Dutch Pacific Voyages of Discovery

By Jan TenBruggencate

Dutch voyagers from 1599 through the middle 1700s discovered many of the major island groups in the Pacific, including Australia, Easter Island, Fiji, Hawai`i, New Zealand, Samoa and Tonga. Three of those expeditions went east to west around Cape Horn and were led by independent adventurers who challenged the monopoly of the Dutch East India Company, in hopes of finding an alternate route to lucrative spice trading ports. Some also acted as pirates or privateers, attacking Spanish and Portuguese interests in the New World. They were brutal trips in the way the voyagers treated those they met, but also in the way in which they were treated. Many sailors died of scurvy and other illness and many others by violent acts. Most sailors on these expeditions did not survive to see Holland again. Ships were lost at sea, through shipwreck or through confiscation by the Dutch East India Company when they reached their goals. Many voyages made later with the permission of the monopoly explored Pacific islands from the west to the east. This volume reviews in detail the actual voyages as well as the political and economic issues that surrounded them in the Netherlands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jan TenBruggencate
• Release date: May 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781948660044

Jan TenBruggencate

Jan TenBruggencate is a Hawaii-based writer of primarily non-fiction.

Book preview

Dutch Pacific Voyages of Discovery

Australia, Easter Island, Fiji, Hawai`i, New Zealand, Samoa, Tasmania, Tonga

Brutality of Early European Circumnativations

Outrages of Government Supported Monopolies

By Jan K. TenBruggencate and Jan W. TenBruggencate

Bridgehouse Press

Dutch Pacific Voyages of Discovery

By Jan K. TenBruggencate and Jan W. TenBruggencate

A Bridgehouse Press Book

© 2018 Jan W. TenBruggencate

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author and copyright holder, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Bridgehouse Press eBook ISBN: 978-1-948660-03-7

Jan W. TenBruggencate

Bridgehouse Press

2878 Pua Nani Street

Lihue HI 96766 U.S.A.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Prologue

Book One

The Early Voyages

Book Two

Mahu and De Cordes

Faith

Loyalty

Gospel

Hope

Charity

Book Three

Schouten and leMaire

Book Four

The Era of Tasman and Visscher

Portuguese contacts

Dutch contacts

Ships en route Holland to Java

Hartog

Claessen

Jacobzoon

De Houtman

Leeuwin

Tortelduyff

Thyssen

De Witt

Pelsaert and the Wreck of the Batavia

Van Spilerghen

Ships sent from the Indies

Jansz

Caarstenz

Pel and Pieterz

Vries

De Vlamingh

Van Delft

The Nassau Fleet

Tasman and Visscher Voyages

Principals: Van Diemen, Tasman, Visscher

Voyage of 1642-1643

Voyage of 1644

Book Five

Roggeveen

Afterword

Final Thoughts

FOREWORD

Two centuries before Captain James Cook’s three Pacific voyages, three Dutch expeditions crossed the great ocean from east to west, making key discoveries that helped map vast Oceania. They discovered Easter Island and described its iconic statues. They discovered many of the islands in the Tuamotu archipelago, along with the northern Societies, and islands in Samoa and Tonga. They left eight deserters in Hawai`i and five on the Tuamotu island of Takapoto. And they proved that the storied Great Southern Continent did not exist, although they put themselves at great risk trying to locate it where others reported it was to be found.

They described Polynesian sailing craft, Pacific islander customs, house construction, weapons and tactics, and much more.

The voyages were also singular for other reasons. The privations of these sailing expeditions were astounding. The scurvy, disease, malnutrition and harsh conditions the crews suffered were incomprehensible by modern standards. In some cases the crews were so sick and weak that they were afraid to stop at populated islands for life-preserving provisions, because they had no hope of being able to survive confrontations with hostile natives. Hundreds of crew members died before seeing Holland again.

They often acted as pirates. The brutality suffered by them, and the brutality they caused others was stunning. They commonly fired muskets into crowds of islanders that seemed threatening. They killed natives by the hundreds and fellow Europeans by the dozens. The examples are found throughout the logs of these voyages, although certain of the voyage leaders were clearly far more violent than others.

In the Mahu and de Cordes expedition that left Holland in 1599, Admiral Simon de Cordes’s nephew, Captain Balthasar De Cordes in 1600 took a Spanish fort in the Americas, killing all the men and enslaving all the European women and children. After using them for immoral purposes, they turned the Spanish captives over to a native tribe as slaves. In the several battles between the Dutch and their native allies at that location, nearly 300 natives were killed.

But they got their comeuppance. Admiral de Cordes and 26 of his men from the ship Loyalty went ashore at La Mocha, and all of them were slaughtered by natives there. One of his other ships, Charity, lost its captain and 23 crew to native attack on one day when they were lured ashore at Cape Santa Maria and attacked by a force of 1,000 natives. When de Cordes’ flagship Loyalty sailed into the Portuguese harbor at Tidore, the Portuguese attacked the crew, dismembering and beheading all but six of them. When the ship left Holland, it had a crew of 130. That’s a survival rate of less than 5 percent.

The Schouten and leMaire expedition that left Holland in 1615 was far less violent but had its moments as well. One of its two ships burned up on shore while crews were trying to burn seaweed off the hull. There were numerous confrontations between the sailors and natives, and it generally came off worse for the natives, who fought with spears and clubs against muskets and cannons. This voyage ended with the confiscation by the Dutch East India Company, the UEIC, of the ship, all its gear and all the expedition’s papers.

A century later, Jacob Roggeveen sailed into history, leaving Holland in 1721. He would discover Easter Island, where one of his crew’s first acts on landing ashore was the slaughter a dozen or so islanders—apparently because they had begun grabbing at sailors’ clothing and weapons. One of Roggeveen’s ships wrecked on the island of Takapoto, and five crew members deserted there, preferring life among the palms and coral reefs to misery and possible death aboard the Dutch ships. Of the 223 men who had left Holland on Roggeveen’s expedition, 74 survived to see both ships and all their cargo confiscated by the UEIC.

But another big piece of this story is the ferocious power of government-supported economic monopolies. In each case, these three expeditions crossed the Pacific after taking a route not controlled by the Dutch East India Company, the UEIC. But in each case, when the surviving ships reached the Indies, the powerful company treated them brutally, confiscating their ships, jailing captains and distributing crews to other ships.

There were other great Dutch voyages of discovery, like that of Tasman, who discovered Australia, New Zealand and other West Pacific lands. He operated with the support of the East India Company. So did Joris van Spilberghen, whose 1614-1617 circumnavigation looted Spanish interests along the Pacific coast of South America, but also did so with government support. We won’t cover those voyages here.

Two of the great side stories from the Mahu and de Cordes voyage involve the Dutch discovery in the year 1600 of the Hawaiian Islands and the Dutch entry into Japan—a story made famous in James Clavell’s 1975 book Shogun, and the subsequent TV miniseries by the same name, which fictionalized the true story of William Adams, the English pilot aboard the Mahu and de Cordes ship Charity. Adams became a friend of the military ruler of Japan, but although he was allowed to write to his wife back home, he never was allowed to leave Japan.

The British Captain James Cook is widely credited with discovering the Hawaiian Islands in 1778. There are at least three things wrong with that perception.

First, of course, is that the islands were already inhabited. The archipelago was actually discovered by intrepid Polynesian navigators and according to robust oral tradition, had been the subject of numerous regular back-and-forth sailing visits by Polynesians from the South Pacific. There is actually some evidence that there were two major waves of Polynesian immigration, the first one around 800 years before Cook, and another a couple of hundred years later, led by a navigator priest named Pa`ao.

Second, the Pacific had been a Spanish ocean long before Cook showed up. Magellan crossed the Pacific in 1521. Spanish ships had been carrying gold from Spanish colonies around Acapulco to Spanish holdings in Manila since the mid 1500s. Spanish sailor Juan Gaetano produced a chart after a 1555 voyage that showed an island chain at a location somewhat off Hawaiian coordinates, but within a few hundred miles to the east. They could have been nothing else than the Hawaiian Islands, as there is no other high island group within 1,000 miles of the Hawaiian high islands in any direction. There is no hard evidence that any of the Spaniards on Gaetano’s trip went ashore.

