Page 65 - Dutch Asiatic Shipping Volume 1

were given a skin of English sheet copper. The cost was indeed much higher. Copper sheathing a 150 footer cost fl. 17,000, nailing it fl. 8,000 and simply coaltarring it fl. 2,500. Decision making was accordingly slow. By the end of 1792 it was decided to request the chambers to copper-bottom all newly built ships by way of experiment, but not to make this compulsory.
Subsequently many more reports and memorandums were written. A definite decision was postponed, to the disquiet of a number of naval officers. They had experienced the difference in speed between copper-bottomed and non copper-bottomed East Indiamen. From 1793 conditions of war in Europe demanded more intensive convoying, whereby the convoy's speed had to be adjusted to that of the slowest ship. Officers like Cornelius de Jong and Count Frederik Sigismund van Bylandt raised this in letters to the Heren Zeventien. O n 7 June 1794 the Enkhuizen,Delft and Rotterdam chambers had to agree totheconclusionoftheexperimentalperiod,allnewshipsnowhavingtobe copper-bot- tomed. In some specific cases they had already been instructed to do this, as in the building of pink-ships. How necessary this was became apparent in the case of the packetboat MARIA LOUISA (4725), which in 1792 had to be copper-bottomed by the Delft chamber for her third voyage. In the shipyard the sheets had not been fixed sufficiently high on the hull!Theadmiralties,whichin1777hadalreadycarriedoutafirstexperiment with copper-bottoming, had by 1794 not yet decided either on coppering all their existing vessels.4 8
Productivity of the six Company shipyards
Soon after the formation of the Company in 1602 the chambers began to acquire their own yards for the building and repair of ships. Apart from the first four decades when it is not clear in all cases whether and when a ship was built under Company auspices, or purchased, it can be ascertained for the rest of the Company's days how many ships were built under its own management. Table 2 provides a survey o f this. The ships are divided into four categories of tonnage, the first of which coincide with the three rates: larger
than 1,000 tons (I), 800-1,000 tons (II), 500-800 tons (III) and smaller than
500 tons (IV).
Table 2: Numbers of ships built in Company
shipyards
6 22 10 27 8 34 4 36 26 48 37 33 1660-698732601071760-693027
c. 1600-09 1610-19 1620-29 1630-39 1640-49 1650-59
211 18 31 5 16 22 43 317 58 79
1700-09 1710-19 1720-29 1730-39 1740-49 1750-59
23 91 9 88 12 85 8 89 5 94 3 77 360 1 1 67 1 10 68 4 36
I
II III IV tot.
I II
1
2112 40 55
11 312 44 70 5 411 54 74
1670-79 11 4 23 1680-89 7 1 32 1690-99 8 12 33
37 75 42 82 37 90
1770-79 37 28 1780-89 40 17 1790-94 21 11
c. 1600-99 53 42 199 412 706 =8% =6% =28% =58%
175 78 755
48 ARA, VOC 143, res. Heren 17 of 3.12.1792; VOC 144, id. of 28.12.1793, 2.1, 26.5 and 7.6.1794; De Jong, Reizen I, 219-220; J. C. de Jonge, Nederlandsche zeewezen V , 7-9.
III
40 42 31 41
15 4
1700-94 219 283
=29% =38% =23% = 10%
IV tot.