Joris van Spilbergen
Joris van Spilbergen (also match mountains; * 1568 in Antwerp, † 1620 in Bergen op Zoom ) was a Dutch navigator.
Spilbergen was first midshipman, stationed at Fort Rammekens, Western Europe's oldest Seefort on the peninsula of Walcheren in the Dutch province of Zeeland. After that he worked as a merchant in Middelburg, but went bankrupt and therefore went into the service of Balthazar de Moucheron, for which he initially to Africa, where de Moucheron was looking for a dock for his ships went. Looking for a suitable place he conquered with his team in 1598, the island of Príncipe by the Portuguese, but he could only hold short. In 1601 he went with three naves de Moucherons to India and landed in Ceylon, where he was befriended by King Vimala Dharma Suriya of Kandy.
1604 Spilbergen returned back to the Netherlands. 1607 he served under Jacob van Heemskerk, who at the Battle of Gibraltar had the task of a lying there, ready to exit Spanish fleet destroyed. Here Spilbergen worked as an organizer.
From 1614 to 1617 traveled Spilbergen on behalf of the Dutch East India Company with a fleet of six ships around the world. To this end, he embarked in Holland to get on the Canary Islands, São Vicente on the South American coast and the Straits of Magellan on the west coast of South America all the way up to the present Gulf of California. From there he traveled to Java. Spilbergen reached Java at about the same time, arrived as Schouten and Le Maire in Asia. The two were imprisoned by order of the East India Company, as you accused them offenses against the trading monopoly of the Company. Then they came under the command of Admiral Spilbergen. 1617 returned Game mountains back with two ships.
In 1617 he settled in Bergen op Zoom ( North Holland ) with modest savings, where he acquired the cottage Het Wolfken in length Potterstraat. In the same year he published a memoir about his journey. When he died in January 1620, he was buried in the Grote Kerk of Bergen op Zoom.
In various places in the Netherlands and Belgium of today there is not a Van Spilbergenstraat, in Bergen op Zoom, however.