Slave Revolts, Enslavement, and (Private) Voc Networks in Early Modern Asia

Chapter 9 Chasing the Delfland: Slave Revolts, Enslavement, and (Private) voc Networks in Early Modern Asia

Matthias van Rossum

A strange scene, in the dead of night. Two slaves lower a writing drawer from a window at the stern of a ship. There is chaos on deck. The sound of breaking bottles and people shouting in different languages. Guns are fired and sailors are jumping into the water.1 The chaos was caused by a revolt. On 14 February 1743, a group of almost forty men and women took control of the deck of the Dutch East India Company fluyt Delfland, anchored just a few miles from the Banda islands. The account of Constable Christiaan Rits from Danzig, almost one year after the event, still shows something of the impact of this sudden uprising.2 Sleeping in the weapons store, he was woken up when “three of the crew walked into the room, very upset”.3 “What is going on”, Rits asked. The sailors replied “that the Buginese are calling amok, and that they had wounded the three of them”. Rits ordered his helpers “to get the half-pikes in order to arm themselves”.4 Everything developed quickly from there. Someone shouted “for gun powder from the window of the cabin”. A rope was lowered. Rits attached “four powder horns” to the rope. As the rope was brought up by the “people who were in the cabin”, he witnessed a “sailor falling in the water from the back of the poop deck, crying for help to save him from drowning”.5 Asking him “what can be done”, the sailor replied, nothing, “the ship has already been [taken] over and the crew has fled to the forecastle”.6 The crew started abandoning the ship. The ship’s tender was brought be- low the stern. It was in the middle of this chaos that bookkeeper Livinius Maarschalk ordered two slaves to lower his little drawer into the vessel.7 The boat must have been quite full, manned with 54 crew members and three

1 Nationaal Archief, The Hague [hereafter, NA], Archief van de voc 1.04.02 [hereafter, voc], inventory number 9408, case number 24. 2 NA, voc, 9408, 24. Declaration by Rits et al. (6 January 1744). 3 Weapons store: de constabelskamer. 4 Constabelsmaats are the helpers (boys) of the constabel. 5 Poop deck: campagnedek; here de kampanje. 6 Forecastle: de bak. 7 NA, voc, 9408, 24. Rits et al. (6 January 1744) and Maarschalk et al. (20 and 22 January 1744).

202 Rossum slaves. They did not wait long to flee the chaotic scene. Leaving the Delfland behind, the group steered their vessel to the islands, only arriving at the island of Pulau Ay at eleven o’clock in the morning.8 This chapter investigates the remarkable story of the enslaved and the crew on board the voc ship Delfland, early in the year of 1743. The case of the Delfland offers an interesting view of shipboard life under the Dutch East India Company, while at the same time providing an insight into the world of slavery and the (private) slave trade in Southeast Asia, problematizing some of the dominant characterizations of Asian slavery. Historiography tends to concep- tualize slavery in Asia as shaped by its urban and debt-related characteristics.9 Slavery in Asia has even been labelled as a relatively “mild” or “benign” form of slavery.10 An important argument that resonates within this perspective is the lack of evidence for slave resistance, in terms of the small number of known examples of slave revolts and marooning.11 Cases such as the revolt on the Delfland undermine this narrative, and point to the need to study the history of slavery, trade, and resistance from a different perspective. The case of the Delfland recounts several aspects of voc history, placing the history of enslavement and slave trade right at the heart of a voc universe re- volving around private trade networks, illegal undertakings, and troublesome shipboard relations. First, as was already noted by the highest voc authorities in Batavia at the time of the case, no slaves were supposed to be on board.12

8 NA, voc, 9408, 24. Napper et al. (26 June 1743) and letter Pieter Reael to Batavia (29 April 1743). 9 A. Reid and J. Brewster, eds., Slavery, bondage and dependency in Southeast Asia (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983); P. Boomgaard, “Human capital, slavery and low rates of economic and population growth in Indonesia, 1600–1910”, Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 24, no. 2 (2003); G. Campbell, “Slavery in the Indian Ocean world”, in The Routledge History of Slavery, eds. G. Heuman and T. Burnard (New York: Routledge, 2011). For a more elaborate discussion, see M. van Rossum, Kleurrijke tragiek. De geschiedenis van slavernij in Azië onder de voc (Hilversum: Verloren, 2015); Linda Mbeki and Matthias van Rossum, “Private slave trade in the Dutch Indian Ocean world: A study into the networks and backgrounds of the slavers and the enslaved in South Asia and South Africa”, Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 38, no. 1 (2017). 10 E. Jones, Wives, slaves and concubines. A history of the female underclass in Dutch Asia (Il- linois: Northern Illinois Press, 2010), 144. 11 M. Vink, “‘The world’s oldest trade’: Dutch slavery and slave trade in the Indian Ocean”, Journal of World History 14, no. 2 (2003); R. Ross, Cape of torments: Slavery and resistance in South Africa (London: Routledge, 1983), 3–5. Kate Ekama points to the dominant char- acter of this line of argument in literature in her chapter “Just deserters: Runaway slaves from the voc cape, c. 1700–1800”, in Desertion in the early modern world, eds. M. van Ros- sum and Jeannette Kamp (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 12 This was noted in Van Rossum, Kleurrijke tragiek.