Vermeer's Hat (3 page)
Authors: Timothy Brook
Cold and plague dented the rate at which the world’s population was growing, but in retrospect it looks now as though humankind
was only preparing for the leap that started around 1700 and still keeps us in midair. Humankind had already broken the limit
of half a billion before the seventeenth century began. We were well past six hundred million by the time it ended. Johannes
Vermeer and Catharina Bolnes made their little contribution to world population growth, though it was not easy. They buried
at least four of their children, three of them in the family grave in the Old Church. There is no record of what they died
of, though one suspects plague would have been mentioned, had that been the cause of death. But losses in the family were
outweighed by gains, for another eleven children survived to adulthood. Five or six had already been born by the time Vermeer
bought the iceboat; perhaps he bought it for their pleasure as well as his own. In the long term, though, only four of his
children married and had children. In many families, if not Vermeer’s, those who failed to marry were propelled out of their
home communities in search of employment and survival. The young men became the sailors who manned the ships, the employees
and bondsmen who staffed the wharves and warehouses handling the new global trade, and the soldiers who filled the armies
and protected the trade. The same young men also supplied the crews of the pirate ships that preyed on the growing maritime
traffic. The young women became maids and prostitutes.
In
View of Delft
, the herring buses are a sign of this history. One benefit that the Dutch gained from global cooling was the southward movement
of fish stocks in the North Sea. Colder winters meant that Arctic ice moved farther south, causing major freeze-ups along
the coast of Norway, where the herring fishery had traditionally been based. The fishery moved south toward the Baltic Sea,
and there it came under the control of Dutch fishermen. This is why we see herring buses moored outside Delft. One of the
founding scholars of climate history has even proposed that the prosperity the Dutch enjoyed in the first half of the seventeenth
century—the very prosperity that Vermeer captures in his domestic interiors—occurred because of this resource windfall. The
herring catch gave the Dutch a stake they could then invest in other ventures, especially in shipping and maritime trade.
Those two herring boats are Vermeer’s evidence of climate change.
View of Delft
has another door we can open onto the seventeenth century. Look again at the steeple of the Old Church next to the Parrot
Brewery tower, and we see a long roof that runs in an unbroken line to the left side of the canvas. (Had Vermeer continued
the painting a little farther to the left, he would have had to include the great windmill at the corner of the city wall
that pumped water out of the canal, which would have altered the structure of the painting.) Earlier commentators have accused
Vermeer of simplifying the skyline in order not to detract from other elements in the painting. When I went to stand on the
far side of the Kolk, I looked for that roofline. The roofs I saw were not composed in quite the way Vermeer painted them,
but despite the architectural adding and subtracting that has gone on since 1660, I could see what he was painting: the roof
of a large warehouse complex stretching the entire block from the Oude Delft to the moat on the city’s west side. It was the
warehouse of the Oost-Indisch Huis, East India House, as I was able to determine by walking up the Oude Delft and checking
the house fronts. This was the home of the Delft Chamber of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie),
the center of a vast web of international trade connecting Delft to Asia.
The Dutch East India Company—the VOC, as it is known—is to corporate capitalism what Benjamin Franklin’s kite is to electronics:
the beginning of something momentous that could not have been predicted at the time. The world’s first large joint-stock company,
the VOC was formed in 1602 when the Dutch Republic obliged the many trading companies popping up to take advantage of the
Asian trade boom to merge into a single commercial organization. The stick was monopoly. Commercial ventures that did not
join the VOC would not be allowed to trade in Asia. The carrot was unlimited profits in which the state would not interfere,
other than to expect a modest tax dividend. The merchants grudgingly went along with the arrangement, and the VOC emerged
as a federation of six regional chambers: the Amsterdam Chamber, which contributed half the capital, the Hoorn and Enkhuizen
chambers in north Holland, Middelburg in the Rhine estuary (Zeeland) in the south, and Rotterdam and Delft in the heart of
Holland. What at first sight looked like an unworkable compromise—separate chambers controlled their own capital and operations
while adhering to uniform guidelines and policies—turned out to be a brilliant innovation. Only a unique federal state such
as the Dutch Republic could have dreamed up a federal company structure. The VOC combined flexibility with strength, giving
the Dutch a huge advantage in the competition to dominate maritime trade to Asia.
Within a few decades, the VOC proved itself to be the most powerful trading corporation in the seventeenth-century world and
the model for the large-scale business enterprises that now dominate the global economy. Its monogram also became the best-known
company trademark of that age, possibly in fact the first global logo. The company-wide monogram consisted of the company’s
three initials with a
V
(Verenigde) in the middle and an
O
(Oostindische) and a
C
(Compagnie) overlapping its two antennae. It was left for each chamber to add its own initial by placing it above or below
the
VOC
initials. The Delft Chamber placed its
D
(Delft) over the bottom point of the
V
, producing a monogram that can still be seen today on the façade of the former Delft Chamber offices on the west side of
the Old Delft Canal. The chamber acquired this building in 1631. Over time it added other buildings to it, each decorated
with the same monogram. The original buildings have long since been converted into private apartments—the VOC went bankrupt
in the 1790s and was disbanded in 1800—but its logo is still there to remind us of this history. Universally familiar to the
Dutch, it gives the long-defunct company a virtual presence in the Netherlands even today.
