Our Lord General … is of such a status that he sends ambassadors to the principal kings of China, Siam, Aceh and Patani; to the emperors of Java and Persia; [and] to the Great Mughal.
—Ambassador Pieter Nuyts, 1627
On 1 January 1624, two ambassadors from China arrived in Batavia, the Dutch East India Company’s new Asian headquarters. This dramatic event, unprecedented in the short history of Dutch settlement there, provided the opening entry of the voluminous Batavia
Dagregister, the daily account of operations that forms a vital source for historians working on this period.
1 The pair had been dispatched by the governor of Fujian province to discuss recent developments on the Penghu Islands, a small chain in the Taiwan straits that Dutch forces had occupied two years earlier. Accompanied by four elephants hurriedly drafted in by local officials to add a touch of grandeur, the ambassadors’ procession wound its way through the city before ending its journey at Batavia Castle, the squat, heavily armed fortress that the company had erected to guard its most important territorial possession in Asia. Passing through two lines of soldiers arrayed in front of the gate, they were led into the sweltering confines of the stronghold. Waiting for them in a central chamber was “His Excellency the General,” the highest-ranking Dutch official in Asia and the new face of VOC diplomacy in the region.
The arrival of the embassy from China and others like it marks an important shift in the nature of VOC diplomatic practice—one that would not only alter the way it did business in Asia but would also have far-reaching consequences for the company’s relationship with the Tokugawa regime. With the conquest of Jayakarta in 1619, the VOC claimed a firm foothold on Asian soil, putting down deep roots that would only be dislodged centuries later. As the city expanded and grew, the organization’s diplomatic strategy began to adjust accordingly, shifting away from its prior reliance on the distant figure of the Stadhouder to a new focus on the governor-general and Batavia Castle as the fulcrum for diplomatic activity. In the decades that followed the mission from Fujian, these officials welcomed dozens of ambassadors into the audience hall located deep inside the fortress. This stream of incoming delegations was matched by a steady flow of embassies, carrying letters issued by the governor-general and bearing no trace of the “king of Holland,” out of the castle to a range of Asian states.
One such mission, sent to Japan in 1627 and placed under the command of Pieter Nuyts, forms the subject of this chapter.
2 In contrast to its humble predecessor that had arrived in Sunpu eighteen years earlier, Nuyts’s embassy was a carefully planned affair, led by a genuine member of the VOC elite and equipped with a rich array of gifts. And yet, despite its extensive preparation and the tens of thousands of guilders that were poured into it, the embassy was an abject failure. That such a well-planned mission would fail where Puyck and van den Broek’s jury-rigged effort had succeeded seems so obviously contradictory that it demands an explanation.
When it came time to account for what had happened, the ambassador, eager to escape personal punishment for the debacle, happily offered up a list of villains that included incompetent interpreters, ignorant Bakufu officials, treacherous allies, and determined enemies intent on pushing the Dutch out of Japan.
3 But as more and more details emerged from Japan, his superiors concluded that Nuyts himself was the primary culprit. He had, they railed, been too arrogant, too intolerant, and, above all, too inflexible in his dealings with the Japanese, needlessly aggravating problems when a better diplomat could have quieted the Bakufu’s concerns while steering the embassy to successful completion. While he fully deserves much of the criticism directed his way—indeed Nuyts emerges as a strikingly unsympathetic figure—this focus on a single individual leaves out an important part of the story of what went wrong in Edo.
4 Perhaps more important, it tends to flatten out the problems inherent in this interaction and to assume that any disagreements could have been settled if the ambassador had simply adopted a suitably humble attitude, presented the right gift, or used the right words. This was never the case. Although he was clearly a poor choice, Nuyts struggled with larger structural issues beyond his control.
By the time he arrived in Japan, the company, shrugging off the royal disguise (detailed in the previous chapter), was in the process of asserting its own right to engage directly with Asian rulers without mediation from the Stadhouder. When Tokugawa officials discovered that his delegation came from Batavia and not the “king of Holland,” it triggered a crisis that defied easy resolution. Over the next weeks Nuyts’s mission became trapped in an uncertain space between two distinct diplomatic narratives, unable to prove its connection to the “king of Holland,” but also incapable of showing that the governor-general was a legitimate actor in his own right. To assume that it failed because of one inept individual is, therefore, to overlook a basic point, that the embassy was not an infinitely malleable tool that could be shaped to European wishes by skillful ambassadors. Rather, diplomatic missions had to conform to a logic mandated by Asian officials, and not all embassies, irrespective of the personal qualities of their chief representatives, were able to pass such a test. In this way there was, to return to an earlier point, nothing straightforward about diplomacy.
While few diplomatic encounters were quite as fraught as Nuyts’s embassy, which ran into a perfect storm of problems, his broader experience as a European ambassador in Asia was not exceptional. During such missions, European conceptions about the proper order of international relations and the rights of diplomatic envoys collided with political realities in Asia. The result was often an overriding sense of anxiety as ambassadors struggled to manage their encounters. This was famously the case with another highly qualified envoy, Thomas Roe, who was sent by the English East India Company to negotiate with the Mughal emperor in 1615. Although he enjoyed more success, Roe’s experience, closely documented in his lengthy diary, often mirrored that of his Dutch counterpart.
5 Both ambassadors tried at every turn to compel respect for mission and master, often by using similar tactics and a shared reliance on theatrical display, but both found themselves constantly on the defensive. For Nuyts, the embassy became a terrible “labyrinth” from which he could see no exit; for Roe it transformed into a “Camp of Confusion” that resisted all his attempts to impose order.
6BATAVIA AS DIPLOMATIC CAPITAL
In many ways the gradual move away from a previous dependence on the Stadhouder as a diplomatic mediator was the inevitable product of the company’s development and its transformation from an unfamiliar interloper into a formidable power with its own territorial base in Asia. However, the precise nature of the strategy that emerged to replace it can be traced back to two momentous developments, the creation of the office of governor-general in 1609 and the conquest of Jayakarta a decade later, that combined to lay the basis for a new diplomatic capital in Asia. In the first years after the company’s formation in 1602, the Heeren 17, a body based in the United Provinces, constituted the organization’s sole permanent command structure. The regular fleets that departed from Europe were placed under the control of an admiral who was commissioned to lead his ships to Asia and, once there, to take command of the company’s operations. But his tenure only extended until such time as a new fleet and a new admiral arrived, creating a sequence of temporary appointments. Although this did, at least in theory, guarantee a clear chain of command, the reality was a highly decentralized system in which fleets operated independently of each other and with minimal coordination. The result was that individual commanders clashed, promises were broken, and the company’s efforts were hampered by disorganization.
As the area of operations expanded and as more and more ships arrived in Asia, it became clear that these arrangements could not be sustained, and in 1609 the Heeren 17 elected to overhaul this system. Their ambitious solution was to create a separate office, the governor-general (
Gouveneur-Generaal), that was to be based permanently in Asia and to take control of all operations there. The decision pushed the VOC onto a different path from its English rival, which continued to rely on a model organized around individual fleets, and brought it more in line with the Portuguese system with its central authority in Goa.
7 To fill the new office, the Heeren 17 selected Pieter Both, an experienced merchant who had traveled to Asia on one of the precompany voyages. He was instructed to assume control over all VOC activities in Asia and to bring them back onto a firm footing.
8In addition to creating a centralized office, the directors recognized that they needed to establish a permanent headquarters in Asia from which the company’s affairs could be directed. The proposed rendezvous, as it appears in VOC documents, needed to posses a good natural harbor in which an ever growing fleet could be refitted, a strategic location preferably at the confluence of major trade routes, and room for expansion, ideally because the territory had already come under the company’s sovereignty or because it fell under the control of a weak political authority willing to grant substantial concessions. The choice eventually settled on Jayakarta, a port city located near Banten that was under the control of a minor prince. In 1610 agreement was reached to allow the company to set up operations there, but relations gradually deteriorated; within a decade there was open war. By the time the dust had settled, the prince had been deposed and his dominion claimed as VOC territory.
The establishment of Batavia permanently altered the trajectory of the company’s development by creating a sovereign space in which it could operate unhampered by external authority.
