400 years on: How the 1622 Battle of Macao unfolded

400 years on: How the 1622 Battle of Macao unfolded Several times in the first volume of Capital (“Das Kapital” in the German original), the only one he edited during his lifetime, in 1867, Karl Marx very critically recalls the history of the Dutch East India Company, the famous VOC (1602-1799). The “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist” book chapter presents the VOC as the first modern capitalist company in the history of the world, and denounces the violence and massive exploitation that this Dutch trade organization brought to Southeast Asia: “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” Further, in the final chapters of the volume that are dedicated to his fundamental thesis on the “primitive accumulation of capital,” Marx mentions Dutch colonialism in Asia several times to illustrate his famous theory on the emergence of modern industrial capitalism from the colonial looting of overseas populations and resources: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.” From Marx’s perspective, the VOC was indeed one of the leading examples of this process of invention for modern industrial capitalism, wherein even a small European nation could be transformed into a vibrant colonial power: “The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mothercountry and were there turned into capital.” In consequence, the pages of Das Kapital show no sympathy for the expansion of Dutch commerce in the Asian seas and ports where the so-called Portuguese eastern maritime empire had been established in the 16th century. Marx stresses that the history of Dutch rule in Asia was “one of the most extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre, and meanness.” This genius 19th-century German philosopher proved these harsh words with a well-known historical example in the study of the decline of the Portuguese commercial presence in the Orient during the 17th century, namely, the Dutch conquest of Malacca, the keystone to the riches of Southeast Asia and the South China seas. According to Marx, to secure Malacca, the Dutch corrupted the Portuguese governor, who then let them into the town in early 1641. They hurried at once to his house and assassinated the governor to “abstain” from paying £21,875, the price for his treason. “Wherever the Dutch VOC set foot”, Marx conclusively remarks, “devastation, and depopulation followed. Banjuwangi, a province of Java, in 1750 numbered over 80,000 inhabitants, in 1811, only 8,000. Sweet commerce!” "1622 Battle of Macau”, oil on canvas, 2021 (private collection) - Artwork by Konstantin Bessmertny Unfortunately, in Capital and his other very voluminous works, Marx did not leave us any notes about Macau and its extraordinary historical importance in the intermediation of world trade from the late 16th century to the early 19th century. He ignores the fact that the history of the VOC in the eastern seas was not just a series of conquests but also included some dramatic setbacks. One of their most important setbacks was the defeat of the Dutch attempt to invade and occupy Macau, which was utterly thwarted after frustrated naval attacks and deadly land clashes on 24 June 1622, the day consecrated to Saint John the Baptist in the Catholic Church liturgical calendar. During this period, from 1580 to 1640, Portugal was ruled by Spanish kings in a dual monarchy system that became known as the Iberian Union. Soon, Portuguese cities, fortresses, and trading posts throughout Asia, including Macau, inherited the usual enemies of the Spanish empire: the English and the Dutch. It is therefore worth remembering that the seven United Provinces of the Netherlands, with around 1.5 million inhabitants, achieved independence through a revolt against Spain in 1581, the same year that Philip II was officially sworn king of Portugal by the assembly of nobles, clergy, and representatives of the Portuguese towns (“Cortes”) gathered in Tomar. Then, precisely through the creation of the VOC in 1602, and the West India Company (GWC) later in 1621, they found the means to guarantee the abundant overseas commercial incomes needed to consolidate their political, economic, and military naval power. In the early decades of the 17th century, the Dutch fleet reached 2,000 ships, at the time more than the combined navies of England and France, and brought together professional navigators and pilots and militias associating Dutch soldiers with mercenaries from the various parts of Northern Europe, all united by the same protestant opposition to Roman Catholicism and imperial Habsburg Spain. From its inauguration as a modern for-profit shared company, the VOC was not only a trade corporation but also a powerful instrument of global maritime war against the Spanish Empire and the Iberian Union. Arriving in the East to compete with and conquer the Portuguese and Spanish settlements in the early 17th century, the VOC established its capital in Jayakarta in 1619, changing its name to Batavia. After that, the growing city-port developed following the urban mercantile pattern of