The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (85 page)

On the morning of February 25, 1603, the
Witte Leeuw
and
Alkmaar
were at anchor in the Singapore Strait off Johor when first light revealed a richly laden Portuguese
nao
at anchor before them. The
Santa Catarina
was en route from Macau to Melaka, just as the Dutch had hoped. With the help of Johorese galleys, the Dutch battered the Portuguese ship for ten hours before she surrendered. In acknowledgment of his assistance, Van Heemskerck presented the sultan of Johor with gifts worth ten thousand guilders and reimbursed a Johorese merchant whose ship he had despoiled the previous year. When auctioned at Amsterdam, the remainder of the
Santa Catarina
’s silks, camphor, sugar, aloes, and porcelain netted three hundred thousand guilders, enough to build fifty or sixty merchants’ houses in Amsterdam. The fantastic wealth of the
Santa Catarina
’s booty notwithstanding, the outstanding importance of this incident derives from the long-term legal consequences of Van Heemskerck’s actions.

The Portuguese vigorously protested the
capture of the
Santa Catarina
, but Van Heemskerck claimed that he was entitled to avenge the crimes against his countrymen at Macau because Prince Maurits of Orange had commissioned him to use force. A Dutch court concurred in judging the capture a lawful prize, but to bolster their claim the directors of the VOC asked the precocious Hugo Grotius, then twenty-one, to draft a justification of their decision. His complete work,
De Jure Praedae
(The Law on Prize and Booty), remained unpublished until the nineteenth century. One chapter, however, appeared anonymously as
Mare Liberum
(The Free Sea) in 1609. The essence of Grotius’s thesis is that “
it is lawful for any nation to go to any other and to
trade with it,” and that Portuguese claims to a monopoly of trade on the basis of a papal grant, territorial possessions in the Indies, or custom were groundless. Furthermore, in the absence of a competent legal authority to which to appeal, Van Heemskerck was entitled to avenge any wrongs committed by the Portuguese to hinder Dutch trade. Support for this argument, and for the practice of using a business to achieve political ends, was far from universal even within the Netherlands where many merchants believed that their interests were best served by peaceful trade.

Portrait of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) by Jansz. van Mierevelt. Grotius sat for this portrait at the age of twenty-eight, seven years after writing his seminal
Mare Liberum
(The Free Sea), the legal justification for his countrymen’s attack on a Portuguese merchant ship in Southeast Asia and, more broadly, on the right of Dutch merchants to sail to and trade in a region over which Portugal claimed a monopoly. His arguments for “the right of navigation and the liberty of traffic” earned him the appellation “father of international law.” Courtesy of the Museum Rotterdam.

The
Santa Catarina
affair and publication of
Mare Liberum
did not initiate the examination and refinement of legal norms governing trade, the right to possession of unoccupied territory,
privateering, freedom of the sea, and other matters pertaining to maritime expansion. Few of Grotius’s legal theories were new, and several of his arguments regarding the laws of nature and of nations derived from classical antecedents. The need to rearticulate them sprang from the determination of northern European states to counter Iberian pretensions in Asia and the Americas, an effort already evident in the sixteenth century. Although Spain demonstrated almost no interest in North America,
Giovanni da Verrazano’s
exploration of the coast from
North Carolina to Newfoundland in 1524 and
Jacques Cartier’s three voyages up the
St. Lawrence River between 1534 and 1542 (both men sailed for France) had to be legitimated in
the face of Spain’s monopolistic claims under the
Treaty of Tordesillas.
Francis I argued that neither Spain nor Portugal had any right to land they did not effectively occupy, and Pope
Clement VII reinterpreted the bull
Inter Caetera
to apply to “
known continents, not to territories subsequently discovered by other powers,” which freed the French, among others, to launch their own voyages of discovery. Planning for Cartier’s third voyage alarmed the Spanish court, although the French king was reported to have said “
that he did not send these ships to make war nor to contravene the peace and friendship with your Majesty [Charles V].” Rather, he blithely insisted that “the sun gave warmth to him as well as to others, and he much desired … to learn how [Adam] had partitioned the world.” Francis furthermore drew sharp distinctions between discovery and occupation, and between the spiritual and temporal power of the popes, who, he claimed, had no business apportioning land among secular sovereigns.

