by Tim Hannigan
But as interesting newcomers in town, the Dutch received a certain amount of polite attention. The resident Portuguese gave them an introduction to the king, who received them in his palace and signed a treaty, as he was inclined to do with any ocean-going traders who came his way. But this was as far as friendly relations went. The Dutch were put out to discover that, apart from the locally-grown pepper, the only spices available in Banten were sold at artificially inflated prices by the resident merchants. They grumbled noisily about this, caused trouble in the markets, and when Cornelis de Houtman managed personally to insult the inner circle of the court, they were ordered to leave. The Dutch were quite happy to comply, but first, in the words of one of their number, ‘it was decided to do all possible harm to the town…’
The hundred or so Hollanders who had survived the scurvy and the infighting now embarked on an outburst of wanton vandalism. They opened fire with all their cannon; they captured, tortured and killed dozens of locals; they sent missiles into the palace, and then, ‘having revenged ourselves to the approval of our ship’s officers’, they ran up their rotten sails, departed from the shell-shocked and smouldering Banten, and went wandering aimlessly along the Javanese coast.
Somewhere near Surabaya a party of local pirates came on board and killed several of the crew, thus bringing down an orgy of destruction on their own beachside villages by way of retribution. Onwards the Dutchmen sailed, with vague designs of crossing the Java Sea towards Maluku. As they passed the low coast of Madura, a local prince sailed out from the shore to greet them with a flotilla of streamer-bedecked barges. The Dutch opened fire, killed the entire Madurese welcoming party, stripped the jewels from the prince’s fingers, and threw his corpse to the sharks.
But even the distraction of massacring the locals was not enough to engender unity amongst de Houtman’s men: their ships were no longer seaworthy and they were now bickering violently over the advisability of continuing to Maluku. It was eventually decided to burn the most worm-eaten of the ships, to consolidate the fractious crews, and to abandon the expedition. They made one final stopover in Bali, and somehow managed to rein in their destructive inclinations long enough to be impressed by the king of the Balinese Gelgel kingdom: ‘a good-natured fat man who had two hundred wives, drove a chariot pulled by two white buffalos and owned fifty dwarves’.
Bali had given no space to the new Islamic vogue and had remained staunchly Hindu-Buddhist. In fact, it had probably received a kind of cultural boost as a consequence of the Islamisation of Java. Oft-told tales of a mass exodus of Hindu-Buddhist courtiers and artisans, fleeing the rampaging Muslim zealots of Demak and finding refuge in Bali, are apocryphal to say the least, and don’t stand up particularly well under scrutiny. The obvious artistic continuity between Hindu-Buddhist Java and Sultan Agung’s Mataram clearly demonstrates that there had been no iconoclastic purge of the island. More importantly, the fall of Majapahit had been a slow atrophying over generations, rather than a single catastrophic defeat. Demak’s ultimate overrunning of the capital was little more than a symbolic formality. However, with no remaining point of cultural orientation in Java, Bali would certainly have gone from being a peripheral vassal to the centre of the Hindu-Buddhist universe, and there were some cultural refugees from amongst the aristocracy and priesthood of old Java who turned up in the Gelgel court. Bali was the only major chunk of Majapahit-claimed Nusantara that would never convert to Islam.
Whatever the nature of its cultural and religious make-up, the Dutch seamen seemed to like Bali, despite its total lack of spices. De Houtman decided to call it ‘Young Holland’, and two sailors stayed behind when their compatriots departed.
And with that the first Dutch expedition to the Archipelago headed home. They had done little but trail offense and bloodshed in their wake, and by the time the three surviving ships limped back into Amsterdam in 1597, there were only 89 of the original 249 sailors still alive. If appearances were anything to go by, the Netherlands’ imperial adventure ought to have ended there. But incredibly, despite the ruin of the fleet and the fact that they had never even reached the Spice Islands, de Houtman’s expedition had managed to turn a small profit. So astronomically high were the prices paid for spices in Western Europe that the tiny quantity of mouldy cloves and second-rate nutmeg that the sailors had picked up in Banten, and during brief stops on the Sumatran coast during the homeward journey, were enough to cover all the costs of the expedition. They even provided the shareholders of the Compagnie van Verre with a small return on their investment.
There was every reason for a return voyage.
News of the financial success of de Houtman’s voyage sparked excitement in the Dutch merchant houses. If you could return a profit without even reaching the Spice Islands, then just imagine the riches if you actually made it as far as the nutmeg groves of Maluku! What followed was a period appropriately known as the Wilde Vaart, the ‘Wild Voyages’. Ship after unregulated ship headed east. They belonged to a burgeoning crop of rival companies and most of them returned successfully. In 1599 the first Dutch fleet actually reached Maluku, and racked up a magnificent 400 percent profit in the process. Having made amends for de Houtman’s earlier vandalism, four rival Dutch spice agencies set themselves up in Banten, while back in the Netherlands there was always ready cash to finance another expedition to the Archipelago.
The Wild Voyages had nothing to do with colonialism. The glory of king and country meant little to these sailors, nor did territorial gains. What mattered was profit, and if accruing it meant behaving like a pirate, then so be it. Though they managed polite relations with at least some of the local chieftains in Maluku, the arrival of a shipload of Dutchmen in an Archipelago port was often cause for the locals to pack up their wares, hide the alcohol and lock their womenfolk safely out of harm’s way. Even many years later, when an organised and territorial kind of colonialism had begun to develop, the Dutchmen were, as far as many locals were concerned, boorish thugs. A treaty signed by a later generation of Hollanders with the Banten sultanate contained clauses demanding that measures be taken to stop Dutchmen stealing from the markets, behaving in an ‘unseemly’ fashion in mosques, molesting women, and leering lecherously at the royal ladies when they performed their open-air ablutions at the riverside.
The Dutch were by no means unique in their bad behaviour. The Portuguese had committed many an outrage—as, of course, had the armies of local kingdoms. The British, too, were as prone as anyone to debauchery and violence when they came ashore.
Ships sailing under an English flag had actually beaten Cornelis de Houtman to Southeast Asia by two decades—the royally sanctioned privateer Sir Francis Drake had filled his hold with Malukan spices on his return voyage from South America in the 1570s, and during the years of the Wild Voyages there were plenty of English ships racing the Dutch for the Spice Islands. It was a free-for-all that risked precipitating a collapse of the European spice market. Back in the Netherlands the investors were well aware of this, and so in the early spring of 1602 the rival trading houses came together to form a monopoly. They called it the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the ‘United East India Company’, better known as the VOC.
At its inception, the VOC was an entirely commercial affair. Like the English, who had started their own East India Company two years earlier, the Dutch in many ways stumbled into possession of an empire by accident, as trade and profit became hopelessly tangled with the political complexities on the ground. In fact, it was the eventual transition of the VOC into a conventional colonial project that turned it from a golden egg-laying goose into a dead economic duck.
In the beginning, however, the Company was an institution with enormous potential. Its shareholders were obliged to invest in the VOC itself, not in individual expeditions—an innovation designed to bring an end to the destructive get-rich-quick motivations of the Wild Voyages. It was run from Amsterdam by a board of seventeen directors, known as the Heeren XVII, the ‘Seventeen Gent
lemen’. Like the equivalent English East India Company, they had a government charter that gave them a semblance of sovereign power and the right to sign treaties in the name of the Netherlands, but they were essentially free to do as they pleased in the Archipelago.
Before the building of the Suez Canal and the invention of steam it could take two years to get a message to Southeast Asia and to receive the reply. The Seventeen Gentlemen were well aware of this, and so in 1610 they created the post of governor-general for their head man in the Archipelago. The governor-general was not supposed to be an imperial viceroy; he was supposed to be an area manager with executive powers, and for the first decade from the VOC headquarters in Ambon—the biggest port of Maluku which the Dutch had captured from the already declining Portuguese in 1605—that’s exactly what he was. But then, in 1617, the Seventeen Gentlemen appointed as their representative in Asia the first man of real consequence. He was thirty-one years old and his name was Jan Pieterszoon Coen.
