Others perished for reasons besides holding back their wealth. A man named Suconsaba and a Franciscan layman born near Goa had sustained injuries during the shipwreck and were near death by the time they made it ashore. According to Adriano de las Cortes, the Spanish Jesuit who wrote a memoir of the wreck of the Guía, “several of us suspected that they weren’t yet dead when the Chinese sliced off both their heads.” Masmamut Ganpti, who may have been a slave of the ship’s owner, Gonçalo Ferreira, made it ashore without incident but got into trouble defending his master against militiamen who tried to take his clothes. The Chinese responded by grabbing him, chopping off his hands and feet as punishment for attacking them, then cutting off his head. Ganpti, whom Las Cortes describes as “a Moorish sailor” and “a brave Black,” died “for no reason and without having given the Chinese the least pretext.” Another of Ferreira’s attendants suffered the same fate, not for challenging the militiamen but for being too weak to keep up when the Chinese later force marched the survivors inland.
The list of those drowned and murdered that morning consists of people identified as Moors, Blacks, Goans, South Asian Muslims, Macanese, Portuguese, Spaniards, slaves, Tagals, and Japanese.1 The casualty list is in effect a short summary of the Guía’s remarkably diverse passenger list. Ninety-one on board were Portuguese. Some of them were born in Macao or lived and worked there, while others hailed from Portuguese colonies scattered around the globe, from the Canary Islands to Goa and Macao. The only other Europeans on board were six Spaniards. A mutual agreement between Spain and Portugal restricted the ships of one from carrying the nationals of the other, but this agreement was ignored as the need arose, especially when the people involved were priests or Catholic laymen on mission business, as all six were. One of the six had come from as far away as Mexico.
The Europeans made up slightly less than half the passenger list. The next largest group on the ship were sixty-nine Japanese—the Dwarf Pirates. The Portuguese in Macao hired Japanese in significant numbers to handle their business dealings with the Chinese. They could write Chinese characters and therefore do a better job of communicating the details of a business arrangement than the Portuguese. Their physical features also meant that Japanese were able to move more freely among Chinese than Europeans were. They even sometimes slipped into the interior, avoiding detection as Portuguese never could. Las Cortes knew one of the Japanese, a Catholic priest named Miguel Matsuda. It was he who was miraculously saved when his clothing stopped an arquebus ball. Banished by the Japanese government to the Philippines in 1614 for converting to Christianity, Matsuda trained with Jesuit missionaries in Manila to become a priest. Now he was on his way to Macao with the plan of returning to Nagasaki on a Portuguese ship and infiltrating his way back into Japan to spread Christian teachings. It was a dangerous mission, and would end in Japan with Matsuda’s capture and execution.
Next most numerous, after the Japanese and the Europeans, were the group to which Ismaël and Budo belonged: thirty-four Muslim merchants from the Portuguese colony of Goa in India, two of whom were traveling with their wives. Finally, Las Cortes mentions in passing “Indians from around Manila” (Tagals), Moors, Blacks, and Jews, without giving numbers for these people.
The extraordinary cross section of humanity on the Guía’s passenger list reveals who was moving through the network of trade that Portuguese shipping sustained. Had Las Cortes not taken the trouble to write an account of the shipwreck, and had his manuscript not been preserved in the British Library, we would not know of the extraordinary mix of people traveling on the Guía. The ship’s owner and captain were Portuguese, but their passengers were a remarkably international crowd, from as far east as Mexico to as far west as the Canary Islands. Las Cortes’s memoir thus reveals that the majority of people on what we would identify as a “Portuguese ship” weren’t Portuguese at all, but people from literally everywhere on the globe. The Guía was not exceptional, for other records reveal the same thing. The last successful Portuguese trade vessel to Japan, which sailed in 1638, consisted of ninety Portuguese and a hundred and fifty “half-castes, Negroes, and colored people,” to quote from another such record. European ships may have dominated the sea-lanes of the seventeenth century, but Europeans were only ever in a minority on board.
