Sailing from China - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 116

nounce, so it could be standing in for almost any soft or breathy sound. Lin can
move directly across both languages, but it can also get mangled within the fam-
ily of sounds known as alveolar consonants: n, l and r. Fortunately dao is easy: it
corresponds unfailingly to the Japanese do ; words such as 'judo' and 'kendo' de-
rive their do from this Chinese syllable. 'Fish Scale Island' turns out to be an ap-
proximation of another Portuguese place-name, Ferando, which is how Europeans
pronounced the name of the port where John Saris opened the East India Company
factory, Hirado.
The records of the Company's decade in Japan - the diary of Factor Richard
Cocks,thejournalofCaptainJohnSaris,thelogsandlettersofMasterWillAdams
- provide the detailed information about what it was like to travel the arteries of
the Northern Sea, far beyond anything Zhang Xie was able to record. For them, as
forLiDanandtheothermerchantsoperatinginHiradoandNagasaki,theNorthern
Sea route was their lifeline to the Ming economy. Given that access to China was
difficult,ifnotimpossible,itwasalsotheirconduittotheportsinAnnam,Champa
(both part of today's Vietnam), Cambodia and Ayutthaya (Thailand), and beyond
thesetoPattaniandJohordowntheMalayPeninsulaandultimatelytoBantamand
Batavia(Jakarta)onJava.Japan-basedmerchantstreatedtheNorthernSearouteas
a backward extension of the Western Sea route. Together these routes constituted
a sort of maritime freeway along which ships of all nations came and went. The
ChinaCaptainandtheEastIndiaCompanyworkedthisrouteasintensivelyasthey
could, but it was not easy.
The English used both arteries of the Northern Sea route. When Saris left Japan
on the Clove , he took the more direct westerly artery. Leaving Japan in Decem-
ber 1613, he 'steered away South-west, edging over for China', as he writes in his
journal. 'A stiffe gale and faire weather' blowing from north-north-east provided
perfect conditions for a ship sailing on the reciprocal. Seven days later the Clove
was off the Fujian coast. Near Moon Harbour, three hundred large junks cut across
Saris's path on their way out to fish. This striking sight was repeated three days
later off the mouth of the Pearl River below Canton. The Clove curved on a path
south-west 'as the Land trends' and four days later stood off the mouth of the
Mekong River. It was an easy run, by far the easiest that any EIC ship would have
coming out of Japan.
The first ship Richard Cocks sent down the Northern Sea route was the Sea
Adventure , a leaky hulk he bought in Nagasaki the following summer. Before
despatching it, he assembled whatever cargo he could that autumn so that it had