Lost in Translation

In 1621 five children of kings and chieftains of the island of Ambon in the East Indies (modern Indonesia) arrived in the United Provinces. They had been sent to the Netherlands by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to study Calvinist theology, so that in time they might spread the light of the gospel among their countrymen. But upon their return to Ambon after ten years in the Netherlands, all did not go the way it had been planned by the Company. The embassy, and the project underwriting it, was dismissed as a failure by the Company; a judgment repeated in modern scholarship. Taking its cue from scholarship in cultural approaches to translation studies, this chapter critiques the “failure” of the Ambonese embassy by re-examining extant textual evidence. The breadth of this evidence demonstrates that such conclusions fail to consider Ambonese agency, and the breadth of European opinion concerning the embassy as expressed by contemporaries.