The British Presence in Macau, 1635–1793

Introduction

1 The Marchandy also of Portugal By divers lands turne into sale. Portugalers with us have trouth in hand: Whose Marchandy commeth much into England. They ben our friends, with their commodities, And wee English passen into their countrees. “Libel of English policie, exhorting all England to keepe the sea” [c.1436], in Richard Hakluyt, Voyages in Eight Volumes, vol. 1, 1962, p. 178 ThisstudysetsouttopresentahistoryoftheBritishpresence,atfirstintheIndian Ocean, pursuing the Portuguese route, and later, in the Far East, in Macau, from 1635 to 1793, as also in Japan (Hirado) from 1613 to 1623, from where the English attempted unsuccessfully to set up direct trade links with China. The British presence in Macau stemmed from Elizabethan interest in Portuguese profit-making in the East Indies, and began with the arrival in 1635 of the first English vessel, the London, in Macau. I end my study with the year 1793, the date of the first British embassy to China led by Lord Macartney, which constituted Britain’s first, albeit diplomatically fruitless, attempt to institutionalise relations between the two countries. I therefore present the most representative episodes of the first two hundred years of the British presence in Macau, a presence which has left its mark, still visible today, on the humanised face of the city, notably in the ancient Protestant cemetery and chapel. In both Portuguese and Anglophone documents, mainly those of the nineteenth century, references were made to other British haunts in the city, notably the English Tavern (Hotel),1 Introduction The British Presence in Macau, 1635–1793 2 the British Museum (the first museum to open its doors in China, 1829–1834, as I have recently shown)2 and the East India Company (EIC) Library.3 Even before the English started to send trading expeditions to Amoy and to Formosa, travelling to China meant putting in at the port of Macau, so these two latter place-names became synonymous by a synecdochical process. In fact, Thomas Naish’s 1731 report to London advises every vessel en route to Amoy to stop off in the enclave, putting in at Taipa for protection against typhoons and to take in supplies,4 hence testifying to the strategic value of the City of the Holy Name of God of Macau both for travellers and for British interests in the Far East. References to Macau in the EIC Records (India Office Records-British Library, IOR) are relatively scant, since, as is known, the China Trade took place in Canton, the main destination for traders, who only lived in the SinoPortuguese enclave because they were banned from living all year round in the Canton factories. References to episodes in the lives of the British and to their experience of Macau which I found in the IOR cover the periods between the trading seasons (March–September), when the supercargoes remained there. In turn, most English-language studies on the Western presence in Southern China study the British presence in Canton, relegating Macau to a secondary place,5 for the EIC’s supercargoes traded mainly in Canton and, as I have already stated, only resided in the enclave between trading seasons, with the city acting as a “means” to attain a commercial “end”. My study thus fills in what has hitherto been a historiographical “vacuum”. Over the many years of preparing for this study, previously published in Portuguese as A Presença Inglesa e as Relações Anglo-Portuguesas em Macau (1635–1793) (Lisbon, 2009), I published portions of the conclusions of this study in A World of Euphemism: Representations of Macau in the Work of Austin Coates: City of Broken Promises as a Historical Novel and a Female Bildungsroman (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation/ Foundation for Science and Technology, Lisbon, 2009) and in several articles in Portuguese and international journals. These have been listed in the bibliography which concludes the present volume. Of the documents pertaining to the EIC to be found in the British Library, I consulted the India Office Records, collections R/10 and G/12 (China and Japan, some of the documents are duplicated in both collections). Volumes R/10/3–7 fill the vacuum of documentation in series G/12 for the period from Introduction 3 1754 to 1774. Most of the data contained in these volumes cover economic and trade concerns, that is, the arrival and departure of vessels, their cargoes and the transactions carried out in China. Sporadically, I found data pertaining...