Here too, in this image, ships figure prominently—indeed, this is not technically a city view, though the text does describe the city of Bantam and its value to the Dutch: This is a depiction of a naval battle between the Dutch and the Portuguese for control of the port that took place around Christmas time 1601. Technically, Dutch merchants and, as of 1602, the VOC, waged trade, not war. All too often, the line between the two was a very fine one. The naval battle described in print and text follows on and epitomizes earlier skirmishes between the Dutch and the Portuguese, going back to 1599. Indeed, the establishment of the Netherlands as a global economy and the European entrepôt
for trade from the East and West Indies depended equally on the mechanisms of war and piracy and on the entanglements of trade. The remainder of this essay offers a case study, the story of one merchant’s travels and travails that exemplify the extent to which mediation governed the seas in the early modern era.
The first private voyager to circumnavigate the globe was the Florentine merchant Francesco Carletti (1573–1636). His exploits and encounters are preserved in the form of an account he wrote on his return to Europe after nearly twenty years, his Ragionamenti or Chronicles. In 1591, at the age of eighteen, Carletti travelled to Seville under the apprenticeship of a Florentine merchant, Nicolo Parenti; and in 1594 Carletti and his father, who had joined him in Spain, set sail for South America, nominally under the protection of the Grand Duke of Tuscany Ferdinando I de’ Medici (1549–1609). Insofar as the young Florentine aspired to furnish the Grand Duke with curiosities from the east, he ventured abroad on the model of Francesco Sassetti, who supplied Ferdinando and his brother Francesco with medicinal goods and ‘galanterie’ from India, where Sassetti lived between 1584 and his death there in 1588.
In 1598 Carletti and his father reached Macao, where his father died; Carletti subsequently began to make his way home. When he returned to Europe in 1602, he did so in a manner entirely contrary to his aims and ambitions and within tenuous reach of the extensive lavish goods he had procured along the way. He returned on a ship outfitted by Dutch merchants, which had captured the Portuguese vessel on which Carletti departed from Goa in December 1601; and after landing in Middelburg, in Zeeland, whence the Dutch ships had sailed east, Carletti spent more than two years fighting an extensive legal battle to regain his goods. He was unsuccessful. On his return to Florence late in 1605, Carletti composed an account of his travels in an effort to preserve his honour. Addressed and dedicated to Ferdinando I, Carletti’s account—the Ragionamenti or Chronicles—tells of his life abroad, his decision to quit the slave trade that served as the initial impetus for his wide travels, and his fateful encounters with the Dutch on his return to Europe from Goa. It would not be an exaggeration to refer to Carletti’s Ragionamenti as chronicles of a series of mediations; ironically, his failure to mediate his fortune successfully may have given rise to this extraordinary text.
In the ‘Fourth Chronicle of the East Indies,’ one of the final chapters of his Ragionamenti or Chronicles, Carletti describes life in Goa, Portuguese trade in the East Indies, and the politics of Asian trade with specific reference to recent changes in the balance of power. Goa had served as the capital of the Portuguese viceroyalty since 1510, and had become the preeminent mercantile hub for Europeans trading in the East Indies by the time Carletti arrived there in March 1599. Carletti remained in Goa longer than he had planned, awaiting a shipment of merchandise he had purchased in Macao that was delayed by weather. The goods he had bought in Macao, after his father died and he resolved to return to Florence, included raw silk, silk thread, and silk for needlework; ‘a great quantity of musk’; gold, which he specifies is ‘a sort of merchandise and is used more for gilding one or another kind of furniture and other objects than as money’; silk accoutrements; porcelain, including jars filled with preserved ginger; china root; a Chinese geographical atlas (preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence); and ‘various other curious things’ intended for the Grand Duke—more on these goods shortly. Of the Indies and of the city Carletti writes, there is no other region in the world in which it is possible to live better and more lavishly, and particularly in the city of Goa, in which there are many businesses that, without any loss on exchange in going and returning, earn from twenty-five to thirty percent at the beginning of each year or, to say it better, at the end of the voyages [...] to Zoffala, Mozambique, Ormuz, China, and the Moluccas, and also to Bengal.
While waiting for his goods from Macao, Carletti resolved to sell the silk he had in hand. He did not sell directly, but sent the silk to the Indian city of Cambay, ‘where it was sold and earned me seventy per cent and more of what it had cost me in China’. From Cambay, ‘by way of a merchant of the Gujarati nation with whom I had correspondence,’ he received linens he intended to sell in Europe, along with bedcovers embroidered with curious, very beautiful designs in workman- ship of a fineness rarely seen, which they also work on silk fabric. And I also had them send me a goodly quantity of things made of mountain crystal and other varieties of stones, such as blood agate, milk agate, and the like.
Indeed, intra-Asian trade depended on a series of cautiously negotiated mediations.
In Goa, Carletti was ideally positioned to make the most of the information and trade networks spun throughout the East Indies by the Portuguese over the course of the preceding century. He describes the splendours of Moghul Emperor Jahangir, for example, on the basis of ‘a letter sent by a Jesuit’ who travelled from Lahore to Agra with the imperial procession. In addition to lavish lists of the goods that were brought to Goa, Carletti’s Chronicles offer a vivid, racy even, description of the life of a merchant ‘at ease in the city’.
Merchants were ‘always engaged in festivities, songs, music, games, and balls,’ while their commands for wares were filled throughout the intra-Asian trade network by captains they engaged. The Portuguese ‘live very lavishly and comfortably in Goa,’ Carletti writes, ‘going about constantly on horseback (the horses being brought from Persia with the ships from Ormuz, and from Arabia)’ and are always accompanied by ‘goodly troupes of slaves’. Of the array of exquisite goods that arrived at Goa, many were installed as decoration for the houses of the Portuguese residents there.
From China comes everything good and beautiful which could be desired in the way of very rich adornments of gold and silk, beds, chests, tables, cabinets, and chairs, all gilded and with a black varnish that is made from a substance taken from the bark of a tree that grows in China and which at first flows like pitch, but then becomes so hard that it repels water and so shiny that one can use it as a mirror. And all this is very beautifully decorated.
In addition to lacquer ware, whose manufacture Carletti attempts to capture while praising its products, the Portuguese homes were also outfitted with porcelain, he writes: ‘They eat everything from Chinese porcelain and, what is better, their foods are entirely made of exquisitely flavoured birds.’ Carletti’s sumptuous description of local culture and cuisine, of slaves and loves, of porcelain and poison, and of beautiful mestizo children of Portuguese fathers and Chinese, Japanese, Javanese, Moluccan, and Bengali mothers is redolent of the entangled, cosmopolitan, highly mediated culture and society Asian markets engendered.
Although Goa produced no indigenous wares other than coconuts, Carletti writes, ‘nonetheless it overflows with every delight and every kind of goods, which are brought there from all sections of those Indies and Oriental regions of which (that is, of whose harbours and traffic) the Portuguese are in control’. While describing Goa as a global hub, Carletti also points to a crucial shift:
Whereas, he wrote, the Portuguese had long dominated the trade in goods trafficked from the east to Europe via Goa, other European nations were gaining a stronghold. With regard to the trade dynamics Carletti describes and the relative loss of their foothold by the Portuguese, he mentions no nation more frequently than the Dutch. (He had, as we shall see, every reason to judge the Dutch most merciless in the pursuit of profit and exotic goods.) Goa continued to thrive at the time he described it, but East Indian trade was no longer solely in Portuguese control: ‘many years ago the Dutch and the English and the French took away from them, one could say, the traffic of the Moluccas whence come cloves, nutmeg, mace, pepper, and other sorts of merchandise of those regions’.33 Carletti specifies myriad ways in which European competitors, prime among them the Dutch, diminished Portuguese trade. ‘Also ruined is the traffic with China,’ on account of prices being higher, because of the abovementioned Hollanders and others [who], having gone there with their multitudes of ships, have reduced everything to lower prices, buying with money of account those things which the Portuguese bought at a profit in exchange for cotton cloths from Negopatan [Negapatam], Manipore, and Coromandel.
Indeed, according to Carletti, by 1605 the Dutch had infested the whole of the elaborate Asian network trade—by entering with cash rather than gradually; by way of bypassing the longstanding intra-Asian network trade of goods; and by ‘preying upon the carracks that ply to and from Lisbon’. Carletti describes Portuguese trade in the Indies as intrinsically profitable; the value of the coins, the reales, he remarks, was fifty percent higher in India than in Lisbon. Notably, he also characterizes the trade in Asian exotica as the signal accomplishment of the Portuguese:
[it] is the splendour of all that Orient and [it] caused and still causes the whole world to marvel and is the greatest thing of usefulness accomplished by the Portuguese [. . .]. On those items incredible profits were and still are made by means of the merchandise that they send from Goa to Portugal on the aforementioned carracks, which ordinarily leave in the month of December, as also in that of January.
The Dutch ‘infest those seas and keep them in continuous fear’. To make matters worse, Carletti reports, they were also shifting the balance of trade values in the Levant: ‘Similarly, they have frightened those who trade through Ormuz, an island at the entrance of the Persian Gulf.’ According to Carletti Dutch interference in trade in the East Indies and beyond threatened Portugal’s national renown, as well as its investment and profit.
Carletti’s Ragionamenti or Chronicles were written in an attempt to secure his honour, and record the fate of his worldly goods—which he lost doubly:
first, in spring 1602, when the Portuguese carrack the San Iago on which he secured passage back to Europe from Goa was captured by Dutch ships outfitted by the Verenigde Zeeuwse Compagnie (United Zeeland Company, one of the forerunners of the VOC); and second, when the Admiralty Court of Middelburg determined in August 1602 that the entire cargo of the San Iago was ‘good prize’ and property of its claimants, the United Zeeland Company. Following the arrival of his goods from Macao, Carletti secured passage to Lisbon on the
outgoing vessel the San Iago, which departed Christmas morning 1601. Carletti arranged with the captain of that ship a space aboard where he ‘could set up a bedroom or living quarter, in which a bed was to be placed for sleeping indoors’ as well as ‘a space for stowing my merchandise, which I had mostly in large cases’. Carletti took along with him three servants—‘one of the Japanese nation, a Korean, and the other a Mozambique Negro’—and 100 chickens, ‘which were excellent in every way’, for consumption when meat was served.
He paid for these spaces, in amounts he recounts in detail, also explaining how such space, ‘conceded by the King, once his pepper has been loaded, to each officer and sailor,’ was allocated and leased. Many such spaces, he writes, ‘are available, and on everything that can be accommodated in them no customs are paid either in India or in Lisbon’.40 The San Iago sailed past Madagascar and around the Cape of Good Hope, on to St. Helena. Although no provisions were needed, the captain was under royal orders to meet other ships in the fleet arriving from Cochin. The San Iago reached St. Helena on Friday, 14 March and anchored as instructed in what was deemed a safe position. Immediately, however, and in fulfilment of various portents Carletti names in his telling, two ships approached—the Zeelandia and Langebercke, from Zeeland, captained by Cornelis Bastiaensz and Nicolaes Anthonisz, respectively, and under the general command of Laurens Bicker. These East Indiamen, outfitted by the United Zeeland Company, had sailed east from Middelburg prior to the founding of the VOC in Amsterdam in 1602, and were returning to Zeeland laden with pepper. They also carried members of the court of the Sultan of Atjeh on what has been described as ‘the first diplomatic mission of a southeast Asian polity to Europe’.
Though it is unclear who instigated the conflict between the Portuguese and the Dutch vessels at St. Helena, it is certain that, once engaged, the Zeelanders did not let up in their effort to capture the San Iago. According to Carletti’s report, panic broke out on board when the Zeelanders approached and, ‘with no direction or sense of what with some reasonableness could be done (not- withstanding the fact that the ships came more in a display of war than one of peace)’ the captain fired at the Dutch ships. The Dutch ‘decided to wait no longer, for it seemed to them only too certainly an invitation in response to the desire that they had, which was to fight’, he writes. It was ‘beyond doubt they had set about stirring things up that way so as to have an occasion to seize upon.’ Although he claims that it would take an author with the playwright Andrea Salvadori’s abilities to describe the battle that followed, Carletti offers a robust description of nearly three days of fighting, at the conclusion of which the San Iago was on the brink of sinking—and the Portuguese surrendered to the Zeelanders.
From St. Helena, Carletti secured passage to Zeeland, where his confidence that his goods would be restored to him on arrival was sorely broken, and he returned empty-handed to Florence three years later. The story is a dramatic one, and bears on the development of early modern global trade. It is directly relevant to the matter of how the Dutch acquired the status of merchants of the exotic in the early years of the seventeenth century, and of how property came to be defined by the Dutch in the context of expanding trade. The capture of the Portuguese trade vessel by the United Zeeland Company ships ‘stirred up a hornet’s nest of political and legal issues’. Among other things, it inspired the design and production of a commemorative medal; it gave rise to a lawsuit that dragged on for three years and involved local and international powers; and it influenced the legal scholar Hugo Grotius, whose treatise on trade and war in the East Indies, De Jure Praedae, he composed after a subsequent significant capture by Dutch East Indiamen of a Portuguese ship.
While space does not permit an examination of the act of state-sponsored piracy that gave rise to Grotius’s treatise De Jure Praedae, it is worthwhile examining the capture of the goods aboard the San Iago and their fate in some further detail. After the Portuguese surrendered, the Zeelanders made their way on board and, according to Carletti, offered a conflicted apology: ‘they made a ceremony of consoling us for what had happened, saying that they were sorry about it and putting the blame for it upon us, who had been the first to provoke it by the artillery shot set off by the captain of our ship.’
The Zeelanders stated openly that they had no letters of marque, or permission from their admiral Prince Maurits or the States General, to capture other nations’ vessels, and that they had only fought because they were attacked first. They agreed to spare the lives of the passengers on the San Iago in exchange for the goods aboard the ship, if the ship survived the night. The ship was in a terrible state and taking water: Its principal cargo, pepper, was strewn about during the fighting and ‘the pumps or bilge-removers could no longer be
used, having become clogged by the pepper floating on the water and entering into them’.48 The Portuguese promised to deliver all jewels on board to their captors; and the Zeelanders in turn promised to repair the ship in order to enable the Portuguese to make good on their agreement to render the goods to them. As evening fell, Carletti convinced an Italian-speaking scribe to take him to the Dutch ships straight away; this bargain was possible, Carletti notes, because of the precious goods he had with him:
I told him that I had many jewels and much other stuff ready to hand which we could carry with us, thus removing it from that danger—and, in particular, more than 2,000 ounces of musk (of which 1,600 were mine)
and the little structure in which the bed was, with other curious things that I was bringing to Your Serene Highness [Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici].
The following day the San Iago was miraculously, according to those still on board, afloat: indeed, ‘the carrack was shipping less water than earlier because the pepper was interfering with the force of water entering through the holes’.50 Pepper was the King’s cargo and the primary motivation for the spice trade conducted by the Portuguese and, in turn, the Dutch and others.
In this remarkable story, it plays numerous roles in addition to instigating the voyages and itineraries of such carracks as the San Iago: When the ship took water it clogged the pumps but, in time, it clogged the holes through which the water entered the vessel as well. Carletti does not make much of the ironies here, but the fate of goods more generally is as central and as inconsistent as the peppercorns. Later, in passing, Carletti describes the waters in which the two Zeeland East Indiamen the Langebercke and the Zeelandia, the Portuguese San Iago, and a third Dutch ship, the Witte Arend, from Amsterdam found themselves after the battle and the surrender as a floating bazaar. His spectacular description is worth citing and explaining. The Witte Arend did not enter the battle between the Zeelanders and the Portuguese, in adherence with the instructions under which it sailed, and the prohibition against the use of force except in the case of self-defense.
Though it had not fought because it could not, [it] nonetheless collected a goodly booty of merchandise [un buon bottino di mercantie] and various things that had been thrown into the sea in order to lighten the carrack [...] the sea having been all covered with silk in skeins and in cloths, with carpetings and infinite other goods, of which that ship, with little trouble, was able to re-collect as much as it wanted [...].
Imagine: The sea itself delivered the goods, merchandise described as loot, to neutral bystanders. A sodden site of mediation, indeed!
After repairs had been made to the San Iago, the Zeelanders encouraged the Portuguese to leave the ship—but did not provide sloops on which they could make passage to the shore or to the Zeelanders’ ships. A number jumped overboard but could not swim; those who made it to the Zeelanders’ sloops had to pass their unsheathed swords. Carletti describes another means to obtain passage, concocted by his Korean servant on the spot. For all manner of reasons, not least because of the role that images play in the salvation of this servant, but principally because of the dynamics of mediation at play, the passage merits citation at length.
Whoever was clever, whoever was able, in the midst of those dangers, to place a chain of gold or pearls around his neck or carry in his hands some cluster of diamonds, was received graciously by them [the Zeelanders], so that they could take all the things that he was carrying. And many saved themselves who would not otherwise have been saved.