47

National and International Labour Markets for Sailors in European, Atlantic and Asian Waters,

1600-1850

Matthias van Rossum, Lex Heerma van Voss, Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen

The Armenian merchants Babtisto Basilion and Wandy Metree were not the luckiest of men. Residing in Manila when Spain declared war on England in 1780, they were expelled by the Spanish governor because they hailed from Madras and therefore were suspected of “attachment to the English.” Despite the monsoon, which made it impossible to sail for Madras, the merchants were forced to leave Manila immediately. With few options left, they purchased a small sloop and recruited a Portuguese pilot and a mixed Macau, Chinese and Indian crew. Together with an expelled French padre, the polyglot company set sail for Macau, sent on their way with only a Spanish flag and a pass ap-proving their journey. Before they reached Macau, however, Santa Reta was sighted by Captain John Fasker of the British vessel Hornby and seized as a prize of war. The merchants filed a complaint against the seizure of their ship, and the case went to the High Court of Admiralty for further judgement. We owe the story of their odyssey to the documentation collected in the court file.1

The case of Santa Reta points to a number of aspects of early modern maritime labour markets. Crews were not necessarily recruited from one na-tionality, nor were they of the same nationality as the owners of the ship or the captain, as was the case in this example. Early modern sailing involved the mobilization of large numbers of workers, both for the merchant marine and – especially during wars – for the navy. The great demand for sailors, in particu-lar in maritime centres, necessitated recruitment from a wide catchment area. Moreover, crews continually had to be refreshed while under way, not only because of the deaths but also because part of the crew often chose to jump ship. This recruitment in “foreign” ports could involve the enrolment of large

1Great Britain, National Archives (TNA/PRO), High Court of Admiralty

(HCA) 32/440. Some of the issues touched upon in the European part of this article have been treated more extensively in Lex Heerma van Voss, Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen, “Sailors, National and International Labour Markets and National Identity, 1600-1850,” in Richard Unger (ed.), Shipping Efficiency and Economic Growth, 1350-1800 (Leiden, 2011), 309-351.

Van Rossum, et al.

48

numbers of men. For these reasons maritime labour markets tended to be nei-ther local nor regional but rather national, international or even intercontinen-tal. In this essay we try to assess how crews were composed in different mari-time theatres and try to explain the patterns found. To accomplish this we employ the so-called “Prize Papers.”2 In times of war, merchant vessels belonging to enemies were regarded as lawful prizes, taken and sold for profit by naval ships or privateers. The most famous collec-tion is in the British National Archives, where documents pertaining to tens of thousands of ships, mainly Dutch and French, but also Spanish, Portuguese, Scandinavian, German, Italian and American have been preserved. These ves-sels and all their paperwork were taken by English privateers or men-of-war between about 1650 and 1815.3 To establish whether a ship was actually en-emy property and therefore a lawful prize, over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the English developed a distinct and elaborate procedure. They would confiscate any ship’s papers or other written material found on board, and a special naval court would question the master and a number of other crew members. Each had to answer a list of questions; under Charles II these were a fixed questionnaire of eighteen items which subsequently evolved until it con-tained thirty-four questions under George III.4

2S.W.P.C. Braunius, “Het leven van de zeventiende-eeuwse zeeman: valse

romantiek of werkelijkheid?” Tijdschrift voor Zeegeschiedenis, Nos. 40/41 (1980), 11-22; and David J. Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter, 1990).

3Other similar collections, albeit more limited in scope, exist in Denmark, Sweden and France. In Denmark, prize papers for the early 1810s can be found at the Rigsarkivet in the records of the Tyske Kancelli Indenrigske Afdeling and those of the Admiralitetet. Other examples are in the archive of the Københavens Søret; we thank Erik Goebel at the Riksarkivet for this information. The French Archives Nationales have prize papers in the Fonds de la Marine, serie F2 and elsewhere. The Swedish Riksarkivet holds the records of the Kommitterade till överseende av fördelningen av arméns flottas priser, Kommitterade över Prisreglementet (Priskommissionen); the Uppbringningar (SE/RA/757/42) and the Kaperiräkenskaper (SE/RA/51303) have re-cords on ships seized. In the Swedish Krigsarkivet are the records of the Kungl. Majts till 1714 års prisräkningars reviderande förordnade kommission, 1726-1727, and the Amiralitetskollegium, Kommissioner, Ej inordnade handlingar, which also contain pa-pers on ship seizures and privateering during the Great Northern War. The Landesar-chiv Greifswald has reports on Prussian prize ships captured in Pomerania, 1710-1714.

4Based on all this evidence the court decided whether the prize had been taken properly and what to do with the ship, cargo and crew. Great Britain, National Ar-chives (TNA/PRO), High Court of Admiralty (HCA) 32/8, for example, includes the ships St. Anne of Newport and Bogen, while HCA 32/800 includes records of the ship La Pauline.

National and International Labour Markets

49

Two types of data make this time-consuming, but readily available source highly useful for research into the questions discussed here. First, it combines data for each ship about origin, route and planned destination, ton-nage, freight and crew members with their origins. Second, it contains the results of the interrogations by the Prize Courts of the most important three or four men on board, mainly from the early eighteenth century onward. Part of these interrogations consists of pertinent, detailed questions about citizenship, national allegiance and personal migration history (we apply the concepts of citizenship and nationality in a very broad way, since they encompass in the early modern period membership in a variety of polities from cities to states, and not yet, as in the nineteenth century, exclusively nation-states). These es-pecially provide insight into self-ascribed identity. As the Prize Papers are international in nature, they make comparisons possible among various mari-time nations. The results here are based on a non-random sample of boxes with dossiers on prizes and their interrogations.5 Using the interrogations, we have constructed a database comprising 315 ships to provide an overview as repre-sentative as possible of ships from European maritime nations in European, intercontinental and intra-Asian shipping. Given the preliminary state of the project and the difficulties in finding a sufficient number of ships for specific routes and nations, the sample size of particular subcategories is not yet large. Further research will be necessary to find more cases for these categories.6

The present essay will discuss the recruitment patterns of leading European maritime nations in both European shipping and maritime activities elsewhere in the world. The comparison between the two leading maritime

5Boxes were selected to cover different wars and seas. By and large we made

no further selection within boxes but processed all the interrogations we found to con-tain a useful amount of data.

6The data for the research on European shipping are derived from TNA/PRO,

HCA 32/8/1-2, 32/13, 32/64/1-2, 32/76/1, 32/145, 32/208/1-2, 32/225, 32/289, 32/316/1-3, 32/332/1, 32/333/1-2, 32/335/1-2, 32/338/1-2, 32/343/1-2, 32/346, 32/356, 32/366/1-2, 32/369/1-2, 32/371/1-2, 32/372/1-2, 32/373/1-2, 32/374/1, 32/395/1-2, 32/396, 32/453/1, 32/488/1, 32/800, 32/801/1-2, 32/802, 32/1063 and 32/1068. The data for the research on intercontinental and intra-Asiatic shipping have been derived from HCA 32/97, 32/106, 32/108, 32/111, 32/112, 32/113, 32/114, 32/118, 32/122, 32/133, 32/136, 32/145, 32/147, 32/155, 32/156, 32/157, 32/160, 32/176, 32/186, 32/190, 32/193, 32/211, 32/229, 32/233, 32/236, 32/244, 32/275, 32/287, 32/293, 32/316, 32/342, 32/343, 32/345, 32/346, 32/347, 32/356, 32/359, 32/395, 32/399, 32/410, 32/418, 32/440, 32/444, 32/465, 32/469, 32/470, 32/492, 32/507, 32/518, 32/550, 32/556, 32/712, 32/1063, 32/1367, 42/281, 42/316 and 42/363. The series HCA 49 contains documents collected from prize courts outside Europe (Cape of Good Hope, Antigua, Bahamas, Barbados, Madras, Halifax, etc.). We consulted HCA 49/5/1-3, 49/14, 49/98, 49/99, 49/100 and 49/101. From these a small number of ships were added to the database.

