Piet Pieterszoon Hein was born in 1577 in Delfshaven, the son of a sea captain, and suffered badly from seasickness. In 1598, during the Eighty Years’ War, he and his father were captured by the Spanish, and he spent about four years as a galley slave in Ambrogio Spinola’s fleet near Sluis before a prisoner exchange around 1602. Captured again in 1603 as captain of the Kleine Neptunus, he was held in a fortress in Havana, where he learned fluent Spanish and studied Caribbean coasts, shoals and defenses. After his release in 1607 he sailed for the Dutch East India Company, and in 1609 in the Banda Islands he took command after local chiefs killed commander Pieter Verhoeff.
In 1623 he became vice admiral of the Dutch West India Company, whose Grand Design aimed to seize Salvador’s sugar plantations and Luanda’s slave trade. In 1628, despite a lost cabin boy revealing the plan, he trapped the Mexican treasure fleet in the Bay of Matanzas, the waters he had studied as a prisoner, and took more than 11.5 million guilders without bloodshed. Named Lieutenant Admiral of Holland and West Friesland with Maarten Tromp as flag captain, he was killed in 1629 off Ostend, struck in the shoulder by a cannonball while fighting Dunkirk privateers.
- In 1605 the merchant Jan Gerritsz Meerman sailed to Cuba partly to learn whether Hein was still alive.
- He captured more than 30 loaded Portuguese merchant ships at Salvador in 1627.
- The silver paid the Dutch army for eight months, helped take ‘s-Hertogenbosch, and gave shareholders a 50 percent dividend.
- He provisioned the surrendered Spanish crews and sent them toward Havana, giving orders in Spanish.
- Cheered from a balcony in Leiden, he remarked that crowds praised easy money, not the dangerous years before it.
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