Piet Pieterszoon Hein

Biography

Piet Hein went to sea as a boy, was captured by the Spanish, and spent four years chained to an oar as a galley slave before being exchanged. He came back and made a career out of it. Rising through the Dutch West India Company, he raided Spanish and Portuguese shipping across the Atlantic and twice attacked Salvador in Brazil. In September 1628 he did what no one had ever done: he cornered the Spanish treasure fleet — the annual bullion convoy that paid the Army of Flanders — in Matanzas Bay in Cuba and took it almost without a shot. Eleven million guilders in silver, gold, indigo and cochineal. The Republic funded its army for eight months on it and took 's-Hertogenbosch the following year with the proceeds; Spain's admiral was executed for losing it. Hein, unimpressed by the celebrations, observed that the same crowd would have hanged him if the wind had changed. He was killed a year later in a skirmish with Ostend privateers in the Channel, hit by a cannonball on his own quarterdeck. Dutch children still sing about him — *Piet Hein, Piet Hein, zijn naam is klein* — which is a strange fate for a former galley slave who financed a siege by robbing an empire.

Key Battles