And third, there is the Dutch discovery. Two disease-stricken Dutch ships, tattered remnants of an expedition that had started with five ships, were trying to get across the Pacific and eventually home. They estimated they were at 16 degrees north, nearly 1,000 miles north of the equator, when on a day in February of 1600 they spotted islands. It had to be Hawai`i, as there are no other islands anywhere near that location. The southernmost point of the largest Hawaiian island is about 1,200 miles north of the equator at 19 degrees north.

Eight Dutch sailors stole a ship’s boat from the Charity and went ashore. The Dutch expedition leaders assumed they would have been killed, but three centuries later, the missionary William Ellis recorded a story of a painted boat filled with men dressed in white and yellow, one of them carrying a sword. And he reported that they were welcomed, married Hawaiian women and were treated as chiefs.

Unlike Gaetano before them and unlike Cook after them, the Dutch voyagers actually left settlers in the Hawaiian Islands.

In all, the Dutch made some of the major European discoveries in the Pacific, but always of islands previously occupied by Polynesians and other aboriginal peoples. The discoveries included Hawai`i in 1600, Australia in 1606, Tonga and the Bismarck Archipelago in 1616, New Zealand, Fiji and Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land) in 1642 and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and Samoa in 1722. There were discoveries, too, of individuals islands of the Tuamotu group and elsewhere.

Other major explorations in the Pacific were accomplished by the Portuguese and Spanish before the Dutch, and the British and Russians after them.

PROLOGUE

Many nations with voyaging traditions sent landlubbers to sea. Often they were captured in bars and on dark streets along the waterfront or elsewhere in river towns, and taught to sail with on-the-job training. The ships that sent out the press gangs in Holland had a decided advantage, because of the small nation's seafaring tradition. The small Dutch towns along the North Sea provided Dutch explorers with expert seamen. They were the North Sea fishermen who ran their craft off the broad sand beaches that line the Dutch ocean coast. All the activity in these towns depended on the sea.

One example is the village of Egmond-aan-zee, Egmond-on-the-sea, nestled among the rolling sand dunes of the coast of North Holland. A fleet of big wooden fishing boats was hauled up on its beach. The streets were of sand, and horses strained to pull wagons through sandy ruts. Boys with baskets collected horse manure from the road, and it was used as a soil additive in villagers' sandy soil gardens.

The rich families of Egmond lived in simple, well-built houses. The rest of the some 300 homes were tiny, wooden huts with steep straw roofs.

In Holland, Egmond-aan-zee was an isolated town. It faced the sea, not the land. But if it seemed only marginally a part of Holland, it was very much a part of the world. Many of its fishermen had visited far-off countries that the inlanders never saw.

Egmond in 1599 was a fishing town like many Dutch coastal fishing towns. While the boats worked the open sea, those still ashore went about the business of supporting the fishery. When the fishing boats returned heavy with a catch, the slippery cargo was generally was smoked. Acrid fumes from the fish-smoking sheds lay oppressively over the village on windless days. Children, women and old men worked in large sheds to repair fishing nets and gear. The wide barn doors were propped open, and shutters were swung away from paneless windows.

The Egmond fishing fleet consisted of 50 craft. The boats had flat bottoms so they could be dragged up on the beach. The skippers would navigate them into the coastal shallows. They would throw a line to teams of horses that hauled the boats ashore. In stormy winter weather, when the boats needed to be pulled much higher on the beach, villagers would step up and take lines alongside the horses to pull the heavy craft out of danger.

The Egmond fishermen used cod lines and trawl nets. They fished primarily for herring, but sometimes for the Greenland whales.

As the fishing boats sailed the North Sea waters, shell fishermen worked in the shallows. Their horse-drawn two-wheeled carts stood in the water. The men laboriously pulled shell nets, attached to long poles, through the waist-deep water. When the nets were full, the men would empty them into the carts. And when a cart was full, the owner would drive the horse up through the sand to the main street. Their load of shells would end up in the lime kilns of Egmond Manor, a town just inland of Egmond-aan-zee.