Everyone in seventeenth-century Delft would have known where the Delft Chamber was located. The VOC was too important to the
Delft economy for this not to be common local knowledge. If any of them stood with me on the far side of the harbor from the
point at which the Old Delft Canal passed under the Capels Bridge between the Schiedam and Rotterdam gates and emptied into
the Kolk, they could have pointed out the red tiled roofs of the VOC warehouse and office complex without difficulty. So too
they could have turned to point south down the canal in the direction of Delfshaven, Schiedam, and Rotterdam, the town’s maritime
ports on the mouth of the Rhine. This stretch of Delft constituted the town’s commercial face, the place from which its citizens
traded with the world. Once we have noticed the VOC’s presence,
View of Delft
begins to strike us as less merely decorative, less casual in its choice of subject, more intentional.
Despite the VOC’s visibility in the painting, as in Delft, there is no evidence that Vermeer himself had a personal connection
with his subject. His grandfather was almost bankrupted speculating in VOC shares in the Company’s early years, after which
the family had nothing to do with it. But no Delft family could truly escape the VOC. Vermeer’s father, Reynier Vos (the family
had not yet adopted the surname Vermeer at the time Reynier was born), an art dealer and innkeeper, may not have worked for
the Company, but his trade depended on serving those who passed through Delft, and most of those came on Company business.
So too a painter could well find himself within the orbit of the VOC. In Amsterdam, for instance, Rembrandt van Rijn collected
fat fees to paint the portraits of VOC directors. But Vermeer didn’t do portraits on commission, so far as we know. Delft
may have been a Company town, but Vermeer never became a Company painter.
Though Vermeer never worked for the VOC, tens of thousands of Dutch people did. A team of Dutch historians has estimated that
in the company’s first ten years of operations, which almost coincides with the first decade of the seventeenth century, eighty-five
hundred men left the Netherlands on VOC ships. In every decade that followed, that total progressively increased. By the 1650s,
over forty thousand were departing every ten years. Close to a million people made the sea journey from Holland to Asia during
the two centuries between 1595 and 1795. Most were young men who preferred a post with the East India Company to staying and
making do with crowded homes and limited patrimonies. Asia for them represented the hope of making better lives elsewhere.
At least three of Vermeer’s cousins were among these VOC out-migrants. According to the will of his father’s brother, Dirck
van der Minne, in 1675, a cousin named Claes was working as a “surgeon in the East Indies” and two first cousins once removed,
Aryen and Dirck Gerritszoon van Sanen, Claes’s nephews, were “both in the East Indies” at the time the will was read.
Not all this million passed through Delft on their way to the East but many thousands did, making their way down the canal
to Rotterdam on the mouth of the Rhine. Vermeer would have encountered them while he was a child in his father’s inn and heard
the boasts of those going out East and the tall tales of those coming home. To go was not always to come back. Indeed, the
odds were against it. Of every three men who took ship to Asia, two did not return. Some died on the journey out, and many
more succumbed to diseases against which they had no immunities after they arrived. But mortality was not the only factor
that kept men from returning. Many chose to stay in Asia, some to avoid paying the cost of success or the shame of failure
when they got home, others because they were able to make new lives in the places where they ended up and had no desire to
return to what they had left behind. Despite the heavy toll of mortality on the company’s men, the VOC prospered, and with
it the Netherlands.
THE EUROPEAN CAPACITY TO MOUNT and sustain commercial operations on a global scale depended in no small part on new technologies
accompanying maritime trade. The English polymath Francis Bacon in 1620 selected for special notice three “mechanical discoveries”
that, in his view, “have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.” One such discovery was the magnetic
compass, enabling navigators to sail out of sight of land and still guess where they were. Another was paper, which permitted
merchants to keep the detailed records needed for multiple transactions and sustain the heavy correspondence that trade over
long distances demands. The third discovery was gunpowder. Without the rapid advances arms manufacturers made in ballistics
technology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European traders abroad would have been hard pressed to overwhelm local
opposition to unwanted trade arrangements and protect the spoils of commerce. The VOC took advantage of all three innovations
to build a network of trade that stretched all the way to East Asia. “No empire, no sect, no star,” Bacon asserted, “seems
to have exerted greater power and influence on human affairs” than these three inventions.
Bacon, famously unaware that all three discoveries came from China, noted that they were of “obscure and inglorious” origin.
Had he been told their origin was Chinese, he would not have been surprised. Thanks to Marco Polo’s colorful descriptions
in his
Travels
of the Mongol court in the later part of the fourteenth century, China held a powerful place in the popular imagination. Europeans
thought of it as a place of power and wealth beyond any known scale. This idea led many to believe that the quickest route
to China must also be the quickest route to their own wealth and power, and to pursue the search for that route. The quest
to get to China was a relentless force that did much to shape the history of the seventeenth century, not just within Europe
and China, but in most of the places in between. This is why China lurks behind every story in this book, even those that
don’t at first glance seem to have anything to do with it. The lure of China’s wealth haunted the seventeenth-century world.
The explosion of seventeenth-century migration was prefaced by an attraction for China that already had begun to shape European
choices in the sixteenth century. The sixteenth was a century of discoveries and violent encounters, of windfalls and errors,
of borders crossed and borders closed, creating a web of connections that spread in all directions. The seventeenth century
was something different. First encounters were becoming sustained engagements; fortuitous exchanges were being systematized
into regular trade; the language of gesture was being supplanted by pidgin dialects and genuine communication. Running through
all these changes was the common factor of mobility. More people were in motion over longer distances and sojourning away
from home for longer periods of time than at any other time in human history. More people were engaging in transactions with
people whose languages they did not know and whose cultures they had never experienced. At the same time, more people were
learning new languages and adjusting to unfamiliar customs. First contacts for the most part were over. The seventeenth was
a century of second contacts.
