The Amboyna Business

This chapter reconstructs the conspiracy trial on Ambon in 1623 by drawing on over fifty depositions and other sources, almost all created after the trial. It analyzes why a Japanese soldier’s questions triggered VOC suspicions of a regional plot featuring Japanese, English, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators, and why the alleged plot took the form the VOC believed it did. It explores the role of torture in the legal process. In the course of presenting a narrative of the conspiracy trial, it sifts through conflicting perspectives and interpretations of events. Almost all aspects of the trial were later disputed in Europe, and this chapter deals directly with the interpretive problems posed by the surviving sources.

Legacies

By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna massacre had become the linchpin of the British Empire, explaining why the British came to have a stronghold in India. This chapter looks at a convergence of circumstances in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the new availability of historical sources, the rise of imperial history as an academic subject, and the crisis of empire posed by the Boer War, to explore the centrality of Amboyna in British history. Works of history and children’s schoolbooks are key sources. The triumph of the Amboyna Massacre—in British history and culture, in reference works, in modern library subject classification systems—reveals that the English at Amboyna may have lost their heads, but they got the last word.

Introduction

A conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators in the Indian Ocean in 1623 caused a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known in English culture for four centuries as the Amboyna Massacre. This introduction explains the European context of the Anglo-Dutch alliance that helped produce the conspiracy and that in turn enabled the English East India Company to create the massacre. In creating the incident as a massacre, the English East India Company yoked the episode to a new word, “massacre”; detached the conspiracy from its regional setting; and created new histories for the episode—as a massacre and as a story of violence against English innocents that would in turn become foundational to the history of the British Empire.

The Reckoning

The English government struggled for thirty years to receive restitution for the incident they had come to know as the Amboyna Massacre. This chapter traces the repercussions in the Indian Ocean and especially in Europe. In England, the English traders who had survived the conspiracy trial became the key witnesses for the East India Company. This chapter explores how these men created new lives for themselves in the wake of the trial. A central component to the success of the East India Company in securing restitution was the publication of old and new Amboyna pamphlets, as well as new illustrations, especially during the 1650s and the First Anglo-Dutch War. The Treaty of Westminster resolved all outstanding claims in 1654, but the animosities of the Amboyna crisis ensured that the English remained dissatisfied with a financial settlement alone and still looked for justice.

Inventing the Amboyna Massacre

The English East India Company turned the Amboyna conspiracy into the Amboyna massacre in 1624. Massacre was a relatively new word in the English language. This chapter analyzes how the company drew on this new word, detached the incident from its Indian Ocean origins, and obscured the participation of non-Europeans in creating the massacre. At a time of renewed Anglo-Dutch alliance, the company could not use the word massacre in print, so it created this powerful message in other ways, especially in a pamphlet called the True Relation and through illustrations of tortured traders. By linking the executed English traders to martyrs, miracles, and acts of divine providence, the company crafted an enduring history of the Amboyna Massacre. The Habsburg Empire printed its own works in an effort to sever the alliance. This chapter charts the tension between the EIC and the English government as the government sought to secure the Dutch alliance and suppressed multiple works connected to Amboyna.

From Competition to Conspiracy

For twenty years, the Dutch and English East India Companies cooperated and competed throughout the Indian Ocean in search of dominance in the spice trade. Conflicts over nutmeg and cloves in Banda and the Moluccas were especially deadly for Europeans and non-Europeans alike. The two companies were constrained in their actions in the Indian Ocean by the nations’ historical ties in Europe and by decisions made by their employers, which ultimately forced them into partnership in 1619 in the wake of overt conflict. That new partnership placed the English in a secondary position. A new type of conflict erupted, one centered on conspiracies. To further trust, the companies required traders to live together in shared houses in the clove-trading posts on Ambon, but the scheme backfired and their intimacy was their undoing.

Epilogue

Although the Amboyna Massacre had not originally been the first English massacre, by the eighteenth century that is what it had become. The epilogue analyzes how the incident displaced previous incidents and acquired historical primacy, drawing on contemporary histories and almanacs to chart this process. It situates Amboyna in the context of other massacres around the world to assess what distinguished Amboyna from other episodes of violence. It concludes by arguing that Amboyna’s status as the first English massacre, along with its origin at the time the word massacre itself entered the English language, shaped the meaning of subsequent violent episodes, and placed intimacy, treachery, and ingratitude at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.

Domesticating Amboyna

Despite the resolution in the Treaty of Westminster (1654), the Amboyna massacre became entrenched in English culture as a familiar cultural touchstone. Three further wars with the Dutch led to new Amboyna pamphlets. Amboyna also became part of internal political disputes in which Tories wrote Amboyna pamphlets to attack Whig rivals. In a wide-ranging exploration of multiple genres of popular and print culture, including plays, advice manuals, fiction, and library catalogues, this chapter analyzes the many ways in which Amboyna became domesticated in English culture. By the end of the seventeenth century it had shed its political significance as a symbol of ingratitude and instead became a consummate tale of cruelty. It also endured as a tale of unrequited injury. British authors such as Dryden, Defoe, and Swift were part of this process. By the end of the eighteenth century, with a final True Relation, it had become a legend.