At the start of 1610, the Staaten-General faced its first post-war crisis; exactly what form of government should oversee the United Provinces? Many nobles and the Stadtholder opted for the more traditional approach, declaring that no nation should exist without a prince at its head. In the ten southern Provinces this was the prevalent idea. It was not without resistance, however. Detractors of the Monarchists stated that they just fought a forty-one year long war to remove a tyrant and should not be in any hurry to install a new one. It was obvious that any new king would not be divinely anointed. He would be answerable to and elected by the Staaten-General and the Provinces.
As with disputes of the previous century, the argument was drawn along geographic lines.
The north favored decentralization and argued that this confederation of Provinces did not need a singular head, that the Staaten-General could rule. Southern members of the Staaten-General argued that such a loose confederation was itself a threat to Netherlander independence. In one proposal, the union would be so loose that neighboring Provinces were not even required to lend aid to any Province suffering invasion by foreign power. In effect, it would make the United Provinces as weak and divided as the Holy Roman Empire.
Northern members remained wary of granting too much power to any central authority. Spain stripping the Provinces of their traditional rights remained fresh in the memories of the older gentlemen gathered in the Hague. With the argument going around in circles it was decided to put the matter to a general vote. Seven Provinces were solid Republican while seven set firmly in the Monarchist camp. Both Limbourg and Brabant could be brought to vote in favor of monarch but never for a foreign king. If one would assume the as-yet-built throne, then the said individual would have to be as Netherlander as every man in the Staaten-General.
All members of the Staaten-General knew a decision must be made quickly. With Spain out of the Netherlands, there was great concern that the Netherlands would splinter, decay into civil war without an external threat and be reduced to individual states as before the Burgundian inheritance. What they need was an internal symbol to fill the role, to bing them together. The Duke of Brabant stood before the Staaten-General at the height of the crisis and declared the Provinces needed the stability only a king could bring. Who would be this king, his fellow nobles asked; would he place himself as a candidate? If any titular head of a Province sought a crown, then others would follow for fear of what one of their rank would do as king. The duke responded; “Not I. There is only one man of who I can think that all Provinces would stand behind.”
The classic definition of a compromise; a decision that nobody really likes yet everyone can live with it, though Maurice of Orange did not fall fully into the category. He had his supporters within the Staaten-General as well as opponents. In fact, the Duke of Brabant was one such opponent. Why would the duke nominate a man for the crown that he viewed as a rival? Maurice was popular among all the people, noble and common, wealthy and destitute. He was a man that each of the Provinces could trust to not grasp for more power. He was the one man who led the Netherlanders to victory over their tyrannical oppressors.
Part of the reason his opponents agreed to crown him king was because Maurice was not exactly enthusiastic about the crown. His apparent lack of ambition sat well with Provinces looking to preserve their rights. Had his father lived, the assembly would without a doubt have demanded William take the crown. Since he was twenty-six years dead, the heir to his land, titles and legacy was the favored choice. Maurice would be king but in modern terms he would be a constitutional monarch, answerable before the Staaten-General for his actions. He would not be the autocrat that reigned across Europe and would possess even less power than King James of Great Britain.
Furthermore, a price was paid for the Netherlander crown; the stewardship of various Provinces and territories, such as over Holland and Zeeland, that Maurice inherited from his father were formally relinquished by the House of Oranje. After the Oath of Abjuration, where the King of Spain was stripped of the Netherlander titles he gained from the Burgundian Inheritance, many of the Stadtholder grabbed the actual titles, casting aside stewardship for direct rulership. The Staaten-General refused to have a king who was also count and duke of the majority of Provinces, thus stripping them of their autonomy.
Like his father, Maurice did resist the attempt to crown him king, partly for modesty’s sake and partly because holding together an army of Netherlanders with Spain breathing down their necks was challenge enough. The thought of holding seventeen separate Provinces together, each with their own opinions and agendas, struck him as a nearly impossible task. Throughout the year 1610, the Netherlands went without a king and began to grow divided. Hollanders wondered why they should listen to Luxembourgers. Zeelanders refused to speak with the Flemish. And as always, the Calvinists were lighting the proverbial fire under the chairs of all who were not members of the Netherlander Reformed Church.
Seeing disunity ripe throughout the Provinces, Maurice relented and accepted the crown. While the United Provinces would never have an established church the duty of crowning the king was offered to the Bishop of Liege. The offer was more than an attempt at reconciliation with Liege’s spiritual head. By crowning the new king, the bishop would grant Maurice and his successors legitimacy in the eyes of foreign princes. It was a move of which Catholic Netherlanders approved, Lutherans accepted and Calvinists protested.
When asked by what name shall he be known, Maurice seriously contemplated using his father’s name. Historians have given many reason as to why he rejected the name William I, many of which are unnecessarily complicate. In Maurice’s own words, he did not feel that he could live up to that name, despite finishing the war his father waged. Instead he decided to use his birth name as his regal name. Once a crown was placed atop his head, Maurice I, King of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, sought a city to place his throne while the Staaten-General sought a place from where they could govern.
More debate raged about where the Staaten-General should permanently convene. Naturally, each Province decided that it was the best location from where to manage the union’s affairs. As with most issues, the Staaten-General failed to reach any consensus, especially with all seventeen delegations trying to convince the rest that their Province was most fit for a capital. A few members called for a rotational schedule, each year the assembly would meet in a different Provinces. There were only two problems; which Province would be first and who exactly would be covering the expenses accumulated by moving the capital every year?
As his first act as king, Maurice I was asked to decide where the assembly should meet. After all, he was now king and would preside over the Staaten-General, and how could he be expected to lead a nation if he could not decide where he should do the leading? Amsterdam was a logical choice, given its increasing importance as a center of trade. Maurice struck the idea down almost immediately, not wanting to give the city too much power. Nor did he wish to grant the Count of Holland more power than he was due.
Throughout 1611, he sent commissions to various cities across the Provinces. They would scout the city, determining its suitability for what would undoubtedly be a growing civil service. Several cities were on his first list and Maurice systematically crossed each off his list. In the end, he returned to a familiar locale, setting up his royal court in his family’s manor in Delft. The Staaten-General did not follow him to his new home. They finally opted to move all the institutions of the union government to the Hague. The Hague was an agreeable location to many concerned as it was a place the Staaten-General convened on many occasions dating back to 1584. The long quest for a capital brought them full circle.
In 1612, the Staaten-General itself received what could only be described as a major overhaul of its structure. Established during the 15th Century, the assembly was originally a tricameral establishment. Following the Pacification of Ghent, the clergy all but lost it direct political power, though despite this its chamber technically existed for the duration of the Forty Years War. In the years that it was in practice, the clergy could and did combine with the nobility to outvote the Third Chamber, despite the fact the other two chambers represented less than one percent of the population.
On a local level, many of the United Provinces possessed republican traits. In various Provinces, the people took it upon themselves to elect mayors, militias elected commanders and as supporters of republicanism never tire of saying, even Maurice was elected king by his peers. The idea that the early United Provinces was a democracy in the modern sense is a bit skewed. During the 17th Century, voter eligibility was determined by the value of their property. Said qualifications allowed for five percent of the male population to obtain the franchise.
