Vermeer's Hat (29 page)
Authors: Timothy Brook
On the morning of New Year’s Day, 1632, Angelo Cocchi emerged cautiously from the cabin in which he and five traveling companions,
two of them wounded, had barricaded themselves for two nights and a day. They found their junk drifting off the coast of Fujian
and completely deserted, except for the bodies of the slain that still lay on the deck. They managed to land the junk on an
island, from which local fisherman conveyed them to the mainland, perhaps out of honest pity, though more likely because they
got the junk in exchange for their aid. They were then transferred to the prefectural seat of Quanzhou, one of the ports that
handled the trade with Manila, from where they were sent on to Governor Xiong in Fuzhou, the provincial capital. Xiong received
Cocchi politely but was not about to grant him residence or even open discussion about trade. Instead, he reported Cocchi’s
arrival to Beijing and asked for instructions. He also ordered that the pirates who had boarded Cocchi’s ship be apprehended
and executed—which they were, despite Cocchi’s plea to spare their lives.
The court responded four months later with an order that the survivors of the
Guía
would have been delighted to receive so quickly: these people were to be sent back. European missionaries were allowed to
enter China so long as they observed the four conditions the Jesuits respected, thanks to Matteo Ricci’s improvisation: arrive
through legal channels, dress Chinese, speak Mandarin, and conduct yourself according to Chinese norms. Cocchi failed on all
counts (was his Chinese substandard, or was the dialect he learned in Cavite unintelligible?) and was ordered out of the country.
Rendition to the Philippines was precisely what Cocchi did
not
want. He wanted to stay in China; he desired to devote the rest of his life to spreading Christianity among the Chinese; he
wanted never to return to Manila, much less to Florence.
When the day arrived for Cocchi to board the boat that was arranged to take him back to Manila, a Japanese Christian who wanted
to go to the Philippines took his place. The substitution was arranged through Luke Liu. Liu was a Chinese Christian from
Fuan, a neighboring county seat where the Jesuits had already established a mission and won ten converts. What a Japanese
Christian was doing in Fuzhou, and how he fooled the authorities, are puzzles without answers, but the ruse worked. After
making the switch, Liu whisked Cocchi out of the capital and off to Fuan, where together they set about transforming Cocchi’s
appearance and speech into those of a Chinese.
Cocchi managed to stay out of sight of the provincial authorities. They would have apprehended and exiled him had they known
he was there. Even so, he worked publicly enough to convert several people and build two churches. He was so certain of his
ambition to build a Dominican presence in Fujian that, within a year, he and his followers devised a plan to smuggle more
missionaries from Manila, again via Taiwan. This time the boat was sent from China for the purpose and was manned by four
Chinese converts to make sure nothing went amiss. The plan went off without a hitch. In July 1633, Cocchi welcomed two Spanish
priests (one of whom, Juan de Morales, had previously led a failed mission to Cambodia) to Fuan. None of this would have been
possible without Cocchi’s Chinese associates, and yet they would not have become involved had Cocchi failed to gain their
trust and devotion. Four and a half months later, at the age of thirty-six, Angelo Cocchi suddenly fell ill. He died in the
very place where he had long intended his life to end, if not quite this soon.
COCCHI, LIKE WELTEVREE, MADE THE choice never to go home. Both men survived the choice they made, at least initially, and
both began to fashion new lives for themselves in their new circumstances, one as a priest, the other as an employee of the
king’s arsenal. Theirs were not the only circumstances through which Europeans who ended up in foreign lands far beyond Europe
made the decision not to go back. There were others.
The ship on which Weltevree had first sailed to Asia, the
Hollandia
, returned to Europe in 1625 with a load of pepper. Two of its crew on that voyage chose not to complete the journey. We know
about them because, by coincidence, none other than Willem Bontekoe captained Weltevree’s
Hollandia
on its return. Bontekoe once again was a magnet for misfortune, for storms ravaged the
Hollandia
during its Indian Ocean crossing. By the time the ship reached the island of Madagascar, it had to limp into the Bay of Sancta
Lucia for repair, including the raising of a new mast.
Sancta Lucia was a mooring that Dutch mariners in this situation regularly used, so the Malagasy people living around the
bay were well familiar with Europeans. Bontekoe sent some of his men ashore to “have speech with the inhabitants”—indicating
that at least one side spoke the language of the other. The Malagasies agreed to let them land and repair their ship, and
even volunteered to help drag the timber needed for making a new mast from the interior of the island out to the coast. Working
side by side bred familiarity, so much so that over the three weeks the crew spent at Sancta Lucia, “the men often wandered
away to seek pleasure.” As Bontekoe bluntly puts it, “the women were keen to have intercourse with our men.” His sole concern
was that the men not absent themselves too much from their jobs, though he also realized that sexual intercourse boosted their
morale. “When they had been with the women,” he noted, “they returned meek as lambs to their work.” The visitors found clear
evidence that this was not the first time Dutch sailors had slept with the local women. Though Bontekoe notes that the Malagasies
are “mostly black” with hair “curled like sheep’s wool,” he also observes that “we saw here many children who were almost
white, and whose fair coloured hair hung from their heads.” He doesn’t need to explain further. The crew of the
Hollandia
were about a decade behind the first Dutch fathers of Malagasy Creole children.
As the ship was preparing for departure on the morning of 24 April, after close to a month’s sojourn at Sancta Lucia, Bontekoe
discovered that two of the men on night watch were missing. Hilke Jopkins and Gerrit Harmensz had not only disappeared, but
had taken one of the ship’s boats with them. As Bontekoe put it, Jopkins and Harmensz “ran away to the blacks.” Perhaps the
evidence of earlier coupling had encouraged Hilke Jopkins to take his chances locally and not return home to Friesland, and
Gerrit Harmensz not to go back to his family in Norden. Is it even reasonable to assume that either man had a home or family
in Europe? Having sailed east years earlier, a choice that was for many a last resort, they may well have had nothing to return
to. Why not make a new life where there seemed some chance of happiness, or even just survival?
Bontekoe sent a company of soldiers out to apprehend the deserters and return them to the ship. Their labor was needed. Jopkins
and Harmensz were spotted at one point, but with the connivance of the Malagasies, they could not be caught. The search achieved
nothing except to delay the
Hollandia
’s departure by one more day. Bontekoe gave up and left them to the life they had chosen.
Jumping culture was not as easy as jumping ship. It involved giving up the language, food, beliefs, and etiquette of one’s
birthplace in favor of those of an adopted land. Such matters were different for the rich, who had a stake in the way things
were at home. Jopkins and Harmensz were poor men, and the conditions of life for the poor were much the same everywhere. Holland’s
poor might eat different grains from Africa’s poor, but starch still made up the bulk of their diet. They might dress themselves
in this homespun rather than that homespun, but rough cloth was rough cloth. They might pray here to this deity rather than
there to that god, but they knew that the afterlife was pretty much beyond their management in any case. All they could do
was pray and hope for the best.
The key actors in this drama of escape were not the European men, even though Bontekoe assigned them the leading role in his
memoir. They were the Malagasy women. Had the women been unwilling to help the Dutchmen, Jopkins and Harmensz could not have
dreamed of surviving at Sancta Lucia. They could have survived without sex, of course, but not without the resources and know-how
the women provided, and the position within kinship networks that relations with them provided.
The same calculations were going on all over the world. Champlain actually encouraged his men to find Huron wives, including
those who had legal wives back in France. There was no better way to ensure their survival than by embedding them among those
best able to support them and facilitate trade. On one side, missionaries in New France denounced these cross-racial unions
as immoral. On the other, Huron men wondered how their women could tolerate such ugly mates. As one Huron said after meeting
his first Frenchman, “Is it possible that any woman would look favourably on such a man?” But they had no other reason to
object, for traders on both sides benefited from the practice: these unions gave them preferential access to trade goods.
Canadian historian Sylvia van Kirk has called these Natives “women in between.” Interposed between two distinctly different
cultural formations, they were able to relate to both, bridging from one to the other and enjoying influence and prestige
as a result. Once the balance between French and Native tilted in French favor, however, the channel they had opened was shut.
