The Dutch–Portuguese War was a global armed conflict involving Dutch forces, in the form of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the Dutch West India Company (GWC), and their allies, against the Iberian Union, and after 1640, the Portuguese Empire. Beginning in 1598, the conflict primarily involved the Dutch companies and fleet invading Portuguese colonies in the Americas, Africa, and the East Indies.
The war can be thought of as an extension of the Eighty Years' War being fought in Europe at the time between Spain and the Netherlands, as Portugal was in a dynastic union with Spain after the War of the Portuguese Succession, for most of the conflict. However, the conflict had little to do with the war in Europe and served mainly as a way for the Dutch to gain an overseas empire and control trade at the cost of the Portuguese. Because of the commodity at the center of the conflict, this war would be nicknamed the Spice War.
Portugal repelled Dutch attempts to secure Brazil, Angola, and Mozambique, but the Dutch disrupted the Portuguese trading networks in Asia, where they captured the Malabar Coast, Ceylon, Malacca, and the Moluccas. In Africa, the Dutch conquered the Gold Coast, Arguin, and Goreé.
Portuguese resentment of Spain, which was perceived as having prioritized its own colonies and neglected the defense of the Portuguese, the weaker member of the union, was a major contributing factor to Portugal shaking off Spanish rule in the Portuguese Restoration War. Moreover, the Portuguese claimed that the Iberian Union was a reason for the attacks on their colonies by the Dutch.
Introduction
The war lasted from 1598 to 1663, and the main participants were the Kingdom of Portugal and the Dutch Republic.
Following the 1580 Iberian Union, Portugal was under Habsburg rule for most of this period, and the Habsburg Philip II of Spain was battling the Dutch Revolt. Prior to the union of the Portuguese and Spanish Crowns, Portuguese merchants used the Low Countries as a base for the sale of their spices in Northern Europe. After the Spaniards gained control of the Portuguese Empire, they declared an embargo on all trade with the rebellious provinces (see Union of Utrecht). In his efforts to subdue the rebelling provinces, Philip II cut off the Netherlands from the spice markets of Lisbon, making it necessary for the Dutch to send their own expeditions to the sources of these commodities and to take control of the Indies spice trade. This followed the capture of Recife in which the Dutch assisted the English in capturing the Portuguese colony.
Like the French and English, the Dutch worked to create a global trade network at the expense of the Iberian kingdoms. The Dutch Empire attacked many territories in Asia under the rule of the Portuguese and Spanish including Formosa, Ceylon, the Philippines, and commercial interests in Japan, Africa (Mina), and South America.
Background
In 1592, during the war with Spain, an English fleet had captured a large Portuguese galleon off the Azores, the Madre de Deus, loaded with 900 tons of merchandise from India and China, worth an estimated half a million pounds (nearly half the size of English treasury at the time). This foretaste of the riches of the East galvanized interest in the region. That same year, Dutch merchants sent Cornelis de Houtman to Lisbon, to gather as much information as he could about the Spice Islands. In 1595, merchant and explorer Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, having traveled widely in the Indian Ocean in the service of the Portuguese, published a travel report in Amsterdam, the "Reys-gheschrift vande navigatien der Portugaloysers in Orienten" ("Report of a journey through the navigations of the Portuguese in the East"). The published report included vast directions on how to navigate ships between Portugal and the East Indies and to Japan. Dutch and British interest fed by new information led to a movement of commercial expansion, and the foundation of the English East India Company in 1600, and Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) in 1602, allowing the entry of chartered companies in the so-called East Indies.
In 1602, the VOC was founded, with the goal of sharing the costs of the exploration of the East Indies and ultimately re-establishing the spice trade, which generated high profits in the new Dutch Republic and other European countries if the spices were bought at source and their supply could be controlled by a monopoly.
The need of founding the VOC arose because, with the war with Spain and Portugal being united to Spain, the trade would now be directed through the southern Low Countries (roughly present-day Belgium), which according to the Union of Arras (or Union of Atrecht) were pledged to the Spanish monarch and were Catholic, as opposed to the Dutch Protestant north. This also meant that the Dutch had lost their most profitable trade partner and their most important source of financing the war against Spain. Additionally, the Dutch would lose their distribution monopoly with France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Northern Europe.
The Portuguese Empire in the Indian Ocean was a traditional thalassocracy that had extended its reach to every major choke point in the ocean. Trade in the area corresponded also to a traditional triangular model whereupon small manufactures would be brought from Europe and traded in Africa for gold and several items, then these would serve to purchase spices in India proper which were then brought back to Europe and traded at immense profit which would be reinvested into ships and troops, to be sent eastwards.
The Portuguese State of India, headquartered in Goa, was a network of key cities which controlled the maritime trade in the Indian Ocean: Sofala was the base for Portuguese operations in East Africa and was supported by Kilwa to better control the Mozambique Channel; from here, the routes took the trade to Goa which was the hub for the rest of the operations and where the India convoy ships out of Europe arrived; from Goa, going northwards, the trade would be protected by the North and Adventurers Fleets all the way to Daman and Diu which oversaw the northern trade and the Gulf of Cambay; while the Fleet of the North escorted merchant ships the Adventurers Fleet would also seek to disrupt the Mecca trade between northern India's Muslims and the Arabian Peninsula; the Diu fleet would then connect the trade to Hormuz which controlled the Persian Gulf routes and interrupted the Basra-Suez trade; southwards from Goa, the Cape Comorin fleet would escort the Goa merchants to Calicut and Cochin on the Malabar Coast and to Ceylon and the connection to the Bay of Bengal; in the Bay of Bengal, the most lucrative trade was on the Coromandel Coast where such settlements as São Tomé of Mylapore and Pulicat served as hubs; it was in the Coromandel and Ceylon settlements where the ships out of the Malacca route often laid anchor because they connected the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea; the Malacca fleet patrolled the Singapore Strait and the routes diverted to Celebes and what is now Indonesia at large in the south, and northwards to China and Japan; China provided silk and china to Macau from where the "Silver Carrack" connected to Japan where several products were exchanged for Japanese silver.
