The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World

THE DUTCH MOMENT

WAR, TRADE, AND SETTLEMENT IN THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ATLANTIC WORLD

WIM KLOOSTER

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Great Transformation

1. The Unleashed Lion

2. Imperial Expansion

3. Imperial Decline

4. Between Hunger and Sword

5. Interimperial Trade

6. Migration and Settlement

7. The Non-Dutch

Epilogue: War, Violence, Slavery, and Freedom

Acknowledgments

Appendix A. The Dutch Slave Trade to the French Caribbean, 1650–1675

Appendix B. Direct Dutch Slave Trade to the Spanish Empire

Notes

For Further Reading

Index

Introduction

The Great Transformation

In the half-century spanning the 1620s through the 1670s, the Atlantic world underwent a profound transformation. Although by 1620 the Iberians were still largely alone in occupying American lands, establishing bridgeheads in Africa, conducting transatlantic trade, and warring or coexisting with indigenous people, they were joined in the following decades by the English, French, and Dutch. While Mexico, Peru, and Brazil had been the foci of Spanish and Portuguese activity in the New World, the newcomers created thriving settlements in the Lesser Antilles and North America. And if making bullion had been the economic rationale for the American empire of Spain (although not for that of Portugal), the production of cash crops became the foundation of many colonies set up by the northern Europeans. As slavery began to underpin the new colonies, Africa was drawn further into the Atlantic world. The Dutch were instrumental in this Great Transformation, and not simply because they established colonies and trading posts of their own. If anything, the Dutch produced little in the way of plantation crops themselves during the middle decades of the century. They were, however, ubiquitous as merchants, selling manufactures and slaves, buying produce, and extending loans across imperial boundaries. The Dutch were so involved in all the other Atlantic empires that Dutch activities provoked the introduction of the English Navigation Acts and Portuguese transatlantic fleet system and contributed to the takeoff of the sugar economies in the French Caribbean, the start of the Swedish and Danish trade in captive Africans, and the Jewish diaspora in the Caribbean and North America. The Dutch contributions to the development of the Atlantic world indicate that its history cannot be fully understood by focusing on empires alone. Each colonial realm was entangled in various ways with other empires. Interimperial trade was fundamental to many American provinces, while cultural influence also tied neighboring colonies together, as did wars and border disputes.

The Dutch arrival in Africa and the Americas also had a huge impact on various Amerindian and African polities. Dutch supplies of firearms, for example, enabled the Iroquois to defeat their enemies in the 1640s and 1650s. Likewise, the Dutch demand for wampum—the shell beads they sold to North American natives, who used them for diplomatic ends, cherished them as prestigious possessions, and assigned great spiritual significance to them—led to an exponential growth in its output by native manufacturers. This productive revolution was one aspect of the transition from subsistence-based to market-based Amerindian economies. In southwestern Africa, Dutch actions were no less consequential. Their occupation of the port of Luanda helped alter political conditions on the ground and shift the area in which Africans were captured who would end up on European slave ships.¹

This book is about the Dutch Moment in Atlantic history—the middle decades of the seventeenth century, when the Dutch left their mark on the wider Atlantic world like never before or afterward. The Great Transformation that occurred was probably bound to happen, but it would have been delayed and colored differently without the Dutch. Although some U.S. historians acknowledge the important role played by the Dutch in the Atlantic world, they frequently either underplay or exaggerate Dutch contributions for lack of knowledge. Dutch scholars of the Atlantic world, by contrast, have traditionally been outshadowed as students of overseas history by colleagues working on the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC). In addition, their predilection has been to deal with one colony at a time, thus largely ignoring the Atlantic context. Consequently, no work is available that discusses the manifold pursuits that characterized the Dutch Atlantic world. It is this void that I plan to fill in The Dutch Moment.

In the hands of historians, the Atlantic Dutch often fall between the cracks, rendered invisible by the attention paid to the other imperial powers. Their only role of note is that of interlopers, of outsiders residing offshore. I hope to right this wrong, not merely by adding another imperial layer to Atlantic history but by helping us understand the whole seventeenth-century Atlantic world more fully. Obviously, the Dutch brought their own institutions, legal practices, and cultural traditions to their projects in Africa and the Americas. The way in which they constructed their colonial project also differed from their European rivals. Whereas these shaped their Atlantic empires in an improvisational manner, the Dutch had actually planned theirs quite deliberately. The ad hoc nature of the Spanish invasion of the Aztec empire, the chance discovery of Brazil by the Portuguese, the equally coincidental English settlement of Bermuda and New England, and the private initiatives of Frenchmen in the Caribbean contrasted with the carefully constructed Grand Design of the Dutch. Military objectives were paramount in the years after 1621. Key bases such as Elmina and Curaçao, not to mention Brazil, were conquered after meticulous preparations.

In another sense, the Dutch were not exceptional. Whereas the Atlantic empire of Spain was a territorial empire from an early date, based as it was on ample indigenous labor, those of Portugal and England remained maritime in nature for many generations before eventually transforming into territorial empires as well. The transition occurred when the imperial goal shifted from the control of trade to the management of commodity production. The rise of Portugal as an imperial power in Brazil, which entailed the expansion of territory, took place in gradual fashion in the seventeenth century, whereas England did not reach the same stage until the middle of the eighteenth. Although historians have labeled the Dutch empire seaborne or commercial, the West India Company (WIC)—the joint-stock company that ruled the Dutch Atlantic after 1621—was also drawn to the creation of a territorial empire. The dream of supplanting Spain in America—which drove some of the Dutch expeditions to the New World—hinged on the conquest of the mining center of Potosí in upper Peru, far into the interior of South America. And managing Potosí would have involved land-based imperialism. Its capture never materialized, but the territorial impulse resurfaced after the invasion of Brazil. Faced with the largest sugar-producing area in the world, the Dutch succumbed to the temptation of empire. They did the same in the East Indies, where spices seduced them into conquering production areas and controlling the land.

