Hendrick Indijck: The first Dutchman in Angkor Wat

The Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or the VOC…. As a writer bitten by the history bug, I can never get enough of it.

It was once the largest multinational in the world. A purely profit-oriented company that did not shy away from any means to achieve its goals, but at the same time, as the historian Jan Kuipers noted, produced culture, stimulated voyages of discovery and nautical inventions, and profoundly influenced life in its trading areas and the Republic of the United Netherlands.

A curious mix of mercantilism-hungry merchants, cunning regents, mad adventurers, enterprising seafarers and ruthless soldiers played a key role for almost two hundred years in a huge area that could be situated between the Cape of Good Hope and Japan. In that period, from 1602 to 1795, the Company sent a ship to Asia a total of 4.721 times. A logistics operation that still appeals to the imagination today, involving 972.000 people. Of this huge number, only a third ever returned to their homeland….

One of the men who risked their lives for the VOC was Hendrick Indijck. It is not clear when exactly he was born, but it is true: according to most historians, this happened around 1615 in Alkmaar. Indijck was a literate and adventurous man. After all, before he entered the service of the VOC, this magister in the notarial profession had first worked for a few years as a clerk for the West India Company in Recife in Penambuco, Brazil, shortly after this region had been conquered by the Republic from the Portuguese. However, the indigenous revolt that broke out in 1645 under the leadership of Joao Fernandes Veira shook Dutch authority and after the defeat of the Dutch troops in the Battle of Tabocas (August 3, 1645), Indijck, like many other compatriots, took his rushes and he returned to the Republic.

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Apparently he had not yet lost his lust for exotic adventures and on July 12, 1650 he came aboard the Enkhuizen in Batavia as the brand new candidate junior merchant of the VOC. Almost immediately he was allowed to travel on to Ayutthaya because mismanagement had caused the VOC factory in the Siamese capital to get into very difficult papers. Together with the future governor-general Rijcklof van Goens, known for his thoroughness, he arrived in Ayutthaya on November 9 of that same year to put things in order. Together with van Goens, Indyck put an end to the corruption and the skulduggery, put an end to smuggling by the Chinese and restored the trade monopoly with the Japanese. He stayed on the banks of the Chao Phraya for five years. Not entirely against his will, as it turned out, because when his mandate expired, he indicated that he would be happy to stay longer, provided he was promoted to merchant.

When it turned out that people in Batavia were not immediately willing to accede to this request, he took the plunge and sailed to Batavia himself to defend his case. It soon became clear that he would have to wait a while for his promotion. Instead, on May 23, 1656, he was charged with an important mission to Cambodia. After VOC personnel had been massacred earlier, he had to make peace with the Cambodians and reopen the declining trading post. Despite the fever of which he and most of his men fell victim, Indyck managed to arrange the VOC affairs again in a relatively very short period of time. At the same time, he took the opportunity to thoroughly explore the region. Thus, after ten days' journey, part of which in a proa across the immense Tonle Sap Lake, he ended up as one of the first Western visitors in the ruins of Angkor Wat.

From 1617 the directors of the VOC had decided that journals had to be kept of all journeys made. After returning home, these had to be handed in to the VOC, which had an exclusive right to publish this often crucial strategic information. His report on Angkor was the first ever written in Dutch… When Hendrick Indijck returns to Batavia at the end of the same year, he receives his much-coveted appointment as a full-fledged merchant, albeit not in the Indies but back in Cambodia. In the Cambodian capital of Lovek, he took over the Logie, which had been abandoned by the English, and tried to reactivate the largely dead trade from Lovek to the Japanese Shogunate. An important step in the right direction was the conclusion of an agreement under which the VOC 'the exclusive trade in deerskins and other commodities for Japan acquired. In all probability, Maria Quikelenburg, his legal wife, had remained in Batavia because it is certain that he lived in Cambodia with a Khmer woman who bore him two children, Gerrit and Adriaentje. He took these children with him when he became chief merchant in October 1660 at the important VOC post in Deshima, Japan. A lucrative mandate that he fulfilled for almost three years, alternating with business trips to Ayutthaya and Batavia.

On April 2, 1664, he was present in Batavia at the baptism of his daughter Anna from his marriage to Maria Quikelenburg. On April 28, this Alkmaar globetrotter was charged for a third time with a mission to Japan, but Pietje de Dood put a stop to that. Hendrik Indijck, in his life chief merchant at the service of the Patented East India Company died on May 4, 664 in Batavia, probably from malaria. He was buried a day later in the Hollandsch Kerkhof.