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Sailing along the Wagenspoor
On the Sea-Road with the Dutch East India Company
Between 1595 - when four ships from Amsterdam sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to Asia - and 1794 - when the last flotilla of ships under the flag of the voc, the Dutch East India Company, sailed to the East Indies - some 4700 vessels set course for the Orient, while only 3300 ships returned. Considering the discrepancy between these two numbers, and looking at the fate of the first and last ships that left for the East, we might presume that these were hazardous expeditions. Only 87 members of the original crew of 240 sailors of the first fleet returned two years later. Of the last fleet of eight ships only one ship reached its destination, Batavia. The English and French confiscated the others en route, except for one ship that was wrecked on the French coast. These bare facts, however, paint a false picture. The first navigation of the Dutch was after all a veritable expedition of discovery, while the last navigation to the Indies under the voc flag was disrupted by war conditions with England and France. The vast discrepancy in numbers between the outward-bound and homeward-bound ships in the two hundred years of the Company's existence can be explained easily. Many ships were built for use in Asian waters and so remained there until they were finally dismantled.
If we take a closer look at the regular traffic between the ports of Holland and Zeeland in Europe and Batavia, the Company's general rendezvous in Asia, over a period of two hundred years, it becomes clear that the navigation to and from the Indies was in fact a very well managed enterprise with - given the ways and means of that period - relatively few shipwrecks and generally speaking a high survival rate of those on board. Exactly such a closer look was taken in the 1970s by a team of historians from Leiden University, when computer-based quantitative analysis of historical research became feasible for the first time. In a three-volume study, which contains a general analysis of the collected data and a detailed survey of all the outward-bound and homeward-bound voyages from the Netherlands to Asia and the Cape of Good Hope, the authors reached the conclusion that, bearing in mind the limitations of sea transport three hundred years ago, a well-organised and basically safe transport link existed between Holland and Java. Notwithstanding its long elaborate lists of data on ship tonnage,
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Crew members of the Peter and Paul, the Dutch East Indiaman which Czar Peter the Great helped to build - as an anonymous carpenter - during his stay in Holland (detail of a painting by A. Storck, 1698). Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam.
departure and arrival dates, numbers of crew and passengers and so on, Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries offers fascinating reading for today's armchair traveller who tries to make sense of those numbers with the help of the introductory volume.
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Sailing on cockle shells
Another interesting source about the navigation of the ships of the voc is the Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie, a detailed account of the organisation of the Dutch East India Company in five volumes written by the executive director (advocaat) Pieter van Dam and presented to the Company management in 1701. The Beschryvinge also devotes several chapters to the navigation to and from the Indies. The Institute for Dutch History (ing) has recently republished this originally highly secret manuscript, which was not published until the late 1920s.
But in order to get a true ‘historical sensation’ of what a trip to the East
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The replica of the Batavia in Lelystad.
must have been like, a visit to one of the two existing replicas of Dutch East Indiamen that are open to the public in Lelystad and Amsterdam is an absolute must. The landlubber's imagination is fired when he or she crosses the gangplank to the Batavia, a colourful, curvy seventeenth-century sea fortress, or for that matter the more austere and functional looking replica of the Amsterdam, an eighteenth-century voc ship. To the traveller who bridges the distance between Schiphol Airport and Soekarno-Hatta Airport in only 14 hours by 400-passenger Boeing 747, the duration of a sea journey from Holland to Java may seem to have taken an age. It took on average two hundred days to reach Java, with a short sojourn at the Cape of Good Hope. Yet three hundred years ago people lived at a much slower pace and thought differently about long distances. Already by the middle of the seventeenth century the navigation of the long voyage to Asia had become so regular, that the sailing route was known as the karrespoor or wagenspoor, the cart track.
