It's slightly less the numbers killed and about the same numbers captured. You include the 800 civilians, the numbers captured could be even much more than 2000.
It is rather convenient that the number of people who were actually captured in the siege was unrecorded so people can inflate the numbers accordingly. And even if we factor in the civilians like you so desperately want the numbers will still look like this
1) Zeelandia : Troops=1800 (highest estimate)
Civillians= 800 (lets generously assume that every women child and infirmed people held a weapon that day, which is unlikely but hey lets give you a crutch here)
Total : 2600.
2) Lowestoft : Number of people killed (2500 highest estimate)
Number of people captured (somewhere around 2000)
Total :
4500 , and this is not factoring in the rest of the Dutch who participated in the battle but was unharmed and/or escaped with more than 96 ships suriving that conflict and for a ship of the line the average sailors was around 200 to 600. The total number of people add up would be 20 x 96= 19200 (EDIT : The Dutch Fleet at the time consisted of 103 ships carrying 4,869 guns and 21,613 men which was divided into several squadrons.
You can try to whitewash the number of people being killed as slight (despite the fact that not all people at Zeelandia died in combat) but the simple fact remain that more people participated and was killed or captured in a single battle that took place in a single day than a siege that took near a year.
I didn't say they were a single entity but the ruling class of the country and the stakeholders of the company were the same people!
We can see by your post that you claimed that the two were the same when they weren't as shown here:
That wasn't really the case. What's the use of the warships staying at home rotting? The bulk of the armada of warships of the Dutch Empire(Actually it was the Dutch Republic at the time fixed it for you)was already on location to stand guard over the colonies and to fight against other competing colonists to gain territories. The Dutch fought decades-long battle with the Portuguese in an effort to capture Malacca before finally succeeding.
But if you agree in your post here that the company does not equate to the Dutch Republic, then we can move on to the next step to clarify that while the rulling class has significant stakes in the company, the VOC does not at any point of time in history represents the totality of Dutch millitary and financial might.
You kept on talking about the limiting factor of financing a battle. The British East India Company was able to finance a private army of 280,000 (Indian soldiers and a smaller number of British soldiers) in India, about twice that of the British Army!
So what ? It was not the Dutch Republic, it was not the VOC and it was certainly not VOC money that paid for the army. The British East India Company is completely irrelevant to this discussion and a red herring at best.
And why do you always pull up the number of soldiers in a battle? The war between the Ming Dynasty forces and Manchus' was known to involve 500,000 soldiers on one side alone.
Because it shows the number of resources that one side had pitted in that battle. For all intents and purpose the numbers that were committed to Zeelandia was a bare fraction of what the Dutch Republic had at the time.
It was not a battle of survival for the Dutch Republic at the time nor was it a battle of national importance for it.
Compare that to the Russo-Japanese war that was the gist of the subject at the time which was a war short of total conflict and we can see why historians mark that as the defining stage which an Asian nation was able to beat a Western power in a modern conflict whereby the entire resource of a nation was directed towards war efforts.
You don't need to employ 100,000 soldiers to capture a tiny Taiwan island defended by a small number of Ming loyalists.
With the political will from the monarch and ruling class, the Dutch East India Company (among the wealthiest of East India Companies, if not the wealthiest) certainly had the resources to build up the necessary matching number of soldiers and ships (no need the big numbers as mentioned above) to try to recapture Taiwan Island from the Ming loyalists had they thought they had a reasonable chance of success.
You can keep saying that, but the simple fact remain that the VOC did not did so is a fact and this in light of greater conflicts that the Dutch Republic fought. And an equal claim can be made that the did not have the resources at the time to make a comeback even if the chances were good.
