Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  Then things got bad. They swung far westward toward Brazil before mounting a long, punishing eastward journey toward the Cape of Good Hope. Scurvy swept through the decks. By August, eleven men aboard the Hollandia had died and only three of the ship’s remaining fifty crewmen were not suffering from the agonies of aching limbs and loosening teeth; the other ships fared only marginally better. They made their way round the Cape of Good Hope, sailing through ravaging storms, and anchored at the tiny island of Nosy Manitse, off the coast of Madagascar, to bury seventy men: in six months at sea, more than a quarter of the expedition’s crew had died.

  Resting on this primordial scallop of land, they searched in vain for the fresh fruit or vegetables that they knew they needed to dissipate the effects of the disease (though, in the absence of an understanding of the need for vitamin C, they attributed scurvy to “too much salty food,” which they thought fruit and vegetables would counterbalance). During this landfall, organization collapsed. One of those who had died had been the captain of the Hollandia. Cornelis de Houtman’s second in command was a man named Gerrit van Beuningen. From the beginning, the two had despised each other. Now, Van Beuningen went over De Houtman’s head and appointed, as replacement for the dead captain, a man that De Houtman did not want in that position. They weighed anchor to continue their voyage, but the power struggle devolved into dissension among the crew; the chaos, plus the need for fresh fruit, forced them to put in at St. Augustine’s Bay on the west coast of Madagascar. They brought their dozens of sick men ashore and made an encampment, and continued the dispute. The council of top officers backed De Houtman, while the midshipmen signed a petition supporting Van Beuningen. At some point, those who were not too ill went off to look for water and food; they hadn’t been gone long when they heard shots. Hurrying back, they discovered that, according to the journal, “the beach was full of black men, who had broken down the encampment” and were ransacking it, while the desperately ill sailors tried to fend them off. As the sailors came rushing back, guns blazing, the natives fled, but they had stolen nearly everything that had been brought ashore. Shortly after, De Houtman got wind of what was apparently an attempted mutiny and clapped Van Beuningen in irons.

  Two months later the expedition had proceeded only to the southern tip of Madagascar. The ships lost their anchors in a storm and put in to port for repairs. Some of the men rowed ashore and went inland to scavenge. Returning to the beach, the English publication of the journal ran, “We went to seeke for our boats, but the wild men had smitten them in peeces, and taken out the nailes [and] stood upon the shore with their weapons in hand and threw stones at us.”

  Despite the exhaustion, death, loss of small boats, and tremendous division among the remaining crew, many of whom were demanding that they abandon the mission and return home, De Houtman managed to push his pathetic little fleet on what would now be the most difficult stretch of the voyage: across the Indian Ocean, toward the East Indies and the fabled Spice Islands. And somehow, after another four months of hell, without having so much as sighted land, they reached their destination, a pretty and vigorous little settlement of straw buildings on stilts surrounded by coconut palms: the town of Bantam, on the western end of the island of Java.

  A year before, a man named Dirck van Os left his home in Amsterdam, walked a short distance northward, with the towering transepts of the Old Church rising behind the housefronts on his right, and entered a building on the other side of Dam Square. Here, in a ground floor “tasting room” in the home of a wine merchant with the rather fitting name of Marten Spil, he encountered eight men whom he knew well.

  Van Os was thirty-eight years old, arrestingly handsome, clean-shaven save for a gingery, thinly curled moustache. If traditional history books used the deeds of businessmen as lynchpins rather than those of kings and generals, his name would probably resound still, for the activities he initiated or took part in would span the globe and encompass an enormous amount of history. He had come from Antwerp in the south, part of the mass exodus from Spanish troops, settling in Amsterdam only six years earlier. His intellect was voracious, and focused on business: he had expanded Dutch trade with Russia and was a shipper of grain, salt, leather, and whale oil. The others he met included Reynier Pauw, an Amsterdam-born dealer in wood and salt, Pieter Hasselaar, a brewer, and Jan Poppen, a German immigrant who owned a great deal of land in and around the city. They were big men, substantial in their physical presence (layers of doublets, cassocks, and thick robes; heavy lace collars and high hats) and in their work. The wine merchant’s establishment sat on the Warmoesstraat, so close to the cacophonously busy harbor the men might have been distracted by the cries of gulls and calls of sailors readying vessels. But then, it was no distraction: via those ships they brought their heavy goods—copper, iron, tar, timber, hemp—into the city and sent them back out, from Russia to Italy, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean.

  It was highly profitable business, but recently they had begun to ponder, and to plot for, something far grander. This generation had been weaned on a story of how global trade worked. The so-called rich trade—the highly prized luxury products of India, Ethiopia, the Spice Islands, and elsewhere—was controlled by the military-navigational complex of the mighty Portuguese empire. Portuguese ships, Portuguese navigators, Portuguese maps and mapmakers, Portuguese cannon, Portuguese factors (aka agents) who maintained, with the backing of papal bulls, a near monopoly over half the world’s commerce: dating from Vasco da Gama’s trip around the Cape of Good Hope and into the Indian Ocean nearly a century before, this network had been a feature of European life. Everyone accepted it and believed in the indomitability of the Portuguese system.

  But this view had begun to change. Partly as a result of the war with Spain (and thus with Portugal), a few Dutch travelers had insinuated themselves behind enemy lines, as it were, becoming firsthand observers of the Portuguese system. These travelers discovered signs that the great empire was tottering and was not nearly so indomitable as its propaganda machine had portrayed. Still, any city that dared to challenge Lisbon for control of the Indies trade would need to have a great deal in the way of infrastructure. It would need ships, a shipbuilding industry, sophisticated navigational know-how, and money. Rather suddenly, Amsterdam possessed all of these.

  What’s more, it had a great influx of new blood. After Antwerp fell to Spanish soldiers in 1585, that city’s non-Catholic inhabitants left forever, and a large percentage of them settled in Amsterdam. These newcomers were mostly not poor, bedraggled refugees but successful merchants, artists, and bankers: people who had helped to make Antwerp the business and cultural capital of northern Europe. They brought with them money, contacts in other cities, knowledge … and one other thing.

  Just as important for the economic revolution that was stewing in the city of Amsterdam was the very newness of the newcomers. In the early twentieth century, an Austrian economist named Joseph Schumpeter espoused a theory about economic innovation that has received a good deal of attention in recent years. Schumpeter said that the mechanism of capitalism was “creative destruction”: that is, a capitalist economy functions provided it keeps innovating, with the new creatively destroying the old. And while innovation is a highly complex thing—involving social groups, fashions and tastes, wars and politics—there is a spark or kernel to it without which it would not come about. The spark of any kind of economic innovation, Schumpeter said, is always the same: a tiny group of people. What’s more, this small group of innovators is almost never part of the current establishment, since the establishment has no need to change things. It is the small, daring group of newcomers who see an opportunity and push ahead. They confront risks and obstacles, including those put in their path by the establishment, and if they have luck and skill, they succeed. Then another group emulates what the first did; then others, until what was once risky and radical has become part of a new established order.

  Schumpeter’s theory fits all sorts of cas
es. It can be applied, for example, to the digital revolution. Companies like Apple and Microsoft were started by outsiders who had a vision and exploited an opening. But when the Dutch economic historian Clé Lesger applied Schumpeter’s theory of innovation to the men who met in Marten Spil’s Amsterdam wineshop in March of 1594, who were instrumental to one of history’s great economic transformations—no less a thing than the first draft of capitalism itself—he found that the theory fit, but only partly. It turns out that while newcomers like Dirck van Os, who had fled war and persecution to root themselves in Amsterdam, spearheaded this innovation, men of the city’s old establishment also took part. Part of the explanation might be that the whole city was in such a state of bustle and transformation that even its establishment was open to innovation and the risks that came with it. Then, too, another thing that helped drive innovation in Amsterdam—something that would work to the city’s advantage time and again in the coming decades—was that Amsterdam was unusual in Europe in imposing virtually no restrictions on newcomers who would do business there. An immigrant didn’t have to join a chartered company—in fact, he didn’t even need to be a citizen. So the established businessmen were open to new ventures, and the immigrants faced no extra bureaucratic hurdles.

