Vermeer's Hat (35 page)
Authors: Timothy Brook
On the massacre of 1603, see Antonio de Morga’s 1609 account in
Philippine Islands
, vol. 15, pp. 272–77;also vol. 16, pp. 30–45, pp. 298–99. The event is covered, with willful misunderstanding of the Chinese side, in Schurz,
Manila Galleon
, pp. 85–90; see also p. 258 on the galleon sinkings. More reliable, though still incomplete, is José Eugenio Borao, “The Massacre of 1603: Chinese Perception of the Spanish on the Philippines,”
Itinerario
22:1 (1998), pp. 22–39. Zhang Xie,
Investigations of the Eastern and Western Oceans
, p. 92, gives a higher estimate of twenty-five thousand killed. The figure of thirty thousand is cited from a 1637 report in Schurz,
Manila Galleon
, p. 81. The minister of war’s estimate of the number of Fujianese going abroad appears in
Unedited Records of the Chongzhen Era,
41.2b. The dynastic history simply says “tens of thousands”; Zhang Tingyu,
Standard History of the Ming Dynasty
, p. 8368.
Schurz’s
Manila Galleon
is the authority on the galleon trade; the quotes come from pp. 265 (scurvy and starvation) and 91 (the 1643 comment on the lack of business causing the uprising). Regarding thirty ships arriving in 1639, see Souza,
Survival of Empire
, p. 84, table 4.8.
For the comment on the arches in Chaozhou, see Girard,
Le Voyage en Chine
, p. 103.
On pearl diving in south China, see Gu Yanwu,
Advantages and Disadvantages
, 29.126a–b.
Feng Menglong mentions the guarding of silver mines in his
Provisional Gazetteer of Shouning County
[
Shouning daizhi
] (1637) (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1983), pp. 36–37.
For “one man in a hundred is rich,” see Brook,
Confusions of Pleasure
, p. 238. On the price of rice in Shanghai in 1639–47, see Ye Mengzhu,
A Survey of the Age
, p. 153; on selling two children for a peck of wheat, see Zhang Lixiang,
Supplement to the Agricultural Treatise, annotated edition
[
Bu nongshu jiaoshi
] (repr. Beijing: Nongye chubanshe, 1983), p. 174.
On junks, see Pierre-Yves Manguin, “The Vanishing
Jong
: Insular Southeast Asian Fleets in Trade and War (Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries),” in
Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power, and Belief
, ed. Anthony Reid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 197–213.
Francesco Careri’s comment is taken from Schurz,
Manila Galleon
, p. 253. For post-1644 Chinese polemics against silver, see von Glahn,
Fountain of Fortune
, pp. 219–22;Gu Yanwu’s comment about “resorting to wine” appears on p. 221.
Andre Gunder Frank,
Reorient: Global Economy in the Asian Age
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 237–48, sees the world monetary crisis of 1640 as caused by the overproduction of silver. For a contrasting interpretation, see Jan de Vries, “Connecting Europe and Asia: A Quantitative Analysis of the Cape-route Trade, 1497–1795,” in
Global Connections and Monetary History, 1470
–
1800
, ed. Dennis Flynn, Arturo Giráldez, and Richard von Glahn (Alder-shot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 35–106.
The sinkings of the
Concepción
and the
San Ambrosio
are noted in Schurz,
Manila Galleon
, p. 259. The recovery of the
Concepción
is described in Eugene Lyon, “Track of the Manila Galleons,” and William Mathers, “
Nuestra Señora de la Concepción
,” both in
National Geographic
, Sept. 1990, pp. 5–37 and pp. 39–55. Excavated in 1987–88, the ship was the first Manila galleon to have its cargo retrieved through underwater archaeology.
The principal source for the 1639 uprising is the anonymous “Relation of the Insurrection of the Chinese,” translated in Blair and Robertson,
Philippine Islands
, vol. 29, pp. 208–58. On the history of Chinese in the Philippines, see Ch‘en Ching-ho,
The Chinese Community in the Sixteenth Century Philippines
(Tokyo: Center for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1968); also Edgar Wickberg,
The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850
–
1898
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965).
