The Gold of Pimaba

Early in 1638 a company of the Dutch East India Company under Captain Johan van Linga rounded the Hengchun Peninsula, marched north along the coast from Taimali, and came out onto the Taitung plain. What the Company wanted was gold. The information had come from villages along the way, passed on piece by piece: somewhere over the mountains to the east there was a river, and there was gold in the river.

Three powers held the plain at the time. The largest was Pimaba, with a population of about three thousand and a thousand men it could put into the field, six or seven smaller villages attached to it, and groves of areca and coconut palms around its houses. To the south lay Tipol, and along the foothills the Rukai village of Tarouma was pushing down from the central mountains. Van Linga reached an alliance with Magol, the headman of Pimaba. The go-betweens were Chinese traders and interpreters, who could be found in both camps.

The alliance served each side differently. The Company wanted a base and guides for the road north. Pimaba wanted guns. In January 1638 the Company joined forces with the lord of Lonckjouw on the Hengchun Peninsula and took Linauw, at the southern end of the rift valley. In January 1640 it went back, this time with Pimaba warriors, and four to five hundred people were killed or wounded. Linauw and Pimaba did not speak the same language and had been enemies for a long time. Pimaba men had never been able to hold ground in that country, and during the assault some of them broke and ran more than once. After this battle the road from the Beinan River through to the Xiuguluan River lay open.

The Company put up a storehouse at Pimaba and stationed a sergeant there with a few dozen soldiers to hold the goods bought locally or shipped in, and to ask about gold. The junior merchant Maarten Wesselingh had come to Taiwan in 1636 and spent several years travelling the southern mountains, surveying villages and writing reports; it was Wesselingh who sent word that the village of Taccabul was willing to make peace with the Company. In 1641 he was killed in the east.

The following year the Governor of Formosa, Paulus Traudenius, brought troops across and, together with Pimaba warriors, attacked the villages of Nicabon and Tammalaccauw. When it was over, Tammalaccauw sent five representatives to Pimaba to sue for peace. Traudenius gave a single order: from now on Tammalaccauw would be subject to Pimaba. In February 1642 the army left Pimaba overland and crossed the mountains of Taccabul back to Tayouan. In April 1643 Tipol, which had also been beaten, came to Pimaba and made formal submission.

From then on, when Company residents needed a chief from the mountain villages, they sent Pimaba men to summon him. Tribute from the villages that had submitted was either collected with Pimaba men escorting the collectors or delivered straight to Pimaba. In 1644 the Company began leasing out village trade in the west, selling the right to trade with each village to the highest bidder. That system never came east. Trade in the east stayed in the hands of the one storehouse and its few dozen soldiers.

And the gold. In 1643 Captain Pieter Boon led troops north as far as Tarraboan, and on 11 May he set out back from there by way of Pimaba. Only after the end of 1645 did the Company fix the place where Tarraboan's gold came from. The vein itself was never found, and in time the search was dropped.

In 1661 Koxinga's fleet sailed into Tayouan. Early the next year the eighty-odd officers and men at the eastern post were escorted by Pimaba men all the way to the coast of Pingtung, where they boarded ship and left. The people who escorted them out came from the same village that had marched with them against Linauw more than twenty years before.