Batavia's Graveyard (51 page)

Giraldo Thibault’s fencing club
Govert Snoek,
De Rosenkruizers in
Nederland: Voornamelijk in de Eerste Helft van de 17de Eeuw. Een Inventarisatie
(unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Utrecht, 1997), pp. 164–73. The Amsterdam
club shut down in 1615, when Thibault moved temporarily to Cleves, so Cornelisz could not
have attended it himself. However, Thibault returned to the Dutch Republic in 1617 and
apparently settled in Leyden, where he died in 1626. It is possible, though there is
certainly no proof, that Jeronimus could have met the fencing master there; in any case,
the point is that he may well have attended some intellectual salon run along similar
lines.

Guillelmo Bartolotti
Israel, op. cit., pp. 345, 347–8.

Cornelisz and Torrentius
Cornelisz’s association with Torrentius was
taken for granted in the
Batavia
journals, which occasionally refer to him as a
“Torrentian.” For a discussion of this point, see epilogue.

The extent of the Torrentian circle
Snoek, op. cit., pp.
78–9.

Schoudt and Lenaertsz
Ibid., pp. 89–90, 91, 94; ONAH 99, fol. 159;
Bredius,
Torrentius,
p. 42. Lenaertsz witnessed the legal document that Cornelisz.
had drawn up to transfer all his worldly goods to Loth Vogel, a matter so humiliating that
he would surely have called on only a close friend to countersign it.

“. . . apothecaries sold the paints . . .”
Roeper, op. cit. p.
14.

“Disciple”
Antonio van Diemen to Pieter de Carpentier, 30
November–10 December 1629, ARA VOC 1009, cited in Henrietta Drake-Brockman,
Voyage
to Disaster
(Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1995), p. 50. It should
be admitted here that there remains no direct evidence that the two men were acquainted,
and Jeronimus’s name does not appear in the process file concerning Torrentius’s
eventual arrest and trial. Nevertheless, in a town with an elite the size of
Haarlem’s—perhaps 1,000 men—it would actually be remarkable if two men of
such distinct views were not known to one another.

Torrentius
Bredius,
Johannes Torrentius,
pp. 1–3, 12,
22–6, 29–31, 34–5, 45–6, 49, 58; Rehorst,
Torrentius,
pp.
11–4, 15–6, 78–80; Zbigniew Herbert,
Still Life with a Bridle
(London:
Jonathan Cape, 1993), pp. 82–100; Snoek, pp. 60, 67–8, 71, 80–3, 87, 90,
101, 171. He was born in Amsterdam in 1589. Torrentius’s father is famous for having
been the first inmate of Amsterdam’s new prison; his mother, Symontgen Lucasdr,
remained loyal to him throughout his imprisonment and exile and survived him.

According to testimony collected by the painter’s irate father-in-law,
Torrentius was well able to pay for his wife’s upkeep but chose not to. He always
dressed in silk, velvet, and satin and owned a horse or two. On one occasion he offered to
take Cornelia back, but only, he said, so that he could “feed her one day and hit her
three days.”

Van Swieten
Bredius, op. cit., p. 25.

Epicurus
One of the principal philosophers of the Hellenistic period,
Epicurus (ca. 341 b.c.–ca. 270 b.c.) was a materialist who taught that the basic
constituents of the universe are indivisible atoms, explained natural phenomena without
resorting to mysticism, and rejected the existence of the soul. As a corollary, he
believed the main point of life was pleasure. Epicurus himself was no hedonist, believing
instead that true happiness stemmed from control of one’s desires and in overcoming
fear of death. His followers, however, soon acquired a reputation for debauchery, and his
views were naturally anathema to the Calvinist ministers of Holland.

Torrentius’s Gnostic views
Snoek, op. cit., pp. 80–2.

Jeronimus’s philosophy
JFP 28 Sep 1629 [DB 153]; verdict on Andries
Jonas, JFP 28 Sep 1629 [DB 203]; verdict on Jan Pelgrom, JFP 28 Sep 1629 [DB 209]; JFP 30
Sep 1629 [DB 212].

Antinomianism, the Free Spirit and the Libertines
Cohn,
The Pursuit of
the Millennium,
pp. 149–51, 156, 166–7, 170, 172–3, 178, 182–4,
287, 301.

“. . . a state where conscience ceased to operate . . .”
Ibid.,
pp. 148, 151, 178.

Descartes
McIntosh,
The Rosy Cross Unveiled,
p. 71. The philosopher
was then a resident of Amsterdam.

