In the cool room the blind man remembers and dictates. His helpers struggle to keep up with the torrent of vivid detail. On the seas there might be schools of jellyfish with crests reaching like sails above the water, shining like blue and purple crystals. The vines, the luscious fruit, the palm trees on the horizon as a ship approached a low-lying island: All are still clear to him. Driven on by his direction, his helpers are nearing completion of the new set of drawings, replacing those lost in a fire the year before. Is the plate of the durian done? Yes, and it’s fine, good images of the big spiny fruit and the big leaves. The blind man smiles as he remembers the first time he tried one, how terrible it smelled and how wonderful the taste was. Do we have one? A boy is sent running to the market. The stench fills the cool room, and then he tastes the rich, creamy fruit.
Thanks to one brilliant and obsessed German in the service of the Dutch company, we can get a sense of the Spice Islands in 1688 not only as scenes of baffling and violent human encounters but also as a world of amazing natural beauty, of exuberant plant and animal life on the islands and in the seas. The great folio volumes of the Ambonese Herbal and the Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet by Georg Everard Rumpf or Rumphius are monuments to the curious, classifying, detail-noting eyes and intricately designing pens of late-seventeenth-century Europeans in their encounters with the natural world.
Rumpf grew up in Hanau near Frankfurt, the son of a successful architect and supervisor of building projects. He got a respectable education, including good Latin. Around the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 many restless young men from devastated and depressed Germany made their way to Amsterdam and eventually to Dutch outposts and trading networks around the globe. In 1646 Rumpf, at the age of eighteen, responded to an announcement by a German prince of an opportunity to join a force that would serve under the Venetian flag in the Mediterranean. The call actually was intended for service with the Dutch West India Company in the last fraction of northeastern Brazil it was defending against Portuguese reconquest. Rumpf’s ship never made it to Brazil, and as a result of either shipwreck or capture at sea, he spent several years in Portugal. There he may have heard of the wonders of the Asian tropics, perhaps specifically of Ambon, far out in the “Spice Islands” of what is now eastern Indonesia. After a short visit back in Hanau he went to Amsterdam and signed on as a soldier with the Dutch East India Company. By the end of 1653 he had passed through Batavia and on to Ambon; he was never to leave the eastern islands again and died in Ambon forty-nine years later.
Rumpf arrived in the late stages of a thorough and nearly definitive suppression of local resistance to Dutch domination and monopoly of the export of cloves. He showed some competence as a military engineer, but he did not like the soldier’s life and in 1657 was able to become a civil official, in charge of an outlying fort on the north side of Ambon Island. Here he had to maintain order among the local people, be on the alert for any anti-Dutch activity by local people or strangers, and prevent the smuggling of cloves. But that scarcely took up all his time. Like other such outpost commanders, he had some of the privileges of a local ruler, receiving supplies of fish, game, and fruits every day. The climate was among the healthiest in the islands for Europeans. He had married a local woman, probably of mixed ancestry and cultural heritage. He began to study the immense abundance of plant life around him, starting with the coconut and areca palms and the fruit trees, going on to the trees and vines of the jungle tangle that pressed close to the coast and clearing. He could step out on the dock of his little fort and watch the fish and crabs in the clear shallows. Making rapid progress in Malay and Ambonese, he began to learn from the people about the medicinal properties of plants. He made occasional voyages in the region; coming back from Banda in 1662, his ship sailed for a whole day through those shoals of jellyfish he remembered and described.
Soon Rumpf conceived an ambitious project to write a book in Latin about the plant life of Ambon. In keeping with his new ambition and hopes for eventual recognition in European learned circles he began to latinize his surname as Rumphius. By 1668 he was so far along that he asked for a year’s leave from his official duties to go to Batavia and finish his book but was turned down. Then disaster struck: By 1670 he was almost completely blind, seeing only a glimmer of light in one eye and nothing at all in the other, suffering intense pain if he went out in the tropical sunlight. Glaucoma or a parasitic infection are the most likely explanations.
