Batavia's Graveyard by Mike Dash Page B

“cage” of wooden palisades 40 or 50 yards out in the
waters of the River IJ, where she would be fitted out. The Peperwerf’s slips were
thus freed for work to begin on yet another vessel. In this way the VOC’s yards
completed 1,500 merchantmen in the seventeenth century alone.
    The
Batavia
herself was no ordinary ship, but one of the greatest vessels
of her day. The ship was named after the Javan town of Batavia, which was the capital of
all the Dutch possessions in the Indies, and she displaced 1,200 tons and measured 160
feet from stem to stern—the very largest size permitted under Company regulations.
She had four decks, three masts, and 30 guns, and her designer—the famous naval
architect Jan Rijksen, still active and alert at the tremendous age of 66—had given
her not only a strong double hull (two three-inch thicknesses of oak, with a waterproof
layer of tarred horsehair in between them) but an outer skin of deal or pine as well. This
softwood sheathing protected the hull from attack by shipworm—the animals preferred
burrowing from stem to stern through the soft planking to attacking the harder oak
beneath—and as an added prophylactic her outer skin was studded with thick iron nails
and coated with a noxious mix of resin, sulphur, oil, and lime. Finally, the sheathing
itself was protected all along the waterline by the hides of several hundred roughly
butchered cattle, which were tacked onto the pine. So long as the unladen
Batavia
rode high in the waters of the IJ, these skins gave the lower part of her hull the
appearance of a mangy patchwork quilt. They would remain in place until they rotted and
dropped off in the course of the vessel’s maiden voyage.
    Thankfully the cattle hides did not obscure
Batavia
’s brightly
painted upperworks, which had been trimmed in green and gold, nor her richly decorated
stern—an ostentatious refinement that the normally parsimonius Gentlemen XVII had
authorized in an effort to overawe the peoples of the East. But all this attention to
detail did not come cheap. As completed, and without supplies,
Batavia
would have
cost the Company almost 100,000 guilders, a fortune at the time.
    This considerable expense was necessary because—once built—the VOC
flogged its ships until they were on the verge of falling apart. The stresses and strains
that the
Batavia
would be exposed to in the course of a single passage to the
Indies were enough to destroy a normal ship, and even with her triple hull a
retourschip
would rarely be expected to make more than half a dozen round trips to the East. Having
served the Gentlemen XVII for somewhere between 10 and 20 years, she would then be
returned to the Zuyder Zee and broken up to provide timber for new housing. It is a
testament to the immense profitability of the spice trade that by the time an East
Indiaman had been turned back into lumber, the profit on her cargoes would have repaid her
building costs several times over.
    A
retourschip
of the
Batavia
’s size could load around 600 tons
of supplies and trade goods when new (and newness made a difference; after a year or two
in service, when the hull became saturated with seawater, cargo capacity could fall by 20
percent). But the holds of an East Indiaman were only ever full when she sailed home so
loaded down with spices that her gunports were sometimes only two feet from the sea. There
was virtually no demand for European goods in the Indies, and although merchantmen
departing from the Netherlands did carry boxes of psalm books, hand grenades, cooking
pots, and barrel hoops destined for the Dutch garrisons of the East, the only bulky cargo
shipped to Java was stone for the Company factories in the East. Each year the Dutch
authorities in the Indies placed orders for further huge quantities of house bricks, which
were sent out as ballast. Occasionally the
eysch—
the governor-general’s
annual order for supplies—included more exotic requests. This was the case in the
autumn