Page 24 - Nicolaes Witsen & Shipbuilding in the Dutch Golden Age

Chapter 1
This explains why almost always the same passages are quoted in modern liter ature: writers quote one another rather than risking the m aelstrom of Witsen’s confusing conglomeration of data. Understandably, nooneever made an attempt to translate the book until now.
Others, discouraged by the book’s impenetrability, simply discard it as nonsense, written b y a m an who did not understand what he was writing about. I hope to dem- onstrate that this is not true. Witsen’s book is a preemi- nent historical source, containing much more information than one might suppose at first sight.
How This Book Originated
In the 1980s I was an amateur model builder with a strong interest in cre ating a model of a seventeenth- century pi- nas based on clear, consistent data rather than a contem- porary ship model or a well-preserved archaeological find. This urge led me to Witsen’s Aeloude en He dendaegse Scheeps-bouw en Bes tier and its forty-page description of the 134-foot pinas, which seemed to meet my require- ments. This model of Witsen’s pinas (see fig. 1.10), which took three years to buil d, is exhibited at the Noordelijk Scheepvaart Museum (Nor thern Shipping Museum) in Groningen.
The Drawings
To build my model, it was nec essary to make drawings, which entailed sorting out and i solating Witsen’s text concerning the pin as, its dimensions, and the rel ation- ships of its parts. Due to the impenetr ability of Witsen’s discourse, this task proved to be so toilsome th at it took years to ac hieve any results. Mak ing the dr awings of the pinas alone cost three years of spare- time labor, almost as much as constructing the model later on. Yet I am con- fident that the dr awings are ac curate representations of the ship Witsen must have envisaged when he took the trouble of putting its dimensions on paper . My various drawings of the ship’s structural components incorpo- rated throughout chapter 2. Larg e, detailed plans of the ship’s lines, compartments, rigging, and other equipment are shown in drawings 1 through 5 (see appendix).
The Building Method
With the data concerning the pinas distilled into a coher- ent whole, the rem aining text proved to yield even more information. When the building process described by Wit- sen is compared with that described by Van Yk, what had hitherto gone unnoticed becomes evident: Dutch ship- building methods must have differed significantly accord- ing to region. I will return to this topic shortly.
Contract Specifications
The use of contract specifications (bestekken) also ap- pears in a c ompletely new light. These contracts, written up by a l awyer and stipul ating the spec ifications of the ships to be built, were actually legal agreements between shipbuilder and c ommissioner. A c ontract contains data on the leng th, breadth, and depth of the ship, its keel, stem, and sternpost, and any more or less important part of the construction; the contract also states when the ship was to be finished, how muc h money it would c ost, and when it was to be delivered. Unlike drawings, with which we are ac customed to work ing nowadays, these build- ing specifications remain a closed book to us —until we combine their dat a with the building method described by Witsen. Then it suddenly appears that much more can be known about the ship in the c ontract than previously assumed.
Apart from c ontracts, so-called certers have also sur - vived from those day s. They contain the shipwright’s notes on a specific ship or type of ships—for instance, the number of planks needed for a 100- foot-long fluyt or the costs for a 120- foot-long ship. In addition, we c an glean information from the charters, specific rules that the large entities like the Dut ch East India C ompany and the Dutch Admiralties laid down for their ship s, divided into classes, called “charters” (rates). Together these archival documents form an inexhaustible source for researchers, once we u nderstand what we are de aling with. Contracts as historical sources will be discussed in chapter 3, which also includes a section on model building as historical re- search and a selection of contracts that Witsen presents as examples.
Selection Principles
To reorganize Witsen’s text, I h ave cut his entire work (except the irrelevant chapters, as explained earlier) into hundreds of selected fr agments and then arr anged them in a new sequenc e that follows Witsen’s own description of the c onstruction process: on pag es 144 to 14 6 of his book he brea ks down the building of the pinas into 122 consecutive stages, and I have used this structure as the basis for reshaping the whole text, raking together all the fragments relevant to each stage under numbered head- ings in c hapter 2 th at correspond to those in Witsen’s original enumerated list.
Not all the text was used; among the mor e theoretical passages only those relevant to our understanding of the subject have been included verbatim. Thus, pages 141 to 144 (How to set the wind to the Sails ) are releg ated to a special section w ith commentary by Gerald de Weerdt
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