THE DUTCH IN INDIA.
A free nation, which is its own master, is born to
command the ocean. It cannot secure the dominion of the
sea without seizing upon the land, which belongs to the
first possessor; that is, to him who is able to drive
out the ancient inhabitants. They are to be enslaved by
force or fraud, and exterminated in order to get their
possessions.
_Raynal._
We come now to the conduct of a Protestant people towards the natives
of their colonies; and happy would it be if we came with this change
to a change in their policy and behaviour. But the Dutch, though
zealous Protestants at home, were zealous Catholics abroad in cruelty
and injustice. Styling themselves a reformed people, there was no
reformation in their treatment of Indians or Caffres. They, as well
as other Protestant nations, cast off the outward forms and many of
the inward superstitions of the Roman church: but they were far, far
indeed from comprehending Christianity in its glorious greatness;
in the magnificence of its moral elevation; in the sublimity of its
objects; in the purity of its feeling, and the beautiful humanity of
its spirit. The temporal yoke of Rome was cast off, but the mental
yoke still lay heavy on their souls, and it required ages of bitter
experience to restore sufficiently their intellectual sensibility
to permit them even to feel it. Popery was dethroned in them, but
not destroyed. They recognized their rights as men, and the slavery
under which they had been held; but their vision was not enough
restored to allow them to recognize the rights of others, and to see
that to hold others in slavery, was only to take themselves out of
the condition of the victim, to put themselves into the more odious,
criminal, and eventually disastrous one of the tyrant. They were still
infinitely distant from the condition of freemen. They were free from
the immediate compulsion of their spiritual task-masters, but they
were not free from the iron which they had thrust into their very
souls,—from the corrupt morals, the perverted principles, the debased
tone of feeling and perception, which the Papal church had inflicted
on them. The wretched substitution of ceremonies, legends, and false
maxims, for the grand and regenerating doctrines of Christian truth,
which had existed for more than a thousand years, had generated a
spurious morality, which ages only could obliterate. It is a fallacy
to suppose that the renunciation of the Romish faith, carried with
it a renunciation of the habits of mind which it had created,—or
that those who called themselves reformers were thoroughly reformed,
and rebaptized with the purity and fulness of Christianity. Many
and glorious examples were given of zeal for the right, even unto
death; of the love of truth, which cast out all fear of flames and
scaffolds; of that devotion to the dictates of conscience that shrunk
from no sacrifice, however severe;—but even in the instance of the
noblest of those noble martyrs, it would be self-delusion for us to
suppose that they had sprung from the depth of darkness to perfect
light at one leap; that they rose instantaneously from gross ignorance
of Christian truths, to the perfection of knowledge; that they had
miraculously cast off at one effort all slavery of spirit, and the
dimness of intellectual vision, which were the work of ages. They had
regained the wish and the will to explore the regions of truth; they
had made some splendid advances, and shewn that they descried some of
the most prominent features of the genuine faith: but they were, the
best of them, but babes in Christ. To become full-grown men required
the natural lapse of time; and to expect them to start up into the full
standard of Christian stature, was to expect an impossibility. And if
the brightest and most intrepid, and most honest intellects were thus
circumstanced, what was the condition of the mass? That may be known
by calling to mind how readily Protestants fell into the spirit of
persecution, and into all the cruelties and outrages of their Popish
predecessors. Ages upon ages were required, to clear away the dusty
cobwebs of error, with which a spurious faith had involved them; and to
raise again the Christian world to the height of Christian knowledge.
We are yet far and very far from having escaped from the one, or risen
to the other. There are yet Christian truths, of the highest import to
humanity, that are treated as fables and fanatic dreams by the mass of
the Christian world; and we shall see as we proceed, that to this hour
the most sacred principles of Christianity are outraged; and the worst
atrocities of the worst ages of Rome are still perpetrated on millions
of millions of human beings, over whom we vaunt our civilization,
and to whom we present our religion as the spirit of heaven, and the
blessing of the earth.
