Page 146 - Kennemerland VOC ship, 1664 - Published Reports

NAUTICAL ARCHAEOLOGY, 20.1
Figure 1. The four golfclub heads found amid the wreckage of the Lastdrager (1653)and (right) the tip of a wooden shaft extracted from the head. (Photo: R. Stenuit).
anintactwoodencore,clearlytheonlysurviving part of the lower end of the shaft.
BelgiumasRobiniapseudoacaciaLinnaei(False Acacia or Black Locust). False Acacia is a tree of medium size, (15 to 18m high when adult, with a trunk diameter of 60 cm at 1.8m height).
AspectrometricanalysisoftheX-rayradiation
of samples of the metal of the Lastdrager club
heads has, under electronic bombardment, Indigenous to the eastern part of North
shown the artefacts to be brass and of the followingcomposition, (weight %).
No. 17 (large, sample nos 1 and 1-2:Cu: 74.89; Zn: 20.49; Sn: 1.15; Pb: 2.83; Fe: 0.63.
No. 18 (small, sample nos 2 and 2.2: Cu: 71.67; Zn: 26.07; Sn: 0.34; Pb: 1.39; Fe: 0.52r21.
The Lastdrager heads are the only ancient heads now known that are made of brass.
The remains of the stocks
America, it is known to have been imported and acclimatized in the Netherlands and also in Britain in the early or mid-17th century, there to be used for a variety of special purposes (Bary- Lenger er al., 1974: 181). Robinia is said to be ‘nearly as tough as ash and equal to oak in other strength properties. It is excellent for steam bending and is highly resistant to decay’. (Rendle, 1969:54).
Discussion
The Colfsloffen
Golf players of the 20th century are in the habit of carrying a set of clubs with different heads to be used on various occasions in the course of the game. In normal play, metallic, heavier, harder and unbreakable heads, or irons, are used for difficult shots.
Bothmetallicandwoodenheadswerealsoused in the 17th century in the Netherlands as can be seen from many contemporary representations and as clearly described in a 1657poem by van Chandelier (Van Hengel, 1982: 50) describing the winter of an Amsterdam citizen:
...When the sides have been drawn he braces himself and strikes his ash weighted with lead or his Scottish cleek of box wood, three fingers wide, one thick, with lead in it at the feather ball, invisible from the driving
The lower end of the wooden stocks are perfectly preserved inside each of the hollow shells of the heads. Each one is split lengthwise, (Figs 1 and 2); the two pieces are pegged together and the whole is glued inside the shell. The glue has been identified as a natural pine resin-based glue by infra-red spectrometry[21I. t has deeply impreg- nated the porous wood. The stocks are made from the trunk of a tree, not from a small branch. It is surmized that the wood has been split and pegged in order to avoid torsion and to be more easily bent, perhaps by means of steam, in the required elbow shape, prior to fixing in the iron. There are vertical, rough grooves cut in the wood which seem to have been made in order to obtain better adhesion between glue, wood and metal.
The wood has been identified by the Station de Technologie Forestitre de I’Etat, in Gembloux,
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