by Mike Dash
This fact was commonly acknowledged. “There are no Ten Commandments south of the equator,” the common saying had it, and honest men were hard to come by in the East. Though personal belongings could be, and were, frequently searched to prevent the private importation of spice, fraudulent accounting was commonplace; it was a relatively simple matter to buy goods at a low price and claim they had cost much more, or to overvalue damaged stock. Nor were the merchants the only ones busily defrauding their employer. Many lesser servants of the VOC bribed fellow Dutchmen to overlook their private activities in the spice markets. Some traded in the name of Asian merchants, though this, too, was prohibited. “There was no ‘esprit de corps’ in the VOC,” one historian has noted. “The Company as a body was avaricious, and its employees were often demoralised by its institutionalised greed . . . . Every able-bodied man from the Councillor of the Indies down to the simple soldier considered it an absolute must to care for himself first.”
Jan Company, which was nothing if not a practical organization, finally resigned itself to the practice of private trade, making only intermittent efforts to stamp it out. A merchant had to be exceptionally greedy or unlucky to be caught; most of those who were had been betrayed by jealous rivals. The most notorious example in Pelsaert’s day was that of Huybert Visnich, who had run a VOC trading post in Persia. His salary was 160 guilders a month, but by the time he was denounced for fraud his private trade had amassed him a fortune estimated at no less than 200,000 guilders. Visnich fled to the Ottoman Empire, where he was eventually killed for his money in 1630. His former employers noted his death, with a certain satisfaction, as “a well deserved punishment by God.” In truth, however, Visnich had simply taken better advantage of his opportunities than hundreds of other merchants who were equally corrupt.
Francisco Pelsaert was no exception to this rule. While at Agra, he used Company funds to set himself up as a moneylender, advancing cash to local indigo growers at an annual rate of 18 percent and pocketing the profits for himself. It was a risky business; he could hardly keep full records, for fear of an audit; the farmers who made up his clientele sometimes defaulted on their loans; and there was always the danger that a colleague would denounce him to the Company. But by initiating his successor in the deception when he himself returned to Surat, Pelsaert successfully evaded detection. By 1636, when his fraud at last came to light, the VOC had incurred sizable losses of almost 44,000 rupees.
Word that there was money to be made in the service of Jan Company did not take long to spread through the United Provinces, and there can be little doubt that Jeronimus Cornelisz planned to recoup his lost fortune through just this sort of private trade. Whether or not the apothecary had been compromised by involvement in the Torrentian scandal, his appearance in Amsterdam in the autumn of 1628 clearly suggests that his chief concern was to restore his battered financial position. There were safer bolt-holes for religious dissidents than Amsterdam, most of them outside the borders of the United Provinces—but none that offered such a tempting combination of anonymity and opportunity.
The town that Jeronimus traversed was not yet fully formed. The horseshoe-shaped canals that still enclose the city center had only just been built, running just inside to the walls, encircling the residential streets and the merchants’ warehouses and leading north toward the crowded harbor. But even then their banks were lined with the thin, tall homes of Holland’s leading citizens—the height of each building roughly denoting its owner’s wealth and status—and the narrow streets so seethed with citizens hurrying to appointments that they were often clogged with carts and carriages. As early as 1617, the press of traffic in the city center had grown so great that a one-way system had been introduced to ease congestion, but, even so, there was still noise and bustle everywhere. Amsterdam’s merchants rose at 5:30 a.m., began work at seven, and labored for an average of 12 or 14 hours a day. Their lives left them little time for strangers, and newcomers to the city often thought themselves invisible. The people of the city were so intent on making money that visitors passed unnoticed on the busy streets.
It is unlikely, then, that anyone noticed or talked to Jeronimus Cornelisz as he threaded his way through the crowded center of the town and passed through the medieval city wall where it was pierced by the Waag, the old customs weigh-house. New fortifications, ordered when it was obvious the city was outgrowing its old boundaries, had been thrown up half a mile or so farther to the east, and the area between the walls had already become one of the commercial centers of Amsterdam. It was close to the harbor and had plenty of room for the construction of warehouses and wharves.