Van Rossum, et al.

50

nations of northwest Europe, the Dutch Republic (or the United Provinces) and England, brings to light two different types of labour markets, one interna-tional and the other national. Within Europe the international maritime labour market of the Dutch Republic was the exception. As we will show below, an analysis of the Prize Papers shows that other European maritime nations fol-lowed the English pattern in which mainly autochthonous seafarers were em-ployed, only incidentally complemented by small numbers of foreigners. In addition, research into the Prize Papers opens the possibility to compare recruitment patterns of the European nations worldwide. Outside Europe, the leading European maritime nations were confronted with more complex recruitment issues. Longer travel distances and a more demanding climate resulted in higher death rates, while being far from home meant less choice in recruiting European workers. This meant that existing employment strategies had to be reconsidered and adapted. The “European pattern” was to a great extent maintained in intercontinental shipping to both Asia and the Americas. Within Asia, however, this had to be abandoned in favour of inter-national recruitment patterns that seem to have been similar to those common in non-European, intra-Asian shipping.

Sailing European Waters From the beginning of the seventeenth century the Dutch Republic found it difficult to allocate labour to meet growing demand in different sectors of the economy. To keep up with rapid economic growth, labour from outside the country’s borders had to be attracted. It has been estimated that halfway through the seventeenth century eight percent of the population of the Nether-lands consisted of foreigners.7 In the Republic’s core region, the province of Holland, the share of foreigners was much larger, around fifteen percent in 1600, eighteen percent in 1650, twelve percent in 1700, fourteen percent in 1750 and again twelve percent in 1800. In individual cities this figure could be much higher. In Amsterdam, for example, the share of the population born outside the Republic for the same years were forty, thirty-eight, twenty-five, twenty-seven and twenty-three percent, respectively.8 There was much variation in the participation of foreigners in the Dutch labour market, and over time within the same sector the share of for-eigners could fluctuate widely. It has been argued, however, that the participa-

7Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, “Niederlande,” in Klaus J. Bade, et al.

(eds.), Enzyklopädie Migration in Europa: Vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Paderborn, 2007), 95-109.

8Jan Lucassen, Immigranten in Holland 1600-1800: Een kwantitatieve be-

nadering (Amsterdam, 2002). This is also available online at www.iisg.nl/cgm/docu-ments/cgm-workingpaper3.pdf.

National and International Labour Markets

51

tion of foreigners in the Netherlands during the early modern period consisted of two distinct sub-periods. The first, which lasted from roughly 1600 to 1670, was characterized by a large influx of foreigners, mostly sedentary migrants who settled for a number of years, if not permanently.9 In the second (1670-1785/1790) the share of foreigners remained substantial, even if it declined somewhat. Among those foreigners, the number of temporary, non-sedentary migrants increased sharply, while that of sedentary migrants declined.

0

10.000

20.000

30.000

40.000

50.000

60.000

70.000

1600 1650 1700 1750 1800 1850

year

sailo

rs

Figure 1: Employment in the Dutch Maritime Labour Market, 1600-1850 Source: Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen, “Six Cross-sections of the Dutch Mari-

time Labour Market: A Preliminary Reconstruction and Its Implications (1610-1850),” in Richard Gorski (ed.), Maritime Labour: Contributions to the History of Work at Sea, 1500-2000 (Amsterdam, 2007), 13-42.

This latter development can also be traced in one of the most impor-

tant sectors of the Dutch labour market, that for maritime workers. The most recent estimate of the size of the Dutch maritime labour market from 1600 to 1850 shows that it was important from the very start of the Dutch Republic (see figure 1). In 1609 an estimated 47,000 men were already working on Dutch ships. Employment grew by a little over 10,000 men in less than thirty years. This increase was in line with what could be expected from the eco-nomic expansion of the Dutch Republic in general. The subsequent contraction of employment in the maritime sector is not surprising since general economic performance worsened during the following decades. Compared to 1635, em-

9Jelle van Lottum, Across the North Sea: The Impact of the Dutch Republic on

Labour Migration, c. 1550-1850 (Amsterdam, 2007), chapter 4.

Van Rossum, et al.

52

ployment by 1694 had contracted by about 6000 men. During the eighteenth century the size of the maritime labour market rose again to almost the level of 1635. In the 1780 cross-section, close to 60,000 men were employed in mari-time activities. Subsequently, the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, the dissolution of the East India Company (VOC) in 1798 and the blockade of Dutch ports dur-ing the Napoleonic period had drastic consequences for maritime employment. By 1827 the number of sailors had declined by more than half to less than 25,000 men. By 1850 there was a small but unimpressive recovery of em-ployment levels.10 The end of the eighteenth century marked the end of The Netherlands as a leading seafaring country, and the maritime labour market would never again be as important for the national economy as in the early modern period.

Figure 2: Share of Foreigners in the Dutch Maritime Labour Market, 1600-1850 Source: Jelle van Lottum, Across the North Sea: The Impact of the Dutch Republic

on Labour Migration, c. 1550-1850 (Amsterdam, 2007), 136.

As was already noted, the native population was not large enough to keep up with the expansion in this sector, and immigrants were necessary to man Dutch ships. The importance of migrants in the maritime labour market, however, changed significantly over time (see figure 2). While between 1635 and 1785 the total numbers employed in the Dutch maritime sector remained relatively stable, the share of foreigners increased. In 1607 about fifteen per-

10Mathias van Rossum, Hand aan hand (Blank en Bruin): Solidariteit en de werking van globalisering, etniciteit en klasse onder zeelieden op de Nederlandse koop-vaardij, 1900-1945 (Amsterdam, 2009), shows that recovery came only after World War I but that employment never reached late eighteenth-century levels.

National and International Labour Markets

53

cent of all sailors were born abroad. By 1635 this rose to slightly over twenty percent, and by the end of the century it increased to just over thirty percent. The eighteenth century, for which only one survey year is available, showed continued growth in the share of foreigners: between 1694 and 1785 their pro-portion rose from slightly over thirty to just over fifty percent. After the end of the eighteenth century the share of immigrants declined quickly. In 1827 less than twenty-five percent of the maritime work force consisted of foreigners, and in 1850 it was only about thirteen percent.

The international character of the Dutch maritime labour market may be contrasted with England, the other leading northwest European maritime nation of the early modern era. English maritime labour research in the past few decades has focussed on the Royal Navy, for instance in the impressive body of work by N.A.M. Rodger. Whereas the Royal Navy used the notorious “press,” the Dutch labour market had no institutionalized forms of coercion. The sole exception was during wartime when Dutch merchant ships were for-bidden to leave port until the navy had the necessary number of men.11 A second remarkable difference was in the countries of origin of the sailors. Compared to the Dutch market, the English labour market was much less international. Whereas the Dutch relied to a great degree on immigrants, the English did not. While even the Royal Navy attracted a number of non-natives,12 the literature generally is not very precise about numbers. Nonethe-less, it is clear that these were not large. The English merchant marine was no different.13 Using the geographical origins of deponents in the High Court of Admiralty, Peter Earle showed that of a sample of about 1500 sailors, eighty-three percent were born in England, twelve percent in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and the Channel Islands, and only five percent outside the British Isles.14 The obvious question is why the English maritime labour market was so different from its Dutch counterpart. A simple geographical explanation is possible: Holland and England each had a recruitment area which was suffi-cient to man the ships of its fleet. They both recruited from areas at roughly the same distance, but given the larger size of the British Isles, the sailors that

11Jaap R. Bruijn, The Dutch Navy of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

(Columbia, SC, 1993), 130. 12N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy

(London, 1986), 158. 13Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth

and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1962; reprint, Newton Abbot, 1972), 307.

14Peter Earle, “English Sailors, 1570-1775,” in Paul C. van Royen, et al. (eds.), “Those Emblems of Hell?” European Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market, 1570-1870 (St. John’s, 1997), 81, table 4.

Van Rossum, et al.

54

England recruited were subjects of the British crown while the Dutch had to depend more on foreigners.15 Elsewhere in Europe maritime recruitment resembled the English more than the Dutch model. A brief tour d’horizon along the European coasts indicates that, with some qualifications, in European seafaring the international recruitment typical of the Dutch Republic was the exception and that primarily national recruitment was the rule. In France, maritime recruitment was over-whelmingly national, especially along the Atlantic coast.16 Spain also manned its fleets mainly from within its borders. In a measure that resembled later English legislation, for security reasons Spain limited the number of foreigners to six per ship in 1658. In Spain, as in France, wartime naval demands on maritime labour markets could lead to somewhat higher numbers of foreigners. The main catchment areas were Portugal, Malta and Italy.17 Danish fleets usu-ally were manned from Denmark and other possessions of the Danish crown.18 In Norway, some immigrant Dutchmen held positions in the fleet, but crews consisted mainly of Norwegians, supplemented by Danes and Swedes depend-ing on which country Norway was subject to politically.19 If the larger maritime nations thus resembled England more than the Dutch Republic, some smaller maritime nations shared the latter’s difficulty of a small homeland combined with large maritime ambitions. The city-republics in northern Germany, like Hamburg and Bremen, had such small hinterlands that they often had to rely on what were technically foreign crews. These were found nearby, however, and the majority were both culturally and linguisti-cally German.20

15For further details, see van Lottum, Across the North Sea. 16T.J.A. Le Goff, “The Labour Market for Sailors in France,” in van Royen,

et al. (eds.), “Those Emblems of Hell?” 300-311.

17Carla Rahn Phillips, “The Labour Market for Sailors in Spain, 1570-1870,” in ibid., 337-339; and Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century (Baltimore, 1998), 54-55.

18Hans Chr. Johansen, “Danish Sailors, 1570-1870,” in: Van Royen, et al.

(eds.), “Those Emblems of Hell?” 244-246. 19Gustav Sætra, “The International Labour Market for Seamen, 1600-1900:

Norway and Norwegian Participation,” in ibid., 173-210. 20Michael North, “German Sailors, 1650-1900,” in ibid., 256-258; and Heide

Gerstenberger, “Ganze Dörfer widmeten sich vorwiegend dem seemännischen Beruf?” in Gerstenberger and Ulrich Welke (eds.), Zur See? Maritime Gewerbe an den Küsten von Nord- und Ostsee (Münster, 1999), 107-137.

National and International Labour Markets

55

Another solution was found by Venice and Portugal, maritime nations which in terms of population size and maritime importance were not unlike the United Provinces. Yet they relied not only on free recruitment like the Dutch but also on the recruitment of forced labour, slaves and other unfree sailors provided by their colonial empires.21 In this sense the Spanish and French na-vies had two faces; a Mediterranean one with unfree labour on their galleys and an Atlantic one with free workers.22 At the other end of the continent in the Baltic, there were also unfree sailors and galleys. The Swedish state, which had little private maritime interest upon which to rely, manned its fleet (and its army for that matter) through conscription, including in dependent Finland. In coastal areas, sets of four farms had to supply one sailor and to house and feed him outside of the campaign season.23 The European maritime labour market of the seventeenth and eight-eenth centuries was thus tripartite: a central zone, including the Dutch Repub-lic, with free labour markets which dealt routinely with crews which consisted of about half foreign nationals; an intermediate zone, comprising Denmark, England, the German city-states, the Austrian Netherlands, France and Spain, with labour markets which were mainly free and generally consisted of its own nationals, usually supplemented by not more than ten percent of foreigners; and an outer zone in the Baltic and Mediterranean, where recruitment involved both free and unfree sailors (conscripts, convicts, prisoners of war and slaves) from among its own population, dependent states and slave-selling areas.24

Data from the Prize Papers confirm these patterns. Ships from the Mediterranean or the Baltic which did not leave those inland seas were not included in the sample. It is important to note here that there was a slight bias

21Jan Lucassen, “Labour and Early Modern Economic Development,” in Ka-

rel Davids and Jan Lucassen (eds.), A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in Euro-pean Perspective (Cambridge, 1995), 376-378; Geoffrey V. Scammell, The World En-compassed: The First European Maritime Empires, c. 800-1650 (London, 1987), 106-108, 173-176 and 268-269; and Pierre Cabanes, Histoire de l’Adriatique (Paris, 2001), 249-251.

22André Zysberg, Les galériens: Vies et destins de 60,000 forçats sur les galères de France, 1680-1748 (Paris, 1987); and Jan Glete, Warfare at sea, 1500-1650: Maritime Conflicts and the Transformation of Europe (London, 2000), 54-59.

23Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Re-

public and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500-1600 (London, 2002); and Yrjö Kaukiainen, “Finnish Sailors, 1750-1870,” in van Royen, et al. (eds.), “Those Em-blems of Hell?” 211-232.

24In the case of unions of the crown in the second group, fellow subjects of the prince (e.g., Scots and Irish on the English fleet or Norwegians and citizens of the Duchies on the Danish fleet) are not counted as foreigners.

Van Rossum, et al.

56

in the data. Some of the interrogations gave figures for different nationalities among the crew, while others mentioned that all belonged to a certain nation, or that the crew was “from diverse nations” or consisted of “Swedes and Danes” or other nationalities. Among this group, only those that mention that all crew belonged to one nation can be quantified. Table 1 therefore somewhat under-represents mixed crews.25 With the limitations mentioned above, the sample confirms the impression in literature that crews on Dutch ships were much more international than those from the intermediate zone.

Table 1 Crews and Nationality in European Shipping, 1664-1803

No. Ships No. Crew Nationals

(%) Foreigners

(%) Total (%)

Dutch Republic 71 551 62 38 100 Scandinavia and Germany

36

307

94

6

100

France (Atlantic) 28 904 99 1 100 Source: Prize Papers Database, July 2008. Across the Atlantic and Beyond The European pattern can be compared with recruitment patterns elsewhere. As has been shown for the Dutch maritime labour market, levels of recruit-ment of national and foreign sailors could differ for various branches of seafar-ing. The Prize Papers, combined with other sources, make it possible to shed light on recruitment patterns of the maritime nations of Europe outside the confines of the Continent. With regard to Atlantic shipping, the European maritime countries developed recruitment patterns resembling that of intra-European shipping. A good example for this can be seen in French Atlantic shipping (see table 2). Out of a collection of twenty-six French ships with an Atlantic destination, only a small portion were manned by mixed crews; most had a crew consisting of only or predominantly French sailors. A somewhat less representative col-

25Calculated from those examinations in our sample that either mentioned that

all crew were from one nation or numbered the crew members for each nationality. This excluded a number of Dutch ships where the skipper declared that his crew was from different countries (e.g., Bogen in 1672 [TNA/PRO, HCA 32/8] or Eendraght in 1780 [TNA/PRO, HCA 32/316]. Only masters of Dutch ships gave this answer. Some answers were of the type “Swedes and Danes,” and these were also excluded because they were not specific enough to count. This means that crews from one nation are over-represented in the table. Another bias was that earlier prize papers seldom offered the complete data used in this table.