When, therefore, we see the Dutch, ay, and the English, and the
Anglo-Americans, still professing truth and practising error; still
preaching mercy, and perpetrating the basest of cruelties; still
boasting of their philosophy and refinement, and enacting the savage;
still vapouring about liberty, with a whip in one hand and a chain in
the other; still holding the soundness of the law of conquest, and the
equal soundness of the commandment, Not to covet our neighbour’s goods;
the soundness of the belief that Negroes, Indians, and Hottentots,
are an inferior species, and the equal soundness of the declaration
that “God made of one blood all the nations of the earth;” still
declaring that LOVE, the love of our neighbour as of ourselves, is
the great distinction of Christians;—and yet persisting in slavery,
war, massacres, extermination of one race, and driving out of others
from their ancient and hereditary lands—we must bear in mind that we
behold only the melancholy result of ages of abandonment of genuine
Christianity for a base and accommodating forgery of its name,—and
the humiliating spectacle of an inconsistency in educated nations
unworthy of the wildest dwellers in the bush, entailed on us by the
active leaven of that very faith which we pride ourselves in having
renounced. We have, indeed, renounced mass and the confessional, and
the purchase of indulgences; but have tenaciously retained the mass of
our tyrannous propensities. We practise our crimes without confessing
them; we indulge our worst desires without even having the honesty to
pay for it; and the old, spurious morality, and political barbarism
of Rome, are as stanchly maintained by us as ever—while we claim to
look back on Popery with horror, and on our present condition as the
celestial light of the nineteenth century.
What a glorious thing it would have been, if when the Dutch and English
had appeared in America and the Indies, they had come there too as
Protestants and Reformed Christians! If they had protested against the
cruelties and aggressions of the popish Spaniards and Portuguese—if
they had reformed all their rapacious practices, and remedied their
abuses—if they had, indeed, shown that they were really gone back to
the genuine faith of Christ, and were come to seek honest benefit by
honest means; to exchange knowledge for wealth, and to make the Pagans
and the Mahomedans _feel_ that there was in Christianity a powder to
refine, to elevate, and to bless, as mighty as they professed. But
that day was not arrived, and has only partially arrived yet, and that
through the missions. For anything that could be discovered by their
practice, the Dutch and English might be the papists, and the Spaniards
and Portuguese the reformed. From their deeds the natives, wherever
they came, could only imagine their religion to be something especially
odious and mischievous.
The Dutch having thrown off the Spanish yoke at home, applied
themselves diligently to commerce; and they would have continued to
purchase from the Spaniards and Portuguese, the commodities of the
eastern and western worlds, to supply their customers therewith;—but
Philip II., smarting under the loss of the Netherlands, and being
master of both Spain and Portugal, commanded his subjects to hold no
dealings with his hated enemies. Passion and resentment are the worst
of counsellors, and Philip soon found it so in this instance. The
Dutch, denied Indian goods in Portugal, determined to seek them in
India itself. They had renounced papal as well as Spanish authority,
and had no scruples about interfering with the pope’s grant of the
east to the Portuguese. They soon, therefore, made their appearance
in the Indian seas, and found the Portuguese so thoroughly detested
there, that nothing was easier for them than to avenge past injuries
and prohibitions, by supplanting them. It was only in 1594 that Philip
issued his impolitic order that they should not be permitted to receive
goods from Portuguese ports,—and by 1602, under their admirals,
Houtman and Van Neck, they had visited Madagascar, the Maldives, and
the isles of Sunda; they had entered into alliance with the principal
sovereigns of Java; established factories in several of the Moluccas,
and brought home abundance of pepper, spices, and other articles.
Numerous trading companies were organized; and these all united by
the policy of the States-general into the one memorable one of the
East India Company, the model and original of all the numerous ones
that sprung up, and especially of the far greater one under the same
name, of England. The natives of India had now a similar spectacle
exhibited to their eyes, which South America had about the same
period—the Christian nations, boasting of their superior refinement
and of their heavenly religion, fighting like furies, and intriguing
like fiends one against another. But the Portuguese were now become
debauched and effeminate, and were unsupported by fresh reinforcements
from Europe; the Dutch were spurred on by all the ardour of united
revenge, ambition, and the love of gain. The time was now come when
the Portuguese were to expiate their perfidy, their robberies, and
their cruelties; and the prediction of one of the kings of Persia was
fulfilled, who, asking an ambassador just arrived at Goa, how many
governors his master had beheaded since the establishment of his power
in India, received for answer—“none at all.” “So much the worse,”
replied the monarch, “his authority cannot be of long duration in a
country where so many acts of outrage and barbarity are committed.”
The Dutch commenced their career in India with an air of moderation
that formed a politic contrast with the arrogance and pretension of the
Portuguese. They fought desperately with the Portuguese, but they kept
a shrewd eye all the time on mercantile opportunities. They sought to
win their way by duplicity, rather than by decisive daring. By these
means they gradually rooted their rivals out of their most important
stations in Java, the Moluccas, in Ceylon, on the Coromandel and
Malabar coasts. Their most lucrative posts were at Java, Bantam, and
the Moluccas. No sooner had they gained an ascendency than they assumed
a haughtiness of demeanor that even surpassed that of the Portuguese;
and in perfidy and cruelty, they became more than rivals. All
historians have remarked with astonishment the fearful metamorphosis
which the Dutch underwent in their colonies. At home they were
moderate, kindly, and liberal; abroad their rapacity, perfidy, and
infamous cruelty made them resemble devils rather than men. Whether
contending with their European rivals, or domineering over the natives,
they showed no mercy and no remorse. Their celebrated massacre of
the English in Amboyna has rung through all lands and languages, and
is become one of the familiar horrors of history. There is, in fact,
no narrative of tortures in the annals of the Inquisition, that can
surpass those which the Dutch practised on their English rivals on this
occasion. The English had five factories in the island of Amboyna, and
the Dutch determined to crush them. For this purpose they got up a
charge of conspiracy against the English—collected them from all their
stations into the town of Amboyna, and after forcing confessions of
guilt from them by the most unheard-of torture, put them to death. The
following specimen of the agonies which Protestants could inflict on
their fellow-protestants, may give an idea of what sort of increase of
religion the Reformation had brought these men.
“Then John Clark, who also came from Hitto, was fetched in, and
soon after was heard to roar out amain. They tortured him with fire
and water for two hours. The manner of his torture, as also that of
Johnson’s and Thompson’s, was as followeth:—
“They first hoisted him by the hands against a large door, and there
made him fast to two staples of iron, fixed on both sides at the top
of the door-posts, extending his arms as wide as they could stretch
them. When thus fastened, his feet, being two feet from the ground,
were extended in the same manner, and made fast to the bottom of the
door-trees on each side. Then they tied a cloth about the lower part
of his face and neck, so close that scarce any water could pass by.
That done, they poured water gently upon his head till the cloth was
full up to his mouth and nostrils, and somewhat higher, so that he
could not draw breath but he must swallow some, which being continually
poured in softly, forced all his inward parts to come out at his nose,
ears, and eyes, and often, as it were choking him, at length took away
his breath, and caused him to faint away. Then they took him down in
a hurry to vomit up the water, and when a little revived, tied him
up again, using him as before. In this manner they served him three
or four times, till his belly was as big as a tun, his cheeks like
bladders, his eyes strutting out beyond his forehead; yet all this
he bore without confessing anything, insomuch that the fiscal and
tormentors reviled him, saying he was a devil, and no man; or was
enchanted, that he could bear so much. Hereupon they cut off his hair
very short, supposing he had some witchcraft hidden therein. Now they
hoisted him up again, and burnt him with lighted candles under his
elbows and arm-pits, in the palms of his hands, and at the bottoms
of his feet, even till the fat dropped out on the candles. Then they
applied fresh ones; and under his arms they burnt so deep that his
inwards might be seen.”—_History of Voyages to the East and West
Indies._
And all this that they might rule sole kings over the delicious islands
of cloves and cinnamon, nutmegs and mace, camphor and coffee, areca
and betel, gold, pearls and precious stones; every one of them more
precious in the eyes of the thorough trader, whether he call himself
Christian or Infidel, than the blood of his brother, or the soul of
himself.
To secure the dominion of these, they compelled the princes of Ternate
and Tidore to consent to the rooting up of all the clove and nutmeg
trees in the islands not entirely under the jealous safeguard of
Dutch keeping. For this they utterly exterminated the inhabitants of
Banda, because they would not submit passively to their yoke. Their
lands were divided amongst the white people, who got slaves from
other islands to cultivate them. For this Malacca was besieged, its
territory ravaged, and its navigation interrupted by pirates; Negapatan
was twice attacked; Cochin was engaged in resisting the kings of
Calicut and Travancore; and Ceylon and Java have been made scenes of
perpetual disturbances. These notorious dissensions have been followed
by as odious oppressions, which have been practised at Japan, China,
Cambodia, Arracan, on the banks of the Ganges, at Achen, Coromandel,
Surat, in Persia, at Bassora, Mocha, and other places. For this they
encouraged and established in Celebes a system of kidnapping the
inhabitants for slaves which converted that island into a perfect hell.
Sir Stamford Raffles has given us a most appalling picture of this
system, and the miseries it produced, in an official document in his
History of Java. In this document it is stated that whole villages
were made slaves of; that there was scarcely a state or a family that
had not its assortment of these unhappy beings, who had been reduced
to this condition by the most cruel and insidious means. There are few
things in history more darkly horrible than this kidnapping system
of the Celebes. The Vehme Gerichte, or secret tribunals of Germany,
were nothing to the secret prisons of the Celebes. In Makásar, and
other places, these secret prisons existed; and such was the dreadful
combination of power, influence, and avarice, in this trade,—for the
magistrates and princes were amongst the chief dealers in it,—that no
possibility of exposing or destroying these dens of thieves existed.
