Merchant Kings

by Stephen R. Bown

  The Nineteen, vindictive in their victory, took advantage of the situation. They refused to allow van der Donck to return to

  New Netherland—after all, the colony had been reaffirmed as their monopoly preserve, and he was a troublemaker who had nearly cost them their charter and their power. Only after much negotiation was he granted a passport to return to his home and family, at the end of 1653, and only after he had renounced the right to play a role in government and agreed to give up practising law in the North American colony forever. The company would allow him to live in its corporate holding so long as he was neutered. His cause seemed forever lost; van der Donck described himself as “wholly disheartened and cast down.”

  After crossing the Atlantic, he continued agitating for civil rights, but behind the scenes. Stuyvesant had to take action on some reforms, such as collecting standard business licence fees, filling official government positions like that of sheriff and building an official city hall. Given the war in Europe and the resulting potential for an attack on New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant also ordered work to commence on a great palisade wall that stretched over seven hundred metres around the old fort and eventually gave rise to Wall Street. In spite of these initiatives, the citizens felt that the company was too tight with its purse strings when it came not just to municipal but also to military infrastructure. The settlement’s defences were poor, and Stuyvesant knew this well, but even his frequent demands to the company’s directors for more troops, ships and equipment went unheeded. These things cost money, and they were not to be approved without imminent need. The colonists knew they were under-defended and frequently complained about the situation, but Stuyvesant, though sympathetic, was caught in the middle. Fortunately for New Netherland, the war never reached North America; a peace treaty with England was signed in 1654 .

  The conflict between the colonists and the company, however, continued. Stuyvesant had not given the limited municipal government any taxing authority, so it depended on the company to fund its civic initiatives. The company and the municipal government jointly ran the colony, but the partnership was not a happy one. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace write in Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 that the two incompatible councils, one representing the people, the other the company, were “constantly bickering over precedence and maneuvering for petty advantages with no clear-cut division of duties between them.” The company feared any changes to its profitable arrangement and wanted the colony to remain a factory centre, a corporate holding, rather than becoming an independent colony. After all, it had started the colony decades earlier and saw no need for any independent institutional structure. Whenever the Dutch Republic was at peace, however, the commercial government became an anachronism, and the demands of the permanent population of non-employees grew more strident.

  “To cast the struggle between the West India Company and the leaders of the commonality in terms of a contest between the forces of tyranny and the forces of democracy,” writes Thomas J.

  Condon in his book New York Beginnings, “or between a grasping commercial company and a struggling group of freemen, fails to do justice to the dimensions of the historical problem involved.”

  But while the company was not entirely malevolent, its greatest failing was that it did not engender any sense of loyalty in the colonists. Many of the settlers were not even Dutch-speaking— some were born in North America, others were fleeing the oppressive societies of New England with their grim theocratic laws and world view. Others yet were from Germany, France or other places in Europe. It has been said that eighteen different languages were spoken in the early Manhattan settlement. One of the results of this multicultural gathering was that the people’s loyalty was fluid and difficult both to contain and to direct, being pulled in so many different directions.

  In outsourcing civic responsibility for its citizens to a monopoly corporation, the States General of the United Provinces of the Netherlands paid the price in lost loyalty. The colonists were not loyal to the company, particularly since it was headquartered across a vast ocean, in the same way that they were loyal to their community. They felt betrayed by their nation, which continued to foist an unwanted, perhaps even hated, corporation upon them, and they lost the will to fight their nation’s enemy. So, when Colonel Richard Nicolls and the English frigates threatened New Amsterdam in 1664 , the colonists had little interest in resisting. They did not want to lay down their lives, endanger the lives of their families or gamble their farms or businesses in defence of an obstructionist monopoly, and perhaps die or lose their property to defend the interests of the West India Company and its domineering governor, Stuyvesant. This was particularly so when the English seemed to promise them many of the things for which they had unsuccessfully fought the Dutch company over the years.

