by Simon Winder
It was impossible for anyone to manage such a sprawling mess and it is curious to imagine what might have happened if the Dutch had concentrated just, say, on colonizing and defending North America. The Portuguese ejected them from Brazil and – in perhaps the most globalized war yet fought by humans – Luso-Brazilian and Tupinambá troops defeated Kongo-Dutch forces in Angola. The English ejected them from New Netherland. Entire colonies appeared and then vanished. Evanescent Pomeroon, with its tiny, diseased capital of New Middelburg, was founded in South America in 1650 but burned to the ground by French pirates in 1689. Political fossils still scatter the world today. The Caribbean island of St-Martin/Sint Maarten is still crazily split in half according to a French–Dutch treaty of 1648. The Dutch island of St Eustatius, as mentioned earlier, briefly became the focus of global attention in 1780 as the main hub for sales of weapons to the American rebels, prompting Britain to declare war on the Dutch and raze St Eustatius to the ground, which did not take long. On the other side of the world the sign saying ‘New Holland’ was painted over by the British and replaced by ‘Australia’ and the island of Timor remains today split into the three fragments that had been argued over between the Dutch and the Portuguese for centuries, with the unplanned side effect of Timor-Leste’s long modern agony.
Time and again, the Dutch completely misunderstood their wider strategic situation and sapped their strength in a mass of futile conflicts which by the late eighteenth century had ruined their country. Forced to side with Napoleon, they had to stand by and watch as the British used this as an excuse to take over Cape Town, Guyana, Ceylon, Malacca and Java, much of which they kept. The absolute dark point came in 1810 with Napoleon’s decision to absorb the Netherlands completely into France. With events now vastly beyond their control, the Dutch simply had to wait on events. After Waterloo, years were spent wrangling with the British over who should rule what bit of south-east Asia, with the newly founded Johore port-town of Singapore a particular source of Dutch rage.
At the Napoleonic nadir, with the Dutch having to reconcile themselves to living in departments called things like Zuyderzée, there was only one place left in the world where their flag continued to fly: the tiny artificial island of Deshima in Nagasaki Bay. For 214 years the Dutch had had the exclusive European right to trade with Japan, a peculiar and as it proved thoroughly marginal privilege in an island country essentially self-sufficient and bristling with anti-foreigner feeling. The Japanese had been disgusted by the inroads of Jesuit-fuelled Christianity and turned to the Dutch in return for their not indulging in the smells-and-bells hysteria they associated with the Portuguese. The settlement, founded in 1641, was monitored intensely, with spies checking that work carried on uninterrupted every Sunday and that Christians who died in Deshima were packed off prayerless, simply put in bags and dropped into the bay. Bibles had to be nailed inside special barrels. There must have been a near comic tension in the compound, with someone just absent-mindedly humming a snatch from ‘The Lord is my shepherd…’ risking everyone being put to the sword.
As part of the same Dutch sugar-rush frenzy of invading everywhere, Deshima started off as the focus of grand plans for joint Dutch–Japanese attacks on Macao and Manila, but through sheer luck the moment passed and no scarred, hoarse and lacquered old Japanese general struggled to his feet with some gauntlety metaphor on his lips. Very little actual trade was done at Deshima but it had some value to the Japanese as a link to the world, with Dutch ship captains questioned on arrival about political news. They were selective and perhaps mischievous with this news: for example, it was only when a British frigate came into Nagasaki Bay during the Napoleonic Wars that the Japanese found out the United States had been independent for a generation. Deshima was a boring and disappointing spot – Japan had ample supplies of almost everything it wanted and, like China, was a culture of a complex density that made it uninterested in European antics. The sheer longevity of Deshima gradually, over many generations, let it drift marginally into Japanese culture. Eventually, as some Japanese officials became interested in European scientific ideas, a tradition of Rangaku, ‘Dutch studies’, emerged, followed by the creation of the Translation Bureau of Barbarian Books. Bulk trade proved much less important to Japan than the impact of the occasional small book slipped into a jacket pocket.
