Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

convene in Amsterdam; the following two it would convene in Middelburg. Any issues on which
the general meeting could not reach a decision would be referred to the States General. 19 Nearly
identical language can be found in the charter of the VOC.
At the same time, however, there were important differences between the two charters.
First, as a corrective to perceived problems in the VOC, provisions were included in the draft
WIC charter to give the chief investors more power in company management and more access to
the company’s financial accounts. 20 Second, to offset the perceived risk of confronting Spain in
the New World, the draft WIC charter included considerable public support: the States General
would provide direct military assistance in the form of sixteen warships, a one-time subsidy of
one million guilders to be paid over five years, and an annual subsidy thereafter of an additional
200,000 guilders. As Albert Meijer has pointed out, this arrangement represented the culmination
of negotiations in which the States General’s contribution to the company rose steadily—a fact
that provides strong evidence both for the importance that that body attached to the new
company and the initial opposition it faced persuading merchants and other potential investors to
participate. 21
Almost as soon as the these terms had been agreed upon, however, the entire enterprise
was shelved in accordance with the terms of a peace agreement with Spain, negotiations for
which began the following year, in 1607. This meant that a number of important issues in the
1606 draft were never resolved. One of these concerned the thorny question of whether the chief
investors or city magistrates would select the company's directors. Even more significant for our
purposes, however, was the question of who would serve as the seventeenth delegate at the
19 Articles 23, 24, 25, 27 in Ibid., 56-57.
20 Meijer, Liefhebbers des Vaderlands ende Beminders van de Commercie, 33.
21 Meijer indicates that the States General's contribution rose from an initially vague promise of "support," to the
sum of 600,000 guilders and then, finally, to 16 warships plus 1,000,000 guilders. Ibid., 54.
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