The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (80 page)

Their overbearing reputation notwithstanding, the Portuguese of the
Estado da India
routinely collaborated with local merchants. They were often in the minority of the trades they claimed to monopolize and many sailed on routes they never attempted to dominate.
Indian merchants often chartered Portuguese ships to carry their cargoes, and many ships under Portuguese officers were otherwise
manned by Asians. The simple reason for this was that Portugal’s population was no more than 1.4 million in 1525, most of whom were in fact contemptuous of seafaring. Few with alternative prospects willingly embarked on a six- or seven-month voyage that one passenger described as “
without any doubt the greatest and most arduous of any that are known in the world,” especially when the odds of returning were so slim. Between twenty-four hundred and four thousand people, most of them young men, sailed annually for Africa, Brazil, and Asia, yet by 1600 there were only around two thousand Portuguese in “Golden Goa,” and probably never more than ten thousand between
Mozambique and Japan at any one time. Of these, fewer than one in ten returned to Portugal, “
some dying there in the countrie, others beeing cast away [and slayne by divers occasions,] and the rest by povertie not able to returne againe: and so against their willes … forced to stay in the Countrie.” Portuguese women were generally forbidden to emigrate, and those Portuguese men who stayed in Asia were encouraged to
marry natives, their preference being for Muslims or high-caste Hindus.

The stereotype of Asians uninterested in maritime commerce is as at variance with the facts as the image of Portuguese as inveterate seafarers. During the
Mughal Empire (1526–1764), Bania (Hindu) shipowners had a
commanding presence in both
Bengal and at
Surat. They also functioned as agents for other people’s ships and worked for two groups of clients in particular, Mughal officials with an interest in shipping, and Europeans—whether private country traders or, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the various East India Companies—engaged in either intra-Asian trade or trade between Europe and Asia. Hindu merchants were noted for their frugality and lack of ostentation, but highly respected for their commercial acumen and disciplined approach. “
When they are still very young and in the laps of their parents and hardly able to walk,” according to an employee of the
Dutch East India Company writing in the 1680s, “they already begin to be trained as merchants. They are made to pretend to engage in trade while playing, first buying [
cowries], followed by silver and gold.”
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In addition to commerce and moneylending, many were
sarrafs,
money changers who specialized in collecting taxes; some were also responsible for transferring government funds around the subcontinent. Foreign coins were not legal tender in the Mughal Empire, but one could take these, or
bullion, to the mint and turn them
into Mughal coins. This took time, however, and an alternative was to obtain the equivalent in
rupees from a
sarraf
.

The subcontinent consumed vast quantities of eastern spices, precious and semiprecious stones, tin from Malaya, and silver from southwest Asia, especially
Mocha, the “treasure chest” of the Mughal Empire. And as in the past, Arabia and Persia provided horses. Indian, Arab, and Persian merchants shared the traffic of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. As many as a thousand
Gujaratis may have lived at Melaka in 1500, and perhaps twice as many were trading across the Bay of Bengal at any given time. In addition to Melaka, their primary destinations included Pegu, in
Myanmar; the peninsular ports of
Tenasserim/Mergui and
Kedah; and, on Sumatra,
Samudra-Pasai and Aceh.
Cambay was superseded as Gujarat’s premier port by Surat, which already had a thriving pilgrim trade to Jeddah, the most profitable in the Indian Ocean and one that attracted investment from the royal household, government officials, and major merchants. With the incorporation of Gujarat into the Mughal Empire in 1573, Surat was connected to the Indian heartland and it grew further still. To the south, Dhabol and Chaul traded to western Asia as well as Bengal and Melaka. In the Malabar ports of
Calicut, Cannanore, and Cochin,
pardesi
(foreign) merchants—Arabs, Persians,
Jews, and Africans—focused on the western trade, while
Mappila merchants sailed mainly to Bay of Bengal ports and Southeast Asia.

