Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [30]
The capital required to fund the chambers came from the merchants of the six towns themselves. There was little difficulty in attracting men anxious to put money in the rich trades; Amsterdam, which was by far the richest chamber, had more than a thousand individual investors, of whom almost 200 contributed in excess of 5,000 guilders apiece. Reinier Pauw, who had started it all, put up six times that amount, but, even so, the five largest contributions were all made by southern immigrants; the biggest investment was one of 85,000 guilders.
The new company was a success from the start. The first combined fleet sailed in 1602 and made an enormous profit. The VOC also enjoyed impressive success in fighting the Portuguese, who found themselves assailed by the substantial Dutch fleets that were arriving in the East. Even when they were themselves outnumbered, the Hollanders had the better ships and superior morale. By 1605 they had captured Ambon, Tidore, and Ternate—three of the most important Spice Islands, which between them produced almost all the world’s supply of cloves. These victories confirmed the corporation as the most profitable, powerful, and important private business in the United Provinces: “Jan Company,” the people of the Dutch Republic took to calling it, in recognition of its primacy.*9
By 1615, with the continuing success of Jan Company apparently assured, Dutch traders in the East became increasingly confident and aggressive. The English trader Henry Middleton, who ran across the merchants of the VOC in Bantam, penned a vigorous protest at the escalating arrogance of “this frothy nation.” He was not the only one to find the Hollanders’ demeanor hard to stomach.
At home in the Netherlands, the Gentlemen XVII indulged in similar high-handedness. Although their victories had been won with guns supplied by the Dutch government, and though the Company’s monopoly remained in the gift of the States-General, the directors of the VOC did not hesitate to assert their independence when the opportunity arose. “The places and the strongholds captured,” they tartly told the States, “should not be regarded as national conquests but as the property of private merchants, who were entitled to sell those places to whomsoever they wished, even if it was to the King of Spain.”
The leaders of the United Provinces, who depended on Jan Company to prosecute their war with Portugal and Spain in eastern waters, had no choice but to tolerate the Gentlemen’s presumption. The same was not true of the English East India Company, whose fragile grip on the spice trade—painfully built up over several decades—was greatly weakened by Dutch aggression. “These butterboxes,” another English merchant complained in 1618, “are groanne so insolent that yf they be suffered but a whit longer, they will make a claime to the whole Indies, so that no man shall trade but themselves or by their leave.” He was right. Within a year the Dutch had all but cleared their rivals from the Indies; within three they had subdued the Banda Islands and seized the world’s entire supply of nutmeg, the most sought-after spice of all. These actions, more than any others, guaranteed a lucrative future for Jan Company. By the middle of the 1620s, the Indies trade, which had been so fragmented and unprofitable only two decades earlier, had evolved into a well-organized monopoly. The six chambers of the VOC sat at the center of a web of trade yielding unprecedented profits.
All this wealth flowed directly into the coffers of the Company, and out again into the pockets of the company’s principal investors—the great merchants of the Dutch Republic and, in particular, the directors of the six chambers themselves. The profits that were earned, and the dividends