Jan Pieterszoon Coen

Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1587–1629) — the fourth Governor-General of the VOC and the principal architect of its territorial and monopolistic policy in the Indonesian archipelago — is the central figure of Johan van der Woude’s Van der Woude (1948), which traces his career from his first voyage under Pieter Willemsz. Verhoeff in 1607 to his directorship of the Bantam-Jacatra factories in 1614 and his ultimate Governor-Generalship. Although Coen’s most famous acts — the conquest of Banda, the founding of Batavia, the Ambonese murder affair of 1623 — lie just outside the period Van der Woude covers, the book’s central argument is that the seeds of Coen’s later policy were sown in his Atjeh-era apprenticeship, when he witnessed at first hand the failures of free competition on the Sumatran and Banda coasts and concluded that monopoly, backed by force, was the only path to profit. In Godee Molsbergen’s account Coen’s Atjeh-related significance lies in his handling of the St. Michel affair — the capture and confiscation of the French ship St. Michel whose pepper cargo had been partly bought in Atjeh.

Early life and first voyage (1607-1610)

Coen sailed from Texel on 22 December 1607 as an onderkoopman on the fleet of nine ships and four jachts under Verhoeff — a fleet “bestaande uit 9 schepen en vier jachten” with 1942 souls aboard. The fleet’s secret instructions, dispatched from Holland on 11 April 1608 and reaching Verhoeff at Bantam on 26 December 1608, committed the Dutch to the new monopolistic policy: in the words of the bewindhebbers, “de eylanden van Banda op ‘t allerhoochste gerecommandeert, als sijnde dese landen der Compagnie daer aen op ‘t alderhoochste gelegen”. Coen was present at the disastrous negotiations at Banda-Neira in 1609 in which Verhoeff and forty-six of his men were murdered by the Bandanese on 22 May 1609 — the event known as “op syn Admiraels Verhoeven leeren bitcharen”. Van der Woude treats this as a formative experience: Coen had “het begin van het treurspel van Banda meegemaakt”, and the lesson he drew was that trade without coercion was a doomed enterprise.

The fleet called at Atjeh on the outward voyage and again at Malaka on 23 November 1608, where Verhoeff — seeking to fulfil his instruction to attack Malaka — found the sultan of Djohor unwilling to help and the Portuguese garrison reinforced after Cornelis Matelieff’s siege of 1606. The Twelve Years’ Truce had just been signed in Europe; the secret instruction of 4 May 1609 directed that “men nu sien, dat wy daer mede ons proffyt doen” — that the truce be exploited to entrench the Company’s position before Spain could regain its strength. Coen’s experience of the Verhoeff voyage taught him both the limits of naval power in the archipelago and the diplomatic complications of trying to fight the Portuguese while at peace with them in Europe.

Director-general of the Bantam-Jacatra factories (1614)

By 1 January 1614, Coen — still only twenty-six — had risen to be director-general of the Bantam and Jacatra factories, the post in which all the threads of the Company’s Asian business converged in his hands. Van der Woude marks this as the decisive moment: “voor het eerst liepen daar alle draden uit Indië en patria in diens handen samen en onder zijn toezicht werden alle gegevens in cijfers in het grootboek uitgedrukt.” The Discours of 1 January 1614 — the long memorandum in which Coen first set out his views to the Heeren Zeventien — was written from this position. Its central complaint was that the bewindhebbers were sending “slechte, onkloeckmoedige menschen” to staff the Indies, and that no amount of commercial skill could compensate for the absence of “deuchtsaem van leven, cloeckmoedich ende groot van verstande”. The Discours explicitly cited Atjeh and Banda as the two theatres in which the policy of free competition had demonstrably failed: at Banda “moet ‘t ondergebracht worden ende moeten aldaer in ‘t veldt domineren”, and at Atjeh the sultan’s balancing policy had kept Dutch pepper prices volatile and the factory precarious.

The Atjeh inheritance

Coen’s Atjeh inheritance was the picture Van der Woude draws in Chapter V. By 1614 the Atjeh trade had lost most of its significance for the Dutch: the sultanate’s pepper was no longer the prime attraction it had been in the 1599–1602 period, when Cornelis de Houtman, Paulus van Caerden, James Lancaster and Joris Spilbergh had all competed for it. The Dutch had learned to draw their pepper from the west coast of Sumatra — Priaman, Tikoe, Pasaman — and from the Bantam-Jacatra region. But the strategic lesson of Atjeh remained: that a sultan who could play Portuguese, Dutch, English and French against each other would never grant a monopoly, and that no factorij on his soil was safe without a fort to back it. The Atjeh experience thus fed directly into the Banda policy that Coen would execute after 1618: trade must be monopolised, forts must be built, and resistance must be crushed.

The St. Michel affair (1617-1618)

Coen’s most direct Atjeh-related action was his handling of the St. Michel affair. The French Saint-Malo expedition’s two ships St. Michel and St. Louis — outfitted by a “gang of conspirators against the Dutch East India Company” including Lodewijk Heyns, Gerard Leroy, Jan Banninck Coeckebakcker, Jan Jansz. Moll and presumably Lemaire — were signalled already when they lay at Atjeh, where the St. Michel (under the “Generaal” Hans de Decker) had already taken on a full cargo of pepper. When the St. Michel was reduced to a wreck five miles below Jakatra and brought under escort before Bantam, Coen — together with his Council — decided to take over the ship with all that was in it, under a proper inventory.

