Of his days in Macao a chronicler wrote: “And as he wanted not for wit, he every day improved himself, grew more and more cunning, and capable of higher advancement.”
One of the ways in which Nicholas Iquan proved his ability was by initiating trade, on his own youthful account, with a tremendously wealthy and powerful Chinese merchant who, escaping the galleys in Manila, had fled to Japan and made his headquarters in the coastal village of Hirado. Here he and his brothers traded with Annam and Tonkin, and were pioneers in the opening up of Formosa. This canny trader, known throughout Eastern Asia simply as Captain China, had a vast fleet of ships, monopolies everywhere and a rugged courage that enabled him to withstand the pressures of the Japanese, the connivances of the brilliant Dutch traders who were his rivals and the depredations of pirates who plagued his convoys. Actually, Captain China was himself a pirate and smuggler on a lavish scale, and he was on the lookout for promising young men to add to his service. It soon became apparent to him that in Macao there was growing up another young trader just about as adventurous as himself.
Captain China was also nominally a Christian, but how he and Nicholas Iquan first got acquainted we do not know. One document states: “Icoan [Iquan] or Gaspar seeing himself at Macao but in a mean condition, and not much considered, returned to his own country; but not being advanced there, nor contenting himself how to live low and obscure, he went from thence to Japan, where at that time there was great freedom to all nations to come and trade, and for this reason he fixed himself there, and got employment under a very rich Chinese merchant, whom he served with great fidelity and diligence in all his concerns, and was very well approved of by his master, who found him daily more and more intelligent in all things relating to traffic, and so confided in him that he sent him with some ships, and a great part of his wealth entrusted to his care, to trade in the kingdoms of Cochin China and Cambaye. Gaspar acquitted himself so well of his employment that he returned with great profit to his master and much credit to himself.”
From his arrival in Japan, probably in 1622, Nicholas Iquan worked hard. He became Captain China’s right-hand man, and thus it was his job to negotiate often with the Dutch, who were among the ablest and most determined traders ever to operate in those waters. Captain China had long been friendly with them and in 1624 advised them to move their base from the Pescadores Islands to Formosa. For several years he acted as a mediator of treaties between the Dutch and the Chinese of the mainland.
It was not surprising, therefore, that Iquan suddenly turned up in 1624 at the Dutch headquarters in the Pescadores, where he served as tailor and interpreter. This latter occupation was extraordinary in that he could speak no Dutch; he was, however, proficient in Chinese and Japanese, and more particularly in Portuguese, the lingua franca of commerce in the Far East. He undoubtedly conversed with the Dutch in that language. Under Captain China’s encouragement, the Dutch now set up a strong base in Formosa, and promoted migration there of Chinese settlers from the mainland. As an employee of the Dutch, in 1625 Nicholas Iquan was able to squeeze money from the immigrants, but failing to amass any substantial wealth in this way, he dreamed of higher goals. Then his chance came.
His patron, Captain China, died in Japan in the fall of 1625, and by the exercise of prompt and daring initiative Iquan launched his career as a pirate chief. He simply usurped control of the late Captain China’s ships and property by pushing aside the claims of his late patron’s son and heir. When necessary, he even engaged in the murder of any loyal servants who opposed him, and shortly his swift craft were harrying the Fukien coast. Within four months of murdering off the opposition, the young pirate had consolidated his position as virtual master of the China Sea.
He commanded four hundred heavily armed junks. These he dispersed at strategic points along the sea lanes, while he himself returned to his ancestral village of Anhai to assume command of all operations. Portuguese caravels fell into his hands, and their rich cargoes were sold in the water-front shops of Amoy. Dutch merchantmen who strayed from the protection of Dutch warships were quickly overpowered and their goods sped into Canton, where traders retained friendly relations with all pirates in hopes of obtaining desirable cargoes. Any vessel setting forth from Japan loaded with the most envied trade goods of Asia—for they were of polished workmanship and difficult to obtain—ran the immediate risk of being quickly overhauled and burned by Nicholas Iquan’s disciplined pirates.
By the beginning of 1627 Iquan commanded the entire China coast between the Yangtse and Pearl rivers, and the acting governor of Formosa reported: “Over a year previously a man named Iquan, formerly interpreter to the [Dutch East India] Company, left without notice and became chief of a pirate band. He amassed much shipping and men, and terrorized the whole China coast, laying waste provinces, towns, and villages, and rendered navigation along that part of the coast impracticable.”
