The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Slightly more promising was an accidental discovery further east, the other side of what has come to be known as the Tasman Sea. At the end of December 1642 his little fleet reached the northern tip of the South Island of Aotearoa (New Zealand). As soon as the Dutch ships arrived, two Māori canoes drew near; the Māori warriors on board kept challenging the Dutch, calling out to them and blowing on shell trumpets; the Dutch responded in kind, shouting, blowing their own trumpets and attempting to scare the Māoris by firing a cannon. Overnight things remained quiet, but the next morning a Māori catamaran set out to investigate the Dutch ships. Before long eight Māori boats were circling the ships. The first catamaran carried thirteen naked men; they must have been a formidable sight, covered in tattoos and clearly very hostile. The Dutch did try to send a small boat to shore, but one of the Māori canoes headed straight for the Dutch boat, ramming it; the Māori crew tussled with the Dutch sailors, clubbing and killing four Dutchmen, and carrying off their bodies. The Dutch would have assumed that the bodies were taken to be eaten, which is not impossible. The bay where these events happened was given the name ‘Murderers’ Bay’ by an irate Tasman, though it is now known more politely as Golden Bay.39 This bloody reception had the effect the Māoris had hoped for: the strange visitors in their massive boats left and headed north, not bothering to explore Aotearoa in any depth.

  Tasman had been made aware that the people he was dealing with now were very different in appearance and style of life from the native Australians; but he failed to work out the shape of the two great islands of Aotearoa, and imagined that Cook Strait, which divides North from South Island, was simply a large inlet; but he did realize, on sailing north all the way to Fiji and Tonga, that wide watery spaces separate Australia from New Zealand, and therefore Australia must have an east coast that would link up with the areas already discovered by the Dutch. In other words, Australia is a continent, not a protrusion out of the southern continent. Tasman had no idea of the shape of New Zealand, since he only saw a little of South Island and the west coast of North Island, and his bitter experiences there did not encourage him to stay longer.40 Even so, the islands began to be marked on Dutch maps by the middle of the seventeenth century, patriotically named after the Dutch province of Zeeland. Tasman took the view that he had arrived on the shores of the southern continent, and that the coastline further south trended all the way to South America, but somehow his reports did not convince the VOC that the Company needed to probe deeper. The VOC was apparently more struck by the similarities between Australia and New Zealand than by the differences between the two lands and the two sets of inhabitants.

  These mediocre results were not disappointing enough to stop the VOC from commissioning a second voyage, in the hope of understanding how all the different pieces of coast that had been identified linked up, if at all. At the end of another uninspiring trip the verdict was confirmed:

  Thus they secured nothing advantageous, but only poor naked beach-runners, without riches, or any noteworthy fruits, very poor, and at many places bad natured men … Meanwhile this great Southland has been gone round by the aforesaid Tasman in two voyages and is reckoned to contain in it 8,000 miles of land as the charts drawn thereof, which we send to your Worships, make known. That such great land lying in various climes … shall have nothing of profit to find is scarcely acceptable.41

  The attitude of the VOC was, then, entirely materialistic. Indeed, one of the tasks assigned to Tasman was the recovery of a treasure chest that had gone down with the Batavia – not that he managed to find the wreck or the castaways who had disappeared on land. The verdict of the VOC was typically ungenerous: thanks to Tasman and his predecessors the Dutch now had a fair idea of the dimensions and shape of Australia, the problem being that it was the wrong continent. There was still confusion, long after Torres’s voyage, about whether Australia and New Guinea were joined together. A map of around 1690 drawn on fine Japanese paper and preserved in Sydney, known (through its provenance) as the Bonaparte map, reveals that the Dutch voyages to Australia did result in the mapping of its western, northern and southern coasts, and there was clearly an assumption that the eastern coast was not too dissimilar.