“The pepper, door Coen in een Hollandsch schip geladen, was deels in Atjeh gekocht, deels geroofd uit Voor-Indische vaartuigen door de Franschen” — The pepper, loaded by Coen into a Dutch ship, was partly bought in Atjeh, partly robbed from Voor-Indië vessels by the French. The Atjeh-bought pepper thus entered the Company’s own commercial circuit by confiscation — a striking instance of how the Atjeh trade could be redirected from one European power to another by force.

French piracy under Dutch colours

From Atjeh the report had reached Bantam that the French had committed piracy under the Dutch flag. Goezeratsche and Moorish ships had been seized and plundered. Indeed, in the St. Michel were found two “Prinsenvlaggen” (Prince’s flags), and the cloths the French had brought were actually the printed cotton stuffs of Voor-Indië. That French should thus besmirch the Dutch name could have great consequences at Suratte and elsewhere. The Heeren Zeventien sent copies of sworn declarations to the Sultan — “den Grooten Heere tot Constantinopelen” (the Great Lord at Constantinople) — so that he might know who the guilty parties were, should complaints about the Dutch reach him.

Coen thought of laying hold of the second ship, the St. Louis, until the French should give sufficient surety for the damage they had done as sea-robbers — but he let the plan drop. The St. Michel lay without rudder and without masts at the island that would later be called Onrust. When the Skipper of the St. Michel forced all his people to leave the ship, Coen decided with his Council to take over the ship with all that was in it, under a proper inventory. The pepper, loaded by Coen into a Dutch ship, had been partly bought in Atjeh, partly robbed from Voor-Indië vessels by the French.

The French damages settlement

It was foreseeable, Coen wrote to the Heeren Meesters, that over all this a howl of indignation would arise in Europe from the French side. But logically. The prediction was accurate: when Coen was in Holland in 1623 he wrote that the English and French questions together had cost the Company some sixteen tonnes of gold. The French shipowners eventually received their claimed damages — 550,000 livres — paid out by the VOC. Le Tellier’s grave is in Bantam. Gravé’s grave is in Atjeh.

The broader Atjeh strategy

Coen’s handling of the St. Michel affair must be set in the context of his wider Atjeh strategy. The Atjeh pepper trade was a piece of the larger contest with the English, the French, and the Portuguese for the spice and pepper commerce of the Archipelago. The Sultan of Atjeh had, since 1602, played the European powers off against one another — granting the English permission to maintain a headquarters at Atjeh (see Soury embassy), allowing the French to call at Tikoe and at Atjeh (see Augustin de Beaulieu’s Atjeh mission (1620-1621)), and at the same time maintaining the Dutch lodge and the exclusive Westkust pepper-rights of the VOC. Coen’s strategy was to enforce the Company’s monopoly claims by force where he could, and to absorb the Atjeh pepper trade into the Company’s commercial circuit by confiscation when the French tried to break in.

Significance

Coen’s significance is as the heir of the 1599–1614 decade of commercial frustration and the executor of the monopoly-by-force policy that the bewindhebbers had already authorised. His Atjeh-era apprenticeship taught him that free competition among European nations on Achehnese and Bandanese soil would always drive prices up and profits down, and that the only solution was the exclusion of competitors and the coercion of suppliers. The Atjeh chapter is thus the prologue to the Banda chapter, and the Banda chapter is the prologue to the founding of Batavia in 1619 and the conquests of the 1620s.

For Atjeh’s history specifically, Coen is significant as the Gouverneur-Generaal whose handling of the St. Michel affair — the confiscation of a ship whose pepper cargo had been partly bought in Atjeh — established the practical limits of French (and, by extension, English) intrusion into the Atjeh pepper trade. His strategic understanding that the Atjeh trade was a piece of a larger European contest, and his willingness to enforce the Company’s monopoly claims by confiscation, set the pattern for the VOC’s Atjeh policy for the next several decades. The eventual French damages settlement of 550,000 livres is the monetary measure of the contest.

Sources

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, XI.

Tijdens de O.I. Compagnie, by Dr. E. C. Godee Molsbergen, Oud-Hoogleeraar, Landsarchivaris te Batavia (Amsterdam: N.V. Swets & Zeitlinger Boekhandel en Uitgevers Mij., 1932), chapters L–LIII (“De Compagnie in Bantam. Fransche Concurrentie. Moeilijkheden met de Franschen. Hans de Decker”; “De St. Michel”; “Augustin de Beaulieu en Robert Grave”), pp. 184–197 of the numbered-letter sequence.

tags	person, dutch, colonial, voc, governor-general, 17th-century, atjeh, banda, trade, monopoly, french, st-michel
aliases	Jan Pietersz. Coen, Coen, J. P. Coen, Jan Coen, Director-General Coen, Gouverneur-Generaal Coen

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