The villagers on shore were amazed by the microcosm of people from all over the globe, who gathered out of the waves. From the villagers’ reactions, Las Cortes supposed that they “had never before seen foreigners or people from other nations.” He guessed that “none of them had ever gone to other countries, and most had never even left their homes.” The two worlds that encountered each other on the beach that February morning existed at opposite ends of the range of global experience available in the seventeenth century: at one pole, those who had lived their lives entirely within their own cultural boundaries; at the other, those who crossed those boundaries on a daily basis and mixed constantly with peoples of different origins, skin colors, languages, and habits.
As we have no record of how these villagers reacted to the sight of Europeans, we can only fill in the gap with descriptions from other contexts. This is one Chinese writer’s impression of Spanish merchants visiting Macao: “They have long bodies and high noses, with cat’s eyes and beaked mouths, curly hair and red whiskers. They love doing business. When making a trade they just hold up several fingers [to show the price], and even if the deal runs to thousands of ounces of silver they do not bother with a contract. In every undertaking they point to heaven as their surety, and they never renege. Their clothes are elegant and clean.” This author then does his best to assimilate these Europeans to a history with which he is familiar. As these men were from what Chinese called the Great West (Europe), which lay beyond the Little West (India), they must be linked to India in some way. The writer may have picked up some snippets of Christian beliefs, for he goes on to suggest that the Spaniards must originally have been Buddhists, but that they had lost their identity and in religious matters now had access only to corrupt doctrines.
If the white men were a curiosity, black men were a shock. “Our Blacks especially intrigued them,” writes Las Cortes. “They never stopped being amazed to see that when they washed themselves, they did not become whiter.” (Las Cortes traveled with a black servant. Are his own prejudices showing through?) Chinese at the time had several terms to name such people. As all foreigners could be called “ghost” (gui), they were simply Black Ghosts. They were also called Kunlun Slaves, using a term coined a thousand years earlier for dark-skinned foreigners from India, which was a land that lay beyond the Kunlun Mountains at the southwestern limit of China. Li Rihua, the collector from Jiaxing who recognized the glass earrings his dealer was trying to pass off as ancient Chinese wares, lived on the Yangtze Delta well to the north and had never seen a black, but he notes in his diary that they were called luting (a term for which the etymology is lost), and that they swam so well that fishermen used them to lure real fish into their nets. Every fishing family in south China owns one, Li was told.
The Chinese geographer Wang Shixing provides a slightly more reliable description. He pictures black men in Macao as having “bodies like lacquer. The only parts left white are their eyes.” He gives them a fearsome reputation. “If a slave’s master ordered him to cut his own throat, then he would do it without thinking whether he should or not. It is in their nature to be deadly with knives. If the master goes out and orders his slave to protect his door, then even if flood or fire should overwhelm him, he will not budge. Should someone give the door the merest push, the slave will kill him, regardless of whether or not theft is involved.” Wang also mentions their underwater prowess, echoing Li Rihua. “They are good at diving,” he writes, “and can retrieve things from the water when a rope is tied around their waists.” The final thing he records about them is their high price. “It takes fifty or sixty ounces of silver to buy one,” a price calculated to amaze his readers, since that sum could buy fifteen he
ad of oxen.
Wang includes this information in his encyclopedic survey of Chinese geography to document the variety of places and people that can be found within China’s borders, which includes Macao. Li Rihua includes his data for a different purpose: to illustrate his conviction that “within heaven and earth strange things appear from time to time; that the number of things in creation is not fixed from the start.” Li grasped that he lived in a time when traditional categories of knowledge did not exhaust everything that existed in the world and new categories might be needed to make sense of the novelties coming into the ken of seventeenth-century Chinese. Unfortunately, even comically, much of this knowledge was hearsay. Li’s description of Dutchmen—“they have red hair and black faces, and the soles of their feet are over two feet long”—presents an omnibus stereotype of a foreigner rather than information that could be called useful knowledge.
An engraving of a “black ghost,” in the terminology of the time, dressed as a Portuguese servant in Macao, from Cai Ruxian’s Illustrated Account of the Eastern Foreigners of 1586. Cai enjoyed the high post of provincial administration commissioner of Guangdong. This may be the earliest Chinese representation of an African.
