The Dutch East India Company and Portugal's war for Asia, 1602–1663

The document opens with a greeting: “The States General of the United Netherlands salute all those who will be shown this.” It was given under the seal of the States General, the assembly of the rebel Dutch provinces, in The Hague on 20 March 1602. In a long list of articles it merged the rival companies that had been racing each other to the spice markets of Asia into one: the United East India Company, in Dutch the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC.1 source1 source

Most of the charter is about money and procedure: who pays what share, where the directors meet, how the accounts are audited. Near the end, between a clause on cargo inventories and one on spice taxes, comes a line about enemies.1 source1 source

Portugal had no king of its own in 1602. Its crown had passed to the Spanish Habsburgs in 1580, and the Dutch were in revolt against that same dynasty. So Portugal's string of fortresses and trading posts from East Africa to Macau, the Estado da Índia governed from Goa, sat squarely in the new company's path. Over the next 61 years the VOC took a large part of it.1 source1 source

For a century, the Portuguese had shipped Asian pepper and spices home on the Carreira da Índia, the annual fleets between Lisbon and Goa, and Dutch and Flemish merchants had bought them in Lisbon and Antwerp to sell across northern Europe. The Habsburg takeover of 1580 and Philip II's war with the Dutch rebels did not stop that trade at once. Despite periodic seizures of their ships, Dutch skippers kept trading in Portuguese ports, Setúbal among them, through the 1580s and 1590s.1 source1 source

What changed things was a bad year at sea. In 1591 no ships at all returned to Lisbon from India, and pepper supplies to the north dried up. In 1594 the States General licensed Jan Huygen van Linschoten's Itinerario, a travel and navigation guide to the Portuguese East, and in 1595 Cornelis de Houtman sailed from Texel for Java carrying the first printed part of Linschoten's route descriptions and a few Portuguese maps. Houtman had himself spent two years as an agent in Portugal gathering information on its Asian trade.1 source1 source

Within a few years, companies in Amsterdam, Zeeland, the Meuse towns and North Holland were all sending fleets. The Huygens Institute's register of Dutch-Asiatic shipping lists 66 voyages by these voorcompagnieën, the pre-companies, before the VOC took over. The States General invited their directors to unite them in “a fixed, secure and orderly entity”.2 sources2 sources

Anyone living in the United Provinces could buy in, with as little or as much as they liked. In Amsterdam 1,143 people subscribed. Of these, 301 came from the southern Netherlands, still under Spanish rule, some of them still living in Antwerp, and they put in 1.4 million guilders, 38 per cent of the chamber's capital. Only two of the subscribers were Portuguese.2 sources2 sources

Its servants in Asia swore loyalty to the States General, but in practice the company could act as a sovereign. Van Veen, following the Dutch historian Femme Gaastra, calls it a state outside the State. On paper its warlike aims were modest: the clause on Spanish and Portuguese ships deals only with sharing out prizes, because some of the early Asia traders wanted no part in a trading company that made war and took prizes.2 sources2 sources

The restraint did not last a year, though the first great prize came from a fleet that had sailed before the company existed. Jacob van Heemskerck had left Texel with eight ships on 23 April 1601. On 25 February 1603, at the mouth of the Johor river off the Strait of Singapore, he attacked the Portuguese carrack Santa Catarina, with nearly a thousand people on board. Her captain, Sebastião Serrão, surrendered.2 sources2 sources

Van Heemskerck had no privateering commission. He presented the attack as revenge for crewmen of an earlier Dutch fleet whom the Portuguese had executed at Macau. He sailed the prize all the way to the Netherlands, and on 9 September 1604 the Amsterdam Admiralty declared it a good prize and ordered the ship and cargo sold.2 sources2 sources

The case also produced a famous book. The company hired Hugo Grotius, a young lawyer and a cousin of Van Heemskerck, to justify the seizure. One chapter of his treatise appeared anonymously as Mare Liberum, The Free Sea, an attack on Portugal's claim to own the route to the Indies. It is usually dated 1609; Van Veen says it came out in November 1608.3 sources3 sources

By then the directors, the Heeren XVII, had chosen war. In 1603 the States General advised them to send bigger, well-armed ships that could damage the enemy, and the directors' instructions to Steven van der Haghen, who sailed that year, said the company was, in Ernst van Veen's translation, “obliged to take the offensive, in whatever manner, against the Spaniards, Portuguese and their allies”. He was to wait off Mozambique for the ships from Lisbon.1 source1 source

In 1605 Van der Haghen took the Portuguese fort on Amboina, in the Moluccas, and joint attacks with the forces of the sultan of Ternate drove the Portuguese from Tidore and Makian too. In 1606 Cornelis Matelief besieged Malacca with the help of the sultan of Johor until a fleet from Goa drove him off. Paulus van Caerden in 1607 and Pieter Verhoeff in 1608 laid siege to the Portuguese fortress on Mozambique Island and failed both times, but took or wrecked several India ships on the way.2 sources2 sources