National and International Labour Markets

57

lection of Spanish ships engaged in Atlantic trade seems to confirm the conclu-sion that recruitment patterns for the intermediate zone in Atlantic shipping were to a large extent a continuation of European patterns.

Table 2 Crews and Nationality in Shipping to and from the West Indies, 1741-1803

No. Ships

No. Ships with Mixed

Crew

Nationals (%)

Europeans (%)

Unknown/Non-European (%)

France 26 3 92 99 1 Scandinavia and Germany

6 6 37 94 6

Dutch Republic 5 5 44 100 0 Spain 3 0 100 100 0

Source: Prize Papers Database, August 2009.

The adoption of European patterns in the Atlantic trades can also be seen in Dutch shipping: Dutch ships sailing westward tended to be manned internationally.26 The Dutch Atlantic ships that have been taken from the Prize Papers confirm this picture, since all Dutch ships in the sample sailed with mixed crews consisting of Dutch, German and Scandinavian sailors. In Atlan-tic shipping, however, this international recruitment pattern seemed not to have been restricted to the Dutch. As evidence in the Prize Papers indicates, this pattern was also used by Northern European vessels. The number of Danish, Hamburg, Prussian and Bremen ships sailing to a cross-Atlantic destination is limited, but those in the 1750s and 1790s showed recruitment patterns similar to the Dutch. Most were manned by mixed crews comprising sailors from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the various German states and some Dutchmen, sometimes completed with the odd English, Spanish, French or “Negro” crew member. These mixed crews were recruited in various places, such as Ham-burg, Copenhagen or even St. Eustatius in the West Indies, but in half of the cases recruitment was carried out in Amsterdam.

The fact that most European countries relied on European seamen for the Atlantic trade can be explained by the relatively short trip – and hence rela-tively low mortality – but also by the virtual absence of networks or traditions of seafaring in the Atlantic region before the ascent of European Atlantic ship-ping. In the East Indies, however, Europeans entered waters where both re-gional and long-distance maritime networks and labour markets had long histo-ries. At the same time, European vessels faced the problem of high death rates and the need to replenish their crews en route and in Asia.

26Van Lottum, Across the North Sea, 137.

Van Rossum, et al.

58

For the English East India Company (EIC), it has been emphasized that from the seventeenth century Asian sailors, both individually and as com-bined lascar crews, were used on the return voyage to Britain. Little is known about the extent of this phenomenon, however, especially for the seventeenth century. With regard to the eighteenth century, some scattered references seem to indicate that the number of Asian sailors on the EIC’s return voyages was rather small, amounting to only 138 arrivals in Britain in 1760 and 167 in 1780.27 It seems that besides this small segment of Asian sailors, British sailors commonly were employed in English intercontinental shipping between Europe and Asia, corresponding to the pattern for European shipping.

Likewise, the VOC recruited in ways similar to other branches of Dutch shipping. Dutch East Indiamen leaving for Asia were manned by mixed crews consisting of mostly Dutch, German and Scandinavian sailors. High death rates were compensated by recruiting more sailors than necessary on outward-bound voyages. This enabled the VOC to man homeward voyages with Europeans until late in the eighteenth century. Only in 1781 did the VOC recruit non-European sailors for returning vessels in Coromandel, Bengal, Ceylon, China and Batavia.28 After this date, significant numbers of Asian sailors were employed alongside Europeans.29

As the Prize Papers indicate, French ships sailing between Europe and Asia were also manned according to the European model (see table 3). Our sample includes nineteen French vessels sailing between Europe and Asia and eight ships with Asian destinations and departures.30 Of the nineteen French

27Michael H. Fisher, “Working across the Seas: Indian Maritime Labourers in

India, Britain, and In Between, 1600–1857,” International Review of Social History, LI, supplement (2006), 21-45.

28J.R. Bruijn, “De personeelsbehoefte van de VOC overzee en aan boord, be-

zien in Aziatisch en Nederlands perspectief,” Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden, No. 91 (1976), 218-248; Jan Lucassen, “A Multina-tional and Its Labor Force: The Dutch East India Company, 1595-1795,” International and Working-Class History, LXVI, No. 2 (2004), 21; and Ingrid G. Dillo, De nadagen van de Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie 1783-1795: Schepen en zeevarenden (Am-sterdam, 1992).

29For the five VOC vessels in our database sailing from Asia to Europe, at least two were manned with mixed European and Asian crews, amounting to forty-three percent of the total crew of the two ships and twenty percent for all five.

30With regard to France, all ships processed were marked as East Indiamen in the catalogue of the Prize Papers, combined with some additional vessels sailing to or in Asia without catalogue reference that have been found by chance. The problem of finding ships sailing to and from Asia – or in Asia where the intra-Asian database is concerned – limits the material available. For France, some of the ships in the cata-

National and International Labour Markets

59

ships sailing between Europe and Asia, only two were manned with mixed French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and American crews. It appears that despite possible shortages of European workers, the French were able to man their ships predominantly with nationals in the second half of the eighteenth century. The crews of nineteen French East Indiamen in the period 1744-1782 were 97.5 percent Frenchmen who boarded in France, Port Louis, Mauritius or Pondicherry.31 Although we have not yet traced French East Indiamen outside this period, it seems safe to say that during the larger part of the eighteenth century, recruitment patterns for French intercontinental shipping resembled the European and Atlantic patterns.

Table 3 Crews and Nationality in Seafaring between

Europe and Asia, and within Asia, 1744-1810

No. Ships

No. Ships with Mixed

Crew

Nationals (%)

Europeans (%)

Unknown/Non-Europeans (%)

France Europe-Asia 19 2 97 99 1 Intra-Asiatic 8 7 10 15 85 Dutch Republic Europe-Asia 5 5 32 77 23 Intra-Asiatic 17 16 4 11 89

Portugal Intra-Asiatic 1 1 7 13 87 Asian traders

Intra-Asiatic 4 4 14 5 95

Note: Figures for “Nationals,” “Europeans” and “Unknown/Non-Europeans” con-

cern all ships, including those with completely national crews, for which the number of nationals and Europeans were mentioned.

Source: See table 2.

logue are marked with the reference “East Indiaman” or “E.I.C.” Still, finding more French ships sailing for or in Asia in the Prize Papers without reference indicates that not all ships were marked. For other nations, however, there are unfortunately no ref-erences to indicate that a vessel might be an East Indiaman. For the Portuguese, no East Indiamen sailing between Europe and Asia have been located in the Prize Papers, but we did find one Portuguese craft engaged in an intra-Asian voyage. For Northern Europe, only the Danish ship America sailing from Batavia to Copenhagen in 1799 has been found thus far, but its small size (eighty tons) and small crew (eight Danish sail-ors) render it unrepresentative of shipping from the East Indies.

