The South China Sea (8 page)

For better and for worse the Chinese coast was now firmly integrated into the global economy. Networks of Chinese, Malays, Arabs and Europeans transmitted the impacts of cannons and currency around the
world. By the end of the sixteenth century, the united Spanish–Portuguese Empire dominated European trade with Asia. But the empire was rotting from within. In 1581, after two decades of unrest and repression, the rulers of seven Dutch provinces declared independence from their Spanish Habsburg rulers. In response, the Portuguese tried to cut the supply of Asian spices. The Dutch response would shake the world. All they needed was a good map.

The answer to their Calvinistic prayers was Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, a Dutchman who had travelled to Spain as a teenager and sailed with the Portuguese between their outposts in Goa, Malacca and Macao (the nearest anchorage to Guangzhou the Portuguese could rent from the Chinese authorities). He assiduously copied their maps and sailing directions until his ship's trunk held, in effect, the keys to Asia. In 1594, after a perilous journey back to the Netherlands, he gave them to a compatriot, Cornelis de Houtman, who organised, the following year, the first Dutch expedition to reach Southeast Asia. It was a disaster. Two-thirds of the crew died, de Houtman offended the Sultan of Banten, ordered murders and rapes and only just made it back alive. Nonetheless he had proved that the Dutch could trade independently with the Spice Islands.

In 1596 Jan Huyghen shared his knowledge with the rest of Europe. His
Itinerario
– the story of his voyages – and his maps (quickly translated into English and German) smashed the Portuguese monopoly of knowledge about how to sail the spice routes.
¹⁰
For northern European entrepreneurs this was a double opportunity – a chance both to hit the Habsburgs and to make a personal fortune. On 31 December 1600, Queen Elizabeth of England granted 216 aristocrats and merchants a Royal Charter to form the East India Company. Two years later, in Amsterdam, six small companies were merged to form its Dutch equivalent, the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC). The VOC was both a trading company and an arm of the state – specifically licensed to fight the Portuguese. But the Portuguese wouldn't give up easily. The contest between the two would ultimately lead to the first ‘world war’, reshape Southeast Asia and give us the system of international maritime law which underlies the conflict in the South China Sea to this day.

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By late 1602 the VOC had established a trading and military bridgehead on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. The Sultan of Johor's dislike of the Portuguese was just as strong as that of the Duch since he was a descendant of the defeated ruler of Malacca. In September 1601 the Portuguese had captured and executed 17 members of a Dutch crew that was attempting to reach Guangzhou (known to Europeans as Canton) and break into the China trade. Now, after learning of the Dutch–Johor alliance, they blockaded and shelled Johor's coast.

On 25 February 1603, the Dutch and Johorese hit back. Admiral Jakob van Heemskerk and his new ally were alerted to a heavily laden Portuguese ship nearby – sailing from Macao to Malacca. By the standards of the time, the
Santa Catarina
was vast. Its cargo included 1,200 bales of raw silk, chests of damask and taffeta, 70 tons of gold, 60 tons of porcelain and large amounts of cotton, linen, sugar, spices and wooden furniture. There were probably around 1,000 people on board: 700 troops, 100 women and children plus a large number of merchants and the crew. Amazingly this vast prize was pitifully defended. The Portuguese had a practice of selling the officers’ positions to the highest bidders, not to the most skilled. The Dutch, on the other hand, trained well.
¹¹

Shortly after sunrise, Van Heemskerk's flotilla (two Dutch ships and several from Johor) found the
Santa Catarina
at anchor in the mouth of the Johor River (close to Changi Airport in modern Singapore). With their first fusillades, they shredded the
Catarina
’s sails so it couldn't move and they spent the rest of the day firing occasional shots into its hull (but not so many as to seriously damage the cargo). With his ship leaking and casualties mounting, the captain, Sebastião Serrão, surrendered. In exchange for their lives, the passengers and crew forfeited the ship and its contents.

When, eventually, the
Santa Catarina
’s cargo reached the Netherlands the quantities of precious metals, luxury textiles and fine porcelain caused a sensation. Merchants were tantalised by the obvious opportunities that lay in the Orient. At auction the cargo sold for 3.5 million guilders – equal to half the total capital of the VOC. But there was a problem. Some of the VOC's shareholders felt the company should be concentrating on maximising its profits rather than fighting a costly war. The Dutch political elite, however, believed their new country needed both profits and war. They needed a good persuader. They sent for the 21-year-old Hugo Grotius.

Hugo Grotius (the Latinised version of Huig de Groot) was, in effect, a celebrity lawyer. Born into a powerful family, he was regarded as a prodigy, graduating from college at 11 and being sent to meet the king of France at the age of 15. He became a barrister and then official historian of Holland (a position more like a modern spin doctor than an earnest academic). In late 1604 he was hired by the directors of the VOC to justify the seizure of the
Santa Catarina
. The apologia he produced would protect the VOC's dual role as trader and fighter but would also evolve into one of the founding documents of international law. It would lay the intellectual foundations for Dutch colonisation and bring about a ‘clash of civilisations’ between European and Southeast Asian concepts of political power and territory.

Most of the conventional wisdom about Hugo Grotius has been overturned in recent years by a pair of historians: Martine Julia van Ittersum and Peter Borschberg. Their careful re-reading of his personal and public writings has allowed us to see that – far from being a disinterested political thinker – Grotius was a lobbyist for the VOC and a determined advocate of Dutch commercial and political rights. He chose his arguments to suit the occasion, misconstrued the positions of others and relied on shaky references. Nonetheless, his writings have had a lasting impact.

The Portuguese argued that they had exclusive rights to trade in Asia because they had discovered the sailing routes to it. In the Iberian Catholic worldview, discovery by non-Christians simply didn't count. Grotius, however, argued a radical new line: Asian rulers were a part of humanity and could therefore make their own decisions about whom to trade with. Whereas Portugal's rulers argued that they had the right to decide who could sail the seas in their domain, Grotius argued that the sea, like air, couldn't be occupied by any one power and was therefore free for all to use. While these ideas might sound modern and progressive, they were also self-interested. They were intended to defend the right of the VOC to sign contracts with Asian rulers. Grotius would later argue that these contracts could legitimately exclude everyone else and also justify the use of force against anyone who tried to impede shipping or renege on contracts.

Grotius lobbied successfully behind the scenes but his arguments remained private until 1609 when they were published anonymously in a seminal pamphlet,
Mare Liberum
–
The Free Sea
. Once again he was
writing for a political purpose – to try to influence peace negotiations between the Dutch and the Spanish. The VOC was terrified that, as a condition of peace, the Dutch government would concede the right of Spain and Portugal to exclude its ships from Asia. Grotius the spin doctor set to work. Again he was successful: the Treaty of Antwerp, signed on 10 April 1609, granted Dutch merchants the right to trade wherever Spain and Portugal didn't already have settlements.

But Grotius also had another target in mind: herring. Even worse than interfering with navigation, in his view, was interfering with fishing. At one point in
Mare Liberum
he calls it ‘insane cupidity’. King James I of England (who was also King James VI of Scotland) was infuriated by the Dutch fleet that sailed along the Scottish and English coasts to intercept the annual migration of herring – upon which hundreds of communities depended for their livelihood. James wanted to keep the Dutch out of what he saw as ‘his’ waters but didn't want to start a fight with one of his few allies in Europe. On 16 May 1609, shortly after
Mare Liberum
had been published, he banned foreigners from fishing along the British coasts without an official licence. But James felt the need to bolster his edict with legal justification. A law professor, William Welwood, wrote a treatise in 1613 using biblical, Roman and (what we would now call) environmental arguments in favour of the king's right to limit foreign fishing. James can't have thought it good enough because, in 1619, he sent for another lawyer – John Selden.

Selden's pamphlet was finished that summer and sent for the king's approval. But at the last minute, James became concerned that his brother-in-law, King Christian of Denmark, might object to English attempts to claim the seas and then stir up a wider dispute about the whole North Atlantic. The pamphlet was quietly shelved and the legal argument temporarily suspended. Over the following decades both Grotius and Selden played active roles in national politics, fell out of favour in their respective countries and were even imprisoned for a while. By the mid-1630s Selden needed to ingratiate himself with England's new king, Charles I, who took a harder line on maritime disputes than his predecessor. In 1635 he offered a set of legal arguments to rebut the claims of Hugo Grotius. Even the title was a direct challenge to the Dutch:
Mare Clausum
–
The Closed Sea
.

Although Selden agreed with Grotius that ships had the right of ‘innocent passage’ through another country's waters, he insisted that states also had a right to restrict access to those waters in some circumstances. He argued that sovereigns ought to be able to claim specific areas – even of the high seas – based on long-standing usage.
¹²
The open sea could, he claimed, be ‘occupied’ and therefore not necessarily open to all: particularly if it contained plenty of herring.
¹³
It must have been around this time – with Selden a leading player in court politics – that he came into possession of the Chinese map.

The argument between Grotius and Selden – between open sea and closed sea – continues to this day. Selden was clearly in favour of drawing imaginary lines through waves but ultimately even Grotius conceded that bays, gulfs and straits could be possessed. However, although they both concluded that it was possible and right to draw lines through the sea, they disagreed about exactly where these lines should be drawn. By the end of the seventeenth century, European states had reached a compromise, sometimes called the ‘cannon shot’ rule, allowing a country to control the waters up to three or four nautical miles from its coast. For several centuries it appeared that Selden had lost the argument – mainly because England (Britain after 1707) became a maritime power. From then on, London's interests were better served by Grotius’ arguments than Selden's. The British Empire was based on the presumed right of countries – and one country in particular – to trade freely around the world. Rather than arguing for wider territorial waters to save the herring, Britannia now argued for narrower ones so that it could rule more of the waves. That required minimising other rulers’ rights to limit navigation. The Royal Navy could usually be relied upon to resolve any major disagreements over this point of legal principle with the application of its own version of the ‘cannon shot’ rule.

In each era, the global hegemon – the Netherlands, then Britain and today the United States – has argued in favour of freedom of navigation and used military force to prevent others challenging that freedom. But Selden's point of view continues to have its adherents, mainly among those on the receiving end of naval gunfire. The question of whether and how coastal states can assert their sovereignty offshore remains with us now and there are few places where this question is more vexed than in the South China Sea.

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The taking of the
Santa Catarina
was the opening shot of what became the first ‘world war’. For most of the first half of the seventeenth century the Dutch and Portuguese were fighting in parts of Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia. For a short period the English East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch VOC formed an alliance – which is why, in 1620, Captain Lenmyes of the
Elizabeth
felt entitled to capture a Chinese ship off Taiwan on the grounds that it was carrying Portuguese and Spanish passengers, and to steal its cargo and perhaps its beautifully illustrated map. The Dutch became the dominant force in the South China Sea for most of the seventeenth century – both as long-distance traders and as middlemen in voyages between Asian destinations. With superior fire-power they had squeezed the Portuguese out of the Japanese silver trade and most of the spice ports and even squashed their English allies in the ‘Amboyna Massacre’ of traders on the (today Indonesian) island of Ambon in 1623.

By 1625, and for the following 50 years, the Dutch Republic dominated global trade. At its peak the Dutch merchant fleet was larger than the Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, Scottish and German fleets combined, with 6,000 ships and 50,000 sailors. Amsterdam was the commercial capital of the world and Batavia (modern Jakarta) was its eastern outpost – in charge of the trade to Taiwan and Japan. In 1641 the VOC finally achieved a crucial breakthrough in Southeast Asia – conquering Malacca to become the dominant force in the Straits.

It was never total dominance though. The VOC always depended on local allies, such as the Sultan of Johor, for support. The company became more enmeshed in regional politics and gradually it acquired territory. Using Grotius’ arguments about the inviolability of contracts, it enforced harsh deals with cold steel: brutalising and sometimes massacring those who resisted. The Chinese authorities were strong enough to keep the VOC out, however, so the Dutch had to deal through the merchants of Fujian. Batavia became the new regional entrepôt, the meeting point of Europe and the Chinese junk trade.