Vermeer's Hat (26 page)
Authors: Timothy Brook
The upshot of these circumstances was that close to ten tons of anticipated silver failed to arrive in Manila. Trade was at
a standstill. The fine balance collapsed at the village of Calamba southeast of Manila on the night of 19 November 1639, when
several hundred Chinese farmers burst into the house of Luis Arias de Mora. These farmers had volunteered to come into the
jungle to build rice paddies for the Spanish in exchange for tax breaks, but conditions were deplorable. Resources were nonexistent,
and the promised tax holiday was never honored. When disease swept through the Chinese community, the farmers turned on Mora.
Mora, the former Chinese Protector of Manila, was now the hated administrator of this agricultural colony. He had used his
position to squeeze the Chinese for all he could get. He was aware of the discontent, but had no reason to suspect anything
that night, and was sound asleep when the mob arrived. The farmers dragged him outside, denounced his oppression, and put
him to death. The insurgents then set off on a march to Manila to appeal for clemency and demand redress for their sufferings.
This small outbreak of violence might have been contained, had the Chinese delegation that rushed down from the Parián to
mediate been able to gain full cooperation from the Spaniards sent to suppress the uprising. During the parley, however, a
junior Spanish officer attacked one wing of the insurgents, possibly without realizing that a cease-fire was in place. The
Chinese fought back, and then the rest of the Spanish forces threw themselves into battle. The war that was being averted
was on again. As soon as word of the insurgency spread, Chinese all over Luzon rose up and joined the rebels. The insurgents
gathered across the Pasig River across from Manila and prepared for their assault. Chinese living in the Parián strove to
maintain their neutrality, but on 2 December they joined the insurgents.
The governor responded by ordering all Chinese inside Manila and the nearby port town of Cavite put to death. The warden of
Cavite, Alonso Garcia Romero, chose to implement the order stealthily. He invited all Chinese in Cavite to close their houses
and gather in the enclave of royal buildings for their own protection. He also invited priests from all the religious orders
to come and hear confessions from the Christian Chinese and baptize the non-Christians. He then announced to the Chinese who
had obediently assembled that they were to be taken in groups of ten to greater safety within the walls of Manila. In fact
they were being taken out for decapitation. Some thirty such groups of ten had been processed when someone noticed a guard
cutting off the purse of one of the departing Chinese. Suddenly the warden’s behavior looked like a trick to take their money
(no one quite yet realized it was a trick to take their lives), and an uproar ensued. The Chinese turned on their guards,
who fled but closed and barricaded the only exit from the outside. A squad of arquebusiers surrounded the building, entered,
and shot every Chinese inside. A Spanish chronicler, who assumed that the Chinese were plotting to rise up and murder all
the Spaniards in Cavite, declared the Cavite massacre to have been “a great mercy of God.” He estimated the death toll at
thirteen hundred. Only twenty-three Chinese managed to escape the massacre.
The Chinese insurgents laid siege to Manila, but the city was well fortified and the Spanish had no difficulty holding out.
After three weeks, they took the offensive, launching an attack across the Pasig River. The Chinese had to fall back, and
eventually were routed from the area. As they passed through one burned village, Spanish soldiers found a singed but otherwise
unharmed statue of Christ in the ruins of a church. They presented it to Corcuera, who declared the statue’s salvation from
fire a miracle, and raised it at the head of his forces: God was on their side. A few days later, a Chinese Christian convert
in a village across the Pasig River exhumed a statue he had buried of Emperor Guan, the god of war and the patron saint of
merchants. The convert should have burned the statue when he converted, but decided instead to bury it behind his house against
future uncertainties. When he was exhumed, according to what Spanish investigators later learned, Emperor Guan promised to
aid his followers in battle. It was a promise his followers could not bring to fruition. As long as the Chinese were outgunned
by their adversaries and orphaned by their ruler, the god of commerce could not prevail over the god of empire.
The Spanish eventually cornered the remnants of the Chinese insurgency and asked a Jesuit priest to negotiate their surrender.
