The Leeuw was a ship of the Dutch West India Company (WIC) chamber of Zeeland. We encounter it in the book Historisch ofte Iaerlijck Verhael by Johannes de Laet, a director of the WIC who wrote this book as a kind of history book on the first period of the WIC. It is complicated to keep apart the various WIC ships with the name Leeuw in this period, because several ships with similar names were active (the Witte Leeuw, Blauwe Leeuw, Rode Leeuw, Zwarte Leeuw, Gouden Leeuw and the Leeuw - all of these names being variations on the Dutch word Lion with the colors white, blue, red, black and golden added, with these colours probably referring to the painting on the sterns of the ships).

In 1626, the ship was active in Brazil in the fleet of Piet Hein and in 1629 it formed part of another big fleet under Hendrik Lonck that left Europe. In 1630 it arrived in Brazil again in a squadron under Dirck Simonsz. In 1633 it was still active in Recife, and this is the last reference to the ship by de Laet. But the ship had been in the Netherlands in the mean time, as is shown by a newspaper article from 1631 see references).

WIC chamber: Zeeland

Tonnage: 120 tons

Crew: 36

Armament: 2 bronze, 16 iron cannon

Rijksmuseum

• Laet, J. de (1644)
  Historie ofte Iaerlijck verhael..., III, VI, VII, X
  pp 93, 176, 195, 206, 350
• Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Courante Uyt Italien ende Duytslandt &c.
  ref. no. 4-1-1631, pp 1