Dutch East India Company Ship Research Articles

The Unlucky Voyage: Batavia’s (1629) Landscape of Survival on the Houtman Abrolhos Islands in Western Australia

The loss of the Dutch East India Company ship Batavia in 1629 on the Houtman Abrolhos off the west coast of Australia and subsequent mutiny is one of the most dramatic events in the history of European encounters with Australia, and was widely popularized in 17th-century publications. The archaeological remains surpass that of a shipwreck with its consequent jetsam and flotsam, and are the silent witnesses to a cultural landscape of survival created within a few months by a horrible sequence of events. Here we present archaeological evidence collected from 2014 to 2019 in a new research project that informs on these historical events. We discovered 12 victims in single and multiple graves, as well as evidence for survivors’ resistance to a band of mutineers and remains of the possible gallows site where 7 mutineers were executed. Together these sites contribute to the understanding of the survival landscape at one of the earliest European sites in Australia.

The Wreck of the Dutch East India Company Ship Haarlem in Table Bay, 1647, and the Establishment of the ‘Tavern of the Seas’

On Sunday 25 March 1647, shortly after five o’clock in the afternoon, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) ship Nieuw Haarlem or Haarlem was wrecked in Table Bay, off the coast of South Africa. The events that followed had far-reaching consequences for the history of South Africa. Fifty-eight of the crew were repatriated by accompanying ships soon after the incident, but 62 men were left behind to try and salvage as much of the cargo as possible. They found refuge in a makeshift camp, where they lived for about one year. During their stay, the men from Haarlem came into contact with indigenous people. Although initially marked by apprehension and reservation, these contacts improved after some time. This led to regular bartering, visits to each other's abodes, basic exchange of language and appreciation of each other's cultures. Upon returning to the Netherlands, the men reported favourably of their experiences. As a result, VOC management decided to establish a much-needed stopover for their ships. This station, known as the ‘Tavern of the Seas’, later developed into the city of Cape Town. The wrecking of Haarlem can thus be regarded as the catalyst that created one of the roots of current multiracial and multicultural South African society.

Laurent Garcin, M.D. F.R.S.: A Forgotten Source for N. L. Burman'sFlora indica(1768)

Abstract. Laurent Garcin (ca. 1681–1751), a Dutch East India Company ship's surgeon, Fellow of the Royal Society and corresponding member of the Academie royale des sciences (Paris), has largely vanished from the annals of botanical and medical science. Yet data presented in this article demonstrate that ca. 1740 he gave some or all of his plant collections from his Asian travels in the 1720s to J. Burman, a correspondent in Amsterdam. Those collections in turn greatly enriched Flora Indica by N. Burman (hereafter Burman fil.) to the tune of 98 specimens. Burman's work is an important historical source for the botany not only of modern-day India, as the title suggests, but also of Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Iran—the “Indies” as they were understood in the eighteenth century. So far only a handful of Garcin's specimens have come to light (G-Burman). These few extant specimens testify to Garcin's collecting zeal and keen eye for materia medica.

Pigments from the Zuiddorp (Zuytdorp) ship sculpture: red, white and blue?

SUMMARY: The Dutch East India Company ship Zuiddorp (also known as Zuytdorp) met its demise in 1712 at the base of steep cliffs along the Western Australian coast. Material from the shipwreck includes an extraordinary example of a caryatid herm from the ship’s stern counter. A recent study of this sculpture and the pigments found on its surface demonstrates Zuiddorp’s archaic stern construction and adornment, which is more of a late 17th-century, than an early 18th-century, Dutch Indiaman. This paper discusses the results of this study and emphasizes how the smallest pieces of evidence can broaden our understanding of contemporaneous regional Dutch East India Company shipbuilding practices.

