A distinguished American historian has observed: “Probably the greatest gap in our knowledge of colonization in the New World is the lack of a work in English on Dutch settlement and trade in Guiana and the Caribbean islands.” At first sight, this bulky and well-produced volume would appear to fill this gap, but a reading of the text shows that it does not adequately do so. It is, essentially, an old-fashioned “drum-and-trumpet” history, dealing mainly with naval battles and skirmishes. Economic and social aspects receive scant consideration. For instance, the vital part played by the Dutch in building up the economy of the British (and, to a lesser extent, the French) Antilles before 1652 is only superficially treated and could easily have been examined in greater depth. Dutch trading activities on the “Wild Coast” and the Amazon, and their relations (including miscegenation) with the Caribs have been far better analyzed by George Edmundson and James A. Williamson fifty years and more ago. The author does not seem to recognize either the interest or the significance of those peculiar Dutch-Amerindian relations. Even in the fields of naval and military history, to which Professor Goslinga largely restricts himself, the book is disappointing. He is evidently unfamiliar with nautical terminology, and his landlubberly descriptions of naval actions suffer accordingly. There are also some very odd remarks about the European background to developments in the Caribbean, which betray an ignorance (or a neglect) of the most authoritative historical writing on the subject. His account of the Armada in 1588 is little better than a travesty, and shows no awareness of the fundamental works by Garrett Mattingly and Michael Lewis. In general, the author shows a curious preference for outdated nineteenth-century works to the neglect of more recent books by Geyl, Van Gelder, Hartog, Menkman et al., even though these latter figure in the indubitably useful and extensive bibliography. On p. 550, n. 69, the author makes the astounding assertion: “Spain was not capable of taking an active part in the Thirty Years’ War.” This monumental gaffe is belied by his own text, but it does not stand alone. On p. 306 we are told that “the Dutch, as the Anglo-Saxons, had a perfect horror of miscegenation, and never produced mixed offspring in huge quantities.” Perhaps the numerous coloured population of South Africa and the many thousands of so-called “Indos” in Indonesia dropped from the skies? On a minor level, it is surprising that a Dutch historian should repeatedly style Amsterdam as “the capital” of the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, and call Jan Huygen van Linschoten a round-the-world traveller, when he was the sedentary secretary to the Archbishop of Goa. The English text at times reads awkwardly: “In Bahia the Dutch had overtaken eleven ships when they subjugated the town,” but this may be the fault of a translator.
There are of course some good things in the book. They include two chapters, respectively on the slave trade (but “Black Ebony” is a tautology and should be “Black Ivory”), and on the bloody Franco-Dutch struggle for Tobago. The author also displays a commendable impartiality as between Dutch and Spanish versions of events. The book also has its uses as a work of reference, although, as indicated above, it must be used with caution even in this limited way.