  Tasman’s voyages were important in the mapping of the south Pacific and the northern edges of the Southern Ocean, but they were based on false premises about the southern continent, and the discovery of both Tasmania and Aotearoa was in many respects accidental: Tasman simply came upon these places. There is a striking contrast with the voyages of Captain Cook well over a hundred years later. Cook’s voyages were seen as scientific endeavours: Joseph Banks and other scientists were on board; observation of the transit of Venus across the Sun was one aim, but accurate mapping of the Pacific was another. Cook carefully identified areas along the coast of Australia that had been neglected ever since the Dutch had arrived in that continent. He established that Aotearoa was not a spur sticking out of a vast Antarctic continent, but two large islands inhabited by a substantial Māori population. Although one motive was to search out land for British colonization, Cook was also commanded to look for the southern continent, even if many of the dreams of finding the golden realm of Beach had long ago evaporated.42

  The story of the first European encounters with Australia and New Zealand differs markedly from the history of European encounters elsewhere in the world. Greed remained a powerful motive for exploration, and yet this was greed that neither country could satisfy – Aotearoa because of the hostility of its Māori inhabitants, and Australia because the land was too poor, dry and unproductive to attract interest. But in sailing as far as Aotearoa, Tasman had reached the last significant inhabited coastline as yet unvisited by Europeans. There were still icy lands empty of people to discover further to the south, and coastlines to map, but Europeans had now truly encompassed the entire world, even if the Māoris had no reason to feel grateful for their presence.

  42

  Knots in the Network

  I

  Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps exaggerated the size of the mid-Atlantic islands. It was hard to believe that places such as the Cape Verde Islands, the Azores and St Helena were mere dots on the ocean, when they possessed such importance as resupply stations for fleets crossing the Atlantic, or passing between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. As a result, Madeira might appear to be the same size as the area that now makes up New York State. Yet from a maritime perspective these were not such small territories: the Azores stretch across 360 miles, or 580 kilometres, so that ships in search of shelter were not exactly looking for a needle in a haystack. The islands were also places where it was not too difficult to collect goods from right across the world. Sailors expected to make a little money on the side by buying and selling the spices of the East as they travelled back home from the Moluccas or India by way of the Cape of Good Hope and the Portuguese islands of the Atlantic. In this way the Azores became an unlikely but useful source of tropical spices that the temperate islands themselves were incapable of producing; Brazilian sugar too was easy to obtain in the archipelagoes, as Brazil became the dominant source of high-quality sugar after 1600. Complex trade networks were created by Dutch and Portuguese merchants that exploited all the loopholes in the relatively light Portuguese system of control; Portuguese ships out of Brazil would arrive in the two major Azorean islands, Terceira and São Miguel, pleading that they had been forced into port by storms, or that they were fleeing from pirates. Then they would unload their sugar and despatch it directly to the Low Countries on other ships, without being subject to the customs duties they would have had to pay in Lisbon.1

  The islands were home to very diverse communities: as well as Portuguese and Spanish settlers, the Atlantic islands were host to English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, Flemish, Italian, German and west African inhabitants, the last group consisting mainly of slaves, although in the Cape Verde Islands they mixed with the Portuguese and others to form a partly free mulatto population.2 However, the develop
ment of large-scale sugar plantations in Brazil, and then in the Caribbean, took the wind out of the sails of Madeira and other Atlantic islands. The slave economy of Brazil suited the back-breaking work that took place in the fields and furnaces of the sugar estates. Transport costs were kept low by relying on mass-produced Portuguese caravels for the shipping of Brazilian sugar. The Dutch took a share of this trade, operating alongside the Portuguese, and again making use of cheaply built ships to reduce overheads. Brazil therefore became a perfectly viable alternative to Madeira or São Tomé, with its notoriously bad sugar. One measure of the decline of sugar in Madeira is that slaves disappeared from the island, for their presence was a sure sign, within the Atlantic world, that sugar or other highly intensive production was under way.3

