Page 222 - Loss of the VOC Retourschip Batavia, Western Australia, 1629

course. The cook would be allotted the requisite utensils and equipment to cater for the crew, passengers and sol- diers for the voyage. The constable would be responsible for the arms and ammunition necessary for the defence of the ship. These lists are, therefore, an important source of information about the material that was taken on board a ship for the voyage to the Indies. At the same time, they fonn a record of the complex society of trades and skills that were involved.
Additionally, there were the provisions with which the ship was supplied for the voyage. Usually, these were calculated for a crew of 100 persons for a period of 15 months. The supply of provisions was stipulated by a resolution of the Heren XVII and became standardized in the mid-17th century.
However, this was only a part of the total. There was, of course, the cargo that the ship carried, which may be divided into two parts: the supplies for the Company at the Cape of Good Hope and in the Indies; and the goods for trade in the Indies. None of this is easy to quantify. The archival sources do not have regular cargo lists of these items. Even though only a few equipage lists survive, we may assume that the equipage was virtually the same for each ship ofa particular size, since the Company resolved that this would be standard each year. However, the supplies for the Indies and the trade goods varied consid- erably from year to year. The main source of infonnation comes from the Eijsch (or requisitions) from the Indies. Each year, the Governor General and the Council at Batavia sent to the Company in the Netherlands a list of requisitions for the following year. These requisitions included supplies for the Company in the Indies together with requests for money to conduct trade, and trade items that were deemed to be profilable for trade at that time. Unfortunately,onlyafewoftheserequisitionlistssurvive, but they are useful for this study as they relate to the period of the mid-17th century. The requisition lists, however, were frequently disregarded by llIe Company at home and there are numerous instances of letters from the Governor General at Batavia complaining that the requisitions and requests had been ignored. Thus the lists only give an indication of the types of goods that were required in the Indies.
There is another group of documents from the same period that records the supplies that arrived in Batavia on particularships.Theseareveryhelpfulinindicatingdispo- sition of cargoes among the ships of the fleets. Finally, in the Resolutions of the Heren XVII, there are some lists of requisitions from the Indies and lists of goods shipped on the various fleets, but these tend to deal only with major items.
There is yet another component in the inventory of items to be found on a Company ship, perhaps the most difficult to estimate, and that is the private possessions that the crew, soldiers and passengers brought on board. Indi- viduals going to the Indies were allowed by the Heren XVII to take with them a prescribed amount ofgoods. The volume of things was limited to a chest of dimensions specified by the Artyckel Briefof the V.D.C., and could
include food, a small amount of money and some trade goods. There may well have been a much larger quantity of smuggled goods and certainly the Company became very concerned about this illegal trade. However, as far as weareconcerned,thequantityoftradegoodsofthisnature would have been small in comparison with the overnIl cargo.
Finally, there is the ship itself, with its masts, rigging, sails, anchors, guns etc. Surprisingly little is known about the building and construction of ships for the Company. The Resolutions of the Heren XVII contain specifications for building a particular ship and defining its class; from time to time, the specifications for the various classes would change. This aspect will be discussed in a future publication on the Batavia hull structure.
Thus it can be seen that there is a complex group of documents available to study that may help to identify the type of items found on a shipwreck. The equipage lists are obviously the most helpful as they remained constant for many years; the requisition lists are less useful. For the Batavia, the problem is more difficult since the archives have less infonnation for this period than is available for lateryears.By1628,theCompanywasonlyjustbeginning to standardize the ships and their equipage, and the nature oftradewaschangingastheCompanyexploredthetrading possibilities in the East.
The Batavia, therefore, represents a complex relation- ship between the archival resource and the archaeological data. Both sources are limited. The archaeological record is confined to what was discovered on the wreck site. Much of the material from the ship, we know from Pelsaen's Journal, was washed over the reef. There are accounts of a variety of material being washed ashore on Batavia's Graveyard (modem Beacon Island). The perishable mate- rial would not have survived and this is, ofcourse, true for nearly all wreck sites. For example, we can assume from lbe bale seals found on the site, that there was cloth material on board the ship. This is corroboratedby the lists of requisitions, since various European cloths were a common trade item requested for the Indies. Furthermore, weknow thatwhenthemutineerswerecapturedbyPelsaert, they were dressed in red laken embroidered with passe- menterie. Thus, from both archival and archaeological sources, we know that cloth was carried on board the ship, although in what quantity is uncertain.
At the archaeological level, the infonnation recorded from the wreck site is important in interpreting the ship's structure and the arrangement of the ship's contents and various personal possessions on board. In the following section, a number of important findings that have resulted from the archaeology of the Batavia are discussed. It is interesting to note that the disposition of the major arte- facts on the site reflect their original location on the ship, and the subsequent events that occurred after the wreck. Thus, the line of guns on the west side of the site indicates that the ship heeled over onto its port side and, as a result, the guns on the starboard side fell across tbe deck and ended in a pile on top of the ones on the port side, creating a single row of guns. This is corroborated by Pelsaert's
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