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

by Michael Krondl

  After the sub-merchants and assistants had left, Raey, the Captain, Dominie Hermans, the Lieutenant, and the Cornet [another officer] remained with the women. They were gay and happy and drank Spanish wine and dallied with those women, singing: Tabe, tabe, Signora moeda—bawa bantal tikar—betta mau rassa! [Greetings, young signora—do bring your sleeping mat and pillow!] What the Dominie had preached during the day was already forgotten; all were too busy with those luscious women…The pleasures lasted until one or two in the morning when everyone went to his bunk and three women slept upstairs…The Cornet took [one of the women] home and had his fun with her in her house.

  No wonder Coen would later harangue the Heren XVII to send a number of “solid Protestant clergymen, not such stupid, uncouth idiots as you have sent heretofore.” All the same, this rowdy, unruly atmosphere dominated the Dutch trading posts throughout most of the early years of the VOC. “It is human beings Your Honors have here, not angels!” Coen repeatedly pointed out to his superiors.

  As Coen ascended the Company’s ranks, this sober Calvinist found all the undisciplined behavior not merely distasteful but a drag on the bottom line. He wanted God-fearing families to come establish some sort of core of decency. “Even if they come naked as a jaybird we can still use them,” he wrote to Amsterdam. He was particularly in favor of sending young women to the Indies, which would have the twofold advantage of emptying the orphanages back home and providing wives to Dutchmen overseas. How morally uplifting these “company maidens” would prove to be is highly debatable, but they were to be a feature of the East India trade for centuries. Unlike the Portuguese, the Dutch never made much of an effort to convert anyone to Christianity. As a result, marriages between Dutchmen and locals were rare. In another letter, Coen harps on the fact that the local Muslims will not allow their women to marry Christians, and what’s more, they “kill their children or abort them so that the mother won’t bear heathens.”

  “A THOROUGH GRASP OF COMMERCE”

  “This Coen is a person with a thorough grasp of commerce as well as statecraft,” wrote the outgoing governor of the Dutch East Indies in 1613 about the newly appointed president and “bookkeeper-general” of the Company’s Indonesian offices. “He is honest, well-balanced, and does not waste any time. I am certain that there has never been anyone here, nor will there be, who surpasses him in efficiency, as Your Lordships will be able to judge from his letters.”

  We can learn a great deal about Hoorn’s best-known son from his profuse letters. (He issued so many reams of correspondence that the ships returning to Holland around the first of every year became known as “book ships.”) Impatience and conceitedness are the leitmotif of his correspondence. “I am almost weary, my voice weakens and the pen falters, to have to repeat that while in some cases you show great courage, there is always something in which you fall short.” Then again and again: “I swear to you by the Almighty that the General Company has no greater enemies than the ignorance and shortsightedness, pardon my words, which seems to prevail among Your Lordships and outvotes the intelligent.”

  While he may have been impertinent, Coen delivered, and the directors were quick to promote him up the company ranks. Between 1607 and 1613, he went from humble clerk to chief merchant in charge of two ships to bookkeeper-general (essentially, the chief financial officer). When he got this last promotion, his assignment was to compile a comprehensive financial report of all the activities of the VOC from Cochin to Nagasaki, a job that he fulfilled with such alacrity that headquarters immediately promoted him to the number two position in the field, director-general. Though he did not get the top post of governor-general for another five years, this effectively put the twenty-seven-year-old Coen in charge of the East India Company’s operations across Asia. All he lacked was the title and the salary—points on which he harped with great regularity in his missives back to Hoogstraat.