  The nine men were joined by another, whom all were especially eager to see, for he, unlikely as he must have seemed with his dour demeanor, was in possession of the key to the success of their radical scheme. His accented Dutch gave him away as being another of the émigrés from the south. He had his own kind of heaviness, but his was the weight of gravitas: he was one of the most respected, and most rabidly conservative, Calvinist theologians of the Dutch provinces. The businessmen were not interested in receiving his spiritual blessing for their venture so much as his worldly knowledge, for Petrus Plancius happened also to be one of the great cartographers of the age. (His map of the world, published two years earlier, can still take your breath away with its vivid colors and lovely intricacy of detail.) He was also a savvy dealer in cartographic knowledge who made it his business to become friends with many of the greatest sailors of the age. A few years later, Henry Hudson would consult with him before venturing across the Atlantic in search of a northwest passage to Asia—a trip that would result in his accidentally encountering what would become New York and the Hudson River.

  The nine businessmen and the theologian/cartographer had been working for some time on their secret venture. Two years earlier, Plancius had purchased maps from a Portuguese cartographer named Bartolomeo de Lasso that showed the route to the East Indies in thrilling detail. At that same time, the merchants sent a spy to Lisbon to get more information. Cornelis de Houtman was not, in fact, a professional spy, but he was apparently very keen for adventure. The merchants gave him a plausible cover: they loaded him down with merchandise samples and gave him credentials as a representative for Amsterdam businesses. He spent two years in Lisbon, gathering details, at regular intervals receiving more merchandise to keep his cover alive, and then came back to Amsterdam flush with the latest information on Portuguese trade agreements and activities in Asia.

  It was presumably De Houtman’s return from Lisbon that prompted the meeting at the wine seller’s shop. He must have been impressive in the presentation he made to them, because in addition to formalizing their venture, committing 290,000 guilders to it and giving it a storybook-sounding name—the Compagnie van Verre, which might best translate as the Company for Faraway Lands—they chose De Houtman to lead the first Dutch expedition to the East Indies. This despite the fact that he was no more a professional sailor than he had been a professional spy.

  The four ships set sail with horns blowing and flags waving. It was a moment of patriotic awareness for the citizens of Amsterdam, awareness that their city was pushing itself into a new future, willing itself toward something grander than previous generations could have imagined.

  The lack of experience behind it all—De Houtman’s as a sailor and leader of men and the merchants’ as managers of global convoys—showed in every facet of the sloppy tragicomic meander that ensued, from the moment the ships lost sight of Texel Island, and Dutch territory, to their finally, improbably, reaching their palm-fringed destination.

  De Houtman’s sources in Lisbon had told him that the town of Bantam, on Java Island, was both a center of pepper production and a spot that the Portuguese had not infiltrated. On arrival, he did his best to cast off the stench of failure and death with which the expedition had become clotted on its long, harrowing journey and introduced himself to the local officials as a would-be trader from a faraway land called Holland, fearsome in its power yet sublime in its fairness toward friends. He was welcomed by the governor and invited to meet with the sultan. Never mind the months of unspeakable hardship he had endured in the voyage to this point; never mind the purply skin and toothlessness left by the scurvy in its retreat or the miasmal rankness of having lived week upon endless week with cadavers and disease and rats and lice and human waste (it was common at the time for sailors to forgo the head and instead crouch in any out-of-the-way spot to relieve themselves): De Houtman dressed for the occasion in velvet, satin, and silk vestments that he had stored for the purpose, strapped on a rapier, and processed, together with as many men as could make themselves into an imitation of Western grandeur, through the tropical town. He had someone hold a sun shade over him as he walked, and a trumpeter went before, sounding blasts on De Houtman’s orders. Europe had arrived.