The insurgents, insisting that “they did no harm where they were not harmed,” agreed to end hostilities on the condition
that the Spaniards allow them to go down to the coast and return to China. Corcuera refused. His condition for accepting their
surrender was just the opposite: that they
not
leave the Philippines. The governor understood that Manila’s wealth and power depended on the Chinese being there. He needed
them to return to Manila and resume the old arrangements if the colony were to survive. Not only did the Chinese lack leverage,
but they too could appreciate the value of returning to the way things were. On 24 February 1640, eight thousand combatants
laid down their arms. They were marched back to Manila in a victory parade before the city walls. The Spanish cavalry led
the parade followed by their indigenous allies, who were followed in turn by the defeated Chinese. At the end of the march
rode Governor Corcuera, and directly in front of him, held aloft on a pole, the fire-blackened statue of Christ that had been
recovered from the burned church.
SILVER DID NOT CAUSE THE massacre of thousands of Chinese in the Philippines. Yet these events would not have occurred had
the bridge of precious metal flowing across the Pacific not collapsed. The rupture inflamed anxieties on both sides, allowing
one small incident to snowball into a massive conflict. The violence that wealth is capable of provoking is invisible in
Woman Holding a Balance
. Preparing to weigh her coins, Catharina Bolnes is untroubled by the frenzy of acquisition and conflict that silver was fueling
in the wider world.
Not everyone who weighed silver in the seventeenth century could be so dispassionate. Fulgencio Orozco was already fifty years
old when he arrived in Potosí in 1610 looking to make money. Although a nobleman, he was too poor to repay a debt of 800 pesos
and unable to assemble a dowry for his daughter, for which he needed another 2,000 pesos. Orozco’s social status gave him
an entrée with the elite families of the town, one of whom was able to recommend him for a position as a foreman in an ore
refinery. It was the sort of job that an American-born Creole rather than a Spanish-born gentleman would take, but Orozco
was desperate and willing to work any job that would earn him silver. Despite his best efforts, the job paid him barely enough
to cover his own costs. His impatience to earn more drove him to leave the refinery in search of quicker methods. After struggling
for twenty months in Potosí and finding himself still no closer to earning his daughter’s dowry, Orozco became deranged and
suicidal. He ended up in the royal hospital, damning Christ for abandoning him in his time of need and ranting at the devil
for not keeping up his end of a bargain that Orozco had thought he had struck to get rich.
Orozco’s rants drew a crowd of spectators, who decided he was possessed and sent for an Augustinian priest, Antonio de la
Calancha, to exorcise the devil inside him. Orozco refused his help, and became so angry at some of the zealous bystanders
imploring the devil to leave his body that he grabbed the priest’s crucifix and smacked one of them on the forehead. The police
arrived to disperse the crowd, which only added to the mayhem. Brother Antonio performed an exorcism without any apparent
effect, and then performed a second. This only drove Orozco to greater frenzy. He kept trying to get the priest to realize
that the devil was not inside him, but standing by the head of his bed. There was nothing in him to exorcise.
Brother Antonio had reached his wits’ end. He turned on his patient and demanded, “Why is someone like you, a nobleman, raving
like a heretic or a Jew?”
“You wish to know why I abhor Christ?” Orozco shot back. “It is because He gives riches to worthless men and common folk,
while He afflicts me, a gentleman whose obligations are heavy, with poverty. Since I came to this Peru to earn money for my
daughter’s dowry, He has repeatedly taken away everything I have earned, forcing me to witness with my own eyes others earning
money where I have lost it. Is there anyone in this city who has worked as hard as I and yet acquired nothing, and when I
am witness to the fact that with less effort than my own, in less time and more easily, many have succeeded in laying hands
on thousands?”
Orozco’s despair was not just in finding himself poor, but in discovering that effort, honest intentions, and gentlemanly
status had nothing to do with success in a commercial economy. Money did not end up in the hands of those who deserved it,
and class was no protection. For Orozco, Potosí had become what it had been for the Andean Natives:
puna
, uninhabitable. Calancha tried to shift the argument by observing sympathetically that, whereas good people might become
rich because God wanted them to, most people in Potosí got rich through theft, usury, and fraud. God might reward the virtuous
with riches, but riches did not necessarily go only to those blessed by God. Potosinos in particular, being “zealous in the
pursuit of riches, and somewhat given to venery,” rarely were among the blessed. This might seem like an impolitic admission
from a priest who preached a doctrine of divine reward for the good and punishment for the evil, but that theology was always
hedged by the conviction that God worked in mysterious ways, that it was not for humans to judge such matters, and that all
such credits and debits would be weighed and sorted at the Last Judgment.
