The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Macau had first of all to make its money, and it did so very successfully. Guangzhou was the source of the silk the Macanese (the term for Macau’s inhabitants) sent on to Japan and elsewhere; Carletti believed that up to 80,000 pounds of silk were carried down from Guangzhou twice a year, as well as mercury, lead and musk. Only a select group of Portuguese from Macau were permitted to land in Guangzhou, and they had to travel up the Pearl River in Chinese boats. Carletti was excited by what they brought to Macau, and eagerly bought silk, musk and gold, which, he observed, ‘is really another sort of merchandise and is used more for gilding one or another kind of furniture and other objects than as a kind of money’, so that its price fluctuated according to seasonal demand. Carletti resolved to send all his goods on to distant Middelburg in the Netherlands and to sell them there. Among these goods were two enormous porcelain vases filled with branches of ginger; the vases were ‘perhaps the largest that ever have been brought to Europe from those lands’, and the Middelburg merchant who bought them forwarded them to the duke of Tuscany. The very best porcelain was reserved for the emperor, ‘but the most beautiful is what one sees ordinarily, white and decorated in blue’. Carletti bought something like 700 pieces of Chinese blue-and-white, all at low cost, a mixture of plates, bowls and other pieces. It is no coincidence that Portuguese tiles (azulejos), and later on Dutch ones, also came to be decorated in blue and white, even though the Iberian peninsula had its own long tradition of more colourful tile-making based on Islamic designs.

  The English traveller Ralph Fitch was in Macau in around 1590, and he explained the simple strategy of the Macanese:

  When the Portugales goe from Macao in China to Japan, they carrie much white silke, Gold, Muske and Porcelanes: and they bring from thence nothing but Silver. They have a great Carake which goeth thither every yeere, and shee bringeth from thence every yeere above 600,000 crusadoes [ducats]; and all this Silver of Japan, and 200,000 crusadoes more in Silver which they bring yeerly out of India, they imploy to their great advantage in China: and they bring from thence Gold, Muske, Silke, Copper, Porcelanes, and many other things very costly and gilded.24

  One writer after another confirmed that the profit to be drawn from the ‘great carrack’ or (as the Portuguese called it) the ‘ship of trade’, Não do Trato, was truly vast, ‘a million in gold’, as Diogo do Couto hyperbolically asserted in around 1600. In 1635 an English visitor to Macau believed that one could make a 100 per cent profit on the return voyage between Macau and either Japan or Manila.25 And yet the Portuguese showed little interest in the beautiful objects produced by Japanese artisans, buying a few writing boxes and an occasional decorated weapon; they craved instead the silver extracted from deep mines. Estimates of the amount of silver exported from Japan on board native, Chinese and European ships during the early seventeenth century reach as much as 187,500 kg per annum.26

  These carracks were rather different to the galleons that crossed the Pacific from Manila. They tended to be larger, broader and slower, starting, in the middle of the sixteenth century, at 400–600 tons’ capacity, and rising by 1600 to as much as 1,600 tons, with occasional ‘monsters’, as Charles Boxer called them, of 2,000 tons; ‘a shipping ton,’ he explained, ‘was a unit of capacity and not of weight’, roughly sixty cubic feet, so that a 2,000-ton carrack had space for 120,000 cubic feet of cargo. They had fewer guns than the galleons, and the disadvantages began to tell once Dutch competitors entered the waters off China and Japan, leading to substitution by smaller and faster vessels known as galiotas, ‘galliots’, and occasionally small frigates and pinnaces as well.27 All these ships descended from the same basic model, the late medieval galleass, with its lateen foremast and its array of square sails, as well as officers’ living quarters at the stern, though the carrack retained the large forecastle of medieval ships. The Japanese made fewer distinctions between the carracks and the galleons than the Portuguese; they looked very different to their own junks, and were simply described as ‘black ships’, kurofune, while the word galiota was transmogrified into the Japanese term kareuta-sen; the Japanese language has always been very open to foreign terms, and the Japanese word for ‘thank you’, arigato, is said (mistakenly, it seems) to be a corruption of the Portuguese obrigado. Japanese fascination with the ‘black ships’ went much further than their name. A popular way of decorating the silk screens that were required in prosperous Japanese homes was to portray the arrival of a massive black ship, with the crew (occasionally displayed as monkeys) swarming over the rigging, Portuguese merchants strolling along the quayside in their western garb, and sometimes a Jesuit missionary to add further verisimilitude.28 Nonetheless, the Portuguese were keen to exploit every opportunity to fill their hold with Japanese silver, and often they hired large junks, manned mainly by Chinese sailors.29 The Portuguese did not insist on using European ships – which in any case were not made in Europe but in Portuguese bases along the shores of the Indian Ocean, where good, hard teak was ready to hand.

