Batavia's Graveyard (9 page)

Pelsaert’s successes in the East, which soon attracted the favorable
attention of the Gentlemen XVII, can be attributed to several factors. To begin with he
was adept at languages, learning fluent Hindustani and picking up a working knowledge of
Persian. He understood instinctively the need to impress his hosts by living
ostentatiously and was careful to arrange for a constant stream of gifts—or
bribes—to present to Indian officials. He also enjoyed the patronage and friendship
of the principal Dutch merchant at Surat, the renowned Pieter van den Broecke, who like
Pelsaert came originally from Antwerp.

In other respects, however, Pelsaert was far from typical of the VOC community in
India. At a time when most Dutch merchants lived lives as far removed as possible from
those of the native peoples of the East, he displayed a fascination for the everyday
activities of ordinary Indians, whose harsh lives he described in unprecedented detail in
reports sent to the Netherlands. The close relations he established with the Indian
community also extended to a series of scandalous affairs with local women, which Pelsaert
carried on with such reckless disregard that he eventually put at risk not only the future
of his mission but even his own life.

Pelsaert’s uncontrollable attraction to women was to be a feature of his
entire career, but it was most evident during these early years in India. He was not alone
in consorting freely with the women of the East; few European females went out to the
Indies, most of those who did so died, and it was in any case generally believed that only
the children of Eurasian couples stood any chance of survival in such unhealthy climates.
But the majority of Dutchmen contented themselves with taking mistresses from among the
servant classes, and abandoning them and their offspring when the time came to go home to
the Netherlands. Pelsaert enjoyed dallying with slave girls as much as did his colleagues,
but he was prepared to go much further than more prudent merchants believed wise. In the
early 1620s, for example, he embarked on a dangerous affair with the wife of one of the
most powerful nobles at the Mogul court in Agra, a relationship that developed so
promisingly that he soon invited the married woman to his home. There the lady chanced
upon a bottle of oil of cloves, a powerful stimulant normally served in tiny doses to
dangerously ill men. Mistaking it for Spanish wine, she gulped down a substantial measure
and promptly dropped dead at Pelsaert’s feet. To escape retribution, the shocked
merchant was forced to have the body buried secretly in the grounds of the Dutch
settlement. He escaped detection, but though the Mogul potentate never did discover
exactly what had happened to his wife, the scandal had at least one long-term repercussion
for the VOC: for many years a local broker named Medari, who had somehow found out what
had happened, used the knowledge to blackmail Jan Company into retaining his otherwise
dispensable services.

Most of Pelsaert’s fellow merchants disapproved of such sexual incontinence,
but even they would have found his other great love—money—entirely
comprehensible. Nor would they have been particularly shocked by the methods he employed
to get it. Like most of his contemporaries, Francisco Pelsaert wished to taste the riches
of the rich trades, and he had no intention of watching the Gentlemen XVII grow fat while
he himself eked out a meager salary.

The simplest way for Dutch merchants to make a fortune in the Indies was to deal
in spices under the table, but this was not permitted. The VOC did allow its men to
purchase minute quantities of cloves or pepper, but—jealous of its monopoly—the
Company forbade more widespread private trade and rarely rewarded its employees’
initiative. Even a man with 20 years’ service, who did his best to serve the Company
and brought home cargoes worth tens of thousands of guilders, could not expect a bonus as
of right. The consequences were predictable. Underpaid and exposed to considerable
temptation, the merchants of the VOC were thoroughly corrupt.

This fact was commonly acknowledged. “There are no Ten Commandments south of
the equator,” the common saying had it, and honest men were hard to come by in the
East. Though personal belongings could be, and were, frequently searched to prevent the
private importation of spice, fraudulent accounting was commonplace; it was a relatively
simple matter to buy goods at a low price and claim they had cost much more, or to
overvalue damaged stock. Nor were the merchants the only ones busily defrauding their
employer. Many lesser servants of the VOC bribed fellow Dutchmen to overlook their private
activities in the spice markets. Some traded in the name of Asian merchants, though this,
too, was prohibited. “There was no ‘esprit de corps’ in the VOC,” one
historian has noted. “The Company as a body was avaricious, and its employees were
often demoralised by its institutionalised greed . . . . Every able-bodied man from the
Councillor of the Indies down to the simple soldier considered it an absolute must to care
for himself first.”

Jan Company, which was nothing if not a practical organization, finally resigned
itself to the practice of private trade, making only intermittent efforts to stamp it out.
A merchant had to be exceptionally greedy or unlucky to be caught; most of those who were
had been betrayed by jealous rivals. The most notorious example in Pelsaert’s day was
that of Huybert Visnich, who had run a VOC trading post in Persia. His salary was 160
guilders a month, but by the time he was denounced for fraud his private trade had amassed
him a fortune estimated at no less than 200,000 guilders. Visnich fled to the Ottoman
Empire, where he was eventually killed for his money in 1630. His former employers noted
his death, with a certain satisfaction, as “a well deserved punishment by God.”
In truth, however, Visnich had simply taken better advantage of his opportunities than
hundreds of other merchants who were equally corrupt.

Francisco Pelsaert was no exception to this rule. While at Agra, he used Company
funds to set himself up as a moneylender, advancing cash to local indigo growers at an
annual rate of 18 percent and pocketing the profits for himself. It was a risky business;
he could hardly keep full records, for fear of an audit; the farmers who made up his
clientele sometimes defaulted on their loans; and there was always the danger that a
colleague would denounce him to the Company. But by initiating his successor in the
deception when he himself returned to Surat, Pelsaert successfully evaded detection. By
1636, when his fraud at last came to light, the VOC had incurred sizable losses of almost
44,000 rupees.

