Vermeer's Hat (8 page)
Authors: Timothy Brook
V
ERMEER PAINTED
Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window
(see plate 3) around the same time he painted
Officer and Laughing Girl
. We see the same upstairs room, the same table and chair, the same woman wearing even the same dress, again his wife Catharina
Bolnes, or so I believe. Although the action in the two paintings is different, both narrate much the same story: the story
of courtship between a man and a woman. The story is overt in
Officer and Laughing Girl
, where we see courting in action. In
Young Woman Reading a Letter
, on the other hand, we see only the woman. The man has a presence in the picture, but only in absentia: the letter the woman
is reading. He is away, possibly half a world away. She reads by the window for the light, but the window is not just ajar
this time. It is wide open. The man is out there somewhere, able to speak to her only through letters. His physical absence
induces Vermeer to construct a different mood. The brilliance of light conversation has been replaced by an internalized tension,
as the young woman concentrates on words that we, the viewers, are not allowed to read.
If the two paintings share space and theme, they differ in the objects they display.
Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window
is uncluttered, but there are more objects in the painting, and they are doing more of the work of creating visual activity.
To balance the busyness of these objects, Vermeer has left the wall empty. Empty but far from blank, this is surely one of
the most richly textured empty walls in Western art. X-ray analysis reveals that Vermeer originally had hung a cupid painting
on that wall (he used it later in
Lady Standing at the Virginals
) to let the reader know that she is reading a love letter, but he later decided against such obvious symbolic hints and painted
it out. To lend a sense of depth and volume to the room, he has used the conventional technique of hanging curtains, one draped
over the open window, the other pulled to one side in the foreground as though drawn back to reveal the painting (it was common
practice to hang curtains across pictures to protect them from light and other damage). The table is covered, this time with
a richly colored Turkish carpet—such carpets were too valuable to throw on floors, as we do today—which has been bunched to
one side to lend vitality to the scene. And there, askew on the carpet in the middle of the table, is an object that, like
the officer’s hat, points toward the wider world into which perhaps her lover or husband has gone: a china dish under a heap
of fruit.
Our eyes go first to the young woman, but the dish would have competed for the attention of Vermeer’s contemporaries. Dishes
like this were a delight to behold, but they were still uncommon and expensive enough that not everyone could buy one. Go
back a decade or two and Chinese dishes rarely make appearances in Dutch paintings—but go forward a decade or two and they
are everywhere. The decade of the 1650s is just the moment when Chinese porcelains were taking their place in Dutch art as
in Dutch life. In fact, these dishes became part of the emergence of a newly popular painting genre, still lifes, which seventeenth-century
Dutch artists turned into an art form. The artist selected objects of a similar type (fruit) or plausibly sharing in a common
theme (decay, the sign of vanity) and arranged them on a table in a visually pleasing way. A large Chinese dish was just the
sort of thing that could serve to unify smaller objects, like fruits, and jumble them together in a dynamic heap. The challenge
of the still life was to make the scene so real that it would fool the eye into believing that this was not a picture—and
the clever artist might paint a fly into the scene, as though the fly too had been fooled. Creating trompe l’oeil reality
was just the challenge that Vermeer played with throughout his painter’s life.
The dish of fruit on the table in front of Catharina is there to delight the eye, but Vermeer is using the still life of tumbled
fruit to convey the tumble of emotions in her mind as she reads the letter from her lover far away—perhaps as far away as
the Dutch East Indies—and struggles to control her thoughts. Her posture and manner suggest a person of calm, but even she
cannot hold her thoughts steady. So too the fruit topples out of the dish before her. It is all arranging and playacting,
of course. The lover is fictional, the sheet of paper the model holds may well have no words written on it, and the carpet
and dish and curtain have all been artfully positioned. But the world is real, and that is what we are in pursuit of. This
dish, appropriately for a picture painted in the town that created delftware, will be the door through which we head out of
Vermeer’s studio and down a corridor of trade routes leading from Delft to China.
SIXTEEN DEGREES BELOW THE EQUATOR and two hundred kilometers from the coast of Africa, a volcanic island breaks the surface
of an otherwise empty South Atlantic. The British East India Company incorporated St. Helena into the British Empire in the
eighteenth century. They built Jamestown at what had been known as Church Bay (now Jamestown Bay) on the leeward side of the
island. The island’s main claim to fame lies in being the place to which the British banished Napoleon after defeating him
at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815—the closing scene in the long drama that led to Britain’s ascendancy as the leading world
power in the nineteenth century.
Before the English occupied St. Helena, the island served as a way station for ships of any nation making the long journey
from Asia back to Europe. Lying directly in the path of the southeast trade winds carrying ships northward from the Cape of
Good Hope, it was a place of refuge where vessels and crews could recover from the storms and diseases that dogged marine
travel; a haven for rest, repair, and the taking on of fresh water before the final leg home. Modern shipping has no need
of such islands and now passes St. Helena by, leaving it, in its oceanic remoteness, for none but tourists to visit.
The only ship in Church Bay at midmorning of the first day of June in 1613 was an English ship, a small East India Company
vessel called the
Pearle
. The
Pearle
had arrived in Church Bay two weeks earlier as part of a convoy of six ships coming back from Asia to London. There was one
other English ship in the convoy, the
Solomon
, but the other four sailed for the Dutch East India Company. Even though the Dutch and the English were often at war in the
seventeenth century, the captains on both sides were content to put aside their differences and sail together for protection
against their real competitors, the Spanish and Portuguese. The six ships passed two weeks at St. Helena resting and refitting
for the final leg of the journey back to Europe. But when the convoy departed at dawn on first of June, they left the
Pearle
behind. Half the
Pearle
’s crew of fifty-two had been on the sick list when the ship arrived at St. Helena, and most were as yet too weak to work.
