After a decade of weakness on Taiwan the Dutch East India Company received reinforcements from Batavia in 1634 and used them to subdue the villages around its fort at Tayouan, burning Mattau in 1635 and compelling its neighbours to submit; Tonio Andrade describes the resulting settlement as a pax hollandica maintained by annual assemblies of village headmen holding company staves of office. The company also acted against the inhabitants of Lamey Island, who had killed the crews of two shipwrecked Dutch vessels; from 1636 successive expeditions drove the islanders into limestone caves, where large numbers died when the entrances were sealed and fires lit, and removed the survivors from the island altogether, distributing them among households at Tayouan and shipping others to Batavia. The island was subsequently leased out for cultivation. These campaigns are documented in unusual detail because the company kept daily registers at Fort Zeelandia, and they are among the best-recorded instances of a European trading company clearing an indigenous population in the seventeenth century.
The Dutch East India Company subjugated the indigenous villages of southwestern Taiwan by punitive expedition, and cleared the inhabitants of Lamey Island from their home entirely
The Company's own village registers, compiled for the annual landdag assemblies, counted about 68,600 people in some 315 villages at the 1650 enumeration — one of the earliest systematic population counts anywhere in maritime Asia. Lamey Island (Lambay, modern Xiaoliuqiu) held around 1,100 people, of whom several hundred died in the 1636 assault and the survivors were deported and dispersed.
No agreed figure. Company records describe several hundred islanders dying in the caves at Lamey in 1636 and further deaths in later sweeps and in transit; the figures given in different Dutch reports do not agree and no reconstruction has settled them. Deaths in the mainland campaigns against Mattau and its neighbours were far smaller and are recorded village by village.
The burning of Mattau, the smoking-out and killing of the Lamey islanders in their caves, and the distribution of surviving Lamey children and adults into Dutch and allied households are recorded in the Zeelandia day-registers and company correspondence used by Andrade.
Taiwan, Indonesia