In theory, the distinction between permissible and unacceptable forms of sex in the early modern Dutch and larger Christian world was clear: reproductive sex within the bounds of marriage was permitted and even a duty for married couples, while other forms of sexuality were both illegal and immoral. The reality, however, was not so simple. Not only was marriage, as we saw in chapter one, the prerogative of only a select few within colonial societies, but it could even be argued that the social and economic conditions created by chartered trading companies effectively fostered illicit forms of sexuality. Christopher Chitty has made this point for homosexuality, arguing that proto-capitalist economies such as the Netherlands of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave rise to labor regimes that brought unwed young men in a state of proximity together in a way that had rarely been seen before.1 Indeed, it is not a coincidence that the majority of sodomy prosecutions at the Court of Justice in Batavia, for example, concerned same-sex encounters aboard VOC vessels.2 This argument, however, can be extended to sexuality at large, beyond the specific phenomenon of sodomy: the social and economic conditions of a global empire that relied on cheap, highly mobile labor strongly limited the possibilities for conjugal, heterosexual family units and instead created a fertile ground for more subversive relations that went directly against the dominant sexual mores of that same empire.
These conditions can be observed working in different ways for different groups. For Europeans, the vast majority of whom were poorly paid single men who lived a transient existence in service of the VOC or WIC, marriage was often not possible (because they had a wife back home in Europe, or because they could not get permission to marry from their superiors) or simply not an attractive option: marriage brought considerable financial responsibilities that other sexual and romantic arrangements did not, in addition to other restrictions such as the ban on repatriation for VOC servants married to Asian women (see chapter one). Opportunities for alternative arrangements, meanwhile, were in considerably greater supply than in Europe, ranging from fleeting
Finally, there were the free Indigenous and creolized populations that formed around Company settlements in the East and West alike: while there were certainly monogamous conjugal units among these groups, often with their own notions of honor and sexual morality, their situation in the colonial empire introduced various degrees of transience that fostered more fleeting, and therefore illicit, sexual relations. Husbands, contracted as soldiers, sailors, or plantation workers, moved away from their wives and families, increasing the likelihood of extra-marital sex among men and women alike. Port cities such as Cochin, Batavia, or Willemstad in Curaçao, meanwhile, saw a constant coming and going of people who needed a place to stay, which frequently ended up being the home of local residents. Economic precarity, here, meant that not everyone was able to afford independent housing, while renting out a room was a convenient way to supplement a household budget. The result was that the intimate space of the home, in many colonial towns, was rarely the exclusive domain of a nuclear family, instead seeing a coming and going of houseguests and lodgers – in addition to a variable staff of enslaved or free live-in servants. As the cases in this chapter will show, it was this porous domestic space – along with ships and other closely quartered places of labor – that formed the primary site of non-marital and thus illegal forms of sexuality. As elsewhere in the early modern world, there was no such thing in the Dutch empire as neatly compartmentalized ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres: work and intimacy were frequently intertwined, and domestic spaces were important sites of communal life and therefore of key concern in questions of social (and sexual) order.
The conditions of empire therefore gave rise to a plethora of encounters and relationships that challenged the vision of moral sexual order that formally governed it. This chapter will trace how colonial inhabitants and authorities negotiated this tension, by examining both the sexual practices that emerged and authorities’ response to these practices. Because it is clear that not all non-marital sex was prosecuted and punished equally, asking which practices authorities intervened in and why tells us a great deal about the specific vision
1 European Men’s Encounters
1.1 The Ship as Site of Sexual Danger
In both the VOC and the WIC charter zones, thousands of men of various backgrounds took to the seas as sailors, soldiers, and passengers in company employment. Confined in close quarters for weeks or months at a time, ships were sites of violence, comradery and, sometimes, sexual encounters. It is not surprising that the majority of prosecutions of sodomy – the most heavily criminalized sexual offense, punishable by death – at Batavia’s Court of Justice originated from an incident on board a VOC vessel: although ships offered plenty of secluded corners for committing clandestine sexual acts, the risk of being caught was extremely high, as private quarters were the privilege of only the highest-ranking officers and passengers.3 Out of 118 men and boys prosecuted in Batavia for sodomy in the eighteenth century, 88 were employed aboard VOC vessels. 49 are listed as sailors, of which 15 junior sailors
In addition to same-sex relations, the presence of women aboard vessels was also perceived as a potential sexual danger by company authorities. Although female passengers were generally kept away from the rank-and-file, illicit sexual encounters – both consensual and violent – could not always be prevented on voyages (see also chapter five) and this seems to have played a part in the VOC’s decision to restrict female migration from Europe, because the Lords XVII motivated their 1650 ban on female passengers without special dispensation with a reference to the particularly disastrous voyage of the Batavia. In 1629, a woman had been sexually assaulted by a group of mutineers on this vessel, after which the ship had crashed off the coast of Australia where several of the surviving female passengers were raped before rescue arrived.7 While (as seen in chapter one) even after 1650 small numbers of European women
1.2 The Merchant and the Minister
There is not only not a single legally married woman beside mine in the entire country, but not even a single female who professes to the Christian faith. Meanwhile, not only does every White have a Heathen woman as his concubine or mistress, many are not ashamed to openly boast that they have two, three, or even more.8
[it] is an abuse that has slipped in since time immemorial and that, we dare say, cannot possibly be rooted out. We are all men here, your Honors, and most of the servants, both commercial and military, are young and in their prime, so it would entail greater abuses, yes even horrors, that would make us resemble Sodom more than we do now, God forbid, if we were to deny them the use of women.10
The council’s perspective reveals both a distinct view of human sexuality and a hierarchy of moral outrage: in their view, men’s sexual energy required an outlet, and if they could not find this with women, it was heavily implied, they would find it with men.11 Whereas for the Reformed Minister Verbeet, any deviation from the Christian marital norms was unacceptable, the colonial administrators were content to opt for what they considered the lesser of two evils. This conflict between ‘Merchant and Minister’ – between commercially-minded pragmatism and religious zeal – was perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in Elmina, with its far-reaching integration of Christian men into non-Christian life and its institutionalization of sexual relationships unsanctioned by the Church – so-called calicharen.12 It was not, however, unique to the West-African coast. In fact, Gerardus Verbeet himself had fought a similar battle with colonial administrators in the East Indies when he was employed by the VOC, and had even published a polemic about his experiences in 1762: initially employed as a junior naval officer (adelborst) and then lay minister (krankbezoeker) in the 1740s and, after completing his studies in Europe, as a predikant in Batavia and the Moluccas in the 1750s, he had made enemies among religious and secular authorities alike. After getting a
Verbeet was appalled at what he saw as moral decay among ‘so-called Christians’ in Southeast Asia as well as West Africa, although he considered the latter the worst of all, even terming it ‘the seat of Satan’.16 Hoping for better, he pleaded with the WIC to be transferred to Curaçao or Suriname – a request which was denied. The West Indies, however, had its own discontents. Most famous among them was Jan Willem Kals, whom we met in chapter one as a vocal proponent of evangelization among the enslaved population of Suriname. Shortly after his installation in the colony as Reformed predikant, Kals made enemies among clerical and secular authorities alike, by criticizing established norms and practices, including those around non-marital sex. In addition to his more famous work Neerlands Hooft-en Wortelsonde, which he published some twenty years after his experiences in Suriname (1756), he also published (in 1733, the year he was forced out of the colony) a polemic reminiscent of Verbeet’s. This ‘Complaint on the rotten morals of leadership, in both ecclesiastical and civil administration in a very fertile and only just budding colony’ was written as a letter to the classis (regional church consistory) of Amsterdam.17 In addition to detailed descriptions of a range of personal and professional conflicts Kals found himself in during his two years in
Verbeet and Kals seem to have been among the rare European voices overtly raising objections to European men’s non-marital sexual relationships with non-European women in Dutch overseas settlements. As outspoken, seemingly pugnacious characters whose broader patterns of conflict resulted in their eventual expulsion from their colonial postings by colonial authorities, they can be seen as exceptions that prove the rule: in general, eighteenth-century religious, political and military authorities alike accepted non-marital arrangements such as concubinage as a more or less inevitable consequence of situating large numbers of predominantly single men in transient colonial settings.
