← Empire: World History
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- [00:01]
William Durham
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 podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
- [00:19]
Narrator/Host
edwina Mountbatten died in the jungles of Borneo. The year was 1960 and she was all alone with. 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 British Empire, the first prime Minister of a free India. His name was Jawaharlal Nehru. Now this fascinating love triangle is so pertinent when it comes to pre partition India politics and we're gonna be delving right in a miniseries, a four parter for you and it's only available to members of our club. So if that isn't you, what you need to do is right away get to empirepoduk.com that's empirepoduk.com and for the price of a coffee, come join our club. And as if you needed any more incentive, let me tell you, our very special guest is the marvellous Alex von Tunzelman, who is the author of Indian Summer. So. So what are you waiting for? Come on.
- [01:29]
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William Durham
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William Durham
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- [02:23]
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- [02:37]
William Durham
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 Nvidia in market capitalization. The story will take us through some extraordinary 17th century financial espionage. The colonization 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 consolation prize of New York. Just me. Today, I'm afraid Anita has another project, but I am here with one of my great friends, Harald van den Linde.
- [03:24]
Harald van den Linde
Harold, welcome to Empire. Well, thanks for having me on the podcast, William.
- [03:28]
William Durham
First of all, we need to talk about the voc, and I can't even pronounce it in Dutch. I'll have a go. Virnichte Ost Indian company. How was that?
- [03:41]
Harald van den Linde
Yeah, that's a decent try for an Englishman, I would say.
- [03:44]
William Durham
I'm a Scot. I'm a Scot, Yeah.
- [03:47]
Harald van den Linde
Oh, yeah, that's a decent try for a Scot. I'd say that in Dutch it is. Vereinigte oost indisse compagnie vait aussay.
- [03:54]
William Durham
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 Herold is going to be guiding us through the founding of it, something which Herold 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.
- [04:20]
Harald van den Linde
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. A book about the history of Jakarta,
- [04:44]
William Durham
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.
- [04:56]
Harald van den Linde
No, absolutely. That's sort of an extension of your Golden Road, and that goes into Indonesia and it's the making of Indonesia. And there's a lot of indic sort of influences, Hindu and Buddhist, that are in there. That's the Majapahit Empire. That's correct.
- [05:09]
William Durham
We should also say that you are married to a lovely lady from Indonesia who you've just reunited with. After our Sibachian trip.
- [05:17]
Harald van den Linde
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.
- [05:30]
William Durham
Harald, let's paint the very 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 their 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?
- [05:55]
Harald van den Linde
Different provinces in the Netherlands that are coming together, they're Protestants to a certain extent, allied 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 Maurits 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 emerge.
- [06:31]
William Durham
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.
- [06:55]
Harald van den Linde
Yeah, we almost have to go back about a hundred years. So in 1498, Vasco da 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 cloves and nutmeg and cinnamon and porcelain, making vast
- [07:22]
William Durham
fortunes in the process.
- [07:23]
Harald van den Linde
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.
- [07:36]
William Durham
Presumably the spices are rather more expensive than the herring and the beer.
- [07:40]
Harald van den Linde
Yeah, yeah. Large quantities of herringer 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 emerge is 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.
- [08:11]
William Durham
Yes, we kind of assume that you just got sort of maps even if you haven't got Google maps, then you probably presume that you've got something. But that is not the case. The Dutch simply do not have maps of Asia. There are none in Western Europe beyond the very secretively kept Portuguese maps.
- [08:28]
Harald van den Linde
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 the 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. 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 try to get through it, through espionage.
- [08:54]
William Durham
So we are opening this series with one of the great stories of industrial espionage in history. It is, it is an absolutely world changing story because the results of this are not only that the Dutch get accessed to India and the Indies, by which they mean modern Indonesia, but also the English, because English get their hands on these maps as a result of this story. So take us to Haarlem in 1563 and introduce us to Jan Hugin van Linschoten. How is that?
- [09:29]
Harald van den Linde
Oh, that's very well pronounced. Very, very good for a Scot. So in 1563, a boy is born, young, and his father has got a job in Enkhuizen, 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 these stories from these 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 dimwit, knowing neither what property is, nor luxury, nor what the world contains. An ignorance which is often the cause of his own ruin.
- [10:15]
William Durham
You get a picture of the man there too, that's sort of impatient and sort of.
- [10:18]
Harald van den Linde
I think he looks a little bit like Van Gogh, the painter Van Gogh, who comes, of course, much later we
- [10:23]
William Durham
in Scotland would call Van Gogh, yeah,
- [10:25]
Harald van den Linde
Van Gogh and the Americans call it Van Gogh or something like that. So Jan van Lieschouten, 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 he's clever or he's lucky, he becomes the secretary to the archbishop, the newly appointed archbishop of Goa, a man called Dom Vincenzo de Fonseca. And my Portuguese is probably not so good. This archbishop is sailing to Goa. And Goa at the time is the epicenter of the Portuguese Empire.
- [10:58]
William Durham
We should explain that it's not at this period a center for trance 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.
- [11:26]
Harald van den Linde
And all the knowledge about how to sail and these sort of things is there. So Jan van Linschuhsen lives there for about six years, from 1583 to 1589.
- [11:36]
William Durham
Are the Portuguese not suspicious of him? The fact that he is Dutch and that he is a Protestant, it doesn't
- [11:42]
Harald van den Linde
seem so much, actually. Jan van Lieschalter writes in his own book that he wants to stay in Goa forever. He changes his mind later.
- [11:47]
William Durham
I know that feeling very well. Every time I go there, I want to stay in. Go forever.
- [11:52]
Harald van den Linde
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 that there were a lot of Portuguese, but seems to be a fairly sort of cosmopolitan place as well.
- [12:09]
William Durham
This 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 Jesuits. 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 the Elizabethan state.
- [12:34]
Harald van den Linde
All sorts of people walk around in Goa. And Johann von Linschouten has unique access to Vaas because he's the secretary of the archbishop. And that's basically with the viceroy 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, that's the ports that they have, and that's how to get to Sylvia and the winds, and details on who to bribe and not to bribe, and these sort of details.
- [13:08]
William Durham
I think it is literally candles at midnight. I remember reading that after the archbishop goes to bed and he's an early bedder. Lynchoten 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 he. I think one day he sees a map and realizes this is, you know, absolutely priceless. If he could somehow find a way of getting it out. Anyway, carry on.
- [13:33]
Harald van den Linde
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 in to go, 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 are doing their own sort of espionage thing with another guy called Cornelius Hauptmann. Cornelius Hauptmann. He will later become the first kind of guy who runs the first voyage, as 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 a 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, Jan van Linschouten comes back into the Netherlands with all of that information.
- [14:43]
William Durham
Do we know how he smuggled it out? I mean, did he. Did he sort of wrap it in, you know, pretend it was something else? What was the.
- [14:49]
Harald van den Linde
I think he put it in some sort of cupboard lately and took it with him. He was a. He went on a boat that sailed back, and it was a boat with spices. They made a stop to make some additional cinnamon, and then they sailed 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 Enkhuizen, 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,
- [15:25]
William Durham
and with maps in it. The maps are in the book?
- [15:28]
Harald van den Linde
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 things these. But you can see the amount of detail that goes into it. Right.
- [15:46]
William Durham
And one thing that happens immediately is that the English, who are also hungry for this sort of information, translate van Linschoten'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.
- [16:06]
Harald van den Linde
So the first book that he then finishes with all these details is given to Cornelius Hauptmann, 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 till you get to the southern port of Sumatra. It's the Strait of Sunda. And there's a town called Banten at the moment, Batam at the time, but Banten 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 veer off a little bit and end up in Mauritius or an island they call Mauritius after the Prince Maurits, which is then ruling the Netherlands at the time. So that's where the name Mauritius comes from.
- [17:18]
William Durham
I didn't know that. It's a Dutch prince, Mauritius.
- [17:21]
Harald van den Linde
Exactly. It's named after the Dutch royal family at the time. But anyway, he ends up there, Kunailes Hauptmann in Indonesia. He buys the spices. He's also pretty much immediately, maybe in 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 some of these spices and bring them back to Amsterdam.
- [17:43]
William Durham
And the profits are beyond imagination, aren't they?
- [17:47]
Harald van den Linde
Actually? No, at that time, not. 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 thereafter. The second one here, via Mauritius and other trips, they are incredibly profitable. And in Holland, all sorts of cities. Enkhuizen, Amsterdam, southern part of Zealand, they all want to do this and set up their own expeditions. We call them the Four Companion, just before the VOC has been established. And they go on their own, even competing with each other to get to the East.
