Why Indigenous Reparations for Piet Heyn’s Colonial Crimes are Relevant for Climate Justice Today

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Piet Heyn statue in Rotterdam.

Introduction to the real story behind Piet Heyn’s ‘heroic’ deed

“Piet Heyn!, Piet Heyn!, Piet Heyn zijn naam is klein,
Zijn daden bennen groot, zijn daden bennen groot
Hij heeft gewonnen de zilveren vloot,
Die heeft gewonnen, gewonnen de Zilvervloot.”

These words will be familiar to many Dutch people, as they will have learned this song in school. Piet Heyn, the subject of this song, was an admiral and privateer for the Dutch West India Company (WIC) in the 17th century. The song chronicles his capture of a shipment of the Spanish Treasure Fleet, which is what this historical figure is most remembered for. It has given him the status of national ‘hero’ in the Netherlands.

Here is a Dutch translation by Doorbraak.
Hier is een Nederlandse vertaling door Doorbraak

From the Dutch perspective, Piet Heyn stole treasures from the Spanish occupier, who had annexed part of the Dutch South at the time. However, there is a different story to be told here. Most of the contents of the fleet were extracted from Indigenous territories that were made into Spanish colonies in South and Central America. From a modern-day perspective, these colonies were not a legitimate part of Spain. Hence, the goods the Spanish took from them were not theirs to take. In fact, the 177.000 pounds of silver on the ship were mined (almost) exclusively by African slaves and Indigenous peoples pressed into forced labour by the Spanish colonisers. It is estimated that the death toll of just the mine outside Cerro Rico, in modern-day Bolivia, was between 5 and 6 million (!). This is roughly the same as the number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. With this in mind, it seems that this Dutch national ‘hero’ is at best a thief stealing from other thieves and at worst complicit in the enslavement of African peoples and the exploitation and genocide of the Indigenous population of the Americas.

12th of October: Columbus Day or Indigenous Liberation Day?

Although various European heads of state have apologised, the Western world has yet to fully come to terms with its colonial past. One example of this phenomenon is the continued existence of ‘Columbus Day’. By the same token as Piet Heyn, Columbus does not deserve the praise he receives today. His continued celebration is a slap in the face of the many Indigenous communities who have suffered and were nearly driven into oblivion as a result of Columbus ‘discovery’. In 2018, this injustice led a collective of Indigenous rights defenders from the Netherlands, named The Indigenous Liberation Movement, to decolonize the 12th of October by reclaiming it as Indigenous Liberation Day. This day is a moment to celebrate Indigenous cultures, as well as to commemorate and mourn the historical injustices Indigenous peoples suffered at the hands of colonisers.

This year, in the spirit of climate justice, the Indigenous Liberation Movement invited environmental NGOs and activist groups like Milieudefensie Jong, Extinction Rebellion and other allies to establish a coalition for reparations. Thanks to collective efforts, a symbolic treasure chest filled with coins and treasures will be handed to a delegation of the Bolivian Embassy. The treasure chest is an artwork, made by activists from Extinction Rebellion Amsterdam, that symbolises the precious metals that were plundered by Piet Heyn. With the intention of reparations, it is to make overtures in the reparation process for Indigenous peoples where official state actors from the Netherlands still choose to abstain from this moral obligation.

How the story of Piet Heyn and the Spanish Treasure Fleet is interwoven into a tapestry of colonisation

Royally chartered multinational corporation – The Dutch West India Company – conferred a privateering licence to Piet Heyn, who occupied the position of company director since 1621. For context, the WIC had been authorised by the Dutch state to maintain a monopoly on trafficking enslaved people from West Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean. At the same time, the company received a government mandate to consecutively transport stolen raw materials from the Americas, the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean, including the eastern tip of the Maluku Islands. These imperialized primary commodities were imported into the Netherlands for lucrative industrial manufacturing.

As Piet Heyn had assumed the position of the WIC’s company director, he effectively authorised himself to hijack a consignment of primary commodities from the Americas to Spain, the well-known Spanish Treasure Fleet. Filled to the brim with imperialized resources, this naval vessel sailed to Spain’s colonial metropole each year as the Spanish imperial crown commanded from the 16th to 18th century.

In September 1628 in particular, Piet Heyn and his crew attacked a Spanish treasure fleet sailing through the Matanzas Bay off the coast of Cuba. Venturing into this pillaging campaign, Piet Heyn was determined to obtain additional funding in defiance of further consolidation of Spanish rule in the annexed Dutch territories comprising contemporary Luxembourg and Belgium. In the end, Piet Heyn managed to steal 177.000 pounds (85 tons) of silver on top of numerous other goods, such as gold, pearls, hides, sugar and a variety of valuable dyes. Afterwards, the spoils were sold for nearly 12 million Dutch Guilders.

The exact monetary value as of today is difficult to establish precisely. However, a combination of data from the IISG and CBS suggests that an estimate of 180 million euros seems realistic. To put this into further context, 85 tons would amount to 0,3% of the totality of 17th-century silver imports to Europe. However, 140 years earlier, prior to the ‘discovery’ of the Americas by Europeans, 85 tons would have accounted for approximately 10% of the silver stock of the entire European continent.

Thus, it is difficult to overstate the effect of the Treasure Fleet on the wealth of Spain and by extension Europe as a whole. By some estimates, the Spanish money supply, measured in tonnes of silver equivalent, increased more than ten-fold between 1492 and 1810. Even more shockingly, the total silver imports (±74.000 tons) to Europe during these years were more than 20 times as high as the total global silver stock in 1492 and 89 times as high as the European silver stock in 1492. Note that not all of the silver mined was even imported to Europe, in fact some estimates indicate that the Spanish Americas produced ±133.000 tons of silver in total, more than 160 times the 1492 European silver stock. Given that this is only part of the wealth gained from Europe’s colonial enterprises during these centuries, it is impossible to argue that modern-day, global inequalities are not largely the result of European colonialism.

In this historiographic account of Piet Heyn’s colonialist endeavours, it is pivotal to be aware that this particular stolen batch of precious metals the Dutch intercepted from the Spanish off the Cuban coast had first been stolen from Indigenous peoples. Their clans had been incorporated into the administrative structures of the Incan Empire in Bolivia and Peru and the Mayan Empire in Mexico. Both civilizations embodied a pluralistic agglomeration of a multitude of interdependent Indigenous tribes and clans. The Mayan empire in Central America was renowned for its mathematical ingenuity, its sophisticated calendar systems and the construction of astronomic observatories that tracked the movement of celestial bodies. Concurrently, the Incan empire was highly advanced with respect to engineering and architecture providing intricate infrastructure in a mountainous landscape. On top of that, the construction of extensive agricultural terraces buttressed a farming system that was contemporaneously highly efficient and ecologically sustainable.

Unfortunately, European colonisation destroyed the heterogeneous and innovative civilizations built by Indigenous peoples. Spanish colonial merchants were commissioned by their respective royal authorities to violently compel enslaved Africans and immiserated Indigenous people toward the extraction of precious metals for the sake of enriching the imperial state’s treasury. For example, the silver mines located in the Potosí region of Bolivia were so prolific, it is said that the silver mined there could have been used to build a bridge to Spain. At its peak, Potosi accounted for 60% of the global silver production, lending some credit to this saying. At the same time, the enslaved Indigenous and African workers were deceived into thinking that the raw materials they extracted from the silver mine were converted into the construction materials for ‘silver-made’ catholic churches, i.e. a phoney silver painted front of the church. In reality, all precious metals were exported to the colonial metropole. The value from beneficiation was funnelled into the Spanish coffers. For this reason, in May of 2024, three Indigenous groups from Bolivia lodged a claim for the restitution of a portion of the profits from a recently discovered Spanish shipwreck, as part of financial reparations for their ancestors’ exploitation in these colonial mines.

