Batavia's Graveyard (52 page)

The Gentlemen XVII
See Bruijn et al.,
Dutch-Asiatic Shipping,
I,
pp. 15–9.

Spices
Glamann, op. cit., pp. 13, 16–24, 74–6, 91–3, 134;
Vlekke, op. cit., pp. 57–61; Milton, op. cit., pp. 3, 18, 58, 80.

The Dutch in the Indies, 1602–1628
Israel,
Dutch Primacy,
p.
73; Vlekke, op. cit., pp. 75–7.

“. . . this frothy nation . . .”
Cited by John Keay,
The
Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company
(London:
HarperCollins, 1993), p. 34.

“The places and the strongholds . . .”
C. R. Boxer,
The Dutch
Seaborne Empire 1600–1800
(London: Hutchinson, 1965), pp. 45–6. The
governments of Europe reciprocated with scorn, and when, years later, the Dutch envoy to
the court of Charles X of Sweden ventured a remark about the freedom of religion, the king
is said to have pulled a golden rixdollar from his pocket and brandished it in the
diplomat’s face, remarking: “Voil_otre religion.”

“These butterboxes . . .”
Quoted by Israel,
Dutch Primacy,
p.
105.

Jacob Poppen
Israel,
The Dutch Republic,
pp. 347–8.

Pay of merchants
In the second half of the century an
upper-merchant’s salary was typically 80–100 guilders a month, or perhaps 1,100
a year, less than the earnings of a typical merchant at home in the Netherlands.
Under-merchants earned half that, and assistants only a quarter as much, so that only the
provision of free board and lodging while in the service of the Company made theirs a
living wage. Boxer,
The Dutch Seaborne Empire,
pp. 201, 300.

The life and times of Francisco Pelsaert
The identity of Francisco
Pelsaert’s father is not known, but his mother was Barbara van Ganderheyden. She
married twice and had three children—Anna Pelsaert, who was born around 1588,
Francisco, and Oeyken, who was five years younger than her brother and thus born around
1600. The children took their surname from Barbara’s second husband, Dirick Pelsaert,
who was a man of German stock. Dirick came originally from Aachen, but his marriage to
Barbara was of short duration, and contemporary records attest that her three offspring
were
voorkinderen—
“forechildren”—that is, the children of an
earlier marriage, the details of which have not yet been traced. Barbara’s father,
Dirick van Ganderheyden, who brought Pelsaert up, earned a good living as administrator of
the estates of various noble widows, heiresses, and monasteries in the Southern
Netherlands. He died in the autumn of 1613 and was buried in Antwerp, though it seems he
had not lived there. His cousin was Hans van Ghinckel of Middelburg, who secured Pelsaert
his introduction to the VOC. Kolff and van Santen,
De Geschriften,
pp.
4–7.

Joining the VOC
Unusually, Pelsaert was required to lodge a surety of
1,000 guilders with the Company before he was accepted. Probably this was
because—being less than 25 years of age—he was still a minor by the standards of
the time. Kolff and Van Santen,
De Geschriften,
p. 7.

Inaccuracies concerning Pelsaert’s antecedents, relations, and personal
history have crept into the record as a result of erroneous statements by the genealogist
H. F. Macco, whose
Geschichte und Genealogie der Familen Peltzer
(Aachen, np,
1901), p. 323 incorrectly states that the
commandeur
was brother-in-law to the
important VOC director Hendrik Brouwer. The “Francoys Pelsaert” mentioned as
Brouwer’s relative, who came from Eupen, appears to have been an entirely different
person; Kolff and van Santen,
De Geschriften,
p. 7. Unfortunately Macco’s
error had already been perpetuated by Henrietta Drake-Brockman in her
Voyage to
Disaster
(Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 1995), pp. 13–14,
and from there it entered the
Batavia
literature generally.

Pelsaert in India
As they evolved, the VOC’s trading bases overseas
were divided into three quarters. The governor-general of the Indies took direct
responsibility for the Spice Islands themselves, which were by far the most important of
the Company’s possessions and made up the “Eastern Quarter.” The factories
in Japan, China, and Formosa made up the “Northern Quarter,” and Surat, which
was established in 1606, became the administrative center for the “Western
Quarter,” which included the trading centers of Persia and the Coromandel Coast.
Pelsaert took control of the factory at Agra in 1623–4 on the death of his
predecessor, Wouter Heuten. His first caravan to Surat (1623) included 146 packs of cloth,
15 packs of indigo, and three female slaves. Kolff and van Santen,
De Geschriften,
pp. 7–12, 13, 17–9, 25–8; Drake-Brockman, op. cit., pp. 11, 15–20,
21n.

Agra
Pelsaert stayed in the city some half a dozen years before the Mogul
emperor Shah Jehan began the construction of its most famous monument, the Taj
Mahal.

“. . . one of the Company’s more vigorous and efficient servants . .
.”
Drake-Brockman, op. cit., pp. 21–7.

Pieter van den Broecke
He lived from 1585 to 1640 and wrote a journal,
still extant, which is an important source for the history of Dutch trade in West Africa
and northern India. He owed some of his success, in turn, to the sponsorship of Gerard
Reynst, who eventually became governor-general of the Indies. By 1626–7, Van den
Broecke and Pelsaert had, however, fallen out spectacularly over the latter’s
suspicion that his friend planned to claim much of the credit for Pelsaert’s
achievements in India. Van den Broecke’s fame rests on his journal, but recent
research into his years with the VOC have shown that while well regarded as a diplomat, he
was notorious for the poor state of his accounts, which were slipshod and impenetrable.
Whether this failing was the consequence of genuine ineptitude or a deliberate attempt to
conceal private trading is difficult to say. K. Ratelband (ed.),
Reizen naar
West-Africa van Pieter van den Broecke, 1605–1614
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1950), pp. xxii–xxxiv, xliii–xlv; Kolff and van Santen,
De Geschriften,
p. 48; W. P. Coolhaas (ed.),
Pieter van den Broecke in Aziï
(The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1962), p. 4.

“. . . reports sent to the Netherlands”
Kolff and van Santen,
De
Geschriften,
pp. 53–7. Pelsaert’s genuine interest in the local people was
exceptionally unusual. As one historian notes, “The average man going to the Indies
had no training and no knowledge of foreign languages. What he knew of Asia before leaving
Amsterdam was very little, usually based on hearsay—or he knew nothing at all. His
contract with the VOC obliged him to serve in the East for some years only . . . his
expectations were limited to the issue of money-making during a temporary sojourn abroad.
Both this and his socio-educational background would make it extremely unlikely for him
ever to get in touch with his Asian environment and to develop an interest in the cultural
specifics of Asia.” Peter Kirsch, “VOC—Trade Without Ethics?” in Karl
Sprengard and Roderich Ptak (eds.),
Maritime Asia: Profit Maximisation, Ethics and
Trade Structure c. 1300–1800
(Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1994), p.
198.

Eurasian couples in the east and infant mortality
L. Blussé, “The
Caryatids of Batavia: Reproduction, Religion and Acculturation Under the VOC,”
Itinerario
7
(1983): 57, 65; Jean Gelman Taylor,
The Social World of Batavia: European and
Eurasian in Dutch Asia
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), pp. 8, 12,
14–6.

“. . . dalliances with slaves . . .”
Kolff and van Santen,
De
Geschriften,
pp. 19–21, 24, 31; Ratelband op. cit., pp. 91–2; Coolhaas, op.
cit., p. 5.

The oil of cloves incident
Kolff and van Santen,
De Geschriften,
pp. 32–3; for the properties and uses of oil of cloves, see M. Boucher, “The
Cape Passage: Some Observations on Health Hazards Aboard Dutch East Indiamen
Outward-bound,”
Historia
26 (1981): 35.

“There are no Ten Commandments south of the equator”
Cited in
Boxer,
The Dutch Seaborne Empire,
p. 205.

Private trade
“The result was that everyone from Governor-General to
cabin boy traded on the side, and everyone else knew it,” Boxer says. “[The
men’s] superiors in the East normally had no inclination to give their subordinates
away, as they themselves were almost invariably deeply implicated.” Ibid., pp.
201–2. The English East India Company, despite an ostensibly more liberal system
(from 1674, employees were allowed to ship as much as 5 percent of the chartered tonnage
on their own account), in fact fared little better; see Keay, op. cit., pp. 34–5,
Ralph Davies,
The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries
(Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1971), p. 147.

“There was no esprit de corps . . .”
Kirsch, op. cit., p.
199.

Huybert Visnich
Ibid., p. 200.

Pelsaert as a money lender
He avoided detection simply by adding the
interest he was owed to the price of the indigo he purchased, thus leaving no trace of his
activities in the factory’s accounts. Without detailed knowledge of local market
conditions, neither the Gentlemen XVII nor Pelsaert’s superiors at the VOC factory in
Surat were in any position to question the prices he paid. Kolff and van Santen,
De
Geschriften,
pp. 33–4.

The Amsterdam one-way system
Geoffrey Cotterell,
Amsterdam: The Life of
a City
(Farnborough: DC Heath, 1973), p. 86.