The idea of the Portuguese and the Ottomans (by proxy) going to war in
Southeast Asia would have been unthinkable had the
Ming Dynasty not abandoned the sea after the last of
Zheng He’s voyages in 1433. As it is, though, the Portuguese helped revive trades left moribund by a shrunken
Chinese market and a dearth of Chinese shipping. If the initial rationale for discovering the sea route to the Indian Ocean was to acquire spices, the realities of Asian trade encouraged the Portuguese to diversify. At the siege of Melaka, a group of Chinese merchants approached Albuquerque to announce their intention to sail with the start of the monsoon. Eager to establish cordial relations with potential trading partners, he granted them safe passage and gave them letters of introduction to the king of
Ayutthaya saying that “
King Manuel of Portugal had been informed that he was a heathen and not a Moslem and so he had a great affection for him and desired to have peace and friendship with him” and promising merchants of his kingdom “all the protection they might need.”

This offer was disingenuous. The greatest threat to peaceful trade was the Portuguese, and at this point their greatest export to Asia may well have been
guns and mercenaries to control trade or as commodities for sale to the highest bidder. Assuming a role previously unheard of in the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese instituted a system of passes—
cartazes
—which all non-Portuguese merchant ships had to carry. The fee for the pass—essentially protection money—was nominal, but the
cartaz
obligated the holder to sail via Portuguese-controlled ports and to pay duties amounting to
about 5 percent.
Nor did possession of a valid
cartaz
guarantee freedom from harassment by the Portuguese, who plundered many ships with valid passes.

In 1513, Portuguese ships arrived at Macau, a peninsula in the
Pearl River delta and gateway to
Guangzhou and southern China, where they hoped to establish themselves and capitalize on the official Chinese withdrawal from overseas trade. They were refused and when they tried again in 1521–22 the emperor responded by
banning all maritime trade in Guangdong Province. In barring Chinese ships from going abroad, the Ming government’s intent was to funnel tribute trade exclusively through imperial ports. Among China’s most important trading partners at this time was Japan, a major source of the silver that was the preferred medium for paying taxes. A riot between rival Japanese merchants at Mingzhou (
Ningbo) in 1523 led to a suspension of Japanese trade there, but China’s demand for silver and Japan’s appetite for silk led to an increase in smuggling and piracy in the coastal provinces. This was exacerbated by the lack of profitable employment among Chinese traders, many of whom relocated to Japan, Southeast Asia, and the
Ryukyu Islands, from where they engaged in illicit commerce with their homeland. In Japan, they were joined by similarly disenfranchised local sailors with whom they plundered coastal shipping and the Chinese mainland. Rather than
acknowledge the fault of their own policies in nurturing this outlawry, the Chinese officials labeled these recreants
wokou
, “Japanese pirates.”

Denied the opportunity for legitimate trade, the Portuguese simply joined smugglers active in
Fujian and
Zhejiang where corruption among the Chinese officials was rife and they could sail with impunity. According to a complaint filed by the commander of coastal defense,
Zhu Wan, in 1548, “
the Portuguese sailed their ships one after another into the interior. After unloading the goods, they publicly hauled up two ships at Duan-yu-zhou for repair. In the eyes of those pirates and barbarians, do they know that the authorities are still there? They are not to blame though,” because the government was not prepared to enforce its own laws. While acknowledging that the Portuguese were smugglers, an opponent of Zhu Wan’s policies argued that the local economy benefited because as commercial intermediaries they paid well for trade goods and double the market price for food and provisions. Persisting in their efforts to establish themselves in China officially, within a decade they had secured extraterritorial rights at Macau, which remained Portuguese territory until 1999. Confined to this enclave, westerners were not allowed to enter China proper until 1583 when the Jesuit missionary
Matteo Ricci settled at Guangdong, where he embarked on a deep study of Chinese culture and religion and undertook to introduce Catholicism and the fruits of western learning and technology, including especially
clocks and other mechanical devices. This effort ultimately took him to
Beijing, where he died in 1610.