The Chinese-Franciscan conversation on silver is taken from Pedro de la Piñuela,
Questions and Answers on First Meeting
[
Chuhui wenda
], in Pascale Girard,
Les Religieux occidentaux en Chine à l’époque moderne
(Lisbon: Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, 2000), pp. 388,472.
For “until recently has supported the full weight of the Monarchy,” see Jeffrey Cole,
The Potosí Mita, 1573
–
1700: Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), pp. 52–53.
The story of Fulgencio Orozco is from Padden,
Tales of Potosí
, pp. 27–32. For Calancha’s comment about Potosinos being “zealous in the pursuit of riches,” see Lewis Hanke,
The Imperial City of Potosí
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), p. 2.
CHAPTER 7. JOURNEYS
Van der Burch’s
The Card Players
is discussed by Michiel Kersten in
Delft Masters, Vermeer’s Contemporaries: Illusionism Through the Conquest of Light and Space
, ed. Michiel Kersten and Danille Lokin (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 1996), pp. 174–75. Two Dutch paintings of the period depicting African servants in the British Royal Collection are Jan de Bray,
The Banquet of Cleopatra
(1652), and Aelbert Cuyp,
The Negro Page
(ca. 1655), the former published in Christopher Lloyd,
Enchanting the Eye: Dutch Paintings of the Golden Age
(London: Royal Collection Publications, 2005), pp. 50–51. Note that de Bray includes a carrack porcelain on the table before Cleopatra.
On the Dutch slave trade, see Peter Emmer, “The Dutch and the Slave Americas,” in
Slavery in the Development of the Americas
, ed. David Eltis, Frank Lewis, and Kenneth Sokoloff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 70–86. On the history of blacks in seventeenth-century Dutch society and art, see Blakely,
Blacks in the Dutch World
, especially pp. 82–115,226–28. On the role of blackness in early modern European society, see Hall,
Things of Darkness
, especially pp. 1–15 and ch. 5; also Steven Epstein,
Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 184–97. As Epstein points out, blacks were latecomers to the slave population of Europe.
Lobo’s history is recounted in C. R. Boxer,
Fidalgoes in the Far East, 1550
–
1770: Fact and Fancy in the History of Macao
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1948), pp. 149–53. On the end of the Portuguese trade to Japan, see C. R. Boxer,
Great Ship from Amacon
p. 155.
The Jesuit rector’s objection to trafficking in children is cited in Souza,
Survival of Empire
, p. 195.
Bontekoe’s voyage is described in his
Memorable Description of the East Indian Voyage,
pp. 57–59,92–95,105–13,142–43. For Coen’s rebuke, see Bruijn et al.,
Dutch Asiatic Shipping
, vol. 1, p. 71.
The 1646–47 voyage of the
Nieuw Haarlem
is recorded in Bruijn et al.,
Dutch Asiatic Shipping
, vol. 2, p. 96, and vol. 3, p. 52.
For “they behaved like a mouse does when it sees a cat” see Nishikawa Joken,
Twilight Tales of Nagasaki
[
Nagasaki yawagusa
], referring to an incident in 1665, quoted in Boxer,
Jan Compagnie in Japan
, p. 121.
Weltevree’s story is told in Gari Ledyard,
The Dutch Come to Korea
, (Seoul: Yaewon, 1971), pp. 26–37; the quotes appear on pp. 28, 36, 181–82, 186, 221; on Bosquet, see pp. 144,204. A second VOC ship named
Hollandia
embarked from Goeree and arrived in Batavia on 29 August 1625, but as Weltevree said he sailed from Amsterdam, he was more likely on the
Hollandia
that departed from Texel. See Bruijn et al.,
Dutch-Asiatic Shipping
, vol. 2, pp. 52,56; vol. 3, p. 28. The fate of the
Ouwerkerck
is noted in Boxer,
The Great Ship from Amacon
, pp. 114–15.
