Empire: World History - 358. Spice Wars: The Rise of the Dutch East India Company (Ep 1)

Episode Date: May 10, 2026

What’s the real story behind the creation of the Dutch East India Company, and how was espionage involved? What made the VOC the first ‘mega-corporation’ in history? And what was the horrific human cost of establishing a colonial stronghold in the East Indies? Get the entire Dutch Empire miniseries early and ad-free by joining the Empire Club at empirepoduk.com  William is joined by Dutch historian Herald van der Linde to explore the staggering rise of the Dutch East India Company - a company so rich it eclipsed the modern valuations of Apple and NVIDIA combined. They discuss how high-stakes espionage, revolutionary cargo ships, and military ruthlessness allowed the Dutch to dominate the 17th-century global economy. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/EMPIRE. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to ⁠www.goalhanger.com.⁠ Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Edwina Mountbatten died in the jungles of Borneo. The year was 1960 and she was all alone. Well, alone, I say, except she was surrounded by letters. And they weren't letters, as you might think, from her husband, Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India. No, these were letters from the man that she truly loved. The scourge of the

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Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment. Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. Today we are talking about a company so powerful it could wage war, execute criminals, establish its own colonies and govern entire continents. And so wealthy that in today's money at its peak it was worth more than twice the combined value of Apple and the Vidia in market capitalisation. The story will take us through some extraordinary 17th century financial espionage, the colonisation of Indonesia and, Anglo-Dutch wars in which the English will end up ruling the seas, but not before the Dutch have kicked them out of Indonesia and they have ended up with the constellation prize of

New York. Just me today, I'm afraid Anita has another project, but I am here with one of my great friends, Harold Vandler, Harold, welcome to empire. Well, thanks for having me on a podcast Will. First of all, we need to talk about the VOC. And I can't even pronounce it in Dutch. I'll have a We're not the Ostindish company How was that? Yeah, that's a decent try for an Englishman I'm saying.

I'm a Scot, I'm a Scott, Harold. Oh, Scott, yeah, that's a decent try for a Scott, I'd say that. In Dutch, it is a Reignite Oast Indies Company, VOC. VEOC. I myself know far less about it than I should do,

considering that I've been writing about its great rival for 20 years. And I'm very, very happy that Herald is going to be guiding us through the founding of it, something which Herald is particularly well qualified to do, since he's not only Dutch, he works in Asia in finance and is in many ways the kind of inheritor of this tradition. So that's right, Will.

I'm at HSBC, one of these financial institutions here predominantly in Asia. We run a podcast, by the way, as well, under the banyan tree, because in Asia, when people spoke about markets and economics, they did so under the tree. You can actually see the tree behind me. I have an interest in Indonesia, as you know. We've been in Sumatra together. We've been in Java together as well. Wrote a book about the history of Jakarta amongst others.

And a wonderful history of Majapahit, which is again one of the subjects that people don't know about. It's one of the great Hindu empires of Asia and one that many people in India will never have heard of. No, absolutely. That's sort of an extension of your golden road, and that goes into Indonesia. It's the making of Indonesia.

and there's a lot of Indic sort of influences Hindu and Buddhists that are in there. That's the Madhapai empire, that's correct. We should also say that you are married to a lovely lady from Indonesia, who you've just been reunited with after our Samaritan trip. That's right. So my wife is Indonesian. I speak Indonesian. But yeah, Indonesia is very close to me.

I've lived there for a long time. It's a place I love. And I try to understand by reading up and writing about its history to a large extent. Harold, let's paint the very one. wide canvas before we close in on the VOC itself. The first thing to say is that, as I expect most people who are listening to this, don't know their Dutch history as well as they might. When the story opens in the 16th century,

Holland is a new country. It's only just got its liberty, hasn't it? Different provinces in the Netherlands that are coming together, they're Protestants. to a certain extent I lied, maybe in that sense with the English as well. And they are revolting against the Spanish overlords that have a claim on the lands. And out of that sort of revolt, new leaders emerge. William of Orange is one of them.

His son, Maurit, later as well. And they move away from royalty. They set up a republic. And it's in that sort of environment where the VOC starts to eat. emerge. And just as they are fighting the Catholic Spanish in Europe, when they begin to cast their eyes overseas and begin to think of expanding into Asian waters and to carry their trade beyond Europe, they bump into the Catholic Portuguese. Give us a picture of the Portuguese Empire that they are beginning to infringe on at the beginning of the story. Yeah, we almost have to go back

about a hundred years. So in 1498, Fasco de Gama goes around the Cape of Good Hope, the southern point of South Africa, and discovers Asia, you could say. He sails and goes into India. And the Portuguese now have access to these Asian markets and they import all the spices we know from clothes and nutmeg and cinnamon and porcelain. Making vast fortunes in the process. Making vast fortunes in the process. And the Dutch trade with the Portuguese for a long time. So they bring herring and beer over to Lisbon and buy these guts. And this is how these spices end up in the rest of Europe. Presumably the spices are rather more expensive than the herring and the beer. Yeah, large quantities of herring and beer for a little bit of spices in those days.

