Chapter 1

Taiwan on the Eve of Colonization

Captain Ripon watched the warriors advance through the woods. For six days he and his men had been cutting timber for a fort. Each day people from a neighboring village had come to laugh at them, asking, "What do you need so much wood for?" This time they were not laughing. Ripon had fought his way around the world, but he did not like the odds. Only six of his eighty men had muskets. The rest had axes, little use against three hundred bow- and spearmen. Fortunately, the sloop had returned during the night for another load of lumber. If Ripon could lead his men to the seashore, they might be able to climb aboard and escape, for the natives were afraid of the ocean.

The warriors began shooting arrows and throwing spears. Ripon's musketeers shot back while Ripon led his men to the beach. When his men began wading through the surf, the enemy advanced in fury, even though the sloop's musketmen shot them down three or four at a time. One warrior struck Ripon in the kidney and was about to deliver the death blow when he was shot by a musketeer on the sloop. Ripon was not the only casualty. Seven of his men were wounded. Of these, four managed to scramble aboard the boat, but the other three fell and were dragged away. Then, even as Dutch muskets kept up a steady barrage, the began cutting the corpses into pieces.1

Who were these warriors, and why did they attack? In this chapter we explore Taiwan and its people on the eve of colonization. Ripon will be our main guide, but we will supplement his account with other early reports—Chinese, Dutch, Spanish, German, and Portuguese—and with modern ethnographies. We will explore the martial culture of the aborigines, who were headhunters engaging in frequent intervillage wars. We will also touch on their relations with Chinese sojourners, relations which became a problem for the company. Indeed, when Ripon reported the incident to his commander, the latter surmised that it was due "to the incitement of the Chinese" and later wrote that since the battle in the woods "we have seen no natives, and it has come to the point that (God help us) whenever we go to a place where Chinese are trading we must be on our guard."2

Taiwan Physical and Human Geography

In Ripon's words, Taiwan looked like three mountains, one on top of the other, the highest covered in snow three months out of the year.3 Modern geographers calculate that 70 percent of Taiwan is mountainous, with more than two hundred peaks higher than 3,000 meters. The mountains are concentrated on the east coast, where they rise nearly vertically from the ocean, reaching heights of 3,000 meters or more, a breathtaking sight. These green-blue cliffs are interrupted only occasionally by a narrow valley or a rocky riverbed, and, if it has been raining recently, the rivers can carry boulders in their churning waters. Most of Taiwan is subtropical, but the high mountains, with their snow-topped peaks, have temperate climates. Taiwan is therefore a place of enormous biological diversity. Indeed, few regions of the world have as many species per square kilometer. Its climate is also monsoonal. From October to March, the dry northern monsoon brings cool air from northern Asia. From May to September the moist southern monsoon brings warm air from Southeast Asia.

Monsoons made travel through the Taiwan Strait relatively predictable. Among the mariners who passed through each year were the Portuguese, who gave the island its European name: Ilha Formosa, or "beautiful island." In 1582 one Portuguese ship ran aground on a sandbar, and its crew and passengers became the first Europeans known to have landed on Taiwan. They were there forty-five days before they could build a ship and sail back to Macao.4 Indeed, Taiwan's western coast was dangerous for deep-drawing European ships because its sandbars and shallows shifted with tide and weather. But beyond the marshy coastline lay fertile alluvial plains, replenished constantly by mineral-rich soil from the mountains. These plains were covered by grasslands and forests, providing habitat for a multitude of animals: pheasants, boars, monkeys, goats, panthers, and, most important, huge herds of deer.

The plains were also home to human beings. Thousands of years ago, groups of people speaking Austronesian languages moved to Taiwan, the first step of an epic migration that took their descendants across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar and across the Pacific Ocean to Easter Island—the most expansive premodern migration in human history.5 By the time of Ripon, those who remained in Taiwan had split into dozens of language groups, and scholars today consider the Formosan Austronesian languages to be the oldest and most diverse branches of the Austronesian linguistic tree.6 Since this linguistic diversity is accompanied by cultural diversity, it is difficult to make generalizations about the culture and society of Taiwanese aborigines, especially for the early seventeenth century. Yet their societies did share common features.

