Click here to view a larger image of this entire map.
Click here to view a larger image of this entire map.
1 It may seem odd that malaria, a tropical disease, flourished in England of the Little Ice Age. But history is an interplay of social and biological processes. Just as Elizabethan marsh-draining techniques unintentionally helped vivax flourish, the improved drainage methods of the Victorian era dramatically cut malaria, because they didn’t leave the brackish pools, thus simultaneously eliminating mosquito habitat and creating better pasturage for cattle, which A. maculipennis, if given the choice, prefers to feed upon. Even so, researchers routinely found “thousands” of the insects roosting “in the dark and ill-ventilated pigsties” of poor coastal farmers as late as the 1920s. Today some fear that global warming will foster the spread of malaria. But if people continue destroying mosquito habitat by draining wetlands the hotter weather may have no impact on malaria rates.
2 Early arrival of the parasite could help explain, too, why Opechancanough never expelled the colonists, even after almost wiping them out in 1622. Debilitated by disease, the Powhatan might have had difficulty mounting a sustained war. Unhappily, these intriguing speculations have the disadvantage of having no empirical support.
3 These figures do not include Indians seized in other colonies. During a vicious Indian war in 1675–76, for instance, Massachusetts sent hundreds of native captives to Spain, Portugal, Hispaniola, Bermuda, and Virginia. And the French in New Orleans seized thousands more. Carolina was a bigger slaver than others, but every English colony in North America was in the same business, with or without the cooperation of local Indians.
PART TWO
Pacific Journeys
4
Shiploads of Money
(Silk for Silver, Part One)
“THAT EXTRA LITTLE EFFORT”
Vastness was its greatest characteristic, with wonder close behind. The vastness—intimidating, confounding, beyond credence—spoke clearly from a hundred miles away. It is said that kings in their palaces looked over the ocean to see a new mountain range on the horizon: wide-bellied ships by the hundred, rigged fore and aft, soldiers massed at their bulwarks. Strange warlike banners snapped from the topgallants. The armada was larger than any before or since. It must have seemed geographic. Wonder attended its sails, followed by capitulation and obeisance. These were the great maritime expeditions sponsored by the Ming emperor Yongle in the early fifteenth century. Such a mark did they leave that some historians believe they were the font of the stories of Sinbad the Sailor.
Built in enormous dry docks, encrusted with precious metals, replete with technical innovations—double hulls, watertight compartments, rust-proofed nails, mechanical bilge pumps—that Europe would not discover for a century, the Chinese ships were marvels for their time. The flagship of their commander, Zheng He, was more than 300 feet long and 150 feet wide, the biggest wooden vessel ever constructed. Records claim it had nine masts. Zheng’s grandest expedition had 317 ships, an amazing figure even now. The Spanish Armada, then the largest fleet in European history, consisted of just 137; the biggest was half the size of Zheng’s flagship.
Zheng himself was among the more unlikely figures to grace Chinese history. Strikingly tall and powerfully built, a Muslim from the backlands, he was captured as a child in 1381 during one of the Yuan dynasty’s last battles against the invading Ming. (For a synopsis of Chinese dynastic history, see the chart on this page.) Standard treatment by the Ming of enemy boys was castration. The emasculated Zheng was pressed into service at the Ming court and gained a reputation for shrewdness and competence. Displaying his eye for the main chance, he jumped to support a coup in which the monarch’s uncle seized power from his nephew. The usurper became the Yongle emperor.1 Zheng became one of his most trusted lieutenants. When the ambitious sovereign planned a series of sea expeditions, he put his favorite eunuch in charge.
To celebrate the 2010 Olympics, China displayed this exact copy of Zheng He’s flagship. Six centuries after the original was built, the ship still was large enough to dazzle crowds. (Photo credit 4.1)
The voyages began in 1405 and ended in 1433 and took Zheng across the Indian Ocean as far as southern Africa. The Yongle emperor viewed them as a way to throw his weight around, and they were powerfully effective. During these voyages Zheng’s fleet subjugated a misbehaving Chinese enclave in Sumatra; intervened in a civil war in Java; invaded Sri Lanka and took its captured ruler to China; and wiped out bandits in Sumatra. Even where no swords were unsheathed Zheng’s armadas were a political triumph, scaring the wits out of every foreign leader who saw them. But the voyages were not followed up. They had become a target in political infighting—one bureaucratic faction championing them, another trying to take down the first by decrying their expense. Yongle’s son and successor aligned with the faction that opposed his father’s policies. He canceled the grand naval adventures on the day he ascended to the throne. Ultimately almost all records of Zheng’s travels were suppressed. China didn’t again send ships so far outside its borders until the nineteenth century.
Many researchers have seen the failure to continue as emblematic of a fatal insularity in Chinese society. “Why did China not make that extra little effort that would have taken it around the southern end of Africa and up into the Atlantic?” asked Landes, the Harvard historian, in his Wealth and Poverty of Nations. Landes’s answer: “The Chinese lacked range, focus, and above all, curiosity.” Hobbled by Confucian ideology, arrogant and complacent, China was “a reluctant improver and a bad learner.” The European Miracle, University of Melbourne historian Eric Jones’s celebrated account of the West’s climb to political dominance, similarly attributes China’s rejection of foreign adventures to “empty cultural superiority” and “self-engrossment.” After Zheng He, the empire “retreated from the sea and became inward-looking.” China, the McGill University political scientist John A. Hall charged in Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West, “was stuck in the same stage for over two thousand years, while Europe, in comparison, progressed like a champion hurdler.” Bubbling with entrepreneurial vim, Portugal, the Netherlands, Spain, and Britain dragged sclerotic China into the rough-and-tumble of the outside world.
Other scholars disagree with this image of Chinese passivity. Nor do they believe the shutdown of Zheng He’s voyages exemplified a cultural lack of curiosity or drive. No matter how far the admiral traveled from home, these writers note, he never encountered a nation richer than his own. Technologically speaking, China was so far ahead of the rest of Eurasia that foreign lands had little to offer except raw materials, which could be obtained without going to the bother of dispatching gigantic flotillas on lengthy journeys. Beijing easily could have sent Zheng past Africa to Europe, observed the George Mason University political scientist Jack Goldstone. But the empire stopped long-range exploration “for the same reason the United States stopped sending men to the moon—there was nothing there to justify the costs of such voyages.”
In a broader sense, though, the question remains. Zheng’s voyages were an exception to a longer, more consequential trend. During most of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), Beijing issued edicts that effectively banned private sea trade. The Yongle emperor and a few other rulers opened it up, but they were exceptions; as a rule, the dynasty clamped down on international exploration and exchange. So draconian were the prohibitions that in 1525 the court ordered coastal officials to destroy all private seagoing vessels.
As puzzling in today’s context as the shutdown was its reversal. Fifty years after the demolition order another emperor reversed course. With the court bureaucracy’s reluctant blessing, a new generation of Chinese ships went on the waters. Soon the Ming had been drawn into a worldwide network of exchange. In a trice, the Chinese economy became enmeshed with Europe (a place previously regarded as too poor to be worth bothering with) and the Americas (a place the emperors hadn’t known existed).
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The court had long feared that unrestricted trade would lead to chaos. Indeed, it did have catastrophic by-effects, though not those predicted by imperial bureaucrats. I’ve already described how the Columbian Exchange across the Atlantic shaped economic and political institutions. Now I turn to the Pacific, where the economic exchange established itself first and greased the skids for the Columbian Exchange. Accordingly, this chapter concerns economics and politics. The next chapter describes their ecological consequences; an environmental convulsion that had dire economic and political consequences for China—among them, in part, its later collapse before the West.
