The Prince of Batavia

How Hamlet sailed to Java,
& Batavia got its name.

Jayakerta became Batavia became Jakarta.
The city was known as Batavia for more than 300 years.

The DRAGON

ON a sailing ship off Sierra Leone, the crew of Captain Keeling’s English East India Company vessel—The Dragon—performed Hamlet. Let’s imagine they did it right there on the open deck, the coast of Africa in high relief. Amateurs all, they performed for each other: polymathic sailors, merchants & fortune-seekers, soldiers, slaves, & scoundrels pressed from port-side taverns around the globe. The captain’s log mentions that the performance was simultaneously translated to Portuguese. It was 1607.

That’s only 6 or 7 years after Hamlet was written.

Keeling’s Dragon was bound for Java & the Spice Islands. Specifically, the Dragon was headed for Banten, about 70 km west of present day Jakarta, where the Brits held trading posts & the Sultan held court. There was no Jakarta then, only the vassal state of Jayakerta, part of the Banten Sultanate. It was the Dutch who’d set up shop in Jayakerta (Jakarta), & only just barely. Jayakerta means Great Victory, referring to the Sultanate’s soundly routing the Portuguese, who also wanted a trading post there. For spice traders, this was a brilliant harbor—offering direct access to markets on half the archipelago—& everyone knew it.

Back then, Europeans weren’t remotely the massive, imperial forces that I tend to imagine—that’s more 19th century colonialism. In the 1600s, the Sultans of Java were far more concerned with the maneuverings of other sultans, & Europeans represented a set of in-fighting forces who, like the Chinese, could be allied with or bullied off, depending. For hundreds of years, the Dutch, like the English, were just another shady mob of foreigners looking to do business. They didn’t conquer or convert; they brokered deals.


The Dutch

While sailors wept for Ophelia on the Dragon, the Dutch secured the Sultan’s permission—beating out the British—to set up two bamboo warehouses in Jayakerta. Their goal--everyone's goal--was monopoly. Records indicate a surrounding settlement of only a few thousand souls. Native garrisons cum township, left over from the Great Victory. Was it like Trader Joe’s setting up a Quonset hut on a village beach, everyone praying the nutmeg ship wouldn’t sink?

According to their own census—counting themselves to pass the time in the long hours of siege to come—the Dutch themselves numbered 350. 350 people & two bamboo warehouses. The Sultan was powerful. Tropical diseases ubiquitous. Jungles for land, pirates at sea. On the northern isles: headhunters.

Such is the abiding nature of business. I wonder if they knew what they were doing. Would anyone?


Building Elsinore

Well, this wouldn’t do at all. The English wanted warehouses at Jayakerta too. When the Sultan told them to piss off, the Brits went to the Prince of Jayakerta. The impertinent Prince said yes, & the Dutch got very nervous. Immediately, the Dutch began to fortify their warehouses, rebuilding them out of stone.

Consider the implications of this tactic through the fine lens of changing names: whereas the bamboo structures were called godown, warehouse, in the mercantile pidgin of Chinese-Malay, the fortified stone buildings were now called kasteel, which means Castle in Dutch; they were closing ranks & preparing for a fight. Inadvertently, they were also setting the stage.

Once the Prince got word of these fortifications, he got nervous, too. He sealed his alliance with the Brits & solicited their aid in driving out the Dutch. The Brits stormed the harbor with a mighty fleet of 3 or 4 ships & drove out the Dutch East India Company—comprised of 1 or 2 ships, at which point the Dutch had their 2 warehouses at their backs & that was about it. An important man named Jan Pieterszoon Coen led the naval retreat: the Dutch ships fled for help, as quick as the wind. A long, long time passed.


The Siege

In December of 1618, the tiny English force laid siege to the Dutch castle-warehouses. There’s no mention of a hot battle or casualties, only a hostile pressure that essentially trapped 350 Dutch East India Company employees in their warehouse district. The English were hoping to smoke them out. Then again, when all you have at hand are two castles full of goodies from the Spice Islands, it seems fair to assume that there was, at the very least, a lot of smoking out going on already.

By the end of January, the Dutch tried to surrender. They were prevented from surrendering, however, by the timely arrival of the furious Sultan, who’d gotten wind of the Prince making deals on the side. The Sultan’s forces drove the Prince out of Jayakerta, & into hiding. They swept the puny English out entirely. And then, they laid siege to the Dutch themselves.

Poor Dutch. For the next 4 months, they held out in their castle compounds, where, by all reports, they slowly began to administrate & debauch themselves to death.

So who are these Dutch East Indies guys going stir crazy under warehouse arrest? One thing we know: only about half of them are actually from Holland. Of the 350: 80 were soldiers, 70 were slaves (Asians, Black Portuguese from India, Sri Lankans…freed Portuguese-Asian slaves would become a significant population in Batavia of the near future), the others were Germans, English, Flemmings, Walloons, & who knows what else. For the sake of allegory, let’s suppose that there were also Danes & Swedes. Like most ship crews traveling at the time, it was polyglot, multi-ethnic, driven by profit, & hungry for women.


How to Pass the Time Under Siege

Records of this stand-off indicate that people began to go a little loopy after a while. One diarist wrote that they split their time between drinking & prayer. They took a census of themselves. Maybe they inventoried their pepper.

Another thing they did to alleviate their boredom under siege was to get married. The Company had not sent them with any women, deeming this port an unseemly destination for respectable girls**. Though the word “married,” in this case, should be interpreted in the broadest possible & perhaps ominous sense, there was a reverend amongst them who obliged his penned flock in performing the sudden increase of ceremonies that wedded European men to native women. They notarized the documents. Cabin-fevered clerks filed them.

Then, on March 12, 1619, they gathered together & decided in a magnificent flight of fancy, in a state of pique, in a pitched irony, in a final act of desperation, as a cosmic joke, in complete earnest, for Holland, for sheer defiance, for the sake of their growing crop of unborn children: to name their community.

They decided to name it BATAVIA, after an early Germanic tribe from the Netherlands. And what better time, really, to proclaim a new name for one’s “town”, what with the Sultan at the door, lunacy at the rein, & nowhere to hide? I wish I knew if anyone thought it was funny at the time.

And THEN, about 3 weeks later, on Easter Monday, April 1, 1619, the Batavians performed a play. Like the Java-bound crew of Keeling’s Dragon 12 years earlier, they performed it for themselves: sailors, merchants & fortune-seekers, soldiers, slaves, & scoundrels from around the globe. The title comes to us in Dutch, though we don’t know what language they performed it in. Portuguese was the closest common tongue then, & Malay the idiom of local commerce. It was titled: “Van den Conninck van Denemarcken en van den Conninck Sweden”—Concerning the King of Denmark & the King of Sweden.

Hamlet, brought in by a Dragon before the ink had fully dried, performed in translation by half-cocked East Indiamen, in Batavia-not-yet-Batavia, inside a Dutch bunker under siege. A murderous Sultan-king at the door; a broken prince in exile! And this is where E is peeking into the story: this discovery—the anecdote of this performance—will be the prologue of his book.


Batavia

On May 30th, after almost six months of siege, the Dutch ships that had been driven out of the harbor by the British finally returned—quick as the wind. This time, Jan Pieterszoon Coen entered with 17 ships. He flattened the Sultan’s forces, razed Jayakerta & burned it to the ground. At which point, the little Dutch compound was suddenly the center of everything. What was everything?
Batavia, of course.

The city did not change its name to Jakarta until the 1940s

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**Mr. J. Pieterszoon Coen—who also argued for using Dutch orphans to create an inexpensive base of permanent settlers—objected to the no-women policy, writing to the Company directors:

“Everyone knows that the male sex cannot survive without women. And yet it seems that Your Excellencies have planted a colony without wishing to. To make up for this lack we have looked for funds and have had to buy many women at high prices. Just as you, Sirs, would only send us the scum of the land, so people here will sell us none but scum either…Should we expect to get good [citizens] from rejects, as you apparently expect? Shall we have to die out to the last man? We therefore request, Your Excellencies, that if you cannot get honest married folk, then send us young girls, and we shall hope that things will go better than our experience with older women to date.”


From: The Social World of Batavia: European & Eurasian in Dutch Asia, by Jean Gelman Taylor