Page 31 - Nicolaes Witsen & Shipbuilding in the Dutch Golden Age

liots, which maintained the region al commerce between the East Indian, Philippine, and Japanese i sles and w ith the Asian continent. Furthermore, the East India Company employed warships for military display as well as real ac- tion against the Portuguese, British, or local pirates—and more often than not to persuade the indig enous peoples to conduct their tr ade through the Dut ch. Besides their military accoutrements, these ship s often h ad some ad- ditional cargo capacity.
The warships or war yachts (oorlogsjachten) were called pinassen, after a fast Basque rowing and sailing ship. The name thus applied to an armed ship, built for speed rather than for trade. Heemskerck, the ship with which Abel Tas- man discovered New Zealand, was of th is type. It had a loading capacity of 60 last (about 120 tons).17
At the end of the seventeenth c entury a lawyer by the name of Van Dam was commissioned to write the histor y
Figure 1.8. Model of a pinas, or war yacht, from the mid-1700s. The model was hung in a church for decoration, which is why the underwater part of the hull is not to scale. Yet it gives a fair image of the pinas of that period. (Courtesy Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam)
of the Dut ch East India C ompany. Published in 1 701, his book was called Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Com- pagnie (Description of the Ea st Indian C ompany). In thi s book the term pinas emerges for the first time in text cov- ering the year 1652, when Van Dam mentions that pinases are replacements for fl uyts. (The rou nd-sterned fluyts soon developed m ajor leakage problems, as their stern s were more vulnerable to dr ying out in the tropic al sun. This is why they were ultimately replaced by galliots and hoekers.) In the section for 1662 he gives the dimensions of “jachten of pinassen” (yachts or pin ases), an indic a- tion that the terms were more or less synonymous at that time.18
According to Van Dam the l arge pinases before 1650 measured 128 feet, the sm aller ones 116 feet. But by the end of the century the East India Company called all return ships “pinases.” Like the ret urn ships, they were m ade
Introduction
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