Batavia's Graveyard (7 page)

The seeds that led eventually to Torrentius’s downfall were sown in the
little German town of Kassel in the year 1614. It was there that a small group of German
adepts produced an esoteric pamphlet that was not only to inspire generations of mystics
but also to lead, at least indirectly, to Jeronimus’s departure from
Haarlem.

The pamphlet was an anonymous work of indeterminate origin purporting to be
nothing less than the manifesto of a powerful secret society called the Order of the Rosy
Cross. It was a potent call for a second reformation—a reformation, this time, of the
sciences—which promised, in return, the dawning of a golden age. But what really
excited those who read the work was its subtext—scraps of information about the
mysterious Brethren of the Rosy Cross themselves.

The Order, said the pamphlet, had been established in the fifteenth century by a
man named Christian Rosenkreuz, who had spent many years traveling in the Middle East,
collecting ancient wisdom and occult knowledge. The pamphlet stated that upon his return
to Germany, Rosenkreuz created a brotherhood to ensure that his discoveries were put to
use. There were eight Brethren of the Rosy Cross, and they moved from place to place,
spreading secret knowledge, adopting the customs and the dress of the countries where they
lived, and living incognito. Each brother was a potent mystic in his own right, and each
was tasked with recruiting a worthy replacement for himself as he grew old. Christian
Rosenkreuz himself, the pamphlet continued, had lived to be 106. When he died, in 1484,
the members of his order laid him to rest in an underground vault hidden somewhere within
the borders of the Holy Roman Empire. The vault was then sealed for a period of 120 years,
and its rediscovery by a member of the Order, in the first years of the seventeenth
century, had heralded the dawning of a new age. The opening of the tomb was a signal for
the Brothers of the Rosy Cross to step out of the shadows and make themselves at last
generally known.

Two further Rosicrucian pamphlets appeared over the next two years, both of them
anonymous and each making further revelations. It is not difficult to understand why they
inspired the tremendous interest that they did. As well as promising the advent of a
golden age, the manifestos hinted at the existence of a secret brotherhood that recruited
most selectively and invited only the best and wisest to join its ranks. An invitation to
join the Rosicrucians would thus be a supreme honor, and one that vainer readers dared
hope might be extended to themselves. The fact that the Brethren of the Order appeared to
travel incognito merely added to their dangerous allure. If no one knew just who they were
or where they lived, it was at least possible that one or several dwelled nearby, and that
they might be searching for converts.

Few people seem to have doubted that the pamphlets were the work of a genuine
group of adepts; a number of prominent thinkers, including the French philosopher
Descartes, devoted considerable efforts to searching for the Order. Several northern
European states—among them the United Provinces—thus began to fear that they
were faced with a genuine and dangerous new threat. Rumors that Rosicrucians had crossed
the borders of the Dutch Republic reached several Calvinist ministers in 1624. In the
following year, a secret agreement between French and Dutch Rosicrucians was purportedly
discovered in a house in Haarlem. This threat—real or not—could not be
tolerated, and in January 1624, the Court of Holland, which was the senior judicial body
in the province, was ordered to investigate the Rosicrucian movement.

The task seemed impossible but, nevertheless, the Court did have some leads.
Rumor and tittle-tattle suggested that the Rosicrucians of the Dutch Republic had their
headquarters in Haarlem, where they assembled by night at a house in the prosperous
Zijlstraat. Furthermore, the judges were informed, “one Thorentius should be
considered one of the most important members of the sect.” Armed with this name, the
Court of Holland commenced an investigation that was to occupy it for the next four
years.

“Thorentius” was not a hard man to identify, and the controversial
painter was eventually seized in Haarlem in the summer of 1627, three years after the
first testimonies against him had been recorded. In the interim, the civic authorities had
discovered a good deal about Torrentius, his circle, and his penchant for drunken
theological discussions in the taverns of the province. The artist was charged with heresy
and with membership of the Rosicrucian order and interrogated on no fewer than five
occasions. Torrentius freely admitted that he had jokingly claimed to possess magical
powers, but he denied every serious charge that was laid against him. His interrogation
continued from August to December without producing anything that would justify a
trial.

By late autumn, the magistrates of Haarlem had grown weary of Torrentius’s
obduracy, and they applied to the Court of Holland for permission to resort to more
violent methods. This was readily granted, and on Christmas Eve 1627 Torrentius was
interrogated by a certain Master Gerrit, who was Haarlem’s executioner and also its
chief torturer. Heavy weights were tied to the painter’s legs while four men hauled
him into the air by ropes that had been attached to his wrists; he was left hanging in
this way while more questions were put to him. Afterward he was stretched on the rack
until his limbs were pulled from their sockets. A third torture damaged his jaw and left
him temporarily unable to eat, and at one point, it appears, some effort was actually made
to shoot him. But the efforts of the torturers were to no avail. Through all this agony,
Torrentius continued to deny he was a Rosicrucian. Supporters of the painter, who spoke to
Master Gerrit in the tavern of the Gilded Half-Moon after the prisoner had been returned
to his cell, were told he had impressed the executioner as an honest man. The only words
Torrentius had spoken, Gerrit said, were, “Oh my Lord, my God!”