Casus belli
At dawn on 25 February 1603, three ships of the VOC seized the Santa Catarina, a Portuguese galleon. It was such a rich prize that its sale proceeds doubled the capital of the VOC. The legality of keeping the prize was questionable under Dutch statute and the Portuguese demanded the return of their cargo. The scandal led to a public judicial hearing and a wider campaign to sway public (and international) opinion. As a result, Hugo Grotius in The Free Sea (Mare Liberum, published 1609) formulated the new principle that the sea was international territory, against the Portuguese mare clausum policy, and all nations were free to use it for seafaring trade. The "free seas" provided suitable ideological justification for the Dutch to break the Portuguese monopoly through its formidable naval power.
Incursion into the East Indies: Batavia challenges Goa
The Portuguese relied on four strategic bases in the East Indies: Goa, Hormuz, Malacca, and Macau. The first served as the seat of Portuguese viceroys, head of all Portuguese possessions east of the Cape of Good Hope and connected India with Portugal proper; Hormuz was a Portuguese protectorate, and the keystone of the Persian Gulf trade between Persia, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the rest of Asia and Africa. Malacca connected Goa to the Indian Ocean trade via Cape Comorin and Ceylon; and Macau was the hub for the trade routes stretching from the South China Sea to the Sea of Japan and to the Spice Islands, east of New Guinea in Melanesia. The other locations were important but not crucial: including Diu along with Bombay (until the English acquisition). These Indian cities controlled the approaches to the smaller Gulf of Cambay and to the larger Arabian Sea as well.
If both Diu and Hormuz would fall, that would prevent the West Asian markets from being taxed by Portugal, which would deny Lisbon the revenue from the southernmost course of the silk route. It was a lucrative trade but not as essential to the Indian Ocean spice trade network at large.
However, the VOC suffered from the same weakness as Portugal: lack of manpower. Thus, a Spanish-style colonization effort was never feasible and only dominion of the seas would allow it to compete. The Portuguese had a century head start in the region and their empire allowed them access to converted and loyal local populations, which shored up inland, what naval power could not ensure at sea. Hence, the Dutch directed their efforts to the periphery of the Portuguese Empire. Avoiding the Indian coasts, they set up their own headquarters in Southeast Asia, in the city of Batavia (modern-day Jakarta). This put them safely distant from Goa but opportunistically close to Malacca and the sea lanes connecting the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Many battles were fought but the most decisive ones fatally injured the Portuguese Indian empire. The Dutch blockade of Goa between 1604 and 1645 deprived Portuguese India from a safe connection to Lisbon – and Europe – for the remainder of the war.
In 1615, a battle off the coast of Malacca destroyed Portuguese naval power in Southeast Asia. The Portuguese lost their naval supremacy to the Dutch in the crucial route between Goa and Macau. The sieges of Qeshm and Hormuz by the combined forces of Persia and England have largely dislodged the Portuguese from West Asia. The 1639 expulsion of the Jesuits (sakoku) and subsequently the Portuguese, from Nagasaki, also doomed the economic viability of Macau. The siege of Malacca of 1641, after many attempts, delivered the city to the Dutch and their regional allies (including the Sultanate of Johor), crucially breaking the spinal cord between Goa and the Orient.
Portuguese establishments were isolated and prone to being picked off one by one, but nevertheless the Dutch only enjoyed mixed success in doing so. Amboina was captured from the Portuguese in 1605, but an attack on Malacca, the Battle of Cape Rachado, the following year narrowly failed in its objective to provide a more strategically located base in the East Indies with favorable monsoon winds. In 1607 and 1608, the Dutch twice failed to subdue the Portuguese stronghold on the Island of Mozambique, due to the close cooperation between the locals and the Portuguese.
The Dutch found what they were looking for in Batavia, conquered by Jan Pieterszoon Coen in 1619. The city would become the capital of the Dutch East Indies.
For the next forty-four years, the two cities of Goa and Batavia would fight relentlessly, since they stood as the capital of Portuguese India and the VOC's base of operations. With the assistance of the Sultanate of Bijapur the Dutch would even attempt to conquer Goa itself, but Portuguese diplomacy defeated this plan.
In fact, Goa had been under intermittent blockade since 1603. Most of the fighting took place in west India, where the Dutch campaign in Malabar sought to replace the Portuguese monopoly on the spice trade. Dutch and Portuguese fleets faced off for control of the sea lanes as was the case with the action of 30 September 1639, while on mainland India the war involved more and more Indian kingdoms and principalities as the Dutch capitalized on local resentment of Portuguese conquests in the early 16th century.
After the fall of Qeshm and Hormuz to the Persians and English, the Portuguese struck out of their Muscat and Goa bases, which led to a destructive campaign against Persia's coastline and an alliance with Ottoman Basra. Eventually, after a naval battle off Hormuz in 1625, Persia vied for a cease-fire with the Portuguese to be able to reestablish trade and provided Portugal with a trading post in Kong. Together with the reestablished Basra route, this temporarily made up for the loss of Hormuz. The pioneers of the destruction of the Portuguese and Spanish mare clausum doctrine were the Dutch in portions of the East Indies.
In 1624, Fernándo de Silva led a Spanish fleet to sack a Dutch ship near the Siamese shoreline. This enraged King Songtham of Siam, who held the Dutch in great preference and ordered attacks on the Spaniards.