Absolutely. I mean, some of that just in weight, these spices were more expensive than gold would be now. So they were very highly priced. Now, the problem then for the Dutch emerges when in 1580, Spain takes control over Portugal. And therefore, access to that market is cut off. And the Dutch have got to find their own way to Asia and to these prices. And that's not easy because they don't know where to go. Yes, we kind of assume that you just got sort of maps. Even if you haven't got Google bats then, you probably presume that you've got something.

But that is not the case. The Dutch simply do not have maps of Asia. that there are none in Western Europe beyond the very secretively kept Portuguese maps. Absolutely. So the Portuguese know where to sail, and it's not even sometimes maps, it's descriptions. Like you go two days south from this particular port, and then you end up on an island, and you go in this direction, and there are lots of birds here, and there's lots of animals, and there's a mountain here.

So it's these descriptions that are important as well. And the Dutch have no knowledge of this, and they need that knowledge now. and they tried to get through it through espionage. So we are opening this series with one of the great stories of industrial espionage in history. It is an absolutely world-changing story because the results of this are not only that the Dutch get access to India and the Indies, by which they mean modern Indonesia, but also the English, because English get their hands of these maps as a result of the India. this story. So take us to Harlem in 1563 and introduce us to Jan Heugen van Linschoten. How is that? Oh, that's very well pronounced. Very very good for a Scott. So in 1563, a boy is born, Jan Heuggen van Linschoten, and his father has got a job in Einkhausen, which is currently about

an hour's drive north of Amsterdam. And he's an innkeeper there. And the boy grows up there. And of course, he hears the stories from the sailors that are in the inn. sailing far away and fantastic stories. And he gets excited about this. He wants to go on an adventure as well. In his later books, and there's a nice quote I have here, he says something,

there's no time more wasted than for a young fellow to stay in his mother's kitchen like a dim wit, knowing neither what property is, nor luxury, nor what the world contains, an ignorance which is often the cause of his own ruin. You get a picture of the man there too, the sort of impatient and sort of... I think he looks a little bit like Van Gogh,

Painter Van Gog, because of course much later. We in Scotland would call Van Gogh. Yeah, Van Gogh. And the Americans call Van Gogh, something like that. So, Jan von Linschoten, he departs, he goes to his stepbrother in Seville, in southern Spain. And from there on, he gets to Portugal. And this is important because somehow either through his clever or he's lucky, he becomes the secretary to the Archbishop, the newly appointed Archbishop of Gowa, a man called Dom Vincenze de von Seca.

Portuguese is probably not so good. This arts bishop is sailing to Goa and Goa at the time is the epicenter of the Portuguese Empire. We should explain that it's not at this period a centre for trans music or for sort of stag nights or stag holidays

and beaches. Goa is the great metropolis of the east. It's a million people at this point. It's an absolutely vast city that has grown incredibly fast on the profits of the Portuguese

spice trade. And all the knowledge about how to sail and these sort of things is there. So Jan van Linschowder lives there for about six years from 1583 to 1589. Are the Portuguese not suspicious of him, the fact that he is Dutch and that he is a Protestant?

It doesn't seem so much. Actually, Jan van Linschowter writes in his own book that he wants to stay and go forever. He changes his mind later. I know that feeling very well. Every time I go there, I want to stay and go from. Yeah, exactly. He thinks it's a lovely place, but he writes about Italians that are walking around. There's another Dutch guy, a few Dutch people he actually meet. One is called Dirk of China, because it's a Dutch guy that went to China had come back. So it seems to be,

there were a lot of Portuguese, but seems to be a fairly sort of cosmopolitan place as well. There's one Englishman, and he ends up in prison almost immediately, and he has to be rescued by another Englishman who is a Jesuit. It turns out that there are English Jesuit. It Of course, being a Jesuit priest is a highly risky thing in England at this point because you're considered to be like a member of Mossad or something. You are a member of a kind of foreign intelligence network in the eyes of Elizabethan state. All sorts of people walk around in Goa. And Joan van Linschoten has unique access to Fars because he's the secretary of the Archbishop.

