Pepper (13 page)
Authors: Marjorie Shaffer
Not surprisingly, elephants figured prominently in the extraordinary royal processions that occurred in Aceh during the peak of the sultanate, when European traders vied for the privilege of buying pepper in the port city and along the west coast of Sumatra. These elaborate parades often incorporated a mind-boggling assortment of richly draped elephants, horses, noblemen, lancers, retainers, slaves, and thousands of soldiers. The sultan himself would ride on an elephant fitted with a howdah (saddle) of pure gold.
During one of the major feasts of Islam in April 1637, Peter Mundy witnessed a huge noisy procession of elephants and men going to the mosque from the palace during the rule of Sultan Iskandar Thani, who owned a thousand captive elephants. He described in great detail this marvelous parade, and it is worthwhile to glimpse the festivities through his eyes to get a sense of these royal processions: “⦠Then came a squadron of Elephantts with certain things like little low turretts on their backes, and in each of them a souldier in redde with a launce in his hand standing upprightt, a shash [turban] on his head part goldâ¦,” Mundy wrote. “The first rancke of Elephantts (they going by 4 in a rank) had each of them 2 greatt swords, or rather long Iron Sithes Fastned to their tusks.⦠Next after these came another Number of Elephantts with little turretts or Cradles on their backes allsoe, somewhatt high railed, whereon were placed smalle gunnes ⦠with a man to manage them. Affter these other elephantts with more turretts with 2 men in each ⦠then other Elephantts with long flags ⦠Affter these came a Multitude with gunnes, and then as many with very long pikes ⦠Amongst all were led many good horses with ritch saddles and Furniture; then a guard of Eunuches on horsebacke withoutt saddles ⦠Then commeth the King on a greatte and stately Elephantt, richly adorned and covered all downe to the Feete.⦠Hee was mounted alofft on a ritch seatt which was covered overhead with a very ritch high Double Pavilion or arche â¦
“Att his Issuing Forth the Musick played, some of them by turnes and others alltogether ⦠all the afforesaid musick Discordantt, Clamorous, and full of Noise. The Marche was alsoe very confuzed and on heapes, there beeing scar[c]e room and tyme For order. However, it was all rare and straunge to behold,
viz.
, the Multitude of greatt Elephantts accoutred and armed after severall Manners, Weapons and Ornamentts, costly Furniture, ett., there beeing Nere as Many More Elephantts allsoe fitted for this shew (thatt could nott Marche with the rest For lack of roome) which stood in sundry places by while the others passed.”
Once again Mundy provides a clearly written, eyewitness account of life in Aceh. He must have spent a good deal of time watching the jostling crowd of men and elephants pass, although he doesn't mention how long it took for the parade to reach the mosque. Mundy drew the procession, and he even included the hordes of onlookers at its edges. His drawings are like postcards from the seventeenth century.
The next day the sultan invited Mundy and other foreigners to an animal fight featuring elephants. Nearly one hundred and fifty were arranged in a circle, and pairs of furious elephants fought in the middle of the ring. Mundy wrote that the elephants were: “Doing their uttermost to hurt each other and Drive backe by shooving and setting their huge Massy bodies one against the other, soe thatt one or the other Must give ground att last.”
Elephants were part of the blood sports enjoyed by the Acehnese, who seemed to have plenty of leisure time on their hands. Among the other Englishmen who observed animal fights in Aceh was William Keeling, an extraordinary seaman who was only twenty-four years old when he served as captain of a ship for the Company's second voyage to the East Indies in 1604. He saw a contest of a hundred elephants and described the fight of buffalos as “⦠full of strength and sleight, seeming therein to have a kind of discourse, and was indeed the most pleasing fight twixt beasts I ever saw.” Keeling commanded the tumultuous third voyage to the East Indies in 1607, when it took his ships sixteen months to reach Priaman in Sumatra. He then sailed to the far eastern Spice Islands, where the Dutch accused him of conspiring to kill a group of VOC men. He survived and subsequently led another Company expedition in 1615 at the age of thirty-five.
