Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [29]
The directors’ only real mistake was to put the wrong men in command of the voyage. Several of the merchants given the responsibility of leading the expedition were temperamentally quite unsuited to the job. One, Gerrit van Beuningen—the upper-merchant of the fleet’s flagship, Amsterdam—spent most of the voyage in chains, accused of the attempted murder of Cornelis de Houtman of the Mauritius. De Houtman in turn, was a hotheaded adventurer who had already served three years in a Portuguese prison for attempting to steal secret charts of eastern waters. Upon the first fleet’s arrival at the Javanese port of Bantam, De Houtman was incensed to find the price of spices higher than he had expected; he responded by opening fire on the town with cannon. At the little fleet’s next port of call, the Javanese boarded the Amsterdam and hacked a dozen members of the crew to death. Further down the coast, De Houtman’s suspicions were aroused by the unprecedented friendliness shown him by the prince of Madura. He opened fire again, slaughtering the members of the welcome party. Finally, the upper-merchant’s attempt to sail on to the clove-producing islands of the Moluccas was thwarted by a near mutiny among the crew. In the circumstances it was no surprise that when the surviving members of the Eerste Schipvaart returned to Amsterdam, after a voyage of more than two years, the value of the pepper in their holds was only just enough to defray the expenses of the expedition.
Reinier Pauw and his colleagues learned the lessons of the First Fleet well. Merging their Long-Distance Company with a rival concern organized by a group of merchants from the Southern Netherlands, they outfitted a second, larger fleet and dispatched it to the Indies in the spring of 1598. Within two years, the eight ships of the Tweede Schipvaart returned with their holds full of spice. Although the costs of this expedition were put at more than half a million guilders, the voyage yielded profits of 100 percent.
The profitability of the rich trades were thus demonstrated in decisive fashion. From now on the Amsterdam syndicate’s biggest problem was deterring competition. Four rival Dutch fleets had set sail for the Indies in the same year as the Tweede Schipvaart, backed by merchants from the Southern Netherlands and Middelburg. In 1599 yet another consortium, the New Brabant Company, outfitted a fleet, and by 1601, no fewer than 14 Dutch fleets had sailed for the Indies and the United Provinces had overtaken Portugal as the leading trading nation in the East. But intense competition between the various Dutch syndicates drove up prices in the Indies—where the cost of spices doubled in the space of half a dozen years—while depressing profits back at home.
This situation could not be allowed to continue, and in 1602 representatives of the rival companies met to discuss the formation of a joint stock corporation that would merge their various interests into one vast company. The attractions of this proposition were obvious. The combined capital of such a company would give it substantial influence in the Indies; furthermore—by establishing control over the importation of spices to the Dutch Republic—the corporation could more or less fix prices as it wanted. The States-General, or parliament, of the United Provinces was in favor of creating a single company and was prepared to grant it a monopoly on all Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. The only real objections came from the merchants of Zeeland, who did not wish to be part of a concern dominated by the interests of Amsterdam.
It took five months of delicate negotiation to resolve the dispute, but—negotiations finally concluded—the various Dutch syndicates merged on 20 March 1602, forming the giant corporation known as the Verenigde Oost-indische Compagnie.*8 The overall management of the VOC was placed in the hands of the 17 directors, the so-called Heren Zeventien, or Gentlemen XVII. This extremely influential group met two or three times each year, for up to