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The low Dutch Protestants included soldiers, seamen, small scale merchants, shop keepers and artisans, as well as lower level civil servants. Although they were not wealthy and came from markedly inferior social stock back home, they were still considered, by virtue of their religion and Dutchness, to be marginally superior to other Europeans on the island, and far above the mulattos and free blacks. As an active port, Willemstad was frequently visited by men of all nationalities: sailors, pirates, merchants, craftsmen seeking their fortunes, even Spanish Catholic priests bent on saving souls. In the second half of the seventeenth century, as prosperity increased on Curaçao, there was a steady infusion of lower class white European laborers: craftsmen, carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, shopkeepers. These included Germans, Danes, French, Spaniards, Walloons and Flemings, as well as some Greeks, Swiss, Ashkenazi Jews
Ft. Amsterdam was the administrative seat of the West India Company as well as the Director's residence. It has remained the seat of givernment to the present (CHA).	and British. Many were former soldiers who had been dismissed from the military and, for a variety of personal reasons, had little desire to return to Europe. Others were drawn from the ranks of ex-convicts, indentured servants, deportees and other undesirables who made up a high percentage of European immigrants to the Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The influx of Frenchmen and Spaniards was so significant that a 1747 ordinance ordered them all off the island.[14] Sailors had no job security: crews were usually paid off in full whenever a ship reached its final destination (or, sometimes, if the haul had been disappointing, they were
not paid at all) and it was their responsibility to find the next posting. Many hung out in Willemstad for days and weeks at a time at the many taverns and boarding houses that sprang up to cater to their needs, including sexual ones. Willemstad became a kind of home port for dozens of European seafarers who would hire out on a promising voyage around the region and then return to spend their wages, looking for the next assignment when their cash began to run low. Over the decades these European sailors were gradually replaced by local free blacks and mulattos and slaves, who offered a more captive crew to local ship owners.

Typical for the region at that time, many European immigrants, not just sailors, hopped from island to island, trying their fortunes in different places, following the economic ups and downs of each island and reacting to the various European wars which frequently changed island ownership. Many of them immigrated to Curaçao for only a few years, leaving when their fortunes took a downturn; others adopted Curaçao as their new home. By the eighteenth century those who had settled on Curaçao formed an emerging urban middle class. Although they were not accepted as equals by the local white elite, they sided with them against blacks and coloreds during slave uprisings and other periods of social unrest. Regardless of their income level - and some were quite poor - whites were never considered to be lower class, by virtue of their race and religion.

The armed forces were an important social sector in early Willemstad; they included the garrison of white soldiers stationed at the fort and sailors aboard navy ships docked in the harbor. The regular armed forces included a brigade of volunteer whites who were ready to serve when necessary; as well as separate mulatto and black forces who received orders from white officers. Marines and sailors were permanently stationed on board the Dutch warships in St. Anna Bay. Rank and file white sailors and soldiers were an international group, made up of Dutchmen, Englishmen, Scots, Walloons, Germans, Danes, Poles, and Frenchmen from the lower segments of European society. At the time, European soldiers were a ragtag, rather undesirable lot: "armies were made up largely of jailbirds, released on condition they joined up, of paupers, of 'any sturdy beggar, any fortune teller, any idle, unknown, suspected fellow in a parish that cannot give an account of himself,'" as well as "recruits called up, kidnapped, or captured... among... subjects or...foes."[18]

Barracks, a recent eighteenth century invention, gave town dwellers some respite from the unwholesome influence of soldiers, but further emphasized "the isolation of the soldier, with his dissolute and brutal manners and his point of view oriented to, and by, what was in those days a lifetime occupation from which only age or desertion offered an escape."[19] Small wonder that the group of international soldiers stationed in seventeenth and eighteenth century Willemstad were considered to be far inferior to the prosperous merchants and ship owners who made up the elite, and even to the more modest small scale shopowners. But they were a colorful segment of society, making their noisy presence felt on the town. "Sailors and gin shops were an inseparable part" of the port of Willemstad, "with, of course, all the accompanying phenomena: drunkenness, street fighting, and prostitution... Bar keepers were probably ex-sailors, ex-soldiers or retired privateers."[20] There is little doubt that the sailors' needs were a boost to Willemstad's early commerce.

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Curaçao Chamber of Commerce & Industry