Discovering Asia: continuing the series on early voyages
from the collection of the Royal Geographical Society
of South Australia
The Stolen East Indian
“Rutters”
How the Dutch Broke the Portuguese Trade Monopoly
During most of the 16th century the East Indian
trade routes of the Portuguese remained a closely guarded secret. However, the
demand for spices in Europe was too strong for their unwieldy supply system,
and by the last decade of the century the Dutch, notably Jan van Linschoten,
Cornelis de Houtman, and Jacob van Neck, had discovered the routes. The
Portuguese were too firmly established on the West Coast of India, where the
huge pepper trade was centred, for the Dutch to make much impression there, but
the fabled “Spice Islands” were a different story. There they could get the
important three spices of cloves, nutmeg and mace. Pepper, which had been grown
and traded in Java, Sumatra, and the Malay Peninsula for centuries, was also
available in large quantities.
“Typvs orbi terrarvm”: map of the world
from the first
English edition of Linschoten’s Itinerario:
Iohn Huighen van Linschoten his Discours of
voyages into ye Easte & West Indies.
Printed at
London By Iohn Wolfe, [1598]. Library of Congress.
THE MAN WHO GAVE THE DUTCH THE
ROUTE TO THE EAST INDIES:
LINSCHOTEN
Linschoten is one of the most important
names in the history of Dutch exploration—far more important to the Dutch
economy than was Abel Tasman. It was due directly to him that the Dutch got to
know of the Portuguese routes to the East and were thus able to break the
Portuguese monopoly on trade with Asia—in particular, the enormously lucrative
spice trade.
Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (1563-1611)
emigrated from Holland to Seville in Spain when he was still in his teens,
joining his brothers who had gone there earlier, and then going to the
Portuguese city of Lisbon, one of the most important trading ports of Europe.
Having got an appointment as Secretary to the new Archbishop of the Portuguese
colony of Goa, on the western coast of India, he sailed there on a Portuguese
ship in 1583. There he kept a diary, full of descriptions of people and places
he saw, and of stories other people told him of places even further east. More
importantly for the history of exploration, he also illicitly copied Portuguese
nautical maps.
He left India in 1590 when the archbishop
died. The ship was attacked by English pirates and wrecked, and Linschoten was
forced to spend two years in the Azores, finally getting back to Lisbon in
1592. The books he wrote when he was back in Holland had a huge impact on Dutch
navigation and hence trade. The second, larger work, which incorporated the
text of the first, was “an exposé” that “turned out to be a bestseller, not
only in Holland but in England and France, too.” (Krondl, The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of
Spice, 2008, p.140). Why? Not only because Linschoten was a fascinating and
colourful writer, but because he provided a route to the East Indies which
would open up the Far East to an onslaught of Dutch mariners and traders.
Sixty-Seven Pirated Route
Guides
Linschoten’s astounding achievement was to
provide Dutch navigators with the text of sixty-seven Portuguese or Spanish
pilots’ roteiros. The contemporary
English was “rutters” or “ruters.” If we used the word today it would be
“routers.” It means precisely that: guides enabling the navigators to find
their bearings from one port to another, in an age when there was no exact
method of calculating longitude. Linschoten’s pirated “rutters” gave the Dutch
a huge number of routes, covering Portugal to Goa, and thence the Strait of
Malacca in the East Indies, the route to Macao, the coasts of Siam (Thailand),
“Kambodja” and “Anam” in Southeast Asia, the route from Java to China, the
Chinese coast and Japan. Also, crucially, the rutters gave the routes to the
Spice Islands, covering the area east of Sumatra to “Bantam”, that is, Banten,
near the western end of Java, a strategically important site and a major
trading city, with a secure harbour on the Sunda Strait. The Dutch would use this
route as a way to the Spice Islands of the Moluccas further east, avoiding the
Portuguese-dominated Strait of Malacca.
Linschoten’s first book, containing the
rutters and some accounts of eastern voyages, was published in Dutch as Reys-gheschrift van de navigatien der
Portugaloysers in Orienten... (Amsterdam, 1595) (“Travel Accounts of
Portuguese Navigation in the Orient”). It was then included in the much fuller Itinerario: Voyage ofte schipvaert van Jan
Huyghen van Linschoten naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien, 1579-1592 (1596)
(“Travel Account of the Voyage of the Sailor Jan Huyghen van Linschoten to
Portuguese East India”), which was translated, reprinted and adapted by other
chroniclers many times over the next forty-odd years.
Portrait of Linschoten
(The Voyage...,
Hakluyt Society ed., 1885, vol, 1,
frontis., reproduced from the English ed. of
1598)
Linschoten did not stay at home after this:
his later life was as exciting as his early years. He sailed on two expeditions
with Willem Barentsz, the Dutch cartographer and explorer, in search of a
Northeast Passage to the East above Siberia. Linschoten was one of the two
crewmembers who published journals on Barentsz’s travels.
