In 1613, Pieter Nuyts, who was staying in Leiden with the famous Orientalist Erpenius, is known to have met with the Moroccan envoy in the Low Countries Al-Hajari.

His plan was to have the Formosans grant sovereignty over Taiwan to the shōgun, while Nuyts was in Japan to assert rival Dutch claims on the island.

Both embassies were refused an audience with the shōgun (the Dutch failure being variously attributed to Nuyts's "haughty demeanour and the antics of his travel companions" and "Hamada's machinations at the court").

[1][6] On returning from his unsuccessful mission to Japan, Nuyts took up his position as the third governor of Formosa, with his residence in Fort Zeelandia in Tayouan (modern-day Anping).

[6] His handling of relations with the natives of Formosa too was a cause for concern, with the residents of Sinkan contrasting his harsh treatment with the "generous hospitality of the Japanese".

[8] In 1629 he narrowly escaped death when after being feted at the aboriginal village of Mattau, the locals took advantage of the relaxed and convivial atmosphere to slaughter sixty off-guard Dutch soldiers—Nuyts was spared by having left early to return to Zeelandia.

Nuyts exacted revenge on the same Hamada Yahei who he blamed for causing the failure of the Japanese embassy by impounding his ships and weapons until the tolls were paid.

[11] The Dutch were very keen to resume the lucrative trade with Japan which had been choked off in the wake of the dispute between Nuyts and Hamada at the behest of the Japanese authorities in Edo.

This was an unprecedented step, and was representative of both the extreme official displeasure with Nuyts in the Dutch hierarchy and the strong desire to recommence Japanese trade.

A measure of the upset he caused to the Dutch authorities can be gauged by the contents of a letter from VOC Governor-General Anthony van Diemen to VOC headquarters in Amsterdam in 1636, expressing his concern about plans to send a highly paid lawyer to Batavia to draw up a legal code: I wonder whether these highly intelligent people do not perform more disservices than services in these quarters, witness the cases of Martinus Sonck, Pieter Nuyts, Pieter Vlack, Antonio van den Heuvel, and others, who have been used to the great disadvantage of the Company ...

[17] During this period he passed the time by mining his collection of classical Latin texts by writers such as Cicero, Seneca, and Tacitus to write treatises on subjects such as the elephant and the Nile Delta, exercises which were designed to display rhetorical flair and high style.

[15] On returning to his home country he first went back to his city of birth Middelburg, before starting a career as a local administrator in Zeelandic Flanders, and settling in Hulst shortly after the town had been wrested from the Spanish in 1645.

[4] It was the younger Pieter who also arranged the posthumous publication of his father's treatise Lof des Elephants, in 1670 — a single known copy of which still exists, in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague.