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Managing Director J. M. de Booy of big Royal Dutch Co. left Holland in a fishing trawler, turned up in London a few days after the blow. Meanwhile, a squiggle of the pen had moved Royal Dutch's headquarters to Curasao, West Indies. At week's end, sentries of the Empire like Emile Zimmerman were thankful that while Dutch office buildings were still in Holland, a vast amount of their assets was still out of Adolf Hitler's reach. And much of their salvage in cash and paper had steel-ribbed protection against finagling by Nazi financiers, Fifth Columnists, frightened Dutchmen. As he had already done in the case of Danish and Norwegian investments and cash in the U. S., President Roosevelt decreed that Dutch and Belgian holdings could not be moved without Government license.
One thing the sentries could not save: the guilder. Until last week the guilder was one of the most actively traded currencies on the New York money market; its quotations had held steady at around 53∧ for over a year. Last week the guilder (like the belga) disappeared from world money markets altogether. In its place, to carry out previous commitments and to get back into what remains of world trade, the Dutch worked mightily to substitute the Java florin. For the most part independent of the guilder and backed by the favorable trade balance of the Indies, the florin has suffered little or none from Hitler's blows.