of Hawai’i, who had acquired a fleet of European-style
ships, defeated his rivals at the Battle of the Red Mouthed Gun. Most Hawai’ians used
traditional boats – note the similarity of the claw-shaped sails of Kamehameha’s adversaries
to that in Plate 1.
62. In 1658 Oliver Cromwell’s son and momentary successor, Richard Cromwell, granted
the English East India Company the right to settle St Helena, which became a resupply
station for English operations across the oceans.
63. The warehouses of the European merchants trading in Canton proudly displayed their
flags. In this image of c.1820 the flags of Britain, Sweden, the United States and other
countries are visible.
64. Even if Commander Perry’s visit to Japan in 1853 only opened the door to foreign traders
by a crack, the sight of his ironclad steam paddleboat fascinated the Japanese.
65. The estuary of the Singapore River was lined with ‘godowns’, storage facilities for the
goods that passed through the port between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
66. The white houses on the right were home to the Jewish merchants of Mogador
(Essaouira), who controlled the tea trade from England to Morocco. From their windows in
the royal casbah they looked out over the wharves where their goods were unloaded.
67. The massive buildings erected in the port of Liverpool at the start of the twentieth century
included the Royal Liver Building and the Cunard offices. This was the city’s golden age.
68. In a similar style to the Liverpool waterfront, the bustling street along the river in
Shanghai, known as the Bund, hosted banks and trading companies and included the vast
Sassoon headquarters, far right.
69. Even after the triumph of the steamship, tea, grain and mail clippers raced to their loading
stations in China and Australia and back to Europe. Here is the Ocean Chief in the 1850s on
the Australia run.
70. The pride of the Cunard White Star fleet, the Queen Mary, arriving in New York on 8
August 1938. The interwar years were the great age of international liner voyages.
71. The largest cruise ship in the world at the time this book was being written, the Allure of
the Sea has capacity for more than 7,000 passengers.
72. The largest container ship in the world at the time this book was being written, the CSCL
Globe has capacity for more than 19,000 containers.
 Museums with Maritime Collections

A book ranging across the globe and across the millennia cannot be based on
close reading of the millions of archival sources that exist. Instead, I have
made extensive use of museum collections from many countries, whether in
maritime museums, described as such, or more general museums with
relevant material such as contemporary maps and documents, ceramic finds
from shipwrecks, porcelain imported into Europe, and in some cases the
physical remains of the ships themselves. This is a list of some of the
museums that have provided me with the richest material and the most
valuable insights. They are not all big or lavish. Sometimes a small hut
containing a local collection has been as helpful as a vast repository.

CAPE VERDE ISLANDS

Praia, Santiago: Archaeological Museum; Ethnological Museum.

CHINA

Hong Kong SAR: Historical Museum; Maritime Museum. Macau SAR:

Historical Museum. Hangzhou: City Museum.

DENMARK

Copenhagen: Nationalmuseet. Helsingør: National Maritime Museum.

Skagen: By-og Egnsmuseum.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Santo Domingo: Alcázar de Colón; Fundación García Arévalo, Pre-Hispanic
Collection; Museo de la Casas Reales; Museo del Hombre Dominicano.

FINLAND

Mariehamn, Åland Islands: Maritime Museum.

GERMANY

Bremerhaven: Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum; Deutsches Auswandererhaus.

Lübeck: Hansemuseum.

ITALY

Genoa: Galata Maritime Museum.

JAPAN

Tokyo: National Museum.

MALAYSIA

Melaka: Cheng Ho Cultural Museum; Maritime Museum; Stadthuys

Museum; Sultanate Palace Museum.

THE NETHERLANDS

Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum; Scheepvaart Museum.

NEW ZEALAND

Wellington: Te Papa National Museum; Wellington Museum.

NORWAY
Bergen: Bergen Museum; Hansa Museum. Oslo: Viking Ship Museum;
National Museum.

PORTUGAL

Angra do Heroísmo, Terceira, Azores: Museum. Faro: Archaeological

Museum. Lisbon: Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga; Gulbenkian Museum.

QATAR

Doha: Islamic Museum.

SINGAPORE

Asiatic Civilizations Museum; Historical Museum; Maritime Museum;

Peranakan Museum.

SPAIN

Ceuta: Museum of the Instituto de Estudios Ceutíes. La Rábida: Convent and

Museum.

SWEDEN

Gothenburg: Maritime Museum. Stockholm: Historiska Museet, Vasa

Museum. Visby, Gotland: Museum.

TURKEY

Istanbul: Maritime Museum.

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

Fujairah: Museum. Sharjah: Archaeological Museum; Maritime Museum;

Islamic Museum.
 UNITED KINGDOM

Belfast: Titanic Belfast. Bristol: M Shed; SS Great Britain. Liverpool:

Maritime Museum. London: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
 Further Reading

Chapter by chapter, the references indicate the large number of specific

studies and primary sources on which I have relied. This bibliography
presents books that deal more generally with the oceans. Some of the books
deal with matters such as the ocean environment that have not been addressed
closely in this book, but are certainly worth pursuing further. Most of the
books cited appeared in the twenty-first century, quite a few even while this
book was being written – this reflects the remarkable explosion in maritime
history in the last couple of decades.

GLOBAL APPROACHES

A mass assault on maritime history is provided by C. Buchet general ed., The

Sea in History – La Mer dans l’histoire (4 vols., Woodbridge, 2017), by an
army of learned authors, but the end result is a miscellany of studies in
French and English with an emphasis on Europe and the Mediterranean. As
the saying goes, ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’, and the books lack a
common approach, while coverage of some areas of the world is patchy,
despite a claim that the book is ‘comprehensive’. D. Armitage, A. Bashford
and S. Sivasundaram, eds., Oceanic Histories (Cambridge, 2018), contains
brief chapters by various hands on most of the world’s major seas, including
the Red Sea, the South China Sea and the Japan Sea, as well as about the
oceans; however, the approach is resolutely historiographical, and
occasionally mired in jargon; there are large bibliographies which are marked
as much by surprising omissions, such as Beaujard’s monumental study of
the Indian Ocean, as by helpful inclusions. In most chapters, lack of attention
to the ancient and medieval periods is a fault found in much of the existing
literature.
 L. Paine’s readable The Sea and Civilization: a Maritime History of the
World (New York, 2013; London, 2014) makes a clear and spirited case for
the role of maritime connections in the development of human civilization.
The book is excellent on nautical technology. A very brief but thoughtful
thematic treatment of similar issues is P. de Souza, Seafaring and
Civilization: Maritime Perspectives on World History (London, 2001).
Michael North, an excellent economic historian based in Germany, has
written a short but wide-ranging maritime history of the world: Zwischen
Hafen und Horizont: Weltgeschichte der Meere (Munich, 2016); even briefer
is R. Bohn, Geschichte der Seefahrt (Munich, 2011).
The archaeologist Brian Fagan has written a number of stimulating books
showing how humans have interacted with the sea from the earliest times,
including Beyond the Blue Horizon: How the Earliest Mariners Unlocked the
Secrets of the Oceans (London, 2012), and Fishing: How the Sea Fed
Civilization (New Haven, 2017), which deals with an aspect of maritime
history largely left to one side in this book. J. Gillis, The Human Shore:
Seacoasts in History (Chicago, 2012) is concise, lively and relevant.
Maritime archaeology provides the basis for the enjoyable A History of the
World in Sixteen Shipwrecks (Lebanon, NH, 2015), by S. Gordon. A fine
survey of the oceans in the medieval and early modern period was provided
by Geoffrey Scammell, The World Encompassed: the First European
Maritime Empires, c.800–1650 (London, 1981); Scammell also edited a
series of four concise but valuable books on the seas and oceans that will be
mentioned under the appropriate heading. Three classic accounts of seaborne
empires cross the imagined boundaries between oceans: C. Boxer, The
Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825 (London, 1969); C. Boxer, The
Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600–1800 (London, 1965); J. H. Parry, The Spanish
Seaborne Empire (London, 1966), all published in J. H. Plumb’s pioneering
series entitled The History of Human Society.
World trade, much of it maritime, and expanding demand for high-quality
material goods, is the theme of B. Lemire’s valuable Global Trade and the
Transformation of Consumer Cultures: the Material World Remade, c.1500–
1820 (Cambridge, 2018). A superb account of the last century of maritime
history, going far beyond Europe, is provided by M. Miller, Europe and the
Maritime World: a Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge, 2012). The study
of naval history and the study of the sort of maritime history portrayed in this
book, with its emphasis on maritime trade, have diverged somewhat. R.
Harding, Modern Naval History: Debates and Prospects (London, 2016),
addresses problems such as the nature of sea power and the structure of
national navies. The classic starting point is A. T. Mahan, The Influence of
Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (Boston, 1890), and subsequent works
by the same author. Excellent examples of naval history are provided by N.
A. M. Rodger in his multi-volume A Naval History of Britain: The Safeguard
of the Sea 660–1649 and The Command of the Ocean 1649–1815 (London,
1997 and 2004).
Environmental histories of the oceans often look back to times before the
coming of humans: D. Stow, Vanished Ocean: How Tethys Reshaped the
World (Oxford, 2010); J. Zalasiewicz and M. Williams, Ocean Worlds: the
Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets (Oxford, 2014). But Callum
Roberts has issued timely warnings about the way humans, and the climate
changes they are generating, affect the seas, along with overfishing and other
short-sighted policies: Ocean of Life: How Our Seas are Changing (London,
2012), and his earlier The Unnatural History of the Sea: the Past and Future
of Humanity and Fishing (London, 2007). To these should be added a study
of declining and extinct island populations (non-human): D. Quammen, The
Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction (London,
1996).
In this book the Mediterranean, with less than 1 per cent of the earth’s
waters, is largely left offstage. The literature is vast but a few titles might
help fill this gap. For the long view, see David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a
Human History of the Mediterranean (London and New York, 2011), to
which this book is a sister; also David Abulafia, ed., The Mediterranean in
History (London and New York, 2003); for the earliest human presence, C.
Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea (London, 2013); on ancient and
early medieval ‘connectivities’, with relevance to other periods too, Peregrine
Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea (Oxford, 2000) and more
recently J. G. Manning, The Open Sea (Princeton, 2018), dealing with the
economy of the ancient Mediterranean; on the sixteenth century but with
much wider significance for the writing of all maritime history, Fernand
Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of
Philip II, translated by Siân Reynolds (2 vols., London, 1972–3).

THE PACIFIC
This is the least studied of the three large oceans, though the literature is well
aware of the need to look closely at the native population; for the long view,
see M. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: a History of Seas, Peoples and Cultures
(Cambridge, 2012); D. Armitage and A. Bashford, eds., Pacific Histories:
Ocean, Land, People (Basingstoke, 2014); and D. Freeman, The Pacific
(Abingdon and New York, 2010), in the Scammell series. Narrower
timescales are represented by A. Couper, Sailors and Traders: a Maritime
History of the Pacific Peoples (Honolulu, 2009), and D. Igler, The Great
Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (Oxford and
New York, 2013).

THE INDIAN OCEAN

Philippe Beaujard has been attempting to portray the Indian Ocean in its
wider setting in his literally heavyweight Les Mondes de l’Océan Indien (2
vols., Paris, 2012). Inspired by Braudel, he sometimes wanders as deep into
Asia as the Gobi Desert, so that it becomes less a maritime history than a rich
and varied history of the continents touching the Indian Ocean. A readable
survey is offered by R. Hall, Empires of the Monsoon: a History of the Indian
Ocean and Its Invaders (London, 1996). Focusing on trade through the South
China Sea and Indian Ocean, R. Ptak has written Die maritime Seidenstrasse:
Küstenräume, Seefahrt und Handel in vorkolonialer Zeit (Munich, 2007). K.
N. Chaudhuri’s lively Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: an
Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1985) also lays
an emphasis on trade, and like Beaujard he is heavily influenced by Braudel.
M. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (Abingdon and New York, 2003), in
Scammell’s series, is by a master of Indian Ocean history.

THE ATLANTIC

The literature on the Atlantic is even more extensive than that on the
Mediterranean. There are several handbooks that manage, more or less
successfully, to draw together a great variety of topics, from life in the early
colonies in North America to the slave trade. Where they generally collapse
is their lack of attention to the Atlantic before 1492, apart from passing
references to Norsemen in Vínland and the Portuguese in the Atlantic islands.
They include: N. Canny and P. Morgan, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the
Atlantic World c.1450–c.1850 (Oxford, 2011); J. Greene and P. Morgan, eds.,
Atlantic History: a Critical Appraisal (New York, 2009); D. Coffman, A.
Leonard and W. O’Reilly, eds., The Atlantic World (Abingdon and New
York, 2015). The same reservation applies to single- or double-author books
about the Atlantic: B. Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours
(Cambridge, Mass., 2005); C. Armstrong and L. Chmielewski, The Atlantic
Experience: Peoples, Places, Ideas (Basingstoke and New York, 2013); F.
Morelli, Il mondo atlantico: una storia senza confini (secoli XV–XIX) (Rome,
2013); but less so with C. Strobel, The Global Atlantic 1400–1900 (Abingdon
and New York, 2015), and with P. Butel, The Atlantic (London and New
York, 1999), in the Scammell series. Bailyn’s book has been particularly
influential, but the Atlantic there conceived has a northern focus and comes
into being with Columbus and Cabot.
The best route into the pre-Columbus eastern Atlantic is provided by Barry
Cunliffe in On the Ocean: the Mediterranean and the Atlantic from
Prehistory to AD 1500 (Oxford, 2017), and his earlier Facing the Ocean: the
Atlantic and Its Peoples, 8000 BC to AD 1500 (Oxford, 2001). On the pre-
Columbian Caribbean, the latest account, though rather densely written, is by
W. Keegan and C. Hofman, The Caribbean before Columbus (Oxford and
New York, 2017), and then for later centuries a book by the leading historian
in the Dominican Republic, Frank Moya Pons, History of the Caribbean:
Plantations, Trade, and War in the Atlantic World (Princeton, 2007), or
another of the Caribbean histories mentioned in my references. For the Gulf
of Mexico in modern times, see J. Davis, The Gulf: the Making of an
American Sea (New York, 2017).
The Atlantic is understood in this book, and in Cunliffe’s books, to
embrace the North Sea, which itself cannot be understood without the Baltic.
The most authoritative general history of the Baltic is that of Michael North,
The Baltic: a History (Cambridge, Mass., 2015; original edition: Geschichte
der Ostsee, Munich, 2011). D. Kirby and M.-L. Hinkkanen contributed a
volume on The Baltic and the North Seas (London and New York, 2000) to
the Scammell series, but its thematic organization does not always make it
easy to identify long-term changes. M. Pye has written a lively history of the
medieval North Sea: The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us
Who We Are (London, 2014), contentiously insisting that the North Sea was
even more important in the development of European civilization than the
Mediterranean. A general history of the English Channel is P. Unwin, The
Narrow Sea (London, 2003). Finally, The Routledge Handbook of Maritime
Trade around Europe 1300–1600 (Abingdon and New York, 2017), edited
by W. Blockmans, M. Krom and J. Wubs-Mrozewicz, has the virtue of
physical breadth even if its chronological range is shorter than most of the
works cited here.

THE ARCTIC OCEAN

Richard Vaughan, best known for his books on the Valois dukes of
Burgundy, also wrote The Arctic: a History (Stroud, 1994), though he ranges
beyond the borders of the Arctic Ocean, as does J. McCannon, A History of
the Arctic: Nature, Exploration and Exploitation (London, 2012). The Arctic
Ocean has a chapter in Oceanic Histories, mentioned earlier – as does the
Southern or Antarctic Ocean (by S. Sörlin and A. Antonello respectively) on
which see now J. McCann, The Wild Sea: a History of the Southern Ocean
(Chicago, 2019).
References
 Preface
1. On winds see F. Fernández-Armesto, ‘The Indian Ocean in World
History’, in A. Disney and E. Booth, eds., Vasco da Gama and the
Linking of Europe and Asia (New Delhi, 2000), pp. 14–16; A.
Dudden, ‘The Sea of Japan/Korea’s East Sea’, in D. Armitage, A.
Bashford and S. Sivasundaram, eds., Oceanic Histories
(Cambridge, 2018), pp. 189–90.
2. D. Armitage, A. Bashford and S. Sivasundaram, ‘Writing World
Oceanic Histories’, in Armitage et al., Oceanic Histories, pp. 1, 8,
26.
3. D. Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, in D. Armitage
and M. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World (London and
New York, 2002), pp. 11–27; also now D. Armitage, ‘Atlantic
History’, in Armitage et al., Oceanic Histories, pp. 85–110; R.
Blakemore, ‘The Changing Fortunes of Atlantic History’, English
Historical Review, vol. 131 (2016), pp. 851–68.
4. D. Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an
Age of Extinction (London, 1996).
5. E. Tagliacozzo, ‘The South China Sea’; Dudden, ‘Sea of
Japan/Korea’s East Sea’; J. Miran, ‘The Red Sea’: all in Armitage
et al., Oceanic Histories, pp. 156–208.
6. S. Sörlin, ‘The Arctic Ocean’, and A. Antonello, ‘The Southern
Ocean’, in Armitage et al., Oceanic Histories, pp. 269–318.
7. C. Roberts, Ocean of Life: How Our Seas are Changing (London,
2012), and his earlier The Unnatural History of the Sea: the Past
and Future of Humanity and Fishing (London, 2007); for the
origins of the oceans see D. Stow, Vanished Ocean: How Tethys
Reshaped the World (Oxford, 2010); J. Zalasiewicz and M.
Williams, Ocean Worlds: the Story of Seas on Earth and Other
Planets (Oxford, 2014); H. Rozwadowski, Vast Expanses: a
History of the Oceans (London, 2018).
8. A. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: the Biological Expansion of
Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge, 1986); A. Watson, Agricultural
 Innovation in the Early Islamic World: the Diffusion of Crops and
Farming Techniques, 700–1100 (Cambridge, 1983).
9. D. Abulafia, ‘Mediterraneans’, in W. Harris, Rethinking the
Mediterranean (Oxford, 2005), pp. 64–93.
10. D. Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the
Age of Columbus (New Haven, 2008).
11. D. Abulafia, ‘Asia, Africa and the Trade of Medieval Europe’, in M.
M. Postan, E. Miller and C. Postan, eds., The Cambridge Economic
History of Europe (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1987), vol. 2, pp. 402–73.
 PART ONE
THE OLDEST OCEAN: THE PACIFIC, 176,000 BC–AD 1350

1. The Oldest Ocean

1. Cited from Cook’s journals by K. R. Howe, The Quest for Origins:
Who First Discovered and Settled the Pacific Islands? (Auckland
and Honolulu, 2003), p. 33.
2. P. V. Kirch, On the Road of the Winds: an Archaeological History
of the Pacific Islands before European Contact (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 2000), p. 93; B. Finney, ‘Ocean Sailing Canoes’, in K. R.
Howe, ed., Vaka Moana – Voyages of the Ancestors: the Discovery
and Settlement of the Pacific (Auckland, 2006), p. 109. See now C.
Thompson, Sea Peoples: In Search of the Ancient Navigators of the
Pacific (London, 2019) for rich new perspectives.
3. Kirch, Road of the Winds, p. 91, citing the work of P. Bellwood.
4. Kirch, Road of the Winds, pp. 44–50.
5. G. Irwin, The Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation of the
Pacific (Cambridge, 1992), p. 19.
6. G. Irwin, ‘Voyaging and Settlement’, in Howe, ed., Vaka Moana, p.
59; M. Morwood and P. van Osterzee, A New Human: the Startling
Discovery and Strange Story of the ‘Hobbits’ of Flores
(Washington DC, 2007).
7. Howe, Quest for Origins, pp. 64–5.
8. C. Clarkson and twenty-eight other authors, ‘Human Occupation of
Northern Australia by 65,000 Years Ago’, Nature, vol. 547 (20
July 2017), pp. 306–26.
9. S. O’Connor and P. Veth, ‘The World’s First Mariners: Savannah
Dwellers in an Island Continent’, in S. O’Connor and P. Veth, eds.,
East of Wallace’s Line: Studies of Past and Present Maritime
Cultures of the Indo-Pacific Region (Rotterdam, 2000), pp. 99–137;
Kirch, Road of the Winds, pp. 67–8.
10. Finney, ‘Ocean Sailing Canoes’, pp. 106–7.
11. Irwin, Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation, p. 27; B. Fagan,
Beyond the Blue Horizon: How the Earliest Mariners Unlocked the
 Secrets of the Oceans (New York, 2012), pp. 17–30.
12. O’Connor and Veth, ‘World’s First Mariners’, pp. 100, 114, 130.
13. N. Sharp, Saltwater People: the Waves of Memory (Toronto, 2002),
p. 77; A. Barham, ‘Late Holocene Maritime Societies in the Torres
Strait Islands, Northern Australia – Cultural Arrival or Cultural
Emergence?’, in O’Connor and Veth, eds., East of Wallace’s Line,
pp. 223–314.
14. Barham, ‘Late Holocene Maritime Societies’, pp. 230, 233.
15. A. Clarke, ‘The “Moorman’s Trowsers”: Macassan and Aboriginal
Interactions and the Changing Fabric of Indigenous Social Life’, in
O’Connor and Veth, eds., East of Wallace’s Line, pp. 315–35.
16. Barham, ‘Late Holocene Maritime Societies’, pp. 228, 234; Sharp,
Saltwater People, pp. 74–5, 78, 80.
17. Barham, ‘Late Holocene Maritime Societies’, p. 248, fig. 5.
18. Sharp, Saltwater People, p. 25.
19. Fagan, Beyond the Blue Horizon, pp. 22–3; Sharp, Saltwater
People, pp. 71, 78–9.
20. Sharp, Saltwater People, p. 84.
21. D. Roe, ‘Maritime, Coastal and Inland Societies in Island
Melanesia: the Bush–Saltwater Divide in Solomon Islands and
Vanuatu’, in O’Connor and Veth, eds., East of Wallace’s Line, pp.
197–222.
22. J. Allen, ‘From Beach to Beach: the Development of Maritime
Economies in Prehistoric Melanesia’, in O’Connor and Veth, eds.,
East of Wallace’s Line, pp. 139–76; Irwin, Prehistoric Exploration
and Colonisation, p. 19.
23. Irwin, Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation, p. 29.
24. Ibid., p. 53.
25. Finney, ‘Ocean Sailing Canoes’, p. 133; A. A. Perminow et al.,
Stjernestier over Stillehavet – Starpaths across the Pacific (Oslo,
2008), pp. 54–6.
26. Kirch, Road of the Winds, p. 111.
27. A. Couper, Sailors and Traders: a Maritime History of the Pacific
Peoples (Honolulu, 2009), p. 24; see also P. Rainbird, The
Archaeology of Micronesia (Cambridge, 2004).
28. Irwin, Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation, p. 37.
29. Howe, Quest for Origins, p. 79; Kirch, Road of the Winds, pp. 109–
10.
30. D. Lewis, We, the Navigators: the Ancient Art of Landfinding in the
Pacific, 2nd edn (Honolulu, 1994), pp. 297–303; on whom see
Thompson, Sea Peoples, pp. 262–73.
31. Lewis, We, the Navigators, pp. 303–4.
32. Kirch, Road of the Winds, p. 98.
33. Ibid., pp. 97, 106–7, 111; Howe, Quest for Origins, p. 75.
34. Kirch, Road of the Winds, pp. 101–6.
35. B. Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London, 1922);
M. K. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: a History of Seas, Peoples, and
Cultures (Cambridge, 2012), p. 16.
36. Kirch, Road of the Winds, p. 113.
37. Illustrations from across Oceania in Finney, ‘Ocean Sailing
Canoes’, pp. 110–17, drawing on A. Haddon and J. Hornell,
Canoes of Oceania (3 vols., Honolulu, 1936–9).
38. B. Finney and S. Low, ‘Navigation’, in Howe, ed., Vaka Moana, p.
165; also Lewis, We, the Navigators, pp. 139–91.
39. Irwin, ‘Voyaging and Settlement’, p. 73.
40. Finney and Low, ‘Navigation’, pp. 170–71; J. Evans, Polynesian
Navigation and the Discovery of New Zealand (Auckland, 2011;
rev. edn of The Discovery of Aotearoa, Auckland, 1998), pp. 55–8.
41. Lewis, We, the Navigators, pp. 102–11.
42. D. Lewis, The Voyaging Stars: Secrets of the Pacific Island
Navigators (Sydney, 1978), p. 19.
43. Cited in Finney and Low, ‘Navigation’, p. 174.
44. Finney and Low, ‘Navigation’, pp. 172, 178–9.
45. Irwin, Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation, pp. 46–7; Howe,
Quest for Origins, pp. 104–5.
46. Lewis, We, the Navigators, pp. 173–91; Finney and Low,
‘Navigation’, pp. 166–8; Howe, Quest for Origins, p. 103.
47. A. Sharp, Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific (Harmondsworth, 1956),
on which see Thompson, Sea Peoples, pp. 250–61.
48. Kirch, Road of the Winds, p. 96.
49. Irwin, ‘Voyaging and Settlement’, p. 76.
 2. Songs of the Navigators
1. G. Irwin, The Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation of the
Pacific (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 73–4, discussing the view that the
interval is an illusion.
2. P. V. Kirch, On the Road of the Winds: an Archaeological History
of the Pacific Islands before European Contact (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 2000), p. 232.
3. Irwin, Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation, pp. 103–4.
4. Cf. A. Sharp, Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific (Harmondsworth,
1956), p. 164.
5. Kirch, Road of the Winds, pp. 283–4; A. A. Perminow, Stjenestier
over Stillehavet – Starpaths across the Pacific (Oslo, 2008), p. 91.
6. Perminow, Stjenestier over Stillehavet, pp. 83, 88–90; Kirch, Road
of the Winds, p. 288; D. Lewis, We, the Navigators: the Ancient Art
of Landfinding in the Pacific (2nd edn, Honolulu, 1994), p. 13.
7. P. V. Kirch, A Shark Going Inland is My Chief: the Island
Civilization of Ancient Hawai’i (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2012),
p. 17.
8. P. V. Kirch, How Chiefs Became Kings: Divine Kingship and the
Rise of Archaic States in Ancient Hawai’i (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 2010).
9. Kirch, Shark Going Inland, pp. 108–9.
10. Cited by Kirch, Shark Going Inland, p. 122.
11. Kirch, How Chiefs Became Kings, pp. 84–6.
12. Kirch, Shark Going Inland, pp. 126–30.
13. Kirch, Road of the Winds, pp. 290–93.
14. Ibid., pp. 289–300, drawing on M. Sahlins, Islands of History
(Chicago, 1985), and P. Kirch and M. Sahlins, Anabulu: the
Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii (2 vols.,
Chicago, 1992).
15. J. Flenley and P. Bahn, The Enigmas of Easter Island (2nd edn,
Oxford, 2003), p. 35; C. Thompson, Sea Peoples: In Search of the
 Ancient Navigators of the Pacific (London, 2019).
16. G. Irwin, ‘Voyaging and Settlement’, in K. R. Howe, ed., Vaka
Moana – Voyages of the Ancestors: the Discovery and Settlement
of the Pacific (Auckland, 2006), p. 83.
17. L. Gamble, The Chumash World at European Contact: Power,
Trade, and Feasting among Complex Hunter-Gatherers (Berkeley
and Los Angeles, 2008); B. Miller, Chumash: a Picture of Their
World (Los Osos, 1988).
18. C. Lazcano Sahagún, Pa-Tai: la Historia olvidada de Ensenada
(Ensenada, 2000), pp. 73–7.
19. T. Heyerdahl and A. Skjølsvold, Archeological Evidence of Pre-
Spanish Visits to the Galápagos Islands (Oslo, 1990; originally
published in American Antiquity, vol. 22 (1956), no. 2, part 3).
20. Flenley and Bahn, Enigmas of Easter Island, p. 34.
21. Irwin, ‘Voyaging and Settlement’, p. 85.
22. Flenley and Bahn, Enigmas of Easter Island, p. 40.
23. Lewis, We, the Navigators, p. 353; Sharp, Ancient Voyagers, pp.
153–5.
24. Flenley and Bahn, Enigmas of Easter Island, pp. 54–5, 75–7, 184–5.
25. Ibid., p. 68.
26. A. Di Piazza and E. Pearthree, ‘A New Reading of Tupaia’s Chart’,
Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 116 (2007), pp. 321–40;
Thompson, Sea Peoples, pp. 88–98.
27. Sharp, Ancient Voyagers, pp. 149, 156–7.
28. D. R. Simmons, The Great New Zealand Myth: a Study of the
Discovery and Origin Traditions of the Maori (Wellington, 1976),
p. 57; Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck), The Coming of the Maori
(Wellington, 1950), p. 5.
29. J. C. Beaglehole, The Discovery of New Zealand (2nd edn,
Wellington, 1961), pp. 1–8.
30. R. Taonui, ‘Polynesian Oral Traditions’, in Howe, ed., Vaka Moana,
pp. 35–6.
31. Simmons, Great New Zealand Myth, pp. 7, 22.
32. P. V. Kirch and R. C. Green, Hawaiki, Ancestral Polynesia: an
Essay in Historical Anthropology (Cambridge, 2001).
33. Taonui, ‘Polynesian Oral Traditions’, pp. 49, 52.
34. Hiroa, Coming of the Maori, pp. 15, 29, 36–7.
35. Ibid., p. 7.
36. Simmons, Great New Zealand Myth, pp. 341–53; Hiroa, Coming of
the Maori, pp. 5–6; J. Evans, Polynesian Navigation and the
Discovery of New Zealand (Auckland, 2011; rev. edn of The
Discovery of Aotearoa, Auckland, 1998), pp. 33–7.
37. Hiroa, Coming of the Maori, pp. 10–11.
38. Simmons, Great New Zealand Myth, pp. 23, 341–2.
39. Text ibid., pp. 342–7; also pp. 71–3, 100.
40. Hiroa, Coming of the Maori, p. 23.
41. Irwin, ‘Voyaging and Settlement’, p. 91.
42. Simmons, Great New Zealand Myth, pp. 344–5; Hiroa, Coming of
the Maori, pp. 24–5.
43. Hiroa, Coming of the Maori, pp. 33–4.
44. Simmons, Great New Zealand Myth, pp. 345–6; Hiroa, Coming of
the Maori, pp. 26–7.
45. Hiroa, Coming of the Maori, p. 43.
46. Ibid., pp. 51, 64; Irwin, ‘Voyaging and Settlement’, pp. 89–90.
47. Simmons, Great New Zealand Myth, pp. 347–50.
48. Irwin, ‘Voyaging and Settlement’, p. 90.
49. D. Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an
Age of Extinction (London, 1996), pp. 193–4; Hiroa, Coming of the
Maori, pp. 19–21.
 PART TWO
THE MIDDLE OCEAN: THE INDIAN OCEAN AND ITS NEIGHBOURS

3. The Waters of Paradise

1. J. Stanley-Baker, Japanese Art (London, 1984), pp. 47–9, and fig.
33.
2. M. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London, 2003), p. 13; H. P. Ray,
The Archaeology of Seafaring in the Indian Ocean (Cambridge,
2003), and other works by this prolific author.
3. P. Beaujard, Les Mondes de l’Océan Indien, vol. 1: De la formation
de l’État au premier système-monde afro-eurasien (4e millénaire
av. J.-C.–6e siècle ap. J.-C.) (Paris, 2012), p. 32; Pearson, Indian
Ocean, p. 14.
4. Sultan Dr Muhammad bin Muhammad al-Qasimi, The Gulf in
Historic Maps 1478–1861 (Sharjah, UAE, 1999).
5. K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: an
Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge,
1985), pp. 25, 27.
6. Beaujard, Mondes, vol. 1, pp. 32–5; Pearson, Indian Ocean, p. 21;
Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation, pp. 22, 24, maps 2 and 3; Ray,
Archaeology of Seafaring, pp. 20–22, figs. 1.1 and 1.2.
7. H. Crawford, Dilmun and Its Gulf Neighbours (Cambridge, 1998),
p. 8.
8. D. T. Potts, The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol. 1: From Prehistory
to the Fall of the Achaemenid Empire (Oxford, 1990), p. 41;
Crawford, Dilmun, p. 14.
9. Potts, Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol. 1, pp. 56, 59–61.
10. M. Roaf and J. Galbraith, ‘Pottery and P-Values: “Seafaring
Merchants of Ur” Re-Examined’, Antiquity, vol. 68 (1994), no.
261, pp. 770–83; Crawford, Dilmun, pp. 24, 27.
11. D. K. Chakrabarti, The External Trade of the Indus Civilization
(New Delhi, 1990), pp. 31–7, 141.
12. J. Connan, R. Carter, H. Crawford, et al., ‘A Comparative
Geochemical Study of Bituminous Boat Remains from H3, As-
 Sabiyah (Kuwait), and RJ-2, Ra’s al-Jinz (Oman)’, Arabian
Archaeology and Epigraphy, vol. 16 (2005), pp. 21–66.
13. Beaujard, Mondes, vol. 1, pp. 67–8, 226.
14. Potts, Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol. 1, p. 44.
15. Crawford, Dilmun, pp. 21, 27, 30.
16. S. Lloyd, Foundations in the Dust: a Story of Mesopotamian
Exploration (2nd edn, Harmondsworth, 1955), pp. 177–9.
17. A. George, The Epic of Gilgamesh: the Babylonian Epic Poem and
Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian (London, 1999), pp. 198–9;
S. N. Kramer, ‘Dilmun: Quest for Paradise’, Antiquity, vol. 37
(1963), no. 146, p. 111.
18. Beaujard, Mondes, vol. 1, pp. 127, 132–3.
19. Geoffrey Bibby, Looking for Dilmun (London and New York, 1970;
new edns 1996, 2012), pp. 79–81.
20. Cf. M. Rice, The Archaeology of the Arabian Gulf c.5000–323 BC
(London, 1994), p. 135, understanding ‘house of the quay’ as a
Dilmun temple.
21. Kramer, ‘Dilmun’, pp. 112–13.
22. W. F. Leemans, Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period as
Revealed by Texts from Southern Mesopotamia (Leiden, 1960), pp.
9–11; also cited by Rice in his often unreliable Archaeology of the
Arabian Gulf, p. 108.
23. Slightly amended from the text cited by Potts, Arabian Gulf in
Antiquity, vol. 1, p. 143.
24. Crawford, Dilmun, p. 104; Potts, Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol. 1,
pp. 90, 113–25, especially fig. 15, p. 120.
25. Leemans, Foreign Trade, pp. 19–21; cf. Potts, Arabian Gulf in
Antiquity, vol. 1, p. 183.
26. Crawford, Dilmun, pp. 104–24.
27. Leemans, Foreign Trade, pp. 26, 29, 31, 33.
28. Leemans, Foreign Trade, p. 36, doc. 14, with some alterations.
29. Cf. Bibby, Looking for Dilmun, taking the view he was of only
moderate wealth.
30. Leemans, Foreign Trade, pp. 39–40, doc. 17, slightly amended; also
pp. 51–2.
31. Rice, Archaeology of the Arabian Gulf, pp. 276–80.
32. Crawford, Dilmun, p. 41.
33. My special thanks to the American University of Sharjah for
facilitating my visit to this and other sites and museums.
34. Crawford, Dilmun, pp. 150–51; also Potts, Arabian Gulf in
Antiquity, vol. 1, pp. 143, 149.
35. Chakrabarti, External Trade, pp. 145, 149; Potts, Arabian Gulf in
Antiquity, vol. 1, p. 167.
36. Leemans, Foreign Trade, pp. 159–66; Chakrabarti, External Trade,
pp. 145–50, citing at length various views.
37. G. Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and
Early Medieval Times, revised by J. Carswell (2nd edn, Princeton,
1995), pp. 129–30.
38. Rice, Archaeology of the Arabian Gulf, p. 271.
39. Excellent maps and an up-to-date survey in J. McIntosh, The
Ancient Indus Valley: New Perspectives (Santa Barbara, 2008);
Ray, Archaeology of Seafaring, p. 92, fig. 4.3; also S. Piggott,
Prehistoric India to 1000 BC (2nd edn, Harmondsworth, 1952), p.
137, fig. 17.
40. L. N. Swamy, Maritime Contacts of Ancient India with Special
Reference to the West Coast (New Delhi, 2000), pp. 21, 26; Ray,
Archaeology of Seafaring, pp. 95–6; Leemans, Foreign Trade, p.
162, citing the views of Sir Mortimer Wheeler, excavator of the
Indus sites.
41. Piggott, Prehistoric India, p. 138; also Beaujard, Mondes, vol. 1, p.
113.
42. Chakrabarti, External Trade, pp. 45–7; Piggott, Prehistoric India,
pp. 208–9.
43. Chakrabarti, External Trade, pp. 47, 53–61, 139, 143; Swamy,
Maritime Contacts, pp. 23–5.
44. Piggott, Prehistoric India, pp. 183–4.
45. Chakrabarti, External Trade, pp. 22–7, 29–30; Swamy, Maritime
Contacts, p. 22.
46. Crawford, Dilmun, p. 150.
47. Bibby, Looking for Dilmun, p. 18.
48. Potts, Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol. 1, pp. 333–4; Ray,
Archaeology of Seafaring, p. 105; Bibby, Looking for Dilmun, pp.
31, 45.
49. Crawford, Dilmun, p. 51; Bibby, Looking for Dilmun, p. 47; image
of inscription: p. 49.
50. Potts, Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol. 1, pp. 88–9; cf. Kramer,
‘Dilmun’, pp. 111–15, recommending India.
51. Crawford, Dilmun, pp. 71–9; Potts, Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol.
1, pp. 168–72.
52. Crawford, Dilmun, pp. 15, 61; Potts, Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol.
1, p. 182.
53. Bibby, Looking for Dilmun, pp. 171–80.
54. Crawford, Dilmun, pp. 61–2, 87–94; Bibby, Looking for Dilmun, p.
253.
55. Potts, Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol. 1, pp. 186–8.
56. Crawford, Dilmun, pp. 95–6; Bibby, Looking for Dilmun, pp. 192–
3, 354–5, 358–9.
57. Crawford, Dilmun, pp. 38, 41.
58. I. Finkel, The Ark before Noah (London, 2014).
59. Connan, Carter, Crawford et al., ‘Comparative Geochemical Study’,
pp. 22–34.
60. Bibby, Looking for Dilmun, p. 193; Rice, Archaeology of the
Arabian Gulf, pp. 148–9.
61. Connan, Carter, Crawford et al., ‘Comparative Geochemical Study’,
pp. 34–54; Ray, Archaeology of Seafaring, pp. 57, 88–9.
62. J. Connan and T. Van de Velde, ‘An Overview of the Bitumen
Trade in the Near East from the Neolithic (c.8000 BC) to the Early
Islamic Period’, Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, vol. 21
(2010), pp. 1–19.
63. Crawford, Dilmun, pp. 38, 63.
64. Ray, Archaeology of Seafaring, pp. 59–61, 66–9; Beaujard, Mondes,
vol. 1, p. 125.
65. Ray, Archaeology of Seafaring, p. 98; Beaujard, Mondes, vol. 1, p.
156.
 4. The Journey to the Land of the God
1. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a Human History of the
Mediterranean (London, 2011), p. 38.
2. A. Gardiner, The Egyptians: an Introduction (2nd edn, London,
1999), pp. 387–8.
3. N. Groom, Frankincense and Myrrh: a Study of the Arabian Incense
Trade (London, 1981), pp. 163–4.
4. Ibid., pp. 3, 12, 24–5; Herodotos, 2:86.
5. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 12:32.58–62 and 65; Groom,
Frankincense and Myrrh, pp. 136–7.
6. Groom, Frankincense and Myrrh, pp. 12–15, 17, 25.
7. R. J. Leprohon, Texts from the Pyramid Age (Leiden, 2005), p. 66;
D. Fabre, Seafaring in Ancient Egypt (London, 2004), p. 89.
8. Illustrated in Fabre, Seafaring in Ancient Egypt, p. 90.
9. D. Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the
Age of Columbus (New Haven, 2008).
10. J. Baines, ‘Interpreting the Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor’,
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, vol. 76 (1990), pp. 55–72; Fabre,
Seafaring in Ancient Egypt, p. 39; M. Cary and E. H. Warmington,
The Ancient Explorers (2nd edn, Harmondsworth, 1963), pp. 75,
233–4.
11. I have used the English translation accompanying the transcription
by M.-J. Nederhof, ‘Shipwrecked Sailor’, http://mjn.host.cs.st-
andrews.ac.uk/egyptian/texts/corpus/pdf/Shipwrecked.pdf, as
amended on 8 June 2009.
12. See the discussion in a later chapter based on M. D. Bukharin, P. de
Geest, H. Dridi et al., Foreign Sailors on Socotra: the Inscriptions
and Drawings from the Cave Hoq (Bremen, 2012); Z. Biedermann,
Soqotra: Geschichte einer christlichen Insel im Indischen Ozean
bis zur frühen Neuzeit (Wiesbaden, 2006).
13. Gardiner, Egyptians, pp. 176, 182.
14. Adapted from Cary and Warmington, Ancient Explorers, p. 75; and
from Fabre, Seafaring in Ancient Egypt, p. 179.
15. Fabre, Seafaring in Ancient Egypt, pp. 158–60 for private traders.
16. Illustrated ibid., p. 180; Gardiner, Egyptians, p. 180.
17. Fabre, Seafaring in Ancient Egypt, p. 179.
18. Illustrated ibid., p. 144; cf. pp. 182–3 for the arrival of goods from
Punt.
19. R. Fattovich, ‘Egypt’s Trade with Punt: New Discoveries on the
Red Sea Coast’, British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and
Sudan, vol. 18 (2012), p. 4; see also K. Bard and R. Fattovich, eds.,
Harbor of the Pharaohs to the Land of Punt: Archaeological
Investigations at Marsa/Wadi Gawasis, Egypt, 2001–2005 (Naples,
2007).
20. Fattovich, ‘Egypt’s Trade with Punt’, pp. 5, 9; Fabre, Seafaring in
Ancient Egypt, pp. 80–83; E. H. Warmington, The Commerce
between the Roman Empire and India (2nd edn, London, 1974), pp.
7–8.
21. Illustrated in Fattovich, ‘Egypt’s Trade with Punt’, pp. 40, 46–7, 55,
figs. 40, 46–8, 63.
22. Ibid., p. 14.
23. Abulafia, Great Sea, pp. 48–52.
24. Groom, Frankincense and Myrrh, pp. 198–204.
25. Ibid., pp. 32–3.
26. Babylonian Talmud, Treatise Kerithoth; see also Exodus 30:34–6.
27. I Kings 9:26–8; also I Chronicles 29:4; I. Finkelstein and N. A.
Silberman, David and Solomon (New York, 2006), pp. 153, 170.
28. I Kings 10:11–22; also II Chronicles 8:18; II Chronicles 9.
29. For strong doubts about Phoenician identity see J. Quinn, In Search
of the Phoenicians (Princeton, 2018); Abulafia, Great Sea, pp. 66–
7.
30. S. Celestino and C. López-Ruiz, Tartessos and the Phoenicians in
Iberia (Oxford, 2016), pp. 111–21.
31. Ezekiel 27; see also M. E. Aubet, The Phoenicians and the West:
Politics, Colonies and Trade (2nd edn, Cambridge, 2001), pp. 364–
71.
32. Ibid., p. 115.
33. G. Pratico, ‘Nelson Glueck’s 1938–1940 Excavations at Tell el-
Kheleifeh: a Reappraisal’, Bulletin of the American Schools of
Oriental Research, no. 259 (1985), pp. 1–32.
34. B. Isserlin, The Israelites (London, 1998), p. 184.
35. Ibid., pp. 185, 226, also plate 44.
36. Matthew 2:11.
37. Groom, Frankincense and Myrrh, pp. 34–7.
 5. Cautious Pioneers
1. Herodotos, 4:44; M. Cary and E. H. Warmington, The Ancient
Explorers (2nd edn, Harmondsworth, 1963), pp. 78–9; D. T. Potts,
The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol. 2: From Alexander the Great to
the Coming of Islam (Oxford, 1990), p. 2.
2. D. Fabre, Seafaring in Ancient Egypt (London, 2004), p. 78.
3. Cary and Warmington, Ancient Explorers, p. 79.
4. Herodotos, 4:42; Fabre, Seafaring in Ancient Egypt, p. 77; Cary and
Warmington, Ancient Explorers, pp. 111–12.
5. Herodotos, 4:43.
6. Cary and Warmington, Ancient Explorers, pp. 114–17.
7. Arrian, Anabasis, 5:26.1–2.
8. Ibid., 7:20.9–10; Strabo, Geography, 16:1.11; Potts, Arabian Gulf in
Antiquity, vol. 2, pp. 2–4.
9. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a Human History of the
Mediterranean (London, 2011), p. 180.
10. Arrian, Anabasis, 18:29–30; Cary and Warmington, Ancient
Explorers, pp. 80–86.
11. Arrian, Anabasis, 18:31.
12. Polybios, 13:9; Potts, Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol. 2, pp. 11–13.
13. H. P. Ray, The Archaeology of Seafaring in the Indian Ocean
(Cambridge, 2003), p. 173.
14. M. Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic
World (3 vols., Oxford, 1940–41), vol. 1, pp. 457–8.
15. Potts, Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol. 2, pp. 85–97.
16. Polybios, 13:9.4–5.
17. Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History, vol. 1, pp. 458–9; Potts,
Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol. 2, p. 93.
18. Potts, Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol. 2, p. 34; and for Thaj
generally, pp. 23–48.
19. Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History, vol. 1, p. 461.
20. N. Groom, Frankincense and Myrrh: a Study of the Arabian Incense
Trade (London, 1981), p. 194.
21. Potts, Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol. 2, p. 31.
22. Strabo, Geography, 16:3; Ray, Archaeology of Seafaring, p. 176.
23. P. Beaujard, Les Mondes de l’Océan Indien, vol. 1: De la formation
de l’État au premier système-monde afro-eurasien (4e millénaire
av. J.-C.–6e siècle ap. J.-C.) (Paris, 2012), p. 361.
24. Fabre, Seafaring in Ancient Egypt, pp. 78–9.
25. Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History, vol. 1, p. 384.
26. Cary and Warmington, Ancient Explorers, pp. 87–8.
27. Strabo, Geography, 2:5.12.
28. Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History, vol. 2, p. 925.
29. Text copied by Photios, cited in extenso in Groom, Frankincense
and Myrrh, pp. 68–72.
30. Strabo, Geography, 2:98–102; Cary and Warmington, Ancient
Explorers, pp. 90–91, 124–5.
31. Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History, vol. 2, p. 927; R.
McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East: Trade Routes to the
Ancient Lands of Arabia, India, and China (London, 2010), p. 24.
 6. Mastering the Monsoon
1. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a Human History of the
Mediterranean (London, 2011), pp. 164–5; M. Rostovtzeff, The
Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World (3 vols.,
Oxford, 1940–41), vol. 2, pp. 920–24.
2. Cited in R. McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East: Trade Routes
to the Ancient Lands of Arabia, India, and China (London, 2010),
p. 143.
3. McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East, p. 28.
4. Lucian of Samosata, Alexander the False Prophet, c.44; R. Tomber,
Indo-Roman Trade: From Pots to Pepper (Bristol and London,
2008), p. 66.
5. E. H. Warmington, The Commerce between the Roman Empire and
India (2nd edn, London, 1974), pp. 39–42; Tomber, Indo-Roman
Trade, pp. 30–37.
6. G. Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and
Early Medieval Times, revised by J. Carswell (2nd edn, Princeton,
1995), pp. 25–6.
7. L. Casson, ed. and transl., The Periplus Maris Erythraei (Princeton,
1989), pp. 86–7; another translation by G. W. B. Huntingford, The
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (London, 1980), p. 52; most
references are to the former, Casson’s edition. I use the form
Periplous because I cannot see any reason to latinize the title of a
work written in Greek. Also, Warmington, Commerce between the
Roman Empire and India, pp. 43–4.
8. M. Cary and E. H. Warmington, The Ancient Explorers (2nd edn,
Harmondsworth, 1963), pp. 95–6, 227.
9. Casson, ed. and transl., Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp. 7–8.
10. Casson in Periplus Maris Erythraei, p. 10; M. Wheeler, Rome
beyond the Imperial Frontiers (2nd edn, Harmondsworth, 1955), p.
138.
11. Casson in Periplus Maris Erythraei, p. 8; text, pp. 62–3; Wheeler,
Rome beyond the Imperial Frontiers, p. 141.
12. Casson in Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp. 5–7; cf. Huntingford in
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, pp. 8–12, dating it between 95 and
130.
13. Casson in Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp. 50–51; S. Sidebotham,
Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 2011), p. 63.
14. Cited from Huntingford’s version in Periplus of the Erythraean Sea,
p. 21.
15. Casson, ed. and transl., Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp. 52–3, 113.
16. Ibid., pp. 58–9, 133.
17. Wheeler, Rome beyond the Imperial Frontiers, p. 138.
18. Cary and Warmington, Ancient Explorers, p. 122; R. Darley, Indo-
Byzantine Exchange, 4th to 7th centuries: a Global History
(Birmingham University Ph.D. thesis, 2013).
19. Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade, p. 98.
20. Casson, ed. and transl., Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp. 60–61, 141–2.
21. Ibid., pp. 62–3.
22. Hourani, Arab Seafaring, pp. 32–3.
23. L. N. Swamy, Maritime Contacts of Ancient India with Special
Reference to the West Coast (New Delhi, 2000), p. 61.
24. Casson, ed. and transl., Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp. 64–5, 158–9;
also Huntingford in Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, pp. 9–10;
Warmington, Commerce between the Roman Empire and India, p.
11.
25. McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East, pp. 3, 28.
26. Casson, ed. and transl., Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp. 66–7.
27. Ibid., pp. 70–71.
28. P. Beaujard, Les Mondes de l’Océan Indien, vol. 1: De la formation
de l’État au premier système-monde afro-eurasien (4e millénaire
av. J.-C.–6e siècle ap. J.-C.) (Paris, 2012), p. 373.
29. Hourani, Arab Seafaring, pp. 16–17.
30. Casson, ed. and transl., Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp. 74–5, 190.
31. Casson in Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp. 22, 26.
32. Casson, ed. and transl., Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp. 74–7.
33. Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade, pp. 125–6.
34. Casson in Periplus Maris Erythraei, p. 210; Tomber, Indo-Roman
Trade, p. 55.
35. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 12:14; Wheeler, Rome beyond the
Imperial Frontiers, p. 148.
36. Casson, ed. and transl., Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp. 80–81, 84–5.
37. Ibid., pp. 82–3; K. Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development in
Early Southeast Asia (Honolulu, 1985), pp. 32–3.
38. Casson in Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp. 241–2.
39. Casson, ed. and transl., Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp. 86–7.
40. Map 14 ibid., p. 225.
41. Beaujard, Mondes, vol. 1, p. 379.
42. Sidebotham, Berenike, pp. 7, 9, 11.
43. Ibid., p. 12; also pp. 18–20.
44. Diodorus Siculus, 3:40.4–8; Sidebotham, Berenike, pp. 51–2, 195.
45. Sidebotham, Berenike, pp. 50–51.
46. Ibid., p. 196.
47. Abulafia, Great Sea, pp. 155–8.
48. Sidebotham, Berenike, pp. 68–81.
49. Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade, p. 62; Sidebotham, Berenike, pp. 81–5.
50. D. Peacock and L. Blue, eds., Myos Hormos – Quseir al-Qadim:
Roman and Islamic Ports on the Red Sea, vol. 1: Survey and
Excavations 1999–2003 (Oxford, 2006), and vol. 2: Finds from the
Excavations 1999–2003 (Oxford, 2011); L. Guo, Commerce,
Culture and Community in a Red Sea Port in the Thirteenth
Century: the Arabic Documents from Quseir (Leiden, 2004);
Strabo, Geography, 17:1.45; Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade, p. 57;
McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East, p. 28; Sidebotham,
Berenike, pp. 184–6.
51. McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East, p. 15.
52. Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade, p. 61.
53. McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East, pp. 15–16, 159–60.
54. Ibid., p. 193 n. 298; Sidebotham, Berenike, pp. 223–4.
55. Sidebotham, Berenike, p. 225; Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade, pp. 26–
7, 141; McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East, p. 49; Wheeler,
Rome beyond the Imperial Frontiers, p. 160.
56. Cited in H. P. Ray, The Archaeology of Seafaring in the Indian
Ocean (Cambridge, 2003), p. 53; see also Beaujard, Mondes, vol. 1,
p. 375.
57. McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East, p. 144; Tomber, Indo-
Roman Trade, p. 55.
58. Sidebotham, Berenike, pp. 226–7, and fig. 12.1; Tomber, Indo-
Roman Trade, p. 76.
59. Cf. Sidebotham, Berenike, pp. 76, 228–30, 249–51.
60. McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East, p. 63; Sidebotham,
Berenike, pp. 175, 177.
61. Sidebotham, Berenike, pp. 231–2, 236–7.
62. McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East, p. 19; Tomber, Indo-
Roman Trade, p. 43.
63. Sidebotham, Berenike, pp. 232–4; Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade, pp.
81, 149.
64. McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East, p. 159.
65. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 12:41.84.
66. Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade, p. 31.
67. Warmington, Commerce between the Roman Empire and India, p.
68.
68. Cited by Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade, p. 67.
69. Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade, pp. 121–2; Beaujard, Mondes, vol. 1,
pp. 401–39, on Buddhism and trade; Swamy, Maritime Contacts,
pp. 58–60.
70. Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade, p. 145.
71. Warmington, Commerce between the Roman Empire and India, pp.
116–26.
72. Cited from McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East, p. 56; also in
Beaujard, Mondes, vol. 1, p. 371.
73. D. Keys, Catastrophe: an Investigation into the Origins of the
Modern World (London, 1999).
74. Cf. V. Begley, ‘Arikamedu Reconsidered’, American Journal of
Archaeology, vol. 87 (1983), pp. 461–81.
75. Warmington, Commerce between the Roman Empire and India, p.
68.
76. Begley, ‘Arikamedu Reconsidered’, p. 461.
77. Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade, pp. 133, 137; Begley, ‘Arikamedu
Reconsidered’, p. 470.
78. Tomber, Indo-Roman Trade, p. 137; cf. the hyper-sceptical Darley,
Indo-Byzantine Exchange, pp. 315–17.
79. Casson, ed. and transl., Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp. 88–9, 228–9;
Wheeler, Rome beyond the Imperial Frontiers, pp. 173–9, and
plates 19a and b; J. M. and G. Casal, Fouilles de Virampatnam-
Arikamedu: rapport de l’Inde et de l’Occident aux environs de
l’Ère chrétienne (Paris, 1949).
80. Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development, p. 35.
81. Strabo, Geography, 15:1.4; McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant
East, p. 10.
82. McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East, pp. 134–5.
83. Ibid., p. 58.
84. Sidebotham, Berenike, pp. 259–75.
85. Ibid., pp. 204–5.
86. Ibid., p. 200; McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East, p. 36.
87. Sidebotham, Berenike, pp. 279–82; Darley, Indo-Byzantine
Exchange, pp. 318–26.
 7. Brahmins, Buddhists and Businessmen
1. P. Beaujard, Les Mondes de l’Océan Indien, vol. 1: De la formation
de l’État au premier système-monde afro-eurasien (4e millénaire
av. J.-C.–6e siècle ap. J.-C.) (Paris, 2012), p. 381.
2. I. Strauch with M. D. Bukharin, P. de Geest, H. Dridi et al., Foreign
Sailors on Socotra: the Inscriptions and Drawings from the Cave
Hoq (Bremen, 2011), p. 13.
3. L. Casson, ed. and transl., The Periplus Maris Erythraei (Princeton,
1989), pp. 68–9, with minor alterations.
4. Casson in Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp. 167–70.
5. Strauch, Foreign Sailors on Socotra, p. 44.
6. K. Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development in Early Southeast
Asia (Honolulu, 1985), p. 37; Strauch, Foreign Sailors on Socotra,
p. 374.
7. Strauch, Foreign Sailors on Socotra, pp. 52–3, 309, 344–5; Casson,
ed. and transl., Periplus Maris Erythraei, pp. 76–7.
8. Strauch, Foreign Sailors on Socotra, pp. 131–2, 141, 211; also p.
214; p. 181: ‘the son of the captain Humiyaka’.
9. Ibid., pp. 227–8, 364–5, 377–9, and fig. 6.13.
10. M. Gorea ibid., pp. 448–83 (šmmr: pp. 455–6); also comments by
Strauch, pp. 79, 338, 377–9.
11. Ibid., pp. 142, 183, 348, 497.
12. Ibid., pp. 375–6, 542.
13. Cited ibid., pp. 384–5.
14. S. Randrianja and S. Ellis, Madagascar: a Short History (London,
2009), pp. 24–6; K. McDonald, Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and
Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World (Oakland,
2015), p. 62; R. Boothby, A Briefe Discovery or Description of the
Most Famous Island of Madagascar or St Laurence in Asia neare
unto East-India; with relation of the healthfulnesse, pleasure,
fertility and wealth of that country, also the condition of the
 natives: also the excellent meanes and accommodation to fit the
planters there (London, 1646).
15. Beaujard, Mondes, vol. 1, pp. 527–8, 538–43, 549–51, 553–8;
Randrianja and Ellis, Madagascar, pp. 29, 35.
16. Beaujard, Mondes, vol. 1, p. 538; Randrianja and Ellis,
Madagascar, p. 22.
17. A. Sherriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism,
Commerce and Islam (London and Zanzibar, 2010), pp. 197–9.
18. Beaujard, Mondes, vol. 1, pp. 525, 530.
19. Ibid., p. 553; Randrianja and Ellis, Madagascar, p. 20.
20. Sherriff, Dhow Cultures, p. 199.
21. Beaujard, Mondes, vol. 1, pp. 530–31.
22. Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development, p. 28.
23. C. C. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, or ‘Malay Annals’ (2nd edn,
Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, 1970).
24. For example, Dionysios Periegetes, whose map is reconstructed in
P. Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese: Studies in the Historical
Geography of the Malay Peninsula before AD 1500 (Kuala Lumpur,
1961), p. 131.
25. T. Suárez, Early Mapping of Southeast Asia (Hong Kong and
Singapore, 1999), pp. 62–3.
26. For gold of Ophir see also D. C. West and A. Kling, eds., The Libro
de las profecías of Christopher Columbus (Gainesville, 1991).
27. Wheatley, Golden Khersonese, pp. 136, 138–62; cf. O. W. Wolters,
Early Indonesian Commerce: a Study of the Origins of Śrīvijaya
(Ithaca, NY, 1967), p. 57.
28. Wang Gungwu, The Nanhai Trade: Early Chinese Trade in the
South China Sea (new edn, Singapore, 2003; original edition:
Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 31
(1958), part 2, pp. 1–135), p. 8.
29. Wang, Nanhai Trade, pp. xiii–xiv; D. Heng, Sino-Malay Trade and
Diplomacy from the Tenth through the Fourteenth Century
(Athens, Ohio, 2009), pp. 21–2.
30. Wang, Nanhai Trade, pp. xvii, 1–2, citing Ssu-Ma Ch’ien (1st c.
BC).
31. See e.g. V. Hansen, The Silk Road: a New History (London, 2012);
J. Millward, The Silk Road: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford,
2013); X. Liu, The Silk Road in World History (New York and
Oxford, 2010); F. Wood, The Silk Road (London, 2002).
32. Wang, Nanhai Trade, p. xv.
33. Ibid., pp. 9, 15.
34. Ibid., p. 33.
35. K. Hall, A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and
Societal Development, 100–1500 (Lanham, 2011), pp. 41–4;
Wheatley, Golden Khersonese, p. 14; Wolters, Early Indonesian
Commerce, pp. 39–41.
36. Wheatley, Golden Khersonese, pp. 16–17, 26–30.
37. Ibid., p. 9, fig. 8.
38. Cited in Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce, p. 44.
39. Wang, Nanhai Trade, pp. 35, 45, from the Shih i Chi cited in the
T’u Shu Chi Ch’eng.
40. Ibid., pp. 50–51 (place names modified to Pinyin).
41. Ibid., pp. 24–5, 52.
42. Wheatley, Golden Khersonese, p. 12.
43. Text ibid., pp. 8–9, removing some square brackets; also in Wang,
Nanhai Trade, p. 16; cf. Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce, p.
61.
44. Wang, Nanhai Trade, p. 19.
45. Ibid., p. 37.
46. Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce, pp. 77–8; Wang, Nanhai
Trade, pp. 18, 59.
47. Wang, Nanhai Trade, p. 39.
48. J. Miksic, ‘The Beginning of Trade in Ancient Southeast Asia: the
Role of Oc Eo and the Lower Mekong River’, in J. Khoo, ed., Art
and Archaeology of Fu Nan: Pre-Khmer Kingdom of the Lower
 Mekong Valley (Bangkok, 2003), p. 22; Wang, Nanhai Trade, pp.
31–48.
49. K’ang Tai cited in Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development, p.
48 – also p. 272; Wheatley, Golden Khersonese, pp. 14–15, 285–7.
50. Miksic, ‘Beginning of Trade’, p. 13; K. Hall, ‘Economic History of
Early Southeast Asia’, in N. Tarling, ed., The Cambridge History of
Southeast Asia, vol. 1: From Early Times to c.1500 (Cambridge,
1992), p. 193.
51. Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development, pp. 49–51; J. C. van
Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and
Economic History (The Hague, 1955).
52. Miksic, ‘Beginning of Trade’, p. 4.
53. Ibid., pp. 2–4, 18.
54. Vo Si Khai, ‘The Kingdom of Fu Nan and the culture of Oc Eo’, in
Khoo, ed., Art and Archaeology of Fu Nan, p. 70.
55. Miksic, ‘Beginning of Trade’, p. 16; also Vo Si Khai, ‘Kingdom of
Fu Nan’, p. 47 and map of waterways, p. 48.
56. K. Taylor, ‘The Early Kingdoms’, in Tarling, ed., Cambridge
History of Southeast Asia, vol. 1, pp. 158–9.
57. Miksic, ‘Beginning of Trade’, pp. 14, 18–19; Vo Si Khai, ‘Kingdom
of Fu Nan’, p. 70.
58. Miksic, ‘Beginning of Trade’, pp. 8–11; Wang, Nanhai Trade, p.
39.
59. Liang Shu in Miksic, ‘Beginning of Trade’, p. 22; Vo Si Khai,
‘Kingdom of Fu Nan’, p. 69.
60. E. H. Warmington, The Commerce between the Roman Empire and
India (2nd edn, London, 1974), pp. 127–9; M. Cary and E. H.
Warmington, The Ancient Explorers (2nd edn, Harmondsworth,
1963), p. 105; Suárez, Early Mapping of Southeast Asia, pp. 90–92.
61. My suggestion, with thanks to Dr Audrey Truschke for
disentangling the Sanskrit, though other interpretations such as
‘Strong City’ exist; see Wheatley, Golden Khersonese, p. 205 for
Kathārsaritsāgara.
62. K’ang Tai cited ibid., p. 16; also in Hall, Maritime Trade and State
Development, pp. 64–5.
63. Text in Wheatley, Golden Khersonese, p. 17.
64. Text Ibid., pp. 37–9; Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce, p. 65.
65. Text in Wheatley, Golden Khersonese, p. 38, with names converted
to Pinyin spelling.
66. Wang, Nanhai Trade, pp. 41–2.
67. Text in Wheatley, Golden Khersonese, p. 39.
68. Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development, p. 37; also Hall,
History of Early Southeast Asia, pp. 65–6.
69. Wang, Nanhai Trade, p. 56.
70. Miksic, ‘Beginning of Trade’, pp. 28–30; Vo Si Khai, ‘Kingdom of
Fu Nan’, p. 84.
71. Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce, pp. 81, 83–5, 129–63.
 8. A Maritime Empire?
1. C. C. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, or ‘Malay Annals’ (2nd edn,
Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, 1970), p. 15.
2. J. Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300–1800
(Singapore, 2013), p. 55.
3. Michel Jacq-Hergoualc’h, transl. Victoria Hobson, The Malay
Peninsula (Leiden, 2001), p. 233.
4. G. Ferrand, L’Empire Sumatranais de Çrīvijaya (Paris, 1922), pp.
5–6, 15–16; F. Hirth and W. W. Rockhill, eds., Chau Ju-kua: His
Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth
Centuries, Entitled Chu-fan-chï (St Petersburg, 1911), p. 114; also
Wang Gungwu, The Nanhai Trade: Early Chinese Trade in the
South China Sea (new edn, Singapore, 2003; original edition:
Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 31
(1958), part 2, pp. 1–135), p. 96, for Fo-chi; D. Heng, Sino-Malay
Trade and Diplomacy from the Tenth through the Fourteenth
Century (Athens, Ohio, 2009), p. 27, for the mission in 683.
5. Hirth and Rockhill, eds., Chau Ju-kua, pp. 60, 114; Ferrand, Empire
Sumatranais, pp. 1, 8; G. Coedès, The Indianized States of
Southeast Asia (Honolulu, 1968).
6. Wang, Nanhai Trade, pp. 87, 91.
7. Cited ibid., p. 113.
8. Ferrand, Empire Sumatranais, pp. 7–8.
9. Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road, pp. 37–8.
10. P. Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese: Studies in the Historical
Geography of the Malay Peninsula before AD 1500 (Kuala Lumpur,
1961), p. 45; Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road, p. 67.
11. Hirth and Rockhill, eds., Chau Ju-kua, p. 61.
12. Ibid., p. 60.
13. Ibid., p. 61; Ferrand, Empire Sumatranais, pp. 8–13; slaves: Song
historian, ibid., p. 16.
14. Ch’ên Ching, Hsin tsuan hsiang p’u, quoting the lost Hsiang lu of
Yeh The’ing-kuei, cited in D. Abulafia, ‘Asia, Africa and the Trade
of Medieval Europe’, in M. M. Postan, E. Miller and C. Postan,
eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe (2nd edn,
Cambridge, 1987), vol. 2, p. 445.
15. Ferrand, Empire Sumatranais, p. 18; Wang, Nanhai Trade, p. 117.
16. Heng, Sino-Malay Trade, p. 82.
17. Hirth and Rockhill, eds., Chau Ju-kua, p. 62; Ferrand, Empire
Sumatranais, p. 2; Heng, Sino-Malay Trade, pp. 83–4.
18. Wang, Nanhai Trade, pp. 114–16; D. Twitchett, Financial
Administration under the Tang Dynasty (2nd edn, Cambridge,
1970).
19. Hirth and Rockhill, eds., Chau Ju-kua, p. 62; Wheatley, Golden
Khersonese, p. 63.
20. Hirth and Rockhill, eds., Chau Ju-kua, p. 62; Ferrand, Empire
Sumatranais, p. 13.
21. Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road.
22. Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfi, ‘Accounts of China and India’, in T.
Mackintosh-Smith and J. Montgomery, eds., Two Arabic Travel
Books (New York, 2014), pp. 88–9; R. Hodges and D. Whitehouse,
Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe (London,
1983), pp. 134–5.
23. G. Ferrand, ed., Voyage du Marchand Arabe Sulaymân en Inde et
en Chine rédigé en 851 suivi de Remarques par Abû Zayd Ḥasan
(vers 916) (Paris, 1922), p. 95, also pp. 96–102, 142; Abū Zayd al-
Sīrāfi, ‘Accounts of China and India’, pp. 32–3, 36–7, 88–91;
Ferrand, Empire Sumatranais, pp. 53–4; Miksic, Singapore and the
Silk Road, p. 80.
24. Ibn al-Fakih al-Hamadhani (902), in Ferrand, Empire Sumatranais,
pp. 54, 67.
25. Abu Zayd Hasan in Ferrand, ed., Voyage du Marchand Arabe, pp.
96–7, 101; ibn Rosteh (c.903), in Ferrand, Empire Sumatranais, p.
55.
26. Second Voyage of Sindbad, in A Plain and Literal Translation of
the Arabian Nights Entertainment now intituled The Book of the
Thousand and One Nights, transl. R. Burton, ed. P. H. Newby
(London, 1950), p. 179.
27. Abu Zayd Hasan (c.916) and al-Mas‘udi (943), in Ferrand, Empire
Sumatranais, pp. 56–9, 62–3; also Bakuwi (15th c.), ibid., p. 78.
28. Al-Idrisi (1154), ibid., pp. 65–6.
29. Ibid., p. 66.
30. Ferrand, Empire Sumatranais, pp. 36, 38–41, 214, 218, 220–21;
Jacq-Hergoualc’h, Malay Peninsula, pp. 239–48; Miksic,
Singapore and the Silk Road, p. 77.
31. Hirth and Rockhill, eds., Chau Ju-kua, p. 60; Ferrand, Empire
Sumatranais, p. 9.
32. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, pp. 77–8.
33. Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road, pp. 74–5, 77, 79; also fig.
2.09, p. 76.
34. Jacq-Hergoualc’h, Malay Peninsula, pp. 234–7.
35. Abulafia, ‘Asia, Africa and the Trade of Medieval Europe’, p. 447.
36. Wang, Nanhai Trade, p. 95: embassies from Jambi (Chan-pei);
Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road, p. 72, for Jambi.
37. Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road, pp. 80–83.
38. H. Kulke, ‘Kadātuan–Śrivijaya: Empire or Kraton of Śrivijaya? A
Reassessment of the Epigraphical Evidence’, Bulletin de l’École
française d’Extrême Orient, vol. 80 (1993), pp. 159–80; Jacq-
Hergoualc’h, Malay Peninsula, pp. 248–55.
39. J. Chaffee, The Muslim Merchants of Pre-Modern China: the
History of a Maritime Asian Trade Diaspora, 750–1400
(Cambridge, 2018), p. 24; O. W. Wolters, Early Indonesian
Commerce: a Study of the Origins of Śrīvijaya (Ithaca, NY, 1967),
pp. 129–38.
40. Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce, p. 151.
41. Jacq-Hergoualc’h, Malay Peninsula, p. 241.
42. Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce, pp. 154–8; Heng, Sino-
Malay Trade, p. 28; Chaffee, Muslim Merchants, p. 29.
43. Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road, p. 91; Heng, Sino-Malay
Trade, pp. 14–15.
44. R. Krahl, J. Guy, J. K. Wilson and J. Raby, eds., Shipwrecked: Tang
Treasures and Monsoon Winds (Singapore and Washington DC,
2010).
45. J. Guy, ‘Rare and Strange Goods: International Trade in Ninth-
Century Asia’, ibid., pp. 19, 30.
46. J. K. Wilson and M. Flecker, ‘Dating the Belitung Shipwreck’, in
Krahl et al., eds., Shipwrecked, p. 40.
47. R. Krahl, ‘Chinese Ceramics in the Late Tang Dynasty’, in Krahl et
al., eds., Shipwrecked, p. 52.
48. Guy, ‘Rare and Strange Goods’, pp. 29–30.
49. Krahl, ‘Chinese Ceramics’, p. 40.
50. Guy, ‘Rare and Strange Goods’, pp. 23, 27.
51. Liu Yang, ‘Tang Dynasty Changsha Ceramics’, in Krahl et al., eds.,
Shipwrecked, pp. 145–59; Krahl, ‘Chinese Ceramics’, p. 46.
52. R. Krahl, ‘Tang Blue-and-White’, in Krahl et al., eds., Shipwrecked,
pp. 209–11; Heng, Sino-Malay Trade, p. 33; also A. Kessler, Song
Blue and White Porcelain on the Silk Road (Leiden, 2012).
53. Krahl et al., eds., Shipwrecked, p. 22, fig. 14.
54. Qi Dongfang, ‘Gold and Silver Wares on the Belitung Shipwreck’,
ibid., pp. 221–7.
55. Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road, p. 71.
56. J. Hallett, ‘Pearl Cups like the Moon: the Abbasid Reception of
Chinese Ceramics’, in Krahl et al., eds., Shipwrecked, pp. 75–81.
57. Krahl, ‘Chinese Ceramics’, p. 40; Miksic, Singapore and the Silk
Road, p. 81.
58. Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road, pp. 86–91; Heng, Sino-Malay
Trade, p. 29; Chaffee, Muslim Merchants, pp. 56–7.
59. Li Qingxin, Nanhai I and the Maritime Silk Road (Beijing, 2009);
Chaffee, Muslim Merchants, pp. 82–3; China and the World:
 Shipwrecks and Export Porcelain on the Maritime Silk Road
(Beijing, 2017; text in Chinese with English and Chinese captions),
pp. 190–201.
60. Wang Gungwu, ‘A Two-Ocean Mediterranean’, in G. Wade and L.
Tana, eds., Anthony Reid and the Study of the Southeast Asian Past
(Singapore, 2012), pp. 68–84.
 9. ‘I am about to cross the Great Ocean’
1. T. Power, The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate AD 500–
1000 (Cairo, 2012); P. Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam
(Oxford, 1987).
2. Power, Red Sea, pp. 70–71, with telling criticisms of I. Shahid,
‘Byzantium in South Arabia’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, vol. 33
(1979), pp. 27–94, especially p. 56; also G. Bowersock, The Throne
of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam (Oxford, 2013), pp.
96–8.
3. Bowersock, Throne of Adulis, pp. 106–33.
4. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a Human History of the
Mediterranean (London, 2011), p. 221.
5. Power, Red Sea, pp. 103–9.
6. R. Hodges and D. Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the
Origins of Europe (London, 1983), pp. 126–9.
7. Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Epistles, 2.1, ll.156–7.
8. Hodges and Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne, pp. 131–2.
9. Xinru Liu, The Silk Road in World History (Oxford and New York,
2010), pp. 96–101; F. Wood, The Silk Road (London, 2002); P.
Frankopan, The Silk Road: a New History of the World (London,
2015).
10. Hodges and Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne, pp. 115–18.
11. Slightly modified from the passage cited by S. M. Stern, ‘Ramisht
of Siraf, a Merchant Millionaire of the Twelfth Century’, Journal
of the Royal Asiatic Society, n.s., vol. 99 (1967), pp. 10–14.
12. D. Abulafia, ‘Asia, Africa and the Trade of Medieval Europe’, in M.
M. Postan, E. Miller and C. Postan, eds., The Cambridge Economic
History of Europe (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1987), vol. 2, p. 451.
13. G. Ferrand, ed., Voyage du Marchand Arabe Sulaymân en Inde et
en Chine rédigé en 851 suivi de Remarques par Abû Zayd Ḥasan
(vers 916) (Paris, 1922), pp. 35–7; Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfi, ‘Accounts
of China and India’, in T. Mackintosh-Smith and J. Montgomery,
 eds., Two Arabic Travel Books (New York, 2014), pp. 28–31 (pp.
5–6 for the problem of authorship; pp. 84–5, 88–9, 136 n. 28 for the
‘China ships’).
14. Ferrand, ed., Voyage du Marchand Arabe, pp. 75–7; Abū Zayd al-
Sīrāfi, ‘Accounts of China and India’, pp. 66–71; D. Heng, Sino-
Malay Trade and Diplomacy from the Tenth through the
Fourteenth Century (Athens, Oh., 2009), pp. 29, 34–5, giving a
date of 873; A. Schottenhammer, ‘China’s Emergence as a
Maritime Power’, in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 5, part
2: Sung China 960–1279 (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 437–525.
15. Ferrand, ed., Voyage du Marchand Arabe, pp. 81, 84; Abū Zayd al-
Sīrāfi, ‘Accounts of China and India’, pp. 72–9.
16. Hodges and Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne, pp. 133–41; D.
Whitehouse, ‘Sīrāf: a Medieval Port on the Persian Gulf’, World
Archaeology, vol. 2 (1970), pp. 141–58.
17. Abulafia, Great Sea, p. 389.
18. Ibid., pp. 258–67 for the Jewish merchants from Cairo; and, more
generally, pp. 268–317.
19. Power, Red Sea, pp. 146, 148–9.
20. Ibid., pp. 155–7; G. T. Scanlon, ‘Egypt and China: Trade and
Imitation’, in D. S. Richards, ed., Islam and the Trade of Asia: a
Colloquium (Oxford, 1970), pp. 81–95.
21. S. D. Goitein and M. Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages:
Documents from the Cairo Geniza – ‘India Book’ (Leiden, 2008),
pp. 387–9; E. Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage: a Social Life of
Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World (Cambridge, 2018).
22. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: the Jewish Communities of
the Arab World as Portrayed in the Cairo Geniza, vol. 1: Economic
Foundations (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967).
23. Cited in S. Reif, A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo: the History of
Cambridge University’s Genizah Collection (Richmond, Surrey,
2000), p. 173.
24. See e.g. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, pp. 160–61, 527, 535.
25. Ibid., p. 159.
26. Li Guo, Commerce, Culture, and Community in a Red Sea Port in
the Thirteenth Century: the Arabic Documents from Quseir
(Leiden, 2004); A. Regourd, ‘Arabic Language Documents on
Paper’, in D. Peacock and L. Blue, eds., Myos Hormos – Quseir al-
Qadim: Roman and Islamic Ports on the Red Sea, vol. 2: Finds
from the Excavations 1999–2003 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 339–44.
27. Guo, Commerce, Culture, and Community, pp. 141, 143, 152, 159–
60, 162, 235, texts 3, 4, 8, 11, 12, 43.
28. Ibid., p. 37.
29. Ibid., pp. 35–8.
30. Regourd, ‘Arabic Language Documents’, pp. 339–40.
31. Cited by Guo, Commerce, Culture, and Community, p. 29.
32. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, p. 189: ‘hiring two camels
from Qus to Aydhab’.
33. D. Peacock, ‘Regional Survey’, in D. Peacock and L. Blue, eds.,
Myos Hormos – Quseir al-Qadim: Roman and Islamic Ports on the
Red Sea, vol. 1: Survey and Excavations 1999–2003 (Oxford,
2006), p. 12.
34. L. Blue, J. Whitewright and R. Thomas, ‘Ships and Ships’ Fittings’,
in Peacock and Blue, eds., Myos Hormos, vol. 2, p. 184.
35. Guo, Commerce, Culture, and Community, p. 137, text 1.
36. M. van der Veen, A. Cox and J. Morales, ‘Plant Remains’, in
Peacock and Blue, eds., Myos Hormos, vol. 2, pp. 228–31.
37. F. Handley, ‘Basketry, Matting and Cordage’, in Peacock and Blue,
eds., Myos Hormos, vol. 2, pp. 306–7.
38. Guo, Commerce, Culture, and Community, pp. 38–9, 175, 181–2,
200, 203, 214–15, 219, 239, 257, 261, 280, texts 17, 20, 26, 27, 31,
32, 46, 58, 60, 67; Regourd, ‘Arabic Language Documents’, pp.
342–3.
39. Guo, Commerce, Culture, and Community, pp. 225–6, text 36.
40. Ibid., pp. 51–4.
41. D. Agius, ‘The Inscribed Ostrich Egg’, in Peacock and Blue, eds.,
Myos Hormos, vol. 1, p. 159 (punctuation modified here).
42. R. Bridgman, ‘Celadon and Qingbai Sherds: Preliminary Thoughts
on the Medieval Ceramics’, in Peacock and Blue, eds., Myos
Hormos, vol. 2, pp. 43–6.
43. Guo, Commerce, Culture, and Community, pp. 63, 75–89, and plate
1, p. 79.
44. R. Margariti, Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the
Life of a Medieval Arabian Port (Chapel Hill, 2007), p. 71; Goitein
and Friedman, India Traders, p. 295.
45. Margariti, Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade, pp. 47–67.
46. N. A. al-Shamrookh, The Commerce and Trade of the Rasulids in
the Yemen, 630–858/1231–1454 (Kuwait, 1996), pp. 101–29.
47. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, pp. 439–47.
48. Alexandria: Abulafia, Great Sea, pp. 296–7, 309.
49. Margariti, Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade, pp. 94–6, 101–2, 113,
115–19; for late medieval Yemen: al-Shamrookh, Commerce and
Trade of the Rasulids, pp. 259–81, 315–36 (appendix 1).
50. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, pp. 508–9: ‘no foreigner
should be molested’; A. Hartman and D. Halkin, Epistles of
Maimonides: Crisis and Leadership (Philadelphia, 1993).
51. Margariti, Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade, pp. 120–21.
52. Ibid., pp. 153–4.
53. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, p. 24.
54. Ibid., p. 534.
55. Ibid., pp. 147, 160–61.
56. E. Lambourn, K. Veluthat and R. Tomber, eds., The Kollam Plates
in the World of the Ninth-Century Indian Ocean (New Delhi,
2020).
57. Ferrand, ed., Voyage du Marchand Arabe, pp. 18, 19, 40, 42; Abū
Zayd al-Sīrāfi, ‘Accounts of China and India’, pp. 30–33; J.
Chaffee, The Muslim Merchants of Pre-Modern China: the History
of a Maritime Asian Trade Diaspora, 750–1400 (Cambridge,
2018), pp. 21–3.
58. S. Digby, ‘The Maritime Trade of India’, in T. Raychaudhuri and I.
Habib, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 1:
c.1200–c.1750 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 127, 146.
59. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, pp. 288–93, 373–6.
60. Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage., pp 00–0.
61. F. Hirth and W. W. Rockhill, eds., Chau Ju-kua: His Work on the
Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,
Entitled Chu-fan-chï (St Petersburg, 1911), pp. 88–9.
62. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, pp. 314–17, 332, 555.
63. Digby, ‘Maritime Trade of India’, pp. 125–6; Goitein and Friedman,
India Traders, pp. 346, 576.
64. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, pp. 54–68; also pp. 473, 476.
65. Ibid., p. 71; Abulafia, Great Sea, pp. 319–20.
66. Hirth and Rockhill, eds., Chau Ju-kua, p. 87.
67. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, pp. 35 n. 15, 210; Chaffee,
Muslim Merchants, p. 31.
68. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, pp. 124–5.
69. Ibid., pp. 387–9.
70. Digby, ‘Maritime Trade of India’, p. 133.
71. Abulafia, Great Sea, p. 296.
72. Abulafia, ‘Asia, Africa and the Trade of Medieval Europe’, pp.
437–43; for Islamic maps of the Indian Ocean, Y. Rapoport and E.
Savage-Smith, Lost Maps of the Caliphs (Oxford, 2018).
 10. The Rising and the Setting Sun
1. I. Morris, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient
Japan (Oxford, 1964), p. 87.
2. See e.g. W. McCullough, ‘The Heian Court, 794–1070’, in The
Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 2: Heian Japan (Cambridge,
1999), p. 83.
3. C. von Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea: Japanese Trade with
China and Korea from the Seventh to the Sixteenth Centuries
(Ithaca, NY, 2006), p. 3; B. Batten, Gateway to Japan: Hakata in
War and Peace, 500–1300 (Honolulu, 2006), pp. 61–2; also David
C. Kang, East Asia before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and
Tribute (New York, 2010), p. 60.
4. Five embassies between 664 and 671: Batten, Gateway to Japan, p.
25.
5. G. Sansom, Japan: a Short Cultural History (4th edn, Stanford,
1978), p. 35.
6. Kim Pusik, The Silla Annals of the Samguk Sagi [‘History of the
Three Kingdoms’], ed. and transl. E. Shultz, H. Kang and D. Kane
(Seongnam-si, 2012), p. 26.
7. I am very grateful to Professor Hiroshi Takayama of Tokyo
University for showing me the Munakata Grand Shrine and its
small but spectacular museum in 2000.
8. Von Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea, p. 67; Batten, Gateway to
Japan, p. 28; in fact Tsushima is a pair of islands very close
together.
9. McCullough, ‘Heian Court’, p. 81.
10. Masao Yaku, The Kojiki in the Life of Japan (Tokyo, 1969).
11. Von Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea, p. 2.
12. R. Bowring and P. Kornicki, eds., Cambridge Encyclopaedia of
Japan (Cambridge, 1993), p. 47.
13. McCullough, ‘Heian Court’, p. 81; C. Eckert, K. Lee, Y. I. Lew et
al., Korea Old and New: a History (Seoul and Cambridge, Mass.,
 1990), p. 42; Jung-Pang Lo, China as a Sea Power, 1127–1368: a
Preliminary Survey of the Maritime Expansion and Naval Exploits
of the Chinese People during the Southern Song and Yuan Periods,
ed. B. Elleman (Singapore, 2012), pp. 52–4.
14. Batten, Gateway to Japan, pp. 52–3, 55, 57–8.
15. Kim Pusik, Silla Annals, p. 308; another T’aeryŏm served as
ambassador to Tang China in 828 and brought back the seeds of
tea-shrubs: p. 345; also p. 159 n. 42.
16. Ibid., p. 207.
17. Ibid., pp. 264, 267, 297; also p. 294 [742]: ‘an envoy from Japan
arrived, but he was not received.’ Cf. pp. 329, 366, 371, 373.
18. R. Borgen, Sugawara no Michizane and the Early Heian Court
(Cambridge, Mass., 1986), pp. 228–40.
19. Von Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea, pp. 5–8, 11–13, 15;
Batten, Gateway to Japan, p. 63, table 2.
20. Batten, Gateway to Japan, pp. 51–2; Kang, East Asia before the
West, pp. 71–2.
21. Batten, Gateway to Japan, pp. 41–5; poem: pp. 41–2, cited from P.
Doe, A Warbler’s Song in the Dusk: the Life and Work of Ōtomo
Yakamochi (718–85) (Berkeley, 1982), pp. 219–20.
22. Batten, Gateway to Japan, pp. 55, 59, 65.
23. Ibid., pp. 69–76, noting p. 72, table 3, and p. 74, fig. 10 (wooden
toilet sticks).
24. Ibid., pp. 3–4, 55, 69–70; also p. 2, fig. 1.
25. Ibid., pp. 67–8.
26. Von Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea, pp. 20–21; McCullough,
‘Heian Court’, p. 91.
27. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, transl. E. Siedensticker
(London, 1992), p. 18.
28. Sansom, Japan, pp. 29–30.
29. C. von Verschuer, Les Relations officielles du Japon avec la Chine
aux VIII et IX siècles (Geneva, 1985), pp. 3, 55–60; Borgen,
e e

Sugawara no Michizane, p. 227.

