Dutch East India Company

Boric acid was first prepared in 1702 by Willem Homberg. He was bom on January 8, 1652, at Batavia on the island of Java. When his father left the service of the Dutch East India Company, the family settled in Amsterdam, where young Wilhelm (or Willem) had a much better opportunity to study than in the torrid climate of the East Indies. After studying law at Jena and Leipzig, he was admitted to the bar in Magdeburg in 1674. Soon becoming more interested in the laws of nature than in those devised by man, he began to devote much time to botany, astronomy, and mechanics. 

The Dutch East India Company (VCO) ruthlessly and efficiently operated a monopoly. For example, in 1735, the VCO burned half a million kg of nutmeg in Amsterdam in an attempt to raise prices. In Indonesia, the Dutch would torch plantations if new growers tried to enter the market or if established growers tried to smuggle their products to non-Dutch traders. 

A large documentation on scurvy has been accumulated during the centuries. Some relevant reports, which contain kinetic information on the development of ascorbate deficiency, will be reviewed briefly. The first well-known, detailed, and comprehensive report on this disease, Treatise on Scurvy, was published in 1757 by the Scottish naval physician James Lind (2). Some case reports are cited here. Thus, during the journey of H.M.S. Salisbury from August 10 to October 28, 1746 (i.e., 75 d), only one sailor was reported ill with the disease. In a report of four ships bound for the East Indies, 105 out of 424 sailors were reported dead from scurvy within 4 months. Other fragmentary notes are oflBcial reports by the Danish and Dutch East India Companies of regular outbreaks of the disease after 5-6 months at sea. This was in the seventeenth century. 

The Dutch were the first to challenge Portugal s domination of the East. Late in the sixteenth century, the Dutch East India Company established its overseas headquarters at Batavia on the island of Java. From this outpost, it quickly took control of the spice trade and deliberately destroyed plant life in the East Indies to dry up supply sources. The effect of an increasing demand for sugar, cinnamon, and other spices, and a market deliberately crippled through manipulation of raw materials, was a skyrocketing increase in prices. The wealthier the Dutch became, the harder they tried to keep other nations from securing a foothold of their own in the rich spice lands of the East. 

However, it was not until 1712, when Engelbert Kaempfer, who lived in Japan from 1690 to 1692 as a medical officer of the Dutch East India Company, published his book Amoenitatum Exoticarum that the Western world fully understood the connection between the cultivation of soybeans and its utilization as a food plant. Kaempfer s drawing of the soybean is accurate, and his detailed description of how to make soy sauce is cotrect. 

For five years (1672-1677) Paul Hermann, an employee of the Dutch East India Company, collected plants on Ceylon (Sri Lanka). When he returned home, he became Professor of Medicine and Botany at Leiden. His Musaeum Zelanicum, published in 1717, contains the earliest documentation seen for soybean in Sri Lanka. 

The first record by a European of soybeans in Indonesia is by George Everhard Rumphius (1628-1702), an employee of the Dutch East India Company (Merrill, 1917). His book. Herbarium Amboinense, published in 1747, 45 years after his death, was based on observations made by him between 1653 and 1670. Rumphius noted that the soybean was used both for food (tofu) and as a green manure. 

Boxer, C.R. Jan compagnie in war and peace, 1602-1799 A Short History of the Dutch East India Company, Asia Studies Series Heinemann Asia Hong Kong, 1979. 

Wills, J.E. Jr. Pepper, Guns, and Parleys. The Dutch East India Company and China, 1622—1681. Harvard University Press Cambridge, MA, 1974,... 

Willem Homberg was born on the island of Java, where his father worked for the Dutch East India Company. Back in Amsterdam, Willem had the possibility of studying in different European seats of learning. In Wiirtenberg he became a doctor of medicine. He worked with Robert Boyle in England, and went to see mines in Germany and Sweden. At the end of his life, he lived in Paris and died there in 1715. 

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