Biography
Olivier van Noort was born in Utrecht. The year is disputed: 1558 according to Wikipedia, 1568 according to the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (which notes that van der Aa wrongly gives 1588). The sources consulted say nothing of his parents or his training. All we know is that he kept an inn in Rotterdam for a time, and that he had a brother, Cornelis, who was crippled in a clash with the Portuguese at Rio de Janeiro.
His career as a seaman is bound up with a single enterprise. In 1598, merchants of Rotterdam financed four ships and 248 men, and entrusted him with the command. The aim was both political, to harm Spanish and Portuguese interests, and commercial, to open a direct route to Southeast Asia. His ships were poorly armed and his crews undisciplined, which the many skirmishes of the voyage confirm.
He left Rotterdam on 2 July 1598. He was repulsed from Rio de Janeiro, passed through the Strait of Magellan from November 1599 and entered the Pacific in early 1600. He then plundered the coasts of Chile and Peru, reached the Marianas and then the Philippines, where, on 14 December 1600, he fought a naval battle off Manila in which the Spanish lost their flagship, the San Diego, while he himself lost one of his vessels. He returned by way of Borneo, Java, the Cape of Good Hope and Saint Helena, and reached Rotterdam on 26 August 1601 with a single ship. The sources speak of 45 survivors, the ADB of 48. The account of this voyage around the world, the first made by a Dutchman, appeared in 1602 under the title Beschryvinghe vande voyagie om den geheelen werelt cloot, published by Cornelis Claesz in Amsterdam according to Wikipedia, with French, Latin and German versions the same year. The ADB also mentions an earlier relation published in Rotterdam under the title Wonderlicke Voyagie, which we were unable to cross-check.
The expedition brought in little, but it showed the Pacific route to the United Provinces and shortly preceded the founding of the East India Company. The ADB judges his methods brutal, close to piracy. After his return, he commanded a state ship in 1602 and was among the defenders of Ostend.
He died on 22 February 1627 in Schoonhoven, where he had spent his last years and where he is buried. We found no indication of where his papers are kept or of a modern edition of his account. His name remains attached to the wreck of the San Diego, found off the Philippines and excavated in the late twentieth century.
