Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  The next great porcelain cargo to arrive in the Netherlands came the same way the following year. The Santa Catarina was captured off Johore in the Strait of Malacca, the sea-lane connecting the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea. This was the most famous seizure of the new century. The Santa Catarina was carrying a hundred thousand pieces of porcelain weighing a total of over fifty tons. (It also held twelve hundred bales of Chinese silk, which sold well because Italy’s silk production had failed that year.) Buyers for the crowned heads of northern Europe flocked to Amsterdam with orders to pay whatever the going price might be.

  The seizures of the San Iago and the Santa Catarina, and the sinking of the White Lion, were skirmishes in the larger war the Dutch were waging not so much against the Portuguese as against the Spanish. The Portuguese were the junior partners of the Spanish during the period 1580–1640, when their crowns were joined, and that in Dutch eyes made them legitimate targets of attack as well. But Spain was the arch-enemy: Spain was the state that had occupied the Low Countries in the sixteenth century and had used spectacular violence to suppress the Dutch independence movement. Even though the truce Spain and the United Provinces signed in 1609 ended direct hostilities in the Low Countries for a time, outside Europe the struggle between the Spanish kingdom and the Dutch republic continued to be waged.

  The rivalry being played out on the high seas—the Spanish not unreasonably called it “piracy”—had to do with more than the Dutch struggle for independence at home, however. It had to do with redefining the global order. Its roots have to be traced back to 1493, the year after Columbus’s first voyage to the West Indies. In light of the new lands discovered across the Atlantic, the pope decreed that same year that Spain should enjoy exclusive jurisdiction over every newly discovered land lying to the west of a north-south meridian drawn 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Morocco, and that Portugal could claim every land to the east of that line. All other European states were excluded from any right to trade into or possess the newly discovered regions. Spain and Portugal altered the terms of the papal bull of 1493 the following year by concluding the Treaty of Tordesillas. This agreement moved the line 270 leagues farther west, possibly because the Portuguese knew, or at least suspected, that a piece of South America might protrude east of that line (they were correct: it was Brazil).

  The Treaty of Tordesillas said nothing about where the line of demarcation should fall on the far side of the globe, since neither of the treaty parties had yet gone there. So Portugal and Spain quickly set off in opposite directions on their race around the globe, Portugal via the Indian Ocean and Spain via the Pacific. They knew that China was there on the opposite side of the globe, and that whoever could establish a presence in that part of the world stood to gain the richest prize of all. The Chinese government was not enthusiastic about letting either state establish a foothold on Chinese soil. Foreigners were permitted to stay in China only as temporary visitors who came as members of visiting diplomatic embassies. The concept of diplomatic embassy was sufficiently elastic, and understood to be so on both sides, that embassies from neighboring states that came to submit “tribute” to the Chinese throne operated as de facto trade delegations. Ambassadors were allowed to engage in trade so long as the volume was kept within modest limits. Traders had to be ambassadors, and that is what the Portuguese wanted to be. They reached China before the Spanish did, and made strong efforts to open official channels of communication with the Chinese court. Consistently rebuffed, they had to make do with illegal trading in the lee of offshore islands. An unofficial agreement in the middle of the sixteenth century at last gave them a foothold on a slender peninsula on the south coast known as Macao, and there they dug in, establishing a tiny colonial base from which to handle trade with both China and Japan.

  At the turn of the seventeenth century, VOC ships were also in the South China Sea, probing along the coast north of Macao as far as Fujian Province for a place where they could set up trade with China. As the Chinese government already had a trading arrangement with one set of “Franks,” as they then called Europeans (they picked up the term from the Arabs), in Macao, it was not interested in making concessions to another set. But private Chinese merchants were eager to trade with any Franks, and some officials were willing to come to an understanding if the price was right. Most notorious of the Chinese officials was Gao Cai, an imperial eunuch in charge of collecting maritime customs duties. As customs receipts went directly into the accounts of the imperial household rather than the ministry of finance, Eunuch Gao bent the rules of the bureaucracy for the benefit of his master. In 1604, he set up a private trading entrepôt in the lee of an offshore island where his agents could trade with the Dutch in return for handsome gifts for himself and the emperor. The provincial governor soon got wind of the scheme and sent in the navy to curtail the eunuch’s smuggling.2

