Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

approve appointments, and coordinate military and diplomatic strategy. 2 The previous meeting,
held in Amsterdam in April and May, had been particularly rancorous, with sharp disagreements
over management of the slave trade and uncertainty over who would be selected to serve as
President of the Hoge Raad (High Council) responsible for governing Dutch Brazil. It was hoped
that the new setting would cool tempers and permit resolution of these and many other pressing
matters. Once the necessary formalities had been exchanged, a copy of the company’s charter
read aloud, the hours set and the fines for tardiness agreed upon, the delegates turned to urgent
correspondence that had arrived only days before from Brazil. What they found would transform
the character and extent of the company’s empire and, with it, the course of Atlantic history. 3
That morning the directors read that Portuguese settlers in Pernambuco, the center of the
Dutch colony in northeastern Brazil, had risen in open revolt. 4 Within a matter of months the
territory under the company’s control—which by the early-1640s had grown to include seven of
the fourteen original Portuguese captaincies—would be reduced to only a handful of coastal
forts. 5 The dispatch of two relief fleets in 1646 and 1647, each including thousands of soldiers,
did not succeed in reclaiming lost ground. In 1649, Andries Bicker (1586-1652), one of
Amsterdam's four burgemeesters (mayors) and an influential voice in the city council, dismissed
any further assistance to the colony: “I don’t suspect anything good can come of it,” he is
2 The translation “Gentlemen Nineteen” is standard in the literature, although some authors have preferred “Lords
Nineteen.” The word “Heer”—literally “Sir”—was used to address property-owning males of non-noble as well as
noble birth. It should not be confused with the more restrictive sense of “gentleman” used to refer to members of the
English gentry.
3 This account is taken from the opening pages of the minutes of the meeting. NA 1.01.07, inv.nr. 12564.17, no. 20,
fols. 1-53. Resolutien van de vergadering van de Heren XIX te Middelburg, 9 September-16 Oktober, 1645.
4 NA 1.05.01.01, inv.nr. 58. The classic account of the revolt remains C. R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624-1654
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957). See also Hermann Wätjen, O Dominio Colonial Hollandez no Brasil: um Capitulo
da Historia Colonial do Seculo XVII, trans. Pedro Celso Uchoa Cavalcanti (São Paulo: Companhia Editora
Nacional, 1938); Evaldo Cabral de Mello, ed., O Brasil holandês, 1630-1654 (São Paulo: Penguin-Companhia,
2010).
5 Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624-1654.
3