Upon formally abolishing the Second Estate, the Staaten-General was reorganized into the more familiar two Chambers. The First Chamber consisted of the titular lords of the realms as well as remaining Stadtholder. Representing the interests of the Provinces, the First Chamber held the power of budgeting, setting tariffs, ratifying treaties and declaring war. The Second Chamber would consist of Electorates who would serve for five year terms and represent the people of the Provinces and cities, though bills from the Second Chamber were subject to review by the First Chamber. The Second Chamber would remain far weaker than the First until the modern Constitution was drafted and ratified two centuries later.
The first election for the Second Chamber took place in April 1613. Elections have greatly evolved over the past four centuries. Unlike today’s orderly and fair elections, early elections in the United Provinces ranged from ripe with corruption and bribery to drunken brawls. While the average Netherlander lacked the property qualification to vote, it did not stop them from forming strong opinions as to how the union should run or participating in lively debates with fists or clubs.
The large cities, such as Amsterdam, Utrecht and Groningen, fell into the hands of wealthy merchants and large shareholders of overseas trading companies. Campaigning in the early days was a rather straightforward affair and seldom involved candidates explaining why they were the best choice. With so few Netherlanders enfranchised campaigns were inexpensive as well. Instead of investing millions of guilders on campaign ads as in the 21st Century, candidates entered the pubs frequented by voters and bought the next round.
Most of the time the merchants won by default. The average Netherlander looked up to the merchants as living symbols of success. The wealthy merchant was considered the pinnacle of mercantile society, a tier that all men should strive to reach. Rotterdam was a bit of an exemption to the merchant stranglehold over large cities. Frederick van Haarlem was a well-respected man and a natural born lead who served with Maurice during the campaign in the southern Provinces. He also lacked any experience in commerce though as a lawyer he did work merchants in court.
Not every city was home to a clear cut leader. Amsterdam was renown for some of the most violent election campaigning in Netherlander history. Two of the largest companies of the 17th Century were headquartered in the city; the United East India Company and the South Atlantic Company. Both were formed during the twilight years of the Netherlands’ struggle for freedom in order to manage both far flung commerce and administering newly acquired colonies.
In most elections during the century, both companies expended large amounts of capital in order to purchase votes. In the beginning of the United Provinces’ history this process was not as expensive as it would be if attempted in a time of universal suffrage. Candidates employed by either company competed in pubs, markets and even churches for the attention of the voters. Supporters flocked to their favorites and the elections grew so divisive that many lifelong friendships were torn asunder by partisan disputes.
One of the bloodiest elections was that of 1628. By that point, supporters of the VOC and South Atlantic Company were so divided that they not longer drank at the same pubs. On the night of February 29, the two crowds spilled out into the street at the same time, their pubs being across the street from each other. What started out as an exchange of drunken taunts and insults soon devolved into a brawl, one that turned bloody after someone in the South Atlantic camp fired into the crowd.
More than a few of the men were armed as the Amsterdam waterfront was far from the safest neighborhood to roam at night, prone to mugging, theft and occasional impressment. After the initial exchange, three of the East India men lay dead and four more wounded. Mercy was not a word the South Atlantic supporters held in their vocabulary that night as they descended upon the wounded with fist and foot. After beating the opposition, South Atlantic men set fir to the East India pub. The confrontation soon turned into a riot with non-voters entered the fray, looting shops already damaged by both sides. Some of the rioters even attempted to board VOC ships, threatening their cargo. VOC marines, many veterans of the Forty Years War, were ordered to repel the boarders.
The riot died down by morning, bringing a lull to the chaos. By the night of March 1, enough alcohol entered the system as to threaten a reigniting of the riot. The Count of Holland called out the Hollander militia to put down any attempt of riot. Of all the issues that threatened to divide the United Provinces; religion, class and Provincial pride, nobody ever expected the election of two companies’ candidates to come close to sparking a civil war. Count Johann established a constabulary to patrol the streets of Amsterdam during the election with the power to break up any night time meeting of more than three men. The new police force was, in theory, answerable only to the count and the law technically remains on the books to this day, though a modern police force rendered it redundant.
One of the few roles a union government could fulfill that all Provinces could agree upon was to set a universal standard for weights, measurement and currency. At its earliest inception, the guilder was divided into twenty stuiver which divided into eight duit in turn divided into sixteen penning. The complex arrangement of fractions continues to give accountants headaches long after its abandonment. In its day it was a clumsy, unwieldy system, one Maurice sought to change.
Maurice proposed a decimalization of the currency well over a century before the birth of the metric system. Instead of twenty, eight and sixteen, the new currency should be divided into ten decs, one hundred cens and one thousand mils. The new terms did not last as Netherlanders continued to use the old terms in place of the strange sounding decimalization, though they would keep the division by powers of ten. As this was an issue that would effect all people and Provinces it required a vote in both chambers.
As such both chambers clashed over who had ultimate control over currency. The First Chamber insisted that a common currency, vital for commerce, was the domain of the Provinces. It was not an unreasonable demand as it was clearly within the First Chamber’s domain. Nonetheless, the Second Chamber insisted that it was the people who would have to endure any change in denomination and change in value of the coinage they currently possessed. Given the influence that financial institutions held over the electors, the fight lasted longer than anyone expected, bot for control over the currency and whether or not to approve Maurice’s plan.
The nobility passed the law swiftly through the First Chamber with only a few opposing. As each Province voted as a block, the overall vote was unanimous. In the Second Chamber, the Act of the Standardization of the Guilder struck a roadblock. The banks and companies that owned many members of the elected government resisted what they deemed and unnecessary change to a system the functioned just fine. Changing from traditional denominations into this radical decimal system would take years and cost involved parties a fortune. The banks would suffer the most. They already minted coins of carefully measured quantities of precious metal. To have a Stuiver all of a sudden have twice its original worth made no sense; neither did the sharp drop in the value of the Penning.
By April 1613, the king’s patience grew thin and he forced the issue before the Second Chamber. He called for a vote where a simple majority would pass the bill. He pleaded for the representatives to vote yes, if for no other reason than a future standardization would cost far more than one now. Three days passed in which each representative took the floor and gave his reason why his colleagues should vote yes or no. A few, those openly opposed to the measure, spoke excessively against it, taking up as much time as their voices would allow. In the end the yes vote won by fifteen votes , though decades would pass before the new standard completely phased out the old.
For being the first monarch of a new nation, very little is attributed to Maurice I once he wore the crown. His second act was one viewed as far more tyrannical than meddling in fiscal affairs. He sought to create a union army. When he announced his intentions to strengthen the Netherlanders, he was met with only scattered applause. Plans for fortifying the southern Provinces against potential invasions by France were well received, particularly by Flanders, Namur and Luxembourg. France, being the only unified neighbor, was also viewed as the greatest threat. One need not look any further than periodic claims of the Rhine as their natural border to see their true intent.