In Europe, Spain and the Dutch agreed the Twelve Years' Truce in 1609. In Asia it changed little, and each side accused the other of breaking it. In 1619 the governor-general Jan Pieterszoon Coen took the Javanese port of Jacatra, razed it and rebuilt it as Batavia, now Jakarta. It became the company's main base in Asia.2 sources2 sources

The numbers show the shift. In the first decade of the seventeenth century the Carreira da Índia sent 71 ships from Lisbon. In the 1630s it managed 33, and in the 1660s 21. The Dutch, starting from almost nothing, sent more ships to Asia every decade.2 sources2 sources

The Dutch did real damage. In 1606 Willem Haultain's fleet blockaded Lisbon and kept that year's India ships in port: seven by van Veen's count, eight by Murteira's. In July 1622 Anglo-Dutch ships caught the outward fleet off Mozambique, carrying a new viceroy and 200,000 cruzados in silver; three ships were lost, with most of the silver. That December an Anglo-Dutch fleet arrived off Goa and kept the homeward ships in port until April 1623. From 1636 to 1644 the VOC blockaded the bar of Goa every season.2 sources2 sources

Even so, the Portuguese historian André Murteira found that enemy action caused fewer failed voyages than the sea did. Of the Carreira's sailings between 1598 and 1625, he counted 27 ruined by privateers or blockades, against 62 lost to wrecks or forced to turn back for other reasons. Over almost the same years the Portuguese, with a century's experience of the Cape route, lost 42 ships on it, against 11 for the Dutch newcomers.1 source1 source

The decisive war was fought for Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, and its cinnamon. The Portuguese held its coasts. Inland, the kingdom of Kandy under Raja Sinha II (Rajasinghe II) had held out against them for decades, and in March 1638 his army destroyed a Portuguese force sent into the hills at Gannoruwa. Its commander, Diogo de Melo, was killed, and the king sent his sword to the Dutch admiral off Goa.2 sources2 sources

Raja Sinha had already sent envoys to Batavia. By the terms João Ribeiro, a Portuguese soldier in Ceylon, later reported, every fort taken was to be the king's, and he would pay the company's costs, down to each ship lost and each shot fired. With 2,000 of his men alongside, a VOC fleet took the small fort of Batticaloa on 18 May 1638 and razed it, then Trincomalee on 1 May 1639.2 sources2 sources

The sources disagree on these dates. The historian P. E. Pieris, who translated Ribeiro, gives both in his notes, and the British historian F. C. Danvers also dates Batticaloa to May 1638. But Ribeiro put both captures in 1639, and in another chapter Danvers has Batticaloa falling on 15 August 1639 and Trincomalee a year later.2 sources2 sources

The richer south-west coast came next. Dutch troops took Negombo on 9 February 1640. On 13 March, with Kandy's army camped six miles away, they stormed Galle through a breach in the São Tiago bastion. The Portuguese recaptured Negombo that November. Two months later, on 14 January 1641, Malacca surrendered after a five-month siege, in which 40 vessels sent by the sultan of Johor, an old enemy of the Portuguese, guarded the harbour. The Portuguese never regained a foothold on the Malay peninsula.1 source1 source

By then Portugal had a king again. The revolt of 1 December 1640 put the Duke of Braganza on the throne as João IV, and the new kingdom, at war with Spain, sought peace with the Dutch. On 12 June 1641 it signed a ten-year truce in The Hague. In Asia the truce was to apply after a year, or sooner if proclaimed there.2 sources2 sources

The VOC took its time. Its commissioner Pieter Boreel arrived with the armistice on 2 March 1643 and would not publish it at Galle, where the Dutch were hemmed in. At Goa he declined again unless the Portuguese gave up the lands around Galle, which, he claimed, Raja Sinha had mortgaged to the company. The truce was finally published at Goa on 10 November 1644. It was due to lapse in 1651, and the Portuguese government feared what would follow.1 source1 source

Fighting in Ceylon resumed in 1652. On 14 October 1655 the Dutch under Gerard Hulft took Kalutara, then laid siege to Colombo, the Portuguese capital in Ceylon, with Raja Sinha's army encamped alongside; Ribeiro put it at 40,000 fighting men and labourers. Hulft was killed during the siege, which lasted seven months. Ribeiro, who was inside, wrote that famine drove the defenders to eat their elephants, and that from 15 March 1656, when plague broke out, to 20 April, the dead counted in the city reached 22,030.2 sources2 sources

The Dutch officers who received them thought at first that they were the officers of the garrison, not all that was left of it. The alliance did not survive the victory. The Dutch kept Colombo, and within days Raja Sinha was fighting his allies; Ribeiro says the king left them only the forts and a few villages near the shore.1 source1 source

