Naturally, no complete record of these expeditions survives. Their members were not literate men, and it is only when they fought the Jesuits, or when they discovered minerals, that a record of their routes has been preserved. We know that before 1632 they had traversed all of southern Brazil, and Paraguay, and even eastern Argentina and Uruguay. Incursions to the north and west followed shortly. There is an authentic record of an expedition reaching Goyaz as early as 1647, and it is probable that by that time they had penetrated the central plateau which stretches across to the Andes, had seen the headwaters of the southern tributaries of the Amazon, and had followed the eastern mountain chain almost to the northern ocean. The Paulistas secured to their country and their race more than a million square miles of fertile and salubrious territory. CHAPTER VIII THE DUTCH CONQUEST By the end of the sixteenth century Holland was practically independent, and the "Beggars of the Sea" were carrying her arms and trade all over the world. Numerous private companies of Dutch merchants made war against Spain on their own account, and great fortunes were made in the capture of Spanish fleets and in trade with Spanish and Portuguese colonies. The Dutch East India Company within a few years possessed itself of the better part of the Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean, and the West India Company was organised to do the same in South America. Incorporated in 1621, it included various smaller companies already engaged in trade and privateering, and was an immense corporation which finally owned more than eight hundred ships, and sent to Brazil alone more than seventy thousand troops. Although protected, subsidised, and conceded a monopoly by the Dutch government, it always remained essentially a company for private profit. The Company's primary object was to capture the Spanish treasure fleets; its secondary object was to conquer the possessions of Spain and Portugal in South America. Brazil furnished the best base for the operations that were intended to make the South Atlantic a Dutch lake; Bahia and Pernambuco were near Europe, had good harbours, lay on the direct route to the Plate and the Pacific, and from them Africa could be conveniently attacked. The sugar trade was a large thing in itself and the daring Dutch traders believed that the Portuguese colonists might welcome a deliverance from Spanish domination. Spain's power was a rotten shell, and impulses lying deep in the national spirit pushed the Dutch on to aggression. The peoples of Western Europe had finally felt all the stimulating influences of the Renaissance, of the Lutheran and Jesuit Reformations, and of the Era of Discovery. It was the epoch of the Thirty Years' War, of the League of Avignon, and of that confused fighting caused by the more vigorous peoples grasping for a share of the spoils of the New World.