Africa and the Atlantic Islands Meet the Garden of Eden

Christopher Columbus’s vision of the world beyond Europe was deeply influenced by what he gleaned from written sources such as Marco Polo and the Bible. Yet he also had a great deal of personal and practical experience from travels in the Atlantic Islands and coastal regions of West Africa. Upon his arrival in the Caribbean, he expected to find the Asia described by Marco Polo. Initially, he considered establishing a series of factories and trading posts, similar to those of the Portuguese in West Africa, from which Europeans could tap into local trade networks. When he discovered that brisk trading relations would not likely come about in the near future, he advocated the establishment of mining and agricultural enterprises, such as those the Portuguese and Castilians had founded in the Atlantic islands. Thus his experience in Africa and the Atlantic islands helped shape his responses to the conditions he unexpectedly encountered in the Caribbean.

SOURCE: William D. Phillips, Jr., “Africa and the Atlantic Islands Meet the Garden of Eden: Christopher Columbus’s View of America,” Journal of World History, vol. 3 (1992).

A few of the other articles in the same issue look rather interesting, too, judging from the abstracts.

UPDATE: Jim Bennett leaves a fascinating comment about something else Columbus learned from earlier experience.

Another effect of Columbus’s experiences in sailing the eastern Atlantic was his understanding of the Atlantic wind system, particularly if you accept his own account of having sailed to Iceland and the seas to its north. Rather than argue over exactly how much credit Columbus deserves for discovering the Americas (an endless and problematic exercise) perhaps it’s worth focusing in Columbus as the discoverer of the mid-Atlantic wind system. This was the underlying reason for his intuitive leap of departing from the Canaries, rather than the Azores, unlike previous expeditions. A Canaries departure puts one into the mid-Atlantic wind system bound west; an Azores departure usually results in fighting the wind system, harder in those days with rigs that couldn’t sail close to the wind.

The Hikayat Abdullah on the Englishmen in Old Malacca

‘At that time [c. 1810], there were not yet many English in the town of Malacca and to see an Englishman was like seeing a tiger, because they were so mischievous and violent. If one or two English ships called in at Malacca, all the Malacca people would keep the doors of their houses shut, for all round the streets there would be a lot of sailors, some of whom would break in the doors of people’s houses, and some would chase the women on the streets, and others would fight amongst themselves and cut one another’s heads open … Moreover, a great number were killed owing to their falling in the river, owing to their being drunk; and all this made people afraid. At that time, I never met an Englishman who had a white face, for all of them had “mounted the green horse,” that is to say, were drunk. So much so, that when children cried, their mothers would say, “Be quiet, the drunken Englishman is coming,” and the children would be scared and keep quiet.’

SOURCE: The Hikayat Abdullah, as quoted in Nigel Barley, The Duke of Puddledock: Travels in the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles (Henry Holt, 1992).

More extracts from the Hikayat Abdullah are available on the National University of Singapore‘s Resources for Literary Study website.

The author of the Hikayat Abdullah, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, grew up in Malacca at a time of British Imperial expansion into the Malay world, and was present in Singapore from the time of Raffles’ arrival in the 1820s onwards. A prolific writer and translator, he is also known as the author of Kesah Pelayaran Abdullah (The Story of the Voyage of Abdullah), an account of a voyage up the east coast of the peninsular in 1837. Abdullah finished his autobiography, the Hikayat Abdullah, in 1843.

The Ningpo: A Chinese Ocean-going Junk

Not all the China trade was in Yankee clipper ships. There was an enormous amount of almost entirely undocumented coastal and ocean-going shipping in Chinese junks plying the seas between China, Southeast Asia, and even North America. One of the few surviving ships of the so-called Junk Trade is the Ningpo, “one of a handful of large old junks that crossed the Pacific and ended up on the West Coast of the United States.”

The Ningpo, 138 feet in length and 31 in beam, was a medium-sized (300 ton) three-masted Fujian style ocean-going ship, very similar to what’s called the Fuzhou pole junk design. Her upper works were teak, with a hull and numerous bulkheads of camphor wood and ironwood hull. The ornately carved oval stern, complete with bird motif and images of the immortals, is typically Fujianese in character. If historical sources can be believed, she was built originally as the Kin Tai Fong, either in 1753, or maybe 1806. And here is where things start to get really interesting.

Apparently, soon after being launched, the Kin Tai Fong soon turned smuggler and slaver, taking part in a rebellion against the government in 1796, a time when pirates were particularly active in Southern China. Next, she was seized for smuggling (silk and opium) and piracy in 1806, and again in 1814, and again in 1823. In 1834, the Kin Tai Fong was reportedly confiscated by Lord Napier for smuggling and carrying slave girls to Canton. In 1841, she began her seven year stint of serving the imperial government as a prison ship. Reportedly, 158 rebels were summarily executed during this time, hence the blood in the scuppers and heads bouncing across the decks. In 1861, she was seized by Taiping rebels and converted into a fast transport. Retaken by English forces, her name was changed (by “Chinese” Gordon?) to Ningpo …

In 1911 she was sold to Americans for $50,000. After having been damaged in a couple typhoons, abandoned by a mutinous crew, and rowed 320 miles back to port after yet another storm, the Ningpo finally sailed across the Pacific to San Pedro, California in a fast 58 days. There she began her career as floating attraction and museum of bizarre torture implements in Los Angeles, Long Beach, and San Diego. By 1917, the Ningpo was towed to Catalina Island, where she eventually began to sink (literally) into oblivion but not before appearing in the background of several Hollywood adventure films. In fact, it was during one of these Hollywood productions that a prop replica of a fire ship drifted out of control when the winds shifted and ran into the slumbering hulk of the Ningpo, burning the topsides to the waterline. What is left of the ship is covered with mud off Ballast point at Cat Harbor, along with an assortment of artifacts at the Casino in Avalon on Catalina Island.

Or so the story goes. Hans Tilburg, a maritime historian and underwater archaeologist at the University of Hawai‘i has a fuller account–with photos–in the online journal Explorations in Southeast Asian Studies.