Dutch Trade on the Nigerian Coast During the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

merchants of Holland and Zealand first began to send their ships to the Guinea coast in 1593. By the end of the sixteenth century they had established contact with Benin and were trading regularly there to the virtual exclusion of the Portuguese. Twenty years later the factor at Sao Jorge da Mina was complaining that the Dutch had ousted his fellow-countrymen entirely from Benin, Ijebu, the Forcados River and the Cameroons, except in the slave trade which the Dutch had not entered, for they had, as yet, no market for slaves.1 During this early phase of trade with the coastal states of Nigeria they were buying principally ivory and peppers for the European market. 'ln addition they took cotton cloths and the stone beads known as coris from Benin, the Forcados River and Ijebu to barter for gold on the Costa da Mina. Dutch traders scored equal successes elsewhere, with the result that by the end of the second decade of the seventeenth century they had supplanted the Portuguese as the chief European traders on the coast of Guinea and were making enormous profits from the gold and ivory acquired there. They then proceeded to hang an albatross around their necks in the shape of a chartered company the West India Company. Formed in June 1621 avowedly for colonisation and commerce through conquest,2 this company was granted a twenty-four-year monopoly of all Dutch trade with West Africa from the Tropic of Cancer to the Cape of Good Hope. Military and naval backing from the States General of the United Provinces enabled it to begin in fine style with some shrewd blows at the declining Portuguese empire. A foothold secured in Pernambuco in 1630 soon expanded to the dimensions of a colony from which in 1637 an expedition sailed to the conquest of Sao Jorge da Mina and the African slave markets, for these were of highest interest to the Dutch now that they possessed a colony whose economy rested upon sugar plantations. Another fleet launched from the Brazilian base in 1641 seized Luanda and Sao Tome from the Portuguese. But the fortunes of the company rose no higher. A sharp decline in profits from the Guinea trade after 1645 drew the company's teeth, so that the Portuguese were able to retake Sao Tome and Luanda in 1648 and drive the Dutch from Brazil in 1654. By 1674 the West India Company was in such a hopeless financial condition that it had to be wound up and replaced by a second, rather more modest organisation.