The Dutch company was at best erratic in its promotion of learning and disinterested curiosity; but Rumphius was a valued official, and his work, if brought to completion, was likely to be useful. He was brought to the main town and castle of Ambon and kept in his honored positions as a member of the governor’s council, where his knowledge of local peoples and languages was exceptionally useful, and as head of a subordinate Council on Marriage Affairs, a sort of domestic court. His son soon was drawing plants better than he ever had. The company furnished a clerk to whom he could dictate. His wife was deeply involved in his work; he gave a particularly fine orchid her name. Then, in February 1674, his wife and youngest daughter went to see the splendid lanterns and processions in the Chinese quarter on the fifteenth day of the first month of the Chinese year; his wife may have been of Chinese ancestry. There was an earthquake, and the wife and daughter were killed by a toppling wall.
Rumphius’s blindness and the loss of his loved ones seem to have increased his focus on his studies. Since it would be very difficult to dictate his work in Latin, it now would be written in Dutch. He prepared a series of less ambitious works: a report on the earthquake, another on agriculture on Ambon, and books on the geography and history of the island, all immediately useful to his company colleagues. The company appointed a second clerk to his staff, then an artist, and by 1688 his son, who had been moving about in company service, also was back in Ambon to help him. He even received some academic recognition from Europe; in 1680, on the recommendation of two Germans who had served the Dutch company as doctors, he was named a member of the Academia Naturae Curiosum in Vienna, and some extracts from his letters were published in its journal.
By 1687 most of the text of his most important work, the Herbal, was done, and the time-consuming work of preparing the drawings was moving along nicely. Then, on January 11 of that year, a fire swept through the town of Ambon. Rumphius’s staff managed to save the text of the book, but the drawings were destroyed. Still, neither he nor the company gave up. He estimated that the drawings could be redone in a year and a half or two years. The company appointed a new artist and transferred Rumphius’s son back to Ambon. In fact by 1690 Rumphius had sent off to Batavia manuscript and illustrations for the first six books of twelve planned. He had also picked out the site where he wished to be buried on Ambon. So we have every reason to picture him in 1688 pushing his staff along on the copying and drawings, listening as they read chapters to him, and trying to think of what he had left out. He recalled to his mind’s eye the coconut palms rising out of the sea as a ship approached a low-lying island (the word picture with which he begins the Herbal), the appearance of the wonderful fruits whose smells, tastes, and textures still were so vivid to him, the spectacular tropical sunrises and sunsets year after year on Ambon. The last books of the Herbal were done and sent off to Batavia in 1697. He already was at work on the Curiosity Cabinet, describing the beautiful shells and sea stars, the many varieties of crab, including the formidable nut-cracking land crab of Ambon (these pages are particular triumphs of exact description of structure and behavior), and all the rest of the incredible riches of the tropical seas.
The leaves and fruit of the durian, from Rumphius’s Ambonese Herbal
Over seventy, blind, frail, with more than forty years in the service of the company, Rumphius still took part in council deliberations at Ambon and plunged on into the study of the minerals of the area. He died on June 15, 1702. The Curiosity Cabinet was published in 1705, but the manuscript of the great Herbal suffered many misadventures. When it finally was received by the Gentlemen Seventeen in the home country, they had great difficulty finding the funds for such a massive project; it was published only in 1741.
Batavia, headquarters in Asia of the Dutch East India Company, was built on the site of a Javanese town the name of which the Dutch heard as “Jakatra”; the modern Indonesian capital of Jakarta is in the same location. The voyager arriving by sea for the first time was amazed to find, on the low-lying north coast of Java, facing shallow waters at six degrees south latitude, a bustle of Indian, Indonesian, Chinese, and European ships; an orderly realm of islands used as recreation grounds for the Dutch rulers and shipyards for the company; a formidable fortress, Batavia Castle, commanding the entrance to the inner harbor; streets of Dutch-style houses along canals; a thriving and well-organized Chinese community; and abundant facilities for drink and other pleasures of the flesh. In the fine houses of prominent Dutchmen one would find scores of slaves, baroque furniture made of dark tropical hardwoods, Dutch blue and white tiles, and elaborately carved openwork panels above the doors between rooms to allow for the circulation of any stray breeze in the oppressive tropical heat.