The Dutch Atlantic empire was forged on the battlefield. The overseas deployment of troops was a—sometimes unheralded—extension of the decades-old independence war against Habsburg Spain. It is hard to overestimate the scope of the overseas wars between the Dutch and the Iberians, which first energized and then debilitated the Netherlanders. The war in Brazil was the largest interimperial conflict of the seventeenth-century Atlantic, a fight that historians have underappreciated. The battle for supremacy between France and Britain during the second Hundred Years’ War, from 1689 through 1815, has captured their imagination, expressed in a recent upsurge in interest in the Seven Years’ War. Earlier rivalries between Atlantic empires, however, have received little attention. Consequently, the questionable notion persists that peace was the norm and war the exception.

The war with Spain was one of many involving the Dutch in the seventeenth-century Atlantic. Portugal, in fact, bore the brunt of Dutch warfare afloat and ashore during its crown union with Spain. Nothing changed, however, after the Portuguese rebelled and became independent. The Dutch maliciously captured Portuguese possessions in Africa and Brazil, setting off another war that would take decades to end. Meanwhile, the Atlantic became a prominent battleground once more during the last two of the three Anglo-Dutch wars, which were largely motivated by commercial competition. Dutch America came close to extinction—but survived. But it did not expand further during the war between the United Provinces and France, which saw more fighting in the Atlantic world.

The numerous armed conflicts involving the Dutch demonstrate that the mid-seventeenth-century Atlantic was not simply a time of new beginnings. It was a period of sustained warfare. Like the Dutch, the English and French started settling in the New World and acquiring West African bases for the slave trade, but their arrival on either side of the ocean was relatively peaceful. The Dutch appearance, on the other hand, was accompanied by untold acts of violence. A focus on the Dutch reveals that, far from being an era of peaceful settlement in the New World—especially by migrants from the British Isles—the middle decades of the seventeenth century were steeped in blood. Violence was the midwife of the Great Transformation.

In one sense, the martial dimension of the Dutch Atlantic was particularly conspicuous. The demographic weight of the soldiers and sailors who defended and extended imperial boundaries was larger than in the other empires. Colonial populations did not exist in the Dutch trading centers along the African coast and never outgrew their small size in the Americas. Yet, however modest the American settlements were, they still had difficulty feeding themselves. For nourishment, they remained dependent on supplies from the Republic, which were often long in coming. Routinely deprived of sustenance, garrison soldiers suffered from other deprivations as well. They were usually an afterthought for the colonial government, the WIC, and the States General, their crucial position in a Dutch Atlantic empire notwithstanding. Their neglect ultimately resulted in a refusal to fight, causing some colonies to be lost.

What also distinguished the Dutch Atlantic were the urban roots of most migrants and their lack of agricultural skills. After the loss of Brazil and New Netherland, the directors of the WIC acknowledged that the Dutch were not cut out to be colonial farmers, unlike the English, who were excellent colonists, as the recent transformation of Barbados had shown.² But, as the directors emphasized, the Dutch were first-rate traders. If empire was one pillar of the Dutch Atlantic, trade was indeed the other. Dutch Atlantic trade had taken off in the late sixteenth century, was reduced to modest levels during the 1610s, and then was placed under the umbrella of the WIC. Unlike its more famous counterpart, the VOC, which maintained major monopolies during it entire lifespan, the WIC was forced to give up most of its monopolies before long, due to its wanting commercial performance. As an unintended consequence of its colonial adventure in Brazil, the WIC did become the world’s largest slave-trading company in the middle part of the century. The end of Dutch Brazil did not slow down the Dutch trade in Africans, which actually expanded, although the destinations were increasingly the foreign parts of the New World. Indeed, Dutch trade in the Atlantic world amounted to much more than commerce with Dutch-held ports and forts. The Dutch stood out for the scope of their transactions in Spanish, French, and English America, in some places regularly outnumbering merchants from the respective metropoles. The cash crops entering the Dutch markets—in particular that of Amsterdam—thus originated in all parts of the Americas. Furthermore, the workers carried by Dutch slavers were often embarked in ports and forts on the African coast that were not under Dutch jurisdiction.

If foreigners built their Atlantic domains with Dutch assistance, the Dutch likewise constructed their own Atlantic world with the help of others. Their fleets and armies included numerous foreigners, largely drawn from countries in northwestern Europe. Uncounted numbers of settlers of Dutch colonies, sometimes as many as half the population, were born in foreign parts of Europe or the New World. Particularly striking is the large percentage of Jewish settlers in Dutch America, where their economic exploits were indispensable to the survival of the colonies. Often born in Portugal or France, these men and their families either had returned to a full Jewish life in Amsterdam or would do so in the Dutch colonies. American Judaism thus took off in the Dutch Atlantic.

Nor would the Dutch have been able to achieve military victories without the native alliances they carefully cultivated in Brazil, Guiana, New Netherland, Angola, and the Gold Coast. In fact, the Dutch Atlantic was quintessentially interimperial, multinational, and multiracial. At the same time, it was an empire designed to benefit the United Provinces. Because warfare was the main raison d’être of the WIC, many potential investors refrained from buying stocks, delaying the departure of the first military expeditions. More adventurous men preferred war over trade in view of the quick riches that could be amassed. For much of the Dutch Moment, privateering was a lucrative pursuit. Silver was the booty of choice, at least when Spain was the enemy. When Portugal remained as the only Iberian foe, ships carrying Brazilian sugar were the main target.

American natives figured in some Atlantic projects as ideal allies. Because Spain was supposedly at war with Amerindians everywhere, they were expected to receive Dutchmen with open arms. In reality, the Dutch relationship with natives was fraught with difficulties. Gold fever, acts of random violence, and occasional enslavement did not ingratiate the Dutch with their indigenous neighbors. Still, commercial networks connected them, and many reliable long-lasting ties were established on an individual level. Religion was hardly ever a meeting ground. Few Amerindians were converted to Calvinism, even if ministers arrived with the twin goals of spreading the Gospel to them and introducing them to civilization. Missionary efforts among Africans on their native soil or in the New World also bore little fruit. Blacks were initially not essentialized as slaves, but the need for coerced labor in Brazil made the colonial Dutch change their minds. Whatever objections had been raised to slavery in sermons or published works were then put aside.

Colonial clergy had to operate in a religious setting for which they had not been prepared. Although religious tolerance was uncommon in the Dutch Republic itself—despite the famous example of Amsterdam—it was the norm in most colonies. Liberty of conscience was a principle set down in the original administrative framework for the American colonies. Here and there, religious groups that were deemed critical for the future of a colony were even granted freedom of worship, which enabled the preservation of social peace. The Dutch failure to deliver on promised tolerance could, however, be costly.