By then, European women were arriving in New France in sufficient numbers to drive Native women from the marriage market and
reimpose racism as a social principle of Canadian society.
These relationships existed on what American historian Richard White calls a “middle ground,” the space in which two cultures
meet and must learn to interact. This space of intersection survives so long as neither culture has the power to overwhelm
the other. As long as it does survive, both cultures are in a position to adjust their differences and negotiate a reasonable
coexistence. Through war, trade, and marriage, the French and the Hurons sustained this sort of middle ground through the
first half of the seventeenth century. The Malagasies and the Dutch were engaged in the same strategy at Sancta Lucia. There,
too, neither side was in a position to force its will on the other, except at the cost of breaking the profitable bond between
them. In this linking of cultures, castaways and captives had many roles to play. They taught and learned languages, gave
and took knowledge, made whatever sense they could of the new customs and ideas they encountered and then interpreted them
to the other side.
This middle ground depended on each side seeing the necessity of compromise. Shakespeare in 1611 intuited the fragility of
this relationship when he wrote
The Tempest
. All too soon, as Caliban rages to Prospero, his shipwrecked European master, what began as kindness—“Thou strokedst me,
and made much of me”—turned to enslavement and deculturation. “You taught me language,” the fictional Caliban bitterly reminds
Prospero, “and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.” Shakespeare’s imaginary character expresses the despair that real
Natives came to feel over their loss of language and culture. As one Algonquin complained to a French missionary who was converting
his fellow tribesmen, “It is you who overturn their brains and make them die.” The consequences of exposure were unstoppably
swift. “It is all done so quickly,” the contemporary Montagnais poet, Armand Collard, has written. “You have no time to react
and so you submit.” The middle ground closes and with it the choice to meet strangers as equals.
To be in Holland was similarly not a choice Van der Burch’s boy got to make. All he could do was submit and figure out how
to improvise in his new surroundings. Looking at how he carries himself in the manner of a Dutch servant, he seems to have
managed all right. And yet there is the hint of something in the frank look he casts our way, a hint perhaps of his mindfulness
that this is not his place.
VERMEER DIDN’T PAINT ANYONE WHO wasn’t born within twenty-five kilometers of Delft. The only time he considered painting people
who weren’t purely Dutch was in his early twenties, when he took on the classical and biblical subjects that a student painter
of that time was expected to paint. In the previous generation, Rembrandt van Rijn in Amsterdam and Leonaert Bramer in Delft
had transformed biblical scenes into visually dramatic subjects establishing a style within which the young Vermeer had no
choice but to start working. The challenge for seventeenth-century painters of scenes from the distant past was how to compose
them in such a way that closed the natural gap between the world the viewers saw around them and the world as it might have
looked in another time and place. The painter wanted his viewers to feel that they were there, actually seeing what was going
on. Was that best achieved by making the biblical past look just like the Dutch present, or by making them different? Was
the demand of realism better served by avoiding such playacting and dressing your figures in contemporary Dutch garb and remaining
faithful to the architectural details of Dutch buildings? If not, then should a painter fill his canvas with Oriental details
picked up from contemporary Near Eastern culture? Was this a more powerful device to get viewers to suspend their disbelief?
Painters of the generation of Bramer and Rembrandt were brilliant in developing a hybrid look that Orientalized some features
while retaining a strong touch of the familiar. Vermeer’s instinct went in the opposite direction: not to try for a faux-historical
realism, but to translate historical moments into the present. When he paints the figure of Jesus in his early
Christ in the House of Mary and Martha
, he depicts him in the conventionally indeterminate drapery that artists of the time tended to put on Jesus. Mary and Martha,
though, he dressed more or less as though they were Dutch women. So too, the sparsely indicated room where they are sitting
looks suspiciously like a Dutch home. Already at the age of twenty-two, Vermeer was shying away from the Near Eastern touches
in which his elders indulged. Within two years, he gave up this sort of fake historicizing entirely and painted nothing but
the real world of everyday Delft.