That's basically with the vice-roes there. That's the number one or two in town. And maybe it was easy access, maybe it was midnight and candles or something like that, but he starts to copy all the information, and that's maps, and that's the ports that they have, and that's how to get to sail there, and the winds and details on who to bribe and not to bribe, and these sort of details. I think it is literally candles at midnight. I remember reading that after the Archbishop goes to bed, and he's an early bedder,

Lin Shoten is up and about, you know, because his job is to clear up after the Archbishop. And so he has every reason to be in his study. And there, I think one day he sees a map and realizes this is absolutely priceless if he could somehow find a way of getting it out. Anyway, carry on. Absolutely. So he copies all of this. So we're now talking about the late 1580s when he's doing that. He was initially thinking about staying into goal, but eventually he changes his mind.

because his brother has died, his family is sick and he thinks, well, I need to see them again and he decides to sail back. In the meantime, in the Netherlands, they don't know this, of course, that this Dutch guy is copying priceless sort of maps and details about traveling to the east down. They're doing their own sort of espionage thing with another guy called Cornelis Hauptmann. Cornelis Hauptmann, he will later become the first kind of guy who runs the first voyage. They call it the first expedition by the Dutch to Asia. But he goes to Lisbon as a merchant and tries to talk to sailors and captains to get all of that information as well.

He's a really good navigator, but he's an horrible spy because the Portuguese see that immediately and arrest him. And the Dutch have to pay for the guy to be released and to return. So they are hungry of this knowledge. And then suddenly, Young von Linschauten comes back into the Netherlands with all of that information. Do we know how he smuggled it out? I mean, did he sort of wrap it in, you know, pretend it was something else? What was the... I think he put it in some sort of cupboard lately and took it with him.

He went on a boat that sailed back and there was a boat with spices. They made a stop to make some additional cinnamon and then they sail back and they stop in the Azores. He goes to Lisbon and from Lisbon. Pretty much immediately he goes back to his hometown. He goes to Amsterdam and Enkhaus where his family lives. And then he writes it down. The Dutch hear about this. and say, listen, in particular, that stuff about how you get to the East, can you publish that as soon as possible?

Because he writes three books, two of them being published in 1596, but one of them in 1595 a year earlier. And with maps in it, the maps are in the book. Yeah, there's maps in it, there's drawings in it. There's all sorts of other funky details in it. Like if you are at the Azores, watch out for the black and white birds and these sort of things. And there's bushes in the water close to Cape Town. I'm not quite sure how relevant that is. I'm not a real sailor.

But anyway, he writes all of these details, but you can see the amount of detail that goes into it, right? And one thing that happens immediately is that the English, who are also hungry for this sort of information, translate Van Ninschoten's book within a year. It's in English. And this, as we'll see, will soon lead to the English making their own way to these. But anyway, the Dutch first. So the Dutch first. So the first book that he then finishes with all these details is given by, to Canales Houtman, who is then appointed to bring four ships to the east. And this guy sets off

with 278 sailors, and with that book, is able to go around Cape Town and sail towards Indonesia. And the most important detail that he learned from Jan van Linschoten is that if you go around Cape Town, go around the Cape, Good Hope, you go to Madagascar, but do not go to India and then follow the coast to the Malacca Strait, because there you're going to run into the Portuguese. He says, go straight basically east, and this is a very long journey, all across the Indian Ocean until you get to the southern port of Sumatra. It's the Strait of Sunda, and there's a town called Bunton at the moment, Batam at the time, but Bunton at the moment, and that's where the port is, where you trade spices.

And that's exactly what he does. He goes over that route, and other Dutch ships follow that route as well, actually on the second trip, second voyage. Some of them fear off a little bit and end up in Mauritia. or an island they call Mauritius after the Prince Moritz, which is then ruling the Netherlands at the time. So that's where the name Mauritius comes from. I didn't know that.

It's a Dutch prince, Mauritius. Exactly. It's named after the Dutch royal family at the time. But anyway, he ends up there, Cornelis Houtman, in Indonesia. He buys the spices. He's also pretty much immediately, maybe a Dutch good fashion at the time, to upset the locals there. He's very blunt and not so diplomatic, it seems. But he's able to get somebody spires.

and bring them back to Amsterdam. And the profits are beyond imagination, aren't they? Actually, no. At that time, not. No. No, actually, on the first trip, they break even. They don't make a lot of money. And it's a humanitarian disaster because out of the 278 people that sail off,

only about, I think it's 78, come back alive. I mean, a lot of them die of scurvy and all sorts of diseases that they get. So 70% of the people that departed Amsterdam, they don't return. but the big thing is that they now know where to go and the voyages they're after the second one there are via Mauritius and other trips they are incredibly profitable and in Holland all sorts of cities, Enghausen Amsterdam, southern part of Zeeland

they all want to do this and set up their own expeditions we call them the full compaginion just before the VOC's been established and they go on their own even competing with each other to get to east to the east so there's very important chronology to get right right here. So it's the first Dutch voyage is which year, Harold? The first one is in 1595 and arrives in Indonesia, what is not Indonesia, in 1596. And they get back in...

And they get back the year after, so 1597, I'm not a mistake. And then 1599, there's a meeting in London to form the company of London merchants trading with the East Indies is the initial title of the English company. and that sales in 1600, by which stage the Dutch have already done, how many voyages? I don't know how many they're done, but they were already sailing for about five years. So they had by that time probably a regular flow of ships going there. But the English at that time did that on the one company. The Dutch had different cities who did it independently.

