Batavia's Graveyard

by Mike Dash

  According to testimony collected by the painter’s irate father-in-law, Torrentius was well able to pay for his wife’s upkeep but chose not to. He always dressed in silk, velvet, and satin and owned a horse or two. On one occasion he offered to take Cornelia back, but only, he said, so that he could “feed her one day and hit her three days.”

  Van Swieten Bredius, op. cit., p. 25.

  Epicurus One of the principal philosophers of the Hellenistic period, Epicurus (ca. 341 b.c.–ca. 270 b.c.) was a materialist who taught that the basic constituents of the universe are indivisible atoms, explained natural phenomena without resorting to mysticism, and rejected the existence of the soul. As a corollary, he believed the main point of life was pleasure. Epicurus himself was no hedonist, believing instead that true happiness stemmed from control of one’s desires and in overcoming fear of death. His followers, however, soon acquired a reputation for debauchery, and his views were naturally anathema to the Calvinist ministers of Holland.

  Torrentius’s Gnostic views Snoek, op. cit., pp. 80–2.

  Jeronimus’s philosophy JFP 28 Sep 1629 [DB 153]; verdict on Andries Jonas, JFP 28 Sep 1629 [DB 203]; verdict on Jan Pelgrom, JFP 28 Sep 1629 [DB 209]; JFP 30 Sep 1629 [DB 212].

  Antinomianism, the Free Spirit and the Libertines Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, pp. 149–51, 156, 166–7, 170, 172–3, 178, 182–4, 287, 301.

  “. . . a state where conscience ceased to operate . . .” Ibid., pp. 148, 151, 178.

  Descartes McIntosh, The Rosy Cross Unveiled, p. 71. The philosopher was then a resident of Amsterdam.

  Rubens Snoek, op cit., p. 142.

  Rosicrucian cells The suggestion that the Rosicrucians were active in Paris appeared in books and posters distributed throughout the French capital in 1623. Ibid., pp. 61–2, 108. Reports in several books that there were Rosicrucian cells in The Hague and Amsterdam appear to be the product of a nineteenth-century hoax. Ibid., pp. 182–4; McIntosh, op. cit., p. 69.

  The Rosicrucian debate in the United Provinces Snoek, op. cit., pp. 62–3, 103–8; Herbert, op. cit., p. 86.

  Investigation of the Rosicrucians Snoek, op. cit., pp. 62–4; Bredius, op. cit. pp. 17–18.

  “. . . the Calvinist authorities were anxious to convict . . .” Bredius suggests the trial of Torrentius was staged to stress the orthodoxy of Haarlem’s ruling elite and bolster the city’s case to be considered the leader of the strictly Calvinist cities of the province of Holland at a time when several of its neighbors were still indulging liberal, Arminian views. Op. cit., p. 28.

  The banishment of the Torrentian circle Snoek, op. cit., pp. 79–80. The coincidence of dates is not exact; Torrentius’s followers were supposed to leave the city no later than 19 September, but Jeronimus Cornelisz may have lingered longer than that, and certainly either remained in, or returned to, Haarlem as late as 9 October, when the city records show he visited one of his solicitors.

  Chapter 2: Gentlemen XVII

  The story of the Dutch East India Company is of considerable importance to both the Netherlands and many of the nations of the Far East, and it has been extensively documented and well studied. Statistical information concerning the VOC’s shipping and its voyages to the East is summarized and elaborated upon, in English, in the three volumes of Jaap Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979–1987). Dutch speakers will turn also to Femme Gaastra’s general study De Geschiedenis van de VOC (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1991), which is more complete and up-to-date than any English language equivalent. Kristoff Glamann’s earlier Dutch-Asiatic Trade 1620–1740 (Copenhagen: Danish Science Press, 1958), though now in many respects outdated, also remains of interest. For details of the construction of Dutch East Indiamen, see Willem Vos’s and Robert Parthesius’s five-volume series, the Batavia Cahiers (Lelystad: np, 1990–93), which fully documents Vos’s recent reconstruction of a full-sized retourschip of the Batavia’s time. This valuable and extremely practical project has resulted in the rediscovery of many early shipbuilding techniques, and the Cahiers deal with many questions that would otherwise have to remain unanswered, given the absence of relevant documentation from the period. On the life of Francisco Pelsaert, I have relied largely on the introductory section to D. H. A. Kolff’s and H. W. van Santen’s recent edition of the commandeur’s Mogul chronicle and remonstrantie, published as De Geschriften van Francisco Pelsaert over Mughal Indiï, 1627: Kroniek en Remonstrantie (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979).