Batavia and its island world presented a baroque spectacle of complexity. The surface appearance of order concealed layers of private interest and arrangement often very much at odds with the unity of power and purpose embodied in Batavia Castle. There was a large population of Portuguese speaking people of mixed ancestry and an influential Chinese community with its own headmen and its own hospital. In the 1680s the Chinese were prospering greatly from regional trade and from the revival of the trade of Chinese merchants coming from their home ports to Batavia. In 1688, for example, the Chinese coming to Batavia to trade bought from the company eight thousand guilders’ worth of pepper. But there was another side to this growing traffic that was less to the liking of the Batavia Chinese. The 1688 junks from China also brought in more than seven hundred people, most of whom planned to stay and start new lives in Java. Already in 1687 the Dutch authorities were complaining of the large numbers of “bankrupts and vagabonds” arriving on the junks from China. New arrivals from China were blamed for a rash of burglaries. The established Chinese suffered from much of this crime, and their hard-won toleration by the Dutch and the Javanese was threatened by reactions against the newcomers. In 1690 the Dutch authorities adopted an expanded set of controls on Chinese immigration and immigrants. In the rural plains around Batavia many established Chinese started sugar-refining mills, and impoverished recent immigrants did most of the hard work in the growing sugar industry. When the rural Chinese exploded in rebellion against the Dutch in 1740, the Batavia Chinese elite sided with the rulers, not with their fellow countrymen.
As the governor-general and council in Batavia reviewed the figures on trade, they could not help noticing the rising importance of the commerce with India, especially in Indian cotton and silk fabrics. Still, the spice trades held a special place in their world. Nowhere in the company’s sphere had a monopoly been more ruthlessly pursued than in the Banda Islands, a tiny archipelago that was the world’s exclusive producer of nutmeg and mace. In the 1620s the Bandanese had been accused of violating monopoly contracts, which they did not fully understand and had not all agreed to, and had been deliberately exterminated, driven away from the cultivated areas to the slopes of a volcano, where they died of starvation and disease during the rainy season. In 1688 there were almost no Bandanese left. The nutmeg groves were in the hands of Dutch entrepreneurs who bought slaves to do the work. The slaves came from Bali, Papua, and India, in a thriving and little-studied slave trade throughout maritime Southeast Asia. In their 1688 letters to the home country the Batavia authorities reported that on the Banda Islands there were 160,000 fully grown nutmeg trees, 185,000 half grown, and 315,000 young. The population of 6,642 included 1,070 Dutch, 3,716 slaves, and just 3 free Bandanese and 25 Bandanese slaves. The letters commented on the horrible cruelty with which the plantation entrepreneurs treated the slaves and other Asians but gave no details.
By 1688 the Dutch had a grip on the centers of clove cultivation almost as firm as for nutmeg and mace. Their seat of power and administration was on the island of Ambon, where we already have met Rumphius. The trouble with the cloves business was that they were too easy to grow and faced an inelastic demand in Europe and Asia. If the Dutch were to continue to buy cheap and sell dear, they had not only to exclude all competitors but also to limit strictly the quantities available in Dutch-controlled ports; if they didn’t, their own servants would succumb to the temptation to divert cloves into private channels and ship them to ports that the Dutch didn’t control. Since the 1650s the Dutch, more or less with the consent of local rulers, had engaged in ruthless campaigns to chop down clove trees in areas where they didn’t have tight enough control or simply when the abundance of tropical nature outran the demand in foreign markets. At the end of 1688 the Batavia authorities noted in their letter to their superiors in the Netherlands that they still faced a chronic overproduction problem; only a small part of the area now planted to cloves was needed to meet the demand of all ports, European and Asian, served by the Dutch company. In the past, when they cut down trees or forced the local people to do so, they had made regular payments to the people to compensate them for the loss of income. But they were not willing to increase the amount paid out in this way, and they feared that if they cut down trees on a few islands, the people would just move to other islands where they were out of reach of the Dutch and plant more clove trees. So they were not cutting down any more trees and were having vague thoughts of trying to induce the local people to switch to agriculture, but they thought that those people would not respond very well, preferring to continue their “lazy” fruit-eating ways rather than switch to growing rice, which was not feasible on Ambon in any case. They were also making final plans to build another substantial fort on an island near Ambon.
