Early Navigation in the Asia-Pacific Region: A Maritime Archaeological Perspective

282 Pages·2016·13.1 MB·English

by  Chunming Wu (eds.)

Chunming Wu E ditor
Early
Navigation in
the Asia-Pacific
Region
A Maritime Archaeological Perspective
fi
Early Navigation in the Asia-Paci c Region
Chunming Wu
Editor
Early Navigation
fi
in the Asia-Paci c Region
A Maritime Archaeological Perspective
123
Editor
ChunmingWu
TheCenter for Maritime Archaeology
Xiamen University
Xiamen, Fujian
China
ISBN978-981-10-0903-7 ISBN978-981-10-0904-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0904-4
LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2016943955
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Foreword
MaritimearchaeologyisundergoingtremendousgrowthinEastAsiaandaroundthe
world.Thisgrowthstemsfromanumberoffactors—fromincreasinglysophisticated
technologythatenablesmoreeffectiveexaminationofdifficult-to-reachsubmerged
sites and more precise mapping and visualization of underwater contexts, to
development projects that have exposed buried coastal remains hitherto unknown,
such as the thirty-seven shipwrecks discovered in a buried harbor in Istanbul
exposedduringtheconstructionofanewsubwaystationandtheexposureofburied
shipremainsinthefoundationofthenewWorldTradecenterbuildinginNewYork
City, to the political significance of maritime archaeology in the South China Sea
and other parts of coastal Asia that has inspired an increasing interest (and conse-
quentlygreaterpolitical and financialsupportfor) new research.
In this book, a distinguished group of respected scholars of maritime archae-
ologyhavecometogethertopresentexamplesandsyntheticdiscussionsofthenew
archaeological research on early navigation in the Pacific region. The papers
include exhaustive summaries of known shipwrecks from the ninth century
onwards to the period of globalized maritime trade dominated by European mer-
chant networks, and overviews of the origins and development of the trade in
porcelains made for European markets. Also included are discussions of specific
shipwrecks and material remains directly related to maritime trade, including col-
lections of porcelains from trading ports and European-inspired architecture from
thevarioussettlementsthatsawaninfluxofforeigninfluenceduringthisperiodof
profound change in East and Southeast Asia.
InEasternAsia,archaeologistshaveinvestigatedshipwrecksofbothlocalAsian
and European origin in southern China, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines,
Indonesia,andMalaysia.AlongthePacificcoastoftheUSAandMexico,anumber
ofSpanishshipwreckshavebeendiscoveredaswell.Thesematerialsillustrateearly
pan-PacifictradingbetweenEastAsiaandtheWesternworldviathetradecenterof
Acapulco, Mexico, early European colonization in Eastern Asia, and resulting
issues of expanding globalization. In addition to these sixteenth–seventeenth-
century shipwrecks, there are also dozens of known shipwrecks predating the
v
vi Foreword
sixteenthcentury,revealingmaritimeculturalinteractionbetweencoastalChinaand
Southeast Asia, and the development of a local maritime cultural communities
predating the period of expansive European contact.
This book emerged from an international workshop held at Harvard University
inJune 2013 sponsored by theHarvard-YenchingInstitute and Xiamen University
called: “Early Navigation in the Asia-Pacific Region: A Maritime Archaeological
Perspective.” More than twenty participants from China, the Philippines, the UK,
Mexico, and the USA participated in this conference with presentations on new
research related to shipwrecks and related issues concerning maritime archaeology
of the Pacific region. The book compiles thirteen of the presentations in a compi-
lation of synthetic and specific studies that contribute archaeological and historical
studies to the literature on navigation and trade in the Pacific region around the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In an introductory chapter, Wu starts the volume off with a comprehensive
catalog of over 30 shipwrecks in the Asia-Pacific region. This is followed by a
historical contextualization of fifteenth-century Southeast Asia by Orillanda who
summarizes the diachronic change in the degree to which merchants from China
were directly involved in maritime trade. Next, Skowronek provides an important
discussion of the spread of East Asian materials into interior regions in the
Americasandthevariablevaluesassociatedwithvariousexoticcommodities.Fahy
and Walker Vadillo then discuss the beginning of the trans-Pacific route of the
Manila Galleons. They confront the puzzling question of why the much faster and
seemingly more efficient route north along the west side of Luzon island was not
preferred over the dangerous and complicated route called the “embocadero”
through the middle of the Philippine archipelago, arguing that an important reason
was that the embocadero provided opportunities for illicit trade. Dizon focuses his
paperontheexcavationofthePhilippinewreckoftheSanDiego,ashipforwhich
there is abundant historical information but the sinking of which is clouded in
mystery, as is the apparently intentionally inaccurate descriptions of the ship in
historical records.