  The growth of Amsterdam Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998), pp. 114–6, 328–32; Geoffrey Cotterell, Amsterdam: The Life of a City (Farnborough: DC Heath, 1973), pp. 18–24. Another problem was the boggy ground, which meant that each new house within the city walls could only be constructed on foundations made of 42-foot wooden piles, each of which had to be driven to the bottom of the marsh by hand. A huge number of piles were required; the royal palace on the Dam itself rests on 13,659 of them. See William Brereton, Travels in Holland, the United Provinces etc. . . . 1634–1635 (London: Chetham Society, 1844), p. 66. The inaccessibility of Amsterdam explains why, for all its enormous commercial success in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Rotterdam is now the principal Dutch port.

  Development of Dutch trade Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 6–17, 45–8. There were other factors, the most important of which may have been the protracted blockade of Antwerp instituted by the United Provinces in the 1570s. Dutch warships intercepted shipping all along the coast and halted river traffic to the city. After 1584 the main land approaches also fell into rebel hands, reducing the city’s trade enormously and contributing to the further growth of Amsterdam.

  The spice road Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping, I, pp. 2, 189–92; Bernard Vlekke, The Story of the Dutch East Indies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946), pp. 57–62; Glamann, op. cit., pp. 13, 16–17, 74–5; Giles Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One Man’s Courage Changed the Course of History (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999), pp. 3–4.

  Population of cities London, with a population of about 230,000, Paris, with approximately 300,000, and Madrid, whose population was somewhere in between, were considerably bigger; Paris was comfortably the largest city in Europe throughout the seventeenth century. The only other European cities with a population comparable to Amsterdam were Lyons, Naples, and Rome. Antwerp’s population halved as a result of the Revolt, and a large proportion of the 40,000 or so people who left the city made for the towns of the United Provinces. The Dutch Republic was in fact by far the most heavily urbanized country in Europe in Cornelisz’s time; by 1600, one Dutchman in four lived in a town with more than 10,000 inhabitants, while the comparable figure in England was only 1 in 10. Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 115, 219.

  Spain and Portugal in the East Determining exactly where the boundary between Spanish and Portuguese interests fell on the far side of the world was no easy matter in an age where there was no reliable way of measuring longitude while at sea. There were several disputes between the powers before the Spanish king sold his claim to the Spiceries to Portugal for the sum of 350,000 ducats in 1529. For Francis Xavier’s views, see Vlekke, op cit., p. 62.

  Jan Huyghen van Linschoten Throughout his stay in the Indies, van Linschoten, who had a lively and curious mind, had made it his business to gather information about Portugal’s colonies in the East. He appears to have come across the rutters during his sojourn in the Azores. Charles Parr, Jan van Linschoten: The Dutch Marco Polo (New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell, 1964), pp. xvi–xvii, 6, 19, 33, 45–8, 80, 176, 180, 189. It was, incidentally, on Van Linschoten’s recommendation that the Dutch concentrated their efforts on the island of Java, where there were no Portuguese trading posts.

  Reinier Pauw Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 344–8. Later, Pauw (1564–1636) was to become a prominent politician and the lea
der of the strict Calvinist faction that brought down the regime of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the advocate of Holland, and had him beheaded in 1619.

  The early history of Dutch trade with the East Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, pp. 61, 67–9; Vlekke, op. cit., pp. 62–3; Milton, op. cit., pp. 28–9, 52–65.

  The Compagnie van Verre and the Dutch first fleet “Far-Lands Company” is a more literal translation. Israel, Dutch Primacy, pp. 67–8; Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping, I, pp. 1–5, 59; Milton, op. cit., pp. 52–65; Vlekke, op. cit., p. 67.

  Cornelis de Houtman Miriam Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998), p. 62; Milton, op. cit., p. 59.

  “. . . the surviving members . . .” The crews of the Eerste Schipvaart experienced appalling mortality rates; only one in three returned alive.

  Expeditions of 1598–1601 Israel, Dutch Primacy, pp. 67–9; Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping, I, pp. 3–4; Vlekke, op. cit., p. 70.

