Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [153]
Competition between the VOC and the English East India Company was intense, and was responsible to a large extent for Anglo–Dutch friction throughout the seventeenth century. Given the financial power of both Companies in their home nations, it is not surprising that each exerted pressure on its respective government at key moments – notably in 1650 and 1688 – when it appeared possible that a close alliance between the English and Dutch states might amalgamate the two trading companies as part of one joint endeavour. And competition between the two Companies ensured that the financial mechanisms developed by the Dutch quickly found their way into the English methods of dealing with import–export, customs and excise, taxation, record-keeping and accounting by emulation. By the time the two nations effectively came under one sovereign rule in 1688, it was a comparatively easy matter to integrate – or at least, harmoniously operate side by side – their administrative and business systems.
While the Dutch West India Company and the English King were at loggerheads over New Netherland and the island of Manhattan, and while the English East India Company was casting an increasingly envious eye on the trading activities of its Dutch VOC rival along the west coast of Africa, farther to the east the Dutch East India Company was developing a robust international trade in an area close to its gardening-nation heart: horticultural exotica and pharmaceuticals. Once again, its interest in the region came into collision on a regular basis with the English, who were also intent on securing exclusive rights to new, lucrative types of merchandise and accompanying forms of new knowledge in medicine and horticulture.
We saw in the context of gardens and gardening how global trade literally transformed the English and Dutch landscapes, introducing species of trees, shrubs and flowers previously entirely unknown in Europe. The biggest transformation, however, was in the realm of new knowledges – particularly medical knowledge. Here, as so often before, Sir Constantijn Huygens may serve as our witness.
In 1674 the elderly Sir Constantijn paid a visit to the English Resident Ambassador, Sir William Temple, at his home in The Hague. Temple was housebound with a bad attack of gout, an affliction that had troubled him for a number of years. He later published an account of the visit:
Talking of my illness, and approving of my obstinacy against all the common prescriptions; [Sir Constantijn] asked me whether I had never heard the Indian way of Curing the Gout by Moxa? I told him no, and asked him what it was?
He said it was a certain kind of Moss that grew in the East-Indies; that their way was, when ever any body fell into a Fit of the Gout, to take a small quantity of it, and form it into a figure, broad at bottom as a twopence, and pointed at top; To set the bottom exactly upon the place where the violence of the pain was fixed, then with a small round perfumed Match (made likewise in the Indies) to give fire to the top of the Moss; which burning down by degrees, came at length to the skin, and burnt it till the Moss was consumed to ashes.
That many times the first burning would remove the pain; if not, it was to be renewed a second, third and fourth time, till it went away, and till the person found he could set his foot boldly to the ground and walk.26
Temple asked Huygens how he had heard about this remedy, and he told him that he had read about it in a book recently published by a Dutch physician who had spent a lot of time in the East Indies and Japan. ‘Though he could not say whether experiment had been made of it here, yet the Book was