Merchant Kings

by Stephen R. Bown

  Portuguese by attacking their remaining bases. Not surprisingly it was not long before the English company was unable to meet its commitment to pay one third of the costs. At one convening of the joint council, on January 1, 1621, Coen proposed his long-delayed plan to invade the Banda Islands and seek revenge for the failed 1609 mission. He laid out his plans for a mighty invasion force and called upon his English allies to ante up a third of the men and ships—something they were unable to do, since most of their ships were already at sea, as Coen knew, having sent them all off on joint missions. He would proceed without them, he announced, under his own authority.

  In February 1621 Coen arrived at Fort Nassau on Great Banda Island with a fleet of thirteen ships, dozens of smaller craft and nearly two thousand troops, including a small contingent of Japanese mercenaries trained as executioners, as well as Javanese rowers and labourers. Fort Nassau itself had a garrison of around 250, making Coen’s private army the greatest military force ever to assemble in the Banda Islands. Despite the apparent joint operation of the companies, Coen suspected, correctly, that many disaffected English were secreted on the mountainous islands helping the Bandanese to prepare for the impending invasion by training them in the use of guns and the construction of fortifications. One English merchant, at the request of some village elders, delivered a letter to Coen urging him to forestall violence. Coen reputedly swore at the messenger, pushed him out the door of his office and announced that “whomsoever he should find he would take them for his utter enemies, and they should fare no better than the inhabitants.”

  With little fanfare, Coen launched his attack by ordering a small ship to circle the island in order to draw fire so that he could determine the location of gun emplacements. He secured this information with two men killed and ten injured.

  A few days later, after he had harangued his men about their indifferent morale and urged them on with appeals to their courage (and the suggestion of cash rewards for victory), the voc troops began the assault. It was not easy, as Great Banda consisted of densely forested, inaccessible mountains and had become the focal point for Bandanese resistance to the voc’s hegemony, drawing fighters from the other islands. After two days of fierce fighting along the crags and ridges, Coen bribed several turncoats with bags of thirty gold coins each to betray their comrades and undermine the defences of the island. His company troops then quickly seized control of most of the island’s defences and settlements. Suffering only six dead and twenty-seven wounded, Coen took over the entire island, with enormous casualties to the defenders.

  A small group of orang kaya slunk down from the mountains and filed into a clearing to request a meeting with Coen, who awaited their surrender aboard his ship. They bowed low and offered him a golden chain and a copper kettle as a sign of their sincerity. In victory, Coen was not magnanimous: he demanded they surrender all their weapons, help destroy all remaining defensive forts and give to him all their sons, to be held as hostages aboard his ships. His economic terms were no less harsh: they would agree to cede sovereignty over all the islands, donate a tenth of all the nutmeg they produced each year to the governor general (that is, himself ) and sell the remaining 90 per cent to the voc at prearranged low prices. In return, Coen promised to protect them from their enemies—presumably meaning not himself but the Portuguese. Coen also promised them that they would not be enslaved or forced into labour or military service outside the Banda Islands.

  Since the orang kaya had seen their mosques desecrated, their houses burned and commandeered for troops and their people terrorized, there was slim chance they would believe Coen’s promise of humane treatment. By his own admission, Coen did not expect the Bandanese to abide by these terms, though they had technically agreed to them. The orang kaya obliged him by remaining hidden in the mountains and delivering neither additional hostages nor weapons. “They are an indolent people,” he wrote, “of which little good can be expected.” Indeed, after a few weeks and on several occasions, armed groups of Bandanese ambushed and killed voc patrols. Coen was waiting for just such an event for a pretext to completely crush them. Giles Milton, in his book Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, notes that Coen’s demand for the Bandanese to cede their sovereignty was “significant for any future uprising would not be considered as an act of war but an act of treason, and treason in Holland was punishable by death.”