  At least, that was what he had hoped, to be the first Europeans, but the hope was soon quashed. The men took in everything they could as they walked the sultry streets of Bantam. They noted the dreamy array of foods on display in the thronged markets (“hennes, hartes, fish and Ryce … Oranges, Lemons, Pomegarnets, Cocombers, Melons, Onions, Garlicke”). They made wide-eyed observations of cultural differences (“the men sit all day upon a mat, and chaw Betele, having ten or twentie women about them, and when they make water, presently one of the women washeth their member, and so they sit playing all the day with their women”). And it wasn’t long before they saw, interspersed between the faces of indigenous islanders and traders from Malacca, Bengal, Malabar, and China, the nervous, untrusting looks of Portuguese merchants, who saw the Dutch mission for what it was intended to be: an outright takeover of the monopoly that Portugal had enjoyed in the East Indies spice trade for more than eight decades.

  But De Houtman’s sources were largely correct: the Portuguese presence here was slight. De Houtman managed to hammer out a trade agreement with the sultan that gave the Dutch favored-nation status. But when it came time to begin bargaining for the prized product—pepper—De Houtman fumbled. The few Portuguese traders on the island didn’t have much real power, but they knew how to make trouble. They began a whispering campaign, telling the sultan that the Dutch planned an attack. De Houtman erupted during the negotiations, fulminating about the presence of the Portuguese. The sultan took his behavior as proof of the warlike intentions of the Dutch and had De Houtman and the men he had brought with him imprisoned.

  The Dutchmen on the ships reacted by blasting their guns at the town and at the Portuguese ships at anchor, “slaying divers of the people.” De Houtman managed to win his release in exchange for a ransom payment. His small fleet sailed away from the port they had come to bargain with, having only caused trouble. For the next month they hugged the Javanese coast, picking up a few sacks of cloves and pepper but mostly bringing on more disaster. At a town on the northwest coast the locals offered them a feast and promised to sell them as much clove and nutmeg as they could carry; in the middle of the party they pulled out swords and killed twelve Dutchmen.

  More dissension ensued. De Houtman was for pushing onward; others wanted to bring their nightmare to an end. Then suddenly one of the ship’s captains died and it was widely believed that De Houtman had poisoned him. De Houtman was imprisoned. With both the commander and vice commander of the expedition under arrest, the expedi
tion at last headed back toward home, stopping for four weeks of R & R on Bali, which one might be tempted to see as the only sensible decision of the entire journey. On August 14, 1597, three ships sailed back into a Dutch port, the fourth having been abandoned because there were too few sailors left to man it.

  The hopeful leaders of the Company for Faraway Lands had had word of the imminent arrival of the ships and sent vessels out to greet their returning heroes. What they found was appalling. Of the 249 men who had left Amsterdam two years and four months earlier, only 89 skeletally emaciated sailors had returned. Both De Houtman and his second in command were under guard and charged with serious crimes. The decks were riddled with disease and tales of horror and mutiny. The word disaster seems eminently applicable to the voyage. It’s not surprising, in that sense, that Dutch history gives it scant attention.

  Yet when I scoured Amsterdam for remnants of De Houtman’s voyage I did find a couple. High up among the rafters in the grand formal entry of the Royal Tropical Institute, seventy-four images sculpted into the tops of columns give an elaborate, though nearly impossible to see, visual depiction of the whole voyage. Near the city’s waterfront sits a squat round tower called the Schreierstoren, which used to look out over the famous “forest of masts” that filled the harbor. Above its doorway is a memorial stone to the “first voyage to the East Indies 1595.” It depicts four little ships teetering darkly on swirling waves and features the Latin epigram navigare necesse est, “to sail is necessary.” The stone was placed on March 10, 1945, 350 years after De Houtman and his crew left that spot and while the city was still under Nazi occupation.