Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

Recife in early May of 1646. It was an inauspicious beginning for a government that would
hobble along for almost eight years, until the colony was definitively relinquished to Portugal.
The council that had taken more than two years to build, and another six months to cajole and
deploy, arrived late and was incapable of restoring order. When Schonenborch, Haecxs, Van
Goch, and Van Beaumont returned to the Republic with the last remaining Dutch soldiers in
January of 1654 they faced both public scorn and the threat of legal prosecution. 105
Many scholars have linked the failure of a Dutch empire in the Atlantic to the Republic's
problems finding sufficient colonists to settle in the Americas. 106 The same might be said of its
problems recruiting colonial administrators. The problem—at least in 1645—was not only that
the company had become overstretched by its various colonial responsibilities, but that the Dutch
elite could not reach agreement on the individuals appropriate to govern an extensive land
colony. Senior members of the magistracy were simply not interested in the post of President in
Brazil, preferring instead to avoid the risks associated with life and military service in the
colonies and to remain closer to the centers of power at home. 107 Members of the Dutch
nobility—at least some of whom believed themselves to be uniquely qualified to serve as
colonial officials—refused to work “in the service of merchants.” In Alexander van der
Capellen's view, the solution lay in greater centralization of colonial affairs and the
subordination of merchant interests to those of the States General. But neither he nor the other
noblemen around the Prince of Orange and the States General were powerful enough to enforce
this view. The company's directors, meanwhile, were eager to more carefully hem-in the
activities of colonial officials and, above all, to save money. Those merchants who traded
105
Trouwers died shortly after arriving in Brazil. See Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 266.
106
See, for example, Pieter C. Emmer and Wim Klooster, “The Dutch Atlantic, 1600-1800: Expansion Without
Empire,” Itinerario 23 (1999): 48-69.
107
Jaap Jacobs, “Incompetente Autocraten? Bestuurlijke Verhouding in de Zeventiende-eeuwse Nederlandse
Atlantische Wereld,” De Zeventiende Eeuw 21, no. 1 (2005): 64–78.
169