In the absence of a confession, the burgomasters of Holland were forced to go to
extraordinary lengths to obtain the verdict that they wanted. In January 1628, Torrentius
was brought to court still crippled from his torture and tried on 31 charges
“extra-ordinaris,”
a rare procedure that meant he was not allowed to mount a defense and could not appeal the
verdict of the court. Instead, the judges heard a long parade of witnesses and statements
damning him as an immoral heretic. In such circumstances, it was inevitable he would be
found guilty, which he was after a truncated hearing. The prosecutor demanded that he be
burned at the stake for his sins, but the aldermen of Haarlem balked at this request.
Instead, Torrentius was sentenced to 20 years in prison. This punishment began at
once.

Undoubtedly the painter’s silence, even under torture, saved him from a far
worse fate and made it impossible for the magistrates to convict him of membership of the
Rosicrucian order. The charge that he was a brother of the Rosy Cross, which had been the
principal reason for his arrest, remained unproven. But Torrentius’s resistance to
the attentions of Master Gerrit had a further consequence. The authorities in Haarlem
could not be certain how widely he had spread his heresies within the city, and though the
evidence that they collected was sufficient for them to identify several dozen prominent
members of his circle, they continued to suspect that others had escaped their
grasp.

In his empty and abandoned store on the Grote Houtstraat, Jeronimus Cornelisz had
reason to be thankful that his name had not cropped up during Torrentius’s trial. But
he knew there was no guarantee that some further investigation of the case would not occur
and that any such action might easily compromise him. This fear, it seems, together with
his bankruptcy, persuaded him that it might be best to leave the city.

The timing of Jeronimus’s departure from his home certainly suggests that
this was so. In the aftermath of Torrentius’s trial, the burgomasters of Haarlem
banished all the members of the painter’s circle from the city. These suspected
heretics were ordered out of the city on 5 September 1628 and given a matter of weeks to
settle their affairs. This period of grace coincides more or less exactly with the period
that Cornelisz spent winding up his affairs and transferring what remained of his
possessions to his creditor, Loth Vogel. At the end of the first week of October 1628 he
appears to have fled from Haarlem. He went leaving his wife and his past life behind and
took the road to Amsterdam, where the wharves and flophouses seethed with human flotsam
just like him, all rootless and all headed for the East.

2

Gentlemen XVII

“If this frothy nation have the trade of the Indies to themselves,
their pride and insolencie will be intollerable.”

HENRY MIDDLETON

B
Y RIGHTS, THE TOWN OF AMSTERDAM SHOULD NEVER HAVE EXISTED. Four hundred years
before Jeronimus Cornelisz first passed through its gates, it had been little more than an
obscure fishing village festering in the marshes at the southern limits of the Zuyder Zee.
Its situation was undoubtedly unfavorable; the climate was appalling—cold and chill
in winter, clammy, damp, and foggy for the remainder of the year—and access to the
open sea was only possible via a maze of narrow channels, masked by sandbanks and so
shallow that ships could not approach the harbor fully laden. There was, in short, little
to suggest that Amsterdam would ever be a place of much significance. Yet by the beginning
of the seventeenth century the village had overcome these natural disadvantages and become
the richest city in the world.

This remarkable success was based on trade. As early as the fifteenth century,
the Dutch had built one of the largest shipping industries in Europe, carrying bulk goods
such as timber, tar, and salt from the Baltic to the North Sea and the Atlantic coast. The
Hollanders were noted for their efficiency, low freight charges, and the sheer volume of
their shipping, which even then dwarfed that of their rivals. The men of Amsterdam were at
the forefront of this business.

From around the year 1500, the old Dutch shipowners—who had made their
profits solely as carriers—began to be supplanted by merchants who took advantage of
the favorable geographical position of the Northern Netherlands to buy and sell goods on
their own account. The seven provinces that would eventually form the Dutch Republic were
ideally placed to profit from the growth of international trade, which at that time was
centered in the ports of Italy and Spain. They were midway between Scandinavia and Iberia
and at the confluence of seaways and river systems that linked the Atlantic coast with
central Europe. Goods landed in Dutch ports could be sent quickly and cheaply to Germany
and England, the Southern Netherlands and France.

