of the Dutch government
were determined to keep peace with Spain. Although Holland's great
pioneer of the "freedom of the seas," Hugo Grotius, refers in his
writings to the great plans upon which the Dutch were deliberating at
the time when Captain John Smith sailed for Virginia, no step was taken
in that direction until two years after the founding of Jamestown. The
voyage of Henry Hudson up the river that bears his name, and the
eventual establishment of the colony called Nieuw Amsterdam, did not
conflict with any Spanish interests and opened the eyes of the
enterprising people to other possibilities in the vast new continent.
Before long the ships of the little confederacy were found in many
harbors all along the Atlantic coast. They discovered some little
islands in the West Indies, which the Spaniards had not found worth
while to colonize, because their rocky structure was prohibitive to
cultivation. So they did not hesitate to anchor their ships in the
inlets of these islands and finally made them a center of contraband
traffic with the continent.

The States-General of Holland still hesitated to grant a charter to the
long-projected West India Company. But they found means to open to
private enterprise almost unrestricted facilities for operation. On the
twenty-seventh of March, 1614, they enacted a measure giving private
individuals an exclusive privilege for four successive voyages to any
passage, harbor or country they should hereafter find. This gave a
powerful impetus to the enterprise of Dutch mariners and merchants, and
also to adventurers of divers nationality. Finally on the third of June,
1621, the Dutch West India Company received a charter for twenty-four
years with privilege of renewal, which gave it the right to traffic and
plant colonies on the coast of America from the Straits of Magellan to
the extreme north. The ships of the company immediately adopted the
policy of reprisals on Spanish commerce. In the expedition of Pit Hein
in 1628, which has been narrated in the previous chapter, the privateers
of the company secured booty eighty times more in value than all their
own exports for the preceding four years had amounted to. Dutch
buccaneers became as much of a menace to Cuban ports and to the ships
plying between Cuba and other countries as the French and British had
been.

The sixty years of Philip IV.'s reign proved a long series of failures
for Spain. They would have resulted in serious di