On the nineteenth of July, after an absence of only one year and two months, the first part of Van Neck's fleet returned safely to Holland. The cargo was unloaded, and was sold on the Amsterdam exchange. After the full cost of the expedition had been paid, each of the shareholders received a profit of just one hundred per cent. Van Neck, who had established the first Dutch settlement in the Indies, was given a public reception by his good city and was marched in state to the town hall.
[CHAPTER VI]
VAN NOORT CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD
Oliver van Noort was the first Hollander to sail around the world. Incidentally, he was the fourth navigator to succeed in this dangerous enterprise since in the year 1520 the little ships of Magellan had accomplished the feat of circumnavigating the globe. Of the hero of this memorable Dutch voyage we know almost nothing. He was a modest man, and except for a few lines of personal introduction which appear in the printed story of his voyage, which was published in Rotterdam, his home town, in the year 1620, in which he tells us that he had made many trips to different parts of the world, his life to us is a complete mystery.
Olivier van Noort.
He was not, like Jacob van Heemskerk and Van Neck, a man of education; neither was he of very low origin. He had picked up a good deal of learning at the common schools. Very likely he had been the mate or perhaps the captain of some small schooner, had made a little money, and then had retired from the sea. Spending one's days on board a ship in the latter half of the sixteenth century was no pleasure. The ships were small. The cabins were uncomfortable, and so low that nowhere one could stand up straight. Cooking had to be done on a very primitive stove, which could not always be used when the weather was bad. The middle part of the deck was apt to be flooded most of the time, and the flat-bottomed ships rolled and pitched horribly. Therefore, as soon as a man had made a little competency as the master of a small craft he was apt to look for some quiet occupation on shore. He had not learned a regular trade which he could use on shore. Very often, therefore, he opened a small hotel or an inn or just an ale-house where he could tell yarns about whales and wild men and queer countries which he had seen in the course of his peregrinations. And when the evening came and the tired citizen wanted to smoke a comfortable pipe and discuss the politics of the pope, the emperor, kings, dukes, bishops and their Mightinesses, his own aldermen, he liked to do so under the guidance of a man who knew what was what in the world and who could compare the stadholder's victories over the Spaniards with those which King Wunga Wunga of Mozambique had gained over his Hottentot neighbors, and who knew that the wine of Oporto sold in Havana for less than the vinegar from Dantsic and the salted fish from Archangel.
Therefore we are not surprised when in the year 1595 we find Oliver van Noort described as the owner of the "Double White Keys," an ale-house in the town of Rotterdam. He might have finished his days there in peace and prosperity, but when Houtman returned from his first voyage and the craze for the riches of the Indies, or at least a share thereof, struck the town of Rotterdam, Van Noort, together with everybody else who could borrow a few pennies, began to think of new ways of reaching the marvelous island of Java, made of gold and jewels and the even more valuable pepper and nutmeg. Van Noort himself possessed some money and the rest he obtained from several of his best customers. With this small sum he founded a trading company of his own. He petitioned the estates general of the republic and the estates of his own province of Holland to assist him in an expedition toward the "Kingdom of Chili, the west coast of America, and if need be, the islands of the Moluccas." To make this important enterprise successful, the estates general were asked to give Van Noort and his trading company freedom of export and import for at least six voyages, and to present it with ten cannon and twelve thousand pounds of gunpowder. He asked for much in the hope of obtaining at least part of what he desired.