Batavia's Graveyard (8 page)

The directors’ only real mistake was to put the wrong men in command of the
voyage. Several of the merchants given the responsibility of leading the expedition were
temperamentally quite unsuited to the job. One, Gerrit van Beuningen—the
upper-merchant of the fleet’s flagship,
Amsterdam—
spent most of the
voyage in chains, accused of the attempted murder of Cornelis de Houtman of the
Mauritius.
De Houtman in turn, was a hotheaded adventurer who had already served three years in a
Portuguese prison for attempting to steal secret charts of eastern waters. Upon the first
fleet’s arrival at the Javanese port of Bantam, De Houtman was incensed to find the
price of spices higher than he had expected; he responded by opening fire on the town with
cannon. At the little fleet’s next port of call, the Javanese boarded the
Amsterdam
and hacked a dozen members of the crew to death. Further down the coast, De Houtman’s
suspicions were aroused by the unprecedented friendliness shown him by the prince of
Madura. He opened fire again, slaughtering the members of the welcome party. Finally, the
upper-merchant’s attempt to sail on to the clove-producing islands of the Moluccas
was thwarted by a near mutiny among the crew. In the circumstances it was no surprise that
when the surviving members of the
Eerste Schipvaart
returned to Amsterdam, after a
voyage of more than two years, the value of the pepper in their holds was only just enough
to defray the expenses of the expedition.

Reinier Pauw and his colleagues learned the lessons of the First Fleet well.
Merging their Long-Distance Company with a rival concern organized by a group of merchants
from the Southern Netherlands, they outfitted a second, larger fleet and dispatched it to
the Indies in the spring of 1598. Within two years, the eight ships of the
Tweede
Schipvaart
returned with their holds full of spice. Although the costs of this
expedition were put at more than half a million guilders, the voyage yielded profits of
100 percent.

The profitability of the rich trades were thus demonstrated in decisive fashion.
From now on the Amsterdam syndicate’s biggest problem was deterring competition. Four
rival Dutch fleets had set sail for the Indies in the same year as the
Tweede
Schipvaart,
backed by merchants from the Southern Netherlands and Middelburg. In 1599
yet another consortium, the New Brabant Company, outfitted a fleet, and by 1601, no fewer
than 14 Dutch fleets had sailed for the Indies and the United Provinces had overtaken
Portugal as the leading trading nation in the East. But intense competition between the
various Dutch syndicates drove up prices in the Indies—where the cost of spices
doubled in the space of half a dozen years—while depressing profits back at
home.

This situation could not be allowed to continue, and in 1602 representatives of
the rival companies met to discuss the formation of a joint stock corporation that would
merge their various interests into one vast company. The attractions of this proposition
were obvious. The combined capital of such a company would give it substantial influence
in the Indies; furthermore—by establishing control over the importation of spices to
the Dutch Republic—the corporation could more or less fix prices as it wanted. The
States-General, or parliament, of the United Provinces was in favor of creating a single
company and was prepared to grant it a monopoly on all Dutch trade east of the Cape of
Good Hope. The only real objections came from the merchants of Zeeland, who did not wish
to be part of a concern dominated by the interests of Amsterdam.

It took five months of delicate negotiation to resolve the dispute,
but—negotiations finally concluded—the various Dutch syndicates merged on 20
March 1602, forming the giant corporation known as the
Verenigde Oost-indische
Compagnie.
^*8
The overall management of the VOC was placed in the hands of the 17
directors, the so-called
Heren Zeventien,
or Gentlemen XVII. This extremely
influential group met two or three times each year, for up to one month at a time, and was
responsible for the Company’s commercial strategy. The VOC’s six local chambers
nevertheless retained considerable independence, each appointing a board of directors to
govern its own affairs, building and equipping its own ships, and keeping the majority of
its profits for itself.

The capital required to fund the chambers came from the merchants of the six
towns themselves. There was little difficulty in attracting men anxious to put money in
the rich trades; Amsterdam, which was by far the richest chamber, had more than a thousand
individual investors, of whom almost 200 contributed in excess of 5,000 guilders apiece.
Reinier Pauw, who had started it all, put up six times that amount, but, even so, the five
largest contributions were all made by southern immigrants; the biggest investment was one
of 85,000 guilders.

The new company was a success from the start. The first combined fleet sailed in
1602 and made an enormous profit. The VOC also enjoyed impressive success in fighting the
Portuguese, who found themselves assailed by the substantial Dutch fleets that were
arriving in the East. Even when they were themselves outnumbered, the Hollanders had the
better ships and superior morale. By 1605 they had captured Ambon, Tidore, and
Ternate—three of the most important Spice Islands, which between them produced almost
all the world’s supply of cloves. These victories confirmed the corporation as the
most profitable, powerful, and important private business in the United Provinces:
“Jan Company,” the people of the Dutch Republic took to calling it, in
recognition of its primacy.
^*9

By 1615, with the continuing success of Jan Company apparently assured, Dutch
traders in the East became increasingly confident and aggressive. The English trader Henry
Middleton, who ran across the merchants of the VOC in Bantam, penned a vigorous protest at
the escalating arrogance of “this frothy nation.” He was not the only one to
find the Hollanders’ demeanor hard to stomach.