The Dutch Moment, then, not only launched the Dutch as intermediaries in the Atlantic world but was itself an important stage in Atlantic history, linking the era before 1600, dominated by Iberian expansion, with the second Hundred Years’ War. Although it may have been short, it left its mark on the wider Atlantic in numerous ways. Just as the Dutch had embarked on their early oceanic adventures as apprentices, others soon learned from Dutch expertise in navigation, cartography, planting, and the slave trade. Dutch commercial assistance allowed both infant English and French colonies and mature Spanish colonies to remain afloat. By contrast, Dutch military campaigns left a trail of casualties and instilled fear in many parts of Ibero-America and later among French and English colonists. This display of power effectively came to an end in the late 1670s. The Dutch did not vanish from the Atlantic world but began a new chapter in their colonial history under the auspices of a new, slimmed-down, and unarmed WIC. The vestiges of their Atlantic realm—Elmina, Curaçao, and Suriname—remained intact, albeit not without military engagements. The role of the Dutch was now reversed: from attackers, they had become defenders.

Although historians largely ignored the seventeenth-century Dutch Atlantic for many years, it has become a fertile environment in recent decades. New light was cast on the WIC by Henk den Heijer’s institutional history, Kees Zandvliet’s study of the WIC use of maps, and Alexander Bick’s micro-historical examination of the WIC in 1645. Benjamin Schmidt showed the importance of America in the Dutch consciousness, Danny Noorlander produced a wide-ranging dissertation on the clergy in the Dutch Atlantic, and Mark Meuwese explored the commercial and military liaisons between the Dutch and both the Africans and Amerindians. Interactions with Amer-indians were also the subject of Lodewijk Hulsman’s dissertation on Guiana. The study of New Netherland was advanced by Jaap Jacobs’s comprehensive monograph, Willem Frijhoff’s model biography of Evert Willemsz, the work of Donna Merwick and Paul Otto on Dutch relations with natives, and Susanah Shaw Romney’s discussion of Dutch interactions with nonwhites. The literature on Dutch Brazil was enriched by the publications of Evaldo Cabral de Mello and Michiel van Groesen, and the Dutch period in Angola and São Tomé was illuminated by the publication of Klaas Ratelband’s decades-old manuscript. Finally, Filipa Ribeiro da Silva has shed new light on the Dutch across the western coast of West Africa.³ What is still missing, however, is a book that offers an overview of the Dutch Atlantic, exploring the creation of overseas societies, economic pursuits across imperial boundaries, and the quest to create an empire of some sort.

Another necessary correction is to put Brazil front and center in the Dutch Atlantic. It is striking that among both historians and laymen New Netherland is the best-known seventeenth-century Dutch colony, whereas few know that a large part of Brazil was under Dutch rule in the same period. From the perspective of North America in general and that of New York in particular, the attention given to New Netherland is easy to understand. But historians who spend time in the archives of the WIC and the States General or who study the contemporary pamphlet literature quickly discover that New Netherland was of marginal importance to the Dutch Atlantic, while the understudied colony of Dutch Brazil was no less than pivotal. Brazil was seen by many, if not all in the Dutch political and mercantile elite as the premier Dutch colony in the western hemisphere—hence the willingness to wage a long and, at times, seemingly endless war that consumed many thousands of soldiers and sailors. In terms of military personnel, Brazil dwarfed all other Dutch colonies and trading posts combined. The contemporary importance attached to Brazil can be also inferred from the decision by the WIC to subdue the two main focal points of Portuguese authority in Africa, Elmina and Luanda, to control outlets of the African slave trade for the benefit of Brazil. It is telling that both invasions were launched not from the Republic but from Brazil.

Its brief lifespan of three decades notwithstanding, Dutch Brazil had a lasting impact on the Atlantic world. After the conquest of Pernambuco, Dutchmen entered the transatlantic slave trade for the first time in a systematic way, thus initiating the transport until 1803 of more than half a million Africans to the New World on board Dutch ships. Dutch Brazil at the same time paved the way for a Jewish life in freedom in the Americas. After the first American synagogues opened their doors in Recife, that example was soon followed in other Dutch and English colonies. And usually the first Jews who moved there were settlers from Brazil and their relatives, who thus became the pioneers of the Jewish communities in both the Caribbean and North America.

The costly military adventure in Brazil unmistakably contributed to the bankruptcy of the WIC. The company engaged in colonial expansion in Brazil at a time when the bottom of the treasury was already visible. Its chance to regain financial health was lost for good in the years that Governor Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen ruled Dutch Brazil. The surrender in Brazil, which occurred even before the WIC was disbanded, gave rise in the United Provinces to a nostalgic longing for the once-flourishing colony, whose greatness was personified by the figure of Johan Maurits. In post-Dutch Brazil itself, Johan Maurits was remembered as a just and kind prince, and the regrettable traits of his regime were explained by reference to his supposedly bad advisers.⁴ In the aftermath of the Dutch surrender, Brazil was also used as an economic model on which both the Dutch and others based themselves in other colonial theaters. The way in which Dutch Suriname took shape was indebted to the former plantation colony, while the once thriving sugar industry in Brazil also inspired colonies in the French and English Caribbean.⁵

Because the establishment of those foreign Caribbean colonies in the 1620s and in 1630 occurred at the time of the Dutch-Iberian war over Brazil, we may wonder whether the latter enabled the former, especially because up until the Portuguese independence in 1640 the Dutch opponent in Brazil was the Habsburg empire. Although it is clear that the Spanish crown did not commit many ships or soldiers to Brazil that would otherwise have been sent to protect the Lesser Antilles from foreign encroachment, Spain suffered from imperial overstretch long before the Dutch invasions of Bahia and Recife. The war in Brazil must only have exacerbated its financial woes.⁶

The imperial dimension of the Dutch Atlantic, so prominently on display in Brazil, is fleshed out in the first four chapters of this book. In chapter 1, I provide a survey of early Dutch Atlantic imperial and inter-imperial activities, and in chapter 2, I detail the dramatic rise to power of the Dutch in Africa and the Americas from the 1620s until the mid-1640s. In chapter 3, I tell the story of the gradual decline of Dutch imperial might. Through it all, the Dutch presence in the Atlantic world was both facilitated and hampered by warfare. The Dutch became the heirs to the Elizabethans, although their preferred targets were Portuguese (not Spanish) ships, settlements, and trading posts. The wars of the United Provinces in the seventeenth century cannot be understood without their Atlantic dimension; although the military confrontations with Habsburg forces in Africa and the Americas were an extension of European hostilities, colonial issues featured prominently at home during the second Anglo-Dutch war and the war with independent Portugal. The men who created and maintained the empire in this Atlantic crucible occupy center stage in chapter 4, in which I provide a comprehensive treatment of the lives of soldiers and sailors.

