Vermeer's Hat (28 page)
Authors: Timothy Brook
For those who managed not to die, illness and injury were there to wear them down. By the end of Bontekoe’s tour of duty that
May, he still had ninety men, but barely half of them were well enough to work. Still, that was enough of a crew for Bontekoe’s
last exploit along the China coast: intercepting a Chinese junk heading for Manila with 250 passengers and cargo intended
for that year’s Acapulco trade. Bontekoe seized the ship and all its cargo, which he wrote was worth “thousands,” and carried
the luckless passengers and crew to the Pescadore Islands in the Strait of Taiwan where the Dutch needed construction labor
to build fortifications for a trading base. Chinese officials later convinced the Dutch to abandon this base and withdraw
to Taiwan. The laborers were not repatriated, however, but shipped off for sale at the slave market in Batavia. This sort
of piracy was why, as a Japanese interpreter in Nagasaki observed, “whenever Chinese ships bound for Nagasaki sighted Red
Hair ships, they behaved like a mouse does when it sees a cat.” In service to the VOC doctrine that the inherent right of
all nations to trade justified seizing cargo from those who denied it, Bontekoe was one of the cats.
NOT EVERY DUTCHMAN STRANDED ON an Asian coast returned to his ship. Four years after Bontekoe captured his last junk, a Dutch
sailor found himself stranded beyond the far north end of the Chinese coast on the Korean island of Cheju. Nothing was heard
of Jan Janszoon Weltevree for twenty-six years. In 1653, the VOC ship
Sparrow Hawk
was on its way from Taiwan to Nagasaki with a load of pepper and sugar and twenty thousand deer skins. A powerful storm engulfed
the ship for five days, blowing her off course and onto Cheju Island. Of the crew of sixty-four, thirty-six men survived the
wreck. They too were not heard of until eight of the thirty-six escaped by sea to the Dutch outpost in Nagasaki thirteen years
later. They carried with them the report that a Dutchman named Weltevree had been living in Korea for thirty-nine years.
Weltevree had sailed to Asia on the
Hollandia
. After reaching Batavia in July 1624, he found work on a smaller ship, the
Ouwerkerck
. As no Dutch-built VOC ship by that name sailed from Holland during this period, the
Ouwerkerck
must have been built in Batavia for the intra-Asian trade. The ship was bound from Taiwan to Nagasaki in July 1627 when a
Chinese junk heading for Moon Harbor on the Fujian coast crossed its bows: another mouse, falling into the paws of another
cat. The junk was carrying a hundred and fifty passengers back to Fujian after the trading season in Manila, presumably laden
with American silver. The ship was unarmed and easily taken. The Dutch captain brought half the Chinese passengers to the
Ouwerkerck
and transferred sixteen of his own sailors to the junk to take charge. The plan was to sail the ships to Taiwan, empty the
junk of its cargo, then transfer the hapless passengers south to Batavia as slave labor. When a storm struck before the ships
reached Taiwan, the cat lost its mouse. The captain of the
Ouwerkerck
abandoned hope of finding his prize and instead headed south to prey on Portuguese ships heading to Japan. If he could not
steal American silver from Chinese ships, he could steal Chinese silks from Portuguese. Soon enough a convoy of five Portuguese
ships came into range. The captain did not know that the five had been refitted for combat and were sailing in disguise to
lure unsuspecting Dutch ships into attack. The
Ouwerkerck
’s attack backfired. The captain and his crew of thirty-three were captured, and the ship was towed to Macao for public burning.
The junk that the
Ouwerkerck
had captured was blown in the opposite direction and washed up at the south end of Korea. Three of the Dutchmen, including
Weltevree, went ashore at Cheju Island to find water. While they foraged, the Chinese on board regained control of their ship
and sailed away, abandoning those who had gone ashore. The “pirate,” as the modern historian who has reconstructed Weltevree’s
story calls him, “had been done in by his victims.”
Weltevree must have handled his first encounter with Koreans with dexterity, for not only did the Koreans not decapitate him,
as the Chinese had done to some of Las Cortes’s fellow shipwreck survivors, but they recruited him for his technical skills.
The sole condition of his employment was that he not leave the country. Now that he was in Korea, he had to accept that he
was there for good. His two fellow castaways died fighting against a Manchu invasion in 1635, but Weltevree survived, and
indeed flourished, as a royal gunsmith. The arquebuses carried by the Koreans who apprehended the
Sparrow Hawk
crew may well have been manufactured under his supervision.