This is not to say that other Reformed ministers stationed across the empire did not express concern over the sexual vices they observed among their flock (as did others who were more removed from colonial society, such as travel writers), but they generally took a more subtle and sympathetic approach.19 Jacobus Capitein – Verbeet’s predecessor in Elmina – also expressed his frustration at what he perceived as the WIC’s indifference towards his goals of promoting a Christian way of life in West-Africa and at the deeply entrenched practice of calicharen. His approach, however, was more sensitive to the challenges of
Indeed, the tense relation between ‘Merchant and Minister’ was not fixed throughout the WIC and VOC period. As Danny Noorlander has shown, the commercial and political activities of the seventeenth-century WIC were deeply intertwined with the zealous interests of the Dutch Reformed Church, and WIC authorities were frequently supportive of church authorities’ interventions into the moral lives of colonists, soldiers, and sailors.22 This genuine moral-religious fervor among the first generations of Dutch colonial authorities and company directors can be observed in legislation on non-marital sex issued in Dutch settlements across the globe, not just those held by the WIC. The government of Jan Pieterszoon Coen in 1622 Batavia, expressing a genuine concern for God’s wrath over ‘the horrific sins’ of concubinage, adultery, and fornication, especially between people of different religions, prescribed a strict set of punishments for non-marital sex: concubinage was to be punished with a fine or, in case of recidivism, with corporal punishment. Non-Christians who ‘instigated’ sex with a Christian would be sentenced to death, as would be adulterers.23 Two decades later, as the VOC was in the process of taking power in Ceylon, its leadership in Galle passed an ordinance condemning the widespread habit of living ‘in public whoredom and concubinage’ with local women which had taken hold among soldiers, sailors and officers. Such ‘vile unchastity’ would henceforth be punished arbitrarily. The ordinance gives both political and religious reasons: this ‘abhorrent lechery’ would not only lead to ‘a reprehensible example among the heathens and weak Roman Catholic Christians and great contempt among them for the true Christian faith, being
This dual concern, with the threat of disasters as a result of God’s wrath on the one hand, and a loss of reputation for Christianity at large in the eyes of foreign peoples on the other, was felt consistently across the globe, from Asia to the Caribbean. Early governors of Curaçao, such as J.P. Tolck in 1638 and Matthias Beck in 1655, were instructed by the WIC to prohibit sexual advances towards indigenous and enslaved African women, so as to prevent friction with these groups.25 In Suriname, one of the first criminal ordinances issued after the colony passed from British into Dutch hands, dating from 1669, prescribed the death penalty for both blasphemy and adultery, and ‘rigorous punishment’ for ‘all fornicators and those living in unchastity’.26 Berbice, which in the seventeenth century was a patroonship held by the Van Peere family, received strict instructions from its patroon Abraham van Peere in 1681. No intercourse was to take place with African and Indigenous women, because it was leading to ‘contempt for God’s holy name, repudiation of the Christian Reformed religion, and particular vexation among a Heathen nation that ought to be won over to the light of the Gospel and the righteous path through the godly example of Christians […]’. Henceforth, the instructions stated, any of Van Peere’s subjects found committing such lechery would be punished with a loss of wages and in case of continued recidivism, banishment from the colony.27
While some of these regulations may sound rather draconian to modern ears – and indeed some punishments, such as the death penalty for adulterers or for inter-ethnic sex were extreme even for contemporary standards – it should be noted that most of the punishments prescribed for unmarried company servants were relatively mild. It seems that VOC and WIC administrators, even early on, when they were arguably at their most zealous, were balancing the importance of maintaining a Christian sense of sexual virtue on the one hand, with that of maintaining a workforce among whom sexual transgressions were ubiquitous on the other. This dilemma was sometimes explicitly verbalized, as in the above-mentioned ban on concubinage in Ceylon, which stipulated that (as elsewhere in VOC-Asia) company servants would be allowed
1.3 Cross-Cultural Encounters
These ‘weak’ servants were not alone: from the companies’ very inception, non-marital sex permeated the VOC and WIC worlds from their lowest to their highest ranks. As soldiers, sailors, merchants, and administrators travelled across the Atlantic and Indian oceans – in the vast majority of cases without a wife – they encountered women from a wide range of backgrounds, each with their own norms and expectations around sexuality, and with their own interests. In some places, pre-existing practices meant that local women had little problem forming temporary relationships with foreigners prior to, in lieu of, or next to a formal marriage. An example is the ‘temporary marriage’ in South East Asia, in which a woman formed an – as the name suggests – temporary, exclusive relationship with a foreigner (often a trader), which could involve domestic work, sexual partnership, an introduction to local networks and local customs, and sometimes a business partnership. In return, the woman could benefit from his connections and receive continuous gifts as a token of an ongoing relationship, or, in some contexts, an agreed-upon financial compensation.29
In Hirado in Japan, where the VOC had a trading post before being confined to Deshima in 1641, Dutch traders encountered Japanese women for whom a pre-marital sexual relationship with a foreigner was not only not an impediment to a respectable marriage, but a means of accumulating funds for a dowry before returning home and starting a family.30 After 1641, restrictions on mobility left less room for sustained relationships, and VOC-traders’ contact with Japanese women became confined to professional Nagasaki-based sex-workers who specifically served the Dutch community (Oranda-yuki).31 In Elmina and elsewhere on the Gold Coast, the matrilineal kinship system centering on the abusua meant that marriage was not necessarily the most important factor in a woman’s social status and property rights, so that possibilities for relationships with foreigners, where they were advantageous, were relatively open.32 Since
Across the Atlantic, the established frameworks for relations with indigenous women were more fraught: like in many places that would become Dutch colonies, the Dutch arrived onto a scene that had already been shaped by previous experiences with Europeans, most prominently Spanish and Portuguese. And while Amerindians had intermingled with Iberian colonists in marital as well as non-marital unions, the memory of violence and exploitation that prevailed by the time Dutch settlers arrived in places such as Berbice and the Leeward Antilles, combined with the extreme dependence of early Dutch settlers on indigenous groups such as the Arawaks (Lokono) and Caribs (Kali’na), rendered inter-cultural (sexual) contact a highly delicate topic.35 Due to a dearth of written sources we know very little of how Indigenous women perceived sexual experiences with Dutch colonists, but we can draw our conclusions from the early bans on sexual contact with Indigenous women, which seem to have been prompted by complaints from Amerindian communities, suggesting a pattern of unwanted attention or even rape.36 In later years, the Amerindian women who show up in the colonial records as sexual partners of colonists were not free women from allied, neighboring communities, but captives transported from further inland and sold into slavery.
In the Dutch cultural imagination, meanwhile, a considerably more simplistic view began to form, of overseas territories as populated by voluptuous, lewd
1.4 Concubinage
A ubiquitous arrangement, across the Dutch empire, was enslaved concubinage, in which a man purchased an enslaved woman and started a sexual and sometimes affective relationship with her. Due to the coercive foundation of these unions (i.e., slavery), it is safe to assume they were frequently involuntary on the part of the woman, who was not in a position to decline, even if in some cases a genuine affective bond may have formed. It is extremely difficult to gauge the perspective of women in these situations, as the available sources are largely silent on their experiences. Rare exceptions can be found in judicial sources, when enslaved concubines were questioned as part of a criminal or political investigation. In 1737, for example, a young Amerindian woman – name unknown – was questioned by the Berbice Council of Policy. Philip Broer
The uniform view of an enslaved woman in a coerced sexual relationship with her master, however, belies the fact that enslavement and coerced sex also worked in other, more indirect ways. Across the Dutch empire, and especially in port cities, enslaved labor was often ‘outsourced’, and this also applied to sexual labor. As Henk Niemeijer has shown for Batavia, enslaved women were often not working in their master’s home, but required to bring in a specified amount in wages earned elsewhere, so-called ‘coolie money’. For many a young woman, the most reliable way to do this was to work as a bijzit (concubine) for a man who agreed to pay her for her sexual and domestic labor. In this arrangement, the boundaries between the lives of enslaved women, those in debt-related servitude (pandelingen) and free but impoverished women was blurry, with the main difference being that the first two had a financial obligation to a third party while free women took on the role simply as a way to survive.42 For some, concubinage was a means to achieve upward social mobility: for an enslaved woman, it could pave a path to manumission if she could accumulate enough money or convince her partner to buy or grant her freedom. Once free, one of the limited paths to a more secure existence and higher social status
In the Atlantic context, too, men had sex at various degrees of coercion with women who were not always their own property. This contact ranged from fleeting encounters to long-term relationships, the latter of which became known, in Suriname, as ‘Surinamese marriage’.43 At the more fleeting end of the scale, we have traces of evidence of men from all walks of life – free, enslaved, black, white, and Amerindian – visiting enslaved black women living on plantations for sex. The way these encounters show up in the sources, however, are strongly tied to the men’s social station. Paradoxically, the sexual encounters of more subaltern men were simultaneously more intensely problematized and discussed more openly than those of elite white colonists. This was (at least in part) because enslaved and impoverished free men’s contact with enslaved women across plantation boundaries implied a mobility that was seen as a threat to the colonial order, more so than the sexual contact itself. Planters took action against free Amerindians in their employment, for example, when the latter left the plantation to see women who lived elsewhere.
In Paramaribo, nightly amorous visits of lower-class individuals became associated with burglary and trespassing: in 1739 the government issued an ordinance in response to numerous complaints of nightly intruders who, when discovered, claimed they were not thieves, but were there to visit enslaved women living on the property. To prevent this excuse being used to escape prosecution, the new ordinance stated that anyone – black or white, free or enslaved – who would henceforth be caught trespassing on private property would be treated as a thief and prosecuted as such.44 This law would be applied throughout the eighteenth century, as exemplified by the prosecution of Profijt, an enslaved man in the service of the free black woman Caatje van Stalting, in 1792. Profijt was not tied to Ms. Stalting’s home, but earned a wage which his mistress laid a claim to every week. One evening, after having fulfilled his obligations for the week, Profijt got drunk and went to the house of the Widow Fellman to see an enslaved woman he knew, in order to spend the night with her, or at least this is what he told the court after being arrested for trespassing and suspicion of theft. When he arrived at one of the enslaved people’s homes on the Fellman estate, an enslaved woman accused him of stealing
Low-ranking whites such as plantation servants, free artisans, and soldiers, meanwhile, were also seen as a potential threat to the colonial order where they sought out enslaved women who were owned by their patrons or by the colony. Here, the concern was less with these men’s mobility and more with plantation discipline, as plantation owners feared that enslaved people’s anger over white overseer’s sexual misconduct could lead to revolts and increases in marronage. This concern went so far that the Society of Berbice, in 1758, even cautioned the colonial government to limit the required number of whites present on plantations: although a low white-to-black ratio was otherwise seen as dangerous, and white settlers were hotly sought after as a means of maintaining control of the colony, the Directors noted that having more than one white for every twenty slaves was a risk too, as it would lead to ‘licentiousness’ with enslaved black women. This, in turn, they argued, would lead to ‘great discontent among the slaves and eventually bring about evil consequences.’46 Indeed, most of the legislation issued in Berbice in the eighteenth century which prohibited sex with enslaved women was targeted specifically at rank-and-file colonial employees. The 1741 regulations for plantation servants and free craftsmen, which targeted ‘disorder and unruliness’ threatening the interests of plantation owners, included a stipulation against ‘carnal conversation’ with enslaved African and Amerindian women. The penalty was a fine that increased with each infraction, a portion of which would go to whoever reported it.47 The 1750 regulations on military discipline set the same rule for soldiers, with an increasing loss of wages and finally physical punishment as the penalty.48 In Suriname, the 1784 regulations for white plantation workers prohibited sexual contact with enslaved women insofar as it resulted in ‘any disorder on the plantations.49
One of them was Harman Nicolaes van de Schepper, the Governor’s son whom we met in chapter two. We learn about his actions because his wife’s attorney, aiming to prove cause for divorce, interrogated a whole range of her husband’s friends and acquaintances, all young men from the upper crust of Surinamese society, many of them military officers. Each confirmed having gone on various group-based outings with Van de Schepper, where the latter had been accompanied by enslaved women, although most were reticent to provide any explicit details pertaining to Van de Schepper’s ‘carnal conversation’ with these women, appealing to the fuzziness of their memory or opting for euphemistic terms such as badineeren (teasing) and stoeien (frolicking). They described visists to the Governor’s mansion and soirées at friends’ homes where Van de Schepper would be seen with two different enslaved women, Fortuna and Margo. The group of friends also regularly snuck through the yard of Louis George de Boisguion, whose property neighbored Fortuna’s lodgings, in order to discreetly reach her. One night, as the party was crossing the creek leading to Boisguion’s yard, they were apprehended by the proprietor. In contrast to those at whom the 1739 trespassing ordinance was aimed, however, the young men were met with laughter from Boisguion, and an invitation to pass through his house instead. Van de Schepper and friends would also visit various plantations, take pleasure cruises on his tent boat along the Suriname river, and joined the festivities during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot in the village of Jodensavanne, where Isaac Cohen Nassy observed him ‘frolicking’ with various enslaved women and dance with a black woman named Philipa.
