Amboina, 1623

Fear and Conspiracy on the Edge of Empire

Adam Clulow

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• ISBN:
  9780231550376
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Imperialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 1623, a Japanese mercenary called Shichiz? was arrested for asking suspicious questions about a Dutch East India Company castle on Amboina, a remote set of islands in what is now eastern Indonesia. He was tortured until he confessed that he had joined a plot orchestrated by a group of English merchants to seize control of the fortification and ultimately to rip the spice-rich islands from the Company's grasp. Two weeks later, Dutch authorities executed twenty-one alleged conspirators, sparking immediate outrage and a controversy that would endure for centuries to come.

In this landmark study, Adam Clulow presents a new perspective on the Amboina case that aims to move beyond the debate over guilt or innocence. Amboina, 1623 argues that the case was driven forward by a potent combination of genuine crisis, imagined threat, and overpowering fear that propelled the rapid escalation from suspicion to torture, that gave shape and form to the sprawling plot, and that pushed it forward to a final bloody conclusion. Based on a detailed analysis of archival records, letters, and contemporary legal documents, this book is a masterful reinterpretation of a trial that has divided opinion for centuries. Amboina, 1623 offers new insights into one of the most famous cases in global history and the nature of European expansion across the early modern world.

PART ONE

Amboina in 1623

CHAPTER I

With Treaty or With Violence

The Ternatans about two or 3 months before the discovery of the conspiracy began to rebel in the quarters of Luhu and Kambelo and murdered some Netherlanders.

—Laurens de Maerschalk, 1628

In February 1621, two years before the Amboina conspiracy case began to unfold, the governor-general of the Dutch East India Company, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, took command of an invasion fleet. Anchored in the harbor at Kota Ambon was the most powerful military force yet assembled by the Dutch empire in Asia. Crowded within the wooden walls of more than a dozen ships were 1,655 soldiers and sailors, virtually every fighting man the organization could muster, including 80 soldiers shipped from its distant outpost in Japan.1 The fleet’s target was the nearby Banda Islands, where local spice growers had persistently resisted VOC attempts to enforce its claimed treaty rights over nutmeg and mace. After years of frustration, Coen had decided that the Company’s might would be brought to bear on Banda, wiping the slate clean and preparing the ground for a new population of settlers and slaves capable of funneling spices into the holds of VOC ships.2

From the walls of Castle Victoria, Herman van Speult, Coen’s ever-dutiful subordinate, watched the fleet assemble. The campaign was to be a decisive moment not just for Banda but also for Amboina, where attempts to lock down the spice trade had faltered in the face of resistance by polities scattered across the Hoamoal Peninsula, which had begun to push back with increasing ferocity against their own treaties with the Company. Starting with the successful conquest of Banda, Coen’s operation was designed to end in Amboina, securing Dutch dominion there and, with it, control over the flow of spices.3 In fact, it had the opposite effect, sparking a descent into violent disorder that provided the backdrop to the 1623 conspiracy trial. Writing a year after the bloody pacification of Banda, Coen, who had nursed ambitious dreams of a single transformative campaign, painted a dark picture of the colony in Amboina, which was surrounded on all sides by enemies who worked in stealth to raise “our friends, vassals and subjects to rebellion.”4 This stark assessment was amplified by a string of violent clashes that took place across Amboina in the months before the 1623 trial, ending in the murder or flight of Dutch officials and the razing to the ground of a number of outposts.

This chapter explores Banda and Amboina together, showing how repeated attempts to exert control over the spice trade created a situation that VOC officials believed could only be resolved by force, and how a violent campaign launched against Banda in 1621 increased unrest across Amboina in 1623. At the center of this story are treaties—signed, ratified, but never observed. After its establishment in 1602, the Company had attempted to channel the flow of commodities in the Malukus by using restrictive agreements that required local signatories to deliver their crops of precious spices at a fixed price in return for protection against the Portuguese and the Spanish. Couched in the language of alliance against a common enemy, VOC treaties were intended to superimpose a reliable political template over an uncertain landscape. But even as they signed such documents, local spice producers had no intention of selling their crops exclusively to the Dutch at deflated prices, particularly when the presence of Asian trading powers like Makassar or European rivals like the English East India Company offered multiple opportunities to evade such restrictions. The result was that these treaties engendered rather than resolved disorder, creating what VOC officials viewed as false allies who were bound to the Company by signed documents but existed in a state of perpetual transgression.

The Company’s administrators talked often in terms of opposing binaries, of control exerted either through “treaty or with violence.”5 Implicit in this was the notion that violence was the opposite of the treaty, something called into action only in the most exceptional of circumstances when all other mechanisms had broken down. In fact, as scholars like Martine van Ittersum and Arthur Weststeijn have shown, the two came bundled together in sites of Dutch expansion.6 Treaties were not the antithesis of empire, an instrument of reciprocal recognition that ensured mutual sovereignty.7 Rather, they became in many cases the very engine driving the expansion of VOC territorial control and with it the organization’s transformation into an Asian power. Although expressed in the language of respect and recognition, such agreements created a problem that many Company officials came to believe could only be solved through violence.8 Because of this, they came attached to a ticking clock counting down relentlessly from signing to the moment of violent resolution when the Company’s false allies were either brought into line or, in some cases, simply erased from the landscape. It was this process that played out in the years leading up to the 1623 trial in Banda and which in turn triggered a rapid deterioration of political conditions in Amboina.

