Verhoeff's Malaka expedition (1608)

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tagsevent, dutch, portuguese, precolonial, atjeh, djohor, malaka, military, naval, 1608, verhoeff, voc
aliasesVerhoeff at Malaka 1608, Pieter Willemsz Verhoeff Malaka expedition, Second Dutch attempt on Malaka 1608

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Verhoeff’s Malaka expedition of 1608 — the second major Dutch attempt on the Portuguese fortress of Malaka, conducted by Admiraal Pieter Willemsz. Verhoeff with a fleet of nine ships and four jachts that had left Texel on 22 December 1607 and appeared before Malaka on 23 November 1608, with the secret instruction of 11 April 1608 to seize Banda and attack Malaka before the Twelve Years’ Truce froze the military situation in Europe — is the abortive Malaka episode that closed the Dutch-Djohor military alliance of 1606-1610 and marked the strategic turn away from the Strait of Malaka toward the Banda islands. The expedition is treated by Johan van der Woude in his Van der Woude (1948) as the pivot on which the early Dutch-Indies strategy turned from the western to the eastern archipelago.

Background and arrival

The Verhoeff fleet of nine ships and four jachts, “bestaande uit 9 schepen en vier jachten”, had left Texel on 22 December 1607 with Jan Pieterszoon Coen aboard as onderkoopman. The fleet’s secret instruction of 11 April 1608, sent after it by fast jacht and reaching Verhoeff at Bantam on 26 December 1608, committed the VOC to a new monopolistic policy: “de eylanden van Banda op ‘t allerhoochste gerecommandeert”. The fleet had already called at Atjeh on the outward voyage and at Mozambique and Calicut, confirming the Dutch commercial treaties along the Malabar coast. After Malaka, Verhoeff was to sail to the Banda islands to obtain the monopoly by treaty or by force.

The attempt on Malaka

Verhoeff appeared before Malaka on 23 November 1608, having spent some weeks in the Strait of Malaka hunting Portuguese merchant craft and sending word to the Dutch factor at Batoesawer to ask the sultan of Djohor for assistance in an attack on the city. The sultan refused. The Dutch factor, Van den Broeck, reported that no help was to be expected: the sultan, discouraged by the long absence of Dutch fleets after Matelieff’s campaign of 1606, had opened peace negotiations with the Portuguese and was on the point of concluding them. The Portuguese, for their part, set an abandoned hulk ablaze on the roadstead and sent their fleet out to engage the Dutch at Ilha da Pedra — Verhoeff’s men were on shore making sloops — but were quickly driven off. Verhoeff, having taken a couple of Chinese junks as prizes and learning from Batoesawer that no help would come from the sultan, decided against a siege — Malaka had been reinforced since 1606 and the garrison doubled — and at the end of the year raised the blockade and sailed for Djohor.

The Djohor embassy and the failure of the alliance

At Djohor Verhoeff pressed the sultan to honour the second Matelieff accord of 23 September 1606 and to permit the Dutch to build a fort on his territory. The sultan refused. The sultan wrote to Prince Maurits that he had been forced to make peace with the Portuguese because the Dutch had failed to maintain a fleet in his waters: “want oversulcx op wien mogen wy onse hope meer stellen omme der stadt van Malacca weder te vercryghen, soo ‘t selvige accort met den Coninck van Portugal voortganck heeft”. Verhoeff gave the sultan money to rebuild the burned capital and stores of war, left two ships at the river mouth, replaced Van den Broeck with Jacques Obelaer as factor, and sailed for Bantam on 8 February 1609. The two ships stayed at Djohor until November 1609, when the sultan’s peace with the Portuguese was formally proclaimed under trumpet-sound on 16 October 1610 and the Portuguese envoy signed the treaty at Malaka.

The strategic shift to Banda

The expedition’s failure at Malaka forced the strategic turn to the eastern archipelago. Verhoeff, having no prospect at Malaka, sailed to the Banda islands to execute the bewindhebbers’ instruction of 11 April 1608 — the instruction that Coen, still a junior officer aboard the fleet, would later cite as the foundation of the VOC’s monopoly policy. The Banda expedition produced the murder of Verhoeff and forty-six of his men on 22 May 1609 at the Bandanese ambush near Rada — an event that, in Van der Woude’s narrative, fixed the Dutch on the path of coercive monopoly that Coen would later execute. The Malaka expedition, in other words, is the strategic pivot: the abandonment of the western archipelago, the turn to Banda, and the inauguration of the monopoly-by-force policy that would define the VOC for the next two centuries.

Significance

Verhoeff’s Malaka expedition of 1608 is, in Van der Woude’s narrative, the principal instance of the failure of the Dutch-Djohor military alliance and the strategic turn from the Strait of Malaka to the eastern archipelago. The expedition’s outcome — the sultan of Djohor’s separate peace with the Portuguese in 1610, the abandonment of the project to take Malaka, the bewindhebbers’ instruction to seize Banda — set the strategic frame for Coen’s directorship of 1614 and for the entire VOC policy of the 1610s. The expedition also marks the end of the first Dutch-Atjeh-Djohor phase of Dutch strategy in the western archipelago: after 1608, the Dutch would no longer maintain a fleet in the Strait of Malaka in force, and the sultan of Atjeh’s successor was free to attack Djohor in 1613 without Dutch interference. The expedition also produced the secret instruction of 4 May 1609 — “dat men nu sien, dat wy daer mede ons proffyt doen” — that completed the policy framework Coen would inherit, and the experience of the expedition itself, including the murder of Verhoeff at Banda, shaped Coen’s conviction that monopoly could only be obtained by force.

See Also

Source

Coen, Koopman van Heeren Zeventien. Geschiedenis van den Hollandshen Handel in Indië (1598-1614), by Johan van der Woude (Amsterdam: C.V. Uitgeverij v/h C. De Boer Jr., 1948), Hoofdstukken II, V, X (pp. 51-65, 130-131, 312-315).

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