Book Reviews
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
BOOK REVIEWS Eric Axelson. Vasco da Gamma: The Diary of His ices will discover it to be an enjoyable, accessible, Travels Through African Waters, 1497-1499. and engaging account. It is certainly a good buy Somerset West, South Africa: Stephan Phillips for most research or university libraries. (Pty) Ltd., 1998. vii + 102, notes, appendices, bibliography, maps, illustrations. ISBN 0-620- M.A. Hennessy 22388-x. Kingston, Ontario Eric Axelson, former head of the Department of History at the University of Cape Town, is to be L.M.E. Shaw. The Anglo-Portuguese Alliance commended for producing a richly illustrated and and the English Merchants in Portugal, 1654- comprehensive new translation of this diary. 1810. Aldershot, Hants. & Brookfield, VT: Translations or the Portuguese original have been Ashgate Publishing, 1998. xii + 233 pp., maps, published previously in 1898,1947 and 1954. The photoplates, appendices, bibliography, index. US last of these, African Explorers (Oxford, 1954), $76.95, cloth; ISBN 1-84014-651-6. was also edited by Axelson, but it did not address the voyage from the coast of Mozambique to This work marks a further contribution by Dr. India and back. That shortfall has been avoided in Shaw to Anglo-Portuguese history in the seven• this valuable new edition, which also contains teenth and eighteenth centuries, significantly other useful features. developing her earlier studies, among them her The anonymous diary commences with da notable investigation into the serious effects of the Gamma's ship leaving Portugal and ceases some• inquisition on Portuguese mercantile wealth and where off Gabon - Axelson addresses why this is resources. Dr. Shaw now provides a general so in his long and highly informative introduction, discussion of political and mercantile relations which is the true value added in this new edition between the treaties of 1654 and 1810. It is based of the diary. Axelson uses the introduction to on an impressive range of British and Portuguese contextualize the diary and explore the problems primary sources, archival as well as printed, and associated with trying to determine the exact a considerable secondary bibliography. nature of da Gamma's ship, voyage, and the like. The work has four parts. The first two review The translation itself is new, and the diary re• the commerce between the two countries over the counts in brief detail this epic voyage from Portu• period, as well as the organisation of the British gal, around the Cape Horn, and on to India. It also consuls and the merchant factories in Portugal. includes much of the return voyage. The third part, comprising nearly two-thirds of the That discussion is further enriched by a book, examines in detail a series of special issues number of high quality colour and monochrome to do with customs duties and disputes; the Bra• illustrations and three appendices. The first ap• zilian corn import and Oporto wine export trades; pendix addresses the question of locating in the seamen and shipping; and the religious problems present the landing point at Natal as described in arising from a group of overwhelmingly the diary. Appendix 2 gives a brief synopsis of da Protestant merchants residing in a strongly Catho• Gamma's life following his 1497-1499 voyage. lic land. Pombal's attempts to redress Portuguese Appendix 3 addresses the Portuguese epic poem economic dependence on England deservedly 05 Lvsiados de Lvis de Camâs (1572), and a receive much attention. But the very important number of lesser known South African poems gold bullion import trade into England, and the influenced by the da Gamma epic tale. This last little recorded and officially noticed but still quite appendix is clearly the most novel - its utility was significant import of Newfoundland dried cod or not immediately apparent to this reader - but no bacalhau into Portugal, perhaps do not get the doubt it will appeal to others, and it is not without attention they deserve. The discussion throughout its own utility. That observation aside, I found is coloured by the sources used, being focussed on this to be a very valuable little book. Experts will official and institutional matters and problems. A find it a lovely addition to their library and nov• fourth part, a thoughtful conclusion, nicely rounds 103 104 The Northern Mariner off the volume, reiterating among other matters 1628 succeeded (at least in the seventeenth cen• the crucial role of British naval power in Anglo- tury) in replacing the existing Protestant trading Portuguese relations. class (dominant both in the town's external trade With this useful addition to the literature, and municipal government) with a newer cluster Anglo-Portuguese trade is becoming one of our of families, all Catholic, who took over both the most studied seventeenth and eighteenth century municipality and its external trade, particularly branches of English foreign