Coen’s analysis of the issues facing the voc was clear and cogent, with a logical, if brutal, conclusion: the spice trade was vital to the economic prosperity of the Netherlands. Not only did profits accrue to the company’s benefit and the benefit of the United Netherlands, but their gain at the same time damaged the prosperity of their enemy Spain, and therefore weakened Spain’s military capacity to dominate the Low Countries. The voc, Coen argued, had a legitimate right to be in the Spice Islands: it had acquired much of its territory by conquest, defending itself against Portuguese and Spanish aggression.
Furthermore, the voc’s claims of monopoly were not based on ancient papal proclamations but on formal legal treaties with various Indonesian nations, particularly in Ternate, the Banda Islands and on Ambon. Spices grew in such abundance in these regions that there was no shortage of supply. Hence competition from the English could not be tolerated, because this would lower prices in Europe and make the business unprofitable.
The spice supply had to be restricted to make the whole enterprise viable. Coen advocated a vast expansion of the company’s operations throughout the region, as well as insisting that the voc’s monopoly over cloves, mace and nutmeg (these being the only spices that could be monopolized, because of their isolated region of origin) be ruthlessly enforced to artificially restrict supply and keep prices high. A powerful corporate fleet should be mustered to complete the assault on the remaining Portuguese and Spanish holdings, attacking them in the Philippines at Manila and in China at Macao. Finally, Dutch colonists, as well as slave labour, should be transported to the company’s distant commercial outposts. When the voc was entrenched and its competitors had been eliminated, local rulers would have no alternative but to respect their contracts and deal only with the voc under that company’s terms. Only then, Coen asserted, would the voc become stable and secure in accruing vast and ongoing profits.
It was an absurdly ambitious vision, beguilingly wide in scope. The Council of Seventeen bought into this intoxicating scheme, overlooking the unsavoury, though unspecified, violence needed to secure it. They now dreamed of dominating not only the Europe-Asia trade, but Asian inter-island shipping as well. It was here that the greatest profits could be made, “as these countries of Asia exceed those of Europe in population, consumption of goods, and industry.” Coen argued that the only route for profit and stability lay in the conquest of the company’s enemies, a restriction on the production of spices and a monopoly on their sale not just in Europe, but throughout the world. Coen’s breathtaking vision called for the voc to control and dominate the commerce of millions of people with ancient traditions and economies far greater than those of the Netherlands, or even of Europe. “Under this system,” writes Bernard Vlekke in Nusantara: A History of Indonesia, “the silk from Persia, the cloth from India, the cinnamon from Ceylon, the porcelain from China, and the copper from Japan would be exchanged for the spices from the Moluccas and the sandalwood from Timor, all under the supervision of the officials of the Company.” The voc would be like a spider astride its giant web, strands stretching to the shores of distant lands none had yet visited, controlling all commercial activity throughout the vast, heavily populated region. The profits, of course, would slide back to investors in the tiny Netherlands, on the other side of the world.
But there was much work to be done before Coen’s landmark proposals could be implemented. In the meantime, Coen strove to rationalize and professionalize the company’s business activities from his base in Bantam and from the island of Ambon, a major administrative centre. During this time he also prosecuted his personal war against anyone who dared to challenge the voc’s monopoly as best he could, given that he was still in a subservient position. Coen was furious to see profits slipping through his fingers, but he was not yet in a position to enforce all the voc’s contracts. The governors general under whom he served during these years, Gerard Reynst and Pieter Both until December 1615 and then Laurens Reael, were far too lenient and genial, in Coen’s opinion, in their co-operation with the English and their respect for the rights and traditions of the local rulers and inhabitants.
