Jacob Groenewegen

Who is Jacob Groenewegen?

Jacob Groenewegen was a Dutch merchant, who was the leading merchant on the fleet under Pieter Willemsz. Verhoeff that left Texel on December 21, 1607, and arrived in Bantam on February 15, 1609. Like Verhoeff, he died on May 22, 1609 on one of the Banda Islands, in an ambush set up by the islanders.

In that same year, Jacques Specx directed two ships dispatched to establish the first official trade relations between the Netherlands and Japan. These ships, De Griffioen and Roode Leeuw met Pijlen, arrived in Japan on July 2, 1609. The trade pass or shuinjō, was issued on 24 August 1609. The correlation to the Western calendar was made two centuries later by Hendrik Doeff, himself opperhoofd of Dejima from 1803 to 1817, and an anonymous Japanese interpreter. They hypothesized that the person it had been issued to, jiyakusu-kuruun-heike, corresponded not to Specx but to Groenewegen. However, since this date postdates VOC records of Groenewegen's death on Banda, recent historians have suggested that jiyakusu-kuruun-heike may actually have been Specx, assuming an abbreviation Corn of his middle name Cornelisz, though this name, pronounced, is a poor fit to the Japanese.