Batavia (4 page)

There was little to keep him there. The island held no treasures, no peoples, nothing of particular interest – and he still had to get to the VOC’s key port in the East Indies, Bantam. Famously, however, before leaving, Hartog took a pewter plate and nailed it to a post, a plate on which was inscribed in Dutch the words:

After leaving the island, Hartog kept sailing north and was amazed to suddenly come across a massive, previously undiscovered coastline extending for
hundreds
of miles! It looked, with no exaggeration, to be the most inhospitable coast in the world, and Hartog and his crew shuddered to think what would happen to a ship’s company that foundered upon it, even in the unlikely case that they survived the initial impact. For this was not a coast of bays, harbours, rivers or beaches, with fields gently sloping down to the water’s edge. Rather, it was an interminable coastline of sheer cliff faces, dust storms and vistas of fly-blown, arid land that was clearly of no use to anyone.

Prima facie, there were no treasures to be had here, no cities worth plundering, no land worth conquering. From time to time, Hartog’s men could see the odd plume of smoke, indicating the likelihood of human habitation on these shores, but those plumes were so sparse it was equally obvious that such savages as there might be there – and savages they would surely be – would be too few in number to bother pursuing with missionary zeal. It was clearly a godforsaken land, inhabited by a godforsaken people, and they were welcome to it.

The main thing for Hartog was to chart it, and as he swept up what would one day be known as the Western Australian coast he did exactly that, to the latitude of around 22 degrees south, at which point the coast veered to the north-east and he veered nor’ by nor’-west to get to the Dutch East Indies, arriving first at Macassar in Celebes in December 1616.

Only a few months later, in April 1617, another ambitious employee of the VOC arrived in Bantam. Francisco Pelsaert was a quietly spoken 20-year-old, with long, black, silken hair and a carefully coiffed goatee beard. He hailed from Antwerp in the Southern Netherlands and had joined the Company three years earlier as an assistant trader, on a salary of 24 guilders a month – close to the lowest rung on the VOC ladder of officialdom.

Nevertheless, the fact that he had a keen intelligence helped, as did being the brother-in-law of none other than Hendrick Brouwer, who was now one of the VOC’s most respected figures. Perhaps the most important thing, however, was that young Pelsaert had courage enough to head to the East Indies in the first place, where the mortality rate for Europeans was devastating, and he advanced remarkably quickly. This was despite the fact that he was a Catholic in a Company generally populated by Protestants. Even
that
could be forgiven if it was clear that an employee had the potential to make the Company a lot of money, and that described Pelsaert perfectly.

Having arrived in Bantam on the
Wapen van Zeeland
, Pelsaert was pleased that he did not have to stay there for long. The port was near the western tip of the island of Sumatra and was a cesspit of disease, most of which came from the malarial mosquitos and women of easy virtue.

Pelsaert, mercifully, was able to escape to healthier moral and physical climes by moving from island to island, including the Spice Islands themselves, which lay 1000 miles to the east, and was able to learn the spice trade from the ground up – demonstrating a capacity with both numbers and people. He became familiar with how the whole Dutch operation worked in the region – how a constant supply of cheap spices from the Spice Islands flowed into the port of Bantam, from where they were sent on to Amsterdam.

By the time Pelsaert left the East Indies a few years later, in December 1620, he was on 60 guilders a month, nearly three times his salary when he had arrived. It was a good indication of how rapidly he had advanced and an even better indication of how much he had learned. From there, Pelsaert was promoted to the position of assistant merchant and sent initially to the port of Surat, which lay some 20 miles up the Tapti River on the north-west coast of India, where the VOC carried out much of its spice trade. He was not long there, however, before being promoted to upper-merchant and sent 650 miles north-east to the town of Agra, to the court of the most powerful man in all India, Mogul Prince Jahangir.

In short order, Pelsaert secured the position of senior merchant, which saw him in charge of the entire VOC operation with the Mogul courts, devoting himself to the lucrative spice, indigo and cloth trades. In this delightful city of Agra – all palaces, forts, temples and markets built on the banks of the River Yamuna – Pelsaert truly came into his own.

In the meantime, as Pelsaert had been making his way in the Company, many more Dutch seafarers had followed in the wake of Dirk Hartog, and trade to the East Indies continued apace. On 8 June 1619, the famed Dutch seafaring Captain-General Frederick de Houtman had left
Tafelbaai
, Table Bay, in the VOC ship the
Dordrecht
in convoy with another VOC ship, the
Amsterdam
, following Brouwer’s route. Frederick was, of course, a veteran of such voyages, and of life in the Dutch East Indies.

