Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

idealized representation of the relative priority that the company gave to each of the areas under
its control:
The ships which are needed yearly in the conquests of the company are:
in Guinea 4
in Argyn, Cabo Verde, Gambia, and Sierra Leone 4
in São Tomé 2
in Loanda 12
in New Netherland and Curaçao 2
in Brazil 24
48
Subtracting the eighteen ships that the company owned yielded thirty ships to be leased, each of
which would save the company 1,200 guilders per month, for a total of 432,000 guilders per
year. The exact manner in which leasing offered a savings over ownership was not made explicit,
but the importance placed on Brazil and Angola—which together were expected to employ three
quarters of the company's 48 ships—is unmistakable. Equally important is the sense the
document conveys of its authors' groping efforts to identify a workable system to integrate the
flow of people and goods. Although Portugal had pioneered the Triangular Trade a half-century
earlier, the WIC had only entered the slave trade in the mid-1630s, and had yet to develop a
workable formula. 78 Trouwers’ eye for saving money and his familiarity with these complicated
geo-commercial issues made him a perfect candidate to oversee the company's trading interests
as a member of the council in Brazil, the colony at the center of the WIC's Atlantic system.
78 Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (London: Verso, 1997). See also Ernst van den Boogaart and
Pieter Emmer, “The Dutch Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1596-1650.” The company's role in the slave
trade will be discussed in the next chapter.
161