In the grand scheme of things, imperialised raw materials funnelled into European nation-building projects historically occurred through a configuration of government-sanctioned corporations intent on amassing maximum profits. The political economy of this batch of precious goods on board of the Spanish Treasure Fleet was highly organised around the dispossession of Indigenous ancestral territories, labour exploitation and enslavement of racialised human beings, and the decimation of biodiverse ecosystems. Importantly, Piet Heyn’s confiscation of twice stolen “property” from Indigenous peoples – that is first at the behest of the Spanish imperial crown and subsequently by its Dutch counterpart – shows how colonialist competition over profit maximisation annihilates the integrity of biodiverse nature. Extractive industries for lucrative global trade take precedence over human rights and nature. For the sake of capital accumulation, colonialist merchants like Piet Heyn had mentally and materially commodified nature into raw materials, thereby making nature prone to ecocide. Analogously, human beings were dehumanized into either exploitable working tools for labour-intensive exploitation of natural endowments and/or collateral damage subject to genocide and ecocide as the natural antecedents of extractivist profit-seeking.

Indigenous rights as a countervailing device against ongoing colonisation and the cognate ecological crisis

In contrast to capitalist economics that by default tend to metastasize into colonialist overexploitation, Indigenous peoples have a substantially different relationship with our earth. In many Indigenous cosmovisions, humans and nature are one and the same and therefore symbiotically interdependent for sustenance. Accordingly, 80% of the remaining biodiversity at present is safeguarded by the conservation practices of Indigenous peoples. Therefore, Indigenous self-determination over land stewardship and resource governance is of vital importance to the mitigation of the climate and biodiversity crisis as their ancestral lands form carbon sinks.

In consideration of this virtual indispensability of Indigenous people to biodiversity conservation, it is then tremendously unfortunate how the energy transition bears a suspicious resemblance to the extraction of metals in the time of Piet Heyn’s theft of the Spanish Treasure Fleet. Indigenous peoples who reside in the ‘Lithium Triangle’, encompassing Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, raise the alarm on forced evictions from their lands. 85 % of the world’s reserves of this critical mineral are mined in this region by transnational corporations for a purportedly greener economy. Lithium is an instrumental component in the manufacturing process of the ion batteries that go into electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels. What has been christened the ‘Lithium Gold Rush’ illustrates how no substantial modifications have been made to the 500-year-old colonialist mechanism of accumulation by dispossession of land, resources and the fruits of one’s labour. Colonialism simply becomes ‘greener’, that is green colonialism.

Notably, multinational corporations that receive government subsidies and export credit insurance for putative sustainable ‘green growth’ enlist the services of private security companies to seize Indigenous peoples’ lands. Concomitantly, right-wing local governments in the Global South grant exploitation permits to extractive companies in exchange for a share in the profits. In the condition that a left-wing government rejects the wholesale privatisation of a country’s natural endowments, these governments render themselves vulnerable to the skullduggery of Western intelligence services and the formal imposition of economic sanctions. Historically, the Global South and Latin America in particular witnessed a series of military coups and assassinations orchestrated, funded and armed by Western intelligence services acting on behalf of the commercial interests of multinationals.

All the aforementioned from past and present is not at all demonstrative of a) reparatory justice as stipulated by ‘the UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law’, and b) climate justice whereby ‘equity and human rights are put at the core of climate decision-making and action’ according to the UNDP. A composite framework simultaneously entailing full reparations for colonialism and neocolonialism by the Global North in conjunction with an anti-imperialist conceptualization of climate justice is a prerequisite condition for redressing the protracted climate and biodiversity crisis. The predicament of Indigenous people should take centre stage in the resolution of the world’s contemporary ecological crisis. In this particular capacity, reparations would customarily consist of five elements, which are respectively: 1.) the cessation of hostilities and guarantees and assurances of non-repetition, 2.) restitution and repatriation, 3.) compensation, 4.) satisfaction, and 5.) rehabilitation.

Indigenous peoples are highly vulnerable to the detrimental externalities of capitalist markets, for their symbiotic interdependence with nature is fundamentally antithetical to the capitalistic drive for limitless profit maximisation on an earth with finite resources. According to the Global Witness Annual Defenders Report from 2023-2024, 196 earth defenders were murdered while exercising their legal right to protect their lands against the extractivist encroachments of commercial enterprises.

By extension, reparations for the imperial seizure of Indigenous lands should be mediated by enforceable legal prohibitions against contemporary ecocidal overexploitation for profit. For this purpose, legal provisions could be derived from the comprehensive framework of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Paramount to the regulation of the conduct of corporations on Indigenous land is Article 10 in this declaration, which denotes Free, Prior and Informed Consent. Commercial exploitation of Indigenous land and resources is exclusively permitted if Indigenous people have been formally consulted with a guarantee of a compensation agreement and if possible, return to ancestral land. Along the same lines, Article 29 of the UNDRIP could be invoked to actualize enhanced latitude for manoeuvre in relation to Indigenous conservation and protection of the natural environment and its productive capacity. This legal provision could cover Indigenous biodiversity conservation as a necessary means for climate mitigation. States should implement assistance programs to operationalize such objectives.

Inter alia, the aforementioned legal instruments from the UNDRIP could lend substance to reparations for it could countervail a historic pattern of currently uninterrupted profit-oriented infringements of Indigenous tenure systems. If applied consistently, it could enact the first condition for full reparations under the UN Convention for Reparations, that is cessation of hostilities and assurances of non-repetition in reference to extractivist land dispossession.

Recommendations to Dutch state actors concerning Indigenous reparations

In a complementary symbolic vein, the symbolic return of the treasure chest stolen by Piet Heyn to the Bolivian embassy makes a first attempt at the fulfilment of the reparatory condition of restitution of illegally taken property, meaning the re-establishment of the situation before the gross violation of rights took place. Likewise, the return of this attribute by Dutch organisations concerned with climate justice represents a token of apology, which would fall under the condition of satisfaction. To alleviate mental suffering and psychological distress, perpetrator entities should offer their apologies. Ideally, the Dutch monarchy and state should offer assurances of non-repetition of rights violation, restitution, compensation and formal apologies to nations whose territorial integrity was and still is dismembered by predatory government-supported companies. Yet, for now, these organisations committed to climate justice, that is the Indigenous Liberation Movement as initiator and Milieudefensie Jong and Extinction Rebellion as allies, intend to set an example for these government actors.

Concomitantly, in a conversation with a representative of the Bolivian embassy in the Netherlands, it was stated that the profits made from the energy transition by Global North companies should not be for the most part expatriated. Instead, technology transfer and investments should be made by the Netherlands to counteract the colonial-imperialist model of exporting cheap raw materials to the industrialised core for more remunerative value-addition abroad. The net result is that the Global North countries like the Netherlands still syphon off relatively inexpensive primary resources for the lucrative self-interested sale of the finished commodity following its beneficiation. In order to create a level playing field, the Netherlands and the West at large should commit to the construction of independent manufacturing capacity, which would be in line with Article 39 of the UNDRIP. The latter stipulates that Indigenous peoples have the right to technical and financial assistance from states and through international cooperation to exercise self-determination over the use of their ancestral lands as they see fit. Even though this could not be fully conceived of as an initiative towards reparations, it is an essential supplementary caveat in the acknowledgment of how global supply chains remain rooted in a neocolonialist modus operandi necessitating reparations. This is also applicable to the economy surrounding the energy transition.

Brief final summary

In a nutshell, by positioning Indigenous peoples and their biodiversity conservation efforts at the centre of climate action, climate justice becomes informed by a framework of reparatory justice for historic structures of oppression that continue to wreak havoc in 2024. Denouncing and making amends for all the ‘isms’, that is colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, extractivism and militarism is necessary to uncover the networks of perpetrators. The latter are again constellations of states, transnational corporations and private security companies with continuously shifting alliances to keep adapting to the capitalistic profit machine’s need to grow indefinitely on an earth with limited natural endowments. The energy transition is no exception to this rule of exploitation unfortunately like Piet Heyn’s chronicle of the plundered Spanish Treasure Fleet wasn’t. Therefore, reparations are the way to go if we truly want to achieve climate justice together.

Written by Maryse van den Burg and Isja Mannens on behalf of Milieudefensie Jong
Mentored by Chautuileo Tranamil on behalf of the Indigenous Liberation Movement

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