The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World 0801450454, 9780801450457

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THE DUTCH MOMENT

THE DUTCH MOMENT WAR , TR A DE , A ND SETT L E M E N T I N T H E SEV E NT EEN T H - CE N T UR Y AT LA N T I C WO R L D

Wim Klooster

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2016 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2016 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Klooster, Wim, author. Title: The Dutch moment : war, trade, and settlement in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world / Wim Klooster. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016014637 | ISBN 9780801450457 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Netherlands—History—17th century. | Netherlands—Commerce—History—17th century. | Dutch—America—History—17th century. | Dutch— Africa, Southern—History—17th century. Classification: LCC DJ172 .K55 2016 | DDC 303.48/24920182109032—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016014637 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

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Cover design: Scott Levine. Cover illustration: Cornelis Verbeeck, A Naval Encounter between Dutch and Spanish Warships, c. 1618/1620. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Contents

Introduction: The Great Transformation

1

1. The Unleashed Lion

11

2. Imperial Expansion

33

3. Imperial Decline

74

4. Between Hunger and Sword

113

5. Interimperial Trade

146

6. Migration and Settlement

189

7. The Non-Dutch

215

Epilogue: War, Violence, Slavery, and Freedom Acknowledgments

265

Appendix A. The Dutch Slave Trade to the French Caribbean, 1650–1675 267 Appendix B. Direct Dutch Slave Trade to the Spanish Empire 269 Notes

271

For Further Reading Index

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405

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THE DUTCH MOMENT

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 1

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INTRODUCTION

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

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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 seventeenthcentury Atlantic, a fight that historians have underappreciated. The battle

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INTRODUCTION

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.

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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

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INTRODUCTION

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

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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 microhistorical 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 Amerindians 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

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INTRODUCTION

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

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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,

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INTRODUCTION

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.

Ch ap ter 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, 11

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C H A PT E R 1

Map 1. The Netherlands, ca. 1600

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. 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

THE UNLEASHED LION

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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 Castile.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

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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

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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

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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

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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-yearold 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

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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

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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

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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 halfcentury 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

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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

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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 Henricus 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

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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

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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 on intelligence provided by Dutch shippers, but for other areas, such as that of the coast of KongoAngola, he copied the work of Duarte Lopez, the Portuguese explorer who had traveled across Kongo and published a book based on his experiences in 1591. The Dutch translation came out in 1596.67 According to scholarly tradition, Dutch trade with Africa was pioneered by a shipmaster from Medemblik named Barent Ericksz. During his imprisonment on the island of São Tomé, he learned details from French prisoners about the gold trade that took place at the Portuguese fort of São Jorge da Mina. After his release, Ericksz rushed back to Holland to interest financiers in a commercial venture on the Gold Coast, which soon flourished at the expense of his captors.68 Before long, Dutch ships swarmed about along the entire West African coast to procure gold and ivory. An estimated two hundred vessels completed an African voyage between 1592 and 1607. By 1615, they arrived at a rate of sixty a year, each ship having in its hold an average of 200,000 ells of textiles, 40,000 pounds of copper work, and 100,000 pounds of strings of beads, as well as an assortment of other commodities.69 King Philip III of Spain informed the viceroy of Portugal that Dutch trade with Mina and Guinea was so advantageous that it provided them with the financial foundation for their fleets and their enterprises “in both Indies.”70 The coast south of Cape Lopez (in today’s Gabon) was initially out of bounds for Dutch ships. A heavy southerly wind made it extremely difficult to cross the Gulf of Guinea from May through January, and a strong current near Cape Lopez made navigation even more dangerous. Once this cape was rounded, an endless struggle against winds and currents awaited ships before they could reach the coast of southwest Africa.71 In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch acquired expertise in navigating here. Led by Pieter Brandt, a pioneer, they expanded their sphere of action to the southwest coast of Africa, where ivory was a popular export item. Brandt made several commercial contacts with Africans on the Congo River and on the Loango coast on behalf of his principal, Gerard Reijnst, an Amsterdam merchant who

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later became governor-general in the Dutch East Indies. Due in part to his tireless work, Dutch ships appeared in such force off the unprotected Portuguese factory at Mpinda, near the mouth of the Congo River, that King Philip III decided to build a fort there in 1609.72 It was at Mpinda three years later that the Dutch were introduced to the benefits of a native alliance when a Dutch ship and a yacht battled at sea in September 1612 with four Portuguese caravels carrying three hundred men, sent from Luanda. The outcome would have been a foregone conclusion if not for the intervention of Sonho warriors. The Sonho-Dutch alliance compelled the Portuguese to beat the retreat.73 Six years before, the count of Sonho had first courted the Dutch in a letter to the States General, which sent a favorable response that may have led to a formal trade agreement. The count probably sought to secure Dutch military support not so much against the Portuguese but the Kingdom of Kongo, from which he tried to secede.74 Trading in Africa was tricky for the Dutch. Although the States of Holland stimulated trade with Africa by granting ships exemptions from the outbound convoy duty, there was no navy protecting commerce with areas claimed by the Iberian monarchy. Such trade was therefore as risky as it was profitable. How profitable is not precisely known, but Dutch trade in African gold and ivory was estimated at 1.2–1.5 million guilders per annum in the first two decades of the seventeenth century.75 Merchants from Amsterdam and Middelburg solidified Dutch commercial interests in the 1610s as they combined forces in a number of what were called Guinea companies.76 These companies frequently collaborated without signing any formal agreements, thus trying to counter the practice of African traders who drove up the prices as soon as more than one ship appeared on the coast.77

Waging War Warfare and trade were not entirely separate activities. Privateering was simply another instrument for obtaining riches from Africa and the Americas, and the captains of merchant ships did not hesitate to seize enemy ships. Twenty-seven of seventy-seven Dutch ships in the Atlantic Ocean in the first seven months of the year 1600 went on privateering expeditions.78 They thereby followed in the footsteps of England’s famous Elizabethan privateers such as Francis Drake and John Hawkins. The connection to their English neighbors had been a natural one since 1585, when the Hispano-Dutch war on the other side of the English Channel was beginning to worry Queen Elizabeth of England. A French hitman, hired by the Spanish king, had assassinated William of Orange the previous year, leaving the Spanish in a position

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to possibly secure control of the Dutch seaports. After all the English ships were seized in Spanish ports, Elizabeth decided to sign the Treaty of Nonesuch with the Dutch States General in August 1585. The queen promised far-reaching military aid, in exchange for which the Dutch handed over the Zeeland ports of Den Briel (Brill), Vlissingen, and Rammekens to the English as pawns until all the aid had been paid for. In addition, the English Earl of Leicester became the Dutch governor-general, and two Englishmen took seats on the Council of State.79 From 1585 to 1604, the Dutch war with Spain thus overlapped with an English war effort against the Spanish, half of which was supplied by privateers.80 The chief response of Spain was to send out the Gran Armada in 1588, the objective of which was not only the conquest of England but the reconquest of the Netherlands, which could not be achieved unless England was thoroughly defeated.81 The failure of the Armada only strengthened the Anglo-Dutch alliance. Initially, the Dutch operated in the shadow of the seasoned English privateers, who had harassed Spanish ships and colonies for decades. But the Dutch war itself also acquired an Atlantic dimension in the 1590s. The two enemies of the Habsburgs joined hands in 1596 in the blockade of the port of Cádiz on the Spanish Atlantic coast. Twelve thousand English and fifteen thousand Dutch soldiers took part in this raid under English command. Cádiz was captured and sacked, but the America-bound cargoes of the Spanish merchant fleet (which increasingly used this port instead of Seville) were left untouched. And although the battle had the effect of striking terror into the Spanish, it was certainly no financial success. Nor could the operation keep the Spanish from organizing a second Armada, which was prevented from reaching the North Sea only by the elements and technical inability.82 Dutch maritime warfare was coordinated after 1597 by five admiralties: Amsterdam, Maze (based in Rotterdam), Zeeland (Middelburg), Friesland (Dokkum and later Harlingen), and West-Friesland and Noorderkwartier (alternately in Enkhuizen and Hoorn). Supervised by the States General, these regional bodies built, financed, and manned warships and shared in the fight against the enemy. In this fight, the Dutch stood alone after the operation at Cádiz. England refrained from military actions against Spain in the next years, and in 1604, one year after the death of Queen Elizabeth, England signed a peace treaty with Philip III. The Atlantic war, meanwhile, continued in 1596 with an attack by two ships of Balthazar de Moucheron on the Portuguese fort of São Jorge da Mina, the key to controlling the Gold Coast. The attempt failed, and two years passed before Balthazar’s men found a new target in the island of Principe, where Ericksz had been captured and

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where a small group of Portuguese settlers ran sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans. The conquest was successful, and farmers and artisans disembarked to begin colonization; however, before reinforcements could arrive from Holland, the new colonists had abandoned the island after dissension arose among them and after fevers accompanying the rainy season had decimated their ranks.83 De Moucheron was also involved in the most ambitious venture to date. The States General took the initiative for a secret contract, signed on their behalf in March 1599 by Johan van Oldenbarnevelt—who as grand pensionary of Holland was a leading public official, second only to the stadholder— with de Moucheron and Pieter van der Hagen, another wealthy refugee merchant from Flanders. They were instructed to assemble a fleet and in the next two years to enter an Iberian port, seize as many enemy ships as possible and attack enemy islands, towns, and ports, some of which were to be occupied. As the fleet commander they appointed Pieter van der Does, a man from Leiden weathered in the fight against Spain. Eleven years before this, he had made a name for himself by capturing a galleon from the Spanish Armada. On May 15, seventy-three ships set sail from Vlissingen with the intention of blockading Lisbon, just as Antwerp had been cut off from the sea. When it emerged that the Dutch had missed the Portuguese fleet arriving from the East Indies, part of Van der Does’s fleet was sent to the Canary Islands, following in the wake of Francis Drake (1595). Although the town of Las Palmas was conquered and enemy ships destroyed, the Spanish struck back and expelled all the Dutch.84 Shortly afterward, in mid-October, the Dutch easily captured the Portuguese sugar island of São Tomé, the final destination of the expedition.85 The invaders, “Lutherans of the Confederation of Lower Germany,” as they were called in Portuguese documents, next experienced a stretch of bad luck. When the rains set in, provisions went bad and tropical diseases spread like wildfire. No fewer than 15 officers and 1,800 men died, partly on the island, partly on the departing ships. Among the victims was Admiral van der Does.86 After he had succumbed, a small squadron crossed the ocean and bombarded the Brazilian capital of Salvador. But this was too little and too late. The main effect of the expedition, apart from the huge devastation on São Tomé, where the invaders burned the city as well as every church and sugar mill they passed, was to warn Spain that the Dutch were able to organize a large fleet (figure 1). This enormous financial debacle made Dutch authorities think twice about new ventures. The only profit to be expected from large-scale expeditions consisted of the enemy ships seized in passing. Although privateering sometimes slowed down the venture, the admiralties and the States General

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Figure 1. Dutch ships returning from Brazil in 1605 after a two-year privateering expedition. Painting by Hendrick Vroom. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

supported this practice, arguing that the prizes compensated the shipowners, at least in part, for the costs they had incurred. A new attempt was made to capture a departing or arriving Portuguese East Indies fleet in 1606–1607, when the Dutch admiralties sent three different fleets to the Iberian Peninsula, each time with financial support from the VOC. Logistical problems prevented these operations from succeeding, but after the third near-miss, an excellent opportunity presented itself to attack the Spanish war fleet at Gibraltar—and this time, the Dutch succeeded. The rout of the Spanish fleet has gone down in history as one of the main Dutch maritime exploits in their long war with the Habsburgs.87 The Dutch also took their war with the Habsburgs to the Americas. Privateers swarmed into American waters, and two privately organized fleets left Dutch ports in the last years of the sixteenth century, seeking a faster trade route to East Asia and aiming to harm the Spanish on the South American west coast.88 Although they replicated the English example of passing through the Strait of Magellan, captured a few Spanish ships, and briefly occupied a town on the island of Chiloé off the coast of southern Chile, no lasting damage was done. Moreover, the loss of human lives among the Dutch crews was enormous.89 One reason for this failure was the precautions taken by Spanish defenders in Peru, whose viceroy had anticipated the arrival of the Dutch expeditions. The Dutch naval buildup frequently alarmed Habsburg authorities in the early years of the seventeenth century. Archduke Albert, the ruler of the Habsburg Netherlands, wrote to Philip III in 1606 about a Dutch scheme to

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form a fleet of seventy or eighty ships carrying 6,000 men that was to attack the ports of Portobello and Cartagena on the Spanish Main and occupy Havana.90 The actual expedition sent by the States General in that year was much more modest, consisting of three ships and a yacht, and its destination was Brazil. Having failed to capture some forts, the attackers returned home after sustaining serious losses.91 Habsburg apprehensions also concerned Dutch associations with Spanish subjects. In one instance, Dutch commanders at anchor in La Yaguana, Santo Domingo, delivered a proclamation from Stadholder Prince Maurits, in which the islanders were offered protection and military aid on the condition that they abandon their loyalty to the king of Spain and renounce their Roman Catholic faith.92 The Dutch threat to Cuba also had a religious dimension, at least according to the Spanish governor there. He asserted that foreign pirates and corsairs—probably Dutchmen— had distributed small booklets, which were filled with heresies that had been translated from their native tongue.93 Because foreign contacts with Spanish subjects were no longer tolerated, the Spanish Council of the Indies eventually decided to start depopulating two areas: the northern coast of Hispaniola (Santo Domingo) and Nueva Ecija in eastern Venezuela. A similar plan to transfer the population of two Cuban towns was, in the end, not carried out.94 During one of their encounters with indigenous Americans in Chile in 1600, the Dutch discovered that Amerindians opposed to Spanish domination were potential allies. The arrival of a Dutch fleet in Chile coincided with large-scale Mapuche resistance to Spanish rule, which culminated in the destruction of the town of Valdivia and the killing of many inhabitants. As the Dutch landed, they may have been mistaken for Spaniards, which would explain the murder of fifty men at the hands of the natives.95 Nevertheless, the two sides organized joint actions against the Spanish as well. Amerindians elsewhere in the New World also sought out the Dutch to form a common front against the Spanish. In 1613, a combined foray of Dutch privateers and Carib bowmen from Guiana seriously threatened Spanish settlers in Trinidad.96 Likewise, an indigenous Nipujoe man from Trinidad regularly joined the Dutch in their expeditions against Spanish targets. As a runaway from slavery or forced labor, he had a reason to seek revenge.97 The president of the audiencia of Santa Fé (in present-day Colombia) was not surprised about Dutch ties with Amerindians: “The Indians embrace their company, because they imitate the barbarity of their lives.” Besides, the Dutch “allow them to enjoy full liberty without constraint of tributes, labor, or the sweet yoke of the Gospel, heavy in their opinion.”98 The Dutch also perceived enslaved blacks in the Iberian colonies as possible allies. The members of the Nassau fleet that sailed in the 1620s (see

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later in the chapter) were apparently convinced that the black population of Peru was a fifth column. The viceroy claimed that the Dutch invaders brought along chests of manumission letters for the slaves in the colony as well many weapons to distribute to them. One section of the fleet, moreover, went to Pisco to foment a slave revolt there.99 The specter of a potential alliance between local slaves and their Dutch enemies did not go away. In 1637, the Spanish colonial authorities reported that a ship from Cuba had arrived in neighboring Santo Domingo with the remarkable message that a fleet of eighty ships was underway from the Dutch Republic. This venture was said to have been in response to a letter written by the blacks and “mulattoes” of the colony to the prince of Orange, in which they promised to surrender the island if he sent five hundred men. In the end, none of this turned out to be correct.100 The Spanish defenders eventually expelled the Dutch from both Santo Domingo and Cuba. A sea battle in 1605 on the south side of Cuba between six or seven Spanish galleons and thirty other European ships involved in the contraband trade, twenty-four of which were Dutch, was fatal for Abraham du Varne, the Dutch commander, and the entire crew of his ship.101 Spanish authorities were equally uncompromising in Santo Domingo, as five men from a ship from Rotterdam learned at their cost in 1607. When they came ashore near one of the evacuated towns, a sergeant and his soldiers surprised them. Three Dutchmen received the death sentence, and the other two, both minors, were sent to Spain to serve on the royal galleys.102 Spain also struck back hard at the salt lagoon of Araya, where the Dutch had freely collected salt since 1599. In 1605, a Spanish fleet of eighteen ships with a combined crew of 2,500 left many of the salt traders dead.103 In Atlantic Africa, the seaborne Dutch also attempted to wrest colonies from the Iberians. Following the failed expedition to São Jorge da Mina and the short-lived occupation of Principe, another opportunity presented itself for the Dutch to subdue São Jorge da Mina in 1606 when a Portuguese soldier deserted from the fort, was captured by members of the Efutu nation, and was brought to Dutch merchants in Accra. The merchants shipped him to the Netherlands, where the man told his captors about the meager supplies inside the fort and the low morale among soldiers. Because the time seemed ripe for the Dutch conquest, several merchants joined hands and organized an expedition of six warships in late summer 1606. The Portuguese, however, were just as well informed about the Dutch. When Dutch troops landed at Mouree on the land of Asebu, a Portuguese army supplemented with blacks from Mina awaited them, killing dozens.104 Undaunted, the Dutch returned to Mouree six years later at the invitation of the king of Sabu, despite the

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increased presence of Portuguese warships in the area after the truce had become effective. Under orders from the States General, a fort, soon to be called Fort Nassau, was built to protect the lucrative gold trade. A foothold had been established in Africa.105 While the overseas fight between the Dutch and the Iberians showed no signs of abating, the war on the home front had gotten bogged down. Public opinion in the Dutch Republic split into two camps: a war party and a peace party. Oldenbarnevelt set himself up as the champion of the peace party, whereas Stadholder Maurits emerged as leader of the war party, which derived its support from strict Calvinists and those interested in privateering and wartime commerce. Oldenbarnevelt won this battle, convincing both the stadholder and the town councils of the need of a cease-fire. During the negotiations that began in 1606, Spain raised the issue of the recent Dutch advances in the East and West Indies. Faced with the Spanish objections, Oldenbarnevelt initially considered abandoning the conquests, but he decided against that because it would provoke a storm of protest. Indeed, the Dutch delegation valued the modest trade with the Indies so highly that it refused to accept the only condition the Spanish side stipulated in February 1608 for recognition of Dutch sovereignty: withdrawal from the Indies. Although one of the Spanish negotiators reported to his king that he had been assured that the Dutch would give up their traffic to the Indies, this was never committed to paper.106 Prolonged negotiations finally produced a twelve-year truce in 1609, by which the Spanish king now recognized the rebellious seven provinces as “free lands, states, and provinces” to which he could lay no claim. As long as the truce obtained, the territorial boundaries remained unaltered, thus perpetuating the border between the northern and southern Netherlands, which had prevailed since at least the Spanish conquest of Antwerp of 1585. The one major Dutch operation during the truce years was an expedition to the South American west coast in 1614. After a swift voyage to the Pacific, the five-ship fleet commanded by Joris van Spilbergen, an experienced navigator, was met by a Spanish fleet of six vessels with superior manpower but inferior firepower. The ensuing Battle of Cañete ended in a resounding victory for van Spilbergen’s men, who sank the Spanish admiral’s ship and lost only forty men, whereas the Spanish side lost at least four hundred. The Dutch next threatened to attack Callao, but an impressive defensive façade erected by the Peruvian viceroy fooled van Spilbergen and made him abandon large offensive operations. As the Dutch fleet eventually sailed westward, the Spanish authorities must have breathed a sigh of relief.107

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The Dutch Republic itself, meanwhile, had come to the brink of civil war. A theological dispute between two university professors stirred up strong feelings, pitting the proponents of a broad church that could accommodate as many Protestant views as possible (the Remonstrants or Arminians) against advocates of an orthodox overhaul of the Calvinist doctrine (the Counter-Remonstrants). The urban magistrates of Holland, led by Oldenbarnevelt, approved of a broad church and protected Remonstrant pastors against their enemies. Many of these enemies were long-time adversaries of Oldenbarnevelt and the magistrates, who seized the opportunity to mobilize against them. Energized by the many domestic tensions that the war had hidden, they made the religious controversy a national cause to which many different groups could rally.108 With a civil war on the horizon, Maurits took charge of the CounterRemonstrants and staged a coup d’état in 1618. He used his new powers to purge the town councils of Holland of Arminians. In this highly charged atmosphere, the Synod of Dort, a national meeting of representatives of the Reformed Church, was organized to settle the Arminian controversy. The participants explicitly condemned the Remonstrants as heretics and for throwing the state and Church into disorder. Around the same time, the States General tried Oldenbarnevelt, found him guilty of treason, and had him publicly executed. Thus, the way was cleared for the resumption of hostilities with Spain. Although Oldenbarnevelt had aspired to a lasting peace, the war party was bent on engaging the enemy again as soon as the truce expired in 1621. By then, the Dutch were finally masters in their own house, having fulfilled their last financial obligations to their English allies in 1616. The pawn towns were consequently returned to Dutch rule.109 Although the Truce of 1609 and the final payments to England in 1616 practically made the Dutch Republic an autonomous nation, the residents of the United Provinces had already embarked on their own commercial course in the 1590s. By seizing the opportunities offered by the war and the consequent collapse of Antwerp, merchants from Amsterdam and other ports established direct trade links with ports in the Mediterranean and the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. The Dutch successfully challenged the Portuguese in Africa, but they remained junior partners in the Brazil trade and played a small role in the lucrative trade with Spanish America. The aim of the projects to set up the WIC, developed both before and during the truce years, was to make the Dutch the dominant commercial force in the Atlantic world. War with the Iberian foes was the key to making the Lion roar.

Ch ap ter 2

Imperial Expansion

On February 14, 1630, Diederick van Waerdenburg could not fall asleep. The lieutenant colonel was in charge of the Dutch invasion troops keeping ready on ships off the coast of Pernambuco, Brazil.1 Van Waerdenburg first prayed alone to God and then prayed together with the minister on his ship before waking up his officers to pray with them. Finally, van Waerdenburg called all three hundred soldiers on board his ship into his cabin in successive groups of eight or ten. He gave them Spanish wine and urged them to act with courage and boldness.2 Along with the other men of the invading fleet, these soldiers carried out their instructions in an exemplary manner, enabling the Dutch to establish a foothold in Brazil. Thus began a remarkable episode in Dutch colonial history. In the next dozen years, Dutch Brazil grew by leaps and bounds until the WIC controlled half of all the former Portuguese captaincies. After a revolt broke out in 1645, almost all these Dutch conquests were reversed, but the Dutch maintained themselves in their capital of Recife until 1654. Nowhere in the Americas did the Dutch or any other power employ as many soldiers as in Brazil. Dutch Brazil, therefore, symbolizes the ambition and military prowess of the young Republic. At the same time, the disappointing proceeds from Brazil, where much was sown but little harvested, were also typical of the Dutch Atlantic. Dutch imperial expansion hinged on Brazil but was not confined to it. In the 1620s and 1630s, Dutch fleets and armies were found 33

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throughout the Atlantic world. Under their umbrella, New World colonies and African trading posts were established that forced the Dutch to come to terms with African and American natives.

The West India Company When war was resumed in 1621, hostilities between the Dutch and the Iberians acquired an explicitly Atlantic dimension. On June 3, less than two months after the truce with Spain expired, the WIC was chartered as a counterpart of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), that future commercial giant in the Indian Ocean that used warfare as a means to seize control of the lucrative spice trade. With their firsthand knowledge of the benefits that could be derived from trade in the Indian Ocean, the Amsterdam political elite lobbied for the establishment of the WIC, eyeing directorships to cash in on Atlantic trade.3 They may have been disappointed in the end. The WIC charter determined that the directors of the five departments (or chambers) received 1 percent in value of all prizes taken from the enemy and 1 percent of all incoming and outgoing goods, as well as 0.5 percent of all gold and silver that arrived.4 Although these provisions were not negligible, the WIC directors must have tried hard to continue their private trade under the front of the company monopoly. The formation of a WIC was also advocated by Willem Usselincx (1567– 1647), a Flemish Calvinist who had arrived in the United Provinces in 1591 as a religious refugee. For a quarter of a century, he bombarded the States General with proposals, but when the time was ripe for a western counterpart of the VOC, Usselincx found himself among many advocates. Although it did not become the blueprint, his proposal to establish a Spanish-style Council of the Indies did influence the way the WIC board was set up.5 As the end of the Twelve Years’ Truce approached, all provinces backed the foundation of a chartered company specifically for the Atlantic world.6 The WIC was a hybrid organization, a private enterprise fulfilling government tasks. The government was not interested in quick returns on its investments. It could wait, as long as certain strategic goals related to the renewed war with Spain were realized. The merchants, to be true, did not share this mindset. They were out to make a profit—and sooner rather than later. But the structure of the chartered company still guaranteed long-term investments because there was no dependence on any particular group of investors. A strong company protected against dangers and risks, and took care of the expensive tasks of regular transports to the colonies and the construction of forts and warehouses far from home.7

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The close collaboration between the government and business interests was no novelty. It had been pioneered by Genoa and Venice in the late Middle Ages.8 The geographic scope was, however, new. The WIC was given the right to monopolize trade, to rule and to administer justice, to conclude treaties with princes, and to maintain an army as well as a fleet. Although the stated aim of the WIC was to conduct trade with Africa and “the West Indies” (i.e., the Americas),9 its directors clearly preferred war over trade, arguing that the existence of enemy Iberian settlements made conducting trade impossible in virtually all of the Caribbean and mainland Central and South America. Trade with Amerindians or the slow cultivation of regions not yet inhabited by Spanish and Portuguese (such as Guiana) would hardly contribute to the welfare of the United Provinces and destruction of the “hereditary enemy.” Instead, the Dutch had to seize ships and property from the Habsburg king and his subjects and capture his settlements. The supporters of the WIC realized that targeting the Americas was not going to be easy and would require a sustained effort. The task was harder than whatever the VOC had achieved in Asia. Arnoldus Buchelius, a humanist, wrote in his diary that, while Asia was merely the concubine of Spain, America was its actual wife. And, he added, Spain was known to be a jealous spouse.10 The WIC mirrored the state that had spawned it. In contrast to the French and English monarchies, which strengthened their positions by concentrating their instruments of power and eliminating local rights and privileges, the Union of Utrecht, the constitutive charter of the Dutch Republic, obliged the participating provinces to maintain the privileges and liberties of all the signatories. Because the national government was based on provincial assemblies and town councils, power and authority were heavily decentralized.11 Although the same was true for the WIC, the day-to-day company business was not as cumbersome as its federal structure implies because some provinces—especially Holland or rather the town of Amsterdam—were more equal than others, a fact that was laid down in a distributive code. The code stipulated both the relative power of the departments or chambers and the contributions each of them had to make to fitting out ships and other company activities. The share of Amsterdam was assessed at four-ninths, Zeeland at two-ninths, and the three other chambers (Maze, Noorderkwartier, and Stad en Lande or Groningen) at one-ninth each.12 The supreme board of the WIC, the Heren XIX (usually translated as the “Gentlemen Nineteen”), met twice or three times per year, the meetings lasting longer as the colonial empire grew. In spite of its appellation, the board included more than nineteen members. Eighteen of them were delegates from the five chambers and a nineteenth seat was reserved for a representative

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of the States General, but in 1623, the original charter was modified by adding two chief investors directors (one each from Amsterdam and Zeeland) to the ranks. These men reported to specific groups of investors, to whom they were responsible. Apart from investors representing regions in the Republic that were traditionally involved in overseas commerce, the WIC was set up to attract investors from new associations of investors.13 From the very start, the WIC was tied to the States General, which communicated with the Heren XIX about numerous matters and helped coordinate overseas military affairs. In addition, the states chipped in with 1 million guilders in support. Nevertheless, it took the new company more than two years to become solvent, even though investors were canvassed at home and abroad.14 There was a conspicuous contrast between the merchants who had traded in the East Indies before 1602 and those who had been active in the Atlantic world prior to 1621. While the former eagerly invested their capital in the VOC, the latter refused to embrace the WIC.15 Some potential investors viewed the WIC as a sham intended for nepotism, a means for the directors to employ their needy friends. Some feared that company posts would be filled by men fueled by ambition, not those propelled by talent. Others were deterred by the example of the VOC, whose arbitrary policies were said to have frequently conflicted with the shareholders’ interests.16 More generally, the hesitation to invest can be explained by the bellicose nature of the new enterprise and its aim to target overseas Iberian possessions, which many considered unassailable.17 The main motive to stake money on this new horse, a pamphlet of a later date explained, was not to earn profit but to harm the enemy. The backers, in other words, may not have been smart investors; they were pious patriots.18 From the investors’ vantage point, then, the WIC amounted to a patriotic lottery.19 Relatively large amounts were brought in by inland towns such as Leiden, Utrecht, Haarlem, and Deventer, whose city councils were bulwarks of rigid Calvinists carrying on propaganda for the WIC. Mennonites were said to steer clear of WIC shares because they expected the company to commit acts of violence under the cloak of commerce, and Roman Catholics did not invest at all, although they were the most affluent.20 The war mood would translate into active anti-Iberian policies. In August 1623, the nineteen directors—the Heren XIX—gathered for a momentous central board meeting in the West-Indisch Huis, a building in Amsterdam that the company rented and added to until it reached an impressive size.21 The Heren XIX followed the lead of the States General, which reasoned that the recently resumed hostilities in the Netherlands would not suffice to bring the war to a happy conclusion. As one director put it, it was necessary

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to “cut off the nerves and veins of the King of Spain’s annual revenues, from which the blood and vivifying spirit spreads through his large body.”22 In other words, warfare had to be extended to the Americas, the source of the silver that oiled the Habsburg war machine. A new front had to be opened. The Spanish side was equally eager to resume the war, not so much to recover the lost provinces, which it no longer considered feasible, but to secure a better peace.23 As much as they intended to return to waging war, Spanish authorities dreaded the Dutch schemes for westward expansion. They made the signing of a new truce contingent on a few major concessions by the Dutch, one of which was to preclude the formation of the WIC and to withdraw from the Americas.24 The official Spanish ban on Dutch navigation and trade in the East and West Indies left the Dutch unimpressed. One pamphleteer wrote in 1630, “The Kings of Spain don’t know the majority of the East and West Indies, so what right may the Spanish have to prohibit the Dutch from trading, trafficking, and navigating there?” It would, he went on, be frivolous for them to appeal to papal dispensation because the pope “has as much right to decide on the matter as the donkey that he rides or the most junior boy in his kitchen.”25 Cartography was the handmaiden of Dutch expansion. The political and economic changes of the mid-1580s, in particular the fall of Antwerp and the reorientation of international trade in the northern Netherlands, were translated into major cartographic activity. Displaying intimate knowledge of areas across the globe, the Dutch would soon be the foremost mapmakers. Petrus Plancius (1552–1622)—cartographer, examiner of the navigators, and Calvinist minister—personified this transformation. Along with Balthazar de Moucheron, a fellow refugee from Antwerp, Plancius invested much time and energy trying to find a northeastern route to Asia.26 The leading Dutch cartographer of the seventeenth century was Hessel Gerritsz (1580/1–1632), a man with a wide range of talents. He was an engraver of maps and prints, the author of several works, a publisher, a printer, and a bookseller. Gerritsz worked with the Amsterdam admiralty and was the cartographer of the VOC before being appointed as the “Chief of the Hydrographical Office” of the WIC. Henceforth, all the journals, maps, and drawings made on board ship to areas that were within the WIC realm had to be sent to Gerritsz. The maps that accompanied Johannes de Laet’s Nieuwe Wereldt (1625) were Gerritsz’s.27 Using ship journals, coastal views, and conversations with returning shipmasters and natives from different latitudes, Gerritsz built an amazing storehouse of data, which he tried to square with the maps produced by his Portuguese colleagues. He also sailed for fourteen

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months in 1628–1629 on the fleet of the experienced Adriaen Jansz Pater, exploring the north and east coasts of South America and the Caribbean islands. In addition, the WIC chamber of Zeeland provided him with logbooks and reconnaissance charts on the condition that the confidential parts would not be leaked.28 Before the WIC started its operations, its counterpart, the VOC, launched a new expedition to southwest America, cofinanced by the Dutch government and labeled the Nassau fleet because of the significant involvement of Stadholder Maurits (of Nassau) in the fleet preparations. The eleven ships, carrying 1,637 sailors and soldiers, made up the largest fleet the Dutch had as yet dispatched to the Pacific.29 This expedition did not catch the Spanish leadership in Peru by surprise. Ever since the days of van Spilbergen, the viceroy had taken strong measures, paying attention to the defense of Callao, the port city of Lima.30 The attackers planned to seize silver transports on the coast of Panama to harm the Spanish enemy and, if possible, to unleash a war that might end in the conquest of the port of Arica in northern Chile as well as the capture—with indigenous help—of Potosí in upper Peru, the main site of silver production in South America.31 None of these goals was achieved. It soon transpired that Arica and Potosí—which the Dutch had naively assumed would not be defended by arms—were strong bulwarks.32 The plan to intercept a silver transport to Panama also miscarried, although the Dutch ships did destroy enemy vessels and port facilities in Callao, Guayaquil, and Acapulco. An unintended consequence of their marauding presence was that the trade fair at Portobelo could not take place for lack of Peruvian goods, which had to be shipped by way of Callao. The shipment of silver to Europe and, hence, the payment of Spanish soldiers was thereby delayed.33 The new king of Spain, Philip IV, who had succeeded his late father Philip III on March 31, 1621, now decided to fit out an armada to protect the Pacific coast. The necessary funds were to be collected in all corners of South America. The clergy was assigned this task to make payment a matter of conscience. The money would, after all, be used to fight heretics. The crown instructed Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, Mercedarians, and Jesuits to go out of their way to target moneyed men. The spiritual offensive, nevertheless, yielded an amount that was not enough. The armada was canceled, and the collected funds were invested in the war in the Low Countries.34 Peru was not alone in living in fear of the Dutch rebels. The Spanish on Cuba also reckoned with Dutch fleets. In 1621, the king warned the governor of Cuba that the Dutch intended to build a fort in the port of Matanzas,

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and the following year, rumors circulated about a Dutch fleet of fifty sail that was to build a fortress on the island. In one version, Stadholder Maurits himself was its commander. It is not surprising, then, that the Nassau fleet was suspected of designs on Cuba. Spanish intelligence was correct in that Dutch authorities did consider an assault on Havana or the capture of a Cuban fortress in these years, even though no concrete plan materialized.35 It was only after the Nassau fleet had left Dutch shores that the WIC became solvent and its directors gathered in Amsterdam for their important board meeting. The fruit of their deliberations was a Grand Design on the Atlantic world that made sense on paper. In the first stage if the Design, one fleet was to conquer Salvador da Bahia in Brazil and another Luanda, the main Portuguese slave-trading port in Africa. Sugar was what the directors were after. Occupying Salvador would enable the capture of the sugar region of northeastern Brazil, while dominance in Luanda would ensure a steady migration of Africans to work the plantations. The execution of the project, however, left much to be desired. The plan to conquer Brazil was propagated by several men, including Jan Andriesz Moerbeeck. An Anabaptist born in Amsterdam, Moerbeeck was highly active during the startup years of the WIC. He was, no doubt, the author of an anonymous advisory report offered to the States General in September 1622. Brazil, Moerbeeck argued, is interesting if only for the profits to be derived from the sugar trade, calculated by him to amount to 5.3 million guilders per year. The overall net gain would be no less than 5 million guilders, a handsome sum to be spent on land and seaborne defenses in the next twenty years.36 The Dutch were, of course, no strangers to the Brazilian sugar trade, although mostly as carriers. The prospect of a direct connection was alluring. Profits would be higher and supplies for Brazil cheaper once the Dutch could end their auxiliary role and assume complete control of the trade. Moerbeeck’s sketch of a bright future probably carried much weight, especially because some of the first WIC directors had themselves been involved in the Brazil trade. Pieter Beltgens had lived in Brazil for six years as a commercial agent, while Hendrick Broen had started trading with Brazil during the truce years.37 The WIC soon started to prepare for a massive invasion of Salvador da Bahia, the Brazilian capital city. Some Dutchmen, led by blind optimism, expected an easy victory. Others, equally misguided, placed their hopes on the resident Portuguese in Brazil, who allegedly suffered under the Spanish yoke and would flock to the invaders.38 The Habsburgs, meanwhile, realized that Brazil could be on the Dutch wish list, even though most expected Pernambuco, not Salvador, to be the site of an invasion.39

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And so did the locals. In this sugar-rich northern captaincy, one fort guarding the village of Recife was completely renovated and two small forts were constructed to protect the nearby town of Olinda. At the same time, the total number of men who could bear arms was around 8,000, and only 1 in 8 had suitable weapons. By contrast, Salvador was eerily quiet, its residents, wearied by years of empty threats, paying little attention to stories about an approaching Dutch fleet.40 The Dutch prepared the expedition quietly and in all secrecy. The lie was spread that twelve ships were fitted out for commercial ends, while in reality a fleet of twenty-three sail was readied, carrying 1,700 soldiers and 1,600 sailors, and led by Admiral Jacob Willekens (1564–1649) and Vice Admiral Piet Pieterszoon Heyn (1577–1629). Having departed on December 21, 1623, the fleet reached its destination, the All Saints’ Bay, on May 8, 1624. The following day, Piet Heyn ordered his troops to open fire at the heavy battery on the edge of Salvador, starting two days of frantic battles that ended on May 10 with the Dutch capture of a city abandoned by almost its entire population.41 What hastened the victory was the departure on the night of May 9 of Bishop Marcos Teixeira, who was joined by three thousand troops and most of the residents.42 Fifty Dutchmen lost their lives in the invasion, and they were joined in death shortly afterward by Johan van Dorth. Van Dorth, a man with more than three decades of war experience, had barely begun his tenure as the Dutch governor of Salvador and commander of the land forces when the enemy appeared to the north of the bay, assaulting the Dutch in small groups.43 Van Dorth personally led two hundred men to confront the marauders, but they were ambushed by a joint army of Luso-Brazilians, indigenous Tupi, and blacks, who introduced the Dutch to guerrilla warfare. This mode of waging war, which predominated in Brazil, was marked by small mobile groups that availed themselves of hit-and-run tactics in territory controlled by the enemy. Van Dorth did not survive the encounter. His countrymen first found his horse, covered with arrows, and then drew from indigenous hands the general’s corpse. His head had been separated and his nose, ears, and hands cut off. Some of his limbs were carried around in triumph by the Portuguese, and other body parts were allegedly eaten by the Amerindians.44 The fall of Salvador led to a sharp rise in religious services and sermons in Portuguese convents and churches seeking divine protection, but the news was slow to reach Dutch shores.45 As late as August 26, more than three months after the successful invasion and almost a month after the capture of the town was known in Lisbon, Maria van Reigersberch carefully chose her words when she wrote to her husband in Paris, the great legal scholar

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Hugo Grotius. She reported “very good news from the West Indies fleet” but added that it “had not yet been confirmed.” Later that week, when confirmation had arrived, spontaneous celebrations broke out in various towns even before public feast days had been announced.46 Jubilation north of the border was met with skepticism in the southern Netherlands, where the first genuine newspaper spread the notion that news of the capture of Salvador was not true, that all that had happened was the plunder of some churches by Dutch invaders.47 Dutch control of Salvador was short-lived, in part because of WIC negligence. Admiral Willekens was allowed to sail off, leaving only 1,600 men behind.48 Although another Dutch fleet was being fitted out, the Iberians were the first to respond, putting to sea with 56 ships and at least 12,463 men, the largest fleet to cross the Atlantic before the mid-eighteenth century.49 The size of the fleet reflected the fear among the Iberian authorities that the rest of Brazil and the Spanish colonies, especially silver-rich Peru, were at risk.50 Many of the men on board the fleet had been removed from the Portuguese garrisons in North Africa, while others were of noble blood and had been attracted by the promise of royal concessions and privileges. The fleet was commanded by Admiral Don Fadrique Álvarez de Toledo Osorio, a relative of the Duke of Alba. When his fleet arrived at the All Saints’ Bay in late March 1625, the Iberian naval blockade-cum-siege could begin. The Dutch camp, meanwhile, fell prey to internal strife. Van Dorth’s successor, Governor Willem Schouten, was not held in esteem by his own soldiers, who removed him from office, chose a successor (Hans Kijff), and pressured him to open negotiations with Toledo. After four days of mutiny and heavy fighting, Kijff signed an agreement with the restoration fleet, ending the era of Dutch Salvador on April 30, 1625.51 The news of the restoration led to large-scale celebrations in the Iberian Peninsula, where good tidings had become a scarce good. Not only was a great procession organized in Lisbon along with artillery salutes and fireworks but the victory was depicted in a soon-to-be famous painting by Juan Bautista Maino and a play by Lope de Vega.52 The mood in the Dutch Republic was understandably different. How could the new colony have been lost so fast? How could the troops have surrendered, abandoning 270 cannon and a huge arsenal of arms and ammunition?53 A government investigation put the blame on the colonial council, which was judged to have lacked courage and to have failed in its task to maintain order.54 Seven officers received the death penalty, although none was executed. At the eleventh hour, they were pardoned at the request of Amalia of Solms, who had recently become the spouse of the new stadholder, Frederick Henry.55

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Even though the conquest of Salvador was ultimately a failure, the Grand Design was still alive. As step two of the first stage of the Design, Piet Heyn, second in command during the capture of Salvador, had left Brazil one week after Willekens as the commander of seven ships. His goal was to overpower the port of Luanda in Angola. Heyn arrived shortly after a squadron led by Filips van Zuylen had tried in vain to capture the port. The defenders were consequently well-prepared when Heyn’s ships appeared. Moreover, Dutch information about conditions on the ground once again turned out to be too optimistic. Heyn had counted on allied troops from Kongo, which did not show up because of domestic problems facing that African kingdom. Because he realized that his mission was doomed to failure, Piet Heyn sailed away, contenting himself with chasing enemy vessels.56 The second stage of the Grand Design began with the departure of the ancillary fleet to Salvador. The local Dutch foothold was to be strengthened before the fleet would divide into Caribbean and African attack squadrons. Although the size of the fleet, thirty-four ships, was appropriate, the slow preparations and the bad weather caused the fleet to leave the Netherlands too late to accomplish anything in Salvador. Not until May 26, three weeks after the restoration fleet, did the Dutch relief force under Boudewijn Hendricksz, burgomaster of the town of Edam, sight All Saints’ Bay.57 After diseases had killed seven hundred of his men in Brazil, Hendricksz sailed with eighteen vessels into the Caribbean as stage two, part two of the Grand Design.58 Three ships were lost in a hurricane and others suffered severe damage, but the Dutch did reach Puerto Rico, whose governor withdrew from the capital of San Juan, allowing the Dutch to pillage the town and the cathedral. They were unable, however, to defeat the garrison. Hendricksz did not survive this Caribbean adventure, and his successor lifted anchor without having succeeded in hurting the Spanish. To compound matters, the other expedition that had embarked after Hendricksz found Salvador back in enemy hands and also ended in utter failure. The relief ships that had not joined Hendricksz in the invasion of Puerto Rico took part in an attack on São Jorge da Mina, the Portuguese nerve center in West Africa. Even though the size of the Dutch invasion force expanded following a chance encounter with yet another Dutch fleet under Jan Dircksz Lam, the combined force was still no match for the Portuguese defenders and their local allies, who ambushed the Dutch on October 25, 1625. Of the 1,200 Dutchmen, 441 perished, many of them losing their heads to the black fighters eager to receive a financial reward the Portuguese had promised them.59 The defeats at Salvador and São Jorge da Mina and the thwarted expeditions to Luanda and Puerto Rico put an end to the Grand Design. Boundless

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ambition had yielded nothing concrete, not so much because of lack of spirit or fighting capacity but because the WIC directors had taken multiple gambles. If eliminating chance is the key to success, the Grand Design was doomed from the start.

Privateering and Naval Action The collapse of Salvador encouraged critics of the WIC to come out of the woodwork. One pamphleteer wrote that the most sensible men “in our land” had predicted that the conquest of Brazil would miscarry. After all, he added, Brazil was the main branch of the royal crown of Spain, which it would defend with all its strength. Conquering towns such as Salvador, therefore, would not work. The Dutch should have looted it, as they did in Cádiz in 1596.60 Looting Iberian property did occur, albeit not so much on land as on the water. The war assumed a distinctly maritime character after 1621, with both sides relying on privateers. The States General initially merely encouraged the capture of Iberian war ships and privateering vessels, but starting in 1625, all enemy craft could be seized.61 Little effort was required in capturing the majority of Spanish or Portuguese ships, which were usually very lightly armed.62 Although most enemy ships were seized by the WIC and other fulltime privateers, many Dutch carriers of goods and passengers also engaged in privateering. One Dutch ship, for example, carrying settlers to Tobago in 1628, overpowered a richly laden Portuguese sugar ship near Lisbon.63 All over the Atlantic, the capture of Iberian prizes was marked by incidents. Sailors on board the first yacht or boat to enter the prize smashed the chests open and took whatever was to their liking.64 Portuguese vessels were the more popular targets among the Dutch, not all of whom stayed close to home. Some preyed on Portuguese ships near Cape Lopez Gonçalves on the African west coast, which were returning from Benin, Calabar, and Ardra to São Tomé.65 Shipping between Portugal and Brazil suffered tremendously at the hands of the privateers, who captured eighty Portuguese vessels employed in the Brazil trade in 1625–1626 alone. The following year, Piet Heyn and his WIC fleet took thirty-eight prizes in Brazilian coastal waters.66 Such actions hit the Bahian sugar economy hard, doubled the freight price for sugar, and kept customs duties from Iberian coffers.67 The Portuguese slave trade also suffered at the hands of the privateers, who took some 1 million reis in revenue from São Tomé’s slave trade alone in 1625. The trade from Angola, the main Spanish American source of enslaved immigrants in these

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years, was also affected. The number of ships registered to sail to Angola on triangular voyages declined from fifteen (1628) to three (1629) and then rose slightly to eight (1630).68 Johannes de Laet, the contemporary WIC chronicler, estimated the immediate damage inflicted by company ships on the Iberian enemies from 1623 and 1636 at 37 million guilders. In this period, the Dutch seized 547 Spanish and Portuguese vessels.69 In these years, a pamphleteer wrote, looking back in 1651, that hardly a month went by without the sight of flags of victory and joy on the waters of the Dutch Republic, with ships proudly flaunting enemy pennants. Victory songs and cheers abounded on the streets throughout the country.70 There was one drawback to the great Atlantic activity deployed by privateers: close to home, ships and crews were in short supply, endangering the Dutch maritime defenses.71 The end of the truce in 1621 also saw a new commitment to maritime warfare among the Habsburg leaders. In fact, a major policy change took place, as the Spanish crown no longer preferred large assault fleets but counted on small privateering operations to be used in commercial warfare.72 Spanish privateering had all but disappeared during the reign of Philip II, but after the disastrous expedition of the Armada in 1588, the authorities had taken recourse to corsairs to defend Spanish coasts.73 Starting in 1621, scores of new vessels were built and enemy ships were attacked en route to France, especially by Spanish privateers based in Bordeaux who ignored French neutrality.74 The most effective innovation was the refurbishing of the port of Dunkirk in the Spanish Netherlands. The construction of a well-protected fort with two hundred guns pointing seaward spelled doom for the Dutch. In the following twenty-five years, privateers in Spanish service took some 3,000 Dutch vessels into Dunkirk, wiping out the value of all Dutch customs receipts.75 Although Dutch shipping in Europe was obviously the Dunkirkers’ main target, crews returning from transatlantic destinations and their shipowners also agonized over these seaborne warriors, who sometimes went after them.76 They did not fear just the loss of ship and goods but knew the stories of Dutch sailors who had been hanged or drowned.77 Sea battles were, of course, dangerous, too. On its return from Brazil in 1630, the WIC ship Overijssel ended up in a battle with three Dunkirk ships (two large and one small), which ended in thirty-one crew members being lost and forty-five injured.78 Five years later, Cornelis Jol, the naval hero who had just captured eleven Spanish ships in the Caribbean, lost his ship, carrying thousands of pesos, to the Dunkirkers. Jol himself was thrown in jail.79 The threat posed by Dunkirk was finally removed by the French in 1646, when a siege that included Polish and Ukranian soldiers

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as well as ten Dutch ships commanded by Maerten Tromp resulted in the evacuation by the Spanish.80 Although the Grand Design was no longer feasible, the Dutch did not give up on maritime warfare, which had been part and parcel of the Design. They set their sights on capturing a Spanish silver transport. Silver, the Dutch realized, oiled the Habsburg war machine. Its capture would both weaken the enemy and boost the Dutch effort. Short of seizing American production centers, the best option was capturing transport vessels. As we have seen, attempts to seize a transport off the Peruvian coast had failed, but potential spoils were even larger in the Caribbean, through which returning fleets from both Mexico and Peru had to sail on their way to Spain. Despite the comprehensive organization of the Spanish defense system, with naval escorts for transatlantic fleets and fortifications to protect the principal Caribbean ports, the WIC did not consider the capture of a returning Spanish fleet a foolhardy undertaking. It was known that following the failed capture of Puerto Rico, Boudewijn Hendricksz’s fleet had missed a golden opportunity to capture a treasure fleet due to a lack of discipline.81 For many years, the movements of the Mexican fleets and Peruvian galleons, which constituted the lifeline of the Spanish Atlantic empire, were studied. This good preparation yielded rich rewards in 1628, when in a dashing exploit Admiral Piet Heyn and his men seized the Mexican treasure fleet en route from Veracruz to Seville. In Matanzas Bay, Cuba, the Dutch fleet, equipped with 2,300 sailors and 1,000 soldiers, subdued the Spanish flota and took control of its cargo, made up of precious metals, indigo, cochineal, tobacco, and dyewood (figure 2). The gross proceeds amounted to an estimated 11.5 million guilders.82 The Spanish were spared an even larger loss because most of the gold and some of the silver had not been registered upon embarkation—these precious metals lined the pockets of officers and men.83 An anonymous Spanish eyewitness sketched the misery of the defeated, 2,000 of whom went ashore after the Dutch had overpowered their vessels. In their shirts or barefoot, they got lost in the mountains, fleeing from bullets and trying to hide from the relentless rainfall. Many wandered all night long, some crying and others sighing or cursing.84 That night, Piet Heyn and some of his men entered La Antigua, the third most important ship of the Spanish fleet, whose captain had remained on board. Heyn mentioned that this capture was not his finest moment; especially on the coast of Brazil, his exploits had been more impressive. The Spanish captain disagreed, saying Heyn did not realize what treasure he had laid his hands on.85 Heyn’s mission, however, was not complete yet. Only after bypassing twenty-seven Dunkirk privateers did his fleet and the treasures arrive home.86 Piet Heyn was now greeted as a hero by large crowds in The Hague, Leiden,

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Figure 2. The Dutch fleet led by Piet Heyn (in front) surprises the Spanish treasure fleet (in the background) in the Cuban bay of Matanzas. News map, 1628. Courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Haarlem, and Amsterdam. Never before, wrote one contemporary historian, had so much wealth entered the United Provinces.87 Heyn’s exploits appealed to the imagination, inspiring countless poems and encouraging many young men to break off their apprenticeships and sign up for the WIC.88 The conquest of the silver fleet was perhaps the greatest achievement of the WIC and certainly the one moment it would forever cherish. For years to come, its board meetings would take place in a room filled not only with Mexican feathers, Chinese paintings, and a scooped-out African tusk but also with several flags of ships from the flota and large paintings, the frames of which had been plated with silver that had come from the Spanish fleet.89 Heyn did not live long beyond Matanzas. He left the WIC and took service with the Dutch navy as lieutenant admiral, but on his first mission, aimed at the Dunkirkers, he was hit by a bullet while pursuing a group of Ostend privateers. He died on the deck of his ship.90 His counterpart, Don Juan de Benavides Bazán, lived longer, although not by much. Enraged, not just because of the financial debacle but also the loss to the reputation of his country, Philip IV had no pity on Bazán, the only admiral in the history of the Spanish transatlantic trade system to abandon his squadron, an act that had facilitated its seizure. His life ended on the gallows in Seville in spring 1634.91

Momentum Regained After the silver was stored in the basement of the Amsterdam West-Indisch Huis, it was traded for coined money and sold at exchange banks to earn

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cash.92 The Heren XIX then paid its investors a handsome 50 percent of the net profit that had fallen into its lap, a decision that would come to haunt them because it meant that only 1.5 million guilders ended up in the WIC treasury. At this juncture, however, the company board was in a mood to celebrate. The States General could also rejoice. To its delight, the Spanish Council of the Indies promptly sent artillery and gunpowder to Caribbean ports in fear of renewed Dutch attacks, thus diverting resources from the European war theater. Furthermore, the next homeward-bound Spanish fleet, ready to sail from the viceroyalty of Peru, was held up, delaying the payment of Habsburg soldiers in the Netherlands and benefitting the army of the United Provinces.93 The Dutch army also reaped more direct benefits of Piet Heyn’s exploit. Part of the silver was used to fund the successful siege of ’s-Hertogenbosch (Bois-le-Duc), ending the Spanish hold on that southern town and reversing Philip IV’s offensive strategy in the northern Netherlands. Besides, the loss of the treasure fleet created a sense of uncertainty at the Habsburg court that was hard to remedy. Rumors thus gained currency, such as the one in June 1629 that the Dutch were preparing to conquer the entire Spanish colonial empire. One fleet was to take the Spanish West Indies while another would seize the Portuguese East Indies. In some versions, England and France supported the Dutch effort, a notion not so farfetched given the state of war between England and Spain (1625–1630). Whether the rumors were believed or not, one month later the Spanish crown fitted an oversized war fleet of thirty-six ships, dubbed the galiflota, which left Cádiz under the command of Don Fadrique de Toledo, the admiral who had restored Spanish rule in Salvador in 1625. The new fleet had multiple objectives; it was to fight the Dutch fleets it encountered, chase foreign settlers from Nevis and St. Christopher in the Spanish Caribbean, and safely bring home the next treasure fleet.94 Toledo succeeded on all fronts. The main concern of Spain in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, especially after Matanzas, was to protect shipments of silver across the Atlantic, by far the most important commodity Spain derived from the New World. Since the 1560s, Spanish officials had organized the transatlantic trading system of the empire—the carrera de Indias—by setting up two well-armed fleets that ideally were to sail each year, guarding the flow of silver against pirates and privateers. Protecting the treasure fleets was not enough in itself if Spain wanted to guarantee the continued existence of the carrera de Indias. Ports throughout the Caribbean world had to be shielded from foreign invasions. Bold Dutch actions and rumors about impending invasions led to Spanish efforts to fortify key Caribbean ports, although

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actual building activity was remarkably small in scale. Possibly connected to the Dutch threat—and the warning provided by the invasion of San Juan in Puerto Rico—was a royal decree of April 19, 1626, which ordered the construction of a defense work of major proportions in Cartagena de Indias and led to the building of the Castillo Grande de Santa Cruz.95 In San Juan itself, many prominent residents were desperate. Some of them even intended to leave the island if their complaints about the small garrison and poor defenses were not heard.96 Their concerns, as well those expressed by the governors of the island, spawned a variety of initiatives, but in the end, everything stayed the same. The main castle thus remained unprotected from the seaside.97 The rumors floating around about enemy squadrons in the Atlantic did provide a wakeup call in Veracruz, New Spain, in 1629. The viceroy, the Marquis of Cerralvo, set about organizing the town defense. To that end, he ordered the municipal council to buy four hundred muskets and arquebuses, and six pieces of bronze artillery, as well as gunpowder and lead balls. As a consequence of these orders, two small bulwarks were constructed in 1633 and 1634.98 By contrast, no alterations were introduced in Havana, an important port of call for the treasure fleets. Even after the disaster at Matanzas, the garrison was not expanded, nor was the main fortress of the town—which was badly in need of repair, as an inspection revealed in 1633—rebuilt until the 1640s.99 The Spanish Indies survived in spite of this metropolitan inaction.100 In view of Dutch ambitions and the shortcomings of the American defenses, the Spanish fears of Dutch privateers were not groundless. Between 1629 and 1640, four more Dutch attempts were made to capture a Spanish treasure fleet, but these ended in failure due to Dutch miscommunication and Spanish success in outwitting the Dutch fleets.101 Not all the Dutch efforts were in vain. In October 1631, the Mexican treasure fleet, carrying two years worth of precious metals, lost its battle with the elements and was all but destroyed after Dutch fleets plying the Caribbean had brought about the postponement of its sailing date until the hurricane season was well under way.102 The Matanzas affair was a gift that kept on giving to the Dutch. On the one hand, the WIC was already becoming dependent on subsidies from the provinces, which helped pay for soldiers’ wages, ships, and rewards for captured vessels; however, the provinces consistently refused to meet their quotas—by fall 1628, they were in arrears for a total of 869,379 guilders.103 On the other hand, the effect of the capture of the flota was a boost to the financial health of the company, prompting the decision to return to Brazil.

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The focus was now on Pernambuco, the captaincy in the north that boasted 150 sugar plantations and that annually sent 120 ships to Portugal.104 One WIC report argued that the Dutch were better placed than the Portuguese to run the sugar trade because they could offer European goods at lower prices and were exempt from tolls and tithes. Moreover, invading and consolidating Pernambuco would not be a tall order.105 Because Piet Heyn was no longer in the service of the WIC (and had recently been killed), Hendrick Cornelisz Loncq (1568–1634) was appointed captain-general of the Dutch fleet. Loncq was a navigator with extensive experience in Atlantic waters, having captured two Iberian ships in Newfoundland as early as 1606.106 More recently, he had been Heyn’s second in command of the expedition sent against the Spanish treasure fleet. A Dutch fleet of sixty-seven ships and yachts put to sea in three stages in May and June 1629, giving rise to the aforementioned rumor of Dutch attacks on the East and West Indies. In the early morning of August 23, between Gran Canaria and Tenerife, eight Dutch ships and yachts suddenly found themselves surrounded by Don Fadrique de Toledo’s galiflota. Although the Dutch lost only a few men, heavy fire notwithstanding, seven of their ships were captured.107 Why most of their fleet could still escape virtually unharmed has yet to be explained. At anchor off St. Vincent, one of the Cape Verde Islands, Loncq received reinforcements from the Netherlands and headed with a fleet of fifty-two ships and thirteen sloops for Pernambuco. What followed on February 15 was an attack according to a tried and tested recipe. Loncq chose a surprise attack, as the Dutch had done before at their invasions of Salvador (1624 and 1627), Luanda (1624), San Juan de Puerto Rico (1625), and São Jorge da Mina (1625). The goal was to remove the merchantmen from the roadstead, land the Dutch boats, and occupy forts with a large number of soldiers.108 In most cases, this design failed, and in Pernambuco, it certainly took longer than desired to complete the assault. What slowed the Dutch advance was the closure of the port entrances, one of which the Portuguese filled with two rows of eight ships each. Only after soldiers had built trenches to the two enemy forts and a battery had been erected could the bombing of the walls of one of the forts begin. The walls quickly collapsed, a breach opened up, and the next day the Portuguese commander hoisted the white flag.109 The Dutch thus gained control of the port and small town of Recife, which would become the headquarters of Dutch Brazil.110 It was preferred to the larger town of Olinda, the capital of Pernambuco, which Dutch troops had conquered shortly before.111 By contrast with Olinda, which was built on hills, Recife was at sea level, which made it possible to build a familiarlooking Dutch town (unlike Salvador, with its differences in altitude) on the

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spot.112 News about the conquest of Olinda and Recife led to euphoria in the mother country. The States of Holland organized an official day of thanksgiving on May 1, and upon their return to Amsterdam on July 23, Loncq and the other leaders of the expedition were met with a massive tribute of yachts. Once ashore, the throng of people made it hard for the new heroes to advance to the West-Indisch Huis.113 What probably went unmentioned that day was the contribution to the invasion of Tupi-speaking Potiguar natives of Brazil. After waging war off and on against the Portuguese since the mid-sixteenth century, they jumped at the opportunity of siding with the Dutch in 1625. The occasion then was the arrival in Paraíba of Boudewijn Hendricksz’s fleet, which had sailed in vain for Salvador, where the Dutch flags had just been taken down. The Dutch-Potiguar alliance in northern Brazil was short-lived. When the fleet left, Hendricksz only allowed a small group of Potiguars, all males, to sail with them to the Caribbean. Thirteen Amerindians eventually disembarked in the United Provinces, where they learned the language and joined the Reformed Church. They also provided the WIC with important cartographic and economic intelligence about Brazil.114 Faced with a new Dutch invasion of Brazil, the Habsburg leaders opted against sending a new restorative fleet. They did fit out a fleet the following year that left Lisbon under the command of Antonio de Oquendo, an experienced admiral, and carrying supplies and reinforcements for Salvador: Spaniards, Portuguese, and men from Naples. The capture of Olinda had left Salvador in a vulnerable position, but Oquendo’s expedition was quite successful. The fleet reached Salvador without a problem and inflicted much damage on the naval arm of Dutch Brazil in a sea battle on September 12, 1631. Dutch Admiral Adriaen Jansz Pater drowned in his heavy armor, one of many Dutchmen to perish.115 How many died is impossible to determine, although the battle seems to have ended in a draw. Oquendo, however, returned to Lisbon in triumph, spreading the news that his enemies had lost 2,000 men. The Dutch themselves put their losses at 350 and those of the Iberians much higher—one soldier believed they amounted to 1,500. The same man noted that so much human flesh, brains, and blood was found on board the conquered Spanish ships that only stump brooms could be used for scrubbing. Even so, it is clear is that the Dutch had not all discharged their duties. Five captains of Dutch ships, in particular, were found guilty of delinquency because they had failed to follow the command to board the Spanish ships.116 The reinforcements that Oquendo had disembarked were badly needed. During the first eighteen months after the Dutch invasion, there had been

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merely 580 paid (professional) troops on the Iberian side. Still, the professional soldiers did not face the Dutch alone. The historian Evaldo Cabral de Mello has estimated that the Iberians could mobilize as many as 19,000 men in Pernambuco: 8,000 whites, 8,000 black slaves, and 3,000 Amerindians. The official Dutch numbers by October 1631 were 4,477 soldiers and 2,240 sailors.117 The arrival of fresh Habsburg troops was not welcomed by the local population, which had to pay for their upkeep. The many tributes levied resulted in major discontent, setting off uprisings in three or four different parts of Pernambuco in March 1633.118 The costs of Dutch warfare in Brazil were borne by the mother country, where the expensive adventure in the new colony soon became a target of criticism. By 1632, just two years after the invasion of Pernambuco, the WIC proved unable to bear the burden. Its directors appealed to the States General for help, requesting an immediate grant of 500,000 guilders and an annual continuing grant of 700,000 guilders.119 Another year later, during peace negotiations with the southern Netherlands, Brazil became a controversial issue because the southern delegates arrived at the negotiating table with unequivocal instructions: under no condition could the Dutch keep Pernambuco, nor was the WIC allowed to continue to exist.120 The WIC was thus forced to defend its raison d’être against those Dutchmen who saw the company as blocking the path to peace. The directors took pride in emphasizing the much-needed help the WIC had provided to the Republic in 1629, when its existence had been in serious jeopardy. In addition to the invasion of an imperial German army that seemed unstoppable and headed for Holland, the Dutch had had to cope with Habsburg advances in the Veluwe.121 The Zeeland Chamber of the WIC had agreed to deploy its soldiers, the Maze Chamber had sent one hundred musketeers on wagons to Arnhem, and 1,100 other soldiers in company service had been dispatched to the towns of Utrecht and Hattem.122 All these men had been ready to set sail on Loncq’s fleet to Pernambuco but were now held up for three months. It is doubtful whether the directors’ argument convinced anyone. The overall number of company soldiers, after all, paled before the total strength of the Dutch army of 24,000 soldiers and 4,000 cavalry.123 Moreover, the actual contribution of the WIC soldiers to the domestic war effort had been negligible because many soldiers had deserted when they discovered they had to serve in the field army.124 The Amsterdam Chamber of the WIC argued that a new truce with the Habsburgs would be the kiss of death for the company. The WIC operated essentially as a war machine that had done yeoman service to the country and was the employer of many thousands of soldiers and sailors, a consumer

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of provisions, and an importer and exporter.125 The WIC therefore had to be supported financially by the provinces now that its funds were insufficient for the continuation of hostilities. In Brazil, the company was ready for a final push before it could declare victory. Repeating Moerbeeck’s estimate, the Heren XIX asserted that the profit that Brazil would yield was around 5 million guilders.126 It expected that 700,000 Flemish pounds were needed to secure all of Brazil, quite a pittance compared to the 7 million that WIC activities annually contributed to the national economy. The Amsterdam city government countered these assertions by pointing out that instead of 7 million Flemish pounds, the WIC had supplied only 2.5 million to the national economy. The Heren XIX had neglected to take into account the salaries and provisions for the 9,000 WIC sailors, as well as the cost to fit out its fleets.127 Unconvinced of the need to support the war effort in Brazil or even of the rationale for the war, the Amsterdam city fathers ordered their delegates to the meeting of the States of Holland to agree to withdrawal from Brazil. Rotterdam and Dordrecht, two of the eighteen cities represented in this body—the provincial administration of Holland—joined them to “end this sorrowful and burdensome war,” but they were opposed by Haarlem, Leiden, Gouda, Hoorn, and Enkhuizen.128 No peace accord was signed with Spain in 1633, nor did the Dutch sent their troops home from Brazil. The war in Pernambuco was thus prolonged, reducing the population of the captaincy, which before the war had been 95,000 people, including 40,000 whites, 40,000 enslaved blacks, and 15,000 Amerindians.129 Still, those who remained were powerful enough to engage in guerrilla activities, which they preferred to pitched battles. At first unfamiliar with this type of warfare, the Dutch learned fast and became experts in laying ambushes.130 The land also suffered from the war because both sides robbed sugar from the sugar mills and the Dutch torched as many plantations as they could lay their hands on inside Portuguese-held territory. In keeping with the conditions under which Dutch and Spanish forces fought each other in the Low Countries, the two sides in Brazil signed what could be called a humanitarian agreement in 1633 at the initiative of Matias de Albuquerque, the governor of Portuguese Brazil, and—as he found out— against the wishes of the Spanish War Council.131 The treaty stipulated that no churches were to be set on fire or statues destroyed, that soldiers seeking it should be given quarter, and that provisions were to be given to imprisoned soldiers and sailors.132 Nonetheless, atrocities occurred on both sides in the years that followed. Explicitly in response to a similar order in the Habsburg camp, Governor Johan Maurits of Dutch Brazil ordered his troops in 1640 to stop giving quarter to the enemy. It was not until a year later that the

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Dutch and their enemies in Brazil signed a new treaty that did give quarter to soldiers and noncombatants who sought it.133 Mistreatment of Dutchmen in other parts of the Americas continued, however. Letters sent to Amsterdam reported that Dutch prisoners in Havana and other Spanish ports in the Caribbean were treated worse than dogs. Surviving on alms, they had to toil like slaves.134 The Heren XIX decided to give the enemies a taste of their own medicine, instructing the ruling council in Brazil that all enemy prisoners had to be chained and forced to work like slaves to see “if the Castilians can be brought to reason by means of retaliation.”135 Dutchmen languishing in Spanish Caribbean dungeons usually came off privateering vessels. Theoretically, those who surrendered without a fight were given free passage with their knapsack and necessary provisions. Those who fought according to the rules of war were also freed, but without their possessions. The only ones who were punished energetically were those who tried to flee with their own vessels during the battle; they were to be hanged.136 But the Spanish at times failed to follow the rules. Eighteen men aboard a merchant ship that had left Vlissingen in 1636 had to spend four long years in jail in Havana after local corsairs captured their vessel.137 On their part, the Dutch sometimes waited a long time before releasing Spanish prisoners. Eighteen months after the capture of the treasure fleet, numerous Spanish seamen were still locked up in the Dutch Republic.138 Never, however, did the Dutch go as far as they did in June 1624 on the Peruvian coast. When the viceroy of Peru refused to exchange two Dutch deserters for two Spanish prisoners of war, the Dutch shot twenty-one Spanish prisoners in revenge.139

Preconceived Notions When the first Dutch overseas expeditions left European waters, Africans and Amerindians were as yet abstract beings, tabulae rasae on whom people could project hope, fear, and fantasy. Even after the first overseas colonies were established, many Dutchmen were not likely to distinguish between natives of distant continents. Van Wassenaer, the widely read chronicler, asserted that the residents of the East Indies were predominantly “Moorish,” a term otherwise reserved for blacks.140 Similarly, a pamphlet of 1649 confused Africans with Amerindians when it accused New Netherland Director Willem Kieft of slaughtering “fifteen hundred poor Africans.”141 Like collectors in other parts of Europe, some Dutchmen assembled a wide variety of items in an attempt to grasp the workings of the universe. The more obscure the objects that made up the Wunder- or Kunstkammern (“cabinets of

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curiosity”), the higher they were valued. The collectors did not clearly differentiate between items from the Americas and those originating in other remote places. The public theater at the University of Leiden displayed shoes and sandals from Russia and Siam, Egyptian mummies, and a hammer used by North American natives.142 The world outside Europe was still largely terra incognita, where wonders and marvels abounded. Johannes de Laet (1581–1649), the WIC director who published an authoritative book on the history of the New World, sent some exotica to the Dane Ole Worm, a professor of medicine and an antiquarian. One of his letters in 1646 that accompanied a small box said: “Amongst the things which I think will be welcome to you are a skeleton of a hand and some ribs of a mermaid, which is found in the sea off the coast of Angola. The Portuguese call her in their language . . . ‘siren.’ And the balls which are turned from her ribs are widely praised as an excellent means against hemorrhages, as I have heard from a Portuguese scholar. I hope I will soon set my eyes on a picture of a live one.”143 Of all the fantastic traits attributed to Africans and Amerindians, cannibalism may have been the most common. It had a long pedigree, having been reinforced by numerous European publications and, no doubt, by selfdescribed eyewitnesses.144 The notion was so ingrained that when a Dutch ship called at Ardra (in present-day Benin) in 1622 and was invited by the inhabitants to trade there, the crew declined in the belief that the local people were man-eaters.145 Two years later, the Nassau fleet entered a bay just north of Cape Horn as the explorers were looking for water and ballast. The young Witte de With, who captained one of the ships, noted that the Dutch encountered some very barbaric men, who killed and ate seventeen Dutchmen.146 Nicolaes van Wassenaer, meanwhile, gathered enough information from around the world to categorize cannibals: those from Brazil ate any part of the human body, the natives of Guinea and southwestern Africa preferred hands and feet, and those from Combelo in the East Indies loved the brains and the muscles.147 Although it is clear that the Dutch usually deceived themselves into thinking that they were dealing with cannibals,148 we have to take into consideration that various tribal societies hardly distinguished between hunting animals for food and waging war on human enemies.149 Others practiced endocannibalism, eating the flesh or ground-up bones of fellow community members. Nor did those Dutchmen on the ground who charged indigenous people with cannibalism express only their own preconceptions. Indigenous notions also left their imprint on the Dutch mind; for instance, in West Africa, natives routinely labeled groups feared for their destructive powers as cannibals.150

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Like other Europeans, the Dutch did not view cannibalism as a racial trait but as a product of paganism or the environment.151 The notion of Anthropophagi (“man-eaters”) was based on the medieval myths, derived from classical authors, that Europeans sometimes used to provide insights into the continents of Africa and North and South America.152 Lourens Lourensz from the Zeeland town of Nieupoort encountered men belonging to the latter group, or at least so he reported. The diminutive ship of merely 24 tons on which he sailed was wrecked in 1618 as it was bound for the Amazon River. About half of the twenty-strong crew perished, but three of them escaped and were welcomed after ten days by indigenous Aracouro, whose village was located on the Cassipora River in what is today Suriname. Two of them died of dysentery, leaving Lourens as the sole survivor. In the next eight years, before he was discovered by another Zeeland ship, Lourens participated unwillingly in cannibalism and witnessed the capture of a member of an enemy tribe: “He was of small stature, stout and fat, and on top, where every man has a neck, he had a lock of long black hair; in the middle of his breast was his nose, the eyes were a span removed from each other, and the ears had no lobes, being small passages and hardly visible, so that it all looked terrifying.”153 Once again, this was no straightforward case of a European projecting a familiar notion onto an unknown land. Lourens’s description was in line with local notions of monstrous “races,” which had earlier been reflected in Sir Walter Raleigh’s description of Guiana.154 The alleged existence of these monstrous races served to prove the otherness of the natives. The classical tale about the Macrobii, to whom extremely long lifespans were attributed, had been transferred to the Americas long before the Dutch first arrived. Amerigo Vespucci had already written that Amerindians died at the ripe age of 150. A German soldier in Dutch service echoed this belief, remarking in his journal that the man-eating natives of Brazil, who supposedly worshipped the devil, lived up to 100 or 150 years. Likewise, the Dutch author of a rich description of Paraíba (Brazil) mentioned cannibals who could reach the age of two hundred.155 The charge of cannibalism made it easy for European observers to brand indigenous Americans as uncivilized humans. Other features of a savage life were paganness, (near-)nakedness, and lack of political centralization and commercial aptitude.156 The common Dutch term for indigenous Americans was wilden, usually translated as “savages,” but “wild people” would be more accurate. The Dutch associated Amerindians with the wild men who had inhabited Old World imaginary since the epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey. In medieval folk tradition, these forest dwellers, who did not till the

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land or have any use for tools, had become wild because of their separation from civilized society.157 Some authors went in the opposite direction by glorifying indigenous cultures. Karel van Mander, a painter, contended in 1604 that the real wilden inhabited the Old World; they could be found among the nobles of Europe.158 Various Dutch intellectuals used natives as foils to criticize contemporary life in the Dutch Republic. In his Vrije Politijke Stellingen (1665), Franciscus van den Enden presented indigenous society in North America as the positive opposite to the Dutch Republic. Living in democratic polities, Amerindians were absolute equals who had no need for judicial authority. The men were peaceful but also militant and resolute in their protection of women and children.159 The author of Pertinente beschrijvinge van Guiana (1676) held up the social life of the Caribs as an example for European “princes, states and monarchies.” Whereas the European custom was to offer rewards for services rendered, the basic principle of Carib society was “to reward according to merits, to repay efforts, and to punish evil properly.”160 There was nothing new about such lavish praise bestowed on barbarians. In the Middle Ages, there had been no lack of civilized admirers who applauded in barbarians what they imagined to be their own lost innocence. Some fine virtues had been abandoned during the march to civilization.161 A notion that gained popularity as the war with Spain evolved was that New World natives made excellent natural allies. As Benjamin Schmidt has shown, America served as an important tool in the propaganda war with Habsburg Spain, an alternative way for the Dutch separatists to write about their own fight against Spanish “tyranny.” The Dutch presented the Habsburg project in the Netherlands as reminiscent of Spanish rule in the Americas, with the Dutch cast in the role of the victims, sharing the fate of the indigenous Americans. The Black Legend, propagated by Bartolomé de Las Casas, the acclaimed Dominican monk, in a work that went through more editions in Dutch than in any other language, taught that Amerindians had been the victims of the barbaric Spaniards. Although Las Casas did not spell it out, it seemed obvious that the indigenous population, laboring under the Spanish yoke, waited for revenge brought by the Dutch.162 The native Tapuya encountered by the Dutch in Brazil displayed customs that they shared with the Dutch ancestors, or so the humanist Caspar Barlaeus believed. He also thought they resembled the customs of the ancients.163 Barlaeus was not alone among European authors who were induced by the dearth of information on American history to compare the more elevated indigenous societies to the familiar polities of ancient Greece and Rome. They emphasized similarities among architecture, deities, and burial customs.164

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The question of Amerindian origins occupied some of the leading minds of the Republic. A famous debate took place in the 1640s between Johannes de Laet and Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), the famous jurist and theologian who earned lasting renown for his work De iure belli ac pacis, which laid the foundations of international and modern natural law. In his exchange with De Laet, Grotius advanced the view that all North American natives had descended from Scandinavian voyagers, with the exception of the people of the Yucatán, whom Grotius considered to be the offspring of Ethiopian Christians, which was proved by their custom of circumcision. The forebears of the indigenous South Americans, Grotius believed, were migrants from Indonesia and the South Sea. Both groups, after all, wrote in characters and from the top down. Reiterating the argument put forth in 1589 by José de Acosta, the Spanish historian who had worked in Peru as a Jesuit missionary, De Laet defended the theory that people from northeastern Asia had come to the Americas across the Bering Strait and that the Amerindians were their descendants. De Laet did not distinguish between Amerindians north and south of the Isthmus of Panama, and he ripped Grotius’s speculation about the Chinese roots of the Peruvians to pieces. Chinese artisans, he argued, were far superior to those of Peru, Confucianism did not resemble the Inca religion, and the Chinese language with its dictionaries could not be compared to the language of men who knew neither pen, paper, nor ink.165

Colonization Alexander van der Capellen (c. 1594–1656) represented the province of Gelderland in the States General and was counsel to Stadholder Frederick Henry. This nobleman was committed to the success of the WIC, in which his father and brother had both invested, but when he was approached in 1645 about the vacant position of president of the ruling High Council in Brazil, he declined.166 His notes, published by one of his descendants, make for interesting reading. In August 1624, he mentions that a yacht had reached the Dutch island of Texel with glad tidings: the Company fleet had captured Salvador. Van der Capellen then writes, “A few days before a ship arrived from Virginia, from a place of which our men took possession on behalf of the States General.”167 The colonization of New Netherland had begun. New Netherland, the area between the 40th and 45th degrees of latitude in eastern North America, had first been named ten years earlier, when traders explored the area between New England and Virginia. The Dutch claim to possession was based on the voyage that Englishman Henry Hudson

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had made in 1609 on behalf of the VOC. Hudson had failed in his mission to find a northwestern passage to China but had found the river that still bears his name. The mercantile firms that frequented the area in the following years, interested in furs, merged in 1614 into the New Netherland Company, almost all of whose promoters were directors of the Noordsche Compagnie, specialized in whaling.168 When the WIC assumed control of the business of the New Netherland Company in 1623, the directors judged it wise to provide the fur trade with a sound foundation by allowing settlers to move into the area. After the first colonists took up their abode in that same year, a larger batch of colonists disembarked in 1624 in three places: near Fort Orange (Albany), “Noteneiland” (today’s Governor’s Island) opposite Manhattan, and at Hooghe Eylandt (present-day Burlington Island) in the Delaware River. The intention of the Heren XIX was to fix the northern, eastern, and southern borders of the colony in this way.169 The Dutch thus backed up their entitlement to the region against English claims, stressing that their claims were rooted in occupation rather than the mere presence of a trading post.170 Not until summer 1625 was a small fort constructed at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. Before long, it grew into the settlement of New Amsterdam. Like New France and New England, New Netherland was comfortably far from Spanish and Portuguese America. And when northern Europeans moved to other parts of the Americas, they tended to settle in the margins of the Iberian colonies, in the Lesser Antilles and the uninhabited parts of the American mainland, especially Guiana. But even there, the northerners ran the risk of Iberian incursions. The Dutch had first tried their luck in Guiana in the early years of the seventeenth century. Natives of Zeeland navigated up the Amazon River and settled there to produce tobacco.171 A modest barter trade was organized with indigenous villages, but most trading posts were ephemeral, as were the Dutch settlements. Some trading posts on the Amazon fell victim to a Portuguese military raid in 1625.172 The main Spanish settlement in Guiana, albeit a modest one, was Santo Tomé on the banks of the Orinoco River. It had been founded in 1595, destroyed by the English in 1618, and then rebuilt by local residents, who made a living cultivating tobacco. On December 11, 1629, they witnessed the approach of Adriaen Jansz Pater, eager to use his nine-fleet squadron to create havoc. Without anything to defend themselves, the population torched their dwellings and fled into the woods. The few houses left standing were taken down by the Dutch soldiers.173 The residents would respond in kind, although it took them eight years. The scene of their revenge was the Caribbean island of Tobago, where

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Dutch colonization had taken off in 1628 with the arrival of a ship with sixty-eight Zeeland settlers sent by Jan de Moor, burgomaster of Vlissingen. Although the initial settlement was abandoned two years later, a new group of two hundred colonists arrived in 1633.174 The new governor of Trinidad, Diego López de Escobar, organized an expedition to dislodge the Dutch in the belief that they were about to attack his island. A Spanish army, made up of troops from Trinidad and, indeed, the town of Santo Tomé, forced the Dutch—most of whom were planters and their families—to surrender. An agreement was then signed, which stipulated that the defeated could keep their freedom and property. Nonetheless, Escobar shipped dozens of prisoners to the island of Margarita, where his counterpart did not send them on to Spain but hanged forty-four adult males,175 an action reminiscent of the Spanish raid on the English colony of Tortuga (north of Haiti) in 1635.176 Through the intervention of some Franciscan friars, the lives of twenty boys under the age of sixteen were spared. They were transported to Trinidad, where they were to be instructed in the Catholic faith and forced to grow tobacco and provisions as slaves alongside Amerindians and captive blacks.177 Although the Spanish crown attempted to keep the news about the events secret to prevent retaliatory acts, the Dutch took revenge.178 The settlers of Essequibo, a Dutch colony in western Guiana where Cornelis de Moor was active, whose son was among the enslaved boys, sailed up the Orinoco in July 1638, accompanied by armed Carib, Arawak, and Warao auxiliaries. They planned to destroy the same town that Pater had selected nine years before and from which had come some of the men responsible for the Tobago raid. Santo Tomé, which had been rebuilt in another spot, was indeed sacked and burned. The Dutch marauders lingered for three months before they committed new acts of destruction in San Joseph de Oruña, a town in Trinidad not far from where the enslaved boys had been put to work. Many of the native warriors eventually paid for siding with the Dutch; they were seized and sold as slaves.179 Spanish soldiers were not employed just to destroy Dutch settlements but also to impair Dutch salt collection in areas claimed by Spain. Salt had created headaches in the Dutch Republic because Spanish embargoes had cut off the traditional routes to salt in the Iberian Peninsula. The salt deficit had important commercial consequences because the decline of supplies to the Baltic reduced the Dutch share in the grain trade. During 1599–1605, prior to the Twelve Years’ Truce, hundreds of Dutch vessels had gathered salt in a natural salt lagoon off Venezuela at Punta de Araya. As previously mentioned, a Spanish fleet killed many of the salt collectors, after which the Dutch did not return. Some did try again after the truce had ended, but they

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encountered a galleon fleet that expelled them. The construction of a Spanish fort did the rest.180 The blow was softened when in 1624 the Netherlanders found out about the salt pans on the island of Tortuga, or “Salt Tortugas,” just off Venezuela. The Dutch were soon regular visitors to the island. To extract the salt, they cut streams and canals around the pans to conduct water to them. In 1631, the Spaniards destroyed and burnt the quays, only to find the Dutch returning the following year. For the next six years, the Dutch loaded salt in peace before a Spanish army, reinforced with indigenous archers, attacked the Dutch fort and killed forty garrison soldiers. The final blow was dealt in 1640, when freshwater was introduced into the pan and washed the salt away within two days.181 The Dutch also collected salt in the Unare River to the west of Cumaná, which had salt of the same high grade as that of Araya. They built a fortress and allied themselves with a group of rebellious Amerindians. But the Dutch also met a bad end here. One hundred Spaniards, armed with matchlocks, and two hundred indigenous archers destroyed the fortress, killing some hundred Dutchmen. In 1640, the Dutch returned and started building a wooden palisade, but Spanish troops took them by surprise.182 Another site where Dutch skippers loaded large amounts of salt was the Caribbean island of St. Martin, whose salt was deemed of better quality than that of Araya. Ninety-seven Europeans, including only two women, lived in the Dutch colony that took shape after a fleet en route to Pernambuco left a garrison on the island in July 1631. They resided in a village with stone houses, a church, and a hospital, and they had thirty enslaved blacks and one native servant at their disposal. On June 24, 1633, the colony was in grave danger when suddenly the flota, made up of fifty-three ships, appeared on the roadstead. The Dutch garrison was no match for the Spanish troops. After an eight-day siege, the defenders surrendered. The victors left behind a garrison to prevent the Dutch from returning.183 Following the loss of St. Martin, the Dutch turned their attention to Curaçao and Bonaire, islands close to the coast of Venezuela with salt pans that had been known to Dutch traders since at least 1625. But the strategic location and, hence, opportunities for privateering, trumped economic motives when the Heren XIX decided to capture Curaçao (and then neighboring Bonaire). Commanded by Johannes van Walbeeck, veteran of the Nassau fleet, former member of Brazil’s ruling council, and former admiral of the WIC fleet in Dutch Brazil, a fleet of six sail left the Republic on May 4, 1634, and arrived at the island on June 6.184 After a failed initial approach, five of the ships moved into the St. Anna’s Bay on July 28, starting

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a slow conquest. The Spanish population of twenty adults and twelve children could defend itself only with the help of the indigenous islanders, who numbered roughly five hundred. Although the defenders mustered only three muskets, the 225 Dutch soldiers made little headway, largely because of the inferior arms they had brought. When they finally occupied the island, the Dutch shipped the Spanish and their native allies to the mainland, except for seventy-five Amerindians that the Dutch decided to use as servants.185 Losing Curaçao could possibly have interfered with the navigation of the treasure fleets, although the measures of the Spanish crown do not seem to reveal that this was a major concern.186 The only initiative to oust the invaders was taken by the governor of Venezuela in 1639, when he began to enlist men throughout his province. And even then, the expedition did not leave for another three years. This makeshift army did conquer Bonaire (which was soon abandoned again) but had no chance on Curaçao, where the Dutch had had eight years to fortify their colony.187 Although Curaçao never returned to the Spanish empire, the misconception has arisen among historians that a combined Hispano-Portuguese fleet took back the island in 1636.188 This notion can be traced back to a rumor that circulated in Spain in that year, one of the countless false rumors that informed the way Europeans thought about the New World, however fleetingly. The examples abound in the United Provinces, where a schoolteacher in The Hague noted in his diary on October 8, 1624, that the Dutch had been expelled from Salvador, seven months before that would actually happen. One month later, the diary mentions the erroneous news that the Nassau fleet had taken the Peruvian towns of Arica and Lima. Similarly, in another diary of 1630, we find a reference to the exploits of the Dutch fleet, which had not only captured Pernambuco (true) but also beaten a Spanish fleet (false).189 In 1638, the false news about the Dutch capture of Salvador reached Europe, to the delight of Hugo Grotius.190 Twelve years earlier, the rumor that the Dutch had captured Puerto Rico spread from the Dutch Republic, where even the States General bought into it, to other parts of Europe. The Venetian ambassador to France, for one, was convinced of its veracity.191 Yet not everyone believed such rumors. The Ottoman vizirs, for example, had their doubts about the news that Piet Heyn had seized the entire flota in 1628.192 That sounded too improbable to be true. Perhaps wishful thinking helped shape the rumor of the Spanish reconquest of Curaçao. Good news from the Caribbean was a rare commodity in Spain in the 1630s, when Dutch attacks in the Atlantic continued apace and settlers from other parts of Europe were moving to the Caribbean, which had once been a Spanish sea. The governor of Puerto Rico sounded

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the alarm in 1636 following notices about foreign takeovers of Dominica, Marie-Galante, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and other islands that maintained contact with St. Christopher and Nevis. At these two islands, the treasure fleets used to take in drinking water, which was made harder by the presence of these “enemies.”193 Many Spanish officials did not distinguish among the northern Europeans, although Juan de Palafox, the man who would later earn fame as bishop of Puebla (Mexico), singled out the Dutch. In a letter to the premier Spanish statesman, the Count-Duke of Olivares, Palafox wrote in 1635, “We must fight them by fire and sword, since all laws stand up against these men who are heretics, rebels, and pirates.”194 The presence of Dutchmen in the West Indies aroused resentment among not only the Spanish but also the English. As in North America, the Dutch settled in an area to which the English laid claim, but the colonists ignored such complaints because they were not backed up by an effective English occupation. Thus, in spite of the royal grant that formally made the Earl of Carlisle the lord proprietor of Barbados and the Leeward Islands (the northern Lesser Antilles), fifty Dutchmen settled on the empty island of St. Eustatius in 1636.195 Still, Anglo-Dutch relations were usually peaceful and sometimes warm in these years. Johannes de Laet even advised the English Parliament in 1641 on the formation of an English West India Company, although the Dutch were not interested in a joint company.196 Nor did the two neighbors form an alliance against Spain, not even at the time of the Anglo-Spanish war of 1625–1630.197 The establishment of several Caribbean colonies of their own and the expansion of trading posts in Africa made it easier for the Dutch to communicate in the Atlantic world. Letters were now assembled in sealed bags and transported by WIC ships.198 In the unsettled stage of the Dutch Atlantic, the vastness of the ocean had made communication a constant challenge. The same was true for Dutch communication in Europe, where countless Dutch ships shuttled back and forth between the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Over time, two relay stations emerged for Dutch postal traffic, one in Elsinore (present-day Helsingør) in Denmark and the other in La Rochelle on the French Atlantic coast. Shipmasters collected letters from the shipowners or charterers in Amsterdam and other ports, who updated the original sailing orders in this correspondence.199 When the Dutch presence was still confined to Mouree, improvised relay stations were set up in West Africa. Cape Lopez, a common spot for ships in the Guinea trade to take in water, was one locale where new information within the Dutch Atlantic was conveyed. In 1623, for example, the officers of the Nassau fleet learned which European ships had anchored there in the

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past weeks. According to one witness, the information was found at “the barren tree, where letters are attached.” Among the letters they found was one from a Dutch ship on its way to the East Indies and another one from a ship returning from there.200 Fleet Admiral Jan Dircksz Lam was told by the WIC in 1625 that he could find further instructions for his expedition to the Gold Coast on the desert Cape Verde island of São Vicente. At the usual watering place, the instructions were to be found in a canister or musket underneath a pile of stones.201 Cape Tiburon in present-day Haiti operated as a similar relay station in the Americas. When Commander Jan Jansz van Hoorn arrived there in 1629 with a WIC squadron, he found letters left behind by Zeeland ships that had departed just eleven days before.202 At times, messages were left behind on signs. The crew of a small vessel that reached the West African island of Corisco after a sea voyage of three months that was marked by many problems and privations, put up a sign that mentioned the names of the shipowner, the commies (a keeper of records and accounts), and the skipper; in case they were to have an accident, the commies later wrote, it would be known how far they had come.203 Some signs were not intended for Dutch eyes; their purpose was to broadcast Dutch possession. Such was the case with the sign attached to a tree at what would later be called Saybrook Point in Connecticut. Displaying the arms of the States General, the sign was meant to say that this place was in Dutch possession.204

Expansion in Brazil and Africa In 1623, Krzysztof Arciszewski (1592–1656) was banished from his native Poland after he and a brother killed an enemy of their family. A Calvinist nobleman with military experience in Polish wars against the Tatars and Ottomans, Arciszewski settled in the Dutch Republic, where he studied at the University of Leiden. After serving in Richelieu’s army that captured La Rochelle, he enlisted as captain of the WIC and was sent to Pernambuco. His military genius, shown in the conquest of the island of Itamaracá, was rewarded with an appointment as major. During a brief visit to Holland in 1633, Arciszewski was named commander-in-chief of all Dutch forces in Brazil, but this decision was immediately annulled by the local authorities, who preferred a countryman of his from Lower Silesia in that position: Józef Zygmunt Szkop (1600–1670), better known among the Dutch as Sigismund von Schoppe. Schoppe had led the troops who conquered the Brazilian island of Itamaracá the year before. Undaunted, Arciszewski eventually became general of artillery and admiral of the Dutch naval forces in Brazil (map 2).205

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Dutch Brazil, 1625–1654

On November 4, 1635, Arciszewski wrote a letter to the Heren XIX, pleading for the extension of Dutch rule in Brazil to the south of the São Francisco River.206 The Dutch had achieved a string of military successes in recent years, conquering Paraíba and the captaincy of Rio Grande. So many prisoners of war were captured that the army leaders were at a loss where to ship them. In 1635 alone, warships disembarked 380 enemy soldiers at the Caribbean island of Barbuda, while another 700 were left at Punta de Araya

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off the coast of Venezuela, to the dismay of the Dutch governor of nearby Curaçao.207 Arciszewski argued that further extension of Dutch power to the south would both allow access to minerals and ensure protection from guerrilla attacks. His pleas had received a minimal response from the Political Council in Dutch Brazil. Because the ruling body of the colony was always divided, Arciszewski asked the Heren XIX to designate a governor who enjoyed wide powers. Waking up to the necessity of having a strongman to rule the colony, the WIC appointed Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (1604–1679) as governor-, captain-, and admiral-general of Dutch Brazil. Johan Maurits had earned a reputation across Europe for the reconquest of Schenkenschans that he had recently engineered in the Dutch war with Spain. What motivated him to accept the offer to become the supreme leader in Brazil is not known, but Johan Maurits may have been lured by the prospect of a lucrative appointment.208 He assumed the supreme command of the army and navy, and was assisted by the three-member High and Secret Council nominated by the WIC and approved by the stadholder. They were to help him delineate colonial policies.209 The grandson of a younger brother of William of Orange, Johan Maurits was surely the most remarkable official to come to Dutch America. The “prince” or “count,” as the Dutch called him, was charismatic; had an impressive military record; was fluent in several languages, although his tongue reportedly was always twisted when trying to speak Portuguese; and loved poetry, science, architecture, and painting. Because he was not hesitant to put his predilections into action and was prodigal with money, Johan Maurits left his imprint on the colony. Nonetheless, many generations of historians have exaggerated his role, following the lead of Caspar Barlaeus, his hagiographer. His military flaws have been swept under the carpet, his jealousy of Arciszewski glossed over, and his extravagant lifestyle—as a representative of a company that was already millions in arrears—trivialized. Johan Maurits’s extracurricular activities appear to have made up for his shortcomings. The count persuaded some forty scholars, scientists, artists, and craftsmen to leave the comforts of the Netherlands behind them and come to Brazil, where he commissioned many of their works. Among the six painters that arrived, two stand out: Frans Post (1612–1680), a gifted painter of landscapes who came to be called “the Canaletto of Brazil,” and Albert Eckhout (c. 1607–1665/6), who painted Amerindians and enslaved Africans from life and made a large number of drawings and oil sketches of the flora and fauna.210 Willem Piso (1611–1678), an outstanding scientist who would later

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be buried in Amsterdam’s Westerkerk, next to Rembrandt’s tomb, came along as Johan Maurits’s personal physician and head of medical services in Brazil. He earned a reputation for his systematic study of tropical diseases that remained authoritative well into the nineteenth century. After his return from Brazil in 1644, Piso published a book chapter on the medicinal properties of Brazilian lemons. Clinical tests, he argued, had proven that bitter and small lemons were more effective in fighting scurvy than sweet lemons and oranges. Medical science has since corroborated his findings.211 What Piso did for tropical diseases, Georg Marcgraf (1610–1644) from Saxony accomplished in the realms of botany and zoology. Most of the Brazilian plant and animal species mentioned by Marcgraf had not been described before. His work was facilitated by the Botanical and Zoological Garden that Johan Maurits had built, and Marcgraf carried out observations in the governor’s newly constructed astronomical observatory. Johan Maurits even had a new town built on the island of Antônio Vaz near Recife. Within a few years, Mauritsstad (or Mauricia) blossomed into a town of 685 inhabitants, marked by the town gates, the housefronts, shop signboards, and the governor’s two palaces (figure 3).212 The governor thus singlehandedly created an urban culture that could rival the sophistication Spanish America had only gradually achieved.213

Figure 3. The twin cities of Recife (“Reciffo”) and Mauritsstad (“de stadt Mauritius”). Courtesy of Royal Library, The Hague.

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Two months after Johan Maurits first arrived in Recife in January 1637, he received a new set of instructions from the WIC. The count was to carry out an old plan: the conquest of São Jorge da Mina on the African Gold Coast. This was more than a center of the gold trade. It had been the seat of Portuguese might in Guinea since 1482, and once captured, it could be expected to allow the Dutch to become involved in the African slave trade. Johan Maurits did not sail himself but dispatched a nine-ship fleet under the command of Colonel Hans van Koin, which arrived after a voyage of two months on August 23 with eight hundred soldiers and four hundred sailors. In the twelve years that had passed since their ignominious defeat at São Jorge, the Dutch had changed their tactics. Military ingenuity alone had not sufficed; it had proven necessary to establish better ties with African states to have a chance to be victorious.214 In itself, this was nothing new. As early as 1618, Dutch musketeers on the Gold Coast had served the ruler of Sabu as mercenaries in a counterattack on the Coromantee.215 What was different from the attack of 1625 was the attempt by the commander of Fort Nassau, Nicolaes van IJperen, in the weeks leading up to the arrival of the Dutch fleet to stir up the African states of Elmina, Komenda, and Efutu against the Portuguese. Assured of some native support, the Dutch were in a good position to challenge the defenders of the castle. And when the defenders failed to sufficiently occupy a hill facing the fort of São Jorge, the Dutch victory was within grasp. For four days, Dutch cannonballs rained down on the fort until the Portuguese gave up, worn down by the lack of provisions and the knowledge that no relief force would come from the Iberian Peninsula. After 155 years of Portuguese occupation, Elmina castle came under Dutch control on August 29, 1637.216 In Brazil, the Dutch forged ahead energetically by disposing of the guerrilla fighters to the north of the São Francisco River and annexing the district of Ceará, which meant that half of all the captaincies in Brazil were in Dutch hands. Governor Johan Maurits now found it opportune to mount an attack on Salvador, the Portuguese capital of Brazil. To that end, he put to sea on April 6, 1638, with 31 ships and nearly 5,000 men, including at least 800 native allies. After the troops had been disembarked a mile and a half from the town and after they had taken a few Portuguese forts, the battle of Salvador began. The defenders’ fighting power was unexpected and hostilities continued without the Dutch making much headway. The siege finally ended in a bloody denouement after forty days, when Johan Maurits ordered a battery that protected the town to be captured. Immediately prior to the actual assault, four hundred troops were ambushed by an equal number of enemy soldiers hiding in the bushes, which did not prevent the Dutch from

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trying to storm the breastwork. For hours, man-to-man fighting took place, and still the Dutch could not push through. According to a Portuguese source, 237 Dutchmen remained on the battlefield. Dutch morale took a hard knock.217 Other Dutch losses were incurred on the high seas, where Spanish privateers enjoyed some of their best years between 1636 and 1639. But the trend was reversed in October 1639 at the Battle of the Downs, a momentous encounter that signaled the start of Spanish naval decline.218 On the English south coast, a battle raged that day between the Spanish war fleet (dubbed, once again, the second Armada) of 85 ships and 13,000 soldiers and 8,000 sailors under the command of Oquendo and the Dutch fleet of 95 ships led by Lieutenant Admiral Maerten Tromp and Vice Admiral Witte de With. Even though the Dutch losses were substantial, amounting to 10 ships and 1,000 men, they paled before the ruins that befell the Spanish navy. At least thirty-two Spanish ships were lost as well as 9,000–10,000 men, including virtually all the officers.219 These losses reverberated in the Americas. Deprived forever of their maritime supremacy, the Spanish hold on Peru was suddenly at risk. The viceroy of Peru wrote to his king on January 1, 1640, that the Dutch could make their way to Callao without being discovered. Residents and their families had therefore massively fled from Lima into the mountains, taking their valuables with them.220 Was Dutch rule in Brazil then secure? The Iberians refused to think so. For years, the highest officials in the Spanish monarchy had committed themselves to sending another combined fleet to Brazil, but no new armada had been launched. Suspicious of the attempts by the Count-Duke of Olivares to integrate their country more fully into the Spanish state and blaming the Dutch conquests in Brazil on the union of Portugal with Spain, the Portuguese made no effort to collaborate on a new Brazilian campaign. In view of the lack of men and ships, Don Fadrique de Toledo, who had been chosen again as the armada commander, refused to be in charge any longer. A shouting match with the count-duke ensued, which led to Toledo’s fall from grace. Olivares had him put in jail, where he passed away a few months later.221 At long last, a combined Hispano-Portuguese fleet of forty sail was organized in 1638 under the command of Fernando de Mascarenhas, Conde da Torre, with the ambitious goal of reconquering the Dutch part of Brazil. Now it was the Dutch population that panicked. Everywhere, settlers buried cash money, in particular silver Spanish reales.222 What the residents did not know was that mortality on board the Iberian fleet was so high that a military confrontation had to be postponed. After Torre had put to sea from Bahia in

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November 1639 with 87 sail, 4,000 sailors, and 5,000 soldiers, a naval battle lasting several days took place the following January, begun when Dutch Admiral Willem Cornelisz Loos went on the offensive. Although Loos was almost instantly killed, the Dutch bombarded their enemies for all but a week until they vanished from sight, devastated by hunger and thirst, and fighting unfavorable winds and the extreme heat. Only two Dutch ships were lost and no more than eighty Dutchmen had died.223 These battles made it impossible for Spain to turn the tide in its war with the United Provinces. The maritime initiative in the war was no longer with the Spanish. The WIC, however, was also running out of steam, certainly in the Atlantic basin. After 1640, large Dutch privateering fleets, for so long a common sight, almost completely disappeared from the Caribbean. The last expedition of some size was that of Cornelis Jol, nicknamed Houtebeen (Pegleg; 1597–1641), intended to intercept a treasure fleet. He appeared off Havana with thirty-six ships, but he was left powerless by a hurricane on September 11, 1640. Several large ships were destroyed, killing sixty-three men on one ship alone, and around two hundred Dutchmen were made prisoner and sent to Spain.224 Although the treasure fleet could head safely for Spain, the year did not end well for the Habsburg monarchy. The two major naval defeats suffered at the hands of the Dutch had consequences on the Iberian mainland, contributing as they did to a climate in which the Portuguese decided to throw off the “Spanish yoke.”225 The Habsburg leaders had always been mindful of the tense crown union with Portugal, making conspicuous efforts to defend Brazil. The Count-Duke of Olivares had even made the restitution of Brazil an absolute condition for peace with the Dutch Republic.226 This stance could not prevent an uprising. On December 1, 1640, the Portuguese revolution broke out, and Spain could not contain it, in part because of another revolt in Catalonia. The Duke of Braganza ascended the throne as John IV, recognized immediately in all parts of the Portuguese empire. The news from Lisbon was received with mixed feelings in the United Provinces and the Dutch colonies. On the one hand, the rupture between the Iberians was welcomed enthusiastically because it was thought to weaken the Spanish. On the other hand, the Dutch were involved in colonial wars with the Portuguese, so the Iberian disunion offered unprecedented possibilities.227 Abandoning Brazil or Elmina was obviously not negotiable; instead, the Dutch reasoned, this was the moment to grab from Portugal as much territory as possible before a truce was signed with the newly independent state. At least, that was the logic expressed by the Heren XIX, which was not altogether seconded by the Dutch political elite.228 The lack of a common

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front did not keep the Heren XIX from writing a letter to Johan Maurits in April that suggested quickly adding some conquest—taking Salvador was considered especially opportune—but the governor had already embarked, of his own accord, on the capture of the district of Sergipe del Rey and had succeeded brilliantly.229 The next step encompassed more. The council of Brazil decided after ample debate to capture the port of Luanda in the Portuguese colony of Angola, replicating for southwestern Africa what had been achieved four years earlier in Elmina. The primary goal was to secure slaves for Dutch Brazil as well as hit the Spanish empire. Without slaves from Angola, the Dutch asserted, no silver mines could operate in Peru and Mexico.230 It was a variation on a theme heard often ever since the foundation of the WIC: we have to carry the war into the Atlantic world to make the silver stream run dry, thus crippling the engine of the Habsburg war machine. Like the fleet that had invaded Elmina, the one designated to conquer Luanda set out from Recife. Led by Admiral Cornelis Jol, 21 ships transported 240 indigenous Brazilians and 2,717 Europeans (1,866 soldiers and 851 seamen). Military aid was expected from African nations, which were to be persuaded with gifts and other means to go to war against the Portuguese.231 The notion that the local people were enemies of the Spanish and the Portuguese and friends of the Dutch was not at all far-fetched in this part of Africa, where Sonho troops had helped the Dutch ward off an attack by Portuguese troops in 1612. In addition, both the king of Kongo and the count of Sonho had approached the Dutch about a military alliance against the Portuguese in the early 1620s.232 The new king of Kongo, Garcia II, was considered a strong potential ally according to a report drawn up by a WIC official with extensive knowledge of southwestern Africa. Brimming with information about the political, economic, and military situation in Luanda, the report would soon prove to be very useful.233 The intruders had the element of surprise on their side. For many years, the Portuguese had counted on a Dutch attack, but they no longer did. In addition, the Dutch battle plan, based on intelligence provided by an imprisoned Spanish steersman, included a landing in between two gun batteries, something the defenders deemed impossible. The actual battle on August 25–26 was therefore brief and caused few casualties on either side (figure 4). But although the victory came easy, consolidating the town was very hard. In the belief that their enemies were mostly interested in robbery and slaves, the response of the Portuguese residents to the Dutch takeover was to flee into the interior, preventing the Dutch from assuming control of a vibrant economy and introducing the foreigners to a guerrilla war.234

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Figure 4. The conquest of Luanda and São Tomé in 1641. Print, 1649–1651. Courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

One more task needed to be executed by Jol and his men. On September 17, they left Luanda to overpower São Tomé, the island in the Gulf of Guinea that the Dutch had briefly occupied forty years earlier. The plan was to make São Tomé a bridge connecting the new possessions in Angola to the trading posts in Guinea. With 664 soldiers, divided into five companies of Europeans and three companies of Brazilians, as well as 400 sailors, the admiral reached the island on October 2. After two weeks of fighting, which resulted in a steady decline of Dutch numbers, a castle was finally captured, which then enabled the conquest of the town of São Tomé without firing a single shot. As in Angola, the residents had absconded into the interior, leaving the Dutch army to languish in the capital city. Yellow fever killed Europeans and Brazilians alike, not sparing Jol himself.235 When forty soldiers defected to the Portuguese, leaving only eighty soldiers, many of whom were ill, in the Dutch camp, the invaders’ hold on the capital was doomed. In November 1642, the Portuguese entered again and the Dutch left. Their only small ray of hope was provided by the notion that the Portuguese were also vulnerable to disease, which kept them from chasing the Dutch from the island altogether.236

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In the year 1642, the Dutch empire in the Atlantic reached its greatest extent. In addition to Luanda and São Tomé, the Dutch had snatched from the Portuguese the captaincy of Maranhão in northern Brazil (November 25, 1641); Benguela, an Angolan port 600 kilometers south of Luanda (December 21, 1641); and fort Axim in West Africa (January 9, 1642). This was all done on the pretext that there was no truce with Portugal or—after that truce had been signed in The Hague on April 12, 1641—that no truce had been ratified or no confirmation of its ratification had been received.237 Imperial ambition was still alive and well in 1642. Apart from its suggestion to annex Maranhão, the WIC Chamber of Zeeland proposed an attack on Salvador— which was seen as weakened by the departure of Spanish and Neapolitan soldiers—and expeditions to capture Rio de Janeiro, Araya, St. Martin, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola.238 While none of these plans left the drawing board, what did materialize was a fleet that was to conquer Chile. Ideas about such a venture had first been discussed before the WIC was founded, but it was during a lull in the fighting in Brazil that a serious effort at conquest was initiated. An expeditionary naval force sailed from the Netherlands, first to Brazil, where it was reinforced with several ships, and then the whole fleet left Recife in January 1643. In charge of the expedition was Hendrick Brouwer (1581–1643), a former governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, who would not survive the expedition. Having rounded Cape Horn, Brouwer and his men arrived at the island of Chiloé and from there passed to the continent. They made contacts with the indigenous Mapuche and conceived plans to fight the common Spanish enemy. After a base was set up in Valdivia, the prospects seemed good. In the end, however, the expedition failed dismally. The Amerindians, who were essential to the strategy, could not be persuaded to form an alliance, the Dutch soon ran short of provisions, and a rumor circulated about a Spanish army that would soon arrive from the north.239 Even in North America, the one corner of the Dutch Atlantic shielded from the war(s) with the Portuguese and Spain, the 1640s introduced headaches that did not bode well for the future. Rapid economic changes formed the backdrop for the First Dutch-Munsee War, also known as Kieft’s War (1640–1645), in New Netherland.240 The arrival of shiploads of immigrants from the Republic, the introduction of free trade, and the depletion of coastal fur resources created a combustible situation. The loss of furs to exchange with Dutch goods meant that the cultivation of maize became more important for various Munsee bands at the same time that Dutch farms in the area proliferated, reducing Munsee farmland. Adding insult to injury, Governor Kieft imposed an annual contribution on the Munsees in the form of corn,

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wampum, or furs in a move to bring these Amerindians under Dutch control. Tensions were further heightened when Dutch settlers started a fateful cycle of violence by murdering three or four Munsees called Raritans and torturing the sachem’s brother after members of this nation had killed some pigs. Peace prevailed for a year before the Raritans killed four Dutch farmhands and set fire to farms.241 Although these incidents did not usher in a war, Governor Willem Kieft was on the alert, which helps explain why he overreacted to the murder of a Dutch farmer by Wecquaesgeek Amerindians, another group of Munsees, in August 1641.242 A first punitive expedition miscarried because the soldiers could not locate their enemies, but Kieft’s men struck decisively in February 1643 after the Wecquaesgeek sought shelter from their Mahican enemies in Pavonia (across the Hudson River from New Amsterdam) and at Curler’s Hook in Lower Manhattan. At the instigation of three settlers who requested an attack “because God delivered them in our hands” and with Kieft’s blessing, an expedition left in the dead of night. At the sites where the Wecquaesgeek had found refuge, the expedition killed more than 120 natives.243 The Dutch must have taken a page out of the book of the English in New England, who had defeated their native foes in the Pequot War (1637–1638) in a similar massacre. By contrast, the midnight massacre did nothing to calm down the Amerindian people. The Dutch had not realized that the Pequots who faced the English had been recruited in their own community while the Munsee at odds with the Dutch included several indigenous nations, apart from the Wecquaesgeek. They would have to be beaten one by one.244 An English veteran of the Pequot War, John Underhill, who had moved to New Netherland with his Dutch wife, now emerged as the Dutch military leader. His actions were swift, brutal, and merciless. On Long Island, his men killed another 120 Amerindians in two villages, and near Stamford, Connecticut, they set fire to a village where many Amerindians had gathered. Between five and seven hundred indigenous men, women, and children died in the flames, while only one Dutch soldier lost his life.245 Having alienated the Munsees, who continued their guerrilla war until August 1645, as well as many fellow settlers, Kieft was recalled to the Republic along with some of his fiercest critics. Their feud was never resolved; their ship was wrecked off the coast of Wales, killing most on board, including the former governor.246 The relative peace that returned to New Netherland after that date stood in sharp contrast to conditions in Dutch Brazil. After a revolt ended Dutch rule in Maranhão in 1644, Luso-Brazilians settlers unleashed a massive revolt against the Dutch in Pernambuco in June 1645. It would prove fatal to Dutch ambitions.

Ch a p ter 3

Imperial Decline

The Dutch were the only republic among the seventeenth-century Atlantic powers.1 Not only did they live without a king but many in the Atlantic world perceived them as being led by merchants— presumably the WIC directors. And that earned them scorn, in the same manner in which a fifteenth-century pope put down Lorenzo de Medici as a “simple merchant.”2 Thus, when the island of São Tomé off West Africa was hotly contested between Dutch and Portuguese forces in the 1640s, the Portuguese lured some Dutch soldiers to their camp by arguing that it was better “to serve the king than common merchants.”3 Similarly, the manifesto prepared by the Portuguese governor-general of Salvador in support of the men in Pernambuco who had risen in revolt against the Dutch in 1645 justified the right of the residents of Pernambuco to “rebel against the subjugation in which they have been kept through force of arms by a company of some merchants of the provinces of Holland.”4 Little did they realize that there was hardly one merchant among the WIC central board members.5 While the WIC was seen as a group of traders, the States General struggled to overcome the challenge that its polity was both new and republican, which prevented its recognition as a full-fledged member of the international community. The Dutch states acknowledged a hierarchy among the countries on the European map, giving precedence to the German emperor, followed by the kings of England and France. Immediately behind the crowned heads ranked 74

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the “republics that possess kingdoms,” a category preserved for Venice. The Dutch states wished to be considered on the same par as the seat of ducal power. After all, they reasoned, their own republic possessed “kingdoms” in the East and West Indies.6 These “kingdoms,” among which Brazil was counted, had been occupied in rapid fashion. Dutch military expansion around the globe was so impressive in the 1630s that Galileo addressed the States General in a letter not only as “Illustrissimi et Potentissimi Signori” but also as conquerors and masters of the ocean.7 Likewise, Sir Fernando Gorges, an organizer of early English colonies in North America, viewed them as great conquerors. Contrasting the Dutch with his fellow Englishmen, Gorges wrote, “Romans, Spanish, and Dutch did and do conquer, not plant tobacco and Puritanism only, like fools.”8 It was rare for foreigners to compare the Dutch to the Romans, whose ancient empire was universally admired by Europeans as the largest and most powerful polity the world had ever seen.9 But it is understandable that the Dutch expansion in the 1620s, 1630s, and 1640s inspired awe, with Asian exploits increasingly matched by victories in Brazil. When Carolus Scribani, the prolific Jesuit author from the southern Netherlands, assumed the guise of a Dutch Calvinist in one of his works, he also made a comparison with the Romans: “Never has the Roman Empire carried her weapons as far as we have. We have sailed around the world many a time, so that the sun does not shine on any parts that our weapons have not seen and tested.”10 Moreover, another author added, our privateers have rendered the state 30 million guilders, an amount that far exceeds the record sum that Paulus Aemilius contributed to the Roman treasury.11 As their control of Brazil grew, the Dutch themselves also began to note similarities to Rome.12 Elias Herckmans (c. 1596–1644) may have been the first to do so in his Der Zee-vaert lof (“Praise of Seafaring,” 1634), a work that starts with the history of seafaring and prominently features Columbus’s first voyage of 1492. Books 4 and 5 celebrate Dutch accomplishments in the East and West Indies, equating the Dutch victories in Pernambuco with deeds of “ancient glory.”13 An anonymous pamphleteer added his own comparison with the Romans, who, after waging war at home for many years with Hannibal’s army, had decided to take the war to Carthage. Hannibal had thus, at last, been forced to leave Italy. The reader understood the reference to the Dutch attempt to weaken Spanish defenses in the Netherlands by opening an overseas front, a suggestion Usselincx had first made.14 Entirely focused on the war in Brazil was the Mauritias, a poem of 6,430 hexameters by Johan Maurits’s own chaplain in Brazil, Franciscus Plante (1613–1690). In the poem, mainly the chronicle of a succession of battles,

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Plante sought to compare Johan Maurits to Aeneas and emulate the epic in which he was the hero, Virgil’s Aeneid. According to the story, a meeting of the gods sends Mercury to the Dutch, telling them they should teach the Spanish a lesson in the far west. Minerva persuades the other gods that the leader against the Spanish had to be Johan Maurits.15 The best-known work to celebrate the “prince” and his activities in Brazil appeared in 1647, the same year as Plante’s poem and three years after the governor’s return to the Republic. Its author was one of the great Dutch literary figures, Caspar Barlaeus (1584–1648). Many pages of his Rerum per octennium in Brasilia, an elaborate description in Latin of Johan Maurits’s rule in Brazil, feature comparisons with antiquity. In their conquests and mission civilisatrice, Barlaeus argued, the Dutch had outshone their Roman antecedents, having had to travel much farther and face enemies more inhumane. The epitome of the governor’s civilizing work was the transformation of Antônio Vaz. The idea of choosing this island, filled with morass and overgrown with shrubs, to build a town originally seemed preposterous. But Johan Maurits’s ingenuity and daring vanquished all obstacles, creating a town traversed by streets and canals, and provided with spacious buildings and warehouses. On the initiative of the governing councils of Brazil and Recife, it was named Mauritsstad, wrote Barlaeus, just like Alexandria and Constantinople bore the names of their founders.16 These writers did not take account of the difference in size between the Dutch empire and that of Rome. Empire-building in the seventeenth century was not about laying claim to vast land masses. The Dutch never specified— with one exception—where the boundary was between their colonies in Guiana and that of the Spanish crown.17 Nor did Dutch officials in Brazil make it a habit to define the area under their control, although Krzysztof Arciszewski wrote in 1637 that the four captured captaincies were 120 miles in length, while the area to the west of the littoral was there for the taking by whomever so wished, up to 600 or 800 miles into the interior. And, he added, “I don’t believe one will encounter any resistance up to the cordilleras of Peru.”18 Such an extension of Dutch-held territory would surely have legitimized comparisons with the Roman Empire, but as it was, the Dutch possessions in the Atlantic world remained relatively isolated. To be sure, New Netherland and Curaçao were commercially and administratively linked, and the shortlived colony of Angola depended heavily on Dutch Brazil. Nevertheless, no well-articulated imperial system reminiscent of Rome emerged.19 In addition, a towering figure such as Hugo Grotius, who died in 1643, never conceived of his compatriots as empire-builders. In his view, the men of the WIC had ventured into Atlantic waters not as conquerors but as merchants.20

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Revolt in Brazil Without full control of Brazil, the prospect for survival of the Dutch colony was small. What ultimately cost the Dutch dearly was their failure to capture Salvador. Without controlling Salvador, there was always the risk, as Adriaen van der Dussen explained to the Heren XIX in 1640, that a few soldiers would be sent into the Dutch zone to set the sugar fields on fire.21 Whereas the inaccessible hinterland thus provided the anti-Dutch forces with a good base of operations, it allowed the Dutch themselves success only in brief sallies. Communications ashore between the Dutch settlements and forts were virtually absent, and only Dutch maritime supremacy could maintain the contacts. Dutch troops, then, were usually stuck in their forts and powerless to put a halt to the scorched-earth policy of their enemies. This context also made an anti-Dutch revolt likely to succeed or at least get off to a good start. The revolt that erupted in Pernambuco in 1645 had been long in coming, motivated by resentment against the Dutch among the Portuguese leaders in Lisbon and the lusophone population in Dutch Brazil. Historians have consistently blamed the revolt on Johan Maurits’s recall to the United Provinces in September 1643 and his departure the following March.22 They have drawn a contrast between a governor who maintained peace throughout his rule and his successors on the High Council—no new governor was appointed—who lacked Johan Maurits’s executive abilities. That line of reasoning is, however, simplistic. During Johan Maurits’s rule, unrest was already spreading among the local lusophones. Johan Maurits himself wrote to the States General in September 1642 that the residents were preparing a general rebellion, motivated, he thought, by the financial burden that they bore and the lack of religious freedom.23 Looking back years later, Father Antônio Vieira, the famous Jesuit missionary and theologian, wrote that discontentment with Dutch rule had not been universal. The revolt even took place against the will of many LusoBrazilians. The ringleaders, moreover, had a pragmatic reason to prepare a revolt: these wealthy men had incurred huge debts to both private merchants and the WIC that they did not want to pay off.24 There is certainly a grain of truth in that assessment. The sugar planters had run up such debts that they had mortgaged their lands, hardware, and slaves.25 Jorge Homem Pinto, for example, stood to gain from the rebellion. The owner of 370 slaves and 1,000 oxen had accumulated a debt of over 900,000 guilders to the WIC. In 1645, he did liquidate an earlier debt of more than 300,000 guilders, but he refused to do the same with the larger amount in the next six years.26 The indebtedness of many Portuguese planters does not explain, however, why many residents who did not belong to the elite supported the revolt.

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Nor does this argument take into account the groundwork laid by King John IV and the authorities in Portugal, who were indignant that diplomatic negotiations with the Dutch Brazil had dragged on ever since the successful Portuguese rebellion against Spain in 1640.27 Brazil was too big for the king to fail. Royal interests in the colony and the taxes levied on products from Brazil together financed the royal house and the war with Spain.28 The man who had taken office as governor-general of Portuguese Brazil in 1642 took the lead in organizing the Brazilian uprising. Antônio Teles da Silva found João Fernandes Vieira (c. 1613–1681 and no relation to Antônio Vieira) willing to lead the revolt. Born in Madeira, Vieira had taken part in the resistance against the Dutch invaders in 1630. He had subsequently done well for himself as a merchant in Dutch Brazil, enabling him to buy a sugar plantation and become a schepen (alderman) of Mauritsstad. Pretending to be well-disposed to Dutch rule, Vieira prepared a conspiracy in all secrecy. But due to careless talk of some who knew about the preparations, he was forced to take up arms on June 13, earlier than planned; nevertheless, the revolt still spread rapidly. His original army of fifty men grew to nine hundred whites and many blacks before the end of the month. They were attracted by Vieira’s promise to free all enslaved black and colored men who enlisted and the false rumor, deliberately spread by Vieira, that the Dutch had forced young bachelors to fight for them.29 The insurrection did not take the high councilors in Recife by surprise.30 They had periodically been informed by colonial residents, including some Roman Catholics, about an imminent rebellion, and they knew from an intercepted letter that the Portuguese king was involved.31 The Council first tried to stem the tide by issuing an amnesty edict, to be read out by clergymen in churches and to be attached to church doors, but it failed to have the intended effect.32 Nor did a mission of two Dutch delegates to Salvador, protesting the end of the truce between Portugal and the Dutch Republic, succeed. The Portuguese authorities did take the opportunity, however, to remind the delegates that the Dutch themselves had broken the truce in 1641 in Angola, São Tomé, Maranhão, and many other places around the globe. The rebellion had immediate repercussions in the rural parts of Dutch Brazil. Fifteen hundred soldiers from Salvador, sent to help expel the foreigners, were dissatisfied with their rations and extorted and robbed the civilian population.33 Some moradores who joined the revolt also targeted civilians, killing a few Dutchmen during a struggle over two barges; murdering three Jews; and manacling thirty to forty Dutchmen in a monastery, where they were later found by Dutch troops.34 However disturbing these acts of violence were, they paled in comparison to the ethnic cleansing of three dozen

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moradores in Cunháu (Rio Grande) by Dutchmen and allied Tarairius and Potiguars on July 16. Having lured a crowd into a chapel under false pretenses, Jacob Rabe (or Rabbi), a German-born settler, orchestrated this massacre, which left deep wounds among the local population.35 The Tarairius were Tapuyas from the sertão of Rio Grande. They proved to be very effective and reliable military allies, but the Dutch were appalled by their endocannibalism, their practice of killing unarmed women and children, and their tendency to loot provisions and cattle owned by the Portuguese. The alliance did not fall apart, however. Led once again by Jacob Rabe and accompanied by armed mission Amerindians who sided with the Dutch, the Tairairius were involved in another bloodbath in Rio Grande on October 3. Fifteen moradores lost their lives in the town of Uruaçu in retaliation for the hanging by the Luso-Brazilian rebels of thirty-three mission Amerindians who had fought with the Dutch to defend a fort near Serinhaem in Pernambuco. That massacre was itself an act of vengeance, organized by the rebels to even the score after the events in Cunháu.36 The Tupi-speaking mission Amerindians (figure 5), labeled Brazilians by the Dutch, first became an integral part of the Dutch war effort in Brazil

Figure 5. Tupi in Dutch Brazil. Detail of “Praefecturae de Paraiba et Rio Grande” (1647). Courtesy of Royal Library, The Hague.

