Page 17 - Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters

commodate the crew and their supplies. Since the VOC ships first had to sail to Asia before they could be employed on a specific route there, this issue was more complicated. The vessels leaving the Netherlands with large crews and victuals for voyages of many months could use part of their cargo holds for other commodities. From the perspective of the VOC, it would be reasonable to record these vessels as having a relatively low number of lasten for their outward- bound voyages. In Asia however, these ships operated with smaller crews, which would in- crease the cargo capacity to a realistic rate. Apart from tax purposes, the lastmaat was also used in the Netherlands by the VOC for inter- nal administrative purposes to control the agreed distribution of shipping volumes over the various Chambers. The repartition as decided at the founding of the VOC in , applied to many of their activities. For the Heren XVII, the distribution of the Chambers’ shares in the activities was a constant concern. At the same time, the Chambers were dedicated to maximis- ing their share, for instance by building slightly larger ships. To control this distribution, so- called egalisaties (equal division) were conducted to compare the last figures of the ships built and/or dispatched by each of the Chambers. These lasten had to represent the economic advan- tages of building and equipping ships and the amount of profit from the Asian cargo that arrived in the chamber. As long as all the ships were built by the VOC and all returned with a cargo to their port of departure, this system could work with realistic cargo volumes. Problems arose as soon as ships were bought instead of being built by the VOC and even more so when vessels remained in Asia. The economic advantage for a certain Chamber would then be mini- mal. In a number of instances, it was decided that certain ships staying in Asia would not be included in the egalisaties (NA .., VOC , - (point XI) & - (point VIII) and NA .., VOC , - (point X)). These resolutions were not executed however and all the departed vessels were listed in the egalisaties. In general, vessels to be stationed in Asia were given lower values than their real capacity, especially the flutes. This vessel-type was of light construction and sailed with small crews, but could take comparatively large cargoes. For these reasons the economic advantages to a chamber in equipping a flute for an extended stay in Asia were relatively low. Also, in principle, the flutes would not sail back to Europe. This meant that the Chamber would not have the economic advantage of a return cargo, which was represented by an unrealistically low number of lasten in the egalisaties. No flute is recorded in the egalisaties as more than  last, whereas the real cargo capacity could be as large as  last. For other ship types, too, the number of lasten in the egalisaties represented the opinions of the Heren XVII about the economic value for the chamber to which the ship belonged. These ideas changed regularly and so did the egalisatie values. Illustrative of this are the regular changes in the lastmaat of the largest rate of vessels, the Retourschepen (homeward-bounders) that sailed between Europe and Asia. The difference in the VOC’s assigned egalisatie value for the same ship could amount to more than %. For some of the larger ships, the VOC appears only to have taken an educated guess about the real cargo capacity after the ship had returned fully laden from Asia (NA .., VOC , fol. ). Although egalisatie values for the number of lasten are available for all VOC ships sailing from the Netherlands, these last values must be considered to be highly unreliable descriptors of cargo capacity. For more reliable data, one needs to look for a less politically tarnished source such as the so-called Navale Macht-lists. At least once a year a list of all vessels available to the Company in Asia, which was named in the correspondence as the Navale Macht (Naval Force), was sent to the Netherlands. After , most of these lists also show the lastmaten of the ships. Probably, these are most realistic assessments of cargo carrying capacity, as the authorities had to use them to calculate the available cargo space. Apart from these systematic sources, for the determination of the lastmaat for a ship, many incidental references to ship dimensions in lasten were also used. When such data was found for certain ships, they were included in the determination of a ‘most probable’ cargo capacity in lasten. The values found for specific ships in the Navale Macht lists and the incidental data were also used to calculate more reliable data for comparable vessels for which only numbers of lasten from the egalisaties are known. It is this ‘most probable’ lastmaat that was used to classify the vessels in the database and as an instrument to review the total capacity of the VOC fleet.  Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters