Lodewijk Heyns was a Dutch renegade (renegate) who, together with Gerard Leroy, Jan Banninck Coeckebakcker, Jan Jansz. Moll and presumably Lemaire, outfitted the French Saint-Malo expedition’s two ships St. Michel and St. Louis — the ships whose Atjeh pepper cargo was eventually confiscated by Coen’s forces at Jakatra in 1618 (see St. Michel affair at Atjeh (1620-1621)). Heyns himself remained in Atjeh while his brother Michiel Heyns died in the Strait of Malakka on the St. Louis.
The conspiracy
The two ships of the Saint-Malo expedition — the St. Michel and the St. Louis — were “van Hollanders gekocht” (bought from Hollanders) and “uitgerust door renegaten” (outfitted by renegades): Lodewijk Heyns, Gerard Leroy, Jan Banninck Coeckebakcker, Jan Jansz. Moll and presumably Lemaire — “het stel samenzweerders tegen de Nederlandsche Oost-Indische Compagnie” (the gang of conspirators against the Dutch East India Company). The choice of French colours was itself part of the intrigue: the conspirators intended to trade under French flags in waters the VOC claimed as its own.
Atjeh and the Strait of Malakka, 1617-1618
The two ships were signalled already when they lay at Atjeh — where the St. Michel took on a full cargo of pepper. They then sailed through the Strait of Malakka, called at Malakka, and were scattered by storm and current. Lodewijk Heyns’s brother — Michiel Heyns — died in the Strait of Malakka of the red flux (roode loop), with many others whose names do not concern us here. Michiel Heyns may, Godee Molsbergen notes, be remembered by the French as perhaps the very first who for France traded at Pondichéry in July 1617 in indigo, diamonds and cloths.
Lodewijk remains at Atjeh
While the St. Louis — with Michiel Heyns aboard — sailed on through the Strait, Lodewijk Heyns himself “was in Atjeh gebleven” — remained at Atjeh. His remaining at Atjeh while his brother sailed on is one of the small human details of the Saint-Malo expedition’s Atjeh call: it suggests that Heyns had business or interests at the sultanate that kept him there beyond the simple loading of the pepper cargo. He thus survived his brother and was not aboard the St. Louis when Michiel died of the red flux.
Significance
For Atjeh’s history, Lodewijk Heyns is significant as the Dutch renegade whose Atjeh sojourn and whose outfitting of the St. Michel produced one of the principal French intrusions into the Atjeh pepper trade of the early seventeenth century. His choice to remain at Atjeh while his brother sailed on also testifies to the sultanate’s role as a place where European renegades could find refuge or commercial opportunity outside the structures of the chartered companies. The Atjeh court’s willingness to host such figures — and to sell them pepper — was one of the factors that made the sultanate a persistent rival to the VOC’s commercial ambitions in northern Sumatra.
See Also
- Hans de Decker
- Jan Pieterszoon Coen
- Laurens Reaal
- St. Michel affair at Atjeh (1620-1621)
- 1617
- 1618
- Acheh
Source
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), chapter LI (“De Compagnie in Bantam. Fransche Concurrentie. Moeilijkheden met de Franschen. Hans de Decker”), pp. 184–188 of the numbered-letter sequence.