Thirty Years on the Seas of the Indies

After the coasts of India, the Scottish captain Alexander Hamilton pushes further east. This third and final volume takes him across the Malay Archipelago, up the coasts of China, and ends at the gates of Japan, the most closed empire of his time. Thirty-five years at sea have blunted neither his curiosity nor his causticity.

The narrative begins at Johore and at Atcheen, governed by queens, then follows the coasts of Sumatra, rich in gold and tin, before crossing Java, its volcanoes and its orangutan, on to the spice-laden Moluccas and Borneo. Hamilton then sails up to Trangano, whose afflicted king begs his protection against an enemy fleet, and on to Siam, where French Jesuits had placed a Greek minister, Constantine Phaulkon, at the head of the kingdom: his bloody fall in 1688 opens one of the book's most dramatic episodes, followed by Hamilton's own trial, accused of treason by the Siamese court in 1719.

The voyage continues through war-torn Cambodia and the forgotten massacre of the English colony at Pulo Condore, before reaching the China of the hongs: the hurricane that dismasts his ship near Macao, the trap set by three Canton merchants who have bought the monopoly on his cargo, the massacre of the Dutch at Amoy told as a lesson in cunning, then the wreck of the Harwich, whose abandoned crew Hamilton alone rescues after his peers turn away. He also describes the gods, laws, and punishments of the empire, the trade in ginseng and tea, before the Manila mutiny in which a priest brandishing a crucifix rouses the city against its viceroy.

The narrative ends at Formosa and Japan, the closed empire that forbids its own subjects from leaving: the rise and then the crushing of Christianity, the affair of the Firando trading post, and the wreck of Dutch explorers stranded in Korea. This third volume thus covers the easternmost stretch of Hamilton's journey, the one where European trade collides most directly with Asian powers: rival companies, local courts, and merchant monopolies sketch a world in the midst of reshaping itself, on the eve of the great expansions of the eighteenth century. A merchant free of any company, Hamilton reports here what he saw with his own eyes rather than what he was told, which makes his testimony a firsthand source on the maritime Asia of his time.

The first complete modern rewriting for today's reader, making this testimony accessible without betraying anything of the voyage. Original illustrations and redrawn maps bring the route to life, while a set of reference materials (glossary, chronology, index, further reading, editor's note, afterword) and selected passages from the original text illuminate the reading.