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usually in partnership which spread the risk and provided greater capital to equip and man the ships and support the long voyages.
    After a first exploratory venture in 1595, the second merchant voyageon the long and hazardous journey to the East Indies sailed in 1598 in an argosy of 22 ships, from which, owing to tempest, disease of the crews, hostile privateers and other dangers of the sea encountered en route, only 14 returned. Yet the cargoes of pepper and spices and Indian objects they brought home more than matched the losses, attracting other investors to enter the competition. In 1601, 65 ships—three times as many as took part in the second venture—set out for the same destination, involving so many competitors that the States General advised amalgamation, and thus was founded, in 1602, the Dutch East India Company, first of the great commercial institutions that were to promote the Netherlands’ rise. With ample capital to underwrite the far-flung argosies, with state-authorized regional monopolies of the trade, the East India Company was followed twenty years later by the Dutch West India Company with an eye on the sugar of Brazil, the silver of Peru and Mexico and expectations of the American fur trade. It was chartered in 1621 with a monopoly of American trade after Henry Hudson, an exploring agent of the Dutch East India Company hired to find a Northeast passage to the Orient, had found instead in the Western Hemisphere a great river equal to the Rhine and had surveyed the American coast from Cape Cod to Virginia. In the same decade, the colony of New Amsterdam was established between the river and the sea, with frontage on both. Proceeds from the two trading companies brought home the riches to enlarge the tax base and provide the government with more money for building and manning more merchant fleets with enlarged scope for expansion. The process was watched resentfully by other nations who, to soothe their envy, endowed the Dutch with a reputation as moneygrubbers. Certainly, moneymaking was a primary national interest and, combined with a strong sense of freedom and independence grown in a long revolt, was the key to the extraordinary Dutch enterprise.
    Superior seamanship and superior ships were the means that carried the Dutch to the crest of world trade, taking the lead from Spain, thought to be the greatest sea power of the time, and from England, the self-appointed rival of Dutch enterprise. England’s captains were limited by the nature of their society, which assumed that a gentlemanly landownership, unspoiled by manual or commercial work, was the highest and purest ideal of social life. English sea captains were likely to be volunteers of the nobility with narrow practical experience, if any, while Dutch captains and admirals were more often the sons of salt-sea sailorswho had grown up handling the ropes. Dutch Admiral de Ruyter, hero of the 17th century navy, astonished a French officer by taking up a broom to clean his cabin and afterward going out to feed his chickens.
    “Enterprisers” of the period, beginning in business as merchants, provided the capital and organization for long-distance trade and for new industries from newly available products—paper for the printing presses, shipyards for larger vessels for the merchant fleets that traveled the ocean routes, manufacture of arms, uniforms, barracks and all the equipment of war. Besides making men rich, the industries justified the mercantile idea—by keeping the poor at work to produce articles for export to bring in a favorable balance of trade and hard money for more ships and more armies. Enterprisers found that the simplest use of profits, as the Dutch soon learned, was in making loans to other enterprisers at interest.
    In 1609, a memorable year, the Hudson River was discovered and the Bank of Amsterdam, the heart that pumped the bloodstream of Dutch commerce, was founded. Introducing new methods of regulating the exchange of