by Tim Hannigan
Even with Jan Pieterszoon Coen hastily interred in the sticky riverine soil of Batavia’s rapidly filling Christian cemetery, the VOC was still set on its course of political and territorial advance—and concurrent financial decline. In the coming decades, the Dutch expanded their toeholds in the Javanese ports into pockets of territory, and eventually came to control the whole of the north coast. They established tenuous outposts on the fringes of Borneo, and they also managed to cow the dominant indigenous power of the eastern Archipelago, the Makassarese sultanate of Gowa. In West Java, meanwhile, the once powerful Banten was made into a virtual client state, its successions decided by the VOC.
The Dutch were not yet in a position to overwhelm Mataram, but after Sultan Agung died in 1646 the kingdom was never quite the same. In the subsequent decades the VOC proceeded to act as a self-interested mercenary to the courts of Central Java whenever there was an internal uprising or a disputed succession. By the eighteenth century it was unthinkable for any conflict to arise in the still-sovereign Mataram territories without Dutch troops being called upon to back one side or other, and when internal tensions became insurmountable in the 1750s and the realm ended up definitively divided between the feuding courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta, the VOC were the powerbrokers. The story of this strange episode, however, belongs to the next chapter.
While all of this was happening, Batavia had continued to grow. In 1624 it had had a total population of just 8,000; by 1670, the city was home to around 130,000 people, with 27,000 of them living inside the walls. No more than 2,000 of these were Europeans; the rest were a mix of immigrants, chancers and slaves from across Asia. There were communities of Arabs and Indians, and there were also large numbers of Portuguese-speaking Catholics. These so-called Black Portuguese, along with other Asian Christians and emancipated slaves, were known by the Dutch as mardijkers—a term originally from the Sanskrit maharddika, meaning ‘eminent man’. Batavia was also home to thousands of Chinese.
Jan Pieterszoon Coen had recognised the value of Chinese economic expertise from the very start. He encouraged the Chinese to come to his new capital, and allowed them to trade freely at a time when not even Dutchmen were permitted to set up private businesses. The Ming Empire had lifted its own ban on Chinese citizens travelling overseas for private trade just one year before the first Dutch fleet reached Java, and soon not only traders, but also settlers, labourers and entrepreneurs, were heading for the Archipelago. Before long, the Chinese accounted for almost a quarter of Batavia’s entire population—and the most productive quarter at that.
As had always been the way when foreigners settled in the ports, a new climate, new foodstuffs—and above all, new women—had created a Chinese creole culture. In truth, they were often closer in lifestyle and language to the indigenous populations around them than to their cousins on the Chinese mainland, as one of their own number explained: ‘When the Chinese remain abroad for several generations without returning to their native land, they frequently cut themselves off from the instructions of the sages; in language, food and dress they imitate the natives and, studying foreign books, they do not scruple to become Javanese’. Those who were Muslim may well have lost their sense of Chinese identity altogether and melted into the wider local populations. Others, however—creolised and Malay-speaking though they often were—still remained identifiably Chinese.
The Dutch had very quickly developed some deeply negative opinions of the indigenous people of Java, and had attached to their ‘national character’ a string of unflattering epithets, foremost of which was ‘lazy’ and its various synonyms. The locals had been banned from living within the city walls of Batavia from the moment they were built. But the Chinese elicited more complex reactions. There was much to praise in the apparent Chinese sense of industry, and they had quickly become essential to the running of the VOC’s operations. But whenever a particular ethnic group can be identified with wealth, then opprobrium won’t be far behind, and European commentators dished out lashings of contempt along with backhanded compliments. Given such attitudes, it was little wonder that jealousy of the Chinese could tip over into outright violence from time to time.
In 1740, the arrival of bands of wandering Chinese freebooters on the outskirts of Batavia sent panicked rumours through the Chinese and European communities of the city. The Dutch believed that the Chinese were plotting to rebel and annihilate them; the Chinese took whispers of deportation to mean they were all to be shipped over the horizon and tipped into the sea.
Tensions rose rapidly, and when word spread that there had been some kind of altercation with the freebooters and that Dutchmen may have been killed, the entire non-Chinese population of Batavia went on the rampage. A Dutch resident of the city named Ary Huysers recorded what happened:
An instantaneous cry of murder and horror resounded through the town, and the most dismal scene of barbarity and rapine presented itself on all sides. All the Chinese, without distinction, men, women, and children, were put to the sword. Neither pregnant women nor suckling infants were spared by the relentless assassins. The prisoners in chains, about a hundred in number, were at the same time slaughtered like sheep. European citizens, to whom some of the wealthy Chinese had fled for safety, violating every principle of humanity and morality, delivered them up to their sanguinary pursuers, and embezzled the property confided to them. In short, all the Chinese, guilty and innocent, were exterminated.
That last sentence was not hyperbole: Huysers really did mean all of them. There had been around ten thousand Chinese residents inside Batavia’s walls before the massacre.
One result of the slaughter was that the few surviving Chinese from outside the walls, together with their vagabonding countrymen whose arrival had precipitated the carnage, ricocheted off around Java, prompting rebellion and uproar wherever they went, and dragging the VOC forces into yet more military entanglement with the decaying Mataram court. The other result was that Batavia received an economic and social blow that it could ill afford—for by the middle of the eighteenth century the city, the Company, and the empire it ran, were unmistakably in the pits.
The rot had probably set in more than a hundred years earlier, the moment Jan Pieterszoon Coen committed troops and cash to territorial gains. The cost of maintaining an ever-expanding network of residencies and military outposts was enormous, and as the outgoings spiralled the returns dwindled. The Council of the Indies—the clutch of administrators who sat in session with the governor-general twice a week in Batavia—would justify military entanglements in the internal affairs of local courts by way of the advantageous treaties that were usually signed as a result. But treaties couldn’t be traded for hard silver in the docks.
To make matters worse, the bottom had fallen out of the spice trade. Nutmeg and cloves were still regarded as pleasant flavourings in the kitchens of Europe, but they were no longer a condiment that people would risk lives and pay in gold to obtain. Smuggling of seedlings out of Maluku, meanwhile, meant that France and Britain were now producing their own crops in their own Indian Ocean territories. This should not have been a problem: the Archipelago was turning out plenty of other export commodities, and with its maritime dominance the VOC was the preeminent presence on the regional commerce networks. Rice was traded back and forth along Asian shipping routes; indigo was being grown in treaty territories; cane sugar plantations had sprouted along the Javanese Pasisir; and in 1696 coffee had been introduced to the green highlands behind Banten.
But on a wider scale, the economy of the entire region had slumped. Japan—a traditional market for tropical wares from the Archipelago—had closed its doors to foreign trade. The British, meanwhile, were proving increasingly adept at bypassing both Dutch and local traders in the carriage of goods from India and points west to Chinese entrepôts. Visitors in the eighteenth century reported that the Batavia roadstead was still ‘always full of the flags of all nations, attracted by the profit they are sure to make by it’, but individua
l fortunes accrued by canny captains could not make up for the VOC’s crippling deficits. By the 1770s, in the entire Archipelago only the VOC stations in the north Java ports were making any money, and the Bandas—one-time honey-pot of the spice trade—were sucking up fifteen times their annual earnings in running costs.
The slump was not only down to circumstances and mismanagement; corruption was also a precipitating factor. Jan Pieterszoon Coen’s complaint that only ‘the scum of the earth’ would settle in Batavia was typical of his caustic character, but he had some justification. As far as Europeans were concerned, the Archipelago was at the insalubrious ends of the earth, and for the most part the only people who would actually want to go there were those with the worst possible motives. The VOC seemed to attract all the flotsam and jetsam of Europe, and plenty of German, French, Danish and even Scottish vagabonds joined its ranks. There were severe punishments for corruption in the VOC rule book, but they were rarely enforced, and across the Archipelago European residents gave themselves over to graft on a grand scale.