Romantic writers have likened the sailing ships of the past to cockleshells compared with today's container vessels and oil tankers, but while the latter tend to overawe us by their sheer size and businesslike appearance, a wood- en sailing ship with its towering masts and rigging emanates a sense of adventure. Indeed, as soon as the visitor to the Batavia has stepped on board this sturdy, well-built seventeenth-century square rigger, and peers up at its stout masts and yards and looks down from the railing of the high poop deck at the water some thirty feet below, he or she cannot but feel admiration for the shipwrights and sailors of yore who built and sailed those ships across the oceans. So well organised were the shipyards of the Company that on average one ship was launched every six months on the wharves of Amsterdam and Middelburg. Although there were several types of ships - varying from the heavily built and armed schip to the lightly armed fluit or the smaller yacht, which was often used for patrol missions in Asia, all were built to special qualifications or charters. The well-built East Indiamen were the object of everybody's admiration. No wonder sailors used to speak about their ship as if she were a female companion that had to be cared for and steered
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but which at the same time took care of them in times of distress.
This said, it is still very hard for someone visiting a museum replica to project himself into the travel conditions of the passenger of three hundred years ago, and perhaps even more difficult to put oneself in the wet shoes, or should we say the bare feet, of the sailor of those days. The museum ship lies safely moored in a harbour occasionally stirred slightly by the wake of a passing barge; groups of tourists meekly follow the guides who explain to them a particular feature of the vessel. How different it must have been for those passengers who sailed on a small vessel from Amsterdam all the way to the northern Wadden island of Texel, where the East Indiamen anchored before their departure. Well-sheltered from western winds, the East Indiamen would gather at the Koopvaardersrede (Merchantmen's Roadstead), and wait for a fair easterly wind to blow them safely out to sea, pushing them Godspeed all the way along the white cliffs through the English Channel as far as the wide space of the Atlantic Ocean. In the seventeenth century a large Dutch East Indiaman of 700 tons carried apart from its cargo between 250 and 300 people, i.e. about 140 sailors, 120 soldiers and a dozen passengers. The majority of the sailors came from the Dutch provinces and Scandinavia, but most of the soldiers originated from the German kingdoms. The passengers were generally speaking high officials, the gequalificeerden, with their wives and occasionally their children.
Square-rigged sailing ships were notorious for their bad windward capabilities. While a modern sailing yacht can sail as close as 30 degrees to the wind, the windjammers of yore were fortunate if they came as close as 60 degrees. If we take into account that they also drifted considerably and thus made considerable leeway, and needed some thirty minutes to go about when approaching the shore, then it becomes understandable that no captain dared to leave the Dutch estuaries while headwinds were blowing. Woe betide the captain who got caught in a south-westerly gale in the English Channel. If he didn't bear away and run before the storm back to where he came from he ran the risk of wrecking his vessel on the French or English coast, as indeed happened to the skipper of the Amsterdam who beached his ship at Hastings, where now, some 250 years later, the ribs of the wooden wreck can occasionally still be seen sticking out of the sands at low tide. Sometimes ship's captains who faced adverse conditions shortly after leaving Holland would gather and decide to sail right round Great Britain by following the island's eastern coast as far as the Shetland Islands and there enter the Atlantic Ocean.
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The hazards of travel
It will by now be clear why the navigation of ships heading for the East Indies with large crews of sailors, soldiers and passengers and costly cargoes of silver and gold bullion soon became a highly regulated affair. Generally speaking, three fleets left the Dutch shores annually, respectively around Christmas, Easter, and finally around the time when the September fair was held, this last fleet being appropriately named the Kermis or ‘Fair’ fleet. These fleets always sailed in convoy under a flag admiral who, the weather permitting, frequently held council en route with officers of the other
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The mutiny of the crew of the Batavia, which ran amuck after the ship stranded on the Abrolhos, west of Australia, in 1627 (plate from Voyagie van 't schip Batavia. Amsterdam, 1647). Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam.
ships to decide on the course to be taken. Often the outward-bound fleets of five to ten East Indiamen were even escorted by warships as far as the Atlantic to make sure that they could reach its deep blue waters.
Vessels were issued with excellent maps, rutters and coastal descriptions which featured beautifully drawn prospects of the coastal promontories together with instructions for sailing routes from Holland to Java, indicating the prevailing winds and currents along the way throughout the seasons, and the ship's officers were ordered to follow these routes unless extraordinary weather conditions forced them to take a different course. On arrival the logbooks would be checked and any deviation from the beaten path had to be accounted for.
These same instructions also detailed the dangers that awaited the ships on the way. First of all there were the navigational hazards, rocks, shallow waters, gales, but also mistakes in the dead reckoning of the position of the ship. The wrecking of the Batavia in 1627 at the Abrolhos Islands off the south-western tip of the Australian continent is a case in point. Because it was very difficult to calculate the exact longitudinal position of a vessel at sea as late as the eighteenth century, ships crossing the Indian Ocean in an easterly direction had to be very careful that they did not come to grief off the Australian coast while en route to Java. Only after John Harrison had devised a trustworthy chronometer was this navigational conundrum solved.
Another danger that threatened the crew was of course the onslaught of epidemic diseases. One disease which frequently struck sailors when they had to do without fresh food for long periods was scurvy, a nutritional disorder caused by a deficiency of vitamin C and characterised by bleeding gums with loosened teeth, bleeding under the skin and stiffness of the joints.
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voc ships near the Cape of Good Hope (anonymous drawing, late 18th century). Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam.
Crew members on the deck of an East Indiaman. This sketch was made by Jan Brandes during his return trip from Batavia, where he spent a few years as a Lutheran minister. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
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No wonder the Company's management eagerly sought refreshment stations along the route until they took the weighty decision to establish such a settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652.
The pleasant aspect of the Cape Town settlement with its agreeable climate, vegetable gardens and wine farms in the hinterland region of Stellenbosch was noted by many voyagers, including Nicolaus de Graaff, a ship's surgeon who made many journeys to the East. When he visited Table Bay for the first time, however, in 1639, he described it as a ‘wild and inhospitable land ... without any fruit trees or cultivated acres, but inhabited by wild, heathen, dirty and stinking people’. Nonetheless, he noted that even then no words could describe the pleasure and joy among the crew when the landfall was sighted: ‘the lame, the crippled and those who were able to leave their sickbed came on deck to see the land’. De Graaff lived long enough to witness the transformation of the settlement in later years. There can be no doubt that the presence of this ‘Indische Zeeherberg’ (‘Indian sea tavern’) saved the lives of many sick sailors. Yet there were also other deadly illnesses for which there was no cure. Typhus and various forms of dysentery led to violent outbreaks of epidemics on board ship for which the ship's surgeons had no treatment.
A third hazard on board the heavily crowded ships was, of course, discipline. So called ziekentroosters, comforters of the sick, took care of the religious duties, reading sermons or texts from the Bible to the crew who would frequently gather on the main deck and listen and pray with bowed heads. As the term implies, the comforters of the sick also helped the ship's surgeon in comforting the sick people on board and would direct the last farewell ritual when a dead crew member would be sent overboard in a tarpaulin bag weighted with stones, with the final salute: ‘een, twee, drie in Godsnaam!’ (‘One, two, three in the name of God!’).
But occasionally religious admonition was not enough to keep all the sailors ‘straight’. Individual fights might lead to riots, and on occasion even to mutiny. Insubordination occurred quite frequently, most often among crew members of foreign nationality. There were basically two kinds of rebellion: refusal to carry out the daily chores or outright insubordination and seizure of control. The case of the mutiny of the crew of the Batavia, which ran amuck after the ship stranded on the Abrolhos, west of Australia, is well known. Mutinies also could occur unexpectedly: at Christmas 1783 the crew of the Java, a large East Indiamen, was startled by a mutiny of Asian crew members who tried to subdue the ship's officers who had collected at the poop. There were some 25 Chinese and 25 Javanese crewmen among the 143 sailors on board, roughly one third of the crew. In the skirmish that followed several people, among them the Councillor of the Indies Jacob Radermacher, were killed before the mutineers were dealt with. The Java was undoubtedly an unlucky ship. On the way to Java it had already lost 185 of its crew of 289 men to epidemic diseases.
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En route
Now that we have reviewed in passing the hazards aboard, let us briefly recapitulate what the route of the average outward-bound trip to the Indies
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looked like. The first short stop after passing the often stormy Bay of Biscay and Cape Finisterre on the Portuguese coast (Cape Finis Terrae, the end of the world) was at the Cape Verde Islands off the African coast, where fresh water and victuals such as cattle and poultry for consumption on board could be loaded. During the ship's council, which was held while the ships were at anchor waiting for all the ships to reassemble, the decision was taken what
On the sea-road with the voc (yellow = route to Batavia; red = return to Holland; green = dangerous spots for wreckage; dotted line = direct routes to Ceylon).
