Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [139]
Van der Beeck was at the English court from 1630 until 1641 or 1642. He seems to have given—in the words of Horace Walpole—“more scandal than satisfaction.” He painted relatively little. Eventually, his royal pension cut off by the Civil War, he crept back into Holland incognito. He had run out of money, but his elderly mother helped to support him. The painter died in February 1644, either forgiven or forgotten by the Calvinist authorities, for the great heretic of Haarlem was buried within the walls of Amsterdam’s New Church, in consecrated ground.
Most of Torrentius’s paintings were confiscated and burned by the public hangman during and after his trial, and the few that he produced in England were soon lost. For many years it was thought that none of his works had survived, but just before the outbreak of the First World War a single masterpiece was rediscovered. It is a still life, showing a flagon and a jug flanking a wineglass and a bridle, which had once been owned by Charles I. The painting had disappeared after the royal collection was auctioned off in 1649, and somehow found its way back to the Netherlands. It was in the Dutch Republic around 1850, its provenance long since forgotten, and eventually came into the possession of a grocer named J. F. Sachse, of Enschede. It miraculously survived a great fire that razed the city in 1862 and was finally recovered and identified in 1913—by which time Sachse’s children were using it as the cover for a barrel of currants. After that it was restored. The painting now hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
Jacques Specx lived on to die, in 1652, as replete with wealth and honor as a lifetime in the spice trade could make a man. He returned to the Republic late in 1632, having been a quarter of a century in the East; since leaving home in 1607, aged 18, he had spent no more than 12 months in the Netherlands and devoted most of his energies to opening up the Dutch trade with Japan. On his way home he seized the uninhabited island of St. Helena in the Company’s name, and for a few years the isle became a popular refueling station for Dutch spice ships on their homeward voyage. Eventually, however, pirates and privateers learned that it was a rich hunting ground, and by the 1660s a sharp increase in the loss of ships had forced the VOC to abandon their new possession.
Home at last, Specx became a director of the Company—one of the Gentlemen XVII—in 1642 and held the post for the last nine years of his life. He died at the ripe age of 63; his voyages had made him rich, and he bequeathed his children a considerable inheritance, including several portraits of himself made by artists of the stature of Rembrandt van Rijn.
Specx’s half-Japanese daughter, Sara, whom Coen had flogged for her supposed immorality, fared less well. After her father’s return to Batavia she was nursed back to health, but because she was Eurasian he was nevertheless compelled to leave her behind in Java upon returning to the Netherlands. (Dutch law at this time forbade Eurasians to enter the Republic. The intent was to encourage men who had fathered families in the East to remain there, thus easing the VOC’s perpetual shortages of manpower.) The girl, who was 15 when this happened, remained in the East and seems to have been well cared for in her father’s absence. A few years later she made a good marriage to a predikant named Georgius Candidius. The groom was