It had now become painfully apparent to the Dutch that this upstart rival, formerly a mere interpreter and tailor in their employ, would have to be taught a lesson. Accordingly a squadron of nine powerful Dutch warships was dispatched to rout out the pirate and destroy his anchorages off Amoy.
The expedition was a disaster. Iquan, bringing into play all his piratical experience, encouraged his junks to wage such merciless warfare against the more unwieldy Dutch ships that the entire squadron, seeing victory unattainable, turned and fled to Java.
Now Nicholas Iquan was unopposed in his chosen seas, and by the end of 1627 he commanded no less than a thousand sail. He captured outright the island city of Amoy and used it as his commercial headquarters, bringing parts of his extensive fleet to its protecting harbor. Yet his rise to ultimate power did not come without a struggle, for he lost Amoy through treachery and had to call upon his former enemies the Dutch to help him recapture it in February, 1630. Years of hard fighting and of ups and downs elapsed before his position as pirate king was finally secure.
But he never relaxed his ambition and in time gained absolute command of the entire China coast from Shanghai to Canton, and this was not a loosely held control. No ship that set out for Japan, Formosa or Macao had much chance of escaping his pirates. Even small coastal vessels, carrying on the work of the Ming emperor of China, were likely to be intercepted, and sometimes the Iquan pirates sailed boldly into port cities that were supposedly in command of Ming ground troops and either laid those facilities waste or held the city for ransom.
This was piracy on the grand scale, and Nicholas Iquan lived in a style commensurate with his riches. It was estimated by contemporaries that he had more than $5,000,000 in his personal treasury, in addition to a superb palace at Anhai, which was fitted out with the finest furnishings that Japan and China could provide.
Understandably, he feared assassination and was constantly guarded by an elite troop of seventy-six Dutchmen who wore special uniforms and were paid well out of the public treasury. Later, when he saw that these Dutchmen wanted to return to their own countrymen in Java, he released them and conscripted an even more striking personal guard whose fame was to last in Asia for many years. From Macao he acquired three hundred Negro slaves who had escaped from that colony after having been hauled there by Portuguese slavers working off Africa. These giant men, dressed in startling silks, hovered constantly about the person of the pirate chief, lending him an air of mystery and power.
The estimate of $5,000,000 for Iquan’s personal fortune at this time is probably conservative, for we know that he announced himself Lord of the Straits of Formosa and that he licensed nonpirate ships to trade there under his protection for the staggering fee of $15,000 a year for each separate ship. He was reported in Japan to be “the richest man in China.” A later historian said of the pirate, “He was good-looking, a skillful poet, a musician of taste, a dancer of merit, and withal of pleasing manners.”
It was obvious that Iquan’s supremacy could not continue unchallenged, and in fact it was allowed to exist at all only because Chines
e, Japanese, and Dutch could not agree upon concerted action to cleanse the seas of this gentle, gifted and well-behaved monster. The problem was solved rather neatly by the vacillating Ming emperor, who in 1628, squeezed by both internal and external pressures, sought some relief by offering Iquan the job of Commander of the Imperial Fleet with full mandarin rank and a commission to drive all pirates from the South China Sea.
Rarely has a messy situation been cleaned up so expeditiously. Pirate Iquan moved from his country palace at Anhai and appeared in the bustling city of Amoy as Admiral Iquan. Here he raised a flag proclaiming his new residence to be the naval headquarters of the imperial Chinese government.
It was as admiral of the fleets that in 1633 he engaged in a full-scale war with the Dutch, and a less able admiral never operated, for on July 13 of that year the enemy, by a stratagem which could easily have been nullified by good seamanship, burned his entire military fleet. But if Nicholas Iquan was a miserable failure as a formal admiral, he was still one of the world’s great pirates, for by October 22 he had somehow reassembled 150 of his old pirate junks, which slipped in upon the Dutch in a stratagem of their own, and totally humiliated his erstwhile conquerors, destroying their vessels and breaking the blockade of Amoy. His pirates having regained what his legal fleet had lost, Iquan never again abandoned piracy, and from then on the Chinese Navy was a curious blend of imperial warships and pirate junks, all operating to the growing glory of Nicholas Iquan. It is recorded that in 1639, ninety-three Chinese junks put into Nagasaki harbor in southern Japan to pick up the choicest trade goods, and of these about three quarters were trading in the personal name of Iquan. This was the apex of his career.