Amsterdam. From Batavia, the VOC trade and military fleet quickly identified Macau as a central trade platform to access rich Chinese trading factories and to attack Manila, the Spanish stronghold in the region with its trade connections to the American New Spain. Even before the establishment of Batavia, the Dutch had attacked Portuguese trade ships nearby Macau in 1601, 1603, and 1607 but didn’t attempt to directly assault the Sino-Portuguese enclave. In 1614, Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1587-1629) became firmly installed in Batavia, first as director-general of all VOC trade factories and then governor-general from 1618 to 1623 and from 1624 to 1629, respectively. Having received mercantile training in Rome, he entered the VOC in 1607, working as a junior and, later, senior merchant to accumulate critical global trading experience. Coen promoted a militant policy based on his sinister motto: Dispereert niet, ontsiet uwe vyanden niet (Do not despair, do not spare your enemy). Accordingly, he maintained that Portuguese and Spanish competition in the Eastern seas should be eliminated by force, a hard strategy that brought him ongoing conflicts with VOC’s board of directors, the Heren (or Gentlemen) XVII, who generally preferred to achieve trade profits through less violent and less costly adventures. Nonetheless, in 1621, Coen ordered a final very expensive attack on the Banda Islands with the help of Japanese mercenaries, aiming to control the prosperous nutmeg trade of the archipelago. The result was the massacre of the Bandanese: about 2,800 were killed, 1,700 enslaved, and around 1,000 exiled to Batavia as an indentured workforce. This violent conquest resounded in the region and especially among the Portuguese and Spanish that had trading factories in the spice islands. Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Anonymous, (c. 1650, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) Preparing to conquer Macao In the same year, Coen started preparing a violent military action to attack and occupy Macau with three main commercial and political goals: controlling the Chinese junk trade to Batavia; removing the Portuguese from the Macau-Nagasaki silver trade, where the Dutch had set up a competing trade through Firando, off Kyushu Island in 1611; and building through the Macanese peninsula a robust military naval base to attack the Manila-Acapulco galleons trade. The VOC had gathered information on Macau through different sources, including Portuguese documents collected in maritime attacks, several inquiries done among Chinese traders in Batavia, and English reports. Coen believed that Macau would not be able to resist an invasion led by a dozen strongly armed ships and a military force of 1,000-1,500 motivated men. On April 10, 1622, the Coen sponsored fleet left Batavia with his clear orders to attack and occupy Macau. It comprised of eight vessels loaded with modern artillery, transporting 1,024 men under the command of Captain Cornelis Reijersen. This captain kept a detailed journal of the expedition following an ongoing general obligation for recording these maritime expeditions, as decreed by the VOC directors in 1617. Battle of Macao, Johan Nieuhof (1665, Peace Palace, the Hague, Netherlands) At the end of May, the fleet attacked two Portuguese trading vessels in Southern Vietnamese waters and also received reinforcements, including an additional three ships and 100 men. On June 20, the expedition reached the roadstead of Macau near the Taipa islands, where two Dutch and two English ships had previously tried to blockade Macau without success. However, Coen's orders were clear and while English naval cooperation could be accepted, they had to be excluded from Macau's conquest and occupation. The finally assembled invasion force included 13 ships and a military force of 600 European soldiers, 100 Bandanese, and tens of other Malay-Indonesian, Bengalese, and Japanese mercenaries. On June 23, Reijerson and other captains reconnoitered the city from afar to identify the best landing spot, which was acknowledged to be the Cacilhas bay area in the outer harbor. In the evening, three Dutch ships engaged in an artillery fight against the bulwark of São Francisco at the entry of the Inner Harbor but, being damaged, retreated later in the night. At the June 24 sunrise, two other vessels restarted the attack on the São Francisco bastion but again withdrew with heavy losses. The land invasion began at the Cacilhas sand beach, where hundreds of attackers debarked from 32 barges. A small Portuguese force of around 150 men led by António Rodrigues Cavalinho, a prominent trader from the Macanese municipal elite, fired against the invaders, seriously hurting captain Cornelis Reijersen who was evacuated to his ship. The Dutch and the mercenaries were then headed by a captain Ruffijn, whom the “Portuguese” defenders strategically enticed up to the slopes of the Guia Hill. Here, in an area known as Fontinha, due to its natural water springs falling from the mountain, the Dutch force was furiously attacked by artillery shots from the