By mid-July, he and his fleet had arrived at a point they estimated to be sufficiently east to take advantage of the southern trade winds that here abounded and so turned nor’-east by north to reach the East Indies. But then, on 19 July, just two hours before dusk, at the latitude of 32 degrees 20 minutes south . . . ‘Land ho!’ There was too little time to get a closer look, so de Houtman steered a little to the west for safety’s sake, and with dawn on the morrow they again altered course and came in closer to the coast. What they saw was a vast coastline – not far from where the city of Fremantle now lies – running roughly north to south and continuing as far as they could see in both directions.

Was this the same coast reported by Dirk Hartog in 1616, of which all VOC captains were now aware? The same coast, albeit far to the south of what Hartog had seen? It would appear so, and yet, as Hartog had also reported, there was no obvious place to land, as the enormous breakers kept pounding the seemingly impregnable coast. Compounding the problem of landing was the unremitting gale, which kept pushing the two ships towards the potentially fatal shore, even breaking the anchor cables of both the
Dordrecht
and the
Amsterdam
in a passage of particularly mighty gusts on 23 July 1619.

The ships carefully continued to the north, charting the coastline all the way. On 28 July, the land to their starboard fell out of sight as their course towards the East Indies took them back into open sea.

The next day, at noon, they found themselves to be at the latitude of 29 degrees 32 minutes south, and continued north by east. These were uncharted waters, and de Houtman was proceeding carefully, which was as well. For, late that very afternoon, just three hours before dusk, the crow’s nest shouted a first sighting of what appeared to be crashing surf upon dangerous reefs and rocky islets lying dead ahead. De Houtman was able to bring his ship up into the wind, drop anchor in relatively safe, if shallow, waters and investigate the reefs and islet. As he subsequently wrote in a long report to the
Heeren XVII
in Amsterdam, ‘
we unexpectedly came upon a low-lying coast
, a level, broken country with reefs all round it’.

For a short time, the Dutchmen upon the two ships were able to explore the area, to establish, as before, that the islets contained nothing of any value and that they appeared incapable of supporting human life. No, the true significance of the place lay not in any value they possessed but in the terrible danger they represented to any ships that would follow them to these parts. De Houtman shuddered to think what would happen to a ship that chanced across those reefs unseen in the night, and with that in mind he carefully marked down their position on his map. He recorded the exact latitude and as close to the longitude as he could estimate so others did not founder upon it as he so very nearly had. He noted in his report:

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As to a name, he called them – for modesty did
not
forbid –
Frederick de Houtman’s Abrolhos
. If the source of the first words was obvious, the origin of the last word was less so – most particularly because de Houtman was Dutch. Yet, as legend would have it, he used a contraction of a Portuguese phrase he had perhaps learned years earlier: ‘
abri vossos olhos
’, or ‘keep your eyes open’.

It was an added warning
– a literary lighthouse – to all mariners that these islands were extremely dangerous. So devastating were the potential consequences of hitting them, with so many Dutch ships obviously at risk, that after de Houtman arrived in Java on 3 September 1619 the information was immediately given to Dutch cartographers to be disseminated in their ever-expanding, ever-more-detailed maps.

De Houtman, meanwhile, had arrived in the Dutch East Indies at a singularly important, and brutal, time in its history, a time that would forever be associated with the merciless but unfailingly efficient nature of one man: Jan Pieterszoon Coen.

The newly installed Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies was tall, slim and ramrod erect. He boasted strong features – deep-set eyes, a prominent nose and cruelly thin lips – and was that newest of breeds, a ‘Company man’, right down to the marrow of his Company bones. Born and raised in Hoorn in the northern quarter of the Dutch Republic, he had begun his service with the VOC just five years after its foundation and risen thereafter, in no small part because of his sheer ruthlessness in executing both his duties and, all too frequently, any person or peoples who got in the Company’s way. On his appointment, Coen set out his views in an official report to the
Heeren XVII
:

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Coen was also of the view that the Dutch must have a total monopoly on trade with the natives and that any native or community found to be trading with another nation, such as Portugal or England, ‘should be punished with death, and that, should the community offend again in like manner, we should be
at liberty to destroy their town
and build a fort there’.