At home in the Netherlands, the Gentlemen XVII indulged in similar
high-handedness. Although their victories had been won with guns supplied by the Dutch
government, and though the Company’s monopoly remained in the gift of the
States-General, the directors of the VOC did not hesitate to assert their independence
when the opportunity arose. “The places and the strongholds captured,” they
tartly told the States, “should not be regarded as national conquests but as the
property of private merchants, who were entitled to sell those places to whomsoever they
wished, even if it was to the King of Spain.”

The leaders of the United Provinces, who depended on Jan Company to prosecute
their war with Portugal and Spain in eastern waters, had no choice but to tolerate the
Gentlemen’s presumption. The same was not true of the English East India Company,
whose fragile grip on the spice trade—painfully built up over several
decades—was greatly weakened by Dutch aggression. “These butterboxes,”
another English merchant complained in 1618, “are groanne so insolent that yf they be
suffered but a whit longer, they will make a claime to the whole Indies, so that no man
shall trade but themselves or by their leave.” He was right. Within a year the Dutch
had all but cleared their rivals from the Indies; within three they had subdued the Banda
Islands and seized the world’s entire supply of nutmeg, the most sought-after spice
of all. These actions, more than any others, guaranteed a lucrative future for Jan
Company. By the middle of the 1620s, the Indies trade, which had been so fragmented and
unprofitable only two decades earlier, had evolved into a well-organized monopoly. The six
chambers of the VOC sat at the center of a web of trade yielding unprecedented
profits.

All this wealth flowed directly into the coffers of the Company, and out again
into the pockets of the company’s principal investors—the great merchants of the
Dutch Republic and, in particular, the directors of the six chambers themselves. The
profits that were earned, and the dividends that were paid, were simply colossal. Returns
of 1,000 percent or more were recorded on certain voyages, and dividends of 10, 20, or, in
one case, even 100 percent were paid annually to the shareholders. The fortunes that the
merchant princes of Amsterdam and Middelburg accumulated exceeded, in some cases, those of
European royalty. The richest man in the Dutch Republic in the 1620s was Jacob Poppen,
whose father Jan had been one of the earliest investors in the Indies trade. Jacob’s
total worth was put at 500,000 guilders—this at a time when it was possible to house
and feed a family in Amsterdam on about 300 guilders a year.

Very little of the money ever found its way into the hands of the merchants and
the sailors who actually risked their lives out in the East. Every VOC employee, from the
upper-merchants down to the lowliest enlisted men, received only a modest salary and the
guarantee of board and lodging for the duration of his employment. This arrangement was
actually a good incentive for the poorer men who filled the lowest posts; it was unlikely
that they would find much steady work in their hometowns. But it held little attraction
for the merchants themselves, whose wages—it was commonly acknowledged—were
scarcely large enough to live on, and who could expect no pension if they did survive long
enough to retire. Since a good portion of the pay they did earn was retained by the VOC
against their eventual return—partly as a precaution against desertion—and since
staying too long in the East was tantamount to suicide, most sailed with the intention of
making as much money as they could in as short a time as possible.

Among their number was the merchant Francisco Pelsaert, who—like so many of
the Company’s most valued men—had been born in Antwerp. Pelsaert was in many
ways a typical servant of the VOC, although he came from a Catholic family and, since Jan
Company hired only Protestants, had been forced to conceal his origins in order to secure
his first appointment. For one thing, he had few family ties to keep him in the
Netherlands—his father had died before he was five years old, and though his mother
remained alive, she soon remarried and seems to have left the boy to be brought up by his
grandfather. For another, though Pelsaert’s relatives were wealthy, he himself had
few resources; when his grandfather died, the old gentleman willed his estate to his wife
and left nothing of significance to his ward.

Forced to seek a fortune of his own, Pelsaert—by now a man of
20—secured an introduction to the Middelburg chamber of the VOC in the last months of
the year 1615. The application was successful. Pelsaert was hired as an assistant—the
lowest merchant rank, one that involved mostly humdrum clerical duties—at a salary of
24 guilders a month. Four months later he took ship for the East on board the
Wapen van
Zeeland.
^*10

Nothing is known of Pelsaert’s first three years in the Indies, but he must
have been reasonably successful. He was promoted to the post of under-merchant around 1620
and dispatched to the Company’s recently established base at Surat, on the northwest
coast of India. There he was to help to open trading relations with the Mogul
emperors—a dynasty so fabulously rich that their name has passed into the English
language as a synonym for power and wealth. Within weeks of his arrival on the
subcontinent, Pelsaert was dispatched to the imperial court at Agra to deal in cloths and
indigo. His salary was increased to 55 guilders a month and, in 1624, to 80. By then the
man from Antwerp had been promoted to the rank of upper-merchant and placed in command of
the VOC’s mission to the Mogul court.

This promotion was undoubtedly deserved, for Pelsaert had proved himself to be
one of the Company’s more vigorous and efficient servants. His principal achievements
while at Agra were to secure control of the indigo trade (the rare blue dye was then an
immensely sought-after commodity) and improve profits by switching the main trade in
spices to Surat from the Coromandel Coast. But he also pressed the Gentlemen XVII to see
India’s rich potential as a trading base. The English East India Company was then
still poorly placed on the subcontinent; had Pelsaert’s recommendations been taken
more seriously at home, the Dutch might have done more to challenge the steady rise of
British influence in India.