Chapter 1 - Pieter Albert Bik and His Writings

Summary

Introduction: Tourism and Colonialism

In the April of 1816, the sailing ship Nassau embarked on a journey from the Netherlands to Java, then newly reacquired under the Dutch flag after the disruptions of the Napoleonic wars. On board were not only a contingent of soon-to-be colonial officials but also their families, including a certain Pieter Albert Bik, at the age of seventeen following his father and older brother who had staked their hope for a better life on the colonies. Pieter Albert, unlike his father, travelled without promise of a position waiting for him, but ended up having a long and successful, if unremarkable, career in the service of the colonial administration. The introduction of steam ships being still some way off, his first passage to the East was both perilous and uncomfortable, but the advance of the technology that was to greatly facilitate Bik's return to his fatherland some three decades later was already becoming increasingly evident in the world around him: that same year, 1816, saw the appearance of the first steamboat on the river Rhine, a hotspot for a new kind of culture of travel within Europe, attracting visitors in large numbers both domestically and from farther afield, especially from Britain. It was one of the beginnings of the now omnipresent phenomenon of tourism, one that Bik was to experience more fully on his later returns to Europe, and record in diaries that became a part of the manuscript published here. On his return from Asia in 1847 not only could he make the journey on a luxurious steamship, he also notes at several locations the then-ongoing construction works laying railway tracks across the face of continental Europe, and he himself got his first taste of train travel on that same journey while visiting Versailles from Paris. Bik got to witness first-hand the changes then taking place in European travel.

Yet the Indies where he made his career were also changing. The re-establishment of Dutch rule was not merely a return to an earlier status quo, as the era of the great trading companies was now squarely in the past and the nineteenth century was to witness a brand of aggressive imperialism and intrusive colonisation quite unlike those of earlier times, perhaps most infamously exemplified on the Asian scene by the Opium War between Britain and China in 1839–42.