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1. Origins of the City of Batavia
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
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1 Origins ofthe Cityof Batavia POPULATION WHEN THE DUTCH NAVIGATOR Comelis Houtman first put in at Jacatra on 13 November 1596, the town was a minor port lying across the mouth of the Ciliwung River on the northwest coast of Java. Its inhabitants, principally members of the Sundanese ethnic group and numbering several thousands, lived within a bamboo enclosure; there was a small settlement of Chinese traders and arrack brewers outside the wall on the north side. Jacatra was a vassal of Bantam, which was at the time a major port in the pepper trade and one of the sultanates defying claims by the Central Javanese kingdom of Mataram to suzerainty over the entire island. The Dutch were the first Europeans to stop at Jacatra. Portuguese traders never settled there. The town's chief harbor master spoke Portuguese, however , which illustrates how that tongue had established itself as a major language of international commerce in the markets of Asia. From 1596 to 1610 Dutch ships called at Jacatra for provisions. In the latter year a contract was signed between the town's ruler, Wijaya Krama, and Jacques I'Hennite, agent for the Netherlands East Indies Company, giving the Dutch land in the Chinese quarter and pennission to build a stone house within a walled compound. 1 The first years at Jacatra passed peaceably enough. Towards the end of 1618, however, agents of England's East India Trading Company were also assigned land and privileges in Jacatra, and Jan Pieterszoon Coen, then second-incommand for the Dutch Company in Asia, determined to establish supremacy over the town. He would make it a rendezvous for shipping, the chief entrepOt for Dutch warehouses, and the seat of Dutch government in the East. The Company's directors had been urging this course since their first appointment of a governor-general nine years earlier. Late in 1618, then, Coen withdrew to the Moluccas to assemble a fleet that was to destroy the Jacatrans and Bantammers and their English allies. On 23 December 1618, while the Dutch compound at Jacatra was under siege from the groups leagued against the VOC, a roll call had been taken by senior merchant Pieter van den Broeck of all residing within its walls. Already 3 THE SOCIAL WORLD OF BATAVIA the Dutch were showing characteristics that were to be enduring features of their settlements in Asia and for which they had no precedent in their native city-states in the Netherlands: they were owners of slaves and took concubines from among the local women. Thus those answering to the roll call, some 350 in all, were found to include both free and slave Asians, as well as European merchants, settlers, women, and soldiers.2 These were the key elements of colonial society throughout Company times. They will be reviewed here in the categories originally assigned to them within the Company's system of governance. Principal among the inhabitants of the beleaguered Jacatra settlement and in all the Dutch settlements in Asia was the group known as merchants. They derived their authority from the central board of directors of the VOC, whose policy decisions, taken at their twice-yearly meetings in Holland, were binding on all their representatives in the East. The six commercial chambers which composed the East Indies Company outfitted their own ships and recruited their own personnel for service in Asia. But appointment of the chief of these, the governor-general, his second-in-command the director-general of trade, and the councillors of the Indies-who together made up the supreme government of the Dutch in Asia-was made by the directors. The governor-general and his Council were required to report annually to the Company's directors and to submit for their approval all appointments, regulations , and edicts enacted locally. In the East, however, in the VOC centuries, when the interval between reporting decisions taken and receipt ofconfirmation or disallowance could be as long as thirty months, the governor-general and his colleagues on the Council held near-absolute powers over the inhabitants of Dutch settlements. In the first years of settlement the most senior officials were sent out directly from Holland to conduct the Company's business. But soon they were chosen also from among men with years of experience in Asia who were promoted locally, although such promotion always required confirmation from the Europe-based directors. Just below this group of senior officials were the merchants in three descending ranks: senior merchant, merchant, and...