There was to be nothing sensational however about the expansion of the Dutch economy
of the
United Provinces, which happened slowly but steadily. It was, in the early stages at any rate,
deliberately discreet, preferring peaceful methods to compulsion.
The almost-centenarian Portuguese empire was in no fit state to bar the way to the
newcomers. As
for the merchants of the United Provinces, they were prepared to communicate with the enemy
himself if it would assure their ships a safe passage, witness one Noel Caron, an agent in England
for the Estados rebeldes, who privately fitted a ship for the
East Indies, putting all his wealth, his
caudal, into the venture, and in order to do so carried on a correspondence with a Spanish agent
of
his acquaintance in Calais.
Was it the desire to avoid trouble that led Dutch captains to sail directly to the
East Indies? From
the Cape of Good Hope, there was a choice of routes: one could take the 'inner' route, along the
coast of Mozambique, which caught the northern monsoon and went by India; or the 'outer' or
rather high seas route, which went by the east coast of Madagascar, the Mascarene islands, then
took the channel through the hundred or so Maldive islands before making straight for Sumatra and
the Sunda Strait in order to reach Bantam, the chief port of Java.
This route used not the monsoons but the trade winds; it was the itinerary chosen
by Cornelis
Houtman who arrived in Bantam on 2.2 June 1596, after a long crossing on the open sea.
Was the choice of this route dictated by the desire to avoid India, where the Portuguese
presence
was more firmly established than elsewhere? Or, as is perfectly possible, did it correspond to a
deliberate decision from the start in favour of the East Indies and fine spices? It was the route
taken, incidentally, by Arab navigators making for Sumatra and also anxious to avoid the
Portuguese.
It is at any rate quite clear that Dutch merchants at first nursed the hope that their
expeditions
might be regarded as purely commercial operations. In June 1595, Cornelis Houtman had reached
the equator in the Atlantic Ocean when he met two enormous Portuguese carracks on their way to
Goa: the meeting was a peaceful one, during which 'Portuguese conserves' were exchanged for
'cheese and hams', and the ships parted company only after 'saluting one another civilly with a
cannon-shot apiece'.180 Jacob Cornelis Van Neck181
protested loudly (though how sincerely we do
not know) when he returned to Holland in April 1599, at the rumours spread about Amsterdam by
Jews of Portuguese origin, according to which his rich and profitable cargo (400% profits) had been
extorted by force and fraud. There was not a shred of truth in this, he declared, for he had followed
the instructions of his directors and taken care not to 'rob anyone of [his] property, but to trade
uprightly with all foreign nations'.
Nevertheless on the voyage of Etienne Van der Hagen, 1599-1601, the Portuguese fort
of Amboyna
was subjected to a regular attack, although to no purpose.
The creation on 2.0 March 1602., on the initiative of the States-General, the Grand
Pensionary
Barneveldt and Maurice of Nassau, of a chartered East India Company, the Vereenigde
Oost-
Indische Compagnie(V.O.C.) which brought together under a single body the previous companies
(voorkompagnien) and which was to conduct itself like an independent power, a state within a
state
(staat-builen-de-staat), would change everything. It meant the end of undisciplined voyages:
between 1598 and 1600s, 65 ships had been sent in 14 fleets. From now on there would be a
single policy, a single direction and a single control of Asian affairs: that of the Company, an
empire in itself, and one given to continuous expansion.
However, the power of good conscience was such that, even in 1608, merchants who had
participated in voyages to the East Indies from the start, were still objecting to any violence,
protesting that their ships had only been equipped to handle honest trade, not to build forts or to
capture Portuguese carracks. They still shared the illusion at this time - and a
fortiori after the
signing in Antwerp on 9 April 1609 of the Twelve Years' Truce which suspended hostilities between
the United Provinces and the Catholic king - that they could calmly collect their share in the Asian
bonanza, particularly since the peace treaty said nothing about areas south of the equator.
The south Atlantic and the Indian Ocean were virtually free zones. In February 1610,
a Dutch vessel
bound for the East Indies put in to Lisbon, and asked the viceroy for the Catholic king's consent
that the truce be announced and applied in the Far East, an indication incidentally that fighting was
still going on there. The viceroy sent to Madrid for instructions, which took so long to come that the
Dutch vessel, having orders to wait only twenty days, left Lisbon without the desired response. This
is only a single incident. Does it prove that the Dutch wanted peace, or merely that they were
prudent?
Their eastward expansion
meantime was proceeding with brio. In 1600 a Dutch ship reached Kyushu, the
southernmost island of the Japanese archipelago;187 in 1601, 1604 and 1607, the Dutch attempted
to trade
directly with Canton, by-passing the Portuguese station at Macao;188by 1603 they were landing
in
Ceylon;189 in 1604, they launched an unsuccessful attack on Malacca;190 in 1605,
they captured the
Portuguese fortress at Amboyna in the Moluccas which thus became the first solid base of the Indies
Company;191 in 1610, they were harassing Spanish ships in the Malacca straits, and captured
Ternate.192
From now on, in spite
of the truce, conquest was pursued, not without difficulty. The Company had indeed
to face not only the Portuguese and the Spanish (the latter, based in Manila and active in the Moluccas,
hung on to Tidore until i663)193 but also the English, who without having any precise plan
of action, tended
to appear here and there; and last but not least, the active
