Nathaniel's nutmeg

by Giles Milton

  As they spent their last minutes in the hall the Japanese prisoners were ushered in and lined up against the opposite wall. This spectacle angered both parties for each believed the other group to be the cause of their present plight. ' "Oh you Englishmen," said one of the Japanese in a voice of despair, "where did wee ever in our lives eat with you, talk with you, or (to our remembrance) see you?" The Englishmen replied: "Why then have you accused us?" ' It was only at this point that all realised the scale of the Dutch deception and 'the poore men, perceiving they were made believe each had accused others before they had so done, indeed, showed them their tortured bodies and said, "If a stone were thus burnt, would it not change his nature? How much more we that are flesh and blood?" '

  The men then embraced each other before being ushered into a courtyard where their sentence was read out by an official standing in a gallery. Here they were reunited with Towerson whose wounds and sores had become so festered that he could scarcely walk. Then, accompanied by five companies of soldiers, they were led in procession to their place of execution, a long and melancholy cortege that wound through crowds of cheering onlookers before arriving at the execution ground.

  As they stood facing their executioner Samuel Coulson drew from his pocket a short prayer which ended in a defiant declaration of his innocence. This being done, he threw the paper into the wind and watched as it fluttered high into the air before being caught by a soldier and taken straight to the governor.

  One by one the men stepped forward to the block. Before the executioner proceeded with his bloody work, each man affirmed in a clear voice that he was innocent of all the crimes of which he was accused. 'And so, one by one, with great cheerfulness, they suffered the fatal stroke.'

  Only Towerson was singled out for special treatment. As the leader of the little English contingent he was accorded the special honour of having a small piece of black velvet tied to the block prior to his being beheaded. In a bill of charges later received by the English East India Company, the cost of this cloth was added to the list on the grounds that it was so bloodstained as to be unusable.

  If van Speult had any qualms about his rough justice, he was about to receive an admonishment from on high. 'At the instant of the execution there arose a great darknesse with a sudden and violent gust of winde and tempest; whereby two of the Dutch shippes riding in the harbour were driven from their anchors.' Worse was to come; within two weeks of the execution 'there happened a great sickness on the island such as was there never seen or heard of, so that the people cried out that it was a plague upon them for the innocent blood of the English.' When the sickness finally subsided, more than a quarter of the island's population had lost their lives. The surviving Englishmen took comfort in these events, remembering Emanuel Thomson's dying words that 'he did not doubt but God would show some sign of their innocencie.'

  The small English community in Batavia knew nothing of these events until they met with two pallid Englishmen disembarking from a vessel in the harbour. When asked to explain their miserable state these men poured out the story of the Amboyna massacre. The English were shocked by what they heard and sent an immediate protest to the new Dutch Governor-General, Pieter de Carpentier, remonstrat­ing against van Speult's 'presumptuous proceedings' in 'imprisoning, torturing and bloodily executing his majesty's subjects' and 'confiscating their goods in direct violation of the Treaty, whereby the King was disgraced and dishonoured and the English nation scandalized'.

  Carpentier treated the protests with cool detachment, but the letters he sent back to Holland reveal that he realised the matter was of the utmost gravity. Although believing that Towerson and his fellow men had indeed been engaged in conspiracy, he condemned in the strongest words the methods used by the fiscal. 'He called himself a lawyer and had been taken into the Company's service as such,' he wrote, but he 'should have shown better judgement in the affair'. He continued: 'We think the rigour of justice should have been mitigated somewhat with Dutch clemency (with consideration to a nation who is our neighbour), especially if such could be done without prejudice to the state and the dignity of justice, as we think could have been done here.'

  When news of the massacre reached London there was uproar. King James at first refused to believe it, claiming it was too foul. But when he heard the story from the mouths of the survivors he was deeply shocked and although not accustomed to show emotion was said to have shed tears over the fate of Towerson and his companions. The Lords of the Privy Council also wept when they were told of the tortures, while the merchants of the East India Company were stunned to silence. Stranger was the reaction of the English public who indulged in what was little short of a national outpouring of grief. Up and down the country pamphlets and broadsheets were published with graphic details of the tortures and in towns and villages men eagerly discussed the gruesome business. A mob gathered around the Dutch Chapel in Lothbury and jeered at the congregation as they entered the church. 'Hypocrites, murderers,' they shouted, 'Amboyna will cost you paradise.' More than fifty years later the poet John Dryden used the massacre to whip up anti-Dutch feeling, publishing his tragedy Amboyna, or The Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants.

  All through the winter indignation grew, and the directors of the East India Company did not fight shy of stoking the public outrage. They commissioned artist Richard Greenbury to produce a huge oil painting depicting the agonies of Towerson and companions, with van Speult and the fiscal gloating over their bloody victory. Greenbury apparently excelled himself, painting a gruesome picture in which he 'lively, largely and artificially' depicted the tortures. The work was to be exhibited in the Company headquarters 'as a perpetual memorial of Dutch cruelty and treachery' and the public were invited to come to view it. So effective was the painting in inciting hatred against the Dutch that the directors were ordered by the government not to display it until after the Shrove Tuesday holiday for fear of a general uprising against the large population of Hollanders living in London.