31The seven French East Indiamen on a homeward-bound voyage had an even

higher percentage of nationals; 99.3 percent of the crew were French.

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60

Beyond the Cape The tendency of European seafaring nations to retain familiar recruitment pat-terns is noteworthy for intercontinental shipping between Europe and Asia, especially when considering the problems of manning ships with sufficient European labour, especially for return voyages. This problem, however, was even more manifest for European shipping activities within Asia. Intra-Asian trade early proved quite profitable for Europeans. For example, the VOC needed the trade within Asia to generate revenues to buy Asian products. Its intra-Asian shipping developed into an important part of its activities in the first decades of the seventeenth century.32 Within Asia, however, the Dutch found it hard to maintain the pattern of sailing with mixed European crews.

Table 4

Crews and Their Origins employed by the VOC in Intra-Asian Shipping, 1691-1785

Total European

Sailors Asian Sailors Others

(soldiers, passengers) % Asian Sailors

1691 3098 75 2 1701 3593 3412 124 45 4 1710 4634 3712 331 548 8 1720 5630 4803 603 215 11 1730 4824 3911 595 251 13 1739 5043 3524 1115 265 24 1750 3559 2630 929 26 1785 1911 1095 816 43

Source: Database Generale Zeemonsterrollen, May 2009.

For the seventeenth century there are several references to the use of indigenous sailors on VOC ships sailing in Asia, but not until the start of the administration of personnel employed in Asia from 1691 onwards can we sys-tematically trace the employment of Asian labour in intra-Asian shipping by the VOC.33 A study of these so-called Generale Land en Zeemonsterrollen shows that right from the start Asian sailors were employed (see table 4 and figure 3). In the first year, seventy-five Asian sailors were enrolled, and in the

32Robert Parthesius, Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters: The Development of the

Dutch East India Company (VOC) Shipping Network in Asia, 1595-1660 (Amsterdam, 2007).

33Ibid.; and Lucassen, “A Multinational and Its Labor Force.”

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period 1695-1700 the number of Asians varied between 120 and 310.34 The number of Asian sailors increased sharply during the eighteenth century, and their share of the total number of sailors employed in Asia climbed to nearly half (42.7 percent) towards the end of the century. The data derived from the Generale Zeemonsterrollen are confirmed by the findings in the Prize Papers, although it must be noted that the analysis is limited only to the period 1781-1810. Of the various Dutch ships in intra-Asian shipping found in the Prize Papers, all except one were manned with mixed European and Asian crews.

0

1.000

2.000

3.000

4.000

5.000

6.000

1691 1701 1710 1720 1730 1739 1750 1785

Per

son

s

0

5.000

10.000

15.000

20.000

25.000

30.000

35.000

40.000

45.000

To

nn

age

Total crew Asian sailors Tonnage Figure 3: Tonnage of the VOC Ships Active in Intra-Asiatic Trade and Numbers of

European and Asian Sailors Employed, 1691-1785 Note: For the estimate of the total tonnage in intra-Asian shipping, see table 7. Source: See table 4.

34The Generale Zeemonsterrollen database was constructed using annual over-views of personnel employed in Asia by the VOC, both on land and at sea. During the seventeenth century occasional overviews were based on estimates. In 1686 the VOC decided to construct annual overviews called the Generale Land- en Zeemonsterrollen; the first, however, was probably not produced until 1691. The database contains all VOC ships in Asia in June of every year for the period 1691-1791. For the years 1702, 1707 and 1792-1795 no Zeemonsterrollen have been preserved. Although information varies over time, for most years it provides information on the crew, their origins (European or Asian), location of recruitment, hierarchical structure, wages and a few other characteristics. The database will be published in 2011 (www.iisg.nl/migration). More information on the VOC’s administration of personnel is in Femme S. Gaastra, De Geschiedenis van de VOC (Zutphen, 2007); and B.J. Slot, et al., “Inhoud en struc-tuur van het archief,” in Inventaris van het archief van de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), 1602-1795 (1811) (Den Haag, 1992). For information on intra-Asian shipping, 1595-1660, see also Robert Parthesius’ database which contains the size, movement and sometimes the crew. This is discussed in Parthesius, Dutch Ships.

Van Rossum, et al.

62

The Dutch, however, were not the only Europeans in Asia to diverge from familiar recruitment patterns. According to the Prize Papers, the French also systematically employed Asian sailors in their intra-Asian shipping. Eight ships of the French Compagnie de Indes sailing between Asian ports have been found in the Prize Papers for the period 1745-1781. On these vessels French sailors accounted for only ten percent of the total crew. Besides their own na-tionals, the French employed seamen from other European nations, born both in Europe and Asia. These mixed European crews were completed with mixed Asian crews, averaging a share of eighty-five percent of the crews in these ships.

Unfortunately, other European nations were less frequently recorded in the Prize Papers. The few vessels that have been found, however, indicate that the use of Asian sailors on European ships sailing from and to Asian ports was widespread. The presence of a lascar crew on the British privateer Hornby when it seized Santa Reta near Macao in 1780 might indicate a wider use of Asian sailors by Europeans in Asia. Furthermore, it is worth considering that the EIC’s practice of completing crews for returning vessels from Asia with Asian sailors might be indicative of a wider use of Asian sailors for shipping within Asia. Regarding Portuguese intra-Asian shipping, the only vessel that thus far has been recovered from the Prize Papers was also manned with a mixed European and Asian crew.35

It is important to note that as with many European crews, the Asian crews were usually diverse. From the Generale Zeemonsterrollen it can be deduced that Asian sailors employed by the VOC in intra-Asian shipping were recruited in places as wide-ranging as Bengal, Cochin, Surat and Negapatnam. The Asian crews consisted of mostly “Moors” or “Inlanders,” but these cate-gories seem to have had the same function as the term lascar in English: a group of Asian sailors of varied origin, religion and culture. In the second half of the eighteenth century the VOC also recruited Chinese and Javanese sailors and employed the various groups on board the same ships. The same held true for the Portuguese ship Antonio e Almas Santas that sailed in 1747 from Cal-cutta to St. Thomé with a crew consisting of “Black Christians” or “Black Christians and Lascars of different ports of India.”36 The muster roll of a French ship sailing within Asia with a partly Asian crew showed places of ori-gin for Asian crew members ranging from Cochin to Pondicherry and Cal-cutta.

The pattern of mixed crews used by Europeans within Asia seems to resemble recruitment patterns for non-European ships in Asia. Again, the few

35TNA/PRO, HCA 32/97/2; and HCA 32/440. 36Quotes from the interrogation with Captain Antonio Fernandez and super-

cargo Francisco da Cunha de Essa of the ship Antonio e Almas Santas. Ibid., HCA 32/97.

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findings of ships within Asia derived from the Prize Papers can be useful in reconstructing Asian recruitment patterns. The four Asian ships that have been found all used mixed Asian crews. The Chinese vessel Juffrouw Gogua sailing with a pass from the VOC from Palembang to Samarang in 1799 was manned by twelve Chinese and thirty-two Javanese sailors, as well as two young slaves. In 1780 the Moor ship of the merchant Balia Rauter, resident at Tenga-patu, sailed from Cochin to Negapatnam under the command of Marka Moelie with a lascar crew of fifteen men. The two Armenian ships likewise used mixed crews. The aforementioned Santa Reta sailed from Manila to Macau with a Portuguese mate and a crew consisting of Chinese, Indians and natives of Macau. Mahajoub sailed in 1750 from Cochin to Mocha and then for Ben-gal with a French captain, three Portuguese and thirty-eight “natives of differ-ent ports of India.”37 “Natives of Different Ports” It could be argued that the employment of crews recruited internationally, or even intercontinentally, might have had consequences for relations among workers on board and for labour productivity. On the one hand, hiring from a larger pool of maritime labour may have led to better-qualified crews. On the other, recruiting internationally might have had disadvantages based on differ-ences in identification, work customs, languages and (national) allegiances. The Prize Papers offer ways to address both issues.

