Crying a muck: Collecting, domesticity, and anomie in seventeenth-century Banten and England

According to Bernard Bailyn, we owe our concept of the Atlantic world to an article by Walter Lippmann in the New Republic from February 1917, encouraging the United States to enter the Great War and defend the integrity of this early modern construction. Compared with that piece, "Some Jacobean Links Between America and the Orient" by Boise Penrose, appearing in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography in October 1940 and January 1941, seems quite obscure, albeit also in its own way prescient. Penrose contended that "of the leading figures in the early history of the East India Company and of the Virginia colony, a very large number took part in the activities of both enterprises; which fact indicates that neither venture was wholly bulkheaded off from the other, nor from the general life and thought of the time, but rather that Virginia and the Indies were closely related."1 Penrose described people like Christopher Newport and Sir Thomas Dale-veterans of Elizabethan wars with Spain and in Ireland and founding figures in the Virginia enterprise who subsequently died in Banten and Masulipatam, respectively. Much recent early modern scholarship follows the lead of Penrose, writing biographies of "global" rather than "Atlantic" lives. The best of this work still shows not "bulkheads" but increasing contrasts between Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and West Pacific economies by the eighteenth century, in part because of slavery and the mass migrations associated with plantation economies.2 But if this second Atlantic world drew much of its energy from English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese plantations, its predecessor in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focused more on the collecting and exchange of silver demanded by Ming China and other Asian commodity producers.3 In this earlier "world," practices of collecting not only illuminate its uncertain limits, but they also provide a sense of where and how concepts of both collecting and Atlantic exchange break down-in the case of the "Muck" described above on the Banten Road on the northwestern coast of Java. The story in question appeared in print in London on July 18, 1642, the first story and image of "a Muck" or an amuk in Java. A group of English sailors on the ship Coster in the harbor of Banten failed to recognize the value and collectability of a Javanese keris or ceremonial knife offered in exchange for a silver Spanish real. The Bantenese trader of foodstuffs, whose offer of a more complex exchange than simple supplies had been refused by the sailors, took the keris he had tried to sell along with one other, which had not been offered for purchase, and killed eight men before himself dying at the hands of a vigilante mob of sailors from a second ship, the Royal Mary (Figure 6.1). While hardly at the level of the Protestant and Catholic massacres going on in Ireland at the same time, events making news pamphlets like this common in early 1640s London, this pamphlet did similarly advertise the murders as a religious story in which justice and order suppressed darkness, disorder, and death.4 Coping with a remarkable number of overlapping languages and practices, the pamphlet claims on the title page to take place at two very precise points in space and moments in time relative to each other-the Banten Road on October 22, 1641, and the bookseller's shop of Thomas Banks along London's western wall on July 18, 1642.5 Banks pioneered the newssheet-his Diurnall occurrances in Parliament (1641-42) and the "revived" Mercurius Britanicus (1648) published at the front and tail ends of the Parliamentary attempt to seize the process of newsmaking were among the earliest examples of the genre. The pamphlet is precisely a technique developed in relation to collecting gone "muck," an effort on the eve of civil war to assert the possibility of a coherent cosmology and language in the face of threats by "Pagans, Heathens and Infidels" to the coherence of the body of an "undeserving Nation" like England. The image freezes the moment of death in an emblematic collection of dead and dying bodies along with two sets of the same "Crests (or dangerous waving Daggers)," one in action and a second collected and laid out as evidence in the upper left corner.6 The keris on the cover would have been familiar to many Londoners. Almost immediately, Edmund Scott, along with other members of the first English factory including a mulatto servant, acquired keris that they wore around Banten. Others brought them home as souvenirs. Four keris could be seen on display at John Tradescant's museum in Lambeth in the 1640s, while the pangéran of Banten regularly sent them to Charles I as gifts.7 In this woodcut, they become souvenirs or a memento mori of the recollection or remembrance of sacrifice (Luke 22:19), alluding to both Protestant martyrs in Catholic murder pamphlets as well as the emblematic language of the arma christi.8 Plato conceptualized such recollection under the term αναμνήσις (anamnesis) as the recovery of lost knowledge (Meno 86b) and the cathartic purge of the distractions of the body that allowed for such knowledge to be reclaimed (Phaedo 65b-67b). Yet, it is not at all clear that this kind of "proper" collecting occurred. Exchange had broken down dramatically, while the title's claim that the amuk had been "justly requited" was not borne out by the story of "a strange sort of justice" in the pamphlet itself. Was collecting in Java really a problem for Londoners with their guns and shiploads of Spanish silver? Although objects from Java began to arrive in England with Francis Drake in 1579 and Walter Cope had a set of Javanese clothes in his collection of "strange objects" in 1599, remarkably few appear in seventeenth-century collections. By contrast, when the British temporarily ruled Java from 1811 to 1815, vast amounts of both texts and objects poured into British archives.9 One explanation of the absence of seventeenth-century collections of Javanese objects, the internal one, has to do with early seventeenth-century Europe itself where, in the words of Paula Findlen, "the structures through which collectors viewed their world turned in on themselves, dissolving the patterns that they have created." Under this interpretation, the Algonquian canoe, the Spanish holy relics, the Javanese clothes, the Chinese lacquerware box, and other items Cope or later the Tradescants collected became obsolete as their aura of curiosity faded. The internal thesis comes in two versions-an older approach about the advance of European subjectivities, knowledge practices, and self-interest (the Cartesian/Gallilean "revolution" of the 1630s) and a newer one, also European, describing discursive shifts concerning the nature of "order," "truth," "evidence," and "certainty."10 An alternative approach would be to consider collecting as a much more diverse phenomenon not only within Europe but also globally. Recognizing this also requires a historical acknowledgment of collecting as more often than not a transcultural practice tied into complex questions about global exchange in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.11 Collecting became a problem in the early seventeenth century in relation to global processes, which C. A. Bayly has neatly summarized as the "Great Domestication." This involved, as John Richards explains, both an "unprecedented intensity" of expansion of exchange relations and the simultaneous development of highly "efficient state and private organizations," or to borrow a phrase, collection agencies.12 Differing languages and valuations of collections (state and private) related directly to practices of collecting on maritime and territorial frontiers that were simultaneously expanding and devolving or fragmenting. Historians trying to grapple with this complex process have resorted to sociological types-emphasizing either the "feudal" aspects of Banten in this period and its failure to develop as a modern state or its "cosmopolitan" character as a precursor to the global cities of later eras.13 This ignores the particularly dynamic role of Java and Sumatra in linking up and redefining global processes of domestication in the early seventeenth century. The Straits of Sunda, which open onto the Indian Ocean between the two islands, enabled sixteenth-century Banten, which controlled them, to compete with Portuguese Malacca and to become the major center of English trade with eastern Asia for almost the entire seventeenth century (1602-82, with the exception of 1619-28). The large overseas Chinese community made Banten a key node in the "silver cycle" for the transfer of Spanish silver onto Chinese ships after England had made peace with Spain in 1604. Especially in Banten, gaps and failures in the process of exchange, translation, and collecting emerged because of the intensification of such processes across linguistic and political lines during the early seventeenth century. New practices and languages of domestication and domesticity developed to resolve those issues but often only partially. That "running amuck," or "crying a muck" as the 1642 pamphlet and later poets phrased it, entered into common English usage in the early seventeenth century should not be merely regarded as an old exotic curiosity or Orientalist slur.