Silt, nutmeg, and Total Football: Part 1

Alternate title: How to avoid thinking about the US election

By way of preface here are two personal beliefs:

1. I think I would quite like the Netherlands. I am partial to oil paintings and tall, crisp beers. I have it on good authority that Amsterdam is a hoot. Not the weed stuff (I support the decriminalisation of all drugs with the exception of marijuana); rather architecture and canals which delight the eye and soul. I look forward to visiting one day.

2. Anti-Dutch bigotry is both justified and funny.

A(nother) project which I am tinkering away at on requires me to spend hours squinting at the prints of the late Dutch historian and botanist François Valentijn. (‘Requires’ may be putting it a bit strongly.) De Stad Bantam is his 1726 depiction of the Dutch East India Company (‘Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie’ or ‘VOC’) port at Banten, Java. A trading post at the farthest horizon of the European worldview. While the Banten Sultanate was still in place, its figurehead reigned at the pleasure of VOC administrators, which is to say, Banten was a company town. A key relay between colonial possessions on the Spice Islands and the rest of the world; even after Dutch Batavia was founded. 100,000 souls, maybe more. In Valentijn’s map we see a teeming city girt by curtain walls, the concentric squares of the royal palace (‘kraton’), and broad parade grounds. Mosques to the west, Chinatown to the east. It is growing in every direction, creeping beyond the enclosure and across tributaries. As the city expands it eats into the agricultural land on the plains. European factories at the periphery eat the new world and digesting it for the old. A smattering VOC ships sit placid at anchor. The are not clear to the human eye but the place must be thick with Europeans, haggling and jostling in the markets, swatting at mosquitoes. The air is thick with mosquitoes. But who would get between a Dutchman and a swamp?

There is the river Peteh in the top-right, indecisive on its route out of the foothills. Its lower reaches take Banten as a metonym as it flows into the Java Sea. The stream brought life to the city and later, though not much later, drowned it in silt. Soon enough the degradation of upstream watersheds push a new landmass out into the bay. Today Old Banten is a kilometre further from the sea than it was then. Sediment carried downstream had rendered the port unusable by the turn of the 19th century. A globally-important entrepôt wrung out, beached, forgotten. As I am reminding you constantly; we are a riparian species — if we don’t look after our rivers they won’t look after us. Today the kratons have been reduced to distant echo; the awing Surosowan Palace pared back to its foundations. Just an outline; better viewed by birds than humans. We can thank time, fires, and Dutch guns for this meagre heap. Conversely, the Great Mosque of Banten (Masjid Agung Banten) stands as proud as it did when Valentijn sketched it. What this suggests about the nature of God and the Universe does not concern you — don’t worry about it. The mosque itself is the only thing it can be; a reflection of character of those who built it. The masjid boasts Javanese tiered roofing while its adjoining minaret is a fine example of Mughal architecture. A blended town since way back.

Valentijn’s print is just one of 1,050 illustrations, maps, and portraits in his life’s work, The Old and New East-Indies (‘Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën’). The tome runs to 5,144 pages; his anthropological, botanical, and personal observations. A trove of scientific proofs — at least by the rather forgiving evidentiary standards of his era — to stretch and provoke the minds of Dutch students back home. You know enough about the historiography of colonialism to know that it has since been skewered, and rightly so, by modern academics. Valentijn’s sourcing left quite a lot to be desired and he would drift into the doldrums of vague hypothesising (my brother from another mother). A borderline unusable vehicle for understanding the lives of the colonial subjects he moved among; but a rich text that gives texture and colour to our understanding of the Dutch mind. It contains some stories which would have been riotously funny in their day. Here, a man who was hanged three times: