Nathaniel's nutmeg (48 page)

The directors of the English East India Company protested, informing the King that they would be forced to abandon trade with the Spice Islands unless 'the Dutch make real restitution for damages, execute justice upon those who had in so great fury and tyranny tortured and slain the English, and give security for the future'. The King acted upon their advice, appointing a committee comprising the country's most distinguished servants to examine all the evidence that had arrived in England. This committee concluded that the massacre had less to do with any conspiracy than with a Dutch plan to permanently evict the English from the Spice Islands. They recommended to the Lord High Admiral that a fleet should be sent to patrol the entrance to the English Channel, lay hold of any outward or homebound Dutch East India ships and keep them in England until suitable compensation was forthcoming. What form that compensation should take was never in doubt. There was only one possible way for the Dutch to atone for the Amboyna Massacre, and that was to hand back the tiny island of Run.

chapter twelve

Striking a Deal

Some fifteen years after
the Massacre of Amboyna, a renegade Dutchman arrived in London bearing some disquieting news. He informed the directors of the East India Company that he had recently visited Run and was surprised to discover that every nutmeg tree on the island had been chopped down. Where once there had been a verdant forest covering Run's mountainous backbone, there was now nothing but exposed soil.

The news was yet another blow to England's in­creasingly forlorn hopes of recovering a foothold in the region. It required only a cursory glance at an atlas for London's merchants to see the tragic story writ large. The Banda Islands were now totally under Dutch control: studded with castles and defended by permanent garrisons, they were probably lost forever. Amboyna, too, was indisputably in Dutch hands. They had chosen it as their regional centre of operations and its jagged coastline was protected by a string of imposing forts. It was much the same story in the northerly islands of Ternate and Tidore which had slowly but surely fallen under the Dutch sphere of influence.

To the dwindling band of Englishmen who lingered in Coen's new capital, Batavia, there were more tangible

reasons for pessimism. Every month saw the arrival of more factors from abandoned outposts; haggard, destitute men who had struggled to keep trading until insolvency or the machinations of the Dutch forced them to flee. Even such far-flung settlements as Siam, Patani on the Malay Peninsula, and Firando in Japan — of which there had been such high hopes — had come to nothing. One by one their traders had been forced to abandon them, leaving decaying warehouses and tarnished reputations. The only places that managed to continue a trade of sorts were those scattered along the coastline of India, but even these would soon be brought to their knees by a devastating and wholly unexpected famine.

The horrific news of events in Amboyna sent a wave of panic through the small English community still living in Batavia. Despised by both the Dutch and the natives, they lived in the town on sufferance of Pieter de Carpentier, the new governor-general, who showed little concern or interest in their welfare. He dismissed their protestations about the massacre at Amboyna, unsettling the English who felt themselves to be in the most vulnerable of positions, surrounded by enemies and with no obvious means of escape. If Carpentier chose to emulate the butchers of Amboyna, they would be unable to resist.

A meeting of the factors ended in decision: scouts were to put to sea at once in order to search for a suitable island upon which the English could build a new headquarters, and the Company's president was to write to London to beg the directors to 'liberate us from the intolerable yoke of the Dutch nation'. Although his letter evoked no response, the scouts soon returned with good news. After sailing around the southern coastline of Sumatra they chanced upon the low-lying island of Lagundi which, they confidently declared, was perfectly suited to their needs.

Why they alighted on this blighted spot remains unclear for it had an extremely unhealthy climate and no source of fresh water. But in October 1624, the remaining Englishmen in Batavia heaved a heavy sigh of relief and fled 'this perfidious people', sailing directly to Lagundi. The flag was raised, the supplies landed, and Lagundi was renamed Prince Charles Island.

Hardly had they made the island their home than their luck once again deserted them. Many of the men succumbed to tropical fevers and dysentery and the wretched remnants spent as much time digging graves as they did on constructing their warehouse. After only a few months a meeting was convened and the survivors elected to return to Batavia, a decision that was fraught with difficulty. Too few to man a ship, the men were forced to beg a Dutch captain to carry them back to the port. They were welcomed with rude cheers and 'a merciless whipping in the public market place'.