The
Pearle
’s water casks were still being filled and loaded that morning. Captain John Tatton had no choice but to delay departure until
the following morning and hope to catch up with the rest of the fleet.
Tatton and his crew were busy preparing the
Pearle
after the others departed when later that morning two great Portuguese ships came into sight around the southern point of
the bay. These were carracks, the great armed transport ships that the Portuguese built to ferry merchandise across the oceans.
They had made their maiden voyage to Goa, Portugal’s little colony on the west coast of India, and were on their way back
to Lisbon with a great cargo of pepper. Tatton understood that the
Pearle
was no match for these two great vessels, the largest wooden ships Europeans ever made. The better part of valor was to scurry
out of range of their guns, so he hoisted his sails and fled. The hasty exit meant abandoning his water casks and the sick
half of his crew on the island. But he was not cutting and running. Tatton had another plan. He went off in hot pursuit of
the rest of the Anglo-Dutch convoy, hoping to convince the Dutch admiral, Jan Derickzson Lam, to turn the fleet around and
return to capture the two carracks in Church Bay.
The
Pearle
caught up to Lam’s flagship, the
Wapen van Amsterdam
, past nightfall. Lam “was very glad and made signs to his Fleet to follow,” Tatton afterward reported. Not all the Dutch
ships heeded his order to turn around, however. The
Bantam
and the
Witte Leeuw
(
White Lion
) turned about and came alongside, but the
Vlissingen
failed to acknowledge the signal, as did the other English ship, the
Solomon
. Lam was undeterred. Four against two might not be as overpowering as six against two, but his fleet had the advantage of
surprise.
After a day and a half of hard tacking against the wind, the Anglo-Dutch quartet arrived back at St. Helena. Lam and Tatton
were right to bank on surprise. Jeronymo de Almeida, the admiral of the Portuguese fleet, must have seen the
Pearle
flee but had then put the English ship out of his mind and made no preparations for its return.
Nossa Senhora da Nazaré
(
Our Lady of Nazareth
), his flagship, lay at anchor with its full length exposed to the open ocean.
Nossa Senhora do Monte da Carmo
(
Our Lady of Mount Carmel
) was anchored alongside it, effectively boxed in by the bigger vessel.
Lam attacked before the Portuguese could reposition their carracks for a better defense. He launched the
Bantam
and the
White Lion
toward the bow and stern of the
Nazareth
at angles that made it almost impossible for the Portuguese to fire its cannon at them, then sailed the
Wapen
straight toward it. Tatton later wrote that Lam should have tried to negotiate a Portuguese surrender, but it seems that Lam
would settle for nothing less than capture. “Too covetous” was Tatton’s judgment.
The
Bantam
’s attack on the
Nazareth
’s bow “much cooled the Portugals courage,” according to Tatton. Then the captain of the
White Lion
, Roeloff Sijmonz Blom, fired on the stern of the
Nazareth
, puncturing it above the waterline. Blom brought the
White Lion
in close enough to cut the carrack’s anchor cables, hoping to force it to drift to shore. The crew of the
Carmel
, caught powerless behind the
Nazareth
, was nonetheless able to pass a replacement cable to the other ship and resecure it. Preparing to board the flagship, Blom
moved the
White Lion
alongside the
Nazareth
and the
Carmel
. As he did so, his starboard gunners exchanged fire with the
Carmel
.
Opinions are divided as to what exactly happened next. Some said that the Portuguese scored a direct hit on the
White Lion
’s powder magazine. Others insisted that a faulty gun on the
White Lion
’s lower deck exploded. Whatever the cause, the explosion blew off the back end of the ship. The
White Lion
sank to the bottom in moments. Tatton believed that Blom, his crew of forty-nine, along with two English passengers on board
died in the blast or were drowned in the bay, though some in fact were rescued and taken back to Lisbon for repatriation.
Having lost an entire ship along with crew and cargo, Admiral Lam could not afford to gamble anything more. He ordered the
other ships to withdraw. Tatton was able to take the
Pearle
in close enough to the shore north of the bay to pick up eleven of his abandoned crew, who had gathered there in the hope
of rescue, before retreating. The misfortunes of this voyage would be played out only at the very end. As the
Bantam
passed through the channel at Texel on its way into the Zuider Zee (now the IJsselmeer), Amsterdam’s inland sea, it went
aground and broke apart. It was atrocious luck for Lam. The number of VOC ships that sank in this channel can be counted on
the fingers of one hand, but this was one of the fingers. (The Portuguese fleet fared only slightly better. Admiral Almeida
was able to get both ships back to Lisbon, but the
Carmel
had been so badly damaged that it had to be removed from service.)
When the
White Lion
sank in thirty-three meters of water, a large cargo went with it to the bottom. The ship’s manifest survives in a Dutch archive,
from which it is possible to find out exactly what was lost. The manifest lists 15,000 bags of pepper,
1
312 kilograms of cloves, 77 kilograms of nutmeg, plus 1,317 diamonds having a combined weight of 480.5 carats. The manifest
was drawn up on the docks at Bantam, the VOC trading port at the westernmost tip of Java. Given the VOC mania for accuracy
of detail and thoroughness of accounting, there is no reason to suspect that anything got into the cargo hold that wasn’t
first recorded in the company ledgers. This is why the marine archaeologists who went down to excavate the wreck of the
White Lion
in 1976 were surprised by what they found. They knew that the spices would long ago have rotted and the diamonds been lost
in the harbor’s shifting sands. They did not expect to find cargo. They were intent instead on recovering the ship’s metalwork,
especially its cannon. And yet there in the mud under the vessel’s shattered hull were strewn thousands of pieces of the very
thing that, in 1613, was synonymous with China itself—china.