Will I love Bitter Bonds?

The title is a pun: in 1676, Cornelia van Nijenroode married Johan Bitter in “Batavia” (then capital of the Dutch East Indies, now Jakarta) and thereafter tried unsuccessfully to break the bonds of matrimony, first in Indonesia and then in the Netherlands.

The story is such a page-turner because it links Dutch sources in both Indonesia and the Netherlands with material from Japan (where Cornelia was born to a Japanese mother and a Dutch father).

It includes a family portrait from 1663, in which Cornelia stands proudly beside her first husband, a prosperous Dutch official, with their two daughters… show more.

Few seventeenth-century women traveled as far as Cornelia van Nijenroode. Born on the island of Hirado off the coast of Kyushu around 1624 to a Dutch father and Japanese mother, she was taken by the Dutch East India Company to Batavia, Indonesia, in 1637. A family portrait now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam shows her with her first husband and daughters. Alas, he died young, leaving her prey to fortune hunters. When her second husband refused to allow her to continue with her commercial enterprises, she tried to divorce him, a struggle that took her all the way to Holland.… show more.