30. J. Stanley-Baker, Japanese Art (London, 1984), pp. 100–101, fig.
67.
31. Von Verschuer, Relations officielles, p. 42.
32. Sansom, Japan, pp. 88–9.
33. Ibid., pp. 60–61.
34. G. Reeves, ed. and transl., The Lotus Sutra (Somerville, 2008); G.
Tanabe, ed., The Lotus Sutra in Japanese Culture (Honolulu,
1989).
35. Von Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea, p. 10.
36. Von Verschuer, Relations officielles, pp. 216–20; von Verschuer,
Across the Perilous Sea, pp. 18–19.
37. Borgen, Sugawara no Michizane, pp. 242–3; McCullough, ‘Heian
Court’, p. 85; see von Verschuer, Relations officielles, pp. 163–4,
and her discussion, pp. 161–80.
38. Borgen, Sugawara no Michizane, pp. 227–53.
39. Von Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea, pp. 14–16.
40. Stanley-Baker, Japanese Art, pp. 53–7; von Verschuer, Across the
Perilous Sea, p. 18.
41. E. Reischauer, ed. and transl., Ennin’s Diary: the Record of a
Pilgrimage to China (New York, 1955); E. Reischauer, Ennin’s
Travels in Tang China (New York, 1955); the French edition,
Ennin: Journal d’un voyageur en Chine au IXe siècle (Paris, 1961)
is translated from Reischauer’s English but has a useful
introduction by R. Lévy. For Ken’in, see Reischauer, Ennin’s
Travels, p. 17, and Ennin’s Diary, p. 410.
42. Reischauer, ed. and transl., Ennin’s Diary, p. 5 n. 13.
43. Reischauer, Ennin’s Travels, pp. 48–51.
44. Ibid., pp. 53–8.
45. Reischauer, ed. and transl., Ennin’s Diary, pp. 100, 118.
46. Kim Pusik, Silla Annals, pp. 346–7.
47. Reischauer, Ennin’s Travels, pp. 60, 63.
48. Ibid., p. 64.
49. Ibid., pp. 65–7.
50. Reischauer, ed. and transl., Ennin’s Diary, p. 8.
51. Ibid., pp. 6–21; Reischauer, Ennin’s Travels, pp. 70–71.
52. Reischauer, ed. and transl., Ennin’s Diary, p. 34.
53. Ibid., pp. 97, 99–101.
54. Ibid., pp. 114–16.
55. Ibid., p. 98; also Reischauer, Ennin’s Travels, p. 97.
56. Reischauer, Ennin’s Travels, p. 83.
57. Ibid., pp. 81–6; Reischauer, ed. and transl., Ennin’s Diary, pp. 95,
122–4; Lévy, Ennin, p. 17.
58. Reischauer, ed. and transl., Ennin’s Diary, pp. 94–5; Reischauer,
Ennin’s Travels, pp. 84–5.
59. Von Verschuer, Relations officielles, p. 205.
60. Reischauer, ed. and transl., Ennin’s Diary, pp. 102–3, 112.
61. Ibid., pp. 102–5; Lévy, Ennin, pp. 13–14.
62. Reischauer, ed. and transl., Ennin’s Diary, pp. 105–7.
63. Ibid., p. 111.
64. Reischauer, Ennin’s Travels, pp. 94–6.
65. Reischauer, ed. and transl., Ennin’s Diary, p. 131; Reischauer,
Ennin’s Travels, pp. 289–90.
66. Reischauer, Ennin’s Travels, pp. 100–113.
67. Ibid., p. 29; also pp. 217–71; Reischauer, ed. and transl., Ennin’s
Diary, pp. 342–89.
68. Reischauer, ed. and transl., Ennin’s Diary, pp. 390, 394.
69. Ibid., pp. 398–404; Lévy, Ennin, pp. 32–3.
70. Kim Pusik, Silla Annals, p. 344; Eckert, Lee, Lew et al., Korea Old
and New, p. 59; von Verschuer, Relations officielles, p. 451 n. 488.
71. Ilyon, Samguk Yusa: Legends and History of the Three Kingdoms of
Ancient Korea, ed. and transl. Ha Tae-Hung and G. Mintz (Seoul,
2006), book ii, section 47.
72. Von Verschuer, Relations officielles, p. 139; pp. 358–9, giving the
text of a document of 842.
73. Reischauer, ed. and transl., Ennin’s Diary, pp. 100, 118; letters: pp.
167–9; Reischauer, Ennin’s Travels, pp. 289–90.
74. Kim Pusik, Silla Annals, p. 349.
75. Ilyon, Samguk Yusa, book ii, section 47; cf. Reischauer, Ennin’s
Travels, pp. 287–94.
76. Kim Pusik, Silla Annals, p. 356, where Wihūn is yet another name
for Yomjang.
 11. ‘Now the world is the world’s world’
1. K. Yamamura, ‘The Growth of Commerce in Medieval Japan’, in
The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 3: Medieval Japan
(Cambridge, 1990), pp. 357, 364; E. Segal, Coins, Trade, and the
State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan (Cambridge,
Mass., 2011), pp. 50–51.
2. K. Shōji, ‘Japan and East Asia’, in Cambridge History of Japan,
vol. 3, pp. 410–11.
3. Yamamura, ‘Growth of Commerce’, pp. 347, 351–6; T. Toyoda,
History of pre-Meiji Commerce in Japan (Tokyo, 1969), pp. 21–8.
4. Segal, Coins, Trade, and the State, pp. 74–80.
5. Ibid., p. 77, fig. 4.
6. Yamamura, ‘Growth of Commerce’, pp. 359–60; Segal, Coins,
Trade, and the State, pp. 46–7, 53.
7. Segal, Coins, Trade, and the State, p. 93; S. Gay, The Moneylenders
of Late Medieval Kyoto (Honolulu, 2001).
8. P. F. Souyri, The World Turned Upside Down: Medieval Japanese
Society (London, 2002), pp. 87–8, 92–5, 154–6; cf. David Abulafia,
The Great Sea: a Human History of the Mediterranean (London,
2011), p. 400 and plate 51; Yamamura, ‘Growth of Commerce’, pp.
366–8.
9. Segal, Coins, Trade, and the State, pp. 59, 84–5.
10. C. von Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea: Japanese Trade with
China and Korea from the Seventh to the Sixteenth Centuries
(Ithaca, NY, 2006), pp. 43, 45.
11. W. McCullough, ‘The Heian Court, 794–1070’, in The Cambridge
History of Japan, vol. 2: Heian Japan (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 87–
8.
12. Von Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea, pp. 53–4, 61–2.
13. Ibid., pp. 101–2.
14. N. C. Rousmanière, Vessels of Influence: China and the Birth of
Porcelain in Medieval and Early Modern Japan (London, 2012),
 pp. 78–82; C. von Verschuer, Les Relations officielles du Japon
avec la Chine aux VIII et IX siècles (Geneva, 1985), p. 251; von
e e

Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea, pp. 63–8.

15. Chinese thirteenth-century treatise quoted in von Verschuer, Across
the Perilous Sea, p. 68.
16. Von Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea, pp. 71–3.
17. Ibid., pp. 45–6, 60.
18. Ibid., pp. 58–9.
19. Ibid., p. 42.
20. Ibid., p. 47.
21. Souyri, World Turned Upside Down, pp. 1–2; for the Taira and
Chinese trade, see Von Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea, p. 46.
22. Von Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea, p. 79.
23. Chung Yang Mo, ‘The Kinds of Ceramic Articles Discovered in
Sinan, and Problems about Them’, in Tokyo kokuritsu
kakabutsukan, Shin’an kaitei hikiage bunbutsu: Sunken Treasures
off the Sinan Coast (Tokyo, Nagoya and Fukoaka, 1983), pp. 84–7;
see also pp. 58–66 and colour plates 1–39 (celadons), pp. 69–70
and colour plates 53–6 (white porcelain).
24. Segal, Coins, Trade, and the State, p. 53.
25. Youn Moo-byong, ‘Recovery of Seabed Relics at Sinan and Its
Results from the Viewpoint of Underwater Archaeology’, in
Shin’an kaitei hikiage bunbutsu, pp. 81–3; von Verschuer, Across
the Perilous Sea, pp. 95–7.
26. Chung, ‘Kinds of Ceramic Articles’, p. 87.
27. Von Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea, p. 81; Shōji, ‘Japan and
East Asia’, pp. 405–7.
28. Souyri, World Turned Upside Down, pp. 158–60.
29. Von Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea, pp. 108–10; F. Gipouloux,
The Asian Mediterranean: Port Cities and Trading Networks in
China, Japan and Southeast Asia, 13th–21st century (Cheltenham,
2011), pp. 64–5; Toyoda, History of pre-Meiji Commerce, p. 30;
Cs. Oláh, Räuberische Chinesen und tückische Japaner: die
 diplomatischen Beziehungen zwischen China und Japan im 15. und
16. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 2009), pp. 141–5.
30. Letters cited from Wang Yi-T’ung, Official Relations between
China and Japan 1368–1549 (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 18–19;
Kanenaga: Toyoda, History of pre-Meiji Commerce, p. 29.
31. Von Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea, pp. 113–17; Gipouloux,
Asian Mediterranean, pp. 65–6; Shōji, ‘Japan and East Asia’, pp.
428–32.
32. Von Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea, p. 121.
33. T. Conlan, In Little Need of Divine Intervention: Takezaki
Suenaga’s Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan (Ithaca, NY,
2001).
34. Shōji, ‘Japan and East Asia’, pp. 414–15; S. Turnbull, The Mongol
Invasions of Japan 1274 and 1281 (Botley, Oxford, 2010), pp. 8–
10; J. Clements, A Brief History of Khubilai Khan (London, 2010);
M. Rossabi, Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1988).
35. Slightly modernized from Henry Yule and Henri Cordier, transl.
and eds., The Travels of Marco Polo: the Complete Yule–Cordier
Edition (3 vols. bound as 2, New York, 1993), vol. 2, pp. 253–5;
Shōji, ‘Japan and East Asia’, p. 419; cf. F. Wood, Did Marco Polo
Go to China? (London, 1995).
36. Conlan, In Little Need of Divine Intervention, p. 201, doc. 1.
37. Turnbull, Mongol Invasions, p. 11.
38. J. Delgado, Khubilai Khan’s Lost Fleet: History’s Greatest Naval
Disaster (London, 2009), pp. 89–90; Conlan, In Little Need of
Divine Intervention, p. 256.
39. Shōji, ‘Japan and East Asia’, pp. 411–15; T. Brook, The Troubled
Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge,
Mass., 2010), p. 26; Souyri, World Turned Upside Down, p. 79.
40. Turnbull, Mongol Invasions, p. 13.
41. Conlan, In Little Need of Divine Intervention, p. 205, doc. 5.
42. Brook, Troubled Empire, p. 26.
43. Conlan, In Little Need of Divine Intervention, p. 50.
44. Shōji, ‘Japan and East Asia’, p. 418; Turnbull, Mongol Invasions,
pp. 32–50, especially pp. 49–50; Delgado, Khubilai Khan’s Lost
Fleet, pp. 92, 97.
45. Delgado, Khubilai Khan’s Lost Fleet, pp. 73–4; Brook, Troubled
Empire, p. 26.
46. Delgado, Khubilai Khan’s Lost Fleet, p. 100.
47. B. Batten, Gateway to Japan: Hakata in War and Peace, 500–1300
(Honolulu, 2006), pp. 48, 132–3, and p. 49, fig. 8; Conlan, In Little
Need of Divine Intervention, pp. 235–6, doc. 41.
48. Turnbull, Mongol Invasions, pp. 56, 60–61, for maps.
49. For small boats, see illustrations from the war scrolls in Conlan, In
Little Need of Divine Intervention, pp.140–46, 151.
50. Turnbull, Mongol Invasions, pp. 63–4; Clements, Brief History of
Khubilai Khan, p. 161.
51. Clements, Brief History of Khubilai Khan, p. 159.
52. Conlan, In Little Need of Divine Intervention, p. 154.
53. Kadenokōji Kanenanka (1243–1308), cited in Conlan, In Little Need
of Divine Intervention, pp. 266–7; ibid., pp. 254, 259.
54. Delgado, Khubilai Khan’s Lost Fleet, pp. 106–8.
55. Yule and Cordier, transl. and eds., Travels of Marco Polo, vol. 2, p.
255; Delgado, Khubilai Khan’s Lost Fleet, p. 111.
56. Yule and Cordier, transl. and eds., Travels of Marco Polo, pp. 255–
60.
57. Clements, Brief History of Khubilai Khan, p. 163.
58. Delgado, Khubilai Khan’s Lost Fleet, pp. 126–53.
59. Ibid., pp. 158–64 (Vietnam); pp. 164–7 (Java); Clements, Brief
History of Khubilai Khan, pp. 192–206 (Vietnam), pp. 215–18
(Java); Yule and Cordier, transl. and eds., Travels of Marco Polo,
vol. 2, pp. 272–5 (Java).
60. Conlan, In Little Need of Divine Intervention, pp. 246–53, docs. 57–
65.
61. Souyri, World Turned Upside Down, p. 62.
62. A. Kobata and M. Matsuda, Ryukyuan Relations with Korea and
South Sea Countries: an Annotated Translation of Documents in
the Rekidai Hōan (Tokyo, 1969), p. 69.
63. R. Pearson, Ancient Ryukyu: an Archaeological Study of Island
Communities (Honolulu, 2013), p. 196, and frontispiece.
64. Ibid., pp. 273–4, 290–91.
65. David C. Kang, East Asia before the West: Five Centuries of Trade
and Tribute (New York, 2010), p. 72.
66. G. Kerr, Okinawa: the History of an Island People (2nd edn, Boston
and Tokyo, 2000), pp. 22–3, 39–42, 45–50, 52.
67. Pearson, Ancient Ryukyu, pp. 202–4.
68. Kerr, Okinawa, pp. 55–6.
69. Ibid., pp. 62–71; Kobata and Matsuda, Ryukyuan Relations, pp. 1–2;
Pearson, Ancient Ryukyu, p. 198.
70. Kobata and Matsuda, Ryukyuan Relations, p. 26.
71. Pearson, Ancient Ryukyu, pp. 207–11, 214–19.
72. Cited by Gipouloux, Asian Mediterranean, p. 66, and in part by
Souyri, World Turned Upside Down, p. 152.
73. Cited by Gipouloux, Asian Mediterranean, p. 71; sapanwood:
Wang, Official Relations, p. 97.
74. Gipouloux, Asian Mediterranean, p. 70; Pearson, Ancient Ryukyu,
pp. 205–7.
75. Pearson, Ancient Ryukyu, pp. 224–5, table 8.2; also pp. 300–301,
315–18.
76. Gipouloux, Asian Mediterranean, p. 68.
77. G. Kerr, Ryukyu Kingdom and Province before 1945 (Pacific
Science Board, Washington DC, 1953), p. 41 n. 36; Kobata and
Matsuda, Ryukyuan Relations, p. 53.
78. Kobata and Matsuda, Ryukyuan Relations, plate section, p. 2.
79. Ibid., p. 19.
80. Ibid., pp. 55–6; Kerr, Ryukyu, p. 46.
81. Kobata and Matsuda, Ryukyuan Relations, pp. 86–7.
82. Ibid., pp. 93–6.
83. Kerr, Okinawa, p. 92.
84. Kobata and Matsuda, Ryukyuan Relations, pp. 104–5, 107.
85. Pearson, Ancient Ryukyu, pp. 309–14.
86. Kerr, Okinawa, pp. 93–5, 120; Kobata and Matsuda, Ryukyuan
Relations, p. 24.
87. Kerr, Ryukyu, pp. 45–7 (and n. 38a); Kobata and Matsuda,
Ryukyuan Relations, pp. 101–29 (Melaka), pp. 147–63 (Java), pp.
124–5 (licence of 1511); Souyri, World Turned Upside Down, p.
152.
88. Armando Cortesão, transl. and ed., The Suma Oriental of Tomé
Pires (London, 1944), vol. 1, pp. 128–31; cf. Kobata and Matsuda,
Ryukyuan Relations, pp. 126–9, citing the Commentaries of the
Great Afonso d’Albuquerque.
89. Souyri, World Turned Upside Down, pp. 148–51.
 12. The Dragon Goes to Sea
1. A. Schottenhammer, Das Songzeitliche Quanzhou im Spannungsfeld
zwischen Zentralregierung und maritimem Handel: unerwartete
Konsequenzen des Zentralstaatlichen Zugriffs auf den Reichtum
einer Küstenregion (Stuttgart, 2002), pp. 5, 51, 176–7; Y. Shiba,
Commerce and Society in Sung China (Ann Arbor, 1970), pp. 90–
91.
2. B. Hayton, The South China Sea: the Struggle for Power in Asia
(New Haven and London, 2014).
3. M. Pollak, Mandarins, Jews, and Missionaries: the Jewish
Experience in the Chinese Empire (2nd edn, Philadelphia, 1983),
pp. 266–7.
4. Jung-Pang Lo, China as a Sea Power, 1127–1368: a Preliminary
Survey of the Maritime Expansion and Naval Exploits of the
Chinese People during the Southern Song and Yuan Periods, ed. B.
Elleman (Singapore, 2012), pp. 197–201; A. Schottenhammer,
‘China’s Emergence as a Maritime Power’, in The Cambridge
History of China, vol. 5, part 2: Sung China 960–1279 (Cambridge,
2015), p. 492.
5. D. Heng, Sino-Malay Trade and Diplomacy from the Tenth through
the Fourteenth Century (Athens, Ohio, 2009), pp. 133–4; Lo,
China as a Sea Power, pp. 201–2.
6. H. Clark, Community, Trade, and Networks: Southern Fujian
Province from the Third to the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge,
1991); W. Eichhorn, Chinese Civilization: an Introduction
(London, 1969), pp. 262–7; Heng, Sino-Malay Trade, pp. 38–63;
Schottenhammer, ‘China’s Emergence as a Maritime Power’, pp.
437–525.
7. Schottenhammer, ‘China’s Emergence as a Maritime Power’, p.
487, table 14.
8. Lo, China as a Sea Power, p. 204.
9. Ibid., pp. 56–7.
10. Heng, Sino-Malay Trade, pp. 40–44.
11. Ibid., p. 125.
12. Ibid., pp. 44–8, 59, 161–7; also Schottenhammer, ‘China’s
Emergence as a Maritime Power’, pp. 485–91.
13. Lo, China as a Sea Power, pp. 67–70.
14. Ibid., pp. 61–4.
15. Heng, Sino-Malay Trade, pp. 54–6, 59–62; Schottenhammer,
‘China’s Emergence as a Maritime Power’, pp. 509–18.
16. Shiba, Commerce and Society, p. 46; Heng, Sino-Malay Trade, p.
58.
17. Heng, Sino-Malay Trade, pp. 149–90.
18. Lo, China as a Sea Power, p. 197.
19. Schottenhammer, ‘China’s Emergence as a Maritime Power’, pp.
493–501.
20. J. Chaffee, ‘The Impact of the Song Imperial Clan on the Overseas
Trade of Quanzhou’, in A. Schottenhammer, ed., The Emporium of
the World: Maritime Quanzhou, 1000–1400 (Leiden, 2001), pp.
34–5; J. Kuwabara, ‘On P’u Shou-keng, a Man of the Western
Regions, Who was Superintendent of the Trading Ships’ Office in
Ch’üan-ch’ou towards the End of the Sung Dynasty’, Memoirs of
the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko, vol. 2 (1928), pp. 1–
79, and vol. 7 (1935), pp. 1–104.
21. Jung-Pang Lo, ‘Maritime Commerce and Its Relation to the Sung
Navy’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient,
vol. 12 (1969), p. 68; Lo, China as a Sea Power, pp. 121–85.
22. Zhu Yu (1111–17), cited in J. Needham and C. Ronan, The Shorter
Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge, 1986), vol. 3
(largely devoted to navigation, and bringing together material from
several parts of the complete work), pp. 28–9, and more extensively
pp. 1–59; J. Needham, Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West
(Cambridge, 1970), pp. 243–4; also cited by A. Aczel, The Riddle
of the Compass: the Invention That Changed the World (New York,
2001), p. 86; J. Huth, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way
(Cambridge, Mass., 2013), p. 99.
23. Needham and Ronan, Shorter Science and Civilization, vol. 3, pp. 2,
9, 56, 59.
24. Lo, ‘Maritime Commerce’, p. 69; Schottenhammer, Songzeitliche
Quanzhou, pp. 295–9; H. Clark, ‘Overseas Trade and Social
Change in Quanzhou through the Song’, in Schottenhammer, ed.,
Emporium of the World, pp. 51–2.
25. Schottenhammer, Songzeitliche Quanzhou, pp. 86–7.
26. Clark, ‘Overseas Trade and Social Change’, p. 51; J. Guy, ‘Tamil
Merchant Guilds and the Quanzhou Trade’, in Schottenhammer,
ed., Emporium of the World, pp. 283–308; Schottenhammer,
‘China’s Emergence as a Maritime Power’, p. 444.
27. J. Stargardt, ‘Behind the Shadows: Archaeological Data on Two-
Way Sea-Trade between Quanzhou and Satingpra, South Thailand,
10th–14th century’, in Schottenhammer, ed., Emporium of the
World, pp. 308–93.
28. K. Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development in Early Southeast
Asia (Honolulu, 1985), p. 207.
29. R. Pearson, Li Min and Li Guo, ‘Port, City, and Hinterlands:
Archaeological Perspectives on Quanzhou and Its Overseas Trade’,
in Schottenhammer, ed., Emporium of the World, pp. 194–201; G.
Kerr, Okinawa: the History of an Island People (2nd edn, Boston
and Tokyo, 2000), pp. 62–71.
30. Lo, ‘Maritime Commerce’, pp. 70–77; Shiba, Commerce and
Society, pp. 187–8.
31. Hung Mai, cited in Shiba, Commerce and Society, pp. 192–3; Clark,
‘Overseas Trade and Social Change’, pp. 47–8; Champa: Hall,
Maritime Trade and State Development, pp. 183, 187; J. Chaffee,
The Muslim Merchants of Pre-Modern China: the History of a
Maritime Asian Trade Diaspora, 750–1400 (Cambridge, 2018), pp.
59–60.
32. Yang Fang, cited in Shiba, Commerce and Society, p. 203.
33. Shiba, Commerce and Society, pp. 204–6.
34. Ibid., pp. 182–3; Clark, ‘Overseas Trade and Social Change’, pp.
53–4.
35. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a Human History of the
Mediterranean (London, 2011), pp. 254–5, 270.
36. Ho Chuimei, ‘The Ceramic Boom in Minnan during Song and Yuan
Times’, in Schottenhammer, ed., Emporium of the World, pp. 237–
81.
37. Schottenhammer, Songzeitliche Quanzhou, pp. 197–215, 225–67;
Shiba, Commerce and Society, pp. 6–10.
38. Chaffee, ‘Impact of the Song Imperial Clan’, pp. 33–5.
39. Schottenhammer, Songzeitliche Quanzhou, pp. 279–80 (diagram
and photograph), 287–91; Needham and Ronan, Shorter Science
and Civilization, vol. 3, pp. 87–9.
40. Needham and Ronan, Shorter Science and Civilization, vol. 3, pp.
68–75.
41. Henry Yule and Henri Cordier, transl. and eds., The Travels of
Marco Polo: the Complete Yule–Cordier Edition (3 vols. bound as
2, New York, 1993), vol. 2, pp. 249–53; even more fanciful than
the hungry whale is D. Selbourne, The City of Light (London,
1999), with its nonsensical claims that similarly grand ships owned
by Spanish Jews regularly travelled back and forth from the Middle
East to China in the thirteenth century; see D. Abulafia, ‘Oriente ed
Occidente: considerazioni sul commercio di Ancona nel Medioevo
– East and West: Observations on the Commerce of Ancona in the
Middle Ages’, in Atti e Memorie della Società Dalmata di Storia
Patria, vol. 26, M. P. Ghezzo, ed., Città e sistema adriatico alla
fine del Medioevo. Bilancio degli studi e prospettive di ricerca
(Venice, 1997), pp. 27–66.
42. Yule and Cordier, transl. and eds., Travels of Marco Polo, vol. 2,
pp. 234–6.
43. Heng, Sino-Malay Trade, pp. 65–9.
44. A. Schottenhammer, ‘The Role of Metals and the Impact of the
Introduction of Huizi Paper Notes in Quanzhou on the
Development of Maritime Trade in the Song Period’, in
Schottenhammer, ed., Emporium of the World, pp. 125, 147, 149;
Pearson, Min and Guo, ‘Port, City, and Hinterlands’, pp. 201–3.
45. Schottenhammer, ‘Role of Metals’, p. 152.
 13. Light over the Western Ocean
1. Wang Yi-T’ung, Official Relations between China and Japan 1368–
1549 (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 22–4; Shih-Shan Henry Tsai,
Perpetual Happiness: the Ming Emperor Yongle (Seattle, 2001),
pp. 193–6.
2. E. Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming
Dynasty, 1405–1433 (New York, 2007), p. 25.
3. Ibid., p. 220; cf. L. Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: the
Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–33 (New York, 1994),
p. 82; original text: Luo Maodeng, San Bao tai jian xi yang ji
(Beijing, 1995) – I am grateful to Chang Na for supplying these
details.
4. Dreyer, Zheng He, p. 126.
5. Ibid., pp. 99, 181; T. Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the
Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), pp. 93–4;
Zheng Kan-zhu, Zheng He vs. Ge Lun-bu (Hong Kong, 2005), with
thanks again to Chang Na; and J. Needham, Science and
Civilization in China, vol 1: Introductory Orientations (Cambridge,
1954); on Needham, there is an admiring but sensationalist
biography by S. Winchester, Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph
Needham and the Great Secrets of China (London, 2008; US
edition: The Man Who Loved China, New York, 2008).
6. G. Menzies, 1421: the Year China Discovered the World (London,
2004); G. Menzies, 1434: the Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet
Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance (London, 2008); J.
Needham and C. Ronan, The Shorter Science and Civilization in
China (Cambridge, 1986), vol. 3, pp. 152–9.
7. B. Olshin, The Mysteries of the Marco Polo Maps (Chicago, 2014).
8. Wang Gungwu, ‘The Opening of Relations between China and
Malacca, 1403–05’, in L. Suryadinata, Admiral Zheng He and
Southeast Asia (Singapore, 2005); Tan Ta Sen, Cheng Ho and
Malacca (Melaka and Singapore, 2005).
9. Dreyer, Zheng He, p. 16.
10. Tsai, Perpetual Happiness, pp. 178–86.
11. Ibid., pp. 187–93.
12. Ibid., p. 80.
13. C. Clunas and J. Harrison-Hall, eds., Ming: 50 Years That Changed
China (London, 2014).
14. Tsai, Perpetual Happiness, p. 71; Hong-wu: Dreyer, Zheng He, pp.
17–20.
15. Dreyer, Zheng He, p. 182.
16. Ibid., pp. 147, 157–9, 162–3 (okapi), 182 (giraffe), 192 (giraffe); T.
Filesi, China and Africa in the Middle Ages (London, 1972), pp.
29–30, 80 n. 99, and plate 6 (giraffe).
17. Ma Huan, Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan, ‘The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s
Shores’ [1433], transl. J. V. G. Mills (Cambridge, 1970); Fei Hsin,
Hsing-Ch’a Sheng-Lan: the Overall Survey of the Star Raft, transl.
J. V. G. Mills and R. Ptak (Wiesbaden, 1996).
18. Ma Huan, Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan, pp. 34, 36; Fei Hsin, Hsing-Ch’a
Sheng-Lan, pp. 81–97, including Cambodia, Taiwan, Ryukyu, etc.
19. O. W. Wolters, The Fall of Śrivijaya in Malay History (London,
1970), p. 155.
20. Cited from the Qing dynasty official history of the Ming by Dreyer,
Zheng He, p. 180.
21. Wolters, Fall of Śrivijaya, p. 156.
22. Tan Ta Sen, Cheng Ho and Islam in Southeast Asia (Singapore,
2009); Dreyer, Zheng He, pp. 68–9.
23. Dreyer, Zheng He, pp. 11–12; Levathes, When China Ruled the
Seas, pp. 61–3.
24. Dreyer, Zheng He, p. 50.
25. Ibid., pp. 52, 148–9, and p. 191, doc. ii; Levathes, When China
Ruled the Seas, pp. 89–92.
26. Dreyer, Zheng He, pp. 18–19, 23.
27. Fei Hsin, Hsing-Ch’a Sheng-Lan, p. 33: ‘27,000 government
troops’; see the reconstruction of a ship’s hold in the charming
Cheng Ho Museum in Melaka; cf. Dreyer, Zheng He, p. 105.
28. Henry Yule and Henri Cordier, transl. and eds., The Travels of
Marco Polo: the Complete Yule–Cordier Edition (3 vols. bound as
2, New York, 1993), vol. 2, pp. 249–53; Dreyer, Zheng He, p. 109.
29. Dreyer, Zheng He, pp. 102–3, 113, 116.
30. Ibid., pp. 116–21.
31. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a Human History of the
Mediterranean (London, 2011), p. 156; Dreyer, Zheng He, p. 112,
table of dimensions.
32. S. Church, ‘Zheng He: an Investigation into the Plausibility of 450-
ft Treasure Ships’, Monumenta Serica, vol. 53 (2005), pp. 1–43.
33. Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas, pp. 96–100, with quotation
from the Taizong Shilu on p. 100.
34. Ma Huan, Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan, pp. 137–40 (see p. 138 n. 9); Fei
Hsin, Hsing-Ch’a Sheng-Lan, p. 67; Levathes, When China Ruled
the Seas, pp. 100–101; on Ma Huan: J. L. L. Duyvendak, Ma Huan
Re-Examined (Verhandelingen der Koninklijke akademie van
wetenschappen te Amsterdam. Afdeeling letterkunde. Nieuwe
reeks, deel XXXII, no. 2, Amsterdam, 1933); and Mills’s
introduction to Ma Huan, Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan, pp. 34–66.
35. Wolters, Fall of Śrivijaya, p. 74.
36. Fei Hsin, Hsing-Ch’a Sheng-Lan, p. 53; Taizong Shilu, cited in
Dreyer, Zheng He, p. 55; Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas, p.
102; also Wolters, Fall of Śrivijaya, pp. 73–4.
37. Liujiagang inscription of 1431, in Dreyer, Zheng He, Appendix ii, p.
192; also Changle inscription of 1431, ibid., Appendix iii, pp. 195–
6; Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas, p. 103.
38. Yule and Cordier, transl. and eds., Travels of Marco Polo, vol. 1,
pp. 423–30.
39. Melaka: Fei Hsin, Hsing-Ch’a Sheng-Lan, pp. 55.
40. Dreyer, Zheng He, pp. 62–5.
41. Taizong Shilu ibid., pp. 67–8; Fei Hsin, Hsing-Ch’a Sheng-Lan, pp.
64–5.
42. Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas, p. 116.
43. Ibid., pp. 116–17.
44. Text in Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas, p. 113.
45. Dreyer, Zheng He, pp. 68–9, 71.
46. Text translated by Chu Hung-lam and J. Geiss in Levathes, When
China Ruled the Seas, pp. 218–19 n. 108.
47. Wolters, Fall of Śrivijaya, p. 157.
48. Fei Hsin, Hsing-Ch’a Sheng-Lan, pp. 53–5.
49. Tan, Cheng Ho and Malacca; Dreyer, Zheng He, pp. 77, 79–81.
50. Maldives and Laccadives: Ma Huan, Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan, pp. 146–
51; Hormuz (Hu-lu-mo-ssu): ibid., pp. 165–72.
51. Dreyer, Zheng He, p. 78.
52. Ma Huan, Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan, p. 168; also Fei Hsin, Hsing-Ch’a
Sheng-Lan, pp. 70–72.
53. Dreyer, Zheng He, pp. 84, 86.
54. N. A. al-Shamrookh, The Commerce and Trade of the Rasulids in
the Yemen, 630–858/1231–1454 (Kuwait, 1996); Dreyer, Zheng
He, p. 87.
55. Ma Huan, Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan, pp. 154–9; also Fei Hsin, Hsing-
Ch’a Sheng-Lan, pp. 98–9.
56. Dreyer, Zheng He, pp. 88–90; text of inscription in Filesi, China
and Africa, pp. 60–61; Fei Hsin, Hsing-Ch’a Sheng-Lan, pp. 101–
2.
57. Filesi, China and Africa, pp. 18–20.
58. G. T. Scanlon, ‘Egypt and China: Trade and Imitation’, in D. S.
Richards, ed., Islam and the Trade of Asia: a Colloquium (Oxford,
1970), pp. 81–96; also N. Chittick, ‘East African Trade with the
Orient’, ibid., pp. 97–104.
59. Filesi, China and Africa, p. 21.
60. Ibid., pp. 42–5; also plates 8–10 and 14.
61. Dreyer, Zheng He, pp. 91–7.
62. Ibid., p. 137.
63. Ibid., p. 144; Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas, pp. 162, 169.
64. Changle inscription of 1431, in Dreyer, Zheng He, Appendix iii, p.
197.
65. Liujiagang inscription of 1431, ibid., Appendix ii, p. 192.
66. Changle inscription of 1431, ibid., Appendix iii, p. 195; Levathes,
When China Ruled the Seas, p. 170.
67. Ma Huan, Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan, pp. 159–65; Fei Hsin, Hsing-Ch’a
Sheng-Lan, pp. 73–7; Dreyer, Zheng He, pp. 152–8; Dreyer
implausibly considers that the 1431 description of storms at sea
reflects experiences in 1432!
68. Ma Huan, Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan, pp. 173–8; cf. Fei Hsin, Hsing-Ch’a
Sheng-Lan, pp. 104–5.
69. Cited from Xuanzong Shilu by Dreyer, Zheng He, pp. 162–3.
70. Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas, pp. 173–4.
71. Dreyer, Zheng He, p. 185; also Zheng, Zheng He vs. Ge Lun-bu.
 14. Lions, Deer and Hunting Dogs
1. Henry Yule and Henri Cordier, transl. and eds., The Travels of
Marco Polo: the Complete Yule–Cordier Edition (3 vols. bound as
2, New York, 1993), vol. 2, pp. 272–4.
2. K. Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development in Early Southeast
Asia (Honolulu, 1985), pp. 176, 194; G. Spencer, The Politics of
Expansion: the Chola Conquest of Sri Lanka and Sri Vijaya
(Madras, 1983); D. Heng, Sino-Malay Trade and Diplomacy from
the Tenth through the Fourteenth Century (Athens, Ohio, 2009),
pp. 85, 87.
3. O. W. Wolters, The Fall of Śrīvijaya in Malay History (London,
1970), pp. 42–3, 48; Heng, Sino-Malay Trade, pp. 96–100, 117–18.
4. C. C. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, or ‘Malay Annals’ (2nd edn,
Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, 1970), p. 36.
5. Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development, pp. 219–22.
6. D. Garnier, Ayutthaya: Venice of the East (Bangkok, 2004), p. 23.
7. Ibid., p. 39; C. Baker and P. Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya:
Siam in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 55–7; C.
Kasetsiri, The Rise of Ayudhya: a History of Siam in the Fourteenth
and Fifteenth Centuries (Kuala Lumpur, 1976), pp. 57–64; C.
Kasetsiri, ‘Origins of a Capital and Seaport: the Early Settlement of
Ayutthaya and Its East Asian Trade’, in K. Breazeale, ed., From
Japan to Arabia: Ayutthaya’s Maritime Relations with Asia
(Bangkok, 1999), pp. 55–79.
8. Garnier, Ayutthaya, pp. 39, 41, 49.
9. Ibid., p. 18; K. Breazeale, ‘Thai Maritime Trade and the Ministry
Responsible’, in Breazeale, ed., From Japan to Arabia, pp. 20–21.
10. Kasetsiri, ‘Origins of a Capital’, pp. 65, 68; Baker and
Phongpaichit, History of Ayutthaya, pp. 51–5.
11. Garnier, Ayutthaya, pp. 13–18; Kasetsiri, ‘Origins of a Capital’, pp.
64–71; D. Wyatt, ‘Ayutthaya, 1409–24: Internal Politics and
International Relations’, in Breazeale, ed., From Japan to Arabia,
pp. 80–88.
12. Heng, Sino-Malay Trade, p. 106.
13. Ibid., pp. 107–9, 122.
14. Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development, p. 211; Wolters, Fall
of Śrīvijaya, pp. 44–6.
15. Wolters, Fall of Śrīvijaya, p. 78; F. Hirth and W. W. Rockhill, eds.,
Chau Ju-kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the
Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu-fan-chï (St
Petersburg, 1911), pp. 75–8, 82–5.
16. P. Rawson, The Art of Southeast Asia (London, 1967), pp. 254–72.
17. Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development, p. 234.
18. Ibid., pp. 235–7.
19. Ibid., pp. 238–41, 245–7.
20. Wolters, Fall of Śrīvijaya, p. 66.
21. E. Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming
Dynasty, 1405–1433 (New York, 2007), p. 63.
22. Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development, pp. 253, 255.
23. V. Glendinning, Raffles and the Golden Opportunity (London,
2012), pp. 217–19; M. R. Frost and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow,
Singapore: a Biography (Singapore and Hong Kong, 2009), pp.
40–45; J. Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300–
1800 (Singapore, 2013), pp. 154–5.
24. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, pp. x–xi; Miksic, Singapore and the
Silk Road, pp. 146–7; K. C. Guan, D. Heng and T. T. Yong,
Singapore: a 700-Year History (National Archives, Singapore,
2009), pp. 11–15.
25. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, p. 2.
26. Ibid., p. 14; Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road, pp. 147–8.
27. Wolters, Fall of Śrīvijaya, pp. 128–35.
28. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, p. 18.
29. Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road, p. 150.
30. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, pp. 19–20; Miksic, Singapore and the
Silk Road, pp. 150–51.
31. Frost and Balasingamchow, Singapore, p. 25; other interpretations
of the name include ‘stop-over place’ and ‘gateway’.
32. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, p. 21.
33. Ibid., pp. 22–3.
34. Ibid., p. 40; Frost and Balasingamchow, Singapore, p. 26; Miksic,
Singapore and the Silk Road, pp. 152–3.
35. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, p. 41; Frost and Balasingamchow,
Singapore, pp. 26, 28.
36. Wang Du-yuan in Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road, pp. 174–5,
177–8; Guan, Heng and Yong, Singapore, pp. 27–8, 47.
37. Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road, pp. 181–2, 185.
38. Dreyer, Zheng He, pp. 40–41.
39. Wolters, Fall of Śrīvijaya, pp. 113, 120–21; Dreyer, Zheng He, pp.
42–3.
40. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, pp. 20–21; Guan, Heng and Yong,
Singapore, p. 10.
41. Guan, Heng and Yong, Singapore, pp. 28–9.
42. Ibid., p. 10, with illustration.
43. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, pp. 26–7; Miksic, Singapore and the
Silk Road, pp. 12–16, fig. 0.17
44. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, p. 26.
45. Guan, Heng and Yong, Singapore, pp. 33–52.
46. Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road, pp. 222–40.
47. Ibid., pp. 295–310.
48. Ibid., pp. 167–8; Wolters, Fall of Śrīvijaya, p. 131; Dreyer, Zheng
He, p. 42.
49. Wolters, Fall of Śrīvijaya, pp. 77–153.
50. Armando Cortesão, transl. and ed., The Suma Oriental of Tomé
Pires (London, 1944), vol. 2, p. 233; Miksic, Singapore and the
Silk Road, pp. 156–62.
51. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, pp. 241–2; Wolters, Fall of Śrīvijaya,
p. 108–9.
52. Cortesão, transl. and ed., Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, vol. 2, p.
232.
53. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, p. 42; cf. Cortesão, transl. and ed.,
Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, vol. 2, pp. 236–7.
54. Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road, p. 400.
55. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, p. 127.
56. Ibid., pp. 43–4.
57. Wolters, Fall of Śrīvijaya, p. 240 n. 42; Cortesão, transl. and ed.,
Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, vol. 2, p. 241.
58. Wolters, Fall of Śrīvijaya, pp. 160–63.
59. D. Freeman, The Straits of Malacca: Gateway or Gauntlet?
(Montreal, 2003).
60. Dreyer, Zheng He, p. 42.
61. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, p. 80.
62. Ibid., p. 81.
63. Kamis bin Hj. Abbas, ed., Melaka Dalam Dunia Maritim – Melaka
in the Maritime World (Melaka, 2004), p. 23; Brown, ed., Sĕjarah
Mĕlayu, pp. 56, 58–9.
64. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, pp. 150–51.
65. Ibid., pp. 44–9.
66. F. Fernández-Armesto, 1492: the Year Our World Began (London,
2010), pp. 226–7, 266, 268.
67. Brown, ed., Sĕjarah Mĕlayu, p. 151; Camoens, The Lusiads, transl.
W. Atkinson (Harmondsworth, 1952), p. 242.
 PART THREE
THE YOUNG OCEAN: THE ATLANTIC, 22,000 BC–AD 1500

