Fortunes at Sea: Mediated Goods and Dutch Trade, Circa 1600 (I)
Claudia Swan
Consider the ubiquity of European ships in the early modern era. Ships outfitted for transport and to gratify commercial interests, imperial zeal, and military aims traversed oceans, sailed straits, and navigated rivers across the globe. As a vehicle, the ship enjoys an extensive history, and in the early modern era, technical advances and interest in establishing European presence far afield of the Mediterranean motivated the construction of increasingly complex mechanisms, which enabled new itineraries across the globe. In the six-
tenth century, Spanish and Portuguese fleets explored new worlds east and west; flotillas and armadas massed to engage foes. In the seventeenth century, state-sponsored companies supported the construction and voyages of fleets from the Netherlands, England, and France that traversed the Indian and Atlantic Oceans; and the grim, wide-reaching slave trade emerged in this era and depended on merchant ships. Ranging from enormous vessels with populous crews, such as those of the Dutch and English and French East and West India Companies, to simple dinghies and horse-drawn passenger boats across the European continent, ships were everywhere, and the most complex of their time were vehicles of astonishment, castles of the sea. In the late seventeenth century, a German pastor aboard a Dutch ship wrote of ‘our ship, which seemed more a castle than a ship; those who had never seen anything like it were utterly amazed by such a structure and stared, their eyes almost glued to it—as the saying goes, like a cow faced with a new gate’. Diego García de Palacio, author of a nautical instruction manual, compared a sailing vessel to the human body:
this machine or labyrinth that we know of as a ship [...] seems to me the perfect semblance of a man...because its hull is like the body: the rigging and cords, like the nerves; the sails, like the many little flaps of skin and tendons in the body; the main hatch like the mouth. The ship also has a belly and related organs to purge and clean itself, like those a man has; the people [on board] are like the soul, the principal officers are like the governing faculties [of the soul].
That a ship, the vessel of early modern global expansion, could sustain comparison with the most highly regarded creation of God as in de Palacio’s 1587 Instrucción nautical is only one indication of the significance of ships in the early modern landscape—metaphorical and actual.
As for images of ships, it is no exaggeration to state that the early modern pictorial field is a sea of them, especially in the Netherlands, where the seafaring success of the young Dutch Republic was avidly commemorated in pictorial records of the vessels responsible for their success in trade and war alike. The series of ten prints of Sailing Vessels issued in the 1560s by the great Antwerp publisher Hieronymus Cock—by Frans Huys after designs by Pieter Bruegel the Elder [Fig. 14.1]—set a precedent amplified by an astonishing number of marine pictures and seascapes produced in the Netherlands after 1600 [Fig. 14.2]. From images of tranquil harbours to turbulent evocations of ships caught in terrifying squalls, and across media from prints to paintings and from pen paintings to luxury objects, depictions of ships came to
represent a new mode of mediating, experiencing, and understanding the world [Figs. 14.3, 14.4].
The Dutch painter and printmaker Reinier Nooms (1623–1664), also known as ‘Zeeman’ on account of his experience as a sailor, produced numerous images of ships on the water—from triple-masted cargo ships (fluiten) suitable for trade in the Baltic and ferries that offered intra-city fare, to the frigates and East Indiamen built for longer trajectories and more substantial cargoes
[Fig. 14.5]. Amazing masses of ships crowd harbour views and vessels pepper the watery terrain of early modern maps. The 1599 painting by Hendrik Cornelisz. Vroom of The Return of the Second Voyage to the East Indies [Fig. 14.2] documents the reception given the fleet returning to Amsterdam:
bumper to bumper boats and their passengers populate the harbour, heralding a new era—and the makings of a new state, the Dutch Republic, built on the riches derived from overseas trade. Wenceslaus Hollar’s series of etchings Navium Variae Figurae et Formae (1647) with its taxonomic depiction of twelve different views of vessels—including many tremendous East Indiamen, at various stages of construction and commission—offers a seventeenth century update on the Huys-Bruegel series. The title page of Hollar’s series [Fig. 14.6] shows what look to be a sailor and a merchant standing in awe before the title vignette of the series, disguised as the decorated hull (the ‘spiegel’) of one of the warehouse-vehicle-fortresses that enabled the trade and defined the horizons of the time.
Long trips in unknown waters became a reality in late fifteenth-century Europe because of a new construction, the full-rigged ship, which ‘incorporated the advantages of southern construction methods and the triangular lateen sail with the hull form and the square rail of northern European types’.
The design of merchant ships known as ‘naos’ (Genoese) or ‘naus’ (Portuguese), large cargo vessels well suited to transporting cargo from Africa and India to Europe, was adapted by Flemish shipwrights and their Dutch counterparts over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Dutch fluit, a long, slender vessel built for trade, carried grain and timber to the Netherlands from the Baltic; the so-called Moedernegotie conducted there served in turn to fund the voyages of the Dutch East and West India Companies alike. The seventeenth century saw the development of a multidecked, heavily rigged, three- or four-masted vessel: referred to by a variety of terms (schip, jacht), it came to be known for returning goods from the East Indies as a retourschip (lit. ‘return ship’; East Indiaman). East Indiamen, the vessels that comprised the fleets sent by the VOC and the WIC, are famous for their trajectories and for their exploits, and feature prominently in travel accounts and other representations.
The ships depicted sailing through the Pillars of Hercules on the title page of Francis Bacon’s 1620 Instauratio Magna is canonical within the iconography of the scientific revolution. As Juan Pimentel has demonstrated, this image, signifying the discovery of a new terrain of knowledge, resonates with the title page of an earlier, Spanish navigational manual (Andrés García de Céspedes, 1606) [Figs. 14.7, 14.8]. Referring to the relationship between these images as a ‘splendid coincidence,’ Pimentel specifies that ‘the image [of the ship sailing between the pillars of Hercules] is used in the Anglo-Saxon tradition to represent increase of knowledge [...] while in the Iberian tradition it represents knowledge gained through discovery and conquest of the New World’. What actual ships enabled came to be emblematized in representations of ships: discovery, knowledge, power. As Sven Dupré and Christoph Lüthy have observed, with reference to these very title pages, ‘Naval circulation led to a circulation of knowledge and in due time became an emblem of the rapid increase in scientific knowledge’. Recently, in a brilliant analysis of the rise of the marine seascape in the Netherlands, Bernhard Siegert has proposed a new conception of ‘the relations among painting, piracy, techniques of navigation, and nation
building’. According to Siegert, the emergent nation state is represented by the very ships—and images of ships—that secured the territory: ‘this chorein [passage] of the Dutch inscribed itself in the form of the Dutch seascape of the late-sixteenth, early-seventeenth century’. In other words, in the early modern era and especially around the turn of the seventeenth century, ships and representations of them went hand in hand with the development of new forms of commerce, interaction, and nationhood.
Is it far-fetched to consider the early modern ship a site of mediation? At its broadest, the noun ‘mediation’ denotes practices intended to reconcile opposites or to intercede between parties or concerns. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘mediation’ in the first instance as ‘agency or action as a mediator; the action of mediating between parties in dispute; intercession on behalf of another’. Certainly ships were sent in the spirit of conflict resolution: Diplomatic envoys, for example, set out with the specific intent of resolution by mediation. Many early modern ships traversed space and time (water being their medium, we might say) in order to negotiate, where the peaceful resolution of dispute was not a primary aim, but trade or warfare were. The OED lists as a second definition of ‘mediation’, ‘Agency or action as an intermediary; the state or fact of serving as an intermediate agent, a means of action, or a medium of transmission; instrumentality’. This definition would apply to early modern ships that mediated or enabled mediation between agents of political and mercantile interests, for example. Instrumentality and transmission are key here, qualifying the relationship between agents or objects and concepts as a process that is not immediate, and is potentially fraught, fractured, diffuse.
Raymond Williams reminds us in his examination of keywords for cultural analysis that, in a Marxist context, mediation tends to presuppose irreconcilable differences. Media studies, as practiced by Friedrich Kittler, for example, analyse mechanisms of transmission and the various processes of mediation they entail or inform—modulation, transformation, synchronization, delay, storage, transposition, scrambling, scanning, mapping, for example.
Let us think, then, of early modern ships as vehicles of mediation—vessels that reconciled geographical differences and vessels that generated processes and relations we can comprehend under the rubric of mediation. The commerce transacted in the East Indies by Europeans, for example, depended on ships to reach, secure, and deploy such sites of mediation as Goa or Bantam— key trading posts in the early modern era. In the formative years of the global Baroque, the constellations traced across the waters by European ships were the product and the source alike of a variety of sorts of mediation, interaction, and entanglement. The remainder of this essay presents a series of mediations undertaken in the name of trade around the turn of the seventeenth century.
These mediations—negotiations, miscommunications, disputes—occurred in the context of Dutch trade overseas; they are mediated here by an account written in Florence in 1605.
In the first decade of the seventeenth century, the Dutch secured a foothold in intra-Asian network trade—trade the VOC sought out and administered, on behalf of the state in formation, the emergent Dutch Republic. This is heralded in Vroom’s depiction of the return of the fleet [Fig. 14.2]; commemorated in a ship-shaped silver spice cellar produced ca. 1600 [Fig. 14.4]; and celebrated in such images as the panoramic 1611 city view of Amsterdam [Fig. 14.9], in which a veritable forest of masts darkens the edges of the built city, and an array of imposing vessels populate the harbour. This paean to a city still in formation presents Amsterdam as a global trade hub, calling it ‘de wijtvermaerde Hooft- Coopstadt des gantschen Weerelts Amsterdam’ (‘the widely renowned capital of trade of the entire world, Amsterdam’). The text accompanying a slightly earlier print describes the city of Bantam in terms very close to those in which Amsterdam would be described [Fig. 14.10]. Bantam, too, is referred to as a ‘vermaerde Coopstadt’ or ‘renowned emporium,’ and the source of spices such as pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, ginger, and so on as well as medicinal drugs, precious stones, such as diamonds, rubies, turquoises, emeralds, sapphires, and others, and also pearls and many other countless strange curiosities, that are found only in the East Indies.
To be continued