In 1613, the 28-year-old Jan Pieterszoon Kun was appointed head of the Dutch trading post in Banten, the sultanate of West Java. A capable, energetic, far-sighted man, not shy about the means to achieve his goals, Kuhn, having made a quick career in the United Netherlands East India Company (NOIC), founded in 1602, put forward a plan to create a permanent center of its possessions in the Malay (Indonesian) archipelago. Kun's choice fell on the small principality of Jayakertu, whose lord was a vassal of Banten. In 1618, Kun, who became Governor-General, began construction of a fort in Jayakert. After repulsing the British and local lords, Kun captured Jayakerta and destroyed it to the ground. On the site of the Indonesian city, a powerful fort and settlement began to be created around it, by order of the directors of the NOIC, which received the name Batavia in 1619-in honor of the Gallic Batavian tribe that once lived in the Netherlands. Batavia became the administrative and commercial center of the NOIC's Asian and African possessions. She admired the sailor Woods Rogers, who, in 1710, after an exhausting seven-month voyage from Europe, he wrote that he was "absolutely amazed to see the magnificent city and the Europeans who are so excellently settled in the Indies" [Naap, 1935, blz. 710]. Keywords: Batavia, Dutch East India Company (NOIC), intra-Asian trade, Batavian roadstead, city channels, port administration. THE PORT CITY AND ITS INHABITANTS Batavia was constructed according to a plan sent from Amsterdam, where the NOIC board was located, authored by the mathematician and topographer Simon Stevin [Breuning, 1954, blz. 125; Leur and Loos, 1949, blz. 194-198]. The Portuguese and Spanish built their fortresses on the sea coast, if possible on islands or peninsulas that could be defended by relatively small forces. Another principle of the Iberian military engineers was the division of the fortress proper, where only Portuguese or Spaniards lived, and the city ... Read more