A Wedding

We can assume that Lea van Bali and Nicolaas Balthus did not make elaborate plans for their wedding, which took place in the summer of 1708. Dutch weddings tended toward austerity, and Lea and Balthuus both lived in Amsterdam. Probably they just signed the parish registry and paid their fees; perhaps they exchanged rings or had a celebratory meal afterward. One suspects that on their wedding day they did not have themselves in mind so much as their daughter Hester, who received baptism in the city’s New Church on July 31. Hester would now be a Christian of married parents, doubly honorable under Dutch law.

Balinese woman (1700), h/t Mark Ponte

Hester’s age remains unknown to your author. She may have been a newborn, but given her mother's age (forty years old), Hester had probably come into the world a decade or more before her christening. Mother Lea, after all, had not been baptized until 1691, a year after her arrival in Amsterdam as a slave of Ida Castelijn. Nicolaas had probably not received early baptism either, since he too had come from the Dutch East Indies.

Lea and Nicolaas belonged to a large and almost entirely enslaved Asian diaspora that the rapacious United East India Company created in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Dutch merchants bought prisoners-of-war from Indonesian princes and bond-servants from famine-wracked islands like Bali, Lea’s homeland. They transported enslaved people to European colonies around the Indian Ocean: to Ceylon, Batavia, Ambon (Nicolaas’s home), and South Africa. Some even wound up in metropolitan Holland. The Indo-Dutch slave trade was small compared to its African contemporary, but still ensnared and immiserated thousands of people - 900,000 or more by 1830, according to historian Matthias van Rossum. Those it bound to service found themselves sweating out their lives as field hands or laborers or household servants, fearful of sexual assault and the lash.

Lea van Bali belonged to the small minority of Indo-Dutch slaves fortunate enough to gain their freedom and live a reasonably secure life. Her latter days were not, alas, entirely free from grief: she had the misfortune to outlive Nicolaas, her second husband Jan, and her daughter Hester, who died in 1728. Lea herself passed away a decade later, at the age of threescore and ten. Freedom, long life, and happiness: sometimes, one can only choose two.

Update, 30 March: Mark Ponte notes that Hester was probably baptized as an infant, as church records would have specified a child or adult baptism. He has also determined that Lea had at least one more child, daughter Elizabeth, born in 1712. See his entry on Lea van Bali for more.


Sources: I am grateful to Mark Ponte, whose research on Lea van Bali provided the fundamental materials for this narrative. See also Richard B. Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500-1850 (Ohio University Press, 2015).