A party of British visitors, passing through Indonesian waters in 1770, glimpsed provincial corruption in action at one of the VOC’s most isolated outposts. On 21 September the good ship Endeavour, under the command of the celebrated Captain James Cook, dropped anchor off the north coast of the miniscule island of Sabu, halfway between Timor and Sumba in the far southeast of the Archipelago. Cook and his crew were heading home after their successful first voyage. They were short of supplies and they had happened upon Sabu by chance.
Even today Sabu is one of Indonesia’s most isolated spots, an unlikely flake of stony land drifting far to the south of the main Nusa Tenggara chain. It was still more remote in the eighteenth century, but it was already home to a lonely VOC resident. He was a German by the name of Johan Christopher Lange.
Lange had been installed on the island in the wake of a treaty-signing between Dutch forces and the Sabunese chieftains in 1756. He had been provided with a pair of mixed-race assistants—a Timor-born ‘Black Portuguese’, and the son of a Dutchman and a local woman by the name of Frederick Craig—but the Company seemed largely to have forgotten about him. He had, as far as Captain Cook could make out, gone three-quarters native: ‘he sits upon the ground, chews his betel, and in every respect has adopted their character and manners; he has married an Indian woman of the island of Timor, who keeps his house after the fashion of her country’. As for Lange’s job, ‘It is hard to say upon what footing he is here’, Cook noted:
[H]e is so far a Governor that the Natives dar[e] do nothing openly without his consent, and yet he can transact no sort of business with Foreigner’s [sic] either in his own or that of the Companys [sic] name nor can it be a place of either honour or profit…
Lange may have been officially forbidden to make any profits out of his posting, but that wasn’t going to stop him trying. Trembling on the beach as the Englishmen rowed ashore, he must have viewed their arrival as the greatest windfall of the decade. Cook and his crew rapidly set up a bustling barter market on the beach. Sabunese villagers, dressed in lengths of their dark homespun ikat cloth, emerged from the groves of lontar palms and were soon cheerfully exchanging new muskets for chickens, buffaloes and cups of tuak—the palm wine that was their drink of choice (‘a very sweet agreeable Cooling liquor’ Cook called it). A cashless economy was not what Lange had had in mind, however. He stomped off home through the palms to come up with a plan.
When Dr Daniel Solander, one of the Endeavour’s biologists, wandered up to the tiny Sabunese capital at Seba, he encountered a flustered Lange who told him ‘that the People were almost in rebellion on account of the Radjas permitting us to trade with goods instead of money’. Solander was not remotely alarmed by this tall tale, and he had already noted how very pleased the locals were with their new muskets. He hung around to watch an amateurish display from the local soldiers that Lange hastily hustled into action with the intention of scaring the Englishman. The botanist found the sight of the ikat-clad army bumping into each other and stumbling over their spears so funny that he stated that he ‘desired he might see the exercise of their Sabres also’.
‘You had better not desire it’, spluttered the exasperated Lange, according to Solander’s account; ‘the People are very much enrag’d’.
Lange had been marooned on Sabu for a decade; no wonder his methods were crude. Cook’s party, meanwhile, had crossed the Pacific successfully and had shown a great aptitude for peaceful encounters with men of many lands. The scaremongering ‘had no part of the design’d effect’. Solander, Cook and the other officers knew exactly what Lange was after, so in the interests of a smooth passage, ‘tho sore against his will’, Cook agreed to pay some very confused locals the grand sum of ten guineas for a pair of buffalos, before carrying on with the bartering. It was all it took, and ‘In the Evening Mr Lange came down to the Beach softened by the money which no doubt he had received: he who was in the morn as sour as verjuice was now all sweetness and softness’.
By now the Englishmen were beginning to feel rather sorry for the pathetic resident. They gave him a small keg of beer, and the next morning they departed for Java, leaving the corrupt German behind, a forlorn figure waving from a lonely beach.
