The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (30 page)

All types of seafaring took their toll, but the VOC was the most voracious consumer of human life. Contemporaries were fully aware of this.‘I’ll equip him well and then simply tell myself that the money is for his burial, for he shall not return,’ sighs the father of one depart- ing VOC sailor in
De ongelukkige levensbeschryving
, while his mother stands beside him crying. The Dutch East Indies were known as ‘the graveyard of Amsterdammers’.
61
Mortality was such that seafaring had a constraining effect on the population of Holland as a whole.
62
In the cities especially, the authorities will not have mourned their loss; they were mainly paupers (admittedly this sometimes meant having to pro- vide poor relief for their widows and children), boys from the munici- pal orphanages, and men from marginal, even criminal groups.

Pay at the lowest ranks was seven to twelve guilders a month, with two months’ cash paid in advance on signing up. Once a man joined his ship he was given free bed and board and free medical care. Most attractive of all was the right to bring back a limited volume of trade goods, a practice referred to as
voering
, literally ‘lining’. The official limitations on this were generally disregarded.
63
The East Indies (often called ‘monkeyland’) presented the tantalizing prospect of luxury and abundance, riches that lay within the grasp of even the common sailor.

R
eturning as a wealthy man was the exception rather than the rule, but with skill and luck a sailor could hope to come home with a few

hundred guilders, enough to set up his own business on land. Fines and advances had often eaten into this already, however, and on re- ceiving their pay, many men had to settle debts incurred before the voyage began.Their main creditors were generally those who held the bills incurred with the recruiters (known as
zielverkopers
, literally ‘soul-sellers’) who had persuaded them to sign on and had kitted them out for the voyage to the East.
64

R
ecruiters, both men and women, were mostly lodging-house keepers who provided shelter to seamen.To relieve freshly discharged

sailors of their money, they encouraged them to eat and drink copi- ously and found prostitutes for them. Men who had just arrived in town for the first time were enticed inside these lodging houses, and as soon as a guest had spent all his money and run up debts, he would be

cajoled into signing up for a voyage, even if he had never been to sea before. As a prospective sailor he no longer needed to hand over money for anything. In addition, he was usually given a sea chest with supplies in it, representing an investment of some tens of guilders. At East India House a contract known as a
transportceel
was made up, stat- ing that the debts incurred would be paid from monies due to him on his return to any person who at that point was in possession of the
ceel
—a word derived from
ceduul
, warrant, and one that became bas- tardized into
ziel
or ‘soul’, hence ‘soul-seller’.This sinister term actually refers to the trade in these documents, which was in the hands of women.To pay off the
150
guilders he notched up on average, a sailor would have to spend
18
months working for the Company.As an item of trade a
ceel
was worth no more than fifty guilders. Soul-sellers were said to entrap gullible newcomers, lock them up until embarkation time, and press them to acknowledge debts far higher than the true costs incurred. This was no doubt true, since the lenders needed to make a profit and many debts would never be repaid. Soul-sellers were often sailors’ wives or widows, able to call on the help of their families if necessary, and a number were former prostitutes. Disreputable or not, for the VOC this arrangement was extremely advantageous. Well into the nineteenth century, those who provided lodgings to seafaring men were integral to the business of recruitment.
65
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Sailors’ wives

Most sailors and soldiers of the VOC were unmarried.
66
They received their pay only after the voyage, and the twenty to forty guilders a year they might be able to transfer home covered only a tenth of the income a fam- ily needed. Sailors’ wives largely had to support themselves and their chil- dren. As far as poor relief went, they fell into the same category as widows. In some senses they were a distinct social group, representing the interests of their seafaring menfolk, for example by protesting against the poor state of the ships or by demanding that ransoms be paid for sailors taken pris- oner.
6
7
City historian JanWagenaar describes how on
6
September
1672
‘a large crowd of the worst rabble, many foreign sailors, and several hundred women whose husbands were serving in the nation’s fleet’ thronged out-

side the Amsterdam house of Admiral Michiel de
R
uyter, hero of the Anglo-Dutch wars, who had been in command of the battle fleet during

the
R
aid on the Medway five years before.The women shouted that the admiral ‘had intended to betray the fleet, and that it would have brought him a ducatoon for each of their poor men’. Much effort was required to end the disturbance without bloodshed.
68
De
R
uyter was not at home at

the time, but his wife was, and it is clear that Mistress de
R
uyter was re-

garded, quite naturally, as being in charge of her husband’s business in his

absence. Six years later,Amsterdam sailors’ wives prevented any more sea- men from being recruited for the Danish fleet while their husbands still had outstanding pay due to them.
69