The English made similar arguments to justify
Francis Drake’s forays into the West Indies in the 1580s, and in the next decade the evangelist of English expansion
Richard Hakluyt observed that because “
the sea & trade are common by the lawe of nature and of nations, it was not lawfull for the Pope, nor is it lawfull for the Spaniard, to prohibite other nations from the communication & participation of this lawe.” English support for the doctrine of the free sea was reversed under James I, who was also James VI of Scotland. More dependent than the English on fish for food and with a relatively modest overseas trade, oriented toward the Baltic, the Scots had long claimed an exclusive right to waters out to twenty-eight miles from shore. After ascending the English throne, James began applying this Scottish notion of a closed sea to keep the Dutch from fishing in English waters, and many assumed that Grotius wrote
Mare Liberum
with a view to preserving Dutch rights to the
Dogger Bank fishing grounds of the North Sea as much as to justify Dutch actions in Southeast Asia.
^a

Indeed,
John Selden’s
Of the Dominion, or, Ownership of the Sea
(also known as
Mare Clausum,
“the Closed Sea”) was drafted in 1619 as a justification of James I’s requirement that foreigners purchase a royal license to fish. The most famous rebuttal to Grotius, Selden’s work was not released at the time for fear of offending the king of Denmark, whose
fishermen also frequented British waters. Selden justified his interpretation of the law by pointing to the “
Customs of so many Nations both ancient and modern.” While his chief focus
was the fisheries, he delineated an absurdly expansive conception of England’s
territorial sea. The
“sea-territory of the
British Empire” to the south and east ended at the continent, but “in the open and vast ocean of the north and west they are to be placed at the utmost extent of those most spacious seas which are possessed by the English, Scots, and Irish.” In other words, Britain’s territorial sea included the North Atlantic all the way to North America, where the French, Dutch, and the English had been making fitful attempts to establish colonies of their own.

Tightly argued and influential as his work is, Grotius was writing at the behest of political masters who changed course as conditions warranted. The Dutch vigorously advocated free trade in European waters, where their shippers were dominant and any restrictions on their movements threatened their profits. Yet once they had removed the Portuguese from Southeast Asia, they abandoned the notion of the free sea to
preserve their own monopoly against the
English and even restricted where and what indigenous mariners could trade. The VOC expelled the Portuguese from the Spice Islands in 1605 and signed treaties with local rulers to fortify the islands. Soon their greatest competition was from their anti-Catholic allies, the English. The
Twelve Years’ Truce ended hostilities with Spain in 1609, but by 1618 war was again on the horizon, and rather than risk a confrontation with England, the
States-General allowed the English
a fixed share of the spice trade in exchange for help in paying for the Dutch garrisons. The VOC’s governor-general,
Jan Pieterszoon Coen, grudgingly followed his superiors’ lead, and a combined Anglo-Dutch squadron besieged the
Spanish colony at Manila and captured many Chinese
junks in an effort to divert the silk trade to Batavia. An empire builder in the mold of Afonso d’Albuquerque, Coen became governor-general of the VOC in 1618. Over the objections of the local ruler of what is now Jakarta, the next year he founded the castle of Batavia, which became the administrative capital of an informal yet growing Dutch empire in Asia and a major emporium of the
East Indies. Celebrated through the early 1700s as the “Queen of the Orient” and “Holland in the Tropics,”
Batavia was a city of brick town houses, government buildings, hospitals and churches, and
canals. Within the city walls lived the ruling Dutch minority alongside the prosperous and numerically larger Chinese community, while discrete communities of
Bugis from south
Sulawesi and colonies of Madurese,
Balinese, and
Ambonese lived beyond the city limits.

