Nathaniel's nutmeg (47 page)

Coulson now begged the minister that he might ask a question.' "You manifest unto us the danger of dissimu­lation in this case," he said, "but tell us, if we suffer guiltlesse, being otherwise also true believers in Jesus Christ, what shall be our reward?" '

To this the minister had a ready answer:' "By how much the cleerer you are, soe much the more glorious shall be your resurrection."'The narrative continues:

With that word Coulson started up, embraced the preacher and gave him his purse with such money as

hee had in it, saying, 'Domine, God bless you. Tell the Governor I freely forgive him; and I entreat you to exhort him to repent of this bloody tragedy wrought upon us poor innocent souls.'

Here all the rest of the Englishmen signified their assent to this speech.

Then spake John Fardo to the rest in the presence of the ministers as followeth; 'My countrymen and brethren that are heere with mee condemned to dye, I charge you all as you will answer it at God's Judgement Seat if any of you bee guilty of this matter, whereof we are condemned, discharge your consciences and confesse the truth for satisfaction of the world.' Hereupon Samuel Coulson spake with a loud voyce, saying: 'According to my innocency in this treason so, Lord, pardon all my sinnes and if I be guiltie thereof, more or lesse, let me never be partaker of Thy heavenly joys.' At which words every one of the rest cryed out, 'Amen for me, amen for me, good Lord!' This done, each of them knowing whom he had accused, went one to another begging forgiveness for their false accusation, being rung from them by the pains or feare of torture. And they all freely forgave one another: for none had bene so falsely accused but he himself had accused another as falsely.

The Dutch ministers found themselves deeply moved by the spectacle of these condemned men professing their innocence and one of them offered to bring them a barrel of wine in order that they might 'drive away their sorrow'. But the men steadfastly declined the offer, not wishing to spend their final hours in a state of drunkenness. Instead they asked the ministers for ink and sat quietly writing their final protestations of innocence. One of these, bear­ing Samuel Coulson's signature, is inscribed into his copy of the Psalms of David which eventually found its way back to Europe. Written on 5 March 1623, 'aboard the Rotterdam lying in irons', it begins:

Understand that I, Samuel Coulson, late factor of Hitto, was apprehended for suspicion of conspiracy; and for anything I know must die for it: wherefore having no meanes to make my innocency knowne, have writ in this book, hoping some good Englishman will see it. I do here sweare upon my salvation, as I do hope by His death and passion to have redemption for my sinnes, that I am cleere of all such conspiracy: neither do I know any Englishman guilty thereof, nor other creature in the world. As this is true, God bless me — Samuel Coulson.

William Griggs also managed to scribble a few lines on that final night: 'We, through torment, were constrained to speake that which we never meant, nor once imagined; the which we take upon our deaths and salvation, that tortured as with that extreme torment of fire and water, that flesh and blood could not endure ... And so farewell; written in the dark.'

How Towerson passed his final night is unknown for he was still held in isolation and unable to communicate with his compatriots. Everything he wrote was confiscated and destroyed except for a couple of lines which he scrawled onto a bill of debt against the Company. This passed undetected until it fell into the hands of an English agent in the Banda Islands: 'Firmed by the firme of me, Gabriel Towerson, now appointed to die, guiltless of anything that can be justly laid to my charge. God forgive them their guilt and receive me to His mercy. Amen.'

That his suffering was at least as great as the rest of the men is clear from an account by Beomont, one of the released, who visited him on the morning of his execution and 'found him sitting in a chamber all alone in a most miserable condition, the wounds of his torture bound up'. He clutched Beomont's hand weakly and prayed him that if he ever reached England he should seek out his brother Billingsley and certify him of his innocence 'which,' he said, 'you yourself know well enough'.

As day broke the men were reminded of their impending execution by the beat of drums and tramp of soldiers echoing through the town. This was to summon spectators wishing to view the bloodshed about to take place. Executions in Amboyna were colourful events; flags and bunting were strung out, bands played, and large crowds 'flocked together to behold this triumph of the Dutch over the English'. The prisoners, meanwhile, were assembled in the great hall for the last time. At the door stood 'the quit and pardoned', those lucky two who had been released on the orders of the governor. To these men the condemned now made their last farewells and solemnly charged them 'to bear witnesse to their friends in England ... that they died not traitors, but so many innocents merely murdered by the Hollanders, whome they prayed God to forgive their blood- thirstinesse and to have mercy upon their own soules'.

As they spent their last minutes in the hall the Japanese prisoners were ushered in and lined up against the opposite wall. This spectacle angered both parties for each believed the other group to be the cause of their present plight. ' "Oh you Englishmen," said one of the Japanese in a voice of despair, "where did wee ever in our lives eat with you, talk with you, or (to our remembrance) see you?" The Englishmen replied: "Why then have you accused us?" ' It was only at this point that all realised the scale of the Dutch deception and 'the poore men, perceiving they were made believe each had accused others before they had so done, indeed, showed them their tortured bodies and said, "If a stone were thus burnt, would it not change his nature? How much more we that are flesh and blood?" '

The men then embraced each other before being ushered into a courtyard where their sentence was read out by an official standing in a gallery. Here they were reunited with Towerson whose wounds and sores had become so festered that he could scarcely walk. Then, accompanied by five companies of soldiers, they were led in procession to their place of execution, a long and melancholy cortege that wound through crowds of cheering onlookers before arriving at the execution ground.