  As far as Coen was concerned, the company’s efficiency was not impeded merely by the degeneracy of its workforce and the doltishness of the leadership in Amsterdam but by the uncooperative producers of the very spices that were the whole point of the enterprise. In all probability, Coen had personally witnessed just how disobliging the natives could be. It is almost certain that he was part of a 1609 fleet under Admiral Verhoef sent to build a fort on the Bandanese island of Neira to make sure the natives understood just how seriously the Dutch took their contracts. Needless to say, the Bandanese had not been consulted about the building project and showed their displeasure by massacring the admiral and some thirty members of his staff. The last time Coen saw his commander’s head, it was likely skewered on the end of a Bandanese battle lance. Of course, the Dutch took their revenge, and the fort was built after all. Subsequently, at least some of the local chieftains, the orang kaya, agreed (once again) to Dutch demands for a mace and nutmeg monopoly throughout the archipelago. The island of Neira itself was seized outright in the name of the Company and the States General “to be kept by us forever,” making it the Netherlands’ first official East Indian colony. It seems that Coen learned two things from this encounter: that you could not trust the “perfidious Moors,” as he tended to call the natives, and that a little bloodletting yielded results. At the time, he was in no position to do anything about it, but years later as governor-general, he took these lessons to their chillingly logical conclusion.

  He got the top job in 1618. Now he had the authority to carry out the Company’s mission as only he saw fit. His first move was to transfer his base of operations from Bantam, where the ruling sultan wouldn’t play by Dutch rules, to Jakarta. When the locals there objected, he had their town burned to the ground. On the ashes of Jakarta’s mosque and marketplace, Coen built a brand-new city named Batavia. (Coen originally wanted to call it Nieuw Hoorn after his hometown, but headquarters wouldn’t go for it.) The inspiration for Batavia was supposedly the Estado da Índia’s capital at Goa, though the VOC base could hardly compare to the gilded “Rome of the East.” The company town looked like it had sprouted from some polder in Holland. Narrow houses topped with stepped gables sat at the edge of straight canals while windmills towered above the city walls. The locals called this tropical Hoorn “Kota Djankong,” the city of Jan Coen; people in Amsterdam and The Hague referred to it as an “honorable prison.” It must have been a pretty lively prison, though, the streets a menagerie of local Javanese and VOC employees, overseas Chinese settlers and Indian merchants, voluntary migrants from Europe and slaves forcibly transported from Madagascar—all drawn here by the smell of money emitted by ships loaded with sweet spice.

  Once the obstinate Javanese had been put in their place, the governor-general turned to the Moluccas. As years had stretched to decades and the stubborn Lusitanians refused to make themselves scarce, the directors of the Dutch East India Company had regretfully come to the conclusion that a pepper monopoly wasn’t in the cards. But the case of nutmeg and cloves was a different matter. Now the trouble was the English, who had begun to butt into the spice trade, even setting up a trading post in the Bandas. Needless to say, Coen was not going to let those sorts of details get in his way. In spite of specific instructions not to use force, the impatient governor-general sent in his troops. They not only sent the English packing but in the process massacred or expelled the entire population of the Bandanese island of Ai. A happy consequence of this (for the VOC, at least) was that the Dutch could now impose a new, 20 percent lower price for nutmeg on the producers. But that was a mere Band-Aid applied to a festering sore, as far as the governor-general was concerned.

  It would appear that Coen had the glimmerings of a final solution to the supply problem at least as early as 1618. In a letter of that year, he notes that Laurens Reael, the company’s rep in Banda, had suggested that the VOC pay a higher rate for nutmeg so that the locals would not be tempted to sell it to others. “But I say NO!” thundered the governor-general. “Do not give in or the whole business will go to the devil. It were better that all
the Bandanese leave their islands; then we could plant Dutch colonies there.” Not everyone was quite as single-mindedly devoted to the Company’s bottom line as Jan Coen. The same Reael who recommended paying more for nutmeg had the temerity to suggest that strict enforcement of the monopoly would result in the wholesale destitution of the natives. “We are so much concerned with profits,” he wrote, “that we do not allow anyone else to make a penny.” In a similar vein, a Dutch admiral on the scene complained that by eliminating local traders, the Company had driven the Moluccans to the brink of starvation. “It can be done, but with what right?” was his comment. Others spoke up for a more equitable solution in the East Indies. But how could the bean counters on Hoogstraat object to Coen’s tactics when they were so effective in shoring up the VOC’s share prices?

