Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  Africans were seen in seventeenth-century East Asia, but Chinese were a rarer sight outside of that region. Ming law forbade Chinese from leaving the emperor’s realm and imposed capital punishment on anyone who left without authorization, should he return. But for over two centuries, many had been going to Southeast Asia to trade and work, and had managed to slip back into China without dire consequences. Most officials looked the other way so long as the maritime traders who came and went were not exporting military materials such as gunpowder. Servitude to foreigners was another matter.

  Ever since the Portuguese set up their colony on the tiny peninsula of Macao in 1557, Chinese had been going there to find work. Many went freely, but some ended up there as bonded labor, either because they had sold themselves into bondage to pay off debts or because they had been kidnapped. Bond service was legal in Ming China, so long as it was entered into willingly and by written contract. Human trafficking with foreigners, however, was against Chinese law, and provincial officials in Canton were vigilant on this point. The ban against human trafficking was important enough to be listed as the second of five basic regulations to which the Portuguese were forced to agree to after a round of negotiations with Chinese officials in 1614. (Another of the regulations forbade the Portuguese from having Japanese servants, “Dwarf Slaves,” in Macao either.) Two years later, these regulations were inscribed on a large stone tablet erected in the center of town, lest anyone conveniently forget what they had agreed to respect. Chinese persons could not be bought and sold.

  Regardless of what was carved in stone, Chinese officials realized that no legal barrier could stop the flood of poor Chinese heading out to scrape a few flakes off the gold mountain of Macao. Ordinary people had no interest in respecting the quarantine that the Ming state would have liked to impose between Chinese and foreigners, especially when the benefits of going out to Macao so clearly outweighed whatever moral duty these regulations were supposed to uphold. “Every year they go,” one official complained, “every year we do not know how many.” The Chinese government’s concern was not so much ideological as fiscal. The problem with letting Chinese leave the country was that they then disappeared from their home county tax registers. One more Chinese bond servant in Macao was one fewer taxpayer. The rector of the Jesuit college in Macao sided with the Chinese officials by speaking out against trafficking in Chinese children, yet this did nothing to stop the flow of the people whose labor and services kept the colony going.

  Had Lobo’s ship made it back to Lisbon, his Chinese bond servant would have become one of Europe’s rare Chinese. A few had gone ahead of him, some as Christian acolytes for the Jesuits to train, some as curiosities to show to great monarchs and enlightened scholars. As the ship didn’t make it, Lobo’s servant was left stranded between his master’s world and his own. Once the Wolf was dead, his bond service was finished—as were his chances of survival. He was about to become one of the many whom the whirlwind of seventeenth-century trade picked up in one place and scattered to another.

  GOING TO SEA WAS A risky business. Merchant corporations in Europe were building ships ever bigger so that they could accommodate ever-larger cargoes and better withstand attack at sea as they sped around the globe on ever-tighter schedules. But the bigger the ship, the less deftly it could maneuver its way through offshore channels, run up on a beach without harm when a storm struck, or evade a smaller but more nimble attacker. As a result, the seventeenth became the great century of shipwrecks. It was a simple matter of numbers. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, 59 Dutch ships and 20 English ships sailed for Asia. Skip a decade to the 1620s, and the numbers increase to 148 Dutch and 53 English. The more ships went out on the ocean, the more ships sank. Add to numbers the pressure of competition. Ships’ captains began to sail at faster speeds and took greater risks in their attempts to outrun their competitors. As a result, more crews and passengers were getting thrown onto coasts evermore far flung and finding themselves in unimagined situations where they had to use their wits to survive. More cultures were being thrown up against each other and having to negotiate swiftly the visible differences of skin color, dress, gesture, and language that tend to mark the boundaries between who we are and who you are.

