1621
Banda Islands Massacre
Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the VOC's ruthless governor-general, ordered the near-total depopulation of the Banda Islands to secure a Dutch monopoly on nutmeg. Villagers were massacred or deported, ringleaders beheaded by imported Japanese samurai. The surviving population was replaced with enslaved laborers on plantations. The nutmeg trade became Dutch, bought at one of the most appalling prices in colonial history.
Dutch West India Company Chartered
The States-General gave a group of Dutch merchants a monopoly on trade and warfare in the Atlantic, explicitly including Portuguese Brazil and the Spanish Caribbean. The WIC would bankroll colonies in Manhattan and Recife, privateer Spanish silver fleets, and help industrialize the Atlantic slave trade. Its ambitions spanned two hemispheres, though its finances would prove less durable than its rival the VOC.
Samoset Greets the Pilgrims
An Abenaki sagamore named Samoset walked into Plymouth and astonished the Pilgrims by saying, in broken English learned from fishermen, welcome, Englishmen. He returned days later with Squanto, who taught the colonists to plant corn with fish. The autumn harvest that followed became American folklore, the origin story of a holiday that would outlive the civilization that inspired it.
Philip IV Inherits Spain
At sixteen, the melancholy, art-loving Philip IV inherited Spain, Portugal, the Low Countries, most of Italy, and an empire in the Americas he would never see. His ambitious favorite, the Count-Duke of Olivares, began the long, hopeless project of arresting Spanish decline through war, but the treasury was already hollow and the empire fracturing at its edges.
Potato Arrives in European Gardens
By the 1620s, the American potato had begun appearing in Spanish, Italian, and Irish gardens as a curiosity or famine insurance crop. Physicians debated its nutritional value; farmers quietly planted it. One of the great calorie revolutions of world history was creeping into Europe from below, and within two centuries the tuber would feed armies, sustain empires, and reshape demography.