The common sailor’s wife was a familiar character, depicted as a harridan. In her narrative poem
Walcheren
(
1769
), Betje Wolff de- scribes the reception given to a ship returning from the East Indies as it arrives in her naitve city of Middelburg, the only place other than Amsterdam where VOC sailors were paid off.The vivid nature of the lines suggests they are based on first-hand observation. Many familiar types appear: the sailor who ‘thinks only of how to spend his money quickly’; the girl who collects nothing more than her lover’s death notice and his sea chest (‘his comrade tells her everything | and how the dying went with him’); the black sheep who had been shipped out east, ‘that plague on the family. . . . who had awaited him at home? . . . His father sighs when he sees him.’ There is a man who happily greets his wife and children, but also a woman from among the common people who is interested only in what the voyage has rendered up:

Look at that hell-cat! Who knows nor care nor love. Look at that fine person too! What a revolting cove. Hey, Hein, was that you? Hey, was that you Pieternel? Where is the sea-chest? Is that all you possess?

(What a tender welcoming address!)

Say, is this all? Well, that’s a fine little trifle!
70

Sailors’ wives, who were often left to live on their own for years, must sometimes have found it hard to remain faithful to their husbands. There was a general feeling that adultery was only to be expected, so it was better not to judge it too harshly.
71
Even the
R
eformed Church opted for mediation rather than punishment in most such cases.
72
The authorities had wanted to impose the death penalty for adultery, ac- cording to Eduard van Zurck in his legal handbook
Codex Batavus
,‘but in a country where so many of the people are seafarers, and so many

women, with their husbands away for so long, turn to others, it was found to be impractical’.
73

R
eturning seamen therefore sometimes encountered children of whom they could not be the father.‘But that is usual, with a voyage to

the East Indies; they will not preach about it in any church,’ writes Adriaan Boelens in his
Klucht van de oneenige-trouw
(
1648
) (Farce of Divided Loyalty).
74
It is a theme of many sea shanties and instances can be found in the Confession Books.
75
In
1651
, for example, Jannetje Jans was brought to court charged with adultery. She said that after her husband, Irishman Jan Krick, left for the East Indies, she had got to know one Klaas Willems,‘who wanted very much to marry her’. Klaas left for the West Indies as a helmsman, whereupon Jan came home to find two young children that were not his. Jannetje offered as an ex- cuse that she had heard tell that Jan Krick himself had been tried and punished for adultery in the East Indies, and this had caused ‘her head to run away with her’.
76
Another sailor, Jan Jansen, a Norwegian, was brought to court in
1656
for hitting a woman because she and her daughter had spread a rumour that his wife had borne a child in his absence,‘which as a lie he could not well tolerate’.
77

In the eyes of contemporaries it was only a short step from adultery to prostitution. Of a group of four prostitutes described in
Het Amster- damsch Hoerdom
, two ‘have husbands who wander about the East Indies as poor soldiers, while these creatures allow themselves to be used by all and sundry’.
78
Their clients are also VOC men, squandering their earnings, and so we come full circle: prostitutes and VOC sailors be-

long together. In his eyewitness account of the
1696
Undertakers
R
iot in Amsterdam, Joris Crafford several times mentions both in the same

breath. In taverns and brothels, he writes, ‘sailing folk, whores, and a multifarious rabble of women and boys’ boasted about about the easy plunder in the city; the rioting sailors were mostly foreigners who were were put up to it by ‘wenches of easy virtue and other unattached females’.
79

The image of seamen as undisciplined and licentious tars who, once on shore, abandoned themselves to drinking and whoring is no doubt a gross exaggeration, but in the Confession Books, naturally enough, we encounter mainly this type rather than his more virtuous cousin.
80
However this may be, the connection between prostitutes and seafarers is beyond dispute. The English philanthropist Jonas Hanway noted in his
Letters Written Occasionally on the Customs of Foreign Nations in

Regard to Harlots
(
1761
) that in Holland prostitutes were sent to the Spin House and that ‘once a year, at their
annual fair
, they walk in a kind of gallery’.
R
eturning seamen often chose brides from among the whores in the Spin House, since they had neither the time nor the inclination to court women.
81
Hanway was grossly mistaken in his belief that the Spin House restored the honour of the prostitutes and it is unlikely that the

prison functioned as a matchmaking bureau, but it is clear that among VOC sailors—and only among them—men could be found who had little objection to marrying prostitutes, ex-prostitutes, or bawds.