  Greenbury himself was delighted with the reaction and demanded £100 from the directors. In this he was to be disappointed for they told him that 'one proffered to cut it out in brass for £30, which was a great deal more labour and workmanship than to draw it on cloth.' In the end Greenbury settled for £40.

  With anti-Dutch protests growing in London there was a feeling that something had to be done. 'For my part,' wrote one notable to Sir Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador at The Hague,'if there were no wiser than I, we should stay or arrest the first Indian ship that comes in our way and hang up upon Dover cliffs as many as we should find faulty or actors in this business and then dispute the matter afterwards: for there is no other course to be had with such manner of men, as neither regard law nor justice, nor any other respect or equity or humanity, but only make gain their God.'

  The States General were extremely concerned at the aftermath of the Amboyna Massacre and unsatisfied with an official report compiled by the directors of the Dutch East India Company. Far from denying that van Speult used torture it actually justified his methods, arguing that 'the torture of the water is much more civill and less dangerous than other tortures for the paine of water doth but cause and produce an oppression and anxiety of breath and respiration.' The report was riddled with inconsistencies and offered no real evidence against the English. After deliberating over its contents the States General recalled van Speult to Holland to answer for his brutality, but he died before he reached Amsterdam. Others made it back to Holland but the special court that convened to investigate their conduct deliberated for months before declaring it could find no reason to punish them for something they did in the belief that they were acting in the best interests of their country.

  The directors of the English East India Company protested, informing the King that they would be forced to abandon trade with the Spice Islands unless 'the Dutch make real restitution for damages, execute justice upon those who had in so great fury and tyranny tortured and sl
ain the English, and give security for the future'. The King acted upon their advice, appointing a committee comprising the country's most distinguished servants to examine all the evidence that had arrived in England. This committee concluded that the massacre had less to do with any conspiracy than with a Dutch plan to permanently evict the English from the Spice Islands. They recommended to the Lord High Admiral that a fleet should be sent to patrol the entrance to the English Channel, lay hold of any outward or homebound Dutch East India ships and keep them in England until suitable compensation was forthcoming. What form that compensation should take was never in doubt. There was only one possible way for the Dutch to atone for the Amboyna Massacre, and that was to hand back the tiny island of Run.

  chapter twelve

  Striking a Deal

  Some fifteen years after the Massacre of Amboyna, a renegade Dutchman arrived in London bearing some disquieting news. He informed the directors of the East India Company that he had recently visited Run and was surprised to discover that every nutmeg tree on the island had been chopped down. Where once there had been a verdant forest covering Run's mountainous backbone, there was now nothing but exposed soil.

  The news was yet another blow to England's in­creasingly forlorn hopes of recovering a foothold in the region. It required only a cursory glance at an atlas for London's merchants to see the tragic story writ large. The Banda Islands were now totally under Dutch control: studded with castles and defended by permanent garrisons, they were probably lost forever. Amboyna, too, was indisputably in Dutch hands. They had chosen it as their regional centre of operations and its jagged coastline was protected by a string of imposing forts. It was much the same story in the northerly islands of Ternate and Tidore which had slowly but surely fallen under the Dutch sphere of influence.

  To the dwindling band of Englishmen who lingered in Coen's new capital, Batavia, there were more tangible

  reasons for pessimism. Every month saw the arrival of more factors from abandoned outposts; haggard, destitute men who had struggled to keep trading until insolvency or the machinations of the Dutch forced them to flee. Even such far-flung settlements as Siam, Patani on the Malay Peninsula, and Firando in Japan — of which there had been such high hopes — had come to nothing. One by one their traders had been forced to abandon them, leaving decaying warehouses and tarnished reputations. The only places that managed to continue a trade of sorts were those scattered along the coastline of India, but even these would soon be brought to their knees by a devastating and wholly unexpected famine.

  The horrific news of events in Amboyna sent a wave of panic through the small English community still living in Batavia. Despised by both the Dutch and the natives, they lived in the town on sufferance of Pieter de Carpentier, the new governor-general, who showed little concern or interest in their welfare. He dismissed their protestations about the massacre at Amboyna, unsettling the English who felt themselves to be in the most vulnerable of positions, surrounded by enemies and with no obvious means of escape. If Carpentier chose to emulate the butchers of Amboyna, they would be unable to resist.

  A meeting of the factors ended in decision: scouts were to put to sea at once in order to search for a suitable island upon which the English could build a new headquarters, and the Company's president was to write to London to beg the directors to 'liberate us from the intolerable yoke of the Dutch nation'. Although his letter evoked no response, the scouts soon returned with good news. After sailing around the southern coastline of Sumatra they chanced upon the low-lying island of Lagundi which, they confidently declared, was perfectly suited to their needs.

  Why they alighted on this blighted spot remains unclear for it had an extremely unhealthy climate and no source of fresh water. But in October 1624, the remaining Englishmen in Batavia heaved a heavy sigh of relief and fled 'this perfidious people', sailing directly to Lagundi. The flag was raised, the supplies landed, and Lagundi was renamed Prince Charles Island.

  Hardly had they made the island their home than their luck once again deserted them. Many of the men succumbed to tropical fevers and dysentery and the wretched remnants spent as much time digging graves as they did on constructing their warehouse. After only a few months a meeting was convened and the survivors elected to return to Batavia, a decision that was fraught with difficulty. Too few to man a ship, the men were forced to beg a Dutch captain to carry them back to the port. They were welcomed with rude cheers and 'a merciless whipping in the public market place'.

  The news from London during this troubled period gave few grounds for optimism. Although King James was determined to have his revenge for the heinous crimes perpetrated at Amboyna, more than three years were to pass before a fleet of India-bound Dutch vessels was seized in the English Channel and towed into Portsmouth. By then, King James was dead and it was left to his successor, King Charles I, to pursue the claim for reparations. The directors at last saw a real chance of obtaining redress, but no sooner had they compiled a report of their grievances than they learned that the King had inexplicably released the vessels. He justified his extraordinary behaviour by explaining that the Dutch had promised to send a negotiating team to England, but few believed such an explanation and rumours of backhanders to the King only fuelled the belief that a secret deal had been struck. One report claimed the King had been handed £30,000 by the Dutch captain; another said he had been given three tons of gold. The Dutch themselves stoked the fire by bragging they had bought the King's jewels back from his pawnbroker.

  The Company was about to enter its darkest hour. The number of ships sailing to the East dropped by almost two thirds and, with trade at a virtual standstill, its stock slumped by more than 20 per cent. In the good years subscribers had freely stumped up more than £200,000 per annum; now the Company beadle was lucky to collect a quarter of that figure. More worrying was the news that the debts were spiralling out of control: when the auditors checked their accounts in the spring of 1629 they were horrified to learn that they were more than £300,000 in the red.

  A series of meetings was called to discuss the parlous state of the Company's finances and it was reluctantly decided that the overheads and expenses should be slashed. The eighteen London employees were the first to feel the squeeze. A list was prepared of their salaries and expenses, together with suggestions of how money could be saved. A few were to be fired, ineffectual workers were to have their pay docked, and others would be retained on much- reduced salaries. First on the list was Mr Tyne, the book­keeper, whose salary was cut from £100 to his 'former proportion' of £80. The apologetic directors explained that with so few ships returning from the Indies he no longer had much book-keeping to do. Mr Handson, the auditor, was the next victim but when he learned that the axe was about to fall he chose to depart with honour, graciously standing down from his position and thereby saving the Company £100 a year. Mr Ducy, a timber measurer, was no less fortunate: his annual ^50 salary was cancelled and he was, in future, to be paid by the day. Others found they were surplus to requirements: Richard Mountney was informed that his salary had been 'recalled' as his services were no longer required.

  Such petty measures were cosmetic and useless in halting the Company's decline. Further cuts in salaries were followed by the abandonment of shipbuilding activities and, in 1643, the forced sale of the Deptford shipyard. 'We could wish,' wrote the directors to their long-suffering factors, 'that we could vindicate the reputation of our nation in these partes [the East], and do ourselves right ... [but] of all these wee must brave the burden and with patience sitt still, until wee may find these frowning times more auspicious to us and our affayres.'

  Throughout these 'frowning times' the directors clung to the hope that Run would one day be restored. In both 1632 and 1633 they sent letters to their Bantam merchants ordering them to reoccupy the island and, in the following year, they actually despatched a vessel to the Banda Islands but the untimely arrival of the monsoon forced it to return to Bantam. In 1636 a spi
rited English merchant sailed single-handedly to Neira to demand the return of Run. He was welcomed by the gleeful Dutch commander who told him that if he rowed across to survey the island he would be a little less hasty in demanding its return. The Dutch, increasingly concerned by the continued English interest in the island, had taken 'all courses to make the iland little or nothing worth'. One onlooker watched with astonishment the Hollanders 'demolish and deface the buildings [and] transplant the nutmeg trees, plucking them up by the roots and carrying them into their owne ilands of Neira and of Poloway [Ai] ... and at last finde a meanes to dispeople the iland and to leave it so as the English might make no use of it'.

  The Dutchman who brought this news to England had been dismissed from the Dutch Company and was determined to have his revenge. He offered to pursue the King's claim for damages in return for a small fee and, to this end, was despatched to Holland to work in tandem with England's ambassador. The men were armed with reams of evidence about Dutch brutality, including a lengthy report investigating 'the barbarous behaviour of the Governor of Banda in burning and torturing the inhabitants, robbing them of gold, silver, jewels, and goods and destroying the nutmeg trees and other spices'. They also had documents listing the 150 Englishmen who had been murdered over the past two decades and a further list of 800 who had been sold into slavery.