  The absence of strong states in Southeast Asia, compared to China, made that region a more promising region for the Dutch to find a foothold. The Spanish (based at Manila in the Philippines) and the Portuguese were too few to dominate the thousands of islands in that zone, so the Dutch moved in swiftly, seizing what were called the Spice Islands from the Portuguese in 1605. Four years later, the VOC set up its first permanent trading post at Bantam on the far west end of the island of Java. After capturing Jakarta to the east, the company moved its headquarters to this location, renaming the town Batavia. Holland now had a base on the other side of the globe from which to challenge the Iberian monopoly on Asian trade. The new arrangement worked well for the company. The value of Dutch imports from the region grew by almost 3 percent annually.

  The White Lion became one of the Netherlands’ earliest and more spectacular casualties in the war to dominate the trade with Asia. The ship had sailed on its maiden voyage from Amsterdam to Asia—a distance of some fourteen thousand nautical miles (twenty-five thousand kilometers)—as early as 1601, a year before the VOC was formed.3 It reached home in July of the following year. Mounting tension with Portuguese vessels in Asian waters justified its being refitted with six new bronze cannon fore and aft. When it embarked on its second journey to Asia in 1605, the White Lion sailed as a VOC ship. The new business arrangement is recorded on the backs of the copper cannon, which the salvage archaeologists fished out of the bay in 1976. Foundry master Hendrick Muers inscribed them with his name and the date—Henricus Muers me fecit 1604—above which he overlaid the interlocking company initials, VOC, plus an A, the insignia of the Amsterdam Chamber of the VOC.

  The White Lion successfully completed a second voyage and then set off on its fateful third in 1610. It was unloaded at Bantam, then reassigned to a naval squadron charged with suppressing an uprising for nutmeg traders in the Spice Islands. The White Lion spent that winter as part of a fleet preying on Spanish ships sailing out of Manila. Five were captured. It was put into interisland shipping for the spring and summer, then ordered back to Bantam to load up for its third return journey to Amsterdam. On 5 December 1612, it departed as one of four ships under the command of Admiral Lam. On the first of June the following summer, it left St. Helena on the final leg of its voyage to Amsterdam. We know the rest of the story.

  Dutch piracy provoked diplomatic protests from other European nations, and not just Portugal.4 When the Dutch seized the Santa Catarina in 1603, Portugal demanded the return of the ship with all its cargo, insisting that it had been an unlawful seizure. The directors of the VOC felt they had to make a case for themselves that did more than glorify their capacity to get away with such theft. They needed principles of international law to prove they were justified in their actions, so they commissioned a bright young lawyer from Delft, Huig de Groot (better known in English by the Latin version of his name, Grotius) to write a brief justifying their claim that the seizure was not piracy but an act taken in defense of the company’s legitimate interests.

  In 1608, Grotius delivered what the VOC directors wanted. De jure praedae
, translated into English as The Spoils of War, argued that the Spanish naval blockade of the Netherlands, then in force, was an act of war. Such provocation gave the Dutch the right to treat Portuguese and Spanish ships as belligerent vessels. One of their ships captured in war was legitimate booty, not illegal seizure. The following year, Grotius expanded The Spoils of War into his masterwork, Mare Liberum, or in its full English title, The Freedom of the Seas or the Right Which Belongs to the Dutch to Take Part in the East Indian Trade.

