1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [85]
American silver was not the sole cause of the upheaval; still, threads of silver link the revolts against Spain in the Netherlands and Portugal, the ruinous Fronde civil war in France, and even the Thirty Years’ War. Flynn and Giráldez said that one of their contributions was to point out that the turbulence in Europe, though devastating, was “a kind of sideshow—most of the silver actually went to Asia.” And not just to some generalized part of Asia. A disproportionate share of the silver ended up in a single port in a single Chinese province: Yuegang, in Fujian.
“A FINE BOATLOAD OF WOODEN NOSES”
Once one of the world’s most important ports, Yuegang has become a nondescript industrial suburb. The sole remaining sign of its former prominence is a three-story, hexagonal tower that was once part of the city walls. When I visited not long ago, the gate was locked; I had to wait for a neighbor to show up with a key. Inside the tower were signs of occupation by a homeless man: grubby blankets, empty ramen packets, girlie magazines. All I could see from the top of the tower was a printing plant and a smoky trash dump and the long rectangles of spinach and tobacco fields. The docks where chroniclers had described junks “packed together like fish scales” were almost empty. Only the geography was unchanged: beyond the harbor was the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan itself, and the South China Sea.
By the mid-1580s, barely a decade into the galleon trade, Yuegang was sending twenty or more big junks to the Philippines every March, at the start of the rainy season. (Before the silver boom, just one or two small ships went there, even during the intervals when trade was legal.) As many as five hundred merchants crammed aboard each ship with every imaginable commodity: silk and porcelain, of course, but also cotton, iron, sugar, flour, chestnuts, oranges, live poultry, jam, ivory, gems, gunpowder, lacquerware, tables and chairs, cattle and horses, and whatever else the Chinese thought Europeans might want. “Some just brought little bits of stuff,” said Li Jinming, a historian at Xiamen University who is the author of a history of Yuegang. “Whatever they could get their hands on. They could sell it at a big premium.” Merchants with little capital could only obtain goods to sell by borrowing at high interest rates. “They had to leave their wives and children with the lender as security,” Li told me. “If a trader died, the family was out of luck.” Lenders took everything they had to repay the contract. If that was not enough, he said, “the wives and children would become servants. The lender could sell their labor to someone else—it was like slavery.”
Typically each ship was chartered by a wealthy trader, who rented space in the hold to the others, usually for 20 percent of the merchant’s gross sales. Belowdecks was a warren of sealed, watertight compartments, windowless and barely the size of a closet, in which traders stored their goods. Porcelain was packed tightly in cases, Li said, with rice separating the plates and bowls. “They injected water on all sides, then set down the case in a humid place. It glued the ceramics into a solid, unbreakable mass.” Theft was rare aboard ship—thieves couldn’t escape with their loot. Nonetheless, merchants brought their own food, slept atop their goods, and stayed inside their dark, noisome compartment during the entire ten-day passage to Manila.
“If they could, they went only once,” Li said. Small-scale traders tried to avoid repeat voyages—“the trip was too dangerous.” The small islands and shallow water in the harbor restricted shipping to several narrow channels, along which oceangoing vessels had to be slowly pulled by smaller boats. Wokou lurked in the fog. To draw pirates from their hiding places, merchants sent out scouts in fast, maneuverable galleys. If they spotted wokou, they could skip away with a warning. Because the scouts could not travel as far as the Philippines, the last