  Coen waited until 1621 to strike. His flotilla dropped anchor in the crystalline waters off Lonthor (Banda Besar), the largest island in the archipelago, in early March. On board were close to two thousand men, including slaves and some one hundred Japanese mercenaries. As the dawn of March 21 dabbed the crowns of the nutmeg trees pink, Coen’s troops tumbled onto the coral beaches and clambered up the island’s dark volcanic cliffs. The sweating, armored soldiers marched through the scented forest of the interior and up narrow footpaths into the sticky jungle as the inhabitants scattered to escape the invaders. Where the Company’s steel and bullets failed, Dutch silver managed to do the trick. In one case, a bribed Bandanese defector guided the attackers to a strategic victory for the handsome sum of 250 reals.*50 Other, less amenable natives plunged from cliffs into the roiling breakers rather than surrender. By the end of the day, as the red-dyed sun dipped behind the smoldering peak of the Gugung Api volcano, Jan Coen could tick off item number one on his strategic plan: the island was effectively his.

  Item number two fell in his lap quickly enough when a delegation of orang kaya arrived on Coen’s ship to sue for peace. The governor-general demanded that the natives level all their fortifications, give up their weapons, hand over their sons as hostages, and, from now on, pay a tribute of 10 percent of the nutmeg harvest. The rest had to be sold exclusively to the VOC at prices fixed by the Company. Hardly in a position to argue, the chiefs submitted—though, not surprisingly, there was little good faith on either side of the bargain. By his own admission, Coen neither expected nor wanted the Bandanese to honor the commitments; he was merely waiting for an excuse to finish what he had started.

  By now, the Bandanese had fled to the hills, leaving mounds of fleshy nutmegs to rot as they fell to the ground. After failing to entice the inhabitants out of the hills, Coen could now justify his endgame. He sent soldiers to torch what remained of the abandoned villages and to hunt down the inhabitants on every one of the Banda Islands. Anyone who could be captured was herded onto troop transports and shipped off to Batavia, where they were sold as slaves—the ones that made it, that is. In at least one consignment of 287 men, 356 women, and 240 children, 176 died on the way. Others, trapped in hilltop crevices with no access to food, died by the thousands—of exposure, starvation, and disease. Then, finally, just to make sure that no one could come back to interfere with his agenda, Coen blockaded the islands to cut off any escape. The accountant’s genocidal program was highly successful. It appears that no more than about 1,000 Bandanese out of an original population of about 15,000 survived.

  Ever meticulous, Coen gave his actions a legal underpinning by holding a trial of some two score prisoners before his final assault. The men, after being subjected to torture (a routine tool of seventeenth-century jurisprudence), confessed that they had broken the terms of the peace treaty and conspired against the life of the governor-general. Yet even some of the Dutch were appalled at the ensuing injustice. “The condemned victims being brought within the enclosure, 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,” wrote a naval lieutenant who witnessed the sight. “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.”

  So far, the plan had proceeded like clockwork, the governor-general could inform headquarters on his return to Batavia. Back in the cool and clammy chambers of the Oost-Indisch Huis, however, the Seventeen were a little taken aback by Coen’s bloody methods. Still, they sent back the expected letter of commendation, even if it was a little diluted by pious reservations about his tactics: “We had wished that it could have been accomplished by more moderate means.” Two years later, though, just to make sure there were no hard feelings, they awarded Coen a compensation package worth close to forty-five thousand guilders, three thousand of which was specifically assigned for the conquest of the spice archipelago.

  The Banda genocide did not solve all of the Company’s problems. The Dutch faced the same situation the Spanish had experienced when they wiped out the indigenous population of their Caribbean conquests: there was nobody to work the plantations. They also came up with the same solution, importing African slaves and Asian coolies to do the work. There was also the perennial issue of smuggling. Despite the Company’s ruthless enforcement of its monopoly, nutmeg continued to leak onto the world market, though in a much more limited fashion now that the Bandanese had been extirpated.