9 Over the next decades, the limits of its authority gradually swelled outward from the tight constrictions of these original boundaries until the company controlled large swathes of Java. The conquest of Jayakarta had the added consequence of creating a rival center of power within the organization itself. From the beginning, the slow pace of communication between Europe and Asia gave the governors-general considerable freedom to operate independently. If so inclined, Batavia could simply ignore or selectively interpret directives by pointing to changed circumstances. The more ambitious governors-general were content to take matters more fully into their hands and to present the directors with a fait accompli. Antonio van Diemen, who held the office from 1636 to 1645, informed his superiors that “we have said and we confirm with this that we
must be trusted with the matters of the Indies, and therefore cannot wait for orders if we are to do the Company’s service.”
10 Another governor-general put it even more directly when he noted that “the Gentlemen in the fatherland make the decisions there that they consider the best, but we do it here according to our own good judgment.”
11 The result was that these officials became an increasingly dominant force within the organization while the Heeren 17 were reduced to a more reactive role.
12
Figure 2.1. The Castle of Batavia, ca. 1656–58. Andries Beeckman. Courtesy of the Collection Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
As the company’s internal politics evolved, its diplomatic strategy began to shift away from Europe. The new focus on Batavia was in part a pragmatic response to the rapid expansion in the organization’s activities and reach. By the 1620s the company was engaged in ongoing negotiations with a range of emperors, kings, sultans, and other rulers across Asia. The sheer volume of diplomatic traffic meant that it could no longer afford to wait for documents from the Stadhouder’s palace, which could, as had been the case in Japan, take years to obtain. At the same time, some within the company began to suspect that a reliance on a figure in Europe for endorsement undermined the governor-general’s own position. As it expanded within Asia, the organization was increasingly obsessed with its own reputation, viewing it as a vital instrument needed to lure allies closer to Batavia while keeping rivals in check.
13 A strong governor-general capable of commanding respect from the “feigned friends and declared enemies” that surrounded Batavia was crucial to the organization’s survival, and persistent references to a more senior figure in Europe could only undermine his hard-won status.
14 Addressing this point directly, one official commented that his superiors should no longer procure letters from the Stadhouder as “the respect for the governor-general is markedly lessened (to the company’s disadvantage).”
15The shift from Holland to Batavia could not have happened, however, without a transformation in the nature of the governor-general’s office. Its first incumbents were comparatively modest figures poorly suited for any role as diplomatic figureheads. unlike the Portuguese viceroys in Goa, the governors-general were not aristocrats, and many came from extremely humble backgrounds, ascending gradually from the lowest rungs to positions of power via decades of service.
16 Some, like Antonio van Diemen, who had fled the United Provinces under an assumed name to avoid legal proceedings, had more colorful pasts. Once they arrived in Asia, the first governors-general, possessing none of the kingly accoutrements of local potentates, struggled to distinguish themselves as anything more than chief merchants. It is not surprising, therefore, that many nearby rulers dismissed the office as lacking the necessary status to engage in diplomacy. One sultan summed up a more general attitude when he proclaimed that sending an embassy to meet with the governor-general “would be in conflict with his honor. If prince Mauritius [Maurits] was here, he would send [an envoy] to him as to a brother, but he would not stoop to [send an embassy] to the general, who was just the overseer of merchants.”
17 Indeed, it was for this reason that the company continued to rely on letters from the Stadhouder for several years after Both’s initial appointment in 1609.
Changing this perception required time. After the conquest of Jayakarta, the VOC set about constructing a new city on the ruins of the old settlement.
18 Over the next decades, laborers straightened rivers, dug canals, and erected rows of gabled houses, transforming the city from a backwater into a booming colonial metropolis that became known as the “queen of the East.”
19 Like Batavia itself, the office of governor-general was remade and all trace of the humble chief merchant erased. By the time the first detailed reports written by foreign travelers to Batavia emerged around the middle of the seventeenth century, the governor-general had become an increasingly imperious figure who had more in common with local rulers than any “overseer of merchants.”
20 Whenever he ventured out, the governor-general traveled in a special carriage of state pulled by six horses and accompanied by a troop of horsemen as well as a bodyguard of richly clad halberdiers. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a French traveler who provided one of the earliest descriptions of Batavia by an outsider, commented that there was “no Cavalry in Europe so well clad or mounted as his; the Horsemen all upon Persian or Arabian Steeds. Nor is his Foot Guard less sumptuous: His Halberdiers wear their yellow Satten Doublets, Scarlet Breeches lac’d with Silver Lace, and their Silk Stockins.”
21
Figure 2.2. Governor-General Pieter Both, Unknown artists, ca. 1750–80. Courtesy of the Collection Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
The overall effect was unmistakably regal. He “displays,” one author summarized, “absolutely the pomp and state of a distinguished sovereign. Not only does he reside in an impressive palace, but his entire state, train and government is kingly.”
22 Another noted that the governor-general was “provided with no less Pomp and State than the Princes of Europe,”
23 while a third explained simply that the incumbent was known as “the Raya de Jaccatra of the Hollanders, that is the king of Jaccatra.”
24 Much like a king, the key episodes of the governor-general’s life—his accession, birthdays, and funeral—were all celebrated with carefully staged events that brought the city to a standstill.
25 The assumption of office took place in front of large crowds who were compelled to swear an “oath of faithfulness” to the incoming incumbent.
26 The conclusion of the ceremony was marked by volleys of musket and cannon fire, after which the city’s leading figures made their way to the castle to offer personal congratulations.
Christopher Fryke, a soldier enlisted in the company’s army, provided a description of the equally lavish birthday celebrations:
It being the General’s Birth-Day … all the Burghers and Freemen were in Arms, and drew up before the General’s Lodgings in the Castle, where after the Discharge of all the Cannon about the Castle and City, they saluted his Excellency with several Vollies of Shot. Each Nation then came in a distinct Body with Presents to the General; as first, the Chineses, Siamers, Japonneses, Macassars, Amboineses, Bandaneses, &c. and even the Javians, who are not permitted to set a foot in the Castle on any other time, were then let in…. These Presents are Magnificent…. Besides this, all the Streets were full of Lights, Bonefires, and Fireworks.
27
The greatest pomp was reserved, however, for the funeral of those governors-general who died in office. These could be enormously expensive affairs, in one case costing over 13,000 rijksdaalders, a huge sum that included 267 gold and silver medals that were specially struck for the occasion.
28 The climax of such ceremonies involved a long cortege formed of hundreds of citizens, employees, musicians, local dignitaries, and foreign ambassadors that wound its way through the streets of Batavia accompanied by volley after volley of cannon fire.
29 At its center, and in a manner befitting any monarch, walked a solemn procession of officials carrying the deceased’s regalia, including his helmet, sword, tunic, gloves, and spurs.
The detailed codification of rules and rituals, the carefully choreographed and often enormously expensive ceremonies used to celebrate major events, and the deliberate fencing off of certain privileges suggest a program that extended far beyond individual whims. While it is clear that many incumbents delighted in such regal trappings, the whole-scale refashioning of the office undertaken in this period was clearly motivated by a desire to boost the governor-general’s status for political reasons.
30 This fact was recognized by contemporary observers, including Tavernier, who noted that to “maintain their Authority and Commerce in the
Indies, [the company] believes it to be to their advantage, that the General … should keep up the Port of a Prince.”
31A governor-general capable of keeping the “Port of a Prince” provided a natural focus for diplomacy, and foreign embassies such as the 1609 mission from Siam that had once made the long trip to Europe to meet with the Stadhouder were gradually redirected to Batavia. In their complexity and rigid insistence on proper protocol, the rituals developed in this city to accommodate diplomatic envoys rivaled those of any royal court with precise requirements detailed in VOC records for each stage, participant, and action.
32 When they arrived, visiting ambassadors were brought ashore in specially decorated vessels while the guns of the assembled fleet boomed overhead. Once on firm ground, they were greeted by a group of high-ranking officials and taken to lodgings specially constructed for “Ambassadors and Envoys of Princes or Foreign states.”
33On the day of the audience, a “carriage of state” (
caros van staat) guarded by a contingent of company troops transported the ambassadors to Batavia Castle, the key ceremonial space for diplomatic interaction.
34 Guy Tachard, a Jesuit visitor to Batavia in the late seventeenth century, noted that the “Citadel hath four Bastions faced and mounted with a great number of brass Guns. There is a good Garison kept in it, not only to hold it out against
Indians and
Europeans, and to succour the other Places in case of necessity ; but also to shew the Greatness and Power of the Company to Ambassadors and Princes, who come thither from all Places of the
Indies.”35 When they reached the stronghold, the envoys handed over their diplomatic letters to a splendidly attired halberdier who placed the documents on a silver or gold platter covered in satin and held under a yellow “parasol of state.”
36These documents, hundreds of which are recorded in the Batavia
Dagregister, reflect the emergence of the governor-general as a diplomatic actor in his own right, another kingly figure in a crowded political landscape. A 1648 missive sent from the ruler of the same state that had once dismissed the governor-general as a merchant of little consequence addressed him as lord “over all lands, castles, ships, yachts and Netherlanders below the winds and powerful in his rule on land as well as on sea.”
37 In 1664 the occupant of the “kingly throne of Jambi” in Java wrote to “to the Governor-General … that sits upon the throne of power in the city of Batavia and rules the nation of Holland in [the lands] above and below the winds.”
38 In 1691 the ruler of Abyssinia addressed his correspondence to the “most honorable Sultan of Sultans of the Hollanders and the great king of kings of the land Batavia,” while a letter from the sovereign of Tonkin was directed simply to the “king of Batavia.”
39 Other rulers opted to refer to the governor-general in more intimate terms as father or grandfather.
40Alongside the incoming embassies that confirmed Batavia’s role as an increasingly important diplomatic hub, there was an equally active flow of traffic out of the city. After the conquest of Jayakarta, dozens of embassies equipped with letters and gifts from the governor-general appeared in capitals across Asia. The most impressive of these traveled to regional powers like Mughal India or Safavid Persia and included elaborate processions that made carefully choreographed entrances into capital cities led by splendidly attired ambassadors.
41 They did so carrying letters from the governor-general, which increasingly replaced documents from the Stadhouder as the standard instrument for VOC diplomatic exchange.
42 The broad trend was thus away from the “king of Holland” template toward a new model oriented around an increasingly regal governor-general who stood confidently at the center of an expansive web of diplomatic links.
43 The moment of transition as Batavia pushed to the fore was not, however, always smooth and a handful of rulers, particularly those that had exchanged a series of documents with the Prince of Orange, protested his retreat from the scene.
In Siam, where the Ayutthayan monarchs had treated the arrival of letters from the Stadhouder as an opportunity to stage lavish spectacles designed to buttress the crown’s authority, the company encountered sustained resistance to its attempt to close down contact with the “king of Holland.” Eventually in 1639, after frequent inquiries about the prospect of future letters from the prince of Orange, the governor-general requested that the king of Siam correspond directly with him and abandon any attempt to communicate with the Stadhouder.
44 The next year, Batavia procured a letter from Maurits’s successor, Frederik Hendrik, asking for a halt to their correspondence.
45 By way of justification, the prince pointed to the great distances separating Siam and the Netherlands, while explaining that the governor-general, the designated overlord of the Dutch in Asia and the possessor himself of sovereign powers, should handle all diplomatic matters. After considerable back and forth, officials in Siam finally consented to this new arrangement and agreed to redirect letters and embassies to Batavia. The situation was quite different in Japan where the diplomatic shift away from Holland prompted outrage.
A NEW EMBASSY TO JAPAN
In 1627, more than a decade after its last embassy had arrived in Japan, the company resolved to send a new delegation to the shogun’s court. Momentum for such a mission had been building for a number of years, partly in response to a series of restrictions that had been placed on the Dutch by Ieyasu’s successor, Tokugawa Hidetada. But, while there was considerable enthusiasm in some parts of the organization, not everyone was convinced a new embassy would achieve its designated aims. In particular, Cornelis van Neijenroode,
opperhoofd of the Japan factory from 1623 to 1632, protested that such a mission would consume significant resources without generating positive results for the company. In a perceptive assessment of what was in fact a sizable divergence between VOC and Tokugawa expectations about diplomacy, he argued that any ambassador would only be able to see the shogun once or twice and would be prohibited from addressing him directly. In Japan, van Neijenroode explained, an ambassador was “nothing more than a letter bearer,” tasked with handing over official documents and participating in accompanying ceremonies, but lacking any ability to break through Tokugawa protocol to negotiate directly with the shogun and secure new concessions.
46 As such, any attempt to use an embassy to open up a new space for dialogue was destined to fail and, rather than lavishing limited funds on such an enterprise, the company would be better served by continuing to rely on the informal delegations, which had traveled intermittently to Edo in the years since the Stadhouder’s last letter, if it wanted to make contact with the shogun.
The catalyst that finally triggered the dispatch of an embassy came not in the form of another restriction on VOC trade in Japan but rather from events on the island of Taiwan. In 1624, the VOC had established a colony, its first in East Asia, on the bay of Tayouan near the modern city of Tainan. When the company moved to exclude Japanese traders who had been using that part of the island for a number of years prior to its arrival, it encountered immediate resistance. The subsequent fight back was spearheaded by Suetsugu Heiz
ō, a Nagasaki merchant and official who refused to relinquish his lucrative trading rights with Tayouan.
47 When news of the conflict between Heiz
ō’s agents and the Dutch prompted outrage in Japan, Batavia determined that something needed to be done to make sure that it did not poison relations with the Tokugawa regime.
The chosen solution, quickly settled on by the incumbent governor-general, Pieter de Carpentier (in office 1623–27), was an embassy. The decision reflected a more general view within the organization of such missions as a vital policy instrument. By providing a mechanism to place a high-ranking Dutch official armed with all the necessary documents and gifts in an Asian capital for a prolonged period of time, the embassy represented a versatile tool capable of being used to resolve a wide range of problems. As such, it was repeatedly pressed into service whenever Batavia confronted significant obstacles. In keeping with this, the embassy to Japan was assigned two important aims.
48 It was first of all to reestablish formal contact between the shogun and the company that had lapsed since the arrival of the last official mission with Maurits’s letter in 1612. The appearance in Edo of an impressive ambassador armed with precious gifts would, it was hoped, be enough to secure the shogun’s good will and improve the company’s position in Japan. The second aim concerned Tayouan. The embassy was dispatched to provide an explanation for the company’s conduct there and, by so doing, to counteract the complaints brought by Suetsugu Heiz
ō and other Japanese merchants. If this discussion proceeded favorably, the ambassador was to petition the shogun to halt Japanese trade with Tayouan by suspending the issue of maritime passes to that destination. In this way, by negotiating directly with the regime, the mission was designed to advance the company’s interests on several fronts, thereby strengthening its position in Japan.
For such an important undertaking, it was crucial to select the right ambassador. The days of simply nominating whoever was closest at hand—a policy that had resulted in Puyck and van den Broek’s appointment as unlikely ambassadors—were long behind the company, which had become more discerning in its choice of representatives in the intervening years. The appointment had to be senior enough to impress the shogun while also possessing the initiative and wherewithal to drive negotiations forward. Fortunately for de Carpentier, a vessel had just arrived from Europe carrying with it an apparently ideal candidate. The fortuitous arrival was Pieter Nuyts, a talented scholar with great ambitions. Born to a prosperous merchant family in Middleburg in 1598, Nuyts had entered Leiden University at just fifteen.
49 After graduating with a doctorate in philosophy in 1620, he took up a position in his father’s business and married soon after. The steady rhythms of the textile trade seems to have held little appeal, however, and in 1626, at the age of twenty-eight, Nuyts entered the company’s service. Like so many of its employees, he was determined to use his time in Asia to secure both fortune and status. He had, in his own words, “not come out … to eat hay” but to make money and to do so as quickly as possible using any means at his disposal.
50Nuyts’s timing was especially good; he had applied to join the company at a time when its administrators were eager to replace the rough adventurers that had initially flocked to Asia with a new generation of educated men better suited to employment in an increasingly prosperous organization. Although lacking any experience of trade outside of Europe, Nuyts was, with the backing of the Zeeland chamber, immediately promoted to the high rank of extraordinary councilor of the Indies. He departed for Asia aboard the
Gulden Zeepaert in May 1626 accompanied by his young son, Laurens, who was to meet a tragic end in Japan. After a voyage of eleven months that included an unplanned detour to the west coast of Australia, Nuyts arrived in Batavia in April 1627, where he was selected to take on two important roles. He was charged first to travel Japan as ambassador and, once this task has been successfully accomplished, to take up the equally critical position of governor of the Tayouan colony.
51 To aid him in the first task, Pieter Muijser, a seasoned merchant who had traveled to Edo before, was appointed deputy ambassador. Although he was the more experienced of the pair, Muijser seems to have retreated into the background, ceding control of the embassy to the far pushier Nuyts.