  Coen now brought from the hold of his ship the forty-five orang kaya whom he had seized earlier, when they originally came to treat with him. He ordered them to be tortured. Coen’s judicial process consisted of the rack and burning irons, and soon the orang kaya either died or confessed to a secret plan to attack the voc. This treason, Coen concluded, was to be punishable by death. Coen’s Japanese mercenaries herded the terrified elders, bound in tight cords, into a bamboo enclosure. There they were convicted of treason and sentenced without a proper trial. voc lieutenant Nicolas van Waert—whose own men could not fight the order and some of whom were killed when refusing to comply—expressed the general revulsion towards Coen’s methods: “Six Japanese soldiers were also ordered inside, and with their sharp swords they beheaded and quartered the eight chief orang kaya and then beheaded and quartered the thirty-six others. This execution was awful to see. The orang kaya died silently without uttering any sound except that one of them, speaking in the Dutch tongue, said, ‘Sirs, have you no mercy?’

  But indeed nothing availed.” Van Waert continued: “All that happened was so dreadful as to leave us stunned. The heads and quarters of those who had been executed were impaled upon bamboos and so displayed. Thus did it happen: God knows who is right. All of us, as professing Christians, were filled with dismay at the way this affair was brought to a conclusion, and we took no pleasure in such dealings.” Another voc officer wrote that “things are carried on in such a criminal and murderous way that the blood of the poor people cries to heaven for revenge.”

  Coen, however, was not finished. His plan had been brewing since 1609: he wanted to depopulate the islands to replace their inhabitants with imported slave and indentured labour under voc control. He proceeded with the ethnic cleansing of the Banda Islands. Over the next several months voc troops burned and destroyed dwellings, rounding up entire villages and herding the captives onto ships, so that they could be transported to Batavia and sold as slaves. Thousands of men, women and children died of disease and starvation during the voyage. Out of a total population of perhaps 13,000 to 15,000, barely 1,000 of the original residents remained in the Banda Islands. Several hundred others were later returned as slaves to work the plantations.

  Coen also defied the agreement between the voc and the English East India Company by capturing all the English on the islands, torturing some of them, manacling them, placing them in the holds of ships as prisoners, seizing their goods and destroying their factories and dwellings. For Coen it was total war—winner take all—and he expected no less from the English. He then began to ship in slaves and colonists to work the plantations. For his actions Coen earned a mild rebuke from the Council of Seventeen, but received a bonus of three thousand guilders for securing Banda nutmeg and mace—the entire world supply—to the voc’s monopoly.

  6

  HIS PRIMARY BUSINESS COMPLETED AND HIS HUNGER for revenge sated—the Bandanese punished for their defiance, the English company effectively defeated, the voc monopoly on a sound footing and his plan to replace local peoples with imported slave labour well underway—Coen decided to take a rest, return to the Netherlands and enjoy the wealth he had accumulated. In 1623 he set sail for Batavia and Amsterdam, deciding on one final bit of business before he left the Indies.

  He had his ship put into Fort Victoria on Ambon, where he made a special effort to warn Herman van Speult, the governor of the voc post there, to be wary of suspicious English activity.

  Coen was certain there would be retaliation for his actions on the Banda Islands. Ambon, a strategically important island on several major trade routes, was a major producer of c
loves.

  Coen then sailed to Batavia to tidy up his affairs and arrange for the settlement of the now depopulated Banda Islands. His plan for Banda was to exterminate all the nutmeg trees on the farthest-outlying islands and then to divide the remaining plantations into sixty-eight 1.2-hectare perken, which would be leased by the company to Dutch planters, who were to be paid 1/122 of the selling price of nutmeg in Amsterdam. This was apparently enough, particularly given the low wages and slave labour, for enormous profits to be made not only for the company but also for the perkeniers, who in the following decades commissioned opulent estate mansions to highlight their wealth and status as landowners.

  While Coen sailed triumphantly to his homeland, his parting words to van Speult on Ambon were propelling events down a horrifying—though, to Coen, not unexpected—path.