The first significant description of the Taiwanese aborigines was left by a Chinese scholar named Chen Di 陳第. In 1603 he accompanied a Chinese imperial anti-pirate mission to Taiwan and afterward wrote "Dong fan ji" 東番記 (An account of the eastern barbarians), a short but important source.7 Most of his time on Taiwan was spent in the Bay of Tayouan (near today's Tainan City), the area that would later become the heartland of the Dutch colony, so his remarks are focused on the inhabitants of that area, a group of villages that later became known as the Siraya.8 One of the first things Chen Di notes is that these people were bellicose. "By nature they are brave and like to fight; . . . they kill and wound each other with the utmost of their strength." A warrior who made a kill took his victim's head, stripped its flesh, and hung it at his door. "Those who have many skeletons hanging at their doors are called braves."9 Chen Di writes that the aborigines had a gendered division of labor. Women farmed, using fire to clear an area and then planting crops, without using irrigation. Men, on the other hand, lived in special men's-only houses, where they trained for hunting and war.

There are other descriptions of such men's houses, which were an important institution of aboriginal life. Ripon, for example, writes that the streets of the aboriginal villages were quite narrow, except for public squares at the center of which stood large round buildings. Men slept in these "temples" and trained in the squares. An early Dutch account describes how "the men are daily trained in the public squares, which are quite large. . . . They exercise with—and race against—each other, sparring with bamboos or reeds, each seeking to gain advantage over the other."10 This exercise occurred to the beating of drums, and appears to have been well organized. Ripon was impressed by the trophies held in these men's houses: "a great number of heads of their enemies, having nothing but the separated skin next to each head, made and tied in the fashion of a horsetail [mouchet], and also the heads of deer and boar. . . . A lamp burns day and night within, and that's where they do their devotions after they return from war, screaming and yelling as though enraged."11

Indeed, the men's houses were the center of a vibrant and pervasive culture of headhunting. A missionary named Georgius Candidius, who lived on Taiwan starting in 1627, described the celebrations that occurred upon the return of a victorious expedition:

When they succeed in bringing home a head from their enemies . . . the whole town holds a great celebration, with cheering and jubilation. First they take the head, parading with it through the whole town. They sing songs to glorify their idols, through whose help they believe they were able to obtain [the head]. Wherever they go in the town they are greeted as heroes and made welcome, being offered the best and strongest drink available. Then they take the head to the church of the one who obtained it (for every 15 or 16 houses there is a special church), where it is cooked in a pot until the flesh . . . falls away. Then they leave it to dry, dousing it with their best and strongest drink. They slaughter a pig in honor of their idols and in this way hold great celebrations. . . . These victory celebrations sometimes continue for fourteen days on end.12

Those who captured a head were heroes, having such a status "that no one has the confidence openly to speak to them for nearly fourteen days [after the head is obtained]."13 Thus, the warriors who attacked Ripon were risking their lives to capture heads. Doubtless the heads of Ripon's fallen comrades ended up as trophies in a men's house.

Headhunting was about more than glory. It is likely that Sirayan males needed to capture a head to advance to full manhood. Anthropologist John Shepherd has reconstructed the world of the Siraya in the seventeenth century, and his brilliant analysis places headhunting in the context of a basic feature of Sirayan society: gender separation.14 For the Siraya the world was divided into a masculine sphere and a feminine sphere. Men and women lived apart for most of their lives. At the age of 4, a boy moved from his mother's house to one of the men's houses, where he received training in hunting and fighting. As he grew older he proceeded through a series of stages called age-grades, each marked by changes in hair and clothing styles. Indeed, age was the most important aspect of his identity, for it determined not just his social authority but also his freedom to have children. He could marry at the age of 21, but once married he still had to reside in the men's house. He might sneak off at night to visit his wife so long as he did not violate the strict taboos that regulated sexual contact, such as that which forbade sex before headhunting raids. It was not until he reached the age of 42 that he could live with his wife, for at that point he ceased to participate actively in the male world of warfare and hunting. Indeed, he was not supposed to father a child before the age of 42, for pregnancy was a dangerous state, bringing together the male and female spheres. If his wife became pregnant before he was 42, her pregnancy was aborted. Those who performed the abortions were the spiritual leaders of the Siraya, the priestesses known as Inibs. They appear to have been the predominant mediators in Sirayan society between human and supernatural spheres before the arrival of Dutch missionaries. The dominance of females in the sphere of divine power (there were, so far as is known, no male priests) paralleled the dominance of males in the sphere of worldly power.15

