The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (81 page)

The Japanese began their withdrawal late the next year but the Koreans and Chinese pressed their attack on both land and sea. On the night of November 19, 1598, a week before the last Japanese forces left Korea, Yi attacked at the
battle of Noryang. The Koreans inflicted great losses on the Japanese, but Yi was killed at the height of the battle—“
a fitting end to such a career,” in the words of a twentieth-century British admiral and historian who declared Yi “equal in his profession” to the Royal Navy’s celebrated Lord Nelson. Yet the subsequent absence of naval warfare in Northeast Asia was due not to the overwhelming might of one power, but to the lack of interest in naval affairs on the part of China and a withdrawal from overseas ventures by Japan and Korea for more than 250 years.

The Portuguese held their own against Ottoman intrigues in the Indian Ocean, and they commanded strategic strongholds from East Africa to China. Even so, while they dominated the Asian trade to Europe in the first half of the century they could not shut down trade to the Persian Gulf and Red Sea. In 1560 nearly 4.5 million pounds of spices reached Venetian,
Ragusan, Genoese, and French ships in Alexandria, and five years later, twenty-three ships from India and
Aceh were
reported at
Jeddah. The Portuguese share of the overall trade may have risen again after 1570, when small quantities of spices began reaching the Americas via
Macau and
Manila, but surviving statistics suggest a decline in
Europeans’
per capita consumption of pepper over the century, and a modest rise in that of other spices. Yet Europe was only one market among many and in this period the size of the
Malabar pepper crop probably doubled, while the production of cloves,
nutmeg, and mace grew fivefold, outcomes that cannot be attributed to the
Portuguese and European demand alone.

Similarly, Venetian and other merchants had not been driven off the Mediterranean for want of
spices at the start of the century because in spite of the attraction of exotics, as alluring for historians as for consumers, most Mediterranean shippers dealt in more mundane, high-volume commodities like cereals, livestock, wine, fish, metals, leather, and manufactures. Unreliable crops made grain “
responsible for more espionage … than the affairs of the Inquisition itself,” and merchants were well attuned to the vagaries of the harvest: scarcity in one place might be met by surplus from another, but profits could only be made by those fortunate enough to arrive before prices began to fall or to escape the ravages of piracy, which in the eastern Mediterranean was most often directed against
grain ships. The center of the
grain trade was Sicily, as it had been intermittently since antiquity, but it did not always dominate the market. Levantine grain could cost less in Spain, and a sharp rise in Turkish production in the mid-sixteenth century led to surpluses, although grain could only be exported to Christian countries through
an elaborate black market.

Despite the continued
growth of Mediterranean trade, the start of transatlantic, transpacific, and Atlantic–Indian Ocean shipping meant that the Mediterranean was no longer the primary arena of western sea trade, but only one region among many. Nonetheless, its shipping remained a cornerstone of the European economy: Venetian
tonnage doubled between 1498 and 1567, and from 1540 to 1570 that of Ragusa grew by 75 percent. Yet changing political and economic fortunes saw the rise of vigorous commercial enterprises in French and Ottoman territories. In 1568, the Ottomans opened their trade
to Christian Europeans by issuing “
capitulations” to French merchants.
^b
The equivalent of the medieval
aman
(safe-conduct pass), these proved invaluable in the mid-seventeenth century, when European merchants could trade legally in Ottoman ports only under the
protection of the French flag. Christians were not the only ones to seek protection from the French. Attacks by the Knights of
Malta and other
corsairs—sailors who plundered ships without the official sanction of a privateer’s commission but with greater national allegiance than a pirate—compelled many Muslim merchants to put their cargoes under the French flag and many Mediterranean hajjis opted to sail for
Egypt in French ships.
^c

English commercial efforts in the eastern Mediterranean were put on a rational footing with an Ottoman grant of capitulations in 1580 and the formation of the
Levant Company the next year. The English advantages were pronounced. They produced woolens more cheaply than their rivals; the Ottomans charged them only 3 percent customs duties (compared with 5 percent paid by the French and Venetians); they sailed
large, heavily armed ships that could sweep aside Spanish opposition in the Strait of Gibraltar; and as Protestants they had no qualms about
ignoring papal interdicts against supplying war matériel to the Ottomans, including iron guns and gunpowder. Ironically, the greatest threat to the company was other Englishmen—corsairs who preyed indiscriminately on the shipping of all nations and sold their prizes in the North African regencies. English merchants may have suffered less direct harm than did those of other nationalities, but the
burden of reprisals for their countrymen’s actions fell on the lawful traders of the Levant Company.
The Dutch followed the English into the Mediterranean, where the Italians hired them for their expertise in the grain trade, and they negotiated for Ottoman capitulations of their own in 1612.

While Iberian mariners were weaving a worldwide web of trade around Africa and across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, the Dutch were busily engrossing the bulk trades of Europe from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. They also benefited from the Portuguese decision to market their pepper at
Antwerp, which had superseded
Bruges as northern Europe’s premier port in the 1400s. Lacking reserves to fund their Asian expansion, the Portuguese could only keep their ships running if they had access to ready cash from merchants who dealt with the problems of retail sale. This was
most easily done at Antwerp, to which German merchant families like the Fuggers and Welsers diverted huge quantities of
copper and silver to pay for Asian sp
ices. The Portuguese also benefited from this arrangement, and by the 1520s
Manoel I derived half his income from spice exports to northern Europe. Antwerp’s connection to the Iberian world strengthened in 1516 when Charles,
duke of Burgundy, who possessed the Netherlands, became Charles I of Spain. The city’s fortunes were subsequently tied to the tensions between
Spain and her fellow Netherlanders to the north.

The Dutch predisposition to maritime trade was a consequence of the paucity of natural resources at home. Living in the delta of some of northwest Europe’s largest rivers, the Dutch were surrounded on three sides by salt- and freshwater from which they had to protect themselves by “
a heavy yearly expenditure for dykes, sluices, mill-races, windmills and polders.” Farming was possible, but in itself could not pay for these improvements. “Wherefore the inhabitants,” in the words of a 1543 petition from the Dutch provinces to Charles, “must maintain themselves by handicrafts and trades, in such wise that they fetch raw materials from foreign lands and re-export the finished products, including diverse sorts of cloth and draperies, to many places, such as the kingdoms of Spain, Portugal,
Germany, Scotland and especially to Denmark, the Baltic, Norway, and other like regions, whence they return with goods and merchandise from those parts, notably wheat and other grains.” The Hanseatic merchants had guarded their control of the Baltic jealously, but by the end of the fifteenth century
a majority of ships sailing through the
Øresund were Dutch. Even though ice closed the Baltic to navigation for five months of the year, a thousand grain ships sailed from
Gdansk to the Netherlands in 1471, and twice that number left the port a century later. By then, most Dutch ships still sailed north in ballast or with cargoes of low-value Iberian salt for the fisheries, the backbone of the Dutch domestic economy.

The Baltic trade provided not only for foodstuffs and luxuries like Russian furs, it was also vital for the Dutch
shipbuilding industry, which imported
virtually all its naval stores: wood,
tar, iron for fastenings, hemp for rigging, and flax for sails. Reliant as they were on maritime trade, the Dutch developed highly sophisticated commercial and shipbuilding practices. They adopted wind-powered sawmills, compensated for the use of inferior wood with superior fabrication, and built ships of distinct design for different trades. Until the
Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule (1568–1648), few individuals in the
Netherlands could afford to build ships on their own. As a result, the Dutch developed the practice of dividing the investment in ships into as many as
sixty-four shares. This meant that many more people from all walks of life were invested in maritime commerce than elsewhere. To this system of apportioning risk and spreading wealth the Dutch married the development of the
fluit
, the most efficient merchantman of the day. Measuring four to five hundred gross tons with a length-to-beam ratio of about five or six to one,
fluits
are often described as floating boxes, with a sharp turn of the bilge, sharp stem and sternposts, and sterns that tapered sharply upward. They carried more sails of smaller size—usually square sails on the fore and main and a lateen mizzen—and because fewer hands were needed to take in sail, they had smaller crews. Although
fluits
were generally slow, most carried no armament, and for protection they sailed in convoys guarded by purpose-built warships.

Unlike his Burgundian father, Charles I, the Spanish-born Philip II tried to curb the privileges long enjoyed by the Dutch; to root out Calvinists, whose numbers were growing especially in the northern provinces; and to impose stiff taxes on merchants. The final breach came in 1568, the start of the Eighty Years’ War, which ended with the independence of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces—the modern Netherlands.
Antwerp was an early casualty in the struggle, and after its capture by the Spanish the population fell by more than half. Amsterdam welcomed the exodus of southern commercial expertise and capital and quickly became a warehouse for an almost infinite variety of products: wine, fruit, and sugar from southern Europe; Asian pepper, spices, and silks;
American silver; and,
encroaching on the English and Hanse trade in northern luxuries,
Russian furs, leather, wax, and caviar, the last of which moved north via river from the Caspian to the
White Sea.

In June 1553, three English ships sailed for the White Sea. Despite an underlying desire to find a
Northeast Passage to China, their primary interest was to find new markets for English woolens. The crews of two ships froze to death on the coast of Lapland, but
Richard Chancellor reached the
Northern Dvina River and from there traveled to the court of
Ivan IV, “the Terrible,” at
Moscow, more than a thousand kilometers to the south. Though “robbed homewards by
Flemings,” he gave a favorable report of his mission, which established cordial relations between the czar and Mary I and promised to give the English a firm hold on the Russian fur trade. In the sixteenth century, Russia referred chiefly to the
Grand Duchy of Muscovy, centered on Moscow, about 750 kilometers northeast of
Kiev. Although situated in
“the
Russian Mesopotamia” from which flowed the Volga, Western Dvina, Dnieper, Don, and Northern Dvina Rivers, Russia had only one saltwater outlet, on the
White Sea. This remote, subarctic coast was not obviously conducive to long-distance trade, but its commercial potential was recognized by
London merchants of the
Muscovy Company and later still by the Dutch.

Seal die of the English Muscovy Company, 1555. The world’s first joint-stock company was established with the aim of opening trade to northern Russia, which at the time had no other outlet to the sea. The English exported textiles in exchange principally for fur. Courtesy of the British Museum.

Chartered with a monopoly of the Russian trade and all lands “
northwards, north-eastwards or north-westwards” not previously known to or visited by English traders, the Muscovy (or Russia) Company was the world’s first joint-stock company in which people could freely buy and sell shares and receive dividends on their investments while leaving the direction of the company’s day-to-day affairs in the hands of management. As in a partnership, shareholders were liable for all company debts, but this was limited to the size of an individual’s investment, a fundamental principle for all publicly traded companies. This structure became the model for the
Levant Company (1581),
East India Company (1600), and the
Dutch East India Company (1602). Muscovy Company merchants led the way north for forty years before Dutch traders eased the English off their perch in the early 1600s thanks to their access to a
more diverse selection of goods. Although Russian merchants did not enter the sea trade in any numbers, Ivan established a
port at
Archangel, Russia’s only saltwater port from 1584 until the founding of
St. Petersburg in 1703.