In particular, Coen despised the traders of the English East India Company and did all he could to frustrate their efforts to secure spices. In one instance in 1613, when an English East India Company expedition led by John Jourdain cruised to Ambon to trade in cloves, Jourdain was shocked to hear Coen’s response to his proposal to buy his stock from the Dutch at slightly above their cost, rather than purchasing cloves from the locals: Coen flatly refused him and ordered him to abandon the island because the voc had already secured contracts for all the cloves “growinge upon the iland.” Coen told Jourdain in a letter “nott to deal with the contrye people for any cloves.” He then sent notice to the local villages that he would attack and burn their dwellings if they traded with the English. When Jourdain, unable to convince the locals, went to meet Coen in person, the youthful-looking Dutchman strode out to meet the English captain. Not surprisingly, the two arrogant men took an immediate dislike to each other. They insulted each other “in a chollericke manner”—Jourdain mocked the younger Coen’s scanty beard and, according to an English account, “did everything to frustrate his endeavours, for it would have been all up
with us there had he succeeded.” Admitting defeat, however, Jourdain sailed off without a cargo of cloves. Coen knew that depriving the English company of revenue was as important as gaining it for the voc.
Coen’s particular interest was in securing the nutmeg monopoly in the Banda Islands, a task he knew to be possible because of the islands’ remote location and tiny size and because they were the only source in the world of the valuable spice. But the English company also had plans for the Bandas: two of the outlying islands, Ai and Run, had not signed monopoly agreements with the voc and traded freely with English merchants. In 1615 the governor general, Gerard Reynst, led more than a thousand company troops to Ai but was repulsed by the Bandanese, who had received guns and training from English company troops. This resulted in a great defeat for the voc, which was driven off the island. Reynst died a few months later, never having recovered from the humiliation. Coen dispatched letters to the Council of Seventeen, fuming that the English “want to reap what we have sowed, and they brag that they are free to do so because their king has authority over the Netherlands nation.” He also reported that “you can be assured that if you do not send a large capital at the earliest opportunity . . . the whole Indies trade is liable to come to nothing.” The following year the voc sent out another, even larger, fleet to capture the island. Coen sent a letter to the English company troops, who were helping the islanders defend themselves, claiming that “if any slaughter of men happened . . . they would not be culpable.” The English company, cowed, abandoned the island and its people to the brutal, smothering embrace of Coen and the voc.
With the voc’s conquest of Ai, there remained only a single nutmeg-producing island, Run, free from the company’s control. That island became a focal point for Coen’s wrath. Even though the Netherlands and England were at peace in Europe, their two
East Indies companies were at war in Asia, and Coen began laying plans for a final conquest. He wrote a condescending note to his superiors in Amsterdam: “If by night and day proud thieves broke into your house, who were not ashamed of any robbery or other offence, how would you defend your property against them without having recourse to ‘maltreatment’? This is what the English are doing against you in the Moluccas. Consequently, we are surprised to receive instructions not to do them bodily harm. If the English have this privilege above all other nations, it must be nice to be an Englishman.”
There were those on the Council of Seventeen who were sympathetic to Coen’s vision and dismissive of the price to be paid; after all, it was a price to be paid by others. Until Coen coolly laid out his grand scheme, the directors of the voc had been content to make money in the usual manner: by commerce and trade.
Coen�
��s proposal, argued logically and passionately, changed the paradigm for viewing the company’s distant activities—activities which were far from the scrutinizing view of citizens and government in the Netherlands. Who was there to hold the company accountable to the customs and laws that restricted behaviour in Europe? Coen’s strict Calvinist morality and conservative temperament urged him to take a greater interest in the affairs of others than a business entity should under healthy circumstances.
Coen wanted to rule people and get rich as a bonus. Through force of will, single-mindedness of purpose, narrowness of thought, righteousness of conviction and the persuasiveness of greed, he was able to make the voc’s business activities conform to his hatreds and his need for revenge.
