The wrecking of the Dutch East India Firm ship Batavia in 1629 is maybe the best-known maritime catastrophe in Australian historical past. The topic of books, articles, performs, and even an opera, Batavia was wrecked on a series of small islands off the coast of Western Australia.
Of Batavia’s 341 crew and passengers, 40 drowned attempting to get off the ship, whereas all others made it to the uninhabited islands close by. The captain, senior officers, two ladies and one baby left in one of many ship’s boats to get assist. However additional tragedy adopted.
A bunch of males on the islands who had gathered across the performing commander intentionally drowned, strangled, minimize the throats, or brutally hacked to dying 125 kids, ladies and men. When the rescue social gathering returned months later, they managed to overpower this dying squad and convey the remaining survivors to security. Along with its many victims and the murderers, Batavia’s wreckage was left within the Houtman Abrolhos archipelago.
The Dutch ship was 45.3 metres lengthy and 600 metric tons in measurement. It sank on its maiden voyage to Southeast Asia. The shipwreck was discovered within the Nineteen Sixties off Morning Reef and was excavated within the Seventies.
The surviving stern part, now in Fremantle’s Western Australian Shipwrecks Museum, is the one portion of any early Seventeenth-century Dutch East India ship raised from the seabed and preserved.
Beforehand, historians might solely guess the place the timber for such ships got here from, when it was felled or the way it was used, as archival data of Dutch timber commerce earlier than 1650 are uncommon or misplaced.
However in new research, we studied the tree rings of the Batavia shipwreck timbers. We’ve got discovered that the oak for the hull was sourced from two separate forests (in northern Germany and the Baltic area); with wooden for the framing parts coming predominantly from the forests of Decrease Saxony. The timber was processed shortly after the timber had been felled (in 1625 or later) and was nonetheless inexperienced when the shipbuilders minimize and bent the planks into form.
Figuring out extra about these timbers helps us perceive the Dutch success in world commerce, together with how they managed to construct such massive ocean-going vessels and so a lot of them.
A novel archaeological information set
Batavia’s stays present a uncommon archaeological useful resource for tree-ring examination as a result of actual dates of its development and sinking are recognized.
Development started someday in spring 1626 and the ship set sail from Texel (The Netherlands) to The East Indies (recognized in the present day as Indonesia) in October 1628. It struck a reef on 4 June 1629. As Batavia had by no means undergone repairs or upkeep work, we all know each piece of timber belongs to the unique construction.
When Batavia was constructed, the Dutch had been the foremost shipbuilders in Europe. By 1640, for instance, round a thousand seagoing ships had been being constructed within the Netherlands every year, principally for export markets.
The Dutch lacked home timber sources to provide the bustling shipbuilding trade and but would have wanted lots of, maybe hundreds, of oak timber to construct Batavia.
The place did all this timber come from? The Dutch East India Firm archives present no detailed data on the place its shipyards purchased timber on the time of Batavia’s development. Whereas the corporate saved detailed data from the mid-Seventeenth century onwards, hardly any of these from the early 1600s have survived.
Happily, tree rings can present solutions to these questions. Timber in temperate local weather zones kind a progress ring every year, just below the bark. This sequence of progress rings produced over years and a long time acts like an environmental bar-code, a progress sample that’s specific to the place the place they grew and died.
This progress sample may be very comparable for timber of the identical species rising in the identical space.
By measuring the ring widths from many timber, a reference tree-ring chronology could be constructed. Then, we will cross match the expansion sample of a particular timber to such reference chronologies, establishing when the tree was felled and the place it had grown. This area of examine is called dendrochronology.
The numerous Batavia timbers we sampled had solely heartwood, or inside rings, demonstrating that Dutch shipbuilders discarded the sapwood (outer rings). Sapwood is softer and accommodates substances that make it extra weak to insect infestation and decay.
Moreover, the outermost heartwood ring of the Batavia hull planks that we sampled dates to 1616. When accounting for the lacking sapwood (9 rings for Baltic oak), this implies the timber had been felled in 1625 or later.
The timber was processed shortly after the timber had been felled. All this demonstrates that Batavia’s builders had been expert craftsmen, intimately aware of the properties of the wooden they used.
Environment friendly shipbuilding and regional choice
The oak timber utilized in Batavia’s hull planks got here from two forests. Timber from close to Lübeck in northern Germany had been used above the ship’s waterline, whereas timber from the Baltic area of northeastern Europe was utilized solely under the waterline.
This Baltic timber was prized by artists like Rembrandt, who used it for panels on which to color. Timber from this area had fantastically straight trunks with very tremendous progress rings, making the wooden straightforward to work and steady.
Clearly, firm shipbuilders valued these similar properties when constructing ships robust sufficient to endure a number of return voyages to southeast Asia. They prevented utilizing timber with knots within the hull and most well-liked wooden from which they may vogue lengthy and powerful planks.
In distinction, we discovered that the timber for Batavia’s framing parts got here predominantly from the forests of Decrease Saxony (northwest Germany). Frames utilised the robust properties of those oaks’ curved wooden fibres. Because it was sourced nearer to dwelling, this timber could have been cheaper and simpler to amass.
Our examine was solely doable as a result of Batavia’s hull was raised in its entirety. Waterlogged wooden is mushy, so extracting samples from the timbers whereas nonetheless below water is all the time difficult. It additionally would have required reducing out massive sections of the ship to entry all of the totally different parts.
Wendy van Duivenvoorde is an Affiliate Professor in Maritime Archaeology at Flinders University. Aoife Daly is an Affiliate professor on the University of Copenhagen. Marta Domínguez Delmás is a analysis Affiliate on the University of Amsterdam. This text is republished from The Conversation below a Creative Commons license. Learn the original article.