Creating a standing army was quite different than building fortresses. Building an army answerable only to the union government was viewed by the Provinces as an attempt to grab more power by the king. Provinces were quite content to retain their own armies, viewing them as adequate protection. After all, they defeated the Spanish so it was assumed they could handle any external threat. From 1613 until his death, Maurice struggled with the Staaten-General for the establishment of this necessary evil. To wait for all of the Provinces to muster their forces might see a French army camped on the Rhine before the United Provinces could react. The Staaten-General asked what exactly this standing army would be doing in the meantime. While the United Provinces were bordered by potentially hostile neighbors it did not mean the United Provinces would always be at war.
In the end, Maurice’s successors settled for a compromise. The Provinces would retain their own defensive measures while the king would be bale to command a relatively small professional army. While it would be powerful enough to delay a French invasion long enough for the Provincial militias to assemble, it would not be so strong as that several Provinces together could not defeat it. This arrangement would remain in place for decades, weathering even the disastrous First Anglo-Netherlander War.
Maurice fought to forge the new nation up until his death, a struggle he considered as challenging as defeating Spain. On April 23, 1625, the United Provinces lost their first king. Maurice’s death was sudden and shocking; when on a horse rise early in the morning, his horse was spooked and threw him to the ground, breaking his neck. For his day, Maurice lived a long life and for his times it was indeed a very eventful one. Yet his death threw the United Provinces into somewhat of a constitutional crisis. Who would succeed Maurice to the throne?
Maurice had two children, both to mistresses and thus both were illegitimate. By law, only an offspring born to a wife was permitted to inherit their father’s holdings. Maurice had no such heir, at least through his children. Some in the Staaten-General called again for the Provinces to become an elected monarchy. The obvious question to the proposal was who would be nominated and by whom? After the outcome of various pieces of legislation from the Second Chamber, none of the members of the First Chamber wanted a king who was owned by the Bank of Amsterdam or VOC.
The search for an heir did not last long. The Staaten-General approached one of Maurice’s still living half-brothers, Frederick Henry van Oranje. Born to the fourth wife of William the Silent about six months before his assassination, the younger Prince of Orange spent much of his life as Maurice’s protégée. Trained in arms by his older brother, Frederick Henry proved himself nearly as good a general as his brother, commanding elements of the army during the Dunkirk Campaign and again at Brussel and Mons.
While serving as a minister in the First Chamber, he proved himself a superior politician and able statesman. Best of all, Frederick Henry was married, to Amalia of Solms-Braunfels, just months before his brother’s death. He would provide what Maurice could not, a legitimate heir to the throne and continuation of a royal dynasty to this date. After Maurice was entombed at the family’s mausoleum in Delft, Frederick Henry was elected king and crowned Frederick I.
One of Frederick’s earliest acts happens to be the one with the longest ranging consequences. Centuries before, Hollanders, Zeelanders and various Netherlander cities battled against great rivers and swamps for arable land. Over the course of decades, marshes were drained, rivers dammed and the might North Sea held back. By the time of Frederick I, all the land above the sea was dry and utilized. Frederick wanted more.
The County of Holland decided to go farther than simply holding the sea back. They would push the North Sea outwards. In the first act of land reclamation, less than a square kilometer of the sea was blocked off by sea walls and dikes, then systematically drained. Their attempt to claim more living space, while an impressive technical feat, cost years’ worth of effort and funding. The Netherlands would grow over the centuries, one of the few countries to literally expand its boundaries.
It was not without its share of problems, to say the least. As with many problems these were political in nature, revolving around landlocked Provinces questioning why they should fund the expansion of their neighbors. The question of funding, always a stumbling block for the Staaten-General, forced Holland and Zeeland to raise their own capital. Other Provinces were in no way obligated to send resources to their neighbors.
At the same time as Holland and Zeeland were expending so much effort to capture and reclaim small pieces of land from the sea, the rest of the Netherlander people began to spread out across the globe. Colonies taken from the defunct Portuguese Empire were immediately exploited by enterprising Netherlanders. Sugar from the New World, spices from the Old and an abundance of cash and food crops from North and South American soon began to flow into Amsterdam and other port cities.
Not all commerce that flowed through the sea lanes was so beneficial. With the acquisition of Brazil and Angola, the blossoming Netherlander Empire inherited one of humanity’s greatest banes; the trade in slaves. During the 17th Century, Amsterdam held the dishonor of being the largest homeport of slavery in all of Europe. More slaver ships were registered in the city than its next two competitors combined and more were registered in the United Provinces than any other European nation. The same Netherlander people who fought forty-one years to secure their own liberty were quick to overlook the subjugated populations in other lands.
In 1607, following the conquest of Brazil, merchants in Amsterdam formed the South Atlantic Company. The initial goal of this company was to ship massive amounts of the white gold known as sugar into Netherlander ports. In the following year, the Staaten-General granted the South Atlantic Company a twenty year monopoly on all trade to Brazil as well as the responsibility of administering the captured Portuguese possession of Angola.
An ocean apart, the two colonies did share a common thread. Though the development of Angola did not switch to full gear until well into the 19th Century, its people were already victim to profit-seeking companies. The largest and most lucrative crop in Brazil at the time required an enormous amount of manpower to cultivate, harvest and especially to process. Indentured servants from the Provinces, many refugees of the Forty Years War, as well as other parts of Europe, served well on the farms and plantations of New Amsterdam. They did not fare so well to harsh labor in the tropical climate of Brazil. Too many would-be colonists from northern Europe fell victim to tropical disease.
The logic of the era dictated that the only people who could survive the jungle climes were men of the jungle. Most of the natives of coastal Brazil were long since dead, their own populations devastated by European diseases. Just as European had little defense against Yellow Fever, the Indians had even less to Small Pox. In events that repeated themselves across the New World, half the native population would perish during each outbreak.
Portuguese plantations solved the problem by importing labor from the Portuguese possessions in Africa. After the Treaty of Calais, most of the trading posts north of the equator in western Africa fell into the hands of the English, which were used to supply their own American colonies with slaves. With the Netherlanders in control of Angola, the South Atlantic Company was more than happy to import laborers for plantations and in turn to transport sugar, as well as tobacco, coffee, cotton and cocoa, back to Europe. While it is true the Portuguese started the slave trade to Brazil, it was the Netherlanders who expanded it rapidly throughout the 17th Century, resulting in 43% of Brazil’s 21st Century population tracing some of its ancestry back to Africa.
The life of a Brazilian slave began in Africa. Like Romans, Greeks and other ancient peoples, the nations of Angola waged war upon each other and took captives as slaves. After conquest and enslavement, the victors would march their captives to the coast. Most ended up in holding pens around the city of Luanda, which served as the South Atlantic Company’s Angolan hub. For untold hundreds of thousands of men and women, it was the proverbial first day of the rest of their lives.
In exchange for their haul, the slavers would receive fabrics, iron tools, weapons and luxuries found nowhere in southern Africa during the 17th Century. In today’s world it is simply unfathomable to trade a fellow human being for a simple iron hatchet yet the slave trade in Africa did run on barter. For the slaves, they faced two potential fates; the brutal and short life on a sugar plantation or the relatively benign life as a slave elsewhere. The term benign might at first appear misleading and will be explained shortly.
The economics of sugar warped a great deal of what we might consider common sense. To start with, it was more profitable for the planters to import food for their slaves, such as salted fish from the North Atlantic, than to set aside a part of prime sugar land for the production of food. It was also more economical to purchase new slaves than to care for sick or wounded, and during sugar harvest many were wounded. A well known image of sugar harvest was one of overseers carrying hatchets during the forty-eight and some times seventy-two hour work sessions during the processing of cane into sugar granules. This was not to chop cane but rather to administer quick amputations should a slave’s hand get caught in the grinders.
Not all slaves worked hard and died young. A slave on a tobacco plantation, for example, did not suffer the same economics. Their conditions were so much better, again relatively speaking, that the planters actually saw their slave populations expand through natural population increase. This may or may not have been a blessing to those who endured it; to their owners, these slaves soon became their most valuable commodity.
The Netherlander populace remained blind to this suffering throughout the century. Before the Enlightenment it was doubtful that many of them would even care about the suffering across the ocean. As long as their homes were filled with previous unknown luxuries from the New World and Far East and their lives remained peaceful and prosperous, they were content with the status quo. As long as the people remained content, the Second Chamber felt little pressure for change.
A more pressing matter to the Staaten-General was what to do with the thousands of Portuguese colonists who already made their homes in Brazil. For the most part, the European population consisted of men who intermarried either with the native population or fathered children by their slaves. It was a similar arrangement to the Spanish colonies, albeit not built on top of already existing civilizations. The Portuguese did not venture to Brazil to start over or raise families. They made the journey to grow rich and return to Portugal to live in luxury. Some of the largest plantation owners did not even live in Brazil. Instead they remained in Portugal and gave the handling of their vast estates to New World agents, agents that often found themselves owners of the very same land once Brazil became a Netherlander possession.
The question of how to deal with a hostile population was on the top of the Governor-General’s list of concerns. This concern would turn out to be a short-lived one. In 1610, out of a population of around one hundred thousand, thirty thousand were classified as white. Between 1610 and 1660, fifty thousand additional Europeans immigrated to Brazil, most of these newcomers Netherlanders with the second highest percentage being German. They arrived not only to grow rich but also to establish themselves in a land that knew no war. They came to open shops, start farms and they brought with them some of the comforts of home, ranging from dairy cattle to tulips.
Northern Brazil had the strongest concentration of Portuguese. The cities of Recife and Pernambuco attracted displaced Netherlanders from the Catholic Provinces as well as English Catholics fleeing the mess known as 17th Century Britain. The city of Natal was the exception. Lutherans from Holland and Friesland migrated to the city in largest enough numbers as to triple its population by 1650 and relegate the Portuguese to a distinct minority.
Not being content to live with either Lutherans or Catholics, the Calvinists of the Netherlands founded the city of Mauristaat in 1615, inland from the mouth of the Parnaiba River. The religiously dissatisfied Netherlanders eventually found their way to Mauristaat, as did a number of Germans fleeing religious warfare plaguing their lands during the 17th Century. Religious refugees from France, the Protestant Huguenots opted for settling along the southern coast of Brazil, inundating Portuguese already living around Guanabana Bay.
King Frederick expressed some concern to the number of foreigners settling in the area, especially since these people originated in lands hostile to the United Provinces. Whether his chief concern was that they might try to secede from Brazil or turn generations-old animosities against each other remains unclear to this date. The Huguenots went to great lengths to convince both king and Staaten-General of their loyalty to the Netherlands, going as far as to rename São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro in honor of their new king, Fredericksbourg.
Much further north in 1609, Henry Hudson set sail for the New World under contract of the VOC in search of a western passage to the Indies. Whichever nation discovered the Northwest Passage would gain a decisive advantage in the spice trade, or so was believed at the time. Sailing the Halve Maen (Half-Moon) past Manhattan Island, what Hudson discovered was not a short cut across a continent but rather a highway by which the various native tribes traded along with a wealth of fur. After determining it was truly a river, Hudson named it in honor of the hero of the Forty Years War, the Mauritius River.
Upon returning to Amsterdam, Hudson brought new of not a passage, rather of a bountiful land rich in soil and in furs. Some forward thinking members of the Staaten-General wanted to use this land for food production, to break the Netherlands’ reliance on imported grain. That was their plan when establishing a charter for the New Netherlands. However, at the time beaver pelts were prized in Europe since the fur could be felted to produce waterproof coats and hats. It was the rush for fur that sent Netherlanders to North America in search of wealth yet it would ultimately be the fertile land itself that would see them settle the land once the fur trade depleted the beaver population.
In the following 1611 to 1614 expedition, Hudson surveyed and charted much of the land between the 38th and 45th Parallel. The expedition entitled the charters of the New Netherlands Company to a five year monopoly as per the rules set down by the Staaten-General, which would be renewed every five years for over a century. The NNC’s first task was the laying down of trading posts along the Mauritius for the purpose of trading the natives for fur, the furthest inland of these being Fort Orange.
Fort Amsterdam, established in 1615, quickly grew from its original purpose into the city of New Amsterdam which according to legend the Netherlanders purchased the island of Manhattan from the natives for sixty guilders’ worth of beads. At the mouth of the Mauritius sat a nominally ice-free harbor throughout the year, making it the obvious nexus of trade between territories further inland and those across the ocean. Merchants by the hundreds, all of them company employees, flocked to the city in its first decade of existence.
They were not along. As well as hordes of trappers, the NNC opened up the island to settlers from back home. The first families, many of which were actually refugees escaping Germany, arrived at New Amsterdam in 1624. A second wave followed shortly after, bringing the population up to six hundred twenty-seven by 1630. These families had little interest in the fur trade. They simply wished to start over and rebuild their lives. Their immigration established a number of farms on the island, with wheat and tobacco being the largest crops.
New Amsterdam approached closely the Staaten-General’s expectation in food production. While a great deal of land was eventually given over to the cultivation of tobacco, the NNC succeeded in producing large quantities of foodstuff for export back to the United Provinces. The top three food crops were wheat, which was turning into whiskey, apples, which was turned into brandy and native corn which was as often used as livestock fodder than human consumption.
Of course all three were outstripped by tobacco. The NNC imposed a limit of 25% of land use on that valuable cash crop. Even with difficulty in enforcing the limit New Amsterdam and other settlements began to offset the dependence on northern European grain by 1650, though Netherlander colonies would not completely eliminate the trade in Baltic grain until the 18th Century.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
As with Brazil, New Amsterdam attracted a number of religious exiles. One such group scheduled to make the crossing were separatists from the Church of England. However, due to navigation errors and other events, these separatists failed to make landfall at New Amsterdam. Instead they landed in the area of Massachusetts Bay, establishing a separate Plymouth colony. Another group of refugees came from across Europe to the United Provinces even before Netherlander independence. The religious toleration of the United Provinces were a welcome turn of fortune for tens of thousands of Jews. In 1637, one hundred seven Jews arrived in New Amsterdam with NNC passports, establishing the first Jewish community in the Americas at Haarlem.