The engagement by the Dutch with others is the subject of the remaining chapters. Following the trail of supply and demand, Dutch merchants crisscrossed the ocean in search of goods and markets. In the process, they became the leading slave traders, as I reveal in chapter 5. In sharp contrast to these merchants’ mobility stood the resistance of the Dutch to settling in the Americas (chapter 6). As a consequence, the colonies depended for a good part on foreign European migrants or European Americans who were overwhelmingly non-Calvinists. Religious tolerance was introduced to manage religious diversity, but it was always challenged by ministers of the Reformed Church and sometimes circumscribed or proscribed by secular authorities afraid of a divided population or even a fifth column. And although the Dutch also came to depend on nonwhites (chapter 7), the notion prevailed that Amerindians and Africans failed to meet the criteria for civilization, as did the zeal to commodify them, which led to discrimination, enslavement, and bloodshed. Violence, as I stress in the epilogue, became a staple of colonial life, in both conventional and unconventional ways. In spite of the multiple friendly connections forged by seventeenth-century Netherlanders with foreign lands and peoples, the Dutch Moment was indeed a violent one.

CHAPTER 1

The Unleashed Lion

On August 25, 1599, exhausted from protracted hardships, the six chief officers of a Dutch fleet in the Strait of Magellan decided to form the Brotherhood of the Unleashed Lion. They swore to each other that no dangers, necessity, or fear of death would make them act to the prejudice of the prosperity of the fatherland or the present voyage. Their intention, they went on, had been from the start to harm the hereditary enemy as much as possible, planting Dutch arms in the American provinces where the Spanish king amassed the treasures that he used to sustain a lengthy war against the Netherlands. The officers carved their names in a memorial tablet that was mounted on a high pillar so it could be descried by passing ships.¹

The Unleashed Lion was a fitting characterization of the northern Netherlands, which came to life in the late sixteenth century when Dutch ships, thus far confined to European waters, began to explore the wider world. The outward thrust took place in the midst of the war with Habsburg Spain, in which the Dutch would eventually obtain their independence. The Dutch entered the Atlantic world as raiders and traders but before their activities acquired an imperial dimension. This is the prehistory of the Dutch Moment in Atlantic history.

Along with the French and the English, the Dutch were the European latecomers in the Atlantic basin. They crossed the Atlantic as privateers, attacking enemy ships with government authorization, and as merchants, seeking to force their way into established Iberian trade routes and, if possible, seize territories for themselves. This expansion did not take off until the 1590s and would assume impressive proportions in the 1620. Individual Dutchmen, nonetheless, had wandered across the Atlantic throughout the sixteenth century, when the Spanish typically referred to them as flamencos, a term commonly used to denote all Netherlanders, north and south.

MAP 1. The Netherlands, ca. 1600

The Dutch polity was a late creation, which only came about during the Revolt against Habsburg rule. The seven provinces that eventually united to form the Dutch Republic (map 1) were originally part of the duchy of Burgundy before King Charles V inherited those lands for the Habsburg family that ruled Spain. Courtiers from the Netherlands had already been part of the retinue of Charles’s father, Philip the Fair, Duke of Burgundy. When Philip traveled through Spain—his future kingdom—in 1502, these courtiers accompanied him. On their journey, they met a ship captain who had been to the West Indies, where he had served as the chief administrator of the islands. The man’s name is not mentioned in the report that one of the retainers compiled, but it must have been Columbus himself.² Netherlanders learned about the New World by dint of such encounters but also through private letters, printed books, maps, manuscripts, and, of course, firsthand experience. Motivated by poverty, adventure, missionary zeal, or scandal, they sought out parts of the New World to settle from the beginning of Iberian colonization. The first flamencos landed in Mexico as early as the days of Hernán Cortés, while others ended up in Peru and Brazil. Jaques de Olanda, Pedro de Olanda de Alva, and a surgeon from Holland in Germany called Maestre Joan were all involved in the Peruvian civil wars.³

It is difficult to generalize about the Dutch emigrants to the Americas before 1621, but some characteristics apply. Practically all were male, generally in their early twenties when they first arrived, and most came to stay. The Netherlanders preferred cities as their abodes, but they did not settle exclusively in major urban centers. In 1607, sixteen years after its foundation, the small remote town of Todos los Santos de la Nueva Rioja in the jurisdiction of Tucumán (today in northwestern Argentina) counted two Haarlemmers among its inhabitants.⁴ Hans van der Vucht lived first in the town of Santo Domingo, then in Bayaha on the northern side of Hispaniola, before relocating to Amsterdam around 1590, where he became the vice principal of the Latin school.⁵ Some Dutch residents of the American provinces of Spain were former prisoners, men such as Douwe Sijbrandtz, a cooper from Harlingen who had been arrested along with other crew members of a Dutch ship in Buenos Aires in 1599. A few years later, Douwe had moved to Asunción in Paraguay with his Spanish wife.⁶

Because moving back and forth across the ocean was difficult, it occurred rarely. First of all, foreigners were forbidden from conducting trade with Spanish America by virtue of a royal provision of February 15, 1504, which was covertly directed against the French and especially Flemish rivals of Cas-tile.⁷ Since that date, the best way to qualify for a move to Spanish America was naturalization. This was difficult to obtain, requiring marriage to a woman from Castile, the establishment of a family, residence in Spain for one or more decades, and possession of a respectable number of goods.⁸ For those who failed in their bid to be naturalized, licenses might be available, but a majority among the foreigners who settled in South America had probably not bothered to register properly. The scores of soldiers and seamen deserting the Spanish galleons included men from the Low Countries, who were frequently employed on these ocean-going ships.⁹ For example, Cornelis Jansen from Grootebroek, captain of a Dutch hulk, served on the Spanish fleet that successfully expelled the French from Florida in 1566.¹⁰