And they competed with each other as well, because it was not a fully united country as it is at the moment. So it's 1602 in March that the idea for founding a single Dutch company to take on these English who jumped on the bandwagon belatedly comes to be. But there is an important difference between the English company and the Dutch company, or certainly how it is financed, because the English have got the idea of a company, whereby you all put, anyone can put in money and get a share of the profits. But they haven't got the idea of tradable shares. Tell us the difference between this and why it's important. So before the 20th of March 1602, what everybody did is you put a bit of money together with a couple of friends, rich merchants, you finance a captain and a ship, send them off,

wait for three years, and when they come back, you're making enormous amount of money. You divide that amongst yourselves, that's the dividends. And that's what the English were doing as well. But the Dutch then set up a company, similar to what the English did, the Fréinertosin is a company, but they make two big differences. The first one is everybody can subscribe. So we got rich merchants, we got priests, we got teachers, we got all sorts of people coming in. That's true in London, too. London, you have, and I've looked at the list.

I've got the list. You can actually call up the list of subscribers just as a library item if you've got a British Library ticket. And I've done this. It's wonderful. And this extraordinary document, this historic document, turns up on your desk an hour later. And there is the list of subscribers to the East Indy Company in 1599 at this first meeting the same year that Shakespeare is writing Hamlet. The same year that Shakespeare is writing Julius Caesar. Indeed, if Shakespeare got stuck in the middle of Hamlet and turned right over London Bridge,

he could have walked to where the meeting was taking place in just about 15 minutes from the Globe Theatre. Anyway, so at the top of that list is the Lord Mayor of London, who puts in £2,000. and then the other grandees. But what's really interesting is that halfway through the list, it turns out to people who describe themselves as leather workers or domestic helps or bottlers or vintners. And they're putting in, you know, five shillings, two pence, three pence. And they're all allowed to do this.

You can buy a single share. But the difference with the Dutch is that they can then sell their shares. Exactly. This is a really big difference because, and I'm going to write this out, So there's two articles of the VOC that's maybe important here. The first one, they say, all the residents of these lands may buy shears in the company. So it's publicly available. It's a public sort of thing.

But then the next article, I believe, is number 11. It states that the convenience or transfer of shears may be done through the bookkeeper of each chamber. What that means is that if you had a stake in this enterprise, this VOC, but you, for whatever reason, needed money, you could find somebody, and they did this actually on a bridge in Amsterdam, where people would meet and could say, listen, you can buy my steak. So you meet somebody says, okay, I'll buy your steak. You come to an agree price. Then you go to the VOC building.

There were two bookkeepers. They would go into the latches and say, okay, Harold, you got a stake, but you're going to send it to Will for this price. Okay, so Harold is crossed out. Will is now a shareholder. This is an investment. And there you go. And that, because people can get out,

it makes it more attractive to participate, so it allows you to raise more capital. You're not waiting five, six years or the possible death of everybody, you know, on the way back through scurvy. Exactly. Or lose everything if these ships never come back, for example. So because they also participate in all the future sort of expeditions that they're going to do as well. So that's a very key difference as well. And they raise quite a lot, a big sum of money, $6,440,000. guilders. Just to compare, 2,000 guilders will give you sort of an average canal house in

Amsterdam at the time. So that's a pretty decent amount of money. And this is considerably more than the East India Company, rather pathetic attempt at raising funds at the same time. This is, is it 10 times more? What's the... It's 50 to 100 times more, depending on what you're looking at it. Yeah. Yeah, but it's like 100 times more than what the English raise. So it's because that flexibility of trading that make people say, okay, I'll put something in. And if it doesn't work, I can babysell it to somebody else. The biggest investor, and this is a guy who will come back a little bit, is a man called Isaac Le Maire.

He is Belgium, what we would call Belgium now, he's Dutch at the time. And he puts in 85,000 guilders. That's actually at that point in time a pretty large sum of money. And what's his motive? He just thinks he can make a huge killing. Yeah, he thinks he makes a, he's going to make a lot of money. That's his expectation. but he runs into a conflict with the people who run the VEOC.

We should quickly give a pen portrait of this guy. I'm just looking at a picture of him, and he looks a bit like sort of one of those King Charles Spaniels. He's got this kind of great sort of floppy mops of hair over both his years. Yeah, I'm quite jealous of his hair. He's got nice big, big, you and I can both do. The kind of shiny locks there. Those are long gone for me.

For our shiny pates, Harold, exactly. So this guy is the biggest investor in what is the kind of 17th century's first Kickstarter. It's also, and I think you make this point, the world's first IPO. Yeah, so in technical terms, this is the first initial public offering, an IPO as we call it these days. And this leads to the foundation of the first burs, which is a Dutch word. Is it originally or is it a French? Yeah, so basically the Dutch would meet on a bridge. If you know, if you come out of the train station in Amsterdam, it's actually the first bridge.

the location is easy to identify. Now, as you're Scottish, I'm Dutch, you know how the weather is. The last thing you want to do is go haggle with somebody on an open bridge. It rains. It's cold. It's damp. So what do you do? You're going to go to the cafe nearby. It's a street called the Warmu Strat in Amsterdam. That's where they get it.

But eventually these cafes were also chock-full with people. So they needed a space. And eventually they built the first purpose-built stock exchange, you could say. They traded spices and all sorts of other things, these things as well. it's right in the centre of Amsterdam the building doesn't exist anymore it's now sort of a square and a new exchange building was later built

and they called it you could call it the wallet if you want to translate it the burrs that's literally what a boers means it just means a wallet it means wallet burs is wallet so kind of an old word

nobody would use it in the Netherlands anymore but that's the meaning of it I think we should take a break here Harold but we've at this crucial moment so we've got a number of first here we've got the first trips to the East Indies by Northern Europe

we've got some of the very first public limited companies and this idea that you can buy a share in a company and we've got the first IPO. That's quite a good start for a small damp island in the North Sea under sea level. Absolutely. But there's a couple of other firsts as well that we need to talk about, but let's take a break first. This episode is sponsored by Better Help. One of the lessons of history is that uncertain times are nothing new. Kingdoms falter, governments lose their nerves, and ordinary people find themselves living through times and events that they didn't choose. What's new is the closeness of it, the way that the anxieties of an age now arrive without a pause.

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This episode is brought to you by the National Archives. It's Tom Holland here from Goalhangers's The Rest is History. Now, American Independence is often painted as a quest for freedom, a triumph of democratic ideals, but it was also a period of immense risk and violence, which turned the colonial world upside down. So if you want to go beyond the familiar tale, of the Boston Tea Party and red-coated battalions, I have some marvelous news for you. The National Archives is holding a free exhibition. Revolution 250. America's Independent Story 1763 to 1783. It's not just a story of declarations and battles and revolutionary heroes. It uncovers the human cost of decisions made on both sides of the Atlantic. You'll also encounter

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Visit staples.ca slash preferred. That was easy. Welcome back. Harold, you were going to tell us about the other great firsts that the VOC score at this point. Yeah, so the VOC for a couple of years, it all goes pretty well.

Expeditions are being financed and they're coming back. But Isaac Le Maire runs into a conflict with the people that run the VEOC the company. And he does something else. He puts a couple of people together,

and he wants now the share price to go down. Why does he want the share price to go down? He's unhappy with it. He gets rid of his shares, and he wants to penalize the owners. So he tries to get the share price down. And how does he do this? He tries to make money out of that as well.

He borrows shares from somebody. It's a short. It's a short. It's the first big short in the world. He shorts the stock, as we can call it. You borrow it and you sell it. He then puts rumours in the market. He's gone to that pub over the bridge again.

Yeah. Exactly. You go to the bridge and say, well, I hear there's a big storm and these ships are not coming. They're not coming back. They've all been eaten by cannibals. Yeah. Exactly.

So people get worried. They sell their shares as well. The price goes down. And because he borrowed this year, he buys them back at the lower price and gives them back. So that's a way of making money. He's a terrible crook. He's an absolute crook. And therefore, the first.

stock market regulations come out because soon after people realize what this guy is doing and say, well, we don't want this. So we're going to put a regulation in place. You cannot short this stock and you cannot manipulate and diverge misinformation. So it's the first stock market regulation that happens as well. There's two reasons I've always understood why the Dutch take off in a way that the East India company doesn't quite at the same time, or certainly at the same rate. The Dutch are far bigger and far more successful in this initial period. And the reasons I was always taught, Harold, and tell me whether I'm wrong, is that first of all, the Dutch better sailors, and have got better ships.

And secondly, that what you're describing, the financial infrastructure in Holland is sort of, you know, 50 years or 100 years ahead of what's available in England. Yeah, that's right. So they are probably about 50 years because there's only, I think, in about 50 years later, that the English set up a similar sort of stock exchange. after William of Orange has come over at the glorious revolution? That's right. So it takes them some time to take on the idea.

The Americans taken over. Actually, the first stock exchange in Asia was in Mumbai. The Indians are the first to take it on. Is that right? Mumbai's stock exchange is the first in Asia. Mumbai, under a banyan tree, by the way. And it's now called Dalal Street in popular Indian sort of language, right? But there is a second thing that you refer to.

The other thing that makes them successful is their maritime technology. So they have a ship. It's called the flout. And instead of having a warship on which people put cargo, that's what the Portuguese were doing and the English were doing, they design a ship that is different. It's a cargo ship with some cannons on top of it. So it has, it's got sort of a rounder, wider belly below the waterline.

