By Baas Keuvelaar
As is well known by all Dutch Burghers who have made a
Study of the history of the Dutch Bast India Company in which
their ancestors took service in the " Good Old Days, " a large
proportion of Europeans, other than Dutch, were servants of the
V. 0. C. Their oath of allegiance to the Hon'ble Company
made them Dutch, and one-fifth of the Company's servants were
Germans, Hoogduitschers or " Moffen, " as they were also
sometimes called. How they acquired a sufficient knowledge of
the Dutch language to qualify themselves, within a short space
of time, for service in important posts in the Government, was
the puzzle. What with Portuguese (as a sort of home language)
Dutch as the official language, Sinhalese the language of
conversation with the villagers, these " moffen" must have had
the gift of tongues to have successfully made love in Dutch to
the Jonge Juffrouws and to have married them afterwards. But
some of my lady readers with say Amor omnia vincit.
Any how, Ludwig von Breitenfeld van Hamburg,
soldaat
in dienst der Ed. Comp. had not remained many days in Ceylon
before he was entered as Lodewyk van Bredeveld in his " act of
appointment, " and years subsequently, in the Church registers.
The Germans in Ceylon in these days were in the habit of
telling
the King of Kandy whenever they had the chance, that they were
a cut above the Dutch. Whether this was a part of a
policy of peaceful penetration, " I cannot say, but the King
like the English skippers of the old type, was not concerned with
ethnological problems and preferred to call them all "Dutchmen."
That the Germans were not inferior to the Dutch in slimness is
shown by the following anecdote about van Bredeveld.
Lodewyk, who entered the Company's service with the rank
of a soldaat, was a man of some education, and noticing that
the Sinhalese were a very litigious race, decided to become a
proctor or procureur, as was the term in use in those days, and
even to this day, in the language of the country.
04/08/07