Upon their arrival in the Americas, many Netherlanders engaged in mercantile activities, especially in Mexico City. So many flamenco merchants resided in one of the streets off the main square that it came to be called the street of the Flemings.¹¹ Others served the Catholic Church. While most Netherlandic clergymen originated from the southern provinces, several Jesuit priests came from the north. One of them, João Baptista, born in 1542, left for Pernambuco, Brazil, in 1577 and perished in a shipwreck in 1599, drowning en route to Ilhéus, where he was the father superior.¹²

The Threat of the Inquisition

Sailing across the Atlantic became more dangerous for residents of the northern Netherlands after their provinces had embarked on a war with their Habsburg king. Hostilities began as a consequence of the sudden radicalization of the Reformation in 1566. People from all walks of life vented their anger on the Catholic Church in an unparalleled iconoclastic fury. The rebellion traveled like a heathland fire throughout the Netherlands. In the path of destruction, the interiors of scores of Roman Catholic churches were smashed to pieces. Resolved to stamp out the heresy, King Philip II sent an army under the Duke of Alba to bring the rebellious provinces to heel. Alba was commissioned to take strong measures. He set up a council that sentenced almost 9,000 Netherlanders for treason or heresy, more than 1,000 of whom were executed. Tens of thousands of others went into exile. Alba also imposed permanent taxes on the sale of personal property and real estate, a move that antagonized merchants and provincial bureaucrats alike and drove many into the arms of the rebels.¹³

These rebels began to wage war on their occupiers by 1568, led by their strong leader, William of Orange, count of Nassau in Germany and prince of Orange (a principality in southern France). His opposite number, the Duke of Alba, aimed to subdue the rebels by ordering all men, women, and children to be killed in the town of Naarden. This bloodbath was counterproductive, strengthening the resolve of his enemies, who began to achieve military victories. Alba held on to the southern provinces, four of which signed the Union of Arras in January 1579, whereby they reconciled with Philip II and declared they would maintain Roman Catholicism as the only religion. Seventeen days later, the provinces of Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht joined together with towns in Friesland, Flanders, and Brabant, as well as with the rural parts of Groningen, to form the Union of Utrecht. This political agreement, promising financial and military cooperation, was the founding constitution of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. It was then and there that the northern Netherlands became the heartland of the revolt. The seeds of the Dutch Republic had been planted.

As the war continued without Alba, who left the Netherlands without accomplishing his mission, King Philip II, who also ruled Portugal after 1580, introduced economic embargoes as an instrument of war. For many years, the Dutch had sailed up and down to the Iberian Peninsula, collecting salt in Andalusia and purchasing a wide array of exotic products in Seville and Lisbon, such as cloves, pepper, nutmeg, sugar, gold, and silver. After 1591, the Dutch were no longer welcome in Lisbon and could, at least officially, buy spices only through the agents of Portuguese distributors in Dutch ports. Imports consequently declined and prices rose. Spanish officials detained four hundred to five hundred Dutch ships for a couple of months in 1595 to hurt Dutch shipping, but the most damaging embargo was that issued in 1598, when the new Spanish king, Philip III, banned Dutch ships from all Iberian ports, halting the flow of Brazilian sugar to Amsterdam and Middelburg. Although Philip III partially rescinded this embargo in 1603–1604, he ordered in 1605 all foreigners living in the Portuguese colonies to return to Europe and expelled from Portugal all Dutchmen born in the rebellious provinces of the north and all Flemings who had relatives there.¹⁴

Against the backdrop of the war, the various tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition arrested scores of seaborne Netherlanders because of their alleged religious deviance. Raised as Calvinists, many Netherlandic immigrants in Spanish America never completely embraced Catholicism. Back home in the Low Countries, a lukewarm attitude vis-à-vis the Catholic Church had never been a serious problem. Even before the start of the anti-Habsburg rebellion, Dutch heretics had not been rounded up on their home soil as they were in Spain. And, although it was rumored that he tried to introduce the Inquisition in the Netherlands, Philip II in actual fact never did.¹⁵ In the overseas Iberian provinces, however, religious orthodoxy was strictly maintained. In 1548, a flamenco was burned alive by the Holy Office in Lima;¹⁶ a decade later, Jacques de Haene, scion of a prominent Antwerp merchant family, came into contact with the Inquisition in Brazil;¹⁷ and Enrique de Holanda, a Dutch-born shoemaker in Yucatán, was tried by the Inquisition in 1569 for making heretical statements.¹⁸ Haarlem native Alberto Jacob, who worked at two sugar mills in Brazil, was also denounced to the Inquisition (in Salvador) because of his heretical words. Despite being interrogated off and on for three years, Alberto did not confess, but the Holy Office still imposed spiritual penances on him.¹⁹ The list goes on, although the cases become less frequent in the course of the seventeenth century.

Around the turn of the seventeenth century, a group of Dutchmen, Germans, and Flemings was the target of the Mexican tribunal of the Inquisition.²⁰ The main suspect in this campaign was a German, Zegbo Vanderbec from Bremen, who went by the name of Simón de Santiago. Simón was a veteran from the Dutch wars against Habsburg Spain, in which he had served in the armies of Maurits—the Dutch stadholder and the son of William of Orange. He had allegedly desecrated churches and monastic houses in Europe and followed the Calvinist doctrine, but he denied everything during his interrogations. In an attempt to exonerate himself, Simón started naming names of Netherlanders in Mexico, and the number of arrests grew commensurably.²¹

Cornelio Adrián César, presumably Cornelis Adriaensz de Keyser, made a name for himself as a printer. Born in Haarlem, he was orphaned at the age of two and as a young boy served the Dutch army as a page. In his teens, he became an apprentice of the famous printer Christoffel Plantijn in Leiden. César seems to have resented his sedentary existence, and he enlisted as a gunner on a fleet that left Spain for Mexico in 1595. He established himself in Mexico City, working successfully in a print shop, but his move to the town of Cuatitlán proved fateful. His fellow countryman, Guillermo Enríquez, denounced him to the Holy Office as a Lutheran heretic. He was found guilty of serving a Calvinist army but was let off with a light punishment because he had been no more than a child at the time. He was commanded to make public abjuration of his heresies, to wear a penitential habit, and to serve a three-year prison sentence. During his confinement, César could continue his printing work, and after his release from prison, he returned to his calling as a printer. His name appeared on title pages until 1620.²²

