Closing the Sea - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 37

donned male armour and men wore women's robes - was taken out of historical
context to prove that God condemned cross-dressing. It is a historically inaccur-
ate interpretation, Selden demonstrates, although he ducks out of religious contro-
versy at the end of his treatise by wryly declaring, 'I abstain to meddle.' But he
has meddled, and the lesson is crystal clear. Theologians who fail to go back to
the original sources shouldn't use scripture to harass people they don't like. The
antiquarians were doing their work. It was the Puritans who were 'exceeding busy
about nothing'.
The point here is that fluency in Hebrew and other ancient Middle Eastern lan-
guages was the new methodology for serious history. It had been part of the new
methodology that resulted in the King James Bible, yet in the hands of scholars
like Selden it would become a tool to discover flaws in its text. As Oriental studies
changed the rules of scholarship in all fields of historical and legal study, the abil-
ity to read Asian languages became the cutting edge for the creation of new know-
ledge in the humanities. Selden's last great scholarly project, on the early history
of the political constitution of the ancient Jews, might look from a distance like
just another case of 'bare and sterile antiquity', but that was not what he was up
to. He delved into this lost tradition for the explicit purpose of uncovering the con-
stitutional principles that should underpin the constitution of Parliament. In Stuart
England the smart people were reading ancient Oriental languages. The fact that
Europeans were moving into the contemporary Orient in ever greater numbers at
this very time only made this curriculum more compelling.
So perhaps it wasn't only the law of the sea that prompted Selden to acquire a
large Chinese map. He was certain that every manuscript encoding Oriental know-
ledge had the potential to reveal world-changing knowledge, and should therefore
becollected andpreserved,evenifnoonecouldyetmakesenseofit.Althoughthe
poet John Milton declared Selden 'chief of the learned men reputed in this land',
and the popular Welsh writer James Howell in 1650 declared, 'Quod Seldenus
nescit, nemo scit' - 'What Selden doesn't know, no one knows' - not even John
Selden could read Chinese. But he didn't need to read Chinese to grasp the geo-
graphy of the map. It would have been no challenge for him to pick out the spot
where, forexample, VanHeemskerck captured the Santa Catarina at the southend
of the Malay Peninsula in 1603. He couldn't have read the place-name by which
Chinese knew Johor, but he should have been able to construe the lines that go in
andoutofJohor'sharbourandconnectittothemainshippingrouteconnectingthe
Gulf of Siam with Melaka.