The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (84 page)

No miracle was forthcoming, but the English guns were not as effective as either they hoped or the Spanish feared. The fleets skirmished up the English Channel for eight days until the Spanish anchored off
Calais in anticipation of rendezvousing with Parma’s transports, which were not ready. Forced out of their anchorage by English fireships, the Spanish lost four ships at the
battle of Gravelines, bringing their total losses over eleven days to only eight vessels.
^d
Forced northward by wind and tide, by August 9 the Spanish commanders had little choice but to make for home by sailing around Scotland and
Ireland. Little did anyone imagine that only sixty-seven of their storm-tossed ships would return to Spanish ports, nearly fifty having been lost at sea or wrecked on the rocky coasts that ring the British Isles.

The story of the Armada has almost as many interpretations as interpreters. Some Englishmen were disappointed that they had not accomplished more, but the loss of the Armada demonstrated that Catholic Spain was not invincible and thus had much the same effect on Dutch and English Protestants that the victory over the Ottomans at Lepanto had had on Christian Europe as a whole. Yet as happened after Lepanto, the victors were unable to capitalize on their success. The next year Drake led the so-called counter-armada to destroy the remnants of the Spanish fleet, establish Don Antonio on the Portuguese throne, and seize the
Azores. The ill-conceived expedition failed and the English fleet returned with only about two thousand of the ten thousand men embarked fit for duty. Far from destroying the Spanish Armada, the “
irretrievable miscarriage, that condemned the war to an inefficient conclusion” sixteen years later, was one of the factors that led to the creation of Spain’s permanent Atlantic fleet, the
Armada del Mar Océano.

Ships big enough to make the long passages across the Atlantic, around Africa to the Indian Ocean, and across the Pacific were essential to European expansion. For much of the sixteenth century
Spain and Portugal faced virtually no competition in the Americas or Asia from other Europeans, apart from a handful of freebooters and pirates who nibbled at the flanks of their Atlantic empires. In the more distant waters of the Monsoon Seas, Portugal managed a commercial network at the absolute limit of what its resources would allow; yet it was not until the end of the century that its exclusive control of seaborne trade between Asia and Europe was effectively challenged, not by Asians resentful of Portuguese arrogance but by Dutch merchants envious of their success and eager to strike a blow against their Spanish overlord.

The losses sustained by the Armada and Philip’s determination to focus his efforts on backing the Catholic faction in the French wars of religion gave the Dutch rebels a much needed respite, as did his decision to lift an embargo on Dutch shipping so that Spain could continue to receive the goods it needed from northern Europe. Blockading the Flemish coast around Antwerp, the Dutch channeled still more commerce to Amsterdam, where many Antwerp merchants had taken refuge. The combination of their commercial expertise and international connections with Amsterdam’s concentration of shipping and industry ignited the port’s meteoric rise, and in so doing helped assure the
Dutch Republic’s eventual independence from Spain in 1648. By that time, the Dutch were the world’s foremost traders, and the torch of ocean trade had passed for the first time to northern Europe, where it would blaze without rival for nearly two hundred years.

The seventeenth century represents the coming of age of the maritime powers of Atlantic Europe. Apart from the Iberian kingdoms, no one had been satisfied with the church-sanctioned division of the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal, but it was not until the 1600s that
Hugo Grotius articulated cogent and accessible arguments in favor of “the free sea.” People and governments deployed this thesis in opportunistic and sometimes contradictory ways, but support for the doctrine encouraged broader participation in intercontinental trade. For the most part these were private initiatives, typically undertaken by joint-stock companies endowed with considerable latitude of action to defend their business and their flag. The Dutch in particular exercised armed force with the blessing of their home government to create an empire of “
ledger and sword” that overlay far older networks of trade in which Asian merchants continued to predominate.

Companies took on such sweeping responsibilities because, notwithstanding the baroque grandeur of their courts and their ships, European monarchs lacked navies capable of executing their will overseas. Even so, rivalries between England, the Dutch Republic, France, and Spain turned the English Channel and adjacent waters into the dark alley of seventeenth-century trade, where
corsairs and privateers threatened all comers, and tricked-out ships of state occasionally swaggered out with their gilded entourages as a reminder of who was in charge. But the ineffectiveness of naval power is obvious from the staggering numbers of
merchant ships captured in the course of five major conflicts in less than half a century. Between the first Anglo-Dutch War and the
Nine Years’ War (1652–97), the English are thought to have seized
between 3,600 and 4,300 enemy merchantmen, while in the same period they lost between 5,500 and 6,300 of their own. Many of these vessels were ransomed back to their owners or recaptured.

Northern
European warships rarely operated beyond European waters. Over the course of the seventeenth century, ships, fleets, and infrastructure grew in size and complexity, and innovative approaches to financing and administration were adopted. Combined with legal and diplomatic remedies, these gradually exerted a stabilizing influence on maritime trade, and smugglers and pirates working without political sanction found themselves increasingly marginalized. The apparent free-for-alls in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean at the end of the century were less a sign of widening chaos than a demonstration of more effective navies, especially on the part of the English, who in the following century would become the world’s preeminent naval power.

