Page 148 - Kennemerland VOC ship, 1664 - Published Reports

NAUTICALARCHAEOLOGY, 20.1
Figure 3.
A colfplayer during a game on ice. The head of his club is identical to the ones found on the Lastdrager.Dutchpicturesofthe I’lthand 18th centuries may indicate that games were played eitherentirelyoniceor,accordingtothearrival point of the ball after a stroke, on ice and on land.Thepoleon theleftisthegoal thatmust be touched by the ball when one plays on ice. (Engraving: Romeijn de Hooghe, c. 1700).
Scottishclubmakers(Kincaid,1687;Mathisson, 1743).In addition to the 19th-centurypreference for red hickory, imported from Tennessee (Farnie, 1857), greenheart, lemonwood and lancewood were used but these had drawbacks (Park, 1896). Most of the hundreds of icono- graphical sourcesextant also show that thechoice of the wood for his club shaft was no unimportant matter for a serious Scottish or Dutch player. Shafts are finely made and finished, varnished, almost always decorated with fringes sometimes topped by a pommel and the grip is often lined with what appears to be velvet or multicoloured leather straps (Figs 3 and 4). One exception is a ceramic tile (Fig. 5a) that shows an elegant Dutch gentleman carrying a club whose rough shaft has obviously just been cut from the nearest bush.
Other extant pre-18th century golfclubheads
In order to evaluate the Lastdrager club heads they should be compared with similar extant artefacts of the 15th-17th centuries.
The Colfsloffenfound in the city of Amsterdam In1972and1973,duringundergroundroadcon- struction in Amsterdam, some municipal rub- bish dumps in use between c. 1560-c. 1650 were encountered. They were hurriedly excavated by the city archaeologists (Baart et al., 1977). Among the many, presumably discarded objects recovered were a small number of heads of golf clubs of various sizes, including a toy. Some had the wooden remains of the broken and wanting wooden shafts inside. The club heads were reported to be made of base pewter, an alloy composed mainly of lead, but have yet to be analysed (Table 1).
The club heads (now in the Amsterdams Historisch Museum) were reported as ‘appar- ently shafted with hazel’ although no definite identification of the wood has been made. Other ironsmadeofleadalloy havebeen foundin recent
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Figure 4.
A golfer or colfspeler starting a game in the winter. The tee is made of mud or snow. The game may well continue on the ice and in this case the hole will for obvious reasons be re- placed by a standing pole. The white ball seems to be a ‘feathery’. (Engraving: Jan Luijken, 1649-17 12).