Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [212]
Decision to head for Java JFP 16 June 1629 [DB 131].
Conditions in the longboat Survivor’s letter, Dec 1629, published in anon., Leyds Veer-Schuyts Praetjen, Tuschen een Koopman ende Borger van Leyden, Varende van Haarlem nae Leyden (np [Amsterdam: Willem Jansz], 1630) [R 235-6]. For Bligh’s voyage, see John Toohey, Captain Bligh’s Portable Nightmare (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), pp. 62–4, 72–8. On psychological issues, see S. Henderson and T. Bostock, “Coping Behaviour After Shipwreck,” British Journal of Psychiatry 131 (1977): 15–20. Henderson and Bostock, who made a particular study of the case of 10 men cast adrift off the coast of Australia in 1973, are explicit concerning the importance of “attachment ideation,” as they term it: “Throughout the ordeal,” they write, “the most conspicuous behaviour was the men’s preoccupation with principal attachment figures such as wives, mothers, children and girl friends. . . . Every one of the survivors reported it as the most helpful content of consciousness which they experienced” (p. 16). In contrast, one man who died after five days adrift was said by the others to have “given up.”
The mutineers’ prediction that Jacobsz would go to Malacca JFP 17 Sep 1629 [DB 143–4].
One kannen of water left Pelsaert declaration, op. cit.
Making Sunda Strait JFP 3 Jul 1629 [DB 133].
Batavia Taylor, The Social World of Batavia, pp. 3–32; Jaap Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 3 vols., 1979–1987), I, pp. 123–4; C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600–1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1965), pp. 189–93, 207; Bernard Vlekke, The Story of the Dutch East Indies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946), pp. 87, 91–2; Spruit, Jan Pietersz Coen, pp. 48–58.
Jan Coen He was born in January 1587 and sent to Rome as a young merchant at the age of 13. Returning to the United Provinces six years later, he signed on with the VOC as an under-merchant, aged only 20. Revisiting the Netherlands in 1611, he presented the Gentlemen XVII with a caustic report on the incompetence he had witnessed among its servants in the East. Impressed, they promoted him to upper-merchant and sent him back east in 1612 in command of a flotilla of two ships. He improved efficiency by cutting down on the number of landfalls his vessels made, and kept his crews healthy by feeding them lemons and plums, thus reducing the incidence of scurvy. These actions further commended him to the Gentlemen XVII, who in 1613 named him director-general, the second most senior position available in the Indies. Six years later Coen succeeded Governor-General Reael, serving in the latter post until 1623, and again from September 1627 until his death in 1629. Coen was well rewarded for his work. In 1624, at the conclusion of his first term as governor-general, the Gentlemen XVII awarded him the unheard-of gratuity of 20,000 guilders—money enough to set their servant up for life and enable him to make an advantageous marriage. Spruit, op. cit., esp. pp. 9–10, 16–8, 41–4.
The expulsion of the English and the conquest of the Banda Islands Spruit, op. cit., pp. 47–50, 71–3; Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 172–6; Giles Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One Man’s Courage Changed the Course of History (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999), pp. 286–7, 298–314. The English retained a foothold in the Spiceries thanks largely to the so-called Treaty of Defence (July 1619) between the Dutch Republic and the English crown, which guaranteed the East India Company a third of the produce of the Indies. The treaty had been signed before the authorities in the United Provinces became fully aware of Coen’s successes in the East. When news of the agreement at last reached Java, the governor-general was predictably apoplectic. Nevertheless, by 1628, when the English East India Company finally abandoned its foothold in Batavia, its only remaining factories in the Indies were in Bantam, Macassar,