Chapter 2 - The Business Venture.

The young women passengers riding in the carriage drawn by Boots and Penney were diamond heiress Gretchen Van Cleef and her cousin Anse DeGier. Gretchen was the great, great, grand-daughter of Anthony Marie Van Cleef. The cousins closely resembled each other. Both possessed typically Dutch inherited physical characteristics; blonde hair, blue-eyes and fair skin. Gretchen Van Cleef, the carriage driver, was not as tall as her cousin, Anse DeGier, but equaled her weight due to her full, voluptuous figure. Anse was tall and lean, which seemed to go with her profession. Anse was a pony girl trainer and she spent many hours at the estate’s pony training facility perfecting her charges’ performance. After a vigorous workout between the shafts, the ponies were usually cooled down by walking them in the corral. They were made to walk in a circle so that their muscles would relax gradually, thereby avoiding cramps in their highly developed leg muscles. Anse; occasionally Gretchen, would stand in the center of the circling ponies, flicking a training whip to keep the ponies on pace.

Unlike her forebear Mynheer Van Cleef, who never visited the vast spice plantation he owned in the Moluccan Islands, Gretchen spent considerable time at the plantation. Her parents wearied of cold, damp European winters, and when Gretchen was twelve years old they relocated to the sunny, warm, East Indies. Gretchen, however, stayed on in Europe to complete her education. She spent her summers with her parents at the estate on Tambura. During these school years she resided in Rotterdam in the home of her aunt and uncle and her cousin, Anse, whom Gretchen adored. Anse was a year older than Gretchen and the impressionable Gretchen strove to emulate her older cousin in all things. They both attended Madame Trudeau’s Academy in Berne, where they received an excellent education suitable for wealthy, aristocratic young ladies. Both girls became accomplished horsewomen while at the academy. Anse was exceptionally adept with horses and she decided that one day she would train her own horses.

Another student at Madame Trudeau’s was a young lady whose name was Jasmine Hunter. Jasmine lived in America, in South Carolina, where her parents owned a cotton plantation. Gretchen befriended Jasmine and they developed a close, warm relationship that endured the rest of their academy years and beyond. When Gretchen was seventeen, Jasmine invited her to spend the summer vacation with her in South Carolina. Gretchen wrote her parents and they gave their permission for her to spend a month with Jasmine, but then she must come to Tambura for the balance of the summer. The girls were delighted with the prospect of Gretchen’s coming to visit in America. Gretchen liked South Carolina from the start. The large antebellum plantation houses, the rural beauty, the genteel manners, all of it. She loved it. Jasmine’s parents farmed a large plantation with many slaves. The slaves who worked in the "big house," as they referred to it, waited on Gretchen hand and foot, but she was used to that from her summers spent at the Van Cleef estate.

Jasmine suggested to Gretchen that they take a tour of the surrounding countryside and visit some of the neighboring plantations. They would leave in the morning, enjoy a leisurely, scenic, carriage ride and have lunch at the home of family friends. Awaiting them as the girls stepped out onto the mansion’s veranda, Gretchen expected to see a team of horses hitched to the carriage. But, instead, standing erectly two abreast, stood six magnificent octoroon girls, harnessed to the carriage shafts. They were of equal height and except for thigh-high, laced boots and glistening, black leather straps which criss-crossed their abdomens, they were completely nude. "We call then plantation ponies," Jasmine informed Gretchen. "Some people have their arms removed and capped for smartness sake, but we haven’t done that, as you can see. Very well, Henry. We’ll be on our way." Henry, a mulatto youth brightly dressed in a coachman’s livery and sporting a tall stovepipe hat, was seated high above the team. He snapped a long-handled carriage whip over the heads of the octoroons, signaling them to start. Gretchen was, to put it mildly, intrigued. She saw the girls’ muscles ripple beneath flawless almond skin as their long legs strained to get the massive carriage underway. Henry cracked the whip again and still again until the carriage slowly began to move down the long drive to the main road that would take them on their leisurely tour. When the carriage reached the road the team was brought up to a trot and then proceeded to prance smartly along. Henry’s whip elicited audible grunts from the bitted octoroons, heard by Jasmine and Gretchen, as it moved idly from one bare buttock to another. The two young ladies were seated in the carriage facing forward which afforded them a delightful view of the gorgeous scenery as well as the incredible sight of six lush buttocks swinging back and forth in precision unison, bearing the red welts of Henry’s flexible whip. Gretchen experienced a feeling of pleasurable, unadulterated lust. The idea of owning a stable of such creatures took shape in her mind for the first time during that unforgettable carriage ride.

