Vermeer's Hat (10 page)
Authors: Timothy Brook
The
White Lion
became one of the Netherlands’ earliest and more spectacular casualties in the war to dominate the trade with Asia. The ship
had sailed on its maiden voyage from Amsterdam to Asia—a distance of some fourteen thousand nautical miles (twenty-five thousand
kilometers)—as early as 1601, a year before the VOC was formed.
3
It reached home in July of the following year. Mounting tension with Portuguese vessels in Asian waters justified its being
refitted with six new bronze cannon fore and aft. When it embarked on its second journey to Asia in 1605, the
White Lion
sailed as a VOC ship. The new business arrangement is recorded on the backs of the copper cannon, which the salvage archaeologists
fished out of the bay in 1976. Foundry master Hendrick Muers inscribed them with his name and the date—
Henricus Muers me fecit 1604
—above which he overlaid the interlocking company initials,
VOC
, plus an
A
, the insignia of the Amsterdam Chamber of the VOC.
The
White Lion
successfully completed a second voyage and then set off on its fateful third in 1610. It was unloaded at Bantam, then reassigned
to a naval squadron charged with suppressing an uprising for nutmeg traders in the Spice Islands. The
White Lion
spent that winter as part of a fleet preying on Spanish ships sailing out of Manila. Five were captured. It was put into interisland
shipping for the spring and summer, then ordered back to Bantam to load up for its third return journey to Amsterdam. On 5
December 1612, it departed as one of four ships under the command of Admiral Lam. On the first of June the following summer,
it left St. Helena on the final leg of its voyage to Amsterdam. We know the rest of the story.
Dutch piracy provoked diplomatic protests from other European nations, and not just Portugal.
4
When the Dutch seized the
Santa Catarina
in 1603, Portugal demanded the return of the ship with all its cargo, insisting that it had been an unlawful seizure. The
directors of the VOC felt they had to make a case for themselves that did more than glorify their capacity to get away with
such theft. They needed principles of international law to prove they were justified in their actions, so they commissioned
a bright young lawyer from Delft, Huig de Groot (better known in English by the Latin version of his name, Grotius) to write
a brief justifying their claim that the seizure was not piracy but an act taken in defense of the company’s legitimate interests.
In 1608, Grotius delivered what the VOC directors wanted.
De jure praedae
, translated into English as
The Spoils of War
, argued that the Spanish naval blockade of the Netherlands, then in force, was an act of war. Such provocation gave the Dutch
the right to treat Portuguese and Spanish ships as belligerent vessels. One of their ships captured in war was legitimate
booty, not illegal seizure. The following year, Grotius expanded
The Spoils of War
into his masterwork,
Mare Liberum
, or in its full English title,
The Freedom of the Seas or the Right Which Belongs to the Dutch to Take Part in the East Indian Trade
.
In
The Freedom of the Seas
, Grotius makes several bold and novel arguments. The boldest of all is one that no one had thus far thought to make: all
people have the right to trade. For the first time, the freedom of trade is declared a principle of international law, as
it has been of the international order ever since. From this fundamental principle, it follows that no state has the right
to prevent the nationals of another state from using sea-lanes for the pursuit of trade. If trade was free, then the seas
on which they traded also were free. Portugal and Spain had no basis for abrogating that right by monopolizing the maritime
trade to Asia. Grotius would not accept their argument that they had earned the monopoly by dint of the work they did to carry
Christianity to the natives in those parts of the world where they traded. The duty of converting the heathen not only did
not trump freedom to trade; for Grotius, it was offensive to the principle that all should be treated equally. “Religious
belief does not do away with either natural or human law from which sovereignty is derived,” he stated. That people should
refuse to accept Christianity is “not sufficient cause to justify war upon them, or to despoil them of their goods.” Nor is
the expense to convert them to be redeemed by preventing other nations from trading with them. Armed with a hugely self-interested
interpretation of Grotius’s argument, the VOC allowed its captains to use force wherever they were blocked from trading.