  On September 8, 1664 , Stuyvesant and his small garrison, compelled by the will of the people, marched out of Fort Amsterdam with their “drums beating and colors flying” and formally surrendered to Nicolls and the English force. The Dutch company troops boarded ships and soon set off for Europe, leaving England as the uncontested political power in the erstwhile Dutch colony. Nicolls, the new political master, toured his new holding, pleased with his accomplishment—he had taken the entire colony without firing a single shot, giving England jurisdiction over not only the former New Nether-land but the entire east coast of North America. He promptly announced that, henceforth, Fort Amsterdam would be called Fort James; Fort Orange, inland along the Hudson River, would be known as Fort Albany; and the town of New Amsterdam, and indeed all of New Netherland, would now be New

  York. When he heard the news, King Charles ii of England wrote to his sister in France, “You will have heard of our taking New Amsterdam. ’Tis a place of great importance . . . we have got the better of it and ’tis now called New York.” At that time the entire colony had a population of about nine thousand, of which several thousand lived in New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island.

  Less than a year later, in February 1665, Charles ii declared war on the United Provinces, using the now decades-old massacre at Ambon as the rallying cry. This was the start of the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The two nations’ great fleets geared up for another round of battles, and Stuyvesant received a perfunctory order from the Nineteen to return immediately to Europe. He must have known he was being set up to take the blame for the ignominious surrender of New Netherland to the English, and he took defensive action. When he boarded the ship for Amsterdam, the erstwhile director-general had armed himself with documents attesting to his character as “an honest proprietor and patriot of the province and a supporter of the reformed religion.” The community leaders of the Commonality of New Netherlands, his legal jousting partners for the past decade, had decided to let bygones be bygones and came together to jointly defend their surrender to the English.

  Capitulation, they claimed, had been their only option: “The Honourable Petrus Stuyvesant, then Director-General of New Netherland did, immediately on the arrival and sojourn of the English frigates, employ every possible means to encourage and animate the Burghers of the City of New Amsterdam and the people of the outvillages, especially on Long Island, to all possible resistance; certainly, to defend the city and fort of New Amsterdam as long as it was capable of defence, but that neither the one nor the other could be prevailed on to do so, because it was impossible, with any hope of a good result.”

  Nevertheless, when Stuyvesant stalked off the ship in Amsterdam, the West India Company publicly accused him of cowardice and incompetence, and blamed him for the loss of the colony to the English. These accusations he vehemently rebutted in the States General. The company he had served his entire adult life had turned on him, claiming that he had “allowed himself to be rode over by Clergymen, women and cowards, in order to surrender to the English what he could defend with reputation, for the sake of thus saving their private properties.” As it had done with van der Donck, the company denied Stuyvesant the right to return
to its corporate landholding across the Atlantic, keeping him in exile from his wife and children and from the place he had come to regard as his home. Whether he appreciated the irony of his predicament is not known. When he finally did win from the States General his right to return, Stuyvesant retreated to his farm on Manhattan Island and retired from public life to a quiet, respectable prosperity with Judith and their children. During the seventeen years he ruled the vast tract of North America for his corporate masters, he had come to realize that his interest no longer lay with the West India Company or with Holland. He lived for four more years in New York, until his death in 1672 at the age of sixty.

  At the Treaty of Breda that ended the Anglo-Dutch war in 1674 , the States General gave up the right to reclaim New Netherland from England in favour of regaining Surinam (Dutch Guiana), which English forces had recently captured; slaves and sugar plantations were of greater value to the company at the time. In the bargain the Dutch Republic also gained the nutmeg island of Run, which the voc had recently conquered from the English and wanted to keep. What was to become the most famous city in the world was bargained away for a tiny and barren nutmeg island in Indonesia and some

  South American slave-dependent sugar plantations. Almost a century later, in 1764 , the original Dutch West India Company collapsed under its debt load. After refinancing and reorganizing, it soldiered on until 1791, when the Dutch government assumed its stock and the authority over its remaining territorial possessions in the Caribbean and South America. although haught y, stubborn and protective of his authority, Pieter Stuyvesant was not a violent man. He appears to have cared for the people of New Netherland and was sympathetic to their needs, but he believed they needed a firm hand and were not to be trusted with responsibility or authority. He made New Amsterdam a clean, orderly and lawful place, but restricted trade and immigration so that its population grew slowly compared with that of the surrounding English colonies.

