Nicolaes Witsen and Shipbuilding in the Dutch Golden Age

Acknowledgements

xiii A few words of gratitude are in order. This book is the product of many specialists who contributed to the proj ect with dedication and enthusiasm. 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 names 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 Historie . We worked together for many years in the attics of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam , where we studied and restored the huge collection of ship models and nautical objects known as the Dutch Navy Collection. Witsen’s text was difficult to translate for two r easons: seventeenth-century Dutch is not easy to understand , 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 finding the right English terminology to fit the text. As in Dutch, many old English shipbuilding terms have been lost in time, and only a few people are capable of providing the correct English equivalents 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 Nick sailed it for a considerable time. In our discussions of terminology we often had conversations about the contents 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 Dutch sailing instructor with a vast knowledge of seventeenth-century sailing techniques. Frits Scholten assisted with the terminolog y of baroque architecture, and Jan Piet Puype, one of the world’s foremost experts on ordnance, shared his expertise. My original drawAcknowledgments xiv Acknowledgments servation Research Laboratory and George T. & Gladys H. Abell Professor of Nautical Archaeology; Kevin Chrisman, Director of the Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation ; and especially Filipe Castro, Frederic R. Mayer Fellow II of Nautical Archaeology, without whom this book would never have existed. I also wish to thank Mary Lenn Dixon, editor-in-chief, Texas A&M University Press, for her trust in me and her decision to publish this book, the first serious attempt to make Dutch seventeenth-century shipbuilding available to an English-speaking audience. ings of Witsen’s 134-foot pinas were redone in AutoCAD by the ever-productive Cor Emke. As a result of this collective expertise, the English version of Witsen’s material is even better th an the Dut ch one. Many unclear passages that clogged the origin al book have been rendered in l anguage that is more comprehensible , even to the l ay reader. Sincere thanks also go to three people from the Nautical Archaeology Program at Texas A&M University for making the English edition of this book possible: Donny Hamilton, Director of the Con- Nicol aes Wits en and Shipbuilding in the Dut ch Golden Age Title page of Witsen’s Aeloude en Hedendaegse Scheeps-bouw en Bestier, 1671 by Romeyn de Hooghe. In the style of his day, the engraving shows the importance of the shipbuilding industry as an allegory. Shipbuilding, represented by the female figure, is flanked by Mercury and Mars, gods of trade and war, and surrounded by shipbuilders displaying their creations. Heroic...