The VOC directors also recognized that the best way to dominate the trade in porcelain was to acquire it through regular trade
channels, not steal it from other ships. They started informing their captains departing for Bantam that they should not think
of coming back without some Chinese porcelain. In 1608, they sent a shopping list: 50,000 butter dishes, 10,000 plates,
2,000 fruit dishes, and 1,000 each of salt cellars, mustard pots, and various wide bowls and large dishes, plus an unspecified
number of jugs and cups. This order represented a spike in demand that Chinese merchants at first failed to meet. Instead,
demand drove up prices. “The porcelain here comes generally so expensive,” noted the dismayed head of operations in Bantam
in a letter to the VOC directors in 1610. Worse, whenever a fleet of Dutch ships arrives in port, the Chinese merchants “immediately
run up the prices so much, that I cannot calculate a profit on them.” The only way to control this price volatility was to
stop all further purchases and negotiate improved supply with the Chinese. “We shall henceforth look out for porcelain and
try to contract with the Chinese that they bring a lot,” he wrote, “for what they have brought until now does not amount
to much and is mostly inferior.” He decided not to buy any of what was on offer that year. “Only very curious goods will serve,” he decided.
By the time the
White Lion
was loading at the docks of Bantam in the winter of 1612, Chinese suppliers were meeting the higher standard that the VOC
expected. The
Wapen van Amsterdam
, the flagship of Lam’s decimated fleet, brought back only five barrels of porcelain, each of which contained five large dishes.
These were special purchases brought as gifts to VOC officials. It was the other Dutch ship that made it to port, the
Vlissingen
, that carried the main china cargo. It disgorged 38,641 pieces, ranging from large, expensive serving dishes and brandy
decanters to modest but attractive oil and vinegar jars and little cups for holding candles. The load was worth 6,791 guilders—not
an unimaginably vast sum when you consider that a skilled artisan at the time could earn 200 guilders in a year, but substantial
nonetheless. This was the start of a long and growing trade in porcelain. By 1640, to choose a date and ship at random, the
Nassau
alone carried back to Amsterdam 126,391 pieces of porcelain. Porcelain was not the most profitable cargo on the ship—that
was pepper, of which the
Nassau
carried 9,164 sacks—but it was the commodity that created the greatest presence in Dutch society. Over the first half of
the seventeenth century, VOC ships delivered to Europe a total of well over three million pieces.
CHINESE POTTERS PRODUCED FOR EXPORT markets all over the world. They also produced for the home market, in quantity and quality
far beyond the stuff they shipped abroad. Chinese of the Ming dynasty were as keen to own beautiful blue-and-white porcelain
as were Dutch householders, but they acquired it guided by much more complex standards of taste.
Wen Zhenheng was a leading connoisseur and arbiter of taste of his generation (he died in 1645). He was living in the cultural
metropolis of Suzhou when the
White Lion
exploded and sank. His home city produced and consumed the very finest works of art and cultural objects to be found in China,
as well as the most commercial. Wen was perfectly placed to produce his famous handbook of cultural consumption and good taste,
A Treatise on Superfluous Things
. The great-grandson of the greatest artist of the sixteenth century, an essayist in his own right, and a member of one of
the richest and most exclusive families in Suzhou, Wen had all the credentials needed to pass the judgments of his class on
what was done and not done in polite society, and on what should be owned and what avoided—which is what
A Treatise on Superfluous Things
is all about. A guide to the dos and don’ts of acquiring and using nice things, it was an answer to the prayers of readers
who, unlike a gentleman such as Wen, were not sufficiently educated or well bred to know these things by upbringing. It was
for the nouveaux riches who yearned to be accepted by their social superiors. On Wen’s part, it was also a clever way to profit
from their ignorance, for the book sold well.
In the section on decorative objects, Wen Zhenheng sets the bar for good quality porcelain very high. He allows that porcelain
is something a gentleman should collect and put on display, but doubts that anything produced after the second quarter of
the fifteenth century has any value, at least as something you would want to let your friends know you owned. The perfect
piece of porcelain, he declares, should be “as blue as the sky, as lustrous as a mirror, as thin as paper, and as resonant
as a chime”—though he has the sense to wonder whether such perfection has ever been achieved, even in the fifteenth century.
