Pieter Willemsz Verhoeff

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Dutch. (April 2009) Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Dutch Wikipedia article at [[:nl:Pieter Willemsz. Verhoeff]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|nl|Pieter Willemsz. Verhoeff}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Pieter Willemsz Verhoeff (c. 1573 – 22 May 1609) was a Dutch admiral of the Admiralty of Amsterdam, notable for his voyage to Asia between 1607 and 1612.

Verhoeff was in the service of the Dutch East India Company. In 1601, he was involved in the Siege of Ostend as part of the Eighty Years War. During the Battle of Gibraltar, in 1607, he was flag captain of the Aeolus, the flagship of Admiral Jacob van Heemskerk.

A fleet of 13 ships commanded by him left Texel in December of 1607, with secret orders to capture Malacca from the Portuguese. He arrived in the Straits of Malacca in 1608 and after a series of unsuccessful attempts to capture the city, he retreated.^[1]

He died during an expedition to the Banda Islands, where he and many of his crew were ambushed and murdered by locals while negotiating with them for the Dutch East India Company. This assassination was a direct cause of the Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands (1609–1621).