“MERCHANTS WERE PIRATES, PIRATES WERE MERCHANTS”
Why did China let in the flood? The decision was driven by two factors, one largely political, one largely economic. The political factor was the Ming desire to enhance the power of the state. Beijing’s prohibition on private trade had less to do with an abhorrence of trade than a desire to control it for the dynasty’s benefit. Unhappily, the attempt backfired—the reaction to the trade ban ended up weakening government control, rather than strengthening it. When Beijing finally admitted this, it abandoned its previous policy. Further driving the emperors to make this decision was the economic factor: China had severe money woes. Literally so—the empire had lost control of its own coinage, and merchants had to buy and sell goods with little lumps of silver. To obtain the necessary silver, China lifted its trade ban, opening itself to the world. Soon the great ships of the galleon trade were carrying silk and silver across the Pacific—the final links in the global economic and ecological network begun by Colón’s efforts in the Caribbean islands and Legazpi’s sojourn in the Philippine islands.
Chinese history is divided into dynasties, beginning before 2000 B.C. The tally here is simplified; the Song dynasty, for instance, is usually split into two eras (it fell apart after an invasion and regrouped with its power center in a different place). And this list doesn’t show the messy transitions between dynasties—the Ming dynasty is usually said to have seized power in 1368, but fighting with the Yuan lasted for several decades before and after that date.
The Ming trade bans have often been described as emblems of Chinese cultural deficiency (Landes: “the Confucian state abhorred mercantile success”). But they were more complicated than that. The bans did not stop all foreign contact. They permitted one exception: “tribute payments,” in which foreigners, hosted in designated government hostels, were generously allowed to offer presents to the throne. Then the emperor would, out of politeness, give them Chinese goods in return. He also allowed them to sell anything he didn’t want, which was often quite a lot.
Coastal merchants recognized the ban-and-tribute scheme for what it was: a way for the government to control international commerce. It was a busy, lucrative affair—in 1403–04, at the height of the supposed ban on foreign merchants, the Ming court hosted “tribute delegations” from no less than thirty-eight nations. Naturally, the Ming wanted the profits from trade. What the dynasty didn’t want was the traders themselves; foreign goods, not foreign people. With a few exceptions, all contact with the world outside was supposed to be supervised by Beijing.2
With bureaucratic logic, court bureaucrats reasoned that because maritime trade was outlawed the nation therefore didn’t need a coastal force to police that trade. China reduced its navy to a few vessels, not enough to patrol the nation’s long coastline. The entirely unsurprising result was a delirium of smuggling (if business is outlawed, only outlaws will do business).
Wokou filled the southeastern coast. Literally, wokou means “Japanese pirates,” but most weren’t Japanese and many weren’t pirates. Although they sometimes had bases in Japan, the majority of the wokou groups were led by Chinese traders who turned to smuggling after one Ming edict or another eliminated their livelihoods. Their ships were crewed by a crazy quilt of citizens in trouble: scholars who had failed to obtain an official post; bankrupt businesspeople; draft dodgers; fired government clerks; starving farmers; disgraced monks; escaped convicts; and, of course, actual professional smugglers. Scattered among them were a few skilled sailors lured into piracy by the promise of wealth. When officials tried to stop these people, violence often ensued. Every now and then this led to the occupation of a city. “Merchants were pirates, pirates were merchants,” Lin Renchuan, a historian at Xiamen University, told me. They would trade peacefully if they could; not so peacefully if they couldn’t.
China’s efforts to control piracy were hampered by incompetence at the top. Histories of the late Ming dynasty are like advertisements for the virtues of democracy. One emperor refused to meet with his ministers for twenty years. Another was a drunk. A third ran away from his duties and lived in the palace garden, researching alchemical recipes for immortality and prostituting hundreds of young women. This last was the Jiajing emperor, who reigned from 1521 to 1567. He put the empire into the hands of a cabal of grand secretaries, who concerned themselves with personal advancement, rather than, say, the piracy on the southeast coast.
Click here to view a larger image.