15. Living on the Edge

1. B. Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge,
Mass., 2005).
2. B. Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean: the Atlantic and Its Peoples 8000
BC–AD 1500 (Oxford, 2001); see also his Europe between the
Oceans, Themes and Variations: 9000 BC–AD 1000 (New Haven,
2008), Britain Begins (Oxford, 2012) and On the Ocean: the
Mediterranean and the Atlantic from Prehistory to AD 1500
(Oxford, 2017), and ‘Atlantic Sea-Ways’, Revista de Guimarães,
special vol. 1 (Guimarães, 1999), pp. 93–105; E. G. Bowen, Britain
and the Western Seaways (London, 1972).
3. J. Henderson, The Atlantic Iron Age: Settlement and Identity in the
First Millennium BC (London, 2007), pp. 11–22, 27–34.
4. Ibid., p. 31, fig. 2.1.
5. Ibid., pp. 30–31.
6. Ibid., pp. 10–11; B. Quinn, The Atlantean Irish: Ireland’s Oriental
and Maritime Heritage (Dublin, 2005), which overstates its case.
7. Henderson, Atlantic Iron Age, p. 36.
8. V. Gaffney, K. Thomson and S. Fitch, Mapping Doggerland: the
Mesolithic Landscapes of the Southern North Sea (Oxford, 2007).
9. Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean, p. 110.
10. A. Saville, ‘Orkney and Scotland before the Neolithic period’, in A.
Ritchie, ed., Neolithic Orkney in Its European Context (McDonald
Institute Monographs, Cambridge, 2000), pp. 95–8.
11. C. Finlayson, The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals
Died Out and We Survived (Oxford, 2009); D. Papagianni and M.
Morse, The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science is
Rewriting Their Story (London, 2013), pp. 174–7.
12. Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean, pp. 109, 115.
13. Henderson, Atlantic Iron Age, p. 52.
14. P. Mellars et al., Excavations on Oronsay: Prehistoric Human
Ecology on a Small Island (Edinburgh, 1987); Cunliffe, Facing the
Ocean, pp. 124–5, and plate 4.11.
15. G. Marchand, ‘Le Mésolithique final en Bretagne: une combinaison
des faits archéologiques’, in S. J. de Laet, ed., Acculturation and
Continuity in Atlantic Europe Mainly during the Neolithic period
and the Bronze Age: Papers Presented at the IV Atlantic
Colloquium, Ghent, 1975 (Bruges, 1976), pp. 67–86; C. Dupont
and Y. Gruet, ‘Malacofaune et crustacés marins des amas
coquilliers mésolithiques de Beg-an-Dorchenn (Plomeur, Finistère)
et de Beg-er-Vil (Quiberon, Morbihan),’ in de Laet, ed.,
Acculturation and Continuity, pp. 139–61; Cunliffe, Facing the
Ocean, p. 417.
16. Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean, pp. 120–22.
17. M. Ruiz-Gálvez Priego, La Europa atlántica en la Edad del Bronce
(Barcelona, 1998), pp. 126–7.
18. C. Renfrew, ‘Megaliths, Territories and Populations’, in de Laet,
ed., Acculturation and Continuity, pp. 200, 218.
19. L. Laporte, ‘Néolithisations de la façade atlantique du Centre-Ouest
et de l’Ouest de la France’, in de Laet, ed., Acculturation and
Continuity, pp. 99–125.
20. R. Schulting, ‘Comme la mer qui se retire: les changements dans
l’exploitation des ressources marines du Mésolithique au
Néolithique en Bretagne’, in de Laet, Acculturation and Continuity,
pp. 163–88; Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean, p. 119.
21. A. Sheridan, ‘Les éléments d’origine bretonne autour de 4000 av. J.-
C. en Écosse: témoignages d’alliance, d’influence, de déplacement,
ou quoi d’autre?’, in de Laet, ed., Acculturation and Continuity, pp.
25–37; N. Milner and P. Woodman, ‘Combler les lacunes …
L’événement le plus étudié, le mieux daté et le moins compris du
Flandrien’, in de Laet, ed., Acculturation and Continuity, pp. 39–
46.
22. Bowen, Britain and the Western Seaways, pp. 19–21.
23. J. Briard, ‘Acculturations néolithiques et campaniformes dans les
tumulus armoricains’, in de Laet, ed., Acculturation and Continuity,
 pp. 34–44.
24. H. N. Savory, ‘The Role of Iberian Communal Tombs in
Mediterranean and Atlantic Prehistory’, in V. Markotić, Ancient
Europe and the Mediterranean: Studies Presented in Honour of
Hugh Hencken (Warminster, 1977), pp. 161–80.
25. A. A. Rodríguez Casal, ‘An Introduction to the Atlantic Megalithic
Complex’, in A. A. Rodríguez Casal, ed., Le Mégalithisme
atlantique – the Atlantic Megaliths: Actes du XIVème Congrès
UISPP, Université de Liège, Belgique, 2–8 septembre 2001 (BAR
Interenational series, no. 1521, Oxford, 2006), p. 1.
26. Renfrew, ‘Megaliths, Territories and Populations’, pp. 198–9; J.
L’Helgouac’h, ‘Les premiers monuments mégalithiques de l’Ouest
de la France’, in A. A. Rodríguez Casal, ed., O Neolítico atlántico e
as orixes do Megalitismo: actas do coloquio internacional
(Santiago de Compostela, 1–6 de abril de 1996) (Cursos e
congresos da Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, no. 101,
Santiago de Compostela, 1996), p. 199.
27. Map in Bowen, Britain and the Western Seaways, p. 33; Rodríguez
Casal, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.
28. Renfrew, ‘Megaliths, Territories and Populations’, p. 199.
29. Renfrew, ‘Megaliths, Territories and Populations’, p. 204;
Rodríguez Casal, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.
30. A. Ritchie, ‘The First Settlers’, in C. Renfrew, ed., The Prehistory
of Orkney BC 4000–1000 AD (2nd edn, Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 36–9;
A. Ritchie, Prehistoric Orkney (London, 1995), p. 21.
31. D. V. Clarke and N. Sharples, ‘Settlements and Subsistence in the
Third Millennium BC’, in Renfrew, ed., Prehistory of Orkney, p. 77.
32. Ibid., pp. 58–68.
33. Ritchie, ‘First Settlers’, pp. 41–50; Ritchie, Prehistoric Orkney, p.
22.
34. H. Pálsson and P. Edwards, transl., Orkneyinga Saga: the History of
the Earls of Orkney (Harmondsworth, 1981), p. 188, cap. 93.
35. A. Henshall, ‘The Chambered Cairns’, in Renfrew, ed., Prehistory
of Orkney, pp. 96–8.
36. C. Renfrew, ‘The Auld Hoose Spaeks: Society and Life in Stone
Age Orkney’, in A. Ritchie, ed., Neolithic Orkney in Its European
Context (McDonald Institute Monographs, Cambridge, 2000), pp.
1–20; A. Shepherd, ‘Skara Brae: Expressing Identity in a Neolithic
Community’, in Ritchie, ed., Neolithic Orkney, pp. 139–58.
37. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a Human History of the
Mediterranean (London, 2011), pp. 10–12.
38. M. Fernández-Miranda, ‘Aspects of Talayotic Culture’, in M.
Balmuth, A. Gilman and L. Prados-Torreira, eds., Encounters and
Transformations: the Archaeology of Iberia in Transition
(Sheffield, 1997), pp. 59–68.
39. G. Daniel, The Megalith Builders of Western Europe (2nd edn,
Harmondsworth, 1963), pp. 26–8, 75–7, to cite just one work by
this author; Savory, ‘Role of Iberian Communal Tombs’, pp. 169,
175; Rodríguez Casal, ‘Introduction’, pp. 4–5.
40. Savory, ‘Role of Iberian Communal Tombs’, p. 174; E. Shee
Twohig, ‘Megalithic Tombs and Megalithic Art in Atlantic
Europe’, in C. Scarre and F. Healy, eds., Trade and Exchange in
Prehistoric Europe: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the
University of Bristol, April 1992 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 87–99; A. A.
Rodríguez Casal, O Megalitismo: a primeira arquitectura
monumental de Galicia (Santiago, 1990), pp. 135–41; also G. and
V. Leisner, Die Megalithgräber der Iberischen Halbinsel, vol. I:
Der Süden (2 vols., Berlin, 1943), and vol. II: Der Westen (3 vols.,
Berlin, 1965).
41. Renfrew, ‘Megaliths, Territories and Populations’, pp. 208, 218;
and several articles and comments in Rodríguez Casal, ed., O
Neolítico atlántico: E. Shee Twohig, ‘Perspectives on the
Megaliths of North West Europe’, pp. 117–27; C.-T. Le Roux,
‘Aspects non funéraires du mégalithisme armoricain’, p. 234; C.
Tavares da Silva, ‘O Neolítico antigo e a origem do Megalitismo
no Sul de Portugal’, pp. 575–85; J. Soares, ‘A transição para as
formações sociais neolíticas na costa sudoeste portuguesa’, pp.
587–608.
 16. Swords and Ploughshares
1. A. Coffyn, Le Bronze Final Atlantique dans la Péninsule Ibérique
(Paris, 1985), p. 113; also p. 112, fig. 53.
2. J. Henderson, The Atlantic Iron Age: Settlement and Identity in the
First Millennium BC (London, 2007), p. 58; R. Harrison, Spain at
the Dawn of History (London, 1988), p. 40; J. Briard, The Bronze
Age in Barbarian Europe: From the Megaliths to the Celts, transl.
M. Turton (London, 1979), p. 76.
3. M. Ruíz-Gálvez Priego, ‘The West of Iberia: Meeting Point
between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic at the End of the
Bronze Age’, in M. Balmuth, A. Gilman and L. Prados-Torreira,
eds., Encounters and Transformations: the Archaeology of Iberia
in Transition (Sheffield, 1997), pp. 95–120; Briard, Bronze Age in
Barbarian Europe, pp. 95–7.
4. M. Ruiz-Gálvez Priego, La Europa atlántica en la Edad del Bronce
(Barcelona, 1998), pp. 121–5.
5. M. C. Fernández Castro, Iberia in Prehistory (Oxford, 1995), p.
140; Briard, Bronze Age in Barbarian Europe, p. 200.
6. Briard, Bronze Age in Barbarian Europe, p. 76.
7. Coffyn, Bronze Final Atlantique, p. 17.
8. Henderson, Atlantic Iron Age, p. 59, fig. 3.1.
9. Ruiz-Gálvez, Europa atlántica, pp. 348–58.
10. Coffyn, Bronze Final Atlantique, pp. 140–41, map 22.
11. S. Bowman and S. Needham, ‘The Dunaverney and Little Thetford
Flesh-Hooks: History, Technology and Their Position within the
Later Bronze Age Atlantic Zone Feasting Complex’, Antiquaries
Journal, vol. 87 (2007), pp. 53–108; Ruiz-Gálvez, Europa
atlántica, pp. 281–2, figs. 89–90; Henderson, Atlantic Iron Age, pp.
63–8; map showing cauldrons, p. 64, fig. 3.5; swords: p. 66, fig.
3.7.
12. Coffyn, Bronze Final Atlantique, pp. 48, 82, 84; also pp. 106–7,
figs. 48–9, and p. 135, map 18; quotation from p. 142.
13. C. Burgess and B. O’Connor, ‘Iberia, the Atlantic Bronze Age and
the Mediterranean’, in S. Celestino, N. Rafel and X.-L. Armada,
eds., Contacto cultural entre el Mediterráneo y el Atlántico (siglos
XII–VIII ANE): la precolonización a debate (Rome and Madrid,
2008), pp. 41–58; Ruiz-Gálvez, Europa atlántica, p. 206; Coffyn,
Bronze Final Atlantique, pp. 143, 181–2, 205–11; but cf. Ruiz-
Gálvez, ‘West of Iberia’, p. 11 (arguing against a shipwreck).
14. H. Hencken, ‘Carp’s Tongue Swords in Spain, France and Italy’,
Zephyrus, vol. 7 (1956), pp. 125–78.
15. Henderson, Atlantic Iron Age, pp. 69–71; Briard, Bronze Age in
Barbarian Europe, p. 202.
16. J. Briard, ‘Relations between Brittany and Great Britain during the
Bronze Age’, in C. Scarre and F. Healy, eds., Trade and Exchange
in Prehistoric Europe: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the
University of Bristol, April 1992 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 183–90.
17. K. Muckleroy, ‘Middle Bronze Age Trade between Britain and
Europe: a Maritime Perspective’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric
Society, vol. 47 (1981), pp. 275–97; Ruiz-Gálvez, Europa
atlántica, p. 141.
18. Henderson, Atlantic Iron Age, pp. 80, 308 n. 11; O. Crumlin-
Pedersen, Archaeology and the Sea in Scandinavia and Britain: a
Personal Account (Roskilde, 2010), pp. 56–7.
19. Briard, Bronze Age in Barbarian Europe, pp. 205–6.
20. Ibid., pp. 196–7.
21. Henderson, Atlantic Iron Age, pp. 93–5 and fig. 3.19; Ruiz-Gálvez,
Europa atlántica, p. 207; Briard, Bronze Age in Barbarian Europe,
pp. 206–8.
22. Henderson, Atlantic Iron Age, pp. 86–8.
23. Ruiz-Gálvez, Europa atlántica, pp. 348–58; Henderson, Atlantic
Iron Age, pp. 87, 99–116.
24. Ruiz-Gálvez, Europa atlántica, pp. 83–6, and fig. 17; Muckleroy,
‘Middle Bronze Age Trade’, pp. 279–80.
25. Coffyn, Bronze Final Atlantique, plate xiv.
26. S. McGrail, ‘Prehistoric Seafaring in the Channel’, in Scarre and
Healy, eds., Trade and Exchange in Prehistoric Europe, pp. 199–
210; Muckleroy, ‘Middle Bronze Age Trade’, p. 275; Briard,
Bronze Age in Barbarian Europe, pp. 67–8.
27. Bercy boats: Ruiz-Gálvez, Europa atlántica, p. 91.
28. C. Renfrew, ‘Trade beyond the Material’, in Scarre and Healy, eds.,
Trade and Exchange in Prehistoric Europe, pp. 10–11.
29. Ruiz-Gálvez, ‘West of Iberia’, pp. 95, 99; S. Celestino and C.
López-Ruiz, Tartessos and the Phoenicians in Iberia (Oxford,
2016), pp. 170–72; J. M. Gutiérrez López et al., ‘La Cueva de
Gorham (Gibraltar): un santuario fenicio en el confín occidental del
Mediterráneo’, in F. Prados, I. García and G. Bernard, eds.,
Confines: el Extremo del Mundo durante la Antigüedad (Alicante,
2012), pp. 303–81.
30. M. E. Aubet, Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies and
Trade (2nd edn, Cambridge, 2001), pp. 301–2.
31. A. Jodin, Mogador: Comptoir phénicien du Maroc atlantique
(Tangier, 1966).
32. Burgess and O’Connor, ‘Iberia, the Atlantic Bronze Age and the
Mediterranean’, p. 51.
33. Cf. G. Daniel, The Megalith Builders of Western Europe (2nd edn,
Harmondsworth, 1963), pp. 89–91.
 17. Tin Traders
1. J. Henderson, The Atlantic Iron Age: Settlement and Identity in the
First Millennium BC (London, 2007), pp. 121–2.
2. Ibid., pp. 122, 136, 212.
3. A. Ritchie, Prehistoric Orkney (London, 1995), pp. 96–116.
4. Henderson, Atlantic Iron Age, p. 168.
5. Ibid., p. 276.
6. Julius Caesar, Gallic Wars, 3.12.
7. Henderson, Atlantic Iron Age, p. 129, fig. 4.13.
8. M. Costa et al., Casa dos Nichos, núcleo de arqueologia (Gabineto
de Arqueologia, Viana do Castelo, s.d.).
9. J. Koch, Tartessian: Celtic in the South-West at the Dawn of
History (2nd edn, Aberystwyth, 2013), p. 270.
10. Ibid., pp. 81 (J.14.1) and 223–4; cf. S. Celestino and C. López-Ruiz,
Tartessos and the Phoenicians in Iberia (Oxford, 2016), pp. 289–
300.
11. Caesar, Gallic Wars, 3.13.
12. B. Cunliffe, The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek (2nd
edn, London, 2002), pp. 104–5.
13. I. Finkel, The Ark before Noah (London, 2014).
14. Herodotos, 1.163–7; David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a Human
History of the Mediterranean (London, 2011), pp. 123–5; Cunliffe,
Pytheas the Greek, pp. 6–8.
15. Facsimile of editio princeps in Avienus, Ora Maritima, ed. J. P.
Murphy (Chicago, 1977), pp. 101–39; see L. Antonelli, Il Periplo
nascosto: Lettura stratigrafica e Commento storico-archeologico
dell’Ora Maritima di Avieno (Padua, 1998) (with edition); F. J.
González Ponce, Avieno y el Periplo (Ecija, 1995).
16. A. Jodin, Mogador: Comptoir phénicien du Maroc atlantique
(Tangier, 1966), pp. 191–3.
17. Cunliffe, Pytheas the Greek, pp. 45–7.
18. Avienus, ll. 85, 267–74; Celestino and López-Ruiz, Tartessos, pp.
88–91.
19. Avienus, ll. 80–332, especially ll. 85, 113–16, 254, 308, 290–98.
20. Cunliffe, Pytheas the Greek, p. 46; Avienus, ll. 95–9, 154–7.
21. Avienus, ll. 98–109, modified from Murphy’s translation.
22. Ibid., ll. 110–16.
23. Ibid., ll. 164–71.
24. Ibid., ll. 202–4.
25. Ibid., ll. 390–93.
26. Pytheas of Massalia, On the Ocean, ed. C. H. Roseman (Chicago,
1994).
27. M. Cary and E. H. Warmington, The Ancient Explorers (2nd edn,
Harmondsworth, 1963), p. 47.
28. See the front cover of the Penguin edition of Cunliffe, Pytheas the
Greek.
29. Strabo, Geography, 1:4.3, in Pytheas, On the Ocean, p. 25, and
3:2.11, p. 60, as also 1:4.5 and 2:3.5, pp. 38, 46.
30. Ibid., 2:4.2, pp. 48–9; the second quotation was cited by Strabo
from the works of the cosmographer Eratosthenes.
31. Cf. Cary and Warmington, Ancient Explorers, p. 48.
32. Roseman in Pytheas, On the Ocean, pp. 152–3.
33. Ibid., pp. 148–50.
34. Cf. Cary and Warmington, Ancient Explorers, p. 47.
35. Cunliffe, Pytheas the Greek, pp. 56–8, 61; Roseman in Pytheas, On
the Ocean, pp. 152–4.
36. Cunliffe, Pytheas the Greek, pp. 65–6.
37. Diodoros the Sicilian, 5.21; compare the imagery c.1500 in D.
Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the
Age of Columbus (New Haven, 2008).
38. Roseman in Pytheas, On the Ocean, pp. 18–19; cf. Cunliffe,
Pytheas the Greek, pp. 75–7; Cary and Warmington, Ancient
Explorers, p. 49.
39. Diodoros the Sicilian, 5.1–4; Pliny the Elder, Natural History,
4.104; Cary and Warmington, Ancient Explorers, p. 47.
40. Strabo, Geography, 2:1.17.
41. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 4.103, in Pytheas, On the Ocean,
pp. 89–90; cf. Cunliffe, Pytheas the Greek, p. 100, assuming Pliny
was definitely citing Pytheas.
42. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 2.186–7 and 4.104, in Pytheas, On
the Ocean, pp. 75, 91–2; Cunliffe, Pytheas the Greek, p. 127.
43. Cunliffe, Pytheas the Greek, p. 125.
44. J. Byock, Viking Age Iceland (London, 2001), p. 11.
45. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 37.35–6; Cunliffe, Pytheas the
Greek, p. 144.
46. Cunliffe, Pytheas the Greek, p. 140.
47. Ibid., p. 142.
 18. North Sea Raiders
1. J. Jensen, The Prehistory of Denmark from the Stone Age to the
Vikings (Copenhagen, 2013), pp. 74, 94, 99, 145, 159.
2. G. Graichen and A. Hesse, Die Bernsteinstraße: Verborgene
Handelswege zwischen Ostsee und Nil (Hamburg, 2013); Jensen,
Prehistory of Denmark, pp. 410–12, 503–6.
3. M. North, The Baltic: a History (Cambridge, Mass., 2015), pp. 25–
6.
4. Jensen, Prehistory of Denmark, pp. 706, 753, 768.
5. Þ. Gylfason, ed., Njál’s Saga (London, 1998), p. 10.
6. Jensen, Prehistory of Denmark, pp. 582–3.
7. Tacitus, Germania, ch. 44.
8. Jensen, Prehistory of Denmark, pp. 326–7, 812–15; J. Haywood,
Dark Age Naval Power: a Reassessment of Frankish and Anglo-
Saxon Seafaring Activity (London, 1991), pp. 63–5, with a diagram
on p. 64; O. Crumlin-Pedersen, Archaeology and the Sea in
Scandinavia and Britain: a Personal Account (Roskilde, 2010), pp.
65–7.
9. Haywood, Dark Age Naval Power, p. 66.
10. Ibid., pp. 17–18; R. Unger, The Ship in the Medieval Economy 600–
1600 (London, 1980), p. 60.
11. Tacitus, Agricola, ch. 28; Haywood, Dark Age Naval Power, pp. 5–
6.
12. Haywood, Dark Age Naval Power, p. 9.
13. Tacitus, Annals, 11.19; E. Knoll and N. IJssennagger,
‘Palaeogeography and People: Historical Frisians in an
Archeological Light’, in J. Hines and N. IJssennagger, Frisians and
Their North Sea Neighbours from the Fifth Century to the Viking
Age (Woodbridge, 2017), pp. 10–11.
14. Tacitus, Histories, 5.23.
15. C. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the
Roman Empire to the Third Reich (New York, 2011).
16. Haywood, Dark Age Naval Power, p. 12.
17. Ibid., pp. 24–34; L. P. Louwe Kooijmans, ‘Archaeology and Coastal
Change in the Netherlands’, in F. H. Thompson, ed., Archaeology
and Coastal Change (London, 1980), pp. 106–33.
18. Haywood, Dark Age Naval Power, pp. 37–41.
19. Ammianus Marcellinus, 26.4.5; 27.8.1.
20. J. N. L. Myres, The Oxford History of England, vol. 1b: The English
Settlements: English Political and Social Life from the Collapse of
Roman Rule to the Emergence of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms (2nd edn,
Oxford, 1989), pp. 74–103.
21. Ibid., pp. 55, 107–8.
22. Haywood, Dark Age Naval Power, pp. 78–85, 179 (with extracts
from the sources); Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks,
transl. L. Thorpe (Harmondsworth, 1974), pp. 163–4.
23. Beowulf, l. 407 (in Seamus Heaney’s translation, London, 2000);
also ll. 812, 1202–14, 1820, 1830, 2354–68, 2497–2506.
24. R. Hodges and D. Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the
Origins of Europe (London, 1983), p. 79.
25. B. Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization
(Oxford, 2005).
26. Haywood, Dark Age Naval Power, pp. 66–73; Unger, Ship in the
Medieval Economy, pp. 63–4; Crumlin-Pedersen, Archaeology and
the Sea, pp. 96–7; G. Asaert, Westeuropese Scheepvaart in de
Middeleeuwen (Bussum, 1974), pp. 14–15.
27. M. Alexander, transl., The Earliest English Poems
(Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 70.
28. Ibid., p. 75.
29. Beowulf, ll. 32–40, 47–50, 240 (in Heaney’s translation).
30. Ibid., ll. 216, 218–19.
31. Ibid., ll. 1905–13.
32. C. Loveluck, Northwest Europe in the Early Middle Ages, c. AD
600–1150 (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 191–2; Knoll and IJssennagger,
‘Paleogeography and People’, pp. 6, 9–10.
33. M. Pye, The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who
We Are (London, 2014), p. 35; R. Latouche, The Birth of Western
Economy: Economic Aspects of the Dark Ages (London, 1961), pp.
122, 134–6.
34. Haywood, Dark Age Naval Power, pp. 88–9; S. Lebecq, Marchands
et navigateurs frisons du haut moyen âge (2 vols., Lille, 1983), vol.
1, pp. 114, 123–7, and vol. 2, pp. 258–9, doc. 52.5.
35. Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs, vol. 2, pp. 59, doc. 10.2, and p.
63, doc. 11.1; W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth
Century (Oxford, 1946), pp. 49–54; H. Mayr-Harting, The Coming
of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1972), pp. 129–
47; J. Hines, ‘The Anglo-Frisian Question’, and T. Pestell, ‘The
Kingdom of East Anglia, Frisia and Continental Connections, c. AD
600–900’, both in Hines and IJssennagger, Frisians, pp. 25–42,
193–222.
36. Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs, vol. 2, p. 232, doc. 46.5.
37. Loveluck, Northwest Europe, pp. 186, 194–7.
38. A. Verhulst, The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe (Cambridge,
1999), p. 20; D. Meier, Seafarers, Merchants and Pirates in the
Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 56–62.
39. Hodges and Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne, pp. 93–101;
Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs, vol. 1, pp. 78–83, 149–63;
quotation from C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages:
Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 682–
5, who gives a smaller area (sixty hectares).
40. Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs, vol. 1, pp. 60–66; Verhulst, Rise
of Cities, pp. 27–8; good illustrations in J. Rozemeyer, De
Ontdekking van Dorestad (Breda, 2012), pp. 20–30 (ignoring the
attempt to identify Dorestad as Utrecht), and also in Unger, Ship in
the Medieval Economy, p. 79, fig. 5; Asaert, Westeuropese
Scheepvaart, pp. 18–19.
41. Verhulst, Rise of Cities, pp. 45–6.
42. Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs, vol. 1, pp. 169–76.
43. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 190–95, 213–15, 258–61.
44. Pye, Edge of the World, p. 44.
45. Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs, vol. 1, p. 260, and vol. 2, pp.
281–2; Alpertus van Metz, Gebeurtenissen van deze tijd en Een
fragment over bisschop Diederik I van Metz, ed. H. van Rij and A.
Sapir Abulafia (Amsterdam, 1980), pp. 18–19.
 19. ‘This iron-studded dragon’
1. From a poem by Þjóðólfr Arnórsson, cited by G. Williams, The
Viking Ship (London, 2014), p. 8.
2. Out of a vast general literature see in particular J. Brøndsted, The
Vikings (2nd edn, Harmondsworth, 1965); E. Oxenstierna, The
Norsemen (London, 1966); G. Jones, A History of the Vikings (2nd
edn, Oxford, 1984); E. Roesdahl, The Vikings (2nd edn, London,
1998); F. D. Logan, The Vikings in History (3rd edn, London,
2005); P. Parker, The Norsemen’s Fury: a History of the Viking
World (London, 2014).
3. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Cambridge MS (Parker Library, Corpus
Christi College), s.a. 878.
4. Ibid., various versions, s.a. 789.
5. Ibid., Peterborough MS, s.a. 793, 794.
6. Ibid., Cambridge MS, s.a. 835, 837, 838, 855.
7. P. Sawyer, The Age of the Vikings (2nd edn, London, 1971), p. 202.
8. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Cambridge MS, s.a. 865.
9. Brøndsted, Vikings, p. 34.
10. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Cambridge MS, s.a. 882.
11. Ibid., s.a. 896.
12. J. Haywood, Dark Age Naval Power: a Reassessment of Frankish
and Anglo-Saxon Seafaring Activity (London, 1991), pp. 75–6.
13. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Cambridge MS, s.a. 917.
14. M. Lawson, Cnut: the Danes in England in the Early Eleventh
Century (Harlow, 1993), pp. 16–48.
15. M. Magnusson and H. Pálsson, eds. and transl., King Harald’s
Saga: Harald Hardradi of Norway, from Snorri Sturluson’s
Heimskringla (Harmondsworth, 1966), pp. 133–54.
16. Brøndsted, Vikings, pp. 36–9; J. Byock, Viking Age Iceland
(London, 2001), pp. 12–13.
17. H. Ellis Davidson, The Viking Road to Byzantium (London, 1976);
E. Christiansen, The Northern Crusades (2nd edn, London, 1997).
18. Brøndsted, Vikings, pp. 31–6.
19. Byock, Viking Age Iceland, pp. 82–4.
20. From the Old Norse poem Hávamál, transl. H. A. Bellows, The
Poetic Edda (New York, 1923), p. 44, stanza 77; J. de Vries,
Heroic Song and Heroic Legend (London and Oxford, 1963), pp.
184, 187.
21. H. Pálsson and P. Edwards, transl., Orkneyinga Saga: the History of
the Earls of Orkney (Harmondsworth, 1981), pp. 214–16.
22. Sawyer, Age of the Vikings, p. 206.
23. Ibn Fadlān, ‘The Book of Ahmad ibn Fadlān’, in C. Stone and P.
Lunde, ed. and transl., Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness: Arab
Travellers in the Far North (London, 2012), pp. 45–55, and other
extracts in the same volume.
24. S. Kleingärtner and G. Williams, ‘Contact and Exchange’, in G.
Williams, P. Pentz and M. Wemhoff, eds., Vikings: Life and
Legend (London, 2014), p. 54.
25. B. Magnus and I. Gustin, Birka and Hovgården – a Story That
Enriches Time (Stockholm, 2012); D. Skre and F.-A. Stylegar,
Kaupang the Viking Town: the Kaupang Exhibition at UKM, Oslo,
2004–2005 (Oslo, 2004).
26. R. Hodges and D. Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the
Origins of Europe (London, 1983), p. 111; K. Struve, ‘Haithabu
and the Early Harbours of the Baltic Sea’, in The World of the
Vikings: an Exhibition Mounted by the Statens Historiska Museum
Stockholm in Co-operation with the National Maritime Museum,
Greenwich, London (London, 1973), pp. 27–8; D. Meier, Seafarers,
Merchants and Pirates in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2006), pp.
76–9.
27. M. North, The Baltic: a History (Cambridge, Mass., 2015), pp. 14–
15, for the Obodrites.
28. Ibid., pp. 19–20.
29. Meier, Seafarers, Merchants and Pirates, pp. 72–3, 80.
30. J. Ahola, Frog and J. Lucenius, eds., The Viking Age in Åland:
Insights into Identity and Remnants of Culture (Helsinki, 2014).
31. Hodges and Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne, p. 116, fig. 46;
generally, L. Thålin, ‘Baltic Trade and the Varangians’, in World of
the Vikings, pp. 22–3.
32. Hodges and Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne, p. 119, fig. 49.
33. Ibid., p. 118.
34. Ibid., pp. 114–15, 117, and fig. 47, p. 116.
35. North, Baltic, p. 9, citing Adam of Bremen.
36. R. Öhrman, Gotlands Fornsal: Bildstenar (2nd edn, Visby, 2000);
E. Nylén and J. P. Lamm, Stones, Ships and Symbols: the Picture
Stones of Gotland from the Viking Age and Before (Stockholm,
1988), pp. 62–3, 68–71, 109–35, 162–9; D. Rossi, ed., Guta Saga:
la Saga dei Gotlandesi (Milan, 2010), pp. 26–7.
37. Nylén and Lamm, Stones, Ships and Symbols, pp. 42, 166–7; R.
Simek, Die Schiffe der Wikinger (Stuttgart, 2014), pp. 54–5.
38. Williams, Viking Ship, pp. 34–9; Simek, Schiffe der Wikinger, pp.
79–82; D. Ellmers, ‘The Ships of the Vikings’, in World of the
Vikings, pp. 13–14.
39. J. Bill, ‘The Oseberg Ship and Ritual Burial’, in Williams et al.,
eds., Vikings, pp. 200–201.
40. Williams, Viking Ship, pp. 26–7, 48–52; G. Asaert, Westeuropese
Scheepvaart in de Middeleeuwen (Bussum, 1974), pp. 20–22; my
special thanks go to Professor Jón Viðar Sigurðsson for guiding me
around the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo.
41. Williams, Viking Ship, pp. 52–5; R. Unger, The Ship in the
Medieval Economy 600–1600 (London, 1980), pp. 82–9.
42. ‘Zuhrī on Viking Ships c.1160’, in Stone and Lunde, ed. and transl.,
Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness, p. 110.
43. A. Christys, Vikings in the South: Voyages to Iberia and the
Mediterranean (London, 2015), pp. 19–25.
44. ‘Ibn Hayyān on the Viking Attack on Seville 844’, in Stone and
Lunde, ed. and transl., Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness, pp.
 105–9; E. Morales Romero, Historia de los Vikingos en España:
Ataques e Incursiones contra los Reinos Cristianos y Musulmanes
de la Península Ibérica en los siglos IX–XI (2nd edn, Madrid,
2006), pp. 127–47; Christys, Vikings in the South, pp. 29–45.
45. Simek, Schiffe der Wikinger, pp. 64–5; F. Brandt, ‘On the
Navigation of the Vikings’, in World of the Vikings, pp. 14–18.
46. Williams, Viking Ship, p. 30; O. Crumlin-Pedersen, Archaeology
and the Sea in Scandinavia and Britain: a Personal Account
(Roskilde, 2010), pp. 82–8.
47. The ship Roskilde 6, centrepiece of the British Museum Viking
exhibition in 2014: J. Bill, ‘Roskilde 6’, in Williams et al., eds.,
Vikings, pp. 228–33; Williams, Viking Ship, pp. 67–73.
48. Williams, Viking Ship, pp. 74–81; Unger, Ship in the Medieval
Economy, p. 91; Crumlin-Pedersen, Archaeology and the Sea, pp.
109–13.
49. M. Egeler, Islands in the West: Classical Myth and the Medieval
Norse and Irish Geographical Imagination (Turnhout, 2017).
 20. New Island Worlds
1. F. D. Logan, The Vikings in History (3rd edn, London, 2005), pp.
21–2, 26–8; A. Forte, R. Oram and F. Pedersen, Viking Empires
(Cambridge, 2005), p. 265.
2. H. Pálsson and P. Edwards, transl., Orkneyinga Saga: the History of
the Earls of Orkney (Harmondsworth, 1981), p. 215.
3. J. Jesch, The Viking Diaspora (London, 2015), pp. 32–3.
4. Forte et al., Viking Empires, p. 268.
5. Pálsson and Edwards, transl., Orkneyinga Saga, pp. 26–7.
6. B. Crawford, The Northern Earldoms: Orkney and Caithness from
AD 870 to 1470 (Edinburgh, 2013), pp. 36, 85–7.
7. Pálsson and Edwards, transl., Orkneyinga Saga, pp. 28–31.
8. Ibid., p. 34.
9. Ibid., pp. 36–8; Crawford, Northern Earldoms, pp. 125–8; Forte et
al., Viking Empires, p. 270.
10. Pálsson and Edwards, transl., Orkneyinga Saga, pp. 50–53.
11. Ibid., p. 84.
12. Crawford, Northern Earldoms, pp. 68, 198–212; black-and-white
plate 1.
13. Pálsson and Edwards, transl., Orkneyinga Saga, pp. 85–6.
14. Ibid., p. 85.
15. R. A. McDonald, ‘The Manx Sea Kings and the Western Oceans:
the Late Norse Isle of Man in Its North Atlantic Context, 1079–
1265’, in B. Hudson, ed., Studies in the Medieval Atlantic (New
York, 2012), p. 150; P. Sawyer, Kings and Vikings: Scandinavia
and Europe AD 700–1100 (New York, 1994), p. 111; A. W. Moore,
A History of the Isle of Man (London, 1900), vol. 1, p. 102.
16. Crawford, Northern Earldoms, pp. 166–7.
17. Sawyer, Kings and Vikings, p. 110; Logan, Vikings in History, pp.
27–8; M. Barnes, The Norn Language of Orkney and Shetland
(Lerwick, 1998).
18. Logan, Vikings in History, p. 29.
19. Ibid., pp. 30, 32–5; D. Meier, Seafarers, Merchants and Pirates in
the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2006), p. 108.
20. Logan, Vikings in History, pp. 38–40.
21. C. Sauer, Northern Mists (2nd edn, San Francisco, 1973), pp. 84–6;
R. Painter, transl., Faroe-Islander Saga (Jefferson, NC, 2016).
22. Jesch, Viking Diaspora, pp. 48–9.
23. Ibid., p. 22; S. Auge, ‘Vikings in the Faeroe Islands’, in W. W.
Fitzhugh and E. I. Ward, eds., Vikings: the North Atlantic Saga
(Washington DC, 2000), pp. 154–63.
24. Jesch, Viking Diaspora, p. 30.
25. Cited from Logan, Vikings in History, p. 44 (with slight
amendments); G. Turville-Petre, The Heroic Age of Scandinavia
(London, 1951), pp. 95–6; G. J. Marcus, The Conquest of the North
Atlantic (Woodbridge, 1980), pp. 22–3.
26. V. Szabo, ‘Subsistence Whaling and the Norse Diaspora:
Norsemen, Basques, and Whale Use in the Western North Atlantic,
ca. AD 900–1640’, in Hudson, ed., Studies in the Medieval Atlantic,
p. 82.
27. Marcus, Conquest of the North Atlantic, pp. 16–17.
28. Irish Life of St Brendan in the Book of Lismore, in S. Webb, ed., The
Voyage of Saint Brendan (2014), doc. 1.
29. Navigatio Brendani, in Webb, ed., Voyage of Saint Brendan, doc. 2.
30. Marcus, Conquest of the North Atlantic, pp. 19–20.
31. D. Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the
Age of Columbus (New Haven, 2008), p. 41; M. Egeler, Islands in
the West: Classical Myth and the Medieval Norse and Irish
Geographical Imagination (Turnhout, 2017).
32. Forte et al., Viking Empires, pp. 304–6; Logan, Vikings in History,
pp. 43–5.
33. Logan, Vikings in History, p. 45; also Jesch, Viking Diaspora, p.
182.
34. Jesch, Viking Diaspora, pp. 194–8.
35. Citations from the twelfth-century Landnámabók, in Logan, Vikings
in History, pp. 47–8; Turville-Petre, Heroic Age of Scandinavia,
pp. 97–8; Sauer, Northern Mists, pp. 86–94.
36. J. Byock, Viking Age Iceland (London, 2001), pp. 48–51 (citing the
Saga of the Foster-Brothers), and p. 56; Jesch, Viking Diaspora, p.
22; also Sauer, Northern Mists, pp. 94–6.
37. Jesch, Viking Diaspora, p. 40.
38. Byock, Viking Age Iceland, pp. 10–11.
39. Jesch, Viking Diaspora, pp. 34–5, 56–7.
40. Logan, Vikings in History, p. 51.
41. Jesch, Viking Diaspora, p. 39; Byock, Viking Age Iceland, pp. 57–
62.
42. Logan, Vikings in History, pp. 45–7; Turville-Petre, Heroic Age of
Scandinavia, pp. 100–101.
43. Marcus, Conquest of the North Atlantic, p. 26.
44. Byock, Viking Age Iceland, pp. 10–11, 82–4, 86.
45. Ibid., pp. 14, 174, 294; Logan, Vikings in History, p. 53.
46. Turville-Petre, Heroic Age of Scandinavia, pp. 101–2.
47. Byock, Viking Age Iceland, pp. 292–301; Logan, Vikings in History,
p. 54; Turville-Petre, Heroic Age of Scandinavia, pp. 101, 107.
48. ‘Egil’s Saga’, in The Sagas of the Icelanders (New York, 2000;
edition based on The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, vols. 1–5,
Reykjavík, 1997), ch. 27, pp. 46–7.
49. Ibid., ch. 33, p. 54
50. Ibid., ch. 39, p. 61.
51. Ibid., ch. 46, pp. 71–4.
52. Ibid., ch. 63, p. 120; B. Gelsinger, Icelandic Enterprise: Commerce
and Economy in the Middle Ages (Columbia, SC, 1981), p. 126.
53. Ibid., p. 31.
54. S. Bagge, Cross and Scepter: the Rise of the Scandinavian
Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation (Princeton, 2014), p.
137.
55. The major work on vaðmal, unfortunately only in Icelandic and
with no summary, is: H. Þorláksson, Vaðmal og Verðlag: Vaðmal í
Utanlandsviðskiptum og Búskop Íslendinga á 13. og 14. Öld
[‘Vaðmal and prices: vaðmal in the foreign shipping and farming of
13th and 14th-century Iceland’] (Reykjavik, 1991); but for its
arguments see O. Vésteinsson, ‘Commercial Shipping and the
Political Economy of Medieval Iceland’, in J. Barrett and D. Orton,
eds., Cod and Herring: the Archaeology and History of Medieval
Sea Fishing (Oxford, 2016), pp. 71–9.
56. Gelsinger, Icelandic Enterprise, pp. 34–6, 46–7, 77–8.
57. Ibid., pp. 69–76.
58. E. Carus-Wilson, ‘The Iceland Venture’, in E. Carus-Wilson,
Medieval Merchant Venturers: Collected Studies (2nd edn,
London, 1967), pp. 98–142.
59. Gelsinger, Icelandic Enterprise, pp. 127, 154.
60. D. Abulafia, Frederick II: a Medieval Emperor (London, 1988), p.
268.
61. Gelsinger, Icelandic Enterprise, pp. 83, 151.
 21. White Bears, Whales and Walruses
1. K. Seaver, The Last Vikings: the Epic Story of the Great Norse
Voyages (2nd edn, London, 2015), fig. 2, p. xxiii, and p. 3; K.
Seaver, The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North
America ca AD 1000–1500 (Stanford, 1996); also F. Gad, The
History of Greenland, vol. 1: Earliest Times to 1700 (London,
1970), pp. 1–7; and now the often acerbic A. Nedkvitne, Norse
Greenland: Viking Peasants in the Arctic (Abingdon, 2019).
2. H. Pálsson and M. Magnusson, ed. and transl., The Vinland Sagas:
the Norse Discovery of America (Harmondsworth, 1965), pp. 15,
39; Seaver, Last Vikings, pp. 14–15.
3. Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 8; Nedkvitne, Norse Greenland, pp. 21–30.
4. Estimates from the ‘Book of the Settlements’ (Landnámabók), in G.
Jones, The Norse Atlantic Saga, being the Norse Voyages of
Discovery and Settlement to Iceland, Greenland, and North
America (2nd edn, Oxford, 1986), p. 157; Pálsson and Magnusson,
ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, pp. 14–15.
5. Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 16; Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, p.
27.
6. Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, pp. 73–7; Gad, History of Greenland,
vol. 1, p. 29.
7. Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, pp. 103–4.
8. ‘Greenlanders’ Saga’, in Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 187; Pálsson
and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, p. 50.
9. Seaver, Last Vikings, pp. 15–16; Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 77.
10. Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, pp. 33–4, 42–5.
11. Objects in the Greenland room, Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen;
Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 104; Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, p.
85; B. Star et al., ‘Ancient DNA Reveals the Chronology of Walrus
Ivory Trade in Norse Greenland’, Proceedings of the Royal Society
B, vol. 285 (2018), 2018.0978; Nedkvitne, Norse Greenland, pp.
170–72.
12. Seaver, Last Vikings, pp. 102–3; G. J. Marcus, The Conquest of the
North Atlantic (Woodbridge, 1980), p. 92; D. Abulafia, Frederick
II: a Medieval Emperor (London, 1988), p. 268.
13. Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 101; Marcus, Conquest of the North
Atlantic, pp. 91, 96; J. Arneborg, ‘Greenland and Europe’, in W.
W. Fitzhugh and E. I. Ward, eds., Vikings: the North Atlantic Saga
(Washington DC, 2000), pp. 304–17.
14. Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, p. 172; G. Davies, Vikings in
America (Edinburgh, 2009), pp. 130–38, discounting the arguments
about metalworking.
15. Ari Frodi, Íslendingabók, cited in Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1,
p. 19.
16. Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, pp. 20–21.
17. Ibid., pp. 23–4, 91–3, 97–102; Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, pp. 93–5;
H. C. Gulløv, ‘Natives and Norse in Greenland’, in Fitzhugh and
Ward, eds., Vikings, pp. 318–26; V. Szabo, ‘Subsistence Whaling
and the Norse Diaspora: Norsemen, Basques, and Whale Use in the
Western North Atlantic, ca. AD 900–1640’, in B. Hudson, ed.,
Studies in the Medieval Atlantic (New York, 2012), p. 83;
Nedkvitne, Norse Greenland, p. 328.
18. Warp weight in the Greenland room, Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen;
Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, pp. 84–5; Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 35;
Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, pp. 39, 84–5.
19. Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 23.
20. ‘Eirík the Red’s Saga’, in Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, pp. 216–17;
Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, pp. 85–6;
Brattahlíð church: Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, pp. 41–2.
21. G. Turville-Petre, The Heroic Age of Scandinavia (London, 1951),
p. 138; Seaver, Last Vikings, pp. 26–9.
22. ‘Authun and the Bear’, in G. Jones, ed. and transl., Eirík the Red
and Other Icelandic Sagas (Oxford, 1961), pp. 163–70.
23. Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, pp. 57, 62–3; Marcus, Conquest
of the North Atlantic, p. 92.
24. Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 114.
25. Ibid., pp. 111, 118–19.
26. Ívar Bárdason, cited by Marcus, Conquest of the North Atlantic, p.
98; also Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, pp. 89–92.
27. Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 95; Nedkvitne, Norse Greenland, pp.
343–9.
28. J. Berglund, ‘The Farm beneath the Sand’, in Fitzhugh and Ward,
eds., Vikings, pp. 295–303.
29. Objects in the Greenland room, Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen; Gad,
History of Greenland, vol. 1, pp. 154–61; Jones, Norse Atlantic
Saga, pp. 110–11; Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 112.
30. B. Fagan, Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of
the New World (New York, 2007); Gad, History of Greenland, vol.
1, pp. 161–2, 181–2; Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 143.
31. T. McGovern, ‘The Demise of Norse Greenland’, in Fitzhugh and
Ward, eds., Vikings, pp. 327–39.
32. Text in H. Ingstad, Land under the Pole Star (London, 1966), pp.
329–30; Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, pp. 158–9.
33. Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, p. 164; Jones, Norse Atlantic
Saga, pp. 112–13.
34. ‘Ungortok the Chief of Kakorttok’, in Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga,
Appendix iii, pp. 262–7.
35. McGovern, ‘Demise of Norse Greenland’, p. 338.
36. N. Lynnerup, ‘Life and Death in Norse Greenland’, in Fitzhugh and
Ward, eds., Vikings, pp. 285–94.
37. Seaver, Last Vikings, pp. 159, 163.
38. Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 87.
39. Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, pp. 29–35.
40. Rune-stone and carvings in the Greenland room, Nationalmuseet,
Copenhagen; Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland
Sagas, p. 21; Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 80; Seaver, Last
Vikings, pp. 42, 112.
41. R. McGhee, ‘Remarks on the Arctic Finds’, in Jones, Norse Atlantic
Saga, Appendix v, p. 283; P. Sutherland, ‘The Norse and Native
 North Americans’, in Fitzhugh and Ward, eds., Vikings, pp. 238–
47.
42. P. Schledermann, ‘Ellesmere: Vikings in the Far North’, in Fitzhugh
and Ward, eds., Vikings, pp. 248–56; Davies, Vikings in America,
pp. 89–104.
43. Marcus, Conquest of the North Atlantic, p. 92; T. Haine, ‘Greenland
Norse Knowledge of the North Atlantic Environment’, in Hudson,
ed., Studies in the Medieval Atlantic, pp. 110–16.
44. Displayed in the Greenland room, Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen.
45. Skálholtsannáll, cited from Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 136; K.
Seaver, ‘Unanswered Questions’, in Fitzhugh and Ward, eds.,
Vikings, p. 275; Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 59.
46. Cited in Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, p.
15.
47. Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 285; M. Egeler, Islands in the West:
Classical Myth and the Medieval Norse and Irish Geographical
Imagination (Turnhout, 2017).
48. Among the justifiably incredulous: K. Seaver, Maps, Myths, and
Men: the Story of the Vínland Map (Stanford, 2004); among the
unjustifiably defensive: Davies, Vikings in America; among the
supporters of the map: R. Skelton, T. Marston and G. Painter, The
Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation (2nd edn, New Haven, 1995);
see also S. Cox, ‘A Norse Penny from Maine’, in Fitzhugh and
Ward, eds., Vikings, pp. 206–7.
49. Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, pp. 53–4.
50. Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 117.
51. Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, pp. 55–8.
52. E. Wahlgren, The Vikings and America (London, 1986), pp. 139–
46, 158; cf. Davies, Vikings in America, pp. 74–5, and Jones, Norse
Atlantic Saga, p. 124.
53. Sutherland, ‘The Norse and Native North Americans’, pp. 238–9.
54. Wahlgren, Vikings and America, pp. 74, 92–3.
55. Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, pp. 64–5.
56. Ibid., pp. 66, 70–71.
57. Ibid., pp. 70–71.
58. Ibid., pp. 67–70, 100.
59. N. Brown, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman (New
York, 2007); Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland
Sagas, p. 71.
60. Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, p. 63.
61. H. Ingstad, Westward to Vinland: the Discovery of Pre-Columbian
Norse House-Sites in North America (London, 1969); B. Linderoth
Wallace, ‘The Viking Settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows’, in
Fitzhugh and Ward, eds., Vikings, pp. 208–16; B. Linderoth
Wallace, ‘The Anse aux Meadows site’, in Jones, Norse Atlantic
Saga, Appendix vii, pp. 285–304; Seaver, Last Vikings, pp. 50–52;
Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, pp. 129–30; Davies, Vikings in
America, pp. 76–81; P. Bergþórsson, The Wineland Millennium
(Reykjavik, 2000).
 22. From Russia with Profit
1. P. Dollinger, The German Hansa (London, 1970), p. 3; H. Brand
and E. Knol, eds., Koggen, Kooplieden en Kantoren: de Hanze, een
praktisch Netwerk (Hilversum, 2011).
2. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a Human History of the
Mediterranean (London, 2011), pp. 287–369.
3. Dollinger, German Hansa, pp. xix–xx.
4. G. Graichen et al., Die Deutsche Hanse: eine heimliche Supermacht
(Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2011), p. 115.
5. D. Abulafia, Frederick II: a Medieval Emperor (London, 1988), p.
229.
6. J. Schildhauer, K. Fritze and W. Stark, Die Hanse (Berlin, DDR,
1982); J. Schildhauer, The Hansa: History and Culture (Leipzig,
1985).
7. Graichen et al., Deutsche Hanse, p. 6.
8. Dollinger, German Hansa, p. xx.
9. See the EU-funded Hansekarte: Map of the Hanseatic League
(Lübeck, 2014).
10. J. Sarnowsky, ‘Die Hanse und der Deutsche Orden – eine
ertragreiche Beziehung’, in Graichen et al., Deutsche Hanse, pp.
163–81.
11. A. Kasekamp, A History of the Baltic States (Basingstoke, 2010),
pp. 12–13.
12. E. Christiansen, The Northern Crusades (2nd edn, London, 1997),
pp. 94–5.
13. Kasekamp, History of the Baltic States, p. 200 n. 37.
14. Christiansen, Northern Crusades, pp. 79–82, 99–103.
15. Kasekamp, History of the Baltic States, pp. 9, 11.
16. Christiansen, Northern Crusades, pp. 54–5, 120.
17. Dollinger, German Hansa, p. 4.
18. Christiansen, Northern Crusades, pp. 29–31.
19. Schildhauer, The Hansa, p. 20.
20. Dollinger, German Hansa, doc. 1, p. 379.
21. Ibid., p. 22.
22. Ibid., doc. 1, p. 380; Schildhauer, The Hansa, p. 19.
23. R. Hammel-Kiesow, ‘Novgorod und Lübeck: Siedlungsgefüge
zweier Handelsstädte im Vergleich’, in N. Angermann and K.
Friedland, eds., Novgorod: Markt und Kontor der Hanse (Cologne,
2002), p. 53.
24. Dollinger, German Hansa, pp. 31–5; R. Bartlett, The Making of
Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1300
(London, 1993).
25. Abulafia, Frederick II, p. 229.
26. G. Westholm, Visby 1361 Invasionen (Stockholm, 2007), and
exhibits in the Gotland Museum, Visby, and Historiska Museet,
Stockholm.
27. Dollinger, German Hansa, pp. 70–71.
28. Schildhauer, The Hansa, pp. 73–4.
29. Hermen Rode’s work is both in Sankt-Annen-Museum, Lübeck, and
in Historiska Museet, Stockholm; M. North, The Baltic: a History
(Cambridge, Mass., 2015), pp. 77–80.
30. North, Baltic, pp. 80–82.
31. D. Kattinger, Die Gotländische Gesellschaft: der frühhansisch-
gotlandische Handel in Nord- und Westeuropa (Cologne, 1999).
32. Dollinger, German Hansa, pp. 7–8, 27; North, Baltic, pp. 43–6.
33. M. W. Thompson, eds., Novgorod the Great: Excavations at the
Medieval City 1951–62 directed by A. V. Artikhovsky and B. A.
Kolchin (London, 1967), p. 12; Hammel-Kiesow, ‘Novgorod und
Lübeck’, p. 60; E. A. Rybina, ‘Früher Handel und westeuropäische
Funde in Novgorod’, in Angermann and Friedland, eds., Novgorod,
pp. 121–32.
34. Dating revised from 1189: A. Choroškevič, ‘Der Ostsee Handel und
der deutsch-russisch-gotländische Vertrag 1191/1192’, in S. Jenks
and M. North, eds., Der Hansische Sonderweg? Beiträge zur
 Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Hanse (Cologne, 1993), pp.
1–12; also B. Schubert, ‘Die Russische Kaufmannschaft und ihre
Beziehung zur Hanse’, in Jenks and North, eds., Hansische
Sonderweg?, pp. 13–22; B. Schubert, ‘Hansische Kaufleute im
Novgoroder Handelskontor’, in Angermann and Friedland, eds.,
Novgorod, pp. 79–95; E. Harder-Gersdorff, ‘Hansische
Handelsgüter auf dem Großmarkt Novgorod (13.–17. Jh.):
Grundstrukturen und Forschungsfragen’, in Angermann and
Friedland, eds., Novgorod, pp. 133–43.
35. Dollinger, German Hansa, pp. 27–30.
36. North, Baltic, pp. 40–43.
37. G. Hoffmann and U. Schnall, eds., Die Kogge: Sternstunde des
deutschen Schiffsarchäologie (Hamburg, 2003); also S. Rose, The
Medieval Sea (London, 2007), pp. 16, 21–2.
38. O. Crumlin-Pedersen, ‘To be or not to be a cog: the Bremen Cog in
Perspective’, International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, vol.
29 (2000), pp. 230–46.
39. B. Fagan, Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of
the New World (New York, 2007), pp. 51–6.
40. J. van Houtte, An Economic History of the Low Countries 800–1800
(London, 1977), p. 90.
41. Saxo Grammaticus (c.1150–c.1220), cited by J. Gade, The
Hanseatic Control of Norwegian Commerce during the Late
Middle Ages (Leiden, 1951), p. 17; P. Holm, ‘Commercial Sea
Fisheries in the Baltic Region c.AD 1000–1600’, in J. Barrett and D.
Orton, eds., Cod and Herring: the Archaeology and History of
Medieval Sea Fishing (Oxford, 2016), pp. 13–22.
42. Gade, Hanseatic Control, pp. 17–18.
43. Schildhauer et al., Die Hanse, pp. 99–100.
44. A. R. Bridbury, England and the Salt Trade in the Later Middle
Ages (Oxford, 1955), pp. 94–8.
45. A. de Oliveira Marques, Hansa e Portugal na Idade Média (Lisbon,
1993).
 23. Stockfish and Spices
1. H. Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: an Analysis of
Systems Change (Princeton, 1994), pp. 109–29; T. Brady, Turning
Swiss: Cities and Empire, 1450–1550 (Cambridge, 1985).
2. P. Dollinger, The German Hansa (London, 1970), pp. 62–3.
3. Ibid., pp. 88–93.
4. Ibid., pp. ix–x.
5. Ibid., p. 91.
6. V. Etting, Queen Margarete, 1353–1412, and the Founding of the
Nordic Union (Leiden, 2004).
7. M. Puhle, Die Vitalienbrüder: Klaus Störtebeker und die Seeräuber
der Hanse (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1992).
8. Dollinger, German Hansa, p. 96.
9. W. Stieda, Hildebrand Veckinchusen: Briefwechsel eines deutschen
Kaufmanns im 15. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1921); M. Lesnikov, Die
Handelsbücher des Hansischen Kaufmannes Veckinchusen (Berlin,
1973); M. Lesnikov and W. Stark, Die Handelsbücher des
Hildebrand Veckinchusen (Cologne, 2013); A. Lorenz-
Ridderbecks, Krisenhandel und Ruin des Hansekaufmanns
Hildebrand Veckinchusen im späten Mittelalter: Untersuchung des
Briefwechsels (1417–1428) (Hamburg, 2014), pp. 13, 15, 27, 32–3;
G. Graichen et al., Die Deutsche Hanse: eine heimliche
Supermacht (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2011), pp. 222, 233
(illustrating the chest full of pepper).
10. Graichen et al., Die Deutsche Hanse, p. 223.
11. Ibid., p. 227; Lorenz-Ridderbecks, Krisenhandel und Ruin, p. 25.
12. A. Vandewalle, Hanze@M€dici: Bruges, Crossroads of European
Cultures (Oostkamp, 2002), pp. 48–9 and accompanying map.
13. J. van Houtte, Bruges: essai d’histoire urbaine (Brussels, 1967), p.
90.
14. Graichen et al., Die Deutsche Hanse, pp. 231–2.
15. Van Houtte, Bruges, pp. 41, 57–8; J. Murray, Bruges, Cradle of
Capitalism, 1280–1390 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 244–5.
16. J. and F. Gies, Merchants and Moneymen: the Commercial
Revolution, 1000–1500 (London, 1972), pp. 199–202, 205.
17. Graichen et al., Die Deutsche Hanse, p. 229.
18. J. Martin, Treasure in the Land of Darkness: the Fur Trade and Its
Significance for Medieval Russia (Cambridge, 1986).
19. Graichen et al., Die Deutsche Hanse, p. 234.
20. Gies, Merchants and Moneymen, p. 206.
21. P. Lantschner, The Logic of Political Conflict in Medieval Cities:
Italy and the Southern Low Countries, 1370–1440 (Oxford, 2015).
22. Gies, Merchants and Moneymen, pp. 206–8, 211.
23. Ibid., p. 209; Graichen et al., Die Deutsche Hanse, pp. 235–6;
Lorenz-Ridderbecks, Krisenhandel und Ruin, pp. 33–40.
24. Dollinger, German Hansa, p. 216.
25. Gies, Merchants and Moneymen, pp. 210–11; Graichen et al., Die
Deutsche Hanse, p. 239.
26. Gies, Merchants and Moneymen, p. 214; Graichen et al., Die
Deutsche Hanse, pp. 240–42; Lorenz-Ridderbecks, Krisenhandel
und Ruin, pp. 69–95.
27. In modern German: Gott erbarme, daß es mit Dir so gekommen ist:
Lorenz-Ridderbecks, Krisenhandel und Ruin, p. 13.
28. Dollinger, German Hansa, pp. 165–6, 173–6; Gies, Merchants and
Moneymen, pp. 209–14.
29. K. Helle, ‘The Emergence of the Town of Bergen in the Light of the
Latest Research Results’, in A. Graßmann, ed., Das Hansische
Kontor zu Bergen und die Lübecker Bergenfahrer – International
Workshop Lübeck 2003 (Lübeck, 2005), pp. 12–27; also A.
Nedkvitne, The German Hansa and Bergen 1100–1600 (Cologne,
2013).
30. A. Liestol, ‘The Runes from Bergen: Voices from the Middle
Ages’, Minnesota History, vol. 40 (1966), part 2, pp. 49–58.
31. Cited from the Sverre Saga, ch. 104, in J. Gade, The Hanseatic
Control of Norwegian Commerce during the Late Middle Ages
(Leiden, 1951), pp. 30–31.
32. Text in Gade, Hanseatic Control, pp. 38–41.
33. Ibid., p. 30 n. 1.
34. Ibid., p. 55.
35. G. A. Ersland, ‘Was the Kontor in Bergen a Topographically Closed
Entity?’, in Graßmann, ed., Das Hansische Kontor zu Bergen, pp.
41–57; Gade, Hanseatic Control, p. 51.
36. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a Human History of the
Mediterranean (London, 2011), pp. 298–9.
37. Ersland, ‘Was the Kontor?’, pp. 47, 53.
38. Gade, Hanseatic Control, pp. 74–7, 80–81.
 24. The English Challenge
1. P. D. A. Harvey, ‘The English Inflation of 1180–1220’, Past and
Present, no. 61 (1973), pp. 26–7.
2. T. H. Lloyd, England and the German Hanse 1157–1611: a Study
of Their Trade and Diplomacy (Cambridge, 1991), p. 15; T. H.
Lloyd, Alien Merchants in England in the High Middle Ages
(Brighton, 1982), pp. 128–9.
3. P. Richards, ‘The Hinterland and Overseas Trade of King’s Lynn
1205–1537: an Introduction’, in K. Friedland and P. Richards, eds.,
Essays in Hanseatic History: the King’s Lynn Symposium 1998
(Dereham, Norfolk, 2005), pp. 10–21.
4. Lloyd, Alien Merchants, pp. 130–31.
5. Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, pp. 23–31.
6. G. Cushway, Edward III and the War at Sea, 1327–1377
(Woodbridge, 2011).
7. Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, pp. 73, 89; S. Jenks, ‘Lynn
and the Hanse: Trade and Relations in the Middle Ages’, in
Friedland and Richards, eds., Essays in Hanseatic History, pp.
101–3.
8. E. Carus-Wilson, ‘Trends in the Export of English Woollens in the
Fourteenth Century’, in E. Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant
Venturers: Collected Studies (2nd edn, London, 1967), pp. 239–64;
J. Fudge, Cargoes, Embargoes, and Emissaries: the Commercial
and Political Interaction of England and the German Hanse 1450–
1510 (Toronto, 1995), p. 5.
9. Richards, ‘Hinterland and Overseas Trade’, p. 19; W. Stark,
‘English Merchants in Danzig’, in Friedland and Richards, eds.,
Essays in Hanseatic History, pp. 64–6; Fudge, Cargoes,
Embargoes, p. 10.
10. E. Christiansen, The Northern Crusades (2nd edn, London, 1997),
pp. 156–7; Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, pp. 131–2;
Fudge, Cargoes, Embargoes, pp. 7–9.
11. M. Burleigh, Prussian Society and the German Order: an
Aristocratic Corporation in Crisis c.1410–1466 (Cambridge,
1984); Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, pp. 178–9; M. M.
Postan, ‘The Economic and Political Relations of England and the
Hanse from 1400 to 1475’, in M. M. Postan and E. Power, eds.,
Studies in English Trade in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1933),
pp. 91–153; S. Jenks, England, die Hanse und Preußen: Handel
und Diplomatie 1377–1474 (3 vols., Cologne, 1992).
12. Fudge, Cargoes, Embargoes, pp. 66–74.
13. E. Carus-Wilson, ‘The Overseas Trade of Bristol in the Fifteenth
Century’, in Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers, pp. 1–
97; also Carus-Wilson, ‘The Iceland Venture’, ibid., pp. 98–142.
14. Fudge, Cargoes, Embargoes, pp. 144–51.
15. Cited in Jenks, ‘Lynn and the Hanse’, p. 103; Fudge, Cargoes,
Embargoes, pp. 74, 109–10.
16. D. Pifarré Torres, El comerç internacional de Barcelona i el Mar
del Nord (Bruges) a Finals del segle XIV (Montserrat, 2002); J.
Hinojosa Montalvo, De Valencia a Flandes: la nave della frutta
(Valencia, 2007).
17. A. Ruddock, Italian Merchants and Shipping in Southampton,
1270–1600 (Southampton, 1951); D. Abulafia, ‘Cittadino e
denizen: mercanti mediterranei a Southampton e a Londra’, in M.
del Treppo, ed., Sistema di rapporti ed élites economiche in Europa
(secoli XII–XVII) (Naples, 1994), pp. 273–91, repr. in D. Abulafia,
Mediterranean Encounters, Economic, Religious, Political, 1100–
1550 (Aldershot, 2000), essay VII.
18. C. Platt, Medieval Southampton: the Port and the Trading
Community, A.D. 1000–1600 (London, 1973), pp. 262–3.
19. B. Kedar, Merchants in Crisis: Genoese and Venetian Men of
Affairs and the Fourteenth-Century Depression (New Haven,
1976), pp. 31–7; P. Strohm, ‘Trade, Treason and the Murder of
Janus Imperial’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 35 (1996), pp. 1–
23.
20. Abulafia, ‘Cittadino e denizen’, pp. 278–9; Platt, Medieval
Southampton, pp. 229–30; Ruddock, Italian Merchants, pp. 183–5.
21. Lloyd, Alien Merchants, p. 163.
22. W. Childs, Anglo-Castilian Trade in the Later Middle Ages
(Manchester, 1978); T. Ruiz, ‘Castilian Merchants in England,
1248–1350’, in W. C. Jordan, B. McNab and T. Ruiz, eds., Order
and Innovation in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Joseph R.
Strayer (Princeton, 1976), pp. 173–85; Lloyd, Alien Merchants, pp.
164–5.
23. E. Ferreira Priegue, Galicia en el comercio marítimo medieval
(Santiago de Compostela, 1988).
24. Childs, Anglo-Castilian Trade, pp. 227–30.
25. G. Warner, ed., The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye: a Poem on the Use
of Sea-Power, 1436 (Oxford, 1926), p. 4.
26. V. Kostić, Dubrovnik i Engleska, 1300–1650 (Belgrade, 1975), pp.
113, 572, 576.
27. M. Pratt, Winchelsea: the Tale of a Medieval Town (Bexhill-on-Sea,
2005), pp. 41–50.
28. Ibid., p. 131.
29. Ibid., pp. 95–8, 112.
30. Ibid., p. 78.
31. Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers, p. 2.
32. T. O’Neill, Merchants and Mariners in Medieval Ireland (Dublin,
1987), pp. 29, 67–8, 108; Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant
Venturers, pp. 13–28.
33. Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers, pp. 5–11.
34. A. Crawford, Bristol and the Wine Trade (Bristol, 1984); M. K.
James, Studies in the Medieval Wine Trade (Oxford, 1971).
35. J. Bernard, Navires et gens de mer à Bordeaux (vers 1400–vers
1500) (3 vols., Paris, 1968); Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant
Venturers, pp. 32–6.
36. Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers, p. 43.
37. M. Barkham, ‘The Offshore and Distant-Water Fisheries of the
Spanish Basques, c.1500–1650’, in D. Starkey, J. Þór and I.
Heidbrink, eds., A History of the North Atlantic Fisheries, vol. 1:
 From Early Times to the mid-Nineteenth Century (Bremerhaven,
2009), pp. 229–49; J. Proulx, ‘The Presence of Basques in
Labrador in the 16th Century’, in R. Grenier, M.-A. Bernier and W.
Stevens, eds., The Underwater Archaeology of Red Bay: Basque
Shipbuilding and Whaling in the 16th Century (5 vols., Ottawa,
2007), vol. 1: Archaeology Underwater: the Project, pp. 25–42.
38. See the twelve first-class essays in E. Jones and R. Stone, eds., The
World of the Newport Medieval Ship: Trade, Politics and Shipping
in the mid-Fifteenth Century (Cardiff, 2018).
39. Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers, pp. 47–9, 53–4, 58–
64; I. Sanderson, A History of Whaling (New York, 1993), pp. 136–
41.
40. B. Little and J. Sansom, The Story of Bristol from the Middle Ages
to Today (3rd edn, Wellington, Somerset, 2003), pp. 14–15; Carus-
Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers, pp. 80–81.
41. S. Jenks, Robert Sturmy’s Commercial Expedition to the
Mediterranean (1457/8) (Bristol, 2006).
42. Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers, pp. 67–8.
43. D. H. Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy,
1450–1700 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991), p. 33; Carus-
Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers, pp. 70–71.
44. B. Gelsinger, Icelandic Enterprise: Commerce and Economy in the
Middle Ages (Columbia, SC, 1981), p. 190.
45. Cited in Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers, p. 111, and
in Gelsinger, Icelandic Enterprise, p. 192.
46. Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers, pp. 101, 103–4, 110–
13.
47. Ibid., pp. 113, 115, 118–20, 125, 131, 137.
48. Gelsinger, Icelandic Enterprise, p. 193; Carus-Wilson, Medieval
Merchant Venturers, pp. 133–42.
49. Cited in D. Quinn, ‘The Argument for the English Discovery of
America between 1480 and 1494’, Geographical Journal, vol. 127
(1961), p. 277; for the original text from Archivo General de
Simancas, Estado de Castilla, leg. 2, f. 6r–v, see plates between p.
 284 and p. 285; J. Williamson, ed., The Cabot Voyages and Bristol
Discovery under Henry VII (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 30–31; E. Jones
and M. Condon, Cabot and Bristol’s Age of Discovery: the Bristol
Discovery Voyages 1480–1508 (Bristol, 2016), p. 18.
50. Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages, pp. 19–32.
51. William of Worcester, Itinerarium, ibid., pp. 187–8 (doc. 6).
52. Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages, pp. 19–20, 175 (doc. 1, ii).
53. Ibid., pp. 188–9 (doc. 7, i and ii); Jones and Condon, Cabot and
Bristol’s Age of Discovery, pp. 15–17.
54. Quinn, ‘Argument for the English Discovery’, pp. 278–9; Carus-
Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers, p. 97 (conflating the two
voyages); Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages, pp. 23–4.
55. C. Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization (Ithaca, NY,
1970), pp. 181–95.
56. Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages, p. 176 (doc. 1, vi).
57. Ibid., pp. 15, 187 (doc. 5); J. Blake, West Africa: Quest for God and
Gold, 1454–1587 (London, 1977), pp. 60–62.
 25. Portugal Rising
1. W. Childs, Trade and Shipping in the Medieval West: Portugal,
Castile and England (Porto, 2013), p. 139.
2. A. Christys, Vikings in the South: Voyages to Iberia and the
Mediterranean (London, 2015), pp. 49–50, 73, 87–8.
3. C. Picard, L’Océan Atlantique musulman de la conquête arabe à
l’époque almohade: Navigation et mise en valeur des côtes d’al-
Andalus et du Maghreb occidental (Portugal–Espagne–Maroc)
(Paris, 1997), pp. 79–80, 112, 118; also his Le Portugal musulman
(VIIIe–XIIIe siècle): l’Occident d’al-Andalus sous domination
islamique (Paris, 2000).
4. Picard, Océan Atlantique musulman, pp. 112, 361–3, 375, 434–44,
518.
5. Ibid., pp. 39, 42–3, 132–4, 171.
6. C. W. David, ed., De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi: the Conquest of
Lisbon (2nd edn, revised by J. Phillips, New York, 2001).
7. Picard, Océan Atlantique musulman, pp. 125, 174, 181, 353, 355–6;
Picard, Portugal musulman, pp. 105, 110; S. Lay, The Reconquest
Kings of Portugal: Political and Cultural Reorientation on the
Medieval Frontier (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 152–3.
8. B. Diffie, Prelude to Empire: Portugal Overseas before Henry the
Navigator (Lincoln, Neb., 1960), pp. 30, 32–3.
9. F. Miranda, Portugal and the Medieval Atlantic: Commercial
Diplomacy, Merchants, and Trade, 1143–1488 (Porto, 2012), pp. 2,
72; T. Viula de Faria, The Politics of Anglo-Portuguese Relations
and Their Protagonists in the Later Middle Ages (c.1369–c.1449)
(D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2012); V. Shillington and A.
Wallis Chapman, The Commercial Relations of England and
Portugal (London, 1907), pp. 31, 41–5; Childs, Trade and
Shipping, pp. 83, 109, 113–14.
10. Miranda, Portugal and the Medieval Atlantic, pp. 65, 161, 183.
11. Cited ibid., p. 64.
12. C. Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization (Ithaca, NY,
1970), pp. 98–112.
13. F. Themudo Barata, Navegação, comércio e relações políticas: os
portugueses no Mediterrâneo Ocidental (1385–1466) (Lisbon,
1998); J. Heers, ‘L’Expansion maritime portugaise à la fin du
Moyen-Âge: la Méditerranée’, Actas do III Colóquio internacional
de estudios luso-brasileiros (Lisbon, 1960), vol. 2, pp. 138–47,
repr. in J. Heers, Société et économie à Gênes (XIVe–XVe siècles)
(London, 1979), essay III; H. Ferhat, Sabta des origines au XIVe
siècle (Rabat 1993; repr. with new pagination, Rabat, 2014).
14. E. Ferreira Priegue, Galicia en el comercio marítimo medieval
(Santiago de Compostela, 1988); J. Heers, ‘Le Commerce des
Basques en Méditerranée au XVe siècle (d’après les archives de
Gênes)’, Bulletin Hispanique, vol. 57 (1955), pp. 292–324.
15. F. Fernández-Armesto, ‘Atlantic Exploration before Columbus: the
Evidence of Maps’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, vol. 30
(1986), pp. 12–34, repr. in F. Fernández-Armesto, ed., The
European Opportunity: an Expanding World (Aldershot, 1995),
vol. 2, pp. 278–300.
16. D. Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the
Age of Columbus (New Haven, 2008), p. 34.
17. Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia, ‘Purgatorio’, canto 26, verses
133–5; T. Cachey, Le Isole Fortunate: appunti di storia letteraria
italiana (Rome, 1995), p. 18.
18. Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, pp. 49–64.
19. Giovanni Boccaccio, De Canaria, in M. Pastore Stocchi, ‘Il “De
Canaria” boccaccesco e un locus deperditus nel “De Insulis” di
Domenico Silvestri’, Rinascimento, vol. 10 (1959), pp. 153–6.
20. Boccaccio, De Canaria, p. 155.
21. Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, pp. 65–7; F. Fernández-Armesto,
Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the
Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492 (London, 1987), pp.
153–9; A. Rumeu de Armas, El obispado de Telde: misioneros
mallorquines y catalanes en el Atlántico (2nd edn, Madrid and
 Telde, 1986); J. Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers and Infidels: the Church
and the non-Christian world, 1250–1500 (Liverpool, 1979).
22. Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, pp. 42–4.
23. M. Adhikari, ‘Europe’s First Settler Colonial Incursion into Africa:
the Genocide of Aboriginal Canary Islanders’, African Historical
Review, vol. 49 (2017), pp. 1–26.
24. Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus, pp. 158, 167.
25. Ferhat, Sabta, pp. 19–28 (old edn), pp. 17–25 (new edn); L. Miguel
Duarte, Ceuta 1415 (Lisbon, 2015), pp. 132–9; A. Unali, Ceuta
1415 (Rome, 2000).
26. D. Abulafia, The Two Italies: Economic Relations between the
Norman Kingdom of Sicily and the Northern Communes
(Cambridge, 1977).
27. C. R. and W. D. Phillips, Spain’s Golden Fleece: Wool Production
and the Wool Trade from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth
Century (Baltimore, 1997).
28. F. Miranda, ‘Os antecedentes económicos da conquista de Ceuta de
1415 reavaliados’, Congreso Internacional: Los orígines de la
expansión europea: Ceuta 1415; VI Centenario de la Toma de
Ceuta, Ceuta 1, 2 y 3 de octubre de 2015 (Ceuta, 2019); C.
Gozalbes Cravioto, Ceuta en los portulanos medievales, siglos XIII,
XIV y XV (Ceuta, 1997).
29. Ceuta en el Medievo: la ciudad en el mundo árabe. II. Jornadas de
historia de Ceuta (Ceuta, 2002); M. Chérif, Ceuta aux époques
almohade et mérinide (Paris, 1996).
30. D. Abulafia, Frederick II: a Medieval Emperor (London, 1988), p.
258.
31. Unali, Ceuta 1415, pp. 198–200.
32. Ibid., pp. 192–8.
33. Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Crónica da Tomada de Ceuta (Mem
Martins, 1992), pp. 44–63.
34. King Duarte I, cited by P. Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’: a
Life (New Haven and London, 2000), p. 40.
35. Ibid., p. 44.
36. Duarte, Ceuta 1415, pp. 88–90.
37. Russell, Prince Henry, pp. 49, 51–2.
38. P. Drumond Braga, Uma lança em África: História da conquista de
Ceuta (Lisbon, 2015), p. 58.
39. Luis Vaz de Camões, The Lusiads, transl. L. White (Oxford, 1997),
canto 4:49, p. 86. See also e.g. D. Nobre Santos, Povoamento da
ilha da Madeira e o sentido ecuménico da cultura lusíada (Estudos
Gerais Universitários de Angola, Sá da Bandeira, Angola, 1966).
40. B. Rogerson, The Last Crusaders: the Hundred-Year Battle for the
Centre of the World (London, 2009), pp. 399–402.
41. Russell, Prince Henry, pp. 120, 291–2.
 26. Virgin Islands
1. S. Halikowski Smith, ‘The Mid-Atlantic Islands: a Theatre of Early
Modern Ecocide?’, International Review of Social History, vol. 55
(2010), Supplement, p. 52.
2. R. Carita, História da Madeira (1420–1566): Povoamento e
produção açucareira (Funchal, 1989), pp. 35–9; F. Fernández-
Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the
Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492 (London, 1987), pp.
195–6.
3. C. Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization (Ithaca, NY,
1970), pp. 206–19.
4. P. Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’: a Life (New Haven and
London, 2000), pp. 94, 98.
5. Ibid., p. 91; J. H. Parry, The Discovery of the Sea (2nd edn,
Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991), p. 97.
6. Halikowski Smith, ‘Mid-Atlantic Islands’, pp. 51–77.
7. A. da Cà da Mosto (Cadamosto), The Voyages of Cadamosto and
Other Documents on Western Africa in the Second Half of the
Fifteenth Century, ed. C. R. Crone (London, 1937), ch. 6, p. 9;
Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus, pp. 198–9.
8. D. Abulafia, ‘Sugar in Spain’, European Review, vol. 16 (2008), pp.
191–210.
9. V. Rau, ‘The Madeiran Sugar Cane Plantations’, in H. Johnson, ed.,
From Reconquest to Empire: the Iberian Background to Latin
American History (New York, 1970), p. 75.
10. A. Vieira, ‘Sugar Islands: the Sugar Economy of Madeira and the
Canaries, 1450–1650’, in S. Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons:
Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680 (Chapel
Hill, 2004), pp. 42–84.
11. Carita, História da Madeira, p. 92.
12. Halikowski Smith, ‘Mid-Atlantic Islands’, p. 61.
13. Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus, pp. 159–66.
14. R. Fuson, Legendary Islands of the Ocean Sea (Sarasota, 1995), pp.
44–55, 103–17; D. Johnson, Phantom Islands of the Atlantic
(London, 1997), pp. 91–128.
15. Russell, Prince Henry, pp. 102–3.
16. Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus, pp. 199–200; D.
Birmingham, Trade and Empire in the Atlantic, 1400–1600
(London, 2000), pp. 14–15.
17. Parry, Discovery of the Sea, p. 99; Halikowski Smith, ‘Mid-Atlantic
Islands’, pp. 61–2.
18. Verlinden, Beginnings of Modern Colonization, pp. 220–27; A.
Vieira, O comércio inter-insular nos séculos XV e XVI: Madeira,
Açores e Canárias (Funchal, 1987).
19. Angra, a Terceira e os Açores nas rotas da Índia e das Américas
(Angra do Heroísmo, 1999).
20. Verlinden, Beginnings of Modern Colonization, pp. 161–80; A.
Peluffo, ed., Antonio de Noli e l’inizio delle scoperte del Nuovo
Mondo (Noli, 2013; online English edition: M. Ferrado de Noli,
ed., Antonio de Noli and the Beginnings of the New World), though
some articles are tendentious.
21. A. Leão Silva, Histórias de um Sahel Insular (Praia, 1995); J.
Blake, ed., Europeans in West Africa (1450–1560): Documents to
Illustrate the Nature and Scope of Portuguese Enterprise in West
Africa (2 vols., London, 1942); Halikowski Smith, ‘Mid-Atlantic
Islands’, pp. 73–4.
22. T. Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western
Africa, 1300–1589 (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 95–115; T. Hall, ed. and
transl., Before Middle Passage: Translated Portuguese
Manuscripts of Atlantic Slave Trading from West Africa to Iberian
Territories, 1513–26 (Farnham, 2015).
23. Examples may be seen in the Ethnographic Museum in Praia,
Santiago.
24. Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, pp. 99–100; cotton:
Hall, ed. and transl., Before Middle Passage, pp. 36, 149, 180, 213.
25. A. Carreira, Cabo Verde: Formação e Extinção de uma Sociaedade
escarvorata (1460–1878) (3rd edn, Praia de Santiago, 2000).
26. C. Evans, M. L. Stig Sørensen and K. Richter, ‘An Early Christian
Church in the Tropics: Excavation of the N. S. de Conceição,
a a

Cidade Velha, Cape Verde’, in T. Green, ed., Brokers of Change:

Atlantic Commerce and Cultures in Precolonial Western Africa
(Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 178 (2012), pp. 173–92.
27. Hall, ed. and transl., Before Middle Passage, p. 15; T. Green,
Masters of Difference: Creolization and the Jewish Presence in
Cabo Verde 1497–1672 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Birmingham, 2007), p. 74; Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave
Trade, p. 98; Evans et al., ‘An Early Christian Church in the
Tropics’, pp. 175–6; Catalans in the Atlantic: I. Armenteros
Martínez, Cataluña en la era de las navegaciones: la participación
catalana en la primera economía atlántica (c.1470–1540)
(Barcelona, 2012).
28. T. Green, ‘The Export of Rice and Millet from Upper Guinea into
the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic Trade’, in R. Law, S. Schwarz and
S. Strickrodt, eds., Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and
Slavery in Atlantic Africa (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 79–97; T. Hall,
‘Portuguese Archival Documentation of Europe’s First Colony in
the Tropics: the Cape Verde Islands, 1460–1530’, in L. McCrank,
ed., Discovery in the Archives of Spain and Portugal:
Quincentenary Essays, 1492–1992 (New York, 1993), p. 389.
29. T. Hall, The Role of Cape Verde Islanders in Organizing and
Operating Maritime Trade between West Africa and Iberian
Territories, 1441–1616 (Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore, 1992, distributed by University Microfilms
International, 1992), p. 234; Hall, ed. and transl., Before Middle
Passage, pp. 266, 275–6; Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave
Trade, p. 101.
30. I. Cabral, A primeira elite colonial atlântica: dos ‘homens honrados
brancos’ de Santiago à ‘Nobreza da Terra’, finais do séc. V–início
do séc. XVII (Praia, 2015); Z. Cohen, Os filhos da folha (Cabo
Verde – séculos XV–XVIII) (Praia, 2007); Green, Rise of the Trans-
Atlantic Slave Trade, pp. 103–7.
31. História geral do Cabo Verde (Lisbon and Praia de Santiago, 1991),
vol. 1, pp. 264–7, 276–9; Hall, ed. and transl., Before Middle
Passage, pp. 84–5.
32. História geral do Cabo Verde, corpo documental (Lisbon, 1988–
90), vol. 2, pp. 234–8; Hall, ed. and transl., Before Middle Passage,
pp. 185–91.
33. M. L. Stig Sørensen, C. Evans and K. Richter, ‘A Place of History:
Archaeology and Heritage at Cidade Velha, Cape Verde’, in P.
Lane and K. McDonald, eds., Slavery in Africa: Archaeology and
Memory (Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 168, 2011), pp.
421–42; ‘A Place of Arrivals: Forging a Nation’s Identity at Cidade
Velha’, World Archaeology Magazine, no. 75 (2016), pp. 32–6.
34. D. Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in
Fifteenth-Century Valencia (Ithaca, NY, 2009).
35. J. Vogt, Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast 1469–1692 (Athens,
Ga., 1979), pp. 19–92; P. E. H. Hair, The Founding of the Castelo
de São Jorge de Mina: an Analysis of the Sources (Madison, 1994);
C. DeCorse, An Archaeology of Elmina: Africans and Europeans
on the Gold Coast, 1400–1900 (Washington DC, 2006); A. Ryder,
Benin and the Europeans, 1485–1897 (London, 1969), pp. 42–5.
36. I. Batista de Sousa, São Tomé et Príncipe de 1485 à 1755: une
société coloniale, de Blanc à Noir (Paris, 2008), p. 17; G. Seibert,
‘São Tomé & Príncipe: the First Plantation Economy in the
Tropics’, in R. Law, S. Schwarz and S. Strickrodt, eds.,
Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic
Africa (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 54–78.
37. R. Garfield, A History of São Tomé Island, 1470–1655: the Key to
Guinea (San Francisco, 1992), p. 64.
38. Seibert, ‘São Tomé & Príncipe’, pp. 60–61.
39. Batista de Souza, São Tomé, pp. 21, 23; Garfield, History of São
Tomé, pp. 31, 35–6.
40. I. Castro Henriques, São Tomé e Príncipe: a invenção de uma
sociedade (Lisbon, 2000), p. 34.
41. F. Soyer, The Persecution of the Jews and Muslims of Portugal:
King Manuel I and the End of Religious Tolerance (1496–7)
(Leiden, 2007).
42. Blake, ed., Europeans in West Africa, vol. 1, doc. 9, pp. 86–7.
43. Seibert, ‘São Tomé & Príncipe’, p. 58.
44. Samuel Usque, Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel, transl. M.
Cohen (Philadelphia, 1965), pp. 201–2; Isaac Abravanel,
Commentary to Exodus (Jerusalem, 1984), p. 67, cited by D. E.
Cohen, The Biblical Exegesis of Don Isaac Abrabanel (Ph.D.
dissertation, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London, 2015), pp. 120, 428.
45. Garfield, History of São Tomé, pp. 65, 71–2, 85; R. Garfield,
‘Public Christians, Secret Jews: Religion and Political Conflict on
São Tomé in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, The
Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 21 (1990), pp. 645–54; Batista de
Sousa, São Tomé, pp. 50–56; Henriques, São Tomé e Príncipe, pp.
63–92.
46. Garfield, History of São Tomé, p. 31.
47. Blake, ed., Europeans in West Africa, vol. 1, pp. 89–90.
48. Ryder, Benin, pp. 42–3 n. 4, 55.
49. Vogt, Portuguese Rule, pp. 38, 46–7, 57–8, 72–3.
50. D. Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the
Age of Columbus (New Haven, 2008), pp. 145–61; R. Kowner,
From White to Yellow: the Japanese in European Racial Thought,
1300–1735 (Montreal, 2014), pp. 50–51.
51. S. E. Morison, Portuguese Voyages to America in the Fifteenth
Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1940).
52. Verlinden, Beginnings of Modern Colonization, pp. 181–95;
Morison, Portuguese Voyages to America, pp. 44–50.
 27. Guinea Gold and Guinea Slaves
1. Text from Zurara in M. Newitt, ed., The Portuguese in West Africa,
1415–1670: a Documentary History (Cambridge, 2010), doc. 35,
pp. 149–50.
2. A. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in
Portugal 1441–1555 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 38–9.
3. D. Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the
Age of Columbus (New Haven, 2008), pp. 39, 43.
4. T. Hall, ed. and transl., Before Middle Passage: Translated
Portuguese Manuscripts of Atlantic Slave Trading From West
Africa to Iberian Territories, 1513–26 (Farnham, 2015), p. 52, also
pp. 43, 45, 65.
5. R. Collins and J. Burns, A History of Sub-Saharan Africa (2nd edn,
Cambridge, 2014), pp. 78–95; B. Davidson, West Africa before the
Colonial Era: a History to 1850 (Harlow, 1998); N. Levtzion,
Ancient Ghana and Mali (London, 1973).
6. E. Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors (2nd edn, Oxford, 1970);
Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali, pp. 81–4; M. Gomez, African
Dominion: a New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West
Africa (Princeton, 2018).
7. J. Day, ‘The Great Bullion Famine of the Fifteenth Century’, Past
and Present, no. 79 (1978), pp. 3–54.
8. S. Stantchev, Spiritual Rationality: Papal Embargo as Cultural
Practice (Oxford, 2015).
9. J. H. Parry, The Discovery of the Sea (2nd edn, Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1991), pp. 99–100; J. Vogt, Portuguese Rule on the Gold
Coast 1469–1692 (Athens, Ga., 1979), p. 4.
10. Newitt, ed., Portuguese in West Africa, p. 47 n. 3.
11. J. Correia, L’Implantation de la ville portugaise en Afrique du Nord
de la prise de Ceuta jusqu’au milieu du XVIe siècle (Porto, 2008;
also published in a parallel Portuguese edition).
12. Newitt, ed., Portuguese in West Africa, pp. 148–50, doc. 35.
13. Vogt, Portuguese Rule, p. 7.
14. Hall, ed. and transl., Before Middle Passage, pp. 29–31.
15. A. da Cà da Mosto (Cadamosto), The Voyages of Cadamosto and
Other Documents on Western Africa in the Second Half of the
Fifteenth Century, ed. C. R. Crone (London, 1937), in Newitt, ed.,
Portuguese in West Africa, pp. 67–71, doc. 16.
16. Hall, ed. and transl., Before Middle Passage, p. 36.
17. Ibid., p. 39; T. Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in
Western Africa, 1300–1589 (Cambridge, 2012), p. 248.
18. Hall, ed. and transl., Before Middle Passage, p. 227.
19. Ibid., pp. 5, 36, 222; C. Evans, M. L. Stig Sørensen and K. Richter,
‘An Early Christian Church in the Tropics: Excavation of the N. S.
a a

de Conceição, Cidade Velha, Cape Verde’, in T. Green, ed.,

Brokers of Change: Atlantic Commerce and Cultures in
Precolonial Western Africa (Proceedings of the British Academy,
vol. 178 (2012)), pp. 173–92.
20. J. Blake, West Africa: Quest for God and Gold, 1454–1587
(London, 1977), pp. 32–4, 83.
21. I. Armenteros Martínez, Cataluña en la era de las navegaciones: la
participación catalana en la primera economía atlántica (c.1470–
1540) (Barcelona, 2012), pp. 72–80.
22. C. Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization (Ithaca, NY,
1970), pp. 176–80.
23. Blake, West Africa, pp. 49–55.
24. Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, p. 95; M. Á. Ladero Quesada, Los
últimos años de Fernando el Católico 1505–1517 (Madrid, 2016),
p. 167 (1509 confirmation).
25. Vogt, Portuguese Rule, pp. 7–9.
26. A. Ryder, Benin and the Europeans, 1485–1897 (London, 1969).
27. Vogt, Portuguese Rule, p. 9.
28. Armenteros Martínez, Cataluña en la era de las navegaciones, pp.
77–80.
29. Blake, West Africa, p. 37.
30. D. Escudier, ed., Voyage d’Eustache Delafosse sur la côte de
Guinée, au Portugal et en Espagne (1479–1481) (Paris, 1992), pp.
12–15.
31. Ibid., pp. 16–17.
32. Ibid., pp. 24–5, 28–31.
33. Ibid., pp. 52–65.
34. Blake, West Africa, pp. 60–62.
35. P. E. H. Hair, The Founding of the Castelo de São Jorge da Mina:
an Analysis of the Sources (Madison, 1994), p. 5.
36. C. Antero Ferreira, Castelo da Mina: da fundação às
representações iconográficas dos séculos XVI e XVII (Lisbon,
2007), p. 10.
37. Hair, Founding of the Castelo, pp. 7, 10–11.
38. Vogt, Portuguese Rule, pp. 20–21; Hair, Founding of the Castelo,
pp. 14–15.
39. Hair, Founding of the Castelo, pp. 15–17; Blake, West Africa, p. 99;
Parry, Discovery of the Sea, p. 108.
40. Hair, Founding of the Castelo, pp. 20–31.
41. Pina and Barros in Hair, Founding of the Castelo, pp. 22–3, 100–
101, 104–5; Pina in Newitt, ed., Portuguese in West Africa, pp. 93–
4; Vogt, Portuguese Rule, p. 25.
42. Vogt, Portuguese Rule, pp. 26–31; C. DeCorse, An Archeology of
Elmina: Africans and Europeans on the Gold Coast, 1400–1900
(Washington DC, 2001), pp. 47–9; Blake, West Africa, p. 99.
43. DeCorse, Archeology of Elmina, pp. 49–51.
44. Vogt, Portuguese Rule, pp. 34–5, 38–9.
45. DeCorse, Archeology of Elmina, p. 51; Blake, West Africa, p. 100.
46. Letter of King João III of 1523 in Newitt, ed., Portuguese in West
Africa, pp. 96–7, doc. 23.
47. H. Thomas, The Slave Trade: a History of the Atlantic Slave Trade
1440–1870 (London, 1997), p. 73.
48. Vogt, Portuguese Rule, p. 57.
49. Ibid., p. 209.
50. Escudier, ed., Voyage d’Eustache Delafosse, pp. 30–31; E. Axelson,
Congo to Cape: Early Portuguese Explorers (London, 1973), pp.
39, 41; D. Peres, A History of the Portuguese Discoveries (Lisbon,
1960), p. 59.
51. Cited by Axelson, Congo to Cape, p. 42.
52. C. Marinescu, La Politique orientale d’Alfonse V d’Aragon roi de
Naples (1416–1458) (Barcelona, 1994), pp. 13–28.
53. Axelson, Congo to Cape, pp. 45–6, 50–51.
54. Ibid., p. 61; Peres, History of the Portuguese Discoveries, pp. 60–
61.
55. J. Manuel Garcia, Breve história dos descobrimentos e expansão de
Portugal (Lisbon, 1999), p. 50.
56. Axelson, Congo to Cape, pp. 63–4; Peres, History of the Portuguese
Discoveries, pp. 63–4.
57. Axelson, Congo to Cape, pp. 69–76.
58. Peres, History of the Portuguese Discoveries, p. 69.
59. Ibid., pp. 69–70.
60. Axelson, Congo to Cape, pp. 115–44, also plate vii opposite p. 113.
61. Ibid., p. 179.
 PART FOUR
OCEANS IN CONVERSATION

28. The Great Acceleration

1. On Columbus: F. Fernández-Armesto, Columbus (Oxford, 1991);
W. D. Phillips and C. Phillips, The Worlds of Christopher
Columbus (Cambridge, 1992); E. Taviani, Christopher Columbus
(London, 1985); S. E. Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (new
edn, New York, 1992); V. Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of
Christopher Columbus (Princeton, 1992).
2. On Cabot: J. Williamson, ed., The Cabot Voyages and Bristol
Discovery under Henry VII (Cambridge, 1962); J. Williamson, The
Voyages of John and Sebastian Cabot (London, 1937); P. Pope,
The Many Landfalls of John Cabot (Toronto, 1997); E. Jones,
‘Alwyn Ruddock: “John Cabot and the Discovery of America”’,
Historical Research, vol. 81 (2008), pp. 224–54; E. Jones and M.
Condon, Cabot and Bristol’s Age of Discovery: the Bristol
Discovery Voyages 1480–1508 (Bristol, 2016).
3. On Vespucci: L. Formisano, ed., Letters from a New World:
Amerigo Vespucci’s Discovery of America (New York, 1992); F.
Fernández-Armesto, Amerigo: the Man Who Gave His Name to
America (London, 2006).
4. The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake, being his Next
Voyage to that to Nombre de Dios formerly imprinted, Carefully
collected out of the notes of Master Francis Fletcher (London,
1628); this phrase is taken as the title of Geoffrey Scammell, The
World Encompassed: the First European Maritime Empires, c.
800–1650 (London, 1981); H. Kelsey, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo
(2nd edn, San Marino, Calif.,1998).
5. W. Keegan and C. Hofman, The Caribbean before Columbus
(Oxford and New York, 2017), p. 23.
6. D. Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the
Age of Columbus (New Haven, 2008), pp. 115–30.
7. Keegan and Hofman, Caribbean before Columbus, pp. 11–15; P.
Siegel, ‘Caribbean Archaeology in Historical Perspective’, pp. 21–
 46, and other articles in W. Keegan, C. Hofman and R. Rodríguez
Ramos, The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Archaeology (Oxford
and New York, 2013); J. Granberry and G. Vescelius, Languages
of the pre-Columbian Antilles (Tuscaloosa, 2004); F. Moya Pons
and R. Flores Paz, eds, Los Taínos en 1492: el debate demográfico
(Santo Domingo, 2013); I. Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of
the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, 1992).
8. S. Wilson, The Archaeology of the Caribbean (Cambridge, 2007),
pp. 95–136.
9. Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, p. 140; Ramon Pané, An Account
of the Antiquities of the Indians, ed. J. J. Arrom and transl. S.
Griswold (Durham, NC, 1999), ch. 10.
10. Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, p. 181.
11. W. Keegan, The People Who Discovered Columbus (Gainesville,
1992), pp. 49–51; also Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, p. 146.
12. Wilson, Archaeology of the Caribbean, pp. 137–54.
13. Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, pp. 175–6.
14. Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages, pp. 208–9, no. 23; Abulafia,
Discovery of Mankind, p. 219.
15. Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, p. 199.
16. D. C. West and A. Kling, eds., The Libro de las profecías of
Christopher Columbus (Gainesville, 1991).
17. Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, p. 13.
18. Fernández-Armesto, Columbus, pp. 17–20.
19. Flint, Imaginative Landscape, p. 40, plate 12.
20. Henry Yule and Henri Cordier, transl. and eds., The Travels of
Marco Polo: the Complete Yule–Cordier Edition (3 vols. bound as
2, New York, 1993), vol. 2, p. 253.
21. Ibid., pp. 253–5.
22. Focus Behaim-Globus (2 vols., Nuremberg, 1992); Fernández-
Armesto, Columbus, p. xxi; Phillips and Phillips, Worlds of
Christopher Columbus, pp. 79–80.
23. Fernández-Armesto, Columbus, p. 1.
24. Jones and Condon, Cabot and Bristol’s Age of Discovery, p. 21.
25. Fernández-Armesto, Columbus, p. 17.
26. C. Varela, Colombo e i Fiorentini (Florence, 1991), pp. 55–60.
27. F. Bruscoli, ‘John Cabot and His Italian Financiers’, Historical
Research, vol. 85 (2012), pp. 372–93; and Jones and Condon,
Cabot and Bristol’s Age of Discovery, pp. 33–4, both published as
part of a wider ‘John Cabot Project’ at the University of Bristol.
28. Varela, Colombo e i Fiorentini, pp. 44–100 (pp. 75–81 for Vespucci
and Columbus).
29. Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, p. 28.
30. Ibid., pp. 105–7.
31. Fernández-Armesto, Columbus, p. 97.
32. Ibid., pp. 72–94.
33. Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, p. 238.
34. Fernández-Armesto, Columbus, pp. 102–14.
35. Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, pp. 216–17.
36. Fernández-Armesto, Columbus, pp. 124–51.
37. E. Mira Caballos, La gran armada colonizadora de Nicolás de
Ovando, 1501–1502 (Santo Domingo, 2014).
38. C. Jant, ed., The Four Voyages of Columbus (2 vols., London,
1929–32), vol.2, pp. 90–93.
39. Fernández-Armesto, Columbus, pp. 161–83.
40. Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, p. 112.
41. C. Varela, La caída de Cristóbal Colón: el juicio de Bobadilla
(Madrid, 2006); Pané, Account of the Antiquities of the Indians.
42. C. Rogers, ‘Christopher Who?’, History Today, vol. 67 (August
2017), pp. 38–49; Keegan and Hofman, Caribbean before
Columbus, pp. 8, 14.
43. Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, pp. 190–92.
44. Ibid., pp. 13, 179.
45. E. Jones, ‘The Matthew of Bristol and the Financiers of John
Cabot’s 1497 Voyage to North America’, English Historical
 Review, vol. 121 (2006), pp. 778–95; Williamson, ed., Cabot
Voyages, p. 206, nos. 19–20; A. Williams, John Cabot and
Newfoundland (St John’s, Nfdl., 1996); J. Butman and S. Targett,
New World, Inc.: How England’s Merchants Founded America and
Launched the British Empire (London, 2018), pp. 25–7.
46. Jones, ‘Alwyn Ruddock’, pp. 230–31.
47. Ibid., pp. 224–6, 253–4.
48. N. Wey Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed
South to the Indies (Cambridge, Mass., 2008).
49. Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages, p. 210, no. 24; Williamson, ibid.,
p. 41; Jones, ‘Alwyn Ruddock’, p. 230.
50. Bruscoli, ‘John Cabot and His Italian Financiers’; Jones, ‘Alwyn
Ruddock’, pp. 231–2, 235–6.
51. Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages, pp. 204–5, no. 18.
52. Jones and Condon, Cabot and Bristol’s Age of Discovery, pp. 39–
48.
53. Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages, pp. 208–9, no. 23; Jones and
Condon, Cabot and Bristol’s Age of Discovery, p. 18.
54. Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages, p. 213, no. 25.
55. Jones and Condon, Cabot and Bristol’s Age of Discovery, pp. 49–
56.
56. Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages, p. 220, no. 31 (i); cf. Williamson,
Voyages of John and Sebastian Cabot, p. 15.
57. Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages, p. 207, no. 21.
58. Ibid., p. 233, no. 40; also Williamson, ibid., pp. 109–11; Jones,
‘Alwyn Ruddock’, pp. 244–5.
59. Williamson, ed., Cabot Voyages, p. 202, no. 15; also Williamson,
ibid., pp. 26–9.
60. S. E. Morison, Portuguese Voyages to America in the Fifteenth
Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1940), pp. 51–68.
61. Ibid., pp. 68–72.
62. Ibid., p. 52; cf. Williamson, Voyages of John and Sebastian Cabot,
pp. 14–15; Williamson in Cabot Voyages, pp. 132–9.
63. For dubious claims to Danish support, see S. Larsen, Dinamarca e
Portugal no século XV (Lisbon, 1983).
 29. Other Routes to the Indies
1. C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825
(London, 1991), pp. 35–7.
2. M. Kriegel and S. Subrahmanyam, ‘The Unity of Opposites:
Abraham Zacut, Vasco da Gama and the Chronicler Gaspar
Correia’, in A. Disney and E. Booth, eds., Vasco da Gama and the
Linking of Europe and Asia (New Delhi, 2000), pp. 48–71.
3. D. Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the
Age of Columbus (New Haven, 2008), pp. 24–30.
4. C. Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization (Ithaca, NY,
1970), pp. 181–95; S. E. Morison, Portuguese Voyages to America
in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1940), pp. 44–50.
5. S. Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama
(Cambridge, 2007), pp. 54–7.
6. Popular accounts: R. Watkins, Unknown Seas: How Vasco da Gama
Opened the East (London, 2003); N. Cliff, The Last Crusade: the
Epic Voyages of Vasco da Gama (London, 2012); best of all, R.
Crowley, Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and
Forged the First Global Empire (London, 2015).
7. L. Adão da Fonseca, Vasco da Gama: o Homem, a Viagem, a Época
(Lisbon, 1998), pp. 9–80; G. Ames, Vasco da Gama: Renaissance
Crusader (New York, 2005), pp. 17–21.
8. E. Ravenstein, ed., A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama
1497–1499 (new edn with introduction by J. M. Garcia, New Delhi
and Madras, 1998), pp. 6–7.
9. Ibid., pp. 11, 13.
10. Ibid., pp. 17–20.
11. Ibid., p. 23.
12. Ibid.,
13. Ibid., p. 36.
14. Fonseca, Vasco da Gama, pp. 149–52.
15. Ravenstein, ed., Journal of the First Voyage, pp. 48, 53–5; Fonseca,
Vasco da Gama, pp. 142–3.
16. Ravenstein, ed., Journal of the First Voyage, pp. 52 n. 3, 53
illustration, 53–4 n. 2, 54 n. 2.
17. Ibid., p. 36 n. 1.
18. ‘Letter of Pedro Vaz de Caminha to King Manuel, 1 May 1500’, in
W. Greenlee, ed., The Voyage of Pedro Álvares Cabral to Brazil
and India from Contemporary Documents and Narratives (London,
1938); Morison, Portuguese Voyages to America, pp. 119–42.
19. Greenlee, ed., Voyage of Pedro Álvares Cabral, pp. lxvii–lxix;
Crowley, Conquerors, pp. 101–17.
20. ‘Letter of Amerigo Vespucci to Lorenzo de’ Medici’, in Greenlee,
ed., Voyage of Pedro Álvares Cabral, pp. 153–61.
21. Crowley, Conquerors, pp. 113–14; Subrahmanyam, Career and
Legend, pp. 182–4; Ames, Vasco da Gama, pp. 84–5.
22. Subrahmanyam, Career and Legend, pp. 201–2, 206–10; Ames,
Vasco da Gama, pp. 86, 89–90.
23. Ames, Vasco da Gama, pp. 93–4.
24. Subrahmanyam, Career and Legend, pp. 221–5; Ames, Vasco da
Gama, pp. 93–100.
25. Subrahmanyam, Career and Legend, pp. 229–31.
26. D. Mearns, D. Parham and B. Frohlich, ‘A Portuguese East
Indiaman from the 1502–1503 Fleet of Vasco da Gama off Al
Hallaniyah Island, Oman: an Interim Report’, International Journal
of Nautical Archaeology, vol. 45 (2016), pp. 331–51.
27. Girolamo Priuli cited by Crowley, Conquerors, p. 116.
28. ‘The Diary of Girolamo Priuli’, in Greenlee, ed., Voyage of Pedro
Álvares Cabral, p. 136; also p. 134.
29. See also ‘Letters sent by Bartolomeo Marchioni to Florence’, in
Greenlee, ed., Voyage of Pedro Álvares Cabral, p. 149.
30. K. O’Rourke and J. Williamson, Did Vasco da Gama Matter for
European Markets? Testing Frederick Lane’s Hypothesis Fifty
Years Later (IIIS Discussion Paper no. 118, Dublin, 2006); E.
 Ashtor, ‘La Découverte de la voie maritime aux Indes et le prix des
épices’, Mélanges en l’honneur de Fernand Braudel, vol. 1:
Histoire économique du monde Méditerranéen (Toulouse, 1973),
pp. 31–48; F. C. Lane, ‘Pepper Prices before da Gama’, Journal of
Economic History, vol. 28 (1968), pp. 590–97.
31. ‘Letters sent by Bartolomeo Marchioni to Florence’, in Greenlee,
ed., Voyage of Pedro Álvares Cabral, pp. 147–9; F. Guidi Bruscoli,
Bartolomeo Marchionni ‘Homem de grossa fazenda’ (ca. 1450–
1530) (Florence, 2014), pp. 135–86; K. Lowe, ‘Understanding
Cultural Exchange between Portugal and Italy in the Renaissance’,
in K. Lowe, ed., Cultural Links between Portugal and Italy in the
Renaissance (Oxford, 2000), pp. 8–9; M. Spallanzani, Mercanti
fiorentini nell’Asia portoghese (Florence, 1997), pp. 47–51.
32. Armando Cortesão, transl. and ed., The Suma Oriental of Tomé
Pires (London, 1944), vol. 2, p. 268; M. Pearson, ‘The East African
Coast in 1498’, in Disney and Booth, eds., Vasco da Gama, pp.
116–30; M. Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders: the Swahili Coast,
India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1998),
pp. 40–43.
33. Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders, pp. 131–4.
34. E. Axelson, Portuguese in South-East Africa 1488–1600 (Cape
Town, 1973), p. 35; E. Axelson, South-East Africa 1488–1530
(London, 1940), p. 59.
35. S. Welch, South Africa under King Manuel 1495–1521 (Cape Town
and Johannesburg, 1946), p. 133.
36. Axelson, South-East Africa, p. 61.
37. Ibid., pp. 64–73; Welch, South Africa under King Manuel, pp. 138–
41; Crowley, Conquerors, pp. 164–6.
38. Axelson, South-East Africa, pp. 73–8; quotation from Crowley,
Conquerors, p. 170.
39. Axelson, South-East Africa, pp. 79–87, 110 n. 2, 112, 118–20;
Axelson, Portuguese in South-East Africa, pp. 38–52.
40. Axelson, South-East Africa, pp. 98–107.
 30. To the Antipodes
1. Thomas More, Utopia, ed. G. Logan and R. Adams (Cambridge,
1989), p. 10.
2. L. Formisano, ed., Letters from a New World: Amerigo Vespucci’s
Discovery of America (New York, 1992), app. E, p. 128.
3. F. Fernández-Armesto, Amerigo: the Man Who Gave His Name to
America (London, 2006).
4. [Vespucci], Letters from a New World, app. E, p. 151.
5. Ibid., ep. VI, p. 67; Lettera di Amerigo Vespucci delle isole
nouamente trouate in quattro suoi viaggi (Florence, 1505), f. 5v.
6. [Vespucci], Letters from a New World, ep. VI, p. 68; Lettera di
Amerigo Vespucci, f. 5v.
7. [Vespucci], Letters from a New World, ep. VI, p. 69; Lettera di
Amerigo Vespucci, f. 6r.
8. [Vespucci], Letters from a New World, ep. VI, p. 69; Lettera di
Amerigo Vespucci, f. 6r.
9. [Vespucci], Letters from a New World, ep. VI, p. 71; Lettera di
Amerigo Vespucci, f. 7r.
10. Cf. [Vespucci], Letters from a New World, ep. I, p. 11.
11. Ibid., ep. V, p. 47.
12. Ibid., p. 45.
13. D. Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the
Age of Columbus (New Haven, 2008), pp. 287–92; D. MacCulloch,
A History of Christianity (London, 2009), p. 783.
14. G. Eatough, ed., Selections from Peter Martyr (Turnhout, 1998),
section 1:9:8.
15. W. Phillips, ed., Testimonies from the Columbian Lawsuits
(Turnhout, 2000), section 13:4.
16. L. Vigneras, The Discovery of South America and the Andalusian
Voyages (Chicago, 1976), p. 124.
17. Ibid., pp. 103–4.
18. R. Fuson, Juan Ponce de León and the Spanish Discovery of Puerto
Rico and Florida (Blacksburg, Va., 2000); D. Peck, Ponce de León
and the Discovery of Florida: the Man, the Myth and the Truth
(Florida, 1995).
19. J. Milanich, Florida’s Indians from Ancient Times to the Present
(Gainesville, 1998); J. Milanich, Florida Indians and the Invasion
from Europe (Gainesville, 1995).
20. D. Keith, J. Duff, S. James, et al., ‘The Molasses Reef Wreck, Turks
and Caicos Islands, B.W.I.: a Preliminary Report’, International
Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Exploration, vol.
13 (1984), pp. 45–63; D. Keith, ‘The Molasses Reef Wreck’, in
Heritage at Risk, Special Edition – Underwater Cultural Heritage
at Risk: Managing Natural and Human Impacts, ed. R. Grenier, D.
Nutley and I. Cochran (International Council on Monuments and
Sites, Paris, April 2006), pp. 82–4.
21. P. Chaunu, Séville et l’Amérique aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris,
1977), pp. 75–6.
22. T. Floyd, The Columbus Dynasty in the Caribbean 1492–1526
(Albuquerque, 1973).
23. A. Devereux, Juan Ponce de León, King Ferdinand and the
Fountain of Youth (Spartanburg, 1993).
24. T. Lester, The Fourth Part of the World: the Epic Story of History’s
Greatest Map (London, 2009).
25. ‘Mundus Novus’, ‘Terra Sanctae Crucis’, ‘Terra de Brazil’, plus
‘America Noviter Reperta’: collection of the Jagiellonian
University, Kraków; cf. the claims of S. Missinne, The Da Vinci
Globe (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2018).
26. J. Williamson, The Voyages of John and Sebastian Cabot (London,
1937), pp. 17–18.
27. For highly sceptical views of the Gonneville narrative see J. L. de
Pontharouart, Paulmier de Gonneville: son voyage imaginaire
(Beauval-en-Caux, 2000), and the Australian Journal of French
Studies, vol. 50 (2013), special issue edited by M. Sankey: M.
Sankey, ‘The Abbé Jean Paulmier and French Missions in the
Terres Australes’, pp. 3–15; J. Truchot, ‘Dans le miroir d’un
 cacique normand’, pp. 16–34; J. Leblond, ‘L’Abbé Paulmier
descendant d’un étranger des Terres australes?’, pp. 35–49; J.
Letrouit, ‘Paulmier faussaire’, pp. 50–74; W. Jennings,
‘Gonneville’s Terra Australis: Too Good to be True?’, pp. 75–86;
M. Sankey, ‘L’Abbé Paulmier and the Rights of Man’, pp. 87–99.
28. Paulmier de Gonneville, Relation authentique du voyage du
Capitaine de Gonneville ès nouvelles terres des Indes, ed. M.
d’Avézac (Paris, 1869), pp. 88–91; other editions: L. Perrone-
Moisés, ed., Vinte Luas: viagem de Paulmier de Gonneville ao
Brasil: 1503–1505 (São Paulo, 1992); Le Voyage de Gonneville
(1501–1505) et la découverte de la Normandie par les Indiens du
Brésil (Paris, 1995); I. Mendes dos Santos, La Découverte du Brésil
(Paris, 2000), pp. 121–42.
29. Gonneville, Relation authentique, p. 88.
30. B. Diffie and G. Winius, Europe and the World in an Age of
Expansion, vol. 1: Foundations of the Portuguese Empire 1415–
1580 (Minneapolis, 1977), p. 449.
31. M. Mollat, Le Commerce maritime normand à la fin du Moyen Âge:
Étude d’histoire économique et sociale (Paris, 1952).
32. P. Whitfield, The Charting of the Oceans: Ten Centuries of
Maritime Maps (London, 1996), pp. 54–8.
33. Gonneville, Relation authentique, pp. 93, 95.
34. Ibid., pp. 99–102.
35. Ibid., pp. 105–6, 109.
36. Dos Santos, Découverte du Brésil, p. 28.
37. Ibid., pp. 147–8.
38. Ibid., p. 29.
39. Ibid., pp. 143–59.
40. Mollat, Commerce maritime normand, pp. 120–21, 195, 215–21.
41. H. Touchard, Le Commerce maritime breton à la fin du Moyen Âge
(Paris, 1967), pp. 288–9; L. Wroth, The Voyages of Giovanni da
Verrazzano (New Haven, 1970), pp. 8–9, 25–7.
42. Mollat, Commerce maritime normand, pp. 498–507.
43. Ibid., p. 501; Wroth, Voyages of Giovanni da Verrazzano, pp. 10–
11, 57–64.
44. Cited by G. Masini and I. Gori, How Florence Invented America:
Vespucci, Verrazzano, and Mazzei and Their Contribution to the
Conception of the New World (New York, 1998), p. 101.
45. Wroth, Voyages of Giovanni da Verrazzano, pp. 14–16, 28–9.
46. M. Mollat du Jourdin and J. Habert, Giovanni et Girolamo
Verrazano, navigateurs de François I : Dossiers de voyages (Paris,
er

1982), pp. ix–x, 53, 66–7, 99.

47. H. Murphy, The Voyage of Verrazzano: a Chapter in the Early
History of Maritime Discovery in America (New York, 1875).
48. Wroth, Voyages of Giovanni da Verrazzano, p. 228.
49. Ibid., pp. 255–62; Mollat du Jourdin and Habert, Giovanni et
Girolamo Verrazano, pp. 117, 122–3.
 31. The Binding of the Oceans
1. John Keats, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’.
2. D. Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the
Age of Columbus (New Haven, 2008), pp. 302–5.
3. G. Williams, ed., The Quest for the Northwest Passage (London,
2007); H. Dalton, Merchants and Explorers: Roger Barlow,
Sebastian Cabot, and Networks of Atlantic Exchange 1500–1560
(Oxford, 2016).
4. J. Evans, Merchant Adventurers: the Voyage of Discovery That
Transformed Tudor England (London, 2013).
5. R. Silverberg, The Longest Voyage: Circumnavigators in the Age of
Discovery (Athens, Oh., 1972), pp. 98–9; H. Kelsey, The First
Circumnavigators: Unsung Heroes of the Age of Discovery (New
Haven, 2016).
6. T. Joyner, Magellan (Camden, Me., 1992), pp. 38–49.
7. A. Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage: a Narrative Account of the First
Circumnavigation, ed. and transl. R. Skelton (2 vols., New Haven,
1994), vol. 1, p. 116; Joyner, Magellan, pp. 48–51; S. E. Morison,
The Great Explorers: the European Discovery of America (New
York, 1976), p. 553; M. Mitchell, Elcano: the First
Circumnavigator (London, 1958), p. 69.
8. G. Badger, ed., and J. Winter Jones, transl., The Travels of Ludovico
di Varthema in Egypt, Syria, Arabia Deserta and Arabia Felix, in
Persia, India, and Ethiopia, A.D. 1503 to 1508 (London, 1863), pp.
lxxvii, xcii–iii, 245–6; Joyner, Magellan, pp. 311–12 n. 50.
9. M. Camino, Exploring the Explorers: Spaniards in Oceania, 1519–
1794 (Manchester, 2008), pp. 23–4.
10. M. Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence in the
Indonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630 (The Hague,
1962), pp. 123–35.
11. Note the misleading title of L. Bergreen, Over the Edge of the
World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
(London, 2003).
12. Morison, Great Explorers, p. 553; Kelsey, First Circumnavigators,
pp. 25–7.
13. Silverberg, Longest Voyage, pp. 97, 116–17; Mitchell, Elcano, pp.
41–2.
14. Mitchell, Elcano, p. 51.
15. A. Pigafetta, The First Voyage around the World, 1519–1522: an
Account of Magellan’s Expedition, ed. T. Cachey (Toronto, 2007);
Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage, vol. 1, based on the French version
in the Beinecke Library, Yale University, reproduced in facsimile
in vol. 2; Magellan’s logbook, an account by Genoese pilot and
other sources in The First Voyage round the World by Magellan
translated from the Account of Pigafetta and Other Contemporary
Letters, ed. Lord Stanley of Alderley (London, 1874).
16. Mitchell, Elcano, pp. 54–7.
17. Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage, vol. 1, pp. 46–50.
18. Morison, Great Explorers, pp. 599–600, with drawing of Schöner’s
western hemisphere.
19. M. Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land
(London, 1999), pp. 8–9; N. Crane, Mercator: the Man Who
Mapped the Planet (London, 2002), pp. 97–100; A. Taylor, The
World of Gerard Mercator: the Mapmaker Who Revolutionized
Geography (New York, 2004), pp. 88–90.
20. Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage, vol. 1, pp. 51–2, 57, 155.
21. Ibid., pp. 57, 60, 148.
22. Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World, pp. 211–14, 374–5, 381.
23. Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage, vol. 1, pp. 60–62.
24. Ibid., pp. 67–9.
25. For example, ibid., pp. 95, 101, 103 (source of quotation).
26. Ibid., p. 75.
27. Ibid., pp. 79–84.
28. Ibid., pp. 87–9; Joyner, Magellan, pp. 191–6; Camino, Exploring
the Explorers, p. 25.
29. Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage, vol. 1, p. 100; Mitchell, Elcano, p.
65.
30. Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage, vol. 1, pp. 113, 116.
31. Ibid., pp. 119–20, 169; Joyner, Magellan, pp. 214–15.
32. ‘Genoese Pilot’s Account’, in Pigafetta, First Voyage round the
World, pp. 26–9; Morison, Great Explorers, pp. 660–62; Camino,
Exploring the Explorers, p. 27.
33. Letter of Elcano to Charles V, 6 September 1522, in Mitchell,
Elcano, pp. 87–9; Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage, vol. 1, pp. 146–7;
Morison, Great Explorers, pp. 664–8.
34. Letter of Charles V, 31 October 1522, cited in Mitchell, Elcano, p.
106.
35. Mitchell, Elcano, p. 105.
36. Silverberg, Longest Voyage, pp. 229–30.
37. Mitchell, Elcano, p. 115.
38. A. Giráldez, The Age of Trade: the Manila Galleons and the Dawn
of the Global Economy (Lanham, 2015), p. 49.
39. Ibid., pp. 49–50; D. Brand, ‘Geographical Exploration by the
Spaniards’, in D. Flynn, A. Giráldez and J. Sobredo, eds., The
Pacific World: Lands, Peoples and History of the Pacific, vol. 4:
European Entry into the Pacific (Aldershot, 2001), p. 17 (original
edition: H. Friis, ed., The Pacific Basin: a History of Its
Geographical Exploration (New York, 1967), p. 121); Camino,
Exploring the Explorers, pp. 28–9; M. Mitchell, Friar Andrés de
Urdaneta, O.S.A. (London, 1964).
40. H. Kelsey, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo (2nd edn, San Marino, Calif.,
1998), pp. 65–78; An Account of the Voyage of Juan Rodríguez
Cabrillo (San Diego, 1999), pp. 18–19.
41. Brand, ‘Geographical Exploration’, p. 25 (original edition: p. 129);
Account of the Voyage of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, pp. 23, 29, 32;
Kelsey, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, pp. 125–6; N. Lemke, Cabrillo:
First European Explorer of the California Coast (San Luis Obispo,
1991); L. Gamble, The Chumash World at European Contact:
Power, Trade, and Feasting among Complex Hunter-Gatherers
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2008), pp. 38–9.
 32. A New Atlantic
1. D. Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the
Age of Columbus (New Haven, 2008), pp. 201–12; P. Chaunu,
Séville et l’Amérique aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris, 1977), pp.
80–86.
2. ‘ADN dominicano: 49 per cent de origen africano’, in the
Dominican newspaper Diario Libre, 6 July 2016, p. 4, reporting
research under the auspices of the Academia Dominicana de la
Historia.
3. R. Pike, ‘Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century: Slaves and
Freedmen’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 47 (1967),
pp. 344–59, partly reprinted as ‘Slavery in Seville at the Time of
Columbus’, in H. B. Johnson, ed., From Reconquest to Empire: the
Iberian Background to Latin American History (New York, 1970),
pp. 85–101.
4. M. L. Stig Sørensen, C. Evans and K. Richter, ‘A Place of History:
Archaeology and Heritage at Cidade Velha, Cape Verde’, in P.
Lane and K. McDonald, eds., Slavery in Africa: Archaeology and
Memory (Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 168, 2011), pp.
422–5; A. Carreira, Cabo Verde: Formação e Extinção de uma
Sociaedade escarvorata (1460–1878) (3rd edn, Praia de Santiago,
2000); T. Hall, ed. and transl., Before Middle Passage: Translated
Portuguese Manuscripts of Atlantic Slave Trading From West
Africa to Iberian Territories, 1513–26 (Farnham, 2015).
5. K. Deagan and J. M. Cruxent, Archaeology at La Isabela:
America’s First European Town (New Haven, 2002); K. Deagan
and J. M. Cruxent, Columbus’s Outpost among the Taínos: Spain
and America at La Isabela, 1493–1498 (New Haven, 2002); V.
Flores Sasso and E. Prieto Vicioso, ‘Aportes a la historia de La
Isabela: Primera ciudad europea en el Nuevo Mundo’, Centro de
Altos Estudios Humanísticos y del Idioma Español adscrito a la
Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Anuario, vol. 6
(2012–13), pp. 411–35.
6. Deagan and Cruxent, Columbus’s Outpost, pp. 53, 57, 96–7, 180–
81; Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, pp. 202–3.
7. Deagan and Cruxent, Columbus’s Outpost, pp. 146, 191–2.
8. Ibid., pp. 194–8.
9. T. Floyd, The Columbus Dynasty in the Caribbean 1492–1526
(Albuquerque, 1973), p. 55.
10. E. Mira Caballos, La gran armada colonizadora de Nicolás de
Ovando, 1501–1502 (Santo Domingo, 2014); E. Pérez Montás, E.
Prieto Vicioso and J. Chez Checo, eds., Basílica catedral de Santo
Domingo (Santo Domingo, 2011).
11. Chaunu, Séville et l’Amérique, pp. 87–8.
12. Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, p. 156.
13. R. Pike, Enterprise and Adventure: the Genoese in Seville and the
Opening of the New World (Ithaca, NY, 1966), pp. 52–9; Floyd,
Columbus Dynasty, pp. 67–8.
14. G. Rodríguez Morel, ‘The Sugar Economy of Española in the
Sixteenth Century’, in S. Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: Sugar
and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680 (Chapel Hill,
2004), pp. 85–6; Pike, Enterprise and Adventure, pp. 128–33.
15. M. Ratekin, ‘The Early Sugar Industry in Española’, Hispanic
American Historical Review, vol. 34 (1954), pp. 3–7.
16. Ibid., pp. 6, 9–11; Rodríguez Morel, ‘Sugar Economy of Española’,
pp. 90–93, 105–6.
17. Ratekin, ‘Early Sugar Industry’, p. 13; Rodríguez Morel, ‘Sugar
Economy of Española’, pp. 103–4; Chaunu, Séville et l’Amérique,
pp. 88–9.
18. J. Friede, Los Welser en la conquista de Venezuela (Caracas and
Madrid, 1961), p. 91.
19. Friede, Los Welser, pp. 91, 580 n. 16.
20. J. Denzer, ‘Die Welser in Venezuela – das Scheiten ihrer
wirtschaftlichen Ziele’, in M. Häberlein and J. Burkhardt, Die
Welser: neue Forschungen zur Geschichte und Kultur des
oberdeutschen Handelshauses (Berlin, 2002), pp. 290, 308, 313.
21. J. del Rio Moreno, Los Inicios de la Agricultura europea en el
Nuevo Mundo, 1492–1542 (2nd edn, Santo Domingo, 2012); J. del
Rio Moreno, Ganadería, plantaciones y comercio azucarero
antillano: siglos XVI y XVII (Santo Domingo, 2012); Pike,
Enterprise and Adventure, p. 133.
22. Chaunu, Séville et l’Amérique, pp. 90–91.
23. Excellent maps displaying the volume of trade in Chaunu, Séville et
l’Amérique, pp. 301–9.
24. Cited by A. de la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth
Century (Chapel Hill, 2008), pp. 67–8.
25. Chaunu, Séville et l’Amérique, p. 100.
26. Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, pp. 209–302; H. Thomas, Rivers of
Gold: the Rise of the Spanish Empire (London, 2003), p. 282; A. de
la Fuente, ‘Sugar and Slavery’, S. Schwartz, ed., in Tropical
Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680
(Chapel Hill, 2004), pp. 117–19.
27. Chaunu, Séville et l’Amérique, p. 99.
28. De la Fuente, Havana, pp. 1–5; J. S. Dean, Tropics Bound:
Elizabeth’s Seadogs on the Spanish Main (Stroud, 2010).
29. Table 2:2, showing imports and exports, 1587–1610, in de la
Fuente, Havana, p. 15; Canary wine: ibid., pp. 22, 90–92; Chinese
goods: ibid., pp. 44–5; shipbuilding: ibid., pp. 127–34.
30. Ibid., pp. 94, 96, 98, 159, 186, 200, 223–4; Chaunu, Séville et
l’Amérique, p. 102.
31. D. Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640
(Chapel Hill and Williamsburg, Va., 2016), pp. 29, 64, 77, 84, 121–
3, 209–15.
 33. The Struggle for the Indian Ocean
1. P. Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the
Age of Discovery (Albany, NY, 1994); S. Özbaran, Ottoman
Expansion toward the Indian Ocean in the 16th Century (Istanbul,
2009); G. Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (New York,
2010).
2. Brummett, Ottoman Seapower, pp. 32–3, 41, 143–70; K. Fleet,
European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: the
Merchants of Genoa and Turkey (Cambridge, 1999).
3. Brummett, Ottoman Seapower, p. 34; K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and
Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: an Economic History from the
Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1985), p. 67.
4. Z. Biedermann, Soqotra: Geschichte einer christlichen Insel im
Indischen Ozean bis zur frühen Neuzeit (Wiesbaden, 2006), pp. 68–
76.
5. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation, p. 69.
6. Özbaran, Ottoman Expansion, pp. 9, 40–41; W. Floor, The Persian
Gulf: a Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities
(Washington DC, 2006), pp. 7–24, 30–49, 89–106.
7. Cited in C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825
(London, 1991), p. 62; Floor, Persian Gulf, pp. 15–16.
8. Floor, Persian Gulf, pp. 91–3; Manuel I of Portugal, Gesta proxime
per Portugalenses in India Ethiopia et alijs Orientalibus Terris
(1507; exemplar in John Carter Brown Library, Brown University).
9. Brummett, Ottoman Seapower, pp. 45, 167; see also Epistola
Potentissimi Emanuelis Regis Portugalie et Algarbiorum etc. de
Victorijs habitis in India et Malacha ad sancto in Christo Patrem et
Dominum nostrum dominum Leonem decimum Pontificem
maximum (1513; exemplar in John Carter Brown Library, Brown
University).
10. Floor, Persian Gulf, pp. 101–6.
11. Özbaran, Ottoman Expansion, pp. 53–4, 57.
12. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation, pp. 69, 71.
13. Brummett, Ottoman Seapower, pp. 34–5, 42; R. Crowley,
Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged
the First Global Empire (London, 2015), pp. 202–41.
14. Brummett, Ottoman Seapower, pp. 42–3.
15. Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration, p. 33; Özbaran, Ottoman
Expansion, pp. 47, 51–2, 70.
16. ‘A letter from Dom Aleixo de Meneses to King Manuel I; the
Portuguese expedition to Jiddah in the Red Sea in 1527’, in
Özbaran, Ottoman Expansion, app. 1, pp. 325–9.
17. Özbaran, Ottoman Expansion, pp. 49–50.
18. Ibid., p. 51.
19. Brummett, Ottoman Seapower, pp. 44–5; Crowley, Conquerors, pp.
324–38, citing quotation on p. 337.
20. Özbaran, Ottoman Expansion, p. 61, engaging with F. Braudel, The
Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
(2 vols., London, 1972–3), vol. 1, p. 389; S. Özbaran, The Ottoman
Response to European Expansion: Studies on Ottoman–Portuguese
Relations in the Indian Ocean and Ottoman Administration in the
Arab Lands during the Sixteenth Century (Istanbul, 1994), pp. 89–
97.
21. Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration, pp. 25–6, 31.
22. Özbaran, Ottoman Expansion, p. 9.
23. Crowley, Conquerors, pp. 203–4, 227–39; Casale, Ottoman Age of
Exploration, pp. 26–7.
24. Letter cited by Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration, p. 28.
25. Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration, pp. 29, 31.
26. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a Human History of the
Mediterranean (London, 2011), pp. 418–23.
27. Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration, pp. 40–41.
28. ‘The report of Selman Reis written in 1525: the Ottoman guns and
ships at the port of Jiddah, the description of the Red Sea and
adjacent countries together with the Portuguese presence in the
 Indian Ocean’, in Özbaran, Ottoman Expansion, app. 2, pp. 334–5;
cited in Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration, p. 43; Özbaran,
Ottoman Response, pp. 99–109.
29. P. Risso, Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in
the Indian Ocean (Boulder, 1995), p. 58.
30. Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration, pp. 41–7, 49; Özbaran,
Ottoman Expansion, p. 8.
31. S. Soucek, Studies in Ottoman Naval History and Maritime
Geography (Istanbul, 2008), pp. 79–82.
32. Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration, p. 56.
33. Portuguese version of a letter to the Ottoman commander, cited in
Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration, pp. 57, 218 n. 17.
34. Özbaran, Ottoman Expansion, pp. 83–4; Casale, Ottoman Age of
Exploration, pp. 59–63.
35. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation, pp. 71–3; Özbaran, Ottoman
Expansion, pp. 80–84; Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration, p. 76.
36. Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, pp. 61–2.
37. Ibid., pp. 48–9.
38. M. Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence in the
Indonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630 (The Hague,
1962), pp. 136–72; also L. F. Thomaz, De Ceuta a Timor (Algés,
1994), pp. 291–9, 513–65; also Armando Cortesão, transl. and ed.,
The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires (London, 1944), vol. 2, pp. 229–
89.
39. Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration, pp. 133, 159.
40. ‘Report of Selman Reis’, in Özbaran, Ottoman Expansion, p. 333.
41. S. Soucek, Piri Reis: Turkish Mapmaking after Columbus (2nd edn,
Istanbul, 2013); M. Özen, Pirî Reis and His Charts (Istanbul,
2006).
42. Soucek, Piri Reis, pp. 47–63.
43. Ibid., pp. 102–11, 114–25, 128–31.
44. G. McIntosh, The Piri Reis Map of 1513 (Athens, Ga., 2000), pp. 5–
7; Özen, Pirî Reis, pp. 3–10; Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration,
 pp. 98–9; Soucek, Studies in Ottoman Naval History, pp. 57–65.
45. Özen, Pirî Reis, pp. 20–22; Soucek, Piri Reis, p. 110.
46. Soucek, Studies in Ottoman Naval History, pp. 35–40, 45, 47.
47. Abulafia, Great Sea, pp. 486–7; Soucek, Piri Reis, p. 78.
48. Soucek, Piri Reis, pp. 30–41.
49. Soucek, Studies in Ottoman Naval History, p. 57; Soucek, Piri Reis,
p. 79; McIntosh, Piri Reis Map, pp. 122–40.
50. Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration, pp. 38–40, and fig. 2:1, p. 38 –
not a map recording Magellan’s route, as Casale supposes.
51. Cf. Soucek, Piri Reis, p. 65.
52. Plates in Özen, Pirî Reis, pp. 69–70; 1528 map: Soucek, Piri Reis,
pp. 96–7, 132; McIntosh, Piri Reis Map, pp. 52–68, makes bizarre
claims about information handed down from a higher civilization
and should be ignored.
53. Soucek, Piri Reis, pp. 68–9.
54. McIntosh, Piri Reis Map, pp. 45–6.
55. Text ibid., pp. 70–71; also in Soucek, Piri Reis, p. 75.
56. Piri Reis, Kitab-i Bahriye [‘Book of Navigation’], cited by Soucek,
Studies in Ottoman Naval History, p. 58.
 34. The Great Galleons of Manila
1. M. Mitchell, Friar Andrés de Urdaneta, O.S.A. (London, 1964), pp.
75, 77.
2. Cited in Mitchell, Friar Andrés de Urdaneta, pp. 73–4.
3. M. Mitchell, Elcano: the First Circumnavigator (London, 1958),
pp. 118, 124, 126–59; R. Silverberg, The Longest Voyage:
Circumnavigators in the Age of Discovery (Athens, Oh., 1972), pp.
230–33.
4. R. Canosa, Banchieri genovesi e sovrani spagnoli tra cinquecento e
seicento (Rome, 1998), pp. 12–13; R. Carande, Carlos V y sus
Banqueros, vol. 3: Los Caminos del Oro y de la Plata (2nd edn,
Barcelona, 1987).
5. M. Camino, Exploring the Explorers: Spaniards in Oceania, 1519–
1794 (Manchester, 2008), pp. 29–30; Mitchell, Friar Andrés de
Urdaneta, p. 78.
6. W. Schurz, The Manila Galleon (New York, 1939), p. 21.
7. A. Giráldez, The Age of Trade: the Manila Galleons and the Dawn
of the Global Economy (Lanham, 2015), pp. 51–2; Schurz, Manila
Galleon, p. 23; Mitchell, Friar Andrés de Urdaneta, pp. 80–84; H.
Kelsey, The First Circumnavigators: Unsung Heroes of the Age of
Discovery (New Haven, 2016), pp. 59–100.
8. E. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain,
1501–1650 (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), pp. 232–3.
9. Mitchell, Friar Andrés de Urdaneta, pp. 99–105; Kelsey, First
Circumnavigators, pp. 101–27.
10. S. Fish, The Manila–Acapulco Galleons: the Treasure Ships of the
Pacific (Milton Keynes, 2011), pp. 60–61.
11. Mitchell, Friar Andrés de Urdaneta, pp. 117–18.
12. Giráldez, Age of Trade, p. 52; Mitchell, Friar Andrés de Urdaneta,
pp. 142–4.
13. Giráldez, Age of Trade, pp. 51–8; Schurz, Manila Galleon, p. 25; H.
Thomas, World Without End; the Global Empire of Philip II
 (London, 2014), pp. 241–50.
14. B. Legarda Jr, ‘Two and a Half Centuries of the Galleon Trade’, in
D. Flynn, A. Giráldez and J. Sobredo, eds., The Pacific World:
Lands, Peoples and History of the Pacific, vol. 4: European Entry
into the Pacific (Aldershot, 2001), p. 37 (original edition:
Philippine Studies, vol. 3 (1955), p. 345); Mitchell, Friar Andrés de
Urdaneta, p. 135.
15. ‘Annotated List of the Transpacific Galleons 1565–1815’, in Fish,
Manila–Acapulco Galleons, pp. 492–523; also the figures and
tables in P. Chaunu, Les Philippines et le Pacifique des Ibériques,
XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles (2 vols., Paris, 1960 and 1966), vols. 1
and 2.
16. See now Giráldez, Age of Trade; also Schurz, Manila Galleon;
Flynn, Giráldez and Sobredo, eds., European Entry; Chaunu,
Philippines; P. Chaunu, ‘Le Galion de Manille: Grandeur et
décadence d’une route de la soie’, in Flynn, Giráldez and Sobredo,
eds., European Entry, pp. 187–202 (original edition: Annales:
Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, vol. 4 (1951), pp. 447–62);
Fish, Manila–Acapulco Galleons.
17. Han-sheng Chuan, ‘The Chinese Silk Trade with Spanish-America
from the Late Ming to to the mid-Ch’ing Period’, in Flynn,
Giráldez and Sobredo, eds., European Entry, pp. 241–59 (original
edition: L. Thompson, ed., Studia Asiatica: Essays in Asian Studies
in Felicitation of the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of Professor Ch’en
Shou-yi (San Francisco, 1975), pp. 99–117).
18. R. von Glahn, The Economic History of China from Antiquity to the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2016), p. 308; T. Brook, The
Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998), pp. 204–5.
19. Giráldez, Age of Trade, p. 57; Thomas, World Without End, p. 251.
20. B. Laufer, ‘The Relations of the Chinese to the Philippine Islands’,
in Flynn, Giráldez and Sobredo, eds., European Entry, pp. 65–6,
89–91 (original edition: Smithsonian Institution, Miscellaneous
Collections, vol. 50, no. 13 (1907), pp. 258–9, 282–4).
21. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a Human History of the
Mediterranean (London, 2011), p. 74.
22. Schurz, Manila Galleon, pp. 23, 27–9, 34–42.
23. F. Carletti, My Voyage around the World, ed. and transl. H.
Weinstock (London, 1965), pp. 4–5.
24. Ibid., pp. 69–70.
25. Ibid., pp. 71, 74–6, 78.
26. Ibid., pp. 79–80.
27. Ibid., pp. 82, 89.
28. Ibid., pp. 83–8.
29. Ibid., pp. 96–7.
30. Ibid., pp. 90–91, 100.
31. Map in R. Bertrand, Le Long Remords de la conquête: Manille–
Mexico–Madrid, l’affaire Diego de Ávila (1577–1580) (Paris,
2015), pp. 58–9; Giráldez, Age of Trade, p. 84; Fish, Manila–
Acapulco Galleons, pp. 65–72.
32. Thomas, World Without End, p. 252.
33. Laufer, ‘Relations of the Chinese’, pp. 55–65 (pp. 248–58).
34. Giráldez, Age of Trade, pp. 26–8; Fish, Manila–Acapulco Galleons,
p. 111.
35. Laufer, ‘Relations of the Chinese’, p. 85 (p. 278).
36. Ibid., p. 75 n. 1 (p. 268 n. 1); Schurz, Manila Galleon, p. 63 n. 1.
37. William Dampier’s description, Canton, 1687, in Schurz, Manila
Galleon, pp. 70–71; Giráldez, Age of Trade, p. 160; Schurz, Manila
Galleon, pp. 74–8.
38. Schurz, Manila Galleon, pp. 71–2; Giráldez, Age of Trade, p. 161;
Fish, Manila–Acapulco Galleons, pp. 109–10.
39. Cited in Schurz, Manila Galleon, pp. 73–4.
40. Diego de Bobadilla, cited in Schurz, Manila Galleon, p. 74.
41. C. Boxer, ‘Plata es Sangre: Sidelights on the Drain of Spanish-
American Silver in the Far East, 1550–1700’, in Flynn, Giráldez
and Sobredo, eds., European Entry, p. 172 (original edition:
 Philippine Studies, vol. 18 (1970), p. 464); D. Flynn and A.
Giráldez, ‘Arbitrage, China, and World Trade in the Early Modern
Period’, in Flynn, Giráldez and Sobredo, eds., European Entry, pp.
261–80 (original edition: Journal of the Economic and Social
History of the Orient, vol. 38 (1995), pp. 429–48).
42. Laufer, ‘Relations of the Chinese’, p. 63 (p. 256).
43. Flynn and Giráldez, ‘Arbitrage, China, and World Trade’, pp. 262–3
(pp. 431–2); von Glahn, Economic History of China, pp. 308–9.
44. Giráldez, Age of Trade, pp. 31–2.
45. Cited in von Glahn, Economic History of China, p. 308.
46. Fish, Manila–Acapulco Galleons, p. 115.
47. Schurz, Manila Galleon, pp. 79–81.
48. Schurz, Manila Galleon, pp. 83–4; Laufer, ‘Relations of the
Chinese’, pp. 68–9 (pp. 261–2); Fish, Manila–Acapulco Galleons,
p. 126.
49. Cavite: Fish, Manila–Acapulco Galleons, pp. 128–42, 156–86.
50. Schurz, Manila Galleon, pp. 85–90.
51. Extracts of Antonio de Morga and Ming Annals in Laufer,
‘Relations of the Chinese’, pp. 74–9 (pp. 267–72); Schurz, Manila
Galleon, p. 91 and n. 6.
52. Schurz, Manila Galleon, pp. 68–9; Thomas, World Without End, pp.
260–82; Laufer, ‘Relations of the Chinese’, p. 68 (p. 261).
53. Thomas, World Without End, p. 282.
54. J. L. Gasch-Tomás, The Atlantic World and the Manila Galleons:
Circulation, Market, and Consumption of Asian Goods in the
Spanish Empire, 1565–1650 (Leiden, 2018).
55. A. Coates, A Macao Narrative (2nd edn, Hong Kong, 2009), pp.
17–30; R. Neild, The China Coast: Trade and the First Treaty
Ports (Hong Kong, 2010), pp. 25–31, 94–5.
56. Schurz, Manila Galleon, pp. 66–7.
57. Chuan, ‘Chinese Silk Trade’, p. 250 (p. 108).
58. Schurz, Manila Galleon, pp. 100–102.
59. R. Kowner, From White to Yellow: the Japanese in European
Racial Thought, 1300–1735 (Montreal, 2014), pp. 152, 154;
Schurz, Manila Galleon, pp. 116–18; Giráldez, Age of Trade, p.
106.
60. Kowner, From White to Yellow, p. 177; Schurz, Manila Galleon, pp.
111–13.
61. Schurz, Manila Galleon, pp. 108–12.
62. W. de Lange, Pars Japonica: the First Dutch Expedition to Reach
the Shores of Japan (Warren, Conn., 2006); G. Milton, Samurai
William: the Adventurer Who Unlocked Japan (London, 2002), pp.
65–87.
63. Giráldez, Age of Trade, pp. 107–8; Milton, Samurai William, pp.
109, 122–4.
64. S. Endo, The Samurai, transl. Van C. Gessel (New York, 1980).
65. Van C. Gessel, ‘Postscript: Fact and Truth in The Samurai’, in
Endo, Samurai, pp. 268–70.
66. Schurz, Manila Galleon, pp. 125–8; Giráldez, Age of Trade, pp.
107–9.
67. T. Toyoda, History of pre-Meiji Commerce in Japan (Tokyo, 1969),
pp. 37–46, 59.
68. Milton, Samurai William, pp. 174–205.
69. Schurz, Manila Galleon, p. 120.
70. Schurz, Manila Galleon, p. 115; Giráldez, Age of Trade, pp. 106,
189–90.
 35. The Black Ships of Macau
1. D. Massarella, A World Elsewhere: Europe’s Encounter with Japan
in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New Haven, 1990), p.
19.
2. C. R. Boxer, Fidalgos in the Far East 1550–1770 (2nd edn, Hong
Kong, 1968), p. 7.
3. J. Wills, ‘Maritime Europe and the Ming’, in J. Wills, ed., China
and Maritime Europe, 1500–1800: Trade, Settlement, Diplomacy,
and Missions (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 26–7, 29–31; A. Coates, A
Macao Narrative (2nd edn, Hong Kong, 2009), pp. 11–12.
4. Armando Cortesão, transl. and ed., The Suma Oriental of Tomé
Pires (London, 1944), vol. 1, pp. 128–131: Lequíos and Jampon;
Massarella, World Elsewhere, pp. 22–3; G. Kerr, Okinawa: the
History of an Island People (2nd edn, Boston and Tokyo, 2000),
pp. 84, 88, 90–94; C. R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan
1549–1650 (2nd edn, Lisbon and Manchester, 1993), p. 14.
5. Cited by Boxer, Christian Century, pp. 16–17; see also Wills,
‘Maritime Europe and the Ming’, pp. 26–8.
6. Boxer, Christian Century, p. 27.
7. Coates, Macao Narrative, pp. 12–13.
8. Diogo de Couto (1597) in Boxer, Christian Century, pp. 24–5; also
Massarella, World Elsewhere, p. 24; Kowner, From White to
Yellow, p. 65.
9. Boxer, Christian Century, pp. 28, 30.
10. Japanese chronicle Yaita-ki, quoted in Boxer, Christian Century, p.
29.
11. Wills, ‘Maritime Europe and the Ming’, pp. 32–4.
12. Coates, Macao Narrative, p. 50.
13. Wills, ‘Maritime Europe and the Ming’, p. 37.
14. Boxer, Christian Century, p. 255.
15. Coates, Macao Narrative, pp. 25–30; Boxer, Fidalgos, p. 3; Wills,
‘Maritime Europe and the Ming’, pp. 38, 41, 47–8; L. P. Barreto,
 Macau: Poder e Saber, séculos XVI e XVII (Queluz de Baixo,
2006), pp. 215–16; cf. F. Welsh, A History of Hong Kong (2nd edn,
London, 1997), pp. 120–31.
16. Boxer, Fidalgos, p. 4; Wills, ‘Maritime Europe and the Ming’, p.
35.
17. Wills, ‘Maritime Europe and the Ming’, p. 37.
18. F. Carletti, My Voyage around the World, ed. and transl. H.
Weinstock (London, 1965), p. 139.
19. Barreto, Macau, p. 116.
20. Wills, ‘Maritime Europe and the Ming’, p. 47.
21. Ibid., p. 42.
22. Carletti, My Voyage, p. 140; Barreto, Macau, pp. 138–41.
23. Barreto, Macau, p. 117.
24. Cited in Boxer, Fidalgos, p. 6; also in Boxer, Christian Century, pp.
105–6.
25. C. R. Boxer, The Great Ship from Amacon: Annals of Macao and
the Old Japan Trade, 1555–1640 (Lisbon, 1959), p. 17.
26. Boxer, Christian Century, plate 14; N. Coolidge Rousmaniere,
Vessels of Influence: China and the Birth of Porcelain in Medieval
and Early Modern Japan (Bristol and London, 2012), p. 109.
27. Boxer, Great Ship from Amacon, pp. 13–14 and p. 13 n. 34.
28. For example, A. Jackson, ‘Visual Responses: Depicting Europeans
in East Asia’, in A. Jackson and A. Jaffer, Encounters: the Meeting
of Asia and Europe 1500–1800 (London, 2004), pp. 202–3, plate
16.1; Boxer, Great Ship from Amacon, plate opposite p. 20; Boxer,
Christian Century, plates 13, 15.
29. For example, Boxer, Great Ship from Amacon, p. 35; also Boxer,
Christian Century, p. 121.
30. Barreto, Macau, pp. 145, 160–61, 193, 220.
31. Boxer, Great Ship from Amacon, p. 47.
32. Ibid., pp. 34–5; Boxer, Christian Century, p. 100; Barreto, Macau,
p. 143.
33. Barreto, Macau, p. 141.
34. M. Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence in the
Indonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630 (The Hague,
1962), pp. 104–5, 134.
35. R. von Glahn, The Economic History of China from Antiquity to the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 308–11.
36. Prodotti e tecniche d’Oltremare nelle economie europee, secc. XIII–
XVIII (Florence, 1998); Barreto, Macau, p. 273.
37. Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence, pp. 123–4.
38. Boxer, Great Ship from Amacon, pp. 33–4, 317–18 (doc. E.ii, 1567–
8).
39. Ibid., p. 115.
40. J. Moran, The Japanese and the Jesuits: Alessandro Valignano in
Sixteenth-Century Japan (London, 1993), p. 67.
41. On Ricci: R. Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo
Ricci 1552–1610 (New York and Oxford, 2010); R. Po-chia Hsia,
Matteo Ricci and the Catholic Mission to China, 1583–1610: a
Short History with Documents (Indianapolis, 2016); M. Laven,
Mission to China: Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Encounter with the
East (London, 2011); also C. R. Boxer, The Church Militant and
Iberian Expansion 1440–1770 (Baltimore, 1978), pp. 53–6.
42. Barreto, Macau, p. 141.
43. Boxer, Christian Century, p. 97.
44. Ibid., p. 120; Barreto, Macau, p. 141.
45. Cited in Boxer, Christian Century, p. 93.
46. Kowner, From White to Yellow, pp. 84, 128–35, 166–70; Barreto,
Macau, p. 139: Luís de Almeida.
47. Boxer, Christian Century, pp. 139–49, 152–3; also Carletti, My
Voyage, pp. 116–25.
48. Moran, Japanese and Jesuits, pp. 58–9, 62–3, 70, 89–90.
49. Carletti, My Voyage, p. 116.
50. Ibid., pp. 104–5.
51. Ibid., pp. 105–8, 121–4, 127–35.
52. Ibid., pp. 108–13; Barreto, Macau, p. 165.
53. Carletti, My Voyage, p. 132.
54. Coolidge Rousmaniere, Vessels of Influence, pp. 78, 81, 87–92,
101–3.
55. Ibid., pp. 64, 130–35, 161; T. Nagatake, Classic Japanese
Porcelain: Imari and Kaikemon (Tokyo, 2003), pp. 49–50, 60–63.
56. Carletti, My Voyage, pp. 114–16.
57. S. Hawley, The Imjin War: Japan’s Sixteenth-Century Invasion of
Korea and Attempt to Conquer China (Seoul and Berkeley, 2005),
pp. 301–48.
58. Cited in Hawley, Imjin War, p. 465.
59. Hawley, Imjin War, pp. 475–6.
60. Ibid., pp. 193, 195–9, and plate section, pp. vi–vii.
61. Ibid., pp. 482–90.
62. Ibid., p. 515.
63. Ibid., pp. 490, 554–5.
64. T. Toyoda, History of pre-Meiji Commerce in Japan (Tokyo, 1969),
pp. 40–41, 49, 53–4.
65. Ibid., p. 43.
66. Letter cited in Hawley, Imjin War, p. 402; Boxer, Christian
Century, p. 161; Moran, Japanese and Jesuits, p. 91.
67. Moran, Japanese and Jesuits, pp. 83–4.
68. Ibid., pp. 84–5, 89.
69. Barreto, Macau, p. 173.
70. Moran, Japanese and Jesuits, p. 86.
71. J. Clements, Christ’s Samurai: the True Story of the Shimabara
Rebellion (London, 2016).
72. Boxer, Great Ship from Amacon, pp. 158–61.
 36. The Fourth Ocean
1. R. Vaughan, The Arctic: a History (Stroud, 1994), p. 36, plate 3.
2. Ibid., p. 37.
3. Cited in G. Connell-Smith, Forerunners of Drake: a Study of
English Trade with Spain in the Early Tudor Period (London,
1954), p. 121 (dating from 1540); R. B. Wernham, Before the
Armada: the Growth of English Foreign Policy 1485–1588
(London, 1966).
4. T. S. Willan, Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade (Manchester,
1959), pp. 92–312.
5. H. Dalton, Merchants and Explorers: Roger Barlow, Sebastian
Cabot, and Networks of Atlantic Exchange 1500–1560 (Oxford,
2016), pp. 29–33, 49–62; ‘Robert Thorne’s Declaration’, in
Richard Hakluyt, Voyages and Documents, ed. J. Hampden
(Oxford, 1958), pp. 17–19; G. Williams, Arctic Labyrinth: The
Quest for the Northwest Passage (London, 2009), pp. 7–8; H.
Wallis, ‘England’s Search for the Northern Passages in the
Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, Arctic, vol. 37 (1984),
pp. 453–5; N. Crane, Mercator: the Man Who Mapped the Planet
(London, 2002), colour plates, section 2, no. 4.
6. A. de Robilant, Venetian Navigators: the Mystery of the Voyages of
the Zen Brothers to the Far North (London, 2011).
7. Wallis, ‘England’s Search’, p. 457.
8. Hakluyt, Voyages and Documents, pp. 40, 44–5; Williams, Arctic
Labyrinth, p. 8; J. Evans, Merchant Adventurers: the Voyage of
Discovery That Transformed Tudor England (London, 2013).
9. Williams, Arctic Labyrinth, p. 9; K. Mayers, The First English
Explorer: the Life of Anthony Jenkinson (1529–1611) and His
Adventures en Route to the Orient (Northam, Devon, 2015), p. 49.
10. Williams, Arctic Labyrinth, pp. 9–10; Vaughan, Arctic, p. 58; K.
Mayers, North-East Passage to Muscovy: Stephen Borough and the
First Tudor Explorations (Stroud, 2005); S. Alford, London’s
 Triumph: Merchant Adventurers and the Tudor City (London,
2017), pp. 80–91, 130–41.
11. Mayers, First English Explorer, pp. 237–49; Alford, London’s
Triumph, pp. 132–41.
12. Mayers, First English Explorer, p. 244.
13. Vaughan, Arctic, p. 59.
14. A Plancius map is on display in the Real Colegio Seminario de
Corpus Christi (Museo del Patriarca), Valencia; J. Tracy, True
Ocean Found: Paludanus’s Letters on Dutch Voyages to the Kara
Sea, 1595–1596 (Minneapolis, 1980), pp. 20–23.
15. J. de Hond and T. Mostert, Novaya Zemlya (Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam, n.d.); inventory of contents quoted in Vaughan, Arctic,
pp. 62–3.
16. L. Hacquebord, De Noordse Compagnie (1614–1642): Opkomst,
bloei en ondergang (Zutphen, 2014); I. Sanderson, A History of
Whaling (New York, 1993), pp. 161, 164.
17. Vaughan, Arctic, p. 64.
18. Wallis, ‘England’s Search’, pp. 457–60.
19. Williams, Arctic Labyrinth, pp. 13–15; P. Whitfield, New Found
Lands: Maps in the History of Exploration (London, 1998), pp. 78–
9 (with illustration of Humphrey Gilbert’s world map).
20. J. McDermott, Martin Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer (New
Haven, 2001); Alford, London’s Triumph, pp. 158–76.
21. Williams, Arctic Labyrinth, p. 16; G. Williams, ed., The Quest for
the Northwest Passage (London, 2007), p. 7.
22. G. Best, A True Discourse of the Late Voyage of Discovery for
Finding a Passage to Cathaya (London, 1578), in Williams, ed.,
Quest for the Northwest Passage, p. 8.
23. Christopher Hall, ‘The First Voyage of Martin Frobisher’, in
Hakluyt, Voyages and Documents, p. 153.
24. D. Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the
Age of Columbus (New Haven, 2008), p. 245.
25. C. F. Hall reporting in 1865, cited by Vaughan, Arctic, p. 69;
Williams, ed., Quest for the Northwest Passage, pp. 19, 30, 529–
30.
26. Hall, ‘First Voyage of Martin Frobisher’, in Hakluyt, Voyages and
Documents, pp. 153–4; ‘The Second Voyage of Martin Frobisher’,
from Best’s True Discourse, in Hakluyt, Voyages and Documents,
pp. 175, 178; Best, True Discourse, in Williams, ed., Quest for the
Northwest Passage, pp. 17, 18; Williams, Arctic Labyrinth, pp. 20,
22.
27. Wallis, ‘England’s Search’, p. 461; Vaughan, Arctic, p. 67.
28. Williams, ed., Quest for the Northwest Passage, p. 20.
29. Williams, Arctic Labyrinth, p. 23.
30. Best, True Discourse, in Williams, ed., Quest for the Northwest
Passage, pp. 23–31; J. McDermott, ed., The Third Voyage of
Martin Frobisher to Baffin Island 1578 (London, 2001); J. Butman
and S. Targett, New World, Inc.: How England’s Merchants
Founded America and Launched the British Empire (London,
2018), pp. 127–35.
31. Williams, Arctic Labyrinth, pp. 25–9.
32. Documents and narratives in Hakluyt, Voyages and Documents, pp.
303–34; Williams, Arctic Labyrinth, pp. 32–8.
33. Vaughan, Arctic, pp. 65–7; Williams, Arctic Labyrinth, pp. 41–3;
Whitfield, New Found Lands, p. 83 (Baffin’s map of Hudson Bay).
34. Hakluyt, Voyages and Documents, pp. 192–224.
35. Ibid., p. 205.
36. Wallis, ‘England’s Search’, p. 467.
37. ‘Drake’s Circumnavigation’, in Hakluyt, Voyages and Documents,
p. 210; D. Wilson, The World Encompassed: Drake’s Great
Voyage 1577–1580 (London, 1977), p. 165.
38. Wallis, ‘England’s Search’, p. 467.
39. ‘The Expedition to Russia’, in Hakluyt, Voyages and Documents,
pp. 46–7.
40. Jens Munk in Williams, ed., Quest for the Northwest Passage, p. 75;
T. Hansen, North West to Hudson Bay: the Life and Times of Jens
Munk (London, 1970, abridged from Danish edition of 1965).
41. Vaughan, Arctic, pp. 72–4; Williams, ed., Quest for the Northwest
Passage, pp. 65–7; Williams, Arctic Labyrinth, pp. 55–9.
 37. The Rise of the Dutch
1. J. van Houtte, An Economic History of the Low Countries 800–1800
(London, 1977), p. 175; P. Spufford, From Antwerp to London: the
Decline of Financial Centres in Europe (Wassenaar, 2005), p. 15;
H. van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market (3 vols., The
Hague, 1963); J. Wegg, Antwerp, 1477–1559 (London, 1916), pp.
48–56, 59.
2. W. Blokmans, Metropolen aan de Noordzee: de geschiedenis van
Nederland 1100–1560 (Amsterdam, 2010), pp. 580–81; Wegg,
Antwerp, pp. 66–8.
3. Blokmans, Metropolen aan de Noordzee, pp. 575, 652.
4. Ibid., pp. 571, 575; Wegg, Antwerp, pp. 60–64.
5. O. Gelderblom, Cities of Commerce: the Institutional Foundations
of International Trade in the Low Countries, 1250–1650
(Princeton, 2013), pp. 29–30; Spufford, From Antwerp to London,
pp. 13–14.
6. J. Guy, Gresham’s Law (London, 2019). pp. 11–13.
7. J. N. Ball, Merchants and Merchandise: the Expansion of Trade in
Europe 1500–1630 (London, 1977), pp. 86–7.
8. Van Houtte, Economic History of the Low Countries, p. 176.
9. Spufford, From Antwerp to London, p. 16.
10. Cited in Spufford, From Antwerp to London, p. 17.
11. Ball, Merchants and Merchandise, pp. 87–8; Gelderblom, Cities of
Commerce, pp. 55–6; Van Houtte, Economic History of the Low
Countries, pp. 176, 187.
12. Spufford, From Antwerp to London, p. 18; Blokmans, Metropolen
aan de Noordzee, pp. 616–17.
13. Gelderblom, Cities of Commerce, pp. 32–3; Van Houtte, Economic
History of the Low Countries, pp. 188–9.
14. J. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–
1806 (Oxford, 1995), p. 307; also S. Schama, The Embarrassment
 of Riches: an Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age
(London, 1987).
15. J. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade (Oxford, 1989), p. 13.
16. Ibid., pp. 22–4; Van Houtte, Economic History of the Low
Countries, p. 106.
17. Israel, Dutch Republic, p. 316.
18. Ibid., pp. 18–21.
19. Van Houtte, Economic History of the Low Countries, pp. 66–7, 70,
147–8.
20. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a Human History of the
Mediterranean (London, 2011), pp. 460, 466, 468, 477.
21. Israel, Dutch Primacy, pp. 26–35.
22. Ibid., pp. 38–42.
23. Ball, Merchants and Merchandise, pp. 98–102.
24. J. Evans, Merchant Adventurers: the Voyage of Discovery That
Transformed Tudor England (London, 2013), pp. 315–27.
25. Israel, Dutch Primacy, pp. 43–8.
 38. Whose Seas?
1. P. Borschberg, ed., Jacques de Coutre’s Singapore and Johore
1594–c.1625 (Singapore, 2015), pp. 64, 66; P. Borschberg, Hugo
Grotius, the Portuguese and Free Trade in the East Indies
(Singapore, 2011); P. de Sousa Pinto, The Portuguese and the
Straits of Melaka 1575–1619: Power, Trade and Diplomacy
(Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, 2012), pp. 31–3, 107.
2. B. Hayton, The South China Sea: the Struggle for Power in Asia
(New Haven and London, 2014).
3. Hugo Grotius, Mare Liberum (Leiden, 1609); quotations are from
Richard Hakluyt’s translation, which is reprinted in D. Armitage,
ed., The Free Sea (Indianapolis, 2004), pp. 3–62.
4. Armitage, ed., Free Sea, p. 10.
5. Armitage in Free Sea, p. xi; W. Welwod, ‘Of the Community and
Propriety of the Seas’, in Armitage, ed., Free Sea, pp. 65–74.
6. Armitage, ed., Free Sea, p. 12.
7. Ibid., p. 13.
8. Ibid., p. 26.
9. Ibid., p. 80, from Grotius’s reply to Welwod.
10. Ibid., p. 32.
11. Armitage in Free Sea, p. xvi.
12. J. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade (Oxford, 1989), pp. 53–6,
and tables 3.3 and 3.4, p. 57.
13. Ibid., p. 61.
14. G. Seibert, ‘São Tomé & Príncipe: the First Plantation Economy in
the Tropics’, in R. Law, S. Schwarz and S. Strickrodt, eds.,
Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic
Africa (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 62, 68, 75.
15. Israel, Dutch Primacy, pp. 63–4; A. de la Fuente, Havana and the
Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (Chapel Hill, 2008), pp. 21, 49.
16. J. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580–
1640 (Baltimore, 1993), p. 93.
17. Israel, Dutch Primacy, pp. 67–73; C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne
Empire 1600–1800 (London, 1965), pp. 49–54, 105, 109; G.
Winius and M. Vink, The Merchant-Warrior Pacified: the VOC
(Dutch East India Co.) and Its Changing Political Economy in
India (New Delhi and Oxford, 1991), pp. 9–12.
18. Israel, Dutch Primacy, p. 129, table 5.1, and pp. 140, 143, 146–9,
with table 5.9 on p. 147.
19. Ibid., pp. 131–8.
20. Ibid., p. 143.
21. Israel, Dutch Primacy, pp. 160–64, and table 5.12, p. 163; C. R.
Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825 (London,
1991), pp. 113–14.
22. ‘Lancaster’s Voyage to the East Indies’, in Richard Hakluyt,
Voyages and Documents, ed. J. Hampden (Oxford, 1958), pp. 399–
420; D. Wilson, The World Encompassed: Drake’s Great Voyage
1577–1580 (London, 1977), p. 100; Gastaldi’s map (1546) and Sir
Humphrey Gilbert’s map (1576), in P. Whitfield, New Found
Lands: Maps in the History of Exploration (London, 1998), pp. 76,
79.
23. ‘Lancaster’s Voyage to the East Indies’, in Hakluyt, Voyages and
Documents, p. 411; G. Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One
Man’s Courage Changed the Course of History (London, 1999), p.
50; J. Keay, The Honourable Company: a History of the English
East India Company (London, 1991), pp. 10–23.
24. Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, pp. 52, 65.
25. Keay, Honourable Company, pp. 14–15.
26. Cited in Keay, Honourable Company, p. 16.
27. Cited in Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, pp. 86–7; Keay, Honourable
Company, p. 17.
28. Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, pp. 90, 92, 94.
29. Cited in Keay, Honourable Company, p. 40.
30. Keay, Honourable Company, pp. 45–6, 114; Milton, Nathaniel’s
Nutmeg, p. 302.
31. Quoted by Keay, Honourable Company, p. 43; also Milton,
Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, p. 273.
32. Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, pp. 305–6.
33. Keay, Honourable Company, p. 31.
34. Ibid., pp. 48–50; Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, pp. 321–42.
35. Keay, Honourable Company, pp. 21, 36, 38, 53, 58–9, 125–6.
36. P. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early
Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York and
Oxford, 2011), p. 7.
37. P. Lawson, The East India Company: a History (Harlow, 1993), pp.
19–24.
38. G. Goodman, Japan and the Dutch 1600–1853 (Richmond, Surrey,
2000), p. 9.
39. D. Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (London,
2010).
40. Goodman, Japan and the Dutch, p. 8.
41. A. Clulow, The Company She Keeps: the Dutch Encounter with
Tokugawa Japan (New York, 2014), pp. 39–40.
42. G. Milton, Samurai William: the Adventurer Who Unlocked Japan
(London, 2002); W. de Lange, Pars Japonica: the First Dutch
Expedition to Reach the Shores of Japan (Warren, Conn., 2006);
also D. Massarella, A World Elsewhere: Europe’s Encounter with
Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New Haven,
1990) (for England); Clulow, The Company She Keeps, pp. 10–11.
43. Clulow, The Company She Keeps, pp. 25, 33–9, 47–58.
44. Cited in Goodman, Japan and the Dutch, p. 13.
45. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia, pp. 78–80; Goodman, Japan
and the Dutch, pp. 10–13.
46. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ch. 25; Clulow, The Company
She Keeps, p. 17.
47. Goodman, Japan and the Dutch, pp. 14–15.
48. Cited in Goodman, Japan and the Dutch, p. 16.
49. Goodman, Japan and the Dutch, p. 19; Toyoda Takeshi, A History
of pre-Meiji Commerce (Tokyo, 1969), p. 46.
50. Takeshi, History of pre-Meiji Commerce, p. 50.
51. Goodman, Japan and the Dutch, pp. 240–41; Takeshi, History of
pre-Meiji Commerce, pp. 63–4.
52. Goodman, Japan and the Dutch, pp. 28–9; Clulow, The Company
She Keeps, pp. 18, 95, 106–20.
53. Goodman, Japan and the Dutch, pp. 69–70.
54. Takeshi, History of pre-Meiji Commerce, p. 46.
 39. Nations Afloat
1. D. Studnicki-Gizbert, ‘La Nación among the Nations: Portuguese
and Other Maritime Trading Diasporas in the Atlantic, Sixteenth to
Eighteenth Centuries’, in R. Kagan and P. Morgan, eds., Atlantic
Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of
Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore, 2009), pp. 75–98.
2. D. Eltis and D. Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
(New Haven, 2010).
3. R. Smith, The Spanish Guild Merchant: a History of the Consulado,
1250–1700 (Durham, NC, 1940), pp. 103–4.
4. Inquisition records in L. Wolf, ed., The Jews in the Canary Islands
(new edn, Toronto, 2001).
5. Studnicki-Gizbert, ‘La Nación among the Nations’, pp. 89–90.
6. D. Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s
Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640
(New York and Oxford, 2007), p. 11.
7. Cited by Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea, p. 36.
8. Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea, pp. 91–2.
9. R. Rowland, ‘New Christian, Marrano, Jew’, in P. Bernardini and
N. Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West
1450–1800 (New York, 2001), p. 135.
10. Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea, p. 72.
11. H. Kellenbenz, Sephardim an der unteren Elbe: ihre wirtschaftliche
und politische Bedeutung vom Ende des 16. bis zum Beginn des 18.
Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 1958), p. 489.
12. Y. Yovel, The Other Within: the Marranos, Split Identity and
Emerging Modernity (Princeton, 2009).
13. Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea, pp. 96–101;
diagram of his connections, p. 99, fig. 4:1.
14. Hamburg: Kellenbenz, Sephardim an der unteren Elbe; Bayonne:
G. Nahon, ‘The Portuguese Jewish Nation of Saint-Esprit-lès-
Bayonne: the American Dimension’, in Bernardini and Fiering,
eds., Jews and the Expansion of Europe, pp. 256–67.
15. Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea, p. 103, fig. 4:2;
Kellenbenz, Sephardim an der unteren Elbe, end map no. 3;
Morocco: pp. 146–9; Baltic: pp. 149–55.
16. P. Mark and J. da Silva Horta, ‘Catholics, Jews, and Muslims in
Early Seventeenth-Century Guiné’, in Kagan and Morgan, eds.,
Atlantic Diasporas, pp. 170–94; P. Mark and J. da Silva Horta, The
Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the
Making of the Atlantic World (Cambridge, 2011).
17. T. Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western
Africa, 1300–1589 (Cambridge, 2012).
18. J. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580–
1640 (Baltimore, 1993).
19. Ibid., pp. 30–31, 42, 45–51, 239–40.
20. J. Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers at the Court of Spain 1626–1650
(New Brunswick, 1983), p. 3.
21. C. Dauverd, Imperial Ambition in the Early Modern Mediterranean:
Genoese Merchants and the Spanish Crown (Cambridge, 2014).
22. T. Kirk, Genoa and the Sea: Policy and Power in an Early Modern
Maritime Republic 1559–1684 (Baltimore, 2005), pp. 127–33.
23. Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers, pp. 21–2, 33, 106–7.
24. Ibid., pp. 108–16.
25. Ibid., pp. 154–80.
26. S. Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: the
Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa
(Berkeley, 2011), p. xvii.
27. Ibid., pp. 24–36.
28. Ibid., pp. xvii, 226–7; I. Baghdiantz McCabe, ‘Small Town
Merchants, Global Ventures: the Maritime Trade of the New Julfan
Armenians in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in M.
Fusaro and A. Polónia, eds., Maritime History as Global History
(St John’s, Nfdl., 2010), pp. 125–57.
29. Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, pp. 52–4.
30. Armando Cortesão, transl. and ed., The Suma Oriental of Tomé
Pires (London, 1944), vol. 2, p. 269.
31. F. Trivellato, ‘Sephardic Merchants in the Early Modern Atlantic
and Beyond’, in an and Morgan, eds., Atlantic Diasporas, p. 111.
32. Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, pp. 48–51,
55–65, 78, 80.
33. Trivellato, ‘Sephardic Merchants’, p. 110.
 40. The Nordic Indies
1. S. Diller, Die Dänen in Indien, Südostasien und China (1620–1845)
(Wiesbaden, 1999), p. 133; O. Feldbæk, ‘The Danish Asia Trade
1620–1807’, Scandinavian Economic History Review, vol. 39
(1991), pp. 3–27.
2. H. Hodacs, Silk and Tea in the North: Scandinavian Trade and the
Market for Asian Goods in Eighteenth-Century Europe
(Basingstoke, 2016), pp. 1–20, 48–81.
3. Ibid., pp. 183, 187.
4. Diller, Dänen in Indien, pp. 11, 114, 267–99.
5. Ibid., p. 39.
6. K. Glamann, ‘The Danish Asiatic Company, 1732–1772’,
Scandinavian Economic History Review, vol. 8 (1960), pp. 109–49;
K. Glamann, ‘The Danish East India Company’, in M. Mollat, ed.,
Sociétés et Compagnies de Commerce en Orient et dans l’Océan
indien (Paris, 1970), pp. 471–9; O. Feldbæk, ‘The Danish Trading
Companies of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’,
Scandinavian Economic History Review, vol. 34 (1986), pp. 211–
13; O. Feldbæk, India Trade under the Danish Flag 1772–1808:
European Enterprise and Anglo-Indian Remittance and Trade
(Odense, 1969).
7. E. Gøbel, ‘Danish Trade to the West Indies and Guinea, 1671–
1754’, Scandinavian Economic History Review, vol. 31 (1983), pp.
21–49; G. Nørregård, Danish Settlements in West Africa (Boston,
1966); W. Westergaard, The Danish West Indies under Company
Rule (1671–1754) (New York, 1917).
8. E. Gøbel, ‘The Danish Asiatic Company’s Voyages to China, 1732–
1833’, Scandinavian Economic History Review, vol. 27 (1979), p.
43.
9. A. Friis, ‘La Valeur documentaire des Comptes du Péage du Sund:
la période 1571–1618’, in M. Mollat, ed., Les Sources de l’histoire
maritime en Europe, du Moyen Âge au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1962),
pp. 365–82.
10. Feldbæk, ‘Danish Trading Companies’, p. 204; S. Subrahmanyam,
‘The Coromandel Trade of the Danish East India Company, 1618–
1649’, Scandinavian Economic History Review, vol. 37 (1989), p.
41; H. Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient 1600–1800
(Minneapolis, 1976), reprinted in S. Subrahmanyam, ed., Maritime
India (New Delhi, 2004), pp. 211, 216; Diller, Dänen in Indien, p.
23.
11. Subrahmanyam, ‘Coromandel Trade’, pp. 43–4.
12. Facsimile of treaty in Diller, Dänen in Indien, pp. 155–8, doc. 16a–
d; Subrahmanyam, ‘Coromandel Trade’, p. 45.
13. Subrahmanyam, ‘Coromandel Trade’, p. 47.
14. Feldbæk, ‘Danish Trading Companies’, p. 207; Diller, Dänen in
Indien, p. 111.
15. Diller, Dänen in Indien, pp. 21, 25 (facsimiles), 34–5, 39, 61–2, 89,
92–3.
16. Feldbæk, ‘Danish Asia Trade’, p. 3.
17. Feldbæk, ‘Danish Trading Companies’, p. 206; Subrahmanyam,
‘Coromandel Trade’, p. 51.
18. Subrahmanyam, ‘Coromandel Trade’, pp. 52–3.
19. Diller, Dänen in Indien, pp. 81, 85, 87; T. Veschow, ‘Voyages of
the Danish Asiatic Company to India and China 1772–1792’,
Scandinavian Economic History Review, vol. 20 (1972), pp. 133–
52.
20. D. McCall, ‘Introduction’, in Nørregård, Danish Settlements, pp. xi,
xxii; Nørregård, Danish Settlements, pp. 142, 228.
21. Nørregård, Danish Settlements, p. 84.
22. Ibid., pp. 87–9.
23. H. Strömberg, En guide till Göteborgs historia – An Historical
Guide to Gothenburg (Gothenburg, 2013), pp. 6, 9; Nørregård,
Danish Settlements, pp. 9–10; C. Koninckx, The First and Second
Charters of the Swedish East India Company (1731–1766): a
Contribution to the Maritime, Economic and Social History of
North-Western Europe in Its Relationships with the Far East
(Kortrijk, 1980), pp. 33–4.
24. Koninckx, First and Second Charters, pp. 31–3; H. Lindqvist, Våra
kolonier: de vi hade och de som aldrig blev av (Stockholm, 2015),
pp. 11–13; Nørregård, Danish Settlements, pp. 7–8.
25. Lindqvist, Våra kolonier, pp. 90–99, 114, 117.
26. Nørregård, Danish Settlements, pp. 11–16.
27. Ibid., pp. 22–24, 29–34.
28. Ibid., pp. 33, 52–3, 57.
29. McCall, ibid., p. xix; H. Mattiesen, ‘Jakob Kettler’, Neue deutsche
Biographie, vol. 10 (Berlin, 1974), p. 314.
30. Westergaard, Danish West Indies, pp. 256–62.
31. Ibid., pp. 31–8.
32. Ibid., pp. 41–2.
33. Gøbel, ‘Danish Trade to the West Indies’, pp. 24, 28–30.
34. Ibid., pp. 33–7.
35. Nørregård, Danish Settlements, pp. 143, 176.
36. Hodacs, Silk and Tea in the North, pp. 29–32; Furber, Rival
Empires of Trade, pp. 217–21.
37. G. M. Young, ed., Macaulay: Prose and Poetry (London, 1952), pp.
213, 217.
38. G. Insh, The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies
(London and New York, 1932); Furber, Rival Empires of Trade, p.
217.
39. K. Söderpalm, ‘SOIC – ett skotskt företag?’, in K. Söderpalm et al.,
Ostindiska Compagniet: Affärer och föremål (Gothenburg, 2000),
pp. 36–61, and English summary, pp. 281–2; R. Hermansson, The
Great East India Adventure: The Story of the Swedish East India
Company (Gothenburg, 2004), pp. 31–2.
40. Hodacs, Silk and Tea in the North, pp. 29, 31.
41. P. Forsberg, Ostindiska Kompaniet: Några studier (Gothenburg,
2015), pp. 90–94; Hermansson, Great East India Adventure, pp.
40–45.
42. Hermansson, Great East India Adventure, pp. 49–57.
43. Forsberg, Ostindiska Kompaniet, pp. 87–90.
44. Hodacs, Silk and Tea in the North, pp. 58–61, 64–6, 79–80.
45. K. Söderpalm, ‘Beställningsporslin från Kina’, in Söderpalm et al.,
Ostindiska Compagniet, pp. 168–83, 291–2.
46. Hermansson, Great East India Adventure, pp. 42–3.
47. Hodacs, Silk and Tea in the North, pp. 10–14.
48. Ibid., p. 153.
49. K. Söderpalm, ‘Svenska Ostindiska Kompaniet 1731–1813: en
översikt’, in Söderpalm et al., Ostindiska Compagniet, pp. 9, 277;
Hermansson, Great East India Adventure, pp. 11, 63, 67–71.
 41. Austrialia or Australia?
1. M. Edmond, Zone of the Marvellous: in Search of the Antipodes
(Auckland, 2009), p. 85; A. Stallard, Antipodes: in Search of the
Southern Continent (Clayton, Vic., 2016).
2. M. Estensen, Terra Australis Incognita: the Spanish Quest for the
Mysterious Great South Land (Crows Nest, NSW, 2006), pp. 8–12,
14 (whence the two quotations); N. Crane, Mercator: the Man Who
Mapped the Planet (London, 2002), p. 97, fig. 12; M. Camino,
Exploring the Explorers: Spaniards in Oceania, 1519–1794
(Manchester, 2008), p. 83, fig. 2:3; Edmond, Zone of the
Marvellous, pp. 32–4; H. Kelsey, The First Circumnavigators:
Unsung Heroes of the Age of Discovery (New Haven, 2016), pp.
134–5; Stallard, Antipodes, pp. 86–111.
3. Camino, Exploring the Explorers, p. 36.
4. Ibid., p. 38; Stallard, Antipodes, pp. 120–24.
5. Mendaña’s report, cited by Estensen, Terra Australis Incognita, p.
27; Camino, Exploring the Explorers, pp. 48–9.
6. D. Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the
Age of Columbus (New Haven, 2008), pp. 267–8.
7. Edmond, Zone of the Marvellous, p. 86.
8. Estensen, Terra Australis Incognita, pp. 19–56; Camino, Exploring
the Explorers, pp. 39–61; Kelsey, First Circumnavigators, pp. 70–
74.
9. Estensen, Terra Australis Incognita, pp. 57–8.
10. Camino, Exploring the Explorers, p. 19.
11. Ibid., pp. 75–8, 80, 101; M. Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the
Great South Land (London, 1999), p. 101.
12. Estensen, Terra Australis Incognita, pp. 129–33.
13. Ibid., pp. 159–60; Camino, Exploring the Explorers, pp. 84, 95;
Stallard, Antipodes, p. 130.
14. Estensen, Terra Australis Incognita, pp. 182–3.
15. Ibid., pp. 197–204.
16. G. Seal, The Savage Shore: Extraordinary Stories of Survival and
Tragedy from the Early Voyages of Discovery (New Haven, 2016),
p. ix.
17. Australian Electoral Commission, History of the Indigenous Vote
(Canberra, 2006).
18. P. Whitfield, Charting of the Oceans: Ten Centuries of Maritime
Maps (London, 1996), pp. 55, 57–8.
19. K. McIntyre, The Secret Discovery of Australia: Portuguese
Ventures 200 Years before Captain Cook (Medindie and London,
1977); A. Sharp, The Discovery of Australia (Oxford, 1963), pp. 2,
4–15, and plate 3.
20. Estensen, Discovery, pp. 53–8; Seal, Savage Shore, p. 15.
21. Estensen, Discovery, pp. 56–8; Seal, Savage Shore, pp. 16–18.
22. Seal, Savage Shore, p. 27.
23. Ibid., pp. 22–5, 265 n. 8; Estensen, Discovery, pp. 119–22.
24. Seal, Savage Shore, p. 28; Estensen, Discovery, pp. 128–9; Sharp,
Discovery of Australia, p. 32.
25. François Pelsaert, supercargo of the Batavia, cited by Estensen,
Discovery, p. 158.
26. Seal, Savage Shore, pp. 30–34; Estensen, Discovery, pp. 140–41;
Sharp, Discovery of Australia, pp. 42–5.
27. M. Dash, Batavia’s Graveyard (London, 2002), pp. 53–7, 62–5.
28. ‘The Journals of Francisco Pelsaert’, transl. E. Drok, in H. Drake-
Brockman, Voyage to Disaster: the Life of Francisco Pelsaert
(London, 1964), p. 122.
29. Pelsaert’s log, in Sharp, Discovery of Australia, p. 61; ‘Journals of
Francisco Pelsaert’, p. 130.
30. Text in Seal, Savage Shore, p. 65; also ‘Journals of Francisco
Pelsaert’, p. 128.
31. Seal, Savage Shore, p. 70; Dash, Batavia’s Graveyard, pp. 30–35,
277–81; ‘Journals of Francisco Pelsaert’, pp. 158–77.
32. Seal, Savage Shore, pp. 67–73; ‘Journals of Francisco Pelsaert’, pp.
142–4; Dash, Batavia’s Graveyard, pp. 205–11.
33. Seal, Savage Shore, pp. 78–80; Estensen, Discovery, pp. 160–61.
34. Dash, Batavia’s Graveyard, pp. 264–75, suggesting on p. 273 a
slightly different scenario; Seal, Savage Shore, pp. 82–4.
35. Seal, Savage Shore, p. 85; Estensen, Discovery, pp. 154–5; Sharp,
Discovery of Australia, pp. 55–6.
36. Estensen, Discovery, pp. 9, 87, 131, 148, 230; Sharp, Discovery of
Australia, p. 39.
37. Seal, Savage Shore, p. 97.
38. Sharp, Discovery of Australia, pp. 70–79.
39. A. Salmond, ‘Two Worlds’, in K. R. Howe, ed., Vaka Moana –
Voyages of the Ancestors: the Discovery and Settlement of the
Pacific (Auckland, 2006), pp. 251–2.
40. Estensen, Discovery, pp. 179–81.
41. Sharp, Discovery of Australia, pp. 87–8; Seal, Savage Shore, p. 96.
42. P. Edwards, ‘The First Voyage 1768–1771: Introduction’, in James
Cook, The Journals (2nd edn, London, 2003), p. 11.
 42. Knots in the Network
1. C. Ebert, Between Empires: Brazilian Sugar in the Early Atlantic
Economy 1550–1630 (Leiden, 2008), pp. 140–41; G. Scammell,
‘The English in the Atlantic Islands c.1450–1650’, Mariner’s
Mirror, vol. 72 (1986), pp. 295–317.
2. T. B. Duncan, Atlantic Islands: Madeira, the Azores and the Cape
Verdes in Seventeenth-Century Commerce and Navigation
(Chicago, 1972), p. 5.
3. Ebert, Between Empires, pp. 104–5; F. Mauro, Le Portugal, le
Brésil et l’Atlantique au XVIIe siècle (1570–1670) (Paris and
Lisbon, 1983; revised edition of Le Portugal et l’Atlantique au
XVIIe siècle: Étude Économique (Paris, 1960)), pp. 209–12.
4. A. Simon, ed., The Bolton Letters: the Letters of an English
Merchant in Madeira 1695–1714, vol. 1: 1695–1700 (London,
1928), pp. 17–19, and p. 56, letter 16; Duncan, Atlantic Islands, pp.
38–9.
5. Simon, ed., Bolton Letters, p. 20; Duncan, Atlantic Islands, p. 42;
Mauro, Le Portugal, le Brésil, pp. 411–21.
6. Duncan, Atlantic Islands, pp. 38–9, 46, 52, 54–60.
7. Simon, ed., Bolton Letters, p. 14.
8. Biographies ibid., pp. 6–7, footnote.
9. East Indies: Simon, ed., Bolton Letters, p. 132, letter 62.
10. Ibid., p. 8; Azorean wheat: ibid., p. 29, letter 4, p. 76, letter 27, p.
87, letter 34, p. 119, letter 55; Dutch wheat: ibid., p. 49, letter 12;
Scottish beef, butter and herrings: ibid., p. 65, letter 21; sugar
unloaded in Madeira: ibid., p. 82, letter 31; Mauro, Le Portugal, le
Brésil, p. 352; A. Vieira, O comércio inter-insular nos séculos XV e
XVI: Madeira, Açores e Canárias (Funchal, 1987).
11. Simon, ed., Bolton Letters, pp. 24–5, letter 2.
12. Ibid., pp. 41–4, letter 10.
13. Ibid., p. 172, letter 88, p. 174, letter 90.
14. Ibid., p. 124, letter 58.
15. Duncan, Atlantic Islands, pp. 88–9, 108–10, tables 16–18.
16. Ibid., pp. 111, 124, 140, 147, 151–3, 156.
17. Ibid., pp. 125–7.
18. Ibid., pp. 135–6; Angra, a Terceira e os Açores nas Rotas da Índia e
das Américas (Angra do Heroísmo, 1999).
19. Duncan, Atlantic Islands, pp. 168–71.
20. A. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: the Biological Expansion of
Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge, 1986).
21. Duncan, Atlantic Islands, pp. 167, 176, 188.
22. A. J. d’Oliveira Bouças, Apelo em pró das ruínas da antiga cidade
da Ribeira Grande em Santiago – C. Verde 1533–1933 (Praia,
1933; new edn as Cidade velha: Ribeira Grande de Santiago,
Praia, 2013).
23. T. Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western
Africa, 1300–1589 (Cambridge, 2012); A. Carreira, Cabo Verde:
Formação e Extinção de uma Sociedade escravocrata (1460–1878)
(3rd edn, Praia de Santiago, 2000).
24. Mauro, Le Portugal, le Brésil, pp. 188–9; Duncan, Atlantic Islands,
pp. 199–200; M. L. Stig Sørensen, C. Evans and K. Richter, ‘A
Place of History: Archaeology and Heritage at Cidade Velha, Cape
Verde’, in P. Lane and K. McDonald, eds., Slavery in Africa:
Archaeology and Memory (Proceedings of the British Academy,
vol. 168, 2011), pp. 421–42.
25. Duncan, Atlantic Islands, pp. 230–31; baptism: Carreira, Cabo
Verde, pp. 259–80.
26. P. Mark and J. da Silva Horta, The Forgotten Diaspora Jewish
Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World
(Cambridge, 2011); Green, Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade;
Carreira, Cabo Verde, pp. 55–78, 146.
27. Duncan, Atlantic Islands, p. 215.
28. Ibid., pp. 219–24.
29. Ibid., pp. 207, 210.
30. S. Royle, The Company’s Island: St Helena, Company Colonies and
the Colonial Endeavour (London, 2007), pp. 9, 11 (whence the
seventeenth-century quotation).
31. A. R. Azzam, The Other Exile: the Remarkable Story of Fernão
Lopes, the Island of Saint Helena, and a Paradise Lost (London,
2017); Royle, Company’s Island, p. 12; chapel: ibid., p. 19, fig. 2:7.
32. Royle, Company’s Island, p. 14, fig. 2:3.
33. ‘Prosperous voyage of the worshipful Thomas Candish’, in J.
Beeching, ed., Hakluyt: Voyages and Discoveries (Harmondsworth,
1972) pp. 276–97.
34. Royle, Company’s Island, pp. 11–19; P. Stern, The Company-State:
Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the
British Empire in India (New York and Oxford, 2011), p. 21; J.
McAleer, Britain’s Maritime Empire: Southern Africa, the South
Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, 1763–1820 (Cambridge, 2017), p.
74.
35. McAleer, Britain’s Maritime Empire, pp. 73–7.
36. Ibid., pp. 34–5; Royle, Company’s Island, pp. 85–7.
37. Royle, Company’s Island, pp. 23–4, 27–8, 46, 51 (fig. 3:1), 175–7
(tables 3:2, 3:3, 3:4 – adjusting Royle’s figures to accommodate
‘free blacks’ as non-slaves).
38. Ibid., pp. 39–41.
39. Ibid., pp. 101–2.
40. McAleer, Britain’s Maritime Empire, pp. 78–9; Royle, The
Company’s Island, pp. 53–4.
41. McAleer, Britain’s Maritime Empire, pp. 78–80.
42. Ibid., pp. 2, 9–10, 17, 24–7.
43. W. Hamond, Madagascar, the Richest and most Fruitfull Island in
the world (London, 1643; title-page reproduced in K. McDonald,
Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the
Indo-Atlantic World (Oakland, 2015), p. 73, fig. 8); W. Hamond, A
Paradox Prooving that the Inhabitants of the Isle called
Madagascar or St Laurence (in Temporall things) are the happiest
People in the World (London, 1640).
44. S. Randrianja and S. Ellis, Madagascar: a Short History (London,
2009), pp. 54–66.
45. Ibid., pp. 110–11.
46. Ibid., pp. 4, 102, 226.
47. R. Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850
(Athens, Oh., 2014), p. 59; D. Eltis and D. Richardson, Atlas of the
Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, 2010), pp. 4–5, map 1; pp.
18–19, map 11; pp. 154–5, maps 107–9.
48. Allen, European Slave Trading, pp. 37, 49.
49. McDonald, Pirates, Merchants, pp. 82–3.
50. Ibid., pp. 84–92; Allen, European Slave Trading, pp. 72–8.
51. Allen, European Slave Trading, pp. 36, 48; also p. 58, table 8..
52. McDonald, Pirates, Merchants, pp. 116–21; Randrianja and Ellis,
Madagascar, p. 106.
53. Allen, European Slave Trading, pp. 47–56, and p. 54, table 7.
54. Ibid., pp. 50, 75–6; and p. 75, table 10, calculating average cargoes
out of Madagascar, 1718–1809.
 43. The Wickedest Place on Earth
1. N. Zahedieh, ‘“A Frugal, Prudential and Hopeful Trade”:
Privateering in Jamaica, 1655–89’, Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History, vol. 18 (1990), p. 149.
2. S. Talty, Empire of Blue Water: Henry Morgan and the Pirates Who
Ruled the Caribbean Waves (London, 2007), pp. 39–40; David
Abulafia, The Great Sea: a Human History of the Mediterranean
(London, 2011), pp. 415–20; cattle in Hispaniola: J. del Rio
Moreno, Ganadería, plantaciones y comercio azucarero antillano,
siglos XVI y XVII (Santo Domingo, 2012).
3. Talty, Empire of Blue Water, pp. 131–2.
4. P. Neher, ‘The Pure Theory of the Muggery’, American Economic
Review, vol. 68 (1978), pp. 437–45; I owe my knowledge of this
work and my awareness of its use in discussing piracy to Peter
Earle. See also Zahedieh, ‘“Frugal, Prudential and Hopeful Trade”’,
p. 145.
5. J. Rogoziński, A Brief History of the Caribbean from the Arawak
and the Carib to the Present Day (New York, 1992), pp. 101–2.
6. K. O. Kuperman, Roanoke, the Abandoned Colony (2nd edn,
Lanham, 2007).
7. K. O. Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, Mass.,
2007); J. Evans, Emigrants: Why the English Sailed to the New
World (London, 2017), p. 4; J. Butman and S. Targett, New World,
Inc.: How England’ Merchants Founded America and Launched
the British Empire (London, 2018), pp. 260–74.
8. M. Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the
Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783 (Chapel Hill and
Williamsburg, Va., 2010), pp. 11–18, 26–32, 37–50, 105, 111, 113,
and table 3, p. 114.
9. Evans, Emigrants, pp. 5–6.
10. R. Fraser, The Mayflower Generation: the Winslow Family and the
Fight for the New World (London, 2017).
11. Evans, Emigrants, pp. 84–91.
12. S. White, A Cold Welcome: the Little Ice Age and Europe’s
Encounter with North America (Cambridge, Mass., 2017); G.
Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in
the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 2013); Evans, Emigrants,
pp. 246–58, 268.
13. H. Beckles, A History of Barbados from Amerindian Settlement to
Caribbean Single Market (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 8–9; P. Drewett,
ed., Prehistoric Barbados (Bridgetown and London, 1991).
14. Rogoziński, Brief History of the Caribbean, p. 67.
15. Cited by T. Hunt, Ten Cities That Made an Empire (London, 2014),
p. 72.
16. Beckles, History of Barbados, pp. 18–20, 31, 36–8, 50–51, 53–8.
17. B. Higman, A. Concise History of the Caribbean (Cambridge,
2011), pp. 87–8, 169–70.
18. Rogoziński, Brief History of the Caribbean, p. 69; Higman, Concise
History of the Caribbean, pp. 98–109; P. Jones, Satan’s Kingdom:
Bristol and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Bristol, 2007), pp. 12–
13.
19. C. G. Pestana, The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver
Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2017); L. H. Roper,
Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion,
1613–1688 (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 154–6.
20. F. Morales Padrón, Spanish Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica, 2003), p.
183; E. Kritzler, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (New York,
2008), pp. 183–5; cf. L. Wolf, Jews in the Canary Islands, being a
Calendar of Jewish Cases Extracted from the Records of the
Canariote Inquisition in the Collection of the Marquess of Bute
(London, 1926; new edn, Toronto, 2001), pp. xxxviii–xl.
21. B. Vega, La derrota de los Ingleses en Santo Domingo, 1655
(Aranjuez, 2013), pp. 24, 27–9, 94–6; Pestana, English Conquest of
Jamaica, pp. 66–92; passage about English position cited from
Kritzler, Jewish Pirates, p. 191; see also M. Hanna, Pirate Nests
and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740 (Chapel Hill, 2015),
pp. 98–101.
22. Vega, Derrota de los Ingleses, pp. 37–102; Morales Padrón,
Spanish Jamaica, p. 184.
23. Roper, Advancing Empire, pp. 156–7.
24. Pestana, English Conquest of Jamaica, pp. 98–105.
25. Cited by Kritzler, Jewish Pirates, p. 189.
26. Morales Padrón, Spanish Jamaica, pp. 51–121, 172; P. Hoffman,
The Spanish Crown and the Defense of the Caribbean, 1535–1585:
Precedent, Patrimonialism, and Royal Parsimony (Baton Rouge,
1980), p. 121.
27. N. Zahedieh, ‘Trade, Plunder and Economic Development in Early
English Jamaica, 1655–89’, Economic History Review, ser. 2, vol.
39 (1986), pp. 205–22.
28. Pestana, English Conquest of Jamaica, p. 119.
29. Ibid., pp. 119–21.
30. Vega, Derrota de los Ingleses, p. 107; Pestana, English Conquest of
Jamaica, p. 138; Kritzler, Jewish Pirates, p. 192.
31. Roper, Advancing Empire, p. 159.
32. W. Westergaard, The Danish West Indies under Company Rule
(1671–1754) (New York, 1917), pp. 31–42; Higman, Concise
History of the Caribbean, pp. 91–4; Rogoziński, Brief History of
the Caribbean, pp. 57–82.
33. Kritzler, Jewish Pirates, p. 194; S. Fortune, Merchants and Jews:
the Struggle for British West Indian Commerce, 1650–1750
(Gainesville, 1984).
34. Kritzler, Jewish Pirates, pp. 216–19, 233–4, 257–63; N. Zahedieh,
‘The Merchants of Port Royal, Jamaica, and the Spanish
Contraband Trade, 1655–1692’, William and Mary Quarterly, vol.
43 (1986), pp. 579–80; treasure chest: R. Marx, Pirate Port: the
Story of the Sunken City of Port Royal (London, 1968), pp. 177–80;
Hanna, Pirate Nests, pp. 109–10.
35. Zahedieh, ‘Merchants of Port Royal’, pp. 574–5; Zahedieh,
‘“Frugal, Prudential and Hopeful Trade”’, p. 146.
36. Pestana, English Conquest of Jamaica, p. 255; C. Pestana, ‘Early
English Jamaica without Pirates’, William and Mary Quarterly, vol.
71 (2014), pp. 321–60.
37. D. Pope, Harry Morgan’s Way: the Biography of Sir Henry Morgan
1635–1684 (London, 1977), pp. 76–81.
38. Talty, Empire of Blue Water, pp. 41–5; Pope, Harry Morgan’s Way,
pp. 90–99.
39. J. Beeching, ‘Introduction’, in A. Exquemeling, The Buccaneers of
America, transl. A. Brown (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 14–15; cf.
Hanna, Pirate Nests, p. 104.
40. Pope, Harry Morgan’s Way, pp. 67, 73.
41. Talty, Empire of Blue Water, pp. 101–21; Zahedieh, ‘Trade, Plunder
and Economic Development’, p. 216: about £60 per head, three
times the annual plantation wage.
42. P. Earle, The Sack of Panamá (London, 1981); Pope, Harry
Morgan’s Way, pp. 212–47.
43. G. Thomas, The Buccaneer King: the Story of Captain Henry
Morgan (London, 2014), pp. ix, 7; Hanna, Pirate Nests, pp. 103–4.
44. Zahedieh, ‘“Frugal, Prudential and Hopeful Trade”’, p. 152.
45. Pope, Harry Morgan’s Way, pp. 333–5; Hanna, Pirate Nests, pp.
138–40.
46. Hanna, Pirate Nests, pp. 106–7.
47. Zahedieh, ‘“Frugal, Prudential and Hopeful Trade”’, pp. 155–6.
48. Zahedieh, ‘Merchants of Port Royal’, pp. 570–71; Zahedieh,
‘“Frugal, Prudential and Hopeful Trade”’, pp. 158, 161.
49. Zahedieh, ‘“Frugal, Prudential and Hopeful Trade”’, p. 148.
50. M. Pawson and D. Buisseret, Port Royal Jamaica (2nd edn,
Kingston, Jamaica, 2000), p. 94.
51. Marx, Pirate Port, p. 175.
52. Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal Jamaica, p. 87.
53. Ibid., p. 89.
54. Zahedieh, ‘Merchants of Port Royal’, pp. 583–4, 589–92; Pawson
and Buisseret, Port Royal Jamaica, p. 92.
55. Zahedieh, ‘Trade, Plunder and Economic Development’, p. 220;
Marx, Pirate Port, pp. 158–9.
56. Marx, Pirate Port, pp. 122, 134, 153, etc.
57. Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal Jamaica, pp. 158–61; cf. Talty,
Empire of Blue Water, pp. 130, 132–5.
58. Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal Jamaica, pp. 135–6.
59. Ibid., pp. 109–11, 120–21.
60. Ibid., pp. 165–8.
 44. A Long Way to China
1. K. McDonald, Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial
America and the Indo-Atlantic World (Oakland, 2015); R. Allen,
European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (Athens,
Oh., 2014).
2. J. Goldstein, Philadelphians and the China Trade 1682–1846:
Commercial, Cultural, and Attitudinal Effects (University Park,
Pa., 1978), p. 17; M. Christman, Adventurous Pursuits: Americans
and the China Trade 1784–1844 (Washington DC, 1984).
3. C. Matson, Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York
(Baltimore, 1998), pp. 142–3, 146–8; source of quotation: p. 183;
C. Frank, Objectifying China: Chinese Commodities in Early
America (Chicago, 2011), p. 56, table 1:2; Goldstein,
Philadelphians and the China Trade, pp. 17–20.
4. Frank, Objectifying China, pp. 5, 1, 12.
5. Ibid., pp. 13–22, 92; examples from the 1790s of E PLURIBUS
UNUM in Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence,
RI.
6. Christman, Adventurous Pursuits, p. 22.
7. J. Fichter, So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade
Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.,
2010), pp. 93–4, 209.
8. Frank, Objectifying China, pp. 31, 34–7.
9. Ibid., pp. 31, 34–7; Goldstein, Philadelphians and the China Trade,
pp. 18, 20.
10. He Sibing, Macao in the Making of Sino-American Relations, 1784–
1844 (Macau, 2015), p. 42.
11. E. Dolin, When America First Met China: an Exotic History of Tea,
Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail (New York, 2012), pp. 65–71.
12. Cited by Frank, Objectifying China, p. 203.
13. Dolin, When America First Met China, pp. 4–6.
14. James Cook, The Journals (2nd edn, London, 2003), p. 559.
15. Dolin, When America First Met China, pp. 9–11; J. Kirker,
Adventures to China: Americans in the Southern Oceans 1792–
1812 (New York, 1970), pp. 8, 13–19.
16. Dolin, When America First Met China, pp. 12–13; He, Macao in the
Making of Early Sino-American Relations, p. 43.
17. Dolin, When America First Met China, pp. 20–21.
18. Text in Goldstein, Philadelphians and the China Trade, p. 32.
19. Cited by Dolin, When America First Met China, p. 22.
20. Cited by Dolin, When America First Met China, p. 74; on Shaw:
He, Macao in the Making of Sino-American Relations, p. 44.
21. Dolin, When America First Met China, pp. 80–84.
22. Ibid., p. 78; text of sea letter in He, Macao in the Making of Sino-
American Relations, p. 43; ‘New People’: p. 45.
23. Cited by He, Macao in the Making of Sino-American Relations, p.
45.
24. J. Downs, The Golden Ghetto: the American Commercial
Community at Canton and the Shaping of American China Policy,
1784–1844 (Bethlehem, Pa., and Cranbury, NJ, 1997), pp. 26–9.
25. R. Nield, The China Coast: Trade and the First Treaty Ports (Hong
Kong, 2010), pp. 48–55, 124–6; Downs, Golden Ghetto, pp. 29, 37,
45, 48, 65–6.
26. W. E. Cheong, The Hong Merchants of Canton: Chinese Merchants
in Sino-Western Trade (Richmond, Surrey, 1997), pp. 193–213;
Downs, Golden Ghetto, pp. 73–4.
27. P. Van Dyke, The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China
Coast, 1700–1845 (Hong Kong and Macau, 2005), pp. 19–33;
Christman, Adventurous Pursuits, p. 23; P. Van Dyke, Merchants
of Canton and Macao, vol. 1: Politics and Strategies in Eighteenth-
Century Chinese Trade (Hong Kong, 2011), pp. 49–66, and vol. 2:
Success and Failure in Chinese Trade (Hong Kong, 2016); Downs,
Golden Ghetto, p. 77.
28. Downs, Golden Ghetto, pp. 81–5, 151–4; Nield, China Coast, pp.
48–50; Dolin, When America First Met China, pp. 173–6;
Christman, Adventurous Pursuits, pp. 85–91.
29. He, Macao in the Making of Sino-American Relations, pp. 46–7.
30. Fichter, So Great a Proffit, pp. 31–5.
31. Kirker, Adventures to China, pp. 13–23, 35–47; J. Harrison,
Forgotten Footprints: Lost Stories in the Discovery of Antactica
(Cardigan, 2012).
32. R. Dana Jr, Two Years before the Mast: a Personal Narrative of Life
at Sea (New York, 1840, and later editions), ch. 5.
33. Fichter, So Great a Proffit, pp. 49–5; Christman, Adventurous
Pursuits, p. 35; S. Ridley, Morning of Fire: John Kendrick’s
Daring American Odyssey in the Pacific (New York, 2010), p. 23.
34. Ridley, Morning of Fire, pp. 30–34.
35. Ibid., p. 33.
36. Ibid., pp. 61–3.
37. Ibid., pp. 67–8.
38. Fichter, So Great a Proffit, pp. 51–2.
39. D. Pethick, The Nootka Connection: Europe and the Northwest
Coast 1790–1795 (Vancouver, 1980), p. 5.
40. Christman, Adventurous Pursuits, pp. 34–5.
41. Pethick, Nootka Connection, pp. 56–61.
42. Kirker, Adventures to China, pp. 35–6.
43. Ibid., pp. 19–21, 50–64.
44. Fichter, So Great a Proffit, pp. 272–7.
 45. Fur and Fire
1. R. Makarova, Russians on the Pacific 1743–1799 (Kingston, Ont.,
1975), ed. and transl. R. Pierce and A. Donnelly from the original
edition (Moscow, 1968), pp. 78–84 – an interesting example of
Soviet-era historical interpretation.
2. See Muller’s account of Dezhnev’s voyage in F. Golder, Russian
Expansion on the Pacific 1641–1850 (2nd edn, New York, 1971),
pp. 268–81, followed by Dezhnev’s own report, pp. 282–8.
3. Makarova, Russians on the Pacific, pp. 31–2.
4. Ibid., p. 107; J. Gibson, Feeding the Russian Fur Trade:
Provisionment of the Okhotsk Seaboard and the Kamchatka
Peninsula 1639–1856 (Madison, 1969), p. 131.
5. Golder, Russian Expansion on the Pacific, pp. 71–95, 98–9;
Makarova, Russians on the Pacific, p. 32.
6. Golder, Russian Expansion on the Pacific, p. 33.
7. Ibid., pp. 40–55.
8. B. Dmytryshyn, E. Crownhart-Vaughan and T. Vaughan, eds., To
Siberia and Russian America: Three Centuries of Russian
Eastward Expansion, vol. 2: Russian Penetration of the North
Pacific Ocean 1700–1797: a Documentary Record (Portland, Ore.,
1988), doc. 12, pp. 59–63, standardizing spelling in the quotation.
9. G. Barratt, Russia in Pacific Waters, 1715–1825: a Survey of the
Origins of Russia’s Naval Presence in the North and South Pacific
(Vancouver, 1981), pp. 7–9.
10. Instructions of 23 December 1724, signed on 26 January 1725, in
Golder, Russian Expansion on the Pacific, p. 134; Dmytryshyn et
al., eds., Russian Penetration of the North Pacific Ocean, doc. 15,
pp. 66–7; also Barratt, Russia in Pacific Waters, pp. 13–14.
11. M. North, The Baltic: a History (Cambridge, Mass., 2015), pp. 146,
180.
12. Barratt, Russia in Pacific Waters, pp. 18–19.
13. Dmytryshyn et al., eds., Russian Penetration of the North Pacific
Ocean, p. xxxvii, and doc. 22, pp. 96–100.
14. Ibid., doc. 22, p. 99.
15. Golder, Russian Expansion on the Pacific, pp. 220–26.
16. Makarova, Russians on the Pacific, p. 69: Egor Peloponisov.
17. Makarova, Russians on the Pacific, pp. 45–6.
18. Ibid., pp. 66, 96–7.
19. Ibid., pp. 67–9.
20. Ibid., pp. 71–2.
21. Dmytryshyn et al., eds., Russian Penetration of the North Pacific
Ocean, doc. 50, p. 321.
22. Ibid., doc. 86, pp. 510–15.
23. Shelikov cited by Barratt, Russia in Pacific Waters, pp. 100–101;
Makarova, Russians on the Pacific, p. 4.
24. J. Gibson, Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods: the
Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785–1841 (Seattle
and Montreal, 1992), p. 16; Barratt, Russia in Pacific Waters, p.
110.
25. Barratt, Russia in Pacific Waters, pp. 102, 110.
26. Cited ibid., p. 109.
27. Barratt, Russia in Pacific Waters, pp. 114–15.
28. Ibid., pp. 119–20.
29. Ibid., pp. 123–9; Gibson, Otter Skins, pp. 14–16.
30. Barratt, Russia in Pacific Waters, pp. 131–8.
31. J. Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific in the Age of Enlightenment
(Cambridge, 2014), pp. 133, 408.
32. T. Lummis, Pacific Paradises: the Discovery of Tahiti and Hawaii
(Stroud, 2005).
33. Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific, p. 195; N. Thomas, Islanders:
the Pacific in the Age of Empire (New Haven, 2010).
34. Cited in Lummis, Pacific Paradises, p. 5; M. K. Matsuda, Pacific
Worlds: a History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures (Cambridge,
 2012), pp. 133–4; A. Couper, Sailors and Traders: a Maritime
History of the Pacific Peoples (Honolulu, 2009), pp. 64–5;
Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific, pp. 134–7.
35. Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific, pp. 134–7.
36. Lummis, Pacific Paradises, pp. 7–10.
37. A. Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island: the European Discovery of Tahiti
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2009), pp. 20–21.
38. Lummis, Pacific Paradises, pp. 13–14; Matsuda, Pacific Worlds,
pp. 134–6; Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific, pp. 146–8, 203–4;
D. Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to
the Gold Rush (Oxford and New York, 2013), pp. 49–51.
39. Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific, p. 233.
40. Ibid., pp. 141, 265.
41. Ibid., pp. 110, 137.
42. D. Sobel, Longitude: the True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved
the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (London, 1995), pp.
138–51.
43. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds, pp. 136–7; Gascoigne, Encountering the
Pacific, pp. 138–9; Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island, pp. 36–8, 174–7,
203–35; Thomas, Islanders, pp. 17–19 (Tupaia’s map: fig. 4, p.
18); Couper, Sailors and Traders, pp. 1–2, 67–8.
44. Couper, Sailors and Traders, pp. 1–2.
45. Ibid., pp. 36–7.
46. Lummis, Pacific Paradises, pp. 77–8.
47. Ibid., pp. 64–5.
48. Cited in Lummis, Pacific Paradises, p. 70; feather cloaks: ibid., p.
78.
49. Ibid., pp. 71–6.
50. Couper, Sailors and Traders, pp. 83–4.
51. Ibid., pp. 83–5, 88.
52. S. Reynolds, The Voyage of the New Hazard to the Northwest
Coast, Hawaii and China, 1810–1813, ed. F. Howay (2nd edn,
 Fairfield, Wash., 1970); Couper, Sailors and Traders, pp. 86–8.
53. Lummis, Pacific Paradises, pp. 80–86, 95–7.
54. Ibid., pp. 87–91.
55. Cited by Couper, Sailors and Traders, p. 88.
56. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds, p. 189.
57. Couper, Sailors and Traders, p. 83.
58. Lummis, Pacific Paradises, pp. 94–101.
 46. From the Lion’s Gate to the Fragrant Harbour
1. M. R. Frost and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, Singapore: a Biography
(Singapore and Hong Kong, 2009), pp. 34–5; J. C. Perry,
Singapore: Unlikely Power (New York, 2017), pp. 29, 34.
2. Perry, Singapore, p. 5.
3. K. C. Guan, D. Heng and T. T. Yong, Singapore: a 700-Year
History (Singapore, 2009), pp. 53–82; Frost and Balasingamchow,
Singapore, pp. 34–7; Perry, Singapore, p. 27.
4. Cf., however, the darker view of N. Wright, William Farquhar and
Singapore: Stepping Out from Raffles’ Shadow (Penang, 2017).
5. Cited by V. Glendinning, Raffles and the Golden Opportunity
(London, 2012), p. 111.
6. Glendinning, Raffles, pp. 176–9; Perry, Singapore, p. 34; Sir
Stamford Raffles, The History of Java (2 vols., 2nd edn, London,
1830); cf. Wright, William Farquhar, pp. 7–13.
7. Cited by Guan et al., Singapore, p. 85, and in Frost and
Balasingamchow, Singapore, p. 47.
8. Frost and Balasingamchow, Singapore, pp. 54–5.
9. Perry, Singapore, p. 39; also K. C. Guan, ‘Singapura as a Central
Place in Malay History and Identity’, and C. Skott, ‘Imagined
Centrality: Sir Stamford Raffles and the Birth of Modern
Singapore’, both in K. Hack, J.-L. Margolin and K. Delaye, eds.,
Singapore from Temasek to the 21st Century: Reinventing the
Global City (Singapore, 2010), pp. 133–54, 155–84.
10. Frost and Balasingamchow, Singapore, pp. 41–6, 73–5; Perry,
Singapore, pp. 37, 41.
11. Perry, Singapore, p. 40.
12. Frost and Balasingamchow, Singapore, pp. 63, 65–9.
13. Guan et al., Singapore, p. 111; Wright, William Farquhar, p. 119.
14. Guan et al., Singapore, p. 113; C. Paix, ‘Singapore as a Central
Place between the West, Asia and China: From the 19th to the 21st
 Centuries’, in Hack et al., Singapore from Temasek to the 21st
Century, p. 212.
15. Peranakans are also known as ‘Straits Chinese’ – see the exhibits in
the Peranakan Museum, Singapore; Frost and Balasingamchow,
Singapore, pp. 93–8.
16. Perry, Singapore, pp. 13–14, 35
17. Guan et al., Singapore, pp. 108–9; Wright, William Farquhar, p.
108.
18. Guan et al., Singapore, pp. 116–20.
19. F. Welsh, A History of Hong Kong (2nd edn, London, 1997), pp.
52–5; R. Nield, The China Coast: Trade and the First Treaty Ports
(Hong Kong, 2010), pp. 127–8; T. Hunt, Ten Cities That Made an
Empire (London, 2014), pp. 233–4.
20. Hunt, Ten The Cities, pp. 232, 234
21. Welsh, History of Hong Kong, pp. 43, 79; R. Nield, China Coast, p.
129.
22. Lin Zexu’s letter to Queen Victoria cited by Hunt, Ten Cities, p.
235; J. Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of
China (London, 2011).
23. Quoted by Hunt, Ten Cities, p. 238.
24. Welsh, History of Hong Kong, pp. 106–12 (Palmerston on p. 108);
Hunt, Ten Cities, p. 240.
25. Nield, China Coast, pp. 175–8, 181; Hunt, Ten Cities, pp. 239, 242,
245, 255–6.
26. Nield, China Coast, pp. 179–80, 184.
 47. Muscateers and Mogadorians
1. M. Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders: the Swahili Coast, India, and
Portugal in the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1998), p. 159; N.
Bennett, A History of the Arab State of Zanzibar (London, 1978),
pp. 11–12.
2. Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders, p. 162.
3. Cited by P. Risso, Oman and Muscat: an Early Modern History
(London, 1986), p. 192; M. R. Bhacker, Trade and Empire in
Muscat and Zanzibar: Roots of British Domination (London,
1992), pp. 12, 67–74.
4. Risso, Oman and Muscat, pp. 78–85; Bennett, History of the Arab
State, pp. 14–15.
5. Risso, Oman and Muscat, pp. 101, 106, 170–72; Bhacker, Trade
and Empire, p. 26.
6. T. Hunt, Ten Cities That Made an Empire (London, 2014), p. 202.
7. Risso, Oman and Muscat, pp. 198–9.
8. Cited by Bennett, History of the Arab State, p. 14.
9. Bennett, History of the Arab State, pp. 19–21.
10. Cited from a nineteenth-century French source by W. Phillips,
Oman: a Short History (London, 1967), p. 127.
11. A. al-Maamiry, Omani Sultans in Zanzibar (1832–1964) (New
Delhi, 1988), pp. 3–4.
12. J. Jones and N. Ridout, A History of Modern Oman (Cambridge,
2015), pp. 53–4; Bennett, History of the Arab State, pp. 57–8;
Bhacker, Trade and Empire, pp. 71, 92–3; UNESCO, World’s
Heritage (4th edn, Paris and Glasgow, 2015), p. 612.
13. A. Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an
East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–
1873 (London, Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, 1987), pp. 49, 62–5; al-
Maamiry, Omani Sultans in Zanzibar, p. 6.
14. Jones and Ridout, History of Modern Oman, pp. 61–2; Sheriff,
Slaves, Spices and Ivory, pp. 77, 91–9; al-Maamiry, Omani Sultans
 in Zanzibar, p. 5; Bennett, History of the Arab State, p. 43;
Bhacker, Trade and Empire, pp. 77–8 (graph and table showing
revenues from Muscat and Zanzibar), also pp. 108–10, 121.
15. D. Cesarani and G. Romain, eds., Jews and Port Cities 1590–1990:
Commerce, Community and Cosmopolitanism (London, 2006).
16. D. Schroeter, Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and
Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco, 1844–1886 (Cambridge,
1988), pp. 1, 219–21.
17. Ibid., pp. 7–12, and map 3, pp. 16–17.
18. D. Schroeter, The Sultan’s Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World
(Stanford, 2002), pp. 44–5.
19. P. Fenton and D. Littman, Exile in the Maghreb: Jews under Islam,
Sources and Documents, 997–1912 (Madison, 2016).
20. Schroeter, Merchants of Essaouira, pp. 34–42.
21. Quoted from Schroeter, Sultan’s Jew, p. 86; see also J. A. O. C.
Brown, Crossing the Strait: Morocco, Gibraltar and Great Britain
in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Leiden, 2012), p. 45.
22. M. Abitbol, Les Commerçants du roi – Tujjār al-Sulṭān: une élite
économique judéo-marocaine au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1998), letters
5–6, pp. 30–31, and letter 11, p. 37; M. Abitbol, Témoins et
acteurs: les Corcos et l’histoire du Maroc contemporain –
Mishpahat Qorqos: ve-ha-Historiya shel Maroqo bizemanenu
(Jerusalem, 1977); Schroeter, Merchants of Essaouira, pp. 21, 23.
23. D. Corcos, ‘Les Juifs du Maroc et leurs mellahs’, in D. Corcos,
Studies in the History of the Jews of Morocco (Jerusalem, 1976),
pp. 64–130; cf. S. Deshen, The Mellah Society: Jewish Community
Life in Sherifian Morocco (Chicago, 1989).
24. Schroeter, Sultan’s Jew, p. 110, fig. 14.
25. For example, Schroeter, Merchants of Essaouira, p. 49.
26. Ibid., pp. 40–41; Schroeter, Sultan’s Jew, p. 19.
27. Schroeter, Merchants of Essaouira, pp. 19, 79, 95–120.
28. Brown, Crossing the Strait, pp. 125–7.
29. Schroeter, Merchants of Essaoiura, pp. 125–8.
30. Ibid., p. 50.
31. Brown, Crossing the Strait, p. 129.
32. Ibid., pp. 94–120, 127, 129–30.
33. Schroeter, Sultan’s Jew, pp. 46, 78; Brown, Crossing the Strait, pp.
17, 49–51.
34. Schroeter, Sultan’s Jew, pp. 44–5.
35. F. Sequeira Dias, ‘Os empresários micaelenses no séclo XIX: o
exemplo de sucesso de Elias Bensaúde (1807–1868)’, Análise
Social, vol. 31 (1996), pp. 437–64, drawing on her doctoral thesis,
Uma estratégia de sucesso numa economia periférica: a Casa
Bensaúde e os Açores, 1800–1873 (Ponta Delgada, 1993).
36. Figures from T. B. Duncan, Atlantic Islands: Madeira, the Azores
and the Cape Verdes in Seventeenth-Century Commerce and
Navigation (Chicago, 1972), pp. 1–4, 22, 162–3; A. Prata, ‘Porto
Grande of S. Vicente: the Coal Business on an Atlantic Island’, in
M. Suárez Bosa, ed., Atlantic Ports and the First Globalisation
c.1850–1930 (Basingstoke, 2014), pp. 49–69.
37. M. Serels, The Jews of Cape Verde: a Brief History (Brooklyn,
1997), pp. 21–4, 38.
38. A. Jaffer, Lascars and Indian Ocean Seafaring, 1780–1860:
Shipboard Life, Unrest and Mutiny (Martlesham, 2015).
 PART FIVE
THE OCEANS CONTAINED
 48. Continents Divided, Oceans Conjoined
1. G. Williams, ed., The Quest for the Northwest Passage (London,
2007), pp. 433–58.
2. I. Sanderson, A History of Whaling (New York, 1993), pp. 213–17;
A. Dudden, ‘The Sea of Japan/Korea’s East Sea’, in D. Armitage,
A. Bashford and S. Sivasundaram, eds., Oceanic Histories
(Cambridge, 2018), pp. 197–8.
3. H. Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (New York, 1851), ch. 111.
4. T. Toyoda, History of pre-Meiji Commerce in Japan (Tokyo, 1969),
pp. 92–4.
5. W. Beasley, The Japanese Experience: a Short History of Japan
(London, 1999), pp. 191–3; B. Walker, A Concise History of Japan
(Cambridge, 2015), pp. 145–6; W. J. Macpherson, The Economic
Development of Japan 1868–1941 (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1995), p.
70, and also pp. 23–4; Toyoda, History of pre-Meiji Commerce, pp.
95–100.
6. D. McCullough, The Path between the Seas: the Creation of the
Panama Canal 1870–1914 (New York, 1977), p. 112.
7. What follows is based on my Great Sea, pp. 545–55, where the
creation of the Suez Canal is discussed at greater length.
8. M. Parker, Hell’s Gorge: the Battle to Build the Panama Canal
(2nd edn of Panama Fever (London, 2007), London, 2008), p. 15.
9. Z. Karabell, Parting the Desert: the Creation of the Suez Canal
(London, 2003), pp. 28–37; J. Marlowe, The Making of the Suez
Canal (London, 1964), pp. 44–5.
10. Karabell, Parting the Desert, pp. 131–2; Lord Kinross, Between
Two Seas: the Creation of the Suez Canal (London, 1968), pp. 98–
9.
11. Karabell, Parting the Desert, p. 260; Kinross, Between Two Seas, p.
287.
12. Marlowe, Making of the Suez Canal, pp. 255–75; Karabell, Parting
the Desert, pp. 262–5; R. Blake, Disraeli (London, 1966), pp. 581–
70.
13. F. Hyde, Blue Funnel: a History of Alfred Holt and Company of
 Liverpool from 1865 to 1914 (Liverpool, 1956), pp. 20, 24.
14. G. Lo Giudice, L’Austria, Trieste ed il Canale di Suez (Catania,
1981), pp. 180–81; Marlowe, Making of the Suez Canal, p. 260.
15. McCullough, Path between the Seas, p. 34.
16. Index to the Reports of the Chief of Engineers, U.S. Army (including
the Reports of the Isthmian Canal Commission, 1899–1914), 1866–
1912, vol. 2: Fortifications, Bridges, Panama Canal, etc., February
16 1914 (63rd Congress, 2nd Session, House of Representatives,
Document no. 740, Washington DC, 1916), p. 2551; Parker, Hell’s
Gorge, pp. 11–12.
17. McCullough, Path between the Seas, pp. 28–30.
18. Parker, Hell’s Gorge, pp. 18–19.
19. McCullough, Path between the Seas, p. 33; Parker, Hell’s Gorge,
pp. 20–24.
20. Quotation from Parker, Hell’s Gorge, p. 32, and more generally see
pp. 27–33.
21. Parker, Hell’s Gorge, pp. 38–9.
22. McCullough, Path between the Seas, pp. 61–7; Parker, Hell’s
Gorge, p. 46.
23. Parker, Hell’s Gorge, pp. 55–6.
24. Ibid., pp. 107, 109–10.
25. McCullough, Path between the Seas, pp. 160–61; Parker, Hell’s
Gorge, pp. 119–23.
26. J. Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the
Panama Canal (New York, 2009), p. 42.
27. McCullough, Path between the Seas, pp. 205–12; Parker, Hell’s
Gorge, pp. 160–62.
28. Parker, Hell’s Gorge, p. 159.
29. McCullough, Path between the Seas, pp. 240–41.
30. Ibid., p. 254.
31. Ibid., p. 255, whence also the quotation from Roosevelt.
32. J. Davis, The Gulf: the Making of an American Sea (New York,
2017).
33. A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea-Power upon History, 1660–1783
(Boston, 1890), p. 33.
34. McCullough, Path between the Seas, pp. 253, 254–5, 259, 262–3,
268–9; Parker, Hell’s Gorge, p. 173.
35. Greene, Canal Builders, pp. 10, 19–20.
36. Greene, Canal Builders, pp. 46–7, 111–16.
37. McCullough, Path between the Seas, pp. 409–21; Parker, Hell’s
Gorge, pp. 238–48.
38. McCullough, Path between the Seas, pp. 492–50, 428–9
(illustrations); Parker, Hell’s Gorge, pp. 211, 306–9; Greene, Canal
Builders, pp. 15–18.
39. McCullough, Path between the Seas, p. 610.
40. Greene, Canal Builders, pp. 51, 95–107, 123–58.
41. McCullough, Path between the Seas, pp. 611–12.
42. Parker, Hell’s Gorge, pp. 368–70.
 49. Steaming to Asia, Paddling to America
1. N. Jones, The Plimsoll Sensation: the Great Campaign to Save
Lives at Sea (London, 2006), p. 10.
2. Jones, Plimsoll Sensation, pp. 1–3.
3. I take this to be the meaning of the comment by L. Paine, The Sea
and Civilization: a Maritime History of the World (London, 2014),
pp. 531–2.
4. Jones, Plimsoll Sensation, ‘Appendix: Songs and Poems’, p. 314.
5. Quoted in Jones, Plimsoll Sensation, ‘Appendix: Songs and Poems’,
p. 315, from 1875.
6. Jones, Plimsoll Sensation, pp. 201–10.
7. Cited in Jones, Plimsoll Sensation, p. 236.
8. Jones, Plimsoll Sensation, pp. 283–5.
9. F. Hyde, Blue Funnel: A History of Alfred Holt and Company of
Liverpool From 1865 to 1914 (Liverpool, 1956), pp. 13–16; F.
Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey: an Economic History of a Port
1700–1970 (Newton Abbot, 1971), pp. 54–5 – much of the
literature on Liverpool shipping was written by this one scholar.
10. Hyde, Blue Funnel, p. 19; M. Falkus, The Blue Funnel Legend: A
History of the Ocean Steamship Company (Basingstoke, 1990), pp.
92–8.
11. G. Milne, ‘North of England Shipowners and Their Business
Connections’, in L. Fischer and E. Lange, eds., International
Merchant Shipping in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: the
Comparative Dimension (St John’s, Nfdl., 2008), pp. 154–7.
12. T. Hunt, Ten Cities That Made an Empire (London, 2014), pp. 387–
94; Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey, pp. 31–4; F. Hyde, Cunard
and the North Atlantic 1840–1973: a History of Shipping and
Financial Management (London, 1975), pp. 129–30.
13. Milne, ‘North of England Shipowners’, pp. 153, 159–64.
14. Falkus, Blue Funnel Legend, p. 102, fig. 10, steamship Nestor I; A.
Prata, ‘Porto Grande of S. Vicente: the Coal Business on an
 Atlantic Island’, in M. Suárez Bosa, ed., Atlantic Ports and the
First Gobalisation c. 1850–1930 (Basingstoke, 2014)’, pp. 49–53.
15. D. Howarth and S. Howarth, The Story of P&O: the Peninsular and
Oriental Steam Navigation Company (2nd edn, London, 1994), pp.
33–4.
16. Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey, pp. 51–2; Howarth and Howarth,
Story of P&O, pp. 15, 94.
17. Falkus, Blue Funnel Legend, pp. 37–9.
18. F. Hyde, Far Eastern Trade 1860–1914 (London, 1973), p. 22;
Hyde, Blue Funnel, pp. 37–9; also Howarth and Howarth, Story of
P&O, pp. 94–5.
19. Falkus, Blue Funnel Legend, p. 4.
20. Hyde, Blue Funnel, pp. 24–5, 32–3, 182 (table of ships in fleet);
Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey, pp. 57, 59–61; Hyde, Far Eastern
Trade, pp. 25–7; Falkus, Blue Funnel Legend, pp. 60–66.
21. Falkus, Blue Funnel Legend, pp. 105–7, 111; Hyde, Blue Funnel,
pp. 56–70; Hyde, Far Eastern Trade, pp. 23, 28–32.
22. Howarth and Howarth, Story of P&O, pp. 30–35, 101.
23. Ibid., pp. 60–62.
24. Ibid., p. 80; F. Welsh, A History of Hong Kong (2nd edn, London,
1997), p. 162.
25. Ibid., pp. 54–5.
26. Hyde, Far Eastern Trade, pp. 17–19.
27. Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic, pp. 75, 84–6.
28. Ibid., pp. 15–16, 28–9, 77, 94–101.
29. R. Gillespie, Early Belfast: the Origins and Growth of an Ulster
Town to 1750 (Belfast, 2007); S. Royle, Portrait of an Industrial
City: Changing Belfast 1750–1914 (Belfast, 2011); J. P. Lynch, An
Unlikely Success Story: the Belfast Shipping Industry 1880–1935
(Belfast, 2001), pp. 2–9, 67.
30. M. Moss and J. Hume, Shipbuilders to the World: 125 Years of
Harland and Wolff, Belfast, 1861–1986 (Belfast, 1986), pp. 12–14,
144, 146; Lynch, Unlikely Success Story, p. 61.
31. S. Tenold, ‘Norwegian Shipping in the Twentieth Century’, in
Fischer and Lange, eds., International Merchant Shipping, p. 57.
32. Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic, pp. 61–2.
33. C. Brautaset and S. Tenold, ‘Lost in Calculation? Norwegian
Merchant Shipping in Asia, 1870–1914’, in M. Fusaro and A.
Polónia, eds., Maritime History as Global History (St John’s, Nfdl.,
2010), pp. 206, 217, 219–20.
34. Tenold, ‘Norwegian Shipping’, pp. 59–60.
35. Brautaset and Tenold, ‘Lost in Calculation?’, p. 207.
36. A. Hardy, Typhoon Wallem: a Personalised Chronicle of the
Wallem Group Limited (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 1–2, 21–3, 25, 37–
8.
37. Ibid., p. 45.
38. G. Harlaftis, A History of Greek-Owned Shipping: the Making of an
International Tramp Fleet, 1830 to the Present Day (London,
1996), p. xx; G. Harlaftis, ‘The Greek Shipping Sector, c.1850–
2000’, in Fischer and Lange, eds., International Merchant
Shipping, p. 79.
39. Harlaftis, History of Greek-Owned Shipping, pp. 52–4, 108–9, table
4; Harlaftis, ‘The Greek Shipping Sector’, p. 80, and table 2, p. 81.
40. Harlaftis, ‘The Greek Shipping Sector’, pp. 82–4.
41. Åland Maritime Museum, The Last Windjammers: Grain Races
round Cape Horn (Mariehamn, 1998), pp. 10–11, 15; E. Newby,
The Last Grain Race (3rd edn, London, 2014), p. xx.
42. Åland Maritime Museum, Last Windjammers, p. 14; Newby, Last
Grain Race, pp. xx–xxi; H. Thesleff, Farewell Windjammer: an
Account of the Last Circumnavigation of the Globe by a Sailing
Ship and the Last Grain Race from Australia to England (London,
1951), pp. 2–3.
43. Thesleff, Farewell Windjammer, pp. 3, 134; Newby, Last Grain
Race, pp. 201–3; Åland Maritime Museum, Last Windjammers, pp.
22–6, 30.
44. Newby, Last Grain Race; Thesleff, Farewell Windjammer, pp. 4–5.
45. Thesleff, Farewell Windjammer, p. 9; Åland Maritime Museum,
Last Windjammers, pp. 22, 41–2.
 50. War and Peace, and More War
1. K. O’Rourke, ‘The Economist and Global History’, in J. Belich, J.
Darwin, M. Frenz and C. Wickham, The Prospect of Global
History (Oxford, 2016), p. 47, especially n. 11.
2. Cited by S. Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton, 2016), pp.
93–4.
3. O’Rourke, ‘Economist and Global History’, pp. 48–9, 55 (and n.
30); also K. O’Rourke and J. Williamson, Globalization and
History: the Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy
(Cambridge, Mass., 1999).
4. M. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World: a Twentieth-Century
History (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 25–9, 35–49, and map 2, p. 42.
5. Ibid., pp. 56–9.
6. Ibid., pp. 39–40, 107 fig. 2 (Chilehaus).
7. Ibid., p. 45.
8. Ibid., pp. 49–55, 75–9.
9. Cited in J. Steinberg, Yesterday’s Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth of
the German Battle Fleet (London, 1965), p. 208.
10. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World, pp. 213, 217–18; M.
Falkus, The Blue Funnel Legend: A History of the Ocean Steamship
Company (Basingstoke, 1990), pp. 157–61; F. Hyde, Cunard and
the North Atlantic 1840–1973: A History of Shipping and Financial
Management (London, 1975), p. 169; D. Howarth and S. Howarth,
The Story of P&O: The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation
Company (2nd edn, London, 1994), p. 117.
11. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World, pp. 217, 231; Falkus, Blue
Funnel Legend, p. 173; Howarth, Story of P&O, p. 124; F. Hyde,
Liverpool and the Mersey: an Economic History of a Port 1700–
1970 (Newton Abbott, 1971), p. 147.
12. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World, pp. 235–7.
13. O’Rourke, ‘Economist and Global History’, p. 55; Falkus, Blue
Funnel Legend, p. 203.
14. Howarth and Howarth, Story of P&O, p. 125; W. J. Macpherson,
The Economic Development of Japan 1868–1941 (2nd edn,
Cambridge, 1995), p. 31.
15. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World, pp. 247, 269.
16. Cited in Howarth, Story of P&O, p. 129; Falkus, Blue Funnel
Legend, p. 229; Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey, p. 149.
17. Falkus, Blue Funnel Legend, pp. 175, 190–92; Hyde, Cunard and
the North Atlantic, p. 181.
18. Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic, pp. 171–3, 180; Miller,
Europe and the Maritime World, pp. 254–5.
19. Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic, pp. 173–6, 180, 227–34.
20. Ibid., pp. 191–218; loan figures: pp. 214–15; Miller, Europe and the
Maritime World, pp. 253–4.
21. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World, p. 248.
22. Quoted by Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic, p. 255; also pp.
264–7, 280.
23. Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey, pp. 160–77.
24. Falkus, Blue Funnel Legend, pp. 240, 245.
25. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World, pp. 277–8; Falkus, Blue
Funnel Legend, p. 236.
26. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World, pp. 282–3.
27. S. Roskill, A Merchant Fleet in War: Alfred Holt & Co., 1939–1945
(London, 1962), pp. 19, 23–8.
28. Ibid., p. 47.
29. Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic, pp. 260–67.
30. Howarth, Story of P&O, pp. 138–40, 145–6.
31. A. Hardy, Typhoon Wallem a Personalised Chronicle of the Wallem
Group Limited (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 64–6; F. Welsh, A History
of Hong Kong (2nd den, London, 1977), pp. 412–23.
32. Roskill, Merchant Fleet in War, map of ships sunk in the war, on
front endpaper; 87 ships: p. 11; Pyrrhus: pp. 29–33; Falkus, Blue
Funnel Legend, p. 237 gives 77.
33. Falkus, Blue Funnel Legend, pp. 237–40, 245.
34. Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey, pp. 178–80; Miller, Europe and
the Maritime World, pp. 281, 284, 304–6; Falkus, Blue Funnel
Legend, pp. 247–8 (Churchill).
 51. The Oceans in a Box
1. D. Howarth and S. Howarth, The Story of P&O: the Peninsular and
Oriental Steam Navigation Company (2nd edn, London, 1994), p.
151.
2. M. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World: a Twentieth-Century
History (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 290–93.
3. F. Welsh, A History of Hong Kong (2nd edn, London, 1997), pp.
442, 444, 451–2.
4. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World, pp. 299–300.
5. J. C. Perry, Singapore: Unlikely Power (New York, 2017), pp. 165–
8, 171.
6. M. R. Frost and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, Singapore: a Biography
(Singapore and Hong Kong, 2009), pp. 322–35; Perry, Singapore,
pp. 148–9, 163; Miller, Europe and the Maritime World, pp. 67–8.
7. F. Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey: an Economic History of a Port
1700–1970 (Newton Abbot, 1971), p. 191; Howarth and Howarth,
Story of P&O, p. 173; on shipyard workers: A. Reid, The Tide of
Democracy: Shipyard Workers and Social Relations in Britain,
1870–1950 (Manchester, 2010).
8. Howarth and Howarth, Story of P&O, pp. 165–6, 174.
9. Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey, p. 187.
10. Howarth and Howarth, Story of P&O, pp. 151, 156–7.
11. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World, p. 306; Hyde, Liverpool
and the Mersey, pp. 192–3, 197.
12. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World, pp. 311–13; p. 312: map of
Rotterdam port.
13. K. Hudson and J. Pettifer, Diamonds in the Sky: a Social History of
Air Travel (London, 1979), pp. 58, 61.
14. Ibid., p. 67.
15. Ibid., pp. 69, 79, 81, 84–7.
16. Howarth and Howarth, Story of P&O, p. 163.
17. F. Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic 1840–1973: a History of
Shipping and Financial Management (London, 1975), pp. 296–302.
18. Ibid., pp. 309, 313.
19. Howarth and Howarth, Story of P&O, pp. 160–61.
20. B. Dickinson and A. Vladimir, $elling the Sea: an Inside Look at
the Cruise Industry (2nd edn, Hoboken, 2008), pp. 21–2.
21. M. Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the
World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (2nd edn, Princeton,
2008), pp. 29–30, 34.
22. Ibid., pp. xi, 36–49, 53; B. Cudahy, Box Boats: How Container
Ships Changed the World (New York, 2006), pp. 20–25.
23. Levinson, The Box, pp. xi, 53; quotation cited by Cudahy, Box
Boats, p. 35.
24. Ibid., pp. 50–53, 57; Cudahy, Box Boats, pp. 26–32.
25. Levinson, The Box, p. xiii.
26. Ibid., pp. 55–7; Cudahy, Box Boats, pp. 35–6, 40–41.
27. Levinson, The Box, pp. 58, 101–26.
28. Cudahy, Box Boats, pp. 69, 75, 84–9 (the observant will note that
the ship loaded whisky, not whiskey as Cudahy opines), 100–106.
29. Levinson, The Box, pp. 171–88, 196, 201, 204–5; Cudahy, Box
Boats, pp. 106–8, 153.
 Conclusion
1. A. Antonello, ‘The Southern Ocean’, in D. Armitage, A. Bashford
and S. Sivasundaram, eds., Oceanic Histories (Cambridge, 2018),
pp. 301–8.
 Index