For Europeans, Deshima might have remained just a minor cul-de-sac, a peculiarity swept away when Commodore Perry’s American fleet entered Tokyo Bay in 1853 and Japan was forcibly ‘opened’. It had one extraordinary claim to fame though – the presence there, from 1823 to 1829, of Philipp Franz von Siebold. A young German doctor, worryingly lacking in medical experience, Siebold was recruited as part of the rebuilding of the Dutch East Indies after Napoleon’s defeat. He was one of those amazing nineteenth-century characters who through their actions intellectually and imaginatively tied together the planet – Humboldt and Bates in tropical America, Gandhi in Natal, Napoleon in Alexandria, Wallace in Borneo, Kingsley in Gabon, al-Afghani in Cairo, Darwin in the Galápagos. It is impossible not to feel irritable about the mass of low-hanging fruit available to these people. They saw things with new eyes and were able to convey that newness to others, creating an excited ferment of which we are the mere inheritors.
Siebold, for example, was a miraculous handler of seeds and seedlings. He broke the Chinese monopoly on tea. All previous attempts had failed, but he studied Japanese techniques for conserving seeds and successfully got a batch to Java which, by 1833, had some 500,000 tea-plants. One small loam-packed box thus began a revolution (continued only later by the British in Assam and Sri Lanka) as well as landing a devastating if accidental blow on China’s import–export balances. He became the great conduit for bringing Japanese plants to the rest of the world, working with the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden. Oddly his future became an unwitting side effect of the Belgian revolution, as the plants he had sent to the National Herbarium in Brussels and the botanical garden in Ghent fell on the wrong side of the new border from his masters in The Hague. Years were spent negotiating their return. What plants these were! I am not sure how this calculation was done, but in Dutch gardens at least it is estimated that three-quarters of the plantings are Siebold descendants. It is thanks to him that my grandparents in West London had the front of their house choking with dusty hydrangeas. The house I grew up in was, at the time, believed to be the place where the five members of the family ran in and out, ate, slept, lived out our lives – but no: we and it were merely a support mechanism for a wisteria of terrifying size. One of Siebold’s original wisterias, the ancestor of countless subsequent colonizers, is still in Leiden, still sporting its sinister, all-conquering little mauve flowers after more than a century and a half. Between the Hortus and Siebold’s own hothouse, chrysanthemums, lilies, azaleas, hostas, peonies, magnolias and ginkgos proliferated and Japan’s great garden culture filled the West. Less happily, Japanese knotweed has also taken over much of the planet thanks to a single plant from Siebold’s collection.
Siebold’s former house in Leiden is now one of Europe’s most absurdly enjoyable museums, packed with some of the heaped piles of stuff that he brought back and demonstrating his restless interests as, with various assistants, he catalogued, nurtured and engraved his holdings and spread one of the great human aesthetics around the world. It is impossible to know where to begin – there is everything from sumo-wrestler prints to lacquered picnic sets to the skull of a giant salamander and an unfortunate Japanese otter so overstuffed it looks like a bolster with residual head and feet. Siebold’s curiosity fills the house, from his interest in Japanese obstetrics to his writings on acupuncture. An artist attached to Deshima, Kawahara Keiga, produced beautiful images for Siebold, of stingrays, crabs, pomegranates, of a giant-salamander hunt in a wooden landscape. He also did a little painting of Siebold, his Japanese courtesan Kusumoto Tagi and their little daughter on a Deshima observation balcony looking out over the bay with a telescope.
