Page 63 - Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters
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for a specialised type of ship. The retourschip was a large vessel specially built to bring substan- tial quantities of Asian products home to the Netherlands. The homeward-bounder was also used within Asia, before a return voyage to the Netherlands or at the end of its career, when it was not considered seaworthy enough to carry the precious cargoes home. The fact that when sailing within Asia these ships were also referred to as retourschip, demonstrates that the VOC used this term to define a specific type of ship. Fig .: Retourschip Salamander, Reinier Nooms. The Salamander (ID ), a homeward-bounder of around last in the service of the VOC during and . The ship made six return journeys and is shown here probably during large maintenance in the Netherlands. Until , nearly all ships sent out by the Voorcompagniëen or the VOC were meant to return to the Netherlands. There was no specific category to classify homeward-bounders; larger vessels were termed schepen (ships), smaller ones jachten (yachts) and the VOC administration main- tained a distinction between ships and yachts over the whole period. However, as an added complication the term ‘ship’ was also used as an inclusive term for vessels in general. The th century administrators were already aware of this problem when they wrote: ‘dat het nieuwe schip segge jacht genaemt sal werden Bommel’ (that the new ship called yacht will be named Bommel (ID:)) or ‘dese ses naeghenoemde Schepen Amsterdam, Dordrecht, Haerlem, Leyden, Delf ende Goude (ID:), welck laetste Schip een Jacht was’ (the following six ships \[...\] of which the last ship is a yacht). At their meeting of October , the assembly of the Heren XVII agreed on a charter with the dimensions for vessel types: large ships with a length of feet and smaller ships or yachts with a length of feet. When the first Governor-General, Both, was sent to Asia in to set up a permanent struc- ture for the VOC in Asia, it was the intention of the VOC directors to work with the principle of the homeward-bounders (Rietbergen , p. ). Although they were not yet called re- tourschepen, the intention was that new large ships would not be used in Asia, but would sail to a main port and load cargo collected in advance by other vessels, allowing a return to the Netherlands as soon as possible. The VOC had good reason to develop such a system because it had experienced the near loss of a number of ships, with their precious freight, after they had first sailed around Asia picking up cargo before they returned to Europe. These round trips throughout Asia could take more then a year and wore the ships out before they commenced their lengthy return voyage. The policy of reserving specialised vessels for the return trip to the Netherlands was clearly the first attempt at a differentiated shipping organisation. However, the number of VOC ships in Asia and the infrastructure in Asia did not allow this policy to be properly implemented. As a result, the new large ships were still used for lengthy trips to Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters