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course to steer to reach the next destination, Table Bay at the Cape of Good Hope. Following a north-easterly trade wind as far as the island of Fernando Po off the Brazilian coast, the ships would continue their journey after a shorter or longer pause in the Doldrums - a belt of converging winds along the equator where ships often lay becalmed for days - until they picked up the westerly winds of the southern hemisphere which conducted them close by the islands of Tristan da Cunha towards Cape Town. The journey from Holland to the Cape took on average about four months. After a stop of two or three weeks in which fresh provisions were loaded and infirm crew members were taken ashore to recuperate, the ships would put out to sea again and embark on the last stretch across the Indian Ocean to the Sunda Straits, the thoroughfare between the islands of Sumatra and Java in the Indonesian archipelago.
From the Cape the ships of the Dutch East India Company took a quite different route towards Asia than the Portuguese or for that matter the English. While the latter headed for the Indian subcontinent and therefore either followed the eastern coast of Africa or set course for the island of Mauritius in a northerly direction, the voc ships set out in an easterly direction picking up the ‘Brave Westerlies’, strong trade winds which took them along the tiny Amsterdam archipelago as far eastward as Australia, where they altered course northwards so as to reach the Sunda Straits with favourable winds and currents. This stretch took on average three months. The first landmark to be sighted was generally the formidable Krakatoa volcano, in the middle of the approaches to the Sunda Strait. Shortly afterwards messages would be exchanged with the voc watch post of Anjer on the Western tip of Java. From there the Bay of Batavia with its Thousand Islands could be easily reached within a few days. These islands made the bay in front of the city a well-sheltered roadstead and anchorage. Ironically, almost every arrival on the Batavian roadstead brought a few more deaths. Here we are not speaking of those sick people who were already on their deathbeds, but of relatively healthy crew members, who literally stuffed themselves to death with tropical fruit. They could not withstand the temptation of the tasty tropical fruits, which were handed to them by Javanese peddlers who steered their little boats to the newly arrived East Indiaman. Eating a lot of fruit after several months of vitamin deficiency meant instant death.
Of course, for most sailors the voyage did not end at Batavia. They had only just arrived. From the Generaal Rendez-vous, as the headquarters of the voc in Asia were called, they would proceed to other destinations: to Persia or the ports of India to the west, to the many islands of the archipelago itself or northeast to China and Japan, where the redoubtable typhoons were waiting for them. How the sailors felt about their own plight it is hard to know. We have seen that there were occasional mutinies, but some adventurers have also left us their memoirs. Those were the lucky ones who made it back to Europe, and their stories often make wonderful reading. I have already mentioned Nicolaus de Graaff, but he is only one of the writers who wrote up their adventures in the Orient The best way to find out how the sailors felt when they returned home is by listening to the songs they belted out, like this one which was sung on the safe return of 21 East Indiamen in the year 1718:
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The ‘Lord of Six Weeks’: voc sailors, when they returned home, could afford all kinds of entertainment. When their money was spent, it was time to sign on again (plate by C. Dusart, late 17th century). Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam.
Hurrah all you young ladies
And good-time girls and whores
Who love to paint the town red
With rough and rowdy boys:
Now you should all be gay,
Get a-swinging and a-singing:
This happy song of twelve verses in which all the pleasures of coming home and the delights of soft welcoming embraces are described, ends with the sailor inevitably heaving a sigh when he realises that he has spent all his money and that it is time to sign on again and embark on another voyage along the wagenspoor.
leonard blussé
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Further reading
| boxer, j.r., The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800. London, 1965. |
| bruijn, j.r., f.s. gaastra and i. schöffer (eds.), Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries (3 vols.). The Hague, 1979-1987. |
| dam, pieter van, Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie. 7 vols. Reprint The Hague, 1976. |
| dash, mike, Batavia's Graveyard. Crown Publ., 2002. |
| glamann, k., Dutch-Asiatic Trade, 1620-1740. Copenhagen / The Hague, 1958. |
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