Yet rather than stabilizing the Dutch East India Company's share price, the news blackout stirred up panic in the market.
Although nearly every newspaper carried articles claiming that "the situation at the Cape of Good Hope will not have much impact on the East India Company," Amsterdam's citizens clearly preferred to believe information from other channels.
For example, the pamphlets appearing in vast numbers on the streets.
On the very day De Witt received the Crown Prince's orders, printing houses in Brussels had begun secretly preparing these booklets—something the French News and Publication Bureau, tempered by large-scale propaganda wars, could handle with effortless familiarity.
In this wave, more than thirty thousand pamphlets in varying styles flooded into Amsterdam.
One had to remember that the city's total population was only a little over 170,000. That was practically one copy for every household.
The pamphlets mainly introduced the English Army's offensive in South Africa, analyzed the devastating blow the East India Company would suffer after losing the Cape of Good Hope, and came to one conclusion: record-breaking losses were inevitable.
Yes, the Dutch East India Company had been losing money ever since the Anglo-Dutch War ten years ago, though the amounts had still remained within people's psychological tolerance.
All the Dutch had been gritting their teeth and holding on, waiting for the company to find a new source of profit and turn its losses into gains.
But the news in the pamphlets dealt them a crushing blow.
What followed was an enormous wave of sell orders for East India Company shares on the stock market.
Naturally, De Witt was behind it.
Though he had only 330,000 Dutch Guilders in capital—four million Francs—he followed the method the Crown Prince had taught him and "sold" more than 2.4 million Dutch Guilders' worth of East