The separation and military training of males was bolstered by another general feature of Formosan Austronesian culture: a culture of intervillage warfare. Missionary Candidius wrote that they "do not live in peace [in vreede ende pays] with each other, but rather wage war continually, one village against the other."17 Ripon, a fighting man, took special note of this, writing that "these people make war village against village."16 [note that the previous two footnotes have switched place.] Indeed, the attack against him may have been motivated by intervillage rivalries. When he was looking for a good place to cut wood, he spoke to people of a Sirayan village called Baccluan.18 Through an interpreter (probably Chinese19), people from Baccluan said they were willing to help Ripon, and they led him to the woods where, they said, he was free to cut lumber. In return, Ripon gave them Indian textiles. As he and his men cut wood, however, they were visited by people from a different village: Mattau.20 When the Mattauwers asked Ripon why his men needed so much wood, he said that they were going to build houses, "but jealousy convinced [the Mattauwers] that we were friends of those of Baccluan, and the interpreter told them that we had given presents to the people of Baccluan, and they got upset [eurent dépit]."21 It seems, then, that one of the reasons the Mattauwers attacked Ripon was that they worried that he and his men had befriended another village.22

Why might one village have wanted to prevent another from allying with the Dutch? In the warlike world of aboriginal Taiwan, a powerful ally could change the villages' balance of power. A village was always in danger, and it could seek protection by allying with another village. As we will see, the first decade of Dutch rule was filled with shifting alliances and constant warfare. Indeed, it appears that there was a shift of alliances even during the short time Ripon was on Taiwan. For example, some months after the fight in the forest, people from Mattau and Baccluan together attacked the company's new stronghold. Three hundred came at night to try to set fire to the new fortress, but a Dutch sentinel "furnished them with a match in the form of a musket, which he fired against them."23 Two company cannons aimed into the night also had an effect: "[The cannon fire] served as a candle to light their way home, but not all made it back, because a good number remained; and in the morning we found blood and pieces of human flesh and limbs and weapons. . . . They didn't come back, because these matches and candles were not agreeable to them."24 The alliance between Mattau and Baccluan held thereafter, and the two villages remained united against the Dutch. As we will see in the following chapter, the two villages would cause much trouble in the early years of colonization.

Intervillage warfare and diplomacy appear to have been conducted within a sort of common geopolitical culture. Wars were conducted in various ways. Most appear to have been raids and ambushes, which Candidius describes vividly for the Siraya:

10 or 20 or 30 or as many as are so inclined, make their way . . . to the place. . . . Then under the cover of night they go into the enemy's fields, to see whether they can find anyone in the fieldhouses. . . . If they find anyone, whether it be old or young, woman or man, then they kill the person, cut the head off, as well as the hands and feet, indeed they sometimes take the entire body, cut into pieces. According as the party is numerous, everyone wants something, so that returning home he may boast of it. . . . Or, if they do not find anyone in the fields, they go to the town, await their opportunity, ambush a house, and kill everyone they find there in the dark, and then flee with the head, hands, and feet, before the rest of the village is alarmed.25

But wars were also sometimes conducted with hundreds of men, as the attacks against Ripon's woodcutters and against the fortress indicate.