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after the arrival of Johan Maurits. During his rule, they helped defeat the remaining Habsburg soldiers in Pernambuco and took part in the overseas conquests of Elmina, Luanda, and São Tomé.37 Interactions with the Brazilians extended beyond the battlefield to everyday social encounters. When the Dutch completed their major conquests in Brazil in 1635, 7,900 Brazilians, all Potiguars and Tobajares, lived in the captaincies of Rio Grande, Paraíba, and Pernambuco. This number declined to about 6,000 in 1639 and 3,583 in 1645, largely due to a smallpox epidemic introduced from Africa and the loss of life during the expedition to Luanda and São Tomé—only one in five native warriors returned alive.38 At the time of the Dutch conquest, the Brazilians dwelled in mission towns run by Jesuit priests. One of the priests, Manuel de Morais, who had previously fought the Dutch, joined them along with 1,600 Brazilians after the capture of Paraíba. It was probably on his advice that the Dutch assumed control of the mission villages, organizing them along the same lines as the Portuguese before them.39 Such control enabled the Dutch to ally with these Amerindians in military expeditions, during which they proved to be indispensable. The first significant act of conventional warfare between the LusoBrazilians and the Dutch in 1645 took place on August 3 at Monte Tabocas, 50 kilometers from Recife. The Dutch outnumbered the Luso-Brazilians almost two to one (2,300 men against 1,200) and had superior arms. Facing Dutch firearms, the rebels used almost exclusively small spears, knives, and swords. Yet 154 men died on the Dutch side compared to only 11 on the other.40 Another decisive victory for the rebels followed two weeks later at the sugar plantation Casa Forte, defended by the Dutch. According to one soldier in Dutch service, only two Dutchmen and seven indigenous allies remained at large after the battle. All others, including 300–350 European soldiers and 500 Amerindians were either dead or in custody at the end of the day.41 Meanwhile, the strategically located fort Pontal de Nazaré had also ended up in rebel hands after an attack in which the Dutch only pretended to defend themselves; the Dutch commander, Diederick van Hoogstraten, had agreed to deliver the bastion even before the start of the revolt.42 The rebels kept the initiative, conquering most of Dutch Brazil before the end of the year and eroding the morale in the Dutch camp. So many “Dutch” soldiers, including a conspicuous number of French Catholics, had changed sides by November that eight entire companies of them, totaling 238 men, were fighting their former friends.43 In the meantime, King John IV did all he could to assist the rebels. He ordered the recruitment of soldiers in Portugal but also infantrymen in Madeira and the Azores, and decreed the dispatch to Brazil of all soldiers who had been jailed after abandoning the

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border crossings where they had been stationed. The king also concerned himself with sending arms and other necessities to the overseas war theater.44 Some residents of the Dutch Republic were shocked and outraged by the events. The two Amsterdam newspapers that were the first to bring the bad news reported that a “blood wedding” had been foiled.45 An anonymous pamphleteer explained in more detail that the Portuguese had intended to start off the revolt with a blood wedding, just as the St. Bartholomew Day’s massacre in Paris in 1572 had signaled the start of the persecution of the Huguenots. The marriage of the daughter of one of the Portuguese aldermen of Mauritsstad, to which the principal Dutchmen were to be invited, would have been used as a front. Once intoxicated with wine, the foreign guests would be assaulted and killed.46 That stage was apparently never reached. Another pamphlet, written by a Zeelander, argued that enough was enough. The colony could be secure only if the Portuguese were all expelled from Brazil because the Portuguese bloodlust deterred potential Dutch migrants. Expulsion would also solve the problem posed by the Catholic religion because it would vanish, thus facilitating the Reformed mission among blacks and Amerindians.47 Indignation about the reversal of Dutch fortune in Brazil was not expressed just in writing but also on the street. The stadholder’s guards regiment in The Hague was barely able to prevent a mob from invading the Portuguese embassy. The uprising in Brazil immediately was felt economically because the Dutch lost their hold on the area where sugar was cultivated and the demand for African slaves therefore dried up. Luanda, which had been the scene of brisk trade during the previous four years, turned into a sleepy port city. Meanwhile, one segment of the Dutch political class was eager to provide the colony in Angola with a more secure footing (map 3). If the Portuguese were removed from the hinterland, they believed, the food supply would improve and trade with the interior would flourish. An attempt to break through enemy lines miscarried in 1646, when the Dutch troops laid siege in vain to the stronghold of Muxima. Fifty Dutch soldiers, including their commander, remained on the battlefield.48 The following year, a new opportunity presented itself after 10,000 Ndembo soldiers and 4,000 soldiers of Queen Njinga of Matamba, assisted by 300 Dutchmen, soundly beat the Portuguese on November 25, 1647. The road to the Portuguese forts at Muxima and Massangano was suddenly open wide.49 The future of Dutch Angola seemed assured, but the opposite was in fact true. The absence of the three hundred soldiers from the Luanda garrison was to have disastrous consequences. Unbeknownst to the Dutch forces in the Angolan hinterland, the Portuguese Overseas Council in Lisbon had presented a bold plan to reconquer

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Map 3. Seventeenth-century Dutch footholds in West Africa

Luanda. The commander of the designated fleet was an experienced servant of the crown named Salvador Correia de Sá e Benavides. The man had won his spurs in the fight with the Dutch on board Toledo’s fleet, which had retaken Salvador in 1625, and had afterward served in various capacities, including as governor of the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro. In 1647 he returned to Rio, commanding a fleet and carrying a title that betrayed the goal of his mission: captain-general and governor of Angola. For de Sá, a sugar planter with a large slave force, restoring Luanda to Portuguese rule would bring both prestige and economic gain. The same was true for the inhabitants of Rio, who largely financed the expedition at de Sá’s instigation.50 On May 12, 1648, a squadron of fifteen sail with probably close to 2,000 men put to sea from Rio de Janeiro to take back Luanda. Once again, the High Council in Brazil had suspected that something was brewing. As recently as April 23, the councilors had notified the WIC of a fleet being fitted out in Rio for an expedition to Luanda. The slow communication by mail prevented

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the WIC from notifying its representatives in Luanda in time. That news should actually have come from Recife, but despite the sudden availability of ships there after the arrival of a sizable Dutch fleet, the Brazilian High Council neglected to tell their counterparts in Luanda. When Salvador de Sá’s fleet appeared out of the blue off Luanda on August 12, the Dutch were therefore thrown into a state of consternation.51 Not all was lost yet. The Dutch defenders managed to rebuff a Portuguese assault on the hill fort called the Morro, killing or injuring 140 to 150 enemies. The Dutch authorities, nonetheless, gave up immediately afterward, hoisting the white flag to the astonishment of their adversaries. As it turned out, captured Portuguese soldiers had told the Dutch that Sá’s army was much larger than the Dutch realized. He had allegedly even organized an expedition to surprise the three hundred Dutch soldiers in the interior. That was a lie, but a powerful one. The Dutch leaders decided they were fighting a losing battle and abandoned all hope.52 The surrender in Luanda, which caused consternation in the ports of Zeeland, was soon followed by capitulation in São Tomé.53 This island had been under Dutch control for only a brief period. When a former Portuguese governor, Lourenço Pires de Tavora, landed in November 1642 with fifty soldiers, a general revolt broke out that ended with the Portuguese conquest of the only city on the island. As they put their house in order, the victors exhumed the bones of Cornelis Jol, who had been buried in the church, and burned his remains along with those of other Dutchmen.54 Six years later, in 1648, not much had changed. Confined to the countryside and unable to get a lively trade started, the future of the Dutch “colony” seemed in doubt. And when, in September, Portuguese ships arrived, carrying evacuated Dutch soldiers from Luanda, the end was near. All that was needed for the Dutch to give up was a proposal by Pires de Tavora to purchase the Dutch possessions on the island for 35,000 patacas (about 90,000 guilders). The proposal was accepted without any hesitation.55

Decline of the Company The main effect of the revolt in Brazil may have been that it doomed the WIC. Lasting control or expansion of the area that was in Dutch hands by early 1645 could have saved the WIC, but once the rebellion had started, the prospects were gloomy. It was clear where the WIC was heading once its headquarters were moved from the impressive West-Indisch Huis to more modest quarters inside the WIC warehouses in 1652. Several contemporary pamphlets agreed on what caused the decline. The author of Nederlants beroerde ingewanden (“The Netherlands’ troubled

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intestines”) made much of the domestic extravagance of the company; costly equipages, superfluous directors, servants, warehouses, gratuitous travels, unsupportable salaries, and employees bent on self-enrichment had all contributed to the decline.56 Another pamphlet, presenting a fictitious discussion among four Amsterdam burgomasters, attributed to one of them the accusation that the company wasted money: “so many Chambers, so many warehouses, so many directors, bookkeepers, servants, etc. attached to each Chamber. . . .” The WIC, he added, was therefore bound to collapse.57 Others added that the loss of most of the WIC monopolies in 1638–1639 had not helped restore the financial health of the company but, rather, had worsened its condition. Whereas monopoly trading companies typically tied up too much capital for too long, the WIC had spent its capital too fast, not (in the first place) on overhead costs but on the war and the plantation economy in Brazil. These massive investments had yielded no returns.58 Within a decade after its foundation, the WIC could no longer pay for its ambitious projects. Its only option was to request subsidies from the States General, which henceforth financed much of the war effort in the Atlantic world. But even then cash flow remained a problem, dependent as the company was on the sale of colonial produce in the United Provinces. The Heren XIX, for example, advised Johan Maurits and the High Council in 1642 to send as much sugar to the Republic as possible. Once the crop had been sold, the company could ship ready money back to Brazil in the following spring.59 In 1645, the WIC narrowly escaped being terminated—and not because of the revolt in Brazil. This year had loomed large ever since the start of the WIC in 1621, when it had been granted a charter for twenty-four years. Anxious to obtain a new charter, the Heren XIX approached the States General in July 1643, requesting a temporary extension of the current charter. The States General passed on the request to the States of Holland, which proposed a merger between the WIC and the VOC, whose charter was also about to expire. The WIC gratefully accepted the advice, but the VOC was dead set against it, afraid to be dragged down by its counterpart. Moreover, the VOC directors stated that their shareholders had deliberately invested in the East Indies, not in the West Indies. The States of Holland did not back down and forced the VOC to buy off the merger by paying a one-time subsidy of 1.5 million guilders to the WIC. When details of this deal leaked out in 1647, the States General extended the charters for both companies for another twenty-five years.60 This measure, however, did not silence the critics of the WIC. In an undated entry in his diary, probably penned in late 1648, Alexander van der

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Capellen presented several proposals for the formation of a Council of the Indies (resembling the Spanish Consejo de Indias in name only), which was to reside in The Hague. Made up of the stadholder, seven or eight deputies form the provinces and six WIC directors, the council would be in charge of company policies, waging wars and conducting trade. Beyond maintaining Brazil and the African possessions, the Council was to find the means to recover Luanda.61 Two years later, a new version of this plan was discussed by the States of Gelderland. There was no longer room for the more than eighty WIC directors, whose gratuities, privileges, and freedoms would be withdrawn. In their stead, a Council of the Indies was to be named by the States General, composed of seventeen men representing all provinces.62 This plan was apparently embraced by the chief WIC shareholders, who sent it to the States General. A committee composed of delegates of the States General and some company directors, however, rejected the plan.63 The States General assumed responsibility for various tasks that the WIC was unable to carry out. The state lent warships to the company, and the fleet of Lieutenant Admiral Maerten Tromp regularly convoyed ships returning home from Brazil or West Africa, usually escorting these bottoms from the English ports they had reached.64 More significantly, the states took charge of the war in Brazil and chose to organize the fleets that transported troops to suppress the revolt. Although the rebels had drastically reduced the area under Dutch control, they were unable to push through to the sea. The Dutch could therefore continue sending reinforcements from Europe. After the WIC, helped by a subsidy of 700,000 guilders from the states, had sent three ships, all borrowed from the Zeeland admiralty, to carry soldiers to Brazil in early 1646, the States General organized a large expedition commanded by Witte de With (1599–1658), a prominent naval officer who had sailed both on the Nassau fleet and Piet Heyn’s celebrated expedition and who had been the second in command at the Battle of the Downs. This secours, as it came to be called, was an expensive mission, which cost the government more than 1.3 million guilders in soldiers’ wages and subsistence money alone, belying Julia Adams’s assertion that the state provided virtually no support to Dutch Brazil at this juncture.65 The WIC, incidentally, was not completely sidelined; its warehouses provided the bulk of the artillery, weapons, and ammunition.66 The company also arranged, with the states’ consent, to have the equivalent of 90,000 guilders coined by the Zeeland mintmaster. The coins were shipped with the secours and were to be used for the troops’ payment.67 The states’ expenditures for the secours did not come about without debate in the States General and in the public sphere. Most publications from the period after 1645 reveal an aversion to a military solution to the revolt. A

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protagonist in a 1649 praatje, a pamphlet featuring the well-known rhetorical device of a fictitious discussion between two or three characters,68 was so disappointed about the WIC fiasco that he rejected the whole enterprise of overseas colonization. He admitted that 6,000, 8,000, or even 10,000 Dutchmen would be able to make a living in the colonies, but that was their private choice. Should the states, to that end, actually have to empty the treasury and wage a dangerous war?69 The chief adversaries in the States General were the deputies of Zeeland and Holland. Both provinces were often at odds, also inside the WIC, where the Chamber of Amsterdam was the opposite number of Zeeland. The battle lines were clearly drawn. Zeeland was always the war party and in favor of commercial monopolies, while Holland championed peace and free trade. What ended the stand-off was a draft peace treaty agreed on in Münster in January 1647 by the delegates of Spain and the Republic. It was now up to the States General to ratify the treaty. As long as the peace treaty was not signed, Holland refused to give its blessing to Witte de With’s secours, which it deemed unwise while the war with Spain was still ongoing. Conversely, Zeeland was against the peace treaty as long as the relief fleet was not allowed to sail. With support from most other provinces, Zeeland won out in the end, eventually prevailing over even the States of Holland.70 The Zeeland victory may seem surprising, but Alexander Bick has revealed that Amsterdam was virtually isolated in its opposition to relief for Brazil, both in the Republic and Holland proper.71 An important argument for organizing the fleet was that sending thousands of troops could not only put down the revolt in Brazil but also prevent unrest at home. France had subsidized eighty companies of the Dutch national army, but that subsidy was discontinued in May 1647 when the end of the war with Spain was in sight. Because the soldiers would soon be out of work and probably homeless, the State General resolved to select men from each company for the secours.72 Although the plan sounded good on paper, it ran into problems when the captains of those companies refused to release the soldiers.73 Their objections were eventually overcome. After endless delays, the bulk of the fleet, made up of twelve navy ships and seven WIC yachts, anchored in Recife on March 18, 1648.74 The fresh troops were not given time to acclimatize. On April 4, they heard from the War Council that they would soon fight the enemy and that the newly arrived officers would be paid but that the soldiers would not receive wages yet.75 On April 17, Sigismund von Schoppe left Recife at 1 a.m. with an impressive force made up of 7,400 European, 1,000 indigenous, and 400 black soldiers as well as 700 baggage-carrying servants and slaves. The force

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also included sixty-one predominantly blue and orange banners and six cannons. They headed for the first battle of Guararapes, which would take place two days later on a ridge south of Recife.76 The battle lasted four hours, after which both sides asked for a cease-fire. The Luso-Brazilians, who had used their enemies’ disorder to their advantage,77 reported losses of 80 dead and 400 wounded, significantly fewer than the losses sustained by the Dutch, 500 dead (including 48 officers) and 556 injured. Some on the Dutch side must have been weighed down by their knapsacks, which contained provisions for another six days.78 What contributed more to their defeat, however, was the indifference of many of the Dutch soldiers, who were so bitter about not being paid that they refused to do battle.79 The contrast was stark with the determination shown by their opponents, who beat them again on the same spot exactly ten months later. In the deadliest of all encounters in the seventeenth-century Dutch Atlantic, 74 Dutch soldiers and 15 officers were taken prisoner, and no fewer than 893 soldiers, 151 officers, and 2 surgeons fell on the battlefield.80 The naval war went better. Anti-Portuguese privateering had been suspended after the cease-fire of 1641, but it recommenced four years later as a result of the Brazilian revolt. Some privateers sailed under WIC colors, others were fitted out by the admiralties, and yet others were private individuals; however, the most successful were those operating on behalf of the Brasilse Directie tot Middelburg, which was active with WIC consent. The Zeelanders who joined the Brasilse Directie had made a living going after ships from Dunkirk but had no means to support themselves after the capitulation of Dunkirk in late 1646. They found a new vocation in chasing Portuguese ships, contributing the lion’s share of the 220 Portuguese vessels lost to the Dutch in 1647 and 1648—or three-quarters of all vessels sailing between Portugal and Brazil.81 The net yield of the ships seized on the Brazilian coast alone from 1646 to 1650 amounted to almost 3.5 million guilders.82 João Fernandes Vieira realized that these seizures were a major source of Dutch income. He proposed, therefore, to prohibit all sugar exports from Brazil, which would leave the Dutch without the richly laden caravels and force them to abandon Brazil.83 But this plan, of course, would have endangered the economy of Portuguese Brazil. Instead, the Portuguese formed the Companhia Geral para o Estado do Brasil, a highly effective joint-stock company that assumed responsibility for the annual fleets, in which warships escorted valuable cargoes to Portugal. Privateering was a lucrative business while it lasted. Although privateers had to hand in up to a quarter of their income (initially 18 and later 10 percent to the WIC, 3.5 percent to the stadholder, and 2 percent to charity),

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the rake-off was considerable.84 The rewards yielded by this business even became a bone of contention among the institutions of the Dutch Republic. The WIC insisted that it was entitled to the rich booty with which the ships of the Zeeland admiralty returned, but the States General denied the company the right to confiscate such ships. Instead, the states ordered the WIC and the admiralty to work out a distributive ratio.85 The aggressive privateers from Zeeland not only incurred the hatred of the Portuguese but were also criticized in the Netherlands and Dutch Brazil for jeopardizing the prospect of peace with Portugal.86 Privateering was a costly affair for the Dutch state, surmised a character from a praatje in 1649. As long as the maritime fight lasted, the state had to maintain 6,000 soldiers in Brazil. The Dutch cause would therefore be better served by peace negotiations.87 A protagonist in another pamphlet accused the Reformed Zeelanders of hypocrisy. Their piety, he said, did not square with their martial captures of Portuguese sugar ships. Likening the Zeelanders to sugar flies, he alleged that they could speak about nothing else. Young and old, male and female servants, wealthy and poor spoke about the freebooters. Even during church services women, men, and boys discussed the deeds of their fellow provincials.88 One speaker in a praatje used a moral argument against privateering, which, he said, rendered the Dutch sailors fierce and wild and the common people godless.89 Indeed, encounters with Portuguese ships often featured rowdiness, not only on the part of privateers fitted out in Zeeland ports but also among Dutch privateers in Brazil. Their number included more and more men unconnected to state or the WIC, “free men” impoverished by the decline of trade. Their officers tried in vain to maintain order when prizes were captured, arguing that the privateers were seeking booty rather than to harm the enemy.90 In 1652, hardly any Dutch privateers were attacking Portuguese ships bound for Brazil. Not only did the Portuguese convoys pay off, but in July of that year, the first Anglo-Dutch war broke out, which enabled Zeelanders to stay close to home and target their English neighbors. The Brazilian coast south of Recife was soon safe again for Portuguese shipping, allowing a fleet of thirty sail to leave from Salvador for Portugal in May 1653.91 The Anglo-Dutch war turned the tables on the Dutch in Brazil, who were now afraid that their own ships, carrying provisions from the mother country, were no longer protected, especially because no navy vessels remained on the coast.92 Defying their instructions, the crews of virtually all the warships that had formed De With’s secours had returned home in 1649, an example followed three years later by the warships that had been sent in 1650.93

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In April 1654, the Amsterdam admiralty organized yet another naval expedition to Brazil. But by the time that two ships and a yacht fitted out by the Amsterdam admiralty weighed anchor in Texel, Dutch Brazil had already ceased to exist. On January 26, the High Council signed the capitulation in the presence of the Portuguese commander, Francisco Barreto, who had led the attack on Recife on behalf of the Brazilian Company and who had also been the Portuguese commander at the two battles of Guararapes. King John IV of Portugal had long been indecisive about the wisdom of sending a fleet to expel the Dutch from Brazil. It was to be expected that the Dutch would respond by dispatching a fleet of their own to Lisbon to blockade the Tagus River, as the English had done as recently as 1650. It was only when the king realized that such a blockade was out of the question, in part because of the Anglo-Dutch war, that he made up his mind. Seventy-seven ships put to sea, more than sixty of which were positioned on the coast near Recife on December 20, 1653. Unlike years past, Recife was stocked up well with provisions. Because a few merchantmen had recently arrived, there was enough food in the warehouses to feed the population for a year.94 The residents of Recife, moreover, had helped remove the main military shortcoming of the town. For two years, Recife had been completely open on the seaside, but due to the civilians’ initiative, the ramshackle batteries had been repaired and new palisades installed.95 War material, however, remained in short supply, and the number of soldiers to defend the colony—no more than 1,100, including blacks and Amerindians—was embarrassingly small.96 The army leader, von Schoppe, almost feared taking the roll call because the numerous defectors could tell the enemy about the weakness of the Dutch soldiers.97 Nor did the officers know whether they could still count on their troops. Lieutenant Colonel Claes Claesz, who commanded the fort de Vijfhoek, overheard his men say that they would tie his hands and feet, deliver the fort, and hand over Claesz to the Portuguese, knowing he would not be given quarter. Claesz thereupon had his soldiers swear an oath of allegiance to him, only to hand in his resignation, which was not accepted. When he, nonetheless, departed from de Vijfhoek, Claesz was followed by the garrisoned indigenous, black, and “mulatto” troops, as well as a few Europeans. If their commander gave up the fight, they asked, why should they continue?98 Given the mood in the garrisons, it may have made sense to open negotiations, as the three Dutch leaders—High Councilors Schoonenburgh and Haecxs and army chief Von Schoppe—did on January 22. Still, a real military confrontation would not necessarily have produced a Portuguese victory. Nevertheless, after the surrender and disarming of both soldiers and civilians,

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it became clear how much the Dutch had longed for the end. One Portuguese later wrote that both camps fraternized to such a degree that it seemed there had never been a war.99 Thus, as they had in 1648, the Dutch gave up a South Atlantic outpost, to the great delight of Portuguese policymakers. Recovering Brazil was, as John Elliott has argued, the salvation of Portugal in its struggle for independence from Spain. The reconquest of Luanda was also important, given the financial importance of the slave trade.100 For the Dutch, the loss of Brazil precluded any further aspirations to imperial greatness, at least in the Atlantic world. Foreigners could now refer to the Dutch when they warned against imperial expansion. Doubtful whether the investment of money, men, and ships in Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design would ever pay off, one English author pointed to “the Proceedings of the Holland West-India Company in Brazil . . . which have not only been baffled by their enemies, but outed of more wealth then [sic] ever they had from thence, the sea reprizals set aside. . . .”101 In the meantime, Spain and the United Provinces had signed a peace treaty in 1648. Even though, after 1621, warfare with the Habsburgs had been the rationale for Dutch empire-building in the Atlantic world, the main Atlantic enemy had consistently been Portugal, both before and after the Portuguese revolt against Spain. The only significant element of the treaty of Münster for the Atlantic Dutch was the Spanish recognition of all Dutch Atlantic colonies and outposts, including places that had been lost to the Portuguese since 1641. Whatever fears Dutch settlers still may have harbored about Spanish incursions were henceforth unjustified.102

The Aftermath The Brazilians, of course, felt betrayed by the Dutch surrender in 1654. Afraid of extermination by the Portuguese, thousands of these faithful native allies took refuge in Ceará, where they killed more than a few Dutchmen who were awaiting passage to Europe.103 Although two months before the surrender, the Political Council of Brazil had implored the States General to protect the Brazilians, the Dutch authorities soon forgot about their former allies, some of whom fled from Brazil with the emigrating Dutch settlers.104 Two hundred of them eventually found their way to the Dutch colonies in Guiana (Pomeroon, Moruca, and Essequibo), while another group settled in St. Christophe before relocating to Tobago.105 Yet, even after the loss of Pernambuco, some Dutchmen hoped that an invasion in another part of Brazil would be welcomed by Amerindians and

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blacks who languished in slavery. Such an alliance would, however, never materialize.106 Unlike the Brazilians, the European residents of Dutch Brazil had the option of leaving in 1654. A steady trickle of returning migrants had shrunk the population of the colony since 1645, but a true exodus began after the Dutch surrender.107 Only a small number of men remained, most of them married to local women. Hundreds who left settled in the Caribbean and a few made a fresh start in New Netherland, but the vast majority repatriated. Those who returned made it abundantly clear that the WIC and the States General owed them money. Most of these plaintiffs were officers and soldiers (see chapter 4), to whom more than a million guilders were owed. Many of them were forced to live in inns because they had no home to return to. Nor did they have the means to pay for their lodgings. Some were so desperate that they sold their claims, never receiving their full value.108 There was a ripple effect as well. The soldiers ran up large debts with innkeepers, merchants, and the sellers of cloth, butter and cheese, who in turn requested payment from the government.109 Pieter van Reusen, an innkeeper, wrote to the States General that, as a result of nonpayment, he could no longer pay his rent and was about to be evicted with his wife and children.110 A large group of shopkeepers, innkeepers, and other residents of The Hague were still demanding to be reimbursed in 1660 by the province of Overijssel, the apparent home of many a veteran of Brazil.111 The motley crowd knocking on the door at the States General also included people who had incurred debts in Dutch Brazil. There were provisions contractors,112 suppliers of bricks,113 the captain of a fishing boat whom the government in Brazil asked to deliver letters to various ships off the coast,114 and a baker in Ceará who had sent sugar to one of the Dutch forts.115 The descendants of some lumberjacks who had chopped wood in the captaincies of Paraíba and Rio Grande in the 1630s were still litigating in 1678.116 The warden of the underage children of Zacharias Valckenhagen, the late executioner of Dutch Brazil, petitioned for wages and for the payment of a slave whom he had lent to the government and who had been arrested by the Portuguese.117 Women also lined up. The widow of the captain on a man-ofwar from Friesland demanded no less than 12,000 guilders.118 Another widow asked to be reimbursed for a shipment of brazilwood fifteen years earlier.119 And then there were the ministers, comforters of the sick, surgeons, clerks, street sweepers, and other civil servants.120 In whatever form they presented their requests, these petitions failed to produce the desired outcome. The members of the Brazil High Council were also owed money. The WIC agreed that Wouter Schoonenborgh and Hendrick Haecx, former

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president and high councilor in Brazil, were granted their salaries and the value of 1 percent of the prizes taken to ports in Brazil. There was one condition, however. As was common when payments were made, the WIC wished to ascertain that the duo had not contravened WIC instructions; anyone could come forward to inform the directors of such actions within one year and six weeks.121 Although nobody did, the WIC chambers failed to pay their dues, with the exception of Amsterdam. Gijsbert de With’s patience was tested, too. In August 1659, nineteen months after the WIC had allocated 50,166 guilders and 9 stivers for him, the former member of the Brazil Justice Council finally received 300 guilders for services rendered. In April 1661, he was awarded an additional 40 guilders and 14 stivers for salary and travel expenses.122 It seemed as if all the former Dutch Brazilians stopped by to complain about overdue pay, even the lavish Johan Maurits. He was promised a substantial amount, only a small part of which eventually ended up in his hands. In 1677, two years before his death, the count still laid claim to 150,000 guilders, which the new WIC could not furnish.123 It was painfully clear that the WIC was near death and unable to pay up. The Chamber of Zeeland, to be true, had met its quota for the Brazilian soldiers’ wages almost perfectly prior to the fall of Recife,124 but the Chamber of Amsterdam was still half a million guilders in arrears.125 Although the WIC was supposed to compensate the colonial civil servants,126 the big paymaster was—and had long been—the States General, whose Atlantic debt amounted to much more. It had hardly started to cover the more than 7 million guilders spent on the army in Brazil in the years 1651 and 1652.127 In 1656, the States General decided that the total debt incurred in Brazil would not be repaid. Soldiers and officers to whom little money was owed stood a better chance of being fully reimbursed, but those claiming 4,000 guilders or more received no more than a quarter or one-fifth of the amount claimed.128 Initially, some government delegates objected to making payments to defeated soldiers without investigating their performance. Officers’ statements, however, stressed that the soldiers had not been unwilling to fight, except for those defending Fort Altona.129 The states ultimately blamed von Schoppe for the loss of Brazil, although they never proved it. In March 1655, seven months after he had been arrested, he was declared guilty of abandoning the “conquests of Brazil,” was stripped of all of his wages and benefits, and ordered to pay for the trial costs.130 Although this sentence—the same as Witte de With had received four years earlier— was implemented, it was tantamount to an acquittal, as Charles Boxer has remarked.131

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Regardless of their financial vicissitudes, not all refugees from Dutch Brazil could settle down in the cold Republic. In August 1655, a group of officers who between them had served across the Atlantic for 207 years submitted a plan to the States General to capture the port of Tamandaré, 100 kilometers south of Recife. They believed a fleet with 1,320 soldiers would suffice.132 Soldiers were not the only ones who were interested in a new adventure in Brazil. A public debate about the pros and cons took place, with those in favor highlighting the fate of the poor native Brazilians who had sided with the Dutch and were now believed to be at the mercy of the ruthless Portuguese victors. Solidarity with the abandoned was the leitmotif of a petition that was signed by many people and submitted to the States General.133 The Zeelanders were the most vociferous proponents of a return to Brazil. Their opponents scoffed at them for ignoring the costs; the only goal of the warmongers, it was said, was recapturing Brazil, whatever money, ships, and “Christian blood” it required.134 Between 1657 and 1661, a restoration of Dutch Brazil was not even unlikely because the United Provinces were in a war with Portugal, albeit a low-intensity war.135 The States General jumped at the opportunity to seek redress for the WIC when King John IV died in November 1656 and was succeeded by Queen Luisa, who ruled as a regent on behalf of her thirteenyear-old son. The plan of an expedition to compel the queen to make concessions was quickly born, and on September 5, 1657, a fleet of fourteen sail left from the Republic under Lieutenant Admiral Jacob Wassenaer van Obdam. Sixteen more ships arrived from the Mediterranean under the command of Lieutenant Admiral Michiel Adriaensz de Ruyter (1607–1676), a shrewd Zeelander with experience in the navy, whaling, and the merchant marine. Soon after Wassenaer van Obdam’s fleet arrived in Lisbon, two Dutch commissioners met with the queen to discuss a draft treaty, which provided for the restitution of Angola, São Tomé, and the areas the Dutch had lost in Brazil since 1641. Although the Dutch side moderated its demands somewhat, the queen refused to honor the proposal. Thus began a blockade of Lisbon, during which de Ruyter captured fifteen Portuguese ships returning from Brazil. The hostilities were short-lived, however, when it transpired that the blockade could not accomplish its goal of making the Portuguese give in. Moreover, the Nordic war between Sweden and Denmark intervened. At this juncture, the Dutch could not risk losing their French allies, who acted as mediators in the conflict with the Portuguese.136 What followed was, therefore, a lackluster four-year war in which only the Zeelanders privateers distinguished themselves, although their actions were uncoordinated. If they had acted together, they could have dealt the sensitive Portuguese slave trade

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a blow. Instead, most captains carrying a letter of marque preferred to trade in the West Indies.137 In 1661, the matter of Brazil finally seemed settled with the signing of a treaty between the Dutch and the Portuguese. The Portuguese committed themselves to hand back all the artillery the Dutch had left behind in Brazil, a promise they did not keep. Sixty-one years after the loss of Brazil, the WIC still corresponded with the States General about approaching Portugal to get back 269 cannons.138 More important than the artillery was the Portuguese promise to reimburse the Dutch for the damage they had sustained during the reconquest of Brazil. Each year, Portugal was to furnish the sum of 4 million cruzados (or 8 million guilders) to the Republic, payable partly in cash but largely in salt from Setúbal and in sugar and tobacco from Brazil.139 It took a long time for the treaty to take effect, due to delays caused especially by the war with Spain, in which Portugal was still involved. One year after the conclusion of that war, on July 30, 1669, a second Luso-Dutch treaty was signed in The Hague, and this was the definitive one. It stipulated that the crown of Portugal would indemnify the WIC for damages worth 500,000 cruzados or 1 million guilders, to be settled in salt from Setúbal.140 Portuguese payments in salt (as well as hard money from customs duties) entered the coffers of the WIC until 1701, when the Portuguese crown paid half of the remaining debt in a lump sum. These indemnities were essential to the functioning of the reestablished WIC, providing it with more cash than did the sale of stocks.141 The Dutch thus largely redeemed Brazil with salt, but many individuals who had incurred financial or material losses in 1654 were left with a feeling of bitterness. Complains about nonpayment would drag on for years, leading the Heren XIX to decide in 1671 that the old Brazilian claims would be settled with bonds that bore interest only from the day they were issued.142 The loss of Brazil, of course, also affected those who had remained behind in the Republic during the years that the Dutch flag flew over Pernambuco. In his Twist der Heeren met sijn Wyngaert (1669), Harmannus Witz, a minister in Leeuwarden, bemoaned their plight. The general poverty and misery at home, he wrote, resulted from the slackening of trade, the loss of the royal conquests in Brazil, and the failure of the WIC, in which so many families had invested their hard-earned money.143 Although the Dutch authorities eventually agreed to retire the notion of a new Brazilian adventure, there was no lack of schemes after 1654 to colonize other parts of South America. According to his own account, a man from Venezuela met with members of the States of Holland and other senior officials during a three-month stay in Amsterdam in 1658. They informed him

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about advanced plans to transform the area between the Orinoco and Brazil into a Dutch colony. Both the coastal strip and the interior would be gradually populated, enabling the Dutch in a future war with Spain to conquer the viceroyalty of Peru, which included all of Spanish-ruled South America. To that end, the Dutch were already preparing to capture the southern cone of the continent. At the start of the war, the States of Holland would fit out a fleet that left for the Río de la Plata, sail up that river, and take Spanish territory. A Dutchman who was fluent in Spanish had been sent to the area to gather intelligence. Dressed in Spanish clothes, he had gone 800 kilometers into the interior, returning to the Republic with a map showing all the rivers and roads he had discovered.144 These plans cannot be confirmed from Dutch sources, but several projects were launched after 1654 to establish new colonies in precisely the area between the Orinoco and Brazil. In 1657, for example, the Spanish consul in Amsterdam found out that a mercantile firm from that city was gathering a large amount of money to send five or six ships with settlers to “the island of Orinoco.”145 The area of Guiana (a.k.a. the Wild Coast) was only nominally in Spanish hands. In reality, there were very few Europeans on the ground. Guiana had attracted settlers from France, England, Ireland, and the Republic since the beginning of the century, but the climate and volatile relations with the indigenous people had doomed virtually every colony. Zeeland was the engine of Dutch colonizing activity in these years. The WIC chamber collaborated closely with three towns (Middelburg, Vlissingen, and Veere) in developing a part of Guiana, which was baptized Nova Zeelandia. This gave a boost to the languishing Dutch colonies of Pomeroon and Essequibo, and encouraged two sets of colonists, one of which was exclusively Jewish, to settle on the nearby Cayenne river.146 In these settlements, as well as in Tobago, the site of another infant Dutch colony, the Zeelanders sought to focus on cash-crop production. As a consequence, human cargoes began to arrive from Africa.147 The Zeeland initiative soon bore fruit. By 1662, the Spanish governor in Santo Thomé estimated that Nova Zeelandia was home to more than 1,000 settlers, who lived with 400 Amerindians and 1,500 enslaved Africans. They had founded, as he put it, “a new Brazil.”148 The Dutch themselves were also prone to refer to a “second Brazil,” a term applied especially to the most prosperous colony to arise in Guiana: Suriname.149 The notion of a second Brazil did not fade rapidly. Militia officers in Suriname still wrote in 1712 that their colony, protected by the States General, could become as potent in people as Brazil.150 Afterward, the idea of a second Brazil surfaced one more time in WIC circles, when the board suggested to the ruling council of Elmina that this Dutch outpost could be

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made into a new Brazil. By then, however, the main association seems to have been with the contemporary Brazilian goldmines rather than the sweet past of Dutch Brazil.151 A practical legacy of Dutch Brazil was the administration of the Dutch Atlantic. Mathias Beck, vice director of Curaçao (1655–1668), had been a well-to-do merchant and alderman in Brazil, where he headed a WIC mining expedition.152 His uncle, Jacob Alrichs, the first director of Nieuwer-Amstel (1657–1659) in New Netherland, had been the receiver-general in Brazil, where his successor Alexander d’Hinoyossa had had a military position.153 Jean Paul Jacquet, the highest-ranking Dutch official on the Delaware River (1655–1656), had also served in the Dutch army in Brazil.154 Huijbert van Beveren, chief commies in Brazil, went on to become governor of Tobago (1657–?);155 Johannes Heinsius, previously secretary of the Council of Justice in Brazil, became governor of Suriname (1678–1680);156 and Jasper van Heussen, alderman of Mauritsstad, eventually served as director-general on the Gold Coast (1658–1661).157 Finally, Quirijn Spranger, director of Dutch Cayenne (1663–1664), had served the WIC in Brazil in various capacities, including that of chief commies of soldiers’ clothing.158 In a published poem that compared Brazil to the Land of Canaan and the Garden of Eden, he gave expression to the nostalgia for the colony that had once been Dutch.159

Rivalry and War with England Although New Netherland was sidelined in the wars with Spain and Portugal, it could not be ignored in the rivalry with England, which found the Dutch in its way when trying for regional hegemony, both in the North Sea and North America. Strife with the English was a birthmark of New Netherland. The purpose of scattering the first settlers in 1624 among four locations (Governor’s Island, the upper Hudson, and the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers) was to lay claim to a large area, thus preempting English appropriation.160 Subsequent border disputes between New Netherland and New England were numerous. At the outset of the first Anglo-Dutch war (1652–54), the WIC directors embraced a bellicose role for New Netherland by pointing out that the area was better placed than any other colony to attack the English.161 Although no attack materialized, the Dutch were almost on the receiving end of an English invasion—a first, albeit minor, Western Design. When his countrymen in New Haven asked for an assault on New Netherland, Oliver Cromwell responded by outfitting an expedition under the command of Robert Sedgwick. Forewarned of possible attacks launched from New Haven or

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Virginia, the Dutch in New Amsterdam erected fortifications.162 Nevertheless, an invasion could still have succeeded because the demand for soldiers to defend the Dutch Republic had kept the WIC from sending men and English settlers could have acted as a fifth column.163 What saved the Dutch was the arrival of peace, which made Sedgwick turn north to Acadia and conquer the French colony there. Although the Dutch North American possessions were saved, Dutch shipping in the North Atlantic did suffer at the hands of English during the war. The loss of ships plying the Atlantic to privateers and the loss of vessels anchored at Barbados compelled the Amsterdam merchants trading in the Caribbean to join hands as anti-English privateers. They proposed to establish a company of their own with important commercial privileges in the Caribbean that was to capture Barbados, but this never got off the ground.164 The Dutch did conquer new territory after the peace was signed in 1654, not in the Caribbean but in North America, and not at the cost of the English but the Swedes. Ever since the foundation in 1638 of New Sweden on the Delaware River, tensions had existed between it and New Netherland, which only grew after Petrus Stuyvesant had taken up his post as directorgeneral in 1647. The repercussions of the war named for Stuyvesant’s predecessor were also still palpable because the governor of New Sweden sought to curry favor with the native peoples by spreading the rumor that the Dutch planned to massacre them, a rumor that seemed credible in light of Kieft’s War.165 Both sides enjoyed native support, with three sachems ceding land to the Dutch (except for hunting and fishing rights), which enabled the Dutch to build Fort Casimir at a strategic location on the Delaware River. When in May 1654 a ship from Sweden captured this poorly defended fort—which the Swedes contended was built on land they had bought from Amerindians—the WIC took up arms.166 Following the arrival of a ship from Amsterdam with war materials and two hundred soldiers, Stuyvesant led an expedition from Manhattan to Delaware Bay. Superior Dutch numbers overwhelmed the Swedish soldiers, leading to their surrender on September 15, 1655.167 But whatever joy the returning army may have felt was extinguished upon their arrival in Manhattan, where on the same day as the Swedes’ surrender, sixty-four canoes had embarked five to six hundred armed Mahican, Hackensack, Esopus, and Tappan Amerindians. They had planned to attack enemy tribes but were sidetracked by the murder of an indigenous woman by a Dutch settler. Violence now ensued on both sides, eventually setting off a three-day campaign of destruction by the natives on Staten Island, which left houses and farms in flames and settlers dead or captured.168 The Second Dutch-Munsee War (or Peach War, 1655–1656)

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had begun. Both this war and the Third Dutch-Munsee War (or Esopus War, 1659–1660, 1663) ended in Dutch victories, in part because of Dutch military superiority and ruthless tactics, in part because of rising European and dwindling indigenous numbers, and in part because of the Munsees’ diplomatic isolation.169 Meanwhile, the Anglo-Dutch peace treaty of 1654 did not usher in harmonious relations between New Netherland and its English neighbors to the north and south. The practical value of the treaty across the Atlantic world was that of an indeterminate cease-fire because mutual resentment remained high. It was telling that in 1656 one of the Amsterdam burgomasters, and again in 1663 the Grand Pensionary of Holland Johan de Witt, proposed to Spain the dispatch of a joint squadron to chase the English from their new colony of Jamaica.170 In 1664, Anglo-Dutch hostilities recommenced without as much as a declaration of war. Before this second Anglo-Dutch war formally got underway, there were showdowns in West Africa and North America. After Connecticut Governor John Winthrop Jr. and some inhabitants of New England and Long Island had convinced the Council for Foreign Plantations and the Privy Council of a plan to attack New Amsterdam, an expedition left England to add New Netherland to English America.171 The new king, Charles II, who was fully behind the mission, awarded his brother, James Stuart, the Duke of York, a patent for a large part of the eastern seaboard. From an imperial perspective, the alien colony had prevented the creation of a contiguous English realm on the North American eastern seaboard. But that was not the only reason for this military operation against a friendly nation. Through this show of force, King Charles II intended to overawe the English colonies, where many were averse toward the crown. The conquest of New Netherland would be an important step in consolidating English dominion in New England. In addition, conquest would facilitate the enforcement of the New Navigation Act of 1660, whose aim was to eliminate Dutch shipments to and from the English colonies.172 The four frigates that the Duke of York sent under Richard Nicholl departed on June 4 and, having been reinforced with hundreds of soldiers in Massachusetts, arrived off New Amsterdam on September 6. Surprised and concerned, Director Stuyvesant attempted to prepare the defenses but failed to gain support. Even if he had succeeded, the chances of survival would have been small, given the modest supplies of powder and lead.173 In this area that specialized in food production, provisions were also in short supply because a ship laden with victuals had been sent to Curaçao three weeks before. The situation was hopeless, a local minister, Samuel Drisius, wrote

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afterward, because “no relief or assistance could be expected, while daily great numbers of Englishmen arrived from New England both on foot and on horseback, hotly bent upon plundering this place. Indians and privateers also offered their services against us, 600 Northern Indians and 150 French privateers, with an English commission. Therefore, at the strong urging of our citizens and inhabitants, our authorities found themselves compelled (however reluctantly) to come to terms, for the sake of avoiding bloodshed and pillage and bloodshed. . . .”174 The English went on to take the other parts of New Netherland as well, meeting fierce resistance in Delaware. The residents of Nieuwer-Amstel, a town ruled by the city of Amsterdam, were ready to succumb to the enemy, but the soldiers, who did not number more than thirty, preferred to fight. In the end, they lost against 130 English soldiers and sailors, who captured the fort and plundered the town.175 They then made off with sixty to seventy enslaved blacks, as well as one hundred sheep; a few dozen cows, oxen, and horses; guns, ammunition, and gunpowder; twenty-four cannon; saw mills; and plows and other farm equipment.176 In nearby Swanendael, the English went even further. Here, a utopian community had been founded in July 1663 by forty-two migrants, probably all Mennonites, who had settled in the same spot where a short-lived Dutch colony (1631–1632) had been destroyed by Amerindians.177 Their leader, Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy (c. 1620–1664), was a Zeelander with a comprehensive settlement plan that served to break out of a familiar spiral. Families that moved to savage and desert lands, Plockhoy noted, often got ill, died, or at least failed to make progress because of their inaptitude, poverty, or isolation. A community without strife and servitude and based on cooperation was the solution. As a former member of an Amsterdam society that criticized the narrow-mindedness of clergymen, Plockhoy argued that the colony would do without a preacher. Instead, all residents would join in singing psalms on Sundays and holidays, and each settler would take turns reading from the Bible.178 Swanendael’s brief history is unknown, except for its end, which came in September 1664, when Colonel Richard Carr ordered its total destruction and his men obeyed. Settlers fled in every direction, several were killed, and others—at least according to Stuyvesant’s report to the States General—were sold as slaves to Virginia.179 Dutch diplomatic protests failed to have any effect. Charles II told the Dutch ambassador in London that the area had been English from the start and that individual Netherlanders had only been admitted to settle there but no authority had been given to the WIC.180 The Dutch were then reduced to silence in the international arena. At home, a group of seventy men— most of them merchants—petitioned the States General to make the English

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return the colony, arguing that in due course New Netherland could replace the Baltic as a source of grain, hemp, flax, tar, pitch, pine, and oak. Others expressed their anger about the invasion in pamphlets or leveled criticism at the negotiators at the Peace of Breda in 1667, who agreed to the definitive transfer of the colony to the English.181 The year 1664 also saw tensions between the Dutch and the English on the African Gold Coast rise to fever pitch. Ever since the arrival of an English flotilla in 1632 and the subsequent establishment of an English headquarters at Cormantine, the two European neighbors sought to secure trading privileges from African nations at the cost of each other. Outright warfare did not occur, however, not even during the first Anglo-Dutch war. The Dutch director at Elmina and the English chief factor decided to refrain from attacks and concentrate on peaceful trade.182 Nor were these the only two European nations carving out trading posts on the littoral. Sweden and Denmark also asserted themselves during the course of the 1650s, ironically first and foremost with the help of Dutchmen.183 These new rivals were supported by the Efutu (or Fetu) treasurer and elite merchant named Akrosan or Jan Claessen, who declined the offer to be made king but was still the most powerful figure in Fetu. Thanks to his backing, the Swedes were able to maintain themselves in their selfconstructed trading post in Fetu territory, Carolusburg, better known today as Cape Coast castle. After Jasper van Heussen, the director-general in Elmina, orchestrated the transfer of this fort to the Dutch in April 1659, Akrosan laid siege to the building and ordered 2,000 musketeers under his command to prevent supplies from reaching the castle. One day after the inevitable Dutch surrender on June 5, Akrosan raised the Swedish flag again. Prior to this setback, the Dutch had reached their most powerful position ever on the Gold Coast, possessing six forts and nine lodges, which meant that only three English trading posts, maintained by no more than twenty factors and soldiers, stood in the way of a Dutch monopoly. On his return to the Netherlands, van Heussen’s predecessor Jan van Valckenburgh had written a report that provided the legal justification for such a monopoly. The Dutch, he reasoned, were legally entitled to the Gold Coast by virtue of their conquests against the Portuguese and the treaties they had signed with indigenous princes.184 This axiom would become the guiding principle of WIC policy in the area. This Dutch attitude led to a more aggressive course on their part in the early 1660s, characterized by the capture of various ships belonging to their European competitors. The seizure of a ship of the Swedish Africa Company was offensive to Akrosan. As long as the Dutch did not return the ship to the Swedes, he tried to starve the WIC of trade, hoping to expel the

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Dutch from the coast altogether. Akrosan did not bluff. He had an important power base around Cape Coast castle, where not only the Efetu conducted trade but also the Akan, who came from the interior.185 The WIC paid back Akrosan in kind by blockading and bombing Cape Coast and another local trading post, owned by the Danes.186 This episode ended with the death of the two main protagonists within months of each other, in 1662. The demise of both Akrosan and van Heussen, who was seen by the Efutu as the genius behind the aggressive WIC policies, resulted in the willingness of the Efutu to compromise. And that enabled the Dutch to drive the Swedes from Cape Coast castle.187 Now possessing two prominent and conveniently located forts in Elmina and Cape Coast castle, the WIC took advantage of its new supremacy by denying, as much as it could, foreign vessels access to the coast. The arrest by the Dutch of two ships fitted out by the English Company of Royal Adventurers (chartered in 1660) and the closing off of Cape Coast, where the English had had a lodge for many years, led to widespread indignation in England.188 But war was not yet on Charles II’s mind when he sent Navy Admiral Robert Holmes on an expedition to the Gold Coast in late 1663. Holmes’s mission was, rather, to guarantee the interests of the Royal Adventurers, protect their ships and their possessions ashore, and stimulate their commercial privileges. Holmes was to resort to violence only if he was thwarted in his tasks. Perhaps, however, did his oral instructions give him more leeway. Even before his eleven ships reached the Gold Coast, Holmes had inflicted much damage on the Dutch. In January and February 1664, he captured two Dutch forts at Goree, which had been important bases for the Zeeland antiPortuguese privateers, as well as a Dutch trading post on the Grain Coast (the area that coincided more or less with present-day Liberia).189 These actions set the tone for an expedition whose unprecedented success came as a complete surprise. In April, the fleet appeared on the Gold Coast, where Holmes easily overpowered four Dutch ships. Van Valckenburgh, the returning director-general, had assured himself of the support of his African allies, including the Efutu, offering 1 benda of gold (or 2 ounces, worth £8 or 80 guilders) for every decapitated European attacking the Dutch forts. Holmes, however, having befriended the Danish Africa Company, had also allied himself with many indigenous authorities. He trumped the Dutch with promises to the Efutu, who changed sides and supported the English attack on Cape Coast castle. After heavy bombardments, the one-hundred-man garrison raised the white flag on May 11. That did not satisfy Holmes, who seized two more Dutch lodges and one fort in the next few days. Elmina, however, proved to be impregnable.190

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This string of victories made England, at one fell swoop, the dominant power on the Gold Coast. The news initially produced skepticism in the Dutch Republic, where the actions that had provoked Holmes’s expedition were little known and where the press doubted that Holmes could have done what was ascribed to him.191 When the rumors proved to be true, delegates of the provinces of Zeeland and Groningen insisted on taking appropriate measures to confront the English aggression. Four of the five admiralties (Friesland abstaining) proposed supporting the WIC with twelve men-ofwar, a plan backed by Johan de Witt, grand pensionary of Holland and the paramount political figure of his day; the States of Holland; and then the States General.192 But instead of organizing a conspicuous expedition in Dutch home ports, the States General assigned the task of carrying out the plan to a squadron in the western Mediterranean that had been fitted out by the admiralties of Amsterdam, Maze, and the Noorderkwartier. Its commander, Michiel de Ruyter (who had been involved in the blockade of Lisbon in 1657), had been commissioned to ransom European slaves in Algiers and protect Dutch merchantmen. After receiving letters with secret instructions, de Ruyter sailed from Cádiz on October 5 with his fleet of twelve sail and 2,272 men.193 De Ruyter had the English flag taken down in many places. Without firing a shot, he recovered the island of Goree with its forts before emptying an English lodge in Sierra Leone. In Tacorary on the Gold Coast, he burned down the village that was home to four hundred to five hundred native allies of the English who had put up serious resistance. De Ruyter refrained from using heavy guns against his enemies, exercising restraint when possible. Although his suggestion about opening negotiations about a capitulation met with the approval of some Englishmen, the defenders of Fort Cormantine, the English headquarters on the Gold Coast, refused. They did not give up until February 8, 1665, after losing many men in attacks by some 1,000 African allies of the Dutch, who had departed from Elmina in canoes.194 After installing a new Dutch garrison, de Ruyter returned to Elmina, where a small ship arrived that night (February 13) with letters for the Vice Admiral from the States General. In consequence of English aggression in Europe and New Netherland, he was ordered to capture as many forts in West Africa as possible and take revenge by inflicting damage in Barbados, New Netherland, Newfoundland, and other places. The instructions made de Ruyter decide not to waste time with an attack on Cape Coast castle. If the expedition had been highly effective so far and lost few men, laying siege to this English stronghold was bound to cost much time and many casualties, the more so because the Dutch had discovered how ill-disposed the local

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African population was toward them. Moreover, de Ruyter expected another Dutch fleet to arrive before long. Therefore, because not all hinged on the actions of his own men, the admiral judged it wise to cross the Atlantic and hurt the English in the Americas. He stood out to sea on February 27, and during his Atlantic crossing, England and the Republic at last declared formal war on each other.195 The results of de Ruyter’s expedition in American waters were less spectacular than his exploits in Africa. He caused major damage to the ships and forts in Carlisle Bay, Barbados, but the price was high. Numerous Dutchmen were injured, and an unknown number died. Moreover, a strong wind forced him to retreat.196 De Ruyter and his men went on to seize seventeen English bottoms in the Caribbean, but they bypassed New York City because of the expected scarcity of foodstuffs. Instead, they sailed for Newfoundland, where they captured seven fishing boats and merchantmen and loaded provisions for the home voyage. After sailing north of Scotland for reasons of caution, de Ruyter’s fleet finally reached the northern Dutch port of Delfzijl on August 6, 1665, disproving rumors circulating in England that his fleet had been taken. From far and near, city and country people came by the thousands to see for themselves the men who had harmed the English enemy in distant theaters.197 “De Ruyter’s arrival hath huffed them up beyond the skies,” George Downing, the English envoy, wrote. Never had an admiral been welcomed back so enthusiastically. He was promptly rewarded for his achievements: only four days after he came ashore, de Ruyter was appointed Lieutenant Admiral of Holland and West-Friesland, followed another day later by his promotion by the States General to commander-in-chief of the navy.198 Summoned to the island of Texel to take charge of another fleet, he made his way through the provinces of Groningen and Friesland on two barges, loudly cheered by residents wherever he passed.199 Although the colonial English swore to take revenge for the damage they sustained in Barbados, they would have turned against their Dutch rivals in the Caribbean even if de Ruyter had not targeted that colony. Authorities throughout the English Atlantic shared the hostile attitude against the Dutch that abounded in the old country. Among them were men such as Thomas Modyford. After a career in Barbados as factor for the Company of Royal Adventurers, Modyford was appointed in 1664 as the new governor of Jamaica, where he pardoned fourteen pirates on death row in early 1665 and ordered them to cruise against the Dutch.200 Modyford wanted to usher in a new era on an island that, ever since its capture from Spain in 1655, had acquired a reputation as one of the main buccaneering bases, home to mariners who were hard to rein in and who enriched themselves by attacking

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Spanish American ships and settlements. His attempts to strike a peaceful tone with Spaniards on nearby islands were in vain, however, because the buccaneers refused to change their lifestyle.201 In a way, they were heirs to the Dutch in their maritime fight against the Spanish. The buccaneers made up almost the entire force that left Jamaica in April 1665 under Lieutenant Colonel Edward Morgan, an uncle of the soon-tobe-notorious Henry Morgan, who would lead many a successful raid against Spanish American targets. The 650 men, Modyford told his superiors in London, were “chiefly reformed privateers, scarce a planter amongst them, being resolute fellows and well-armed with fusees and pistols. Their design is to fall upon the Dutch fleet trading at St. Christopher’s, capture Eustatia [St. Eustatius], Saba, and Curaçao, and on their homeward voyage visit the French and English buccaneers at Hispaniola and Tortugas. . . . God sending good success, the Dutch will have no considerable place left them in the West Indies, and the late kindness and moderation towards these privateers will be thought well bestowed.”202 The expedition to St. Eustatius and the adjacent island of Saba, another Dutch colony, was exceedingly successful. Although the first island was reputedly difficult to seize, the Dutch defenders gave up on July 23, after which a party of sixty-nine men reduced Saba to English obedience. Following the buccaneers’ customary sacks—they had, after all, been recruited with that promise—the expedition leaders (minus Morgan, who passed away during the attack) had the Dutch residents who would not swear an oath of allegiance to the English king abducted to St. Martin. The dismantlement of the infrastructure of both colonies was equally momentous. Copper, stills, and some nine hundred slaves were removed and largely disembarked at Jamaica. This must have given an important boost to the budding sugar economy.203 What was left of the booty stolen on St. Eustatius caused great strife among both the officers and soldiers, who disputed the division of the spoils. Because fewer than 250 out of the 650 men appeared on a roll call, the planned assaults on St. Martin and Curaçao had to be canceled, at least temporarily. Modyford, nevertheless, soon ordered Edward Mansfield to undertake an attack on Curaçao and begged his superiors on November 26, 1665, “for full instructions as to what employment to give to the privateers after the suppression of the Dutch, whose name, he guesses, will ere three months expire, be forgotten in the Indies.” On the same day, Charles II wrote to Modyford to express his praise for the capture of St. Eustatius and Saba. He was “full of hope shortly to hear of the like success against Curaçao . . . desiring him to go on to root the Dutch out of all places in the West Indies, and where he shall have success to transplant the greatest part of them to

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Jamaica or other Plantations, which may have the benefit of their industry without hazard of revolt. . . .”204 In the meantime, the Dutch colony on the small Virgin Island of Tortola, which had been founded by a group of Zeelanders in 1648, had also ceased to exist.205 Thirty-six English buccaneers from Salt Tortugas agreed to capture the island soon after receiving word about the outbreak of the war. Because their invasion of July 18–19 occurred without commission, it lacked legitimacy. They succeeded in their intentions in spite of the 130 armed men defending Tortola, who failed to fire a single shot. Nobody stood in the way as the buccaneers sailed away to Bermuda with the seventy enslaved Africans of the colony.206 The theft of African bodies from foreign ships and colonies had marked the English colonization of the Americas from its start, but thus far, the Spanish colonies had been the ones to lose their enslaved workers.207 The war with the Dutch Republic provided a convenient occasion to engage in massive transfers of unpaid slaves from the Dutch to the English islands. The next English target in the Dutch Caribbean was Tobago, a colony that was home to Zeelanders, who had first arrived in 1654, and Frenchmen, who made up about half the European population.208 Eighty English privateers captured the island in September, after which the same scenario unfolded as in Statia and Saba. The invaders destroyed all eighteen sugar plantations and everything that could not be carried off, dragging away all that was useful, especially the coppers, the kettles and pans of the sugar mill. The action then shifted to Guiana, where three hundred troops from Barbados overran the Dutch colonies on the Pomeroon and Essequibo rivers in January 1666, followed in March by the English capture of another Dutch Guiana colony further to the east on the Approuague River.209 These actions left just two colonies of some significance flying the Dutch flag: Berbice and Curaçao. A squadron was fitted out to turn Curaçao into an English island, but disobedient soldiers and some of their officers forced Edward Mansfield, the expedition leader, to plot a new course. In response to his men’s desire to hit a Spanish colony (which they considered more lucrative and less dangerous), Mansfield headed for Providence Island with part of his fleet, taking back the colony that England had lost to Spain in 1641.210 Although it seemed that the final hour of Dutch America had come, the tide turned within a few months. On November 13, 1666, a group of 120 Dutchmen, including some exiled former residents, reconquered St. Eustatius, carrying a commission from Matthias Beck, the governor of Curaçao. French soldiers provided welcome assistance, although the sources are contradictory about their exact role. At any rate, 350 English residents were shipped to Jamaica.211 And more help was forthcoming from the mother country.

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As early as late 1665, Zeeland Pensionary Pieter de Huybert (1622–1696) put forward a plan to fit out a mixed fleet of Holland and Zeeland ships to strike at English trade east and west. When the States of Holland dropped out—most likely because the required ships were not ready on time—the expedition became one exclusively financed and organized by the province of Zeeland. Seven ships departed from the port of Veere on December 30, 1666, with 750 sailors and 225 soldiers on board. Their commander was Abraham Crijnssen, a man who had made a name for himself fighting against the Dunkirkers and the English. In spite of the initial design, his mission was a purely Atlantic one. He was ordered to capture or destroy English merchantmen at Cape Verde; conquer the English colony of “Soramme, otherwise called Serename”; recapture Essequibo, Pomeroon, and Tobago; ravage other English possessions in the West Indies; attack English colonies in North America; and cripple the fisheries of Newfoundland and Iceland.212 It was a bold plan, strongly reminiscent of the ambitious designs the WIC had harbored in the 1620s. Having ignored his instructions about Cape Verde, Crijnssen arrived at Suriname, an English possession since 1651, on February 25, 1667. The next day, a short bombardment sufficed for Lieutenant General William Byam to hoist the white flag. No more than 50 pounds of gunpowder were left in the fort. The surrender of the settlement of Thorarica was less straightforward, in part because neither side spoke the other’s language, but eventually the entire colony was rendered into submission.213 Crijnssen pushed on in a western direction along the Wild Coast, reconquering Pomeroon, Essequibo, and Tobago before he and some French allies engaged a large English fleet near Nevis. His final act was the capture off Virginia of numerous English ships laden with tobacco. Back in Zeeland, the ships and booty yielded the handsome amount of 345,991 guilders.214 Although the Dutch defenders put up a good fight, Suriname changed hands once more a few months later, but the English reconquest of October 17 occurred after the two countries had signed a new peace treaty in Breda, which provided for the preservation of Dutch rule in Suriname. The States of Zeeland, therefore, dispatched Crijnssen again to again take possession of the new colony.215 By the time he disembarked, much damage had been done. The English reconquerors had demolished several sugar mills and carried off slaves from the plantations to Barbados.216 The colony was not fully dismantled, but it would take some time to recover. While the war years 1672–1678 may have threatened the very existence of the United Provinces, they saw new reversals of fortune for Dutch America. The year 1672 is still known in the Netherlands as the Rampjaar (the Year

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of Calamity), when the Dutch miraculously survived the simultaneous invasions of German princes, England (which started the third Anglo-Dutch war), and Louis XIV’s France. Like England at an earlier juncture, the French now tried to free themselves from Dutch commercial and maritime hegemony. Omnipresent Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert was keen on cutting out the Dutch from French colonial trade and expelling them from all the West Indies and West Africa.217 His first undertaking had been to dispatch three vessels in 1669 that were to capture Dutch ships in the Caribbean if they were found trading in the French islands or sailed too close to the coast of French possessions.218 The French alliance with England in 1672 offered a unique opportunity to reduce the Dutch Republic to insignificance. But the first naval battle of the war, which took place on the English North Sea coast, had an unexpected result. The Anglo-French attempt, with the Duke of York and Vice Admiral Count Jean d’Estrées at the helm, to blockade the Dutch coast with a joint fleet of ninety-three ships and thus prevent Dutch ships from sailing to their various destinations across the globe, was repelled by the Dutch fleet of seventy-five ships, commanded by lieutenant admirals de Ruyter, Adriaen Banckert, and Willem Joseph van Gent. The outcome of the massive battle of Solebay (June 7, 1672) may have been inconclusive, but it allowed the Dutch to take the war to American shores. That was badly needed because an English force under Colonel William Stapleton, governor of the English Leeward Islands, reconquered St. Eustatius in late June. The eighty residents made their governor surrender the island without armed resistance. When a French expedition laid claim to the island a few days later, the Dutch chose to remain under English rule. After Saba had capitulated to the English on July 4, a squadron of six hundred men from Barbados added Tobago to the English empire in December. The victors deliberately continued with the English demolition of the Dutch Caribbean infrastructure, in keeping with the commander’s instruction to destroy everything that he could lay his hands on. Slaves and commodities were divided among the soldiers.219 The Dutch of St. Martin, the island shared with France, had by then also been placed under foreign jurisdiction after the governor of the French part annexed the Dutch area. It seemed as though Curaçao was next. In March 1673, a fleet with 1,200–1,300 men, commanded by French Governor-General Jean Charles de Baas, arrived on the shores of the island. As it turned out, the invaders were poorly informed about the local fortifications,220 and they were probably unaware of the large shipments of ammunition and foodstuffs brought in by private shipowners in the Netherlands, which allowed

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the garrison soldiers and the slaves to survive.221 The French provisions, by contrast, shrank rapidly, making a retreat inevitable. More good news was on the way. Too much concerned with warfare at home, the States General left any initiatives about waging war in the Atlantic world to the five admiralties. Those of Zeeland and Amsterdam jumped at the opportunity. The man who once again took the lead in Zeeland, Pensionary de Huybert, reintroduced some plans from the previous war. With instructions from the States of Zeeland that differed little from those of Crijnssen in 1667, a new but smaller squadron of six ships weighed anchor on December 15, 1672. Commander Cornelis Evertsen de Jonge and his 587 men first swung into action near the Cape Verde islands, where they ran into the English East India fleet sailing home. Two prizes were incorporated into Evertsen’s fleet. The planned attack on the island of St. Helena, an English way station en route to the Indian Ocean, was not necessary because a Dutch squadron from the South African Cape colony had recently subdued it. Therefore, Evertsen next sailed to Suriname to size up the situation.222 Heartened by the conditions he found, but delayed by repairs to his ships, Evertsen headed for Martinique in late May 1673. He soon encountered a squadron flying French flags, but to his great surprise, the colors disguised another Dutch squadron, this one fitted out by the Amsterdam admiralty and led by Jacob Binckes (1637–1677), a native of Friesland. The two men resolved to form a single fleet.223 This fleet took some prizes at French islands and anchored at St. Eustatius on June 8. The English refusal to strike their flag was the sign for the Dutch ships to open fire and the landing forces to go ashore. Before long, the defenders fled from the fort, allowing the Dutch to take their place. They turned the tables on the English, setting fire to the fort, the nearby houses, and the warehouses on the bay, thus rendering the island useless for their enemies. No garrison was left behind, and the entire population was transferred to Curaçao: both the more than two hundred Africans (who were auctioned off on Curaçao) and the Dutchmen who had surrendered so easily the previous year and had now sided with the English. The same happened to the population of Saba when that island was reconquered a few days later.224 The Dutch display of force continued in the Chesapeake, where the fleet captured seven ships, destroyed ten more, defeated a royal navy squadron, and inflicted much damage. The most devastating act of war was saved for Newfoundland, where all facilities were obliterated and almost the entire fishing fleet burned.225 This followed in the wake of hostilities in what used to be New Netherland. When on August 7 the fleet dropped anchor at Sandy

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Hook, New Jersey, in search of water, a few Dutch farmers from Long Island and Staten Island came on board. Their chorus of criticism about harsh English rule, combined with intelligence about the small garrison guarding New York City, set off an impromptu attack on the town. The English were completely overpowered as ships opened fire on Fort James while six hundred troops made landfall. On August 9, the second-largest town in English America (after Boston) was back in Dutch hands. Its new name was Nieuw Orangien (New Orange).226 The takeover was hardly felt as a foreign occupation. Delegations from other parts of the former New Netherland (the colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware), with a total population of 6,000 or 7,000, voluntarily submitted to Dutch rule.227 A bright future seemed to be in store, the city fathers of New Orange wrote to the States General, if New Netherland could supply foodstuffs to Dutch warships and to the colonies of Curaçao and Suriname.228 The councilors of King Charles II feared the worst. They imagined an extensive economic collaboration between the Dutch, with their low-priced, high-quality manufactures, and the New Englanders, who had come to dominate trade on the eastern seaboard and to the West Indies. This cooperation could even assume a military character. Moreover, control of New York City, the only fortified port on mainland Anglo-America, would provide the Dutch access to Chesapeake Bay and thereby the chance to repeat the recent raid on the tobacco fleet.229 But this was not to be. At the Peace of Westminster, made public on March 6, 1674, the Republic agreed to return all of New Netherland—and this time it was for good. After eight days of negotiation in late October to early November, the Dutch surrendered New Netherland to Major Edmund Andros, who arrived from England as the new governor of what was once again an English colony. Outside the legal and political realm, New York remained in many ways Dutch in the decades to come. But despite the continued vibrancy of their culture, the Dutch settlers merged with the English, or so it appeared to outsiders. The Mahicans put it succinctly: “The English and Dutch are now one.”230 In reality, the Dutch character of New Amsterdam and its surroundings faded only gradually, especially in areas where the ethnic Dutch continued to dominate. That was the case, for instance, in the village of Schenectady. Among its 238 inhabitants in 1697, only 7 Englishmen were counted.231 Although few immigrants arrived in the former New Netherland from the United Provinces after 1674, Dutch customs, beliefs, and language were transmitted from one generation to the next by way of the family, print culture, and the Reformed Church. Well into the eighteenth century, the Dutch Bible was a prized possession in many families.232

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Thanks to the Treaty of Westminster, the only enemy left for the Dutch Republic to fight in 1674 was France. An enormous Dutch fleet left the home ports in May to wage war with the French both in Europe and the New World. Although the bulk of the fleet stayed in European waters, a total of thirty-eight vessels sailed from Vlissingen to the West Indies, commanded by de Ruyter, who had reached the ripe age of sixty-seven. The destination of the 4,000 soldiers and 3,400 sailors was Martinique, the French Caribbean headquarters, from where it was hoped all French islands could be subjugated. Leaving Martinique in French hands was considered dangerous because it could be used to launch expeditions aimed at Dutch targets, such as that of de Baas against Curaçao. Counting on the Huguenot population to flock to their side, the Dutch expected an easy victory, but they were deceived. The defenses were optimally organized, and the fort was almost impossible to take because of its height, which prevented the ship artillery from bombarding the fort walls. In addition, the element of surprise was once again missing because the islanders had known about de Ruyter’s plans more than a month prior to his arrival. Undaunted, the admiral entered into combat on July 20, the day of his arrival, but not before his men had discovered warehouses filled with red wine and brandy. Many became too inebriated to join the fight, while others attacked the fort “in epic disorder,” as one French observer noted. As a result, 143 Dutchmen fell, including many officers, and 318 men were wounded. In sharp contrast to his Atlantic expedition of 1664–1665, de Ruyter retreated without accomplishing anything. He would serve the Dutch state for two more years until his death in a Mediterranean naval battle.233 One more time, a Dutch war fleet headed for the Caribbean, commanded by Jacob Binckes. Despite losing one hundred of the four hundred men he sent ashore in the attack, Binckes reinstated Dutch power at Cayenne (which had been captured by the French in 1664) on May 5, 1676.234 Next, he quickly took the French islands of Marie-Galante and St. Martin, seizing a hundred slaves at St. Martin and embarking seven hundred slaves as well as sixty-eight unhappy Protestant settlers at Marie-Galante.235 Binckes disembarked the settlers and slaves on Tobago, now owned by the States of Holland. Meanwhile, Louis XIV had responded to Binckes’s actions in the West Indies by sending a fleet under the Count Jean d’Estrées. Supported by guns from their frigates, the French attacked the Dutch fort from two sides on December 18 and restored the colony to French rule within half an hour.236 D’Estrées then set his sights on Tobago, recruiting hundreds of additional men on the French islands. With a force of 4,000 men, he made for Tobago in February 1677, which was defended by 1,700 Dutchmen. Twice, d’Estrées

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tried to subdue Binckes and his men with a combined assault by land and sea, but he failed both times. The second battle, held on March 3, was one of the bloodiest Caribbean encounters of the seventeenth century. An explosion killed most of the 445 men on one French ship, while virtually all the new colonists, confined to a Dutch ship, perished when their ship caught fire. Six months later, however, d’Estrées returned with another fleet, and this time he succeeded brilliantly. He took Goree on October 31 and reconquered Tobago on December 12 after a shell hit the powder magazine in the fort, killing 250 men, including Admiral Binckes. Moreover, the Dutch numbers had been depleted prior to d’Estrées’s arrival due to poor food supplies.237 The French fleet then prepared for an attack that should have been d’Estrées’ crowning achievement: the capture of Curaçao, the island that had become the chief Dutch colony in the Americas.238 Departing from Martinique on May 7, 1678, with hundreds of buccaneers on board, the fleet never made it to the Dutch colony. The ships were wrecked on the coral reefs of the Aves Islands four days after putting to sea, and hundreds of sailors and soldiers drowned. Curaçao was thus saved from a likely conquest.239 Nonetheless, France had won the Caribbean war. At the Peace of Nijmegen, signed in August, it kept all the captured colonies.240 What had set the French apart in this war was the existence of well-populated, vibrant Caribbean colonies, which were used as way stations for the troops to convalesce and new soldiers to be recruited. The Dutch lacked this advantage.241 Among the men who were severely wounded on Tobago was Vice Admiral Pieter Constant, a native of Middelburg who in years past had made a name for himself as a fierce fighter, like many other Zeelanders who had been instrumental in the Dutch expansion in the Atlantic world. As captain of a Brazil-bound ship, he had once managed to fight off twelve Dunkirk frigates near the Isle of Wight.242 Constant excelled as a privateer, especially during the second Anglo-Dutch war, but he also posed as a privateer to conduct contraband trade in Puerto Rico and Cuba.243 In 1672, he was appointed commander of Tobago, and one year later, he helped defend Curaçao against the French. As a ship captain, Constant frequented the French colonies, where he sided with the residents in their disputes with the mercantilist policies introduced by Colbert. In 1670, he led his crew and that of another Zeeland ship in inciting the inhabitants of Saint-Domingue in three different parts of the colony to break the chains that tied them to the French West India Company. A general insurrection ensued. Six years later, after helping in the defeat of the French in the battle of St. Martin, Constant returned to St. Domingue, accompanied by Binckes. He read out the text of a manifesto that invited the population to rally to the prince of Orange;

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under the stadholder’s rule, they were to enjoy trade with all nations. But this expedition was not crowned with success because Constant was thwarted in his attempt to unleash a revolt.244 That a hoodlum like Constant ended up incapacitated may be symbolic of the fate of the Dutch in the Atlantic world, where their role as a military power was definitively over by 1678. Four years before, the WIC had perished after a protracted illness. For most of its life, the company had depended on the military support of other Dutch institutions: the States General, the States of Holland and Zeeland, and the admiralties. Many a servant of these institutions had considered such aid foolhardy. Wassenaer van Obdam, commander-in-chief of the navy, wrote to Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt in 1664 that “experience sadly teaches that the vast expenses previously made in her favor, when her cause seemed legitimate, have been thrown, as it were, in a bottomless pit.”245 As a trading company, the WIC was a shadow of its former self after 1650. Its debts prevented the directors from fitting out more than a small number of ships. If a profit was made, it benefited only the chief shareholders, while the company had to defray its overhead costs in both the Republic and the colonies. At the suggestion of the States of Holland and with the blessing of the States General, the WIC was finally dissolved on September 20, 1674. It was succeeded on October 1 by another organization with the same name. Old shares were converted to new ones, the number of seats on the central board was reduced from nineteen to ten, and the number of directorships in the individual chambers was cut in half. A new starting capital was thus created for a slimmed-down WIC, whose commercial activities in the decades to come were confined to trade with West Africa and the transatlantic slave trade.246 The only other task of the WIC in the period up to the its definitive demise in 1791 was the governance of colonies and trading posts. Expansion was now a thing of the past.

Ch ap ter 4

Between Hunger and Sword

Soldiers enlisted in the WIC for the same reasons that motivated them all over Europe: “Some were fleeing from some personal difficulty—an intolerable family situation, a girl made pregnant, perhaps criminal proceedings and a prison sentence or worse. Some were attracted by the opportunity to break out of the narrow horizons and dreary routine of life on the farm or in the workshop. In an age when travel was difficult and expensive and the man seeking work outside his immediate environment an object of suspicion, military service was one of the few ways in which the poor could hope to see something of the world. Most of all, however, men were driven to enlist by poverty. . . .”1 In the late 1620s, a more immediate motivation to join the WIC ranks was Piet Heyn’s capture of the Spanish flota.2 Sailors signed up for WIC ships in numbers so high that the VOC had a hard time finding suitable mariners.3 Such enthusiasm, which briefly resurfaced a decade later, was exceptional. Company servants did not usually display a strong identification with their employer; they simply wanted to make a living. Thus, the soldiers who had been selected for the Dutch garrisons in Africa, but whose voyage was cut short when the officers of the ten men-of-war that were to carry them across the Atlantic decided to hibernate in the Republic, did not wait for their ships to depart. They all signed up for service in the Dutch army at home.4 113

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Soldiers and sailors were essential for the functioning of the Dutch Atlantic. They conquered foreign colonies, established others, manned garrisons, and maintained connections with the mother country. The lives they led, the futures they imagined, the violence they encountered, and the deprivation that they suffered were intimately connected with the way the Dutch Atlantic functioned.

The Rank and File In the first two decades after the resumption of the war with Spain in 1621, the WIC had impressive numbers of soldiers at its disposal who matched those serving the VOC. Admiral Jacob Willekens headed the first invasion at Salvador in 1624 with a force of 1,240 sailors and 1,510 soldiers. When he captured the treasure fleet in 1628, Piet Heyn commanded at least 3,780 men, 70 percent of whom were sailors. The largest Dutch Atlantic invasion armies were those guided by Hendrick Loncq to Pernambuco in 1630 and Witte de With’s secours of 1647, both of which numbered around 7,200 men.5 Smaller fleets included Jol’s to Luanda in 1641 (2,957), de Ruyter’s in 1664 (2,272), van Koin’s to Elmina in 1637 (1,200 men), Jol’s to São Tomé (1,060) in 1641, and Crijnssen’s in 1667 (975).6 Many of the soldiers who took part in colonial conquests became garrison soldiers once victory had been achieved. On de Ruyter’s 1664 fleet, for example, ten soldiers and sailors on each of the thirteen ships were assigned by lot to form the new garrison of Goree.7 The size of the garrisons depended on the importance of the colony and the amount of resistance that could be expected. The largest Dutch garrison in the Caribbean was that of Curaçao, where at most 350 soldiers were stationed in 1635 (table 1). The other Caribbean barracks all had fewer than one hundred men under arms, the smallest being that of Tobago, where forty-five adult males and twenty boys made up the defense force.8 Yellow fever and malaria wreaked havoc on all the African garrisons. In the 1610s, forty of the sixty soldiers sent to Fort Mouree died within a few years,9 and by the 1630s, the WIC had to recruit an average of more than one hundred men each year to “refresh” the garrisons of its West African forts and the coastal fleet stationed in the Gulf of Guinea. By the 1660s, new recruits for the Dutch forts and lodges in Africa totaled more than three hundred per year.10 The ranks were also quickly depleted in Luanda, the largest of the African garrisons, whose numbers declined from 1,450 (1641) to 500 or 600 (1646), and only half of the original 350 soldiers stationed in São Tomé in 1641 were left at the time of its surrender (1648), including 16 slaves.11 The garrison of New Amsterdam

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Transatlantic troop strength, c. 1640

GARRISON

YEAR

NUMBER OF SOLDIERS

Brazil (combined)

1648

6,000a

Luanda

1641–1648

500–1,450

São Tomé

1641

350

Curaçao

1635

350

Elmina

1637

175

St. Martin

1633

95

Bonaire

1640

70

Tobago

1637

65

New Amsterdam

1643

50–60

a The number had been close to 2,000 in the period September 1645 to January 1646. See Bruno Romero Ferreira Miranda, “Gente de Guerra: Origem, cotidiano e resistência dos soldados do exército da Companhia das Índias Ocidentais no Brasil (1630–1654)” (PhD diss., University of Leiden, 2011), 38.

varied greatly in size, climbing from 50–60 men in 1643 to approximately 250 in the early 1650s before it fell back to 180 in 1664. In that year, at the surrender of New Netherland to the Duke of York, no more than 250–300 soldiers could be found in the entire colony, including Fort Orange and the forts on the Delaware River and the Esopus Creek.12 That number was roughly the same as that in early Suriname (about 270) and smaller than that boasted by the Dutch encampment in Pomeroon (Guiana), estimated by a Dutch settler in 1665 at 400.13 All these numbers paled in comparison to those needed for the occupation of Brazil. The numbers of soldiers shipped to the various parts of the Dutch Atlantic from June 1639 to April 1640 reveal the importance attached to Brazil, where 3,177 of all 3,276 soldiers were assigned, amounting to 97 percent. The other recipients were Africa (fifty-nine soldiers), Curaçao (twenty-four), and New Netherland (sixteen).14 Although the Dutch army in Salvador (1624–1625) had been relatively modest, with 1,600 men divided into 10 companies,15 thousands more were under arms at any time during the Dutch hold on Pernambuco (1630–1654), starting with the 3,734 soldiers that Admiral Hendrick Loncq left behind when he departed from Brazil in June 1630.16 Because armed encounters and the scourge of disease took their toll, the dispatch of fresh troops from the Republic was no luxury. Still, the pace at which this happened was impressive, especially compared with the Habsburgs. On average, one flute or yacht arrived every other week between July 1630 and February 1631, carrying provisions as well as new soldiers—in all, over 1,000.17 And in spite of the waning health of the WIC, fresh troops continued to be shipped from 1632 to 1636, for a total number of 7,268

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sailors and 9,199 soldiers.18 Such a flow was, however, not maintained in the long run. When the revolt of 1645 began to spread, no more than 2,000 Dutch soldiers remained in all Brazil. Within three years, that number was to triple due to the arrival of Witte de With’s secours, but it would shrink again almost as rapidly.19 The initial zeal to fight in Brazil gradually gave way to indifference or outright unwillingness to serve the Dutch cause. Not only had the Dutch war machine faltered, word had reached the United Provinces about the miserable lives led by the rank and file in Brazil. In a pamphlet from 1649 featuring a fictional conversation, one of the protagonists remarks about the island of “Taparica” (Itaparica) in Brazil: “[O]ur men cannot accomplish much here, working hard to construct forts, and very ill-provided with victuals; It seems to me that they are famished, and the sailors are at least as bad off as the soldiers, since they never rest. . . .” His interlocutor is not surprised that many sailors and soldiers are deserting: “Here [i.e., in the Dutch Republic], a dog would run away from his master if he were treated like that. . . .”20 For prospective soldiers and sailors, there were plenty of alternatives. The Dutch Atlantic had to compete for soldiers with the VOC and with other European states. In 1646, agents from both Venice and Hesse lured numerous soldiers from Amsterdam, The Hague, and other towns with large sums of money.21 Alarmed, the WIC directors requested that the States General issue a ban on foreign recruitment on Dutch soil.22 The officers signing up troops for Witte de With’s secours were not to be envied. Colonels and captains were trying hard to persuade young men to sign up for Brazil, but they met with little response.23 Those recruiting among Dutch army soldiers in the garrison town of Bergen op Zoom were apparently so frustrated that they abused the potential enlistees.24 Others painted Brazil in rosy colors: the drinking water was excellent, the beaches were full of fish, the barracks were comfortable, and earning good money by the side was eminently possible without having to toil hard. Moreover, soldiers could send for their wife and children and live apart with their family once their expedition had reached its destination.25 By 1650, the commissioners charged with drafting new troops for Brazil concluded that there was no interest at all. The drum had beaten in vain in Hoorn, Enkhuizen, and neighboring towns, and no more than thirty men had enlisted in The Hague and Delft.26 This indifference stood in stark contrast with the enthusiasm displayed by young males just two years later, when untold numbers gathered to join the naval effort against England during the first Anglo-Dutch war.27 England could fight its wars with the Dutch only by using impressment, a method employed by various naval powers to solve the labor problem on

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their fleets.28 The republican Dutch did not resort to this solution, which their rivals traditionally rationalized as based on the monarch’s power to call on his or her subjects to defend the country.29 The absence of impressment does not mean, however, that the choice of sailors to work on Dutch oceangoing ships was entirely free. Like the soldiers who ended up in transatlantic garrisons, sailors were often the victims of crimps or “soul sellers.” Usually women, these crimps provided young males in ports such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Middelburg with food, liquor, and lodging. After a few weeks had passed, they tried to persuade their guests to sign up for the admiralties or the great companies.30 Not all keepers of lodging houses were exploitative, nor were they all women. Scottish sailors in Rotterdam could choose from at least sixty-one different individuals, couples, or associations of persons, all of their own nation, in the years 1630–1660. It would seem that their fellow nationals sought to help rather than dupe them.31 Soldiers and sailors seeking WIC employ in Amsterdam had to sign up at the West-Indisch Huis. One soldier incorporated in the expedition to capture Pernambuco in 1629–1630 has given us an impression of the events that transpired on his first day. Prospective soldiers had to swear under oath that on their way to Brazil, they would surrender to the enemy only after blowing up their ship by setting fire to the powder magazine. After this solemn promise, they marched with flying colors across Amsterdam to the waiting vessels that carried them to the island of Volewijk at the city marine entrance. After the exercise and muster, all swore an oath of allegiance to their officers and regimental colors.32 Although departing soldiers were sometimes provided with a rapier (a sword used for slashing and thrusting), a firelock, and a hammock, they usually had to purchase their own kit. Because not everyone had the wherewithal, some borrowed money from relatives or their crimp. Future wages were often the only collateral for such loans.33 The force of nature was always a concern on transatlantic voyages. The weather could postpone sailing dates for months or influence the well-being of those on board for a long time. When the Nassau fleet put to sea in April 1623, the frost was so sharp that many toes and feet froze. The ships were forced to anchor off Cape Verde for ten days and cure the sick ashore in tents.34 Dozens of soldiers sailing on Witte de Wit’s fleet in 1647 were not to be envied either; the ships were so overloaded that they had to pass the entire voyage to Brazil under the naked sky.35 To make matters worse, many Dutch ocean-going vessels were worm-eaten and lacking cables, anchors, and sails.36 The ships that made up the Dutch homeward-bound fleet after the defeat in Salvador (1625), noted an Englishman who sailed on this fleet, “had not beene trimmed in two yeares, they had no good tacklings at all, some of

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them had but an anchor a piece, they were all exceeding leaky. In the ship that I my selfe came in, our souldiers pumped 20 and 24 thousand strokes a day.”37 On one Brazil-bound WIC ship (1638) that was not seaworthy, the steady pumping of water kept the vessel afloat until it sank 30 sea miles from Ireland; 44 men escaped, and 103 men drowned.38 On less eventful outbound voyages, there were various ways to get out of the everyday routine aboard ship. Although officially forbidden, sailors and soldiers played dice, cards, checkers, and backgammon, which regularly sowed discord.39 After Lisbon had disappeared from view, and a rock formation called the Barlengas appeared, veteran sailors would announce that those who had never been this far had to appear on deck. While the old guard played cacophonous music, the novice was met by a fake judge, who decided that he had to be baptized by immersing him in the sea three times. Men could forgo this ordeal by paying a “christening gift,” usually in the form of drinks.40 Although forbidden on VOC ships by 1616, the tradition survived on ships of the Dutch navy and the WIC, even after the Heren XIX banned the practice in 1641.41 On one fleet bound for Brazil, the soldiers, who were the obvious target of this banter, refused to go along. Some of them still fell into the hands of sailors, who tied ropes under the soldiers’ armpits and were about to “bathe” them when other soldiers came to their rescue. At this point, the fleet commander, Michiel van Gogh, stepped in. He determined that no one could be forced to be “baptized” and settled the matter amicably by distributing wine—one pint for every sailor and two for every seven soldiers.42

Families and Foreigners The demographic features of soldiers and sailors in the Atlantic world probably resembled those of their counterparts on board East Indiamen. Sailors bound for the East Indies were on average twenty-four or twenty-five years of age, and only one in five was married.43 After 1645, surviving relatives of sailors who had served the navy in Atlantic waters and died in service were given one extra month of pay.44 This new rule did not benefit the spouses of the numerous soldiers on board Witte de With’s Brazil-bound fleet, who requested even before departure to be maintained during their husbands’ absence.45 Few wives traveled along with their soldier husbands. The 614 soldiers departing to Brazil from December 1645 to February 1646 were accompanied by only 23 wives and 9 children.46 Soldiers who maintained a family in the Netherlands often left behind poverty-stricken wives and children. Almoners and deacons had to support many such families. We can

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also assume that the wives of sailors in WIC or navy service, like the spouses of VOC mariners, became beggars, worked in bordellos, or scraped a living by spinning or sewing.47 The WIC policy to give soldiers and sailors a two-month payment at their enlistment for the benefit of their families did not always have the intended result. Because their husbands had frequently run up substantial debts, many soldiers’ wives never received a penny.48 Maertge Gillisdr., for instance, lived in poverty in Rotterdam for six years after her husband had sailed to the West Indies for the Chamber of Zeeland. All she received from her spouse in that period was 32 guilders to maintain herself and her children. After he died, she tried to collect his back pay and reach a settlement with his creditors.49 Machteltge Jansdr. was also indigent. She raised the children of her deceased soldier son, who had died on the expedition that captured Pernambuco in 1630.50 Jenneke Slesiger, whose father had died as a soldier in Brazil, tried in vain to obtain his overdue wages of 196 guilders from the States of Friesland. After their refusal, she traveled to The Hague and moved in with a large family, until she was told they could not maintain her anymore. Describing herself as sickly and “completely naked,” she was thus forced to live on the streets.51 Captain Aernout de Sales, who perished in Brazil, left three children whose mother had also passed away. They laid claim to the 922 guilders and 11 stivers he was owed.52 Prior to their departure across the Atlantic, some soldiers and mariners and their wives appointed each other their sole heirs.53 Jan Cornelisz from Delft and his wife Ermpgen Huybregtdr. did so on three occasions within an eleven-year period.54 Nor was it uncommon for a soldier or sailor to give his promise of marriage shortly before embarkation and make his beloved his only or principal heiress.55 An army captain told two friends prior to the first battle of Guararapes that he had become engaged before leaving Rotterdam. He let them know that he wanted her to collect his wages if he were to die in the engagement.56 One sailor bound for Brazil empowered his aunt and uncle to demand payment from the admiralty board and pass it on to his wife, but only if she remained pregnant and gave birth to a living child.57 Of course, some recruits were eager to leave their families behind. Willem Jans Ruijchaver, married with a child in Rotterdam, left on a ship for Brazil but disembarked in Barbados, where he was said to have moved in with another woman.58 Others left after procreating out of wedlock.59 Nor did the wives who stayed behind all remain chaste. One surgeon on board de Ruyter’s Africa-bound fleet of 1664 accused his wife of adultery, while the wives of two sailors who had left for the West Indies both gave birth to an illegitimate child during their husbands’ absence.60

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Women on the home front commiserated with their husbands. When they found out about the great mortality among their spouses aboard a yacht anchored at Curaçao in 1635, a group of sailors’ wives asked the WIC for permission to leave for the Caribbean with provisions. Alternatively, they suggested the company release the sailors.61 Three decades later, the wives of soldiers left behind in garrisons in Senegal and the Gold Coast by Michiel de Ruyter asked repeatedly for their replacement.62 Wives also frequently pleaded to collect overdue wages.63 Barbara van Goutsweert, the mother of a young boy, did all she could—including notarizing documents in both Recife and Amsterdam—to collect the money owed to her husband, an army captain who had meanwhile died.64 The spouses of the men dispatched for the secours of 1647 asked the States General for maintenance during the absence of their men, while the wives of sailors serving on four navy ships in Brazil joined hands in 1651. Although they claimed they were entitled to collect twenty months of their husbands’ wages, they had been paid for only ten. Having had their request sternly rejected by the Admiralty of Amsterdam, the women turned to the States General, which instantly ordered funds to be made available to the admiralty. Two months later, the president of the States General complained that the sailors’ wives had come to his home, asking for payment and for their husbands to be recalled.65 Nor were spouses the only ones eager to welcome back soldiers or sailors. After Witte de With had condemned one of the captains of the 1647 secours for sodomy, exiling him to Fernando de Noronha,66 the man’s spouse in the Republic petitioned for his release. She pleaded in his defense on behalf of their only daughter; “the old mother,” who was in her late seventies; and his brothers, brothers-in-law, and all other relatives.67 Witte de With’s own return—however ignominious—must have been eagerly awaited by his six children, who had lost their mother during de With’s absence. In a letter from the west of England, where his ship had ended up on the return voyage, the admiral lamented that his family was suffering badly.68 Usually, it was the soldier’s or sailor’s wife who suffered the loss of a spouse. Widows claiming wages on the doorstep of the States General became a familiar sight in the late 1640s, following the bloody battles of Guararapes and the destructive work of diseases in Brazil.69 Because women often had no income at all without a husband’s wages, they tried to remarry as soon as possible. Trijne Hendricx, one of the few women to accompany her husband to Elmina, lost him soon after their arrival. She married again, now to a German soldier in WIC service, but he passed away in Elmina’s unhealthy climate fourteen months later. Just over three months later, Trijne tied the knot with yet another soldier.70

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This German soldier was one of many. Dutch ships and colonies could not rely on Dutchmen alone. Having come down the Rhine River from his native town of Basel in 1611 and marveling at the ships he saw in Amsterdam, Samuel Brun thought the opportunities to travel seemed endless. The ships arrived from or left for the East Indies, the Americas, Guinea, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and the Levant. Brun was offered the chance to board an East Indiaman, but he was dissuaded by a friend, who pointed out that the ship was very small. Instead, Brun departed on a vessel bound for Angola.71 Fate also determined the destination of Ambrosius Richshoffer, a seventeen-year old German from Strasbourg who sailed down the Rhine from Frankfurt. His plan, and that of his traveling companion, was to enlist for the East Indies, but because no ships were in port bound for that destination, the WIC recruited him for the expedition that was to conquer Salvador, the capital of Brazil.72 Finally, Peter Hansen Hajstrup from Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany failed to join the entourage of a Danish prince, whose legation in Copenhagen was leaving for Muscovy. Hajstrup and a friend thereupon boarded a Dutch ship and ended up in Amsterdam. When his money began to run out, he joined the WIC and left for Brazil.73 As these examples suggest, numerous parts of Europe were represented in the Dutch transatlantic garrisons. When the Dutch surrendered Cape Coast castle on the African Gold Coast to an English force in 1664, their own senior officers were a Frenchman and a Hungarian.74 Dutchmen had actually been a minority in their own national army ever since the start of the war against Spain. Only one in three companies of the field army was Dutch.75 An English traveler observed in the early seventeenth century: “Wee cannot say that the men are much consumed by the Civill warres, their Army consisting altogether of strangers, and few or no Hollanders, except some willingly served, for otherwise they cannot be pressed by authority, but only for the defence of the City or Towne wherein they dwell.”76 While most soldiers in the Atlantic colonies came from abroad, most sailors plying the ocean were native Dutchmen. Nevertheless, all Dutch fleets were multiethnic; for example, the aforementioned 1629 fleet destined for Pernambuco included, according to a Spanish report, Dutchmen, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Flemings, Dunkirkers, Germans, Italians, and Portuguese.77 Germans, often hailing from Westphalia, Hesse, and the Palatinate, formed the single most numerous ethnic group in WIC service. In New Netherland, for example, they made up 35.5 percent of the troops, compared to 32.6 percent from the Dutch Republic.78 In Brazil, Germans made up 26.3 percent of the soldiers who served from 1632 to 1654, with Dutch natives accounting for 36 percent.79 Ever since the start of the Dutch Revolt, the

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States General had recruited in northwestern Germany, a practice outlawed by the Holy Roman Empire at the start of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618, when the German princes needed local men for their own armies. In spite of this, the Dutch remained the main employer of soldiers from this area until 1630, when Sweden supplanted them as it entered the Thirty Years’ War.80 While some soldiers were recruited by the WIC with the help of innkeepers in ports such as Bremen,81 most potential German soldiers and sailors moved at their own initiative to Amsterdam, where they made up the single largest group of foreigners.82 Germans in Dutch service were often hard to distinguish from native Dutchmen. In the Dutch army, for example, scores of Dutchmen could be found in the High German regiments.83 Nor did Germans form a group of their own in the Atlantic world, although they did once take up arms against all others on a Brazil-bound ship. To prevent further rebelliousness, the officers divided the Germans among the other ships of the fleet.84 It is also hard to imagine the Dutch Atlantic without English soldiers. They served in Piet Heyn’s fleet in 1628 and were well-represented in Curaçao’s garrison.85 In Brazil, where one in ten soldiers was English, an entire company of 150–180 soldiers was composed of Englishmen and commanded by a man named John Goodlad.86 Indeed, English soldiers were so conspicuous in Dutch-held Pernambuco that the authorities requested Protestant ministers be sent who were fluent in both Portuguese and English.87 In 1646, when it became apparent that enthusiasm for Brazil among the Dutch had waned, the States General sent recruiters to England. Although the civil war had not ended, their goal must have been to find demobilized men, of whom there were many. Soon, an agreement was signed about the dispatch of a regiment of foot-soldiers, earmarked for Brazil.88 A decade before, such a mission would have failed—in 1635, thirty-eight unsuspecting Englishmen were arrested when their ship, bound for Curaçao, made a stopover in Southampton, apparently guilty of ignoring the ban on serving a foreign state.89 Scandinavians became more prominent as the century wore on, at least among the mariners. Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes made up 43 percent of the sailors on board Michiel de Ruyter’s flagship during his 1664–1665 expedition.90 A sizable number of Catholic foreigners also served in the Dutch colonies, defying the papal ban on military and civil service for the United Provinces. Most of them hailed from France and the southern Netherlands.91 After sixty-four of these French-speaking soldiers had made their way from Brazil to the Caribbean in 1654, they were enlisted on the French island of Grenada, where they were called the “Brazilians.”92 Frenchmen in Dutch service often aroused suspicion because of their Catholic affinities.

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Governor Matias de Albuquerque of Portuguese Brazil responded to these tensions by having French letters distributed in the Dutch forts in which WIC soldiers were promised high wages if they were to defect; alternatively, they were given the option to return to Europe.93 The Dutch commanders in Maranhão saw their prejudices confirmed when the only survivors of a lost battle in 1643 were ten Frenchmen in the Dutch camp, who had tried to escape to safety. They were hanged on the gallows.94 French soldiers seem to have deserted their ranks more frequently than other ethnicities, although they certainly did not act consistently as a fifth column.95 Still, some French soldiers provided a Portuguese clergyman in Luanda with intelligence about the Dutch troop strength,96 and at least two hundred French soldiers joined the Portuguese after the Dutch surrender there. They were happy to find a new employer, one who gave them even the back pay owed to them by the Dutch. Moreover, the soldiers said, they preferred fighting for a French ally.97 On their part, the Dutch also welcomed enemy turncoats. The governor of Nevis observed in 1673 that most soldiers on board the fleet of Evertsen and Binckes that threatened the English West Indies were Englishmen who had “treacherously deserted their colours” during the recent English invasion of the Dutch Republic.98

Risk and Compensation Once they disembarked across the Atlantic, many a soldier had to fight immediately. Imprisonment could be their fate, but they were more likely to be wounded or killed.99 Death could come knocking on the door at any moment, during pitched battles, such as those at Guararapes, naval battles, as well as in sieges, ambushes, and other guerrilla attacks. It motivated some soldiers in Dutch-held Salvador in 1625 to resist the enemy and fight as long as they could keep upright. Otherwise, they told each other, we will either meet our end or serve as galley slaves.100 Maximiliaen Schade, an army captain in Brazil, left a hitherto obscure narrative that describes a soldier’s vicissitudes in wartime. After arriving in Brazil in 1637, Schade sailed on the fleet that seized the captaincy of Maranhão in November 1641. He was then garrisoned with his men in a small fort made of clay and stone called Monte Calvário. Peaceful relations prevailed until September 30, 1642, when the local Luso-Brazilians, led by two priests, opened hostilities, aware of the recent Dutch conquests of Portuguese colonies and trading posts. They seized Monte Calvário, occupied Dutch sugar plantations, killed around seventy Dutch soldiers and officers, and gave quarter to fifty others. In the next six months, the Portuguese depleted the Dutch

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numbers even further, shooting two sergeants and several soldiers in cold blood. Schade and his lieutenant were imprisoned in separate cells, starved, and almost poisoned. After a Dutch expedition arrived from Pernambuco, the Portuguese moved Schade and several other Dutch prisoners out of the way, putting them on a ship that sailed on the Maricu River for sixty-four miles and marching them through the woods to Grão Para, where they arrived in September 1643. By then, five or six soldiers had died of hunger. Yet the end was not in sight. When they were about to sail to Europe on a ship from Zeeland, the Portuguese governor Albuquerque confiscated the vessel and sold it, casting the Dutchmen again into prison. Eventually, Schade escaped on a French ship that took him back to the Netherlands.101 One condition might be even worse than death: being severely wounded. In the wake of all-out battles on land, old soldiers routinely walked through the field to finish off with their knives any countrymen who were still breathing.102 If men did not size up the situation following a military clash, animals would. After the assault on Salvador ordered by Johan Maurits in 1638, the field was littered with the internal organs and excrement of men and beasts, attracting scores of foraging snakes, toads, lizards, and other reptiles. As it reached the remote Dutch encampment, the smell of the battlefield made many unwell.103 Sailors and soldiers who met with permanent physical injury in encounters with the enemy could apply for benefits. On February 13, 1627, the Heren XIX introduced rules that applied to all officers and sailors on board WIC ships: 800 guilders were promised for losing the right arm, 900 for the loss of both eyes, and 800 for the loss of both legs.104 Other injuries would be indemnified after inspection by “good men,” doctors or surgeons. Some of the soldiers who were injured at the battles of Guararapes did indeed apply for monetary compensation, including a man who had lost only one finger.105 In practice, some disabled men were forced to continue their service.106 Nor was payment automatic because former prisoners of war had to provide evidence that they had not cowardly surrendered. One group of former prisoners of war who disembarked in Rotterdam in 1647 found out how long it could take to receive their due. The WIC Chambers of Zeeland and Maze deferred payments for doctor’s visits and medication for five years. At that point, the Rotterdam admiralty had lost its patience and decided to pay off the debt by settling the claim with funds it owed the WIC.107 Whether he was wounded or not, a soldier’s life was not synonymous with the clash of arms. In the East Indies, it was fairly common for a soldier to work in a trade of his choice by skipping guard duty and paying another soldier 5 stivers to keep watch in his stead.108 No such practice seems to have

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developed in the Atlantic basin, where guard duty was also a soldier’s main task. In addition, soldiers were involved in logging, loading salt, and building forts, although not all recruits were assigned the same tasks. Soldiers who enlisted in the United Provinces were obliged to state their old profession, enabling the companies to use their skills at the proper time.109 Even when conquering expeditions, such as the one in Curaçao (1634), did not include a single full-time artisan, there was certainly no shortage of soldiers who had received prior training as artisans. Sailors were also used in the Dutch invasions of Africa and the Americas.110 Michiel de Ruyter, for one, counted on the active engagement of sailors ashore during his expedition to Martinique in 1674. Prior to his fleet’s departure from the Republic, he ordered his officers to have them practice throwing hand grenades.111 Ordinarily, sailors were used only to reinforce the land troops, as during the Dutch invasions of Olinda of 1630 and Cayenne of 1676.112 On the fleet of Piet Heyn that made landfall in Brazil in March 1625 to conquer the town of Espírito Santo, every two sailors were flanked by two soldiers to ensure that discipline was maintained. This measure could still not prevent the invasion’s failure, due in part to the sailors’ lack of experience.113 The use of mariners in the occupation of Porto Calvo (Brazil) in 1635 also came at a price because it prevented effective maritime operations from being carried out on the coast of Salvador.114 As the more mobile of the two groups, sailors at times engaged in petty transatlantic trade. Two mariners bought a hogshead of anise and four stoops of wine in Rotterdam to sell in Pernambuco, where they were headed. The woman who sold them these goods carried the risk for any damage incurred during the passage and would get half the profits.115 Likewise, in the absence of established relations between planters in early Dutch Suriname and merchants in the United Provinces, it was ocean-crossing sailors who filled the need of the colony for European merchandise.116 On one occasion, sailors and soldiers who had laid their hands on cargoes of wild cochineal sold these in New Amsterdam; at another time, sailors coming home from New Netherland brought back peltries. When the furs were confiscated, their wives demanded compensation from the WIC.117 Sailors’ transactions were often shady or outright illegal, as in the case of mariners who hid Brazilian sugar in their shirts and pants before selling it ashore in the Republic.118 The main risk involved was the tendency of customers to buy the products offered and not pay for them. In such cases, there was no redress for the sailors.119 The soldiers’ wages were generally quite modest. The average WIC soldier received no more than 8 guilders per month, although pay raises were not uncommon.120 Wages were higher in unpopular outposts, such as Angola,

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where soldiers were paid five times as much.121 Climbing the ranks also offered prospects. In New Amsterdam, a common soldier started with a monthly wage of 8–9 guilders, a cadet (adelborst) received 10, a corporal or sergeant 18, an ensign 42, and the captain lieutenant 50.122 Discrepancies in payments could lead to unrest, both in the colonies and on board the fleets, as it did on Witte de With’s fleet at anchor at Texel in 1648, when the soldiers on one ship found out that their colleagues on other ships had already received another installment of their wages.123 Unmarried sailors and soldiers frequently squandered all the money they had made. During one storm that raged in the Atlantic, Ambrosius Richshoffer, the young man from Strasbourg, overheard one sailor say to another, “What poor devils are we, having to work a lot day and night, always endangering our bodies and lives on the sea, especially in such awful stormy weather, badly treated and poorly paid. . . .” Once the storm was over, the tone changed: “When we go to Amsterdam, we’ll have fun again, stuff ourselves every day, booze, and visit the whorehouses, as long as we have money. When that is spent, we will take service again.”124 Upon their return to the United Provinces, some company servants did indeed spend the money they had earned in a short time; they were known as the “lords of six weeks.”125 Indeed, sailors’ ambitions were modest. Sailors simply sought employment and spent the money they earned on liquor and prostitutes. One of the governors of Curaçao justified the presence of these women with his remark that “where there is shipping, there must be whores.”126 By contrast with the men who lived as if there were no tomorrow, some were able to leave the soldiering life behind. In New Netherland, a colony that did not face continuous enemy threats, soldiers sometimes requested and were granted leave to end their WIC service and start a farming life with their family.127 Others did so after their term of service came to an end, usually after five years. Several men who arrived with their families in New Netherland in the 1650s and 1660s had signed up for a one- or two-year term, after which they would practice their old profession. Military service allowed them a free passage. But when, in 1661, Director Stuyvesant offered land to the soldiers who were no longer needed after the end of the First Esopus War, they declined. We, they answered, have neither learned a craft nor farmwork, and have to make a living by the sword. “If not here, then we must seek our fortune elsewhere.” Nor was there much enthusiasm on Curaçao, although the WIC directors were willing to allow soldiers to start planting before their service had ended.128 Brazil and Suriname did boast an appreciable number of former soldiers who became civilians, running an inn or using their original training

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in artisan trades as carpenters, blacksmiths, or masons.129 At the same time, their military experience was not wasted because they increased the ranks of the civil militia.130 Not all newly minted vrijluiden aided the colony in Brazil. The High Council singled out for criticism former French soldiers who robbed Portuguese residents, and Johan Maurits noted that ex-soldiers in general were a failure as cultivators.131 Perhaps hampered by their small financial means, they had to offer their services to the more prosperous planters or re-enlist in the army. Discharged soldiers in Angola seem to have fared better, but their number was negligible. By 1645, only ten were cultivating lands with the help of a total of thirty slaves.132

Discipline and Disease For the average soldier, taking up another trade was not a realistic prospect. What drove some men to despair was to be stuck in a profession in which they continually endangered their own lives and spent the best years of their lives fighting enemies. And instead of recognition, they met with disdain.133 In a fictitious discussion in Brasyls Schuyt-Praetjen (1649), a minister who had served in Brazil cited the many soldiers there who had exclaimed that they would much rather be in a rasphuis, a house of correction for criminals, beggars, and vagabonds in Holland. Metropolitan discipline thus appeared preferable to the ubiquitous discipline afloat and ashore in the Atlantic world. However important it may have been to maintain order, the punishments meted out strike us today as excessive. There was a serious risk of inflicting permanent damage on both sailors and soldiers.134 One soldier who had left the garrison of New Amsterdam with his baggage, but without permission, had his head shaved clean, received lashes, and was condemned to work alongside WIC slaves for two years, but that was not all. Using a red-hot awl, the officer made holes in his ears, so one could recognize him during a new attempt to escape.135 Likewise, four soldiers who returned late to Elmina castle had to spend ninety minutes on three consecutive days on a so-called wooden horse (a horselike device with a sharp back) while carrying 25-pound weights on their legs. They also lost five months’ wages.136 After 1625, any WIC soldier who ran away with weapons or advanced wages could count on physical punishment. Those leaving their ship in time of need without consent of their superiors were to be beaten with a cord until death ensued.137 Neglect of duty could also get an officer executed. Two of the five captains who had failed to act with total commitment during a naval battle off Brazil in 1640 died by the sword. Five other captains who had been found guilty of the same crime nine years before, also off Brazil,

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were more fortunate. They were exiled from the Republic and had their possessions confiscated.138 Capital punishment was usually meted out to men who jeopardized their ship, an entire fleet, or a colony, such as deserters. The court-martial of the fleet that sailed to Chile in 1643 imposed the death penalty on eleven men who had defected: six were dropped into the sea, and five were shot.139 Two others remained at large and seem to have continued fighting the Spanish, albeit now on the side of the native Puelche, leading them into battle until they were defeated in 1649.140 Once in a blue moon, Dutch authorities spared the lives of deserters, as in Brazil in 1646, when a defecting sergeant was executed for high treason, but through the intervention of “some of the most principal women,” the soldiers who had committed the same crime were left unpunished.141 Less fortunate were those soldiers in Brazil who defected out of sheer desperation, only to experience the Dutch capture of the Portuguese ships on which they sought to return to Europe. One such soldier was a Walloon who had been with the Dutch for fourteen years. The Portuguese made him prisoner at Cabo do Santo Agostinho but did not kill him despite his refusal to fight for the Portuguese. They did not feed him or give him anything to drink, so he was forced to sell his clothes to obtain bread. He roamed the streets naked, while his friends who had signed up for service with Portugal were well fed and well clad. In the end, he did join the Portuguese and served for eighteen months, after which he was allowed to return to Europe. Unfortunately for him, Dutch privateers captured his caravel en route from Salvador to Portugal. His fate was shared by an English mercenary who had served the Dutch for twelve years. Having obtained his leave in 1645, he was about to sail for Holland when the revolt started. He was made a prisoner at Rio San Francisco and taken to Salvador, where indigence made him take up arms for the rebels. He also obtained his leave, and like the Walloon did not wish to resist when the Dutch attacked their caravel, in spite of their orders. Neither man, however, was given mercy by the Dutch.142 Apart from rigid discipline, disease was a fact of life for soldiers. Some contracted an illness even before their departure to strange shores. Soldiers from the central parts of Germany often developed respiratory diseases prior to departure during the long wait for a favorable wind off the island of Texel. Poor hygiene was also pathogenic. Although the use of soap was not unknown, the lack of washing water in the cold winter months, when all hatches remained shut, made for an unhealthy atmosphere. Never changing clothes, not even after a wet day on deck, sailors must have frequently contracted pneumonia. Then there were all kinds of lice, for which there was no

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known remedy.143 Nor was the WIC very concerned about hygiene. A flute that sailed with Witte de With’s expedition to Recife had just returned from Greenland with blubber and had hardly been cleaned before 150 soldiers went aboard. A contagious disease broke out that claimed dozens of lives.144 When another fleet was ready to be dispatched to Brazil two years later, illnesses also wreaked havoc on the men aboard. Once the sick, incapacitated, and unwilling soldiers had been removed, only 500 out of 2,800 remained.145 At an earlier stage (1630–1631), soldiers in Brazil had been tormented by night blindness, an unmistakable sign of vitamin A deficiency.146 The shortage of bread grains and legumes must also have caused a serious vitamin B deficiency. In 1634 one in seven soldiers in Dutch Brazil was officially listed as sick.147 But if bread was lacking, alcohol was often abundantly present. The Dutch soldiers on São Tomé walked around without a shirt, preferring to spend their wages on wine, not clothes. The intake of alcoholic drinks among soldiers in Brazil was so frequent that some postmortems have revealed cirrhosis of the liver.148 Yet others suffered from dysentery, two types of which Willem Piso (the head of medical services in Brazil) diagnosed: bacterial dysentery and amoebic dysentery. The former type was epidemic and was accompanied by a bloody flux. Dysentery, a common affliction on long voyages, was “promoted by unhygienic overcrowding, especially where drinking water, earth closets and cooking facilities were in close proximity, and lack of washing water made personal cleanliness difficult.”149 Epidemics struck other Dutch colonies as well, although none as hard as the “pestilential” disease—most likely yellow fever—that almost wiped out the Curaçao garrison in 1648.150 Dysentery and yellow fever were potentially deadly, as was scurvy. This disease blocked the renewal of the body’s connective tissues, causing hundreds of small hemorrhages all over the body. Sufferers had to contend with the rotting of gums, fatigue, feebleness, stiff joints, hemorrhaging, and in most cases death. Although crews on VOC ships ran a higher risk, scurvy also decimated the Dutch army at home and many Dutch ship crews in the Atlantic basin, particularly affecting ships that ended up in the doldrums.151 Because any exertion could prove fatal, physicians prescribed absolute rest for patients. Apart from that, they usually confined themselves to treating symptoms. Scorbutic men on Piet Heyn’s fleet in 1628 received two drams of brandy, one to drink and the other to rinse their mouth, which was not overly extravagant given the swollen and bleeding gums that made it impossible to eat.152 Scurvy may have prevented the success of some Dutch expeditions, although Piet Heyn’s afflicted men nonetheless captured the treasure fleet. Similarly, the fleet bound for Pernambuco in 1629–1630 succeeded in

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its mission in spite of the spread of scurvy on board, incapacitating one-third of all sailors and soldiers by the time the invasion took place.153 The best remedy for scurvy is vitamin C; as little as 10 milligrams a day can have a preventative effect. Unaware of this, many of the seventeenthcentury Dutch considered the consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables, rather than specific fruits, the best treatment.154 The ocean-going men on board the Dutch ships ran a much higher risk of contracting scurvy than the Spanish and Portuguese, in whose cuisines citrus fruit, onions, garlic, and peppers were staples. Northern Europeans, in contrast, preferred highprotein menus, making them susceptible to vitamin deficiency, which could lead to scurvy if no adequate measures were taken. Usually the foodstuffs on board were flour, biscuit (a mixture of wheat and rye flours), salted meat, fish, cheese, butter, barley, peas, beans, wine, and beer, none of which were curative.155 Yet lime juice was taken on board a fleet bound for the East Indies as early as 1598 to prevent scurvy.156 The Dutch also seemed to have had a hunch that lemons and oranges were beneficial. They often attempted to procure these fruits at Cape Verde or on the African west coast.157 In 1623, for example, the crew of the Nassau fleet gathered 120,000 lemons in the estuary of Sierra Leone and received 22,000 oranges from the population of São Antonio in the Cape Verde Islands. Even such quantities could not prevent a massive outbreak of scurvy, which prompted Admiral Jacques l’Hermite to set course for Annobom, an island off the African west coast.158 Within four days, l’Hermite’s men laid in a stock of hundreds of thousands of oranges, and still, the scurvy faded away only gradually.159 The relief fleet en route to Salvador in 1625 under Admiral Jan Dircksz Lam availed itself of the abundant supplies of limes in Sierra Leone, where Lam had decided to head after scurvy broke out among six hundred soldiers on three ships. The improvised stay ashore would last for four months. Once again, the Dutch started from the assumption that any fresh provisions worked magic rather than relying specifically on antiscorbutic limes.160 The men who had signed up for de Ruyter’s Atlantic expedition of 1664–1665 were fortunate, therefore, that prior to the departure of the fleet from Cádiz, lemons had been purchased—thirty-one for each officer and eighteen or twenty for the rank and file.161 Scurvy followed the Dutch to the New World. Eighteen months after the Dutch landing in Pernambuco in 1630, the disease spread among the soldiers, most of whom fed themselves only with foodstuffs shipped from the mother country for lack of local produce. Fernando de Noronha, an island off the coast of Brazil, was soon transformed into a convalescent home

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for both soldiers and scorbutic African slaves. It was a remarkably successful health resort.162 The disease, however, continued to rear its ugly head. When in 1648 the colonial government reviewed the sailors on five WIC ships that had just returned from cruising off Salvador, half of the men were found to have scurvy, which was no surprise given their diet of porridge supplemented by a little meat and bacon.163 Eventually, the Dutch started cultivating limes on the Gold Coast, exporting them after 1676, albeit in modest quantities.164 A commonly observed correlation was between disease and dirt. Illnesses were associated with the bad smells caused by dirt.165 Hence, one account of the voyage of Lam’s relief fleet to Salvador in 1625 relates that in West Africa “a long camp-tent was made with berths or sleeping-places hanging [from the roof] and not on the ground, on account of the evil vapors which rise out of the earth.” The strategy was of no avail, probably because yellow fever now broke out. As more than two hundred soldiers died, the Dutch camp was covered with graves.166 Mortality was extremely high on the African coast, where Europeans often died like flies, the victims of yellow fever and malaria. The village of Mouree on the Gold Coast, next to Fort Nassau, was known as the “Dutch cemetery.”167 A Dutch comforter of the sick at Fort Nassau noted that forty members of the garrison were suffering from Guinea worm. He also wrote that for every one hundred soldiers and officials who came to the Gold Coast, hardly ten lived to return home.168 Conditions were hardly any better in São Tomé, which was reputed to be an island of death.169 For a brief period, the High Council in Brazil used São Tomé as a place of exile for misbehaving soldiers, a measure tantamount to the death penalty for the punished, who ran a great danger of contracting the endemic island diseases. The Heren XIX quickly banned the practice.170 After the Dutch conquest in 1641, large numbers of officers, sailors, and soldiers suffered from fatigue, splitting headaches, and an onslaught of fever. Scores eventually passed away, including the great Admiral Cornelis Jol, who probably fell victim to yellow fever.171 In Luanda, which was captured simultaneously, the Dutch authorities counted on a fast acclimatization of their troops, but almost half of the men—both in the original expedition and the reinforcements—died within the first ten months. Two years later, the WIC board in Amsterdam insisted that the survivors stay put because they were used to “the air and soil of the land,” even though their time had expired and they were aching to return home, no doubt in part because of the utter lack of shoes, hats, and clothes.172 The troops serving in Angola faced many odds. Diseases began to spread among them within one month of the conquest, and before one year had

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passed, all surgeons except one had perished and the supply of medicine had dried up. In the same year, 1642, conditions were hardly better in Recife, where only one physician and one surgeon remained and where the acute shortage of drugs prompted the WIC to look for medicine on the free market.173 The WIC Board in Amsterdam did not help matters, refusing to send badly needed—but highly expensive—medicine to São Tomé. The board asserted that where nature had brought together so many diseases, remedies must be found in the form of vulnerary herbs, plants, and roots.174 Their argument echoed a popular medical handbook that had just been published. In his Inleydinge tot de Hollantsche genees-middelen, Johan van Beverwijck contended that lands where certain diseases were found produced the very herbs that could cure them.175 Another claim made in Amsterdam was that no accidents or diseases could occur in the absence of military operations. The head of the WIC pharmacy in Brazil begged to differ. If that were true, he asked, how then to explain the daily misery in Amsterdam?176

Provisions Half a century ago, the French historian Michel Morineau studied an estimate made in West-Friesland in 1648 of the provisions to be sent to Brazil for 3,000 Dutch troops. He concluded that the Dutch soldier had been well-fed.177 In reality, the provisioning of the Dutch transatlantic garrisons was often woefully inadequate. After the conquest of Salvador (1624), one soldier instantly realized that survival would be hard in the new outpost: “Admiral Jakob Willekens,” he later reminisced, “had provided us with few victuals that were supposed to last for an entire year; [but] the whole fleet would have died of hunger and other agonies, if it were not for the ships that we captured.”178 By December 1624, the authorities ordered all blacks in the city to gather because they helped consume the few provisions that were left. They were shipped south of the city, to be sold to the Portuguese for oxen, chickens, pigs, and fruit. When the Portuguese refused, the Dutch went ashore, stole oxen, left the blacks behind on an island, and sailed back to Salvador.179 In the first months of 1625, the lack of meat forced the Dutch to eat horses, cats, dogs, and even iguanas. Killing cats was outlawed, however, because the felines could solve the plague of rats in the city.180 Conditions hardly improved during the return to Europe that followed the Dutch defeat, when starving soldiers started wearing necklaces of lead bullets, gnawing them like a horse gnaws his bit. After they had finally reached England and were presented with abundant fresh food, more than a few stuffed themselves silly and soon died.181

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The garrison soldiers on Curaçao had no cause for complaint in the first years after the conquest of 1634. Bread, biscuit, cheese, vinegar, beans, peas, wine, and brandy were sent from the United Provinces, and meat was obtained from an indigenous settlement. But after nearly all the livestock had been killed, food conditions became precarious. In 1640, the stores of flour and biscuit were used up, and the soldiers lived on a weekly ration of beans and three pounds of meat.182 The Suriname garrison was on the verge of starvation in 1672. “Slender as greyhounds,” they came to see Governor Versterre after having gone without bread for two or three weeks. After informing him that it was impossible to serve, they told the governor of their intention to put down their arms and find food among the Amerindians.183 Collecting fruit in the interior was not an option in Pernambuco, where the Dutch were afraid of being ambushed.184 From the start of the Dutch presence, food supplies from the homeland were therefore a dire necessity, including lard, butter, oil, and especially grain, which was most in demand. The WIC even summoned the ambassadors in England and France to help out in 1630, but no grain arrived from abroad. Meanwhile the governing councils in Utrecht, Gelderland, and Schouwen in Zeeland forbade export so as not to starve their own people.185 The soldiers themselves were more interested in beef and bacon, which were often in short supply. At least, attempts to grow typically Dutch vegetables such as lettuce, radishes, cucumbers, and turnips were partially successful.186 Still, the food supplies were so low by 1636 that one soldier awaiting shipment at Texel asked his family to send ham, smoked meat, and cheese, which he hoped to consume in Brazil. He had heard that “the rations there shall not only be small, but also stale and half-rotten.”187 The WIC initially monopolized food supplies sent from the Netherlands, but acknowledging its own limitations, it eventually gave way to private traders.188 The company involvement in sustenance did not come to an end, however. The directors argued that purchasing bacon at home and sending it to Brazil did not make sense if pigs could be shipped there and allowed to multiply. All the chambers were therefore instructed to embark sows and piglets.189 The chambers were also allowed to ship fish to Brazil, and the Chamber of Zeeland energetically went ahead with such shipments.190 At the same time, the WIC attempted to induce the settlers of New Netherland to start sending fish, flour, and other local produce to Brazil, but to no avail.191 The Iberian scorched-earth tactics compounded the problem of food supplies. As 3,000 Dutch troops invaded Sergipe in November of 1637, the Habsburg commander, Count de Bagnuoli, and his Neapolitan soldiers withdrew to Salvador. Prior to this, in an act of economic warfare, the count

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ordered the destruction of reed plots and everything else that might benefit the enemy, including 5,000 cattle. He took another 8,000 head of cattle along with him.192 Cattle, of course, were not only important for the supply of meat but also crucial in the sugar industry. European rye and wheat flours were exported from Dutch home ports to Brazil, although they could easily be substituted with locally grown cassava (or manioc) flour, from which white bread, cake, and biscuit were made. Since the early part of the century, cassava had sustained many a hungry Dutch crew in Caribbean waters. During an expedition to the West Indies in 1624, for example, Commander Pieter Schouten boarded a vessel to St. Christopher, where he made the natives prepare cassava.193 Since eating uncooked cassava led to a certain death from poisoning, Dutch crews and settlers in Guiana relied on its preparation by Amerindians, who were experts in removing the poisonous parts.194 Consequently, no provisions could usually be procured in the absence of natives. Dependence on Amerindian food supplies continued throughout the seventeenth century, even when the Dutch learned to prepare cassava themselves.195 Although cassava could have fed Dutch settlers in Brazil as well, planters in 1638 massively ignored an ordinance that called for the cultivation of two hundred cassava beds per slave. The lure of sugar was to blame. The government was not willing to compromise, ordering the sugar planters the following year to plant, both in January and August, five hundred beds per slave. After protests by planters and lavradores de cana (small-scale sugar producers who did not own a mill) that, in the months of August and September, slaves were busy cutting cane and processing sugar, the stipulated number was reduced to three hundred beds per slave. The specter of monoculture did not go away, partly because planters had to hand over half of the cassava crop to the government without monetary compensation. Instead of money, they received entitlements that were almost worthless, despite the claim of the High Council to the contrary.196 Knowledge of cassava preparation continued to be wanting in Dutch towns and army camps. In 1646, some soldiers in Fort Mauritius on the São Francisco River died and others fell ill after consuming the cassava they had cooked.197 And on the eve of the Dutch surrender, cassava was no more than a minor ingredient of the population’s diet.198 The expeditions organized in the early 1640s to Angola and São Tomé and Maranhão exacerbated the food problem in Brazil.199 By 1643, the Recife warehouses were empty and the troops were dying of hunger. Soldiers cursed the day they had signed on, swearing they would look for new masters who would take better care of them.200 Not all contemporaries were convinced that these were legitimate complaints. Caspar Barlaeus believed that soldiers from

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poor or rugged countries would not object. The Dutch soldiers, he argued, were so used to being well fed that they could not cope with any deprivation.201 Barlaeus, who never set foot in Brazil, underestimated the seriousness of the situation. The few times meat was distributed, soldiers had to eat it raw due to the chronic shortage of wood because the Dutch did not dare to venture outside the twin cities of Recife and Mauritsstad.202 To supplement their meals, soldiers sometimes purchased foodstuffs from merchants, which came back to haunt them. Because they were penniless, they bought on credit but were often unable to pay back their debts by the time their service was up. One soldier received a false receipt, was not allowed to prove this injustice, and took his own life with his musket.203 Meanwhile, conditions in Luanda were so bleak that the Dutch relied on supplies from Brazil or were forced to buy provisions from their own enemies.204 The fate of Maranhão, the northernmost Dutch conquest in Brazil, resembled that of Luanda. Surviving on the leftovers sent from Recife, this captaincy seemed doomed after only one year.205 The revolt that started in Brazil in 1645 had a disastrous effect on the food supply. During the siege of Recife, a soldier in the service of the WIC wrote in his diary that horses, dogs, cats, and rats were his best fare.206 In view of the small supply of flour that was left in its own stores and in those of private merchants, the WIC organized an expedition of three hundred soldiers in February 1646 accompanied by a large force of natives to steal cassava from enemy territory near the island of Itamaracá. The mission failed dismally; a bloody clash ensued with enemy soldiers in which, according to a Portuguese source, eighty Dutchmen were slain and many others wounded. The rest escaped emptyhanded in their sloops.207 In June, two ships with provisions, the Gulde Valck and the Elisabeth, arrived in the nick of time from the Netherlands to prevent a catastrophe.208 The day before their miraculous appearance, only four barrels of flour were left in the warehouses.209 The ruling council had written to the Chamber of Zeeland that all the food had been consumed: “We no longer have any peas, beans, groats and wheat, nor salted meat or bacon. The residents have to do without bread. From what is left of the flour, we are baking bread for the garrison. Otherwise they will mutiny and desert.”210 The arrival of Witte de With’s secours worsened the problem. After the heavy defeat in the second battle of Guararapes, the High Council president drily remarked to de With that the army could not have been fed without this defeat.211 Still, the situation remained critical. Later that year, deputies from Holland to the States General warned that empty warehouses in Brazil could easily lead to surrender. They proposed making 200,000 guilders available to buy provisions, insisting that each province was to pay its share. After some debate, six ships and six yachts were dispatched carrying food.212

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By then, Witte de With and his war council had already decided to return to the Netherlands. He refused to perish from hunger along with his sailors.213 The explanation for the structural food shortages lies in the enormous investments required by the occupation and warfare in Brazil, which were not matched by sufficient revenues; the WIC lacked liquid assets and income from Brazilian agriculture was disappointing. The amount of money needed to maintain the troops in Brazil was exorbitant. In 1638, Johan Maurits and his council calculated that 3.5 million guilders had to be invested in Brazil each year, including 1.44 million guilders for recruitment, wages, and food for the soldiers.214 And the costs for the troops rose in the next ten years. The Dutch central audit office put the total amount needed to pay and feed the 9,290 men in Brazil in 1648 at 2,123,672 guilders.215 The WIC, which had run up a debt of 18 million guilders by 1636, was unable to furnish such amounts.216 Indeed, immediately after news arrived from Brazil about the successful invasion of 1630, the WIC began to bombard the States General and the individual provinces with missives, demanding the prompt payment of wages and provisions for the 6,000 soldiers in Brazil.217 Until the surrender in Brazil in 1654, the company would be dependent on financial aid from the States General. The war burden thereby shifted toward the seven provinces, but they defaulted consistently.218 As early as March 1631, the states owed the WIC 1.25 million guilders. Even Holland, the only province that initially kept up its payments, stopped contributing in 1634 until the other provinces had paid their due.219 Nor did the situation improve. When the States General in 1649 took stock of the subsidies sent by the provinces since 1635, it turned out that no province had paid even half of its share. Three provinces had not even paid one-fourth (table 2).220 The delay had a knock-on effect because the WIC could not pay Table 2

Dutch provinces and their unpaid Brazil subsidies, 1649

PROVINCE

DUE (GUILDERS)

PAID (GUILDERS)

UNPAID (GUILDERS)

PERCENTAGE UNPAID

Holland

5,818,536

2,348,238

3,470,298

59.6

Friesland

1,357,113

230,098

1,127,015

83.0

Zeeland

915,153

336,541

578,612

63.2

Utrecht

615,308

208,605

406,703

66.1

Gelderland

589,617

143,000

446,617

75.7

Groningen

581,049

274,052

306,997

52.8

Overijssel

397,538

94,243

303,295

76.3

Source: NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, March 11, 1649. Note: The amounts have been rounded off.