In February 1658 Rijcklof van Goens sailed for the north of the island, with ten ships and 3,200 soldiers according to Ribeiro, or about 1,500 men by the Dutch records. Mannar fell on 22 February, and then Jaffna, after a siege in which more than 1,600 people inside died or were killed. Its last 140 defenders marched out on 24 June 1658, Ribeiro says; the Dutch records give 22 June. Portuguese Ceylon was over.2 sources2 sources

Across the strait lay the Malabar coast of south-west India, its pepper ports divided among rival kings. Van Goens took Quilon on 29 December 1658, but could not hold it. Then the Dutch found an ally in the Zamorin of Calicut, the strongest of those kings and for 150 years an enemy of the Portuguese and of the raja of Cochin. In February 1661 the Zamorin agreed a joint attack with the governor of Ceylon, and the Dutch handed him the Portuguese fort of Palliport once they had taken it.1 source1 source

Van Goens came back in December 1661 with some 4,000 men and retook Quilon. On 15 January 1662, with Nairs, Malabar's warrior caste, sent by the Zamorin in the trenches, he stormed Cranganore. The Portuguese lost about 120 Europeans there, besides a large number of Nairs, slaves and others; Baldaeus, a chaplain with the fleet, counted 200 Christians dead.1 source1 source

Cochin had its own quarrel. The Dutch backed a claimant to its throne, a young man covered in jewels who spoke good Portuguese; the reigning queen favoured the Portuguese, and Van Goens's troops stormed her palace. An assault on Portuguese Cochin on 5 February 1662 failed, and on the night of 2 March the Dutch embarked before the monsoon.2 sources2 sources

The two countries had in fact already made peace. At The Hague on 6 August 1661 Portugal agreed to pay the Dutch Republic 4 million cruzados, each worth two Carolus guilders, in 16 annual instalments of money, sugar, tobacco or salt. Portugal also had to hand back the Dutch guns captured at Recife and the other forts of north-eastern Brazil, which Portuguese settlers had taken from the Dutch West India Company by 1654.2 sources2 sources

Article VI held the trap. Fighting was to stop in Europe two months after signing, but in the rest of the world only from the day the treaty was published, and each side would keep whatever it held by then. Portugal ratified on 24 May 1662. The States General followed late in 1662: Galletti, from the Batavia records, gives 14 December, Danvers 4 December and the Portuguese treaty collection 4 November.2 sources2 sources

The Dutch were back before Cochin, in greater force, late in 1662. They were in a hurry, since news of the peace was expected any day. After a failed first assault, a second broke into the town on 6 January, and on the 7th the governor, Inácio Sarmento, signed a capitulation. On the 8th about 1,100 people came out, fewer than 300 of them soldiers; the siege had cost the Dutch 360 men. Unmarried Portuguese were shipped to Europe and married ones sent to Goa.2 sources2 sources

Cannanore, the last Portuguese fort on the coast, capitulated on 13 February 1663; at Goa its commander was executed for giving up too easily. Batavia had official word of the peace only in June. In March 1664 an envoy from the viceroy at Goa demanded Cochin and Cannanore back, since both fell after the treaty was signed. The Dutch answered that the peace counted in Asia only from its publication, on 14 March 1663. Portugal's ambassador in the Netherlands pressed the claim again in 1666 and got nowhere.2 sources2 sources

A further treaty, signed on 30 July 1669, left Cochin and Cannanore in Dutch hands as security until Portugal paid the overdue instalments and the cost of the campaign, and settled another 500,000 cruzados in salt from Setúbal. Bombay had meanwhile gone to England, under the marriage treaty of Catherine of Braganza and Charles II of 23 June 1661.3 sources3 sources

The company's Indian allies did less well than it did. The Zamorin had expected to be made king of Cochin, or at least to be given the island of Vypeen, and got neither. The Dutch were instead bound by treaty to protect the king of Cochin, his old rival, and were drawn into their wars for the next half-century.1 source1 source

The war left the Estado da Índia a fraction of its old size. Goa, blockaded every season from 1636 to 1644, never fell to the Dutch, and it stayed Portuguese until December 1961. The forts and cinnamon of Ceylon, the Malabar pepper ports and the Malacca strait passed to the VOC.5 sources5 sources

The Dutch sold the fort at Cannanore to the local ruler, the Ali Raja, in 1771, and held Cochin until a British force took it in 1795. In Ceylon they stayed until 1796, when Galle surrendered to the British a week after Colombo.2 sources2 sources

Historians still argue about how much the Dutch caused that decline. Ernst van Veen's Leiden thesis of 2000 argued that it had causes in Brazil, Africa and Europe as well as in Asia, and he blamed the Carreira's heavy losses on poor seamanship and pilotage more than on foreign raiders. Murteira's figures point the same way for the early years: Dutch raids mattered, but wrecks and voyages abandoned for other reasons mattered more.2 sources2 sources

The company outlived its rival's eastern empire but not by much. Its ships made 4,722 outward voyages to Asia in all; the last left the Netherlands on 26 December 1794, and the company was disbanded in 1798. Its archive is in the Nationaal Archief in The Hague.1 source1 source