Closing the Sea - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 25

his generation and would remain prominent throughout his life, most of which he
ended up spending in political exile (Fig. 5).
The topic that bothered Buckingham was entitled Mare Liberum (' The Free
Sea' , usually referred to as ' The Freedom of the Seas' ). In it de Groot argued just
that: that no state could exert exclusive jurisdiction over the ocean, and that the
ships of every nation were at liberty to sail wherever they chose in pursuit of trade.
Itmight better have been titled Free Trade .The particular legal issue that deGroot
was tasked to address was the Portuguese claim that, following the papal division
of the world between themselves and the Spanish in 1494, the Dutch East India
Company (or VOC) had no right to be sending ships into East Indian waters. The
book arose in very particular circumstances, and in the service of very particular
interests. It was a gauntlet thrown down against the Portuguese, but with enough
general force to be a slap in the face of any nation that might seek to block Dutch
entry into global trade, and enough legal logic to mark the beginning of what we
know today as international law.
The incident that set this dispute going took place on 25 February 1603, at the
southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, known today as the Singapore Strait. A VOC
captain, Jacob van Heemskerck, had been trawling for spices around the southern
edge of the South China Sea for a year without much success. The first port of
call for the Dutch and English merchants newly arriving in South-East Asia at this
time was Bantam, a small independent kingdom and trading port at the west end
of the island of Java. Van Heemskerck had been able to load five ships with spices
here the previous spring and send them back to the Netherlands, but his principal
goal was to break the stranglehold that Portugal had over spice producers in the
Molucca Islands to the east of Java, known as the Spice Islands.
Portugal was pursuing a vigorous campaign to keep the new interlopers from
northern Europe out of its trade zone, executing captured Dutchmen as a warning
ofthelengthstowhichitwaspreparedtogotokeepitscompetitorsoutofthismar-
ket. Van Heemskerck made no headway in the Spice Islands and went west to Pat-
tani, an international port on the east side of the Malay Peninsula. There he struck
up a relationship with Raja Bongsu, the brother of the sultan of Johor, a small re-
gional power that occupied the southern tip of the peninsula and which had de-
claredwaronthePortuguesefortheirhigh-handedtacticsintheregion.VanHeem-
skerck was desperate to come up with some way to make a fortune on this voyage,
and Johor was eager to rid itself of the Portuguese, so between them they hatched
a scheme to capture the next Portuguese cargo ship that passed through the Singa-