Japan's Economy by Proxy in the Seventeenth Century: China, the N ...

The merchants who invested in this trade, many of them Jewish merchants who fled to the United Provinces in order to escape the Spanish Inquisition, specialized in carrying Baltic grain to countries such as Spain and the Italian city-states, areas that were prone to regular famines.¹⁴ In return, they shipped Mediterranean products such as olives and wine north to Scandinavia, the Baltic States, and Russia. An indication of how extensive the Dutch role in this trade was can be seen in the number of ships passing through “the Sound;” Dutch ships outnumbered those of all other countries by a margin of two to one. Merchants at the time referred to the trade with the Baltic as the “mother trade,” and by the late sixteenth century the Dutch had as many as 1,200 ships engaged solely in this lucrative business.¹⁵ The cheaper transport rates that the Dutch were able to offer in Baltic grain was so vital to the Spanish that even in times of bitter warfare, Dutch ships were regularly arriving in Spanish ports.¹⁶

It was this background in the Baltic shipping industry, along with the highly developed Dutch herring and whaling industries, that prepared the United Provinces for an advance into the Indian Ocean. Of the Dutch prowess in the Herring business, Meynert Semeyns wrote in 1639, “The Lord has, through the instrument of the herring, made

Holland an exchange and staple market for the whole of Europe. The herring keeps Dutch trade going, and the Dutch trade sets the world afloat.”¹⁷ Such an extensive whaling and herring industry naturally ensured that the Dutch would lead the way in technological innovations in the construction of ships and in the ability to operate them cheaply and efficiently. During the years of Dutch supremacy on the seas, 500 ships per year were being constructed in Dutch shipyards, both for domestic use and for sale abroad.¹⁸

There is a debate among historians of early modern Dutch history as to the true impetus behind the initial Dutch advance into the Indian Ocean. Until the last decades of the sixteenth century, the Dutch received their supply of spices and other Asian products from Antwerp via Lisbon.