North of the Ambon area, the region called Maluku or the Moluccas, around the twin volcanic islands of Ternate and Tidore, had been a center of clove production and European rivalry since the arrival of the Portuguese in the early 1500s. The people of Maluku conceived their political world as having two complementary focal points in Ternate and Tidore; the ideal state was one of balance and manageable rivalry, not the victory of one over the other. The influence of Islam had strengthened the idea of hereditary monarchy, but there still was a strong feeling that a would-be king had to prove his abilities and spiritual powers to the elders of the various settlements. There were many legends of men arriving from across the ocean, proving themselves to the “lords of the land,” and becoming king.
The dualism of Ternate and Tidore had worked pretty well for the people of Maluku as long as they could align with rival European powers. But the Dutch expelled the Portuguese, and the Spanish withdrew their last remnants in the early 1660s. Thereafter the brotherhood of the rulers of Ternate and Tidore became a sibling rivalry for the favor of Father Company. The Dutch got along well with collective and nonmonarchical forms of government in the home country, but in Asia they were more comfortable dealing with monarchies, which made it easier to know whom to support and whom they should pressure to live up to a treaty. Some of them were inclined to see danger for themselves in any growing Islamic influence, and they were not entirely wrong. From the 1660s on they kept steady pressure on the rulers of Maluku to adopt European customs, dress, and a more centralized form of monarchy. The sultan of Ternate named his sons Amsterdam and Rotterdam. When Sultan Amsterdam came to the throne in 1675, he went along with the Dutch program of cultural assimilation and sought to strengthen his control in outlying areas by force, provoking a great deal of resistance and even some opposition from the Dutch. On Tidore, on the other hand, Sultan Saifuddin refused to go along with the Dutch program and relied on traditional consensus-building forms of politics, so that he was much more popular among his own people but on much worse terms with the Dutch. After Saifuddin died on October 2, 1687, the company intervened to place his son on the throne despite the strong claims of Saifuddin’s brother. The Batavia authorities hoped they might now have better relations with Tidore, but by the end of 1688 they were writing that the new sultan was as troublesome as his father. In the harbor at Ternate, Tidore marauders had attacked some fishermen very close to the company ships lying at anchor and beheaded six of them: When the Dutch complained to the new sultan of Tidore, he sent six of his people to the Dutch, saying they could kill these and then they would be even; the Dutch refused, “it being contrary to all Christian laws.”
Across the Sunda Strait from Java was the great island of Sumatra, extending about nine hundred miles to the northwest, forming the west side of the Strait of Melaka, much of its mountainous, densely forested interior little known to the people who frequented its coasts and harbors. On the north end of the island the port kingdom of Aceh maintained its independence and Islamic orientation, welcoming all kinds of European and Asian traders as long as they did not seek monopoly privileges or political hegemony. The central interior produced considerable gold; the Dutch company had gotten its hands on some of the gold-producing areas, which it worked with slave labor, not very productively. Closest to Batavia and of constant concern to the governor-general and council were twin ports and kingdoms on Sumatra’s southeast coast, Jambi and Palembang. Their rulers frequently described themselves as brothers, but fraternal rivalry was a permanent possibility that had been exacerbated by the actions of the Dutch. In 1688 the situation at Jambi was especially baffling and dangerous in the eyes of the Dutch.
The physical settings of the two kingdoms were similar. The capital was a port town, several days’ sail up a twisting river, in a broad coastal zone of mangrove and swamp forest, large parts of which frequently were inundated by high tides or high water in the rivers. Most houses were built on pilings and had water beneath them at least part of the year. The landscape was so flat that any small hill drew attention; one such hill near Palembang had become the center of many legends of the origins and burials of local kings. Europeans and other outsiders found these hot, damp, mosquito-plagued places unhealthy. There was not much population or production near these cities; they were simply nodes for transfer of wealth, and sometimes power, between the more populous areas upriver and larger centers of wealth and power across the seas.
Access to the upriver areas depended on networks of rivers and tributaries. When the water was too low, they were impassable. When they were running fullest in March and April after the rainy season, the trip downstream was rapid and more than a little dangerous, the return voyage against the flood impossible. In between, trips upstream might take weeks of rowing. The lure upstream was fertile land in the river valleys that could be cleared and planted with pepper vines. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries traders from China and Europe came to Jambi, Palembang, Banten, and other ports in quest of the large quantities of pepper they could sell in the expanding commercial economies of their homelands. Clearing tropical forests with mediocre tools was slow work. The pepper vines began to bear only in the fifth year after they were planted. By 1688 it had been clear for decades that too many vines had been planted, too much production stimulated. Warehouses in Amsterdam and Batavia were overflowing with pepper.
