Batavia's Graveyard by Mike Dash

his money in 1630. His former employers noted
his death, with a certain satisfaction, as “a well deserved punishment by God.”
In truth, however, Visnich had simply taken better advantage of his opportunities than
hundreds of other merchants who were equally corrupt.
    Francisco Pelsaert was no exception to this rule. While at Agra, he used Company
funds to set himself up as a moneylender, advancing cash to local indigo growers at an
annual rate of 18 percent and pocketing the profits for himself. It was a risky business;
he could hardly keep full records, for fear of an audit; the farmers who made up his
clientele sometimes defaulted on their loans; and there was always the danger that a
colleague would denounce him to the Company. But by initiating his successor in the
deception when he himself returned to Surat, Pelsaert successfully evaded detection. By
1636, when his fraud at last came to light, the VOC had incurred sizable losses of almost
44,000 rupees.

    Word that there was money to be made in the service of Jan Company did not take
long to spread through the United Provinces, and there can be little doubt that Jeronimus
Cornelisz planned to recoup his lost fortune through just this sort of private trade.
Whether or not the apothecary had been compromised by involvement in the Torrentian
scandal, his appearance in Amsterdam in the autumn of 1628 clearly suggests that his chief
concern was to restore his battered financial position. There were safer bolt-holes for
religious dissidents than Amsterdam, most of them outside the borders of the United
Provinces—but none that offered such a tempting combination of anonymity and
opportunity.
    The town that Jeronimus traversed was not yet fully formed. The horseshoe-shaped
canals that still enclose the city center had only just been built, running just inside to
the walls, encircling the residential streets and the merchants’ warehouses and
leading north toward the crowded harbor. But even then their banks were lined with the
thin, tall homes of Holland’s leading citizens—the height of each building
roughly denoting its owner’s wealth and status—and the narrow streets so seethed
with citizens hurrying to appointments that they were often clogged with carts and
carriages. As early as 1617, the press of traffic in the city center had grown so great
that a one-way system had been introduced to ease congestion, but, even so, there was
still noise and bustle everywhere. Amsterdam’s merchants rose at 5:30 a.m., began
work at seven, and labored for an average of 12 or 14 hours a day. Their lives left them
little time for strangers, and newcomers to the city often thought themselves invisible.
The people of the city were so intent on making money that visitors passed unnoticed on
the busy streets.
    It is unlikely, then, that anyone noticed or talked to Jeronimus Cornelisz as he
threaded his way through the crowded center of the town and passed through the medieval
city wall where it was pierced by the
Waag,
the old customs weigh-house. New
fortifications, ordered when it was obvious the city was outgrowing its old boundaries,
had been thrown up half a mile or so farther to the east, and the area between the walls
had already become one of the commercial centers of Amsterdam. It was close to the harbor
and had plenty of room for the construction of warehouses and wharves.
    The town became much less cramped and crowded on the far side of the
Waag;
Cornelisz would easily have found what he was looking for. His destination was the East
India House, which stood on the Kloveniersburgwal, a tree-lined canal that had once been
the city moat, and close to one end of the Oude Hoogstraat, the old high street of
Amsterdam. The House itself was an elegant, if not especially imposing, three-story brick
rectangle completed in 1606 and built around a central courtyard. It was the main
headquarters of the local chamber of the VOC.
    Recruitment to Jan Company was a haphazard business.