Page 15 - Nicolaes Witsen & Shipbuilding in the Dutch Golden Age

Acknowledgments
A few words of gratitude are in order. This book is the product of many spe- cialists who c ontributed to the proj ect with dedication and enthus iasm. In the Dutch version, published in 1994 in Holland, I included a long li st of people to whom I offered my sincere thanks, and I w ill repeat only the n ames of those who were important for this English edition—which is not to suggest that all the others have become unimportant. Professor André Wegener Sleeswyk wrote the foreword, and Gerald de Weerdt provided some magnificent drawings to illustrate the book as well as a section on sailing with square-rigged ships in chapter 1.
Diederick Wildeman, curator of the Navigation and Library Collections of the Scheepvaartmuseum in Amsterdam, wrote the essay in the appendix on textual variants in the two editions of Witsen’s treatise; he has rewritten his original contribution to take into account recent research.
The translation into English was done by my good friend and c olleague Dr. Alan Lemmers, a historian and researcher at the Instituut voor Maritieme Histo- rie. We worked together for many years in the attics of the Rijksmuseum in Am- sterdam, where we studied and restored the huge collection of ship models and nautical objects known as the Dutc h Navy Collection. Witsen’s text was difficult to translate for two r easons: seventeenth-century Dutch is not easy to u nder- stand, even for the Dutch themselves, and old technical Dutch is an even bigger problem; furthermore, many shipbuilding terms and practices have disappeared since the end of wooden shipbuilding. Alan has done a marvelous job, for which I admire him highly.
An especially thorny problem was fi nding the right English terminology to fit the text. As in Dut ch, many old Engli sh shipbuilding terms have been lost in time, and only a few people are capable of providing the correct English equiva- lents for the terms in Witsen’s text. Such a person is Nick Burningham. He was deeply involved in the research for building the replica of the Duyfken, the small Dutch yacht that was the fi rst to map parts of the Australian continent in 1616. The ship was built in Fremantle, Australia, a few years ago, and Nic k sailed it for a considerable time. In our di scussions of terminology we often had conver- sations about the c ontents of the text itself, and we were h appy to delve into the difficult material with the help of other experts, both inside and outside the field. Olof Pipping of the Vasa Museum in Stockholm contributed to the sec - tion on rigging, a s did Menno L eenstra, a Dut ch sailing instructor with a vast knowledge of seventeenth-century sailing techniques. Frits Scholten assisted with the terminolog y of baroque arc hitecture, and Jan Piet Puype, one of the world’s foremost experts on ordnance, shared his expertise. My original draw-
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