Melchior van Santvoort

Melchior van Santvoort was and one of the first Dutchmen in Japan, arriving as one of William Adams's shipmates on the De Liefde, which was wrecked on the coast of Kyūshū in 1600.

Onboard the De Liefd, Santvort was serving as a ships’ clerk. The ship departed Rotterdam in 1598, on a trading voyage and attempted a circumnavigation of the globe, but it was shipwrecked on the coast of Bungo Province in Japan with only 24 survivors. They were received by future Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, who questioned them at length on European politics and foreign affairs. In 1605, Santvoort and Leifde’s former skipper Jacob Quaeckernaeck were allowed to leave Japan on a Red Seal Ship provided by the daimyo of Hirado. They were headed to Pattani in the Malay Peninsula, since the word had reached Japan that the Dutch East India Company had established a trading post there. They arrived at Pattani in December 1605 and discovered a small Dutch factory. As the factory lacked the necessary resources to dispatch a trading mission to the shogun, van Santvoort returned to Japan to continue his flourishing business there. In 1609, van Santvoort helped the VOC’s representative Jacques Specx in his negotiations with the shogun to establish Dutch trading post in Japan. In 1613, van Santvoort was reported by Dutch traders in Ayutthaya to have made a fortune from the Indo-China trade.