Rubens
Snoek, op cit., p. 142.

Rosicrucian cells
The suggestion that the Rosicrucians were active in
Paris appeared in books and posters distributed throughout the French capital in 1623.
Ibid., pp. 61–2, 108. Reports in several books that there were Rosicrucian cells in
The Hague and Amsterdam appear to be the product of a nineteenth-century hoax. Ibid., pp.
182–4; McIntosh, op. cit., p. 69.

The Rosicrucian debate in the United Provinces
Snoek, op. cit., pp.
62–3, 103–8; Herbert, op. cit., p. 86.

Investigation of the Rosicrucians
Snoek, op. cit., pp. 62–4; Bredius,
op. cit. pp. 17–18.

“. . . the Calvinist authorities were anxious to convict . . .”
Bredius
suggests the trial of Torrentius was staged to stress the orthodoxy of Haarlem’s
ruling elite and bolster the city’s case to be considered the leader of the strictly
Calvinist cities of the province of Holland at a time when several of its neighbors were
still indulging liberal, Arminian views. Op. cit., p. 28.

The banishment of the Torrentian circle
Snoek, op. cit., pp. 79–80.
The coincidence of dates is not exact; Torrentius’s followers were supposed to leave
the city no later than 19 September, but Jeronimus Cornelisz may have lingered longer than
that, and certainly either remained in, or returned to, Haarlem as late as 9 October, when
the city records show he visited one of his solicitors.

Chapter 2: Gentlemen XVII

The story of the Dutch East India Company is of considerable importance to
both the Netherlands and many of the nations of the Far East, and it has been extensively
documented and well studied. Statistical information concerning the VOC’s shipping
and its voyages to the East is summarized and elaborated upon, in English, in the three
volumes of Jaap Bruijn et al.,
Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979–1987). Dutch speakers will turn also to Femme
Gaastra’s general study
De Geschiedenis van de VOC
(Zutphen: Walburg Pers,
1991), which is more complete and up-to-date than any English language equivalent.
Kristoff Glamann’s earlier
Dutch-Asiatic Trade 1620–1740
(Copenhagen:
Danish Science Press, 1958), though now in many respects outdated, also remains of
interest. For details of the construction of Dutch East Indiamen, see Willem Vos’s
and Robert Parthesius’s five-volume series, the Batavia
Cahiers
(Lelystad: np,
1990–93), which fully documents Vos’s recent reconstruction of a full-sized
retourschip
of the
Batavia
’s time. This valuable and extremely practical project has
resulted in the rediscovery of many early shipbuilding techniques, and the
Cahiers
deal with many questions that would otherwise have to remain unanswered, given the absence
of relevant documentation from the period. On the life of Francisco Pelsaert, I have
relied largely on the introductory section to D. H. A. Kolff’s and H. W. van
Santen’s recent edition of the
commandeur
’s Mogul chronicle and
remonstrantie,
published as
De Geschriften van Francisco Pelsaert over Mughal Indiï, 1627: Kroniek en
Remonstrantie
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979).

The growth of Amsterdam
Jonathan Israel,
The Dutch Republic: Its Rise,
Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806
(Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998), pp.
114–6, 328–32; Geoffrey Cotterell,
Amsterdam: The Life of a City
(Farnborough: DC Heath, 1973), pp. 18–24. Another problem was the boggy ground, which
meant that each new house within the city walls could only be constructed on foundations
made of 42-foot wooden piles, each of which had to be driven to the bottom of the marsh by
hand. A huge number of piles were required; the royal palace on the Dam itself rests on
13,659 of them. See William Brereton,
Travels in Holland, the United Provinces etc. . .
. 1634–1635
(London: Chetham Society, 1844), p. 66. The inaccessibility of
Amsterdam explains why, for all its enormous commercial success in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, Rotterdam is now the principal Dutch port.

Development of Dutch trade
Jonathan Israel,
Dutch Primacy in World
Trade, 1585–1740
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 6–17, 45–8. There
were other factors, the most important of which may have been the protracted blockade of
Antwerp instituted by the United Provinces in the 1570s. Dutch warships intercepted
shipping all along the coast and halted river traffic to the city. After 1584 the main
land approaches also fell into rebel hands, reducing the city’s trade enormously and
contributing to the further growth of Amsterdam.

The spice road
Bruijn et al.,
Dutch-Asiatic Shipping,
I, pp. 2,
189–92; Bernard Vlekke,
The Story of the Dutch East Indies
(Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1946), pp. 57–62; Glamann, op. cit., pp. 13, 16–17,
74–5; Giles Milton,
Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One Man’s Courage Changed
the Course of History
(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999), pp. 3–4.