By 1626, the colonists elected their first governor, Peter Minuit. During the building of New Amsterdam, the Mohawk-Mohican War further north forced many settlers and traders trying to make their living in the Mauritius Valley to flee to the more defensible city of New Amsterdam. With the threat of Indian attack looming over the horizon, New Amsterdammers constructed a stone wall across the breadth of their island. Unfortunately its value was short-lived since the planner failed to take into account a growing population. By 1640, settlers lived on both sides of the wall.
Growth of the colony overall was not contained just to the city. Thanks to heavy immigration from German lands, by the time of the First Anglo-Netherlander War, New Amsterdam spread to encompass the lands between the Connecticut and Susquehanna River, bringing the border into contact with the English colonies of Virginia and Plymouth. The search of furs as the beaver population crashed brought a northern expansion to the borders of the Iroquois Confederacy and an eventual westward expansion to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River.
On the opposite side of the world, the first of the VOC ships arrived in Ceylon during the last years of the Forty Years War. Upon arrival they discovered the Kandyan kings of Ceylon under the heels of the Portuguese. Portuguese advisors were strategically placed in Kandy’s royal court while Kandyan nobles were given an education by Portuguese Jesuits. When VOC ships full of mercenaries and businessmen arrived in Kandy and proposed and alliance against the Portuguese to King Rajasighe, what else could the King of Kandy do but agree.
With the decimation of the Portuguese Navy, Portuguese forces on the island of Ceylon were hard pressed to resist the Netherlanders and their native allies. Even before the Treaty of Calais was signed the Portuguese found themselves ejected from the island. A treaty signed between the VOC and Kandy granted a trading monopoly to the company. To preserve this agreement, the VOC thwarted any attempts by European missionaries to establish themselves on the island, even those from the Netherlands. Though the United Provinces lacked any state religion it did not mean private citizens abandoned their faith or a desire to spread the gospel. They were mostly redirected in their desire to the New World, a land that European and Asian alike considered uncivilized.
When English ships attempted to trade with the Kandyans, the VOC captured the ships and imprisoned the crews. The VOC further strengthened its control over the cinnamon trade by waging war against the King of Jaffna, another state upon the island. Though the war was fought mostly with Kandyan soldiers, it was the VOC that benefitted the most. After a thirteen month siege of the city of Jaffna, the Company and Kandy partitioned the kingdom. Lands acquired by the VOC were open to limited colonization from the Netherlands and these colonists were under contract to grow spices in high demand back home.
Netherlander plantations spread across Company lands between 1634 and 1645. By 1645, more than ten thousand Netherlander, almost all VOC employees, called Ceylon home. The VOC offered similar contracts to Kandyan subjects, increasing the spice output even further. The situation on Ceylon was quite unique in the colonial era as it was a true and equal partnership between Europe and India.
The natives preferred the Netherlanders far more than the Portuguese. Where Portugal went to impose its ways, VOC employees were more interested in growing richer, a goal that easily crosses cultural boundaries, even the nominally Theravada population of Kandy. If anything, Netherlander colonists adopted more aspects of Ceylonese culture than the Kandyans of Netherlander. Ceylon did not see the same population spike in the wake of the German wars of religion as did Brazil or New Amsterdam; the VOC was very selective about to whom it granted passports.
From Colombo, the VOC not only administered its lands on Ceylon but also mainland Indian ports it took from Portugal. Chief among these trading posts was Goa. The Portuguese garrison in Goa held out until after the end of the Forty Years War, refusing to strike the colors even after officials from Portugal delivered the peace treaty to Goa. The siege of the city lasted until well into 1611, when the VOC brought in additional mercenaries from Ceylon, as well as other parts of India, to storm the city.
Even after the VOC gained dominion over trade in southern India, Company colonists continued to chose the island over the subcontinent. During the course of the 17th Century, more than seventy thousand Netherlanders would establish themselves on Ceylonese plantations as opposed to the less than nine thousand who made their new homes on the mainland. It would not be until both the French and English were defeated in India during the next century that colonists would begin migrating their in any great numbers.
The VOC maintaining the market’s stability was vital for economic well-being of the Netherlander people. Spices such as cinnamon, ginger and especially pepper were known to the peoples of the Far East for millennia and were staples in their diets. These same spices were seen as luxuries of Europe and the wealthy would pay dearly for a full kilogram of spices. Since the days of the long dead Roman Empire a trade in spices existed. Control of the trade changed hands between Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks and Italians. With the Ottoman Empire controlling the flow of spices out of Asia, they were in a position to impose heavy duties upon the tax and generate great profit by simply allowing trade to continue.
During the 15th Century, an alternate route to Asia was sought that would bypass the middleman. The Portuguese made several attempts to circumnavigate Africa, finally succeeding in rounding the Cape in 1488. In 1497, Portuguese traders sailed as far as India, loaded their hulls with spices and turned to Europe. At the Battle of Diu in 1509, the Portuguese defeated the Ottoman Navy, securing for themselves a place in India. Over the next thirty years, the Ottoman Empire was forced from the Indian Ocean, abandoning it to Portuguese influence. This wealth, and Portuguese attempts to block any other European from the trade helped turn the United Provinces’ struggle for independence into a conquest of Portugal’s colonial empire in the final ten years of the war.
The first exclusively Netherlander venture in the Far East in search of spices started in 1595, when a group of merchants attempted to bypass the Portuguese monopoly. In 1596, a four ship flotilla commanded by Cornelius de Houtman made contact with the Spice Islands in modern day Java and Indonesia. By 1598, several more of these small trading fleets reached the East Indies, most returning with substantial profit. In March 1599, a twenty-two ship fleet commanded by Jacob van Neck set sail for the Spice Islands, returning to Europe with profit margins in excess of four hundred percent. Furthermore, van Neck allied himself and his crew with anti-Portuguese natives and cleared the island of Hitu for exclusive trading rights for Netherlander merchants.
In these years, a corporation was formed for the duration of a single voyage. Given the amount of capital risked and dangers in making such a voyage, investors were keen to insure a return on their investments. As such, after the voyage ended, the spices, other cargo and the ships that carried them were liquidated and the cash doled out to the investors.
These early investments in the spice trade turned out to be hit-or-miss affairs. Ships could return with massive profits or they might not return at all, falling prey to the weather, disease, piracy and enemy states. In the case of the first United East India Company (VOC) expedition the profits were so great that investors decided not to have a total liquidation. Rather they would sell the spices and fund an even larger follow up expedition. This generosity stemmed from the more than four hundred percent return the investors earned, despite the loss of eight ships.
