Pepper (21 page)

By the second half of the seventeenth century, the VOC had begun to successfully apply pressure to control prices, forcing spice growers to sell their crops at low contract prices. The long arm of the VOC could be felt throughout the pepper-growing regions of Sumatra and Java. A once-profitable endeavor had now lost its luster, and a Malaysian court chronicle of the late seventeenth century conveys the lamentable predicament of pepper growers: “Let people nowhere in this country plant pepper, as is done in Jambi and Palembang. Perhaps those countries grow pepper for the sake of money, in order to grow wealthy. There is no doubt that in the end they will go to ruin.”

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When Indian cloth could no longer be traded widely for pepper in Southeast Asia, the VOC and the English East India Company found another item that could be substituted easily—opium grown in India. The narcotic was first traded for pepper along the Malabar Coast of India in 1663, when the Dutch conquered Cochin, and soon after opium began flowing to Indonesia. By 1688 the VOC was exporting some 56,000 pounds of opium from Bengal to the archipelago; twenty years later, the amount had doubled. By the early eighteenth century more than 100,000 pounds were exported during peak years, which rarely satisfied VOC orders of up to 190,000 pounds annually.

Public auctions of opium were held in Batavia, where merchants from Indonesia, Malaysia, and China bought the drug, and the Dutch pursued exclusive contracts to sell opium in Sumatra and Java. After the Dutch conquered Bantam, they made a special effort to make opium widely available in Java, but forbid the sale of the drug in Batavia itself, fearing that slaves in the city would start smoking. Obviously, the Dutch were well aware of the debilitating effects of the drug. Historian Om Prakash writes that opium was smoked everywhere in the Indonesian archipelago, but it was most widely used in Java, Sumatra, and the Malay Peninsula. The predilection for opium among the Malaysians was noted by many European travelers.

“The Mallayans are such admirers of opium that they would mortgage all they hold most valuable to procure it,” wrote Charles Lockyer, one of the many Englishmen who engaged in private trade in Asia. In 1711 he described opium addicts who disengaged from their day-to-day lives, caught in the grip of their addiction. “Those that use it to excess are seldom long-lived, which themselves are very sensible of; yet they are no longer satisfied than their cares are diverted by the pleasing effects of it,” he noted. “I have been told by an Englishman who accustomed himself to it at Benkoolen; it is a difficult matter to leave it, after once experiencing the exquisite harmony, where with it affects every part of the body. On such a tickling in his blood, such a languishing delight in everything he did, that it justly might be termed a pleasure too great for human nature to support.”

The scholar William Marsden commented on opium smoking in his masterwork
The History of Sumatra
. He, too, noted that Malaysians were particularly attached to opium, and estimated that about 120 chests, or about 16,800 pounds, were purchased annually on the west coast of Sumatra. Each sold for about three hundred dollars, although he reported that in times of scarcity a chest could be sold for its weight in silver, and a single chest of about 140 pounds of the drug could fetch up to three thousand dollars. Marsden didn't believe that opium was a problem and described it as a “luxury” in Sumatra. The vicious attacks and furious quarrels attributed to its use were, in his estimation, “idle notions.”

In fact, all of the Europeans in the eighteenth century sold the narcotic in Asia because it was another extraordinarily profitable commodity, an integral part of Asian trade. The United States joined the trade at the turn of the nineteenth century when the newly founded country entered the pepper business. Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont, an American merchant, distiller, and major landowner in New York City, knew about opium's importance. He was a pepper trader in his youth. Opium, he wrote in 1796, was the “chief article” bartered for pepper in Penang (off of the west coast of the Malay Peninsula), adding that “consumption among the Mallays is immense.” Bengal textile piece goods, iron, old muskets and pistols, among other items, were also traded for pepper, which could be bought at about nine to twelve cents a pound, he noted.

American pepper traders routinely bartered opium for pepper in Indonesia and Malaysia during the nineteenth century. “Nothing is more certain than that opium brings generally 100 percent [profit] when sold to the Malays in Barter, and no reason can be alleged against visiting the Malay Coasts except Danger,” wrote merchant Thomas Patrickson to Isaac Hazelhurst in 1789. Hazelhurst owned a shipping company in New York. Patrickson touted the advantages of trading opium for pepper, calculating that 3,000 to 4,000 pounds sterling would buy enough opium in India to acquire an entire cargo of pepper, some 350,000 pounds, from the Malaysians. In turn, the pepper would yield 35,000 pounds sterling, a
1,000 percent
profit on their initial investment.

Opium wasn't the only means of buying pepper. The archipelago had a long history of trade, and coins made of silver, lead, and copper were used to purchase pepper in Indonesia. In 1768 Stavorinus, the VOC captain, for example, sailed from Batavia carrying eight chests with fifty thousand Spanish dollars on board to pay for pepper purchased from the king of Bantam. And it was well known that people in Sumatra liked to wear coins as ornaments. Raffles noticed that in the interior of Sumatra people wore necklaces of coins. He observed that “women and children were decorated with a profusion of silver ornaments, and particularly with strings of dollars and other coins hanging two or three deep round the neck. It was not uncommon to see a child with a hundred dollars round her neck.”

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When the market for Indian textiles in Southeast Asia declined, a new market opened in Europe for this cloth, which was used for clothing and furnishings. By the late seventeenth century, the export to Europe of piece goods from Bengal, in particular, had soared. The Bengal textiles, a mixture of cotton and silk, were of finer quality than the brightly colored, coarser calicoes from Gujarat and other areas of western India, which were needed for the slave trade in the West Indies. Increasingly, the ledgers of both the VOC and the English East India Company displayed Indian textiles. By 1738 textiles, silk, and cotton accounted for nearly 30 percent of the value of goods exported from Batavia.

By that time tea and coffee, too, had become a staple in the Asia-to-Europe trade. Near the end of the eighteenth century, the English East India Company was importing some fifteen to twenty million pounds of tea from China, a trade that largely eluded the VOC. Millions of pounds of black and green teas, with names like souchong, hyson skin, young hyson, Singlo, Twankay, and Bohea, were packed in chests and loaded onto ships in Canton.

The English East India Company had also taken over the trade in textiles by the last half of the eighteenth century. “The trade in piece goods, which in former times, produced such considerable benefit to the company, is now almost entirely in the hands of the English; at least they are very detrimental to the portion of it that remains with us, by their competition for purchases [in India],” VOC Captain Stavorinus observed in 1770. In the nineteenth century, the English would provide their own textiles to compete with Indian goods in Asia; the advent of machine weaving and spinning in the second half of the eighteenth century allowed the English to sell their textiles at affordable prices for the first time in Asia. Trade in English manufactured goods was still a “new thing” in Asia, noted Pierrepont, the New York-based trader, in 1796.

Textiles and tea became main sources of revenue for the English East India Company in the eighteenth century, although pepper was never omitted from its ledgers. The spice was still an integral part of the intra-Asian trade, especially in China, and millions of pounds were imported to Europe annually. However, by the last half of the eighteenth century the spice that originally inspired ocean travel had been overtaken by other luxuries and temptations in the world's marketplaces.

What contributed to the downfall of the VOC? It is hard to believe that a quasi-military, government-supported company that wielded wide power in Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could ever be brought down, but it fell as a result of its own internal dynamics. Part of the reason stemmed from the way it treated its employees. The men employed by the VOC knew that they were risking their lives in the tropics, but they also knew that they could strike it rich in the tropics. Their daily wages were a pittance, but they could buy and sell spices on their own or steal spices from the company's ships and make a fortune. The company, thousands of miles away, could do very little to stop them. “Virtually nobody was able to live on their official pay, let alone save anything for eventual retirement, and pensions were only awarded under very exceptional circumstances before about 1753,” wrote historian C. R. Boxer in his groundbreaking book
The Dutch Seaborne Empire
. “The result was that everyone from Governor-General to cabin-boy traded on the side and everyone else knew it.” The so-called quasi-legal “private trade,” which allowed VOC seamen and merchants to bring home a small amount of goods from the East, was so widely abused that some ships returning to Holland carried more “private goods” than company goods.

Many other opportunities for enrichment existed. Squeezing “extra” commissions from native suppliers, doctoring the books with overvalued goods, using different scales to weigh incoming and outgoing merchandise, and adulterating and pilfering goods destined for VOC warehouses or for voyages to Holland were common ploys.

One enterprising employee in Bengal, India, set up his own company in his wife's name to carry on private trade. Their two nephews, who held important jobs with the VOC in Bengal, were made shareholders of their uncle's company and they negotiated deals to buy private goods on VOC ships at below-market prices using a phony merchant's name. Afterward, they sold the merchandise at a higher price for their uncle's company. If anyone objected, they would claim the private goods for the VOC.

Some notorious cases of graft emerged involving VOC officials who headed factories in India. Disciplinary actions were taken, but business soon returned to its old footing. An investigator estimated that fraud and private trading in India had cost the company as much as 3.8 million guilders from 1678 to 1686.

Fraud was endemic throughout the ranks of the company. Even lowly sailors had ingenious ways of disguising their perfidy aboard VOC ships. “The seamen [the Dutch] who go to the Spice Islands aren't supposed to bring spice back for themselves, except for a small amount for their own use, a pound or two,” wrote William Dampier. “Yet they will meet vessels at sea and sell their cloves—10 to 15 tons out of 100, and yet seemingly carry their complement to Batavia. They will pour water among the remaining part of their cargo, which will swell them to that degree, that the ship's hold will be as full again, as it was before they were sold. This is but one instance of many hundreds of little deceitful arts the Dutch seamen in those parts have among them.… I believe there are nowhere greater thieves.”

In Batavia, a crucial node for the opium trade, smuggling proved irresistible. In 1676, a year when the harvest was particularly good, company employees smuggled 152,600 pounds of the drug into Batavia, which was several times more than the amount of opium imported by the VOC into the city from India.

At one time corruption was thought to be the main factor that led to the end of the VOC—the initials VOC were once cynically referred to as
Vergaan Onder Corruptie
, collapsed through corruption. Undoubtedly smuggling and stealing, and a thousand other fraudulent insults, caused irreparable damage to the VOC, but modern historians believe that inadequate financing, the continued focus on spices at the expense of new markets such as tea, and the disastrous Fourth Anglo-Dutch War in 1780 also contributed substantially to the VOC's eventual downfall.

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The Dutch weren't the only Europeans in Asia who knew how to rip off their employer. Near the end of the eighteenth century, the economist Adam Smith, a leading critic of the English East India Company, wrote that the Company's monopoly relied not only on the price people paid for East India goods and the profits made on its imports, but also on “all the extraordinary waste which the fraud and abuse, inseparable from the management of the affairs of so great a company, must necessarily have occasioned.”

Like its Dutch counterpart, the English East India Company also paid its employees a pittance, and consequently fraud and the so-called private trade flourished among everyone working for the Company, from the crews on pepper ships to the highest-ranking factor in India. Some of these men became quite wealthy. Remember Elihu Yale donated his fortune from private trading to found Yale University. He owned four country ships.

The Company could do little to deter private trade. The British, however, had an alternative that was largely unavailable to the men employed by the VOC. Unlike the Dutch, the British could become country traders, men who legitimately traded on their own in Asia, which provided a sort of escape valve for disgruntled English East India Company seamen, who were legion. Desertion was so common among men serving the English and Dutch companies that a standard “form of agreement” for the rendition of deserters had been drawn by the early eighteenth century.

The English East India Company finally gave its employees official sanction to trade in Asian goods, except for pepper and calicoes, in 1667, even though Englishmen had already been trading on their own accounts for decades. As early as 1614, private trade was already well established. That year an English factor in Bantam accused several of his countrymen of “purloining the Company's goods, deceiving private men, insolvent behavior … and great wealth they have suddenly gathered together.”