Part 1195

Having found the way to India by sea, the Portuguese were prompt in taking measures to make themselves strong in that part of the world and to control the trade with it. They were helped in this effort by the grant of imagined rights which Prince Henry had obtained from the Pope, long before. But they strengthened the rights which the Pope gave them, by the older fashioned methods of conquest and possession. They began at once to plant themselves firmly at important points in the eastern seas and on the Indian coast. They sent out one of their ablest military men, Francesco d'Almeida, with a strong force of ships and volunteers, and appointed him Viceroy of India. He took possession of several parts of the Malabar coast (the western coast of the southern extremity of Hindostan) and built forts in which garrisons were placed. He similarly established the Portuguese power in Ceylon, took possession of the Maldive Islands and founded trading settlements in Sumatra. The Venetians, who saw that their ancient trade with the East was doomed unless this new rivalry could be crushed, now joined their Mahometan allies of Egypt in a great effort to drive the Portuguese back. A formidable fleet was fitted out on the Red Sea and sent against Almeida. He was unfortunate in his first encounter with these allied enemies and lost the squadron that opposed them. But the resolute viceroy was undaunted. Recalled from his command, he refused to give it up until he had equipped and led another fleet against the navy of the Egyptians and completely destroyed it. The successor of Almeida, as viceroy of India, was a remarkable personage who is known in the annals of his time as "the great Afonso D'Albuquerque." The chronicle of his exploits in Africa and India, compiled by his son from his own letters and records, and entitled "The commentaries of the great Afonso D'Albuquerque," has been translated into English and published by the Hakluyt Society. He was a remarkably energetic commander, and very honest in his way, according to the notions of his time; but he did the work of subjugation and conquest which he was sent to do in a cruel and rapacious style. He was not rapacious on his own account; but he saw no wrong in anything done for the profit of his country. In the course of seven years he spread the Portuguese power so widely and fixed it so firmly on the East Indian coasts and in the neighboring seas that there was hardly an attempt for many years to disturb it. None but Portuguese ships dared enter the Indian ocean without special permits, and the few which received admission were forbidden to trade in spices—the most precious merchandise of the region. From the Indies the Portuguese made their way to the coasts of China and put themselves on friendly terms with its people. They were permitted to occupy the port of Macao and have possessed it ever since. Some years later they discovered the islands of Japan and opened the earliest European commerce with that singular country. So they held for a time the complete mastery of eastern trade and enlarged it to greater bounds than it had ever reached before. But they were satisfied with keeping the sources of the supply of eastern goods to Europe in their own hands. The first handling of the commodities was all that they tried to control. They brought to Lisbon the spices, silks, cotton, pearls, ivory, sugar, aromatic drugs and the like, which their ships and merchants gathered up, and there sold them to other traders, Dutch, English and German for the most part, who found the final markets for them and who enjoyed a good half of the profits of the trade. These latter derived great advantages from the arrangements—much more than they had gained in their trading with Genoa and Venice—and the commerce of Holland and England grew rapidly as the result. {3714} But the glory and prosperity of the Portuguese, as masters of the rich traffic of the eastern world, were not of long duration. Before the 16th century closed, they had lost the footholds of their power and were slipping into the background very fast. By misfortunes and by folly combined, all the fruits of the patient wisdom of Prince Henry, the persevering courage of Vasco da Gama, the bold energy of Almeida, and the restless enterprise of Albuquerque, were torn out of their hands. Almost from the first, a greedy and jealous court had done all that could be done to destroy the grand opportunities in trade which the country had gained. Private enterprise was discouraged; the crown claimed exclusive rights over large parts of the commerce opened up, and these rights were sold, given to favorites and dealt with in many ways that are ruinous to successful trade. Royal jealousy sent three viceroys to divide among them the government of the Portuguese possessions in the East, when there should have been but one, and the same jealousy kept these vice-royalties ever changing. Of course, there was nowhere good government nor thrifty management of trade. In the midst of this bad state of things, the royal family of Portugal died out, in 1580, and Philip II. of Spain set up claims to the crown which he was strong enough to make good. Portugal thus became joined to Spain, for the next sixty years, and was dragged into Philip's wicked war with the Netherlands. Her Spanish masters did what they could to draw her trade away from Lisbon to Cadiz and Seville. The Dutch and English, her former customers and friends, made enemies now by Philip of Spain, pushed their way into the eastern seas, defying the mandates of the Pope, and broke down her supremacy there. When the Portuguese, in 1640, threw off the Spanish yoke and asserted their independence again, calling a prince of the house of Braganza to the throne, there was not much left of their former power or their former trade. They still held Goa, on the western coast of Hindostan, and the Chinese port of Macao—as they do to the present day; and they retained, as they still do, considerable possessions in Africa. But their brief importance in navigation, in colonization and trade, was quite gone and they dropped back to a humble position in the history of the world. Even the management of their home trade with other countries fell mostly, after a time, into the hands of the English, who became their special allies and friends.