In October 1617 Coen got a chance to implement some of his schemes. Although the Council of Seventeen was reluctant to embrace his bloody vision, his reports and actions hinted at an unusual talent and force of will, of decisiveness. When the temporary governor general, Laurens Reael, a dandy who had taken over from Gerard Reynst, resigned in protest over his low pay, Coen was the natural choice as the new head of Eastern operations, especially by those who were in favour of a more aggressive policy to secure and stabilize the voc’s profitability. Coen assumed command on April 30, 1618, when he was only thirty-one years old. His initial orders from Amsterdam called for action: “Something on a large scale must be done against the enemies; the inhabitants of Banda must be killed or driven out of the land, and if necessary the country must be turned into a desert by uprooting the trees and shrubs.” Four years after he had conceived his vision for expanding the voc’s trade and securing the spice monopoly, Coen could put his scheme into action. Finally he had a free hand to indulge his long-held conviction that violent force was necessary for profitability. “Your Honours should know by experience,” he wrote to the Council of Seventeen, “that trade in Asia must be driven and maintained under the protection and favour of Your Honours’ own weapons, and that the weapons must be paid for by the profits from the trade; so that we cannot carry on trade without war, nor war without trade.”
5
WHEN THE COUNCIL OF SEVENTEEN APPOINTED COEN as the new governor general of its operations in the East Indies, the voc was still on a shaky foundation. In more than a decade of warring, and after numerous agreements attesting to their monopoly trading rights, many of the Dutch traders had pushed their hosts too far. They had refused to acknowledge their hosts’ cultural and religious traditions and had annoyed others with their rudeness and constant quarrelling, including bickering with other foreigners, such as the English and the Chinese. There were attacks on voc merchants and ships. Other peoples, at Ambon and the Banda Islands, continued to flout signed monopoly agreements and secretly traded with English, Chinese and Malay merchants. When Spanish and Portuguese prisoners escaped from a voc ship and sought protection in the English company’s fort at Bantam in 1618, this caused an open rift in the fragile peace between the Dutch and English companies, and they began to skirmish with each other in the streets.
Coen recounted with pride the chaos he had sowed: “One day they threaten to sail to Banda in force and take revenge, and the next they say they will attack our ships at sea. They expect to get even by reprisals in the Channel at home and they are going to break our heads. Daily they come up with new threats which clearly shows that they are quite confused.” The pretence of peaceful business was shed.
Coen had always hated Bantam for its cloying, fetid airs, so when the Sultan of Bantam commanded him to stop fighting with the English there, Coen ordered the removal of his headquarters from Bantam eighty kilometres east along the same coast to the little town of Jakarta, where he was welcomed by the prince. Coen had not been in Jakarta long, however, when he ordered a small English factory in the city burned and destroyed. Unexpectedly, an English East India Company fleet then arrived, led by Sir Thomas Dale. He ordered eleven of his ships to blockade Coen’s seven ships in the port and demanded Coen’s surrender. Although he was outmanned, Coen refused.
After several days of stalling, naval warfare began between the two companies’ ships on January 2, 1619. They lined up in battle formation in front of Jakarta and slid past each other in “a cruel bloody fight.” All shipping in the Indonesian port stopped as thousands of cannons roared, acrid smoke clouded the air and hundreds of men were torn open by shards of splintered wood, mangled by flying grapeshot and picked off by sharpshooters in the rigging. As the fleets disengaged for the night, it was obvious that the English company’s fleet was trouncing the voc’s ships. That night, Coen called his captains together for a council of war to discuss their weak position, a result of their battered ships, numerous wounded and depleted stocks of ammunition. When three more English company ships arrived the next morning, Coen, gritting his teeth in humiliation, ordered the men in his Jakarta factory to defend the depot to the death and then gave the signal for his ships to turn and flee before the superior forces of his hated enemy. It was something he had never done before.
As his battered fleet hoisted its sails and headed to the Moluccas, where he planned to regroup and reassemble a stronger fleet from the vessels stationed at his many trading entrepôts throughout the region, Coen, glowering with frustration, retreated to his cabin. His bony hand clutching a quill, he dashed off a letter to the Council of Seventeen castigating them for not providing him with enough men, ships and weapons. It is not difficult to discern the arrogance behind his caustic missive: “And now see what has happened . . . I swear that no enemies do our cause more harm than the ignorance and stupidity existing among you, gentlemen!” he wrote to his superiors.