  The year 1647 happens to have been a particularly bad one for Dutch ships making the passage around the Cape of Good Hope. Four months earlier, the Nieuw Haarlem, on the return leg of its fourth round-trip to Batavia, foundered near the cape, stranding its passengers there for almost a year before rescue came. Once they were back in Amsterdam, the survivors lobbied the VOC to let them return to the southern end of Africa and colonize it. The VOC was not keen to get involved in occupying territory overseas beyond what was needed to conduct trade. Unlike the Spanish and Portuguese, who projected their trade power as an imperium of military control, the Dutch simply wanted to come and go as free traders. After five years of intensive lobbying, some of the survivors were able to go back and settle in the place where they had been washed ashore in 1647. It was the first Dutch settler expedition to the cape, the first thread in the fabric of white settlement and black servitude in South Africa that would take three centuries to weave and several tumultuous decades late in the twentieth century to unravel.

  Maritime ventures created fortunes for a lucky few and fueled the dreams of the rest. Some men willingly indentured themselves to long voyages from which the likelihood of winning riches—even of returning—may not have been good, but which was better than staying at home. Even for those who did stay home, there was vicarious pleasure in dreaming about sailing abroad for riches, and the schaden-freude of knowing that death and destruction lay at every turn for those who did so. So much could go wrong on long sea voyages. Disease, dehydration, and starvation regularly devastated crews at sea. Storms could tear a ship apart and leave not a plank to indicate that it or those who sailed on it had ever existed. Unfamiliar coastlines consistently misled navigators and uncharted rocks tore out ships’ bottoms, tilting passengers into the waves and dumping cargoes on sea bottoms. And as Adriano de las Cortes discovered, making it to shore was no guarantee of survival if the local inhabitants had learned to be suspicious of traders and their guns, or avaricious for whatever goods they might carry.

  It is hardly surprising, then, to learn that the seventeenth-century imagination was much gripped by tales of disaster at sea. From the beginning of the century, writers in all genres were happy to supply readers with such stories. Even William Shakespeare got caught up in the demand for shipwreck tales late in his career, though if he churned out The Tempest merely to please public taste, he ultimately wrote what today is regarded as one of his most enthralling plays. Of the shipwreck tales that publishers rushed into print in the early decades, none sold as well as Willem Bontekoe’s A Memorable Description of the East Indian Voyage. Bontekoe regales the reader with six years of hair-raising adventures starting in 1619, when he captained the Nieuw Hoorn so disastrously across the Indian Ocean. He claims he wrote the account for his family and friends back in Hoorn (he was one of three brothers who captained VOC ships), doubting that anyone else would be interested in reading it, and tells the readers to blame the publisher for taking his manuscript from him and putting it into print, should they judge the book substandard. Two decades had passed since the events Bontekoe describes, but that did not dismay a public avid for this kind of story. The book was a wild commercial success.

  Unexpected disaster struck the Nieuw Hoorn on the journey out. On the Indian Ocean crossing, a sailor upset a lantern that started a fire. The crew did what they could, but the blaze quickly got out of hand and burned its way to the gunpowder stores and detonated the ship’s supply. The explosion killed many crewmen and drowned many more. Some were able to escape to the ship’s two lifeboats before the explosion tore the ship apart, but Bontekoe stayed on board to the last. The force of the explosion threw him clear of the ship. Wounded and dazed, he had enough life left in him to grab hold of a floati
ng mast. The survivors in one of the lifeboats eventually fished him out of the sea. Seventy-two men and boys then drifted eastward for two weeks with nothing but the ocean around them. As their food supply dwindled, the sailors eyed the cabin boys for food. Fortunately for all on board, the lifeboats drifted onto an island off the coast of Sumatra before hunger took their lives.

  The disaster had not been Bontekoe’s fault, and yet Jan Coen, the recently appointed VOC governor at Batavia and one of the company’s more effective leaders, rebuked him once he reached the Dutch colony. The VOC had been developing a new route across the Indian Ocean but Bontekoe had failed to take it. Rather than go around the cape and up to Madagascar and then head east, which placed ships in unfavorable currents and howling winds, VOC ships were encouraged to head south from the cape and pick up the westerlies. These winds would carry them smartly across the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Before going too far east and smashing onto the rocky western coast of Australia, the ships were to cut north to Batavia. Bontekoe had skipped the cape and taken the old route. He justified his choice in his log with the observation that “all our people were still in good health, and we did not lack water; therefore we let all sails out.” In the end, though, his journey was far longer than it needed to be. The new route cut the eleven-month journey from Amsterdam to Batavia by three or four months. Bontekoe could have been in Batavia three months before the explosion ever happened.1