The Inquisition of the Canary Islands displayed a similar fervor in these years. A few dozen Englishmen, Flemings, Germans, and Frenchmen fell into the clutches of the local tribunal in the 1590s. In an auto-da-fé in 1597, six Dutchmen were condemned as heretics. Jaques Banqueresme, a native of Veere and resident of Vlissingen (Flushing), was sent to a monastery in Spain and forever forbidden to go to lands of heretics.²³ The other five received prison sentences: Ricardo Mansen, a boatswain (two years detention and confiscation of his belongings); Roque Corinsen (four years imprisonment); Pedro Sebastian, a merchant, and Giraldo Hugo (both two years of detention); and Gaspar Nicolas Claysen (one year imprisonment). Claysen was probably told never to show his face again. When he returned to the Canary Islands as shipmaster of a Flemish ship in 1611, he was arrested. Although Dirk Rodenburg, a Dutch diplomat, spoke with King Philip III about Claysen’s imprisonment, reminding the king that the rigorous procedures of the Inquisition had contributed to the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt, Claysen could not be saved.²⁴ Condemned in January 1612 as a relapsed Protestant, he was burned alive on February 22, 1614. One year later he was followed at the stake by Tobias Lorenzo from Vlissingen, who resided in Garachico in the Canaries.²⁵

More fortunate or less naïve than Claysen were the three shipmasters Jaques Marsen from Vlissingen, Conrado Jacobo from Dordrecht, and the Fleming Hans Hansen.²⁶ The trial against these men started in March 1593 and did not conclude until November 1597, when Hansen was condemned for heresy to two years confinement in a convent. His goods were seized, and he was prohibited from ever visiting heretic lands again. If Hansen showed remorse, which may have helped him get a lenient sentence, he must have lapsed because his was one of three images burned in an auto-da-fé held in the cathedral in 1608. Like Marsen and Jacobo, who were the other two depicted in the images, Hansen had been wise enough not to return to the archipelago.

These waves of persecution of Dutch Protestants around 1600 were not a harbinger of things to come. Inquisition proceedings involving Dutchmen were exceptional in the seventeenth century. Only a handful of cases have surfaced, including a protracted Mexican trial against the presumed heretic Juan Boot from Delft that ended in 1638 when the case against this fifty-eight-year-old engineer was suspended. He was not allowed, however, to leave New Spain.²⁷ In 1648, the year Spain signed the peace with the Republic, Dutch ship captain Juan Federico was arrested by the tribunal of Cartagena de Indias after openly confessing his Calvinist beliefs. He managed to escape.²⁸ Three decades later, another Juan Federico was jailed. Four witnesses testified in Cartagena in 1679 against a twenty-eight-year-old brazier named Juan Federico Preys, accusing this native of Leiden of observing the Lutheran and Calvinist sects. After he confessed that he adhered to the Calvinist religion, Preys was exiled to Spain and his goods were confiscated.²⁹

The Start of Dutch Atlantic Trade

Philip II’s trade embargoes in themselves did not induce many Dutch traders to explore the Atlantic world, even if they did contribute to the Dutch transatlantic expansion. What unleashed the Dutch Lion in an economic sense were the changes wrought by the warfare within the Netherlands. The chaos, misery, and dislocation in the south made many men and women migrate to the north, bringing along their expertise and widening the economic base of Holland. After the port of Antwerp fell to Spanish troops, the northern rebels closed the river Scheldt, largely shutting off Antwerp from the outside world. The consequences were far-reaching because Antwerp had traditionally been the import and redistribution center for goods from southern Europe and the Iberian empires. The function of Amsterdam within the Habsburg trade system had been comparatively limited. The Baltic and Scandinavia predominated as the origins and destinations of goods on the Amsterdam market, and the only Iberian product traded there was salt. By way of Amsterdam, goods from the European northern and eastern coasts were shipped to the rest of the Netherlands, while return cargoes were sent through Amsterdam in the opposite direction.³⁰

All this changed after 1585, the year Spanish troops took Antwerp. Individual traders and associations of merchants from Holland and Zeeland now tried to fill the gap by opening direct commercial links with ports in Europe and beyond. The sudden division between north and south allowed the Amsterdam trade to grow dramatically, not just at the expense of Antwerp but also the Zeeland ports. The vast majority of Amsterdam merchants active prior to the takeoff of the Dutch commercial expansion in the 1590s continued to invest in the traditional trades, importing Baltic grain or dealing with Norway and Germany. But some old merchants were willing to take the risks of trading with new markets.³¹ As pioneers in the long-distance northern trade, they were joined by two groups of outsiders: merchants from the southern Netherlands and men of the Portuguese Nation, a group largely made up of New Christians. The merchants hailing from Antwerp and adjacent areas in the south operated as cogs in the well-oiled international networks of southern Netherlanders. The significance of these men also lies in the role of a number of merchant bankers in their midst in endowing Amsterdam with an important money and capital market.³²

In the 1590s, both native Dutch merchants and those originating in the southern Netherlands forged trade links with ports in Russia, Italy and the eastern Mediterranean, and, despite the ongoing war, also Spain and Portugal. By 1600, Amsterdam and the Zeeland ports dominated the import of salt from and export of grain to Portugal.³³ Last but not least, the Dutch entered the Indian and Atlantic oceans with ships of their own. What is striking about the early voyages to Brazil, Angola, and the Caribbean is that the organizers belonged to the same Flemish families that controlled the Dutch trade with Russia, including the Meunicx, du Moulin, and van de Kerckhoven clans.³⁴

The Netherlanders were emboldened by Portugal, a country comparable in size, population, and maritime experience to their own, which was the established European power in West Africa, Brazil, and the Indian Ocean. Numerous Dutchmen owed their expertise as mariners to their schooling on board Portuguese ships, while others had served Portugal ashore in India, usually in Goa, the Portuguese nerve center in the East.³⁵ Yet others had gathered information while in Portuguese captivity or during a stay in Brazil, which they used to inform themselves about the details of the local economy. One of them was Dierick Ruyters, who was jailed by the Portuguese in Rio de Janeiro in 1618 before being transferred to Pernambuco. Escaping after two and a half years, Ruyters combined a variety of Portuguese and Dutch data in his influential navigational guide Toortse der Zeevaert (1623). His main source was the guide published by the Portuguese examiner of navigators, Manuel de Figueredo, editions of which had appeared in 1609 and 1614. Ruyters extensively annotated Figueredo’s work and added his own observations and those of other Dutch sailors, who had meanwhile become very familiar with the Atlantic.

