The Dutch expedition to the Pacific began as a bid to break Iberian control of distant sea routes and ended, for John Blackthorne, with one battered ship and a crew on the edge of death. The Erasmus, the sole survivor of the expeditionary force, carried him from Chile into waters almost wholly unknown to him. The voyage’s military and commercial ambitions had made it a venture of conquest; its actual measure became whether its last ship could find land, preserve its crew, and continue navigating when its secret guide ran out.

Purpose and Historical Setting

The expedition sailed from the Netherlands during its long war with Spain. The Netherlands remained legally part of the Spanish Empire, while England, its ally, had also fought Spain for two decades and openly supported the Dutch for a decade. The conflict gave the voyage both its targets and its political urgency: the fleet was ordered to plunder Spanish and Portuguese possessions in the New World, set them alight, establish permanent trading concessions, and discover Pacific islands that could serve as Dutch bases. It was also supposed to claim territory for the Netherlands and return home within three years.

The fleet comprised five ships and 496 volunteers, nearly all Dutch, with three Englishmen among them: two pilots and an officer. The Erasmus was a 260-ton, three-masted trader-warship from Rotterdam, armed with twenty cannon. Its mission joined exploration to privateering and colonization: charting new waters was not separate from seizing routes and territory, but a means of reaching them. The first Dutch ships to breach the Strait of Magellan’s guarded passage were therefore also carrying the war with Spain into the Pacific.

Command, Delay, and the Fleet’s Losses

At Tierra del Fuego, almost a year before the ship’s desperate approach to Japan, favorable winds had offered the fleet a chance to make its way through the Strait of Magellan. Captain-General Spillbergen instead ordered a landing to search for gold and treasure. Blackthorne argued that the barren shore offered no such reward and urged the fleet to proceed while Spanish warships were comparatively scarce in the Pacific. Spillbergen overruled him and put the question to the other captains rather than the pilots, then led the unproductive searches ashore. The decision displaced navigational judgment with a vote among commanders and cost the expedition time.

The winds changed early. Fearful of Spanish fleets to the north, Spillbergen delayed departure, and the fleet had to winter in Tierra del Fuego for four months. During the wait, 156 men died of starvation, cold, and flux; the survivors even ate the calfskin covering the ropes. Storms inside the strait then scattered the ships. Only the Erasmus reached the rendezvous off Chile. It waited a month for the missing vessels, but with the Spaniards closing in, Blackthorne and the remaining crew sailed into the unknown without them. The expedition had lost its fleet before its Pacific passage had properly begun.

The Open Sea and the Limits of Navigation

The Erasmus had no reliable chart of the waters beyond Chile. Its secret rutter—the navigation manual on which Blackthorne depended—ended there. The crew had been at sea for a year, eleven months, and two days; Chile was already 133 days behind them when Blackthorne searched the gray horizon for land. The ship had crossed the ocean Magellan had named the Pacific, but the name offered no assurance of safety. Reefs and shoals repeatedly threatened the voyage, and the vessel’s remaining provisions and water were almost exhausted.

The broader navigational problem was structural: the few charts available were too vague to be useful, and longitude could not be fixed. A rutter could substitute accumulated experience for a position that could not be calculated. It recorded compass courses between ports and capes, soundings, water color and seabed, currents, winds, storms, fair-weather patterns, places to careen and replenish a ship, and the locations of friends, enemies, shoals, reefs, tides, and havens. Yet its usefulness depended on the pilot who observed the route, the accuracy of its copying or printing, and the reliability of translation; errors, even deliberate ones, could remain hidden until a sailor tested the instructions at sea.

Such knowledge was also a guarded strategic resource. The English, Dutch, and French possessed rutters for their own waters, but Portugal and Spain controlled most of the recorded routes through the rest of the world. They treated guides to the New World, the Strait of Magellan, the Cape of Good Hope, and the sea lanes to Asia as national treasures, while their Dutch and English enemies sought them. Blackthorne’s teacher, Alban Caradoc, had taught him that a rutter could help a pilot cross waters beyond sight of land, but not that it made the unknown harmless. The expedition put that lesson to its harshest test: its guide ended at Chile, and the pilot had to carry the ship onward by observation and judgment.

The Erasmus and the Voyage’s Afterlife

By the time Blackthorne looked east from the storm-tossed deck, the expedition had contracted to a single ship and a handful of survivors. Of the Erasmus’s crew of 107, only 28 remained; just ten could walk, while the others were near death. Captain-General Spillbergen was among the sick. Food was gone, the little water left was foul, and scurvy had taken hold. Blackthorne had conserved fruit against his crew’s warnings and was less badly affected than many of them, but the ship’s survival depended on more than his personal endurance: the remaining sailors had to make landfall before hunger, illness, or the sea finished what the expedition’s delays had begun.

The voyage’s methods continued to matter after the Erasmus reached Japan. Blackthorne’s experience as an ocean pilot informed his later work at sea, where he assessed routes, wind, ship handling, and the dangers of hostile waters. When Vasco Rodrigues piloted a galley from the Izu Peninsula toward Anjiro fishing village, Blackthorne understood why Rodrigues had left the coastal shelter and chosen an open-water course for speed. Later, during the pursuit by the Santa Theresa, Blackthorne judged how the frigate’s need to tack constrained it in narrow water while the galley could maneuver more freely. These later episodes were not the expedition itself, but they show what its perilous passage had formed: a pilot whose navigational knowledge could become a tactical advantage in another ship and another political struggle.

The expedition’s decisive consequence in the narrative is thus both material and personal. Its original fleet, intended to carry Dutch power across the Pacific, largely vanished; its surviving vessel delivered Blackthorne into a world beyond the reach of his charts and familiar political assumptions. The crossing did not fulfill the planned return within three years. Instead, it made the solitary surviving pilot a participant in Japanese maritime and political affairs, where the capacity to read sea and ship would remain as consequential as the weapons carried aboard them.