ABSTRACT
From the early 1400s onwards Europeans in ever increasing numbers penetrated to and settled in the wider world, often in regions well beyond those over which their compatriots could claim jurisdiction. With some-shipwrecked sailors, convicts left to learn what they could of Africa by Portuguese and English East India fleets, prisoners seized by local peoples-it was the outcome of misfortune or miscalculation. But many whites fled from the society of their fellows to avoid the consequences of misdeeds real or alleged, or to seek a better life. Asia, with its fabulous wealth and its demand (in India especially) for western skills, had attracted renegades long before the arrival of Vasco da Gama. By the seventeenth century such were their numbers that they could be found anywhere from Japan to the Arabian Sea, commanding local ships, serving as soldiers or simply living by their wits. And some did remarkably well, like that eclectic Englishman who, in the 1670s, having made ‘a great fortune in commerce at Madras’, turned Muslim, built himself ‘a fine house’ in Hindu style in Coromandel and set up as a landed magnate. 1 Portuguese adventurers became pirate chiefs in the Bay of Bengal and independent potentates in East Africa. Buccaneers roamed the Caribbean, on whose coasts, in Honduras and Campeche, there grew up communities of loggers living as Indians did. In the Americas whites went off to dwell among local tribes and northern frontiersmen hunted and traded far afield native fashion. And where European authority petered out, whether around Goa or in North America, a mixture of ‘pacified’ natives and those described by contemporaries as ‘white savages’ warred and traded with their neighbours.
