The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice

by Michael Krondl

  The Dutch had a knack for getting people to cooperate; it was a system that would be familiar to any mafioso working the garbage-collection business in Lower Manhattan. Ships bristling with guns anchored a stone’s throw from the headmen’s villages (or royal palaces) and offered “protection” in exchange for the right to buy up all the local spice crop at prices set by the Company. A typical example was the agreement signed by several Banda orang kaya (local headmen) invited on board the armed merchant ship Gelderland on May 23, 1602. No doubt the chiefs were given a selective tour of the ship and taken down the narrow staircase onto the gun deck for a thorough examination of some two dozen polished cast-iron cannon aimed at their fragile homes. They may even have been treated to a demonstration of their lethal effect. Surely they grasped this better than the sheet of parchment scrawled with legal jargon that the pink-faced interlopers thrust at them. They certainly couldn’t have understood the terms of the Dutch-language contract, which specified that, in exchange for protection against the Portuguese and English, the Bandanese granted the Dutch an irrevocable monopoly on nutmeg. Under the circumstances, few of the headmen refused. But it’s hardly remarkable that the islanders also tried to evade the contracts. After all, had the locals taken the agreement too much to heart, they would have starved. By this era, the nutmeg islands were totally dependent on imported food, yet the Hollanders had no interest in transporting bulky and perishable commodities such as sago and rice. Instead, they brought Indian calico, which they insisted the islanders exchange at fixed prices. Of course, as far as the legal counsel of the VOC was concerned, these agreements were all aboveboard and perfectly lawful—if the natives had nothing to eat, that was their own affair—so when the locals did not live up to the letter of the documents, the Dutch felt completely justified sending in their enforcers.

  This worked smoothly in Southeast Asia, where the Estado da Índia was thin on the ground. There, the Dutch were easily able to fend off a Portuguese invasion of Banda in 1600, and a year later, the company’s ships sank a Portuguese fleet in a full-scale naval battle in the Bay of Bantam, which assured access to Javanese pepper. In 1605, the VOC nabbed the Portuguese fort of Amboina, strategically sited between the clove islands and the nutmeg archipelago. India was another matter. The original plan had been to evict the Portuguese from the entire subcontinent, but the decrepit empire had more kick in it than the Dutch had counted on. After several unsuccessful attacks on Golden Goa, the VOC satisfied itself with a temporary treaty of alliance with the rulers of Calicut, who were still fuming about Vasco da Gama and his lot.

  Back in Amsterdam, news of the VOC’s successes and failures sent the Company’s share prices on a roller-coaster ride. The rapid ascent of the initial stock offering turned into a free fall when news trickled back that the clove island of Tidore had been recaptured by the Spanish and that the Moluccas might be a lost cause. The situation in Holland was actually made worse by the fact that arriving VOC ships continued to unload bales of pepper on every wharf. Not only the Netherlands but all of Europe was awash with Dutch, Portuguese, and now even English pepper. (The English East India Company was chartered in 1600.) In Amsterdam alone, according to Buzanval (the French ambassador as well as a VOC shareholder), warehouses were packed to the roofs with pepper worth more than a million guilders that went begging for customers. In a short time, shares that once seemed like they would zoom into the stratosphere were being dumped at 60 percent of their face value. In the Oost-Indisch Huis boardroom, it was plain to see that the Company could not depend on pepper alone to keep its shareholders happy. The Heren XVII decided to rework their business plan, to focus their attention on the islands ruled by the sultans of Ternate.

  After my long, civilized lunch with the genteel Frank Lavooij, I could only wonder how much the world of business has changed. Just how many of today’s mouse-wielding financiers would have the stomach or the audacity for what VOC employees were expected to carry out? When I hear Lavooij discuss his company’s well-regarded policies, according to which he encourages farmers to produce organically and builds processing plants in third-world countries (all because it is more profitable, he readily admits), I think back to the well-regarded practices of 1600, pondering what decisions Lavooij might be making were he sitting in the chamber with the Seventeen. When you look into the eyes of the many portraits of the East India Company’s functionaries, it’s hard to conceive of them condoning slave trading and genocide in the name of their shareholders.

  Well, that’s not quite right: there’s one face that is all too telling.

  THE COMPANY MAN

  Of all the original towns that made up the “chambers” of the United Company, none is as delightful as Hoorn. Unlike Amsterdam, this small city has never had its second life, so nobody found it necessary to tear down street after street of pert seventeenth-century town houses to put up something more up-to-date after the town’s harbor silted up in the eighteenth century.

  It was an unusually sunny afternoon when I left Amsterdam’s Centraal Station for the forty-minute trip to Hoorn so that I could look into the eyes of the town’s most notorious son. The pale winter sun turned the polders a particularly luminous green; wooly clumps of sheep plodded contentedly between the sky blue canals. As I left Hoorn’s railway station behind, it became immediately evident how important the East India Company used to be here. You see it in the VOC insignia that peek out from under eaves, in the impressive old Company warehouses that tower five stories above the town’s principal canal, in a street named Peper Straat, but perhaps most poignantly in the faces of former company officials who peer from the walls of the local history museum.

  The quirky Westfries Museum presides over Roode Steen, a postcard-perfect rhomboid of a medieval square a few steps from the old harbor. The museum is fronted by a stepped façade plastered with a busy display of insignia, giving it all the appearance of an overwrought sports trophy—in an endearing, Renaissance sort of way. Inside, it is all crooked passageways and leaning stairs filled with dusty portraits of plump and jolly militiamen (the town had to pass an ordinance to limit the duration of parties thrown by these seventeenth-century weekend warriors to no more than three days, a museum guide tells me) and cluttered with souvenirs from Holland’s glory years.

  Up the creaky stairs, pride of place is given to a high, timbered room devoted to the East India Company. Here, the musty stench of ancient stuff is made even thicker by the slightly sickly smell of cloves mingling with nutmeg and mace. The curators had the clever idea of installing rough burlap sacks of sweet spices to remind you of what put their city on the map. It’s a clever conceit, especially when you read that each sack would have been worth the price of a house in seventeenth-century Hoorn—a rather nice house at that. The hall’s walls are lined with group portraits of men who look as if they didn’t party much with the militiamen downstairs. These are the businessmen who ran the East India Company. Up on the left is the fleshy figure of the VOC officer Cornelis de Groot, his image the cliché of the capitalist fat cat with his pencil-thin mustache, double chins, and bland smile. Nearby stands the Hoorn chamber director and sometime mayor, Francois Van Brederhoff, looking as if he were late for a meeting. Others lounge and lean, surveying the room. There’s one person in the room who doesn’t seem as if he much liked having his portrait painted. But that would have been typical of the man whom many consider the greatest villain (and some, a towering hero) of the Dutch spice trade.

  Jan Pieterszoon Coen sat for his portrait after he became the Company’s chief operating officer in the Far East. His crew-cut, chiseled, leathery head pokes out of a fashionably frilly collar like an ill-tempered tortoise dressed for the prom. He looks across the room at a group portrait of luxuriantly bewigged and chubby-cheeked VOC functionaries arranged around a long table draped with a splendid carmine Turkish rug. It may be irritation at the painter’s slowness that shows in Coen’s hard eyes, but I can’t help but imagine scorn when I follow his gaze.

/>   Jan Pieterszoon Coen sat for at least two portraits. This one belongs to the Rijksmuseum.

  What did these young and comfortable upstarts know of Coen’s distant world filled with armed, recalcitrant natives unwilling to submit to his business plan? To these well-fed gentlemen, the festering jungles and pirate-filled bays were no more than marks and scratches on globes and maps. What did it matter to them how Coen dealt with the assets and liabilities in the Far East as long as the investors were happy? Did they not, after all, have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders? Jan Coen has been systematically vilified by modern Dutch historians, but as far as he was concerned, he was simply carrying out the Company’s policies to their genocidally logical conclusion even as the boardroom barons claimed plausible deniability. As he looks across at these boys of privilege, you can almost hear him say (as he did in letter after irritated letter to headquarters), You may not have liked my methods, but where would you be now without me?