Population of cities
London, with a population of about 230,000, Paris,
with approximately 300,000, and Madrid, whose population was somewhere in between, were
considerably bigger; Paris was comfortably the largest city in Europe throughout the
seventeenth century. The only other European cities with a population comparable to
Amsterdam were Lyons, Naples, and Rome. Antwerp’s population halved as a result of
the Revolt, and a large proportion of the 40,000 or so people who left the city made for
the towns of the United Provinces. The Dutch Republic was in fact by far the most heavily
urbanized country in Europe in Cornelisz’s time; by 1600, one Dutchman in four lived
in a town with more than 10,000 inhabitants, while the comparable figure in England was
only 1 in 10. Israel,
The Dutch Republic,
pp. 115, 219.

Spain and Portugal in the East
Determining exactly where the boundary
between Spanish and Portuguese interests fell on the far side of the world was no easy
matter in an age where there was no reliable way of measuring longitude while at sea.
There were several disputes between the powers before the Spanish king sold his claim to
the Spiceries to Portugal for the sum of 350,000 ducats in 1529. For Francis Xavier’s
views, see Vlekke, op cit., p. 62.

Jan Huyghen van Linschoten
Throughout his stay in the Indies, van
Linschoten, who had a lively and curious mind, had made it his business to gather
information about Portugal’s colonies in the East. He appears to have come across the
rutters during his sojourn in the Azores. Charles Parr,
Jan van Linschoten: The Dutch
Marco Polo
(New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell, 1964), pp. xvi–xvii, 6, 19, 33,
45–8, 80, 176, 180, 189. It was, incidentally, on Van Linschoten’s
recommendation that the Dutch concentrated their efforts on the island of Java, where
there were no Portuguese trading posts.

Reinier Pauw
Israel,
The Dutch Republic,
pp. 344–8. Later,
Pauw (1564–1636) was to become a prominent politician and the leader of the strict
Calvinist faction that brought down the regime of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the advocate
of Holland, and had him beheaded in 1619.

The early history of Dutch trade with the East
Israel,
Dutch Primacy in
World Trade,
pp. 61, 67–9; Vlekke, op. cit., pp. 62–3; Milton, op. cit., pp.
28–9, 52–65.

The Compagnie van Verre and the Dutch first fleet
“Far-Lands
Company” is a more literal translation. Israel,
Dutch Primacy,
pp. 67–8;
Bruijn et al.,
Dutch-Asiatic Shipping,
I, pp. 1–5, 59; Milton, op. cit., pp.
52–65; Vlekke, op. cit., p. 67.

Cornelis de Houtman
Miriam Estensen,
Discovery: The Quest for the Great
South Land
(Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998), p. 62; Milton, op. cit., p.
59.

“. . . the surviving members . . .”
The crews of the
Eerste
Schipvaart
experienced appalling mortality rates; only one in three returned
alive.

Expeditions of 1598–1601
Israel, Dutch Primacy, pp. 67–9; Bruijn
et al.,
Dutch-Asiatic Shipping,
I, pp. 3–4; Vlekke, op. cit., p. 70.

The creation of the VOC
The proposition of a joint stock company was a
unique solution made possible only by the fact that the United Provinces was a federal
republic. A precedent had, however, been set a few years earlier with an attempt to create
an eight-strong cartel of companies involved in the Guinea trade. This attempt was
unsuccessful, as in the end the companies of Zeeland had elected to retain their
independence. Israel, op. cit., pp. 61, 69–71; Bruijn et al.,
Dutch-Asiatic
Shipping,
I, pp. 4–5. The price of the monopoly and of state support was not
cheap; the first charter, which ran for 21 years, cost the VOC 25,000 guilders. It was
renewed for a similar period at no charge in 1623, the Company’s reward for its
assistance in the wars with Spain, but by the end of the century a 40-year renewal cost
the VOC a further three million guilders. Glamann, op. cit., p. 6. The goods that
Jeronimus and his colleagues were required to buy and sell became more varied as the
Company evolved. Spices remained the staple of the Indies trade, but over the years the
VOC expanded its operations to deal in cottons and silks from India and China, dyestuffs,
and even copper and silver from Japan. Profits were good here, too; cotton, for example,
typically sold at 80–100 percent more than it had cost in the Indies, and margins of
up to 500 percent were not unheard-of.