Coen was a stern man with angry eyes and flying moustaches. He was born in the windy fishing town of Hoorn on the Dutch coast and brought up in the strictest of Calvinist traditions. He went out to Asia early and rose quickly to the top of the VOC ranks. He was on the scene in 1607 when dozens of Dutch traders were killed in an uprising by the inhabitants of the Bandas—the tiny Malukan archipelago that was the world’s sole source of nutmeg. He had harboured a deep dislike of the locals ever since. He was no friend to the Netherlands’ English rivals either. Even before he was appointed governor-general, he was in the habit of sending outrageously belligerent letters to the Seventeen Gentlemen, sneering at their soft-touch policies and demanding more aggression towards competitors.
Quite what manner of person Coen was depends entirely on your perspective. From a financial point of view he was the hot-head who—with his doctrine of ‘no trade without war, no war without trade’—overstepped the mark and kick-started the slow but ceaseless descent of the VOC into bankruptcy. For later patriotic Hollanders he was the man who launched an empire—and for their nationalist Indonesian counterparts he was the first of the rapacious colonial exploiters. For seventeenth-century English traders, meanwhile, he was little short of demonic, a ruthless rival who clattered over the decks on cloven hooves and presided over the worst Dutch perfidy in the history of the spice trade. One thing is certain however: if Cornelis de Houtman, staggering scurvy-ridden up the Banten beach in 1596, marks the symbolic arrival of Dutch colonialism in the Archipelago, then Jan Pieterszoon Coen, twenty-one years later, represents its real beginnings.
On 30 December 1618, the tall masts of fourteen English ships hove into view off the mouth a muddy river called the Ciliwung on the north coast of Java, fifty miles east of Banten. The estuarine settlement there had originally been called Sunda Kelapa—a name which referred to the local abundance of coconuts—but in 1527, according to legend, it had fallen to Sunan Gunungjati, a wandering member of the Wali Songo from Cirebon. The port had originally been an entrepôt of the Hindu-Buddhist state of Pajajaran, but by the 1520s Pajajaran was as faded as Majapahit and the conquest can hardly have been one of high drama. However, Sunan Gunungjati (or whoever it was that really oversaw the seizure) must have had a penchant for hyperbole: they renamed the new possession Jayakarta, meaning ‘Victorious Deed’. By 1618 Jayakarta was the seat of a minor vassal prince of Banten who was in his way a small embodiment of the new synthesis that was increasingly defining Javanese culture—a Muslim with a Sanskrit name, Wijayakrama.
Since 1611, the VOC had maintained a small outpost on the banks of the Ciliwung opposite Jayakarta’s modest fortification. The English, too, had their own fortified warehouse beside the township, and although it was hardly a place to excite the fantasies of urban planners, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, in his new role as Dutch governor-general, had taken a shine to Jayakarta as a spot suitable for a future Dutch capital in the Archipelago. The old headquarters at Ambon, despite being in the thick of the spiceries, was too far from other key staging posts. The long-established Banten, meanwhile, was still bristling with rival trading factions, and a base there was always dependent on the goodwill of its young king, Abu al-Mafakhir, and his wily uncle, the regent Pangeran Arya Ranamanggala. Coen had decided that Jayakarta—or Jaccatra, as both Dutch and Englishmen mistransliterated it at the time—with its sheltered location and accessible river channel, would make a nice alternative. But now, with the arrival of that English fleet under the command of an admiral called Thomas Dale, it was about to become the setting for an absurd four-way conflict.
Prince Wijayakrama of Jayakarta had been troubling the Banten court, behaving in a fashion not befitting a deferent vassal. What was more, the Bantenese were unsure about the advisability of allowing a major Dutch outpost to develop on the fringes of their realm. Turning to the time-honoured tradition of getting someone else to do your dirty work, they had encouraged an English naval fleet then harboured in Banten to sail down the coast, unseat Wijayakrama and evict their Dutch rivals. Relations between the English and the Dutch were far from friendly at the time. Coen was making great efforts to obliterate England’s own Spice Islands outpost on the minuscule Banda islet of Run, and he had every intention of banishing them from the Archipelago altogether. Admiral Dale found that his own motivations intersected very neatly with those of the sultan. He headed for Jayakarta.
In the event, the siege of Jayakarta was scarcely more fitting of its glorious epithet than the minor conquest nine decades earlier. The fleets of Coen and Dale danced delicately around each other for twenty-four hours before the outnumbered Dutch departed abruptly for Ambon in search of reinforcements. Dale then came ashore and managed to team up with Prince Wijayakrama to besiege the remaining Hollanders.