The page references in this index correspond to the print edition from which
this ebook was created, and clicking on them will take you to the the location
in the ebook where the equivalent print page would begin. To find a specific
word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook
reader.

Entries starting with the Old Norse letter thorn (Þ) are filed after Z.

Aaron 80
Abacan 226
abalone 196, 232
Abbas, Shah of Iran 705, 706
Abbasids 164, 170, 173, 364, 366
‘Abdu’l-‘aziz, Sa‘id 291–2
Aborigines 8–9, 10
and first Dutchmen in Australia 736, 737, 741
Tasmanian 742
voting rights in Australian states 733
Yolŋu 10
Abu Dhabi 62
Abu Mufarrij 176, 177, 178, 179
Abu Zayd Hassan of Siraf 156, 172
abzu 56, 66
Acapulco 616, 619, 621, 623, 624, 630, 631, 642, 648, 701, 706
Aceh, Sumatra 689
Achilles, SS 865, 866
Achnacreebeag 308
Adam of Bremen 367, 393
Adams, William (Miura Anjin) 631, 632, 691–2
Aden xviii, 51, 105–6, 180–82, 185, 187, 265, 266, 267, 598, 600–601, 604,
605
Admiralty Islands 10
Adulis 104, 115, 123
adzes 15
Aegean 83, 85
naval warfare 595
Syros island 873
Afghanistan 54, 57, 59, 202
lapis lazuli 62
Afonso de Lorosa, Pedro 576–7
Afonso V of Portugal 504, 505, 506, 507
Afriat, Aaron 839
Africa 500–503
boats 502
and China 265–7
coastal exploration by Vivaldi brothers 471
and copper 503
east xx, 61, 62, 90, 104, 109, 122, 123, 162, 182, 254, 540, 545–6 see also
Eritrea; Ethiopia/Ethiopians; Madagascar; Mauritius; Mozambique;
Somalia; Austronesians on coast of 132; Axum see Axum; coast 47, 61,
132; and East Indies 548–9; and Madagascar 759; and the Portuguese
540, 543, 545–6, 547, 548–9; sorghum 114
gold see gold: African
Greek settlers 841
Horn of 266
Maghrib 478, 839, 885
mulatto population 503
and Muslims 500, 502
Operation Torch in north Africa 890
and the Portuguese 465, 476, 490, 501–14, 540, 543, 545–6, 547, 548–9;
and the Danes 718–19; and gold 471–4, 501, 502; and slavery see
slavery/slaves: and the Portuguese; and Swahili Coast 545–6
pottery/ceramics 492
raiders 548
and the slave trade see slavery/slaves
south 514, 566, 569, 578 see also Cape of Good Hope; and da Gamba 539–
40
South see South Africa
sub-Saharan 465, 472, 501, 834, 840; gold 472, 501; slaves 471, 583–4
trade see trade: African
 trans-Sahara caravan traffic 475, 834
west 398, 500, 501–7, 702 see also Elmina; Ghana; Guinea; and the Danes
712, 716, 717–22; and Dominican DNA 583; Dutch in 686; Gold Coast
686, 718–19; and maize 752; Mina coast 506–8; Mogador as a gateway
to 840; Portuguese trading stations 683, 753–4; and the Swedes 716–17
Agamemnon, SS 865
Agatharchides of Knidos 97
Agricola 344
agriculture/farming
Dutch 675–6
Hawai’ian 26–7
Icelandic 385
irrigation see irrigation
Mesolithic 305
Neolithic 307
in Pacific islands 12
tools 221
agronomy, Lapita 12
Aguado, Juan 528
Ahab 82
Ahaziah, son of Ahab 82
Ahutoru, Tahitian prince 811–12, 813
Ainus 797, 809
aircraft 898
anti-aircraft guns 889
effect of safe jet traffic on passenger shipping across oceans 879–80, 898–
9
limitations as cargo vessels 901
and Second World War 887, 888, 889, 891
airlines 898–9
airships 898
Ajanta caves, India 129
Ajax, SS 865
Akkad 57, 62
Akkadian 55
Ala-uddin, sultan 689
Alagakkonara of Ceylon 262–3
Åland 874
Åland Islands 366, 873–6
Alaska 254, 255, 399, 786, 791, 795, 797, 903
and the Russians 804, 805–6, 807–8, 809, 816, 903
Albuquerque, Afonso de 598–9, 600–601, 602–3, 606
Alcáçovas, Treaty of 505
Alcatrázes 491
alder 339
Aleppo 598
Aleutian Islands 786, 793, 797, 804, 805
Alexander VI, Pope 407, 537
Alexander the Great 46, 89, 90, 93, 282, 289
Alexandria 93, 99, 115, 188, 265, 266, 495, 544, 567, 594, 603, 838, 872
and Indian Ocean 96, 103, 187
library 97
and the spice trade 595, 600, 601, 604, 669
steam packet between England and 848–9
and Suez Canal 848–9, 851
taxation by Mamluks in 595
and Venetians 460, 601
Alfonso V of Aragon 512
Alfonso VIII of Castile 471
Alfred, king of Wessex 357, 361
Alfred Holt & Co. see Blue Funnel Line
Algarve 467, 468, 477, 478, 485, 497–9
Algeciras 475, 478
Algeria 477
Ali, Muhammad, of Egypt 848, 849
Alkaff family 823–4
Allure of the Seas 900
Almeida, Francisco de 547, 568, 600, 602
Almohad caliphs 175, 468
almonds 114, 178, 429, 492, 839
Almoravids 501
aloes 153, 194
Als island 342
Alva, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of 673
Amalfi 243
Amazons 581
amber 337–8, 339–42, 472
Baltic 337, 338, 441, 701
beads 339
Jutish 337, 339
and North Sea 337–8, 339
ambergris 180, 467, 766
Amboyna island 615, 689–90, 714
massacre 690
Ambrose, Christopher 455
American Revolution 721–2
and Boston Tea Party 784
Americas see Central America; North America; South America; United
States of America
Ammianus Marcellinus 347
Amoy 826
‘Amr ibn Kulṯum 94
Amsterdam 643, 673, 674, 676, 677, 679, 682, 702, 780, 839
archives 634
Armenians 708
immigrants 677
Long-Distance Company 684
New Christians of 693, 700, 708
and New Julfans 706, 708
Portuguese merchants in 684, 685, 705
printing press 708
Sephardim 701, 702, 704
amulets 179, 398
Amun-Ra (god) 76
Amundsen, Roald 871
Amur River 801, 806
Anatolia 54
anchorites 381, 413
Anconi of Kilwa 547
Ancuvannam 183
Andalusia 467, 505, 656
 silks 623
Andamans 43, 260–61
Andouros 111
Andrew of Bristol 570
Angkor, Cambodia 50, 158, 249–50
Angkor Wat temples 140
Angles 344, 347, 348, 352
Anglesey 313, 377
under Norse rule 378
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 357–60
Anglo-Saxons 347, 349–50, 352, 357, 363
Anglo-Saxon England 347, 349, 355–6, 357–62
literature 318, 348, 349–51, 366–7
shipping 349–51
trade 355
and Vikings 357–62
Ango, Jean the Elder 562
Ango, Jean the Younger 562
Ango family of Dieppe 562
Angola 503, 593, 701
Angra, Azores 488 750, 751, 752
Annals of Ulster 372
Annam 239, 255, 260
Anne (cog) 460
Annia family 116
Annunciada 545
Ansip, Andrus 419
Antarctic Ocean xxii, 655
Anthony of Padua, St 697
anti-aircraft guns 889
anti-Semitism 697, 700, 855, 884
Antigua 768
Antilles
Greater 520 see also Cuba; Hispaniola; Jamaica; Puerto Rico
Lesser 520, 767–8, 772 see also Barbados; Trinidad
Antiochos III 94
Antwerp 438, 441, 545, 600, 606, 643, 669–76, 701, 880
 banks 673
Bourse 669, 672
Charles V and the banks of 673
and copper 672
English decline in trade with 673
English Merchant Adventurers in 669, 672–3
and Hansards 673
merchants in 672–3; from Bruges 668–9
and the Portuguese 545, 600, 617, 668, 669, 672, 673
printing 672
and the rise of the Dutch 669–76
and silver 668, 672
and south German businessmen 672
and the Spanish 673
spice market 579, 600, 614, 615, 617, 668, 669–72
and Venetians 669–70, 672
Aotea 38
Aotearoa see New Zealand
apples 114
Aqaba, Gulf of 73, 88
Aquinas, Thomas 499, 680
Arabia 52, 71–3, 76, 82, 85
aridification 52
Hadhramawt 128
incense 94, 115
Indian embassies to rulers of south Arabia 129
and opium 825
Sabaea 96
south Arabian pottery 88, 129
and Thaj 94
Zheng He in 265
Arabian Gulf see Persian/Arabian Gulf
Arabian Nights 171
Sinbad the Sailor 133, 156–7, 171
Arabs
of Arabia 52 see also Arabia; and Mouza 105
Bosi see Bosi/Po-ššu
 of Egypt 52
invasion of Persia 170
and Madagascar 132
merchants see merchants: Arab
pan-Arabian alliance attempts 605
pirates 130
ships 130, 131, 545–6, 549
in Singapore 823–4
Six-Day War (1967) 896
and Śri Vijaya (Zabaj) 155–8
and Thaj 94
Aragon 468
and Algeria 477
Aran Islands 382
Arawaks 520, 521 see also Taíno Indians
Archangel 677–8, 706
Arctic 655–60
ice 339, 655, 657, 660, 661, 664
Arctic Ocean xxii, 655–67, 801
and the Danes 666–7
and the Dutch 660–61
and the English 657–60, 662–6
and Muscovy Company 659–60, 662
Arellano, captain 615–16
Arezzo 120
Argentina 880
Arguim 501, 502
Argyré 134
Arikamedu 116, 119–21
Arison, Ted 899–900
Aristotle 90
Armenians 619, 705–8, 789, 823, 841, 873
Armitage, David xx
Armorica
axes 320
Veneti 330
aromatics 47, 71, 76, 79, 93, 97, 99, 157, 239–40, 273 see also incense;
perfumes
aromatic woods 80, 233, 278, 648 see also sapanwood
Arosca, king 559
Arrian 90–91
arsenic 185
Arsinoë 88
artichokes 170
asbestos 139
Ascension Island 755
ascorbic acid 573
Ashab Mosque 244
Ashikaga shoguns 219, 220, 231
Aso, Mount 196
Aspinall, William 852
Assyrians 55, 61, 323
Astakapra/Hathab 129
Astor, John Jacob 796
astrolabes 544
Atlantic Ocean
Almohad–Portuguese battles in 468
Atlantic Bronze Age 303, 314–25
Atlantic historians/‘Atlantic history’ industry xx, 299
Bristol sailors in 463
businessmen funding transatlantic voyages 525–6
and ‘Celts’ 302
container shipping 901–5
and the Danes 712
Dias’s discovery of link with Indian Ocean 514, 536, 537
‘extensions’ see Baltic; Caribbean; North Sea
in First World War 882
Iron Age 325–38
islands 481–96, 501–2, 745–58 see also specific islands by name;
Macaronesian see Macaronesia
Madagascar as link with Indian Ocean 758, 780
and Mediterranean see Mediterranean: and Atlantic Ocean
and Mesolithic cultures 304–7
 Muslim fleets in 465–7
and Neolithic communities 299, 307–14
passenger traffic across 860, 869
Portuguese and Spanish sparring for control 526
and ‘processual’ archaeologists 301
promontory forts 328–9
and Pytheas 334–8
sea level changes 303
and Second World War 890
tides 306, 336
and Tordesillas Treaty 537
trade see trade: Atlantic
trade networks see trading networks: Atlantic
transatlantic air services 898–9
transatlantic cables 864
transatlantic trade routes 562–4, 606
transatlantic voyages to reach the ‘Indies’ 517, 522–35, 537, 550–64, 566–
8, 571–2
and ‘the Western Seaways’ 299
winds xv, 302, 304, 333, 389, 538, 558, 735–6, 751
Atlas Mountains 468
Atlasov, Vladimir 800
Atrahasis 67
aubergine 178
Aubert, Jean 562
Auðun 401–2
Augsburg 672, 675
Augustinians 615, 640
Augustus Caesar 102, 106
Aurora 839
Australian continent 6, 727–44
Aborigines see Aborigines
and Ålanders 875
on Dieppe maps 733–4
the Dutch and ‘New Holland’ 733, 735–43
and the English 737
New Guinea see New Guinea
 New South Wales 813
Pleistocene 6–7
and the Portuguese 733, 734, 735
and Second World War 887
Spanish search for southern continent 729–32
stone fish traps 9
Tasmania 7, 741–2, 743
Terra Australis speculation 718
Austrialia del Espiritú Santo 732
Austronesian languages 3–4, 12, 16, 27, 131
Austronesians, and Madagascar xxi
Avalokitesvara statue 159
Avienus 332–4
Aviz dynasty 469, 474
Axelson, Eric 514
axes 7, 194, 312, 810
Armorican 320
Carp’s Tongue 324
currency 320
‘median-winged’ 319–20
Mycenaean copper axe 314
palstave 319, 320
socketed 320
Axum 104, 111, 122, 123, 130
coins 167
pottery 115, 167
Ayaz, Malik 602
Aydhab 175–6
Ayla (Aqaba–Eilat) 115, 167
Ayutthaya/Ayudhya 276–9, 290, 706
‘Azafids 475
Azambuja, Diogo de 508, 509
Aznaghi 501
Azores xxi, 471, 486–8, 593, 745, 750–52, 840
and Atlantic/global trading networks 750–51, 752
and the English 750–51
and Flemings 481
 Jews 840
and New England 750–51
slaves 497
wheat 752
wine 751
Aztecs 618, 635

