The Shallow Seas by Dawn Farnham

her room embarrassed at these feelings and his professions of love.
    Now, though, she had recovered her poise.
    Tigran opened the sideboard and took out a blue and white dinner plate from the large service which lay inside. She recognised again the arms of the VOC adorning, in blue, the centre of the plate.
    â€œThese were Reijmsdijk’s also. Father bought the estate and everything in it, including Reijmsdijk’s portrait. I have never bothered to change anything in the house. Since my mother, no woman has really lived here as mistress. Should you wish to do anything, make it over to your taste, change everything, you have only to say, and all will be as you wish.”
    Tigran looked at her, and Charlotte found again, to her annoyance, that she felt like blushing.
    They went into the great hall. The floor was tiled in white, surrounded at the outer edges with a frame of Dutch Delft blue tiles.
    â€œThese tiles tell a story, the story of Holland,” said Tigran.
    He pointed to the many images of fish in a variety of numbers and dispositions swimming around the floor; other tiles showed fish piled in baskets, some sold by sturdy women, some in boats.
    â€œHerring,” he said and smiled at her frown. “A humble fish to be sure. But without the humble herring, Holland would never have become the greatest trading nation on earth.”
    He pointed to a tile that showed a fat-bottomed ship heaped with herring. Elsewhere, merchants stood proudly displaying their wealth, their houses, their cities. The square-rigged, wind-filled sails of 17th- and 18th-century ships sailed around the edge of the hall floor.
    â€œA Dutchman, Jan-Willem Beukelszoon, you see, discovered a method for curing the herring at sea so that it would not spoil. In a stroke, the Dutch had a long-lasting and delicious commodity they could trade all over Europe. They became sailors, traders and merchants of repute, began to build great new types of ships and invented a country which was built and governed not by some war-mongering and greedy king but by sensible and clever burghers. When they outgrew Europe, they looked to the rest of the world. It was inevitable that when the power of Portugal and Spain waned, the Dutch with their ships and knowledge would take over world trade, especially here in the Spice Islands. The VOC was their means of conquest, the first joint stock company every formed. In 1602, it raised six and a half million guilders. Can you imagine such a sum!”
    Tigran pointed out other tiles showing coats-of-arms of the countries which had flown the VOC flag, including the fan-shaped man-made island of Deshima and its bridge in Nagasaki harbour, which the Japanese had built to prevent their enterprising trading partners from encroaching on their country. The VOC had ruled over Amboyna, Banda, Ternate, Macassar, Malacca, Ceylon, Java and the Cape of Good Hope. They had had factories in Bengal, on the Coramandel Coast, in Siam and on the Persian Gulf. Their trade routes connected the whole of the Orient, Africa and Europe with Amsterdam. In the Persian Gulf the Company traded spices for salt, in Zanzibar salt for cloves, in India cloves for gold, in China gold for tea and silk, in Japan silk for copper and in the islands of Southeast Asia, copper for spices. The inner Asian trade had been as profitable as that with Europe.
    â€œMy Dutch tutor used this floor as a history lesson,” Tigran said as he wandered around the hall. “He was always somewhat annoyed that VOC had traded New Amsterdam in exchange for the English leaving the Spice Islands, but it must have seemed a good proposition at the time. It is ironic that Holland has lost all these places because of their support of America, a colony they traded away over a hundred years ago.”
    He looked over the hall.
    â€œThey created the first stock exchange, the first exchange bank. By the middle of the 17th century, they controlled half the world trade.