Pieter Phoonsen of Surat, c. 1730–1740

Abstract

Pieter Laurens Phoonsen, son of Bernard Phoonsen, a distinguished servant of the Dutch East India Company, was born at Gale in Ceylon in 1691 and probably never saw the Netherlands in his life. He was enrolled as a common sailor on a ship of the Dutch Company at Batavia in the year 1707. The peak of his career in the service of the Company was reached when he succeeded Herman Bruinink as the directeur of the Dutch council at Surat late in the year 1728. The papers produced at the Dutch lodge at Surat throughout the 1730s show Phoonsen as an efficient servant of the Company, an upright man keen to uphold the honour of the white race in an alien environment and, on the whole, aloof from the fearful complications of these years in the city of Surat. Phoonsen's colleagues in the council at Surat carefully emulated their chief and the official papers give no ground to suspect that the Indian world enmeshed in any way with life as it went on behind the walls at the Dutch lodge or that the Company, whatever the directors might say, had any well-founded reason for complaint. True, such upright men were not universally admired even at the time. Apart from the distant suspicion of Amsterdam, there was scepticism closer at hand. Writing an ordinary business letter in the early 1730s, Henry Lowther, the chief of the English factory at Surat, noted: ‘The Dutch have sold their cargo, that is the Chief and Council have bought it underhand but at what price no one knows.’ The prolix correspondence from the Dutch lodge at Surat was not, however, tainted with such meanness.