In matters of trade, the Dutch expansion was also modeled on a Portuguese example. Although Dutch merchants traded from their ships during the first stages of Dutch expansion in the Atlantic, they soon began to establish trading stations at strategic locations in both Africa and the Americas. Fort Mouree on the Gold Coast, New Amsterdam on the Hudson River, and numerous small stations in Guiana were all based on the factoria, which was so important in Portuguese trade in the Indian Ocean and offered a decisive advantage over the ship-bound trade. No longer did ships have to remain anchored for many successive months until their holds were filled with the desired products; instead, local factors would tap the hinterland and barter with natives so that arriving ships could take in their cargoes and leave.³⁶

In their Atlantic expansion, the Dutch were not inspired only by the Portuguese. They also followed in the wake of the English, whose Elizabethan privateers they admired. Some sailors had taken part in English transatlantic expeditions, including those by Francis Drake and John Hawkins. Dutch trade and war plans in the wider world were informed by the works of Richard Hakluyt, with their detailed information about Spanish fortifications, population figures, and commercial opportunities. The Dutch also preferred the more experienced English pilots in their first voyages across the Atlantic and beyond the Cape of Good Hope.³⁷ But England could not (yet) provide a model for how to organize an oceanic system. Spain may seem to have been the obvious model to copy but never appealed to the Dutch because of the territorial nature of the Spanish empire, which would have been impossible to run by a nation short on people and resources.

Dierick Ruyters was among the many Dutchmen who spent time in Brazilian ports in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, usually as members of Luso-Netherlandic networks. Flemings had started arriving in Lisbon in the early fifteenth century, but it was not until the half-century after 1580 that their trading colony in the Portuguese capital began to expand. And it did so in spectacular fashion. The special connection with Lisbon, the European entrepôt for Asian spices such as cloves, pepper, and nutmeg, and for products from Brazil, was a major factor in the success of Antwerp in the sixteenth century, when it blossomed into the chief center of trade and finance in northern Europe.

As a triangular trade developed among Antwerp, Lisbon, and Brazil after the 1560s, sugar and other products from the Portuguese colony began to make inroads into the commercial channels of the Low Countries. Once Spanish troops had conquered Antwerp and many of its merchants moved north, trade between the northern Netherlands and Brazil got underway, keeping to the beaten triangular track. Superior to the Portuguese caravels, which were vulnerable to attacks by English privateers and pirates and which had less capacity, Dutch ships sailed back and forth to Brazil, carrying large amounts of sugar. Authorities in Lisbon allowed foreign ships to leave for Brazil as long as a Portuguese person had been designated as surety. This proviso was intended to ensure the return of the ship to Portugal.³⁸ A typical voyage was that of Pauwel Gerritsen, who sailed from Zeeland to Lisbon in 1593, where his ship was anchored for fifteen weeks before leaving for first Salvador and then Pernambuco. Gerritsen returned with five hundred chests of sugar and a consignment of brazilwood.³⁹ Such large amounts of brazilwood were received in exchange for luxury items that, starting in 1599, rasping this wood to obtain a dye was a standard activity for the beggars and thieves detained at the bridewell in Amsterdam, the first house of correction on the European continent. In the same year, 1599, the terms Bresilien hout (brazilwood), Bresilien verwe (Brazil dye), and Bresilien peper (Brazil pepper) first entered a dictionary of the Dutch language.⁴⁰

Copious amounts of brazilwood and sugar were carried by the Witte Hond, one of the ships in the Brazil trade, which was captured by English privateers in 1587. The ship itinerary reveals the various nationalities involved in the Brazil trade. Owned by Dutchmen from Hoorn, the ship sailed with an unspecified cargo from Danzig to Lisbon, where a Netherlandish merchant rented it for a voyage to Brazil by way of the Canary Islands.⁴¹ Hamburg was the intended destination for the return trip. The international nature of this trade is also borne out by the activities of Jaspar Basiliers Jr., whose family resided in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Lisbon. When Basiliers agreed to move to Salvador in April 1600, he acted under the orders of Cornelis Snellincx and Jerônimo de Vadder in Lisbon, Vincent van Hove in Antwerp, Hendrik Uylens in Rotterdam, and several Amsterdam merchants. Basiliers may have been one of the last merchants to move to Brazil because the 1605 ban explicitly forbade a foreign presence in the colony. Henceforth, all Europeans firms had to rely on Portuguese correspondents. Family ties with Portugal could, therefore, be helpful, as in the case of Hans de Schot, a merchant from the southern Netherlands based in Amsterdam and related to the Anselmos of Antwerp and Lisbon. Between 1595 and 1597, he fitted out six Dutch ships in cooperation with his brother-in-law, Antônio Anselmo of Lisbon, with Salvador or Pernambuco as their destination.⁴² It is not clear which Portuguese contacts were maintained by Johan van der Veken, an enterprising merchant-banker and another native of the southern Netherlands, who moved to Rotterdam and began to trade with Brazil in 1597. One of the ships that he helped freight, the Gouden Leeuw, left Rotterdam in 1597 for Viana in Portugal, where local merchants loaded the ship. Any space left in the hold of the ship was to be used by the Rotterdammers, whose supplies included textiles, tinwork, and nails. In late 1599, the ship arrived back in Rotterdam with sugar and brazilwood.⁴³

To call this commerce with Brazil featuring Dutch ships and cargoes a Dutch trade would thus be inaccurate. It was rather a trade involving multiple nationalities. This was no academic question at the time because privateers fitted out by the Dutch admiralties regularly seized ships with products for or goods coming from Brazil. In the years around 1600, the States General allowed such captures, based on the premise that the cargoes, whether carried by Dutch or foreign ships, mostly benefited the Spaniards and the Portuguese.⁴⁴

