First Dutch Voyage to the East Indies (1595-1597): de Houtman

The first Dutch voyage to the East Indies, led by Cornelis de Houtman between 1595 and 1597, opened the way for Dutch trade and later colonial power in Asia. Four ships sailed from the Netherlands in April 1595 and reached Banten in western Java in June 1596, guided by navigational knowledge obtained from the Portuguese. The voyage was badly managed and cost most of the crew their lives, but its return in August 1597 set off a rush of Dutch expeditions that led to the founding of the VOC in 1602.

Background

For most of the 16th century Europe’s spices from Asia reached the Netherlands through Lisbon, where Dutch merchants bought pepper, cloves and nutmeg brought by the Portuguese since Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India. The northern provinces of the Netherlands were then fighting for independence from Spain in the Dutch Revolt.

In 1580 Philip II of Spain also became king of Portugal. Dutch access to the spice trade through Lisbon became uncertain, and Dutch merchants began to consider sailing to Asia themselves. Their problem was knowledge: the Portuguese guarded their charts and sailing directions as state secrets.

Stolen knowledge

Dutch merchants overcame this by gathering Portuguese information. Cornelis de Houtman, a merchant from Gouda, and his brother Frederick were sent to Lisbon in the early 1590s to collect intelligence on the trade. The Amsterdam preacher and cartographer Petrus Plancius obtained Portuguese charts and produced maps and navigational instruction for the voyage.

Above all, Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, a Dutchman who had served the Archbishop of Goa in India for several years, published detailed descriptions of the Portuguese routes and of Asian trade. His sailing directions appeared in 1595 and his larger work, the Itinerario, in 1596. They became essential guides for Dutch and English ships.

The voyage out

In 1594 nine Amsterdam merchants founded the Compagnie van Verre, the “Company of Far Lands”, to finance the expedition. It fitted out four ships: the Mauritius, the Hollandia, the Amsterdam and a small pinnace, the Duyfken, with about 249 men. Cornelis de Houtman sailed as chief merchant, with real authority shared with a ship’s council.

The fleet left Texel on 2 April 1595. It sailed around the Cape of Good Hope but lost many men to scurvy. A long stay in Madagascar to recover was disastrous: disease continued, and dozens died. The ships then crossed the Indian Ocean, passing south of Sumatra, and reached Banten, the main pepper port of western Java, in late June 1596.

Trouble at Banten and Java

Banten was a busy international port where Chinese, Gujarati, Arab and Portuguese merchants traded. The Dutch were at first welcomed, but de Houtman’s arrogant behaviour, quarrels over prices and Portuguese influence at the court soured relations. De Houtman and several others were detained and released only after a ransom was paid. The Dutch then fired on the town before leaving.

The fleet sailed east along the north coast of Java. Further violent incidents followed: at Sidayu, Javanese attackers boarded the ships and killed a number of crew, and the Dutch bombarded and raided coastal settlements. With too few men left to sail all the ships, the crew burned the Amsterdam in January 1597.

The remaining ships reached Bali in February 1597, where they were well received; two sailors chose to stay on the island. Unable to reach the Moluccas, the source of cloves and nutmeg, the fleet headed home.

Return and results

Three ships reached Texel on 14 August 1597. Of the roughly 249 men who had sailed, only about 87 to 89 came back. The cargo, mostly pepper, was smaller than hoped, and historians generally judge the voyage to have made little or no profit after costs.

The returning sailors also brought back a wealth of information. Accounts of the voyage, illustrated with engravings of Banten’s harbour, markets, merchants and ships, were published in 1597 and 1598 and sold widely. Frederick de Houtman’s observations of southern stars were used by Plancius, and the stars he and the navigator Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser recorded contributed to twelve new southern constellations that still appear on star charts today.

Despite its losses, the expedition was seen as a success in principle. It showed that Dutch ships could reach the spice-producing islands and trade there directly, bypassing Lisbon. In 1598 Dutch companies sent out 22 ships in five fleets. The second voyage, under Jacob van Neck, returned in 1599 with a rich cargo and very large profits.

Key people

• Cornelis de Houtman (1565–1599): merchant from Gouda and chief merchant of the expedition. Contemporaries and historians alike have criticised his quarrelsome and high-handed leadership.
• Frederick de Houtman (1571–1627): Cornelis’s younger brother, who made astronomical observations of the southern sky during the voyage that helped define new constellations, and later compiled a Malay word list.
• Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (1563–1611): traveller and writer whose books on Portuguese Asia guided the voyage.
• Petrus Plancius (1552–1622): Amsterdam minister, cartographer and adviser to the merchants, who supplied charts and navigational instruction.

Myths and facts

Myth: the voyage was a commercial triumph. It returned with a modest cargo and lost more than half its men. Its importance lay in proving the route and the opportunity, not in its profits, which were the work of the expeditions that followed.

Myth: the Dutch discovered a new route. De Houtman followed the Portuguese route around the Cape of Good Hope, with the help of Portuguese information. A genuinely new and faster Dutch route, sailing east with the strong westerly winds of the southern Indian Ocean before turning north, was introduced by Hendrik Brouwer in 1611.

Fact: violence marked the first contact. The clashes at Banten and along the Java coast set a pattern of armed trade that became characteristic of Dutch activity in Asia in the following decades.

Consequences

The many competing “pre-companies” in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Zeeland and elsewhere drove up prices in Asia and down in Europe. To end this rivalry and strengthen the fight against Spain and Portugal, the States General merged them in 1602 into the Dutch East India Company (VOC), with a monopoly of Dutch trade in Asia. England had founded its own East India Company in 1600.

Cornelis de Houtman sailed again in 1598 on an expedition to Aceh in northern Sumatra. A conflict with the sultan’s forces broke out, and de Houtman was killed there in September 1599. His brother Frederick was imprisoned for about two years, during which he compiled one of the first Dutch-Malay dictionaries.

Timeline

• 1592: Cornelis de Houtman is in Lisbon gathering information on the spice trade.
• 1594: The Compagnie van Verre is founded in Amsterdam.
• 1595, 2 April: Four ships under de Houtman leave Texel.
• 1595–1596: The fleet loses many men to scurvy during a long stay in Madagascar.
• 1596, June: The fleet arrives at Banten in western Java.
• 1597, January: The Amsterdam is burned for lack of crew.
• 1597, 14 August: Three ships return to Texel with fewer than 90 men.
• 1602: Rival Dutch companies are merged into the VOC.

Why it matters

De Houtman’s voyage began to break the Portuguese hold on the sea route to the East Indies and began nearly 350 years of Dutch commercial and colonial presence in Indonesia. Its mixture of daring, stolen knowledge, poor leadership and violence foreshadowed much of the European expansion that followed in Asia.