Harman Nicolaes Van de Schepper was likely not the only one: from his lack of effort to hide his affairs with women such as Margo, Fortuna and Philipa and his willingness to brag about his adventures and his illegitimate children, it is clear that this pattern was quite accepted among men of the planter class. It was quite rare for it to be explicitly discussed – let alone addressed as a problem – in the official discourse that makes up the bulk of the colonial
… he submits himself to the infatuated rule of his slave, puts her above all the whites on the plantation, goes boating with her, asks to be called her husband, sleeps alone with her in a closed room, hangs her hammock close to his, they caress each other without the slightest fear, and regularly shout obscenities at each other and argue about the venereal diseases which each accuses the other of having contracted elsewhere.54
when, in the morning, [Ugenin] asked the Indian woman if they had enjoyed themselves, and she only answered with a few regretful words, he responded that such a life was not right and that he would prefer to leave the plantation, and since then Du Thon has been ill-disposed towards him57
Ugenin was sentenced to a lashing and eternal banishment from the colony. Surveyor Knapp, on the other hand, would face serious legal repercussions only in 1743, and not for this incident, but for having an affair with multiple married white women, including the wife of the former governor. The charges against him in this case now also alluded to other indiscretions on Knapp’s part, as evidence of his lack of respect for worldly or godly laws. To the allegations that he, ‘as everyone on this colony knows’, had been in a relationship with an enslaved (now manumitted and baptized) woman, Knapp responded that if everyone suspected him of it, it was only because it was such a common ‘fashion’.58
Indeed, the practice was ‘fashionable’ up to the highest ranks of colonial government, and a popular accusation in political spats. Governor Waterham tried to get the governing council’s secretary Jan Valk fired in 1736 by pointing out that he had multiple children with Waterham’s enslaved cook, Tannetje (he did allow Valk to purchase the freedom of his children, however, and in 1738 even gave her to Valk in exchange for an enslaved man), and also complained of the clerk Hellenbach who had reportedly impregnated the
1.5 Coercion and Agency
While the cases discussed above describe in detail the judgments, sentiments, and motivations of the men involved, we are left largely in the dark with regards to the experiences of the enslaved women around whom the intrigues revolved. It is clear that being enslaved added a layer of coercion to many a sexual encounter, even when this was not with a woman’s own master. A rare documented instance of an enslaved woman explicitly vocalizing this can be found in a criminal court case between the black woman Amimba, enslaved in the household of the Jewish colonist Salomon Junior, and Carel Imbert, a free mixed-race military officer. They had had an altercation on the street in Paramaribo, in which Amimba had reportedly screamed out: ‘you damned wretched mulatto, freedom makes you freemen crazy.’61
When questioned about her behavior by the authorities, Amimba stated that Imbert had repeatedly made unwanted sexual advances at her, and when she had rejected him by saying she already had a partner and wanted nothing to do with him, he had erupted in anger, beaten her with his umbrella, called her a whore, and told her that ‘she was only a slave, and if he destroyed her not a soul would make an issue of it.’62 Although none of the witnesses who
Amimba’s assumptions were not unfounded. While Imbert faced virtually no legal repercussions for his violence against her (and Amimba was sentenced to the Spanish Buck for her outburst), his intermediate social status did complicate his legal treatment: the incident drew attention to a pattern of what the governing council called ‘improper familiarities with slaves’: for freedmen like Imbert, who were expected to be loyal to the white slave-owning establishment, such entanglements across the free-enslaved boundary were seen as a political threat, and Carel Imbert was demoted from his rank of sub-lieutenant in the colored militia.64
Even in cases of clear coercion, it is still possible to read enslaved women’s agency in sexual encounters. We can surmise that Wanaqua, after Jean Carles purchased her, did what she could to turn a situation she was forced into to her advantage. Margo and Fortuna, likewise, were not in a position to say no to the Surinamese Governor’s son, even if he was not personally their master, but might have chosen to act agreeably as a way of (temporarily) improving their situation. Sexual and emotional labor could function as an escape from other forms of (often back-breaking) labor, and involve special privileges or material rewards. Just as in the East Indies, (enslaved) concubinage could form a path to freedom – if not for oneself, then for one’s children – and thus pose opportunities for upward social mobility that were unavailable for many people in the enslaved population, such as men, elderly women, and women not in
In some cases, formerly enslaved women, through a relationship with a white slaveowner, could end up being slaveowners themselves. An example is the above-mentioned Tannetje, the Berbice governor’s former cook, who was baptized Tannetje Hoop after her manumission and whose two sons were recognized by their father Jan Valk and educated as free Christians. Tannetje herself would eventually become the owner of the Weltevreden plantation. Records sent to Amsterdam from Berbice suggest that Hoop and Valk each had a share in Weltevreeden during his life, and that after he died, she was able to take over the mortgage with a considerable discount (because Valk’s estate was insolvent) and take full control of the plantation.67
Women who acquired property through a non-marital relationship, however, were sometimes met with pushback from the colonial establishment. An example is L’Esperance, a manumitted woman in Suriname, who had lived in long-term enslaved concubinage with her master, the plantation director and administrator Hendrik Diereriks. Diereriks manumitted her in his will, ‘as a reward for her faithful service,’ and stipulated that she would retain the right to live in his house for the remainder of her life, assisted by an enslaved man named Fortuijn as well as an enslaved woman of her choosing.68 Diederiks also named his natural son, a mixed-race young man also named Hendrik, whom he likely conceived with L’Esperance, as his heir. The young Hendrik had been sent to Amsterdam to be trained as a millwright. Unbeknownst to his parents, however, Hendrik Jr. died in Amsterdam in 1761, twenty-two months before the death of his father in 1763. Hendrik Senior’s will had specified that, should his
The executors of Diederiks’ will, however, refused to hand over the estate to the newly manumitted woman, initially on the grounds of the technicality that the young Hendrik had died before his father, and had thus never been the heir whose place L’Esperance could take in a legal substitution. When L’Esperance challenged this by suing the executors before the Surinamese civil court, however, the response of their legal counsel, L. Beudt, revealed that their objections went beyond juridical propriety, and concerned L’Esperance’s status as a recently manumitted black woman and former concubine. Even if the will had directly instituted L’Esperance as the sole beneficiary, Beudt asserted, it was not clear such a role could legally be applied to concubines, and especially not ‘black Heathen concubines as those in this land, who make the most cunning whores look faithful.’ Beudt’s argument also linked the case to the social status of enslaved Africans in general, whom he described as rightly being considered personae indignae, and to what he perceived as a worrying trend of intermixing in which white fathers recognized their mixed-race children, raised them as their own, and sometimes even attempted to legitimize them by marrying their mothers – all developments which he saw as threatening the dominant status of the white community: ‘before you know it the blacks are inside the carriage and whites in the driver’s seat.’69 The case dragged on for years, but in the end, the Court of Justice ruled in L’Esperance’s favor, and ordered the executors to grant her full possession of the estate. Although at this, fiscaal Jan Nepveu, outraged that ‘in absence of a legitimate heir, the inheritance should go to an illegitimate one’, tried to intervene, this was to no avail: the case ended up with the Society of Suriname in Amsterdam, whose directors, after consulting a legal scholar in the Hague, decided not to pursue the matter further.70 L’Esperance had won.71
1.6
Where European men engaged in non-marital sex with Christian women, the legal practice had many similarities with that of the Dutch Republic. There are several examples of young women taking legal action against men who had ‘deflowered’ them under promises of marriage, such as Debora Maria van Claveren in Suriname, who sued a young man named J.J. de Cramer in 1780 after she had given birth to his child, hoping to compel him to marry her or otherwise compensate ‘her tarnished honor’ and provide financial support. Although she was unsuccessful in the former pursuit, the court sentenced De Cramer to pay her two hundred guilders for the cost of childbirth, and another two hundred each year for twenty years in child support.72 In the VOC-world, too, women occasionally filed paternity suits or otherwise demanded compensation for having been ‘deflowered’.