Cocchi’s story is told in Dunne
Generation of Giants
, pp. 235–39, and by Antonio Sisto Rosso in the
Dictionary of Ming Biography
, ed. L. Carrington Goodrich and Chao-ying Fang (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 409–10.
On “women in between,” see Sylvia van Kirk,
“Many Tender Ties”: Women in Fur-Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670
–
1870
(Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer, 1980), pp. 4–8,28–29,75–77. On the “middle ground,” see Richard White,
The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650
–
1815
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 52.
The quotes from Caliban come from act 1, scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
. For “it is you who overturn their brains and make them die,” see Penny Petrone, ed.,
First People, First Voices
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), p. 8. Armand Collard’s poem, “Barefoot on the Massacred Earth,” is quoted in Sioui,
For an Amerindian Autohistory
, p. 33.
Richard Trexler’s comment comes from his
The Journey of the Magi: Meanings in the History of a Christian Story
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 6; see pp. 102–7 on the black magus and the eccentric position of the third king.
CHAPTER 8. ENDINGS: NO MAN IS AN ISLAND
Donne’s seventeenth meditation is found in John Donne,
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), pp. 97–98; I have modernized some spelling and punctuation.
For Bontekoe’s purchase of pigs, see his
Memorable Description
, p. 109.
For “today it is snowing in China,” see Ledyard,
The Dutch Come to Korea
, p. 28.
On Corcuera’s disputes with the Church and subsequent career, see Cushner,
Spain in the Philippines
, pp. 159–67; “for where shoes were worth two reals before,” see
Philippine Islands
, vol. 35, p. 195.
For Catharina’s comments on “the ruinous and protracted war,” see Montias,
Vermeer and His Milieu
, p. 351. On the bodies buried in the Thins-Vermeer grave in the Old Church, see O. H. Dijkstra, “Jan Vermeer van Delft: drie archiefvondsten” [Jan Vermeer of Delft: Three Archival Discoveries],
Oude Holland
83 (1968), p. 223.
CHAPTER 1. THE VIEW FROM DELFT
1
. The Ming dynasty, founded in 1368, was overthrown in 1644 when a rebel army captured Beijing and drove the last emperor to suicide, then was forced out in turn by a Manchu army invading from the northeast. The Manchu Qing dynasty lasted till 1911.
2
. Europeans prized pearls that were large, which this pearl is, and round, which it isn’t. Chinese valued size—a first-rate pearl had to be at least 3.75 centimeters in diameter—but preferred a pearl that was “slightly flattened on one side, giving it the shape of an overturned pot,” to quote a formula used by all Chinese writers on pearls. A pearl of this quality was called a “pendant pearl” and used exclusively for earrings.
CHAPTER 2. VERMEER’S HAT
1
. The map depicts the coastal half of the new United Provinces, with west at the top of the map. Originally compiled by the van Berckenrode family of Delft map-makers, it was published just after 1620 by the leading commercial cartographer of Amsterdam, Willem Blaeu. Vermeer may have included it to allude to, or mock, an earlier Dutch painterly tradition that used images of the world, such as maps, to disparage the worldly concerns of figures in a painting, particularly women.
2
. The Montagnais are known in Canada today as the Idlu First Nation. The name, also romanized as Innu, means “the People.”
3
. The name
Algonquin
, meaning “relatives” or “allies,” was applied to Algonkian-speaking tribes widely dispersed across present-day Québec and Ontario. Champlain’s particular allies were the Onontchataronons, known today as the Petite Nation Algonquins.
4
. The Hurons who fought with Champlain were the Arendarhonons, the People at the Rock, one of four tribes of the Confederacy. The name
Huron
appears to have been coined by the French as an abbreviation of
Arendarhonon
, punning on the French term for the hair on a boar’s head (
hure de sanglier
). The Hurons called themselves the Wendats, the Islanders, referring to the cosmogonic myth that placed them on the back of a turtle-island swimming in the cosmic sea. Their descendants today are known in Québec as Wendats and in Oklahoma as Wyandots.
5
. The Iroquois Confederacy grew to six nations later in the century; the Six Nations now live in southwestern Ontario. The Iroquois called themselves the Rotin-nonhsionni, the House Builders (which the French turned into
Hodénosaunee
). To the Algonquins, they were known as the Naadawe, the Snakes. The Mohawks called themselves the Kanyenkehaka, meaning People of the Flint Site. “Mohawk” is an Algonkian insult meaning Eaters of Animate Things, by implication, Eaters of Humans. The French called them the Anniehronnon.
6
. The name was given not by Champlain but by mockers of René-Robert de la Salle’s attempt in 1669 to find a water route to China. When the explorers returned to Québec in failure, they were called “the Chinese,” and de la Salle’s fief, here at Sault St. Louis, was renamed Lachine. The place-name is still in use.
7
. Jean Guérard’s 1634 world map,
Carte universelle hydrographique
, includes this note beside Hudson Bay: “Grand Ocean descouuert l’an, 1612, par henry hudson Anglois, l’on croit qu’il y a passage de la au Japan” (The Great Ocean discovered in the year 1612 by the Englishman Henry Hudson; it is believed there is a passage from here to Japan).
8
. The lake that Champlain put on his map, although in the wrong location, is Lake Nipigon, Nipigon being another version of
Ouinigipous
. The name would be adapted yet again for the first major settlement in Manitoba, Winnipeg.
9
. The French also called them Gens de Mer, the People of the Sea, and also Peu-ples Maritimes, the Maritime Peoples. The desire to associate them with oceanic water was unshakeable.
CHAPTER 3. A DISH OF FRUIT
1
. One bag of pepper weighed about 12 kilograms. At a retail price on the Amsterdam exchange of fl. 0.8 per old pound (0.494 kilograms) this cargo of pepper was worth 364,000 guilders.
2
. In 1603, Gao Cai sent a semi-official delegation to the Spanish colony of Manila in the Philippines to investigate the truth of tales he had heard of a “gold mountain.” It was enough to alarm the Spanish with fears of invasion and set off a massacre of Chinese residents in the city—an event that would be repeated thirty-six years later, the subject of chapter six.
3
. The Dutch favored lion names for their ships, especially in the early days of the VOC. A
Red Lion
sailed to Japan in 1609, to choose one at random. The Dutch also used place names. The
Delft
was launched in 1607 and made three return journeys to Goa and Java; a new
Delft
was built in 1640. The
China
was lost in 1608 while riding at anchor in a storm off Ternate in the Spice Islands; in 1676, the Amsterdam Chamber launched another
China
two and a half times the size of her earlier namesake. By contrast, the Portuguese named their carracks after female saints, seeking their protection. The Chinese used bird names, wishing for their ships the power to speed across the water.
4
. When a Dutch ship—also bearing the name of
White Lion
, as it happens—pillaged French ships in the St. Lawrence River in 1606, the king of France lodged a complaint with the Dutch government, declaring that the Dutch had no right to trade in territories under his jurisdiction. The Dutch agreed to compensate the owner of the ships for his losses, but they also used the inquiry as a platform to declare that the French had no right to block them from trading wherever they liked.
CHAPTER 4. GEOGRAPHY LESSONS
1
. “Moor” is a European term that originally referred to Muslim traders from Morea on the Peloponnesian coast. Later it was expanded to include all Muslims around the Mediterranean, and eventually Muslims everywhere. Masmamut may well be a version of Mohammad. “Moor” was also used to name black Africans.
2
. This was not the first time the Ming government had recruited Portuguese from Macao for military assistance. The previous emperor had made the same invitation after ascending the throne. Seven Portuguese gunners went north in 1622 with an interpreter and an entourage of sixteen. Court politics turned against them, so that when a gun exploded during a demonstration in 1623, killing the Portuguese gunner and wounding three Chinese, they were sent back.