Spices and Treaties

Propelling the creation of the Dutch East India Company and running like a thread through its early operations in Asia was an overwhelming, insatiable lust for spices.9 For Europeans, spices represented one of the great commercial prizes of the seventeenth century. While a number of spices could command high prices, an intoxicating triumvirate—nutmeg, mace, and cloves—stood at the top of the wider hierarchy.10 Together, their capacity to generate the greatest profits meant that they assumed a prominent place in the European imagination. The value of these spices derived from their myriad properties that would, one writer assured his readers, take “too long to narrate.”11 Among other things, cloves could “strengthen the Liver, the Maw, and the hart, they further digestion, they procure evacuation of the Urine … preseveth the sight, and four Drammes being drunke with Milk, doe procure lust.”12 Nutmeg, just as potent, was said to “comferteth the braine, sharpeth the memorie, warmeth and strengthneth the Maw, driveth winde out of the body, maketh a sweet breath, driveth downe Urine, stoppeth the Laske (diarrhoea).”13

These potent attributes and the readily portable nature of precious spices combined to make them irresistible targets for commercial expansion. The great complicating factor, but one that also spurred dreams of absolute monopoly, was that these commodities were concentrated in the Malukus, a remote set of islands in modern-day Indonesia that was widely referred to as the Spice Islands.14 Nutmeg and mace came primarily from the Banda Islands, and cloves from Amboina, located to the northwest within easy sailing distance.15 Simply getting a ship thousands of miles from Europe to the Spice Islands was difficult; developing a reliable infrastructure capable of gathering, storing, and exporting these commodities year after year imposed a vast logistical challenge.

The first Dutch fleet to reach the Spice Islands arrived under the command of Jacob van Neck in 1599. It had been sent by one of the smaller trading companies, now known collectively as the pre-companies (voorcompagnieen), that combined to send fifteen such expeditions to Asia before the establishment of the VOC.16 Van Neck’s voyage was a stunning success, harvesting enough spices to generate a 400 percent profit and triggering a rush of copycat enterprises.17 The arrival of so many competing fleets in a relatively short time drove down the price for spices and undermined the basis for profitable trade. It quickly became clear that one unified company would have a much better chance of exploiting this newly opened market. In December 1601, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the senior statesman in the United Provinces, convened a conference that brought together the directors of all the rival companies. The outcome of months of hard-fought negotiations was the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or United East India Company, which was formed by merging six of the pre-companies.

The VOC represented a significant improvement on the pre-companies. It was larger, more stable, and better equipped with a range of powers designed to allow it to compete effectively in Asia. The new organization drew on a vast initial capital of 6,424,588 guilders, which was raised from shares bought by 1,800 individual investors.18 In contrast to its predecessors, which were capitalized for individual expeditions, meaning that all remaining funds had to be returned to the investors at the conclusion of these enterprises, the VOC’s capital crossed voyages, lasting initially for ten years but later becoming effectively permanent.19 At the same time, the 1602 charter gave the Company exclusive rights to a vast area of operations east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Strait of Magellan. This allowed the organization’s directors, the famous Gentlemen 17 (Heeren XVII), to develop a long-term strategy for expansion in Asia, an option denied both to the pre-companies and to its English rival, which had been established two years earlier on the older model.20 Finally, the States General gifted the VOC, which was created in part to carry the fight against Portugal and Spain into a new region, with an arsenal of privileges and powers that allowed it to wage war, conduct diplomacy, and plant colonies in Asia.

These powers were turned immediately toward the Spice Islands. Here, the fact that spice production was concentrated in a narrow geographical area located outside the boundaries of a major state, the very features that made it so difficult for Europeans to access the trade in the first place, seemed to create an opening for the Company.21 Unlike other commodities that poured forth from disparate sources, the trade in nutmeg, mace, and cloves could, it seemed, be encompassed by a single organization equipped with a sufficiently aggressive strategy. The potential prize was enormous. If the newly formed Company could find a way to control the flow of spices in Amboina and Banda, it could ensure its long-term survival, make its investors rich, and deprive its Portuguese and Spanish rivals of access to a lucrative resource. But how to do this? How to stretch power across thousands of miles to control a commodity that had been available to the highest bidder for centuries, and to a territory where vessels belonging to a range of commercial competitors could simply land at any one of dozens of inlets along the coast to purchase spices? For VOC officials, the answer lay in a key instrument of the Dutch Empire, the protection/tribute treaty, which was used to stamp their influence over the spice trade.22

As the Company’s expeditions pushed further into Asian waters, its captains and merchants moved to sign documents, which they described as “treaties” (verbondt) or “accords” (accordt), with local rulers and leaders.23 These treaties were rooted in what seems at first a deferential attitude toward Asian rulers. From the beginning, VOC officials made no attempt to deny the essential sovereignty of local regimes as a prelude to ambitious claims. To the contrary, they insisted—and the point was reinforced by writers such as Hugo Grotius, who emerged as the Company’s most effective legal champion—that European powers had no right to claim Asian territory on the basis of discovery, papal donation, the requirement for mass proselytism, or similar arguments. Instead, VOC officials carefully positioned themselves as the protectors of local rulers who had been threatened by the aggressive imperial incursions of Portugal and Spain. In Grotius’s formulation, “When the East Indian princes and nations, suffering under the Spaniards’ harsh injustice, saw the courage and strength of the Dutch, they implored our aid and alliance and were saved from extreme danger by our troops; for their own offered no protection.”24

While Dutch agents reveled in their self-presentation as “the most valiant of men, defenders of their allies and subduers of their enemies; and … saviours of the Orient,” the offer of protection came attached to a steep price tag.25 The recipients of this protection were required to offer tribute in retu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Note to the Reader
• Acknowledgments
• Maps of Southeast Asia, Amboina, and the Banda Islands
• Introduction: The Company and the Colony
• PART I: Amboina in 1623
• PART II: Remaking a Conspiracy Trial
• Epilogue: The Fearful Empire
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index