The most important piece of evidence in these cases, similarly to the Dutch Republic, was a child born from the pre-marital encounter, as well as the girl’s declaration of the father’s identity to the midwife while in labor. This proved to be a problem for Anna Maria Roeloffs, the orphaned daughter of a VOC sailor and a local woman from Colombo. This girl, age 16, had moved between various relatives’ and neighbors’ homes since the death of her parents, and briefly lived in the Reformed orphanage in 1779. She was evicted from the orphanage, however, when she claimed to have been impregnated by Louis Galus, a sailor who had frequented her grandmother’s home outside the city. Months later, however, it became clear that Anna Maria was not pregnant after all, and Colombo’s Court of Justice ruled that Galus could not be found liable for ‘deflowering’ her, because she had no proof, nor could he be compelled to marry her because Galus was a Catholic and Roeloffs a Protestant. Simultaneously, however, Anna Maria was described as a ‘dishonored daughter’ in the court records, and declared to be unworthy of the orphanage’s diaconal protection.73
Anna Maria fit in a larger pattern of orphan girls coming under investigation for premarital sexuality. These cases stand out from other ‘defloration’ cases where young women, usually assisted by a parent, took legal action themselves and frequently won financial support for themselves. Instead, three incidents from 1721, 1762 and 1772, involving girls from Reformed orphanages in Ceylon, led to criminal investigations, with the girls, far from winning financial support, being ousted from the orphanage and receiving corporal punishment. In a particularly high-profile case, from 1773 Gale, a girl named Cicilia had initially pointed to a soldier as the father of her illegitimate child, but later
1.7 Prostitution
In the Early Modern Period, that which in the historiography has frequently been referred to as ‘prostitution’ was not a clearly defined crime or economic activity in the way that it would be from the nineteenth century onward. In fact, the Dutch word prostitueeren, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rarely referred explicitly to sex in exchange for money, but rather to a more general exposure to dishonor, either on one’s own accord or by someone else.75 More common were the terms hoer (whore) and hoererij (whoredom), although these words were not exclusively used for women performing sexual labor for payment: hoererij included all non-marital, and thus indecent forms of sexuality and a hoer was a disreputable woman whose dishonor was tied to her sexual availability outside of marriage, regardless of whether money changed hands.76 In colonial contexts, definitions became even more hazy because of the institution of slavery, which often involved various forms of (forced) sexual labor, both paid and unpaid. In both the East Indies and the Atlantic context, the dishonored status and perceived sexual availability of enslaved women resulted in a conceptual overlap between slavin and hoer, to the point where they were almost used synonymously in certain contexts.77
The many calamities and wretched accidents that have resulted from the unchaste lives, and the keeping of public and especially secret brothels, by womenfolk who have surrendered all honor and shame, are known to all, so it will not be necessary to say any more in this regard. In this case, complete proof can be found of those wretched consequences, with one comrade having taken the life of another, all because of one such lewd woman.83
The court agreed that Doe was guilty: although she had begged for a monetary fine rather than physical punishment ‘out of consideration for the shame brought onto her Christian child’ she was sentenced to be lashed on her bare buttocks, followed by twenty-five years of chain labor. Buttenaer was sentenced to run the gauntlet six times for two days and then sent to Batavia to be dealt with by the High Government.84 Notably, Doe’s master and father
This is consistent with prosecution patterns in other settlements, where ‘unchastity’ involving marginalized women generally only came to judicial attention if violence had broken out. The perceived association between sex work and public disorder can also be seen in a 1682 piece of legislation from Batavia that was later incorporated into the Batavia Statutes. In a lengthy ordinance that addressed knife fights and other disorderly conduct among sailors and other low-ranking VOC servants (defined as anyone below the rank of second mate), violence was linked not just to taphouses and inns and the alcohol that was consumed there, but specifically to sex workers: ‘daily experience shows that many accidents also take place in brothels and taverns of ill repute and vile debauchery of whores present there.’ The ordinance ordered an investigation into such establishments, and declared that all women who frequented or stayed in these places would be taken for whores. If caught, they would be fined twenty rixdollars and if they were unable to pay, they could be detained in a place that would be a threatening specter for many Batavian women, not just those engaged in sex work, in the years to come: the spinhuis.85
2 Free Women and Illicit Sex
2.1 Dispatch from the Women’s Workhouse
In November 1718, the VOC’s newly appointed Governor-General, Hendrick Zwaardecroon, received a petition from Catharina Gabriels, ex-wife of the repatriated Burgher Jan Wijnen, begging to be ‘forgiven and pardoned for her mistakes and missteps,’ and to be released from the women’s work house. Gabriels explained that she had been sent to the tugthuis (or spinhuis) in 1711, after a conviction from Batavia’s Schepenbank. In the seven years since, she explained, she had suffered in abject misery, although she patiently submitted herself to her well-deserved punishment. Now that news had arrived of her
Catharina Gabriels was not alone. When she filed her petition for release in 1718, she was joined by at least a dozen other women, all of whom had been placed in the disciplinary institution at some point in the first two decades of the 1700s. All the petitions took the same format: the women introduced themselves, explained when they had been placed in the workhouse and by which authority, and described both the extent of their misery and their own patience in enduring it, before addressing the Governor-General as a benevolent, almost God-like father-figure who could redeem and deliver them. Some women were placed in the workhouse by the Schepenbank like Catharina was; others, usually wives of VOC servants, were sent to the institution by the Court of Justice, either of Batavia or of one of the smaller VOC establishments, which did not have their own tugthuis. Johanna Castersz, for example, wife of a VOC sergeant stationed in Malacca, had been sent to Batavia by the Malaccan Court of Justice to serve out her eight-year sentence.87 It was also possible for a woman to be sent to the tugthuis extra-judicially, however. This could be at the request of her husband or at the High Government’s own discretion.88 In July 1713, Governor-General Van Riebeeck had ordered six women to be placed in the workhouse for an indefinite period – including the sister of the well-known minister and author Francois Valentijn with her two daughters, one of whom had had an illegitimate child – on the grounds of being ‘of very bad behavior and living a reproachful life, even by the standards of Heathens and Mahomedans.’89
God forbid, it has been found that several married as well as unmarried women within this polity live such scandalous and unfettered lives, that it would not only seduce and spoil many young people, children from honorable homes, and slander the Christian name among Heathens and Moors, but also unleash the wrath of God onto this state.91
In a way, the tugthuis, or spinhuis as it was sometimes called in reference to the mandatory handiwork that was performed there, just as in its Amsterdam-based counterpart, was the closest thing the VOC-world had to a prison in the modern sense of the word, since the Company’s jail cells were primarily intended as pre-trial holding facilities, with judicial penalties generally being confined to monetary fines, physical punishment, or banishment, the latter of which could involve chain labor.92 As the above quote shows, however, the workhouse was also quintessentially an institution of moral discipline tasked with protecting the honor of the Christian community, which for women first and foremost involved sexual propriety. The Batavian women’s workhouse seems to have been the only consistent institution of its kind in Dutch overseas colonies during this period: women from across the VOC-world as far as the Cape would occasionally be sent there, while ‘troublesome’ women from Atlantic colonies such as Suriname would at times be shipped
2.2 Gender, Status, and Sexual Morality
As became clear in the previous section, VOC and WIC authorities, especially in their early years, were genuinely concerned about the moral implications of the sexual transgressions of men and women alike, but women – and specifically Christian women – became and remained a particular subject of disciplinary intervention. Henk Niemeijer has shown this for the church in Batavia, which disproportionately censured women over men for sexual transgressions (204 compared to 90 in the final quarter of the seventeenth century).94 The majority of these women were Asian or Eurasian, which can in part be explained by the relatively small number of European-born women in the East Indies, but Niemeijer also points to a difference in attitude, with free European women being much less likely to quietly submit to church authorities than those coming from a background of slavery.95 No doubt economic factors played a part in this, as formerly enslaved Christian women were more likely to rely on the church for financial assistance, and thus more susceptible to disciplinary action. At the same time, however, white women in colonies across the Dutch empire also seem to have been emboldened by a certain socio-cultural self-confidence, or a sense that the church needed them as much as they needed it. This is illustrated by an incident from Curaçao in 1740, when a group of seventeen members of the Dutch Reformed Church, all women, wrote to the church council of the island that they would refuse to partake in the Lord’s Supper while Jan van Schagen, the island’s fiscaal and a church elder, who had offended them, was present. A denial of the right to partake in the sacrament was one of the chief tools the Reformed Church had at its disposal to discipline
A look at the prosecution rates of the Court of Justice complements the view of gendered and racialized religious discipline: from Batavia to Cochin to Suriname, free Christian women, and especially the wives and daughters of company servants, were extremely unlikely to be tried before the criminal court, but if they were, it was usually for a sexual offence such as adultery. Of the criminal case proceedings of Batavia’s Court of Justice, only 49 out of 2887 defendants are non-enslaved women, and out of the 37 for which charges are known, eleven were on trial for a sexual offence, more than any other category of crime.97 In Cochin, 16 out of 573 defendants were free women and of these, three faced adultery charges.98 In Suriname, as in other West-Indian plantation colonies, it was extremely rare to see a free woman, let alone a white woman, tried before the criminal court, with the vast majority of defendants being enslaved people on trial for running away or other forms of resistance against the slavery system. But where there was a criminal prosecution of illicit sex, white women were disproportionately represented. In the year 1750, for example, only 38 out of 235 defendants before the Court of Policy and Criminal Justice were female, and of these, 28 (74%) were enslaved black women. Of the eight white women appearing before the court that year, one was on trial for adultery (the only adultery prosecution the court saw that year), one for slanderous accusations of adultery, one for pre-marital sex, and one for running off with a group of soldiers. Conversely, among other population groups, offences related to sexual morality represented only a tiny fraction of criminal cases.99
While the consistent over-representation of sexual offences among (free) female defendants and that of female offenders among trials pertaining to sexual morality suggests that women’s sexual transgressions were a hot issue for colonial authorities across the empire, the small number of cases, in an absolute sense, leaves us with a problem. It is difficult to say how representative the women in these cases were of the general population, not only because the majority of women having non-marital sex were never prosecuted, but also
2.3 Adultery in Colonial Spaces
The colonial historian Frederik de Haan, in his discussion of Batavia’s spinhuis, describes the institution as virtually empty by the late 1700s and explains this as a result of a fading interest in policing women’s sexual infractions throughout the eighteenth century due to a loosening of moral standards.100 While this seems to be true for the final decades of the century, when convictions for sexual offences become rare, around the mid-eighteenth century women were still quite regularly sent to the institution through a judicial sentence, and often for fifty years, longer than any of the women sentenced to the workhouse at the start of the century. One explanation for this is that, by this point, sexual offences that resulted in shorter or indeterminate institutionalization, such as premarital sex, prostitution, or unspecified ‘immodest’ behavior, were rarely prosecuted anymore, while the more heavily punishable crime of adultery continued to be tried.
Adultery, along with incest, was among the most serious sexual crimes: the Political Ordinance of Holland, the Dutch legal text on marriage and (hetero)sexual offences which was widely applied throughout the Dutch Republic and much of the Dutch overseas world, prescribed a banishment of fifty years for married women who had extramarital sex, regardless of whether their lover was also married or not. Married men faced this punishment only if they committed adultery with a married woman, or if they were caught with an unmarried woman multiple times. For singular instances of infidelity of married men with single women the Ordinance was milder, prescribing only a two-week
The Batavia Statutes of 1642 returned to the level of severity found in the Political Ordinance, prescribing a fine of 100 reals in addition to fifty years of banishment for adultery involving a married woman, specifying that women would be ‘banished’ to the workhouse while men could either be ‘banished’ ad opus publicum (i.e. sent off for forced labor) or simply banished from VOC-territory.104 The latter, in practice, was generally applied to VOC servants and other Europeans and the former to Asians and some low-ranking Company servants. Women, if found guilty, were indeed sentenced to a fine and fifty years in the spinhuis quite consistently.
Although marital infidelity is a timeless phenomenon, the circumstances under which it comes about and is (or isn’t) prosecuted vary historically. Historians of the Dutch Republic such as Manon van der Heijden have shown that the VOC, along with other maritime employers, played a role in the high rates of women on trial for adultery in port cities such as Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Because sailing husbands frequently never returned home or were absent for years, often without their wives receiving word from them, many women ended up in a new relationship without definite proof of their husbands’ death. Since
Among colonial authorities, anxieties about these women’s (often precarious) economic situation and their sexual virtue could become intertwined. In Curaçao in the mid-eighteenth century, this resulted in a dramatic investigation and prosecution of two wealthy Jewish islanders, accused of attempting to commit adultery with impoverished Christian women, with one woman accusing one of the suspects of taking advantage of her husband being away at sea, while offering to forgive a debt if she slept with him.107 Husbands themselves also expressed concerns about their wives’ fidelity while they were away at sea, while other men permanently left their wives and repatriated, despite laws that were meant to prevent this. Their (ex-)wives were frequently left in a similarly vulnerable position to the many widows and single women that populated colonial port towns such as Batavia and Willemstad, with the significant difference that the legal authorities still viewed them as married women. This
One such woman was Margaretha Lijpard from Batavia, described in the VOC’s records as ‘the separated wife of the repatriated junior merchant Cornelis Coster.’ It is not specified what had prompted the separation, but it is clear that Margaretha’s standard of living, which previously must have been quite respectable, took a turn for the worse after Cornelis returned to the Netherlands. She received ten rixdollars a month from the Company – likely arranged by her husband, as men who were given permission to repatriate without their wives were required to provide for them financially – but this was considerably less than what a junior merchant’s family would have lived on in the second half of the eighteenth century.108 She was forced to move in with her mother and stepfather, the soldier Matthias Herman. To make ends meet, her parents took in a lodger for twenty rixdollars a month, the German military captain (in VOC employment) Ferdinand Willem Van Leben, who had recently separated from his wife. Van Leben took a liking to Margaretha, and his affections were encouraged by Matthias Herman, who apparently saw them as both an opportunity for his stepdaughter’s social advancement and an excuse to ask for more rent from Van Leben.
By the time the authorities caught wind of the situation (as a result of Van Leben’s wife filing for divorce), the officer was already on his way back to Europe, but both Margareta Lijphard and her stepfather were prosecuted – she for double adultery, and he for ‘conniving’ this offence. Margaretha initially defended herself by claiming that Van Leben had forced her, then that he had seduced her under false pretenses and promised to take her with him to Germany and marry her there. Promises of marriage could be a mitigating factor in some circumstances – notably in case of pre-marital carnal conversation, in which young women could frequently avoid punishment if they could prove there had been a mutual agreement to wed. Since Margaretha was still technically a married woman, however, the court did not accept this defense, and she was sentenced to fifty years in the women’s workhouse.109
Margaretha and Ferdinand met in the domestic sphere while he was a lodger, which was a common pattern in VOC Asia, where people rarely lived in nuclear households, instead sharing their homes with (enslaved) servants,
In addition to family members and houseguests, the people with whom married couples lived in closest proximity were enslaved domestic servants. No one knew more about what went on behind closed doors than a lijfslaaf or lijfslavin (enslaved personal attendants) who frequently even slept in the same room as their master or mistress, served as messengers, and were frequent confidants. As a result of this intimacy, houseslaves were almost invariably involved in cases of adultery coming to light, playing a considerably more important role in adultery cases than neighbors, who were generally a prime factor in prosecutions of sexual transgressions in Europe.111 Enslaved people who witnessed adultery, and especially enslaved women attending to the lady of the house, faced a delicate dilemma: keep their mistress’ secret, or inform the husband, who legally was the ultimate authority in the house. Betraying a mistress’ trust could have dire consequences in the form of retribution, but there are also cases of enslaved women who helped cover up their mistress’ secret affair being prosecuted as accomplices to adultery. In 1736 Batavia, three enslaved women named Tjindra, Cassandra, and Sitie, who had helped hide their mistress Anna Maria Keppelaer’s infidelity from her husband, faced a punishment of lashing and branding under the gallows followed by twenty-five years of chain labor for their complicity and for lying to their master. Other slaves in the household, who had not actively assisted, nonetheless reported that they had been afraid to tell their master what was going on, and had only told a fellow enslaved man, who had then informed Anna Maria’s husband.112
A complicating factor was that an enslaved witness’ testimony, on its own, was not admissible in court. This becomes clear in the case of Camoenie van Boegis, an enslaved woman who was caught, dressed as a boy, trying to flee
These patterns are not unique to Batavia: from the Dutch East Indies to the Caribbean, enslaved people simultaneously took a position of trusted intimacy that frequently made them prime witnesses in adultery cases, and were treated with suspicion and distrust when offering legal testimony, with repudiations of slaves giving incriminating testimony against their masters bleeding over into more generalized ethnic and racial prejudice against non-Christian and non-white witnesses. Jessica Roitman and Aviva Ben-Ur have shown this for Suriname and Curaçao, highlighting how not just enslaved witnesses but also free Afrodescendants who leveled accusations against members of the (white) Sephardic community were both highly knowledgeable due to their intimate
While many women put on trial for adultery were reported by their aggrieved husband, the courts could also act unilaterally regardless of the injured party’s wishes. Not every husband wished for his wife to be subjected to the draconian measures of the Dutch colonial legal system, and there are even examples of husbands lobbying for clemency on their wives’ behalf. Carsten Jansz, a burgher on the island of Banda, for example, petitioned the local VOC government alongside his wife Christina Pietersz’s sister Margarietje in 1690. Christina had been sentenced to fifty years in the workhouse as well as public flogging and branding for adultery, promting Carsten and Margarietje, ‘as father and aunt of [Christina’s] surviving little children,’ to plead with the Council to spare her from corporal punishment, stressing ‘the irreparable damage and shame that would await the little sprouts, particularly with regards to their marriage prospects.’ The Council was unwavering in its verdict, however, and rejected the petition. For the VOC, clearly, there was more on the line in the case than the interests of a husband obtaining retribution for adultery, which may have had something to do with the identity of Christina’s adulterous partner: this Noormammon was not a Christian but a Muslim, as evident from his designation as a Moors Mardijker.116
2.4 Crossing the (Racial) Line
There is one pattern of prosecutions that stands out, both for its consistency across the early modern Dutch empire and for the intensity of colonial authorities’ reactions, and that is that concerning sex (and particularly adultery) between European or European-affiliated women and racialized, non-Christian men. No other sexual transgression elicited such vitriolic outrage from prosecutors and courts, or was punished as harshly, with the exception of sodomy – an act which shocked authorities’ sensibilities so much that concerted efforts were made to obscure its existence. Legislation specifically targeting inter-religious and inter-ethnic sex started almost immediately after the start of Dutch colonization, with Jan Pieterzoon Coen in 1622 mandating the death penalty for any ‘unchristian’ who ‘instigated’ sex with a Christian (woman).117
The definition of ‘Dutch’, in this context, was flexible. What becomes clear from the cases where, in practice, judicial and administrative authorities decided to act, was that the women whose sexual honor must be guarded from outsiders were those who in some form or another were seen as belonging to the groups whose proliferation and social dominance the companies sought to promote: company servants first and foremost, Europeans in a secondary sense, and to a lesser extent Christians in general. Christian women, even if they had no European relatives, could be prosecuted if they had sex with non-Christian men, because such pairings undermined efforts to grow a Christian community whose religious affiliation facilitated the Company’s control over the population.119 That it was primarily Christian women’s promiscuity outside the Christian community that came under scrutiny, and not Christian men’s, can be explained in part by traditional notions of women as ‘vessels’ of the next generation, and in part by the fact that the father and husband’s religious and ethnic identity was understood to determine that of the children.
Especially since the Company intends to found a colony here with native women, and will never be able to achieve this objective without exterminating that horrible and unbearable crime of adultery, nor can we come to an honorable propagation of our own nation, without first purging the marital state from that evil poison and rigorously eradicating that horrific unchastity once and for all, as an example to others.121
Whenever a native mestiza or black woman who is married to a Dutchman should commit infidelity and thus come to break the dignity of her marriage and the respect of the nation through adultery, [and] have intercourse with a native man, slave or any other black and her equal, that same woman shall be […] punished with death, along with the adulterer.122
The Ceylon ordinance was a bit of an anomaly: in most other Dutch overseas settlements, harsh punishments such as the death penalty were reserved for the racialized men who slept with Christian women, with the women
Even when a woman had no formally recognized relationship with a European, sexual encounters across religious lines and boundaries of the colonial social hierarchy could be enough to provoke a prosecution. One example is that of Helena Box, a Christian woman living in Makassar, who had been the concubine of a European Corporal and had taken over his home and his servants after his death. In 1780, it came to light that she had an affair with her Muslim servant Moesoe. The VOC court in Makassar sentenced Moessoe to twenty-five years of chain labor, and Helena, whose ‘most shameful familiarity with a Mahomedan’ had, according to the prosecutor, ‘disgraced Christianity,’ was banished for life.125 It is likely no coincidence that the court records highlight Moessoe’s identity as a Muslim: in the VOC world but especially in Makassar, Christianity functioned as an important marker of political allegiance and Islam, conversely, was associated with hostile foreign polities
Christians with an ‘outsider’ status could face aggravated charges, too, however, as was the case for a Siam-based Luso-Asian shipbroker who started an affair with a Batavian woman and attempted to transport her outside of VOC-territories, and was sentenced to death: this Anthonio de Britto Lagos spent time in Batavia in 1755 and befriended a local Luso-Asian burgher family, the De Remedios. He grew particularly close with Margaretha de Remedio, the eldest daughter, who had recently separated from her husband, a former VOC assistant. The two began a sexual relationship, and Anthonio eventually convinced Margaretha to move to Siam with him. The pair boarded a Siamese ship along with Margaretha’s eleven-year-old sister, who had been betrothed to Anthonio’s son, and a handful of enslaved servants. The ship was intercepted by VOC authorities and Anthonio and Margaretha were tried in Batavia. Margaretha was sentenced to twenty-five years in the workhouse, plus a fine of 100 rixdollars, although she would serve just under half that sentence, being released in 1768. Anthonio, although a Christian, was given a harsher sentence, possibly in part due to his status as a foreigner: he was sentenced to death by hanging.126
In the West-Indies, sex between European-identified women and enslaved or otherwise subaltern men was also a far greater threat to colonial authorities’ sensibilities than the gender-reversed scenario, but here the emphasis was more explicitly on race and skin color than religion or ethnic affiliation. Here, the women whose sexual honor was anxiously protected were specifically white women, and the men whose sexual encounters with such women were utterly taboo were those described as ‘Negroes,’ ‘Mulattoes,’ and ‘Indians’. The first recorded piece of legislation that explicitly targeted this type of interracial sex comes from Suriname, in 1711, and was issued after two white women were found to have given birth to children fathered by black men.127 ‘To prevent such disgraceful and unnatural fornication and adultery in the future’ it was pronounced that any unmarried white woman caught having ‘carnal conversation with a Negro,’ would henceforth be whipped and banished from the colony for life. A married woman would receive the same punishment, in addition to
Although the Surinamese version of the law did not mention Amerindians, in practice all enslaved men, whether black or Indigenous, were included. Nor was the ban limited to white women of the Christian faith: in 1730, Hanna (or Ganna) Levy, an unmarried Jewish girl belonging to Suriname’s Ashkenazi community, was caught by her neighbors having ‘carnal conversation’ with Jan, ‘an Indian slave of her uncle Jacob Polak’.131 Jan was sentenced to death by hanging and Hanna was banished from the colony for life, although the Government had considerable trouble getting her out: the scandal attached to her was so great that no skipper sailing for Holland was willing to take her aboard, so that the Council had to resort to randomly assigning her to someone, and finding a Jewish family to escort her on the journey.132
It is also worrisome […] to approve such marriages without reservations. Would white women, eager to wed, not get the idea to manumit Negroes
in order to marry them? And with that, wouldn’t they want to marry free Negroes? In our time – God be thanked – we do not see that infamy of mixing, as in the past, when under Governor Jan de Goijer, it was necessary […] to forbid white women that reprehensible mixing […] and to institute the death penalty against those Negroes.133
It thus seems that the threat of violent punishment, along with social stigma, was a strong enough deterrent to make these types of pairings rare, or at the very least prompted inter-racial couples to take increased efforts to hide their relationship, most crucially through birth control. It is also likely that stigma propelled husbands and other family members finding out about wives’ or daughters’ affairs to deal with them within the domestic sphere rather than face the public shame that came with turning to the authorities.134 By the 1760s, moreover, the number of white women in the colony was already significantly less than at the start of the century, meaning the chances of a white woman giving birth to a mixed-race child and thus being caught were smaller.