Siebold�
�s collections were the result of disaster in Deshima. A blind eye was turned by the Nagasaki authorities to some of the tiny island’s oddities. For example, there were only a handful of Dutch there but there could be up to fifty Japanese ‘translators’ looking after them, who would in fact be medical students visiting Siebold. Siebold introduced the cataract operation to Japan and would swap doing these operations for artworks and information. Siebold had to use intermediaries to get much of his information on Japan and the authorities in far-off Edo were in an increasing panic about the activities of various circling, nosy foreigners. Sketching the coastline or defences or creating maps was punishable by death (it was a crime in Europe too – hence Hogarth’s arrest in Calais). Through sheer bad luck some sketches created thanks to Siebold’s friend, the Court Astronomer, Takahashi Sakuzaemon, were found. Takahashi was imprisoned, with all his teeth torn out to prevent him from biting off his tongue to avoid testifying – he later died in prison. Siebold himself was lucky simply to be expelled.
Siebold later became famous in Japan, seen as a great medical benefactor as well as perhaps the single most important figure in exporting Japan’s culture to the world, both through his plants and through his publications (including the massive Flora Japonica and Fauna Japonica). The success of Siebold’s work was blamed, by the final Dutch ruler of Deshima, for drawing unwanted attention to Japan and hence to the disaster of Commodore Perry’s ‘Black Ships’. It is a shame that Siebold was himself such an unpleasant character, perhaps the reason he is not more widely known, but legacies act in strange ways. When Siebold left Japan he saw a small boat in the harbour from which Kusumoto Tagi and their daughter waved goodbye. That daughter, Kusumoto Ine, became Japan’s first female doctor of Western medicine and in her own right a startling result of Nagasaki’s tiny entrepôt.
Baden in turmoil
The events of 1789 to 1815 laid out effectively the gamut of human behaviour, in dramatic and tragic terms. For those coming of age in its aftermath it seemed they had missed an epoch of giants. When Jenny Marx wrote from Trier in 1845 that ‘life here is a pocket edition’ she was speaking both on behalf of those living in a decayed cathedral town on the Mosel, and on behalf of all Europeans. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic years were like a huge Sears catalogue, found reliably on the doorstep each year, and with something for everyone. Different people turned to different pages and with different forms of nostalgia, curiosity or dread – everything from a special deal on poles on which aristocrats’ heads could be publicly paraded to bulk rates on reliable, poorly educated peasant militia who could be let loose on bourgeois liberals. Kits for burning chateaux or for printing up inflammatory posters, romantic refits for wrecked Catholic churches to stun the faithful into fresh obedience, everything you need to smash down barricades. There were pages giving printed forms with wording for timely concessions to mobs, and others announcing distracting military adventures abroad.
With the news in early 1848 that Paris was convulsed by a fresh revolution, everyone ran to their catalogues, frenziedly trying to find the right page. The revolutions that broke out across Europe were real and sometimes very violent, but both sides were almost incapacitated by self-consciousness: they could already see the massacred nobles, just as much as they could see the mob fleeing like frightened animals from a well-aimed volley. The thousands of prints and paintings of 1848 all have this rather worn quality and yet Europe was a very different place when it came through the other side. All classes shared a terror of repeating the sort of frenzy associated with the 1790s,3 and no new Napoleon emerged to sweep the Continent – but the excitement and strangeness of 1848 were real.
The whole point of the sort of religiose, side-whiskered regimes that ran Europe was to hold off the mob, but many of the most ardent conservatives (a term invented in this period) saw this as merely an ultimately doomed rear-guard action. Only so much could be done by finishing Cologne Cathedral or handing out colour lithographs of young, slightly more open-minded members of royal families. The years between Waterloo and 1848 were in many ways very attractive. Although hardly lacking in violence, it was an era when politicians remained aware of the horrors that had defined their youths and were tensely non-escalatory. The Paganini–Schubert–Liszt soundtrack was agreeable and recognizably middle-class cultures spread, but it always felt like an interlude. Everything was played out in an atmosphere of regretful aftermath, following the death of various giants whose legacy was endlessly chewed over: not just Napoleon, but Hegel, Byron, Beethoven, Goethe. Darwin had spent his five years going round the world, but nobody yet knew what that meant; steamships and trains proliferated but were not yet ubiquitous.
