There are weapons a man makes with his hands, with steel and
gunpowder and the dark machinations of his mind. And then there are weapons
that come from within, from the darkest caverns of our bodies, the stuff that
reminds us—no matter how civilized we pretend to be—that we’re all just walking
sacks of meat and fluid and waste.
Hell, I’ve written about a lot of terrible things in my
time. But sometimes the truth—the goddamn historical truth—is stranger and more
horrifying than anything I could conjure from the shadows of my imagination.
This isn’t fiction, folks. This really happened.
PART I: THE APPROACH
In the sweltering heat of 1628, long before America was even
a gleam in the founding fathers’ eyes, the soldiers of Mataram marched toward
Batavia. Their bare feet slapped against the dirt paths, callused soles
cracking with each step. You could smell them coming—not just the usual stench
of unwashed bodies and leather baking in the Indonesian sun, but something
else: anticipation, the metallic tang of coming violence.
Sultan Agung wanted Fort Hollandia gone. Simple as that. The
VOC—the Dutch East India Company—had driven their colonizer’s stake deep into
his territory, and the fort was like a splinter under his royal fingernail,
festering, impossible to ignore.
The Sultan wasn’t there himself, of course. Big shots rarely
are when the dying starts. He sent Tumenggung Bahureksa and Ki Mandurareja
instead, two of his patih—his commanders—with a small army trailing behind
them.
(If you think I’m making these names up, I’m not. Reality
doesn’t have to worry about what sounds plausible to American ears. Reality
just is.)
They brought ladders and battering rams, weapons as old as
warfare itself. The Dutch defenders—all twenty-four of them, if you can believe
Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen’s report—watched from inside the fort as
the Mataram forces assembled. Twenty-four against hundreds. The kind of odds
that make a man’s bowels turn to water.
Funny I should mention bowels. Remember that detail. It’s
important.
PART II: THE FIRST ASSAULT
The first attack was like many first dates—awkward,
fumbling, and over much too quickly. It lasted just a day and a night. The
Mataram soldiers, for all their superiority in numbers, found themselves
outmatched by Dutch firepower and tactical position.
I imagine those Dutch soldiers huddled inside Fort Hollandia
as night fell, their faces illuminated by muzzle flashes as they fired at
shadowy figures scaling the walls. Twenty-four men, counting their bullets,
watching their gunpowder dwindle, listening to the shouts and screams outside.
“We’ll die here,” one might have whispered, the words barely
audible above the gunfire.
“Shut up and reload,” another would have answered.
By dawn, the Mataram forces had retreated, leaving their
dead scattered like broken toys around the perimeter of the fort. Round one to
the Dutch. But wars, like the best horror stories, rarely end after the first
scare.
PART III: THE RETURN
They came back in 1629. October 25th, to be precise. The
Dutch were down to seventeen men now. Seventeen against an army.
This time, the Mataram forces were smarter. They attacked
from all sides, like a virus overwhelming an immune system. The Dutch fought
back with everything they had: muskets, pistols, even rocks and cookware when
the ammunition ran low.
There comes a point in any siege when the defenders have to
face the ugly truth: they’re out of options. The bullets are gone. The
gunpowder kegs scrape empty. The stones have all been thrown.
That’s when a twenty-three-year-old German sergeant named
Hans Madelijn had what history would record as either a stroke of genius or an
act of desperate madness. Often, those two things are the same.
“Bring the shit,” he ordered.
His men stared at him.
“The what?”
“You heard me. All the shit in the fort. Bring it. Now.”
PART IV: THE FINAL WEAPON
We live in an age of clinical distance from our bodily
functions. We flush and forget. But in the 17th century, human waste was an
everyday reality. Chamber pots emptied out windows. Sewage running in open
gutters. The smell of human excrement as common as woodsmoke.
But to use it as a weapon? That required a special kind of
desperation—or inspiration.
The Dutch soldiers gathered it all: the contents of chamber
pots, the communal latrines, days and maybe weeks worth of human waste. Into
pottery containers it went. The smell inside the fort must have been ungodly,
even by 17th-century standards.
Then they took up positions along the walls. Below them, the
Mataram soldiers were closing in, confident in their superior numbers,
convinced that this time, the fort would fall.
“Ready,” Madelijn might have said, lifting his arm as his
men hoisted their foul ammunition. I imagine him hesitating for just a moment,
wondering if military history would judge him a madman or a savior.
“FIRE!”
Down it rained. Not bullets or arrows or boiling oil, but
human feces. Pot after pot arcing through the air, then shattering on impact.
The splatter radius would have been considerable.
Imagine it hitting you. The sudden weight, the explosive
impact, the immediate realization of what just landed on your head, your face,
your clothes. The stench enveloping you like a physical force.
“O Seytang Orang Hollanda de bachalay sammatay!”
The cry went up from the Mataram forces. “Oh, the Dutch
devils are fighting with shit!”
“Mambet tahi! Mambet tahi!” (“Smells like shit! Smells like
shit!”)
The effect was immediate and devastating. The attack
collapsed into chaos. Men who had faced bullets without flinching now fled,
gagging, vomiting, desperately trying to wipe the filth from their skin and
clothes.
Even the brave Mandurareja, who had led his men through
gunfire, couldn’t stand his ground against this most primal of assaults. His
fine clothes were smeared with excrement, the stench clinging to him like a
second skin.
The Mataram forces retreated to the nearest river, desperate
to cleanse themselves. The battle was over. Fort Hollandia stood, defended not
by bullets or blades, but by the basest product of human biology.
PART V: THE AFTERMATH
History is written by the victors, but sometimes even the
victors are embarrassed by how they won. The Dutch didn’t celebrate this
particular triumph with the same gusto they might have shown after a more
conventional military victory.
The Mataram forces, meanwhile, nursed a grudge as foul as
the weapon that had defeated them. They dubbed Batavia “Kota Tahi”—the City of
Feces. The name stuck, at least among the locals. The street west of the former
fort was known as “Gang Tahi” well into the 19th century.
Some say the word “Betawi” itself—the name for the
indigenous people of Jakarta—originated from those cries of “Mambet tahi!”
during the retreat. Etymology is funny that way. Words outlive the people who
spoke them, carrying ancient humiliations into the present.
Sultan Agung never did take Fort Hollandia. The Dutch East
India Company continued its colonial project, building an empire on spices,
slavery, and apparently, when necessary, shit.
EPILOGUE
We like to think warfare has rules, boundaries, a certain
twisted nobility. But when survival is at stake, humans will use whatever
weapons come to hand—or from within.
From the plague-ridden corpses catapulted over the walls of
Kaffa to the smallpox blankets given to Native Americans, biological warfare
has always been with us. It’s one of our oldest and most terrible innovations.
But there’s something uniquely horrifying about the Siege of
Batavia. Something primal. Something that reminds us that beneath our civilized
veneer, we’re still animals, capable of using every part of ourselves—even the
parts we’d rather flush and forget—to destroy our enemies.
The next time you sit on your porcelain throne, think about
Hans Madelijn and his seventeen desperate men. Think about how they used what
most of us consider unmentionable to win a battle that, by all rights, they
should have lost.
And maybe—just maybe—look at the flush handle with a little
more respect.
Because sometimes, the most terrible weapon isn’t the one we
forge with fire and steel.
Sometimes, it’s the one we produce every day.
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