That was only one side of the troubles Jambi and Palembang were encountering in the wake of their commercial expansion and especially of the Dutch involvement in their affairs. Relations between rulers and ruled, between the lords of the downstream port cities and their numerous and distant upstream subjects, were expressed and worked out in terms of kinship. All systems of hereditary power do this to a greater or lesser degree, but here the implications were more pervasive than for China’s vast bureaucracy or Europe’s structures of law, privilege, and commerce. Rulers were supposed to be like clan elders, having great prestige but not absolute power, keeping people’s respect by settling disputes and giving generous gifts. Their people’s recognition of them would be expressed in deference, obedience, and gifts. The looseness of such a ruler-subject relation was enhanced by the physical distance and difficulty of movement between the upriver areas and the ruler in his city in the swamps. Many local power holders upriver were royal relatives who had chosen to carve out semi-independent spheres for themselves but might intervene in capital politics if they did not like what was going on there.
This kind of political give-and-take came under drastic pressure once the Dutch had a contract for the delivery of pepper and the exclusion of competitors from trade. They would support the ruler as sovereign if he would keep firm control and increase deliveries of pepper, but it was just such firm control and pressure to maximize production and delivery that would disrupt the delicate balances of the traditional political order, including its ceremonial and reciprocal ways of collecting goods to send downstream. Despite the tensions this brought about, in 1688 the sultan of Palembang, Abdul Rahman, seemed wealthy and secure on his throne, his reign marred only by a fitful rivalry between his two sons. But in Jambi Sultan Ingalaga was a weak ruler, the trade of his kingdom was in decline, and he had been challenged by an upriver leader with an explicitly Islamic and anti-Dutch agenda. In 1687 the Dutch had sent a small force to Jambi and had been astonished to find many Jambi nobles deserting their sovereign and supporting his son, who now was installed on the throne. Ingalaga fled upstream. In March 1688 he came back to his capital, threatening to attack, but then lost his nerve in the face of wide support for his son and sought protection from the Dutch commanders, who sent him off to a lonely and uncomfortable exile in Batavia. Abdul Rahman of Palembang supported the new sultan of Jambi. The Islamic, anti-Dutch threat had been shunted aside, at least for the moment. Palembang continued to prosper, and Jambi continued to decline.
Cornelia van Nijenroode arrived in the Netherlands on August 10, 1688. She never had set foot there before in her fifty-eight years of life. She was pursuing her legal case against the efforts of her estranged husband, Johan Bitter, to make off with all of the fortune she had inherited from her first husband. She must have had the dress, manners, and language of a wealthy Dutch lady returning from the Indies, but her features betrayed a still more exotic origin: She had been born in Hirado, Japan, in 1630, the daughter of a Dutch merchant and a Japanese lady. After her parents died, she was raised in the orphanage in Batavia and does not seem to have ever traveled far from there until she boarded ship for Holland at the end of 1687. The short days and damp chill of the end of the year, so unlike Batavia’s equatorial even days and moist heat, and the absence of the many servants chattering in Portuguese in her big Batavia house must have added to her unease as she conferred with her attorney and prepared the suit that she filed with the High Court of Holland in November 1688. Her story builds a bridge back from Batavia to the home country and shines a narrow, bright beam into the murk of high-level Batavia society.
Cornelia’s upbringing in the Batavia orphanage, probably eased by an inheritance from her father, does not seem to have been especially unpleasant. She had some social connections with a small community of Japanese exiles in Batavia and appears to have written regularly to her family in Hirado. In 1652 she married Pieter Cnoll. Between 1653 and 1670 she gave birth to ten children, only one of whom lived to adulthood. A fine portrait has come down to us of Pieter, Cornelia, and two of their daughters; the artist has caught Cornelia’s elegant Dutch dress and her Japanese features.
