Changing the Image of the Southern Pacific:

Abstract

In 1601, Olivier van Noort was the first Dutch explorer to successfully complete the circumnavigation of the world, in the wake of such illustrious adventurers as Magellan, Drake and Cavendish. His success once again reminded English and Iberian rivals that the recently established Dutch Republic had arrived on the colonial scene, where it would play an important role for centuries to come. For his voyage around the world in 1598, Van Noort — like his predecessors — directed his fleet of four vessels in a westerly direction. After traversing the Strait of Magellan, he remained close to the coast of South America before crossing the Pacific in a more or less straight route towards the Philippines. He sailed by the Mariana Islands, and then encountered a hostile Spanish fleet off the coast of Manila that forced him to head south for Bantam. Van Noort’s account, published soon after his return to Rotterdam, only very cursorily reported on his experiences in the Pacific. By the time of the second Dutch circumnavigation, the situation in Asia had changed profoundly. The Dutch East India Company (VOC), established in 1602, enjoyed a monopoly on trade in the area reached by rounding the Cape of Good Hope or by passing through the Strait of Magellan. Potential competitors in the Dutch Republic, like the Amsterdam merchant Isaac Le Maire, could only watch in agony how the statesponsored company made huge profits by cornering the international trade in pepper and spices. In 1614, Le Maire founded his own maritime company, the Australische Compagnie, in order to find a second western route to Asia, one not covered in the patent of the VOC. He financed a small fleet of two ships, the Eendracht and the Hoorn, and appointed his son Jacob Le Maire and the experienced captain Willem Cornelisz Schouten as leaders of the venture. Only the Eendracht (‘Unity’) rounded Cape Horn passing through Le Maire Strait, thus avoiding the Strait of Magellan, and eventually arrived in Batavia where the bullish governor-general Jan Pietersz Coen confiscated its