  Overly regulated, its citizens never fully unleashed their potential. Although he had the interests of the community at heart, Stuyvesant remained a corporate director, ultimately beholden to his masters and the shareholders. It must have been difficult, balancing his obligations to the company, the legal owners of the entire colony, and the people whom he regarded increasingly as his compatriots.

  He could never fully embrace either obligation. In the early years, the colony needed a man of forceful character to bang it into shape, but Stuyvesant was too proud, irascible and stubborn to know when it was time for him to step down. He was hampered by his naturally conservative instincts and his loyalty to his employer, a company that seemed particularly blind to the implications of its policies in a global economic sense. For years the West India Company had restricted the colonists’ freedoms and had never provided enough for their military defence.

  These quarrels between the citizens and the company had settled into a bitter resentment.

  Oddly, before he surrendered New Netherland to the English, in the articles of transfer Stuyvesant insisted on a clause stipulating that the citizens “shall keep and enjoy the liberty of the consciences in religion” and other freedoms under the new English rule. As a result, New York under the English resembled the Dutch Republic in its cultural and religious tolerance and was not at all like the surrounding English colonies. The merchant king of New Netherland moulded New Amsterdam into a bustling, cosmopolitan port, ideally situated for future growth; at the same time, he sucked the life out of it by smothering it. Like a flame denied oxygen, New Amsterdam under the company’s rule dwindled into smouldering coals until, enlivened by a fresh breeze, it became New York.

  Jan Pieterszoon Coen, merchant and warrior, despised the English and fought ruthlessly to secure a monopoly in spices for the Dutch East India Company.

  A volcano ominously erupts on Gunung Api in the Banda Islands, coinciding with the arrival of a Dutch East India Company fleet, in this early seventeenth-century engraving.

  The famous port of Batavia, now called Jakarta, was founded by Jan Pieterszoon Coen in 1619 because he despised the cloying, fetid airs of Bantam where the Dutch East India Company headquarters had been located.

  The chaotic and bustling spice markets of the Moluccas are depicted in this seventeenth-century engraving.

  Pieter Stuyvesant, the stern and paternalistic director-general of the Dutch West India Company, ruled all of New Netherland from his fort in New Amsterdam from 1647 until he surrendered to the English in 1664 .

  One of the earliest engravings of the budding Dutch West India Company settlement of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, originally included in Adriaen van der Donck’s A Description of New Netherland.

  This 1664 colour print by Johannes Vingboons shows New Amsterdam at the moment of capture by English troops in September. The English renamed the town New York.

  This 1667 Chart of New Netherland and the English Virginias from Cape Cod to Cape Canrick by Pieter Goos shows the region claimed by the Dutch West India Company as well as the English colonies to the north and south.

  Robert Clive, the brilliant military genius who rose from being a clerk to lead the English East India Company to enormous territorial gains in the dying days of the Mughal Empire in the mid-eighteenth century, is shown in this classic painting by Sir Nathaniel Dance.

  This mid-eighteenth century print titled A Perspective View of Fort St. George on the Coromandel Coast, belonging to the East India Company, shows one of the most important company trading and military outposts in India.

  In this famous and somewhat fanciful eighteenth-century painting titled Robert Clive and Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey, 1757, by Francis Hayman, Clive is shown graciously negotiating for the future of Bengal and its thirty million inhabitants. It was the first major territorial conquest of the English East India Company.

  Chapter 3

  “Consider the situation in which the victory of Plassey placed me. A great prince was dependent on my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles; I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels. Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation.”

  ROBERT CLIVE, C. 1772

  Companies at War

  SIR ROBERT CLIVE AND THE

  ENGLISH EAST INDIA COMPANY

  1

  AFTER THE MASSACR E AT AMBON IN 1623 , THE FOR-tunes of the English East India Company stagnated. Panicked English merchants throughout the East Indies now feared for their lives: what would prevent the Dutch East India Company, the voc, from instigating further atrocities or massacres of the English? Although the hated Jan Pieterszoon Coen had departed for Europe, who knew the mind of the new governor general, Pieter de Carpentier? Within a few years virtually all employees of the English company had fled the region, except for a skeleton base at Bantam. This exodus, coupled with a general economic decline, caused shipping to and from the Eastern markets to plummet by over 60 per cent. By the end of the 1630s the company, horribly in debt, began to sell off its assets, ships and buildings. Only a modest trade with India sustained it during these lean years.

  Several years earlier, in the early 1600s, William Hawkins had led a diplomatic mission to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, carrying a letter from England’s King James i requesting the right to establish a trading outpost in Surat on India’s northwest coast. The company’s trade in India began slowly and tentatively, but throughout the seventeenth century trade with India kept ships busy, departing London for the East and returning with exotic cargoes. The start of the English Civil War in 1642 and the subsequent decade of unrest made maritime travel increasingly dangerous and was disastrous for commerce. Then, in 1649, Oliver Cromwell ordered King Charles i beheaded and proclaimed a commonwealth, and the company’s royal charter ended. Soon rival traders began to outfit ships to sail to India. Cromwell urged the company to continue its shipbuilding and overseas trade, but without the benefit
of a monopoly a decline in the company’s fortune was inevitable. It struggled as Cromwell vigorously pursued legal claims against the voc for the damage to English shipping stemming from the massacre at Ambon. He did, however, succeed in gaining 85,000 pounds in compensation for the company and 4 ,000 pounds for the families of the tortured and murdered English merchants.

  In mid-January 1657 Sir William Cockayne, the governor of the company, convened a meeting of the remaining investors to highlight the company’s unsound financial position. Revenue was down, with no near-term prospects for improvement. Expenses had been slashed but to no avail, and the company’s debt was mounting. Cockayne proposed a liquidation of the remaining assets and a shutdown of the entire enterprise: “It is resolved to appoint a sale of the island, customs, houses and rights in the Indies.” In previous years most of the valuable assets had already been sold off to sustain the waning business. The great fleets that once graced the Thames, bringing the heady spices, perfumes and textiles of the world to Europe, would cease to sail to those distant shores. Before the business could be wrapped up, though, Oliver Cromwell and his Council of State, startled into action by the imminent demise of one of the nation’s premier business enterprises, drew up a new charter for the company, which passed on October 19.

  But the company would not be the same organization.

  Although its monopoly would again be enforced and the company would again be exempt from the law forbidding the export from England of silver, the prime currency of the Eastern trade, its financial structure was to be more like that of the voc: while it would be a joint stock enterprise, its capital would become permanent rather than temporary. Previously the company had been more like a shell organization that tried to coordinate a series of independent ventures, rather than a company as we know it today, with an overarching direction or strategy. Each expedition had been financed independently and had profited or lost independently. The bookkeeping was complicated, raising new capital for each ship that sailed was tedious, and competition among the company’s own ships prevented the formation of a unified strategy against the voc. If a profitable toehold was to be established for the Eastern trade, a structure similar to that of the Dutch company was needed, including the ability to use all available capital to pursue common goals, such as strong fortifications, co-operation between ships, the construction of joint factories and effective defence forces. To succeed, the new English East India Company would need both an organized strategy for logistics, support and defence and the money to finance it. The new corporate structure promised to solve these issues, and within months London investors had come up with over 750,000 pounds in new capital. For the first time in decades, the company’s future looked bright.