Maritime and Oceanic History

"In 1603, Dutch Admiral Jacob van Heemskerk plundered a Portuguese merchantman, the Santa Catarina, travelling from Macao to Melaka. The sale of the cargo at a public auction made traders across Northern Europe aware of the riches to be reaped from Asian trade. However, the episode raised legal questions and the United Dutch East India Company (VOC) commissioned the young Hugo Grotius to defend Heemskerk's actions. Grotius produced two classic legal texts, The Law of Price and Booty and its spin-off, The Free Sea, among the greatest works in the history of international legal and political thought. His observations dealt with free trade in the East Indies, the Dutch Republic's military conflict with the Portuguese and Spanish in Asia, and the legal and moral grounds for attacking and plundering Portuguese and Spanish mercantile shipping.

This book considers the background to the treaties then content and significances, and what Grotius actually knew about Southeast Asian politics and Portuguese institutions of trade and diplomacy when he wrote them.

Grotius' work on the freedom of the sea was a cornerstone in his enduring reputation as one of the founders of modern international law. The present book provides a valuable resource for historians of Southeast Asia and for students of international relations, political theory, maritime history and public law.
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Admiral Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge who also served as a director in the Dutch East India Company’s Rotterdam chamber for three decades during the early seventeenth century, set sail from the Dutch Republic in 1605. He launched an attack on Portuguese Melaka in 1606 and signed landmark treaties with Johor and Ternate in the same year. On his return to the Netherlands in the autumn of 1608 he began to write a series of epistolary reports and memoranda which were received and carefully studied by leading policy makers in the Republic at the time, including Hugo Grotius and Jan van Oldenbarnevelt. This paper provides an overview of the materials that survive in Dutch archives and specifically delves into his evolving conclusions about security, trade, and diplomacy in Singapore, Batu Sawar and the Johor River Region at large.

La ruta comercial conocida como Nao de China, Galeón de Acapulco o Galeón de Manila, se instituyó rápidamente como la base para la consolidación del control político y económico que la corona española buscaba mantener e, incluso, aumentar en las recientemente descubiertas Filipinas. Se trataba de un enclave estratégico de primer orden, ante las ambiciones expansionistas de sus rivales portugueses que, con anterioridad, ya se habían instalado en las cercanas Molucas. Tanto es así, que esta ruta se mantuvo en funcionamiento 250 años, desde 1565 hasta 1815, y se encargó de comunicar los mercados orientales y europeos, conectando puertos estratégicos como Manila, Acapulco o Veracruz,  en los continentes asiático y americano para, desde éste último, enlazar con Europa a través de Sevilla. Se trataba de una ruta comercial que pretendía aprovechar los nuevos territorios imperiales, y el apenas explorado océano Pacífico, para posibilitar la llegada de los productos asiáticos a Europa a través de una nueva vía, frente a las tradicionales terrestres constituidas desde siglos atrás, como la tan famosa Ruta de la Seda, y al reciente descubrimiento portugués del paso que bordeaba África.

This paper examines Hugo Grotius’ ideas on the freedom of navigation on the high seas and Southeast Asian maritime practices in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. In the past Charles H. Alexandrowicz (and closely following him Ram Prakash Anand) had argued that Grotius’ position – which was admittedly unusual in a European legal context at that point in time – had been influenced by early Dutch experiences in the island world of Southeast Asia. Recent Grotius research, however, has debunked these positions as both speculative and false. At the time of writing or revising his treatise Mare Liberum for the press (ca.1604-9), Grotius possessed only a very shallow knowledge of Asian maritime practices. This paper aims to take the analysis a crucial step further: Did the polities of insular Southeast Asia really pursue a policy of Mare Liberum as has been generally surmised by some legal historians and IR theorists? What concepts of maritime space prevailed, and how do they compare with Grotius and some of his contemporaries? A careful scrutiny and comparison of key concepts will yield some unexpected results.

"Abstract:
For just over 100 years steamboats ruled the waterways of the southeastern U.S., providing necessary transportation of both people and goods. One of the last steamboats to navigate the waters of the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee and Flint River System was the Barbara Hunt (1929-1940). Her short life and lonely death at the confluence of these three rivers mirrors the rise and fall of the steamboat as a viable means of transportation through the changing technology of the twentieth century. Through ethnohistorical research and archaeological investigations by Brockington and Associates, the story of this once proud ship is now being retold.

