In 1612, after gaining permission of the local rulers through the Treaty of Asebu, he built Fort Nassau near Moree, on the site of an original Dutch trading post that had been burned down by the Portuguese.

After the Twelve Years's Truce ended in 1621, the Dutch West India Company was established, which tried to seize the Portuguese colonies in Africa and America as part of the Groot Desseyn plan.

Whereas Swedish presence on the Gold Coast turned out to be only temporary, British and Danish settlement in the area proved to be permanent.

From 1694 until 1700, the Dutch West India Company fought the Komenda Wars with the British over trade rights with the Eguafo Kingdom.

The Portuguese had completely left the area, but still the Gold Coast had the highest concentration of European military architecture outside of Europe.

European men often created alliances with the local African people through a practice known as cassare or calisare derived from the Portuguese casar meaning "to marry."

Although the existence of the so-called "Elmina Note" is often questioned, the Dutch generally paid two ounces of gold per month to the Ashanti as tribute.

Several Ashanti-Fante wars followed and the rivalry between the two peoples were key in the events surrounding the transfer of the Dutch Gold Coast to Britain in 1872.

William I of the Netherlands took over this abolition when he issued a royal decree to that effect in June 1814 and signed the Anglo-Dutch Slave Trade Treaty in May 1818.

This republican and revolutionist background made him controversial in the Kingdom of the Netherlands established in 1815, which effectively banned him from the country by assigning to him the rather obscure governorship of the Gold Coast in 1815.

At the same time, however, Daendels regarded his governorship as an opportunity to establish a private business monopoly in the Dutch Gold Coast.

Major General Jan Verveer arrived for this purpose in Elmina on 1 November 1836, and went to the Ashanti capital of Kumasi with a delegation of about 900 people.

A recruitment depot was established in Kumasi, and furthermore the king sent the young Ashanti princes Kwasi Boachi and Kwame Poku with General Verveer to take with him to the Netherlands, so that they could receive a good education.

[9] The trade proved a disaster for the Dutch, as their long-standing alliance with the mighty inland Ashanti Empire did not fare well with the coastal Fante population around the new forts assigned to them, who were allied with the British.

Unsurprisingly, the Ashanti army had an uncompromising attitude to their Fante rivals, making the prospect of a compromise between the Ashanti-backed Elminese and the new Fante-dominated forts transferred to the Dutch ever more difficult.

In February of that year, a treaty had been signed with the United Kingdom, under which terms the whole colony was to be ceded for a sum of 46,939.62 Dutch guilders.

This larger claim was not primarily meant to reclaim Luanda and Sao Tomé from the Portuguese, however, but merely to establish authority over Dutch trade in the area.

The composition of the council was changed for a final time in 1784, in the wake of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, now extending the membership to include the bookkeeper-general-and-commissioner.

[20] The government itself was reformed in 1847, which among its most notable inventions included the establishment of a Court of Justice, legally separate from the council, although memberships often overlapped.

[23] As a consequence of the tariff system set up in the Anglo-Dutch Gold Coast Treaty, a tax and customs office was established in Elmina in 1867.

[27] Furthermore, in 1664, the Dutch conquered Suriname, complementing Berbice and Essequibo as Caribbean plantation colonies depending on slave labour.

While the Ashanti succeeded in the Battle of Feyiase of 1701 to establish their hegemony on the Gold Coast, it took them a few years to fully "pacify" their newly conquered territory.

To this purpose, he sent Jacob van den Broucke as "opperkommies" (head merchant) to the Dutch trading post at Ouidah, on the Slave Coast.

This contributed to the rise of the Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie (MCC), which dominated the Dutch slave trade for much of the eighteenth century.

This meant a severe blow to the economy of the Gold Coast, which had increasingly relied on slave trade from the 18th century onwards.

Due to the rude treatment of workers, La Rocha Vièra was unable to attract new labourers, and the plantation died an early death.

A decree from 1700 by the Governor-General at Elmina stipulated that employees of the Dutch West India Company who were to return to the Netherlands either had to take their (illegitimate) children with them, or had to pay a sum of money to provide for their "Christian upbringing".

He was subsequently installed by the Dutch East India Company as a Christian minister at Elmina, where he married Antonia Ginderdros.

This attention also revealed that the head of Ahanta king Badu Bonsu II, taken to the Netherlands after his execution in 1838, was still in the possession of the Leiden University Medical Centre.

[54] In an episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, British-Ghanaian actor Hugh Quarshie traced his ancestry to Pieter Martinus Johannes Kamerling, a Dutch official on the Gold Coast.