At this point, Calancha abandoned theological reasoning and offered Orozco a deal. Suppose the people assembled around his
hospital bed—and this group now included eight to ten priests of the Inquisition, who were keenly interested in the rumor
that Orozco was spouting heresy—raised the 2,800 pesos to cover his needs? Would he agree to spurn the devil and seek God’s
forgiveness? Orozco fell quiet but stayed noncommittal. He needed to see the money. To demonstrate their good faith, four
or five priests went off to draw the silver from funds controlled by the Inquisition and have it weighed at the assaying office
in the exact amount Orozco required. They even checked how much it would cost to have the silver delivered back to Spain before
they returned to Orozco’s bedside.
The offer worked. When the sacks of silver were delivered to his bedside that evening, the madman repented, praising God and
confessing his sins to the priest. Exhausted, he lost the power of speech later in the evening and died in the small hours
of the morning. At a cost of 2,800 pesos plus courier charges, it was an expensive conversion, but the Church (which, like
every other institution in Potosí, accumulated a substantial share of silver) expressed itself satisfied with the transaction.
Charity had worked its magic. A debt had been paid, a dowry secured, and a soul saved. And the agent through which all this
was achieved—the agent as well of the man’s despair and death—was the silver dug out of Potosí, the very same substance waiting
for Catharina to calmly assess its value.
T
HE CARD PLAYERS
(see plate 7) is easily recognized as a midcentury Dutch painting, but one is unlikely to mistake it for a Vermeer. The familiar
elements are present: windows on the left, diagonally laid marble squares, a line of Delft tiles where the wall meets the
floor, a Turkish carpet pushed aside on a table where two people converse, a delftware jug imitating Chinese blue-and-white,
a wineglass held up, a map of the province of Holland on the wall. Add the officer in red military coat and beaver hat flirting
with the young woman, and it seems like Vermeer’s
Officer and Laughing Girl
all over again. But it isn’t. The painting has all the elements of a Vermeer, yet it lacks the precision of draftsmanship
and the care in composition that can turn a generic scene into a dynamic painting.
The artist is Hendrik van der Burch, a painter of good reputation who worked in the same circles as Johannes Vermeer and possibly
to much the same level of commercial success. The two men were rough contemporaries on the Delft art scene. Born near Delft
five years before Vermeer, he moved to the city when he was fifteen. He studied painting there and joined the guild of St.
Luke when he was twenty-one—exactly the same age at which Vermeer joined five years later. No documents prove the two artists
knew each other, but it is impossible that they did
not
, since Van der Burch’s sister or stepsister married the prominent Pieter de Hooch, whose paintings Vermeer certainly knew.
It is harder to prove a link between
The Card Players
and
Officer and Laughing Girl
. The courting officer was a common subject. Vermeer likely executed his painting first by a year or two, though by then Van
der Burch was living in Leiden or Amsterdam, so he may never have seen
Officer and Laughing Girl
.
Despite similarities of subject matter and style, no Vermeer interior prepares us for the figure who stands dead center in
Van der Burch’s picture. Vermeer painted no children, he painted no servant boys, and he painted no Africans. Van der Burch
gives us all three in a ten-year-old African boy in fancy doublet and earrings, doing his mistress’s bidding. Not only that,
but he is looking straight at the artist—and at us. The man and woman are busily engaged in their game with each other, just
as the little girl to one side is engaged in hers with the lapdog. The African boy alone is unengaged in these games, and
looks at us almost knowingly. It is an odd pose for someone pouring a glass of wine. He should be looking at the wineglass.
Even more odd is the position of the glass. Close inspection shows that he is holding the glass with his left hand. But from
a superficial glance at the painting, the viewer could think that the woman is holding it between her thumb and forefinger—which
was the polite way to hold stemware in the seventeenth century. The only indication that she isn’t holding the glass is the
card in her hand, though you have to look closely to see it.
