Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

African coast for the explicit purpose of trade until the mid-1630s, almost two centuries after
Portugal, and 80 years after Sir Richard Hawkins’ journeys in the mid-sixteenth century. 131
Scholars have disputed whether this reflected a moral aversion to the slave trade or was
simply the result of economic considerations. Cornelis Goslinga, for example, pointed to
evidence of popular opposition to slavery. In 1596, when Dutch privateers seized a Portuguese
ship carrying 130 slaves and tried to sell them in Middelburg, the city’s mayor refused the ship
entry on the grounds that Africans “could not be kept by anyone as slaves and sold as such, but
had to be put in their natural freedom without anyone pretending [to have] rights to them as his
property.” 132 Later, in 1623, the question of slavery was referred to a committee in the Heren
XIX that included, among others, Killaen van Rensselaer. This committee advised that, “it
appears this trade ought not to be practiced by Christians.” 133 At almost precisely the same time,
however, the directors of the VOC reached agreement on a code to regulate the treatment of
slaves in Asia and Hugo Grotius published his famous defense of slavery in De Juri Belli et
Pacis. 134 Having assessed the available evidence, Ernst van den Boogaart and Pieter Emmer
conclude that doubts over the morality of the Atlantic slave trade persisted, but that they were
hardly universal and that economic considerations—especially the lack at this time of a viable
market for slaves in the New World—played at least an equal, if not a more important, role. 135
This began to change when the territory under the company's control expanded and
officials in Brazil, Guyana, the Antilles, and the newly captured island of Curaçao began
131 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery; Harry Kelsey, Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
132 Cited in Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast 1580-1680, 341. See also Unger, “Essay
on the History of the Dutch Slave Trade,” 48.
133 NA 1.05.01.01, inv.nr. 1, entry for July 24, 1623. See also Cited in Van den Boogaart and Emmer, “The Dutch
Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1596-1650,” 356.
134 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 190, 194.
135 Van den Boogaart and Emmer, “The Dutch Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1596-1650,” 355–357.
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