With the decision as to ambassadors settled, officials in Batavia moved to equip the mission with the familiar elements of a formal embassy: letters, a suitable retinue, and gifts. Of most importance were two documents prepared for Hidetada and his son Iemitsu. By 1627, Hidetada had officially retired as shogun, but he retained a considerable measure of power, and there was no question that the first missive, addressed to the “old emperor,” was the more significant. At first reading, this document appears entirely uncontroversial, a straightforward greeting filled with appropriately humble phrases and punctuated by the occasional obsequious flourish:
We recognize and are extremely grateful for the great friendship and favor that the Dutch nation has enjoyed for so many years through Your Majesty’s special kindness in the lands of Japan. We could not therefore neglect to reverently and honorably thank Your Majesty…. In order to convey our sentiments we have expressly dispatched our envoy, the Honorable Mr Nuyts, and one of our closest councilors, P. Muyser, to present our letter with all due respect to Your Majesty and to reverently seek that your kindness and affection for the Dutch nation shall continue…. As confirmation of our thanks and as evidence of our friendship … we present you with two metal cannon from Holland, powder, cannon balls and other accessories as well as some small gifts. Our envoy will present these to Your Majesty and we hope that you will be pleased to accept them. Further, please faithfully credit and trust all matters that our envoys will further explain to Your Majesty. [Signed, your obedient servant, the Honorable General Pieter de Carpentier in the] Castle of Batavia, May 10, 1627.
52
To understand why such an inoffensive letter became an immediate source of contention in Edo requires us to look beyond its bland phrasing to consider the writer’s unstated assumptions. Although couched in modest terms that positioned the governor-general as a supplicant eager to retain the shogun’s favor so that his subordinates could operate in Japan, de Carpentier’s letter was, at the same time, a confident assertion of the office’s rights.
When it first made contact with Tokugawa Ieyasu, the company had deliberately sought out letters from the Stadhouder to supply an appropriate basis for diplomacy. The result was to bind its representatives to a figure presented, and certainly understood, in Japan as the “king of Holland.” In contrast, de Carpentier’s letter, written in a period in which the company was turning away from this older model of interaction, made no mention of its former figurehead. Instead, the “king of Holland” was mysteriously erased, supplanted instead by a new sovereign who wrote to the shogun from his headquarters in Batavia offering friendship. Even though the letter made no grand claims about the governor-general’s influence or power, it was nonetheless premised on a basic assumption: that de Carpentier should be seen as an independent political actor fully entitled to dispatch ambassadors and hence to take up his place, without any reference to an external authority, in Japanese diplomatic circuits alongside more conventional sovereigns. Because this was self-evident, the letter made no attempt to explain exactly who the “Honorable General” was or to provide a justification for his role. Instead, diplomacy was presented as a natural extension of his office, a sovereign prerogative that could and should simply be accepted as a given. This was of course the company’s official position, clearly outlined in article 35 of its charter, which had handed the organization (and hence its chief official in Asia) the right to engage with foreign princes and potentates without reliance on a separate figure. But, as Nuyts would soon discover, just because a right had been granted in Europe did not mean that it was automatically recognized on the other side of the world where diplomacy came with its own set of rules.
One additional assumption buried within the letter should also be mentioned. At the end of the document, de Carpentier asked the shogun to “faithfully credit and trust all matters that our envoys will further explain.” As Bakufu officials later pointed out, this short clause effectively empowered the ambassador to hold talks directly with the shogun. Rather than functioning simply as a letter bearer, Nuyts traveled to Edo, therefore, as an active negotiator charged to speak on behalf of Batavia by opening a direct dialogue with the shogun, or at least his closest advisers, in order to advance the company’s interests across a broad range of issues. This result was yet another hidden pitfall primed to claim the ambassadors once they arrived in Edo.
Whereas Puyck and van den Broek had been forced to cobble their embassy together with whatever could be found at hand, Nuyts’s mission was to lack for nothing. By 1627 the company, keenly aware that its embassies needed to look the part, was prepared to invest significant funds in providing all the trappings of a sovereign delegation. As ambassador, Nuyts was provided with a personal retinue of four servants clad in livery, two bodyguards, and two secretaries. The final procession, as detailed in his instructions, was to consist of thirty-four participants including a similar escort for his deputy Muijser, two merchants from the Japan factory, four translators and assistants, six Japanese servants, and three black slaves.
53 In contrast to their predecessors’ odd assortment of presents, the ambassadors were provided with a lavish array of gifts.
54 The key offering was a set of four heavy cannon brought all the way from Europe and designed to satisfy a longstanding Tokugawa interest in European artillery, one area in which the Dutch held an undisputed lead over the Japanese. In addition, the company planned to present the shogun with large quantities of sandalwood and silk as well as a selection of more exotic items that included Persian rugs, Spanish wine, Chinese garments, and European firearms. To further smooth the embassy’s progress, officials in Batavia drew up a list of important Bakufu officials who were to be presented with gifts of their own.
All these preparations meant that by the time the embassy departed, it had been carefully equipped with every possible tool that Batavia could provide. Given how much more impressive it was than the company’s early efforts in Japan, there seemed every reason to believe that the mission would achieve its aims, initiating a shift in Bakufu policy toward Tayouan and securing a general improvement in the Dutch position in Japan.
Departing Batavia in June 1627, Nuyts headed first to Tayouan to inspect the company’s settlement there before continuing on to Japan. On the morning of 1 August, his ship sailed into the harbor at Hirado decorated with a special set of oversized banners and flags.
55 The ostentatious gesture provides the first suggestion as to how Nuyts conceived of his own role and highlights the obsessive concern with display that became the hallmark of his embassy. Although earning him the later opprobrium of his superiors, who condemned it as a product of a character defect, and hence fitting neatly into the story emphasizing Nuyts personal failings, it was a preoccupation that he shared with other European ambassadors in Asia, many of whom adopted notably similar tactics.
56All embassies are a kind of diplomatic theater, but this particular group of envoys was especially dependent on, to use Richmond Barbour’s words, the “language of spectacle” to make their case.
57 Operating in distant lands and armed with distinctly limited tools, European ambassadors in Asia fell naturally into a role as central players in an elaborate pantomime designed to prove their quality and the authority of the sponsor. The result was to ensure that each stage of their embassies became a performance, invariably starring the ambassador in a leading part, to be arranged in such a way as to demonstrate that this was someone and something worth taking seriously. In India Thomas Roe, perhaps the most famous of the early ambassadors, sought every opportunity to use display to prove his elevated position and thus uphold the “honor and dignity” of his royal master.
58 In this way the key moments of his embassy became opportunities for theatrical demonstration, each one meticulously arranged to show that he was “an Ambassador from a Mightie King.”
59 Like Roe, Nuyts embraced the role of actor, using every occasion to map out his status through gesture or display. For him, the preservation of the “honor and reputation of our embassy” was of paramount concern requiring careful shelter from slights and enhancement through spectacle.
60 When viewed in this light, his tactics seem less the product of individual failings than of the precarious position that European ambassadors occupied in early modern Asia.
For envoys like Nuyts or Roe, the moment of transfer from ship to shore provided the first stage on which to mark out their authority and required, for this reason, special care. The act itself was fraught with meaning.
61 If the wooden walls of the ship were a prison to be endured for months or even years on end, they also offered a comforting space, a floating site of European jurisdiction where the ambassador’s authority was unquestioned and internal hierarchies secure. If the ship was safe, the land could hold any number of perils. In making the transition to solid ground, ambassadors were forced to subject their persons to the vagaries of their Asian hosts, to rules they could not control and to conditions they held no mastery over. Because of this, the moment of transfer needed to set the right tone for the subsequent embassy. A successful disembarkation could firmly establish the ambassador’s authority, making it clear that he was no ordinary traveler and ensuring special treatment in the future. If the embassy started badly, however, it might continue that way, dooming the mission before it was even properly underway.
Eager to get things just right, envoys were prepared to wait aboard their ship for days until the proper conditions for landing could be guaranteed. In India, Thomas Roe made landfall only after he had arranged for a magnificent, carefully choreographed landing complete with a “Court of Guard, and the shippes in their best Equipage giuing me their ordinance as I passed ; with his trumpetts and Musique ahead my boate in the best manner.”
62 Despite these preparations, his grand procession faltered when local officials, in accordance with well-established procedures, insisted on searching the ambassador and his retinue. Protesting that he was the “Ambassador of a Mightie and free Prince” who could never submit to such indignities, Roe was compelled to retreat back to the boats until a new arrangement could be worked out.