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the Amsterdam Admiralty, which had spent no less than 605,205 guilders to fit out both the secours of 1647 and another fleet two years later.221 The provinces did not make their payments contingent on specific demands, with the exception of Overijssel and Friesland. In 1645, both provinces had been opposed, along with Gelderland, to the appointment of Wouter Schonenborgh as the successor of Johan Maurits in Brazil.222 Their discontent with the WIC resurfaced in later years. The Overijssel delegates to the States General argued in 1651 that no further money could be poured into the WIC treasury without introducing reforms.223 No details were given, but the States of Overijssel must have agreed with the criticisms of the WIC voiced by Amsterdam and prevalent in the contemporary pamphlet literature, which pointed to the costly design of the company, the directors’ mismanagement and corruption, and the lack of free trade with Brazil. Apart from this case, defaulting on payments was not a strategy pursued by provinces to address particular issues. Even after accumulating their debt for years, they still consented to contribute their share to the massive sum that the States General voted to spend on the 1647 secours.224 Friesland, the only province not convinced of the need to send the secours, had a sustained record of defaulting on the payment of its share of the war burden, which regularly drove the States General to despair. When the Dutch receiver-general presented the Frisian States with a bill of more than 6 million guilders in 1635, they firmly rejected the allegation that they owed that amount. It took an eighteen-month visit by the Council of State, assisted by soldiers, to persuade the states to take the necessary steps to contribute to the national treasury.225 It was equally hard to convince Friesland of the need to support the WIC. The province had never been more than superficially involved in the company. Due to lack of funds, it had missed out twice on a chamber of its own, and the disgruntlement about its outsider position never went away. The attitude would change, opined William Frederick, stadholder of Friesland and Groningen, only if the Frisians were granted their own WIC chamber. Friesland may have hoped to obtain this when the WIC charter expired in 1647 and the province backed a merger of the VOC and WIC, but the efforts of its representatives came to nothing. It was only natural for the Frisians, once the WIC star began to fade, to stop all aid, the entreaties of the other provinces notwithstanding. The Frisians’ refusal to pay their share of 600,000 guilders for the secours, which they saw as a big waste, was therefore in keeping with its past stance.226 The Frisian States finally made explicit the reasons for their intransigence in 1653 during talks with yet another delegation from the States General. Their interlocutors, they contended, had not presented them with any advantages that their

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province could expect from sharing the burden. Nor, the Frisians continued, had the emissaries been authorized to discuss a reorganization of the WIC, which the Frisians imagined could occur by transforming the company to a state organization, a plan “to which some provinces have already shown to be inclined.”227 These words may have referred to the previously mentioned project conceived by the States of Gelderland, which the States General had voted down. What also irked the Frisians, as was revealed a few years later when they declined to pay for the militiamen who had returned from Brazil, was the private nature of the WIC. It had been founded, they wrote, for the private profit and burden [“belastinge”] of the residents of some of the provinces, not for the generality.228 The wages of the soldiers serving in the Dutch Republic were never a major issue, in part because of the adherence to a system in which the provinces maintained the soldiers stationed in their territories. The provinces were therefore anxious to arrange for payment because rebellious soldiers could be a scourge.229 Even so, the provinces were not always on time with their payments. The key to success for the Dutch army was ultimately its double financial buffer. Officers had their own capital, allowing them to advance wages if the province was negligent.230 But more important were the military solicitors, private moneylenders who advanced soldiers’ wages to the company commander in exchange for a monthly salary.231 Whenever the provinces were in arrears, the solicitors took action, often advancing large sums of money. They were not to be envied, however, because they ran the risk of never getting their money back, in spite of desperate appeals to the states to settle their debts.232 In the Republic, then, the solicitors were taken for a ride, while in Brazil, where the position of solicitor was unknown and where officers lacked resources, the soldiers were the ones to pay the price. Dutch Brazil itself never produced enough to offset the gigantic costs of the colony. The plantations that had made Brazil the leading global sugar producer were destroyed in the ongoing war, and all the Dutch rulers could do was impose a wide variety of taxes. But even combined with the customs duties, the tax proceeds could not meet the needs of the soldiery. In the years 1646–1650, the many prizes captured on the coast of Brazil could have solved the problem, but the proceeds ended up largely in the hands of individual settlers.233 Meanwhile, all the Heren XIX did was send two treasurers to map the financial situation and to suggest solutions. When this duo failed, an equally toothless financial council was appointed.234 Although the soldiers themselves blamed the High Council of Brazil for their misery, the councilors did try to find practical solutions. In 1648, for example, they attempted to make the island of Itamaracá into the

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pantry for Recife. In exchange for part of the crop, the WIC distributed land to settlers, provided them with slaves, and urged them to cultivate a large variety of fruits and vegetables.235 When this initiative proved unsuccessful, the High Council confiscated the provisions found on warships fitted out by the Amsterdam admiralty, undoubtedly to feed the troops.236 In their correspondence with the States General, the councilors always showed themselves sympathetic to the suffering soldiers: “It is sad and a shame for the country to which the soldiers have sworn an oath, to see them pass through the streets with clothes in rags and tatters, some of them unable to cover their private parts, and in appearance more like beggars than soldiers. . . .”237 After their miserable return to the Dutch Republic in 1654—many were “packed like herrings” or forced to spend the passage on deck—soldiers continued to lay the blame on the High Council.238 Their complaints seem credible. The former soldiers asserted that the rulers in Brazil later sold most of the foodstuffs to private individuals, paying the wages of soldiers in “light money,” which was worth 25 percent less than money in the Republic, while compensating themselves and the army officers in “Holland money.” Alternatively, the councilors paid the soldiers in kind in the form of rotten tobacco and sour wine and beer.239 Another accusation, leveled in a pamphlet published in 1655, was that the councilors had refused to contribute monthly wages to soldiers on the eve of the first battle of Guararapes, although they had paid the officers—which was indeed the case.240 The alleged reason was greed. The councilors expected many of the soldiers to perish, which would make it possible to distribute the wages among the members of the council.241 It did not help the councilors’ reputation that they showed no compassion when soldiers made requests for money or clothing during the final years of the colony.242 It is a small wonder that the councilors were seen as the bogeymen and that, on at least one occasion, soldiers broke into their bedrooms, demanding back pay.243 The real culprits, however, were an ocean away—the metropolitan authorities that gave Dutch Brazil the cold shoulder in the 1640s and 1650s. In the final years of the colony, consequently, the garrison in Brazil offered a sorry sight. The army found itself short not only of food and clothes but of timber, stone, chalk, tiles, iron, and whale oil (used for lights), all materials essential for repairing the soldiers’ quarters in Recife. Because the barracks were so rickety that soldiers could only sleep there at the risk of their own lives, they began to spend the night outdoors.244 There was no end to their sufferings. After returning to the United Provinces, the joint officers and soldiers described their hardships of the previous eight years. Due to the

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continuous siege, poverty, famine, and misery, they had been “forced to live between hunger and sword.”245 Nor did metropolitan authorities treat the rank and file much better in the 1660s and 1670s. Because of the difficulty of finding replacements, the WIC was not eager to bring home the 130 soldiers de Ruyter had left behind at Goree in October 1664. Even after the wives of the garrisoned men wrote a petition to the Amsterdam Admiralty, which was discussed by the States General in August 1666, the WIC took more than a year to start repatriating the soldiers.246 Finally, the soldiers serving on the island of Tobago were deprived of socks, shoes, clothes, and provisions, as the commander of the colony admitted in 1670. Seven years later, poor provisioning led to the demise of a colony that planters and investors could have turned into an important producer of cash crops, after famine had seriously reduced the Dutch forces. Out of 1,000 settlers and 600–700 soldiers, only 300 or 400 men remained after a few months, if English sources are to be believed, facilitating the conquest by d’Estrées (figure 6).247

Figure 6.

Clashing French and Dutch troops on Tobago, 1677. Painting by Romeyn de Hooghe.

Courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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Defection and Rebellion The numerous ships bound for Brazil offer examples of the reluctance felt by sailors and soldiers to tie their fate to that of the Dutch empire. One fleet was kept from sailing to Brazil for three months by the extraordinarily severe winter of 1645–1646, which was typical of the “Little Ice Age,” and then it was stuck at the Isle of Wight for another two months.248 After being exposed to storm, rain, and freezing cold for several months, the sailors and soldiers on board the Loanda penned a joint petition to their commander while the ship was at anchor on the Isle of Wight, waiting for favorable weather. They asked to lift their anchors and return home, afraid as they were to die of poverty and diseases.249 When another group of soldiers were awaiting shipment to Brazil in Zeeland in 1647, a fleet with time-expired troops arrived from Recife. Their stories about hunger and deprivation made such an impression that the fresh recruits attempted to escape in all possible ways, but their efforts were in vain.250 Six sailors standing guard on another ship ready to sail for Brazil in 1648 had more luck. When their ship ended up on the roadstead of Brouwershaven, they rowed themselves ashore and vanished.251 Lack of provisions and the prospect of never seeing one’s home again could inspire sailors and soldiers to ignore their instructions and act in insubordinate ways. The sailors on board a Dutch privateer that had sailed for three months in 1654 in search of Portuguese ships were frustrated about the lack of food and disbursement in spite of eight or nine years of faithful service. What broke the camel’s back was the inability of the ship to berth at Recife, where the Dutch army had just surrendered. Sixty-six men revolted and took control of the ship, which they steered to Puerto Rico.252 Soldiers often translated their frustration about payments into desertion. It must have been the main reason for the 257 soldiers who had deserted Dutch colors in Brazil by 1645.253 Not all the soldiers who abandoned their posts joined the Portuguese armed forces; some turned into brigands, robbing travelers or raiding plantations and estates.254 But usually, deserters made their way to rival European settlements and signed up for duty. Six soldiers serving in New Amstel, the Amsterdam colony in Delaware, undoubtedly suffering from the disease and malnutrition that had killed one hundred residents within a year, deserted with their wives and maid servants in 1659 to nearby Maryland.255 Strikes and rebellions were the potentially powerful weapons of soldiers and sailors. Soldiers in Curaçao, worn down by logging, fetching salt, and building a fort and kept in the dark about the WIC plans for the island,

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demanded extra pay in 1635. When their request was denied, they stopped working, prompting the commander to promise that he would send for Spanish wine.256 Eight months passed before a conspiracy to kill the commander and other officers was discovered. Remarkably, the ringleaders were spared, and as a consequence, the fort was not finished because the soldiers’ respect for their officers plummeted.257 In the closing years of Dutch Brazil, discipline was also in short supply, as the officers, dreading mutiny, loosened the reins.258 Troops in Luanda, meanwhile, threatened to mutiny if no new recruits soon appeared on the scene. They wanted to be “liberated.” To solve the issue, the authorities in Recife dispatched 135 volunteers across the Atlantic in February 1648.259 Liberation is a telling term. A soldier’s life resembled that of a slave in more ways than one. As one historian has argued, both were used for heavy manual labor, were regimented and punished in similar ways, and produced runaways.260 And just as the white elites feared the freedom of black slaves following emancipation, they worried about the consequences of releasing many soldiers when wars or expeditions came to an end.261 Their concern was justified. A veteran of the Nassau fleet, angry about the default of payment, attacked some members of the Amsterdam Admiralty Council in 1628.262 Two years later, a group of forty or fifty intoxicated veterans of Piet Heyn’s heroic fleet, both sailors and soldiers, responded to the rumor that they had received too large a share from the Spanish fleet. Beating a drum and dragging a cannon, they tried in vain to loot the silver stored in the West-Indisch Huis.263 The slow end of Dutch Brazil instilled fear in the authorities back home. In 1649, the Council of State requested the States General to ask the provinces for the prompt payment of returning officers and soldiers to prevent a disaster.264 The next year, sailors who had recently returned on two ships from Brazil abused three admiralty members in Enkhuizen, while making serious threats. The town burgomasters responded by distributing gunpowder and lead among the citizens, exhorting them to wait for a sign to take up arms and defend the admiralty councilors.265 In 1660, it was Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt who was threatened, and the threat came again from Enkhuizen. A certain Willem Sloot told the Dutch leader in a letter that he had to fear for his life if the men who had served in Brazil would not be paid.266 How de Witt responded is unknown, but some authorities were gripped with fear, as in Amsterdam at the start of the first Anglo-Dutch war in 1652. In September of that year, a sailors’ uproar broke out over wages. After fifty sailors threw stones at soldiers, the magistrates executed two of the ringleaders and had the city occupied by troops to prevent further riots.

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In Rotterdam, anguish about rebellious sailors led to the renewed use of the dilapidated gallows.267 The homecoming in 1654 of many men to whom wages were owed did not lead to revolts, but the specter of violence receded slowly. In August, Lieuwe van Aitzema, a Dutch diplomat, discerned an atmosphere of public fear in a conversation with an English colleague in The Hague: “Here is a great number of soldiers come from Brazil, and there are more expected. These men are not paid, nor contented, half wild. Holland hath promised to furnish 40,000 gilders, to give to each two months pay, and to each officer one month; and with that they are to be commanded to depart out of the Hague; for they are men to frighten people, and chiefly at this time, where there is so much inclination to seditions and tumults.”268 Enemy bullets or ambushes were dangerous, but they were part and parcel of the soldiering life. Outside the battlefield, however, soldiers in the Dutch Atlantic also led a miserable existence. The food was scanty, poor, and often spoiled. Physical punishment for small indiscretions was the norm. Only a few soldiers could conceive of a career beyond their current military contract. They did display a sense of belonging, whether it was to ethnicity, religion, or employer (the states or the WIC).269 In addition, as we will see, a shared hatred of the enemy on his own Catholic soil could inspire acts of iconoclasm, which had no practical use but did underline the esprit de corps. And that was not insignificant. The soldiers, and to a lesser extent, the sailors in the Dutch Atlantic were thrown together, because they were the ones to pay the bill for Dutch imperial misrule. Since boundless ambition was not undergirded by a steady cash flow to the transatlantic garrisons, the very soldiers who had helped underpin and expand the empire were rarely paid and poorly fed. The consequences were grave. In key parts of the Atlantic world, the Dutch surrendered easily. There was, no doubt, a connection between the deprivation of the troops in Salvador (1625) and their eagerness to start negotiations with the Iberian fleet. Similarly, it was no coincidence that the Dutch surrendered to a Portuguese fleet in Luanda (1648) at the same time that Dutch soldiers complained about their meager provisions and about their unwillingness to serve after their term had expired. The colony could have been saved if the soldiers sent from Recife to Luanda on June 29, 1648, to help the local garrison withstand Salvador Correia’s fleet had obeyed their orders. Instead, they assumed control of their ship, the Getrouwen Herder, and took it to Rio de Janeiro, where they sold the bottom. Dutch Luanda thus remained without fresh reinforcements and capitulated.270 Mutinies also cost the Dutch their maritime presence on the coast of Brazil. The first revolt broke out on board the Dolphijn, a ship fitted out by

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the Rotterdam admiralty. Captain Job Forant turned a deaf ear to his crewmembers’ complaint that the want of food had killed the sick among them. Scorbutic men cried out that they wanted to eat their fill before dying.271 On May 29, 1649, a group of soldiers grabbed the wheel, shouting that that they had served their time and that the WIC food was inedible. They sailed home, telling the authorities that their ships had drifted too far north due to winds and currents to return to Recife.272 Thus began the maritime exodus from Dutch Brazil. Taken over by time-expired and starving sailors, seven ships followed the Dolphijn’s example before the end of the year, ignoring their instructions and the wishes of the colonial High Council. Witte de With also left Brazil in 1649, steering two warships to the United Provinces after the States General had left him to his own devices. Fearing a further deterioration of his ships and hunger riots among his sailors, the admiral saw no reason to remain in Brazil.273 The same scenario was repeated in 1652, when sailors on ten warships that had arrived two years before mutinied and returned home.274 Like these sailors, the soldiers in Pernambuco began to renege on their duties. Many infantrymen had preferred not to engage the enemy at the crucial first battle of Guararapes because of underpayment. Nor did the 350 men who occupied Olinda in the immediate aftermath of that battle fight the 50 Portuguese sent against them. They left the fort they had occupied and entered the gates of Recife shouting for money.275 At the eventual surrender of Brazil, soldiers again played a central role, as the army leader, Lieutenant General Von Schoppe, disclosed after his return to the Republic. Summoned to appear before the States General, Von Schoppe presented a report in which he explained his reasons for giving up Brazil. In the first place, there had been a lack of permanent troops to man the forts and defend the colony. Second, the soldiers were so sickened, unwilling, and desperate due to the bad rations and not being paid that they candidly declared at the arrival of the Portuguese fleet that the time of their redemption had come. This was their release, they said, from tyranny and slavery.276 The two civilian leaders of Dutch Brazil, Schonenborgh and Haecx, confirmed this assessment. At the appearance of the Portuguese fleet, they wrote, soldiers were heard saying that they saw their redemption before their very eyes.277 They may not have been chattel slaves, but the soldiers in Brazil and Angola craved liberty just as much as other unfree groups in the Americas. The indentured servants on the English island of Nevis responded in a similar way as did the troops in Dutch Brazil when they were forced into military service as a Spanish fleet appeared in 1625. Instead of fighting, the servants

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cried out, “Liberty, joyfull Liberty.”278 The Iberians were not their enemies but, rather, the foes of their real enemies—their own masters. Although they were crucial for the expansion and defense of the Dutch Atlantic, soldiers and sailors were not only poorly paid—if they were paid at all—but suffered from many other forms of deprivation. Ignored by the imperial center, those who had defended Dutch Brazil eventually refused to do battle. Battered and bruised, starved and wearied by years of empty promises, they gave up on the pivotal colony of the Dutch Atlantic. The creation of a political empire was thereby doomed. A commercial empire, however, did come about.

Ch a p ter 5

Interimperial Trade

Around 1650, Dutch investments in the Atlantic exceeded those made in Asia. Long-term investment in the WIC in the form of stock and bonds amounted to 22.1 million guilders around 1650 compared to 16.4 million in investments in the VOC. Investments in transatlantic plantations and patroonships (see chapter 6) may have come to another 1 million guilders. Short-term investments in the nearby Atlantic were even five times higher than in the Indian Ocean: 10 million compared to 2 million guilders.1 These short-time investments benefited the WIC only to a small degree because the WIC was just one of the numerous Dutch firms active in the Atlantic world. Moreover, the WIC was not primarily a trading company. The major focus of its initial energies, as we have seen, was the capture of Spanish and Portuguese ships, colonies, and trading posts. Such actions were inevitably detrimental to WIC commerce. Ships were needed in the first place to wage war, and those employed in trading ventures were often seized by enemy bottoms. Trade was certainly not the only Dutch economic activity in the Atlantic world, where scores of people were dedicated to extractive pursuits such as mining precious metals, collecting salt, and whaling and to agriculture in both tropical and temperate zones. Trade was, however, by far the most important activity, although the flow of commodities between the United Provinces and the colonies did not reach extraordinary levels in the mid-seventeenth century. Instead, commerce with foreigners—Africans 146

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and European Americans—was the anchor of the Dutch Atlantic economy. Indeed, the Dutch were the champions of interimperial Atlantic trade. The French and the English may have preceded them in tapping the commercial opportunities in the Spanish colonies, but the Dutch took up trade with all of Atlantic America, including the Spanish domain after the peace of 1648.

Trade with Africans and Amerindians When the Dutch first ventured into the Atlantic world in the 1590s, most of the littorals were firmly in indigenous hands in Africa and the greater Caribbean. Trade with Africans and Amerindians served a political as well as an economic purpose: commerce could help cement anti-Iberian bonds. Dutch merchants soon endeared themselves to native traders because of their vast supply of manufactures at low prices. They achieved their most spectacular success on the Gold Coast, where the Portuguese had monopolized European trade for over a century, obtaining control of the commodity trade by the first years of the seventeenth century.2 Dutch goods also found their way to the interior of South America. The members of a Portuguese expedition up the Amazon River in 1637–1639 were surprised to find Dutch trade goods among the Amerindians on the upper stretches of the Amazon River.3 In North America, the Dutch wrought irreversible change in the Mohawk communities. By the 1650s, their cloth, linen, ironware, and copper kettles had come to replace traditional earthen pots, stone implements, and animal skins.4 Not everywhere did Dutch goods become popular. The Dutch themselves, at least, found their exchanges with the Amerindians in Guiana and Brazil disappointing. Descriptions of native lifestyles reveal a barely concealed contempt for the lack of consumerism; consumption was clearly seen as an ingredient of civilization. After numerous failed mercantile voyages to Guiana, the WIC board lamented in 1633 that earlier expectations of that region remained unfulfilled because the coast was inhabited only by “barbarian” Amerindians who had no need for clothing or other items.5 Even the Tupi-speaking Amerindians of Brazil, who were deemed more advanced than their enemies, the Tapuya, lived carefree, a Dutchman in Brazil wrote, “without any inclination to gather some wealth, happy with a net or hammock to sleep in and a few gourd shells to drink from, along with their bow and arrow and the game they are allowed to shoot in the woods for their sustenance. . . .” The men worked only to earn enough linen for themselves and their wives to cover their bodies.6 Firearms were particularly in demand among Africans and Amerindians. Members of a Dutch fleet who surrendered at Valparaíso in Chile in the

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late sixteenth century and were later sent to Lima for interrogation related that large quantities of arquebuses, muskets, and other war material had been stored on board. Local Amerindians were the intended recipients in an armed alliance against the Spanish.7 In North America, members of the Five Nations were eager to buy firearms, viewing them as superior to bows and arrows for hunting. They used them to capture thousands of native enemies.8 But the Dutch also stood to gain because the arms sales guaranteed a steady flow of furs. Moreover, the weapons sold were deployed to inflict damage on New France and never on Beverwijck, the center of the Dutch fur trade. Nevertheless, the authorities of New Netherland were wary of the sale of guns, powder, and lead, fearing they might be used against them. Director Kieft even decided that any infraction was forbidden under penalty of death. This and numerous subsequent prohibitions did not have the intended effect, in part because of the authorities’ own connivance.9 During Director Stuyvesant’s tenure, the placard against the traffic in firearms had to be published again.10

The Quest for Gold and Silver Whether they were traders or administrators, the search for gold and silver mines was a leitmotif of the Netherlanders’ expansion in the Atlantic world. The contrast with the French and English is conspicuous. These nations had also been guided by a quest for precious metals but soon contented themselves with trade and agriculture.11 The Dutch hunger for precious metals lured adventurous men to obscure parts of the world. In 1624, Engelbrecht Pieterssen van der Zee, a merchant from Brielle, purported to have found a new island in the Davis Strait that possessed hitherto unknown silver and gold mines. Captain Jan Jansz Slob from Hoorn made every effort in the 1610s to locate the Green Island in the western Caribbean, supposedly abundant in gold. When he asked for directions to this island off Cape Gracias de Dios in Honduras, three Spaniards killed him, along with three of his sailors. In 1626, two yachts again made a thorough search for the Green Island, and one month before capturing the treasure fleet, Piet Heyn sent one of his ships to look for the mythical island, which may have been Providence Island. It was, Johannes de Laet wrote, like searching for a needle in a haystack.12 On a Dutch ship en route from the Gold Coast to Brazil in 1645, a story went around about another island. A man had once stayed on a golden island, the story went, after having been exiled there as a way of capital punishment. But one day, he took off his shirt and drew the attention of a passing ship. Once aboard, he emptied his pockets, and only gold came out.

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The shipmaster returned to the area after completing the voyage to England, but he failed to locate the island.13 A mythical civilization on the Spanish Main was also said to yield untold quantities of gold. A Spanish conquistador had sought in vain to find El Dorado in successive expeditions since 1583 but was convinced that it was located near the Caroni River, a tributary of the Orinoco. Although Sir Walter Raleigh, English adventurer, also failed to find it on his 1595 voyage, he left an important legacy that same year by publishing his thoughts on a huge gold mine in his Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtifull Empire of Guiana, soon translated into Dutch. In December 1597, four Dutch ships arrived at the Orinoco, where the Spanish authorities allowed them to sail up the Caroni River. Despite hearing from natives about abundant gold deposits, the ships returned empty-handed.14 Interest did not fade, however. The burgomaster of Middelburg in 1599 fitted out a ship of 300 tons “to visit the river called Dorado, situated in America.”15 In later years, there was never a lack of men hoping to find mines in Guiana. One Dutchman in Essequibo reported in 1625 about his meeting with a Frenchman who had lived there for three years. The man had allegedly found a mine of crystal, “with which one could fill infinite canoes.”16 David Pietersz de Vries, a well-traveled Dutchman, heard in Suriname in 1634 about gold and diamond deposits in the highlands, and a few years later a Zeelander undertook an expedition to search of silver in the Orinoco River.17 Balthasar Gerbier, an Anglo-Dutch courtier, diplomat, writer, and adventurer, did his utmost to find a gold mine in Guiana in the 1650s, but the first voyage undertaken from the Republic yielded nothing but mud. A man who pretended to be able to find ore deposits with a dowsing rod was brought along on the second expedition, but his efforts were also in vain.18 Despite such disappointments, the author of ’t Verheerlickte Nederland asserted in 1659 that Guiana, according to the Spanish, easily surpassed Peru, Chile, and Mexico “in gold wealth.”19 It was easier to organize such forays after Suriname had become Dutch. The goal was now, once again, to find Lake Parima, on the banks of which El Dorado was presumed to be situated.20 And although the lake, which can be found on many early modern maps, never existed, the Dutch kept looking for it into the eighteenth century. Wherever the Dutch settled down in the Atlantic world, a search for precious metals was soon begun.21 On Curaçao, the persistent rumor about the existence of a gold mine led to excavation work involving six miners who were shipped in from Germany. It was of no avail.22 In New Netherland, where the WIC had instructed the first governor of the colony to interview Amerindians about their knowledge of precious metals,23 Governor Willem

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Kieft met an indigenous man who painted his face with a shining mineral that resembled gold. After the man had pointed out where the ore could be found near Rensselaerswijck, it took a long time before the Dutch knew what they had found because a ship carrying samples to the Republic was lost, not once but twice. In the end, the ore turned out to be pyrite, also known as fool’s gold.24 Assessing whether a stone was gold was less cumbersome in Brazil because High Councilor Pieter Bas happened to have been a goldsmith in Haarlem. He examined a sample of “gold” from Sergipe and concluded that it contained nothing of value.25 The Dutch in Brazil were also guided by Amerindians in their quest to locate precious metals. Six natives who had traveled with the Dutch to the Republic after the loss of Salvador divulged information about a silver mine near Ceará, another one a ten days march away, and a third near Paraíba. Two of these Amerindians claimed to have held the silver in their hands.26 Thus began a long chapter in which the Dutch, assisted by German miners, tried to find rich ores near Ceará. To compensate for the lack of workers, all residents of the United Provinces were allowed to sail to the area in their own ships and excavate silver without paying taxes.27 Luck was once more against the Dutch. When finally, during the first Anglo-Dutch war, a large sample was sent to the Republic, English privateers captured the ship.28 A fresh attempt by merchants from Dordrecht to dig for silver in Brazil was also ill starred. When their ship, carrying miners from Liège, appeared off Recife, the Dutch flag was no longer up.29 Just as chimerical as these mining schemes were the projects aimed at seizing Potosí (figure 7), the famed center of Spanish silver production in Upper Peru. The WIC considered establishing control of the Río de la Plata “to come closer to the heart of the King of Spain’s treasures,” getting better access and knowledge of the mines in Potosí.30 In 1642, Johan Maurits strongly considered conquering Buenos Aires as a gateway to Peru and its riches. He had already assembled a force of eight hundred men when two other campaigns required the ships and soldiers from Brazil: Brouwer’s expedition to Chile and a relief squadron for São Tomé, where the Dutch had been chased from the capital.31 At an earlier juncture, the Nassau fleet had set sail in the belief that it was possible to conquer Potosí, in spite of its location in the interior of South America. The leaders of the fleet learned only in April 1624, on the Peruvian coast after a failed attack on Callao, that the intelligence available in the Republic about Potosí was incorrect. The plan to send a fleet to Arica, where Amerindians would show the way to a defenseless Potosí was a pipe dream. Not only was Arica fortified, but Potosí was home to over 20,000 Spaniards as well as many blacks and Amerindians, and they all had guns.32

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Figure 7. Potosí, cover page of Een Lief-hebber des Vaderlandts, Levendich Discours vant ghemeyne Lants welvaert voor desen de Oost ende nu oock de West-Indische generale Compaignie aenghevanghen seer notabel om te lesen. Pamphlet, 1622. Courtesy of Royal Library, The Hague.

Brazil also opened up possibilities to gain access to Potosí, or so some ambitious Dutchmen thought. A “rich and excellent” silver mine inside enemy territory near the São Francisco River had also occupied the Dutch minds since at least 1633. When Arciszewski wrote to the Heren XIX two

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years later about the desirability of extending Dutch Brazil to that river, he mentioned not only the existence of silver but also the possible access that the Dutch might gain to a great river that would lead to Peru. In addition, a Portuguese had told him about the lake from which that river originated and where grains of gold had been found. At a later date, an expedition was indeed launched alongside the São Francisco River.33 There were likely many more Luso-Brazilians pulling the wool over the Dutchmen’s eyes. Barlaeus did not doubt that the Portuguese trifled with the Dutch appetite for precious metals.34 But the Dutch fooled themselves as well. Their notion of the existence of other silver mines, west of the Rio Grande do Norte, was probably caused by confusing nomenclature. The Dutch at times called the Potengí River “Potosij,” and in 1650 they took samples of minerals in a mine situated in that river.35 Potosí also played a role in the decision to invade Maranhão in 1642, which may have been connected to a letter written by Gideon Morris two years before, in which he speculated about the access the new “conquest” would provide to Potosí, by way of the Amazon. Morris’s source was Johannes de Laet’s usually reliable—but in this case mistaken— Nieuwe Wereldt.36 The Dutch were obsessed with gold and silver, but the Iberians also attributed to them evil plans to conquer Potosí that did not exist. Reports signed by Jesuit priests and local rulers in Peru, Buenos Aires, and Asunción had the Dutch exploring the route to Potosí after 1628 together with Jews. A Jesuit priest seemed to know that the capture of Paraguay was one of the main Dutch priorities. Some observers ascribed to the Dutch the goal of reaching Potosí in a sort of scissors movement. They planned to occupy the Amazon, which was neglected by the Portuguese but had been colonized by the Dutch during the truce years, and avail themselves of the route that the residents of the Brazilian town of São Paulo used to get to the Jesuit missions. Both the Amazon and the missions supposedly would enable access to Upper Peru.37 Not in every corner of the Atlantic world were natives willing to share their knowledge of local mines. One reason that the expedition to Chile in 1643 miscarried was the mere mention of gold by the Dutch. The caciques (indigenous chiefs) with whom the Dutch had allied against the mutual Spanish enemy flatly denied all knowledge of gold mines but also told the Dutch at length about the Spanish mistreatment of the Amerindians in their pursuit of gold.38 In Africa, the Dutch never managed to seize gold mines, but that was not for lack of planning. The Africans had already realized around 1600 that the Dutch visitors had a marked interest in gold. In his Beschryvinge van het Gout

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Koninckrijck van Guinea, Pieter de Marees, a merchant, wrote that “they say that gold is our god.” It was for that reason, he continued, that the natives kept the location of their gold mines secret.39 The Gold Coast was not the only site of Dutch gold fever. In the 1640s, the Heren XIX also urged Dutch officials in Angola to look for precious metals. They were especially interested in a gold mine near the capital city of Kongo, São Salvador, urging their correspondents to send samples to determine profitability.40 Still, the Gold Coast offered more opportunities as an area where production had regularly expanded since the sixteenth century.41 After capturing Elmina, the Dutch thought it feasible to undertake gold production themselves. During an expedition in 1653, WIC servants did discover hundreds of gold pits on the Ankobra River, but the local ruler did not allow the Dutch to start exploitation of the metal. Subsequent Dutch attempts to extract gold themselves also came to naught.42 Gold-digging machines were used twice in streams and rivers near Elmina, but the Dutch efforts were futile.43 Gold, then, had to be procured by way of trade, and the African continent was the place to procure it. Before the conquest of Recife, Africa completely dominated Dutch trade in the Atlantic basin, accounting for 90 percent of the value of that trade.44 Despite the overall success of this trade, however, most companies engaged in this business were founded for only a single voyage.45 Dutch merchants in Africa were not exclusively interested in gold. By the mid-1620s, twelve ships and yachts traded with the Gold Coast but also with Benin, the Grain Coast, Angola, and Cape Verde, purchasing cargoes of gold, ivory, and leopard, tiger, snake, and crocodile hides. A pamphlet from 1644 estimated the overall value of goods derived from Africa since the WIC founding at 20 million guilders.46 This estimate was probably too high, since the company was only able to import products worth close to 0.5 million guilders per year in the period until 1636. Ironically, the years 1637–1648, immediately following the capture of Elmina, showed a steep decline in both gold and ivory purchases.47 These goods were all imported on ships fitted out by the WIC, which in the early 1620s replaced the various Dutch firms that had earlier competed on the African coast. The men steering these companies were not immediately sidelined. Instead, it was on their ships that many of the soldiers, ammunition, provisions, and trade goods reached African shores on behalf of the WIC.48 On a large stretch of the African west coast north of Cape Lopez, the WIC faced little competition—and none at all from the Portuguese after the capture of Elmina. The company reaped profits from its monopoly. In earlier times, Dutch firms had competed in the gold trade against each other, which forced them to pay 70–100 pounds of brassware

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for 1 bende (2 ounces) of gold supplied by Akan merchants from the interior of the Gold Coast. The WIC, by contrast, did not have to pay more than an average of 35 pounds of brassware.49 Apart from brassware, the WIC sold mostly linen, cloth, basins, kettles, ironwork, and brandy in the early 1630s, for a total amount of more than 0.5 million guilders per year. These supplies did not change, but the conquest of Elmina signaled a lasting change in the way the Dutch carried out trade on the Gold Coast. Trade had traditionally been conducted by means of leggers, ships anchored offshore, which could be a costly affair because some agents could not comply with the instructions of the shipowners until twenty months had passed. Preference was now given to maintaining trading lodges or small forts, although the leggers never completely disappeared.50 The alluring prospect of a secure African market immediately produced competition in Holland between Delft and Leiden. Once Leiden’s industry found willing buyers in Elmina for azure serges, producers in Delft secured tonnage to send hundreds of their own to the Gold Coast.51 Foreign rivals soon appeared as well, in particular the English, who made their first appearance on the Gold Coast before the conquest of Elmina, setting up their headquarters in Cormantine. They were willing to offer 40 pounds of brassware for 1 bende of gold.52 English merchants and ships began to arrive in ever-growing numbers, prompting Director-General Jacob Ruychaver to initiate a policy of underselling. That proved not to be a solution because the English matched the Dutch prices at every step and the Africans withheld their goods until both the Englishmen and Dutchmen were present and they could benefit from competition to undersell.53 In mid-century, the Danes and Swedes also established themselves on the Gold Coast, and Dutch interlopers joined the competitors of the WIC. As a consequence, company trade was reduced to just one-quarter of all commerce on the Gold Coast, according to a Dutch estimate of 1671.54

Salt and Sugar During the search for precious metals, the Dutch also attempted to procure more prosaic items far from home: whaling oil and salt. Dutch whaling, which took place off Spitsbergen and Jan Mayen Island in the Arctic Ocean, began to flourish in the 1620s in spite of a fierce rivalry with England. Each summer, according to a description from 1628, eight hundred men sailed to the Arctic to work for the Noordsche Compagnie, which monopolized the business through 1642. The trade grew from an average of eighteen (1616–1625) to forty-nine (1656–1665) annual ships, although the returns diminished.55

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Whereas whaling created enmity with the English, the salt business was affected by the war with the Habsburgs. As discussed in chapter 1, the Dutch had traditionally collected salt on the Atlantic side of Europe, in southwestern France, Portugal, and Andalusia, but in the 1590s, the Spanish kings arrested hundreds of Dutch ships anchored in Iberian ports, leading Dutch shipowners to explore other options in the Atlantic. The truce years saw the Dutch return to Setúbal in Portugal, a site whose salt was better suited for preserving fish, but new problems emerged once the truce expired.56 For some years, the Dutch continued their voyages to Setúbal, masquerading as foreign ships by using Scottish, French, German, and Flemish crews and documents.57 They also returned to Araya, only to encounter a galleon fleet that expelled them, and they were equally unsuccessful in establishing permanent salt-collecting bases in Tortuga and on the Unare River, as previously discussed. Some alternatives remained. The superintendent of the English Caribbean islands allowed ships from Holland and Zeeland to come and load salt at the salt pans of St. Christopher.58 Other ships, including some of just 30 tons, sailed to St. Martin, which had three salt basins, reputedly the most accessible in the region. Its salt was right underneath the surface of the water and had to be broken up with shovels.59 The captain of an English bottom, who sojourned on the island as a Dutch prisoner, reported that 190 Dutch ships came there to load in 1631–1632. But once again, a decisive Spanish counteraction, in the form of a squadron that arrived in 1633, was not long in coming. This partly explains the Dutch conquest of Curaçao one year later, even though the expedition leader reported to the Heren XIX that the local salt lagoons were disappointing. Bonaire, in contrast, did prove to be a source of much salt.60 The ten years truce signed between the Dutch and the Portuguese in 1641 solved the salt problem because Dutch ships were now allowed back in Setúbal.61 Nonetheless, the Caribbean continued to play a role in the Dutch salt trade because the WIC rented the salt carriers to transport troops and war material to Brazil. These ships would take in salt on their return voyage, not just for sale in Europe but to salt the same vessels, prolonging their preservation.62 Ultimately, even the Dutch era in Brazil was inextricably bound up with the salt trade. As we have seen, at the Treaty of The Hague from 1669, it was decided that Portugal had to pay in Setúbal salt for conquering Dutch Brazil. The association of Brazil with salt is ironic given the importance of sugar as a rationale for the invasions of 1624 and 1630. How important was sugar production? Agriculture was not a major pursuit in the Dutch Atlantic, which was home to colonial populations that were small by any standard. While the New Netherlanders dedicated themselves

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to cereal subsistence farming, the settlers of most Dutch Caribbean islands and Guiana cultivated tobacco, although in amounts too small to deserve to be quoted on the Amsterdam staple market. Only in Brazil did large-scale cash-crop production exist of sugar and tobacco, predominantly undertaken by the conquered Luso-Brazilian residents. Yet sugar cultivation did not benefit the Dutch in Brazil until the capture in 1635 of a large area where the crop was grown. And even then, the war with the Iberians delayed the operation of the plantations. For years, the Dutch had carried out a scorched-earth policy at the expense of their enemies’ sugar estates; now the roles were now reversed as the Habsburg soldiers burned sugarfields and mills, and smashed sugar cauldrons and other equipment to pieces.63 When this campaign had run its course, the High Council tried in vain to lure the Luso-Brazilian planters back from their self-imposed exile. In 1637–1638, therefore, the government put the plantations, most of which were in Pernambuco, up for auction.64 The Dutch, however, were able to run sugar mills only by relying on the expertise of Portuguese agents and lavradores.65 The Dutch ownership of the sugar estates, nevertheless, enabled a direct connection to be forged between the plantations and the sugar refineries of the Republic. Jean de Mey, an immigrant from Rouen who owned two refineries in Rotterdam, could avail himself of his family ties. A daughter of his wife’s sister was married to Isaac de Rasière, the owner of three sugar plantations in Brazil, and the husband of another daughter in the same family also ran a sugar mill in Brazil.66 Ultimately, the sugar planters in Dutch Brazil did not derive much benefit from their new property because, even in the short period before the start of the revolt, Dutch Brazil produced far below its capacity. Moerbeeck had estimated (see chapter 2) that 60,000 chests of 500 pounds each could be imported to the United Provinces, but the actual average import during the era of Dutch Brazil (1630–1654) was close to 6,000. In no year were more than 21,000 chests shipped to the Netherlands.67 After the start of the revolt, the sugar crop in much-reduced Dutch Brazil was negligible, prompting Johan Maurits, the former governor, to advise the States General that a general pardon should be proclaimed for the rebels in Brazil, the leaders of the conspiracy excepted. Without the Portuguese, he argued, the colony would give little benefit to the company because making sugar was its principal activity, and that was impossible without Portuguese know-how.68 The governor was not alone in stressing the Dutch dependence on Portuguese planters and specialized workers.69 Some Jews and Christians left Brazil in 1654 with expertise in sugar growing.70 They included men who would continue to practice this trade

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in foreign colonies. Such was the case with Jan van Ool, the joint owner of a sugar mill in Brazil in 1641 and co-owner of a sugar estate in Martinique with twenty-five slaves in 1660.71 Another former resident of Dutch Brazil, Pierre l’Hermite, and his son co-owned three sugar estates in Martinique in 1671.72 At least twenty-six Dutchmen and six former residents of Dutch Brazil moved to Guadeloupe, where almost all were listed as habitants or sucriers in the island censuses. They included Claes Claesz (the lieutenant colonel who had abandoned Fort de Vijfhoek), Adriaen Bullestraeten (a former master carpenter who had worked himself up to the Ruling Council of Brazil), Johan Listrij, “Josse Pitre,” and “Arrians Van Spiegle.” The plantation of Nicolaes Jansen, a Dutchman who also seems to have arrived from Brazil, was the second largest of the island by 1669.73 Jacob and Jean de Sweers simply took up where they had left off in Brazil, using the expertise they had gained and putting to work at least some of the free and enslaved workers they had used in Brazil. They also continued their partnership with their brother Paulus in Amsterdam, who in the past had sent provisions and other necessities to Brazil and who changed the destination of such goods to Guadeloupe after 1654.74 The roughly one hundred Dutch settlers and their descendants still made up of the bulk of the Protestant population of Guadeloupe in 1687, when their religion was outlawed. For the sake of convenience, they converted to Catholicism, a step some had already taken prior to this ban.75 Even though sugar refineries in Amsterdam doubled from twenty-five in 1622 to more than fifty in 1662, each building being of five or six stories and representing investments of 200,000 guilders, little sugar had arrived from the new Dutch colonies in Guiana by 1662.76 Still, a manuscript from the 1660s, intended for prospective Dutch sugar planters in Essequibo, reveals local knowledge of sugar planting. In the months May through July, the author argued, thirty black slaves were needed in the first year to clear the forest. In September, the wood would be dry and ready for burning and clearing. The soil was cleaned in October, and planting took place in the last two months of the year. Forty plots of land were to be planted with cane and corn, and ten with yam, cassava, and beans, all to feed the slaves. In the second year, forty additional slaves were needed to plant, together with the first group of slaves, sixty to seventy plots with cane and provisions. After the second planting, a sugar mill had to be erected, as well as a boiling and purging house, a stable, and a building to distill brandy. Other expenses included horses, cows, six copper cauldrons, two brandy stills, water troughs, and gutters.77 By the mid-1660s, the Dutch began to engage in sugar planting in earnest. While one man may have been the lone pioneer in Essequibo in 1664, English invaders found six “good plantations with sugar works” in St. Eustatius

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the following year.78 A book by a resident of Tobago mentions another six sugar plantations on that island, while an expedition of English conquerors counted no less than eighteen.79 How many of these were actually operated by Dutchmen remains unknown because the Dutch settlers of St. Eustatius shared their island with numerous Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotsmen, and Frenchmen outnumbered Dutchmen on Tobago. As late as 1674, an English observer noted that the Dutch in Suriname “have not the skill of making sugar, but hire the very raggedest English. . . .”80 Yet it was in Suriname, in Dutch hands since 1667, that the Dutch turned a corner. Although the colony initially faced some teething troubles—the knowledge of curing sugar left much to be desired and cattle to drive the mills were virtually absent in the startup years—the number of plantations grew to fifty-two by 1671.81

The Slave Trade The decade-long Dutch control of most of the sugar-producing area of Brazil introduced them to the trade in black Africans. Although the Dutch would dominate the Atlantic slave trade in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, few Dutch merchants had expertise in carrying human cargoes when the WIC was founded. No more than eleven voyages have been documented before 1621. Nonetheless, the Dutch were familiar with the institution of slavery. First of all, scores of their compatriots languished on the galleys and in the palaces of Muslim rulers in North Africa, the victims of the Barbary corsairs. These corsairs were not interested in cargoes—their goal was to seize people in order to ransom them. Due to the location of most of their home bases in North Africa, their predominant activities were in the Mediterranean, but some groups operated from the Atlantic coast of Morocco, where they preyed on Atlantic shipping. The cost to Dutch shipping was high. Even when shipmasters avoided capture, their ships might be damaged and crewmembers killed or injured. In 1639, for instance, the Soutcas did reach Brazil after a two-day maritime battle with Barbary “pirates” but had lost its master as well as twenty sailors and soldiers.82 Not all polities involved in the ransom business were active privateers. Sidi Ali ben Mussa and his men, who controlled the Sous area south of Marrakech, could simply wait for crews to fall into their lap. The Erasmus, a slave ship bound for the Gold Coast in 1638, and the Maecht van Dordrecht, a merchantman on its way to Brazil in 1639, were both wrecked near Sidi Ali’s headquarters. The crews of fifty-one and twenty-seven men, respectively, were reduced to slavery for three years before Dutch authorities ransomed them.83 On behalf of these North African slaves—and there

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were always hundreds, if not thousands of them—money was raised in the churches in dozens of towns across the Netherlands, among relatives and fellow sailors, and door-to-door collections were made to redeem them.84 One way in which the Dutch gained firsthand knowledge of the transatlantic slave trade was through their own privateering. The classic case involved a group of 130 slaves on a captured Portuguese vessel, taken by a Dutch privateer to Middelburg in 1596. The city burgomaster was embarrassed, and the States of Zeeland ordered the Africans to be “restored to their natural liberty.” Although nine Africans remained ashore and died in the next few months, the ship captain seems to have ignored the ruling and taken most slaves to the Americas.85 In the decades that followed, Dutch privateers captured many more Portuguese slave ships, disposing of the Africans on board wherever they could.86 For example, the more than twenty Africans arriving in Virginia in 1619, who were long believed to have been the first blacks imported into North America, had probably been captured from the Portuguese by a ship from Vlissingen that colluded with an English vessel.87 After New Netherland was settled, some Africans found on Portuguese prizes were also sent there as slaves. In 1630, for instance, Michiel Pauw received no fewer than fifty Africans that had come off a Portuguese prize.88 In other cases, the captains of privateers let go of the seized ships because they could not feed all the mouths. In the years prior to the foundation of the WIC, residents of the Republic did more than prey on Portuguese slave ships. Portuguese Jews owned ships involved in the slave trade out of Luanda, which were usually insured by Christian Dutchmen.89 In addition, a handful of Christian merchants ignored the States General’s ban on trading in people and participated in the African slave trade themselves, either in the service of colleagues in Portugal or on their own account.90 But for a long time, the Dutch slave trade remained minimal for obvious reasons. It was not until the 1620s that lasting Dutch colonies were set up in the New World. As long as the Dutch were raiding and trading, instead of settling throughout the Atlantic world, they had no use for enslaved Africans. At the time of the founding of the WIC, the Dutch slave trade was still negligible. Even the small numbers of Africans at work on Dutch plantations at the mouth of the Amazon River may have been initially supplied by foreigners.91 Setting up the slave trade was an agenda item at the second WIC board meeting in November 1623, and the connection was obvious: once in control of the world’s largest sugar-producing area in Brazil, the WIC would put enslaved Africans to work to make the plantations profitable. Consequently, not only were imports from “Guinea” and Angola needed, but to guarantee

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a steady supply of African workers, it was necessary for the company itself to organize the voyages, which was preferable to depending on foreign merchants. Within a few weeks, therefore, three ships were sent to Angola. This was a false start, however. The WIC did import captives from the Bight of Benin to Fort Nassau on the African Gold Coast, starting in 1624, but it would take another dozen years for the Dutch to become actively involved in the slave trade to the Americas.92 It is unclear to what extent men of the Portuguese nation living in Amsterdam, including its Jewish segment, continued to participate in the Iberian slave trade in the 1620s and 1630s. The viceroy of Peru thought they remained active when he advised his king in 1638 to close the port of Buenos Aires because of the financial damage inflicted by smugglers. The smugglers, he alleged, were “Hebrews from Holland” who used intermediaries in Portugal for their slave trade and who worked in part for Dutch principals.93 It was only when the Dutch assumed control of the Brazil sugar industry that the need for slave labor made itself felt in Dutch America. One Dutch observer wrote, “Without such slaves, it is impossible to accomplish anything in Brazil; without them no sugar mills can operate and no land can be tilled.” “And,” he added, “it would be needlessly scrupulous if anyone had qualms about it.”94 The Heren XIX certainly had no qualms about entering the African slave trade. In 1635, they gave orders to ship captains to start the slave trade on the African coast, where the Dutch now possessed trading centers at Arguin, Goree, and Mouree.95 To provide additional the supplies, the authorities in Dutch Brazil had privateers target Portuguese slave ships and encouraged soldiers to steal slaves ashore from the enemy.96 The conquest of Elmina, Luanda, and São Tomé within a four-year span (1637–1641) was also connected to labor concerns in Brazil. It is telling that these places were conquered by two Dutch fleets fitted out in Brazil, not in Amsterdam. Elmina (São Jorge da Mina) was the chief Portuguese stronghold in Guinea, as was Angola in South West Africa. The Dutch were particularly keen on incorporating Angola into their empire. Not only, they thought, would that guarantee a steady import of captives, but at the same time, the Spanish archenemy would be dealt a heavy blow because their silver mines, the source of Spanish wealth, would be unable to operate without an influx of Africans.97 Portuguese officials had realized all along how important Angola could be for the Dutch. Five years before they lost this African jewel in their crown, the Portuguese Council of State asked for reinforcements to be sent to prevent the Dutch from invading Angola.98 Luanda and Elmina, incidentally, were not the exclusive suppliers of Dutch slaves. Slavers also traveled to Ardra and Calabar, where the WIC built small lodges in the

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early 1640s, from which factors maintained contact with local princes and traders.99 The slave trade was a business like any other but with its own features. Unfamiliar with these features, the Dutch initially made lots of mistakes, both in Guinea and Angola. They first overestimated their capacity to buy slaves in Africa. Partly because of the crucial role of Luanda in the Portuguese slave trade, the authorities in Dutch Brazil expected to import 15,000 captives per year from the Angolan capital.100 Dutch commanders signed treaties with the king of Kongo and the count of Sonho, but these failed in their purpose. In the first nine months following the Dutch conquest, fewer than five hundred slaves were actually shipped to Brazil. What the Dutch did not realize was that Kongo and Sonho were no longer primary slave centers and that most slaves came from other lands in the interior, such as Matamba, Ndongo, and Pombo. The passage of slave caravans was, however, being blocked by the very Portuguese whom the Dutch had expelled from Luanda and who had fled inland.101 Another mistake was to think that Africans could be enslaved indiscriminately. As the Dutch authorities in Brazil had to point out to the officers in charge of the conquest of Luanda in 1641, “Our intention is not for you to take [the blacks] in raids or as arbitrary spoils.”102 The States General added one year later in its instructions for the government of the Dutch-occupied areas on the Angolan coast that those natives who were free should not be enslaved.103 Apparently, not everybody understood these messages because on board the first shipment from Angola to Brazil were certain women “of good birth,” who had been sent from the interior to Luanda, where the Dutch had seized them. Dutch ignorance also concerned what goods to bring in exchange for slaves. They soon learned that sometimes as many as twenty or thirty different commodities were needed, including cowry shells, cotton cloth, and copper arm rings.104 The island of São Tomé, which the Dutch occupied in 1641, produced palm oil, cloth, and other merchandise that was commonly traded for captives.105 The specific merchandise they needed to bring for barter was different from place to place,106 and they also needed to keep up with local fashion. One Dutch factor wrote to his superiors in Elmina that his English rivals “were outdoing him in trade, thanks to a new variety of bead decorated with spirals of white and yellow.” A sample was immediately sent to the Netherlands with the request for beads of the same pattern. In some places, no goods could buy the Dutch slaves, such as in the kingdom of Benin, whose ruler maintained a ban on the sale of male captives. Here, the Dutch were able to procure only a small number of women slaves.107

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The slave trade was highly profitable, at least on paper. Slaves could be purchased on the Congo River with shells worth 100 guilders and sold in Brazil for five or six times that amount; the less expensive slaves bought in the Bight of Benin with bars of iron—used locally as currency—were sold for ten times the original value.108 To assume, however, that the difference constituted a net gain is too simplistic. After all, the slave ship had to be built, the crew paid, and guns and shackles purchased, to name just a few of the expenses that had to be deducted.109 Still, some men did well in this business. One beneficiary was Francesco Feroni (1614/16–1696), a native of Tuscany who moved to Amsterdam in the early 1640s. He specialized in the Baltic grain trade to Italy, which was largely carried on in Dutch ships. His achievements landed him the position of the official Tuscan envoy to the Dutch Republic. At some point after the revolt in Brazil of 1645, Feroni involved himself in the slave trade to the Caribbean, fitting out his own ship for the triangular voyages. Compared to the cereal business, his profit margins grew substantially, making him a wealthy man. The WIC board even met at times in his home.110 Contemporary reports reveal that the organization of slave shipments left much to be desired. The decks were not regularly washed, the Africans had nothing to cover themselves with, and the water and food rations were insufficient. The advice of an experienced slave trader, submitted to the government in Dutch Brazil in 1639, obviously went unheeded. The slaves, he proposed, have to be given a pot of beans, gruel, or barley porridge, with some palm oil added. Two years later, it was suggested that the slave ships be provisioned for six weeks, giving each slave rations of corn one day and beans the next. In addition, the captives were to be fed dried and salted fish, and pieces of elephant or hippopotamus meat, to be cooked with salt and palm oil.111 But another year later, the Dutch government in Brazil found that the slave business was not run well and that the lack of provisions and water on board the ships had caused a large death toll. In addition, many captives had jumped overboard or poisoned themselves. Those Africans who reached the other shore alive were described as shadows. Their plight did not improve upon their arrival in Recife, where there was an almost permanent food shortage. As late as 1646, an official WIC report found that provisions for slaves marked out for transatlantic shipment in Luanda were insufficient, which accounted for the death of many on the Middle Passage.112 While the Portuguese had initially prevented the Dutch from acquiring large numbers of slaves from the interior of Angola, the armistice concluded between the Netherlands and Portugal in June 1642 turned the Portuguese into trading partners in Africa. In addition, the intensification of warfare

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between neighboring African nations led to a constant stream of captives to the coast, often coming from as far as 200 miles inland.113 But the smooth operation of the Dutch slave trade ashore, ironically, created problems of its own. Food and water were in short supply for the Middle Passage, and facilities were lacking in Brazil to house the slaves. Not surprisingly, more than a quarter of the 1,800 Africans who sailed from Angola in the six months after October 1643 died during the crossing.114 Nor could all surviving slaves be sold to the sugar plantations; the government and army had first choice, before the planters could make their selection. An additional problem was the introduction of smallpox, which probably originated in Ardra.115 The disease left a trail of death at the plantations in Brazil. In Paraíba alone, more than 1,000 slaves died from this disease in 1642.116 It was not long before the brief heyday of Dutch slave shipments to Brazil came to an end. In the wake of the revolt that began in June 1645, scores of sugar plantations were destroyed, making it virtually impossible for the Dutch to sell the newly arriving slaves. To spare foodstuffs in Recife, 850 Africans were first shipped to the island of Fernando de Noronha, but the utter lack of provisions there made the Dutch decide to sell the captives in the Caribbean. No such leniency was exercised when a new shipment of 251 slaves arrived from Angola. These poor men and women were forced to survive on the same barren island off the coast of Brazil, where all they could eat to stay alive were rats. It was now abundantly clear that deliveries of slaves had to stop, and the Dutch in Luanda were told accordingly. The many captives arriving in the city from the interior were henceforth—till further notice—kept in sheds and dilapidated old ships, from which most escaped within a year; countless others died.117 As mentioned in chapter 3, the revolt of the Portuguese in Brazil was itself connected to the slave trade. Featured prominently among the leaders of the rebellion were the sugar lords, owners of large plantations who were notoriously short of liquid assets. For the settlement of their debts, they had to mortgage all their property: the sugar mills, the draft oxen, and the slaves. Under the circumstances, the Dutch allowed them to buy slaves on credit, a solution that would be commonplace in the French and British Caribbean sugar islands in the eighteenth century.118 The rebellion that erupted in 1645, the very year that the sugar lords were bound to start paying off their debts, precluded the payment of debts worth over 4.6 million guilders, most of which had been contracted for the purchase of slaves.119 In the remaining nine years of Dutch rule in Brazil, the number of African captives arriving in Recife was no more than 1,550. The various company chambers almost immediately discontinued their slave shipments from

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Africa, prompting the decision to allow private individuals to import slaves from Luanda. Although these private traders were still required to disembark their human cargo in Recife, they had the right to weigh anchor and sail from Dutch Brazil to any destination if the slaves could not be sold in Recife.120 This was the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the Dutch slave trade. In the next decades, non-Dutch colonies would be the recipients of most of the captives transported across the Atlantic by the Dutch, who had quickly become experts in the field.121 Of the 202 Dutch slave voyages in the 1650s and 1660s with known embarkation sites, only 30 had a Dutch colony as their primary destination122—by contrast, only three English slave voyages in the same decades had a non-English embarkation point.123 In the process, the Dutch became the leading Atlantic slave traders, a fact historians have failed to acknowledge. In the period 1641–1670, the Dutch conducted 300 documented voyages; England conducted the next most (225), followed by Portugal (71), Spain (21), France (14), Sweden and Denmark (6), and Genoa (1). In other words, almost half (47 percent) of all transatlantic slave expeditions in the three middle decades of the century were organized by the Dutch.124 The increased role of the Dutch in the Atlantic slave trade produced several examples of great human suffering, due usually to extremely long crossings. For example, two ships that were scheduled to sail from West Africa to New Amsterdam ended up in a heavy storm and suddenly found themselves not near North America but in the southern part of the Caribbean. All Spanish authorities refused them entry, so the vessels sailed on, exhausting their water and food supplies. Four hundred Africans starved to death.125 Slaves also perished after disembarkation. In 1680, the WIC directors complained to the governor of Curaçao that 1,196 of the 4,847 recently arrived slaves had died. The Africans had been mistreated and fed the meat of sick horses, which helps explain the high mortality.126

Trade with English and French America What set the Dutch apart from other Atlantic empires, both as slave traders and as carriers of nonhuman cargoes, is the degree to which they functioned as the trading partners of settlers all over the Caribbean and coastal North and South America, irrespective of imperial allegiance. One way to gain access to foreign colonial markets was by cruising. Cruising was not a Dutch innovation but had been practiced by French ships in the generations before the Dutch began to explore Atlantic waters. Taking a southern route across

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the ocean, these ships would reach the shores of Brazil and sail from there to whichever ports in the Caribbean admitted them, usually visiting multiple ports in a single voyage.127 Their control of Pernambuco after 1630 made similar voyages possible for the Dutch, whose cruising experience kept pace with the migration of northern Europeans to the Lesser Antilles, which had begun in the mid1620s and accelerated in the 1630s. The voyages of Michiel de Ruyter may serve as an example. Prior to his naval career, de Ruyter was captain of a merchantman that traversed the Atlantic a few times. Twice in 1640–1641, he crossed the Atlantic to Recife and sailed back by way of the Caribbean. Neither voyage can qualify as a cruising trip, but de Ruyter did engage in some trade at St. Christopher in 1641. At any rate, he gained useful knowledge about trading and navigating in the Caribbean, which he used to his advantage when he was back in the area in 1646. After his ship had arrived at Barbados on February 25 of that year, de Ruyter met with the governor or the island to arrange for an exchange of his goods for tobacco. Having sold a cargo of wine, his ship departed from Barbados on February 27, reaching Martinique twenty-four hours later. There de Ruyter once again approached the governor to strike a deal and land goods. On March 6, the ships left for St. Kitts, where they anchored two days later. Having obtained a license, de Ruyter carried out some trade here as well.128 He thus used precautions in his attempts to engage in transimperial trade. That was a lesson lost on adventurers who sailed to the far side of the Atlantic haphazardly. Abraham Alvares was one of them. He put to sea from Texel in late 1659 on a voyage to Martinique “and the coasts of the Indies.” The expedition amounted to a series of failed efforts to interest foreigners in trading. Unable to sell his goods anywhere, Alvares finally left them behind on Curaçao and sailed home on an empty ship.129 Cruising did not mean calling at New World ports indiscriminately. Until 1648, ship captains were at pains to avoid most American ports because they happened to be part of the Spanish realm. In the 1620s, 1630s, and 1640s, Anglo-America was the cruisers’ preferred destination. Crops from the English colonies were marketed in Dutch ports soon after production had started. Tobacco from Barbados was traded in Rotterdam as early as January 1630, less than two years after Barbadians had started selling their crop.130 Around the same time, Dutchmen began to visit the new English colony of Providence Island, whose owners in London made it clear at the outset which roles they had in mind for the Dutchmen on the island. They were “only to have interest in land as occupiers and manurers.”131 In other words, they could not act as merchants. Nevertheless, the owners concluded

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bitterly six years later that the commodities of the island were being carried away by the Dutch. Ultimately, the lack of English shipping was so acute that the owners ordered the governor and council of Providence to allow the Dutch free trade.132 Apart from their shipping capacity, the Dutch stood out for their wide variety of cheap supplies—especially textiles (including linen, silk, satin, and lace), tools and other hardware, ceramics, and provisions—their willingness to extend credit, and their offer to bear the risk of the cargo themselves, which English planters preferred to the more expensive alternative of shipping the goods to Amsterdam themselves.133 Dutch merchants thus ingratiated themselves in the tiny Leeward Islands of St. Christopher and Montserrat, 65 and 39 square miles, respectively, in size. St. Christopher (or St. Kitts) was known for its superior tobacco crop.134 Founded in 1624, the English “plantation” was sandwiched between two French settlements, where the Dutch kept most of their storehouses in the 1630s, although they also shipped off much English produce.135 Dutch storehouses, each three or four stories high, sprang up, too, on Montserrat, although not until the first Anglo-Dutch war, when merchants from St. Eustatius sent numerous boats and sloops to the island. Roger Osborne, the Irish-born governor of Montserrat, not only connived at but benefited from this trade.136 Tobacco growers flocked to these foreign merchants, who offered one or two years of credit. As a consequence, 100 Montserrat planters—and 146 Antiguan planters—were listed as debtors to the Dutch by 1655.137 Two decades later, the Dutch were still the main carriers of produce from the island.138 Some tobacco planters established direct contacts with Rotterdam. In 1639, English residents of St. Christopher (or St. Kitts) signed a contract with a Rotterdam ship captain who was to sail together with one of his principals to St. Kitts and load a large amount of tobacco, one-third of which was to be disembarked on the Isle of Wight and the remainder in Rotterdam.139 Similarly, John Arnett, a merchant from Barbados, purchased sixty muskets in Rotterdam, which were to be shipped to Barbados and exchanged for 3,300 pounds of tobacco.140 Arnett was among a group of eleven men from St. Kitts and Barbados who found themselves in Rotterdam in 1644, undoubtedly to discuss new arrangements with local merchants.141 These traveling planters also looked for indentured servants. Service contracts in the Amsterdam notarial archives draw attention to Dutch natives being sent to work on St. Christopher tobacco plantations, and groups of—probably orphan—boys going to Barbados for periods of three to five years to top and tail tobacco or to pick cotton.142 Rotterdam merchants strengthened the mutual ties in the following years by using commercial agents on the English islands. John Gay, for example,

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employed his brother Richard on Barbados, where he owned a storehouse and from where he procured tobacco and cotton.143 Gay was one of many Englishmen settling in Rotterdam in the 1620s and 1630s. Their presence, motivated by economic opportunity and religious tolerance, facilitated trade between the city and Anglo-America. Especially after the Merchant Adventurers relocated from Middelburg to Rotterdam in 1635, shipping to the English West Indies grow. In exchange for ironware, textiles, provisions, sails, and ropes, the Adventurers imported tobacco, cotton, sugar, indigo, and yellowwood.144 Amsterdam merchants also sent factors to Barbados, while some Barbadian planters availed themselves of an agent in Amsterdam.145 On the mainland of North America, Dutch traders were mostly interested in the Chesapeake, where they sold a wide array of Dutch commodities, including linen, coarse cloth, brandy, and occasionally slaves.146 Zeeland merchants were the pioneers, but Amsterdam and Rotterdam also involved themselves in the tobacco trade to Virginia, as can be surmised from the indebtedness of Virginia planters to merchants in those ports.147 In addition, New Amsterdam developed into a reliable partner of the Virginians, as local merchants working for Amsterdam or Rotterdam firms fitted out small craft that could visit plantations in Chesapeake Bay and return with tobacco. The leading Amsterdam merchants present in the Chesapeake, Dirck Corssen Stam (b. 1608) and Arent Corssen Stam (1615–1646), both settled in Virginia in the late 1630s and bought 860 acres of land in Elizabeth City County, as well as a parcel of land in James Island.148 These investments laid the foundation for a brisk trade between Virginia and Amsterdam in the years to come, when the Stam brothers shipped more tobacco to Europe than any firm in England. In the year 1641 alone, they transferred upwards of 100,000 pounds.149 Indeed, the Dutch share of the tobacco exports from the Chesapeake was, at least at times, substantial.150 The estimate made in an anonymous English pamphlet that Dutch vessels made up half of all European ships at anchor in Virginia to buy tobacco was, however, an exaggeration.151 At the same time, Dutch trade with Barbados was flourishing. Looking back in 1651, the governor and council of the island paid their respect to the foreigners, who had been regular visitors since the early days of colonization. They argued that “all the antient [sic] inhabitants know very well, how greatly they have been obliged to those of the Low Countries for their subsistence, and how difficult it would have been . . . , without their assistance, ever to have inhabited these places, or to have brought them into order.”152 Historians have gone one step further by asserting that the Dutch role was not limited to the supply of necessities and the purchase of locally produced

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crops. Dutch influence supposedly extended much further.153 The Dutch are the missing link, the deus ex machina, the explanation for why Barbados and several other English and French colonies in the Caribbean were able to create, almost overnight, highly successful sugar industries.154 Having acquired control of the Brazil sugar cultivation, the Dutch transferred their capital, know-how, technology to the foreign West Indies. They thus helped unleash the sugar revolution, which originated in Barbados, and they did it deliberately. As Alan Taylor, historian, writes, “Because Dutch-run plantations alone could not supply the [Amsterdam] refineries, Dutch traders financed the development of sugar plantations and mills on Barbados.”155 The Dutch supposedly taught the planters how to produce sugar, loaned them capital to buy land and equipment and to set up the sugar mills, supplied the slaves who worked the plantations and ground the cane, and shipped the end product to Europe.156 Dutch ships, to be true, frequently called at the English colonies, supplying myriad commodities on credit. When no more than a few English ships appeared in the West Indies during the civil war, Dutch vessels and their cargoes often saved the day.157 It is also clear that the horses that served as draft animals on the plantations often came off Dutch ships.158 Likewise, the furnaces used for boiling cane juice seem to have been built of Dutch bricks (klinkers), which were often used on Dutch ships as ballast.159 Moreover, work routines and labor divisions were undeniably transferred from Pernambuco to Barbados, although most likely without direct Dutch involvement.160 But it is doubtful whether capital goods such as sugar mills and cauldrons were supplied in great number. There is, in fact, hardly any proof for this hypothesis. On the contrary, the Dutch archives reveal that textiles and provisions predominated in the holds of Caribbean-bound ships and that hardware formed only a negligible part of outgoing cargoes.161 A crucial ingredient in the theory about the Dutch transfer of the sugar industry is the volume of their slave supplies. But evidence is lacking for the traditional hypothesis that the Dutch sold large numbers of Africans in the early stages of English sugar cultivation.162 During the crucial Barbadian startup years as a sugar producer, beginning in 1639, the Dutch were still struggling to send slaves to Brazil, as discussed previously. In addition, the Dutch slave trade was a monopoly of the WIC, whose board did everything in its power to send bonded Africans to its prize colony in Brazil. The company allowed shipments of Africans to foreign colonies only after the start of the Brazilian revolt in 1645, by which time sugar cultivation on Barbados had already taken off.163 In December of that year, the High Council in Brazil even recommended selling slaves preferably in Barbados because they

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were in high demand there and would earn the most money.164 Another four months later, the Dutch director-general in Elmina suggested making Barbados an alternative destination for captives.165 Nevertheless, few WIC ships or Dutch smugglers sailed to the island with human cargoes in the years ahead. Only three cases have been documented for the mid-1640s.166 Nor were the Lesser Antilles the recipients of many smuggled Africans or slaves taken from Iberian prizes after 1645—these were almost exclusively sold to Spanish colonies.167 Furthermore, the capacity of the Dutch to supply slaves was seriously affected by the loss in 1648 of Luanda, the main source of African labor. Not until the latter days of the Dutch period in Brazil are there signs of a restructuring of the Dutch slave trade that benefited the English colonies,168 and by then, the enforcement of the Navigation Acts made shipments to these colonies a hazardous affair.169 All things considered, it would seem that, in the early stages of colonization, the English slave trade to Barbados must have been more significant than most historians have realized.170 Twenty English slave voyages to Barbados have been documented for the 1640s, although little is still known about the early years of the decade. Reports by Dutch merchants and governors in Africa show, however, that the English frequently bought slaves at Calabar and supplemented their human cargoes on other parts of the coast before sailing to Barbados.171 Furthermore, information supplied by the governors of Dutch Elmina implies that the estimated yearly average of slave imports into the British Caribbean could well have been carried only by English ships during the years 1645–1647. The Dutch also counted a total of seventyfive English slavers on the Gold Coast alone from 1652 to 1657.172 I therefore concur with John McCusker and Russell Menard, who argue that the sugar boom in Barbados was not the work of the Dutch. They suggest that English merchants and local families who had settled on the island in the early years of colonization were responsible for the proliferation of the sugar estates on the island, starting in the 1640s. From modest beginnings, the families had saved money producing cotton and tobacco, and used it to invest in sugar plantations.173 The main difference between the Leeward Islands, where the Dutch did play a more comprehensive role, and Barbados was the initial lack of a high-quality staple, followed by the rapid transition in Barbados to a sugar economy, which attracted scores of English mercantile houses. Consequently, Dutch merchants never enjoyed the opportunity to settle there in appreciable numbers and own warehouses.174 Nevertheless, the Dutch did help Barbados during the formative years of the colony. Recognizing their role, but intent on earning customs duties, the governor of the island introduced a tax on foreign vessels in 1634 of

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20 shillings and 7 percent on all goods they sold. In order to fill his depleted treasury, King Charles I followed up this measure by ordering ships that shipped English tobacco directly to foreign ports to pay the proper duty.175 In Virginia, the Dutch presence was large enough for the authorities in England to require as early as 1627 that all vessels leaving the colony sail first to London. In the years 1637, 1638, and 1641, the English government ordered the governor and council of Virginia to curb the trade with the Dutch, except in times of serious economic problems.176 Because the commercial and financial activities of the Dutch met a widespread need, such instructions were usually issued in vain. Noncompliance was the rule. When London merchants, shortly after the civil war came to an end, lobbied for measures to curtail Dutch commerce, they met with protests from the Virginia Assembly and Governor William Berkeley, who maintained that the Dutch had rescued the colony during the war.177 The passing of the Navigation Acts by English Parliament unhinged some of the close ties between the Dutch and settlers all over Anglo-America. In itself, the first Act of 1651 was a moderate mercantilist measure that mandated that colonial products could be transported to England, Ireland, or other English domains only in ships owned by Englishmen and that those ships had to sail directly to their destination. But the stipulation that goods could only be shipped to ports in the English realm directly from where they were manufactured made shipments of most products from the Dutch Republic illegal.178 The Navigation Acts were a heavy blow for a man like Aelbrecht Cockx (1616–1656) from Rotterdam. The son of a shipmaster, Cockx traded mainly with the New World, although he was also involved in some ventures to Madeira and North Africa.179 Mainly interested in importing tobacco, he maintained contacts with merchants in Amsterdam, the center of the Dutch tobacco trade,180 and freighted ships to St. Kitts, Barbados, and the Chesapeake, on which he often sailed himself. In the 1640s, he dropped this hands-on approach and employed a commercial agent on St. Kitts and shared another one on Barbados.181 Apart from dry goods, Cockx transported indentured servants to the English islands, on one occasion picking up 160 of them in Scotland en route to Barbados.182 Although he did not become wealthy, Cockx did well for himself. He had a yacht built, owned at least one other ship, and co-owned several others, including the Spiegel, a ship that sailed to Maryland in 1644 with his brother Havik at the helm.183 In that year, Aelbrecht was involved in at least five ships that left Rotterdam for the Americas.184 The enforcement of the Navigation Acts and the first AngloDutch War forced Cockx to make a living in another way. In 1655–1656,

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he took part in a WIC privateering expedition on the African coast. During that venture, he died in Gabon and was buried in that remote corner of the Atlantic world.185 Other Dutch merchants trading with the English islands also suffered because of the Navigation Acts, especially because the government in London backed up its measure by sending seven war ships and twelve armed merchantmen that captured at least nineteen Dutch ships at or near Barbados. 186 A few years later, in 1655, an English squadron surprised another two dozen Dutch merchantmen off Barbados. They were among the three hundred ships, most of them Dutch, seized at English islands in the 1650s for contravening the new act.187 These captures may have scared off some Dutch merchants but by no means all, if only because the ships confiscated in 1655 were forfeited after a jury on Barbados found “for the strangers against Parliament and state.”188 In general, the Dutch trade persisted, both in Barbados and the Leeward Islands, where English colonists worked hard to preserve their ties with the Dutch while the Restoration government sought to eliminate them. In 1654, enough people “of the Dutch Nation” lived on Barbados to be granted the privilege of meeting for religious worship on Sundays.189 Ironically, the second Anglo-Dutch War produced shortages and economic crises that encouraged the continuation of Dutch trade.190 Over time, however, merchants from the United Provinces began to comply with the Navigation Acts. They could no longer turn to Dutch agents on the island but had to rely on English factors or Dutchmen who had become denizens of the English empire. They also contacted English ship captains to take in their cargoes, had their ships transfer cargoes in London or the outports, and sent their vessels under the disguise of English ownership with an English captain and crew.191 In addition, of course, they continued direct trade, which was now illegal but could still be rewarding. The Navigation Acts also affected Dutch shipping to North America, albeit largely after the English conquest of New Netherland. Shipments of merchandise from Amsterdam to Fort Orange, the former Dutch stronghold on the upper Hudson River, continued until the late 1680s and started to taper off only in the 1690s.192 More important, direct trade between the Republic and New York resumed soon after the English invasion of 1664. In view of the lack of supplies from England and the desire of the residents of New York to maintain the link with Amsterdam, the authorities in London started issuing permits for Dutch ships to conduct trade in former New Amsterdam. What is more, successive governors of New York looked the other way when additional Dutch ships dropped anchor. After the Dutch

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reconquest of New York had been reversed in 1674, Anglo-Dutch trade in New York increasingly complied with the Navigation Acts. Most ships now sailed to and from Amsterdam through the outport of Dover, where they cleared customs. They would return with goods consigned to English and Dutch merchants. New Yorkers, Dutchmen, and Englishmen joined hands as investors in these ventures.193 The hypothesis about the key Dutch role in ushering in a sugar boom in the Caribbean does hold up for the French colonies. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch dominance of early French colonial trade was undisputed.194 Merchants from the Zeeland ports of Middelburg and Vlissingen were particularly active in the French Caribbean. One shipmaster from Zeeland may even be considered responsible for the start of tobacco cultivation in St. Christophe, the French colony on St. Kitts.195 And in Amsterdam, traders had correspondents among the French population, not just the Dutch.196 The relations between the Dutch and the French settlers were placed on a regular footing after the Dutch conquest of neighboring St. Eustatius in 1636.197 Four years later, the captain-general of the colony, Phillippe de Longvilliers de Poincy, signed a contract with Zeeland merchants to have the colony supplied with all necessities.198 A plantation fire, which probably broke out in the boiling room of a sugar mill in 1663, destroyed over sixty well-stocked Dutch warehouses, with losses amounting to more than 2 million livres worth of goods.199 French historians, likewise, credit the Dutch for having helped Guadeloupe and Martinique through the difficult early plantation years.200 The governor of Guadeloupe remarked in 1665 that many of the best sugar plantations owed their existence to the advances made by the Dutch. No fewer than 637 residents of the island were indebted to these foreigners.201 Similarly, the arriving lieutenant general of the French West Indies found Martinique excessively indebted to the Dutch.202 Apart from Dutch merchants fitting out ships that plied the ocean,203 French tobacco growers frequently traveled to the United Provinces to cultivate ties in the years 1630–1634.204 These planters were not looking for servants, which, as a rule, came from France itself. Nonetheless, one French military official did leave from Martinique for the Dutch Republic in 1649 to import indentured servants, returning the next year with nine or ten people.205 The Dutch, however, almost completely controlled the slave trade to the French colonies in the 1660s (appendix A).206 So many Africans were landed in the French islands that the holds of the ships were too small in 1664–1665 to carry all the sugar received in payment.207 The sole two French vessels arriving with Africans during this decade were actually both Dutch vessels in disguise, having first left from

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Dutch ports.208 The amount of sugar received for slaves even prejudiced Dutch captains against the planters in early Dutch Suriname. When the captains of two slave ships that arrived in Suriname in 1669 found out that planters could not pay them in sugar, they threatened to sail away to the French colonies with a total of 450 Africans.209 The Dutch supplied all that the planters needed to start the sugar revolution. In addition to slaves, they provided credit, imported horses for use on the sugar plantations and introduced technical know-how. Curaçao supplied large numbers of oxen and horses to the French colonies until 1670. The Dutch island contributed in particular to the development of St. Christophe, providing the horses that drove five of the six sugar mills by 1658.210 Artisans who had left Dutch Brazil in 1654 taught the French how to assemble the metal cylinders that crushed the cane and the boilers in which the cane juice was purified. They also instructed the French in making the molds in which the sugar syrup crystallized and making white sugar from muscovado (unrefined brown sugar).211 Even Dutch soldiers exiting Brazil played their part in the nascent sugar industry of the French Caribbean. In June 1654, sixty-four of them arrived in the nick of time on Grenada, just as the threat of indigenous attacks had made the French settlers decide to abandon the island. Dutch military aid enabled them to stay and transform the island into a sugar colony.212 The gradual breakaway of the colonies from metropolitan control in midcentury had not passed unnoticed by the French crown. Although Minister Colbert was especially keen on ending the trade with the Dutch, that “nation of herring mongers, of cheese vendors.”213 He estimated that, of the 150 ships conducting trade in the French West Indies in 1662, no more than three or four were French.214 The foundation in May 1664, by royal decree, of the French West India Company signaled the resolve of French authorities to begin ousting the Dutch. But the French did more than assign a monopoly on colonial trade to a new company. Their merchants actually involved themselves in shipping goods to the colonies, and the number of ships built increased dramatically.215 Only under these circumstances could the mercantilist attempt to cut out the Dutch have an effect, although not without creating serious problems in the colonies. The total ban on Dutch ships, introduced in 1664, did not work, as the French authorities acknowledged by allowing ships from the Dutch Republic two years later to trade after paying a 5 percent duty.216 By the end of the decade, however, French tariff walls were so high that they hampered Dutch merchants, who now had to pay 10 percent of import and export duties to the French West India Company.217 Still, what had previously been legal trade continued in covert ways. In 1670,

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a judicial investigation in Guadeloupe revealed that vessels from St. Eustatius were still exchanging European products for sugar and rum; two Dutchborn residents on the French island functioned as intermediaries.218 The royal ban on trading with the Dutch, initially issued under the pretext of a plague epidemic in Amsterdam, led to regular revolts, first in Martinique (1665–1667) and some years later in Saint-Domingue (1670–1671), where Dutch merchants stirred up the settlers.219 Many men did not need any prodding. Their resentment of the French company monopolies was such that they called their condition “white slavery.”220 After an accommodation was reached with officials, the revolts finally subsided.221 Left with no alternatives, the Dutch merchants requested that the States General lodge a protest with the French king over the loss of many valuable ships and cargoes, but eventually they gave up.222 The effects were disastrous, claimed Jacques Savary, a merchant who earned fame for his trade manual Le Parfait Négociant (1675). Not only did some of the principal merchants of Middelburg and Vlissingen go bankrupt, over thirty sugar refineries were ruined in Amsterdam alone, or at least Savary claimed.223 The French embargo did have a pernicious effect on Dutch trade, although Savary exaggerated. In practice if not in theory, the Dutch maintained their commercial presence on the French islands, which was not even ended by the six-year Franco-Dutch War that began in 1672. Unlike the Dutchmen in France, those on the French islands were not to be expelled, King Louis XIV wrote to the governors-general of the islands.224 Still, the ousting of the Dutch was bound to happen. After the Peace of Nijmegen (1678), French authorities successfully eliminated the Dutch intermediaries. The nightmare of a character in a praatje from 1665, written before de Ruyter’s restoration of the Dutch position in West Africa was known, thus came true: “Now that we have lost New Netherland and Guinea,” the man had exclaimed, “and the French aim to ban Dutch trade with the Caribbean island, where shall we sail!”225 The answer was not long in coming: Spanish America.

Trade with the Spanish Colonies By contrast with the English colonies, Dutch merchants avoided Spanish America for a long time. Not until the Treaty of Münster (1648) did Dutch ships venture to the many ports of the Spanish Caribbean. Both Dutch entrepreneurs and Spanish authorities immediately realized that the Dutch could assume control of the Spanish colonial trade.226 The slave trade, in particular, offered attractive prospects. Portuguese merchants had traditionally shipped Africans to the Spanish colonies, but their trade came to an abrupt halt

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after the successful revolt of Portugal against Spain in 1640. The monopoly contracts (asientos) to supply slaves gave way to individual licenses.227 When that solution did not work, carrying slaves was assigned to the Seville guild of merchants, but this also failed. Dutch merchants discovered this niche soon after the Peace of Münster, organizing fifty-one direct slave voyages to destinations in the Spanish empire in the period 1651–1670 (see appendix B). In addition, they set up sixty-eight slave voyages to Curaçao, which came to function as a way station for the slave trade to Spanish America.228 During these two decades, then, six Dutch slave expeditions on average were organized to Spanish American ports. The Dutch thereby dominated the supplying of slaves to the Spanish empire; only forty-three voyages organized by non-Dutchmen were recorded for these years. It took some time for Dutch supplies to find Spanish demand. The first ship chartered for this purpose, the Propheet Daniel, shared some of the features of successful Dutch ventures in the years to come. Although it departed from Amsterdam in 1649, the ship captain was a Spanish native, named Pedro García Billegas, and another Spaniard, Francisco Vaz Pinto, was also on board. Numerous merchants invested in the expedition—including Gerrit van Papenbroeck, VOC director; Abraham de Visscher, WIC director; and Guillelmo Bartolotti, a wealthy banker—but the eventual outcome must have deterred most of them.229 After crossing the ocean with slaves bought at Ardra, the ship had to be keelhauled and caulked in Puerto Rico, where the captives were sold at the request of the governor of the island. The residents of Santo Domingo then intervened, accusing the sailors of piracy and arguing that the organizers of the venture were Jews. As a consequence, the ship was confiscated.230 The intense traffic in human cargoes reflects the overall trend of massive trade between merchants from the Dutch Republic and settlers in Spanish America in the 1650s and 1660s. Both the WIC and other Dutch shipowners ignored the formal ban by Spain on foreign trade with its colonies, claiming that no illicit transactions took place in the Spanish “West Indies.”231 These trading ventures were risky, not only due to the official monopoly of Spain on trade with its American provinces but because the ventures involved shipments of exchange commodities worth tens or hundreds of thousands of guilders. Moreover, the voyages involved multiple stops and varying transactions. Any disruption on the way could therefore cause the whole commercial structure to collapse.232 This was, therefore, the province of men with capital, such as Henrico Mathias (1609–1676). Born in Lütjenburg in Holstein (northern Germany), Mathias arrived in Amsterdam from Hamburg in the late 1640s. His mercantile career took off

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after he married Maria Timmermans in 1649.233 Maria’s father was Pauwel Timmerman (1590–1660), an Amsterdam sugar refiner and WIC director, and her uncle was Samuel Timmerman de Oude, a sugar baker married to Leonora Coijmans, sister of Balthasar, the heir of a famous banking imperium that branched out into the slave trade.234 Such contacts must have been very helpful for Mathias, whose transatlantic enterprises soon multiplied. In the year 1655 alone, he insured cargoes on the following routes: Puerto Rico– Amsterdam, Saint-Malo–Newfoundland–Civita Vecchia, Cádiz–Amsterdam, Faro–Angola–Salvador (Brazil)–Lisbon, and Cádiz–Havana–Veracruz.235 For the African slave trade, Mathias had representatives in Angola, Elmina, Mouri, Cape Coast, Accra, and Cormantine.236 Other commerce that he helped organize connected Bonaire to New Amsterdam and, later, New York City to Curaçao.237 In 1662, Mathias had gathered enough capital to purchase his in-laws’ sugar refinery, and although his new investment burned to the ground in 1670, he was still wealthy enough to be listed as a chief shareholder of the WIC Chamber of Amsterdam.238 Cruising in the Spanish realm was mostly practiced by Amsterdam merchants, among whom Mathias was one of the most prominent. In the mid1660s, for instance, he helped organize the voyage of the Liefde, which conducted trade in several Cuban ports, Caracas, Maracaibo, and Río Hacha. The ship returned to the Republic with 4,000 hides, 3,000 canisters of tobacco, and 30,000 pesos in cash.239 Mathias combined such expeditions with slave voyages. Around the same time that he fitted out the Liefde, he prepared for the departure of El Principe, whose projected route was Angola–Buenos Aires. The ship did arrive with slaves in Buenos Aires, but the Spanish governor confiscated both the ship and the 315 surviving Africans.240 Shipowners such as Mathias and their captains adopted a variety of measures to counter the attendant risks of the trade. The captain of the Dutch slaver El Caballero asked permission to enter the port of Buenos Aires under the pretext of seeking provisions.241 Shipowners also arranged for Spaniards or Dutchmen and Flemings or other foreigners fluent in Spanish to travel as supercargos.242 To the dismay of the Spanish authorities, one Andrés de Rozas, member of the elite military order of St. James, captained a Dutch ship to Buenos Aires in the 1650s.243 Another tried and tested method was to give Spanish, and often unmistakably Catholic, names to the ships. In addition, the Dutch frequently changed ship names and captains at the moment of departure, apparently to render useless whatever information Spanish diplomats in the Republic and their spies possessed.244 The owners of three Dutch slavers that put to sea from Amsterdam in 1659 went even further in their ambition to assume a Spanish guise by taking in Spanish sailors at Tenerife.245

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Ship captains also eagerly jumped at the opportunity to secure Spanish letters of marque after 1648, as issued by King Philip IV and his governor in the Spanish Netherlands. A report from 1651, probably penned by a German, asserted that, once they had obtained a letter of marque, many Dutchmen and Portuguese residents of the United Provinces filled the holds of their ships in Dutch ports, supplemented their cargoes in France and Lisbon, and sailed to Africa to buy slaves. Their goal was to gain access to Spanish America without paying customs duties under the pretext that their ships were prizes taken from the Portuguese or French (both of which were enemies of Spain at the time).246 Three Dutch ship captains attempted to achieve the same goal without a Spanish commission. In the early 1660s, they bought slaves in Luanda and sailed to Buenos Aires with eight hundred Africans on board one of their ships. When they were in view of the port, they engaged in a mock battle with the slave ship, which for good measure had merchants on board from Portugal, with which Spain was still at war. The battle ended in the capture of the slaver by the other two ships; however, the scheme was not completely executed as planned because the Portuguese, helped by a Frenchman, went ashore with two hundred Africans. The governor arrested the Dutch captains and shipped them to Spain, from where they had to be ransomed to receive their freedom.247 The risks could also be reduced by introducing “gifts” for senior officials. Two ships from Amsterdam gained access to trade in Portobelo by paying Governor Fernando de la Riva Agüero a bribe of 60,000 pesos in 1658. Usually, smaller amounts of gifts sufficed, such as the 4,000 pesos that were paid in Havana in 1665.248 The owner of some of the ships that carried hush money was Guillaume Belin de la Garde (b. 1620), an Amsterdam merchant and a native of Saint-Malo who also traded frequently with Buenos Aires. Together with Thomas Broes, a fellow merchant, he corresponded with the governor of Buenos Aires and three others in that town.249 One of them was Tomás de Rojas, who acted as broker for several Dutchmen for twelve years until he was jailed. After paying a fine of 1,300 pesos, he was a free man again.250 Although some merchants allegedly made use of falsified licenses,251 it was much more common to find ways to obtain real licenses in either Cádiz or the Canary Islands, the two gateways to the Spanish Indies. Cádiz supplanted Seville in the seventeenth century as the port through which the Spanish fleet trade with America was funneled. Foreigners had a large stake in this trade, but they could only take part by working through Spanish freighters while still carrying the risk themselves.252 Some Dutchmen had participated in the carrera de Indias during the war, but it was not until the Peace of

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Münster that they began operating in Cádiz on a large scale. Already by fall 1649, their imports were worth 6 million pesos.253 Cornelius Suijskens (1634–1679) settled in Cádiz in the 1660s, where he was naturalized in 1666, but he never gave up his Dutch business contacts. Among his correspondents was his childhood friend, Philips van Hulten (c. 1631–1692), whom he supplied with indigo and other tropical crops.254 Van Hulten was deeply involved in Atlantic commerce, collaborating regularly with Henrico Mathias. A ship that he had helped load was once denied entrance to the Spanish West Indies, which forced the captain to cross the ocean again with a full cargo and anchor in Cádiz. The crew handed the goods to Suijskens, who had them transferred to the ships chartered by a Basque merchant who had just secured a license for three ships for Buenos Aires. This venture proved to be successful, resulting in a return cargo for Van Hulten and company of 20,000 hides and a large batch of silver.255 On another occasion, Suijskens seems to have arranged for a license that legalized the voyage of a 600-ton ship owned by a group of merchants that included Van Hulten, which was to sail in the company of the Spanish galleons to the Americas.256 Merchants from the Spanish Netherlands helped the Dutch bridge the cultural and linguistic gap with the Spanish world, as they had before 1621. Flemings were always involved in Amsterdam ventures to the Americas by way of Cádiz. Jan Bollaert from Antwerp was the co-owner of a ship that returned from the Spanish colonies with 100,000 pesos, which two Flemish supercargos had received in payment for their merchandise in Lima.257 Bollaert also fitted out three ships for trade in the Spanish Caribbean in 1664, along with a few Flemish traders in Cádiz and two Dutch merchants. One of these “Dutchmen” was Jacques Alexander Beni, who had lived in Cádiz for eight years and had laid the groundwork for this venture by striking deals with the governors of Cuba and Campeche.258 Another Antwerpbased merchant named Albert Janssen signed a contract with a group of Amsterdam merchants in the same year. He obtained licenses for two ships bound for Buenos Aires through a correspondent in Madrid.259 Similarly, Dunkirk-born Pedro Colarte performed a variety of financial services for Dutch merchants pursuing trade between Cádiz and the Spanish colonies.260 The Dutch also availed themselves of ports in the Canary Islands in their traffic with Spanish America. The Canarian link dated back at least to the 1590s, when Dutch ships called at the archipelago on their way to Brazil,261 although Dutch trade with the Canaries did not amount to much in the period between the truce and the Peace of Münster.262 Within four years of the Peace of Münster, however, the Spanish consul in Amsterdam reported that the Dutch were conducting trade in the Canaries after paying bribes and

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exchanging Dutch goods for colonial products supplied from the Americas by Spanish vessels.263 The Dutch presence continued to grow in the years to come.264 The use of the Canary Islands as a launching pad for trade with the Spanish colonies was made easier by the decision of the Spanish crown in 1649 to grant the Canaries the right to export a maximum annual amount of 700 toneladas (or 644,000 kilograms) in goods (raised in 1657 to 1,000). Products leaving the islands, it was stipulated, could be shipped only in bottoms built in the Canaries or in Biscay. If the Dutch wished to abide by the rules, therefore, they had to arrange for shipments in Spanish vessels.265 In reality, they used their own ships. Although some ships sailed to unspecified Caribbean destinations,266 most had instructions to gain access to one or more specific ports, especially Caracas and Havana. One of the pioneering ships was the St. Pieter, which set sail in 1649 from Amsterdam to Caracas by way of the Canary Islands and returned directly to Amsterdam.267 For the purpose of trade in Cuba, Dutch merchants secured registers (or licenses) in name of Canary residents with whom the Amsterdam shipowners corresponded. A register was usually a permit to sail to Havana with Canary wine, but Havana was not the final destination. A new license for trade in other parts of Spanish America could be obtained there, allowing the voyage to continue.268 Sailing without a license was not recommended, and ideally the license was on board by the time the ship left the Republic, a lesson lost on the owners of the Nieuw Stadhuis van Amsterdam, which was arrested in Santa Cruz in 1657 en route to Caracas and the Spanish Main. The owners lost the entire cargo.269 Some commercial expeditions fitted out in Amsterdam can hardly be designated as Dutch. The owners of the Hope, which traded in Trinidad, Cumaná, and Trujillo (Honduras) in 1657–1658, were three English merchants from London, two Portuguese Jews residing in the same city, and two inhabitants of Amsterdam: John Tilly of Amsterdam, an Irish merchant, and John Chanterwell, a former resident of London. Disguised as a Spanish ship, and with a crew that included Spaniards, Dutchmen, and Irishmen, the ship was seized by the English on its return to Amsterdam.270 Amsterdammers, Flemings, and Londoners were not the only initiators of this trade. Spanish subjects from the Iberian Peninsula, the Canary Islands, and the colonies were also active, sailing to Amsterdam with great regularity. Captain Pedro Rodríguez Henríquez from Seville chartered a Dutch ship in 1651 for a voyage to the Spanish Caribbean by way of the Canaries.271 Another captain, Antonio de Vasconcelos from the Canaries, was in Amsterdam in 1658 to seal a deal with Jan Broersz and Isaacq Hermans, two local merchants who planned to send a ship from the Canary Islands

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to the Spanish West Indies. The cargo would be send under Vasconcelos’s name.272 In 1661, Geronimo de Herrera y Leiva from Tenerife bought a ship in Amsterdam together with a local Italian merchant with the knowledge that he would get a register for the Canaries.273 In that same year, Tristán Muños de Ladesma from Caracas arrived in Amsterdam and arranged for a ship to be sent to La Guaira by way of the Canaries. Money borrowed from Henrico Mathias enabled the man to pay for the cargo.274 The link with Cuba was facilitated by creoles from the island traveling on board the Dutch ships. In 1663, Juan Fias from Bayamo, Cuba, sailed on the Esperanza, which was to cross the Atlantic from the Canaries with luxury goods to his home town or another Cuban port.275 Likewise, two Cubans traveled on board the Santa Agueda in 1665 after Juan Esteban Guillen from Tenerife had assured Amsterdam merchants that he had a register for Havana.276 In the second half of the 1660s, the Canaries lost their significance as a market for Dutch merchants and as a transit point for Dutch trade with Spanish America due to increased competition from English and French merchants. Dutch Canarian trade had shrunk considerably both in volume and value by 1667–1668, two years for which the Spanish consul in Amsterdam collected data.277 Another reason for this decline was the choice made by Amsterdam shipowners in the mid-1660s to no longer open up the Spanish American markets by means of direct trade from the United Provinces, instead availing themselves of the island of Curaçao. The commercial ripening of Curaçao, a colony that had been economically unviable during the first two decades of Dutch rule, enabled shipowners in the Republic to reduce the risks of their Spanish American trade. Instead of long voyages with multiple stops that might end in the confiscation of ship and cargo, they directed their ships to Curaçao, from where other, smaller vessels shipped the cargo to the customers. In return for their goods, the Dutch received indigo from Guatemala, where in 1660 two residents were sentenced to death and one to life in jail for trading with the Dutch.278 But cacao was the main item imported from Spanish America, and especially from Venezuela, the largest global producer of the crop. We first come across the Curaçao cacao connection in early 1656, when the carrera de Indias was in disarray following the English conquest of Jamaica. Amsterdam merchants took advantage of this by sending shiploads full of cacao to Spain, explaining to Spanish officials that they had procured the crop from Curaçao, adding for good measure, but dishonestly, that cacao was cultivated there.279 At the same time, trade between Curaçao and Portobelo, in the southwestern corner of the Caribbean, became big business. This was an attractive site to conduct trade because it was, and had

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been for many years, the venue where the trade fairs were held and Spanish products exchanged for silver and produce. The initiative was taken by a Spaniard, who suggested to Governor Beck in 1657 that slaves should be sold in Portobelo to blaze a trail by which the Spanish would come and trade for captives in the future.280 Within four years, the Curaçaoans spoiled the market in Portobelo, and the audiencia president of Panama had no doubt who were to blame: Curaçao’s Jews, who owned, he said, three hundred (trade) houses on the island.281 By 1670, Curaçao had become a successful entrepôt that was becoming more and more attractive to European merchants. The Spanish consul in Amsterdam reported that “[t] trade from here with the Indies via Curaçao is continuing, and increasing in such a manner that the goods sent to those Indies by that way are not much less than those sent from Cádiz, which trade is being lost, and as I understand on reliable authority, some merchants of Cádiz have ordered their correspondents in this town to send merchandise to the Indies by way of Curaçao on their account.”282 One key to the success of Dutch merchants in northern South America was their ability to supply large numbers of slaves on a regular basis. Henrico Mathias and Francisco Feroni organized multiple voyages at this critical juncture to connect Amsterdam to Caracas and Portobelo. Mathias was sole owner of Bontekoe (which arrived in Curaçao in 1657) and co-owner of St Pieter (Buenos Aires, 1658), Liefde (Curaçao and Portobelo 1659), Juffrouw Catharina (Curaçao, 1665), Leonora/Leeuwinne (Curaçao, 1669), Gerechtigheid/ Justitie (Curaçao, 1672), Gekroonde Liefde (Curaçao, 1673), and Eendracht (Curaçao, 1674).283 Together with his partners (Guillaume Belin la Garde and Philips van Hulten), Mathias had an agent on Curaçao.284 He also maintained close relations with Mathias Beck, the governor of Curaçao, and it is not entirely coincidental that Beck’s successor, Ludovicus Boudewijns, was Henrico’s brother-in-law. As a major WIC shareholder, Henrico must have exerted some influence. His efforts were in vain, however, because Boudewijns died five days after his arrival on the Caribbean island.285 Feroni was member of a group of merchants organizing the asiento trade in the 1660s. When the Spanish crown resuscitated the asientos in 1662, it joined forces with two well-reputed merchants from Genoa, Domenico Grillo and Ambrosio Lomelino. In turn, they signed contracts with the WIC and the Royal African Company, which committed them to send slaves to Curaçao, Jamaica, and Barbados. Agents of the asentistas would transport the Africans from there to the ports of Spanish America.286 Feroni acted as an agent of the asentistas in Amsterdam and as such occupied himself, in tandem with some other merchants, with fitting out and

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provisioning the slave ships while the WIC took care of the actual purchase of slaves in Angola.287 Thus began a thriving slave trade to the Spanish colonies. In the seventy years after 1658, the Dutch shipped an estimated 100,000 Africans to Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, and Panama, either directly or—more commonly— by way of Curaçao.288 Only a minority of these slaves were imported from the Gold Coast, the area to which the Dutch were mostly confined in Africa after losing Luanda and São Tomé. In the 1660s, the Bight of Benin, where the WIC now possessed a factory at Ardra, became the main source of slaves. Other captives came from the coast north of Luanda, where the Dutch had created a commercial network in the 1650s. By 1670, some 3,000 captives passed through the Dutch factory at Loango.289 Although the voluminous trade with the Spanish Main compensated in the short term for the loss of intensive Dutch commercial traffic with the French and English Caribbean, the Spanish American economy failed to keep pace with the English and French islands. Consequently, the demand for slaves and commodities showed no rapid increase and the development of Curaçao was kept in check.290 Then again, even at the height of its involvement in Spanish American commerce, the capacity of Curaçao was stretched to its limits. The island was hardly prepared for the large influx of Africans. So many slaves arrived on the island in 1669 that virtually all the cattle would have to be slaughtered to feed the Africans. To spare the cows and goats on the island, the WIC sent salted meat and bacon from Amsterdam.291 In addition to the numerous captives introduced for the asiento, an appreciable number of Africans was sold by the slave traders for their own account. To curb this practice, the WIC directors in Amsterdam decided in 1671 to start branding slaves: the adults on the right part of the chest and the children on the upper left arm.292 The transported Africans, as this measure indicates, were no more than commodities to the mercantile Dutch. As such, they had to be fed and treated well, both during the voyage and after disembarkation.293 That also applied to those Africans whom the asiento agents refused to buy because of purported physical defects. As early as 1670, a consortium of Englishmen, based in London, Boston, and Rotterdam, contracted with the WIC to import these manquerones from Curaçao in exchange for New England goods.294

Domestic Rivals in Foreign Guises In their trade with Spanish America, the Dutch combined many methods to circumvent the official ban on foreign trade. The ultimate solution was

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the transformation of Curaçao from a sleepy island to a bustling colony that served as a transit center. The merchants who made Curaçao their commercial headquarters could use the asiento as a cover for their business, just as Spanish licenses had opened doors for the long-distance Dutch traders with the Spanish colonies. By contrast with the Spanish realm, licenses were uncommon in the French and English Atlantic until the onset of mercantilism in the 1650s and 1660s. The Dutch consequently resorted to some of the same strategies they had worked out for the Spanish American trade, bringing “gifts” and using legal loopholes whenever they could. Commerce with Virginia and Barbados was, therefore, not severed but was organized in a different way.295 Dutch merchants, for instance, would send a cargo to England, where one of their associates entered the goods in the name of an Englishman so as to avoid “alien” duties. Both on the outgoing and return voyages, the ship would preferably stop at a small outport, where the customs officials were bribed, allowing most goods to go untaxed. In this way, Dutch merchants continued to compete with English merchants in some English colonies.296 On top of foreign commercial restrictions, Dutch merchants also had to cope with the monopolistic regulations imposed by the WIC. The company could not handle its commercial responsibilities, failing to supply exchange commodities in a timely manner and not transporting enough civilian employees. These shortcomings were serious impediments to trade in Africa, opening the door to English rivals.297 The war with the Iberian foes was the chief cause of the poor commercial performance of the WIC. Nine years into its existence, the expensive war effort proved such a burden for the company that capital was lacking to finance some of the large planned commercial expeditions. It was for this reason that the States General, on which the WIC came to rely for subsidies, forced the WIC to abandon parts of its monopoly immediately after the conquest of Pernambuco, opening the trade with the new colony first to shareholders and then to all interested Dutchmen and Luso-Brazilians. Private individuals made little use of this option in the first years because of the war and the prohibitive export duties. But soon a change set in, due to the expansion of Dutch-controlled territory, the reduction of freight rates, and the expanded scope for private trade. Although the WIC directors were confident that their commercial primacy would not be challenged, private traders dominated the Brazil trade before long.298 They constructed warehouses in the port towns and began sending large amounts of sugar and brazilwood to the Republic. At home, a passionate paper war broke out over the advantages and drawbacks of monopoly and about who stood to benefit from the monopolies. Clinging to monopolies that enabled merchants from their province access to

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New World riches that would otherwise have been hard to obtain, the WIC Zeeland Chamber vehemently opposed any breaches. The likeminded shareholders in the province of Utrecht resented the alleged parasitical behavior of the private merchants, who did not participate in the WIC and reaped the commercial benefits of the colony the company had established in Brazil.299 The issue came to a head due to a campaign in 1636 to raise private money by targeting shareholders. The capital thus gathered could help improve the WIC’s dismal financial condition and, more pressingly, support the war effort in Brazil. Shareholders, however, did not brim with enthusiasm because free trade remained intact, which meant, they alleged, that the company would still lack in cash and credit.300 The opponents of free trade, supported by WIC men in Brazil, achieved a temporary victory when the States General sided with them and restored the monopolies in late 1636. Only in this way, the states hoped, would the company be able to run the colony. Sixteen months later, in April 1638, the states reversed their decision by opening up trade to Brazil again, albeit not without compromise. The slave trade would remain a WIC monopoly and free traders were bound to own shares in the company and could trade only in proportion to the value of their shares. WIC income would thus be guaranteed.301 The trend toward free trade, however circumscribed, was now irreversible, and two years later, merchants trading between the United Provinces and New Netherland became the beneficiaries of free trade as well. The next concession to private traders, in 1646, was the right to fit out their own ships. Until then, they had been forced to use the holds of WIC ships.302 The last monopoly to go was the slave trade in 1648.303 While they lasted, the WIC monopolies bred illicit trade in all the Dutch colonies. The crews of ships arriving in New Amsterdam from Dutch ports often threw chests overboard so they could be towed abreast by other ships. Likewise, ships setting out on the return leg left beaver skins on desert islands off the coast.304 Smuggling assumed another guise in Brazil. High winds or rough seas served as a pretext for merchantmen arriving from the Netherlands to cast anchor in the outer roadstead. At dusk, small boats would come alongside and take a part of the commodities consigned to the free traders. These cargoes were then unloaded to the north or south of Recife. The ship captains and boatswains of the ocean-going vessels, who were obviously in on the conspiracy, assured authorities that the goods must have been stolen or disappeared otherwise at disembarkation; the bills of lading had mysteriously evaporated.305 At times, enslaved Africans also vanished upon disembarkation in Brazil or after being taken ashore. The standard explanation given to cover up their theft was that they had died.306

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The penalties for smuggling were most severe in Elmina, where delinquents not only lost their property and wages but were whipped and sometimes jailed for an extended period.307 It was harder to punish Dutchmen bypassing Elmina to trade on other parts of the African coast. The ship Lammerenbergh and the yacht Suichlam (or Zuiglam) purchased 350 slaves at New Calabar in 1659 without informing the WIC. The Africans on board the yacht were sold in Tobago and Essequibo.308 Commonly, Dutchmen evading WIC monopolies in the African trade worked for foreign monarchs.309 Especially after the start of the revolt in Dutch Brazil in 1645, which reduced WIC shipping, Dutch merchants courted foreign shipowners (and vice versa) in their quest for African riches, employing many Dutch sailors in spite of the official Dutch ban on sailing for foreign countries.310 In 1645, the Fortuyn, flying the flag of the Duke of Courland, appeared on the Gold Coast, but the cargo had been taken aboard in the Dutch Republic and the entire crew and all the officers were Dutch— the captain was even a former WIC servant. The ship and cargo were seized upon its return to the Netherlands but released “out of courtesy and for reasons of state.”311 In 1646, the Swedish ship St. Jacob arrived on the Gold Coast with a crew that was largely Dutch. Its captain, a Dutchman named Arent Gabbes (or Gabbessen; 1609–1651) had gained some experience in the WIC slave trade to Brazil before leaving for Sweden, perhaps because the company directors had accused him of fraud. He moved his family to Sweden and began to trade in Africa under the Swedish flag with a predominantly Dutch crew. In 1649, Gabbes made an agreement with the rulers of Efutu that led to the establishment of a Swedish lodge at Cape Coast.312 The Swedish Africa Company (1649–1663) relied heavily on Dutch cargoes and expertise.313 Henrico Mathias, Guillaume Belin la Garde, and Philips van Hulten were all involved in one way or another.314 The key figure on the ground in Africa was Hendrick Caerloff, born in the German town of Rostock in the early 1620s. After serving the Dutch in São Tomé and Elmina, Caerloff left for Amsterdam in 1649 but returned within a year as director of the Swedish company in Africa. After a row, Caerloff parted company with the Swedes, but he traveled once again to the Gold Coast in 1657, this time with a military commission from the Danish king. He thus helped the Danish Africa Company get its bearings in an enterprise that was Dutch in all but name, with Isaac Coymans as one of the main financial backers. When Caerloff broke with his Danish principals, he testified against Coymans, who was found guilty of high treason, having informed the Danish company of Dutch military plans. Coymans was jailed for six years, fined 20,000 guilders, and exiled from both the United Provinces and the territories ruled by the WIC.315

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Danish merchants had made use of Dutch services before. Amsterdamborn Thieleman Willekens was an old hand in the Dutch slave trade, having lived for four years on the Calabar coast, when he changed his loyalty to Denmark. In 1647, he captained a ship with a Danish commission and sailed to Calabar to buy slaves destined for the Caribbean. Although Willekens completed the leg to Barbados, this appears to have been his only Danish voyage. Due to a storm and leaks in the hold of the ship on his return trip to Glückstadt, he was forced to put into New Amsterdam, where DirectorGeneral Stuyvesant confiscated his ship and cargo.316 One year later, another “Danish” ship was seized on its return, carrying gold and ivory from the Gold Coast to the Dutch Republic, where it had been fitted out. The year 1647 saw at least two French slavers sail on the Gold Coast with Dutch masters, one of them a WIC veteran. The Dutch seized one of these vessels at São Tomé. Another ship captained by a Dutchman was captured in 1648 on the Gold Coast; this was followed six months later by the capture of two other vessels sent by a an Amsterdam merchant, one with a Dutch captain and the other with a Dutch master and twenty-two other Dutchmen on board.317 Likewise, several Dutch merchants were among the freighters of the Spanish ship San Felipe, which left from Sanlucar in Spain for Gambia in 1648 on a slave-trading expedition. On board were a Dutch steersman, captain, and cook.318 In 1650, Portuguese traders relied on two Dutch merchants, Pieter Baudaart from Middelburg and Egbert Schut from Amsterdam, in their quest to import 103 slaves from Benin, who were to be sold in the Caribbean. The ship Goude Fortuijn and the yacht De Elant completed the task with as many as eighty Dutchmen aboard.319 Another vessel leaving from the Netherlands for an African voyage was El Santo Rey Don Ferdinando in 1654. Armed with a Spanish commission, captained by a Dutchman, and carrying twenty-six or twenty-seven Dutch crew members, this ship bought slaves in the Bight of Benin.320 In 1652, Director-General Ruychaver complained from Elmina to the States General about the Dutchmen who eagerly participated in the slave trade of foreign countries “for extraordinary remuneration.” Having acquired their experience in the service of the WIC, they sold it for money “to the ruin of the same.”321 The expertise offered by these Dutch officers and sailors was not limited to navigation. Seasoned in the Africa trade, they knew about prices, products, and the local African names for the items they offered for sale.322 The services provided by, once again, Hendrick Caerloff (admittedly no Dutchman, but one with “Dutch” expertise), for instance, were indispensable to the French West India Company after 1665. From Amsterdam, Caerloff fitted out at least five documented French triangular

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voyages, established a French factory at Offra, and sailed on board some ships to the French Caribbean to take care of business.323 Another former WIC employee who offered his services to the French West India Company was Gerrit van Tets. He had worked in the mid-1640s as a junior clerk (ondercommies) for the Dutch at Fort Nassau and Cape Coast castle and commies at the Shama lodge. After collaborating with Caerloff for several years, van Tets sailed to West Africa for the French West India Company in 1666–1667 and for the Danish African Company in 1668. His return to the Dutch fold was short-lived because he was condemned for fraudulent trade in 1677.324 Dutch rivalry under strange flags faded in the following years because the foreigners could copy the expertise of their Dutch masters and could do without their help. Dutch interlopers who did not seek the umbrella of foreign protection to further their own designs now struck out on their own, especially from Zeeland. The WIC confiscated five of these smuggling ships in the years 1655–1657 and another seven in 1660–1664. The company continued to go after suspected interlopers in the decades that followed.325 Justice was not always served, however. The WIC lacked fast ships equipped to intercept smugglers, nor did its employees in Elmina pursue interlopers wholeheartedly. Many of them, it turned out, had once been smugglers themselves.326 The widespread willingness of WIC men to change their allegiance and join foreign companies was not in evidence only on the shores of Africa. The Swedish colony of New Sweden in present-day Delaware would probably not have gotten off the ground without Dutch investments, commercial expertise, and experience in relations with the indigenous population.327 It would be too simple to label these Dutchmen opportunists and leave it at that. Natives of a republic that was still in its infancy, they felt their first loyalty to a town or small region. Identification with the new polity was therefore not automatic. Creating or embracing opportunities abroad was also not unusual for the subjects of foreign crowns, at least in the first half of the seventeenth century. The increased emphasis on mercantilism began to block such careers as the century advanced, as first indicated by the English Navigation Acts. If the distinction between WIC employees and servants of foreign princes was sometimes hard to detect, the dividing line between proponents of monopoly and free trade was not always clear either. The interests of WIC personnel did not necessarily coincide with the official monopoly— benefiting from the secret information to which they had access, WIC directors were among the principals of the free traders.328 Likewise, by buying shares shareholders were privy to firsthand commercial information about

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the Atlantic world and were able to protect their shady business practices against legal action from the company. Unlike the VOC, the WIC became a special-interest organization for merchants operating in Atlantic waters.329 Interimperial trade was a hallmark of the Dutch Atlantic, flourishing especially after the abolition of most WIC monopolies in the trade with Dutch America. The activities of Dutch merchants in early Virginia were significant, their supplies to—and returning cargoes from—Spanish America were impressive, and their slave trade to the French Caribbean was indispensable in building the French sugar business. In their trade with Africa, the Dutch did not rely on their European counterparts but dealt with African customers and suppliers themselves. Foreign competitors benefited here from the expertise of Dutchmen sidelined by the WIC monopolies. As foreign powers introduced mercantilist measures, backed up by commercial changes, the Dutch Atlantic began to depend more on the exploitation of Dutch colonies than before as plantation economies developed that yielded cash crops. The commerce with foreign colonies did continue, with Curaçao and St. Eustatius functioning as regional entrepôts. But compared to their ubiquitous activities abroad in previous decades, Dutch merchants cast their net less widely than before. They now concentrated on those foreign colonial ports with which they could profitably trade from their Caribbean island bases.

Ch ap ter 6

Migration and Settlement

The seventeenth-century Dutch Atlantic was both a theater of warfare and a commercial bridge linking the continents—it was no highway for European settlers. But that was not for lack of plans. After the Twelve Years’ Truce had come to an end, some Dutchmen encouraged large-scale migration. In view of the overpopulation of the United Provinces, one pamphleteer recommended colonization in the New World, which could serve as an asylum pauperum.1 A protagonist in a 1623 praatje rejected the notion that the Dutch colonies would be devoid of people. That is ridiculous, he said, because the Inquisition will continually send us coreligionists from Catholic lands. They will help enlighten the blind heathens and the Amerindians.2 A quarter century later, it had become clear that settlers were in short supply after all. One of the characters in Haerlems Schuytpraetjen of 1649 insisted that the colony in Brazil could not be saved, even if all the lost territories were restored. Ten thousand migrants were what Brazil needed, and no tax exemption or religious freedom would persuade that many people to leave their native soil. If the WIC were to restore our Brazil to Dutch rule, it could populate the colony only with Frenchmen, Englishmen, Portuguese, and blacks who were not inhabitants of the Republic. The Dutch nation was naturally unfit to create foreign colonies. Behold the Caribbean islands, which were equally open to the Dutch as to the French and English who settled there by the thousands. What kind of colony did the 189

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Dutch have in New Netherland, where they spared no trouble or expense? In size, the protagonist concluded with some exaggeration, it was not even a hundredth of English Virginia. Because migration was not a priority for the WIC, in many cases its directors left the organization to resourceful individuals. But even when it was not involved in setting up overseas settlements, WIC policies affected migration. Opponents of the WIC trade monopoly linked the exclusion of noncompany traders to the aversion of potential migrants to move across the Atlantic. Those Dutchmen who overcame their inhibitions and settled in the Americas found themselves in a world that had familiar features. Crops, laws, holidays, and the pivotal role of the Reformed Church were all reminders of the country they had left behind. They were the building blocks of empire.

Populations, Careers, and Families The character from the praatje was right. No populous Dutch colonies emerged in the Americas. Even Brazil, the colony with most inhabitants, remained small. Although at its height (1640), the population under Dutch control was probably somewhere between 90,000 and 110,000, the overwhelming majority had been conquered in the previous decade.3 Once the anti-Dutch revolt took off, only a fraction remained under Dutch rule. According to a head count, 13,378 resided in Dutch Brazil in September 1645, over half of whom hailed from Europe (table 3).4 Next in size was New Netherland, which had 7,000–8,000 residents by the time of the English conquest of 1664, after a steady growth spurred on by both immigration and natural increase.5 In the earliest years of the WIC, the main settlement at Fort Orange had been home to no more than eight families and ten or twelve sailors in company service, and even by 1650, no more than 2,000 people lived in the entire colony.6 The Suriname planters estimated the population of the colony in 1671 at 3,800, a number that would grow by more than 1,000 in the next dozen years despite mortality and emigration.7 Despite the growth, the capital of Paramaribo lacked all the marks of a city. One arriving governor remarked that it was a sad, neglected, impoverished, and dilapidated locale with no more than a few apartments.8 Remarkable for an empire whose center was among the most urbanized countries in the world, several Dutch colonies did indeed lack a genuine urban environment. In Essequibo, for example, no town would ever emerge.9 Dutchmen settled in small numbers in Guiana and the adjacent area of the Amazon, both claimed by the Habsburg crown but without Iberian settlements. In reality, this was still Amerindian territory. The Dutch were thinly spread across a vast area, although they preferred the western part of Guiana,

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Table 3

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Population of Dutch America

COLONY Brazila

TOTAL YEAR POPULATION EUR OPEANS AFRICANS AMERINDIANS 1640 1645

90,000–110,000 13,378

New Netherlandb 1650 1664

1,500–2,000 7,000–8,000

Surinamec

1671 1684

3,800 5,092

7,124

2,671

3,583

800 811

2,500 4,137

500 144

Tobagod

1662

1,600–1,700

1,200

400–500

Pomeroon & Morucae

1662

2,130

430

1,500

St. Eustatiusf

1665

1,170

330

Curaçaog

1665

600

Essequiboh

1660

300–400

Sabai

1665

236

111

Cayennej

1664

230

100

200

130

a Evaldo Cabral de Mello, Olinda Restaurada: Guerra e Açúcar no Nordeste, 1630–1654 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora ForenseUniversitaria; São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1975), 168; Victor Enthoven, “Dutch Crossings: Migration between the Netherlands and the New World, 1600–1800,” Atlantic Studies 2, no. 2 (2005), 155. b Jaap Jacobs, “In Such a Far Distant Land, Separated from All the Friends: Why Were the Dutch in New Netherland?” in Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley, ed. Jaap Jacobs and L. H. Roper (Albany: SUNY, 2014), 154. c ZA, SZ 2035/225, petition of the inhabitants of Suriname to the States of Zeeland, March 11, 1671; Claudia Schnurmann, Atlantische Welten: Engländer und Niederländer im amerikanisch-atlantischen Raum 1648-1713 (Köln: Böhlau, 1998), 382. d Arie Boomert, “Amerindian-European Encounters on and around Tobago (1498–ca.1810),” Antropológica 97–98 (2002), 128. Hamelberg’s estimate of 7,000 slaves on Tobago in 1665 is far too high; J. H. J. Hamelberg, “Tobago: Een vergeten Nederlandsche kolonie,” Vierde jaarlijksch verslag van Geschied-, Taal-, Land- en Volkenkundig Genootschap, gevestigd te Willemstad, Curaçao (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1900), 18; Cornelis C. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1971), 444. e George Lincoln Burr, “The Guiana Boundary: A Postscript to the Work of the American Commission,” American Historical Review 6, no. 1 (October 1900), 57–58. f Leendert Jan Joosse, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld: Ontmoeting met Afrikanen en Indianen (1600–1700) (Kampen: Uitgeverij Kok, 2008), 351. g Bernard Buddingh’, Van Punt en Snoa: Ontstaan en groei van Willemstad, Curaçao vanaf 1634: De Willemstad tussen 1700 en 1732 en de bouwgeschiedenis van de synagoge Mikvé Israël-Emanuel 1730–1732 (’s-Hertogenbosch: Aldus Uitgevers, 1994), 42. h By one estimate, there were 1,500–1,600 inhabitants in the late 1650s, but it suffered steep population loss due to a famine; Joosse, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld, 376. i Col. Theodore Cary to the Duke of Albermarle, St. Eustatius, August 23, 1665, in W. Noël Sainsbury, CSP, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1661–1668, Preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1880), 319. j The Jewish colony included sixty Europeans and eighty enslaved Africans in 1664; Lodewijk Augustinus Henri Christiaan Hulsman, “Nederlands Amazonia: Handel met indianen tussen 1580 en 1680” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2009), 150. The original Christian colony in Cayenne was made up of thirty to forty settlers, but there are no data for enslaved Africans. I have estimated their number at fifty; NAN, SG 5767, WIC directors J. Rijckaerts and David van Baerle to the States General, Amsterdam, February 21, 1664. Berbice had fewer than one hundred European inhabitants in 1680; Hulsman, “Nederlands Amazonia,” 156.

especially Cayenne and the mouth of the Oiapoque (or Wiapoco) River, where Dutch merchants and colonists displayed virtually uninterrupted activity from 1598 through 1677.10 Both here and elsewhere, Dutch transatlantic migration was so modest that a Dutch prisoner in Chile—a member

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of Hendrick Brouwer’s expedition—admitted that settlers would never go voluntarily; they would have to be tricked.11 Men, one pamphlet asserted, are generally not prepared to leave their homeland unless they are forced out or entertain the hope to improve materially. As a modern sociologist has put it, what motivates people to move is the perceived gap between their current level of satisfaction and the level they expect to attain in a new land.12 As the WIC directors recognized, everyone who wanted to work could find employment in the United Provinces. There was no reason to relocate to a distant land and face an insecure future.13 Moreover, unbeknownst to the directors, real wages were rising for more than a century, starting in the 1570s. Not until the 1680s did they began to decline.14 Potential migrants realized that the grass was not greener on the other side of the ocean (map 4). Even when prices rose during the wars of the 1650s and 1660s, they decided to wait and see, hoping that the economy would soon rebound. Only New Netherland attracted a respectable number of immigrants during these decades. The explanation offered by a contemporary pamphlet for the hesitancy of Dutch farmers to move there was the poor experiences of the Dutch farmers who had settled in the Palatinate, East Friesland, and Brandenburg.15 Their lack of success made potential settlers think twice about migrating an ocean away. One reason why the colonies remained underpopulated was the small number of immigrant women. The first transatlantic colonies were male societies and, in that sense, a continuation of life on board ship.16 Women were sometimes even kept from boarding ships because their presence could allegedly give rise to sexual tensions.17 In 1633, on the eve of the Spanish reconquest, the Dutch colony on St. Martin comprised ninety-five white males and two Dutch women.18 Females were equally rare in early Curaçao, where a new governor disembarked in 1639 with 250 men (partly replacing those who had served their time), increasing the overall male population to 273. Ten women came along as well, but even this modest number was halved within one year because one of them died and four others returned to Europe.19 Women were present in comparably small numbers in the Dutch trading posts in Africa, where it was highly uncommon for WIC personnel to bring their spouses along. The female deficit was not conspicuous in all the colonies. A census carried out in Recife in 1645–1646 recorded 855 men and 452 women (and 397 children). These were all private settlers. Another five hundred women and children were listed as the dependents of WIC servants, and it is safe to assume that women made up at least half of this number. If they all lived in the capital, the total female European presence in Recife must have been around seven hundred.20 Similarly, the 76 males on Statia who refused to

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Map 4. The seventeenth-century Dutch Atlantic

swear allegiance to the English crown after the English conquest of 1665 were accompanied by 42 women and 132 children.21 Women were, however, nowhere better represented than in New Netherland, at least during the last decade of Dutch rule, when families accounted for 70 percent of all settlers.22

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The WIC did not make it easy for women to migrate to the colonies on their own. Women could do so only if they were married. The Chamber of Amsterdam also required the wife to produce proof that her husband had asked her to join him.23 Single women did live in Dutch Brazil, but they tended to be widows, whose number (especially for Germans) grew rapidly after the start of the rebellion and especially following the battles of Guararapes in 1648–49, when approximately 1,550 Dutchmen lost their lives. Several widows were arrested and put in jail when they tried to procure food for their children outside Recife. Nearly all wanted to return to the United Provinces, but few had enough wherewithal for the trip. Some were even required to pay the WIC for debts contracted by their late husbands. The number of orphans in Brazil also increased after 1645. After the orphan masters of Mauritsstad—whose task it was to appoint guardians for orphaned children—acknowledged that they had lost control of the situation, the government named surrogate parents for the orphans, most of whom dwelled in the hospital of Recife for lack of an orphanage.24 Not all women came to the colonies as wives of WIC servants or free settlers. A small minority indentured themselves to male colonists. In 1659, two women entered into contracts with settlers about to leave for the New World. Jannetje Jans hired herself out for two years as a domestic servant to David Dias Anthunes, an Amsterdam merchant who intended to go to Cayenne. He would pay for her passage and her victuals and berth, both during and after the voyage.25 For Sara, a mulatto woman, serving Isaac Serrano’s family was not new. She was contracted as housekeeper on Curaçao for three years, the same work she had performed for nineteen years in the family’s home in Amsterdam.26 Reports about the dangers to which colonists exposed themselves may have kept many women in the Old World from moving to the New World. Of course, crossing the ocean itself was not without its dangers. In 1658, a Dutch ship carrying 160 freemen en route to Nova Zeelandia was captured by the Barbary corsairs, who took the passengers as slaves to northern Africa.27 This scenario was repeated twenty years later. After the six-year war with France had finally come to a conclusion, forty-two men, women, and children embarked in the belief they would be starting a new life in Suriname. All of them, however, were seized by the Barbary corsairs and enslaved in Algiers.28 Diseases were another scourge. A contagious disease decimated the settlers on board a ship bound for the Oiapoque River in 1677; fortythree or forty-four people were buried at sea.29 What also plagued the Dutch colonies was return migration. Family duties, homesickness, and a variety of other circumstances (such as the revolt

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in Brazil) could make migrants cross the ocean again.30 Hans Fredericks, for example, a baker from Curaçao, returned because he had been engaged for some years to a widow in Holland and was afraid she would marry someone else in his absence.31 Nicolaes de Zoutte, a planter, purported to leave Suriname because of the heavy back pains tormenting him and his spouse.32 Moreover, his wife added, the colony “reminds one of Sodom and Gomorra.” Lying, cheating, yelling, insulting, and binging were common practices, and those who did not go along were branded as “telltales and church pillars.”33 Many others put their luck to the test when they first migrated, trying to make a quick fortune and then return home. In New Netherland, the resulting colonial society was in constant flux, with merchants and factors traveling back and forth between the Old World and the New, officials returning after their appointment had come to an end, and farmers and artisans going back as well if the Promised Land fell short of their expectations.34 Although moving back from Recife to the United Provinces was originally fairly easy, it became harder in 1647, when an order was published to the effect that everyone who planned to return was bound to put his name on a list six weeks prior to departure—debtors and criminals would thus be prevented from sneaking out.35 Before a ship weighed anchor, the fiscal, a councilor, and some sergeants would review the passengers on deck, and every nook and cranny was searched for stowaways.36 Once, after sailors had allowed a man and woman to come on board who had neither obtained leave nor put their names on the list, the couple was so afraid of the approaching fiscal that they hid in a barrel. They were later found to have suffocated.37 Among the numerous settlers who nonetheless managed to leave Recife after 1647 were Adriaen Crynen Post and his wife Clara. They reached their native soil in late 1649, only to leave for Staten Island in June 1650.38 It was not exceptional for returnees to discover that they could no longer live in the United Provinces. Isaac de Rasière, who had been the first secretary of the council of New Amsterdam, later resided as a merchant in Brazil with his wife Eva. Forced to return to the Republic after the demise of that colony, the couple once again moved to the Americas in 1669, when they settled in Barbados.39 Some returning migrants put their colonial contacts and expertise to good use. Abraham Drago (1628–1697) lived on Curaçao for four years before returning in 1655 to Amsterdam, where he became one of the most active traders with the island. He also traveled back and forth, encouraging migration by bringing entire families along.40 Other settlers of Dutch America, men and women alike, crossed the ocean repeatedly to maintain and expand their commercial contacts.41

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The migrants who embarked in the Republic to start anew on the other side of the ocean were distinctly urban. Among the first group that disembarked in New Netherland to till the land for six years, there were many without any experience in agriculture. They repatriated even before their contract expired.42 By contrast, merchants, small business owners, and innkeepers were well-represented in Dutch America.43 A plantation-owning minister in Suriname wrote to his uncle that farmers were not even needed. Haymaking and sowing were not required nor could a farmer teach the slaves anything. Instead, the farmer would have to learn planting, felling wood, and rowing from them.44 The skills that were in demand were those of carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, shipwrights, sloop makers, and sawyers.45 Men aspiring to a bureaucratic career in the Atlantic world were rare. Still, there were opportunities for intelligent, hardworking young males, who were provided with room and board and paid reasonably well. In Brazil, where the governor and his council were free to shape the civil service as they saw fit, one could find employment as bookkeeper, clerk, usher, constable, prison guard, and commies. Requiring good oral and written knowledge of Dutch, mathematics, and decent writing skills, the posts of bookkeeper and commies were not within everybody’s reach, but blood ties and friendships helped some settlers get started.46 A pamphlet claimed that friendship with a WIC director was a prerequisite for being nominated for any senior WIC position, both at home and abroad.47 One man who relied on his network of friends was Isaac Sweers (1622– 1673). At the age of eighteen, Isaac, the son of Arent Sweers, a VOC director, was taken under the wing of his brother Salomon, who had made a career in the East Indies. Salomon trained him for six or seven months in copying journals, acts, contracts, wills, and other documents to prepare him for WIC or VOC service. Offered the choice between the post of junior merchant on a ship to Asia or, at the intercession of friends, of supercargo on a ship bound for Brazil, Isaac chose the latter, partly because yet another brother, Abraham, served in that colony.48 From clerk at the government offices in Recife, Isaac rose to become a notary and legal counsel. His subsequent military career, begun in Brazil, culminated in his appointment as vice admiral of the United Provinces.49 Prior training did not hurt, although sometimes all it took to secure a senior appointment in the Atlantic world was to be at the right time at the right place. In New Netherland, Bastiaen Jansz Krol (c. 1595–1674), a cloth worker turned comforter of the sick, entered the civil service in 1624 at Fort Orange in Albany as a WIC commies. He was soon appointed as the director at Fort Orange. In 1632, when Director Pieter Minuit was recalled to the

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Netherlands, Krol became the acting director-general of New Netherland, a position he kept for just over one year.50 Krol’s fast rise would have been impossible, or at least highly exceptional, in Asia. In the Atlantic world, it was not uncommon to make a career by simply staying alive, as shown by the example of Dirck Wilree (1636–1674). At the age of twenty-two, Dutchborn Wilree was a merchant on board a Danish interloper that sailed to the African coast. The ship, a galliot, was found to be in such a bad condition that the crew burnt it on the Cameroon River, where Wilree boarded an English ship that brought him to Elmina. Due to the high mortality among Europeans, who tended to die like flies in the rainy season, from April to July, civil servants were in such short supply at that post that the WIC immediately offered Wilree a position as assistant. Serving in various Dutch factories on the Gold Coast, he advanced to the rank of commies and, after barely one year, was appointed superintendent of cargoes at Mouree, a fort of great importance for the gold trade with the Akan. Upon the director-general’s demise in May 1661, Wilree provisionally succeeded him. Less than two and a half years after his arrival in West Africa, he found himself in command of 250 men. For most of the next thirteen years, he was the supreme Dutch official on the Gold Coast.51 Those who played their cards well could also use the expertise they gathered to begin a mercantile career. Govert Loockermans (1616/7–1670/1) from Turnhout in the Spanish Netherlands arrived in New Amsterdam as cook’s mate in 1633, when the new director-general, Wouter van Twiller, with whom he had sailed on the same ship, took the sixteen-year-old on as a WIC clerk. After six years, Loockermans set himself up as a free trader, sailing back and forth to Amsterdam for several years before settling in New Amsterdam. In due course, he became one of the leading merchants of the city.52 Pieter Aldroff was twenty-two when he started working as a WIC commies in Recife. After three years, he received a promotion to commissaris (chief commies) and was active in that position for another two years, until 1647. He returned to Amsterdam, probably to start out as a merchant in Recife, where we find him trading in 1650–1652. Aldroff seems to have remained in Brazil until the bitter end before returning to Amsterdam.53 Although the performance of clerical tasks could help launch a career, advancing in the Atlantic world differed markedly from making a career in Asia. There was no Atlantic equivalent of the network of Asian factories, linked by a regular exchange of information and commodities, nor was there a central headquarters, although Recife was sometimes suggested. The Portuguese defeat of Dutch Brazil in 1654 was an important watershed. If the Dutch had maintained their Brazilian captaincies, Recife might have come to

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resemble Batavia, and regular connections would probably have been established with Dutch possessions in North America, the Caribbean, and Africa. The loss of Brazil, followed ten years later by the English conquest of New Netherland, left the United Provinces without a launching pad for talented young men. In the next three centuries, it was primarily in Asia where colonial careers would be made. Several men turned their Atlantic experience to their advantage in the service of the VOC. Zacharias Wagner or Wagenaer (1614–1668), born in Dresden, a remarkable person by all standards, first arrived in Brazil as a common soldier. This self-taught scholar, who compiled a book with watercolors of local wildlife and people, worked his way up to become the quartermaster at the court of Johan Maurits. After sailing to Batavia in 1643 as adelborst (or cadet, one rank above a common soldier), Wagner was appointed a member of the ruling council of Dutch Taiwan, served twice as chief of the factory at Deshima, was a member of the Council of Justice in Batavia, and became the second-in-command at the Cape Colony. He repatriated in 1667 as vice commander of the return fleet.54 Mattheus van den Broucke (1620–1685) spent ten years in WIC service in Brazil, during which time he was taken prisoner by the Portuguese. He embarked on a VOC fleet in 1648 and served as the director of the Dutch post in Bengal and a member of the Council of the Indies. Following his repatriation as admiral of the return fleet, Van den Broucke assumed the post of director of the Amsterdam VOC Chamber and was burgomaster of Dordrecht.55

Advantages and Privileges Successful migrants notwithstanding, it soon dawned on the Heren XIX that it could not fulfill the second article of the WIC charter, which called for the peopling of “fertile and uninhabited quarters.” They had no choice but to outsource this task, although they did not intend to open up colonization indiscriminately to any private individuals. Company shareholders of substance were to engage in colonization as “patroons,” who received privileges that resembled manorial rights in the Republic.56 These patroons were granted land in fief that they were expected to use, provided that fifty or sixty colonists over the age of fifteen were transferred within four years.57 The patroon owed homage for the fief he received and was guaranteed the right of inheritance. He could distribute the lands that he held in fief and levy tithes and an excise duty.58 The patroon exercised his wide powers only on behalf of the WIC and the States General, which authorized him, in case one or more towns were founded in his patroonship, to appoint officers and

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magistrates and enact laws. North American patroons also had jurisdiction over capital offenses.59 A rush for patroonships in North America, the Guiana plantations, and the Caribbean islands ensued among the WIC directors in Amsterdam and Zeeland, although few materialized.60 Patroonships did spring up in St. Martin, St. Eustatius, and Saba, which were delegated to patroons shortly after the Dutch took possession in the 1630s, and Tobago for some time functioned as a patroonship under the name New Walcheren. In Guiana, Berbice was the private domain of the Van Pere family from Zeeland, starting in 1627.61 Of the various patroonships founded in North America in the 1620s, only that of Kiliaen van Rensselaer (c. 1586–1643) in and around Albany survived its teething troubles.62 And these were by no means small, considering the fact that during the first decade of its existence almost half the known immigrants to Rensselaerswijk moved elsewhere in New Netherland or returned to Europe. It was therefore impossible to fulfill the obligation to create a settlement of fifty people within four years.63 Because no patroonships were issued for Brazil, the WIC had to undertake the task of colonizing that colony itself.64 In the aftermath of the 1630 invasion, it lured individuals or families interested in taking up trade or agriculture, as well as artisans, barber-surgeons, pharmacists, and schoolmasters with the promise of a free passage.65 After a string of battlefield successes, the WIC also encouraged soldiers to settle down and become farmers. In 1634, the States General issued a full-fledged charter for the peopling of Brazil, which allowed for both individual and collective colonization. Collective colonization, led by a governor, preacher, and other rulers who were chosen by the participants, had the aim of establishing towns. The minimum size of such a colony was twenty-five families or fifty people. If the number of settlers was less, they were considered individual migrants.66 The legal framework for the patroonships was provided by the Freedoms and Exemptions issued by the Zeeland Chamber in 1628, those of the Amsterdam Chamber of 1629, and some later ones. The first two sets of privileges stipulated that WIC ships would ship settlers to their patroonships on payment of passage and freight. Both also made it clear that the WIC conceived of colonists as farmers. Animals and implements were shipped free of charge if enough space was available. All settlers were tax-exempt for ten years and were free to conduct trade in the Americas, provided they shipped their goods on board company ships.67 Free trade, as we have seen, was a tricky problem that was hotly debated in the Netherlands in the 1620s and 1630s. The discussion revolved around whether the colonies would be best served by the continuation of WIC monopolies or by free trade, which would

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stimulate migration to the colonies. The faction favoring WIC monopolies was dead against the free-trade proposal, arguing that even the Dutch presence in New Netherland should be limited to what was strictly necessary to curtail WIC spending on defense and the supply of victuals.68 The debate did not only pit WIC men against merchants without WIC connections. The WIC Chamber of Amsterdam advocated free trade, which it believed would help prevent a financial collapse. The directors pointed out that under a regime of limited free trade the WIC would receive more in the way of duties and taxes than it could ever earn by conducting trade for its own account.69 They also used another argument. In Brazil, they said, a monopoly would alienate the sizable Portuguese population, and the colony would subsequently be doomed, “for the Portuguese comprise as many as one thousand or more families.”70 Johan Maurits echoed this feeling in a letter to the Heren XIX. He had found in conversations that the Portuguese took exception to a monopoly, “saying they would rather leave their crops on the land than performing all their labor for others under a closed trade, working as slaves for the Company. . . .”71 The immigration of “free” settlers (artisans, merchants, and other colonists not in company service), so the argument ran, did more to guarantee the survival of a colony than the colonial presence of soldiers. “Ubi populus ibi opulus,” rhymed the Dutch commander-in-chief in Brazil, Krzysztof Arciszewski: where there are people, there is wealth.72 In addition, without trade the military was bound to become a liability because its salaries and rations would eat away the WIC budget.73 A “free” population would create economic activity, pay import and export duties, and bear the burden of the soldiery as well.74 Arciszewski’s arguments, supported by Johan Maurits, were instrumental in the adoption of a qualified free-trade policy for Brazil in 1638 (see chapter 5). When the states took stock of New Netherland in that same year, they concluded that the colony had, at best, a modest population, which had started to decline “and appears to be neglected by the West India Company, so that the inhabitants of foreign princes and potentates are endeavoring to incorporate New Netherland, and if not seasonably attended to, will at once entirely overrun it.”75 It was time for the States General to act. Its deputies to the WIC were instructed to make it clear that the company was to populate the colony or lose it to the states.76 Some of the monopolists had objected to dispatching many settlers to the colonies, contending that populous colonies could one day cast off their yoke. They expected the dregs of society to gather overseas, men who would produce anything but an orderly society and would deprave those of higher moral standing.77 The governing council of Brazil agreed. Indiscriminately

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populating the colonies was not the right method to encourage their efflorescence. In the sugar economy, men of means were needed in the first place. And, as Johan Maurits observed, sugar planting was profitable only for settlers with capital and brains.78 Three decades later, the residents of Suriname challenged the notion that only planters should be welcomed. Servants or, at least, people who could be made into agricultural laborers were the soul of the colony, the seminary that would produce good and wise planters.79 Abraham Crijnssen, the conqueror of Suriname, had already suggested sending colonists. His proposal not only addressed the need to people overseas provinces but was rooted in the noble ideal of educating paupers and vagabonds to become planters. Plantation owners, Crijnssen noted, were desperate for men to look after their slaves. These immigrants would receive victuals and a small wage, and would soon get their chance to attain higher positions. Most planters with large estates in Barbados had started out that way.80 It would therefore be desirable, Crijnssen wrote, if the States of Zeeland could ship vagrants and beggars to Suriname, especially those who would otherwise waste away in a bridewell.81 Unlike the other Atlantic powers, England in particular, the Netherlands never sent more than a few criminals to the other side of the Atlantic, although the colonies could have used their manpower.82 Before the requests from Suriname, sending convicts to populate the colonies had been discussed but never with a concrete result. In 1636, the States General had proposed to send vagabonds and outcasts to New Netherland, where “such persons shall be restored to their former state and freedom.”83 Twelve years later, the States of Holland discussed a plan to people the embattled Dutch colony in Brazil with beggars and vagrants, but decided that the colony would be better off with upright individuals.84 Orphans formed another category of potential migrants. At least fifty orphans were sent to New Netherland in the 1650s,85 and more than 177 orphans from Aalmoezeniersweeshuis in Amsterdam, one of the two municipally organized orphanages in the city, were transported to Suriname in the late 1680s.86 A plan in mid-century to ship orphans to Curaçao never materialized, nor did the project that involved one hundred WIC shareholders who committed themselves in the 1670s to send as many as 2,400 boys and girls to a new colony between Suriname and the Amazon River.87 Orphans did leave from Dutch ports but usually for the East Indies.88 Orphans could travel freely, but they were not the only ones. As previously noted, the patroons and the WIC frequently advanced or paid for the passage of settlers to New Netherland. Along with a free crossing, Kiliaen van Rensselaer provided his colonists—on condition of repayment—with

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grain for consumption and sowing, selected a suitable site to build a farm, had a house built with barracks and barn, and gave them a wagon, a plow, and other implements, as well as four horses and four cows.89 Settlers in Brazil were given free passage and were exempted from tithes, initially for two and then for seven years and one additional year for every child. They were also allowed to freely fell trees for the construction of houses and ships.90 The WIC went one step further in 1663, exempting individuals moving to Cayenne from paying all taxes for ten years.91 The city of Amsterdam promised the settlers of New Amstel—which it hoped to develop as an alternative granary for the Baltic92—to advance the transport costs and to provide settlers for one year with clothes, provisions, and seed for sowing. Every family was allowed to own at least 40 acres of land on the understanding that the land would be under cultivation within two years.93 Farmers were exempt from paying both the tax on horned beasts and the tax on salt for ten years and from tithes for twenty years.94 Six years later, in 1662, the Mennonite settlers of the Delaware River received an exemption from tithes and all taxes for twenty years. Amsterdam advanced 100 guilders to each male to be used for the passage and defrayed the cost of the transport of women and children.95 Such privileges may have helped prospective settlers to make up their minds.96 Some may also have been swayed by tracts aimed specifically at them. Johannes de Laet and Nicolaes van Wassenaer painted a rosy picture of nature and opportunities in New Netherland. Another, anonymous, writer asserted that the healthy climate prevented settlers from getting ill, and he went on to hold out the promise of “the finest, healthiest and most fertile land of this world.” Settlers were especially advised to establish themselves on the banks of the Delaware River, where fertile lands abounded and agriculture was said to demand less effort than in Europe. Local Amerindians were not to be feared either because they lacked passionate temperaments.97 What is more, colonists would find themselves in a realm of freedom, where they would not be servants to anyone.98 While the Chamber of Amsterdam, as well as those plugging the Amsterdam patroonship of New Amstel, extolled North America, the Chamber of Zeeland paid tribute to the colonies in Guiana. An emissary from the German electorate of Bavaria experienced the close ties of the two chambers with different parts of the New World firsthand. When he met with WIC directors in 1664 about a possible Bavarian patroonship, the Amsterdam Chamber eulogized the virtues of New Netherland, still ignorant of its recent loss to England. The climate, so the Bavarian was told, was moderate, the soil yielded wheat, barley, oat, tobacco, wine, and all kinds of tree fruits. There was an abundance of fish and birds, and the mountains were rich in copper and crystal. Guiana, on the other hand,

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was unhealthy, feverish, and marshy. The directors of the Zeeland Chamber, meanwhile, stressed that New Netherland was poor, whereas Guiana was rich, producing gold, silver, pearls, crystal, precious stones, saltpeter, balsam, rubber, sugar, and dyewood.99 These competing visions of the New World may have diminished the allure of both tropical and moderate climates.100 Moreover, tempting as it may be to ascribe much weight to these tales of cornucopia, it is doubtful whether they persuaded Dutchmen to move across the Atlantic. The historian Ernst van den Boogaart found that most who left their homeland to work as servants in New Netherland—as artisans or agents of merchants, as farm laborers or maids—were recruited by people who already lived on the other side of the ocean, “either personally during a visit to the fatherland or through a business relation, a relative and, in a few cases, a captain sailing regularly to America. The others were contracted by people on the verge of emigrating.”101 Patroon Kiliaen van Rensselaer owned land in the rather infertile regions of the Gooi and the Veluwe in the central parts of the United Provinces, where his agents succeeded in persuading local farmers to emigrate. They transformed his domain into a self-supporting agricultural colony. Before long, the WIC on Manhattan became completely dependent on Rensselaerswijck’s grain surplus.102 Back home in the Netherlands, the city of Amsterdam also recruited settlers from the Veluwe, as well as the Betuwe region during the years that it ruled New Amstel (1656–1664). Its agents placarded the conditions of colonization.103 Like his uncle Kiliaen van Rensselaer, Wouter van Twiller, the one-time governor of New Netherland, signed up tenants from his native region, the Veluwe, to work on his farm on Manhattan. One contract stated that the farmhands had to sow, mow, and plow according to the “Gelderland way.”104 Colonial recruiters generally preferred rural laborers from the central and eastern provinces, who were reputed to be good and hard-working farmers. Many a family in the rural east of the country, where warfare with Spanish troops intermittently disrupted the economy, scratched a living. Although the local tobacco industry brought relief in the second quarter of the century, few able-bodied workers were involved, and for them, migration may have been an option.105 Despite its relatively high number of immigrant farmers, New Netherland could not shed its reputation among the English as a mere trading post. In his Short Discoverie of the Coasts and Continents of America (1644), William Castell depicted a colony that the Dutch had failed to develop. Instead of tilling the land, they had let the land lie fallow and focused on commerce. Like the Amerindians, their presence and their claim to land could be overlooked.106 We can wonder whether Castell would have been so outspoken if he had foreseen the primarily agrarian character of migration to New

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Netherland during the final years (1657–1664) of the colony; however, even then the numbers could not compare to those moving to Anglo-America. Still, the population of New Netherland was not small compared to that of a colony such as Pennsylvania. Both colonies apparently did not need much nonslave labor, which was true for all of Dutch America. Thus, potential settlers from the United Provinces, Germany, and Scandinavia moved an ocean away not as “free” migrants but as servants of the WIC.107

Ties with the Netherlands Whether they moved to tropical or temperate colonies, migrants entered a familiar world. The colonies were unmistakably western offshoots of the Dutch Republic, especially in terms of foodways and jurisprudence. Nourishment was never easy. Some colonial populations remained so small that they were hardly viable, which was to a large degree due to the persistent difficulty of producing enough food. That the first settlers ate the same provisions as ship crews should come as no surprise. The residents of the patroonship of Pavonia on the west bank of the Hudson River, for instance, lived on hardtack, yellow peas, and raw beans.108 But, ideally, the victuals imported from the Netherlands could soon be supplemented with locally grown crops. The first crops harvested on Dutch Curaçao included beans and pumpkins, as well as corn, cassava, potatoes, bananas, and melons.109 The Dutch settlers of Brazil cultivated vegetables from seeds they had brought from the Netherlands—lettuce, cabbage, radishes, turnips, spinach, and even potatoes—and grew fruit such as grapes, figs, lemons, oranges, and other citrus fruits.110 Similarly, the colonists at Oiapoque cultivated lettuce, radishes, pumpkins, cucumbers, endive, and beans but also consumed corn, pineapples, lemons, and bananas, which grew in the wild.111 Even after years of colonization, however, most settlers of Dutch America remained dependent on food imports from the mother country.112 Shipments to Brazil included salted beef and lamb, bacon, smoked ham, various fish, wine, cheese, and butter; the vessel that brought new Director-General Kieft to New Netherland carried beef, pork, butter, cheese, hard bread, barley, and white peas.113 Grain was grown in New Netherland, but its cultivation had to compete as an economic pursuit with the lucrative beaver trade, which held a greater attraction for the residents of Beverwijck (Albany). Settlers relied throughout the colonial period on supplies of corn, venison, and fish from indigenous villages.114 In the southern hemisphere, another staple should have solved the food problem: cassava. Cassava, as Johannes de Laet remarked prior to the conquest

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of Brazil, was abundantly present in the Portuguese colony, although he failed to add that, whereas the crop was rich in calories, it was poor in nutritional value.115 The cultivation of cassava left much to be desired, even after the authorities had obliged planters to set apart some land to grow the crop. Johan Maurits granted many exemptions from this order, and planters as well as lavradores ignored it because planting sugarcane was more profitable.116 Occasionally, famine reared its ugly head. The residents of Maranhão, the northernmost Dutch conquest in Brazil, survived on the leftovers sent from Recife. This captaincy seemed doomed after only one year, when one official wrote, “Our warehouses are completely devoid of provisions, containing nothing but flour and salt, and we cannot obtain anything else because we are besieged all around. . . .”117 In other parts of Brazil, hunger began to affect everyone after 1645. A member of the Council of Justice (the higher appeals court) wrote that his wife and children had repeatedly cried pitifully for want of food.118 Masters kept whatever flour they still had for themselves at the expense of their slaves, bakers reduced their breads by one-third, and to heat the furnaces for baking bread, the residents of Recife turned to driftwood that had washed ashore onto the rocks or the beach near the port. The pitch and tar in this maritime debris gave the bread a sickening taste. To prevent a rebellion among the poor, the magistrates went from house to house, accompanied by armed soldiers, ordering everybody to hand in whatever food they had and storing it in the public warehouses.119 The failure to achieve self-sufficiency also came to haunt Suriname. When shipping from the Dutch Republic was interrupted following the outbreak of war with England in 1672, the Jews and their slaves suffered from starvation. The situation did not improve much in the following year.120 The food situation was often so precarious that the simultaneous arrival of many people put a serious strain on provisions. The sudden appearance in 1644 of 450 WIC servants who had been driven away from Maranhão shocked the ruling council of Curaçao, which had struggled to solve a food crisis for the previous three years. The councilors resolved, therefore, to send most of these unwelcome guests on to New Netherland.121 The arrival of slave ships also caused problems. The scarcity of provisions in Recife in 1646 prevented the sale of slaves from Angola, who were then shipped to Fernando de Noronha.122 The 350–400 Africans who entered New Amsterdam as slaves in 1664 (a few weeks before the English conquest), combined with the departure of a ship with provisions to Curaçao, depleted the victuals.123 During its first decade as a transit port in the transatlantic slave trade, Curaçao itself at times faced a dismal food supply. It was almost impossible to feed the 3,000 captive Africans awaiting transshipment to the Spanish Main in 1668.

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The next year, the WIC Chamber of Amsterdam sent salted meat and bacon to feed the Africans in a move to spare the cows and goats on the island.124 The overseas settlements, in particular Brazil, continued to depend on supplies of provisions from the metropolis in spite of WIC efforts to involve other colonies in sending provisions to Recife. The WIC had devised plans in 1633 to have New Netherland export grain to Brazil, West Africa, or Curaçao. This never materialized. Nor did the WIC persuade the settlers of New Netherland to send fish, flour, and local produce to Brazil when that colony was badly in need of supplies in the mid-1640s.125 Even insatiable hunger in Brazil, then, could not bring about the integration of the Dutch Atlantic. Indeed, Barlaeus claimed that the inability of Brazil to feed itself was one of the reasons why the WIC turned down Johan Maurits’s request to integrate Brazil and Angola. Brazil, the directors pointed out, depended on victuals from the Republic and could not feed “Africa.” In addition, a detour via Brazil would lead to the deterioration of the provisions destined for Angola.126 Food was not the only link with the mother country. In every new colony, the WIC soon introduced major elements of Dutch jurisprudence. The written and customary laws covering inheritance and matrimony in Holland and Zeeland were adopted, while in civil cases and commercial disputes, Roman law prevailed, as it did in the United Provinces.127 These laws suited a society that revolved around commerce and helped the effectiveness of Dutch colonial governance.128 The legal system in the vast mainland colonies resembled that of Republic, although specific regulations for these settlements were drawn up on October 13, 1629, prior to the conquest of Pernambuco. The regulations were originally intended for Brazil only, but they were modified even before Loncq’s fleet weighed anchor into a general set of rules for all of Dutch America. Equal rights were a cornerstone of this set of regulations. All people, of whatever status or nation, were entitled to equal protection of their person and property. In criminal justice, the metropolitan practices were to be copied, while in civil justice, the accepted proceedings were those of the States of Holland.129 Inferior courts were set up in eighteen towns in New Netherland and in at least seven in Brazil. The courts in these two colonies comprised a minimum of three magistrates, initially chosen by the colonial council from lists of nominees submitted by the settlers and later coopted by the incumbent magistrates. The magistrates of Recife and New Amsterdam enjoyed wider powers than their colleagues in smaller settlements.130 In the districts of Brazil where Lusophones outnumbered the Dutch, the courts of justice were composed of three Luso-Brazilians and two Dutchmen.131

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These local courts made law and administered justice. They tried minor criminal cases, but adultery, blasphemy, theft, and other felonies were outside their jurisdiction. Inhabitants of New Netherland accused of such offences were arrested and sent to the capital. If they had been wrongfully convicted of a minor offence, they could take their case to the colonial council in Manhattan; Dutch Brazilians could appeal in Recife.132 Keeping a close watch on the inferior courts, the ruling councils regularly intervened when local magistrates called in their help or when mistakes were made. Distant towns in practice enjoyed the most independence from the capital.133 In general, however, the governments in New Netherland and Brazil were much stronger than in the Republic, where towns had the right to deal with both civil and criminal justice.134 Culturally, the world that the colonial settlers from the United Provinces entered on the far side of the ocean was also a familiar one. Urban residences and warehouses had a narrow frontage, in common with houses in the Republic, and the houses tended to stretch out behind. Brick houses with typically Dutch step-gables were built in the town of Nieuw Vlissingen in Tobago.135 The 1,154,550 bricks imported from the Netherlands between January 1641 and July 1643 must also have given Recife a Dutch feel, which would have been reinforced by street names such as Heerestraet and Seestraet.136 Similarly, the main waterways in New Netherland were given Dutch names, which translate as the Fresh, North, and South rivers (whereas the English named them the Connecticut, Hudson, and Delaware rivers). All over the Dutch Atlantic world, migrants and sojourners introduced their own dishes and forms of entertainment, used the same calendar as they did back home, and celebrated the same holidays. The main church holidays were Easter, Ascension Day, Pentecost, and Christmas.137 Local Dutch holidays were also celebrated, both aboard and ashore. On the day the Amsterdam fair was held, the master of one of the ships en route to Pernambuco in 1629 distributed the meat of a big swine to his sailors.138 Similarly, the director-general at Elmina, Haarlem native Jacob Ruychaver, presented the soldiers at the fort with a cow and the civil employees with a pig on the eve of the Haarlem fair.139 Other habits formed in the United Provinces were also too entrenched to overcome in the colonies. In spite of the tropical Brazilian climate, Dutch mothers wore heavy, dark clothing and swaddled their infants, ignorant of the practices of acclimatized Luso-Brazilians.140 Nor did emotional links with the home country evaporate on distant shores. In his will, Philippus Antheunissen, a ship captain who died on the roads of Recife in 1631, remembered the “common poor” of Middelburg with 20 guilders. And when Jan Maertijns passed away in Recife in 1640, he

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bequeathed 100 guilders to the poor of Amsterdam.141 Residents of Dutch America considered the United Provinces not merely as their native soil. Their home country provided a source of legitimacy and a model to emulate, and they expressed that in the names of the overseas provinces: New Netherland, New Walcheren (Tobago), New Zeeland (the Caribbean island of St. Croix), and Nova Zeelandia (Essequibo).142 Furthermore, the Dutch tongue, as Joyce Goodfriend has argued, was “at the heart of Dutch culture, the link to memory and the means of communicating with God.”143 Another connection to the mother country was provided by the colonial authorities when they decided to devote public attention to memorable events in the United Provinces or the Dutch Atlantic. God was thanked for a victory gained or was approached for support in an imminent campaign.144 A colonial day of prayer was proclaimed in New Netherland in the wake of the annexation of New Sweden, and in Brazil, days of prayer were frequently held as a result of military events. In 1646, for instance, the surrender of Hulst, a Spanish stronghold in the Netherlands, to the stadholder was celebrated with cannon shots in all the forts of Dutch Brazil.145 On some occasions, gratitude and a request for blessing blended. In 1641, as a squadron left Recife for an attack on Angola, the High Council of Brazil argued that, because Dutch arms would be useless without God’s blessing, a day of fasting and prayer was to be held, thanking God for the large and numerous favors received, and beseeching Him to bless the present expedition “for the propagation of his Kingdom.”146 On Curaçao, an annual day of prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving celebrated the failure of the ill-fated French naval expedition in 1678, which had been about to destroy the island when it miraculously ran aground on the coral reefs of the Aves Islands.147 Days of prayer were also called when Amerindian assaults or “hot fevers and dangerous diseases” made inroads. All such “evils” were attributed to the sins of the residents.148 Once the danger was past, a day of thanksgiving was proclaimed.149

The Reformed Church In the seventeenth century, religion everywhere affected all spheres of life, and the Dutch Atlantic was no exception. The Reformed Church was more than a religious body in the Dutch trading posts and colonies. It was the main cultural institution. The historian Willem Frijhoff has argued that it “regularly brought together the population, guarded the language and cultural heritage, defended European values, and fostered the community spirit.”150 In New York, it was the Dutch Reformed Church, which insisted on the use of Dutch as a medium of worship, that was responsible for the continued

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flourishing of the Dutch language long after English had achieved the status of the official tongue.151 In spite of the pivotal position of the Church throughout the Dutch Atlantic, the authorities did not adopt Willem Usselinx’s proposal, made in his draft for a WIC charter in 1619, to allow only Church members as settlers.152 Some colonial magistrates, however, shared Usselinx’s views. In Rensselaerswijck, church attendance once a week was made compulsory, and people staying away were fined according to their means and gender.153 And on Curaçao, Governor Matthias Beck ordered the entire garrison and the sailors on board all the ships in port to attend the Reformed service each Sunday.154 But these were exceptions. While the unity of state and religion was selfevident in other countries, the Reformed Church was not the established Dutch church—membership was not required by law. At the same time, it was the “public church,” the official spiritual organ of society, which meant that the rulers had to clear the way for the Reformed religion.155 The provisional instructions for São Tomé of 1642 mentioned that “the Director and council shall hold in esteem the true, reformed religion such as it is taught in public in this county and ensure, using the means that are available, such as preachers or [Bible-] readers, that God’s word is taught or read out on Sunday morning and afternoon, as well as on other days, and that prayers are offered to Him daily in the morning and evening, in order that His just wrath may be averted and the gracious and rich blessing may be upon them again.”156 Religious care for Dutchmen abroad, whether east or west, was entrusted to personnel appointed by the consistories. The Amsterdam consistory addressed this task by creating a committee of “deputati ad res Indicas” on March 25, 1621. Aimed originally at Dutch strongholds in Asia, the commission soon busied itself with the Atlantic arena as well. It was this consistory that exhorted the Heren XIX on July 27, 1623, to staff ships leaving for the Americas with religious personnel. In 1636, the classis, a subdivision of the Church, took over the reins from the consistory and assumed control of religious affairs in the East and West Indies.157 Virtually all Dutch colonial churches started their life as the church of an army garrison, only gradually giving way to an institution that resembled the model in the Republic.158 Eventually, the ecclesiastical organization of the United Provinces, based on parishes, each with a consistory, was introduced in both Brazil and New Netherland. In other corners of the Dutch Atlantic, this was not necessary, given the small numbers of church members. The minute Curaçao congregation had only twenty members in 1662, a number that subsequently shrank.159 Most colonies or trading posts could therefore

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do with just one minister. A second pastor in Guinea was not needed, the Heren XIX decided in 1659, because the congregation in Elmina was small and the Dutch stationed in nearby forts and lodges could come to Elmina for services.160 Consistories, which met weekly, were made up of preachers as well as laymen dedicated to charity work. Often hailing from the middle strata, these men exercised a measure of power that they lacked in political circles. Their main tasks were to guard morality and maintain clerical discipline.161 In the United Provinces, ministers within the same geographical area met in the classis, an institution that coordinated regional Church affairs. New Netherland was never granted a classis of its own, whereas all twelve consistories of Brazil were joined under a single classis in 1636. Similar to the mother country, where the classes of each province formed a synod, the classes of Pernambuco and Paraíba constituted a Brazilian synod from 1642 to 1646, a unique episode in the history of Dutch colonialism. Remarkably, the synod was organized on the initiative of the local church hierarchy and was allowed despite protests from the churches in Zeeland and Amsterdam.162 Preachers were the chief servants of the Reformed Church. They had been tested on their command of dogmatics, apologetics, and exegesis, but not on their knowledge of indigenous peoples or their languages.163 In form and content, their sermons probably resembled those delivered in churches throughout the United Provinces. A sermon urged the congregation to penance and remorse, broadcast the message of the Bible, and took issue with dissenters.164 An important task for any minister was, as the south Holland synod put it, “maintaining strict discipline and the fear of the Lord” among the sailors.165 Several ministers had a long career serving the Church in the colonies, and their mobility was remarkable. Frederick Vitteus first served in an unknown capacity in Pernambuco, prior to the founding of a Reformed congregation. In 1635, he was appointed ordinand on Curaçao for a period of three years, acting there as the garrison chaplain. After a return to Amsterdam, he was sent back to Recife as an ordinand and sailed from there to Angola with Jol’s fleet in 1641, having been promoted to minister. He soon died in that capacity in the new colony.166 Vitteus’s successor as minister on Curaçao was also a globetrotter. Jonas Aertsz made three voyages to the East Indies as a comforter of the sick before he was appointed minister during a stay in the Netherlands. As such, he preached first in Batavia, then in Ternate (the Moluccas), and then apparently in Luanda (Angola). He did not survive his stay on Curaçao.167 The distance to the colonies could hamper the supervision of the classis over the colonial churches. Minister Michael Sijperius of Curaçao, as it

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turned out, had not only refrained from passing the required test, he was not even a member of the congregation. One wonders whether he was self-appointed.168 It was often difficult to fill vacancies, especially during the seven years that the Dutch held sway in Angola. Hermannus Noldius first pledged to go but then decided to stay home after failing to persuade his wife to join him. Next, Willem Vinman presented himself, a man who had served in both the West and East Indies and who had preached on the Zuiderzee island of Schokland in the previous six years. Although he was not disinclined to go, he later changed his mind.169 The following candidate was Adolphus Empenius, a former pastor in Emderland (East Frisia), who had been forced to flee due to the Thirty Years’ War. He was accepted, but upon inquiry, it transpired that he had visited a “notorious whorehouse” in Amsterdam and spent the night there. As late as December 28, 1648, after a four-year search—and more than four months after Angola was lost—the classis was still urged to find a qualified preacher for Luanda.170 Moral uprightness was a key quality for preachers because they were supposed to be guardians of morality. This meant that they had their work cut out for themselves, especially when it came to preserving the true character of the Christian Sabbath. The prohibition against serving beer in inns during church service was reissued several times in Brazil,171 where people profaned the Sabbath, said the consistory, by “singing, jumping, openly working, buying and selling, inebriation, playing, and many different acts of lewdness and excesses, which incur divine wrath.”172 After the start of the rebellion in Brazil in 1645, a wave of new religious fervor energized the Dutch colonial government, prompting it to reissue the edict that forbade profaning Sundays; blasphemy; prostitution; and, after the church bell rang, selling drinks in taverns. In 1646, the Reformed Church ordered Jews on Sundays to keep their trading houses closed, prevent their children from going to school, and forbid their slaves from working.173 Around the same time, Petrus Stuyvesant imposed a similar policy in New Netherland. It was part of his effort to convert New Amsterdam “into a society in which men and women saw the wisdom of living according to biblical precepts.”174 Stuyvesant’s was a voice in the wilderness. Even in the mother country, kindred spirits found themselves embattled, as Sabbath observance and its enforcement became an issue that split the Dutch Republic into two factions.175 Nowhere, however, were conditions as bleak as in Guinea, where the Dutch tried to confine their presence to their factories. Only a few years after the first Dutch fort was built in Mouree, and prior to the founding of the WIC, a minister arriving there from the Netherlands encountered utter moral degeneration. From his lodgings above the soldiers’ prison, he

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could hear soldiers getting drunk and singing dirty songs at all hours of the day.176 Ministers would never be popular in Guinea because their sermons frequently condemned the behavior of both junior and senior employees, who were not allowed to bring their wives along, for involving themselves with Amerindian, black, and mulatto women. Although European women were welcome in the American colonies, they were often the target of criticism by moralizing ministers. It was not rare for these ministers to start legal proceedings against single women, whom they considered especially dissolute. In this way, the ministers acted to the detriment of the colonies, which included few women to begin with.177 Apart from the preachers, there was another group of religious workers in the Dutch Atlantic (afloat and ashore) with an unequivocally moral task: the comforters (or visitors) of the sick. This post originated in the United Provinces, where comforters waged a moral crusade alongside Calvinist ministers against adultery, drunkenness, promiscuity and other forms of social derailment. Their impact, however, was felt more on long-distance voyages and in the colonies. In almost all colonies and trading posts, they were the church quartermasters, taking the pulpit on Sundays, preaching, and singing psalms. Only when the colony had reached critical mass did a pastor arrive.178 Ever since they first sailed in 1598 on the second fleet bound for the East Indies, the comforters helped shape Dutch colonialism. The first Dutchman to baptize a non-European—a Malagasy slave on Mauritius—was a comforter, and comforters were the ones who founded the Reformed Church in places as far apart as Batavia, the Cape of Good Hope, and New Amsterdam.179 The task of these laymen was much broader than their name suggests. Although they lacked a university education, the comforters consoled patients by means of scripture reading, helped the weak, poor, and orphaned, held public Bible lectures, and warned against violating the Ten Commandments.180 In theory, only the minister could interpret God’s word authoritatively, while the comforters were allowed merely to pass it on or apply it in practice.181 The rationale of the comforters’ activities was provided by the Reformed Protestant view of disease as a product of sin. Because recovery depended on moral purification, the comforters of the sick occupied a key position. The connection between sin and disease was obvious to the men on board a fleet en route to Pernambuco (1629–1630), when faced with a drummer who could not be cured of his illness. Consumed by lice, he was put in a tub of seawater, and his mates wiped off the lice. But the lice soon returned, and the man became blind and died. The explanation on board was unequivocal: the man was supposed to have led a life of vice; some were even under the impression that he had beaten his parents.182

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Willem Frijhoff has contended that on board, where tensions could quickly spin out of control, comforters had a moderating function. In the colonial forts and settlements, their role as an omnipresent moral authority figure was equally important.183 In practice, their role abroad was thus not unlike that of the minister in the home country. Still, the classis rarely authorized them to preach sermons, administer baptisms, or perform marriage services, and usually only for lack of a minister.184 Comforters were generally of fairly humble origin. Tailors, cobblers, and schoolmasters predominated.185 Nor did they exactly make a fortune themselves. Although they had been selected after careful screening, comforters of the sick in the Atlantic world were consistently underpaid.186 Colonial officials in Recife and Mouree further undermined their prestige by ordering the comforters to stand guard. The orders were reversed only after comforters in both places protested that such an assignment was incompatible with their office.187 The salaries of maritime preachers and comforters became a hot issue in 1640–1641, when it transpired that they were taken from the wages of the soldiers and sailors. Relations between servants of the Church and the sailors suffered, prompting the WIC to order the latter to stop their heavy-handedness and urge them to readmit preachers and comforters to ship cabins.188 Their youth explains why many comforters were still single at the time of their embarkation for the colonial world. There is every appearance that authorities in Dutch America generally preferred single men, perhaps because of the lower costs of accommodating bachelors. The VOC, on the other hand, seeking to discourage a return from the colonies to the mother country, allowed the wives and children of company servants, including the comforters of the sick, to come along for free or at sharply reduced rates.189 This contrast may explain why so many comforters serving at Atlantic posts were drawn to Asia.190 Comforters had to be at least twenty years of age.191 They qualified by first standing a moral test and then passing an exam that determined their competence. After passing the test, the candidate had to read out aloud from the Bible and flawlessly sing King David’s psalms. Many were subsequently advised to practice singing or to study the foundations of the Christian religion.192 Pieter Fransen was a special case. Born in 1578, he had spent his adult life making musical instruments, including a well-known viola da gamba that he built in 1625. Financial woes began to plague him in 1631, and by 1640, he attempted a career change by applying for the post of comforter. Although passable in singing and reading, he was ultimately found to be unfit. But because he was over sixty years of age, the members of the

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Amsterdam classis did not find it in their hearts to leave the man emptyhanded. Fransen was thus sent to Guinea.193 At his destination, he may have encountered another comforter of the sick, who continued to preach even after he had gone blind.194 The classis sometimes rejected candidates after checking whether they had moral shortcomings. For example, the plan of Carel de Groote, an Amsterdam schoolteacher, to go to the West Indies was wrecked when his alcoholism came to light.195 Abraham Caspersz applied to a post in the East Indies after his service in the West Indies had come to an end. The classis refused him, telling Caspersz that people mocked him because he was given to drink. He was advised to support his family in another way.196 Peter de Bruyn was repatriated from Paraíba on account of his “vicious life,”197 and the plan of Stoffel Cornelissen Bull, who had been employed in Angola, to serve in the East Indies was defeated when it transpired that he was not only a drunk but had conceived a child in Angola with a native woman and had subsequently sold both into slavery.198 The truth was not always the deciding factor here. Because a comforter had to be above reproach, groundless rumors could block an appointment.199 The expectation that Dutchmen would settle the Americas in large numbers was never fulfilled. There were simply too few factors pushing people to leave the Republic, with its full employment and its free domestic labor market. Many colonies experienced a false start, others were almost too small to be viable, and still others continued to depend on provisions sent from Dutch home ports. Foodways from the Republic thus found their way to the small overseas provinces, along with other forms of Dutch culture, such as jurisprudence. Likewise, Calvinism left its imprint on the Dutch Atlantic. Even though it was not the state church, the Reformed Church was of critical importance to the colonies as a meeting place, guardian of morality, and protector of the cultural heritage.

Ch ap ter 7

The Non-Dutch

Although the prevalence of Dutch culture may suggest otherwise, a significant number of settlers in Dutch America were not Dutch natives. If we count the Portuguese Jews among them, foreigners actually dominated the European population of Dutch America, setting the Dutch Atlantic apart from the other contemporary Atlantic realms. Foreigners were needed to build up the Dutch Atlantic because, as Krzysztof Arciszewski put it, “with Hollanders alone one cannot populate a kingdom.”1 Including foreigners in Dutch colonial schemes was therefore never an issue. Before any settlers had set foot in Dutch America, Willem Usselinx had already written that German and Scandinavian people should be allowed to colonize overseas Dutch settlements. The Levendich Discours (1622) asserted that many good folks could be recruited for Brazil, including Walloons, Flemings, Brabanders, Germans, Danes, and other Scandinavian and Baltic people. These were simple, hard-working men, “neither dominant nor prone to rebellion, and similar in nature to our countrymen.”2 The commissioners and directors of New Amstel even advised against Dutch settlers: “Thus, people only must be sent there who are laborious and skilled in farming. No Hollanders but other foreign nations must be employed and attracted for this purpose, the Swedes and Finns (who are already there in reasonable numbers) being, among others, therefore particularly fitted.”3

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It is good to remember that national identities had not been fully shaped yet and that the difference in Dutchness between people from the eastern provinces and those from the German side of the border were often negligible. In addition, the foreigners must have undergone the influence of Dutch culture as they passed through or lived in the Republic. “It is notable,” one pamphleteer argued in 1681, that strangers from our surrounding countries “having lived among us or served us for some years, have taken on the character of the Dutch. They actually forsake their own country and birth, and pass for good Dutchmen in the next generation.”4 Those foreigners who remained faithful to their own culture in Dutch America could expect some form of religious tolerance for the sake of social peace. Dutch authorities also sought to maintain good ties with the Amerindian and African nations in whose midst they planted their colonies and trading posts. Because harmonious relations were required for the development of trade, they presented indigenous leaders with gifts and recognized their sovereignty. Harmony also existed on a personal level in that coexistence with native settlements at times engendered intimate relations between Dutch males and local women, especially when there was a deficit of European women. In sharp contrast with such equality was the practice of Amerindian and African servitude. Dutch traders in the Greater Caribbean tapped into the indigenous slave trades to supply settlers with bonded workers while planters in Brazil and other plantation colonies availed themselves of enslaved Africans who were carried across the ocean. Whatever rights and privileges blacks initially enjoyed in the Dutch colonies were soon superseded by economic imperatives.

Englishmen, Walloons, and Portuguese The WIC directors expected many nearby foreigners to move to Dutch America to flee religious persecution. Plans to settle religious refugees date back to the early stages of Dutch presence in the Americas, where the Dutch authorities usually considered Guiana, defined in this period as the region between Punta de Araya or Trinidad in the west and the Amazon in the east, the appropriate location for their settlement.5 The first group that seems to have petitioned the States General were the Anabaptists, but they were refused permission to leave for Guiana.6 Sixty years later, two other settlement plans for Guiana were conceived that were to accommodate religious refugees. One of these was initiated by the States of Holland, which stated that an important objective of the new colony to be founded in Guiana was to provide an asylum for all Protestants who were persecuted or had been

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driven away from their homes.7 Specific groups of Protestants were welcome in a colony at the Oiapoque River, established by John Price (a.k.a. Johan Aparicius), an English minister in The Hague who had previously served the Reformed Church in Dutch Brazil. Price barred Arians, Socinians, Anabaptists, and Quakers, but he welcomed Presbyterians or Independents from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and other countries.8 Like the Guiana colonies, New Amstel was viewed by the Amsterdam city council as a safe haven for both impoverished Christians of all denominations and (particularly) persecuted Protestants.9 The Waldenses, refugees from Savoy, where their coreligionists had been massacred in 1655, seem to have embarked in Amsterdam for New Amstel in the following year.10 Even if few religious refugees from Europe settled in Dutch America in the end, there was no lack of foreigners. In some instances, Zeelanders collaborated with Englishmen, as in the year 1611, when they assisted in the migration of Englishmen and Irish refugees to the upper Amazon delta. Out of respect for his Spanish colleague, Philip III, King James I of England had strictly forbidden his subjects to move to the overseas territories of Spain. But James had overlooked the loophole of Vlissingen, the domicile of numerous English soldiers and merchants. Accompanied by migrants from the British Isles, they left in Zeeland ships for the Amazon, where many took up residence in Zeeland colonies, which were rapidly anglicized.11 The scene of Zeeland ships carrying Englishmen across the Atlantic was repeated in 1616, when 130 Englishmen and -women were among the colonists embarking for the Amazon River, including 14 families. They had lived in Vlissingen and Rammekens, two ports in Zeeland, and the men had probably been soldiers in the garrisons. As we have seen in chapter 1, both places, along with Brill (Den Briel), had been “cautionary” towns, given by the Dutch to England as security for the aid sent by Queen Elizabeth in 1585. The tax revenues of these towns were used as payment for the English military support. In 1616, however, these English garrisons were disbanded after the Dutch States General paid off the English state and redeemed the towns, prompting some soldiers to try their luck in South America. Their colony on the Amazon existed until 1623, when the settlers, wearied by indigenous attacks, decided to return to Europe. Most tried to sail for England, but they were probably shipwrecked.12 In the years ahead, Englishmen and Irishmen living in colonies on the Amazon River remained dependent on Zeeland for shipping goods and personnel. Likewise, English residents of Zeeland continued to move to the New World on Zeeland vessels but, more often, on ships leaving from England.13 Another group Englishmen was inclined to become the first settlers of a Dutch colony in North America. On February 2, 1620, the directors of the

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New Netherland Company petitioned Stadholder Maurits and the States General for permission to populate an area with Englishmen resident in the Republic and England. The group of religious dissenters, based in Leiden, was not named in the petition, but they are now known as the Pilgrims. The States General turned down the request after consulting with Maurits. Later that year, the Pilgrims were to settle a new territory in North America for England. Although leaving the Netherlands behind, their life in New England would bear the imprint of their stay in Leiden. Jeremy Bangs has suggested that the Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving at the end of their first American summer in 1621 may have been based on the day of prayer and thanksgiving celebrated each year in Leiden to commemorate the lifting of the Spanish siege in 1574.14 Around the time of that first Thanksgiving in Plymouth, fifty to sixty Walloon and French families, all Protestant immigrants to the Dutch Republic, applied to the English ambassador in The Hague to settle in Virginia. When their wish to build an autonomous city was not granted, they abandoned their plan and turned to the directors of the WIC. In July 1623, eleven heads of families finally left on a WIC ship to size up the situation in Guiana, which seemed to offer good prospects for migration; however, a raid launched by the Portuguese from Belém (Brazil) on a Dutch colony on the Xingu River convinced the men that this area was not ideal for starting a settlement.15 Eventually, a group of thirty Walloons did leave for the New World, settling in New Netherland, where they were among the first settlers.16 While these colonists left numerous descendants, the Walloons who helped settle Curaçao soon faded into obscurity. Seven men and women embarked in 1635, probably along with ten Englishmen, to plant tobacco, cotton, or other crops on the island. Beyond that, nothing is known about their fate.17 Other Walloons moved to St. Eustatius, where twenty-three Flemings and Walloons were among the forty-one settlers that arrived there in 1636.18 Eventually, New Netherland did become home to Englishmen, in particular those arriving from New England, who formed six villages. They were granted the same rights as the Dutch immigrants and allowed to build their own forts and churches and elect their own officials.19 In addition, people from northern France found their way to New Netherland in the years 1656–1664, settling on Staten Island and in Nieuw-Haarlem on Manhattan, where half the residents spoke French by the time of the English takeover.20 Men and women from the British Isles also moved to St. Eustatius, where sixty-one English, Irish, and Scottish residents were counted in 1665 (against at least 269 Dutchmen), and in the same year, the English, Scottish and Irish

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presence on Saba (fifty-four) was almost equal to that of the Dutch (fiftyseven).21 The Dutch language was at times an obstacle to the integration of foreigners, although never did it pose a problem for the numerous soldiers whose native tongue was Low German because the differences between the two languages were relatively small.22 But very few Walloons and Huguenots in New Netherland understood the Dutch tongue,23 the Jews’ lack of knowledge of Dutch in Brazil was sometimes embarrassing,24 and the Dutch language also posed difficulties for the anglophone settlers of New Netherland. The WIC made a thorough search for a bilingual Reformed preacher in that colony and found Samuel Drisius, pastor of a congregation in England, who was capable of preaching even in French.25 Bilingual ministers were in demand. The authorities in Pernambuco requested two ministers with fluency in Portuguese as well as English because there were so many English soldiers.26 Later, in 1647, an English pastor was needed in Recife, as well as a minister who could lead services in Dutch and French. St. Eustatius also had a bilingual Dutch pastor, who preached in French and Dutch.27 Because such linguistically gifted preachers were hard to replace, their departure could create a void. Services in the French Protestant Church of Mauritsstad, which was constructed in 1642 for the benefit of the local French community, were suspended after only two years when the sole minister capable of preaching in French returned to Europe.28 Although language could hinder communication with the Dutch authorities, the Luso-Brazilian population of Dutch Brazil had other, more serious problems, as Johan Maurits and his High and Secret Council found out in 1640. In that year, they convened a diet to listen to the complaints of delegates from towns and villages in the three captaincies of Pernambuco, Itamaracá, and Paraíba. Fifty-six men gathered, for the most part sugarlords, owners of sugar warehouses, and merchants.29 What this Luso-Brazilian elite especially resented were the vexations they suffered at the hands of the schouten, whose job was a combination of sheriff and prosecuting attorney. The schouten frequently extorted money for their own benefit when dispatched to collect money for punishments meted out to the residents; what was more, they convicted people without the examination of witnesses. Always looking for a peaceful solution, Johan Maurits advised to have the schouten not proceed to sentencing except in cases of injury, theft, or homicide.30 The Dutch authorities were often wary of Portuguese residents in Dutch Brazil, who might be in league with the enemy. Jan Robberts, a member of the Political Council, denounced the delivery by the Portuguese of oil, cheese, ham, and other foodstuffs to the enemy. A placard was soon issued

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prohibiting Dutch residents from selling provisions to the Portuguese.31 Three years later, the Heren XIX went one step further by ordering Johan Maurits and his council to expel any Portuguese from the colony if they were hostile toward the Dutch.32 The concerns about a fifth column also surfaced in Suriname when the third Anglo-Dutch War broke out in 1672. One settler wrote to the Netherlands, “We constantly fear the English, both our fellow inhabitants and the enemy without.”33 All English settlers were subsequently put under house arrest.34 Once the war had ended, the States of Zeeland sang a different tune, in that they deemed it important to placate the English settlers. While the members of the Council of Policy were all Dutch, the Council of Justice, which judged criminal cases, came to include two Englishmen.35 At an earlier stage, New Netherland Director Stuyvesant had relied on English advisors, two of whom he appointed in 1650 as the representatives of the colony in negotiations with New England about boundary disputes. This decision provoked severe criticism from Dutch settlers.36

Rather Two Orange Flags than One Inquisitor Unlike the English, Jewish settlers never raised any suspicions. Portuguese Jews proved to be reliable supporters of the Dutch empire who helped set up several colonies. Their persecution by the Iberian Inquisitions had made them likely allies in the eyes of many Dutchmen in the early seventeenth century. In his Toortse der Zeevaert, Dierick Ruyters gained courage from the presence of so many Jews in the American provinces of Spain because they rather saw “two Orange flags than one inquisitor.” If the Dutch were to invade in an attempt to defeat the King of Spain and remove the yoke of the Inquisition, Ruyters believed, the Jews would undoubtedly risk their lives for the cause. And there were supposedly many Jews to be found in the Iberian Atlantic. Ruyters asserted that most Portuguese in the Río de la Plata and from there all the way to the Amazon River were Jews.37 Angola was also seen as refuge for Jews. After the conquest of Luanda, Johan Maurits and his council in Brazil hired a Portuguese to induce the local population to obedience. The man was Jewish, “as are the majority of the residents, although covertly,” the councilors added in a letter to the Heren XIX.38 The American tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition confirmed this notion. Confessions and accusations obtained by the Inquisition in Cartagena de Indias seemed to reveal the existence of a Jewish organization founded to support the Dutch in their naval warfare on the Spanish and—less important— to ransom Amsterdam Jews captured by Barbary pirates.39 Another alleged

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example of the close relationship between Jews and Dutchmen was the conquest of Salvador (1624), which had succeeded, according to some, only due to local New Christian treachery. Lope de Vega, Spanish playwright, immortalized this view in El Brasil Restituido. In reality, however, a minority of the collaborators were New Christians. Stuart Schwartz has demonstrated that the charge against judaizing New Christians served to exonerate the Spanish bishop and soldiers who had fled the city after the first Dutch attacks (see chapter 2).40 Jews were also blamed for the successful Dutch invasion of Pernambuco (1630). In a memorandum that Captain Esteban de Ares Fonseca submitted to the Spanish Inquisition in Madrid in 1634, he highlighted the role of a Jew from Amsterdam who had instructed the Dutch in how to organize their invasion.41 What lent credibility to the imagined secret relationship was the tolerance that Jews enjoyed in several towns in the Dutch Republic. The Jewish presence in the United Provinces had been negligible until the late sixteenth century, when economic factors mingled with more pressing reasons of a religious nature started driving scores of Portuguese judaizers to Amsterdam. In the years following the crown union between Spain and Portugal in 1580, the Portuguese Inquisition had stepped up its activities, intensifying in particular its persecution of the New Christians. Because the Inquisition often targeted entire groups of related families or clans, these New Christians moved out of Portugal in groups. In Amsterdam, where many of the newly arrived Portuguese gradually reverted to Judaism, the right to practice Judaism in private was legally recognized.42 In this respect, there was no difference from the Dutch treatment of Roman Catholics. Many Amsterdam Jews actually did support the WIC’s bellicosity. In the startup years of the WIC, they lobbied conspicuously for the invasion of Brazil.43 Jewish assistance was also offered in the form of at least forty Iberian and twenty German Jewish soldiers who took part in the expedition of 1629–1630 to invade Pernambuco. Originally, they were to sail on one ship, but later they were distributed among the fleet.44 In 1647, representatives of the Jewish nation petitioned the States General for the conquest of the island of Itaparica so that the Brazilian colony could be maintained.45 And twenty years later numerous Jewish merchants and shipowners joined hands in a request to the states to recapture New Netherland.46 The extension of freedom of conscience to Jews in the Iberian colonies in the administrative guidelines of 1629, which were applied to all Dutch colonies, raises the question of how the WIC knew about the presence of judaizers in America (and Africa). The directors were probably aware of crypto-Jews because of the sojourns in early seventeenth-century Amsterdam

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of more than a dozen Portuguese who were involved in the sugar trade and traveled to Amsterdam both to take care of business and to revert to their ancestral faith.47 Jews in the Dutch Atlantic also benefited from their status as non-Christian strangers, as they did in Amsterdam. Although crypto-Jews had indeed lived in the New World since the earliest days of Iberian colonization, it was in Dutch Brazil that Jews were first allowed to openly live in the Americas in accordance with their faith. The opening in 1636 of a synagogue in Recife was a momentous milestone. It was not only the first public synagogue in the Americas but also in the Dutch world, opening its doors three years before the one in Amsterdam. Before long, other synagogues sprang up in Mauritsstad, Paraíba, and one on the banks of the São Francisco River, where today stands the town of Penedo. Only the synagogues in Recife and Mauritsstad, however, were connected to a congregation.48 As arriving Jews found communities where they could freely profess their religion, Jewish conversions to Christianity were exceedingly rare, especially compared to the Dutch East Indies, where such congregations were lacking.49 Immigrants from Amsterdam included David Abravanel Dormido (alias Manuel Martins), a New Christian who had been a treasurer for King Philip IV of Spain but who was convicted for judaizing. With his wife and daughter, Abravanel spent five years in an Inquisition prison before his release in 1632. Via Bordeaux, he made his way to Amsterdam, where he settled in 1640.50 Jews were arguably better off in Brazil than in the Dutch Republic. Unlike in Amsterdam, they were formally granted residential rights as well as the right to retail trade, both undoubtedly in recognition of their vital contribution to the Dutch Atlantic economy. The Jews had found a niche in Brazil after the decline of their European commerce had forced them to try their luck in the new colony.51 Most Jewish males found employment in tax collecting, money-lending, sugar exporting, and the retail and slave trades. Some ran sugar plantations, although not many. Of the forty-four sugar mills sold in 1637, only six were bought by (four) Jews.52 The outbreak of the revolt of 1645 rocked the foundations of the world of Dutch Atlantic Jewry. Economically and emotionally, the events that unfolded that summer were such a shock that it would take them many years to recover.53 Immediately after the start of the revolt, local Portuguese residents killed three Jews in Ipojuca, including a wealthy and prominent man.54 Two others were caught and hanged on August 30, the same day that two more Jews were captured in Pau Amarelo, baptized, and killed. Several others were sent to Lisbon, where the Inquisition tried them. One man in their midst, Isaac de Castro Tartas, was burned alive. Those who, like Samuel

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Israel, the rabbi of Penedo, could prove that they had been born Jews were eventually released.55 As persecution grew, the Dutch States General ordered, in an unambiguous letter of December 7 to the High Council in Brazil that went far beyond the guarantee of tolerance, that the Jews who remained in the colony were to receive protection from any damage to person or property.56 This letter from The Hague followed a mere ten days after the leaders of the Jewish community of Amsterdam had approached the states by way of their city burgomasters. They expressed their fear of the fate of their coreligionists in Brazil, who had alerted the High Council to the impending revolt. As a result of this disclosure, the rebels announced that the arrested Jews would not be given quarter.57 The Dutch protection guarantee was honored during the negotiations that led to the surrender in 1654. The victorious General Barreto proclaimed that whoever hurt a member of the Jewish nation could count on a heavy punishment. He also allowed Jews to sell their goods and embark in ships to the United Provinces.58 The official tolerance of the Judaism in Dutch America, whether in the form of freedom of conscience or freedom of public worship, often provoked clerical protests. Along with the Catholic Portuguese, the Dutch Reformed Church in Brazil opposed religious freedom for the Jews of Recife. The Church Council called it scandalous that the Jews had rented two houses to hold religious services. In this way, so it was said during a meeting of January 1638, they irritate pious Christians and make the Dutch fall in the esteem of the Portuguese, who suspect every tolerant Dutchman of being a half-Jew. In November 1640, the council repeated its complaints in a letter to the WIC board, pointing out that, “since there is no country in the world where Jews are not limited,” it should not be the case in Brazil either.59 Barlaeus, who examined Johan Maurits’s correspondence, wrote that the governor was in agreement with the pastors, adhering to the principle that the Jews should revere Christ as the Messiah.60 In other words, while the Dutch practiced tolerance, their goal remained conversion of Catholics and Jews. Although not all Dutch officials subscribed to this policy, Director Stuyvesant of New Netherland, who wanted to deny Jews access to the colony, was as antiSemitic as the WIC directors who wrote to him in 1652 (two years before the first Jews arrived in New Amsterdam): “This nation is cunning and generally deceitful; therefore, one should not trust them too much.”61 Anti-Jewish prejudice was not absent from Dutch Brazil. Sixty-six “common Christians” of Recife, who accused the Jews of lying, deceiving, and thereby monopolizing trade and brokerage, launched a diatribe that culminated in the observation that in other countries Jews had to wear red hats or

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yellow badges. What prevented the local authorities from doing the same?62 This attitude continued to prevail among part of the Christian population of Recife, leading the mahamad of the Zur Israel congregation in 1651 to keep the synagogue door closed on the night of Simhat Torah to prevent disturbances.63 Legend has it that some Jews stayed behind in Brazil after the Dutch surrender. The original settlers of Venhaver, a town in the interior of Rio Grande do Norte, maintain their own identity to this day, which is separate in traditions and beliefs from the other inhabitants, who refer to them as the Jews or the descendants of the Jews. In actual fact, they are probably the descendants of Portuguese New Christians who took up residence in Rio Grande do Norte because of inquisitorial activities elsewhere in Brazil.64 Most Jews from Dutch Brazil took part in the hasty exodus that occurred after the Dutch surrender in 1654. A large contingent of Jews and Dutchmen made their way to Martinique, where the Jesuit priests convinced Jacques Dyel du Parquet, the owner of the island, that nothing was more opposed to the king’s intentions than allowing foreigners who would introduce heresy and Judaism into the colony. Refused entrance, the refugees continued their travels and landed at Guadeloupe, whose proprietor was less scrupulous. When shortly afterward another large ship stopped at Martinique with three hundred men and women, including slaves and seven or eight Jewish family heads, du Parquet welcomed them with open arms. The Jewish community survived in Martinique until the expulsion of its members in 1685.65 In September 1654, a group of twenty-three Jews arrived in New Amsterdam. At least seven other Jewish exiles from Brazil came to the same town within one year, having first fled to the Republic. None of the twentythree became rooted in New Amsterdam, where earlier that year three men who had embarked in Amsterdam had been the first Jews to arrive. No synagogue was erected—although private meetings for worship were probably held—and if Director Stuyvesant had had his way, all Jews would have been expelled. The local Calvinist ministers shared his views, but the WIC Amsterdam Chamber recognized the economic role of the Jews and instructed Stuyvesant to tolerate their presence.66 A majority of the Jews who left Brazil in 1654 crossed the Atlantic and returned to the Netherlands. Some two hundred Jewish families arrived in Amsterdam from Brazil in the period 1646–1655,67 some of them so impoverished that, time and again, collections were made in the Amsterdam Portuguese synagogue to alleviate their plight.68 But the New World soon lured the Dutch Jews back, in part because Amsterdam was becoming overcrowded.69 Three hundred Jewish refugees who arrived from Poland in June

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1656 were first accommodated in two warehouses before they were provided with apartments. There was not enough room for all of them, however, and some settled elsewhere, including England.70 Not only had the Jewish population of Amsterdam reached critical mass, but the downfall of the CountDuke of Olivares, the powerful Spanish minister and protector of the Jews, had also caused an Iberian exodus. The loss of Dutch Brazil made the need to create new Jewish communities all the more urgent.71 For Jewish settlers, Brazil was recreated in Guiana in the sense that their privileges echoed those first recognized in the lost colony. The organizers of an agricultural Jewish colony in Essequibo (“Nova Zeelandia”) even went beyond requesting religious freedom and personal protection; they also asked for—and received—the assurance that Jews did not have to appear in court on the Sabbath and that delegates “of the Hebrew nation” were to give advice to the government. These freedoms served as a blueprint for the privileges extended to the Jews of the English colony of Suriname, which evidently vied with the neighboring Dutch colonies for Jewish settlers.72 The initiatives for these communities were all taken in Holland and Zeeland. David Cohen Nassi, alias Joseph Nunes da Fonseca (1612–1685), who had left Brazil a few years before the surrender, signed a contract in 1657 with the States of Zeeland that allowed him and other Brazilian veterans to start the colony in Essequibo.73 Jews also settled on the nearby Pomeroon River. Two men who arrived there in 1658 embraced the warm weather, which contrasted sharply with the cold Dutch winters: “We shall thank God that He has delivered us from the hell of snow, and has brought us in peace to this beautiful country, where after many, many years we will lay our bodies to rest.”74 The Pomeroon settlement thrived from 1658 to 1666, when English troops invaded western Guiana and destroyed the colonies under Dutch rule.75 An equally short life was granted to the Dutch colony of Cayenne, where in 1659 the WIC granted David Nassi (the same man as before) extensive privileges that were reminiscent of the freedoms the Jews had enjoyed in Brazil. They could publicly exercise their religion, maintain a school and synagogue, and have jurisdiction in a specific part of the colony.76 From time to time, Nassi sent settlers, but the French conquest in 1664 stopped this flow.77 By then, around sixty Jews lived in Cayenne, possessing eighty slaves.78 Some refugees from these abortive colonies, including Nassi, found their way to the English settlement of Suriname and officially became subjects of the States of Zeeland following Abraham Crijnssen’s conquest in 1667.79 It was in Suriname that the Portuguese Jews would remain. Here, the regents of their community wrote in 1785, their forebears had come with

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their riches from Portugal and especially Brazil with the intention to resurrect the peace they had lost due to the Inquisition.80 To safeguard this peace, each generation of Suriname Jews had to defend itself against authorities unwilling to grant the promised tolerance.81 Less embattled was the Jewish community in the other Dutch colony where the Jewish presence would endure: Curaçao. A group of thirteen pioneers had arrived there in 1651, even before the fall of Recife, followed by a larger contingent eight years later that included men who had served as parnassim (communal leaders) in Recife. Jewish males became involved immediately in regional trade, in which subsequent generations were to make their living.82 One former settler of Dutch Brazil, João de Yllán (1609–1696), was a vital link in the transformation of Curaçao into an entrepôt. After successfully negotiating the establishment of a Jewish colony, he soon risked expulsion: Yllán engaged in commerce, although he was allowed only to cultivate fruits and other produce.83 In fact, Yllán was starting business ventures in a port without shipowning, shipbuilding and repair, stevedoring, finance, or inland transport facilities. He began by importing horses and supplying flour and clothing to the WIC employees.84 And the trend that he started was continued by other Jews, men such as Jeoshuah and Mordechay Enriquez, described in contemporary documents as peddlers and traders in cattle. Jeoshuah is also said to have encouraged Jews from Amsterdam to move to Curaçao.85 In due course, these Jews helped forge ties with the nearby Spanish colonies. Their success, however, obscures the poverty of many other Jews in the Caribbean colonies. David Alvares Torres kept traveling to transatlantic destinations to escape from penury. After returning from Brazil to Amsterdam in 1652, he left for Martinique in 1661 but was back in Amsterdam from 1662 to 1668, receiving regular support for himself and his growing family from the Portuguese community. The community also paid for some of his passages to the New World. He sailed to Barbados in 1668, was back in Amsterdam in 1675, returned to Barbados the next year, and lived in Curaçao, Jamaica, London, and again Barbados before coming back to Amsterdam one again in 1681. He died there in 1684.86 The promotion of Jewish settlement in the Americas was given an important impulse by a one-time resident of Dutch Brazil, Antonio de Montezinos. In 1644, Montezinos arrived in Amsterdam to tell Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657) the story of his meeting with South American Amerindians, whom he took for Hebrew-speaking Jews and members of the Ten Lost Tribes. Convinced that this was the sign that the coming of the Messiah was near, Menasseh began to plan new Jewish settlements in England and the Americas, especially for the persecuted Jews from Iberia and

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Poland. Such migration, he hoped, would accelerate the dispersal of Jews all over the globe, which was a precondition of the coming of the Messiah. Menasseh expounded his views in Hope of Israel (1650), a work that attracted a large following. The Jewish community of Curaçao took the Hebrew title of the book, Mikveh Israel, as its name. The names of the congregations of Bridgetown (Barbados), Speighstown (Barbados), New Amsterdam, and Newport also expressed the belief that the worldwide scattering of Jews was to precede the ingathering.87 What helped Menasseh’s ideas gain currency was that he resided in Amsterdam, the “Jerusalem of the West,” whose Jewish congregation developed into the mother community of most Jewish settlements that sprang up in the Americas. Jews in Brazil, Guiana, the Caribbean, and North America returned to full religious and cultural Jewish life by copying institutions that had recently been established in the Dutch city. The 1638 ascamot (bylaws) of the Amsterdam congregation were the archetype for all seventeenth-century congregations in the New World; in Barbados and Curaçao even the number of articles—forty-two—followed the Dutch original.88 The Amsterdam parnassim spent thousands of guilders to sponsor Jewish migration to Essequibo in the years 1658–1660, financing the passage and purchasing forty-six slaves for the Jews already settled there. Smaller sums were spent on migration to Cayenne and Curacao.89 The Amsterdam congregation also donated Torah scrolls to New Amsterdam (1655), Barbados (1657), Cayenne (1659), Curaçao (1659), and Martinique (1676).90 Such initiatives were in keeping with a tradition of Amsterdam leadership that went back to 1612. In that year, the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam had sent Jacob Peregrino as spiritual leader to the West African ports of Joal and Porto d’Ale, accompanied by prayer books and ritual instruments. Peregrino’s arrival among the Portuguese Jews of Senegambia had soon been followed by the opening of a synagogue.91 In all these ways, Amsterdam was connected to an Atlantic world that was much vaster than the Dutch imperial realm.

Religious Tolerance The settlement of large numbers of Jews and other outsiders in colonial Dutch America derived in part from the practice of tolerance, which was understood in the early modern world as allowing “people of a different faith to live peacefully in one’s community.”92 Tolerance was a hallmark of the Dutch Republic, whose foundational document, the Union of Utrecht (1579) recognized individual freedom of conscience. The same was true in the Atlantic world, where a series of administrative principles established

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in 1629 for all Dutch colonies conquered or to be conquered by the WIC introduced liberty of conscience. Considering the beneficiaries of this freedom, it is clear that the measure was not intended in the first place to stimulate migration from Europe. The rationale was rather to organize a new society in the wake of a military conquest: “The liberty of Spaniards, Portuguese and natives, whether they be Roman Catholics or Jews, will be respected.”93 The 1642 instructions for the government of southern Africa (i.e., Angola) were more elaborate: “The Portuguese and the natives, whether Catholic, Jewish or of another religion, will keep their freedom, without interference or investigation of their consciences or private houses, . . . provided the Jews or Catholics refrain from public services, scandals,” and dishonoring the Christian Gospel.94 The WIC board expected that the Dutch invaders would encounter Catholics and Jews wherever they found themselves during the execution of the Grand Design. Extending freedom of conscience would facilitate their integration into the post-war societies. Freedom of public worship was another matter, however. The same instructions for Angola, for example, specified that all clergymen were to be banned.95 The scope of religious freedom varied in time and space. Tolerance was never a given but was constantly negotiated. Some religions were permitted more freedom than what was officially acknowledged, whereas others were more persecuted than we might expect. Even Catholics could therefore experience a measure of freedom. The establishment of transatlantic colonies resembled the earlier foundation of the United Provinces in the drastic changes it wrought in Catholic lives. Of all the religious minorities in the Dutch Republic, the Catholics were the most marginalized in the 1570s and 1580s, when the government built a new public religious order, secularizing the property of the Roman Catholic Church. The confiscation of churches, monasteries, and parish revenues, and the ban on the public celebration of the Mass, priests, processions, wearing rosaries, and singing hymns made life hard for the Catholic faithful. And although in the decades that followed officials occasionally connived at the presence of priests, the confiscation of benefices made it almost impossible for priests to be maintained. These moves were repeated in the Portuguese colonies, albeit obviously with regional variations. After successful confrontations with Catholic armies, Dutch authorities confiscated churches for religious or civic use and used benefices for the construction and maintenance of schools, church buildings, orphanages, and hospitals.96 Officially, Catholics in Brazil, as in the Dutch Republic, were not allowed public worship or public appearances of clergymen, but in reality monks

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increased in number and priests were saying mass “everywhere,” supported by the collection of tithes. Saints’ figures were carried through the streets, chapels built without permission, and the Reformed Church complained that processions occurred under the guise of funerals and that “idolatry” had reappeared “under the veil of comedies.”97 Although a staunch Calvinist himself, Governor Johan Maurits made it a matter of principle to tolerate these events and look the other way. In spite of such apparent generosity, tolerance was hardly appreciated by its intended beneficiaries, who experienced their fate as persecution. The historian Charles Parker has summed up the various forms of persecution that Catholics suffered in the United Provinces: “the destruction of sacred property; the disruption and prohibition of sacramental services; the apprehension, incarceration, ransom, and deportment of priests; the financial extortion practiced against the laity; the fear of harassment; the exclusion from public office; as well as the necessity of having to travel in disguise and worship in secret, often at night.”98 Similar persecution occurred in the colonies, as in Ceylon, where harassment of priests took place on the secret orders of the Dutch colonial government.99 In Salvador (1624), the WIC kept Catholic clergymen on a tight rein, as the Jesuit provincial and nine members of his order found out. Returning from a collection they made elsewhere in Brazil, and ignorant of the Dutch takeover, they were arrested upon arrival in Salvador and sent to Holland, along with four Benedictines and two Franciscans.100 Similarly, the Dutch captured seventeen Jesuits after the invasion of Pernambuco in 1630 and expelled them.101 The persecution of Jesuits was not arbitrary. The Jesuits had been an anti-Protestant order ever since its leaders realized the extent to which Martin Luther’s message had spread in the Holy Roman Empire.102 The 1629 provisional regulations for the areas to be conquered in Brazil therefore singled out the Society of Jesus as a dangerous institution; all Jesuits were therefore to be banned from Dutch-held areas.103 In actual practice, that did not happen until 1636, after Jesuit priests had encouraged Amerindians to fight the Dutch. Other priests were exiled or received harsh treatment by the hands of the WIC in 1639 and early 1640, during the menacing off the coast by an Iberian fleet.104 Anti-Jesuit resentment did not subside as the century advanced. Following the Dutch recapture of New Netherland in 1673, the new leaders of the colony endeavored to expel the Jesuits from the territory of the Iroquois, albeit in vain.105 Local conditions usually determined whether freedom of public worship was introduced. In New Netherland, it was granted to the residents of New Sweden, who found themselves “trapped” in Dutch territory after

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Stuyvesant’s conquest of that colony in 1655. These Swedes and Finns did not have to renounce their Lutheranism, which they were allowed to continue practicing in public. This was a handsome gesture of the Dutch government, considering that the few Lutherans of Paraíba, the 150 Lutheran families of New Amsterdam, and the countless German soldiers in Dutch service could not publicly profess their religion.106 Their condition stood in sharp contrast with Amsterdam, home to a fast-growing Lutheran community that celebrated its services in a church of its own, which opened its doors in 1633.107 The distinction between freedom of public worship and freedom of conscience was not clear cut. The freedom of the Lutherans in New Sweden remained circumscribed while various forms of connivance existed vis-à-vis Lutheran religious practices in New Amsterdam. The practice of connivance temporarily ended in New Netherland in 1656, when Petrus Stuyvesant and his council decided that Protestant dissenters were granted only the right to family worship. Worshipping with men and women who were not one’s relatives was forbidden. This unilateral decision did not go over well with the WIC, which viewed it as a break with established practice. The Chamber of Amsterdam responded with a sharp rebuke.108 In a move to facilitate the Lutherans’ assimilation, the same chamber introduced a slightly changed baptismal formula that enabled the Lutherans to have their children baptized in the Reformed Church.109 Dutch tolerance was meant to cope with religious diversity, not to foster it.110 As in the case of New Sweden, religious freedom was intended to benefit the population groups on the ground and not those people who still had to migrate. Also, as in New Sweden, the beneficiaries’ religion and ethnicity often coincided. Allowing the Catholics to practice their religion in freedom, as occurred to some degree in Brazil and later Curaçao, was therefore synonymous with issuing Roman Catholic freedom of religion. Catholics from the Republic were not among the intended recipients, nor do we know of any Catholics who moved to the colonies because of this privilege.111 What is striking is the desire expressed by Dutch merchants residing in French St. Christophe in 1650 for their own priests. Such a request would not have been granted in a Dutch colony.112 Religious freedom for the Catholic population of Brazil also arrived in the wake of Dutch conquests, starting with the capture of the town of Paraíba in 1634. In a formal treaty, the Dutch allowed for further use of churches and divine sacrifices and promised that priests and images would not be molested. While it is unclear what prompted Dutch officials to grant all these articles, there may be a connection to similar treaties signed in the

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Netherlands with cities in Limburg after their capture in 1632. The phrasing is almost identical.113 The key elements of this treaty were subsequently extended to the inhabitants of Pernambuco, Rio Grande, and the town of Goiana after the Dutch completed their conquests there. Priests and members of the Franciscan, Carmelite, and Benedictine orders, which formed nine monasteries, were to receive complete freedom of movement and could continue to finance their orders in the traditional fashion.114 These treaties seem to have persuaded many Luso-Brazilians, who had fled the war zones, to return to their homes.115 If the Limburg treaties influenced those in Dutch Brazil, Brazil in turn seems to have had an impact of the introduction of religious freedom by the Dutch in Asia. In Malacca, Justus Schouten, a VOC official, pondered in 1641, in the immediate aftermath of the Dutch victory against the Portuguese, what type of governance might be introduced. As he considered introducing a measure of religious freedom, he failed to cite the United Provinces as the blueprint. Instead, he referred first and foremost to the practice introduced by the WIC in Brazil and then went on to list other examples of countries with peacefully coexisting religions, such as Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary in years past, as well as contemporary France and Poland. Schouten suggested allowing Roman Catholics the public exercise of their religion to tie them to the new rulers, to lure Portuguese merchants, and to induce more enemy towns to surrender.116 These same arguments had provided the rationale for the treaties in Limburg and Brazil, and may have been instrumental when religious freedom was granted to Catholics in the Indian towns of Cochin (1663) and Nagapattinam (1664) after Dutch victories there.117 The treaties in Brazil produced a divide between, on the one hand, Recife and Mauritsstad, which had a predominantly Calvinist character, and, on the other, the towns in the interior where Luso-Brazilians formed the majority and where they were formally free to profess their religion.118 For some time, the latter area was marked by peaceful coexistence, exemplified by Dutch residents inviting Catholic priests to baptize their children and consecrate their weddings in the absence of Calvinist ministers.119 Priests even came to some Dutch-owned sugar mills once a year to give their blessing to the start of the cane-crushing season. At the end of the day, however, religious freedom was not necessarily what the residents of Paraíba, Pernambuco, and Rio Grande experienced. The intensification of the war soon led the WIC to deny the Catholic populations access to their churches and clergymen.120 In Porto Calvo, all clergymen were driven away during the hostilities. In the aforementioned diet convened by Johan Maurits and his council in 1640,

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the Luso-Brazilian delegates submitted a request with four demands: the permission to petition Rome for a vicar-general or bishop for all of Dutch Brazil, authorization for new priests to enter Dutch Brazil and for them to be financially supported, and the free exercise of the Catholic religion in homes, streets, and public places.121 No progress was made, however, as borne out by the arrival of six Capuchin friars in January 1642. They came as prisoners off a Dutch ship that captured the friars as they were heading for Kongo. Johan Maurits decided to provide them with a monastery in Olinda and grant them complete religious freedom. The jubilation of the local Catholics of Pernambuco suggests how lamentable their conditions were.122 Later that year, when news arrived that Portugal and the Dutch Republic had signed a cease-fire, Catholic residents again vented their displeasure, now in a series of letters to the Dutch States General. Arguing that they had kept quiet for the duration of the war, the Luso-Brazilian spokesmen now demanded that they should enjoy the rights that the original treaties granted them. What irked them was the ban on immigration by clergymen, which meant that deceased men of the cloth were never replaced. Portuguese leaders in the jurisdiction of Goiana and Itamaracá revealed that only three priests there were still alive, all graybeards, so that the people were in danger of soon living as heathens.123 The Dutch refusal to admit clergymen from outside Dutch Brazil was based on the fear that new arrivals would be in league with the enemy. For the same reason, the States General forbade monks from outside the United Provinces to be admitted to cloisters in Limburg.124 Dutch clergy, meanwhile, added fuel to the flames by loudly protesting the tolerance enjoyed by Roman Catholics. They were alarmed about sermons preached in public churches, monks dwelling in monasteries, as well as the construction of a new temple. Besides, as we have seen, they vehemently protested the revival of processions and what they saw as idolatry.125 Minister Vincent Soler (a Spanish convert to Calvinism) probably expressed the general feeling of the Church when he wrote that the “papists” had as much freedom in Dutch Brazil as they had in Rome.126 And the clergymen were not the only ones standing in the way of a biconfessional society. Backed by the WIC, the local Dutch actively proselytized among the Catholic residents of Brazil, distributing books that explained the alleged errors of their beliefs. By both encouraging Protestantism and discouraging Catholicism, the WIC hoped not only to root out “papal superstition” but to cultivate mutual sympathy for both religious groups, stimulate intermarriage, and thereby forge a single people that was well disposed toward the government. In pursuing this policy, the High Council did not shy away from declaring marriages illegal

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that were solemnized by Catholic priests. In 1642, however, Johan Maurits and his governing council concluded that such a policy could not work. The Catholics were too much attached to their religion.127 In his “political will,” written two years later as he departed from the colony, the governor struck a more moderate tone, but on that occasion, he also made it clear that tolerance was a temporary necessity.128 At an earlier date, Krzysztof Arciszewski had predicted that the local Catholic population would not stay in Dutch territory. The freedom that they could expect under Portuguese rule, including religious freedom, was simply too enticing. Tolerance, in other words, was no panacea.129 In spite of Johan Maurits’s noble intentions—he supported religious freedom for his Catholic neighbors in Mauritsstad, which would have meant the restitution of their churches—nothing changed. The alternative to religious freedom, the governor contended, was revolt. And indeed, less than three years later, the devastating revolt broke out among the moradores, the resident Luso-Brazilians. The Dutch refusal to honor the treaty of Paraíba and its copies—passed over by historians—was an important factor in this uprising. A pamphlet that Catholics in Pernambuco published in Antwerp one year after the start of the rebellion bears this out. The Dutch, the text said, had kept their word in the immediate aftermath of the treaties, but eventually they had ignored the treaties, arresting clergymen and forcing them into exile.130 For these Catholics, it was indeed easy to mistake tolerance for persecution.131 After the Brazilian adventure had come to an end, the trend in the Dutch Republic toward the growing acceptance of public Catholicism after 1648 was extended to some colonies. Thus, the stadholder and the WIC allowed Catholics to settle on Curaçao in 1661. Mercantile reasons accelerated the lifting of restrictions on Catholic worship, as the authorities accommodated the Genoese contractors of the asiento. By the 1670s, these merchants used a chapel with an altar whenever business brought them to the island.132 Priests from the nearby Spanish colonies arrived in their wake, no fewer than fifty-five between 1680 and 1705. While these men came of their own accord, the governor of Suriname invited priests to come to his colony. He argued that, if Roman Catholic planters were allowed to settle there, they had the right to spiritual care.133 Three priests who arrived in civilian clothes created a commotion by their mere presence, upsetting the States of Zeeland, which demanded the men be sent back to the Netherlands. Furious about such interference, the governor obeyed in his own way. The priests had died in the interim, so he had their remains exhumed and shipped to Zeeland.134

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Native Neighbors The 1629 guidelines stipulated that the religious freedom of Amerindians would also be respected, albeit only for those who were Catholics or Jews. In practice, religion would rarely drive a wedge between the Dutch and their indigenous neighbors. It might even have become an arena that brought the two sides together, but as we will see, missionizing efforts were modest and rarely effective. Outside Brazil, the points of contact were primarily economic rather than religious. Colonial societies came about in a process of trial and error, during which Dutch settlers often depended on the aid and expertise of the American and African natives. Communication could be difficult in the stage of first contact. Four natives of the Juan Fernández Islands off South America gestured that the men on board a Dutch fleet in the 1610s should come ashore. They also shouted something, but the Dutch could not understand them, although, as one of them later related, “we called out to them in the Spanish, Malay, Javanese, and Dutch language.”135 Some Dutchmen continued to avail themselves of sign language throughout the seventeenth century, but the acquisition of indigenous languages was vital for creating lasting bonds.136 In practice, however, a pidginized form of native languages often prevailed in day-to-day interactions, at least in North America.137 Those Dutchman who did acquire fluency in indigenous languages made themselves indispensable. In the 1620s, Thomas Janssen, who had lived among the Caribs and had learned their language, provided some topographical clues regarding the names of Caribbean islands.138 Pieter Barentsen mastered indigenous languages and customs during an expedition in 1619 to the Caribbean, Guiana, and Florida. His linguistic skills and the ease with which he dealt with Amerindians were very useful to the settlers of New Netherland, leading to his appointment by Director Pieter Minuit as commander of Fort Orange.139 One Dutch factor on the Oiapoque River assimilated so well that he had forgotten his native tongue when he met the crews of a Dutch squadron that appeared in 1627.140 The best intermediaries did not merely facilitate communications but gained the Amerindians’ trust. Aert Adriaensz Groenewegen is a prime example. Having first served Spain as a commercial agent in the Orinoco delta, he started working for a consortium of English and Dutch merchants from Zeeland in 1615. After establishing a fort on the Essequibo River, he remained the senior Dutch official for a number of decades, in no small part because of his excellent ties to the natives.141 Another example is Arent van Curler (1620–1667), the manager of Rensselaerswijck, seen by the Mohawks

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as a faithful ally. Following his death, they made “Corlaer,” a corrupted form of his name, into the title by which they addressed later governors of New York.142 Amerindians themselves proved to be reliable brokers for the Dutch. On the Suriname River, some Amsterdam merchants relied in the early 1610s on the services of a young Amerindian who conducted trade, traveled, and translated on their behalf. For no apparent reason, a Dutch factor shot the boy with a flintlock in 1613, seriously wounding him. According to one eyewitness, he later died.143 In North America, the Dutch also used foreign “factors” or trade agents as traits d’union with the local peoples, men such as Juan Rodríguez, probably a Eurafrican from Santo Domingo, whom Thijs Volckertsz Mossel, a Dutch ship captain, had left behind in 1613 as commercial agent in the Lower Hudson Valley to exchange commodities for beaver pelts with Algonquian-speaking natives.144 In Africa, the Dutch availed themselves of brokers, typically merchants or courtiers, to communicate with native rulers. As a rule, they were paid well for their services, but not infrequently they abandoned one employer and joined another without prior notice. Their backgrounds were quite varied; some were related to royal clans, whereas others were of mixed ancestry or had been born into slavery.145 Indigenous brokerage could also be taught. Dirck Gerritsz China did not beat around the bush when his Spanish captors asked him in Chile in 1600 about Dutch designs on America. The plan of this expedition was, he said, to find good lands fit for settlement and bring some native men back to the Netherlands who would be taught the Dutch language and were to be treated as friends. Once they were returned on ships that would also carry Dutch settlers, trade was supposed to start flowing. The model, he added, was that of the Portuguese in India.146 Their stay in the United Provinces also served to impress the natives with the power and civilization of their hosts. In addition, it was considered essential to convert the new allies to the Calvinist religion.147 The goals of Diogo Dias Querido, an Amsterdam merchant, in bringing a few Africans to his home, however, differed in one respect. In addition to teaching them Dutch, which they were to use as interpreters on board his merchantmen along the African coast, Querido seems to have converted them to his own religion: Judaism.148 Dutch brokers in the New World at times entered into sexual relationships with native women, whose willingness to have intercourse with visiting Dutch traders was probably a communal strategy to solidify the men’s bonds with indigenous nations.149 There are more than a few examples of Dutchmen forming families with indigenous Mohawk and Tupi women.150 A minister in Brasyls Schuyt-Praetjen blamed the Brazilian uprising in 1645 on

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Dutch sexual liaisons with native women. Just as God had given the Land of Canaan to Israel on the condition that no sins would be committed by their engaging with the pagans’ gods or their daughters, He had led the Dutch to Brazil on the same condition. But, the pastor contended, “we have honored the sins and riches of the land more than God’s commandment, as we interacted with the wives and daughters of the Portuguese, but even exceeded all bounds in their relations with female blacks and mulattoes (Eurafricans), as well as Brazilian [Tupi] and Tapuya women. For our sins we have brought down on our heads a just punishment.” What this fictitious minister referred to was the abuse of native women, which was apparently not exceptional. The Church railed against any intimate relations by Christians with indigenous women. Only pious dealings with native people, wrote a minister in West Africa, could induce the blind heathens to Christ’s Kingdom.151 In the Americas, the WIC also prohibited these sexual relations so as not to jeopardize its alliance with its Amerindian allies.152 Nevertheless, native females remained in demand wherever European women were heavily outnumbered by men. To prevent problems, the WIC therefore urged prospective male settlers from the German county of Hanau (1669) to bring their wives along to Guiana.153 Even more conspicuous was the tendency of Dutch males to engage in liaisons with Eurafrican women on the African Gold Coast. WIC officials who had fathered a child with a native woman saw part of their income withheld by the Company, which transferred that portion to the child’s mother or warden in a move to remain on good terms with African leaders.154 The Portuguese had set the tone for European-African liaisons. The wife of Louis Fidelerius, ensign in Elmina since 1638, was the daughter of a Portuguese man and a Eurafrican woman.155 Another Eurafrican woman was the companion of no fewer than three successive WIC employees in Elmina. Helena Correa was the offspring of a native woman and Emanuel Correa, the Portuguese governor of the fort of Axim. Helena was first married to a Portuguese man at Axim, who left after the Dutch conquest of the fort in 1642. She remarried Jan Gelendonck, the deputy chief at the Dutch factory of Cabo Cors (Cape Coast Castle) and himself the son of a Portuguese captain and a black slave woman. Around 1650, she started a long affair with the new fiscaal (public prosecutor) of Elmina, Jan van Valckenburgh, from which one son was born. Valckenburgh had married shortly before he left the Netherlands but made Helena the first lady of Elmina castle when he was appointed director-general in 1656. Valckenburgh left in 1659 for the Netherlands, and by the time he returned to Elmina, Helena had become the mistress of the aforementioned Dirck Wilree, who was unmarried. She bore Wilree three sons.156

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Close contact provided a window into the local cultures. During his first day ashore in Elmina, Michael Hemmersam (a WIC employee who hailed from Nuremburg) was surprised by a local woman who “sprang up to me, offered me her hand and wanted to talk to me. This greatly startled me, and I asked those who could talk to her and understood the language what this meant or what would come of it. They said that when one of them died, they supposed that he travelled to another place. Now since this Mooress’ husband had died a short time before, she said it was me, and I was her deceased husband, who had become white through death but was now coming there with other people so that I should not be recognized.” After her husband returned, the woman and her family told Hemmersam he was the husband’s brother. “I had to let it remain,” he concluded, “that I too had previously been born a Moor.”157 Unlike Hemmersam, a Zeeland merchant trading at Cape Mount (in present-day Liberia) was prone to share the local beliefs. A Swiss physician on board his ship reported that the man “told me he had heard the terrible voice of the evil spirit requiring the local people to make sacrifice to him. When I asked my factor where he heard this, he said, ‘In the forest; but no-one may come there except the king, Thaba Flamore, and his counselors.’ Several times the same day I heard a really gruesome voice, and I saw women and children, as well as those who did not belong [to the sacrificing group], fleeing to their homes out of great fear and dread of the evil spirit.”158 Insights into local customs were required to establish and maintain commercial and diplomatic ties with the American and African nations. Reciprocal gifts of the right quality and quantity were the glue in these relationships. In meetings with men of the Five Nations in North America, the Dutch were well-advised, for instance, to reinforce their promises by presenting gifts such as kettles, axes, gunpowder, and lead. Likewise, indigenous allies in Brazil were provided with hats, linen, axes, knives, scissors, canisters, fishhooks, and mirrors.159 The alliance made in 1598 with the king of Sabu on the Gold Coast, a small kingdom where Dutch merchants traded with Akan suppliers of gold, was also reinforced by periodic gifts, including some sent by Stadholder Maurits.160 In those parts of West Africa where the Dutch eventually established long-lasting trading posts (such as Mouree and Elmina), they were dependent on the protection of the local African authorities. To obtain the Africans’ cooperation, the Dutch not only had to shower them with gifts and show the respect due from subjects. The Dutch invariably treated African rulers as sovereign princes and concluded treaties of alliance with them. The consignments of trade goods and gold that the Dutch sent to the rulers in

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accordance with such written agreements were interpreted differently by the two sides. While the WIC broadcast them to its European rivals as gifts supplied by a country in sovereign possession of forts and trading posts, local rulers saw themselves as the sovereigns who rented out coastal strips of land, for which they received tribute in the form of gold and commodities. Nor did the agreements, in their view, award the WIC exclusive trading rights.161 The dynamics of the Dutch interactions with Amerindians were similar. In “selling” their lands to the WIC, the Munsees did not intend to transfer their territories permanently to the Dutch. They never relinquished their position as the sovereign power and merely allowed the Dutch to jointly occupy the land.162 In native eyes, then, the Dutch were at best equal partners. They were recognized as such by the contemporary Iroquois, who seem to have struck a deal with Dutch merchants that laid down the principles of a subsequent equal relationship between the two sides, based on mutual benefit and noninterference.163

Slavery In various parts of the Americas, Dutch colonists and merchants did not only trade with natives but also bought and sold them. Settlers in Guiana procured indigenous slaves from the Amerindians’ own native enemies, who routinely sold them to the Europeans on the coast.164 In the 1640s, Dutch traders unconnected to the WIC began transporting and selling natives from Dominica and the Brazilian captaincy of Maranhão as slaves in the Caribbean.165 As was the case with English at Barbados in the same years, this was an intermittent trade, which supplemented the commerce in enslaved Africans.166 A relatively high number of Amerindian slaves seem to have been shipped to St. Eustatius during the colony’s first years of the colony, supplied by both Dutchmen and smugglers from foreign countries. Indigenous slaves were also exported from the same island. In 1642, some settlers tricked eighty-one natives into coming on board their ships under the pretense of friendship and trade. They were kidnapped and probably sold elsewhere.167 Officially, no indigenous Americans could be forced to work against their will. They were to be ruled like all others. The States General resolved on August 23, 1636, that the natives of the country “shall be left undisturbed to enjoy their freedom; they are in no way whatsoever to be made slaves, but together with the other inhabitants shall enjoy political and civil rights; they are to be ruled in conformity with their laws.”168 Six years later, the WIC did, however, authorize the enslavement of those Amerindians who waged war on the indigenous allies of the Dutch. Such slaves were to be sold or to serve

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the WIC for seven years.169 In addition, free rein was given to indigenous slavery in Maranhão, where the lack of enslaved Africans induced the Heren XIX to have the natives who had served the Portuguese as slaves remain in bondage. After a few months, the Heren backed off from that decision after tensions had surfaced with Amerindian allies over this policy. Nevertheless, although their legal status was altered, many of the Indians in Maranhão found themselves in a condition of quasi-slavery.170 The boundary between voluntary Indian service and slavery is often difficult to determine, as the historian Lodewijk Hulsman has noted.171 By no means all Amerindians whose labor the Dutch used in Brazil were slaves, even though the exact terms of their service are unclear. Amerindians felled firewood for sugar plantations, planted sugarcane, cleaned cane fields, drove carts, and herded livestock.172 Others were personal servants, such as a Tapuya boy who stayed with Peter Hansen Hajstrup, a soldier in the Dutch army, for five years. After the Dutch defeat, Hajstrup took him along to Europe.173 Whether such servants were formal slaves is unknown. Nor do we have information on the legal status of the ten captives the Dutch acquired in the First Esopus War, who were sent from New Netherland to Curaçao in 1660.174 During the pioneer years of Curaçao, Amerindians who had stayed on the island after the Spanish defeat also worked for the Dutch. Their numbers were modest. A native islander who was interrogated by the Spanish authorities in Caracas in 1640 divulged that ten males were at work in the forts and twelve cut and transported grass for the Dutch horses, while two females helped grow vegetables.175 Two Dutch colonies did practice large-scale indigenous slavery in the seventeenth century: St. Eustatius and Suriname. By 1665, Statia was home to more than four hundred enslaved natives.176 A group of forty-seven residents of early Dutch Suriname estimated the number of enslaved Amerindians in their colony in 1671 at five hundred, a legacy of the period of English colonization.177 That number declined rapidly, shrinking to 106 in 1684, in part because English settlers moving to Barbados forcibly took natives along with them.178 Only in the course of the eighteenth century did indigenous slavery in Suriname fade away. Before the Dutch started enslaving Amerindians, they had acquired experience with slavery in the Indian Ocean. The slave trade in which they engaged was initially modest, however. By 1618, no more than seventy slaves dwelled at the Dutch headquarters in Java. Within a few years, that number rose significantly, especially after the shipment of 1,900 slaves from the Coromandel Coast of India in 1622–1623.179 Nor was slavery unknown in Amsterdam, where men of the Portuguese nation frequently passed through

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with their African servants.180 A five-year-old boy, for example, arrived in the city around 1618 after he had been purchased in Luanda. He was baptized, given the Christian name Antônio, and taught by his master, Gaspar Afonso Martel, to recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. After about one year, the two left for Brazil.181 Likewise, Antônio Henriques Alvin lived in Amsterdam for several months in 1626 with eight slaves after they had all been captured by a Dutch privateer en route from Brazil to Portugal.182 The presence of captives is also suggested by the 1614 regulation of the Portuguese Jewish community that set aside a separate cemetery plot for “slaves, servants, and Jewish girls who are not of our Nation.”183 In the latter part of the century, however, slavery seems to have disappeared from the Jewish neighborhood. The slave of a merchant, who had left Brazil in 1654 and was planning to move to Barbados, wished to remain in Amsterdam when she realized that she was free and not obliged to serve her master.184 In a letter to an old Spanish friend, Abraham Idaña, a Jewish resident of the city who had originated from Spain confirmed in 1685 that freedom in Amsterdam was universal: “Slavery is not allowed here. Arriving slaves are immediately freed. The many blacks from Brazil and other areas all work for wages here.”185 Still, even though slavery may have ended among the Jews of Amsterdam, at least one slave remained in the city, the property of Christians. In 1694, Aletta van Houttuin, the widow of Lourens de Rasière, freed eighteen-year-old Jan Pick van Angola, who had served her Brazil-born husband for some years, upon the African’s request.186 In the early stages of Dutch colonization of the Americas, white-black relations were not always informed by racial hierarchy. They resembled the relatively relaxed interactions during the start-off years of the English colonies in the Chesapeake, when African numbers were small and blacks worked alongside indentured servants and their masters to cultivate tobacco.187 For example, simple acts of kindness marked the interactions between Dutch ship crews and New World blacks. One captain, who had briefly employed five blacks at Hispaniola—where these men had voluntarily worked for him in exchange for provisions—intended to disembark them at the island of Tortuga, as they had wished. But when they changed their mind, afraid they would find no food there, the captain took pity on them and brought them to Amsterdam.188 In New Netherland, slaves appearing in courts of law were treated in the same way as white suspects. They could even take legal action against free individuals.189 A group of enslaved men who served in the black militia of the colony negotiated a “half-freedom”: they would become free in exchange for the annual payment of a compensation sum while their children continued to serve the WIC as slaves.190 Nonetheless, Dutch authorities

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thwarted attempts by whites and blacks to mingle. In their instructions for one of the first governors of Curaçao, the WIC authorities disapproved of sexual contacts between whites and blacks, although Christians were permitted to marry Africans who had been baptized.191 Nor were whites in New Netherland allowed to have sexual contacts with Amerindians or blacks.192 Blacks in Dutch Salvador (1624–1625) functioned somewhat like the indigenous servants whose legal status was not always clear. These Africans were commanded to perform dangerous tasks such as venturing out of the besieged city to procure cassava, bananas, oranges, pineapples, and other fruit.193 Able-bodied males were incorporated into the Dutch army and made up an appreciable part of the armed forces. At the Dutch surrender, the Iberians counted 2,000 European soldiers and 590 blacks.194 When the Dutch established their foothold in Pernambuco in 1630, five hundred of the seven hundred blacks flocked to their side. The army leaders decided to use the males to help build forts, fight the enemy, and support the war effort in other ways.195 In the chaos created by the ongoing hostilities, many blacks fled from Dutch service in the following five years,196 and by 1645–1646, only 259 Africans were counted in the service of the WIC.197 Although the Dutch views of Africans may not have been decidedly racist before 1635, by the time the Dutch controlled a large plantation area in Brazil, their attitudes changed rapidly. Faced with an already segregated society, the Dutch made no effort to undo it after they had ousted the Iberians. The plantation system that provided the rationale for their invasion dictated that the Dutch saw slaves primarily as investments rather than human beings. This was illustrated by the instructions for the Bruynvisch, a slave ship that left from Delfshaven for Luanda in 1642. The directors of the WIC Meuse Chamber stipulated that the vessel was to sail from Luanda to Pernambuco with “blacks or other commodities.”198 Not all Africans in Dutch Brazil were forced to work on plantations. For lack of expensive Dutch artisans, they were trained—as were blacks in New Amsterdam and Dutch forts in Africa—to be carpenters, bricklayers, and blacksmiths, and they proved to be competent. But, even though they showed on a daily basis that they could perform jobs previously reserved for the Dutch, almost all the Africans in Brazil remained slaves. The conditions in New Amsterdam were vastly different. By the time of the English conquest, 75 of the 375 black residents of the city were free, living in family units on plots of land granted to them when they were manumitted.199 The treatment of slaves on tropical plantations was almost routinely inhumane. Planters in Brazil not only worked their captives on Sundays, at least until the government banned that practice, but put down rebellions, individual

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or collective, with the most brutal force.200 The colonial government allowed slave masters certain corporal punishments, such as beating slaves with a whip, stick, or leather belt; putting them in irons or tied to a stake; and fettering them at the feet and neck.201 Small wonder, then, that some tried to escape— and succeeded—fleeing by land to the maroon community of Palmares or by sea to Fernando de Noronha.202 The dehumanization of blacks enabled the authorities in Brazil to make a clear distinction between slaves and free people when the scarcity of food led to near-famine conditions in 1646. Blacks simply had to do without provisions and suffered the consequences.203 Johan Nieuhof remarked that bitter and sharp hunger had made their eyes hollow and so wild that they frightened the most intrepid.204 In the early years of Dutch Atlantic expansion, no consensus had existed among Dutch intellectuals and WIC men about the legitimacy of black slavery. Some denied there was a need for any slave labor. The author of Levendich Discours (1622) argued that after a (still imaginary) Dutch takeover in Brazil, blacks would be made free laborers who would work diligently to procure fine clothes and become more cultured. The slaves of the Portuguese, he related, only worked as long as they were beaten.205 Nor did Willem Usselincx consider the transportation of slaves to the Dutch colonies necessary. It was cheaper, he thought, to have the labor performed by Dutchmen, who would also work harder.206 But he did not have objections against the slave trade as such. Slavery gave the Africans the gift of life, he argued. If there had been no one to buy them, they would have been killed for the crimes they had committed or executed by the party that had won the war in which they had been taken prisoner.207 The latter argument was echoed by Pastor Godefridus Udemans (1581/2–1649) in an influential book reprinted just one year after the conquest of Elmina (1637). In ’t Geestelyck Roer Van ’t Coopmans Schip (“The Spiritual Rudder of the Merchant Ship,” 1638), he devised a comprehensive Protestant justification for Dutch involvement in the slave trade.208 The Dutch were allowed to enslave pagans and Turks, Udemans argued, referring to the book of Leviticus, if they were captured in just wars or if their parents or other masters had sold the captives for a just price, as was reportedly the case in Angola.209 Johannes de Mey, a philosophy professor, opined that Christians could indeed in good conscience purchase humans who would otherwise have been killed or eaten by their enemies. This transaction not only released them from a certain death but made them happier by introducing them to the truth and Christ’s doctrine.210 Gedeon Morris, a WIC official writing from Brazil in 1637, also brought up cannibalism. The thirteen nations at war with each other in the Amazon delta, he argued, consumed enemy prisoners of war. The Dutch should not object to

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buying slaves because such transactions saved them.211 Finally, Pieter Geyers, a WIC commies in West Africa around 1680, added that Africans who hailed from Kongo were natural slaves. None of them supposedly wanted to return from the New World to their African homes.212 To many Dutch natives, blackness seems to have been strange or frightening, and increasingly associated with lack of civilization. In his four-volume history of the WIC, which was based in part on conversations with ship captains and crews, de Laet described the encounter between Dutch sailors aboard Admiral Andries Veron’s fleet and a human-like animal in Sierra Leone in 1625. This was an animal nobody had ever seen before.213 Another account of the same expedition relates how the Dutch caught a monstrous beast, altogether with the countenance of a woman, with long hair on its head, hanging down on both sides, and with hands and feet like those of a human being. It was brought on board the ship . . . and it ate bread and drank water. When someone pretended to weep, it cried too—more and more; and being miserable, it laid its paw under its head and sat sadly. At length, when it showed itself so human in everything . . . the common sailors had second thoughts, wondering whether it might in fact be an accursed woman, who had been residing in the bush until the time when she had been caught. Since most of them were seized by this frenzy, they threw it overboard and it drowned.214 The beliefs of the men on board Veron’s fleet did not simply reflect their ignorance or their imagination. Both de Laet’s account and a third report about the encounter with the man-beast, probably a gorilla, suggest that this was not a simple case of the projection of European ideas about magic. Instead, the Dutch attributed to local blacks the belief that their deceased souls rested in the animal.215 The lack of familiarity with Africans did, however, lead some Dutchmen to resort to representations based on a mixture of hearsay and fantasy. The author of a memorandum in the 1590s wrote that in the African interior “there are many people who do not speak, but only whistle, others with goats’ feet, and others [who are] like greyhounds, and all these peoples have no houses, but live like beasts in the fields.”216 The earliest firsthand Dutch description of the African Gold Coast (1602) echoed the message of foreign travelers that Africans were a less advanced sort of humans—that they were wild, cruel, and voluptuous barbarians.217 The author, Pieter de Marees, called Africans thievish and avaricious savages, servants of idols who did not teach their children anything while chastising them terribly.218 But he went

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on to note: “The men [of this country] are all that fine, upright men should be. They are good workers and have bodies as strong as trees. They learn easily, understand quickly and, when they see something demonstrated, will copy it as quickly as one could wish . . . They are very clever at trading, which they still learn daily from the Dutch, so they will yet become cleverer than the Dutch themselves.”219 It was perhaps natural for Netherlanders to consider blacks exotic for lack of an African presence in the Netherlands. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, the United Provinces were home to no more than a few dozen people of African birth or heritage.220 Some Dutchmen may have been aware of what Africans looked like through European paintings that had portrayed them since the fourteenth century; by the seventeenth century, Dutch paintings depicted Africans on a fairly broad scale. Some representations were positive, but there were negative associations as well. Caspar, the black king in the Adoration of the Magi, was painted as an elegant man, but the Ethiopian eunuch, whose baptism was a favorite theme among Dutch artists, was usually represented as inferior.221 Willem Godschalck van Focquenbroch (1640–1670), a poet and physician who spent the last two years of his short life in Elmina, observed parallels between African customs and those of the Jews. The Africans, he wrote, “have inherited very much from the old Hebrews or the children of Israel, although somewhat corrupted because of the passage of time, since they live without books and writing systems. They have many laws and ceremonies that coincide considerably with the Old Testament: for many of them in many lands are circumcised.”222 Ideas about Africa and its inhabitants were often rooted as well in the biblical story of Noah from the book of Genesis. Noah condemned the descendants of one of his sons, Ham, to perpetual servitude; and it was conventional in European art to depict Ham’s descendants as Negroid. This interpretation appeared in the Netherlands as early as the thirteenth century.223 The curse of Ham—a common Christian explanation for the assumed backwardness of Africans—had begun to feature in Dutch treatises once the Dutch entered the African slave trade.224 The curse appeared, for example, in Korte beschrijvinge van eenige vergetene en verborgene antiquiteiten (1660), written by Johan Picart, a minister in Coevorden. Picart acknowledged that Ham and his offspring had founded powerful nations in Africa, but he added that slavery had been a central element of their history. Over the centuries, most Africans had been enslaved by their own kings and many still found themselves in Ottoman slavery. The inhabitants of places such as Kongo, Angola, and Guinea were dragged hither and thither as slaves. And that was

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not necessarily a bad thing because only heavy corporal punishment would make the Africans flourish.225 Udemans emphasized the need for Dutch masters to be good to their slaves. He even recommended freeing the captives after a certain number of years to prevent the Africans from becoming discouraged as well as to facilitate their conversion. Some authors cited Exodus 21:2 or Deuteronomy, which stipulates manumission in the seventh year. De Mey, for one, proposed manumitting after six years those slaves who had shown themselves to be faithful Christians. The hope of freedom would lead to more voluntary and loyal service. Moreover, he maintained, in spite of the master’s vast powers over the slave, a Christian lord’s behavior must be tempered by fairness and mercy. The Christian must also realize that he had a Lord in heavens compared to whom he was an infinitely more insignificant servant than the lowliest slave of the world’s mightiest master.226 Some authors condemned the slave trade or criticized specific aspects of slavery. They categorized enslavement as the theft of human bodies, which they deemed taboo, just as they denounced the custom, ascribed to Catholic countries, of kidnapping children to have them enter monasteries or join religious orders. Other writers were not opposed to the slave trade itself but were opposed to selling Africans to Catholics. Udemans in particular warned the Dutch not to sell slaves to the “tyrannical” Spanish and Portuguese. Ironically, that is just what the Dutch would be doing in the years to come.227 Others, who knew about the custom of slaveholders’ keeping enslaved women as their concubines, argued against sexual liaisons with women of African background. Five years after traveling to the Caribbean, Jan Bara, a poet and playwright, chided the “Negress lover” who called himself a Christian but whose seed’s adulteration blasphemed God’s name.228 Several representatives of the Nadere Reformatie, or Second Reformation, voiced their own criticism. They emphasized an instinctive, God-fearing, pious conduct in life through the reform of sins and a personal relationship with God. Among them was Cornelius Poudroyen, who ventriloquized the ideas of Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676), the famous orthodox Calvinist theologian and preacher. Poudroyen countered the argument that cultivating the land was impossible in some areas without slave labor by pointing to the servants at work in the Republic in quarries, in mines, and as sawyers and ditch diggers. These servants could also be employed in distant lands. But no work should be imposed on slaves that masters would not impose on themselves or others because they were their fellow-creatures.229 Nor should one purchase prisoners of war, Poudroyen wrote. People sold by their enemies were enslaved in an unjust or just war. But even in the latter case, some had

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possibly been enslaved illegally. It ill behooved Christians to get wrapped up in this raw, confusing, dangerous, and unfair trade and thus magnify somebody else’s evil.230 Poudroyen was seconded by other theologians and pastors, such as Georgius de Raad and Jacobus Hondius. Hondius, a minister in Hoorn and follower of Voetius, denounced in his Swart Register van Duysent Sonden (“Black Register of a Thousand Sins”) of 1679 both Reformed Church members in general and the directors of the WIC and VOC in particular for their participation in the slave trade. Slaves, Hondius wrote, were not animals. They were perhaps “miserable people,” but their nature was the same as that of Church members. Jews, Turks, pagans and so-called Christians might take part in the slave trade, but “Reformed church members should not taint themselves with such uncompassionate trade. Rather, they should act in fear of the Lord, in order that the money they make will be a blessing rather than a curse.”231 Unconnected to the Second Reformation was Franciscus van den Enden, the philosopher who argued in a 1662 tract extolling New Netherland that no Christians could take part in enslaving fellow humans.232 Van den Enden was probably influenced by the ideas of Pieter Plockhoy, whose colony at New Amstel included no slaves or indentured servants.233 Caspar Barlaeus also expressed an antislavery sentiment that was highly uncommon at the time. His argument was an interesting one. In the Middle Ages, he wrote, slavery still existed in Europe. But it fell into disuse among those who had been civilized by Christ’s doctrine and ideas, perhaps because it was deemed sinful to keep in bondage Christians redeemed by Christ’s blood or simply to make converts among pagans by a show of unusual humanity. Consequently, slavery had disappeared by the year 1212. But now that greed had also grown among the Reformed Christians, they had returned to the habit of buying and selling men, even though man was made in God’s likeness and redeemed by Christ. Because of this habit, it was not unusual for a wise man to serve an ignorant one or for a good person to serve a criminal.234

Conversions Although the overseas Dutch have sometimes been portrayed as being interested exclusively in trade, spreading the Gospel to the “blind heathens” was one of the stated objectives of the ministers of the Reformed Church, both in Africa and the Americas. In itself, this goal was at odds with the policy of toleration. Since 1629, the Heren XIX had instructed the Dutch to leave the indigenous people free in their religion.235 One reason to take up the task of missionizing was to preempt Catholics from doing the same.236 Because

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Catholic missionaries had usually been active wherever the Dutch made landfall, their arrival often led to a battle of dogmas, as in Luanda in 1641.237 Dutch missionary zeal was expressed in the introduction of many Protestant publications in Kongo, whose king asserted after the Dutch loss of Angola that he had publicly burned “heretical books.” These books made few converts, if any. One Portuguese friar asserted that no natives came to listen to the Dutch, even looking at them as if they were the devil when these strangers came to buy ivory.238 Linguistic problems plagued the Dutch missions. The commies at Fort Orange in New Netherland contended that the Amerindians deliberately changed their language every two or three years.239 The language gap with the natives explained, wrote Pastor Laurentius Benderius in 1633 from the Gold Coast, why his efforts to spread God’s Word had met with little success. His plea for a schoolmaster who could teach Dutch was answered by the Chamber of Amsterdam, but the teacher soon gave up for lack of books in African languages.240 In Brazil, where several ministers settled in the mission villages, one pastor wrote a three-volume work introducing the Protestant religion. This catechism, containing formulas for baptism and the Lord’s Supper, was set in Tupi, Dutch, and Portuguese, which many Amerindians spoke as their second language. The author confessed to having presented the subject matter in often simplistic terms in Tupi because of the language’s “barbarian” character, which did not lend itself to a proper expression of all the theological notions. When push came to shove, this catechism was probably sidelined, due in part to the protests of the Church in the United Provinces against the author’s dubious theological stand.241 Based on a method occasionally used by the Dutch in Asia—and probably inspired by the example of Portuguese colonizers—was the suggestion by Pastor Jonas Michaëlius in New Netherland to withdraw indigenous youths from their parental authority and lodge them with Dutch families, where they would be educated in the Christian doctrine. This project was discontinued after the adult natives turned against it.242 A similar initiative in Brazil did not fare any better. In 1642, three ministers presented a written discussion to the colonial council in which they proposed to separate the children from their parents, put them in boarding schools, and train them in the Christian faith, arts, and crafts. The Heren XIX reacted approvingly, but the Amerindians rejected the proposal angrily, both in Pernambuco and Ceará, and several Dutch men were apparently killed by way of protest. Catechization was consequently abandoned.243 Attempts continued, nonetheless, to reach the general indigenous population by means of native intermediaries. Pastor Joannis Backerus instructed one Amerindian man on Curaçao in the

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Dutch tongue and the religious foundations, while Johannes Megapolensis did the same in New Netherland. In Brazil, the Dutch even appointed Tupi schoolmasters.244 The proposal of the three ministers in Brazil was based on the assumption that a civilizing mission was necessary among the Amerindians. In keeping with the general European conflation of culture with race, the unspoken assumption of Dutch authorities at home and in the colonies was always that Amerindians showed signs of barbarism.245 The 1636 policy guidelines for Curaçao therefore argued that all should be done to deliver the Amerindians from their barbarous ways. The education of the children had as its aim both their conversion to Christianity and a moral life.246 What barbarism entailed was crystal clear to Pastor Jonas Michaëlius in New Netherland. The Amerindians, he opined, had fallen prey to diabolism and godlessness, which had led to unnatural wildness and sexual waywardness.247 Civilization meant having no more than one wife, keeping no concubines, and visiting no prostitutes, the Tupi in Brazil were told. A civilized person also refrained from body painting and communal dances.248 In addition, civilization was connected to the market. If the Amerindians embraced civilization and began to dress themselves, they would turn into consumers of Dutch textiles.249 Despite their hard work, the ministers failed in their mission civilisatrice. Eventually, the pastors in Brazil had to conclude that two vices could not be eradicated: drunkenness and marital infidelity.250 On balance, Dutch missionary efforts were not very successful. In 1654, two ministers could report only one possible case of native conversion in New Netherland, and even this one man proved to be no true convert. Three years later, the same two ministers wrote that he had changed: “He took to drinking brandy, he pawned the Bible, and turned into a regular beast. . . .”251 Pastor Vincent Soler lived in Dutch Brazil for seven years. Upon his arrival in 1636, he noted that the Amerindians knew of the existence of the Prince of Orange better than of God.252 Two decades later, the pastors had still not reached many Amerindians. The success rate was equally small in those parts of Africa that the Dutch claimed for themselves. Capuchin priests in Central Africa reported that the local “pagans” did not think highly of the Dutch religion. It consisted, they said, only in words and not in acts such as offerings and sacrifices similar to their own.253 We might add that the African religions, with their numerous deities and spirits, were more congruent with Roman Catholic cosmology, in which many saints mediated between the believer and the Christian God, than with Protestantism. At any rate, it was hard for Dutch pastors to erase the Catholic practices and beliefs that many of the Africans and Amerindians they encountered had grown up with.

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We may also question the Dutch missionary zeal. Mark Meuwese has concluded that “[w]henever the missionary program interfered with commercial or geo-political objectives . . . the WIC put a stop to evangelization efforts.”254 Nor was the Reformed Church firmly committed to the goal of conversion. In some corners of the Dutch Atlantic, ministers apparently arrived without a clear idea of who could be baptized. In 1644, both Johannes Backerus on Curaçao and Jacobus van der Burgh in Angola asked the classis of Amsterdam what to do. The answer was based on the Synod of Dordt: only heathens who had been raised by Reformed adults could be selected for the baptismal font.255 In line with that policy, a twelve-year-old boy brought from Africa to Amsterdam by a Dutch ship captain was allowed to be baptized provided he was further instructed in the Reformed doctrine.256 Poudroyen’s Voetian catechism also stressed that only those children of Jews, Turks, or heathens who had at least one Reformed parent were eligible for baptism.257 If, so the classis wrote to pastor van Beaumont in Curaçao in 1661, Catholic priests had earlier baptized both parents by wholesale, these would still not be considered Christians.258 In other words, only those African and Amerindian children who had been raised in the Reformed religion, made a profession of their faith and whose parents had adopted the same faith could be baptized. In this way, as Danny Noorlander has argued, “the church set a high, inflexible standard for conversion.”259 In Amsterdam, the board of directors of the local Portuguese Jewish congregation introduced a series of prohibitions to prevent men and women of African descent from attaining the same status as those from the Iberian Peninsula. In 1641, “mulatto” or black women were not allowed to take a seat in the synagogue before the arrival of the “white” women,260 and three years later, it was decreed that no circumcised black Jews were to be called to the Torah or given any honorary tasks to perform in the synagogue.261 In 1650, the Talmud Torah effectively excluded blacks from the congregation by determining that only individuals of Portuguese or Spanish descent could be circumcised or allowed to enter the ritual bath, preconditions for a Jewish burial for males and females.262 Blacks were not excluded from the Jewish congregation in Brazil, nor were they barred from the Calvinist churches in Dutch America. The number of blacks and “mulattoes”—predominantly domestic slaves—who were baptized by ministers of the Reformed Church in Brazil was 199 in the period 1647–1654, while in New Netherland at least 56 people of African descent had been baptized by 1656.263 These numbers pale, of course, in comparison to those that Iberian missionaries claimed to have converted. In contrast with the Iberian slaveholders, Dutch planters considered slave

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baptism a thorny question. They were not alone in the New World. The Danish crown told its Lutheran missionaries in the Virgin Islands that “slaves were not to become free by virtue of becoming Christian,” and the same principle was stressed for the English West Indies by the English attorneygeneral. To the horror of the French authorities in St. Christophe, Capuchin missionaries preached that blacks could no longer be held as slaves after receiving baptism.264 In the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa), the secular authorities upheld the same principle.265 In New Netherland, Africans actively sought baptism for their children, but (according to one Dutch pastor) for the wrong reason—they wanted to release their offspring from slavery. To these African Americans, baptism meant joining the Christian community, and Christians, after all, could not be slaves.266 The Synod of Dordt (1618–1619), the last general meeting of the Dutch Reformed Church, had decided that heathen children who had been instructed in the Christian religion, had made profession, had sought baptism themselves, and had then been christened were to enjoy the same freedom as other Christians. But this category was small and made up only of the children the Dutch had wrested from their parents and employed as slaves.267 As a rule, then, Dutch pastors were wary of equating baptism with freedom. In Brazil, the main objective of the slaves’ religious instruction was to make them accept their fate.268 Instead of compassion, pastors often showed disdain for the Africans in the overseas settlements. The first Dutch minister in New Netherland, Jonas Michaëlius, wrote shortly after his arrival, “The Angolan slave women are thieving, lazy, and unwelcome trash.”269 No minister went on record protesting the gift of a slave for domestic service, whom they received from the WIC as a matter of course. One pastor, Johannes Polhemius, even sold at least nine Africans during his ministry in Brazil.270 The only exception was Jacob Dapper, a Recife minister who raised the question whether it was legal for a Christian to trade in or possess black slaves. Johan Maurits was not the only one who thought that those were unnecessary scruples.271 The Dutch missionary effort faded rapidly after the loss of Brazil and New Netherland. It was as if the religious zeal that had helped spur transatlantic warfare and guide the spread of Calvinism on new shores was extinguished. After the Dutch defeat in Angola, the Portuguese were still alarmed to find “numerous heretical catechisms, destined to infect the whole population.”272 The same catechisms were found among Brazilian Amerindians in the Serra de Ibiapaba, which they had turned into a “local Geneva” according to the Jesuit Antônio de Vieira.273 By 1660, however, Pastor Adriaan van Beaumont reported from Curaçao to the Amsterdam classis that the attempt to instruct

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indigenous children in the Reformed religion had stagnated. They live, he wrote, “without God in the world as animals.” A black man who had previously served as their teacher had taught them only godlessness. Van Beaumont had tried to turn the tide, baptizing fifteen native children, but he soon passed away. His successor let the classis know in 1664 that he was about to mingle with Amerindians, but his mission does not seem to have been effective. Before long, Dutch ministers gave up on administering to the spiritual needs of natives and blacks, leaving this task to itinerant Catholic priests arriving from the mainland.274 This withdrawal, which also occurred in the other Dutch colonies, was met by a deafening silence at home. It was now exceedingly rare for Dutchmen to discuss missions among slaves, although the WIC shareholders from Zeeland did emphasize the need for the company to instruct “the Moors.”275 By and large, the days were gone when authors defended the Dutch presence overseas by reference to the need to spread the “true religion” among “blind heathens.” Jodocus van Lodenstein, a pastor from Utrecht, still deplored in 1676 that little activity had been displayed to enlighten the pagans. Thousands, he wrote, should have been sent to shine the light of the Gospel, but in reality hardly enough pastors arrived on the far side of the ocean to minister to the local European populations. But van Lodenstein was among the few to mourn the loss of evangelical activity, which had always seemed to have been part and parcel of Dutch expansion. The nightmare of a 1645 pamphleteer, who had argued that, if the Dutch stopped spreading the Gospel among Amerindians and Africans, the Portuguese would be correct in equating them with pirates, had come true.276 The Atlantic policies of the Republic were conspicuously different from those of the Iberians when it came to the freedom of conscience that was formally extended to other religions. The services of other faiths could therefore take place in the homes of private citizens. In addition, certain groups such as the Jews enjoyed freedom of worship. Neither form of tolerance was meant to encourage migration to the colonies but, rather, to deal with religious differences on the ground. These policies bore fruit, enabling the European contingent of the colonial populations to grow far beyond the modest (Reformed) Dutch element. Still, the colonial societies remained unstable. Even Brazil and New Netherland, the two largest colonies, were marked by uncertainty and military vulnerability because of the settlers’ strained relations with their European and indigenous neighbors. Whatever missionary efforts were undertaken ultimately failed to unite the two groups. Nor did ministers make much headway with the conversion of Africans and their descendants in colonial America.

Epilogue War, Violence, Slavery, and Freedom

Optimism blinded the architects of the Grand Design. Their argumentation was distilled in a small book from 1622 that encouraged the Dutch to subscribe to the WIC. What opposition, the author asked, can we expect from our enemy? There will not be much resistance in Guinea, he answered, since our merchants have been trading there without interference for many years. The Spanish will, however, put all their energy into the protection of the Americas, sending fleet after fleet to thwart us and building fortifications. We know what our enemy has done in the past, when he feared English or French invasions. What we need, therefore, is many well-armed ships, large numbers of sailors and soldiers, and much money. All of that is within our reach. We are very good in building ships, which we can do at half the costs of the Spanish. And where in the world is there such a multitude of valiant and experienced mariners as in our land? Nor do we have to look elsewhere for soldiers. As for the finances, all we need is for those qualified people who have at least 10,000 guilders to invest 2 or 3 percent of our money in the company. That will yield an initial capital of 10 million guilders. The Spanish defenses need not bother us. Only seven or eight forts deserve that name, some of which had been captured by the Dutch and other countries in the past. We are well-prepared for an assault because many of our men have spent time in America and know how to attack it.1 252

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Although it took a long time for the WIC to gain capital liquidity, the Grand Design was pursued without regard to its costs. It was soon clear that the investments offered low yields. In a fictitious conversation between two Spanish caballeros, Don Pelagio and Don Bonaventura, published in 1626, the latter observes that the Dutch had in the previous years sent over one hundred well-armed ships to the “West Indies” at gigantic cost. Assuming that every ship, carrying provisions for three years, was worth 100,000 guilders, Bonaventura concluded that 10 million guilders have been “smothered” in these vessels.2 Five years later, following the invasion of Pernambuco, the humanist Arnoldus Buchelius wrote in his diary, “It has always been my opinion that conquering and maintaining places is very detrimental to the Company.” Despite the debacle of Salvador, he added, the directors were repeating the same mistake. By keeping a large garrison in Pernambuco, they were squandering their money and needed the states to help out.3 Writing after the demise of Dutch Brazil, Pieter de la Court opined that warfare was particularly harmful for the province of Holland, which was dependent on trade. Approvingly, he cited the request by the States of Holland, presented to Stadholder Frederick Henry in 1640, not to engage in future conquests. Otherwise the state might collapse like an eroded mountain.4 While the outbursts of joy that greeted Piet Heyn, Michiel de Ruyter, and the victors of Salvador and Pernambuco show how important their transatlantic exploits were for the creation of a Dutch nation, Buchelius and de la Court had a point.5 Capturing enemy colonies was costly, and so was maintaining them. A logical consequence of the conquest of the main sugar area of Brazil was the addition of Elmina and Luanda to the budding Dutch empire. Financially, the situation was, however, disastrous even before the WIC expeditions left for Africa and before the spendthrift Johan Maurits was appointed governor of Brazil. After its debt had risen to 18 million guilders by 1636, the WIC never regained its financial health. The conquest of Salvador, which failed in 1638, could have turned the tide, but even then, it would have taken a long time for the WIC to recover. Although the expansive ambitions of the WIC should be seen against the background of the new war effort that the Dutch undertook after the truce with Spain had expired, they were also part of a pattern shared by other European countries. Never before had the gap between the strategic ambitions of European governments and their ability to fulfill them been as wide as during the Thirty Years’ War.6 The Dutch ambitions seem to have been primarily political, but we may wonder whether the Dutch merchants and their backers used the war with the Iberians as a pretext to engage in westward expansion. Was the notion of a second front that removed enemy

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men and arms from the domestic scene truthful? It is also possible to see the Dutch expansion, not just in the Atlantic but worldwide, as an outgrowth of the independence process. Similar to the push by German and Italian leaders, dissatisfied with the mere unification of their countries, for the acquisition of colonies after 1870/1, influential Dutchmen may have tried to harness the momentum that had allowed the Republic to achieve virtual autonomy by 1609 for extra-European schemes. Unlike some of their rivals, the Dutch did not suffer the consequences of their unrealistic projections at home but in the Atlantic world. The WIC leaders, however, refused to admit that overextension was the root cause of the collapse of the Dutch Atlantic empire. What explained the failure, they reasoned in 1669, was the lack of planters that came to the colonies. If only enough people had settled in the American colonies who had devoted themselves to tilling the land, Brazil and New Netherland would still have been in Dutch hands. Moreover, as a former “director” (governor) of Dutch Cayenne pointed out five years later, a populous colony can defend itself against intruders. That was the lesson he had learned from the botched Dutch attack on Martinique in 1674.7 The same argument—that vigorous settlements produced civil militias that obviated the need to send soldiers— had been used by the proponents of free trade in the 1630s. In practice, it was not so simple. When the WIC directors recommended this solution to Petrus Stuyvesant in the early 1660s, suggesting armed settlers should attack enemy natives in the open field, the director of New Netherland protested vehemently. “We do not remember,” he wrote, “that citizens and inhabitants in the fatherland were held or compelled” to such military service. Soldiers should be sent to do the work.8 Warfare, not only in the form of territorial campaigns but also conducted by privateers and naval squadrons attacking ports, was essential for both the rise and demise of Dutch political might in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world. Their early success in targeting Portuguese and Spanish vessels, colonies, and outposts enabled the Dutch to become Atlantic players. Conversely, the reversal of fortune in Brazil after 1645 began a process of Dutch decline in the Atlantic world, which was punctuated by the surrender of Brazil in 1654, the dispossession of the African outpost of Cape Coast castle in 1664, the WIC bankruptcy in 1674, and the definitive relinquishing of New Netherland in the same year. At the same time, Dutch commercial prowess was usually unconnected to military assertiveness. The massive trade conducted with the French and English colonies, as well as those of Spain after 1648, resulted from the initiatives of numerous individual merchants not employed by the WIC.