Northern European states lacked the means and motive to mount effective naval campaigns against the
Iberian powers overseas, but their governments condoned the activities of merchants willing to challenge Spanish and Portuguese dominance of trade in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Hoping to put a stranglehold on the Dutch rebels, in 1598 Spain’s
Philip III banned Dutch shipping from Iberian ports as well as Portuguese holdings in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. The embargo hobbled Dutch trade in the Mediterranean and between Iberia and the Baltic, but it spurred
Dutch interest in oceanic shipping. The number of vessels sailing to West Africa for gold, gums, ivory, and São Thomé sugar rose from three or four per year to an average of twenty in the decade after 1599. Even before Philip’s embargo, Dutch merchants began to consider ways to reach Asia via either a
Northeast Passage or by following the
Portuguese into the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese held close the secrets of navigation to the east: in 1504
Manoel I issued a royal decree calling for the
routine destruction of logbooks and charts describing Asian waters. Northern Europeans gained some familiarity with the Monsoon Seas as crew, merchants, and adventurers in Portuguese pay, and in 1591–94,
James Lancaster commanded three English ships as far as the Malay Peninsula. Yet information about the Indian Ocean and beyond remained sparse and anecdotal until the publication of
Jan Huyghen van Linschoten’s
Itinerario
in 1595. The Dutch Linschoten had spent several years as a merchant with his brothers in
Seville and Lisbon before becoming secretary to the archbishop of Goa in 1583. After a decade in India he returned home and wrote his
Itinerario
of

Based largely on secondhand information, Linschoten’s “briefe note” presented detailed descriptions of major ports, their inhabitants, forms of government, and chief trading goods. The
Itinerario
became a Baedeker for merchants aspiring to capture the riches of Asia, and
Cornelis de Houtman took a copy on the first Dutch expedition to the Indies in 1595–97. This voyage barely broke even and only a third of his 240 crew survived, but Houtman won permission from the sultan of Banten, in western Java, for Dutch ships to trade there. Between 1598 and 1601 fifteen provincial merchant companies sent a total of
sixty-five ships to trade in the Spice Islands and make
commercial treaties with local rulers. Indicative as it was of the Dutch entrepreneurial spirit, this competition drove up the cost of pepper and other spices in Asia while depressing the prices at which they could be sold at home. To counter the decline in profits, in 1602 the various companies came together as the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (United East India Company, or VOC). Whereas the earlier companies had been “
established … solely for the purpose of doing honest business and trading in peace and not from hostility or maliciousness,” the VOC was both a trading entity and an instrument of the state chartered by the
States-General (the Dutch parliament) and invested with the powers to wage war, contract treaties, establish forts, administer the law, and in most respects act as an arm of the Dutch government, which in effect it was. The state’s view was epitomized in a comment by
Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the leading politician of the day: “
The great East India Company, with four years of hard work, public and private, I have helped establish in order to inflict damage on the Spanish and Portuguese.” In effect, the VOC went on to create its own version of the
Estado da India
. The main difference was that its ruling body, the
Heren XVII (seventeen gentlemen) in the Netherlands, and the governor-general and council of the Indies in Batavia (now Jakarta), had greater freedom from political control, demonstrated vastly more commercial acumen, and drew on infinitely greater financial resources, distribution networks, and industrial capacity, especially shipbuilding, than the
Estado
ever mustered.

Map of the coasts of Southeast Asia and China—east is at top—published with the
Itinerario: Voyage ofte schipvaert van Jan Huyghen van Linschoten naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien, 1579–1592
(Travel account: Voyage of the sailor Jan Huyghen van Linschoten to the Portuguese East Indies) in 1596. Linschoten presented detailed descriptions of major ports, their inhabitants, forms of government, and commodities and rarities—trade secrets the Portuguese had jealously guarded throughout the sixteenth century. The
Itinerario
became the standard guidebook for merchants aspiring to capture the riches of Asia, and Cornelis de Houtman took a copy on the first Dutch expedition to the Indies in 1595–97. Courtesy of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine, Portland.

Two years earlier, an Amsterdam fleet had sailed under Admiral Jacob van
Neck, who took two ships to investigate the possibility of establishing a Dutch presence in China. Sailing into the
Pearl River delta, the Dutch anchored before “
a great town spread out before us, all built in the Spanish style, on the hill a Portuguese church and on top of it a large blue cross.… According to Huygen [van Linschoten]’s notebook this had to be Macao.” Van Neck sent twenty men to negotiate with the Portuguese, who, determined to prevent their meeting with local officials and securing the right to trade in China,
executed all but three of them. In the meantime, Admiral
Jacob van Heemskerck had reached Banten, where he found six rival Dutch ships and countless other merchants from around Asia. With pepper prices too high for his liking, he took the
Witte Leeuw
and
Alkmaar
to the northern Java port of
Japara, where the sultan arrested twelve of his crew and forbade him to trade. Sailing east he established a factory at
Gresik and seized a Portuguese ship and letters recounting the fate of Van Neck’s men at Macau. Unable to avenge his countrymen’s judicial murder out of concern for the men held at Japara and others he planned to leave as agents at Gresik, Van Heemskerck sailed for the Malay Peninsula port of
Pattani, whose queen had allowed the Dutch to establish a factory as a counterweight to the Portuguese. While there, the sultan of
Johor’s brother encouraged him to wait for the Portuguese ship due from Macau.