John Saris and the China Captain - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 62

Rather than paintings, send prints, he advised. Paintings 'they esteem not, but had
ratherhaveprintedblackpaperwithshipps,horses,men,battells,burdsorsuchlike
trifles'. The inventory of visual images in the Hirado factory reveals that maps of
Britain outnumbered paintings and prints by two to one, but Cocks does not men-
tion whether he thought these could sell.
____________________
Thomas Smythe had appointed John Saris three years earlier to command the
eighth voyage of the East India Company to Asia. He left England in April 1611
and after trading along the coast of India reached Bantam in October 1612. He
soon set sail for the Spice Islands to prospect for spices. While his first obligation
was to make money for the Company, he was sent with a political purpose as well,
which was to challenge the recent Dutch effort to displace Spanish dominance of
the spice trade in the Moluccas - the Spice Islands. These tropical volcanic islands
arescatteredbetweenSulawesiandNewGuineatowardstheeasternendoftoday's
Indonesia.Theecologyofthewettestnorthernislandsinthisarchipelago-Ternate,
TidoreandMatyan-wasperfectforgrowingnutmeg,clovesandmace,spicesthat
fetched their weight in gold back in Europe. The trade was an old one, controlled
by local chiefs and handled by Chinese and Muslim traders before Europeans ar-
rived.
JohnSariswasthereineffecttochallengetheVOCpositionlaidoutbydeGroot
in The Free Sea . If the seas of East Asia were as free as de Groot said they were,
the English should be able to trade there. This wasn't how the Dutch saw the situ-
ation.HavingchewedoffpartsofthePortugueseandtheSpanishempires,theyhad
no intention of letting the English in on the spice trade. Saris was there to test the
proposition. The Dutch were completely unwilling to let the English into the trade.
Every time Saris approached a local ruler to set up a trade deal, he found himself
blocked by the Dutch. Even small sales were scuppered. Whenever a prospective
sellercameforwardwithclovestosell,Dutchmenwhoweretherebeforehimused
'a mixture of coaxing and intimidation', as the historian Martine van Ittersum has
phrased it, to prevent the English from doing any business.
When Saris reached Matyan, in mid-March, a local headman came aboard the
Clove to discuss trade, but two Dutchmen accompanied him to make sure the
man didn't sell the Englishmen anything and to threaten the pilot who had guided
Saris to the island. The Dutch had taken control of Matyan five years earlier,
and they insisted the English had no right to be there. Having conquered by the