3
. Rodrigues was lucky to get back to Macao. Twelve of the Portuguese gunners died the previous winter in Shandong province when Chinese soldiers mutinied for back pay. As the mutineers stormed the city the Portuguese were defending, Ro-drigues managed to escape by jumping from the city wall into a snowbank. Thanks to global cooling, he only broke an arm in the fall.
CHAPTER 5. SCHOOL FOR SMOKING
1
. After leaving the Americas for France, the word “petum” returned with the French who, needing to name a Native tribe outside the Huron Confederacy who were the major tobacco dealers, called them the Pétuns.
2
. Dekker is describing a cigar: tobacco leaves rolled into a cylindrical mass, inserted into a casing (“Pudding”), then smoked. Smoking this thing was part of Dekker’s humor, “pudding” being Elizabethan slang for penis. “Trinidado” was the name for tobacco coming from Trinidad.
3
. The Japanese abandoned
en
for
tabako
in the nineteenth century when they switched from pipes to cigarettes, but the word lingers on No Smoking signs:
kin’en
, “smoking prohibited.”
CHAPTER 6. WEIGHING SILVER
1
. Eight reals had the value of one peso, which was valued at 26.4487 grams of pure silver. Until 1728, the peso was refined to a purity of 0.931, giving the coin a real weight of 28.75 grams. The English translated “pesos” as “pieces” (pieces-of-eight being pesos of eight reals).
2
. The government imposed a state monopoly on pearl beds from the same anxiety that wealth in private hands threatens the dynasty. In the case of pearls, only Tanka, or boat people, of south China were allowed to harvest pearls under government license. But the best pearl divers in south China were ten-year-old boys who trained themselves to sink to the bottom undetected, break open a mussel, swallow the pearl, and then swim off.
3
. The term “ghetto” was first used when Venetian Jews were moved in 1516 to a small islet of this name in the Cannaregio district. The ghetto, a Venetian word meaning “foundry,” was an artisan district where glassmaking had been done until it was moved to the island of Murano to reduce the threat of fire. The gates to the ghetto were closed at night;whether they were locked depended on the political climate. The gates were removed after 1797, but rebuilt in 1815 during the Austrian occupation. Jews were granted freedom of residence in Venice only in 1866.
4
. “Junk” came into European languages in the 1610s to transcribe
jong
, the Malay word for their large flat-bottomed boats. Europeans soon narrowed the word exclusively to designate the cargo vessels that Chinese merchants used in Southeast Asia, which incorporated elements of Malay design. The English synonym meaning “rubbish” derives from a different maritime origin: “junk” was a piece of old nautical rope too worn to serve as rigging and only fit for other uses, such as padding or stuffing.
CHAPTER 7. JOURNEYS
1
. The
Mauritius
, on which Bontekoe’s younger brother Jacob sailed to the East three years later, may have taken the same course on its outbound voyage, for its death toll was shockingly high. The
Mauritius
and its sister ship the
Wapen van Rotterdam
lost 275 men on the crossing. They abandoned the
Wapen
on the south coast of Java for want of manpower. Jacob was later sent back to recover the ship, which he did, and was made its captain (
Memorable Description
, p. 114).
2
. Some of these garments may have been imaginary, but perhaps not all. According to the posthumous inventory of his possessions, Vermeer owned two “Turkish mantles,” a “Turkish robe,” and a pair of “Turkish trousers,” as well as two “Indian coats.” Did Bramer have his own collection of Oriental costumes in which to dress up his models?
CHAPTER 8. ENDINGS: NO MAN IS AN ISLAND
1
. The desire to discover a common history for all humankind also motivated European scholars to build universal chronologies, usually by expanding biblical history into a global framework. Research of this sort led James Ussher in 1650 famously to determine that the history of the world began with its divine creation in 4004 B.C., an invented date that apparently still finds favor in certain fundamentalist circles.