  In Madeira, the hunt began for alternatives, but the rich soil of the island was becoming exhausted after two centuries of intensive exploitation by sugar-planters. What saved Madeira was the product for which the island remains famous: its wine. Seventeenth-century Madeira wine was rather different to the rich dessert wine that is produced nowadays. It was neither fortified nor nurtured for years into a fine vintage wine; most of it was red plonk, drunk within a year of the harvest, but it was very popular with sailors. There were some superior wines made in small quantities from Malvasia (or Malmsey) and other grapes; but these were hard to obtain. Yet Madeira wine had some remarkable characteristics. It seemed to be unaffected by heat or transportation; if anything, they were thought to improve the wine, and nineteenth-century English Madeira enthusiasts would often demand wine that had been carried first of all to the Caribbean or South America.4 Besides, there were plenty of willing consumers in Brazil and the West Indies, whom English merchants supplied not just with slaves but with wine. Barbados was especially thirsty for Madeira wines, while English settlers in Jamaica became major consumers after the island fell under English rule in 1655.5

  The Madeira wine trade was boosted by the fact that the island lay within easy reach of England, but was also well situated along the Atlantic trade routes, making it a useful loading point for ships bound for either North or South America. So began the intimate relationship between Madeira and England that remains unbroken. English business houses began to flourish on Madeira, beginning in the late sixteenth century with Robert Willoughby, whose safety on the island was guaranteed since he was a Catholic – indeed, he became a Knight of the Portuguese Order of Christ. The seventeenth-century English colony included a good number of Protestants. There were frequent brushes with the Inquisition; however, it was obvious to the Portuguese authorities that the English colony was a valuable asset, so the Protestants mainly suffered insults.6 In many ways their position was similar to that of the Portuguese New Christians, whose Jewish identity could conveniently be ignored when doing business. These English merchants often lived in some style, possessing agreeable quintas, or estates, away from the capital at Funchal. The bonds became closer as the English brought in cloth, which helped balance the cost of the wine they were taking out of the island. The looms of Devon and Essex hummed as English cloth displaced French and Flemish. A firm mutual relationship came into being.7

  The English presence in Madeira is illuminated by the chance survival of letters written by a merchant from Warwick who traded actively between Madeira and the West Indies, as well as towards England, around 1700. William Bolton was the agent in Madeira of Robert Heysham, a London banker and merchant who had interests in Africa and who also owned lands in Barbados, where his partner and brother, William, functioned as official agent for the British planters.8 ‘African trade’ in this period meant, above all, the trade in slaves, imported into the West Indies to work on sugar plantations. That, however, was not Bolton’s speciality, even if the goods he sent to Barbados and Jamaica were no doubt paid for with profits from the sugar mills and the slave trade. Bolton’s career shows how Madeira was locked into a much larger world than that of the eastern Atlantic. Quite apart from his connections with the Heyshams and Barbados, he found customers in Boston, New York, Rhode Island and Bermuda, and he loaded Madeira wines on to ships that passed the island bound for Brazil, India and the East Indies.9 His activities also reveal how dependent Madeira had become on Europe for basic supplies, for the shift first to sugar and then to wine had turned the island into a place of monoculture, drawing its wheat from Holland, England, North America and the Azores, its meat and dairy goods from Scotland and Ireland, its fish from Scotland and Newfoundland, its woollen, silk and cotton goods from England. Particularly astonishing is the dependence of Madeira on the West Indies for supplies of the very product that had catapulted Madeira to fame in the fifteenth century, sugar; and timber, another prized export from the island in the days of Henry the Navigator, was now brought from the English colonies in North America.10

