The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (94 page)

In theory, only Russian merchant ships were allowed to sail through the straits, but others, the French especially, circumvented this restriction by putting their ships under the Russian flag. This fledgling
commerce was disrupted by the Russo-Turkish War of 1787–92, which erupted over Russia’s annexation of the
Crimea and construction of a naval base at
Sevastopol. By war’s end, Russia’s commercial and political activity on the Black Sea centered on
Odessa, in what is now
Ukraine. Under a succession of able administrators—two of them French—the port grew from a hamlet of two thousand people in 1794 to a bustling city of seventy-five thousand half a century later. Before the coming of the railroad in the mid-nineteenth century, Russia’s Black Sea ports depended less on trade with northern Russia than on the sea trade with ports in the Ottoman Empire, the Aegean, and beyond. Although many Russians immigrated to Odessa in this period, the merchant community was more cosmopolitan than any in the empire, comprising
Armenians,
Jews, Greeks,
Tatars, and German
Mennonites, as well as
traders from France and other western European countries. Turks came, too, though it was not until the
Treaty of Adrianople (Edirne) in 1829 that Turkish ports—as distinct from the straits—were opened to Russian shipping.

Russian access to the Black Sea endowed the tsar with unprecedented influence over the Orthodox populations of the Ottoman Empire from the
Balkans
to the
Middle East, and alarmed the British, who feared that Russia might succeed France as the main threat—albeit not a naval one per se—to their Indian trade. During the
Seven Years’ War, the East India Company’s armies (manned almost exclusively by Indian soldiers) had defeated the governor of Bengal, an autonomous province of the
Mughal Empire that became the cornerstone of
British India. The Mughal governor was replaced by a company puppet, and a few years later the enfeebled Mughal emperor was convinced to appoint the East India Company itself as
diwan
(treasurer) of Bengal,
Bihar, and
Orissa. From its base at the
Hugli River port of
Calcutta, the company moved swiftly to maximize its profits from Bengal, one of the richest areas
in India. Thanks to its control of Bengal’s invaluable silk and cotton manufactures, the amount of silver the company had to export to India to pay for
imports to Europe fell more than 90 percent, from almost 5 million guilders in 1751–52 to less than 400,000 twenty years later. Yet between 1760 and 1780 the value of
exports from Bengal grew nearly threefold, to 12.5 million guilders per year. The total value of the
Dutch and English companies’ imports to Europe grew fourfold in the eighteenth century, but the composition of the trade changed markedly. In the late 1630s, spices (including
pepper) accounted for more than two-thirds of the VOC’s shipments and textiles less than 15 percent. A century later the share of spices had fallen to 14 percent, and that of textiles had grown threefold. The English were never as dependent on spices, which represented only 4 percent of their exports in 1731–40, when textiles accounted for more than three-quarters.

The greatest stimulant to Europe’s Asian trade was
Chinese tea, which had been introduced to Europe in limited amounts from the 1660s. The Dutch were the first to pursue the trade regularly, and by 1715 the VOC was purchasing about sixty or seventy thousand pounds per year for the Netherlands, a figure that rose to four or five million pounds by the end of the century. More remarkable was the success of their English rivals, whose purchases grew from twenty thousand pounds per year in 1700 to one hundred thousand pounds in 1706, and six million pounds sixty years later. Until the British government lowered its extortionate import duties on tea (
between 79 and 127 percent) in 1784, it is estimated that more than seven million pounds of tea—about half the total imported into continental Europe by the VOC and other trading companies—were smuggled into Britain annually. Reduction of tariffs to 12.5 percent had the combined effect of lowering the retail price of tea, eliminating smuggling, and increasing Britain’s share of tea imports to Europe from 36 to 84 percent.

The British artist Thomas Daniell’s aquatint
Calcutta from the River Hoogly
shows the seat of British power in India in 1788, nearly a century after the East India Company established Fort William. The river teems with a variety of different watercraft, from the Bengal
dingi
at left, a private pleasure barge propelled by sixteen rowers, and two
badgras
, houseboats with enormous triangular rudders and lowered masts, at right. The scene is dominated by the company’s single-masted, square-rigged “pinnace-budgerow”—in essence a Europeanized
badgra
with long galleries of windows used by company officials on the rivers of India. Courtesy of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Gift of Lee and Roy Galloway, S1999.8.8.

