by Mike Dash
“There was no esprit de corps . . .” Kirsch, op. cit., p. 199.
Huybert Visnich Ibid., p. 200.
Pelsaert as a money lender He avoided detection simply by adding the interest he was owed to the price of the indigo he purchased, thus leaving no trace of his activities in the factory’s accounts. Without detailed knowledge of local market conditions, neither the Gentlemen XVII nor Pelsaert’s superiors at the VOC factory in Surat were in any position to question the prices he paid. Kolff and van Santen, De Geschriften, pp. 33–4.
The Amsterdam one-way system Geoffrey Cotterell, Amsterdam: The Life of a City (Farnborough: DC Heath, 1973), p. 86.
Cornelisz’s selection procedure Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, p. 51; Kirsch, op. cit., pp. 198–9; Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping, I, p. 147. “To be ranked as an assistant, merchant or upper-merchant did not mean very much,” Kirsch observes. “Whatever the rank, it had little or nothing to do with abilities or morals. It was a label only, won by practical experience of acting as a profit-maximiser.”
Adriaan Block He lived from 1581/2 until 1661 and was the brother-in-law of Isaac Massa (1586–1643), another wealthy merchant who built a fortune trading with Russia and who belonged to Thibault’s Fencing club. Govert Snoek, De Rosenkruizers in Nederland, Voornamelijk in de Eerste Helft van de 17de Eeuw. Een Inventarisatie (Ph.D. thesis, University of Utrecht, 1997), pp. 72–4, 164.
Merchants and assistants Difficult as it generally was to recruit both officers and men, it was unusual for the Company to go so far as to hire a novice as an under-merchant. The position was a relatively senior one and was generally awarded to men who boasted at least half a dozen years of faithful service to the company in the lesser position of assistant, or clerk. On many smaller ships, an under-merchant would be the most senior VOC officer on board, and it would fall to him to direct the skipper and barter for trade goods with the experienced native merchants of the east. For this reason, even men who came from good families tended to join the VOC as assistants if they were without influence, and they learned the trade of merchant by watching their superiors for a period of years. Francisco Pelsaert started as an assistant and served at that rank for four or five years before receiving promotion to under-merchant (Kolff and van Santen, op. cit., pp. 6–7). He was, however, much younger at this time than was Cornelisz, who was not in any case unique. Some men were even more greatly favored than he; Pieter van den Broecke, who had years of experience in Africa, actually joined the company as an upper-merchant on the recommendation of Gerard Reynst, the son of a prominent soap-boiler and a future Governor-General of the Indies. Ratelband, op. cit., pp. XXXI, XXXIV.
The Peperwerf and the building of the Batavia The island of Rapenburg has long since become part of the city of Amsterdam and now exists only as a street name and a square. The yards there dated to 1608, before which the Amsterdam chamber of the VOC contracted with private shipbuilders for its vessels. Even after that date the six chambers built their own ships to their own specifications, and there were subtle—indeed sometimes considerable—differences between the vessels built in the different yards.
No records survive concerning the construction or the cost of the Batavia herself, though she was built in compliance of a directive of 17 March 1626. Given that average building times were then 8 or 12 months, it would appear to have taken the VOC another 12–18 months to lay her down. Like all Dutch East Indiamen, she was built not to a detailed set of plans, but by rule of thumb. The ship was made of green timber—Dutch shipwrights found seasoned wood too hard to work with. Measurements are given in English feet, which were slightly bigger than the Amsterdam feet the original shipwrights worked in (one Amsterdam foot = 11 inches, or 28 cm). In terms of labor, construction required about 183,000 man hours. P. Gretler, “De Peperwerf,” in R. Parthesius (ed.), Batavia Cahier 2: De Herbouw van een Oostindiïvaarder (Lelystad: np, 1990), pp. 58–64; Willem Vos, “Een Rondleiding Door een Oostindiïvaarder,” in Batavia Cahier 4: Een Rondleiding door een Oostindiïvaarder (Lelystad: np, 1993), pp. 3–45; A. van der Zee, “Bronmen voor Oostindiïvaarders: Het VOC-Boekhoundjournaal,” in R. Parthesius (ed.), Batavia Cahier 3: De Herbouw van een Oostindiïvaarder (Leylystad: np, 1990), p. 61; Jeremy Green, Myra Stanbury, and Femme Gaastra (eds.), The ANCODS Colloquium: Papers Presented at the Australia-Netherlands Colloquium on Maritime Archaeology and Maritime History (Fremantle: Australian National Centre of Excellence for Maritime Archaeology, 1999), p. 71; Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping, I, pp. 37–9, 93; Philippe Godard, The First and Last Voyage of the Batavia (Perth: Abrolhos Publishing, nd, c. 1993), pp. 56–66; C. R. Boxer, “The Dutch East-Indiamen: Their Sailors, Their Navigators and Life on Board, 1602–1795,” The Mariner’s Mirror 49 (1963): 82; H. N. Kamer, Het VOC-Retourschip: Een Panorama van de 17de- en 18de-Eeuwse Scheepsbouw (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1995), pp. 30–8, 218–9.