  As in the case of Manila, the raison d’être of the town was its intermediary role, rather than anything it could offer from its own limited resources. The secret of Macau’s success was that it was not a royal foundation, but had been created by private initiative. It never cost the king of Portugal anything. Macau was governed by its own ‘Loyal Senate’, or Leal Senado, whose members, mainly interested in profit from trade, took advantage of the distance separating Macau from Lisbon to manage the town’s own affairs.30 The accession of Philip II of Spain to the throne of Portugal did not, as has been seen, lead to a merger of the Spanish and Portuguese trading networks in the Pacific or anywhere else. From 1581 onwards the governors of both Goa and Manila deplored what still counted as illicit trade across the imaginary line dividing the Spanish from the Portuguese hemisphere, but in the vast spaces of the Pacific it continued. Wealthy Mexican merchants obtained Chinese silks from Guangzhou by way of Macau and Manila, where the Portuguese sold their silk at a very respectable profit, before the goods were ferried along the galleon route all the way to Acapulco.31 The route to Japan was the foundation of Macau’s fortune, and had the great advantage of being relatively short, compared to the routes from Melaka westwards, or from Manila eastwards.

  As the Portuguese became more familiar with the coasts of Japan, they realized that they needed a base there, just as they now had a base in southern China, and the obvious place to look was the south-west of Kyushu island, not too far from important ports such as Hakata. One very promising location was a fishing village within the lands of a great landowner sympathetic to the Christians, Omura Sumitada. A Jesuit priest had turned up there in around 1569 and, having kindly been offered accommodation in a Buddhist temple, he proceeded to demolish it and to build a parish church out of its planks; he managed to convert the entire population, including Omura. There was a large bay that would provide excellent anchorage for a great black ship. Local wars brought refugees to the village, and it grew and grew – all the more so when the Portuguese chose it as their port of preference in 1571. The name of this place is Nagasaki, meaning ‘Long Cape’.32 Within a couple of years the risks in sailing seas that were still little known became obvious when a massive carrack bound for Nagasaki and weighed down by a very heavy cargo foundered in a matter of minutes after being violently struck by a summer typhoon. There were a good many Jesuit missionaries on board and a large part of the cargo consisted of Chinese silks the Jesuits were bringing to Japan, where they planned to sell the goods and use the profit to fund their missionary campaigns.33 Two survivors were pulled from the sea by a passing Melaka junk, under Portuguese command; they were Arabs or Indians, and one soon died.

  The constant problem with any attempt to explain the lively maritime connections linking such places as Malaya, Siam, Cambodia, China, the Philippines and Japan is that it easily develops into an account of the links between Melaka, Macau, Manila and Nagasaki, in other words the places where the Portuguese or the Spaniards created their
bases. Yet it is obvious from (say) Carletti’s account of his voyage round the world that he saw and sailed in non-European ships, and that the Siamese, the Javanese and others were in constant movement back and forth, while far more spices were absorbed by China than ever reached Europe.34 For under the Ming China was the big economy on the planet. Its own sailors were still discouraged from venturing on to the open sea, but that did not stop them from doing so, nor did it prevent the large Chinese settlements all around the South China Sea from coming into existence. China’s hunger for silver shaped the economy not just of the Ming Empire but of much vaster spaces, including Japan and Spanish America. Trade with China from nearly all directions continued to flourish until the 1640s, a decade marked by the collapse of the Ming dynasty and a period of cool weather that damaged production across the globe.35

