Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [36]
A retourschip of the Batavia’s size could load around 600 tons of supplies and trade goods when new (and newness made a difference; after a year or two in service, when the hull became saturated with seawater, cargo capacity could fall by 20 percent). But the holds of an East Indiaman were only ever full when she sailed home so loaded down with spices that her gunports were sometimes only two feet from the sea. There was virtually no demand for European goods in the Indies, and although merchantmen departing from the Netherlands did carry boxes of psalm books, hand grenades, cooking pots, and barrel hoops destined for the Dutch garrisons of the East, the only bulky cargo shipped to Java was stone for the Company factories in the East. Each year the Dutch authorities in the Indies placed orders for further huge quantities of house bricks, which were sent out as ballast. Occasionally the eysch—the governor-general’s annual order for supplies—included more exotic requests. This was the case in the autumn of 1628; down in Batavia’s airless bilges, sweating workmen were already busy stowing an entire 25-foot-high prefabricated gateway, made up of 137 huge sandstone blocks weighing 37 tons in all, destined for Castle Batavia itself.
Fortunately for the Gentlemen XVII, there was one commodity that the people of the Spiceries were willing to trade for cloves and nutmeg. The local population might have little use for the Dutch linens and thick English cloth that were northern Europe’s major exports at this time, but they did have an insatiable desire for bullion—preferably silver coin, which was the common currency of the East. Retourschepen therefore set out for the East carrying not trade goods but box after box of silver.
Gigantic sums of money—up to 250,000 guilders for each vessel, equivalent to about $19 million today—were supplied to the retourschepen in massive wooden chests. Each 500-pound case contained 8,000 coins, and the specie in a strongbox totaled about 20,000 guilders. This was enough to be a real temptation, and the risk of theft was such that the money chests were kept separate from the remainder of the cargo. The bullion was brought aboard no more than an hour or two before the crew weighed anchor and arrived under the watchful eye of no less than one of the Gentlemen XVII, who would demand an appropriate receipt signed by the skipper and the upper-merchant. Once aboard, the chests were stored not in the hold but in the Great Cabin in the stern, where only the most senior merchants had access to them. Then they were watched all the way to Java.
By the last months of 1626, Francisco Pelsaert’s existing three-year contract with the VOC was almost up. As one of the most experienced Company men in India, and the leader of a mission to Agra that had been a considerable success in commercial terms, the upper-merchant could normally have expected to be reemployed with a substantial increase in his monthly pay. On this occasion, however, there was no sign of a new contract, and when Pelsaert asked his superiors to resolve the matter, the VOC proved unexpectedly reticent.
The chief difficulty, it appears, concerned the Antwerp merchant’s failings as a diplomat. One of the main goals of Pelsaert’s mission had been to establish a Dutch presence at the Mogul court and secure favorable treatment for the VOC from the Emperor Jahangir.*11 This he had conspicuously failed to do. There were mitigating circumstances, it is true; in 1624 Jahangir