Pepper (14 page)

—
W
ILLIAM
M
ARSDEN, 1811

“This [Benkoolen] is without exception the most wretched place I ever beheld. I cannot convey to you an adequate idea of the state of ruin and dilapidation which surrounds me. What with the natural impediments, bad government, and the awful visitations of Providence that we have recently experienced in repeated earthquakes, we have scarcely a dwelling in which to lay our heads…”

—
S
IR
S
TAMFORD
R
AFFLES, 1818

Unlike the spices of the far eastern islands, black pepper could not be confined to any one region, and the burghers in Amsterdam knew that a pepper monopoly would be hard to obtain. Nevertheless, in the late seventeenth century, it appeared that the Dutch were making a bold attempt to bring pepper under their exclusive control, at least in India. Under VOC military commander Rijklof van Goens, the Dutch had greatly expanded their presence along the Malabar Coast, usurping many of the strategic strongholds of the Portuguese and their allies in India, including Quilon and Cannanore. And in 1663, he conquered the crown jewel—the pepper port of Cochin. But his campaign wasn't a complete success—Calicut would not bow to the Dutch. Instead, the powerful Hindu Zamorin leader of Calicut invited the English to establish a factory in the historically important port. Some twenty years later, the English also opened factories in other towns along the Malabar Coast, most notably Anjengo and Tellicherry, which is still known today for its outstanding pepper. The Dutch tried to remove the English by bombarding their pepper boats. Meanwhile, the English worried “how long we may be able to keep our station … on the coast of Malabar if the Dutch resolve to pursue their long laid design of engrossing all the pepper trade in India by armes which our duty to our king and country obligeth us to prevent to the utmost of our power.”

Despite their aggression, the Dutch could not dislodge the English from the Malabar Coast. In 1701 VOC Commander Magnus Wichelman reprised a famous phrase about black pepper to express the displeasure of the Dutch. Pepper, he wrote, is “the bride around which everyone dances on this coast and she has many lovers, namely the English, Danish, Portuguese and Surat traders, etc.… But the most important competitors the Company must face in this trade are the English, the biggest and most harmful of them all.”

*   *   *

Although the English were on the Malabar Coast of India, the pepper trade there was less important than the trade in Indonesia. By 1672, a particularly robust year for pepper, the English East India Company was enjoying a huge increase in its pepper imports, shipping more than seven million pounds of the spice from Indonesia to Europe, compared to only 465,000 pounds from the Malabar Coast. Nine years later, despite the ups and downs of the pepper market, the Company still imported more than four million pounds from Southeast Asia—roughly half of the consumption of black pepper in Europe. The Company was quite dependent on Indonesian pepper and, as we know, most of this pepper came from Sumatra and from Bantam in Java, where the Strait of Malacca flows into the Sunda Straits separating Java and Sumatra. Bantam was less than fifty miles away from Batavia, the Dutch East India Company's formidable headquarters in Asia.

Bantam welcomed English, French, Danish, and Chinese traders, who all had factories or warehouses there. The English even sold beer and wine to the Dutch in Batavia. Although the Dutch had tried to crush Bantam's other foreign trade earlier in the century, the sprawling port town recovered and even prospered. The town boasted a large Chinese population, who lived in a section lined with brick houses and shops, markets, a royal square, and even cabarets and other amusements geared to foreigners.

In 1671 the English had built two new factories for pepper, and over the next four years their pepper business boomed. By the late 1670s, Bantam was a free port right under the nose of the Dutch, and the largest foreign factories belonged to the English. Even though the Dutch had a factory in Batavia, its main purpose was for collecting political information rather than for trading pepper. This situation did not please Cornelus Speelman, the VOC's governor-general in Batavia. A hardworking, educated man who spoke Malay, Speelman was also a bellicose and corrupt administrator who had been suspended early in his career for trading on his own behalf. Before he became the highest ranking VOC official in Asia in 1681, he had served as governor of the Dutch factories along the Coromandel Coast of India, rife with double-dealing Europeans, and waged war against the Makassar people of South Sulawesi, securing a key Indonesian spice port for the Dutch. The war redeemed Speelman's reputation, and sowed fear in his enemies.

The English East India's factory in Bantam was its oldest in Asia. It had been operating since James Lancaster established a trading post there in 1602, and had become an official “presidency” in the Company's administrative hierarchy. The Bantam factory also housed a large portion of the English Company's pepper from Jambi on the eastern shores of Sumatra as well as from Bantam itself, a rich source of pepper controlled by the sultan. However, the flow of Jambi pepper was staunched after Malaysians from Johore crossed the Strait of Malacca, attacking and destroying the British factory in Jambi in 1679. From then on, the English were almost entirely dependent on the pepper from Bantam, and they worried that their position was becoming precarious. Batavia wasn't far away.

The Dutch in Batavia were never happy about the English factory in Bantam, and their annoyance only increased after Speelman was installed in Batavia. When civil war broke out in 1681 between the aging sultan of Bantam and his son, Speelman jumped at an opportunity to banish the VOC's main rival in Indonesia.

*   *   *

In the battle for control of Bantam in 1682, the sultan's son and a few hundred of his men had barricaded themselves inside the city's fort as his father laid siege. At the shelled English warehouse or factory, a terrified merchant worried that the tides of war would certainly turn if the Dutch arrived in the city, for the Dutch supported the son. “'Tis said the Dutch have more Forces coming and if they land their men, undoubtedly Bantam is theirs,” wrote the English merchant. “We stand to the fate of War, our Factory being in the midst of danger; which we keep with Guard and constant Watch: We have each our Muskets, with such other Arms as we could get for our defence; and in this posture we stand expecting the sudden (but dreadful) Assaults of the Enemy.”

The Dutch attacked Bantam and overwhelmed the sultan's forces. The anonymous English merchant observed that the Dutch “soon Routed all the Javas, and received a welcome Admission into the Fort of the Young King (then drove to so great a streight by the Siege of his Fathers Army, that he could not have held out many days longer…) they immediately hoisted the Standard, and what remained undestroyed by the Old King's Forces, they that day mostly burnt, and Marched in Triumph through every part of Town: We kept our Factory Gates shut, and were by them unmolested; as likewise the French, Danes, and Chinese…” These foreign merchants might have already known that their presence would not be tolerated by the Dutch.

The newly installed young sultan, a Dutch puppet, soon ordered the British and the other Europeans, except the Dutch, of course, to leave Bantam. The English were told to abandon the town and with “all possible speed to get our Goods aboard our Ships, and depart his Countrey…” They hastily gathered what they could and sealed the factory with its remaining merchandise valued at 22,000 royals of eight. (The Spanish real, or piece of eight, was one of the most widely used currencies in the age of discovery. It was equivalent to 0.0255 kilograms of silver, the value of a Portuguese cruzado.) “So ended the Honourable Companies ancient Factory of Bantam, where the English have been settled, and have had a constant Trade about this 70 years,” wrote the English merchant. “I cannot say they departed thence like Hannibal out of Africk, accusing both Gods and Men, with imprecations on themselves for any omissions of their own; but truly did severely repine at the Kings ingratitude to (as I may call us) the Nurses and Father of his Country, the English being by his Father and all the Inhabitants generally so acknowledged; and not undeservedly, having by their Trade enrich'd it, and brought it to what it was.” That sentiment, smacking of colonial paternalism, would become the prism through which the British justified their imperium in the following centuries. Unlike the Dutch, the English liked to think of themselves as a benevolent presence only interested in enriching countries by trade, echoing Queen Elizabeth's sentiments in the letter that Lancaster had carried on the first voyage of the English East India Company.