In keeping with China’s long tradition of limiting the pernicious influence of foreigners, the
Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) implemented what came to be
known as the
Canton system of trade to maintain a safe distance between their subjects and Europeans. The principles were laid out in the
Five Regulations of 1759, which limited where and when ships and people could go (European women, including servants, were confined to
Macau); required that all trade be conducted only through the government-sanctioned
Cohong (
gonghang
) merchants; limited contacts between Europeans and Chinese; and prevented foreigners from learning Chinese. Only a few hundred Europeans were present in Canton (as the English called Guangzhou) at any time in the eighteenth century, a negligible number in comparison with the thousands of Fujianese
and Cantonese who emigrated to or traded with Southeast Asia after the Qing government eased restrictions on
Chinese maritime trade in 1683.

This vast increase in Chinese participation in the commercial and political world of Southeast Asia was a function of private enterprise without government support, but on such a large scale that the overseas Chinese became “
merchants without empire,” not unlike the Muslim traders on the coast of India in earlier centuries. Chinatowns had long anchored the colonial cities of Macau,
Manila, Batavia, and Melaka, in all of which Chinese merchants and artisans far outnumbered European settlers.
Junks of five or six hundred tons from Amoy (Xiamen) frequented Brunei, on Borneo, which was outside the European sphere of influence, and in 1776 an East India Company visitor wrote that “
the commerce between China and Borneo [is] somewhat like the trade from Europe to America” in scale. By the end of the century it is estimated that Amoy was the home
port of
a thousand seagoing junks.

The Chinese also insinuated themselves into the administrative structures of indigenous states like Mataram Java and
Ayutthaya in Thailand, where rulers appointed them tax farmers to keep such lucrative sinecures away from indigenous rivals. In some places the Chinese formed their own fledgling polities under the auspices of local overlords. As their numbers grew,
Chinese settlers turned increasingly to agriculture, cultivating food crops and pepper. Other attractions included mining for tin on the Malay Peninsula and gold on Borneo, where there was a gold rush at the end of the century. While the Portuguese, Dutch, and later the British gravitated toward places where Chinese merchants were already active, the overseas
Chinese and Southeast Asians were less dependent on Europeans.
Bugis merchants from
Sulawesi eventually wrested control over several Malay states from the Dutch, and their settlement in the southern Malay Peninsula attracted
Stamford Raffles to the island of Singapore, at the eastern end of the Strait of Malacca. In 1819, he leased the island from the sultan of
Johor and founded a trading settlement with a view to fostering Chinese trade and undermining the VOC. His choice was exemplary. When the island formally became a British crown colony in 1867 the population had reached 100,000, and today the independent city-state of Singapore is home to five million people and ranks as one of the five busiest ports in the world.

By the time Raffles settled on Singapore, American merchants had entered the trade of the
Monsoon Seas, where they hoped to find profitable trading opportunities in a world dominated by the British, who after the American Revolution did all in their power to choke the trade of their former colonists. In 1783, the
Empress of China
sailed from New York with a cargo of ginseng, wine, and brandy, miscellaneous wares, and twenty thousand dollars
in silver. One of thirty-four western ships at
Canton that year, the
Empress of China
realized a profit of more than 25 percent and loaded tea, gold, silk, and porcelain for the return passage. But like their European counterparts, the Americans produced little that the
Chinese wanted or needed.
John Ledyard, a Connecticut-born veteran of James Cook’s third voyage of
exploration, promoted the idea of harvesting furs in the Pacific Northwest for sale in Canton as a way of breaking into the lucrative China trade without running a deficit. In September 1787, a consortium of
Boston merchants, shipowners, and captains sent out the
Columbia Rediviva,
under
John Kendrick, and
Lady Washington,
commanded by
Robert Gray. Sailing by way of Cape Horn, they reached the
Spanish settlement at
Nootka Sound on the west coast of
Vancouver Island off
British Columbia, where they found three English ships engaged in the same trade. After swapping ships with Kendrick, Gray sailed for Canton, traded the skins for tea, and returned home via the
Cape of Good Hope, thus completing the first circumnavigation of the globe under the American flag.

