Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [99]
For all this, even newcomers such as Zwaantie Hendricx could never really think of Batavia as a European town. In many respects, indeed, it was thoroughly oriental. There was an extensive Chinese quarter and a whole street packed with gambling dens, which was closed to Europeans after dark. One in four of the citizens were Chinese, and, of the remainder, two-thirds were Asian slaves. The European population amounted to about 1,200 soldiers and a few hundred merchants, clerks, and artisans; there were very few Dutch women at all, and almost all the men took local mistresses or wives. The wildlife, too, was alien. Rainforest crept up almost to the gates; there were monkeys and rhinoceroses in the jungle, and tigers sometimes stalked and killed slaves in the sugar fields outside the walls. To make matters worse, Bantamese bandits often prowled in the vicinity, attacking and robbing those unwise enough to venture any distance from the town. Batavia thus existed in a sort of splendid isolation. Newcomers arrived by sea, stayed sometimes for years without seeing anything of the country they were in, and departed the same way they had come.
The community within the walls was singularly one-dimensional. Virtually the entire white population worked directly for the VOC. Over the years, the Gentlemen XVII did make repeated efforts to entice emigrants from Europe to settle in the Indies as “free-burghers”—private citizens who would, it was hoped, provide the sort of infrastructure a real community required—but since the newcomers suffered appallingly from disease and were never allowed to profit from the trade in spices, they made up no more than a tiny fraction of the population. The few would-be settlers who did make the journey rarely stayed for long. Drained and depressed by the muggy pall that hung limply over the whole settlement, they found the town intolerable. Disease was rife, the canals swarmed with mosquitoes, and the midday heat was so intense that even Jan Company did not require its clerks to be at their desks at noon. They worked from 6 to 11 a.m. and 1 to 6 p.m. instead.
The ruler of Batavia was the governor-general of the Indies. He was a senior merchant, sent out from the Dutch Republic by the VOC, who controlled—either directly or through local subordinates—not only the town itself, but all the Company’s factories and possessions from Arabia to the coast of Japan. The governor-general was charged not only with ensuring the profitability of the spice trade but with diplomatic and military affairs as well, and his powers within Batavia itself rivaled those of any eastern potentate. A Council of the Indies, made up of eight upper-merchants of wide experience, offered advice and played some part in the decision making, but it was rare for its members to stand up to a man on whom they themselves largely depended for advancement. Since it took a minimum of 18 months to send a request to the Netherlands and receive an answer, strong governors could and did defy even the Gentlemen XVII for years.
There were only two significant restrictions on the power of an able governor. One was the law—Dutch statutes applied throughout the VOC’s possessions, and legal affairs were in the hands of the fiscaal, a lawyer sent out from the Netherlands. The other was the ever-changing size and strength of the Company’s military forces. Like every other European power active in the Eastern oceans, the Dutch were permanently short of ships and men, and each governor-general was aware that if his factories and forts ever were attacked—whether by native armies, the English, or the Portuguese—his forces were so meager that the loss of a single ship, or a company of soldiers, might determine the outcome of the battle. The soldiers and sailors of the VOC understood this, too, and were much harder to control than they had been in the Netherlands. Men fought, drank, and whored their