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Beneath the soft words and silken panoply of glistening banners and richly embroidered robes, ships armed with gunpowder weapons formed what we would call today an “oceanic strike force,” an instrument capable of compelling or conquering. As many as twenty-eight to thirty thousand people sailed with the fleet; most of them were soldiers, illustrating that Zheng He himself was by profession a military man and had made his reputation fighting. His troops aboard outnumbered what would soon be the entire standing army of the king of France.

Whether the precious pepper was then put to other uses was not reported. This trade diminished sharply after 1824 as the Dutch began to tighten their grip on the Indonesian archipelago and did not look with a kindly eye on other foreign traders. The British also did their best to hamper the Yankees. ” They benefited most from the Iberian opening of the World Ocean and began to range widely across the globe. Opportunities seemed unlimited. In 1703 a Scottish sea captain–trader, an adventurer named Alexander Hamilton (no relation to the later American statesman) turned down, strange as it may seem, what he interpreted as an offer of Singapore Island from the Sultan of Johor.

A growing appetite for tea made the British increasingly interested in developing trade with China. They wanted to circumvent these annoyingly rivalrous Hollanders who appeared to be locking up both of the straits. ” But the British long before showed grudging admiration too. ” In the early nineteenth century, young, newly free America, although no real threat to Britain, was also stretching its canvas with its ships entering the Southeast Asian trade. This too roused British ire. Salem merchants began at the end of the eighteenth century to engage in the Sumatran pepper trade in which relatively small investments could yield huge returns.