Johan Nieuhof’s (1618-1672) promising career as a merchant with the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was upended in 1665 when he was accused of mismanaging the Company’s pearl fishery in Tuticorin (Thoothukudi, India). Arrested and tried in Colombo, he was convicted and moved to Batavia (Jakarta, Indonesia) in 1667, where he spent three years appealing his conviction to the VOC’s directors in Amsterdam. While in the Dutch colonial capital in the East, he was stripped of all Company duties, which allowed him to dedicate himself to taking a full view of the city. Alongside his depiction of the Company’s artisans’ lodgings, Nieuhof wrote that he conceived of the “description of the entire city of Batavia and what he drew of it” while residing there. These notes and sketches formed the basis of his posthumously published travelogue Zee en Lantreize, door verscheide Gewesten van Oostindie (“Sea and Land Voyage, through various Regions of the East Indies,” wed. Jacob van Meurs, Amsterdam, 1682), which provided a firsthand account of the city replete with engraved cityscapes and pseudo-ethnographic portraits of its diverse inhabitants. My dissertation examines how the printed images in Nieuhof’s travelogue conceived of ways to relate to Batavia’s built environment and to order the peoples who inhabited it. I contend that the visual strategies it developed served to exaggerate colonial control over the region at a time when, elsewhere in their global empire, the Dutch faced significant territorial losses.
Under the auspices of the 2025-2026 Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Graduate Research Fellowship, I was able to spend a generative month at the Clark, where I studied early modern travelogues such as Jan Struys’s Drie aanmerkelijke en seer rampspoedige reysen (1676); a first edition of William Dampier’s A new voyage round the world (1698); as well as John Ogilby’s editions of Arnoldus Montanus’s An Embassy from the East-India company of the United Provinces to the Grand Tartar Cham (1669) and Atlas Japannensis (1670). I also examined the 1700 German accounts of Christopher Fryke and Christopher Schewitzer, which contain rich written descriptions of Batavia. Thank you to Ken Karmiole for your generous support of my research. This fellowship has helped me further my understanding of how Europeans were already conceiving of Batavia as a Dutch city in the seventeenth century.
To learn more, join the upcoming lecture , Johan Nieuhof’s Batavia presented via Zoom on April 24, 2026.
-Emma Gagnon, Kenneth Karmiole Graduate Fellow 2025-2026, PhD Candidate, University of California, Santa Barbara