Merchants from Salem,
Massachusetts, were in the vanguard of the China trade, and having helped establish an American presence at Canton they turned to
pepper from Sumatra and coffee from
Mocha. Imports of the former rose at a great rate, reaching one million pounds in 1802 and more than seven times that two years later. Americans also began trading in Japan after the French invasion of the
Netherlands in 1795. Because no VOC ships were available to sail from Batavia to their factory in Japan,
the Dutch hired ships from neutral countries like Denmark and the United States. By 1807, eleven U.S. ships had reached
Deshima under the Dutch flag. This was a humble start, but four decades later the United States would take the lead in ending Japan’s self-imposed isolation from western powers.

Americans were among the pioneers of transpacific trade and were preceded there only by the Spanish
Manila galleon and Russian fur traders. Other Europeans’ engagement with the Pacific had been sporadic and limited to the occasional exploratory voyage, and a few attempts to catch the Manila galleon and harass Spanish coastal trade between Peru and Mexico. But the ocean itself was vast, the technology of the time so inadequate, and the measures of success so particular that the Pacific remained out of bounds. As a result, by the eighteenth century much of the world map still remained a blank.

Although British and French navigators would reap most of the credit for opening the Pacific,
Russians were taking an interest in the North Pacific
even before Peter the Great put Russia on the road to naval power. By 1619, Russia had pushed its eastern border to the Pacific, establishing river ports along the way including Yakutsk on the Lena. In 1649, a decade after the first
Russians reached the Pacific,
Semyon Dezhnev led a hundred men in seven
koches
(a type of one- or two-masted, square-sailed vessel) down the Kolyma River to the Arctic, around the Chukotski Peninsula, and south through the
Bering Strait to the Anadyr River, a distance of roughly fifteen hundred miles. Only about a dozen men survived this first European transit of the strait and Dezhnev’s expedition was all but forgotten. However, the proximity or contiguity of northeast
Siberia and northwest America was widely suspected, and shortly before his death Peter the Great appointed the Danish navigator
Vitus Bering to explore eastward of the Chukotski Peninsula. After a three-year trek across Siberia, in 1728 Bering sailed the
Sviatoi Gavril
(Saint Gabriel) from Kamchatka as far as the
Arctic Circle, and the next year he sighted
Alaska. A decade later, Bering took two brigs from
Okhotsk along the
Aleutian Islands as far as the
Alaska Peninsula. En route back, the expedition reached the Komandorsky Islands, 175 miles shy of the
Kamchatka peninsula, where Bering and a number of his crew died on the island that now bears his name. The survivors reached Kamchatka in 1742 with thirty thousand dollars’ worth of sea otter skins, and there followed an island-hopping
fur rush through the Aleutians to Alaska. In 1799 the Russian government chartered the
Russian-American Fur Company with a monopoly on trade north of
Vancouver Island.

By this time, English, French, and Spanish explorers had been busily sketching in the map of the Pacific for more than three decades. The wealth generated from international trade helped finance a wave of government-backed expeditions animated by a spirit of inquiry into natural phenomena and human society. Central to their mission was the resolution of two outstanding mysteries of the Pacific: whether the vast and assuredly rich southern continent,
Terra Australis, existed in temperate latitudes of the southern hemisphere and whether there was a western outlet for a
Northwest Passage. Our retrospective admiration for the cultural and scientific outcomes should not obscure the commercial and diplomatic imperatives that underlay them. As much as they owed to
Enlightenment sensibilities, these voyages were motivated by imperial rivalry and a desire to expand trade. The potential of commercial advantage was essential to the success of exploration. In 1642, the VOC had commissioned
Abel Jansen Tasman “
to discover the partly known and still unreached South and Easternland [Australia] for the improvement, and increase of the Comp[an]y’s general welfare.” Sailing from Batavia, Tasman reached
Tasmania,
New Zealand,
Tonga, and northern Australia, but “no riches or things of profit but only the said lands and apparently good
passage [toward South America] were discovered.” When a second voyage proved even less rewarding, the VOC summarily abandoned the effort.