Banten Banten Indonesia

Pinto, while buying goods in the Javan port of Bantam, is joined by forty Portuguese merchants who are alarmed by the violence that has erupted in the area after the Emperor had been slain by his page over a point of honor.

Cornelis de Houtman’s ships had left Madagascar in February; it has taken another four months for them to reach Sumatra.

When on June 27, 1596, the expedition finally arrives in northwestern Java at Banten, the island’s most important pepper port, only around a hundred of the original two hundred and forty-nine men have survived the voyage.

The local Portuguese traders introduce de Houtman to the Banten sultan, who promptly enters into an optimistic treaty with the Dutch, writing "We are well content to have a permanent league of alliance and friendship with His Highness the Prince Maurice of Nassau, of the Netherlands and with you, gentlemen."

Unfortunately, trade negotiations turn sour, perhaps caused by Portuguese instigators, perhaps by inexperience: de Houtman is undiplomatic and insulting to the sultan, and is turned away for "rude behavior" without being able to buy any spices at all.

The crew is forced to find drinking water and other supplies on Sumatra across the Sunda Strait, at which crossing Keyser apparently dies.

...first English East India Company factory (trading post) established at Bantam and a commercial mission dispatched to the Moluccas.

The Company struggles initially due to the competition from the already well established Dutch, but imports of pepper from Java are to become be an important part of the Company's trade for twenty years.

The first permanent Dutch trading post in Indonesia is established in 1603 in Banten, West Java.

The Dutch East India Company in Bantam dispatches Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon, or Jansz, to investigate New Guinea’s potential in gold and spices in 1605.

Janszoon, of whose early life nothing is known, is first recorded as entering into the service of the Oude compagnie, one of the predecessors of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), as a mate aboard the Hollandia, part of the second fleet dispatched by the Dutch to the Dutch East Indies in 1598.

On May 5, 1601, he had again sailed for the East Indies as master of the Lam, one of three ships in the fleet of Joris van Spilbergen.

Janszoon had sailed from the Netherlands for the East Indies for the third time on December 18, 1603, as captain of the Duyfken (or Duijfken, meaning “Little Dove”), one of twelve ships of the great fleet of Steven van der Hagen.

Once in the Indies, Janszoon had been sent to search for other outlets of trade, particularly in “the great land of New Guinea and other East and Southlands.”

Janszoon, arriving at Bantam in June 1606, calls the land he has discovered “Nieu Zeland” after the Dutch province of Zeeland, but the name is not adopted and will later be used by Abel Tasman for New Zealand.

Janszoon will return to the Netherlands believing that the south coast of New Guinea is joined to the land along which he sailed, and Dutch maps will reproduce this error for many years.

Though there have been suggestions that earlier navigators from China, France, or Portugal may have discovered parts of Australia, the Duyfken is the first European vessel definitely known to have done so.

...the first permanent VOC settlement in Banten is controlled by a powerful local ruler and subject to stiff competition from Chinese and English traders.