- [18:37]
William Durham
So there's very important chronology to get right here. So it's the first Dutch voyages, which Harold.
- [18:43]
Harald van den Linde
The first One is in 1595 and arrives in Indonesia, what is now Indonesia, in 1596, and they get back in, and they get back the year after. So 1597, if I'm not mistaken.
- [18:55]
William Durham
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 sails in 1600, by which stage the Dutch have already done how many voyages?
- [19:13]
Harald van den Linde
I don't know how many they've 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 under 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.
- [19:36]
William Durham
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 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.
- [20:15]
Harald van den Linde
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 make 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 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.
- [20:49]
William Durham
That's true in London too. London you have. And I've looked at the list, I've got the. 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 India 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, you 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 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.
- [21:55]
Harald van den Linde
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 shares 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 conveyance or transfer of shares years 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 stake. So you meet somebody says, okay, I'll buy your stake. You come to an agreed price. Then you go to the VOC building, there were two bookkeepers and they would go into the ledgers 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.
- [23:04]
William Durham
You're not waiting five, six years or the possible death of everybody, you know, on the way back through scurvy and.
- [23:09]
Harald van den Linde
Yeah, yeah, 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, that's, that's a pretty decent amount of money.
- [23:37]
William Durham
And this is considerably more than the East India Company. Rather pathetic attempt at raising funds at the same time. Is it 10 times more? What's the.
- [23:48]
Harald van den Linde
It's 50 to 100 times more, depending on what you're looking at. But yeah, yeah, but it's like 100 times more than what the English raised. So it's because that flexibility of trading that made 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.
- [24:17]
William Durham
And what's his motive? He just thinks he can make a huge, huge killing.
- [24:20]
Harald van den Linde
Yeah, he thinks he makes. 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 voc.
- [24:31]
William Durham
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. Got this kind of great sort of floppy mops of hair over both his ears and.
- [24:43]
Harald van den Linde
Yeah, I'm quite jealous of his hair. He's got nice big.
- [24:46]
William Durham
Yeah, you and I can both.
- [24:47]
Harald van den Linde
Shiny locks there.
- [24:48]
William Durham
That.
- [24:49]
Harald van den Linde
Those are long gone for me.
- [24:51]
William Durham
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 iPad.
- [25:05]
Harald van den Linde
Yeah. So in technical terms, this is the first initial public offering, an ipo, as we call it these days.
- [25:12]
William Durham
And this leads to the foundation of the first Bourse, which is a Dutch word. Is it original or is it a French word?
- [25:18]
Harald van den Linde
Yeah. So basically the Dutch would meet on a bridge. If, you know, if you come out of the train station, 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. And it's a street called Varmustraat 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 center 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, De Bourse.
- [26:04]
William Durham
That's literally what a burs means. It just means a wallet.
- [26:06]
Harald van den Linde
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.
- [26:14]
William Durham
I think we should take a break here, Harold. But we've at this crucial moment. So we've got a number of firsts here. We've got the first trips to the East Indies by Northern Europeans. We've got some of the very first public limited companies. 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.
- [26:40]
Harald van den Linde
Absolutely. But there's a couple of other firsts as well that we need to talk about. But let's take a break first.
- [26:50]
William Durham
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- [29:00]
Harald van den Linde
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- [29:11]
William Durham
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- [29:13]
Harald van den Linde
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- [29:20]
William Durham
Welcome back, Harold. You were going to tell us about the other great firsts that the VOC score at this point.
- [29:27]
Harald van den Linde
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 voc, the company. And he does something else. He puts a couple of people together and he wants now the share price to go down.
- [29:50]
William Durham
Why does he want the share price to go down?
- [29:53]
Harald van den Linde
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.
- [30:08]
William Durham
It's a short.
- [30:08]
Harald van den Linde
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 sell it. He then puts rumors in the market.
- [30:16]
William Durham
He's got to that pub over the bridge again.
- [30:18]
Harald van den Linde
Yeah, exactly. You go to the bridge and say, I hear there's a big storm and these ships are not coming. They're not coming back.
- [30:24]
William Durham
They've all been eaten by cannibals.