For the years of tragedy were closing in, requiring this bold pirate to make substantial decisions in the field of moral judgment, and his grievous failure in this respect marred his reputation and cost him his life. These were the trying years when the exhausted Ming dynasty, which had governed China for almost three centuries, was being invaded from the north by the resolute Manchus, who were destined to destroy the Ming rule and to reign successfully as alien invaders down to the revolution of 1911.
Throughout China men in positions of authority were required to take sides. Was the glorious Ming reign entering its final eclipse? If so, would it not be wise to link one’s fortunes with the surging, brutal Manchus? On the other hand, had not the Ming often been in difficulties and had they not always triumphed? Would it not be wiser to wait awhile before abandoning their cause as hopeless? Like hundreds of his compatriots, Nicholas Iquan weighed these delicate moral problems.
At first he sided boldly with the Ming and in 1644 accepted from them the resounding title of Count Pacifier of the South. Later he became a full duke, and it seemed that history was about to provide another example in which a land revolution, led this time by the Manchus, would fail to enlist the support of a loyal navy, which in this case would continue to adhere to the dying Ming banners.
But now the Ming cause began to deteriorate rapidly and Duke Nicholas, hearing of the losses ashore, began his fatal vacillation. It was speeded when the Manchus offered him the viceroyship of three major provinces if he would deliver his pirate fleet to their side.
This offer was so appealing to Duke Nicholas that he decided to accept. Accordingly, one morning he left his naval headquarters in Amoy and journeyed to the Manchu city of Foochow surrounded by troops, including his imposing personal guard of three hundred Macao Negroes. Iquan was now about forty-three years old, one of the most powerful figures in war-torn China. His wealth was indeterminable, his fleets vast, his area of control greater than that enjoyed by most European monarchs of his time. Over his dominions he exercised the power of life and death, and over the trade of three nations he was absolute dictator.
We have a portrait of Iquan as he may have looked that day in 1646 while walking through the bright Foochow sunlight on his way to see the Manchu emissaries. He was of middle height and heavy in build. He wore voluminous robes from which his hands did not protrude. He carried a wand of office and a belt of beads hanging over a chunky stomach. He displayed wide-set eyes, bushy eyebrows and a generous nose. He wore a very long, drooping mustache which fell well below his chin, with a broad if not heavy beard and a little square patch of whisker, closely trimmed, right below the edge of his lower lip. He covered his head with a heavily brocaded cap adorned with jewels and ornamented by two scrolls which rose from the rear. His richly made shoes pointed upwards, and if the entire portrait is imaginary, as some claim, it was nevertheless intended to portray a man of substance and authority.
Doubtless he spoke in Portuguese to the giant blacks of his bodyguard, who were arrayed in brilliant costumes which would enhance their impressiveness, so that when Iquan’s procession reached the tent of the Manchu general who had been sent south for these important negotiations, the pirate and his bodyguard quite overshadowed the stolid and blunt Manchus.
The Manchu general, having enticed Iquan ashore, proceeded to accord the pirate a series of banquets and entertainments requiring three full days of the most splendid ceremony and concentrated drunkenness. This tickled Iquan’s vanity, and while he was preening himself upon the deference paid him by the Manchus, he did not observe that they were inconspicuously separating him from all his troops except his elite Negro guard.
When hidden Manchu soldiers finally fell upon Iquan, a furious battle ensued, in which the Negroes were superb, encouraging each other with the traditional Portuguese battle cry of “Santiago!” This fearfully stirring shout spurred them to extraordinary feats of loyalty and more than one hundred died trying to rescue their master, but in the end the Manchus were victorious, and Nicholas Iquan never again saw the sea.
He was carted, a very special and revered prisoner, to Peking, where he was kept for fourteen long years in loose and luxurious arrest while the alien Manchus systematically subdued and organized the Chinese empire. He was allowed to take a wife, by whom he had a son, and it is recorded that with some of his private wealth he helped Christian missionaries in their work.