  The seeds he planted were about to bear sickening fruit. Fort Victoria was manned by two hundred company soldiers, who controlled dozens of great guns mounted on tall stone towers. It was separated from the town by a deep moat and was bounded on one side by the sea. Armed voc ships lay at anchor in the harbour—it would take a mighty force to challenge the power of the voc fortress at Ambon. Nevertheless, from the battlements of his strong castle, van Speult cast a suspicious glance about the island and narrowed in on the small English East India Company factory, a dilapidated compound of about a dozen men that reflected the company’s fortunes. Van Speult’s network of spies and paid informants soon turned up the expected suspicious activity: a sentry spotted a Japanese mercenary employed by the English merchants skulking about the battlements of the voc fortress. The next day, rumours that the man was a spy awakened van Speult’s fears, and he ordered the hapless man to be brought in for questioning. After a judicious application of torture, the man agreed that he and his thirty or so compatriots had a plan to seize the castle. All the other Japanese in the area were quickly rounded up and tortured until they were broken— after which they also “revealed” the complicity of the English chief factor, Gabriel Towerson. That Towerson routinely dined with van Speult and his men and had regular access to the fortress does not seem to have allayed van Speult’s suspicions.

  Van Speult invited his erstwhile dinner companions to meet him in his castle. When they walked in unarmed, the voc men-at-arms seized them. Some were manacled and tossed into the dungeons, others were locked below water level aboard a Dutch ship. The screams started soon afterward. In the atmosphere of fear and intimidation, many of the Dutch traders seemed to lose their humanity. While being questioned about their role in the alleged secret attack, the English merchants endured the fate of the Japanese mercenaries who had been compelled to betray them: they were burned, stabbed, stretched on the rack and partially drowned. Several of them, while chained to a stone wall, had their limbs blown off with gunpowder. A pamphlet published after the event, titled A True Relation of the Unjust, Cruel and Barbarous Proceedings Against the English at Amboyna, written by a conscience-stricken voc employee, related how the English company employees had been forced to confess to the preposterous scheme of planning an attack against the heavily fortified voc post and ordered to sign documents attesting to their villainy before they died. Ten Englishmen, nine Japanese and a resident Portuguese native were beheaded on March 9, 1623 .

  Towerson, the alleged ringleader, was cut into quarters and then beheaded. His head was stuck on a pole and displayed for public viewing. In Nusantara: A History of Indonesia Bernard Vlekke writes that “for two hundred and fifty years the ‘massacre’ of Amboina retained its propaganda value in Europe. In Indonesia it was only one of many bloody episodes in the history of ruthless commercial competition.” The English company, now effectively eliminated from the Indonesian spice race, was never to regain a toehold in the Indies, and not surprisingly the massacre ended the joint agreement between the two companies. Coen had won. He had maintained all along that the enterprise would only be profitable if prices could be controlled, and after 1623 he set the voc on the path to achieving this objective.

  Back in the Netherlands, Coen settled into the comfortable life of a gentleman. He assumed the headship of the voc chamber in Hoorn and settled himself in a stately house befitting a man of his wealth. He acquired a suitable wife, the daughter of one of the voc’s leading directors, and had his and his wife’s portraits painted by a prominent artist. The Dutch historian Jurrien van Goor has called them “a testament to Coen’s ambition, pride and self-esteem . . . His robe and pose are almost regal.” But as news of his business methods trickled back to Europe, many of his countrymen were appalled by Coen’s actions and feared the horrible reputation the voc was giving the entire Dutch nation. Coen’s plans for the Indies also raised eyebrows: if native Indonesians were replaced with Dutch colonists— working under the auspices of the voc, with a monopoly on all trade and using slave labour to grow their food—how would the local people live? The voc was a trading company, was it not? “There is no profit at all in an empty sea, empty countries, and dead people,” claimed one of the directors. But the immediate profits appeared to be enormous, and no one seriously challenged the voc’s monopoly; its overseas activities were not governed, after all, by the laws of the United Netherlands. Outside of Europe, the only external laws they obeyed came from opponents with bigger guns. So, after much debate within the voc, Coen sought and was appointed to a second term as governor general in 1624 . His departure for Batavia was, however, delayed because of diplomatic fallout from the massacre at Ambon. By 1627 things had settled down enough for him to board a ship in Amsterdam incognito, along with his wife and her brother and sister, for his final voyage to the spiceries.

