Page 152 - Kennemerland VOC ship, 1664 - Published Reports

NAUTICAL ARCHAEOLOGY, 20.1
Figure 7.
An example of col/being played by Dutchmen abroad: the players who enjoyed their sport in the vicinity of Rome in the year 1622 are believed to be two Dutch painters then staying in Rome with Cornelis Poelenburgh (1568-1677), the author of the drawing: Bartholomeus Breenberg and Paul Bril (Photo: Rijksmuseum Amsterdam).
Figure 8.
The game of golf was imported from the Netherlands to the east coast of Scotland in the 15th century. Sporting ties continued during the followingcenturies.In thisengrav- ing by J. Aliamet after Adriaen van de Velde (1635-1672) Dutchmen play against Scots, possibly mercenary soldiers or visiting merchants.
and he added that out ofabout 4500 books on the sport and its early history which existed in 1982, only two, apart from his own publications, were based161on research of academic standard in official, original contemporary sources and that, consequently, by reading these four books, ‘one disposes of all the known historical facts about golf‘(astatementwithwhichthiswritergenerally agrees).
One may now briefly summarize the findings of Van Hengel and other reliable authors. Agreed that we are talking of a game played out- doors in which competing players must, with the help of a club featuring a special tip end, strike a ball in order to send it to a series of goals (holes or poles or anything else) in as few stokes as possible, suffice it to say here that evidence from official original contemporary documents (such as city laws and ordinances and court records) in the Low Countries have revealed the following succession.
From c.1300-c. 1700: the ‘long game’ of colf, a game played outdoors in the fields or, more rarely on well kept greens and most often in the wintertime and then on ice and or on solid ground. It was mostly played in port-cities on the Western coastal areas of Holland and Zealand.
From c. 1450 on: due probably to frequent voyages and travels of Dutch fishermen, sailors and merchants to Scotland, to favourable con- sular agreements, to the presence of Scottish
mercenaries serving in the forces of the Staaten generaal, the game of colf is exported from the harbours of the west coast of the Netherlands across the North Sea to the harbours of the east coast of Scotland (Fig. 8) where it is called, with the local peculiar pronunciation, gof. From Eastern Scotland gof spreads over the cen- turiestothewholeofBritainfirstandlaterback to Europe (including, around 1890, to the Netherlands from where it had disappeared around 1700-1 720 to be succeeded by kolJ
The nine golfclub heads found on the two VOC outgoing ships therefore are of importance for the early history and the spread of golf because they bear additional and unquestion- able testimony to the way the game was exported overseas by Dutch seamen or travellers.
Conclusion
Golf is played today by many millions of people in the world, many of them influential and often for deeper reasons than exercise and fresh air.
The implements of the game, as used in the past, are an essential part of research into its history. Here, underwater archaeology can con- tribute and perhaps the excavators of other VOC wrecks elsewhere in the world, or indeed, of any Dutch ship lost between the 13th and 19th century should now look for possible colfslofen in their dusty cardboard boxes labelled ‘uniden- tified artefacts’ (or perhaps ‘cauldron feet and
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