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the South China Sea. How else could he have had the confidence to produce such
a perfect mindscape of the Chinese trading world into which the Europeans had
come?
So we can say that we do know him after all, even if we can never put a name
to him. That must remain a piece of the puzzle we will never find. And even if we
can'tknowhisnameandcan'tquitedeterminewherehedrewthemap,wecanfig-
ure out when. We have already come close.
There were three times when John Saris could have acquired it. The third and
lasttimewashisfinalcallintoBantam,inearly1614,onhiswayhomefromJapan.
This doesn't seem the likely occasion. He was there for a little over five weeks,
and while he did have dealings with Chinese merchants during his stay, he men-
tionsnothinginhisjournalaboutdunningthemforunpaiddebts.Besides,hewasa
commander, not a bailiff. Collecting debts would have been beneath the dignity of
his position. The second time was when he arrived on his way to the Spice Islands
before heading to Japan. He was in port for two and a half months in the winter
of 1612-13, but during that time was much occupied with loading and despatching
twoofhisshipsbacktoLondon.Itisequally hardtoimagine himoutdebt-collect-
ing.
That leaves his first stint in Bantam, a five-year posting that started in 1604,
culminated with his promotion to the post of Chief Factor in 1608 and ended with
his departure home on 4 October 1609 to lobby for promotion to commander. This
strikes me as the likeliest time for acquiring the map. The job of Chief Factor
would certainly have included collecting bad debts from Chinese merchants with
whom the Company had done business. If Selden got the story right, the merchant
from whom Saris took the map 'pressed' him 'exceedingly to restore it at good
ransome'. One can imagine all the reasons, from the cost that must have gone into
producing the map to the value ofthe trading knowledge it recorded, especially for
foreign newcomers unfamiliar with the trade routes of the region, to the political
liability of having let strategic information about China fall into the hands of a for-
eigner. Foreigners were not allowed to have maps of China, as I learned centuries
later.
If 1609 was the date by which Saris confiscated the map, we can also determine
the date before which it could not have been made. The map in fact has a very pre-
cise time signature, buried in the label beside Wanlaogao that so intrigued Thomas
Hyde: 'Where Red Hairs live'. The label, as we know, refers to the founding of the
first Dutch fort on Ter-nate in May 1607, which resulted in the famous division of
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