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Notes from the Field: The Strange Case of Thome Corea

banner image for Notes from the Field: The Strange Case of Thome Corea

From the editors: Notes from the Field is a series with a long history at NEP. In this latest iteration, the series has three broad areas of focus. First, Notes from the Field is designed to take readers into unexpected corners of the world’s great archives and to explore the experience of working there. We aim to describe some of the spaces and places in which historians work every day. Second, we’re interested in fascinating stories that might not become the central focus of a book or an article but which nonetheless reveal intriguing corners of the past. And third the series discusses the often unexpected experiences of doing fieldwork where each day can bring new challenges, joys or discoveries. Together these stories form our new Notes from the Field.

I’m a historian of early modern East and Southeast Asia, so I’m fortunate to work in some of the most interesting archives in the world. I spend a lot of time at the National Archives in The Hague, a city in the Netherlands with a long history. This archive stores hundreds of thousands of documents connected with the Dutch East India Company (the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC), which carved out a commercial empire in Asia in the seventeenth century.

I’ve used archives across four continents. The National Archives is undoubtedly the most accessible and user-friendly archives I’ve ever worked in. You can travel there by train, registration is simple, and it’s easy to get access to original documents rather than poor microfilmed copies. It’s a wonderful place to work.

But it can also be a little overwhelming. Within an hour after arriving, you can find yourself confronting huge piles of documents, invariably written in the dense and idiosyncratic script of VOC employees. That script, especially as used in earlier documents, can takes dozens of hours per source to decipher.

VOC documents
Author’s photograph, VOC documents

The challenges involved in doing research at the National Archives are daunting, but this also makes working there exceptionally exciting, as historians frequently come across documents that no one has seen in hundreds of years. One of my favorite documents is just one page long. It’s a confession signed by Thome Corea, a ‘Japanese’ mercenary who was stationed on a remote island in Southeast Asia in 1623.

The document is connected with the Amboina conspiracy case, the subject of my recent book. The case started with one of Thome Corea’s fellow soldiers. On February 23rd, 1623, a Japanese mercenary called Shichizō, in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, was arrested for asking questions about the defenses of one of the company’s forts on the remote island of Amboina in modern-day Indonesia. 

a photo the of document that talks about Thome Corea's cse

When he failed to provide an adequate explanation, he was subjected to the “torture of water”: a cloth was “put before his face and fastened behind his head, hanging upon under his chinne, [and] after this the water was poured upon his head.”  The result of this process, which we would call waterboarding today, was a confession claiming that Shichizō had joined a plot orchestrated by a group of English merchants. The merchants allegedly hoped to seize control of the VOC fortification and ultimately to rip the spice-rich island from the company’s grasp.

Armed with this information, the VOC governor proceeded to arrest, interrogate, and torture the remaining ten Japanese mercenaries in the garrison, all of whom (including Thome Corea) admitted to signing onto the plot in return for a substantial reward. A few days later, attention turned to the English, who also confessed–again, under torture–to a role in a conspiracy aimed at the “taking of the castle, and the murdering of the Netherlanders.” On March 9th, an improvised tribunal of VOC employees with the governor at its head convened to render judgment on the conspirators. The result was an emphatic guilty verdict, and shortly thereafter, ten English merchants and ten Japanese mercenaries were executed in the public square outside the fortress.

Imagined depiction of torture
Imagined depiction of torture RP-P-OB-68.279, Rijksmuseum

The case became enormously controversial in Europe. When news of what had happened reached London in 1624, it sparked an immediate outage. English officials denounced the flawed nature of the judicial procedures while ridiculing the notion that a conspiracy had existed in the first place. As news of the trial spread, propelled by the publication of cheap broadsheet ballads and incendiary pamphlets, everyone seemed to be talking about Japanese soldiers and their particular capabilities.

For Dutch writers determined to emphasize the potential strength of the Amboina plotters, the Japanese were fearsome warriors capable of swaying the outcome of any conflict. A “small number of Japonians were not slightly to be regarded,” exclaimed one writer, as the “valour & prowess of that Nation” made them far more potent than an equivalent contingent of European soldiers. Not so, scoffed their English opponents, who claimed that the Japanese were no military “Gyants” and that the wondrous feats ascribed to them nothing more than “Apochriphal Legends” with no basis in fact.

Column of Japanese Soldiers
Column of Japanese Soldiers, Anonymous, 1600 (RP-P-OB-75.407, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

One of the ‘Japanese; soldiers caught up in the Amboina case was Thome Corea. He was tortured and waterboarded by Dutch officials and rapidly confessed. But as he was illiterate, he could not sign his name. Instead, he made a rough mark.