He does let a few sixteenth-century pieces pass his scrutiny—but only so long as they were only for everyday use. A host might
serve tea to his guests in cups produced by Potter Cui, for instance. (Cui’s private kiln at Jingdezhen turned out fine porcelain,
both blue-and-white and multicolored, during the third quarter of the sixteenth century.) But really, Wen complains, the cups
are a little too large to be elegant. They should be used only if nothing else is on hand.
Owning objects of high cultural value was a treacherous business among those struggling up the ladder of status. Even if you
possessed a piece of porcelain that Wen considered fine enough to own, care still had to be taken not to use it in the wrong
way or at the wrong time. For instance, to set out a vase for people to see, the only piece of furniture on which it was acceptable
to put it was “a table in the Japanese style,” as he describes it. The size of this table depends on the size and style of
the vase, and that in turn depends on the size of the room in which the vase is displayed. “In the spring and winter, bronze
vessels are appropriate to use; in the autumn and summer, ceramic vases,” he insists. Nothing else is acceptable. “Value
bronze and ceramic, and hold gold and silver cheap,” he instructs. Objects made of precious metals should be avoided not
to cool the sin of pride, as the Koran warned, but to keep those who were merely wealthy and without education or taste in
their places. “Avoid vases with rings,” he also advises, “and never arrange them in pairs.” It was all very complicated.
Among his many rules, Wen included some for the flowers you were allowed to put in your vase. These admonitions end with the
severe caution that “any more than two stems and your room will end up looking like a tavern.” The exuberance of the floral
displays that Europeans gaily stuffed into their newly acquired Chinese porcelains, and that Dutch artists loved to paint
when they weren’t painting tavern scenes (and sometimes when they were) would have struck Wen as utterly tasteless and hopelessly
lower class. Just imagine the dismay he would have felt over how Europeans used their teacups. Wen allowed that it was all
right to put out fruit and nuts when drinking tea from one of Potter Cui’s cups, for instance, but never oranges. Oranges
were too fragrant to be served alongside tea, as was jasmine and cassia. In the war that Wen waged against bad taste, Europeans
would have lost hands down.
Europeans could know nothing of these status games. They were too new to the art of owning porcelain to worry about anything
except getting their hands on some. They had their rules too, but their cultural terrain of luxury ownership, at least in
ceramic matters, was not so heavily mined. The precious pieces of porcelain that came out of the hold of the
Vlissingen
and were put on auction at VOC warehouses in 1613 were highly desired, regardless of their style or even their quality. The
only cultural values they carried was that they were rare, exclusive, and expensive. Having no experience with porcelain,
Europeans could let their new acquisitions migrate into whatever niches their buyers fancied. Chinese dishes started to appear
on tables at meal times, since porcelain was marvelously easy to clean and did not pass on the flavor of yesterday’s food
to today’s dinner. They were also put on display as costly curiosities from the far side of the globe. They decorated tables,
display cabinets, mantles, even the lintels over doors. (Careful attention paid to doorframes in mid- to late-seventeenth-century
paintings of Dutch interiors will reveal dishes or vases perched on them.) It would have been pointless to restrict the placing
of fine vases to low Japanese-style tables, since Europeans had no idea what those were. They put them anywhere they liked.
These things mattered deeply to Wen Zhenheng. In his world of complex status distinctions, the superiority of the refined
over the vulgar was always threatening to get lost whenever the uncultured rich asserted their power over the merely well
educated. Wealth was no guard against vulgarity. On the contrary, as the ever-growing ranks of the nouveaux riches in the
commercial age in which Wen found himself rushed to live ostentatiously without learning to live well, wealth was more likely
to produce vulgarity than assist someone to buy his way out of it. The untutored ate off gold and silver plates without the
least awareness that they were engaging in boorish display. They washed their calligraphy brushes in recently fired porcelain
cups, when they really shouldn’t have used porcelain at all, but jade or bronze—Wen allowed the use of a porcelain water pot
only if it had been produced before 1435. These were tough rules. They favored the cultural insider with knowledge that the
merely wealthy could not hope to gain—except, ironically, by buying a copy of
A Treatise on Superfluous Things
. In the war of status, the recently arrived were always at risk, since they did not get to the write the rules. On the other
hand, at least they could play the game. The poor, after all, never got the chance.