Page 19 - Nicolaes Witsen & Shipbuilding in the Dutch Golden Age

one 1 Introduction
This book is about seventeenth-century Dutch shipbuilding, a rather inacces- sible field of research up to now. The earliest written sources appear only in the second half of the 1600s, known as Holland’s Golden Century.
ItisunfortunatethatthefirstDutchbookeverwrittenonthesubject isvery impenetrable. The bulk of the information that Nicolaes Witsen presents in his Aeloude en Hedendaegse Scheeps-bouw en Bestier (Ancient and Modern Ship- building and Management, 1671) remains hidden in cloudy formulations and a chaotic structure. Still, it is an extremely valuable book that needs and deserves clarification and attention, which I have attempted to do in the present volume by offering a guide into Witsen’s work and the world of his subject—the almost forgotten basics of a craft that contributed as no other to the fl ourishing Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century.
Nicolaes Witsen
Nicolaes Corneliszoon Witsen was born on May 8, 1641, the son of an influential Amsterdam merchant. He studied law at Leiden University, and in 1664 he visited Russia as a member of Jacob Boreel’s legation. Here he collected information on the land and people of Russia and later published a map of “Tartarije” (Russia). After his return to Amsterdam he became a member of the town council. Thirteen times he held the offi ce of burgomaster of Amsterdam. In 16 71 he pub lished the first treatise on shipbuilding in Holland, Aeloude en Hedendaegse Scheeps- bouw en Bestier, a second edition of which appeared in 1690 (for a comparison of the two editions, see “Variations on Witsen” by Diederick Wildeman in the ap- pendix). In 1672, the “Disaster Year,” he became a member of the committee for the defense of the city of Amsterdam, and in 1674 a council delegate.1
As a diplom at he was active in England and Scandinavia, and he was the host and mentor of Pe ter the Great during the cz ar’s visits to Holland. In 1692 he published a second important treatise, Noord en Oost-Tartarije (reprinted in 1705), in which he displayed his knowledge of the Russian Empire. He remained an active administrator well into his old age, as is demonstrated by his efforts concerning the placement of beacons on the Zuider Zee. On August 10, 1717, he died and was buried in Egmond aan de Hoef , where he had a c ountry mansion named Huis Tytverdijf (Pastime).2
Why a patrician like Witsen chose to engage himself in a subject like ship- building—which was probably a trivial pastime in the eyes of his peers, and did so, moreover, at the level of the actual practices of the shipyard—remains an
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