English Misadventures in the Red Sea and the Tangled Web of Jurisdiction, Sovereignty and Commerce in the Early Seventeenth Century

Abstract

This article analyses the first three English ventures into the Red Sea from 1608–1614 under the auspices of the East India Company's fourth, sixth, and eighth voyages. These ventures experienced a variety of disasters from shipwreck, captivity, mutiny, and the deaths of crewmembers. The sixth voyage, commanded by Henry Middleton, experienced the worst of the disasters. Middleton ran afoul of Ottoman officials in the port city of Mocha in Yemen and was taken in chains to the regional capital of Sana'a. He eventually escaped and returned to the Red Sea to seek revenge by blockading the port and committing acts of piracy. Middleton's actions reverberated back to Istanbul and London, where the main point of contact between England and the Ottoman Empire, the Levant Company, was forced to deal with the fallout in order to maintain its presence in the Sultan's dominions. The article argues that, despite the failures of these voyages, they reveal a great deal about the nature of overlapping jurisdictions and sovereignty in the early modern world, and furthermore they provide an important window into the evolution of corporations into entities capable of putting together empires amongst these disparate jurisdictions.