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“If this frothy nation have the trade of the Indies to themselves, their pride and insolencie will be intollerable.”
HENRY MIDDLETON
BY RIGHTS, THE TOWN OF AMSTERDAM SHOULD NEVER HAVE EXISTED. Four hundred years before Jeronimus Cornelisz first passed through its gates, it had been little more than an obscure fishing village festering in the marshes at the southern limits of the Zuyder Zee. Its situation was undoubtedly unfavorable; the climate was appalling—cold and chill in winter, clammy, damp, and foggy for the remainder of the year—and access to the open sea was only possible via a maze of narrow channels, masked by sandbanks and so shallow that ships could not approach the harbor fully laden. There was, in short, little to suggest that Amsterdam would ever be a place of much significance. Yet by the beginning of the seventeenth century the village had overcome these natural disadvantages and become the richest city in the world.
This remarkable success was based on trade. As early as the fifteenth century, the Dutch had built one of the largest shipping industries in Europe, carrying bulk goods such as timber, tar, and salt from the Baltic to the North Sea and the Atlantic coast. The Hollanders were noted for their efficiency, low freight charges, and the sheer volume of their shipping, which even then dwarfed that of their rivals. The men of Amsterdam were at the forefront of this business.
From around the year 1500, the old Dutch shipowners—who had made their profits solely as carriers—began to be supplanted by merchants who took advantage of the favorable geographical position of the Northern Netherlands to buy and sell goods on their own account. The seven provinces that would eventually form the Dutch Republic were ideally placed to profit from the growth of international trade, which at that time was centered in the ports of Italy and Spain. They were midway between Scandinavia and Iberia and at the confluence of seaways and river systems that linked the Atlantic coast with central Europe. Goods landed in Dutch ports could be sent quickly and cheaply to Germany and England, the Southern Netherlands and France.
The towns of Zeeland and the Zuyder Zee thus grew in wealth and population. For many years, however, the greatest fortunes continued to be made by merchants in the Southern Netherlands. The towns of Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent were far bigger than Amsterdam and its great Zeeland rival Middelburg, and they had long been established as commercial centers for the trade in wool and cotton. Being large and wealthy places, they also attracted merchants specializing in luxury goods such as spice and sugar. Commodities of this sort were generally known as the “rich trades” because they were so much more profitable than the bulk trades of the Dutch.
The merchants of the Southern Netherlands retained their dominant position until late in the sixteenth century. It was only in the late 1570s that the people of the northern provinces at last began to overtake those of the south. One reason for this was the Dutch Revolt, which broke out in 1572 and ran on intermittently until 1648. Before the war began, Amsterdam had been a town of 30,000 people—a good size for the time, but no more than a third the size of Antwerp and smaller, too, than Brussels, Ghent, and Bruges. By 1600, though, double that number lived within the city walls, and by 1628 the number of inhabitants had exploded to 110,000. Amsterdam was now larger than any of its southern rivals and, indeed, one of the four largest cities in Europe.
In an age when plague and pestilence visited the largest towns with grim regularity, and could carry off up to a fifth of the population within a year, such rapid growth could only be the result of mass immigration. Amsterdam became home to tens of thousands of new citizens during these years. A few, like Jeronimus Cornelisz himself, were from elsewhere in the Dutch Republic, but the majority were Protestant refugees from the Southern Netherlands, driven north by Spanish persecution and the war. Many of the refugees were merchants from the great cities of Flanders and Wallonia, who possessed both capital and experience. They helped to establish Amsterdam as a trading power in its own right. A new bank, a stock exchange, and all the other paraphernalia of a mercantile economy followed, and by 1620 the town had unquestionably become the greatest entrepôt in northern Europe. During the first third of the seventeenth century, this flood of cash and expertise made it easier to exploit fresh opportunities and open up new markets. The most important of these was the spice trade.
Why spice? Amsterdam, in truth, was built upon the taste of rotting meat. In 1600, when the science of food preservation was still in its infancy, most of the cuts sold by butchers or hung in larders throughout Europe were sour and decaying. The only things that masked the tang of decomposing flesh were spices such as pepper, which thus became the most-sought-after luxury goods of the day.
The great difficulty, so far as the merchants of Europe were concerned, was that spices came from far away. They were grown and harvested in a swath of southeast Asia stretching from India nearly to New Guinea, and though they had been known in Europe since Roman times, they had never been available in any quantity and could only be afforded by the rich. To get as far north as the Dutch Republic, they had to travel enormous distances. The annual harvest was first carried in small boats and on the backs of animals to the great trading ports of China, Indonesia, and the Coromandel Coast, where merchants from Asia, Persia, and Arabia paid good prices for it. From there the spice road headed west and north, eventually terminating in the Italian quarter of Constantinople. Venetian and Genoan skippers then carried the precious spices west, until at last they reached the markets of Italy, then France and Spain, and—finally—the cities of the United Provinces, where they were used to flavor roasts and stews, turned into medicines, and valued as preservatives. The whole voyage from Asian tree to European table took the best part of two years, and until the middle of the fifteenth century the merchants of the West had no real control over either the supply of spices or their price, which in the course of the long journey could increase a hundredfold.
It was only in 1498, when men from Portugal first rounded Africa and found their way to the Indian coast, that Europeans gained direct access to the markets of the East. For another century, the Portuguese and, to a lesser extent, the Spaniards explored the archipelagos that stretched from Sumatra to the Philippines and produced the spice so greatly coveted at home. They kept their hard-won knowledge of the sea routes secret, reserving for themselves the lucrative new trade with the Indies. Profits from these ventures flowed into the coffers of the kings of Portugal and Spain.
