The well-known portraits of Jan and Maria van Riebeeck are in fact not the Van Riebeecks at all, but the Vermuyden-Kettinghs. This authentic painting of Van Riebeeck is from De Stichter by E.C. Godée
By 1600 several small states in the Indonesian Archipelago were geared towards foreign trade with merchants from China, India and other Asian countries, and also from Europe. To capture this trade, Dutch merchants in 1602 established the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) in Amsterdam as a chartered company. Two years earlier the English East India Company had been founded in London.
When the journal The Economist published a ‘Millennium Edition’ 400 years later, it observed that in their impact on the world, both good and bad, perhaps only the companies of Henry Ford and Bill Gates matched the two East India Companies. The VOC could be called the world’s first multinational corporation. During the first decade of the Cape station (1652–1662), 205 ships with 40 200 people on board sailed to the East, while 103 ships with some 13 000 people returned to the Netherlands.
The face on the previous South African note, too, was not Van Riebeeck’s but Vermuyden’s
The VOC established itself by following more or less in the footsteps of the Portuguese but aiming to eliminate them as rivals. Although the VOC proclaimed free trade, it practised a monopoly wherever it could. It evicted most of its European rivals from the East, compelling local rulers to grant it exclusive trading rights. Soon it had seized Bantam, the Moluccas, Java and Amboyna. In 1619 it introduced a regular government under a governor general, presiding over a Council of India, in Jakarta, which it renamed Batavia. The city became the capital of the VOC’s Eastern empire. The Company, a sovereign power in its own right according to its 1602 charter, could recruit soldiers, wage war, enter into treaties with other powers and maintain order in the settlements it had founded. Dutchmen in its employ swore fealty both to the Company and the States General in the Netherlands. All Europeans in its settlements were subject both to the laws of the Netherlands and to the regulations framed by the Company.
The VOC paid most of the officials in its empire a measly salary. To compensate for their low pay, many of its staff stole from their employer, embezzling or trading for their own account. Jan van Riebeeck, the man the VOC chose to oversee the establishment of the Cape station, had earlier been fined for private trading and recalled from a post in Japan.
VOC information