The town became much less cramped and crowded on the far side of the Waag; Cornelisz would easily have found what he was looking for. His destination was the East India House, which stood on the Kloveniersburgwal, a tree-lined canal that had once been the city moat, and close to one end of the Oude Hoogstraat, the old high street of Amsterdam. The House itself was an elegant, if not especially imposing, three-story brick rectangle completed in 1606 and built around a central courtyard. It was the main headquarters of the local chamber of the VOC.
Recruitment to Jan Company was a haphazard business. There were no tests and no exams; no references were required. Since only the desperate and the destitute applied, the VOC could not afford to be overly selective, and there were particular shortages of candidates from among the upper and the middle classes. So many merchants were required—most large ships required a staff of up to a dozen, generally an upper-merchant, an under-merchant, and 8 or 10 assistants, bookkeepers, and clerks—that the only explicit criteria were that a man should sign a five-year contract and that he should not be bankrupt, nor Catholic, nor “infamous.” Even these rules were rarely enforced.
It is not clear whom Jeronimus visited in the East India House or how exactly he first established contact with the VOC. The web of friends and colleagues that Torrentius had built up throughout Holland included a certain Adriaan Block of Lisse, who had made his fortune in the East and possessed a good deal of influence within the Company. It is possible that he provided Cornelisz with an introduction to the directors of the Amsterdam chamber. It is equally possible that Jeronimus had made the acquaintance of someone with the necessary connections through his own family, or his wife’s, or among the clientele of his failed business in Haarlem. Whatever the truth, it seems that the apothecary’s age, his social status, and his knowledge of pharmacy—which at this time required detailed understanding of the properties of spice—were enough to convince the directors of the local chamber to overlook his recent and unfortunate disgrace. Cornelisz emerged onto the Kloveniersburgwal as a full-fledged employee of the VOC. He carried with him his commission as an under-merchant, and orders to sail for the Indies within a month.
Had Jeronimus continued to head east on leaving the East India House, he would have reached the Amsterdam waterfront at just the point where a narrow wooden bridge arched over to a little island known as Rapenburg. There, in two adjoining shipyards right under the city walls, the Amsterdam chamber of the Company was completing the East Indiaman that would transport him to the East. The yards, which were together called the Peperwerf, were still very new, but they were already the largest and the most efficient anywhere in Europe. By standardizing the design and the components of their ships, the Gentlemen XVII had introduced many of the elements of what would now be recognized as mass production into their shipbuilding program, cutting the time needed to turn out a large East Indiaman to as little as six months. This was staggeringly quick, but, even so, the vessels produced on the Peperwerf boasted a sophisticated design that made them far superior to the ships used by the English and the Portuguese. In Jeronimus’s day Dutch East Indiamen were, in fact, the most complex machines yet built by man, and their advanced construction made them easier to load, cheaper to run, and able to carry much more cargo than their foreign counterparts.
There were several different sorts of ship, each designe
d for a specific task. The most expensive were East Indiamen of the Batavia’s class, which were called retourschepen (“return ships”). These vessels were specially designed to carry passengers as well as cargo and were built to survive long ocean voyages to and from the Indies. Next in importance was the fluyt—a cheap, flat-bottomed, round-sterned vessel with a high proportion of easily accessible cargo space—and, after that, the jacht, which was generally a light and handy craft built to carry no more than 50 tons of cargo.
Each type was built according to the Dutch “shell-first” method, a revolutionary construction technique that called for a ship’s external planking to be assembled and nailed together before the internal ribs and frames were added. As soon as this phase of the building work was finished, the half-finished East Indiaman would be floated and towed out to a “cage” of wooden palisades 40 or 50 yards out in the waters of the River IJ, where she would be fitted out. The Peperwerf’s slips were thus freed for work to begin on yet another vessel. In this way the VOC’s yards completed 1,500 merchantmen in the seventeenth century alone.