3 Conclusion
Sex outside of marriage was ubiquitous across the Dutch empire, and colonial authorities were aware of the limits of their control in this respect. Although Dutch law and Christian morality were in agreement that no form of sexuality
Women classified as white, European, or Christian, however, were the target of considerably more intense control when it came to non-marital sex, just as non-European men they engaged with were targets of often violent – sometimes even deadly – judicial intervention in a way that non-Christian, non-European women rarely were. This came down, in part, to the pragmatics of reproduction: Christian women in Asia, and white Christian and Jewish women in the Caribbean, being relatively in short supply, were expected to have children with men from their own communities, and thus help perpetuate those communities. An illegitimate, mixed-race child born to such women was thus considered unacceptable. The gendered role of honor in communal status and power, however, also played a significant role: women’s honor, more so than men’s, was defined by sexual virtue, while simultaneously women’s sexual honor reflected on the status and respectability of their husbands, fathers, and even wider communities. In colonial societies where authorities had an interest in maintaining an exclusive free Christian and more-or-less European community whose status was elevated above that of neighboring groups, the dishonoring of one’s ‘own’ women by an outsider or social inferior was particularly offensive.
The sexual encounters discussed in this chapter, whether they were consensual or coercive, were criminalized not as offences against a private victim, but as affronts to the public order. Even in case of adultery, which was conceived as a crime with an injured party (i.e. the adulterer’s spouse) who could seek justice, prosecutors could take unilateral action, not on behalf of the individual victim, but on behalf of the community and its social order. In the following chapter, this hazy line between ‘public’ and ‘private’ conceptions of crime will
Christopher Chitty, Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2020).
Imran Canfijn et al., “Early Modern Dutch Colonial Court Records, 1637–1828,” IISH Data Collection, September 18, 2025.
For an in-depth discussion of the conditions surrounding sodomy cases on VOC ships, see Matthias van Rossum, Werkers van de wereld: Globalisering, arbeid en interculturele ontmoetingen tussen Aziatische en Europese zeelieden in dienst van de VOC, 1600–1800 (Uitgeverij Verloren, 2014), 319–340.
Canfijn et al., “Early Modern Dutch Colonial Court Records.” Cases date from (1729–1790 – no data for 1700–1728). Note that ‘sodomy’ does not necessarily imply homosexuality: the term was used for all sexual acts deemed unnatural, including bestiality, although the majority of cases prosecuted involved two men.
Elwin Hofman, ‘The End of Sodomy: Law, Prosecution Patterns, and the Evanescent Will to Knowledge in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, 1770–1830,” Journal of Social History 54, no. 2 (November 1, 2020): 483.
T.M. Aerts, “Het verfoeijelijke crimen van sodomie’. Sodomie op VOC-schepen in de 18e eeuw,” Leidschrift 4 (April 1988): 5–21.
Ketelaars, Compagniesdochters, 159–65.
‘alzoo er niet alleen geen Een Egte vrouw buijten de mijne op het gandsche Land is, maar zelfs geen Een Vrouwsperzoon die belijdenis doet van den Christen Godsdienst terwijl in tusschen alle de Blanken niet alleen Een heijdin tot een Concubijn of Bijzit hebben, maar zelfs veele zig niet schamen opentlijk te Roemen, dat zij er twee, Drie en meer teffens hebben,’ NL-HaNA, WIC, 1.05.01.02, inv.no. 492, Letter from G. Verbeet 20 October 1764, folio 754.
NL-HaNA, WIC, 1.05.01.02, inv.no. 947, Director-General and Council’s response to G. Verbeet’s resignation, 23 October 1764, scan 72–73.
‘dezelve is een Misbruijk voor ‘s menschen geheugen hier reets ingekropen en dat wij durven zeggen onmogelijk uijtgeroeijt kan werden, wij zijn hier alle Menschen, wel Ed: Heeren, de meeste der Bediendens zo negotieere als Militaire zijn Jong en in het prilste van haare kragt, dus zoo zoude het grootere misbruijken na zig sleepen, Jaa gruwelen meede brengen die ons eerder na Sodom zoude doen gelijken, als wij nu God betert doen, zoo wij hun het gebruijk der vrouwen wilden beletten.’ NL-HaNA, WIC, 1.05.01.02, inv.no. 929, Documents from the Coast of Guinea, 1763–1768, Letter from Director-General and Council to the Lords X, 23 October 1764, scan 264, folio 99.
This fits a larger pattern in European ideas on sexuality, which in the sixteenth century began to conceive of a natural human sex drive that required an outlet. Sara F. Mattheus Grieco, “The Body, Appearance, and Sexuality,” in A history of women in the West: III. Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes, ed. Natalie Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), 71.
Natalie Everts, “‘Huwelijk Naar’s Lands Wijze’. Relaties Tussen Afrikaanse Vrouwen En Europeanen Aan de Goudkust (West-Afrika) 1700–1817: Een Aanpassing van de Beeldvorming.’,” Tijdschrift Voor Geschiedenis 111, no. 4 (1998): 598–616.
Gerardus Verbeet, Memorie, of, getrouw verhaal van alle de moeilykheden, vervolgingen, en mishandelingen, den persoon van Gerardus Verbeet, laatst geweest predikant tot Banda, in Neerlands Oostindien aangedaan, door hem zelfs opgestelt, en voorzien van daar toe specterende papieren en bewyzen (Delft: Egbert vander Smout, 1762), 16.
Verbeet, 26–27.
NL-HaNA VOC 1.04.02 inv.no. 9323, Criminal sentencing of Gerardus Verbeet, 22 June 1761, scan 109.
NL-HaNA, WIC, 1.05.01.02, inv.no. 492, Letter from G. Verbeet to WIC Directors, 20 October 1764, folio 757.
Jan Willem Kals, Klagte over de Bedorvene Zeden Der Voorgangeren, Zoo in’t Kerk- Als Burger-Bestuur in Eene Zeer Vrugtbare Ende Eerst Opluikende Colonie, Voorgestelt in Eene Behandelinge, Gepleegt Aan Een Predikant, Aan’t Eerwaarde Classis van Amsterdam, 1733.
Kals, 24.
One contemporary writer who regularly touched on scandals and conflicts surrounding concubinage was François Valentijn. See Van Wamelen, Family life, 375–76; François Valentijn, Oud en nieuw Oost-Indiën, vervattende een naaukeurige en uitvoerige verhandelinge van Nederlands mogentheyd in die gewesten, benevens eene wydluftige beschryvige der Moluccos … en alle de eylanden onder dezelve landbestieringen behoorende; het Nederlands comptoir op Suratte, en de levens der Groote Mogols …, vol. 2 (Dordrecht/Amsterdam: J. van Braam & Gerard onder de Linden, 1724).
Kpobi, “Mission in Chains,” 75, 152–53.
NL-HaNA, WIC, 1.05.01.02, inv.no. 124, Resolutions 10 March 1700, scan 335–339.
Noorlander, Heaven’s Wrath, 106.
NIP vol I, Ordinance of 20 july 1622, 99–102.
CP-I, 3–4.
WIP-C-I, 3–8, 52–59.
Ordinance of 19 February 1669, in WIP-S-I, 33–35.
“Instructie betreffende relaties met zwarte of Amerindiaanse vrouwen voor allen die in dienst zijn van Abraham van Pere,” May 20, 1681, Plakaatboek Guyana 1670–1816, Accesible through http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/retroboeken/guyana; Original: NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 219, folio 1–4.
CP-I Ordinance of 30 May/3 June 1641, Galle, 3–4.
Andaya, “From Temporary Wife to Prostitute,” 1998, 12–15; Anthony Reid, “Female Roles in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (1988): 629–45.
Bin Mihalopoulos, “The Making of Prostitutes: The Karayuki-San,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 1993, 41–56; Van Wamelen, Family life, 390; Blussé, Bitters Bruid, 14.
Gary P. Leupp, Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543–1900 (London/New York: Continuum, 2003), 10.
Everts, “‘Huwelijk Naar ‘s Lands Wijze.’”
Everts, “A Motley Company.”
Henk den Heijer, “Institutional Interaction on the Gold Coast: African and Dutch Institutional Cooperation in Elmina, 1600–1800,” in Exploring the Dutch Empire: Agents, Networks and Institutions, 1600–2000, ed. Catia Antunes and Jos Gommans (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 203–26.
Kars, Blood on the River, 38.
WIP-C-I #1 (1638), 3–8; #39 (1655), 52–59; Plakaatboek Guyana, 20 May 1681; 4 September 1700.
Andaya, “From Temporary Wife to Prostitute,” 1998, 21–22. Francois Valentijn, for example, warned against the seductive women of the Moluccas who could reduce men to madness. François Valentijn, ‘Uitvoerige Beschrijving der Vijf Moluccos, Vol I’, in Oud en nieuw Oost-Indiën (Dordrecht/Amsterdam: J. van Braam & Gerard onder de Linden, 1724), 15–16; Bert Paasman, “Lof van Oost-Indiën: Liedjes Uit de VOC-Tijd,” Indische Letteren 6, no. 1 (1991): 6–10. If this image is based on any genuine experiences by Dutch sailors in the Indies, it may be emblematic of the divergent cultural expectations Barbara Watson Andaya describes between European men and Southeast Asian women, with the former coming from a framework of prostitution as sex-for-money (and having his gendered expectations subverted in this scenario) and the latter viewing small (monetary) gifts as a token of an ongoing affective relationship.
