7 July 1601
God Be Praised
The King of Bali sends the King of Holland his greetings. Your Admiral Cornelis van Eemskerck has come to me, bringing me a letter from Your Highness and requesting that I should permit Hollanders to trade here as freely as the Balinese themselves, wherefore I grant permission for all whom You send to trade as freely as my own people may when they visit Holland and for Bali and Holland to be one.
This is a copy of the King’s letter, which was given to me in the Balinese language and which Emanuel Rodenburch has translated into Dutch. There was no signature. It will also be sent from me to you.
Cornells van Eemskerck
The Radja also presented van Heemskerck with a typical token of royal favor—a beautiful Balinese female slave. Van Heemskerck seemed unaccountably indisposed to accept, at least until Roodenburg explained that to decline would be impolitic. Neither van Heemskerck nor his successors proved reluctant to accept the Radja’s far from naive consent to reciprocal trading conditions as a charter for one-way trade or his offhand endorsement of Dutch hopes for unity as acknowledgment of an alliance. Although nothing much came of the contact for almost two and one half centuries, it was on the basis of this document that the Dutch assured themselves that they had special rights in the island.
V.O.C. Factory and Free Burghers from Batavia
The Netherlands (or United) East India Company, known in the East as the V.O.C. (Vereenegde Oost-Indische Compagnie), manifested little interest in Bali even though it took vigorous and often violent measures to establish itself firmly in the Moluccas, Java, and Sumatra. It does seem to have opened some sort of trading post in about the year 1620, but there is very little indication of subsequent activities or of any continuing European presence. The first merchant, Hans van Meldert, was instructed to purchase “rice, beasts, provisions, and women,” but he aroused such suspicion and hostility on the part of the radjas that he was very soon recalled, having acquired, it seems, as the total result of his enterprise only one consignment of fourteen female slaves. For the next two centuries, Balinese commerce was mainly in the hands of Chinese, Arab, Bugis, and occasional Dutch private traders. These latter were the Batavian “free burghers” who came to be tolerated on the fringes of the Company’s Batavia Castle and were permitted to deal in goods which the V.O.C. itself found either profitless or objectionable, although it did at times quietly and indirectly participate. In the case of Bali this meant mainly slaves and opium.
Trade in Slaves and Opium; Missions of Oosterwijk and Bacharach
The very skimpy records of Dutch contacts with Bali during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries relate mainly to the appearance in Batavia and in Bali of various slavers and opium-runners, the acts of mutiny, piracy, and treachery which their activities provoked, and the inconsecutive and ineffectual efforts of the V.O.C. officials either to ban or control and restrict the trade. Other records refer to the rapidly growing Balinese community in Batavia itself—by the end of the eighteenth century a total of about 1,000 Balinese members of the Dutch colonial army, some 1,500 free Balinese residents, and very numerous Balinese slaves. This entire community traced its origins either to slaves sold as soldiers, who earned their freedom after five to ten years of faithful service, or household slaves, who were commonly freed by their masters or declared free upon the death of their masters, open sale generally being prohibited. The free Balinese population of Batavia was fourth in size of all the racial sectors, the first being the Mardyckers (Portuguese who lived like Malays), second the Dutch, and third the Chinese. The total population of the city was then about 30,000, half slave and half free.
Balinese Community in Batavia; Senopati; Balinese–Javanese Wars
The most famous member of the Balinese community in Batavia was Senopati, a Balinese in fact only by association, a folk hero of the late seventeenth century whose history is half legendary. Senopati seems by birth to have been a Javanese prince, but he fled to Bali in early youth to escape from the cruelty of his uncle, the Susuhunan. Settling in Djembrana, he became the foster son of the Chinese sjahbandar (harbor master). Later, in a spirit of pure adventure, he permitted himself to be sold as a slave and shipped to Java. In the course of the voyage he earned the admiration and gratitude of the slaver by fighting off pirates, but upon reaching Batavia he consented nevertheless to be sold into the family of a wealthy Dutch merchant. He served his Dutch master faithfully up until the time that he fell into a complicated set of difficulties by reason of rejecting the amorous advances of the daughter of a Dutch general. Entering the Dutch army he fought bravely in the colonial wars until he became so outraged by the arrogance of the Dutch that he raised an insurrection against them. Eventually he founded his own kingdom in East Java in rivalry to the Susuhunan.
The story of the Balinese trade in slaves and opium was punctuated with romantic episodes such as those associated with Senopati and others which are merely squalid. It is one with regard to which the records are far from numerous or detailed, but it warrants effort at explanation. The Balinese radjas enjoyed and exercised the traditional right to enslave and to sell as slaves all such persons as would constitute an encumbrance or an embarrassment to the state. This general category included criminals, castaways, outcasts, orphans, drifters, debtors, and even the widows and children of men who died without leaving enough property for their support. It was regarded as both the right and the duty of the radjas to make sure that such persons did not impose a burden upon society but rather contributed to it, and when Western reformers later interfered with the system the Balinese neither understood nor approved. Balinese slaves, furthermore, were highly prized both in Bali and overseas. Balinese male slaves were famous for their manual skills and their courage, the females for their beauty and artistic attainments. The price of a healthy young slave was about 100–150 rijksdaalder at home and five to ten times that amount in overseas markets. The Dutch themselves wanted Balinese slaves both as recruits for their colonial army and as household servants in Batavia. But the biggest market of all was in French Mauritius, to which as many as 500 slaves would be sent by a single ship. The slavers often found it most convenient and profitable to make payment with opium, a commodity which found ready market among Balinese royalty and even more especially among Javanese, Bugis, and Chinese smugglers, who distributed it throughout the archipelago in defiance of Dutch attempts to enforce a monopoly. The island of Bali, of course, had more to sell than slaves and wanted to buy other goods as well as opium, especially arms; but the slave–opium link-up was extremely important to development of its commerce. The first commercial center was the northern port of Buleleng. Here the radjas recognized the advantages of foreign contact and a small resident community of Chinese, Arab, and Bugis merchants facilitated it.
The intermittent presence in Bali of certain Batavian merchants and the reports they brought back with regard to the wealth and power of the radjas several times stirred the V.O.C. to make overtures of alliance. In the year 1633 the Governor-General, Hendrick Brouwer, heard from the Batavian free burgher Jeuriaen Courten that the Dewa Agung was preparing a great military expedition against the Mataram Empire in Java, with which the Dutch themselves were at war. Brouwer determined to provide the Balinese with assistance in the expectation of so weakening Mataram’s power that the Dutch forces could win an easy victory. He therefore dispatched a special ambassador, Van Oosterwijk, to offer the Dewa Agung provisions for his troops and ships to transport them to East Java. The mission was accompanied by Justus Heurnius, a missionary on his way to Ambon, who later reported briefly, favorably, and quite inaccurately about the readiness of the Balinese to accept Christianity—a report that was filed away in church and state archives and forgotten, which was just as well. Van Oosterwijk, who remained in Bali only briefly, and Captain Jochem Roloffszoon van Deutecom, who was sent as his replacement, both failed to achieve their purpose. Certain of the Dutch in Batavia intimated that the Governor-General had been impulsive and gullible and his emissaries clumsy. In fact the visitors arrived at a most inauspicious time, just when the Dewa Agung and his court were altogether preoccupied