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Some contemporaries believed that the Dutch could have saved themselves much time, energy, and expense if they had kept to conducting trade in the Atlantic world rather than waging war and conquering territories. They saw the WIC as part of the problem, not the solution. One pamphleteer in 1649 discussed the notion that the decay of the WIC would inevitably mean the decline of Amsterdam. That was a lie, he maintained. Amsterdam was not affected by the drop in sugar shipments from Brazil because these were compensated for by large amounts of sugar arriving from Portugal.9 We may wonder whether a Dutch Atlantic would have come about without overseas troop deployment. It is true that the main colonial outposts that remained Dutch after 1678 had all been conquered (Curaçao, Elmina, and Suriname) or reconquered (St. Eustatius) by military expeditions. It is also true that commerce could itself bring about war, as the Dutch merchants trading with English and French colonies found out. The impressive trade they conducted was an important cause of the Anglo-Dutch wars and the French war with the Dutch Republic. But the example of Denmark as an Atlantic player is instructional. Without incurring significant costs, the Danes occupied three Caribbean islands in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, which they transformed into cash-crop producers like Suriname and interimperial smugglers like Curaçao and St. Eustatius. The WIC founders would have protested against this line of reasoning. Their primary goal was not to carve out viable colonies but to create a second, Atlantic front against the Spanish foe. Besides, the defenders of WIC warfare could have pointed to the fate of Venice, as one pamphleteer did in the mid-1630s. The Venetians, he argued, had lost their primacy in the Levant trade because they did not engage in overseas conquests, unlike the Portuguese and the Dutch. Only conquests could safeguard overseas trade.10 What such authors did not foresee was that violence would become more than a way to relate to the hereditary enemy. Instead, violence was the ultimate expression of what it meant to be Dutch in both a religious and cultural sense. And where violence appeared on the surface, it invariably created problems between the Dutch and their neighbors, as was reflected in contemporary literature. A character from a 1659 praatje mentioned some examples of the lack of compassion the Dutch habitually displayed. While Barbary corsairs deprived the Dutch of their freedom, he contended, the Dutch cut short their lives by tying them with their backs to each other and throwing them in the water. It is well-known, he added, how cruel the Dutch had been to their slaves in Brazil and elsewhere. And he had known captains who treated their crews worse than slaves.11

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Violence was also a factor in the tensions between the Dutch conquerors and the resident Catholic population of the Iberian colonies. In the immediate aftermath of many a conquest, Dutch soldiers did not always distinguish between the military enemy and civilian targets. Attacks on enemy cities and villages were often accompanied by looting. Large-scale looting occurred at least seven times in the wake of Dutch conquests in the Atlantic world: Salvador (1624), Sisal in Yucatán (1624), Olinda (1630), Luanda (1641), the city of São Tomé (1641), São Luís de Maranhão (1641), and Fort Cormantine on the Gold Coast (1665).12 Looting and plundering were acts that represented one of the unofficial “wages of war,” along with women and liquor. They could also combine individual and collective protest—there was a causal relationship between the deprivations of soldiers and sailors on board and their misbehavior ashore in Salvador and Luanda.13 But other actions, especially those steeped in anti-Catholic sentiment, were aimed at the enemy. According to one historian, “Calvinist troops [in Brazil] fell upon local inhabitants who were celebrating the feast of the apostles St. Philip and St. James. Women, dressed in their fines, had their ears slit and fingers cut off as the invaders plundered their jewels.”14 Did this really happen? It is not easy to distinguish between propaganda and actual facts in the Brazilian publications of the seventeenth century. The revolt that began in 1645 must have changed the perspective on the previous period entirely, perhaps giving rise to exaggeration and fabrication. One author, for instance, asserted that when 1,500 Dutch soldiers, led by Diederick van Waerdenburgh, sacked Igaraçu (north of Recife) in 1632, they manacled all the monks of the Franciscan monastery and killed many residents. Because he was born in 1625, however, it is unlikely that the author recalled the events himself.15 It seems that Dutch military conduct in the Americas was not excessively violent against individuals. Instead, churches were the soldiers’ preferred targets.16 The violence assumed the form of old-fashioned iconoclasm, continuing an anti-Spanish tradition pioneered in the Americas by Frenchmen and Englishmen.17 The individual details of most objects destroyed may have been lost on the iconoclasts, who simply smashed them because they were “idols.” Perhaps the images and sculptures of popular saints were their targets of choice, as had been the case during the early stages of the Reformation, but there is too little evidence to draw that conclusion. Some Catholic objects were noticed, however, such as the tabernacle taken from Pernambuco to Essequibo.18 Mocking the venerated box containing the consecrated host as an “idol,” the Dutch tried to show that it lacked any magical power. Their conduct was similar to that of radicals in the early Reformation, whose challenge to traditional worship was expressed in the deliberate mocking of

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Catholic ceremonies. Beyond that, damage to enemy idols was considered tantamount to reducing the power of the Spanish or Portuguese regime.19 Other Dutch iconoclasts seemed to criticize the mediated nature of Catholic worship.20 The soldiers who conquered Olinda in Brazil (1630) drank from sacred chalices and left the churches dressed in the sacred liturgical vestments and the gowns of fraternal orders, or adorned their horses with ornaments.21 During their incursion in the lagoon of Maracaibo in 1641, the Dutch profaned “the statues of saints by chopping them up and mocking them, [which they also did with] chalices, patens, [sacred] lamps, and chasubles.”22 And in Salvador (1624), the Dutch invaders replaced relics with empty bottles and the statues of saints with portraits of Stadholder Maurits and several of his relatives.23 They must have realized how much the Catholic population was attached to what were considered sacred objects.24 Nor did other iconoclasts indiscriminately destroy images. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, Dutch invaders in 1626 ransacked the Cathedral, stealing the church bells—which would soon ring in the first Dutch church in New Amsterdam—the organ, and most ornaments. They burned all the images, the altar retables, a fine sacrarium, and the hymnals. The behavior of Dutch troops in Santo Thomé on the Orinoco River in 1637 was very similar. They burned the church and all the ornaments of the divine service, “profaning the temples with a thousand evil deeds”; burned and cut to pieces almost all the images; and took away the reliquary with its tabernacle.25 Labeling such acts automatically as vandalism would be to overlook their symbolism. The perpetrators intended to render the images powerless by breaking limbs of statues or decapitating the “idols.”26 Yet smashing and burning images did not merely symbolize the start of a new era and a repudiation of the old; it was aimed at an irreversible break with the past.27 In Igaraçu, wrote one observer, the Dutch “broke the images of Christ and the Virgin Mary and of the other saints to pieces, trampling them with such frenzy, that by so doing, it seemed to them that they were extinguishing the Roman Catholic faith.”28 What is remarkable is the reintroduction of the phenomenon of iconoclasm after its long absence in the Netherlands, revealing enduring antipathies and discourses that were reactivated once the soldiers faced Catholic houses of worship. Iconoclasm in the Low Countries had been the first form of anti-Habsburg resistance. In 1566, as previously noted, an iconoclastic fury spread from Antwerp to the northern Netherlands, frequently orchestrated by priests and noblemen.29 The Dutch iconoclasts in Ibero-America acted in ways similar to both their Dutch ancestors and the iconoclasts in Strasbourg, Basel, and Zurich in the early stages of the Reformation, where attacks were directed not just against representational art—such as altar retables and

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sculptures—but all the material culture of Catholicism, including lamps and liturgical vestments.30 Nor was iconoclasm entirely absent in the Netherlands, where it surfaced in the Generality Lands in the immediate aftermath of the Peace of Münster in response to the same “undisguised display of Catholic feeling” the Dutch witnessed in the Iberian colonies. The difference is that the soldiers acted here unambiguously on behalf of the Dutch authorities, carrying out orders as they removed the images.31 The behavior of the Dutch soldiers in the Americas does not betray a sophisticated understanding of Calvinist theology. Iconoclasm enabled frustrated and badgered men to vent their displeasure while consolidating their esprit de corps. But because it occurred selectively, the question presents itself of why it happened when it did. It is my impression that anti-Catholicism was the underlying cause, but what triggered the iconoclasm was anger and frustration about the enemy’s conduct.32 When indignation among Dutch soldiers was not caused by enemy behavior, they channeled it into desertion instead of taking it out on Catholic churches or churchmen. This was often an individual or collective response to the deprivation soldiers suffered, whether in the form of lack of provisions, strenuous labor, or unjust treatment. In the relative emptiness of the New World, desertion usually meant joining the opposite army. No less than eight companies of Dutch soldiers in Brazil sided with the enemy in 1645 after having suffered hunger and lack of comfort for many months.33 What motivated and united many soldiers was an elementary antipapism, expressed in expeditions against churches and clergymen. In the bouts of iconoclasm, this popular antipapism mixed with personal motives.34 Nor were all participants in these destructive actions committed Protestants. After iconoclasts had wreaked havoc in a Jesuit church in Olinda, at least three Dutch culprits acknowledged their guilt in an inscription made with charcoal in the central niche of the main altar retable, scribbling the year (1631) and adding their names.35 The display of unadulterated anti-Catholic behavior by soldiers in Brazil must have alienated many residents of the Portuguese colony. The setting of Jacob Rabe’s first massacre in a chapel, taking place as it did in the early stages of the revolt against Dutch rule, would have turned the moradores even more against the Protestant outsiders. The emphasis by one side on its identity thus helped consolidate that of the other side. Violence was equally pervasive in Dutch relations with the Amerindians. From the start of their incursions in the New World, Dutchmen perished at the hands of natives, often—at least initially—because they were taken for other strangers. The Dutch victims of indigenous violence in Chile in 1599 were most likely mistaken for Spaniards.36 In the Lesser Antilles, where

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Island Caribs defended themselves tooth and nail against the encroachment of northern Europeans, two ships that were later to join Piet Heyn’s famous fleet of 1628 lost a total of thirty-three men ashore on the island of Grenada, all killed by Amerindians. The violence seems to have come in retaliation for the murderous kidnapping by some Frenchmen of a number of Amerindians, whom they had planned to sell at St. Kitts.37 Island Caribs from St. Vincent and Grenada seem to have attacked the Dutch settlers of Tobago in these years, prompting the directors of the WIC Zeeland Chamber to instruct Admiral Loncq before his departure to Pernambuco to capture as many natives of Grenada “as our Enemies are using, with the help of the good wilden with whom we have friendly relations.” Loncq was to sell them on Cuba.38 It is clear, nonetheless, that the Dutch themselves were often guilty of courting revenge. This happened in Connecticut, where in 1633 the Dutch built the Fort House the Good Hope, which later developed into the town of Hartford. The aim was to shield Dutch trade with Amerindians from their English rivals in eastern New England. A treaty signed that same year with their Pequot trading partners allowed the Pequot to occupy land in the vicinity but also stated that other native groups would have free access to the fortified trading post. When a few Pequot men killed rival Amerindians near the House the Good Hope, the Dutch answered this breach of the treaty by murdering the Pequot grand sachem, Tatobem. The cycle of violence continued, with the Pequots assassinating the eight-man crew of a vessel, mistakenly believing that they were Dutch.39 Because the men were actually English, this massacre would eventually lead to the Pequot War, fought between Englishmen and Pequots. Likewise, Dutch actions triggered the indigenous revolts in Brazil in 1644 that led to the loss of Maranhão and that jeopardized Dutch rule in Ceará. The Dutch were (probably correctly) held responsible for the introduction of smallpox here, but equally important was the enslavement of Amerindians in Maranhão and the exploitation of indigenous laborers in the salt pans in Ceará.40 In the Caribbean and Guiana, Dutch conflicts with natives also engendered violent responses. The tactless policies of Governor Abel Thisso were partly responsible for the Carib siege of the Dutch settlement on Tobago in 1668.41 The first skirmishes did not lead to bloodshed, but the war dragged on and turned more violent in 1670, when Amerindians killed nineteen settlers.42 The settlers of Dutch Suriname distrusted the Amerindians almost from the start. A guerrilla war broke out in 1678, marked by indigenous attacks on plantations, killings of Europeans, and defections to the Amerindians by

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enslaved Africans.43 The demographic consequences were serious; Governor Heinsius estimated in May 1679 that the number of European settlers had dropped from 1,500 to 500 in twelve years. What ultimately terminated the war was the arrival of troops from the Netherlands, who fought the rebels with all their might. During one single expedition, they captured eighty-two indigenous males, hanging them all and reducing their wives and children to slavery. Slavery had, ironically, been at the root of the war with the Amerindians. Heinsius concluded that the traders who traveled to indigenous villages, extorting and blackmailing the residents, had provoked the bloodshed. Commander Abraham Beeckman of Demerara was more specific: these traders, he wrote, had especially engaged in kidnapping Amerindian women whom they sought to sell as slaves.44 Dutch interactions with Amerindians were akin to the ways in which other Europeans related to the indigenous population. The enslavement of the wives and children of insurgent natives in Suriname was reminiscent of the legal Spanish bondage of rebel natives in Chile for most of the seventeenth century.45 Similar to the overseas English, Dutch settlers considered violence an acceptable alternative if gentle persuasion failed.46 In fact, the parallels to English colonialism abound. As in the case of English settlers in North America, intensive trade relations, dependence on native food supplies, interpersonal ties, and physical proximity did nothing to remove Dutch suspicions of their Amerindian neighbors across the New World. And suspicions bred violence. Armed peace thus alternated in the colonial societies with military encounters that jeopardized the very existence of the colonies by reducing the number of European settlers. For colonists seeking an alternative to war-torn Europe, the New World must have appeared no less violent. The similarities between Dutch and English ideals and practices regarding slavery and freedom are also conspicuous. Apprentices of the Elizabethan privateers and students of Richard Hakluyt, the Dutch agreed that Spain was the world’s great oppressor and that its American wealth made it such a threat. The WIC leaders and supporters, therefore, considered military expansion into the Atlantic world the next step in the long war with Habsburg Spain. They intended to unleash the Dutch Lion in the Atlantic for the benefit of the war at home. Liberation was even extended to extraEuropean allies, as Dutch armies sought to free those whom they saw as suffering under the Spanish yoke. The Nassau fleet seems to have arrived in Peru in the 1620s with letters of manumission for enslaved blacks, and two decades later the expedition of Brouwer aimed to release the Amerindian population of Chile from slavery and “Spanish tyranny.” In a speech to

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the local caciques, Brouwer’s successor, Elias Herckmans, made the obvious comparison between the native struggle for freedom from Spain, which they had waged ever since 1555, and that of the Dutch, a war then in its eighth decade.47 Like their English colleagues, Dutch schemers dreamed of establishing colonies in the New World that were the opposite of the Spanish Indies, which had been marked—as they proclaimed—by the tyranny of the Roman Church and the ruthless exploitation of the indigenous population. Instead, the true faith would be protected and offered to Amerindians along with the principles of civilization. They would live side by side with Europeans in a state of perfect freedom. Although Richard Hakluyt, the author who promoted English colonies in North America, included among the European residents condemned men and women from England, the Dutch never toyed with that idea.48 Indeed, contrary to what happened in the English Atlantic, no convicts were ever sent to the Dutch colonies. Nor did free Dutch natives make their way to the New World in droves—one distinguishing mark of the Dutch Atlantic was the high percentage of foreign-born European migrants. Whether they were lured by religious tolerance is hard to determine. Commercial opportunities surely played a large role in their motivation to cross the ocean. Trade remained more important than planting in the Dutch Atlantic for most of the century. Commercial freedom for the Dutch was rooted in the war effort. The closure of the Scheldt in 1585 allowed Amsterdam (and, to a lesser degree, other ports) to relinquish its supporting role in Netherlandish trade with southern Europe and the Iberian colonies. Because its merchants now went in search of these products themselves, they began to outdo Antwerp. The trade embargoes issued by the Spanish kings further encouraged Dutch merchants to bypass the Iberian Peninsula. Sailing to destinations throughout the Atlantic basin, they became the champions of free trade. In French and English America, they were the natural allies of the residents who defied restrictive mercantilist laws and organized insurrections against the metropolitan regime. The royalists who seized power on Barbados in 1650 did not fear Cromwell or Parliament because they “would find ways of protection, viz. by the Hollanders.” Similarly, the anti-royalists who joined Bacon’s Rebellion and tried to free themselves of the Navigation Acts in Virginia in 1676 challenged the king under the presumption that the Dutch would arm and protect them.49 The 1665 revolt of French settlers in Martinique, cut off from Dutch supplies and left without Dutch holds to carry their tobacco and sugar, was accompanied by the yell “Vive les Hollandais.” In Saint-Domingue, finally, Dutchmen standing up for their own commercial

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freedom had a hand in two uprisings in the 1670s that threatened French rule. Although neither succeeded, the colonists associated the Dutch with free trade for some to come. The settlers had a “Dutch heart,” as one French official put it.50 The ability of so many Dutch to leave European waters and establish new trade routes was, as David Eltis has argued, predicated on the particular relationship in Western Europe between the individual and the state. Such initiatives would have been impossible in contemporary Africa or pre-Columbian America. In addition, Eltis has suggested that the same relationship “implied the freedom to enslave others.”51 Like the English, Dutch settlers and authorities did approve of black slavery, which they deemed indispensable to the functioning of the plantation economies of the Dutch Atlantic. Enslaved Africans were therefore shipped in by the thousands as they embarked on a lifetime of coercion and pain at the hands of white masters. By the time Suriname had come under Dutch rule, the treatment of slaves was a spectacle to arriving Dutch natives. The crewmember of a ship that had just completed a voyage from the Republic told his brother in a letter what he had witnessed the previous day. Three blacks had been whipped and branded, one of them lost an ear, and another one had both ears cut off.52 Acceptance of Africans’ bondage, however, took some time to develop among the Dutch. Similar to their English neighbors, Dutch projects for the New World had initially not included slavery or forced labor. In New Netherland, as in early Virginia, blacks often functioned as members of the community. By contrast, black slavery quickly became the norm in sugar-growing Barbados, just as it did in Dutch Brazil.53 Finally, in both the Dutch and the English Atlantic, Africans (or Amerindians) were not the only colonial residents who were exploited and unfree. The massive numbers of indentured servants who joined the English colonies led miserable lives and saw the term of their service frequently extended. Some compared their condition to slavery. Servants, Governor Heinsius of Suriname wrote, could not be found in the Netherlands, which left the Dutch with no other means to increase the colonial population than to admit soldiers. He would make them good planters, he added.54 In reality, few soldiers ever became planters in the Dutch Atlantic. They were stuck in a life of misery. Ignored, malnourished, maltreated, and often unable to return home years after their time had expired, they came to view themselves as slaves, or at least some did, with fateful consequences for the Dutch empire. A writer recently contended that “[a]ll the empires of history flourished for no more than a half-life, before they foundered on overexpansion and

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internal contradictions.”55 But what is a half-life? The Atlantic empire of Spain survived for more than three centuries. That of the Dutch, on the other hand, took shape in the 1620 and ended for all practical purposes after the last transatlantic wars of the 1670s, when the fleets and armies were no longer used for the purpose of expansion. By then, metropolitan merchants had also abandoned most of their direct trade with foreign American colonies. The Dutch Moment had passed.

Ack nowledgments

This book was written in bits and pieces until a semester-long sabbatical in 2013 allowed me to craft most of the manuscript. Those five months at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in Wassenaar, the Netherlands, I spent in the company of fellow Atlanticists Aviva Ben-Ur, Karel Davids, Alison Games, Gert Oostindie, and Benjamin Schmidt. Their feedback has improved this book in ways small and large. Alison’s later critique as a reviewer for the press was especially on target and forced me to address some structural problems. I am hugely indebted to her, as I am to the other reviewer for the press, Jaap Jacobs, who shared with me digital copies of many files from the Nationaal Archief and provided detailed criticism of the manuscript. Many errors were left on his cutting board. I also thank Jeroen Dewulf for reading the entire manuscript and sharing his own insights.The book has also profited from comments and questions I received after papers or lectures presented at the Annual Convention of the American Historical Association, Assumption College, Brown University, Calvin College, Columbia University, Duke University, Harvard University, the John Carter Brown Library, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Iowa, and the University of Pennsylvania. I am also grateful to the staffs of the Archivo General de Indias (Seville), the Archivo General de Simancas, the Nationaal Archief (The Hague), the National Archives of the United Kingdom (Kew), and the Stadsarchief Amsterdam, who worked hard to produce the voluminous archival materials I requested. Likewise, the librarians at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague) and the interlibrary loan staff at my home institution of Clark University time and again provided access to the secondary literature.Thanks are also due to the Higgins School of the Humanities at Clark University, which provided financial support for the publication of this book. Finally, I have been fortunate to work with Michael McGandy as editor. His compelling suggestions and sage advice have improved the book at every stage of its development.

265

Appendix A

The Dutch Slave Trade to the French Caribbean, 1650–1675 YEAR

SHIP

PLACE OF EMBARKATION

1653

Fortuijn

St. Domingue & Martinique

1653

Luipaard

Martinique & St. Christophe

1654

Rode Leeuw

Martinique

1655

St. Jan

Martinique

1659

Poelwijk

Guadeloupe

1659

Witte Paert

Guadeloupe

1661

Coninck Salomon

Martinique

1661

Gideon

Guadeloupe

1661

St. Jacob

Martinique

1662

Fortuijn

Guadeloupe

1662

Vergulde Son

Martinique

1662

Vrede

French Caribbean

1663

Sta Maria

Martinique

1663

Vergulde Bever

Martinique

1664

Hoop

Martinique

1664

Juffrouw Catharina

Martinique

1664

Liefde

Martinique

1664

Moor

Guadeloupe

1664

Ridder St. Joris

Cayenne & Guadeloupe

1665

Diamant

Guadeloupe

1665

Gerechtigheid

Martinique & St. Christophe

1665

Goude Tijger

Martinique & St. Christophe

1665

Juffrouw Catharina

Martinique

1665

Rebecca

St. Christophe & Guadeloupe

1666

Eendracht

Martinique

1666

Goude Luipaard/Goude Tijger

Martinique

1666

Jonge Prins Willem

French Caribbean

1666

Ruijter

Guadeloupe

1667

Hoop

Martinique

1667

Leonora

Martinique

1667

Rebecca

Martinique

1668

Tijdverdrijf

French Caribbean

1668

Verstoorde Leeuw

Martinique (Continued )

267

268

YEAR

APPENDIX A

SHIP

PLACE OF EMBARKATION

1668

Vrede

a

Martinique

1668

Wilde Vrouw

Martinique

1668

Zeelandia

Martinique

1669

Abrahams Offerande

Martinique

1669

Juffrouw Aletta

Cayenne & Martinique

1669

Indiaan

French Caribbean

1669

Jager

Martinique

1669

Prins van Oranje te Paert

Martinique

1669

St. Franciscus

Grenada & Cayenne

1669

Reine Esther

Grenada

1669

St. Jan

Martinique

1669

Vergulde Posthoorn

Martinique

1669

N.N.

French Caribbean

1670

Tourneur

French Caribbean

1670

Vredenburg

Martinique, Grenada, and St. Christophe

1671

Hoop

Martinique

Source: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org, accessed June 25, 2013. Notes: Sixteen of these voyages combined shipments to a French and a Dutch colony, usually Curaçao. This list is by no means exhaustive. The Europa, for instance, left from Texel in 1666 for a slave-trading voyage to the French Caribbean in 1666, but no paper trail was left about the outcome of the expedition; Abdoulaye Ly, La Compagnie du Sénégal (s.l.: Présence Africaine, 1958), 97–98. At the same time, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database lists both the Gekroonde Bril (no. 11590) and the Groene Viskorf (no. 44254) as sailing to French Cayenne in 1664, although their destination was Dutch Cayenne, prior to the French takeover. a The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has separate entries for this ship under nos. 11644 (Vrede) and 44285 (Vreede), but this was the one and the same vessel, captained by Hendrick Breijhaen.

Appendix B

Direct Dutch Slave Trade to the Spanish Empire YEAR

SHIP

PLACE OF EMBARKATION

1649

Propheet Daniel

Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo

1652

Melkmeid

Canary Islands, Cádiz Canary Islands

1652

St Jacob

1652

Goude Fortuin

Cartagena

1652

Liefde

Spanish West Indies

1653

Gele Zon/Sol

Santo Domingo

1653

Gele Engel/Engel Gabriel

Santo Domingo

1654

Anna

Canary Islands

1654

Zonnebloem

Cartagena

1655

Fortuin

Cartagena

1656

Eenhoorn

Cartagena

1656

Ste Maria

Cartagena

1657

Eendracht

Canary Islands

1657

Maria

Buenos Aires

1657

Zwarte Leeuw

Portobelo

1657

Zwarte Dubbele Arend

Portobelo

1658

Moor

Tenerife, Cádiz

1658

St Pieter

Tenerife

1658

St Pieter

Cartagena Buenos Aires

1658

St Pieter

1659

Boodschap Maria

Cartagena

1659

Hoop/Esperanza

Buenos Aires

1659

Liefde

Riohachaa

1659

St Jansburgh

Portobelo/Spanish West Indies

1659

Encarnación

La Guairab

1659

Vergulde Zalm

La Guaira

1659

St Franciscus

La Guaira Portobelo

1659

Zwarte Arend

1659

Unknown

Rio de la Hacha

1660

Bleeckertje

Cumaná

1660

Engel/Angel de Guarda

Cartagena

1660

Grote Coer/Pietas

Buenos Aires

1660

St Jan Baptist/San Juan Bautista

Buenos Aires (Continued )

269

270

APPENDIX B

YEAR

SHIP

PLACE OF EMBARKATION

1660

St. Pieter

Spanish Central Americac

1661

Geboorte Christi/Santo Christo

Cartagena

1661

Paz

Buenos Aires

1661

St Jacob

Santa Marta

1661

St Jan Baptist/S Juan Bautista

Buenos Aires, Rio de la Hacha, Havana

1661

Zon/Royal Arms of England

Santa Marta

1661

St Jan

Cartagena Spanish West Indies

1661

Dolfijn

1662

Jonge Prins/Principe Mozo

Buenos Aires, Caracas

1662

S João Bautista

Buenos Aires

1662

Ste Maria

Spanish West Indies

1663

Naranjo

Buenos Aires

1667

Caballero

Cartagena

1667

Prins van Oranje te Paard

Buenos Aires

1668

Agatha

Cádiz

1669

St. Catharina

Cartagena, Portobelo

1670

Hoop

Cartagena, Portobelo

1670

Huis Ter Laan

Canary Islands

1670

Verstoorde Leeuw

Cádiz

1670

Eendracht

Spanish West Indies Cádiz

1671

Jupiter

1671

Sta Maria

Tenerife

1673

Sta Andrea

Spanish West Indies

1677

Goude Poort/Eendracht

Cádiz

1677

Santa Luben

Buenos Aires

Source: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org, accessed June 25, 2013. a

SAA, NA 905, fol. 603, Act of September 2, 1660. AGI, Indiferente General 1668, Esteban Gamarra to the Spanish Crown, October 2, 1663. This ship is not listed in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. c Probably Chagres; AGI, Panamá, 22 R.6, N.97, audiencia president to the Crown, April 24, 1661. b

Notes

Introduction

1. Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly ser. 3, 40, no. 4 (1983): 538; Paul Otto, “Henry Hudson, the Munsees, and the Wampum Revolution,” in Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley, ed. Jaap Jacobs and Louis H. Roper (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 90–93; Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 145. 2. Gründlicher Bericht von Beschaffenheit und Eigenschaft, Cultivirung und Bewohnung, Privilegien und Beneficien deß in America zwischen Rio Orinoco und Rio de las Amazones an der vesten Küst des in der Landschafft Guiana gelegenen . . . Landes (Franckfurt: Wilhelm Serlin, 1669), 30–31, 39. 3. Henk den Heijer, Geschiedenis van de WIC (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1994); Kees Zandvliet, Mapping for Money: Maps, Plans, and Topographic Paintings and Their Role in Dutch Overseas Expansion during the 16th and 17th Centuries (Amsterdam: Batavian Lion International, 1998); Alexander Bick, “Governing the Free Sea: The Dutch West India Company and Commercial Politics, 1618–1645” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012); Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Daniel Noorlander, “Serving God and Mammon: The Reformed Church and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World, 1621–1674” (PhD. diss., Georgetown University, 2011); Mark Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595–1674 (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Jaap Jacobs, Een zegenrijk gewest: Nieuw-Nederland in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Prometheus/ Bert Bakker, 1999) [translated as New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: Brill, 2005)]; Lodewijk Augustinus Henri Christiaan Hulsman, “Nederlands Amazonia: Handel met indianen tussen 1580 en 1680” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2009); Willem Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz.: Een Hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf, 1607–1647 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1995) [trans. as Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus 1607–1647 (Leiden: Brill, 2007)]; Donna Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Paul Otto, The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006); Susanah Shaw Romney, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2014); Evaldo Cabral de Mello, O negócio do Brasil: Portugal, os Países Baixos e o Nordeste, 1641–1699 (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 1998); Michiel van Groesen, “Herinneringen aan Holland: De verbeelding van de Opstand in Salvador 271

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de Bahia,” Holland 41, no. 4 (2009): 291–303; “A Week to Remember: Dutch Publishers and the Competition for News from Brazil, 26 August–2 September 1624,” Quaerendo 40 (2010): 26–49; Klaas Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika 1600–1650: Angola, Kongo en São Tomé (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2000); Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in West Africa (1580–1674): Empires, Merchants, and the Atlantic System (Leiden: Brill, 2011). The most recent overview of the global Dutch empire is Piet Emmer and Jos Gommans, Rijk aan de rand van de wereld: De geschiedenis van Nederland overzee, 1600–1800 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2012). 4. Evaldo Cabral de Mello, Rubro Veio: O imaginário da restauração pernambucana (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1986), 330–332. 5. Cf. Stuart B. Schwartz, “Looking for a New Brazil: Crisis and Rebirth in the Atlantic World after the Fall of Pernambuco,” in The Legacy of Dutch Brazil, ed. Michiel van Groesen (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 41–58. 6. Wim Klooster, “The Geopolitical Impact of Dutch Brazil on the Western Hemisphere,” in van Groesen, Legacy of Dutch Brazil, 25–40: 38–39. 1. The Unleashed Lion

1. Barent Iansz. Potgieter, VVijdtloopigh Verhael van tgene de vijf Schepen (die int jaer 1598 tot Rotterdam toegherust werden om door de Straet Magellana haren handel te dryven) wedervaren is tot den 7 September 1599 toe (Amsterdam: Zacharias Heijns, 1600). The Dutch could not fall back on established rituals when they entered a terrain that was not visibly in the possession of other Christians. Still, the ceremony in the Strait of Magellan is reminiscent of the one held one year earlier in the Indian Ocean on the island of Mauritius. The vice admiral of the Dutch fleet that was en route to the East Indies nailed a wooden board to a tree with the arms of Amsterdam, Holland, and Zeeland. The Dutch sailors carved their religion in Spanish on the board. See Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 166. The lion, incidentally, was both a common symbol in Dutch heraldry and a common element of ship names. 2. Louis Sicking and Raymond Fagel, “In het kielzog van Columbus: De heer van Veere en de Nieuwe Wereld 1517–1527,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 114 (1999), 316. 3. Eddy Stols, “Gens des Pays-Bas en Amérique Espagnole aux premiers siècles de la colonization,” Bulletin de l’Institut Historique Belge de Rome 44 (1974), 593; Colección de Documentos Inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y organización de las antiguas posesiones españolas de América y Oceanía sacados de los archivos del Reino y muy especialmente del de Indias, vol. 20 (Madrid: Imprenta del Hospicio, 1873), 504, 506, 514. 4. “Niculás Giraldo” had lived in the Americas for eight years, his fellow townsman from Haarlem, “Guillermo Pérez,” for sixteen years. See Bernard Lavallé, “Les étrangers dans les régions de Tucuman et Potosí (1607–1610),” Bulletin Hispanique 86 (1974): 125–141. 5. Stadsarchief Amsterdam [SAA], Notarieel Archief [NA] 44/162V-163, act of July 30, 1593. 6. Hendrik Ottsen, Journael van de reis naar Zuid-Amerika (1598–1601), ed. J. W. IJzerman (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1918), cxxxviii.

N OT ES TO PA G E S 1 3 – 1 6

273

7. Demetrio Ramos Pérez, “La prevención de Fernando el Católico contra el presumible dominio flamenco de América: La primera disposición contra el paso de extranjeros al nuevo continente,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas 14 (1977): 22–23. 8. Stols, “Gens des Pays-Bas,” 572. 9. Sailors and soldiers in Spanish service frequently resorted to absenteeism to avoid the red tape regarding migration. Such migrants sometimes outnumbered those who came in a legal manner. See Auke Pieter Jacobs, “Legal and Illegal Emigration from Seville, 1550–1650,” in “To Make America”: European Migration in the Early Modern Period, ed. Ida Altman and James Horn (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 78–79. 10. Stols, “Gens des Pays-Bas,” 575. 11. Ibid., 583. 12. A. J. J. M. van den Eerenbeemt, De missie-actie in Nederland (±1600–1940) (Nijmegen: Uitgeverij J.J. Berkhout, 1945), 18. 13. Jonathan Irving Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477– 1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 156–157, 167–169. 14. Eddy Stols, “Os Mercadores Flamengos em Portugal e no Brasil antes das Conquistas Holandesas,” Anais de História. Publicação do Departamento de História da Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciéncias e Letras de Assis 5 (1973), 33–34; Eddy Stols, De Spaanse Brabanders, of de handelsbetrekkingen der Zuidelijke Nederlanden met de Iberische wereld, 1598–1648 (Brussel: Paleis der Academiën, 1971), 107–108; Christopher Ebert, Between Empires: Brazilian Sugar in the Early Atlantic Economy, 1550–1630 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 49; Daniel Strum, “The Portuguese Jews and New Christians in the Sugar Trade: Managing Business Overseas—Kinship and Ethnicity Revisited (Amsterdam, Porto and Brazil, 1595–1618)” (PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2009), 15–18. See also Daniel Strum, The Sugar Trade: Brazil, Portugal, and the Netherlands (1595–1630) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 15. Werner Thomas, “De mythe van de Spaanse inquisitie in de Nederlanden van de zestiende eeuw,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 105, no. 3 (1990), 353. 16. Stols, “Gens des Pays-Bas,” 597. 17. Stols, “Mercadores Flamengos,” 27. 18. Adela Pinet Plasencia, ed., La Península de Yucatán en el Archivo General de la Nación (San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Centro de Investigaciones Humanísticas de Mesoamérica y el Estado de Chiapas, 1998), 201. 19. Another prisoner of the Inquisition in Salvador was “João d’Araújo, alias Abraham Cabalhão,” son of Francisco Kabeljauw, a Leiden merchant. See Eddy Stols, “Dutch and Flemish Victims of the Inquisition in Brazil,” in Essays on Cultural Identity in Colonial Latin America, ed. Jan Lechner (Leiden: Vakgroep Talen en Culturen van Latijns-Amerika, 1988), 35, 55–58; Stols, “Mercadores Flamengos,” 35. 20. Alfonso Toro, ed., Los judíos en la Nueva España: Documentos del siglo xvi correspondientes al ramo de Inquisición (Mexico City: Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993 [1932], 61–62, 66; Richard E. Greenleaf, The Mexican Inquisition of the Sixteenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969), 208.

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21. Greenleaf, Mexican Inquisition, 191–206. 22. A. A. M. Stols, “The Haarlem Printer Cornelio Adriano César Tried before the Mexican Inquisition 1598,” in Studia Bibliographica in Honorem Herman de la Fontaine Verwey (Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, 1968), 356–363; José Toribio Medina and Julio Jimenez Rueda, Historia del Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en México, 2nd ed. (Mexico City: Ediciones Fuente Cultural, 1954), 85, 158; ibid., 185. 23. Agustín Millares, Historia de la Inquisición en las Islas Canarias, 4 vols. (Las Palmas de Gran-Canaria: Imprenta de La Verdad, 1874), 2: 148–151. 24. J. A. Worp, “Dirk Rodenburg,” Oud-Holland 13 (1895), 84–85. 25. Henry Charles Lea, The Inquisition, Spanish Dependencies. Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, Milan, the Canaries, Mexico, Peru, New Granada (London: Macmillan, 1922), 154. 26. The Inquisition files list him once as born in Leuven and residing in Copenhagen, and elsewhere as a native of Antwerp living in Vlissingen. 27. Medina and Jimenez Rueda, Historia del Tribunal, 186. 28. Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 87–88. 29. Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid), Sección de Inquisición, Libro 1023, fols. 264–265. 30. Clé Lesger, The Rise of the Amsterdam Market and Information Exchange: Merchants, Commercial Expansion and Change in the Spatial Economy of the Low Countries, c. 1550–1630 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 46, 65–67, 71, 74, 129–130, 135–137. 31. Ibid., 151, 173–179. 32. Ibid., 157–158, 162. See also J. Briels, Zuid-Nederlandse immigratie 1572–1630 (Haarlem: Fibula-Van Dishoeck, 1978), 37–41. 33. Oscar Gelderblom, Zuid-Nederlandse kooplieden en de opkomst van de Amsterdamse stapelmarkt (1578–1630) (Hilversum: Verloren, 2000), 158, 178–182, 224; Lesger, Rise of the Amsterdam Market, 85–87; Ebert, Between Empires, 34. 34. Eric H. Wijnroks, Handel tussen Rusland en de Nederlanden, 1560–1640: Een netwerkanalyse van de Antwerpse en Amsterdamse kooplieden, handelend op Rusland (Hilversum: Verloren, 2003), 267–273. 35. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 217; Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, 149–150; Stols, Spaanse Brabanders, 101; Victor Enthoven, “Zeeland en de opkomst van de Republiek: Handel en strijd in de Scheldedelta, c. 1550–1621” (PhD diss., Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, 1996), 241. 36. Lodewijk Augustinus Henri Christiaan Hulsman, “Nederlands Amazonia: Handel met indianen tussen 1580 en 1680” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2009), 93. 37. Peter T. Bradley, The Lure of Peru: Maritime Intrusion into the South Sea, 1598– 1701 (London: Macmillan, 1989), 12, 201–202; examination of “Rodrigo Giraldo” (Dirck Gerritsz), Santiago de Chile, February 10, 1600, in Colección de Historiadores de Chile y de documentos relativos a la historia nacional, vol. 45: Los holandeses en Chile (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Universitaria, 1923), 346. 38. SAA, NA 197:173–174, act of January 30, 1612. 39. SAA, NA 73, fol. 5, act of November 26, 1595. 40. Jan Wagenaar, Amsterdam in zyne opkomst, aanwas, geschiedenissen, voorregten, koophandel, gebouwen, kerkenstaat, schoolen, schutterye, gilden en regeeringe, 4 vols.

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275

(Amsterdam: Isaak Tirion, 1765), 2: 251. The dictionary was C. Kiliaen’s Etymologicum teutonicae linguae (Antwerp, 1599). Cornelis Maria Schulten, Nederlandse expansie in Latijns Amerika. Brazilië: 1624–1654 (Bussum: Fibula-Van Dishoeck, 1968), 15. For Dutch brazilwood imports, see also José Manuel Santos Pérez, “Filipe III e a ameaça neerlandesa no Brasil: Medos globais, estratégia real e respostas locais,” in Brazilië in de Nederlandse archieven (1624–1654), ed. Marianne L. Wiesebron (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2013), 159, 161. 41. Rudolf Häpke, ed., Niederländische Akten und Urkunden zur Geschichte det Hanse und zur deutschen Seegeschichte, 2 vols. (Lübeck: Verein für hansische Geschichte, 1923), 2: 421–426. 42. Stols, “Mercadores Flamengos,” 37, 40; Ottsen, Journael van de reis naar ZuidAmerika, xxvii–xxviii; Ebert, Between Empires, 82; Simon Hart, “De Italië-vaart, 1590–1620,” Jaarboek Amstelodamum 70 (1978), 60n. 1; Gelderblom, Zuid-Nederlandse kooplieden, 181. 43. Roelof Bijlsma, “Rotterdam’s Amerika-vaart in de eerste helft der 17de eeuw,” Bijdragen voor Vaderlandsche Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde, ser. 5, no. 3 (1916), 100. Another commercial expedition that van der Veken organized with Pieter van der Haghe, his fellow merchant, bypassed Portugal: Noortje de Roy van Zuydewijn, Van koopman tot icon: Johan van der Veken en de ZuidNederlandse immigranten in Rotterdam rond 1600 (Amsterdam: Prometheus/Bert Bakker, 2002), 94. 44. Resolutions of the States General, November 9, 1603, in H. H. P. Rijperman, ed., Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal van 1576 tot 1609, vol. 12, 1602–1603 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), 631. 45. Examples include the Gulden Leeuw, St. Pieters Pynas, Sant Olof, Eenhoorn, Roode Leeuw, Vogelstruys, and Ingelsche Groet: SAA, NA, 47/96V, 48/21, 49/62, 50/39V, 76/208, 51/79, 52/59, acts of March 13 and June 10, 1595; March 5 and August 28, 1596; and April 17, April 27, and September 24, 1597. 46. Enthoven, “Zeeland,” 275. 47. Jonathan Irving Israel, “Spain and the Dutch Sephardim, 1609–1660,” in Empires and Entrepots: The Dutch, the Spanish Monarchy and the Jews, 1585–1713 (London and Ronceverte: Hambledon Press, 1990), 363. 48. Ebert, Between Empires, 102. 49. Anne Pérotin-Dumon, “The Pirate and the Emperor: Power and the Law on the Seas, 1450–1850,” in The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350–1750, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 206–207. 50. Eufemio Lorenzo Sanz, Comercio de España con América en la época de Felipe II, 2 vols. (Valladolid: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Diputación Provincial de Valladolid, 1980), 2: 157. 51. The Fortuin was seized near Santo Domingo by the London vessel the Rose Lion in March 1595 and taken to Plymouth. See Kenneth R. Andrews, ed. English Privateering Voyages to the West Indies, 1588–1595: Documents Relating to English Voyages to the West Indies from the Defeat of the Armada to the Last Voyage of Sir Francis Drake, including Spanish Documents (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 340–341, 345–352. 52. Examination of Bennetus Boetto in ibid., 371.

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53. Venezuela-British Guiana Boundary Arbitration, The Case of the United States of Venezuela before the Tribunal of Arbitration to Convene at Paris, vol. 1 (New York: Evening Post Job Printing House, 1898), 63. 54. Ibid., 62. It was probably this ship that completed the return trip to Margarita in four months: John de Zantfort and Peter Helleman of Antwerp to Michael Bacher in Lisbon, July 6, 1595, in List and Analysis of State Papers, Foreign Series Elizabeth I, Preserved in the Public Record Office, vol. 6, ed. Richard Bruce Wernham (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1993), 209. 55. Cornelis Frans Adolf van Dam and Irene Aloha Wright, eds., Nederlandsche zeevaarders op de eilanden in de Caraïbische Zee en aan de kust van Columbia en Venezuela gedurende de jaren 1621–1648: Documenten hoofdzakelijk uit het Archivo General de Indias, 2 vols. (Utrecht: Kemink & Zoon, 1934), 1: 7–8n; Cornelis C. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1971), 118, 122; Engel Sluiter, “Dutch-Spanish Rivalry in the Caribbean Area, 1594–1609,” Hispanic American Historical Review 28 (1948), 173,181. See also Huguette Chaunu and Pierre Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique (1504–1650), 8 vols. (Paris: Colin, 1955– 1959), 8-1: 609, 610. 56. SAA, NA 195, fol. 181V, March 16, 1607; SAA, NA 120, fol. 111V, August 31, 1610; Sir Thomas Roe to the Earl of Salisbury, Port of Spain, Trinidad, February 28/March 10, 1611, in Joyce Lorimer, English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon 1550–1646 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1989), 153. 57. SAA, NA 102, fols. 90v-93, Act of September 24, 1605. Irene Aloha Wright, “Rescates: With Special Reference to Cuba, 1599–1610,” Hispanic American Historical Review 3, no. 3 (August 1920): 333–361; Sluiter, “Dutch-Spanish Rivalry,” 184; César García del Pino, “El Obispo Cabezas, Silvestre de Balboa y los contrabandistas de Manzanilla,” Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí 17, no. 2 (1975), 34; Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1998), 25–26. 58. See, for example, the resolutions of the Zeeland Admiralty, April 2, 1607, in Ivo J. van Loo, ed., Resolutiën van de Gecommitteerde Raden ter Admiraliteit in Zeeland 1584–1648, deel V: 1606–1609 (Middelburg: Zeeuws Archief, 2012), 182–183. 59. Charles T. Gehring and William A. Starna, “Dutch and Indians in the Hudson Valley: The Early Period,” Hudson Valley Regional Review 9, no. 2 (1992), 10–11. 60. Jan Kupp, “Le développement de l’intérêt hollandais dans la pêcherie de la morue de Terre-Neuve: L’influence hollandaise sur les pêcheries de Terre-Neuve au dix-septième siècle,” Revue d’Histoire de l’Amérique Française 27, no. 4 (1974), 566– 567; Simon Hart, The Prehistory of the New Netherland Company (Amsterdam: City of Amsterdam Press, 1959), 7. 61. H. H. P. Rijperman, ed., Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal van 1576 tot 1609, vol. 13, 1604–1606 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957), 500. 62. Marc Lescarbot, Histoire de la Novvelle France contenant les navigations, découvertes, & habitations faites par les François és Indes Occidentales & Nouvelle-France (Paris: Iean Milot, 1609), 630; Marcel Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, vol. 2, Le comptoir 1604–1627 (Montréal and Paris: Fides, 1966), 66. 63. Cornelius Jaenen, “De Hollanders en de Vlamingen in de Franse visserij in Noord-Amerika,” in Atlantisch avontuur: De Lage Landen, Frankrijk en de expansie

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naar het westen, 1500–1800, ed. Piet Emmer, Henk den Heijer, and Louis Sicking (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2010), 107–111. 64. Van Cleaf Bachman, Peltries or Plantations: The Economic Policies of the Dutch West India Company in New Netherland 1623–1639 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 9–12. 65. S. Muller Fz., Geschiedenis der Noordsche Compagnie (Utrecht: Gebr. Van der Post, 1874), 67. 66. Jan Karel Jakob de Jonge, De opkomst van het Nederlandsch gezag in Oost-Indië (1595–1610):Verzameling van onuitgegeven stukken uit het oud-koloniaal archief, 13 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, and Amsterdam: Frederik Muller, 1862–1909), 1: 178. 67. Klaas Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika 1600–1650: Angola, Kongo en São Tomé (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2000), 33; Günter Schilder, Monumenta Cartographica Neerlandica VII: Cornelis Claesz (c. 1551–1609): Stimulator and Driving Force of Dutch Cartography (Alphen aan den Rijn: Uitgeverij Canaletto/Repro-Holland, 2003), 188, 282. 68. Henk den Heijer, Geschiedenis van de WIC (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1994), 17–18. 69. Ibid.; John Vogt, Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast, 1469–1682 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979), 166; “Consideratien van handelaars over het belang van den handel op de kust van Guinea,” Kroniek van het Historisch Genootschap gevestigd te Utrecht 27 (1872), 262. 70. King Philip III of Spain to the viceroy of Portugal, November 7, 1613, cited in J. Denucé, Afrika in de XVIde eeuw en de handel van Antwerpen met een reproductie van de wandkaart van Blaeu-Verbist van 1644 in 9 folio-bladen (Antwerpen: De Sikkel, 1937), 45n. 1. Cf. Bijlage F, in Klaas Ratelband, ed., De Westafrikaanse reis van Piet Heyn 1624–1625 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), 49; Vogt, Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast, 166–167. 71. Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 33. 72. Ibid., 37–42. On August 6, 1612, the States General officially recognized that Gerrit Reijnst and company had been the first Dutchmen to have navigated to Congo, Loango, and Angola. See Arie Theodorus van Deursen, ed., Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal, Nieuwe Reeks 1610–1670, vol. 1, 1610–1612 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 196. In actual fact, others are likely to have sailed there first but without making any impact. See De Jonge, Opkomst, 1: 37. 73. Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 41. 74. Mark Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595–1674 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 84–85. 75. Nationaal Archief, The Netherlands [NAN], Aanwinsten 1640, “Memorie van de gewichtige redenen die de heeren Staten Generael behooren te overweghen om gheensins te wycken vande handelinge ende vaert van Indien.” Enthoven, Zeeland, 268. For this trade, see also Ratelband, Westafrikaanse reis, app. F, 49. 76. Enthoven, “Zeeland,” 267. 77. Peter Wolfgang Klein, De Trippen in de 17e eeuw: Een studie over het ondernemersgedrag op de Hollandse stapelmarkt (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1965), 146–149. 78. Frédéric Mauro, Le Portugal, le Brésil et l’Atlantique au XVIIe siècle (1570– 1670): Étude économique (Paris: Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, 1983), 538.

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79. David Michael Loades, England’s Maritime Empire: Seapower, commerce, and policy, 1490–1690 (London: Longman, 2000), 120; Jan Heringa, De eer en hoogheid van de staat: Over de plaats der Verenigde Nederlanden in het diplomatieke leven van de zeventiende eeuw (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1961), 232. 80. Loades, England’s Maritime Empire, 123–124. 81. Ibid., 128. 82. Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics 1588–1603 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 113–118. 83. Enthoven, “Zeeland,” 181–182, 266; Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 36. 84. Jacques Henrij Abendanon, “De vlootaanval onder bevel van Jhr. Pieter van der Does op de Canarische eilanden en het eiland Santo Thomé in 1599 volgens Nederlandsche en Spaansche bronnen,” Bijdragen voor Vaderlandsche Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde, ser. 5, 8 (1921): 14–63. 85. In the process, dozens of sugar mills were destroyed, most of which were still inoperative by the 1640s. See Adam Jones, ed., West Africa in the Mid-Seventeenth Century: An Anonymous Dutch Manuscript (Atlanta: African Studies Association Press, 1995), 55–56. 86. Robert Garfield, A History of São Tomé Island 1470–1655: The Key to Guinea (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992), 155–157; Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 36–37. 87. F. Graefe, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der See-Expeditionen von 1606 und 1607,” Bijdragen voor Vaderlandsche Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde, ser. 7, 3 (1933), 222–225. 88. Declaration of ‘Adrián Diego’ from Leiden, carpenter on board the Geloof and from the Strait to Callao in Vliegend Hart, Callao, December 18, 1599, in Colección de Historiadores de Chile y de documentos relativos a la historia nacional, vol. 45: Los holandeses en Chile (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Universitaria, 1923), 313. 89. Declaration of “Pedro Joan,” Callao, December 13, 1599, in Colección de Historiadores de Chile, vol. 45: 279–280; Declaration of Dirck Gerritsz, Santiago de Chile, February 10, 1600, in Colección de Historiadores de Chile, vol. 45 (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Universitaria, 1923), 342–343. 90. Irene Aloha Wright, “The Dutch and Cuba, 1609–1643,” Hispanic American Historical Review 4, no. 4 (1921), 598. 91. Resolutions of the States General, April 15, 1605, July 1, 1606 and February 5, 1611, in Rijperman, Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal,13: 253, 807–808; van Deursen, Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal, 1: 316. 92. Official proclamation of Paulus van Caerden (“Pablos Barlandingen”) to the cabildo, administrators, judges and inhabitants of Santo Domingo, January 25, 1605, in Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi, Relaciones históricas de Santo Domingo, 2 vols. (Ciudad Trujillo: R. D. Editora Montalvo, 1942–1945), 2: 236–238; Carlos Esteban Deive, Tangomangos: Contrabando y piratería en Santo Domingo 1522–1606 (Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1996), 203–206. Maurits thus acted as the Dutch sovereign, as he did on other occasions in encounters with delegates of non-European rulers. See Mark Meuwese, “The States General and the Stadholder: Dutch Diplomatic Practices in the Atlantic World before the West India Company,” Journal of Early American History 3 (2013), 49. 93. Isabelo Macías Domínguez, Cuba en la primera mitad del siglo XVII (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1978), 329.

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94. Kenneth R. Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder, 1530–1630 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 178–179, 225–227; Joyce Lorimer, “The English Contraband Tobacco Trade in Trinidad and Guiana 1590–1617,” in The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480–1650, ed. Kenneth R. Andrews, Nicholas P. Canny, and Paul E. H. Hair (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1978), 124–150: 128, 130; Sluiter, “Dutch-Spanish Rivalry,” 182–183, 188, 193–194; Venezuela-British Guiana Boundary Arbitration, Case of Venezuela, 62; Roland D. Hussey, “Spanish Reaction to Foreign Aggression in the Caribbean to about 1680,” Hispanic American Historical Review 9, no. 3 (1929), 294. 95. Bradley, Lure of Peru, 23. 96. Lorimer, “English Contraband Tobacco Trade,” 147. 97. Account by Jacques Ousiel, presented to the WIC, 1637, in Report and Accompanying Papers of the Commission Appointed by the President of the United States to Investigate and Report on the Divisional Line between the Republic of Venezuela and British Guiana (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1897), 87–88. 98. Memorandum by Don Juan Desologuren, November 19, 1637, in British Guiana Boundary, Arbitration with the United States of Venezuela: Appendix to the Case on Behalf of Her Britannic Majesty (London: Foreign Office, 1898), 77. 99. Frederick P. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 181. 100. Carlos Esteban Deive, Los guerrilleros negros: Esclavos y cimarrones en Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1989), 77; Archivo General de Indias (Seville), Santo Domingo, 870, L.10, fols. 106v-107r, the Spanish Crown to Juan Bitrián de Beamonte y Navarra, governor and captain-general of Hispaniola, Madrid, July 1, 1638. 101. Macías Domínguez, Cuba, 337. Joannes de Laet, Nieuvve Wereldt Ofte Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien (Leyden: I. Elzevier, 1625), 21–22, erroneously gives 1606 as the year of his battle. 102. Macías Domínguez, Cuba, 331–332; Deive, Tangomangos, 236. 103. Sluiter, “Dutch-Spanish Rivalry,” 180, 188–190; Chaunu and Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique, 4: 127; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 121, 124; Enthoven, “Zeeland,” 260. 104. Vogt, Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast, 148, 155–156. 105. Ibid., 164–165; J. Bato’ora Ballong-Wen-Mewuda, São Jorge da Mina 1482– 1637: La vie d’un comptoir portugais en Afrique occidentale (Lisbonne and Paris: Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, Commission Nationale pour les Commémorations des Découvertes Portugaises, 1993), 473. By early 1613, eighty soldiers defended the fort. See resolutions of the States General, May 20, 1613, in Resolutiën der StatenGeneraal 1613–1616, ed. Arie Theodorus van Deursen (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 65. 106. Paul C. Allen, Philip III and the Pax Hispanica, 1598–1621: The Failure of Grand Strategy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 206–207, 232–233; Jonathan Irving Israel, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World 1606–1661 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 5–6, 33. 107. Peter T. Bradley, The Lure of Peru: Maritime Intrusion into the South Sea, 1598– 1701 (London: Macmillan, 1989), 30–48; Pilar Latasa Vassallo, Administración virreinal

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en el Perú: Gobierno del Marqués de Montesclaros (1607–1615) (Madrid: Editorial Centro de Estudios Ramón Areces, 1997), 573–582. 108. Israel, Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World, 60; Maarten Prak, Gouden Eeuw: Het raadsel van de Republiek (Amsterdam: Boom, 2012), 41. 109. Heringa, Eer en hoogheid van de staat, 232–233. 2. Imperial Expansion

1. Little has been written about Jonkheer (squire) van Waerdenburg (or Waerdenburch), lord of the vrije heerlijkheid (enclave) of Rijsum and Marscamp, and member of the Reformed Church. We find him in 1622 serving in the Dutch army as sergeant major and seven years later as lieutenant colonel, commanding the garrison in Utrecht. He was appointed governor of Dutch Brazil, albeit without the authority to match that title, and was repatriated in 1633. In 1635, King Louis XIII of France appointed him commander of a Dutch infantry regiment in French service, and during the first Anglo-Dutch war, he served as one of the two commanders of a Dutch squadron in the Mediterranean. On his rank of lord, see Arnoldus Johannes Cornelius Kremer, “Bemmel,” Algemeen Nederlandsch Familieblad 11 (1894), 188. On his Church membership, see Leendert Jan Joosse, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld: Ontmoeting met Afrikanen en Indianen (1600–1700) (Kampen: Uitgeverij Kok, 2008), 128, 450. On his rank of sergeant major, see Constantijn Huygens, De briefwisseling van Constantijn Huygens (1608–1687), vol. 12, 1634–1639, ed. Jacob Adolf Worp (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1913), 58n. 4. On his rank of lieutenant colonel, see NAN, Staten-Generaal [SG] 5768, West India Company shareholders to the States General, 1668. On his authority in Brazil, see Hermann Wätjen, Das holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien: Ein Kapitel aus der Kolonialgeschichte des 17. Jahrhunderts (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, Gotha: Perthes, 1921), 180–181. On his French service, see Lieuwe van Aitzema, Saken van staet en oorlogh, in, ende omtrent de Vereenigde Nederlanden, 6 vols. (’s-GravenHaghe: Johan Veely, Johan Tongerloo, ende Jasper Doll, 1669), 2: 271; F. J. G. ten Raa, Het Staatsche leger 1568–1795, 7 vols. (Breda: De Koninklijke Militaire Academie, 1911–1950), 4: 301–302; Hugo de Groot, Briefwisseling van Hugo Grotius, vol 7, ed. Bernardus Lambertus Meulenbroek (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 381n. 11. On the first Anglo-Dutch war, see Johan E. Elias, Schetsen uit de geschiedenis van ons zeewezen, 6 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1930), 6: 20. One pamphlet criticized the way the West India Company treated van Waerdenburg after his return from Brazil. See De Brasilsche breede-byl; ofte T’samen-spraek, tusschen Kees Jansz. Schott, komende uyt Brasil, en Jan Maet, Koopmans-knecht, hebbende voor desen ook in Brasil geweest, over den verloop in Brasil (s.l., 1647), 31. I have found no evidence for the assertion made by a Brazilian translator that van Waerdenburg fought under Ernst von Mansfeld in the early part of the Thirty Years’ War before joining Gabriel Bethlen in the same war and signing up for the army of Venice: Olinda conquistada: narrativa do padre João Baers, capelão do C.el Theodoro de Waerdenburch, trans. Alfredo de Carvalho (Recife: Typographia do Laemmert & C., 1898), vii–viii. 2. Johannes Baers, Olinda, ghelegen int Landt van Brasil, in de Capitania van Phernambuco, met Mannelijke dapperheyd ende groote couragie inghenomen, ende geluckelijck verovert op den 16. Februarij A.o 1630 (Amsterdam: Hendrick Laurentsz, 1630), 13. During the second Anglo-Dutch war, the States General also recommended that

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officers of warships provide sailors with a glass of wine before battle to spur them on; Nicolaes Wittsen, Aloude en hedendaegsche scheeps-bouw en bestier (Amsterdam: Casparus Commelijn; Broer en Jan Appelaer, 1671), 404. 3. Clé Lesger, The Rise of the Amsterdam Market and Information Exchange: Merchants, Commercial Expansion and Change in the Spatial Economy of the Low Countries, c. 1550–1630 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 178–179. 4. Pieter Jan van Winter, De Westindische Compagnie ter kamer Stad en Lande (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 78–79. 5. Alexander Bick, “Governing the Free Sea: The Dutch West India Company and Commercial Politics, 1618–1645” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012), 121, 127. See also pp. 98–111 for the first WIC drafts. 6. Van Winter, Kamer Stad en Lande, 7. 7. Peter Wolfgang Klein, “The Origins of Trading Companies,” in Companies and Trade, ed. Leonard Blussé and Femme Gaastra (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1981), 23–24. 8. Edwin S. Hunt and James M. Murray, A History of Business in Medieval Europe, 1200–1550 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 219. 9. Henk den Heijer, Geschiedenis van de WIC (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1994), 33. 10. Arnoldus Buchelius, “VOC-dagboek 1619–1639,” 101v, diary entry of March 12, 1623, http://www.gahetna.nl/sites/default/files/bijlagen/transcriptie_ voc-dagboek_buchelius.pdf, accessed on February 12, 2016. 11. Guido de Bruin, “Het politiek bestel van de Republiek: een anomalie in het vroegmodern Europa?” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 114, no. 1 (1999): 16–17; Arie Theodorus van Deursen, “Tussen eenheid en zelfstandigheid. De toepassing van de Unie als fundamentele wet,” in De hartslag van het leven: Studies over de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1996), 321. 12. A comparable code was used in the appointment of the Heren XIX, the board of nineteen that ruled the WIC. Willem Rudolf Menkman, De West-Indische Compagnie (Amsterdam: Van Kampen, 1947), 44–46; den Heijer, Geschiedenis van de WIC, 31. 13. Bick, “Governing the Free Sea,” 111, 115–116, 129. 14. Half of the money from the states was a subsidy; the other half was an investment in the company’ capital: Johannes Gerard van Dillen, “De West-Indische Compagnie, het Calvinisme en de politiek,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 74 (1961) 150–151. The WIC advertised itself prominently in France, where with the king’s permission placards were put up in cities such as Paris, Rouen, and La Rochelle; “Brieven van David Nuyts aan Van Hilten,” Kroniek van het Historisch Genootschap gevestigd te Utrecht 25, ser. 5, 5 (1869), 111. 15. Oscar Gelderblom, Zuid-Nederlandse kooplieden en de opkomst van de Amsterdamse stapelmarkt (1578–1630) (Hilversum: Verloren, 2000), 237–238. 16. “Advies tot aanbeveling van der verovering van Brazilië door de WestIndische Compagnie. Uit het archief van Hilten,” Kroniek van het Historisch Genootschap gevestigd te Utrecht, ser. 6, pt. 2, no. 27 (1871), 230–232. Given the similarity in style and content to the text of another tract (Redenen waarom de West-Indische Compagnie dient te trachten het Landt van Brasilia den Coninck van Spangien te ontmachtigen [Amsterdam: Cornelis Lodewijcksz, 1624]), the author of this memorandum was undoubtedly Jan Andriesz Moerbeeck.

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17. Ewout Teellinck, De tweede wachter, brengende tijdinghe vande nacht, dat is,Van het overgaen vande Bahia, met Eenen heylsamen raedt, wat daer over te doen staet (’s-Gravenhaghe: Aert Meurs, 1625), C3. 18. De Portogysen goeden buurman: Ghetrocken uyt de Registers van syn goet Gebuerschap gehouden in Lisbona, Maringan, Caep Sint Augustijn, Sint Paulo de Loando, en Sant Tomée. Dienende tot Antwoort op het ongefondeerde Brasyls-Schuyt-praetjen, Weest onnosel als de Duyven, En voorsichtich als de Slangen (1649). 19. For this qualification, see George Davison Winius, The Fatal History of Portuguese Ceylon: Transition to Dutch Rule (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 61. 20. Rolf H. Bremmer Jr., “The Correspondence of Johannes de Laet (1581– 1649) as a Mirror of His Life,” Lias 25, no. 2 (1998), 150; Arnoldus Buchelius, “VOC-dagboek 1619–1639,” 99r, diary entry of July 30, 1621, http://www.gahetna. nl/sites/default/files/bijlagen/transcriptie_voc-dagboek_buchelius.pdf, accessed on February 12, 2016. Although individual Catholics may not have invested any money, the Catholic Church was forced to make a contribution, at least in Utrecht. See Utrechts Archief, 88, “Verzamelde stukken van de oud-katholieke kerk in Nederland: rekening van de door de vijf Utrechtse kapittels betaalde gelden ten behoeve van de Oost- en West-Indische Compagnie in 1601, 1621 en z.d.” (p. 405); 220 Kapittel van Sint Pieter te Utrecht, inventarisnummer 699-a, 2.4.1, 221 Kapittel van Sint Marie te Utrecht, inventarisnummer 1762. The initial WIC capital of 7 million guilders was raised to 17 million in four capital drives between 1623 and 1639. See Norbert H. Schneeloch, Aktionäre der Westindischen Compagnie von 1674: Die Verschmelzung der alten Kapitalgebergruppen zu einer neuen Aktiengesellschaft (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), 27–29. 21. Ton Koot, “Het West-Indisch Huis: Een gebouw met een opmerkelijke geschiedenis,” Ons Amsterdam 30, no. 3 (1978), 74. Historians have long considered this meeting the first of the Heren XIX, but according to Bick, an earlier one had been held in December 1622. See “Governing the Free Sea,” 112. 22. Johannes de Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael van de Verrichtinghen der Gheoctroyeerde WestIndische Compagnie in derthien Boecken, ed. Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, 4 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1931–1937), 1: 5. 23. David Goodman, Spanish Naval Power, 1589–1665 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 17–19. 24. Jan Josephus Poelhekke, ’t Uytgaen van den Treves: Spanje en de Nederlanden in 1621 (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1960), 40–42. 25. Redenen, Waeromme dat de Vereenighde Nederlanden, geensints eenighe Vrede met den Koningh van Spaignien konnen, mogen, noch behooren te maecken. Zijnde het Tweede Deel van ’t Tractaet tegens Pays, Treves, en Onderhandelinge met den Koningh van Spaignien (’s-Gravenhage: Aert Meuris, 1630). 26. Kees Zandvliet, Mapping for Money: Maps, Plans, and Topographic Paintings and Their Role in Dutch Overseas Expansion during the 16th and 17th Centuries (Amsterdam: Batavian Lion International, 1998), 34. 27. Johannes Keuning, “Hessel Gerritsz,” Imago Mundi 6 (1949), 49, 53, 56, 61. 28. Zandvliet, Mapping for Money, 165; ibid., 63. 29. Iournael vande Nassausche vloot, ofte beschryvingh vande voyagie omden gantschen aerdt-kloot (Amsterdam, 1626), preface.

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30. Peter T. Bradley, The Lure of Peru: Maritime Intrusion into the South Sea, 1598– 1701 (London: Macmillan, 1989), 66; Jonathan Irving Israel, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World 1606–1661 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 28. 31. Willem Voorbeijtel Cannenburg, De reis om de wereld van de Nassausche vloot, 1623–1626 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), xx–xxiii. 32. Ibid., 71–72. 33. Bradley, Lure of Peru, 64–65; Anne Doedens and Henk Looijesteijn, eds., Op jacht naar Spaans Zilver: Het scheepsjournaal van Willem van Brederode, kapitein der mariniers in de Nassause vloot (1623–1626) (Hilversum: Verloren, 2008), 92. 34. Huguette Chaunu and Pierre Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique (1504–1650), 8 vols. (Paris: Colin, 1955–1959), 5: 77–79. 35. AGI, Santo Domingo, 869, L.7, fols. 143r–143v, 152v–153r, Royal Cédula to Francisco Venegas, Governor of Havana and Captain-General of Cuba, El Campillo, October 21, 1628, the Spanish Crown to Venegas, Madrid, March 27, 1622; Irene A. Wright, “The Dutch and Cuba, 1609–1643,” Hispanic American Historical Review 4, no. 4 (1921), 602; Isabelo Macías Domínguez, Cuba en la primera mitad del siglo XVII (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1978), 359–362; “Advies tot aanbeveling,” 238–239. 36. “Advies tot aanbeveling,” 234–235. The amounts mentioned by Moerbeeck are virtually identical to those in the original plan. Ian Andriesz Moerbeeck, Redenen waarom de West-Indische Compagnie dient te trachten het Landt van Brasilia den Coninck van Spangien te ontmachtigen (Amsterdam: Cornelis Lodewijcksz, 1624), 8–9. Decades later, in 1651, Moerbeeck was exiled from Holland, Zeeland, Friesland, and Utrecht after confessing that he had tried to bribe members of the States General on behalf of the Portuguese embassy. See F. Moerbeek, “Een omkoopschandaal in de 17e eeuw,” Nederlandse Historiën 15, no. 4 (1981), 123–129. 37. E. M. Koen, “Notarial Records Relating to the Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam up to 1639,” Studia Rosenthaliana 5 (1971), 110; Gelderblom, Zuid-Nederlandse kooplieden, 217; Daniel Strum, “The Portuguese Jews and New Christians in the Sugar Trade: Managing Business Overseas—Kinship and Ethnicity Revisited (Amsterdam, Porto and Brazil, 1595–1618)” (PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2009), 272. 38. Buchelius, “VOC-dagboek,” 98v, diary entry of August 1621; Dierick Ruiters, Toortse der zee-vaert, ed. Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1913), 36. 39. Francis A. Dutra, “Matias de Albuquerque and the Defense of Northeastern Brazil, 1620–1626,” Studia no. 36 (1973), 119, 139. 40. Ibid., 126–133, 142. 41. George Edmundson, “The Dutch Power in Brazil (1624–1654). Part I—the Struggle for Bahia (1624–1627),” English Historical Review 11, no. 42 (1896), 237–246; Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, ed., Documenten uit het archief van den LuitenantAdmiraal Piet Heyn (Utrecht: Kemink & Zoon, 1928), lviii–lxiii. 42. Stuart Schwartz, “The Voyage of the Vassals: Royal Power, Noble Obligations, and Merchant Capital before the Portuguese Restoration of Independence, 1624–1640,” Hispanic American Historical Review 96, no. 3 (1991), 750–751. 43. In their attempt to dispel the Dutch, the Portuguese granted a general pardon to convicted criminals. See Dutra, “Matias de Albuquerque,” 151; Timothy J. Coates,

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Convicts and Orphans: Forced and State-Sponsored Colonizers in the Portuguese Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 54. 44. Johann Gregor Aldenburgk, Reise nach Brasilien, 1623–1626 (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1930), 33–34. 45. Joaquim Veríssiomo Serrão, Do Brasil Filipino ão Brasil de 1640 (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1968), 193. 46. Michiel van Groesen, “A Week to Remember: Dutch Publishers and the Competition for News from Brazil, 26 August–2 September 1624,” Quaerendo 40, no. 1 (2010), 27–28, 35–36. 47. K. van Damme with J. Deploige, “‘Slecht nieuws, geen nieuws’: Abraham Verhoeven (1575–1652) en de Nieuwe Tijdinghen: Politieke pers en propaganda in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden tijdens de vroege zeventiende eeuw,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 113 (1998), 15. 48. NAN, SG 5751, “Sommiere staat van maandelijkse soldij voor 1600 mannen, bestaande in tien compagnieen,” insert in A. Bruijningh and M. Huygens of the Council of State to the States General, June 27, 1624. 49. Schwartz, “Voyage of the Vassals,” 735, 744. 50. Joseph Newcombe Joyce, “Spanish Influence in Portuguese Administration: A Study of the Conselho da Fazenda and Habsburg Brazil, 1580–1640” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1974), 334. 51. Cornelis Maria Schulten, Nederlandse expansie in Latijns Amerika: Brazilië: 1624–1654 (Bussum: Fibula-Van Dishoeck, 1968), 30–32; Israel, Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World, 131; De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 2: 83–84; Michael Georg de Boer, “De val van Bahia,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 58 (1943), 47–48. For the Portuguese perspective, see Bartolomeu Guerreiro, Iornada dos Vassalos da Coroa de Portugal, pera se recuperar a Cidade do Salvador, na Bahya de todos os Santos, tomada pollos Olandezes, a oito de Mayo de 1624. & recuperada ao primeiro de Mayo de 1625 (Lisboa: Mattheus Pinheiro, 1625). 52. Schwartz, “Voyage of the Vassals,” 736. 53. Gonçalo de Cespedes, Historia de Don Felipe III, Rey de las Españas (Barcelona: Sebastian de Cormellas, 1634), 242. 54. NAN, SG 5751, WIC, Chamber of Amsterdam to the States General, October 17, 1625. 55. Schulten, Nederlandse expansie in Latijns Amerika, 32. 56. Henk den Heijer, ed., Expeditie naar de Goudkust: Het journaal van Jan Dircksz Lam over de Nederlandse aanval op Elmina, 1624–1626 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2006), 33; John Thornton and Andrea Mosterman, “A Re-Interpretation of the KongoPortuguese War of 1622 according to New Documentary Evidence,” Journal of African History 51 (2010), 244. 57. Guerreiro, Iornada dos vasallos, 30. 58. De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 2: 93. For an excellent overview of the Grand Design, see den Heijer, Expeditie naar de Goudkust, 31–39. 59. De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 1: 108–109; “Relaçam da milagrosa victoria qve alcansov Dom Francisco Sovto,” in António Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 11 vols. (Lisboa: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1952–1988), 7: 389–392; John Vogt, Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast, 1469–1682 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979), 180–182; den Heijer, Expeditie naar de Goudkust, 53–55.

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60. Teellinck, Tweede wachter, C3. 61. Virginia W. Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherlands (Gordonsville, VA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 108. 62. Some of these ships were of Dutch build, having first been captured by the Portuguese. One of these, seized by the Dutch off the coast of Brazil, still carried the coat of arms of the stadholder on its backside. See NAN, SG 5752, Arnoldt Kelffken and A. Bruijningh to the States General, Amsterdam, October 23, 1628. 63. NAN, SG 5752, the Admiralty of Zeeland to the States General, Middelburg, April 19, 1628. The ship was named Oudt Vlissingen, its captain Jacob Martens. 64. “Commissie voor Pieter Pietersz Hein als Admirael en Capitein Generael ten dienste van de West-Indische Compagnie,” in Piet Heyn en de Zilvervloot: Bescheiden uit Nederlandsche en Spaansche archieven, ed. Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber and Irene Aloha Wright (Utrecht: Kemink & Zoon, 1928), 12. 65. Klaas Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika 1600–1650: Angola, Kongo en São Tomé (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2000), 49. 66. Charles Ralph Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 29, 33. According to one contemporary estimate, the Dutch seized eighty ships in the Brazil trade in 1625–1626. See “Memorial do estado do Brazil pa. S. Mag. de,” 1627, in Livro Primeiro do Govêrno do Brasil 1607–1633 (Rio de Janeiro: Departamento de Imprensa Nacional, 1958), 315. Another estimate puts the number lost to the Dutch in 1626–1627 at sixty of the three hundred ships in the trade between Portugal and Brazil. See Stuart Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 174. 67. Leonor Freire Costa, O transporte no Atlântico e a Companhia Geral do Comércio do Brasil (1580–1673) (Lisboa: Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descubrimentos Portugueses, 2002), 77. They also made officials weary of potential enemy actions. As a “defense measure,” one Bahian governor even forbade all sugar ships from leaving from 1634 through early 1636 (71–72). 68. Robert Garfield, A History of São Tomé Island 1470–1655: The Key to Guinea (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992), 180; Beatrix Heintze, “Das Ende des unabhängigen Staates Ndongo (Angola): Neue Chronologie und Reinterpretation (1617–1630),” Paideuma 27 (1981), 261; Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Hispanoamérica y el comercio de esclavos: Los asientos portugueses (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1977), 82. 69. De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 4: 282–287. The Spanish State Council estimated the costs of Dutch aggression between 1623 and 1626 at more than 5 million ducados, or over 6 million pesos. See Evaldo Cabral de Mello, Olinda Restaurada: Guerra e Açúcar no Nordeste, 1630–1654 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Forense-Universitaria; São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1975), 55. For Dutch privateering off Southwest Africa, see Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 83–85. The majority of seizures of Iberian vessels, however, took place along the Spanish and Portuguese coasts, and were not the work of WIC ships but free Dutch and Barbary Coast privateers. 70. Vertoogh, over den toestant der West-Indische Compagnie, in haer begin, midden, ende eynde, met een remedie tot redres van deselve (Rotterdam: Johannes van Roon, 1651).

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71. Johannes Pieter Arend, Otto van Rees, and Willem Gerard Brill, Algemeene geschiedenis des vaderlands, van de vroegste tijden tot op heden, vol. 3 (Amsterdam: C. R. Schleyer and Zoon, 1863), pt. 4: 305–306. 72. Robert A. Stradling, The Armada of Flanders: Spanish Maritime Policy and European War, 1568–1668 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 20. 73. Enrique Otero Lana, Los corsarios españoles durante la decadencia de los Austrias: El corso español del Atlántico peninsular en el siglo XVII (1621–1697) (Madrid: Editorial Naval, 1992), 255, 257. 74. Ibid., 163, 258–259. 75. Stradling, Armada of Flanders, 35–36; Israel, Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World, 195–196; Arie Theodorus van Deursen, Mensen van klein vermogen: Het ‘kopergeld’ van de Gouden Eeuw (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1992), 248–249. 76. NAN, SG 5753, WIC Board to the States General, c. April 1633; Otero Lana, Corsarios españoles, 436. 77. Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 112. 78. NAN, SG 5752, G. van Arnhem to the States General, Middelburg, December 13, 1630; Gemeentearchief Rotterdam [GAR], Oud Notarieel Archief [ONA] 93: 6/8, Act of January 25, 1631. In all, no more than five or six ships returning from Brazil fell into the Dunkirkers’ lap. See Wätjen, Holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien, 336. 79. Johan Hartog, Curaçao, van kolonie tot autonomie, 2 vols. (Aruba: De Wit, 1961), 1: 190; Israel, Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World, 265. For another attack on a ship bound for Brazil, see Copye van ’t Journael gehouden by Gedeon Moris, Koopman op het Schip vande West-Indische Compagnie, genaemt de Princesse, uytgevaren naer Bresilien van Zeelandt den 27 February 1640 (Amsterdam: Francois Lieshout, 1640). Systematic attacks on Dutch convoys from the Americas did not take place, although privateers from Guipúzcoa and Dunkirk did agree to undertake such a project in 1635. The outbreak of war between Spain and France prevented its implementation. See Otero Lana, Corsarios españoles, 436. 80. This siege followed several years of an intermittent Dutch blockade of the Flemish coast. See Simon Groenveld, Verlopend getij: De Nederlandse Republiek en de Engelse Burgeroorlog, 1640–1646 (Dieren: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1984), 135–172. 81. De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 1: 130. 82. Dionysius Spranckhuysen, “Cort Verhael vande voyage gedaen door de vlote van de West-Indische Compagnye, onder het beleydt van den Heere Generael Pieter Pietersz. Heyn,” in Piet Heyn en de Zilvervloot: Bescheiden uit Nederlandsche en Spaansche Archieven, ed. Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber and Irene Aloha Wright (Utrecht: Kemink & Zoon, 1928), 193. 83. Fernando Serrano Mangas, Armadas y flotas de la plata (1620–1648) (Madrid: Banco de España, 1990), 333. This was a perennial feature of the carrera de Indias: Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 111–113. 84. Document no. IV, in Irene Aloha Wright, ed., Bescheiden over de verovering van de Zilvervloot door Piet Heyn (Utrecht: Kemink & Zoon, 1928), ∗22. 85. Leví Marrero, Cuba: Economía y Sociedad, III (Madrid: Editorial Playor, 1975), 108. 86. Schulten, Nederlandse expansie in Latijns Amerika, 35. The first ship from Heyn’s fleet to reach European waters, the Hollandia, had to fight off five

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Dunkirkers, while the Eenhoorn lost its shipmaster in a similar battle. That ship was rescued by another ship from the same fleet, the Utrecht; See Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber and Irene Aloha Wright, eds., Piet Heyn en de Zilvervloot: Bescheiden uit Nederlandsche en Spaansche archieven bijeenverzameld (Utrecht: Kemink & Zoon, 1928), cxxviii. 87. Petrus Scriverius, Corte historische beschryvinghe der Nederlandtsche oorlogen, beginnende van den aenvangh der Nederlandsche beroerten tot in den jare 1646 incluis (Amsterdam: Broer Iansz, 1646), 212. See also Daniel Heinsius, Het beleg van ’s-Hertogenbosch in 1629 en andere gebeurtenissen uit die tijd, ed. Jan van Boxtel (’s-Hertogenbosch: Polare, 2013), 76. 88. Van Winter, Kamer Stad en Lande, 230. 89. J. M. van Wijhe, “Amsterdam in het begin der 17e eeuw: Aanteekeningen van Ernst Brinck,” Amstelodamum 20 (1923), 32. 90. L’Honoré Naber and Wright, Piet Heyn en de Zilvervloot, clxviii. 91. Serrano Mangas, Armadas y flotas de la plata, 258; Marrero, Cuba, 110. 92. Koot, “West-Indisch Huis,” 79; NAN, SG 5752, minutes of WIC meeting, November 30, 1628. 93. Stradling, Armada of Flanders, 17; Israel, Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World, 201. Compare Francisco de Céspedes, Governor of the Río de la Plata, to King Philip IV, October 28, 1629, in Pablo Pastells, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en la Provincia del Paraguay (Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Perú, Bolivia y Brasil) según los documentos originales del Archivo General de Indias, 2 vols. (Madrid: Librería General de Victoriano Suárez, 1912–1915), 1: 439. 94. Carla Rahn Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain: Imperial Defense in the Early Seventeenth Century (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 183. 95. Juan Manuel Zapatero, Historia de las fortificaciones de Cartagena de Indias (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica del Centro Iberoamericana de Cooperación y Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, 1979), 53–61. 96. In 1636, the Dutch added insult to injury by capturing a ship en route from Mexico to Puerto Rico with funds meant, in part, to pay the wages of the four hundred garrison soldiers. See Francisco de Tajagrano and Diego Nuñez de Peralta to the Crown, Santo Domingo, September 28, 1636, in Cornelis Frans Adolf van Dam and Irene Aloha Wright, eds., Nederlandsche zeevaarders op de eilanden in de Caraïbische Zee en aan de kust van Columbia en Venezuela gedurende de jaren 1621–1648: Documenten hoofdzakelijk uit het Archivo General de Indias, 2 vols. (Utrecht: Kemink & Zoon, 1934), 2: ∗54–∗55. 97. Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Historia de Puerto Rico (1600–1650) (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos de Sevilla, 1974), 169–174, 182; José Antonio Calderón Quijano, Las fortificaciones españoles en América y Filipinas (Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1996), 226–227. 98. Pablo Montero, Ulúa, puente intercontinental en el siglo XVII, Colección Historias de San Juan de Ulúa en la Historia, vol. 2 (México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Internacional de Contenedores Asociados de Veracruz, 1997), 80–83; Calderón Quijano, Fortificaciones españoles, 86. 99. Macías, Cuba, 244, 262, 271, 294, 368, 370.

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100. Jonathan Israel’s argument that the Caribbean colonies were sealed off from Dutch attack is therefore mistaken; “Olivares and the Government of the Spanish Indies, 1621–1643,” in Empires and Entrepots: The Dutch, the Spanish Monarchy and the Jews, 1585–1713 (London and Ronceverte: Hambledon Press, 1990), 279. See also Wim Klooster, “The Geopolitical Impact of Dutch Brazil on the Western Hemisphere,” in The Legacy of Dutch Brazil, ed. Michiel van Groesen (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014). In one port far from the fleets’ shipping lanes, the news of the Dutch invasion of Pernambuco in 1630 did lead to frantic activity. Shortly after the start of his tenure in late 1631, the new governor of the Río de la Plata, Pedro Esteban Dávila, began a program to defend Buenos Aires, especially through the construction of a fort. He was alarmed by the news about a possible attack from the Dutch, who had seized Pernambuco; moreover, a Dutch ship had been seen exploring the estuary of the Río de la Plata. The Dutch scare had not dissipated under his successor, who arrived in 1637. See José Torre Revelo, “Los gobernadores de Buenos Aires (1617–1777),” in Historia de la Nación Argentina, vol. 3, ed. Ricardo H. Levene (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1937), 476, 478–479; Serrano Mangas, Armadas y flotas de la plata, 369. 101. Den Heijer, Geschiedenis van de WIC, 63, 65; Cornelis C. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1971), 215–223. See for Jol’s failed attempt of 1638: Didier Rault, “La información y su manipulación en la relaciones de sucesos: Encuesta sobre dos relatos de batallas navales entre españoles y holandeses (1638),” Criticón 86 (2002), 97–115. 102. Flor Trejo Rivera, La flota de Nueva España 1630–1631: Vicisitudes y naufragios (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2003), 55–61; De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 3: 68. Many Portuguese ships and cargoes were lost in this way, both in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. See Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500–1660 (London: Routledge, 2002), 113. 103. NAN, SG 5752, “Utstaende schult vant subsidium,” insert in Arnoldt Kelffken and A. Bruijningh to the States General, Amsterdam, October 23, 1628. 104. Frédéric Mauro, Le Brésil au XVIIe siècle: Documents inédits relatifs à l’Atlantique portugais (Coimbra: s.n., 1961), 175–176. 105. Ben N. Teensma, ed., Suiker, verfhout en tabak: Het Braziliaanse Handboek van Johannes de Laet (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2009), 85. 106. Simon Hart, The Prehistory of the New Netherland Company (Amsterdam: City of Amsterdam Press, 1959), 12. 107. Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain, 183. 108. L’Honoré Naber and Wright, Piet Heyn en de Zilvervloot, clxxvi. 109. George Edmundson, “The Dutch Power in Brazil (continued),” English Historical Review 14 (1899), 686–93; Verovering van de stadt Olinda, gelegen in de Capitania van Phernambuco, door den E.E. Manhaften, Gestrenghen Heyndrick C. Lonck, Generael de Water ende te Lande (Amsterdam: Hessel Gerritsz [1630]), 3. 110. José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos flamengos: Influência da ocupação holandesa na vida e na cultura do Norte do Brasil, 2nd ed. (Recife: Governo do Estado de Pernambuco, 1978), 35. 111. Bonifácio Mueller, O convento de Santo Antônio do Recife (Recife: Fundação de Cultura Cidade do Recife, 1984), 14.

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112. Oscar F. Hefting, “High versus Low: Portuguese and Dutch Fortification Traditions Meet in Colonial Brazil (1500–1654),” in First Forts: Essays on the Archaeology of Proto-Colonial Fortifications, ed. Eric Klingelhofer (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 201–202. 113. Nicolaas Christiaan Kist, Neêrland’s bededagen en biddagsbrieven: Eene bijdrage ter opbouwing der geschiedenis van staat en kerk in Nederland , 2 vols. (Leiden: S. en J. Luchtmans, 1848–1849), 2: 139. Baers, Olinda, 36. Thanksgiving days were also held to celebrate Piet Heyn’s capture of the treasure fleet and the conquest of Paraíba. See Kist, Neêrland’s bededagen en biddagsbrieven, 2: 133–134, 147. 114. Mark Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595–1674 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 131–139. 115. Some contemporary sources have Pater putting on his armor after being wounded and jumping into the water in desperation. See Arend, Van Rees and Brill, Algemeene geschiedenis des vaderlands, 3: 549. De Laet has a different version of the event in Iaerlyck Verhael, 3: 15–16. 116. NAN, SG 5753, D. Waerdenburgh to the States General, Antonio Vaz, October 7, 1631; Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, ed. Reisebeschreibungen von deutschen Beamten und Kriegsleuten im Dienst der niederländischen West- und Ost-Indischen Kompagnien 1602–1797, 13 vols. (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1930), 2: 86–88; Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain, 189–190; Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 47–48. 117. In 1634, there were 4,136 soldiers and 1,528 sailors in the Dutch camp; Mello, Olinda Restaurada, 32, 41, 137, 166, 185. 118. Mello, Olinda Restaurada, 141. 119. Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 293. 120. Israel, Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World, 245–249. 121. Ibid., 176–178; van Deursen, Mensen van klein vermogen, 241–242. 122. Minutes of the WIC Chamber of Zeeland, August 18, 1629, in Johannes Hermanus Jacobus Hamelberg, ed., Documenten behoorende bij “De Nederlanders op de West-Indische eilanden” (Amsterdam: Emmering, 1979), 14; NAN, SG 5752, WIC directors Cornelis Bicker and Hendrick Broen to the States General, Amsterdam, July 30, 1629, and WIC directors, Chamber of Maze to unknown, Dordrecht, July 31, 1629. 123. Ten Raa, Staatsche leger, 4: 27. 124. Peter de Cauwer, Tranen van bloed: Het beleg van ’s-Hertogenbosch en de oorlog in de Nederlanden, 1629 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 148. In addition, the residents of Muiden who had each been obliged to provide quarters for four, five, or six WIC soldiers complained about the havoc the men had wreaked on their houses and furniture, and about the deadly diseases they had introduced. See T. L. J. Verroen, “Een wapenzaal op het Muiderslot,” Jaarboek van het Genootschap Amstelodamum 80 (1988), 64. 125. Michael Georg de Boer, “Een memorie over den toestand der West Indische Compagnie in het jaar 1633,” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 21 (1900): 343–362. This document reiterated many points that the Heren XIX had stressed four yours before. See Consideratien ende redenen der E. Heeren Bewind-hebberen vande Geoctrojeerde West-Indische Compagnie nopende de teghenwoordige deliberatie over den Treves met den Coning van Hispanien (Haerlem: Adriaen Rooman, 1629). 126. Meeting of July 13, 1633, in Particuliere Notulen van de vergaderingen van de Staten van Holland door N. Stellingwerff en S. Schot, vol. 6, ed. Jannie W. VeenendaalBarth (Den Haag: Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 2002), 265.

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127. Minutes of the meeting of the States of Holland, June 15, 1633, in Particuliere Notulen Staten van Holland, 6: 248–249. 128. Israel, Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World, 248–249. 129. Mello, Olinda Restaurada, 166–168. 130. Duarte de Albuquerque Coelho, Memórias Diárias da Guerra do Brasil (Recife: Fundação de Cultura Cidade do Recife, 1982), 127; Cuthbert Pudsey, Journal of a Residence in Brazil, ed. Nelson Papavero and Dante Martins Teixeira (Petrópolis: Petrobas, 2000), 59. It is likely that more than a few soldiers in the Dutch ranks had experience with guerrilla warfare because it was also common in early modern Europe. See Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 41. Nevertheless, one colonel in Dutch Brazil still complained in 1647 about his troops’ unfamiliarity with ambushes. See Benjamin Nicolaas Teensma, “Verbrokkeld, verpuind, verwaaid: de laatste maanden van Fort Mauritius in Nederlands Brazilië: November 1646–April 1647,” unpublished ms., 2015. 131. King Philip IV ordered Albuquerque to break the agreement: Mello, Olinda Restaurada, 241–242. 132. De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 3: 153–155. One example from the Low Countries was the Dutch-Spanish protocol on prisoners of 1602, renewed in 1622. See Henry Hexham, The Principles of the Art Militarie: Practised in the Vvarres of the Vnited Netherlands: Represented by Figure, the Vvord of Command, and Demonstration (London: Printed by M. P. for M. Symmons), app. 3–8. 133. Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 98–100, 104. 134. Earlier, after the Dutch defeat at Puerto Rico, two hundred to three hundred Dutchmen were shipped to Spain in defiance of the agreement that had been made. They were reportedly mistreated during their imprisonment in Spain. See NAN, SG 5751, memorandum WIC for the States General, May 19, 1626. 135. NAN, Oude West-Indische Compagnie [OWIC] 9, Heren XIX to Johan Maurits and the High and Secret Council of Brazil, Amsterdam, April 18, 1642. In 1643, the Spanish crown instructed Alvaro de Luna Sarmiento, governor of Cuba, to stop bothering or mistreating Dutch prisoners of war. See van Dam and Wright, Nederlandsche zeevaarders, 2: 221. This measure was not linked, however, to the policy change in Dutch Brazil, where the Habsburgs were no longer involved after 1640. 136. Otero Lana, Corsarios españoles, 81. 137. NAN, SG 5755, Pieter Bisof [?] and Willem Constant, WIC directors, Chamber of Zeeland to the States General, Middelburg, March 23, 1640. 138. NAN, SG 5752, Henrick van Zevender, bailiff of Rosendaal, to the States General, [read] March 18, 1630. 139. Voorbeijtel Cannenburg, Reis om de wereld, lxxxiii–lxxxv. 140. Nicolaes à Wassenaer, Het elfde deel of ’t vervolgh van het Historisch verhael aller ghedencwaerdiger geschiedenisen, die van aprili tot october, deses jaers 1626 voorgevallen syn (Amsterdam: Johannes Janssonius, 1626), 109. 141. Amsterdams Dam-praetje, van wat outs en wat nieuws. En wat vreemts. (Amsterdam: Ian van Soest, 1649). This confusion was not typically Dutch. For many decades after their arrival in Brazil, the Portuguese kept calling the Amerindians “blacks.” See Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 169.

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142. Mary Helms, “Essay on Objects: Interpretations of Distance Made Tangible,” in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. Stuart Schwartz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 371, 373. Exotica were also collected in other Dutch towns. The WIC Chamber of Maze sold four African rhinoceros horns in 1625, and some twenty years later, Minister Joannes Haselbeeck returned to Groningen from Brazil with a sample of curiosities that he donated to the local university. See Nicolaes van Wassenaer, ’t Hiende deel of t vervolgh van het Historisch verhael aller gedenck-waerdiger, die van octobrj des jaers 1625. tot april, des jaers 1626. voor-ghevallen sijn (Amsterdam: Johannes Janssonius, 1626), 105; van Winter, Kamer Stad en Lande, 226. 143. In Bremmer, “Correspondence of Johannes de Laet,” 160–161. 144. Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 34, 42; Michiel van Groesen, “Images of America in the Low Countries until the Seventeenth Century,” in Handbook Dutch-American Relations, ed. Hans Krabbendam, Cornelis A. van Minnen, and Giles Scott-Smith (Amsterdam: Boom; and Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 55. 145. Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750: The Impact of the African Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 120. 146. Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, “t Leven en bedrijff van vice-admirael De With, zaliger,” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 46 (1926), 85. 147. Wassenaer, Elfd deel Historisch Verhael, 102. 148. L’Honoré Naber, “Leven en bedrijff,” 85. 149. Pieter Spierenburg, De verbroken betovering: Mentaliteit en cultuur in preïndustrieel Europa (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998), 246. 150. Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300– 1589 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 237. 151. Compare Nigel Rigby, “Sober Cannibals and Drunken Christians: Colonial Encounters of the Cannibal Kind,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 27, no. 1 (1992), 177. 152. Peter Mason, Deconstructing America: Representations of the Other (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 97–117. 153. Nicolaes à Wassenaer, ’t Waelfde deel of ’t vervolgh van het Historisch verhael aller gedenckwaerdiger geschiedeniss. die van octobri des jaers 1626. tot april, des jaers 1627. voorgevallen zijn (Amsterdam: Johannes Janssonius, 1627), 62–64. 154. Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, transcribed, annotated, and introduced by Neil L. Whitehead (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 91–94. 155. L’Honoré Naber, Reisebeschreibungen, 1: 36–37; Elias Herckmans, “Generale beschrijvinge van de Capitanie Paraiba,” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap gevestigd te Utrecht 2 (1879), 365–366. 156. Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade, 56–58; Pieter de Marees, Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea (1602), ed. and trans. Albert van Dantzig and Adam Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 26–32. See also Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, ed., “Nota van Pieter Mortamer over het gewest Angola (met een bijlage),” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 54 (1933), 31.

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157. Mason, Deconstructing America, 43–50; Paul Otto, The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 64–65. 158. Benjamin Schmidt, “‘O Fortunate Land!’: Karel van Mander, A West Indies Landscape, and the Dutch Discovery of America,” New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 69, no. 1–2 (1995), 7. 159. Franciscus van den Enden, Vrije Politijke Stellingen, ed. Wim Klever (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 1992), 34–37. 160. Pertinente Beschrijvinge van Guiana. Gelegen aan de vaste Kust van America. Waer in kortelijck verhaelt wort het aenmerckelijckste dat in en omtrent het Landt van Guiana valt als de Limiten, het Klimaet en de Stoffen der Landen, de Mineralen, Edele Gesteenten, Vruchten, Dieren, ende overvloedigheyt der Vissen, nevens derselver Inwoonderen aldaer (Amsterdam: Jan Claesz ten Hoorn, 1676), 41. 161. William R. Jones, “The Image of the Barbarian in Medieval Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 13 (1971), 377. 162. Schmidt, Innocence Abroad, xxi–xxii, 75–76, 88, 96–99. Similarly, the Dutch arrived in Asia with the notion that they would liberate the native peoples, allegedly victims of Portuguese crimes. See Martine Julia van Ittersum, Profit and Principle: Hugo Grotius, Natural Rights Theories and the Rise of Dutch Power in the East Indies (1595–1615) (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 81–97, 482–483. 163. Ernst van den Boogaart, “Infernal Allies: The Dutch West India Company and the Tarairiu, 1630–1654,” in Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen: A humanist prince in Europe and Brazil: Essays on the tercentenary of his death, ed. Ernst van den Boogaart, in collaboration with H. R. Hoetink (Den Haag: Johan Maurits van Nassau Stichting, 1979), 534. 164. Sabine MacCormack, “Limits of Understanding: Perceptions of GrecoRoman and Amerindian Paganism in Early Modern Europe,” in America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 87. 165. Lee Eldridge Huddlestone, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729 (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1967), 118–128; Benjamin Schmidt, “Space, Time, Travel: Hugo de Groot, Johannes de Laet, and the Advancement of Geographic Learning,” Lias 25, no. 2 (1998): 177–199. 166. “Alexander van der Capellen, ca. 1592–1656, edelman, staatsman en memorialist,” in C. A. M. Gietman, I. D. Jacobs, R. M. Kemperink, and J. A. E. Kuys, Biografisch Woordenboek Gelderland: Bekende en onbekende mannen en vrouwen uit de Gelderse geschiedenis 8 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2011), 36–40; Bick, “Governing the Free Sea,” 150–154. 167. Alexander van der Capellen, Gedenkschriften van Jonkheer Alexander van der Capellen, Heere van Aartsbergen, Boedelhoff, en Mervelt: beginnende met den jaare 1621, en gaande tot 1654, 2 vols. (Utrecht: J. v. Schoonhoven en Comp, 1777–1778), 1: 302–303. 168. George Edmundson, “The Dutch in Western Guiana,” English Historical Review 16 (1901), 663. 169. Gerrit Johan van Grol, De grondpolitiek in het West-Indisch domein der Generaliteit, 3 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Algemeene Landsdrukkerij, 1934), 2: 31; Janny Venema, Kiliaen van Rensselaer (1586–1643): Designing a New World (Hilversum: Verloren, 2010), 215–216.

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170. Jaap Jacobs, “Dutch Proprietary Manors in America: The Patroonships in New Netherland,” in Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500–1750, ed. Louis H. Roper and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 303. 171. George Edmundson, “The Dutch on the Amazon and Negro in the Seventeenth Century,” English Historical Review 18 (1903), 644. 172. Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 412. 173. Miguel Ángel Perera, La provincial fantasma: Guyana siglo XVII: Ecología cultural y antropología histórica a de una rapina, 1598–1704 (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, Consejo de Desarrollo Científico y Humanistíco, 2003), 95, 100; de Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 2: 101. 174. Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 435; Arie Boomert, “AmerindianEuropean Encounters on and around Tobago (1498–ca.1810),” Antropológica 97–98 (2002), 111. 175. NAN, SG 5754, directors S. Blomaert and J. Harijnchout of the WIC Chamber of Amsterdam, to the States General, Amsterdam, November 21, 1637; Boomert, “Amerindian-European Encounters,” 112–113. The original royal instructions for the reconquest of St. Martin in 1633 called for the killing of all Dutchmen, but these were modified at the last moment. See Thomas G. Mathews, “The Spanish Domination of Saint Martin (1633–1648),” Caribbean Studies 9, no. 1 (1969), 9. 176. Twenty-five Dutch settlers had arrived on this same island in 1631. See Kiliaen van Rensselaer to the Heren XIX, November 25, 1633, in Arnold Johan Ferdinand van Laer, ed., Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts: Being the Letters of Kiliaen van Rensselaer, 1630–1643, and Other Documents Relating to the Colony of Rensselaerswyck (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1908), 241. 177. Account by Jacques Ousiel, presented to the WIC, 1637, in Report and Accompanying Papers of the Commission Appointed by the President of the United States to Investigate and Report on the Divisional Line between the Republic of Venezuela and British Guiana (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1897), 73–76, 87. 178. AGI, Santo Domingo 870, L.10, f. 67r–68r, the Spanish Crown to Juan Luis Camarena, governor of Margarita, Madrid, December 23, 1637. 179. Edmundson, “Dutch in Western Guiana,” 671–672; Boomert, “AmerindianEuropean Encounters,” 113–114, 116. 180. Cesáreo Fernández Duro, Armada española desde la unión de los Reinos de Castilla y de Aragón, 9 vols. (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1896), 4: 32; Virginia Rau, A exploração e o comércio do sal de Setúbal: Estudo de história económica (Lisbon: s.n., 1951), 140; Eddy Stols, De Spaanse Brabanders, of de handelsbetrekkingen der Zuidelijke Nederlanden met de Iberische wereld, 1598–1648 (Brussel: Paleis der Academiën, 1971), 45; Jonathan Irving Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade 1585–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 138; Piet Boon, Bouwers van de zee: Zeevarenden van het Westfriese platteland, c.1680–1720 (’s-Gravenhage: Stichting Historische Reeks, 1996), 54; Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1998), 26–29. Many years later, Dutch politicians seemed to have mistakenly believed that their salt collectors had frequented Araya during the Truce years. See NAN, SG 7051, “Memorie tot naeder esclairissement op de Resolutie van de Ho: Mo: Heeren Staten Generael der Vereenichde Nederlanden, in dato 24 November 1657 nopende de zoutvaert op Punto del Reij.”

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181. NAN, OWIC 1, unspecified fols., secret instruction for the ships, yachts, and sloops sailing from Pernambuco to the West Indies under Commander, ViceCommander and Rear Admiral Tolbeek, December 1634. See also fols. 24–25, 28–29; Benito Arias Montano to the Crown, discussed in Madrid, October 1 and 12, 1632, in van Dam and Wright, Nederlandsche zeevaarders, 1: ∗129–∗130(216); Francisco Nuñez Melian to the Crown, Caracas, October 5, 1632, in van Dam and Wright, Nederlandsche zeevaarders, 1: ∗133(223); Governor Benito Arias Montano to General Ruy Fernandez de Fuenmayor, Cumaná, June 10, 1638, insert in: Ruy Fernandez de Fuenmayor to King Philip IV, Caracas, November 28, 1639, in Antoine Maduro, ed., Documenten uit de jaren 1639 en 1640 welke zich in de “Archivo General de Indias” te Sevilla bevinden en betrekking hebben op de door de Spanjaarden beraamde plannen om het eiland Curaçao op de Nederlanders te heroveren (Curaçao: Drukkerij Scherpenheuvel, 1961), 26–27; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 129– 131,135; Carlos Saiz Cidoncha, Historia de la piratería en América española (Madrid: San Martín, 1985), 209. 182. Francisco Nuñez Melian to the Marquis of Cardereita, Caracas, October 15, 1633, in van Dam and Wright, Nederlandsche zeevaarders, 1: ∗145 (240–242); Bishop Juan of Puerto Rico to the Crown, Margarita, December 10, 1633, in van Dam and Wright, Nederlandsche zeevaarders, 1: ∗147–∗149 (244–247); War Council of the Indies to the King, Madrid, October 9, 1641, in van Dam and Wright, Nederlandsche zeevaarders, 1: ∗152–∗156 (252–259). 183. Relacion de la famosa victoria, que la Armada que fue a las Indias este año de 1633 de q. fue General el Marquès de Cadereyta, alcançò del enemigo Olandes, echandole del Puerto, y Fortaleza de S. Martin. Dase cuenta de todos los sucessos desde el dia q. salieron de España, hasta que llegaron al dicho Puerto, y las personas q. mas se señalaron (Sevilla: Pedro Gomez de Pastrana, 1633); Willem Rudolf Menkman, De Nederlanders in het Caraibische zeegebied waarin vervat de geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Antillen (Amsterdam: Van Kampen & Zoon, 1942), 38–39; Johan Hartog, De Bovenwindse eilanden: Sint Maarten—Saba—Sint Eustatius (Aruba: De Wit, 1964), 39–47; Mathews, “Spanish Domination of Saint Martin,” 3–23; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 132–134. Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain, 194–195. Eleven years later, the Dutch tried to reconquer the island, but they failed in spite of outnumbering their enemies. The Dutch commander, none other than Petrus Stuyvesant, later the director of New Netherland, was so severely injured that his leg had to be amputated. 184. De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 3: 83n. 4; Hartog, Curaçao, van kolonie tot autonomie, 1: 102–103; Zandvliet, Mapping for Money, 82–83. For van Walbeeck, see Willem Frijhoff, “Neglected Networks: Director Willem Kieft and His Dutch Relatives,” in Revisiting New Netherland: Perspectives on Early Dutch America, ed. Joyce Goodfriend (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 184–186. 185. Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 263–268; Johannes van Walbeeck to the Heren XIX, August 27, 1634, in de Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 4: 301–311. In 1636, Van Walbeeck sent thirty men to Bonaire, who attached the Dutch coat of arms, carved in lead, to a stick, thus broadcasting the message that the island was Dutch. See Carlos Felice Cardot, Curazao hispánico (Antagonismo flamenco-español) (Caracas: Italgráfica, 1973), 238. By 1640, there was a garrison of seventy soldiers. See SAA, Acta Classis Amsterdam [ACA] 379: 224, Jonas Aertsz to the Classis Amsterdam, Curaçao, August 8, 1640.

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186. There was, however, talk in December 1635 of an expedition organized from Cumaná to expel the Dutch. See Cipriano de Utrera, Noticias Históricas de Santo Domingo, 4 vols., ed. Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi (Santo Domingo: Taller, 1979), 4: 112. 187. Lucas Guillermo Castillo Lara, San Sebastian de los Reyes, 2 vols. (Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1984), 1: 271, 275. 188. Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain, 209. 189. David Beck, Spiegel van mijn leven: Haags dagboek 1624, ed. S. E. Veldhuijzen (Hilversum: Verloren, 1993), 183, 201; van der Capellen, Gedenkschriften, 1: 573. 190. Martine Julia van Ittersum, “The Long Goodbye: Hugo Grotius’ Justification of Dutch Expansion Overseas, 1615–1645,” History of European Ideas 36, no. 4 (2010), 402. 191. NAN, SG 5752, burgomasters and regents of Amsterdam to the States General, February 27, 1626; Arturo Morales Carrión, Puerto Rico and the Non-Hispanic Caribbean: A Study in the Decline of Spanish Exclusivism (Rio Piedras: University of Puerto Rico Press, 1952), 33. See also den Heijer, Expeditie naar de Goudkust, 139. 192. Jan Willem Samberg, De Hollandsche Gereformeerde Gemeente te Smirna: De geschiedenis eener handelskerk (Leiden: Eduard IJdo, 1928), 18. 193. Iñigo de la Mota Sarmiento to the Crown, San Juan de Puerto Rico, July 25, 1636, in van Dam and Wright, Nederlandsche zeevaarders, 2: ∗53. 194. Bibiano Torres Ramírez, La Armada de Barlovento (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1981), 35. 195. Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 261–262. 196. Bremmer, “Correspondence of Johannes de Laet,” 158; Johan Engelbert Elias, Het voorspel van den Eersten Engelschen Oorlog, 2 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1920), 2: 163. 197. Paul E. Kopperman, “Ambivalent Allies: Anglo-Dutch Relations and the Struggle against the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean, 1621–1641,” Journal of Caribbean History 21, no. 1 (1987): 55–77. 198. Jaap Jacobs, “Incompetente autocraten? Bestuurlijke verhoudingen in de zeventiende-eeuwse Nederlandse Atlantische Wereld,” De Zeventiende Eeuw: Cultuur in de Nederlanden in Interdisciplinair Perspectief 21 (2005), 69. In the 1650s, complaints arose about the practice of private shippers who volunteered to bring the letters from New Netherland and Curaçao to the Republic but who failed to reliably deliver them. See resolution, WIC, Chamber of Amsterdam, October 30, 1659, in Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, ed., Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638–1674, compiled and translated from the Original Dutch in the Office of the Secretary of State, Albany, N.Y. (Albany: Weed, Parsons, and Co., 1868), 379. The WIC reserved for itself the right to open all letters except those sent by non-WIC men to other “freemen.” See Articulen, ende ordonnantien ter vergaderinge vande Negenthiene der Generale Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie geresumeert ende ghearresteert (1641). 199. Lesger, Rise of the Amsterdam Market, 240–241. 200. Voorbeijtel Cannenburg, Reis om de wereld, 26n. 1; Doedens and Looijesteijn, Op jacht naar Spaans Zilver, 128–129, 163. 201. Den Heijer, Expeditie naar de Goudkust, 92. Before they began to colonize the Cape the Good Hope, the Dutch used the Cape as a similar relay station, where letters were left under stones, a practice copied from the English. See Perry Moree,

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“Met vriend die God geleide”: Het Nederlands-Aziatisch postvervoer ten tijde van de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1998), 32–42. 202. De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 2: 92. 203. Jacob de Lange, Demonomanie, of der Mooren Wonderheden: Zijnde een verhael, of Voiagie, nae het Moorse Koninckrijck van Guinea, als mede van haer Fitities, of de Magie, ’t welck is Tovery; Handelende van hare Tovenaeren, en ghemeensaemheydt met de Duyvelen, en haer wechvaeren met dien (Amsterdam: Bartholomeus Schouwers, 1658), 32. 204. Lauric Henneton, “The House of Hope in the Valley of Discord: Connecticut Geopolitics beyond “Anglo-Dutch” Rivalries, 1613–1654” in Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley, ed. Jaap Jacobs and Louis H. Roper (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 169–194: 175. 205. Johan Carel Marinus Warnsinck, “Christoffel Artichewsky,” in de Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 4: xxv–lxxiii; Maria Paradowska, Przyjm laur zwycięski (Katowice: Wydawnictwo “Śląsk,” 1987), 54–78; Edmund Stephen Urbański, “The Military Adventures of Krzysztof Arciszewski in Seventeenth Century Brazil and Europe,” Polish American Studies, 45, no. 1 (1988), 63–64. 206. De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 4: xl. 207. Hartog, Curaçao, van kolonie tot autonomie, 1: 172–173. 208. Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 68. 209. Wätjen, Holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien, 184–185. 210. The authoritative works on these painters are Erik Larsen, Frans Post: Interprète du Brésil (Amsterdam and Rio de Janeiro: Colibris, 1962); Quentin Buvelot, ed., Albert Eckhout: Een Hollandse kunstenaar in Brazilië (Den Haag: Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen Mauritshuis; and Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, 2004); Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). 211. Francisco Guerra, “Medicine in Dutch Brazil 1624–1654,” in Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen 1604–1679: A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil. Essays on the Occasion of the Tercentenary of his Death, ed. Ernst van den Boogaart, in collaboration with Hendrik Richard Hoetink and Peter James Palmer Whitehead (’s-Gravenhage: Johan Maurits van Nassau Stichting, 1979), 484, 490. 212. Hannedea van Nederveen Meerkerk, “Eine neue Stadt in der Neuen Welt: Wie die Idee zur Stadt wuchs,” in Sein Feld war die Welt: Johann Moritz von NassauSiegen (1604–1679): Von Siegen über die Niederlande und Brasilien nach Brandenburg, ed. Gerhard Brunn and Cornelius Neutsch (München: Waxmann, 2008), 111, 114. 213. See John Huxtable Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 248. 214. Vogt, Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast, 183. 215. John K. Thornton, Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800 (London: UCL Press, 1999), 59–60, 66. For the effectiveness of small groups of mercenaries in West Africa, see John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 124. 216. Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 91–93; Vogt, Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast, 189–192; Robert D. Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast, 1620–1667” (PhD diss., University of South Africa, 1975), 167–174. 217. Coelho, Memórias Diárias da Guerra do Brasil, 342–343; Caspar van Baerle, The History of Brazil under the Governorship of Johan Maurits of Nassau, 1636–1644,

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trans. Blanche T. van Berckel-Ebeling Koning (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 76–84; Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 87. 218. Otero Lana, Corsarios españoles, 283, 284. 219. Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain, 218–219. Three months later, Oquendo also died of an illness. 220. Pablo Emiliano Pérez-Mallaína Bueno and Bibiano Torres Ramírez, La Armada del Mar del Sur (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de Sevilla, 1987), 218. 221. Joyce, “Spanish Influence in Portuguese Administration,” 356, 358, 369; Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 61; John Huxtable Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in an Age of Decline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 478–479. 222. Joyce, “Spanish Influence in Portuguese Administration,” 388–389; Wätjen, Holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien, 203. 223. Johan Carel Marinus Warnsinck, Van vlootvoogden en zeeslagen, 3rd ed. (Amsterdam: P. N. van Kampen & Zoon, 1942), 128–159; Susana Münch Miranda and João Paulo Salvado, “Struggling for Brazil: Dutch, Portuguese and Spaniards in the 1640 Naval Battle of Paraíba,” Tijdschrift voor Zeegeschiedenis 34 (2015), 59–62. For contemporary details, see Het Naderste ende Sekerste Journalier Verhael ofte Copye van sekeren brieff (’s-Gravenhage: I. Burchoorn, 1640); Benito Arias Montano to the King, Cumaná, March 3, 1640, in Documenten uit de jaren 1639 en 1640, 53. 224. Wright, “Dutch and Cuba,” 627–630. The sixty-three casualties were on board the ship de Bull: GAR, ONA 344: 102/211, Act of October 18, 1641. It is not clear which Dutch maritime activity in the Gulf of Mexico in the 1640s induced the president of the audiencia of Guatemala to gather all male Spaniards across an area of 400 kilometers. See Jean-Pierre Tardieu, “Las vistas de un arbitrista sobre la aparición de un hombre nuevo en las Indias Occidentales (mitad del siglo XVII),” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 50, no. 1 (1993), 246. 225. Charles Ralph Boxer, Salvador de Sá and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola, 1602–1686 (London: Athlone Press, 1952), 141. 226. John Huxtable Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of Spain (1598–1640) (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 493. 227. In Brazil, Portuguese independence meant that Spanish and Neapolitan soldiers were discharged, but in some Spanish colonies, Portuguese soldiers remained in the garrisons, as they did in St. Martin. See Diego Guajardo Fajardo to the Spanish Crown, St. Martin, April 20, 1644, in van Dam and Wright, Nederlandsche zeevaarders, 2: ∗145. In general, however, the Spanish mistrusted their neighbors. See Stuart B. Schwartz, “Panic in the Indies: The Portuguese Threat to the Spanish Empire, 1640–50,” Colonial Latin American Review 2, no. 1–2 (1993): 165–187. 228. Antvvoort vanden ghetrouwen Hollander: Op den aenspraeck van den heetgebaeckerden Hollander (1645). 229. NAN, SG 5756, Johan Maurits to the States General, Pernambuco, June 1, 1641. 230. Ibid. After the conquest of Luanda, a resident of Dutch Brazil wrote to a friend in La Rochelle that “the Spaniards will be now wholly destitute of Negros in the West Indies.” See N. N., A Little true forraine newes better than a great deale of domestick spurious false newes, published daily without feare or wit to the shame of the nation and beyond the liberty of Paris pasquils: vnto which is added a letter written by the

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lieutenant of the Tower to the Parliament in defence of himselfe and may give satisfaction to all men (1642), 11. 231. Instructions of Johan Maurits and the Secret Council of Brazil for Admiral Cornelis Jol, P. Moortamer, C. Nieulant, and J. Henderson, Recife, May 28, 1641, in Louis Jadin, ed., L’ancien Congo et l’Angola 1639–1655 d’après les archives romaines, portugaises, néerlandaises et espagnoles (Bruxelles and Rome: Institut Historique belge de Rome, 1975), 35. 232. Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 41, 60–61. 233. Ibid., 100–105; Thornton and Mosterman, “Re-Interpretation.” 234. Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 111–113, 121; NAN, SG 5756, Johan Maurits to the States General, Pernambuco, November 11, 1641. 235. Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 136, 143–149; Guerra, “Medicine in Dutch Brazil,” 477. 236. Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 178; Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 147–151; Klaas Ratelband, Vijf dagregisters van het kasteel São Jorge da Mina (Elmina) aan de Goudkust (1645–1647) (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1953), lxxxvi; Advice of the Chamber of Accounts of the West India Company, delivered to their High Mightinesses’ Commissioners, May 27, 1647, in Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York; Procured in Holland, England and France by John Romeyn Brodhead, 15 vols. (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons, 1856), 1: 243. 237. The date of the capture of Axim is provided by Olfert Dapper, Naukeurige beschrijvinge der Afrikaensche gewesten van Egypten, Barbaryen, Lybien, Biledulgerid, Negroslant, Guinea, Ethiopiën, Abyssinie (Amsterdam: Jacob van Meurs, 1676). For the capture itself, see Michael Hemmersam, West-Indianische Reissbeschreibung de An. 1639 biss 1645 von Amsterdam nach St. Jorius de Mina, ein Castel in Africa (Nürnberg: Paulus Fürsten, 1663), 21–26. 238. NAN, Collectie Radermacher 544, “Bedenckinge die de heeren Commissarissen over de secrete besoijgnes der vergaderinge van de heeren bewinthebberen vande camer in Zeelandt sijn voordragende.” 239. Benjamin Schmidt, “Exotic Allies: The Dutch-Chilean Encounter and the (Failed) Conquest of America,” Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 440–473; Henk den Heijer, “De expeditie van Hendrick Brouwer en Elias Herckmans naar Chili,” in Brazilië in de Nederlandse archieven (1624–1654), ed. Marianne L. Wiesebron (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2013), 112–139. 240. In labeling this the First Dutch-Munsee War, I am following Paul Otto, Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America, 106. 241. Evan Haefeli, “Kieft’s War and the Cultures of Violence in Colonial America,” in Michael A. Bellesisle, ed. Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 18–19; Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade, 241–243. 242. An additional explanation is that Kieft sought to restore his honor by taking revenge. See Willem Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz.: Een Hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf, 1607–1647 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1995) [trans. as Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus 1607–1647 (Leiden: Brill, 2007)], 573. 243. Ibid., 578. Haefeli, “Kieft’s War,” 26–27.

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244. David Naumec, “The Pequot Wars, Kieft’s War, and the Decade of Conflict (1635–1645)” (paper presented at the conference on 17th-Century Warfare, Diplomacy. and Society in the American Northeast, Mashantucket Pequot Museum, Mashantucket, CT, October 18–19, 2013). 245. Haefeli, “Kieft’s War,” 31–32; Otto, Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America, 122–124. 246. Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade, 249. 3. Imperial Decline

1. The English republican “experiment” lasted from 1649 to 1653, although some historians end the period in 1660 with the formal restoration of the monarchy. 2. Alison Brown, “Platonism in Fifteenth-Century Florence and Its Contribution to Early Modern Political Thought,” Journal of Modern History 58, no. 2 (1986), 384. 3. Klaas Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika 1600–1650: Angola, Kongo en São Tomé (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2000), 177–178. 4. José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, Restauradores de Pernambuco: Biografias de figuras do século XVII que defenderam e consolidaram a unidade brasileira: João Fernandes Vieira (Recife: Imprensa Universitária, 1967), 190. 5. Alexander Bick, “Governing the Free Sea: The Dutch West India Company and Commercial Politics, 1618–1645” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012), 128. 6. Jan Heringa, De eer en hoogheid van de staat: Over de plaats der Verenigde Nederlanden in het diplomatieke leven van de zeventiende eeuw (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1961), 263–264. 7. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12561.72, Galileo Galilei to the States General, received November 11, 1636. 8. “Sir Ferdinando Gorges to Secretary Windebank,” June 20, 1638, in W. Noël Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers [CSP], Colonial Series, 1574–1660, Preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1860), 218, 276. 9. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500–c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 11–12. 10. Ludovicus Brouwers, Carolus Scribani S.J., 1561–1629: Een groot man van de Contra-Reformatie in de Nederlanden (Antwerpen: Ruusbroec-Genootschap, 1961), 460. 11. Caspar van Baerle, The History of Brazil under the Governorship of Johan Maurits of Nassau, 1636–1644, trans. Blanche T. van Berckel-Ebeling Koning (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 29. 12. It is, therefore, not correct to claim, as Patricia Seed has done, that the Dutch were the only Atlantic power not to see themselves as heirs to the Romans. See Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 183. 13. Petrus de Lange added his own list of maritime Dutch exploits in his Batavise Romeyn from 1661, but by then Brazil had been lost. Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 253.

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14. Reden van dat die West-Indische Compagnie oft handelinge niet alleen profijtelijck maer oock noodtsaeckelijck is tot behoudenisse van onsen Staet (1636), 12. For Usselincx’s suggestion, see Naerder bedenckingen, over de zee-vaerdt, coophandel ende neeringhe, als mede de versekeringhe vanden staet deser vereenichde Landen, inde teghenwoordighe vredehandelinghe met den coninck van Spangnien ende de aerts-hertoghen (1608). A rare example of a comparison with antiquity from a later date was one made by Mauritius, governor of Suriname, who likened the war between the Dutch and the maroons in the mid-eighteenth century to that between the Romans and the Germanic tribes. See Cornelis Ascanius van Sijpesteijn, Mr. Jan Jacob Mauricius, gouverneur-generaal van Suriname, van 1742 tot 1751 (’s-Gravenhage: De Gebroeders van Cleef, 1858), 86–90. 15. R. E. Eekhout, “The Mauritias: A Neo-Latin Epic by Franciscus Plante,” in Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen 1604–1679: A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil. Essays on the Occasion of the Tercentenary of his Death, ed. Ernst van den Boogaart, in collaboration with Hendrik Richard Hoetink and Peter James Palmer Whitehead (The Hague: The Johan Maurits van Nassau Stichting, 1979), 377–393; Schmidt, Innocence Abroad, 253–254. For Johan Maurits’s own Roman framework, see Michael Pye, “Johann Moritz—ein geträumtes Empire,” in Sein Feld war die Welt: Johann Moritz von Nassau-Siegen (1604–1679): Von Siegen über die Niederlande und Brasilien nach Brandenburg, ed. Gerhard Brunn and Cornelius Neutsch (München: Waxmann, 2008), 62–64. 16. Van Baerle, History of Brazil, 143–144. An inventory drawn up in 1659 of the possessions of Lieutenant Johan Bettinck, a Brazil veteran, reveals the juxtaposition in the vestibule of his home of twelve busts of Roman emperors and a map of Brazil. See Michiel van Groesen, “Officers of the West India Company, Their Networks, and Their Personal Memories of Dutch Brazil,” in The Dutch Trading Companies As Knowledge Networks, ed. Siegfried Huigen, Jan L. de Jong, and Elmer Kolfin (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 53–54. 17. See George Lincoln Burr, “Report on the Evidence of Dutch Archives as to European Occupation and Claims in Western Guiana,” in Report of the Special Commission Established by the President January 4, 1896, to Examine and Report upon the True Divisional Line between the Republic of Venezuela and British Guiana (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1898), 119–406. 18. Krzysztof Arciszewski to Johan Maurits and the High Council of Brazil, Amsterdam, July 24, 1637, in “Missive van den kolonnel Artichofsky aan Graaf Maurits en den Hoogen Raad in Brazilië, 24 juli 1637,” Kroniek van het Historisch Genootschap gevestigd te Utrecht ser. 5, 25, no. 5 (1869), 240. 19. For a similar observation regarding the French colonies, see Kenneth Banks, Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713– 1763 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 7. 20. Martine Julia van Ittersum, “The Long Goodbye: Hugo Grotius’ Justification of Dutch Expansion Overseas, 1615–1645,” History of European Ideas 36, no. 4 (2010), 408. 21. Report of Adriaen van der Dussen to the Heren XIX, April 4, 1640, in Van Baerle, History of Brazil, 138–139. The WIC board had probably sent van der Dussen to Brazil to size up the situation. See H. K. Nagtegaal, “Het Delftse geslacht Van der Dussen,” http://www.hogenda.nl/wp-content/plugins/hogenda-search/ download_attachment.php?id=999&type=genealogy, accessed February 13, 2016.

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22. The Heren XIX disliked the governor’s overspending because their aim was to economize after concluding the truce with Portugal. See Charles R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 156. 23. Evaldo Cabral de Mello, De Braziliaanse affaire: Portugal, de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden en Noord-Oost Brazilië, 1641–1669 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2005), 31. 24. Maria Thetis Nunes, Sergipe Colonial (Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, Universidade Federal de Sergipe, 1989), 83–84. 25. J. V. Rasenberg to the Heren XIX, Recife, March 26, 1645, in Louis Jadin, ed., L’ancien Congo et l’Angola 1639–1655 d’après les archives romaines, portugaises, néerlandaises et espagnoles (Bruxelles and Rome: Institut Historique belge de Rome, 1975), 644. 26. Brasilsche Geltsack. Waer in dat claerlijck vertoont wordt waer dat de participanten van de West-Indische Comp. haer gelt gebleven is (Recife: “in de Bree-bijl,” 1647). 27. Mello, Braziliaanse affaire, 30–33. 28. Cátia Alexandra Pereira Antunes, “Globalisation in the Early Modern Period: The Economic Relationship between Amsterdam and Lisbon, 1640–1705” (PhD diss., University of Leiden, 2004), 149. 29. Mello, Restauradores de Pernambuco, 161–163. 30. Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 162–166. 31. Brasilsche Geltsack; NAN, Collectie Leo van Aitzema, 91: legation of WIC director Michiel ten Hove and Gijsbert de With to Portugal, 1657. 32. Johan Nieuhof, Gedenkweerdige Brasiliaense zee- en lant-reize: Behelzende al het geen op dezelve is voorgevallen. Beneffens een bondige beschrijving van gantsche Neerlants Brasil, zoo van lantschappen, steden, dieren, gewassen, als draghten, zeden en godsdienst der inwoonders: en inzonderheit ein wijtloopig verhael der merkwaardigste voorvallen en geschiedenissen, die zich, geduurende zijn negenjarigh verblijf in Brasil, in d’oorlogen en opstant der Portugesen tegen d’onzen, zich sedert het jaer 1640. tot 1649. hebben toegedragen (Amsterdam: de weduwe van Jacob Meurs, 1682), 75–76; Mello, Restauradores de Pernambuco, 164. 33. Evaldo Cabral de Mello, Olinda Restaurada: Guerra e Açúcar no Nordeste, 1630– 1654 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Forense-Universitaria; São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1975), 266. 34. Matheus vanden Broeck, Journael ofte Historiaelse Beschrijvinge van Matheus vanden Broeck. Van ’t geen hy selfs ghesien ende waerachtigh gebeurt is, wegen ’t begin ende Revolte van de Portugese in Brasiel, als mede de conditie en het overgaen van de Forten aldaer (Amstelredam: Gerrit van Goedesbergen, 1651), 2; Nieuhof, Gedenkweerdige Brasiliaense zee- en lant-reize, 77, 79. 35. Diogo Lopes de Santiago, História da guerra de Pernambuco e feitos memoráveis do mestre de campo João Fernandes Vieira, herói digno de eterna memória, primeiro aclamador da guerra (Recife: Governo de Pernambuco, 1984), 235–237; Mark Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595–1674 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 172. The exact number of deaths is disputed. Meuwese mentions thirty-five and Gonsalves de Mello thirty-six. Santiago gives a death toll of sixty-nine, but that was an exaggeration. See Mello, Restauradores de Pernambuco, 173–174. Nieuhof presented these two massacres as actions for which only Tapyuas were responsible. See Gedenkweerdige Brasiliaense zee- en lant-reize, 153.

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36. Ernst van den Boogaart, “Infernal Allies: The Dutch West India Company and the Tarairiu, 1630–1654,” in Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen: A humanist prince in Europe and Brazil: Essays on the tercentenary of his death, ed. Ernst van den Boogaart, in collaboration with H. R. Hoetink (Den Haag: Johan Maurits van Nassau Stichting, 1979), 519–538; Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, 141–147, 173–174, 176. 37. Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, 150–151, 154–155, 157–158, 175, 189–190. 38. Frans Leonard Schalkwijk, Igreja e estado no Brasil holandês, 1630–1654 (Recife: Governo de Pernambuco, 1986), 249; ibid., 166. On the island of Itamaracá, the Amerindians consistently formed the majority of the population. Because of a lack of Europeans, the Dutch had settled the island with Brazilians in 1633, and an inspection in 1649 yielded 465 indigenous men, women, and children, as well as sixty-nine Europeans and an unknown number of European soldiers. See Johannes de Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael van de Verrichtinghen der Gheoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie in derthien Boecken, ed. Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, 4 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1931–1937), 3: 208; José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos flamengos: Influência da ocupação holandesa na vida e na cultura do Norte do Brasil, 2nd ed. (Recife: Governo do Estado de Pernambuco, 1978), 155n. 111. 39. Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, 148, 158–159. 40. Evaldo Cabral de Mello, Rubro Veio: O imaginário da restauração pernambucana (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1986), 287–288. 41. Frank Ibold, Jens Jäger, and Detlev Kraack, eds., Das Memorial und Jurenal des Peter Hansen Hajstrup (1624–1672) (Neumünster: Wachholtz Verlag, 1995), 72–74. 42. Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 165, 167, 170–171. Many years later, in 1692, his son requested privileges from the Portuguese crown for his father’s role in the surrender. See Cleonir Xavier de Albuquerque, A remuneração de serviços da Guerra holandesa (A propósito de um Sermão do Padre Vieira) (Recife: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Instituto de Ciéncias do Homem, Imprensa Universitaria, 1968), 40. 43. Mello, Tempo dos flamengos, 145n. 62, 240. 44. Mello, Restauradores de Pernambuco, 27–29. 45. Bick, “Governing the Free Sea,” 54–56. 46. Iournael . . . nopende de Rebellye ende verradelycke Desseynen der Portugesen alhier in Brasil voorgekomen (Arnhem, 1647). Johan Nieuhof, who lived in Recife at the time of the revolt, mentions the existence of not one but multiple Portuguese plots to massacre the Dutch during Pentecost under the cover of weddings and tournaments. See Nieuhof, Gedenkweerdige Brasiliaense zee- en lant-reize, 79. The “Paris bloodwedding” was a theme that often featured in pamphlets in the 1640s. It was also the theme of two plays. The references usually served to warn the Dutch against alleged French treachery. See Hans Duits, Van Bartholomeusnacht tot Bataafse opstand: Studies over de relatie tussen politiek en toneel in het midden van de zeventiende eeuw (Hilversum: Verloren, 1990), 40–93. 47. P. Le Candele, Wel-Vaert vande West-Indische Compagnie. Waer in klaerlijck vertoont wert door wat Middel deselve Compagnie tot groote Conquesten soude konnen gheraken [Middelburg, 1646]. 48. Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 240–241. 49. Ibid., 253–257. 50. Charles Ralph Boxer, Salvador de Sá and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola, 1602–1686 (London: Athlone Press, 1952), 243, 253–257.

