A worldwide trading network

Abstract

On 23 February 1631, Evert Willemszoon, who had begun his journey in the Dutch city of Woerden, arrived in hell. For this seventeenth-century Dutchman, hell was a very real place. It was located on the west coast of tropical Africa, in Guinea, parts of which were tellingly called the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast. For Evert Willemszoon, hell also had a name: Fort Nassau in Mouree. Most of the people who went there had but one objective, to get rich quickly. In Mouree there were two ways of doing this: trading in precious metals and trading in people. Evert Willemszoon arrived on the eve of a new phase in Dutch colonial history. Until this time the Dutch had been only marginally involved in the slave trade. The Dutch West India Company (WIC), founded in 1621, had so far failed to establish a viable colony in South America. Thanks to an unexpected stroke of luck, however – the WIC's commander, Piet Heyn, had captured the Spanish silver fleet in 1628 – the Company could now afford to launch a large-scale attack on the Brazilian mainland. In the autumn of 1629, a fleet of sixty-seven ships sailed for the region of Pernambuco, the easternmost part of Brazil. The most important town, Recife, soon fell into Dutch hands. Many of the inhabitants fled, setting fire to the town's sugar warehouses before they left, which was all the more unfortunate because sugar had been the WIC's reason for going there.