Villages were therefore protected by plant defenses or bamboo or wooden walls.26 In 1630, for example, inhabitants of Mattau built "a sturdy double wall around their village, the inside filled with clay, as well as a moat and many demi-lunes."27 Demi lunes [halven maenen], a hallmark of the European revolution in fortification, were defensive works built outside of fortifications that served to protect bastions from assault.28 What might have been meant by demi-lunes in the case of Mattau is not entirely clear, but they were probably some sort of defensive outwork.29 Village fortifications could also be quite large, as were, for example, the defensive bamboo hedges of another powerful village, the non-Siraya village of Favorolang, which were reported in 1637 to be some 10 meters (30 voeten) wide.30 Such fortifications made hostile entrance difficult. Friends, however, could enter through village gates, which might number from three to six, and which were always heavily guarded. Indeed, village gates were frequently the sites of the men's dormitories, which thus acted as guard houses. If an enemy tried to enter the village he would immediately find himself confronted by the spears and arrows of the village's warriors.31 The fortified village appears to have been ubiquitous on all of Formosa.32 Indeed, in many areas it persisted into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as it did among the Ami, the Paiwan, and the Rukai peoples.33

Such constant warfare was, it seems, tempered by diplomatic conventions. It appears to have been customary sometimes to warn an enemy officially before attacking him. Candidius writes, "When war is undertaken against a village, they first officially end the peace and warn each other."34 More general were conventions for paying tribute and restitution, pigs and spears being the usual currency. In 1626, for example, the villages of Mattau and Baccluan agreed to give twenty pigs to the village of Sinkan as restitution for an earlier attack.35 Similarly, in 1635, Mattau paid a restitution to Sinkan of nine pigs and eight of Mattau's "largest spears."36 Another convention was the sending of weapons to those with whom one desired peace or those whom one wanted as allies against a common enemy. In late 1635 and early 1636, for example, the Dutch East India Company received a spate of peace offerings, many of them accompanied by the sending of weapons. Mattau itself sent a spear and an ax to the company to signify that it was prepared to open peace negotiations. The mountain village of Taraquang sent two arrows to ask the Dutch "to grant them peace and security."37 The village of Tevorang sent a spear, "thereby implying that they were well inclined to join their arms to ours, and that our friendship was all they desired."38 If offering weapons signified a willingness for peace, the ultimate sign of subjection was a gift of trees planted in one's native soil, which the Dutch demanded as a formal sign that the village in question offered its sovereignty to the United Provinces of the Netherlands.39

The existence of such diplomatic conventions—the formal declaration of war, formal means for paying tribute and restitution, formal means for making truces and treaties, and formal means for indicating subjection—meant that warfare and diplomacy were carried out in the framework of certain rules (which, to be sure, might be broken). Thus, although the aboriginal villages lived in tension, they nonetheless possessed means to mediate that tension and so remained in contact with each other. In this way, information about strength and weakness, rumors of battles fought or impending, made their way through the villages. This situation was not unlike that in Europe itself, where early modern states existed in a tense power balance even as diplomatic, cultural, and economic intercourse continued. Europeans therefore did not find geopolitics on Taiwan entirely foreign, and they put their experience to good use in exploiting divisions among the Austronesian villages. Yet these villages themselves proved adept at diplomacy and, as we shall see, made good use of competition between the Europeans and their rivals.

Among the Siraya, the village was the highest-order political unit, but in other parts of Taiwan there were larger units. In the far south the Dutch encountered a proto-state, whose leader they referred to as the "Prince [vorst] of Lonkjouw."40 He ruled over some sixteen villages, each of which itself had an appointed chief. Succession to the princedom was hereditary.41 Lonkjouw was probably the most centralized Austronesian political unit on Formosa in the early seventeenth century, but there were other areas that had political organization above the village level. It is important to the history of the European colonization of the island that both the Spanish and the Dutch established their colonies in areas in which such higher-order political units were absent.