Batavia The name is taken from that of the ancient, and semimythical, tribe of Batavians, who had occupied the Netherlands 1500 years earlier and—in legend at least—were supposed to have fought exceptionally bravely against the Romans.
“. . . 30 guns . . .” Bert Westera, “Geschut voor de Batavia,” in Robert Parthesius (ed.), Batavia Cahier 2: De Herbouw van een Oostindiïvaarder (Lelystad: np, 1990), pp. 22–5.
“. . . the most complex machines yet built . . .” Pablo Pérez-Mallaína’s observation, made of sixteenth-century Spanish merchantmen, applies equally to the Dutch East Indiamen of the next century. “A multi-decked ship . . . formed a floating collection of the incredible successes achieved by human ingenuity to that time. [Such ships were] veritable showcases of the technological developments of western Europe. They were the most complex machines of the epoch.” Spain’s Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 63.
Fluyt and jacht Jaap Bruijn and Femme S. Gaastra, “The Dutch East India Company’s Shipping, 1602–1795, in a Comparative Perspective,” in Bruijn and Gaastra (eds.), Ships, Sailors and Spices: East India Companies and Their Shipping in the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries (Amsterdam: NEHA, 1993), p. 185; Davies, op. cit., p. 49.
“. . . in as little as six months . . .” Eight to 12 months was perhaps closer to the average, but still a remarkable achievement.
“. . . the VOC flogged its ships . . .” Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping, I, 27–8, 95.
“virtually no demand for European goods . . .” The only significant exports at this time were lead and mercury.
The prefabricated gateway This gateway, salvaged and restored, can be viewed in the Western Australian Maritime Museum in Fremantle. See Marit van Huystee, The Lost Gateway of Jakarta (Fremantle: Western Australian Maritime Museum, 1994) and the epilogue for additional details.
Coinage on board Especially the fabled stukken van achten. These “pieces of eight,” which came from Spanish mines in South America, could be counted on to contain silver of a fixed purity and value, but with the renewal of the war against Spain in the early 1620s, supplies of this superior coinage dried up, and the VOC was forced to export less well regarded Dutch and German coinage instead. The enduring clamor for silver posed particular problems for the Gentlemen XVII in the 1620s. The occasional spectacular naval victory might secure substantial quantities of freshly minted reals for Jan Company; indeed, in 1628 Admiral Piet Hein captured the entire annual Spanish treasure fleet off the coast of Cuba. But the Batavia sailed before this fortune made its way into circulation, and carried a heterogeneous collection of coins from the principalities of northern Germany (a region that, thanks to the notorious economic madness known as the kipper- und wipperzeit [ca. 1600–1623], had acquired an unenviable reputation for producing clipped coins and debased coinage). Glamann, op. cit., pp. 41–51; Phillip Playford, Carpet of Silver: The Wreck of the Zuytdorp (Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 1996), pp. 10, 43–5. For the kipper- und wipperzeit, see Charles Kindleberger, “The E
conomic Crisis of 1619 to 1623,” Journal of Economic History 51 (1991). Jan Company’s success in opening up the Indies trade eventually caused significant problems for the Dutch economy. So much silver was shipped out to the East that the States-General was forced to pass a law forbidding more than two-thirds of the bullion coming into the country to be reexported. Stan Wilson, Doits to Ducatoons: The Coins of the Dutch East India Company Ship Batavia, Lost on the Western Australian Coast 1629 (Perth: Western Australian Museum, 1989), pp. 3–11.
The need for diplomacy Kolff and van Santen, op. cit., p. 11.
Pelsaert’s return from India Ibid., pp. 29, 37–41; confession of Jeronimus Cornelisz, JFP 19 Sep 1629 [DB 163–4]; Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Voyage to Disaster (Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 1995), pp. 32–3.
Wollebrand Gheleijnsen de Jongh De Jongh (1594–1674) was head of the VOC settlement at Burhanpur and much less experienced in India than Pelsaert. He came originally from Alkmaar and served the VOC from 1613 to 1648. In the nineteenth century he became famous in the Netherlands as a character in a popular historical novel, but he has since been forgotten. Kolff and van Santen, op. cit., pp. 28–9.
Jacobsz and the Dordrecht Drake-Brockman, op. cit., p. 61.
Chronicle and remonstrantie Ibid., pp. 21–32; Kolff and van Santen, op. cit., pp. 1–2, 44.
