Le Mayor, Isaac

Isaac le Mer was born in the Protestant city of Doornik (now Tournais ) in the province of Hainaut . In 1581, after the city came under the rule of Catholics, Le Mayr fled to Antwerp , where he married (22 children were born in this marriage ^[2] ) and got profitable business connections. In 1585, after the fall of Antwerp , le Mayor and his partners settled in Amsterdam ; full-fledged citizen of Amsterdam le Mayor became only in 1601 ^[2] . At the beginning of his career, Le Mayor traded in greens, but soon engaged in profitable international trade ^[1] . Le Mayor and partners equipped ships to Italy , Spain , to the Baltic ports and to Arkhangelsk ; Especially profitable was the trade in fish with the British and Spaniards ^[1] . The share of the partnerships in which Le Mer participated was exactly one third of the merchant ships that visited Arkhangelsk in the years 1594-1600 ^[1] . They brought salt to Arkhangelsk from Setubal , and goods from Russia were brought to Amsterdam, Setubal and Venice ^[1] . It is known that Le Mayor traded furs; it was sable skins that he paid in 1591 with the Russians, who kept his relative Jan de Valle ^[3] for the debts.

At the very end of the XVII century, Le Mayer abandoned trade with Arkhangelsk and completely switched to risky, but extremely profitable trade with the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia ) ^[1] . In 1599, four ships set up by Le Mayor and partners of the New Brabant Company ^{[2] [1]} set sail there. A year later, this company merged with the old "Brabant Company", forming the "New Amsterdam" (the first East India) company with a fleet of eight ships ^[2] . In 1602, after a series of acquisitions that brought together almost all Dutch and Zeeland foreign trade companies ^[2] , the New Amsterdam Company was reorganized into the united East India Company ( Netherlands. Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC ) - the largest public corporation of its time with a fleet of 14 ships ^{[2] [1]} . Le Mayor, who owned 97 thousand guilders of the company, was among its largest shareholders and took the post of one of its fourteen directors ^{[2] [1]} .

Soon after the establishment of the company, rumors of fraud in the company's board of directors spread around Amsterdam ^[4] . Le Mera and his comrades were accused of the fact that the first overseas campaign of the East Indian fleet was carried out exclusively in the interests of the directors themselves, to the detriment of other shareholders ^[5] . At the end of 1604, le Meru was first formally charged; in February 1605, he was forced to resign as director, pay a pledge of three thousand guilders to the treasury and give a formal obligation to never engage in colonial trade again ^{[4] [1]} .

Aligned forever from the management of the company, le Mayor became its implacable enemy ^[1] . In 1608, he offered his services to the king of France , who wanted to establish his own trading company, but these plans did not materialize due to the uncertainty of the foreign policy situation ^[6] . In the same year, he tried to establish a joint venture with the French and Henry Hudson , but he preferred to enter the service of the Dutch East India Company ^[1] . In 1609, le Mayor nevertheless agreed with the French and sent a ship with goods worth 10 thousand guilders to the southern seas; all that is known about this expedition is that it was unsuccessful ^[7] . Despite opposition from French courtiers, Le Mayor continued to campaign for the creation of the French East India Company; the assassination of Henry IV on May 14, 1610 finally buried this project ^{[7] [1]} .

As hopes melted away into French rival East India company money, le Maire was more and more fascinated by the idea of ​​hitting the hated company from the inside, with the hands of its own shareholders. There were 1201 people in the year the company was founded; in total, they invested 3.68 million guilders in the company ^[8] . Stocks as such in the 1600s did not exist either as standard documents on paper or as equal shares of the same par value. The rights of the shareholder were certified by an entry in the register maintained by the company itself; the share of each shareholder was not measured in the number of shares, but only in the amount of money (standard shares with a par value of 3,000 florins were introduced only in the second half of the 17th century) ^[8] . Large shareholders like Le Mayor often sold to the side a share of their contributions to the company, but it was simply impossible to “buy one share” ^[8] . Nevertheless, there were a lot of transactions and the concept of stock exchange rate of shares (as a percentage of the nominal value of the deposit) already existed. Under the influence of rumors and news from the colonies, the course in 1605-1609 ranged from 126% to 200%; in the spring of 1609, unexpectedly for the directors of the Company, the course went down ^[9] .

