A Brill Calendar: October 22

Laurens Reael: An Amiable Exception

Few mercantile Dutch endeavours have put so indelible a stamp on the nation than the remarkably wide range of efforts needed to acquire - at a substantial profit - Asiatic spices.

Post-medieval explorations of the planet, interest in navigation, geography, map-making, mathematics, unknown foreign languages, customs and products were primarily driven by the insatiable and massive need for pepper, cinnamon and nutmeg.

Political correctness at the beginning of a new millennium likes to depict the cruelty of Dutch exploiters like Jan Pieterszoon Coen as merciless men, guilty of mass-murder when it suited their lust for power and money; and it cannot be denied that the Portuguese, (Holland’s main competitors in South-east Asia), and subsequently the Dutch, conducted themselves in ways considered excessive and criminal today.

And indeed it is seldom in those early days of colonial exploitation that one meets with a top-ranking official of the nascent VOC - the Dutch United East-India Company - like Laurens Reael, born on October 22, 1583 in Amsterdam and dying there just one day before he would have reached the sturdy age of 54 years.

As an early Governor-General of East-India, he asked to be relieved from his lofty position, since he couldn’t condone anymore the policy, strategy and tactics ‘vis-à-vis’ the native tribes the VOC had to contend with in their acquisition of valuable goods and commodities. Laurens Reael, son of an affluent merchant father with the same Christian name, and a man who had studied law at Leyden University (also in its first decades of existence) was indeed an amiable exception to an increasingly relentless rule.