Pepper (19 page)
Authors: Marjorie Shaffer
Violence followed Coen throughout his career, but the murder of Dutch Admiral Pieter Verhoeven and forty-six of his men by the Bandanese in 1609, undoubtedly helped shape Coen's attitude about the islandsâVerhoeven was beheaded. Operating under instructions from the Gentlemen 17, the VOC's directors, Verhoeven had been trying to negotiate an exclusive contract for nutmeg when the attack occurred. His fleet appeared while William Keeling, the captain of the English East India Company's third voyage, was on one of the Banda Islands loading nutmeg. The Dutch immediately suspected that Keeling had instigated the attack by the Bandanese against Verhoeven and his men. The English captain repeatedly declared his innocence and, despite Dutch attempts to prevent him from loading his ships, Keeling didn't leave the islands until he was satisfied with his cargo. Afterward, the Dutch blockaded the island where the killings took place, starving the population. Those who survived signed an exclusive trade contract with the VOC. The Dutch thought the contract extended to all of the Banda Islands, but it did not. In the following years, English ships occasionally appeared, and the people on some of the other islands, notably Ay and Run, turned to them for protection against the seemingly genocidal Dutch.
The Amboyna Massacre
The Dutch and the English both set their sights on the bounty of the far eastern islands, but the Dutch had the better organization and the finances to make first claims. They cleared away the Portuguese and the Spanish, capturing Amboyna from the Portuguese in 1605, and building a fort in east Ternate, once a stronghold of the Spanish, in 1607. The Dutch weren't happy to share the fruits of their efforts with the English ships that occasionally visited.
Almost from its inception, the Anglo-Dutch rivalry was engorged with hatred, but an incident in the early decades of the seventeenth century on a small island in the remote reaches of the South China Sea ensured a long-lasting enmity. Amboyna, an English sea captain wrote in 1621, “sitteth as queen between the isles of Banda and the Moluccas. She is beautified with fruits of several factories, and dearly beloved of the Dutch.” Here, where the sea breezes carried the scent of cloves, the Dutch brutally tortured and beheaded ten Englishmen in 1623, an incident known as the Amboyna Massacre.
The Dutch had built a heavily secured fort in the town of Ambon on Amboyna, where they attempted to concentrate the production of cloves. Surrounded by a moat, the fort was festooned with brass ordnance and was a garrison for some two hundred Dutch soldiers and a handful of hired Japanese warriors. A small group of unarmed English traders lived in a house in the town. The Dutch accused them of conspiring to kill the Dutch governor, Herman van Speult, to overthrow the garrison once an English Company ship arrived. Clearly, the English were greatly outnumbered and without arms, but in the tense atmosphere following the agreement of 1619, the conspiracy may have seemed real to van Speult, some historians speculate. The Dutch based their claims on the inquisitiveness of a Japanese warrior who had asked a Dutchman on night patrol a series of questions about the strength of the garrison, which seems fairly innocuous given the setting. Who knows? Perhaps the man was simply taking a walk and decided to make small talk with the night patrolman. Apparently the Dutch believed that his questions were aimed at obtaining information that would help the English storm the garrison. Rather than making inquiries that may have resolved their suspicions, the Dutch seized the Japanese man, put him to torture, and soon obtained a confession of a conspiracy. Ten Englishmen were then quickly rounded up.
The Dutch also used torture to wring confessions from the unfortunate Englishmen who were arrested. A description of these torments by the surviving Englishman on the island was published in a pamphlet in England, which served for many years as an indelible reminder of Dutch cruelty. Samuel Colson confessed to plotting against the Dutch after he saw what water torture had done to his fellow countryman Edward Collins. The Dutch version of waterboarding involved hoisting a man some two feet off the ground with his arms and legs spread as far apart as possible, fastened to a door post with iron rungs. A cloth draped around his neck and face was pulled out to form a funnel. Then the torturer stepped up on a table and poured water “softly upon his head until the cloth was full, up to the mouth and nostrils, and somewhat higher; so that he could not draw breath, but he must withal suck-in water: which being still continued to bee poured in softly, forced all in inwards parts, came out of his nose, eares, and eyes; and often as it was stifling & choking him, at length took away his breath, & brought him to a swoune or fainting.⦠Then they tooke him quickly down, and make him vomit up the water. Being a little recovered, they triced him up againe, and poured in the water as before ⦠till his body was swolne twice or thrice as bigge as before, high cheeks like great bladders, and his eyes staring and strutting out beyond his forehead⦔ If a man refused to confess, his feet, elbows, the palms of his hand, and armpits were burned with lit candles.
