Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 24, 1933. TRADE AND EMPIRE

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 147, 24 June 1933, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 24, 1933. TRADE AND EMPIRE

In an essay-entitled "Observations concerning the Trade and Commerce of England with the Dutch and other Foreign Nations 7 which is said to have been presented by Sir Walter Raleigh in manuscript tb James I soon after his accession But is of doubtful authenticity, a striking picture is presented of the almost complete dependence of England's foreign trade at the beginning of the seventeenth century upon Dutch enterprise. In the ordinary trade between England and Holland there were 500 or 600 Dutch ships employed and less than a tenth of that number of English. . When England was short of corn, one reason. was that nearly £200,000 worth of it had been exported' from the three ports of Southampton, Exeter, and Bristol ialone in Dutch and German ships. With a permanent store of 700,000 quarters.of corn} none of' it home-grown, laid up at Amsterdam, Holland herself • was never short, and it Avas remarked that "a dearth of one year in England, France, Spain, Portugal, or Italy sufficed to enrich Holland for seven years after." Nor ,'was England any more capable of ■ looking after her own fish than after her own corn. The best fisheries in the world were on the British' coasts, yet the Dutch carried to the four great Baltic ports of Koenigsberg, Elbing, Stettin, and Hamburg £620,000 worth of herrings every year, while England sent none at all. A similar disproportion prevailed in the completely external trade. In the supplying of north-eastern. Europe with wine and salt, mostly from France and Spain, England had not a single ship employed, but Holland had nearly a thousand. And, speaking generally, the writer's conclusion was that for some years "past the foreign trade of England had been decaying rather than extending. It is a surprising and distressing story. England's foreign trade, which had formerly depended in,turn upon the ships of the Hanseatic League and of Venice had now been transferred in very large measure to those of Holland. Yet in 1588 one. of the decisive battles of the world had been fought at"sea and' won by England. Pursuant to a Papal award and the Treaty of Tordesillas, Spain and Portugal had divided the; great oceans 6f the world-,between them two. years after Columbus had covered America. The western Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific belonged' to Spain. Portugal was satisfied with the Atlantic south of Morocco and the Indian Ocean. After enduring for nearly a century these pretensions were finally shattered when the great Spanish Armada was defeated by the little ships of England, fighting alone. Yet not her seamen and merchants but those of Holland were the first tb take advantage of the opening of the high seas that was thus effected. They had already established themselves in the legitimate business of carriers of the East India trade from Lisbon to the/ports of northern Europe, while English enterprise mostly took the form of privateering, not to say piratical, adventure in the west. The splendid use that the Dutchmen made in European waters of their great start has been sufficiently indicated by the "Observations" of Raleigh or the. Pseudo-Raleigh above quoted. But within seven years .after the defeat of the Armada the: Dutch turned their attention to the East, and there they got a five'years' start which the British never fully caught up. In his article on "The Influence of the Spice Trade on World History" in the April "Nineteenth Century," General Sir Percy Sykes indicates what the Holland of today owes to the promptitude of these pioneers. In 1595, he writes, they dispatched a pioneer expedition, the leader of which brought back a treaty with the King of Bantam, in Java. This important success, as it was considered, was followed up by fleets sailing annually and the formation of tho United Company, to which sovereign powers were delegated. The Dutch attacked the Portuguese wherever they mot thorn. In the Spice Islands, their prin--cipal objective, they ultimately succeeded in driving them out, and firmly established themselves in tho Malay Archipolago, which from that time bocame the scat of their power. The Dutch might possibly have postponed for a long time the competition of a more dangerous rival than Portugal if they had not been a little too greedy. Canning wrote in his rhyming dispatch: v In matters commercial The fault of the Dutch. Is giving too little And asking too much. The Dutchmen of an earlier day werte naturally betrayed into the same weakness by their monopoly in:

lhe Spice Islands. It is recprded in the first letter-book of the East India Company that in 1599 the merchants of London were shocked by the action of the Dutch in raising the price of pepper from 3s per pound to 6s and even Bs. . Even "our somewhat sluggish ancestors," as Sir Percy Sykes calls them, were unable to stand this, and a petition was presented to Queen Elizabeth who in the following year granted a charter to what was ultimately called the East India Company. ' - But the operations of the East India Company were at-.first on a very small scale and it had a long and doubtful struggle. Nor were its methods at the outset always v&at the present age would regard as respectable. Queen' Elizabeth's charter granted a licence;- V ,' to her loving subjects that "they at their own adventures, costs and charges, as well for the honour of."this our Bealm of England as for the,,increase aud advancement of trade ; an\l .merchandize within the realm, etc., might adventure after merchandize, gold, pearl, jewels, and other commodities, which are tp be bought, bartered, procured, exchanged, or otherwise obtained. There is a charming naivety about that concluding phrase, "or otherwise obtained." .* What the company or its agent, could not acquire by purchase, barter, or exchange they might "otherwise obtain." Whatever, may have been meant by the phrasev it covered a very wide/range, of which John Lancaster, who commanded the first English expedition to the Spice Islands since Drake's, took full advantage. A large part, at any rate, of the valuable cargo, including 1,000,0001b of pepper, which he brought home, was "otherwise acquired" by the plunder.of a Portuguese ship. But Lancaster, who was only out to "supply his necessir ties," was, as the chronicler says, very glad of this help and very thankful to God for it, and, as he told me, he was much bound to God, who had eased him of a heavy care, and that ho could not W thankful enough to Him for this blessing given him. And ;he was "in due time rewarded with a title.. '_•-_'. The reason why the East India Company was beaten by the' Dutch in the competition for the Spice Islands is explained as follows by -Sir William Hunter in a passage which General Sykes quotes:—In the first quarter of pie seventbe. t_ century, the strength of England was not less than that of Holland. But .he English, were not as yet prepared to risk a little for tho Indian trade; .the English sovereigns would risk nothing. The Dutch people and the Dutch Government were ready to risk much. Holland brought to the struggle!; a slowly acquired knowledge of the Eastern trade, a vast patriotic subscription from the United Provinces, and a resolve alike of her people and her Government that the Spice Islands' should pass to no other hands but their own. Beaten in the struggle for the Spice Islands the East India Company was compelled to fall back' upon India, where it built its first fort at^Madras in 1639, and in view of the company's origin it is open .for those who like tracing big events to small,causes to say that Britain owes her Indian Empire to a .quarrel about the price of pepper. /