Barbara Watson Andaya, “From Temporary Wife to Prostitute: Sexuality and Economic Change in Early Modern Southeast Asia,” Journal of Women’s History 9, no. 4 (1998): 11–34.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 69, Request to Governor Waterham by Jan Couzijn, 18 July 1737, scan 269–269.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 69, Council minutes 27 July 1737, scan 251.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 69, Note from Mariti Broer agreeing to a separation, 11 August 1737, scan 328.
Niemeijer, “Calvinisme en koloniale stadscultuur,” 257–58.
Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 43; Van Lier, Frontier Society, 78.
Ordinance 382, 19 February 1739, WIP-S-I, 455; NL-HaNA, RvP-S, 1.05.10.02, inv.no. 20 (1739), scan 43.
NL-HaNA, RvP-S, 1.05.10.02, inv.no. 855, Trial of Profijt, 18 May 1792, scan 381–382. The Spaanse Bok involved being whipped with one’s hands bound to one’s knees and a pole on the ground.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 2, Minutes of the Directors of the Society of Berbice, 3 May 1758, scan 295.
PG, Regulations for artisans and plantation servants, 5 December 1741.
PG, Regulations on military discipline, 2 September 1750.
WIP-S-II, #876, 31 August 1784, no. 9, 1069–1070.
NL-HaNA, Staten-Generaal, 1.01.02, inv.no. 9502 Dossier of the divorce case between Apolonia Jacoba van der Meulen and Herman Nicolaes van de Schepper, 1746.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 439, List of persons who departed to Berbice as independent planters of employees, scan 92.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 68, Memo for the Governor issued by Jean Carles, 29 January 1737, scan 69.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 69, Letter written by Jean Carles to Jean Pierre St. Martin, 14 October 1737. Quotes translated from French, scan 279–280.
‘dat soo wanneer hij sig onderwerpt de verliefde heerschapije van sijne Slavinne, hij haar over alle blancken der Plantage stelt, dat hij met haar in een Jagt uitvaart, sigh man van haar doet noemen, met haar alleen in eene beslote kamer slaapt, haar hangmat digt bij de sijne doet hangen, dat sij elkander lieffkosen sonder de minste vreeze, en dickwijls sigh uijtschelden en samen twisten over de Venus sieckten, die sij sig elkander verwijten elders gekregen te hebben,’ NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 68, Memo for the Governor issued by Jean Carles, 29 January 1737, scan 70.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 68, Request by Jean Carles, scan 62–63; inv.no. 68, Council minutes February 16 1737, scan 50–51; inv.no. 69, Sentencing of Jean Carles, July 13, 1737, scan 250; inv.no. 14, Resolutions April 1 1738, scan 85; Resolutions April 21, scan 92.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 65, Interrogation of Balthazar Ugenin, 28 August 1736, scan 362–364.; inv.no. 67, Testimony of M. Touschaij, 22 July 1736, scan 94; inv.no. 65, Request by Jan Daniel Knapp, 30 August 1736, scan 10.
‘smorgens hij vragende aan de Indiain of zij veel Plijcier gehad hebben, zij hem gene als wijnige spijtige woorden daer op gevende, hij weder zeijde dat zoo een Leven niet en betaamde ende hij Liever van de plantagie Wilde gaan, ende is du Thon naer die teijdt Ongunstigh op hem geweest,’ NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 65, Interrogation of Bathazar Ugenin, 28 August 1736, scan 362–364. Jean Carles, who had tended to Knapp’s wounds after his encounter with Ugenin and provided a witness statement in the case, had been aware of these allegations against Bermond by Ugenin and referred to them in his own case against his employer – to no avail. NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 68, scan 69.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 67, sentencing of Balthazar Ugenin, 15 October 1736, scan 96; inv.no. 86, Summary of charges against Jan Daniel Knap, by Governor Lösner, 23 October 1743, scan 310–311; Protest issued by Jan Daniel Knapp, 30 October 1743, scan 318–329.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 62, Missive from Bernardt Waterham, 21 August 1735, scan 778; inv.no. 65, Missive from Bernhardt Waterham, 5 May 1736, scan 472; inv.no. 327, act of transport, 7 May 1738, scan 7.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 73, Missive from Bernhardt Waterham, 6 January 1739, scan 25; inv.no. 72, Missive from Jan Andries Lossner, 6 January 1739, scan 101–112.
NL-HaNA, RvP-S, 1.05.10.02, inv.no. 840, Testimony of Bentie van Sobre, 21 January 1782, folio 18–19.
NL-HaNA, RvP-S, 1.05.10.02, inv.no. 840, Testimony of Amimba, 16 January 1782, folio 20–21.
Giorgi Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), cited in Felicia Fricke, “The Post-Abolition Period and Slavery in Curaçao: A Postcolonial Perspective on Oral Historical Data,” Basiton: Working Papers on Slavery and Its Afterlives 1, no. 2 (2020): 3–7.
NL-HaNA, SvS, 1.05.03 inv.no. 174, Resolution Governor and Council, 22 February 1782, scan 27–28.
Guno Jones and Betty de Hart, “(Not) Measuring Mixedness in the Netherlands,” in The Palgrave International Handbook of Mixed Racial and Ethnic Classification, ed. Zarine L. Rocha and Peter J. Aspinall (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020), 367–87; Fatah-Black, Eigendomsstrijd.
As Guno Jones and Betty de Hart point out, this translated into the racial classifications of free people, with those described as ‘colored’ far outnumbering those labeled ‘black’, and the reverse being true for enslaved population numbers documented by Van Lier. Jones and de Hart, ‘(Not) Measuring Mixedness in the Netherlands’; Lier, Samenleving in een grensgebied, 71.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 15, Resolutions December 5 1748, 613, inv.no. 100, Missive from Johan Christian Frauendorff, as administrator of Weltevreeden, 25 August 1749.
NL-HaNA, SvS, 1.05.03 inv.no. 320, Testament of Hendrik Diederiks, 25 July 1760, folio 238.
NL-HaNA, SvS, 1.05.03 inv.no. 320, Legal advice to executors of the Diederiks estate by L. Beudt, 24 October 1763, 256–260.
NL-HaNA, SvS, 1.05.03 inv.no. 328, Instructive Memo from Second Fiscaal Texier, 28 February 1766, folio 176–182; Ibid., Verdict Court of Civil Justice 26 November 1765, folio 188; inv.no. 57, Resolution from Directors, 16 December 1767, folio 358.
The fiscaal, notably, stood to gain from L’Esperance being denied her inheritance, because estates for which no legal heir could be identified could fall to his office. What likely helped L’Esperance’s case, however, was that, as her legal counsel pointed out, Hendrik Diereriks Senior had himself been the illegitimate child of a white man and an Amerindian woman, and thus ab intestato inheritance law did not apply to him, making the question of a legal heir irrelevant. NL-HaNA, SvS, 1.05.03 inv.no. 320, Legal advice from J. Bollard, 26 September 1763, folio 250–255.
NL-HaNA, RvP-S, 1.05.10.02, inv.no. 936, folio 129–140.
SLNA VOC 1.11.06.08, inv.no. 4687, scan 2–47.
SLNA VOC 1.11.06.08, inv.no. 4672, folio 5–8.
Instituut voor de Nederlandsche Taal, ‘Prostitueeren’, in Woordenboek Der Nederlandsche Taal, 2007, Geïntegreerde Taalbank, https://gtb.ivdnt.org/; Manon Van der Heijden, Women and Crime in Early Modern Holland, Crime and City in History (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 101.
Lotte van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam, The Burgher and the Whore (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 4–5, accessed June 28, 2021.
Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives, 2016, 80; Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 332; Niemeijer, Batavia, 72–73.
van der Heijden, Women and Crime, 101; By the eighteenth century, however, the trend seems to have reversed somewhat, with prosecutions declining in Amsterdam and Rotterdam becoming known for its strict approach. Pol, The Burgher and the Whore, 97; Marion Pluskota, “Governing Sexuality: Regulating Prostitution in Early Modern Europe,” in New Approaches to Governance and Rule in Urban Europe Since 1500 (Routledge, 2020), 100.
Elizabeth B. van Heyningen, “The Social Evil in the Cape Colony 1868–1902: Prostitution and the Contagious Diseases Acts,” Journal of Southern African Studies 10, no. 2 (1984): 170.
“26 November 1681 – Verbod teen byeenkomste van Kompanjiesdienaars en slavinne,” in S. D. Naudé, Kaapse plakkaatboek Vol I, Kaapse argiefstukke 108061515 (Kaapstad: Cape Times, 1951), 179–80.
NL-HaNA, WIC, 1.05.01.02, inv.no. 124, Ordinance 23 June 1692, scan 279.
Bosma and Raben, Being “Dutch” in the Indies, 31.
‘Het voeren van een ontugtig leeven, en houden van openbaare, dog insonderheid van geheime bordeelhuijsen, door alle eer en schaampte afgelegt hebbende vrouwlieden, heeft reeds zo veel onheilen en droevige ongelukken uijtgewerkt dat niemant daar van onkundig kan zijn, en het dus niet nodig zal weesen eenige verdre aanhalingen dientewegen te doen. Te minder het geval in dezen weder een volkome bewijs van die droevigen gevolgen uijtleeverd, hebbende den eenen cammeraat den anderen niet anders als door toedoen van zo een ontugtig vrouwmens, het leven benomen,’ Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, Residentiearchief Makassar [hereafter: ANRI Makassar], inv.no. 321.1 (1780), Criminal court proceedings of Jacobus Buttenaer and Doe van Timor, folio 255.
ANRI Makassar, inv.no. 321.1, Sentencing 18 May 1780, folio 190.
NIP vol III, 23 January 1682, 85. The article made a distinction in punishment based on ethnic origin: inlandsche (i.e. South East Asian) women would be detained there with a chain around the leg.
Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, Archief van de gouverneur-generaal en raden van Indië (Hoge Regering) van de Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie en taakopvolgers, 1612–1812 [hereafter ANRI Hoge Regering] inv.no. 1198, Appendices to Resolutions 1718, scan 539. Accessed through https://sejarah-nusantara.anri.go.id/.
ANRI Hoge Regering inv.no. 1198, scan 546.
ANRI Hoge Regering inv.no. 1198, Realia 1610–1808, June 3, 1718, “Een wijff van zeker Bouginees Sergeant, word over haar ontuchtig Leven, op de klagte van haar Man, tot nader besluyt in dit huys geplaatst, 3 Juni 1718,” scan 507; Accessed through https://sejarah-nusantara.anri.go.id/.
