Journal, Memorials and Letters of Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge: Security, Diplomacy and Commerce in 17th-century Southeast Asia

Students of early modern Southeast Asia are already indebted to Peter Borschberg in respect of two richly documented works and to NUS Press for producing them with skill and devotion. They are The Singapore and Melaka Straits: Violence, Security and Diplomacy in the 17^th Century (Singapore, 2010) and Hugo Grotius, the Portuguese and Free Trade in the East Indies (Singapore, 2011). The first focused on Singapore and the Straits at the turn of the century. The second added to the recent studies of Grotius and his connection with the Indies that also include, most notably, M. J. van Ittersum’s Profit and Principle (Leiden: Brill, 2006). The two topics are central to the history of the period and, in the case of Grotius, to a longer history, that of the development of international law.

The new volume covers some of the same issues and involves some of the same dramatis personae. But its explicit focus is on the early years of the VOC (the Dutch East India Company) and in particular on Admiral Matelieff, who headed the second voyage it sent out. Grotius comes on to the stage again, of course, since he made use of documents Matelieff sent home, and received letters from him at the time of the conferences with the English in 1613 and 1615.

Borschberg’s book consists of an introduction, in which he puts Matelieff’s voyage in context and outlines his subsequent role as a Director of the VOC with unique experience of the Indies. This is followed by a selection of documents, most of them translated from the Dutch for the first time. Each of the documents, which include graphic narrative as well as reports and advice, is separately introduced by the editor. They are also footnoted by him but, to make them easier to read, most of the supporting and explicatory material is placed in the glossary that follows, dealing with non-geographic terms, currencies, measures, and commodities, so thorough that it is worth consulting or reading as a stand-alone reference source for historians of Southeast Asia, expert or otherwise. A list of place names and geographic terms—likely also to be a widely useful reference source—a bibliography and an index round out the volume.

It is completed, however, by the copious black-and-white and coloured illustrations that, as with the previous volumes, afford additional enrichment. There are portraits, maps, title pages, ‘bird’s eye views’, sketches, and etchings. NUS Press and its printers have done Borschberg and his sources proud.

The documents are divided into two groups. The first includes journals of the voyage, memorials, and letters. The second includes supplementary documents, such as instructions from the Directors and treaties with the rulers of Aceh, Ternate, and Sambas.

Matelieff, as Borschberg shows, was a visionary, but a down-to-earth one. His vision was indeed substantially realized in the policies the VOC subsequently pursued. He argued that the Company should cease to organize its operations voyage by voyage and appoint a Governor-general with overall local authority. ‘Everything … should be under a government without being subject to the admirals’ ambitions any more’ (p. 278). The VOC should, he also urged, select what he called a ‘rendezvous’, for which he preferred over Melaka—which he had failed to take from the Portuguese—a position nearer the Sunda Straits, such as Jeyakarta [Jakarta]; the Company should ‘keep the main factory there’ (p. 281). Both these proposals were, of course, adopted in subsequent years, though Matelieff was impatient with the Directors for not acting more promptly.

Matelieff himself began to carry out his third recommendation: to pursue a monopoly of the fine spices. In 1607, in pursuit of the clove trade, he signed the VOC’s first exclusive treaty, offering security in return for monopoly, with Ternate. The Company’s hold on nutmeg began in 1609 after Matelieff had gone home. Pepper was now so widely distributed that...