Page 107 - Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters

On May , the ship was near Galle, in bad weather, when the leak worsened. In order not to miss the entrance to the Bay of Galle, the skipper decided to anchor in thirteen fathoms of water. To keep the ship dry, the crew deployed a fourth and a fifth pump. When the time came to sail, the crew were so exhausted after constant pumping that they were unable to lift the anchor, and had to cut the rope. The Dolfijn sailed to the entrance of the bay, where they again anchored, and fired several guns as distress signals. The situation became untenable, five pumps were not enough to keep the ship afloat and buckets were also needed. The only sensible course of action was to sail the ship into the bay as quickly as possible in order to save the crew, money and cargo. Again, there was a problem in lifting the anchor, because the crew were either fully occupied with pumping or were completely exhausted. Another problem arose when the pilot came on board. He explained that it was impossible to enter the bay because the ship was lying directly in front of a shallow reef and the wind was not favourable. Aware of the seriousness of the situation, the VOC sent help on a sloop from the shore, but by the evening the ship had to be abandoned, since water was already lapping the galleries at the side of the cabin. In a final attempt by the skipper of the Dolfijn to save the money, he loaded the chests on the sloop. However, when he heard the moaning and shouting of the crew still on board he realised that it would be impossible to save both the men and the money. The situation became critical when more and more crewmen jumped on board the sloop, endangering both the cargo and crew, so the skipper threw twenty chests overboard. When the crew were safe, the skipper went back on board, risking his own life, to pick up the last six chests of money from the upper deck of the sinking ship. After he had handed over the chests, he fell overboard and was already drowning when someone rescued him with a hook. Injured but alive, the captain and crew could do nothing more than watch the Dolfijn go down. By the next day, only the tops of the masts could be seen above the water. Being the third ship in four years to be wrecked in sight of Galle, some procedures for dealing with disasters must have been in place. People were therefore probably not too astonished to see, days after the shipwreck, a man in the company of VOC officials carrying a strange device of leather hoses and leaving the fortified city for a diving experiment in the bay. In late May , some of the dignitaries of Galle had condescended to be present at a demonstration by a man who claimed that he could dive to deep sites using a leather hose for air supply. The test was conducted with a hose seven and a half fathoms long that was tightly wound around his arms and probably connected to a bodice pulled over the upper part of the body. Expectations and hopes were high, if the trial was successful, the VOC could salvage some of the four and a half ‘tons of gold’, i.e. . guilders, that were lost when the ship was wrecked on  May  (NA .., VOC , p. ). This sum, being equivalent to the annual profit of the important trading post Surat, was huge by contemporary standards (Coolhaas , p. ). The demonstration turned out to be very disappointing; soon after the diver was lowered into the water he signalled that he wanted to be pulled up. In the diary of one of the officials present, the situation was explained thus: ‘because by binding the weights to his body to make him sink he was too suffocated and incapable to accomplish his mission.’ (SLNA /, fol. ). The diver also  fathoms. The VOC officials must have been desperate because a few days earlier an unsuccessful attempt to salvage the money was made. On that occasion, the officials sent a corporal by boat to the site where the Dolfijn’s topmast was protruding from the water. On the wreck site, the corporal used his specially designed long drill to reach the money chest sitting on the seafloor. This attempt failed too: the long drill broke due to the great depth and the rough seas and also because the ropes, sails and broken masts blocked the way (SLNA /, fol. , ). In the hope of retrieving some of the cargo, the VOC posted guards on the fort and the beaches in case some of the valuables washed ashore. It is surprising that the archives do not reveal an attempt to salvage the chests of money from the Dolfijn with the assistance of pearl fishers. On other occasions, they were used to salvage valuables from shipwrecks. For the salvaging of money from the Batavia wrecked in  on the Houtman Ab- rolhos off the west-coast of Australia, pearl divers were specially brought there from Batavia (Roeper , p. -) These divers were called ‘Guseraten’ (from Gujarat in India) (Colenbrander , p. ). . The conclusion was clear: this diving device would not be the solution to recover the twenty chests of money from a depth of twenty-five claimed that the water had entered the hose and the bodice The shipping and logistics in operation 