In other words, market goods could mediate personal salvation. ‘But,’ continues Carletti, one of my servants, of the Korean nation, played a trick on them despite the fact that he did not know how to swim and was aware that they were not accepting servants or slaves like himself. Around his neck he hung two of my little pictures, one on which was depicted a crucified Christ, whereas the other was an Ecce homo, and both of them on copper. I still have them and value them highly because they were made by good artists in Japan, as well as because of the trick carried out by that servant of mine. Wearing them, he plunged into the sea and was quickly picked up by those sailors, who thought that he had something of great value to them. And when they saw what the things were, they gave them back to him, and as he was already in their boat, let him remain there, and thus took him to their ship, where he saved those pictures for me with very little difficulty because they, being mostly heretical Calvinists, did not wish to see pictures either of the saints or even of God Himself crucified.
Like so much of Carletti’s Chronicles, this passage illuminates the value of goods and lives in the context of East Indian trade—and it involves a sly joke.
Moreover, it demonstrates the uses of Christian images made in Japan—three sorts of uses: by Carletti as private devotional images; by his Korean servant as a means for salvation by the greedy Zeelanders; and by Carletti as a sort of ex voto to commemorate the event he describes here.
In addition to these pictures, Carletti also managed to take porcelain with him aboard the Zeeland flagship, where he and fifty other men were housed in the hutch under strict watch en route from St. Helena. Having repaired the San Iago to the point that it could sail again, the Zeelanders sailed west, arriving twenty-three days later at the island of Fernando de Noronha off the coast of Brazil. Carletti describes surviving this passage and the horrendous food he and his fellow passengers were fed as a spell of good fortune.
I would have been in a bad way if good luck (ortuna) had not helped me by making me have with me one of those porcelain vases full of pears preserved in China, it having been among the many vases containing conserves which I had turned over to the Zeeland captain.
Those in the hutch, he writes, were treated ‘without any pity from those good persons who were happily enjoying the many gifts they had found on the carrack’ (‘Tanti regali che avevano trovato nella caracca’). The dispossessed goods were translated into gifts, which the Zeelanders ‘found’—much as the Witte Arend had collected ‘a goodly booty of merchandise’.
The status of prized goods was as fluid as the waters in which they changed hands. Carletti bargained and persuaded his way back to Zeeland from the coast of Brazil by cooking some sort of seafowl in a manner that made it not only palatable but delectable even, and by reminding his captors of the Grand Duke of Tuscany’s control over the port of Leghorn (Livorno). When the ships sailed from Fernando de Noronha some of the Portuguese who stayed (in Brazil) warned Carletti that he would not be safe. His response? ‘Where my goods go, I want to go with my body, come what may.’57 Carletti arrived in Middelburg on 7 July 1602. His body and his goods were indeed in one and the same place, but divided by the events of the preceding months and the claims laid to them by the Zeelanders. He was not the only one whose fate changed dramatically: He recalls in his Chronicles that when the San Iago made land, twenty days after the East Indiamen arrived, and was unloaded, it contained much more wealth than they [the Middelburgers] had thought or could think, even though more than one fourth of it had been lost, for sure, and especially of the jewels, two-thirds of which had been stolen by whoever wanted them and by the very captains and other officers of the ships that had captured it.
‘Those jewels’, he continues, were changing hands during those days, a good part of them going to those who had lost nothing and had had no part in that misfortune. And many who had been poor became rich, whereas the rich became beggars.
Carletti repeatedly emphasizes the fluidity with which goods changed hands; with which, for example, merchandise became gifts; and with which owners were dispossessed and new owners made by taking those lost goods. He refers at one point to his efforts to conceive a way of recovering the things that I had aboard the carrack that was taken as a prize by the two ships of the Zeeland merchants, who had been sent to India to trade for spices in the Molucca Islands, and not to act as corsairs.