For the first issue, the Prize Papers offer a direct way to test skills. Interrogated sailors were asked to state their age and sign their name. This gives information on general skills, such as literacy and numeracy. Even if the relationship between the ability to sign one’s name and literacy is not perfect, it is generally accepted that there is a relationship. In a similar way, the ages supplied by the informants give information about their numeracy. People who are not used to working with figures often give their age in round numbers, ending with five or zero, a phenomenon called “age-heaping.” Working from a separate sample of 966 masters and sailors interrogated in 1756-1783, Jelle van Lottum and Bo Poulsen have established literacy and numeracy rates for sailors of different nationalities. As might be expected, masters were both more numerate and literate than sailors, but there was also a remarkable dif-ference between sailors of different nationalities.38

37Ibid., HCA 32/712; HCA 32/342; HCA 32/440; and HCA 32/133.

38Jelle van Lottum and Bo Poulsen, “Estimating Levels of Numeracy and Lit-

eracy in the Maritime Sector of the North Atlantic in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Scandinavian Economic History Review, LIX, No. 1 (2011).

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64

When we focus on European maritime labour markets, illiteracy was lowest among Dutch and Danish crew members. Spanish, French and German sailors were more often unable to sign their names. Numeracy was highest for Danes, and also for those from the other Scandinavian countries. The overall age-heaping level of Scandinavian sailors was insignificant, which implies that they steered clear of doing this, while French, Dutch and German crews showed clear evidence of age-heaping and were thus less numerate. Spanish crews were even less numerate than those three groups. This leads to an inter-esting conclusion. On average, sailors were among the groups with the lowest stock of human capital in each society, but by hiring Scandinavian crew mem-bers, Dutch fleets actually increased their human capital stock. Recruitment from pools of relatively skilled seamen, as far as we can see in Europe, might have made the strategy of international recruitment and the employment of mixed crews as efficient as others. Again, the Prize Papers supply some interesting data. An example is given in table 5. Comparable ships of over thirty tons were selected from the database and categorized as Northern European (Scandinavian and German), Dutch or Southern European (French and Spanish). On the whole, tons per man were much higher for Dutch and Northern European ships than for those from Southern Europe. These data seem to suggest that Dutch crews were efficient, even if they were composed of crew members of different nationalities.

Table 5

Average Ship’s Tonnage, Crew Size and Average Tons per Man in European Shipping, 1672-1803

Region/Country N Average Tons Men/Ship Tons/Man Northern Europe 46 165 9.4 17.7 Dutch Republic 78 177 12.5 14.2 Southern Europe 31 108 24.2 4.5 Source: See table 1.

Extending the analysis of labour productivity from Europe to Asia is possible for Dutch shipping by combining the Generale Zeemonsterrollen with information from the Dutch-Asiatic Shipping (DAS) Project. While the Zee-monsterrollen list all vessels in intra-Asian shipping, containing information on the crew size of certain ships, the DAS database lists all voyages of VOC ships between Europe and Asia with information on ship size in tons. Most vessels in the Zeemonsterrollen can be traced in the DAS database; only for those built or bought in Asia is there no information on tonnage. These vessels, however, comprised less than ten percent of the fleet for most years except 1701 when

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twenty-two percent of the ships were untraceable. Linking information on crew size and tonnage enables an estimation of labour productivity (see table 6).39

Table 6

Crew, Total Tonnage and Tonnage per Man in VOC Intra-Asian Shipping, 1691-1785

Total Crew Total Tonnage

(extrapolation) Tons/Man

1691 3098 29,419 9.5 1701 3593 31,623 8.8 1710 4634 35,628 7.7 1720 5630 41,331 7.3 1730 4824 34,088 7.1 1739 5043 34,680 6.9 1750 3559 26,056 7.3 1785 1911 22,200 11.6 Source: See table 4.

These results can be checked and complemented using the Prize Pa-pers, which also provide a way to estimate labour productivity (see table 7). For the period 1778-1783, ships making intra-Asian voyages suggest an inter-esting difference between French and Dutch (VOC) intra-Asian shipping. Whereas French ships were much larger, they were also less efficient. The strong performance of Dutch intra-Asiatic shipping at the end of the eighteenth century is more or less consistent with the results based on the Generale Zee-monsterrollen for the same period. Labour productivity was lower for the French at the end of the eighteenth century and for the VOC during previous decades. Although labour productivity in intra-Asian shipping was not particu-larly high compared to European shipping, the use of mixed Asian and Euro-pean crews seems not to have seriously hampered efficiency. The tons per man ratios on Dutch and French ships in intra-Asian shipping were roughly compa-rable to shipping by Southern European nations within Europe.

39The total tonnage in table 6 is an extrapolation. For the years mentioned it

has been possible to trace between seventy-eight and 100 percent of the vessels from the Generale Zeemonsterrollen in the DAS database. Using crew size to determine the share of the ships for which tonnage was known, it has been possible to estimate the total tonnage of the fleet. Crew size seems a more useful variable than number of ships, since most unknown ships were likely smaller. Asian-built vessels that were not in the DAS were excluded because they did not make the passage from or to Europe. By us-ing the crew size variable, smaller ships sailing with smaller crews have less weight in the extrapolation.

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66

Table 7 Average Tonnage, Crew Size and Tons per Man in Intra-Asian Shipping,

1778-1783

N Average Tons Men/Ship Tons/Man French 5 418 68 5.9 Dutch Republic 11 180 26 10.2 Source: See table 2.

The Prize Papers are more difficult to use to test the skills, or the level of human capital, for the mixed crews in the intra-Asian branches of European shipping. One important reason is that in Asia the legal procedure required after a seizure was not always followed as closely as in other parts of the world. The absence of prize courts in the region until the end of the eigh-teenth century must have played a part. On some occasions privateers did not interview crew members after the seizure of a ship. In these cases it was often the privateers who were subjected to an interrogation, sometimes years later when they had returned to England. On other occasions, instructions for the interrogation were not followed accurately, leaving interrogations with only a couple of important questions, often without age and signature. Further, even when interrogations were done correctly, the privateers tended to interrogate mostly the Europeans. This leaves us with rather scattered information. For now, only one interrogation with an Asian sailor has been recovered that might inform us to some extent about the issues under discussion. Sarang Hodjee Subdee was employed on the Armenian-owned Maha-joub sailing from Mocha to Bengal under the French captain Francis Mon-simett with three Portuguese and an Asian crew. After the capture of the ves-sel, Hodjee Subdee was interrogated together with the French captain and the Portuguese first mate, Theodore Lobo. What is interesting about this case are the differences in “knowledge” between the three persons interrogated. The captain could state the tonnage of the vessel precisely but was unable to pro-vide the exact number of sailors on board. The sarang, Hodjee Subdee, on the contrary, was not informed about the ship’s tonnage but was able to state that “at the time she was taken and seized forty two mariners, besides ten passen-gers,…all natives of different ports of India, except the captain, and he was a French Man, that they all came on board at Chandernagore.” The sarang seemed better informed than the captain about the size of the crew and the place of recruitment. But Hodjee Subdee’s information was contradicted by the Siam-born Theodore Lobo, who stated that Mahajoub had, besides eleven pas-sengers, “thirty four mariners, including himself and the rest of the officers,

