Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

notes on these documents, suggest that we should count him among the advocates for lifting the
company’s monopoly on the slave trade. 52
Specx devoted little attention to calculations for the region around the River Gambia,
recording only that expenses of 125,000 guilders, mostly for trade goods and ships, were
rewarded with revenues of 200,000 guilders, for a tidy profit of 75,000 guilders. 53 But he paid
much closer attention to the island of São Tomé, the company's most recent conquest and a trade
hub within the South Atlantic. 54 A major producer of sugar under the Portuguese throughout the
sixteenth century, by this time the island was becoming a transit point for slaves. Unlike the
other regions, Specx calculated the costs of the trade in terms of slaves, cotton, and gold, all of
which could be exchanged for sugar. By trading goods valued at 94,060 guilders, plus expenses
of 73,600 guilders for 220 soldiers and support personnel, he expected the company to take away
541,200 guilders worth of sugar. 55
This was already the highest rate of profit of any of the conquest areas, and Specx
believed it could be made even more profitable by planting indigo, tobacco, and East Indian
pepper. Even more important, though—and perhaps drawing on his experience with the VOC,
which had supplemented both its income and its access to silver by facilitating the vast and
profitable intra-Asia trade—he imagined that São Tomé might one day serve as a staple-market
for all of West Africa. 56
The accumulated annual profits from all five conquests amounted to just less than 3
million guilders. Against this figure Specx counted the company's overhead in the Netherlands,
52 NA 1.10.78, inv.nr. 8, fols. 123-127, fol. 186, fols. 187-190.
53 Ibid., fols. 118v and 119.
54 Den Heijer, Goud, Ivoor en Slaven. See also Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of
the Atlantic World, 1450-1680 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
55 NA 1.10.78, inv.nr. 8, fols. 118v-119v.
56 Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika 1600-1650; Gaastra, The Dutch East India Company.
238