Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [33]
This fact was commonly acknowledged. “There are no Ten Commandments south of the equator,” the common saying had it, and honest men were hard to come by in the East. Though personal belongings could be, and were, frequently searched to prevent the private importation of spice, fraudulent accounting was commonplace; it was a relatively simple matter to buy goods at a low price and claim they had cost much more, or to overvalue damaged stock. Nor were the merchants the only ones busily defrauding their employer. Many lesser servants of the VOC bribed fellow Dutchmen to overlook their private activities in the spice markets. Some traded in the name of Asian merchants, though this, too, was prohibited. “There was no ‘esprit de corps’ in the VOC,” one historian has noted. “The Company as a body was avaricious, and its employees were often demoralised by its institutionalised greed . . . . Every able-bodied man from the Councillor of the Indies down to the simple soldier considered it an absolute must to care for himself first.”
Jan Company, which was nothing if not a practical organization, finally resigned itself to the practice of private trade, making only intermittent efforts to stamp it out. A merchant had to be exceptionally greedy or unlucky to be caught; most of those who were had been betrayed by jealous rivals. The most notorious example in Pelsaert’s day was that of Huybert Visnich, who had run a VOC trading post in Persia. His salary was 160 guilders a month, but by the time he was denounced for fraud his private trade had amassed him a fortune estimated at no less than 200,000 guilders. Visnich fled to the Ottoman Empire, where he was eventually killed for his money in 1630. His former employers noted his death, with a certain satisfaction, as “a well deserved punishment by God.” In truth, however, Visnich had simply taken better advantage of his opportunities than hundreds of other merchants who were equally corrupt.
Francisco Pelsaert was no exception to this rule. While at Agra, he used Company funds to set himself up as a moneylender, advancing cash to local indigo growers at an annual rate of 18 percent and pocketing the profits for himself. It was a risky business; he could hardly keep full records, for fear of an audit; the farmers who made up his clientele sometimes defaulted on their loans; and there was always the danger that a colleague would denounce him to the Company. But by initiating his successor in the deception when he himself returned to Surat, Pelsaert successfully evaded detection. By 1636, when his fraud at last came to light, the VOC had incurred sizable losses of almost 44,000 rupees.
Word that there was money to be made in the service of Jan Company did not take long to spread through the United Provinces, and there can be little doubt that Jeronimus Cornelisz planned to recoup his lost fortune through just this sort of private trade. Whether or not the apothecary had been compromised by involvement in the Torrentian scandal, his appearance in Amsterdam in the autumn of 1628 clearly suggests that his chief concern was to restore his battered financial position. There were safer bolt-holes for religious dissidents than Amsterdam, most of them outside the borders of the United Provinces—but none that offered such a tempting combination of anonymity and opportunity.
The town that Jeronimus traversed was not yet fully formed. The horseshoe-shaped canals that still enclose the city center had only just been built, running just inside to the walls, encircling the residential streets and the merchants’ warehouses and leading north toward the crowded harbor. But even then their banks were lined with the thin, tall homes of Holland’s leading citizens—the height of each building roughly denoting