In the Brazil trade, men residing in the northern and southern Netherlands—Dutchmen and Flemings—worked in close conjunction in more than one way. Dutch ship captains heading for Brazil sought Flemish sailors, who were less suspect religiously, had a better command of the Portuguese language, and were more experienced on the coasts of the New World. Therefore, Dutch ships en route to Pernambuco in the 1590s frequently called at the Canary Islands, Cádiz, or Madeira to embark Flemings.⁴⁵ The Canaries became an important hub for Dutch shipping, attracting Dutch textiles and provisions, perhaps partly for re-export to the American colonies.⁴⁶ Dutch ships also used the Atlantic archipelagoes to avoid going through customs in Oporto and Lisbon, and to take in unregistered sugar and brazilwood on the return voyage from Brazil to the United Provinces.⁴⁷ Another device the Dutch used was freighting ships owned by Germans to avoid problems. Most of the ships listed as German in Brazil in the years around 1600 must have been Dutch in disguise.⁴⁸

The riches of Spanish America also held a powerful attraction, tempting many a shipowner from Holland and Zeeland to go in search of them.⁴⁹ They commonly used their Flemish contacts in Sanlúcar (Andalusia) and nearby Seville, the port from which the Spanish fleets and galleons departed for the New World. The proceeds of Dutch merchandise in Seville were used to buy goods to send to Spanish America, where the Dutch traded covertly, using the names of Spanish friends and colleagues as a safety measure. In this way, 200,000 to 400,000 ducats entered the pockets of Dutch merchants in the late sixteenth century as payment for the manufactures the Dutch furnished.⁵⁰ One example of an early Dutch venture to the Spanish colonies was that of the Fortuijn, which sailed from Arnemuiden to Santo Domingo in 1593. The vessel was fitted out by Johannes Henri-cus from Haarlem, who settled in Seville in the 1570s, and his son-in-law. The principal officers of the vessel were Dutch, but to cover up the Dutch ownership, the pilot and several other crewmen were Spanish.⁵¹ Previous ventures by Henricus had involved shipments of goods to Pedro Orto Sandoval, the judge at the audiencia of Santo Domingo and one of the most powerful men on the island.⁵² Such personal ties were invaluable for this type of extralegal trade.

Johan van der Veken, the aforementioned Brazil trader, also took the lead in trading directly with the Spanish colonies, bypassing Seville entirely. In 1597, he was granted a commission for two vessels manned with Dutch and other foreigners, to go to the coast of Guinea, Peru and the West Indies, and there to trade and bargain with indigenous inhabitants.⁵³ Another merchant who opened up America was Balthasar de Moucheron. In 1595, the States of Zeeland (the provincial government) granted him freedom of convoy for a cargo of goods to the Spanish Indies, probably Margarita.⁵⁴ Moucheron was undoubtedly acquainted with the pearl fisheries on the coast of Venezuela, and especially those off Margarita. In these years, through barter or theft, Dutch ships obtained so many pearls that these stopped being used as local currency.⁵⁵ Other Dutch ships returned from the Caribbean with tobacco, which had been acquired through barter with natives in Cumaná and with Spanish settlers in Trinidad.⁵⁶ Finally, for a few years around the turn of the sixteenth century, 1,500 men on 20 Dutch ships were involved in buying hides at Santo Domingo and in Cuba for the benefit of the Amsterdam leather industry.⁵⁷ The West Indies trade was full of risks for the pioneering merchants from the United Provinces. Winds, currents, shoals, and shorelines were little known, as were the local needs ashore. Before regular contacts had been established, many a ship returned to a Dutch port without having sold its cargo.⁵⁸

In their trade with Brazil and the Spanish Caribbean, the Dutch tended to progressively disengage from the multinational networks in which they had participated, and the same was true for their trade with North America. Although it is generally accepted that this commerce began in the wake of Henry Hudson’s exploratory voyage of 1609, Dutch merchants had been lured to North America before then.⁵⁹ In the 1590s—when exactly is unknown—some of them stopped buying Newfoundland cod in the English ports of Plymouth and Dartmouth, preferring to send ships directly from Amsterdam to Newfoundland. Dutch commodities were exchanged for cod, which was then sold in ports in southern Europe, such as Alicante, Cádiz, Genoa, Leghorn, and Marseilles. In the early decades of the seventeenth century, the volume and value of this trade were quite modest.⁶⁰ Similarly, the fur trade had first drawn Dutch merchants to North America in the last years of the sixteenth century, several years before Hudson’s voyage. By 1605, a consortium of Amsterdam merchants had its request denied to have the sole right for a six-month period to conduct trade with New France because it was a known trade.⁶¹ One year later, the French envoy in The Hague complained on behalf of his king about a group of Dutch smugglers that was reportedly catching beavers and other fur animals from the great river of Canada.⁶² Most Dutch activity in the area of present-day Canada was, however, focused on the import of cod at Newfoundland, which was subsequently sold in the Mediterranean. This was a multinational trade that involved both the shipment of fishermen from Brittany, Normandy, or Portugal to Newfoundland and the purchase of cod from local English and French fishermen.⁶³

After the States General issued a charter for a monopoly company that would discover new passages, ports, countries, or places in North America, the four companies importing fur from eastern North America merged in October 1614. The merchants working for the newly named New Netherland Company received exclusive permission to sail to the newly discovered lands situate in America between New France and Virginia, whereof the sea coasts lie between the 40th and 45th degrees of latitude, now named ‘New Netherland.’ On an island in the Hudson River, the company erected a trading post and called it Fort Nassau.⁶⁴ Nine months before the establishment of the New Netherland Company, another firm with a North Atlantic focus had been founded, the Noordsche Compagnie, which was to monopolize Dutch whaling until 1642. Many of the merchants active in the New Netherland trade were also involved as carriers or regional directors in the Noordsche Compagnie.⁶⁵

It is unknown when the Dutch started sailing to West Africa, but that had certainly happened by September 1592, when Jacob Floris van Langen applied for a patent for his globe. That instrument, he purported, had helped his countrymen travel to Pernambuco as well as São Tomé and Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea.⁶⁶ In a book from 1596, Berend ten Broecke (Bernardus Paludanus) presented data on trade and shipping along the coasts of Africa and its islands based on a mixture of Portuguese and firsthand Dutch information. Paludanus relied for some descriptions