MAURITIUS off Rotterdam.
August 26, 1601

Watercolor 14" x 21"


By 1595 the Dutch fleet was ten times the size of Portugal's, and they were ready to challenge for control of the spice trade. In that year four Dutch ships under the command of Cornelis de Houtman made it to the Spice Islands via the Cape of Good Hope, traded for a fortune in spices, and three of the four ships returned safely to the Netherlands two years later. In 1598, buoyed by Houtman’s success, Dutch merchants sent thirteen ships back around the Cape of Good Hope, and two other expeditions tested the route through the Straits of Magellan. The first fleet of five ships gave up after transiting the straits and returned home. The second fleet of four ships under the command of Oliver Van Noort, fought its way through and tried to imitate Drakes success against the Spanish on the west coast of South America. This expedition found little to plunder and headed west across the Pacific. By this time, 1600 AD, only Van Noort’s ship MAURITIUS and a smaller consort remained of the fleet, and the smaller ship was lost to Spanish galleons in the Phillipines. Bloodied after the battle, and with only a few men left, the MAURITIUS crossed the Indian Ocean, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and arrived back in Amsterdam on August 26, 1601. Van Noort was the first Dutch Navigator to circumnavigate the world, and only the fourth of any nation to do so.

The MAURITIUS is pictured in the English Channel off the entrance to Rotterdam at the time of her arrival on August 26, 1601.