- [30:25]
Harald van den Linde
Yeah, exactly. So people get worried. They sell their shares as well. The price goes down and because he borrowed a share, he buys them back at a lower price and gives them back. So that's a way of making money.
- [30:36]
William Durham
He's a terrible crook.
- [30:37]
Harald van den Linde
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 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.
- [30:57]
William Durham
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, Harald, and tell me whether I'm wrong, is that first of all, the Dutch are better sailors and 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.
- [31:28]
Harald van den Linde
Yeah, that's right. So they are probably about 50 years. Because it's only, I think, at about 50 years later that the English set up a similar sort of stock exchange
- [31:36]
William Durham
after William of Orange has come over. The glorious revolution.
- [31:40]
Harald van den Linde
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.
- [31:48]
William Durham
Is that right? Mumbai Stock Exchange is the first in Asia.
- [31:51]
Harald van den Linde
Mumbai under a banyan tree, by the way, and it's now called Dallao 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 float, and it's 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 kind of 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 four, 30 to 40 that they have in other ships. And they industrialized it. So even now in Amsterdam, there's areas, they call it Oosterdoc, amongst others, where people made these ships on a sort of industrial way, continuous sort of way,
- [32:48]
William Durham
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. Empire. And this is something now that the Dutch really get going and the Brits again are behind that, we will have Deptford 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 important it is. But anyway, we're jumping ahead of the story now.
- [33:21]
Harald van den Linde
The Devil Shits Dutchman is what Samuel Pippitts actually wrote down. I think at some point in time when they came up to Thames.
- [33:27]
William Durham
Quite right. The perfect description by Samuel Pepys. 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.
- [33:48]
Harald van den Linde
Absolutely. So they make 4800 journeys between Amsterdam and Asia. About a million people are being transported.
- [33:59]
Narrator/Host
A million people.
- [33:59]
Harald van den Linde
That's a hell of 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.
- [34:20]
William Durham
We should say here that again, people assume that the early British in India had this in the enormous manpower. But half a century after the Battle of Plassey 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 to.
- [34:54]
Harald van den Linde
But with a few of your friends and mates, it's much better. That's right, exactly but the amount of cargo they ship over the Dutchies in these company ships over the VOC is enormous, about two and a half 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 greatest trading company in the history of mankind. It's enormous.
- [35:24]
William Durham
Extraordinary. Extraordinary. And of course, one of the reasons for this is that there are some brilliant English personnel working under the Dutch, including a man called Henry Hudson. Tell us about him.
- [35:35]
Harald van den Linde
In the 1590s, when we still in the espionage and the first voyages, the Dutch also thought that you could sail north and then end up in Asia. So they had a couple of expeditions. They all got stuck in the ice. There's a very famous one with a
- [35:51]
William Durham
guy called Willem Barnes, as in the Bering Sea. They all get eaten by polar bears. There's some terrible disaster.
- [35:57]
Harald van den Linde
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 the sea. So it's all a disaster. But they try again in the early 1600s, 1609, if I'm not mistaken, and an Englishman sails and then goes west from the Netherlands towards what's now Canada, Hudson Bay. And he hugs what is now the American, American coast and sees a big river and a mixer stops there, goes inland and calls it the Hudson River.
- [36:28]
William Durham
And he finds a small island which is named Manhattan.
- [36:32]
Harald van den Linde
Manhattan. And if you are Dutch and you 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 Wall was, which is now, of course, the biggest stock market market in the world. So the. The Dutch fingerprints are there as well.
- [36:52]
William Durham
Huh? 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 disarmingly talks about as gnats Nuts. Anyway, we'd be hearing more about that afterwards, but that results in obviously, Manhattan ending up in English ads. But we'll get there. We'll get there eventually.
- [37:12]
Harald van den Linde
You'll get that later.
- [37:13]
William Durham
But tell us now about. And again, I get to probably get his name wrong. Another of these crucial characters, Jan Peterson Cohen.
- [37:22]
Harald van den Linde
Yeah, so Jan Peterson Kohn is from the town of Hoorn, which is just close to Enkhuizen, where our friend Jan van Linschoten's 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 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 get things gone. Other people consider him to be a genocidal maniac. And without doubt, Maoz is going to talk about that. There's some really horrific stuff.
- [38:11]
William Durham
Both of these are true, in fact, aren't they?