Gabriel Towerson, the chief English factor in Amboyna, was beheaded first in late February, 1623. Colson and eight other Englishmen, a Portuguese man named Augustine Perez, and ten Japanese warriors were subsequently executed for conspiring to overthrow the Dutch in Amboyna. Edward Collins and several other Englishmen were pardoned. The trumped-up charges, the confessions obtained through torture, and the executions outraged the English, who had planned to quit the Bandas and the Moluccas anyway, a good two months before the killings took place. They left soon after.
The infamous Amboyna Massacre reverberated for the remainder of the seventeenth century, providing the basis for the enduring hatred between the English and the Dutch, who in Europe fought three wars over trade in the seventeenth century, and a fourth in the eighteenth century that was a disaster for the Dutch. As part of the treaty ending the First Anglo-Dutch War in 1654, relatives of the men who died in Amboyna received £3,615. The events in Amboyna shattered any hopes that the Dutch were inclined to share in the riches of the spice trade.
Jan Pieterszoon Coen wasn't officially governor-general when the Amboyna executions occurred (he had recently left the post and had even promised to send a Dutch ship to Amboyna to bring away the English prior to the accusations of a conspiracy), but the loss of human life probably would not have upset him; his hatred of the English and anyone else who defied the Dutch was well known. In his most notorious act, Coen brought a force of some two thousand men to the Banda Islands in 1621 and slaughtered some thirteen thousand native people. Thousands of other Bandanese subsequently died of starvation or were deported as slaves. Only a few hundred people survived. Afterward, slaves from various parts of Asia were shipped to the islands to harvest nutmeg. Although there were critics in Holland who were outraged by Coen's actions, the VOC did not intervene to stop him.
The Dutch had another strategy to ensure their spice monopolyâlaying waste to forests. To prevent outsiders from stealing spices, they cut down spice trees on certain islands to concentrate production on others, an approach that didn't work especially well. According to the pirate William Dampier, a sea captain named “Rofy” related in 1685 that “while he lived with the Dutch, he was sent with other men to cut down the spice trees; and he himself did at several times cut down 700 to 800 trees. Yet although the Dutch take such care to destroy them, there are many uninhabited islands that have plenty of spice trees.” Dampier also mentioned a captain of a Dutch ship who told him that “near the island of Banda there is an island where the cloves falling from the trees lie and rot on the ground ⦠at times 3 to 4 inches thick under the trees.” No matter how many trees they destroyed, the Dutch were never entirely successful in preventing spice piracy. The Dutch monopoly in far eastern spices was also difficult to enforce for another reason: cloves and nutmegs found their way onto English and French ships with the help of corrupt VOC officials. One of the biggest obstacles the Dutch faced during the seventeenth century was the port of Makassar on South Sulawesi.
Defying the Dutch monopoly, the Makassarese sailed to the far eastern Spice Islands and brought nutmegs and cloves back to the port of Makassar, which lies on the southern peninsula of Sulawesi. Consequently, Makassar became a major port for spices and other commodities among European and Chinese traders who wanted to avoid the Dutch. The English set up a factory in the port in 1613, and the Danish, French, Portuguese, and Chinese regularly visited. The traders could buy the spices from the Spice Islands, pepper, cloth from India, and Chinese wares, and they were welcomed in Makassar, which was known for its unusual openness toward foreigners. One of its government officials had a library filled with European books and he was especially keen to learn about Western science.
The VOC often asked Makassarese rulers to restrict trade, to which one ruler famously replied: “God has made the earth and the sea and has divided the earth among men and given the sea in common to all.” These were people who didn't believe that the oceans had landlords. Their political and economic acumen made them powerful, and many in eastern Indonesia believed the Makassar kingdom could not be conquered, according to historian Leonard Andaya. But an unlikely alliance between the Dutch and the Bugis people of South Sulawesi, enemies of the Makassar people, would put an end to Makassar rule. Cornelis Speelman, the corrupt VOC commander who later banished the English and other foreign traders from Bantam in Java, led the expedition against Makassar and other major towns along the southwestern coast of the island. Like the Portuguese who enlisted the help of Malaysian rulers to repel an attack on Malacca by Iskandar Muda earlier in the seventeenth century, the Dutch, too, exploited rivalries among native peoples to further their cause.