COMMERCE: MODERN: The Spaniards.

While the Portuguese were pursuing glory and gain in the track of Vasco da Gama, which led them south and east, the Spaniards were doing the same in the wake of the three little ships which Columbus, with a bolder hand, had steered westward, to strange shores which he never dreamed of finding. These newly opened regions of the globe, in the Atlantic and on both sides of it, were divided between the two nations by the Pope, and it was a bold matter in those days to dispute his right. He gave to the Spaniards all islands and countries found west of a meridian line drawn 27½° west of the island of Ferro, in the Canary group. This nearly corresponds with the meridian 45½° west of Greenwich. To the Portuguese he assigned all discoveries east of it. So they both went on their appointed ways, with pious hearts and untroubled consciences, busily hunting for heathen lands to seize and despoil. But the eastern field, in which the Portuguese did most of their work, was one where commerce was old and where something of Europe and its people was already known. They were forced to look upon trade as the chief object of their pursuit. With the Spaniards the case was different. They found their way to a quarter of the world which Europe had never heard of and came upon people who never saw the faces of white men until then. These strange races of the new world were some of them quite as civilized, in certain respects, as the Spaniards who invaded them, and even more so, it would seem, in their notions of truth and in the refinement of their manners and modes of life. But they were simple and unsuspecting; they were not warlike in disposition and they were rudely and poorly armed. So the mail-clad cavaliers of Spain crushed them into helpless slavery with perfect ease. From the islands of the West Indies, which they discovered and occupied first, the Spaniards had soon made their way to the shores of the two continents of America, North and South. They found cities and nations which astonished them by their splendor and wealth and set them wild with greedy desires. Europe looked poor in comparison with the shining wealth of Mexico and Peru. The Spaniards went mad with the lust of gold. They lost human feeling and common sense in their greediness to grasp the metal treasures of the new world. They were indifferent to the more precious and abounding products that it offered, and neglected to build up the great commerce which might have filled their hands with lasting riches. They made the old fable of the goose which laid golden eggs a piece of real history. They killed the goose; they destroyed their source of wealth in Peru and Mexico by their eager extortions. Of true commerce between the old world and the new there was little while the Spaniards controlled it. They did, in the course of time, ship considerable quantities of sugar, tobacco, hides, logwood, indigo, cochineal, cocoa, cinchona, or Peruvian bark (from which quinine is extracted) and other American products, from their various colonies; but to no such extent as a wise and enterprising people would have done, having the same opportunities. Once a year, or once in two years, a fleet of ships was sent from Seville, at first, and afterwards from Cadiz, to Vera Cruz, for freights from Mexico, and another to Porto Bello, on the Isthmus of Panama, for the South American freights. The ships which made the latter voyage were distinguished from the Mexican fleet by being called the galleons. For a long time, twelve galleons in the one squadron and fifteen ships in the other, making their voyage once a year, and sometimes only every other year, conveyed all the trade that passed between Spain and America; which shows how little the Spaniards drew from their great possessions, except the enormous treasure of silver and gold which a few ships could transport. This glittering treasure formed, in fact, the main cargo of the Peruvian galleons and the Mexican fleet. Before the close of the reign of Philip II. the number of galleons was increased to about forty and that of the fleet to fifty or sixty. {3715} It is quite certain that no country had ever before received such a quantity of gold and silver as came into Spain during the 16th century. Instead of enriching, it ruined the nation. Neither rulers nor people had sense enough to see what a treacherous and delusive kind of wealth it formed, if trusted to alone. They vainly fancied that, with such a store of precious metals to draw upon, they could afford to despise the homely labors by which other people lived. With such mad notions as these, the honest industries of Spain were treated with neglect or worse. Her trade with neighboring countries was looked upon as a business too insignificant for Spaniards to care for or trouble themselves about. It was mostly given over to the Dutch and Flemings, while they remained under Spanish rule, and it was afterwards kept up in great part by smugglers, Dutch and English. Agriculture decayed, and its destruction was helped by the formation of a great aristocratic company of sheep-farmers, called the Mesta, to which such tyrannical rights and privileges were given by the crown that the most fertile parts of Spain were finally turned into sheep-pasture, under its control. The best artisans and the most enterprising merchants of the kingdom were driven out, because they were Moors and Jews, or they were burned for Christian beliefs which the Church did not approve. The Inquisition was so busy, with its racks and its fires, that no other business could thrive. Every kind of production dwindled, and for the supplying of all descriptions of wants the Spaniards were soon driven to look to other countries. The few who laid hands upon the riches coming in from the plunder of America spent it recklessly, in extravagant ways, while costly foreign wars which had no success, and plots in France and England which came to nothing, drained the coffers of the king. And thus the great stream of gold and silver which flowed into Spain from the new world ran out of it quite as fast, until nearly every other country in Europe held more of it than Spain herself. The strong hand with which the Spaniards were able at first, and for some time, to hold the vast domain of sea and land which the Pope had given them and which their own sailors and soldiers had explored and seized, grew weak before the end of a hundred years after the memorable voyage of Columbus was made. The hardy Dutch, driven to revolt and enmity by tyrannical government and by cruel religious persecutions, attacked them everywhere, in the eastern and western world. The English, just beginning to grow ambitious and bold on the ocean, and constantly threatened by the armadas of Spain, did the same. But these were not the only enemies who harassed the Spanish colonies and fleets. In a general way, the whole world went to war with the insolent nation which claimed the lordship of the earth. There came into existence, in the 17th century, a powerful organization of pirates or freebooters, made up of daring men of all nations, who carried on for many years a villainous warfare of their own against the Spaniards at sea and against their American settlements. These Buccaneers, as they were called, gained strongholds in several islands of the West Indies, from which the Spaniards were not able to dislodge them. Under the attacks of all these enemies, combined with her own misgovernment and her contempt and abuse of thrifty industries and fair trade—which no people can neglect without ruin—Spain steadily and rapidly sank.

