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

In addition, the boom in Japanese silver production that occurred in the second half of the sixteenth century made it possible for the Portuguese to realize huge profits from the Macao-Nagasaki connection. The position of captain on this journey, in fact, was consistently the most profitable assignment in the whole of the Portuguese trade empire and was accordingly awarded by the king to a member of the Portuguese nobility.¹¹ This continued to be the case to the very end of Portuguese relations with Japan, and was the envy of all other European powers in Asia. Dutch merchants in Asia, for example, routinely recorded in their diaries that if only the Dutch East India Company (hereafter shortened to VOC) could find a supply of silk such as the Portuguese had in Macao, they too would be able to tap into the huge profits Japan had to offer.

Dutch Maritime Supremacy and the VOC

The Dutch already had a rather developed seafaring tradition by the middle of the sixteenth century. While the Portuguese were sailing ever farther down the west coast of Africa and eventually around the Cape of Good Hope to India, the Dutch were sailing in the opposite direction. Dutch merchants of the sixteenth century had come to dominate the most lucrative seaborne trade in all of Europe, a trade that always dwarfed other routes, even after the Dutch expanded into the Indian Ocean. The carrying trade between the Mediterranean and the Baltic countries offered tremendous profits for the Dutch commercial apparatus centered on the maritime provinces of Holland and Zeeland.¹² The great strength of the Dutch was that they were able to “undercut” the competition by shipping goods at much lower prices that any other competitor. This was due, in part, to Dutch innovation in terms of shipbuilding; Dutch ships were generally recognized to be the most advanced in Europe. The Haringbuis, for example, was able to stay at sea for six to eight weeks, a process being developed in which the herring catch could be salted and stored on the ship, eliminating the need to put in at port.¹³ It was this technological advancement, combined with the ability of Dutch merchants to provide cheap shipping, which allowed the Dutch to intrude so successfully on European trade.