trade. This, however, that to Canada. Yet, this new trading elite had to can be justified by its importance in English operate in a socio-economic world of serious commercial expansion, particularly in the first challenges and ill-defined boundaries in the sixty years of the eighteenth century, through the seventeenth century. Bosher shows that the access it gave English merchants to the riches of Gaigneurs introduced many related Catholic Brazil and particularly the gold of Mina Gérais. families into the North Atlantic trade but at the same time were prepared to borrow needed funds Stephen Fisher from French Huguenots and Dutch Protestant Exeter, Devon houses and to join with such allies in joint ven• tures. This contrast between the deceptive clarity of Olaf Uwe Janzen (ed.). Merchant Organization royal policy and the less obvious pressures of the and Maritime Trade in the North Atlantic, 1660- market appears as well in the papers of other 1815. Research in Maritime History, No. 15. St. contributors. On the one hand is the highly regu• John's, NF: International Maritime Economic lated world described by A. Zabala Uriarte's History Association, 1998. x + 267 pp., maps, paper on "The Consolidation of Bilbao as a Trade figures, tables. US $15, paper; ISBN 0-9681288- Centre in the Second Half of the Seventeenth 5-8. Century." Yet one suspects that over time much of the success of Bilbao depended on local, rather This interesting collection of papers on maritime than central, initiatives. This same half-century history was originally assembled for the planned saw the elaboration of the English legislation international economic history congress at Seville governing trade with that country's American in 1998. The aborting of that conference was a colonies. Yet Nuala Zahadieh's paper shows that serious challenge which the session organizer has the individual merchant needed more than legisla• met by this publication. It is all too easy to view tive protection to survive and had to construct his the maritime life of the early modem Atlantic own edifice of personal credit and reputation, the world as being composed of a series of bilateral edifice that made it possible for him to make exchanges, in which the colonies of any particular purchases on credit and to attract consignment maritime power were constrained by laws or business. Daniel Rabuzzi's paper shows how, market forces to direct most of their external trade after the Revolution, American merchants, freed towards the "mother country." By contrast, much from the restrictions of the navigation acts, could recent work, particularly that of Ian Steele, who try to trade directly to northern Europe, an area provides an introductory essay, has tended to formerly supplied with American products via the emphasize the multilateral character of much British entrepot. They were often successful but North Atlantic commerce. Such a focus turns the still had to utilize British correspondents for attention of the researcher and reader away from information and financial services. Less depend• the systematic and planned schemes of royal ent on British help were the activities of Amer• officialdom towards the more chaotic, less sys• ican merchants in Bordeaux during the war years tematic activities of individual traders and local (1793-1815), the subject of Silvia Marzagalli's markets. interesting paper. Less successful were the efforts To say that modern scholarship seeks to of a small group of British merchants to develop escape from earlier legal and policy-defined a trade with Iceland, a hitherto neglected topic categories does not mean that all policy-oriented that is explored in the pioneering paper of Anna legal arrangements are ignored. J.F. Bosher's Agnarsdôttir. The coolness of the Danish govern• extremely interesting article on the Gaigneur ment forced the traders to seek more of the sup• family of La Rochelle makes clear how royal port of the British government than they perhaps policy after the surrender of the Huguenot town in had first envisaged. Long before the American Book Reviews 105 Revolution, though each colonial power had its Troops in the Conquest of Africa (1998) - The own version of a regulatory system designed to World and the West is not strictly an academic conserve as much of the trade of its colonies in book. It has neither notes nor bibliography; the hands of its own subjects as possible, there instead it has further readings at the end of each were objective needs in those colonies that could chapter. most efficiently be satisfied from the British This is by no means to denigrate a fascinat• North American colonies. The intrusion of the ing book. Curtin's monograph is aimed at what North American ships into the French and Span• used to be called the intelligent reader, academic ish colonies is relatively well known. Johannes or otherwise. It is divided into four parts. The Postma expands our knowledge of this phenome• first, "Conquest," sets the scene.