Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast.

Episode 40.

Japan's Christian Century, Part 3.

Our last episode ended with me talking about the arrival of a Dutch ship called the Leifde in Bungo Prefecture in Kewshu.

I think at this point it behooves us to back up a bit and discuss how exactly that ship ended up

there. As we discussed during the last episode, ever since the 1570s, Dutch power had been

growing exponentially. The Dutch had begun pushing into the New World, attacking Spanish ships,

and setting up some limited forts in the areas of Suriname and the Netherlands

Antilles, a series of islands the modern kingdom of the Netherlands still controls.

Eventually, the Dutch, like their English allies, would begin attempting to settle the

continental United States as well. When the Dutch-backed explorer Henry Hudson sailed to modern New York in

1609, he laid the groundwork for the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, which would eventually become

modern New York. This, by the way, is a story very near and near to my own heart. I grew up in a town

founded by a former Dutch sailor in an area where many places still

had Dutch names, and the high school I went to was called Hendrick Hudson High School.

Anyway, at the same time the Dutch were pushing into the new world, they were also striking

into Asia. As we discussed, they had successfully defeated the Portuguese in Indonesia in 1575, and were beginning to colonize that region as well, which they would hold on to for the next 400 years until 1949.

By 1600, then, the pressure from the Dutch was mounting in every area of the Portuguese-Spanish

empire, often called the Iberian Union, since the peninsula on which Portugal and Spain are

located is called the Iberian Peninsula. The Leifte, meaning love in Dutch, was part of a

squadron of five ships whose names I will not attempt to pronounce.

The squadron was dispatched in 1598, with the purpose of engaging in various forms of dubiously legal trade and definitely illegal piracy in the Spanish Empire.

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