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stories for teachers & students 2013
Ship of Fools Not the Dutch!
Supporting Resources
Dutch Lives in the World
stories by winthrop professor susan broomhall
In the seventeenth century, the Dutch were well known as the
best boat builders in the business. But this hadn’t always been
the case. Just a century or two earlier, no one would have
thought twice about them. But when they realised that expansion
for their nation would have to happen via the sea, the Dutch paid
attention to the best in the business (Germans) and learnt to do
it even better.
Not only were their building practices fast and efficient and not
too costly, but the boats they built were well designed. They were
fast and manoeuvrable, and needed fewer crew than other
European vessels. They were shallow-bottomed which meant
they could come in close to the coast and were very stable in the
water. Even their rivals thought so. One Portuguese merchant
wrote of the Dutch sailors that ‘they go with their ships all over
the world and to places where ours cannot navigate’.
It might be surprising but some of the international experts of
these Dutch building techniques are right here in WA. A whole
raft of old shipbuilding skills had to be re-learned by shipwrights
in Fremantle in order to build the replica Duyfken plank-first in
the old way. This was launched in 1999.
One of the things that hampered other nations from competing
with the Dutch were monarchs who pushed their shipwrights to
build ever more ambitious ships that showed off their power and
glory, without an eye to practical concerns. Many were heavily
decorated and painted. Kings liked cannons which looked
impressive to opponents but were heavy. Too many guns would
sink the ship. Gustavus Adolphus found this out the hard way,
when the Vasa, the pride of the Swedish fleet with its beautiful
gold-leaf decoration, sunk in Stockholm harbour only 120 metres
from shore on its maiden voyage in August 1628 in front of the
most of the city’s population who had turned out to see it sail.
He had given his (Dutch) shipwrights all manner of headaches,
specifying the measurements they were to use for the ship and
hurrying them to have it in the water as soon as possible.
Early modern people enjoyed these morality tales, of those in
high places who grew too proud of their own abilities and then
crashed back down to earth, or in this case, sank to the bottom
of the sea.
IMAGE/ Reinier Zeeman, Quelque Nauires (Some Ships) 1652. © The Trustees of the British Museum
FAR FROM HOME: ADVENTURES, TREKS, EXILES & MIGRATION
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