  In The Freedom of the Seas, Grotius makes several bold and novel arguments. The boldest of all is one that no one had thus far thought to make: all people have the right to trade. For the first time, the freedom of trade is declared a principle of international law, as it has been of the international order ever since. From this fundamental principle, it follows that no state has the right to prevent the nationals of another state from using sea-lanes for the pursuit of trade. If trade was free, then the seas on which they traded also were free. Portugal and Spain had no basis for abrogating that right by monopolizing the maritime trade to Asia. Grotius would not accept their argument that they had earned the monopoly by dint of the work they did to carry Christianity to the natives in those parts of the world where they traded. The duty of converting the heathen not only did not trump freedom to trade; for Grotius, it was offensive to the principle that all should be treated equally. “Religious belief does not do away with either natural or human law from which sovereignty is derived,” he stated. That people should refuse to accept Christianity is “not sufficient cause to justify war upon them, or to despoil them of their goods.” Nor is the expense to convert them to be redeemed by preventing other nations from trading with them. Armed with a hugely self-interested interpretation of Grotius’s argument, the VOC allowed its captains to use force wherever they were blocked from trading.

  The VOC directors also recognized that the best way to dominate the trade in porcelain was to acquire it through regular trade channels, not steal it from other ships. They started informing their captains departing for Bantam that they should not think of coming back without some Chinese porcelain. In 1608, they sent a shopping list: 50,000 butter dishes, 10,000 plates, 2,000 fruit dishes, and 1,000 each of salt cellars, mustard pots, and various wide bowls and large dishes, plus an unspecified number of jugs and cups. This order represented a spike in demand that Chinese merchants at first failed to meet. Instead, demand drove up prices. “The porcelain here comes generally so expensive,” noted the dismayed head of operations in Bantam in a letter to the VOC directors in 1610. Worse, whenever a fleet of Dutch ships arrives in port, the Chinese merchants “immediately run up the prices so much, that I cannot calculate a profit on them.” The only way to control this price volatility was to stop all further purchases and negotiate improved supply with the Chinese. “We shall henceforth look out for porcelain and try to contract with the Chinese that they bring a lot,” he wrote, “for what they have brought until now does not amount to much and is mostly inferior.” He decided not to buy any of what was on offer that year. “Only very curious goods will serve,” he decided.

  By the time the White Lion was loading at the docks of Bantam in the winter of 1612, Chinese suppliers were meeting the higher standard that the VOC expected. The Wapen van Amsterdam, the flagship of Lam’s decimated fleet, brought back only five barrels of porcelain, each of which contained five large dishes. These were special purchases brought as gifts to VOC officials. It was the other Dutch ship that made it to port, the Vlissingen, that carried the main china cargo. It disgorged 38,641 pieces, ranging from large, expensive serving dishes and brandy decanters to modest but attractive oil and vinegar jars and little cups for holding candles. The load was worth 6,791 guilders—not an unimaginably vast sum when you consider that a skilled artisan at the time could earn 200 guilders in a year, but substantial nonetheless. This was the start of a long and growing trade in porcelain. By 1640, to choose a date and ship at random, the Nassau alone carried back to Amsterdam 126,391 pieces of porcelain. Porcelain was not the most profitable cargo on the ship—that was pepper, of which the Nassau carried 9,164 sacks—but it was the commodity that created the greatest presence in Dutch society. Over the first half of the seventeenth century, VOC ships delivered to Europe a total of well over three million pieces.

  CHINESE POTTERS PRODUCED FOR EXPORT markets all over the world. They also produced for the home market, in quantity and quality far beyond the stuff they shipped abroad. Chinese of the Ming dynasty were as keen to own beautiful blue-and-white porcelain as were Dutch householders, but they acquired it guided by much more complex standards of taste.

  Wen Zhenheng was a leading connoisseur and arbiter of taste of his generation (he died in 1645). He was living in the cultural metropolis of Suzhou when the White Lion exploded and sank. His home city produced and consumed the very finest works of art and cultural objects to be found in China, as well as the most commercial. Wen was perfectly placed to produce his famous handbook of cultural consumption and good taste, A Treatise on Superfluous Things. The great-grandson of the greatest artist of the sixteenth century, an essayist in his own right, and a member of one of the richest and most exclusive families in Suzhou, Wen had all the credentials needed to pass the judgments of his class on what was done and not done in polite society, and on what should be owned and what avoided—which is what A Treatise on Superfluous Things is all about. A guide to the dos and don’ts of acquiring and using nice things, it was an answer to the prayers of readers who, unlike a gentleman such as Wen, were not sufficiently educated or well bred to know these things by upbringing. It was for the nouveaux riches who yearned to be accepted by their social superiors. On Wen’s part, it was also a clever way to profit from their ignorance, for the book sold well.

  In the section on decorative objects, Wen Zhenheng sets the bar for good quality porcelain very high. He allows that porcelain is something a gentleman should collect and put on display, but doubts that anything produced after the second quarter of the fifteenth century has any value, at least as something you would want to let your friends know you owned. The perfect piece of porcelain, he declares, should be “as blue as the sky, as lustrous as a mirror, as thin as paper, and as resonant as a chime”—though he has the sense to wonder whether such perfection has ever been achieved, even in the fifteenth century. He does let a few sixteenth-century pieces pass his scrutiny—but only so long as they were only for everyday use. A host might serve tea to his guests in cups produced by Potter Cui, for instance. (Cui’s private kiln at Jingdezhen turned out fine porcelain, both blue-and-white and multicolored, during the third quarter of the sixteenth century.) But really, Wen complains, the cups are a little too large to be elegant. They should be used only if nothing else is on hand.

  Owning objects of high cultural value was a treacherous business among those struggling up the ladder of status. Even if you possessed a piece of porcelain that Wen considered fine enough to own, care still had to be taken not to use it in the wrong way or at the wrong time. For instance, to set out a vase for people to see, the only piece of furniture on which it was acceptable to put it was “a table in the Japanese style,” as he describes it. The size of this table depends on the size and style of the vase, and that in turn depends on the size of the room in which the vase is displayed. “In the spring and winter, bronze vessels are appropriate to use; in the autumn and summer, ceramic vases,” he insists. Nothing else is acceptable. “Value bronze and ceramic, and hold gold and silver cheap,” he instructs. Objects made of precious metals should be avoided not to cool the sin of pride, as the Koran warned, but to keep those who were merely wealthy and without education or taste in their places. “Avoid vases with rings,” he also advises, “and never arrange them in pairs.” It was all very complicated.

  Among his many rules, Wen included some for the flowers you were allowed to put in your vase. These admonitions end with the severe caution that “any more than two stems and your room
will end up looking like a tavern.” The exuberance of the floral displays that Europeans gaily stuffed into their newly acquired Chinese porcelains, and that Dutch artists loved to paint when they weren’t painting tavern scenes (and sometimes when they were) would have struck Wen as utterly tasteless and hopelessly lower class. Just imagine the dismay he would have felt over how Europeans used their teacups. Wen allowed that it was all right to put out fruit and nuts when drinking tea from one of Potter Cui’s cups, for instance, but never oranges. Oranges were too fragrant to be served alongside tea, as was jasmine and cassia. In the war that Wen waged against bad taste, Europeans would have lost hands down.

  Europeans could know nothing of these status games. They were too new to the art of owning porcelain to worry about anything except getting their hands on some. They had their rules too, but their cultural terrain of luxury ownership, at least in ceramic matters, was not so heavily mined. The precious pieces of porcelain that came out of the hold of the Vlissingen and were put on auction at VOC warehouses in 1613 were highly desired, regardless of their style or even their quality. The only cultural values they carried was that they were rare, exclusive, and expensive. Having no experience with porcelain, Europeans could let their new acquisitions migrate into whatever niches their buyers fancied. Chinese dishes started to appear on tables at meal times, since porcelain was marvelously easy to clean and did not pass on the flavor of yesterday’s food to today’s dinner. They were also put on display as costly curiosities from the far side of the globe. They decorated tables, display cabinets, mantles, even the lintels over doors. (Careful attention paid to doorframes in mid- to late-seventeenth-century paintings of Dutch interiors will reveal dishes or vases perched on them.) It would have been pointless to restrict the placing of fine vases to low Japanese-style tables, since Europeans had no idea what those were. They put them anywhere they liked.