Though the modern VOC is the most powerful and wealthy corporation in the world, its first incarnation’s power greatly exceeded it. The charter granted by the Staaten-General in 1600, gave the VOC the right not only to establish its own private navy but also to mint coins, sign treaties and even form its own military alliances, provided all of this occurred east of Africa. Over the span of two hundred years, the VOC competed and occasionally engaged in open warfare with similar companies of neighboring states, the most substantial being the English East India Company. Despite the glamour received in popular media over these conflicts it is often forgotten that their battle for control of trade in India ultimately ruined both of them.
The first permanent Netherlander settlement in the East Indies was established shortly after the VOC made its presence felt in the region. The VOC established its post at Baten on the western coast of Java in 1603. From here, the VOC wasted little time in establishing trade networks and pushing out the competition. Within two years they had captured the Portuguese fort in the Moluccas and by 1607, the VOC managed to drive the Portuguese off Sumatra and effectively lock them out of the East Indies. Shortly after, they established themselves in Jayakarta, not to be confused with nearby modern Jakarta, and subverted the local prince.
To enable more effective control of its East Asian affairs, the VOC created the office of Governor-General of the Indies. Along with the Governor-Generalship came the Council of the Indies, and advisory council that served as much to keep the idea of personal empire out of the Governor-General’s mind as to advise him. To secure its monopoly, the VOC had to do more than subvert local rulers and keep its own officers in line. It fought a series of skirmishes with English traders for the better part of a century.
The alliance between the United Provinces and England was largely forgotten so far from home. When the English attempted to subvert the chiefs and princes of Ambon into their camp, they and the VOC employees who were part of the conspiracy were arrested. The employees were brought up on charges of treason and executed. The English had no such formality. The VOC summarily executed the English, resulting in an episode the English called the Amboyan Massacre.
In 1619, the VOC appointed a ruthless and single-minded son of a Hoorn investor to the office of Governor-General. Jan Pieterszoon Coen almost singlehandedly created the Netherlander spice empire for all of the East Indies. In the year he arrived on Java, the English and their native allies laid siege to the Netherlander post in Jayakarta. On May 30, Coen arrived with nineteen ships and saved the post, or what was left of it after the battle ended. Atop the ruins the VOC constructed the city of Batavia, named after the ancient tribe that once roamed the Low Countries. Batavia soon became the center of the Indies spice trade and the VOC’s capital in the region.
In response to English meddling, Coen ordered an invasion of the island of Banda to capture a larger share of the clove trade. Coen responded so heavy-handedly that most of the natives ended up driven from the island. Those who did not flee on their own initiative were deported, starved out of their defenses or even simply killed to make way for Netherlander plantation owners and their slaves. Some of these slaves were hapless natives of the island taken captive but a vast majority of them were imported across the Indian Ocean from East Africans ports such as Sofala. Coen’s justification for the invasion was a claim that the English were attempting to subvert the island. During the cut-throat competition between giant European companies, the locals tended to be ground under foot.
Coen was more than a mere butcher; he was also a very able administrator. One of his plans for the East Indies was to bring in Netherlanders to colonize the island. The plan was struck down by Company shareholders as cost prohibited. One of his more successful schemes was a system on intra-Asian trade. Though Europe was starved for spices, the continent produced little that Asian desired. Aside from textiles, of which the United Provinces produced in abundance, the native spice traders insisted on payments in silver or gold. Japan was a known source of silver and had even less use for European goods than the Indies with the exception of firearms.
Japan also craved Chinese goods. In turn, China craved sandalwood, which the Netherlanders had readily available on a dozen islands. Sandalwood from the Indies arrived in China and exchanged for manufactured goods, which in turn were shipped to the VOC trading post at Sasebo for silver than in turn went back to the Indies to purchase the spice. The spice, naturally, shipped out to Europe for a profit in far excess of the minor fortune Coen generated in this triangular trade.
Java was never a popular destination for settlers during the 17th Century. Its tormenting heat, endemic disease and long one-way voyage kept away all but the most determined merchants. The VOC asserted its ultimate control over the whole island by a series of fortified trading posts along the coast. There was little reason to conquer the entire island when the Company could simply control the ports and all market access to and from the island.
Java was not the only island of interest in the Indies. Aside from other spice-rich islands, the fabled Terra Australis was first reported by William Janszoon in 1606. In 1616, Dirk Hartog sailed east from the Cape of Good Hope via the Roaring Forties, cross oceanic currents than made the voyage to Java far quicker than depending upon the monsoon, to become the first European confirmed to have spotted the coast of New Holland.
It turned out to be a vast, empty land devoid of civilization and little in the way of native population. As the VOC was interested in trade and a few shareholders did wonder if an equivalent of the Inca Empire lay somewhere along the uncharted coasts. Had they known no such trading partner existed they never would have funded the expeditions to chart the coasts in hopes of discovering wealthy trading partners.
In the middle of the 17th Century, the island-continent of Australia, as well as nearby islands in the Pacific, was charted by the legendary explorer Abel Tasman (1603-54). Not much is know about his early life, up to and including the exact date in 1603, when he was born. We do know that he was born in the Province of Ommenlanden. References to being at sea as early as 1615, as a cabin boy appear in Tasman’s journals. For the first seven years of his employment with the VOC, he served as navigator on several ships trading in the East Indies, Indochina and as far as Japan. One voyage in 1634, he narrowly avoided death when a portion of his crew was massacred by the native of Ceram.
He proved himself a capable of navigator and in 1638, was given command of two ships; the Engel and the Gracht, where he spent eight months out of Batavia mapping Bali, Flores and visiting the northern coast of Australia. Along with trade goods from the native kingdoms, Tasman brought back tales of dragons on Komodo and a race of monkey-men on Flores, a claim that has been taken more seriously in light of recent paleontological evidence uncovered on the island. No such treasures were brought back from the Australian shores, a coast he followed for several days before turning back north.
Upon returning to his homeland, he lobbied the VOC board to launch an expedition to chart this southern continent. While some shareholders were willing to invest in expeditions that might discover a new civilization, not all were convinced that it existed. Tasman proposed, and a majority of the board agreed, that there would be little cost to risk on exploring this land. At worst, the Company would not have the services of a handful of vessels for the duration. The potential for discovery, however, offered great returns.
A great and wealthy civilization could possibly thrive on Australia’s southern, and therefor more temperate coast. There was little reason to doubt it since Spain discovered wealthy civilizations in less hospitable places. Of course Spain great rich off plundering these civilizations. The VOC was different, it preferred its trading partners to remain in one piece and thus provide a steady income for decades or centuries to come. In 1641, Tasman left the island of Mauritius, traveling the Roaring Forties to begin the first circumnavigation of Australia.
Upon reaching the souther lands, his ships, the Limmen and Zeemmuw, sailed into Haai Bay where Tasman and his crew set out in search of food, water and profit. He sought signs of civilization or at the very least tribal peoples with whom the Netherlanders could trade. After a three day trek inland, he encountered his first group of natives. Unlike the peoples of the East Indies, he viewed these natives as wild as the animals that roamed the land. They were a Stone Age tribe of nomads, lacking even basic agriculture. While the natives proved to be of little interest to Tasman, the metal tools carried by his expedition fascinated the natives.