Having reached China, it was only a matter of time before the Portuguese ventured to Japan, where they established themselves at
Nagasaki and
served as middlemen between
Japan and China. Their timing was impeccable, for in an effort to curtail the depredations of the
wokou
the Chinese had severed relations with Japan in 1548, nine years before the founding of Macau. Civil war had engulfed Japan for almost a century, and the revenues that accrued to the shogunate from the revived commerce helped tip the balance toward stability and unification. The Portuguese traded silk, gold, and silver but virtually no western goods except the
harquebus, a cumbersome but lethal gun that the Japanese quickly learned to manufacture and deploy for themselves. (Cannon were introduced in 1551, but these proved harder to manufacture and their use spread more slowly.) In 1549, a mission led by (Saint) Francis Xavier introduced Christianity. Whereas Ricci converted only two thousand Chinese before his death, by the end of the sixteenth century there were an estimated
three hundred thousand Japanese Christians. This success excited the hostility of Buddhist clergy whose intrigues convinced the government that the Christians constituted a threat to the country’s hard-won political stability. The shogun began restricting their activities in 1565;
Christianity
was outlawed completely in 1614; and the Portuguese were expelled brutally in 1639. Their only real legacy was a minute community of Dutch traders who had followed them to Japan but whose religious modesty made them acceptable to the authorities.

The shoguns not only limited the activities of foreign traders, they also imposed tight restrictions on Japanese merchants, who were all but barred from sailing abroad. At the end of the sixteenth century, however, the likelihood of Japan’s withdrawing from active participation in the affairs of Northeast Asia and beyond would have seemed remote, for no sooner had the regent, Toyotomi
Hideyoshi, ended the Japanese civil wars and brought Japan under unified rule than he invaded the Korean Peninsula. In so doing, he certainly sought to reopen trade with China, for although the Ming eased their ban on Chinese traveling overseas in 1567,
Japan remained off-limits.
Hideyoshi also seems to have viewed an invasion of
Goryeo and China as a natural extension of the unification of Japan as well as a convenient outlet for soldiers and mariners idled by the peace. An edict of 1588 ordered “
sea captains and fishermen of the provinces and seashores, and all those who go in ships to the sea [to] subscribe to written oaths that henceforth they shall not engage in the slightest piratical activity.” Japan’s soldiers were probably as well armed and seasoned as any in the world, and lacking either recent experience of large-scale warfare or firearms, Goryeo was ill-prepared for an unprovoked invasion. About 140,000 Japanese landed near
Busan in May 1592 and within ten weeks
Seoul and
Pyeongyang had fallen.

Goryeo’s salvation depended on an unlikely combination of the Chinese army, Korean guerrillas, and Admiral
Yi Sun-sin. Goryeo was divided into sixteen naval districts, two for each of the kingdom’s eight provinces. An admiral of Jeolla (Cholla) Province, Yi combined a sophisticated and aggressive strategy with the severe tactical discipline necessary for converting apparently certain defeat into a series of paralyzing victories. Among the tools at his disposal was the heavily armed and protected
geobukseon,
or
turtle ship, a two-masted, covered galley. According to a contemporary description

Turtle ships constituted something of a dead end in warship development and no more than five were probably available to Yi at any one time. All the same, they were critical to the Koreans’ success. In the summer of 1592, Yi forced ten engagements, the most decisive of which came in June at the
battle of Hansan Island. Feigning retreat before superior numbers, Yi lured eighty Japanese ships out of harbor and then enveloped them in what he called the “crane wing” formation. With the loss of sixty ships, the Japanese were unable to open the passage around the Korean Peninsula to the Yellow Sea and thus move supplies or troops to the front lines by ship. The resulting delays combined with China’s entry into the war forced the Japanese to evacuate Pyeongyang and Seoul and to open peace negotiations. These drawn-out discussions eventually collapsed and
Hideyoshi renewed the invasion in 1597. The Japanese had absorbed the naval lessons of the earlier campaign, and
Yi Sun-sin had been sacked as a result of court intrigues. His incompetent successor lost more than 150 ships at the
battle of Chilcheonryang and the Japanese were poised to sail into the Yellow Sea. Hastily reinstated, Yi rallied a dozen ships and on September 16 fought the Japanese to a standstill at the
battle of Myeongryang, a strait that narrows to only three hundred meters and through which the tide can race at more than ten knots. Prevented from deploying logistical support by sea, Japanese ground forces were again put on the defensive.