Laurens Reael

Laurens Reael
Laurens Reael
	Governor-General of the East Indies
	In office; 19 June 1616 – 21 March 1619
Preceded by	Gerard Reynst
Succeeded by	Jan Pieterszoon Coen
Personal details
Born	22 October 1583; Amsterdam, Dutch Republic
Died	21 October 1637 (aged 53); Amsterdam, Dutch Republic
Employer	Dutch East India Company

Laurens Reael (22 October 1583 – 21 October 1637) was an employee of the

Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies

from 1616 to 1619, and an admiral of the Dutch Republican Navy from 1625 to 1627.

Early life

Laurens Reael was the son of Laurens Jacobsz Reael, a merchant in Amsterdam named after the sign or gable stone of his house/shop In den gouden Reael ("In the Golden Real") and an amateur poet known for writing Geuzenliederen (songs of the geuzen). The Amsterdam neighborhood Gouden Reael is named after Laurens Reael's birth house, via a later (1648) warehouse of the Reael family on the Zandhoek that turned into a popular inn. Laurens Jr. had academic talents, excelling in math and languages. He studied law in Leiden, where he lived in the house of Jacobus Arminius who had married his older sister Lijsbet Reael in 1590. Laurens received his doctorate in 1608.

East Indies

In May 1611, he left as

Schouten & Le Maire (12 September) upon their respective arrivals at Ternate from the Dutch Republic via the Strait of Magellan and Cape Horn. He was unaware that the VOC had ordered Schouten & Le Maire's ships to be confiscated for alleged infringement of its monopoly of trade to the Spice Islands

.

Already after a year, on 31 October 1617, Reael resigned following a dispute with the VOC's leadership (the Lords XVII) on the treatment of both the English competitors in the Moluccas and of the native people. The jurist Reael would only take action against the English if international law would allow that and had protested repeatedly against the incursions against the natives. He, like the local admiral

Staten Generaal

and the VOC's Lords XVII upon his return to the Dutch Republic, he made these points again very clear.

It would take however until 21 March 1619, when the decidedly less pacifistic

Japara on Java

.

Later life in the Dutch Republic

Reael left the East Indies in January 1620 for Holland where for several years he focused on poetry, partially because his sympathies for the

Pieter Cornelisz Hooft and Joost van den Vondel and became part of the Muiderkring

. In 1623 Vondel dedicated his poem Lof der Zeevaart (Ode to Seafaring) to him.

After the death of

Willem van Nassau

.

At the end of 1627, he was sent as a diplomat to Denmark, which at that time was at war with

Ferdinand II of Austria. On his way back early in 1628, he suffered a shipwreck of the coast of Jutland, where Austrian imperial troops happened to be camped. These captured him and sent him to Vienna, where he would remain imprisoned until February 1629. On his return he was not reinstated in his naval functions. In the summer of that year he married, and in 1630 he became councillor and in 1632 alderman

(schepen) of the city of Amsterdam.

In 1637, he was considered for the function of

Fleet Admiral of the confederate Dutch fleet to replace the incompetent Philips van Dorp, but in October, after losing his two young sons earlier in the year, he died of bubonic plague in Amsterdam. He was buried in Amsterdam in the Westerkerk

.

Authority control databases
International	ISNI VIAF WorldCat
National	France BnF data Germany Netherlands
People	Netherlands Deutsche Biographie
Other	IdRef

Early life

East Indies

Later life in the Dutch Republic

External links