1 - The First Military Actions Overseas (1590–1602/1621)

Summary

In the first twenty years of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), the conflict with Spain gradually shifted from the provinces of Holland and Zeeland, the core area of the Dutch Revolt, to the edges of the Northern Netherlands, and the contours of what would become the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands — commonly referred to as the Dutch Republic — emerged. That period saw the creation not only of a strong army that was increasingly able to repel the enemy but also a navy whose operational capability extended far beyond its own coastal waters. With initial help from the English the transition from a defensive to an offensive phase in the war would eventually pave the way for maritime actions against the Spanish and Portuguese outside Europe.

This first chapter examines the key question of how Dutch rebels were able to shift from their initial, essentially defensive stance to a position of strength that enabled them to carry the fight to the Iberians in places far beyond Europe's borders. The involvement of private entrepreneurs in that process was significant and not to be underestimated. The States General lacked the financial resources for large-scale overseas campaigns. If war were to be fought there was no option but to work with merchants and traders whose main motivation was profit. But what did this collaboration of the mercantile and the military look like and what resources did the respective parties deploy?

In Africa, Asia and the Americas the Dutch faced Spanish and Portuguese adversaries whose extensive empire-building had been in progress since the late fifteenth century. In 1580 the Portuguese and Spanish crowns were united in a personal union, bringing the whole of the Iberian peninsula and both countries’ overseas possessions under the control of the Spanish Habsburg monarchs. The Iberian Union thus established between the two great ‘colonial’ powers would last until 1640. We shall see how that Hispano-Lusitanian empire was built and how the Iberians had organised its defence.

From there we move on to look at the combined Anglo-Dutch expeditions to the Iberian peninsula's Atlantic waters, operations that were the prelude to the later Dutch actions in the Atlantic and Asian theatres of trade and war. In the final years of the sixteenth century, several Dutch fleets and squadrons sailed to diverse overseas destinations, setting the stage for later expansion in the East and West.