Individual villages could be large, especially in the Siraya area.42 An early Dutch source reports that Mattau had 2,000 fighting [weerbaere] men. This figure, which would correspond to a total population of around 8,000 people, is undoubtedly inflated.43 Mattau's population was probably closer to 2,000.44 Baccluan probably had around 1,500 inhabitants, and other nearby villages were similar in size. Farther from the Siraya region, village sizes tended to decrease. Some villages were recorded as having as few as 9 inhabitants, although most had at least 100, and many small villages were probably offshoots of larger ones.45

From Dutch sources, one can reckon the total population of Taiwan to have been around 100,000, which indicates a population density of around 3 persons per square kilometer.46 In more populated areas, such as the southwestern plains, the population density was probably around 5 persons per square kilometer. Such densities are, of course, far lower than were the population densities of intensively farmed areas like Fujian and Holland, but they are also lower than population densities among other Austronesian peoples with similar sustenance patterns. Austronesian swidden cultivators in the Philippines, Borneo, and Indonesia can reach population densities of more than 20 persons per square kilometer, and densities above 50 per kilometer have been observed among swidden agriculturists in New Guinea and parts of Polynesia.47 Taiwan's low population density translated into a relatively high standard of living. European visitors to Taiwan frequently noted that the aborigines were tall and healthy-looking.

The main reason for the aborigines' health and stature was their access to animal protein. Deer lived on the island in spectacular abundance, "sometimes two or three thousand in a flock together."48 German traveller Albrecht Herport, who visited Taiwan in 1660, when deer stocks on the island were already greatly depleted, wrote: "One finds here a large and unbelievable amount [Menge] of deer, so that it is a wonder that they can all find sustenance here. The deer are delicious [küstig], fat, and full in meat: innumerably many are shot and trapped . . . throughout the year."49 Deer were a primary source of food and wealth for the aborigines before colonization. Chinese traveler Chen Di left the first extant description of aboriginal deer hunting: "In the winter, when the deer come out in herds, then some hundred or tens of men will go after them, run them down until they are exhausted, and surround them. The spears find their marks and the catch is piled high as a hill."50 Some hunters put hooks on their arrows so that deer would get entangled in the underbrush, and sometimes they attached little bells to the hooks so that wounded deer could be pursued by ear through the bush.51 When the deer were caught they were skinned and the meat was cut up and dried in the sun. The meat was a valuable source of protein, which is one reason the Formosans were so well-nourished. Indeed, Ripon described them as "tall and hefty [gros], like big giants."52

Deer were not used just for food. The skin was used for clothing, armor, weapons, and, as an anecdote from Ripon makes clear, even bedding:

I was once going to sleep in the house of one whom they considered the most brave, and, having stayed for a long time, I asked where I would sleep with my men. Thinking to do me honor, he offered me his own bed, but there was nothing but deer skins beneath and above to serve as both sheet and blanket. I told him that I wasn't accustomed to lie in a bed without mattress and blankets, unless I were on campaign. He responded that it would be necessary to find me a woman to serve as my blanket. I responded that I wasn't accustomed to that type of cover either.53

Ripon also noted another use of deer products. When describing the interior of Formosans' dwellings, he wrote that they were furnished primarily with "small, flat trunks, about two feet [demi-aune] long, which are filled with Indian-style clothing, which they exchange for deerskins and venison."54 The aborigines of Taiwan were thus already connected to international trade networks before the Europeans arrived. Their primary trading partners were from China's Fujian Province.

Chinese in Taiwan

A seventeenth-century Chinese source has this to say about Fujian Province: "It is a barren land [斥鹵磽確] whose fields do not supply food, and inhabitants must turn to the seas to make their living. Nine out of ten families make their living from the ocean."55 The author exaggerates the numbers, but many Fujianese did make their living on the sea. Taiwan was increasingly a destination for them in the late Ming period. Indeed, in northern Taiwan, which had the longest-standing trade links with Fujian, some aboriginal peoples made their living as traders, buying iron and textiles from Chinese merchants and then exchanging them for products Chinese merchants sought, such as coal, sulfur, gold, and venison. It was not a high-volume business, but it was enough to allow these aboriginal intermediaries to make their living entirely through trade and handicrafts, a means of sustenance unique among Formosan Austronesians.56

The southwestern part of Taiwan had no coal or sulfur or gold, but in the sixteenth century it began to surpass northern Taiwan as a destination for Fujianese traders. One draw was the mullet fish, which migrated to the Taiwan Strait each year to spawn. Around the winter solstice, a hundred or more fishing junks from Fujian braved the difficult crossing to Taiwan to catch mullet with traps, nets, and poison. Six or eight weeks later they went home. Mullet flesh, dried and salted, fetched a pretty profit, and mullet roe fetched even more.57 At times these fishermen set up camp on Taiwan's shores, and some of them were doubtless threatened by headhunting parties. Many, however, began trading with aborigines, buying deer products—venison, skins, and antlers.