  What made the Spanish, Portuguese and later Dutch ships that entered these waters different – even ships constructed in India or in Mexico – was that they formed part of a worldwide network that linked Antwerp and Amsterdam to Melaka, the Moluccas and Mexico. They were the agents of empires that stretched across distances never matched in human history, whether one is thinking of the Portuguese seaborne empire, largely consisting of trade stations and subject ports, or the territorial empire of the Spaniards that encompassed the Americas and saw the Philippines as a dependency of Spanish America. A particularly important aspect of the creation of transoceanic links was the arrival of alien plants in new continents. Obvious cases include the arrival of maize and tobacco in Europe, from Spanish America, but the Portuguese presence in Macau introduced ‘the vegetables of the western seas’ into Ming China: lettuce, watercress, bell peppers, new types of bean. Several of these new fruits and vegetables, such as the papaya and the guava, were not European at all, but they were still brought by Europeans; both the papaya and the guava were Mexican fruits, and the papaya was native to the area around Veracruz, from where the Manila galleons headed westwards.36 More sinister arrivals in the Far East were European weapons, not that the Chinese or Japanese lacked firearms of their own; however, they admired European ones, and the existence of their own advanced technology meant that it proved easy to copy what the Portuguese and their rivals showed them. The same applied to navigation, where the superior charts and handbooks carried by the Portuguese gave a distinct advantage; Portuguese sailing manuals, or roteiros, were translated into Japanese.37

  III

  Nothing could be achieved in Japan without the consent of the rulers of the empire. However, identifying who actually exercised power was not straightforward. In the mid-sixteenth century the emperor was a cipher, and the power of the daimyo, local warlords, remained formidable; occasionally they would send messages to Macau asking for help against their enemies: Omura Sumitada wrote asking for a supply of saltpetre, which was a vital ingredient of gunpowder, while showing due deference to the Catholic Church.38 The great weakness of the daimyo was that they spent all their resources on the maintenance of their samurai, whom they paid in kind with supplies of rice from their estates, and without whom they could not hope to stay in power. By and large, both daimyo and samurai had little money to spare, and lived simply off rice, vegetables and fruit. The opportunity to make money from the Great Ship of Amacon was too good to miss.39 However, by 1600 a succession of capable and ruthless shoguns managed to impose control from the imperial capital at Kyoto and their own headquarters at Edo (now Tokyo) over large areas of the country, and they were the people with whom the Portuguese would most need to curry favour, even though the daimyo remained a force in the outlying regions. The relationship between the Portuguese and the shoguns was complicated by the attempts of the Jesuits to introduce Christianity into Japan, and the increasing alarm the shoguns felt at their success; this was exactly the area where the policy followed by sundry daimyo often diverged from that of the central government. An example of this divergence was the daimyo Omura Sumitada, who vigorously encouraged conversion to Christianity.40

  Much has been written about the Jesuit attempts to bring Christianity to China, and the way the Jesuits tried to make Christianity palatable to the Chinese by themselves adopting Chinese ways of life, and by adapting their teachings to the assumptions of a society dominated by Confucian ideas about rank and honour. Macau, where Jesuits had been residing from the start of its history, and where they built the imposing Church of St Paul, whose façade is now the symbol of the city, was the base from which Matteo Ricci and others launched their missions into China. Before he reached Macau, Ricci had already spent some time in Goa, the major Jesuit centre in Asia, with a Jesuit college containing over a hundred members, so that his Chinese mission can be seen as a spin-off from the creation of the Portuguese trading network.41 However, from the perspective of maritime history the Jesuit campaigns in Japan, rather than China, have particular interest, because the silk trade from Macau and the missions became closely intertwined in what sometimes proved a very dangerous operation.42

