15. Beam me up

14. One name to make a note of

13. Benghazi

12. If you act like that, think like that

… if you’re nowt but a potty-mouthed woke loony leftist, the peeps gonna tell ya: “We’re not gonna take it anymore!”

11. Dutch East India Company

When the Dutch East India Company (VOC) surrendered Formosa (Taiwan) to the Ming loyalist commander Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong) in February 1662 after the Siege of Fort Zeelandia, many Dutch soldiers and officials were permitted to leave for Batavia (Jakarta), but several Dutch women and children were captured, enslaved, or kept behind….

For nearly four decades, the Dutch East India Company had controlled parts of Taiwan, then known to Europeans as Formosa. That ended when the Ming loyalist commander Zheng Chenggong, better known as Koxinga, brought a massive force against the Dutch stronghold of Fort Zeelandia.

After a nine-month siege, the Dutch surrendered.

The agreement allowed the surviving garrison and civilians inside the fort to leave.

But not everyone was there to be rescued.

During the fighting, Dutch families elsewhere had already fallen into Koxinga’s hands. Dutch accounts describe male prisoners being executed and surviving women and children being held captive.

Among them was the family of missionary Antonius Hambroek.

Koxinga sent Hambroek to Fort Zeelandia with an ultimatum: persuade the Dutch to surrender or face death.

Two of Hambroek’s daughters were safely inside the fort.

He could have remained with them.

Instead, he reportedly urged the defenders to continue resisting and returned to captivity, knowing what awaited him.

He was executed.

His wife and children remained prisoners.

One of his teenage daughters was taken as a concubine by Koxinga himself. Other captured Dutch women were distributed among commanders or soldiers as wives and concubines.

Their individual names largely disappear from the story.

Years passed.

In 1684, more than two decades after the Dutch surrender, reports indicated that some of these women were still living in captivity. An effort to arrange their release came to nothing.

Histories of colonial Taiwan usually remember 1662 as the year Koxinga expelled the Dutch.

But military victories look very different when told through the women left behind.

The Dutch sailed away from Formosa.

Some of their women never did.