Worst affected by piracy was the resource-poor province of Fujian, in southeastern China, facing Taiwan across the Taiwan Strait. Most of the province consists of low but craggy mountains with weathered red soil; flat, arable land is mainly confined to river valleys and a narrow ribbon along the coast. “The mountains peak in rocky summits, and the labor of plowing never ceases,” moaned one thirteenth-century Fujianese writer. “The lowlands are salt marshes and cannot be tilled.” Famine was a constant risk; despite big terracing and land-reclamation projects, Fujian couldn’t grow enough grain to feed itself. Half of the province’s rice had to be imported—not an easy task, because the mountains isolate Fujian from the rest of the nation. Among the region’s few natural assets are the fine natural harbors that scallop its stony coast. For evident reasons, Fujian depended on the sea. It has long been China’s center for maritime trade—which, in the days of sail, meant that it was China’s center for international trade. When international trade was officially banned, Fujianese found themselves in an uncomfortable position—there was nothing for them on land.
The walled city of Yuegang, portrayed in this seventeenth-century Chinese map, was once one of the world’s most important ports. Today its role has been taken by the modern city of Xiamen (then the village of Amoy), on an island in the harbor. (Photo credit 4.2)
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The conflict was particularly intense around the port city of Yuegang. Located at the mouth of the Jiulong River, Yuegang’s harbor was full of small islets, sandbars, and other shipping hazards. Because of the area’s notorious haze, navigation was difficult—when I puttered about the harbor during my visits, I sometimes couldn’t see boats that were only a few hundred yards away. The main docks were several miles up the Jiulong, in water so shallow that ships had to be towed in on the incoming tide. The location was an anti-piracy measure: criminals would not dare raid the docks, because the incoming tide that permitted entrance was too strong to allow escape. At the same time, many Yuegang shipowners were pirates—the harbor protected them from people like themselves.
The old city, full of Tang dynasty shrines, was connected by a raised walkway to the newer Ming city, built further inland with larger walls. Inside both were packed huddles of houses—“bandit dens,” sneered one official in the 1560s, whose inhabitants “have collaborated with foreigners to spread chaos to the detriment of the local area for a long time now.” Indeed, Yuegang was such a pirates’ paradise that at one point Beijing divided the populace into groups of ten families that had to account for their members every five days; if one family did something illegal, all ten would be punished.
Imperial China’s day-to-day history is largely recorded in the annual gazetteers sent to Beijing from each of the nation’s counties. Yuegang’s county had so much wokou trouble that the gazetteer’s compilers eventually devoted a special appendix to it:
“Bandit Incursions.”
Bandit Incursions began in 1547, when a Dutch merchant/pirate/smuggler group set up a base on Wu Island, a recently shuttered naval base just south of Yuegang’s harbor. “Dutch” is a bit of a misnomer; the traders flew a Dutch flag, but they were a hodgepodge of Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch hustlers with some semi-enslaved Malays. Chinese and Japanese wokou happily sent ships to trade with them, as did legitimate businesspeople from Yuegang; a busy, multilingual market sprang up in Wu Island’s small but serviceable harbor. Unenthusiastic about the encampment was Zhu Wan, governor for both Fujian and Zhejiang, the province to the north. He dispatched soldiers to drive out the foreigners.
Wu Island consists of two rocky, steep, scrub-covered mounds with a low “saddle” between them. The Dutch had ensconced themselves in an improvised fort atop one of the mounds, forcing the Chinese to attack uphill. In a brief skirmish, the merchant/pirate group beat back the Chinese forces. Zhu changed tactics: he imprisoned ninety local merchants who had traded at Wu Island. In a gesture that even the unsympathetic gazetteer described as altruistic, the Dutch sent emissaries to plead for their allies’ lives. Dismissing the entreaties, Governor Zhu beheaded all ninety. The Dutch abandoned Wu Island and gave up their attempt to trade openly; later they roamed the region, preying on the very Fujianese merchants and smugglers with whom they previously had collaborated.
A former pirate stronghold, Wu Island, in the hazy waters off of Yuegang, is now a center for fishing and aquaculture. (Photo credit 4.8)