On February 23, 1623, the authorities of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Amboyna (present-day Kota Ambon) arrested Shichizo, a Japanese mercenary whom the Dutch suspected of treachery. Under torture, Shichizo named his co-conspirators, who were all brought in for questioning. Two weeks later, he was beheaded. But along with Shichizo, the Dutch decapitated twenty others, including twelve members of the English East India Company (EIC). Hence a routine investigation quickly become an international incident.
Once the news reached Europe, the English were outraged, because in 1619, both nations had agreed to share the expenses and the profits in the East Indies. Both companies duly printed rival explanations, the English emphasizing the grand guignol aspects and the Dutch their “most civil” torture. The English insisted that it had all been a plot directed from Batavia, if not Amsterdam, to eliminate awkward trading rivals, while the Dutch maintained that the English had been planning to slaughter them. With republications, the dispute over these executions seemed interminable, and only in 1654 did the Dutch finally pay £88,615 in compensation. Even then, the matter was not over. In 1673, John Dryden, the celebrated poet, put the massacre on the London stage. Subsequently, Dutch and English scholars have analyzed the extensive records, only to reiterate one of the two grand narratives.
In Amboina, 1623, Adam Clulow returns to these events, but he carefully avoids either explanation. After all, he argues, there could not have been a vast Dutch plot because VOC officials roundly criticized both the interrogations and the trial. Likewise, the English only confessed after lengthy sessions of waterboarding, and they were never accorded their rights under Dutch law. Instead, using the extensive VOC records, Clulow carefully examines the conditions in the Dutch outpost, nearly 1,300 miles from Batavia/Jakarta and almost a year from Europe.
In sharp contrast with earlier scholars who stressed the power and inevitability of these imperial ventures, Clulow emphasizes the all-pervasive fear that gripped the Dutch officials. The Ambonese were increasingly restive, and the Dutch had no illusions about surviving a mass uprising involving thousands of warriors. To limit the labor demands on the local population, the Dutch imported enslaved people from around the Indian Ocean, and in 1623, there were slightly fewer than two hundred people on Kota Ambon. They, too, might revolt. It is easy to imagine the Dutch alarm when Shichizo fingered Augustine Peres, the captain of the slaves. Further compounding the situation was the VOC's lack of European troops. Desperate for more security, the colonial officials retained Japanese mercenaries, who proved formidable in battle but very difficult to control. Thus, Shichizo was first arrested after he asked very detailed questions about the local defenses, questions that played on Dutch anxieties.
The final ingredient in the volatile mixture in the Dutch fort was the presence of about a dozen EIC employees. They were fellow Protestants and allies in Europe, and both groups frequently dined and socialized together. Nevertheless, the Dutch regarded them as trade rivals, all too eager to betray their kindness. This mass of anxieties boiled over when Shichizo insisted that Abel Price, an Englishman, was organizing the mutiny. Such is Clulow's skill that the reader can sense the panic that these reports caused among the Dutch officials.
While an investigation was one thing, a mass execution was quite another. To explain it, Clulow points to a last-minute change in leadership. The governor, Herman Van Speult, was a veteran administrator. Yet Shichizo's testimony so dismayed him that he left the investigation and trial to Isaaq de Bruyn, the chief legal officer. In the most chilling chapter of the book, Clulow follows de Bruyn in his daily round of tortures. Although De Bruyn projected confidence, he soon proved shockingly ignorant of Dutch law and VOC regulations. He ignored both the checks against wholesale torture and the standard procedure of preparing written questions and recording the prisoners' answers. Above all, his prisoners were denied a chance to validate their confessions after recovering from waterboarding. Poignant indeed were the statements from two Englishmen who used a book and on the back of a letter to protest their cruel treatment and innocence. In the end, the Dutch officials hesitated to execute the Englishmen, knowing full well that the news would strain and possibly rupture the Anglo-Dutch alliance. Van Speult toyed with sending the prisoners to Batavia, where the case could be reviewed. But in the end, mounting anxieties about these interconnected uprisings overcame his reservations, and the prisoners were beheaded.
The most appalling part of the story is not these executions. Rather, it is the Dutch decision that only harsh measures would ensure control of the island and the all-important close trade. Consequently, Van Speult and his successors decimated the Ambonese population.
Clulow won a number of prizes for his first book. He likely will do so again with his second, which emphasizes the polyglot world on Ambon, populated with African and Gujarati laborers, drunken “Hollander women,” “Lusified” Asians, free Dutchmen with mixed-race families, “Javans, Macasars and Portingalls or Spaniards,” Japanese warriors, and a stray Scotsman. Amboina, 1623 deserves the widest possible readership. The story is compelling. So, too, is Clulow's argument about the corrosive effect of fears and anxieties on colonial officials without enough back-up and effectively marooned “on the edge of Empire.”