  Coen began his company career after serving a seven-year accounting apprenticeship in Rome, where he had studied the latest in Italian finance. He came home in 1605, just around the time the first spice-loaded VOC ship returned to Hoorn with a cargo worth more than a million guilders (equivalent to something like two hundred million dollars today). That shipment alone gave the shareholders a 75 percent return on their investment! The same year, VOC shares were trading at 200 percent of their face value on the Amsterdam exchange. No wonder all the ports in Holland were feverish with excitement. Though it’s hard to conceive of the Coen of the Westfries portrait being swept up in any sort of frenzy, he clearly saw the opportunities in the spice trade that an overgrown village like Hoorn could never offer. With this in mind, the twenty-year-old managed to get himself a job on the lowest rung of the VOC corporate ladder, as submerchant, at a monthly salary of thirty-five guilders plus room and board. His bosses recognized his talent and quickly promoted him. By the age of thirty-one, he had the top job in the Far East. Leave it to the Dutch to pick an accountant to build their empire.

  A SAILOR’S LIFE

  In Amsterdam, the naval museum has at least as many models of the old ships that traveled the spice route round the Cape of Good Hope as Lisbon’s fine collection of miniature galleons and naus, but at least in one respect, the Amsterdamers can lord it over the Lisboetas: they have a life-size reproduction of an East Indiaman. The ship, appropriately enough named the Amsterdam, lies at anchor by the waterfront, several canals east of the Centraal Station, just about where the seventeenth-century VOC shipyards used to be. Naval historians will scoff that it’s a copy, and of an eighteenth-century ship at that, but that would make it only a little more luxurious than earlier models. This is decidedly no cruise ship. The quarters assigned to merchants like Coen wouldn’t pass muster as a walk-in closet, and the ship’s galley would qualify as such only in a New York studio apartment. The downstairs deck is about half the size of a basketball court, which seems spacious enough until you realize it had to accommodate more than three hundred rowdy and bored sailors.

  The men who boarded ships like the one carrying Jan Coen to the East Indies in 1607 would have been a motley and unruly bunch. But at least they were free men—unlike the slaves and convicts who populated the Carreira da Índia’s later crews. The Dutch seamen were assembled by professional recruiters—known as zielverkopers, or “soul merchants”—who trolled the taverns and back alleys of Holland’s slums. One favorite ploy was to advance wages to the impecunious recruits, who typically drank the money at the nearest bar. Now they were not only broke but in debt. They had no choice but to go east. Some never got out of arrears to the Company and remained free men in name only. Later, when the alehouses proved inadequate, the VOC regularly turned to the governors of orphanages and workhouses to supply additional souls to man the Company’s ships. Like the Portuguese, Dutch sailors died by the hundreds from accidents, violence, and disease, with the result that the soul merchants were never out of work.

  The discipline aboard Dutch ships was perhaps even more brutal than on other European merchant ships of the time. Maybe people were more hardened after the atrocities of the Spanish war, or perhaps commanders were just desperate to keep their brawling, drunken, malnourished, and often sick crew from murdering one another. The official rule books allowed captains to punish any seaman who injured another by pinning him to the mast with a knife through his hand until he tore himself free. Anyone who killed another was to be bound to the dead victim and thrown overboard. You have to wonder, though, just how often a skipper would resort to punishments that would leave him with even fewer sailors to run the ship.

  Yet, in spite of the crowded conditions, the population of a ship like the Amsterdam was far smaller than that of the virtual floating cities that set out from Lisbon. For one thing, the early Dutch vessels carried neither settlers, priests, nor colonial functionaries with their attendant slaves and servants. From the standpoint of quantity, the average sailor was probably better fed than his Portuguese counterpart, at least once the Dutch had figured out what would make it through the equatorial heat. (In the first voyage to the Indies and back, half the crew died.) The officers did have the occasional culinary perk, but they were hardly living it up like the Carreira da Índia’s elite. If the Amsterdam’s kitchen is in any way representative, all the cook had to work with to serve some 333 bodies was a modest grill and a built-in cooking basin just big enough to submerge one big turkey. Any sort of baking was out of the question, so scheepsbeschuit, or hardtack (the tough, crackerlike bread universal to all sailing nations), was the only bread for officers and crew alike after the first few days out. (To make it palatable, it was often soaked with beer and sweetened with treacle.)

