Page 8 - Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters

Foreword ‘How to create a monster and how to get it back in its cage’ seems to be an appropriate motto for this research project of mine. Not because the research and the work itself turned out to be monstrous but because my own ambitions and the ensuing consequences went out of hand. What started with the idea of reconstructing the shipping history of some VOC ships in the th century gradually evolved into a systematic study on the whole VOC fleet and their ship- ping activities in Asia until . I had initially hoped for my research to just shed light on an underexposed aspect of the Dutch and Asian maritime history, but found wrestling with the ever growing database of VOC ships in service and the voyages they made. Meant to support me in the analyses of the development of the shipping network in Asia it turned out to be a project and a creature in itself. To date it contains more than . records of voyages to about  individual destinations. Of these, . voyages between  destinations in  Asian areas are relevant to this study. Of course, this monster was created voluntarily and primarily nourished by my curiosity to find out more about the maritime context the VOC ships were operating in. This interest was sparked already in the ’s during my research work for the Batavia-project, in first The Netherlands for the ‘replica’ building in Lelystad, and later also in Australia for the Western Australian Maritime Museum. Since then I have been privileged to be part of various other projects centred around the activities of VOC in Asian waters of which the Avondster project in Sri Lanka was the highlight. I feel privileged not only because I was able to work on exiting projects but above all, because it brought me in contact with wonderful colleagues many of which have become friends. Here, I would really like to pay tribute to the team members of the various projects I worked on. Together with the support of other friends and colleagues from the Western Australian Mari- time Museum and the Amsterdam Historical Museum the writing of this publication became an academic adventure rather than the synonym more often used: the lonesome quest. With so many people supporting my work it is difficult to single out some of them with a special acknowledgement. Still, there are a few that played a special role in the conception of this research. First of all, the people that inspired me to start this intellectual journey by stimu- lating me to look always for a new question behind an answer: Jeremy Green, Bas Kist and of course my supervisor Leo Noordegraaf. Then, the people who stimulated me to carry on and made it possible to fulfil this task: Isabelle Garachon, Camille Parthesius, Romain Parthesius. The support I received in that respect from Pauline Kruseman, director of the Amsterdam His- torical Museum, was essential and heart warming. Special thanks to Menno Leenstra who be- came the driving force behind the establishment of the database by continuously collecting ‘trips and ships’ and whose comments and advice were of invaluable importance to me. Het Centrum voor de studie van de Gouden Eeuw, on instigation of its director Henk van Nierop, sup- ported me financially to complete the final stage of this research. Then, there are those who just believed in this endeavour and therefore supported me im- mensely. There were many but four need to be singled out: Karen Millar, Albert van Nunen Karioen, Miranda Vos and Patricia Meehan. I also would like to thank Karina Acton, Christine van der Pijl-Ketel and Fred Lambert for reading the text and correcting ‘my English’. Although I enjoyed the whole process of this research tremendously, the real delight of the work laid in the tail end. During the last year, when the writing and deciding on the final draft 