You could put much more twice as much cargo in it. The rigging is different, so you don't need as many people. I think they run 12 to 15 people on a ship instead of the 30 to 40, they have in other ships and they industrialized it. So even now in Amsterdam, there's areas they're called it Oster Dock amongst others where people made these ships on a sort of industrial way, a continuous sort of way. In the way that the Venetians had been doing for a while, the Arsenal in Venice was famously the first great shipyard in Europe, wasn't it? And they used to churn out a major galleon at once a week or something at the peak of the Venetian Empire. And this is something

now that the Dutch really get going. And the Brits again are behind. We will have Depford Dock doing the same a little bit later. And indeed, a little bit later, the Dutch sail up the Thames and attack Deptford Docks. They know how it is. But anyway, we're jumping ahead of the story now. The Devil Schitts Dutchman is what Samuel Pipits actually rode down, I think, at some point in time when they came up to Thames. Quite right. The perfect description by Samuel P.

So I agree entirely. As a result of very advanced financial instruments and pretty exciting. new cutting-edge maritime technology, the VOC takes off on an incredible scale, much, much more so than the East India Company. Give us an idea of the scale of the whole thing. Absolutely. So they make 4,800 journeys between Amsterdam and Asia. About a million people are being transported from a million people.

A million people. That is more because the rest of over that period, we're talking about the whole period. of the VOC, so that's from 1602 to 1796 when it goes bankrupt. So it's almost 200 years. A million people are being transported. That is more than all the other European nations together, I believe they do around 900,000. We should say here that again, people assume that the early British and India had this enormous manpower.

But half a century after the Battle of Placian, in 1790 something, they have a stock-taking of East India Company personnel. And there's only 10,000 British civilians in India, although they've conquered now most of Hindustan and are on their way to conquering the whole thing. But it's only 10,000 people, so they keep it very tight partly because they want to keep the profits tight.

But with a few of your friends are mates as much better, that's right. Exactly. But the amount of cargo they ship over, the Dutch East Indies ship over the FEOC, is enormous, about two and a million tons. That's about five times as much as what the English sail over in the same period. So it's an enormous company

and I would say it's not just the greatest trading company of the 17th century, by most measures, it's actually the greatest trading company in the history of mankind. It's enormous. Extraordinary. And of course, one of the reasons for this is that there are some brilliant English personnel

working in the, under the Dutch, including a man called Henry Hudson. Tell us about him. In the 1590s, when we're still in the espionage and the first voyages, the Dutch also thought that you could sail north and then end up in Asia. So I had a couple of expeditions. They all got stuck in the ice. There's a very famous one with a guy called Willem Barrens.

As in the Bear and Sea, they all get eaten by bipolar bears. There's some terrible disaster. Yeah, they're being attacked by polar bears. He survives that. But I think on the way back, he dies and he's being buried on. on the sea. So it's all a disaster. But they try again in the early 1600, 16.09 if not mistaken. And an Englishman sails and then goes west from the Netherlands towards what's now Canada, the Hudson Bay and he hugs what is now the American coast and sees a big river and makes a

stop stay. It goes inland and calls it the Hudson River. And he finds a small island which is named Manhattan. Manhattan. And if you are Dutch and you go, go to New York, Manhattan, you can see all these Dutch names everywhere. You see Brooklyn, Hoboken, Bronx, Harlem, Staten Island. They're all Dutch names. Wall Street was where the fortifications were the war was, which is now, of course, the biggest stock market in the world. So the Dutch fingerprints are there as well. Aha. And then we're going to come back next episode where we have Giles Milton talking about his wonderful book, Nathaniel's Nutmeg, which Giles rather disarvingly talks about as

Nats nuts. Anyway, we'd be hearing more about that afterwards, but that results in obviously Manhattan ending up in English as, but we'll get there eventually. You'll get that later. But tell us now about, and again, I'm going to probably get his name wrong,

another of these crucial characters, Jan Peterson Cohen. Yeah. So, Jan Peterson Coon is from the town of Horn, which is just close to Enghausen, where our friend Jan van Linschoten, his father was this innkeeper. Very nice town.

And he goes to the east, to Indonesia, and sets up, and is sort of an administrator at the very beginning, and sets up the duchies in these companies there. He builds warehouses and these sort of things. But he goes up in the ranks quite rapidly. He's got a very mixed reputation in the Netherlands. Some people consider him to be the founder

of the enterprise and adventurer and somebody, an administrator who got things gone, other people consider him to be a genocidal maniac. And without doubt, Miles is going to talk about that. There's some really horrific stuff he did. Both of these are true, in fact, aren't they? Both of them are true. Indeed, not so long ago, his statue is still in the city of Horn.

I think a delivery car broke it. It fell over, and it was a big discussion. Should we raise him up again or not? A museum stepped in, said, well, why don't we do an exhibition? Ask people to vote on it. and the vote was eventually, let's raise him up again, but let's put a sort of a plaque beneath it, saying that this guy was also a genocidal maniac.