Weltevree did more than just adapt to his new circumstances in Korea: he prospered. He worked hard, rose in rank, married
a Korean woman, and had children who were assigned to carry on their father’s trade as gunsmiths. By the time the
Sparrow Hawk
wrecked on the coast of Cheju, Weltevree had been speaking and presumably reading Korean for twenty-six years. Having spoken
no Dutch for that long, when confronted with the Dutch sailors, he found it awkward to speak to them. As one of the
Sparrow Hawk
survivors later recorded, they were surprised that “a Man of 58 Years of Age, as he then was, could so forget his Mother-tongue,
that we had much to do at first to understand him; but it must be observ’d he recover’d it again in a month.” Weltevree had
crossed so far over the language barrier with his host culture that he found it difficult to cross back when the need arose.
He may have learned other Asian languages, for one of his duties was to take charge of foreign sailors and fishermen—mostly
Japanese and Chinese—who were shipwrecked on the coast. He shared command of the newly shipwrecked Dutch sailors with a Chinese
sergeant, in fact, and they may well have communicated with each other in a language other than Korean.
Weltevree integrated himself into Korean society so well that Koreans came to accept him as one of them. The Korean official
who introduced him to the
Sparrow Hawk
survivors laughed when they expressed delight in finding a Dutchman. “You are mistaken,” the Korean told them, “for he is
a
Coresian
.” Weltevree may have looked Dutch to the Dutchmen, but to the Koreans he had become something else. The Dutchmen who found
him a generation later could scarcely imagine such a transformation. His entry into Korea had been a matter of necessity at
the time, but by the time the
Sparrow Hawk
struck the coast, Weltevree had no wish to leave. He had attained a position of much greater importance than he ever could
have achieved back home, and in that condition survived into his seventies surrounded by his sons. His life as a Korean turned
out far better than his life as a returned Dutchman would have been.
When the survivors of the
Sparrow Hawk
learned in their first interview with the Korean king that they would not be permitted to return to the Dutch post in Japan,
they were shocked. Repatriation was the shipwreck convention in Europe, and they had expected it to be respected in Asia.
“We humbly beseech your Majesty,” the Dutch sailors addressed the king through Weltevree, “that since we have lost our Ship
to the Storm, you would be pleas’d to send us over to Japan, that with the assistance of the Dutch there, we might one Day
return to our Country, to enjoy the Company of our Wives, Children and Friends.”
“It is not the custom of Corea to suffer strangers to depart the Kingdom,” the king replied. “You must resolve to end your
Days in my Dominions. I will provide you with all Necessaries.” The king saw no reason to alter standard procedure, as foreigners
who left Korea might take back strategic information that could be used against the king in the future.
The king then became the ethnologist and ordered them to sing Dutch songs and dance Dutch dances so that he could witness
European culture firsthand. After the performance, he gave them each a set of clothes “after their Fashion,” as one of the
survivors put it, and assigned them to serve in the royal bodyguard. Henceforth they would live as Koreans. Some learned to
function well in the Korean language, but most were not content with their new position. Two years later, the ship’s master
and a gunner approached a Manchu ambassador visiting Korea to ask that he take them back to China, whence they understood
they could be repatriated. The Koreans, learning of this appeal, were adamant that this should not happen. They bribed the
Manchu ambassador to get the two Dutchmen back and threw them in prison, where they eventually died. Eleven years after this
incident, another eight, unwilling to accept their life sentence, escaped by boat to Japan. They were the ones who carried
the story of Weltevree, otherwise thought lost at sea, to the outside world.
That left eight of the original crew to live out their lives as “Core-sians.” Among them was a sailor named Alexander Bosquet.
This man had had several identities before being stranded in Korea. He started life as a Scot, possibly one of the Scottish
exile community in France; then went looking for work in the Netherlands, where he changed his name to Sandert Basket; then
sailed to Asia as a ship’s gunner for the VOC. He ended up finally in Korea—where he must have been obliged to adopt yet another
name, this time a Korean one. Bosquet/Basket managed to be Scottish, French, Dutch, and Korean by turns. How many of the other
“Dutchmen” on the
Sparrow Hawk
started out as something else or ended up as something else again?
