Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-04T19:29:15.188Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

European Exiles, Renegades and Outlaws and the Maritime Economy of Asia c.1500–1750

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

G. V. Scammell
G. V. Scammell
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

For centuries Europeans were fascinated by rumours and legends of the wealth and wonders of the Orient and by stories of the supposed existence there of realms free from all those tiresome taboos and restrictions that prevailed in the West. Long before the arrival of Vasco da Gama, renegades were serving the Mongols in Iran and Marco Polo had been in the entourage of the Grand Khan himself. The Portuguese pioneers were disconcerted to encounter in 1501 a certain Benvenuto de Abano who had spent the previous twenty-five years sailing the seas of Asia, and his contemporary, the Muslim Khoja Safar Salmâni, an erstwhile Genoese or Albanian. But this was nothing compared with the flow that followed western penetration of the maritime economy of the East, scattering European adventurers and outlaws throughout the Orient anywhere from the shores of the Persian Gulf to those of the Pacific Ocean. And very soon these hopefuls were joined by European pirates, some working from ports in their mother countries, some from the Caribbean and North America, and some from bases in the Indian Ocean, of which Madagascar was, according to taste, the most celebrated or the most notorious. Such men, frequently of remarkable skills and fearsome abilities, exercised a considerable influence on the maritime history of the East in the early modern centuries, and it is with the origins, aspirations and activities of these elusive—indeed often anonymous—but nevertheless highly significant figures that this paper is concerned.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , October 1992 , pp. 641 - 661
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Scammell, G. V., ‘The Great Age of Discovery, 1450–1650’ (London, Hakluyt Society, 1982), p. 6.Google Scholar

2 Scammell, G. V., The First Imperial Age, European Overseas Expansion c. 1400–1715 (London, 1989), pp. 29–30, 169, 237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Voyage dans les deltas du Gange et dt L'Irraouaddy, 1521, ed. Bouchon et, GenevièveThomaz, Luis Filipe (Paris, 1988), pp. 51, 337.Google Scholar

4 The New Cambridge History of India, I, 1, Pearson, M. N., The Portuguese in India (Cambridge, 1987), p. 87;Google ScholarScammell, G. V., ‘The Pillars of Empire: Indigenous Assistance and the Survival of the Estado da India c. 1600–1700’, Modern Asian Studies 22, 3 (1988), pp. 437ff at p. 485;CrossRefGoogle ScholarDisney, Anthony, ‘Smugglers and Smuggling in the Western Half of the Estado da India in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, Indica 26, 1 and 2 (1989), pp. 57ff at p. 65;Google ScholarIntrepid Itinerant. Manuel Godinho and his Journey from India to Portugal in 1663, ed. and trs. Correia-Afonso, John and Lobo, Vitalio (OUP, Bombay, 1990), pp. 52, 71;Google ScholarKulkarni, A. R., ‘Marathas and the Sea’, in Mathew, K. S. (ed.), Studies in Maritime History (Pondicherry, 1990), p. 96;Google ScholarBouchon, , Voyage dans Us deltas, p. 62.Google Scholar

5 Massarella, Derek, A World Elsewhere. Europe's Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Yale UP, 1990), p. 105.Google Scholar

6 Quiason, Serafim D., English ‘Country Trade’ with the Philippines, 1644–1765 (Quezon City, 1966), pp. 37ff.Google Scholar

7 A huge fund of information on English and other renegades is to be found in Danvers, F. C. and Foster, W. (eds), Letters Received by the English East India Company from its Servants in the East, 1602–1617 (6 vols, London, 1896–1902);Google Scholar in Foster, W. (ed.), The English Factories in India, 1618–1669 (13 vols, Oxford, 1906–1927);Google Scholar and in SirFawcett, Charles (ed.), English Factories in India, 1670–77, 1678–84,new ser. (Oxford, 1952–1955).Google Scholar See also Grey, Charles, Pirates of the Eastern Seas, 1618–1723 (London, 1933).Google Scholar

8 Scammell, G. V., The World Encompassed. The First European Maritime Empires c.800– 1650 (London, 1981), p. 412.Google Scholar

9 The Travels of the Abbé Carré in India and the Near East, 1672 to 1674, trs. Fawcett, Lady and ed. SirFawcett, Charles with the assistance of Sir Richard Burn (3 vols, Hakluyt Society, 1947–1948), III, 748ff.Google Scholar

10 Scammell, G. V., ‘England, Portugal and the Estado da India c. 1500–1635’, Modem Asian Studies 16, 2 (1982), pp. 177ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Godinho, ed. Correia-Afonso, p. 71.Google Scholar

12 Foster, et al. , Factories, passim.Google Scholar

13 Scammell, G. V., ‘Indigenous Assistance in the Establishment of Portuguese Power in Asia in the Sixteenth Century’, Modem Asian Studies 14, 1 (1980), pp. 1ff at PP. 3–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Massarella, , World Elsewhere, pp. 81, 132–3.Google Scholar

15 Peter Floris, His Voyage to the East Indies in the Globe, 1611–13, ed. Moreland, W. H. (Hakluyt Society, 1934), p. 68.Google Scholar

16 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India, 1640–67, ed. and trs. Ball, V. (2 vols, 1889), revised edn by William Crooke (OUP, 1925), I, 203–7;Google Scholarcf. Chaudhuri, K. N., Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean. An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 139–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Kulkarni, , ‘Marathas and the Sea’, p. 96.Google Scholar

18 Pearson, , Portuguese in India, p. 86.Google Scholar

19 Scammell, , ‘Pillars of Empire’, p. 485.Google Scholar

20 Scammell, , ‘England, Portugal and the Estado’, p. 180.Google Scholar

21 Pearson, M. N., ‘Pious Passengers' Motivations for the Hajj from Early Modern India’, in Mathews, Studies in Maritime History, pp. 112–26;Google Scholar see also the accounts of Joseph Pitts (c.1685) and Charles Jacques Poncet (1700–1701) in SirFoster, William (ed.), The Red Sea and Adjacent Countries at the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Hakluyt Society, 1949), pp. 38, 158.Google Scholar

22 Scammell, G. V., ‘Shipowning in the Economy and Politics of Early Modern England’, The Historical Journal XV, 3 (1972), pp. 385ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Grey, , Pirates, passim;Google ScholarBoxer, C. R., ‘The Count of Ericeira and the Pirates’, History Today XXIV (1974), pp. 854ff.Google Scholar

24 Coleman, D. C., The Economy of England, 1450–1750 (Oxford, 1977), p. 133.Google Scholar

25 Davis, Ralph, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1962), pp. 133ff.Google Scholar

26 Rediker, Marcus, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World I700–1750 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 245.Google Scholar

27 Pearson, , Portuguese in India, p. 86;Google ScholarGodinho, ed. Correia-Afonso, p. 209.Google Scholar

28 Massarella, , World Elsewhere, pp. 80–1, 105.Google Scholar

29 Godinho, ed. Correia-Afonso, pp. 67–8.Google Scholar

30 Pearson, , Portuguese in India, p. 86.Google Scholar

31 Furber, Holden, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient 1600–1800 (Minneapolis, 1976), pp. 144–5.Google Scholar

32 Foster, , ed., The Red Sea, pp. 175–7.Google Scholar