The Chinese government had accepted the Portuguese version of the
Santa Catarina
affair and, viewing the Dutch as pirates, refused to allow them to trade. In 1624, the Dutch built
Zeelandia Castle on
Taiwan. Less than a hundred miles from the Chinese mainland, Taiwan was home to an indigenous population of
Austronesian-speaking people whose predilection for headhunting had dampened Chinese interest in the island before the sixteenth century, when it became a haven for pirates. By 1603, there was a small Chinese presence lured by the abundance of deer, whose skins were coveted by the Japanese. The island’s strategic location made it attractive to Iberian and Japanese merchants who made halfhearted efforts to settle there, but the real pioneers were the Dutch, who made Zeelandia an entrepôt for merchants from China, Japan, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and Batavia. Like Batavia and Spanish Manila, Dutch Taiwan was predominantly Chinese and, in the words of a Dutch official, “
The Chinese are the only bees on Formosa [Taiwan] that give honey.” By 1645 the island’s Chinese population numbered fifteen thousand, many of them engaged in the island’s sugar industry, which the Dutch had introduced from Southeast Asia.

On the mainland, the Ming government’s position had become increasingly parlous. In 1610, the
Mongolian
Manchus had severed ties with the
Ming Dynasty and over the next quarter century they consolidated their hold over Mongolia and founded the
Qing Dynasty. When a rebel army took
Beijing and the Ming emperor hanged himself in 1644, many Chinese appealed to the Manchus to intervene. As so often before, imperial loyalists retreated to the south and southeast coasts, where resistance to the Qing was strongest, although it depended on unreliable warlords and adventurers. Among the more notable of these was
Zheng Zhilong, whose family controlled much of the sea trade between
Hangzhou and
Guangzhou. Zheng defected to the Qing following their capture of Hangzhou in 1646, but his son
Zheng Chenggong, known as Koxinga, proved intensely loyal.
^b
Born to a Japanese mother in the port of
Hirado, north of Nagasaki, the younger Zheng rose in the service of the
Southern Ming. In 1659 he attacked
Nanjing, but Ming loyalists failed to rise in support and his forces—between fifty and one hundred thousand men in a thousand vessels—retreated down the Yangzi to
Jinmen (Quemoy Island), off
Xiamen. He then decided to relocate his followers to Taiwan and in 1662 forced the Dutch off the island.

Zheng died within the year, but his followers constituted a clear and present threat to the mainland. To avoid attacks from Zheng’s successors, the
Manchus ordered the entire population of Zhejiang,
Fujian, Guangdong, and
Guangxi Provinces to relocate at least thirty kilometers from the coast. The displacement of millions of people ruined China’s overseas trade for the next two decades. In 1683, the
Kangxi emperor ordered one of Zheng Chenggong’s former captains to invade Taiwan. A force of three hundred ships and twenty thousand troops easily took the island and, to prevent foreign traders from establishing themselves there, the government annexed Taiwan,
lifted the prohibition on China’s overseas trade, and allowed people to move back to the coasts. With its dearth of desirable commodities, however, Taiwan was again relegated to the margins of Asian trade, although it later became Fujian’s rice basket and, in the late twentieth century, a major center of shipbuilding and global trade in its own right.

The Dutch expulsion from Taiwan was partly offset by their privileged position as the only Europeans allowed in Japan. Under
Hideyoshi’s successor,
Tokugawa Ieyasu, Japanese merchants had begun trading with Southeast Asia. Ieyasu supported foreign trade but subjected it to tight regulation, and ships could not sail from Japan without a
government-issued vermilion seal, called a
shuin
. Between 1604 and 1635, 370 ships sailed with vermilion seals, and “Japan towns” could be found in the Philippines,
Vietnam,
Thailand,
Myanmar, Sumatra, and Java. But the fate of Japan’s maritime expansion was linked ultimately to that of Japanese Christians. In the 1630s, Ieyasu’s grandson
Tokugawa Iemitsu issued a series of maritime prohibitions (
kaikin
) with a view to stemming Christian influence. These kept Japanese from sailing overseas and prevented anyone who had lived abroad for more than five years from returning home. Following the
Shimabara rebellion involving mostly Christian peasants, the Portuguese (long suspected of smuggling priests into the country) were barred from Japan in 1639. From this point, Japan’s connections to the outside world were channeled through the “
four gates”:
Tsushima, for trade with Korea; Satsuma, for trade with the island kingdom of Ryukyu; Matsumae, in southwest
Hokkaido, for relations with the Ainu; and Nagasaki, for merchants from China, Taiwan, and Batavia.