Sailing from China - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 119

the Sea Adventure made one last voyage. Once again it leaked so badly that it had
toshifttheroutetotheRyukyus.Almostayearlaterthe Sea Adventure wasableto
set sail. It made Siam on the last day of December, but was deemed unfit for fur-
ther service and junked, to use that word in its other sense. Two more junks sailing
for the EIC would run down the Northern Sea route, one as far as Tonkin (Hanoi),
where it turned a modest profit, the other as far as the Mekong Delta, where it was
blown back by winds and earned the Company nothing.
With no further sailings over the next four years the EIC pulled Cocks and his
men out of Hirado and closed the factory. Cocks was reprimanded for losing the
Company a great deal of money and ordered back to London. He died in agony en
route and never made it home. The real problem wasn't Richard Cocks. It wasn't
the difficult monsoon winds, for all the havoc they could wreak when the timing
was wrong. It was the conditions of trade: too much competition, too little access
to Chinese markets and too much extortion from officials every step of the way.
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For those who could not trade directly into the Ming dynasty, which in this era
was just about everyone, the Northern Sea route was not sustainable on its own.
The only way to trade profitably was to link up, as Will Adams and Edmund Say-
ers repeatedly did, with the Western Sea route. On the Selden map that route starts
out by leaving Zhangzhou/Quanzhou on a bearing of dingwei (205°), then once in
the Taiwan Strait turning to kunshen (235°). The Selden map shows the Western
Sea route splitting many times as it goes south, sometimes into two routes, some-
times into three, at each fork sending out tendrils around the South China Sea. The
first fork is at Qizhou, the Seven Islands, off Hainan. Here one route splits off on a
long gengyou bearing(265°)thatthenturnsto qianhai (325°)andrunsintotheport
serving Tonkin (now Hanoi). The main route continues south between the Paracel
Islands and Vietnam, then divides four ways off the south-east coast of Vietnam:
onestrandstraighttoBatavia,onethatmakesalongarcsouthandtheneastaround
Borneo, a third to the mouth of the Singapore Strait, and a fourth to Pattani, half-
way down the Malay Peninsula. Each of these strands linked China to yet another
Chinese sojourning community based in ports around the South China Sea.
One of the busiest points on the Selden map is the Singapore Strait, at the south
end of the Malay Peninsula. This was the location of the state of Johor, famously
the site of van Heemskerck's seizure of the Santa Catarina , which led to the de-
bate between de Groot and Selden. Routes from Johor go in every direction. One