Batavia's Graveyard (27 page)

Thus Ariaen found some measure of redemption on the Timor Sea. Whether he still
planned to mutiny is difficult to say. Jacobsz had no idea he was suspected of plotting
against the Company, and without Jeronimus at his side the resolution he had displayed in
the Southern Ocean may well have drained away. Cornelisz, as we have seen, retained some
faith in him and hoped the skipper would murder Pelsaert during the voyage north, tip his
body over the side, and then sail to Malacca for assistance. But though the Portuguese
might indeed have supplied a rescue ship, when they heard about the VOC money chests
waiting in the Abrolhos, it seems unlikely that Jacobsz could have disposed of the
commandeur
even if he had wanted to. There were, perhaps, half a dozen mutineers in the longboat; but
they must have been heavily outnumbered by the loyalists. The three steersmen, for
example, had never been part of Jacobsz’s conspiracy and were unlikely to stand by
while Pelsaert was murdered and the boat diverted to the Malay coast. Besides, it would
have been impossible, in the crowded longboat, to kill the merchant without being
detected, and a struggle might have tipped the boat, and its passengers, into the sea.
Frightened, thirsty sailors seldom make good material for mutiny, and as they neared the
Indies the chances are that Jacobsz and Jan Evertsz spent more time husbanding their
remaining stores than scheming against the
commandeur.

The voyage from the North-West Cape had taken them 11 days—long enough for
the remaining stocks of food and water to run dangerously low. Most of the bread had been
tipped overboard during the storm, and what was left must have been severely rationed; the
people in the boat would have endured severe hunger pangs at first, and then the dull
feeling of emptiness that marks the onset of starvation. Rain fell on three occasions
while they were at sea, marginally reducing their dependence on the water casks, but they
were forced to cut the water ration even so. Thirst tormented everyone on board, but the
knowledge that the boat was making rapid progress—they were sailing up to 90 miles a
day—must have helped to sustain morale during the voyage.

The Javan coast was sighted on the afternoon of 27 June. They had completed the
crossing only just in time; when the longboat made its landfall, only one
kannen
of
water (less than two pints) remained of the 70 they had scooped up from the rock pools of
the North-West Cape. Some caution was still required—the island’s southern
littoral was not under Dutch control, and the local people might be hostile—but next
morning they replenished their barrels from a waterfall and sailed and rowed on toward
Sunda Strait, where the trade routes and the monsoon winds converged and Dutch ships
congregated on their way to and from Batavia. Remarkably, all 48 of those who had left the
Abrolhos in the longboat had survived the journey; even the babe in arms was still alive.
Light winds delayed them, but they reached the southwest tip of Java on 3 July and found,
to their intense delight, four VOC ships waiting in the Strait; one of them was the
Sardam,
the little
jacht
that had sailed with them all the way from Texel to the Cape. Four
days later they were in Batavia.

The VOC’s headquarters in the Indies had been a town of little moment until
Cornelis de Houtman arrived there one day in November 1596. It was then a community of
perhaps 2,000 or 3,000 people, situated at the mouth of the Tiliwung River and protected
by nothing more than a bamboo wall. The Javanese inhabitants, who called their town
Jacatra, were subjects of the Sultan of Bantam, 50 miles to the west. They made their
living from fishing, agriculture, and trade, and their town also boasted a small Chinese
community, which controlled the arak-brewing business and a good deal of the general
commerce besides. De Houtman purchased some supplies, and thereafter Dutch ships began to
call regularly at the port, which was marginally healthier and a good deal cheaper than
Bantam itself.

Gradually Dutch influence grew. In 1610 the local ruler, or
pangeran,
gave
the VOC some land in the Chinese quarter and permission to construct a stone warehouse and
a walled compound on it; within a few years, this building became one of Jan
Company’s largest factories, or warehouses, in the Far East. Relations between the
Gentlemen XVII and the
pangeran
were generally excellent, so, in 1618, the Company
built a new hospital and a little ship repair yard just outside the town. It was also
decided to move most of the business traditionally transacted at Bantam along the coast to
Jacatra.

At this point, to the great displeasure of the VOC, the English East India
Company began to build its own warehouse outside the walls. If the Jacatran ruler’s
intention was to play the rival Europeans off against one another, he succeeded all too
well. The Dutch attacked the English factory and burned it to the ground; the English
retaliated by assembling such a substantial fleet outside the town that the whole Dutch
community was forced to flee east to the Moluccas. That was far from the end of the
matter, however; a few months later the VOC counterattacked in force, unleashing 2,000
troops against Jacatra, burning it down, and leveling the few buildings left standing in
the ruins. The
pangeran,
who had sided with the English, was overthrown, and the
old settlement was rebuilt as the fortress of Batavia.

The new town, founded on 30 May 1619, was protected by a modern castle on the
coast, nine times bigger than its predecessor and built of white coral slabs. The castle
had four bastions, known as Diamond, Ruby, Sapphire, and Pearl, prompting the local
Javanese to nickname the settlement
kota-inten,
“Diamond City.” The name
stuck, not least because the trade that soon began to pour through the gates made it one
of the wealthiest places in the Indies.

Old Jacatra disappeared; new Batavia looked Dutch. The houses were built of
brick, much of it imported all the way from the Netherlands in the bilges of
retourschepen
sailing out in ballast, and they were tall and thin and roofed with tiles, just as they
were in Amsterdam. The streets were lined with trees and ran in dead-straight lines, and
there were churches, schools, and even canals built in the European style. The whole town,
indeed, made few concessions to the tropics; most of the Dutch who lived there smoked and
drank to excess, as they did at home
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; there was a tremendous preoccupation with rank and
social status; and despite the humidity and heat, soldiers and merchants alike still
dressed in the heavy black wool clothes that were the fashion in the Netherlands. The
native Javanese were not allowed within the gates.