The voyage around Australia continued in January. Sailing along the southern coast of the continent was mostly an uneventful journey. Tasman stopped at multiple locations in search of natives. The VOC would be most displeased to learn this large southern land had zero opportunities for trade. In May, he crossed the Tasman Sea and discovered a large island that now shares his name. Tasman Island was a far greener place than most of Australia. As with the mainland he made contact with some natives and discovered they too lacked anything worth trading. Unfortunately, such an isolated people also lacked the immunity defenses of the Javanese. By the time further European expeditions arrived the natives that Tasman discovered were all but decimated. Only the low population density prevented disease from wiping out the entire island’s population.
Sailing north, Tasman discovered the Great Barrier Reef, where the Limmen wrecked in October. Tasman was forced to spend three months in what the British dubbed Queensland, near modern day Brisbane, to make repairs. Abundant trees provided a source of lumber even if native trees were less than ideal for ship building. Nearly twenty percent of his crew succumbed to tropical diseases as well as venomous fauna during the stay. Two of his men were lost to crocodile attacks while Tasman charted part of the Brisbane River, forcing him to turn back after only venturing thirty-three kilometers.
Tasman returned to Batavia in March 1643, delivering his findings to a disappointed VOC crowd. While no trading partners were discovered, his journals describing the strange native people and animals was an eventual hit back in the United Provinces, where Netherlanders wanted to hear more about the wondrous new land. As much as he impressed the average person back home, he was not so successful in impressing those who fund such voyages, who were less than enthusiastic about an animal with a pouch in its belly that hops about all day. Tasman set sail for home that year, spending the next three years organizing and lobbying for a third expedition.
His maps provided much information for the famed Netherlander cartography industry, with Australia filling in a once empty and unknown space. The exact nature of Australia was as much debated at the time of Tasman as it is today. Was it a small continent or a very large island? Earlier predictions of a southern continent called for something much larger, perhaps even the size of Africa. This was all based on the presumption of scholars of the era that the land masses should balance each other out on a globe. We now know that no such requirement exists in nature.
Tasman made his third voyage to the continent between 1646 and 1648, discovering New Zeeland with its hostile natives and remains of giant birds and sailing as far as Fiji and Tonga. As with previous voyages, Tasman was empowered by the VOC to establish trade relations with any natives discovered. The Maori had the same love of metal as all Polynesians and instead of peaceful barter, a band of Maori attacked Tasman’s encampment on November 8, 1647. The attackers were repelled at the cost of fifteen dead Netherlanders.
An outbreak of scurvy struck while in the southern Pacific, forcing Tasman to bring his small fleet of three ships to take an extended stay on the island of Tongatapu. There, he traded iron tools and implements for supplies. The natives of Tonga proved to be friendlier than the inhabitants of New Zeeland, so much so that his crew found it difficult to say goodbye. The discovery of the island gave European sailors a way station in crossing the Pacific.
In 1678, a Netherlander expedition set out to form a settlement on the island, a project abandoned when disease claimed a number of the colonists. The Tongans, less resistant to European strains, suffered heavier loss of life due to the epidemic. This fate repeated itself across the Pacific. Tonga would forever drift from Netherlander influence, eventually falling under an English protectorate before the turn of the 20th Century.
Fiji turned out to be an opposite of Tonga and in fact, more reminiscent of New Zeeland. Instead of smiling, friendly native, Tasman and he crew encountered what he described as warring cannibals of the island who were constantly at each other’s throats. Human sacrifice was also not unknown to Fiji. On form involved using men as roller for when launching a new ship. Tasman filled his journal with atrocities and the savage nature of the islanders. Often in the course of European exploration, explorers would embellish accounts of savagery among native population. While what Tasman discovered did happen it was not the everyday occurrence as made out by him. His reports did, however, encourage other European ships to sail well clear of Fiji.
Tasman would have liked to launch a fourth expedition and indeed planned for one. It would have involved sailing further southeast, well past New Zeeland. It was just as well that such an expedition was never launched. As Tasman would likely have been the first European to spot Antarctica, the only natives discovered would have been penguins. When he returned to Java, the VOC appointed him to the Council of Justice. He retired from the VOC in 1652, disappointed that his fourth expedition never sailed, returning to his merchant roots until the start of the First Anglo-Netherlander war.
His final voyage saw him commanding eight ships and sailing north to Manila. The VOC hoped to expel the English from the Philippines as well as eliminate other trading posts in the East Indies. He never made landfall. His fleet suffered defeat at the hands of a larger English flotilla on June 19, 1654. Half of the VOC sailors were killed in the fight or from their wounds afterwards. Tasman took a musket round to his hip, fracturing his pelvis. While the would itself may have only left him lame, the infection that followed claimed his life.
Further north from Tasman’s voyages, the first Netherlanders reached Formosa in 1624, landing on the sandy Tayouan Peninsula. It was here that the VOC constructed its first trading post on the island. The Company planned to utilize it to strengthen their trade in China and with Japan. The Japanese in particular; the hide of the Sitka Deer was sought after by samurai for use in constructing their armor. The VOC paid natives for the deer hides, selling them to the Japanese warlords for silver, adding to the Oriental trade triangle. VOC operations on the island expanded with the establishment of Fort Zeelandia in 1635.
Even before the expansion, the VOC made it clear that its operations on the island were vital for the trade with China, important enough to warrant appointing a governor-general in 1627, with one Gerald de With. The office continued into existence until the first VOC’s collapse, when the Staaten-General took over and folded Formosa into the East Indies.
VOC control over the island was not uncontested. During the 1630s, the Spanish attempted to establish its own trading posts as well as missions on the island with no success. Despite the two governments being formally at peace, VOC soldiers would find these posts and burn them to the ground after massacring the competition. The English made similar attempts to penetrate the island with the same lack of results.
Twenty years after first establishing themselves on Formosa, the VOC soon found the Sitka Deer population in steep decline, forcing them to pay the natives more for each hide. To offset the dwindling trade, the Company introduced both sugar and mulberry plantations to the island. The latter they obtained from China along with laborers and some unique tools. Anything the VOC found that improved profits they were quick to adopt. The seed drill, known in China for centuries, was still a novelty to Europeans at the time. The VOC was the first to discover that in increased the yield of crops over the traditional casting of seed method. Though it spread over Netherlander plantations and farms on Formosa quickly it took longer for the device to catch on in other colonies.
Netherlander settlers arrived in 1644, numbering only one hundred employees, each granted a parcel of land to cultivate both sugar and mulberry, with whatever space leftover for personal use. The mulberry tree itself was of no use to the Netherlanders or any other people. The silk worm was a different matter; they thrived on the leaves of the mulberry, giving the VOC yet another profitable commodity to ship back to Europe. Laborers to work these plantations were brought over from China as indentured servants. Legally they were free after seven years of service, though most continued to labor for the VOC as paid laborers.