Focused ontheother side ofthePacific,Junco examinesthewreckofa Manila
GalleoninBajaCaliforniaandillustratestheutilityasasourcetostudyshipwrecks
of a nautical treatise by Diego Garcia de Palacio, a Spanish ship captain and
would-beconquerorofChina.ThisisfollowedbyadetaileddiscussionbyVonder
PortenofKraakplatedesignsequencefromshipwrecksalongtheWesterncoastof
NorthAmerica.Thispapershowshowarefinedchronologycanbeusedtonarrow
down and deductively determine the identity of specific shipwrecks and describes
how the early days of porcelain trade reflect a testing of the market to see what
designs would be received well by European consumers. The next two papers
continue discussion of wrecks off the American west coast. Williams describes
recentworkontheBeeswaxWreckinOregonprovidingastrongargumentthatthe
ship was the Santo Cristo de Burgos, wrecked in 1693. Lally continues the eval-
uation of the Beeswax Wreck with a detailed analysis of collected ceramics, con-
cludingthatit isunlikelythat thewreckdates laterthan the1690sduetoalack of
Foreword vii
certain motifs that would have been common in a later wreck, and the presence of
certain attributes that fell out offavor around this time.
The last few chapters return to the western side of the Pacific. Liu describes
variousphases ofshipwrecks inEastAsia—fromthelatefifteenth centuryintothe
early sixteenth century—seeingatransition fromlocal trade networks inSoutheast
Asia to the advent of European involvement in the region and the emergence of a
European market for products of the region including spices and especially
porcelains starting in themid-sixteenth century. Ueda discusses recent excavations
inBanten,whichstartedasamajorpeppertradingcenterinearlysixteenthcentury,
wasseizedbytheDutchfromthesultanateinlateseventeenthcentury,andbecame
the location of an important Dutch fort dating to the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.Excavationshaverevealedashiftintheuseofceramicsfromafocuson
prestige goods used primarily by elites to a broader use of smaller tablewares by a
larger portion of the population. Deng reports on recent excavations of the
Xiaobaijiao wreck off the coast of Zhejiang, the contents of which illustrate the
complicated nature of sources from which ship cargos might come and the role of
private merchant firms off of China’s coast. Finally, Wu discusses the conflict
between local traders and Iberian merchants and the material changes in East Asia
resulting from this colonial encounter.
The material collected in this book relates to several important topics in
archaeologythathavesignificancewellbeyondthemaritimecontextsandhistorical
periods covered here. One such topic concerns the nature of culture contact and
colonialism in a world where some populations included specialist traders and
soldiers who possessed radically more effective technologies of violence, trans-
portation, and communication when compared with populations they encountered
during their travels. The degree of imbalance varied considerably across the
Asia-Pacific region, and the nature of the encounter, therefore, would have been
quitedifferentinBanten,thePhilippines,theChinesecoast,andvariouspartsofthe
western coast of North America.
The ability of archaeologists to tease out the interactions that occurred between
maritime merchants and local populations is strongly influenced by the available
source materials, which extend beyond the material remains from shipwrecks and
other archaeological sites containing tradematerial toincludehistorical documents
and oral histories. The papers in this volume employ a wide variety of source
material, from detailed analyses of ceramic chronology and function in the papers
by Lally, Von der Porten, and Ueda, to various historical documents, such as the
treatisediscussedbyJunco,tooralhistoriesofNativeAmericangroupsmentioned
by Williams in his assessment of the date of the Beeswax Wreck.
Likewise,variousaspectsofthematerialrecordreflectthecomplexprocessesof
cultural and technological hybridization that occur in many contexts of encounter.
Theshipsandtheircargosthatcompriseaparticularlycentralfocusofmanyofthe
papers in this volume and much of the broader literature on maritime archaeology
embodytheseprocessesintheircomplicatedidentities.Welearnthatitcanbequite
difficult to simply and straightforwardly assign a boat to a particular place or
group.Sometimesboatdesignscamefromoneplace,thematerialtomaketheboat
viii Foreword
from another, and the crew and cargo from a variety of locations and cultural
backgrounds. As Wu describes in his introductory essay, from the fourteenth to
fifteenth centuries the shipbuilding in the nascent maritime interaction sphere of
SoutheastAsiadevelopedintoahybridizedtechnology.Whatdoesitmean tobea
“Chinese vessel” in this context? Does this mean a Chinese design? A Chinese
crew?Chinesecraftsmanship?Chinesecargo?FahyandWalkerVadillo,similarly,
mention how some of the Spanish sailing in the South China sea were using local
vessels. The detailed descriptions of shipbuilding techniques and the sources from
which various components of ship cargos came reveal some aspects of these
complicated cultural palimpsests.
Another important theme in the volume concerns the related topic of global-
ization, which involved not just the expansion of influence from one part of the
worldtoothers,butalsoaseriesofsignificanteffects.Theseincludebroadlyshared
commonpracticesacrossalargeregion,thebringingtogetherofculturalinfluences
from a number of source, local variations on an emergent standardized set of
practices and idioms, and new forms of economic entanglement, including multi-
regional dependency and vulnerability. In Southeast Asia, we learn that while the
spicetradewasamajordrivingforcebehindthedevelopmentoflong-distancetrade
networks, other commodities played increasingly central roles, perhaps the most
important of which were trade porcelains. The porcelain trade is particularly rele-
vant to notions of globalization as we see how broad shifts in access to porcelain
from certain sources had major global effects on porcelain production in distant
places.AsdiscussedbyLiu,Ueda,andothersinthisvolume,shiftsoftheceramic
industry from China to Southeast Asia, Japan, and the Netherlands, each precipi-
tated by factors that impacted the availability of certain ceramics and the values
associatedwiththem,illustratethehighlyinterconnectedandinterdependentworld
that emerged through the development of maritime trade networks.
A final theme worth mentioning that relates directly to this topic of global
economic integration concerns the values of certain commodities. Skowronek, for
example, explicitly discusses the way in which perceived needs, desires, and
ubiquityandtheattemptstoimitatecertaincommoditiesallrelatetotheprocessof
generating value. His discussion of these factors with reference to porcelains and
mayolica “knockoffs” recalls the sort of value variability Sidney Mintz has dis-
cussedinthecaseofsugarintheAtlanticWorldandthatcanbeobservedinother
commodities as well. Furthermore, as Von der Porten discusses, the values of
porcelains that were obtained for the European market depended in large part on
issues of taste, which the merchants were only able to assess through a period of
experimentation, during which various grades of porcelains were evaluated
according to the profit margin they might generate for the merchants.
The papers all point out many more research questions that still need to be
addressedbyfutureresearch,andthetopicscoveredheremerelyscratchthesurface
when it comes to breadth of the discipline. This collection is particularly valuable
because of the diversity of the scholars who have contributed. Bringing together
thisgroupofperspectivesisnoeasytaskgiventherangeoflanguagesandresearch
orientations represented. Of course even more diversity could have extended the
Foreword ix
geographicalscopeofthecollection.Itisnoteworthythatworkspecificallyfocused
on Japan or Vietnam is not present in the volume, but this simply highlights the
needtomorecomparativeresearchinfuturediscussionsofthistopic.Theresulting
volumeismultifacetedandcomplexlikethearchaeologicalcontextsofshipwrecks
and trading centers that are studied, and it serves as a valuable contribution to the
globalized field of maritime archaeology.
Rowan Flad
Harvard University
Contents
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii
Co-sponsoring Institutes—HYI and CMAXMU. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxiii
1 A Summary on Shipwrecks of the Pre-contact Period
and the Development of Regional Maritime Trade Network
in East Asia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Chunming Wu
1.1 Investigation of Pre-contact Shipwrecks in Eastern Asia . . . . . . 2
1.2 The Origin and Sailing Routes of the Shipwrecks:
Case Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.3 The“FourOceansNavigation”SystemandMaritimeCultural
Interaction among Seas Surrounding China before European
Arrived in 16th Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2 Of Ships and Shipping: The Maritime Archaeology
of Fifteenth Century CE Southeast Asia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Bobby C. Orillaneda
2.1 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.2 Historical Background of Fifteenth Century Southeast Asia. . . . 30
2.2.1 The Rise of Melaka and Ayutthaya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.2.2 The Fall of Angkor, Majapahit and Champa . . . . . . . . 34
2.3 The Shipwreck Evidence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.3.1 Rang Kwien (c. 1400–1430) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.3.2 Nanyang Shipwreck (c. 1425–1450). . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
2.3.3 Ko Khram (c. 1450–1487) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.3.4 Pandanan Wreck (c. 1450–1487) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
2.3.5 Royal Nanhai (c. 1450–1487) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
xi