The Dutch East India Company in Asia, 1595–1811." a Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies

Rossum, Matthias van. "The Dutch East India Company in Asia, 1595–1811." A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies. Ed. Clare Anderson. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 157–182. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 25 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350000704.ch-006>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 25 September 2021, 22:37 UTC. Copyright © Clare Anderson and Contributors 2018. You may share this work for non- commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 6 The Dutch East India Company in Asia, 1595–1811 Matthias van Rossum Introduction One morning in the middle of December 1728, around eight o’clock, the convict Pieter Ewouts from Middelburg was ordered ‘with several other convicts’ to walk from the convict barracks in the artisans’ quarter of the Dutch colonial city of Batavia to the artillery. The convicts walked through the city chained in pairs. Pieter was also in chains, which ‘linked him to another European’. Only two months earlier, he had been a young sailor on the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC) ship Coning Carel. He was brought before the Raad van Justitie (Court of Justice) of Batavia after he had stabbed a fellow crew member during a drunken fight in the city. The Court of Justice sentenced him ‘to be fiercely beaten and consequently put in chains in order to be banished for the period of three consequent years of labour at the Company’s public works without payment’. After the convicts arrived at the artillery that morning, they were commanded ‘to unload heavy planks from a vessel lying behind the artillery and to carry them in’. It was during this work that Pieter’s chains had broken loose. He would later claim that ‘one of the heavy planks had fallen on the chain’, causing ‘one of the shackles to bend’ and break. Pieter and his fellow convict did not hesitate. ‘Together they left the artillery and swam across the river’, in the words of Pieter’s later testimony before the Court of Justice of Batavia. They ‘came on land again near theHoenderpassersbrug ’ (chicken market bridge), where Pieter and ‘the European left each other without ever seeing each other again’. Pieter declared he had ‘ever since this time sought to flee from here [Batavia] and in the meantime he had been here and there during the day, while at night he had slept at the Company’s equipage wharf in the vessels that laid on the ridge to be worked on, until yesterday when he was caught’. Captured as a runaway convict, Pieter Ewouts was again brought before the Court of Justice. The prosecutor pointed out that – freeing himself from his chains – he had violated the earlier sentence of the court and demanded that he serve an extra two years of convict labour. Perhaps because Pieter had not been found guilty of crimes such as theft or violence during his escape, the 158 A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies Court of Justice decided to convict him ‘to the period of one year in addition to his previous banishment’.1 This chapter studies the practices of convict labour and transportation in the Asian empire of the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The VOC was created in 1602 from several smaller Dutch trading initiatives that had started to sail to Asia from 1595 onwards.2 Soon after its foundation, the Company would become a key player in trade and imperial politics throughout maritime Asia. The Estates General of the Dutch Republic gave the Company monopoly rights for trade on as well as the trade within Asia, and it granted it sovereignty rights to act on behalf of the Republic in relation to foreign powers and its settlements and subjects. The construction of the VOC was an explicit part of the strategy to shift the theatre of the independence war between the Dutch Republic and the Iberian empires to Asia. As a Company-State, the VOC always combined mercantile, military and governmental functions. In the Batavian Revolution, the VOC was nationalized (1795) and formally dissolved (1798), but its trade charter and overseas governmental structures would last much longer. At the height of its influence, roughly from 1640 to 1750, the Company combined extensive territorial control in regions such as Java, the Banda islands, the Moluccas, Ceylon and Southern Africa (the Cape of Good Hope) with trade and politics in regions where it exerted less influence. This led to a variety of other arrangements, ranging from the possession of forts or settlements (Malacca) to factories and trading houses, as in Canton (China), Deshima (Japan) and Surat (western India). Until deep into the eighteenth century, the VOC operated the largest merchant fleet throughout Asian waters.3 The study of penal practices of the VOC has been taken up mainly from the perspective of ‘banishment’ or ‘exile’ and has focused strongly on the Cape of Good Hope, especially Robben Island.4 It has also shown the extensive interaction and mobility between Robben Island and other punitive sites at the Cape.5 Case studies for other places are limited, and have been restricted to Batavia and Galle (Ceylon).6 Further research has explored the history of penal connections between Batavia and the Cape, drawing attention especially to the banishment of princes and local royalties.7 It is important to note that in all these studies, ‘banishment’ has almost exclusively been understood as a form of ‘exile’. This explains why, for example, Kerry Ward only distinguishes between banishment ‘to the fatherland’, ‘to a specific place within the Company’s realm’ and ‘to banishment outside’ the VOCs realm, without explicitly referring to the possibility that punishments labelled as banishment were executed locally with less degrees of mobility.8 This explains why historians have seen some islands, like that of Edam (Batavia), more ‘as a prison and holding site for prisoners and exiles waiting for the next departing fleet’, rather than as a convict island that had its own specific function as a site of punishment (especially the rope factory).9 Although studies acknowledge the existence of other circuits of penal transportation, the focus on elite convicts and the notion of ‘exile’ has remained very persistent.10 This chapter will show that patterns of transportation and the employment of convicts were more complex than has been recognized. It will improve our understanding of VOC penal practices by shifting the perspective back to the relation between local, regional and intercontinental penal practices, and the links between The Dutch East India Company in Asia, 1595–1811 159 (judicial) punishment, convict labour and banishment. It provides an overview of the penal system of the VOC by exploring these different circuits of convict placement and the variety of convict labour sites. It reveals the importance of penal hard labour and the particular meaning of ‘banishment’ in the context of the VOC and its local, regional and intercontinental penal circuits and legal systems. The penal system of the VOC was much more complex than the practice of exiling rebellious kings and nobles to Ceylon or Robben Island. Convicts from different parts of the Indonesian archipelago, India and other parts of Asia were placed in sites throughout the VOC empire. These could be urban sites, such as the gemeene werken (public works) in the middle of Company settlements, or isolated islands, for example Edam. The circuits of convict labour and transportation were closely linked to the circuits of justice created by the Company. In contrast to the later colonial state period (from 1816 onwards), the number of convicts was not large – perhaps totalling a few hundred or thousand convict labourers at any one time. The function of convict labour in this VOC- period, however, should be viewed especially through its strategic role with respect to upholding various (coercive) labour regimes. The punishment of hard labour was used to discipline contract, corvée and slave labourers. This chapter points toward the existence of local and regional circuits of convict labour and (dis)placement that were much larger than intercontinental convict flows. The penal system did bring about important connections between the different ends of the VOC empire, most notably Batavia and its islands Onrust and Edam, the region of Ceylon (and the Coromandel Coast), the Cape of Good Hope and the Banda Islands. Most connections or contacts, however, came into existence through the placement of convicts who had been transported over long distances amidst much larger groups of local and regional convicts. Furthermore, it is important to note that the penal system of the VOC was never explicitly directed outwards – convicts were not only exiled from the centres to the fringes of empire (from Batavia to Robben Island, for example). The VOC system of convict labour and transportation was always multidirectional – with similar numbers of convicts being sent from Ceylon and the Cape to Batavia – and directed inwards as much as outwards – with perhaps the most important convict islands located at the heart of the empire, in the bay of Batavia (Map 6.1).11 Banishment and convict labour in the Dutch Asian Empire In order to understand penal practices under the VOC, it is crucial to note that convict labour, banishment and exile were not distinct punishments. In rare cases Company courts would inflict the punishment of banishment outside all forts, cities and places under the jurisdiction of the Company. Or, they would rule that a Company subject would be sent back to the patria (Dutch Republic) – often after having served another punishment.

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