Sea - the Company had twenty-three factories spread throughout coastal India. The ‘Dell’arcano del mare’ (item 13) is one the “greatest atlases of the world” (Wardington): the first sea atlas of the world, but also the first to use Mercator’s projection; the earliest to show magnetic deviation; the first to show currents and prevailing winds; the first to expound the advantages of ‘Great Circle Sailing’ – the shortest distance between two points on a globe; and “perhaps less importantly the first sea-atlas to be compiled by an Englishman, albeit abroad in Italy” (Wardington). The EIC’s ascendancy in the Indian Subcontinent had reached a highpoint by 1668, when the Islands of Bombay (today’s Mumbai) were given to England by Portugal as part of Charles II’s wedding dowry. In 1711, the EIC opened up a massive new market when China’s Kangxi Emperor granted the Company rights to trade for tea and silver at Canton (Guangzhou). By 1720, the EIC’s activities accounted for fifteen percent of Britain’s total imports. It was not long before the Company had established factories in Banten ( Java), Ayuthaya, and Patani, and was conducting limited trade with Cambodia and Cochin-China. From Calcutta through the Malacca Strait and beyond While the EIC was preeminent in mainland India, the Dutch still dominated Indonesia, the Malay Peninsula. Nevertheless, the largest separately-issued chart of the Straits of Malacca and Singapore of the eighteenth century was published in England (item 14), by the firm of Mount and Page. James Larken’s ‘A new and correct chart of the straits of Malacca, with the coast of malacca & part of the Island of Sumatra’ (1754-1761), based on VOC sources, is a very graphic illustration of growing English interest in the region. Even though the early Dutch and English voyages to the Spice Islands had used the Sunda Strait to access the Indonesian archipelago, the most proven route to the Moluccas was via the Malacca and Singapore Straits, held by the Portuguese from 1511 to 1641, when it came under Dutch rule. Imagine the surprise and delight of the English, in 1795, when as the result of an extraordinary turn of events, including the French Revolution, the exiled ruler of the Netherlands, Prince William of Orange, offered his English custodians control of all Dutch colonies, to prevent them too falling into the hands of the French. The EIC immediately occupied Malacca. Java followed in 1811, with Thomas Stamford Raffles, who is credited with being the founder of modern Singapore, appointed Lieutenant-Governor of the colony. In 1818, Raffles persuaded the EIC to establish a base at Singapore, the strategic location of which one Captain Alexander Hamilton had identified in 1703: “a proper place for a company to settle a colony on, lying in the center of trade, and being accommodated with good rivers and safe harbours, so conveniently situated that all winds served shipping 8
DANIEL CROUCH RARE BOOKS
JOURNEY TO THE EAST
