Three days in Old Siam

Published on February 10, 2008

A Traveller in Siam in the Year 1655
By Gijsbert Heeck
Translated and introduced by Barend Jan Terwiel
Published by Silkworm Books, 2008
Available at Asia Books and Kinokuniya, Bt595
Reviewed by Michael Smithies


Special to The Nation
Gijsbert Heeck, sometimes spelt Heecq, is well-known to cognoscenti of 17th-century Siam for his detailed description of the Dutch "lodge" (warehouse, comptoir, go-down, office, call it what you will), the extent and rather luxurious nature of which were the envy of the other foreign communities in Ayutthaya, be they Portuguese, French, English or Japanese.

What is much less known is that his account of his stay in Siam extended far beyond the establishment of the Dutch East India Company on the east bank of the Chao Phya below Wat Phananchoeng.

Heeck, born in 1619 near Utrecht, a ship's surgeon, had twice travelled to the Indies before he returned to the Netherlands to settle down, but the death of two successive wives and one child caused him to change his plans and depart once more, in 1654, this time as chief medical surgeon for three years.  

In Siam, 1655  was the last full year of the reign of King Prasat Thong, who came to the throne in 1629 after a messy power struggle and whose succession was in turn similarly disputed the year after Heeck's visit; Prasat Thong's tempestuous and volatile character is made clear in the works of that other VOC employee, Jeremias van Vliet.

Heeck points out that the court's relations with the Dutch were a little strained, but that did not stop him visiting Ayutthaya from September 9 to 12 and leaving a detailed and seemingly accurate account of the capital, noting the fast-flowing water in the straight canals that criss-crossed the city, and the empty  elephant houses because the elephants were taking the air outside the city to escape decimation from an infectious disease.

Nor did it prevent the Siamese coming down on the side of the Dutch in a dispute with the Portuguese.

 The book is divided into three parts: 19 pages of introduction, 48 pages of translated text, and 41 pages of the original Dutch. We are given for good measure several pages of colour illustrations, including two fold-out maps of the Chao Phya, one being the well-known Valentijn map of 1724-6, the other the much less known Siamese River manuscript map circa 1690 from the National Archives at The Hague.

Heeck in some ways is a bit of a gossip - thank goodness, for we learn a good deal about life in mid-17th-century Siam. One other aspect that comes out in this account is the constant desire of the Company to reduce costs (already seen in the sending of the first Siamese embassy to Holland earlier in the century) - to the point of pushing for a marriage to reduce office expenses and offload an employee to Batavia.

One section in the otherwise exemplary introduction is pretentiously if politically fashionably headed "Gender studies", when all it covers is the role of Siamese mistresses of the Dutch and their offspring.

But any quibbles are minor, and can be ironed out in a later edition. For now, we should be very thankful that a complete edition of Heeck's text has appeared in the original and in English translation, and this relatively slim volume should quickly find a place on the bookshelves of every person interested in 17th-century Siam.