Things were exchanged by processes of capture (prize) and exchange (trade), and Carletti was left empty-handed. Once the returning fleet made land, the transfer of goods became a legal affair. Carletti recounts that he attempted first by friendly means to ‘recover [his] possessions’ but that he was encouraged to pursue legal means (‘the route of justice’) to defend his merchandise, which the Zeelanders ‘pretended to have acquired legally in the capture’. The subject of the subsequent and last chapter, ‘The Sixth and Final Chronicle of the East Indies’ of the Ragionamenti is the lawsuit that ensued. Armed with letters he procured via an intermediary from the Grand Duke, Carletti set out from Middelburg in September 1602 and presented the letters directly to the Stadtholder Prince Maurits, who was at the time engaged in Grave, in Gelderland, which he freed from Spanish control that year. Maurits assured Carletti that he would support his cause, but also stated, ‘he could do very little because this was a concern of the merchants, over whom he exercised no command’. In addition to the support of the Grand Duke, whose neutrality and control of Leghorn (Livorno) were frequently cited to emphasize the importance of keeping him in good favour, Carletti also solicited the aid of the French ambassador to the States General Paul Choart de Buzanval, who was already making gestures on behalf of Carletti in August in The Hague.
(Henri IV, King of France, was married to Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici’s niece Maria de’ Medici.)
Carletti’s claims gave rise to a complex, international affair that stirred political and mercantile interests and passions alike. International affiliations proved insufficient, however, to counter the claims and the power within the United Provinces of the United Zeeland Company and the Admiralty of Middelburg. As Martine van Ittersum has explained, regarding the complexity of the situation and the difficulty Carletti faced, ‘the province of Zeeland was, quite literally, on the frontline of the war with Philip III of Spain and Portugal and economically quite dependent on the Indies trade’. The merchants of the United Zeeland Company were now operating as VOC merchants, as the companies had merged in March 1602. Having secured the San Iago and its contents, the Zeeland merchants to whom Carletti appealed amicably were resolved not to settle the matter out of court, and ‘went all about the city saying that’ the matter had to go to court because ‘if they restored [his] things to [him] they would have to restore their things to all the others who, also being neutrals, had had interest in that carrack’. The ensuing months brought intense diplomatic and legal parrying, on the part of all parties involved.
Inventories of the goods aboard the Zeeland vessels were drawn up, and a price for the pepper was set. The goods belonging to the Atjeh mission (cloves, indigo, and pepper) were accounted for, and a funeral for the emissary who died in Middelburg was arranged. On 23 November the Middelburg Admiralty officially permitted the sale of goods, ‘initially all of the damaged goods, and then porcelain, blankets, textiles, pavilions, bed coverings, wall hangings, and woven cloths’. The sale of the porcelain was to take place in the warehouse where it was kept, in packets of twenty small dishes and ten little bowls at a time; and the prices of ebony, raw silk, musk, cloves, mace, and cinnamon were likewise set. Over the course of the subsequent days and weeks the remaining goods were sold—among them, wet pepper, raw linen, cinnamon, saltpetre, camphor, galbanum, spikenard, cardamom. In January, all of the gold and silver aboard the San Iago was melted down and sold.
Although a provision was made by the Admiralty on 25 November that the sale of Carletti’s goods would cease until further decree, it is not clear what measures were taken to protect his goods, in the general rush to allocate the wares—wares that are referred to in several records of the Zeeland College of the Admiralty Board and the Zeeland Chamber of the VOC as ‘booty’. That the carrack and its contents—the ‘booty’ prized by the Zeeland merchants from their Portuguese enemies—were for sale was advertised across the land, by way of printed notices. Moreover, particularly precious items were offered to various statesmen as gifts. In early October items were set aside ‘to be presented’, including spices, textiles, porcelain, bezoar stones, and musk. Prince Maurits received a ‘golden throne with its accoutrements, a pavilion, a peacock wrought in silver, a fine bezoar stone, and two ounces of amber’. In November, Maurits’s half-brother Frederick Hendrik, up and coming military and political figure and future stadtholder, was given ‘from the goods coming from the carrack[,] a pavilion with its hangings, one ounce of ambergris, two balekens of musk, and a bezoar stone’. In addition to the gifts for statesmen of the highest rank, the VOC merchants presented packets to the city of Middelburg, to at least sixteen local functionaries, and to the captains of the ships. These packets all contained porcelain—either little dishes or bowls. The translation of goods into gifts proved to be an effective ploy on the part of the VOC:
One year after the ships returned to Zeeland and Carletti initiated the suit, on 12 August 1603, the Admiralty of Middelburg (‘court of the sea’) found in favour of the merchants, declaring ‘the goods of the aforesaid defendant condemned and confiscated for the benefit of the common cause and of those who have the right after paying the costs’.74 Mediation begat mediation: Goods purchased by Carletti were converted by way of capture into the currency of booty and, subsequently, translated into gifts and commodities.