The towns of Zeeland and the Zuyder Zee thus grew in wealth and population. For
many years, however, the greatest fortunes continued to be made by merchants in the
Southern Netherlands. The towns of Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent were far bigger than
Amsterdam and its great Zeeland rival Middelburg, and they had long been established as
commercial centers for the trade in wool and cotton. Being large and wealthy places, they
also attracted merchants specializing in luxury goods such as spice and sugar. Commodities
of this sort were generally known as the “rich trades” because they were so much
more profitable than the bulk trades of the Dutch.

The merchants of the Southern Netherlands retained their dominant position until
late in the sixteenth century. It was only in the late 1570s that the people of the
northern provinces at last began to overtake those of the south. One reason for this was
the Dutch Revolt, which broke out in 1572 and ran on intermittently until 1648. Before the
war began, Amsterdam had been a town of 30,000 people—a good size for the time, but
no more than a third the size of Antwerp and smaller, too, than Brussels, Ghent, and
Bruges. By 1600, though, double that number lived within the city walls, and by 1628 the
number of inhabitants had exploded to 110,000. Amsterdam was now larger than any of its
southern rivals and, indeed, one of the four largest cities in Europe.

In an age when plague and pestilence visited the largest towns with grim
regularity, and could carry off up to a fifth of the population within a year, such rapid
growth could only be the result of mass immigration. Amsterdam became home to tens of
thousands of new citizens during these years. A few, like Jeronimus Cornelisz himself,
were from elsewhere in the Dutch Republic, but the majority were Protestant refugees from
the Southern Netherlands, driven north by Spanish persecution and the war. Many of the
refugees were merchants from the great cities of Flanders and Wallonia, who possessed both
capital and experience. They helped to establish Amsterdam as a trading power in its own
right. A new bank, a stock exchange, and all the other paraphernalia of a mercantile
economy followed, and by 1620 the town had unquestionably become the greatest entrepôt in
northern Europe. During the first third of the seventeenth century, this flood of cash and
expertise made it easier to exploit fresh opportunities and open up new markets. The most
important of these was the spice trade.

Why spice? Amsterdam, in truth, was built upon the taste of rotting meat. In
1600, when the science of food preservation was still in its infancy, most of the cuts
sold by butchers or hung in larders throughout Europe were sour and decaying. The only
things that masked the tang of decomposing flesh were spices such as pepper, which thus
became the most-sought-after luxury goods of the day.

The great difficulty, so far as the merchants of Europe were concerned, was that
spices came from far away. They were grown and harvested in a swath of southeast Asia
stretching from India nearly to New Guinea, and though they had been known in Europe since
Roman times, they had never been available in any quantity and could only be afforded by
the rich. To get as far north as the Dutch Republic, they had to travel enormous
distances. The annual harvest was first carried in small boats and on the backs of animals
to the great trading ports of China, Indonesia, and the Coromandel Coast, where merchants
from Asia, Persia, and Arabia paid good prices for it. From there the spice road headed
west and north, eventually terminating in the Italian quarter of Constantinople. Venetian
and Genoan skippers then carried the precious spices west, until at last they reached the
markets of Italy, then France and Spain, and—finally—the cities of the United
Provinces, where they were used to flavor roasts and stews, turned into medicines, and
valued as preservatives. The whole voyage from Asian tree to European table took the best
part of two years, and until the middle of the fifteenth century the merchants of the West
had no real control over either the supply of spices or their price, which in the course
of the long journey could increase a hundredfold.

It was only in 1498, when men from Portugal first rounded Africa and found their
way to the Indian coast, that Europeans gained direct access to the markets of the East.
For another century, the Portuguese and, to a lesser extent, the Spaniards explored the
archipelagos that stretched from Sumatra to the Philippines and produced the spice so
greatly coveted at home. They kept their hard-won knowledge of the sea routes secret,
reserving for themselves the lucrative new trade with the Indies. Profits from these
ventures flowed into the coffers of the kings of Portugal and Spain.

By Jeronimus’s day, however, fierce competition from the Netherlands and
England had robbed Iberia of its monopoly. The Dutch and English East India Companies now
controlled most of the markets of the East and shipped their wares home to London and the
seaports of the United Provinces. Thousands of sacks of spices, to which were added tons
of precious metals, porcelain, and cotton, were unloaded in the warehouses of these
companies each year, and the wealth generated by their sale defied belief. The ships that
thronged the busy roadsteads north of Amsterdam went halfway round the world to sail home
full of spice; the closely guarded warehouses grouped along the wharves bulged with it;
and the auction houses and the grocers’ shops along the grander streets sold it, all
at profits so enormous that men traveled to the town from all over Europe in the hope of
sharing in them. The city had become a place where a man’s readiness to chance a long
voyage east was more important than his past, and where one or two successful speculations
were all it took to restore a fortune. These were the qualities that attracted Jeronimus
Cornelisz.

