The Taste of Conquest (34 page)

Back in Europe, people had known about the Spice Islands with their drug plantations at least since Marco Polo’s day. They even had a rough idea of their location. The peripatetic Venetian had his facts more or less right when he wrote, “[The sea] lies towards the east and according to the testimony of experienced pilots and seamen who sail upon it and are well acquainted with the truth it contains 7,448 islands, most of them inhabited. And I assure you that in all these islands there is no tree that does not give off a powerful and agreeable fragrance and serve some useful purpose.” His numbers were a little off; the actual count is more than 25,000. But he never made it that far. The first Europeans to arrive were Portuguese.

What they found was a world very different from India. Here, there were no great kingdoms or empires but rather hundreds, if not thousands, of minor principalities and a handful of great port cities that had grown rich off the spice trade. Malacca, Macassar, and Achin were comparable to cities like Genoa and Antwerp in size and importance, though the volume of spices that passed through their gates could only be compared to the great entrepôts like Venice or Alexandria.

Despite bullying their way into the neighborhood in the early 1500s, the Portuguese had little influence here. Sure, they grabbed a few strategic spots—mainly, the city of Malacca, which, like today’s Singapore, had a stranglehold on the principal route between East and South Asia. And the conquistadores did put up a fort on Ternate, where they attempted (unsuccessfully) to control the clove trade. But a hundred years later, when the first Dutch ships nosed round the Cape of Good Hope, the Southeast Asian spice trade was, to all intents and purposes, the same as it had always been. A gaggle of sultans, princes, and local chiefs controlled the sale and production of spices while the usual suspects redistributed them across the region. Even most Portuguese vessels were manned almost entirely by local Malay sailors. The Estado da Índia had become just another player among many. But a profound change was in the offing, for neither the Portuguese nor the wealthiest of the sultans were a match for the cutthroat business practices of the Dutch.

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Today, the forty-eighth sultan of Ternate still presides over his two-hundred-year-old palace on the principal clove island. He is attended by courtiers who strain their necks to keep their heads below his in the name of tradition. His faithful address him by the divine title
Jo’o,
or “Lord.” And whenever the smoldering peak of Gammalama threatens to erupt, the semidivine dignitary rides out on a dugout canoe in order to calm the island’s volcano by a ritual circumnavigation. Not that he has any political power under Indonesia’s constitution. This is a pity, at least according to the current sultan, Dr. Mudaffar Sjah (who holds a PhD from the University of Indonesia). In an interview given to the
South China Morning Post
on the royal back porch, he suggests that the current religious conflict would go away if people just returned to the old ways, to the traditions of the past. Between sips of lychee juice, the Muslim VIP muses about the golden era when his ancestors had real power, when they were the rulers of the spice archipelago. The would-be monarch has his detractors, though, the ones who remember the sultan’s long tenure in the corrupt Suharto regime. Local villagers accuse him of fomenting the sectarian bloodshed. And they are quick to remind you of the centuries when the sultans of Ternate collaborated with the Dutch colonial regime. True enough, yet after their experience with the Portuguese, could Mudaffar’s forefathers have imagined that the Dutch could be worse?

The first locals to come face-to-face with the Europeans lived several hundred miles south of the sultan’s capital. In 1511, Admiral Afonso de Albuquerque had just barely restocked his fleet after conquering Malacca when he sent out three ships to search for the fabled isles. This mini-armada, under the command of Captain António de Abreu, presumably hired (or shanghaied) Malay pilots to guide their two-thousand-mile sail past Java, Bali, and Timor, for they found the tiny Banda Islands without any trouble. They were apparently well received by the inhabitants, who were familiar enough with foreign visitors, even if these bushy-bearded Europeans were a little out of the ordinary. They were happy to sell the Portuguese nutmeg, mace, and even some imported cloves for what the Europeans considered a bargain price. Back in Lisbon, they figured, they would make a 1,000 percent profit. Interestingly, one of the sailors on the expedition was Fernão de Magalhães (better known to the world as Magellan). It was his personal experience in Banda that later helped him convince the Spanish king to finance his trip round the world.