63In Japan, Nuyts followed a similar pattern. Like Roe, the ambassador was determined to show that the status of his office merited special treatment. All ships arriving in Hirado were required to wait in the harbor for inspection by local officials before disembarking their crews and passengers. Seeing this as an unacceptable affront, the ambassador insisted that he be allowed to disembark immediately, informing officials arriving to conduct the inspection that the quality of his office meant that such rules could not apply to him. Such “insolent authority” could not, Nuyts insisted, be tolerated, for it would undermine the very basis of his embassy.
64 When his protests failed to elicit the requisite exemption, he decided to take matters into his own hands by landing on his own initiative without submitting to a search. If officials in Hirado could not grasp the distinction between a formal envoy and an ordinary Dutch merchant, then it must be demonstrated to them by action.
That these comedies of manners played out with such earnestness over seemingly trivial issues speaks to the importance of display. The same concern drove Nuyts’s subsequent preparations in Hirado. Whereas Batavia’s initial plans had called for a thirty-four-member suite, once in Japan the ambassador opted to increase this figure to seventy. Eager to make an even bigger splash, he sought out a group of trumpeters capable of marking the progress of the embassy with appropriate fanfare.
65 As transport for the procession, Nuyts insisted that officials in Hirado, already antagonized by his earlier conduct, loan him the domain’s flagship, a splendid fifty-six-oar galley the daimyo maintained for his personal use.
66 When they refused, he complained bitterly that the embassy was being treated in a belittling manner with no sign of the appropriate level of respect.
67On 15 August the embassy departed Hirado, reaching the port city of Shimonoseki five days later. Contrary winds kept the party stuck in the port for a week, allowing Nuyts to make use of the enforced delay to arrange for a Japanese translation of the letters from the governor-general.
68 The decision to translate these documents while in transit raises the obvious question as to why this crucial task had not been done in Hirado, where assistance could be sought both from the staff of the Japan factory and members of the ruling Matsura family. In later accounts sent to his superiors, van Neijenroode, the opperhoofd, wrote furiously about the seemingly cavalier way in which the process of translation had been treated. Lamenting Nuyts’s rushed job, he contrasted it with the procedures followed for earlier letters from the Stadhouder, which had been carefully translated in consultation with Japanese officials before being checked and rechecked.
69 Still more infuriating, Nuyts had not even seen fit to show the original documents to van Neijenroode, who had direct experience dealing with the Bakufu. Instead, he seems to have been determined to jealously guard access to these letters, secreting them away until the triumphal moment of presentation. The result was an essentially literal translation that made little attempt to reshape the letter for its intended audience.
Once the winds had turned, the embassy was able to proceed again and reached Osaka on 1 September. Leaving their vessels, they applied for permission from Bakufu authorities to continue on to Edo by land. Just over two weeks later, word reached the group that they were authorized to proceed and could make use of the regime’s transportation and accommodation network.
70 In addition to providing a welcome endorsement of the delegation’s status as an official embassy, the news initiated a dramatic enlargement of the ambassador’s retinue, which, augmented by dozens of samurai, grooms, and palanquin bearers, blew out to 240 men.
71 From Osaka, Nuyts and his men proceeded along the T
ōkaid
ō thoroughfare, the great eastern coastal route that bound the economic and political capitals of Japan. Their newly conferred status allowing rapid travel along the bustling tree-lined highway, they entered the western boundaries of Edo proper on 1 October.
For once even Nuyts appears to have been content with the honor accorded to the embassy as it made its way into the sprawling city.
72 Accompanied by officials belonging to Hirado domain, the procession moved slowly through streets that had been specially cleaned for the occasion and strewn with sand. Like other embassies arriving in Edo in this period, it drew huge crowds. To facilitate uninterrupted passage, Tokugawa authorities had cordoned off the route by closing the connecting streets so the ambassadors could pass without a crush of onlookers. In the spaces between these intersections, thousands of spectators, eager to catch a glimpse of the exotic visitors, had gathered, sitting, according to the embassy diary, in “great numbers in perfect and still order to see us passing.”
73 Nuyts’s natural tendency to demand a greater show of respect quickly resurfaced, however, when the procession reached its designated accommodation near the center of the city. Like other foreign envoys, they were housed in a Buddhist temple, which had been temporarily requisitioned for the purpose.
74 In the absence of other appropriate structures, temples were considered the natural site for hosting large processions of diplomats, far more suitable than the alternative, which would require the Bakufu to displace a daimyo from his residence. Predictably, Nuyts did not see it this way, and, after insisting that their accommodation was not appropriate to “lodge such persons,” he agreed to relent only when informed that the shogun had specifically mandated the arrangement.
75Once he had settled in, Nuyts had his first opportunity to meet with Matsura Takanobu (1591–1637), the daimyo of Hirado and the designated broker between the Dutch and the Bakufu. The master of a territory heavily dependent on the income from foreign trade, Takanobu was the company’s most consistent, if also most self-interested, ally in Japan.
76 But he was also the most exposed if the Dutch ran into problems, and, when the embassy’s prospects for success dimmed, the daimyo moved to actively distance himself from Nuyts by joining in the chorus of condemnation. During these early meetings, however, when a favorable outcome seemed assured, the ambassador recorded his trust in this “friend of the [Dutch] nation” and promised his full cooperation with anything Takanobu might suggest.
77On 3 October a small group of senior Bakufu officials requested to see the ambassador’s official letters so they could approve them before the formal presentation in Edo Castle. Later that day, a message came back informing Nuyts that the documents appeared broadly acceptable, but that they did require some modification. The problems seemed relatively minor, stemming from questions of translation, and could, at least according to Matsura Takanobu, be easily remedied by changing a few words. Even better, an influential Tokugawa official, Itami Yasukatsu, had volunteered to work with the ambassador to adjust the letters to “Japanese style” so that they could be delivered to the shogun without delay.
78 That night heavy rain fell, drenching the city and cascading off the tiled roof of the temple. The next morning, as the rain continued, Nuyts dispatched his deputy, Pieter Muijser, to the meeting with Itami in the lord of Hirado’s walled compound.
Expecting a friendly discussion, Muijser was subjected instead to an extended interrogation that had been prompted by growing Bakufu concerns over the precise nature of the embassy. The questioning was led by Itami Yasukatsu, but also present were two monks, described in the diary as “Japanse papen,” who sat quietly recording all of Muijser’s answers for later submission to Edo Castle.
79 For the deputy ambassador, the attendance of these silent scribes was clearly unsettling, and an almost palpable sense of anxiety pervades the pages of the diary whenever they are mentioned. These were “sly and cunning people” who could not be trusted, dangerous individuals who threatened the success of the embassy.
80 As the employee of an organization obsessed with record keeping—to the extent that it created one of the great archives of the early modern world—Muijser must have been used to the presence of scribes, raising the obvious question as to why he felt such evident unease.
For Europeans traveling into the New World, writing formed one part of a potent suite of technologies that included gunpowder and steel. At home, propagandists of empire rejoiced in what one author dubbed the “literall advantage” conferred on them by the ability to write and keep records. If speech separated man from beast, writing divided different kinds of societies, giving advantage to some. As Samuel Purchas noted, “God hath added herein a further grace, that as men by the former exceed Beasts, so hereby one man may excell another; and amongst Men, some are accounted Civill, and more Sociable and religious, by the Use of letters and of Writing, which others wanting are esteemed Brutish, Savage, Barbarous.”
81 With their means of record limited to speech, the peoples of the New World remained trapped, he explained, forever in the present. In contrast, Europeans, because of their access to writing, gained a kind of immortality, a link to the great “Patriarkes, Prophets, Apostles, Fathers, Philosophers, [or] Historians” that enabled them to transcend the relentlessly ticking clock of life and which set them apart from the barbarians they had discovered in the Americas.
82Europeans moving into Asia encountered highly literate societies in which writing served many different purposes. In the Tokugawa Bakufu the Dutch found a regime served by a steadily expanding bureaucracy whose rule was underpinned by the unceasing accumulation of written materials. In the face of such cultures, any notion of “literall advantage” slipped away, taking with it some of the characteristic confidence exhibited by Europeans in the New World. The hushed sound of brush on paper as the two monks “wrote everything down before we had even finished speaking,” reminded Muijser that both sides were keeping records.