For all this, even newcomers such as Zwaantie Hendricx could never really think
of Batavia as a European town. In many respects, indeed, it was thoroughly oriental. There
was an extensive Chinese quarter and a whole street packed with gambling dens, which was
closed to Europeans after dark. One in four of the citizens were Chinese, and, of the
remainder, two-thirds were Asian slaves. The European population amounted to about 1,200
soldiers and a few hundred merchants, clerks, and artisans; there were very few Dutch
women at all, and almost all the men took local mistresses or wives. The wildlife, too,
was alien. Rainforest crept up almost to the gates; there were monkeys and rhinoceroses in
the jungle, and tigers sometimes stalked and killed slaves in the sugar fields outside the
walls. To make matters worse, Bantamese bandits often prowled in the vicinity, attacking
and robbing those unwise enough to venture any distance from the town. Batavia thus
existed in a sort of splendid isolation. Newcomers arrived by sea, stayed sometimes for
years without seeing anything of the country they were in, and departed the same way they
had come.

The community within the walls was singularly one-dimensional. Virtually the
entire white population worked directly for the VOC. Over the years, the Gentlemen XVII
did make repeated efforts to entice emigrants from Europe to settle in the Indies as
“free-burghers”—private citizens who would, it was hoped, provide the sort
of infrastructure a real community required—but since the newcomers suffered
appallingly from disease and were never allowed to profit from the trade in spices, they
made up no more than a tiny fraction of the population. The few would-be settlers who did
make the journey rarely stayed for long. Drained and depressed by the muggy pall that hung
limply over the whole settlement, they found the town intolerable. Disease was rife, the
canals swarmed with mosquitoes, and the midday heat was so intense that even Jan Company
did not require its clerks to be at their desks at noon. They worked from 6 to 11 a.m. and
1 to 6 p.m. instead.

The ruler of Batavia was the governor-general of the Indies. He was a senior
merchant, sent out from the Dutch Republic by the VOC, who controlled—either directly
or through local subordinates—not only the town itself, but all the Company’s
factories and possessions from Arabia to the coast of Japan. The governor-general was
charged not only with ensuring the profitability of the spice trade but with diplomatic
and military affairs as well, and his powers within Batavia itself rivaled those of any
eastern potentate. A Council of the Indies, made up of eight upper-merchants of wide
experience, offered advice and played some part in the decision making, but it was rare
for its members to stand up to a man on whom they themselves largely depended for
advancement. Since it took a minimum of 18 months to send a request to the Netherlands and
receive an answer, strong governors could and did defy even the Gentlemen XVII for
years.

There were only two significant restrictions on the power of an able governor.
One was the law—Dutch statutes applied throughout the VOC’s possessions, and
legal affairs were in the hands of the
fiscaal,
a lawyer sent out from the
Netherlands. The other was the ever-changing size and strength of the Company’s
military forces. Like every other European power active in the Eastern oceans, the Dutch
were permanently short of ships and men, and each governor-general was aware that if his
factories and forts ever were attacked—whether by native armies, the English, or the
Portuguese—his forces were so meager that the loss of a single ship, or a company of
soldiers, might determine the outcome of the battle. The soldiers and sailors of the VOC
understood this, too, and were much harder to control than they had been in the
Netherlands. Men fought, drank, and whored their way through five years’ service in
the East with little fear of punishment, and they were capable of causing considerable
disruption within Batavia itself.

Only a governor of strong character could adapt to the debilitating conditions,
deal with his own men and the local rulers, and still increase profits for the Gentlemen
XVII; but in 1629, when the emaciated crew of Pelsaert’s longboat finally stumbled
ashore in Java, it happened that just such a man had charge of all the VOC’s
possessions in the East—a governor who was at once stern, unbending, humorless,
God-fearing, honest, and austere. His name was Jan Coen, and he was the architect of the
Dutch empire in the Indies.

Coen was a native of the port of Hoorn, in the North Quarter of Holland, and had
served the Company since 1607, standing out so starkly among the self-serving private
traders who peopled the VOC hierarchy in the East that he was promoted very swiftly. He
was an upper-merchant at the age of 25 and governor-general by 1619, when he was only 32.
Unlike many of the merchants serving in the East, Coen believed in using military force to
expand the VOC’s dominions and had no compunction in unleashing the Company’s
armies against both native rulers and his European rivals. He had already all but driven
the English East India Company out of the Spiceries, founding Batavia along the way, and
conquered the Banda Islands,
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securing the world’s supply of nutmeg for the Dutch.
The Gentlemen XVII held him in the highest regard, even tolerating the blunt and caustic
criticisms of their own tightfisted lack of ambition that were a feature of Coen’s
frequent letters home.

Nevertheless, as Pelsaert would have known, the governor’s unprecedented
ruthlessness had caused the VOC all sorts of trouble in the last decade. The most
notorious of several incidents had occurred in 1623 on the spice isle of Ambon, when the
VOC wrongly suspected its English competitors of plotting an attack on the Dutch factory.
Fifteen East India Company merchants were arrested, along with several Japanese
mercenaries. The men were tortured until they confessed—one had flames played along
the soles of his feet “until the fat dropt and put out the candles”—and
then were executed. When news of the “Amboina massacre” reached London, the
outcry that erupted was so violent that the Gentlemen XVII were forced to promise that
Coen would see no further service in the East. Privately, however, the Company knew that
it could not do without him. Within three years it had sent its most notorious servant
back to the Indies, sailing under an assumed name, to begin a second term as
governor-general.