Jan Huyghen van Linschoten
He is credited with publishing in Europe important classified information about Asian trade and navigation that was hidden by the Portuguese.
Even more crucially, he provided nautical data like currents, deeps, islands and sandbanks that were absolutely vital for safe navigation, along with coastal depictions to guide the way.
The publication of the navigational routes enabled the passage to the East Indies to be opened to trading by the Dutch, French and the English.
While in Goa, Jan Huygen van Linschoten kept a diary of his observations of the Portuguese-ruled city, amassing information about the Europeans, Indians, and other Asians who lived there.
Jan Huygen van Linschoten made note of the trading conditions among different countries, and the sea routes for travelling between them.
The 1587 death of his sponsor, the Archbishop of Goa, while on a voyage to Lisbon to report to the King of Portugal, meant the end of van Linschoten's appointment.
Barentsz reached the west coast of Novaya Zemlya and followed it northward, before being forced to turn back in the face of large icebergs.
This work contains numerous sailing directions, not only for shipping between Portugal and the East Indies colonies, but also between India, China and Japan.
"The frontispiece of the first edition [was] pirated [from] the engraving from (of all things) a work celebrating the campaigns of a Spanish general and printed...up as the Dutch hero" by his publisher Joost Gillis Saeghman.
[11] The map published in this book, Exacta & accurata delinatio… regionibus China, Cauchinchina, Camboja, sive Champa, Syao, Malacca, Arracan & Pegu, was prepared by Petrus Plancius.
[12] An English-language edition of the Itinerario was published in London in 1598, entitled Iohn Huighen van Linschoten his Discours of Voyages into ye Easte & West Indies.
In addition to detailed maps of these places, van Linschoten also provided the geographic ‘key’ to unlocking the Portuguese grip on passage through the Malacca Strait.
He suggested traders approach the East Indies from south of Sumatra through the Sunda Strait, thereby minimizing the risk of Portuguese intervention.
This passage eventually became the main Dutch route into southeast Asia and was the origin of their colonization of the territories that form today's Indonesia.
Due to this, during his lifetime, van Linschoten engaged personally in polemics with Petrus Plancius, the later cartographer of the VOC, for the preparation of de Houtman's fleet, but also in his sailings North.
