The Book of the Ocean

by Ernest Ingersoll

With that grand awakening of interest in education, industry, and discovery which took place in the fourteenth century, the city of Venice gained the lead in power, and her merchants became the most enterprising and wealthy. It was the expansion of commerce that urged the explorations that marked the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for by this time Venice had her banks—the first in the world to approach the character of modern banks—and her exchange on the famous Rialto bridge; Genoa was in close rivalry; Spain was gathering immense quantities of gold in South America; and England was coming to the front as a maritime power. The trade with Cathay—as India, China, and the Oriental islands were called collectively—was chiefly by caravans across the Persian deserts, and Spain, England, and Holland had small shares in it, since the only water-route known was through the Mediterranean and Red seas, where, between the perils of the ocean, the extortionate charges and stealings of the Arabs (who carried the cargoes from vessel to vessel across the Isthmus of Suez), and the risk of capture by Algerian pirates, there was little chance left for profit to either merchants or ship-owners.

To western Europe, then, Vasco de Gama’s discovery of the route around the Cape of Good Hope was a long advantage, and England and Holland at least were quick to seize it. The great “East India Companies” of the Dutch and English were formed by a group of powerful merchants in London and in Amsterdam, who were given vast privileges by their governments in respect to trading in the East. The Dutch company was not founded until 1602, two years after the English company, but it soon became the more prominent of the two, and was one of the principal means by which the Netherlands secured the preponderance of the carrying trade of the world, bringing to her ports, by the middle of the seventeenth century, almost all the commerce previously enjoyed by Cadiz, Lisbon, and Antwerp, and making very serious inroads upon that of London and Bristol. The Dutch East India ships, copied from the Genoese carracks, were the biggest merchant vessels then afloat, well able to cope with many of the war-ships; and two hundred of them were at this time engaged in the Asiatic trade alone.

A CLIPPER ESCAPING FROM THE “ALABAMA.”

It was in aid of the English rival company not only, but as an attempt to save and revive the commercial position of England generally, that Cromwell’s “navigation laws” were enacted, prohibiting the carriage of goods to or from British shores except in ships owned and manned by Englishmen,— laws that were aimed directly at the Dutch, and led to the long wars of the latter half of the seventeenth century. These were called wars for the supremacy of the sea, but actually they were a prolonged struggle for the biggest share of the world’s trade, which is the only real value of the “supremacy of the sea.” It is a saying that “trade follows the flag,” and so it does; but at the beginning the flag goes were the trade is to be had.

These companies were so mixed up in the politics of their respective governments that it would be a long task, although entertaining, to trace their growth, which is really that of western civilization in the East. They equipped fleets of merchant and war vessels, established forts, carried on small wars along the Oriental coasts, and were really little kingdoms within kingdoms, because of their wide monopoly, enormous wealth, and the national importance of all their enterprises. The final result was that, as Great Britain finally overcame the Dutch and French at home, so her East India Company ousted them from India; but it was not until 1858 that old “John Company,” which had come to be regarded by the natives of India as the government itself, was dissolved, and resigned its territories to the crown and a system of trade open to all the world.

Those were slow and costly times compared with the present, though seeming to us full of a romance impossible now. A voyage around the world occupied three years, and to go from London to Calcutta and back took from New Year’s to Christmas under the most favorable circumstances. Another important change, too, has gradually come about. Formerly, the vessels were owned almost entirely by the merchants themselves, or by a company of them; they paid all a ship’s expenses, and put into her a cargo of their own wares. They would send to China, for instance, cotton goods, household furniture, hatchets, tools, cutlery and other hardware, farming implements, and fancy goods of all sorts. In return the vessels would bring silks, tea, and porcelain, which would go into the owners’ warehouses and be sold in their own shops. Shipper, importer, and merchant were all one.

Now this is changed. The importers and merchants of London, Hamburg, and New York are not often those who own vessels and bring their own goods. Instead of this they have agents, who live permanently in each of the foreign ports, where they buy the merchandise they want and hire a vessel, or the needed space in a vessel, belonging to somebody else to bring them home. By the old way, the nation which had anything to sell carried it to the nation that would buy it, and brought back the best thing it could get in exchange; now the merchants go to various parts of the world, buy their cargoes, and order them sent home, in substantially the same way as you go a-shopping in town.

This has brought out a new department of sea-labor, unknown, as a class, a century ago—the business of carrying goods which the owners of the vessels have no property in. In London, New York, Hamburg, and all other seaboard cities of this and other countries, the great majority of the shipping is owned, not by the merchants of the city, but by “transportation companies,” who agree to carry cargoes at a certain rate.