The Barbara Hunt:
The Barbara Hunt was built in Osage City, Missouri in 1929. She was about 100 tons and measured 100 feet by 22 feet with a depth of hold of 4 feet. The Barbara Hunt was powered by a 137 horsepower engine. She was operated with a crew of five. She was a stern paddlewheeled towboat and her first home port was Saint Louis, Missouri. While in St. Louis from 1929 to 1938 she was owned by Bilhorn, Bower and Peters. In 1938 the Columbus Towing Company purchased the Barbara Hunt and brought her to serve in the Chattahoochee, Flint and Apalachicola River systems. Once in the southeast she carried out the same tasks as she had back in Missouri which was transportation of goods such as cotton, fertilizer and passengers. The Barbara Hunt served as a packet. A packet is the term given to a regular passenger route between a set series of destinations. The only known officers that served aboard the Barbara Hunt were Art Groves and George Antrainer. While in Missouri she was captained by Art Groves (1936-1938), and piloted by George Antrainer (1938). The records are unclear as to who her officers and crew were when she arrived in Columbus. Sometime around 1940 she was used by a gravel company located south of the town of Chattahoochee, Florida as a tug boat. It is unclear from the background research if the Barbara Hunt was sold to the gravel company, or just leased to them. On June 12, 1940, the Barbara Hunt sank along the Apalachicola River south of the Victory bridge close to Chattahoochee, Florida. She had been abandoned some time before this and allowed to sink unceremoniously into the river.

The Rise and Fall of River Traffic Along the Apalachicola River:
Long before well maintained roads, rivers served as the best economical way to transport goods and people throughout the interior of the southeast. The Chattahoochee, Flint and Apalachicola Rivers all served as major arteries that pumped the economic heart of the southeast. During the early 1800s the Apalachicola River began to rise in importance as steamships became the perfect instrument for navigating the sometimes shallow rivers due to their flat hulls which gave steamboats a shallow draft. Cotton was king for the Apalachicola River. Steamboats would transport massive amounts of cotton and other raw materials down to the mouth of the Apalachicola where it was offloaded, then goods were loaded that had been brought in via the Gulf of Mexico on ships. These goods were then transported back up the river to waiting consumers. When the railroads reached various major production areas in the 1850s the river transportation system started to see a decline. It was slow at first, but continued to worsen. After the Civil War and the decline in the importance of cotton in the south, the river transportation system suffered. But a final blow came in the early 1900s when the once happenstance roads of the southeast started to undergo a major improvement. During this steady decline in river travel, the United States Army Corps of Engineers continued working to keep the rivers a viable means of transportation and commerce. The Corps of Engineers dredged the rivers and later began a series of locks and dams to regulate the drastically fluctuating water levels in the river due to rainfall and drought. Once overland transportation vastly improved, the Apalachicola River along with many other rivers ceased to be a viable means of transportation."

"The various pages of this blog offer you insights into the multiple ways how the humanities can cooperate and interact with ocean research. You find the following information on the blog's permanent pages:

"About this Blog": In how far is ocean research of interest to the humanities?

"Humanist Ocean Research": Insights and suggestions for humanist approaches to important topics in ocean research.

"Humanist Projects": Read about three projects on storm floods and tsunamis that already have been carried through.

"Maritime Disasters": Probably the no. 1 on the list of topics that fascinate not only humanists, but also the general public.

"Why Humanities?" And what exactly is it that the humanities can contribute to enhance ocean research? Read about the specific talents and competences that humanists can add to enrich inter- and transdisciplinary ocean research.
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"Four hundred years ago, the Dutch humanist and jurisconsult Hugo Grotius was commissioned by the United Netherlands’ East India Company (VOC) to write a defense of Admiral Jakob van Heemskerk’s seizure of a Portuguese merchant carrack in the Straits of Singapore (February 1603). At the time he was twenty-one years old. What Grotius produced between 1604 and 1606 is a comprehensive political and historical exposé on war. Today, this work is known as De Jure Praedae Commentarius, or “Commentary on Law of Prize and Booty”. Only part of this comprehensive manuscript was published during its author’s lifetime and is known as Mare Liberum or “The Free Sea” (1609).
Mare Liberum is essentially a propagandistic treatise and argues for Holland’s merchants to freely access emporia in Asia by unimpeded navigation across the high seas. The freedom of navigation forms a subset to the overarching arguments on the freedom of access and trade. This particular assessment of Mare Liberum stands in sharp contrast to past interpretations, insofar as these have placed the ‘freedom of the seas’ - and not the broader issues surrounding ‘free trade’ - at the forefront of scholarly attention. From this vantage point, Grotius was surprisingly consistent in his thinking on the broader issues of maritime trade and navigation.
During the first two decades of the seventeenth century, Grotius lent a helping hand in the process of forging political and commercial treaties between the VOC and Asian rulers. Far from championing peace and the freedom of navigation on the high seas for which the Dutch humanist is best remembered in modern times, Grotius should also assume a place among the intellectual fathers of Dutch colonial rule in Asia."""""

""The article re-evaluates maritime routes from Venice to the Levant and back from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth centuries, casting doubt on the conclusions arrived at by historians working within the primarily geographic approach. The paper examines records from over 150 voyages, such as diaries and travelogues of travelers and pilgrims, as well as taking into consideration geographic studies and various navigational aids used today. The study concludes that during this period, Venetian vessels sailed greater distances and much farther from the coast than had previously been thought, and that crossing open water was an integral part of any long distance voyage.

The study was undertaken for the MA dissertation at Tel Aviv University's Department of History under the supervision of Prof. Benjamin Arbel, and accepted by Prof. David Jacoby.

Online access follow the link below. If you are having hard time finding it, please write me."