Pieter Cnoll rose to responsible and lucrative positions in the company hierarchy and died in 1672. His will designated his widow as his major heir and the guardian of his children. There was ample wealth; she would have a big carriage and a household with forty slaves. In 1675 the lawyer Johan Bitter arrived in Batavia from Holland. His wife had died on the voyage out. He had four children to support. His salary as a member of the Court of Justice was not adequate to support his family in the lavish style of the Batavia elite. He was attracted by Cornelia’s wealth, she perhaps by his legal expertise and high connections, which might help her preserve her wealth and status. She insisted on a prenuptial agreement by which she remained in exclusive possession of all the money and property she brought to the marriage. They were married just over six months after Bitter’s arrival in Batavia.
Things went bad quickly. When Cornelia proposed to make a small investment in her own name, Bitter informed her that although it was clear that he did not share ownership of her property, nothing was said in the agreement about its management. She could not do anything without his participation and approval. There were ferocious quarrels. Friends intervened and persuaded Cornelia to try to buy peace by giving Bitter the sum he had been promised if she died before him. But the quarrels continued. Bitter beat her, dislocating her shoulder. She moved out but came back. Bitter offered to divorce her for a cash payment of f125,000;* she refused. Cornelia sued for divorce, and Bitter filed a countersuit, claiming that the prenuptial agreement was invalid and he was entitled to half her assets. When the Batavia Church Council, more interested in Christian harmony than in anyone’s rights, tried to effect a reconciliation, Bitter slandered the motives of its members, refused to apologize, and made endless procedural delays.
Cornelia was trying to get some of her money safely deposited under the names of friends. Bitter got his hands on some of her money and sent some diamonds and a bill of exchange to Holland. The diamonds were discovered; he was accused of smuggling diamonds in violation of the company’s monopoly, dismissed from its service, and sent home in 1680. In Holland he filed a new suit, asking that Cornelia be ordered to reconcile with him and that half her assets deposited with the company be sequestered as his by right. The court ordered only a reconciliation, ignoring what was for Bitter the key question of Cornelia’s fortune. But now he began to win a few rounds. The diamond-smuggling charge was dropped, he was reinstated in the company’s service, and he returned to Batavia in 1683.
Compelled by the court order, man and wife now shared a house and seem to have settled into an uneasy peace. But then he transferred f50,000 of her money to his own account and sent most of it to Holland. On January 5, 1686, three sailors saw a man beating a middle-aged lady until she bled from her mouth, while he shouted, “You whore, beast, bitch, come here and I’ll trample you under my feet until the blood spills from your throat.” The authorities arrived; but after all, Bitter was a member of the Court of Justice, and after a night in jail the three witnesses decided not to testify against him. Now Cornelia appealed for permission to live apart from Bitter and safeguard her assets but was turned down. The authorities still were seeking a Christian reconciliation, but they finally gave up and in 1687 sent both parties to the Netherlands.
Arriving some time in the summer of 1688, Cornelia retained a good attorney and filed a suit in November 1688 before the High Court of Holland requesting legal separation from Bitter, the restitution of f45,500 he had taken of her assets, and the proceeds of the sale of her house, coach, and other assets in Batavia. Bitter countersued, asking that she be named a “malicious desertrix” and that he be granted one-fourth of her assets outright and the administration of the rest. The High Court did not pass sentence until July 4, 1691. It then ordered Cornelia to live in peace with her husband and declared him entitled to half the income from her assets. There was to be a further consultation after the August recess; it never took place, and it is likely that Cornelia died that summer. Bitter lived on in Holland in very comfortable circumstances and died in 1714.
For many years Cornelia had been a good Japanese daughter, writing regularly from Batavia to her mother’s relatives in Hirado. Now, so far from Batavia, did she remember the little town on the island side of the narrow strait, the daimyo’s castle looming above it, and the Chinese junks and high-walled European ships in the bays around the island? Surely she remembered Batavia, its lonely little Japanese community, the prosperity and intelligence of the Chinese, the earnestness and hypocrisy of the Church Council, the sailors and taverns, the fresh fish and wonderful tropical fruit, the stink of the canals, the giggling slave girls doing her bidding, the endless pregnancies when her first husband was alive, the fun of being on her own and making investments that paid off, the nightmare of Johan Bitter dodging truth and right. The canals weren’t too clean in Holland, and the drunken workmen and sailors sounded familiar; but the streets were narrow, the breeze sometimes was chilly even in midsummer, and the long days were getting shorter at an amazing rate as the summer wore on.
*The standard abbreviation for the Dutch guilder is “f.”