Pelsaert in the United Provinces The plate showed scenes that would be familiar to the Muslim emperors—one example, recovered from the wreck site and now on display in the Western Australian Maritime Museum, is a one-foot silver jar portraying an Islamic purification ceremony. Cf. V. D. Roeper (ed.), De Schipbreuk van de Batavia, 1629 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1994), pp. 10, 13.
“. . . designed to the upper-merchant’s own specifications . . .” Drake-Brockman, op. cit., p. 36.
“. . . traveling via the East Indies . . .” The prevailing winds in the Indian Ocean meant that, in normal circumstances, it was actually faster to sail to India via Java than it was to go directly there, battling adverse winds and currents on the voyage from the Cape of Good Hope to Surat.
Jacques Specx He was born in Dordrecht in 1589, the son of an immigrant from the Southern Netherlands, and sailed for the Indies as an under-merchant in December 1607. Specx traveled to Japan and opened up a new trade there, becoming the first head of the Dutch factory on the island of Hirado (1610–13 and 1614–21). Recalled to the Netherlands in 1627 to brief the Gentlemen XVII in person on Japan, he was appointed to command the main autumn fleet sailing to the Indies in the autumn of 1628. W. P. Coolhaas, “Aanvullingen en Verbeteringen op Van Rhede van der Kloot’s De Gouveneurs-Generalen Commissarissen-Generaal van Nederlandsch-Indiï (1610–1888),” De Nederlandsche Leeuw 73 (1956): 341; F. W. Stapel, De Gouveneurs-Generaal van Nederlandsch-Indiï in Beeld en Woord (The Hague: Van Stockum, 1941), p. 19.
Chapter 3: The Tavern of the Ocean
No detailed accounts survive of the first leg of the Batavia’s journey east. The ship’s journal and letters home, left under a “post office stone” at the Cape of Good Hope, seem to have been lost and certainly never reached the Netherlands; and Pelsaert’s own papers were thrown overboard by rioting sailors in the Abrolhos. Because of this, some of the details in my account have been drawn from general Dutch experience, and a description of a typical passage in the late 1620s constructed from sources such as Jaap Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 3 vols., 1979–1987) and Bruijn’s “Between Batavia and the Cape: Shipping Patterns of the Dutch East India Company,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 11 (1980).
Dordrecht The proper name of the ship was the Maeght van Dort (which means Virgin of Dordrecht), but she seems usually to have been known simply by the diminutive.
“Autumn was the busiest time of year . . .” Three main fleets sailed to Java every year—one in April, another in September, and the last at Christmas. The Christmas fleet had always been the largest. Its crews were expected to endure the miseries of the Dutch winter, but by the time they neared the equator there were generally fresh winds to carry them across the doldrums, and the fleet arrived in the East in good time to be unloaded and repaired before the return voyage began in November. Ships that left at Easter enjoyed better weather in European waters, but less favorable conditions once they reached the Atlantic. The third, September, sailing occurred while the Dutch were enjoying their great autumn festivals, and the ships that departed at this time of year were known as the kermis, or fair, fleet. The kermis fleet was a recent innovation, and in 1628 only two ships a year were sent east this early in the autumn. From this it will be seen that the fleet commanded by Jacques Specx and Francisco Pelsaert fell outside the normal run of VOC operations. Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping, I, 62–3; Bruijn, “Between Batavia and the Cape” p. 252.
Initial impressions of the ship R. van Gelder, Het Oost-Indisch Avontuur: Duitsers in Dienst van de VOC, 1600–1800 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1997), p. 149. In his account of the Georgian Royal Navy, N. A. M. Rodger recounts a British boy’s first impressions of being “registered in a wooden world” a little more than a century later, which were quite similar. Life on board was quite different to life ashore in almost every aspect; sailors had their own society, manners and dress, the boy observed. “Nor could I think what world I was in, whether among spirits of devils. All seemed strange, different language and strange expressions of tongue, that I thought myself always asleep or in a dream, and never properly awake.” The Wooden World (London: Fontana, 1988), p. 37.
The Great Cabin It measured approximately 20 feet by 15 and enjoyed good head room, though—like every cabin in the stern—its steeply sloping floor made it treacherous in any sea.
Creesje Jansdochter For her use of the diminutive, see GAA, baptismal registers 40, fol. 157 (30 January 1622), which records the birth of her first son.