  Coen did not arrive in Batavia until September 1627. Once there, he lost little time in continuing to consolidate the voc monopoly. The local people did not, however, easily give up their livelihoods and ancient traditions and freedoms. In December, a few months after Coen arrived, Sultan Agung, who ruled Mataram, an expanding central Javanese empire that potentially threatened the voc’s headquarters in Batavia, launched two deadly sieges against Coen at the headquarters. Once again, Coen proved that he was a master tactician. After a month-long failed attack, Agung’s army disbanded, and as punishment to his forces for their defeat, the humiliated sultan ordered 750 executions within view of the voc castle walls. Before the end of 1628 Sultan Agung returned with an even greater force, numbering in the tens of thousands. The entire military strength of his empire, it was sure to crush the voc’s private army and conquer Batavia. But during the months of the siege, Coen again proved a sly and dangerous adversary. Sensing a weakness in the seemingly overwhelming military forces arrayed against him, Coen narrowed in and devised an attack.

  At sea, the voc was by far the most powerful force in the region, and Coen used its naval superiority to destroy all of Agung’s grain barges, which were slowly lumbering along the coast. By the time the remnants of Agung’s supply fleet arrived at Batavia, thousands of his troops were on the verge of starvation. Heartened by Coen’s early victory, the defenders of the voc’s fort held out until Agung’s fleet fled, leaving a trail of dead bodies.

  The voc’s predominance was now recognized throughout the region. Unfortunately for Coen, the siege of Batavia was accompanied by a number of ailments that were common among crowds of humanity locked in a confined space for prolonged periods of time. Chief among these ailments were dysentery and cholera, and Coen himself died in his castle of one of these diseases on September 20, 1629. He was forty-two years old. Some claimed that his death was hastened by the fear of meeting his successor, Jacques Specx, whose daughter, Saartje, Coen had ordered publicly whipped years earlier.

  After Coen’s death, Batavia and the Dutch were established as masters of the Indonesian trade and the most powerful military force in the region. A true merchant king, Coen had built the foundation of the Dutch company’s empire—without him and his bloody vision the voc would have remained a trading company, content to let the symbiotic daily commercial
activity of others flourish alongside its own. After he died, the voc kept to Coen’s chosen path, becoming more entrenched, consolidating power, continuing to conquer and seizing as much autonomy from local peoples as military might permitted. In 1641 the company finally conquered Portuguese Malacca after a six-year naval blockade of the strait. The city and sultanate of

  Bantam capitulated in 1684 , and the sultan agreed to expel all non-Dutch or non-voc foreigners. The voc continued its corporate war with the English East India Company, which mostly focused on the west coast of India. However, the war between the two companies significantly contributed to the three seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch wars that were mostly fought in European waters, although they spilled over to North America and involved the corporate holdings of the Dutch West India Company as well. By virtue of its size, the voc dominated much of the trade in Europe, controlling half of Europe’s foreign trade by mid-century.

  To control production and keep prices high, voc troops uprooted nutmeg and clove trees that were growing outside voc-approved plantations. Islanders in Tidore and Ternate were forbidden to grow any clove, previously their sole source of income, and planting a clove tree became an offence punishable by death. The voc depopulated entire islands and relocated the peoples to places where they could be controlled on plantations. There were, understandably, revolts by local peoples, but these outbursts were easily crushed. In the process of securing enormous profits, the voc impoverished entire societies. By deciding where and in what quantity spices could be grown, by relocating peoples, by reordering whole societies and ancient cultural practices to ensure the highest possible return for distant shareholders, the voc evolved from being just a company to becoming a quasi-colonial entity that intruded into the lives of Indonesians and determined all aspects of their lives—their commercial patterns, relationships, religious practices, food, clothing and freedoms.