Calamitous Voyages: the social space of shipwreck and mutiny narratives in the Dutch East India Company

This article analyses four accounts of mutinies and wrecks of Dutch East India Company ships: those of the Nieuw Hoorn, Batavia, Blydorp and Nijenburg. These stories can be read as worst-case survival manuals, which support the Company’s discourse of discipline. They advise readers that the best option in the event of disaster is to obey the officers’ orders and the Company’s rules, linking this advice to moral and religious ideas of endurance and divine providence that were common in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The accounts also link shipboard spatial protocols with proper social order. The stories present the Indies as a dangerous physical and moral testing ground, from which the ship provides a vital protective barrier, but only if the crew acts with disciplined solidarity and shows seamanlike virtues of cohesion and perseverance. Disorder among the crew, especially the breaching of spatial boundaries between officers and men, invites the dangers of the Indies to penetrate the safe space of the ship. Such breaches threaten all the boundaries on which the lives of the ship and crew depend: between the ship and the sea, between moral and immoral behaviour, and between Europeans and the non-European world. Where spatial boundaries break down, the stories show chaos and calamity following. Where the stories have ‘happy endings’, these are brought about by the re-establishment of proper spatial and social hierarchies.

Commanders of Dutch East India Company Ships in the Eighteenth Century - By Japp R. Bruijn

Commanders of Dutch East India Company Ships in the Eighteenth Century - By Japp R. Bruijn

The Illusion of Freedom in South Africa: Post-colonialism, Exploitation and Identity Crisis in Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country

Colonization of Africa began in 1488 when the Portuguese explorer Bartolemeu Dias first sailed along the cost of South Africa and eventually arrived at the north of South Africa. Then the British sailors stopped briefly in the southwest of Africa on their way to India in the 1600s. In 1602, the Dutch East India Company was established to expand trade relationship with colonies in Asia by entering into a fierce rivalry with Britain, and Jan van Riebeeck brought in 1652 three Dutch East India Company ships with around 100 people to establish a station, and these people, known as Afrikaners, were the first white settlers of South Africa. By the end of the seventeenth century, the white population, including Dutch, German, and French, increased considerably in South Africa by killing, driving out or enslaving the indigenous peoples, and then the slave trade started.

Of Paper and Men: A Note on the Archives of the VOC as a Source for the History of Madagascar

In July 1752, two days after their arrival at a roadstead in Saint Augustine's Bay on the south-western coast of Madagascar, ‘theGreat Island’, two junior merchants of the Dutch East India Company ship Schuylenburch headed for the residence of king Ratsimandresy (Ramanrasse in the Dutch sources). They were Philip Boomgaard and Dirk Westerhoff, responsible for commercial affairs and on a trade mission for the Company. On the way to the king's residence, about two miles inland from ‘Toulier’ (Toliara), they were welcomed by Ramanrasse's son, ‘crovmprince Revenoe’, and they offered him a few gifts they had brought along. However, upon taking a closer look at the presents Revenoe disdainfully threw astring of beads on the ground replying ‘that the Dutch were nothing more than traffickers, and that he expected them upon their arrival to present him with proper gifts just like the British and French traders that frequented his father's court were accustomed to do’.

The second destruction of the Geldermalsen

This review of C. J. A. Jorg’s book on the Chinese porcelain from the Dutch East India Company ship Geldermalsen, which sank in 1752, addresses some broader questions involved in the destruction of shipwreck sites for commercial profit. These questions grew out of the issue of what relationship scholars should have with those who destroy sites and acquire objects from them. The first part of the article is a review of Jorg’s book, followed by a commentary on the problems that collecting from looted sites raise.

Analysis of Chinese Porcelains and Ceramics

ABSTRACT Trace and minor components in fragnzen~~ of northern Chinese porcelains and the poorly-known southern Chinese porcellun- eous ware from e.ucavatiom in the south-western Cape were determined non-desrmctively by PIXE in the glazes und in the body material. Correspondence analysis of the analytical riata showed that the Clzine.se glazes, though different from that of Englkh specimens, could not be dzferentiated. The analysis of the body material enabled the no~hem porceluins and some of the southern ceramics to be distinguished, but somp southern porcel- laneous ware could not be grouped separutel?. * Manuscript received September 1985. Originally read at the 2nd International Symposium on Analytical Chemistry in the Exploitation, Mining and Processing of Materials, Pretoria. April 15-19, 1985. Introduction Cape Town served as an important halfway station for the Dutch East India Company ships trading between their homeland and the Far East.