12 - Non-European Enemies and Allies

Summary

The previous chapters on Dutch military action in the Atlantic area focused first and foremost on confrontation with European enemies and cooperation with European allies. They were a determining factor in the success or failure of founding and keeping trading posts and colonies. The military conflicts and wars with European enemies were numerous, but by and large the way in which they were fought was not significantly different from the way armies and navies fought in Europe. In West Africa, actions were usually aimed at winning the largest possible share of the market from European rivals, while in armed conflicts in the Americas colonial possession was at stake.

When European powers came into direct conflict with each other they fought with weapons and tactics that were the norm in Europe. Only the scale of the violence differed, especially on land, usually being less massive than on European battlefields due to the comparatively small numbers of troops involved.

With the non-European enemies or allies who are the focus of this chapter, it was a different matter. In the Atlantic area the Dutch were confronted with a tremendous diversity of indigenous American and African peoples whose reactions were often impossible to predict, especially in the initial phase of the colonisation process. There were clashing (military) cultures and conflicting commercial and territorial interests. This chapter begins with the first economic contacts and early violent confrontations between Europeans and indigenous Americans — or ‘Indians’ as they were referred to in Europe. We shall then see how trading posts evolved into settled colonies in the New World and how a ‘frontier society’ developed. In this early period what explains the dichotomy between intensive trade contacts and increasing hostilities between the Dutch and the indigenous peoples, confrontations that sometimes threatened a colony's very survival? What were the military capabilities of those indigenous enemies and how, given their generally ‘inferior’ weapons, were they sometimes able to prevail over the Europeans, albeit never for long?

Besides indigenous groups, the enslaved workers in plantation colonies who had been transported to the Americas by Europeans posed a significant threat. Most plantation colonies averaged twenty enslaved to every European settler; on the plantations themselves the ratio of slave to slave-owner was even higher. To keep the enslaved population under control, colonists used a divisive system in which brutality was the rule rather than the exception.