  In mid-December 1695 William Bolton reported on the ships that stood off Madeira. A Portuguese vessel was loading plenty of wine for delivery in Brazil, and a Bristol ship was heading for the West Indies also carrying wine; a ship from New York was ‘bound home with about 100 Pipes’, approximately 5,700 litres.11 In July 1696 Bolton described how ‘a strang [sic] revolution in my affairs’ took place: ‘I was seized upon and putt into a wett dungeon’; and the complaints against him tell something about the priorities of the Portuguese government of Madeira – he was told by the governor himself that the English ships had stayed for too short a time during a recent visit, with the result that not enough wine could be shipped: 2,000 pipes remained unsold. But, he objected, some of these ships were West Indian and simply did not have the capacity to carry large amounts of wine.12 In July 1700 he was already thinking ahead and keeping his partners in London well informed: ‘We are like to have a plentiful Vintage: the weather is good and above half the vines are out of danger, soe that it wil be your advantage to send a ship to be here the latter end of December, or the beginning of January.’ He insisted that ‘our Vintage wil be large. The weather cannot be better. Now our hopes is only upon a good season to gather it.’13 One visitor Bolton observed was the great astronomer Edmund Halley: a ship arrived in January 1699, and ‘on borde her was Mr Halley, the Mathematician, bound to the coast of Brazil and to the southward of ye Cape; his designe is to observe the variation of ye Compass’.14 Bolton’s letters thus expose to view a whole network of contacts mediated through Madeira, which became the meeting point for ships travelling to and from Portugal, the Netherlands, England, North America, the West Indies and Brazil.

  II

  Like Madeira, the Azores were particularly favoured by the English. Between 1620 and 1694, 279 ships are known to have put in at São Miguel, now the capital of the Azores. Well over half were English, while fewer than 10 per cent were Portuguese. Not just the ships were English: the major routes pointed to and from England, for the Azores, even more than Madeira, depended on the cloths of south-west England, such as the Taunton cottons that, despite their name, were made of wool.15 The Azorean ports, such as Angra on the island of Terceira, could handle large merchantmen and men-of-war much better than Funchal in Madeira, where there was barely a harbour to speak of. Nor was this simply the story of a close relationship with Great Britain. England’s American colonies benefited greatly from access to these Atlantic islands. Horta, on the island of Faial, developed intimate ties with the English possessions in North America during the seventeenth century. The wine of the neighbouring island of Pico, grown on the steep slopes of its volcano, and comparable to Madeira wines, was a great attraction. As Horta grew, so did its contacts with New England, and it was on its American business, rather than its European, that its flourishing economy was based, since the Bostonians often bought more Azorean than Madeiran wine, and then made a handsome profit redistributing it across the English colonies just at the moment when these colonies were being established along the east coast of North America – in Maine, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, North Carolina and South Carolina. The early newspapers of New York and Boston carried adve
rtisements for wines brought from the Azores. Horta was also a vital stopping point for shipping bound from England to the West Indies.16 One cannot understand the success of the English in creating a transatlantic network of maritime routes without taking into full account the role of the Azores.

  There was, however, a fly in the ointment. East Indiamen would arrive ready to be resupplied with food before making the final leg of their long journey to Lisbon. As has been seen, Portuguese law forbade those on board from unloading their eastern spices and luxury goods, which were supposed to be sent all the way to Lisbon and then re-exported, if the Azoreans still wanted them. Naturally there were ways around this – smuggling, bribery, open defiance of the law. In 1649 a big, heavy ship called the Santo André was escorted into the port of Angra, on the island of Terceira, by English and Dutch allies of the Portuguese, since it was under threat from pirates and was carrying a very valuable cargo of cinnamon. Special permission was given to unload the spices but this cargo still needed to get to Lisbon, and the Santo André was twenty-six years old and not very seaworthy after its long voyage from the East Indies; besides, there were strong winds against which she would make little headway. The Portuguese therefore hired two English ships, and the precious cargo was divided equally among all three boats. They reached the mouth of the Tagus safely enough, but once again the wind was the obstacle. The English ships were small enough to work their way into Lisbon harbour, but the Santo André was a cumbersome galleon, and its master fled before the winds to the inlets off the coast of Galicia, the famous rías. But this was Spanish territory, and the Spanish king was still fighting what he regarded as an impudent rebellion by the Portuguese, who had broken free from the Habsburg dynasty nine years earlier. As a result, the galleon and its cargo were impounded, meaning that a good third of the cinnamon was lost to the enemy.17