WA Maritime Museum showcases relics of European contact

There’s a good reason why the Traders & Travellers exhibition should be on show at the WA Maritime Museum.

East Indian Market Stall by Albert Eckhout (1640-66) (detail).

In recent decades we have become rather uncomfortable with the idea of heroic ­European explorers discovering new lands and new people. After all, these places existed even before we supposedly found them. They did not suddenly become real or relevant because we encountered them, inscribed them on maps and wrote about them.

But, on the other hand, there is some justification for the narrative of discovery, for it was the Europeans who, just as they invented modern science, first had the curiosity, the boldness, even the drive for financial gain — for it wasn’t all pure and disinterested thirst for knowledge — to take the immense risks of sailing beyond the seas they knew, venturing into uncharted oceans and exposing themselves to encounters with foreign people who were as likely to kill them as to trade with them.

There is a spine-tingling passage in Dante where the shade of Odysseus, in the Inferno, explains why he undertook a final voyage out into the Atlantic — spine-tingling because this voyage so uncannily anticipates that of Christopher Columbus almost two centuries later and because of Odysseus’s explanation of his motivation: per divenir del mondo esperto (“to acquire experience of the world”). Dante has captured the restless curiosity of the Homeric Odysseus and prefigured that of the Renaissance.

This was the spirit that set Europe on the path to creating, and for a time dominating, the modern world. The other great civilisations, such as the Chinese at the same period, ­supremely sophisticated as they were, remained content to believe they were the centre of the universe and felt no need to reach beyond what they already understood. Others closed themselves deliberately to the new, such as the Muslims who banned printing and the Japanese who tried to quarantine their nation from foreign influence.

It was the Portuguese and the Spanish — though Columbus was Genoese, and possibly born in the Genoese city of Calvi in Corsica — who showed the way, starting with the great voyage of Columbus himself (1492), and then by those of Vasco da Gama (1497-98) and Ferdinand Magellan (1519-22).

They were followed later in the 16th century by Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe (1577-80), prefiguring the future naval ­supremacy of the British from the 18th century onwards.

The Dutch, however, dominated seafaring in the 17th century. They were extremely able and experienced sailors, pioneers in developing the financial structures, such as joint stock companies and insurance, that could underpin large-scale and sustainable trading ventures, and ruthless in their pursuit of profit. They virtually monopolised the immensely lucrative spice trade, taking possession of the Spice Islands to guarantee their control of the market, and establishing themselves as the leading maritime traders from the Chinese coast to Europe.

Crossing the Indian Ocean to reach their possessions in what is now Indonesia, the Dutch ventured to higher latitudes, seeking more favourable winds, and became the first Europeans to set foot on the coast of Western Australia.

It is thus fitting that Travellers and Traders of the Indian Ocean World, which includes important loans from the British Museum and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, should take place at the WA Maritime Museum in Fremantle, and the museum deliberately has structured the exhibition to begin with the point of connection that will be familiar to its audience.

The show opens, in fact, with the first token of European presence in Australia: a pewter plate — for tin does not rust — hammered flat, inscribed and nailed to a tree near the Tropic of Capricorn by Dirk Hartog in 1616. Many years later, coincidentally, another Dutch mariner, Willem de Vlamingh, landed at the same spot, replaced Hartog’s pewter plate with a second one and took the original back to Amsterdam; still later, in 1818 Louis de Freycinet, who had found the second plate in 1801, removed it to Paris. Today the second plate belongs to the Fremantle Museum and the first has been lent by the Rijksmuseum.

Clothing clasps from the wreck of the Batavia.

Not long after the first arrival of the Dutch, the bizarre and horrible story of the Batavia unfolded off the West Australian coast. This notorious mutiny led to murder, a reign of terror by a delusional criminal, and finally the capture and execution of the mutineers.

The wreck of the Batavia has been recovered and part of its hull is exhibited in the museum’s permanent display. But the present exhibition also includes some fascinating finds from the still current excavations of the burials of those who died in this episode, both the murdered victims and the executed mutineers; among other items are nails that are probably all that remain of the gibbets where the criminals were strung up and left hanging by the ocean for their ­corpses to be picked over by the seabirds.

Nearby are remains from the cargo the ship was carrying, which include a set of engraved silver vessels intended as a gift for the Mughal emperor Jahangir in India.

More precious, however, was a magnificent ancient cam­eo representing the emperor Constantine and his family in a chariot drawn by centaurs, trampling his enemies. This fine example of late antique art had once belonged to Peter Paul Rub­ens, somehow surviving the catastrophic events of the mutiny to make its way back to Amsterdam.