Linschoten: Early
Texts
The RGSSA Library holds Latin translations
of Linschoten’s work on the East and some accounts of other early Dutch
ventures to the East Indies in Parts II, III and IV (1599-1601) of the
important collection of early travel narratives collated and published by the
De Bry brothers, known as “India Orientalis” or “Petits voyages.”
BRY, Johann Theodor de, 1561-1623?
[India Orientalis. Pt. 2. Latin]
II. pars Indiae Orientalis, in qva Iohan.
Hvgonis Lintscotani nauigatio in Orientem, item regna, littora, portus,
flumina, apparentiae, habitus moresque Indorum & Lusitanorum pariter in
Oriente degentium: praeterea merces, monetae, mensurae, & pondera, quae
quibus in locis, quóve compendio prostent, accurate proponuntur. Ea Lintscotvs
ipse spectator atq; autor primùm vernaculo sibi idiomate Belgice in publicum
dedit: deinde superioribus Germanis Germanice, & nunc Latinis item auribus
Latine vtcunq, reddita enunciauit. Francofordii, ex officina Wolffgangi
Richteri, 1599
(York Gate Library 2044)
BRY, Johann Theodor de, 1561-1623?
[India Orientalis. Pt. 3. Latin]
Tertia pars Indiae Orientalis: qua
continentur I. Secunda pars nauigationum à Ioanne Hvgone Lintschotano Hollando
in Orientem susceptarum ... II. Nauigatio Hollandorum in insulas Orientales,
Iavan & Svmatram ... III. Tres nauigationes Hollandorum in modò dictam
Indiam per Septentrionalem seu glacialem oceanum ... Fideli stvdio et opera de
Germanico in Latinum translata, & bono ordine disposita à Bilibaldo
Strobaeo Silesio. Adiectae svnt huic operi multae eaeqve accuratissima tabula
seu mappa chorographica. Francofvrti, excudebat Matthaeus Beckerus, 1601.
(York Gate Library 2045)
BRY, Johann Theodor de, 1561-1623?
[India Orientalis. Pt. 4. Latin]
Pars qvarta Indiae Orientalis: qva
primvm varij generis animalia, fructus, abores: item, aromata seu species & materialia: similiter &
margarita seu uniones, ac gemmarum species pleraqz, sicut in India tum
effodiantur, tum generentur; quo itidem in censu, pretio & appellatione
sint, accuratè describuntur. Per Ioannem Hvgonem Lintschotanum, & nonnullos
alios. Descriptioni huic adiectae nonnullibi sunt annotationes clariss. Dn.
Bernhardi Palvdani ..., apprimè vtiles & eruditae. Secvndo: Nouissima
Hollandorum in Indiam Orientalem nauigatio, ad veris Anni 1598 introitum
suscepta, & quatuor exinde reducibus nauibus mense Iulio An. 1599 confecta,
exponitur. Francofurti, apud Matthaevm Becker, 1601.
(York Gate Library 2046)
Two early depictions of “Bantam” (Banten):
above, Shipping; below, Foreign merchants
(India
Orientalis, Pt. 3)
The De Bry family was responsible for publishing
some of the greatest collections of travel narratives of the late 16th and
early 17th centuries. Theodor de Bry (1528-1598), the father, started off in
life as a goldsmith and engraver. When the first accounts of Dutch, Spanish and
English explorers in Asia and the Americas began to be published in the 1580s,
De Bry became interested in producing illustrated editions of them. He was born
in Liège but fled to Strasbourg around 1570 when the Spanish invaded the Low
Countries. He travelled to France and England in the 1580s, meeting the English
geographer and historian Richard
Hakluyt. It was not until he was in his sixties, by which time he was settled
with his family in Frankfurt-am-Main, that he published his first great set of
books, America, or Les grands voyages, as they have become
It is the second set, India Orientalis, that deals with the exploration of the East
Indies. Theodor de Bry died well before it was completed and it was his sons,
Johann Theodor de Bry (1561-1623) and Johann Israel de Bry (d.1611), who
followed in his footsteps and issued this large set of volumes, which certainly
merits more than the title by which it has become known to bibliophiles: Les petits voyages.
India
Orientalis is probably
the greatest single collection of material on early voyages to the East Indies,
and is unique in its extraordinary wealth of cartographical and visual material
on Africa, India, the Spice Islands, and South Asia.