To me, the placement of the wineglass directly over her hand suggests that Van der Burch originally intended that she should
hold it for her page boy to fill. That would make the principal act of exchange in the painting between the white mistress
and her black servant, a favorite pairing in seventeenth-century paintings of upper-class women. But Van der Burch changed
his mind, deciding that the principal act of exchange should be between the woman and her suitor. The wineglass she receives
from the boy is no longer the center of the painting; the playing card she gives to her suitor takes its place. At that point,
it was too late for him to remove the boy. So there the young African stands pouring wine from a jug, but with the glass full
and no wine actually flowing from the tipping jug. No wonder the boy is able to take his eyes from the task and look at us.
As we look at him. We would never know from Vermeer’s oeuvre that there were Africans in Delft. Van der Burch shows that there
were. Africans had been coming in small numbers to Europe since the fifteenth century, but their numbers were increasing noticeably
in the Low Countries in the seventeenth century. Africans arrived as sailors, laborers, and servants in the port cities of
Antwerp and Amsterdam, but most of all as slaves. The laws of those cities permitted slaves to petition the city authorities
for manumission from slavery once they had entered their jurisdictions. Few, it seems, did. The legal distinction may not
anyway have made much difference to the real life of Africans in Flanders or the Netherlands, who had little alternative to
employment outside domestic service and were as good as bound to the master or mistress who acquired them, even if the law
judged them to be legally free.
Van der Burch was not the exception among Dutch painters in including a black servant in his painting. Many Dutch artists
painted Africans, usually within domestic settings, indicating that these slaves were not kept apart from the white families
that owned them. In fact, those who owned black child servants (and they are usually boys) wanted to show off what they possessed.
It was not unlike having an artist put a favorite Chinese vase into the painting you commissioned. It signaled your wealth,
your good bourgeois taste, and your knowledge that these were meaningful signs in the social world in which you thrived. If
you were a woman and your black slave was a boy, his copresence in a painting also highlighted your color, your complexion,
your gender, and your superiority.
The boy in
The Card Players
is the door within this painting that opens onto a wider world of travel, movement, servitude, and dislocation. This wider
world was seeping into everyday life in the Low Countries, bringing real people from real places far away. As for this particular
boy, we know nothing beyond the fact of his presence in this picture. If he wasn’t born in Delft, he was probably one of the
unlucky ones who found himself caught in the net of trade and capture that moved people as readily as it moved things. Still,
to be alive was to be one of the lucky ones. So many drawn into the whirlpool of global movement never made it out alive.
Even those who went by choice rather than by force often were not spared. The toll of the seventeenth century fell on both.
To reckon the human costs of the restless movement that scattered people across the seventeenth-century globe, we will follow
five journeys that dumped people in places and situations far from where they were born: three men in Natal on the southeast
coast of Africa, seventy-two men and boys on an island off the coast of Java, a Dutchman on the Korean island of Cheju, an
Italian on the coast of Fujian, and two homeward-bound Dutch sailors on the island of Madagascar. Over their journeys hangs
the figure of Van der Burch’s black boy, the one who made it safely to Delft but never made it home. We shall end with a journey
story dear to seventeenth-century Christians, the journey of the magi, to think about why Vermeer hung a painting of this
subject in his house.
THE LAST TIME ANYONE SAW them, the three men watched their shipmates cross the broad river before them and recede into the
African distance heading, they hoped, in the direction of Mozambique. The huge fat man on the litter, which his bearers had
set under a makeshift canopy, was a Portuguese. Attending him were a Chinese and an African. The names of the African and
the Chinese are forgotten. Slaves of empires rarely get their names entered in the public record unless they commit crimes
that the annals of colonial justice consider worth preserving. But we do know the name of the Portuguese reclining on the
litter, for he was their owner: Sebastian Lobo da Silveira.
Lobo—his name means “wolf”—had the reputation of being the most obese man in Macao in the 1640s. In February 1647, he was
sent back to Portugal to face trial. He had arrived in Macao nine years earlier to take up the lucrative position of captain
general, a post that gave him command of all maritime trade between Macao and Japan. Lobo paid handsomely back in Lisbon for
a monopoly that he expected in turn to pay him handsomely in Macao. Portugal had a monopoly on the trade between China and
Japan, since the governments of both countries were generally hostile to direct trade but permitted the Portuguese to act
as middlemen. A single return run between the Portuguese colony of Macao and the Japanese port of Nagasaki, carrying Chinese
silks in one direction and Japanese silver in the other, could double your capital, so long as the Dutch did not capture your
ship. But Lobo’s timing was bad. He had the misfortune to buy his post in 1638, just before Japan banished Portuguese traders
from Japan for failing to observe the ban against missionaries entering the country. A Portuguese captain who tested the ban
in 1639 was expelled. Another who tried in 1640 was executed along with most of his crew. Thenceforth only the Dutch, who
happily agreed not to smuggle Catholic proselytizers into Japan, were permitted to trade in Nagasaki. There were no more runs
from Macao, and no more easy profits for the Wolf.
