The return of Houtman's expedition was the signal for a great outburst of commercial enterprise in the Low Countries, seekers after fortune or adventure flocking to the Indies as, centuries later, other fortune-seekers, other adventurers, flocked to the gold-diggings of the Sierras, the Yukon, and the Rand. On those distant seas, however, the adventurers were beyond the reach of any law, the same lawless conditions prevailing in the Indies at the beginning of the seventeenth century which characterized Californian life in the days of '49. The Dutch warred on the natives and on the Portuguese, and, when there was no one else to offer them resistance, they fought among themselves. By 1602 conditions had become so intolerable that the government of Holland, in order to tranquillize the Indies, and to stabilize the spice market at home, decided to amalgamate the various trading enterprises into one great corporation, the Dutch East India Company, which was authorized to exercise the functions of government in those remote seas and to prosecute the war against Spain. When Philip shut the Dutch out of Lisbon, he made a formidable enemy for himself, for, though the burghers went to the East primarily in order to save their commerce from extinction, they were animated in a scarcely less degree by a determination to even their score with Spain.
The history of the Dutch East India Company is not a savory one. It was a powerful instrument for extracting the wealth of the Indies, and, so long as the wealth was forthcoming, the stockholders at home in Holland did not inquire too closely as to how the instrument was used. The story of the company from its formation in 1602 until its dissolution nearly two centuries later is a record of intrigue, cruelty and oppression. It exercised virtually sovereign powers. It made and enforced its own laws, it maintained its own fleet and army, it negotiated treaties with Japan and China, it dethroned sultans and rajahs, it established trading-posts and factories at the Cape of Good Hope, in the Persian Gulf, on the coasts of Malabar and Coromandel, and in Bengal; it waged war against the Portuguese, the Spaniards and the English in turn. When at the summit of its power, in 1669, the company possessed forty warships and one hundred and fifty merchantmen, maintained an army of ten thousand men, and paid a forty per cent dividend.