Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [100]
Only a governor of strong character could adapt to the debilitating conditions, deal with his own men and the local rulers, and still increase profits for the Gentlemen XVII; but in 1629, when the emaciated crew of Pelsaert’s longboat finally stumbled ashore in Java, it happened that just such a man had charge of all the VOC’s possessions in the East—a governor who was at once stern, unbending, humorless, God-fearing, honest, and austere. His name was Jan Coen, and he was the architect of the Dutch empire in the Indies.
Coen was a native of the port of Hoorn, in the North Quarter of Holland, and had served the Company since 1607, standing out so starkly among the self-serving private traders who peopled the VOC hierarchy in the East that he was promoted very swiftly. He was an upper-merchant at the age of 25 and governor-general by 1619, when he was only 32. Unlike many of the merchants serving in the East, Coen believed in using military force to expand the VOC’s dominions and had no compunction in unleashing the Company’s armies against both native rulers and his European rivals. He had already all but driven the English East India Company out of the Spiceries, founding Batavia along the way, and conquered the Banda Islands,*36 securing the world’s supply of nutmeg for the Dutch. The Gentlemen XVII held him in the highest regard, even tolerating the blunt and caustic criticisms of their own tightfisted lack of ambition that were a feature of Coen’s frequent letters home.
Nevertheless, as Pelsaert would have known, the governor’s unprecedented ruthlessness had caused the VOC all sorts of trouble in the last decade. The most notorious of several incidents had occurred in 1623 on the spice isle of Ambon, when the VOC wrongly suspected its English competitors of plotting an attack on the Dutch factory. Fifteen East India Company merchants were arrested, along with several Japanese mercenaries. The men were tortured until they confessed—one had flames played along the soles of his feet “until the fat dropt and put out the candles”—and then were executed. When news of the “Amboina massacre” reached London, the outcry that erupted was so violent that the Gentlemen XVII were forced to promise that Coen would see no further service in the East. Privately, however, the Company knew that it could not do without him. Within three years it had sent its most notorious servant back to the Indies, sailing under an assumed name, to begin a second term as governor-general.
Coen had returned to Batavia in September 1627 to find the city under threat. The Bantamese, whose lands lay to the west, had fallen quiet, but to the east of the Dutch enclave lay the much larger empire of Mataram, “an oriental despotism of the traditional kind” whose sultan controlled three-quarters of Java. The VOC—with its gaze fixed firmly on the spice trade—had little interest in its neighbor, which was a purely agricultural society with a barter economy, but Mataram coveted Batavia. Its ruler, Agung, was a conqueror who dreamed of ruling huge tracts of the Indies. He had already subdued several smaller sultanates and taken the title “Susuhunan,” which means “He to whom everything is subject.” Now he began to plan to overthrow the Dutch.
Within a year of Coen’s return, the Susuhunan attacked. In August 1628 Agung laid siege to Batavia with an army of more than 10,000 men, and the governor-general was compelled to order the evacuation of the southern and western quarters of the town. To deny Batavia to the enemy, Coen was forced to burn most of the settlement down and withdraw to the fortress, where he and his garrison endured a three-month siege that ended only when the Mataramese ran out of supplies. The siege was not lifted until 3 December, and the Dutch knew that Agung would almost certainly return the following August, when his next harvest had been gathered in. Thus, when Pelsaert’s emaciated, bone-weary