Page 119 - Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters

8 An analysis of the development of VOC shipping in Asia until  The general development of VOC shipping is described in chapters  and . This chapter pre- sents and interprets the data collated relating to the development of the VOC network in Asia. As explained in chapter , the database contains, for the period examined, a total of . voyages between  destinations in  Asian areas; these have been extracted from the total of more then . voyages held in the database. All the records of local voyages and of the wait- ing time of a vessel are excluded for the analysis of the development of Dutch shipping in Asian waters until . These exclusions have been made for a number of reasons. In the first place, the sources available for the reconstruction of local shipping are very diverse and not consistent for all destinations. It is, therefore, possible that the shipping in some areas is relatively over-rep- resented. In addition due to concurrent research for the Avondster Project, (Parthesius, ) shipping in Galle was studied in greater detail than other areas. For general shipping, (between areas) this focus has no effect because with a few exceptions, all of the voyages are also found in the general references. Shipping within a particular area is not seen to have contributed to the development of the intra-Asian shipping. Analysis of local shipping provides an insight into the use of specific types of vessels by the VOC and this is covered in chapter . From analysing the data, the total growth of VOC shipping in Asia can be calculated/estab- lished. These figures relate to shipping within Asia, and therefore do not include the arrival of ships from Europe, which were part of European-Asian shipping. Apart from a few exceptions over the years, the first stop was west Java, with Batavia as the central rendezvous from . A ship’s journey is included only if its first port of call was in Asia and it then sailed to another destination within Asia.. This chapter presents and explains the quantitative data from the database relating to the development of the VOC network in Asia. The applied methods are described in chapter  on the database. Table .: Development of the intra-Asian shipping in frequency (arrivals on a destination in Asia) and volume (tonnage in lasten) From the data in Table - it can be seen that up to , the frequency shows a steep growth, consistent with the initial developmental phase (see chapter .). From  until , there is 