Word that there was money to be made in the service of Jan Company did not take
long to spread through the United Provinces, and there can be little doubt that Jeronimus
Cornelisz planned to recoup his lost fortune through just this sort of private trade.
Whether or not the apothecary had been compromised by involvement in the Torrentian
scandal, his appearance in Amsterdam in the autumn of 1628 clearly suggests that his chief
concern was to restore his battered financial position. There were safer bolt-holes for
religious dissidents than Amsterdam, most of them outside the borders of the United
Provinces—but none that offered such a tempting combination of anonymity and
opportunity.

The town that Jeronimus traversed was not yet fully formed. The horseshoe-shaped
canals that still enclose the city center had only just been built, running just inside to
the walls, encircling the residential streets and the merchants’ warehouses and
leading north toward the crowded harbor. But even then their banks were lined with the
thin, tall homes of Holland’s leading citizens—the height of each building
roughly denoting its owner’s wealth and status—and the narrow streets so seethed
with citizens hurrying to appointments that they were often clogged with carts and
carriages. As early as 1617, the press of traffic in the city center had grown so great
that a one-way system had been introduced to ease congestion, but, even so, there was
still noise and bustle everywhere. Amsterdam’s merchants rose at 5:30 a.m., began
work at seven, and labored for an average of 12 or 14 hours a day. Their lives left them
little time for strangers, and newcomers to the city often thought themselves invisible.
The people of the city were so intent on making money that visitors passed unnoticed on
the busy streets.

It is unlikely, then, that anyone noticed or talked to Jeronimus Cornelisz as he
threaded his way through the crowded center of the town and passed through the medieval
city wall where it was pierced by the
Waag,
the old customs weigh-house. New
fortifications, ordered when it was obvious the city was outgrowing its old boundaries,
had been thrown up half a mile or so farther to the east, and the area between the walls
had already become one of the commercial centers of Amsterdam. It was close to the harbor
and had plenty of room for the construction of warehouses and wharves.

The town became much less cramped and crowded on the far side of the
Waag;
Cornelisz would easily have found what he was looking for. His destination was the East
India House, which stood on the Kloveniersburgwal, a tree-lined canal that had once been
the city moat, and close to one end of the Oude Hoogstraat, the old high street of
Amsterdam. The House itself was an elegant, if not especially imposing, three-story brick
rectangle completed in 1606 and built around a central courtyard. It was the main
headquarters of the local chamber of the VOC.

Recruitment to Jan Company was a haphazard business. There were no tests and no
exams; no references were required. Since only the desperate and the destitute applied,
the VOC could not afford to be overly selective, and there were particular shortages of
candidates from among the upper and the middle classes. So many merchants were
required—most large ships required a staff of up to a dozen, generally an
upper-merchant, an under-merchant, and 8 or 10 assistants, bookkeepers, and
clerks—that the only explicit criteria were that a man should sign a five-year
contract and that he should not be bankrupt, nor Catholic, nor “infamous.” Even
these rules were rarely enforced.

It is not clear whom Jeronimus visited in the East India House or how exactly he
first established contact with the VOC. The web of friends and colleagues that Torrentius
had built up throughout Holland included a certain Adriaan Block of Lisse, who had made
his fortune in the East and possessed a good deal of influence within the Company. It is
possible that he provided Cornelisz with an introduction to the directors of the Amsterdam
chamber. It is equally possible that Jeronimus had made the acquaintance of someone with
the necessary connections through his own family, or his wife’s, or among the
clientele of his failed business in Haarlem. Whatever the truth, it seems that the
apothecary’s age, his social status, and his knowledge of pharmacy—which at this
time required detailed understanding of the properties of spice—were enough to
convince the directors of the local chamber to overlook his recent and unfortunate
disgrace. Cornelisz emerged onto the Kloveniersburgwal as a full-fledged employee of the
VOC. He carried with him his commission as an under-merchant, and orders to sail for the
Indies within a month.

Had Jeronimus continued to head east on leaving the East India House, he would
have reached the Amsterdam waterfront at just the point where a narrow wooden bridge
arched over to a little island known as Rapenburg. There, in two adjoining shipyards right
under the city walls, the Amsterdam chamber of the Company was completing the East
Indiaman that would transport him to the East. The yards, which were together called the
Peperwerf, were still very new, but they were already the largest and the most efficient
anywhere in Europe. By standardizing the design and the components of their ships, the
Gentlemen XVII had introduced many of the elements of what would now be recognized as mass
production into their shipbuilding program, cutting the time needed to turn out a large
East Indiaman to as little as six months. This was staggeringly quick, but, even so, the
vessels produced on the Peperwerf boasted a sophisticated design that made them far
superior to the ships used by the English and the Portuguese. In Jeronimus’s day
Dutch East Indiamen were, in fact, the most complex machines yet built by man, and their
advanced construction made them easier to load, cheaper to run, and able to carry much
more cargo than their foreign counterparts.

There were several different sorts of ship, each designed for a specific task.
The most expensive were East Indiamen of the
Batavia
’s class, which were
called
retourschepen
(“return ships”). These vessels were specially
designed to carry passengers as well as cargo and were built to survive long ocean voyages
to and from the Indies. Next in importance was the
fluyt—
a cheap,
flat-bottomed, round-sterned vessel with a high proportion of easily accessible cargo
space—and, after that, the
jacht,
which was generally a light and handy craft
built to carry no more than 50 tons of cargo.