In late 1666, Speelman sent a fleet of nearly 1,900 Dutch soldiers and sailors, Bugis, and natives from the Spice Islands to destroy the Makassar kingdom. On land they were joined by many more Bugis troops, but they also encountered fierce opposition from an army of some 15,000 Makassarese. Speelman had expected to go to war, although it took more than a year for Makassar to fall. Numerous villages were burned and thousands died.
The Makassarese were a vanquished people. The treaty ending the war gave the VOC control over the trade and foreign affairs of South Sulawesi, while the Bugis ruled internally. Now only the Dutch could trade in Makassar. The Portuguese and the English were immediately expelled and were not allowed to enter or live there again. The VOC reserved the right to trade exclusively in cloth and Chinese wares and it was also exempt from all import and export tolls and duties. Meanwhile, the Makassarese had to pay for damages to VOC property during the war, and no new fortifications could be built without Dutch approval. Finally, the Makassar people could only sail to Bali, the Java coast, Jambi and Palembang in Sumatra, Johor in Malaysia, and Borneo. Any Makassar ship found on the open seas without a Dutch pass risked attack.
Long before the war in Makassar, it was already well established that the Dutch would pursue a spice monopoly by any means. Ironically, their obsession with spices led to one of the most lopsided deals in modern history. In 1666, the same year that the Dutch began their conquest of Makassar, the tiny island of Run, where the Dutch had burned down all of the nutmeg trees, was given to the Dutch by the English. In return, the English got the island of Manhattan.
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Put off by the Portuguese forts along the pepper-rich coast of southwest India, the Dutch in the early seventeenth century looked elsewhere to establish a rendezvous, a central location for transshipment of goods to Holland and to Asia. They had first chosen Amboyna as their headquarters but soon realized that it was too far from the nexus of trade in Asia. Malacca was a natural choice, but the Dutch had so far failed to oust the Portuguese. (They finally succeeded in 1641, following a six-year blockade of the Strait of Malacca.) Their interest then turned to the Indonesian archipelago, where pepper could be obtained and where the Straits of Malacca and Sunda were crucial transit points for Asian goods going to Europe and to markets in Asia, especially China. The Dutch had already established a fast route to Indonesia. Unlike other Europeans sailing on the Indian Ocean, they reached Indonesia by setting a course due east along the “roaring forties” after leaving the Cape of Good Hope. When they encountered the southeast trade winds, they set their course north toward the Strait of Sunda.
Until the arrival of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, none of the rulers in Java would grant the Dutch permission to build a fort on their territory. Bantam was the most obvious choice for a fort because it already was a major pepper port, but the Bantamese successfully rebuffed the Dutch. “Permission” would have to be obtained by force of arms, an approach Coen preferred. He found his opportunity in nearby Jakarta, a town situated on a marshy plain at the head of a large bay, well placed to be a center for trade in Asian goods because of its position on the Straits of Malacca and Sunda. Despite some initial jockeying for power between the Dutch and English, who initially showed up with a larger number of ships, Coen finally seized the port in 1619 and destroyed the quarters belonging to the
panegran
(prince), who was sent packing to Bantam. The newly named Batavia was more than ten thousand miles from Holland by way of the Cape of Good Hope.
“All the kings of these lands know full well what the planting of our colony at Jakarta signifies, and what may follow from it, as well as the cleverest and most far-seeing politician in Europe might do,” Coen boasted, reveling in his victorious assault and the threat it posed to other Europeans, especially the English. An orderly walled Dutch city, with its tidy rows of houses, canals, and a towering castle known as Casteel Batavia, would be built on the smoldering ruins of old Jakarta. Eventually, nearly all of the VOC's trade in Asia would be funneled through Batavia, a hub system reminiscent of modern-day air travel. Incoming and outgoing Dutch company ships had to stop in Batavia. In the seventeenth century, this port city was unique.