The Batavia herself was no ordinary ship, but one of the greatest vessels of her day. The ship was named after the Javan town of Batavia, which was the capital of all the Dutch possessions in the Indies, and she displaced 1,200 tons and measured 160 feet from stem to stern—the very largest size permitted under Company regulations. She had four decks, three masts, and 30 guns, and her designer—the famous naval architect Jan Rijksen, still active and alert at the tremendous age of 66—had given her not only a strong double hull (two three-inch thicknesses of oak, with a waterproof layer of tarred horsehair in between them) but an outer skin of deal or pine as well. This softwood sheathing protected the hull from attack by shipworm—the animals preferred burrowing from stem to stern through the soft planking to attacking the harder oak beneath—and as an added prophylactic her outer skin was studded with thick iron nails and coated with a noxious mix of resin, sulphur, oil, and lime. Finally, the sheathing itself was protected all along the waterline by the hides of several hundred roughly butchered cattle, which were tacked onto the pine. So long as the unladen Batavia rode high in the waters of the IJ, these skins gave the lower part of her hull the appearance of a mangy patchwork quilt. They would remain in place until they rotted and dropped off in the course of the vessel’s maiden voyage.
Thankfully the cattle hides did not obscure Batavia’s brightly painted upperworks, which had been trimmed in green and gold, nor her richly decorated stern—an ostentatious refinement that the normally parsimonius Gentlemen XVII had authorized in an effort to overawe the peoples of the East. But all this attention to detail did not come cheap. As completed, and without supplies, Batavia would have cost the Company almost 100,000 guilders, a fortune at the time.
This considerable expense was necessary because—once built—the VOC flogged its ships until they were on the verge of falling apart. The stresses and strains that the Batavia would be exposed to in the course of a single passage to the Indies were enough to destroy a normal ship, and even with her triple hull a retourschip would rarely be expected to make more than half a dozen round trips to the East. Having served the Gentlemen XVII for somewhere between 10 and 20 years, she would then be returned to the Zuyder Zee and broken up to provide timber for new housing. It is a testament to the immense profitability of the spice trade that by the time an East Indiaman had been turned back into lumber, the profit on her cargoes would have repaid her building costs several times over.
A retourschip of the Batavia’s size could load around 600 tons of supplies and trade goods when new (and newness made a difference; after a year or two in service, when the hull became saturated with seawater, cargo capacity could fall by 20 percent). But the holds of an East Indiaman were only ever full when she sailed home so loaded down with spices that her gunports were sometimes only two feet from the sea. There was virtually no demand for European goods in the Indies, and although merchantmen departing from the Netherlands did carry boxes of psalm books, hand grenades, cooking pots, and barrel hoops destined for the Dutch garrisons of the East, the only bulky cargo shipped to Java was stone for the Company factories in the East. Each year the Dutch authorities in the Indies placed orders for further huge quantities of house bricks, which were sent out as ballast. Occasionally the eysch—the governor-general’s annual order for supplies—included more exotic requests. This was the case in the autumn of 1628; down in Batavia’s airless bilges, sweating workmen were already busy stowing an entire 25-foot-high prefabricated gateway, made up of 137 huge sandstone blocks weighing 37 tons in all, destined for Castle Batavia itself.
Fortunately for the Gentlemen XVII, there was one commodity that the people of the Spiceries were willing to trade for cloves and nutmeg. The local population might have little use for the Dutch linens and thick English cloth that were northern Europe’s major exports at this time, but they did have an insatiable desire for bullion—preferably silver coin, which was the common currency of the East. Retourschepen therefore set out for the East carrying not trade goods but box after box of silver.
Gigantic sums of money—up to 250,000 guilders for each vessel, equivalent to about $19 million today—were supplied to the retourschepen in massive wooden chests. Each 500-pound case contained 8,000 coins, and the specie in a strongbox totaled about 20,000 guilders. This was enough to be a real temptation, and the risk of theft was such that the money chests were kept separate from the remainder of the cargo. The bullion was brought aboard no more than an hour or two before the crew weighed anchor and arrived under the watchful eye of no less than one of the Gentlemen XVII, who would demand an appropriate receipt signed by the skipper and the upper-merchant. Once aboard, the chests were stored not in the hold but in the Great Cabin in the stern, where only the most senior merchants had access to them. Then they were watched all the way to Java.