Such vivid glimpses of the Australian connection with the history of travel in the Indian Ocean are followed by two sections that range back in time from the early modern period to remote antiquity. We begin with items that offer a broader view of the Dutch maritime network: two 17th-century paintings from the Rijksmuseum represent the port of Amsterdam and the Dutch East Indies capital of Batavia, today Jakarta: the two ends of one of the most profitable trade routes of the time. It is interesting to remember that when the first colony was founded at Sydney in 1788, Batavia, already an old and prosperous city, was the closest outpost of European civilisation in the region.

Nearby is a very early Dutch map of the East Indies, which includes the first record of the Australian coastline. We are used to seeing the later Dutch maps in which much of the continent is outlined and only the east coast remains a void, waiting to be filled in by James Cook a century later, but here it is just a disconcertingly short stretch of coast near the tropic of Capricorn, and named as the land of the Eendracht, after Hartog’s ship. Next to the map is the photographic reproduction of a painting by Gerard ter Borch that was destroyed by bombing during World War II: it is a scene of relatively decorous carousing in a high-class brothel, including a blown-up version of this map on the wall behind.

From the same period comes a painting that so effectively evokes the intertwining of aesthetic, scientific and commercial interests in the Dutch golden age that it has been adopted as the face of the exhibition, on posters and the cover of the catalogue. Ostensibly a genre picture representing a fruit market in Batavia — although the artist had never been there and relied on secondary sources — the painting is also a botanical compendium of exotic tropical fruit. Each one is indeed numbered and identified in a list on the lower right of the composition.

The market stallholder is Chinese, early evidence of the presence of the hardworking and entrepreneurial Chinese who still play such an important role in Malaysia and Indonesia. From an art-historical point of view, the anonymous painter has based the overall composition on the well-established convention of Dutch and Flemish market scenes, which offered the pretext for elaborate still-life com­positions of fruit, vegetables, meat or fish, but has added the motif of a boy stealing a banana for a touch of genre comedy.

The next section takes us back into the Middle Ages and even deep into antiquity. Diverse objects from a variety of regions evoke the cultures that have surrounded the ocean but above all emphasise the networks of trade and exchange that have linked these peoples since time immemorial.

Model of a masula surf boat from Madras, India.

There are printed fabrics and ceramics, each of which — one highly perishable and the other extremely durable — have served to transmit languages of pattern and ornamentation all over the Eurasian continent and into the islands and archipelagos surrounding it for so long that it is often hard to say where a particular motif originated.

There are important trade goods that we may never have thought of, such as the marble tombstones that were carved in India and exported all across the Muslim world. These must have been ordered after a person’s death, specifying the name and the scriptural verses that were required, and the whole process of ordering and delivery must have taken many months. Or did individuals sometimes order their own tombstones in advance?

Some objects are extraordinarily old, such as the Indus Valley seals, one of which was found in Baghdad. They were made about 4000 years ago and originate from the first important centre of civilisation to emerge in the Indian subcontinent. The one found in Baghdad presumably made its way to Mesopotamia in the possession of a merchant. Perhaps he settled and died there. The Indus Valley people seem to have been inspired by the example of the ­Sumerians to devise their own early form of writing, but the characters carved into the seal remain undeciphered today.

Among so many other fascinating objects, one that is particularly intriguing is a giant clam shell the hinge of which has been carved into the face of a woman, so that the rest of the shell looks rather like a cloak billowing behind her. The object dates from the 7th century BC, the early Archaic period in Greek chronology, and was found at Vulci, in ­Etrurian Italy, but was carved in Phoenicia. The shell itself probably came from the Red Sea.

So even considered merely as a commodity, the object has a complex history, but the story of its meaning may be even more interesting. A woman carved into a shell with billowing drapery can hardly fail to make us think of Aphrodite rising from the sea, and this is not an anachronistic association, for the myth goes back to Homer and Hesiod, and Paphos in Cyprus, where the new goddess first came ashore, was already celebrated as an important cult place. The style of the face seems similar to the Greco-Phoenician manner of some later sarcophaguses of the area. There is no doubt that the Etruscans knew the myth, and nothing would be more appropriate than for an Etruscan lady of 2600 years ago to mix the chalk or lead to whiten her com­plexion in a container evoking, perhaps magically, the power of the goddess of love and sexuality.

Travellers and Traders in the Indian Ocean World

WA Maritime Museum, Fremantle. Until April 23.