Monte fortress, which was still under construction, and by a varied mosaic of militiamen, including retired Portuguese soldiers from the State of India who had married and settled in Macau, Eurasian traders and their domestic servants, local and maritime Chinese, Spanish merchants and their Tagalog helpers, and hundreds of African slaves. They violently dispatched the invaders, immediately killing captain Rufijn and hundreds of Dutch militiamen and their mercenaries. Dutch sources recognized the loss of 180 men, hundreds of injured, and the loss of most of the landed military equipment, including several canons. Some Portuguese sources suggest 300 Dutch were killed and hundreds captured, while Spanish documents from the Manila governor increase the enemy deceased to 800! Map of Macao by Pedro Barreto de Resende (c. 1635), Évora Library The great defeat Immediately after the heavy Dutch defeat, a process of textual representation of the victory started among the Portuguese winners, while the Dutch losers also produced a long process of justification for the failure. Over a decade, tens of Dutch reports and documents, including tough inquiries among the survivors, were produced. Since the VOC losses in men and equipment were very high, the Dutch defeat in Macau was not tolerable for a profit-making trade company. The Portuguese from Macau produced three main immediate representations of the victorious event with some strategic divergences and diverse distribution of heroic decisive leadership. The first, entitled in Spanish Relación de la Vitoria, was printed in both Lisbon and Madrid in 1623. It was probably written by a Jesuit visitor to the Macau missions, the Portuguese father Jerónimo Rodrigues (1567-1628), who explained to European Catholic readers that the Dutch defeat was a Jesuit feat since the missionaries themselves led the Macanese attack against the “heretical” invasion. During this period, the Dominicans, who had settled in Macau from Manila since 1587, and were already criticizing the Jesuit missionary accommodation strategies for entering China, produced their own interpretation of the Dutch defeat. The Portuguese friar António do Rosário wrote an explanation of the victory extolling the leadership of the city's captain, who was also the Captain of the Japanese voyage, one Lopo Sarmento de Carvalho, but his text remained just a manuscript. Subsequently, the Jesuit account spread and grew by mobilizing the extensive world network of the powerful religious congregation. Later, the 17th and 18th-century Jesuit chronicles, including Father Manuel Xavier 's account and other apologetic texts, added their convenient hero: the Italian Father Giacomo Rho (1593-1638), a renamed astronomer and expert in artillery as most epochal Jesuit missionaries in China, who fired during the battle a straight cannon shot from Fortaleza do Monte. Some versions explain that this shot destroyed the Dutch ammunition carrier creating tremendous despair, while others say that it even exploded the Dutch admiral ship, thus securing the fatal victory over the invaders. The Dutch VOC sources, including the previously referred expedition journal of Reijerson, give a very different account. Being aware that round numbers in these texts are not accurate figures but rather nouns, and numeric “words” always ending in two zeros normally express “many,” the Dutch documents based on several witnesses of the events naturally decreased their forces and increased the mobilization of the Macau defenders. The sources agree that there were very few white Portuguese fighters during the land confrontations. The Dutch were mainly attacked by hundreds of black slaves unable to fight as European “gentlemen” but who pitilessly slaughtered the Dutch soldiers, thus behaving as “savages.” Some documents from the VOC archives even suggest that the Portuguese had purposely drugged their slaves, who then barbarically injured, killed, and beheaded the surprised Dutch officials and soldiers. All the witnesses who had participated in the combat and were questioned for several years by VOC agents finally agreed that a European army couldn’t easily oppose the enormous animalistic brutality of the hundreds of African slaves, who outnumbered the Dutch forces. The Portuguese sources only mention the role of the kaffirs (“cafres,” in Portuguese”) without any special emphasis or figures. However, several accounts refer that most of their owners immediately freed many of them after the great victory. The “Portuguese” representations, but written in Castilian, also agree that the slaves beheaded many Dutch, which was interpreted as a kind of triumphal celebration of the day of Saint John the Baptist enabling the invasion to be violently defeated. Civil and religious authorities in the following years agreed to make June 24th the city’s day and an observant Catholic holiday in honor of the miraculous intercession of John the Baptist. Memories of foreigners who visited Macau in the years following the victory described the religious and profane festivities of that day, including a devotional pilgrimage to a stone cross erected on the site of Fontinha and even theatrical performances made by children who studied with the Jesuits, which memorialized the great victory on the day of Saint John the Baptist with miniatures of boats and war scenarios. Much later, in 1871, the Leal Senado of Macau erected a public monument commemorating the battle, in the style of the 19th-century national memory realms, that still stands today, naming the local public garden “Vitória” (Victory). A column surmounted by the Portuguese royal arms displays a large inscription on the stone body that summarizes the triumph of the 24th of June 1622, but not without some manipulation dictated by the growing anti-British nationalism of the Portuguese colonial commercial bourgeoisie in the late 19th century. In the case of Macau, they wrongly accused the British colony of Hong Kong as the primary cause of the economic decline of the PortugueseChinese city; consequently, the name of the Dutch captain Cornelis Reijersen was engraved as “Roggers” on the monument! Victory Monument in Macao inaugurated in 1871 The role of Mozambican slaves A historian researching these diverse narrative representations and studying the available epochal documentation about the Macau battle of June 24, 1622, must clearly acknowledge from Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish sources that the invading VOC forces could not have been defeated by the limited number of local Portuguese and Eurasian Macanese – some of whom were out of the enclave to trade in Canton during a seasonal fair, and others, about one hundred, who had been recruited for the war against the Manchu – without the mobilization of the hundreds of African slaves in the enclave. The kaffirs of the Jesuit and Dominican descriptions were mainly Macuas and Macondes from Mozambique transported annually by the hundreds in the trade boats from the “carreira da Índia” to Goa, Malacca, and Macau. In the early 1600s, there were already 2,000 black slaves in Malacca and 1,000 in Macau. Unloved in the East, their only prospect of a tolerable existence was to identify themselves as closely as they could with their Portuguese masters. In Macau, these African slaves constituted the private militias of wealthy Portuguese and Eurasian merchants, and they did the heaviest work from artillery foundry to bakery, and were diligent domestic servants carrying water daily to their owners’ households, from which they also emptied the wastes, ensuring cleanliness and security. They were often mobilized by the Portuguese municipal government and other institutions for policing and repression activities, being greatly feared by the local Chinese population, as several foreign travelers have witnessed. Some wealthy traders, owners of several houses, warehouses, and ships, easily kept private militias of 20 to 30 black African slaves. But they could also be easily found working hard in religious convents and monasteries, hospitals, and in the powerful local Misericórdia, taking care of dangerous and dirty activities with the sick, injured, and lepers. Most of them were allowed to carry their “indigenous” weapons when working outside their domestic households, as the defeated Dutch had witnessed with surprise when they faced longbows, assegai spears, and massive axes in the Macau battle. Traditional history has generally forgotten these subaltern groups and has always preferred to praise the more powerful classes and their dominant heroes that sponsored the written narrative and documentary accounts. Still, the very rich and capitalist VOC has fully documented that it lost the battle of June 24, 1622, at the hands of the unexpectedly brave black militiamen who were African Portuguese slaves living, working, and protecting the small Christian part of the Chinese peninsula baptized as “City of the Name of God”. After their tragic defeat in Macau, the remains of the Dutch fleet attacked the main Pescadores Island, Peng-hu, off the Taiwan coast, building a fortified trading post there in the following months. In July 1624, a large Chinese fleet sent by the governor of Fujian laid siege to this new VOC base and forced the Dutch to withdraw to the south of Taiwan, where they later founded the famous Fort Zeelandia, their main stronghold in the region for almost four decades up to 1662. However, this costly position only gave the VOC a very indirect link to the Chinese markets since the imperial government officially forbade any commerce on the island. In parallel, the Spanish from Manila occupied the Northern areas of Formosa in 1626 to protect the Macau-Manila trade from any further Dutch attacks. After 17 years of occupation, the last Spanish fortress on the island fell to Dutch forces in 1642, thus enlarging the VOC control over large parts of Taiwan but without significant impacts on access to the South China trade. In this context, the old dream of occupying Macau was not dead among the VOC leaders in Batavia. It was revived in the early 1640s when the Spanish empire faced several difficulties, including the Portuguese Restoration Revolution and the Catalan Rebellion, leading to further revolts in Naples and Sicily, all in the well-known context of the ongoing Dutch War of independence that lasted up to 1648. The novel project for a VOC attack on Macau became a personal goal of a former protégé of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Antonio van Diemen (1593-1645), when he became governor-general in Batavia in 1635, and especially after the victorious Dutch occupation of “Portuguese” Malacca on January 14, 1641. A young merchant installed in Amsterdam, van Diemen was bankrupted around 1616 and then enrolled as a simple soldier in the VOC, and using a fake name, reached Batavia. He soon became appreciated and supported by Coen, who appointed him to the important positions of commercial director and member of the Indies’ Council in 1626. During his decade of governorship, van Diemen widely expanded the VOC trading territories in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia at the expense of Portuguese settlements. Between 1636 and 1639, the governor-general promoted the blockade of Goa by VOC ships enabling the Company to gain a foothold in Wingurla, on the Malabar coast, thus reaching the profitable pepper trade, albeit the move brought the Company few immediate advantages and a lot of expenses. In May 1638, the VOC was established in Ceylon by occupying the Portuguese settlement of Batticaloa and later, in 1640, Galle. This same year, van Diemen sent his own envoys to Japan supporting the well-known arrest and killing of most of the members of the trade embassy sent in July to Nagasaki by the Leal Senado of Macau, thus definitively ending Portuguese trade to the Japanese islands. Empowered, respected, and feared after the conquest of Malacca, van Diemen started personally preparing the military and financial conditions to gather a powerful fleet able to attack Macau successfully. It seems that most resources and ships were already in place in the early months of 1642 when the governor-general received a Portuguese envoy from the Viceroy in Goa who announced that, after the Lisbon Restoration Revolution, on December 1, 1640, Portugal and the Dutch General States had formally signed a ten-year peace treaty on June 12, 1641, that even included navy help to the new Bragança dynasty war against Spain. The envoy was immediately arrested in Batavia, but van Diemen received orders from the Dutch States to respect the peace agreement with Portugal in the following months. The proposed attack on Macau was abandoned, and the powerful fleet was used to consolidate VOC control of the small Moluccas’ spice islands rich in cloves and nutmeg. If the projected new attack on Macau had taken place, the VOC fleet would have been surprised to see that large fortresses strongly protected the city from the prominent hills. They were full of artillery authorized by the Chinese regional authorities to target the sea. The “Christian” town was also surrounded by a solid wall that was paradoxically built by the hundreds of Dutch prisoners from the June 24, 1622, defeat. It would have been almost impossible in the 1640s to conquer the solid Macanese citadel from the sea since land access through the small peninsula isthmus was wholly controlled by the Chinese empire and firmly closed to European access. Moreover, the Dutch would also certainly face fearful Chinese official and private opposition because the imperial authorities preferred a Sino-Portuguese harbor based on open trade and mutual benefits rather than VOC commercial monopolies for, according to Marx, achieving that famous “primitive accumulation of capital” based on colonial resources, trade, and people heavy exploitation. Ironically, Batavia finally accessed the profitable trade in South China thanks to Macanese traders and ships. From the second half of the 17th century on, following the ratification of the political truce between Portugal and the Dutch Republic, the Leal Senado of Macau decided to sponsor every year three to four ships for trading in Batavia loaded with Chinese tea and other goods sold against silver and spices. Usually, one or two of these vessels would navigate from Batavia to the Solor-Timor islands controlled by local Portuguese Eurasians – the famous “topassen” or “black-Portuguese” of the Dutch – to charge sandalwood, slaves, and beeswax. The latter was profitably sold in the return voyage immediately in Batavia for the Javanese batik industries, while sandalwood had a huge fruitful demand in China. In a final perspective, the Marxian “sweet commerce” was really the expertise of Macau and its ductile traders in the 17th century, consolidating its fundamental role as a trading platform between China productions and Asian markets. References: BLUSSÉ, Leonard. “Brief Encounter at Macao”, in: Modern Asian Studies, vol. 22, No. 3, Special Issue: Asian Studies in Honour of Professor Charles Boxer (1988), pp. 647-664. BOXER, Charles R. (1991). “The 24th of June 1622. A Portuguese feat of arms”, in: Estudos para a História de Macau, séculos XVI a XVIII. Lisboa: Fundação Oriente, I, pp. 43-56. 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