Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

testimony to the States of Zeeland, and presumably to the States of Holland and the company as
well. Just eight days after the news first arrived, it was beginning to be subsumed within a larger
story, composed from sources that need not even have traveled to Brazil, but which instead
reflected information shared by sailors, merchants, and others along the ocean transit ways that
linked the Americas, Iberia, and northern Europe. As Woodruff Smith noted, the chartered
companies’ proprietary channels for collecting information offered specific elites a level of detail
and speed that was difficult to rival, but their advantage in the marketplace for information was
short-lived. 50 This meant that the WIC needed not only to craft an appropriate practical response
to the news from Brazil; it needed also to gather and corroborate sources, guard those details that
its directors believed could plausibly be kept secret, and work to shape both the private and
public discourses to support an interpretation of the news that best suited their own political
goals. 51 If the responsibility of the Zeeland chamber had been limited to quickly evaluating and
disseminating the information they had received, this broader political responsibility fell to the
Heren XIX. That body's meeting opened in Middelburg on September 9, 1645. 52
3. The Heren XIX and the Politics of Information
As the host chamber, it was Zeeland's responsibility to draft an agenda, set the date, and send
invitations to the other chambers and to the States General to attend the fall meeting of the Heren
50 Smith, “The Function of Commercial Centers in the Modernization of European Capitalism: Amsterdam as an
Information Exchange in the Seventeenth Century,” 995.
51 By September 4, the Portuguese ambassador at The Hague, Francisco Coutinho, had clearly seen the secret
documents delivered by the company to the States General. Later that fall he would support the publication of letters
by disgruntled company servants in an effort to discredit the company in The Hague. Francisco de Sousa Coutinho,
Correspondência Diplomática de Francisco de Sousa Coutinho Durante a sua Embaixada em Holanda, ed. Edgar
Prestage and Pedro de Azevedo (Coimbra: Impr. da Universidade, 1920). Coutinho to Conde da Vidiguiera,
September 4, 1645. On Coutinho's publishing strategy, see Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624-1654, 178.
52 NA 1.01.07, inv.nr. 12564.17, fol. 1.
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