The Dutch made sure that Bantam would never again threaten their commercial interests. Under the Dutch, all of the pepper grown in the sultan's territories in southern Sumatra and other areas had to be sold to the VOC at a contracted price and the sultan had to pay a yearly tribute of one hundred bahars (about 37,000 pounds) of pepper to the Dutch company. Bantam became the largest supplier of pepper to the VOC and a sort of vassal state. The Dutch built Fort Speelwyk, named in honor of Speelman, an impressive fortress with high, thick walls mounted by some forty-eight cannons and surrounded by a moat. The sultan was continually “guarded” by a force of some 130 Dutch soldiers in a garrison inside his palace. “This force serves nominally to defend the person of the king from all hostile attempts; but, in fact, to have him always in the Company's power,” wrote Johan Splinter Stavorinus, a perspicacious Dutch naval officer who served the VOC as a captain of an East Indiaman. In 1769 Stavorinus sailed from Batavia to Bantam, where he loaded onto his ship some 1,200,000 pounds of black pepper and three thousand pounds of white pepper purchased from the sultan. “None of his [the sultan's] subjects, either high or low, not even his sons, are allowed to approach his person, without the knowledge of the captain of the Dutch military, who received information respecting the king's visitors from the guard at the gate, and transmits it, from time to time, to the commandant at Fort Speelwyk,” Stavorinus wrote. “No Javanese or Bantammer is ever allowed to pass the night within the walls of the fort.”

Bantam lay at the bottom of the bay where many large ships could safely anchor. Like Aceh, the Javanese town was nestled in groves of coconut trees, its houses scattered amid the forest.

*   *   *

In the immediate aftermath of the Dutch takeover of Bantam, the English Company's pepper imports from Southeast Asia fell substantially. Not only had the new sultan given the Dutch exclusive rights to the trade in Bantam, he also gave the VOC the same rights to the pepper in the Lampongs, an area in southern Sumatra near the Sunda Strait that belonged to the Bantam sultanate. At this point, the English had to find another pepper port in Indonesia. The Dutch had already brokered an exclusive contract for pepper in Jambi and Palembang, the rich pepper region on the east coast of Sumatra lying adjacent to Jambi, so the east coast of Sumatra was not an option. National pride and an appetite for profits (a portion of which went into the pockets of merchants for their “private trade” rather than the company itself) wouldn't let the English leave altogether and allow the Dutch to control Indonesian pepper. To the English, the Hollander's bid to occupy Bantam was another naked attempt to dominate the pepper trade, reminiscent of the VOC's campaign along the Malabar Coast. Much was at stake for the English; the market for pepper was far greater than for any other spice in terms of volume of trade, and pepper had a sentimental appeal as the foundation commodity upon which the East India Company was built.

Their dismissal from Bantam did teach the English a valuable lesson—if they wanted to establish another factory in Indonesia, they had best build a real fortification. Although there were English forts in St. Helena, Bombay, and Madras (Fort St. George) along the rest of the spice route, most of the Company's factories employed only a few men. The Dutch factories were defended by soldiers, and they had built a large castle in Batavia in addition to forts in the far eastern Spice Islands. If the English wanted to retain a presence in the spice trade, and the growing trade in other commodities, such as tea, they almost certainly would have to build forts and employ soldiers, a big expense, especially in light of the Company's shaky finances. This was a crucial turning point in the history of the Company, a time when commerce began to give way to colonialism.

The English hadn't considered Benkoolen (modern-day Bengkulu), a port on the southwest coast of Sumatra, as a promising option for a costly fort, but spurred by the actions of the Dutch, this remote settlement about three hundred miles south of Priaman became inextricably, and infamously, tied to the fortunes of the East India Company. In 1684 Elihu Yale, a native of Boston who worked for the Company in Madras, India, was temporarily in charge of this main port, from which ships were sent to Sumatra for pepper. He sent two Company employees, a former soldier and teacher named Ralph Ord and a man named William Cawley, to Aceh to negotiate with the sultana to reestablish a factory there. Zaquiyat ud-udin Inayat cordially received the English visitors and politely listened to their request, but she seemed most interested in the periwigs that the gentlemen wore and asked Ord if he could take his off. He obliged.

Like her predecessors, the sultana relished Aceh's independence and could not assent to an English fort made of brick in her domain. Even if the governor of Madras filled her palace with gold, she told Ord and Crawley, she wouldn't permit the building of a fort or even a house with brick. A permanent edifice, she knew, could be used as a base for territorial expansion. The sultana told them that a fort made of timber and plank would be the “utmost indulgence” that could be allowed, an indication of the anxiety European incursions in Sumatra had already provoked. Nevertheless, the trip wasn't entirely fruitless for the two men.