  Food preservation methods were just as limited as they had been in Vasco da Gama’s day. Moreover, to the great consternation of the Dutch crew, beer would not last more than a month or two in the tropical heat. The men were stuck with fetid water washed down with a little wine, which held up better. And not even enough water at that. Shipboard diaries report that sailors had to subsist on something like a quart of water a day, a minuscule quantity when you consider the sweaty work, salty food, and sultry climate. In the first few weeks, they occasionally got to taste a little fresh meat to relieve the monotony. Official VOC provisioning lists allow for several live pigs on board as well as several dozen hens to provide fresh eggs for the sick. But the shelf life of the livestock on board wasn’t much better than the beer. Once the fresh meat had been consumed, the crew was stuck with a diet of boiled salted beef, boiled salty bacon, boiled gruel, and boiled peas. The officers did have it a little better, at least in one intriguing respect. Whereas the only seasoning included on an official VOC provisioning list for the sailors was mustard and horseradish, the officers had a substantial allowance of both domestic and Asian spices to season their gruel—something on the order of three ounces a week.*48 This may be the best indication yet of just how much spice middle-class Netherlanders really ate around 1700.

  One source of Dutch protein that was denied to Portuguese seamen on the pepper naus was, of course, cheese. The weekly three-quarters of a pound of cheese each India-bound sailor received may alone explain why the Hollanders were considerably taller than the Portuguese and better fed than their competitors. Still, by the time they rounded the cape, the ships’ supply of fuel—most likely, dried peat or German coal on the outbound voyage—would often have run out, so, unable to cook, the dehydrated sailors were stuck with little more than worm-infested biscuit to gnaw with their Gouda.

  Is it any wonder that the half-starved, alcohol-deprived sailors disembarking at Cochin headed straight for the public houses, where they drank themselves insensate? As the partying ordinances in Hoorn make clear, Calvinist society did not condone indulgent behavior—or at least, not too much of it. Admittedly, even back home, Dutch sailors were notorious for their drinking, fighting, and whoring, but in India, half a world away from nosy neighbors and purse-lip
ped ministers, the seamen could indulge in every vice without a look back. (Though, if the small number of mixed-race offspring produced by the Dutch in the Far East is any indication, their consummate skill with the tankard may have made them less successful in other indulgences—at least, when compared to the Portuguese.) Knowing full well what fueled a Dutch sailor, Linschoten had reassured his readers that a distilled liquor called arrack existed in plenty in the Indies; he particularly recommends the arrack from Malaysia. In India and Indonesia, arrack was made by distilling the fermented nectar of the palmyra palm (though fermented sugarcane and rice were also used), resulting in a relatively neutral-tasting white firewater.*49 A Portuguese visitor to India in 1587 commented that that “araca” is very strong but improves with age, and that raisins were thrown into it to take off its roughness and sweeten it. A commercial version of this same liquor is sold today in little corner shops all over Goa, where it is called feni. Goans usually drink it straight, though, for the tourists, they mix it with lime soda. There is also a homemade version, which regularly kills people.

  The arrack naturally led to every indiscretion you could think of, and not by common sailors alone. At the Dutch “factory” in Jakarta, the senior Company official made no friends by repeatedly sexually harassing the wives of high-ranking Javanese. This was apparently not an isolated incident. An anonymous journal from a few years later reads like a kinky novel. According to our reporter, the entire senior staff of the same fort behaved in a most un-Calvinist way, with the dominie (pastor) jumping right in. It apparently all began with Spanish wine (rather than the local tipple) when four Indonesian/Portuguese mulatas were invited to the officers’ mess to partake of the evening meal. But more was to come: