The British country traders were a growing problem for the Dutch trading network during the second half of the eighteenth century. Conversely, the Dutch presence was one of the many difficulties that the country traders had to contend with in the Malay Archipelago.

The life of a British country trader operating in the Malay Archipelago in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was never easy. In addition to the usual perils of the sea and the extremely fluid local political situation, merchant mariners had to be cognizant of the current international alliances operating in Europe if their journeys were to end peacefully and profitably. In particular, whether Britain and The Netherlands were in a state of war, or at peace, was of critical importance.

Captain Walter Dawes of the country trader Lucy Maria appears to have been unfortunate in that, in 1804, he was forced to call in at Dutch Ternate to seek assistance. It would appear that he was not well-informed either about the local political situation or of the fact that hostilities had broken out in Europe between the English and the Dutch. Events surrounding this individual voyage provide a singular example of the intricacies of the inter-relationship between Dutch, English and Indonesian politics in the Archipelago at a time when, as Anthony Webster has described it, there was “a complex overlay of European rivalry upon existing indigenous disputes and feuds”.

Different concepts of free trade in the Malay Archipelago in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

The VOC was founded in 1602 and within a few years engaged Hugo Grotius, founder of international law, to argue its case for freedom of navigation and trade in the Malay Archipelago. “I shall base my argument on the following most specific and unimpeachable axiom of the Law of Nations, called a primary rule or first principle, the spirit of which is self-evident and immutable, to wit: Every nation is free to travel to every other nation, and to trade with it”, he wrote in his famous Mare Liberum. Grotius was involved in negotiations with England over fishing rights in the North Sea and trade in the East Indies in 1613 and 1615.