Bab al-Mandeb 180

Strait 78, 104
baboons 76
Babylon 88, 91, 93
Babylonia 47, 50, 85, 94
Cyrus’s conquest of 85
great flood myth 56, 67
world map 50
Babylonians 50, 55
bacalao 752
Bạch Đầng 228
Badang (giant) 288
Baffin Island 393, 399, 407, 663
Baghdad 170, 172, 173, 188, 841
Bahadur Shah of Gujarat 605
Bahamas 527, 554
depopulation 531, 582
and piracy 765
trade network 520
Bahrain 52, 54, 65, 66, 67, 244, 598, 599
Qala’at al-Bahrain 65–6
Baiões 323–4
Baitán 382
Balboa, Juan Núñez de 565
Balboa, Vasco Núñez de 563
Balboa (town), Panama 858
Baldridge, Adam 760–61
Bali 146, 280
Baltic 299, 303, 342, 353, 364
amber 337, 338, 441, 701
 conquest and transformation in 13th century 420–22
and the Danes 421, 713, 714, 715–16, 721–2
‘Drive to the East’ 418, 425
and the Dutch 675, 676, 677, 685, 686
and England 367, 452–3
exotic goods 716
Hansa members 433–6
herring 430, 436, 451, 674
and ‘Mediterranean of the North’ 415 see also Hansa, German
merchants 367
and North Sea xxii, 365, 366
paganism 421–2
pitch 721
and Russia 802, 807, 809
rye 420, 428, 439, 444, 675, 676, 682
and silver 364
and the Swedes 421, 422, 677
tar 721
trade see trade: Baltic
Viking raids 362, 365
Vitalienbrüder harassment 447
‘Wendish’ 433
Baluchistan 91
bamboo 12, 122
bananas xxiii, 12, 620
bandits 138, 175–6, 262
Banks, Joseph 3, 743, 812
Bantam, Java 688, 689
Bantam island 736
Bantus 131, 132
Baranov, Alexander 816
Barbados 701, 749, 761–2, 766, 767–8, 769, 772, 774
Bridgetown see Bridgetown, Barbados
workers on Panama Canal 859
Barbar 66
Barbarikon 107, 108, 124
Barbarossa, Hayrettin 607
Barbary Company 657
Barbary corsairs 607, 718, 764, 782
Barcelona 440, 455, 470, 475
Bardi family 526, 533
Barents Sea 658, 678
Barentsz, Willem 660–61, 678
barges 343–4
Baribatani 182
bark boats 9
barley 58, 62, 70, 92, 381, 385, 390, 444, 562
Barros, João de 508, 509
Barus 160, 164
Barygaza 103, 105, 107–8, 124, 128, 138, 185–6
Basques 455, 459, 708
sailors 404, 469, 477, 570
ships 459, 470
Basra 172, 598, 604, 606, 831
Batavia 738–41, 743
Batavia/Batavians 345, 690, 692, 736, 818, 823
steamship link with Singapore 868
Bates, Edward 861–2
Bates, Sir Percy 886
Bayeux Tapestry 371
Bayonne, France 685–6, 701
bdellium 71, 106, 107
beans 177, 246, 492, 604, 643–4
mung 114
soya 648
bears 408
fur/skins 406, 408
polar 391, 397, 401–2, 408, 534
Beaujard, Philippe 132
Beauport monks 562
Bede 353
Bedouins 595
beef 112, 590, 591, 664
beer 431, 432, 462, 664, 760, 761, 901, 902
beetroot 431
Behaim, Martin 572
globe 525, 572, 655
Beijing 254, 261, 265, 267, 636, 827
Beirut 495, 544, 567, 594, 601, 604, 669
Belém 480
Belfast 869–70, 899
Belgium
Flanders see Flanders
railways 880
Belitung wreck 162–4, 165
ben Yiju, Abraham 182, 184–6
ben Yiju family 184
Bencoolen, Sumatra 761, 820
Bengal 255, 269, 562
opium poppy fields 825
Benin 506
Benin City 506
Bensaúde, Elias 840
Bensaúde family 840
benzoin resin 153
Beowulf 318, 348, 350–51, 366–7
Berardi, Giannetto 525
Berbers 468, 472, 836
Muslim Tuareg 500
Sanhaja 501
slaves 502
Berenice (daughter of Herod Agrippa) 113
Bereniké Troglodytika xviii, 52, 78, 103, 110–23, 179
Bergen 390, 391, 403, 415, 461, 721
Bryggen (wharves) 443, 445, 446
and Hansards 418, 419, 443–6
Norwegian community in 443–4
women 446
Bering, Vitus 802–3
Bermuda 766
Bertoa 560–61
beryl 99, 118
Beth-Horon 83
Beukelszoon, Willem 430, 436
Bevin, Ernest 893
Bezborodko, Alexander Andreyevich 805
Bia-Punt 79
Bianco, Andrea 524
Bibby, Geoffrey 65–6
Bible 79–84, 761, 771
Bickley, John 714
Bidya 93
Bilal 181
Bilgames 56
birds see also chicken; falcons; ostriches; parrots
catching 310
domestic 12
Birger of Sweden 422
Birka, Sweden 354, 355, 364, 365, 366, 367, 426
Bismarck, Otto von 418
Bismarck archipelago 12, 14, 15
bitumen 54, 67, 68
Bjarni Herjólfson 410
Black Death 123, 403, 405, 432, 454, 473, 675
Black Sea 346, 423, 524
grain trade 872
and the Greeks 872
and Russia 802, 809
Blue Funnel Line 866, 867, 882, 887
and Second World War 890–91
Blunth, Edward 559
BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation) 898–9
and Cunard 899
boats/ships 575, 611, 868
at Aceh, Sumatra 689
African 502
Ålander 874–6
alder 339
American 785, 786–91, 792, 795, 817; battleships 856, 857, 859; Perry’s
‘black ships’ 846, 847; whalers 845
Arab 130, 131, 545–6, 549
Armada de Molucca 570–73, 574–8
and armed convoys 888
Armenian 706–7
Austronesian, with outriggers 4, 16, 133
barges 343–4
bark 9
Basque 459, 470
and Bereniké 111
Bermudian 766
bitumen-sealed 54, 67–8
‘black ships’ of Macau/Great Ship of Amacon 641–2
British: English see boats/ships: English; in First World War 882–3; in
Hawai’i 815, 817; and Nootka Sound 794; and the Russians 794; and
search for North-West Passage 795; steamships 826, 860–61, 864–9,
881, 882–3; in Victoria Harbour 826
Bronze Age 319
búzas 390–91
of camphor wood 227–8
canoes see canoes
caravels 483–4, 503, 508–9, 510–11, 512, 513
carracks see carracks
Castilian 456
Catalan 471
catamarans 16, 133, 134, 742
Chinese 137, 206, 244, 245, 247–8, 254, 255, 258–60, 268, 282, 622, 629;
fireships 637; junks see junks: Chinese; Treasure Ships 254, 259, 260,
266, 267
Chumash 28
clinker-built 343, 349, 368–9
coal supply ships 861, 865, 888
Cochin 543
cogs 354, 426, 428–9, 451, 456, 460, 484
container ships xviii, 880, 895, 897, 901–5, 908 see also containerization
with copper keel sheathing 815
coracles 331
cruising 868, 879, 899–900
currachs 331, 382
dhows see dhows
diesel-engined 884, 885
dismantled, with reuse of wood 122–3
Dutch 675, 678, 683, 740, 748; in Baltic 675, 676, 685; early arrivals in
Australian waters 736, 738–42; in Indonesia 724; merchant fleets 668,
685, 883; naval vessels 685; sunk by privateers from Dunkirk 685; VOC
vessels 736, 738–41
Egyptian 73–4, 96; royal fleets 77
elephantegoi 111
English 557, 678; Bristol ships 458–9, 463–4, 522, 532, 750; at São
Miguel in 17th century 750; slave ships 762; sunk by privateers from
Dunkirk 685
Filipino 622, 628
fireships 637
in First World War 881–3
flat-bottomed 343, 354, 800
Flemish 456
Florentine 456
French 557, 860
Frisian 354
Funanese 142–3
funerary barges 73–4
galleons see galleons; Manila galleons
galliots 641
Genoese 454
German 875, 876; in Second World War 888, 890; U-boats 881, 882, 888,
891
gold model 331
Gotlandish 368
and the great flood 67
Greco-Roman 109, 124
Greek 109, 872–3
Hansa 420, 428–9, 451
Hawai’ian European-style fleet 815
hide 67
Hiram’s ships 73, 80–81, 85
Hoq cave image 129
Indonesian 134, 285
insurance costs 685
in Iron Age 321
Japanese 212, 214, 216, 224, 225, 227, 629, 693; ‘barrel ships’ 652; junks
628, 637; in Second World War 888; and vermilion seals 629, 632, 652;
warships 883
Javanese 285, 548, 549, 606
junks see junks
kayaks 399
knǫrrs 371, 385, 390–91
Korean 206, 650–51
Lapita 15–16
‘Lascars’ manning European ships 841
with leg irons 554
limewood 339
liners 860, 869, 882, 885, 907 see also cruising and cruise lines/industry
log-boats 321
Macanese ‘black ships’/Great Ship of Amacon 641–2, 644, 645–6, 647
Majorcan 454
Malay 134, 139, 142–3
Mamluk fleet 598
Māori 742
Marinid warships 478
merchant fleets see merchant fleets/navies
Mesopotamian rivercraft 331
Mongol 223, 226, 227–8
Muslim fleets 465–7
Neolithic 321–2
Norman 561
North Sea 342–4; small ships used in warfare 342, 348
Norwegian 870–71
oak 339, 354, 369
oil tankers 897
Omani 68, 831–2
Ottoman 549; Indian Ocean fleet 605
P&O numbers during and after Second World War 896
passenger shipping across oceans affected by safe jet traffic 879–80, 898–9
in Persian Gulf 54, 67–8, 93
ploia megala from Barygaza 106
Polynesian 15–16, 19, 24, 731, 810–11
Portuguese 468, 470, 507, 513, 514, 601, 609–10, 628; Almeida’s fleet
600, 602; avoiding customs duties 745; caravels 483–4, 508–9, 510–11,
512, 513; carracks 370, 641, 643, 646–7, 679; with da Gama 537–8,
539; and expropriated ships in expedition to Ceuta 476–8; flotilla off
Bantam island 736; privately owned ships in South China Sea and
Moluccas 606; ‘ship of the captain of Malacca’ captured by Lancaster
688
and Pytheas 335
rafts, balsa wood 29
reed 28, 67–8
Roman fleets 344, 346
royal yachts 369, 816–17
Russian 794, 802, 807–9; in Hawai’i 815; at Okhotsk 806; shitik (sewn
boats) 800, 803
sailing ships 321, 865–6; Ålander 874–6; clippers 860, 866; elephantegoi
111; windjammers 860, 875, 876
Scandinavian 339, 342–3, 347, 357, 360–61, 365, 368–71
in Second World War 888–91, 896
Seleucid 93
sewn-plank 68, 131
shares in 428
in Singapore 823
six-oared 397
skin-boats 411
slave ships 510, 511, 560, 757–8, 762
Solomon’s ships 73, 81, 82, 85
Spanish: Armada defeat by English 627, 676; armed merchant fleets 704;
and Drake 665; harassing Lady Washington and Columbia 793; treasure
ships 665, 673, 686, 764–5, 851
steamships xviii, 824, 841, 848–9, 860–61, 864–73; British 826, 860–61,
864–9, 881, 882–3; and Conference System 866–7, 868; and
 globalization 877, 878; iron/steel-clad 826, 864, 868–9, 882–3; paddle-
driven 846, 867, 868, 873; screw-driven 868–9
submarines see submarines
Suione 342–3
Sumerian 57
Sutton Hoo ship 349
Swedish 875
Thai 278
treasure ships see treasure ships
uxer 474
Venetian galleys 669–72
Venetic 330–31
Viking 347, 357, 360–61, 365, 368–71, 376–7, 467
for war: American battleships 856, 857, 859; of Augustus 106; in Beowulf
351; British 361, 815, 817, 881, 882–3; canoes 21, 342; English 361;
German 888, 890 see also U-boats; Japanese 883; Marinid 478; in North
Sea 342, 348; Omani 831; Ottoman galleys 549; Portuguese 601;
Russian 794; Viking 369, 376
whalers 459, 845
wooden-shelled, covered in hide 321, 331
wrecked see shipwrecks
Bobadilla, Francisco de 529
Boccaccio, Giovanni 472, 473
Boeing aircraft 898–9
‘Bog People’ 339
boilers, copper 721
Bolton, William 749–50
Bombay (Mumbai) xxix, 604
Muslims 789
Boothby, Richard 759
Bordeaux 458–9
Bordelais 458
Borneo 142, 160, 238
Bornholm 339, 342
Borobodur 133, 164, 280
Bosau, Helmold von 424
Boscà, Joan 506
Bosi/Po-ššu 147, 161–2, 170
Boston, England 447, 450, 452
Boston, Massachusetts 780, 785, 792, 904
Boston Tea Party 784
bottle gourds 29
Bougainville, Louis de 811–12
Bounty 31
Boxer, Charles 606
bracelets 540, 754
brass 503, 505, 507
gold 509
silver 548
Brahmins 140, 144
and Faxien 145–6
and Kathāsaritsāgara 143
Brandenburg
Denmark and Brandenburg–Prussia 713, 715–16
and Guinea 716
brandy 803
brass 104, 506, 511, 754, 778
bracelets 503, 505, 507
Brattahlíð, Greenland 397, 400
Braudel, Fernand xx
Brava 266
Brazil xxiii, 553
and Cape Verde 752
and the Dutch 686, 705, 748, 772
and the French 557–60, 561
and Hamburg 880
and Portugal 541, 542, 560–61, 584, 704; and the Dutch 705; Portuguese
discovery 517; and Portuguese merchants avoiding customs duties 745;
trade 560–61, 748
slave trade/economy 490, 553, 560, 748
sugar 745, 748, 753
trade see trade: Brazilian
Tupí Indians 553, 560, 561
Tupinambá Indians 519
 and the Verrazanos 563–4
brazilwood 560, 561, 676
bread 50, 400, 620, 648
cassava 582, 585
fish meal 92
sago 576
breadfruit 12
Bremen 426, 433, 445, 449, 676
cog 428–9
Bremerhaven, German Maritime Museum 428
Brendan, St 381–2, 383
Brian Boru 379–80
bribery 155, 181, 214, 362, 507, 623, 638, 751, 855
gold bribes 207, 782–3
silver bribes 782–3
Bridgetown, Barbados 768, 769
museum 900
Bristol 453, 457–64, 524, 774, 875, 885, 887
air raids 891
merchants 534, 657
ships 458–9, 463–4, 522, 532, 750
Britain see also England/English; Scotland; Wales
Admiralty 866, 888, 889
and Ålanders 875
and American Revolution 721–2
BEF, Second World War 889
Board of Trade 850–51
Bronze Age 316, 320, 322
and China: Canton trade 709, 814, 825; First Opium War 826, 827; and
Hong Kong 639, 826–8, 893; Second Opium War 827; steamship
operations 866–7; Treaty of Nanking 826, 827; and the Treaty Ports
827–8
Christianization 347, 349
circular villages 321
and Cyprus 851
Diodoros the Sicilian on the early Britons 336
and the Dutch 820–21, 822 see also England/English: and the Dutch; and
Second World War 888
and the Falklands 795
and First World War 881–3
and France see France: and Britain/England
and Germany see Germany: and Britain
and Gothenburg (Little London) 723
grain imports 881
and Hawai’i 816
and Hong Kong 639, 826–8, 893
and India see India: and the British/English
Iron Age 328
Jacobites 723
and Java 820
labour relations 896, 897
and Macau 806
Malay Straits Settlements 822
and Malta 849, 851
Mediterranean power and influence 851
and Melaka 818
merchant fleets/Merchant Navy 871, 873, 883, 889
Merchant Shipping Act 861–2
and Morocco 657, 838–9, 840
naval tradition/power 418, 826, 881 see also Royal Navy
Neolithic 309, 313
and Nicaragua 851
and Nootka Sound 794
North-West Passage prize offer 813
and Norway 871, 888
and Oman 831; Moresby Treaty 832, 833
and the Pacific islands 810–11, 812–13
and Panama Canal 851
and Penang 820, 821, 868
and the Portuguese 841 see also England/English: and Portugal
and raiders 346–7
Roman Britannia 344, 345, 346–7, 348, 355–6
Royal Air Force 889
 Royal Navy see Royal Navy
and rubber 892
seamen’s strikes 896, 897
and Second World War 887–91
shipbuilding 869, 896
and Singapore see Singapore: and Britain/England
and slavery 347, 829, 831, 832, 841
and Spain see Spain/Spaniards: and Britain/England
and Suez Canal 848–9, 850–51, 896
and sugar trade see sugar: and Britain/England
and the Swedes 725
and tea 724, 725, 726
tilting land 304
trade see trade: British
and the USA see United States of America: and Britain
and Vancouver Island 791
Britannic, RMS 870
British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company (Cunard)
860–61, 868–9, 882, 884–5 see also Cunard
British Expeditionary Force 889
British India Steam Navigation Company 868
British Institute of Persian Studies 172
British Museum 50, 55, 174, 812
British Overseas Airways Corporation see BOAC
Brittany 301, 302
Bronze Age 316, 319, 320
Celtic language 330
and Cornwall 328
fishermen 562
and Germanic raiders 345, 346
Iron Age 326, 328
Mesolithic 306
Neolithic 308–10, 312, 313
promontory forts 328
Brock’s 889
Broighter, County Derry 331
bronze 58, 97, 108, 160, 164–5, 185
 in Atlantic lands 316
in Bronze Age 314, 317, 319–20
Buddhist staffs 164
Chinese bronzes 141
figurines 58, 326, 332
ingots 320
payment in amber for bronze goods 338
weapons 316, 317, 319–20
brooches 326, 353
Brookes, John 737
Brouwer, Hendrik 736, 738
Bruges 343, 355, 433, 438–9, 440, 441–2, 465, 469–70, 674
and Maximilian of Austria 668–9
merchants moving to Antwerp 668–9
Brunei, Borneo 576
bubonic plague 123, 403, 405, 432
Buddhism
Avalokitesvara statue 159
Borobodur temple complex 164
bronze staffs 164
Buddha relics 263
Buddha statues 146, 152–3, 164, 194, 277, 366
and Ceylon 166, 257, 263
and China 43, 137, 142, 144–6, 152, 166, 208–9, 215, 245, 263, 267
Far Eastern Buddhist desire for fundamental texts 152
and Funan 142
Great Collection of Buddhist Sutras 234
and Greek culture 90
Hinayana 203
Hinduism interwoven with 293
and the Indian Ocean 43–6, 118
in Japan 43–6, 146, 198, 199–200, 202, 215, 229, 649, 654; and Ennin
202–9, 210–11; and fisherfolk 213; and persecution 646
Korean 166, 194, 198
Lotus Sutra 199–200, 215
Mahayana 199–200, 203
and Majapahit 280
 monasteries 118, 128, 163, 205, 208–9, 218, 235, 236, 245, 646
and moneylending 214
persecution of Buddhists: in China 208–9; in Japan 646
Scripture of the Dragon-King of the Sea 205
and Socotra 128
spread along trade routes xx, 146, 166
and Śri Vijaya 152, 154
and tea 215, 216
temples 154, 164, 642, 647, 649
trade encouraged by 236
and Vietnam 142, 144
Zen see Zen
Budomel, king 503
Bueno de Mesquita, Benjamin 772–3
Buenos Aires 700
Bugi pirates 819, 823
Buka 11
Bukhara 258
Burgos, Laws of 531
burial see also tombs
in boat-shaped graves 342, 368
boat burials 348–9, 350–51, 364, 368, 369
goods 65, 312, 349, 369
Herjólfsnes graves 404, 405, 406
mass 405
mounds 65, 313
on Orkney and Shetland 372
practices 312, 325, 348–9; and cremation 317
in Ribeira Grande 491
rites 319
royal burials 287
of slaves 491
urn burials 317
Viking 368, 372
Burma 121, 706, 708
Bushmen 539–40
butter 381, 399, 444, 445, 462, 487, 664, 752
 clarified 104
dishes 715
Butterfield and Swire 866
Buxhövden, Albert von 420
búzas 390–91
Buzurg 186
Byzantine Empire 167, 601
Byzantine army 362

cables, intercontinental 864, 877, 907

Cabo Frio, Brazil 560
Cabot, John 464, 517, 522, 523, 525–6, 532–5
discovery of North America 413, 532–5; and Newfoundland 413, 522, 533
and Japan 532
Cabot, Sebastian 533–4, 557, 565, 658, 661, 662
Cabral, Pedro Álvares 541–2, 560, 602
Cabrillo, Juan Rodríguez 517, 580–81
Cacheu-São Domingos 503
Cadamosto/Ca’ da Mosto, Alvise 484, 485, 488, 502–3
Cádiz (Gadir) 81, 83, 322, 323, 332, 335, 370, 617, 764–5
and New Julfans 706, 708
Caesar, Julius 328, 330, 331
Gallic Wars 328
caffeine 711, 784 see also coffee; tea
Cai Jingfang 242–3
Cairo 171, 173, 175, 265, 500, 898
Chinese ceramics in 174
as city of Babylon 88
Jews 124, 536
Old Cairo see Fustat
Teldo in 595–8
Caithness 373, 376, 379
Calafia, mythical queen 581
Calais 455
Calcutta (Kolkata) 707, 832
Armenian printing house 708
Çaldıran, battle of 599
Caledonian Canal 848
Calicut 51, 52, 261, 262, 265, 267, 269, 540–41, 542, 543
California 517, 580–81, 806, 808, 846
gold 852–3
Callao, Peru 729
Calvinists 660, 693, 708, 741–3, 769, 825
Cambodia 140, 244, 648–9, 653
Khmer kingdom see Khmer kingdom/kings
Cambridge Economic History of Europe xxiv
Cambridge University archaeologists 490, 491
camel caravans 94, 475, 840
camels 99, 266
cameralism 725
Camões, Luís de 276
Lusiads 276, 296, 479
Campbell, Colin 723–4
Campbell Clan 404
camphor 147, 153, 184, 220, 547, 569
cloves 184
ships of camphor wood 227–8
Canaanites 81
Canada 399, 408, 565, 661, 845, 874, 882
boundary with USA 794
Canary Islands 465, 471–4, 481, 488, 501, 502, 518–19, 527, 593
and Castile 504, 505
and Havana 592
slaves 473–4, 486, 497, 499
sugar 589–90
suspected secret Jews in 697
wine 592, 688
Canberra, SS 899
candelabra 194
Candish, Thomas see Cavendish, Thomas
Canggu Ferry Charter 280
Cannanore 542, 598
cannibalism 156, 520, 526, 530, 559, 560, 563, 663, 729–30, 809
Canning, George 460
cannon 265, 457, 542, 546, 558, 602, 608, 737, 742, 756, 788, 815
canoes
Alaskan art of canoeing 797
fleet from Hawaiki 37
Māori 742
outrigger canoes of Torres Strait 9, 10
Polynesian 24, 731, 810–11; Tahitian 21
Taíno 521–2
war canoes 21, 342
Cansino, Diego Alonso 491
Cantabrians 455, 470
Cantino Map 535
Canton see Guangzhou/Canton
Canton 867
Canynges, William 460
Cão, Diogo 507, 511–14
Cape Horn xv, 572, 727, 785, 791–2, 793, 807, 845, 851, 857, 875
Cape of Good Hope 47, 254, 514, 537, 558, 567, 577, 617, 665, 687, 703,
707, 794, 845
Cape Verde Islands xxi, 483, 488–92, 558, 578, 579, 593, 631, 745, 752–5
and Atlantic/global trading networks 752–5
and Brazil 752
and the Castilians 505
Columbia in 792–3
Creole 491
and the Dutch 683, 753
and East Indies 752–3, 754
horse-breeding 489, 502
Moroccan Jewish settlers 841
mulatto population 748
New Christians 491, 702, 754
Nossa Senhora da Conceição 490
Nossa Senhora do Rosário 490–91
and the Portuguese 488–92, 702, 748, 753, 754, 841
salt 489, 683, 752
and slavery see slavery/slaves: and Cape Verde
and the Spanish 754
car ferries 899
Caramansa 509–10
Carausius 346
caravels 483–4, 503, 508–9, 510–11, 512, 513
Carbon 14 dating 30, 38, 78, 312, 354, 381
cardamom 99, 153, 157, 178
Caribbean xxiii, 299, 520–23, 555–6, 763–79
Antilles see Antilles
and Bermuda 766
and Columbus 270, 520, 521–2, 523–4, 527–8, 529, 530–31
cotton 522, 588
and the Danes 711–12, 716, 720–22, 772
Dutch raids in 772
and the English 764–5, 766–79
ethnic complexity of pre-Columbian 520–21
European migration to 766–7
gold 531, 553, 555, 582, 588–9
Jamaica see Jamaica
Kettler in 719, 720
pearls 701
pleasure cruises 868, 899–900
privateers/buccaneers 763–5, 772, 773–6, 778, 779
slavery 490, 491, 583–5, 592, 593, 720–21, 767, 769, 777
and the Spanish 520, 553, 582–93, 634, 764–5, 767, 768, 770–71; and gold
531, 553, 555, 582, 588–9; and Jamaica 771, 773
sugar 582, 589–90, 766, 768–9
Taínos see Taíno Indians
Tobago conflict 719
trade network 520, 527 see also trade: Caribbean
treasure ships 763, 764–5
and the USA 856, 857, 858
West Indies see West Indies
Carleton, Mary 778
Carletti, Antonio 618–20, 621, 639, 640, 643, 647, 648–9
Carletti, Francesco 618–22
Carlsborg fort, Guinea 717, 718
carnelian 54, 57, 59, 64
Carolinas 17, 761
Carolingian dynasty 354
carpets
Indian 548
Persian 598
carracks 370, 643, 646–7, 679
and galleons 641
Cartagena de las Indias, Colombia 697, 701, 753
Carthage/Carthaginians 81, 91, 115, 323, 331, 335
Cartier, Jacques 661
cartographers/cartography 471, 514, 524, 525, 554, 556, 558, 570, 572, 607–
10, 660, 744
Carvajal, Antonio Fernandez 769
cash 178 see also coins
Chinese 153, 172, 188, 207, 214, 218, 240, 242, 244, 245, 249, 266–7
in Japan 214
Caspian Sea 364
cassava/manioc 521, 588, 752, 756
bread 582, 585
cassia 80, 104
wood 99
Castanheda, Fernão Lopes de 512
Castile/Castilians 456–7, 465, 468, 469, 474, 475, 555
attack on Salé 471
and the Canaries 504, 505
cloth 491
and the Genoese 528
and Morocco 477
navy 528
and the Portuguese 476, 477, 478, 479, 489, 504–5, 571
castration 832 see also eunuchs
Catalans 415, 429, 454, 471, 473, 474, 491, 609, 669
world maps 500
catamarans 16, 133, 134, 742
catfish 112
Cathay Company 662, 664
Cathay Pacific 867
Catherine II, the Great 804, 805–6
Catherine of Aragon 534, 656
cattle 352, 399, 404, 405, 486, 675, 730, 759, 764, 766
on Cuba 591
on Hispaniola 590–91
Moroccan 839
cauldrons 317, 318
Cavendish, Thomas 687, 727, 756
caviar 682
Cavite 626
Cebu 575–6
cedar 73, 78, 80, 81, 122, 259
Celtic languages 317, 330
Celts 302, 363
Celtic Christianity 379, 380
‘Celtic’ identity 329–30
in Iceland 386
mixed marriages between Scandinavians and 375–6, 380, 386
and Norwegian sovereignty 378–9
Vikings and Celtic armies 379
Central America 565, 617, 851–2, 853 see also Costa Rica; Guatemala;
Honduras; Nicaragua; Panama
and gold 565, 589
and Panama Canal xviii, 847–8, 849, 851–9
and Spain 577–8
Centurión, Gaspar 588
ceramics see pottery/ceramics
Ceuta 431, 468, 470, 471, 474–9, 701, 839
and the Portuguese 476–9, 501
Ceylon/Sri Lanka xxix, 46, 111, 118, 122, 185, 254, 261, 724
Bosi in 147
and Buddhism 166, 257, 263
and China 262–3
and the Danes 713–14
and the Persians 147
and Ptolemy 118, 119, 727
and the Romans 102, 103, 727
 and silk 147
and Śri Vijaya 152
as Taprobané 109
CGT (Compagnie Générale Transatlantique) 885, 886
Chagres, River 855, 858
Champa 239, 245–6, 249–50, 260
Chancellor, Richard 658, 659, 666
Chang Pogo xxx, 204, 208, 209–11
Changan 199
Changle 268
Changsha 163
Charibaël 104
Charlemagne 354, 365
Charles II of England 720, 764, 772, 773, 774
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain 453, 556, 569, 570, 575,
577, 578, 579, 590, 611–14
and banks of Antwerp 673
Charles Martel 352
Charlotte, Queen 820
Châtillon, Reynaud de 187
Chauci 344–6
Cheddar 317
cheese 381, 399, 487, 493, 675, 752, 777
Chelmsford 345
Chen Zu-yi 261
Cheng Ho see Zheng He
Cheng Hoon Teng temple, Melaka 258
chert 15
chicken 38, 112, 132, 558, 574
chickpeas 177, 588
Chile 880
China/Chinese
and Africa 265–7
books 215, 245, 246
and Britain see Britain: and China
bronzes 141
and Buddhism 43, 137, 142, 144–6, 152, 166, 208–9, 215, 245, 263, 267
Bureau of Ortaq Affairs 249
ceramics see pottery/ceramics: Chinese
and Ceylon 262–3
and Champa 239, 245–6
Chin dynasty 239, 248–9
and Christianity 627, 640, 645, 695
cloths see cloth: Chinese
coins/cash 138, 153, 172, 188, 207, 214, 218, 221, 229, 240, 242, 244, 245,
249, 266–7
Confucianism see Confucianism
copper 238, 242
cultural influences on neighbours 189, 199–200, 215, 234, 235
and the Danes 709, 712, 714, 725
and the Dutch 823
and European chinoiserie 710, 715
and European weapons 644
and France see France: and China
and Funan 139–44
and furs 785–6, 791, 792–6, 797, 806
and gold 216
Grand Canal 254
Han dynasty 135–6, 138–9, 190, 198
herbs 660
imperial court 142, 154, 163–4, 189, 198, 215, 216, 233, 236, 239–40,
241–2, 244, 248, 250
incense 286
and India see India: and China
industrial development 907–8
and Iraq 185
iron ore 242
and Japan see Japan/Japanese: and China
and Java 163–4, 188, 244, 260, 262, 268–9, 280–81, 286–7
Jesuits in 640
jewels 562
and Korea 189, 191, 192, 198, 210, 236, 239, 244, 245, 287, 650
luxury of elite 188
magnetic compass 243, 256, 370
and Malaya 135–6, 138–9, 144, 147
and Manila 620–21, 622–6, 715, 780; foundation story 618
medicine 278
and Melaka 254, 286, 293–4, 295, 636
men taking Filipino wives 625
Mercantile Shipping and Transportation Bureau 248
merchant fleets 248
merchants: Chinese merchants see merchants: Chinese; foreign merchants
in China 238, 243–4
and Mexico see Mexico: and China
Ming dynasty 213, 219–20, 229, 238, 251–71, 278, 281, 286–7, 289, 293–
4, 617, 624, 643, 650; voyages under Zheng He xvii, 254–5, 256–69,
280–81, 293, 622, 636
and the Moluccas 574
and Mongols see Mongols: and China
Muslim communities/mosques 244, 258
naval wars 239
navy 136, 238, 239, 245, 260, 261
and North America 780–96
and Norway 871
‘One Belt, One Road’ project 908
and opium see opium
paintings 230
Pax Sinica 293
People’s Republic of China 639, 892–3, 907–8
and Persian Gulf 171–2
and Philippines 574, 614, 617, 618, 620–21, 622–6
piracy 293, 625, 867
porcelain see porcelain: Chinese
port superintendents 154–5
and the Portuguese 606–7, 627–8, 636–7, 638–42, 643–4, 652
pottery see pottery/ceramics: Chinese
Qin Empire 136
Qing Empire 801
religious eclecticism 263
Republic of China 892–3
and Russia 800, 801, 802, 806
 and Ryukyu Islands 231–2, 234, 614
sailors 135, 233, 625, 642, 732
‘Seven Warring States’ conflict 136
shipbuilding 247, 259–60
ships see boats/ships: Chinese; junks: Chinese
and Siam 262, 278
silk see silk: Chinese
and the Silk Road xx, 135–6
and silver 220, 623, 624–5, 643, 696
and Singapore 286, 288–9, 822–3
skins 107
Song dynasty 149, 154, 165, 213, 221, 224, 228, 239–50, 273, 622; Song
culture 222; Southern 221, 222, 238
and South China Sea see South China Sea: and China
Southern Song dynasty 221, 222, 238
and the Spanish 622–8, 652, 806
and spices 545, 574, 606, 643
and Śri Vijaya 149–52, 153–6, 161, 273
and sugar 238
superiority beliefs/claims 221, 236, 256; as a moral force 256
and Sweden 725, 726
Tang dynasty 142, 154, 160, 170, 192, 198, 200, 201, 203, 206–11, 215,
216; pottery 158, 163, 172
taxation see taxation: Chinese
tea 215, 246, 768, 781, 790
trade see trade: Chinese
and tribute 142, 236, 238, 257, 262, 270, 281, 293, 622
urban growth 242
and the USA 709, 781, 787–96, 893
and Vietnam 136, 139–44, 245, 257
voyages under Zheng He xvii, 254–5, 256–69, 280–81, 293, 622, 636
Wu dynasty 136–7, 142
Yuan dynasty 213, 218, 219, 221, 228, 248–9, 259
Yueh kingdoms 135–6
chinoiserie, European 710, 715
Chios 872–3
Chirikov, Aleksei 803
Ch’oe (agent of Chang Pogo) 210
Ch’oe-I 222
Choiseul, Étienne François, Duc de 812
Chola Tamils 174, 273
Chōnen 215
Christian IV of Denmark 666, 713, 717
Christianity
anchorites 381, 413
Armenian 707
Augustinians 615, 640
Britain’s Christianization 347, 349
Calvinists 660
Celtic 379, 380
and China 627, 640, 645, 695
Christian trading republics emerging 173
Christians vs Muslims in Spain 423, 468, 477
Church in Norway 390
crusades see crusades
Dominicans 554, 582, 640, 652–3
in Faroe Islands 383
forced conversion of Jews to 537
Franciscans see Franciscans
in Frisia 352
in Greenland 397, 400
Iberian Christian-Muslim conflicts 467–8
in Iceland 386–7
incense use 71
and the Inquisition see Inquisition
Irish monks 381–3, 386–7
and Japan 628, 630, 632, 640, 643, 644, 645–6, 648, 653–4, 692, 693, 694,
695; Japanese converts on Kyushu 654; missionary activities 628, 630,
640, 643, 644, 645–7; persecution of Christians 628, 630, 632, 646, 647,
648, 654
Jeronymites 589
Jesuits see Jesuits
Karelian Christianization 422
and Korea 695
 Lithuania’s Christianization 437
London Missionary Society 813
missionary activities 33; across North Sea 352–3; in China 640, 645; in
Hawai’ian islands 24; by Jesuits 628, 640, 643, 644–7; and silk trade
645–6
Muslim governments’ relationship with Christians 836–8
Nestorians 160
and Orkney 375–6
papacy see papacy
persecution of Christians see also Inquisition; Protestants in Netherlands
under duke of Alva 673
and piracy 761
Portuguese New Christians (of Jewish origin) 494, 503, 537, 609, 672,
673, 685, 698, 699–701, 702–3, 704–5, 708, 712, 749, 754, 769–70,
840; of Amsterdam, in Macau and Manila 693; in Cape Verde 491, 754;
on St Thomas Island 720
Protestant see Protestantism/Protestants
Red Sea and Jewish–Christian confrontation 130, 166–7
Russian Orthodox 420, 427, 437
and Ryukyu Islands 695
Scandinavia’s Christianization 361
and Socotra 129, 130
Syrian Christians 841
and Vietnam 695
and the Vikings 367
Christiansborg fort 718, 721
chronometers 16, 731, 812
Chrysé 110, 134, 135
Ch’üan-chou see Quanzhou
Chulan 282–3
Chumash Indians 28, 580
Churchill, Winston 891
Chuzan 229, 231–4
Cidade Velha see Ribeira Grande
cinnamon 92, 99, 194, 542, 543, 569
bark 615
Cinque Ports 456–7
Cirebon wreck 162
cisterns 99, 180
citron 178
Ciudad Trujillo 586 see also Santo Domingo, Hispaniola
clams 14
Cleopatra II of Egypt 97
Cleopatra 816–17
climate change xxii
global warming 908
cloak pins 319, 324
Clontarf, battle of 379–80
cloth
American 833, 839
barafulas 754
bark-cloth 21, 810
Castilian 491
Chinese 107; nankeen 790, 809, 816; silks see silk: Chinese
coarse 588
cotton 106, 109, 128, 184, 504, 540, 624, 715, 724 see also cotton;
American 833; calico 635, 690, 714, 717; Lancashire 866; Manchester
839, 873
as currency 754
Dutch 678; broadcloth 631
Egyptian 104
English 451–2, 459, 461, 669, 749, 750, 839; and Bristol 457–8; and
Ragusans 456
fine 58, 107, 363, 454, 457, 588 see also silk
Flemish 439, 440, 451, 470, 491
Florentine 453–4
French 470
hemp 194
Indian 107, 635, 715; calico 635, 690, 714; cotton 715; and the Danes 714,
715
linen 373, 444, 457, 540, 548, 624
at Lo Yueh 135
luxurious purple textiles 106
Mercers 669
 and Norway 391
Okinawan 234
at Omana 106
Portuguese 754
and Ragusans 456
satin 233
silk see silk
Ubaid 53, 54
woollen 353, 400, 441, 451, 866
clothes 184
African 540
cotton 540
English 660, 663
Greenland costumes at Herjólfsnes 404
linen 540, 548
at Qusayr al-Qadim 178
cloves xix, 153, 157, 233, 280, 429, 548, 569, 577, 578, 606, 611, 614, 684,
688, 714, 754
camphor 184
and Oman 829, 833
Clydeside 869, 891, 899
Cnut 361, 371, 375
Co-hong guild 789
coal 824, 841, 846, 860, 861, 884, 888
depots/bunkers 841, 846, 865, 884
supply ships 861, 865, 888
Welsh 884
cobalt 238
Cobh (Queenstown), Ireland 875
Cobo, Juan 652–3
Cochin 261, 269, 547, 568, 598, 640
ships 543
cocoa 721
coconuts 12, 20, 29, 114, 132, 178, 185, 493, 574
cod 306, 399, 420, 430, 442, 462, 463, 522, 562, 752
tax on 562
Coen, Jan Pieterszoon 690, 713, 738, 739
coffee 95, 706, 709, 711, 715, 721, 725, 831, 832
Mocca 831
cogs (ships) 354, 426, 428–9, 451, 456, 460, 484
Coimbra 467
coins see also cash
Axumite 167
in Barus 160
billon 586
in Cape Verde 492
Chinese 138, 153, 172, 188, 207, 214, 221, 229, 240, 242, 249, 266–7
copper 153, 172, 200, 207, 218, 240, 242, 249
Frisian 353, 354
gold 164, 172, 352, 478, 687, 730, 803
Greek 326
on Hispaniola 586
hoards 345, 366
in Intan shipwreck 164
introduction to India 102
Islamic 364, 366
Javanese 164
on Nanhai I 165
Newport finds 459
Norse 410
Peruvian 777
Portuguese white royal coins 476–7
for Rhineland wines 367
Roman 107, 118, 120–21, 141
Ryukyu 232
of Sasanian kings of Persia 118
silver 184, 200, 352, 353, 364, 448–9, 730, 754; American silver coins
melted down for jewellery 754; billon alloy 586; dirhams 366; Maria
Theresa silver dollars 833–4; and Port Royal 777
in Siraf 172
Spanish 586
Cologne 342, 344, 354, 427, 449
and Hansards 428, 433, 438, 441, 442, 444, 447, 448, 452
merchants of 449, 450
 Venice Company 441
Colombia 592, 697, 777
and Gran Colombia/New Granada 852
and Panama Canal 854, 857–8
Colombo, Domenico 525
Colón, Diego 555, 587
Colón, Luís de 771
Colón, Panama 854, 855, 858
Columba, St 382
Columbia 792, 793
Columbus, Bartholomew 586
Columbus, Christopher xvii–xviii, 27, 254, 256, 463, 464, 483, 514, 517,
525–6, 533, 537
Bobadilla’s arrest of 529
Book of Prophecies 729
in Bristol 524
and Cape Verde 490
and cotton 588
crusade strategy 523
and de la Cosa 554
earth size calculation 537
and gold 524, 528, 529, 531, 588, 589
and Iceland 410, 524
and Japan 524–5, 537
lack of supplies hindering circumnavigation of world 523
and Madeira 486
and New World 46, 517, 521, 582, 585, 586, 588, 589; 1st voyage 522,
523–4, 526–7, 532; 2nd voyage 527–8; 3rd voyage 528–9; 4th voyage
529–31; and Bahamas 527; Caribbean islands 270, 520, 521–2, 523–4,
527–8, 529, 530–31; Hispaniola 520, 521, 527–8, 529, 530, 531, 582,
585, 769; and Taíno Indians 521–2, 527, 528, 529, 530–31, 537; and the
term ‘Indies’ 46, 517
and Pané 521
and Perestrello family 524, 525
and Piri Reis 610
and sugar trade 525, 589
and transformation of Atlantic navigation 582
 and Vespucci 526
Columbus, Diego (Diego Colón) 555, 587
Columbus, Ferdinand 523
Columbus family see also Colón, Colombo 550–51, 555
Comoros archipelago 131
compasses
magnetic 243, 256, 370
sidereal 17
Conference System 866–7, 868
Confucianism 200, 208, 256
and trade 236
Congo, River 512, 513
Constans II, Byzantine emperor 172
Constantinople 115, 485
fall to Turks 460, 594
as Mikelgarð 362
Ottoman court 456
Venetian trade with 601
containerization 901–5
container ports 897, 904–5, 907
container revolution 880
container ships xviii, 880, 895, 897, 901–5, 908
Cook, Captain James 3, 5, 31–2, 733, 743–4, 785–6, 791, 792, 809, 812–14
death 814
journals 791, 807
and the Russians 804
Cook Islands 29
Copenhagen 701, 712, 713, 714, 715, 718, 721, 724
Atlantic trade 721–2
Baltic trade 721–2
copper 47, 58, 106, 135, 164, 477
and Africa 503
and Antwerp 672
Atlantic arc and copper ores 320–21
boilers 721
and China 238, 242
coins 153, 172, 200, 207, 218, 240, 242, 249
 and Dilmun 65, 69
and Indians 108
ingots 60, 242
and Japan 692, 847
keel sheathing 815
and Magan 57, 67, 68
Mycenaean axe 314
nickel content 58
and Oman 58, 61
oxidized 217
plates 183, 794
and the Portuguese 672
Sardinian 324
Sumatran 160
and Venice 672
Welsh 302
Copts 52
coracles 331
coral 153, 754
Corcos, Abraham 837, 838
Corcos family 836, 837
cordage 178
Córdoba 170, 175
Cormac ui Liatháin 382
Cornelisz, Jeronimus 739–41
Cornwall 302, 308, 322, 326, 330, 336
and Brittany 328
promontory forts 328
tin 302
Corsica 331
Corte Real, Gaspar 534
Corte Real family 534–5, 662
Cortés, Hernán 565, 580, 587, 611
Cosa, Juan de la 553–4
Cossacks 801
Costa (cruise company) 900
Costa Rica 529
cotton 106, 109, 128, 184, 504, 540, 715, 724, 754
American cloth 833
calico 635, 690, 714, 717
Caribbean 522, 588
Chinese 624
and Columbus 588
Egyptian 185
Lancashire cloths 866
and Liverpool 865
and Manchester 839, 873
and the Portuguese 635
Courthope, Nathaniel 690
Cousin, Jean 558
Couto, Diogo do 641
Coventry 458
Covilhã, Pero da 536, 545
Cowasjee, Framjee 824
cowries 14
shells 495, 506, 511
Crawford, Harriet 61
cremation 317
Creole 491
Cresques family 480
Crete 70, 83
Minoans 322
crocodiles 12
Croker Island 10
Cromwell, Oliver 691, 719, 756, 764, 769–70, 772, 773
Cromwell, Richard 756
Crosby, Alfred xxiii
Crown Jewels 450
cruising and cruise lines/industry 868, 879, 899–900, 907
crusades
and economic warfare against Islam 501, 523, 537, 546
and gold 481
Henry V’s crusading Military Order (Order of Christ) 481, 485, 497, 501,
749
 northern 420–21
Second Crusade 423, 468
Third Crusade 449
and trade 422; and Mediterranean trade centres 420
CSCL Globe 905
Cuba 521, 527, 554, 555, 565, 587, 591–3, 769, 774
American occupation 856
and Columbus 523
and the Dutch 683, 772
Havana’s pre-eminence within Spanish Indies 591
sugar 591
and US war with Spain 856
Cunard 867, 882, 885–6, 899
British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company 860–61,
868–9, 882, 884–5
joint transatlantic air service with BOAC 899
Second World War and Cunard ships 889–90
White Star merger 886
Cunard, Samuel 860
Cunliffe, Barry 307, 335
Curaçao 709, 766, 772
Curonian raiders 422
currachs 331, 382
currants 682, 873
currents xv
Gulf Stream xv
Kuroshio xv
down Labrador coast 464
Mediterranean 322
Pacific 16
Red Sea 51
South Equatorial 16
Cushing, John 790
Cutty Sark 866
Cyprus 70, 83, 91, 323, 324
and Britain 851
cloak pins 319
 and Ottomans 604
Cyrus the Great 85

Da Mosto, Alvise see Cadamosto/Ca’ da Mosto, Alvise

Da Qin 148–9
Däbrä Damo monastery 130
Đại Việt 228
Daia 58
Dair al-Bahri 76
dairy goods 66, 308, 432, 442, 487, 593, 675, 749
Dalma 54
Damascus 170, 423
Dana, Richard Henry Jr: Two Years before the Mast 791–2
Danegeld 362
Daniel, Glyn 312
Danish Asiatic Company 712
Danish East India Company 667, 713 see also United East India Company,
Danish (later Danish Asiatic Company)
Danish West India Company 667, 719, 720, 721
Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy 472
Danzig xxii, xxix, 425, 431, 433, 438, 441, 447, 452, 470, 685
merchants of 453
Daoism 295
Dardanelles 857
Darien Company 722–3
Darien Scheme 722–3
Darius Hystaspis 88, 95
Dartmouth 468
Dashi 153, 162, 266
date palms 53
dates 53–4, 68, 177, 178, 187
and the ‘Muscateers’ 831
Dauphin Map 734
Dávila family of Segovia 588
Davis, John 665–6, 688
Davis Strait 655
Day, John 463, 533
Dazaifu, Japan 197
de la Fosse, Eustache 506–7, 511
Dee, John 664
deer 273, 276, 306, 310, 552
hides 278
Dehua 247, 289
Delano, Warren 790
Delaware River 717
delftware 778
Delos 98, 99
Denisovans 8
Denmark/Danes xxii, 306, 339, 342, 343
African population ruled by 716
Angles 347
and Arctic Ocean 666–7
and the Atlantic 712
and the Baltic 421, 713, 714, 715–16, 721–2
boats/ships 339, 343
and Brandenburg–Prussia 713
and the Caribbean 711–12, 716, 720–22, 772
and Ceylon 713–14
and China 709, 712, 714, 725
and Curonian raiders 422
Danish coastal empire 425, 724
Danish siege of Stockholm 436
and the Dutch 685–6, 713, 718
East India Company see Danish East India Company; United East India
Company, Danish (later Danish Asiatic Company)
and the English 714, 718, 720
and the French 720
global trading network 709
and Guinea 712, 716, 721
and Hansards 424–5
and India 712, 714, 715
and Kurland 715–16
Lübeck and the Danes 424–5
merchant fleets 724
 merchants 712, 719
and Morocco 836
National Museum 398
and Norway 712
and the Portuguese 718–19
rock carvings 322
shipwrecks 357
and slavery 709, 712, 716, 720, 722
and Spain 685
and the Swedes 724
and Thirty Years War 714
trade see trade: Danish
Vikings see Vikings
and west Africa 712, 716, 717–22
West India Company 719, 720, 721
and West Indies 711–12, 713, 716, 720–22
Dent, Thomas 824
Depression, Great 883–4, 886
Deshima Island 197, 691, 692, 693–4, 695, 808, 846
Deutsche Lufthansa 898
Dezhnev, Semen 800
dhows 131, 134, 171, 545–6, 549
Oman’s ancestors of 68
Dhu Nuwas (Yūsuf) 166–7
diamonds 99, 141, 703
Dian Ramach of Madagascar 759–60
Dias, Bartomeu 514, 536, 537, 538–9
Dicuil 337, 381, 386
Diderot, Denis 811
Dieppe 558, 561
Ango family 562
maps 733–4
diesel engines 884, 885
Dilmun 56–61, 64–9
and copper 65, 69
and Indus Valley 66–7
Dingler, Jules 855
Dinis of Portugal 469, 470
Diodoros the Sicilian 111, 338
and Pytheas 336
Disko Island 397, 408
Disraeli, Benjamin 850, 861
Diu, Gujarat 546, 600, 601, 602, 604–5, 831
DNA analysis 12, 26, 27, 132, 317, 347, 386, 491
Dominican Republic 583
dockworkers 901
dodo xxi
Doggerland/Dogger Bank 303
dogs 12, 38
hunting dogs 75, 273
Dollinger, Philippe 419
Dolphin 810, 811
Dominican Republic 527, 583, 586–8 see also Hispaniola
DNA analysis 583
Dominicans 554, 582, 640, 652–3
Dordrecht 439
Dorestad 353–4, 355
Dorset Eskimos 398–9
Dorset Island 408
Dover Strait 321, 346
Drake, Sir Francis 490, 517, 617, 631, 665, 687, 704, 727, 730, 753, 770, 795
Drax, Sir James 768
Dreyer, Edward 254, 259
Drummond Hay, John 838
Drumont, Édouard 855
dry-stone house foundations 321
Dublin 361, 379, 875
Dubrovnik
and Ottomans 603
Ragusans 81, 455–6
dugongs 9, 10, 112
Dunkirk 685
Dunkirk II Marine Transgression 345
Dutch see Netherlands/Holland and the Dutch
Dutch East India Company see VOC (United East India Company)
Dutch West India Company (WIC) 683, 686
Duyfken 736
dyes 50, 194, 323, 473 see also sandalwood
indigo 107, 717, 754
orchil 474, 502
woad 455, 459, 488

Ea-nasir 60–61, 65, 68

Eanes, Gil 501
Earth Mother 312
East Anglia 304
East China Sea 198, 250
East India Company, Danish 667, 712, 884
East India Company, Dutch see VOC (United East India Company)
East India Company, English 688, 689, 691, 723, 755, 760, 761, 780, 781,
817, 820, 824, 831
and Boston Tea Party 784
and New Julfans 707
opium trade 825–6
and Singapore 819–20, 821
tea export monopoly to America 784
East India Company, Swedish 723–6
East Indies xxi, 134, 156, 723–6, 752 see also specific countries of south and
south-east Asia
Austronesians from xxi
and Cape Verde 752–3, 754
and Danish East India Company see Danish East India Company; United
East India Company, Danish (later Danish Asiatic Company)
Dias’s discovery of route to 514, 536, 537
and the Dutch see Netherlands/Holland and the Dutch: and the East
Indies/Indonesia
East Indian crew stop-overs: in Azores 751; in Cape Verde 752–3
and Egypt 88, 98, 99, 116 see also India: and Egypt
and the English 657, 687–90 see also East India Company, English
Indonesia see Indonesia/Indonesians
Magellan’s attempt to reach 569–76
 Malaya see Malaya/Malays
and North America 780–96
Philippines see Philippines
and the Portuguese see Portugal/Portuguese: and East Indies/Indonesia
and Russia 802
and south-east Africa 548–9
and the Spanish 567–81; and Manila galleons see Manila galleons
Spice Islands see Moluccas/Spice Islands
spice trade see spices/spice trade
and Swedish East India Company 723–6
wider area covered by term 46, 781
Easter Island 3, 27, 29–31
ebony 47, 57, 76, 78–9, 106, 122, 233, 265
Edo, Japan 644, 652, 653, 693, 695, 807, 846 see also Tokyo
Edo Bay 846
Edward I of England 450, 456, 469
Edward II of England 450
Edward III of England 450, 454–5
Edward IV of England 507
Edward VI of England 658
eels 14
Eendracht 736
Egbert of Wessex 360
Egede, Niels 405
Egeria 117
eggs 178, 179
Egil’s Saga 389
Egypt/Egyptians 46, 47, 91
Alexandrian Egyptians 99
and Bereniké 111
and Chinese ceramics 174, 266
and East Indies 88, 98, 99, 116 see also India: and Egypt
emeralds 174
Fatimid Empire 160, 173
under Hatshepsut 75–6, 78
and India 182–3, 187–8
Mamluks see Mamluks
 merchants 181, 182, 265
and Mesopotamia 47, 70
and Ottomans 601–2, 603
and Persia 85
Ptolemies see Ptolemies
and the ‘Sea Peoples’ 79
shipping on Nile 70
ships see boats/ships: Egyptian
and Six-Day War (1967) 896
Suez see Suez Canal
trade see trade: Egyptian
unification of Upper and Lower Egypt 70, 76
Eirík the Red 393, 396–7, 398, 400, 410
Eisai 216
El Dorado 553
El Piñal 627–8
Elcano, Juan Sebastian 569, 570, 571, 577, 578, 579, 581, 617
Eleanor of Aquitaine 458
Eleanor 815
elephant birds 133
elephantegoi 111
elephants 59, 64, 93, 96, 104, 111, 170, 266, 278, 365, 542, 833
ivory see ivory: elephant
tusks 135 see also ivory: elephant
Eliezer, son of Dodavahu 82
Elizabeth I 453, 657, 659, 660, 662, 663–4, 689, 731
1600 charter 691
Ellesmere Island 407, 408
Elliott, Charles 826
Elmina 493, 495, 508, 510–11, 560, 561, 584, 585, 686
Elsinore see Helsingør
Elyot, Hugh 534
emeralds 99, 174, 238
Empire Flying Boats 898
Empress of China 785, 786–90, 791
Endo, Shusaku: The Samurai 632
Enfantin, Barthélemy-Prosper 848
England/English
and Amboyna island 714
Anglo-Saxon 347, 349, 355–6, 357–62
Anglo-Saxon literature 318
Antwerp trade decline 673
and Arctic Ocean 657–60, 662–6
and Armenians 707
and Australia 737
and the Azores 750–51
and the Baltic 367, 452–3
and Barbados 767–8, 772
and Bermuda 766
Bronze Age 319
and the Caribbean 764–5, 766–79
cloth see cloth: English
Crown Jewels 450
and the Danes 714, 718, 720
Darien Scheme and Scottish union 722–3
delftware 778
and the Dutch 682, 687–91; and Cromwell 769; Tobago conflict 719
and the East Indies 657, 687–90 see also East India Company, English
Englishmen in Prussia 451–2
and France see France: and Britain/England
and Gambia 719
glassware 660
gold desired by 663–4
grain trade 389, 391, 444, 458
and Guinea 716
and Hansards 419, 447–53, 456, 458, 463
house of Tudor 534
and Iceland 461–3
and India see India: and the British/English
and Ireland 767
Italian bankers in 454
and Jamaica 765, 768, 769–79
and Jews 700, 769–70, 839
London see London
 and Madeira 484, 748–50
Magnus Intercursus treaty with Habsburg rulers of Flanders 669
merchants in: English merchants see merchants: English; Frisian
merchants 353; Greek merchants 872–3; Portuguese merchants 469;
under protection of Crown 469
and Morocco 657, 838–9, 840
Navigation Act (1651) 780, 784
navy: and the Anglo-Saxons 361; RN see Royal Navy
Neolithic 309, 310; descendants from 317
and the New World 557, 766–7; and Manhattan Island/New Amsterdam
690, 717, 756
and the papacy 770, 771
piracy 452, 718, 763–5, 773–6
and Portugal 465, 474, 751–2; English merchants meeting Portuguese
objections 464; and Madeira 484; Portuguese alliances 469, 474
privateers 405, 662, 730, 763, 764, 774–6
Protestant England 557, 730
and raiders 346–7
raising English flag in new lands 533
Royal African Company 760, 777
and Run 690, 714
and Russia 659
ships see boats/ships: English
silver 448–9, 451
and Spain see Spain/Spaniards: and Britain/England
and the spice trade see spices/spice trade: and the English
and St George 697
steam packet between England and Alexandria 848–9
and sugar 657, 768
trade see trade: English
Viking raids 357–62
Virginia Company 766
wheat 389, 391, 444
wool 450, 453, 454, 456, 460
English Channel 299, 319, 321, 322
car ferries 899
defence by Cinque Ports 456–7
 and Edward III’s wars in 450
Germanic raids 346
piracy 456
souterrains both sides of 329
English language 838
pidgin English 790
Enki (god) 56, 57
Enkidu 56
Ennin (Jikaku Daishi) 202–9, 210–11
Enrique (Sumatran servant/interpreter) 568, 570, 574, 575
environmental oceanic damage xxiii, 908
Eratosthenes 334
Eridu 56
Erie Canal 848
Erik of Pomerania 436–7, 461–2
Erikson, Gustaf 874, 876
Eritrea 71–3, 79, 122, 182
ermine 427, 428
Ertebølle 306
Eskimos
Dorset 398–9
Inuit 398, 399–400, 404, 405, 406–7, 408, 411
Esmeralda 543–4
Esmerault, Jean de 486
Espoir 557–60
Essaouira see Mogador
Essomericq, son of Arosca 559
Estonia 420, 421, 428
Estonian raiders 422
Ethiopia/Ethiopians 130, 166–7, 512, 536, 540
Axum see Axum
Etruria 120
Etruria, SS 869
Etruscans 326, 331, 334–5, 338
Etzion-Geber 80, 82, 83
Eudaimōn Arabia (Aden) 105–6
Eudoxos of Kyzikos 97–8
Euergetes II 97
Eugénie of France 859
eunuchs 99, 255, 258, 267, 268, 270, 293, 832
Euphrates 50, 52
European Union 419
Evans, James 766–7
Evans, Jeff 20
exoticism
exotic animals 76, 136, 255, 256 see also specific animals
exotic goods, luxuries and foods xix, 68, 114–15, 136, 174–5, 186, 215,
236, 238, 278, 280, 366, 617, 649, 660, 682, 693, 716, 780–81 see also
aromatics; carnelian; ebony; emeralds; ivory; lapis lazuli; silk;
spices/spice trade; sugar
exotic information 322
Exquemeling, Alexandre 774, 775
Ezekiel 81–2

Fabian, William 507

falcons 398
Faleiro, Rui 570
Falkland Islands 666, 791, 795
Falmouth, Cornwall 848–9, 875
Fan-man/Fan Shiman 140, 143, 144
Fan Wenhu 226
fans 216, 234
farming see agriculture/farming
Faroe Islands 380–81, 383, 386, 387, 444, 712, 721
Farquhar, William 819, 821, 822, 828
Fatimid Empire 160, 173
Faxien (Shih Fa-Hsien) 144–6
Fei Xin 256–7, 259, 261, 264, 269
Felixstowe 880, 904–5, 907
feng shui 243, 289
Ferdinand II of Aragon, king of Castile 464, 489, 505, 522, 527, 529, 530,
534, 555–6, 567–8
Fernandes, Valentim 493, 494
Fernando de Noronha island 560
Ferrand, Gabriel 148
Ferrer, Jaume 474, 500, 501
Fetu people 718
Fez, Morocco 175, 471, 475, 834, 837
figs 470, 491, 493, 756
Fiji 11, 14, 19
Filipino language 131
Finland 421
Finno-Ugrians 421–2
furs 428
Karelians 422
Finney, Ben 20
First World War 881–3
and Belfast 870
fish 11, 28, 35, 39, 66, 68, 74, 91, 112, 180, 213, 303, 306, 352, 381, 429,
431, 502, 803
bones 54, 92
cod see cod
deep-sea 34
dried 432, 442, 793
farms 26, 280
flounder 306
freshwater 306
garfish 284, 285
herring see herring
hooks 9, 15, 24, 28, 39
Japanese diet of 196
Norwegian stokffish 463
parrot fish 14
pelagic 9
plastics in fishy food chain 908
pounded fish meal 92
raw 91, 92
salmon 196
sauce, garum 112, 116, 120
shellfish see shellfish
stock depletion 908
 and Torres Strait islanders 9, 10
traps 9
tuna/tunny see tuna
fishing
and Japanese ‘People of the Sea’ 213
Norway’s access to fishing grounds 712
overfishing 908
pelagic fishing from bark boats 9
tunny 54
Fitch, Ralph 598, 640–41
Flanders 173, 240, 353, 355, 430, 431, 451
Antwerp see Antwerp
and the Azores 481, 488
cloth 439, 440, 451, 470, 491
and the Dutch 682, 685
and grain trade 428
and Hansards 433, 439
and Madeira 486
and Madeiran sugar 485
Magnus Intercursus treaty between England and Habsburg rulers of 669
and Mina 506–7
and Portugal 469–70, 474
ships 456
and sugar trade 486
flax 176, 178, 444
flesh-hooks 317, 318
Flóki Vilgerðarson 384
Florence/Florentines 440, 564
banks/bankers 450, 454
and Bruges 438
businessmen backing long sea voyages 525, 545, 564
cloth/wool 453–4, 460
merchants 618–22
Savonarola’s revolution 526
ships 456
Flores 7
Florida 554, 565, 592, 857
 Miami 899–900, 902
Florida 580
flounder 306
flour 63, 176, 177, 444, 445, 491, 493
sago 15
wheat 620, 624, 648
Formosa Island see Taiwan
Fortin, Mouris 559
Fowey, Cornwall 462
France
anti-Semitism 855
Antwerp banking loans 673
and Brazil 557–60, 561
and Britain/England: Edward III’s wars 450, 454; and Henry VIII 557;
Henry V’s wars 477; and Panama Canal 851; and Suez Canal 849, 850,
896
Brittany see Brittany
Bronze Age 314, 316–17, 319
and China 709; Canton occupation 827
cloth 470
and the Danes 720
and the Dutch 818
and the Falklands 795
Franco-Ottoman alliance 603
and Germany, Second World War 888
and Guinea 561
Habsburg rivalry 672
Huguenots 676, 696, 697
Italy invaded by 526
and Madagascar 557
merchant navy 888
and Milan 559–60
and Morocco 561
and Naples 559–60
Napoleonic Wars 712, 789, 818
Neolithic 309, 313
and Newfoundland 562
 Normandy see Normandy/Normans
and the Pacific islands 811–12
and Panama Canal 848, 851, 854–5, 858
Pondicherry rulership/base 119, 707 see also Pondicherry
and the Portuguese 561–2
Scandinavian raids on northern France 348
and Second Crusade 423
and Second World War 888
and Spain 676, 795
and St Thomas 720
and Suez Canal 848–50, 896
tin 324
trade see trade: French
trade routes affected by La Tène culture 332, 334–5
wine 458–9, 675
Francis I of France 562, 563, 661
Franciscans 537, 640, 645, 648, 653, 731, 838
and Jesuits 653
Francisco de Vitoria, archbishop of Mexico City 701
frankincense 47, 71, 76, 80, 104, 106, 107, 153, 243
duty 273
Japanese purchases of 194
Franklin, Sir John 565, 845
Franks 345, 346, 348, 352, 354, 361
and Vikings 360
Franz Joseph of Austria 859
Frederick I Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor 418, 424
Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor 398, 418, 425, 475
Frederick II of Denmark 666
Frederiksborg fort 718, 721
Freneau, Philip 786–7
Freydis 412
Frisia/Frisians 344, 348, 351–5, 674
Frisian language 352
and Haithabu 366
and Vikings 360
Vitalienbrüder in East Frisian islands 437
Frobisher, Martin 662–3, 664–5, 666
Frobisher Bay 663
Fuerteventura 472, 473
Fuggers banking house, Augsburg 579, 672, 673
Fujiwara clan 217
Fujiwara no Tsunetsugu 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 215
Fukoaka see Hakata (Fukoaka)
Funan, southern Vietnam 137, 139–44
and Buddhism 142
and China 139–44
ships 142–3
and Zhenla 146–7
Funchal, Madeira 484, 749, 750
Museum of Sacred Art 485
funerary barges 73–4
furs/fur trade 194, 198, 367, 440, 441, 712, 797
bear furs 408
in Canton 806
and China 785–6, 791, 792–6, 797, 806
ermine 427, 428
Finnish 428
and Hawai’i 816
North American/US 785–6, 791–6, 816
Russian 365, 420, 422, 423, 427, 428, 786, 804, 806; and England 659
sea otter 785, 786, 806, 808, 809
and the Spanish 806
taxation 804
Fustat (Old Cairo) xx, 160, 174, 175, 182
Ben Ezra synagogue 175
Chinese pottery at 179
Genizah documents 174, 175–6, 182, 184
Jews of 176
merchants 175, 181, 184, 187

Gabriel 662–3
Gadir see Cádiz
Galápagos Islands 28–9
Galicia 301–2, 304, 459, 461, 470
Bronze Age 317
citânias 329
megalithic culture 312
Neolithic 312
rías 751
rock carvings 322
Galicians 455
galleons 29, 771, 777
and carracks 641
Manila see Manila galleons
Santo André 751
Gallia Belgica 344–5, 346
galliots 641
Galloway 328
Gama, Gaspar da 541–2
Gama, Vasco da xvii–xviii, 490, 514, 519, 522, 537–41, 602, 755
Gambia 719
Ganges 110, 121
Gannascus 344–5
Gardar, Greenland 397, 400, 407
Garðar Svávarsson 384
garfish 284, 285
garnets 141
garum sauce 112, 116, 120
Gascony 458, 459
Gatun lake, Panama 858
Gaul/Gauls 115, 330, 331, 332, 335, 336, 345, 346
Gaza 122, 167
gazelle skins 323
Gdansk see Danzig
Geer, Louis De 717
Genizah documents 174, 175–6, 182, 184
Genoa/Genoese 188, 415, 420, 461, 465, 470, 471, 525, 703–4
bankers 590, 703
and Bruges 438
and Castile 528
 and Ceuta 475, 478
East India Company funding attempts 704
and Indian Ocean 703–4
investors in sugar trade 589–90
and Lisbon 470
and London 455
and Madeira 481, 486
merchants 470, 475, 682
and Mogador 836
and Portugal 470, 485
ships 454
and silver from New World 611
and slave trade 503, 588, 777
and St George 697
and wool 454–5
George, St 697
George, Prince Regent, later George IV 820
George 463
Germaine de Foix 556
Germanic languages 347, 352
Germanic raiders 344–7
Germany
Antwerp and south German businessmen 672
bankers 450, 579, 590, 672, 673, 675, 703
Brandenburg see Brandenburg
and Britain: and First World War 881–3; and naval power 418, 881; and
Second World War 887–91
Bronze Age 317, 319, 320
and First World War 881–3
and France, Second World War 888
German Democratic Republic 418–19, 422–3
German Hansa see Hansa, German
heavy industry exit points 880
internecine warfare in 1620s and 1630s 686
and Italy see Italy: and Germany
and Japan, Second World War 887, 888
Jews 422, 886
 Low German language see Low German language
Luftwaffe 889
and Madeira 486
merchant navy 882, 883
merchants see merchants: German
Military Orders 420–21
mines 882, 889
naval ambitions 418, 881, 887
Prussia see Prussia
and Second Crusade 423
and Second World War 887–91
Slav wars with 423
and Thirty Years War 714
trade see trade: German
transatlantic air service 898
and Urnfield Culture 317
and the USA: and First World War 882; and US immigration policy 885
Gerrha 94, 95
Ghana 492, 716, 718 see also Elmina
ghee 104
Ghent 355
Gibraltar 90, 322–3, 335, 475, 656, 801, 851
and Morocco 839–40
Strait of 323, 324, 454, 467, 470, 475, 477–8, 857
Gilbert, Humphrey 662
Gilgamesh 55, 56
ginger 12, 99, 118, 188, 429, 542, 574, 615, 640
ginseng 194, 786
giraffes 255, 259, 265, 266, 269
glaciers 304
Glasgow 869, 874, 875, 889
glass beads 288, 521, 554, 754
Glob, P. V. 65–6, 306, 339
global warming 908
globalization 877–9
debates concerning origins of xvi–xvii, 877
global economy and First World War 882–3
 and trade routes xvi–xvii, 877
and transatlantic wheat trade 878
globes 525, 556, 572, 652, 655, 661–2
glottochronology 131–2
Glückstadt 701, 712, 717–18, 721
trade with Guinea 719
Glückstadt Company 718
Glueck, Nelson 83
Goa 52, 508, 546, 599, 600, 605, 606, 617, 621, 634, 642, 645, 648, 652, 759
Inquisition in 703
Jesuits 645
goats 404, 489, 730
meat 752
milk 752
skins 473, 756, 839
Godfred of Denmark 360, 365
Godijn, Louis 676
Godmanchester 346–7
Goitein, S. D. 174
Gokstad ship 369
gold 57, 76, 106, 244, 505, 540, 547, 588, 640, 717
African 471–4, 475, 481, 484, 496, 500–501, 506; Guinea/Mina coast 507,
508, 509–11; ‘River of Gold’ 471, 473, 474, 484, 496, 500, 502, 511
artefacts found in Broighter 331
Aztec 635
bars 509
from Bia-Punt 79
boat model 331
bracelets 509
bribes 207, 782–3
bullion famine 500–501
Californian 852–3
Caribbean 531, 553, 555, 582, 588–9
and China 216
of Chrysé and Argyré 134
coins 164, 172, 352, 478, 687, 730, 803
and Columbus 524, 528, 529, 531, 588, 589
 and crusades 481
dust 207, 216, 475, 510, 531, 840
and economic warfare against Islam 501, 537, 546
and El Dorado 553, 590
and encomienda system 531
English ambitions for 663–4
‘fool’s gold’ 664–5
of Funan 140
and Hispaniola 531, 582
Inca 635
ingots 156
and Japan 194, 216, 221, 232, 524, 847
leaf 216
mining 174
and the Moluccas 611
and Oc-èo 141
of Ophir 80–81, 82
in Philippines 574
and the Portuguese 471–4, 501, 502, 506, 507, 508, 509–11, 546, 548, 560,
635, 652; funding imperial expansion 511; gold funding imperial
expansion 511
of Ptolemy’s Syria 97
in Red Sea 176
Roman 108
and Russia 801, 802, 803
and Singapore/Temasek 286
and slavery 582
and Sofala 548
and Solomon 81
and the Spanish 531, 553, 555, 582, 588–9, 729
and Śri Vijaya 153
tribute 546
Viking raids on 362
Welsh 302
Golden Hind 665
Gomes, Diogo 488
Gomes, Fernão 504, 506
Gonneville, Binot Paulmier de 557–60
Gonville Hall, Cambridge 669
gooseberries 114
Gothenburg 717, 722, 723, 724, 725
archipelago 726
‘Little London’ and the British 723
Reformed Church 723
Gotland 353, 357, 366, 367, 368, 418, 419, 423, 424, 425, 427, 437, 448
Bronze Age 368
Gotlanders’ Saga 368
Gouvea, Francisco de 653
Graf Spee 888
grain trade xix, 57, 104, 106, 238, 276, 352, 432, 442, 444, 470, 860 see also
barley; maize; millet; rice; rye; wheat
Ålander 874–6
Black Sea 872
British imports 881
and Ceuta 475, 478
and the Dutch 428, 675, 676–7
English 389, 391, 444, 458
grain surpluses 50
and Hansards 428, 429
and Iceland 390–91
Santo Domingo imports from Spain 587–8
Spanish 587–8
Gran Canaria see Grand Canary
Gran Colombia 852
Granada 475, 476, 477, 485
Grand Canary (Gran Canaria) 472–3, 501, 505
grapes 114
graves see burial; tombs
Gray, Robert 793, 794
Great Britain see Britain
Great Britain, SS 864
Great Chronicle of London 533
Great Collection of Buddhist Sutras 234
Great Depression 883–4, 886
Great Eastern, SS 864
Great Gift 773
Great Northern War 802
Greece/Greeks
Alexandrian Greeks 99
and Bereniké 111
Buddhism and Greek culture 90
coins 326
Greco-Roman merchants see merchants: Greco-Roman/‘Roman’
Greek pirates 130
Greek towns in northern Italy 334–5
and Hellenization 46, 93
Ionia see Ionia
maritime trade from 19th century 872–3
Massalia and Greek travellers 331–2
Mycenaeans see Mycenaeans
and Persia 85
pottery 94, 323
settlers in Africa 841
ships 109, 872–3
and Socotra 129–30
trade routes of Bronze Age Greece 314
Greek language 111
of Socrotans 130
Greene, Daniel 795
Greenland xix, xxi, 362, 380, 393–409, 721
Black Death in 405
Christianity 397, 400
Corte Real’s rediscovery 534
Eastern Settlement 397, 399, 400, 404, 406
Eskimos: Dorset 398–9; Inuit 398, 399–400, 404, 405, 406–7
falcons 398
hunting 397
and Iceland 393–8, 400–402
named Labrador 534–5
Norse discovery and settlement 393–402, 403–7, 655
and Norway 712
 paganism 400
Southern Settlement 397
trade 398, 402–4, 407, 408
Western Settlement 397, 404, 408
women 406
Greenlanders’ Saga 407, 409, 410–11, 413
Greifswald 418, 426
Gresham, Sir Thomas 669
Gresham College 669
Grijalva, Juan de 614
Grim Kamban 380
Grimaldo, Juan Francisco de 588
Grotius, Hugo 679–82, 773, 822
Guadeloupe 768
Guam 573–4, 856
Guanches 472, 488
Guangdong 159
Guangzhou/Canton xxix–xxx, 136, 138, 147, 149, 163, 164, 172, 199, 240,
243–50, 636–7, 640, 642, 723, 725, 814
and the British 709, 814, 825
‘Canton System’ 789
and Empress of China 785, 786–8
and the French 827
and furs 806
Hoppos 789
merchants in 824, 825
and New Julfans 706
North American trade with 786–91
and opium 825–6
and West Indies 711–12
Guatemala 581
guavas 644
Guðrið, wife of Þorfinn Karlsefni 411, 412, 413
Guðroð Crovan 378
Guðrum 361
Guerra, Luis 553
Guerra brothers 553
guilds, merchant 183, 184, 213, 249, 355, 669, 789
Guinea 504–8
and the Brandenburgers 716
coast 489, 490, 504, 505–12, 545, 669, 702, 712, 716, 718; Carlsborg fort
717, 718
and the Danes 712, 716, 721
and England 716
and France 561
and the Portuguese 504–8, 754
scramble in 17th century for 716–19
and the Spanish 754
and the Swedes 716, 718
trade see trade: Guinea
trading stations 716
Guinea Bissau 504
Gujarat/Gujaratis 51, 602, 604–5
Diu see Diu, Gujarat
Gulden Zeepaert, ’t 741
Gulf Stream xv
gum arabic 839
Gunnbjorn Ulf-Krakuson 396
Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden 716, 717
Gwadar, Oman/Pakistan 829
Gypsies 46

Habsburgs 439, 604, 703

Angra’s Spanish Habsburg fortifications 752
and France 672
Magnus Intercursus treaty between England and Habsburg rulers of
Flanders 669
and New Christians 702, 704–5
Portuguese 1640 rebellion 705
and São Felipe, Cape Verde 753
southern Netherlands transfer from Spanish to Austrian Habsburg rule 722
in Spain 614, 764–5
Hacho, Mount 474, 475, 478
Hadhramawt, south Arabia 128
hairstyles 170
Haithabu 365–7, 371, 421
Haiti 527, 685 see also Hispaniola
Hakata (Fukoaka) 196, 212, 224, 652
Hakata Bay 196, 197, 215, 216–17, 223, 224, 225
Hakluyt, Richard 658
Hakusuki, battle of 192
Halley, Edmund 750
Hallstatt culture 326, 330, 331–2
Hamburg 424, 437, 445, 449, 673, 676, 702, 712, 880
Chilehaus 880
and Portuguese Jewish merchants 701
and Second World War 891, 892
Sephardim 701
trading links with South America 880
Hamburg–Amerika Line 869
Hamilton, Alexander 818–19
Hamwih (Southampton) 353
Hangzhou (Quinsay) 221, 224, 226, 238, 239, 240, 245, 248, 250
Hannibal 845
Hanoi 138
Hans, king of Denmark 464
Hansa, German xxii, 403, 415–31, 432–46, 668
and Antwerp 673
Baltic members’ importance 433–6
and Bergen 418, 419, 443–6
and Bruges 433, 438–9, 440, 441–2
cogs 426, 428, 451
and Cologne 428, 433, 438, 441, 442, 444, 447, 448, 452
Diets (Hansetage) 420, 432–6, 437, 453
and the Dutch 425, 428, 668, 674–5, 676, 683; conflict with Spain 685
and England 419, 447–53, 456, 458, 463
‘Hanseatic League’ 419, 432–3, 452
and herring 674
and Iceland 461–3
Kontor 440, 444, 445, 446, 447–8
and Norwegians 442–6
 and Portugal 431, 477
post-plague ‘Hansa of the Towns’ 432–6
Prussian members 452
and Teutonic Order 420–21, 428, 436, 437, 441, 452
trade routes 424–5, 438
HAPAG 881, 885, 886, 891, 904
Harald Fairhair 362–3, 373, 380, 384, 385–6, 389, 401, 402
Harald Hardraða 361–2, 377, 378
Harali 57
Harappā 63
Harland, Edward 870
Harland and Wolff shipyard, Belfast 870, 899
Harold Godwinsson 362
harpoons 28, 304, 399
Harris, William xxiii
Harrison, John, chronometer 812
Hartog, Dirk 736
Harun ar-Rashid 170, 365
Hasekura Tsunenaga 632
Hastings, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st Marquess of 821
Haswell, Robert 793
Hathab/Astakapra 129
Hatshepsut/Hashepsowe, Queen 75–6, 77, 78, 82
Havana xviii, 591–3, 617, 701, 754
Hawai’ian islands xxiii, 3, 20–21, 25–7, 810, 813–17, 859
agriculture 26–7
first settlers 24
Kaua’i 25, 814, 815
and Māori language 132
and Marquesas 24, 30
O’ahu 24, 25, 814, 816
pineapples 859
sweet potatoes 29
and the USA 816, 817, 856, 859
Hawaiian Citizen 903
Hawaiki 5, 33, 34, 35–6, 37–8
Hayam Wuruk of Majapahit 280
Hayes’ Island 739–40
hazelnuts 114
Hazor 80
Heaney, Seamus 351
Hebrides 328, 377, 378
Viking raids 372
Hedeby see Haithabu
Heian see Kyoto/Heian
Hekataios 88
Hellenization 46, 93
Helluland 409
Helsingborg 425
Helsingør (Elsinore) castle 713
Helsingør narrows 685
hemp 194
Henriques, Moses Josua 719
Henry I of Schwerin 425
Henry II of England 458
Henry III, Holy Roman Emperor 402
Henry III of England 450, 469
Henry IV of England 452
Henry V of England 476, 477
Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor 449
Henry VII of England 526, 532–3, 534, 557
Henry VIII of England 557, 656
Henry the Impotent, king of Castile 504–5
Henry the Lion 424, 425, 427
Henry of Navarre 676
Henry the Navigator, Prince Henry 431, 465, 469, 476, 478, 479–80, 481,
484, 485, 499, 501, 502, 503, 514
and the Azores 487, 488
Belém statue 480
and Madeira 484, 485
hens see chicken
Herjólfsnes, Greenland 404, 405, 406, 410
Hermapollon 112–13
Herodotos 88–9, 90, 334
herring 306, 420, 426, 428, 429–30, 436, 451, 562
Baltic 430, 436, 451, 674
and the Dutch 668, 674, 683, 685
North Sea 430, 436, 674
Heyerdahl, Thor 27–30, 299, 727
Heyn, Piet 686
Heysham, Robert 749
Heysham, William 749
hides see skins/hides
Hideyoshi Toyotomi 628, 629, 630, 646–7, 649, 651–3
Dutch merchants in 650–51
Himilco 333
Himyar 122, 123, 166–7
Hindenburg 898
Hindostan, SS 865, 867
Hinduism/Hindus 109, 183, 548
Brahmins see Brahmins
Buddhism interwoven with Hinduism 293
and Madagascar 759
and Majapahit 280
and Melaka 293, 295
Oman and Hindu merchants 834
and the Portuguese 547, 548, 606; Portuguese Christianizing mistakes over
images 541
and Socotra 128
and Vietnam 144
Vishnu statues 159
Hine-te-aparangi 32, 34
Hippalos 102, 109
Hirado, Japan 692, 693–4
Hiram, king of Tyre 73, 80
Hispaniola 491, 555, 582–6, 656, 768–9, 770
cattle 590–91
and Columbus 520, 521, 527–8, 529, 530, 531, 582, 585, 769
and the Dutch 683
gold 531, 582
and Havana 592
 hides 590, 591
salt 588
Santo Domingo see Santo Domingo, Hispaniola
sugar 582, 589–90, 768–9
Taínos 520, 521, 527–8, 529, 530, 531, 582, 583
Hitler, Adolf 887, 888
Hjǫrleif 384–5
Hoëdic 306, 308
Hojeda, Alonso de 534, 550, 551, 552, 554
Hokianga nui a Kupe 33
Hokkaido 191
Hokule’a 20
Holocene period 303, 304
Holt, Alfred 864–7, 868
shipping company see Blue Funnel Line
hominids, early, in Flores 7
Honduras 591, 592
honey 194, 389, 391, 444, 470
Hong-wu 256, 260
Hong-xi 267
Hong Kong 637, 639
and Blue Funnel Line 867, 891
and Britain 639, 826–8, 893
Chinese bazaar 827
Chinese settlers 827
Club 827
as a container port 904, 907
and the Depression 886
merchants 789–90, 808, 824
and Mizrahi Jews 841
opium trade 827, 828
P&O office 892
and People’s Republic of China 639, 892–3, 907
and pirate raids 867
and Second World War 887, 892; and post-war period 892–3
and the USA 893
Victoria Island 826, 867
 Wallem shipping company 890
Hong Kong and Whampoa Dock Company 905
Honolulu 903
Hopewell 706
Hoppos, Canton 789
Hoq cave, Socotra 128
Horace 170
Hormuz 8, 254, 264–5, 267, 269, 598–9, 604, 606, 608, 610, 634
Strait of 52, 62, 166, 598, 634
Horrea Piperataria 114
horses 220, 404, 489, 581, 652, 730
horse-breeding on Cape Verde 489, 502
and yellow fever 855
Horta, Azores 750–51
horticulture, Lapita 12–13
Hotu Matu’a 30
houses
circular 321, 324, 329
in circular villages 321
with dry-stone foundations 321
Inuit 399
Madeiran 484
merchant 425–6, 443, 445–6, 838
oblong 321
of timber and wattle 366
Howqua (Hong merchant) 790
Huang Chao 172
Hudson, Henry 665
Hudson Bay 408, 557, 658, 664, 665, 666–7
Huelva 319
Huguenots 676, 696, 697
Hull 447, 451, 462, 871
human sacrifice 367, 368, 730, 809, 810
Humboldt, Alexander von 852
Hundred Years War 469
Hung Wu-ti 219, 220
hunting 302, 304, 306–7, 397, 399
 in Greenland 397
grounds 404, 406, 794
by Ming emperors 256
seals 399
turtles 105
whales see whales/whaling
Hussein, sultan of Johor 821–2
Hutchison Ports 905
Hygelac 348
Hyksos 75
Hyogo 218

Iberia xxii, 305 see also Castile/Castilians; Catalans; Galicia;

