Meantime Portugal was for sixty
years an appanage of the Spanish crown, while the Netherlands were at their
heroic labor for independence. Thus when the Dutch came to prevail at sea
in the early seventeenth century the Portuguese posts in Guinea fell their
prey, and in 1621 the Dutch West India Company was chartered to take them
over. Closely identified with the Dutch government, this company not
only founded the colony of New Netherland and endeavored to foster the
employment of negro slaves there, but in 1634 it seized the Spanish island
of Curacao near the Venezuelan coast and made it a basis for smuggling
slaves into the Spanish dominions. And now the English, the French and the
Danes began to give systematic attention to the African and West Indian
opportunities, whether in the form of buccaneering, slave trading or
colonization.
The revolt of Portugal in 1640 brought a turning point. For a
quarter-century thereafter the Spanish government, regarding the Portuguese
as rebels, suspended all trade relations with them, the asiento included.
But the trade alternatives remaining were all distasteful to Spain. The
English were heretics; the Dutch were both heretics and rebels; the French
and the Danes were too weak at sea to handle the great slave trading
contract with security; and Spain had no means of her own for large scale
commerce.
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