The next hundred years or so were less amicable, at least on the clove islands to the north. In 1522, the Portuguese built a fort at Ternate, spitting distance from the sultan’s palace. They then proceeded to depose or kill one ruler after another, poison the heirs, and remove whole royal families to the Estado da Índia’s stronghold in distant Malacca. Finally, the assassination of the ruling sultan in 1574 proved to be one murder too many for the locals. They rose up the following year and expelled the foreigners from their island. Not surprisingly, when the Dutch arrived in 1599 promising help against the Portuguese, the Moluccans jumped at the opportunity of an alliance.

The Dutch had a knack for getting people to cooperate; it was a system that would be familiar to any mafioso working the garbage-collection business in Lower Manhattan. Ships bristling with guns anchored a stone’s throw from the headmen’s villages (or royal palaces) and offered “protection” in exchange for the right to buy up all the local spice crop at prices set by the Company. A typical example was the agreement signed by several Banda
orang kaya
(local headmen) invited on board the armed merchant ship
Gelderland
on May 23, 1602. No doubt the chiefs were given a selective tour of the ship and taken down the narrow staircase onto the gun deck for a thorough examination of some two dozen polished cast-iron cannon aimed at their fragile homes. They may even have been treated to a demonstration of their lethal effect. Surely they grasped this better than the sheet of parchment scrawled with legal jargon that the pink-faced interlopers thrust at them. They certainly couldn’t have understood the terms of the Dutch-language contract, which specified that, in exchange for protection against the Portuguese and English, the Bandanese granted the Dutch an irrevocable monopoly on nutmeg. Under the circumstances, few of the headmen refused. But it’s hardly remarkable that the islanders also tried to evade the contracts. After all, had the locals taken the agreement too much to heart, they would have starved. By this era, the nutmeg islands were totally dependent on imported food, yet the Hollanders had no interest in transporting bulky and perishable commodities such as sago and rice. Instead, they brought Indian calico, which they insisted the islanders exchange at fixed prices. Of course, as far as the legal counsel of the VOC was concerned, these agreements were all aboveboard and perfectly lawful—if the natives had nothing to eat, that was their own affair—so when the locals did not live up to the letter of the documents, the Dutch felt completely justified sending in their enforcers.

This worked smoothly in Southeast Asia, where the Estado da Índia was thin on the ground. There, the Dutch were easily able to fend off a Portuguese invasion of Banda in 1600, and a year later, the company’s ships sank a Portuguese fleet in a full-scale naval battle in the Bay of Bantam, which assured access to Javanese pepper. In 1605, the VOC nabbed the Portuguese fort of Amboina, strategically sited between the clove islands and the nutmeg archipelago. India was another matter. The original plan had been to evict the Portuguese from the entire subcontinent, but the decrepit empire had more kick in it than the Dutch had counted on. After several unsuccessful attacks on Golden Goa, the VOC satisfied itself with a temporary treaty of alliance with the rulers of Calicut, who were still fuming about Vasco da Gama and his lot.

Back in Amsterdam, news of the VOC’s successes and failures sent the Company’s share prices on a roller-coaster ride. The rapid ascent of the initial stock offering turned into a free fall when news trickled back that the clove island of Tidore had been recaptured by the Spanish and that the Moluccas might be a lost cause. The situation in Holland was actually made worse by the fact that arriving VOC ships continued to unload bales of pepper on every wharf. Not only the Netherlands but all of Europe was awash with Dutch, Portuguese, and now even English pepper. (The English East India Company was chartered in 1600.) In Amsterdam alone, according to Buzanval (the French ambassador as well as a VOC shareholder), warehouses were packed to the roofs with pepper worth more than a million guilders that went begging for customers. In a short time, shares that once seemed like they would zoom into the stratosphere were being dumped at 60 percent of their face value. In the Oost-Indisch Huis boardroom, it was plain to see that the Company could not depend on pepper alone to keep its shareholders happy. The
Heren XVII
decided to rework their business plan, to focus their attention on the islands ruled by the sultans of Ternate.

After my long, civilized lunch with the genteel Frank Lavooij, I could only wonder how much the world of business has changed. Just how many of today’s mouse-wielding financiers would have the stomach or the audacity for what VOC employees were expected to carry out? When I hear Lavooij discuss his company’s well-regarded policies, according to which he encourages farmers to produce organically and builds processing plants in third-world countries (all because it is more profitable, he readily admits), I think back to the well-regarded practices of 1600, pondering what decisions Lavooij might be making were he sitting in the chamber with the Seventeen. When you look into the eyes of the many portraits of the East India Company’s functionaries, it’s hard to conceive of them condoning slave trading and genocide in the name of their shareholders.

Well, that’s not quite right: there’s one face that is all too telling.

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Of all the original towns that made up the “chambers” of the United Company, none is as delightful as Hoorn. Unlike Amsterdam, this small city has never had its second life, so nobody found it necessary to tear down street after street of pert seventeenth-century town houses to put up something more up-to-date after the town’s harbor silted up in the eighteenth century.

It was an unusually sunny afternoon when I left Amsterdam’s Centraal Station for the forty-minute trip to Hoorn so that I could look into the eyes of the town’s most notorious son. The pale winter sun turned the polders a particularly luminous green; wooly clumps of sheep plodded contentedly between the sky blue canals. As I left Hoorn’s railway station behind, it became immediately evident how important the East India Company used to be here. You see it in the VOC insignia that peek out from under eaves, in the impressive old Company warehouses that tower five stories above the town’s principal canal, in a street named Peper Straat, but perhaps most poignantly in the faces of former company officials who peer from the walls of the local history museum.

The quirky Westfries Museum presides over Roode Steen, a postcard-perfect rhomboid of a medieval square a few steps from the old harbor. The museum is fronted by a stepped façade plastered with a busy display of insignia, giving it all the appearance of an overwrought sports trophy—in an endearing, Renaissance sort of way. Inside, it is all crooked passageways and leaning stairs filled with dusty portraits of plump and jolly militiamen (the town had to pass an ordinance to limit the duration of parties thrown by these seventeenth-century weekend warriors to no more than three days, a museum guide tells me) and cluttered with souvenirs from Holland’s glory years.

Up the creaky stairs, pride of place is given to a high, timbered room devoted to the East India Company. Here, the musty stench of ancient stuff is made even thicker by the slightly sickly smell of cloves mingling with nutmeg and mace. The curators had the clever idea of installing rough burlap sacks of sweet spices to remind you of what put their city on the map. It’s a clever conceit, especially when you read that each sack would have been worth the price of a house in seventeenth-century Hoorn—a rather nice house at that. The hall’s walls are lined with group portraits of men who look as if they didn’t party much with the militiamen downstairs. These are the businessmen who ran the East India Company. Up on the left is the fleshy figure of the VOC officer Cornelis de Groot, his image the cliché of the capitalist fat cat with his pencil-thin mustache, double chins, and bland smile. Nearby stands the Hoorn chamber director and sometime mayor, Francois Van Brederhoff, looking as if he were late for a meeting. Others lounge and lean, surveying the room. There’s one person in the room who doesn’t seem as if he much liked having his portrait painted. But that would have been typical of the man whom many consider the greatest villain (and some, a towering hero) of the Dutch spice trade.

Jan Pieterszoon Coen sat for his portrait after he became the Company’s chief operating officer in the Far East. His crew-cut, chiseled, leathery head pokes out of a fashionably frilly collar like an ill-tempered tortoise dressed for the prom. He looks across the room at a group portrait of luxuriantly bewigged and chubby-cheeked VOC functionaries arranged around a long table draped with a splendid carmine Turkish rug. It may be irritation at the painter’s slowness that shows in Coen’s hard eyes, but I can’t help but imagine scorn when I follow his gaze.