Not everyone was pleased with the arrangement set up by the VOC. Pirates plied the China Sea for centuries and in 1641, the made the mistake of preying upon a VOC ship. Over the next three years, and at great expense, the VOC navy combed the Sparely Islands and rooted out all the pirate nests they could locate. Estimates of just how many pirates were killed between 1641 and 1644, range upwards to thirty thousand, though that is likely an exaggeration.
Some of the native Formosans were equally unpleased with the Netherlanders. Opposition to VOC attempts to unify the tribes of the island under their rule sparked an uprising. The short-lived uprising was quickly crushed by a punitive expedition against Bakloan and Mattau, which ended with the destruction of both towns. The VOC was as ruthless against native states as against European competition.
Finding they effectively governed the island, the VOC looked towards its new population to help fund the running of the island. They levied a head tax on all natives over the age of five, most of it was reinvested in the island. Having never paid taxes before the arrival of the VOC, the natives naturally resented this burden. The Company used most of the revenue generated by taxes to finance the construction of roads, harbors and generally improving the island’s limited infrastructure. Some of the tax revenue went into schools established by the Company where the natives were taught to speak Dutch.
The most serious threat to VOC rule over the island arrived in 1660, when Ming Loyalist Koxinga led an army on to four hundred ships to invade the island. Thousands of these soldiers began a lengthy siege of Fort Zeelandia. Defending the city was Governor-General Frederick Coyett, several hundred Company men and a thousand native auxiliaries. Such a threat was Koxinga, that VOC forces were drawn from afar to combat the Ming. From Ceylon, the King of Kandy sent four thousand soldiers to aid his allies in their fight. The siege was lifted only when reinforcements from Java and Ceylon landed. For two years, the VOC fought Koxinga for control of the island. The war ended when the general was finally cornered on Formosa’s west coast, where he fell into VOC hands. Koxinga as well as other survivors of his army were executed shortly afterwards.
Hainan was the last of the VOC’s “big four” possessions to be colonized. The VOC captured the island partly in response to the Ming invasion of Formosa and partly as an opportunistic land grab in the wake of the Manchu’s invasion of China in 1664. Unlike the Ming, the Qing Dynasty had little in the way of overseas ambition. After half a century in the Orient, the VOC had the leverage to cut off trade between China and the outside world. In a brief war following the invasion of Formosa and the fall of the Ming, the VOC forced the Qing to cede to them the island of Hainan and grant the Netherlands trade concession, including a monopoly on tea exports. This was as much as a slap in the face of the English following the humiliating peace of the First Anglo-Netherlander as it was a business move. Since England restricted trade to English ports to English ships, the VOC restricted the exportation of tea to England.
Hainan was used as the VOC’s primary trading center in the South China Sea, where commerce between the island, southern China and Vietnam was moderately prosperous. Colonists from the Provinces arrived on the island just as the Second Anglo-Netherlander War erupted. These colonists, like those on the other three of the Big Four, were interested in making their fortunes on plantations. Like many other holdings, the Netherlanders first established sugar plantations. Those colonists under contract with the VOC were ordered to cease and desist. The Company had a vested interest in keeping the price of sugar, along with the profits it reaped, high and thus tried to limit the supplies to a point where they could supply just enough of the white gold to keep prices from rocketing sugar in the luxury of the rich.
Instead, the Company ordered tea to be planted in great quantities, overseen by Netherlander colonists and worked by Chinese laborers. Unlike operations in other parts of the world, there were no slaves involved on Hainan. In fact, the pay the VOC offered the common laborers exceeded what they could expect to earn under the Qing by such a wide margin that it caused a flood of immigrants to the island. The VOC was not equipped to fight another war with China while it fought the English and was forced to negotiate a new treaty with the Qing, establishing strict quotas concerning the importation of labor.
Following the conclusion of the Second Anglo-Netherlander War, the VOC had a stranglehold on the world tea market. After losing the war, the English were forces to purchase most if tea from their former foe turned allies. The arrangement continued until England began to operate their own tea plantations out of the Philippines. By the start of the 18th Century, the VOC expanded its operations on Hainan beyond tea cultivation into silk production and mining. Deposits of silver discovered on the island were tapped by the Company and used to further finance the VOC’s expansion in the East Indies.
The tactics that the VOC used to keep on top of their business varied throughout the 17th and 18th Centuries. Their sheer size permitted them to undercut their small competition by offering more for spices in the East and selling them for less in the West. Though they wanted to maximize profits, the revenue generated by the bulk of which they carried was enough to keep the shareholders content. Undercutting was a tactic reserved for fellow Netherlander traders.
Traders from foreign nations were not so fortunate. To battle these, the VOC and its navy took control over the trade lanes. The VOC took a more direct approach dealing with these companies, preferring to either sink or seize the competition’s ships on sight. The Company managed to keep complete control over the eastward current in the Indian Ocean around forty degrees south. This route that took ships from the Cape to New Holland was the Company’s closet guarded secret.
With control over a large portion of trade between Europe and the outside world, the United Provinces were soon on the rise. Their army was still no match for the full might of other Europeans state, their chief concern being France. However, their wealth not only gave them great influence in European courts, it also allowed them to hire mercenaries in the event of war. This notwithstanding, the Netherlands preferred to expand through trade and commerce instead of brute force. Sometimes they took a diplomatic approach, such as during the 1640s, when King Frederick opened negotiations with Christian IV of Denmark-Norway.
A treaty of alliance was signed between the United Provinces and Denmark-Norway. Sweden was a growing concern of Frederick during the last years of his life. By allying with Denmark-Norway he hoped to contain their expansion. Though the Swedish Army was might, and allies made a great buffer, its navy was not much of a threat. Just weeks before the death of Frederick, his only son, William, married the daughter of the Danish king, Christina of Denmark. Following the wedding, in August 1647, Frederick died. He is remembered as the hardest working of the Netherlander monarchs, often starting his day before sunrise and ending it well after sunset.
When asked what name he would use, William chose his own upon ascending to the throne. The reign of William I is too short to allow him to distinguish himself from his uncle or his father. In 1650, a smallpox outbreak swept across the Netherlands, eventually working its way into the heart of the Hague. William I succumbed to the virus only one week before the birth of his son. The United Provinces were not the only nation to be struck by the epidemic. Smallpox infected many capitals, including Kopenhagen.
Prince Frederick died from the disease. The fate of his brother, George, is not so clear cut. He did die during the epidemic but nationalists groups in Denmark have maintained for centuries that he was murdered by Netherlander assassins who used the outbreak as cover. While he was a critic of the alliance, there is no evidence he either planned to revoke it or that his death included any foul play. His death left Denmark-Norway with a potential succession crisis when his son, also named Christian, died shortly afterwards. According to Danish law of succession, the crown would not eventually fall upon Christian IV’s only grandson, the infant Willem van Oranje. When William I of Denmark-Norway also became William II of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, he brought the two North Sea powers into personal union, paving the way for greater things.