© DVN, een project van Huygens ING en OGC (UU). Bronvermelding: Michiel van Groesen, en, in: Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland. URL: https://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/vrouwenlexicon/lemmata/en [13/01/2014]
SPECX, Sara (born Hirado?, Japan, 1616/17 – died Formosa, c. 1636), central figure in a scandal in Batavia. Daughter of Jacques Specx (born c. 1585), head of the VOC trading post in Hirado and later governor-general in Batavia, and a Japanese woman. Sara Specx married Georg Candidus (1597-1647), German clergyman of the VOC in the Moluccas and Formosa, in May 1632 in Batavia. This marriage was probably childless.
Sara (Saartje) Specx was the illegitimate daughter of Jacques Specx and a Japanese woman. She was conceived when her father was staying in Japan as a senior merchant of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). This was seen as a serious indiscretion, for company policy aimed to prevent the ‘bastardisation’ of the Dutch population in Asia. The progeny of such undesirable relationships between company servants and native women were therefore sent to Batavia to be brought up under the supervision of the VOC. When Sara’s father returned temporarily to the Netherlands in 1628, she was given into the care of Governor-General Jan Pietersz Coen and his wife Eva Ment.
While staying with the Coens, Sara became the central figure of a scandal in June 1629. Pieter Kortenhoef, an illegitimate sixteen-year-old who served the VOC in Batavia as an ensign, gained access – by virtue of his position – to the living quarters of the ‘state daughters’, as the foster daughters in the Coen family were called. Here, ‘on two different occasions’, he ‘had his way’ with Sara, who had been informed of his coming and had spread a mat out on the floor in expectation of his visit. Coen, who was known for his strict discipline, was furious. Their love-making cost the two teenagers dearly: Pieter was condemned to death by beheading, a sentence that was carried out the following day. At first Sara was condemned to death by drowning in a barrel, but because she was not yet fourteen, the minimum age for the death penalty, her sentence was commuted to flogging in the town hall. The punishment was inflicted ‘with open doors’, so that Sara could serve as a deterrent to others.
Legal aftermath
To be sure, the practical consequences of the incident had been dealt with, but its legal aftermath dragged on for some time. Coen died in Batavia, but his successor, none other than Jacques Specx, kept the question on the agenda: as acting governor-general, Specx tried to take revenge on those he held responsible for the public humiliation of his daughter. The judges were unassailable, but the prosecutor Anthony van den Heuvel was called to account. Thanks to the court records generated by this case, we are very well informed about the ‘the Specx affair’. Pieter Kortenhoef was beheaded for committing treason by forcing his way into Coen’s house. He had proposed marriage to Sara, which would normally be reason enough to drop the charges against the couple, but because their crime was considered a ‘crimen maiestatis’, this extenuating circumstance had not been taken into account.
Sara may have escaped the executioner, but her father took the case very seriously indeed, and he was supported by the Amsterdam merchant Boudewijn Kortenhoef, Pieter’s uncle, who told him the affair had caused much sorrow in the Dutch Republic as well. Jacob Cats even referred to the incident in his Aenmerckinge over onteerde dochters (Comments on dishonoured daughters) of 1637. Moreover, it was rumoured in the Republic that Jacques Specx had disowned his daughter, but this was not true. In fact, Specx was so angry at the members of the Council of Justice in Batavia that he refused, when attending church services, to celebrate The Lord’s Supper with them. Specx’s attitude was probably a reason for the Heeren XVII not to appoint him as Coen’s permanent successor. In 1632 he was recalled to the Netherlands. At the age of sixteen or seventeen, Sara married the German VOC clergyman Georg Candidus. In Formosa, where she lived from May 1633 onwards, she led a life of luxury thanks to a legacy from her father. She most likely died around 1636, after which Candidus returned to Europe.
Historiography and image
Various scholars have studied the case of Sara Specx, particularly in connection with the reputation of Jan Pietersz Coen. In the nineteenth century, Conrad Busken Huet saw Sara’s punishment as confirmation of Coen’s reputation as a brute, and put the incident on a par with the bloodbath the governor-general had caused in 1621 on the Banda islands. This interpretation was adopted by others, including Charles Boxer in The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600-1800 (1967). In 1944, in an attempt to rehabilitate Coen, the Utrecht historian Frederik Carel Gerretson re-examined the testimony of the prosecutor Van den Heuvel. He argued that Coen could do no other than punish Sara and Pieter. Coen had merely followed VOC regulations to the letter, and could not be blamed for the outcome: Pieter’s conviction and subsequent execution. Gerretson also underlined the fact that Coen had pre-empted criticism that he was sparing his foster daughter by making Sara’s flogging a public event, instead of punishing her behind closed doors.
This drama of morals was romanticised several times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1845 the Indonesian writer/journalist W. L. Ritter provided the historical facts with fictitious dialogues between the main characters in his volume Nieuwe Indische verhalen en herinneringen uit vroegeren en lateren tijden (New Indonesian stories and recollections from earlier and later times). Slauerhoff dramatised the affair in the play Jan Pietersz. Coen (1930), in which he stripped the governor-general of his hero status and portrayed him as extremely violent. The performance of this play was forbidden both before and after the Second World War in a number of cities in the Netherlands, including Amsterdam and Utrecht.
Archives
For relevant archival sources, see the source editions listed below and Gerretson (1944).
Bibliography
- F. Valentijn, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën 4-5(Dordrecht/Amsterdam 1726) 285-86, 289-92.
- W.L. Ritter, Nieuwe Indische verhalen en herinneringen uit vroegeren en lateren tijden 1 (Batavia 1845) 3-51.
- V.I. van de Wall, Vrouwen uit den Compagnie’s tijd (Amersfoort 1923) 49-60.
- Jan Pietersz. Coen: bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië, H.T. Colenbrander ed., 5 (The Hague 1933) 751.
- C. Gerretson, Coens eerherstel (Amsterdam 1944) 58-98.
- Generale missiven van gouverneurs-generaal en raden aan Heren XVII der Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, W.Ph. Coolhaas et al. ed., 1 (The Hague 1960) 465 [Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën 104].
- W.Ph. Coolhaas, Het huis ‘De dubbele Arend’: het huis Keizersgracht 141, thans ‘Van Riebeeckhuis’ genaamd, nu daar een halve eeuw gearbeid is voor de culturele en economische betrekkingen met Zuid-Afrika (1973).
- J. Slauerhoff, Jan Pietersz. Coen. Drama in elf taferelen (4th ed.; Amsterdam 1986 [first ed.: 1932]) [with an introduction by Ronald Brouwer].
- L. P. van Putten, Gouverneurs-generaal van Nederlands-Indië 1 (Rotterdam 2002) 54-59.
Author: Michiel van Groesen
last updated: 13/01/2014