Finally, for reasons which will become apparent later, the Manchus tired of their most important prisoner and in 1661 decreed that he should suffer the excruciating “death of the thousand cuts,” in which the executioner was charged with slowly hacking away the members of the victim’s body, making the required number of cuts before the doomed man died.
At the last moment, possibly inspired by the brave record of this fifty-eight-year-old pirate, the officials relented and allowed him to be beheaded, along with his two lesser sons.
Thus died Nicholas Iquan, one of the most powerful pirates the world has known. His conquests embraced whole seas, thousands of miles of coastline, innumerable ships, vast fleets, an army of many thousands and spoils of such magnitude as to be beyond computation. It is upon the accomplishments of Nicholas Iquan that the authors base their contention that the pirates of the Caribbean were colorful, but the pirates of the Pacific were majestic.
It is with a sense of awe, therefore, that we now state that the man of whom we wish to speak in this chapter outshines Nicholas Iquan in the way the sun outshines the moon. Where Iquan was merely massive in his operations, this man was brilliant. Where Iquan was a pirate merely to indulge himself, this man was a master tactician working on a grand design. And where Iquan vacillated on vital issues, the pirate of whom we write had a constancy of conscience that stupefies the imagination and a devotedness to principle that has immortalized him.
Let us now double back to the year 1622, when the young Chinese merchant Nicholas Iquan grew tired of the confining life of Macao and set out for Japan. He was on his way to that fateful visit to Captain China, whose fleets he would shortly steal in his first great act of piracy.
Iquan probably settled outside of Nagasaki at the village of Hirado, which at this time was the most flourishing center for foreign trade in all Japan. It was not only the main port of call for Chinese merchants, but here
the Dutch had chosen to make their headquarters, and in 1623, while Iquan was still there, the English were to open their factory under the flag of the East India Company. Hirado was also the base from which the Dutch and English sent forth a combined fleet to fight their trade rivals, the Spanish and Portuguese. At any rate, wherever he lived the young merchant was faced with one problem that Chinese in Japan face even today: where can a Chinese man get a woman?
After the normal experiments in low dives, and after conversing with the casual girls of the water front, Iquan found a young woman named Tagawa. She was born in 1601 and was thus about the same age as Iquan. Her first name has never been discovered and in Japan and China alike she is known simply as Miss Tagawa. There is bitter controversy in learned circles concerning who she was. Dr. R. A. B. Ponsonby-Fane, an English diplomat, spent many hundreds of words proving to his satisfaction that Miss Tagawa was a lady of excellent background and possibly of the samurai class. Chinese scholars, hoping to claim so notable a girl for their own, contend that she was the daughter of an earlier Chinese merchant and some Japanese girl whom he had picked up along the docks. Enemies of Iquan state bluntly that his wife was a prostitute, and some historians accept the charge: “The ‘scion of the proud Tagawa family’ was in reality nothing more than the humble inmate of a local brothel in the little fishing town of Hirado.” But cooler heads reason that while she was probably a local girl of no distinguished family, the evidence available fails to support the contention that she was a prostitute.
At any rate, this unknown Japanese girl, Miss Tagawa, married the Chinese merchant Nicholas Iquan and became the mother of the greatest pirate Asia, and possibly the world, has ever known. The intense loyalty that characterized her son was doubtless derived from this Tagawa girl: for six years she reared the boy in Japan; for twenty-one years she never saw Iquan. Then, just as Iquan’s fortunes were about to collapse with his defection to the Manchu invaders, he summoned this long-forgotten wife to join him at Anhai. Without hesitating, and against all the odds interposed by the reluctant Japanese government, Miss Tagawa emigrated to China, where in the general debacle that overcame her family in 1646, when Iquan surrendered to the Manchus, she preserved its honor by a suicide in the Japanese fashion. Romancers carried word of her gallant action throughout the countryside, embroidering it with lurid details. “She plunged a Japanese sword into herself, then leapt from the wall of the palace at Anhai,” whereupon the astounded Manchus are supposed to have cried, “If the women of Japan are of such a sort, what must the men be like?” Exemplifying such constancy, Miss Tagawa passed bodily into Japan’s greatest classical drama, where it is said of her, “Even though she was a woman, she did not forget her old home, and paid reverence to the land that gave her birth. Until her last breath she thought of the honor of Japan.”