  The survivors of the Nieuw Hoorn stumbled onto an island that they soon realized was anything but deserted. Shortly after going ashore they found a campfire that had recently been put out, with a small stack of tobacco leaves piled beside it—evidence that the Malays on this island had already been inducted into the joys of smoking. The islanders had also learned not to expose themselves to newcomers but to slip from sight and assess their strength and disposition before making direct contact. The Malays showed up the next morning to parley. Three of the Dutch sailors who had been to Asia before knew enough Malay to make themselves understood. The first question the Malays asked was whether the men were carrying firearms. The Dutch had lost all their arquebuses when their ship exploded, but they were canny enough not to reveal that they were unarmed, telling their hosts that their guns were stashed in their boats. Their questions showed the sailors that the Malays knew a considerable amount about Dutch trade, as did their willingness to take Dutch coins in exchange for food. The islanders knew the name of Governor Jan Coen in Batavia. They also knew that Dutch traders carried valuable goods, and so attempted an ambush the following day. The attack failed, though at the cost of several Dutch lives.

  Bontekoe and his men fled back to sea in their lifeboats and eventually connected with Dutch ships that carried them to Batavia. There they got work on VOC ships sailing the waters around Southeast Asia. Three years later, in June 1622, Bontekoe took part in the failed Dutch attack on Macao, in which a cannonball from Giacomo Rho’s gun made a lucky hit and ignited the attackers’ gunpowder casks. The explosion, as Bontekoe delicately phrases it, “placed our men in a quandary.” Unable to capture the town, the Dutch withdrew and spent the rest of the summer on the ocean blockading the Portuguese and harassing Chinese shipping. If the VOC could not have Macao, they could force the Chinese into opening a separate trading relationship elsewhere on the coast—which is why the survivors of the Nossa Senhora da Guía three summers later found themselves threatened by militiamen when their ship ran aground. The Red Hairs had taught coastal people one lesson above all: fear Europeans.

  That summer of skirmishes continued into the fall, when four sailors and two cabin boys from Bontekoe’s ship got marooned on the coast. The six were manning a boat assigned to guard a captured Chinese ship when a storm blew up and drove them ashore. They survived the shipwreck and managed to hold on to their arquebuses. Even though their soaked guns could not be fired, they wielded them in a threatening manner to warn off anyone who approached. On their second day ashore, they were able to obtain fire from a house to relight the guns’ matches. When later that day they came upon half a dozen Chinese bodies on a beach, shot by other Dutchmen, they had good reason to fear that the locals would be looking for reprisal. Soon enough the Dutch sailors were surrounded, though the crowd remained at a cautious distance, watching them. To make sure the Chinese kept that distance, the Dutchmen fired their guns into the air to warn them from getting any closer. They reported with some satisfaction that the Chinese “were mightily shaken” by the sound—but surely they had seen arquebuses before. They also said that the Chinese “gazed at them with wonder.” These Dutchmen may have been the first real Red Hairs these Chinese had ever seen.

  The locals were armed with only knives and pikes, and not keen to pick a fight. Instead of challenging the Red Hairs, they decided it would be safer to mollify and contain them. They gestured them toward a village temple and made signs that they would be fed. The Dutchmen were on their guard, lest this was a trick. It wasn’t. The Chinese must have reckoned that starving men might behave less rationally than men who had full stomachs. After the meal, the Dutchmen withdrew and went down to the shore in the hope of attracting the attention of a passing Dutch ship. It was fortunate that they they did not have to fight, as “they had not four shots of powder left in their bandoleers.” They passed an anxious night on the beach, and following morning constructed a makeshift raft and escaped to sea and rescue.

  The six men and boys were fortunate to survive their adventure. For ordinary folk like these who found themselves hitched to the stars of their globe-sailing captains, the odds barely favored survival. The toll on those serving under Bontekoe’s command through the following winter and spring—and this says nothing about the even greater toll on Chinese lives—was discouragingly steady. Hendrick Bruys of Bremen died of a poisoned Chinese arrow on 24 January 1623. Claes Cornelisz of Middelburg died on 17 March. The following night they lost Jan Gerritzs Brouwer of Haarlem, promoted to second mate less than six weeks earlier. The worst case has to be the nameless young man who died on 19 April. Four days earlier he climbed out of the hold of a captured junk tethered to Bontekoe’s ship to pee over the side just as his mates were testing a newly installed cannon behind him. The ball-shot went right through his leg. The ship’s surgeon amputated the young man’s leg four days later to stop the infection, but he was dead within an hour.

  For those who managed not to die, illness and injury were there to wear them down. By the end of Bontekoe’s tour of duty that May, he still had ninety men, but barely half of them were well enough to work. Still, that was enough of a crew for Bontekoe’s last exploit along the China coast: intercepting a Chinese junk heading for Manila with 250 passengers and cargo intended for that year’s Acapulco trade. Bontekoe seized the ship and all its cargo, which he wrote was worth “thousands,” and carried the luckless passengers and crew to the Pescadore Islands in the Strait of Taiwan where the Dutch needed construction labor to build fortifications for a trading base. Chinese officials later convinced the Dutch to abandon this base and withdraw to Taiwan. The laborers were not repatriated, however, but shipped off for sale at the slave market in Batavia. This sort of piracy was why, as a Japanese interpreter in Nagasaki observed, “whenever Chinese ships bound for Nagasaki sighted Red Hair ships, they behaved like a mouse does when it sees a cat.” In service to the VOC doctrine that the inherent right of all nations to trade justified seizing cargo from those who denied it, Bontekoe was one of the cats.

  NOT EVERY DUTCHMAN STRANDED ON an Asian coast returned to his ship. Four years after Bontekoe captured his last junk, a Dutch sailor found himself stranded beyond the far north end of the Chinese coast on the Korean island of Cheju. Nothing was heard of Jan Janszoon Weltevree for twenty-six years. In 1653, the VOC ship Sparrow Hawk was on its way from Taiwan to Nagasaki with a load of pepper and sugar and twenty thousand deer skins. A powerful storm engulfed the ship for five days, blowing her off course and onto Cheju Island. Of the crew of sixty-four, thirty-six men survived the wreck. T
hey too were not heard of until eight of the thirty-six escaped by sea to the Dutch outpost in Nagasaki thirteen years later. They carried with them the report that a Dutchman named Weltevree had been living in Korea for thirty-nine years.

  Weltevree had sailed to Asia on the Hollandia. After reaching Batavia in July 1624, he found work on a smaller ship, the Ouwerkerck. As no Dutch-built VOC ship by that name sailed from Holland during this period, the Ouwerkerck must have been built in Batavia for the intra-Asian trade. The ship was bound from Taiwan to Nagasaki in July 1627 when a Chinese junk heading for Moon Harbor on the Fujian coast crossed its bows: another mouse, falling into the paws of another cat. The junk was carrying a hundred and fifty passengers back to Fujian after the trading season in Manila, presumably laden with American silver. The ship was unarmed and easily taken. The Dutch captain brought half the Chinese passengers to the Ouwerkerck and transferred sixteen of his own sailors to the junk to take charge. The plan was to sail the ships to Taiwan, empty the junk of its cargo, then transfer the hapless passengers south to Batavia as slave labor. When a storm struck before the ships reached Taiwan, the cat lost its mouse. The captain of the Ouwerkerck abandoned hope of finding his prize and instead headed south to prey on Portuguese ships heading to Japan. If he could not steal American silver from Chinese ships, he could steal Chinese silks from Portuguese. Soon enough a convoy of five Portuguese ships came into range. The captain did not know that the five had been refitted for combat and were sailing in disguise to lure unsuspecting Dutch ships into attack. The Ouwerkerck’s attack backfired. The captain and his crew of thirty-three were captured, and the ship was towed to Macao for public burning.