As we have seen, the whorehouse was regarded as an ‘upside-down’ house, an honest Christian household turned on its head. In the song ‘Samen-spraeck tusschen een Zeeman en een Borger’ (Dialogue Be- tween a Seaman and a Burgher) a burgher addresses a sailor:

You enter neither church nor chapel Hear only those who curse and swear From one whorehouse to another Malice is all you’ll e’er learn there.
82

A sailor goes to a whorehouse the way a burgher would go to church, was the reproach, but from the point of view of the seaman himself, a whorehouse may have been rather more like a surrogate home, where he could find a bed for a while, a woman to sleep with, a place to eat, and a seat near the fire. Money and property might be given to a whore or a bawd for safe keeping. This is an old seaman’s tradition, incidentally, and examples can still be found well into the twentieth century.
83
It is a custom mentioned in the Confession Books, although, naturally, mainly in cases where the arrangement went wrong. Josientje Alders, for example, herself married to a man who had left for the East Indies, was accused in
1668
of taking money from a bag of coins a VOC sailor had given her to look after. He had counted it out right in front of her, but now it contained less than before. She insisted in court that she had taken nothing.There was no proof of theft.
84

In harbourside neighbourhoods there was some degree of effective social control. In August
1737
a VOC sailor who had disembarked and just received his pay found himself a bed at a sailors’ lodging house in an alley near the harbour.The first thing he did was to get drunk, and soon he was enticed into a nearby whorehouse. One of the other guests informed the landlord of the lodging house, adding that the sailor was carrying all his earnings with him, a purse with two pieces of gold to

the value of ninety guilders. Together they went to the whorehouse, where they found the sailor in bed with a woman. ‘Where is your money? Give it to me,’ said the landlord.The prostitute tried to get him to leave, saying:‘He’s my husband; you’ve nothing to do with this.’ The landlord then appealed to the brothel-keeper,Wietske Albers:‘Wietske you’d better watch out; if he loses all his money the blame will fall on you.’ But her reply was: ‘I’m a shameless bawd; no one can harm me.’ The gold had indeed disappeared from the purse the sailor had given Wietske to look after. Wietske ‘knew nothing about it’. Nevertheless, she was arrested for theft and sentenced to three years in the Spin House. Another neighbour,‘a burgher’, also testified.
85

Whorehouses fulfilled yet another important function. On the long voyage to the East or West Indies there was little opportunity to con- tact those who remained at home. On arrival in Batavia, sailors would be bombarded with appeals for news and for letters from Holland, and returning sailors took back to their fatherland letters written or dic- tated by those left behind. They often carried verbal messages too, since sailors tended to be illiterate, the foreigners among them espe- cially.
86
Generally speaking this system worked well. Often a wife would be told of her husband’s death by fellow sailors some time be- fore she was officially informed of it by the Company, which meant she could go to fetch a certificate of her widowhood from East India House. Katrijn van Brul, for example, knew by ‘word of mouth’ that her husband was dead, although he was officially registered as missing. Brothel-keeper Trijn Jans heard in
1673
that her husband in the East Indies was seriously ill, and Pietertje Jans heard by similar means that her husband, from whom she had received no direct message in ten years, was a prisoner in Turkey.
87
In
1723
, when the Norwegian gov- ernment set up a study into seamen serving abroad, in most cases on Dutch ships, family members turned out to be reasonably well in- formed of where their menfolk were and how they were doing, even though many had been absent for years.
88

When in late summer the ships full of men returning from the Indies came in, they were thronged by women eager to ask them about their sweethearts, husbands, brothers, or sons, and many VOC men, carrying messages in their pockets or in their heads, set off in search of the wives and families of comrades who had died or were still overseas. Whorehouses were important as the meeting places that facilitated this exchange of mes- sages; women arrested in whorehouses often gave it as a legitimate reason

for being there, especially in July and August. Marretje Jacobs, for instance, admitted ‘that her husband is in the East Indies, and that she has now been found with a VOC sailor, who has just arrived back with the first of the Indies ships, a man she says brought her tidings of her husband’s death and with whom she then slept’.
89
The vegetable-seller Marritje Martens was arrested at ten-thirty in the evening in a whorehouse she said she had en- tered ‘to chat about her husband who is at sea’.
90
Trijntje Sybrands, who was found one night with two ‘notorious whores’, claimed she had visited them merely‘to receive news of her husband’.
91
A pregnant girl said she had been in the company of a bawd at the moment of her arrest merely in order to ‘find out whether [she] had letters from her sweetheart’; another woman declared that she had gone along with the man with whom she was found only ‘because he said her husband’s ship had come in’.
92
Most of these cases date from before
1670
, but instances can be found in later years, too. Fijtje Dirks who was banished for brothel-keeping but arrested in the city in August
1747
,defended herself by saying that‘she had received a letter from her husband in the East Indies and had been intending to leave again immediately’.
93

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources see seamen,VOC sailors in particular, who were closely connected to prostitutes and bawds, whether as clients or as panders, as unfaithful lovers or as fathers of ille- gitimate children, as husbands, as neighbours, or as friends who had known the women in their native regions.The VOC was the last resort of desperate men, just as prostitution was for women.The saying ‘birds of a feather flock together’ (
gelyk van aart is wel gepaart
), which appears as the caption to a lithograph by Jacob Gole after Cornelis Dusart showing a drunken seaman dancing with a lopsided gait, holding a bulging purse on the head of an equally unappetizing sweetheart, her breasts bare (Plate
11
), does not merely reflect a connection contemporaries imagined to exist between prostitutes and seafarers. It reflects the reality.

7
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‘Miraculous tricks, to earn a living by idling’: Sex for Money and Money for Sex

T

he aim of prostitution is to earn money by sex. For all the moral and social problems it brings with it, the trade is part of economic

life, and the sums earned and spent in prostitution were integral to Amsterdam’s economy. Brothels and music houses were illegal busi- nesses, but businesses nonetheless.Although legitimate trades were not threatened with police raids, closure, arrests of employees or confisca- tion of capital, and adhered to guild statutes and other regulations that had legal force, in many other respects prostitution was no different from most other pre-industrial enterprises. Brothels operated on a small scale and were organized as households. Within them, men’s work was distinct from women’s work, and debt and credit functioned in ways typical of the period.The income, expenditure, and organiza- tion of prostitution are best understood in the context of the main- stream economy.

From the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth, the nor- mal daily wage of a working man in the province of Holland was about one guilder.With a six-day working week and various holidays, this amounted to a basic annual income of around
300
guilders.
1
In Amsterdam pay was a little higher; generally speaking the city’s labour- ers could count on a weekly wage of seven guilders and an annual income of around
350
.
2
On the other hand, life in Amsterdam was more expensive than elsewhere. The city levied steep excise duties, which made bread and other staple items costly, and rents were rela- tively high.

Women were paid about half the amount men received for comparable work; this was no different in Holland than in the rest of Europe. The normal daily wage for sewing or cleaning, for example, was eight to ten stivers, in other words three guilders or a little less per week. The annual income of live-in maidservants ranged from twenty to a hundred guilders, but it was usually between thirty and fifty. In addition they were given board and lodging, plus the
huurpenning
(the counterpart to the English ‘hiring shilling’) of three guilders when they first entered service, pocket money to spend at the annual fair, New Year’s bonuses, and sometimes fabric to make clothes. Most importantly of all, they received tips on all kinds of occasions. Such extras were a normal part of a servant’s remunera- tion and they complicate the task of calculating precise incomes.

In the first ever round of comprehensive taxation, in
1747
, two- thirds of Amsterdam heads of household were taxed on an annual in- come of below
600
guilders. Half earned
300
guilders or less, but this group included many single people living alone. Any family earning under about
300
guilders annually was considered to be living below the poverty line.
3
A nominal basic wage brought home by the man of the family was therefore just enough to keep the wolf from the door in good times, and it would usually be supplemented by the earnings of his wife and children, tips and bonuses, and perhaps additional in- come from the city’s informal economy.While
300
guilders a year was the absolute minimum a family needed, the sum generally held to be sufficient for an individual to live on at a basic subsistence level was three guilders a week. Both the VOC and the Admiralty made weekly payments of three guilders to tide sailors over for a while, or in pen- sions for men grown old in service or invalided out.Three guilders was also the amount the city refunded to cover the weekly cost of nursing care in the Gasthuis and the highest sum paid out by the guilds in weekly pensions or sick pay.
4
Women, for whom this was a normal week’s wages, could therefore just about manage on their earnings but not maintain a household of their own.

Poor people even in the relatively rich city of Amsterdam learned at an early age the art of making ends meet. Concentration on a single well-defined activity was unusual; for a tip or commission, people would be prepared to deliver a message or engage in
ad hoc
trading. In this ‘economy of makeshifts’ an individual needed to grasp any oppor- tunity to get his or her hands on a little money. Good contacts were essential: for odd jobs and favours people usually looked to relatives,

neighbours, or old acquaintances from their own home regions. Single persons, not living with their families, often had a
kameraad
or com- rade, a close friend and ally they could count on. This was the rule aboard ships, but we see a similar pattern in prostitution when the same two women were arrested together more than once.This was no impersonal marketplace but a face-to-face economy, and a great deal depended on reputation and the creditworthiness bound up with it. It was important for the poor to know exactly what poor relief and charitable resources were available, the conditions for receiving help, and whom they should approach. They would also do well to keep themselves informed about how the police operated and the criteria the courts would use should they be brought to trial.
5

An essential feature of the pre-industrial economy was low produc- tivity, which contributed to structural poverty.The basic necessities of life such as food, shelter, and clothing were relatively expensive, and most people would spend practically all their earnings on essentials. Labour, by contrast, was in plentiful supply and therefore cheap.
6
In the prostitution business the low cost of labour is illustrated by the time invested in each client. Transactions from which a considerable profit was expected, such as the entrapment of married men or catering to specific sexual desires, might require weeks or even months of prepara- tion. Such arrangements often involved several people, each of whom received a share of the profits.