I’ve read about Portugeuse and Dutch merchants who would sail to places like Java/Malaysia to purchase pepper and nutmeg for huge profits. Movies set in this era show European traders coming into port and everyone just displaying their goods and bartering. Is that how it worked or was their more structure to it? Like when the Dutch made their first expedition to Indonesia, did the Sultan of Benten already know they were coming? Did they have to meet with him first to get a license to access the ports? Did people have to have a common language or did they just come into an established market and point? When they arrived in port were there standard prices, like this much silver means this much pepper? I love the details of these first-hand historic accounts, but I can't find anything that goes into detail on how this trading actually took place. Everything I read is more about the high-level trade routes and only goes into detail when describing battles/conflicts which I'm less interested in.
I can answer this question for the Dutch East India Company!
The earliest expeditions to the Indonesian Archipelago can be summarised as “improvisation”: when (and if, because quite a few lost their way) the Dutch trading ships managed to reach Java, they often had to establish new trading-relations with the local populace. Portugal, now part of Spain and therefore at war with the Dutch Republic, were present in the major trading ports in the region. Goa, Malacca, Macao, the Moluccas, and Nagasaki. The Dutch couldn’t contest these strongholds: the delegation send ashore from two Dutch ships at Macao were immediately captured by Portuguese soldiers and executed (6 by public hanging, the rest drowned in the sea at night(1)) so they were forced to seek out smaller ports like Benten.
To address your movie-inspired image: the Dutch first had to gain permission to trade, let alone dock their ships, from the local government before they could trade. Often this was done through gifts and sometimes through force. The Fifth Expedition saw the captain of the Swarte Leeuw (the Black Lion) capture a local fishing boat with the 6 crewmembers before even approaching the harbour. In his opinion, they would have a stronger position during negotations for trading rights.(1) When they finally acquired these rights, the Dutch would trade mainly with the government by a temporary contract. But they’d often manage to trade a little extra with private traders.
Language wasn’t an issue: most of the merchants on board of the Dutch ships spoke Portuguese and so did local merchants. And if they didn’t, they’d have no problem finding translators. In the early years, prices were decided on the spot, but were largely influenced by the prices in the overall trading network. Remember that international trade between what’s now the Arabian Peninsula, India, and Indonesia existed thousands of years before the Portuguese showed up.
Throughout the 17th century, the Dutch managed to gain more and more territory in the region, and this changed the way they conducted trade. By conquering the major ports in the region (Batavia, Malacca, Makassar, Capetown) and creating new trading posts (factorijen, like Fort Zeelandia on Taiwan, Colombo, Calicut, etcetera) the Dutch settled into a structured trading system. Trade agreements between the Dutch and local governments, Dutch mines and plantations, warfare, piracy all provided the Dutch East India Company with luxury resources to sell in Europe and enslaved people to keep the system working.
There are many, MANY, contracts, registers, records, journals, and other sources that kept record of all the (legal) trade that took place by and in the domain of the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch were a stickler for recording everything (preferably 3-fold). Veritable armies of notaries, secretaries, and clerks dutifully recorded everything that changed hands.
Of course, there was a LOT of smuggling. Captains and crew often wouldn’t shy away from personally buying jewels, spices, and persons and not report this. Although punishment was severe, smuggling still was rampant throughout the existence of the Company.(3)
The problem with first-hand accounts is that they’re often not of interest for many historians or readers. They either want to write/read about “exciting” things like war, or compile data from sources to show the total worth of goods traded in a specific year. Transcribing and publishing first-hand accounts is laborious work, which often does not yield sufficient gains for many research projects. That’s also why these accounts are often not translated into modern English.
You could try https://dekok.xyz/htrsearch/ which is a search-engine that uses Hand-text recognition software to look through the Dutch colonial archives. You’ll have to translate the keywords you’re looking for into Dutch first, and then translate the results back. It’s far from perfect, but it’ll give you an idea of what’s been recorded.
============
(1) L. Blussé, ‘Brief encounter at Macao’, Modern Asian Studies Vol. 22, No. 3, Special Issue: Asian Studies in Honour of Professor Charles Boxer (1988) 651.
(2) Parmentier, Davids, en Everaert. Peper, plancius en porselein, 26.
(3) J. Lucassen, M. van Rossum. “Smokkelloon en zilverstromen: illegale export van edelmetaal via de VOC”. Tijdschrift Sociale Economische Geschiedenis, Vol 13, No. 1, 2016. 99-133