by Mike Dash
It was not until 1592 that a solution to this enduring problem presented itself in the shape of a young man named Jan Huyghen van Linschoten. Van Linschoten was originally from the herring port of Enkhuizen but had recently returned from a nine-year sojourn in the East, during which he had lived in Goa and spent two years in the Azores. He had learned fluent Portuguese and made the acquaintance not only of many influential men, but also of a number of humble navigators and ordinary sailors. In consequence, Van Linschoten was uniquely well informed not only about Portugal’s possessions in the East, but also about the routes that her ships sailed and the Asian ports where they traded for their spices. This extensive store of knowledge was poured into three books published in Holland in 1595–6. It is no coincidence that the earliest Dutch expedition to the Indies sailed shortly after the first of these volumes was completed.
The rich merchants who had fitted out this fleet called themselves the Compagnie de Verre—the Long-Distance Company. They came from Amsterdam and were led by a rich and influential merchant by the name of Reinier Pauw, who (having made his fortune in Baltic timber) now wished to invest in Indies spice. Between them, Pauw and his merchant friends collected the staggering total of 290,000 guilders with which to fund an Indies fleet. This proved to be enough not only to equip four ships but also to supply them with a huge quantity of silver with which to purchase cargoes.
The expedition, known to the Dutch as the Eerste Schipvaart, or “First Fleet,” was carefully planned over a period of more than three years and had the backing of the state itself. All four ships were heavily outfitted with guns supplied free of charge by a variety of Dutch cities, provided with the latest charts, and their pilots thoroughly schooled in navigation. Most important of all, shortly before they sailed in the spring of 1595, each skipper was given a hastily prepared rutter called the Reysgeschrift. It contained Jan van Linschoten’s full sailing directions for the Indies.
The directors’ only real mistake was to put the wrong men in command of the voyage. Several of the merchants given the responsibility of leading the expedition were temperamentally quite unsuited to the job. One, Gerrit van Beuningen—the upper-merchant of the fleet’s flagship, Amsterdam—spent most of the voyage in chains, accused of the attempted murder of Cornelis de Houtman of the Mauritius. De Houtman in turn, was a hotheaded adventurer who had already served three years in a Portuguese prison for attempting to steal secret charts of eastern waters. Upon the first fleet’s arrival at the Javanese port of Bantam, De Houtman was incensed to find the price of spices higher than he had expected; he responded by opening fire on the town with cannon. At the little fleet’s next port of call, the Javanese boarded the Amsterdam and hacked a dozen members of the crew to death. Further down the coast, De Houtman’s suspicions were aroused by the unprecedented friendliness shown him by the prince of Madura. He opened fire again, slaughtering the members of the welcome party. Finally, the upper-merchant’s attempt to sail on to the clove-producing islands of the Moluccas was thwarted by a near mutiny among the crew. In the circumstances it was no surprise that when the surviving members of the Eerste Schipvaart returned to Amsterdam, after a voyage of more than two years, the value of the pepper in their holds was only just enough to defray the expenses of the expedition.
Reinier Pauw and his colleagues learned the lessons of the First Fleet well. Merging their Long-Distance Company with a rival concern organized by a group of merchants from the Southern Netherlands, they outfitted a second, larger fleet and dispatched it to the Indies in the spring of 1598. Within two years, the eight ships of the Tweede Schipvaart returned with their holds full of spice. Although the costs of this expedition were put at more than half a million guilders, the voyage yielded profits of 100 percent.
The profitability of the rich trades were thus demonstrated in decisive fashion. From now on the Amsterdam syndicate’s biggest problem was deterring competition. Four rival Dutch fleets had set sail for the Indies in the same year as the Tweede Schipvaart, backed by merchants from the Southern Netherlands and Middelburg. In 1599 yet another consortium, the New Brabant Company, outfitted a fleet, and by 1601, no fewer than 14 Dutch fleets had sailed for the Indies and the United Provinces had overtaken Portugal as the leading trading nation in the East. But intense competition between the various Dutch syndicates drove up prices in the Indies—where the cost of spices doubled in the space of half a dozen years—while depressing profits back at home.
This situation could not be allowed to continue, and in 1602 representatives of the rival companies met to discuss the formation of a joint stock corporation that would merge their various interests into one vast company. The attractions of this proposition were obvious. The combined capital of such a company would give it substantial influence in the Indies; furthermore—by establishing control over the importation of spices to the Dutch Republic—the corporation could more or less fix prices as it wanted. The States-General, or parliament, of the United Provinces was in favor of creating a single company and was prepared to grant it a monopoly on all Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. The only real objections came from the merchants of Zeeland, who did not wish to be part of a concern dominated by the interests of Amsterdam.
It took five months of delicate negotiation to resolve the dispute, but—negotiations finally concluded—the various Dutch syndicates merged on 20 March 1602, forming the giant corporation known as the Verenigde Oost-indische Compagnie.*8 The overall management of the VOC was placed in the hands of the 17 directors, the so-called Heren Zeventien, or Gentlemen XVII. This extremely influential group met two or three times each year, for up to one month at a time, and was responsible for the Company’s commercial strategy. The VOC’s six local chambers nevertheless retained considerable independence, each appointing a board of directors to govern its own affairs, building and equipping its own ships, and keeping the majority of its profits for itself.
The capital required to fund the chambers came from the merchants of the six towns themselves. There was little difficulty in attracting men anxious to put money in the rich trades; Amsterdam, which was by far the richest chamber, had more than a thousand individual investors, of whom almost 200 contributed in excess of 5,000 guilders apiece. Reinier Pauw, who had started it all, put up six times that amount, but, even so, the five largest contributions were all made by southern immigrants; the biggest investment was one of 85,000 guilders.
The new company was a success from the start. The first combined fleet sailed in 1602 and made an enormous profit. The VOC also enjoyed impressive success in fighting the Portuguese, who found themselves assailed by the substantial Dutch fleets that were arriving in the East. Even when they were themselves outnumbered, the Hollanders had the better ships and superior morale. By 1605 they had captured Ambon, Tidore, and Ternate—three of the most important Spice Islands, which between them produced almost all the world’s supply of cloves. These victories confirmed the corporation as the most profitable, powerful, and important private business in the United Provinces: “Jan Company,” the people of the Dutch Republic took to calling it, in recognition of its primacy.*9
By 1615, with the continuing success of Jan Company apparently assured, Dutch traders in the East became increasingly confident and aggressive. The English trader Henry Middleton, who ran across the merchants of the VOC in Bantam, penned a vigorous protest at the escalating arrogance of “this frothy nation.” He was not the only one to find the Hollanders’ demeanor hard to stomach.
At home in the Netherlands, the Gentlemen XVII indulged in similar high-handedness. Although their victories had been won with guns supplied by the Dutch government, and though the Company’s monopoly remained in the gift of the States-General, the directors of the VOC did not hesitate to assert their independence when the opportunity arose. “The places and the strongholds captured,” they tartly told the States, “should not be regarded as national conquests but as the property of private merchants, who were entitled to sell thos
e places to whomsoever they wished, even if it was to the King of Spain.”
The leaders of the United Provinces, who depended on Jan Company to prosecute their war with Portugal and Spain in eastern waters, had no choice but to tolerate the Gentlemen’s presumption. The same was not true of the English East India Company, whose fragile grip on the spice trade—painfully built up over several decades—was greatly weakened by Dutch aggression. “These butterboxes,” another English merchant complained in 1618, “are groanne so insolent that yf they be suffered but a whit longer, they will make a claime to the whole Indies, so that no man shall trade but themselves or by their leave.” He was right. Within a year the Dutch had all but cleared their rivals from the Indies; within three they had subdued the Banda Islands and seized the world’s entire supply of nutmeg, the most sought-after spice of all. These actions, more than any others, guaranteed a lucrative future for Jan Company. By the middle of the 1620s, the Indies trade, which had been so fragmented and unprofitable only two decades earlier, had evolved into a well-organized monopoly. The six chambers of the VOC sat at the center of a web of trade yielding unprecedented profits.
All this wealth flowed directly into the coffers of the Company, and out again into the pockets of the company’s principal investors—the great merchants of the Dutch Republic and, in particular, the directors of the six chambers themselves. The profits that were earned, and the dividends that were paid, were simply colossal. Returns of 1,000 percent or more were recorded on certain voyages, and dividends of 10, 20, or, in one case, even 100 percent were paid annually to the shareholders. The fortunes that the merchant princes of Amsterdam and Middelburg accumulated exceeded, in some cases, those of European royalty. The richest man in the Dutch Republic in the 1620s was Jacob Poppen, whose father Jan had been one of the earliest investors in the Indies trade. Jacob’s total worth was put at 500,000 guilders—this at a time when it was possible to house and feed a family in Amsterdam on about 300 guilders a year.
Very little of the money ever found its way into the hands of the merchants and the sailors who actually risked their lives out in the East. Every VOC employee, from the upper-merchants down to the lowliest enlisted men, received only a modest salary and the guarantee of board and lodging for the duration of his employment. This arrangement was actually a good incentive for the poorer men who filled the lowest posts; it was unlikely that they would find much steady work in their hometowns. But it held little attraction for the merchants themselves, whose wages—it was commonly acknowledged—were scarcely large enough to live on, and who could expect no pension if they did survive long enough to retire. Since a good portion of the pay they did earn was retained by the VOC against their eventual return—partly as a precaution against desertion—and since staying too long in the East was tantamount to suicide, most sailed with the intention of making as much money as they could in as short a time as possible.
Among their number was the merchant Francisco Pelsaert, who—like so many of the Company’s most valued men—had been born in Antwerp. Pelsaert was in many ways a typical servant of the VOC, although he came from a Catholic family and, since Jan Company hired only Protestants, had been forced to conceal his origins in order to secure his first appointment. For one thing, he had few family ties to keep him in the Netherlands—his father had died before he was five years old, and though his mother remained alive, she soon remarried and seems to have left the boy to be brought up by his grandfather. For another, though Pelsaert’s relatives were wealthy, he himself had few resources; when his grandfather died, the old gentleman willed his estate to his wife and left nothing of significance to his ward.
Forced to seek a fortune of his own, Pelsaert—by now a man of 20—secured an introduction to the Middelburg chamber of the VOC in the last months of the year 1615. The application was successful. Pelsaert was hired as an assistant—the lowest merchant rank, one that involved mostly humdrum clerical duties—at a salary of 24 guilders a month. Four months later he took ship for the East on board the Wapen van Zeeland.*10
Nothing is known of Pelsaert’s first three years in the Indies, but he must have been reasonably successful. He was promoted to the post of under-merchant around 1620 and dispatched to the Company’s recently established base at Surat, on the northwest coast of India. There he was to help to open trading relations with the Mogul emperors—a dynasty so fabulously rich that their name has passed into the English language as a synonym for power and wealth. Within weeks of his arrival on the subcontinent, Pelsaert was dispatched to the imperial court at Agra to deal in cloths and indigo. His salary was increased to 55 guilders a month and, in 1624, to 80. By then the man from Antwerp had been promoted to the rank of upper-merchant and placed in command of the VOC’s mission to the Mogul court.
This promotion was undoubtedly deserved, for Pelsaert had proved himself to be one of the Company’s more vigorous and efficient servants. His principal achievements while at Agra were to secure control of the indigo trade (the rare blue dye was then an immensely sought-after commodity) and improve profits by switching the main trade in spices to Surat from the Coromandel Coast. But he also pressed the Gentlemen XVII to see India’s rich potential as a trading base. The English East India Company was then still poorly placed on the subcontinent; had Pelsaert’s recommendations been taken more seriously at home, the Dutch might have done more to challenge the steady rise of British influence in India.
Pelsaert’s successes in the East, which soon attracted the favorable attention of the Gentlemen XVII, can be attributed to several factors. To begin with he was adept at languages, learning fluent Hindustani and picking up a working knowledge of Persian. He understood instinctively the need to impress his hosts by living ostentatiously and was careful to arrange for a constant stream of gifts—or bribes—to present to Indian officials. He also enjoyed the patronage and friendship of the principal Dutch merchant at Surat, the renowned Pieter van den Broecke, who like Pelsaert came originally from Antwerp.
In other respects, however, Pelsaert was far from typical of the VOC community in India. At a time when most Dutch merchants lived lives as far removed as possible from those of the native peoples of the East, he displayed a fascination for the everyday activities of ordinary Indians, whose harsh lives he described in unprecedented detail in reports sent to the Netherlands. The close relations he established with the Indian community also extended to a series of scandalous affairs with local women, which Pelsaert carried on with such reckless disregard that he eventually put at risk not only the future of his mission but even his own life.
Pelsaert’s uncontrollable attraction to women was to be a feature of his entire career, but it was most evident during these early years in India. He was not alone in consorting freely with the women of the East; few European females went out to the Indies, most of those who did so died, and it was in any case generally believed that only the children of Eurasian couples stood any chance of survival in such unhealthy climates. But the majority of Dutchmen contented themselves with taking mistresses from among the servant classes, and abandoning them and their offspring when the time came to go home to the Netherlands. Pelsaert enjoyed dallying with slave girls as much as did his colleagues, but he was prepared to go much further than more prudent merchants believed wise. In the early 1620s, for example, he embarked on a dangerous affair with the wife of one of the most powerful nobles at the Mogul court in Agra, a relationship that developed so promisingly that he soon invited the married woman to his home. There the lady chanced upon a bottle of oil of cloves, a powerful stimulant normally served in tiny doses to dangerously ill men. Mistaking it for Spanish wine, she gulped down a substantial measure and promptly dropped dead at Pelsaert’s feet. To escape retribution, the shocked merchant was forced to have the body buried secretly in the grounds of the Dutch settlement. He escaped detection, but though the Mogul potentate never did discover exactly what had happened to his wife, the scandal had at least one long-term repercussion
for the VOC: for many years a local broker named Medari, who had somehow found out what had happened, used the knowledge to blackmail Jan Company into retaining his otherwise dispensable services.
Most of Pelsaert’s fellow merchants disapproved of such sexual incontinence, but even they would have found his other great love—money—entirely comprehensible. Nor would they have been particularly shocked by the methods he employed to get it. Like most of his contemporaries, Francisco Pelsaert wished to taste the riches of the rich trades, and he had no intention of watching the Gentlemen XVII grow fat while he himself eked out a meager salary.
The simplest way for Dutch merchants to make a fortune in the Indies was to deal in spices under the table, but this was not permitted. The VOC did allow its men to purchase minute quantities of cloves or pepper, but—jealous of its monopoly—the Company forbade more widespread private trade and rarely rewarded its employees’ initiative. Even a man with 20 years’ service, who did his best to serve the Company and brought home cargoes worth tens of thousands of guilders, could not expect a bonus as of right. The consequences were predictable. Underpaid and exposed to considerable temptation, the merchants of the VOC were thoroughly corrupt.