  The missionaries were well aware that conversion took place by command. An Italian Jesuit, Alessandro di Valignano, who for thirty-two years led the Jesuit mission in Japan, saw a direct link between the Christianization of Japan and the arrival of the Great Ship of Amacon in Kyushu. He suggested that the Pope should ban, under pain of excommunication, visits by the Great Ship of Amacon to ‘the ports of lords who persecute Christianity or who are reluctant to allow their vassals to be converted’.43 Valignano was keen to promote the trade in silk towards Japan because the Jesuits invested heavily in it; from the profits of this trade they funded their operations, and unless someone else could come up with 12,000 ducats per annum they would have to continue to pursue profit, whatever the Franciscans, with their vows of poverty, or the Protestants, with their accusations of hypocrisy, might say.44 In a text he wrote in 1580 Valignano showed how important the Great Ship had become in the great project of turning Japan Christian:

  The greatest help that we have had hitherto in securing Christians is that of the Great Ship … For as the lords of Japan are very poor, as has been said, and the benefits they derive when the ships come to their ports are very great, they try hard to entice them to their fiefs. And since they have convinced themselves that they will come to where there are Christians and churches, and whither the padres wish them to come, it therefore follows that many of them, even though they are heathen, seek to get the padres to come thither and to secure churches and convents, thinking that by this means the ships will [in their turn] secure other favours they wish to obtain from the padres. And since the Japanese are so much at the disposal of their lords, they readily become converted when told to do so by their lords and they think it is their wish.45

  Valignano opined that, being ‘white’, the Japanese were ‘of good understanding and behaviour’, the whiteness of the Japanese being a common motif in European writings at the time. Whiteness might be thought of as a metaphor for the rational behaviour that some contemporaries denied to American Indians, black Africans and other peoples. Valignano expounded a racial hierarchy in which white-skinned Christian Europeans naturally stood at the apex, but his respect for Japanese culture and manners led him to place his hosts very high up his scale.46

  The dominant figures in Japan during the 1580s, the shogun Nobunaga and his successor, the regent Hideyoshi, were worried that the Jesuits were the secret vanguard of a Portuguese takeover of their islands. Their hostility to the missionaries was demonstrated in 1587 and again ten years later. On the first occasion they ordered the priests out of Japan, but within a few years the Jesuits had argued their way back in; on the second occasion Hideyoshi unleashed a brutal persecution of Japanese Christians, resulting in mass crucifixions of men, women and children in and around Nagasaki. Yet the suspicion remains that Hideyoshi’s prime aim was to bring the daimyo of Kyushu, often sympathetic to Christianity, under his control, rather than a deep-seated hostility to the religion itself, for he could also show the Christians favour when it suite
d his interests. This interpretation is bolstered by the fact that Hideyoshi vigorously persecuted Buddhist monks of various sects, since he regarded the Buddhist monasteries as political rivals, institutions that stood outside the centralized state he was trying to create. Valignano observed that Buddhist monasteries of around a hundred monks were reduced to only four or five after these persecutions. On one occasion Hideyoshi even rejected a plea from Buddhist monks who suspected that the local daimyo, a Christian, planned to destroy the images in their temple; far from supporting them, even though his wife pleaded with him to do so, Hideyoshi had the images brought to Kyoto and chopped up for firewood. On another occasion Hideyoshi visited a church and declared that all that was stopping him from becoming a Christian was the ban on having many concubines: ‘if you will stretch a point in this, I will likewise become a convert.’ A further reason for his friendly attitude in the years around 1586 was that he was planning the conquest not merely of Korea but of China; he wanted to hire two Portuguese carracks and he promised the Jesuits that he would build churches right across China were his campaigns to succeed. When a Jesuit emissary agreed to obtain the ships Hideyoshi’s enthusiasm knew no bounds, and he offered the Jesuits the right to preach throughout his lands and a bundle of privileges greater than those enjoyed by the Buddhists.