- [38:13]
Harald van den Linde
Both of them are true, indeed. Not so long ago, his statue is still in the city of Hoorn. 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 plaque beneath it saying that this guy was also a genocidal maniac.
- [38:38]
William Durham
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 be to me, a fair. A fair solution to this.
- [39:03]
Harald van den Linde
Absolutely. You can't ignore history. We just have to acknowledge.
- [39:06]
William Durham
No. Should we forget 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 anything we were getting up to in Sumatra. But tell us the story.
- [39:33]
Harald van den Linde
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 Peterson Kuhn is in control, you could say, of. Of the operations in what is now called Jakarta. It's called Jayakarta in those days.
- [39:50]
William Durham
Victory City.
- [39:51]
Harald van den Linde
Yeah, yeah. It means Victorious City, and there's a whole reason for that, is related to Majapahit, but. But we don't want to go there. But there are basically three parties. So you got the Dutch there, and they use Jayakarta as the sort of places where they have warehouses. So they stop and then they go onto 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 Chillibung 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 a 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 Japanese want both of them out. Now, at one point in time, the English are in the. 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.
- [41:02]
William Durham
As a Scotsman, I have to say that this sounds right. The English do this sort of thing.
- [41:06]
Harald van den Linde
It sounds exactly. Sounds very right, yes. So a brawl, 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 Peterson Koon says, listen, we. We're gonna. This is not gonna end up very well for us. I'm gonna go to the Molucca Islands. 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 1618, 1619, which
- [41:41]
William Durham
is still there in Batavia today. And it's the. It's the Maritime Museum, isn't it?
- [41:46]
Harald van den Linde
Yeah, it's very close to the Maritime Museum. And if you. 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 Jan Peterson with reinforcements is going to be back. This is not going to work out well for us. So what do you do? You got to drink gin and you're gonna have a big party. And that's where the orgies come in. And I'll leave it to people's imagination what all of the stuff they did.
- [42:19]
William Durham
What I do want you to be explicit about though, Harold, we can leave the orgies, as you say, to one side, but the Djinn, we should definitely focus in.
- [42:28]
Harald van den Linde
Gin 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 kick the Dutch out. And it takes them so long that eventually the reinforcements of the Dutch come back in. Young Peterson Kuhn is back.
- [42:49]
William Durham
Kuhn comes with his new men.
- [42:52]
Harald van den Linde
Exactly. And then they kick the English out and they pushed the Javanese back and burned down the whole city, Jayakarta. And on top of it, they built a whole new city, a castle and a city they call Batavi. That is really sort of the making of modern Jakarta as well.
- [43:11]
William Durham
And today when you go to Jakarta, Batavia is really just a suburb, isn't it? It's kind of. It's a historic suburb on the edge of the city.
- [43:20]
Harald van den Linde
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 Jakarta that you walk around in a Dutch city, actually there's a cafe called Batavia. It's really, really nice. It's really interesting to walk around. You can still see the remnants of the castle there as well.
- [43:38]
William Durham
That's right, sorry. And the gin, we have to focus in on the gin then. So Dutch courage is a reference to this.
- [43:45]
Harald van den Linde
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 never 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 enormous run, 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 struggling with the Spanish. And. 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.
- [44:31]
William Durham
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 is named. Is. Has a misleadingly Dutch name.
- [44:43]
Harald van den Linde
Yeah. And he's got this beautiful Dutch shaped old bottle to refer back to that old heritage. That's right, yeah.
- [44:50]
William Durham
The Scots take these clever ideas years and develop them and then make that make their money.
- [44:55]
Harald van den Linde
But the Dutch gin at the time actually looks like a Scotch whisky. It's yellowish, it's malty, it's very much like. It's very different than the gin that you would think about now.
- [45:03]
William Durham
Do people make a version of it today? Have you drunk an old gin, so to speak?
- [45:07]
Harald van den Linde
Oh, I've drunk many old gins and I think at some point in time we should try to do that together as well.
- [45:12]
William Durham
We should also say that one of Harold's amazing qualities is that you are. You're a nose. Are you? You, you've got a. 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. Is one of your magic tricks.
- [45:30]
Harald van den Linde
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.
- [45:38]
William Durham
While the rest of us were making sourdough bread, you were busy studying and
- [45:43]
Harald van den Linde
advanced wine and wine.