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51. Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 262. 52. António da Silva Rego, A dupla restauração de Angola 1641–1648 (Lisboa: Agência Geral das Colónias, 1948), 226–231, 236–237; Boxer, Salvador de Sá, 265– 268; Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 269–272. Salvador de Sá could thus start his tenure as governor and captain-general of Angola. One of his successors was João Fernandes Vieira, the rebel leader from Brazil: Mello, Restauradores de Pernambuco, 165–200. 53. Lieuwe van Aitzema, Saken van staet en oorlogh, in, ende omtrent de Vereenigde Nederlanden, 6 vols. (’s-Gravenhaghe: Johan Veely, Johan Tongerloo, ende Jasper Doll, 1669), 3: 338. 54. Pieter Jan van Winter, De Westindische Compagnie ter kamer Stad en Lande (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 228. 55. Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 175–176, 286, 288–289. 56. Nederlants beroerde ingewanden, over de laetste tijdinge, van de Munstersche vrede handelinge (s.l., 1647), 5. 57. Copye van de Resolutie vande Heeren Burgemeesters ende Raden tot Amsterdam op ’t stuck vande West-Indische Compagnie, Genomen in August 1649 (Uytrecht: Ian Havick, 1649). 58. Henk den Heijer, Geschiedenis van de WIC (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1994), 66. 59. NAN, OWIC 9, Heren XIX to Johan Maurits and the High Council, Amsterdam, October 1642. 60. Den Heijer, Geschiedenis van de WIC, 95–102. 61. Alexander van der Capellen, Gedenkschriften van Jonkheer Alexander van der Capellen, Heere van Aartsbergen, Boedelhoff, en Mervelt: beginnende met den jaare 1621, en gaande tot 1654, 2 vols. (Utrecht: J. v. Schoonhoven en Comp, 1777–1778), 2: 253. 62. Utrechts Archief, Huis Amerongen 5125, “extract vuijt het reces des lantdages in Septembris ende Octobri binnen Zutphen gehouden, anno 1650, voorslach tot redres vant verval der Westindische Compagnie.” Holland had four members, Zeeland had three, and the other five provinces each had two. In its composition, the Comité tot de zaken van de kolonien en bezittingen op de kust van Guinea en in America, which assumed the tasks of the East and West India companies in 1795, resembled the Council of the Indies as proposed in 1650. See Pieter Marinus Netscher, Geschiedenis van de koloniën Essequebo, Demerary en Berbice, van de vestiging van de Nederlanders aldaar tot op onzen tijd (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1888), 275. 63. Henk den Heijer, Goud, ivoor en slaven: Scheepvaart en handel van de Tweede Westindische Compagnie op Afrika, 1674–1740 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1997), 25; Chris te Lintum, “De Kamer der West-Indische Compagnie te Delft,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 63, no. 1 (1910), 102–103. 64. For soldiers, see NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, December, 10, 1640. For chartering warships, see NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, January 16, 1646. for convoys, see NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, resolutions July 20 and 21, 1639; June 14, June 28, and November 1, 1640; April 12, 1641; November 14, 1642; January 24, June 8, June 13, and October 30, 1643; and November 25, 1644. The merchants of the Zeehont sailed from the Caribbean to Saint-Martin-de-Ré in southwestern France in November 1644 to join the Dutch convoy; NAN, Hof van Holland 12371, testimony of Nataniel Silvestre and Simon Dircksz, La Rochelle, January 8, 1645.

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65. Willem Johannes van Hoboken, Witte de With in Brazilië, 1648–1649 (Amsterdam: N.V. Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1955), 3–4; NAN, SG, Resolutions of the States General, meeting of March 20, 1651; Julia Adams, “Trading States, Trading Places: The Role of Patrimonialism in Early Modern Dutch Development,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36, no. 2 (1994), 340. 66. NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, September 16, 1647. 67. NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, February 7, 1646. 68. Craig E. Harline has argued that “what makes many Dutch pamphlet dialogues so interesting was the frequent setting of a discussion before an everyday Dutch backdrop, with authentic and recognizable Dutch characters.” See Pamphlets, Printing, and Political Culture in the Early Dutch Republic (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 53. 69. Haerlems Schuyt-praetjen op ’t Redres vande West-Indische Compagnie (1649). 70. Van Hoboken, Witte de With in Brazilië, 15–18. 71. Bick, “Governing the Free Sea,” 76–77. 72. Willem Johannes van Hoboken, “Een troepentransport naar Brazilië in 1647,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 62 (1949), 100–109; van Hoboken, Witte de With in Brazilië, 41; A. P., Remonstrantie aen alle steden ende vroetschappen der Vrye Vereenighde Nederlanden, by forme van discours (Dordrecht: Philips van Macedonien, 1647), 13. 73. NAN, SG 4845, resolutions of the States General, March 12, 1646. 74. After De With returned to the Republic in 1650 on his own authority, Stadholder William II put him in jail, leading the States of Holland to accuse the stadholder of interfering with their authority. 75. Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 194–195. 76. Santiago, História da guerra, 483, 496–497. 77. NAN, Collectie Radermacher 544, memorandum of Sigismund von Schoppe. 78. Van Hoboken, Witte de With in Brazilië, 86. In itself, having soldiers carry food for one week in their knapsacks was a new solution to the perennial problem of army provisioning. It was also independently introduced by Oliver Cromwell around this time. See Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 76. If coastal or riverine transportation was available, vessels could carry the foodstuffs, as happened in the days leading up to the battle near Porto Calvo in 1636. See Jens Jäger, “Die Schlacht bei Porto Calvo (Matta Redonda) im Januar 1636. Augenzeugenbericht eines Soldaten,” Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 54, no. 2 (1995), 531. 79. Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 196–197. 80. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.34. 81. Ivo J. van Loo, “Kaapvaart, handel en staatsbelang: Het gebruik van kaapvaart als maritiem machtsmiddel en vorm van ondernemerschap tijdens de Nederlandse Opstand, 1568–1648,” in Ondernemers & bestuurders: economie en politiek in de Noordelijke Nederlanden in de late Middeleeuwen en vroegmoderne tijd, ed. Clé Lesger and Leo Noordegraaf (Amsterdam: NEHA, 1999), 367; Mello, Olinda Restaurada, 83, 88. For an eyewitness account of a battle in 1648 between Dutch privateers and a Portuguese ship en route from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, see Richard Fleckno, Relation of Ten Years Travells in Europe, Asia, Affrique, and America: All by Way of Letters Occasionally Written to Diver Noble Personages, from Place to Place (London [1656?]), 63–64. Dutch colonies

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benefited from the slaves privateers found on board Portuguese ships. In 1649, the yacht Hasenberch from Middelburg captured a Portuguese slave ship en route from Angola to Rio de Janeiro. Three hundred Africans had already died, and the remaining two hundred were sold in Recife. See NAN, OWIC 65, president and council of Brazil to the Heren XIX, Recife, November 29, 1649. In 1651, off Luanda, the Meerminne surprised a vessel that carried the incredible number of 1,280 slaves. The Africans were sold in St. Eustatius and other Caribbean islands; NAN, Aanwinsten Eerste Afdeling 992, minutes WIC, Chamber of Zeeland, January 15, 1652. It is unclear whether the 131 captives sold in Martinique in 1651 came off the Meerminne. See NAN, Aanwinsten Eerste Afdeling 992, minutes WIC, Chamber of Zeeland, October 9, 1651. 82. The exact amount was 3,444,409 guilders and 11 stivers. See NAN, SG 5766, “Lijste van prinsen by particuliere en Compagnies vaertuygen op de custe van Brasil verovert.” 83. Mello, Olinda Restaurada, 92. 84. Franz Binder, “Die zeeländische Kaperfahrt 1654–1662,” Archief: Mededelingen van het Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen (1976), 42. 85. NAN, SG 5752, admiralty of Zeeland to the States General, Middelburg, April 19, 1628; WIC Chamber of Zeeland to the States General, received May 26, 1628; Virginia W. Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherlands (Gordonsville, VA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 20. 86. Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 32–33. 87. Amsterdams Vuur-Praetje, van ’tEen ende ’tander datter nu om gaet (Amstelredam: Claes Pietersz, 1649). 88. Amsterdams Tafel-Praetje van wat goets en wat quaets en wat noodichs (Gouda: Iasper Cornelisz, 1649). 89. Amsterdams Vuur-Praetje. 90. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.34, president and council of Brazil to the States General, Recife, June 22, 1651. 91. Binder, “Zeeländische Kaperfahrt,” 42. 92. WIC directors Johan le Thor, Isaack van Beeck, and N. ten Hove to the States General’s deputies for West India affairs, July 30, 1652, in O’Callaghan, ed., Documents, 1: 484. 93. Van Hoboken, Witte de With in Brazilië, 106–107, 201, 204, 219, 220, 224, 247; Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 228, 233. These vessels could not prevent two ships returning from Brazil from being run aground by English ships and a third ship from being captured. See NAN, SG 5899, fol. 7r, extraordinary ambassadors Jacob Cats, Gerard Schaep, and Paulus van der Perre to the States General, Chelsey, June 27, 1652. 94. Relaçam diaria do sitio, e tomada da forte praça do Recife, recuperação das Capitanías de Itamaraca, Paraiba, Rio Grande, Ciará, and Ilha de Fernão de Noronha (Lisboa: Na officina Craesbeeckiana, 1654); Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 239. 95. Cort, Bondigh ende Waerachtigh Verhael Van ’t schandelijck over-geven ende verlaten vande voorname Conquesten van Brasil, Onder de Regeeringe vande Heren Wouter van Schonenburgh, President, Hendrick Haecx, Hoogen Raet, ende Sigismondus van Schoppe, Luyrenant Generael over de Militie, 1654 (Middelburgh: Thomas Dircksz van Brouwershaven, 1655). 96. Motiven die d’E. Officieren der Militie in Consideratie hebben ghenomen (1654).

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97. NAN, SG 5765, Sigismund von Schoppe to the States General, Mauritia, September 8, 1653. 98. Cort, Bondigh ende Waerachtigh Verhael. The anonymous author argues that the High Council discharged Claesz, but the daily minutes reveal that this did not happen. See NAN, Hof van Holland 5252, dagelijkse notulen Brazilië, January 20, 1654. 99. Relaçam diaria do sitio. 100. John Huxtable Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469–1716 (London: Penguin Books, 1990 [1963]), 355; John Huxtable Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of Spain (1598–1640) (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 545. 101. “Some Considerations upon the Present Expedition Supposed for the West-India’s, Humbly Remitted to his Highnesse the Lord Protector, and Delivered to Secretary Thurloe, in September 1654 Long before the Fleetes Departure,” in F. B., Considerations and Proposals Presented to His Late Highnesse Oliver, Lord Protector of England Touching the Not Warring with Spain, or the More Advantagious Prosecuting Thereof, after It Was Begun (1659), 3. 102. “Der Vertragstext,” in Der Frieden von Münster, De Vrede van Munster 1648, ed. Gerd Dethlefs (Münster: Regensberg, 1998), 78–79. Kristen Block mistakenly asserts that the 1670 Treaty of Madrid, signed by Spain and England, was the first time the Spanish crown acknowledged that the fifteenth-century papal bans on Protestant settlement in the Americas were no longer viable. The Treaty of Münster deserves that distinction. See Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 205. 103. Rita Krommen, “Mathias Beck und die Westindische Kompagnie: Zur Herrschaft der Niederländer im kolonialen Ceará,” Arbeitspapiere zur Lateinamerikaforschung 2, no. 1 (2001), 71. The senior Dutch official in Ceará, Mathias Beck, wrote that four thousand natives arrived there, while the number listed in Relaçam diaria do sitio is only 852. 104. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12582.4, President and Council of Brazil to the States General, received November 24, 1653. 105. Burr, “Guiana Boundary,” 57–58; Binder, “Zeeländische Kaperfahrt,” 43. 106. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.40, inv. nr. 1, information supplied by Joost Weisberger, The Hague, March 10, 1655. 107. A first sizable batch of soldiers had returned from Brazil in 1651. See NAN, Raad van State 1871, fol. 51, secret resolutions of the States General, November 23, 1651. 108. NAN, SG 5766, request by officers who served in Brazil, read April 11, 1656. 109. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.43, memorandum of Johannes Moll, cloth merchants, for the States General, The Hague, June 4, 1655; NAN, SG 5766, requests by cloth dealers and other shopkeepers in The Hague, April 11, 1656, May 13, 1656; NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.43, undated request by Catarina Merijn and Cornelia de Bruijn to the States General; NAN, SG 4846, resolutions of the States General, April 3, 1658. Two Amsterdam widows approached the States General for reimbursement of the money they had advanced to a soldier and an adelborst (cadet) before their departure to Brazil. See NAN, SG 5766, request by Janneke Gerrijts and Diewertie Jans, read November 9, 1656.

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110. NAN, SG 5766, request by Pieter van Reusen, read April 11, 1656. 111. NAN, SG 5767, request by shopkeepers, innkeepers, and residents of The Hague to the province of Overijssel, July 3, 1660. 112. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.42, WIC meetings of June 15 and 19, 1657; NAN, SG 5766, memorandum to Mr. Huijgens and the other deputies for matters regarding Brazil, read January 15, 1657. 113. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.52, WIC meeting of April 29, 1661. 114. Ibid., WIC meeting of December 21, 1657. 115. Ibid., WIC meeting of September 9, 1659. 116. Ibid., WIC, Chamber of Amsterdam, to the States General, Amsterdam, undated (1679) and May 7, 1680. 117. Ibid., WIC meeting of August 11, 1656. Valckenhagen’s son requested payment again five years later; NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.52, WIC meeting of April 26, 1661. 118. NAN, SG 5765, memorandum, reported June 3, 1655. 119. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.42, WIC meeting, August 10, 1656. 120. Van Winter, Kamer Stad en Lande, 41. 121. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.42. 122. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.42 and 12564.52, meetings of WIC, Chamber of Amsterdam, August 26 and September 4 and 6, 1659; and April 26, 1661. 123. Van Winter, Kamer Stad en Lande, 38–40. See also Norbert H. Schneeloch, Aktionäre der Westindischen Compagnie von 1674: Die Verschmelzung der alten Kapitalgebergruppen zu einer neuen Aktiengesellschaft (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), 268–269. The wardens of his relative, William III, the Prince of Orange, also put in an appearance. As the admiral-general of the United Provinces, the prince claimed 3.5 percent of the value of all prizes taken to Dutch Brazil in the years 1646–1650 (i.e., in the four years prior to his birth). It emerged, however, that the proceeds, 120,554 guilders, had been spent on victuals, clothing, and other needs of the Dutch army in Brazil. See NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.50, statement by Jacob Alrichs, former chief of tax revenues in Brazil, The Hague, July 5, 1655; Wardens of the Prince of Orange to the States General, November 17, 1656; extract from the register of resolutions of the States General, June 11, 1660. 124. The chamber fell 0.3 percent short; NAN, SG 5765, bookkeepers Gillis van Schendel and Johan van der Dussen to the States General, The Hague, October 12, 1654. 125. The minimum amount was 498,978 guilders; ibid., bookkeepers Gillis van Schendel and Johan van der Dussen to the States General, The Hague, February 5, 1655. 126. Total costs were 155,304 guilders and 18 stivers; NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.42. 127. NAN, SG 5765, resolutie Staten-Generaal, August 28, 1655, Council of State to the States General, The Hague, October 1, 1655. 128. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.39, extract from the register of resolutions of the States General, November 15, 1656.

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129. NAN, SG 5765, extract from the register of resolutions of the WIC, September 10, 1654. 130. Ibid., Adriaen van Adrichem to the States General, January 14, 1655, insert in W. van Alphen, president of the war council, to the States General, received March 20, 1655. 131. Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 244. 132. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12582.8, secret design to capture a port in Brazil. The plan was hatched by Captain Otto Keije and German Corporal Joost Weisberger. 133. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12577.32, petition to the States General, read May 15, 1655. 134. ’t Verheerlickte Nederland door d’Herstelde Zee-vaart (1659), 57. 135. Antunes, “Globalisation in the Early Modern Period,” 154–155. 136. Cornelis van de Haar, De diplomatieke betrekkingen tussen de Republiek en Portugal, 1640–1661 (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1961), 145–151. 137. Binder, “Zeeländische Kaperfahrt,” 44, 52. Robin Law has contended that the Portuguese slave trade at Allada suffered in the 1620s from Dutch “piracy.” See “The Slave Trade in Seventeenth-Century Allada: A Revision,” African Economic History 22 (1994), 64–66. I have found two Zeeland captures of Portuguese slavers in the years 1657–1661. In 1658, a ship from Vlissingen seized a ship carrying seven hundred slaves off the coast of Brazil and sold the captives to Nova Zeelandia, the new colony in Guiana. See Hollantsche Mercurius 8 (1659), 161. Another privateering success on the Brazilian coast was that of the Gouden Leeuw in 1661. The ship sailed with its booty of thirty slaves and some manufactures to Cádiz. See NAN, SG 7055, consul Jacome van den Hove to the WIC, Cádiz, March 27, 1661. 138. NAN, SG 5775, WIC directors to the States General, received May 20, 1715. The complaint was repeated three years later. See NAN, SG 5775, WIC directors to the States General. May 12, 1718. 139. Cátia Antunes, “The Commercial Relationship between Amsterdam and the Portuguese Salt-Exporting Ports: Aveiro and Setúbal, 1580–1715,” Journal of Early Modern History 12 (2008), 38–39; Mello, Braziliaanse affaire, 158. 140. Antunes, “Commercial Relationship,” 39–40; Mello, Braziliaanse affaire, 175–178. The difference of 3 million guilders between the texts of the two treaties is explained by the Dutch conquest in 1663 of the Portuguese entrepôts of Cochin and Cananor in India. In practice, the 3 million guilders were the price the Dutch paid for the VOC to keep these places. See Cornelis C. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guianas, 1680–1791 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1985), 31–32. 141. Den Heijer, Goud, ivoor en slaven, 308; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Guianas, 31–2. 142. NAN, SG 5769, States General to the WIC, Chamber of Amsterdam, February 1, 1675; WIC, Chamber of Amsterdam, to the States General, Amsterdam, February 27, 1675; NAN, SG 5770, WIC, Chamber of Amsterdam, to the States General, Amsterdam, February 16, 1678 and October 31, 1679. 143. C. Fahner, “‘De vrome omgang onzer natie’: Nadere Reformatie, zending en de WIC,” Documentatieblad Nadere Reformatie 17 (1993), 23. Harmannus Witz (1636–1708), better known as Herman Witsius, went on to have an impressive career as professor of theology, teaching consecutively in Franeker, Utrecht, and Leiden.

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See L. Knappert, “Witsius (Herman),” in Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek, ed. Philip Christiaan Molhuysen and Petrus Johannes Blok, 10 vols. (Leiden: A.W. Sijthoff ’s Uitgevers-Maatschappij, 1914), 3: 1445–1448. 144. Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 8389, fol. 111, insert in Gregorio de Tapia to Esteban de Gamarra, Spanish ambassador in the Dutch Republic, Aranjuez, April 26, 1662. Sixty years later, another plan to establish a Dutch foothold in the Río de la Plata was launched, this time the fantasy of a man without any connections on the ground: Ruud Paesie, ed., Voor zilver en Zeeuws belang: De rampzalige Zuidzeeexpeditie van de Middelburgse Commercie Compagnie, 1724–1727 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2012), 32. 145. Algemeen Rijksarchief Belgium, Archives de l’Ambassade d’Espagne à La Haye, 534, consul Jacques Richard to Esteban de Gamarra, Amsterdam, October 5, 1657. 146. Cornelis C. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1971), 420–425. 147. Hollantsche Mercurius 9 (1659), 161–162. 148. Burr, “Guiana Boundary,” 57–58. In 1660, some of those Africans had come off a Zeeland slave ship called Braziliaanse Eendracht (“Brazilian Harmony”). 149. As Abrahamus à Westhuysen argued, “And if with God’s blessing it can be maintained, it is very suitable to make it another Brazil.” Waerachtig verhael van de heerlyke overwinning van Pirmeriba ende de riviere Seraname (’s-Gravenhage: Iohannes Rammazeyn, n.d.). Likewise, a committee made up of members of the Amsterdam Municipal Council, meeting in 1681 to discuss the trade with Suriname, argued that the colony could become a “second Brazil”: See Gerard Willem van der Meiden, Betwist bestuur: Een eeuw strijd om de macht in Suriname 1651–1753 (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1987), 31. In 1676, Jacob Binckes wrote from Cayenne that there was land enough to make that colony a “second Brazil,” provided residents arrived from the Netherlands: Johannes Hermanus Jacobus Hamelberg, “Tobago: Een vergeten Nederlandsche kolonie,” Vierde jaarlijksch verslag van Geschied-, Taal-, Land- en Volkenkundig Genootschap, gevestigd te Willemstad, Curaçao (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1900), 67. 150. Van der Meiden, Betwist bestuur, 73. 151. NAN, Nieuwe West-Indische Compagnie [NWIC] 109, fols. 291–292, Jan Pranger, G. Ockers, B. Overbeke, and J. Elet to the Heren X, Elmina, April 3, 1732. 152. Krommen, “Mathias Beck und die Westindische Kompagnie,”49–51. 153. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.50, deposition of Jacob Alrichs, The Hague, July 5, 1655; John Romeyn Brodhead, History of the State of New York: First Period, 1609–1664 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853), 631. Beck referred to Alrichs as “our uncle” in a letter to Stuyvesant of February 4, 1660, in Charles T. Gehring and Jacob Adriaan Schiltkamp, eds., Curacao Papers 1640–1665, New Netherland Documents XVII (Interlaken, NY: Heart of the Lakes, 1987), 407. 154. Mark L. Thompson, The Contest for the Delaware Valley: Allegiance, Identity, and Empire in the Seventeenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 148–150. 155. NAN, SG 4846, Resolutions of the States General, February 26, 1663; Cornelis J. Wasch, “Braziliaanse pretensiën,” Maandblad van het genealogisch-heraldiek genootschap “De Nederlandsche Leeuw” 5, no. 8 (1887), 75. For his function in Brazil,

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see Corte ende bondige deductie van redenen, dienende tot narechtinge van Hare Hoog Mogenden de Heeren Staten Generael der Vereeniche Nederlanden (’s-Gravenhage: Henricus Hondius, 1657), 16. 156. Van der Meiden, Betwist bestuur, 28–29. 157. NAN, SG 5764, bailiff and aldermen of Mauritsstad to the delegates from Brazil, Mauritsstad, January 18, 1653; NAN, SG 4846, Resolutions of the States General, August 15, 1661. For his dates in office on the Gold Coast, see NAN, SG 5767, “Poincten waerop alle de leeden vande Geoctroijeerde West-Indise Compagnie beschreven werden,” 1662. 158. NAN, SG 4846, Resolutions of the States General, June 25, 1663; NAN, SG 5769, document signed by WIC directors David van Baerle and Jacobus Reijnst, March 1, 1666. 159. The poem was published in O. K. [Otto Keye], Het Waere Onderscheydt tusschen Koude en Warme Landen (’s-Gravenhage, 1659). 160. Jaap Jacobs, Een zegenrijk gewest: Nieuw-Nederland in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Prometheus/Bert Bakker, 1999) [trans. as New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: Brill, 2005)], 63. 161. WIC directors Johan le Thor, Isaack van Beeck and N. ten Hove to the States General’s deputies for West India affairs, July 30, 1652, in O’Callaghan, Documents, 1: 483–484. 162. Louise A. Breen, Transgressing the Bounds: Subversive Enterprises among the Puritan Elite in Massachusetts, 1630–1692 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 57–59; “Extract from Propositions Made by the Director-General in View of a Threatened Attack of the English,” in Berthold Fernow, ed., Documents Relating to the History of the Dutch and Swedish Settlements on the Delaware River (Albany: Argus Company, 1877), 75; Petrus Stuyvesant to the WIC directors in Amsterdam, New Amsterdam, May 31, 1657, in Martha Dickinson Shattuck, ed., New Netherland Papers, c. 1650–1660: From the Collected Papers of Hans Bontemantel, Director of the Amsterdam Chamber of the West India Company, Held by the New York Public Library, trans. Dingman Veersteeg (Albany, NY: New Netherland Research Center and the New Netherland Institute, 2011), 42. 163. WIC directors, Chamber of Amsterdam, A. Pater and Eduard Man, to director and council in New Netherland, Amsterdam, July 6, 1653, in Charles T. Gehring, ed. and trans., Correspondence 1647–1653 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 208–209; Simon Middleton, “Order and Authority in New Netherland: The 1653 Remonstrance and Early Settlement Politics,” William and Mary Quarterly, ser. 3, 67, no. 1 (2010), 66. 164. NAN, OWIC 5, fol. 139, “Advys van de kooplieden,” Amsterdam, August 17, 1652, and fol. 162, Gijsbert Rudophij to the WIC, The Hague, December 19, 1652. 165. Thompson, Contest for the Delaware Valley, 86–88. 166. Hans Norman, “The Swedish Colonial Venture in North America, 1638– 1655,” in The Rise and Fall of New Sweden: Governor Johan Risingh’s Journal 1654–1655 in its Historical Context, ed. Stellan Dahlgren and Hans Norman (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell International), 45–126: 90; Clinton Alfred Weslager, The Swedes and Dutch at New Castle: With Highlights in the History of the Delaware Valley, 1638–1664 (Wilmington: The Middle Atlantic Press, 1987), 83–89, 100–101, 123–126.

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167. Norman, “Swedish Colonial Venture,” 111–116. For more on the Amerindian dimension of this conquest, see Cynthia J. Van Zandt, Brothers among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 177–185. 168. Donna Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 219–222. 169. Paul Otto, The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 142–155. For Dutch violence against Munsees and other North Americans natives, see also Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), chaps. 8 and 9. During the Second Dutch-Munsee War, forty Dutchmen were killed; in the Third Dutch-Munsee War (also known as the First and Second Esopus Wars), the Dutch lost at least thirty men, women, and children. See Otto, Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America, 143; Marc B. Fried, The Early History of Kingston & Ulster County, N.Y. (Marbletown, NY: Ulster County Historical Society, 1975), 33–34, 62. The Amerindian losses are unknown. 170. Manuel Herrero Sánchez, El acercamiento hispano-neerlandés (1648–1678) (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2000), 366–367. 171. Louis H. Roper, “The Fall of New Netherland and Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Imperial Formation, 1654–1676,” New England Quarterly 87, no. 4 (2014), 685. 172. Jacobs, Zegenrijk gewest, 164–165; Megan Lindsay Cherry, “The Imperial and Political Motivations behind the English Conquest of New Netherland,” Dutch Crossing 34, no. 1 (2010): 77–94. 173. Paul R. Huey, “Dutch Colonial Forts in New Netherland,” in First Forts: Essays on the Archaeology of Proto-colonial Fortifications, ed. Eric Klingelhofer (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 155. 174. Rev. Samuel Drisius to the Classis of Amsterdam, New Amsterdam, September 15, 1664, in Albert Eekhof, De Hervormde Kerk in Noord-Amerika (1624– 1664), 2 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1913), 2: xlvii. 175. Simon Hart, “De stadskolonie Nieuwer-Amstel aan de Delaware River in Noord-Amerika,” Maandblad Amstelodamum 38 (1951), 92; Robert Carr to Richard Nicolls, October 13, 1664, in O’Callaghan, Documents, 3: 73. 176. Thompson, Contest for the Delaware Valley, 182. 177. In June 1662, Plockhoy had committed to bringing twenty-five settlers to the Delaware River. They were exempted from taxes for a period of twenty years. O’Callaghan, Documents, 2: 176–177. 178. Jean Seguy, Utopie coopérative et oecuménisme: Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy van Zurik-Zee, 1620–1700 (Paris and La Haye: Moulton, 1968), 58–59, 61, 63, 66; Henk Looijesteijn, “Between Sin and Salvation: The Seventeenth-Century Dutch Artisan Pieter Plockhoy and His Ethics of Work,” International Review of Social History 56 (2011): 69–88; Evan Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 49–52, 238–251. 179. NAN, SG 5768, undated report by Petrus Stuyvesant to the States General. 180. Ambassador M. van Gogh to the Secretary of the States General, Chelsey, November 7, 1664, in O’Callaghan, Documents, 3: 78. For Stuyvesant’s protest, see “Copies of the Several Letters Which Passed between Col. Nicolls, the Present

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Governor, and the Late Dutch Governor Stuyvesant, before the Surrender of New York, under his Majesty’s Obedience, with the Articles upon Which It Was Surrendered,” New York, August 29–September 8, in W. Noël Sainsbury, CSP, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1661–1668, Preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1880), 225–228. 181. NA SG 5768, petition presented to the States General by Daniel Planck et al., 1667; Praatje in ’t ronde, of verhaal van een gesprek, voorgevallen in den Hage in een Herberg, tusschen eenige Persoonen: Waer in verhandelt werden verscheiden zaken, noodig voor de Hollanders te weten (Dordrecht: J. Redelijckhuisen, 1669), 7; Pieter Geyl, Oranje en Stuart 1641–1672 (Utrecht: Oosthoek, 1939), 250. 182. Robert D. Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast, 1620–1667” (PhD diss., University of South Africa, 1975), 123–128, 132, 315. 183. For the diplomatic repercussions, see Joan Römelingh, De diplomatieke betrekkingen van de Republiek met Denemarken en Zweden, 1660–1675 (Amsterdam: Drukkerij en uitgeverij Jacob van Campen, 1970), 23–37. 184. Kwame Y. Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600–1720: A Study of the African Reaction to European Trade (London: Clarendon Press, 1970), 107–111; Margaret Makepeace, “English Traders on the Guinea Coast, 1657–1668,” History in Africa 16 (1989), 244; Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 404–411. 185. Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (KITLV), Leiden, Collectie Westerse Handschriften 65, report of director-general Valckenburg, September 1659, fol. 431. 186. Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 474–478. The Dutch and the Danes accused each other of illegal appropriation of their respective territories, leading the Danes to attack the WIC lodge of Orsou in the kingdom of Accra in 1661. Their African allies killed several Dutchmen on this occasion. See NAN, SG 5767, argument by Michiel ten Hove, January 31, 1664; Van Aitzema, Saken van staet en oorlogh, 4: 213–214, 225. 187. Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 489, 507. An alternative explanation for the Efutu willingness to have the Swedish company evict the castle was that they had been bribed by the English, who sought possession of the castle themselves (548–549). 188. Ibid., 498, 549. 189. Binder, “Zeeländische Kaperfahrt,” 47. 190. Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 568–570, 575, 582, 585– 595; Ole Justesen, ed., Danish Sources for the History of Ghana, 1657–1754, 2 vols. (s.n.: Det Kongelinge Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2005), 1: 13–17. 191. Roger Downing and Gijs Rommelse, A Fearful Gentleman: Sir George Downing in The Hague, 1658–1672 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2011), 131. 192. Adri P. van Vliet, “‘Sijt ghekommandeert te zeijlen na de Kust van Ghenee’: Expeditionair optreden op de kust van West-Afrika, 1664–1665,” in Geweld in de West: Een militaire geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Atlantische wereld, 1600–1800, ed. Victor Enthoven, Henk den Heijer, and Han Jordaan (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 253. De Witt and his confidantes did not inform several members of the States General, who were seen as unreliable, of the impending expedition. See Gerard Brandt, Het leven en bedryf van den here Michiel de Ruiter, Hertog, Ridder, &c. L. Admiraal Generaal van

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Hollandt en Westvrieslandt (Amsterdam: Wolfgang, Waasberge, Boom, Van Someren en Goethals, 1687), 292–294. 193. Pieter Verhoog and Leendert Koelmans, De reis van Michiel Adriaanszoon de Ruyter in 1664–1665 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 22–23, 65, 69; Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 599–600. King Philip IV of Spain had ensured that de Ruyter’s ships enjoyed the same rights in Spanish ports as the king’s own subjects. See Herrero Sánchez, Acercamiento hispano-neerlandés, 382. 194. Brandt, Leven en bedryf, 305–312, 323, 327–328, 352; Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 605–610, 616–621; Verhoog and Koelmans, Reis van Michiel Adriaanszoon de Ruyter, 78–80; “Particulars of Our Voyage (in Capt. Reynolds’ ship) on the Coast of Africa,” April 1665, in Sainsbury, CSP, 1661–1668, 294–295. 195. Verhoog and Koelmans, Reis van Michiel Adriaanszoon de Ruyter, 82–87; Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 602, 610–612; Brandt, Leven en bedryf, 338. 196. Wim Klooster, “De Ruyter’s Attack on Barbados: The Dutch Perspective,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 60 (2014): 42–53. 197. Brandt, Leven en bedryf, 369, 389–393; Verhoog and Koelmans, Reis van Michiel Adriaanszoon de Ruyter, 91, 94–96, 103–104; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 385–388; “Jo. Carlisle to Williamson,” July 23, 1665, in Mary Anne Everett Green, ed., CSP, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles II, 1664–1665, Preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1863), 487. 198. George Downing to the Earl of Arlington, August 14, 1665, in Herman Theodoor Colenbrander, ed., Bescheiden uit vreemde archieven omtrent de groote Nederlandsche zeeoorlogen 1652–1676, 2 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1919), 1: 282; Petrus Johannes Blok, Michiel Adriaanszoon de Ruyter (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1930), 222. 199. Ronald Prud’homme van Reine, Rechterhand van Nederland: Biografie van Michiel Adriaenszoon de Ruyter, 5th ed. (Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 2007), 52. 200. Violet Barbour, “Privateers and Pirates of the West Indies,” American Historical Review 16, no. 3 (1911), 547. 201. Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 110–111. 202. “Thomas Modyford to Secretary Lord Arlington,” Jamaica, April 20, 1665, in Sainsbury, CSP, 1661–1668, 292 203. “Colonel Theodore Cary to the Duke of Albemarle,” St. Eustatius, August 23, 1665; “List of Things Found upon St. Eustatius”; and “Account of the Booty, Arms, and Persons Taken upon the Dutch island of Saba by the Jamaican Forces,” in Sainsbury, CSP, Colonial Series, 1661–1668, 320. 204. “Governor Sir Thos.Modyford to Lord Archingdale,” Jamaica, November 16, 1665; “The King to Thomas Modyford,” Oxford, November 16, 1665; and “A True and Perfect Narrative by Col. Theod. Cary,” in Sainsbury, CSP, 1661–1668, 329–330, 332–333. The Dutch on Curaçao had long been aware of these plans: NAN, SG 5768, Vice-Director Mathias Beck to the WIC, Curaçao, October 10, 1665. 205. Tortola was a patroonship (see chapter 6): NAN, SG 5770, directors Paulus Godin and Nicolas van Beeck of the WIC Chamber of Amsterdam to the States General, Amsterdam, September 3, 1683.

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206. J. H. Lefroy, Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermudas of Somers Islands, Compiled from the Colonial Records and Other Original Sources 1511– 1687, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1879), 2: 232–233. 207. Gregory E. O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Civilization, 2014), 90. 208. Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 439–444. 209. “An Exact Narrative of ye State of Guyana & of ye English Colony in Surynam,” in Vincent T. Harlow, ed., Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623–1667 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1925), 200. The location of this colony in Guiana is obscure. 210. “Governor Lord Willoughby to (Sec. Lord Arlington),” Barbados, January 29, 1666; “John Reid to (Sec. Lord Arlington),” January 1666; and “Governor Sir Thos. Modyford to the Duke of Albemarle,” Jamaica, June 8, 1666, in Sainsbury, CSP, 1661–1668, 354–355, 387. Expecting an attack on Curaçao, the WIC had sent three vessels with ammunition and provisions to the island in the previous year. See NAN, SG 4847, Resolutions of the States General, March 5 and May 7, 1665. It is not clear whether the states granted the WIC request to send 150 soldiers to Curaçao. See NAN, SG 4847, resolutions of the States General, January 12, 1666. 211. NAN, SG 5768, Ferdinandus van Overschelde to Willem van Vrijberge, delegate of the States of Zeeland, St. Christopher, December 21, 1666; Johan Hartog, De Bovenwindse eilanden Sint Maarten, Saba, Sint Eustatius: Eens Gouden Rots, nu zilveren dollars (Aruba: De Wit, 1964), 98–105. 212. Johan Carel Marinus Warnsinck, Abraham Crijnssen, de verovering van Suriname en zijn aanslag op Virginië in 1667 (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgeversmaatschappij, 1936), 3–15; Van der Meiden, Betwist bestuur, 20–21; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 396–397. 213. Warnsinck, Abraham Crijnssen, 27. 214. Westhuysen, Waerachtig verhael; William L. Shea, The Virginia Militia in the Seventeenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 90–92; Wietse Veenstra and Arjan Otte, “Financiering van de oorlogsvoering te water: De Admiraliteit van Zeeland,” in Overheidsfinanciën tijdens de Republiek en het Koninkrijk, 1600–1850, ed. Henk Boels (Hilversum: Verloren, 2012), 27–28. 215. Zeeuws Archief [ZA], Archief van de Staten van Zeeland [SZ], 2035/1, Abraham Crijnssen to the States of Zeeland, June 14, 1667; “Narrative of the Taking of the English Colony of Surinam by the Zealand Fleet, Together with the Articles of Surrender,” February 24–March 6, 1667; and “A Short Narrative of the State and Condition of the Colony of Surinam, and Especially of the Occurrences There since the Departure of Lt.-Genl. Willoughby to This Present Time,” July 30 1668, in Sainsbury, CSP, 1661–1668, 599–600; van der Meiden, Betwist bestuur, 21–23. 216. ZA, SZ 2035/7, Johan Tressry to [Abraham Crijnssen], Suriname, January 13, 1668. The dismantlement continued in pursuance of the articles of transfer. In the end, 412 slaves, 160 head of cattle, and 20 sugar cauldrons departed from Suriname, leaving 714 slaves and 121 cauldrons: Frederik Eliza Mulert, “De eerste uit Nederland naar Suriname gezonden landmeters (1667),” Tijdschrift van het Koninklijk Nederlandsch Aardrijkskundig Genootschap, ser. 2, 29 (1912), 316–319; 30 (1913):

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40–41; “Memorial of J. Meerman and Joh. Boreel, Dutch Ambassadors to the King,” London, May 25, 1668, in Sainsbury, CSP, 1661–1668, 571–572. 217. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, “Propositions sur les avantages que l’on pourrait tirer des Etats de Hollande pour l’augmentation du commerce du royaume,” in Lettres, instructions et mémoires de Colbert, ed. Pierre Clément, 2 vols. (Paris : Imprimerie impériale, 1863), 2: 658–660; Abdoulaye Ly, La Compagnie du Sénégal (s.l.: Présence Africaine, 1958), 104. 218. James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 270; Stewart L. Mims, Colbert’s West India Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912), 195–199. 219. Hartog, Bovenwindse eilanden, 107; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 446; “The President and Council of Barbadoes to the Council for Trade and Plantations,” Barbados, August 14, 1673, in W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., CSP, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1669–1674: Preserved in Her Majesty’s Public Record Office (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1889), 516–517. 220. Hartog, Bovenwindse eilanden, 106–107; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 469–472. 221. NAN, SG 5768, WIC directors Jacob Quina Carelsz and Jan van Erpecum, Chamber of Amsterdam, to the States General, August 17, 1673. 222. The residents of Suriname feared an English attack. In November 1672, there was talk in the colony of an impending expedition of seven frigates from Barbados. See National Archives of the United Kingdom [NAUK], High Court of Admiralty [HCA] 223, Franco Henriques Pereyra to unknown, Suriname, November 7, 1672. What the settlers could not know is that in July Stadholder William III had secretly written to King Charles II of English offering a set of proposals that included the return of Suriname to English rule in exchange for peace. See Wout Troost, Stadholder-koning Willem III: Een politieke biografie (Hilversum: Verloren, 2001), 91. 223. Cornelis de Waard, De Zeeuwsche expeditie naar de West onder Cornelis Evertsen den jonge, 1672–1674, Nieuw Nederland een jaar onder Nederlandsch bestuur (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1928), xxi–xxxiii, 104–105; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 467–469. 224. De Waard, Zeeuwsche expeditie, 25–31. 225. Donald G. Shomette and Robert D. Haslach, Raid on America: The Dutch Naval Campaign of 1672–1674 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 139–150, 203–205. 226. De Waard, Zeeuwsche expeditie, 40; ibid., 169–174. 227. NAN, Admiraliteitscolleges Evertsen XI-18, meeting of Admirals Cornelis Evertse and Jacob Binckes and the war council, New Orange, August 12 and 13, 1673. 228. NAN, SG 5769, bailiff, burgomaster, and aldermen of New Orange on the island of Manhattan in New Netherland to the States General, September 8, 1673. 229. Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 332–335. 230. In Neil Salisbury, “Toward the Covenant Chain: Iroquois and Southern New England Algonquians, 1637–1684,” in Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois

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and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800, ed. Daniel K. Richter and James H. Merrell (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 69. 231. Thomas E. Burke Jr., Mohawk Frontier: The Dutch Community of Schenectady, New York, 1661–1710 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 119, 210. 232. Joyce Diane Goodfriend, “The Social and Cultural Life of Dutch Settlers, 1664–1776,” in Handbook Dutch-American Relations, ed. Hans Krabbendam, Cornelis A. van Minnen, and Giles Scott-Smith (Amsterdam: Boom; and Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 122, 125. See also Roger Panetta, Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture (New York: Hudson River Museum/Fordham University Press, 2009). 233. Prud’homme van Reine, Rechterhand van Nederland, 282–290; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 473–477; Christian Buchet, La lutte pour l’espace caraïbe et la façade atlantique de l’Amérique Centrale et du Sud (1672–1763) (Paris: Libraririe de l’Inde Éditeur, 1991), 97–102; P. de Longuemare, Une famille d’auteurs aux seizième, dix-septième et dix-huitième siècles: Les Sainte-Marthe. Etude historique et littéraire d’après de nombreux documents inédits (Paris: Alphonse Picard et Fils, 1902), 197–201. 234. Gérard Lafleur, “Les Hollandais et les Antilles françaises (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles),” in Entre Calvinistes et Catholiques: Les relations religieuses entre la France et les Pays-Bas du Nord (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle), ed. Yves Krumenacker (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010), 128. 235. Buchet, Lutte pour l’espace caraïbe, 103–104. For the devastating impact of the raid on these islands, see Christian Schnakenbourg, “Recherches sur l’histoire de l’industrie sucrière à Marie-Galante, 1664–1964,” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe 2–4 (1981), 18; Denise Parisis and Henri Parisis, “Le siècle du sucre à Saint-Martin français,” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe 1–4 (1994), 10. There was a brief Dutch intermezzo in Cayenne in 1667: Stephen Sanders, Het grijnzend doodshoofd: Nederlandse piraten in de Gouden Eeuw (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2006), 52–53. 236. On the French side, forty men died and ninety-five were wounded, while on the Dutch side, thirty-three men died and thirty-seven were wounded. See Buchet, Lutte pour l’espace caraïbe, 106–107. 237. Ibid., 107–119, 149. In a letter to the States General written just one year earlier, Quirijn Spranger had expressed his doubts about the ability of Tobago to maintain itself in a hostile French, English, and Carib environment. See NAN, SG 5769, WIC Chamber of Amsterdam to the States General. Amsterdam, September 20, 1675. 238. One measure of the significance of Curaçao was that, although Batavia was the destination of most letters (eighty-three) from the Dutch Republic in 1672, no Atlantic colony received more than Curaçao (sixty). See Judith Brouwer, “Levenstekens: Gekaapte brieven uit het Rampjaar 1672” (PhD diss., Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 2013), 38–40. 239. For many years to come, a Thanksgiving ceremony was organized to commemorate this event, just like the French on Martinique organized an annual Thanksgiving Mass to express their gratitude for the failure of de Ruyter’s attack. See S. van Dissel, “De Hervormde, thans vereenigde Protestantsche gemeente van Curaçao,” in Kerkhistorisch archief, ed. N. C. Kist and W. Moll, 2 vols. (Amsterdam:

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P.N. van Kampen, 1857–1859), 2: 300; Joseph Rennard, “À propos d’un récent essai sur l’histoire religieuse de la Martinique,” Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France 10, no. 48 (1924), 326–327. 240. Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 447–456, 478–481; James Pritchard, “The Franco-Dutch War in the West Indies, 1672–1678: An Early “Lesson” in Imperial Defense,” in New Interpretations in Naval History: Selected Papers from the Thirteenth Naval History Symposium Held at Annapolis, Maryland, 2–4 October 1997, ed. William M. McBride and Eric P. Reed (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1998), 11–15. 241. Buchet, Lutte pour l’espace caraïbe, 134–141, 146–148. 242. Iovrnael ghehouden op het Schip de Princesse Aemilia (s.l., 1640). 243. Binder, “Zeeländische Kaperfahrt,” 46; AGI, Santo Domingo 5354, Manuel de Belmonte to the Count of Medellín, c. 1675. 244. Gerrit Johan van Grol, De grondpolitiek in het West-Indisch domein der Generaliteit, 3 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Algemeene Landsdrukkerij, 1934), 1: 101; Omstandigh Verhael van de Fransche Rodomontade voor het Fort Curassao (s.l., 1673); Charles Frostin, Histoire de l’autonomisme colon de la partie française de St. Domingue aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Contribution à l’étude du sentiment américain d’indépendance (Lille: Université de Lille III, 1973), 98–99, 125–126; Charles Frostin, Les révoltes blanches à Saint-Domingue aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Haïti avant 1789) (Paris: L’École, 1975), 103–104, 113; Abraham Jacob van der Aa, Biographisch woordenboek der Nederlanden, bevattende levensbeschrijvingen van soodanige Persoonen die zich op eenigerlei wijze in ons Vaderland hebben vermaard gemaakt, 12 vols. (Haarlem: J. J. van Brederode, 1852–1878), 3: 671. 245. Nicolas Japikse, “De Witt en Wassenaer van Obdam vóór den slag van Lowestoft,” De Navorscher 52 (1902), 298. Yet the States General agreed only two years later to send a subsidy of 100,000 guilders to the WIC to bolster its African defenses. This sum was, however, largely financed by the gold that de Ruyter’s fleet had captured from the English in Africa. See NAN, SG 4847, Resolutions of the States General, February 9, 1666. 246. Schneeloch, Aktionäre der Westindischen Compagnie von 1674, 77–78; den Heijer, Goud, ivoor en slaven, 30, 46–49. 4. Between Hunger and Sword

1. Matthew Smith Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime, 1618– 1789 (London: Fontana, 1988), 46. 2. Pieter Jan van Winter, De Westindische Compagnie ter kamer Stad en Lande (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 230. 3. NAN, SG 52, Resolutions of the States General, May 1, 1629. We know next to nothing about soldiers’ interoceanic mobility, despite scattered references to veterans from the East Indies serving in the Atlantic world. See, for example, Adam Jones, German Sources for West African History, 1599–1669 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1983), 131. 4. NAN, SG 5768, Dirck Spiegel and Cornelis Cloeck, directors of the WIC Chamber of Amsterdam, to the States General, Amsterdam, September 13, 1666. Army captains in early 1665 were also actively recruiting for a war against the bishop of Münster.

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5. Johannes de Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael van de Verrichtinghen der Gheoctroyeerde WestIndische Compagnie in derthien Boecken, ed. Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, 4 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1931–1937), 1: 8–9; Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber and Irene Aloha Wright, eds., Piet Heyn en de Zilvervloot: Bescheiden uit Nederlandsche en Spaansche Archieven (Utrecht: Kemink & Zoon, 1928), 55; Ambrosius Richshoffer, Reise nach Brasilien 1629–1632: Neu herausgegeben nach der zu Strassburg bei Josias Städel im Jahre 1677 erschienenen Original-Ausgabe (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1930), 33. 6. Klaas Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika 1600–1650: Angola, Kongo en São Tomé (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2000), 103–104, 142; Pieter Verhoog and Leendert Koelmans, De reis van Michiel Adriaanszoon de Ruyter in 1664–1665 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 23. 7. Adri P. van Vliet, “Een vriendelijcke groetenisse”: Brieven van het thuisfront aan de vloot van De Ruyter (1664–1665) (Franeker: Uitgeverij Van Wijnen, 2007), 39–40. In 1670, the French vice admiral estimated the number of soldiers in the Dutch garrison at sixty; Thilmans and N. I. de Moraes, “Le passage à la Petite Côte du vice-admiral d’Estrées (1670),” Bulletin de l’Institut fondamental d’Afrique noire, ser. 2, serie B, no. 1 (1977), 58. 8. Willem Rudolf Menkman, De Nederlanders in het Caraibische zeegebied waarin vervat de geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Antillen (Amsterdam: Van Kampen & Zoon, 1942), 52; Gerrit Johan van Grol, De grondpolitiek in het West-Indisch domein der Generaliteit, 3 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Algemeene Landsdrukkerij, 1934), 1: 108; SAA, acta Classis Amsterdam 379: 224, comforter of the sick Johannes Walrave to the Classis Amsterdam, Fort Amsterdam, July 8, 1649. For Bonaire, see SAA, acta Classis Amsterdam 379: 224, minister Jonas Aertsz to the Classis Amsterdam, Curaçao, August 8, 1640. For St. Martin and Tobago, see Cornelis C. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1971), 134, 436. 9. Leendert Jan Joosse, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld: Ontmoeting met Afrikanen en Indianen (1600–1700) (Kampen: Uitgeverij Kok, 2008), 163. 10. Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in West Africa (1580–1674): Empires, Merchants, and the Atlantic System (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 104. 11. Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 130, 143, 150, 249n. 45, 286. 12. Jaap Jacobs, “Soldiers of the Company: Military Personnel of the West India Company in Nieu Nederlandt,” in Jacob Leisler’s Atlantic World in the Later Seventeenth Century: Essays on Religion, Militia, Trade, and Networks, ed. Hermann Wellenreuther (Münster: LIT, 2009), 16. 13. For Suriname, see H. van Breen, “Cornelis van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck, Gouverneur van Suriname (1683–1688),” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 16 (1901), 16. For Pomeroon, see examination of “Pedro Pedro Bonostre,” native of St. Eustatius, Santo Tomé, March 19, 1665, in British Guiana Boundary, Arbitration with the United States of Venezuela: Appendix to the Case on Behalf of Her Britannic Majesty (London: Foreign Office, 1898), 162. 14. Utrechts Archief, Staten van Utrecht, 233, inv.nr. 231–24, fol. 190v-193, http://www.geneaknowhow.net/script/dewit/brazil.html, accessed February 14, 2016. 15. NAN, SG 5751, “Sommiere staat van maandelijkse soldij voor 1600 mannen, bestaande in tien compagnieen,” enclosure in A. Bruyningh and M. Huygens of the Council of State to the States General, The Hague, June 27, 1624.

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16. NAN, SG 5752, report of Gerhardt van Arnhem and Ewolt van der Dussen, delegates of the States General to the Heren XIX, Middelburg, August–September 1630. 17. Calculated on the basis of Ambrosius Richshoffer, Reise nach Brasilien 1629–1632: Neu herausgegeben nach der zu Strassburg bei Josias Städel im Jahre 1677 erschienenen Original-Ausgabe (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1930), 62–71. 18. Calculated on the basis of De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 3: 80–81, 135–137; 4: 1–3, 118–119, 200–201. From January 1636 to September 1637, 3,259 soldiers arrived in Brazil; NAN, OWIC 53, fol. 195. 19. Willem Johannes van Hoboken, Witte de With in Brazilië, 1648–1649 (Amsterdam: N.V. Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1955), 111; NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten, 12564.20, 29: overview of the troop strength of the fortifications in Brazil, compiled by president and council of Brazil [1648]: Rio Grande 80, Paraíba 320, Tamarica 420, Pernambuco 3,200. The total number shrank considerably in the years that followed: 3,364 (1649), 2,980 (1650), 2,289 (1651), and 2,297 (including forty Africans, 1653); NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten, 12564.29, no. 5, Generale lijst van de militia in Brazil, 5 November 1649; NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten, 12564.29, generale lijst militia in Brazil, 15 februari 1650; NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.34; NAN, SG 5764, Sigismund von Schkoppe to the States General, Mauritia, February 25, 1653. 20. De Zeeusche Verre-Kyker (Vlissingen, 1649). The contrast with the plight of sailors on board Piet Heyn’s victorious fleet was conspicuous. Flush with money, some Scottish sailors went ashore when their returning ship stopped in an English port. They did not bother to claim their wages. See Petrus Scriverius, Corte historische beschryvinghe der Nederlandtsche oorlogen, beginnende van den aenvangh der Nederlandsche beroerten tot in den jare 1646 incluis (Amsterdam: Broer Iansz, 1646), 211. 21. NAN, SG 4845, resolutions of the States General, February 6, 1646. 22. Ibid., resolutions of the States General, March 12, 1646. 23. Ibid., resolutions of the States General, September 23, 1647; Willem Frederik, Gloria parendi: Dagboeken van Willem Frederik, stadholder van Friesland, Groningen en Drenthe, 1643–1649, 1651–1654, ed. Jacob Visser and G. N. van der Plaat (Den Haag: Nederlands Historisch Genootschap, 1995), entry of October 16, 1647; van Hoboken, Witte de With in Brazilië, 39–40. The States General had asked the Council of State in late 1645 to select three volunteers for Brazil from each of the 530 army companies. See NAN, SG 4845, resolutions of the States General, December 23, 1645. 24. NAN, SG 4845, resolutions of the States General, October 2, 1647. The WIC Chamber of Amsterdam, on the other hand, put hardly any effort into recruiting troops. See Alexander van der Capellen, Gedenkschriften van Jonkheer Alexander van der Capellen, Heere van Aartsbergen, Boedelhoff, en Mervelt: beginnende met den jaare 1621, en gaande tot 1654, 2 vols. (Utrecht: J. v. Schoonhoven en Comp, 1777–1778), 2: 234. 25. Beneficien voor de soldaeten gaende naar Brasil (’s-Gravenhage: Byde Weduwe, ende Erfgenamen van wijlen Hillebrant Iacobsz van Wouw, 1647); van Hoboken, Witte de With in Brazilië, 41–42. 26. NAN, SG 4845, resolutions of the States General, May 27, 1650. 27. See also Hollandsche Mercurius 1652, pp. 14–15.

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28. John Donoghue, Fire under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 225–226. 29. Denver Brunsman, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the EighteenthCentury Atlantic World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 20. 30. Johannes de Hullu, “De matrozen en soldaten op de schepen der OostIndische Compagnie,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van NederlandschIndië 69 (1914), 318–323; Marc A. van Alphen, “The Female Side of Dutch Shipping: Financial Bonds of Seamen Ashore in the 17th and 18th Century,” in AngloDutch Mercantile Marine Relations 1700–1850, ed. Jacobus Ruurd Bruijn and Willem Frederik Jacob Mörzer Bruyns (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum ‘Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum’; and Leiden: Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, 1991), 125–132. 31. Douglas Catterall, “Interlopers in an Intercultural Zone? Early Scots Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1630–1660,” in Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World: People, Products, and Practices on the Move, ed. Caroline A. Williams (Farnham, UK; and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 83–87. 32. Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, ed. Reisebeschreibungen von deutschen Beamten und Kriegsleuten im Dienst der niederländischen West- und Ost-Indischen Kompagnien 1602–1797, 13 vols. (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1930), 2: 5–6. In 1658, the WIC was in such great haste to dispatch a group of soldiers to New Netherland that their oath of allegiance had to be administered upon their arrival: WIC, Chamber of Amsterdam, to Petrus Stuyvesant, June 7, 1658, in Charles T. Gehring, ed., Correspondence, 1654–1658 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 182. 33. NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, November 27, 1649; GAR, ONA 135/196, f. 267, Act of June 28, 1637; 135/254, f. 347, Act of December 30, 1639; GAR, Archief Delfshaven, 3843, 74/291, Act of October 11, 1659; Susanah Shaw Romney, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2014), 31. After 1641, the price of their gun was subtracted from their monthly wage. See Articulen, ende ordonnantien ter vergaderinge vande Negenthiene der Generale Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie geresumeert ende ghearresteert (1641). 34. Willem Voorbeijtel Cannenburg, De reis om de wereld van de Nassausche vloot, 1623–1626 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), xlix. 35. NAN, SG 4845, resolutions of the States General, December 18, 1647. 36. Van Winter, Kamer Stad en Lande, 123; Voorbeijtel Cannenburg, Reis om de wereld, lxvi–lxvii; NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.34, President and Council of Brazil to the States General, Recife, August 21, 1651. 37. I. B., A Plaine and True Relation, of the Going Forth of a Holland Fleete the Eleventh of November 1623, to the Coast of Brasile: With the Taking in of Salvedoe, and the Chief Occurrences Falling Out There, in the Time of the Hollanders Continuance Therein (Rotterdam: M. S., 1626), 20. 38. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.6, Huijgens, Niclaes van der Boeckhorst Duijst van Voorhout, A. Ploos van Amstel, Fredrick vryheer van Swartsenburch, Albert Coenraets Burch, J. de Laet, F. Franck, Pieter Claessen Bosschieter, F. Schillenburch, B. Hogenhoeck, and Ab. Wilmerdonck, representing the WIC, to Count Johan Maurits and the High Councillors in Brazil, The Hague, May 1, 1638. The Nassau went down with six hundred chests of colonial products,

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two-thirds of them filled with sugar. See N. van Reigersberch to Hugo Grotius, April 19, 1638, in Barnardus Lambertus Meulenbroek, ed. Briefwisseling van Hugo Grotius, 10 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 9: 218. 39. L’Honoré Naber and Wright, Piet Heyn en de zilvervloot, 17–18; Hendrik Ottsen, Journael van de reis naar Zuid-Amerika (1598–1601), ed. Jan Willem IJzerman (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1918), 91. 40. Herman Ketting, Leven, werk en rebellie aan boord van Oost-Indiëvaarders (1595– ±1650) (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2002), 168–175. This was not just a Dutch tradition. See Henning Henningsen, Crossing the Equator; Sailors’ Baptism and Other Initiation Rites, with a Danish Summary (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1961); Benerson Little, The Buccaneer’s Realm: Pirate Life on the Spanish Main, 1674–1688 (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2007), 112–113; Gilles Proulx, Between France and New France: Life aboard the Tall Sailing Ships (Toronto and Charlottetown: Dundurn Press, 1984), 127; Kenneth Banks, Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 77. 41. Journael, gehouden op ‘s Landts-schip de Spiegel, van ’t gene gepasseert en verricht is op de Vloot van haer Ho. Mo. De Heeren Staten Generael der Vereenighde Nederlanden (Amsterdam: Jacob Venckel, 1665), 6; Johan Nieuhof, Gedenkweerdige Brasiliaense zee- en lant-reize: Behelzende al het geen op dezelve is voorgevallen. Beneffens een bondige beschrijving van gantsche Neerlants Brasil, zoo van lantschappen, steden, dieren, gewassen, als draghten, zeden en godsdienst der inwoonders: en inzonderheit ein wijtloopig verhael der merkwaardigste voorvallen en geschiedenissen, die zich, geduurende zijn negenjarigh verblijf in Brasil, in d’oorlogen en opstant der Portugesen tegen d’onzen, zich sedert het jaer 1640. tot 1649. hebben toegedragen (Amsterdam: de weduwe van Jacob Meurs, 1682), 2; Verhoog and Koelmans, Reis van Michiel Adriaanszoon de Ruyter, 53. On the WIC prohibition, see Articulen, ende ordonnantien ter vergaderinge vande Negenthiene der Generale Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie geresumeert ende ghearresteert (1641). 42. Pierre Moreau, Histoire des derniers troubles du Brésil entre les Hollandois et les Portugais (Paris: Augustin Courbe, 1651), 116–117. Despite this incident, it seems that sailors and soldiers recruited by the WIC were less at loggerheads than were their counterparts in VOC service. See Jacobus Ruurd Bruijn and Elisabeth Susanna van Eyck van Heslinga, “De scheepvaart van de Oost-Indische Compagnie en het verschijnsel muiterij,” in Muiterij: Oproer en berechting op schepen van de VOC, ed. Jacobus Ruurd Bruijn and Elisabeth Susanna van Eyck van Heslinga (Haarlem: De Boer Maritiem, 1980), 15. 43. Ketting, Leven, werk en rebellie, 51, 53. 44. Jaap R. Bruijn, Varend verleden: De Nederlandse oorlogsvloot in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Balans, 1998), 77. In 1665, the States General substantially increased these amounts to 1,500, 700, 350, and 300 guilders. See Gerard Brandt, Het leven en bedryf van den here Michiel de Ruiter, Hertog, Ridder, &c. L. Admiraal Generaal van Hollandt en Westvrieslandt (Amsterdam: Wolfgang, Waasberge, Boom, Van Someren en Goethals, 1687), 380. 45. NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, November 25, 1647. 46. Bruno Romero Ferreira Miranda, “Gente de Guerra: Origem, cotidiano e resistência dos soldados do exército da Companhia das Índias Ocidentais no Brasil (1630–1654)” (PhD diss., University of Leiden, 2011), 62. For the transatlantic life of

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a woman who married four times, at least twice to soldiers, see, Annette M. Cramer van den Boogaart, “The Life of Teuntje Straetmans: A Dutch Woman’s Travels in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World,” Long Island Historical Journal 15 (2003): 35–53. 47. Anette de Wit, “Zeemansvrouwen aan het werk: De arbeidsmarktpositie van vrouwen in Maassluis, Schiedam en Ter Heijde (1600–1700), Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis 3 (2005), 75–76. 48. NAN, SG 5753, WIC directors to the States General, received January 19, 1634. Danielle van den Heuvel details the hard lives of the spouses of VOC sailors in the eighteenth century in “Bij uijtlandigheijt van haar man”: Echtgenotes van VOCzeelieden, aangemonsterd voor de Kamer Enkhuizen (1700–1750) (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2005). 49. GAR, ONA 198: 241/362, Act of February 10, 1639. 50. GAR, ONA 204: 16/24, Act of October 10, 1642. 51. NAN, SG 5766, request by Jenneke Slesiger to the States General, read April 11, 1656. 52. NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, January 21, 1651. 53. Examples include Willem Gerritsz van Ruytevelt (Brazil), Edward Moore (“West Indies”), Harman Nanning (“West Indies”), Joost Robberechtsz Bruyn (Guinea), Cornelis Dircxz (Pernambuco), Jan Harmansz van der Cruys (probably Brazil), Joris Jansz van der Wan (Pernambuco), Jan Rijcken (Brazil), Jan Cornelissen, Jan Gerritsz van Lieuwaerden (Brazil), and Frederick Janz Vonck (Guinea); GAR, ONA 156: 16/31 (Act of October 22, 1624); 62: 76/261 (Act of December 24, 1624); 187: 120/183 (Act of April 17, 1626); 148: 479/736 (Act of November 5, 1630); 128: 369/977 (Act of June 25, 1631); 196: 2/2 (Act of December 26, 1635); 81:304/951 (Act of December 2, 1640); 203: 40/56 (Act of January 27, 1642); 81: 350/1089 (Act of June 9, 1642); 209: 48/92 (Act of November 23, 1647); and 130: 176/483 (Act of October 11, 1654). 54. Jan Cornelisz left for Guinea in 1633; Brazil in 1642; and Rouen, Luanda, and Pernambuco in 1644; GAR, ONA 186: 99/186 (Act of April 14, 1633); 90: 350/1089 (Act of June 9, 1642); and 82: 4 (act of March 10, 1644). 55. For example, Cornelis Pietersz (“West Indies”); Heynrick Jansz (Guinea); Daniel Danielsz (“West Indies”); Jan Jansz (“West Indies”); Symon Jansz (“West Indies”); Jan Marcusz, carpenter (“West Indies”); Bouwe Sibertsz (Pernambuco); Joris Jorisz van Dordrecht (“West Indies”); Willem Jacobsz (“West Indies”); and Antonis Verschuyr (Guinea); GAR, ONA 104: 121/185 (Act of November 27, 1623); 80: 239/857 (Act of August 5, 1626); 187: 225/351 (Act of April 14, 1627); 188: 142/212 (Act of April 3, 1628); 189: 175/286 (Act of August 28, 1629); 189: 208/346 (Act of October 23, 1629); 185: 75/88 (Act of December 21, 1632); 198: 170/251 (Act of December 3, 1638); 81: 269/849 (Act of December 16, 1639); and 221: 72/258 (Act of October 5, 1663). 56. GAR, ONA 337: 310/650, Act of October 5, 1649. 57. GAR, ONA 210: 166/342, Act of December 18, 1649. 58. GAR, ONA 393: 205/335, Act of August 8, 1652, deposition of Jan Heindericx Boschman van Diest and Jan de Graeff van Brussel. One week after this deposition, Ruijchaver’s wife produced a certificate of good behavior in her quest to sail to Brazil and accompany her husband. See GAR, ONA 213: 68/148, unsigned act of August 15, 1652.

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59. Dirck Dammisz was in “the West Indies” when his child was born out of wedlock. Eight years later, he had still not paid a dime for the child’s upkeep. See Gemeentearchief Schiedam, Notarieel Archief 752, fol. 81, deposition of Michiel Symonsz and Bartholomeus Arijensz van Stralen, March 20, 1655. 60. Van Vliet, “Vriendelijcke groetenisse,” 93; GAR, ONA 200: 127/170, Act of April 11, 1640; GAR, ONA 433: 4/8, Act of June 20, 1641. 61. Resolutions WIC Chamber of Amsterdam, November 12, 1635, in Johannes Hermanus Jacobus Hamelberg, ed., Documenten behoorende bij “De Nederlanders op de West-Indische eilanden” (Amsterdam: Emmering, 1979), 37. 62. NAN, SG 4847, resolutions of the States General, August 20, 1666. 63. See also Jaap R. Bruijn, The Dutch Navy of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 60. 64. SAA, NA 1500, Act of July 19, 1640. 65. NAN, SG 4845, resolutions of the States General, November 25, 1647; July 8 and September 30, 1651. There is no evidence that their husbands were accused of having sided with Witte de With and therefore potentially guilty of neglect of duty. Three of the women remained in The Hague for another six months. Upon their request, the states then paid off their debt to local innkeepers, enabling them to return to their home towns. See NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, March 27, 1652. 66. Van Hoboken, Witte de With in Brazilië, 187–188. 67. NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, November 23, 1649. The States General thereupon advised the admiralty college of the Noorderkwartier to exile the man to a distant location. 68. NAN, SG 5762, Witte Cornelisz de With to the States General, on board the Brederode in Anglesey, January 14, 1650. 69. NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, September 23, October 6, 14, 18, and 19, November 11, and December 11, 1649; January 3 and 31, March 24, April 16, and May 31, 1650. Among the new troops from the regiments of colonels Keerweer, Brincken, and Van den Brande, twice as many (68 vs. 34) died in the hospital in the first months after their arrival as at Guararapes. See NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten, 12564.20, 23. That was undoubtedly due in part to unhealthy conditions in the hospital. One German in Brazil reported in the late 1630s that even a healthy man could not survive there for long. See Steven Ozment, Three Behaim Boys: Growing Up in Early Modern Germany: A Chronicle of Their Lives (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 283. 70. Annette Michèle Ricciardi-Cramer van den Bogaart, “Women in the Early Modern Dutch Atlantic World” (PhD diss., Stony Brook University, 2013), 78–79. 71. Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, ed., Samuel Brun’s Schiffarten (1624) (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1913), 1. 72. L’Honoré Naber, Reisebeschreibungen, 2: 5–6. 73. Detlev A. Kraack, “Flensburg, an Early Modern Centre Of Trade. The Autobiographical Writings of Peter Hansen Hajstrup (1624–1672),” in The North Sea and Culture (1550–1800): Proceedings of the International Conference held at Leiden 21–22 April 1995, ed. Juliette Roding and Lex Heerma van Voss (Hilversum: Verloren, 1996), 241, 244. 74. Wilhelm Johann Müller, Die Afrikanische auf der Guineischen Gold-Cust gelegene Landschafft Fetu, wahrhafftig und fleissig auf eigener acht-jähriger Erfahrung genauer

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Besichtigung und unablässiger Erforschung beschrieben (Hamburg: Zacharias Härtel, 1676), 18; Robert D. Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast, 1620–1667” (PhD diss., University of South Africa, 1975), 584–585. 75. Ronald de Graaf, Oorlog, mijn arme schapen: Een andere kijk op de Tachtigjarige Oorlog, 1565–1648 (Franeker: Van Wijnen, 2004), 487. Olaf van Nimwegen asserts that foreigners accounted for half of the troops in Dutch service. See The Dutch Army and the Military Revolutions, 1588–1688 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2010), 33. 76. Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell through the Twelve Dominions of Germany, Bohmerland, Sweitzerland Netherland, Denmarke, Poland, Italy Turky, France, England, Scotland & Ireland, 4 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1908), 4: 468–469. Jacob Andries van S. Laurens, Witte de With’s former quartermaster, was awarded 200 guilders after losing his left arm during a battle in Brazil. See NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, June 8, 1650. 77. AGI, Consulados 92 no. 17, “Relacion de las prevenciones hechas en la Habana para oponerse a los designios de la armada holandesa,” 1629. 78. Jacobs, “Soldiers of the Company,” 18–19. German soldiers were also pursued by the Portuguese, who promised them huge wages: H. Doedens to Ant. Van Hilten, Amsterdam, January 23, 1646, in “Origineele brieven van H. Doedens aan Ant. v. Hilten, betreffende de West-Indische Compagnie. 1641–1648. Uit het archief van Hilten,” Kroniek van het Historisch Genootschap, gevestigd te Utrecht, ser 5, 5 (1869), 414. 79. Miranda, “Gente de Guerra,” 43. 80. Peter Burschel, Söldner im Nordwestdeutschland des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts: Sozialgeschichtliche Studien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), 160; van Nimwegen, Dutch Army, 36. 81. NAN, SG 9410, minutes of the WIC board meeting, Amsterdam, March 6, 1642. 82. From 1601 to 1675, they made up 20.5 percent of all brides and grooms who contracted their first marriage in Amsterdam. See Hubert Nusteling, Welvaart en werkgelegenheid in Amsterdam, 1540–1860: Een relaas over demografie, economie en sociale politiek van een wereldstad (Amsterdam & Dieren: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1985), 44. 83. Discoers na den tijdt die loopt (Gouda: Pieter Vermeyden, 1647). 84. Moreau, Histoire des derniers troubles, 112–113. 85. Notarial archives of Bergen-op-Zoom, notary Wouter de Witte, minute acts of other acts, 50: 59, p. 123, Act of March 1629; 50: 61, pp. 117–118, Act of May 24, 1645. Among the 150 men sent as reinforcements to Curaçao in 1635 were forty Englishmen. The English authorities seized them at Cowes, where the ship made a stopover. See John Knapp and John Miller to the Council, Southampton, June 7, 1635, and Thomas Wulfris to Francis Brooks, Southampton, June 8, 1635, in John Brice, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the reign of Charles I, 1635, Preserved in the State Paper Department of His Majesty’s Public Record Office (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1865), 111, 113–114. 86. José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos flamengos: Influência da ocupação holandesa na vida e na cultura do Norte do Brasil, 2nd ed. (Recife: Governo do Estado de Pernambuco, 1978), 116. Some of these Englishmen may have belonged to a group of 120 soldiers sent overland from England to Germany in the late 1630s to assist the Palatine elector in the Thirty Years’ War. Thirty-three of them did not advance beyond Amsterdam, where they were recruited by the WIC: Petition of Captain

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Gilbert Byron to the King, c. 1639, in William Douglas Hamilton, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the reign of Charles I, Oct 1639–Mar 1640, Preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, vol. 15 (London: Longman, 1877), 267. 87. Hermann Wätjen, Das holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien: Ein Kapitel aus der Kolonialgeschichte des 17. Jahrhunderts (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, Gotha: Perthes, 1921), 216. 88. NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, April 25 and 28, 1646. At an earlier date, the English crown had objected to recruitment by foreign powers. See NAN, SG 5893, ambassador Alb. Joachimi and deputy Govert Brasser to the States General, London, March 31, 1634. 89. John Knapp, searcher [at Southampton], and John Miller, deputy to the Farmer of the King’s Customs, and the King’s Searchers’ Deputy at Cowes, to the Council, June 7, 1635, in John Bruce, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the reign of Charles I, April-Dec 1635, preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, (London: Longman, Roberts & Green, 1865), 111. 90. Van Vliet, “Vriendelijcke groetenisse,” 35. 91. In the final eight years, 243 Flemings and Walloons served in Dutch Brazil, making up 4 percent of the total number of reinforcements in those years. See D. C. J. Devaart, “Vlamingen en Walen als soldaten voor de West-Indische Compagnie in Brazilië van 1648–1654,” Vlaamse Stam 3 (1967): 365–372. 92. Jean Petitjean Roget, ed., Histoire de l’Isle de Grenade en Amérique, 1649–1659: Manuscrit anonyme de 1659 (Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1975), 101, 116n. 7. As early as 1635, the Synod of the Walloon Churches in the Dutch Republic requested a minister to be sent to Dutch Brazil to attend to the spiritual needs of the large number of Frenchmen and Walloons. See Livre synodal contenant les articles résolus dans les synodes des Eglises Wallonnes des Pays-Bas, 2 vols. (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1896), 1: 388. 93. De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 3: 141. 94. Mário Martins Meireles, Holandeses no Maranhão (1641–1644) (São Luís: PPPG/EDUFMA, 1991), 136. 95. Like the deserting Irishmen in British service during the Seven Years’ War, they may have simply been more conspicuous because of their officers’ fears of bonds with the Catholic enemy. See Thomas Agostini, “‘Deserted His Majesty’s Service’: Military Runaways, the British-American Press, and the Problem of Desertion during the Seven Years’ War,” Journal of Social History 40, no. 4 (2007), 961–962. 96. António da Silva Rego, A dupla restauração de Angola 1641–1648 (Lisboa: Agência Geral das Colónias, 1948), 40. 97. The total costs for the Portuguese in Angola came to 683,350 reis. See Report of Salvador Correia de Sá. Luanda, August 20, 1648, in Louis Jadin, ed., L’ancien Congo et l’Angola 1639–1655 d’après les archives romaines, portugaises, néerlandaises et espagnoles (Bruxelles and Rome: Institut Historique belge de Rome, 1975), 1039–1041; NAN, Admiraliteitencolleges 1.01.47.16 (2) (dagboek Isaac Sweers), fols. 16–18. See also Extract ende Copye van verscheyde brieven en schriften, belangende de rebellie der Paepsche Portugesen van desen Staet in Brasilien. Tot bewijs dat de Kroon van Portugael schuldich is aen de selve (s.l., 1646), 7–8.

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98. Governor Stapleton to the Council for Trade and Plantations, Nevis, June 18, 1673, in Sainsbury, W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers [CSP], Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1669–1674: Preserved in Her Majesty’s Public Record Office (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1889), 501. 99. In 1641, Dutch soldiers were imprisoned in Havana, Cartagena, Santo Domingo, Caracas, Cumaná, and Cumanagoto. See WIC, Chamber of Amsterdam, to the States General, Amsterdam, November 20, 1641, in “Missieven betreffende de West-Ind. Compagnie, 1641 en 1645 (Archief Van Hilten),” Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 3 (1880), 361. 100. L’Honoré Naber, Reisebeschreibungen, 1: 69. 101. NAN, Collectie Sweers 8, fols. 208–211. The States General discussed his report in late 1644. See NAN, SG 4845, resolutions of the States General, December 1, 1644. For the revolt in Maranhão, see Meireles, Holandeses no Maranhão, 108–121. 102. Francisco Guerra, “Medicine in Dutch Brazil 1624–1654,” in Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen 1604–1679: A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil. Essays on the Occasion of the Tercentenary of his Death, ed. Ernst van den Boogaart, in collaboration with Hendrik Richard Hoetink and Peter James Palmer Whitehead (’s-Gravenhage: Johan Maurits van Nassau Stichting, 1979), 482. 103. Guglielmo Piso, De Indiae Utriusque Re Naturali et Medica (Amstelaedami: Ludovicus et Daniel Elzevirios, 1658), 326. 104. Articulen, ende ordonnantien ter vergaderinge vande Negenthiene der Generale Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie geresumeert ende ghearresteert (1641). These amounts were identical with those in the VOC 1634 ordinance. See A. Bijl, De Nederlandse convooidienst: De maritieme bescherming van koopvaardij en zeevisserij tegen piraten en oorlogsgevaar in het verleden (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1951), 138–139. The amounts handed out in the Dutch navy from 1645 onward differed. Eight hundred guilders were paid for the loss of both eyes, 400 for the loss of both legs, 250 for the right arm, and 200 for the left arm. The loss of hands and feet was also indemnified. See Arnold E. Leuftink, De geneeskunde bij ‘s lands oorlogsvloot in de 17e eeuw (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1952), 126. 105. Among them were Jan Willemsz Houwer, who lost a thumb, and Gabriel Corseij, who lost an index finger. See NAN, SG 5765, petitions to the States General of G. de Scaghen, The Hague, June 10, 1655, and F. Duijst van Voorhoudt, The Hague, June 15, 1655. 106. SAA, acta Classis Amsterdam 379: 40, petition of Christoffel Cornelisz, September 17, 1640. 107. Leuftink, Geneeskunde, 53–54. 108. Daniel de Iongh, Het krijgswezen onder de Oostindische Compagnie (’s-Gravenhage: Van Stockum en Zoon, 1950), 84–85. 109. The demand for masons and carpenters in Luanda was so pressing that the WIC recruited them among the soldiers serving in Brazil. See Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 705. 110. See, for example, de Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 1: 70–71, 91, 95, 106, 108, 114; 4: 77, 153–154, 223, 250. 111. Ronald Prud’homme van Reine, Rechterhand van Nederland: Biografie van Michiel Adriaenszoon de Ruyter, 5th ed. (Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 2007), 285.

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112. Johannes Baers, Olinda, ghelegen int Landt van Brasil, in de Capitania van Phernambuco, met Mannelijke dapperheyd ende groote couragie inghenomen, ende geluckelijck verovert op den 16. Februarij A.o 1630 (Amsterdam: Hendrick Laurentsz, 1630), 16; Johannes Cornelis de Jonge, Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche zeewezen, 6 vols. (’s-Gravenhage and Amsterdam: Gebroeders Van Cleef, 1833–1848), 3-2: 301. Sailors were also used on occasion to defend colonies against foreign invaders, as in Paraíba in 1636. See Elias Herckmans to Constantijn Huygens, Frederica de Paraíba, December 9, 1636, in Jacob Adolf Worp, ed., De briefwisseling van Constantijn Huygens (1608–1687), 6 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1913), 2: 215. 113. De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 1: 70–71. 114. Rômulo Luiz Xavier do Nascimento, “O Desconforto da Governabilidade: Aspectos da administração no Brasil holandês (1630–1644)” (PhD diss., Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2008), 179. 115. GAR, ONA 185, 190/253, Act of April 8, 1633. 116. Governor C. van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck to the directors of the Society of Suriname, Suriname, August 24, 1684, in R. Bijlsma, “De brieven van gouverneur Van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck aan directeuren der Sociëteit van Suriname uit het jaar 1684,” De West-Indische Gids 7 (1925–26), 179. 117. WIC directors to Petrus Stuyvesant, Amsterdam, April 15, 1650, in Berthold Fernow, ed., Documents Relating to the History of the Early Colonial Settlements Principally on Long Island (Albany: Weed, Parsons, and Co., 1883), 123; NAN, Collectie Radermacher 542, minutes of WIC board meeting, September 1, 1634. 118. NAN, OWIC 8, Heren XIX to Johan Maurits and the High Council in Brazil, Amsterdam, July 1, 1640. 119. The same was true for sailors in the merchant marine. See Placard of governor and policy council of Suriname, March 12, 1670, in Jacobus Thomas de Smidt and To van der Lee, eds., West-Indisch plakaatboek: Plakaten, ordonnantiën en andere wetten, uitgevaardigd in Suriname, 1667–1816, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1973), 1: 58. On rare occasions, sailors received more than some trifles when they availed themselves of the spoils of maritime warfare. The greater the haul, the more precious the crumbs that ended up in the pockets of the rank and file. Never did silver sparkle in more hands than after Piet Heyn’s capture of the flota, although a battle off the coast of Brazil in 1640 also satisfied the sailors’ appetite for silver. See Johan Carel Marinus Warnsinck, Van vlootvoogden en zeeslagen, 3rd ed. (Amsterdam: P. N. van Kampen & Zoon, 1942), 154. 120. See, for example, NAN, SG 5766, “Calculatie wat sullen commen te costen 200 coppen soldaten in soldyen en vivres als ammonitie van oorloge, medicamenten etc,” c. 1657. 121. Insert in High Council in Brazil to the authorities in Angola, Recife, December 3, 1641, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 139. Soldiers from de Ruyter’s fleet who were incorporated into the garrison in Goree had been promised 50 guilders per month. See NAN, SG 4847, resolutions of the States General, January 11, 1668. 122. Jacobs, “Soldiers of the Company,” 22. 123. NAN, SG 4845, resolutions of the States General, February 10, 1648, December 11, 1649. 124. L’Honoré Naber, Reisebeschreibungen, 2: 126–127.

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125. Cornelis Daniël van Strien, British Travellers in Holland during the Stuart Period: Edward Browne and John Locke as Tourists in the United Provinces (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), 194. 126. Johan Hartog, Mogen de eilanden zich verheugen: Geschiedenis van het protestantisme op de Nederlandse Antillen ([Willemstad:] Kerkeraad van de Verenigde Protestantse Gemeente van Curaçao, 1969), 30. 127. Petitions of Luycas Dircksz and Evert Dircksz van der As, minutes of the Council of New Netherland, February/March 1656, in Charles T. Gehring, ed., Council Minutes, 1655–1656 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 224, 253. 128. Jaap Jacobs, Een zegenrijk gewest: Nieuw-Nederland in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Prometheus/Bert Bakker, 1999) [trans. as New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: Brill, 2005)], 75–76; Jacobs, “Soldiers of the Company,” 28–29; Van Grol, Grondpolitiek, 1: 128. 129. Miranda, “Gente de Guerra,” 261. 130. As early as 1634, two years after the first soldiers were discharged, there were two civil militia companies of eighty men each in Brazil. See Mello, Tempo dos flamengos, 52. For Suriname, see ZA, SZ 2035/178, Governor Julius Lichtenbergh to the States of Zeeland, Suriname, August 30, 1669. 131. NAN, OWIC 55, Johan Maurits and council to the Heren XIX, Recife, May 7, 1640; “Sommier discours over de staet vande vier geconquesteerde capitanias Parnambuco, Itamarica, Paraiba ende Rio Grande, inde noorderdeelen van Brasil,” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 2 (1879), 289. 132. Charles Ralph Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 132, 145; José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, ed., Fontes para a história do Brasil holandês, 2 vols. (Recife: MinC- Secretaria da Cultura, 1985), 1: 218; “Sommier discours,” 288; NAN, OWIC 9, Heren XIX to the directors in Luanda, November 30, 1644; Heren XIX to the directors in Luanda, Amsterdam, July 6, 1645, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 703. To further increase the output of foodstuffs, five WIC slave-trade commissioners suggested in October 1646 that Angolan slaves awaiting shipment should till the land. See Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 860–861. 133. Moreau, Histoire des derniers troubles, 162–163. 134. See for example, Klaas Ratelband, Vijf dagregisters van het kasteel São Jorge da Mina (Elmina) aan de Goudkust (1645–1647) (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1953), 11n. 4, 46n. 1, 141–142; Moreau, Histoire des derniers troubles, 153–154; Albert Eekhof, De Hervormde Kerk in Noord-Amerika (1624–1664), 2 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1913), 1: 120. 135. Eekhof, Hervormde Kerk, 1: 144–145. 136. Ratelband, Vijf dagregisters, 141–142. 137. Placcaet ende ordonnantie vande […] Staten Generael […] tegens wech-loopers die hun in dienst vande Oost ofte West-Indische Compaignien begeven hebbende, verloop (s’Graven-haghe: wed. ende erfg. H.J. van Wouw, 1625). See also NAN, SG 5751, WIC directors Albert Koenraats, Ph. Doublet, and Jacob Hamel to the States General, received March 22, 1625. 138. Van Winter, Kamer Stad en Lande, 118; NAN, OWIC 47, Admiral Maerten Thijssen to the Heren XIX, Recife, November 7, 1631. 139. Caspar Schmalkalden, Brasil Holandês, 2 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Index, 1998), 1: 144.

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140. María Ximena Urbina Carrasco, La Frontera de arriba en Chile Colonial: Interacción hispano-indigena en el territorio entre Valdivia y Chiloé e imaginario de sus bordes geográficos, 1600–1800 (Valparaíso: Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, 2009), 78. 141. Cort, Bondigh ende Waerachtigh Verhael Van ’t schandelijck over-geven ende verlaten vande voorname Conquesten van Brasil, Onder de Regeeringe vande Heren Wouter van Schonenburgh, President, Hendrick Haecx, Hoogen Raet, ende Sigismondus van Schoppe, Luytenant Generael over de Militie, 1654 (Middelburgh: Thomas Dircksz van Brouwershaven, 1655); Lief-hebber, Iournael ofte kort discours nopende de rebellye ende verradelijcke desseynen der Portugesen, alhier in Brasil voorgenomen, ’t welck in Junio 1645 is ondeckt. Ende wat vorder daer nae ghepasseert is, tot den 28. April 1647 (s.l.: Jan Jacobsz, 1647). 142. Moreau, Histoire des derniers troubles, 162–166. 143. Wim Buijze, Georg Everhard Rumphius’ reis naar Portugal 1645–1648: Een onderzoek (Den Haag: Buijze, 2002), 101–102. 144. Willem Johannes van Hoboken, “Een troepentransport naar Brazilië in 1647,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 62 (1949), 102. 145. NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, November 15, 1649. This fleet of six ships and six yachts reached Recife in May 1650. See Cornelis van de Haar, De diplomatieke betrekkingen tussen de Republiek en Portugal, 1640–1661 (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1961), 121. 146. De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 2: 153; L’Honoré Naber, Reisebeschreibungen, 2: 64, 73. See also Kenneth F. Kiple and Virginia H. Kiple, “Deficiency Diseases in the Caribbean,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11, no. 2 (1980), 207. 147. In January 1634, 2,571 healthy and 414 sick soldiers were counted (a sick ratio of 13.8 percent), and in August of that year 3,379 soldiers were listed as healthy and 600 as sick (15.0 percent). See NAN, SG 5753, “Lijste van de Compaignien in Brasilien,” January 4, 1634, insert in Sigismund van Schoppe to the States General, Antônio Vaz, August 30, 1634. See also a document sent to the WIC, Recife, before May 27, 1641, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 31. Conditions were better in 1649, when 367 of 3,611 men (10.2 percent) were sick. See NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten, 12564.34, insert in President and council of Brazil to the States General, Mauritia, September 14, 1649. 148. Ratelband, Vijf dagregisters, 307; Guerra, “Medicine in Dutch Brazil,” 476. 149. Anne Doedens and Henk Looijesteijn, eds., Op jacht naar Spaans Zilver: Het scheepsjournaal van Willem van Brederode, kapitein der mariniers in de Nassause vloot (1623–1626) (Hilversum: Verloren, 2008), 66; Guerra, “Medicine in Dutch Brazil,” 478, 488; Piso, Indiae Utriusque, 40; Michael Craton, “Death, Disease and Medicine on Jamaican Slave Plantations: The Example of Worthy Park, 1767–1838,” Histoire Social/Social History 9 (1976), 246. 150. SAA, ACA 224, comforter of the sick Johannes Walrave to the Classis Amsterdam, Fort Amsterdam, Curaçao, July 8, 1649. For the spread of yellow fever in the Caribbean in these years, see John Robert McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 64. 151. One ship en route from the Netherlands to São Tomé was hit by scurvy during a five-week period spent in the doldrums. See NAN, SG 9411, Bartolomeus Wouters and F. van Capelle to the High and Secret Council in Brazil, aboard the

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Walcheren at São Tomé, n.d. [c. 1642]. For the devastation caused by scurvy among soldiers serving at home, see De Graaf, Oorlog, mijn arme schapen, 505–506. Ignorant of the real cause of scurvy, Nicolaes Witsen attributed the disease to the phenomenon of doldrums itself. See Scheeps-bouw en bestier (1671), 410. 152. Carla Rahn Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain: Imperial Defense in the Early Seventeenth Century (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 172; L’Honoré Naber and Wright, Piet Heyn en de zilvervloot, cix. 153. Calculated on the basis of De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 2: 115, 127. 154. Mello, Tempo dos flamengos, 41–43; Hendrik Leonard Houtzager, “Paulus Barbette: Een vernieuwend geneesheer in 17de-eeuws Amsterdam,” Ons Amsterdam 42, no. 10 (1990), 267. On theoretical grounds, Cornelis van de Voorde, a medical author, even argued against the use of lime or orange juice: Leuftink, Geneeskunde, 110. For the destructive effects of scurvy in history, see Kenneth J. Carpenter, The History of Scurvy and Vitamin C (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 155. Phillips, Six Galleons, 172–180; Voorbeijtel Cannenburg, Reis om de wereld, 161; Examination of “Antonio Juan,” Concepción, November 23, 1643, in Colección de Historiadores de Chile y de documentos relativos a la historia nacional, vol. 45: Los holandeses en Chile (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Universitaria, 1923), 415–416. 156. Stephen Snelders, Vrijbuiters van de heelkunde: Op zoek naar medische kennis in de tropen, 1600–1800 (Amsterdam and Antwerpen: Uitgeverij Atlas, 2012), 60. 157. Ottsen, Journael van de reis naar Zuid-Amerika, lvii, cxl. 158. Alfred de Booy, ed., De derde reis van de V.O.C. onder het beleid van admiraal Paulus van Caerden uitgezeild in 1606, 2 vols. (’s-Gravenhage; Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 1: 99–100, 150; Margot E. van Opstall, ed. De reis van de vloot van Pieter Willemsz Verhoeff naar Azië 1607–1612 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1992), 204; Klaas Ratelband, ed., Reizen naar West-Afrika van Pieter van den Broecke 1605–1614 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), 82–83; Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, ed., “’t Leven en bedrijff van vice-admirael De With, zaliger,” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 47 (1926), 84; De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 1: 69, 158–159. Annobom was not completely out of bounds later in the century. See NAN, Aanwinsten, Eerste Afdeling 940, fol. 25, Journal of Jan Jacob Beer, supercargo on the flute St. Jan de Dooper. Likewise, Dutch ships continued to avail themselves of oranges and lemons in São Antonio. See Ben Teensma, ed., Suiker, verfhout en tabak: Het Braziliaanse Handboek van Johannes de Laet (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2009), 56. 159. Voorbeijtel Cannenburg, Reis om de wereld, lxvii–lxxi, lxxxvii, 34. 160. Adam Jones, “Sources on Early Sierra Leone (22): The Visit of a Dutch Fleet in 1625,” Africana Research Bulletin 15, no. 2 (1986), 53. 161. Verhoog and Keulmans, Reis van Michiel Adriaanszoon de Ruyter, 68. 162. NAN, OWIC 47, Servatius Carpentier, Diederick van Waerdenburgh, Johannes van Walbeeck, and Marten Thijssen to the board of XIX [undated, c. November 1631]. See also Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos, 41–45. This island, visited by Dutch ships since the early part of the century, was a patroonship owned by Michiel Pauw. See Maria Emília Madeira Santos, “O problema da segurança das rotas e a concorrência luso-holandesa antes de 1620,” Revista da Universidade de Coimbra 23 (1985), 135; Ernst van den Boogaart, “Morrer e viver em Fernando de Noronha, 1630–1654,” in Viver e morrer no Brasil holandês, ed. Marcos Galindo (Recife: Massangana, 2005), 19–46.

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163. NAN, Aanwinsten 405, fol. 310. 164. Snelders, Vrijbuiters van de heelkunde, 62. 165. John Horace Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Exploration and Settlement, 1450 to 1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981 [1963]), 74. 166. Bartolomeu Guerreiro, Iornada dos Vassalos da Coroa de Portugal, pera se recuperar a Cidade do Salvador, na Bahya de todos os Santos, tomada pollos Olandezes, a oito de Mayo de 1624. & recuperada ao primeiro de Mayo de 1625 (Lisboa: Mattheus Pinheiro, 1625), 64; Guerra, “Medicine in Dutch Brazil,” 474, 477. 167. Ratelband, Vijf dagregisters, lxxi. 168. Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 71; John Vogt, Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast, 1469–1682 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979), 176–177. 169. Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 49. 170. Johan Maurits and Council to the Heren XIX, Recife, February 28, 1642, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 230; Eekhof, Hervormde Kerk, 1: 144. 171. Guerra, “Medicine in Dutch Brazil,” 477. 172. Cornelis Nieulant and Pieter Moortamer to Johan Maurits and the Council of Brazil, Luanda, April 19, 1642; Cornelis Nieulant to Johan Maurits and the High Council in Brazil, Luanda, December 17, 1642, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 272–273, 371. Socks and shoes were also conspicuously absent from Fort Mauritius in Brazil in 1646–1647 and in the Tobago garrison in 1668. See Benjamin Nicolaas Teensma, “Verbrokkeld, verpuind, verwaaid: de laatste maanden van Fort Mauritius in Nederlands Brazilië: November 1646–April 1647,” unpublished ms., 2015; ZA, SZ 2035 /75, Abel Thisso to the States of Zeeland, Nova Walcheren [Tobago], October 2, 1668. 173. Lieutenant Colonel James Henderson to Johan Maurits, Luanda, September 29, 1641; Johan Maurits and the Council of Brazil to the Heren XIX, Recife, February 28, 1642; C. Nieulant and P. Moortamer to the Council in Brazil, Luanda, late May 1642, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 116, 231, 294. Witte de With’s secours of 1647 sailed with one doctor and five surgeons: NAN, Raad van State, Commissieboeken, 1527, fols. 221–222. 174. Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 236. 175. Johan van Beverwijck, Inleydinge tot de Hollantsche genees-middelen. Ofte Kort Bericht, Dat elck landt genoegh heeft, tot onderhoudt van het Leven, ende de Gesontheyt der Inwoonders (Dordrecht: Jasper Gorissz., 1642), 8, 29. The same argument was made by contemporary Englishmen. See Joyce E. Chaplin, “Natural Philosophy and Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies,” William and Mary Quarterly, ser. 3, 54, no. 1 (1997), 246. 176. NAN, SG 5756, Abraham Duijrcop, chief apothecary in Brazil, to Michael and Jacob Block, chief apothecaries in Amsterdam, Recife, April 27, 1642. 177. Michel Morineau, “Rations militaires et rations moyennes en Hollande au XVIIe siècle,” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 18, no. 3 (1963), 521–531. 178. Clemente Maria da Silva-Nigra, “A Invasão Hollandeza na Bahia 1624– 1625 pela testemunha ocular Johann Georg Aldenburg 1631,” Anaes do Arquivo Publico da Bahia 26 (1938): 114. 179. Johann Gregor Aldenburgk, Reise nach Brasilien, 1623–1626 (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1930), 49.

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180. L’Honoré Naber, Reisebeschreibungen, 1: 57. After the Dutch conquest of Pernambuco, the Heren XIX recommended that every ship bound for Brazil carry a few cats to fight the rat problem: Mello, Tempo dos flamengos, 157. 181. L’Honoré Naber, Reisebeschreibungen, 1: 82–83, 87. 182. Antoine Maduro, ed., Documenten uit de jaren 1639 en 1640 welke zich in de “Archivo General de Indias” te Sevilla bevinden en betrekking hebben op de door de Spanjaarden beraamde plannen om het eiland Curaçao op de Nederlanders te heroveren (Curaçao: Drukkerij Scherpenheuvel, 1961), 29, 32, 39, 41. 183. ZA, SZ 2035/235, Governor Pieter Versterre to the States of Zeeland, Suriname, December 29, 1672. 184. Mello, Tempo dos flamengos, 41–44. 185. NAN, SG 5752, extract from the resolutions of the town government of Utrecht, October 21, 1630; commissioners of the WIC to the States General, November 9, 1630; WIC board to the States General, received November 29, 1630; NAN, SG 5753, burgomasters, aldermen and council of Nijmegen to the States General, November 30, 1630. 186. Utrechts Archief, Huis Amerongen 5124, M. van Ceulen and Johan Gijselling to the admiralty of Amsterdam?, Recife, 1633; “Sommier discours,” 296. 187. Stephan Carl Behaim to Johannes Morian, January 16, 1636, in Ozment, Three Behaim Boys, 270. 188. Van Winter, Kamer Stad en Lande, 137–138. 189. NAN, SG 9410, report of deputies for WIC affairs, November 30, 1641. More than three years later, pigs were indeed being bred. See Wätjen, Holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien, 282. The Dutch commander at “Cabo Verde” reported that no cows or oxen thrived there, only goats. See resolutions of the WIC, Chamber of Amsterdam, April 18, 1636, in Hamelberg, Documenten, 30. 190. Proceedings of the West India Company, Chamber of Zeeland, June 30, 1642, in British Guiana Boundary, Appendix, 129. A ship that was apparently chartered by the Maze Chamber left via Plymouth for Newfoundland; from there it was to ship fish to Pernambuco. See GAR, ONA 257/477, Act of June 9, 1642. 191. Dennis J. Maika, “Commerce and Community: Manhattan Merchants in the Seventeenth Century” (PhD diss., New York University, 1995), 35. 192. Maria Thetis Nunes, Sergipe Colonial (Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, Universidade Federal de Sergipe, 1989), 76–77. 193. De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 2: 48. 194. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.6, S. Carpentier, Jacob Stachover, Sigismund van Schoppe and Christoffel Artichewsky to the WIC, Philippa in Frederickstadt, Paraíba, January 4, 1635; “Journaux et Nouvelles tirées de la bouche de Marins Hollandais et Portugais de la Navigation aux Antilles et sur les Côtes du Brésil: Manuscrit de Hessel Gerritsz traduit pour la Bibliothèque Nationale de Rio de Janeiro par E.J. Bondam,” Annaes da Bibliotheca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro 29 (1907), 113–114; Wätjen, Holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien, 283–284. 195. In 1668, the governor of Dutch Tobago ordered the free settlers to grow cassava for the garrison. In addition, Dutch-produced cassava pans and cassava graters were in use in early Dutch Suriname. See Lodewijk Augustinus Henri Christiaan Hulsman, “Nederlands Amazonia: Handel met indianen tussen 1580 en 1680” (PhD

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diss., University of Amsterdam, 2009), 134–135, 183–184, 221; ZA, SZ 2035/15–16, Abel Thisso to the States of Zeeland, Nova Walcheren, April 30, 1668. 196. NAN, OWIC 54, no. 9, Governor and Council of Brazil to the Board of Nineteen, Recife, March 5, 1639; Mello, Tempo dos flamengos, 150–154. Conditions on the other side of the front, in Portuguese-held Salvador, were similar. In view of the precarious food situation, and being threatened by attacks from Amerindians and privateers, the government of Portuguese Brazil ordered an increase in cassava output. See Frédéric Mauro, Le Portugal, le Brésil et l’Atlantique au XVIIe siècle (1570–1670): Étude économique (Paris: Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, 1983), 304. 197. Teensma, “Verbrokkeld, verpuind, verwaaid.” 198. NAN, SG 5764, Sigismund von Schoppe to the States General, Mauritsstad, December 20, 1652. 199. Nieuhof, Gedenkweerdige Brasiliaense zee- en lantreize, 44. 200. Report by the Council of Pernambuco to the XIX. Recife, June 12, 1643, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 433; Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 193. 201. Caspar van Baerle, The History of Brazil under the Governorship of Johan Maurits of Nassau, 1636–1644, trans. Blanche T. van Berckel-Ebeling Koning (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 36. 202. Moreau, Histoire des derniers troubles, 87–88. 203. Augustus van Quelen, Kort Verhael Vanden staet van Fernanbuc, Toe-ge-eygent de E. Heeren Gecommitteerde ter Vergaderinghe vande Negenthiene, inde Geoctroyeerde WestIndische Compagnie, ter Camere van Amstelredam (Amsterdam, 1640). 204. Caspar Croesen to the Council in Brazil, c. May 1643, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 613; Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 158, 191, 193; Nascimento, “Desconforto da Governabilidade,” 185–186. 205. NAN, SG 9411, P.J. Bas to the WIC, São Luís de Maranhão, November 15, 1642. 206. Frank Ibold, Jens Jäger, and Detlev Kraack, eds., Das Memorial und Jurenal des Peter Hansen Hajstrup (1624–1672) (Neumünster: Wachholtz Verlag, 1995), 76. See also Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, “Het dagboek van Hendrik Haecxs, lid van den Hoogen Raad van Brazilië (1645–1654),” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 46 (1925), 235; Extract ende Copye van verscheyde brieven en schriften, 5. Voor-Looper Brenghende oprecht bescheyt uyt Amsterdam, Aen een voortreffelijcken Heer in ’s Gravenhaghe, Weghens de Verraderije in Brasil, Met het Schip Zeelandia, afgevaerdicht den twaelfden December 1645 van Pharnambuco (s.l., 1646). 207. Diogo Lopes de Santiago, História da guerra de Pernambuco e feitos memoráveis do mestre de campo João Fernandes Vieira, herói digno de eterna memória, primeiro aclamador da guerra (Recife: Governo de Pernambuco, 1984), 387–388. 208. Nieuhof, Gedenkweerdige Brasiliaense zee- en lantreize, 175–176; Amsterdamsche veerman op Middelburgh (Vlissingen: Jacob Jansz Pieck, 1650), 8. 209. L’Honoré Naber, “Dagboek van Hendrik Haecxs,” 183. 210. Quoted in Buijze, Georg Everhard Rumphius’ reis, 64. 211. Walter Breeman van der Hagen, Het leven en de daden van Witte Cornelisz. De With, ed. Anne Doedens (Franeker: Uitgeverij Van Wijnen, 2008), 172. 212. NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, August 2 and September 18, 1649. 213. Breeman van der Hagen, Leven en de daden, 174.

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214. Wätjen, Holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien, 195–196. 215. NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, January 24, 1648. 216. Otto van Rees, Geschiedenis der Staathuishoudkunde in Nederland tot het einde der achttiende eeuw, 2 vols. (Utrecht: Kemink en Zoon, 1865–1868), 2: 192. 217. NAN, SG 5752, WIC, Chamber of Amsterdam, to the States General, received September 23, 1630. 218. The provinces, similarly, defaulted on their payments to the admiralties. They were 1.9 million guilders in arrears in 1626 and 4.1 million in 1635. See Marjolein Catherina ’t Hart, “In Quest for Funds: Warfare and State Formation in the Netherlands” (PhD diss., University of Leiden, 1989), 80. 219. Van Rees, Geschiedenis der Staathuishoudkunde, 192. 220. Gelderland, Utrecht, and Overijssel continued to default on their payments for the aid that had been sent to Brazil. See NAN, SG 5766, Philips Doublet to the States General, The Hague, August 13, 1657; NAN, SG 4846, Resolutions of the States General, November 18, 1658 and March 13, 1659. The States of Zeeland had started making payments only after the arrival of a delegation from the Heren XIX that had begged them to following the outbreak of the Brazilian revolt in 1645. See Alexander Bick, “Governing the Free Sea: The Dutch West India Company and Commercial Politics, 1618–1645” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012), 75–76. Holland was the least to blame of all the provinces, despite the opposition in Amsterdam to the financing of the war by the States General. The city municipal board had voted as early as 1632 against the adoption by the states of thirty-six army companies in Pernambuco. See Frits Snapper, “Oorlogsinvloeden op de overzeese handel van Holland 1551–1719” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 1959), 83. 221. NAN, SG 4845, resolutions of the States General, July 23, 1651. 222. Lieuwe van Aitzema, Saken van staet en oorlogh, in, ende omtrent de Vereenigde Nederlanden, 6 vols. (’s Graven-Haghe: Johan Veely, Johan Tongerloo, ende Jasper Doll, 1669), 3: 88–89. 223. NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, July 24 and October 29, 1651. 224. See, for instance, Haerlems Schuyt-praetjen op ’t Redres vande West-Indische Compagnie (1649). 225. Hotso Spanninga, Gulden Vrijheid?: Politieke cultuur en staatsvorming in Friesland, 1600–1640 ((Hilversum: Verloren, 2012), 255, 315–336. By May 1640, the Friesland debt still amounted to more than 4 million guilders. See Van Aitzema, Saken van staet en oorlog, 2: 733–734. 226. NAN, Collectie Radermacher 542, minutes of the Heren XIX, March 27 and 28, 1634; NAN, SG 5763, Stadholder William Frederick to the States General, Aix-la-Chapelle, September 9, 1651; Vertoogh, over den toestant der West-Indische Compagnie, in haer begin, midden, ende eynde, met een remedie tot redres van deselve. Vol. 1 (Rotterdam: Johannes van Roon, 1651); A. Hallema, “Friesland en de voormalige compagnieën op Oost en West,” West-Indische Gids 15, no. 1 (1934), 81–96. Friesland had still paid nothing in 1656. See NAN, SG 5766, memorandum, March 28, 1656. Nor did the Frisians pay for expeditions to Brazil after 1647. See resolutions of the States of Holland, September 16, 1650, in Resolutien van de Heeren Staten van Hollandt en Westvrieslandt, genomen zedert den aenvang der bedieninge van den Heer Johan de Witt, beginnende met den tweeden Aug. 1653 ende eyndigende met den negentienden Dec. 1668

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(Amsterdam: J. Oosterwyk, Steenhouwer en Uytweri, 1719), 275–276; NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, June 15, 16, and 30, and October 11, 1651, the States of Friesland to the delegates of the States General, April 25, 1651; NAN, SG 4846, resolutions of the States General, February 13, 1654. In spite of the attitude of the provincial states, the Friesland Admiralty sent two men-of-war to Brazil in 1650 at the request of the States General. See NAN, SG 5762, C.G. Brouwer and Gisb. de Wickersloot to the States General, January 12, 1650; NAN, SG 4845, resolutions of the States General, March 7, 1650. 227. NAN, SG 5764, statement by the States of Friesland, “op t’ Landts Huys” (Leeuwarden), March 11, 1653. 228. NAN, SG 5766, States of Friesland to the States General, Leeuwarden, November 17, 1656. 229. Wim Hüsken, “Dagelijkse beslommeringen in het Staatse Leger (1606– 1642),” De zeventiende eeuw 10 (1994), 107. 230. In the East Indies, Dutch captains did have their own capital, however small, from which they advanced the soldiers’ outfits. See De Iongh, Krijgswezen, 81. On rare occasions, the WIC may have operated in this way. See Miranda, “Gente de Guerra,” 78. The lack of capital among Dutch army officers did prevent the kind of excesses seen in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War, when many provisions did not reach the soldiers because officers ran a highly profitable business in foodstuffs. See Bernhard R. Kroener, “Soldat oder Soldateska? Programmatischer Aufriß einer Sozialgeschichte militärischer Unterschichten in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Militärgeschichte: Probleme—Thesen—Wege, ed. Manfred Messerschmidt, Klaus A. Maier, Werner Rahn and Bruno Thoß (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag-Anstalt, 1982), 106. 231. H. L. Zwitzer, “De militie van den staat”: Het leger van de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden (Amsterdam: Van Soeren, 1991), 91–99; Olaf van Nimwegen, “Deser landen crijchsvolck”: Het Staatse leger en de militaire revoluties (1588–1688) (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker: 2006), 67–70. 232. Olaf van Nimwegen and Ronald Prud’homme van Reine, “De organisatie en financiering van leger en vloot van de Republiek,” in De Tachtigjarige Oorlog: Van opstand naar geregelde oorlog, 1568–1648, ed. Petra Groen (Amsterdam: Boom, 2013), 370–372. 233. NA SG 5766, Bontemantel and David van Baerle, WIC Chamber of Amsterdam to the States General, January 13, 1656. 234. Wätjen, Holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien, 197–206. 235. Rita Krommen, “Mathias Beck und die Westindische Compagnie: Zur Herrschaft der Niederländer im kolonialen Ceará,” Arbeitspapiere zur Lateinamerikaforschung 2, no. 1 (2001), 74; NAN, SG 5760, President and Council of Brazil to the States General, Recife, July 9, 1648. This decision was long in coming. As early as 1637, the lieutenant colonel had told the Zeeland Chamber that once Itamaracá were captured, many soldiers in his regiment would be eager to leave the company service and till the land or become artisans. See Ooghen-Salve tot verlichtinghe, van alle Participanten, so vande Oost, Ende West-Indische Compaignien, Mitsgaders verscheyden notabele Consideratien, aengaende de Vereeninghe van de Oost- ende -West-Indische Compaignien, met malkanderen (’s-Gravenhage: Lieven de Lange, 1644), 17. 236. That occurred in November 1649: NAN, SG 4845, resolutions of the States General, July 9, 1650.

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237. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.29, no. 9, W. Schonenborgh, Hendrik Haecxs, and M. van Goch, president and councilors of Brazil, to the States General, February 15, 1650. 238. Corte ende bondige deductie van redenen, dienende tot narechtinge van Hare Hoog Mogenden de Heeren Staten Generael der Vereeniche Nederlanden (’s-Gravenhage: Henricus Hondius, 1657), 26. 239. Ibid.; NAN, SG 5765, “Corte deductie vervattende de redenen, dewelcke fondeeren het recht van Haer Ho: Mog: Militie in Brazijll” (late 1654). One soldier even accused the WIC of selling provisions to the Portuguese. See Moreau, Histoire des derniers troubles, 19–20. 240. Cort, Bondigh ende Waerachtigh Verhael. Perhaps it was telling that that the councilors had neglected to assemble provisions on the eve of the first Guararapes campaign. They sprang into action only when Witte de With notified them of the lack of bread, meat, and bacon. See Breeman van der Hagen, Leven en de daden, 164. The soldiers’ contempt for the High Council is also addressed in [Cornelis Jansz,] Schuering voor Arnoldus Montanus op sijn Boek genaamd Beroerden Oceaan. Waer in aangewesen werden verscheyde sinneloose woorden, vuyle misgrepen en andere onbillijkheden in ’t voor-seyde Boek gepleegd (Amsterdam: Cornelis Jansz, 1656.), 24. 241. Some officers in Brazil acted in the same way. See “Memorie door den Kolonnel Artichofsky, bij zijn vertrek uit Brazilië in 1637 overgeleverd aan Graaf Maurits en zijnen Geheimen Raad,” Kroniek van het Historisch Genootschap gevestigd te Utrecht, ser. 5, 25, no. 5 (1869), 326–327; Ibold, Jäger, and Kraack, Memorial und Jurenal, 98. A letter sent from Brazil to the States General in 1648 also links the nonpayment of one month’s wages to the refusal of the soldiers to fight at Guararapes. See NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten, 12564.20, inv. no. 32: unsigned letter, Recife, May 13, 1648. The governor of Suriname also collected the wages of many runaway or deceased soldiers. See ZA, SZ 2035/283, “1668–1678 rekening tot laste van den heer commandeur Pieter Versterre salgr.” 242. Cort, Bondigh ende Waerachtigh Verhael. 243. Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 227; NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.34, President and Council of Brazil to the States General, Mauritia, January 23, 1651. 244. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.34, president and council of Brazil to the States General, Recife, January 25 and March 20, 1651. A shipment of clothes in 1653 contained only half the promised six hundred shirts for soldiers, sailors, and civilian personnel. See NAN, SG 5765, W. Schonenborch and H. W. Haecx to the States General, The Hague, October 9, 1654. Various members of the Jewish community bought goods for resale to the militia in these last years of Dutch Brazil. Abraham Cohen, Davi Mendes, Sara Salon, and Ishac Senior Coronel supplied clothing, Abraão Israel shoes, and Pedro de Crasto and Isaac da Fonseca both. See Egon Wolff and Frieda Wolff, Dicionário Biográfico, 7 vols. (Rio de Janeiro, ERCA: 1986–1992), 1: 38, 40, 44, 56, 97, 116, 174. 245. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.43, memorandum from the joint officers and soldiers who served in Brazil to the States General, May 25, 1655. The allusion to soldiers and officers living between hunger and sword in Brazil also appeared in Seeckere remonstrantie, aen hare Hoogh Moghende de Heeren Staten Generael der Vereenighde Nederlanden, overgegeven door de gesamentlijcke aenwesende Gedeputeerdens

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uyt Brazyl: Tenderende tot behoudenisse van die glorieuse konincklijcke conquesten (1657). The juxtaposition of hunger and sword may echo Jeremiah 14 and 15, but it does not refer to a specific passage. The complaints of the officers and soldiers echoed the judgment of an English soldier who served in the Dutch army at home. Thomas Raymond found that the life of the common soldier “is the most miserable in the world, and that not so much because his life is in danger—that is little or nothing— but for the terrible miseries he endures in hunger and nakedness, in hard marches and bad quarters. Godfrey Davies, ed., Autobiography of Thomas Raymond and Memoirs of the Family of Guise of Elmore, Gloucestershire (London: Offices of the Society, 1917), 43. 246. NAN, SG 5768, WIC directors H. Bontemantel and Jacobus Reijnst to the States General, undated; G. Thilmans and N. I. de Moraes, “Villault de Bellefond sur la côte occidentale d’Afrique. Les deux premières campagnes de l’Europe (1666– 1671),” Bulletin de l’Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire ser. 2, 38, no. 2 (1976), 270. 247. ZA, SZ 2035/215, commander Abel Thisso to the States of Zeeland, Tobago, March 25, 1670; Christian Buchet, La lutte pour l’espace caraïbe et la façade atlantique de l’Amérique Centrale et du Sud (1672–1763) (Paris: Librairie de l’Inde Éditeur, 1991), 149. 248. Northern Europeans experienced particularly severe winters in the 1640s. See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period,” American Historical Review 87, no. 5 (1982), 1264. 249. Buijze, Georg Everhard Rumphius’ reis, 58–59. 250. Van Hoboken, “Troepentransport,” 109; Moreau, Histoire des derniers troubles, 192–194. 251. NAN, SG 4845, Resolutions of the States General, May 2, 1648. 252. NAN, SG 7046, King Philip IV to Vicente Richard, Spain’s consul in Amsterdam, Madrid, August 20, 1654. 253. Nieuhof, Gedenkweerdige Brasiliaense zee- en lantreize, 154. 254. Moreau, Histoire des derniers troubles, 22–24; NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.6, Johan Maurits and Council in Brazil to the WIC, February 15, 1638. Eight companies of Dutchmen, totaling 255 men, had defected to the enemy side by November 1645. See Mello, Tempo dos flamengos, 138–139, 145. 255. Clinton Alfred Weslager, The Swedes and Dutch at New Castle: With Highlights in the History of the Delaware Valley, 1638–1664 (Wilmington: The Middle Atlantic Press, 1987), 169–170. The enemy camp at times actively pursued desertion, which could result in the passing on of secret information. See Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 177–178. 256. Van Grol, Grondpolitiek, 114–115 257. Ibid., 117–118. 258. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.34, president and council of Brazil to the States General, Recife, January 20 and February 8, 1651, and Mauritia, March 20, 1651. 259. General report from Recife to the WIC directors, February 26, 1648, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 948–949. The expedition occurred also no doubt in compliance with a request by the Heren XIX. See NAN, OWIC 10, Heren XIX to the president and High Council of Brazil, The Hague, January 18, 1648. 260. David Patrick Geggus, “Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789–1815,” in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean,

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ed. David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997): 25. 261. Van der Capellen, Gedenkschriften, 1: 554. In an entry of October 1629, van der Capellen remarked in response to the peace negotiations that the mariners would defect to “our enemies” or become enemies themselves. 262. Resolution of the States General, July 10, 1628, http://www.historici.nl/ Onderzoek/Projecten/BesluitenStaten-generaal1626–1651, accessed February 4, 2013. 263. NAN, SG 5752, WIC directors to the States General, received April 13, 1629; van der Capellen, Gedenkschriften, 1: 495. 264. NAN, SG 4845, resolutions of the States General, October 6, 1649. 265. NAN, SG 4845, resolutions of the States General, March 5, 1650. Veterans from Brazil also molested admiralty councilors in Rotterdam. See NAN, SG 5763, Willem Braber to the States General, Rotterdam, January 18, 1651. 266. Willem Sloot to Johan de Witt, Enkhuizen, May 11, 1660, in Nicolas Japikse, ed. Brieven aan Johan de Witt, vol. 12, 1660–1672, ed. Robert Fruin (Amsterdam: Johannes Müller, 1922), 12–13. 267. Van Aitzema, Saken van staet en oorlog, 3: 746–747; Johan E. Elias, “Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis onzer admiraliteiten ten tijde van den eersten Engelschen oorlog,” Bijdragen voor Vaderlandsche Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde, ser. 7, 4 (1934), 204n. 2. 268. “A Letter of Intelligence,” The Hague, August 14, 1654, in A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, vol. 2, 1654, ed. Thomas Birch (London: The Executor for the late Mr. Fletcher Gyles, Thomas Woodward, Charles Davis, 1742), 519. 269. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten, 12564.20, 127: President W. Schonenborch and councilors M. van Goch, H. Haecxs, and S. van Beaumont to the Heren XIX, Recife, July 9, 1648. 270. Van Hoboken, Witte de With in Brazilië, 106–107. Many of the mutineers did not dare return to the United Provinces, settling in Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon. See NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.40, inv. no. 1, information supplied by Joost Weisberger, The Hague, March 10, 1655. 271. Van Hoboken, Witte de With in Brazilië, 197. 272. Ibid, 201, 204. 273. Having initially authorized this, the High Council withdrew its support in fear of a Portuguese-English blockade of Recife. See van Hoboken, Witte de With in Brazilië, 219, 220, 224, 247. 274. Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 228, 233. 275. Van Hoboken, Witte de With in Brazilië, 91–92. 276. NAN, Hof van Holland 5252, report of Sigismund von Schoppe submitted to the States General, The Hague, July 29, 1654. A printed version appears in Elias Luzac, Hollands rijkdom behelzende den Oorsprong van den Koophandel en van de Magt van dezen Staat; de toeneemende vermeerdering van deszelfs Koophandel en Scheepvaart, 3 vols. (Leyden: Luzac en Van Damme, 1781), 2: 111–115. 277. Ibid., 2: 117. 278. “Relation of the First Settlement of St. Christophers and Nevis, by John Hilton, Storekeeper and Chief Gunner of Nevis,” in Vincent T. Harlow, ed., Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623–1667 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1925), 11.

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5. Interimperial Trade

1. Victor Enthoven, “An Assessment of Dutch Transatlantic Commerce, 1585–1817,” in Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817, ed. Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 422. 2. Mark Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595–1674 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 321. 3. John Hemming, “How Brazil Acquired Roraima,” Hispanic American Historical Review 70, no. 2 (1990): 298. 4. Janny Venema, Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 1652–1664 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2003), 163. 5. Johannes Gerard van Dillen, “De West-Indische Compagnie, het Calvinisme en de politiek,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 74 (1961), 161. 6. “Sommier discours over de staet vande vier geconquesteerde capitanias Parnambuco, Itamarica, Paraiba ende Rio Grande, inde noorderdeelen van Brasil,” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 2 (1879), 290–291. 7. Peter T. Bradley, The Lure of Peru: Maritime Intrusion into the South Sea, 1598– 1701 (London: Macmillan, 1989), 11. 8. Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade, 266. 9. Dennis Sullivan, The Punishment of Crime in Colonial New York: The Dutch Experience in Albany during the Seventeenth Century (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 177–183. 10. Stuyvesant, Sille and La Montagne to the WIC, New Amsterdam, August 11, 1656, in Martha Dickinson Shattuck, ed. New Netherland Papers, c. 1650–1660: From the Collected Papers of Hans Bontemantel, Director of the Amsterdam Chamber of the West India Company, Held by the New York Public Library, trans. Dingman Veersteeg (Albany, NY: New Netherland Research Center and the New Netherland Institute, 2011), 40. 11. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500–c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 67. 12. Resolutions of the States General, February 15, 1627, http://www.historici. nl/Onderzoek/Projecten/BesluitenStaten-generaal1626–1651, accessed February 4, 2013; Johannes de Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael van de Verrichtinghen der Gheoctroyeerde WestIndische Compagnie in derthien Boecken, ed. Samuel Pierre L’Honoré Naber, 4 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1931–1937), 1: 99, 153–158; NAN, SG 5481, request by Willem Jacobs Melcknap from Hoorn and Cornelis Adriaens Ackersloot from Amsterdam, 1617; Resolutions of the States General, October 18, 1617 and February 2, 1618, in Johannes Gradus Smit, ed., Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal, Nieuwe Reeks 1610–1670 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 243, 325; Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber and Irene A. Wright, eds., Piet Heyn en de Zilvervloot: Bescheiden uit Nederlandsche en Spaansche Archieven (Utrecht: Kemink & Zoon, 1928), 25. 13. Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, ed. Reisebeschreibungen von deutschen Beamten und Kriegsleuten im Dienst der niederländischen West- und Ost-Indischen Kompagnien 1602–1797, 15 vols. (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1930), 3: 84–85. 14. Robert Silverberg, The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1967), 355–356; A. Cabeliau, “Account of a Journey to Guiana and Trinidad in the Years 1597 and 1598,” in British Guiana Boundary, Arbitration with the United States of Venezuela: Appendix to the Case on Behalf of Her Britannic Majesty (London: Foreign Office, 1898), 21.

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15. Cornelis C. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1971), 57. 16. Quoted in George Edmundson, “The Dutch on the Amazon and Negro in the Seventeenth Century: Part II, Dutch Trade in the Basin of the Rio Negro,” English Historical Review 19 (1904), 7. 17. Charles McKew Parr, The Voyages of David de Vries: Navigator and Adventurer (New York: Crowell, 1969), 158; George Edmundson, “The Dutch in Western Guiana,” English Historical Review 16 (1901), 673. 18. Michael Georg de Boer, “Een Nederlandsche goudzoeker,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 18 (1903), 4–5, 13. 19. ’t Verheerlickte Nederland door d’Herstelde Zee-vaart (1659), 24. For the endeavor to find gold in Dutch Cayenne in 1663, see NAN, SG 5769, account of Q. Spranger, 1675. 20. Jan Marinus van der Linde, Surinaamse suikerheren en hun kerk: Plantagekolonie en handelskerk ten tijde van Johannes Basseliers, predikant en planter in Suriname, 1667–1689 (Wageningen: Veenman, 1966), 64. 21. The quest for silver and gold mines continued into the eighteenth century, as in Berbice. See Jan Jacob Hartsinck, Beschryving van Guiana, of de wilde kust in ZuidAmerica (Amsterdam: Gerrit Tielenburg, 1770), 320. It also persisted in the Dutch East Indies. See Denys Lombard, “Un expert “saxon” dans les mines d’or de Sumatra au XVIIème s.,” Archipel 2 (1971), 238. 22. Isaac S. Emmanuel and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1970), 38; Governor Mathias Beck to the WIC, Curaçao, July 28, 1657, in Charles T. Gehring and Jacob Adriaan Schiltkamp, eds., Curacao Papers 1640–1665, New Netherland Documents XVII (Interlaken, NY: Heart of the Lakes, 1987), 107; NAN, Aanwinsten 1361, Michiel ten Hove to Nicolaas ten Hove, April 30, 1664; Johannes Hermanus Jacobus Hamelberg, ed., Documenten behoorende bij “De Nederlanders op de West-Indische eilanden” (Amsterdam: Emmering, 1979), 87. 23. Paul Otto, The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 83. 24. “The Representation of New Netherland, 1650,” in Narratives of New Netherland 1609–1664, ed. John Franklin Jameson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 299; Jaap Jacobs, Een zegenrijk gewest: Nieuw-Nederland in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Prometheus/Bert Bakker, 1999) [trans. as New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: Brill, 2005)], 39. 25. José Antonio Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da Nação: Cristãos-novos e judeus em Pernambuco 1542–1654 (Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco and Editora Massangana, 1989), 272–273. The capture of Pernambuco may not have set off a gold fever, but there was no lack of self-described experts in precious metals requesting the WIC to pay for their passage to Brazil. See, for example, NAN, Collectie Radermacher 542, minutes of the meeting of the Heren XIX, April 1, 1634, request by Pouls Heemler van Neurenburch. 26. Examination of Caspar Paraoupaba, Andreus Francisco, Pieter Poty, Antony Guirawassauay, Antony Francisco, and Lauys Caspar, Amsterdam, March 20, 1628, in “Journaux et Nouvelles tirées de la bouche de Marins Hollandais et Portugais de la Navigation aux Antilles et sur les Côtes du Brésil: Manuscrit de Hessel Gerritsz

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traduit pour la Bibliothèque Nationale de Rio de Janeiro par E.J. Bondam,” Annaes da Bibliotheca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro 29 (1907), 173–174. For Ceará, see Ben Teensma, ed., Suiker, verfhout en tabak: Het Braziliaanse Handboek van Johannes de Laet (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2009), 76. For Paraíba, see Benjamin Nicolaas Teensma, “Het directoraat van dominee Jodocus van Stetten, anno 1645, over een veronderstelde zilvermijn aan de Rio Sucurú in Paraíba,” in Brazilië in de Nederlandse archieven (1624–1654): Oude West-Indische Compagnie: Correspondentie van de Heren XIX en de notulen van de Hoge en Secrete Raad van Brazilië, ed. Marianne L. Wiesebron (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2011), 24–47. 27. NAN, OWIC 65, Hans Sempsiell and Carel Helpagh to unknown, Fort Schonenborgh, May 3, 1649; NAN, SG 5763, President and Council of Brazil to the States General, Recife, August 22, 1651; NAN, SG 5763, memorandum of Huygens, lectum July 28, 1651; Rita Krommen, “Mathias Beck und die Westindische Compagnie: Zur Herrschaft der Niederländer im kolonialen Ceará,” Arbeitspapiere zur Lateinamerikaforschung 2, no. 1 (2001), 59–70. 28. Jacob le Maire to his brother-in-law, Amsterdam, November 9, 1654, in Thomas Birch, ed., A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, vol. 2, 1654, (London: The Executor for the late Mr. Fletcher Gyles, Thomas Woodward, Charles Davis, 1742), 700–701. 29. Peter Wolfgang Klein, De Trippen in de 17e eeuw: Een studie over het ondernemersgedrag op de Hollandse stapelmarkt (Assen: Van Gorcum & Co., 1965), 101. 30. Teensma, Suiker, verfhout en tabak, 160. 31. Caspar van Baerle, The History of Brazil under the Governorship of Johan Maurits of Nassau, 1636–1644, trans. Blanche T. van Berckel-Ebeling Koning (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 235–236. 32. Willem Voorbeijtel Cannenburg, De reis om de wereld van de Nassausche vloot, 1623–1626 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 71–72. 33. Minutes of the States of Holland, July 13, 1633, in Jannie W. VeenendaalBarth, ed., Particuliere Notulen van de vergaderingen van de Staten van Holland 1620–1640 door N. Stellingwerff en S. Schot (Den Haag: Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 2002), 265; Benjamin Nicolaas Teensma, “The Mission of Rudolph Baro in Search of Nhanduí in the Macaguá Mountains, 1647,” in Dutch Brazil: Documents in the Leiden University Library, ed. Cristina Ferrão and José Paulo Monteiro Soares (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Index, 1997), 20, 22; De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 4: xl. 34. Van Baerle, History of Brazil, 48-49. 35. NAN, Aanwinsten 1028, “Journalen van ingenieur Pieter van Strucht en Jan Houck op reis naar de mijn in Rio Grande, 1650.” 36. Alexander Bick, “Governing the Free Sea: The Dutch West India Company and Commercial Politics, 1618–1645” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012), 244n. 72. 37. Rafael Ruiz, “The Spanish-Dutch War and the Policy of the Spanish Crown toward the Town of São Paulo,” Itinerario: European Journal of Overseas History 26, no. 1 (2002): 107–125. 38. Benjamin Schmidt, “Exotic Allies: The Dutch-Chilean Encounter and the (Failed) Conquest of America,” Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999), 469. Inquiring about gold mines was indeed the first concern of this expedition. See van Baerle, History of Brazil, 253. For one Dutch author, an alliance with Chilean natives was the key to

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Potosí. See Schaede die den Staet der Vereenichde Nederlanden, en d’Inghesetenen van dien, is aenstaende, by de versuymenisse van d’Oost en West-Indische Negotie onder een Octroy en Societeyt te begrijpen (’s-Gravenhage: Ian Veeli, 1644), 9. 39. Wim Wennekes, Gouden handel: De eerste Nederlanders overzee, en wat zij daar haalden (Amsterdam and Antwerpen: Atlas, 1996), 321–322. 40. Heren XIX to the directors of the coast of Africa, Amsterdam, November 30, 1644, in Louis Jadin, ed., L’ancien Congo et l’Angola 1639–1655 d’après les archives romaines, portugaises, néerlandaises et espagnoles (Bruxelles and Rome: Institut Historique belge de Rome, 1975), 591–592. 41. Ray A. Kea, Settlements, Trade, and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 192–194. 42. Henk den Heijer, Goud, ivoor en slaven: Scheepvaart en handel van de Tweede Westindische Compagnie op Afrika, 1674–1740 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1997), 131. 43. NAN, SG 5768, agreement between Cornelis Cloeck, Ab. Wilmerdonx, P. Mortamer and N. ten Hoven with Gerard van Hetlingen, The Hague, October 1, 1665; NAN, SG 4847, Resolutions of the States General, February 9, 1666; Franz Binder, “Die Goldeinfuhr von der Goldküste in die Vereinigten Provinzen, 1655– 1675,” in Precious Metals in the Age of Expansion, ed. Hermann Kellenbenz (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 139; Norbert H. Schneeloch, Aktionäre der Westindischen Compagnie von 1674: Die Verschmelzung der alten Kapitalgebergruppen zu einer neuen Aktiengesellschaft (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), 46n. 2. 44. “Effects of the West India Company, 1626,” in Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York; Procured in Holland, England and France by John Romeyn Brodhead, 15 vols. (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons, 1856), 1: 35–36. Salt imports from Araya (Venezuela) constituted the main Atlantic trade during the brief period 1599–1605. 45. Klein, Trippen in de 17e eeuw, 139. 46. Tvvee dedvctien, aen-gaende de vereeninge van d’Oost ende West-indische Compagnien, aen de Ed: Groot Mog: Heeren Staten van Hollandt ende West-Vrieslandt, vande Westindische Compagnie, over-gelevert (’s-Gravenhage: Ian Veely, 1644), 10. 47. Ernst van den Boogaart, Pieter Emmer, Peter Klein, and Kees Zandvliet, La expansión holandesa en el Atlántico (Madrid: Mapfre, 1992), 118–120. 48. Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in West Africa (1580–1674): Empires, Merchants, and the Atlantic System (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 283–284. 49. Samuel Blommaert to Axel Oxenstierna, June 3, 1635, in Gerhard Wilhelm Kernkamp, ed., “Brieven van Samuel Blommaert aan Axel Oxenstierna, 1635–1641,” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 29 (1908), 72–73. The first Dutch companies on the coast did attempt to prevent prices from being pushed up. See Klein, Trippen in de 17e eeuw, 147–149. For the Akan traders, see Kea, Settlements, Trade, and Polities, 248–287. 50. The lodges were built at Komenda, Cape Coast, Anomabo, Accra, and Cormantine, as well as Axim and Shama, both of which were captured by the Dutch in the next few years. See Robert D. Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast, 1620– 1667” (PhD diss., University of South Africa, 1975), 179–183; V. W. C., Trou-hertighe onderrichtinghe aen alle hooft-participanten en liefhebbers van de Geoctr. W.I.C. (1643). 51. Stadsarchief Leiden, Stukken betreffende de WIC in het algemeen, 6699, extract from a letter from the General at the coast of Guinea, July 31, 1639.