  The creation of the VOC The proposition of a joint stock company was a unique solution made possible only by the fact that the United Provinces was a federal republic. A precedent had, however, been set a few years earlier with an attempt to create an eight-strong cartel of companies involved in the Guinea trade. This attempt was unsuccessful, as in the end the companies of Zeeland had elected to retain their independence. Israel, op. cit., pp. 61, 69–71; Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping, I, pp. 4–5. The price of the monopoly and of state support was not cheap; the first charter, which ran for 21 years, cost the VOC 25,000 guilders. It was renewed for a similar period at no charge in 1623, the Company’s reward for its assistance in the wars with Spain, but by the end of the century a 40-year renewal cost the VOC a further three million guilders. Glamann, op. cit., p. 6. The goods that Jeronimus and his colleagues were required to buy and sell became more varied as the Company evolved. Spices remained the staple of the Indies trade, but over the years the VOC expanded its operations to deal in cottons and silks from India and China, dyestuffs, and even copper and silver from Japan. Profits were good here, too; cotton, for example, typically sold at 80–100 percent more than it had cost in the Indies, and margins of up to 500 percent were not unheard-of.

  The Gentlemen XVII See Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping, I, pp. 15–9.

  Spices Glamann, op. cit., pp. 13, 16–24, 74–6, 91–3, 134; Vlekke, op. cit., pp. 57–61; Milton, op. cit., pp. 3, 18, 58, 80.

  The Dutch in the Indies, 1602–1628 Israel, Dutch Primacy, p. 73; Vlekke, op. cit., pp. 75–7.

  “. . . this frothy nation . . .” Cited by John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (London: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 34.

  “The places and the strongholds . . .” C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600–1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1965), pp. 45–6. The governments of Europe reciprocated with scorn, and when, years later, the Dutch envoy to the court of Charles X of Sweden ventured a remark about the freedom of religion, the king is said to have pulled a golden rixdollar from his pocket and brandished it in the diplomat’s face, remarking: “Voil_otre religion.”

  “These butterboxes . . .” Quoted by Israel, Dutch Primacy, p. 105.

  Jacob Poppen Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 347–8.

  Pay of merchants In the second half of the century an upper-merchant’s salary was typically 80–100 guilders a month, or perhaps 1,100 a year, less than the earnings of a typical merchant at home in the Netherlands. Under-merchants earned half that, and assistants only a quarter as much, so that only the provision of free board and lodging while in the service of the Company made theirs a living wage. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, pp. 201, 300.

  The life and times of Francisco Pelsaert The identity of Francisco Pelsaert’s father is not known, but his mother was Barbara van Ganderheyden. She married twice and had three children—Anna Pelsaert, who was born around 1588, Francisco, and Oeyken, who was five years younger than her brother and thus born around 1600. The children took their surname from Barbara’s second husband, Dirick Pelsaert, who was a man of German stock. Dirick came originally from Aachen, but his marriage to Barbara was of short duration, and contemporary records attest that her three offspring were voorkinderen—“forechildren”—that is, the children of an earlier marriage, the details of which have not yet been traced. Barbara’s father, Dirick van Ganderheyden, who brought Pelsaert up, earned a good living as administrator of the estates of various noble widows, heiresses, and monasteries in the Southern Netherlands. He died in the autumn of 1613 and was buried in Antwerp, though it seems he had not lived there. His cousin was Hans van Ghinckel of Middelburg, who secured Pelsaert his introduction to the VOC. Kolff and van Santen, De Geschriften, pp. 4–7.

  Joining the VOC Unusually, Pelsaert was required to lodge a surety of 1,000 guilders with the Company before he was accepted. Probably this was because—being less than 25 years of age—he was still a minor by the standards of the time. Kolff and Van Santen, De Geschriften, p. 7.

  Inaccuracies concerning Pelsaert’s antecedents, relations, and personal history have crept into the record as a result of erroneous statements by the genealogist H. F. Macco, whose Geschichte und Genealogie der Familen Peltzer (Aachen, np, 1901), p. 323 incorrectly states that the commandeur was brother-in-law to the important VOC director Hendrik Brouwer. The “Francoys Pelsaert” mentioned as Brouwer’s relative, who came from Eupen, appears to have been an entirely different person; Kolff and van Santen, De Geschriften, p. 7. Unfortunately Macco’s error had already been perpetuated by Henrietta Drake-Brockman in her Voyage to Disaster (Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 1995), pp. 13–14, and from there it entered the Batavia literature generally.

