Hoorn was founded in the early 8th century and soon became a centre of trade for the area, due to its excellent port and good links with other trading centres and nations. The town continued to grow and to make its way by trade and other seafaring means and must have grown quite substantially as in the mid 1300’s, the Count of Holland accepted a payment from Hoorn so that it could become a city.In the centuries after this, ships that sailed from Hoorn traded all over the world, Bringing back new and valuable commodities such as spices, from places such as Indonesia. Not all of their trading was done on an equal footing with the locals and captains such as Jans Pitersoen Coen who founded the capital city of Indonesia, now called Jakarta, acquired a reputation for violence among the locals during his voyages at the beginning of the 1600’s. In 1618 another Hoorn seafarer ,Willem Ysbrandtsz Bontekoe, rounded the southernmost tip of South America going through massive storms and huge seas and named it Kaap Hoorn, or Cape Horn, in honor of his city home.After this enduring period of prosperity Hoorn went downhill and the city turned, once again, to its original profession of fishing to keep the economy going.