Keeling was unusually devoted to his wife. He did not want to be separated from her when he was told to remain in Bantam or in Jakarta to take charge of the Company's business in the East Indies. The Company turned down his petition to have her travel with him. Hanging on as long as she could, she remained on his ship until the last moment it left the Downs. The Company later rescinded its instructions to Keeling and he returned home with his fleet from Bantam.
Another captain who witnessed animal fights in Aceh was Thomas Best, a veteran seaman who led the Company's famous tenth voyage in 1613. The animal fights began with six elephants, followed by four buffalos, “which made a very excellent and fierce fight. Their fierceness such that hardly 60 to 80 men could part them, fastening ropes to their hind legs to draw them asunder,” Best wrote. The entertainment finished with ten to twelve rams pitted against one another “which likewise made very greate fight; and so continued till it was darke, that wee coulde not see longer.” Sultan Iskandar Muda then gave the Englishmen a “bankett of at least 40 dishes, with such plenty of hott drincks as might have suffized a druncken armye.”
Although Keeling and Best returned with pepper to England, neither could persuade the sultan to sign a trade treaty. The crafty sultan had wined and dined them, and provided them with riveting spectacles, but he refused to give away his pepper exclusively to any foreign country.
The spectacular animal fights staged during the reign of Iskandar Muda and his son-in-law fell out of favor among the sultanas who succeeded them over the following fifty years. Today, the Asiatic elephant (
Elephas maximus
), which made its home in Sumatra, Southeast Asia, and India, is considered a threatened species, a victim of the export trade, the reduction of their forest habitats, and disease. Nowadays it is mostly the tourists who ride elephants in Asia.
Feasts in Flowing Water
The sultans of Aceh enjoyed feasting, but flowing water probably offered the most pleasant setting for dining grandly in Aceh. Imagine being fêted all day in a shallow river of clear, cool running water, as merchant traders regularly were, amid the splendors of the tropics. You drink rice wine while servants offer food on golden platters. At the end of the day, you return to your quarters for a nap. In the seventeenth century, these men, who bathed infrequently on their long voyages to the East, emerged in Aceh into a land where fresh water was abundantâprobably one of the reasons why the Acehnese especially liked to bathe, as historian Anthony Reid has noted. The city is located on the Aceh River and faces the Andaman Sea. The English pirate Dampier noted during his stay in Aceh that “They are here, as at Mindanao, very superstitious in washing and cleansing themselves from defilements, and for that reason they delight to live near the rivers or streams.⦠The river of Achin near the city is always full of people of both sexes and ages.⦠Even the sick are brought to the river to wash.”
This was a land where baths and pleasure gardens dotted the banks of the river, where cleanliness was desired and appreciated. Few Europeans of that time would have understood the benefits of bathing. Modern plumbing and modern hygiene didn't exist. Human waste was flung out the window from a chamber pot. The water for baths had to be hauled from wells, and bathing was a low priority compared to all of the other chores that had to be done.
In 1613 Thomas Best and some of his men were with Iskandar Muda when he sat in a river for five or six hours while his nephew poured water over him from a bucket made of pure gold. An English merchant who observed this scene wrote that Best and some Dutch merchants were taken to the river, which was six or seven miles from the town, with the King, who was riding an elephant. “They came to a place wher they washed themselves; the King sitting upon a seatt in the midst of the river, with our Generall and the Dutch merchants and all his nobles aboutt him in the watter, with aboundance of people that were spectators on the shoare; his nephew poureing watter upon him as he satt, with a golden buckitt, for a space of 5 or 6 houres. Then afterwards they had a great banquett, with aboundance of food and arack, dressed after their manner. Having ended the banquett, they retourned to the Kinges pallace, with our English trumpetts sounding before them, and women playing and singing before the Kinge.”