Shrimp were collected in the shallows, too. Shrimp fishermen used a net to scoop up the shrimp, and tossed their catch into baskets they wore on their backs. The shrimp were boiled. Sometimes pieces of rusty iron were added to the boiling pot to give the catch a redder color. It added to the price when the cooked shrimp were sold in the bustling inland town of Alkmaar.

When enough of the fishing smacks had returned with their catches, the town crier would beat a cymbal with a wooden bat to announce the beginning of the fish auction. The bidding took place on the sand. When a boat's haul was sold, the catch was loaded into reed packs and carried to the main street. There, it was transferred to dog carts.

The heavy work of the normal day seldom was nearly constant but there was a respite during the two-day Kermes, a fair during which the poor folk could make merry at no great expense.

Tables were set up along the main street. There was plenty of brandywine and beer. In the Pump Square, local women sold homemade sweets and snacks, and vendors from larger towns sold more exotic foods and trinkets, Bagpipe and flute music was accompanied by foot stomping and dancing of the steps of the Scottish-three. A minstrel sang sea ballads to the accompaniment of a belly-organ. There were sporting competitions. In one of them, men being driven at full speed in shell-fishermens' carts would try to spear small rings. Sometimes a Bohemian would perform with a dancing bear.

Life in the fishing towns was a hard one despite these diversions. Many a sailor pulled off a woolen cap to display misformed or missing ears, lost to frostbite on whaling expeditions. Others had shortened limbs, from improperly set bone breaks, or missing limbs, amputated to cut away gangrenous tissue.

And many died. The North Sea is a harsh sea. Each night during the cold Egmond winters, the town lit beacons in steel firebaskets raised on masts at the north end of town. All the coastal towns did. But in spite of these warnings, boats were lost. On stormy nights, when the North Sea beat itself into a foaming frenzy against the coastal dunes, crews unlucky enough to still be at sea often foundered. Their ships struck on coastal shoals and washed ashore holed or in pieces. Often enough, the crews perished from hypothermia or drowning long before reaching land.

In the face of all that and perhaps because of the harsh conditions at home, expeditions to the Indies had attraction for many. For some fishermen, a voyage of discovery to exotic lands and warm southern seas must have seemed too good to be true. Some expeditions went well, but many sailors who went out on the big voyaging ships would not return. In an age of poor navigation and questionable charts, they ended up on lost ships sailing uncharted seas until the crews perished aboard or the ships went down.

BOOK ONE

EARLY VOYAGES

Life was never easy in the Low Countries during the 80 years war with Spain. It was particularly difficult for the merchant leMaire clan. Isaac leMaire's early years were spent in Hainant in the south of Flanders. They were there because their home town, Tournay, was in the control of the Spanish army under Parma. The Spanish rulers were Roman Catholic, while the leMaires were followers of the Reformation. One leMaire son aspired to the ministry. That didn't help matters under Spanish Catholic rule.

The family moved to Antwerp, where Isaac married his Maria, who was to bear him 22 children. The expanding power of Spain swept into that part of the country, and when Spain took Antwerp in 1585, the leMaires moved on. Their next stop was Amsterdam, a growing town with a network of canals that promoted commerce. LeMaire's three brothers eventually joined him in Amsterdam. They operated independently, but cooperated and supported one another. The translocation was a logical move for the family. LeMaire had already been doing business with Amsterdam, so he had contacts.

Isaac's first son, Jacob, was born in Amsterdam a year after the marriage, and his business began to prosper. The family reputation was that of shrewd businessmen who were not to be crossed. In some corners, they were feared for their aggressive pursuit of profit and power. They suffered from being considered outsiders and became accustomed to fighting for their own interests. Within a decade, Isaac leMaire was one of the most successful merchants in the city.

Isaac in some ways flaunted his separateness. He was not a large man, but he made himself noticed with a French flair for dress and grooming. He spoke fluent French, but his Dutch was accented with country Flemish, a dialect quite different from that of the citified Amsterdamers. He knew this, and instead of attempting to overcome it, he chose to speak primarily French, and to do his Dutch language communication in writing.

While people were wary of him, his fellow businessmen recognized and respected leMaire's business sense. Before the 80 Years War, the Lowlands traded primarily along the coast of western Europe, England and the