Dutch interest in the Indies dated to the 1590s, when merchant immigrants from
the south began to have an impact on the city’s trade. During this decade herring,
salt, and timber became less significant to Amsterdam than the more valuable commodities
of the rich trades. Fleets were fitted out and dispatched north and west in search of all
manner of luxury goods. Dutch merchants sailed to Muscovy to buy up furs, whale oil, and
caviar, and to the Americas for sugar and silver. But it was clear, even at this early
date, that the riches of the East would far surpass them all.

The Indies trade was at this time still in the hands of Portugal and Spain, whose
domination of the Spiceries had been ratified a hundred years earlier by the so-called
Treaty of Tordesillas. This agreement, sponsored by Pope Alexander VI, was signed in 1494,
and under its terms Portugal and Spain agreed to split the world between them. The treaty
assigned to Spain all undiscovered territories to the west of a line of longitude that ran
from pole to pole a few hundred miles to the west of the Cape Verde Islands, and to
Portugal all new lands to the east. In this way the Spaniards gained a formal title to the
Americas and the Portuguese the right to exploit the Indies. Between them the two Iberian
powers established a duopoly on trade with the West that did not always sit well with
their own citizens; the great missionary St. Francis Xavier wrote of the Portuguese
officials he encountered in the East: “Their knowledge is restricted to conjugation
of the verb
rapio,
to steal, in which they show an amazing capacity for inventing
new tenses and participles.” Naturally enough, the Dutch and English—who coveted
the Spice Islands for themselves—were even more unhappy with the
arrangement.

Nevertheless, challenging Iberian domination of the East was no simple matter.
Spain and Portugal had contrived to keep their knowledge of the Indies secret, and as late
as 1590 neither the Dutch nor any other Western power had any real idea of the best way to
reach the Spiceries, the precise location of the richest islands, or the disposition of
the forces ranged against them. The information that the rivals of Spain and Portugal
needed most—detailed sailing instructions for Far Eastern waters—was, moreover,
the very thing most closely guarded by their enemies. In the days before the development
of accurate maps and instruments, all seafaring nations went to great lengths to preserve
the accumulated knowledge of their sailors, compiling decades of experiences to produce
directions outlining all that was known about a given place or route. These instructions,
which were known as rutters, were among the most jealously guarded possessions of the
state. Iberian pilots and masters were under the strictest instructions to destroy their
copies if threatened with shipwreck or capture, and they obeyed their orders so
scrupulously that no sailing directions were ever found on board Spanish or Portuguese
ships taken by privateers. More subtle efforts also failed; the Dutch sent spies to Lisbon
to buy or steal copies of the rutters but with no success. Without an understanding of the
information the rutters contained, it was generally acknowledged that any expedition to
the East would be a costly failure.

It was not until 1592 that a solution to this enduring problem presented itself
in the shape of a young man named Jan Huyghen van Linschoten. Van Linschoten was
originally from the herring port of Enkhuizen but had recently returned from a nine-year
sojourn in the East, during which he had lived in Goa and spent two years in the Azores.
He had learned fluent Portuguese and made the acquaintance not only of many influential
men, but also of a number of humble navigators and ordinary sailors. In consequence, Van
Linschoten was uniquely well informed not only about Portugal’s possessions in the
East, but also about the routes that her ships sailed and the Asian ports where they
traded for their spices. This extensive store of knowledge was poured into three books
published in Holland in 1595–6. It is no coincidence that the earliest Dutch
expedition to the Indies sailed shortly after the first of these volumes was
completed.

The rich merchants who had fitted out this fleet called themselves the
Compagnie
de Verre—
the Long-Distance Company. They came from Amsterdam and were led by a
rich and influential merchant by the name of Reinier Pauw, who (having made his fortune in
Baltic timber) now wished to invest in Indies spice. Between them, Pauw and his merchant
friends collected the staggering total of 290,000 guilders with which to fund an Indies
fleet. This proved to be enough not only to equip four ships but also to supply them with
a huge quantity of silver with which to purchase cargoes.

The expedition, known to the Dutch as the
Eerste Schipvaart,
or
“First Fleet,” was carefully planned over a period of more than three years and
had the backing of the state itself. All four ships were heavily outfitted with guns
supplied free of charge by a variety of Dutch cities, provided with the latest charts, and
their pilots thoroughly schooled in navigation. Most important of all, shortly before they
sailed in the spring of 1595, each skipper was given a hastily prepared rutter called the
Reysgeschrift.
It contained Jan van Linschoten’s full sailing directions for the Indies.