Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [35]
There were several different sorts of ship, each designed for a specific task. The most expensive were East Indiamen of the Batavia’s class, which were called retourschepen (“return ships”). These vessels were specially designed to carry passengers as well as cargo and were built to survive long ocean voyages to and from the Indies. Next in importance was the fluyt—a cheap, flat-bottomed, round-sterned vessel with a high proportion of easily accessible cargo space—and, after that, the jacht, which was generally a light and handy craft built to carry no more than 50 tons of cargo.
Each type was built according to the Dutch “shell-first” method, a revolutionary construction technique that called for a ship’s external planking to be assembled and nailed together before the internal ribs and frames were added. As soon as this phase of the building work was finished, the half-finished East Indiaman would be floated and towed out to a “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