Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [180]
The growth of Amsterdam Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998), pp. 114–6, 328–32; Geoffrey Cotterell, Amsterdam: The Life of a City (Farnborough: DC Heath, 1973), pp. 18–24. Another problem was the boggy ground, which meant that each new house within the city walls could only be constructed on foundations made of 42-foot wooden piles, each of which had to be driven to the bottom of the marsh by hand. A huge number of piles were required; the royal palace on the Dam itself rests on 13,659 of them. See William Brereton, Travels in Holland, the United Provinces etc. . . . 1634–1635 (London: Chetham Society, 1844), p. 66. The inaccessibility of Amsterdam explains why, for all its enormous commercial success in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Rotterdam is now the principal Dutch port.
Development of Dutch trade Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 6–17, 45–8. There were other factors, the most important of which may have been the protracted blockade of Antwerp instituted by the United Provinces in the 1570s. Dutch warships intercepted shipping all along the coast and halted river traffic to the city. After 1584 the main land approaches also fell into rebel hands, reducing the city’s trade enormously and contributing to the further growth of Amsterdam.
The spice road Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping, I, pp. 2, 189–92; Bernard Vlekke, The Story of the Dutch East Indies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946), pp. 57–62; Glamann, op. cit., pp. 13, 16–17, 74–5; Giles Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One Man’s Courage Changed the Course of History (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999), pp. 3–4.
Population of cities London, with a population of about 230,000, Paris, with approximately 300,000, and Madrid, whose population was somewhere in between, were considerably bigger; Paris was comfortably the largest city in Europe throughout the seventeenth century. The only other European cities with a population comparable to Amsterdam were Lyons, Naples, and Rome. Antwerp’s population halved as a result of the Revolt, and a large proportion of the 40,000 or so people who left the city made for the towns of the United Provinces. The Dutch Republic was in fact by far the most heavily urbanized country in Europe in Cornelisz’s time; by 1600, one Dutchman in four lived in a town with more than 10,000 inhabitants, while the comparable figure in England was only 1 in 10. Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 115, 219.
Spain and Portugal in the East Determining exactly where the boundary between Spanish and Portuguese interests fell on the far side of the world was no easy matter in an age where there was no reliable way of measuring longitude while at sea. There were several disputes between the powers before the Spanish king sold his claim to the Spiceries to Portugal for the sum of 350,000 ducats in 1529. For Francis Xavier’s views, see Vlekke, op cit., p. 62.
Jan Huyghen van Linschoten Throughout his stay in the Indies, van Linschoten, who had a lively and curious mind, had made it his business to gather information about Portugal’s colonies in the East. He appears to have come across the rutters during his sojourn in the Azores. Charles Parr, Jan van Linschoten: The Dutch Marco Polo (New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell, 1964), pp. xvi–xvii, 6, 19, 33, 45–8, 80, 176, 180, 189. It was, incidentally, on Van Linschoten’s recommendation that the Dutch concentrated their efforts on the island of Java, where there were no Portuguese trading posts.
Reinier Pauw Israel, The Dutch