The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (29 page)

The sources offer only an occasional glimpse of clients from the established citizenry. In
1735
, in a rare exception, the bailiffs’ accounts mention both a rather large number of payments (nineteen) used to buy off adultery with a prostitute and the occupations of the men involved. They include three shopkeepers, the son of a shopkeeper,

a wine merchant, a trader in ironmongery, a brick merchant, a
beunhaas
(meaning in this case a trader who operated outside the guilds), a bookkeeper, a brewer, two ships’ captains and one skipper of a barge, a farmer and a turf-seller, an innkeeper, two weigh-house porters, and a comb-maker.The innkeeper came from Haarlem and the farmer from Broek in Waterland, an affluent village north of Amsterdam.
31
Among the more scattered references to occupations in other years, skippers and wine merchants feature relatively frequently.

There are plenty of individual examples of settled burghers and men from the higher social strata who visited prostitutes.The judicial archives in the university town of Leiden confirm that a significant proportion of cli-

ents there were students, a reputation reflected in books such as
De Leidsche straat-schender, of de roekelooze student
(
1679
) (The Leiden Street-
R
uffian, or the
R
eckless Student).
32
In their diaries Constantijn Huygens Jr, secretary to the Prince of Orange, and the Amsterdammer Jacob Bicker
R
aye, both inveterate gossipmongers, give several examples of men of the highest cir-

cles who frequented prostitutes or kept mistresses, although when it amounted to adultery such behaviour did not always go unpunished.
33

Lodewijck van der Saan notes in his diary in
1698
that an Amster- dam prostitute had told him

that many high-ranking gentlemen of Amsterdam visited, at ungodly hours, the brothel in which she had lived two years earlier, and that they had a special password that would gain them entry when they knocked of an evening, which on that occasion was ‘gone is the winter’; that her master the brothel- keeper went to the stock exchange daily to seek gallants, and that he seldom came home without bringing one or another such with him.
34

This was a story, incidentally, that perfectly suited anyone who detested the ‘great lords’ of the day, an antipathy not unusual in burgher-dominated Holland. ‘
Heren en hoeren
(lords and whores)’, said poet and statesman Jacob Cats,‘differ by only one letter’.
35

In the Confession Books occasional reference is made to clients from the higher social circles. Jacobus Christiaanse, for example, was arrested in
1687
for tempting into his brothel ‘a certain young man, being the son of a merchant’.
36
The names of such men are rarely re- corded, with the odd exception.Anna Chantrijn from Liège described in
1658
how ‘she had been kept by a certain young man called Pieter Fockenburg and had been given the pox by the same’. Margriet Elf- man admitted in
1689
that she had been maintained by a merchant

for several years and subsequently by one Herman Jarig, who had since left for the East Indies.
37

Men who frequented whores did serious harm to their reputations and it was impressed upon everyone that prostitution was a dishonour- able and deplorable business. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that Amsterdam burghers visited prostitutes, or that a small number kept ‘chambered whores’. So what exactly was the norm? What was re- garded as acceptable? To take one example, should the testimony by a recently married man in
1701
that he had been to the whores no more than three or four times before his wedding day be seen as indicating a fairly average sowing of wild oats? He made his declaration in front of a notary, since he needed to explain to his wife the origin of his ‘secret ailment’, presumably a venereal disease.
38
It is impossible to give an unequivocal answer.
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Prostitutes and VOC sailors

Contemporaries, as we saw in Chapter
4
, attributed the demand for prostitutes to the presence of so many sailors. ‘When the East India fleets come home, the seamen are so mad for women, that if they had no such houses to bait in, they would force the very citizens’ wives and daughters,’ writes the Englishman William Carr in
1688
.
39
A decade later, Mandeville repeated this ancient argument in his
Fable of the Bees
(see Appendix
1
):‘Where six or seven Thousand Sailors arrive at once, as it often happens at
Amsterdam
, that have seen none but their own sex for many Months together, how is it to be suppos’d that honest Women should walk the Streets unmolested, if there were no Harlots to be had at reasonable Prices?’ Some added that the lusts of those who had been to the East Indies had been enflamed by the heat of the tropics.
40

It is surely improbable that in the absence of prostitutes sailors would have stalked the streets of Amsterdam raping women, but there is an indisputable connection between seafaring and prostitution, as dem- onstrated by its prevalence in any harbour city. Ships returning from the East Indies—these stories usually feature sailors of the East India Company, the VOC—generally arrived at the island of Texel just off the north coast in July or August, after which their crews travelled on as quickly as possible by boat or even on foot.They did not all arrive in Amsterdam simultaneously as Mandeville claims, but there were

certainly many of them, since although the VOC signed men up in various places, none received payment anywhere but in Amsterdam or Middelburg.
41
Prostitutes must have done particularly good business in late summer, because in September the annual fair took place in Am- sterdam, just as the sailors about to leave on the VOC ships due to sail in early autumn were receiving their signing-up pay. Many sea shanties tell how Amsterdam girls awaited the returning fleet with anticipation and joy, especially those in the brothels, where preparations were made to relieve returning VOC sailors of their money as quickly as possible.
42

VOC sailors were held in low regard. Their worst qualities, in the eyes of established citizens, were their habit of frequenting prostitutes and their reckless spending.This squandering of money met with par- ticular disapproval. Even though they spent several years working for their pay, they ran through it all in a few weeks. And instead of thank- ing God for a safe journey, they went straight to the brothels, where they were given the pox for their pains and would be ejected as soon as their money ran out. A popular expression referred to returning VOC sailors as ‘Lords of six weeks’.

Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
describes four men drinking with prosti- tutes in a music house as ‘sailors who have arrived from the East Indies with the latest ships, and who will have to voyage out there again by spring, since in this manner their pay will be rapidly used up’. The conclusion runs: ‘There are no men more foolish in the world than these arrack drinkers, nor any who have less regard for money, since it is nonetheless certain that nowhere must one do so much to earn it as the soldiers and sailors in the Indies do.’ The men have been back for just four weeks, but of the
500
guilders they each earned on average, none has more than
125
guilders left,‘so splendidly have they lived and so clean have they been plucked by the whores’.
43

Nicolaus de Graaff, a ship’s surgeon who made five voyages to the East Indies between
1639
and
1687
, writes in his
Oost-Indise spiegel
(
1701
) (East Indies Mirror) that the sailors spend money recklessly even while still in the Indies, and that on their return

the little they then still have to their credit,and come to receive at East India House, they take straight to the whore-basements or bawdy-houses,and allow to be plainly raked in, their glasses being refilled continually, so that often some see neither sun nor moon until it is all spent...and then they are kicked out by the whores or

whoremasters, so that they go looking for some recruiter or other, who gives them board and lodgings until the Company begins taking on men again.
44

Nevertheless, observed Thomas Penson in
1687
, the authorities al- lowed them to carry on as they pleased as long as they did not commit too many riotous offences on the streets,‘since by this means the States never want seamen to go on that voyage’.
45

Seafarers, especially VOC sailors and naval hands, were regarded as belonging to a separate social category.They had their own subculture, as was normal for an occupational group whose members lived and worked together for many months in a small space, having to rely upon one another in adverse circumstances.
46
On shore they were recognizable as sailors by their clothing, such as their long trousers and ‘English knit caps’, and by their jargon, their rituals, even their gait.
47
Their character was often compared to the sea. Sailors are ‘as rough and intractable as the element they sail upon’, they are gruff and ill- mannered, since they deal only with the wind and waves. ‘All Sea- faring Men, especially
the Dutch
, are like the Element they belong to, much given to loudness and roaring,’ writes Mandeville.
48
They are violent.They swear terribly. They drink heavily. They are addicted to gambling, playing games of their own, as we read for example in a complaint by a woman in
1694
who testifies that her husband, on his return from the East Indies, has gambled away all he earned,
300
guil- ders, in a gaming house where ‘an East Indies game called
topmaas
, being the throwing of two dice’ is played.
49
This ‘topping’ or playing on the ‘top board’ was something sailors learned from the Chinese in Batavia, even though it was strictly forbidden by the Company.
50

Sailors also loved singing.They sang a great deal aboard ship as they worked, pulling ropes and climbing the rigging to the rhythm of sea shanties, and indeed in their free time.
51
They were especially keen on dancing. On many ships there was someone who played the fiddle, and to whose tunes the sailors practised dances suitable for confined spaces.
52
According to
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
, ‘such folk cannot be happy without frolicking and dancing’. The book includes several vivid de- scriptions of their dances, which were as wild as they were complicated and so noisy that some dance-hall proprietors had organs instead of the usual small group of instrumentalists, because, and here is Mandeville again: ‘the Noise of half a dozen of them, when they call themselves Merry, is sufficient to drown twice the number of Flutes or Violins.’
53

VOC sailors were regarded by their social superiors—and therefore by those who wrote about them—as a bunch of wild men, a strange tribe best avoided. All that unrestrained dancing was enough by itself to mark them out as a low and uncivilized segment of the popula- tion.
54
It was not their occupation as such that was dishonourable, but the fact that soldiers and sailors of the VOC were recruited from what was seen as the scum of the nation: the lowest strata of the urban popu- lation whose members were not regarded as honourable, the black sheep of good families who had forfeited all honour and credit, and foreigners whose reputations were simply unknown.
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Seafaring

The importance of shipping to the lives of the ordinary people of Hol- land is hard to overestimate. Seafaring was a major source of employ- ment. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries some
50
,
000
to
60
,
000
men were at sea in Dutch ships in any given year.
55
Shipping fell into two distinct categories. Freight traffic on Europe’s inland waterways, fishing, and whaling were seasonal occupations for which crews were mainly recruited from the rural areas of Dutch coastal provinces, often from the captain’s home town or village. Seamen em- ployed by the VOC, the WIC, or the Dutch navy, on the other hand, enlisted for much longer periods. They were mainly recruited from among the lower orders in Dutch cities, supplemented by a consider- able number of foreigners, mainly Germans and Scandinavians. The pay was less good, the chances of survival smaller, and the status of the sailors lower.
56

In Amsterdam most sailors fell into the latter category and the vast majority, except in times of war, signed up with the VOC, the Dutch
R
epublic’s largest employer. Three times a year a fleet was fitted out for embarkation. There were the ‘Christmas ships’ that sailed in De- cember or January, the ‘Easter ships’ that left in April or May, and the ‘Fair ships’, departing in September or October.
57
In the second half

of the seventeenth century an average of about
4
,
100
men left annu- ally for the East Indies as sailors and soldiers; in the first half of the eighteenth century the number was
6
,
600
.
58
This adds up to a total in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of a million men (and among them several dozen women dressed as men).
59
Officially only

a third came back. Many deserted, some stayed on to live in the East, but their failure to return is attributable mainly to the appalling mor- tality rate.
60
Six to
10
per cent died before even completing the out- ward journey, from accidents and above all from sickness.