83 While European promoters of expansion in the New World could rejoice at the lack of an indigenous past, their counterparts in Asia contended with a recorded history over which they had no control. It was, in this moment, all too clear to Muijser that the fate of the embassy hinged not on Dutch but on Japanese writing. Indeed, it was the looming presence of past VOC delegations preserved in the Bakufu’s own diplomatic records that doomed the embassy to failure. Despite their attempts to bluff their way out of trouble, the ambassadors found they could not escape the documentary evidence left over from the company’s earlier embassies to Japan. As Itami’s two scribes took down the twists and turns of Muijser’s hastily improvised explanations, they had only to look to their own records to expose a string of damning contradictions.
Already unnerved, Muijser’s composure was soon shattered. The interview commenced with a simple question: “where has Nuyts actually come from?” The deputy ambassador replied that he “has come from Java via Tayouan and has now arrived in Edo.”
84 A second question followed quickly. Had Nuyts “been sent to the emperor [shogun] of Japan from the king in Holland or from Batavia?” Attempting somehow to steer a middle path between two distinct alternatives, Muijser replied that Nuyts “has come from Holland to the Indies to aid in government. He was sent as ambassador with another qualified person to the emperor [shogun] of Japan from the governor-general in Batavia to thank His Majesty for the friendship we have received and to ask that it continues in the future.” His answer, rapidly communicated to Edo Castle, exposed the fact that the ambassadors had come from Batavia and hence lacked any connection with the “king of Holland.” The result was to rip away the diplomatic scaffolding laboriously assembled by earlier envoys and to throw the framework for interaction between the company and the shogun into doubt.
Turning to the charged question of documents, Itami pushed for further detail. “Were the letters,” he wanted to know, “written and signed in Holland or in Batavia?” The pressure mounting, Muijser moved to assert the governor-general’s position as a monarch in his own right. The documents were, he stated, not from Holland, but had been “written and signed by the king of the Indies in Batavia (Connick in Indien op Batavia).” If the letters and the ambassadors came from Batavia, what about the gifts they had brought with them? Once again, Muijser sought a middle road by explaining that, whereas the “cannon and most of the other gifts were brought from Holland,” at least some of the offerings did indeed come from Batavia.
Returning to the question of political sponsors, Itami asked what links existed between the “king of Batavia,” a figure unfamiliar to the Japanese, the “king of Holland,” and the ambassador himself? Were they all part of one royal dynasty tied by a single bloodline? Opting this time for a clear falsehood rather than a blurring of title and position, Muijser replied that the “king of Batavia and the king of Holland were blood relations. As a result they corresponded frequently with each other. The ambassador was an important man, a councilor of the Indies and not inferior in lineage to the king.” The origins of the embassy firmly established, Itami pressed Muijser as to its real purpose. Initially reluctant to admit that they had any ambition beyond expressing gratitude to the shogun, the deputy ambassador eventually conceded that Nuyts was really here to talk about events on the company’s colony of Tayouan.
With that the long interrogation came to an end, giving Muijser his first chance to recover from the relentless barrage of questions. The experience had been disturbingly close to a trial, with questions raining down one after another, all “asked in such an impertinent way and with such authority as if we were common criminals.”
85 However one looked at it, it was clear that the ground had shifted under the ambassadors’ feet and that the fate of the mission, which had seemed so assured just a few days earlier, hung now in the balance. In the days after Muijser’s interview, Matsura Takanobu, who had been charged by the Bakufu to get to the bottom of these unexpected developments, interrogated the two ambassadors on multiple occasions. Since the central fact that they had not been sent by the “king of Holland” was now abundantly clear, attention turned to the figure of the governor-general. Bakufu officials wished to know who he was and whether the office was in fact suitably “qualified to send an ambassador to the shogun.”
86 The task of answering these questions and hence of proving that the embassy merited official recognition fell to Nuyts.
87EDO AS LABYRINTH
Although inflected by the company’s particular characteristics, the essential problem was the same one faced by so many European ambassadors in early modern Asia. unable to dictate terms, individuals like Thomas Roe, Pieter Nuyts, or any one of a string of equivalent figures were compelled to find a way to fit within existing diplomatic norms. But, when they tried to do so, they often found that their missions failed to match up to even the most basic of local expectations. Nuyts’s situation was made more difficult by the fact that Tokugawa diplomatic practice had become increasingly rigid in the intervening years since the company had first made contact. Whereas Puyck and van den Broek had arrived at an especially receptive moment for diplomatic engagement, Nuyts was far less fortunate in his timing. Since the death of the first shogun, the regime had become steadily more inflexible, permitting less and less room for any deviation from its prescribed norms about proper diplomacy. Only recognized sovereigns who used the right kind of diplomatic language were permitted to correspond with the shogun, and any lapse in protocol could trigger immediate rejection of missive or mission.
In 1627, for example, the same year that Nuyts arrived in Edo, Bakufu officials dismissed a letter from Cochinchina, an emerging state in Southeast Asia that had exchanged numerous missives with Tokugawa Ieyasu, as “too discourteous … [to] be communicated to the shogun.”
88 Formal embassies, even if they came from a powerful polity with a long history of contact with Japan, could also suffer the same treatment if there was any question about the ruler’s broader legitimacy. This was the fate of a series of missions sent from the king of Siam in 1634, 163536, 1653, and 1655–56 that were all turned back after questions were raised about the manner in which he had seized power from his royal predecessor.
89 The tenor of the Bakufu’s response to these embassies was revealing with one official noting that “in view of the fact that Siam is a country of injustice where a traitor killed the King and usurped the Kingdom, the Shogun did not accept the letter.”
90The incessant questioning pulled Nuyts into a labyrinth, a confusing maze in which each turn required yet another defense of the embassy’s claims. For an ambassador obsessed with his own prestige, it was almost too much to bear, and he lamented the constant attack on his authority.
91 The seemingly endless rounds of interrogation centered on three key assertions that were either disputed or dismissed out of hand by Tokugawa authorities. First, the ambassador maintained that the governor-general was a sovereign ruler in his own right. As the “absolute lord over our lands in the Indies,” he wielded the same powers as a more conventional head of state and should be treated as such.
92 In making the argument, Nuyts showed no hesitation in adopting the language of kingship, which had already been used by Muijser, by describing the general as “our king” and the king of the Dutch Indies.
93 In case there was any doubt about what he meant, he made the direct link to the Japanese system by arguing that the Dutch looked at the governor-general in the same way as Tokugawa subjects viewed the shogun.
94 Aware that he had to justify the switch from the Stadhouder to Batavia, Nuyts explained that the king of the Indies and the king of Holland were, in political terms, virtually identical figures who shared the same “potency and strength.”
95 Since this was the case, and if one added in the fact that they were in constant correspondence, the result was that it did not really matter whether it was the ruler of Holland or Batavia who had actually dispatched the embassy to Japan. In this way, there was, Nuyts asserted, no contradiction between his mission and the claims made by earlier delegations.
Although Nuyts piled claim after claim about the governor-general’s position, one on top of another, the flood of questions did not abate. Like other European ambassadors, he struggled to provide evidence to support his grander statements about the strength of his master and thereby to give weight to his assertions. The daily frustrations he encountered stand in stark contrast to one of the few seventeenth-century imaginings of VOC diplomacy, a painting by Jan Baptist Weenix that shows an ambassador, Johan van Twist, on his way to meet with the sultan of Bijapur.
96 In it the Dutch envoy is depicted on horseback riding alongside local officials with a powerful VOC fleet looming in the background. Although he is in India to seek help, the ambassador appears in every way the dominant figure, able to control negotiations by pointing to the massed array of ships, cannon smoke billowing from their gun ports, to support his assertions. In fact, this image bears little connection to the realities of most embassies. Isolated in Edo, Nuyts could not summon witnesses or point to an assembled fleet to confirm Batavia’s power. Instead, the only tactic left available to him was to offer up claim after unsupported claim and to hope that the right combination would convince his listeners of the governor-general’s status.
With no ability to substantiate his declarations, he was reduced to vague threats, complaining ceaselessly about the lack of respect and warning that “if these reach the ears of our lord he will take it badly.”
97 A similar fate befell Thomas Roe in India. In his commission Roe had been instructed to awe his Mughal interlocutors by describing the English king’s “power and strength at Sea, which giveth us not onelie reputacion and auority amongst the Greatest Princes of Christendome, but Maketh us even a Terrour to all other Nations.”
98 But once at court he found himself unable to substantiate his claims about English authority and was, like his Dutch counterpart, compelled to rely on bluff and bluster.