Southwestern Taiwanese trade remained of minor importance until after 1567, when the Ming court lifted the ban on foreign trade but held in place the ban on Sino-Japanese trade. Chinese merchants, eager to buy Japanese silver, sought places to meet Japanese just outside the jurisdiction of China. Southwestern Taiwan was one of these places. The Japanese were eager to buy Chinese silks and porcelain, but they also began buying deerskins, which they used to make decorative wall coverings, armor, and other items. Chinese peddlers began making huge profits by buying deerskins from aborigines and selling them to the Japanese. In Ripon's words, deerskins "are the biggest business [le plus grand trafic] that there is in this country."58 Chinese traded not just the Indian-style textiles that Ripon saw in aboriginal houses but also iron, ceramics, and salt. The latter might easily have been produced in Taiwan, prompting an early Dutch visitor to ask a Chinese trader why the aborigines bought salt from the Chinese when "the nature of [their] land, aided by the interaction of the sun and the sea, gives it to them in abundance."59 The man replied "that the Chinese are perfectly aware of this, and clever enough to extract it from this natural abundance. But if they had shown the inhabitants how to do it, then their profitable trade would have gone to ruins, as it is an art and craft that can be learned only by sight; therefore they were keeping them to their rural devotion and simplicity."60

According to Chen Di, Fujianese trade to Taiwan increased markedly in the late sixteenth century. Indeed, he noted that some Fujianese merchants had even learned aboriginal languages. Early Dutch sources corroborate his account. One Dutch visitor found scores of Chinese living in an aboriginal village near the center of Sino-Japanese trade: "There is scarcely a house in this village . . . that does not have one or two or three, or even five or six Chinese living there."61 Indeed, he wrote, the villagers' speech was so riddled with Chinese words "that it . . . is a mixed and broken language."62 The visitor had no knowledge of the aboriginal language, and later accounts show that this and other aboriginal languages were alive and well, but his account suggests that Sino-aboriginal interactions were strong and growing in the years before the Europeans arrived. Chen Di felt that such contact was bad for the aborigines: "I am afraid their pure simplicity is becoming more and more corrupted."63

There is evidence of at two Chinese villages during the earliest years of Dutch settlement. The larger of the two was on a long thin peninsula, practically an island, that formed the Bay of Tayouan. It was separated by water from the aboriginal villages and certainly predated the arrival of the Dutch. It appears to have been inhabited year-round, which is one reason the Dutch decided to establish their headquarters nearby. The other village was on the mainland. It was smaller and may not have predated Dutch colonization. (It would later become the city of Tainan.) In the early seventeenth century it and its sister village on the peninsula were, according to a Chinese man who visited them, inhabited by "fishermen and pirates".64

Pirates indeed appear to have found Taiwan an amenable base, and there were many, many Chinese pirates during the first half of the seventeenth century. The reason is simple. Since Chinese were prohibited from trading with Japan, they turned to smuggling. Smugglers enjoyed no legal protection from their government and were therefore vulnerable to robbery and extortion. Moreover, they had no official means of guaranteeing their contracts. For these reasons they found it necessary to form organizations to enforce their claims against their rivals. There were thus selective pressures favoring the rise of large, armed maritime smuggling organizations, which combined smuggling, piracy, and extortion, selling protection to merchants and fishermen and using violence to enforce their claims against rivals. Chinese scholars have coined terms for these organizations, such as armed maritime organizations (海商武裝集團)65 or, even better, pirate-merchants (海寇商人).66 When the Chinese court had firm control over its coasts, such organizations declined, as they did in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. On the eve of European colonization, however, they were once again on the rise. They would prove a difficult challenge for the Dutch, but the Dutch also faced other enemies as well: samurai, conquistadores, and, of course, headhunters like those who had dismembered Ripon's comrades. The battle in which Ripon nearly died was the first of many.

Notes: