The Taste of Conquest (35 page)

Jan Pieterszoon Coen sat for at least two portraits. This one belongs to the Rijksmuseum.

What did these young and comfortable upstarts know of Coen’s distant world filled with armed, recalcitrant natives unwilling to submit to his business plan? To these well-fed gentlemen, the festering jungles and pirate-filled bays were no more than marks and scratches on globes and maps. What did it matter to them how Coen dealt with the assets and liabilities in the Far East as long as the investors were happy? Did they not, after all, have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders? Jan Coen has been systematically vilified by modern Dutch historians, but as far as he was concerned, he was simply carrying out the Company’s policies to their genocidally logical conclusion even as the boardroom barons claimed plausible deniability. As he looks across at these boys of privilege, you can almost hear him say (as he did in letter after irritated letter to headquarters), You may not have liked my methods, but where would you be now without me?

Coen began his company career after serving a seven-year accounting apprenticeship in Rome, where he had studied the latest in Italian finance. He came home in 1605, just around the time the first spice-loaded VOC ship returned to Hoorn with a cargo worth more than a million guilders (equivalent to something like two hundred million dollars today). That shipment alone gave the shareholders a 75 percent return on their investment! The same year, VOC shares were trading at 200 percent of their face value on the Amsterdam exchange. No wonder all the ports in Holland were feverish with excitement. Though it’s hard to conceive of the Coen of the Westfries portrait being swept up in any sort of frenzy, he clearly saw the opportunities in the spice trade that an overgrown village like Hoorn could never offer. With this in mind, the twenty-year-old managed to get himself a job on the lowest rung of the VOC corporate ladder, as submerchant, at a monthly salary of thirty-five guilders plus room and board. His bosses recognized his talent and quickly promoted him. By the age of thirty-one, he had the top job in the Far East. Leave it to the Dutch to pick an accountant to build their empire.

A S
AILOR’S
L
IFE

In Amsterdam, the naval museum has at least as many models of the old ships that traveled the spice route round the Cape of Good Hope as Lisbon’s fine collection of miniature galleons and
naus,
but at least in one respect, the Amsterdamers can lord it over the
Lisboetas:
they have a life-size reproduction of an East Indiaman. The ship, appropriately enough named the
Amsterdam,
lies at anchor by the waterfront, several canals east of the Centraal Station, just about where the seventeenth-century VOC shipyards used to be. Naval historians will scoff that it’s a copy, and of an eighteenth-century ship at that, but that would make it only a little more luxurious than earlier models. This is decidedly no cruise ship. The quarters assigned to merchants like Coen wouldn’t pass muster as a walk-in closet, and the ship’s galley would qualify as such only in a New York studio apartment. The downstairs deck is about half the size of a basketball court, which seems spacious enough until you realize it had to accommodate more than three hundred rowdy and bored sailors.

The men who boarded ships like the one carrying Jan Coen to the East Indies in 1607 would have been a motley and unruly bunch. But at least they were free men—unlike the slaves and convicts who populated the
Carreira da Índia
’s later crews. The Dutch seamen were assembled by professional recruiters—known as
zielverkopers,
or “soul merchants”—who trolled the taverns and back alleys of Holland’s slums. One favorite ploy was to advance wages to the impecunious recruits, who typically drank the money at the nearest bar. Now they were not only broke but in debt. They had no choice but to go east. Some never got out of arrears to the Company and remained free men in name only. Later, when the alehouses proved inadequate, the VOC regularly turned to the governors of orphanages and workhouses to supply additional souls to man the Company’s ships. Like the Portuguese, Dutch sailors died by the hundreds from accidents, violence, and disease, with the result that the soul merchants were never out of work.

The discipline aboard Dutch ships was perhaps even more brutal than on other European merchant ships of the time. Maybe people were more hardened after the atrocities of the Spanish war, or perhaps commanders were just desperate to keep their brawling, drunken, malnourished, and often sick crew from murdering one another. The official rule books allowed captains to punish any seaman who injured another by pinning him to the mast with a knife through his hand until he tore himself free. Anyone who killed another was to be bound to the dead victim and thrown overboard. You have to wonder, though, just how often a skipper would resort to punishments that would leave him with even fewer sailors to run the ship.

Yet, in spite of the crowded conditions, the population of a ship like the
Amsterdam
was far smaller than that of the virtual floating cities that set out from Lisbon. For one thing, the early Dutch vessels carried neither settlers, priests, nor colonial functionaries with their attendant slaves and servants. From the standpoint of quantity, the average sailor was probably better fed than his Portuguese counterpart, at least once the Dutch had figured out what would make it through the equatorial heat. (In the first voyage to the Indies and back, half the crew died.) The officers did have the occasional culinary perk, but they were hardly living it up like the
Carreira da Índia
’s elite. If the
Amsterdam
’s kitchen is in any way representative, all the cook had to work with to serve some 333 bodies was a modest grill and a built-in cooking basin just big enough to submerge one big turkey. Any sort of baking was out of the question, so
scheepsbeschuit,
or hardtack (the tough, crackerlike bread universal to all sailing nations), was the only bread for officers and crew alike after the first few days out. (To make it palatable, it was often soaked with beer and sweetened with treacle.)

Food preservation methods were just as limited as they had been in Vasco da Gama’s day. Moreover, to the great consternation of the Dutch crew, beer would not last more than a month or two in the tropical heat. The men were stuck with fetid water washed down with a little wine, which held up better. And not even enough water at that. Shipboard diaries report that sailors had to subsist on something like a quart of water a day, a minuscule quantity when you consider the sweaty work, salty food, and sultry climate. In the first few weeks, they occasionally got to taste a little fresh meat to relieve the monotony. Official VOC provisioning lists allow for several live pigs on board as well as several dozen hens to provide fresh eggs for the sick. But the shelf life of the livestock on board wasn’t much better than the beer. Once the fresh meat had been consumed, the crew was stuck with a diet of boiled salted beef, boiled salty bacon, boiled gruel, and boiled peas. The officers did have it a little better, at least in one intriguing respect. Whereas the only seasoning included on an official VOC provisioning list for the sailors was mustard and horseradish, the officers had a substantial allowance of both domestic and Asian spices to season their gruel—something on the order of three ounces a week.
^*48
This may be the best indication yet of just how much spice middle-class Netherlanders really ate around 1700.

One source of Dutch protein that was denied to Portuguese seamen on the pepper
naus
was, of course, cheese. The weekly three-quarters of a pound of cheese each India-bound sailor received may alone explain why the Hollanders were considerably taller than the Portuguese and better fed than their competitors. Still, by the time they rounded the cape, the ships’ supply of fuel—most likely, dried peat or German coal on the outbound voyage—would often have run out, so, unable to cook, the dehydrated sailors were stuck with little more than worm-infested biscuit to gnaw with their Gouda.

Is it any wonder that the half-starved, alcohol-deprived sailors disembarking at Cochin headed straight for the public houses, where they drank themselves insensate? As the partying ordinances in Hoorn make clear, Calvinist society did not condone indulgent behavior—or at least, not too much of it. Admittedly, even back home, Dutch sailors were notorious for their drinking, fighting, and whoring, but in India, half a world away from nosy neighbors and purse-lipped ministers, the seamen could indulge in every vice without a look back. (Though, if the small number of mixed-race offspring produced by the Dutch in the Far East is any indication, their consummate skill with the tankard may have made them less successful in other indulgences—at least, when compared to the Portuguese.) Knowing full well what fueled a Dutch sailor, Linschoten had reassured his readers that a distilled liquor called arrack existed in plenty in the Indies; he particularly recommends the arrack from Malaysia. In India and Indonesia, arrack was made by distilling the fermented nectar of the palmyra palm (though fermented sugarcane and rice were also used), resulting in a relatively neutral-tasting white firewater.
^*49
A Portuguese visitor to India in 1587 commented that that “araca” is very strong but improves with age, and that raisins were thrown into it to take off its roughness and sweeten it. A commercial version of this same liquor is sold today in little corner shops all over Goa, where it is called
feni.
Goans usually drink it straight, though, for the tourists, they mix it with lime soda. There is also a homemade version, which regularly kills people.

The arrack naturally led to every indiscretion you could think of, and not by common sailors alone. At the Dutch “factory” in Jakarta, the senior Company official made no friends by repeatedly sexually harassing the wives of high-ranking Javanese. This was apparently not an isolated incident. An anonymous journal from a few years later reads like a kinky novel. According to our reporter, the entire senior staff of the same fort behaved in a most un-Calvinist way, with the
dominie
(pastor) jumping right in. It apparently all began with Spanish wine (rather than the local tipple) when four Indonesian/Portuguese mulatas were invited to the officers’ mess to partake of the evening meal. But more was to come:

After the sub-merchants and assistants had left, Raey, the Captain, Dominie Hermans, the Lieutenant, and the Cornet [another officer] remained with the women. They were gay and happy and drank Spanish wine and dallied with those women, singing:
Tabe, tabe, Signora moeda—bawa bantal tikar—betta mau rassa!
[Greetings, young signora—do bring your sleeping mat and pillow!] What the Dominie had preached during the day was already forgotten; all were too busy with those luscious women…The pleasures lasted until one or two in the morning when everyone went to his bunk and three women slept upstairs…The Cornet took [one of the women] home and had his fun with her in her house.

No wonder Coen would later harangue the
Heren XVII
to send a number of “solid Protestant clergymen, not such stupid, uncouth idiots as you have sent heretofore.” All the same, this rowdy, unruly atmosphere dominated the Dutch trading posts throughout most of the early years of the VOC. “It is human beings Your Honors have here, not angels!” Coen repeatedly pointed out to his superiors.

As Coen ascended the Company’s ranks, this sober Calvinist found all the undisciplined behavior not merely distasteful but a drag on the bottom line. He wanted God-fearing families to come establish some sort of core of decency. “Even if they come naked as a jaybird we can still use them,” he wrote to Amsterdam. He was particularly in favor of sending young women to the Indies, which would have the twofold advantage of emptying the orphanages back home and providing wives to Dutchmen overseas. How morally uplifting these “company maidens” would prove to be is highly debatable, but they were to be a feature of the East India trade for centuries. Unlike the Portuguese, the Dutch never made much of an effort to convert anyone to Christianity. As a result, marriages between Dutchmen and locals were rare. In another letter, Coen harps on the fact that the local Muslims will not allow their women to marry Christians, and what’s more, they “kill their children or abort them so that the mother won’t bear heathens.”

“A T
HOROUGH
G
RASP OF
C
OMMERCE”

“This Coen is a person with a thorough grasp of commerce as well as statecraft,” wrote the outgoing governor of the Dutch East Indies in 1613 about the newly appointed president and “bookkeeper-general” of the Company’s Indonesian offices. “He is honest, well-balanced, and does not waste any time. I am certain that there has never been anyone here, nor will there be, who surpasses him in efficiency, as Your Lordships will be able to judge from his letters.”