They use the unusual format \017 to describe an ASCII value of 17 (decimal).
So you send the cursor home with:
softSPItransfer(0x01);
to move the cursor to column 5 in the second row:
softSPItransfer(0x11);
softSPItransfer(0x04);
softSPItransfer(0x01);
At least that's my interpretation of the datasheet.