Portugal/Portuguese; Spain/Spaniards
Atlantic culture of 324–5
Bronze Age 316, 322
Christian vs Muslim struggle in 12th century 467–8
circular villages 321
Iron Age 330
Neolithic 308–9, 313
pin-brooches 326
roundhouses 329
ships in Mediterranean from Atlantic Iberia 470
and Spanish Reconquista 468, 477
swords 318–19
visitors to London 455
Ibn al-Muqaddam 182
Ibn Battuta 248
Ibn Hawqal 171
Ibn Iyas 595
Ibn Sab’in 475
Ibrahim Pasha, Pargalı 603, 607
ice 303–4
Arctic 339, 655, 657, 660, 661, 664
glaciers 304
receding 908
Ice Age 303–4
 ‘Little Ice Age’ of 17th century 767
Iceland xix, 362–3, 383–8
Black Death in 403, 405
and Bristol 461–3
and Columbus 410, 524
and England 461–3
and Greenland 393–8, 400–402
and Hansards 461–3
and Norway 712
paganism 387–8, 400, 407
sagas 370, 380, 384, 386, 387–8, 396, 444; Egil’s Saga 389, 391;
Orkneyinga Saga 311, 363, 364, 373, 375, 376
tallow 721
trade 390–92, 461–3
vaðmal cloth 390–1, 403
Ictis island 336
Ideal-X 902–3
Idrisi, Muhammad al- 130, 157–8, 471–2, 475
Ieyasu Tokugawa 629, 630–31, 632, 653–4, 692, 693–4
iguanas 12
Iki island 224
Imari wares 650
Imhof family and banking house 672
Imma 353
immigration see migration
Imperator 885
Imperial Airways 898
Incas 29, 618, 635, 727
incense 71–3, 122, 243 see also frankincense; myrrh
Arabian 94, 115
Assyrian 80
Chinese 286
in Jewish Temple 80
and the ‘Muscateers’ 831
stands/vessels 80
Sumerian 80
Inchcape, James Lyle Mackay, 1st Earl of 884
India
Ajanta caves 129
and Armenians 706, 707, 708
and the British/English 690–91, 714, 851 see also East India Company,
English; and Armenians 707
Buddhist monasteries 118, 128
Cabral in 542
carpets 548
and China 125, 137, 138–9, 144–6, 147, 152, 161, 282–3 see also Indo-
China
cloth see cloth: Indian
coastal ethnic/religious diversity in 9th century 183
coins introduced to 102
da Gama in 540–41
and the Danes 712, 714, 715
diamonds 703
and Egypt 182–3, 187–8
da Gama in 543
Goa see Goa
Gujarat see Gujarat/Gujaratis
as interchange point between trade networks 187
and Japan 152
luxury of elite 188
mail sent with P&O 867
and Malaya 282
and Mediterranean 108
merchant guilds 183, 184
merchants from see merchants: Indian
Mughal invasions 604–5
Muslims in 183, 261
de Nova in 542
and Oman 831, 832
and Ottomans 603, 605
pepper see pepper: Indian
and the Portuguese 540–43, 604–5, 606
‘Roman’ merchants and southern India 52
Romans in 118
 and silver 188
and Śri Vijaya 161
steamship link with Persian Gulf 868
Tamils see Tamils
trade see trade: Indian
and Vietnam see Vietnam: and India
and West Indies 711–12
wine imports 116
Zheng He in 261
Indian Ocean 43–69, 103
and Abbasid rise 170
and Alexandria 96, 103, 187
and American ‘Red Sea men’ 781–2
and British India Steam Navigation Company 868
and Buddhism 43–6, 118
control struggle over 594–610
Dias’s discovery of link with Atlantic 514, 536, 537
‘extensions’ xxii; Red Sea see Red Sea; South China Sea see South China
Sea
and the Genoese 703–4
Greco-Roman xviii
and Gujarat 602
historic exit points 46–7
and the ‘Indies’ 46, 99, 517
and ‘Lascars’ 841
as link between Mediterranean and South China Sea 338
Madagascar as link with Atlantic 758, 780
Magellan’s experience of 568
maritime network 43, 90, 93, 124, 125, 147, 167–70, 279
Mediterranean interaction 98, 116, 117, 124, 167–70, 338, 517
Melaka as link with South China Sea 272, 295, 569, 636
monsoons 50, 51, 52, 96, 102, 171, 182, 546
navigation 117
and Ottomans see Turks/Ottomans: and Indian Ocean
Pacific Ocean contrasted with 43
of the Periplous 103–10, 116, 119, 124, 125–8, 134
and Persian Gulf see Persian/Arabian Gulf
 piracy widespread through 707
and Portugal see Portugal/Portuguese: and Indian Ocean
Ptolemy’s view of 89, 105, 496, 727
and Red Sea see Red Sea
‘Silk Route of the Sea’ xx, 265; and Singapore 281–9
Singapore as link with South China Sea 272
Spice Islands see Moluccas/Spice Islands
spices in Indian cuisine 714–15
and Strait of Malacca see Melaka (Malacca): Strait of Malacca
tides 103, 107
trade see trade: Indian Ocean
trade routes see trade routes: Indian Ocean
and the Turks see Turks/Ottomans: and Indian Ocean
and the USA 781–2, 795
winds 51, 110 see also monsoons
and Zheng He’s voyages 254–5, 256–69, 280–81, 293
‘Indies’
areas covered by term in Middle Ages 46, 517, 523
Columbus and the term 46, 517
East Indies see East Indies; Indonesia/Indonesians
spice trade see spices/spice trade
transatlantic attempts to reach 517, 522–35, 537, 550–64, 566–8, 571–2
West Indies see West Indies
indigo 107, 717, 754
Indiké 120
Indo-China 137, 147, 249–50 see also Cambodia; Vietnam
and Fan-man’s conquests 144
Faxien’s voyages 144–6
and Sanskrit 144
Indonesia/Indonesians 6, 43, 147 see also East Indies; Malaya/Malays
and Buddhism 166
Bugi pirates 819, 823
Chola and Indonesian trade 273
and the Dutch see Netherlands/Holland and the Dutch: and the East
Indies/Indonesia
Federation of Malaya and Indonesian Republic 893–4
and Madagascar 132–3
 merchants 10, 132, 165
Moluccas see Moluccas/Spice Islands
and the Portuguese see Portugal/Portuguese: and East Indies/Indonesia
and Ryukyu Islands 232
sailings between India and China 125
spice trade with Madagascar 132–3
Sumatra see Sumatra
and Vietnam 143
Zabaj 155–8 see also Śri Vijaya, Sumatra
Indus River 50, 53, 68, 88, 106–7
Indus Valley and civilization 53, 62–9
and Dilmun 66–7 see also Dilmun
pottery 62, 63
seals 63–4
and Sumer 62
trade with Mesopotamia 66–7, 69
industrialization 861, 865, 869–70, 896, 907–8
infant mortality 307
Ingolf Arnarson 384–5
ingots
bronze 320
copper 60, 242
gold 156
silver 165
tin 164
Ingstad, Anne Stine and Helge 413
Innocent VIII 513
Inquisition 491, 592, 656–7, 673, 685, 699, 700, 703, 705, 707, 708, 730,
749, 754, 769, 770, 775
Intan wreck 164–5
Inuit 398, 399–400, 404, 405, 406–7, 408, 411, 663
Ionia 82, 85
Ionian Islands 682, 872, 873
Ipswich 353
Iran see Persia/Iran
Iraq 68, 85, 164, 598
Chinese trade with 185
 Ottoman government of 831
Sumer see Sumer/Sumerians
Ubaid 53–4
Ireland
Bronze Age 316, 320
circular villages 321
currachs 331, 382
and the English 767
Irish Free State: and Second World War 888–9; and the USA 885
Irish monks 381–3, 386–7
linen industry 457
migrants fleeing famine 860
monuments 301
and Orkney 311–12
and the potato 752
promontory forts 328
trade 457
and US immigration policy 885
Viking raids 361, 372, 379–80, 381
Irian 280
Irish Channel 312
Irish Sea 313
iron 97, 104, 133, 142, 158, 185, 408, 807, 888
aboard SS London 861
early ironmaking 316
and Greenland 398, 408, 413
and Iceland 391–2
magnetized 243
and Marianas 619–20
nails see nails
and Norsemen 408
ore 242
pyrites 664–5
Spanish 455
steamships 826, 864, 868–9, 882–3
Swedish 724
technology 314–16
irrigation 50
on Hawai’i 25, 26
Irvine, Charles 723
Isaac the Jew 186–7
Isabella of Castile 464, 489, 504–5, 522, 527, 529, 534, 582
death 530, 555
Isadora, Aelia 111
Isbister, Orkney 311
Isfahan 705–8
Isidore of Seville 135, 409
Isis 122
Iskandar Shah 282, 285, 290
Islam/Muslims xx, 94, 546
Abbasid dynasty 164, 170
and Africa 500, 502
Almohads 175, 468
in Bombay 789
caliphate rivalries in 8th century 170
in China 244, 258
Christians vs Muslims in Spain 423, 477
coins 364
and the crusades see crusades
dirhams 366
European struggle against Muslim power 46 see also crusades
forcible conversion of Jews 181
Indian 183; in Calicut 261
and interest payments 837
and Ma Huan 269–70
and Madagascar 759
and Malaya 282
Mamluks see Mamluks
and Melaka 291–2, 293, 295
merchants see merchants: Muslim
‘Moors’ 292, 465–7, 537, 540, 541, 569, 617, 707
Muslim fleets 465–7
Muslim pilgrims 866
Muslims of Persian origin in 9th century 184
 and Pasai 276
and Portugal see Portugal/Portuguese: and Islam
‘purity of blood’ doctrine and hiding of Muslim ancestry 696
in Quanzhou 244
and Red Sea closure to non-Muslims 187
relationship between Muslim governments and Jews/Christians 836–8
Shi‘ite 173, 599
in Spain see Spain/Spaniards: Muslim (al-Andalus)
spread along trade routes 146, 166
and Śri Vijaya 147
Sunnis see Sunni Muslims
and Tengah/Muhammad 291–2, 293
and Zheng He 257–8
Íslendingabók 398
Ismail Pasha 849–50
Israel, Jonathan 674, 686
Israel, Six-Day War (1967) 896
Israelites
and incense 80
and Jewish Temple 80, 81
Italy 115, 240 see also Sicily; Tuscany
bankers 450, 454, 532, 590, 703; in England 454
French invasion 526
and Germany: landward connections 441, 442; and Second World War 889
Greek towns in northern Italy 334–5
and London 454–5
merchants see merchants: Italian
migrants fleeing poverty 860
and Ottomans 601
and Second World War 889
wars with Charles V 611
Zheng He in 254–5
Ivan III of Russia 677
Ivan IV, the Terrible 659–60, 677
Ívar Bárdarson 403–4
ivory 505, 547, 717, 840
craftsmen 503
 elephant 47, 59, 61, 62, 63, 76, 105, 107, 118, 121, 122, 153, 233, 265,
278, 323, 324, 398, 405, 833
and the Omanis 829, 831, 833
and the Portuguese 501, 504, 635
and the USA 833
walrus xix, 385, 391, 397, 404, 408
Izu islands 230

Jackson, Andrew 852

Jacob 782–3
Jacobites 723
Jacobsz, Ariaen 738–9
Jakarta see Batavia/Batavians
Jamaica 520, 530, 749, 761, 769–79
and the English 765, 768, 769–79
Jews 773
Miami ferry service 900
and Panama Canal workforce 853–4, 855
Port Royal 765, 769–79
silver 777, 778
and slave trade 777
and the Spanish 771, 773
sugar trade 777, 779
Jambi 160, 273, 279, 287
James I of England 690
James II of England 777
James III of Majorca 473
James of Bruges 488
church in Azores 491
Jamestown, Virginia 557, 766
Jan Mayen Island 396
Jang Bogo see Chang Pogo
Jansz/Janszoon, Willem 736
Janus Imperiale 454
Japan/Japanese 6, 190–209, 212–29
Ainus 797
archers 211, 230
armour 211
artists 200
Ashikaga shoguns 219, 220, 231
bakufu 212, 217, 222, 223, 225, 229
and ‘barbarians’ 847
on Behaim’s globe 525
bonzes (religious teachers) 647
Buddhism see Buddhism: in Japan
and Cabot 532
and Carletti 621, 647, 648–9
cash 214
Ceremony of National Purification 199
and China 135, 152, 188, 189–90, 192, 197, 198–209, 212–21, 228–9, 235,
236, 251, 287; and Hideyoshi’s assault on Korea 650–51; Hideyoshi’s
conquest plans 646; Japanese mercenaries in Manila garrison vs Chinese
626; and Philip II’s plan to invade China 627; trade 201–2, 212–20, 228,
638, 647, 649
and Christianity see Christianity: and Japan
coal 846
and Columbus 524–5, 537
and copper 692, 847
daimyos (warlords) 644, 646, 647, 650, 654
and the Dutch see Netherlands/Holland and the Dutch: and Japan
early ethnic variety 191
and European technology 847
and European weapons 644
and First World War 883
and Germany, Second World War 887, 888
and gold 194, 216, 221, 232, 524, 847
guilds (za) 213
Iki 224
imperial court 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 200, 203, 205, 209, 213, 214, 215,
217, 222, 223, 228–9
and India 152
inflation 214
Inland Sea 199, 204, 212, 218, 232, 652
inter-clan battles 219, 230
and Java 220
junks 628, 637
kami-kaze pilots 229
kaolin 650
and Korea 190, 191–9, 200, 204, 223, 225, 646, 649–51
Kyushu see Kyushu island
lacquered boxes xix, 216
and Macau 635, 638, 639, 642, 644, 654
and Manila 622, 628–30, 632, 633
Meiji regime 847, 883, 888
mercenaries 626, 628–9
merchant fleets 883, 896
merchants 189, 221, 616, 629, 630, 649
and Mexico 630–31
Ministry of Commerce 847
Mongol attacks on 221, 222–8
paintings 198
paper 200, 201, 213, 743
pearls 216, 221
peasants 213
‘People of the Sea’ 213
and Philippines 617, 622, 628–30, 632, 633, 648, 652–3
Polo’s account of 221
and the Portuguese 606–7, 628, 630, 632, 635–8, 639, 642, 647, 653, 654,
692–3; and access to Chinese silk 652; and Dutch 692–3; and Hideyoshi
646–7; and Jesuits 644, 646–7; translation of Portuguese sailing manuals
into Japanese 644
pottery see pottery/ceramics: Japanese
power fragmentation in 14th century 230, 231
and rice 808, 847
and the Russians see Russia: and the Japanese
and Ryukyu Islands 229–30, 232, 614
sake 212
samurai 223–4, 225, 644, 649
on Schöner’s globe 572
seafaring 199
and Second World War 887–8, 890, 891
 Shikoku island 218
shipbuilding 212, 896
ships see boats/ships: Japanese
shogunate abolition (1868) 847
Shōsō-in imperial treasury, Nara 194, 207, 217
and Siam 220
and silk 194, 200, 201, 628, 630, 633, 847
silver 638, 641, 642, 647, 801, 847
and the Spanish 627, 629–30, 632, 633, 652–3; and Dutch 692
Takashima 227
and tea 215–16, 230, 649, 847
trade see trade: Japanese
Tsushima see Tsushima island
and the USA 846–7; and Second World War 888
and Vietnam 632
wakō pirates 218, 219, 220, 222, 637, 638
and Waldseemüller 556
and Wallem 872
Japan current xv
Japan Sea 6, 43, 198, 200
Jardine, William 824, 825, 827
Jarlshof, Shetland 372
Java/Javans 7, 113, 154, 162, 272, 279–81, 287, 689, 736
Batavia see Batavia/Batavians
and Britain 820
and China 163–4, 188, 244, 260, 262, 268–9, 280–81, 286–7
and the Dutch 688
and Japan 220
Majapahit kingdom 279–81, 284–5, 287, 290
merchants 292
and Mongols 228, 272, 279
and Norway 871
Parameśvara and Javan rule over Sumatra 287, 289–90
Polo and ‘Great Java’ 272, 280, 734
and the Portuguese 578
and Ryukyu Islands 233
ships 285; junks 548, 549, 606
 and Singapore/Temasek 284–5, 286, 288, 289
spice merchants in 250
and Śri Vijaya 159, 160, 272–3, 279–80, 287
trade 163–4
Jefferson, Thomas 792
Jeffreys, George, 1st Baron 777
Jehosaphat 82
Jelling, Jutland 353
Jenkinson, Anthony 659–60, 706
Jerónimo de Jesús de Castro 653
Jeronymites 589
Jerusalem 460, 523, 531, 537
Temple 80, 81, 728
and Third Crusade 449
Jesuits 628, 640, 642, 643, 644–7, 648, 653
and Franciscans 653
jet 141
jewellery 141, 265 see also specific gemstones
American silver coins melted down for 754
bracelets see bracelets
brooches 326, 353
Crown Jewels 450
Lapita 15
necklaces 56, 102
Jews 52, 96
Adeni 181
of Alexandria 99
anti-Semitism 697, 700, 855, 884
in Azores 840
bankers 450, 855
of Cairo 124, 536
in China 238
and citron 178
and England 700, 769–70, 839
and flax 176, 178
forced conversion: to Christianity 537; to Islam 181
French anti-Semitism 855
 of Fustat 176
Genizah documents 174, 175–6, 182, 184
German 422, 886
Gibraltar settlement 656
impurity laws and eastern drinking vessels 174, 187
and the Inquisition 699, 700
in Jamaica 773
Khazars 171
London’s Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue 700, 838
Majorcan 480
in Manchester 839
in Mangalore 186
merchants 175–6, 181, 183, 184, 238, 354, 697–702, 834, 841
Mizrahi 841
Moroccan 697, 836–8, 840–41
Muslim governments’ relationship with 836–8
of Persian origin 184
and the Portuguese 536, 537, 697, 699–700, 701, 702, 717–18, 772–3, 838,
840 see also Christianity: Portuguese New Christians (of Jewish origin);
children from Portugal sent to São Tomé 493, 494
‘purity of blood’ doctrine and hiding of Jewish ancestry 696
Red Sea and Jewish–Christian confrontation 130, 166–7
Sephardic see Sephardim
and silk 176
in Singapore 823
in Spain 698
suspected secret Jews: in the Canaries 697; in Havana 592
Tabernacles Feast 178
Yemenite 181, 182
Jian-wen 251
Jiddah 595, 598, 602
Jikaku Daishi (Ennin) 202–9, 210–11
Jingdezhen 174
João I of Portugal 476, 477, 484
João II of Portugal 494, 496, 508, 512, 513, 514, 527, 537
John, king of England 449, 469
John I of Portugal 469
John, Prester 46, 512, 523, 536, 540
Johnson, Lyndon B. 903
Johor 239, 679, 818, 821
Jon Grønlænder 405–6
Jordan 83
Josephus 135
Jourdain, John 689, 690
Jtj (wife of Parekhou) 77
Juana la Beltraneja 505
Juana the Mad, queen of Castile 555
Julfa 706 see also New Julfan merchants
Jungdezhen 649
junks xx, 134, 137, 233, 234, 575, 637
Chinese 135, 217, 243, 246, 247, 259, 270, 278, 621, 622, 623, 624, 625,
628, 636, 638, 781, 867
Japanese 628, 637
Javanese 548, 549, 606
Melakan 643
and the Portuguese 636, 637, 642, 643
Jutes 344, 347, 348
Jutland 685
battle of 882

Ka‘aba, Mecca 163, 171

Kahiki 25
Kaiana, Hawai’ian prince 814–15
Kaifeng 238
Kalevala 366
Kalinga 288
Kalpe see Gibraltar
Kamakura 212, 214, 215, 217, 223, 224, 229
Kamara (Puhar) 119
Kamaran Island 601
Kamchatka Peninsula 800, 802, 803, 807
Kamehameha I of Hawai’i 814, 815, 816, 817
Kamehameha II of Hawai’i 816–17
Kané 123
Kane (god) 26
Kangp’a see Chang Pogo
Kanton, near Stockholm 725
kaolin 650
Karachi 63, 91
Karelians 422
Karl Hundason, king of the Scots 376
Katharine Sturmy 461
Kathāsaritsāgara 143
Kattigara 121, 143
Kaua’i 25, 814, 815
Kaundinya 140, 141
Kaupang, Norway 353, 355, 365, 390
Kawano Michiari 224–5
kayaks 399
Keats, John 565
Kedah 152, 161
kelp 196
Kemal Reis 607, 610
Kempe, Margery 452
Kendrick, John 792, 793, 794
Ken’in (Buddhist monk) 202
Kennedy, John F. 903
Kent 360
Ketill the Fool 386
Kettler, Jacob 719, 720
Khazars 171
Khmer kingdom/kings 140–41, 158
and Champa 249–50
and Song China 244
Kholmogory 660
Khubilai Khan 221, 222, 223, 224, 227, 228, 247, 248, 263, 272
Ki no Misu 204
Kidd, William 761
Kiev/Rus 365, 367, 423
Kilwa 131, 176, 543, 546, 547, 568
Kim Yang 211
kingfisher feathers 135, 139
King’s Mirror 399, 400
Kingston Bay, Jamaica 771, 778, 855
Kiribati Islands 14, 31, 614
Kiritimati 31
Kish/Qays 173–4, 180
Klysma 102, 117
knives 194
knǫrrs 371, 385, 390–91
Koch, John 330
Kodiak Island 793, 805
Kōfuko-ji monastery, Nara 235
Koguryō, Korea 192, 194
Kola Peninsula 658–9
Kolkata see Calcutta
Kollam 183–4
Komr 158
Kon-Tiki 27, 28
Kongo slaves 493, 503
Konstantin of Novgorod 427
Koptos 78, 111, 112, 113, 116
Korea
and Buddhism 166, 194, 198
celadon 232
and China 189, 191, 192, 198, 210, 236, 239, 244, 245, 287, 650
and Christianity 695
House of Li 219
and Japan 190, 191–9, 200, 204, 223, 225, 646, 649–51
Kim dynasty 193
Koguryō kingdom 192, 194
Koryō 219, 222, 223
merchants 189, 207; merchant communities from Quanzhou 245
and Mongols 222, 249
navy 650–51
North 193
Paekche kingdom 192, 194
Parhae kingdom 194, 197–8
 and Red Sea 117
and Ryukyu Islands 232, 234
ships 206, 650–51
silk 244, 247
Silla kingdom 192–3, 194, 195, 197, 198, 199, 204, 211
slaves 210
tea bowls 649
trade 194, 198, 216, 630
Kōrokan, Japan 196–7
Koryō, Korea 219, 222, 223
Kos, Greek island 116
Kosh, Socotra 129
Kosmas Indikopleustes 130
Kowloon 828
Kra Isthmus 137, 144, 273
Krakatoa 119
Kronstadt, Baltic 807, 809
Kruzenshtern, Johann-Anton von 806–9
Kulami 182
Kumiai Indians 28
Kunemura 232
Kupe, Polynesian navigator 32–6
Kuril Islands 797, 803, 804
Kurland 715–16, 719
Kuroshio current xv
Kuwait 54, 67
Kuy (war-god) 26
Kwallŭk 194
Kylsant, Owen Philipps, 1st Baron 883–4
Kylsant Royal Mail 883–4
Kyoto/Heian 212, 216–17, 218, 223, 228, 644
Minamoto assault on 230
Tōfuku-ji monastery 218
Kyushu island 191, 195, 196, 197, 204, 208, 215, 216–17, 218, 220, 652 see
also Hakata (Fukoaka)
and Hideyoshi 646
Japanese converts to Christianity 654
pirates (wakō) 218
La Gomera 589
La Isabela 528, 585–6, 588
La Navidad 585
La Pérouse, Jean-François de Galaup, comte de 809, 812
La Tène culture 326, 330, 332, 334
Labrador 464, 533, 557
Greenland given name of 534–5
lacquer 220
boxes xix, 216, 703
Lady Hughes 788
Lady Washington 792, 793
Lagash 64, 65
Lagos, Algarve 497–9, 502
Lancaster, James 687–9
Langdon Bay, Kent 319–20, 321
Lanzarote 471, 472, 473
Laodicea 108, 122
lapis lazuli 57, 59, 62, 107, 194, 202, 238
Lapita people/culture 11–16, 19
agronomy 12
boats 15–16
horticulture 12–13
pottery 12, 14
trade 15
Lapps/Sami 373, 655
larch 408
Las Casas, Bartolomé de 554, 582, 584, 585, 591
Las Coles 585
Lasa 265
Latin 111–12
Latvia 420, 422
peasants 719
Lavenham 453
Lavrador, João Fernandes 534
Lazarus, Emma 860
Le Havre 562, 564
lead 333, 640
Leander 807
leather 455, 839
Lebanon 81, 91
Ledyard, John 785
Lee Kuan Yew 894
Legázpi, Miguel López de 615, 616, 618
Leif Eiríksson (Leif the Lucky) 400, 407, 410, 411, 413
Leisler, Jacob 782–3
lemons 573, 752
juice 688
lemurs, giant 133
leopards 99, 266
skins 323
Lesseps, Ferdinand de 849, 854
lettuce 643
Leuké Komé 115
Levant Company 691
Levant trade 460–61
Lewis, Bernard 836
Lewis, David 13
Lewis chessmen 397
Liang shu 137
Libelle of Englyshe Polycye 455
Libya/Libyans 73, 79, 90
Liefde, De 631, 691
life expectancy 307
Lima 697
Limahon 625, 627
limes 573, 752
limewood 339
Limyriké 109
Lin Feng/Limahon 625, 627
Lin Zexu 825–6
Lindisfarme 360, 364, 372
linen 373, 444, 457, 540, 548, 624
Linnaeus, Carl 725
lions 99, 259, 266, 269, 276
skins 323
liquorice 194
Lisbon xxii, 370, 468, 469, 470, 476, 477, 487, 510, 545, 600, 606, 617, 648,
676, 701, 840
archives 594, 634
businessmen funding transatlantic voyages 525
Castilian siege of 476
and the Dutch 677, 682–3
investors 561, 703
and Madeiran sugar 485
shipbuilding 484
and spices 682–3, 684
unloading of cargoes in transit to avoid customs in 745, 751
Litany of Oengus 381
Lithuania 437, 452
Liubice 423
Liujiagang 268, 270
Liverpool 864, 865, 866, 868, 871, 873, 874, 875, 880, 885, 887
air raids 891
post-war recovery of shipping companies 897
and Second World War 891, 892
Livonia/Livs 420–21, 441
Livorno 619, 676, 682, 700, 772, 838, 872
Lixus 323
Lloyds 861
Lo Yueh 135
Loaísa, Garcia Jofre de 579
lodestones 243, 370
Lomellini family 470
London 419, 438, 780, 885
air raids and damage 891, 892, 896
and Bensaúde 840
and Bristol cloth 458
cosmopolitanism 455
Genoese in 455
and Greek merchants 872–3
 and Hansards 447–8, 449, 450, 453
and Italians 454–5
and Navigation Act (1651) 780
New Christians of 700, 708
and New Julfans 706
Port of 454, 839, 880, 891, 892, 896, 897; docks 904
post-war recovery 897
Royal African Company 760
Royal Exchange 669
Royal Society 792, 820
and under-sea cables 864
Sephardim 701
Spaniards in 455
Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue 700, 838
Steelyard and the Hansard Kontor 447–8, 453
tax exemptions 455
Viking raid on 360
and wool 454
London, SS 860–61
London Missionary Society 813
Long Melford 453
Longe, William 456
longitude, fixing 16, 731, 812
Loos, Wouter 740
Lopes Pereira, Manuel 704
Lopez, Fernando 755–6
Lopius, Marcus 793
Lothal 63, 64
Lotus Sutra 199–200, 215
Louis the Pious 337
Louis XI 459
Louis XII 559–60
Louis XIV 720
Louisiana, USS 859
Love Boat 900
Low Countries
Flanders see Flanders
 Netherlands see Netherlands/Holland and the Dutch
and Portuguese merchants avoiding customs duties 745
Portuguese sugar imports 669
and Spain 673, 685 see also Netherlands/Holland and the Dutch: and the
Spanish
Low German language 426
Middle Low German 423
Lu-Enlilla 58–9, 65
Lu-Mešlamtaë 59
Lu Xun 138
Luanda, Angola 593, 701
Lübeck 418, 419, 422, 423, 424–6, 427, 429, 440–41, 444, 445, 447, 449,
450, 452, 470
Alt-Lübeck 423
Bone-Cutter Rebellions 440
and Hansa Diets 432, 433, 436, 437
herring 430
Lübeckers in England 449–50
marzipan emporium 429
New Council 440–41
salt 430–31
Society of the Circle 440, 442
Lucca 454
Lucena, Vasco Fernandes de 513
Lucian of Samosata 102
Lucqua (Hong merchant) 808
Luftwaffe 889
Lüneburg Heath 431
Luo Mao-deng: The Grand Director of the Three Treasures Goes Down to
the Western Ocean 254, 259, 265
Lusitania, RMS 882
luxury goods 58, 75, 82, 139, 192, 199, 215, 217, 232, 349, 420, 427 see also
specific goods by name
Arctic 412, 414, 415
Chinese customs rates on 241–2, 273
European demand from new colonies in mid-16th century 588
exotic luxuries see exoticism: exotic goods, luxuries and foods
 and German Hansa 420, 427
and Hawai’i 816
Japan and Portuguese luxuries 647
Mediterranean 672
and Russia 802
Luzon island 616, 618, 622
ceramics 652
Lvov 708
lychees 246–7
Lydia 85
Lynn, England 447, 449, 451–2, 462
Steelyard 453
lynx 306
Lyons 562

Ma Huan 256–7, 261, 264–5, 269–70, 280

Maasvlakte 897
Mabuchi Kamo 847
Macaronesia 481–96, 745–55 see also Azores; Canary Islands; Cape Verde
Islands; Madeira
Macassar 10
Macau (Macao) xviii, xxix, 592, 617, 627–8, 634, 638–42, 648, 709, 725,
787, 808, 826
‘black ships’ of Macau/Great Ship of Amacon 641–2, 644, 645–6, 647
and the British 806
and gambling 907
and Japan 635, 638, 639, 642, 644, 654
Jesuits 645
and New Julfans 706
opium trade 827
and the Portuguese 638–42, 643–4, 787; New Christians 703
silk 640
and silver 763
and tax 639
and the USA 806
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 1st Baron 722
mace 611, 684, 703, 781
Macnin, Meir 839
Macnin family 836
Macpherson, W. J. 847
Mactan 576
Madagascar xxi, 43, 131–3, 158, 162, 542, 548, 549, 758–62
and east Africa 759
and English East India Company 760, 761
French claims to 557
and Hinduism 759
and Islam 759
as link between Atlantic and Indian Ocean 758, 780
Malagasy language 3, 132
and piracy 760–61
and the Portuguese 759
rice 759
and slavery 760, 761–2, 780
Madanela Cansina 491–2
Madeira xxi, xxiii, 5, 459, 464, 471, 483–6, 488, 545, 593, 745, 748–50
Caribbean and Brazilian sugar plantations’ effect on 748
and the English 484, 748–50
Genoese in 481, 486
rabbits in Porto Santo 486
settlers at end of 15th century 486
shipbuilding 484
slaves 486, 497
sugar xxiii, 464, 485, 486, 501, 561, 562, 748, 749
timber 749
and the West Indies 749
wheat 484, 486
wine 748, 749–50
wood 484, 485, 749
Madras (Chennai) 706, 707
Madrid 632, 686, 699, 701, 703, 704
Mælbrigte 375
Maersk 905
Maes Howe 310, 311
Magan 58–9, 61, 62
 and copper 57, 67, 68
Magellan, Ferdinand 5, 39, 517, 563, 568, 569–76, 609, 617, 655, 735
Magellan, Strait of 572, 579, 687, 731
Magellanica 716, 717, 727
magnetism 243
magnetic compass 243, 256, 370
Magnus, Olaus 655
Magnus Barelegs 377, 378
Magnus Erlendsson 377–8
cult of St Magnus 379
Magnus VI Haakonsson of Norway 444
Mahan, Alfred Thayer 856–7, 858
Mahdia 184
Maimon, David ben 175–6
Maimonides, Moses 175
Maine, USS 856, 857
maize 588, 643, 752
Majapahit 279–81, 284–5, 287, 290
Majorca (Mallorca) 471, 473
Jews 480
ships 454
Majoreros 472
Majos 472
Malabar Coast 184, 186, 187
malabathron 75, 109
Malacca see Melaka (Malacca)
Malagasy language 3, 132
Malagueta pepper 504, 505, 507, 511, 669
Mälaren, Lake 364
malaria 13, 853, 854, 858
Malaspina, Alejandro 795
Malay Annals xxiv, 134, 158, 276, 282, 284, 287, 288, 289, 290–91, 294, 295
Malaya/Malays xx, 52, 125, 135, 162, 239, 240, 273 see also
Indonesia/Indonesians
and Buddhism 166
Bugi pirates 819, 823
and China 135–6, 138–9, 144, 147
 Federation of Malaya: and Indonesian Republic 893–4; Singapore’s
expulsion 895
as Golden Chersonese 110, 121–2
independence movement 893
Indian cultural influence on 282
and Islam 282
language 131, 820, 822
Melaka see Melaka (Malacca)
and Red Sea 84
and rubber 824, 868, 888, 892, 893–4
sailings between India and China 125
as seafaring nation 134, 283
ships 134, 139, 142–3
Singapore see Singapore
Straits Settlements 822
tin 164, 868
Malayu 160 see also Jambi
Malcolm, king of the Scots 375
Malfante, Antonio 501
Mali empire 500
Malindi 266
Malinowski, Bronisław 15
Mallorca see Majorca
Mallorca, Jaume de 480
Malmö 425
Malmsey wine 455, 748
Malocello, Lançalotto 471, 472
Malta 312, 849, 851
Malvinas see Falkland Islands
Mamluks 536, 537, 594–8
and Diu 600, 601, 602
fleet 598
navy 600, 602
and the Portuguese 595, 598, 600, 602
and Red Sea 265, 595, 598, 600–601
and spice trade 595
and Turks 600
 Venetian–Mamluk treaties and relations 595–8, 600
Man, Isle of 308, 328, 376, 378
Viking raids 372
Manchester 865
and Bensaúde 840
cloth 839, 873
Jews 839
Manchester Ship Canal 865
Mandinga 502, 503
Manević, Ivan 455–6
Mangaia 29
Mangalore 184–6, 831
mangos 185
Manhattan Island 690, 756
New Amsterdam 717
Manigraman 183
Manila 592, 620–26, 642, 648
and Acapulco 623, 624, 630, 648, 701, 706
Armenians 706–7
Carletti in 620–22
and the Chinese 618, 620–21, 622–6, 715, 780
foundation story (Chinese) 618
and the Japanese 622, 628–30, 632, 633
and Macau 628
and Mexico 623, 780
New Christians 703
and New Julfans 706–7
and Second World War 891
and silver 635, 763
and slavery 697
Spanish settlers 620–21, 622, 625, 626
and Sultan Soliman 617–18
Manila galleons 3, 39, 518, 615–18, 620, 623, 624, 630–33, 665, 687, 701,
813
and Acapulco–Manila link 623, 624, 630, 648, 701, 706
and circumnavigation routes 617
and Japanese mercenaries vs Chinese 626
 and New Julfans 706
manilhas (brass bracelets) 503, 504
manioc see cassava/manioc
Mansa Musa of Mali 500
Mansfield, Edward 774
Mansur, sultan of Tidore 568, 576
Manuel I of Portugal 523, 537, 538–9, 541, 542, 544, 546, 547, 548, 560,
569, 571, 602, 703
Māoris 5, 19, 38–9, 744
and earliest Dutchmen in New Zealand 742
and Hawai’ian language 132
stories of coming to Aotearoa 32–8
mapmakers see cartographers/cartography
marble 115, 492
Marchionni, Bartolomeo 545, 561
Marconi, Guglielmo 864
Marcus Julius Alexander 113
family 111
Margaret of Austria 578
Margaret of Denmark 436–7
Marguerite of Navarre 562
Maria Theresa, Holy Roman Empress 722
Marianas (‘Islands of Thieves’) 574, 619–20
Mariehamn, Åland Islands 874, 876
Marienburg 420
Marinid dynasty 475
warships 478
maritime safety 860–63, 870
Markland 408–9, 410, 414
Marquesas Islands 24, 30, 731, 807
Marrakesh, Morocco 834, 836, 837
‘Marramitta’ (Malagasy slave cook) 761
Marseilles 707, 872
Marshallese people 17–18
Martinique 768
Martyr, Peter 521
Maru (god) 38
Marxism 418
Mary I of England 654, 656, 662
Mary II of England 782
marzipan 429
Más Afuera island 791, 795
Massalia 331–4, 335, 336, 338
Mas‘udi, al- 124, 157
Matheson, James 824, 825, 827
Matsuda, Matt 811
Matthew 532
Mauritius xxi, 5, 43, 712, 724, 761, 831
Maurits, Prince, Stadhouder 660, 692
Maximilian of Austria 668–9
Mayflower 767
Mazarin, Cardinal Jules 720
Mazu see Tianfei/Mazu (sea goddess)
McKinley, William 856, 857
McLean, Malcolm 901–4
Meares, John 814
Mecca 177, 180, 187, 258, 269, 595, 598, 604
Ka‘aba 163, 171
and the Turks 602
Medici family 439, 542
Ferdinando de’ Medici 619
Medina 187, 602, 604
Medina Sidonia, dukes of 656
Mediterranean xx, xxiii, 85, 115, 166, 415
and Atlantic Ocean 322–5; Avienus’ Mediterranean perspective 332–3;
links with Atlantic networks 470, 517
and Bereniké 115–17
Black Death/bubonic plague 123, 432
and Black Sea slave trade 524
Bronze Age 314, 319, 322–5
cables 864
currents 322
Greek merchant shipping 872–3
Habsburg naval power 604
 and India 108
interaction with Indian Ocean 98, 116, 117, 124, 167–70, 338, 517
luxuries 672
Mahan on 857
and Ottomans 604, 607
parallels with Song China 247
reawakening with rising Fatimid power 173
salt 475
ships from Atlantic Iberia 470
Spanish merchants in 455
trade networks see trading networks: Mediterranean
Viking raids 370
winds 322, 324
‘Mediterranean of the North’ between Baltic and North Sea 414
‘megalithic’ culture 308, 310–13
Megiddo 80
Mehmet II 601
Mekong, River 141
Mela, Pomponius 134–5
Melaka (Malacca) xviii, xxix, 148, 158, 255, 261, 264, 271, 272, 273–6, 281,
289–96, 568, 569, 598, 617, 627, 643, 709
Albuquerque’s capture of 603, 606, 636
and Alexander the Great 282, 289
and Britain 818
Cheng Hoon Teng temple 258
and China 254, 286, 293–4, 295, 636
Daoists in 295
and the Dutch 818
founding legend 818
and Hinduism 293, 295
and Iskandar 282, 287, 289, 290–91
and Islam 291–2, 293, 295
as link between Indian Ocean, Spice Islands and China 272, 295, 569, 636
Madagascan trade 548
and New Julfa 706
and Ottomans 577, 607
and Parameśvara 255, 264, 287, 289, 290, 293
 and pirates 292, 293, 736
and the Portuguese 234, 295–6, 568, 569, 606, 634, 636, 736; New
Christians 703
and Ryukyu Islands 232, 233, 234
and Siam 293–5
and Singapore 285, 289, 822
St Paul’s Hill 291, 295
Strait of Malacca 47, 121, 137, 145, 152, 155, 162, 220, 273, 279, 292,
295–6, 606, 736, 818; and Singapore 281–2, 286, 290
and tribute 295
and Zheng He’s voyages 257, 260, 261, 262, 264, 269, 293, 636
Melanesia 3, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 732, 797
and Lapita people 11
Melilla 536, 839
Meluḫḫa 56, 57, 61–2, 63, 64, 68
Melville, Herman: Moby-Dick 845–6
Ménard, Louis 320
Mendaña, Álvaro de 729–30, 731, 733
Mendonça, Cristóvão de 735
Mendoza, Antonio de 580
Menezes, Tristão de 577
Mer Island 10
Mercator, Gerard, world map 572, 657–8, 661, 728
Mercers 669
Merchant Adventurers, English 669, 672–3
merchant fleets/navies
Ålander 874–5
Allied tonnage lost in Second World War 888
American 856–7
British 871, 873, 883, 889
Chinese 248
Danish 724
Dutch 668, 685, 883
Egyptian 96
French 888
German 882, 883
Greek 870, 872–3
 Japanese 883, 896
Kurland 719
Norwegian 870–71, 888
Seleucid 96
Spanish 704
Swedish 871
Tahitian 813
merchant guilds 183, 184, 213, 249, 355, 669, 789
merchant houses 425–6, 443, 445–6, 838
Merchant Shipping Act, British 861–2
merchants
American 795
in Antwerp 668–9, 672–3
Arab 94, 105, 165, 171, 183, 249, 519, 540, 824, 831, 833; Dashi 153, 162,
266
in Baltic 367
in Barus 160
of Barygaza 106
of Bordeaux 458
Bosi 147, 161–2, 170
Bruges merchants moving to Antwerp 668–9
from Cairo 181
Canaanite 81
and Carolingian dynasty 354
China’s foreign merchants 189, 243–4, 806
Chinese 135, 139, 201, 212, 215, 219, 239, 240, 242–3, 245, 246, 617;
assimilated Jewish merchants 238; in Canton 824, 825; communities
from Quanzhou in Korea and Vietnam 245; Hong merchants 789–90,
808, 824; in Java 271; and Macau 639; in Philippines 616, 622, 623; and
Siam 278; in Śri Vijaya 273; in Sumatra 271
coal merchants 841
of Cologne 449, 450
confiscation from xviii
Danish–Norwegian 712, 719
of Danzig 453
Delian 98
Dutch 677, 686, 717, 745; in Japan 197, 650, 693–4
Egyptian 181, 182, 265
in England, under protection of Crown 469
English 452, 457, 458–64, 534, 656, 657, 752; Bristol 534, 657; in Canton
814; coal merchants 841; and the Danes 712; in Japan 691–2; at
Kholmogory 660; in Madeira 749
fleets of see merchant fleets/navies
Frisian 353
fur merchants 806
Fustat/Genizah 175, 181, 184, 187
German 420, 426, 443, 717; Hanseatic see Hansa, German
in Gibraltar 840
Greco-Roman/‘Roman’, in Indian Ocean 52, 105, 106, 108, 110, 118, 133,
142
Hanseatic see Hansa, German
and Havana 592
houses 425–6, 443, 445–6
Indian 110, 117, 604, 606; Gujarati 604; in Muscat 831; and Oman 831,
833, 834; and Socotra 128–9; Sumatra-bound 183
Indonesian 10, 132, 165
Italian 188, 470, 475, 562, 595; Florentine 618–22; Genoese 470, 475, 682;
Tuscan 682; Venetian 594, 682
Jamaican 778
Japanese 189, 221, 616, 629, 630, 649
Javanese 292
Jewish 175–6, 181, 183, 184, 238, 354, 697–702, 834, 841
Korean 189, 207
Malayan 165
in Manila 622, 629
meeting points xix, 66–7, 99, 107, 111, 160, 181–2, 243–50, 438–9, 752,
834 see also specific trading centres
Mexican 642
middlemen in shipping agencies 896
in Mogador 834, 838
Muslim 153, 162, 183–4, 186, 187, 292, 293, 500, 543, 575, 838; and
Africa 500; in Atlantic waters 467; in Mogador 838
Nabataean 94, 99
and North Sea 351–2
 Obodrite 365
Persian/Iranian 183, 249; New Julfan 705–8
in Persian Gulf 64, 172–3
in Philippines 616, 622
Phoenician 81, 322–3
Portuguese 576–7, 606, 616, 684, 697–8, 699–705, 745; in Amsterdam
684, 685, 705; in Antwerp 673; in Brazil 745; and Cape Verde 490, 491;
and Ceuta 476; and China 625, 636–8; and Crown monopoly on spice
trade 606; and England 469; and Inquisition 770; and Japan 637–8, 642,
647; Jewish 697–702, 838; in Macau 642; and São Tomé 492; and
slavery 490, 491
Portuguese customs duties avoided by 745
and Quanzhou 243–50
Ragusan 455–6
in Ribeira Grande 491
routes favoured by see trade routes
Russian 422, 423, 804, 805–6
Scandinavian 367
Sirafi 171
slave-merchants 266, 490, 491, 753, 754, 777 see also slavery/slaves
Sogdian 135–6
Spanish 455, 553; of Seville 589
spice merchants 103, 116, 250; spice route’s merchants of different origins
52
and Śri Vijaya 154, 164
Sumerian 59
Swahili 833
Tamil 244
taxation on see taxation: on merchants
trading licences 634
of Ur 60
Varangian 364, 423
in Whampoa Island 788–9
wine 457, 458–9
mercury 244, 366, 640
Merino sheep 475
Mersa Gawasis 78
Mersey 891 see also Liverpool
Mesolithic cultures 304–7
Mesopotamia
and Egypt 47, 70
Iraq see Iraq
and Persian Gulf 47
pottery 64
and Red Sea 47
rivercraft 331
Seleucids see Seleucids
Sumer see Sumer/Sumerians
trade with Indus Valley 66–7, 69
and Ubaid culture 53
Mexico 3, 531, 643
and China 592, 620–21, 624, 633; Chinese silks 592, 621, 623–4, 780
and Havana 592, 617
and Japan 630–31
and Manila 623, 780
merchants 642
and New Julfans 706, 707
Philippine link through Manila galleons see Manila galleons
route to Spice Islands 580–81
silver 592, 619, 624, 635, 707
Spanish conquest/New Spain 590, 591, 611, 614, 616, 635; and the
Philippines 617
trade see trade: Mexican
and the USA 846
Mexico City 619, 620, 701, 703
Miami 899–900, 902
Mic-Mac Indians 413, 562
Michael 662, 664
Micronesia 3, 6, 797
Middelburg 431, 465, 640, 675
Miðgarðr serpent 371
migration
and diffusionist approaches to cultures 301, 312
Dutch commerce producing flood of immigrants 677
 of Europeans to Caribbean 766–7
Great Migration from Hawaiki 37
Jewish immigrants: in Azores 840; in Cape Verde 841
from Korea to Japan 191
between Melaka and Singapore 822
to North America from late 19th century 869
Polynesian 13–14
Portuguese migrants 696
and religious beliefs 19
with rising sea levels 345–6
and shipping companies 869
and trading diasporas 705–8, 838–9
and transatlantic passenger traffic 860, 869
US immigration restrictions 884–5
and Viking raids 362
Mikelgarð 362 see also Constantinople
Miksic, John 158
Milan, Gabriel 720–21
Milan 470, 559–60
millet 50, 246, 491, 754
Milton, John 770
Mimana 192
Mina coast 506–8
Minamoto clan 217, 230
Mindelo, Cape Verde 841
Mindoro island 616
mines 882, 889
Mingzhou 240
Minnagar 107
Minoans 322
mirrors 194
Mitchell, David 691
Mizrahi Jews 841
Mleiha 61
moa 12, 39
Mogadishu 265, 266–7
Mogador (Essaouira) xxix, 90, 323, 326, 467, 834–40, 841
 islands off 502
mohair 682
Mohawks 781
Mohenjo-daro 63, 64, 66, 69
Moluccas/Spice Islands xix, 12, 132, 143, 160, 166, 171, 182, 276, 280, 295,
567, 643
and China 574
Dutch in 684–5, 688, 689–90
and the English/EIC 687–90, 756
and Magellan–Elcano voyage 568–79
Mexican route to 580–81
and Ottomans 607
and the Portuguese 568–81, 606, 611, 614
and the Spanish 567–81, 606, 611, 614
Mombasa 540, 546, 547, 568, 759, 829, 831, 833
Mon-Khmer people 139–40
Mongols
attacks on Japan 221, 222–8
and China: attacks on southern China 224; and fall of Quanzhou 247; and
Yong-le 267; Yuan rule 218, 221, 228, 248–9, 259
and Java 228, 272, 279
and Korea 222, 249
ships 223, 226, 227–8
and tribute 223, 279
and Vietnam 222, 228
Monmouth Rebellion 777
Monmu of Japan 192
monsoons 50, 51, 52, 96, 102, 171, 182, 261, 546
and Śri Vijaya 149
Montaigne, Michel de 730
Montesinos, Antonio de 582
Montserrat 767–8
monuments, stone 59, 301
Neolithic 310–13
Moor Sand, Devon 319–20, 321
Mo’orea 20
Moors see Islam/Muslims
More, Sir Thomas: Utopia 521, 550
Moresby, Fairfax 832
Moresby Treaty 832, 833
Morga, Antonio de 624, 629
Morgan, Sir Henry 764, 774–5, 847
Morison, Samuel Eliot 495–6
Morocco 323, 324–5, 431, 464, 467, 468, 471, 475, 479
and Britain/England 657, 838–9, 840
and Castile 477
cattle 839
and the Danes 836
and France 561
and Gibraltar 839–40
Jews 697, 836–8, 840–41
leather 839
Marinid dynasty 475
Mogador see Mogador
and Portugal 479, 536, 657; and Ceuta 476–9
and sugar 839
and tea 839
trade 511, 561, 657, 834–40
Morris, Robert 785, 786
Morse code 864
Moscow 677
Moselle wines 675
Moshulu 875
Mother Goddess 312
Motya 83
Mouza 105
Mowje (Indian in Muscat) 831
Mozambique 546, 548, 563
Mozarabs 467
Mughals 604–5
Muhammad ibn Abdallah, Muhammad III of Morocco 834–6, 839
mules 839
Muli’eleali 25
mullet 26
Mumbai see Bombay
Munakata shrine 191
mung beans 114
Munk, Jens 666–7
Muqaddam, ibn al- 182
Muscat 598, 829–32, 834
Muscovy 800, 804
trade 659, 678
Muscovy Company 659–60, 662, 691
Musi, River 158
musical instruments 202
musk 186, 194, 640
musk oxen 408
muskets 721
Muskett (Benjamin Bueno de Mesquita) 772–3
Muslims see Islam/Muslims
Mussolini, Benito 889
Muziris, India 112, 114, 138
Muziris Papyrus 112–13
Mycenaeans 314, 322
warriors 83
Myngs, Christopher 774, 776
Myos Hormos 96, 103, 112, 113, 115, 117, 122–3, 179
as Qusayr see Qusayr al-Qadim
myrrh 47, 71–3, 75, 76, 80, 99, 104, 153, 266

Nabataeans 79, 94, 99, 111, 129

and Socotra 129
Naddoð 384
Nadezhda 807, 808
Nagasaki 232, 628, 630, 646, 648, 652, 653, 691, 692, 694
Naha, Okinawa 232
nails 123, 343, 349, 369, 492, 806, 810, 811
Nakhom Si Thammarat 163
Namibia 539
Nancy 795
Nanhai I wreck 165
Nanjing 142, 260, 262, 267, 636
Bao-en temple 267
Nanking, Treaty of 826, 827
Nanna (god) 58
Nansen, Fridtjof 871
Nantes 346
Nantucket 845
Naples 555, 559–60, 703
Napoleonic Wars 712, 789, 818
Nara, Japan 196, 197, 200, 202, 203, 204, 207, 217
Kōfuko-ji monastery 235
Shōsō-in 194, 207, 217
Tōdaiji temple 194, 202
nard 107, 109
Narva, Baltic port 677
narwhal 397
tusks 695
Nasrid dynasty 475
Navarre 468
Navidad, Mexico 615
Navigatio Brendani 382
navigation
and chronometers 16, 731, 812
Columbus and transformation of Atlantic navigation 582
compasses see compasses
English Navigation Act (1651) 780, 784
European assumptions of superiority 731
and fixing longitude 16, 731, 812
free navigation rights and trade rights 679–82, 822
Frisian 354–5
Indian Ocean 117
and knowledge of winds 51
long-distance navigation made possible by archipelago stopping-places
751; Cape Verde 752–3
Manila galleons creating circumnavigation routes 617
mythology of Prince Henry’s school of 479–80
 Pacific: and Chinese magnetic compass 243; navigational antiquity 6–8;
pause with cessation of Lapita expansion 19; Polynesian 16–19, 39;
revival by 5th century AD 20
Piri Reis’ book on 607–10
Polynesian charts 17
and ‘scientific’ aspects of early circumnavigation 809
skills: Austronesian 133–4; European, in Pacific 573; Italian 489; Japanese
631; Philippine 615; Polynesian 16–19, 573, 731, 812–13
by stars 17, 18
translation of Portuguese sailing manuals into Japanese 644
Nazis 437
Neanderthals 304
Nearchos 90–92, 93
Necho of Egypt 89
necklaces 56, 102
Needham, Joseph 243
Science and Civilization in China 254
Neira, Moluccas 688
Nelson, Horatio 851
Nelson, Kenneth 890
Neolithic peoples 9, 12, 63
of Atlantic coasts 299, 307–14
body sizes 307
‘Neolithic Revolution’ 307
stone monuments 310–13
Nereids 92
Nernar, Norway 396
Nestorians 160
Netherlands/Holland and the Dutch xix, 320, 336, 352, 353, 673, 682, 689–
90
Amsterdam see Amsterdam
and Antwerp 669–76
and Arctic Ocean 660–61
and Armenians 708
and Australia (‘New Holland’) 733, 735–43
and Ayutthaya 278
and the Baltic 675, 676, 677, 685, 686
and Brazil 686, 748, 772; and the Portuguese 705
and Britain see Britain: and the Dutch
and Cape Verde 683, 753
and the Chinese 823
cloth 631, 678
and Cuba 683, 772
and Curaçao 766, 772
and dairy goods 675
and the Danes 685–6, 713, 718
Dutch East India Company see VOC (United East India Company)
Dutch West India Company (WIC) 683, 686
and the East Indies/Indonesia 678, 682, 684–5, 688, 689–90, 724, 818,
820, 821, 822, 823, 892 see also VOC (United East India Company)
and the English see England/English: and the Dutch
farming 675–6
and the Flemings 682, 685
and France 818
and grain 428, 675, 676–7
and Hansards see Hansa, German: and the Dutch
and herring 668, 674, 683, 685
and Hispaniola 683
immigrants in Dutch cities 677
and Japan 691–5, 846; and Dutch luxuries 647; Dutch merchants in Japan
197, 650, 691–5
Malay Straits Settlements 822
and the Mediterranean 676, 682
and Melaka 818
merchant fleets/navy 668, 685, 883
merchants see merchants: Dutch
and Middelburg 675
and New Zealand 742–3, 744
and North America 783–4
ocean route struggle/supremacy 5, 667, 679–91
and pepper 678
piracy 676, 679, 682
porcelain imports xix
 and the Portuguese 674, 705, 751–2; and Japan 692–3; and Melaka 818;
New Christians in Bayonne 685–6; and St Helena 756; and trade see
trade: Dutch–Portuguese struggle in
and Red Sea 892
resistance to Philip II of Spain 654
Revolt of 1572 673
rise of the Dutch: installation in Japan 691–5; merchant fleets 668; naval
and commercial power 674–8; and rise of English trade 687–91; shift of
commercial power from Antwerp to Amsterdam 668–73; on world stage
from end of 16th century 682–7
Rotterdam investment 880
and St Helena 757
and salt 674, 675, 676, 683, 685
‘Sea-Beggars’ 673
and Second World War 888
ships see boats/ships: Dutch
southern transfer from Spanish to Austrian Habsburg rule 722
and the Spanish 627, 660, 685–7, 700; and Curaçao 772; and Japan 692;
and Philip II 676–7; Philip II’s temporary ban on Dutch trade 676–7;
Philip III’s ban on Dutch trade 683, 684; Spanish government in the
Netherlands 675; Twelve Years Truce 677
and spices 678, 684, 688, 736
and the Swedes 718, 724
tiles 640
trade see trade: Dutch
and Venezuela 683, 684
and west Africa 686
and West Indies 683, 686, 783–4
Neva 807, 808
New Amsterdam 717
New England xxi
New Granada 852
New Guinea 6–7, 9, 13, 733, 736, 743
Papua New Guinea 9
and Solomon Islands 10
and Torres Strait islanders 9
New Hazard 815–16
New Julfan merchants 705–8
New South Wales 813
New York 780–81, 790, 846, 880, 903
Port Authority 902
Statue of Liberty 860, 879
New Zealand (Aotearoa) 3, 20
discovery stories 31–8
and the Dutch 742–3, 744
Māori xix, 32–9 see also Māoris
moa 12, 39
and Polynesia 32–9
settlement 5
sweet potato 29
and Tasman 742–3, 744
Te Papa (National Museum) 38, 814
Newby, Eric 875
Newfoundland xxiii, 463, 534, 557, 752
and Cabot 413, 522, 533
and the French 562
Grand Banks 562
Newport 459
Nicaragua 774, 851–2, 854, 856
Nicobar Islands 269
Niðaros 390, 397
Niederegger family 429
Niger, River 500, 506
Nigsisanabsa 59
Nijál’s Saga 342
Nikanor archive 113
Niklot 424
Nile 70, 78, 102, 111, 177, 266, 898
catfish 112
Nile Delta 79
Darius’ channel through 88
Niña 553
Ningal (goddess) 59
Ningbo 638, 826
Nissim, Abu’l-Faraj 184
Nobunaga Oda 646, 647, 649
Noli, Antonio da 488, 489, 609
Nombre de Díos, Panama 591, 847
Nootka Convention 794
Nootka Sound 794
Normandie 886
Normandy/Normans 361, 474, 558–9, 562
Bronze Age 319, 320
Lower 308
pirates 562
sailors 558–9
ships 561
Norn dialect 379
Noronha, Fernão de 560, 561
Norsemen xix, xxi–xxii
Christianization of Greenland’s Norse settlers 397
and Greenland 393–402, 403–7, 655
and Iceland 383–8
mixed marriages between Celts and 375–6, 380, 386
Norse settlement across northern Atlantic 380–92
and North America 409–14
paganism 364, 367, 379, 383, 387–8
trade with America 414
Viking see Vikings
voyages northwards from Greenland 407–9
North-East Passage 565–6, 657, 659, 661, 666, 800, 805
North-West Passage 535, 563, 565, 657, 661–7, 794–5, 813–14
North America
American Revolution see American Revolution
Azores and New England 750–51
bibles 761
Cabot’s discovery of 532–5
Cabrillo and California 580–81
and China 780–96
and the Dutch 783–4
Dutch and English agreement over Manhattan Island 690, 756
 and East Indies 780–96
and furs 785–6, 791, 816
and Indian Ocean 780–96
Jamaica and English colonies in 777
Jamestown as English foothold in 766
migration from late 19th century to 869
native Americans 781, 793, 816, 884
neutrality in Napoleonic Wars 789
and Norsemen 409–14
Ponce de León’s discovery 554
and porcelain 780, 781, 784
ships see boats/ships: American
and the Spanish 554; and Casa de Contratación 555
and tea 781, 783–4, 789
trade see trade: North American
USA see United States of America
wheat 878
North Pole 373, 657–8
North Sea
and amber 337–8, 339
and Baltic xxii, 365, 366
defence patrols 346
and Edward III’s wars 450
herring 436, 674; interruption of herring flow to Flanders 430
and lowering sea levels 303
and ‘Mediterranean of the North’ 415 see also Hansa, German
merchants 351–2
raiders 339–72 see also Vikings
ships see boats/ships: North Sea
terpen (mounds above waters) 344, 352
trade see trade: North Sea
Vitalienbrüder harassment 447
Norway 304, 342
and Britain 871, 888
Church 390
dairy production 442
and Denmark 712
 and Greenland 712
and Hansards 442–6
under Harald Fairhair 363, 380, 385–6, 389
and Iceland 712
kingdom re-creation (1905) 871
merchant navy 870–71, 888
and the Orkneys 372, 373–8
and Second World War 888, 890
shipping network 871
ships 870–71
shipwrecks 357
stokffish 463
trade see trade: Norwegian
Vikings see Vikings
Norwegian Caribbean Lines 899–900
Norwegian Cruise Line 900
Notke, Bernt 426
Nova, João de 542, 545, 547, 548
Novaya Zemlya 658, 659, 661, 801
Novgorod 367, 419, 423, 427, 440
Peterhof 427
‘ntyw 71
Nubia/Nubians 73, 78
Nunes da Costa family 701
nuraghi (Sardinian stone towers/castles) 312, 324, 326
nuraghic culture 324
Nuremberg 672, 675
nutmeg xix, 233, 568, 578, 611, 614, 684, 688, 690, 703, 714, 781
trees 690
Nuyts, Pieter 693
Nydam, Denmark 343

O’ahu 24, 25, 814, 816

oak 78, 331, 339, 343, 354, 369
Oakland, California 904
Obearea, Polynesian queen 811
Obodrites 365
obsidian 12, 15, 39, 54–5
Oc-èo 141–2, 143
ocean currents see currents
ocean ecology xxii, xxiii
Ocean Steamship Company, Liverpool 864, 865–7
octopuses 21, 32, 34
Odessa 872
Ohanessi, Mateos ordi 706
oil xix, 76, 106, 177, 470, 888
and diesel engines 884, 885
olive 115, 116, 120, 467, 492, 493, 510, 839
palm 493
sesame 57, 59, 104
tankers 897
whale 721
Okhotsk 803, 804, 806
Okinawa 220, 229, 230, 231, 232, 234
Okinoshima island 191
Olaf the Tranquil 443
Olaf Tryggvason 375, 383, 400
Olivares, Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of 704, 705
olive oil 115, 116, 120, 467, 492, 493, 510, 839
jars 120
olives 114
Olmen, Ferdinand van 464, 496, 537
Olympias, Aelia 111
Olympic, RMS 870
Oman 52, 53, 67, 68, 106, 598, 829–34
boats 68
and Britain 831, 832, 833
and cloves 829, 833
and copper 58, 61
and India 831, 832
and ivory 829, 831, 833
and Magan see Magan
Moresby Treaty 832, 833
Omani ‘empire’ 829
 and Pakistan 62
pirates 829
and the Portuguese 829–31, 832
ships 68, 831–2
and slavery 829, 831
sultans of 829
trade with Zabaj 156
and the USA 833
and Zanzibar 831, 832–4
Omana 106
Omura Sumitada 642–3, 644
onions 58–9
onyx 107
opals 141
Ophir 73, 80–81, 82, 135, 728–9 see also Punt
opium 796, 824, 825–6, 827, 828
First Opium War 826, 827
Second Opium War 827
oranges xxiii, 246–7, 574
orchil 474, 502
Order of Christ 481, 485, 497, 749
Order of the Knights of the Holy Ghost 732
Order of the Temple 481, 501
Oregon, USS 857, 859
Øresund 424, 425, 438
Orient Company 868
Orkney Islands xxii, 304, 321, 326, 328, 347, 372–9, 386, 444
Christianization 375–6
and Ireland 311–12
Neolithic 310–12, 372–3
Norn dialect 379
Norse character 379
and Norway 372, 373–8
and Vikings 372, 373–9
Orkneyinga Saga 311, 363, 364, 373, 375, 376
Oro cult 21
Oronsay 305–6
O’Rourke, Kevin 877–8
Ortaqs 249
Ortelius, Abraham 664
world map 728
Orthodox Russians 420, 427, 437
Oscar II 872
Oseberg ship 369, 376
Ostend Company 722, 723
Östergötland 342
ostraka 112
ostriches 266, 269
feathers 840
Ottomans see Turks/Ottomans
Ovando, Nicolás de 529, 555, 586–7
Oviedo y Valdés, Gonzalo Fernández de 553
oysters 14, 196

P&O (Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company) 865, 867–8, 882,
899
and airlines 899
and seamen’s 1966 strike 896
and Second World War 890, 892; and recovery 896
Pa’ao 25
Pacific languages 3–4
Pacific Ocean 3–39, 565
container shipping 903
currents 16
English entry to 665, 687, 730–31
and English–Spanish conflict 665, 687, 730–31
‘extensions’ see Japan Sea; South China Sea; Yellow Sea
Hawai’i see Hawai’ian islands
Indian Ocean contrasted with 43
island farming 12
island settlement process 5–6
Lapita culture see Lapita people/culture
as largest ocean 3
and Magellan–Elcano voyage 573–4
 maritime culture 5
navigation see navigation: Pacific
northern 616, 786, 797–800, 803–9
Philippines see Philippines
Polynesia see Polynesia/Polynesians
and the Russians 791, 800–809
and Second World War 888, 891
South China Sea see South China Sea
as ‘South Sea’ xx
Spain and Pacific islands 614, 728–33
trade see trade: Pacific
and the USA 785, 791–5, 845–6
winds see winds: Pacific
Paekche, Korea 192, 194
paganism
Baltic 421–2
in Greenland 400
in Iceland 387–8, 400, 407
Norse 364, 367, 379, 383, 387–8
‘northern crusades’ against 420–21
Slav 423–4
of Taínos 527
Pakistan 50, 53, 62, 67, 598, 829
Palembang, Indonesia 147, 148, 152, 155, 158–60, 161, 232, 261, 267, 269,
271, 272–3, 283
and Parameśvara 289–90
and Singapore 285
Palermo 73, 184
Palermo Stone 73–4
palm oil 493
palm wine 574, 688, 754
Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount 826, 852
Pan-Atlantic Steamship Company 902–3
Pan American Airways 897–8
Panama 29, 529, 591, 701, 730, 764–5, 774, 846, 847
American settlement of Colón 854, 855, 858
Canal xviii, 847–8, 849, 851–9
 coast 529
Darien Scheme 722–3
Gatun lake 858
Indians 529
railway 852–4
and war between Britain and Spain 851
Panama City 775, 847, 853
Pané, Ramon 521
Panpan 146
panthers 99
Panyu 135
papacy 423
and the Canaries 474
and the English 770, 771
world division into Spanish and Portuguese hemispheres 533, 537, 541,
570, 579, 611, 680
papayas 644
paper 185, 194, 559, 588
Japanese 200, 201, 213, 743
money 240, 249, 262, 624
Papey island 386
Papua New Guinea 9
papyri 71, 74, 94, 111, 112
Muziris Papyrus 112–13
Parameśvara 255, 264, 287, 289–90, 293
Parekhou 77
Parhae, Korea 194, 197–8
Paris 855
Parker, Daniel 785, 786
parrot fish 14
parrots 216, 220, 543, 560, 561
Parsees 824, 834
Parthians 93
Pasai 276, 292, 293
Semudera–Pasai 273–6, 279, 292
Passat 876
passenger shipping 860, 869, 899–900
Patagonians 572
Paterson, William 722
Patna 121
Paul I of Russia 805, 806
Paul II, Pope 485
Paviken, Gotland 366
peaches 114
peacocks 220
feathers 233
Pearl Harbour 891
Pearl River 627, 636, 638, 640, 787, 789, 826, 867, 893, 908
and the British 826, 867
pearls 54, 59, 109, 135, 139, 540, 701, 813
of Funan 140
Japanese 216, 221
and the ‘Muscateers’ 831
Pedro, Prince, duke of Coimbra 469, 487
Pelgrom de Bye, Jan 740
Pelican (later Golden Hind) 665
Pelsaert, François 738–9, 740
Pemba 132, 267, 831
Peña Negra 323–4
Penang 820, 821, 865, 866, 868
penguins 558
Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company see P&O
Penn, William 770
pepper 50, 71, 99, 109, 147, 178, 181, 188, 218, 220, 232, 234, 246, 247,
248, 276, 278, 280, 724, 756
aboard Witte Leeuw 756
bell peppers 644
black 113–14, 178
and the Danes 714
and the Dutch 678
English East India Company factory, Bencoolen 761, 820
green 461
Indian 595; Indo-Roman trade 113–14, 115; south Indian 113, 569
Indo-Roman trade 877
 long 108
Malagueta 504, 505, 507, 511, 669
peppercorns 114, 438
and the Portuguese 504, 505, 511, 540, 541, 542, 543, 544–5, 595, 600,
669
and the Venetians 544, 545
warehouses (Horrea Piperataria) 114
Perestrello, Bartolomeu 483, 485
Perestrello family 524, 525
Pérez, Manuel Bautista 701
Pérez de Castrogeríz, Andrés 455
perfumes 52, 71, 99, 140, 161, 166, 170, 178, 278
and ambergris 180, 467
Periplous (source of Avienus) 332
Periplous (Kosmas Indikopleustes) 130
Periplous tēs Eruthras thalassēs 103–10, 116, 119, 121, 124, 125–8, 134
Perry, Matthew C. 846, 847
Persia/Iran 52, 54, 65, 68, 82, 85, 92, 96, 164
Arab invasion of Persia 170
Bosi see Bosi/Po-ššu
and Caspian Sea 364
and Ceylon 147
cobalt 238
coins of Sasanian kings 118
fashions 170
Great Sophy 599
and Greece 85
and Hormuz 599
merchants see merchants: Persian/Iranian
and Ottomans 599, 604
Persian carpets 598
Persian Empire 85
and Phoenician trade 323
and Portugal 599
pottery 159, 164
Safavid shahs 705, 706, 707
Sasanid Persia see Sasanid Persia/Empire
 silk 706
silver 188, 364
Siraf see Siraf
Persian/Arabian Gulf 8, 47, 51, 52, 56, 61–2
boats 54, 67–8, 93
and China 171–2
and Kish 173–4
and Ottomans 604, 606
and Red Sea 166, 173–4
Seleucid fleet in 93
steamship link with India 868
and Strait of Hormuz see Hormuz: Strait of
trade 46, 53–4, 170–73
trade routes see trade routes: from Persian Gulf
Peru 531, 580, 581
coins 777
and Mendaña 729, 731
Philippine link through Manila galleons 617 see also Manila galleons
silver 592, 619, 624, 635, 672, 678, 696, 700, 715, 724–5, 763
and the slave trade 701
Spanish conquest 590, 611, 635
Pessart, Bernt 715
Peter I, the Great 800, 802, 806
Peter IV of Aragon 473
Peter the Deacon 117
Petra 79, 94, 96, 167
Petrarch 473
Petropavlovsk 807
Pevensey, England 346
Philadelphia 780, 790
Philip I of Spain 555
Philip II of Spain 582, 614, 615, 616, 618, 621, 627, 642, 652–3, 654, 656,
676, 700, 703, 730, 732
Philip III of Spain 625, 626, 630, 682, 683, 684, 692
Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy 439
Philippa of Lancaster 469
Philippines 3, 244, 574–6, 729
 American occupation 856
and China 574, 614, 617, 618, 620–21, 622–6
and Japan 617, 622, 628–30, 632, 633, 648, 652–3
merchants in 616, 622, 623, 629
and Norway 871
and Peru 617
and South China Sea 908
and the Spanish 570, 614–15, 634; and Manila galleons see Manila
galleons; treatment as extension of Mexico 617
Philipse, Frederick 760–61
Philo (admiral) 96
Phoenicians 81, 83, 89–90, 91, 322–3, 330, 502, 834
Piacenza 470
Piailug 17
Pico, Azores 751
Picts 347
pidgin English 790
Pidyar 182
Pigafetta, Antonio 570–71, 572, 573, 574, 575, 576, 622
Piggott, Stuart 63
pigs 12, 552, 591, 730, 810, 811, 813
pilgrimage/pilgrims xv, 239, 459, 460, 461, 469
in Japan 652
Muslim 866
route through Syria to Mecca 595
Pimienta, Francisco Diáz 592
pin-brooches 326
Pina, Rui 494
pine 73, 78, 343, 371
nuts 207
resin 153
pine marten 306
furs 428
pineapples, tinned 859
Pinzón, Vicente Yáñez 553
pirates/piracy xviii, 68, 130, 138, 140, 155, 172, 187, 192, 198, 218, 391,
455, 559, 562, 621 see also privateers; raiders
 in Bahamas 765
Barbary corsairs 607, 718, 764, 782
Bugi pirates 819, 823
Caribbean 763–5, 772, 773–6, 778, 779
and Chang Pogo xxx, 204, 208, 209–11
and Chen Zu-yi 261
Chinese 293, 625, 867
Chinese naval suppression of 239, 245
and Christianity 761
Dutch 676, 679, 682
English 452, 718, 763–5, 773–6
English accusations of German piracy 450
in English Channel 456
Germanic 344–6, 450
and Hansards 433, 436
and Havana 592
Indian Ocean’s widespread piracy 707
Karelian 422
Kish as a pirate kingdom 173
licensed piracy 765, 775–6
and Madagascar 760–61
and Melaka/Malacca Strait 292, 293, 736
Norman 562
North Sea 339–56
Omani 829
Orang Laut ‘Sea People’ 290
Portuguese 470
prize money 776
and ‘The Pure Theory of the Muggery’ 765
and Singapore/Temasek 286
Vitalienbrüder 436, 437, 447
wakō pirates 218, 219, 220, 222, 637, 638
Pires, Tomé 234, 292, 296, 546, 636, 706
Suma Oriental 289–90
Piri Reis 607–10
Pisa/Pisans 188, 415, 420, 454, 460
pistachios 178
Pitcairn Island 31
pitch 721
Pithom 96
Pizarro, Francisco 581, 611
Plancius, Petrus 660
plantains 493, 756, 815
Plantijn, Christoffel 672
plastics, in oceans 908
Plimsoll, Samuel 861–2
and Plimsoll Days 863
Plimsoll line 863
Pliny the Elder 71, 95, 103, 108, 116–17, 334, 336, 337, 338
plums 114
Plymouth 360, 687
pneumonic plague 432 see also Black Death
Pô, Fernando 507
Poduké 119, 121
Poland 452
polar bears 391, 397, 401–2, 408, 534
Polo, Marco 43, 110, 124, 216, 221, 226–7, 228, 249, 255, 256, 259, 260–61,
272, 636
book of travels 247–8, 259, 729
and ‘Great Java’ 272, 280, 734
Polybios 94, 334, 335
Polynesia/Polynesians 3–6, 11, 12–14, 133, 728, 729, 732, 797
boats 15–16, 19, 24, 731, 810–11
and Europeans in 1760s and 1770s 809–13
and free love 809–10
Hawai’ian settlers and links 24, 26 see also Hawai’ian islands
languages 3, 131, 615
and Lapita culture see Lapita people/culture
as maritime folk 4
maritime technology 39
migration 13–14
mythology 140
navigational skills 16–19, 573, 731, 812–13
and New Zealand see Māoris; New Zealand
 open societies 21
pottery 14
in ‘Remote Oceania’ 14
sailors/navigators xxi, 3, 5, 12, 16–19, 27, 29
second expansion phase 15, 29
sibling rivalry 13–14
and South America 27–9
and Spanish sailors 728, 731, 732
stratified societies 21
Tahiti see Tahiti/Tahitians
‘Theory of Relativity’ (etak) 18
tools 15, 16, 24
Pomare I of Tahiti 813
Pomeranians 423
Pommern 876
Ponce de León, Juan 554, 555–6, 565
Pondicherry xviii, 119, 121, 707 see also Arikamedu
porcelain xx, 184, 187, 710
blue-and-white 218, 238, 289, 818
Chinese xix, xxi, 153, 160, 163, 165, 174, 187, 227, 229, 238, 239, 247,
267, 617, 640, 649, 715; aboard Witte Leeuw 756; celadons 174, 179,
216, 217–18, 232, 247, 289; and Gothenburg 725; and Hawai’i 816; and
Mexico 592; and Morocco 839; and North America 780, 781, 784; in
Philippines 574, 622, 623; in Port Royal 778; and Singapore 288–9
cobalt-blue (Shonzui) 649
Dutch imports xix
Japanese 649–50, 839
Korean 649
and North America 780, 781, 784
and Russia 802, 809
and Ryukyu Islands 231, 233, 234
white 154, 163, 174, 227, 289
pork 112
Port Arthur 872
Port Royal, Jamaica 765, 769–79
Port Said 849, 851
Portchester 346
Portinari family 438
Portland, Dorset 360
Porto 467, 468, 469, 477
Porto Bello, Panama 764–5, 774
Porto de Ale 702
Porto Santo 483, 485, 486
Porto Seguro 687
Portugal/Portuguese 52, 387, 459, 465, 467–80, 636
and Africa see Africa: and the Portuguese
Algarve see Algarve
and Angola 593
and Antwerp 545, 600, 617, 668, 669, 672, 673
and Australia 733, 734, 735
Aviz dynasty 469, 474
and the Azores 487–8, 840
and Brazil see Brazil: and Portugal
and Britain 841 see also England/English: and Portugal
Bronze Age 316, 317, 319, 323–4
and Bruges 469–70
and the Canaries 472–4
and Cape Verde 488–92, 702, 748, 753, 754, 841
and Cartagena de las Indias 697
and Ceuta 476–9, 501
and China 606–7, 627–8, 636–7, 638–42, 643–4, 652
citânias 329
cloth 754
and control of Atlantic 526
and copper 672
Cortes (parliament) 485
and the Danes 718–19
and the Dutch see Netherlands/Holland and the Dutch: and the Portuguese;
trade: Dutch–Portuguese struggle in
and East Indies/Indonesia 536–49, 568–81, 635, 679–80
and England see England/English: and Portugal
and Flanders 469–70, 474
and France 561–2
and Genoese 470, 485
and gold see gold: and the Portuguese
and Guinea 504–8, 754
Habsburg rulers 705, 753
and Hansards 431, 477
in Havana 592
and Hindus 541, 547, 548, 606
and Hormuz 598–9, 604, 634
and India 540–43, 604–5, 606
and Indian Ocean 47, 124, 536–49, 569, 594, 595–601, 604, 702, 832;
aspirations 511–14; Ottoman–Portuguese conflict 549, 594, 599–607,
610
and Islam 512, 523, 537, 541, 546–7; Iberian Muslim struggle with
Portuguese Christians in 12th century 467–8; and Muslim sultans in
Moluccas 606
and Italian navigational skills 489
and ivory 501, 504, 635
and Japan see Japan/Japanese: and the Portuguese
and Java 578
Jews see Jews: and the Portuguese
lançados (‘thrown ones’) 503, 753–4
and Macaronesia 481–96
and Macau see Macau: and the Portuguese
and Madagascar 759
and Madeira 483–6
and Mamluks 595, 598, 600, 602
megalithic culture 312
and Melaka see Melaka (Malacca): and the Portuguese
merchants see merchants: Portuguese
migrants 696
and Mogador 834
and the Moluccas 568–81, 606, 611, 614
monuments 301
and Morocco see Morocco: and Portugal
national monarchy restored (1640) 705
Neolithic 309, 312
New Christians see Christianity: Portuguese New Christians (of Jewish
origin)
and the Omanis 829–31, 832
Order of Christ 481, 485, 497, 749
and Ottomans 600, 602–3, 607
papal global division and Portuguese rights 533, 537, 541, 570, 579, 680
and Persia 599
piracy 470
Portuguese empire 508
pottery 492
rebellion of 1640 against Habsburgs 705
and Red Sea see Red Sea: and Portugal
and Ryukyu Islands 234, 636
and St Helena 755–6
salt 683
and São Tomé 481–3, 492–5, 506
São Tomé and Jewish children from Portugal 493, 494
sea route dominion 5
ships see boats/ships: Portuguese
and silver 640–41, 668, 672, 700
and slavery see slavery/slaves: and the Portuguese
Socotran occupation 598
and South China Sea 636; and privately owned Portuguese ships 606
and the Spanish 526, 533, 537, 567–81, 611, 614, 700, 751–2; and Cape
Verde 754; Castilians 476, 477, 478, 479, 489, 504–5, 571; and China
627–8; diaspora in Madrid 703, 704; and Guinea 754; and New
Christians 704–5; and papal division of the world 533, 537, 541, 570,
579, 611; Philip II of Spain succeeding to throne of Portugal 621, 627,
642, 700; played against each other by Spice Islands rulers 606;
Portuguese independence with 1640 rebellion against Habsburg rule
687, 754
and spices see spices/spice trade: and the Portuguese
Strait of Hormuz control 634
and sugar 669, 697
and Sumatra 578
and Tangier 479
taxation see taxation: Portuguese
tiles 640
trade see trade: Portuguese
 trading stations in west Africa 683, 753–4
unloading of cargoes in transit to avoid Portuguese customs duties 745,
751
wine 459, 469, 647
Po-ššu see Bosi/Po-ššu
Postan, Sir Michael (‘Munia’) xxiv
potatoes xxiii, 752, 815
Potosí, Peru 696, 700, 763
pottery/ceramics 454
Abbasid 164
at Achnacreebeag 308
African 492
amphorae 115, 116, 119–20
south Arabian 88, 129
Axumite 115, 167
in Barus 160
on Belitung shipwreck 163
from Bereniké 115
bitumen-sealed earthenware 68
in Cape Verde 492
Chinese 153, 159, 163, 164, 176, 179, 186, 217, 230, 242, 244, 247, 725,
781; and Africa 267; and Egypt 174, 266; global reach of 877; at Hakata
196, 216–17; and Japan 649; Jian bowls 215; and Mexico 592; and
North America 780, 781, 784; and Philippines 574, 614, 622; porcelain
see porcelain: Chinese; and Ryukyu Islands 232; and Siam 278; and
Singapore 288–9; and Spain 617; Tang pottery 158, 163, 172; white
pottery (hisoku) 216–17
on Cirebon wreck 162
delftware 778
Eritrean 78
Greek 94, 323
Indus 62, 63
Japanese 232; porcelain 649–50, 839
Jordanian 83
and Kon-Tiki expedition 28
Korean 649
Lapita 12, 14
 Luzon ceramics 652
Madagascan 133
Mesolithic pottery 304
Mesopotamian 64
from northern Moluccas 12
on Nanhai I 165
through ‘Near Oceania’ 14
Nubian 78
at Palembang 160
Persian 159, 164
Phoenician 323
Polynesian 14
porcelain see porcelain
Portuguese 492
and Punt 78
at Qusayr al-Qadim 179
in Red Sea 176
through ‘Remote Oceania’ 14–15
Rhenish 353, 404
Roman 107
rouletted ware 115
and Ryukyu Islands 232
Seleukeian 94–5
of Silves 467
and Singapore/Temasek see silk
Sirafi 172
Spanish 586
Sudanese 78
Sumerian 61
Taíno 586
tea bowls 216, 230, 649
Thai 232
Ubaid 53, 54
Vietnamese 232
Yemeni 78
Pottinger, Sir Henry 826
Pound, Ezra 350
Powell, John 767
Praia, Cape Verde 490, 631, 753, 792–3
Praia da Vitória, Terceira 488
Praise-of-the-Two-Lands 73
Príncipe 506
printing
in Antwerp 672
Armenian printing houses 708
Ottoman refusals 608
presses 608, 708
Priuli, Girolamo 544
privateers
in Caribbean 763–5, 772, 773–6, 778, 779
from Dunkirk 685
Dutch ‘Sea-Beggars’ 673
English 405, 662, 730, 763, 764, 774–6
Vitalienbruder 436
promontory forts, Atlantic 328–9
prostitutes 823
male temple prostitutes 82
Protestantism/Protestants 317, 645
in Antwerp 672
Calvinists 660, 693, 708, 741–3, 769, 825
and England 557, 730, 770
Huguenots 676, 696, 697
in Madeiran English community 749
persecution in Netherlands under duke of Alva 673
Reformed Church in Gothenburg 723
Prussia 420, 428
Denmark and Brandenburg–Prussia 713, 715–16
Englishmen in 451–2
Hansa members 452
Prynne, William 769
Psenosiris, son of Leon 112
Ptolemaïs Thērēn 104
Ptolemies 93, 94, 95–8, 110–11
army 96
 and Bereniké 110–11
Ptolemy I Soter 95, 96
Ptolemy II Soter 96, 98
shipbuilding 111, 260
Syria under 94, 97
Ptolemy (Alexandrian geographer) 121, 122, 135, 345, 524, 536
and Ceylon 118, 119, 727
and the Indian Ocean 89, 105, 496, 727
and Kattigara 143
world map 727
Pu Hesan (Abu Hassan/Husain) 245
Pu Luoxin (Abu’l-Hassan) 243
Pu Shougeng 242, 247
Puerto Rico 520, 555, 769, 900, 903
and the USA 856
Puhar 119, 121
Pula Run see Run, Moluccas
Punt 47, 73, 74, 75, 76–9
trade with Egypt 47
Punta de Araya 683
Puteoli 116
Pyongyang 650
Pyrrhus 891
Pytheas of Marseilles 331, 334–8

Qala’at al-Bahrain 65–6

QANTAS 898
Qatar 52, 54
Qayrawan 173
Qays see Kish/Qays
Qian Hanshu 138–9
Qing Empire 801
Qingjing (mosque) 244
Qos 78
Quanzhou (Zaytun) xviii, xix, 187, 224, 226, 234, 238, 243–50, 265, 278,
638
Quechua Indians 29
Queen Elizabeth, RMS 886–7, 889–90, 899
Queen Elizabeth 2 (QE2) 899
Queen Mary, RMS 886–7, 889–90, 899
Queen Mary 2, RMS 900
Queensland 9, 10
Quentovic 353, 354, 355
Quevedo, Francisco de 704
Quilon 183–4
Quinsay see Hangzhou
Quirós, Pedro Fernandes de 731–2
Quoygrew, Orkneys 373
Qus 177
Qusayr al-Qadim 52, 78, 112, 123, 177–8 see also Myos Hormos
documents from Shaykh’s House 176–9
sheikh of 176, 178, 179, 187

rabbits 486
radio waves 864
Rædwald 349
Raffles, Sir Thomas Stamford 281–2, 819–21, 822, 823, 824–5, 828
Ragusa/Ragusans 81, 455–6
Raiateans 13
raiders xix, 13, 104 see also bandits; pirates/piracy
African 548
Bedouin 595
Castilian 457
Curonian 422
Estonian 422
Frankish 346
Germanic 344–7
North Sea 339–72 see also Vikings
Pict 347
and raiding culture 351, 362, 364
Scot 347
and sea defences 345–7
slave-raiders 554, 559
Viking see Vikings
railways xx, 865, 880
Chinese ‘One Belt, One Road’ project 908
and globalization 877
Panama railway 852–4
US 790; containers and US railroad companies 901
Rainbow Serpent 10
Raleigh, Sir Walter 731, 765–6
Ralli family 873
Ramisht of Siraf 171, 173, 180, 185
Rangoon 871
Rapa Nui see Easter Island
Rapa Nui (Easter Island) 3, 29–31
Ra’s al-Junz 68
rats 572
Pacific 10, 12, 24, 38
Ravenser 447
Rawalpindi 890
‘Red–Med’ canal 95–6
Red Sea xxii, 8, 46, 102, 103–4, 166–7, 398, 603, 892
and Bab al-Mandeb 180
cables 864
ceramics in 176
closure to non-Muslims 187
currents 51
highway 70, 111–13, 166–7, 181–2, 187, 517, 594, 600, 605–6, 634, 672
and Jewish–Christian confrontation 130, 166–7
and Mamluks 265, 595, 598, 600–601
and Ottomans 601, 602, 603, 604, 605, 608
and Persian Gulf 166, 173–4
pirate raids 187
and Portugal 600–601, 604; and Mamluks 598, 600–601; Portuguese
blockade 546, 601, 634, 672
Qusayr see Qusayr al-Qadim
Roman outstations 122
straits to Indian Ocean 180
trade see trade: Red Sea
winds 51, 52, 117
Reinach, Jacques de 855
Reinel, Pedro 609
Reischauer, Edwin 205
religion see also specific religions by name
crusades see crusades
eclecticism/syncretism 263, 293
and migration 19
pagan see paganism
and trade 144–6
René II of Naples 556
Renfrew, Colin 322
resins 47, 75, 79, 106, 132, 143, 147, 153, 165, 337
benzoin 153, 156
gum-resins 71 see also frankincense; myrrh
Réunion 43, 761, 831
Reval 421
Reykjavík 385
Rezanov, Nikolai Petrovich 807, 808
Rhine 344, 352, 353, 897
barges 343–4
Rhenish pottery 353, 404
Rhine–Maas estuary 677
Rhineland wine 353, 367, 448
rhinoceros 266
horn 104, 105, 121, 135, 139, 155, 242, 278, 695; pills from 199
Rhodes 99, 115, 122
rhubarb 153, 184, 194
Ri Sanpei 649–50
Rias Baixas 304
Riau islands 239, 821, 823
Ribe, Denmark 354
Ribeira Grande (Cidade Velha) 490–91, 492, 578, 584–5, 631, 753
Riberol, Francisco 590
Ricardo, David 825
Ricci, Matteo 645
rice 50, 106, 114, 132, 153, 177, 187, 213, 214, 246, 276, 281, 441, 491, 648,
652, 752, 803
 and Japan 808, 847
Madagascan 759
and Majapahit 280
Norway’s ferrying of 871
wine 286, 648
Richard I of England 449
Richard II of England 436
Richard III of England 462
Riga 420, 433, 438, 440, 470
Rikyû 649
Rio de Janeiro 701
Roanoke, North Carolina 765–6
Roaring Forties xv, 735–6
Roberts, Dr (Columbia surgeon) 792
Roberts, Edmund 833
Robinson, Alan 737
Roça do Casal do Meiro 324
rock carvings 321, 322
Rode, Hermen 426
Roebuck 758
Roger II of Sicily 472
Rognvald, earl of Orkney 364
Rolf, Norse ruler of Normandy 373
Roman Empire 121, 122, 166
cost of Mediterranean trade with Indies 116–17
fall in the West 348
goods found in Oc-èo 142
outstations in Red Sea 122
and raiders 347
Roman Britannia 344, 345, 346–7, 348, 355–6
Romans 99–102
clothing brought through Indian Ocean 108
coins 107, 118, 120–21, 141
fleets 344, 346
gold 108
Greco-Roman merchants see merchants: Greco-Roman/‘Roman’
in India 118
 Indo-Roman trade 52, 110–23, 877
pottery 107
and raiders 344–7
silver 108
Rome 99, 109, 115
Horace on 170
Horrea Piperataria 114
Roosevelt, Theodore 856, 857, 858–9
Rosenkrantz, Herman 713
Roskilde ships 370–71
Rostock 418, 423, 425, 426
Rostovtzeff, Michael 98
Rotterdam 880, 891, 892, 897, 903, 904
Rouen 701
roundhouses 321, 324, 329
Roupinho, Fuas 468
Royal African Company 760, 777
Royal Air Force 889
Royal Caribbean Lines 900
Royal Danish Baltic and Guinea Trading Company 721–2
Royal Dutch Shell 897
Royal Exchange, London 669
Royal Navy 573, 773, 789, 826, 866, 881
and Belfast 870
in Second World War 889
and the slave trade 829
Royal Society of London 792, 820
rubber 824, 868, 888, 892, 893–4
rubies 141
Rügen island 425
Rugians 423
rum 761, 778
Rumi, Yaqut ar- 177
Run, Moluccas 690, 714, 756
runes 443
rune stones 368
Rus see Kiev/Rus
Russell, Sir Peter 479
Russia
Admiralty 806
and Alaska 804, 805–6, 807–8, 809, 816, 903
and the Baltic 802, 807, 809
and the Black Sea 802, 809
boats see boats/ships: Russian
brandy 803
and China 800, 801, 802, 806
and the East Indies 802
and England 659
and furs 365, 420, 422, 423, 427, 428, 659, 786, 804, 806
and gold 801, 802, 803
Great Northern War 802
and Hansards 428
and Hawai’i 816
and the Japanese 808; Russo–Japanese War (1904–5) 871–2
luxury goods 802
merchants 422, 423, 804, 805–6
migrants fleeing persecution 860
Muscovy see Muscovy
naval power 802
Orthodox 420, 427, 437
and the Pacific 791, 800–809
and porcelain 802, 809
and Sannakh islanders 804
ships see boats/ships: Russian
and silk 802
and spices 801
and the Swedes 802
trade see trade: Russian
warships 794
wax 427, 428, 678
Russia–America Company 805, 808, 817
rye 426, 428, 442, 677
Baltic 420, 428, 439, 444, 675, 676, 682
Rye, England 456
Ryukyu Islands 220, 229–34, 244, 277, 614, 636
and Christianity 695
Chuzan 229, 231–4

Saavedra, Álvaro de 580

Sabaea 96
Sabas 97
sabres 220
Safavid shahs 705, 706, 707
Safed, Galilee 608, 701
saffron 132, 492
Saga of Eirík the Red 400, 407, 409, 410, 412–13
sago 576
Sagres 479–80
Sahul 7
Said bin Sultan, Sayyid 293, 833–4
Said Pasha 849
Saimur 171
Saint-Dié, Lorraine 556
Saint-Domingue see Santo Domingo, Hispaniola
St Helena xxi, 5, 745, 755–8, 809
and the Dutch 757
and English East India Company 755, 756–8
and the Portuguese 755–6
slaves on 756, 762
St John Island 638
St Kitts 767
St Mary’s Island (off N-E coast of Madagascar) 760–61
St Paul island, Indian Ocean 795
St Paul’s School 669
St Thomas, Virgin Islands 720–21
Sainte-Croix island, West Indies 721
Sakai 219, 230
sake 212, 652
cups 198
Sakhalin island 808, 872
sakimori 195
Sal island, Cape Verde 489, 683
Salawesi 280
Salazar, António de Oliveira 480, 513
Saldanha, António de 546
Salé, Morocco 467, 471, 475
Rovers 718
Salem 790
Salim ‘son of the cantor’ 181
salmon 196
Salonika 838
salt 135, 180, 213, 246, 320, 322, 352, 429, 441, 463, 477, 588, 808
Capeverdian 489, 683, 752
and the Dutch 674, 675, 676, 683, 685
Mediterranean 475
Portuguese 683
as preservative 108, 116, 430–31, 489, 674, 683, 752
from Sal 489, 683
Spanish 683
Venezuelan 683, 684, 685
Saltykov, Fedor Stepanovich 801
Samarkand 255
Sami/Lapps 373, 655
Samoa 11, 14, 19, 21
samurai 223–4, 225, 644, 649
San-fo-chi 153
San Antonio 572
San Francisco 851, 852, 903, 904
Bay 581, 853
San Francisco 630
San Pedro/Pablo 616
San Salvador 581
sandalwood 81, 153, 157, 578, 791, 796, 813, 815, 816, 817
Sanfoqi 149
Sanhaja Berbers 501
Sanlúcar de Barrameda 656
Sannakh islanders 804
Sanskrit 107, 128, 129, 141, 144, 149, 159–60
Sansom, Sir George 190
Santa Barbara Channel 28
Santa Casa de Misericórdia 640
Santa Catarina 679, 682
Santa Cruz islands 731
Santa Luzia citânia 329
Santa María 254, 526–7, 585
Santa Maria island 487–8
Santiago, Cape Verde 490, 492, 497, 631, 753
Santiago, Cuba 592, 774
Santiago de Compostela 459, 469
Santiago 504
Santo André 751
Santo Domingo, Hispaniola 586–8, 591, 593, 709, 768–9, 770
Welser bank 590
Zona Colonial 587
São Felipe, Cape Verde 753
São Jorge da Mina see Elmina
São Miguel 487, 745, 750
São Pedro 544
São Tomé 481–3, 492–5, 506, 560
and the Dutch 683
mulatto population 493
as place of exile 481–3, 493
slavery 481–3, 493, 495, 497, 510, 511
sugar 493
sapanwood 232, 233, 234, 278
sapphires 99, 115, 118, 141
‘Saracens’ 508
Sarangani island 614
Sarapis (god) 112, 114, 122
Sarawak Steamship Company 892
Sardinia 324, 326
Sargon of Akkad (Sargon the Great) 57–8, 65
Sargon of Assyria 65
Sarhat, Israel di 707
Saris, John 632
Sarmiento de Gamboa, Pedro 729, 730, 731
Sasanid Persia/Empire 141, 147, 167
Sasanian kings 118
Sassoon, Frederick 827
Sassoon family of Bombay 823
Sataspes 89, 90
Satavahana Empire 105
satin 233
Satingpra 244
Satsuma 652
Saudi Arabia 53, 93–4
Savonarola, Girolamo 526
Saxons 344, 345, 346, 347, 348
Sayf ad-din of Hormuz 598
Scandinavia 170–71, 342 see also Denmark/Danes; Norway; Sweden
brooches 353
as centre of interconnected global operations 711
Christianization 361
exotic luxuries reaching 366
Margaret and the three realms of 436–7
merchants 367
mixed marriages between Celts and Scandinavians 375–6, 380, 386
Norsemen see Norsemen
pagan Scandinavian women in Faroes 383
ports serving as northern European distribution centres 722
raiders from 347–8, 356–72 see also Vikings
Scandinavians in Haithabu 366
ships 342–3, 347, 357, 360–61, 365, 368–71
and the tea trade 725
Scharnhorst 890
Schauenburg, Adolf von 423
Scheldt, River 361, 673, 676, 897
Schleswig 423
Schöner, Johannes 572
Schottun, Richard 452
scimitars 318
Scotland 302, 304, 887
 brochs (small castles) 326
Darien Scheme and Scottish union with England 722–3
Jacobites 723
Jamaica and Scottish Highlanders 772
‘megalithic’ culture 308
monuments 301
Neolithic 310
to Orkney 304
Scot raiders 347
Scottish Company of the Indies 722
scurvy 573, 616, 666, 687, 688, 752, 793
‘Sea-Beggars’, Dutch 673
Sea–Land Service 903–4
sea levels 6, 11
falling 52, 303
rising 11, 20, 303, 339, 345; and Dunkirk II Marine Transgression 345
sea otters 785, 808
fur 785, 786, 806, 808, 809
sea slugs 232
Seacole, Mary 853
‘Seafarer, The’ 350
Seal, Graham 733
seals (emblems)
Indus 63–4
round stamp seals 66
and Ryukyu Islands 233
for shipping bound for China 235
Sumerian 63–4
seals (mammals) 306, 404, 785, 791
blubber 408, 797
seal-hunting 399
skins 397, 502, 785, 791
seaplanes 898
seaweed 196, 232, 306
Sebag family 836
Sebastian of Portugal 479, 621, 700
Second World War 887–91, 896
 and Belfast 870
Seeley, Sir John 765
Seine, River 319, 321, 332, 369
Seleucids 93
Syria under 94
Seleukeia 94–5
Selim I 603, 607
Selman Reis 603–4, 607
Semudera 264, 267, 276, 279
Semudera–Pasai 273–6, 279, 292
Seneca 337, 531
Senegal 702, 708
Seoul 650
Sephardim 698–700, 701, 717, 768, 834, 838, 840
of Amsterdam 701, 702, 704
Serer people 500, 502, 503
Serrão, Francisco 568–9, 571–2, 576, 606
Serrão, João 571, 576
sesame
Indian 114
oil 57, 59, 104
Severn, River 361
Seville 370, 467, 507, 528, 532, 561, 586, 617, 618, 623, 676, 696
archives 594, 634
businessmen funding transatlantic voyages 525, 588
Casa de Contratación 555
and the Dutch 677
and Havana 592
investors 703
and Japan 632
merchants 589
and Santo Domingo 590
and silver 635
slaves 583–4
trade with Americas 703
shagreen 648–9
Shama (African village) 508
Shamash (sun god) 60
Shanghai 244, 826, 827, 866, 871, 872, 893
sharks 14
fins 232
skins 648–9
Sharp, Andrew 19
Shaw, Samuel 787
Sheba 82
Queen of 81
sheep 372–3, 381, 385, 400, 404, 486, 489, 730
Merino 475
Shelikov, Grigory Ivanovich 805–6
shellfish 11, 28, 196, 306, 310, 323, 373, 701
Shenzhen 907–8
Sheppey, Isle of 360
Shetland xxii, 328, 372, 373, 377, 379, 386
Norn dialect 379
Shih Chong 137–8
Shi‘ite Muslims 173, 599
Shikoku island 218
Shintō 191, 200, 205, 206, 207, 208, 214, 228–9
shrines 205, 228, 647
shipbuilding
Ålander 874
Belfast 869–70, 899
British 869, 896
and Cabrillo 581
Chinese 259–60; in Quanzhou 247
European assumptions of superiority 731
in Funan 140
Japanese 212, 896
at Lisbon 484
Madeiran 484
at Okhotsk 806
Ptolemaic 111, 260
shipowners 111, 182, 244, 861–2, 872
Arab 105
 of Bristol 460, 461, 463
Chinese 241
Dutch 717
Greek 873, 895
in Ionian Islands 873
Korean 209
Portuguese 470, 504
safety requirements 861–3
shipping safety 860–63, 870
ships see boats/ships
shipwrecks xviii, xx, xxii, 162, 172, 230, 554–5, 617, 874
off Australian coast 735, 737, 738–41, 743
Batavia 738–41, 743
Belitung 162–4, 165
Cirebon 162
Esmeralda 543–4
in Far North 804
Intan 164–5
Nanhai I 165
Quanzhou 247
salvaging 776
Sinan 217–18
Viking 357, 360
Shōsō-in, Nara 217
Shunten 230
Siam 220, 229, 232, 233, 262, 267, 270, 648–9, 706
and Ayutthaya 276, 277–8
and China 262, 278
Gulf of 139
and Melaka 293–5
and Singapore 289
under Thai rulers 279
trade 233, 277–8
and tribute 277, 295
Siberia 399, 408, 800–803, 804, 805
Sicily 182, 186, 475, 485
sickles 324
Sidebotham, Steven 117
Sierra Leone 504
Sigismund of Luxembourg, Holy Roman Emperor 441
Sigtuna 422
Sigurð, earl of Orkney 373, 375, 379
Sigurð of Norway, ‘Jerusalem Traveller’ 402
silk 99, 121, 136, 149, 170, 184, 187, 454, 547, 623, 687, 724
Armenian 707
and Bosi 147
Byzantine silver plate 349
and Ceylon 147
Chinese 108, 153, 163, 170–71, 172, 220, 239, 242, 244, 562, 633, 642,
643, 701, 707; and Japan 638, 652; in Manila 617, 623, 624, 707, 715;
and Mexico 592, 621, 623–4, 780; and North America 780; and the
Portuguese 652; and Quanzhou 247, 278; and Siam 278; and the Spanish
617, 623
Christian missionary activities and the silk trade 645–6
and Hansards 429
and Japan 194, 200, 201, 628, 630, 633, 847
Jews’ interest in 176
and Julfans 706
Korean 244, 247
Macanese 640
Persian 706
and Russia 802
and Ryukyu Islands 231
screens 641–2
and Singapore/Temasek 286
and Sofala 548
and the Swedes 724, 725
turbans 540
Silk Road xx, 135–6, 170, 199
and Buddhist texts 146
Chinese ‘One Belt, One Road’ 908
and ‘Polar Silk Route’ proposals 908
silkworms 630
Silla, Korea 192–3, 194, 195, 197, 198, 199, 204, 211
silver 81, 97, 135, 170–71, 244, 365, 477, 547, 713, 715
aboard Batavia 738, 739, 740, 743
American 611, 616, 624, 707, 754, 769; Mexican 592, 619, 624, 635, 707;
Peruvian 592, 619, 624, 635, 672, 678, 696, 700, 715, 724–5, 763;
silverware 816; and the Swedes 724–5
and Antwerp 668, 672
and the Baltic 364
billon alloy 586
bracelets 548
bribes 782–3
bullion 188, 354, 364, 477, 500–501, 619, 624–5, 635, 647, 763
and Charlemagne 354
and China 220, 623, 624–5, 643, 696
of Chrysé and Argyré 134
coins see coins: silver
English 448–9, 451
of Funan 140
hack (weighed) 60, 68, 153, 364, 390, 648
and India 188
ingots 165
Iranian 188, 364
and Jamaica 777, 778
Japanese 638, 641, 642, 647, 801, 847
and Macau 763
and Manila 635, 763
mines 170, 364, 449, 635, 700, 763, 802
of Porto Bello 774–5
and the Portuguese 640–41, 668, 672, 700
Roman 108
and Seville 635
in Shetlands 372
Siberian 801–2
‘Single Whip’ taxes and silver payments 624
and the Spanish 81, 635, 696
and Śri Vijaya 153
Sterling 449
and the Swedes 724–5
 of Tartessos 81, 322
tribute 360
and the Varangians 364
and Venice 672
Viking raids on 362
Silver City Airways 899
Silves 467, 468
Simla, SS 867
Sinan wreck 217–18
Sindbad the Sailor 133, 156–7
Singapore 272, 818–24, 828
and Ayutthaya 290
Batavian steamship link 868
and Britain/England 287–8, 821–2, 828, 893; and East India Company
819–20, 821
and China 286, 288–9, 822–3
as a container port 904
ethnic diversity 822–4
expulsion from Malaysian Federation 895
Fort Canning 281, 287–8, 289, 291
History Museum 288
and Java 284–5, 286, 288, 289
and Majapahit 280
and Melaka 285, 289, 822
and Norway 871
P&O office 892
and Palembang 285
Peranakan families 823
previously Temasek 279, 282, 283, 285, 286
and Raffles 281–2
rubber 824, 893–4
and Second World War 887, 892; and post-war period 893–6
and Siam 289
and ‘Silk Route of the Sea’ 281–9
and slavery 823
and Sri Tri Buana story 283–4, 287
and steamships 868
 and Strait of Malacca 281–2, 286, 290
Tan Tock Seng Hospital 823
trade 288–9, 824–5, 826
and the UN 894–6
and Vietnam 286
Singapore Stone 288
Singhasari 279
Sinthos see Indus River
Siraf 156, 164, 171–2, 184
Sitka, Alaska 807–8
Skania 430
Skara Brae 310–11, 321
skins/hides 353, 470, 795 see also furs/fur trade
bear 406
boat construction with hides 67, 321, 331
Chinese 107
Cuban 591
deer hides 278
and the Dutch 683
gazelle 323
goat 473, 756, 839
from Hispaniola 590, 591
leopard 323
lion 323
Merino sheep 475
seal 397, 502, 785, 791
tiger 194, 278
walrus 398
whale 91
Skrælings
Inuit see Inuit
in Vínland 411–13
Skuldelev ships 370–71
Skye 382
Skylax 88, 90
skýr 399
slavery/slaves 106, 108, 128, 185, 410, 513, 545, 581, 708
Anglo-Saxon 347
in Angola 503
Arab slavers (Dashi) 266
and Atlantic islands 481, 483
and the Azores 497
Bantu slaves 131
and Barbados 767
Berber slaves 502
and Bermuda 766
Brazilian 490, 553, 560, 748
and the British 347, 829, 831, 832, 841
burials 491
and the Canaries 473–4, 486, 497, 499
and Cape Verde 489, 490, 491, 492, 497, 502, 503, 504, 584, 593, 702,
753–5, 756, 841
Caribbean 490, 491, 583–5, 592, 593, 720–21, 767, 769, 777
and castration 832
Danish slave trade 709, 712, 716, 720, 722
female slaves 137–8, 347, 379, 386, 553, 823
and Frisians 344
and the Genoese 503, 588, 777
and gold 582
and Guinea Bissau 504
in Iceland 386
in Jamaica 777
Kongo slaves 493, 503
Korean slaves 210
and Liverpool 865
in Madeira 486, 497
Malagasy 760, 761–2, 780
and Manila 697
of Mina coast 507
native American slaves 816
and Oman 829, 831
and the Portuguese 489, 490, 491, 492, 497–9, 502–4, 510, 511, 547, 560,
584, 700, 701, 753–4, 841
and the Royal Navy 829
 on St Helena 756, 762
and São Tomé 481–3, 493, 495, 497, 510, 511
Shih Chong’s female slaves 137–8
and Sierra Leone 504
and Singapore 823
slave-merchants 266, 490, 491, 753, 754, 777
slave-raiders 554, 559
slave ships 510, 511, 560, 757–8, 762
slave trade xix, 153, 473, 483, 489, 490, 491, 492, 497–9, 503, 505, 524,
560, 583–5, 588, 593, 697, 701, 709, 716, 722, 749, 753–5, 777
and the Spanish 490, 491, 492, 503, 505, 531, 552, 553, 554, 582, 583–5,
592, 593, 777
sub-Saharan 471, 583–4
and sugar trade 582, 584, 589, 749, 762, 768, 831
Taíno 531
and the Vikings 347
Welsh slaves 379
in west Africa 500
and West Indies 841
Slavs 366, 418, 421–2, 423
‘Drive to the East’ 418, 425
in GDR 423
German wars 423
Slovenia 338
Smaragdus, Mons 115
Smith, Adam 825
smuggling 109, 181, 231, 249, 619, 686, 751, 776, 783–4, 894
Smyrna 676, 701, 838
snails, edible 112
Snefru 73
Snorri 413
Society 758
Society Islands 20, 21, 25
Socotra 75, 125–31, 132, 598
Hoq cave 128
pirates 130
trade 130–31
Sodré, Vicente 544
Sofala 157–8, 546, 548
Sogdian merchants 135–6
Soliman, Rajah 617–18
Solís, Juan de 567–8
Solomon 73, 80–81, 82
Solomon Islands 3, 10, 11, 728–30, 731
Somalia 62, 71, 79, 96, 167, 182, 266
Sōpatma 119
Sorbians 423
Sørensen, Marie Louise 492
sorghum 114
souterrains 329
South Africa
trade 841, 874, 880
South America see also specific countries by name
Cape Horn see Cape Horn
Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of 528, 532
Gran Colombia 852
and Hamburg 880
maritime highway to Caribbean islands 521
New Granada 852
and Polynesians 27–9
and the Spanish 28–9, 522–3, 550–56; and Casa de Contratación 555; and
gold 553; loss of northern colonies 852; and slavery 553, 554; Vespucci
and the ‘Antipodes’ 550–53
trade with northern European ports 880
South China Sea xxii, 6, 43, 121, 125, 136, 148, 240, 679
and China 240, 822; Chinese claims/control 136–7, 238, 908; and Pax
Sinica 293; Quanzhou trade 244–50
Melaka as link with Indian Ocean 272, 295, 569, 636
and Mongol rule 279
and the Portuguese see Portugal/Portuguese: and South China Sea
shipwrecks 162–5
Singapore as link with Indian Ocean 272
and smuggling 894
trade see trade: South China Sea
 trading empires 131, 133; Śri Vijaya see Śri Vijaya, Sumatra
and Wu Chinese 137, 142
and Zheng He’s voyages 254–5, 256–69, 280–81, 293, 636
South Equatorial Current 16
Southampton 454–5, 458, 885, 887
air raids 891
as Hamwih 353
Southern Ocean see Antarctic Ocean
Souyri, Pierre-François 235
soya beans 648
Spain/Spaniards
and Aden 182
and African coast 471
amphorae 115
Andalusia see Andalusia
and Antwerp 673
and Armenians 707
Basques see Basques
and Britain/England 557, 656; Armada 627, 676; and the Caribbean 764–5,
770–71; and Cromwell 769, 770; and the Inquisition 656–7; and Jamaica
773–9; and licensed piracy 765, 775–6; and Nootka Sound/Convention
794; and the Pacific 665, 687, 730–31; Panama and war between 851;
resistance to Philip II of Spain 654; tussles between English and Spanish
sailors hitting Antwerp trade 673
Bronze Age 319, 323–4
and Cape Verde 754
and the Caribbean see Caribbean: and the Spanish
Castilians see Castile/Castilians
Catalans see Catalans
and the Chinese 622–8, 652, 806
Christian reconquest 477; and battle of Las Navas de Tolosa 468
Christians vs Muslims in 423, 477; battle of Las Navas de Tolosa 468
coins 586
and control of Atlantic 526
and Cuba 565, 856
and Denmark 685
and the Dutch see Netherlands/Holland and the Dutch: and the Spanish
and East Indies see East Indies: and the Spanish
and the Falklands 795
and France 676, 795
Frankish raids in 346
and Galápagos Islands 28
Galicia see Galicia
and gold 531, 553, 555, 582, 588–9, 729
and Guinea 754
Habsburg dynasty 614, 764–5
and Hispaniola 528, 555
Italian wars of Charles V 611
and Jamaica 771, 773
and Japan see Japan/Japanese
and the Spanish Jews 698
and Low Countries 673, 675 see also Netherlands/Holland and the Dutch:
and the Spanish
Manila galleons see Manila galleons
Manila’s Spanish settlers 620–21, 622, 625, 626
merchants see merchants: Spanish
and Mexico see Mexico: Spanish conquest/New Spain
and the Moluccas 567–81, 606, 611, 614
Morgan and the Spaniards of Panama 775
Muslim (al-Andalus) 170, 369, 464, 465–7, 468, 698; battle of Las Navas
de Tolosa 468; Granada as last Muslim kingdom 476, 477; and
surrender treaties forged with Muslim princes 547
navy 627, 676, 856
Neolithic 309, 313
and the Netherlands 627
and Nootka Sound 794
and North America see North America: and the Spanish
nuraghic culture 324
and Pacific islands 614, 728–33
and Panama 591, 851
papal global division and Spanish rights 533, 537, 570, 579, 611, 680
and Peru 590, 611, 635
and the Philippines see Philippines: and the Spanish
and Polynesian islands 728, 731, 732
 and Portugal see Portugal/Portuguese: and the Spanish
pottery 586
rock carvings 321
and Ryukyu Islands 614
salt 683
search for southern continent 729–32
ships see boats/ships: Spanish
and silver 81, 635, 696
and slavery see slavery/slaves: and the Spanish
and South America see South America: and the Spanish
Spaniards in London 455
and spices see spices/spice trade: and the Spanish
swords 318
tin 324
trade see trade: Spanish
and the USA 856
and Vancouver Island 791
Viking raids 370, 465
wine 459, 633
Spanberg, Martin 803
Spanish Inquisition see Inquisition
spears 104, 321, 342, 736, 793
Spencer Bay, Australia 875
Spice Islands see Moluccas/Spice Islands
spices/spice trade xxi, 93, 99, 114–15, 125, 143, 147, 161, 166, 175, 184,
187, 272, 279, 454, 540, 733 see also specific spices
at Aceh, Sumatra 689
and Alexandria 595, 600, 601, 604, 669
Antwerp market 579, 600, 614, 615, 617, 668, 669–72
and the Azores 745
and Beirut 495, 544, 567, 594, 601, 604, 669
and China 545, 574, 606, 643
and Columbus 523
cost of spices 181
and the Danes 714–15
and the Dutch 678, 684, 688, 736
and the English 173, 688–90, 737; EIC 820
 and German banking houses 672
and German Hansa 420, 429
in Horrea Piperataria 114
and incense-making 80
and Indian cuisine 714–15
Indo-Roman trade 52, 113–16, 877
and Malacca Strait 220
and Mamluks 595
and the ‘Muscateers’ 831
and the Philippines 622
and the Portuguese 523, 537, 542, 543, 544–5, 546, 563, 567–8, 569, 599–
601, 605, 617, 635, 700, 751; and Antwerp 668, 669, 672; Lisbon
market 682–3, 684; and the Moluccas 568–81, 606, 611, 614; and
pepper 504, 505, 511, 540, 541, 542, 543, 544–5, 595, 600, 669
and Red Sea 52, 170–71, 594, 600, 603, 605–6, 672
and Russia 801
and Ryukyu Islands 231, 232, 233
and Semudera 276
and the Spanish 566–81, 606, 617; and the Moluccas 567–81, 606, 611,
614; and the Philippines 615 see also Manila galleons; search for
southern continent 729
spice routes 52, 170–71, 173, 523, 594, 606, 617, 672
and Sturmy 460
taxation of spice traffic 181, 187
and theories about Indonesians and Madagascar 132–3
and transatlantic attempts to reach the Indies 517, 522–35, 537, 550–64,
566–8, 571–2
and the Turks 602, 603
undermining of Muslim economies by diversion of 523, 537, 546
and Venice 595, 675
spinning 414
Spinola family 470
Spitsbergen 396, 655, 661
Sri Lanka see Ceylon
Śri Vijaya, Sumatra 133, 147, 148–65, 187, 243, 250
and Buddhism 152, 154
and China 149–52, 153–6, 161, 273
 Chola’s attack on 273
and India 161
and Java 159, 160, 272–3, 279–80, 287
merchants 154, 164
and monsoons 149
as Zabaj, and the Arabs 155–8
Stamford Bridge, battle of 377
Staraya Ladoga 365, 367
starlight navigation 17, 18
Statue of Liberty 860, 879
steam power
and globalization 877
and the railways 854
and shipping 848–9, 860–61, 864–73
steel 104
stegodons 7
Sterling silver 449
Stettin (Szczecin) 423, 452
Stiles, Ezra 785
Stockholm 418, 421
archipelago 364–5
Danish siege 436
and Vitalienbrüder 436
Störtebeker, Klaus 437
Strabo 96, 98, 99, 106, 118, 121, 334, 335, 336–7
Stralsund 425
Stuart, Charles Edward, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ 723
Stuart, James Francis Edward, the ‘Old Pretender’ 723
Sturmy, Robert 460–61
submarines 883, 887
German U-boats 881, 882, 888, 891
Sudan 78, 174
slave castration in Coptic monastery on Mount Jebel-Eter 832
Suez Canal xviii, 848–51, 857, 859, 866, 867
closure (1956) 896
nationalization 896
sugar xxiii, 104, 118, 154, 238, 429, 454, 459, 485, 500–501, 545, 676, 717,
718, 772
Barbadian 768
Bermudan 766
Brazilian 745, 748, 753
and Britain/England 657, 768, 881
and the Canaries 589–90
cane 12
Caribbean 582, 589–90, 748, 766, 768–9
Columbus and sugar trade 525, 589
Cuban 591
the Danes, and sugar from West Indies 721
equipment for manufacturing 721
and Flanders 486, 669
global reach of sugar trade 877
and Hispaniola 582, 589–90, 768–9
Jamaican 777, 779
from La Gomera 589
Madeiran xxiii, 464, 485, 486, 501, 561, 562, 748, 749
mills 486, 589, 749
and Moroccans 839
and the ‘Muscateers’ 831
plantations 582, 683, 748, 749, 768, 774, 777, 831
and the Portuguese 669, 697
and São Tomé 493
and slavery 582, 584, 589, 749, 762, 768, 831
and tea trade 768, 839
Sugawara no Michizane 201
Suione boats 342–3
Sulayman of Basra 171–2, 183–4, 185
Süleyman the Magnificent/Lawgiver 603, 604, 605, 607
Süleyman Pasha, Hadım 605, 608
sulphur 391
Sumatra 147, 149, 157, 159, 233, 244, 261, 264, 269, 273, 279, 606, 740, 821
Chinese piracy off 293
copper 160
East India Company base in 831
 EIC pepper factory, Bencoolen 761, 820
Lancaster in 689
Palembang see Palembang, Indonesia
Parameśvara and Javan rule 287, 289–90
and the Portuguese 578
Śri Vijaya see Śri Vijaya
and Thailand 279
tin 160
Sumbal, Samuel 836
Sumer/Sumerians 46, 47, 50, 55–70
boats 57
and Dilmun see Dilmun
and Indus Valley 62
literature 55
myths 55, 56, 67
pottery 61
seals 63–4
trade 57–62
Sunbay (slave girl) 553
Sunda (Pleistocene island bridge linking south-east Asia to Sahul) 7
Sunda Strait 606, 736, 787, 821, 868
Sunni Muslims 295, 594, 705
Turks 599
Surabaya 268–9
Surat (Armenian merchant) 706
Sūryavarman II 244
Sutton Hoo ship burial 349
Svantovit (god) 425
Svein Asleifarson 363, 373
Svein Forkbeard of Denmark 361, 375, 401–2
Sverre of Norway 444
Sveti Pavel 804
Swahili coast 519, 545–6, 831, 833
Swan Hellenic 900
Sweden xxi, 322, 342, 364–5, 426, 427
and west Africa 716–17
and Baltic conquest 421, 422, 677
 boats 342, 365
and the British 725
and China 725, 726
and the Danes 724
and the Dutch 718, 724
and a ‘General Commercial Company for Asia, Africa, America and
Magellanica’ 716–17
global trading network 709
Gotland see Gotland
and Great Northern War 802
and Guinea 716, 718
invasion of Jutland 685
iron 724
rune stones 368
and Russia 802
and silk 724, 725
and silver 724–5
Swedish East India Company 723–6
Swedish Vikings 362
and tea 709, 725, 871
trade 709, 722, 724–6, 871
Varangian merchants from 423
sweet potato 12, 29, 37, 493
Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver’s Travels 693
Swire, John 866–7
Swire family 867
Switzerland 889
Sword Brethren 420, 421
swords 233, 342, 740
Atlantic Bronze Age 317–19
Carp’s Tongue 318
Mongol 227
Ryukyu 233, 234
scimitars 318
of Yavanas 114
Sydney 813
Syria 70, 79, 598
 Mamluks 265
under the Ottomans 594, 601
under Ptolemies 94, 97
and Second Crusade 423
under Seleucids 94
and Ubaid 54
Syros island 873
Szczecin (Stettin) 423, 452

Tacitus: Germania 342–3, 344, 345

T’aeryŏm of Silla 193, 196, 197
Tahiti/Tahitians 20, 21, 25–6, 810–12, 813
Raiateans 13
Taíno Indians 518–19, 521–2, 527, 528, 529, 530–31, 537, 555, 582–3, 585,
588, 591, 592
Taira clan 217, 230
Taiwan 6, 208, 278, 653, 693
prehistoric culture 11–13
and Republic of China 892–3
and South China Sea 908
Taizu 239
Takashima island 227
Takeno Jôô 649
Takezaki Suenaga 223–4, 225–6
Tale of Genji 194, 198, 215
‘Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor’ 74
Talepakemalai 15
Tallinn 421, 433, 438, 439
tallow 381, 473, 678, 721
Talmud 80
Tamemoto no Minamoto 230
Tamil language 112
Tamils 52, 160, 183
Chola 174, 273
merchants 244
in Singapore 823
Tan Tock Seng 823
Tanegashima 637
Tangier 479
battle of 484
Tannenberg, battle of 452
Tantalus 891
Taprobané 109 see also Ceylon
tar 721
taro 25, 178
Tarragona 346
Tarshish 81, 82
Tartessos 81, 322, 330, 332
Tartu 438
Tasman, Abel Janszoon 31–2, 741–3
Tasmania 7, 741–2, 743
Taunton cottons 750
Tavira 478, 479
taxation
in Alexandria 595
on Arctic shipping passing Novaya Zemlya 801
Chinese 239, 240; customs rates on luxury goods 241–2, 273; and Macau
639; from Quanzhou trade 244, 273; ‘Single Whip’ taxes and silver
payments 624
on cod 562
coffee import duties 831
customs to Portuguese at Indian Ocean stations 606
on Danish Sound shipping 801
English exemptions 455
on fur trade 804
and Gibraltar 801
under Harald Fairhair 363
and Isaac the Jew 186
of Koreans by Japanese 192
Madeira’s trade tax exemption 486
Mamluk 594, 595
on merchants xviii, 109, 450; and England’s Carta Mercatoria 450, 469
of non-Muslims in Aden 181
Omani 833–4
 Ottoman tax in Egypt 603
papal tax, ‘Peter’s Pence’ 403
Portuguese: on Asian shipping 635, 751; avoidance in Cape Verde through
using cloths as currency 754; customs duties avoided by Portuguese
merchants 745; unloading of cargoes in transit to avoid 745, 751
‘Single Whip’ and silver payments 624
of spice traffic 181, 187
on tea 725, 726, 784
and trade agreements 838–9
tea xxi, 207, 215–16, 230, 246, 649, 715, 724, 809, 816
‘Afriat Tea’ 839
bowls 216, 230, 649
and Britain 724, 725, 726
bushes 725
ceremonies 216, 649
clippers 866
fake 710–11
gatherings 649
herbal 784
and Japan 215–16, 230, 649, 847
lodge 216
and New England 781
and the sugar trade 768, 839
taxes on 725, 726, 784
trade 706, 709–11, 725, 726, 790, 860; Danish 709, 715; English Tea Act
and EIC 784; global reach of 877; and Moroccans 839; North American
781, 783–4, 789; Scandinavian pick of best teas 725; and sugar 768,
839; Swedish 709, 725, 871
teacups 715, 725
teak 106, 122, 642
Teide, Mount 472
Teixeira family 701
Teldo (Venetian messenger) 595–8
telegraph cables 864, 877, 907
Tell el-Kheleifeh 83
Tell Qasile 83
Temasek 279, 282, 283, 285, 286 see also Singapore
Tenerife 472, 488, 501, 505
Tengah/Muhammad 291–2, 293
Terceira, Azores 488, 504, 745, 750
Ternate 576, 577, 580, 606
Dutch in 684
sultan of 568
Tetouan, Morocco 839
Teutonic Knights/Order 420–21, 428, 436, 437, 441, 452
Thailand 113, 117, 137
and Ayutthaya 290
boats 278
‘eaglewood’ 278
merchants in South China Sea 240
pottery 232
and Siam 279
and Sumatra 279
Thaj 93–5
Thames 807
Thames, River 360, 369
Theodoric, king of Metz 348
Thirty Years War 714
Thomas (cog) 456–7
Thomas, Hugh 627
Thomas Aquinas 499, 680
Thorne, Robert, the elder 534, 657
Thorne, Robert, the younger 657
Thorne family 657
Thousand and One Nights see Arabian Nights
Three Kings, battle of the 479
Thule 337
Tianfei/Mazu (sea goddess) 258, 261, 268, 823
Tibet 706
tides
Atlantic 306, 336
Brittany 328
English Channel 321
Indian Ocean 103, 107
Tidore 576–7, 580, 606
Dutch in 684
sultan of 568, 576
Tierra del Fuego 572, 718, 727
tigers 64
skins 194, 278
Tigris 50, 52
Timbuktu 500, 501, 509
Timor 578, 734
tin 108, 320–21, 324, 461
Atlantic tin trade 332–8
Cornish 302
in Haithabu 366
ingots 164
Malayan 164, 868
Sumatran 160
Tintam, John 507
Tirpitz, Alfred von 881, 887
Titanic, RMS 860, 870
Titus 113
Tlingits 808, 809
tobacco 643, 709, 717, 721, 766, 767, 772, 803, 840
Tobago, Caribbean 719
Tōdaiji temple, Nara 194, 202
Togen Eien 221–2
Toi 32, 35–6
Tokyo
Bay 846
as Edo see Edo, Japan
Toledo, Francisco de 730
Tolosa plains battle (Las Navas de Tolosa) 468
Tomber, Roberta 116
tombs see also burial
chambered/vaulted 311, 324
monumental 59, 61
Neolithic 308, 309, 311, 312
Orkney 311
 passage tombs 308, 313
royal 287
Sardinian 324
Tonga 19
Tongking, Gulf of 136
tools
axes see axes
farm 221
Mesolithic 304, 306
Polynesian 15, 16, 24
in Roça do Casal do Meiro tomb 324
stone 53, 91, 304, 314, 316
topaz 141
Topia 553
Topsham, Devon 314
torpedoes 882, 890
Torres, Luís de 527, 731–3
Torres Strait 9–10, 733
Torsdesillas, Treaty of 537, 541, 611
Torshavn 383
tortoiseshell 105, 109, 118, 121, 130, 135, 198
Tortuga island 773–4
Toscanelli, Paolo 524
Tostig 361–2, 377
trade
African 510–11, 592; between Glückstadt and Guinea 719; South African
880; trans-Sahara caravan traffic 475, 834
Anglo-Saxon 355
Armenian 705–8
aromatic see aromatics; incense; perfumes
Atlantic: Angra as a nodal point 752; and Baltic 721–2; of Copenhagen
721–2; eastern Atlantic from Neolithic times xxii; and Greenland 398,
402–4, 407, 408; Muslim 467; Norse trade with North America 414; tin
trade 332–8
at Ayla 167
Baltic 338, 339, 364–5, 366, 367, 418, 420, 427, 428; and Amsterdam 676;
and Atlantic 721–2; and the Danes 713, 714, 715–16, 721–2; and the
 Dutch 675, 676, 677, 685, 686; of Veckinchusens 441
‘Barbary’ 657
battle for control of maritime trade 526, 594–610, 667
Bermudian 766
Brazilian 560–61, 748, 880; slave trade/economy 490, 553, 560, 748
British see also trade: English: Canton trade 709, 825; with Japan 846;
opium 825–6, 827; strike disruptions 896; through Suez Canal 850–51
Buddhism’s attitude to 236
Caribbean 520, 521, 590; British blocking of trade with North America
780, 781, 785; contraband trade in Spanish islands 771, 772, 776;
Havana 592, 617; Hispaniola 586; between Jamaica and the English
colonies in North America 777; networks 520, 527; slave trade see
slavery/slaves: Caribbean
Chinese 236–50, 643, 709; Britain and Canton trade 709, 825; with
Denmark 709, 712, 714, 725; and ethnic diversity in China 238; fur
trade 785–6, 791, 792–6, 797, 806; with Hawai’i 815, 816; Hong
downturn after Second World War 893; Hung’s ban on Chinese
merchants trading overseas 219, 220; and imperial court 154, 163–4,
216, 236–8, 239–40, 241–2, 244, 248, 250; with Iraq 185; with Japan
201–2, 212–20, 228, 638, 647, 649; and Java 163–4; with Khmer
Empire 244; with Mexico 592; Ming ban on private trade 257, 261;
Ming restrictions on foreign trade 286–7, 289, 290; with Moluccas 574;
networks 822–3; with North America/USA 709, 780–96; opium 825–6,
827; with Philippines 620–21, 622–5; porcelain see porcelain: Chinese;
with Portugal 627, 636–7, 652; Quanzhou and ‘commercial revolution’
239, 243–50; with Russia 801, 802, 806, 807, 808–9; with Siam 277;
silk 108, 153, 163, 170–71, 172, 239, 242, 244, 652; with Siraf 171–2;
Song liberalization 240, 273; South China Sea trade of Quanzhou 244–
50; sucking away Chinese cash 188; with Sweden 725, 726; and tribute
xix, 236, 257; women’s investment 239
Chola 273
Christian trading republics emerging 173
coffee 95, 709, 711, 721, 725, 831
and Confucianism 236
and containers see containerization
copper see copper
and crusade 420, 422
Cuban 772
Danish 667, 709, 711–19; Baltic trade 713, 714, 715–16, 721–2; with
China 709, 712, 714, 725; with India 712, 713, 714, 715; and neutrality
in Napoleonic Wars 712; slave trade 709, 712, 716, 720, 722; spice trade
714–15; tea trade 709, 715; with West Indies 711–12, 713
Dutch xix, 197, 627, 674, 676; Amsterdam 677; and the Baltic 675, 676,
677, 685, 686; in Brazil 686, 748; cloth 678; with East Indies 678, 682,
684–5; and the English 687–91; in exotic goods 660; grain trade 675,
676–7; herring trade 668, 674, 683, 685; intra-Asian trade 674; with
Japan 694–5, 846; pepper 678; with Russia 677–8; and São Tomé 683;
and the Spanish 683, 876–7; spice trade 678, 684, 688, 736; and struggle
for ocean route supremacy 5, 667, 679–91; in West Indies 683, 686
Dutch–Portuguese struggle in 677, 682–3; and Amboyna control 689–90;
and Dutch global trade 678, 679–82; Dutch supplanting of Portuguese
trade 668, 674; and Lisbon trade 677, 682–3, 684; and ocean route
supremacy 5, 667, 673–5, 677, 679; Philip II’s ban on Dutch trade 676–
7; Philip III’s ban on Dutch trade 683, 684; and Portuguese trading
stations in west Africa 683; and St Helena 756; and success of Dutch
merchant fleets 668; and Viana do Castelo’s ignoring of rules 686
Egyptian 70–79; Indian Ocean 70–79, 99–102; with Punt 47, 73, 75, 76–9;
Red Sea trade 46, 79, 110–11, 594; and tribute 77
English 448–9, 451–2, 455–6; and Bristol 457–64; and the Dutch 687–91;
grain trade 389, 391, 444, 458; with Hansa 419, 453, 458; with Portugal
700; with Russia 659; spice trade see spices/spice trade: and the English;
wine trade 457, 458–9
English Channel 319–20
exotic see exoticism: exotic goods, luxuries and foods
exponential and transformative growth of maritime trade 880
free navigation rights and trade rights 679–82, 822
free trade 219, 419, 682, 804, 824–5, 826
French 562–3; Atlantic, from Neolithic times xxii; with China 709
Frisian 352–3, 355
fur see furs/fur trade
German 173, 421 see also Hansa, German; Glückstadt trade with Guinea
719
and globalization see globalization
grain see grain trade
Greek 872–3
and Greenland 398, 402–4, 407, 408
Guinea 504–8, 719, 754; coast 489, 490, 504, 669, 717
Hanseatic 419–20, 426–8, 429–31, 432–46
Hawai’ian 815–17
Icelandic 390–92, 461–3
illicit, between Portuguese and Spanish hemispheres 642
Indian 265; ‘country trade’ 713, 715, 825; with Denmark 712, 713, 714,
715; and New Julfans 706, 707
Indian Ocean 47, 51–2, 53–4, 90, 99, 149, 238, 241; and Ceylon 118; and
Dilmun 66–7; and Egypt 70–79, 99–102; between Gerrha and Babylonia
94; between Mesopotamia and Indus Valley 66–7, 69; with North
America 780–96; and the Omanis 832; and Periplous tēs Eruthras
thalassēs 104–9, 124; and the Romans 52, 110, 877; and
Singapore/Temasek 286; and Śri Vijaya 149; and Strait of Malacca 279
see also Melaka (Malacca): Strait of Malacca; Sumerian 57–62
Indo-Roman 52, 110–23, 877
intra-Asian 674, 871
Irish 457
Japanese 189, 632–3, 647–50; with Britain 846; with China 201–2, 212–
20, 228, 638, 647, 649; with the Dutch 694–5, 846; and imperial court
194; imports 194; in Inland Sea 652; with Korea 194, 198, 630; and
Macau 638; masked as tribute xix; official/unofficial distinction 235;
with Philippines 629, 648; and Portuguese 652, 654; with Russia 846;
with US 846–7
Javanese 163–4
Korean 194, 198, 216, 630
Lapita 15
Levant 460–61
in luxuries see luxury goods
between Madagascar and Melaka 548
and Majapahit 280
and mapmakers 471
Mediterranean centres and the crusades 420
merchant guilds 183, 184, 249
merchants see merchants
Mexican: with China 592; with Havana 592, 617
monopolies 233, 277–8, 335, 441, 447, 506, 563, 600, 690, 695, 723, 773,
784 see also East India Company, English; VOC (United East India
Company)
Moroccan 511, 561, 657, 834–40
‘Muscateer’ involvement with European trade 831–2
Muscovy 659, 678
Norse trade with North America 414
North American see also trade: US: with Bermuda 766; Caribbean trade
blocked by British 780, 781, 785; with China, 709, 780–96; fur trade
785–6, 791–6, 816; and Indian Ocean 780–96; with Jamaica 777; with
the Norse 414; wheat trade 878
North Sea 353–5, 390, 430; networks 348, 444
Norwegian 390–92, 871–2; and Bergen 443–4; and Hansards 442–6; intra-
Asian trade 871
Omani 829, 831–4
opium 824, 825–6, 827, 828
Orkney 373, 444
Pacific: Manila as hub of 618 see also Manila galleons; networks 795,
815–16, 817; role in island societies 15; and Spain 29; Torres Strait
islanders 9–10; and the USA 785, 791–5
pearl 54 see also pearls
in Persian Gulf 46, 53–4, 170–73
Philippine 614, 617, 620–21, 622–5, 629, 648; with Manila galleons see
Manila galleons
Phoenician 81, 83, 322–3
Portuguese 459, 469–71, 474, 563, 697–703; in Africa 510–11; with Brazil
560–61, 748; in calico cloth 635; with China 627, 636–7, 652; in cotton
635; and the Dutch see trade: Dutch–Portuguese struggle in; with
England 700; and global trade networks 470–71, 617, 700–702, 703; and
Havana 592, 754; and Japanese 652, 654; mastery of trade routes in all
oceans 704; methods 634; and trading stations in west Africa 683
Red Sea 46, 79–84, 96, 174–82, 187; Egyptian 46, 79, 110–11; Indo-
Roman 110–23; as spice route 52, 170–71, 594, 600, 603, 605–6, 672
religion’s intertwining with 144–6
resin see resins
role in Pacific island societies 15
Roman: Indo-Roman 52, 110–23, 877; pepper 113–16, 877
Russian 422, 427–8, 839; with China 801, 802, 806, 807, 808–9; with the
Dutch 677–8; with East Indies 802; with England 659; fur trade see
furs/fur trade: Russian; with Japan 846; and the northern Pacific 800,
803–9
sandalwood see sandalwood
Scandinavian ports serving as northern European distribution centres 722
Siamese 233, 277–8
silk see silk
and Singapore/Temasek 286, 288–9, 824–5
Sirafi 171–2
Slav 423
slave see slavery/slaves: slave trade
Socotran 130–31
South American trade with northern European ports 880
South China Sea 137, 138, 140, 141–2, 145, 149, 162–5, 240; and
Ayutthaya 278–9; networks 240, 617, 822; and Quanzhou 244–50; and
Singapore 288–9; and Śri Vijaya 149
Spanish 455, 634–5; and Caribbean see Caribbean: and the Spanish; and
Casa de Contratación 555; and the Dutch 683, 876–7; fur trade 806;
grain trade 587–8; and Havana 592, 617; inter-colonial 592; methods
634–5; scorned by the nobility 696; between Seville and the Americas
703; slave trade see slavery/slaves: and the Spanish
Spanish inter-colonial 592
spice see spices/spice trade
Spice Islands 574
Śri Vijaya as intermediary between Indian Ocean and South China Sea
trade 149, 273
sugar see sugar
Sumatra and Malay peninsula trading empires 131, 133; Śri Vijaya see Śri
Vijaya, Sumatra
Sumerian 57–62
Swedish 709, 722, 724–6, 871
taxes and trade agreements 838–9
tea see tea: trade
tin 332–8
and tribute xix, 214, 236, 238, 257 see also tribute
Ubaidi 53–4
 US: with China 709, 781, 784–96; fur trade 785–6, 791–6, 816; with
Hawai’i 816; international trade of eastern ports 845; with Japan 846–7;
and the Pacific 785, 791–5, 845–6; restrictions 879; whaling 845; wheat
trade 878
Venetian 594, 595, 601, 675
Welsh 457
wine see wine
between Zabaj and Oman 156
trade routes xvii–xviii, 52
acceleration from 1490s in linking oceans 517–19
between Alexandria and India/Ceylon 103
around Cape Horn 785, 791–2, 793, 807, 845, 851, 875
Atlantic ports to Indian Ocean 606
from Aydhab and Qusayr to Far East 179
battle for control of maritime routes 526, 594–610, 667
of Bronze Age Greece 314
Buddhism’s spread along xx, 146, 166
Caribbean 521
between China and India 125, 137, 138–9
described by Carletti 648
and Dilmun 61, 65, 66–9
Dutch struggle/supremacy in ocean routes 5, 667, 679–91
between England and Alexandria 848–9
and globalization xvi–xvii, 879
Greco-Roman route linking Egypt with south India xviii, 106–10, 877
Hanseatic 424–5, 438
and Hormuz 598
Indian Ocean 124; to Atlantic ports 606; between Egypt and the Indies 99–
102; ‘Silk Route of the Sea’ see Indian Ocean: ‘Silk Route of the Sea’;
to South China Sea 255, 272, 338
Islam’s spread along 146, 166
between Macau and Japan 635
networks of see trading networks
overland xix–xx, 99; for amber 339–42; between Ayla and Gaza 167; and
Hormuz 598; through Petra 167; Silk Road see Silk Road
across Pacific 29, 648
through Panama Canal 859
 from Persian Gulf: in 8th century 170–71; to India 184
Portuguese mastery of oceanic routes 704
Red Sea highway 70, 111–13, 166–7, 181–2, 517, 594, 600, 603, 605–6,
634, 672
shifts in southern France with La Tène culture 334–5
Silk Road see Silk Road
from Siraf to India 184
across South China Sea 138, 241, 250, 272, 606; to Indian Ocean 255, 272,
338
Spanish control of Pacific routes 29
spice routes 52, 170–71, 173, 523, 600, 606, 617, 672
and Strait of Gibraltar 470, 475 see also Gibraltar: Strait of
through Suez Canal 849–51, 866
transatlantic 562–4, 606
across Yellow Sea 649
trade winds 16
trading diasporas 697–708
trading licences 634
trading networks
Aden as nodal point in global network 182
Ålander 874–6
Armenian 705–8
Atlantic 302, 391–2; and the Azores 751–2; Bahama 520; between islands
488; links with Mediterranean 470, 517; and Manila galleons see Manila
galleons
and Ayutthaya 278–9
Bahama 520
between Baltic and North Sea 366
Caribbean 520, 527
centring on the Azores 488
Chinese 822–3
and date palms 53
Dutch network in East Indies 684–5, 688, 689–90, 821
exploiting Portuguese control loopholes 745
global 182, 188, 594, 643; and Cape Verde 752–5; of the Danes 709; and
European weapons arriving in Far East 644; and Hawai’i 815–16, 817;
and introduction of alien plants 643–4, 752; and Portugal 470–71, 617,
 700–702, 703; and Scandinavia as centre of interconnected global
operations 711; of the Swedes 709
between Hamburg and South America 880
Hanseatic 444
between Iceland and Norway 391–2
India as interchange point between 187
of Indian Ocean 43, 90, 93, 124, 125, 147, 167–70, 279
between Indonesia and Malaya 147
and interconnection of oceans xxi
Japanese 647–8
Lapita 15, 19
linking Mediterranean to Indian Ocean 167–70
and Madeira 748–50
and Manila 620–22
Mediterranean 322, 338; and the Dutch 676, 682; links with Atlantic
networks 470, 517
and Melaka 272, 295, 569, 636
North Sea 348, 444
Norwegian shipping network 391–2, 871
Pacific 795, 815–16, 817
Portuguese 470–71, 617, 700–705
of primary produce xix
and Ryukyu Islands 231–4, 614
Sephardic 838, 840
and Seville 586
South China Sea 240, 617, 822
of Śri Vijaya and South China Sea 148–65
and Sumatra 233
in Torres Strait 10
Tranquebar, India 713, 714, 715
Transoxiana 170
treasure ships 774
in Caribbean 763, 764–5
Chinese 254, 259, 260, 266, 267
Spanish 665, 673, 686, 764–5, 851
Trekh Sviatitelei 794
Trevor-Roper, Hugh xxiv
Tri Buana 283–4, 287
tribute 21, 26, 77, 230
and China xix, 142, 236, 238, 257, 262, 270, 281, 293, 622
food tribute to chieftains on Hawaiki 38
Frisian 360
in gold 546
and Japan 192, 213, 215
Korean 192
and Manila 618
and Melaka 295
Mongols’ demand for 223, 279
from People of the Sea 213
Russian, on people of Siberia 801
and Siam 277, 295
silver 360
and trade xix, 214, 236, 238, 257
from Zanzibar 546
Trier 342
Trieste 851, 872
Trinidad 521, 592
Trinidad 577
Trinity 463–4
Trinity College, Cambridge 905
Tristan da Cunha 755, 758
Triton 787
Trujillo, Rafael 586
Tryall/Trial 737
Tsushima island 191, 195, 204, 216, 218, 224
Korean invasion 223, 225
Mongol invasion 223
Tuamoto 26
Tuareg Berbers 500
Tudors 534
Tun-sun 144
tuna 196, 467
tunny-fishing 54
Tunisia 173, 182, 184, 186
Tupac Inca Yupanqui 727
Tupaia (Polynesian navigator) 16–17, 31, 812–13
Tupí Indians 553, 560, 561
Tupinambá Indians 519
Turks/Ottomans 318, 456, 536, 537, 601–10
and Basra 604, 606
Constantinople’s fall to 460, 594
and Diu 602
and Egypt 601–2, 603
Franco-Ottoman alliance 603
and Hormuz 608
and India 603, 605
and Indian Ocean 601–10; Ottoman–Portuguese conflict 549, 594, 599–
607, 610
and Italy 601
and Mamluks 600
and Mediterranean 604, 607
and Melaka 577, 607
and the Moluccas 607
navies 566
Ottoman government of Iraq 831
and Persian Gulf 604, 606
and Persians 599, 604
and the Portuguese 600, 602–3, 607
printing refusals 608
and Red Sea 601, 602, 603, 604, 605, 608
ships see boats/ships: Ottoman
and the spice trade 602, 603
sugar supplies threatened by 485
Sunni Turks 599
and Syria 594, 601
and Venetians 595, 603, 607
and Yemen 603–4
turquoise 99, 107
turtles 9, 10, 105, 112, 278
Tuscany 486, 682
Livorno see Livorno
Tyneside 869
typhoons 146, 176, 226, 228, 245, 620, 623, 637, 643
Tyre 81–2, 83
Tyrkir (German slave) 410, 411

U-boats 881, 882, 888, 891

U Thong 277
Ubaid 53–4
Ulf the Unwashed 342
‘Umar, Caliph 167
Umm an-Nar 52, 61, 65, 67
Unalaska Island 793
UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) 901
UNESCO 908
United American Company 805
United East India Company, Danish (later Danish Asiatic Company) 712,
714
United East India Company, Dutch see VOC (United East India Company)
United Nations 894–6
Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 901
UNESCO 908
United States of America
aircraft 898
American Standards Association 903
anti-Semitism 884
boundary with Canada 794
and Britain 852, 864, 878
California acquired by 852
and the Caribbean 856, 857, 858
and China 709, 781, 787–96, 893
Colón settlement, Panama 854
Congress 884, 885
container shipping 901–4
and Cuba 856
and Cunard 884–7
dockworkers 901
empire-building 856
 and the Falklands 795
first generation millionaires 796
and First World War 882
Florida see Florida
and Germany see Germany: and the USA
and Hawai’i 816, 817, 856, 859
immigration policies 884–5
and Indian Ocean 781–2, 795
and ivory 833
and Japan see Japan/Japanese: and the USA
and Macau 806
merchant fleets 856–7
merchants 795
and Mexico 846
naval power 856
and Oman 833
and the Pacific 785, 791–5, 845–6
and Panama Canal 852–4, 856–9
and the Philippines 856
and Puerto Rico 856
racism 884
railway network 790
and Second World War 888, 890
ships see boats/ships: American
and Spain 856
trade see trade: US
US Virgin Islands 720
Vietnam War 904
whaling 845
wheat 878
Upēri 65
Uppsala 367
Ur 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 64, 66, 69
Ur-Nammu 58
Ur-Nanše of Lagash 65
Urdaneta, Andrés de 580, 611, 616
Urnfield Culture 317
Usipi tribe 344
Usque, Samuel 494
Usselinx, Willem 717
Uti-napishtim 56
Utrecht, Peace of 453
uxers 474
Uzbekistan 170

Vaaz brothers 703

Vajrabodhi 149
Valdemar I of Denmark 425
Valdemar IV Atterdag 425
Valencia 478, 485, 492, 532
Valignano, Alessandro di 645–6, 647, 653
Vancouver Island 786, 791, 793, 816
Vanderbilt, Cornelius 854
Vanuatu 14, 19, 732
Varangians 362, 364, 367, 423
Vardø/Wardhouse 666
Varthema, Ludovico di 569
Vaz, Tristão 483, 485
Veckinchusen, Hildebrand von 438, 439–40, 441–2
Veckinchusen, Sivert von 438, 439–41, 442
Vega, Lope de 704
vegetarianism 230
Velázquez, Diego 591
Velloso (Spanish landowner) 589
Venables, Robert 770
Veneti 328, 330–31
Venezuela 551–2, 590
and the Dutch 683, 684
salt 683, 684, 685
Venice/Venetians 188, 415, 420, 454, 470, 676, 701
and Alexandria 460, 601
and Antwerp 669–70, 672
Armenian printing house 708
and copper 672
 and cruise ships 900
galleys 669–72
glassware 660, 688, 754
merchants 594, 682
and Ottomans 595, 603, 607
and pepper 544, 545
and silver 672
and the spice trade 595, 675
trade 594, 595, 601
Venetian–Mamluk treaties and relations 595–8, 600
Vera Cruz harbour, Austrialia del Espiritú Santo 732
Veracruz, Mexico 591, 617, 764, 847
verdigris 217
Verrazano, Giovanni da 562–4, 661
Verrazano, Girolamo da 563–4
Vespucci, Amerigo 517, 523, 525, 526, 550–53, 556, 560, 566, 610
and Cabral 542
and Columbus 526
and de la Cosa 553–4
Viana do Castelo, Portugal 469, 686
Viborg 422
Victoria, Queen 826, 850, 864
Victoria 571, 577, 578, 581
Victoria Harbour 826
Vienna 604
Vietnam 113, 136, 228
and Buddhism 142, 144
and China 136, 139–44, 245, 257
and Christianity 695
Funan see Funan, southern Vietnam
and Hinduism 144
and India 140; Indianization 140, 144 and Indonesia 143
and Japan 632
merchant communities from Quanzhou 245
and Mongols 222, 228
and Norway 871
pottery 232
 Red River delta 146
and South China Sea 908
and Temasek 286
War 904
Vikings xix, 243, 299, 347–8, 355, 356, 357–72, 465–7
and Anglo-Saxons 357–62
and Celts 375–6
and Christians 367
cult of the violent hero 363
and Franks 360
and Frisia 360
human sacrifice 367, 368
and Ireland 361, 372, 379–80, 381
and mixture of Norse and Celtic culture 379
and Orkney 372, 373–9
paganism 364, 367, 379, 388
ships 347, 357, 360–61, 365, 368–71, 376–7, 467
Swedish 362
‘Viking diaspora’ of Norse settlement 380–92
and wine 367
Village of the Two Parts, Mina 509
Villalobos, Ruy López de 614–15, 728–9
Villena 323–4
vinegar 510, 588
Vínland 398, 409, 410–11, 414
Virgin Islands, US 720
Virginia 761, 766, 767
Virginia Company 766
Visby, Sweden 418, 419, 423, 424, 425, 426–7, 449
Vishnu statues 159
Vitalienbrüder 436, 437, 447
vitamin C 573
Vivaldi brothers 471, 501
Vix 332
VOC (United East India Company) 677, 684, 685, 688, 692, 695, 713–14,
717, 723, 736
charts 741
 ships 736, 738–41
and Tasman 743
Vorontosov, Alexander Romanovich 805
Vorwerk 880

Wadden Sea 354

Wadi Gawasis 78
Wagrians 423
Waldseemüller, Martin, world map 556, 728
Wales 302, 308, 330, 347
Anglesey see Anglesey
Bronze Age 316, 317
copper 302
coracles 331
gold 302
promontory forts 328
trade 457
Viking raids 361
Vikings and Welsh slaves 379
wallabies 9
Wallace, Alfred Russel 158
Wallacea 7
Wallem, Haakon 872
Wallem shipping company 890
Wallis, Samuel 810, 811
walnuts 114
walrus 391, 397–8
hide 398
ivory 408
tusks/ivory xix, 385, 391, 397, 406
‘Wanderer, The’ 350
Wando island 209–10
Wang Dayuan 279, 285–6, 289
Descriptions of the Barbarians of the Isles 285–6
Wang Gung-Wu 138, 139
Wang Hong 637
Wang Liang 207–8
Wang No 201
Wang Yuanmao 245–6
Wardhouse/Vardø 666
Warwick, Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of 719
Washington, George 792
watercress 643
watermelons 178
Watson, Andrew xxiii
wax 427, 428, 444, 470, 503, 678, 682
weapons
axes see axes
bronze 316, 317, 319–20
cannon see cannon
from Danish colonial empire 721
European weapons arriving in Far East 644
of hardened wood 472
Japanese 213, 222, 232
of raiders 342, 343
spears 104, 321, 342, 736, 793
stone 472
swords see swords
Wei 136
Welser family and banking house of Augsburg 589, 590, 672
Welwod, William 679, 681
Wends 423–4
Weng Chao 245
Wessex 319, 360
West India Company, Danish 667, 719, 720, 721
West India Company, Dutch 683, 686
West Indies 781 see also Caribbean
Antilles see Antilles
Bahamas see Bahamas
and the Canaries 592
Columbus and the term ‘Indies’ 46, 517
cotton 588
and the Danes 711–12, 713, 716, 720–22
and the Dutch 683, 686, 783–4
 Hispaniola see Hispaniola
Jamaica see Jamaica
and Madeira 749
mules sent from Morocco to 839
and North American imports/smuggling 780, 783–4
scramble in 17th century for 719–21
and slavery 841
Spanish: Spanish involvement see Caribbean: and the Spanish; Spanish
islands see Antilles: Lesser Antilles; Cuba; Dominican Republic;
Hispaniola; Jamaica; Puerto Rico; Trinidad
and sugar trade 721, 839
trade links with the East 711–12
West Indian workers on Panama Canal 853–4, 855
whales/whaling xxiii, 381, 385, 399, 661
ambergris 180, 467, 766
baleen whales 399, 661; Right whale 659, 661
massive decline in some species of whale 908
Sperm whale 845
and the USA 845
whale blubber 385, 408
whale bones 92, 310
whale meat 196, 323, 381, 385
whale oil 721
whale skins 91
whaling ships 459, 845
Whampoa Island 788, 816
Wharton, Samuel 781
wheat 50, 52, 70, 92, 187, 246, 442, 444, 461, 475, 492, 545, 648
American 878
Azorean 752
English 389, 391, 444
flour 620, 624, 648
globalization and transatlantic wheat trade 878
Madeiran 484, 486
in Qusayr 176–7
Wheeler, Sir Mortimer 103, 121
whisky 904
White Bulgars 171
White Sea 659, 666, 677–8
White Star 886
Wilem, Jan de 713
Wilfred of York 352
William III of England 782
William of Normandy 362
Willibrord 352
Willoughby, Sir Hugh 658, 666
Willoughby, Robert 748–9
Wilson, Woodrow 882
Winchelsea, England 456–7
winds
Atlantic xv, 302, 304, 333, 389, 538, 558, 735–6, 751
around Cape Horn 727, 792, 793
English Channel 321
essential knowledge for navigators 51
Indian Ocean 51, 110 see also monsoons
Mediterranean 322, 324
monsoons see monsoons
Pacific 20, 614–15; easterly 16; and journeys to South America 29; wind
system 616, 813
Red Sea 51, 52, 117
Roaring Forties xv, 735–6
trade winds 16
typhoons see typhoons
Windsor, Treaty of 469
wine xix, 106, 112, 115, 331, 432, 439, 444, 449, 491, 665
amphorae 119–20
Azorean 751
and Bristol 458–9
Canary 592, 688
English wine trade 457, 458–9
French 458–9, 675
Indian imports 116
Italian 104, 115, 116
Madeiran 748, 749–50
 Malmsey 455, 748
merchants 457, 458–9
Moselle 675
palm wine 574, 688, 754
Portuguese 459, 469, 647
Rhineland 353, 367, 448
rice wine 286, 648
Spanish 459, 633
Syrian 104
and Winchelsea 457
Winsemius, Albert 894–6
Witte Leeuw 756
woad 455, 459, 488
Wolff, Gustav 870
Wolin 367
Wolof cavalry 502
wolves 306
women
of Bergen 446
Chinese men taking Filipino wives 625
Chinese women investing in trade 239
enslaved 347, 379, 386, 553
Greenland 406
Hawai’ian 814, 815
labouring in Panama 858
maritime role xix
Neolithic body sizes 307
pagan Scandinavian women in Faroes 383
Polynesian 810
prostitutes 823
shipowners 111
slaves 137–8, 347, 379, 386, 553, 823
Wonders of India 186
wood 65, 414
in Algarve 467
aromatic/perfumed 80, 233, 278, 648 see also sapanwood
brazilwood 560, 561, 676
 cassia 99
cedar 73, 78, 80, 81, 122, 259
from dismantled ships 122–3
driftwood 276, 380–81, 399, 408, 452, 661
fine/precious woods 57, 63, 106, 247 see also ebony; sandalwood; teak
Finnish timber 724
firewood 246
Inuit search for timber 399–400
larch 408
limewood 339
Madeiran 484, 485, 749
oak 78, 331, 339, 343, 354, 369
pine 73, 78, 343, 371
Portuguese timber 484
sandalwood see sandalwood
on São Tomé 493
sapanwood 232, 233, 234, 278
teak 106, 122, 642
Thai ‘eaglewood’ 278
weapons of hardened 472
wool xix, 58, 352, 353, 448
and Calais 455
English 450, 453, 454, 456, 460, 866
and Florence 454
and the Genoese 454–5
Merino 475
Taunton cottons, made of 750
woollen cloth 353, 400, 441, 451, 866
Woolley, Sir Leonard 60
World Heritage Sites 908
world maps 472, 556, 661–2, 745 see also globes
Babylonian 50
Catalan 500
de la Cosa 554
Dieppe maps 733–4
Hereford mappamundi 50
Mercator 572, 657–8, 661, 728
 Ortelius 728
Piri Reis 607–10
Ptolemy 727
Waldseemüller 556, 728
‘World Ocean’ xvi
world wars see First World War; Second World War
Wurst 429
Wuzung 208
Wyse, Lucien Napoleon Bonaparte 854–5

Xerxes 89
Xia Yuan-ji 267, 268
Xuan-de 267, 268, 270, 293–4

yams 12, 132, 493, 752

Yangtze River 136, 205, 259, 260, 268, 866
estuary 199, 245
Yangzhou 199, 206
Yanyuwa people 10
Yarhibol (god) 114
Yaroslav III of Novgorod 427
Yavan 82
Yavanas 114, 116, 118–19, 129
Yazd-bozed 161
yellow fever 853–4, 855, 858
Yellow Sea 6, 43, 200, 649
Yemen 62, 71, 73, 78, 166, 254, 595, 603–4 see also Himyar
coffee trade 831
Jews in 181, 182
and Mouza 105
and Socotra 128
Zheng He in 265
Yepoti 145
Yi Sun-sin 651
Yijing 149, 160
Yin Qing 255, 293
Yokohama 846, 892
Yolŋu people 10
Yomjang 211
Yong-le (Zhu Di) 251–4, 255–6, 257, 259, 263–4, 267, 281
York 353, 361
Yoshimitsu 235, 251–2
Ypres 440–41
Yucatán peninsula 592–3
Yueh people 135–7
Yunnan 257–9
Yūsuf (Dhu Nuwas) 166–8

Zabaj 155–9 see also Śri Vijaya, Sumatra

Zacuto, Abraham 536–7
Zaikov, Potap 793–5
Zanj 182–3
Zanzibar 104–6, 131–3, 171–2, 176–7, 266–7, 546–7, 829–30, 841
and Oman 831, 832–4
Zanzibar City 833
Zarco, João Gonçalves 483–4, 485, 486
Zaytun see Quanzhou
zebras 259, 266
Zen 215, 218, 222, 229
vegetarianism 230
Zenkan 230
Zhao Rugua 149, 152, 154, 155, 158, 184–5, 186, 266
Zheng He (Cheng Ho) xvii, xxix, 254–5, 256–69, 278, 280–81, 293, 622, 636
Zhengde Emperor 636
Zhenla 146–7
Zhou Man 267
Zhu Cong 245
Zimbaue 548
Ziryab 170
Ziusudra 56, 67
Zoroastrianism 170, 172, 183
Zoskales 104
Zuhrī, az- 369–70
Zuider Zee 677
Zurara, Gomes Eanes de 484, 497–9, 502

Þorfinn, Earl 376, 377

Þorfinn Karlsefni 411, 412
Þorkell the Far-Travelled 400
Þorvald 411
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First published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 2019
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2019
Copyright © David Abulafia, 2019
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover: Detail from Landscape with The Fall of Icarus, c. 1558, by Pieter Bruegel, in the Musée des
Beaux Arts, Brussels. (Photo © Bridgeman Images)
ISBN: 978-0-141-97209-1
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