Close-up of Thome Corea's confession
Close-up of Thome Corea’s confession

Although he represented himself as a ferocious Japanese soldier, Thome Corea was not actually Japanese. In fact he was Korean. And he had a remarkable life. We know from the records associated with the trial that Corea was aged fifty in 1623, meaning that he was born around 1573. He was thus likely brought to Japan in the turbulent aftermath of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s massive invasion of Korea in 1592.

He probably came to Japan as a young captive along with tens of thousands of Korean children, women and men who were enslaved by the returning armies. Keinen, a Buddhist monk who traveled to Korea as part of the invading forces, observed the mass transport of children: “They are carrying off Korean children and killing their parents. Never shall they see each other again. Their mutual cries—surely this is like the torture meted out by the fiends of hell.” (1) Thome Corea may have been one of these children.

At some point, he secured his freedom but was unable to return to Korea. Instead, like so many of his countrymen he was drawn to western Japan’s bustling cosmopolitan ports like Nagasaki or Hirado. There he seems to have eked out a living until the Dutch East India Company came recruiting. It offered three year contracts, dangerous work, and poor conditions–but also the promise of a steady wage.

Corea’s unlikely career suggests that the Company’s attempts to recruit legion of Japanese soldiers to fight on its behalf opened up an unexpected space for reinvention, one in which a Korean captives could morph, in search of a stable wage, into a fearsome Japanese soldier. If so, Corea was not alone in making this change. VOC records include multiple references to “Japanese” soldiers with names that suggest links to places like Macao, China or Korea but who were able to take advantage of new opportunities afforded by the Company’s martial visions.

Thome Corea generated just a few lines in the sources and one hastily scrawled cross to mark his confession. He was part of important events in global history but he did not drive them. But his story is important. Like so many historians, I love working in the archives because I’m able to uncover evidence of hidden lives. Thome Corea is an example of such a life.


(1) Wm. Theodore de Bary, Donald Keene, George Tanabe, and Paul Varley, ed. Sources of Japanese Tradition : Volume 1: From Earliest Times to 1600 (Columbia University Press, New York, 2010: 467-72

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Conspiracies, Fear, and the Dutch Empire in Asia

By Adam Clulow

On  February 23, 1623, a Japanese mercenary called Shichizō in the employ of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) was arrested for asking questions about the defenses of one of the company’s forts on the remote island of Amboina in modern day Indonesia.  When he failed to provide an adequate explanation, he was waterboarded, a cloth “put before his face and fastened behind his head, hanging upon under his chinne, [and] after this the water was poured upon his head.”   The result of this “torture of water,” or waterboarding as we would call it today, was a confession, that Shichizō had joined a plot orchestrated by a group of English merchants to seize control of the fortification and ultimately to rip the spice-rich island from the company’s grasp.

The Arms of the Dutch East India Company and of the Town of Batavia, Jeronimus Becx (II), 1651 (SK-A-4643, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Armed with this information, the VOC governor proceeded to arrest, interrogate, and ultimately to torture the remaining ten Japanese mercenaries in the garrison, all of whom admitted to signing onto the plot in return for a substantial reward.   A few days later, attention turned to the English, who also confessed, also under torture, to a role in a conspiracy aimed at the “taking of the castle, and the murdering of the Netherlanders.”   On March 9, an improvised tribunal of VOC employees with the governor at their head convened to render judgment on the conspirators.  The result was an emphatic guilty verdict and shortly thereafter ten English merchants and ten Japanese mercenaries were executed in the public square outside the fortress.

When news of what had happened on Amboina reached London at the end of May 1624, it sparked immediate outrage from the directors of the English East India Company, from the monarch, James I, and by all accounts from the general public.  Passions were further inflamed by the publication of a slew of incendiary pamphlets on both sides that sought either to damn the Dutch as bloody tyrants or condemn the English as faithless traitors. All of these were accompanied by ubiquitous images of torture and execution at the hands of Dutch officials.

The result was that, despite occurring thousands of miles away in an unfamiliar part of the world, the trial on Amboina swiftly escalated to become one of the most famous legal cases of the age and the subject of a long-running dispute between the Dutch and English governments, which clashed bitterly over the twin issues of blame and compensation.  It took close to a decade for the initial uproar to die down but the case remained prominent throughout the seventeenth century, generating a continuous flow of publications including pamphlets, sermons, broadsheet ballads and even a stage play penned by John Dryden in 1673.   So famous was the case that its remnants are scattered in archives across the world including the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin, which preserves a remarkable set of pamphlets related to Amboina.

Things did not end in the seventeenth century.  The controversy was periodically resuscitated in subsequent centuries, reappearing, for example, in the Boer War (1899-1902) when it used by English writers to illustrate the essential villainy of not only the Dutch but also, more tenuously, their Afrikaner descendants in South Africa.  It resurfaced even more recently in Giles Milton’s hugely popular history of these events, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg (1999), which repeated some of the standard charges made against the VOC.

For hundreds of years now, scholars and popular writers have fought over just what happened on Amboina in 1623.  Across this long period, the debate has split along remarkably static national lines.  For their part, English writers insist that no plot existed and hence that VOC actions on Amboina was nothing more than the judicial murder of innocents.  In contrast, Dutch historians are clear that some sort of conspiracy existed, even if it was still inchoate, and hence that the legal proceedings were essentially justified.

My book was born from a sense of frustration with standard approaches to the case. It aims to move beyond the conventional debate over English guilt or innocence by looking instead at the territory where the trial took place and what was happening there in the weeks and months before Shichizō first appeared on the walls of the fort.

The book starts by shifting the spotlight away from the standard focus on the accused English conspirators to the three Asian parties, local polities on Amboina, Japanese mercenaries, and slaves primarily from South Asia, supposedly implicated in the plot. While the involvement of such different groups raises questions about the likelihood of such an expansive conspiracy, it also reveals something about how the Dutch East India Company was changing in this period. As it dove deeper and deeper into the region’s politics, the organization turned increasingly to Asian settlers to populate its colonies, Asian slaves to provide labor, and Asian fighters to wage war alongside its troops.

Image of Japanese soldiers around 1600.
Column of Japanese Soldiers, Anonymous, 1600 (RP-P-OB-75.407, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Exploring each of these groups in turn, Amboina, 1623 argues that while this process of what one scholar calls “Asiafication” allowed the Company to set down roots in the region, it also created a deep well of colonial anxiety.   By working through each element of the supposed plot, the book sets out to trace how the questions of a single young Japanese soldier morphed into a sprawling conspiracy and how the case was driven forward by a potent combination of genuine crisis, imagined threat, and overpowering fear that propelled a rapid escalation from suspicion to torture and finally to mass execution.

In 2006, then prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende called in an impromptu address to the Dutch House of Representatives for a revival of what he described as the “VOC mentality” (VOC- mentaliteit).  What he meant, as far as we can make out, was a revived dynamism, optimism, and above all confidence that permitted the Dutch to dominate global commerce in the seventeenth century and which would enable the modern-day Netherlands to recover, in his view, some of its luster by harnessing this spirit.  And we are all familiar with the images of Dutch confidence and success from the seventeenth century that are scattered across museums in the Netherlands and beyond.

VOC senior merchant. Aelbert Cuyp, c. 1640– 1660 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. SK- A- 2350)

Such depictions show a familiar image of the confident, conquering European standing in a transformed landscape surrounded by the technologies of power and looming over colonial subjects. In fact, and despite such representations, VOC officials and merchants lived in a world filled with terrors. As they moved into the region, Dutch agents were plunged into an alien landscape that was crowded with sophisticated societies, long-established political and economic networks, and powerful states capable of mustering vast military resources. Clinging to the coast, they felt acutely and constantly vulnerable. Recognizing the pervasive role of fear helps explain the frequently chaotic nature of the Amboina trial. It also tells us something about the Dutch empire in a period still commonly referred to as the Golden Age. Looking closely at the Amboina trial is a reminder that the “VOC mentality,” if we can use such a term, was dominated as much by fear as by confidence, and that this fear dictated how Company officials interacted with the world around them. It is, in other words, something to be studied and understood, certainly, but not emulated.

Adam Clulow, Amboina, 1623: Fear and Conspiracy on the Edge of Empire  (2019)

Online Resources

In the process of writing the book, I developed an interactive website, The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial (www.amboyna.org), designed to take students into the heart of the Amboina trial. The site allows you to work through the details of the case guided by commentary from historians and barristers and come to a final verdict as to guilt or innocence.

Further Reading

Learn more about the Amboina conspiracy and related seventeenth-century imperial encounters:

Alison Games, Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory (2020)
Brilliantly explores how the case entrenched itself in English history and memory across a period of several centuries.

W. Ph. Coolhaas, “Notes and Comments on the so-called Amboina,” in M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz, M.E. van opstall, and G.J. Schutte, eds. Dutch Authors on Asian History: A Selection of Dutch Historiography on the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (1988), 198-240.
Perhaps the best article ever written on the case by one of the giants of Dutch empire scholarship. Concludes that there was a plot but is critical of the way the case was handled.

Anthony Milton, “Marketing a Massacre: Amboyna, the East India Company and the Public Sphere in Early Stuart England,” in Steve Pincus and Peter Lake (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (2007).
A fascinating examination of how the English East India Company attempted to mobilize public and elite opinion around the case.

Giles Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg (1999)
A popular account detailing the English push into Asia.

Connected pages on Not Even Past

Adam Clulow and Tom Chandler, Building a Virtual City for the Classroom: Angkor

Image Credits

Banner credit:  Andries Beekman, The Castle at Batavia, c. 1661 (detail, SK-A-19, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).


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