The immediate cause of the collapse was the activity of a secret partnership of traders, established by le Mayor for a short-term game to reduce the shares of the East India Company ^{[10] [1]} . Suspecting something was wrong, its directors appealed to lawmakers with a demand to prohibit "air trading" - futures trading in shares not owned by the seller ^[11] . A party of bears ( French baissiers ^[1] ), engaged in such trade, brought counter accusations of incompetent management: according to them, the company's warehouses were overstocked with dull nutmeg for many years to come, as a result - a fair stock price was still to be below ^[12] . The ban on stock trading in Amsterdam, the Bears wrote, will only lead to the transfer of the exchange platform outside the Netherlands ^[10] . According to Dyllen, the author of the counterclaim was precisely Le Mayor, and insider information was supplied to him by the chief accountant of the company, also dissatisfied with the board of directors ^[10] . Le Mayor made a big mistake: despite publicly publicizing the internal problems of the company, which even paid dividends not with gold, but with stale spices ^[13] , the stock price recovered and steadily went up. The "French project", on which the "bears" secretly put, did not take place ^[14] . In April-May 1610, the deadline for the execution of futures transactions concluded with the expectation of depreciation came, and most of the “bears” of the Le Mer party became bankrupt ^{[15] [1]} . Explicit frauds with nonexistent shares that covered Le Mer's secret allies in the company itself were also revealed ^[15] .

The result of an unsuccessful intrigue was a legislative ban on unsecured futures contracts with securities, which lasted until 1689, and the expulsion of Le Mayor himself from Amsterdam. Le Mayor moved to Egmond Binnen , formally remaining a major shareholder in the East India Company, but lost any dividend rights. The top of the Amsterdam merchants forever refused to trust him ^[16] .

In 1614, Le Mayor, who did not lose hope of ruining the East India Company, established a new enterprise with the money of the merchants of the city of Horn ^{[17] [1]} . Horn, which flourished in the first half of the 16th century, long ago lost the championship to Amsterdam ^[18] ; few wealthy residents of Horn saw the last opportunity in the enterprise of le Mera to revive the quenched port city. Le Mayor invited them to finance an expedition in search of a new path from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean , bypassing Tierra del Fuego ; thereby, he hoped to undermine the monopoly of the East India Company, which controlled the only known passage through the Strait of Magellan ^[1] .

In June 1615, the new “Australian company” le Merah sent two ships, the Horn and Endracht, under the command of Willem Schouten and the sons of le Mayor Jacob and Daniel, in search of a new path ^[1] . The Horn sank in the Atlantic, and the Endracht circled Tierra del Fuego in January 1616, crossed the strait named after Le Maure , explored the cape named after the city of Horn (Le Mayor and Schouten mistakenly considered it to be part of Tierra del Fuego), and left to the Pacific Ocean. Having visited the islands of the Tonga archipelago on the way, in October 1616 the “Endracht” reached Batavia . After a brief arrest for breaking the monopoly of the East India Company, the brothers Le Mayor and Schouten were released to their homeland; Schouten joined the East India Company, Daniel returned to his father, and Jacob le Mayor died on his way home ^{[17] [1]} . Despite the loss of his son and the confiscation of the ship (it was later challenged in court), Isaac le Mare considered the Endracht expedition a personal triumph ^[17] . After a long boycott, he was allowed not only to return to Amsterdam, but also to deliver a report from the rostrum of the General States ^[17] . However, due to another conflict, this time with the shareholders of the "Australian company", he failed to use the results of the "Endracht" swimming ^[1] .

Le Mayer spent the last years of his life in barren litigation with the East India Company ^[19] . On his tombstone in the parish church of Egmond-Binnen, a country epitaph was carved: “ Here lies Isaac le Mer, a merchant who, by God's grace in his affairs in different parts of the world, has known so many riches that in thirty years he lost 150 thousand florins , but not his honor . He died a good Christian on September 20, 1624 ” ^[20] . According to Rene Cornelis Bacchusen (biographer le Maure), the village carver was mistaken by one order of magnitude. In fact, le Mayor lost at least one and a half million ^[20] .

• Dillen, JG Isaac Le Maire and the early trading in Dutch East India Company shares // Pioneers of Financial Economics: Contributions Prior to Irving Fisher / ed. G. Poitras. - Edward Elgar, 2006. - P. 45-63. - ISBN 1845423827 . Annotated translation from French into English by Isaac le Maire et le commerce des actions de la Compaigne de Indes Orientales '', Revue d'Histoire Moderne: 5-21, 121-37.