  Pelsaert in India As they evolved, the VOC’s trading bases overseas were divided into three quarters. The governor-general of the Indies took direct responsibility for the Spice Islands themselves, which were by far the most important of the Company’s possessions and made up the “Eastern Quarter.” The factories in Japan, China, and Formosa made up the “Northern Quarter,” and Surat, which was established in 1606, became the administrative center for the “Western Quarter,” which included the trading centers of Persia and the Coromandel Coast. Pelsaert took control of the factory at Agra in 1623–4 on the death of his predecessor, Wouter Heuten. His first caravan to Surat (1623) included 146 packs of cloth, 15 packs of indigo, and three female slaves. Kolff and van Santen, De Geschriften, pp. 7–12, 13, 17–9, 25–8; Drake-Brockman, op. cit., pp. 11, 15–20, 21n.

  Agra Pelsaert stayed in the city some half a dozen years before the Mogul emperor Shah Jehan began the construction of its most famous monument, the Taj Mahal.

  “. . . one of the Company’s more vigorous and efficient servants . . .” Drake-Brockman, op. cit., pp. 21–7.

  Pieter van den Broecke He lived from 1585 to 1640 and wrote a journal, still extant, which is an important source for the history of Dutch trade in West Africa and northern India. He owed some of his success, in turn, to the sponsorship of Gerard Reynst, who eventually became governor-general of the Indies. By 1626–7, Van den Broecke and Pelsaert had, however, fallen out spectacularly over the latter’s suspicion that his friend planned to claim much of the credit for Pelsaert’s achievements in India. Van den Broecke’s fame rests on his journal, but recent research into his years with the VOC have shown that while well regarded as a diplomat, he was notorious for the poor state of his accounts, which were slipshod and impenetrable. Whether this failing was the consequence of genuine ineptitude or a deliberate attempt to conceal private trading is difficult to say. K. Ratelband (ed.), Reizen naar West-Africa van Pieter van den Broecke, 1605–1614 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), pp. xxii–xxxiv, xliii–xlv; Kolff and van Santen, De Geschriften, p. 48; W. P. Coolhaas (ed.), Pieter van den Broecke in Aziï (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p. 4.

  “. . . reports sent to the Netherlands” Kolff and van Santen, De Geschriften, pp. 53–7. Pelsaer
t’s genuine interest in the local people was exceptionally unusual. As one historian notes, “The average man going to the Indies had no training and no knowledge of foreign languages. What he knew of Asia before leaving Amsterdam was very little, usually based on hearsay—or he knew nothing at all. His contract with the VOC obliged him to serve in the East for some years only . . . his expectations were limited to the issue of money-making during a temporary sojourn abroad. Both this and his socio-educational background would make it extremely unlikely for him ever to get in touch with his Asian environment and to develop an interest in the cultural specifics of Asia.” Peter Kirsch, “VOC—Trade Without Ethics?” in Karl Sprengard and Roderich Ptak (eds.), Maritime Asia: Profit Maximisation, Ethics and Trade Structure c. 1300–1800 (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1994), p. 198.

  Eurasian couples in the east and infant mortality L. Blussé, “The Caryatids of Batavia: Reproduction, Religion and Acculturation Under the VOC,” Itinerario 7 (1983): 57, 65; Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), pp. 8, 12, 14–6.

  “. . . dalliances with slaves . . .” Kolff and van Santen, De Geschriften, pp. 19–21, 24, 31; Ratelband op. cit., pp. 91–2; Coolhaas, op. cit., p. 5.

  The oil of cloves incident Kolff and van Santen, De Geschriften, pp. 32–3; for the properties and uses of oil of cloves, see M. Boucher, “The Cape Passage: Some Observations on Health Hazards Aboard Dutch East Indiamen Outward-bound,” Historia 26 (1981): 35.

  “There are no Ten Commandments south of the equator” Cited in Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, p. 205.

  Private trade “The result was that everyone from Governor-General to cabin boy traded on the side, and everyone else knew it,” Boxer says. “[The men’s] superiors in the East normally had no inclination to give their subordinates away, as they themselves were almost invariably deeply implicated.” Ibid., pp. 201–2. The English East India Company, despite an ostensibly more liberal system (from 1674, employees were allowed to ship as much as 5 percent of the chartered tonnage on their own account), in fact fared little better; see Keay, op. cit., pp. 34–5, Ralph Davies, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1971), p. 147.