THE FIRST DAYS OF CAPTIVITY were grueling. The military officer was in no mood to be lenient. He was also unwilling to keep them in his own custody any longer than he had to in case his superiors found fault with his procedures, so he marched them off to Jinghai Garrison, one of a series of walled military posts along this stretch of the coast. The garrison commander examined them, but having no interpreter he learned very little. He too judged that it was safer to assume the worst than to later be found to have been carelessly lenient, so he dismissed their claim that they were innocent traders and treated them as the pirates he assumed they were. He in turn sent them up the ladder of command to the officials in the Chaozhou prefectural seat, who put them, and the Jinghai commander, through several days of close questioning. Again there was no interpreter, though after several days officials in Chaozhou were able to locate a Chinese who had worked in Macao and knew enough Portuguese to do basic translation. To everyone’s surprise, the man recognized one of the Macao merchants, the Portuguese-born António Viegas, who had sold him cloves several years earlier. Then an officer came forward who had worked as a cobbler in Manila and knew enough Spanish to translate for the Spaniards. (Las Cortes was surprised that he wasn’t too embarrassed to admit his profession, as Spaniards regarded shoe repair as a demeaning trade and would deny having such a disreputable past if they could.) The cobbler-turned-officer was a sympathetic soul, who intervened discreetly on the foreigners’ behalf to better their situation. Chaozhou officials also found a man who had worked among the Chinese merchants in Nagasaki and had married a Japanese woman, who was able to translate for the Guía’s Japanese passengers.
The Jinghai commander laid out his charge of piracy before his superiors in Chaozhou. He claimed that the foreigners had started the fighting, attacking the militia like pirates and resisting arrest for an entire day. They had also carried silver ashore and buried it for future use. Being of so many different nationalities, they could not be on legitimate business but had to be a gang of desperadoes who had banded together to plunder. Two or three of them were blond, indisputable evidence that there were Red Hairs among them. Finally, no one could deny that the band included a large number of Japanese, who were absolutely forbidden to come ashore. The circumstantial evidence was that these were pirates, and that the commander had brilliantly apprehended them before they could do any damage.
The prefectural officials then wanted to hear from the survivors, particularly on the matter of the hidden silver. When asked whether any Chinese had taken any silver from him, a Portuguese priest named Luis de Ángulo stated that the militiaman who captured him had taken the fifty pesos he was carrying in his clothes. As soon as this came out and was translated, all the Jinghai soldiers present threw themselves on their knees and violently protested that none of them had done any such thing, as stealing a captive’s property in the line of duty was a serious offense. At this point, all the interpreters asked to withdraw. They knew what the Jinghai soldiers would do to them if any more of the truth were to come out. It was enough to make the officials suspicious of the commander’s story, and as other stories of theft surfaced in subsequent questioning, their suspicions grew. Now the investigation was turned in the other direction, and it was the Jinghai commander who was under scrutiny.
In any matter concerning foreigners, no final judgment could be reached at the prefectural level. The case had to be referred to the provincial authorities in Canton before any decision was made about releasing Las Cortes and the others to Macao. The process would end up taking a year.
ANXIETY ABOUT SEABORNE FOREIGNERS WAS not restricted to fishermen or officials charged with protecting that coast against smugglers and pirates. Lu Zhaolong, a native of Xiangshan, the county in which Macao was located, was a highly educated member of the Cantonese gentry who rose through the ranks of the bureaucracy during the 1620s to a secretarial posting in the central government. There is no reason to suppose that the story of the wreck of the Guía reached him, though this being an international incident, a report would have had to be sent to the court. Regardless, Lu kept abreast of what was going on in his home county, if only to keep an eye on the interests of his family and friends.