As they stood facing their executioner Samuel Coulson drew from his pocket a short prayer which ended in a defiant declaration of his innocence. This being done, he threw the paper into the wind and watched as it fluttered high into the air before being caught by a soldier and taken straight to the governor.

One by one the men stepped forward to the block. Before the executioner proceeded with his bloody work, each man affirmed in a clear voice that he was innocent of all the crimes of which he was accused. 'And so, one by one, with great cheerfulness, they suffered the fatal stroke.'

Only Towerson was singled out for special treatment. As the leader of the little English contingent he was accorded the special honour of having a small piece of black velvet tied to the block prior to his being beheaded. In a bill of charges later received by the English East India Company, the cost of this cloth was added to the list on the grounds that it was so bloodstained as to be unusable.

If van Speult had any qualms about his rough justice, he was about to receive an admonishment from on high. 'At the instant of the execution there arose a great darknesse with a sudden and violent gust of winde and tempest; whereby two of the Dutch shippes riding in the harbour were driven from their anchors.' Worse was to come; within two weeks of the execution 'there happened a great sickness on the island such as was there never seen or heard of, so that the people cried out that it was a plague upon them for the innocent blood of the English.' When the sickness finally subsided, more than a quarter of the island's population had lost their lives. The surviving Englishmen took comfort in these events, remembering Emanuel Thomson's dying words that 'he did not doubt but God would show some sign of their innocencie.'

The small English community in Batavia knew nothing of these events until they met with two pallid Englishmen disembarking from a vessel in the harbour. When asked to explain their miserable state these men poured out the story of the Amboyna massacre. The English were shocked by what they heard and sent an immediate protest to the new Dutch Governor-General, Pieter de Carpentier, remonstrat­ing against van Speult's 'presumptuous proceedings' in 'imprisoning, torturing and bloodily executing his majesty's subjects' and 'confiscating their goods in direct violation of the Treaty, whereby the King was disgraced and dishonoured and the English nation scandalized'.

Carpentier treated the protests with cool detachment, but the letters he sent back to Holland reveal that he realised the matter was of the utmost gravity. Although believing that Towerson and his fellow men had indeed been engaged in conspiracy, he condemned in the strongest words the methods used by the fiscal. 'He called himself a lawyer and had been taken into the Company's service as such,' he wrote, but he 'should have shown better judgement in the affair'. He continued: 'We think the rigour of justice should have been mitigated somewhat with Dutch clemency (with consideration to a nation who is our neighbour), especially if such could be done without prejudice to the state and the dignity of justice, as we think could have been done here.'

When news of the massacre reached London there was uproar. King James at first refused to believe it, claiming it was too foul. But when he heard the story from the mouths of the survivors he was deeply shocked and although not accustomed to show emotion was said to have shed tears over the fate of Towerson and his companions. The Lords of the Privy Council also wept when they were told of the tortures, while the merchants of the East India Company were stunned to silence. Stranger was the reaction of the English public who indulged in what was little short of a national outpouring of grief. Up and down the country pamphlets and broadsheets were published with graphic details of the tortures and in towns and villages men eagerly discussed the gruesome business. A mob gathered around the Dutch Chapel in Lothbury and jeered at the congregation as they entered the church. 'Hypocrites, murderers,' they shouted, 'Amboyna will cost you paradise.' More than fifty years later the poet John Dryden used the massacre to whip up anti-Dutch feeling, publishing his tragedy
Amboyna, or The Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants.

All through the winter indignation grew, and the directors of the East India Company did not fight shy of stoking the public outrage. They commissioned artist Richard Greenbury to produce a huge oil painting depicting the agonies of Towerson and companions, with van Speult and the fiscal gloating over their bloody victory. Greenbury apparently excelled himself, painting a gruesome picture in which he 'lively, largely and artificially' depicted the tortures. The work was to be exhibited in the Company headquarters 'as a perpetual memorial of Dutch cruelty and treachery' and the public were invited to come to view it. So effective was the painting in inciting hatred against the Dutch that the directors were ordered by the government not to display it until after the Shrove Tuesday holiday for fear of a general uprising against the large population of Hollanders living in London.

Greenbury himself was delighted with the reaction and demanded £100 from the directors. In this he was to be disappointed for they told him that 'one proffered to cut it out in brass for £30, which was a great deal more labour and workmanship than to draw it on cloth.' In the end Greenbury settled for £40.

With anti-Dutch protests growing in London there was a feeling that something had to be done. 'For my part,' wrote one notable to Sir Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador at The Hague,'if there were no wiser than I, we should stay or arrest the first Indian ship that comes in our way and hang up upon Dover cliffs as many as we should find faulty or actors in this business and then dispute the matter afterwards: for there is no other course to be had with such manner of men, as neither regard law nor justice, nor any other respect or equity or humanity, but only make gain their God.'

The States General were extremely concerned at the aftermath of the Amboyna Massacre and unsatisfied with an official report compiled by the directors of the Dutch East India Company. Far from denying that van Speult used torture it actually justified his methods, arguing that 'the torture of the water is much more civill and less dangerous than other tortures for the paine of water doth but cause and produce an oppression and anxiety of breath and respiration.' The report was riddled with inconsistencies and offered no real evidence against the English. After deliberating over its contents the States General recalled van Speult to Holland to answer for his brutality, but he died before he reached Amsterdam. Others made it back to Holland but the special court that convened to investigate their conduct deliberated for months before declaring it could find no reason to punish them for something they did in the belief that they were acting in the best interests of their country.