99 The result was a precarious situation in which representatives like Roe and Nuyts could, all too easily, start to appear, according to the damning critique leveled at the VOC envoy by one Japanese observer, “more like swindlers (
bedriegers) than ambassadors.”
100While Nuyts’s inability to back up his assertions was problem enough, the situation deteriorated further when the Bakufu began to assemble its own evidence. Its first exhibit was the governor-general’s letter to the shogun. If diplomatic missives were key instruments in the European push into Asia, they were also, as Miles Ogborn has shown in his analysis of English letters, inherently fraught. Just as ambassadors “delivered poor presents, and often delivered them badly, so they brought poor letters.”
101 Often clumsily prepared or shoddily translated, such documents could, once relinquished to local officials, swiftly transform from substandard examples of diplomatic correspondence into genuinely perilous objects. This was the case with the missive that Nuyts carried from the governor-general. Intended as a key prop capable of buttressing his authority, it became instead a millstone around the ambassadors’ neck, dragging the embassy farther and farther down.
Figure 2.3. Johan van Twist as ambassador to the Sultan of Bijapur, ca. 1645–60. Jan Baptist Weenix. Courtesy of the Collection Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
The problem, aside from the obvious lack of reference to the Stadhouder, centered on the most innocuous of lines, the valediction “your obedient servant” that appeared, as in so many Dutch documents of the period, at the end of the letter. In the Japanese translation, this was rendered as
miuchi no mono, a term usually used to describe low-ranking vassals or retainers. Because of this it was immediately seized upon by Tokugawa officials as evidence that the governor-general was not the powerful sovereign described by the ambassadors. If he was truly a kinglike figure, why did the lord of Batavia insist on using such “humble and submissive (
ootmoedige)” language that not only violated Japanese diplomatic conventions but also bore no resemblance to the “style of a sovereign lord?” In response, Nuyts explained that the valediction was simply an “ordinary Dutch custom,” a inconsequential courtesy without any real meaning that should simply be ignored.
102 The explanation did not, however, placate Bakufu officials, who would return to this particular phrase weeks later when they met to discuss the fate of the embassy.
The image of the trial in which the ambassadors stood in the dock as common criminals took on a more ominous meaning as the Bakufu started to call its own witnesses. If the Dutch Republic was a remote presence able to be easily manipulated by VOC representatives who could mold their presentation of its political arrangements to their benefit, Batavia, located on the edges of Japanese trading circuits, was a different matter altogether. Although they tried to present it in the best possible light, the Dutch held no monopoly over information within Japan about the city or its administrators. Instead, Bakufu officials could call on several groups, including Kyushu-based merchants who traded in the region around the company’s headquarters, Japanese mariners and mercenaries who had been hired by the Dutch to make up their labor shortage, and members of the Chinese community in Japan with direct knowledge of Batavia. On 7 October Nuyts received word that Edo Castle was searching for individuals who had traveled to Southeast Asia and possessed some first-hand knowledge of the city and its chief official. Although we do not know all the details, the subsequent search seems to have turned up a sailor who, having served aboard a VOC ship, was able to confirm that the governor-general was more official than sovereign.
103When confronted with this testimony, which came from a period before the development of the lavish ceremonies described in the earlier part of this chapter, the ambassador responded that such an uninformed witness clearly had no real knowledge of Batavia. If he had truly appeared before the governor-general, there would be no question as to that office’s status or authority. Despite these protests, the combination of the letter and such accounts led Bakufu officials inexorably to one conclusion, that the governor-general could not be “an absolute and potent lord but must be a vassal or servant of the prince or king in Holland.”
104 If Nuyts had compared de Carpentier to the shogun, they had a far less flattering figure in mind; The governor-general was, the ambassadors were informed, more like the governor of Nagasaki, a subordinate official with limited authority and certainly no claim to sovereign status.
The second set of assertions put forward by the ambassadors concerned the governor-general’s place in established diplomatic orders. In an effort to convince Bakufu officials of his mission’s essential legitimacy, Nuyts insisted that since Batavia occupied a well-defined position in international orders there was no basis to question the governor-general’s right to dispatch embassies or letters directly to the shogun. Far from being the unruly upstart that Tokugawa officials seemed to imagine, Batavia was already integrated into a global diplomatic network: “Our Lord General [the governor-general]… sends ambassadors to the principal kings of China, Siam, Aceh and Patani; to the emperors of Java and Persia; to the Great Mughal (who is one of the most powerful lords in the world); and to many other potentates. And in none of these cases was his authority or absolute strength ever questioned in any way. But in all cases the ambassadors were accepted as if they had come from a sovereign prince.”
105 If such a diverse list of states, including the great superpowers of Asian politics, had not objected to the arrival of an embassy from Batavia, what right did the shogun have to protest? On a later occasion the ambassador returned to the same point, but with a different set of partners. “The Lord General’s ambassadors were,” he suggested “accepted by all the kings and princes around [Japan], namely by those of China, Siam, Aceh, Patani, Molucccas, Amboina, Banda, as well as many others,” and always honored appropriately.
106The claim attempted to turn the tables by suggesting that it was not the company that was in violation of accepted protocol but rather the Bakufu, which had failed to grasp the nature of the wider diplomatic landscape. It was an argument made equally forcefully by other European envoys who used similar assertions about an established diplomatic order to lend credence to their claims for recognition. In India Roe explained that his interpretation of proper diplomatic practice derived not simply from “the customs of England, but [from] the consent of all the world.”
107 Once again, however, the difficulty lay in providing proof and ambassadors quickly veered into fiction to strengthen their case. Compelling as Nuyts’s long list of diplomatic partners appears at first, it does not stand up to scrutiny, including tiny islands like Amboina or the Banda archipelago, where the company’s success depended on bullying local leaders into submission, but also China, which remained beyond the reach of VOC diplomats. Indeed, no embassy from Batavia had made it into the Chinese interior, and it would be a number of decades, long after the collapse of the Ming regime, before an official mission from the governor-general finally arrived in Beijing.
108The third and final group of assertions centered on the role of the ambassador. Like other European envoys in this period, Nuyts arrived with a clear set of expectations about the proper nature of diplomacy. Chief among these was the ambassador’s right to not only represent the person of his master, in this case the governor-general, but also to engage directly in negotiations with foreign rulers on his behalf. The view reflected what was in fact standard VOC policy. The company used embassies for highly specific purposes, to win concessions, negotiate treaties, or resolve issues of particular concern through face to face talks with the sovereign and his court. The most successful ambassadors returned home with treaties precisely laying out their employer’s rights and privileges in foreign territories. This essentially utilitarian approach to diplomacy reflected the nature of the organization and its overriding concern with balance sheets. For de Carpentier and other governors-general, the embassy was, above all else, an investment designed to achieve returns far exceeding its related expenditures. The sizable debit represented by each diplomatic mission had, therefore, to be matched by a larger gain somewhere else on the ledger. In the case of Nuyts’s mission, it had been dispatched in the hope that it would conjure up absolute control over trade between Taiwan and Japan, an economic prize worth many times the anticipated costs of the embassy.
The Bakufu possessed a very different view of the ambassador’s role. Once again it was the letter, or more particularly the clause empowering Nuyts as negotiator, that exposed the divergence. Such language was, the Dutch were informed, appropriate to “petitioners,” but not to ambassadors, and had no place at the shogun’s court.
109 After a sustained burst of improvisation under the first shogun, Tokugawa diplomatic practice had by 1627 settled into a fixed, largely ritualized pattern. The arrival of foreign embassies, the key event in the diplomatic calendar, became an occasion for the confirmation of an existing order rather than an opportunity to push policy out in new directions through dialogue. In this way, as Ron Toby’s study of Tokugawa diplomacy has so persuasively shown, delegations came to serve as the centerpiece of carefully stage-managed pageants designed to project an idealized vision of international politics centered on the shogun. They provided, in his words, an opportunity to “create the illusion of an East Asian world order that was Japanese in design and Japanese in focus.”
110This goal left little room for the idea of the ambassador as negotiator and no space for direct talks with the court. Envoys to Edo were not expected to bring with them a list of demands, or even a set of issues to be discussed directly with the Tokugawa shogun, but rather to act out their role in a prearranged drama and depart without troubling the basis of the Bakufu’s order.
111 This view of diplomacy was perfectly summed up at the time by one Japanese official who explained that “envoys or ambassadors … were people who had been sent from their lord or prince to the shogun to pay him homage, wish him well and nothing else. In contrast, people who came with presents trying to seek something were entirely different. Their presents were given in order to obtain something and not out of true reverence for the emperor [shogun].”