But then things went from bad to good for Coen. Sir Thomas Dale, feckless, unfocused and unable to unify the independent captains of his fleet, allowed Coen to escape and then bungled the assault on the fort. Dale directed his ships not to hunt down the remnants of Coen’s shattered fleet. Instead, he headed to the coast of India, where he died of disease a few months later. The once-formidable English East India Company fleet scattered, partly because of the awkward governing structure of the English company. Dale’s fleet was not truly under his command: he relied on persuasion, since each captain was responsible for the profit or loss of his own expedition, with no overarching or coordinated corporate directive and no long-term financing.
After successfully holding off their English attackers, on March 2 , the men of the voc garrison decided to name their little fortress Batavia, “as Holland used to be called in days of antiquity.” In May, Coen returned in triumph to Jakarta, victorious in the face of the English company’s awkward, decentralized governing structure. He marched a thousand fresh troops into the fortress and on May 28 ordered them to attack. The local prince, stunned at the unexpected treachery, was unable to fend off Coen’s troops. Coen conquered the town of three thousand, burned down most of its buildings and seized the land for the voc. He then drew up plans for a new settlement on the traditional Dutch model with which he was familiar.
Coen kept the name Batavia for the new settlement, a solid stone fortress surrounded by angled streets, canals and bridges.
“All the kings of these lands know full well what the planting of our colony at Jakarta signifies, and what may follow from it, as well as the cleverest and most far-seeing politician in Europe might do,” he boasted. He then pressed his attack against the English company ships, which were now dispersed into smaller groups, and defeated them, capturing seven for his own use, effectively ending the English company’s challenge to the voc in Indonesia. “It is certain that this victory and the fleeing of the English will create quite a furor throughout the Indies,” he admitted. “This will enhance the honour and the reputation of the Dutch nation. Now everyone will want to be our friend.”
On the verge of achieving his grand objective, the culmination of nearly a decade of dreaming, Coen received the worst news of his career. On July 17, 1619, he opened a letter from the Council of Seventeen: he must desist in his
attack on the English company’s shipping. The letter was a truce, signed by representatives of both companies as part of an agreement between the two national governments to “forgive and forget” past hostilities. They would each return captured ships and prisoners and “henceforth live and converse as trusted friends.” The two companies agreed to work jointly to expel the Portuguese and Spanish from the Moluccas and to maintain their forts and factories. But the monopoly would no longer be exclusive to either company; it was to be shared, one third to the English company and two thirds to the Dutch company, with each supplying its share of ships and men and receiving its portion of the spices to sell as it wished.
Sensible though the partnership was, it infuriated Coen. He was either unaware of or uncaring about the European repercussions of the hostilities between the two companies in the East Indies, nearly sparking a costly war that would consume all the profits from the spice trade and then some. He knew only that the price of the spices in Europe would plummet and that the cost to purchase them in Indonesia would rise if there was competition. He fired off an impetuous letter to the Council of Seventeen, a letter dripping with sarcasm: “The English owe you a debt of gratitude,” he sneered, “because after they have worked themselves out of the Indies, your Lordships put them right back again . . . It is incomprehensible that the English should be allowed one third of the cloves, nutmegs and mace since they cannot lay claim to a single grain of sand in the Moluccas, Amboyna, or Banda.”
Coen had no intention of abiding by the treaty. In any case the voc was too powerful to be compelled to listen to the dictates of the Dutch government. So far from Europe—with communication taking up to a year to get a reply—Coen knew he had a certain latitude in his interpretation of orders. He went about organizing a joint “fleet of defence” that would congregate in the bustling new capital of Batavia, where he now grudgingly permitted English agents to operate. Getting wind of the English company’s lack of capital, men and ships, he proposed a succession of grandiose plans to oust the Spanish and
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