Any man, woman, or child might be suddenly pounced on, and immured in
one of these secret prisons till there were sufficient victims to send
to the slave-ships. They were then marched out chained at midnight,
and put on board. Any one may imagine the terror and insecurity which
such a state of things occasioned. Everybody knew that such invisible
dungeons of despair were in the midst of them, and that any moment he
might be dragged into one of them, beyond the power or any hope of
rescue.
“A rich citizen,” says this singular official report, “who has a
sufficient number of emissaries called bondsmen, carries on this trade
of kidnapping much more easily than a poor one does. The latter is
often obliged to go himself to the _Kámpong Búgis_, or elsewhere, to
take a view of the stolen victim, and to carry him home; while the
former quietly smokes his pipe, sure that his thieves will in every
corner find out for him sufficient game without his exerting himself
at all. The thief, the interpreter, the seller, are all active in his
service, because they are paid by him. In some cases the purchaser
unites himself with the seller to deceive the interpreter, while in
others the interpreter agrees with the thief and pretended seller to
put the victim into the hands of the purchaser. What precautions, what
scrutiny can avail, when we reflect, that the profound secrecy of the
prisons is equalled only by the strict precautions in carrying the
person on board?”
The man-stealers were trained for the purpose. They marked out their
victims, watched for days, and often weeks, endeavoured to associate
themselves with them, and beguile them into some place where they might
be easily secured. Or they pounced on them in the fields or woods. They
roved about in gangs during the night, and in solitary places. None
dare cry for help, or they were stabbed instantly, even though it were
before the door of the purchaser.
What hope indeed could there be for anybody, when the authorities were
in this diabolical league? and this was the custom of legalizing a
kidnapping: “A person calling himself an interpreter, repairs, at the
desire of one who says that he has bought a slave, to the secretary’s
office, accompanied by any native who, provided with a note from
the purchaser, gives himself out as the seller. For three rupees, a
certificate of sale in the usual form is immediately made out; three
rupees are paid to the notary; two rupees are put into the hands of
the interpreter; the whole transaction is concluded, and the purchaser
has thus become the owner of a free-born man, who is very often stolen
without his (the purchaser’s) concurrence; but about this he does not
trouble himself, for the victim is already concealed where nobody can
find him; nor can the transaction become public, because there never
were found more faithful receivers than the slave-traders. It is a
maxim with them, in their own phrase, “never to betray their prison.”
Both purchaser and seller are often fictitious—the public officers
being in league with the interpreters. By such means it is obvious a
stolen man is as easily procured as if he were already pinioned at the
door of his purchaser. You have only to give a rupee to any one to
say that he is the seller, and plenty are ready to do that. Numbers
maintain themselves on such profits, and slaves are thus often bribed
against their own possessors. The victims are never examined, nor do
the Dutch concern themselves about the matter, so that at any time
any number of orders for transport may, if necessary, be prepared
before-hand with the utmost security.
“Let us,” continues the report, “represent to ourselves this one town
of Makásar, filled with prisons, the one more dismal than the other,
which are stuffed with hundreds of wretches, the victims of avarice
and tyranny, who, chained in fetters, and taken away from their wives,
children, parents, friends, and comforts, look to their future destiny
with despair.”
On the other hand, wives missing their husbands, children their
parents, parents their children, with their hearts filled with rage and
revenge, were running through the streets, if possible, to discover
where their relatives were concealed. It was in vain. They were
sometimes stabbed, if too troublesome in their inquiries; or led on by
false hopes of ransom, till they were themselves thrown into debt, and
easily made a prey of too. Such was the terror universally existing in
these islands when the English conquered them, that the inhabitants did
not dare to walk the streets, work in the fields, or go on a journey,
except in companies of five or six together, and well armed.
Such were some of the practices of the Protestant Dutch. But their
sordid villany in gaining possession of places was just as great
as that in getting hold of people. Desirous of becoming masters of
Malacca, they bribed the Portuguese governor to betray it into their
hands. The bargain was struck, and he introduced the enemy into the
city in 1641. They hastened to his house, and massacred him, to save
the bribe of 500,000 livres—21,875_l._ of English money! The Dutch
commander then tauntingly asked the commander of the Portuguese
garrison, as he marched out, when he would come back again to the
place. The Portuguese gravely replied—“_When your crimes are greater
than ours!_”
Desirous of seizing on Cochin on the coast of Malabar, they had no
sooner invested it than the news of peace between Holland and Portugal
arrived; but they kept this secret till the place was taken, and when
reproached by the Portuguese with their base conduct, they coolly
replied—“Who did the same on the coast of Brazil?”
Like all designing people, they were as suspicious of evil as they knew
themselves capable of it. On first touching at the isle of Madura,
the prince intimated his wish to pay his respects to the commander on
board his vessel. It was assented to; but when the Dutch saw the number
of boats coming off, they became alarmed, fired their cannon on the
unsuspicious crowd, and then fell upon the confounded throng with such
fury that they killed the prince, and the greater part of his followers.
Their manner of first gaining a footing in Batavia is thus recorded by
the Javan historians. “In the first place they wished to ascertain
the strength of _Jákatra_ (the native town on the ruins of which
Batavia was built). They therefore landed like máta-mátas (peons or
messengers); the captain of the ship disguising himself with a turban,
and accompanying several _Khójas_, (natives of the Coromandel coast.)
When he had made his observations, he entered upon trade; offering
however much better terms than were just, and making more presents
than were necessary. A friendship thus took place between him and the
prince: when this was established, the captain said that his ship was
in want of repairs, and the prince allowed the vessel to come up the
river. There the captain knocked out the planks of the bottom, and
sunk the vessel, to obtain a pretence for further delay, and then
requested a very small piece of ground on which to build a shed for the
protection of the sails and other property during the repair of the
vessel. This being granted, the captain raised a wall of mud, so that
nobody could know what he was doing, and continued to court the favour
of the prince. He soon requested as much more land as could be covered
by a buffalo’s hide, on which to build a small _póndok_. This being
complied with, he cut the hide into strips, and claimed all the land he
could inclose with them. He went on with his buildings, engaging to pay
all the expenses of raising them. When the fort was finished, he threw
down his mud wall, planted his cannon, and refused to pay a _doit_!”
But the whole history of the Dutch in Java is too long for our purpose.
It may be found in Sir Stamford Raffles’s two great quartos, and it
is one of the most extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery,
massacre and meanness. The slaughter of the Chinese traders there is
a fearful transaction. On pretence of conveying those who yielded
out of the country, they took them to sea, and threw them overboard.
On one occasion, they demanded the body of _Surapáti_—a brave man,
who rose from the rank of a slave to that of a chief, and a very
troublesome one to them—from the very grave. They placed it upright
in a chair, the commandant approached it, made his obeisance, treated
it as a living person, with an expression of ironical mockery, and the
officers followed his example. They then burnt the body, mixed it with
gun-powder, and fired a salute with it in honour of the victory.
Such was their treatment of the natives, that the population of one
province, _Banyuawngi_, which in 1750 amounted to upwards of 80,000
souls, in 1811 was reduced to 8,000. It is no less remarkable, says Sir
Stamford Raffles, that while in all the capitals of British India the
population has increased, wherever the Dutch influence has prevailed
the work of depopulation has followed. In the Moluccas the oppressions
and the consequent depopulation was monstrous. Whenever the natives
have had the opportunity they have fled from the provinces under
their power to the native tracts. With the following extract from Sir
Stamford Raffles we will conclude this dismal notice of the deeds of a
European people, claiming to be Christian, and what is more, Protestant
and Reformed.
“Great demands were at all times made on the peasantry of Java for the
Dutch army. Confined in unhealthy garrisons, exposed to unnecessary
hardships and privations, extraordinary casualties took place amongst
them, and frequent new levies became necessary, while the anticipation
of danger and suffering produced an aversion to the service, which was
only aggravated by the subsequent measures of cruelty and oppression.
The conscripts raised in the provinces were usually sent to the
metropolis by water; and though the distance be short between any two
points of the island, a mortality similar to that of a slave-ship in
the middle passage took place on board these receptacles of reluctant
recruits. They were generally confined in the stocks till their arrival
at Batavia.... Besides the supply of the army, one half of the male
population of the country was constantly held in readiness for other
public services, and thus a great portion of the effective hands
were taken from their families, and detained at a distance from home
in labours which broke their spirit and exhausted their strength.
During the administration of Marshal Daendals, it has been calculated
that the construction of public roads alone destroyed the lives of
at least ten thousand workmen. The transport of government stores,
and the capricious requisitions of government agents of all classes,
perpetually harassed, and frequently carried off numbers of the people.
If to these drains we add the waste of life occasioned by insurrections
which tyranny and impolicy excited in Chéribon; the blighting effects
of the coffee monopoly, and forced services in the Priáng’en Regencies,
and the still more desolating operations of the policy pursued, and the
consequent anarchy produced, in Bantam, we shall have some idea of the
depopulating causes which existed under the Dutch administration.”