112 While there was some room for negotiation, it was to be done in the margins of the embassy with a designated groups of intermediaries, rather than in the halls of Edo Castle.
113For Nuyts, there was no credible distinction between petitioner and ambassador, with the two roles overlapping so fundamentally that they could not be separated out. As before, he turned to international norms to support his argument by explaining that the “law and nature of ambassadors were common not only to Holland but also France, England, Spain, Italy, Germany and even to the Great Turk as well as other princes and potentates.”
114 Like other envoys, he had been sent to give presents and letters to the shogun and his advisers, but also to discuss matters of mutual concern. If the shogun did not want to grant his requests, then he could simply refuse and send the ambassadors home. In fact, the assessment missed the point almost completely. Rather than being concerned with how best to respond to the company’s requests, the Bakufu had rejected the premise of the ambassador as petitioner. If the Dutch wanted to discuss specific issues, they could do so with officials attached to Hirado domain, the designated mediator for communications between the company and Edo, but no direct dialogue with the shogun would take place during the embassy. To reinforce the message, Matsura Takanobu asked Nuyts to sign a document pledging that he would not attempt to present any demands to the shogun if an audience was in fact eventually granted. Instead he was, the daimyo insisted, to content himself with handing over his letters and thanking the shogun “for the great generosity he has shown to our nation.”
115After a week of questioning, the ambassadors were worn out. Their interwoven claims about the governor-general’s power, his place in an international diplomatic order, and the proper rights of ambassadors had been systematically picked apart by relentless interrogation. Increasingly Nuyts, his grand entrance into the city a distant memory, retreated to sullen expressions of disgust while lamenting that he had not been sent to explain the nature and form of his government to the Japanese. As his despair swelled, so did the need to assign blame elsewhere. Suspicion fell first on the Japanese interpreters. Either they were incompetent, unable to properly convey even the simplest of concepts, or they were treacherous, intentionally distorting statements in order to sabotage the embassy. Any trust in the daimyo of Hirado quickly receded as well; he was not, the ambassador concluded, “our friend or at least he does not have the authority to bring our affairs to a good outcome.”
116As their trust in putative allies diminished, fear about their enemies’ baleful influence surged. The ambassadors increasingly traced all their problems back to Suetsugu Heiz
ō, the Nagasaki merchant/official intent on keeping open Japan’s trading links with Tayouan. He had, they imagined, orchestrated a vast conspiracy stretching all the way up to the highest levels of the Bakufu. As the shadowy puppet master pulling the strings behind the scenes, he was responsible for the embassy’s misfortunes. All this was aggravated, the ambassadors maintained, by the flawed character of the Japanese. Japan’s inhabitants were, Nuyts maintained, chronic liars who sought constantly to defraud. Condensing his feelings into an overarching equation of deceit, he insisted that any visitor to the archipelago could only trust one person in ten, and even he lied 90 percent of the time.
117 The constant deceit and obstinate rigidity of the Japanese allowed no room for negotiation or even the application of reason, and it meant that the ambassadors were stuck in an endless loop, repeating the same assertions to a people incapable of understanding them.
118REJECTION AND BLAME
The embassy dragged on for another three weeks in this poisonous climate. Each day conditions seemed to deteriorate a little further, until the ambassadors were reduced to the role of captives, unable to leave their lodgings without special permission.
119 Finally, on 5 November, Bakufu officials summoned the Dutch envoys to deliver their final verdict. This time, a junior merchant, Francois Caron, was dispatched to the meeting in place of the exhausted ambassadors. The news was not good. Doi Toshikatsu, a senior adviser to the shogun, announced that the embassy had been officially rejected because the governor-general was nothing more than a subordinate of the “king of Holland” and hence clearly not qualified to send a diplomatic mission to the shogun:
They understood that Pieter de Carpentier was a servant or a servant of a servant of our king in Holland. They had learnt this from the humble ending of the letters, and particularly the phrase “your obedient servant” which can only be interpreted as having been written by a minor flunky…. They had, moreover, never heard of Java or Batavia and ships from either place had never come to Japan…. They had discussed this matter in detail and were forced to conclude that we are not ambassadors from our king in Holland. Therefore they cannot receive us and we should now depart.
120
The description can be matched with the Japanese record of the meeting, which appears in Ikoku nikki:
A letter has been presented from Holland and was [initially] mediated by the Matsura of Hizen. The letter was written by a vassal of Java. It was written in kana and kanji. Java is a county of the same status as Holland. Because the Dutch do not know letters [are illiterate in Japanese], they have made those from Java write the letter…. We have never heard of a letter coming from Java or its vassals. There were many strange parts [in this document]. As to the words “miuchi no mono,” the envoy explained that he understood this phrase meant vassal in Japan. In any case the letter was discourteous, and even for a robber country [like Holland] we have never heard of something like this.
121
Both accounts emphasized the multiple issues that had plagued the embassy since it arrived in Edo. First, the delegation clearly did not, as admitted by its own participants, originate with the “king of Holland.” Second, the Bakufu had never heard of Batavia or Java, and, third, it was unwilling to accept a diplomatic letter from a low-ranking official like de Carpentier. Both descriptions specifically mentioned the letter’s valediction, which was used as irrefutable evidence of the governor-general’s low status.
Miuchi no mono the Japanese rendition of “your obedient servant,” belonged to the language of vassals rather than sovereigns and had no place in official diplomatic correspondence.
While the signs had not been good, the Bakufu’s rejection was unexpectedly comprehensive, and it meant that, far from securing new privileges from the shogun, the ambassadors had not even made it within the walls of Edo Castle. Considering the scale of the failure and the costs involved, someone had to take the blame, but Nuyts was determined that it would not be him. Despite his best efforts, however, officials in Batavia, after dismissing a long list of the ambassador’s preferred scapegoats, eventually concluded that he should be held personally responsible for the debacle.
122 Although Nuyts, who emerges in the record as an impetuous, confrontational, and excessively intolerant individual, was undoubtedly a poor candidate to head a diplomatic mission, he cannot be held entirely accountable for what happened. His own failings as ambassador do not change the consistent nature of Bakufu objections, which remained unchanged after the initial meeting with Itami Yasukatsu on 4 October. In a subsequent interview the daimyo of Hirado gave a succinct explanation of what had gone wrong: “It was understood that you were an ambassador who had come directly out of Holland and therefore you were received with honor. However when it was found that you came from Java or Jaccatra or Batavia from a king or a general that was not known, then the emperor [shogun] would not receive you or speak with you.”
123The 1627 mission collapsed, therefore, because it possessed no connection with the “king of Holland” and because, having determined this fact, Bakufu officials refused to recognize the governor-general’s right to engage in diplomacy. Neither issue had much to do with Nuyts’s own conduct, although he certainly did not help the situation, and even the most skillful of diplomats would have struggled to reconcile the basic contradiction at the center of the embassy. Having accepted missions and letters from the “king of Holland” in 1609 and 1612, the Bakufu refused in 1627 to endorse the company’s clumsy sleight of hand—its attempt to substitute one sovereign with another without preparing the ground for the transfer. In effect, the Japanese regime, which could simply reference its own diplomatic archives for proof of past assertions about Dutch power structures, did nothing more than hold the company’s representatives to their own statements about the Stadhouder and demand that they remain consistent.
While it took the ambassadors by surprise, the clash between the shogun and the company had in fact been brewing quietly for some time. The diplomatic camouflage provided by the presence of the Stadhouder was never intended to be permanent, and it was only a matter of time before the company, and its chief official in Asia, asserted their rights to engage in independent diplomacy without reaching back to the United Provinces. When this finally happened in 1627, the result was an immediate conflict over diplomatic rights that left Nuyts, who lacked any means to impose the company’s terms on negotiations by compelling recognition, scrambling to defend his superior’s position. The Bakufu’s eventual response, so clearly summed up by Doi Toshikatsu, was to dismiss the governor-general as a lowly official who had no place in the business of diplomacy.
124 The result was to throw the company’s diplomatic strategy in Japan into disarray. In the end, the fate of his mission was a stark reminder that, for all its ambitions, a hybrid enterprise like the company had no assurances of success when it attempted to force its way into Asian diplomatic circuits that possessed their own rules and expectations. Diplomacy was, as Nuyts could readily testify, difficult, and it was all too easy for even the best prepared of ambassadors to become, like him, just another “swindler” trapped with an unhelpful piece of paper thousands of miles from home.