ANRI Hoge Regering inv.no. 936, Resolutions 1713, scan 456.
ANRI Hoge Regering inv.no. 1198, folio 527; inv.no. 1200, folio 49. Mardijkers were free Christian South (East) Asians, usually with a (family) background of enslavement.
‘Alsoo, Godt betert, bevonden wert, hoe dat eenige getrouwde als ongetrouwde vrouwen binnen deser republicque soodanigen schandaleusen ende ongebonden leven syn leydende, dat daer door niet alleen veel jonge luyden, kinderen van eerlycken huyse, gedebaucheert ende bedorven, mitsgaders de Christen name onder de heydenen en Mooren gelastert, maer oock de straffe Godes over desen staet gehaelt soude werden,’ ‘Reglement voor het vrouwen-tuchthuis te Batavia,’ 3 July 1741, in NIP vol. I, 461. This allusion to ‘children from honorable homes’ as being in moral danger was a common theme in Dutch legal scholarship of the seventeenth century, when referring to prostitution. See, for example, Simon van Leeuwen, Het Rooms-Hollands-Regt, Waar in de Roomse Wetten Met Het Huydendaagse Neerlands Regt … over Een Gebragt Werden …, 9th ed. (Amsterdam, 1678, 1720), 475.
See also Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 85–126.
An example is Lucia Nawich in Suriname, who after several run-ins with the law throughout her life (notably for adultery in 1750 at the age of 29) was finally banished from the colony in her old age when she was caught selling moonshine to slaves. She was sent to Amsterdam, where the burgomasters had agreed to place her in a tugthuis. NL-HaNA, RvP-S, 1.05.10.02, inv.no. 109, May 11 1780, scan 127–128; inv.no. 170, January 19 1781, scans 15, 182. Two VOC outposts that did have a ‘spinhuis’ of their own in the seventeenth century were Ceylon and Banda, the latter of which also incarcerated women from Ambon, but it is unclear if these institutions persisted into the eighteenth century.
Niemeijer, “Calvinisme en koloniale stadscultuur,” 222.
Niemeijer, 225–26.
Gemeente Archief Amsterdam – Archief van de Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk; Classis Amsterdam, 379, inv.no. 225, scan 22–23.
Imran Canfijn et al., “Early Modern Dutch Colonial Court Records, 1637–1828,” IISH Data Collection, September 18, 2025.
Ibid.
Data provided by Karwan Fatah-Black, Imran Canfijn, and Ramona Negrón; NL-HaNA, RvP-S, 1.05.10.02, inv.nos. 346, 550, 800, 801, NL-HaNA, SvS, 1.05.03 inv.no. 142.
F. de Haan, Oud Batavia: gedenkboek uitgegeven door het Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen naar aanleiding van het driehonderdjarig bestaan der stad in 1919 (Batavia: Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen, 1922), 295.
Cornelis Cau, ed., ‘Ordonnantie vande Policien binnen Holland, in date den eersen Aprilis 1580’, in Groot placaet-boeck, vervattende de placaten, ordonnantien ende edicten van de Staten Generael der Vereenighde Nederlanden, ende van de Staten van Hollandt en West-Vrieslandt, mitsgaders van de Staten van Zeelandt, Vol 1 (The Hague, 1658), art. 14–17.
Surinamese Ordinance of 19 February 1669, in WIP-S, 33–35; ‘Renovatie en ampliatie van door verloop van tijt ombedwongenheijt der ingesetenen ofte negligentie der officieren niet achtervolcht worden ordonnantien en plakaten betreffende concubinage overspel en bloedschande,’ Batavia 20 July 1622, in NIP vol I, 100; ‘Besluit waarbij de doodstraf ingevoerd wordt voor overspel door inlandse vrouwen van nederlanders gepleegd,’ Colombo 14 November 1659, in CP vol I, 48–49.
NL-HaNA VOC 1.04.02, inv.no. 1230, Missive R. van Goens to Batavia, November 1659, folio 141.
“Van verscheijde misdaeden ende eerst van hoererije ende overspel,” in NIP Vol I, 586.
Van der Heijden, Women and Crime, 7.
This was not limited to Europeans: the Chinese-Javanese woman Lim Tjinio, whose husband Pouw Tieko was frequently away from their home in Semarang, traded in ginger opium without her husband’s involvement, which only became a problem when Pouw died, and she needed to prove that the property she had amassed was rightfully hers. ANRI Notarissen inv.no. 6390, #1691.
NL-HaNA, WIC, 1.05.01.02, inv.no. 583, Documents regarding the prosecution of Mordechaij Parera, 1737, folio 169–217.
Cornelis Coster’s salary had been 40 rixdollars a month, but it is likely his real income was higher than that, as his position would have enabled him to engage in profitable private trade. NL-HaNA VOC 1.04.02 inv.no. 5253, civil servants registry, folio 5.
NL-HaNA VOC 1.04.02 inv.no. 9323, Sentencing of Margaretha Lijphart, 11 June 1761, scan 97.
Taylor, The Social World of Batavia, 59; Singh, Fort Cochin in Kerala, 111.
Van der Heijden, Huwelijk in Holland, 259.
NL-HaNA VOC 1.04.02 inv.no. 9375, Criminal case files Anna Maria Keppelaer, 1 February 1736, scan 349- 413; In the end, they were sentenced to a lashing on the buttocks, after which they were returned to their master’s home, who was obliged to send them away from Batavia within six months. NL-HaNA VOC 1.04.02 inv.no. 9300, 11 February 1736, scan 224.
NL-HaNA VOC 1.04.02 inv.no. 9318, 17 September 1755, scan 20–23.
NL-HaNA VOC 1.04.02 inv.no. 9318, 22 December 1755, scan 140.
Aviva Ben-Ur and Jessica V. Roitman, “Adultery Here and There: Crossing Sexual Boundaries in the Dutch Jewish Atlantic,” in Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680–1800, ed. Gert Oostindie and Jessica V. Roitman (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 183–223.
NL-HaNA VOC 1.04.02 inv.no. 8041, Banda Council minutes 7 January 1690, folio157, scan 998.
NIP vol. I, 20 July 1622, 99–101.
NIP vol. I, Statuten van Batavia, 5 July 1642, 586–587.
An example is the Christian Malay women Jerisina in Malacca, who was prosecuted for ‘carnal converation’ with a Chinese man. British Library: India Office Records and Private Papers, Judicial Minutes, IOR/R/9/16/2: ‘Minutes of the Council of Justice Malacca,” August 7–20, 1748. See also Sophie Rose and Elisabeth Heijmans, “From Impropriety to Betrayal: Policing Non-Marital Sex in the Early Modern Dutch Empire,” Journal of Social History 55, no. 2 (2021): 315–44.
Rose and Heijmans, 325.
‘daar de Compagnie voorheeft de colonie selfs met inlantse vrouwen alhier te stichten, die sonder uijtroeing van dat grauwelijck en onverdraeghelijck overspel noijt en sal connen berijcken haer ooghmerck noch oock tot een honorable voortteelinghe onser eygen natie geraacken, sonder dat alvorens den houwelijcken staet van dat boos vergift gesuyvert ende die grouwelijcke onkuysheyt andere ten exempel eenmael rigoreuselijck uijtgeroeyt sal wesen,’ CP-I, Ordinance #39, 19 November 1658.
‘Dat wanneer een inlandtse mesticie of swarte vrouw die met een Hollander getrouwt is, haar comt in onecht te vergrijpen ende alsoo de waardicheyt hares houwlijx en’t respect der natie door overspel ende onkuysheyt te verbreecken, sich vleeslijk met een inlander, slaaft ofte enich ander swart ende hares gelijcke, dat deselve vrouwe met den overspeelder sonder eenige simulatie noch conniventie wel seeckeijk metter doot sal gestraft werden.’ CP-I, Ordinance #51, 14 November 1659. See also Rose and Heijmans, “From Impropriety to Betrayal,” 329.
NL-HaNA VOC 1.04.02 inv.no. 9375 CrimPr 1736, scan 349–413.
NL-HaNA VOC 1.04.02 inv.no. 9300, Sentencing 11 February 1736, scan 224.
ANRI, Makasar, inv.no. 321.2, Criminal case files 1780.
NL-HaNA VOC 1.04.02 inv.no. 9318, Sentencing of De Britto lagos and De Remedio, 15 May 1756, scan 293; Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen, Realia: register op de generale resolutiën van het Kasteel Batavia, 1632–1805 (Gualth. Kolff, 1882), Vol I, 127.
For the details of this case, see Hilde Neus, “Seksualiteit in Suriname: Tegenverhalen over liefde en ‘vleselijke conversatie’ in een koloniale samenleving,” De Achttiende Eeuw 53, no. 1 (January 1, 2021): 176–77; Rose and Heijmans, “From Impropriety to Betrayal,” 331–32.
WIP-S vol 1, #277.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 82, Council Minutes 5 December 1741, folio 274; Ordinance 6 December 1741, folio 412.
NL-HaNA, SvB, 1.05.05, inv.no. 80, letter from Predikant Frauendorff, 10 May 1741, scan 86.
NL-HaNA, SvS, 1.05.03 inv.no. 258, scan 260–269.
Ibid., inv.no. 132, Minutes 26 April 1731, scan 654.
‘Het is ock bekommerlijk […] die Huwelijke sonder bepaalinge in te willige. Zou aan blanke, wedlustige Vrouwen ook niet in’t zin Kunnen koomen, om Neegers Vry te maaken, en daarmeede te trouwen? Zouden sij ook niet met vrije neegers trouwen willen? God Sij gedankt, Wij sien in onse tijde de Infamie van die Vermenginge niet, als in voorige tijd, wanneer onder den Gouverneur Johan de Goijer, men genoodsaakt was, op Straafe van Gezeling en Bande, blanke Vrouwen die verfoelijke Verminginge te verbieden, zo sij ongehuwt waeren, en zo gehouwde Vrouwen sig dus vergaten deselve soude daar en boven gebrandmerkt worden en de dood straafe tegen de Negers te statueeren,’ Ibid., inv.no. 321, 2 February 1764, scan 334.
Judging from the Scottish soldier John Stedman’s account, the legal and social norms in late-eighteenth century Suriname were still largely the same as they had been in 1711: “[…] should it be known that an European female had an intercourse with a slave of any denomination, she is for ever detested, and the slave loses his life without mercy – Such are the despotic laws of men in Dutch Guiana over the weaker sex.” John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam in Guiana, on the Wild Coast of South America, from the Year 1772 to 1777 (London: J. Johnson & J. Edwards, 1796), 297.