The presence of so many foreigners along the coast troubled Lu. So too did the far greater number of Chinese who were more than content to truck and barter with these pirates, especially with the Red Hairs. The Chinese in fact knew little about these people. The first account of a country called “Helan” (Holland) to appear in the Veritable Records, the daily court diary, appears in an entry from the summer of 1623. Although the report concedes that “their intention does not go beyond desiring Chinese commodities,” court officials were anxiously aware of the Red Hairs as yet another uncontrollable presence along the coast. Some, such as Lu Zhaolong, wanted all the foreigners gone, not just the Red Hairs.
In June 1630, five years after the wreck of the Guía, Lu Zhaolong sent up the first of a series of four memorials, or policy recommendations, to Emperor Chongzhen. At this time the court was embroiled in a foreign policy controversy over where the real danger lay: south or north. Who was the greater threat to the regime: the European and Japanese traders on the south coast, or the Mongolian and Tungusic warriors on the northern border? This was a recurring conundrum for Chinese policy makers, and the answer determined the direction in which military resources should flow. Recent developments on both borders were forcing the question. The northern foreigners, who would soon adopt the ethnic name of Manchu, had taken most of the land beyond the Great Wall and were even now raiding across it at will. The Red Hairs, Macanese Foreigners, and Dwarf Pirates were disturbing the southeast coast. There was no Great Wall of China along the shore, behind which the military forces of the Ming dynasty could hunker down and hold a defensive position. There was only the open coast. Much of that coast was inhospitable to large ships, yet there were island anchorages enough where ships from the Great Western Ocean could make deals with Chinese merchants and thumb their noses at foreign trade regulations.
Lu Zhaolong was sure that the greater threat to China lay in the south rather than in the north. As a supervising censor assigned to oversee the operations of the Ministry of Rites, the arm of the Ming government charged with handling relations with foreigners, he was in a position to know what was going on there. And this ministry, over the 1620s, had regularly shown itself willing to find accommodation with the Portuguese in Macao and their Jesuit missionaries. Lu was alarmed. In the first of his four memorials to Emperor Chongzhen, Lu warned him against having anything to do with the foreigners in Macao.
“Your official was born and grew up in Xiangshan county and knows the real intentions of the Macanese Foreigners,” Lu told his emperor. “By nature they are aggressive and violent, and their minds are inscruta
ble.” He recalls that the first contacts were limited to trading in the lee of offshore islands, then notes that the Portuguese were able to get a toehold at Macao. “Initially they only put up tents and camped there, but over time they constructed buildings and walled Green Island, and after that they erected gun towers and stout ramparts so that they could defend themselves inside.” With them came a motley collection of foreigners. As far as Lu was concerned, this was proof that the Portuguese were utterly indifferent to China’s strict laws about who was allowed to enter China, on what terms, and how they should conduct themselves when they did. In particular, by allowing Japanese onto Chinese soil without first obtaining Chinese permission, the Portuguese demonstrated their utter indifference to Chinese laws.
“There are times when they embark on their foreign ships and force their way into the interior,” Lu reminded the emperor. “To sustain their immoral intentions, they resist government troops, pillage our people, kidnap our children, and buy up saltpetre, lead, and iron,” all of which were proscribed for export as military materiel. Even worse was the behavior this provoked among ordinary Chinese. “Criminal types from Fujian Province go in large numbers to feed on Macao. Those who are induced to make a living there cannot be fewer than twenty or thirty thousand. The bandits of Guangdong Province rely on them to cause trouble, in numbers beyond counting.” The key issue was not culture but criminality, especially on the Chinese side.
Two years before Lu Zhaolong addressed his emperor on this matter, the newly enthroned emperor had sided with the faction that feared the Manchus more than the Europeans, and had agreed to invite a team of Portuguese gunners to travel from Macao to Beijing to improve artillery defenses on China’s northern border. But the other faction had been strong enough to stall the delegation in Nanjing. Even if a northern invasion was imminent, they argued, was hiring foreign mercenaries the solution to strengthening the underdefended border? Had Chinese not originally invented cannon? Why were Chinese munitions not adequate to the purpose? (Las Cortes in his memoir is scathing about the quality of Chinese firearms.) “How could it be that only after foreigners teach us are we able to display our military might?” Lu later asked. More to the point, did danger on one border justify exposing China to danger on another?
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