Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [184]
Merchants and assistants Difficult as it generally was to recruit both officers and men, it was unusual for the Company to go so far as to hire a novice as an under-merchant. The position was a relatively senior one and was generally awarded to men who boasted at least half a dozen years of faithful service to the company in the lesser position of assistant, or clerk. On many smaller ships, an under-merchant would be the most senior VOC officer on board, and it would fall to him to direct the skipper and barter for trade goods with the experienced native merchants of the east. For this reason, even men who came from good families tended to join the VOC as assistants if they were without influence, and they learned the trade of merchant by watching their superiors for a period of years. Francisco Pelsaert started as an assistant and served at that rank for four or five years before receiving promotion to under-merchant (Kolff and van Santen, op. cit., pp. 6–7). He was, however, much younger at this time than was Cornelisz, who was not in any case unique. Some men were even more greatly favored than he; Pieter van den Broecke, who had years of experience in Africa, actually joined the company as an upper-merchant on the recommendation of Gerard Reynst, the son of a prominent soap-boiler and a future Governor-General of the Indies. Ratelband, op. cit., pp. XXXI, XXXIV.
The Peperwerf and the building of the Batavia The island of Rapenburg has long since become part of the city of Amsterdam and now exists only as a street name and a square. The yards there dated to 1608, before which the Amsterdam chamber of the VOC contracted with private shipbuilders for its vessels. Even after that date the six chambers built their own ships to their own specifications, and there were subtle—indeed sometimes considerable—differences between the vessels built in the different yards.
No records survive concerning the construction or the cost of the Batavia herself, though she was built in compliance of a directive of 17 March 1626. Given that average building times were then 8 or 12 months, it would appear to have taken the VOC another 12–18 months to lay her down. Like all Dutch East Indiamen, she was built not to a detailed set of plans, but by rule of thumb. The ship was made of green timber—Dutch shipwrights found seasoned wood too hard to work with. Measurements are given in English feet, which were slightly bigger than the Amsterdam feet the original shipwrights worked in (one Amsterdam foot = 11 inches, or 28 cm). In terms of labor, construction required about 183,000 man hours. P. Gretler, “De Peperwerf,” in R. Parthesius (ed.), Batavia Cahier 2: De Herbouw van een Oostindiïvaarder (Lelystad: np, 1990), pp. 58–64; Willem Vos, “Een Rondleiding Door een Oostindiïvaarder,” in Batavia Cahier 4: Een Rondleiding door een Oostindiïvaarder (Lelystad: np, 1993), pp. 3–45; A. van der Zee, “Bronmen voor Oostindiïvaarders: Het VOC-Boekhoundjournaal,” in R. Parthesius (ed.), Batavia Cahier 3: De Herbouw van een Oostindiïvaarder (Leylystad: np, 1990), p. 61; Jeremy Green, Myra Stanbury, and Femme Gaastra (eds.), The ANCODS Colloquium: Papers Presented at the Australia-Netherlands Colloquium on Maritime Archaeology and Maritime History (Fremantle: Australian National Centre of Excellence for Maritime Archaeology, 1999), p. 71; Bruijn et al., Dutch-Asiatic Shipping, I, pp. 37–9, 93; Philippe Godard, The First and Last Voyage of the Batavia (Perth: Abrolhos Publishing, nd, c. 1993), pp. 56–66; C. R. Boxer, “The Dutch East-Indiamen: Their Sailors, Their Navigators and Life on Board, 1602–1795,” The Mariner’s Mirror 49 (1963): 82; H. N. Kamer, Het VOC-Retourschip: Een Panorama van de 17de- en 18de-Eeuwse Scheepsbouw (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1995), pp. 30–8, 218–9.
Batavia The name is taken from that of the ancient, and semimythical, tribe of Batavians, who had occupied the Netherlands 1500 years earlier and—in legend at least