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on board the said ship” and “that the people had come on board at different places, and their complement was last compleated [sic] at Chandernagore.”40

It cannot be said with certainty who was correct and therefore who would have had responsibility for crew and recruitment, the Bengalese sarang or the Asian-Portuguese first mate. Normally we might expect the sarang to be in control of the lascar crew.41 The vague reference to the place of recruit-ment, however, is puzzling, even more so because the statement of the first mate – that recruitment was only completed at Chardanagore – corresponded with the statement of the captain, who declared that the crew “came on board at different parts of the river of Bengal.” Although it is impossible to assess the level of numeracy and literacy among Asian sailors, the case of Hodjee Subdee draws our attention to the possibility that able-bodied seamen did not necessarily have to be recruited in Europe. They could also be Asians like Hodjee, “born at Manapatam in the Kingdom of Bengal” and “a subject to the King of Bengal.”

International recruitment and the employment of mixed crews might have been at least as efficient as national recruitment strategies. It did, how-ever, call into question the identity and loyalty of the sailors employed. Estab-lishing “nationality” played an important part in the interrogations by the Eng-lish prize courts. This proved to be a complicated issue, as sailors were asked to state their place of birth, present and former places of residence, possible citizenships and the sovereign to whom they considered themselves subject. Allegiances could shift over time if sailors migrated, acquired citizenship in another town or had close relatives there. Different relationships could also link a sailor to more than one place or nation. Within the multinational context of the Dutch labour market, European sailors seem to have identified their connections on more complex lines, to stress more urban than national citizen-ship and to allow more for mixed and shifting spatial identities than simple national ones. It is clear that more loyalties than just nationhood were relevant, and that nationality was not uncomplicated.

Within Asia, additional lines of categorization seemed to have been important. Here, it could sometimes be enough to refer to crew members as being “European” in contrast to “natives of the East Indies.” Although alle-giances to the French or Portuguese king were still crucial, additional lines of identification were introduced. European sailors seemed to feel the need to distinguish, for example, between “European Portuguese” and “Indian Portu-guese.”42 For Asian sailors, categories based on birth or region of origin were

40TNA/PRO, HCA 32/133. 41See, for example, Fisher, “Working across the Seas.” 42See Antonio e Almas Santas (TNA/PRO, HCA 32/97/2); Mahajoub

(TNA/PRP, HCA 32/133); or Occident (TNA/PRO, HCA 32/492/1).

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68

employed, like “native,” “Javanese” or “Chinese.” But also important were identifications based on occupation – for example, being a “lascar” – or on religion, with references to “Black Christians,” “Caffers” or “Moors.”

Even if their nationalities differed, actual differences still may have been limited among members of the mixed northwestern European crews re-cruited for Dutch European and intercontinental shipping. On the eastern shores of the North Sea and the southern shore of the Baltic, Platt-deutsch functioned as a lingua franca, as did English on the western shores of the North Sea. It is likely that many Scandinavian and German seamen who served on Dutch vessels spoke at least a little Dutch. Furthermore, differences in work customs within the Dutch catchment area were probably limited.

Differences in languages and cultural backgrounds were likely to be greater within mixed European-Asian crews in intra-Asian shipping. Crews were composed of groups that could be from diverse regional-ethnic origins: Europeans, Chinese, Javanese or lascars. Even if the entire crew consisted of lascars, this could mean that sailors were recruited from ports as far apart as Cochin, Pondicherry and Calcutta. Although these lascar crews were held to-gether by strong social structures and subculture, this should not mask the fact that diversity was characteristic of lascar crews.

Despite this diversity, problems of loyalty, or distrust of Asian crews, do not seem to have prevailed. As we have seen, the strategy of employing mixed European and Asian crews was widespread among European seafaring nations in Asia. Different groups of European and Asian sailors worked on the same ships in the same functions. Further, wages for European and Asian sail-ors seem to have been the same or only slightly different. Asian sailors em-ployed by the VOC during the late seventeenth and the first half of the eight-eenth century earned a uniform wage of 7.5 guilders a month, the sarang (foreman) often received twelve and the sarang’s mate (second foreman) 10.5. These wages were not regarded as high by Asian sailors, as the VOC regularly reported difficulties in recruiting Asians.43 Able-bodied European sailors were often recruited for nine guilders. Younger and inexperienced sailors were paid only seven guilders, and boys only five.44 At the end of their contract in Asia, experienced and healthy European sailors were encouraged to extend their ser-

43Lucassen, “A Multinational and Its Labor Force,” 21; Parthesius, Dutch

Ships, 106; and W. Philippus Coolhaas (ed.), Generale missiven van gouverneurs-generaal en raden aan Heren XVII der Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (11 vols., Den Haag, 1960-1997) XI, 4, 85 and 307.

44Femme S. Gaastra, The Dutch East India Company: Expansion and Decline (Zutphen, 2003); Jaap R. Bruijn and Jan Lucassen, Op de schepen der Oost-Indische Compagnie: Vijf artikelen van J. de Hullu (Groningen, 1980); and Herman Ketting, Leven, werk en rebellie aan boord van Oost-Indiëvaarders (1596-1650) (Amsterdam, 2005).

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vice in Asia by raising their salary by one guilder.45 These differences in wages are very low compared to wage differentials in the nineteenth century. In 1848, for example, according to a House of Commons report British sailors earned up to nine times as much as Asian sailors (British sailors were reported to earn forty-five shillings per month, and lascars five shillings per month).46

Asian crews were employed in large groups on various types of ships. For the VOC we can see a steady rise in the shares of Asian crews on ships engaged in intra-Asian trade. From 1691 to 1730, the share of Asian crews varied from a quarter to a third. For example, De Groote Visserij, lying before Batavia when registration was taken for the Generale Zeemonsterrol in June 1691, had fifty-two Europeans and twenty-one Moorse matroosen (Moorish sailors). In the 1730s and 1740s, the average shares of Asians rose, averaging forty to sixty percent of the crew. Slot Aldegonda, lying at Samarang in June 1737, for example, employed a crew of twenty-five Europeans and forty-four Asian sailors registered as “Inlanders” (natives). On Hillegonda in 1746, three-quarters of the crew consisted of Asian sailors, as the ship was manned by 446 Moorse zeevarenden and 146 European sailors. These higher shares of Asian sailors continued for the rest of the eighteenth century, with the higher shares of Asian crews becoming less exceptional. In 1784 Europa was regis-tered at Rembang with a crew of ninety-four sailors, among whom only eight-een were Europeans, the rest being Chinese and Javanese.47 Problems of loy-alty seem not to have been omnipresent and were certainly not a reason against pursuing a strategy of sailing with mixed crews.

This does not mean, however, that there were never any problems with, or boundaries to, loyalty. The case of the French ship Le Fatchay illus-trates this well. Sailing from Mauritius to Pondicherry in 1745, the muster roll shows a crew with three French officers and one French carpenter, comple-mented by six Portuguese sailors, one Moor carpenter, two Moor caulkers, seven lascar officers and sixty-one lascars. Again, the large share of Asian sailors against only a few Europeans, and even fewer French, can be seen as a sign of relative trust. Before Siam, stranded English sailors waiting for an op-portunity to leave for an English factory managed to seize the French vessel. With too few sailors to man the large craft, the English could not dispense

45Pieter van Dam, Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie (7 vols.,’s-

Gravenhage, 1927-1954; reprint, ’s-Gravenhage, 1976), III, 313 and 317. 46Fisher, “Working across the Seas,” 45. On wage differences between Euro-

peans and non-Europeans in the Dutch intercontinental merchant marine during early twentieth century, see Van Rossum, Hand aan Hand, 37-40 and 253.

47Database Generale Zeemonsterrollen. The ships referred to are mentioned in

The Netherlands, National Archives, Archief van de VOC (1.04.02), 5232, 11707, 11767 and 11780.

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70

with the entire crew of the seized Le Fatchay. Distrusting the Asian sailors less than the French and Portuguese, the English sailors put on shore all the French and Portuguese except the carpenter. The English also put on shore part of the lascar crew that they deemed not strictly necessary. It is unclear whether this decision was taken out of concern for the lack of provisions or out of distrust of the lascars. If it were distrust, the English would soon be proven correct in their judgment. In search of provisions, the English sent the cooper and an-other European ashore with two boats, twenty-five lascars and two tindals (petty officers). They did not return the next day, however, and the English sailors, already “very suspicious of [the lascars] being treacherous to us” took immediate action. They “made a catamaran & sent two people a shore upon it to see if they could meet with our two men.” But they came too late: it ap-peared that the lascars had murdered the English and deserted with the boats. It was reported that the two men were “bound to a tree that was cut down, and cut & mangled in a most barbarous manner, they were warm when they came on shore, so that they [the lascars sent with the sloop] had not quite murdered them, when they went away with 2 boats.”

Ethnic tensions were not unknown among mixed crews. As several cases show, in different situations lines could be drawn in various ways. For example, the mutiny on the VOC ship Nijenborg near the Cape Verde Islands in 1763 was, according to J.C. Mollema, in part an ethnic conflict in which a mostly German group of rebels rose against Dutch officers.48 In the mutinies on Slot ter Hoge and Java in 1783, Asians rose against European officers. On Java, the Chinese sailors, outraged by bad conditions on board, murdered sev-eral officers. What was interesting here was the stance taken by the slaves and Javanese sailors on board. While the slaves were probably involved in the up-rising, and four of them committed suicide when the Chinese were taken pris-oner, the Javanese stayed neutral and the mandoer (foreman) of the Javanese even warned the remaining European officers of a second attempt at mutiny.49 Conclusion Maritime expansion in the early modern period was not only crucial for eco-nomic development but also depended on the active recruitment of labour which often involved long-distance migration and the emergence of geographi-cally extended labour markets. In this essay we have presented an overview of

48J.C. Mollema, Een muiterij in de achttiende eeuw: het afloopen van het

Oost-Indische Compagnie-schip Nijenborg in 1763 (Haarlem, 1933).

49Klaas van der Tempel, “‘Wij hebben amok in ons schip:’ Aziaten in opstand tijdens drie terugreizen op het einde van de achttiende eeuw,” in Jaap R. Bruijn and E.S. van Eyck van Heslinga (eds.), Muijterij: Oproer en berechting op schepen van de VOC (Haarlem, 1980), 123-147.

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the recruitment patterns of European nations for their shipping in European, intercontinental and Asian waters. Contrasting the English maritime labour market with the Dutch shows two clearly different patterns. In the Dutch case this meant the development of an international labour market from the early seventeenth century onwards, comprising important parts of continental north-western Europe and even regions outside Europe. In the contrasting English case it meant the development of a national labour market, more or less cover-ing the British Isles. Other European countries showed a pattern similar to that of the English. Most maritime labour markets in Europe were of a national character or at least limited to recruiting fellow subjects of their monarch.

Although national recruitment patterns were the norm, three important exceptions can be discerned. The first two were the Dutch maritime labour market for various branches of shipping and northern Europeans active in At-lantic shipping. Employing national crews in European waters, northern Euro-peans recruited northwestern European sailors of different nationalities for Atlantic shipping. Here, however, they seemed to have followed the Dutch international recruitment pattern, in several cases even recruiting in Amster-dam. The third important exception was European shipping in Asian waters.

In Asia, all European nations seemed to have abandoned familiar re-cruitment patterns and adapted to local conditions. The Prize Papers show that in intra-Asian shipping, Europeans not only ceased to sail with sailors of their own nationality but also started to sail with mixed crews comprised of both Europeans and Asians from diverse places of origin in each continent. Again based on our findings, this seems to be in correspondence with the way con-temporary Asian captains manned their vessels and what was possibly already common in Asia before the arrival of the Europeans.

This situation, with predominantly national recruitment except for Dutch shipping and European shipping in Asia, leads to two possible explana-tions. First, it could be argued that the small size of the Republic forced the Dutch to recruit internationally. Some smaller maritime nations might have shared the difficulty of a small homeland combined with large maritime ambi-tions, but they only seem to have been forced to recruit internationally for in-tercontinental shipping, as the example of northwestern European maritime nations shows. Maritime nations with larger homelands, like England or France, found it easier to recruit nationally. In Asia, all European seafaring powers sailed with mixed European and Asian crews. Here, what was a neces-sity for European maritime powers short on national crews fit well with re-gional practices. The experience of the Dutch in employing mixed crews in European waters might have rendered them more efficient in Asian waters where employing mixed European and Asian crews was also a necessity.

The widespread nature of mixed recruitment patterns within Asia, however, also fits a second possible explanation. It could be argued that the Asian experience of European maritime nations influenced their recruitment

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72

patterns in European and intercontinental shipping. Having learned in Asian waters to employ mixed crews, the Dutch may have started using a similar strategy in European and intercontinental shipping. Being more oriented to the Atlantic, the English and French maintained national recruitment patterns. The Portuguese case might be an interesting test for this second explanation, as they shared the “Dutch” characteristics of having a small homeland and an “Asian experience” early on. In order to test this, more research would be needed on Portuguese European and intra-Asian shipping. With the decline of Dutch maritime hegemony and the rise of the English at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth cen-tury, national maritime labour markets became increasingly important.50 It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that a second surge of interna-tionalization of maritime labour markets took place. In this flow of internation-alization, patterns that had been common in Asian seafaring became global, as Chinese, lascars, Javanese and Filipinos became indispensable on ships of all nations and in almost all branches of seafaring.51 This situation has not essen-tially changed since.52

Besides developments in recruitment patterns, the material presented in this essay shows that processes of identification and loyalty in early modern international maritime labour markets were complex. Despite some conflicts, the strategy of employing mixed crews did not seem to have been less efficient than employing crews of a single nationality.

50Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, The Mobility Transition in Europe Revis-

ited, 1500-1900: Sources and Methods (2010, IISH Research Paper No. 46), http://www.iisg.nl/publications/respap46.pdf).

51Fisher, “Working across the Seas;” and Ravi Ahuja, “Mobility and Con-

tainment: The Voyages of South Asian Seamen, c. 1900-1960,” International Review of Social History, LI, supplement (2006), 14, 21-45 and 111-141.

52Heide Gerstenberger and Ulrich Welke, Arbeit auf See: Zur Okonomie und

Ethnologie der Globalisierung (Münster, 2004); and Richard Gorski (ed.), Maritime Labour: Contributions to the History of Work at Sea, 1500-2000 (Amsterdam, 2007).