The Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), a colossal enterprise for its time, employed a vast number of workers. The problem, however, was that two-thirds of the people died either during the journey or shortly after arriving in Asia. Scurvy, starvation, shipwrecks, clashes with the indigenous population, or with rival Spanish or Portuguese competitors were the usual causes of the high mortality rate. The loss of life on the outward journey alone was 15–20%. Upon arrival in Java, tropical diseases – particularly the dreaded malaria, typhus and dysentery – awaited the survivors. The VOC therefore constantly needed a fresh supply of a significant number of people to replace the workers who had died. Even in the seventeenth century, the Netherlands was a small country with a population of just 1.5 million. In the seventeenth century, the VOC had approximately 30 000 employees, of whom around 25 000 were in Asia. It soon became clear that, with such a small population, the Netherlands could not meet the VOC’s long-term staffing requirements. The labour shortage forced the directors of the trading company to recruit workers not only in the Netherlands but also abroad. In this article, I examine VOC workers from the Kingdom of Hungary. From the preliminary inventory, we can therefore conclude that they mostly (87%) held the lowest-ranking positions in the Dutch company and served for an average of six years. Just under 21% of the Hungarians survived the tropical adventure, and only 17% were able to return to Europe. It must be noted that most of them were assigned to lower-ranking positions. They had no formal education, so they were confined to poorly paid jobs (sailor, soldier). They were largely left to fend for themselves, and their mortality rate was much higher than that of the average VOC employee.