The Honourable Company. John Keay
that enough was enough. In January he discussed the dissolution of all the new factories with Coen and by 9 February the order had evidently gone out. Sadly it was once again too late to avert a tragic postscript to the English involvement in the spice trade.
On that same night, while pacing the low parapets of the gloomy Dutch fort at Ambon, a Japanese mercenary in Dutch employ fell into conversation with a Hollander on guard duty. ‘Amongst other talke’, the Japanese asked the Dutchman some pertinent questions about the disposition of the fort’s defences. He was promptly arrested and under torture confessed that he and several other Japanese had been planning a mutiny. Tortured again he implicated the English.
In charge of the English factory on Ambon was none other than Gabriel Towerson who twenty-two years earlier had sailed with Lancaster and been left at Bantam with Scot. Under him were about fourteen other Englishmen – factors, servants, a tailor and a surgeon-cum-barber. On 15 February all were invited to the fort and, suspecting nothing, all attended. They were immediately arrested and imprisoned, some being held in the fort’s dungeons, others aboard ships riding nearby. Next day, and for the whole of the following week, each in turn was tortured.
Remembering how Towerson himself had treated the arsonists at Bantam, the ordeals that he and his men now underwent at the hands of the Dutch fiscal (judge) were not perhaps exceptional. It was indeed a brutal age. On the other hand the subsequent outrage in England, and the embarrassment in Holland, belie the idea that what happened at Ambon was acceptable. Typically the prisoner was spread-eagled on a vertical rack that was in fact a door frame. A cylindrical sleeve of material was then slipped over his head and tightly secured at the neck with a tourniquet.
That done, they poured the water softly upon his head untill the cloth was full up to the mouth and nostrils and somewhat higher; so that he could not draw breath but must withal suck in the water; which still being poured in softly, forced all his inward partes [and] came out of his nose, eares and eyes; and often as it were stifling him, at length took his breath away and brought him to a swoone or fainting.
The prisoner was then freed and encouraged to vomit. Then the treatment began again. After thus being topped up three or four times ‘his body was swollen twice or thrice as big as before, his cheeks like great bladders, and his eyes staring and strutting out beyond his forehead’.
Some got off lightly. As soon as they confessed to whatever role in the plot they were supposed to have played, and as soon as they had implicated Towerson and the other factors, they were returned to their cells. Others proved extremely hard to break. Clark, one of the factors, survived four water sessions and then was subjected to lighted candles being played on the soles of his feet ‘untill the fat dropt and put out the candles’. He still refused to co-operate. The candles were relit and applied to his armpits ‘until his innards might evidently be seene’. ‘Thus wearied and overcome by torment’, he confessed.
So eventually did they all with the possible exception of Towerson whose fate was unknown. He was, however, alive for at the end of the week he was brought forth to hear his men denounce him. Confronted by their commander, ‘that honest and godly man’, according to one of them, ‘who harboured no ill will to anyone, much lesse attempt any such business as this’, most retracted. ‘They fell upon their knees before him praying for God’s sake to forgive them.’
On 25 February they were sentenced; ten were to die; so were nine Japanese and one Portuguese. They were returned to their cells to settle their affairs and say their prayers. In signing (or ‘firming’) a payment release for some small consignment of piece goods, Towerson wrote his last words.
Firmed by the firme of mee, Gabriel Towerson, now appointed to dye, guiltless of anything that can be laid to my charge. God forgive them their guilt and receive me to his mercy, Amen.
Others scribbled on the fly-leaves of their prayer books. ‘Having no better meanes to make my innocence knowne, I have writ this in this book, hoping some good Englishman will see it.’ ‘As I mean, and hope, to have pardon for my sins, I knowe no more than the child unborn of this business.’ ‘I was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where I desire this book may come that my friends may knowe of my innocency.’ With the merchant’s instinct to turn every situation to some profit, one of the factors shouted as they were led off to execution, ‘If I be guilty, let me never partake of thye heavenly joyes, O Lord’. ‘Amen for me’, cried each in turn, ‘amen for me, good Lord.’ Assuredly no crime had been committed by the condemned. They died like martyrs and indeed the account of their sufferings reads much like a piece of Tudor martyrology. It was another massacre of innocents, and hence, ever after, it would be remembered and glorified as ‘The Amboina Massacre’.
The job of winding up the factory’s affairs fell to Richard Welden who for more than a decade had been the lone factor left on Butung by David Middleton. Transferred to the Bandas, where he had also had to pick up the pieces, he now shrugged off Dutch attempts to implicate him and sailed over to Ambon to collect the survivors and enquire into the circumstances. Thence he proceeded to Batavia, where complaints were duly lodged and duly rejected, and then on to England.
He arrived in the summer of 1624. Word of the massacre had preceded him via Holland but now ‘this crying business of Amboina’ provoked a major furore. Some wanted to take the next Dutch ship that entered the English Channel and see the culprits ‘hung up upon the cliffs of Dover’. Protests were lodged in Holland. Reluctantly James I agreed to reprisals. But nothing was actually done and in 1625 a Dutch fleet from the East was allowed to sail quietly past Dover in full view of the Royal Navy. This was too much for the East India Company. Suspecting the then Governor, Sir Morris Abbot, of being too easily duped by royal promises, subscribers withheld their payments and pressured the directors into announcing that due to Government inaction they must finally ‘give over the trade of the Indies’.
In reality they had already done so. Closure of the factories in the Spice Islands and a withdrawal from Batavia – temporary but soon to be permanent – signalled a long hiatus in English ambitions to participate in the spice trade. At Macassar a small English establishment buying cloves from native prabus would survive until 1667; and Bantam would linger on until the 1680s as a source of pepper. But perhaps the disillusionment of the English is best seen in the unlikely outcome of diplomatic wrangles over the status of Run. For, frequently revived, English claims to the islet were actually recognized after Cromwell’s Dutch War and in 1665 the place was officially handed over. Vindication at last. A fort and colony were planned and several ships revisited the island. Yet never, it would appear, was it actually reoccupied. Depopulated and denuded of its nutmeg trees, it may well have been worthless.
To the likes of Nathaniel Courthope, turning in his sandy grave on a neighbouring atoll, the neglect of Pulo Run must have seemed like a terrible betrayal. Yet, after a lapse of forty years, his refusal to concede to the Dutch yielded that substantial dividend on the other side of the world at the mouth of the Hudson river. Just as improbably, more than 150 years later, servants of the same Honourable Company that Courthope had served so devotedly would revive his hopes of the spice trade and again load nutmegs at the Bandas and pace the parapets of Ambon’s unhappy fort.
CHAPTER THREE Pleasant and Fruitfull Lands
JAPAN, SIAM, AND THE COAST
History is not short of reasons why the East India Company was founded. Some have already been noticed: the expected profits from the spice trade, the growth of English sea power in the Armada period, the about-turn in Anglo-Portuguese relations following the dynastic union of Spain and Portugal, and the encouragement afforded by the first Dutch voyages to the East. Another and an older reason of which much was made in contemporary debate was the need to find new markets for England’s staple export of woollen cloth. Ever since the 1570s and the sack of Antwerp, the traditional entrepot for English cloth, the search for new markets and new distributive systems had been a national priority. The Muscovy (Russia), Eastland (Baltic), and Levant Companies were all export-orientated and the various attempts to find a north-west passage were partly