  When it came to cloves, the East India Company had a more intractable problem. Unlike nutmeg and mace, which were limited to the minute Bandas, clove trees grew all over the Moluccas, and the trade in cloves was way beyond the limited policing powers of the corporation. Smugglers could easily get double the Company’s fixed price if they could slip by the guns of the enforcers. But here, too, the Netherlanders showed their business acumen. If they couldn’t control the clove plantations, they would simply burn them down. In 1625, some sixty-five thousand trees—and the lives, villages, and livelihoods of thousands—were destroyed on Ceram’s Hoamoal Peninsula alone. Agents went in with axes and torches to wipe out clove plantations elsewhere on Ceram, on Tidore, and on Ternate. (The sultan was paid off with “extirpation moneys” to keep mum.)

  The contraband trade thrived partly because there were harbors willing to take it in. So the Company went after the Portuguese, with whom, incidentally, they were no longer at war; Malacca fell in 1641, Ceylon in 1658, and finally even Cochin in 1663. In Indonesia, the VOC seized the independent ports of Aceh, Macassar, and Bantam. It took a good part of the seventeenth century, but by the late 1660s, the Dutch could claim a virtual monopoly on nutmeg, mace, cloves, and cinnamon. And their price by century’s end reflected it. In Amsterdam, all these spices (except nutmeg) were selling for easily double what they had been in 1600.

  Not that Jan Pieterszoon Coen would live to see the empire built upon his bloodstained foundation. Life expectancies were brief in the East India trade no matter what your rank. The governor-general died in Batavia on September 21, 1629, at the age of forty-two, reportedly from a sudden seizure of “dysentery” (probably cholera). The following day, he was buried with great pomp and ceremony, at company expense. Apparently, when word got back to Hoogstraat that they had picked up the bill, the Seventeen were incensed that they had been charged. Yet no doubt their anger was short-lived, as they saw profits rolling in.

  One of the effects of the Dutch entry into the spice trade was that the price of the spices in which they did not gain a monopoly, such as pepper and ginger, plummeted, while the price of the “fine spices” of the Moluccas as well as Ceylonese cinnamon rose. So now pepper and ginger, which had never been exceptionally expensive, became commonplace condiments, while the others became rarer as the VOC strangled the supply at its source to guarantee a high price. In the seventeenth century, cinnamon was still very popular among the cognoscenti
, but the “it” spice, especially in France and England, was increasingly nutmeg.

  The sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century explosion in the demand for the rarer spices can at least partly be attributed to their use as nutraceuticals. Asian aromatics—and in particular, the “fine spices”—had been used to cure ailments of all kinds at least since the days when Romans used to send their merchants to Cochin. But the printing revolution of the sixteenth century created a whole new market for diet books trumpeting the use of spices as a dietary supplement to balance and “correct” other foods. Any doctor worth his salt had to know the many uses of pepper and, more important, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg in his practice. The directors of the Dutch East India Company had only to walk out the front door of company headquarters and glance up the Kloveniersburgwal Canal to Amsterdam’s spice market on the Nieuwemarkt to see perfumed bales dispatched to apothecaries across Europe. What they didn’t see, or understand, was that the current diet advice was headed the way of the grapefruit diet.

  PRESCRIBING SPICE

  After all I had read about the Nieuwemarkt, I suppose I had expected the square to be lined with picturesque Dutch façades and have a whiff of nutmeg in the air as I wandered by one foggy Tuesday morning. Instead, the broad plaza is framed by a jumble of plain shops and modern office buildings. The square would be almost homely were it not for the pointy-towered, cinnamon-colored fortress that squats at its center. When this fortified gate was built in 1488 to protect the up-and-coming hamlet of Amsterdam, it was planted with its feet in the canal that encircled the city like a moat. Then, when the city burst its walls in the early sixteen hundreds, the authorities constructed this nieuwe markt (“new market”) by paving over a section of the canal. The new market specialized in the aromatic treasure brought from the East, and the tower became a weighing station for the spices that canal boats brought down from the harbor.