WELTEVREE NEVER MEANT TO LAND on Korean soil. Nor had he any intention of staying there when he did, though in time he accepted
the sovereignty into which he had fallen. China handled such affairs differently, as we have seen. Adriano de las Cortes and
the survivors of the
Guía
were permitted to repatriate after clearing themselves of the suspicion of being pirates. But there were other Europeans who
did enter China with the intention of staying: missionaries.
There were two ways to take up permanent residence in China. One was to petition the regional authorities for permission,
which the Jesuits successfully did starting in the 1580s. It was understood on both sides that, by entering China of their
own will, they were agreeing to remain in China for the remainder of their lives. From the Chinese point of view, the only
reason a foreigner would come and then leave, other than to bring tribute, was to spy. The other way to enter China was to
sneak in unnoticed, which is what missionaries of the Dominican order started to do in the 1630s. These two ways into China—by
the “front door” through Macao (the Jesuits’ route), and by the “back door” along the Fujian coast (the Dominicans’)—happen
to be the same two paths by which tobacco first entered China.
The Jesuit strategy of working with the political authorities in China was based on the hope that their support would translate
into open toleration and popular acceptance. The most successful of the early Jesuits was the Italian missionary Matteo Ricci,
who entered China from Macao in 1583. After spending a decade improvising his dress and conduct, Ricci worked out an accommodative
relationship with Chinese customs and beliefs that enabled him to find his way into elite society—and after 1604 to collaborate
with Paolo Xu on translation projects. Their success encouraged the Jesuits to follow this path of accommodation. By the time
of Xu’s death in 1633, there were roughly a dozen Jesuit missionaries working throughout the realm.
The Dominicans’ strategy was the diametric opposite of the Jesuits’ accommodative posture. They were suspicious that accommodating,
both politically and theologically, compromised the integrity of Christian doctrine. The Dominicans preferred to sidestep
officialdom and embed themselves in local social networks below the radar of the state. This is why, when an Italian Dominican
named Angelo Cocchi landed on an island off the Fujian coast on the second day of 1632, he was not another hapless shipwreck
victim seeking repatriation, but someone who intended his journey to end exactly here in China.
Angelo Cocchi was fortunate to have reached China. By all rights he should have died before reaching land. He and his party
of twelve had bought passage on a ship that was leaving Taiwan two days earlier. Cocchi had been on the island for the previous
three years heading a Dominican mission that had been founded five years earlier. (The Spanish would shortly abandon their
little foothold and leave Taiwan to the Dutch.) Juan de Alcarazo, the Spanish governor of the Philippines, asked him to open
trade negotiations with the Chinese governor of Fujian, Xiong Wencan. Cocchi had agreed readily, for the request handed him
a long-sought opportunity to go to China. His dream to convert the Chinese may have dawned on him as early as 1610, when the
thirteen-year-old Florentine boy entered the Dominican order as a novice. Perhaps the idea took form over the next decade
of study in Fiesole and Salamanca, or when he left Cádiz for Panama in 1620, or when he took ship in Acapulco for Manila in
1621. The idea was certainly upon him by 1627, when he was ordered to learn the Fujian dialect in Cavite, the port of Manila
where all Chinese, and possibly his former teacher, would be systematically massacred in 1639.
On 30 December 1631, Angelo Cocchi took passage on a Chinese junk sailing from Taiwan to Fujian. His multicultural retinue
included a fellow Dominican from Spain, Tomas de la Sierra, two Spanish guards, seven Filipinos, a Mexican, and a Chinese
interpreter. Whatever they were bringing with them in the way of presents, supplies, and rumored silver was too great a temptation
for the sailors of the vessel. The crew wasted no time. On the first night at sea, they attacked the foreigners, intending
to kill them all and take their possessions. Five Filipinos, the Mexican, and one Spaniard were killed. The rest retreated
to a cabin and barricaded themselves inside. Each side spent the following day waiting out the other. The next night, New
Year’s Eve, the boat was boarded by yet another gang of pirates, who stripped it of everything it carried, massacred the entire
crew, and left the boat to drift. Did they not know that an Italian, a Chinese, two Spaniards, and two Filipinos were hiding
below deck? It seems not, for they would have been sure to equate foreigners with silver and fight them for it.