Anthony Marie Van Cleef carried on his business ventures in a period of history when Holland was a world power, even contending with mighty England for commercial primacy. During his career, Van Cleef had the reputation of being an extremely shrewd entrepreneur. He invested first in the flourishing spice trade centered in the Dutch East Indies and later parlayed his profits made from the spice trade into equally profitable investments in South African gold and diamond mines. DeBeers ranked him second only to themselves in South African assets. But, it is the property in the Moluccan Islands, or Spice Islands, as they are sometimes called, which provide the setting for our story. In his lifetime, Van Cleef never visited the East Indies. Nor, for that matter, had he ever been to South Africa. Instead, he spent his entire life in Amsterdam, the capitol of The Netherlands, which he considered to be the cultural and financial center of Europe and he saw little sense in leaving it for any extended period of time. Among his countrymen he wasn’t alone in holding that opinion. Many Hollanders, who are a proud and patriotic people, shared it. Earlier, Dutch mariner Abel Tasman had explored the western Pacific, thereby laying the foundation for Holland’s claim of hegemony in the area.. The claim was contested by arch- rival England, but the two colonial powers eventually carved up the region to their mutual satisfaction. Holland’s considerably large and modern navy made it possible for aggressive Dutch merchants to trade and establish themselves almost everywhere in the world. Consistent with the policy of his fellow entrepreneurs, Van Cleef hired agents to manage his foreign properties. For the management of his East Indies plantations he selected the Dutch East Indies Company. This proved to be a good choice. The company employed competent managers and, most importantly, maintained excellent relations with both the Dutch governor’s office in Jakarta and the Australian government’s representative there. Australia had more than just a casual interest in the Spice Islands. England purchased significant quantities of spices and coffee beans (and later tea) from the Dutch planters there. Brokers in Sydney were heavily involved in the spice and coffee trade. When the blight destroyed the coffee crop in the late eighteenth century, the planters switched from growing coffee to growing tea; thus England (and America) became a tea- drinking nation.

Van Cleef had purchased a large coffee plantation on the Moluccan island of Tambura, located north of Australia in the Malay Archipelago, which runs between Celebes and New Guinea. Operating a plantation is labor intensive. Accordingly, the management company dreamt up a novel scheme and approached the Australian consulate with it. What were the possibilities of having Australian convict labor contracted to Tambura to work on the plantation? England was deporting thousands of people convicted of petty offenses in England, Scotland and Ireland to Australian penal institutions. Under the terms of the scheme the convicts would be indentured servants of the company for a period of time to coincide with their prison sentences. A small wage would be remitted to the Australian treasury, presumably to be held in trust for the prisoners until their release from bondage. The company would, of course, feed, clothe and house the servants. It was a win-win situation. The company would get a cheap supply of labor and the Australian government would be relieved of the expense of feeding and clothing the convicts, of paying prison guards and of all the other expenses involved with running prisons. The consulate discussed the offer with Canberra and the government officials there readily agreed to the company’s proposal. An initial shipment of three hundred indentured servants were shipped from Sydney to Tambura. Unmarried men and women were housed in separate barracks; married couples were assigned to small cabins. They were fed in dining halls, given cotton clothing (shoes were deemed unnecessary) and put under the supervision of company overseers who taught them how to carry out the plantation work. The treatment of the indentured servants was consistent with the treatment accorded most menial labor throughout European colonies during that period. The punishment for disobedience was swift and sure, typically a flogging witnessed by the other servants. But, rewards for hard work and good behavior were also forthcoming in the form of banquets and presents on special occasions, such as Anthony Marie’s birthday and Christmas.

When the period of their servitude was drawing to a close, many of the servants approached their overseers asking to stay on at the plantation. They were told that this was possible, but only if they agreed to become chattels of the company for life. Also, any children born to them would be chattels. Not surprisingly, when they contemplated life lived in the harsh world that awaited them if they left the plantation, many of the servants agreed to the company’s offer of chatteldom. Thus, did slavery come to Tambura. Within five generations the working population of the plantation numbered approximately three thousand slaves. In the year eighteen-fifty-six, when she was twenty-two years old, Gretchen Van Cleef inherited the Van Cleef fortune, including the huge Tambura plantation and its three thousand slaves.