Joost Schouten (c. 1600 – 1644) was a Dutch East Indies Company figure of considerable repute, in demand as an astute administrator, diplomat, courtier and negotiator for this Dutch colonial and mercantile outpost in the South-East Asian archipelago today known as Indonesia. In July 1644, Schouten was found to have engaged in homosexual sex with numerous men. Convicted of sodomy, a capital offence in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, he was burnt at the stake.