Coen is known for strict governance and…
September 1629 CE
Coen is known for strict governance and harsh criticism of people who do not share his views, at times directed even at the Heeren XVII (for which he has been reprimanded).
His overall policies are however never judged to be unreasonable.
Known be strict towards subordinates and merciless to his opponents, Coen’s willingness to use violence to obtain his ends is too much for many, even for such a relatively violent period of history.
Saartje Specx, the daughter of Jacques Specx, governor of the North Quarter of the VOC's)Asian trading empire, and a Japanese concubine, had been born in 1617 at the Dutch trading base on the island of Hirado.
Twelve years old in 1629, she is living at Batavia in Java under Coen’s protection.
Here she falls in love with fifteen-year-old Pieter Cortenhoeff, a standard-bearer in the VOC army, and is found making love to him in Coen's private apartment.
When the Governor hears of this, a contemporary writer attests, "his face turned white and his chair and the table trembled."
Coen has Cortenhoeff beheaded and has to be dissuaded from having Saartje drowned in a barrel.
Instead she is severely beaten in front of the Town Hall of Batavia. (Under the rules governing the VOC's Asian possessions, Saartje Specx, as a part-Asian, has no right to live in the Netherlands. On her father's return to Java she makes a good marriage to Georgius Candidius, a Calvinist minister, and accompanies him to the Dutch trading base in Formosa, where she will die at nineteen in 1636.)
Sultan Agung of Mataram has besieged Batavia twice during Coen's term in office, in 1628 and 1629.
Agung's military is poorly armed, however, and has inadequate provisions of food, and is never able to capture the city.
The forty-two-year-old Coen suddenly dies during Agung's second siege, on September 21, 1629.
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