One wonders at the choice of title for this book because there is little Dutch in the text or bibliography, and the author draws his history not from Dutch sources but from English and Spanish chronicles. The mammoth East Indies Company is granted only a single chapter comprising ten pages. The Dutch West Indies Company is introduced in a chapter of six pages, and the following account of its activities is restricted to North America and northeast South America, with which the author is familiar as a professor of history at the University of Caracas.
Elsewhere the author is preoccupied with the subject of human slavery but does not dilate upon the dreadful record of the D. W. I. C. in the Caribbean. He devotes a chapter of three pages to a royal cédula designed to protect Negroes and Indians in the encomiendas and translates into Spanish an antislavery resolution of the Mennonite Calvinistic sect meeting in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1688. This is irrelevant to his subject, as is a translation into Spanish of the Mayflower Resolution of 1620. The book contains a variety of other materials, including a comparison of various European colonial policies, a description of early Spanish laws regarding the encomienda system in the West Indies, and a translation into Spanish of Peter Stuyvesant’s report of the surrender of New Netherlands to the English in 1666. There is a decree by Simón Bolívar in 1818 condemning contraband evasion of customs. Six pages describe a frontier dispute between Venezuela and Great Britain, and thirteen pages are devoted to sketches of the overseas, largely oriental colonies of Denmark, Sweden, and of the Hanseatic states.
The twenty-page bibliography is overexpanded and irrelevant in many instances, and the same may be said of the copious footnotes. The six-page chronology of dates running from 1528 to 1917 has some merit but is not wholly applicable to the title. Two charts of Guiana dated 1798 and 1887 are partly indecipherable; a simple explanatory drawing of the area would be much more useful. Despite these shortcomings Professor Bello is to be commended for extensive research and an interesting and informative presentation. He has made a contribution to the history of northeast South America.