Another daylong fête was described by William Keeling in May 1616. In Aceh Keeling was entertained in a river during the early rule of Iskandar Muda, and his sense of sheer joy offers a rare insight into his feelings. “At the King's commaund,” he related, “I ⦠attended him to the spring of the river about 5 or 6 mile from the towne where we dyned w[i]th him & and his nobilitie sitting above the waist in water, the cleerest and coolest I ever saw or felt.” At the time, many of Keeling's men were dying of dysentery, and Keeling himself eventually became sick. Meanwhile, he was constantly concerned with the lading of pepper, which pressed on him as the days went by and more of his men died. “I sent to the King and bought 300 bayars of his pepper from Pryaman, the bahar is 395 English pounds,” he wrote in his journal. “⦠I came aboard the
Dragon
as well to prepare the Peppercorne to her speedy lading [of] pepper as for my health, now too impaired by a long flux [dysentery],” he noted in another journal entry. Yet, despite his preoccupations, he could still revel in water “the clearest and coolest” he had ever seen or felt. After Keeling returned to England in 1617, he never went to sea again. Dysentery had taken a toll on his health, and he died at the age of forty-two in 1620.
As the seventeenth century unfolded, the joyous processions and feasts staged for the English and Dutch traders who sailed to Sumatra to buy pepper became mere memories. Merry scenes of Europeans aloft sacred elephants dissolved into armed conflict for trade, profits, and control as the Dutch, in particular, pushed to establish spice monopolies throughout Asia. In this century, the Dutch dominated the Asia trade with their fast ships and brutal focus on establishing spice monopolies in cinnamon (Sri Lanka), cloves (the Moluccas), nutmegs, and mace (Banda Islands). They made sure no one else had access to these spices, and deliberately kept supplies low to raise purchase prices in Europe. The penalty was death for anyone caught buying these spices from anyone other than the Dutch. When sultans in maritime ports would not agree to the terms set by the Dutch to buy spices, the northern Europeans would blockade the ports. Aceh, for example, was the target of a crippling Dutch blockade in the 1650s. Since many Asian spice ports were dependent on boats to bring in food, the blockades effectively starved the local population.
In the early seventeenth century, English and Dutch traders sought to buy pepper from regions in Sumatra that were not controlled by either Aceh or Bantam, the pepper-rich sultanate in northeastern Java that also held sway over the pepper trade in southern and southwestern Sumatra. There was only one area that was independentâJambi on the east coast of the island. It has been estimated that each raft reaching downstream ports in Jambi could carry 150 piculs (about 19,950 pounds), and that forty thousand to fifty thousand bags of pepper were taken annually from the Jambi highlands. Both the English and the Dutch, along with the Portuguese, Chinese, Malaysians, and Javanese, flocked there to buy pepper even though the settlement of Jambi was difficult to reach, lying more than eighty miles upstream along a navigable but dangerous river.
It took great skill to maneuver lightweight boats laden with pepper through the dangerous rapids of inland rivers and their tributaries, so the Europeans left this part of the business to the natives, whose skill with rafts was legendary, although their rafts occasionally overturned in the turbulent waters. Luckily, hardy pepper berries are not damaged by water. The Europeans negotiated prices with the downstream rulers, but upstream villages were responsible for bringing the pepper to the port. In turn, the Europeans cut deals with local rulers to ensure that the pepper was grown and transported.
It was an unusual situation in eastern Sumatra, and for a while the English and the Dutch tolerated each other because there was pepper in Jambi, as well as in neighboring Palembang. Elsewhere the Dutch weren't as open-minded.
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Five
The British Invade
IN 1685 THE ENGLISH EAST INDIA COMPANY FOUNDED A PEPPER COLONY IN BENKOOLEN ON THE TREACHEROUS SOUTHWESTERN COAST OF SUMATRA. AFTER YEARS OF FINANCIAL LOSSES, THE NATIVES WERE FORCED TO PLANT PEPPER BUT THE COLONY WAS NEVER PROFITABLE. EVEN SO, THE ENGLISH STAYED FOR 140 YEARS.
“Of those productions of Sumatra, which are regarded as articles of commerce, the most important and most abundant is pepper. This is the object of the East India Company's trade thither, and this alone it keeps in its own hands; its servants, and merchants under its protection, being free to deal in every other commodity.”