The porcelain parcelled out in the fall of 1602 to the city of Middelburg (twenty-eight packets of little dishes; fourteen of small bowls); the bailiff, steward, tollmaster (two packets each); the burgomasters of Vlissingen (unspecified number of packets); the governor of Vlissingen (some of the largest pieces, with others from the warehouses); and others was an unprecedented giftor bribe. Two months later, in December, it was resolved that ‘the bed [ledicant] for the Duke of Florence [The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando I de’ Medici] would be sent via diplomatic channels to the King of France for him to see it, and thence to the Grand Duke. The porcupine [porcos spino] belonging to the Italian, and the rhinoceros horn cup [...] were also to be sent to the king’. Some of the very curiosities Carletti transported for the Medici ruler of Tuscany were being presented by the VOC to the King of France. In the meantime, Carletti was being held accountable for the salary of the judges, who, he claimed, ‘tried—and always kept on trying—to do everything possible to prolong the trial’. According to Carletti, the bed and other curiosities the VOC documented sending to the Grand Duke by way of diplomatic channels via the French court were sent to the Queen of France—in lieu, he writes, of providing ‘that which she justly asked in my favour and benefit’ when she wrote letters of support. In other words, his request for her mediation was contravened by the mediation of diplomatic gifts on the part of the VOC. Carletti reports in his Chronicles, addressed to the Grand Duke, that the Queen of France rejected the gift: ‘she did not want to accept it, not wanting to prejudice my cause’.
While the VOC may have thought it a clever move to gift a bed intended for one Medici to another, the Queen of France was clearly on to the fact that the gift was presented at Carletti’s expense. Later in the final Chronicle, Carletti describes what he experienced as a breakthrough after several years, when the Grand Duke apparently threatened to commandeer goods from Dutch ships in Leghorn (Livorno) equivalent to the value of what Carletti sought to recuperate in Zeeland. Even this, though, had little effect ultimately and he writes of finding himself ‘with an empty purse and one bag full of patience and another full of documents’ to show for his efforts. Ultimately he was awarded 13,000 florins, some of which he was then forced to spend on a meal for the lawyers and judges. Carletti made his way home to his native Florence in 1606, and there composed his Chronicles.
In the last, pathetic passages of the final Chronicle, Carletti describes his feelings on having lost his worldly goods: ‘it is enough to break one’s heart’, he writes, emphasizing too the estrangement he felt in a foreign country. He goes on at some length, bemoaning the vicissitudes of fortune. Carletti and his goods were incidental casualties in a politically fraught trade encounter of the pirating kind. He, his life story, and his Chronicles are unique—but the plotline involving Dutch capture of Portuguese (and Spanish, in the West Indies) ships and goods is far from exceptional for this time. Indeed, it has been estimated that ‘during the period of the first charter (1602–1623) the VOC looted between 150 and 200 Portuguese ships, with a value of roughly ten million guilders. Without the income of this so-called “free commerce” the VOC would have gone bankrupt’. In his landmark study of Porcelain and the Dutch East India Company (1954) T. Volker pointed out that, prior to 1602, ‘only a few specimens of porcelain had reached Holland via Portugal and Spain’ and that it was in that year that for ‘the first time the Dutch public saw porcelain in appreciable quantities’—thanks to the arrival of the goods from the San Iago.
The subsequent significant shipment of porcelain to the United Provinces arrived in Amsterdam two years later in 1604: This was booty from the Portuguese ship the Santa Catarina, seized by the Dutch naval hero Jacob van Heemskerck. As a result of the seizure of that one Portuguese carrack, approximately 60,000 kilos or up to 100,000 pieces of porcelain are estimated to have entered the Dutch market in 1604. The arrival in both 1602 and 1604 of huge amounts of exotic goods—porcelain, raw and woven silks, pepper, musk and ambergris, gold, furniture—made national and international news at the time. From our perspective it is now clear that these hyper-mediated goods and their arrival in European ports on Dutch ships signalled the dawn of a new era—one marked by the complex, global entanglements traced by ships, castles of the sea, vessels of mediation.