This is what we had in Shrewsbury last decade, because the picture of Clive, also a character with some very dubious horror stories attached to him. His statue in Shrewsbury was up for discussion, and in the end they decided to keep it up, but to put a plaque listing his crimes as well as his achievements, which seems to me, to me, a fair solution to this. Absolutely.

You can't ignore history. We just have to acknowledge what happened. Nor should we forget it. Whether we like it or not, these things are important. And the horror stories are important as well as the great triumphs. We've painted a picture now of this world coming up. And I remember you in your cups last week, Harold, telling me about the orgies, which you said that the Dutch inflicted on the English.

I should say this was not a reflection of any of anything. we were getting up to in Sumatra, but tell us the story. Yeah, so there are orgies involved. It's not inflicted upon the English. The English might have participated. I'm not quite sure. But basically what happens is that young Peter's own Kuhn is in control, you could say, of the operations in what is now called Jakarta.

It's called Jaya Kharta in those days. Victory City. Yeah, yeah. It means a victorious city. And there's a whole reason for that. is related to Majapai, but we don't want to go there. But there are basically three parties. So you've got the Dutch there, and they use Jaya-A-Kata as the sort of places where they have warehouses,

there's sort of stop, and then they go on to the Spice Islands and bring the spices there, and then they make the longer journey back. You got the English on the opposite side of a river. It's called the Chilliwung River, and they set up, as English people do, a pub. So they get a lodge over there. And then you have the Javanese who live in the city just a little bit further south from it. And these three parties, they don't like each other. The Dutch want the English out.

They want a monopoly. The English want the Dutch out. And the Javanese want both of them out. Now, at one point in time, the English have the upper hand. They have a sort of alliance with the Javanese. And there are more English ships in the neighborhood than there are Dutch ships. So there's not too many Dutch people around. Just happened to be the case.

And then the English basically started the conflict. They confiscate one of these Dutch ships And it becomes a braw A fight between the Dutch and the English As a Scotsman I have to say that this sounds right The English do this sort of thing It sounds very right, yes So a braw at the start of a fight

And the English say we're going to tie ourselves up with the Japanese And we're going to kick the Dutch out The Dutch understand that they are in a minority And young Peter Sankoon says Listen we're going to This is not going to end up very well for us I'm going to go to the Malucca Island It's quite a bit of sailing to do

and get reinforcements because that's where the ships are. And he sails off and leaves a small party of Dutch people, Dutch guys, in this sort of fortified warehouses that they have at that time. And this is about 16, 18, 16, 19.

Which are still there in Batavia today and it's the Maritime Museum, isn't it? Yeah, it's very close to the maritime museum and if there's a small tower in North Jakarta, you can actually see the remnants of a castle that they later built still there as well. The walls and some of it is still there. Anyway, the guys who stay behind these Dutch people, they think, well, you know, the English are going to attack us.

It takes months before John Peters-on-Cunwit's reinforcements is going to be back. This is not going to work out well for us. So what do you do? You've got to drink gin and you've got to have a big party. And that's where the orgies come in and I'll leave it to people's imagination and what all of that stuff they did. What I do want you to be explicit about, though, Harold, we can leave the orgies, as you say, to one side. but the gin we should definitely focus in. Jin was a thing already in those days,

but very quickly before we go there, because the English tie up with the Javanese, but they start to negotiate on what their sort of relationship is going to be after they kicked the Dutch out, and it takes them so long that eventually the reinforcements of the Dutch come back in. John Peterson Coon is back. Coon comes with his new men. Exactly, and then they kicked the English out,

And they pushed the Javanese back and burn down the whole city, Jaya Kata. And on top of it, they build a whole new city, a castle and a city they call Batavia. And that is really the sort of the making of modern Jakarta as well. And today when you go to Jakarta, Batavia is really just a suburb, isn't it? It's a kind of, it's a historic suburb on the edge of the city. The city hall and an old church and some of the warehouses that are built, They're all still there. So it feels like in northern Chicago that you walk around in a Dutch city, actually.

There's a cafe called Batavia. It's really, very nice. It's really interesting to walk around. You can still see the remnants of the castle there as well. That's right. Sorry, and the gin. We have to focus in on the gin then. So Dutch courage is a reference to this.

Exactly. Because back in Amsterdam, all these spices are flowing in. And the Dutch were already making gin, and they start to experiment with it. So gin is, we call it gin now, but it's Geneva. Geneva comes from juniper. It's a juniper-flavored distillate. And the Dutch then say, well, why don't we throw some nutmeg or maybe some cinnamon in or some other spices?

So they make really interesting gin. Gin becomes very popular. And as you rightly say, so the English pick up on that, at some point in time in almonds, when according to these, I must say. But before that, they see that the Dutch are drinking it as they go to battle. This is even earlier, but they're still in struggling with this. Spanish and the English follow and say let's drink gin before we go into battle and that's where the word Dutch courage actually comes from. And today of course the Scots make lovely gin,

but they call it by disguised Dutch names. So Hendrix which is made in, I think in Edinburgh, has a misleadingly Dutch name. Yeah and he's got this beautiful Dutch-shaped old bottle to refer back to that old heritage. That's right. The Scots take these clever ideas and develop them and then make that make their money. But the Dutch gin at the time actually looks like a Scots whiskey. It's yellowish. It's, it's, it's very much like, it's very different than the gin that you would think about now.

