ABSTRACT
Philip II was faced with an uprising in the Low Countries, or Netherlands, a region he had inherited from his father, the former Emperor Charles V. Militantly Protestant Hollanders, among them the so-called Sea Beggars, were actively harassing the Spanish and others in the early 1570s; after 1580, the year that Philip added Portugal to the united kingdoms of Spain, a number of Low Country provinces had declared themselves independent of Hapsburg rule. The Dutch would continue to fight Spain and Portugal, both at home and abroad, until the Peace of Munster (Westphalia) in 1648. Thus, though most of the Dutch depredations on Luso-Hispanic shipping and settlements in the West Indies were called "piracy" by Philip II and his successors, in truth they were an outgrowth of a generalized state of war and rebellion. What came to be known afterward as the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) was, like Elizabeth's war with Spain, an on-again, off-again affair, and by no means always "on." Similar also was the method of
fighting "beyond the line" by means of privately financed ventures aimed at trade, plunder, or settlement, loosely approved by a financially weak central government. After the tum of the seventeenth century, Dutch privateering, or piracy, was a business, but it was also almost universally affiliated with one or both of the great Dutch trading corporations of the early modem period, the East India Company (or VOC, after its Dutch acronym, chartered in 1602) and the West India Company (established in 1621). Dutch sea-rovers, as will be seen, would pose the first serious threat to Spanish and Portuguese sovereignty in the Americas, capturing northeastern Brazil in 1630 and attempting to plant colonies in Chile by 1642. In the Caribbean the Dutch capped years of piracy and contrabanding with the capture of the New Spain treasure fleet off the north coast of Cuba in 1628, and followed with the establishment of permanent colonies at Cura<;ao (1634) and other minor islands, and Suriname, on the Wild Coast of South America.