Lange was one small man lining his own threadbare pockets on one small island, but his behaviour was replicated throughout VOC realms. Corruption was so endemic that it had become almost officially normalised: to obtain an administrative post, a junior Company merchant might be expected to make a payment to the appointments board totalling almost ninety times the value of his monthly salary. The death of one chief VOC cashier in Batavia revealed that a million guilders had vanished from the treasury on his watch, and by the late eighteenth century graft had become so normal that Company staff were actually being formally taxed on their illicit incomes. One VOC official, supposedly on a salary of sixty guilders a month, filed a self-assessed tax return for a staggering thirty thousand guilders.
Those who weren’t engaged in energetic graft, meanwhile, were either dying or depressed. Even the Queen of the East had lost her glamour. Late eighteenth-century accounts of Batavia convey an appropriately fin-de-siècle atmosphere, but without any of the last-gasp hedonism. Although new waves of Chinese entrepreneurs had taken over the shop-houses left empty in the wake of the 1740 massacre, Batavia’s total population had dwindled. Many corners of the city had been abandoned, and the once smooth-flowing canals were choked with sewage and general detritus. Indeed, Batavia had become ‘one of the most unwholesome spots on the face of the globe’.
The mortality was horrific. A new European arrival in Batavia, it was said, had barely a 50 percent chance of surviving his first year, and a bleak sort of cynicism seems to have infected the survivors:
[L]ittle signs are shown of emotion or surprise, on hearing that the companion of yesterday is to-day no more. When an acquaintance is said to be dead, the common reply is, ‘Well, he owed me nothing;’ or, ‘I must get my money off his executors’.
European Batavia’s once burgeoning social scene had withered away, and even when it came to romance there were slim pickings. As far as the stuffier colonial gentlemen were concerned there had always been a chronic shortage of marriageable women in the Indies. Way back in the 1620s, in one of his rancorous missives to the Seventeen Gentlemen, Jan Pieterszoon Coen had complained that ‘Everyone knows that the male sex cannot exist without women … if your Excellencies cannot get any honest married people, do not neglect to send underage young girls’.
A ready supply of wholesome Dutch teenagers was never forthcoming, however, and the tiny handful of white women that the VOC did convince to head east turned out to be far from respectable, prompting officials to admit that they were ‘of no use for the man on the street and expensive and prejudicial to the interests of the Company’. At one point in the seventeenth century, the Seventeen Gentlemen managed to recruit a few purportedly married couples from the Netherlands and sent them
out to settle at Ambon in Maluku. However, these couples turned out to be no sort of civilising influence, as a furious Coen reported in yet another of his vitriolic missives: ‘you will have heard … how ill your good intentions have turned out, that is, with the arrival here of the married couples. Our reputation has suffered badly and the [locals] are absolutely scandalised by them, because of their bestial living, their constant drunkenness and lewdness’.
Between 1602 and 1795, the VOC sent some five thousand ships from the Netherlands to the Archipelago, carrying a total of around a million Europeans, the vast majority of who were male. Inevitably these early generations of Dutchmen, just like other foreign settlers before them, had availed themselves of local wives and concubines, from either the old-established mestizo Portuguese community, or from amongst the Javanese, Sundanese and others. As a result, Batavia and the other big VOC-held cities became home to large populations of mixed-race Indo-Europeans, and by the late eighteenth century this community was the standard source of colonial wives. These Java-born women were often illiterate. Most spoke pidgin Portuguese or Malay by preference. Many knew no Dutch at all, and European visitors were generally disapproving, with one declaring that ‘the handsomest would scarcely be thought middling in Europe’.
All of this—the corruption and collapse, the disease and the dearth of marriageable women—had combined to cast a pall of constant gloom over Batavia. The VOC, and indeed the entire concept of ‘company colonialism’, seemed to be dying. And as it expired there were new signs of life in the indigenous courts—in Central Java the Mataram heirs of the Majapahit mantle were stirring.