First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [14]
A tangible element of the expansion overseas was the ships themselves. Through their grain trade with the Baltic countries, the Dutch had better access than their rivals to the timber of the Baltic, giving them a steady supply of the material for making ships. They used a more efficient design, distinct from that of warships, for cargo ships which could be handled by fewer in crew and which, having no guns, could carry a larger cargo and, through the use of standardized parts, were built more cheaply and quickly and in larger numbers than those of other nations. When Peter the Great determined to achieve sea power for Russia, he came to Holland in 1697 to the dry dock at Zaandam between Zuyder Zee and the North Sea to learn about ship-building. At Zaandam a shallow-draft 250-ton cargo ship called a “flute” cost half as much to build as its counterpart in English shipyards. With simplified rigging, a 200-ton ship could be sailed by ten men, whereas in England a ship of the same size needed a crew of twenty or thirty.
In the 17th century, national energies opened into a period of spectacular enrichment of trade and commercial expansion in which Dutch talents and methods led them to excel and acquire the status of a major power. Cash profits from the flow of new products—spices of the East Indies, cotton of India, tea of China, sugar of the West Indies—enabled the Dutch to lend money to their neighbors. Because of their shipping and financial resources, their alliance became valuable.
The phenomenon of their rise, apart from its specifically Dutch elements, took its impulse from the spirit of the age beginning in the latter decades of the 1500s. The doors of the Middle Ages were opening out into new realms of every kind—freedom of thought, information through printing and, physically, to a wider world. Construction of larger ships allowed merchant-mariners to leave the confines of the Mediterranean and the trade of its familiar shores for the products and materials and unknown peoples in distant lands—cotton, sugar, pepper and spices, tea and coffee, silk and porcelains, all coming to Europe to enrich life and enlarge commerce and initiate industry. Europeans burst from their continent, crossed the Atlantic, entered the Pacific, rounded the Cape of Africa, found the East Indies. The Dutch were soon in the forefront. With their engineering skills adapted to ship-building and having no wide acres at home available for purchase to draw their money into landowning, they invested in maritime ventures, usually in partnership which spread the risk and provided greater capital to equip and man the ships and support the long voyages.
After a first exploratory venture in 1595, the second merchant voyage on the long and hazardous journey to the East Indies sailed in 1598 in an argosy of 22 ships, from which, owing to tempest, disease of the crews, hostile privateers and other dangers of the sea encountered en route, only 14 returned. Yet the cargoes of pepper and spices and Indian objects they brought home more than matched the losses, attracting other investors to enter the competition. In 1601, 65 ships—three times as many as took part in the second venture—set out for the same destination, involving so many competitors