By the last months of 1626, Francisco Pelsaert’s existing three-year contract with the VOC was almost up. As one of the most experienced Company men in India, and the leader of a mission to Agra that had been a considerable success in commercial terms, the upper-merchant could normally have expected to be reemployed with a substantial increase in his monthly pay. On this occasion, however, there was no sign of a new contract, and when Pelsaert asked his superiors to resolve the matter, the VOC proved unexpectedly reticent.
The chief difficulty, it appears, concerned the Antwerp merchant’s failings as a diplomat. One of the main goals of Pelsaert’s mission had been to establish a Dutch presence at the Mogul court and secure favorable treatment for the VOC from the Emperor Jahangir.*11 This he had conspicuously failed to do. There were mitigating circumstances, it is true; in 1624 Jahangir had removed himself from Agra to Lahore, limiting Dutch access to the Mogul court. Nevertheless, Pieter van den Broecke, at Surat, soon concluded that the upper-merchant’s diplomatic gifts were limited, and in 1625 he decided to send a second mission to Lahore. This embassy was led by a certain Hendrick Vapoer, who proved to have a real talent for dealing with the Mogul government. Vapoer’s reward was Pelsaert’s job in Agra.
Pelsaert was naturally incensed by this decision, more so when he learned that Vapoer would be paid twice what he had earned. But there was little he could do about it, and when his contract expired in March 1627 he returned overland to Surat. He arrived on the coast in May and there quarreled with the generally easygoing Van den Broecke, whom he no doubt blamed for Vapoer’s appointment. Van den Broecke did what he could to mend the damage, begging his old friend to stay in India, but Pelsaert was too proud to let that happen. He insisted on returning to the Netherlands instead.
Still smarting from his treatment at the hands of the VOC, the merchant took ship in Surat 10 days before Christmas. He was given a cabin in the old Dordrecht, sailing as a guest of the fleet president, commandeur Grijph. Pelsaert passed the time while he waited for the ship to sail in the company of Grijph; a fellow upper-merchant, Wollebrand Geleynssen de Jongh*12;
and the recently appointed skipper of the Dordrecht. The skipper’s name was Ariaen Jacobsz.
The Dordrecht was Ariaen’s first major command after a decade spent working in the inter-island trade. He ought to have been anxious to make a good impression, but the heat and the humidity of Surat brought out the worst in Jacobsz. For whatever reason, Pelsaert irritated him—perhaps it was the upper-merchant’s self-importance. Within days the two had fallen out to a dangerous degree.
The dispute that was to cause so much trouble on the Batavia had a most mundane beginning. Ten years in the draining climate of the Indies had given Jacobsz an unhealthy love of alcohol, and he refused to moderate his habits in the presence of three senior officers of the VOC. One night in Surat harbor the skipper became drunk and grievously insulted Pelsaert before the other merchants. Next day commandeur Grijph was forced to rebuke him, “saying that that was not the manner to sail in peace to the Fatherland, and that he must behave himself differently.” Jacobsz blamed Pelsaert for this public dressing-down. Henceforth, as the skipper was later to explain, he always hated Pelsaert.
Grijph’s presence prevented matters from going any further on the journey to the United Provinces, and Pelsaert arrived home in June 1628. The merchant spent July and August engaged in a successful campaign to win back the favor of the Gentlemen XVII. He had already composed two special reports—a chronicle and a remonstrantie, or dissertation, concerning trade in the subcontinent—in an effort to establish himself as an expert on Indian affairs; now he made a new suggestion for finding favor with the Mogul emperors. Jahangir, he pointed out, had never shown much interest in the gifts of Western emissaries. But he did seem to like jewels and silver.