- [45:45]
William Durham
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 voc. Because when I was researching this, I came across Van der Lindes. So it's not just the Rimples who are out in East India companies, they have their Dutch counterparts.
- [46:02]
Harald van den Linde
No, absolutely. So they build up this new city, Batavia, and there's a nice quote from Jan Peterson Kund, when he writes a letter back to Amsterdam, says you got to send people over because. Because the only people that come over here, it's all riff raff. I don't want them. I want people of good station or good quality statue. Good quality. Exactly. And he needs ladies. He needs women as well. And for whatever reason, Barbara van der Linde is popping up. She comes up in the records. So she arrives in Batavia around 1650.
- [46:36]
William Durham
She's really early. She's really early.
- [46:38]
Harald van den Linde
She's really early. It's a frontier town. It's a rough frontier town in those
- [46:43]
William Durham
days with very bad mortality rates. Everyone died in Batavia. It was famous for its malaria and. Or they didn't know it was malaria.
- [46:50]
Harald van den Linde
Exactly. All sorts of malaria and all sorts of diseases were going around.
- [46:53]
William Durham
Yeah.
- [46:54]
Harald van den Linde
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, 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.
- [47:22]
William Durham
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.
- [47:29]
Harald van den Linde
Absolutely. So he's a sort of genocidal maniac probably as well. So in 17, 1942, he, this guy van der Linde, 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 whereby the Dutch go around and kill all the Chinese, elderly Chinese, younger Chinese babies. They drown them with their swords and knives. They kill them.
- [48:03]
William Durham
What's the excuse for that? Why are they on this killing spree?
- [48:07]
Harald van den Linde
Because Batavia was actually a reasonable sized 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 happening that there were all sorts of nervousness and tensions between the Chinese and the Dutch. So this, there's a spark in suddenly, 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 Glodoc. 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, is still hanging there in 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 foundry book in the Netherlands that relates to that.
- [49:14]
William Durham
Yeah, it doesn't say megalomaniac psychopath as one of his.
- [49:19]
Harald van den Linde
No, that's. They've omitted that. Just like with John Peter Sokoon. 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.
- [49:36]
William Durham
You and I seem to have these war criminals in our, in our past. They're not us, but they are ours. And you know, 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 original.
- [50:00]
Harald van den Linde
Different countries, the ruins, as somebody once written, are everywhere, including in our own family.
- [50:07]
William Durham
Harold, thank you very, very much. That's all for today. The next episode is going to be 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 Durham.
- [50:42]
Harald van den Linde
And for me, I want to say Anita, but it's Harold Van Der Linde this time.
- [50:51]
William Durham
Why did we really go to war with Iraq?
- [50:54]
Advertiser/Commercial Voice
And did Saddam Hussein really have weapons of mass destruction?
- [50:58]
William Durham
I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist.
- [51:01]
Advertiser/Commercial Voice
And I'm David McCloskey, author and former CIA analyst. We are the hosts of the Rest Is Classified. And in our latest series, we are telling the true story of one of history's biggest intelligence failures. Iraq WMD.
- [51:14]
Harald van den Linde
In 2003, the US and UK told
- [51:17]
William Durham
the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But they were wrong.
- [51:23]
Advertiser/Commercial Voice
This wasn't a simple lie. It was something far more complicated, far more interesting and far more dangerous.
- [51:29]
William Durham
Spies who believe their sources, politicians who wanted the public to believe in the threat, and a dictator who couldn't prove he'd already destroyed the weapons.
- [51:40]
Advertiser/Commercial Voice
In this series, we go deep inside the CIA and MI6, go into the rooms where decisions were made and look at the sources who fabricated the intelligence that took us to war.
- [51:52]
William Durham
The Iraq war reshaped the Middle east and permanently weakened public trust in governments and intelligence agencies and and its consequences are still playing out today.
- [52:01]
Advertiser/Commercial Voice
Plus, in a Declassified Club exclusive, we are joined by three people who are at the heart of the decision to go to war. Former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, Tony Blair's former communications director Alistair Campbell and former acting head of the CIA, Michael Morell.
- [52:17]
William Durham
So get the full story by listening to the rest is classified and subscribing to the Declassified Club. Wherever you get your podcasts.