Blocked from trading with Japan, Lobo turned to other schemes, such as obliging wealthy Macanese merchants who needed his
good opinion to loan him large sums he had no intention of paying back. Adding insult to injury, he enjoyed flaunting his
wealth and snubbing public convention. He went about Macao in a ridiculous “Moorish costume of rich gold and sky blue silk,
with a red cap on his head.” His rapacity put him in conflict with the Senate, a body consisting of the leading merchants
of the town. That conflict eventually led to street battles in which the antagonists actually brought artillery into play
against each other. When the crown administrator tried to get the situation in hand at the end of the summer of 1642, Lobo
had him kidnapped, locked in a private dungeon for eight months, and finally beaten to death.
The disorder that erupted in the streets of Macao here at the far southern edge of China was nothing compared to the chaos
engulfing the cities of north China at that moment, where rebel bands were fighting government armies and, at least as often,
each other, in the struggle to win supremacy over the faltering Ming regime. In 1644, one of these rebel leaders, a postal
guard made redundant by the collapse of central funding, mounted a daring raid on Beijing and took the capital. Finding himself
abandoned by those who had sworn to uphold his reign, Emperor Chongzhen, the one who tried to get Portuguese gunners to Beijing
despite the objections of some of his courtiers, hanged himself from a tree at the north end of the Forbidden City. China
was not to be taken so easily by one of its own, however. Within six weeks, a joint Sino-Manchu army swooped down on Beijing
from the Great Wall and drove the rebel leader from his tenuously held prize. The Manchus then staged a coup by putting a
young prince of their own on the throne and declaring him to be the first emperor of the Qing dynasty. The Ming dynasty was
now officially over.
That same year, a new governor arrived in Macao from the Portuguese colony of Goa. Charges had been filed against Lobo in
Lisbon, and the new governor’s job was to indict him. It would take two and half years before the governor was at last able
to bundle the Wolf onto a carrack bound for Europe. The ship left Macao in February 1647. With Lobo went his devoted brother,
his Chinese bond servant, and an African slave loaned to him for the duration of the voyage. Their ship never made it around
the Cape of Good Hope. It went aground somewhere short of the cape, in the region now known as Natal. Those who made it ashore
reckoned that their best chance of survival lay in trekking north toward Mozambique, but it was not a solution that suited
Lobo’s constitution. The merchant was so grossly overweight and physically ruined by his extravagant lifestyle that he could
walk only a few steps at a time. His brother had a hammock made from fishing lines and convinced the cabin boys to carry him
in this device for a handsome daily wage.
Within a day, the porters tired of their employment and decided to leave the Wolf in the company of several nuns who could
go no farther. Lobo’s brother stepped in and promised rich rewards to sixteen sailors to take over the work, along with the
threat that they might be held responsible for failing to fulfill the king’s command to return Lobo to Lisbon. So off they
went, leaving the nuns behind. After a week of heavy carrying and dwindling food supplies, no price could buy cooperation.
On the south bank of a wide river they could not possibly lug him across, the sailors put up a small cloth awning and left
Lobo there. His Chinese bond servant and African slave had no choice but to remain with him, their prospects no better than
his. Lobo’s brother tarried with them for a few hours, then set off after the others. He made it back to Portugal. The three
men he abandoned were never heard of again.
Africans were seen in seventeenth-century East Asia, but Chinese were a rarer sight outside of that region. Ming law forbade
Chinese from leaving the emperor’s realm and imposed capital punishment on anyone who left without authorization, should he
return. But for over two centuries, many had been going to Southeast Asia to trade and work, and had managed to slip back
into China without dire consequences. Most officials looked the other way so long as the maritime traders who came and went
were not exporting military materials such as gunpowder. Servitude to foreigners was another matter.