The life and times of Gijsbert Bastiaensz For his marriage, see GAD, marital registers 17 (1604–1618) for 10 February 1604. On the burial of his child, see GAD, burial registers 1692 for September 1613. Neither the name nor the sex of the child are specified in the register, but the only candidates for the burial are Pieter Gijsbertsz (baptized March 1610) and Hester (baptized July 1612), for whom see GAD baptismal registers 3 (1605–1619). Since a passing reference in JFP (sentence on Jeronimus Cornelisz, 28 Sep 1629) mentions another child, Willemijntgie, as the “middle daughter” of the family, it would appear that only three girls were alive at that time, and that Hester must therefore have been the child buried in 1613. For the horse-mill, see GAD, TR 747 fol. 95. The mill was acquired from Neeltgen Willemsdr, widow of the miller Cornelis Gillisz, on 7 May 1604. For the land Gijsbert acquired for grazing horses, see ONAD 23, fols. 252–252v, which records that the predikant had rented five morgen (a morgen is two and a quarter acres) from Walvaren van Arckel in the nearby village of Dubbeldam. Bastiaensz also owned some additional property through his wife in the Steechoversloot, the Dordrecht street where he and his family lived; see GAD TR 766, fol. 99v. For the predikant’s service as one of the 10 elders on the church council in Dordrecht, see GAD NKD 3, fol. 38v; NKD 3, fol. 115; ibid., fol. 158v; ibid., fol. 248; NKD 4, fol. 48. Records suggestive of Gijsbert Bastiaensz’s status in the community are relatively abundant. His name appears 15 times in the indexes to the solicitors’ records of Dordrecht; for his services in witnessing notarial acts, see, e.g., ONAD 3, fol. 21v; for his work as a member of a 1616 arbitration committee, see ONAD 53, fol. 63; and for his duties as an executor of the will of Willem Jansz Slenaer, in September 1618, see ONAD 54, fol. 23v.
“His scant surviving writings . . .” The predikant’s only known written legacy is the letter he penned in December 1629 describing his experiences on the Batavia, published in the second (1649) edition of the pamphlet Ongeluckige Voyagie, Van ’t Schip Batavia. This document is hereafter referred to as LGB.
“Gijsbert Bastiaensz was later to confess . . .” LGB.
Dordrecht note
d for its orthodoxy Israel, The Dutch Republic, p. 382.
Maria Schepens For the history of the Schepens family, see GAD, Familie-archief 85, a notebook relating to the ancestors of Matthijs Balen. This book, which lacks pagination, contains a section on the genealogy of the Schepenses. From this it appears that Maria was the last of 12 children born as a result of her father’s two marriages, the first betrothal being to Elisabeth van Relegem of Brussels, in 1555, and the second to one Judith Willemsdr in about 1570–2. Pieter Schepens came from Beringe in the province of Liège and was thus probably a member of the diaspora that resulted from the persecution of the non-Catholic population of the Southern Netherlands by the Spaniards. His daughter Maria’s birth date is not known, but it was probably around 1580–1. Her eldest half-brother, Gerard Schepens (1556–1609), was also a Calvinist minister, though he did not join the Reformed Church until he was 16 years old. Gijsbert Bastiaensz stood as godfather to Gerard’s daughter Catharina in November 1609. Gerard’s son Samuel followed his father into the Reformed Church. It is also interesting to note that one of Maria’s many cousins was Emanuel Sweerts, a leading exporter of tulip bulbs who lived in Amsterdam.
The difficulties of recruitment In fact, no more than 900 predikanten served in the East in the whole 200-year history of the VOC. C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600–1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1965), pp. 114–7.
Bastiaen Gijsbrechtsz and his family Gijsbrechtsz was probably born some time in the 1550s, since he married in April 1575. His wife was named Haesken Jansdr. The couple had at least five children. Gijsbert, the eldest, would appear to have been born in 1576. His sister Elisabeth followed in 1580/1, but she must have died young since a second daughter of the same name was baptized in February 1588. A second son, Cornelis, was born early in 1583, and a third, called Huich or Hugo, in February 1595. Bastiaen Gijsbrechtsz died in Dordrecht at some point before 5 April 1606; his wife survived him and was not buried until April 1624. It would appear probable that she and Gijsbrechtsz moved away from Dordrecht for a while between 1588 and 1595, since there is a long gap between the births of the second Elisabeth and Hugo, and a will of Haesken’s dated 1606 mentions two further children—a son named Willem and another daughter, Agnete—who cannot be traced in the town records. Yet another son, Jan, is mentioned in a will of Hugo Bastiaensz, which was drawn up in July 1614, and he is referred to again, along with an otherwise unknown sister, Sara, in the preamble to Gijsbrecht Bastiaensz’s letter from Batavia, LGB. This takes the possible total of Bastiaen Gijsbrechtsz’s children to nine. Alternatively, he may have been Haesken’s second husband, and several of her children may have been fathered by the first. GAD, baptismal registers 1 (1574–1587), 2 (1587–1604); burial registers 1697. For Haesken’s will, see ONAD 3, fol. 423 and for Hugo’s see ONAD 20, fols. 240r–240v. Gijsbert Bastiaensz himself also goes unrecorded in the Dordrecht baptismal registers. For his age, see ONAD 27, fol. 23.