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52. Olfert Dapper, Naukeurige beschrijvinge der Afrikaensche gewesten van Egypten, Barbaryen, Lybien, Biledulgerid, Negroslant, Guinea, Ethiopiën, Abyssinie (Amsterdam: Jacob van Meurs, 1676), 108; Michael Georg de Boer, “Een memorie over den toestand der West Indische Compagnie in het jaar 1633,” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 21 (1900), 348. For the large variety of European trade goods in Elmina in 1645, see Stanley B. Alpern, “What Africans Got for Their Slaves: A Master List of European Trade Goods,” History in Africa, 22 (1995): 5–43. Some French ships were also found trading near Fort Nassau in the early 1630s. See “Extract uyt het Register der Resolutien van de Hoogh Mog. Heeren Staten Generael der Vereenighde Nederlanden,” August 16, 1632, in Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, “Verzameling van Stukken over de West-Indische Compagnie, 17e & 18e Eeuw.” 53. Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 246–247. 54. NAN, SG 5768, petition to the States General, read on August 25, 1671. 55. Cornelis de Jong, Geschiedenis van de oude Nederlandse walvisvaart, 3 vols. (Pretoria: Universiteit van Suid-Afrika, 1972), 1: 191–192, 200; Louwrens Hacquebord, “Smeerenburg: Het verblijf van Nederlandse walvisvaarders op de westkust van Spitsbergen in de zeventiende eeuw” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 1984), 75, 77. 56. Willem Wubbo Klooster, “Illicit Riches: The Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795” (PhD diss., University of Leiden, 1995), 26–28. 57. Cesáreo Fernández Duro, Armada española desde la unión de los Reinos de Castilla y de Aragón, 9 vols. (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1896), 4: 32; Virginia Rau, A exploração e o comércio do sal de Setúbal: Estudo de história económica (Lisbon: s.n., 1951), 140; Eddy Stols, De Spaanse Brabanders, of de handelsbetrekkingen der Zuidelijke Nederlanden met de Iberische wereld, 1598–1648 (Brussel: Paleis der Academiën, 1971), 45. 58. NAN, SG 5753. 59. L’Honoré Naber, Reisebeschreibungen, 2: 114; “The voyage of Sir Henry Colt,” in Vincent T. Harlow, ed., Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623– 1667 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1925), 94; GAR, ONA 251/504 (Act of April 28, 1633). 60. Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 269, 338. 61. Ibid., 137. 62. The salt had to be collected before the rainy season, which began in June, to prevent it from melting. The best time for ships to leave the Republic for Brazil was therefore in the fall. See Samuel Blommaert to Axel Oxenstierna, Amsterdam, July 23, 1637, in Kernkamp, “Brieven van Samuel Blommaert,” 122–123; Roelof Bijlsma, “Rotterdam’s Amerika-vaart in de eerste helft der 17de eeuw,” Bijdragen voor Vaderlandsche Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde, ser. 5, no. 3 (1916), 120; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 129. For the importance of St. Christopher in this trade, see GAR, ONA 87, 61 and 63/126, acts of August 31 and October 30, 1647. 63. Krzysztof Arciszewski to Johan Maurits and the High Council of Brazil, Amsterdam, July 24, 1637; “Missive van den kolonnel Artichofsky aan Graaf Maurits en den Hoogen Raad in Brazilië, 24 juli 1637,” Kroniek van het Historisch Genootschap gevestigd te Utrecht ser. 5, 25, no. 5 (1869), 226. 64. Hermann Wätjen, Das holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien: Ein Kapitel aus der Kolonialgeschichte des 17. Jahrhunderts (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, Gotha: Perthes, 1921), 267, 269.

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65. Augustus van Quelen, Kort Verhael Vanden staet van Fernanbuc, Toe-ge-eygent de E. Heeren Gecommitteerde ter Vergaderinghe vande Negenthiene, inde Geoctroyeerde WestIndische Compagnie, ter Camere van Amstelredam (Amsterdam, 1640). 66. Bijlsma, “Rotterdam’s Amerika-vaart,” 122–123. 67. The total number of chests was 137,665, calculated on the basis of Wätjen, Holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien, 316–323. Note, however, that data for WIC shipments in 1647 and 1648 are missing but that Wätjen does include sugar chests from captured Portuguese ships among the Dutch exports of 1634. 68. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten, 12564.30A, Johan Maurits to the States General, Wesel, February 29, 1646. 69. Charles Ralph Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 142–144. 70. It was, therefore, not commonly known that it took many years to establish a thriving plantation. Under the circumstances, a story could spread about the remarkable achievement of a sailor in a new colony in Guiana. Having been marooned there by his shipmaster after a dispute, the sailor had supposedly set up a plantation within five or six weeks, valued by some at 200 rijksdaalders and attracting many planters to the new colony from the Caribbean. See Hollantsche Mercurius 9 (1659), 161–162. 71. GAR, ONA 423: 49/64, Act of April 7, 1641; Eugène Bruneau-Latouche, Personnes et familles à la Martinique au XVIIe siècle d’après recensements et terriers nominatifs (Fort de France: Société d’Histoire de la Martinique, 1983), 17, 63. Before entering the sugar business, Van Ool had been a shopkeeper in Pernambuco. See GAR, ONA 150: 862/1305, Act of November 13, 1636. 72. Gérard Lafleur, “Relations avec l’étranger des minorités religieuses aux Antilles françaises (XVIIe–XVIIIe s.),” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, no. 57–58 (1983), 34. 73. Gérard Lafleur, Présence protestante en Guadeloupe au XVIIe siècle (Guadeloupe: Centre Departemental de Documentation Pédagogique, 1980), 16–17, 26, 30; Philippe Rossignol and Bernadette Rossignol, “La famille Classen ou Classe (Hollande, Brésil, Guadeloupe),” Bulletin de Généalogie et Histoire de la Caraïbe 41(1992), 639. Also listed as sucriers in 1664–1687 were Hubert de Loover (or van Loveren) from Zeeland and Guillaume and “Pitre” de Bologne from Rotterdam. Another Dutch sugar planter listed in 1671–1687 was Albert “Zuar” or Zwart. See Anne Pérotin-Dumon, La ville aux îles, la ville dans l’île: Basse-Terre et Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, 1650–1820 (Paris: Editions Karthala, 2000), 115; Gérard Lafleur, “L’origine des protestants de Guadeloupe au XVIIe siècle,” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe 3 (1978), 56–57; Gérard Lafleur, “Bouillante: L’histoire et les hommes,” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe 3–4 (1982), 38. 74. Gérard Lafleur, Saint-Claude: Histoire d’une commune de Guadeloupe (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1993), 25–29; Lodewijk Hulsman and Martijn van den Bel, “Recherches en archives sur la famille Sweers,” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe 3–4 (2012): 45–58. 75. Jacques Petitjean-Roget, “Les Protestants à la Martinique sous l’Ancien Régime,” Revue d’histoire des colonies 42, no. 147 (1955), 238–240. 76. Arjan Poelwijk, “In dienste vant suyckerbacken”: De Amsterdamse suikernijverheid en haar ondernemers, 1580–1630 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2003), 54; J. J. Reese, De suikerhandel van Amsterdam van het begin der 17de eeuw tot 1813; een bijdrage tot de

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handelsgeschiedenis des vaderlands, hoofdzakelijk uit de archieven, 2 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1908–1911), 1: 107. 77. NAN, Collectie Radermacher 619. 78. For Essequibo, see Report and Accompanying Papers of the Commission Appointed by the President, by United States: Commission to Investigate and Report upon the True Divisional Line between Venezuela and British Guiana (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1897), 192n.2; For St. Eustatius, see “List of Things Found on St. Eustatius,” August 23, 1665, in W. Noël Sainsbury, Calendar of State Papers [CSP], Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1661–1668, Preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1880), 319–320. 79. Charles de Rochefort, Le tableau de l’isle de Tabago, ou de la Nouvelle Oüalchre, l’une des Isles Antilles de l’Amerique, Dependante de la souverainité des Hauts & Puissans Seigneurs les Estats Generaus des Provinces Unies des Pais-bas (Leyde: Jean le Carpentier, 1665), 59; Sainsbury, CSP, 1661–1668, 355. Some sugar planters moved from Brazil directly or indirectly to Curaçao. See NAN, SG 5769, Governor Jan Doncker to the States General, Curaçao, September 20, 1674. If they were among those who tried to grow sugar on the Dutch island, their efforts yielded little result. By 1688, the cultivation of sugar was abandoned. See Willem Wubbo Klooster, “Illicit Riches: The Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795” (PhD diss., University of Leiden, 1995), 62. 80. ZA, SZ 2035–50, list of inhabitants of Tobago, July 5, 1668. The quotation is from W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., CSP, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, vol. 9: 1675–1676, and Addenda, 1574–1674 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1893), 154. 81. Placard of governor Philip Julius Lichtenbergh of Suriname, Suriname, April 5, 1669, in Jacobus Thomas de Smidt and To van der Lee, eds., West-Indisch plakaatboek: Plakaten, ordonnantiën en andere wetten, uitgevaardigd in Suriname, 1667–1816, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1973), 1: 38; ZA, SZ 2035–204 /205 /206, Governor Julius Lichtenbergh to the States of Zeeland, Suriname, February 8, 1670; ZA, SZ 2035–225, petition of the inhabitants of Suriname to the States of Zeeland, March 11, 1671. Not until the mid-1680s had the necessary improvements been introduced in the manufacturing process. See Frederik Oudschants Dentz, Cornelis vann Aerssen van Sommelsdijck: Een belangwekkende figuur uit de geschiedenis van Suriname (Amsterdam: P. N. van Kampen & Zoon, 1938), 94. 82. NAN, OWIC 55, Johan Maurits and council to the Heren XIX, Recife, March 2, 1639. 83. GAR, ONA 202, act 280/386, Act of November 19, 1641, testimony of Cornelis Jacobs, Hans Bierboom, and Floris Tomasz, on behalf of Lucas Lucasz van Brugge; Resolutions of the States General, December 27, 1638 and November 17, 1642, http://www.historici.nl/Onderzoek/Projecten/BesluitenStaten-generaal 1626–1651, accessed February 4, 2013; Klaas Ratelband, Vijf dagregisters van het kasteel São Jorge da Mina (Elmina) aan de Goudkust (1645–1647) (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1953), li–lv. Enslavement of a Dutch slave-ship crew occurred again in 1699, this time at Saleh. See Johan Cornelis de Bakker, “Slaves, Arms, and Holy War: Moroccan Policy vis-à-vis the Dutch Republic during the Establishment of the ‘Alawī Dynasty (1660–1727)” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 1991), 159.

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84. Piet Boon, “Genomen door den Turck: Christenslaven in Noord-Afrika,” in Slaven en schepen: Enkele reis, bestemming onbekend, ed. Remmelt Daalder, Andrea Kieskamp and Dirk J. Tang (Leiden: Primavera Pers; and Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum 2001), 66–67. 85. Dienke Hondius, “Black Africans in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 31, no. 2 (2008), 88–89. 86. De Laet, Iaerlijck Verhael, 1: 26, 160–161. In 1606, a Dutch ship sold the Africans aboard a seized Portuguese ship to an English shipmaster. See Klein, Trippen in de 17e eeuw, 139. In the 1630s, English privateers added to the downturn in slave supplies to Ibero-America by capturing sixteen vessels. See Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 41. 87. Engel Sluiter, “New Light on the ‘20. and Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia, August 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 2 (1997): 395–398. 88. De Laet, Iaerlijck Verhael, 4: 287; Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, 37. 89. Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, “Crossing Empires: Portuguese, Sephardic, and Dutch Business Networks in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1580–1674,” Americas 68, no. 1 (2011), 22; Cátia Antunes and Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, “Amsterdam Merchants in the Slave Trade and African Commerce, 1580s–1670s,” Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis 9, no. 4 (2012): 3–30. 90. Not among them was Casper van Senden, who obtained a license from Queen Elizabeth in 1596 to transport blacks residing in England and sell them as slaves in the Iberian Peninsula. Although Guasco labels him “Dutch,” he hailed from Lübeck. See Michael Guasco, “‘Free from the Tyrannous Spanyard’? Englishmen and Africans in Spain’s Atlantic World,” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 29, no. 1 (2008), 11; Miranda Kaufmann, “Caspar van Senden, Sir Thomas Sherley and the ‘Blackamoor’ Project,” Historical Research 81, no. 212 (2008): 366–371. 91. Lorimer speculates that Dutch ships returning from Cape Verde, Elmina, and Brazil had supplied these slaves, while Ratelband suggests Portuguese Jews may have been responsible. See Joyce Lorimer, ed., English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, 1550–1646 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1989), 76; Klaas Ratelband, ed., De Westafrikaanse reis van Piet Heyn 1624–1625 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), ciii. At least one ship, leaving in late 1626, was sent by the Zeeland Chamber to Angola to import slaves for the Amazon. See Report and Accompanying Papers, 44. 92. Klaas Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika 1600–1650: Angola, Kongo en São Tomé (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2000), 50; Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 81. 93. Germán Peralta Rivera, El comercio negrero en América Latina (1595–1640) (Lima: Universidad Federal Federico Villareal/Editorial Universitaria, 2005), 301. Six Portuguese Jews from Amsterdam invested in an English slaving voyage to Calabar and the Spanish Main in 1647–1648. See examination of Luís de Chávez, Cartagena de Indias, July 15, September 1, and October 10, 1649, in Anna María Splendiani, Cincuenta años de Inquisición en el Tribunal de Cartagena de Indias 1610–1660, 4 vols. (Santafé de Bogotá: Centro Editorial Javeriano, Instituto Colombiano de Cultura Hispánica, 1997), 3: 245–247. 94. “Sommier discours,” 292–293.

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95. NAN, OWIC 9, Heren XIX to the Political Council in Pernambuco, Amsterdam, April 19, 1635; Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 151. 96. NAN, OWIC 51, fol. 122, councilors Jacob Stachouwer, E. Herckmans, H. Schilt, and P. Serooskercke to the Heren XIX, Recife, November 6, 1636; Cuthbert Pudsey, Journal of a Residence in Brazil, ed. Nelson Papavero and Dante Martins Teixeira (Petrópolis: Petrobas, 2000), 133. 97. NAN, SG 5756, Johan Maurits to the States General, Pernambuco, June 1, 1641. This last idea was erroneous. Few Africans worked in the two major mining centers of Potosí or Zacatecas, where Amerindians constituted the vast majority of miners. 98. Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, “La traite négrière et les avatars de la colonisation portugaise au Brésil et en Angola (1550–1825),” in Cahiers du C.R.I.A.R. no. 1, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), 31. I have found no evidence supporting one historian’s assertion that Portuguese merchants supplied numerous slaves to the Dutch in Pernambuco. See José Gonçalves Salvador, Os Magnatas do Tráfico Negreiro (Séculos XVI e XVII) (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1981), 87. 99. Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 223–224. At Calabar, the Dutch could not do business without offering Portuguese arm rings for sale, which they had confiscated from captured Portuguese ships. See NAN, OWIC 52, fol. 49, Claes van IJperen in Fort Nassau, Mouri, to Johan Maurits and Council in, April 19, 1637. 100. This expectation was not exaggerated. In the first fifteen years of the century, legal slave exports from Luanda amounted to 12,000–13,000, while during the four-year government of Luis Mendes de Vasconcelos (August 1617–October 1621), 50,000 slaves left the Angolan capital. See Beatrix Heintze, “Das Ende des unabhängigen Staates Ndongo (Angola): Neue Chronologie und Reinterpretation (1617–1630),” Paideuma 27 (1981), 199–200, 208–209. 101. Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 156–157. 102. Instructions of Johan Maurits and the Secret Council of Brazil to Admiral Jol, P. Moortamer, C. Nieulant, and J. Henderson, Recife, May 28, 1641, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 38. 103. NAN, SG 5756, “Provisionele Instructie voor de Regeringe van het Suijder district van de Cust van Africa,” confirmed April 11, 1642, fol. 43. 104. Report by Pieter Moortamer to the Council in Brazil, on board the Mauritius, October 14, 1642, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 349; Ernst van den Boogaart and Pieter C. Emmer, “The Dutch Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1596–1650,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (New York, San Francisco, and London: Academic Press, 1979), 359–360. 105. Directors Nieulant and Moortamer to the Council of Brazil, Luanda, February/March 1642, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 204. 106. Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, ed., “Nota van Pieter Mortamer over het gewest Angola (met een bijlage),” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 54 (1933), 33. 107. Alan Frederick Charles Ryder, “Dutch Trade on the Nigerian Coast during the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 3 (1965), 209, 203.

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108. On the other hand, even though the slaves from Ardra (Benin) were inexpensive, they were not appreciated by all planters, who complained about their misbehaving and shunning work. See NAN, OWIC 52, fol. 104, W. Schott to the WIC Chamber of Zeeland, Recife, August 25, 1637; “Sommier discours,” 292. 109. David Eltis, Pieter C. Emmer, and Frank D. Lewis, “More than Profits? The Contribution of the Slave Trade to the Dutch Economy: Assessing Fatah-Black and van Rossum,” Slavery & Abolition (forthcoming). 110. Hans Cools, “Francesco Feroni (1614/16–1696): Broker in Cereals, Slaves, and Works of Art,” in Your Humble Servant: Agents in Early Modern Europe, ed. Hans Cools, Marika Keblusek and Badeloch Noldus (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2006), 45–47. 111. Report from Pieter Moortamer to the Council of Brazil, on board the Mauritius, October 14, 1642, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 354. See also Van den Boogaart and Emmer, “Dutch Participation,” 46–47. 112. L’Honoré Naber, “Nota van Pieter Mortamer,” 38; Report of the committee for the reorganization of the WIC, October 10, 1646, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 856. 113. Van den Boogaart and Emmer, “Dutch Participation,” 363–364; Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 215–216. 114. Governor and council of Brazil to the directors in Luanda, Recife, August 14, 1643, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 475; Ratelband, Nederlanders in WestAfrika, 180. 115. It would seem that Ardra was the source of smallpox in Dutch Brazil. Of the 185 Africans imported by the Swarte Beer from Ardra and Calabar in 1642, 26 died en route to Brazil, and the same also happened in 1642 to 54 of the 236 slaves embarked on the Leeuwinne van Zeeland at Ardra. See NAN, OWIC 57, fol. 153, Johan Maurits and Council to the Heren XIX, April 30, 1642; NAN, OWIC 57, fol. 111, Willem van Mekren, aboard the ship the Gulden Rhee at Cape Lopez, to Johan Maurits and Council, May 21, 1642. 116. NAN, OWIC 57, fol. 64, request by the senhores de ingenhos and lavradores in Paraíba to the governor-general and council. See also NAN, OWIC 55, fol. 123, request by João Carneiro de Marij from Pojuca to Johan Maurits and the High and Secret Council; NAN, OWIC 57, fol. 26, the Portuguese aldermen of Mauritia to the States General, September 14, 1642; NAN, OWIC 58, fol. 113, request by the inhabitants of the Varzea to the governor-general and council, 1643. 117. Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 223–225, 241. The assertion made many years later by the governor of Suriname that deficient supplies of slaves had led to the downfall of Dutch overseas colonies is therefore false not only for New Netherland but also for Brazil. See NAN, Collectie Radermacher 609, no. 6, Governor Van Sommelsdyck to the directors of the colony, Suriname, May 27, 1685. 118. Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies 1739–1763 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 333. 119. Pieter Cornelis Emmer, “The Dutch and the Making of the Second Atlantic System,” in Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, ed. Barbara L. Solow (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 84. 120. Report of the Heren XIX on the Angolan trade, May 23, 1647, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 894–896; Advice of the Chamber of Accounts of the West

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India Company, delivered to the commissioners of the States General, May 27, 1647, in O’Callaghan, Documents, 1: 243. Five years later, the WIC allowed the residents of New Netherland to import slaves from Africa for agricultural purposes. See WIC directors to the inhabitants of Manhattan, Amsterdam, April 4, 1652, in Charles T. Gehring, ed., Correspondence 1647–1653, New Netherland Documents Series, vol. 11 (Syracuse; Syracuse University Press, 2000), 160. Prior and subsequent to the first arrangement, some ships sailed directly from Angola to the Caribbean, for example, the Tamandare, which carried three hundred Africans from Angola to Barbados in 1646. See Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 259, 278. 121. An example of Dutch intermediacy in the European slave trade is the shipment in 1666 of enslaved blacks from Vilanova in Portugal to Cádiz. See NAUK, HCA 30–641, Lammert Jansen Vermeij to Maria Adams-Oosterwijk, Vilanova, January 26, 1666. 122. Curaçao was the largest recipient of Dutch slave ships, but the arriving captives were intended for reshipment to the Spanish colonies. In three cases, slave ships combined Suriname and Curaçao as destinations: the Zwarte Arend/Aguila (1668), the Vergulde Zon (1669), and the Zeelandia (1670); Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, voyage identification nos. 11779, 11581, and 44143, http://www.slavevoyages. org, accessed April 23, 2013. Nor was New Netherland a common destination. Twelve petitioners in New Amsterdam stressed in 1660 that colonists bought their slaves from “our neighbors, French, English, Swedes, Danes, and Courlanders.” Susanah Shaw Romney, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2014), 200. 123. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database lists Swallow (1664; no. 9587), Happy Adventure (1665; no. 9601), William (1666, no. 9612), York (1667, no. 28050), and Thomas and William (1668, no. 21579) as going to Dutch Guiana, but they sailed to the English colony of Suriname; http://www.slavevoyages.org, accessed April 23, 2013. 124. My calculations are based on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, ibid. 125. In Río Sinú, they were captured by two Spanish vessels and taken to Cartagena, where the governor confiscated ships, cargoes, and the slaves. See NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12576.77, Jacobus Reijnst and Ab. Wilmerdonxs, WIC Chamber of Amsterdam, to the States General, Amsterdam, November 3, 1661; AGS, Estado 8390, fol. 269, Esteban Gamarra to the Spanish Crown, The Hague, June 2, 1663. 126. NAN, NWIC 467, fol. 86, WIC directors to Nicolaas van Liebergen, Governor of Curaçao, Amsterdam, July 15, 1680; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Guianas, 248. Four years earlier, the governor of the island had sent a sloop to Maracaibo, requesting the local authorities to allow his men to buy food for the large number of slaves that had arrived from Africa. See Letizia Vaccari, ed., Juicios de residencia en la Provincia de Venezuela: Don Francisco Dávila Orejon Gaston (1673–1677) (Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1983), 54. 127. Gayle K. Brunelle, The New World Merchants of Rouen, 1559–1630 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1991), 17–18. 128. NAN, 1.10.72.01, 1, 171, and 172, journals of Michiel de Ruyter, 1640, 1641, and 1644–1647.

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129. SAA, NA 2992, fols. 37–38, Act of January 18, 1661, testimony of Abraham Alvares from Amsterdam at the request of Isaac da Silva, alias Fernan Martins, and Moises da Silva. 130. GAR, ONA 141: 140/212, act of June 22, 1630. The first tobacco seeds on Barbados had been procured from Dutch settlers in Guiana. See Anne PérotinDumon, “French, English and Dutch in the Lesser Antilles: From Privateering to Planting, c. 1550–c. 1650,” in General History of the Caribbean, vol. 2, New Societies: The Caribbean in the Long Sixteenth Century, ed. Pieter Cornelis Emmer and Germán Carrera Damas (London: UNESCO, Macmillan Education, 1999), 124. 131. The Company of Adventurers of Providence Island to Governor Captain Philip Bell, London, February 7, 1631, in “America and West Indies: February 1631,” in W. Noël Sainsbury, ed., CSP, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, vol. 1: 1574–1660 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1860), 127. 132. The Company of Providence Island to the Governor and Council, London, March 29, 1637, and The Company of Providence Island to Capt. Nat. Butler, Governor, London, July 3, 1638, in ibid., 249, 279. The free-trade permission was granted in June 1639: Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 133; Paul E. Kopperman, “Ambivalent Allies: Anglo-Dutch Relations and the Struggle against the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean, 1621–1641,” Journal of Caribbean History 21, no. 1 (1987), 62–63. The extent of the Dutch impact on Providence Island is suggested by a letter from the company of the island instructing the governor and council that no fort or bay was to have a Dutch name. Any Dutch names already given were to be altered. See Carl Bridenbaugh and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624–1690 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 313, 372; The Company of Providence Island to the Governor and Council, London, March 29, 1637, in Sainsbury, CSP, 1574–1660, 249. 133. Christian J. Koot, Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621–1713 (New York and London: New York University Press, 2011), 36–37; Monique Klarenbeek, “Grutters op de Antillen: Particuliere kooplieden uit de Republiek op het eiland Sint Christoffel in de zeventiende eeuw,” Tijdschrift voor Zeegeschiedenis 32, no. 2 (2013), 27. 134. David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 157. 135. John Cordy Jeaffreson, ed., A Young Squire of the Seventeenth Century: From the Papers (A.D. 1676–1686) of Christopher Jeaffreson, of Dullingham House, Cambridgeshire, 2 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1878), 1: 215–216. A French merchant who was detained by the Spanish in the Caribbean in 1635 related that St. Christopher was home to 2,000 people, including 400 Frenchmen. The Dutch, he asserted, had a leader who obeyed the English governor. See Jean-Pierre Moreau, Les Petites Antilles de Christoph Colomb à Richelieu (Paris: Karthala, 1992), 205. One market for St. Christopher tobacco was Genua; “Statistik des Amsterdamer Mittelmeerverkehres von 1646/47,” Abhandlungen zur Verkehr- und Seegeschichte 1–2 (1908), 218, 323. 136. Testimonies of Henry Waad, Richard Waad, and Henry Wheeler, October 9, 1654, in Analecta Hibernica 4 (1932), 225–228. 137. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 122n.

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138. Donald Harman Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630–1730 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 67. For Dutch tobacco shipments from Bermuda, see Order of a General Court for the Somers Islands Company, April 24, 1652, in Sainsbury, CSP, 1574–1660, 378. 139. Bijlsma, “Rotterdam’s Amerika-vaart,” 125, 127; W. G. D. Murray, “De Rotterdamsche toeback-coopers,” Rotterdamsch jaarboekje, ser. 5, 1 (1943), 23. 140. GAR, ONA 86: 336/637, Act of December 28, 1644. 141. GAR, ONA 86, 307/585, Act of January 13, 1644, agreement between Aelbrecht Cockx and Simon Gordon, Randel Russell, Thomas Iverson, Lawrence Liveson, Marguet St. Jordin, Thomas Bagbew, Edward Carlisle, William Badcock, John Thomson, John Arnett, and Henry Wooten. Russell was back in Rotterdam in late 1645, selling St. Christopher tobacco; GAR, ONA 96, 81/127, Act of March 1, 1646. Koot has suggested a connection between the presence of Samuel Winthrop (son of John Winthrop, Massachusetts governor) in Rotterdam in 1647 and his subsequent planting career in Antigua and St. Kitts. See Empire at the Periphery, 51. 142. SAA, NA 490/252, Act of June 3, 1642, contract of Pieter Jansz van der Veer and Pieter Janssen of Flushing employ Gerrit Burmeester, Pieter Graeff, Pieter Roeloffs, Torsten Sijbrantsson and Hendrick Bottelman (St. Christopher); GAR, ONA 74/131, Act of March 9, 1644, contract between Edward Carlyle and the parents of one eighteen-year old and one seventeen-year old boy to work on his tobacco plantation in St. Christopher for a period of four years. For Barbados, see SAA, NA 1620, act of December 12, 1645. 143. Bijlsma, “Rotterdam’s Amerika-vaart,” 131, 134. 144. Arne van der Schoor, Stad en aanwas: Geschiedenis van Rotterdam tot 1815, 2 vols. (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, 1999), 1: 212. 145. Van den Boogaart et al., Expansión holandesa en el Atlántico, 163. 146. The King to the Governor and Council of Virginia, April 22, 1637, in Sainsbury, CSP, 1574–1660, 250–251; SAA, NA 1609, fols. 43–46, Act of June 29, 1639. Petition of Dutch merchants to the States General, c. November 1651, in O’Callaghan, Documents, 1: 436–437. For slave supplies, see John R. Pagan, “Dutch Maritime and Commercial Activity in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 90 (1982), 497. 147. Victor Enthoven and Wim Klooster, “Contours of Virginia-Dutch Trade in the Long Seventeenth Century,” in Early Modern Virginia: New Essays on the Old Dominion, ed. Douglas Bradburn and John Coombs (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 95–96; Beverley Fleet, ed., Virginia Colonial Abstracts, vol. 24 (York County) (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co.), 82; GAR, ONA, Act of August 14, 1645. 148. Nell Marion Nugent, Cavaliers and Pioneers: Abstracts of Virginia Land Patents and Grants, 1623–1800 (Richmond, VA: Dietz Printing, 1934), 98, 104–105. 149. Jacobs, Zegenrijk gewest, 203; Pagan, “Dutch Maritime and Commercial Activity,” 487–488. 150. Pagan, “Dutch Maritime and Commercial Activity,” 489; Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 44. A 1649 tract noted that in Virginia “at last Christmas we had trading ten ships from London, two from Bristol, twelve Hollanders, and seven from New England.” James R. Perry, The Formation of a Society on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1615–1655 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 149.

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151. Philip Alexander Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century. An Inquiry into the Material Condition of the People, Based upon Original and Contemporaneous Records (New York and London: MacMillan, 1907), 290–291; Pagan, “Dutch Maritime and Commercial Activity,” 491. 152. Quoted in John C. Appleby, “English Settlement in the Lesser Antilles during War and Peace, 1603–1660,” in The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, ed. Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 96. See also The King to the feoffees of Jas. late Earl of Carlisle, April 1637, in Sainsbury, CSP, 1574–1660, 251. 153. Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 29. 154. Russell R. Menard has suggested that the “myth of the Dutch” originated in Barbados in the 1660s and was developed by planters during an economic depression in their fight against the Navigation Acts. See Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 51. 155. Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Viking, 2001), 210. 156. Proponents of this theory can also refer to contemporary English documents, one of which claimed that during the Civil War, the Dutch “managed the whole trade in o.r Western Colonies, and furnished the Island w.th Negroes, Coppers, Stills, and all other things Appertaining to the Ingenious.” Cited in Vincent T. Harlow, A History of Barbados, 1625–1685 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1926), 42. 157. Ibid., 38. For a list of 138 Dutch ships trading at Barbados in the years 1634–1669, see Yda Schreuder, “Evidence from the Notarial Protocols in the Amsterdam Municipal Archives about Trade Relationships between Amsterdam and Barbados in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 52 (2006), 73–77. 158. Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 104; Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 62–63; Petition of Anthony Rous to the Lord Protector and Council, Barbados, November 18, 1656, in “America and West Indies: November 1656,” in Sainsbury, CSP, 1574–1660, 451. These horses originated in the United Provinces, New Netherland, and Curaçao: Resolutions of the States of Holland, November 29, 1650, in Resolutien van de Heeren Staten van Hollandt en Westvrieslandt, genomen zedert den aenvang der bedieninge van den Heer Johan de Witt, beginnende met den tweeden Aug. 1653 ende eyndigende met den negentienden Dec. 1668 (Amsterdam: J. Oosterwyk, Steenhouwer en Uytweri, 1719), 353; Alexander Gunkel and Jerome S. Handler, “A Swiss Medical Doctor’s Description of Barbados in 1661: The Account of Christian Spoeri,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 33 (1969), 3. 159. Nicholas Darnell Davis, The Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados, 1650– 1652 (Demerara: “Argosy” Press, 1883), 49. 160. Eric Otremba, “Inventing Ingenios: Experimental Philosophy and the Secret Sugar-Makers of the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic,” History and Technology: An International Journal 28, no. 2 (2012), 131. 161. Van den Boogaart et al., Expansión holandesa en el Atlántico, 163; Klooster, “Illicit Riches,” 209–220.

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162. For this thesis, see, for example, Yda Schreuder, “The Influence of the Dutch Colonial Trade in Barbados in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 48 (2002), 53; Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies (New York: Walker & Company, 2011), 57. Nor is there any proof for the thesis that the Dutch supplied slaves to other parts of the Caribbean in the 1620s and 1630s. For this uninformed notion, see Betty Wood, “The Origins of Slavery in the Americas, 1500–1700,” in The Routledge History of Slavery, ed. Gad Heuman and Trevor Burnard (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 70–71. 163. The Heren XIX protested when the Prins Maurits arrived in West Africa in 1644 to buy Africans and sell them in Barbados. See NAN, OWIC 9, Heren XIX to Director Ruijchaver, Amsterdam, August 22, 1644. Batie, incidentally, makes too much of the events taking place in 1645. Robert Carlyle Batie, “Why Sugar? Economic Cycles and the Changing of Staples on the English and French Antilles, 1624–1654,” in Caribbean Slave Society and Economy: A Student Reader, ed. Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd (Kingston: Ian Randle; and London: James Currey, 1991), 47. 164. NAN, OWIC 60, fol. 89, instructions from the High Council in Brazil for the commies Walien Jorisz and his colleague Laurens van Heusden, December 30, 1645. 165. Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 263. 166. One smuggler, the Tamandare, carried tree hundred Africans from Angola to Barbados in 1646; Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 259, 278. The other two ships were the St. Jacob (captured by English in 1644), and the Seerobbe (1646); see the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, voyage identification nos. 21962 and 11855, http://www.slavevoyages.org, accessed April 23, 2013. 167. Franz Binder, “Die zeeländische Kaperfahrt 1654–1662,” Archief: Mededelingen van het Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen (1976), 53. 168. In 1653, the WIC allowed private merchants to sell African captives in the West Indies: WIC Directors to Director General Petrus Stuyvesant and Council of New Netherland. Amsterdam, July 6, 1653, in Gehring, Correspondence, 214–215. 169. In 1658, two Dutch slavers were captured by the authorities in Barbados carrying 253 and 191 slaves, respectively: Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 71. 170. See also Larry Gragg, “‘To Procure Negroes’: The English Slave Trade to Barbados, 1627–60,” Slavery and Abolition 16 (1995): 65–84; Van den Boogaart et al., Expansión holandesa en el Atlántico, 161. 171. Ratelband, Vijf dagregisters, 6, 9, 11–12, 54, 117, 165–166, 169–171, 195, 211, 265, 282, 284–285, 292, 293–294. 172. Van den Boogaart and Emmer, “Dutch Participation,” 371–372. 173. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, “The Sugar Industry in the Seventeenth Century: A New Perspective on the Barbadian ‘Sugar Revolution,’” in Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 301–303. 174. Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 49. 175. Ibid., 34, 38. 176. Murray, “De Rotterdamsche toeback-coopers,” 34. The pull of the Dutch remained so strong, however, that several Virginians came on board the ships that

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transported their crops to the Dutch Republic to take care of business, just like their colleagues from the West Indies. See GAR, ONA 99: 160/290 (April 10, 1642); 204: 288/435 (July 26, 1643); 152: 647/957 (August 29, 1643); Ralph T. Whitelaw, Virginia’s Eastern Shore: A History of Northampton and Accomack Counties, 2 vols. (Richmond: Virginia Historical Society, 1951), 1: 108, 289. In 1636, John Gater had bought a 300-acre plantation in Elizabeth City County. See Nugent, Cavaliers and Pioneers, 49. 177. April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 49. 178. Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols. (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1938), 4: 36–37, 61–62; Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 59. 179. GAR, ONA 263, 530/745; 480, 66/89; 437, 69/88, Acts of November 2, 1643, December 22, 1643, and May 16, 1645. 180. GAR, ONA 96, 23/34, Act of March 17, 1645; GAR, ONA 474, 390/619, Act of June 7, 1648. 181. He shared the Barbados factor with his associates, Pieter Sonnemans, burgomaster, and Cornelis Coninck, city councilor. The latter had shipped 2,000 pounds of gunpowder to Barbados in 1645. For St. Kitts, see GAR, ONA 96: 210/325, Act of October 6, 1649. For Barbados, see GAR, ONA 87, 69/142, Act of December 19, 1647. For Coninck, see Henriette de Bruyn Kops, A Spirited Exchange: The Wine and Brandy Trade between France and the Dutch Republic in Its Atlantic Framework, 1600–1650 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 101n. 59. Coninck also co-owned a plantation in Virginia. See GAR, ONA, 537, 97/161, Act of August 22, 1648. 182. GAR, ONA 472, 192/305, Act of March 11, 1647. 183. Their tobacco-buying expedition coincided with the arrival of Richard Ingle, a prominent English tobacco trader who attacked Maryland in February 1645 and took over the government of the colony. Ingle forced the Dutch to hand over their tobacco. See GAR, ONA 90, 257/384 and 96, 53/78, acts of September 16 and 26, 1645. 184. Bijlsma, “Rotterdam’s Amerika-vaart,” 132. 185. GAR, ONA 394, 282/489, Act of June 16, 1656. 186. NAN, SG 4846, Resolutions of the States General, February 18, 1651: Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 330. There was a huge outrage in Amsterdam and Zeeland over the seizures. See Steven C.A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 65. Not all Dutch traders and shipowners suffered in the end. Two merchants whose cargoes fell prey to the English at Barbados in 1651 and had insured them received the insured amounts from the insurers. See Waterlands Archief (Purmerend), Notarieel Archief, 516, Act of February 28, 1654. 187. Charles Wilson, Profit and Power: A Study of England and the Dutch Wars (London, New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1957), 87; Claudia Schnurmann, Atlantische Welten: Engländer und Niederländer im amerikanisch-atlantischen Raum 1648–1713 (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1998), 182–184. These cases are not related to those of Dutch vessels confiscated during the first Anglo-Dutch war. English privateers seized at least eighteen Zeeland ships, with a combined tonnage of approximately 4,080 on their return voyage from the West Indies. See NAN, SG 5765, directors of the WIC, Chamber of Zeeland, to the States General, Middelburg,

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March 26, 1654. The WIC chambers of Amsterdam, Zeeland, and Maze assessed total damage at about 700,000 guilders. See NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12576.68, “Index sive Repertorium querularum et postulatorum, quae ex parte mercatorum aliorum Belagrum contra populos Reipublicae Angliae.” In addition, more than a dozen storehouses owned by Dutch merchants were sequestered in St. Kitts in 1654. See Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line, 309n. 188. Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 67. 189. Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640– 1661 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 129. 190. Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 99. 191. David Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 311–312; Schreuder, “Evidence from the Notarial Protocols,” 68; Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 140. 192. Jan Kupp, “Aspects of New York-Dutch Trade under the English, 1670– 1674,” New York Historical Society Quarterly 58 (1974), 141. 193. Dennis J. Maika, “Commerce and Community: Manhattan Merchants in the Seventeenth Century” (PhD diss., New York University, 1995), 392–393; Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 111–116. 194. James B. Collins, “The Role of Atlantic France in the Baltic Trade: Dutch Traders and Polish Grain at Nantes, 1625–1675,” Journal of European Economic History 13, no. 1 (1984), 245, 251, 259–260. 195. Stewart L. Mims, Colbert’s West India Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912), 20. 196. See NAUK, HCA 30/226, Esbrant Winter to Jean de Lievett in St. Christophe, Amsterdam, October 4, 1664. 197. It was only logical for a Dutch privateer who captured a large Iberian slave ship in that year to turn the Africans over to the planters of St. Christophe. See Clarence J. Munford, The Black Ordeal of Slavery and Slave Trading in the French West Indies 1625–1715, 3 vols. (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), 2: 378. 198. Mims, Colbert’s West India Policy, 22–23, 26, 39; Pierre Pelleprat, Relato de las Misiones de los Padres de la Compañía de Jesús en las Islas y en Tierra Firme de América Meridional (Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1965), 56. At times, Dutch privateers sold prizes and/or their cargoes at the French islands. One turned over a large human cargo from an Iberian ship to the French planters at St. Christophe in 1636, while another sold his numerous (English) prizes and their cargoes in 1654 at St. Christophe and Guadeloupe. See Munford, Black Ordeal, 3: 467; A. Bijl, De Nederlandse convooidienst: De maritieme bescherming van koopvaardij en zeevisserij tegen piraten en oorlogsgevaar in het verleden (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1951), 104–106. 199. Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line, 182. 200. Charles Frostin, Histoire de l’autonomisme colon de la partie française de St. Domingue aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Contribution à l’étude du sentiment américain d’indépendance (Lille: Université de Lille III, 1973), 31, 62, 65. See also PérotinDumon, Ville aux îles, la ville dans l’île, 115. 201. Lafleur, “Relations avec l’étranger,” 29, 34. The largest debtor in tobacco was the Jesuit order. See Laënnec Hurbon, Le phénomène religieux dans la Caraïbe: Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane, Haïti (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2000), 33.

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202. Frostin, Histoire de l’autonomisme colon, 65. 203. One of these men was Frederik Raphoen, an Amsterdam merchant who traded in Guadeloupe, St. Christopher, and Martinique until 1662. See SAA, NA 2995, fols. 300–301, Act of September 28, 1662. 204. Pierre Pluchon, Histoire des Antilles et de la Guyane (Toulouse: Edouard Privat, 1982), 71, 89. 205. Jean Petitjean Roget, ed. Histoire de l’Isle de Grenade en Amérique, 1649– 1659: manuscrit anonyme de 1659 (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1975), 117. In 1663, Jean Roy hired Jan Willemsen to work as a cooper in Martinique. See SAA, NA 2995, Act of April 26, 1663. A few other notarized acts regarding Dutchmen contracted for the French colonies have survived. See GAR, ONA 276, 79/175, Act of August 22, 1654, contract between Tomas Verniers and Adriaen Janss van Stockum (Guadeloupe); SAA, NA 2993, fols. 498–499, Act of November 8, 1661: Jan de Hamel employs Jan Heijnen (St. Christophe); SAA, NA 2995, fols. 232–233, Act of July 28, 1662: Jacques Maheu hires Herman van der Groes as a cooper (St. Christophe). 206. In 1652, Huybert van Gageldonck, may have pioneered the Dutch slave trade with the French islands by signing a contract with the governor of Guadeloupe. See GAR, ONA 442: 89, fol. 118, Act of May 10, 1652. 207. NAN, SG 5768, WIC directors J. Rijckaert and David van Baerle to the States General, 1665. See Abdoulaye Ly, La Compagnie du Sénégal (s.l.: Présence Africaine, 1958), 93. One contemporary source claimed that in Martinique the Dutch sold as many as 12,000 or 13,000 Africans in one year (1664–1665). That, however, must be considered an exaggeration: Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par le François, 4 vols. (Paris: Thomas Iolly, 1667–1671), 3: 201–202. 208. These were the Goude Poort, which supplied slaves to Martinique in 1664, and the Tijdverdrijf, which sailed with slaves to the French Caribbean in 1666. See the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, voyage identification nos. 33814 and 44266, http://www.slavevoyages.org, accessed April 23, 2013. 209. ZA, SZ 2035/196, Governor Julius Lichtenbergh to the States of Zeeland, Suriname, December 4, 1669. Eventually, most Africans were sold in Suriname. See ZA, SZ 2035/202, Governor Pieter Versterre to the States of Zeeland, Suriname, December 24, 1669. 210. Willem Rudolf Menkman, De Nederlanders in het Caraibische zeegebied waarin vervat de geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Antillen (Amsterdam: Van Kampen & Zoon, 1942), 73; Mims, Colbert’s West India Policy, 326–327. The Dutch also furnished cows, although there is no evidence that these were used in sugar mills. See Cornelis Flessen to Barend Adriaanse, Basseterre, St. Christophe, December 4, 1664, http:// brievenalsbuit.inl.nl/zeebrieven/page/article?doc=178&query=, accessed February 14, 2016. 211. Paul Butel, Histoire des Antilles françaises, XVIIe–XXe siècle (s.l.: Perrin, 2002), 70; Philip P. Boucher, France and the American Tropics to 1700: Tropics of Discontent? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 157. Bertie Mandelblatt has suggested that the enslaved Africans accompanying the Dutch who left Brazil played an unheralded role in the dissemination of expertise in sugar cultivation. See “‘À la façon du Brésil’: The Dutch Model of Sugar Plantations in the Anglo- and FrancoCaribbean and the Cicrulation of Knowledge in Overlapping Atlantic Worlds” (paper

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presented at the conference Beyond Sweetness: New Histories of Sugar in the Early Atlantic World, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI, October 24–27, 2013). 212. Gérard Lafleur, “Les Hollandais et les Antilles françaises (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles),” in Entre Calvinistes et Catholiques: Les relations religieuses entre la France et les Pays-Bas du Nord (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle), ed. Yves Krumenacker (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010), 121. 213. Quoted in John C. Rule, “Louis XIV, Roi-Bureaucrate,” in Louis XIV and the Craft of Kingship, ed. John C. Rule (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1969), 59. 214. Mims, Colbert’s West India Policy, 47. 215. Within twenty-two years, the number of ships of 100 tons or more tripled. See Pluchon, Histoire des Antilles, 90. The start of the commerce of the French West India Company with Saint-Christophe was unfortunate because the merchants had neglected to ship women’s shoes. For the time being, planters’ wives had to walk barefoot to Sunday mass. See Klarenbeek, “Grutters op de Antillen,” 33. 216. Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 172, 181. 217. SAA, NA 2230, fols. 998–999, Act of August 1, 1669, depositions of Claes Carstensz and Hendrick Breijhaen. 218. Gérard Lafleur, Bouillante: Coeur de la Côte sous le vent (Guadeloupe) (Paris: Karthala, 2004), 44–45. 219. Violet Barbour, Capitalism in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1950), 89–90; Nellis M. Crouse, The French Struggle for the West Indies 1665–1713 (London: Frank Cass, 1966 [1943]) 4, 10–11; Paul Butel, Les Caraïbes au temps des filibustiers XVIe–XVIIe siècles (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1982) 81–82, 97, 102. 220. Boucher, France and the American Tropics, 193. 221. Pluchon, Histoire des Antilles, 99–102. 222. NAN, SG 4847, Resolutions of the States General, June 23, July 2, and September 5 and 20, October 13, November 1, 1668. 223. Jacques Savary, Le parfait négociant, ou instruction générale pour ce qui regarde le commerce des merchandises de France, & des pays étrangers, 2 vols. (Paris: Chez les Frères Estienne, 1757), 2: 216. 224. Lafleur, “Hollandais et les Antilles françaises,” 127. 225. Buere-Praetje tusschen een borger en een matroos, aengaende de ghelegentheydt deses tijdts [1665]. 226. The Council of the Indies to the King, Madrid, November 1, 1648, in Cornelis Frans Adolf van Dam and Irene Aloha Wright, eds., Nederlandsche zeevaarders op de eilanden in de Caraïbische Zee en aan de kust van Columbia en Venezuela gedurende de jaren 1621–1648: Documenten hoofdzakelijk uit het Archivo General de Indias, 2 vols. (Utrecht: Kemink & Zoon, 1934), 2: ∗161–∗162. 227. In the mid-1640s, one pamphlet alleged without citing evidence that the Dutch were directing slave ships to the American colonies of their Spanish enemy: Uyt-vaert vande West-Indische Compagnie (1645). 228. The voyage of the Hoop in 1670 falls into both categories in that it disembarked slaves in Curaçao, Cartagena, and Portobelo. 229. SAA, NA 2113A, fols. 25–27, Act of August 30, 1649, testimony of Pedro Garcia Billegas (“de las Montanhas de Burgos”). For investors, see SAA, NA 2113A,

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fols. 113, 137–139, Act of July 15, 1649. Bartolotti and his wife would later bequeath the amount of 1.2 million guilders, See Norbert H. Schneeloch, “Das Kapitalengagement der Amsterdamer Familie Bartolotti in der Westindischen Compagnie,” in Wirtschaftskräfte und Wirtschaftswege: Festschrift für Hermann Kellenbenz, ed. Jürgen Schneider, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978), 2: 172. 230. SAA, NA 1819/800, Act of September 29, 1651. 231. NAN, OWIC 16, notes of the meeting of the WIC Chamber of Zeeland, December 11, 1672. 232. Brunelle, New World Merchants of Rouen, 18. 233. No documents pointing to commercial ventures by Mathias prior to 1649 have surfaced. His name is missing from among the twenty-nine Amsterdam merchants trading with the West Indies who sent a petition to the city government in that year. See Reese, Suikerhandel, 2: app. VIII. Moreover, he was still listed as resident of Hamburg in 1649; Schneeloch, Aktionäre der Westindischen Compagnie von 1674, 305n. 3. 234. I am indebted to Mr. Ruud Koopman (Zaandam, the Netherlands) for sharing this genealogical information with me. In 1653, Maria’s sister Christina married Ludovicus Boudewijns van Barlicum, the later director of Curaçao. Mathias was thereby related to the late Johannes de Laet, whose second wife was Maria Boudewijns van Berlicum. See Rolf H. Bremmer Jr., “The Correspondence of Johannes de Laet (1581–1649) as a Mirror of His Life,” Lias 25, no. 2 (1998), 149. For the background of the Timmermans family, see Eric H. Wijnroks, Handel tussen Rusland en de Nederlanden, 1560–1640: Een netwerkanalyse van de Antwerpse en Amsterdamse kooplieden, handelend op Rusland (Hilversum: Verloren, 2003), 95–98. 235. SAA, NA 1115, fol. 17, Act of October 5, 1655; AGS, Estado 8395, AGI, Indiferente General 1668, Esteban Gamarra to the Spanish Crown, The Hague, August 4, 1665, and November 1665. 236. Ribeiro da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in West Africa, 309. For Mathias’s investments in the slave trade, see AGS, Estado 8395, fol. 69, Esteban de Gamarra to King Philip IV, The Hague, August 4, 1665. 237. David van Baerle and Abraham Wilmerdonx, WIC directors, Chamber of Amsterdam, to Petrus Stuyvesant, Amsterdam, November 23, 1654, in Berthold Fernow, Documents Relating to the History of the Early Colonial Settlements Principally on Long Island (Albany: Weed, Parsons, and Co., 1883), 303; Ribeiro da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in West Africa, 309. 238. Schneeloch, Aktionäre der Westindischen Compagnie von 1674, 305n. 3; Reese, Suikerhandel, 2: 125. One example of Mathias’s perfectionism was his search for the best sheet lead as lining for shipboard pantries to prevent food from going bad. See Museum Boymans-van Beuningen Rotterdam, Brood: De geschiedenis van het brood en het broodgebruik in Nederland (Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1983), 62. 239. AGI, Indiferente General, 1668, memorandum of Esteban Gamarra, November 1665. 240. AGS, Estado 8395, fol. 69, Gamarra to King Philip IV, The Hague, August 4, 1665. This voyage probably concerns the Principe Mozo (see appendix B). Mathias must have been aware of the official ban on foreign trade. The captain of the Dutch ship Pietas, whose destination was Buenos Aires, was instructed in 1660 to leave for

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Caracas, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, or Cartagena if commerce in Buenos Aires was prohibited: NAN, SG 5767, “Instructie voor d’officieren opt schip de Pietas.” 241. AGI, Buenos Aires, 2, L.7, fols. 302v–303r, royal cédula to the president and oidores of the audiencia of Buenos Aires, Madrid, February 3, 1665. 242. AGS, Estado 8387, fols. 239 and 280, AGS, Estado 8394, fol. 62, and AGI, Indiferente General 1668, Esteban Gamarra to the Spanish Crown, May 17, 1661, November 1661, February 4, 1665, and November 1665. 243. AGI, Charcas, 416, L.5, fols. 190r–191v, royal cédula to the Count de Alba de Aliste, viceroy of Peru, Aranjuez, April 28, 1659. 244. AGS, Estado 8387, fol. 93, Esteban Gamarra to the King, The Hague, March 8, 1661. 245. These ships, the Encarnación, San Francisco, and El Salmon Dorado sailed on to Ardra and sold a total of 318 slaves in La Guaira, the port of Caracas. See AGI, Indiferente General 1668, Esteban Gamarra to the Spanish Crown, October 2, 1663. 246. Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, “Guerra económica y comercio extranjero en el reinado de Felipe IV,” Hispania: Revista española de historia 23 (1963), 99–100. 247. Pierre Salmon, Le voyage de M. de Massiac en Amérique du Sud au XVIIe siècle (Bruxelles: Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, 1984), 21–23, 60. 248. AGI, Indiferente General 1668, Esteban Gamarra to the Spanish Crown, April 1666. 249. AGS, Estado 8387, fol. 280, Gamarra to the Spanish Crown, The Hague, November 1661. 250. Lutgardo García Fuentes, El comercio español con América, 1650–1700 (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1980), 153, 154. 251. AGI, Buenos Aires, 2, L.6, fols.152V–153V, royal cédula to Pedro de Baygorri Ruiz, governor and captain-general of the Río de la Plata, Madrid, March 30, 1657; AGS, Estado 8386, fol. 296, Esteban Gamarra to the King, December 30, 1660; AGS, Estado 8387, fol. 239, Gamarra, May 17, 1661. 252. John Everaert, De internationale en koloniale handel der Vlaamse firma’s te Cadiz, 1670–1700 (Brugge: De Tempel, 1973), 353–362; Antonio Miguel Bernal, La financiación de la carrera de Indias (1492–1824): Dinero y crédito en el comercio colonial español con América (Sevilla: Fundación El Monte, 1992), 353. 253. AGS, Estado 2070, the Count of Peñaranda to King Philip IV, November 13, 1649. 254. NAN, 3.20.58, Familiepapieren Suyskens 64, 65, 68. 255. AGS, Estado 8394, fols. 62–64, Gamarra to the Spanish Crown, February 4, 1665. This was an exceptionally large number of hides, even when distributed among the three ships. See Emilio A. Coni, Historia de las vaquerías de Río de la Plata, 1555–1750 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Devenir, 1956), 21. 256. The merchandise from another Amsterdam ship that had looked in vain for a commercial opening in Buenos Aires was transferred simultaneously to the Basque vessels. Pedro Colarte, a Spanish Fleming, acted as the intermediary in this case. See AGI, Indiferente General 1668, Gamarra to the Spanish Crown, February 2, 1666. 257. Ibid., Esteban de Gamarra to the Crown, late 1663 or early 1664. 258. Ibid., Esteban Gamarra to the Crown, June 1664. In the end, the destinations of Beni’s ships were not, as intended, Cuba and Yucatán but Trinidad and

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Maracaibo: NAN, SG 4847, Resolutions of the States General of May 16, 1664; AGI, Indiferente General 1668, Esteban Gamarra to the Crown, March 4, 1665. 259. AGS, Estado 8394, fol. 175, Esteban Gamarra to the Crown, The Hague, March 17, 1665. 260. Manuel Bustos Rodríguez, Burguesía de negocios y capitalismo en Cádiz: Los Colarte (1650–1750) (Cádiz: Excma. Diputación Provincial de Cádiz, 1991), 58. 261. SAA, NA 47/96V, 48/21, Acts of March 13 and June 10, 1595. The Canaries were the lynchpin in the illicit Atlantic slave trade as early as the 1550s. See Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 212–215. 262. Elisa Torres Santana, El comercio de las Canarias Orientales en tiempos de Felipe III (Las Palmas: Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria, 1991), 353–354. One exceptional arrival was that of a ship from Amsterdam in 1622, whose crew requested a passport to sail to Africa and return with slaves. See Germán Santana Pérez, “La importancia geoestratégica de Canarias a través de la actuación de los holandeses,” in Los extranjeros en la España moderna: Actas del I Colloquio Internacional celebrado en Málaga del 28 a 30 de noviembre de 2002, ed. M. B. Villar García and Pilar Pezzi Cristóbal, eds., (Málaga: Portadilla, 2003), 624n. 5. 263. Fernando Serrano Mangas, Armadas y flotas de la plata (1620–1648) (Madrid: Banco de España, 1990), 367; Jonathan Irving Israel, “The Canary Islands and the Sephardic Atlantic Trade Network (1620–1660),” in Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World Maritime Empires (1540–1740) (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 275– 276. The argument of one historian that the Canary trade was firmly in the hands of English merchants in the seventeenth century is not true for the 1650s and early 1660s. See George F. Steckley, “The Wine Economy of Tenerife in the Seventeenth Century: Anglo-Spanish Partnership in a Luxury Trade,” Economic History Review 33, no. 3 (1980), 340–341. 264. AGS, Estado 8384, fol. 234, the King to Gamarra, Madrid, September 28, 1657. On several occasions during the first Anglo-Dutch war, the Dutch sold captured English ships at Gran Canaria. See Germán Santana Pérez, “Canarias: base de la actuación holandesa en el Atlántico (siglos XVII y XVIII),” Cuadernos de Historia Moderna 29 (2004), 105. 265. García Fuentes, Comercio español con América, 96–99. 266. That was the case with, for example, the Vergulde Fortuyn, Ste Maria, Admirael Tromp, ’t Wapen van Kampen, and Witte Roos: SAA, NA 2118/94 (Act of May 2, 1657), 1122/10 (Act of August 3, 1657), 1124/257 (Act of March 18, 1658), 1125/160 (Act of May 8, 1658), and 1134/115 (Act of July 27, 1660). 267. SAA, NA 1090/13, Act of September 2, 1649. 268. A group of Dutch merchants led by Philips van Hulten corresponded from 1653 to at least 1663 with Juan de Ponte and Salvador Alonso on the Canary Islands. See AGI, Indiferente General 1668, Esteban de Gamarra to the Spanish Crown, November 27, 1663; memorandum Council of the Indies, Madrid, January 16, 1664. 269. Israel, “Canary Islands,” 281–282. 270. NAUK, HCA 13/72, fol. 481r, examinaton of Simon Blaeu, January 28, 1658; NAUK, HCA 13/73, fols. 66v–67v, examination of Diego Mendez, February 15, 1658. 271. Israel, “Canary Islands,” 280–281.

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272. SAA, NA 2859, fol. 248, Act of May 29, 1658. 273. AGS, Estado 8387, fol. 164, Gamarra to King, April 5, 1661. 274. A.k.a. as Tristán Muñoz de Ladesma; SAA, NA 3002/148–149, Act of July 12, 1661. 275. AGI, Indiferente General 1668, Esteban Gamarra to unknown, 1664. 276. Ibid., Esteban Gamarra to the Spanish Crown, October 29, 1664, April 1666. 277. Juan A. Sánchez Belén, “El comercio de exportación holandés en Canarias durante la Guerra de Devolución (1667–1668),” in Coloquio de historia canario-americana (1996), ed. Francisco Morales Padrón, 3 vols. (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Ediciones del Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria, 1998), 2: 197, 203–204. A late example of a Canary link in Dutch transatlantic trade is the voyage in 1672 of the Santa Maria, which shipped three hundred enslaved Africans from their native continent to Tenerife. From there, the captives were to be transported to Suriname. See Erik van der Doe, “Dirck, Michiel en Benedictus en de slaven van Ardra: Brieven uit 1672 over liefde en slavenhandel en over een verdwenen Amsterdams en Zeeuws schip,” in Dirck, Michiel en Benedictus en de slaven van Ardra en andere Sailing Letters. Bundel aangeboden aan Dirk J. Tang na zijn vertrek van de Koninklijke Bibliotheek. ed. Peter de Bode, Erik van der Doe, and Perry Moree (Pijnacker: De Heeren Drie, 2011), 25–29. 278. Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520– 1720 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 358. 279. AGS, Estado 8383, fol. 61, report of the Spanish consul Jacques Richard, Amsterdam, March 4, 1656. 280. Mathias Beck to the WIC, Curaçao, July 28, 1657, in Gehring and Schiltkamp, Curaçao Papers, 104–105. The author of an anonymous Dutch document from 1655 realized that Curaçao’s location was ideal for the slave trade to the Spanish colonies. He expected a flourishing slave trade to spur migration to the island. See Universiteitsbibliotheek Ghent, “Voorslag om een gestabilieerde handel ofte negotie op te comen opregten opt eylant Curaçao” (manuscript, 1655). 281. AGI, Panama, 22, R.6, N.104, audiencia president Fernando de la Riva Agüero to unknown, Portobelo, April 30, 1661. 282. AGS, Estado, fol. 296, consul Jacques Richard to Esteban de Gamarra, Amsterdam, December 24, 1670. 283. Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org, accessed April 23, 2013. 284. SAA, NA 905/603 and 2211/115, Acts of September 2, 1660 and July 19, 1661. Mathias and Van Hulten regularly borrowed money from each other. See SAA, Archief Wisselbank, 65, fol. 115, and 66, fol. 115. 285. AGI, Indiferente General 1668, Esteban Gamarra to the Spanish Crown. The Hague, October 2, 1663; AGS, Estado 8395, fol. 69, Esteban Gamarra to King Philip IV, The Hague, August 4, 1665. 286. Marisa Vega Franco, El tráfico de esclavos con América: Asientos de Grillo y Lomelín, 1663–1674 (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1984), 47–49. Prior to 1662, the Dutch, like the Portuguese before then, had tried to minimize the slave trade on the Gold Coast so as not to damage the gold trade. The asiento business changed this. See Binder, “Goldeinfuhr,” 136–137. De Ruyter’s Gold Coast raid in 1664 made it impossible for the English to supply the promised

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numbers of slaves in the mid-1660s. See Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 503. 287. Den Heijer, Goud, ivoor en slaven, 29. 288. Johannes Menne Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600–1815 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 35, 45, 48. 289. KITLV, Collectie Westerse Handschriften 65, fol. 404, report by directorgeneral Van Valckenburg, September 1659; S. van Brakel, “Eene memorie over den handel der West-Indische Compagnie omstreeks 1670,” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 35 (1914), 97; Postma. Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 112 (table 5.2); Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 96. 290. Pieter Cornelis Emmer, “‘Jesus Christ Was Good, but Trade Was Better’: An Overview of the Transit Trade of the Dutch Antilles, 1634–1795,” in The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, ed. Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 216. 291. Resolutions WIC Chamber of Amsterdam, June 13, 1669, in Hamelberg, Documenten, 83. 292. Resolutions WIC Chamber of Amsterdam, November 6, 1671, in Hamelberg, Documenten, 84; NAN, Hof van Holland 9822, “Notitie & specificatie der overledene, vercoghte & nogh levendige onverkogte slaven,” 1678, 1679, and testimony of Willem Juijst and Mordechay Henriques, May 17, 1678. 293. Provisions during the voyage to America ideally lasted for three months and included bacon, bread, barley porridge, beans, tamarind, brandy, and tobacco. Alternatively, the diet might have comprised rice, bananas, and coconuts, as well as lemon juice to prevent scurvy. See NAN, Aanwinsten 1365, expenses incurred for a slave ship dispatched to Ardra, Amsterdam, July 13, 1678; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 350. 294. Schnurmann, Atlantische Welten, 264–266. 295. For continued trade with Virginia, see Enthoven and Klooster, “Contours of Virginia-Dutch Trade,” 107–114. 296. Harlow, History of Barbados, 263. 297. NAN, OWIC 10, Heren XIX to the director in Elmina, Middelburg, July 21, 1646; Ribeiro da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in West Africa, 332–333; Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 250–251. 298. Wätjen, Holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien, 286; Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 76; Pieter Jan van Winter, De Westindische Compagnie ter kamer Stad en Lande (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 135. By 1636, private traders exported 61.6 percent of all sugar to the Republic. See Wätjen, Holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien, 317, 320. 299. NAN, SG 5754, report by G. van Arnhem and F. Herberts on some points debated by the Heren XIX in March and April of 1635. See also the petition of the shareholders in the province of Utrecht, Utrecht, February 10, 1637, in “Stukken betreffende den vrijen handel op Brazilië, 1637: Uit het archief Van Hilten,” Kroniek van het Historisch Genootschap, gevestigd te Utrecht, ser. 5, 5 (1869), 197–199; Het Spel van Brasilien,Vergheleken by een goedt Verkeer-Spel (s.l., 1638). 300. Bick, “Governing the Free Sea,” 178–186. 301. Ibid., 208–209.

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302. Wätjen, Holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien, 344; O’Callaghan, Documents, 1: 245. In these years, free trade also triumphed in the Dutch whaling business; the monopoly of the Noordsche Compagnie came to an end in 1642. See S. Muller Fz., Geschiedenis der Noordsche Compagnie (Utrecht: Gebr. Van der Post, 1874), 350–351. 303. Resolutions of the States General, January 16, 1648, http://www.historici. nl/Onderzoek/Projecten/BesluitenStaten-generaal1626–1651, accessed February 4, 2013. 304. Jacobs, Zegenrijk gewest, 186–187. 305. Wätjen, Holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien, 298–299. The Dutch erected palisades around Recife to prevent smuggling. See Henk den Heijer and Ben Teensma, Nederlands Brazilië in kaart: Nederlanders in het Atlantisch gebied, 1600–1650: Den corte beschrijvinge inhoudende de cust van Brazil ende meer andere plaetsen (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2011), 147. 306. NAN, SG 5764, anonymous memorandum for the States General, c. 1649. 307. Henk den Heijer, “Een dienaar van vele heren: De Atlantische carrière van Hendrick Caerloff,” in Het verre gezicht: Poltieke en culturele relaties tussen Nederland en Azië, Afrika en Amerika. Opstellen aangeboden aan Prof. Dr. Leonard Blussé, ed. J. Thomas Lindblad and Alicia Schrikker (Franeker: Uitgeverij Van Wijnen, 2011), 164. 308. NAN, SG 5767, Jaspar van Heussen to the Heren XIX, Elmina, October 25, 1659; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, voyage identification no. 44219, http:// www.slavevoyages.org, accessed April 25, 2013. 309. For an early attempt (1638) to sail to Africa under the protection of Dunkirk, see Ribeiro da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in West Africa, 284. Dutchmen also competed with the VOC under foreign flags: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “On the Significance of Gadflies: The Genoese East India Company of the 1640s,” Journal of European Economic History 17, no. 3 (1988), 566, 570, 576–577; Waldemar Westergaard, The Danish West Indies under Company rule (1671–1754): With a Supplementary Chapter, 1755–1917 (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 153. 310. Franz Binder and Norbert Schneeloch, “Dirck Dircksz. Wilre en Willem Godschalk van Focquenbroch (?), geschilderd door Pieter de Wit te Elmina in 1669,” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 27, no. 1 (1979), 13–15. 311. Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 266. Another voyage organized by Dutchmen for Courland occurred in 1659: NAN, SG 5767, Dirck Spiegel and C. Burgh, directors of the WIC Chamber of Amsterdam, to the States General, Amsterdam, March 17, 1661; Bontemantel and David van Baerle, directors of the WIC Chamber of Amsterdam, to the States General, Amsterdam, June 23, 1661. 312. De Brasilsche breede-byl; ofte T’samen-spraek, tusschen Kees Jansz. Schott, komende uyt Brasil, en Jan Maet, Koopmans-knecht, hebbende voor desen ook in Brasil geweest, over den verloop in Brasil (s.l., 1647), 27; Ratelband, Vijf dagregisters, xliii n. 1, 209, 214–215, 250–251; Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 267, 271–272. 313. György Nováky, Handelskompanier och kompanihandel. Svenska Afrikakompaniet 1649–1663: En studie i feodal handel (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1990). 314. Ibid., 185; Gerhard Wilhelm Kernkamp, “Een contract tot slavenhandel van 1657,” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 22 (1901): 444–459. 315. Den Heijer, “Dienaar van vele heren,” 167–171; Albert van Dantzig, Les hollandais sur la côte de Guinée à l’époque de l’essor de l’Ashanti et du Dahomey 1680–1740 (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 1980), 38–46; Guido de Bruin,

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Geheimhouding en verraad: De geheimhouding van staatszaken ten tijde van de Republiek (1600–1750) (’s-Gravenhage: SDU, 1991), 526–528; Brieven, confessie; mitsgaders advisenvan verscheyden rechtsgeleerden in de saeck van Isaac Coymans gegeven: alsmede de sententie daerop gevolgt (Rotterdam: Dirck Iansz. [1662]), 75. Coymans’s sentence was eventually reduced to five years of imprisonment. Gerrit Bremer, a Dutchman, conducted illicit trade at the Gambia River in 1659 on behalf of Denmark. See NAN, SG 5767, Jacob Pergens and J. Rijckaerts, WIC Chamber of Amsterdam, to the States General, April 1, 1660. 316. Ratelband, Vijf dagregisters, 249n. 1, 297–298; SAA, NA 5075, 2278 I, fols. 77–78, testimony of Minne Cornelisz, July 14, 1649; SAA, NA 2278 II, fol. 34, testimony of Thieleman Willekens, October 25, 1649. I thank Jaap Jacobs for the archival references. 317. Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 268–270. 318. NAN, SG 5763, notarial act, Amsterdam, November 23, 1649. This ship never sailed to the New World, although the captain had purchased 140 Africans. Free Africans ashore rebelled and liberated the captives. 319. NAN, SG 5763, director general Jacob Ruychaver to the States General, Elmina, January 26, 1652. 320. Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 359. 321. NAN, SG 5763, director general Jacob Ruychaver to the States General, Elmina, January 26, 1652. 322. Ratelband, Vijf dagregisters, xli–xlii. 323. Den Heijer,”Dienaar van vele heren,” 172–173. Caerloff must have been involved in the voyage in 1671 of the Dutch slaver Rotterdam to Angola with a French commission. See NAN, SG 5768, WIC Chamber of Amsterdam to the States General, read July 15, 1671. 324. G. Thilmans and N. I. de Moraes, “Villault de Bellefond sur la côte occidentale d’Afrique. Les deux premières campagnes de l’Europe (1666–1671),” Bulletin de l’Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire ser. 2, 38, no. 2 (1976), 272–273, 275, 299. 325. Ribeiro da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in West Africa, 285; Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast,” 345; Rudolf Paesie, Lorrendrayen op Africa: De illegale goederen- en slavenhandel op West-Afrika tijdens het achttiende-eeuwse handelsmonopolie van de West-Indische Compagnie, 1700–1734 (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 2008), 24. Of the eight ships listed by Paesie for 1660–1664, one sailed for the Duke of Courland. An armed encounter off Angola between a company ship and a Zeeland interloper in 1671 ended in the death of twenty slaves and one crewmember. See NAUK, HCA 30/227, Johan Rietspier to his sister, 1672. 326. Binder, “Goldeinfuhr,” 141–142; Paesie, Lorrendrayen op Africa, 24–25. 327. Mark L. Thompson, The Contest for the Delaware Valley: Allegiance, Identity, and Empire in the Seventeenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 58–60, 70–74. 328. NAN, SG 5752, report submitted by Gerhardt van Arnhem and Ewolt van der Dussen, deputies of the States General, to the meeting of the Heren XIX, Middelburg, August–September 1630. See also Wätjen, Holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien, 287. 329. Johan Francke, “Utiliteyt voor de gemeene sake: De Zeeuwse commissievaart en haar achterban tijdens de Negenjarige Oorlog, 1688–1697” (PhD diss.,

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University of Leiden, 2001), 83; Enthoven, “Assessment of Dutch Transatlantic Commerce,” 397. 6. Migration and Settlement

1. Cornelis C. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1971), 40. 2. Fin de la guerre: Dialogus, ofte t’Samen-sprekinge . . . dienende tot een exemplaer, of spiegel om te bewysē dat de West-Indische interprinse d’eenige, ende beste middele is . . . om de Spangiaerden uyt den Nederlanden te jagen (Amsterdam: Paulus Aertsz. van Ravesteyn, 1623), 27. 3. Based on the estimates in Evaldo Cabral de Mello, Olinda Restaurada: Guerra e Açúcar no Nordeste, 1630–1654 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Forense-Universitaria; São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1975), 168. 4. Victor Enthoven, “Dutch Crossings: Migration between the Netherlands and the New World, 1600–1800,” Atlantic Studies 2, no. 2 (2005), 155. 5. For lack of a census, we are in the dark about the size of New Netherland nonwhite population. The number of black residents of New Amsterdam has been estimated at 375 and that of Dutch Delaware at 125, for a total of 500. See Joyce Diane Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 115; William H. Williams, Slavery and Freedom in Delaware, 1639–1865 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996), 9. But these numbers seem inflated and do not explain why the European population was obliged to work on the New Amsterdam wall in 1653 (e-mail comm., Charles Gehring, May 22, 2013). 6. Albert Eekhof, Bastiaen Jansz. Krol: Krankenbezoeker, Kommies en Kommandeur van Nieuw-Nederland (1595–1645): Nieuwe gegevens voor de kennis der vestiging van ons kerkelijk en koloniaal gezag in Noord-Amerika (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1910), 35–36; Jaap Jacobs, “In Such a Far Distant Land, Separated from All the Friends: Why Were the Dutch in New Netherland?” in Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley, ed. Jaap Jacobs and Louis H. Roper (Albany: SUNY, 2014), 154. 7. ZA, SZ 2035/225, petition of the inhabitants of Suriname to the States of Zeeland, March 11, 1671; NAN, Sociëteit van Suriname 213, fols. 226–233. 8. Frederik Oudschants Dentz, Cornelis vann Aerssen van Sommelsdijck: Een belangwekkende figuur uit de geschiedenis van Suriname (Amsterdam: P.N. van Kampen & Zoon, 1938), 60. 9. George Lincoln Burr, “Report on the Evidence of Dutch Archives as to European Occupation and Claims in Western Guiana,” in Report of the Special Commission Established by the President January 4, 1896, to Examine and Report upon the True Divisional Line between the Republic of Venezuela and British Guiana (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1898), 213–215. 10. Lodewijk Augustinus Henri Christiaan Hulsman, “Nederlands Amazonia: Handel met indianen tussen 1580 en 1680” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2009), 117, 134, 200, 202. 11. Colección de Documentos Inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y organización de las antiguas posesiones españolas de América y Oceanía sacados de los archivos del Reino y muy especialmente del de Indias, vol. 20 (Madrid: Imprenta del Hospicio, 1873), 420.

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12. Deductie waer by onpartijdelijck overwogen ende bewesen wort, wat het beste voor de Compagnie van West-Indien zy: Den Handel te sluyten of open te laten (’s-Gravenhage [c. 1638]), 16; Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 93. 13. NAN, SG 5752, WIC directors to the States General, received October 23, 1629; NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.4, “West-Indische Compagnie, Remonstrantien op het stuck van de handelinge 1633, 1635 ende 1636.” 14. Jan de Vries, “Population and Economy of the Preindustrial Netherlands,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 15, no. 4 (1985), 674. 15. ’t Verheerlickte Nederland door d’Herstelde Zee-vaart (1659), 15, 50. 16. Aboard the fleet to Pernambuco (1629–1630) were 7,280 men and not a single woman; S. P. l’Honoré Naber, ed. Reisebeschreibungen von deutschen Beamten und Kriegsleuten im Dienst der niederländischen West- und Ost-Indischen Kompagnien 1602–1797, 13 vols. (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1930), 2: 33, 35. 17. Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol, Daar was laatst een meisje loos: Nederlandse vrouwen als matrozen en soldaten: Een historisch onderzoek (Baarn: Ambo, 1981), 42. 18. In addition, there were twenty male and ten female blacks and one Amerindian woman; Willem Rudolf Menkman, De Nederlanders in het Caraibische zeegebied waarin vervat de geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Antillen (Amsterdam: Van Kampen & Zoon, 1942), 38. 19. Examination of Juan Cazuel from Picardie, Caracas, August 24, 1639, and Juo. Rravi from London, Caracas, July 2, 1640, in Antoine Maduro, ed., Documenten uit de jaren 1639 en 1640 welke zich in de “Archivo General de Indias” te Sevilla bevinden en betrekking hebben op de door de Spanjaarden beraamde plannen om het eiland Curaçao op de Nederlanders te heroveren (Curaçao: Drukkerij Scherpenheuvel, 1961), 40, 90. A Spanish soldier who had served on the island claimed thirteen years later that there was not a single woman on the island; AGI, Escribanía de Camara 6A, Santo Domingo, October 5, 1653. 20. José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos flamengos: Influência da ocupação holandesa na vida e na cultura do Norte do Brasil, 2nd ed. (Recife: Governo do Estado de Pernambuco, 1978), 73n. 122. The contrast between women-starved peripheral colonies (such as St. Martin) and demographically more balanced colonies (such as Recife) was also evident in Dutch Asia in the seventeenth century. Batavia, the counterpart of Recife, comprised 602 females (women and girls) and 873 males in 1674, whereas island of Banda had 457 male Europeans accompanied by only 23 women (and 88 children); Jacobus Ruurd Bruijn, “De personeelsbehoefte van de VOC overzee en aan boord, bezien in Aziatisch en Nederlands perspectief,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 91 (1976), 227. 21. W. Noël Sainsbury, CSP, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1661–1668, Preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1880), 319–320. In Tobago, 120 men lived with 37 women and 41 children; ZA, SZ 2035/135, list of Tobago inhabitants, April 1669. 22. In the first fifteen years of Dutch colonization, the migratory flow had leaned greatly toward young males, a tendency that continued to characterize the migration of private servants. See Oliver A. Rink, Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press; and Cooperstown: New York State Historical Association, 1986), 165–168; Ernst

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van den Boogaart, “The Servant Migration to New Netherland, 1624–1664,” in Colonialism and Migration; Indentured Labour before and after Slavery, ed. Pieter Cornelis Emmer (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1986), 63. See also David W. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 26; Henry A. Gemery, “Markets for Migrants: English Indentured Servitude and Emigration in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Colonialism and Migration; Indentured Labour before and after Slavery, ed. Pieter Christiaan Emmer (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1986), 41. The vast farmland in New Netherland attracted a group of settlers from Drenthe in these years, the less affluent among whom may have been lured by high rural wages. See Jan Folkerts, “Drenthe and New Netherland: Two Outer Provinces at the Time of Emigration,” Ons Waardeel 6 (1986), 84–86. 23. Deborah Hamer, “Creating an Orderly Society: The Regulation of Marriage and Sex in the Dutch Atlantic World, 1621–1674” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014), 121–122. 24. Frans Leonard Schalkwijk, Igreja e estado no Brasil holandês, 1630–1654 (Recife: Governo de Pernambuco, 1986), 189–191. 25. SAA, NA 2989, fols. 311–312, Act of September 22, 1659. 26. SAA, NA 2989, fols. 185–186, Act of June 17, 1659. After completing the terms of their service, both women were free to stay or leave. 27. Hollandtsche Mercurius 9 (1659), 161. 28. ZA, SZ 2035/333–335, Governor Johannes Heinsius to the States of Zeeland, Surinamburgh, May 30, 1679; Laura van den Broek and Maaike Jacobs, eds., De slavernij-ervaringen van Cornelis Stout in Algiers (1678–1680) en Maria ter Metelen in Marokko (1731–1743) (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2006). 29. NAN, Collectie Afgedwaalde Stukken (1.11.03), 69, Johan Pempelfort to the Admiralty of Amsterdam, Orangen on the Wiapoco River, March 16, 1677. 30. See also David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 192–193. International wars may have induced settlers to move back, but these same wars made a return passage dangerous. It was probably for this reason that numerous Dutchmen settled in the new Danish colony of St. Thomas after the outbreak of war in 1672. See Waldemar Westergaard, The Danish West Indies under Company Rule (1671–1754): With a Supplementary Chapter, 1755– 1917 (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 38. 31. M. Beck to the WIC directors, Curaçao, June 11, 1657, in Charles T. Gehring and J. A. Schiltkamp, eds., Curacao Papers 1640–1665, New Netherland Documents XVII (Interlaken, NY: Heart of the Lakes, 1987). The distance between the colony and metropolis could weigh heavily on personal relationships, irrespective of the rank of the WIC servant. Anthoni de Lyedekerck, governor of Fort Nassau in Guinea, had promised to marry Aeffgen Coninck of Rotterdam. But, even though he presented her with jewels to confirm his pledge as well as an obligation worth 12,000 guilders, a gold chain, and two ivory salt cellars from Benin, she lost her interest and married a local wine merchant. See GAR, ONA 98: 85/239, Act of June 27, 1623, declaration by Willem de Haen; Henriette S. de Bruyn Kops, “Liquid Silver: The Wine and Brandy Trade between Nantes and Rotterdam in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2005), 130n. 234.

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32. NAUK HCA 30/223, Nicolaes de Zoutte to his mother (or mother-in-law), September 3, 1672. 33. NAUK HCA 30/223, insert in Nicolaes de Zoutte to unknown, September 3, 1672. Elisabeth Emerij to Neeltje van der Weijde, Torarica, September 8, 1672. 34. Willem Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz.: Een Hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf, 1607–1647 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1995) [trans. as Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus 1607–1647 (Leiden: Brill, 2007)], 575. 35. In the past, some freemen who had deceived others had been able to enlist the support of shipmasters, who carried them back to the Republic before the colonial authorities caught up with them. See NAN, OWIC 8, Heren XIX to Johan Maurits and the High Council of Brazil, Amsterdam, October 24, 1639. 36. Despite the precautions, the two brothers Isaac and José Abeniacar, who owed the WIC a large sum of money, fled from Recife to Holland in 1649 without licenses or passports. See José Antonio Gonsalves de Mello, “Gente da Nação. Judeus residentes no Brasil holandês, 1630–54,” Revista do Instituto Arqueológico, Histórico e Geográfico Pernambucano 51 (1979), 130. 37. Pierre Moreau, Histoire des derniers troubles du Brésil entre les Hollandois et les Portugais (Paris: Augustin Courbe, 1651), 174–175. 38. http://www.user.shentel.net/neals/v-h-p-b.htm, accessed March 14, 2013. See also Willem Johannes van Hoboken, Witte de With in Brazilië, 1648–1649 (Amsterdam: N.V. Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1955), 158. 39. When Isaac’s son Lourens, born in Paraíba in 1641, married in Amsterdam in 1669, he declared that his parents had left for Barbados. See Elsevier, “Isaac de Rasière,” De Navorscher 20 (1870): 9–11. Lourens’s sister Anna Constantia, born in Brazil in 1640, died in Curaçao in 1737; NAN, NWIC 585, fol. 9, Jan van Schagen and Gerard Striddels to the WIC, Curaçao, May 16, 1738. 40. Egon Wolff and Frieda Wolff, A Odisséia dos Judeus de Recife (São Paulo: Centro de Estudos Judaicos, 1979), 30–31; Herbert I. Bloom, The Economic Activities of the Jews of Amsterdam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Williamsport: Bayard Press, 1937), 62, 95–96n. 76, 147. 41. Susanah Shaw Romney, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2014), 95. 42. Gerrit Johan van Grol, De grondpolitiek in het West-Indisch domein der Generaliteit, 3 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Algemeene Landsdrukkerij, 1934), 2: 32–34. 43. Speculatien op ’t Concept van Reglement op Brasil (Amsterdam: Samuel Vermeer, 1648), 3; “Sommier discours over de staet vande vier geconquesteerde capitanias Parnambuco, Itamarica, Paraiba ende Rio Grande, inde noorderdeelen van Brasil,” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 2 (1879), 286. 44. NAUK, HCA 30/227, J. Basseliers to his uncle, Suriname, c. 1672. 45. ZA, SZ 2035/225, petition of the inhabitants of Suriname to the States of Zeeland, March 11, 1671. 46. Roelof van Gelder, Het Oost-Indisch avontuur: Duitsers in dienst van de VOC (1600–1800) (Nijmegen: SUN, 1997), 175. For careers in the Dutch Republic, see Maarten Prak, “Loopbaan en carrière in de Gouden Eeuw,” De Zeventiende Eeuw 27 (2011): 130–140.

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47. Consideratie over de tegenwoordighe ghelegentheydt van Brasil (Amstelredam: Ian van Hilten, 1644), 21. 48. In 1641, Abraham Sweers embarked as captain of a company of soldiers on the expedition that was to conquer Luanda. En route he was killed by an Italian soldier for no apparent reason. See Louis Jadin, ed., L’ancien Congo et l’Angola 1639–1655 d’après les archives romaines, portugaises, néerlandaises et espagnoles (Bruxelles and Rome: Institut Historique belge de Rome, 1975), 64. 49. NAN, Admiraliteitscolleges XXVI Sweers 1647–1722, “Notitie journaelscherwijse gehouden van t’ geene mijn Isaacq Sweers, geboortich van Nieumegen, int cort is voorgevallen”; Willem Philippus Coolhaas, ed., Generale Missiven van Gouverneurs-Generaal en Raden aan Heren XVII der Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, 13 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 1: 532n. 4. 50. Following a stay in the Netherlands, Krol returned to Fort Orange in 1638 for a six-year term, after which he moved back to the United Provinces. See Eekhof, Bastiaen Jansz. Krol, 25, 29, 35–36, 40, 42, 55–57; Willem Frijhoff, “A Misunderstood Calvinist: The Religious Choices of Bastiaen Jansz Krol, New Netherland’s First Church Servant,” Journal of Early American History 1, no. 1 (2011), 63–64. 51. During Jan van Valckenburgh’s tenure as director-general (January 1663–July 1667), Wilree was chief commies in Elmina. When Van Valckenburgh died, Wilree took over until his departure to the Netherlands in May 1674. He died four months later in a shipwreck off the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog. See Franz Binder and Norbert Schneeloch, “Dirck Dircksz. Wilre en Willem Godschalk van Focquenbroch (?), geschilderd door Pieter de Wit te Elmina in 1669,” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 27, no. 1 (1979), 20–21. 52. David M. Riker, “Govert Loockermans, Free Merchant of New Amsterdam,” De Halve Maen 42, no. 3 (1989), 6; Willem Frijhoff, “Govert Loockermans (1617?–1671?) en zijn verwanten: Hoe een Turnhoutenaar zich wist op te werken in de Nieuwe Wereld,” Taxandria 83 (2011), 10–12. 53. SAA, NA 1592, fol. 78 (fourth pagination), Act of March 19, 1648; SAA, NA 1593, fol. 98 (fourth pagination), Act of September 19, 1651; GAR, ONA 497: 56, fol. 85, Act of July 5, 1652; NAN, SG 5764, bailiff and aldermen of Mauritsstad to the delegates from Brazil, Mauritsstad, January 18, 1653; SAA, NA 1595, fols. 284–285, Act of May 29, 1656. 54. Leonard Blussé, W. E. Milde, and Natalie Everts, eds., De dagregisters van het kasteel Zeelandia, Taiwan 1629–1662, vol. 3, 1648–1655 (Den Haag: Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 1996), 240n. 10; W. Wijnaendts van Resandt, De Gezaghebbers der Oost-Indische Compagnie op hare Buiten-Comptoiren in Azië. (Amsterdam: Liebaert, 1944), 143–144; Van Gelder, Oost-Indisch avontuur, 296. 55. Matheus vanden Broeck, Journael ofte Historiaelse Beschrijvinge van Matheus vanden Broeck. Van ’t geen hy selfs ghesien ende waerachtigh gebeurt is, wegen ’t begin ende Revolte van de Portugese in Brasiel, als mede de conditie en het overgaen van de Forten aldaer (Amstelredam: Gerrit van Goedesbergen, 1651); Coolhaas, Generale Missiven, 3: 189n. 2; Wijnaendts van Resandt, Gezaghebbers, 27–28. Few other men spread their wings in the Atlantic after serving the VOC. In addition to Hendrick Brouwer, this select group included Jan Dircksz Lam and Adriaen van der Dussen. Lam, who perished during the assault he led on Elmina in 1625, had been active in service to the VOC from 1607 to 1621, reaching the post of Governor of the Moluccas. Van der

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Dussen served on the Brazil High Council after a VOC career that culminated in his appointment as head of the lodge at Djambi. See Henk den Heijer, ed., Expeditie naar de Goudkust: Het journaal van Jan Dircksz Lam over de Nederlandse aanval op Elmina, 1624–1626 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2006), 42–45; Roelof Bijlsma, “Rotterdam’s Amerika-vaart in de eerste helft der 17de eeuw,” Bijdragen voor Vaderlandsche Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde, ser. 5, no. 3 (1916), 112. Piet Heyn’s VOC service occurred between the periods in which he was active in the Atlantic. 56. Van Grol, Grondpolitiek, 2: 24; Jaap Jacobs, “Dutch Proprietary Manors in America: The Patroonships in New Netherland,” in Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500–1750, ed. Louis H. Roper and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 308–309. 57. See also the Charter of Freedom and Exemptions of June 7, 1629, in Arnold Johan Ferdinand van Laer, ed., Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts: Being the Letters of Kiliaen van Rensselaer, 1630–1643, and Other Documents Relating to the Colony of Rensselaerswyck (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1908), 136–152. 58. Van Grol, Grondpolitiek, 1: 13–14, 20; Charles Verlinden, “The Transfer of Colonial Techniques from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic,” in An Expanding World, vol. 2, The European Opportunity, ed. Felipe Fernández-Armesto (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1995), 238–239. 59. New Project of Freedoms and Exemptions, 1636, in Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York; Procured in Holland, England and France by John Romeyn Brodhead, 15 vols. (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons, 1856), 1: 97; Oliver A. Rink, “Company Management or Private Trade: The Two Patroonship Plans for New Netherland,” New York History 59 (1978), 17. His counterparts in St. Eustatius, Saba, and St. Martin did not. See van Grol, Grondpolitiek, 1: 20. 60. Janny Venema, Kiliaen van Rensselaer (1586–1643): Designing a New World (Hilversum: Verloren, 2010), 219–222. 61. The second WIC gained control of all three Dutch Leeward islands in 1680, but the patroonship of Berbice survived until 1720, when the colony was passed on to a joint-stock company, the Society of Berbice. See Cornelis C. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guianas, 1680–1791 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1985), 128, 440. 62. The North American patroonships of Pavonia and Swanendael were sold to the WIC in 1634 and 1635; Leonie van Nierop, “Rensselaerswyck, 1629–1704,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis no. 60 (1947), 4. A few patroonships founded at later dates, including Staten Island, were moderately successful. 63. Thomas J. Condon, New York Beginnings: The Commercial Origins of New Netherland (New York: New York University Press; and London: University of London Press, 1968), 141; Van Nierop, “Rensselaerswyck,” 20. By 1650, around two hundred people lived there; Venema, Kiliaen van Rensselaer, 257. 64. Michiel Pauw claimed the islands that made up Fernando de Noronha as a patroonship, but he never sent any settlers there. 65. NAN, SG 5752, extract of the resolutions of the WIC Chamber of Zeeland, Middelburg, August 31, 1630; West-Indische Compagnie, articvlen met approbatie vande Ho. Mo. Heeren Staten Generael der Vereenichde Nederlanden provisionelijck beraemt by bewint-hebberen vande [. . .] West-Indische Compagnie [. . .] over het open ende vrij stel-

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len vanden handel ende negotie op de stad Olinda de Parnambuco (Middelburgh: By de weduwe en erffghenamen van Symon Moulert [1630]). 66. Van Grol, Grondpolitiek, 2: 57–59 67. Ibid., 2: 40–41. Private landowners in Dutch America were obliged to pay tithes in recognition of the right of the WIC to the land that they possessed (2: 258). 68. Rink, “Company Management or Private Trade,” 6–8; Jaap Jacobs, Een zegenrijk gewest: Nieuw-Nederland in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Prometheus/ Bert Bakker, 1999) [trans. as New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: Brill, 2005)], 64, 118. 69. Charles R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 77. 70. Deductie waer by onpartijdelijck overwogen wort, 15. 71. NAN, OWIC 53, Johan Maurits to the Heren XIX, Antônio Vaz, March 19, 1638. See also “Stukken betreffende den vrijen handel op Brazilië, 1637: Uit het archief Van Hilten,” Kroniek van het Historisch Genootschap, gevestigd te Utrecht, ser. 5, 5 (1869), 203–205. 72. Arciczewski to Johan Maurits and the High Council, Amsterdam, July 24, 1637, in “Missive van den kolonnel Artichofsky aan Graaf Maurits en den Hoogen Raad in Brazilië, 24 juli 1637,” Kroniek van het Historisch Genootschap gevestigd te Utrecht ser. 5, 25, no. 5 (1869), 236. 73. NAN, SG 5754, report by G. van Arnhem and F. Herberts on some points debated by the Heren XIX in March and April of 1635. 74. Vertoogh By een Lief-hebber des Vaderlants vertoont, teghen het ongefondeerde ende schadelijck sluyten der vryen handel in Brazil (1637); “Sommier discours,” 285. 75. Resolution of the States General, April 26, 1638, in O’Callaghan, Documents, 1: 106. 76. Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 134. 77. Caspar van Baerle, The History of Brazil under the Governorship of Johan Maurits of Nassau, 1636–1644, trans. Blanche T. van Berckel-Ebeling Koning (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 88. 78. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten, 12564.6, the council of Brazil to the Heren XIX, 1638, fols. 12–13; “Sommier discours,” 289. 79. ZA, SZ 2035/129, petition of the inhabitants of Suriname to Governor Philip Julius Lichtenbergh, March 1669. 80. ZA, SZ 2035/58, Abraham Crijnssen to the States of Zeeland, Suriname River, August 3, 1668. 81. Governor Lichtenberg repeated this suggestion one year later. See ZA, SZ 2035/124, Governor Julius Lichtenbergh to the States of Zeeland, Suriname, March 18, 1669. 82. See also David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 72. In the 1680s, eleven men were deported to Suriname, but this colony would never come to resemble nearby Devils Island. See Jan Marinus van der Linde, Surinaamse suikerheren en hun kerk: Plantagekolonie en handelskerk ten tijde van Johannes Basseliers, predikant en planter in Suriname, 1667–1689 (Wageningen: Veenman, 1966), 57–58. 83. New Project of Freedoms and Exemptions, 1636, in O’Callaghan, Documents, 1: 99. This plan never materialized. Curiously, what he perceived as the lack

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of civility of the inhabitants of Albany gave Pehr Kalm, a Finnish traveler, reason to speculate in the mid-eighteenth century that the Dutch had peopled the town with vagabonds from the metropolis. See Adolph B. Benson ed., The America of 1750: Peter Kalm’s Travels in North America. The English Version of 1770, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1964 [1937]), 1: 345. 84. Arie Theeodorus van Deursen, Mensen van klein vermogen: Het ‘kopergeld’ van de Gouden Eeuw (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1992), 66. Four years earlier, a new set of Freedoms and Exemptions was published for Brazil that provided for a seven-year exemption of tithes (with the notable exception of sugar), with an additional year of exemption for every child that came along or was born after migration. See NAN, Collectie Radermacher 546, placard: “Vryheden ende Exemptien . . . aen alle de gene die hun met hare woonstede naer Brasil sullen willen begeven, ofte jegenwoordig daer woonen,” Amsterdam, November 25, 1644. 85. WIC, Chamber of Amsterdam, to Petrus Stuyvesant and council in New Netherland, Amsterdam, May 18, 1654, and burgomasters and regents of Amsterdam to Petrus Stuyvesant, Amsterdam, May 27, 1655, in Charles T. Gehring, ed., Correspondence 1647–1653, New Netherland Documents Series, vol. 11 (Syracuse; Syracuse University Press, 2000), 15–16, 64; Albert Eekhof, De Hervormde Kerk in Noord-Amerika (1624–1664), 2 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1913), 2: 93; van den Boogaart, “Servant Migration to New Netherland,” 64; Vice-Director J. Alrichs to the Commissioners of the Colony on the Delaware River, New Amstel, October 10, 1658, in Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, Procured in Holland, England and France, vol. 2 (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Co., 1858), 52. 86. It was stipulated that the orphans serve Calvinist families in Suriname, not Jews or other non-Christians. See NAN, Oud Archief Suriname, Raad van Politie 1, meeting of April 18, 1689; van der Linde, Surinaamse suikerheren en hun kerk, 56. For Curaçao, see Bernard Buddingh’, Van Punt en Snoa: Ontstaan en groei van Willemstad, Curaçao vanaf 1634: De Willemstad tussen 1700 en 1732 en de bouwgeschiedenis van de synagoge Mikvé Israël-Emanuel 1730–1732 (’s-Hertogenbosch: Aldus Uitgevers, 1994), 34. From the other Amsterdam city orphanage, the Burgerweeshuis, a total of 809 orphans were employed on VOC and WIC ships (predominantly, on the former) between 1616 and 1699. That number constituted 13 percent of all orphans from that orphanage who were put to service. See Anne E. C. McCants, Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 66 (table 9). 87. Manuel Belmonte, a Spanish agent, wrote to his superiors in 1676 that one hundred shareholders would send ten boys and two girls each, and would repeat this four years later. The numbers add up to 2,400, not 2,600 as he wrote. See British Guiana Boundary, Arbitration with the United States of Venezuela: Appendix to the Case on Behalf of Her Britannic Majesty (London: Foreign Office, 1898), 178–179. 88. One orphanage in Delft alone sent 810 orphans to the East Indies in the period 1620–1793. See A. Hallema, “Emigratie en twerkstelling van wezen op de schepen en in het gebied der VOC en WIC gedurende de 17e en 18e eeuw,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 70 (1957), 211. 89. Kiliaen van Rensselaer to Johannes Megapolensis, Amsterdam, February 12, 1642, in Van Laer, Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts, 604–605.

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90. Regulations determined by the States General, on the advice of the West India Company board, for the peopling and cultivation of the places conquered by the WIC in Brazil, 1634, in José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, ed., Fontes para a história do Brasil holandês, 2 vols. (Recife: MinC—Secretaria da Cultura, 1985), 1: 221; NAN, SG 9410, reports from the deputies of WIC affairs, February 19 and 21, 1642. 91. NAN, Aanwinsten eerste afdeling 1360, notice of the WIC directors, Chamber of Amsterdam, January 18, 1663. 92. Simon Hart, “De stadskolonie Nieuwer-Amstel aan de Delaware River in Noord-Amerika,” Amstelodamum 38 (1951), 91, 93. 93. The text says 20 or more morgens. One morgen was the equivalent of approximately 2 acres. 94. Conditien, Die door de Heeren Burgermeesteren der Stadt Amstelredam, volgens ’t gemaeckte Accordt met de West-Indische Compagnie, ende d’Approbatie van hare Hog. Mog. de Heeren Staten Generael der Vereenighde Nederlanden, daer op gevolght, gepresenteert werden aen alle de gene, die als Coloniers na Nieuw-Nederlandt willen vertrecken, &c. (Amsterdam: Jan Banning, 1656). 95. O’Callaghan, Documents, 2: 176–177. 96. Although the privileges seem generous, not all settlers were satisfied. In 1640, New Sweden was settled by farmers from the province of Utrecht, for whom the land taxes had become too burdensome but who had been unable to reach an agreement with the WIC. In the early 1650s, another batch arrived from Utrecht. See Amandus Johnson, The Swedish Settlements on the Delaware: Their History and Relation to the Indians, Dutch and English, 1638–1664: With an Account of the South, the New Sweden, and the American Companies, and the Efforts of Sweden to Regain the Colony (New York: University of Pennsylvania, D. Appleton, 1911), 135–144; Johan Printz to Oxenstierna, August 30, 1652, in Amandus Johnson, The Instruction for Johan Printz, Governor of New Sweden: Translated from the Swedish with Introduction, Notes and Appendices, Including Letters from Governor John Winthrop, of Massachusetts, and Minutes of Courts, Sitting in New Sweden (Philadelphia: Swedish Colonial Society, 1930), 186. 97. Kort Verhael van Nieuw-Nederlants Gelegentheit, Deugden, Natuerlijke Voorrechten, en byzondere bequaemheidt ter bevolkingh (s.l., 1662), 1, 7–8, 19, 23. See also Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 257–260. 98. Frans Blom and Henk Looijesteijn, “A Land of Milk and Honey: Colonial Propaganda and the City of Amsterdam, 1656–1664,” De Halve Maen 85, no. 3 (2012), 53–54. 99. No such patroonship materialized, although the WIC offered the Bavarians an area in Guiana measuring 30 by 100 Dutch miles. As it turned out, the Duchy of Bavaria was unable to afford an expensive colonizing project. See Abraham Hulshof, “Een Duitsch econoom in en over ons land omstreeks 1670,” Onze Eeuw: Maandschrift voor staatkunde, letteren, wetenschap en kunst 10, no. 4 (1910), 70–71, 76–79. 100. Karel Davids, “Nederlanders en de natuur in de Nieuwe Wereld. Een vergelijking van visies op de natuur in Brazilië, Nieuw Nederland en de Wilde Kust in de zeventiende eeuw,” Jaarboek voor Ecologische Geschiedenis 10 (2010), 10. 101. Van den Boogaart, “Servant Migration to New Netherland,” 62–63. 102. Jan Folkerts, “The Failure of West India Company Farming on the Island of Manhattan,” De Halve Maen 69 (1996), 51.

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103. Nicolaas de Roever, “Kiliaen van Rensselaer and His Colony of Rensselaerswyck,” in van Laer, Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts, 53; Hart, “Stadskolonie,” 92. Peasants from the Veluwe were sometimes bracketed together with German farmers. In 1661, the City Council of Amsterdam asked for twenty-five or thirty farm servants from Gelderland or Westphalia (Germany) to be sent to New Amstel. See resolution of March 9, 1661, in O’Callaghan, Documents 2: 168–169. VOC officials shared the preference for farmers from the eastern provinces. See Remco Raben, “Batavia and Colombo: The Ethnic and Spatial Order of Two Colonial Cities, 1600–1800” (PhD diss., University of Leiden, 1996), 153. 104. Folkerts, “Failure of West India Company Farming,” 52. 105. Johannes Jacobus Herks, De geschiedenis van de Amersfoortse tabak (’s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1967), 70, 72, 73, 86, 88, 90, 92, 181–192; H. K. Roessingh, Inlandse tabak: Expansie en contractie van een handelsgewas in de 17e en 18e eeuw in Nederland (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1976), 98–99. 106. Sabine Klein, “‘They Have Invaded the Whole River’: Boundary Negotiations in Anglo-Dutch Colonial Discourse,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9, no. 2 (2011), 343–344. 107. Pieter Emmer, “The West India Company, 1621–1791: Dutch or Atlantic?” in The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580–1880: Trade, Slavery and Emancipation (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998), 85–86. 108. Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz., 572. 109. NAN, OWIC 51, Johannes van Walbeeck to the WIC Chamber of Amsterdam, March 24, 1636. 110. Vincent Joachim Soler, “Brief and Curious Report of Some Peculiarities of Brazil. Seventeenth Century Pamphlet (1639),” in Dutch Brazil, vol. 1, Documents in the Leiden University Library, ed. Cristina Ferrão and José Paulo Monteiro Soares (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Index, 1997), 45–46. 111. NAN, Collectie Afgedwaalde Stukken, 69, Johan Pempelfort to the Admiralty of Amsterdam, Orangen on the Wiapoco River, March 16, 1677. 112. Dependence on metropolitan food supplies would still mark the Dutch plantation colonies of Berbice and Essequibo in the mid-eighteenth century. See L. Bosman, Nieuw Amsterdam in Berbice (Guyana): De planning en bouw van een koloniale stad, 1764–1800 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1994), 28. 113. Soler, “Brief and Curious Report,” 45–46; Folkerts, “Failure of West India Company Farming,” 50. 114. Donna Merwick, “Dutch Townsmen and Land Use: A Spatial Perspective on Seventeenth-Century Albany, New York,” William & Mary Quarterly, ser. 3, 37 (1980), 57; Romney, New Netherland Connections, 151. 115. Ben Teensma, ed., Suiker, verfhout en tabak: Het Braziliaanse Handboek van Johannes de Laet (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2009), 85. 116. NAN, OWIC 54, no. 9, governor and council of Brazil to the Heren XIX, Recife, March 5, 1639; NAN, OWIC 9, Heren XIX to Johan Maurits and the High Council, Amsterdam, October 24, 1639 and April 18, 1642; NAN, OWIC 55, Johan Maurits and council to the Heren XIX, Recife, May 7, 1640. Cassava was later also cultivated in Tobago and Suriname; ZA, SZ 2035/12, Jean Lansman to the States of Zeeland, Tobago, April 19, 1668; ZA, SZ 2035/15–16, Abel Thisso to the States of Zeeland, Nova Walcheren [Tobago], April 30, 1668; ZA, SZ 2035/209, Nicolaes

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Combe to the States of Zeeland, Suriname, February 14, 1670. Lavradores de cana were sugarcane cultivators, some of whom owned slaves and land, although most were tenants or sharecroppers who leased land from mill owners, on whom they also depended for refining and processing. 117. NAN, SG 9411, P. J. Bas to the WIC, São Luís de Maranhão, November 15, 1642. 118. Pieter Marinus Netscher, Les hollandais au Brésil, notice historique sur les PaysBas et le Brésil au XVIIe siècle (La Haye: Belinfante Frères, 1853), 154. 119. Moreau, Histoire des derniers troubles, 87–88. 120. NAUK, High Court of Admiralty, Prize Records, 30/223, Francisco Henriquez Pereyra to Pedro Henriquez Pereyra in Amsterdam, Suriname, September 12, 1672; ZA, SZ 2035/241, Governor Pieter Versterre to the States of Zeeland, Suriname, May 6, 1673. 121. Resolution of May 18, 1644, in Gehring and Schiltkamp, Curacao Papers, 36. 122. Mello, Olinda Restaurada, 91. 123. Eekhof, Hervormde Kerk, 1: 151. 124. Mathias Beck to the WIC, Curaçao, July 28, 1657, in Gehring and Schiltkamp, Curaçao Papers, 106; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 362–363; Resolution, WIC Chamber of Amsterdam, June 13, 1669, in Johannes Hermanus Jacobus Hamelberg, ed., Documenten behoorende bij “De Nederlanders op de West-Indische eilanden” (Amsterdam: Emmering, 1979), 83. 125. Dennis J. Maika, “Commerce and Community: Manhattan Merchants in the Seventeenth Century” (PhD diss., New York University, 1995), 35; Van Cleaf Bachman, Peltries or Plantations: The Economic Policies of the Dutch West India Company in New Netherland 1623–1639 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 70. See also Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 196. 126. Van Baerle, History of Brazil, 202. 127. Mello, Fontes, 10; Martha Dickinson Shattuck, “A Civil Society: Court and Community in Beverwijck, New Netherland, 1652–1664” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1993), 23–25. 128. Shattuck, “Civil Society,” 33–34. 129. Van Grol, Grondpolitiek, 1: 29–30. 130. Shattuck, “Civil Society,” 47–48; Hermann Wätjen, Das holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien: Ein Kapitel aus der Kolonialgeschichte des 17. Jahrhunderts (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, Gotha: Perthes, 1921), 188–190. 131. In contrast, practicing members of Catholic churches in the Dutch Republic were excluded from public office. 132. In Suriname, criminal law did not leave any room for compromise, at least not officially. All adulterers, for example were to receive the death penalty. See “Criminele en penale wetten ende ordonnantien,” February 19, 1669, in Jacobus Thomas de Smidt and To van der Lee, eds., West-Indisch plakaatboek: Plakaten, ordonnantiën en andere wetten, uitgevaardigd in Suriname, 1667–1816, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1973), 1: 4. 133. Langdon G. Wright, “Local Government and Central Authority in New Netherland,” New York Historical Society Quarterly (1973), 13; Jacobs, Zegenrijk gewest, 151, 155; Dennis Sullivan, The Punishment of Crime in Colonial New York: The Dutch Experience in Albany during the Seventeenth Century (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 43.

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134. Shattuck, “Civil Society,” 61–62. 135. Arie Boomert, “Amerindian-European Encounters on and around Tobago (1498–ca.1810),” Antropológica 97–98 (2002), 106. 136. Mello, Tempo dos flamengos, 74, 76, 79. 137. The crew of a Dutch flute went to church in Elmina in 1668 to listen to a sermon on Whitmonday. That afternoon, a great feast was laid on, and all officers in the fort were regaled. See NAN, Aanwinsten, Eerste Afdeling 940, fol. 21, journal of Jan Jacob Beer, supercargo on the St. Jan de Dooper. 138. He did not get along with the soldiers, who were not given any meat. See L’Honoré Naber, Reisebeschreibungen, 2: 22–23. 139. Klaas Ratelband, Vijf dagregisters van het kasteel São Jorge da Mina (Elmina) aan de Goudkust (1645–1647) (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1953), 57. 140. Francisco Guerra, “Medicine in Dutch Brazil 1624–1654,” in Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen 1604–1679: A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil. Essays on the Occasion of the Tercentenary of his Death, ed. Ernst van den Boogaart, in collaboration with Hendrik Richard Hoetink and Peter James Palmer Whitehead (’s-Gravenhage: Johan Maurits van Nassau Stichting, 1979), 476. 141. NAN, OWIC 47, fol. 439, Johan van Leeuwen to the Heren XIX, on board the Fortuijn off Pernambuco, November 7, 1631; GAR, ONA 201: 197/262, Act of February 17, 1641. 142. Joyce Diane Goodfriend, “Writing/Righting Dutch Colonial History,” New York History 80 (1999): 5–28. For Dutch cartographic nomenclature, see Benjamin Schmidt, “Mapping an Empire: Cartographic and Colonial Rivalry in SeventeenthCentury Dutch and English North America,” William and Mary Quarterly, ser. 3, 54, no. 3 (1997), 551. For the Dutch on St. Croix, see Juan de Balaños to the Spanish Crown, Puerto Rico, January 23, 1643, in Cornelis Frans Adolf van Dam and Irene Aloha Wright, eds., Nederlandsche zeevaarders op de eilanden in de Caraïbische Zee en aan de kust van Columbia en Venezuela gedurende de jaren 1621–1648: Documenten hoofdzakelijk uit het Archivo General de Indias, 2 vols. (Utrecht: Kemink & Zoon, 1934), 2: ∗73); Alfredo E. Figueredo, “The Early European Colonization of St. Croix (1621–1645),” Journal of the Virgin Islands Archaeological Society 6 (1978): 59–64. 143. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 196. 144. Johannes de Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael van de Verrichtinghen der Gheoctroyeerde WestIndische Compagnie in derthien Boecken, ed. Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, 4 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1931–1937), 2: 135; 3: 30, 160; Jacobs, Zegenrijk gewest, 384–385. 145. Frank Ibold, Jens Jäger, and Detlev Kraack, eds., Das Memorial und Jurenal des Peter Hansen Hajstrup (1624–1672) (Neumünster: Wachholtz Verlag, 1995), 75. 146. Announcement of the Council of Brazil, May 28, 1641, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 43. 147. Jacob Adriaan Schiltkamp and Jacobus Thomas de Smidt, West Indisch plakaatboek. Publikaties en andere wetten betrekking hebbende op St. Maarten - St. Eustatius - Saba. 1648/1681–1816 (Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1979), 140–141. 148. Eekhof, Hervormde Kerk, 1: 120. 149. Ibid., 1: 121. 150. Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz, 581.

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151. As late as the 1750s, copies of the 1637 Dutch Bible translation were imported into New York; Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 188–189. 152. In addition, he proposed creating a council of theologians, which was to occupy itself with the overseas assignments of pastors and schoolteachers to “disturb the devil’s realm.” Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Wild Coast, 40; Otto van Rees, Geschiedenis der Staathuishoudkunde in Nederland tot het einde der achttiende eeuw, 2 vols. (Utrecht: Kemink en Zoon, 1865–1868), 2: 400–401. 153. Van Nierop, “Rensselaerswyck,” 217. 154. Johan Hartog, Mogen de eilanden zich verheugen: Geschiedenis van het protestantisme op de Nederlandse Antillen ([Willemstad:] Kerkeraad van de Verenigde Protestantse Gemeente van Curaçao, 1969), 11. 155. Willem Frijhoff and Marijke Spies, 1650: Bevochten eendracht (Den Haag: Sdu Uitgevers, 1999), 353–354; Benjamin Kaplan, “Fictions of Privacy: House Chapels and the Spatial Accommodation of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe,” American Historical Review 107, no. 4 (2002), 1042–1043. 156. Adam Jones, ed., West Africa in the Mid-Seventeenth Century: An Anonymous Dutch Manuscript (s.l.: African Studies Association Press, 1995), 68–69. 157. Eekhof, Hervormde Kerk, 1: 15, 17, 23. 158. Schalkwijk, Igreja e estado, 121. 159. Hartog, Mogen de eilanden zich verheugen, 11. 160. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.42, WIC meeting of August 25, 1659. 161. Frijhoff and Spies, 1650, 362. 162. Schalkwijk, Igreja e estado, 121–122, 129, 137. 163. Laurentius Knappert, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Bovenwindsche eilanden in de 18de eeuw (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1932), 170. 164. Van Deursen, Mensen van klein vermogen, 296. 165. Leendert Jan Joosse, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld: Ontmoeting met Afrikanen en Indianen (1600–1700) (Kampen: Uitgeverij Kok, 2008), 121. 166. SAA, ACA 157, fol. 14; “Classicale Acta van Brazilië,” Archief voor de geschiedenis der oude Hollandsche zending, 3 vols. (Utrecht: C. van Bentum, 1885), 2: 310; Johan Hartog, Curaçao, van kolonie tot autonomie, 2 vols. (Aruba: De Wit, 1961), 1: 209–210; Schalkwijk, Igreja e estado, 145; Klaas Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika 1600–1650: Angola, Kongo en São Tomé (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2000), 104–105. 167. Coolhaas, Generale Missiven, 1: 651n. 5; Hartog, Mogen de eilanden zich verheugen, 8; Gijsbertus Marius Jozef Maria Koolen, Een seer bequaem middel: Onderwijs en kerk onder de zeventiende-eeuwse VOC (Kampen: Kok, 1993), 12, 122, 127. 168. SAA, ACA 379: 224, pastor Adrianus van Beaumont to the Classis Amsterdam, Curaçao, April 17, 1660. 169. He had preached in the villages of Ens and Emmeloord; SAA, ACA 157, fols. 193–195, meetings of January 27, February 24, and March 9, 1648. 170. SAA, ACA 157, fols. 195, 200–201, 210, meetings of June 29, August 10, and December 28, 1648. 171. Schalkwijk, Igreja e estado, 115. 172. Meeting of the Reformed Church Council, March 3, 1637, in “Classicale Acta van Brazilië,” Archief voor de geschiedenis der oude Hollandsche zending, 3 vols. (Utrecht: C. van Bentum, 1885), 2: 227.

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173. José Antonio Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da Nação: Cristãos-novos e judeus em Pernambuco 1542–1654 (Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco and Editora Massangana, 1989), 305. The authorities in the Dutch Cape colony in South Africa tried in vain to prevent innkeepers from drawing beer before or during sermons. See Johannes Petrus Claasen, Die sieketroosters in Suid-Afrika 1652–1866 (Pretoria: N. G. Kerkboekhandel, 1977), 87–88. 174. Joyce D. Goodfriend, “The Struggle over the Sabbath in Petrus Stuyvesant’s New Amsterdam,” in Power and the City in the Netherlandic World, ed. Wayne te Brake and Wim Klooster (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), 205–224. See also Jacobs, Zegenrijk gewest, 384. 175. Jonathan Irving Israel, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World 1606–1661 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 662–664. 176. See the minister’s report to the Amsterdam church council on June 21, 1618: “Aantekeningen betreffende Oost- en West-Indische kerkzaken 1604–1652. Volgens het onuitgegeven handschrift van Prof. Dr. H.C. Millies,” De Navorscher 41 (1891), 3–4. 177. Daniel Noorlander, “Serving God and Mammon: The Reformed Church and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World, 1621–1674” (PhD. diss., Georgetown University, 2011), 313–314. 178. Conditions for colonies, adopted by the WIC board, November 22, 1628, in Report and Accompanying Papers of the Commission Appointed by the President, by United States: Commission to Investigate and Report upon the True Divisional Line between Venezuela and British Guiana (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1897), 63; Liberties and exemptions offered by the WIC Zeeland Chamber to patroons of colonies in Guiana, 1657, in Report and Accompanying Papers, 123. 179. Claasen, Sieketroosters in Suid-Afrika, 26; Caspar Adam Laurens van Troostenburg de Bruyn, De Hervormde Kerk in Nederlandsch Oost-Indië (1602–1795) (Arnhem: Tjeenk Willink, 1884), 5–6; Joosse, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld, 113–114. 180. “Copy of a Call and of a Letter of Instruction for Siecken-Troosters Going to the East or West Indies, etc.” in Edward Tanjore Corwin, ed., Ecclesiastical Records State of New York, 7 vols. (Albany, NY: James B. Lyon, 1901), 1: 96–97. 181. Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz., 519. 182. L’Honoré Naber, Reisebeschreibungen, 2: 33. A moral interpretation of disease was not uniquely Dutch. In the early seventeenth century, for instance, some Englishmen linked syphilis to the sodomy, cannibalism, or general debauchery they ascribed to Amerindians. See Joyce E. Chaplin, “Natural Philosophy and Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies,” William and Mary Quarterly, ser. 3, 54, no. 1 (1997), 237. 183. Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz., 526. 184. Eekhof, Hervormde Kerk, 1: 13; Minutes of the meeting of the Reformed Church Council, October 29, 1638, in “Classicale Acta van Brazilië,” Archief voor de geschiedenis der oude Hollandsche zending, 3 vols. (Utrecht: C. van Bentum, 1885), 2: 258; Schalkwijk, Igreja e estado, 196. Not every WIC ship had a comforter on board. There was none in the expedition that put to sea in 1634 to conquer Curaçao, although prayers and “edifying practices” were held. See Menkman, Nederlanders in Caraibische zeegebied, 42. Nor was a comforter present on the Olifant, a ship en route to Pernambuco in 1642. When a soldier’s wife gave birth to a son, it

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was a German mercenary who baptized the newborn in front of the entire crew. See Caspar Schmalkalden, Brasil Holandês, 2 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Index, 1998), 1: 30. 185. Eekhof, Hervormde Kerk, 1: 14; Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz., 521–522. 186. In Brazil, they complained that the rations they received were even smaller than those for schoolteachers; Meeting of the Reformed church council, April 20, 1640, in “Classicale Acta van Brazilië,” Archief voor de geschiedenis der oude Hollandsche zending, 3 vols. (Utrecht: C. van Bentum, 1885), 2: 276. 187. Schalkwijk, Igreja e estado, 194. 188. SAA, ACA 157, fol. 28, 31, 62. Meetings of March 5 and 26, 1640, and November 19, 1641. 189. The church council in Dutch Brazil, for instance, rejected a request from Boudewijn Maarschalck, comforter of the sick at Cabo de Santo Agostinho, that he be allowed to leave for the fatherland and bring back his wife. See Meeting of the church council of Brazil, April 20, 1640, in “Classicale Acta van Brazilië,” Archief voor de geschiedenis der oude Hollandsche zending, 3 vols. (Utrecht: C. van Bentum, 1885), 2: 270. By contrast, Abraham Floris, comforter in Batavia, was granted permission to collect his wife; Meeting of the church council of Batavia, January 4, 1649, in Jakob Mooij, ed., Bouwstoffen voor de geschiedenis der Protestantsche Kerk in Nederlandsch-Indië, 3 vols. (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1927–1931), 2: 111. See also Vibeke Roeper, “Het Journael van Seyger van Rechteren, 1628–1633: Waarheid, overdrijving en fictie in een egodocument,” Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie 56 (2002), 125. 190. I am not aware of comforters sent from Asia to the Atlantic world, but dozens went in the opposite direction. See Noorlander, “Serving God and Mammon,” 318–323. 191. Koolen, Seer bequaem middel, 88. 192. Examples include Gerardus Besten and Johannes Christiani; SAA, ACA 157, fols. 17, 21, exams of October 4 and December 11, 1639. It was also possible to secure an appointment as comforter while serving in the colonies. Examples include Christoffel Cornelisz in Brazil, who had lost an arm as a gunner in WIC service. See SAA, ACA 379: 40, request dated September 17, 1640. 193. Johan H. Giskes, “Tweehonderd jaar bouw van strijkinstrumenten in Amsterdam (1600–1800),” Jaarboek Amstelodamum 79 (1987), 61; SAA, ACA 157, fols. 32–34, meetings of April 23, May 8, and May 28, 1640. 194. Ratelband, Vijf dagregisters, 304. 195. SAA, ACA 157, fol. 69, meeting of March 18, 1642. 196. SAA, ACA 157, fols. 146, 157, meetings of October 30, 1645 and August 27, 1646. 197. Meeting of the Reformed Church Council, November 21, 1640, in “Acta van Brazilië,” Archief voor de geschiedenis der oude Hollandsche zending, 3 vols. (Utrecht: C. van Bentum, 1885), 2: 288. 198. SAA, ACA 157, fol. 228, meeting of November 30, 1649. 199. See also Charles H. Parker, The Reformation of Community: Social Welfare and Calvinist Charity in Holland, 1572–1620 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 144.

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7. The Non-Dutch

1. Krzysztof Arciszewski to Johan Maurits and the High Council of Brazil, Amsterdam, July 24, 1637; “Missive van den kolonnel Artichofsky aan Graaf Maurits en den Hoogen Raad in Brazilië, 24 juli 1637,” Kroniek van het Historisch Genootschap gevestigd te Utrecht ser. 5, 25, no. 5 (1869), 233. 2. Een Lief-hebber des Vaderlandts, Levendich Discours vant ghemeyne Lants welvaert voor desen de Oost ende nu oock de West-Indische generale Compaignie aenghevanghen seer notabel om te lesen ([Amsterdam:] Broer Iansz, 1622). 3. Report of the Commissioners and Directors over Amsterdam’s colony, submitted to the Burgomasters, August 10, 1663, in Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York; Procured in Holland, England and France by John Romeyn Brodhead, 15 vols. (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons, 1856), 2: 211. 4. Korte aenwysinge van de bysondere nuttigheden, die met reden te gemoet gesien kunnen werden, uyt de conservatie ende verbeteringe van de Colonie van Suriname (s.l., 1681), 11. 5. British Guiana Boundary, Arbitration with the United States of Venezuela: Appendix to the Case on Behalf of Her Britannic Majesty (London: Foreign Office, 1898), 25. 6. Their leader, Theodorus Claessen, pledged in 1614 that he and his company would contribute 200,000 ducats to their colony. Although he was refused permission, Claessen was later reported to have first lived with eighty Anabaptists in Cayenne, where most males had indigenous concubines, before moving the colony to Suriname; Information touching on the West Indies, April 4, 1615. See Account of Map of Coast from the Amazon to the Island of Margarita, in ibid., 39–43. 7. Een Vertoogh van de considerabele Colonie, By de Edele Groot Mog. Heeren Staten van Hollandt ende West-Vrieslant, uytgeset op de vaste Kust van America (s.l.: Jacobus Scheltus, 1676), 13, conditions listed by Simon van Beaumont, July 20, 1675. 8. NAN, Collectie Afgedwaalde Stukken (1.11.03), 69, Johan Pempelfort to the Admiralty of Amsterdam, Orangen on the Wiapoco River, March 16, 1677. 9. “Some Thoughts on the Colonie at the South River in New Netherland,” in O’Callaghan, Documents, 2: 201. See also Clinton Alfred Weslager, “The City of Amsterdam’s Colony on the Delaware, 1656–1664; with Unpublished Dutch Notarial Abstracts,” Delaware History 20 (1982), 84n; Simon Hart, “De stadskolonie Nieuwer-Amstel aan de Delaware River in Noord-Amerika,” Amstelodamum 38 (1951), 92. 10. Arnoldus Montanus, De nieuwe en onbekende weereld: of beschryving van America en ’t Zuid-land (Amsterdam: Jacob Meurs, 1671), 134. Five years later, land grants were made to several Waldenses on Staten Island. See John Romeyn Brodhead, History of the State of New York: First Period, 1609–1664 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853), 692. 11. Victor Enthoven, “Zeeland en de opkomst van de Republiek: Handel en strijd in de Scheldedelta, c. 1550–1621” (PhD diss., Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, 1996), 261. Two decades later, prospective Irish-Dutch settlers still left from Vlissingen for the Amazon region; W. Noël Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers [CSP], Colonial Series, 1574–1660, Preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1860), 218. 12. Joyce Lorimer, ed., English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, 1550– 1646 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1989), 53, 163–165.