Linschoten: Translations,
Reprints & Facsimiles of Early Texts
Linschoten, Jan Huygen van, 1563-1611
[Itinerário. English]
The voyage of John Huyghen van Linschoten
to the East Indies: from the old English translation of 1598, the first
book, containing his description of the East, edited, the first volume by the
late Arthur Coke Burnell ; the second volume by P.A. Tiele. London, Printed for
the Hakluyt Society, 1885. (Works issued by the Hakluyt Society; no. 70-71) 2
vols.
This edition of the Itinerario, translated into
English in 1598, was published by the Hakluyt Society in 1885 using an
edited version of the early translation, supplemented with explanatory notes.
It is a rich source of information about Portuguese trade with the East Indies,
as well as descriptions of the fauna, flora
and indigenous peoples of the regions Linschoten visited or learned
about. Small wonder that his book was so popular in so many languages in its
day: it is detailed, thorough, and extremely colourful.
Here are Linschoten’s descriptions of mace
and cloves from the Hakluyt Society edition’s English translation. They are so
vivid you can almost see and smell them!
Of Mace, Folie, or Flowers of Nutmegges, and Nutmegges
... The fruite is altogether like great round Peaches, the inward
part whereof is the Nutmegge. This hath about it a hard shell like wood,
wherein the Nut lyeth loose: and this wooden shel or huske is covered over with
Nutmeg flower, which is called Mace, and over it is the fruite, which without
is like the fruite of a Peach. When it is ripe it is a verie costly meate, and
of a most pleasant savor. ... When the Nuttes begin to be ripe, then they
swell, and the first shell or huske bursteth in peeces, and the Nutmegge
flowers doe continue redde, as Scarlet, which is a verie faire sight to behold,
if the trees bee full of fruite. Sometimes also the Mace breaketh, which is the
cause that the Nutmegges come alltogether without the Mace, and when the
Nutmegge drieth, then the Mace falleth off, and the red changeth into Orenge
colour, as you see by the Mace that is brought hether. The Ilands where they
grow, specially Banda, are very unholesome countries, as also the Ilands of
Maluco, many that traffique thether die or are in great perill of their lives,
by sicknesse, notwithstanding great gaine maketh men to travel thether.
This is what mace looks like when the
outer, peach-like husk is just about to fall off:
Linschoten just nailed it, didn’t he?
And “Of Cloves” he writes:
Cloves are by the Turkes, Persians, Arabians, and most part of the
Indians called Calafur, and in the Ilands of Maluco, where they are only found
and do grow Chamke. These Ilands are five, lying under the Equinoctiall line,
as in the descriptions thereof is declared. They have nothing else but Cloves,
which are caried from thence, throughout the world, the trees whereon they
grow, are like Bay trees, the blossomes at the first white, then greene, and at
the last red and hard which are the Cloves, and when the blossomes are greene,
they have the pleasantest smell in all the world.
I’ll end this entry on Linschoten, whom I
found to be one of the most fascinating of the early European writers on the
“discovery” of Asia, with the sort of meat recipe that would have been eaten in
Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. This is an English recipe which uses several
spices, including cloves. Today in English cookery cloves are almost entirely
confined to cakes and desserts.
Bibliophiles, please skip!
(From: A
Noble boke off cookry ffor a prynce houssolde or eny other estately houssolde: reprinted verbatim from a rare ms. in the
Holkham collection, edited by Mrs. Alexander Napier. London: Elliot Stock,
1882.)
“Buknad” or “buknadde,” etc., was just a
name for a veal stew thickened with eggs. The modern English spelling would be:
To make buknade,
take veal small and veal parboiled, then gather up the flesh and strain the
broth through a strainer and put it in to the pot and set it on the fire and
put thereto onions minced, powder of pepper, powder of cloves and canelle
[cinnamon], and in the boiling put in the flesh; then take raw yolks in a bowl
and cast thereto the heated broth and mele [mix] it well together and in the
setting down put in the egg and stir it together in the setting down and give
it a little colour of saffron and salt it and serve it.
Today we’d probably brown the small veal
pieces before stewing them. I think it’d be yummy! No wonder they wanted spices
so much in Linschoten’s day.
Note: Early
recipes never give you precise quantities. Be careful with the cloves: of all
the spices it’s cloves which can very easily dominate and overpower a dish. If
you try it, watch how you mix the “het brothe” with the bowl
of egg yolks “in the setting down.” I'm not sure exactly what the writer is
trying to describe here, but I think it’s the way we’d approach it today, which
is to add a little of the hot spiced meat liquid to the egg yolks, stirring well,
and then, with the pan off the heat, slowly add the egg mixture to the stew,
stirring all the time, until the egg is well mixed in and not curdled. If
necessary, you can then reheat it gently on a low heat to thicken it up a
little.
--
This post was researched and created by Kathy Boyes
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