Pepper (20 page)

Once considered one of the great seaports of the world, Batavia was a bustling entrepôt frequented by innumerable vessels. A forest of masts filled its bay. The Indiamen of the English East India Company and other ships sailing between Europe and China stopped in Batavia, and it was the main port for Chinese, Indian, and other Asian ships. During its heyday, roughly from the late seventeenth century until 1730, Batavia was known as the “Queen of the East.” “The Bay of Batavia is the finest and most secure of any in the world,” wrote a French traveler in the 1680s. “Ships ride there without any danger all year round; for that Sea is hardly ever agitated, as well because there are a great number of little Islands that break the waves…”

Indeed, Batavia became famous for its sheltered anchorage. VOC Captain John Splinter Stavorinus observed in 1771 that “the road of Batavia is justly esteemed one of the best in the world, as well with regard to the anchoring-ground … as with regard to the safety it affords to the ships which anchor in it, and to the number which it can contain. Although the road is open from N.W. to E.N.E. and east, yet ships lie as secure and quiet as if they were landlocked, on account of the numerous islands which lie on that side, and break the force of the waves. Ships, therefore, are never obliged to moor stem and stern here; and the current which runs within the islands is not strong, but without them it is very violent.” Stavorinus's informative journals were published in Dutch soon after he died in 1788 at the age of forty-nine. English and French translations quickly followed.

The lure of pepper had brought the Chinese to Java and Sumatra long before the arrival of the Dutch, and they were welcomed in Batavia. Historian Leonard Blussé describes Batavia as a Chinese city built by Chinese migrant laborers who stayed and eventually prospered, often choosing to marry Balinese slave women who were brought to the city. The Dutch needed the Chinese to populate the city because relatively few Dutch wanted to settle in such a faraway place, and in the early years of the city's history Chinese people were abducted in China and brought to Batavia. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the Chinese became an economic force; Batavia, in Blussé's words, was a Chinese colonial town under Dutch protection. Fearing uprisings from the Javanese, the Dutch did not allow them to live in the city.

From the beginning, the Dutch wanted to ensure that Batavia would be the biggest port in Indonesia, and to achieve their goal they resorted to their usual tactics. Only one year after the founding of Batavia, the Dutch blockaded Jambi in eastern Sumatra and Bantam in Java in order to divert Chinese junks to Batavia. Coen also ordered Dutch ships to remove pepper from Chinese junks under the pretext that the Chinese, who often acted as intermediaries in the pepper trade, were in debt to the Dutch.

The unremitting hunger for pepper among the Chinese was one of the engines that drove trade in Batavia. Richly laden Chinese ships brought “coarse commodities” such as porcelain, ironware, textile piece goods, and leaden coins called
picis,
which were traded for large amounts of pepper. In 1694, for example, over two million pounds of pepper were sold to twenty junks that had arrived in Batavia. Indeed, by the end of the seventeenth century the Dutch had pulled out of direct trade with China entirely and allowed the Chinese to trade in the archipelago without safe conduct passes, a rare privilege.

At around the same time, the rather cozy arrangements between the Dutch and the Chinese in urban Batavia began to fray because of Chinese sugar plantations. As the plantations expanded, a large number of the unemployed and undocumented from China poured into Java to work in the mills. The Dutch reacted by imposing quotas on immigration and instituting residency permits. Many undocumented Chinese people were deported to China; a smaller number was banished to the Cape of Good Hope. Meanwhile, Chinese residents inside the city were being pressed by exorbitant taxes and various extortions, in addition to the monthly poll tax that they had paid since Batavia was established.

When the market for Batavian sugar sank due to changes in supplies to Europe in the 1720s, mills were forced to close and desperate workers filled the countryside. By the 1730s, some 50 percent of Batavia's population was Chinese, and the town of some 24,000 was sitting atop a powder keg. In the spring of 1740, VOC authorities lit the fuse with a plan to ship unemployed Chinese people to Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) in order to solve Batavia's “Chinese problem.” Rumors spread quickly among the Chinese that the Dutch had no intention of sailing to Ceylon but instead planned to throw workers overboard. Chinese workers in the countryside revolted, attacking sugar mills and breaching the walls of the city. They had expected Batavia's Chinese residents to unite with them, but the VOC quickly put down the revolt. The reaction over the following days was swift and horrible. Thousands of Chinese residences and businesses were plundered. Altogether, some ten thousand Chinese people lost their lives in the 1740 massacre. In the aftermath, the Chinese were no longer allowed to live inside the city.

By the nineteenth century, the town had declined significantly, its high walls destroyed, its canals filled. But its polyglot wealth was still evident among the remaining ornate gates and drawbridges that once graced its numerous canals. An octagon church that held a great organ and teakwood pulpit, and a baronial city hall, among other buildings, were reminders of its former glory when “Europeans would doubtless be dazzled, and inclined to envy his hospitable host, the luxurious Batavian,” one observer wrote. Trees with their fragrant blossoms still lined the canals, although the little pavilions where the city's burghers once sat in the evening to enjoy their pipes and beloved beer had disappeared.

Visitors were well aware of the decline in the city's fortunes. Batavia's success as a center for Asian trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not shield the city from disease. Like Benkoolen in Sumatra, Batavia proved to be a graveyard. The sugar plantations in the countryside contributed to the problem. As the plantations expanded, fresh water running through the city's canals was diverted for irrigation and more land was cleared of forest, causing silting and stagnant water that became a breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. In the late 1770s, Stavorinus described Batavia as a “most unwholesome place of abode, and the mortality greater here, than at any other spot of the Company's possessions…”

Thousands of VOC employees died from malaria. Historians estimate that the disease killed about 20 percent of the Dutch population, although the death toll was far higher in some years. In 1768 and 1769, for instance, some 2,400 of 5,490 employees of the company died in the city's hospitals. Situated on a marshy plane, Batavia was “surrounded on all sides by stagnant waters, fens, bogs, and oozy ditches—every street intersected by canals … into which every description of filth was thrown,” wrote J. N. Reynolds, an American who visited Batavia in the 1830s. He described Batavia, “this boasted mart of the world,” as a “garnished sepulcher,… teeming with contagion, pestilence and death.”

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In a relatively short period of time, Indian Ocean ports stretching from India to the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea became acquainted with Dutch traders in their fast ships. Although the VOC and the English East India Company were established nearly simultaneously, from the beginning the VOC was given far greater powers than its English counterpart.

English sovereigns were content to give the John Company an exclusive charter to sell pepper and other spices; the English government did not have a stake in the Company—sovereigns renewed its charter throughout the Company's existence. By contrast, the Jan Company, as the VOC was called, is often described as a “state within a state.” The VOC could negotiate treaties with foreign rulers, hire soldiers, build forts, and arm its ships. It was basically an “armed” company. It also was well financed—the VOC had ten times the capitalization of the English East India Company.

Consequently, the VOC had many more ships than the English East India Company—from 1600 to 1650, for example, the Dutch sent 655 ships to Asia while the English sent only 286, and obviously imported far more pepper. The Dutch took the lead quite early. By 1615 the VOC was importing up to six million pounds of pepper from the East. Pepper accounted for some 60 percent of the VOC's trade in the years 1619 to 1621, and still made up some 50 percent of the value of Dutch trade from Batavia to Europe in 1650. The English East India Company usually lagged far behind during the first half of the seventeenth century, with its annual pepper imports ranging from a low of some 420,000 pounds in 1609 to a high of nearly three million in 1626. The English managed to import more than one million pounds only twelve times in the years between 1603 and 1640.

The VOC was the most successful commercial enterprise of its kind in the seventeenth century, the golden age of Dutch history, when commerce and the arts flourished. This was the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer. Dutch power sprang from its mastery of the seas. A beautiful gold-embossed atlas published in 1630 by Willem Blaeu, one of the most celebrated cartographers of his day, contains depictions of lofty Dutch ships, tricolors unfurled, along the coasts of the New World, Europe, and Asia. In Blaeu's detailed map of Asia, Sumatra is studded with ports. Maps like these hung on the walls of Dutch houses and are seen in some of Vermeer's paintings.

While the VOC profited from trade to Europe, it also benefited substantially from trade to Asia, which was called the country trade. No other European trading company participated in the intra-Asian trade as widely as the VOC did in the seventeenth century. The Dutch joined an already thriving trading network and used their military powers to manipulate it to their own advantage. They understood the vital importance of the intra-Asian trade. “The country trade and the profit from it are the soul of the Company which must be looked after carefully, because if the soul decays, the entire body would be destroyed quickly,” the Gentlemen 17, the directors of the VOC, wrote in 1648.

In order to understand the success of the Dutch in Asian trade, one has to begin with India. Indian textiles were the keys that opened the doors to intra-Asia trade, especially the spice trade. Coarse piecegoods as well as exceptional handwoven textiles from India had long been traded for pepper and other spices in Indonesia, and Indian and Arab traders knew the types of cotton cloth that appealed to people living in each of the vast archipelago's major ports. When the Europeans arrived, their textiles could not possibly compete with the amazing variety of heavier calicoes and thinner muslins of India. Available in plain colors, like white or brown, the cotton textiles also were adorned in colorful patterns produced by wood blocks, or were painted. The printed pieces were called chintz and the painted cloths
pintadoes.
The southeast Coromandel Coast was a vital part of the trade, as Hendrik Brouwer, a high-ranking VOC administrator noted in 1612: “The Coromandel Coast is the left arm of the Moluccas, because we have noticed that without the textiles of Coromandel, commerce is dead in the Moluccas.” He served in Japan and was Governor-General in Asia from 1632 to 1636, and pioneered the “roaring forties” route across the Indian Ocean to Indonesia.

The Dutch could have bought Indian textiles from Aceh in Sumatra, but the dividend-conscious merchants figured it would be more profitable to purchase these textiles from the source, and that is why the Dutch and the English originally sought factories in the cloth-producing areas of India.

Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the butcher of the Bandas, then based in Bantam, Java, saw the possibilities. He described with unusual clarity the complexities of the intra-Asian trade, envisioning a giant swap market with textiles, spices, and precious metals exchanged in a dizzying symphony of trade. Unlike other Europeans, the Dutch relied heavily on precious metals from Japan to help grease the wheels of trade in Asia, an arrangement that worked well for most of Holland's glorious seventeenth century.

In 1619, Coen wrote to the Gentlemen 17 of his vision. “Guserat textiles must be traded for pepper and gold on the shores of Sumatra; pepper from Bantam for reals and textiles from the coast [of Coromandel]; Chinese goods and gold for sandalwood, pepper and reals; silver can be got from Japan for Chinese goods; the textiles from the Coromandel coast for spices, other merchandise and pieces of eight; pieces of eight from Arabia for spices and other small goods, making sure that one compensates the other, and that all is done in ships without money from the Netherlands.
Your worships have the principal spices already so what is stopping it? Only a few ships and a little water to work the pumps
. [Italics added.] Are there more ships in the world than in the Netherlands? Is there a lack of water there to prime the pumps? (I mean with this, send enough money, until the marvelous native trade has been reformed).”

Coen omitted a crucial piece of information in his analysis of the intricacies of intra-Asian trade. How would the Dutch pay for the Indian textiles from Gujarat, the first item on his long list, the one that sets in motion all of the other exchanges? The Indians weren't interested in the European goods offered by the Dutch, which perhaps explains his omission. He was well aware that the Indians wanted money, and they wanted it in the form of silver and other precious metals.

Historians estimate that the Dutch shipped cloth from the Coromandel Coast of India to Batavia worth some 22,000 to 44,000 pounds of silver (roughly one to two million guilders) annually from 1620 to 1650. What happened to all of that silver? No one really knows for sure. Silver flowed into Asia like an enormous river (the Spanish silver mines in South America were a major source), but the Dutch were lucky to find additional supplies of precious metals in Asia, especially silver in Japan, which aided their booming intra-Asian business in the seventeenth century. When the Japanese banned the export of silver in the later part of the century, the textile exchange in Asia had already begun to wind down; people in Java and Sumatra, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, could no longer afford to buy as much cloth, because they were no longer making as much of a profit from growing pepper as they had been earlier in the century.