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13. Ibid., 52. Among the 5,000 people leaving from London for the Americas in 1635 were 121 from Middelburg and Vlissingen. See Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 32. 14. Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojouners: Leiden and the Foundations of Plymouth Plantation (Plymouth, MA: General Society of Mayflower Descendants, 2009), 588–590, 645–646. 15. Mrs. Robert W. de Forest, A Walloon Family in America: Lockwood de Forest and His Forbears 1500–1848: Together with a Voyage to Guiana Being the Journal of Jesse de Forest and His Colonists 1623–1625, 2 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914), 1: 18–30, 2: 231;. Lorimer, English and Irish Settlement, 75–78. 16. Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, “The Walloon and Huguenot Elements in New Netherland and Seventeenth-Century New York: Identity, History, and Memory,” in Revisiting New Netherland: Perspectives on Early Dutch America, ed. Joyce Goodfriend (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 41–54. 17. Resolutions WIC Chamber of Amsterdam, April 30, 1635, in Johannes Hermanus Jacobus Hamelberg, ed., Documenten behoorende bij “De Nederlanders op de West-Indische eilanden” (Amsterdam: Emmering, 1979), 37. 18. Johan Hartog, De Bovenwindse eilanden Sint Maarten, Saba, Sint Eustatius: Eens Gouden Rots, nu zilveren dollars (Aruba: De Wit, 1964), 56. 19. Langdon G. Wright, “Local Government and Central Authority in New Netherland,” New York Historical Society Quarterly (1973), 10–11. 20. Leendert Jan Joosse, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld: Ontmoeting met Afrikanen en Indianen (1600–1700) (Kampen: Uitgeverij Kok, 2008), 261. 21. List of things found upon St. Eustatius, August 23, 1665, in W. Noël Sainsbury, CSP, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1661–1668, Preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1880), 319–320; Hartog, Bovenwindse eilanden, 223. Charles de Rochefort’s estimate of 1,600 inhabitants, made in his Histoire naturelle et morale des isles Antilles de l’Amérique (1658), seems exaggerated. See also Carl Bridenbaugh and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624– 1690 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 76n. 22. German travelers in the United Provinces in the seventeenth century called the Dutch language “German” or “Low German.” See Steffi Schmidt, Die Niederlande und die Niederländer im Urteil deutscher Reisenden: Eine Untersuchung deutscher Reisebeschreibungen von der Mitte des 17. bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Siegburg: Verlag F. Schmitt, 1963), 63. Tellingly, “Nova Germania” was the name that Peter Plancius, the geographer-minister, gave to the Wild Coast of Guiana, which he planned as an area of Dutch settlement. See Nicolaes à Wassenaer, Het elfde deel of ’t vervolgh van het Historisch verhael aller ghedencwaerdiger geschiedenissen, die […] van aprili tot october, deses jaers 1626. voorgevallen syn (Amsterdam: Johannes Janssonius, 1626), 113. 23. Pastor Jonas Michaëlius to pastor Adriaen Smoutius, New Amsterdam, August 11, 1628, in Edward Tanjore Corwin, ed., Ecclesiastical Records State of New York, 7 vols. (Albany, NY: James B. Lyon, 1901), 1: 53. 24. José Antonio Gonsalves de Mello, “Gente da Nação. Judeus residentes no Brasil holandês, 1630–54,” Revista do Instituto Arqueológico, Histórico e Geográfico Pernambucano 51 (1979), 245.

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25. Daniel Noorlander, “Serving God and Mammon: The Reformed Church and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World, 1621–1674” (PhD. diss., Georgetown University, 2011), 115; Charles T. Gehring, ed., Correspondence 1647– 1653, New Netherland Documents Series, vol. 11 (Syracuse; Syracuse University Press, 2000), 156. Drisius (1600–1673) served as a pastor in New Amsterdam/New York from 1652 until his death. 26. Hermann Wätjen, Das holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien: Ein Kapitel aus der Kolonialgeschichte des 17. Jahrhunderts (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, Gotha: Perthes, 1921), 216. 27. SAA, ACA 157, fol. 186, meeting of September 16, 1647; Charles de Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale des Iles Antilles de l’Amérique (Roterdam: Arnould Leers, 1658), 42. 28. Half the building costs for the church were paid by the Heren XIX and the other half by a fine paid in Brazil by a blaspheming Jew. See José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos flamengos: Influência da ocupação holandesa na vida e na cultura do Norte do Brasil, 2nd ed. (Recife: Governo do Estado de Pernambuco, 1978), 115. 29. José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, ed., Fontes para a história do Brasil holandês, 2 vols. (Recife: MinC—Secretaria da Cultura, 1985), 2: 301–306. Starting in 1649, at least four diets were held in New Netherland, where delegates of Dutch and English settlements advised the director-general and council. See Jaap Jacobs, Een zegenrijk gewest: Nieuw-Nederland in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Prometheus/Bert Bakker, 1999) [trans. as New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: Brill, 2005)], 156–157. 30. NAN, SG 5755, Duarte Gomes da Silveira to the States General and the Prince of Orange, Paraíba, June 1, 1637; Mello, Fontes, 2: 388–390, 397, 403; Pierre Moreau, Histoire des derniers troubles du Brésil entre les Hollandois et les Portugais (Paris: Augustin Courbe, 1651), 19; Auguste de Guelen, Kort verhael vanden staet van Fernanbuc (Amsterdam, 1640). 31. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten, 12564.6, extract of the resolutions of the States General, February 27, 1637, referring to the letter by Jan Robberts to the WIC Chamber of Maze, December 20, 1636. 32. NAN, OWIC 8, Heren XIX to Johan Maurits and the High Council, Amsterdam, October 24, 1639. 33. NAUK, HCA 30/223, Simon van Cleeff to unknown, Suriname, September 7, 1672. 34. Placard from Governor Pieter Versterre, June 9, 1672, in Jacob Adriaan Schiltkamp and Jacobus Thomas de Smidt, West Indisch plakaatboek. Publikaties en andere wetten betrekking hebbende op St. Maarten - St. Eustatius - Saba. 1648/1681-1816 (Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1979), 1: 71. 35. Cornelis C. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guianas, 1680– 1791 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1985), 270. Mixed rule was introduced in Brazil as well. In those districts where the Lusophones outnumbered the Dutch, the courts of justice were composed of three Luso-Brazilians and two Dutchmen. 36. Simon Middleton, “Order and Authority in New Netherland: The 1653 Remonstrance and Early Settlement Politics,” William and Mary Quarterly, ser. 3, 67, no. 1 (2010), 51–52.

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37. Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, ed., Toortse der Zeevaert door Dierick Ruiters (1623) (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1913), 35–36. 38. NAN, SG 5756, Johan Maurits and councilors Henric Hamel, A. van Bullestraete and D. Codde van der Burgh to the Heren XIX, Recife, May 2, 1642. The Portuguese Inquisition started prosecuting Angolan Jews after 1626. See Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, “The Apprenticeship of Colonization,” in Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, ed. Barbara L. Solow (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 163 39. Testimony of Blas de Paz Pinto, Francisco de Heredia, and Manuel de Fonseca Enríquez, February 27, 1637, and Manuel de Fonseca Enríquez, September 25, 1636, in Anna María Splendiani, Cincuenta años de Inquisición en el Tribunal de Cartagena de Indias 1610–1660, 4 vols. (Santafé de Bogotá: Centro Editorial Javeriano, Instituto Colombiano de Cultura Hispánica, 1997), 3: 43, 48, 64; Maria da Graça A. Mateus Ventura, “Os Gramaxo: Um caso paradigmático de redes de influência em Cartagena das Índias,” Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas 1 (2001): 72; Seymour B. Liebman, The Jews in New Spain: Faith, Flame, and the Inquisition (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press [1970]), 220–221. 40. Stuart Schwartz, “The Voyage of the Vassals: Royal Power, Noble Obligations, and Merchant Capital before the Portuguese Restoration of Independence, 1624–1640,” Hispanic American Historical Review 96, no. 3 (1991), 752–758. 41. Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd ed., 18 vols.(New York and London: Columbia University Press, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1952–1983), 15: 328–329. The man in question was named as Antonio Vaez Henriques, alias Mosen Coen. A Moses Cohen Henriques did indeed live in Dutch Brazil, where he married in 1631. He probably died in Barbados in 1663 or 1664. See Egon Wolff and Frieda Wolff, Dicionário Biográfico, 7 vols. (Rio de Janeiro, ERCA: 1986–1992), 1: 94. As important as Dutch Brazil would be for the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam, not every one of them backed the Dutch conquest. Three men were involved in a conspiracy to return Brazil to the Portuguese in 1632. See Johannes de Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael van de Verrichtinghen der Gheoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie in derthien Boecken, ed. Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, 4 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1931–1937), 3: 104–107. 42. Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans. The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000), 11–13, 19. 43. NAN, SG 5751, Willem Usselincx to the States General, The Hague, February 24, 1623. 44. Hermann Kellenbenz, A participação da Companhia de judeus na conquista holandesa de Pernambuco (s.l.: Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Departamento Cultural, 1966), 13–15; Willem Rudolf Menkman, De Nederlanders in het Caraibische zeegebied waarin vervat de geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Antillen (Amsterdam: Van Kampen & Zoon, 1942), 44; Isaac Samuel Emmanuel and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1970), 37–38. One veteran of the conquest of Pernambuco, Samuel Cohen, a Portuguese-born Jew, served as interpreter in the expedition that seized Curaçao in 1634 and was subsequently appointed captain of the Amerindians. Cohen was later mentioned as “our Portuguese language man” in Luanda. See Mark Meuwese, “Samuel Cohen

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(c. 1600–1642): Jewish Translator in Brazil, Curaçao and Angola,” in The Human Tradition in the Atlantic World, 1500–1850, ed. Karen Racine and Beatriz Gallotti Mamigonian (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 27–42. Meuwese is wrong to argue that Cohen was a German Jewish name. Numerous Cohens were found in the Iberian Peninsula as well. 45. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten, 12564.20, fol. 125, letter of June 26, 1647. 46. NAN, SG 5768, request by Semuel Velho, Jacob Abendana, João de la Faya, David Nunes Mendes, Aron Moreno Henriques, Simão do Valle da Fons., Abrão Paiz et al., 1667. 47. Wim Klooster, “Communities of Port Jews and Their Contacts in the Dutch Atlantic World,” Jewish History 20, no. 2 (June 2006), 132–133. 48. Mello, “Gente da Nação,” 230–231. After originally meeting in a rented house, the congregation Kahal Kadosh Tsur Israel moved into a building especially constructed for its services. See Bruno Feitler, “Jews and New Christians in Dutch Brazil, 1630–1654,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, ed. Richard Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 126–127. 49. See, for instance, the conversions in the East Indies of Daniel Joosten and Isaac Louis; meetings church council Batavia, August 23 and September 20, 1649, September 28 and November 9, 1656, in J. Mooij, ed., Bouwstoffen voor de geschiedenis der Protestantsche Kerk in Nederlandsch-Indië, 3 vols. (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1927–1931), 2: 137, 139, 499, 509. For the exceptional case of a Jewish conversion in Dutch Brazil, see Frans Leonard Schalkwijk, “Het eerste Gereformeerde pastoral verslag uit Zuid-Amerika: Het ‘jurnael’ van dominee Jodocus à Stetten, Paraíba, 1636,” Documentatieblad voor de geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Zending en Overzeese Kerken 10, no. 2 (2003), 8. 50. After the loss of Brazil, he moved back to Amsterdam and settled in England. See Egon Wolff and Frieda Wolff, A Odisséia dos Judeus de Recife (São Paulo: Centro de Estudos Judaicos, 1979), 165. 51. Jonathan Irving Israel, “Spain and the Dutch Sephardim, 1609–1660,” in Empires and Entrepots: The Dutch, the Spanish Monarchy and the Jews, 1585–1713 (London and Ronceverte: Hambledon Press, 1990), 386. 52. Wolff and Wolff, Odisséia dos Judeus de Recife, 54; Mello, “Gente da Nação,” 225, 238–239. 53. Jonathan Irving Israel, “Dutch Sephardic Jewry, Millenarian Politics and the Struggle for Brazil, 1650–54,” in Conflicts of Empires: Spain, the Low Countries and the Struggle for World Supremacy 1585–1713 (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1997), 157, 159. 54. Diogo Lopes de Santiago, História da guerra de Pernambuco e feitos memoráveis do mestre de campo João Fernandes Vieira, herói digno de eterna memória, primeiro aclamador da guerra (Recife: Governo de Pernambuco, 1984), 226–227. 55. Israel, “Dutch Sephardi Jewry,” 161–162; Wolff and Wolff, Dicionário Biográfico, 1: 38, 97–98; Mello, “Gente da Nação,” 159; Frans Leonard Schalkwijk, Igreja e estado no Brasil holandês, 1630–1654 (Recife: Governo de Pernambuco, 1986), 383. 56. Arnold Wiznitzer, The Jews of Colonial Brazil (Morningside Heights, NY: Columbia University Press, 1960), 99–100; Benjamin Nicolaas Teensma, “Resent-

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ment in Recife: Jews and Public Opinion in 17th-century Dutch Brazil,” in Essays on Cultural Identity in Colonial Latin America: Problems and Repercussions, ed. Jan Lechner (Leiden: Leiden University, Department of Latin American Languages and Cultures, 1988), 75–76. This protection was not automatic, however. On the eve of the fall of Recife, Dutch authorities had to be reminded of the protection they had promised to offer. See NAN, SG 5765, petition of Abraham d’Azevedo on behalf of the Jewish nation in Brazil and Amsterdam, The Hague, September 26, 1653. 57. Benjamin Nicolaas Teensma, “Van marraan tot jood: 17e en 18e-eeuwse Amsterdamse Sephardim en hun Iberische achtergrond,” Amstelodamum 80 (1988), 114–116. What they did not mention was that a Jewish militia company had lost fifty men fighting the rebels. See Wiznitzer, Jews of Colonial Brazil, 99–100. 58. Teensma, “Van marraan tot jood,” 116–117. 59. Wätjen, Holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien, 221, 231; Teensma, “Resentment in Recife,” 68. 60. Caspar van Baerle, The History of Brazil under the Governorship of Johan Maurits of Nassau, 1636–1644, trans. Blanche T. van Berckel-Ebeling Koning (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 53. 61. WIC directors to Petrus Stuyvesant, Amsterdam, April 4, 1652, in Gehring, Correspondence 1647–1653, 154. 62. Mello, “Gente da Nação,” 282, 223. The town fathers of Amsterdam had decided in 1605 that Jews did not have to wear special insignia. See Rudolf Barteld Evenhuis, Ook dat was Amsterdam, 5 vols. (Amsterdam: W. ten Have, 1967), 2: 172. 63. Teensma, “Resentment in Recife,” 69. Joosse refuses to consider these Christians anti-Semites, but their collective scapegoating of Jews for the usurious practices of some of them followed a traditional anti-Semitic logic. See Joosse, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld, 489. 64. Jacques Cukierkorn, “Retornando—Coming Back. A Description and Historical Perspective of the Crypto-Jewish Community of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil” (Rabbinic thesis, Hebrew Union College, 1994), 35, 39–40. (I am indebted to Abraham Peck for this reference.) In actual fact, some Jews did remain in Brazil, including José da Silva, who had left for the Netherlands in 1648 or 1649, was circumcised, and returned to Recife, living there until the surrender. He then moved away, first to Ipojuca and next to the São Francisco River, where he reportedly became a cowherd. He was not caught, however, and in 1674 the authorities were still after him. See Bruno Feitler, Inquisition, juifs et nouveaux-chrétiens au Brésil: Le Nordeste, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003), 185–186. Men such as da Silva were henceforth cut off from Amsterdam or other parts of Europe. When Estevan Luis da Costa died childless in Amsterdam in 1665, he made Branca de Valença one of his heirs. But because she lived in Brazil, it was impossible to inform her; SAA, NA 2996, fols. 98–99, Act of April 29, 1665. 65. Joseph Rennard, “Juifs et Protestants aux Antilles françaises au XVIIe siècle: Préliminaires de la Révocation de l’Edit de Nantes,” Revue de l’Histoire des Missions 10 (1933), 437–439; Isaac Samuel Emmanuel, “Les juifs de la Martinique et leurs coreligionnaires d’Amsterdam au XVIIe siècle,” Revue des Études Juives 123 (1964): 511–516. 66. As in old Amsterdam, they were not allowed to be employed in a trade or to have open retail shops. See Leo Hershkowitz, “New Amsterdam’s Twenty-Three

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Jews—Myth or Reality?” in Hebrew and the Bible in America: The First Two Centuries, ed. Shalom Goldman (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1993), 171–183; Robert P. Swierenga, The Forerunners: Dutch Jewry in the North American Diaspora (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 37–38; WIC, Chamber of Amsterdam, to Petrus Stuyvesant, April 26, 1655, and June 14, 1656, in Berthold Fernow, Documents Relating to the History of the Early Colonial Settlements Principally on Long Island (Albany: Weed, Parsons, and Co., 1883), 315, 351. 67. Israel, “Spain and the Dutch Sephardim,” 385. 68. SAA, ACA 240, “Livro Grande 1639–1728,” 25, 29, 36, 38b, 42b, 43, 51. Because Jews took their children along, the 1670s saw a flurry of weddings in Amsterdam involving Jews born in Dutch Brazil. In that decade, more Jewish brides and grooms (eighteen, or 7.7 percent) originated from Dutch Brazil than from Lisbon and Oporto combined (sixteen) or from Bayonne and Bordeaux combined (twelve). Calculated on the basis of the known birth places as listed in Dave Verdooner and Harmen Snel, Trouwen in Mokum: Jewish Marriage in Amsterdam 1598–1811, 2 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Warray, n.d.), 1: 46–50. 69. In the mid-1650s, overcrowding must have been more conspicuous in the Jewish neighborhood of the city, where the devastating plague epidemic of 1655 made very few victims. See Lydia Hagoort, Het Beth Haim in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel: De begraafplaats van de Portugese joden in Amsterdam, 1614–1945 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2005), 54–55. 70. Hollandse Mercurius 7 (1656), 75. 71. Renate Gertrud Fuks-Mansfeld, “Bevolkingsproblematiek in joods Amsterdam in de zeventiende eeuw,” Studia Rosenthaliana 18, no. 2 (1984): 134–142; Jonathan Irving Israel, “Menasseh ben Israel and the Dutch Sephardic Colonization Movement of the Mid-Seventeenth Century (1645–1657),” in Menasseh Ben Israel and His World, ed. Yosef Kaplan, Henri Méchoulan and Richard Popkin (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 146–147. 72. Wim Klooster, “The Essequibo Liberties: The Link between Jewish Brazil and Jewish Suriname,” Studia Rosenthaliana 42–43 (2010–2011): 77–82. Christians continued to challenge these privileges throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Joosse is wrong to argue that the Jews of Suriname were not allowed to work on Sundays until 1695. That right had first been granted in 1669. See Joosse, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld, 406; David Cohen Nassy, Essai Historique sur la Colonie de Surinam, 2 vols. (Paramaribo, 1788; reprinted Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1968), 2: 135. 73. Former Jewish residents of Brazil who moved to Essequibo included Davi Castiel, Jacob Gabai Correia, Abraham da Costa, Isaac da Costa, and Filipe de Funtes. See Wolff and Wolff, Odisséia dos Judeus de Recife, 248, 250; Wolff and Wolff, Dicionário Biográfico, 1: 45, 46, 48, 78. 74. Jaap Meijer, Pioneers of Pauroma: Contributions to the Earliest History of the Jewish Colonization of America (Paramaribo: Eldorado, 1954), 22. 75. Samuel Oppenheim, “An Early Jewish Colony in Western Guiana: Supplemental Data,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 16 (1909), 53–70; “The Discription of Guyana,” in Vincent T. Harlow, ed., Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623–1667 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1925), 141–142; Israel, “Menasseh ben Israel,” 148–149.

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76. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.42, minutes of WIC meetings of September 10 and 12, 1659. 77. NAN, SG, Loketkasten en Secreetkasten 12564.42, privileges granted, September 10, 1659; NAN, SG 5767, WIC board to the States General, January 1664; J. Rijckaert and David van Baerle, Chamber of Amsterdam, to the Estates General. Amsterdam, February 21, 1664. 78. Lodewijk Augustinus Henri Christiaan Hulsman, “Nederlands Amazonia: Handel met indianen tussen 1580 en 1680” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2009), 150. 79. For Nassi, Yllán, and other organizers of Jewish colonies after 1654, see Wim Klooster, “Networks of Colonial Entrepreneurs: The Founders of the Jewish Settlements in Dutch America, 1650s and 1660s,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, ed. Richard Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 31–49, 226–236. 80. NAN, Sociëteit van Suriname 500, memorandum of the regents and deputies of the Portuguese Jewish nation, Jacob Henriques Barrios Jessurun, David Nunes Monsanto, and Samuel Hoheb Brandon, for J. G. Wichers, governor general of Suriname and the Courts of Policy and Criminal Justice, Paramaribo, January 5, 1785. 81. For instance, see ZA, SZ 2035/246, petition of the Hebrew Nation to Governor Pieter Versterre to exempt the Jews from observing the Sunday as a day of rest. 82. AGS, Estado 8386, fol. 296, Esteban de Gamarra to King Philip IV, December 30, 1660. 83. WIC directors to Vice-Director Lucas Rodenburgh of Curaçao, Amsterdam, July 7, 1654, in Gehring, Correspondence 1647–1653, 62. 84. SAA, NA 1501, Act of July 22, 1641; Vice-Director L. Rodenburgh to the WIC directors, Curaçao, April 2, 1654, in Charles T. Gehring and J. A. Schiltkamp, eds., Curacao Papers 1640–1665, New Netherland Documents XVII (Interlaken, NY: Heart of the Lakes, 1987), 57–58. 85. Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews, 68–71. 86. Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare among the Portuguese Jews in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford and Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012), 48–49, 299. 87. Elisabeth Levi de Montezinos, “The Narrative of Aharon Levi, alias Antonio de Montezinos,” American Sephardi: Journal of the Sephardic Studies Program of Yeshiva University 7–8 (1975): 62–83. For messianism in the Jewish Atlantic, see Wim Klooster, “The Caribbean and the Atlantic World,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 7, The Early Modern Period, c.1500-c.1815, ed. Adam Sutcliffe and Jonathan Karp (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 88. Günter Böhm, Los sefardíes en los dominios holandeses de América del Sur y del Caribe, 1630–1750 (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 1992), 59n; Mello, “Gente da Nação,” 279. 89. Emmanuel and Emmanuel, History of the Jews, 774. 90. Ibid., 46; Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew 1492–1776, 3 vols. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 1: 123; Isaac Samuel Emmanuel, “New Light on Early American Jewry,” American Jewish Archives 7–8 (1955–1956), 21–22. 91. Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta, The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 33–37.

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92. Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 143. 93. NAN, SG 5751, outline for the government of Salvador and other places to be conquered in Brazil (1623). 94. NAN, SG 5756, “Provisionele Instructie voor de Regeringe van het Suijder district vande Cust van Africa” April 11, 1642. 95. Ibid. 96. Charles H. Parker, Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 9–10; Schalkwijk, Igrje e estado, 399–405. 97. José Antonio Gonsalves de Mello, Nederlanders in Brazilië (1624–1654): De invloed van de Hollandse besetting op het leven en de cultuur in Noord-Brazilië, ed. Benjamin Nicolaas Teensma (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2001), 247; Schalkwijk, Igreja e estado, 405; Delegates of the WIC board of XIX to Count Nassau and the Council in Brazil. Amsterdam, July 10, 1641, in Louis Jadin, ed., L’ancien Congo et l’Angola 1639–1655 d’après les archives romaines, portugaises, néerlandaises et espagnoles (Bruxelles and Rome: Institut Historique belge de Rome, 1975), 53–54; Meetings of January 5, 1638, April 20, 1640, and July 18, 1644, in “Classicale Acta van Brazilië,” Archief voor de geschiedenis der oude Hollandsche zending, 3 vols. (Utrecht: C. van Bentum, 1885), 2: 239, 242, 270, 314. 98. Parker, Faith on the Margins, 12. 99. Karunadasa Wijesiri Goonewardena, The Foundation of Dutch Power in Ceylon, 1638–1658 (Amsterdam: Djambatan, 1958), 146. In 1687, priests were able to enter again. They were not of European birth but Indian or biracial, which is why they went unnoticed at first. See Jurrien van Goor, Jan Kompenie as Schoolmaster: Dutch Education in Ceylon, 1690–1795 (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1978), 15. 100. NAN, SG 5751, WIC directors Albert Koenraats and Rombout Jacobsen to the States General, Amsterdam, August 29, 1624; Bartolomeu Guerreiro, Iornada dos Vassalos da Coroa de Portugal, pera se recuperar a Cidade do Salvador, na Bahya de todos os Santos, tomada pollos Olandezes, a oito de Mayo de 1624. & recuperada ao primeiro de Mayo de 1625 (Lisboa: Mattheus Pinheiro, 1625), 31. 101. Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 210, 679–681. Six of them died in Dutch captivity, three of them in the Republic. 102. John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 278. 103. For anti-Jesuit rhetoric in the Republic in the 1620s, see Michiel van Groesen, “A Brazilian Jesuit in Amsterdam: Anti-Spanish and Anti-Jesuit Rhetoric in the Early Dutch Golden Age,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 160 (2011): 445–470. By 1720, the WIC still maintained the regulation against Jesuits; NAN, SG 5775, resolutions WIC, Chamber of Amsterdam, October 16, 1720. 104. Frans Leonard Schalkwijk, The Reformed Church in Dutch Brazil (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum 1998), 277, 287, 294; Charles R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624– 1654 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 57; Manoel Calado, O Valeroso Lucideno e Triumpho da Liberdade: Primeira parte, 2 vols. (Lisboa: Paulo Craesbeeck, 1648), 1: 109. The presence of the Dutch in Brazil inhibited the growth of the Jesuit province. By the

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early 1650s, the number of Jesuits was about the same as around the turn of the century. By 1701, their number had doubled. See Alden, Making of an Enterprise, 219–220. 105. Jon Parmenter, The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534–1701 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 146. 106. Hans Norman, “The Swedish Colonial Venture in North America, 1638– 1655,” in Stellan Dahlgren & Hans Norman, eds., The Rise and Fall of New Sweden: Governor Johan Risingh’s Journal 1654-1655 in its Historical Context (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell International), 194–195; Schalkwijk, Igreja e estado, 387. What motivated Stuyvesant was the need to persuade the Swedish colonists to surrender quickly so that he could return to New Amsterdam, where a war with Amerindians had broken out. See Evan Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 104. 107. Erika Kuijpers, “Een zeventiende-eeuwse migrantenkerk: De lutheranen in Amsterdam,” in Amsterdammer worden: migranten, hun organisaties en inburgering, 1600– 2000, ed. Leo Lucassen (Amsterdam: Vossiuspers UvA, 2004), 41–43. 108. Haefeli, New Netherland, 140–147. 109. Ibid, 186, 194, 207–208. 110. Ibid., 17. 111. The Amsterdam city government did allow one priest to go to New Netherland as a missionary, but he never went. See P. M. Grijpink, “Everard Stalpaert van der Wiele ontvangt permissie om als missionaris naar Nieuw-Nederland te gaan. Anno 1662,” in Bijdragen voor de Geschiedenis van het Bisdom van Haarlem 32 (1909), 180–181. I thank Jaap Jacobs for this reference. 112. Giovanni Pizzorusso, Roma nei Caraibi: L’organizzazione delle missioni cattoliche nelle Antille e in Guyana (1635–1675) (Rome: École Française de Rome, Palais Farnèse, 1995), 76. 113. For Maastricht, see Petrus Joseph Hubertus Ubachs, Twee heren, twee confessies: De verhouding van Staat en Kerk te Maastricht, 1632–1673 (Assen and Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1975), 442–444. For Venlo, see Articulen, By Sijne Excell. Den Heer Prince van Orangien geaccordeert aen de Magistraet, Borgeren en gesamentlijck Inwoonderen der Stadt Venlo (1632). For Brazil, see de Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 4: 132. 114. “Sommier discours over de staet vande vier geconquesteerde capitanias Parnambuco, Itamarica, Paraiba ende Rio Grande, inde noorderdeelen van Brasil,” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 2 (1879): 282–283; Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 54. 115. Manifest door d’Inwoonders van Parnambuco uytgegeven tot hun verantwoordinghe op’t aennemen der wapenen teghens de West-Indische Compagnie; ghedirigeert aen alle Christene Princen, ende besonderlijck aen de Hoogh-Mo. HH. Staten Generael van de vereenighde Nederlanden (Antwerpen: Pieter vanden Cruyssen, 1646), 2. 116. J. Schouten, account submitted to Governor General Antonio van Diemen and the Councilors of India, September 7, 1641, in Pieter Arend Leupe, “Stukken betrekkelijk het beleg en de verovering van Malakka op de Portugezen in 1640– 1641, benevens het rapport van den kommissaris Schouten over den verleden en tegenwoordigen toestand dier stad,” Berigten van het Historisch Genootschap te Utrecht 7, no. 1 (1859), 365–366. 117. Hendrik E. Niemeijer, Batavia: Een koloniale samenleving in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Balans, 2005), 243–244.

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118. Mário Neme, Fórmulas políticas no Brasil holandês (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1971), 168, 176–177. 119. José Antonio Gonsalves de Mello, “Vincent Joachim Soler in Dutch Brazil,” in Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen 1604–1679: A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil: Essays on the Occasion of the Tercentenary of His Death, ed. Ernst van den Boogaart, in collaboration with Hendrik Richard Hoetink and Peter James Palmer Whitehead (’s-Gravenhage: Johan Maurits van Nassau Stichting, 1979), 249. 120. The initial conditions seem to have been better. In 1638, the Dutch Reformed Church still complained about processions and public performances of plays. See “Classicale Acta van Brazilië,” Archief voor de geschiedenis der oude Hollandsche zending, 3 vols. (Utrecht: C. van Bentum, 1885), 2: 242–243. 121. Mello, Fontes, 2: 301–306; Schalkwijk, Igreja e estado, 409–413. 122. Pizzorusso, Roma nei Caraibi, 141–142; Feitler, Inquisition, juifs et nouveauxchrétiens au Brésil, 202. In 1645, Dutch privateers captured four Genoese Capuchins whose ship had run aground en route to Congo. Dutch officials in both Luanda and Recife, where they were sent before being shipped back to Europe, treated them very poorly. See Bonaventura da Taggia to Francesco Ingoli, Amsterdam, September 6, 1646; Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 838–843. In 1652, another Dutch privateer captured a Luanda-bound ship with another group of Capuchins on board, disembarking the passengers far from any settlement on the Benguela coast (1262n. 1). 123. NAN, OWIC 57: 23, the Portuguese aldermen of Goiana and Itamaracá to the States General, September 5, 1642; NAN, OWIC 57: 25, the Portuguese aldermen of Igaraçu to the States General, September 11, 1642; NAN, OWIC 57: 26, the aldermen of the city of Mauricia to the States General, September 14, 1642; NAN, OWIC 57: 27, the Portuguese aldermen of Porto Calvo to the States General, September 18, 1642; NAN, OWIC 57: 28, the aldermen of São Antonio de Cabo to the States General, September 25, 1642. 124. Ubachs, Twee heren, twee confessies, 294. 125. Meetings of January 5, 1638, April 20, 1640, and July 18, 1644, in “Classicale Acta van Brazilië,” Archief voor de geschiedenis der oude Hollandsche zending, 3 vols. (Utrecht: C. van Bentum, 1885), 2: 239, 270, 314. 126. Benjamin Nicolaas Teensma, “The Brazilian Letters of Vincent Joachim Soler,” in Dutch Brazil: Documents in the Leiden University Library, ed. Cristina Ferrão and José Paulo Monteiro (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Index, 1997), 60; Mello, “Vincent Joachim Soler in Dutch Brazil,” 247. 127. NAN, OWIC 57:32, fols. 27–28, Johan Maurits and councilors Henric Hamel, A. van Bullestrate, and D. Codde van der Burgh to the Heren XIX, Recife, September 29, 1642; Deborah Hamer, “Creating an Orderly Society: The Regulation of Marriage and Sex in the Dutch Atlantic World, 1621–1674” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014), 152–155. See also Adriaen van der Dussen’s report to the Heren XIX, April 4, 1640, in Van Baerle, History of Brazil, 128–130. 128. Noorlander, “Serving God and Mammon,” 233. 129. “Missive van den kolonnel Artichofsky,” 233–234. 130. NAN, OWIC 57:32, Johan Maurits and councilors Henric Hamel, A. van Bullestrate, and D. Codde van der Burgh to the Heren XIX, Recife, September 29, 1642; Manifest door d’Inwoonders van Parnambuco uytgegeven, 9.

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131. The experiences of the Catholics were, then, at odds, with Charles Boxer’s statement that “a greater degree of religious freedom was allowed in Netherlands Brazil during Johan Maurits’s rule than anywhere in the Western world.” Dutch in Brazil, 124. The ethnically English magistrates and residents of Flushing on Long Island in New Netherland, authors of the “Flushing Remonstrance” (1657) shared the critique of the Portuguese Catholics of Brazil. As one historian has argued, they perceived as persecution “anything that impinged on the religious freedom of movement, expression, and organization . . .” See Haefeli, New Netherland, 171. 132. Johan Neercassel, an apostolic vicar of Holland, made this assertion in 1672. See Pizzorusso, Roma nei Caraibi, 78. 133. Menkman, Nederlanders in het Caraibische zeegebied, 93–94; Jan Marinus van der Linde, Surinaamse suikerheren en hun kerk: Plantagekolonie en handelskerk ten tijde van Johannes Basseliers, predikant en planter in Suriname, 1667–1689 (Wageningen: Veenman, 1966), 179–181; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Guianas, 247, 257–258; Willibrordus Menno Jan Brada, Pater Schabel, SJ, 1704–1713 (Willemstad: s.n., 1965), 33; AGI, Santo Domingo 744, Governor Diego de Melo Maldonado to King Charles II, Caracas, May 3, 1686. One Reformed minister still protested the presence of Catholic priests on Curaçao in the early eighteenth century; NAN, NWIC 569, fol. 492, Nic. Verkuijl to the WIC, Curaçao, June 1, 1707. 134. Frederik Oudschants Dentz, Cornelis vann Aerssen van Sommelsdijck: Een belangwekkende figuur uit de geschiedenis van Suriname (Amsterdam: P.N. van Kampen & Zoon, 1938), 133. 135. Willem Cornelisz. Schouten, Iournael ofte Beschryving vande Wonderlijcke Voyagie, ghedaen door Willem Cornelisz. Schouten, van Hoorn, in den Iaere 1615, 1616, ende 1617: Hoe hy bezuyden de Straete van Magallanes, een nieuwe Passagie ondeckt, en de geheele Aerd-cloot om-gezeylt heeft (Dokkum: Louis Vlasbloem, 1649), 18–19. 136. See also the discussion of an expedition to Guiana in 1658 in Meijer, Pioneers of Pauroma, 39. 137. Lois M. Feister, “Linguistic Communication between the Dutch and Indians in New Netherland, 1609–1664,” Ethnohistory 20, no. 1 (1973), 31; Anthony Buccini, “Swannekens ende Wilden: Linguistic Attitudes and Communication Strategies among the Dutch and Indians in New Netherland,” in The Low Countries and the New World(s): Travel, Discovery, Early Relations, ed. Johanna C. Prins, Bettina Brandt, Timothy Stevens, and Thomas S. Shannon (Lanham, MD, and New York: University Press of America, 2000), 11–28. 138. “Journaux et Nouvelles tirées de la bouche de Marins Hollandais et Portugais de la Navigation aux Antilles et sur les Côtes du Brésil: Manuscrit de Hessel Gerritsz traduit pour la Bibliothèque Nationale de Rio de Janeiro par E.J. Bondam,” Annaes da Bibliotheca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro 29 (1907), 101. 139. Wassenaer, Historisch Verhael, 12: 39. 140. George Edmundson,” The Dutch on the Amazon and Negro in the Seventeenth Century,” English Historical Review 18 (1903), 660. 141. Mark Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595–1674 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 106. 142. Janny Venema, Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 1652– 1664 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2003), 169–170.

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143. Simon van Brakel, “Een Amsterdamsche factorij te Paramaribo in 1613,” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 35 (1914), 85; SAA, NA 278, fol. 301, deposition of Jeuriaen Eldertsz, May 5, 1617. 144. Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade, 118–119. 145. Albert van Dantzig, Les hollandais sur la côte de Guinée à l’époque de l’essor de l’Ashanti et du Dahomey 1680–1740 (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’OutreMer, 1980), 35–36. After capturing Elmina, the Dutch spoke Portuguese with local Africans in the first years after the conquest. See Klaas Ratelband, Vijf dagregisters van het kasteel São Jorge da Mina (Elmina) aan de Goudkust (1645–1647) (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1953), 85n. 5. 146. Examination of captain “Rodrigo Giraldo,” Santiago de Chile, February 10, 1600, in Colección de Historiadores de Chile y de documentos relativos a la historia nacional, vol. 45: Los holandeses en Chile (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Universitaria, 1923), 346. Using the same strategy in Asia, the Dutch shipped some Moluccan boys to the Republic, although without the intended effect. Either the boys were sent back home too quickly or so late that they had forgotten their native tongue. See Gijsbertus Marius Jozef Maria Koolen, Een seer bequaem middel: Onderwijs en kerk onder de zeventiende-eeuwse VOC (Kampen: Kok, 1993), 90–91, 95–96. 147. Marcus P. Meuwese, “For the Peace and Well-Being of the Country: Intercultural Mediators and Dutch-Indian Relations in New Netherland and Dutch Brazil, 1600–1664” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2003), 73. 148. Information supplied by chief inquisitor Pedro de Castilho to the Council of State, November 9, 1611, in Klaas Ratelband, ed., De Westafrikaanse reis van Piet Heyn 1624–1625 (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), 49; Wiznitzer, Jews of Colonial Brazil, 46. 149. Susanah Shaw Romney, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2014), 180. 150. For the Mohawks, see Parmenter, Edge of the Woods, 109; ibid., 181. For the Tupis, see Joosse, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld, 497. Dutchmen also fathered children in Roatán, an island off Honduras. See AGI, Guatemala 17, ramo 1, no. 4. (I thank Arne Bialuschewski for the last reference.) Jacob Rabe, the man responsible for massacres among the moradores, was married to a Tapuya woman. See Santiago, História da guerra, 236. 151. Joose, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld, 171. 152. Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade, 160. 153. Gründlicher Bericht von Beschaffenheit und Eigenschaft, Cultivirung und Bewohnung, Privilegien und Beneficien deß in America zwischen Rio Orinoco und Rio de las Amazones an der vesten Küst des in der Landschafft Guiana gelegenen . . . Landes (Franckfurt: Wilhelm Serlin, 1669), 11. 154. Franz Binder and Norbert Schneeloch, “Dirck Dircksz. Wilre en Willem Godschalk van Focquenbroch (?), geschilderd door Pieter de Wit te Elmina in 1669,” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 27, no. 1 (1979), 18. 155. Ratelband, Vijf dagregisters, 179. 156. Binder and Schneeloch, “Dirck Dircksz,” 17–18. 157. Adam Jones, German Sources for West African History, 1599–1669 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1983), 104–105.

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158. Ibid., 75. 159. Venema, Beverwijck, 162–163; Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade, 149. See also SAA, ACA 379: 212, minister Johannes Offinga and elders Gijsbert de With and Jacques van Ceulen to the classis of Amsterdam, Recife, November 23, 1649. 160. Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade, 74. 161. Ibid., 288, 307. 162. Paul Otto, The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 97. 163. The Tawagonshi Treaty of 1613, however, mentioned by both Iroquois and historians, probably refers to an agreement, not a treaty. The private Dutch merchants, after all, did not act on behalf of the States General. The treaty published by an amateur historian in 1968 has been shown to be a forgery on linguistic grounds. See Charles T. Gehring, William A. Starna and William N. Fenton, “The Tawagonshi Treaty of 1613: The Final Chapter,” New York History 68, no. 4 (1987), 385–87; Parmenter, Edge of the Woods, 22–24. The Journal of Early American History devoted volume 3, issue 1 (2013) to this document. 164. Raymond Buve, “Gouverneur Johannes Heinsius: de rol van Van Aerssen’s voorganger in de Surinaamse Indianenoorlog, 1678–1680,” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids (1966), 14; Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade, 108. 165. NAN, SG 9410, affairs of the deputies of the WIC, February 12, 1642. In 1644, the High Council of Brazil sent a ship to the Caribbean islands to seize two notorious slave dealers, capturing one of them and releasing the nine Amerindians in his possession. See Gerrit Johan van Grol, De grondpolitiek in het West-Indisch domein der Generaliteit, 3 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Algemeene Landsdrukkerij, 1934), 1: 55. 166. Jerome S. Handler, “The Amerindian Slave Population of Barbados in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” Caribbean Studies 8, no. 4 (1969), 47. 167. Minutes of the meeting of the WIC, Chamber of Zeeland, March 9, 1645, in Report and Accompanying Papers of the Commission Appointed by the President, by United States: Commission to Investigate and Report upon the True Divisional Line between Venezuela and British Guiana (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1897), 103; Johannes de Mey, Al de nederduitsche wercken, bestaande in een beschrijving van ’t gewisse, eigenschappen en werken Gods, verklaring van zommige spreuken Zalomons, en duistere plaatsen des Nieuwen Testaments, byzonderlijk van den brief tot den Hebreen: Mitsgaders een geopent natuur-en genaden-tooneel (Middelburgh: Johannis Meertens, 1681), 305. For de Mey’s stay on St. Eustatius, see Huib J. Zuidervaart, “Het natuurbeeld van Johannes de Mey (1617–1678), hoogleraar filosofie aan de Illustere School te Middelburg,” Archief. Mededelingen van het Koninklijk Zeeuws Genootschap der Wetenschappen (2001), 7. 168. Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean and Guianas, 561. 169. NAN, SG 9410, affairs of the deputies of the WIC, March 17, 1642. 170. Mello, Tempo dos flamengos, 205–207. 171. Hulsman, “Nederlands Amazonia,” 178. 172. “Sommier discours,” 291. 173. Frank Ibold, Jens Jäger, and Detlev Kraack, eds., Das Memorial und Jurenal des Peter Hansen Hajstrup (1624–1672) (Neumünster: Wachholtz Verlag, 1995), 121. Willem Usselinx had a servant from the Amazon who stayed with him for three

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years in the Netherlands. See John Franklin Jameson, William Usselinx, Founder of the Dutch and Swedish West India Companies (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1887), 240. 174. Marc B. Fried, The Early History of Kingston & Ulster County, N.Y. (Marbletown, NY: Ulster County Historical Society, 1975), 37, 41. 175. Examination of Juo. Mestiço, Caracas, July 3, 1640, in Antoine Maduro, ed., Documenten uit de jaren 1639 en 1640 welke zich in de “Archivo General de Indias” te Sevilla bevinden en betrekking hebben op de door de Spanjaarden beraamde plannen om het eiland Curaçao op de Nederlanders te heroveren (Curaçao: Drukkerij Scherpenheuvel, 1961), 92–93. 176. Hartog, Bovenwindse eilanden, 61–62. 177. Victor Enthoven, “Suriname and Zeeland: Fifteen Years of Dutch Misery on the Wild Coast, 1667–1682,” in International Conference on Shipping, Factories and Colonization, ed. John Everaert and Jan Parmentier (Brussels: Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, 1996), 256; van der Linde, Surinaamse suikerheren en hun kerk, 89–90. The practice of enslaving Amerindians in Essequibo was curtailed by an ordinance of 1686, which allowed only those who were already enslaved among the Amerindians themselves to be used as slaves. See Pieter Marinus Netscher, Geschiedenis van de koloniën Essequebo, Demerary en Berbice, van de vestiging van de Nederlanders aldaar tot op onzen tijd (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1888), 91–92. 178. Natives in Suriname told the Dutch in 1675 that English migrants had secretly put nine Amerindians on board their departing ships. See NAN, SG 5769, deposition of Phelix Craght, Jems Torner and Jan Lievensz, August 24, 1675. 179. Anna Jacoba Böeseken, Slaves and Free Blacks at the Cape, 1658–1700 (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1977), 62. For the subsequent Dutch slave trade in the Indian Ocean, see Markus Vink, “‘The World’s Oldest Trade’: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of World History 14, no. 2 (2003): 131–177. 180. In Portugal, both old and New Christians had unrestricted access to slaves. See A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal 1441–1555 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 63. 181. James Hoke Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the AfricanPortuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 95. 182. Dienke Hondius, “Black Africans in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 31, no 2 (2008), 90–91. In midseventeenth century Middelburg, Christians complained that a Jewish merchant intended to sell a baptized black woman as a slave. See Lein van Wallenburg, “De Joden in Zeeland,” Nederlandse Historiën 12 (1978), 165. 183. Wilhelmina Christina Pieterse, ed., Livro de Bet Haim do Kahel Kados de Bet Yahacob (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1970), 4. The records of the congregation of the Portuguese Jews refer to the burial of fifteen blacks and “mulattoes” in the years 1614–1648. See Hagoort, Beth Haim, 50–51. The existence of enslaved blacks has also been documented for the contemporary Jewish communities of Antwerp and Hamburg. See Jean Denucé, Afrika in de XVIde eeuw en de handel van Antwerpen met een reproductie van de wandkaart van Blaeu-Verbist van 1644 in 9 folio-bladen (Antwerpen: De Sikkel, 1937), 49; Hans Pohl, Die Portugiesen in Antwerpen (1567–1648): Zur Geschichte einer Minderheit (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1977), 324; Michael

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Studemund-Halévy, Biographisches Lexikon der Hamburger Sefarden: Die Grabinschriften des Portugiesenfriedhofs an der Königstrasse in Hamburg-Altona (Hamburg: Christians Verlag, 2000), 664–665. 184. Dienke Hondius, “Access to the Netherlands of Enslaved and Free Black Africans: Exploring Legal and Social Historical Practices in the Sixteenth–Nineteenth Centuries,” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 32, no. 3 (2011), 381. 185. Benjamin Nicolaas Teensma, “Abraham Idaña’s beschrijving van Amsterdam, 1685,” Amstelodamum 83 (1991), 131. 186. Annette Michèle Ricciardi-Cramer van den Bogaart, “Women in the Early Modern Dutch Atlantic World” (PhD diss., Stony Brook University, 2013), 183. Ricciardi spells Lourens’s last name as la Rosière, but see G. A. Six, “Geschiedenis,” Navorscher, new series, 23, no. 6 (1873), 546. 187. James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the SeventeenthCentury Chesapeake (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 149. 188. SAA NA 695 fol. 468, act of August 28, 1636, examination of Hessel Hiddes and Heijn Ottes. It is unknown what happened to the five. 189. Willem Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz.: Een Hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf, 1607–1647 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1995) [trans. as Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus 1607–1647 (Leiden: Brill, 2007)], 766– 768; Jaap Jacobs, “Van Angola naar Manhattan. Slavernij in Nieuw-Nederland in de zeventiende eeuw,” in Slaven en schepen: Enkele reis, bestemming onbekend, ed. Remmelt Daalder, Andrea Kieskamp and Dirk J. Tang (Leiden: Primavera Pers; and Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum 2001), 69–75. 190. Jeroen Dewulf, “Emulating a Portuguese Model: The Slave Policy of the West India Company and the Dutch Reformed Church in Dutch Brazil (1630– 1654) and New Netherland (1614–1664) in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Early American History 4 (2014), 17. 191. Compare the instructions for Jacob Pietersz Tolck, governor of Curaçao, in Gehring and Schiltkamp, Curacao Papers, 5, and Jacobs, “Van Angola naar Manhattan,” 75. 192. Jacobs, Zegenrijk gewest, 330. 193. Johann Gregor Aldenburgk, Reise nach Brasilien, 1623–1626 (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1930), 44–47. 194. Gonçalo de Cespedes, Historia de Don Felipe III, Rey de las Españas (Barcelona: Sebastian de Cormellas, 1634), 242. 195. NAN, SG 5752, report of Gerhardt van Arnhem and Ewolt van der Dussen, delegates of the States General to the Heren XIX, Middelburg, August–September 1630. See Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, ed. Reisebeschreibungen von deutschen Beamten und Kriegsleuten im Dienst der niederländischen West- und Ost-Indischen Kompagnien 1602–1797, 13 vols. (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1930), 2: 32, 59; De Laet, Iaerlijck Verhael, 2: 146; NAN, OWIC 47, Diederick van Waerdenburg to the Heren XIX, Antônio Vaz, October 7, 1631. 196. Mello, Tempo dos flamengos, 176–177. 197. The number of slaves owned by private individuals in Recife and Mauritsstad in 1645–1646 was 1,962. The number of privately owned black slaves in Itamaracá, Paraíba, and Rio Grande was 450. See Mello, Tempo dos flamengos, 73n. 122.

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198. GAR, ONA 86, 262/489, Act of September 8, 1642. 199. Joyce Diane Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 115. 200. Wätjen, Holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien, 223–224. 201. Mello, Tempo dos flamengos, 189. 202. NAN, Hof van Holland 5252, dagelijkse notulen Brazilië, December 18, 1653. 203. Lief-hebber, Iournael ofte kort discours, nopende de rebellye ende verradelijcke desseynen der Portugesen, alhier in Brasil voorgenomen, ’t welck in Junio 1645 is ondeckt (Arnhem: Jan Jacobsz, 1647). 204. Johan Nieuhof, Gedenkweerdige Brasiliaense zee- en lant-reize: Behelzende al het geen op dezelve is voorgevallen. Beneffens een bondige beschrijving van gantsche Neerlants Brasil, zoo van lantschappen, steden, dieren, gewassen, als draghten, zeden en godsdienst der inwoonders: en inzonderheit ein wijtloopig verhael der merkwaardigste voorvallen en geschiedenissen, die zich, geduurende zijn negenjarigh verblijf in Brasil, in d’oorlogen en opstant der Portugesen tegen d’onzen, zich sedert het jaer 1640. tot 1649. hebben toegedragen (Amsterdam: de weduwe van Jacob Meurs, 1682), 175. 205. Een Lief-hebber des Vaderlandts, Levendich Discours vant ghemeyne Lants welvaert voor desen de Oost ende nu oock de West-Indische generale Compaignie aenghevanghen seer notabel om te lesen ([Amsterdam:] Broer Iansz, 1622). 206. Cited in Otto van Rees, Geschiedenis der Staathuishoudkunde in Nederland tot het einde der achttiende eeuw, 2 vols. (Utrecht: Kemink en Zoon, 1865–1868), 2: 93. 207. Gerrit Jan Schutte, “Bij het schemerlicht van hun tijd. Zeventiende-eeuwse gereformeerden en de slavenhandel,” in Mensen van de Nieuwe Tijd. Een liber amicorum voor A. Th. van Deursen, ed. Marijke Bruggeman et al. (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1996), 200. 208. Ibid., 194, 201. 209. Godfried Udemans, ’t Geestelyck Roer Van ’t Coopmans Schip. Dat is: Trouwbericht, hoe dat een Coopman, en Coopvaerder, hem selven dragen moet in syne handelinge, in Pays, ende in Oorloge, voor God, ende de Menschen, te Water ende te Lande, insonderheydt onder de Heydenen in Oost ende West-Indien: ter eeren Gods, stichtinge syner Gemeynten, ende saligheydt syner zielen: mitsgaders tot het tijtlich welvaren van het Vaderlandt, ende syne Familie, 2nd ed. (Dordrecht: Françoys Boels, 1640), 182. Protestants in the seventeenth century became increasingly interested in the Old Testament, using the text to distill a social model. 210. De Mey, Al de nederduytsche wercken, 306. 211. Hulsman, “Nederlands Amazonia,” 139, n. 174. 212. Van der Linde, Surinaamse suikerheren en hun kerk, 86–88. 213. De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 1: 105–106. 214. Adam Jones, “Sources on Early Sierra Leone (22): The Visit of a Dutch Fleet in 1625,” Africana Research Bulletin 15, no. 2 (1986), 57. One aspect of this story—the range of human passions ascribed to the animal—may have been inserted by Willem Piso into Jacobus Bontius’s description of an orangutan in his posthumously published Tropische geneeskunde. See also Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 222.

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215. The belief of local Africans about the animal had been transmitted to the Dutch by a Portuguese, who had lived there for twelve years. See Wassenaer, Historisch Verhael, 12: 54. 216. Ernst van den Boogaart, “Colour Prejudice and the Yardstick of Civility: The Initial Dutch Confrontation with Black Africans, 1590–1635,” in Racism and Colonialism: Essays on Ideology and Social Structure, ed. Robert Ross (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 44. 217. Ernst van den Boogaart and Pieter Cornelis Emmer, “The Dutch Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1596–1650,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (New York, San Francisco, and London: Academic Press, 1979), 37. 218. Pieter de Marees, Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea (1602), ed. and trans. Albert van Dantzig and Adam Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 26–32. See also Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, ed., “Nota van Pieter Mortamer over het gewest Angola (met een bijlage),” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 54 (1933), 31. 219. De Marees, Description and Historical Account, 31. 220. Egon Wolff and Frieda Wolff, Judeus, Judaizantes e seus Escravos (Rio de Janeiro: s.n., 1987), 16; Yosef Kaplan, “Political Concepts in the World of the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam during the Seventeenth Century: The Problem of Exclusion and the Boundaries of Self-Identity,” in Menasseh Ben Israel and His World, ed. Yosef Kaplan, Henri Méchoulan and Richard Popkin (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 58–59. 221. Allison Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 92, 276–277. 222. Cited in van der Linde, Surinaamse suikerheren en hun kerk, 50. 223. Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World, 82–83, 92, 95. 224. Van den Boogaart, “Colour Prejudice,” 44, 53; Elizabeth A. Sutton, Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 198. 225. Bert Paasman, “Mens of dier? Beeldvorming over negers in de tijd voor de rassentheorieën,” in Vreemd gespuis, ed. Jan Erik Dubbeldam and Jaap Tanja (Amsterdam: Ambo, Novib, 1987), 100. 226. Udemans, Geestelijck Roer, 183; De Mey, Al de nederduytsche wercken, 307. One author agreed that pagan slaves had to serve forever; ’t Verheerlickte Nederland door d’Herstelde Zee-vaart (1659), 44–45. 227. Schutte, “Bij het schemerlicht,” 198, 203, 206; Udemans, Geestelijck Roer, 182. 228. Jan Bara, De godvruchtige verklikker (Amsterdam: Jan van Duisberg, 1657), 60. On Bara’s voyage to the Caribbean, see C. H. P. Meijer, “Bara,” in Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek, ed. Philip Christiaan Molhuysen and Petrus Johannes Blok, 10 vols. (Leiden: A.W. Sijthoff ’s Uitgever-Maatschappij, 1918), 4: 85–87. 229. Abraham Kuyper, ed., Voetius’ catechisatie over den Heidelbergschen Catechismus: Naar Poudroyen’s editie van 1662 op nieuw uitgegeven, bij ons publiek ingeleid en met enkele aantekeningen voorzien (Rotterdam: Gebroeders Huge, 1891), 994. 230. Ibid., 991–993. 231. Markus P. M. Vink, “‘A Work of Compassion?’ Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century,” in Contingent Lives: Social

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Identity and Material Culture in the VOC World, ed. Nigel Worden (Cape Town: Historical Studies Department, University of Cape Town, 2007), 470–472. 232. Kort Verhael van Nieuw-Nederlants Gelegentheit, Deugden, Natuerlijke Voorrechten, en byzondere bequaemheidt ter bevolkingh (s.l.: s.n., 1662), 26. 233. Henk Looijesteijn, “Between Sin and Salvation: The Seventeenth-Century Dutch Artisan Pieter Plockhoy and His Ethics of Work,” International Review of Social History 56 (2011), 80. The short-lived 1677 Dutch colony on the Oiapoque, which fell prey within a few months to internal feuds and a French invasion from Cayenne, also stands out because of its complete lack of enslaved Africans. See Hulsman, “Nederlands Amazonia,” 160–161. 234. Van Baerle, History of Brazil, 180–181. See also Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger, “Von Sklavenhandel und christlichen Vorbehalten: Die Aktualität von Caspar Barlaeus in Amerika und Afrika,” in Sein Feld war die Welt: Johann Moritz von NassauSiegen (1604–1679): Von Siegen über die Niederlande und Brasilien nach Brandenburg, ed. Gerhard Brunn and Cornelius Neutsch (München: Waxmann, 2008), 150–153. 235. Van Grol, Grondpolitiek, 2: 23. See also NAN, SG 5756, “Provisionele Instructie voor de Regeringe van het Suijder district van de Cust van Africa,” April 11, 1642. 236. Reden van dat die West-Indische Compagnie oft handelinge niet alleen profijtelijck maer oock nootsaeckelijck is tot behoudenisse van onsen Staet (1636), 9. 237. António Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 11 vols. (Lisboa: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1952–1988), 9: 281–290. 238. Stéphanie Caroline Boechat Correia, “O Reino do Congo e os miseráveis do mar: o Congo, o Sonho e os holandeses no Atlântico, 1600–1650” (MA thesis, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2012), 150, 189 239. Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz., 627. 240. NAN, OWIC 8, fol. 135, Heren XIX to General Jan Jochumssen Sticker [in Fort Nassau?], Amsterdam, July 7, 1633; Joosse, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld, 177. 241. Schalkwijk, Igreja e estado, 316–324. 242. Joosse, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld, 317–318. 243. Mello, Tempo dos flamengos, 220–222. 244. SAA, ACA 379: 224, minister Joannis Backerus to the Classis of Amsterdam, Curaçao, May 1, 1644; Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz., 786; Joosse, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld, 502. 245. James Hoke Sweet, “The Iberian Origins of American Racist Thought,” William and Mary Quarterly, ser. 3, 54, no. 1 (1997), 144. 246. Van Grol, Grondpolitiek, 1: 111. 247. Joosse, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld, 315. His colleague Megapolensis, on the other hand, believed the Amerindians’ morality compared favorably with that of various settlers. 248. Joosse, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld, 504; Hamer, “Creating an Orderly Society,” 199; Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade, 165. 249. Van Rees, Geschiedenis der Staathuishoudkunde, 2: 91–92. 250. Schalkwijk, Igreja e estado, 290. 251. Otto, Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America, 141. 252. Jacques Solé, “Les difficultés de l’implantation au Brésil autour de 1640 d’après la correspondance du pasteur français Soler avec André Rivet,” in D’un Rivage

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à l’Autre: Villes et Protestantisme dans l’Aire Atlantique (XVIe–XVIIe siècles): Actes du Colloque organisé à La Rochelle (13 et 14 novembre 1998), ed. Guy Martinière, Didier Poton and François Souty (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1999), 245. 253. Antonio da Monteprandone to the Secretary of Propaganda, Rome, 1653, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 1463. 254. Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade, 324. 255. Acts of the Classis of Amsterdam, November 7, 1644, in Corwin, Ecclesiastical Records State of New York, 1: 186; Joosse, Geloof in de Nieuwe Wereld, 169, 357. 256. Herman Roodenburg, Onder censuur: De kerkelijke tucht in de gereformeerde gemeente van Amsterdam, 1578–1700 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1990), 86. 257. Kuyper, Voetius’ catechisatie, 652. 258. C. Schulz and Peter Grians, deputies “ad res Indicas,” to pastor van Beaumont in Curaçao, Amsterdam, July 8, 1661, in Corwin, Ecclesiastical Records State of New York, 1: 508. 259. Noorlander, “Serving God and Mammon,” 312. 260. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 206. 261. Kaplan, “Political Concepts,” 58–59. 262. Hondius, “Black Africans in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam,” 95. 263. C. J. Wasch, “Een doopregister der Hollanders in Brazilië,” Algemeen Nederlandsch Familieblad 5 (1888), 141–144, 169–172, 197–200, 225–228, 253–256, 281– 284; 6 (1889): 1–4, 25–28, 49–52, 73–77; Haefeli, New Netherland, 129. 264. Neville A. T. Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies: St. Thomas, St. John, St. Croix, ed. Barry W. Higman (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 47; Sue Peabody, “‘A Dangerous Zeal’: Catholic Missions to Slaves in the French Antilles, 1635–1800,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 1 (2002), 69. 265. Andries Raath, “Covenant and the Christian Community: Bullinger and the Relationship between Church and Magistracy in Early Cape Settlement (1652– 1708),” Sixteenth Century Journal 33, no. 4 (2002), 1014. 266. Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz., 778. Deborah Hamer has suggested that free and enslaved black women sought baptism, membership in the Reformed Church, and Christian marriage to escape rape and sexual coercion. See “Creating an Orderly Society,” 237. 267. H. Kaajan, De Pro-Acta der Dordtsche Synode (Rotterdam: T. de Vries Dz., 1914), 248–249. 268. Mello, Tempo dos flamengos, 189. 269. Willem Frijhoff, Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus 1607–1647 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 530 [translation of Wegen van Evert Willemsz]. For ministers and slaves, see Gerald De Jong, “The Dutch Reformed Church and Negro Slavery in Colonial America,” Church History 40, no. 4 (1971), 423–436. 270. Schalkwijk, Igreja e estado, 153; Albert Eekhof, De Hervormde Kerk in NoordAmerika (1624–1664) (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1913), 160–161. 271. Frans Leonard Schalkwijk, “Índios evangélicos no Brasil Holandês,” in Viver e morrer no Brasil Holandês, ed. Marcos Galindo (Recife: Massangana, 2005), 128. 272. Father Antonio de Couto to the provincial of Portugal, Jeronimo Vogado, Luanda, September 5, 1648, in Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola, 1070. 273. Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 136–137.

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274. SAA, ACA 379: 224, pastor Adrianus van Beaumont to the Classis of Amsterdam, Curaçao, April 17, 1660; pastor Wilhelmus Volckringh to the Classis of Amsterdam, Curaçao, June 9, 1664. 275. Murk van der Bijl, Idee en interest:Voorgeschiedenis, verloop en achtergronden van de politieke twisten in Zeeland en vooral in Middelburg tussen 1702 en 1715 (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff/Bouma’s Boekhuis, 1981), 216. 276. Uyt-vaert vande West-Indische Compagnie: Met een Propositie ende Vertooninghe, ghedaen door een seker Heere, aenden Coninck van Castilien, teghens de West-Indische Compagnie (s.l.: s.n., 1645). Epilogue

1. Korte onderrichtinghe ende vermaninghe aen alle lief-hebbers des vaderlandts, om liberalijcken te tekenen in de West-Indische Compagnie. In de welcke kortelijck wordt aengewesen, de nootsaeckelijckheyt, doenlijckheyt, ende nutticheyt vande selve (Leyden: Isaack Elsevier, 1622). 2. Spaenschen raedt. Om die Geunieerde Provincien, te water ende te lande te benauwen, van alle neeringen en welvaren te berooven, om soo voorts de selvige weder onder Spaensche tyrannije te brengen (’s-Gravenhage: Aert Meuris, 1626), 16. 3. Arnoldus Buchelius, “VOC-dagboek 1619–1639,” 101v, diary entry of March 12, 1623, 146, http://www.gahetna.nl/sites/default/files/bijlagen/transcriptie_ voc-dagboek_buchelius.pdf, accessed February 19, 2016. 4. Pieter de la Court, Interest van Holland, ofte gronden van Hollands-welvaren (Amsterdam: Joan Cyprianus Vandergracht, 1662), 63, 65. 5. Although Peter Rietbergen has suggested that national pride was probably confined to the province of Holland, it seems to have transcended regional borders in these instances. See Peter J. A. N. Rietbergen, “Beeld en zelfbeeld. ‘Nederlandse identiteit’ in politieke structuur en politieke cultuur tijdens de Republiek,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 107 (1992), 646. 6. Simon Adams, “Tactics of Politics? ‘The Military Revolution’ and the Hapsburg Hegemony, 1525–1648,” in The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe, ed. Clifford J. Rogers (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 258. 7. Gründlicher Bericht von Beschaffenheit und Eigenschaft, Cultivirung und Bewohnung, Privilegien und Beneficien deß in America zwischen Rio Orinoco und Rio de las Amazones an der vesten Küst des in der Landschafft Guiana gelegenen . . . Landes (Franckfurt: Wilhelm Serlin, 1669), 30–31, 39; NAN, SG 5769, Q. Spranger, discourse regarding a noteworthy design on America, presented to the States General, March 22, 1675. 8. Donna Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 231. 9. Examen vande Valsche Resolutie vande Heeren Burgemeesters ende Raden tot Amsterdam. Op ’t stuck vande West-Indische Compagnie (Amsterdam: Abraham de Bruyn, 1649), 5–6. 10. Reden van dat die West-Indische Compagnie oft handelinge niet alleen profijtelijck maer oock nootsaeckelijck is tot behoudenisse van onsen Staet (1636), 5–6. 11. ’t Verheerlickte Nederland door d’Herstelde Zee-vaart (1659), 45.

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12. Apart from these examples, in which the conquerors came off ships fitted out by the state or the WIC, the crew of one privateering vessel wreaked havoc on the Cape Verdian island of Ilha do Fogo in 1655, plundering the town of San Felipe. See Franz Binder, “Die zeeländische Kaperfahrt 1654–1662,” Archief: Mededelingen van het Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen (1976), 52; T. Bentley Duncan, Atlantic Islands: Madeira, the Azores and the Cape Verdes in Seventeenth-Century Commerce and Navigation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 181. 13. Johannes de Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael van de Verrichtinghen der Gheoctroyeerde WestIndische Compagnie in derthien Boecken, ed. Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber, 4 vols. (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1931–1937), 1: 23–25; Klaas Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika 1600–1650: Angola, Kongo en São Tomé (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2000), 113–114. In a notarized deposition from 1644, two officers declared that the leaders of the Dutch expedition to Luanda had allowed their troops to loot for three days; Johannes Gerard van Dillen, “Vreemdelingen te Amsterdam in de eerste helft der zeventiende eeuw,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 50 (1935), 20n. 1. 14. Joan Meznar, “Our Lady of the Rosary, African Slaves, and the Struggle against Heretics in Brazil, 1550–1660,” Journal of Early Modern History 9, no. 3–4 (2005), 384. 15. Francisco de Brito Freire, Nova Lusitânia: História da Guerra Brasílica (São Paulo: Beca Produções Culturais, 2001), 156. 16. Iconoclasm by soldiers also occurred during the English Civil Wars, which saw the destruction of the interiors of the cathedrals of Canterbury and Peterborough. See Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 64, 71–74. In addition, members of at least five English expeditions to Spanish America engaged in acts of iconoclasm: Oxenham’s voyage of 1576, Francis Drake’s voyages in 1577–1580 and 1585–1586, Christopher Newport’s voyage in 1592, and the failed assault on the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo in 1655 (a.k.a. Cromwell’s Western Design). Later in the seventeenth century, English pirates routinely destroyed images in churches on the Pacific side of South America. See Nicholas M. Beasley, “Wars of Religion in the Circum-Caribbean: English Iconoclasm in Spanish America, 1570– 1702,” in Saints and Their Cults in the Atlantic World, ed. Margaret Cormack (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 156–162; “The Relation of Captain Pallano,” in Spanish Narratives of the English Attack on Santo Domingo 1655. Transcribed and Translated from the Original Documents in the General Archives of the Indies and Edited for the Royal Historical Society, ed. Irene Aloha Wright, (London: Offices of the Society, 1926), 14; Mark G. Hanna, Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2015), 159. Finally, the captain of a Dutch privateer went on a rampage in a Catholic church in the Spanish Main during the War of the Spanish Succession, mocking the enemy’s faith while dressed in a priestly garb. See Manuscript diary of Michaël Alexius Schabel, Curacao, 1707–1708, translated by Jaime Koos Visker and Antoon Stikvoort, entry of November 3, 1707. 17. Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 43, 48, 54, 55. 18. British Guiana Boundary, Arbitration with the United States of Venezuela: Appendix to the Case on Behalf of Her Britannic Majesty (London: Foreign Office, 1898),88, 103–105.

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19. Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 179; David Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives: The Second Gerson Lecture Held in Memory of Horst Gerson (1907–1978) in the Aula of the University of Groningen on October 7, 1983 (Maarssen: Gary Schwartz, 1985), 25. 20. See also Frauke Volkland, “Konfessionelle Abgrenzung zwischen Gewalt, Stereotypenbildung und Symbolik: Gemischtkonfessionelle Gebiete der Ostschweiz und die Kurpfalz im Vergleich,” in Religion und Gewalt: Konflikte, Rituale, Deutungen (1500–1800,)ed. Kaspar von Greyerz and Kim Siebenhüner (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 357. 21. Diogo Lopes de Santiago, História da guerra de Pernambuco e feitos memoráveis do mestre de campo João Fernandes Vieira, herói digno de eterna memória, primeiro aclamador da guerra (Recife: Governo de Pernambuco, 1984), 107; Duarte de Albuquerque Coelho, Memórias Diárias da Guerra do Brasil (Recife: Fundação de Cultura Cidade do Recife, 1982), 122. See also John Walter, “‘Abolishing Superstition with Sedition’? The Politics of Popular Iconoclasm in England 1640–1642,” Past and Present 183 (May 2004), 87. “Images were not just destroyed. They were subjected to a degradation, at once both literal and metaphorical, with rituals deliberately borrowed from the punishments traditionally inflicted on heretics and traitors” (87). 22. Francisco Rubio de Avila to the audiencia of Santa Fé, Mérida, December 4, 1641, in C. F. A. van Dam and Irene Aloha Wright, eds., Nederlandsche zeevaarders op de eilanden in de Caraïbische Zee en aan de kust van Columbia en Venezuela gedurende de jaren 1621–1648: Documenten hoofdzakelijk uit het Archivo General de Indias, 2 vols. (Utrecht: Kemink & Zoon, 1934), 2: ∗99. 23. Michiel van Groesen, “Herinneringen aan Holland: De verbeelding van de Opstand in Salvador de Bahia,” Holland 41, no. 4 (2009), 297. 24. This attachment was illustrated by the (successful) mission of Luso-Brazilian soldiers in 1637 to bring back from Franciscan monasteries in Ipojuca, inside occupied Dutch territory, more than twenty chalices, six silver monstrances, several sacred silver vases, and a cross containing the relics of the Holy Cross. See José Antonio Gonsalves de Mello, Antônio Dias Cardoso, sargento-mor do têrço de infanteria de Pernambuco (Recife: Universidade do Recife, 1954), 12. 25. British Guiana Boundary, Appendix, 88, 103–105. 26. Sergiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1993), 76–77. 27. Yves-Marie Bercé, Revolt and Revolution in Early Modern Europe: An Essay on the History of Political Violence, trans. Joseph Bergin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 20. 28. Manoel Calado, O Valeroso Lucideno e Triumpho da Liberdade: Primeira parte, 2 vols. (Lisboa: Paulo Craesbeeck, 1648), 1: 27. 29. Alastair C. Duke and Dirk Herbert Arnold Kolff, “The Time of Troubles in the County of Holland, 1566–1567,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 82 (1969), 321– 323. See also Phyllis Mack Crew, Calvinist Preaching and Iconoclasm in the Netherlands 1544–1569 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 10. 30. Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 26, 85.

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31. Jonathan Irving Israel, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World 1606–1661 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 377–378. 32. Different from unofficial iconoclasm during the French Revolution, the soldiers’ iconoclasm was not meant as a protest against the authorities’ supposed leniency toward the opponents. See also Richard Clay, Iconoclasm in Revolutionary Paris: The Transformation of Signs (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2012), 280. 33. José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos flamengos: Influência da ocupação holandesa na vida e na cultura do Norte do Brasil, 2nd ed. (Recife: Governo do Estado de Pernambuco, 1978), 145n. As in Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, worries about their personal future may have provided another motive for deserters. See Jan Willem Huntebrinker, “Fromme Knechte” und “Garteteufel”: Söldner als soziale Gruppe im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2010), 213–214. Hunger also caused desertion in the last years of Dutch Brazil. See NAN, SG 5764, Guillaume d’Houthain to the States General, Fort Margarita, Paraíba, December 10, 1652. 34. The dynamics were similar among the armies serving the French Revolution. See Richard Cobb, Les armées révolutionnaires: Instrument de la Terreur dans les départements, Avril 1793-Floréal An II (Paris: Mouton, 1963), 653; T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland, 1792–1802 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 221. Dutch antipapism was also expressed verbally. The Jesuit chronicler of the Iberian reconquest of Salvador (1625) mentions a blasphemous Dutch soldier, who asserted that the Virgin Mary had had sexual intercourse before giving birth to Jesus Christ. See Bartolomeu Guerreiro, Iornada dos Vassalos da Coroa de Portugal, pera se recuperar a Cidade do Salvador, na Bahya de todos os Santos, tomada pollos Olandezes, a oito de Mayo de 1624. & recuperada ao primeiro de Mayo de 1625 (Lisboa: Mattheus Pinheiro, 1625), 53. 35. Marcos Albuquerque, “Holandeses en Pernambuco: Rescate material de la Historia,” in El desafío holandés al dominio ibérico en Brasil en el siglo XVII, ed. José Manuel Santos Pérez and George F. Cabral de Souza (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2006), 115. 36. Peter T. Bradley, The Lure of Peru: Maritime Intrusion into the South Sea, 1598– 1701 (London: Macmillan, 1989), 23. 37. Samuel Pierre l’Honoré Naber and Irene Aloha Wright, eds., Piet Heyn en de Zilvervloot: Bescheiden uit Nederlandsche en Spaansche Archieven (Utrecht: Kemink & Zoon, 1928), cxiv, 177; De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, 1: 139. 38. Arie Boomert, “Amerindian-European Encounters on and around Tobago (1498–ca.1810),” Antropológica 97–98 (2002), 108. 39. Alfred A. Cave, “Who Killed John Stone? A Note on the Origins of the Pequot War,” William and Mary Quarterly, ser. 3, 49, no. 3 (1992), 512–513. 40. Mark Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595–1674 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 167–169; Rita Krommen, “Mathias Beck und die Westindische Compagnie: Zur Herrschaft der Niederländer im kolonialen Ceará,” Arbeitspapiere zur Lateinamerikaforschung 2, no. 1 (2001), 40–45; Johan Nieuhof, Gedenkweerdige Brasiliaense zee- en lant-reize: Behelzende al het geen op dezelve is voorgevallen. Beneffens een bondige beschrijving van gantsche Neerlants Brasil, zoo van lantschappen, steden, dieren, gewassen, als draghten, zeden en godsdienst der inwoonders: en inzonderheit ein wijtloopig verhael der merkwaardigste voorvallen en geschiedenissen, die

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zich, geduurende zijn negenjarigh verblijf in Brasil, in d’oorlogen en opstant der Portugesen tegen d’onzen, zich sedert het jaer 1640. tot 1649. hebben toegedragen (Amsterdam: de weduwe van Jacob Meurs, 1682), 44–45. 41. Jan Marinus van der Linde, Surinaamse suikerheren en hun kerk: Plantagekolonie en handelskerk ten tijde van Johannes Basseliers, predikant en planter in Suriname, 1667–1689 (Wageningen: Veenman, 1966), 40. 42. ZA, SZ 2035/215, Abel Thisso to the States of Zeeland, March 25, 1670. 43. Raymond Buve, “Gouverneur Johannes Heinsius: de rol van Van Aerssen’s voorganger in de Surinaamse Indianenoorlog, 1678–1680,” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids (1966), 17; ZA, SZ 2035/377, Governor Johannes Heinsius to the States General, Surinamburgh, January 1, 1680. 44. Van der Linde, Surinaamse suikerheren en hun kerk, 42–43; Buve, “Gouverneur Johannes Heinsius,” 21; Lodewijk Augustinus Henri Christiaan Hulsman, “Nederlands Amazonia: Handel met indianen tussen 1580 en 1680” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2009), 246. 45. María Ximena Urbina Carrasco, La Frontera de arriba en Chile Colonial: Interacción hispano-indigena en el territorio entre Valdivia y Chiloé e imaginario de sus bordes geográficos, 1600–1800 (Valparaíso: Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, 2009), 83–84. 46. Melanie Perreault, “‘To Fear and to Love Us’: Intercultural Violence in the English Atlantic,” Journal of World History 17, no. 1 (2006), 77–78. 47. NAN, OWIC 44, report of Elbert Crispijnsen, 1643–1644, 4r, 6r. 48. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 17, 28, 61. 49. Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640– 1661 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 101; Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 68. 50. Charles Frostin, Les révoltes blanches à Saint-Domingue aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Haïti avant 1789) (Paris: L’École, 1975), 98, 113. 51. David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 22–23. 52. NAUK, HCA 30/227, unknown to unknown, Thorarica, January 9, 1672. 53. See also Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 24, 133, 155. 54. ZA, SZ 2035/333–335, Governor Johannes Heinsius to the States of Zeeland, Surinamburgh, May 30, 1679. 55. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Brussels, the Gentle Monster or the Disenfranchisement of Europe (London: Seagull Books, 2011), 71.

For Further Reading

Dutch intellectual and visual engagement with the Americas is the theme of Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), whereas Michiel van Groesen, Amsterdam’s Atlantic: Public Opinion and the Making of Dutch Brazil (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming) spotlights media coverage of the most coveted Dutch colony. The commercial triangle among Brazil, Portugal, and the Low Countries before 1630 is discussed in Christopher Ebert, Between Empires: Brazilian Sugar in the Early Atlantic Economy, 1550–1630 (Leiden: Brill, 2008) and Daniel Strum, The Sugar Trade: Brazil, Portugal, and the Netherlands (1595–1630) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). Jeroen Dewulf, “Emulating a Portuguese Model: The Slave Policy of the West India Company and the Dutch Reformed Church in Dutch Brazil (1630–1654) and New Netherland (1614–1664) in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Early American History 4 (2014): 3–36, deals with the Portuguese influence on the Dutch Atlantic. The standard work on the West India Company (WIC) is Henk den Heijer, Geschiedenis van de WIC (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1994) and the WIC cartographic pursuits are spotlighted in Kees Zandvliet, Mapping for Money: Maps, Plans, and Topographic Paintings and Their Role in Dutch Overseas Expansion during the 16th and 17th Centuries (Amsterdam: Batavian Lion International, 1998). The clergy in the Dutch Atlantic are portrayed in Daniel Noorlander, “Serving God and Mammon: The Reformed Church and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World, 1621–1674” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2011). Marriage in the colonies is the theme of Deborah Hamer, “Creating an Orderly Society: The Regulation of Marriage and Sex in the Dutch Atlantic World, 1621–1674” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014). Cornelis C. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1971), and Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World 1606–1661 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), discuss the political context of Dutch expansion in the Atlantic world.

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Among the studies of Dutch military action after mid-century are Franz Binder, “Die zeeländische Kaperfahrt 1654–1662,” Archief: Mededelingen van het Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen (1976), and Donald G. Shomette and Robert D. Haslach, Raid on America: The Dutch Naval Campaign of 1672–1674 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988). Valuable studies of Dutch Brazil include Charles Ralph Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), Evaldo Cabral de Mello, Olinda Restaurada: Guerra e Açúcar no Nordeste, 1630–1654 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Forense-Universitaria; and São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1975), and Michiel van Groesen, ed., The Legacy of Dutch Brazil (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014). The most insightful works on New Netherland are Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: Brill, 2005) and Willem Frijhoff, Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus 1607–1647 (Leiden: Brill, 2007). Dutch activities in Africa are best approached through Klaas Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika 1600–1650: Angola, Kongo en São Tomé (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2000) and Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in West Africa (1580–1674): Empires, Merchants, and the Atlantic System (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Robert D. Porter, “European Activity on the Gold Coast, 1620–1667” (PhD diss., University of South Africa, 1975), and Franz Binder, “Die Goldeinfuhr von der Goldküste in die Vereinigten Provinzen, 1655–1675,” in Precious Metals in the Age of Expansion, ed. Hermann Kellenbenz (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), highlight the Dutch trade with West Africa. AngloDutch trade in the Americas is covered by Claudia Schnurmann, Atlantische Welten: Engländer und Niederländer im amerikanisch-atlantischen Raum 1648– 1713 (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1998); Christian J. Koot, Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621–1713 (New York and London: New York University Press, 2011); and Victor Enthoven and Wim Klooster, “Contours of Virginia-Dutch Trade in the Long Seventeenth Century,” in Early Modern Virginia: New Essays on the Old Dominion, ed. Douglas Bradburn and John Coombs (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). All studies of the Dutch slave trade start with Johannes Menne Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600– 1815 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). The Jewish component of the Dutch Atlantic, and specifically Dutch Brazil, is the focus of José Antonio Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da Nação: Cristãosnovos e judeus em Pernambuco 1542–1654 (Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco and Editora Massangana, 1989). The rich literature on Dutch-Amerindian relations includes Arie Boomert, “Amerindian-European Encounters on

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and around Tobago (1498–ca.1810),” Antropológica 97–98 (2002): 71–207; Donna Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Paul Otto, The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006); and Susanah Shaw Romney, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2014). Finally, Mark Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595–1674 (Leiden: Brill, 2012) discusses ties with indigenous people in both the New World and Africa.

Index

Accra, 30, 176 Acosta, José de, 57 Adam, Julia, 85 Aertsz, Jonas, 210 Aitzema, Lieuwe, van, 143 Akrosan, 100–101 Alba, Duke of, 14–15, 41 Albuquerque, Matias de, 52, 123–24 Aldroff, Pieter, 197 Algiers, 102, 194 All Saints Bay, 40–42 Alrichs, Jacob, 96 Alvares, Abraham, 165 Alvin, Antônio Henriques, 240 Amazon River, 55, 58, 147, 152, 159, 190, 201, 216–17, 220 Amsterdam, 5, 13, 15, 18, 25, 32, 92, 102, 108, 116–17, 167, 171–72, 179, 194, 199–203, 223–26, 239–40, 247–49, 255, 261 Andalusia, 15, 22, 155 Andros, Edmund, 109 Angola, 5, 7, 18, 24, 42–44, 70–72, 78, 81–82, 93, 121, 125, 131–32, 134, 153, 159–63, 176, 205–6, 208–11, 220, 228, 250 Anselmo, Antônio, 21 Antheunissen, Philippus, 207 Anthunes, David Dias, 194 Antwerp, 15, 18, 20–21, 27, 32, 37, 178, 233, 257, 261 Araya, 30, 59–60, 64–65, 72, 155, 216 Archduke Albert, 28–29 Arciszewski, Krzysztof, 63–65, 76, 151–52, 200, 215, 233 Ardra, 43, 54, 160, 163, 175, 182 Arica, 38, 61, 150 Armada, 26–27, 38, 44, 68 Arminians, 32 Arnett, John, 166 Asunción, 13, 152 Baas, Jean Charles de, 107, 110 Backerus, Joannis, 247–49

Bahia, 9, 68 Baltic region, 18, 59, 62, 162, 202, 215 Banckert, Adriaen, 107 Bangs, Jeremy, 218 Banqueresme, Jaques, 16 baptisms, 213, 230, 244, 247, 249–50 Baptista, João, 14 Bara, Jan, 245 Barbados, 5, 62, 97, 102–3, 105, 107, 165–71, 181, 183, 186, 201, 226–27, 238, 240, 261 Barbary corsairs, 158, 194, 220, 255 Barentsen, Pieter, 234 Barlaeus, Caspar, 56, 65, 76, 134–35, 152, 206, 223, 246 Barreto, Francisco, 89, 223 Bartolotti, Guillelmo, 175 Bas, Pieter, 150 Basiliers Jr., Jaspar, 21 Batavia, 198, 210, 212 Baudaart, Pieter, 186 Bazán, Don Juan de Benavides, 46 Beaumont, Adriaan, van, 249–51 Beck, Mathias, 96, 105, 181, 209 Beeckman, Abraham, 260 Beltgens, Pieter, 39 Benderius, Laurentius, 247 Benguela, 72 Beni, Jacques Alexander, 178 Benin, 43, 153, 160–62, 182, 186 Berbice, 105, 199 Bering Strait, 57 Berkeley, William, 170 Bermuda, 3, 105 Beveren, Huijbert van, 96 Beverwijck, 148, 204 Beverwijck, Johan van, 132 Bick, Alexander, 7, 86 Billegas, Pedro García, 175 Binckes, Jacob, 108, 110–11, 123 Bollaert, Jan, 178 Bonaire, 60–61, 115, 155, 176 Boogaart, Ernst van den, 203 Boot, Juan, 17

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INDEX

Bordeaux, 44, 222 Boudewijns, Ludovicus, 181 Boxer, Charles, 92 Brandt, Pieter, 24–25 Brazil: anti-Dutch revolt, 77–83, 116, 121–22, 135, 162–63, 168, 190, 222, 259; brazilwood production, 20–21, 91, 183; diseases, 27, 42, 66, 80, 115, 120, 129, 141, 163, 259; Dutch military incursions, 3–5, 8, 29, 33, 39–42, 49–53, 63–68, 114–18, 125, 255–57; Dutch settlement, 3, 7–8, 20, 33, 63, 115–16, 165, 183–84, 189–91, 199–202, 204–11, 219, 230–33, 237, 247–48, 253–54, 259–60; Dutch trade, 8, 17–23, 32, 147, 156–57, 164–65; guerrilla warfare, 40, 52, 67; Jewish community, 8, 78, 152, 156, 219–24, 227; military importance, 8; population patterns, 52, 80, 91, 190–91; silver production, 150; slavery, 6, 8, 51–52, 70, 127, 134, 157–63, 168, 205, 216, 238–42, 255, 259–60, 262; soldier demographics, 115–16, 121–22; sugar production, 3, 6, 8, 15, 20, 39–40, 43, 49, 52, 77–78, 81, 87, 94, 123, 134, 138, 156–57, 160, 163, 168, 239, 253; tobacco production, 58, 94; West India Company (WIC) expansion, 5, 8–9, 33, 39–43, 49–53, 72, 84, 183–84 Brill, 26, 217 Britain: See England Brittany, 23 Broen, Hendrick, 39 Broersz, Jan, 179 Broes, Thomas, 177 Brotherhood of the Unleashed Lion, 11 Broucke, Mattheus van, 198 Brouwer, Hendrick, 72, 150, 192, 260–61 Brun, Samuel, 121 Bruyn, Peter de, 214 Buchelius, Arnoldus, 35, 253 Buenos Aires, 13, 150, 152, 160, 176–78, 181 Bull, Stoffel Cornelissen, 214 Bullestraeten, Adriaen, 157 Burgh, Jacobus van der, 249 Byam, William, 106 Cádiz, 21, 23, 26, 43, 47, 102, 130, 176–78, 181 Caerloff, Hendrick, 185–87 Calabar, 43, 160, 169, 186 Callao, 31, 38, 68, 150 Calvinism, 6, 9, 15–17, 31–32, 34, 36, 63, 75, 212, 214, 224, 229, 231–32, 235, 245, 249–50, 256, 258

Canada, 23 Canary Islands, 16–17, 20–21, 27, 177–80 Cañete, 31 cannibalism, 54–55, 79, 242–43 Cape Coast, 100–102, 121, 176, 185, 187, 236, 254 Cape Horn, 54, 72 Cape Lopez, 24, 43, 62, 153 Cape of Good Hope, 19, 212, 250 Cape Tiburon, 63 Cape Verde, 49, 63, 106, 108, 117, 130, 153 Capellen, Alexander van der, 57, 84–85 Caracas, 176, 179–81, 239 Carr, Richard, 99 Cartagena, 29, 48 cartography, 6, 37–38, 50 Caspersz, Abraham, 214 cassava, 134–35, 157, 204–5, 241 Castell, William, 203 Catalonia, 69 Catholicism, 14–15, 29, 36, 59, 78, 80–81, 122, 143, 157, 176, 189, 221, 223, 228–34, 245–51, 256–57 Cayenne, 95–96, 110, 125, 191, 202, 225, 227, 254 Ceará, 67, 90–91, 150, 247, 259 César, Cornelio Adrián, 16 Chanterwell, John, 179 Charles I, 170 Charles II, 98–99, 101, 104, 109 Charles V, 12–13 Chesapeake Bay, 108–9, 167, 170, 240 Chile, 28, 38, 72, 147–50, 152, 191, 235, 258, 260 Chiloé, 28, 72 China, 57–58 China, Dirck Gerritsz, 235 Claesz, Claes, 89, 157 Claysen, Gaspar Nicolas, 16–17 Cockx, Aelbrecht, 170–71 Colarte, Pedro, 178 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 107, 111 Colombia, 29, 182 Columbus, Christopher, 13, 75 Congo River, 24–25, 162 Connecticut, 63, 73, 96, 98, 207, 259 Constant, Pieter, 111–12 Corinsen, Roque, 16 Cormantine, 100, 102, 154, 176 corn, 72, 157, 162 Cornelisz, Jan, 119 Correa, Helena, 236 Cortés, Hernán, 13 cotton, 161, 166–67, 169

INDEX Count-Duke of Olivares, 62, 68–69, 225 Court, Pieter de la, 253 Coymans, Isaac, 185 Crijnssen, Abraham, 106, 108, 114, 201, 225 Cromwell, Oliver, 90, 96, 261 Cuba, 22, 29–30, 38–39, 45, 111, 176, 178, 180, 182, 259 Cumaná, 22, 60, 179 Curaçao, 3, 7, 60–61, 65, 96, 98, 104–5, 107–11, 114–15, 124, 126, 133, 141–42, 149, 155, 173, 175–76, 180–83, 188, 191–92, 207–10, 226–27, 233, 239, 241, 247–48, 255 Curler, Arent van, 234–35 Danzig, 20 Dapper, Jacob, 250 Dartmouth, 23 Delaware River, 58, 96–97, 115, 202, 207 Delft, 17, 116, 119, 154 Denmark, 2, 62, 93, 100–101, 122, 154, 164, 185–86, 215, 255 D’Estrées, Jean, 107, 110–11, 140 Deventer, 36 D’Hinoyossa, Alexander, 96 diseases, 27, 42, 66, 71, 115, 120, 127–32, 141, 163, 194, 259 Does, Pieter van der, 27 Dominica, 38, 62 Dordrecht, 52, 150 Dormido, David Abravanel, 222 Dorth, Johan van, 40–41 Downing, George, 103 Drago, Abraham, 195 Drake, Francis, 19, 25, 27 Drisius, Samuel, 98–99, 219 Dunkirk, 44–46, 106, 111, 121 Dussen, Adriaen van der, 77 Dutch military: Africa incursions, 5, 26, 30–32, 42–44, 67–71, 81–83, 100–102, 114–15, 125, 255–56; alliances, 5–6, 26, 29–30, 42, 56, 67, 70, 79, 102; ancient Rome comparisons, 74–76; Brazil incursions, 3–5, 8, 29, 33, 39–42, 49–53, 63–68, 85–90, 114–18, 125, 255–57; Caribbean islands incursions, 29, 38–39, 42, 45–50, 53, 58–64, 71–72, 103–8, 110–12, 125, 235, 257, 259; casualties, 7, 27–28, 50, 69, 123–24, 131; Chile incursions, 29, 72; discipline, 127–28, 142; disease risks, 27, 42, 114–15, 120, 127–32, 141; Dutch-Munsee wars, 72–73, 97–98; England, conflicts with, 7, 62, 88–89, 96–112, 116–17, 150, 170–71; France, conflicts with, 4, 7, 107,

411

110–11, 174, 255; gold seizures, 34, 45; mutinies, 41, 141–45; New Netherland incursions, 72–73, 96–99, 121; Peru incursions, 3, 41, 45, 53; Portugal, conflicts with, 3–4, 6, 9, 25–28, 31–32, 39, 43–44, 49, 67–72, 77–83, 87–90, 93–94, 123–24, 254; provisioning, 52–53, 87, 116–17, 132–37, 141–45, 258; sailor family relations, 113, 116, 118–20; silver seizures, 6, 34, 38, 41, 45–47, 70; slave alliances, 29–30, 241; soldier demographics, 118, 121–27; Spain, conflicts with, 3–4, 6, 9, 11–18, 26–32, 34–37, 43–53, 59–61, 68–70, 254–55, 260–61; sugar seizures, 6, 39–40, 43, 52, 87–88, 125, 253; Sweden, conflicts with, 97, 100–101; tobacco seizures, 45, 106, 109; troop strength, 40, 51, 69, 113–17, 136, 139; wages, 91–92, 113, 117, 119–20, 123, 125–26, 136, 138–39, 142–45, 213; See also East India Company (VOC): West India Company (WIC) Dutch settlement: Africa, 2–3, 6, 30–31, 39, 67, 70–72, 81–83, 100–102, 112, 160–61, 197, 205–6, 208–14, 235–38; agricultural production, 1, 5, 136, 155–56, 196, 199–203, 225, 254; Brazil, 3, 7–8, 20, 33, 63–72, 75–84, 115–16, 165, 183–84, 189–91, 199–202, 204–11, 219, 230–33, 237, 247–48, 253–54, 259–60; Caribbean islands, 7–9, 58–63, 72, 90–91, 97, 103–8, 110–12, 114–15, 140, 155–58, 169–74, 191–92, 199, 208, 218, 235; Chile, 72, 152; employment opportunities, 192, 196–99, 222, 241; English colonists, 216–20, 260; French colonists, 218–19; gender roles, 118–20, 192–94, 212–13, 235–36; Guiana, 58–59, 90, 95–96, 105–6, 115, 149, 156–57, 190–91, 199, 210–12, 216–17; immigrant demographics, 13–14, 109, 196, 200–203, 213, 261; Jewish settlers, 5, 8, 78, 95, 152, 156, 160, 181, 215, 219–27; language obstacles, 178, 219, 234, 247; missionary efforts, 6, 13, 246–51; mother country connections, 4, 109, 190, 204–8, 214; motivational factors, 189–92, 201–3, 214, 251, 261; native relationships, 5–6, 56, 234–38, 251; New Netherland, 2, 57–58, 72–73, 76, 96–99, 108–9, 114–15, 159, 171–72, 190–94, 200–211, 234–37, 247–50, 254, 261; patroonships, 146, 198–99, 201–4; Peru, 95, 150–52; Reformed Church role, 9, 50, 81, 109, 190, 208–14, 223, 229–30, 246, 249; refugees, 216–17, 225; religious

412

INDEX

Dutch settlement (continued) conversions, 222–23, 245–51; return migration, 13, 139, 194–95, 224; tolerance principles, 6, 227–33, 246, 251, 261; WIC monopolies, impact of, 199–200, 204 Dutch trade: Africa, 2–5, 7, 18–19, 24–25, 35, 62, 100, 147–48, 152–54, 158–64, 185, 237; Brazil, 8, 17–23, 32, 147, 150, 156–57, 164–65; Canary Islands hub, 21–22, 177–80; capital markets, 1, 18, 166, 168; Caribbean islands, 18–23, 30, 35, 37, 97, 104, 155–58, 164–74, 180–83, 188, 254–55, 261; cartography, role of, 6, 37–38, 50; cod, 23; cruising, 131, 164–65, 176; East Indies, 3, 37; embargos, 15, 17, 37, 59, 173–75, 261; England, 23, 164–74, 183, 188, 254–55, 261; European models, 19–20; firearms, 2, 147–48; flamenco merchants, 12–15; Flemish sailors, 21; France, 23, 168, 172–74, 188, 254–55, 261; furs, 23, 58, 72, 125, 148, 153, 235; gold, 6, 15, 24–25, 31, 67, 148–49, 152–54, 186, 237–38; internal warfare impact, 18–20, 31–32; Italy, 18; ivory, 24–25, 153, 186; New Netherland, 23–24, 57–58, 72–73, 98, 100, 125, 147–48, 167; Portugal, 18, 20–22; Russia, 18; salt, 15, 18, 30, 59–60, 124, 146, 154–55, 259; silver, 6, 15, 45, 148, 150–52; slaves, 1–2, 4–8, 67, 70, 95, 110, 158–64, 167–69, 172–77, 181–86, 238–39, 259–62; smuggling, 23, 160, 169, 184–87, 238; Spain, 14–15, 18, 32, 174–83, 188; spices, 3, 15, 20, 34; sugar, 2, 15, 20, 49, 87, 123, 138, 156–58, 160, 163, 167–68, 172–74, 253, 255; tobacco, 22, 94, 156, 165–70; trading stations, 1, 3–4, 19, 62, 154; wampum, 2, 73; whaling, 23, 146, 154–55; See also East India Company (VOC): West India Company (WIC) East India Company (VOC): Chile expansion efforts, 38; Cuba expansion efforts, 38–39; disease risks, 129; funding, 28, 36, 146; monopolies, 5; Nassau fleet, 38–39, 54, 60–62, 117, 130, 142, 150, 260; New Netherland expansion efforts, 58; Peru expansion efforts, 38; scholarly research, 2; silver seizures, 38; slave trade, 246; soldier enlistments, 113–14, 116; Spain, conflicts with, 38–39; spice trade, 34; West India Company (WIC) merger discussions, 84, 137

Eckhout, Albert, 65 Efutu, 30, 67, 100–101, 185 Elliott, John, 90 Elmina, 3, 7–8, 26, 30, 42, 49, 67, 69–70, 80, 100–102, 114–15, 127, 153–54, 160, 169, 176, 185, 207, 210, 236–37, 253, 255 Eltis, David, 262 Enden, Franciscus van den, 56, 246 England: Africa expansion efforts, 100–102; agricultural production, 1, 5, 148, 166–68; colonization skills, 5; Dutch colony settlers, 216–20; Dutch military conflicts, 7, 62, 88–89, 96–112, 116–17, 150, 170–71; Dutch soldier recruitments, 122; Dutch trade, 23, 164–74, 183, 188, 254–55, 261; France, conflict with, 4; gold trade, 154; maritime power, 3; Navigation Acts, 1, 98, 169–72, 261; New England settlement, 3, 73, 96–98, 190, 218; Pequot War, 73, 259; precious metals trade, 148; silver trade, 150; slavery, 4, 99, 105–8, 161, 164, 168–69, 239, 260, 262; Spain, conflicts with, 26, 47, 62, 105; sugar industry, 104–5, 163, 169; territorial goals, 3, 96; tobacco trade, 169–70; West Indies settlements, 3, 5, 103–7; whaling, 154–55 Enkhuizen, 52, 116, 142 Ericksz, Barent, 24, 26–27 Escobar, Diego López de, 59 Essequibo, 59, 90, 95, 105–6, 149, 157, 185, 190–91, 208, 225, 227, 234, 256 Ethiopia, 57, 244 Federico, Juan, 17 Fernando de Noronha, 120, 130–31, 163, 205, 242 Feroni, Francesco, 162, 181 Fias, Juan, 180 Fidelerius, Louis, 236 Figueredo, Manuel de, 19 flamencos, 12–15 Flamore, Thaba, 237 Flanders, 15, 27 Florida, 14, 234 Focquenbroch, Willem Godschalck van, 244 Fonseca, Esteban de Ares, 221 Forant, Job, 144 Fort Altona, 92 Fort Casimir, 97 Fort Cormantine, 102, 256 Fort James, 109 Fort Mouree, 19, 114, 197 Fort Nassau, 23, 31, 67, 131, 160, 187

INDEX Fort Orange, 58, 115, 171, 190, 196, 234, 247 France: Dutch colony settlers, 218–19; Dutch military conflicts, 4, 7, 107, 110–11, 174, 255; Dutch soldier recruitments, 122–23; Dutch trade, 23, 168, 172–74, 188, 254–55, 261; England, conflict with, 4; Guiana settlements, 95; precious metals trade, 148; religious environment, 231; salt production, 155; slavery, 4, 164, 172–73, 186; sugar industry, 173–74; tobacco production, 172 Fransen, Pieter, 213–14 Frederick, William, 137 Fredericks, Hans, 195 Friesland, 15, 91, 102–3, 136–37 Frijhoff, Willem, 7, 208, 213 furs, 23, 58, 72, 125, 235 Gabbes, Arent, 185 Garde, Guillaume Belin de la, 177, 181, 185 Gay, John, 166–67 Gelderland, 57, 85, 133, 136–38 Gelendonck, Jan, 236 Genoa, 23, 181 Gent, Willem Joseph van, 107 Gerbier, Balthasar, 149 Germany, 18, 22, 51, 74, 107, 120–22, 149–50, 194, 204, 215–16, 230–31, 254 Gerritsen, Pauwel, 20 Gerritsz, Hessel, 37–38 Geyers, Pieter, 243 Gibralter, 28 Goa, 19 Gogh, Michiel van, 118 Goiana, 231–32 gold, 6, 24–25, 31, 67, 148–50, 152–54, 186, 203, 237–38 Goodfriend, Joyce, 208 Goodlad, John, 122 Goree, 101–2, 111, 114, 140, 160 Gorges, Fernando Sir, 75 Gouda, 52 Goutsweert, Barbara van, 120 Governor’s Island, 58, 96 Gran Canaria, 49 Grenada, 122, 173, 259 Grillo, Domenico, 181 Groenewegen, Aert Adriaensz, 234 Groesen, Michiel van, 7 Groningen, 15, 35, 102–3, 136–37 Groote, Carel de, 214 Grotius, Hugo, 41, 57, 61, 76

413

Guadeloupe, 62, 157, 172, 174, 224 Guararapes, 87, 89, 119–20, 123–24, 135, 139, 144, 194 Guayaquil, 38 guerrilla warfare, 40, 65, 67, 70, 123 Guiana, 5, 29, 35, 58, 90, 95–96, 105, 147, 149, 157, 190, 199, 202–3, 216–18, 225, 227 Guillen, Juan Esteban, 180 Guinea, 22, 24–25, 67, 71, 114, 159–61, 210–12, 214 Gulf of Guinea, 24 Haarlem, 13, 22, 36, 46, 52, 150, 207, 218 Habsburg Empire, 3, 9, 11–12, 14–16, 18, 26, 28–29, 37, 39, 45–47, 50–51, 56, 69, 155, 190, 260 Haecx, Hendrick, 89, 91–92, 144 Haene, Jacques de, 15 Hagen, Pieter van der, 27 Hajstrup, Peter Hansen, 121, 239 Hakluyt, Richard, 19, 260–61 Hamburg, 20 Hansen, Hans, 17 Hattem, 51 Havana, 39, 48, 53, 69, 176–77, 179–80 Hawkins, John, 19, 25 Heijer, Henk den, 7 Heinsius, Johannes, 96, 260, 262 Hemmersam, Michael, 237 Hendricksz, Boudewijn, 42, 45, 50 Hendricx, Trijne, 120 Henricus, Johannes, 22 Henríquez, Pedro Rodríguez, 179 Henry, Frederick, 41, 57, 253 Herckmans, Elias, 75, 261 Heren XIX, 35–36, 47, 52–53, 58, 60, 65, 69–70, 84, 94, 118, 124, 131, 138, 153, 160, 198, 209–10, 239, 247; See also West India Company (WIC) Hermans, Isaacq, 179 Heussen, Jasper van, 96, 100–101 Heyn, Piet Pieterszoon, 40, 42–43, 45–47, 49, 61, 85, 113, 122, 129, 148, 253, 259 Hispaniola, 72, 104, 240 Holland, 14–15, 18, 22, 51, 84, 86, 95, 106, 110, 112, 136, 201, 206, 216, 225, 253 Holmes, Robert, 101–2 Hondius, Jacobus, 246 Honduras, 148, 179 Hoogstraten, Diederick van, 80 Hoorn, 52, 116, 148, 246 Hoorn, Jan Jansz van, 63

414

INDEX

Houttuin, Aletta van, 240 Hove, Vincent van, 21 Hudson, Henry, 23, 57–58 Hudson River, 19, 23, 73, 96, 171, 204, 207 Hugo, Giraldo, 16 Hulsman, Lodewijk, 7, 239 Hulten, Philips van, 178, 181, 185 Hundred Years’ War, 4, 6 Huybert, Pieter de, 106 Idaña, Abraham, 240 Igaraçu, 256–57 IJperen, Nicolaes van, 67 India, 19, 235, 239 Indian Ocean, 19, 32, 34, 108, 146, 239 Indonesia, 57 Ireland, 95, 158, 170, 179, 217–18 Iroquois, 2 Isle of Wight, 111, 141, 166 Israel, Samuel, 222–23 Italy, 18, 121, 162, 254 Itamaracá, 63, 135, 138–39, 219, 232 Itaparica, 116, 221 ivory, 24–25, 153, 186 Jacobo, Conrado, 17 Jacobs, Jaap, 7 Jacquet, Jean Paul, 96 Jamaica, 98, 103–5, 180–81, 226 Jans, Nannetje, 194 Jansen, Cornelis, 14 Jansen, Nicolaes, 157 Janssen, Albert, 178 Janssen, Thomas, 234 Jesuits, 38, 75, 77, 80, 152, 229, 258 Johan Maurits, 8, 52, 65–67, 76–77, 84, 92, 136, 150, 156, 200–201, 205–6, 219–20, 229, 231–33, 253 John IV, 69, 78, 80–81, 89, 93 Jol, Cornelis, 44, 69–71, 83, 114, 131, 210 Jonge, Cornelis Evertsen de, 108 Kieft, Willem, 53, 72–73, 97, 148–50, 204 Kijff, Hans, 41 Koin, Hans van, 67, 114 Komenda, 67 Kongo, 24–25, 42, 70, 153, 161, 232, 243, 247 Krol, Bastiaen Jansz, 196–97 La Rochelle, 62–63 Ladesma, Tristan Muños de, 180 Laet, Johannes de, 37, 44, 54, 57, 62, 148, 152, 202, 204–5, 243

Lam, Jan Dircksz, 42, 63, 130–31 Langen, Jacob Floris van, 24 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 56 Leghorn, 23 Leiden, 27, 36, 45, 52, 154, 218 Lesser Antilles, 1, 9, 58, 62, 165, 169, 258–59 L’Hermite, Jacques, 130 L’Hermite, Pierre, 157 Liberia, 101, 237 Lima, 38, 61, 68, 148, 178 Limburg, 231–32 Lisbon, 15, 20–21, 27, 77, 89, 93, 222 Listrij, Johan, 157 Loango, 24, 182 Lodenstein, Jodocus van, 251 Lomelino, Ambrosio, 181 Loncq, Hendrick Cornelisz, 49–51, 114–15, 206, 259 Long Island, 73, 98, 109 Longvilliers, Phillippe de, 172 Loockermans, Govert, 197 Loos, Willem Cornelisz, 69 Lopez, Duarte, 24 Lorenzo, Tobias, 17 Louis XIV, 107, 110, 174 Lourensz, Lourens, 55 Luanda, 2, 8, 25, 39, 42, 49, 70–72, 80–83, 85, 90, 114–15, 131, 135, 142–43, 159–64, 169, 177, 182, 210–11, 220, 240, 247, 253, 256 Lutheranism, 16–17, 27, 229–30 Madeira, 21, 80, 170 Maertijns, Jan, 207–8 Maino, Juan Bautista, 41 Mander, Karl van, 56 Manhattan, 58, 73, 97, 203, 207 Mansen, Ricardo, 16 Mansfield, Edward, 104–5 Maracaibo, 176, 257 Maranhão, 72–73, 78, 123, 134–35, 152, 205, 238–39, 256, 259 Marcgraf, Georg, 66 Marees, Pieter de, 153, 243–44 Margarita, 22, 59 Marie-Galante, 62, 110 Marseilles, 23 Marsen, Jaques, 17 Martel, Gaspar Afonso, 240 Martinique, 62, 108, 110–11, 125, 157, 165, 172, 174, 224, 226–27, 254, 261 Mascarenhas, Fernando de, 68–69 Matamba, 81, 161 Matanzas, 38, 45–48

INDEX Mathias, Henrico, 175–76, 178, 180–81, 185 Maurits, Johan: See Johan Maurits Maurits, stadholder, 16, 29, 31–32, 38–39 Mauritsstad, 66, 76, 78, 81, 96, 135, 194, 219, 222, 231, 233 Maze, 26, 35, 51, 102, 124 McCusker, John, 169 Mediterranean Sea, 18, 23, 32, 62, 93, 102, 110, 158 Megapolensis, Johannes, 248 Mello, Evaldo Cabral de, 7, 51 Menard, Russell, 169 Menasseh ben Israel, 226–27 Merwick, Donna, 7 Meuwese, Mark, 7, 249 Mexico, 1, 13, 16–17, 45–46, 48, 62, 70, 149 Mey, Jean de, 156 Mey, Johannes de, 242, 245 Michaëlius, Jonas, 247, 250 Middelburg, 25, 95, 111, 117, 149, 159, 167, 172, 174, 186 Mina, 24 Minuit, Pieter, 196, 234 Modyford, Thomas, 103–4 Moerbeeck, Jan Andriesz, 39, 52, 156 Montezinos, Antonio de, 226 Montserrat, 166 Moor, Cornelis de, 59 Moor, Jan de, 59 Morais, Manuel de, 80 Morgan, Edward, 104 Morineau, Michel, 132 Morris, Gedeon, 152, 242 Moruca, 90, 191 Mossel Thijs, Volckertsz, 235 Moucheron, Balthasar de, 22, 26–27, 37, 176 Mouree, 30, 62, 131, 160, 176, 211, 213, 237 Mpinda, 25 Naples, 50 Nassau fleet, 38–39, 54, 60–62, 117, 130, 142, 150, 260 Nassi, David Cohen, 225 Navigation Acts, 1, 98, 169–72, 261 Nevis, 47, 62, 106, 123, 144 New Amstel, 141, 202–3, 215–17, 246 New Amsterdam, 19, 114–15, 167, 176, 184, 186, 206, 224, 227, 230, 241 New England, 3, 57, 73, 96–98, 109, 259 New Netherland: agricultural production, 155–56, 196, 201–4, 254; conversions, 247–48; Dutch military incursions, 72–73, 96–99, 121; Dutch settlement, 2,

415

57–58, 72–73, 76, 96–99, 108–9, 114–15, 159, 171–72, 190–94, 201–11, 234–37, 247–50, 254, 261; Dutch trade, 23–24, 57–58, 72–73, 98, 100, 125, 147–48, 167; employment opportunities, 195–96, 203; founding, 23, 57–58, 159; fur trade, 23, 58, 72, 125, 204; Kieft’s War, 53, 72–73, 97; legal system, 206–7, 220, 240; native alliances, 5–6, 251; natural resources, 100, 133, 149–50, 202–3, 206; New England border disputes, 58, 96–99, 220, 259; New Netherland Company, 23, 58, 218; patroonships, 199–200; population patterns, 190–93, 200, 204; religious conversions, 249–50; religious environment, 208–11, 221, 223, 229–30, 246–50; return migration, 195; scholarly research, 7–8; slavery, 159, 167, 205, 240–41, 246, 249–50, 259–62; soldier demographics, 115, 121, 126; surrender, 109, 115, 174, 198, 254 New Sweden, 97, 187, 208, 229–30 New York, 7, 103, 109, 171–72, 176, 208, 235 Newfoundland, 23, 49, 102–3, 106, 108, 176 Nicholl, Richard, 98 Nieuhof, Johan, 242 Noldius, Hermannus, 211 Noorderkwartier, 26, 35, 102 Noordsche Compagnie, 23–24, 154 Noorlander, Danny, 7, 249 Normandy, 23 North Sea, 26, 96, 107 Norway, 18, 122 Obdam, Jacob Wassenaer van, 93, 112 Oiapoque River, 91, 194, 204, 217, 234 Oldenbarnevelt, Johan van, 27, 31–32 Olinda, 49–50, 125, 144, 232, 256–58 Olivares, Count-Duke of, 62, 68 Ool, Jan van, 157 Oporto, 21 Oquendo, Antonio de, 50 Orinoco River, 58–59, 95, 149, 234, 257 Osborne, Roger, 166 Otto, Paul, 7 Overijssel, 91, 136–37 Palafox, Juan de, 62 Paludanus, Bernardus, 24 Panama, 38, 181–82 Papenbroeck, Gerrit van, 175 Paraguay, 13, 152 Paraíba, 50, 55, 64, 80, 91, 150, 163, 210, 214, 219, 222, 230–31, 233

416

INDEX

Parker, Charles, 229 Parquet, Jacques Dyel du, 224 Pater, Adriaen Jansz, 38, 50, 58–59 Pauw, Michiel, 159 Pavonia, 73, 204 Peace of Nijmegen, 111, 174 Penedo, 222–23 Pequot War, 73, 259 Peregrino, Jacob, 227 Pernambuco, 8, 19–21, 24, 32, 39, 49, 51, 60–61, 73, 77–80, 114–15, 117, 121, 133, 144, 165, 168, 206, 210, 212, 219, 221, 231–33, 241, 247, 253 Peru, 1, 3, 13, 22, 28, 30–31, 38, 41, 45, 47, 53, 57, 70, 95, 149–52, 160, 260 Philip II, 14–15, 44 Philip III, 15, 17, 24–26, 28–29, 38, 217 Philip IV, 38, 46–47, 177, 222 Philip the Fair (Duke of Burgundy), 13 Picart, Johan, 244 Pilgrims, 218 Pinto, Francisco Vaz, 175 Pinto, Jorge Homem, 77 Piso, Willem, 65–66, 129 Pitre, Josse, 157 Plancius, Petrus, 37 Plante, Franciscus, 75–76 Plockhoy, Pieter Cornelisz, 99, 246 Plymouth, 23 Poland, 44, 63, 224, 227, 231 Polhemius, Johannes, 250 Pomeroon, 90, 95, 105–6, 115, 191, 225 Portobelo, 29, 38, 177, 180–81 Portugal: Africa expansion efforts, 19, 42, 67, 70; Brazil expansion efforts, 1, 3, 19, 90; cod trade, 23; Dutch military conflicts, 3–4, 6, 9, 25–28, 31–32, 39, 43–44, 49, 67–72, 77–83, 87–90, 93–94, 123–24, 254; Dutch trade, 18, 20–22; independence, 4, 9; maritime power, 3, 19; Mexico expansion efforts, 1; Peru expansion efforts, 1; salt production, 94, 155; slavery, 39, 43, 90, 93–94, 159–64, 239–40, 242; Spain, conflicts with, 69, 78, 90, 94, 175; sugar industry, 6, 20, 27, 49, 222, 255; trade monopolies, 147 Post, Adriaen Crynen, 195 Post, Frans, 65 Potosí, 3, 38, 150–52 Poudroyen, Cornelius, 245–46, 249 Preys, Juan Federico, 17 Price, John, 217 Príncipe, 24, 26

Protestantism, 17, 32, 110, 122, 157, 212, 216–17, 219, 229–30, 232, 242, 247–48, 258 Puerto Rico, 42, 45, 48–49, 61–62, 72, 111, 141, 175–76, 257 Punta de Araya, 59–60, 64–65, 72, 216 Queen Elizabeth, 25–26, 217, 260 Querido, Diogo Dias, 235 Raad, Georgius de, 246 Rabe, Jacob, 79, 258 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 55, 149 Rammekens, 26, 217 Rasière, Isaac de, 195 Rasière, Lourens de, 240 Ratelband, Klaas, 7 Recife, 8–9, 33, 40, 49–50, 66–67, 70, 86–89, 92, 132, 134–35, 141–44, 162–64, 192, 194–95, 197–98, 205–7, 213, 219, 222–24, 226, 231 Reformation, 14, 245–46, 256–58 Reformed Church, 9, 32, 50, 81, 109, 190, 208–14, 217, 219, 223, 229–30, 246, 249 Reigersberch, Maria van, 40–41 Reijnst, Gerard, 24–25 Remonstrants, 32 Rensselaer, Kiliaen van, 199, 201–3 Rensselaerswijck, 150, 199, 203, 209, 234 Reusen, Pieter van, 91 Richshoffer, Ambrosius, 121, 126 Rio de Janeiro, 72, 82, 143 Río de la Plata, 95, 150, 220 Rio Grande, 64, 79–80, 91, 152, 231 Robberts, Jan, 219–20 Rodenburg, Dirk, 17 Rodríguez, Juan, 235 Rojas, Tomás de, 177 Romney, Susanah Shaw, 7 Rotterdam, 21, 30, 52, 117, 119, 124, 166–67 Rozas, Andrés de, 176 Russia, 18, 54 Ruychaver, Jacob, 154, 186, 207 Ruyter, Michiel Adriaensz de, 93, 102–3, 107, 110, 114, 122, 125, 140, 165, 253 Ruyters, Dierick, 19–20, 220 Sá e Benavides, Correia de, 82–83 Saba, 104–5, 107–8, 191, 199, 219 salt, 18, 30, 59–60, 94, 124, 146, 154–55, 259 Salvador, 15, 20–21, 27, 39–43, 49–50, 57, 61, 67, 70, 72, 77–78, 114–15, 121, 132, 143, 221, 229, 241, 253, 256–57

INDEX Sandy Hook, 108–9 Santo Domingo, 13, 22, 29–30, 175, 235 Santo Tomé, 58–59, 95, 257 São Francisco River, 64, 67, 134, 151–52, 222 São Paulo, 152 São Tomé, 7, 24, 27, 43, 71–74, 78, 80, 93, 114–15, 129, 131–32, 134, 150, 160–61, 182, 209, 256 São Vicente, 63 Savary, Jacques, 174 Schade, Maximiliaen, 123–23 Scheldt River, 18, 261 Schmidt, Benjamin, 7 Schonenborgh, Wouter, 89, 91–92, 137, 144 Schoppe, Sigismund von, 63, 86, 89, 92, 144 Schouten, Justus, 231 Schouten, Pieter, 134 Schouten, Willem, 41 Schut, Egbert, 186 Schwartz, Stuart, 221 Scotland, 103, 117, 155, 158, 170, 217–18 Scribani, Carolus, 75 Sebastian, Pedro, 16 Sedgwick, Robert, 96–97 Sergipe, 70, 133, 150 Serrano, Isaac, 194 Setúbal, 94, 155 Seven Years’ War, 4 Seville, 15, 22, 26, 45–46, 177, 179 Sidi Ali ben Mussa, 158 Sierra Leone, 102, 130, 243 Sijbrandtz, Douwe, 13 Sijperius, Michael, 210–11 Silva, Antônio Teles da, 78 Silva, Filipa Ribeiro da, 7 silver, 6, 15, 34, 37–38, 41, 45–47, 70, 148, 150–52, 203 Simón de Santiago, 16 slavery: armed forces role, 241; asiento contracts, 175, 181–83, 233; Barbary corsairs, 158, 194, 220, 255; branding, 182; Brazil, 6, 8, 51–52, 70, 77–78, 127, 134, 157–63, 168, 205, 216, 238–42, 255, 259–60, 262; Caribbean islands, 59–60, 105–7, 110, 157, 161–64, 168–69, 172–77, 181–82, 185–88, 216, 227, 238–41, 258, 262; commodity exchanges, 161–62; Denmark, 2, 164, 186; Dutch trade, 1–2, 4–8, 67, 70, 95, 110, 158–64, 167–69, 172–77, 181–86, 238–39, 259–62; East India Company (VOC) role, 246; emancipation, 142; England, 4, 99, 105–8, 161, 164, 168–69, 239, 260, 262; escape

417

attempts, 242; fatalities, 159, 162–64, 184, 205, 242; France, 4, 164, 172–73, 186; military role, 29–30, 241; New Netherland, 159, 167, 205, 240–41, 246, 249–50, 259–62; Portugal, 27, 39, 43, 90, 93–94, 159–64, 239–40, 242; profitability, 162; provisioning, 157, 162–64, 182, 205; religious connections, 6, 59, 211–12, 240–46, 249–50; retaliation motive, 59; Spain, 164, 169, 174–76, 181–82, 186, 260; sugar production, 27, 29, 43, 77–78, 134, 157, 160–63, 168, 188, 239, 262; Suriname, 127, 173, 196, 201, 239, 262; Sweden, 2, 164; tobacco production, 59, 240; West India Company (WIC) role, 5, 112, 127, 139, 159–64, 168–69, 182–85, 238–41, 246 Slob, Jan Jansz, 148 Sloot, Willem, 142 Snellincx, Cornelis, 21 Soler, Vincent, 232, 248 Sonho, 25, 70, 161 South Sea, 57 Spain: Armada, 26–27, 38, 44, 68; Aztec empire invasion, 3; Brazil expansion efforts, 1, 9; Dutch military conflicts, 3–4, 6, 9, 11–18, 26–32, 34–37, 43–53, 59–61, 68–70, 254–55, 260–61; Dutch trade, 14–15, 18, 32, 174–83, 188; England, conflicts with, 26, 47, 62, 105; gold industry, 45; Habsburg Empire, 3, 9, 11–12, 14–16, 18, 26, 28–29, 37, 39, 45–47, 50–51, 56, 69, 155, 190, 260; indigenous labor, 3; Inquisition, 14–17, 189, 220–22, 226; Lesser Antilles expansion efforts, 9; Mexico expansion efforts, 1; naval decline, 68; Peru expansion efforts, 1, 68; Portugal, conflicts with, 69, 78, 90, 94, 175; silver industry, 6, 38, 45–47, 160; slavery, 164, 169, 174–76, 181–82, 186, 260; territorial goals, 9; tobacco trade, 176; trade restrictions, 13, 15, 37, 59, 173–75, 182–83, 261 spices, 3, 15, 20, 34 Spiegle, Arrians van, 157 Spilbergen, Joris van, 31, 38 Spranger, Quirijn, 96 St. Christophe, 90, 172–73, 230, 250 St. Christopher, 47, 62, 104, 134, 155, 165–66 St. Domingue, 111, 174 St. Eustatius/Statia, 62, 104–5, 107–8, 157–58, 166, 172, 174, 188, 191–93, 199, 218–19, 238–39, 255

418

INDEX

St. Helena, 108 St. Kitts, 165–66, 170, 172, 259 St. Martin, 60, 72, 104, 107, 110–11, 115, 155, 192, 199 St. Vincent, 49, 259 Stam, Dirck/Arent Corssen, 167 Stapleton, William, 107 Staten Island, 97, 109, 195, 218 Strait of Magellan, 11, 28 Stuart, James (Duke of York), 98, 107, 115 Stuyvesant, Petrus, 97–98, 126, 148, 186, 211, 220, 223–24, 230, 254 sugar, 2–3, 6, 8, 15, 20–21, 27, 39–40, 43, 49, 52, 77, 94, 104–6, 123, 125, 134, 138, 156–58, 160, 163, 167–69, 172–74, 203, 222, 239, 253, 255, 262 Suijskens, Cornelius, 178 Suriname, 7–8, 55, 95–96, 106, 108–9, 115, 127, 133, 149, 158, 173, 190–91, 200, 220, 225–26, 233, 255, 259, 262 Swanendael, 99 Sweden, 2, 93, 97, 100–101, 122, 154, 164, 185, 187, 208, 229–30 Sweers, Isaac, 196 Synod of Dort, 32 Tagus River, 89 Tamandaré, 93 Tartas, Isaac de Castro, 222–23 Tavora, Lourenço Pires de, 83 Taylor, Alan, 168 Teixeira, Marcos, 40 Tenerife, 49, 176, 180 Tets, Gerrit van, 187 Texel, 57, 128, 165 The Hague, 23, 45, 61, 72, 81, 85, 91, 94, 116, 223 Thirty Years’ War, 122, 211, 253 Thisso, Abel, 259 Tilly, John, 179 tobacco, 22, 45, 58–59, 75, 94, 106, 109, 139, 156, 165–67, 169–70, 172, 176, 203, 218, 240 Tobago, 43, 58–59, 90, 95–96, 105–7, 110–11, 114–15, 140, 158, 185, 191, 199, 207–8, 259 Todos los Santos de la Nueva Rioja, 13 Toledo Osorio, Don Fadrique Álvarez de, 41, 47, 49, 68, 82 Toortse der Zeevaert, 19 Torres, David Alvarez, 226 Tortola, 105 Tortuga, 59–60, 104–5, 155, 240

Treaty of Münster, 86, 90, 174–75, 177–78, 258 Treaty of Nonesuch, 26 Trinidad, 22, 29, 59, 179 Tromp, Maerten, 45, 68, 85 Tucumán, 13 Twelve Years’ Truce, 31, 34, 59, 189 Twiller, Wouter van, 197, 203 Udemans, Godefridus, 242, 245 Unare River, 60, 155 Underhill, John, 73 Union of Utrecht, 14–15, 35, 227 Usselincx, Willem, 34, 209, 215, 242 Utrecht, 14–15, 35–36, 51, 133, 136, 184, 227, 251 Uylens, Hendrik, 21 Vadder, Jerônimo de, 21 Valckenburgh, Jan van, 100–101, 236 Valckenhagen, Zacharias, 91 Valdivia, 29, 72 Varne, Abraham du, 30 Vasconcelos, Antonio de, 179–80 Veere, 16, 95, 106 Vega, Lope de, 41, 221 Veken, Johan van der, 21–22 Venezuela, 22, 29, 59–61, 65, 94, 180, 182 Veracruz, 45, 48, 176 Veron, Andries, 243 Vespucci, Amerigo, 55 Vieira, Antônio de, 250 Vieira, Father Antônio, 77 Vieira, João Fernandes, 78, 87 Vinman, Willem, 211 Virginia, 23, 57, 97, 99, 159, 167, 170, 183, 188, 190, 261–62 Visscher, Abraham de, 175 Vitteus, Frederick, 210 Vlissingen, 16, 26–27, 53, 59, 95, 110, 159, 172, 174, 217 Voetius, Gisbertus, 245 Vries, David Pietersz de, 149 Vucht, Hans van der, 13 Waerdenburg, Diederick van, 33, 256 Wagner, Zacharias, 198 Walbeeck, Johannes van, 60 wampum, 2, 73 Wassenaer, Nicolaes van, 53–54, 202 West India Company (WIC): Brazil expansion efforts, 5, 8–9, 33, 39–43, 49–53, 72, 84, 183–84; communication

INDEX role, 62–63, 82–83; funding, 6, 34, 36, 39, 48, 51–52, 57, 84–85, 94, 112, 137–38, 146, 183–84, 252; gold seizures, 34, 45; Grand Design, 39–43, 45; Heren XIX, 35–36, 47, 52–53, 58, 60, 65, 69–70, 84, 94, 118, 124, 131, 138, 153, 160, 198, 209–10, 239, 247; monopolies, 5, 34–35, 84, 100–101, 133, 153–54, 168, 183–89, 199–200; New Netherland expansion efforts, 58; organizational structure, 7, 34–36, 84–85, 112, 138; origins, 32, 34, 84; Portugal, conflicts with, 43–44, 146; privateering, 43–46, 87–88, 97, 159–60, 171; profitability, 8, 34, 36, 39, 47–48, 52, 87–88, 112, 136– 38, 154, 183–84, 253–54; propaganda, 36, 83–84; provisioning, 52–53, 87, 116–17, 132–37, 141–45, 258; salt trade, 155; scholarly research, 7; secours missions, 85–87, 114, 116, 120, 135–37; silver seizures, 6, 34, 45–47, 150; slave trade, 5, 112, 127, 139, 159–64, 168–69, 182–85, 238–41, 246; soldier demographics, 121– 27; soldier enlistments, 113–14, 116–19, 121, 136; Spain, conflicts with, 36–37, 43–50, 146; sugar seizures, 6, 39–40, 43,

419

159; wages, 91–92, 113, 117, 119–20, 123, 125–26, 136, 138–39, 142–45 whaling, 23, 58, 93, 146, 154–55 Willekens, Jacob, 40–42, 114, 132 Willekens, Thieleman, 186 Willemsz, Evert, 7 William of Orange, 14, 16, 25, 65 Wilree, Dick, 236 Wilree, Dirck, 197 Winthrop Jr., John, 98 With, Gijsbert de, 92 With, Witte de, 68, 85–86, 88, 92, 114, 116–20, 126, 135–36, 144 Witt, Johan de, 98, 102, 112, 142 Witte Hond, 20 Witz, Harmannus, 94 Yllán, João de, 226 York, Duke of, 98, 107, 115 Zandvliet, Kees, 7 Zeeland, 14–15, 18, 22, 83, 86–88, 92–93, 95, 102, 106, 108, 112, 124, 133, 136, 167, 184, 187, 199, 202–3, 217, 225, 233 Zoutte, Nicolaes de, 195 Zuylen, Filips van, 42