A good example of how 1848 developed is the Grand Duchy of Baden. Of all the new states that consolidated during and after Napoleon, Baden should have been one of the most likely to succeed. Its compact and cheerful lamb-chop shape, its busy Rhine towns, some revered and ancient, others new and industrial, its dense agriculture and timber forests all pointed at its being a possible extra Belgium or Luxembourg. It was at the technological cutting edge, boldly building its first railway (from Mannheim to Heidelberg) in 1840, but unfortunately choosing a different, big gauge to all its neighbours (a gauge which would end up being used only by the Russians) and which required expensive, recriminatory and sheepish unpicking a bit later. Tucked away on the borders with France and Switzerland and with innumerable ancient links to Strasbourg and Basle, Baden had every reason to be a cooperative, mild and independent place. Somehow, though, it never settled down and it became a case history as to why Germany ended up united.
Baden’s capital of Karlsruhe was a first indicator of unease – founded in the eighteenth century as a gigantic expression of absolutism, its street plan in the shape of a fan, with the ducal palace at its base. This really poor idea gives it something of a flavour of an American grid city,4 but one in which you are caught in an Escher-like nightmare in which to get any place you have to travel in a peculiar zigzag. It reminds me of a pot experience I once had where I was under the impression that my legs had gone all bandy and were marching off in different directions. In this unfortunate city lurked the dukes, elevated by Napoleon to grand dukes. Napoleon’s vision for Baden was an unflattering one. He handed it places which had belonged to others (such as Heidelberg, the right-bank lands of Strasbourg and Speyer and the Black Forest Towns) to ensure permanent enmity with its neighbours. The thin northern strip of Baden along the Rhine was designed to be useless, a prophylactic between France and the rest of Germany which would be incapable of defending itself and could be burst through by the French army. Napoleon’s needs came to nothing as, in one of the great moments in the wars, memorialized in endless prints scattered through Badenese museums, Tsar Alexander I and his Russian army crossed the Rhine into France at Mannheim. As the tide of fighting swept west of ‘liberated’ Baden there were a host of sticky questions to be asked, not least around the Grand Duke’s being married to an adopted member of Napoleon’s family.
As the new, post-Napoleon age of monarchical legitimism began, the Grand Dukes were therefore poorly positioned to make big claims for themselves. There was also no reason at all why an inhabitant of Konstanz, Freiburg or Mannheim, say, which were new to the duchy, should particularly feel like crooking the knee to such a gang. The Grand Dukes were a dynastic fiasco. The enormously long-lived Grand Duke Karl Friedrich had a son, Karl Ludwig, who spent many years with his wife having five daughters in a row. At last they had a son, Karl, but Karl Ludwig, having waited forty-six years for his father to die, packed it in and died himself. Karl at last became Grand Duke in 1811, but then died childless shortly thereafter. This meant a dynastic dead end and Karl’s surprised uncle Ludwig took over, who was twenty-three years older than his predecessor and then died too. Luckily old Karl Friedrich had had two families (this thicket of Karls will soon clear) – he remarried later in his vast life morganatically, i.e. his wife was insufficiently posh so her children were debarred
from inheriting. As they were the only ones now left, legal twists and turns gave the job to one of these children, Leopold, who was about the same age as the Grand Duke two back.
This shambles is only worth recounting because it is from its implausibilities that the potent myth of Kaspar Hauser emerged. He was a simpleton who claimed to have been locked up for much of his life in a stable and whose condition baffled the era’s savants. He became rumoured to be the true child of Karl, snatched and imprisoned by the morganatic mum so that her own genes could kick in. The story made no sense – but it did at least lead to Werner Herzog’s wonderful film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, which manages to be a sort of essence of both the 1820s and the 1970s at the same time. That the story became so widely believed was ruinous for the Grand Dukes, reflecting a sense across Baden of their rulers, not as legitimate, ancient, fathers of the nation, etc. but as frauds.
