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

One of his biggest accomplishments, it has been claimed, was bringing to light the fact that Portuguese power in Asia was not the monumental colossus that many Dutch merchants had imagined it to be, but was rather a tenuous patchwork of alliances and monopolies that was very much on the decline. Thus, recent Dutch historiography pays less attention to international political factors such as the war with the Spanish, and instead emphasizes a natural extension of an already quite advanced maritime tradition. The expertise of recently repatriated sailors such as Linschotten and Dirk Gerritszoon Pomp, along with the realization that the Dutch could compete with the Portuguese for power in the “East Indies,” prompted the United Provinces to try their luck in the Asian trade.²⁵

The Formation of the Dutch East India Company was not the event that inaugurated the Dutch advance into Asia, but rather was the culmination of a process beginning with a number of smaller companies, called voorcomapnieën, that were the direct ancestors of the VOC.²⁶ The first of these companies consisted of nine merchants from Amsterdam who, meeting in the warehouse of Martin Spils, appointed Cornelis de Houtman to lead a voyage to the Spice Islands.²⁷ Early Dutch captains used Linschotten’s Itinerario to great effect since it described in detail the trade of the Portuguese in Java and included a number of nautical charts of the Indian Ocean. (The English captain John Saris, who led the first English voyage to Japan, claimed that he found the archipelago using nothing but Linschotten’s book).²⁸ De Houtman’s fleet sailed from Texel on April 12, 1595, with four ships and arrived at Bantam after a fifteen-month voyage.²⁹ While not an overly profitable venture, the earnings were large enough to cover the overhead of the voyage and demonstrate to investors the potential for profit of future Dutch voyages to the Indies. More significant in the long run, however, was that the Dutch had succeeded in breaking the Portuguese price monopoly on spices and were now in a position to challenge their hitherto unrivalled commercial empire.

Ironically, initial Dutch success in challenging the Portuguese in Asia also harmed trade within the United Provinces itself. This was primarily because increased Dutch shipping to the Indies flooded the market in Europe with spices, thereby driving the price down and making their import less profitable.³⁰