There will be more to say, but I studied this issue when writing a book on a specific VOC ship, the Batavia, and her voyage east in 1628-29. The officers and petty officers involved may not have been typical of those who worked for the Company across the whole of its nearly 200-year life, but I have no reason to think that they were so atypical that the examples I researched would be misleading. the following extracts are lifted from my book Batavia's Graveyard (2002). In terms of general reading the go-to work is undoubtedly Femme Gaastra's Geschiedenis van de VOC: Opkomst, Bloei en Ondergang (2012).

• The skipper – in charge of all sailing operations, but subordinate to the upper merchant when in port

The skipper of the Batavia was a tough old seaman with considerable experience of the Indies trade, a man named Ariaen Jacobsz. He came from Durgerdam, a fishing village just a mile or two north-east of Amsterdam, and he had been a servant of the VOC for two decades or more. Jacobsz was a veteran of several voyages to the east and probably in his middle forties, which would have made him one of the oldest men on board. That he was a superb sailor is beyond doubt; he had already skippered another large VOC merchantman with some success, and the East India Company was not in the habit of trusting its newest ships to indifferent officers. But the records of his service show that Jacobsz. was also choleric, quick-tempered and sensitive to any slight; that he sometimes drank to excess; and that he was a lecher who was not above imposing his attentions on the female passengers whom he carried in his ships.

• The upper merchant – responsible for trading and for the overall profitability of the voyage

The upper-merchant, who was called Francisco Pelsaert, was in many respects Jacobsz.’s opposite – not only in wealth and education, which was to be expected in this period, but in origin as well. For one thing, Pelsaert was no Dutchman; he came from Antwerp in the Southern Netherlands, the great rival of Amsterdam. Moreover he had been born into a Catholic family at a time when the VOC required its officers to be Protestant; he lacked Jacobsz.’s powers of leadership; and despite long service in the Indies, he was as indecisive as the skipper was self-confident. The two men were not friends.

The upper merchant – like so many of the Company’s most valued men – had been born in Antwerp. Pelsaert was in many ways a typical servant of the VOC, although he came from a Catholic family, and (since Jan Company hired only Protestants) had been forced to conceal his origins in order to secure his first appointment. For one thing, he had few family ties to keep him in the Netherlands – his father had died before he was five years old, and though his mother remained alive, she soon remarried and seems to have left the boy to be brought up by his grandfather. For another, though Pelsaert’s relatives were wealthy, he himself had few resources; when his grandfather died, the old gentleman willed his estate to his wife and left nothing of significance to his ward.

Forced to seek a fortune of his own, Pelsaert – by now a man of 20 – secured an introduction to the Middelburg chamber of the VOC in the last months of the year 1615. The application was successful. Pelsaert was hired as an assistant – the lowest merchant rank, one that involved mostly humdrum clerical duties – at a salary of 24 guilders a month. Four months later he took ship for the east on board the Wapen van Zeeland•.

Nothing is known of Pelsaert’s first three years in the Indies, but he must have been reasonably successful. He was promoted to the post of under-merchant around 1620 and despatched to the Company’s recently-established base at Surat, on the north-west coast of India. There he was to help to open trading relations with the Mughal emperors. Within weeks of his arrival on the subcontinent, Pelsaert was despatched to the imperial court at Agra to deal in cloths and indigo. His salary was increased to 55 guilders a month and, in 1624, to 80. By then the man from Antwerp had been promoted to the rank of upper-merchant and placed in command of the VOC’s mission to the Mughal court.

The simplest way for Dutch merchants to make a fortune in the Indies was to deal in spices on their own account, but this was not in fact permitted. The VOC did allow its men to bring minute quantities of cloves or pepper home, but ­– jealous of its monopoly – the Company forbade more widespread private trade and rarely rewarded its employees’ initiative. Even a man with 20 years’ service, who did his best to serve the Company and brought home cargoes worth tens of thousands of guilders, could not expect a bonus as of right. The consequences were predictable. Under-paid and exposed to considerable temptation, the merchants of the VOC were thoroughly corrupt.

This fact was commonly acknowledged. ‘There are no Ten Commandments south of the Equator’, the common saying had it, and honest men were hard to come by in the east. Though personal belongings could be, and were, frequently searched to prevent the private importation of spice, fraudulent accounting was commonplace; it was a relatively simple matter to buy goods at a low price and claim they had cost much more, or to over-value damaged stock. Nor were the merchants the only ones busily defrauding their employer. Many lesser servants of the VOC bribed fellow Dutchmen to overlook their private activities in the spice markets. Some traded in the name of Asian merchants, though this, too, was prohibited. ‘There was no ‘esprit de corps’ in the VOC,’ one historian has noted. ‘The Company as a body was avaricious, and its employees were often demoralised by its institutionalised greed... Every able-bodied man from the Councillor of the Indies down to the simple soldier considered it an absolute must to care for himself first.’

Francisco Pelsaert was no exception to this rule. While at Agra, he used Company funds to set himself up as a money lender, advancing cash to local indigo-growers at an annual rate of 18 percent and pocketing the profits for himself. It was a risky business; he could hardly keep full records, for fear of an audit; the farmers who made up his clientele sometimes defaulted on their loans; and there was always the danger that a colleague would denounce him to the Company. But by initiating his successor in the deception when he himself returned to Surat, Pelsaert successfully evaded detection. By 1636, when his fraud at last came to light, the VOC had incurred losses of almost 44,000 rupees.