COMMERCE: MODERN: The Flemings and the Dutch.

In the first half of the 16th century, the people of the Netherlands were the tolerably contented subjects of that famous monarch, the Emperor Charles V., who ruled in Spain, in Naples, in Germany (the old Empire), and in Burgundy, as well as in the Lowland principalities, Flanders, Holland, and the rest. They were already very prosperous, working hard at many callings, trading shrewdly and busily with the rest of the world, and diligently picking up all kinds of knowledge everywhere. In the southern provinces (which we may call the Belgian, because they are mostly now embraced in the modern kingdom of Belgium) the chief industries were those of the loom, in all branches of weaving; and in skilful workmanship of every kind the people were tasteful and apt. These provinces were the seat of a much greater and more general activity in manufactures than appeared in the states to the north of them (which we will call the Dutch states, without distinction, because they are now included in the kingdom of Holland). The latter were more extensively employed in fisheries, in navigation and in ship building, although most kinds of industry, manufacturing and agricultural, were thriftily and successfully carried on. At the time when Charles V. ruled the Netherlands, the city of Antwerp, in the Belgian circle of provinces, was the great metropolis of Netherland trade. It was much more than that. It was the foremost commercial capital of the world. The traffic which slipped away from Venice and Genoa, had fixed its central seat in this younger town on the Scheldt. It was sure to plant its new emporium somewhere in the Netherlands, because there was nowhere else in Europe so much energy, so much enterprise, so much industry, so much commercial wisdom, so much activity of domestic trade. Spain and Portugal held the wealth of the Indies and the Americas in their hands, but we have seen how incapable they were of using the commercial advantage it gave them. Lisbon, Cadiz and Seville were only depots for the transfer of merchandise; it was impossible to make them real capitals of trade, because they could not and would not furnish either the spirit, or the genius, or the organized agencies that it demands. The Netherlands, with their long schooling in commerce upon a smaller scale, were ready to meet every requirement when the new era opened and gave them their greater chance. There was no other mercantile organization so well prepared. The league of the Hansa Towns was breaking and failing; the English were just beginning to show their aptitude for manufactures and trade. Some one of the Netherland cities was sure to win the sovereignty in commercial affairs which Venice gave up, and Antwerp proved the winner, for a time. During most of the 16th century, it was the business center of Europe. It was the gathering-place of the merchants and the seat of the money-changers and bankers. Two and three thousand ships were often crowded in its harbor, at one time. It distributed the merchandise of the East and West Indies, which it took from Portugal and Spain, and the manifold wares of the many manufacturing towns of Flanders, Brabant, southern Germany, to a great extent, and northern France. {3716} At the same time, its own looms, anvils, tanneries, glass-works, dyeing-vats and mechanic shops of various kinds were numerous and busy. Its thriving population was rapidly increased, for it welcomed all who came with skill or knowledge or money or strong hands to take part in its work. Such was Antwerp during the reign of Charles V., and at the time (A. D. 1555-1556) when that weary monarch gave up his many crowns to his evil son, Philip II. of Spain, and went away to a Spanish monastery to seek for rest. The government of Charles in the Netherlands had been hard and heavy, but the people were left free enough to prosper and to grow intelligent and strong. Under Philip the prospect changed. The story of his malignant persecutions and oppressions, of the revolt to which they drove the Netherland provinces, of the long, merciless war in which he strove to ruin or subdue them, of the independence which the Dutch provinces achieved and the prosperous career on which they entered, is told in another place.

See NETHERLANDS (page 2256, and after).