Do people make a version of it today? Have you drunk an old gin, so to speak? Oh, I've drunk many old gins. And I think at some point in time, we should try to do that together as well. We should also say that one of Herod's amazing qualities is that you are a nose, aren't you? You've got, you're a diploma of wine. I've seen you be able to spot. you could tell which vineyard in which French village a glass of wine was made.

It was one of your magic traits. Yeah, during COVID I really had to pick up my tasting and skills a little bit again because you need to continuously train that, which is a fantastic hobby to have. While the rest of us were making sourdough bread, you were busy studying advanced wine. Studying gin and wine. I think you've had the better part. Now, one thing you've got to tell us, Harold, is about your family's connection to the VAC, Because when I was researching this, I came across Van der Lenders.

So it's not just the Ripples who are out in East India companies. They have their Dutch counterparts. No, absolutely. So they build up this new city, Batavia. And there's a nice quote from young Peter Soank Kun when he writes a letter to back to Amsterdam, says, you've got to send people over because the only people that come over here, it's all riffraff. I don't want them.

I want people of good station or good statue. People of quality. A good quality, exactly. And he needs ladies. He needs women as well. And for whatever reason, Barbara van der Linder is popping up. She comes up in the record. So she arrives in Batavia around 1650.

She's really early. She's really early. She's really early. It's a frontier town. It's a rough frontier town in those days. With very bad mortality rates. Everyone died in Batavia. It was famous for its malaria.

Or they didn't know it was malaria. Exactly. Also, there's a malaria. all sorts of diseases were going around. So it's not a place you wanted to go to, I think, and she probably ran away from either divorce or maybe bad debt or whatever it was in the Netherlands. But she arrives there and sets up a family,

and we can follow her a little bit. And one of these ancestors, I know for certain, is my ancestor because he eventually gets involved with quite a nasty episode in Batavian history and sends a record back to the Netherlands. Just be a bit more explicit here, Harold. You're talking about a nasty incident. This is actually a full-scale genocidal massacre that we're talking about here.

Absolutely. So he's a sort of genocidal maniac probably as well. So in 1742, this guy, von der Linder, is the head of the administration in the castle. And we know that the administration and some Chinese people have a fallout. That becomes a brawl. And that basically sparks a three-day sort of. genocidal movement in Batavia by the Dutch go around and kill all the Chinese. Elderly Chinese, younger Chinese babies, they drown them.

They, with the swords and knives, they kill them. What's the excuse for this? Why are they on this killing spree? Because Batavia was actually a reasonable size town, but 80% of it was probably, maybe 90% of it was Chinese. It was more a Chinese town. And the Dutch were a minority, and I think they felt threatened. You could already see in some of the accounts prior to this happily.

that there were all sorts of nervousness and tensions between the Chinese and the Dutch. So this, there's a spark and so they poof, and then for about three days they go into this killing spree and kill all the Chinese and eventually the Chinese had to move out of Batavia into an area called Glodok and that's still Chinatown in Jakarta today. Now, being the head of the administration, I suspect very much that my ancestor was involved with that and I know for certain he's my ancestor because two years later he passes away And upon his death, they sent back a wooden plaque to remember him to their church, their family church in the Netherlands. And I went to that church and that plaque, 350 years later, still hanging the end of the back of the church.

And it describes him, it doesn't say what he did, he describes him as a fantastic sort of administrator, very wealthy sort of guy. But we have a family book in the Netherlands that relates to that, yeah. It doesn't say megalomaniac psychopath as one of his qualities. No, they've omitted that. just like we're jumping the Zonkund. But yeah, they've omitted that particular detail. But I know from a family book that we have in our family that he's related to us. So there's a clear link here between him, me and most likely Barbara from the Linden as well.

You and I seem to have these war criminals in our past. They're not us, but they are ours. And we can't undo this history. But I think it's very important to recognize it, to talk about it openly, to not obfuscate it. and to and to yeah to to to to recognize that there was an enormous cost

to be paid for the rich exactly different countries the ruins somebody once written are everywhere including in our own family Harold thank you very very much that's all for today the next episode is going to be

a friend of the show Giles Milton who's coming to tell us the story of his best-selling book Nathaniel's Nutmeg, the story of the island of Run, which generated, and we've already hinted at this, the world's most consequential property swap, how a small spice island was traded for Manhattan. That is now available, however, for our lucky club members, and you can become one too by following the link in the episode description. That's all from me, William Derrimple. And for me, I want to say Anita, but it's Harold Vandalinda this time.

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