Colonization and Christianity/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV.
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.
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 power 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 secresy 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—21,875l. 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 Príang'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."