The VOC’s Jayakarta outpost was tiny, and with Coen’s fleet gone it was defended by a skeleton crew of soldiers and traders. After a muddy and malarial month during which little action took place, they were ready to surrender. However, at this point a new army appeared from the west. Back in Banten, the king and the regent had realised that the upshot of the shenanigans in Jayakarta was likely to be either an entrenched Wijayakrama, or a minor Dutch fort replaced with a major English one. They sent their men to settle the score. Both Dale and Wijayakrama reacted in an understandable fashion—the English took to their boats and bolted, while the Javanese gathered their grumbling courtesans and fled to the mountains. And the Dutch remained more or less besieged.
For the next three months very little happened. The Dutch eked out their days in the fort getting drunk and dying of malaria. On 12 March 1619, however, one of the unnamed defenders roused himself sufficiently from the torpor to come up with a fanciful new name for the place in honour of a Roman-era Germanic tribe by the name of the Batavi. When Coen returned in May with a fully armed fleet, all fired up for a victorious deed of his own, he found that the English had gone, the Bantenese had largely lost interest, and that Jayakarta was now called Batavia. He needed only to come ashore, burn the palace, the mosque and every other Javanese building in sight, and the Dutch would be in possession of both a location and a name for their grand East Indies capital.
Batavia was known as ‘the Queen of the East’. At the head of the town stood a stocky, four-cornered fort with cannon-lined ramparts. Behind this there was a grid of smooth-flowing canals flanked by heavyset buildings with whitewashed walls. For a place with a feverish climate occupied largely by slaves and the kind of Dutchmen Coen himself described as ‘the scum of the earth’, it was rather pleasant.
From this little pocket of tropical Europa the Dutch consolidated their control of trade in the Archipelago. Within a year of the founding of the city, the last English redoubt in the Banda Islands had been wiped from the map; in 1641 the Dutch ousted the Portuguese from Melaka; and by 1682 the VOC was powerful enough to press an advantageous treaty on the once-feared Banten court ordering all English traders to be kicked out for good.
But if all this paints a picture of a colonial
Dutch power approaching supremacy, it is worth taking note of how very little of the Archipelago they actually controlled in the late seventeenth century. At this stage they were, in some ways, simply a trading power on the old Srivijayan-style hub-and-spoke model. Though they held sway in much of northern and central Maluku, elsewhere they were usually a token presence at best. Sumatra, Borneo and Nusa Tenggara were essentially untrammelled, and even in Java, Dutch possessions only amounted to an arrow-shaped abscess of orange-daubed territory around Batavia. There were other Dutch outposts in all of the major ports on Java’s north coast, but most of the island was firmly under the sway of indigenous kings—Banten in the west, and Sultan Agung’s mighty Mataram reigning over the rest. The Dutch domain was the merest pimple on the flank of Java.
Sultan Agung tried hard to squeeze the tiny colonial pustule of Batavia, but he failed to squirt the Dutchmen out into the Java Sea. For all their territorial insignificance, the Dutch had one mighty advantage—the very factor that had carried them the seven thousand miles to the Archipelago in the first place: a maritime mastery.
Mataram first besieged Batavia in 1628. Sultan Agung had already overwhelmed Surabaya and all the other city-states strung along the Pasisir, and he had an army of some 160,000 men. Batavia should have proved no great challenge. But the Dutch base was 300 miles (480 kilometres) from the Mataram court and the roads were terrible. It took months to get the attacking army in place, and it proved near-impossible to keep them fed and watered once they were there. The Dutch, meanwhile, were free to come and go as they pleased by sea throughout. After a lengthy stalemate, the Mataram commanders were executed by their own troops for their incompetence, and the Javanese army trudged home over the hills.
They returned the following year and spent a further two months outside the walls of Batavia. But again, Dutch naval superiority made the siege hopelessly ineffectual, and the Mataram forces gave up once more. Dutch losses were negligible, but the second siege did at least defeat one sturdy constitution. On 20 September 1629, just twelve days before the Javanese pulled out for good, Jan Pieterszoon Coen succumbed to dysentery, doubtless spitting vitriol about the spinelessness of the Seventeen Gentlemen to the very last.