The British Presence in Macau, 1635–1793

1. Anglo-Portuguese conflicts and the founding of the East India Company

7 We should share with the Portugall in the East. —Richard Hakluyt, Voyages, vol. 5, p. 116 Euro-Asian relations, determined in part by the European response to societies such as the Chinese and the Japanese, developed slowly, and, as stated by Donald Lach, reflect the feeling which those cultures aroused in Western traveller -writers, as well as the latters’ preconceived ideas and tastes.1 From the end of the sixteenth century, when Macau was enjoying its economic apogee, reports reached England about the enclave and Japan, both in the form of translated Portuguese sources and in the writings of travellers and traders such as the Dutch Dirck Gerritszoon Pomp (1544–1608) and Jan Huygen van Linschotten (1563–1611) who established themselves beyond the Cape of Good Hope, in the Portuguese domains that they would later describe. The English maritime enterprise clashed early on with Iberian interests, and the first frictions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries foreshadow later, more serious conflicts. In the aftermath of English buccaneer raids on Portuguese trade in Africa,2 King Sebastian put in place measures of trade reprisals against England, decreeing that Portuguese ports should be closed to English vessels and products, namely textiles. Negotiations for an Anglo-Portuguese treaty, which Philip II of Castile, as an enemy of England, did not desire, dragged on until 1576, and in October of that year the Portuguese king and Elizabeth I signed a treaty whereby each nation undertook to return vessels and goods seized before that date, and English traders gained freedom to trade in Portugal.3 1 Anglo-Portuguese conflicts and the founding of the East India Company The British Presence in Macau, 1635–1793 8 During the dual monarchy of the Phillips, the Anglo-Portuguese alliance remained “dormant”,4 while a number of expeditions to distant Cathay departed from England, without success, however. In 1553, Sir Hugh Willoughby set sail for the East, but never reached it, and in 1591 three English vessels, one of which under the command of Sir James Lancaster, sailed beyond the Cape of Good Hope to avail themselves of Portuguese trade, as did the same sailor again in 1601, when he travelled to Banten (Java), where the Dutch had been since 1596, and which later became an English factory of strategic importance for the pepper trade. In 1596, the first official expedition to China left England, comprising three vessels (the Bear, the Bear’s Whelp and the Benjamin) under the command of Benjamin Wood. This fleet did not, however, reach its destination.5 In 1602–1604, Sir Edward Michelborne obtained leave to travel to the East, notably to China and Japan, although this initiative bore no fruit.6 In Elizabethan England, Richard Hakluyt (1552?–1616) collected, translated and published, in The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589–1600),7 dozens of European sources, including Portuguese,8 in which Macau is a tenuous presence, functioning as a symbolic space of origin of the riches and the experiences which Portugal had imported from the Far East. Later, all this information was complemented by the collection published by Samuel Purchas (c.1577–1626), Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrims (1625),9 in part comprising manuscripts inherited from Hakluyt, which encouraged English traders and investors to venture forth in the wake of Portuguese vessels. All these data on the Asian human and trading realities later became crucial in the clashes between the Portuguese and the English in the Eastern seas and were decisive in weakening the former and in the ensuing upset of the “Carreira da Índia”, the Portuguese kingdom being unable to defend its Eastern territories effectively. From the mid-sixteenth century onward, the English sought alternative routes to those used by the Portuguese to reach the East, and several adventurers attempted to discover passages to China via the Northwest and Northeast.10 If English corsairs had already been taking Portuguese vessels and invading Portuguese territories, the annexation of Portugal by Spain in 1580 meant that the political reasons which had led England—within the context of the oldest political alliance in the Western world11 —to respect Portugal now waned. Anglo-Portuguese conflicts and the founding of the EIC 9 Attacks on Portuguese ships intensified, carried out by Sir Francis Drake (c.1540–1596), Sir Walter Raleigh (1552?–1618), among other “sea dogs”, in an attempt to weaken the Catholic Spanish enemy and demonstrate English naval...