The news from London during this troubled period gave few grounds for optimism. Although King James was determined to have his revenge for the heinous crimes perpetrated at Amboyna, more than three years were to pass before a fleet of India-bound Dutch vessels was seized in the English Channel and towed into Portsmouth. By then, King James was dead and it was left to his successor, King Charles I, to pursue the claim for reparations. The directors at last saw a real chance of obtaining redress, but no sooner had they compiled a report of their grievances than they learned that the King had inexplicably released the vessels. He justified his extraordinary behaviour by explaining that the Dutch had promised to send a negotiating team to England, but few believed such an explanation and rumours of backhanders to the King only fuelled the belief that a secret deal had been struck. One report claimed the King had been handed £30,000 by the Dutch captain; another said he had been given three tons of gold. The Dutch themselves stoked the fire by bragging they had bought the King's jewels back from his pawnbroker.

The Company was about to enter its darkest hour. The number of ships sailing to the East dropped by almost two thirds and, with trade at a virtual standstill, its stock slumped by more than 20 per cent. In the good years subscribers had freely stumped up more than £200,000 per annum; now the Company beadle was lucky to collect a quarter of that figure. More worrying was the news that the debts were spiralling out of control: when the auditors checked their accounts in the spring of 1629 they were horrified to learn that they were more than £300,000 in the red.

A series of meetings was called to discuss the parlous state of the Company's finances and it was reluctantly decided that the overheads and expenses should be slashed. The eighteen London employees were the first to feel the squeeze. A list was prepared of their salaries and expenses, together with suggestions of how money could be saved. A few were to be fired, ineffectual workers were to have their pay docked, and others would be retained on much- reduced salaries. First on the list was Mr Tyne, the book­keeper, whose salary was cut from £100 to his 'former proportion' of £80. The apologetic directors explained that with so few ships returning from the Indies he no longer had much book-keeping to do. Mr Handson, the auditor, was the next victim but when he learned that the axe was about to fall he chose to depart with honour, graciously standing down from his position and thereby saving the Company £100 a year. Mr Ducy, a timber measurer, was no less fortunate: his annual ^50 salary was cancelled and he was, in future, to be paid by the day. Others found they were surplus to requirements: Richard Mountney was informed that his salary had been 'recalled' as his services were no longer required.

Such petty measures were cosmetic and useless in halting the Company's decline. Further cuts in salaries were followed by the abandonment of shipbuilding activities and, in 1643, the forced sale of the Deptford shipyard. 'We could wish,' wrote the directors to their long-suffering factors, 'that we could vindicate the reputation of our nation in these partes [the East], and do ourselves right ... [but] of all these wee must brave the burden and with patience sitt still, until wee may find these frowning times more auspicious to us and our affayres.'

Throughout these 'frowning times' the directors clung to the hope that Run would one day be restored. In both 1632 and 1633 they sent letters to their Bantam merchants ordering them to reoccupy the island and, in the following year, they actually despatched a vessel to the Banda Islands but the untimely arrival of the monsoon forced it to return to Bantam. In 1636 a spirited English merchant sailed single-handedly to Neira to demand the return of Run. He was welcomed by the gleeful Dutch commander who told him that if he rowed across to survey the island he would be a little less hasty in demanding its return. The Dutch, increasingly concerned by the continued English interest in the island, had taken 'all courses to make the iland little or nothing worth'. One onlooker watched with astonishment the Hollanders 'demolish and deface the buildings [and] transplant the nutmeg trees, plucking them up by the roots and carrying them into their owne ilands of Neira and of Poloway [Ai] ... and at last finde a meanes to dispeople the iland and to leave it so as the English might make no use of it'.

The Dutchman who brought this news to England had been dismissed from the Dutch Company and was determined to have his revenge. He offered to pursue the King's claim for damages in return for a small fee and, to this end, was despatched to Holland to work in tandem with England's ambassador. The men were armed with reams of evidence about Dutch brutality, including a lengthy report investigating 'the barbarous behaviour of the Governor of Banda in burning and torturing the inhabitants, robbing them of gold, silver, jewels, and goods and destroying the nutmeg trees and other spices'. They also had documents listing the 150 Englishmen who had been murdered over the past two decades and a further list of 800 who had been sold into slavery.

The ensuing negotiations fill page after page of East India Company records — a litany of complaints, grievances and hard bargaining. The English team were given considerable flexibility when it came to discussing reparations but the bottom line was that Run should be replanted with nutmeg trees and restored to England. In addition, the directors demanded a one-off payment of £200,000 for losses suffered, both human and financial. This sum dropped steadily over the months that followed but still the Dutch refused to pay a single guilder.

By unhappy coincidence it was during these long years of negotiations that the Banda Islands entered their most productive period, producing hitherto undreamed of quantities of nutmeg and mace. In the five years between 1633 and 1638, for which records are still extant, the combined weight of nutmeg and mace exported to Holland exceeded four million pounds. That, of course, was only the official quantity. Many Dutch settlers on the islands were amassing private fortunes by clandestinely selling nutmeg to native merchants and traders. Although this practice was strictly prohibited by the Dutch authorities, the ragged coastline of the Banda Islands proved impossible to police and the settlers had few difficulties in finding buyers for their spice.

The success of the nutmeg plantations was due, in no small part, to Coen s strategy of ridding the islands of their native inhabitants and replacing them with Dutchmen. Before leaving the East Indies, he had announced that the Dutch Company was inviting applications for grants of land in the Banda archipelago. In return for defence against foreign attack and slaves to work the plantations, applicants had to agree to settle permanently and produce spices only for the company. Many 'free burghers' living in Batavia - men who had completed their contracts but remained in the East — proved only too willing to take up Coen's offer and applications were soon flooding in. The Banda Islands were parcelled into small estates, sixty-eight men were chosen to farm them, and the surviving Bandanese were compelled to teach them how to cultivate the nutmeg tree.

Success and riches went to the heads of most settlers who, having procured the necessary slaves to work their land, sank into a life of dissolute drunkenness. Coen himself complained that most of the settlers were 'wholly unsuitable for the planting of colonies [and] some are worse than animals'. In this he was correct: they were generally lazy and unruly and needed harsh measures to keep them in check. A journal kept by one Company employee records that in the space of one five-year period he witnessed the following punishments: two persons burned alive, one broken on the wheel, nine hanged, nine decapitated, three garrotted, and one 'arquebussed' - a punishment which entailed being shot to pieces by the matchlock arquebus gun favoured by the Dutch.

The Dutch grasp over the Banda archipelago was now so complete that the English directors began to despair of ever recovering Run, especially when the outbreak of the English Civil War put paid to any immediate hopes of despatching a fleet to the East. 'Wee are fearfull how far wee shall be able to performe in this troublesome tymes,' they wrote, 'when all trade and commerce in this kingdome is fallen to the ground through our owne unhappie divisions at home.' Intermittent fighting, a breakdown of com­munications, heavy taxation and increased risks at sea caused a complete loss of trade and the directors bemoaned that 'as the badnesse of trade and scarsity of monyes are here, so is all Europe in little better condition, but in a turmoyle.'

By the winter of 1656 the East India Company was on its knees. For more than four decades its merchants had struggled to compete with the Dutch, despatching increasingly decrepit ships to the Spice Islands and clinging to the last threads of their trade. Now, even that had come to nothing: the grand fleets that had once sailed majestically down the Thames were little more than a distant memory. The Deptford shipyard had been sold, the warehouses lay empty and the employees were on the breadline, only drawing money on the rare occasions when a ship limped back from the Indies.

Overseas the Company's remaining assets were of little worth. The factors still living in Bantam had almost ceased trading and their sole success during this grim period — the acquisition of a modest cargo of pepper — was immediately scuppered when the Dutch captured the ship and gleefully towed her to Batavia. On India's north-west coastline the trading post at Surat had, for a while, reaped considerable profits for the Company. But it had been hit hard by pirates and its fortunes were dealt an even harsher blow when the great famine of 1630 wiped out the town's population. 'The land was allmost voyde of inhabitants,' wrote one of the factors living in Surat, 'the most part fledd, the rest dedd.' His vivid account of the crisis left the London directors in no doubt that it would be many years before their Surat trade would recover. 'Noe less lamentable was it to see the poor people scrapeing the dunghills for food, yea in the very excrement of beastes ... our noses were never free of the stinck of corpses [for] they dragg them out by the heels stark naked of all ages and sexes, till they are out of the gates, and there they are left so that the way is half barred up.' Surat had become a ghost town and when the factors at last strayed out of their compound 'we hardly could see any living persons where heretofore was thousands ... women were seen to roast their children [and] men travelling in the waie were laid hold of to be eaten.'