Cornelisz’s selection procedure
Boxer,
The Dutch Seaborne Empire,
p. 51; Kirsch, op. cit., pp. 198–9; Bruijn et al.,
Dutch-Asiatic Shipping,
I,
p. 147. “To be ranked as an assistant, merchant or upper-merchant did not mean very
much,” Kirsch observes. “Whatever the rank, it had little or nothing to do with
abilities or morals. It was a label only, won by practical experience of acting as a
profit-maximiser.”

Adriaan Block
He lived from 1581/2 until 1661 and was the brother-in-law
of Isaac Massa (1586–1643), another wealthy merchant who built a fortune trading with
Russia and who belonged to Thibault’s Fencing club. Govert Snoek,
De Rosenkruizers
in Nederland, Voornamelijk in de Eerste Helft van de 17de Eeuw. Een Inventarisatie
(Ph.D. thesis, University of Utrecht, 1997), pp. 72–4, 164.

Merchants and assistants
Difficult as it generally was to recruit both
officers and men, it was unusual for the Company to go so far as to hire a novice as an
under-merchant. The position was a relatively senior one and was generally awarded to men
who boasted at least half a dozen years of faithful service to the company in the lesser
position of assistant, or clerk. On many smaller ships, an under-merchant would be the
most senior VOC officer on board, and it would fall to him to direct the skipper and
barter for trade goods with the experienced native merchants of the east. For this reason,
even men who came from good families tended to join the VOC as assistants if they were
without influence, and they learned the trade of merchant by watching their superiors for
a period of years. Francisco Pelsaert started as an assistant and served at that rank for
four or five years before receiving promotion to under-merchant (Kolff and van Santen, op.
cit., pp. 6–7). He was, however, much younger at this time than was Cornelisz, who
was not in any case unique. Some men were even more greatly favored than he; Pieter van
den Broecke, who had years of experience in Africa, actually joined the company as an
upper-merchant on the recommendation of Gerard Reynst, the son of a prominent soap-boiler
and a future Governor-General of the Indies. Ratelband, op. cit., pp. XXXI,
XXXIV.

The Peperwerf and the building of the Batavia
The island of Rapenburg has
long since become part of the city of Amsterdam and now exists only as a street name and a
square. The yards there dated to 1608, before which the Amsterdam chamber of the VOC
contracted with private shipbuilders for its vessels. Even after that date the six
chambers built their own ships to their own specifications, and there were
subtle—indeed sometimes considerable—differences between the vessels built in
the different yards.

No records survive concerning the construction or the cost of the
Batavia
herself, though she was built in compliance of a directive of 17 March 1626. Given that
average building times were then 8 or 12 months, it would appear to have taken the VOC
another 12–18 months to lay her down. Like all Dutch East Indiamen, she was built not
to a detailed set of plans, but by rule of thumb. The ship was made of green
timber—Dutch shipwrights found seasoned wood too hard to work with. Measurements are
given in English feet, which were slightly bigger than the Amsterdam feet the original
shipwrights worked in (one Amsterdam foot = 11 inches, or 28 cm). In terms of labor,
construction required about 183,000 man hours. P. Gretler, “De Peperwerf,” in R.
Parthesius (ed.), Batavia
Cahier 2: De Herbouw van een Oostindiïvaarder
(Lelystad:
np, 1990), pp. 58–64; Willem Vos, “Een Rondleiding Door een
Oostindiïvaarder,” in Batavia
Cahier 4: Een Rondleiding door een
Oostindiïvaarder
(Lelystad: np, 1993), pp. 3–45; A. van der Zee, “Bronmen
voor Oostindiïvaarders: Het VOC-Boekhoundjournaal,” in R. Parthesius (ed.), Batavia
Cahier
3: De Herbouw van een Oostindiïvaarder
(Leylystad: np, 1990), p. 61; Jeremy Green,
Myra Stanbury, and Femme Gaastra (eds.),
The ANCODS Colloquium: Papers Presented at the
Australia-Netherlands Colloquium on Maritime Archaeology and Maritime History
(Fremantle: Australian National Centre of Excellence for Maritime Archaeology, 1999), p.
71; Bruijn et al.,
Dutch-Asiatic Shipping,
I, pp. 37–9, 93; Philippe Godard,
The
First and Last Voyage of the
Batavia (Perth: Abrolhos Publishing, nd, c. 1993), pp.
56–66; C. R. Boxer, “The Dutch East-Indiamen: Their Sailors, Their Navigators
and Life on Board, 1602–1795,”
The Mariner’s Mirror
49 (1963): 82;
H. N. Kamer,
Het VOC-Retourschip: Een Panorama van de 17de- en 18de-Eeuwse Scheepsbouw
(Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1995), pp. 30–8, 218–9.