By Jeronimus’s day, however, fierce competition from the Netherlands and England had robbed Iberia of its monopoly. The Dutch and English East India Companies now controlled most of the markets of the East and shipped their wares home to London and the seaports of the United Provinces. Thousands of sacks of spices, to which were added tons of precious metals, porcelain, and cotton, were unloaded in the warehouses of these companies each year, and the wealth generated by their sale defied belief. The ships that thronged the busy roadsteads north of Amsterdam went halfway round the world to sail home full of spice; the closely guarded warehouses grouped along the wharves bulged with it; and the auction houses and the grocers’ shops along the grander streets sold it, all at profits so enormous that men traveled to the town from all over Europe in the hope of sharing in them. The city had become a place where a man’s readiness to chance a long voyage east was more important than his past, and where one or two successful speculations were all it took to restore a fortune. These were the qualities that attracted Jeronimus Cornelisz.
Dutch interest in the Indies dated to the 1590s, when merchant immigrants from the south began to have an impact on the city’s trade. During this decade herring, salt, and timber became less significant to Amsterdam than the more valuable commodities of the rich trades. Fleets were fitted out and dispatched north and west in search of all manner of luxury goods. Dutch merchants sailed to Muscovy to buy up furs, whale oil, and caviar, and to the Americas for sugar and silver. But it was clear, even at this early date, that the riches of the East would far surpass them all.
The Indies trade was at this time still in the hands of Portugal and Spain, whose domination of the Spiceries had been ratified a hundred years earlier by the so-called Treaty of Tordesillas. This agreement, sponsored by Pope Alexander VI, was signed in 1494, and under its terms Portugal and Spain agreed to split the world between them. The treaty assigned to Spain all undiscovered territories to the west of a line of longitude that ran from pole to pole a few hundred miles to the west of the Cape Verde Islands, and to Portugal all new lands to the east. In this way the Spaniards gained a formal title to the Americas and the Portuguese the right to exploit the Indies. Between them the two Iberian powers established a duopoly on trade with the West that did not always sit well with their own citizens; the great missionary St. Francis Xavier wrote of the Portuguese officials he encountered in the East: “Their knowledge is restricted to conjugation of the verb rapio, to steal, in which they show an amazing capacity for inventing new tenses and participles.” Naturally enough, the Dutch and English—who coveted the Spice Islands for themselves—were even more unhappy with the arrangement.
Nevertheless, challenging Iberian domination of the East was no simple matter. Spain and Portugal had contrived to keep their knowledge of the Indies secret, and as late as 1590 neither the Dutch nor any other Western power had any real idea of the best way to reach the Spiceries, the precise location of the richest islands, or the disposition of the forces ranged against them. The information that the rivals of Spain and Portugal needed most—detailed sailing instructions for Far Eastern waters—was, moreover, the very thing most closely guarded by their enemies. In the days before the development of accurate maps and instruments, all seafaring nations went to great lengths to preserve the accumulated knowledge of their sailors, compiling decades of experiences to produce directions outlining all that was known about a given place or route. These instructions, which were known as rutters, were among the most jealously guarded possessions of the state. Iberian pilots and masters were under the strictest instructions to destroy their copies if threatened with shipwreck or capture, and they obeyed their orders so scrupulously that no sailing directions were ever found on board Spanish or Portuguese ships taken by privateers. More subtle efforts also failed; the Dutch sent spies to Lisbon to buy or steal copies of the rutters but with no success. Without an understanding of the information the rutters contained, it was generally acknowledged that any expedition to the East would be a costly failure.
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 those 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.
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 designed 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 Bataviarode 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.
Pelsaert’s plan was to send large quantities of special silver plate to India. These goods, which he called “toys,” would be carefully commissioned to suit the local tastes identified in his remonstrantie and could be relied upon to impress the Moguls with the power of the VOC. Items of silverware could be given as gifts, sold at the imperial court, or exchanged for spice. The toys would make a memorable impression and might also win favor and new trading privileges for the Dutch.
Impressed by Pelsaert’s detailed knowledge of Indian affairs, the Gentlemen XVII agreed to commission plate to the upper-merchant’s specifications. In doing so they took a considerable risk, for the final cost of the consignment of silver was almost 60,000 guilders. But so great was the VOC’s new confidence in Pelsaert that he now received not just a new and better contract, but instructions to accompany his toys back to India.
By late summer, then, Pelsaert found himself restored to favor. He would sail to Surat with his silver plate, the Gentlemen XVII decreed, traveling via the East Indies. The main autumn fleet was due to leave home waters late in October 1628 under the command of Jacques Specx of the Hollandia—a member of the Council of the Indies and one of the most senior and experienced traders in the VOC. It was expected to include several retourschepen of the largest kind, including the brand-new Batavia.
Though still being completed at the Peperwerf, Batavia already had a skipper. Ariaen Jacobsz’s safe handling of the Dordrecht had so impressed the directors of Jan Company that they had chosen him, of all their sailors, to command the new ship on her maiden voyage. She had an under-merchant, too, in the untried, untested Jeronimus Cornelisz. All that she now required was an upper-merchant of ability and wide experience. One candidate seemed particularly suitable.
Francisco Pelsaert joined them just before they sailed.