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About Maritime careers
Seafarers are a fascinating class of workers. They form a dynamic labour force, characterised over the past 400 years by varying levels of internationalisation. On this website we showcase the results of our research into the functioning of Dutch maritime labour markets and the characteristics of the seagoing workforce, and the changes these underwent over time. We’re interested in questions such as: how did skill levels of seamen develop over the centuries? How international was the maritime sector? And what changes in the level of internationalization do we witness over time? What differences can we observe between careers of native and migrant sailors? Time span and sources Currently, most of…
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Where Dutch seafarers on Belgian merchant vessels came from (1845-1885)
In an earlier post, our colleague Kristof Loockx, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp, wrote about the Antwerp seamen’s registry–a great source for maritime historical research. In this post, he takes a closer look at the Dutchmen in this registry: where in the Netherlands did they come from? Foreigners in the Antwerp seamen’s registry During the nineteenth century, there were never enough Belgian seafarers to meet the demand for labour of the Belgian merchant fleet. The Belgian merchant marine therefore relied heavily on foreign labour. In general, the ratio of Belgian to foreign seafarers was about 1:2 in the middle of the century, and 1:2.8 in 1890. We know…
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Dutch merchant seamen in Belgian sources
Seafarers have never been bound to a particular flag, which makes it challenging to reconstruct their careers. In this post, Kristof Loockx, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp and visiting researcher at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, addresses a selection of sources that provide more information about Dutch seafarers on the Belgian merchant fleet. In our section on Sailor’s lives, he makes these sources tangible by following two Dutch seafarers who sailed regularly on Belgian merchant vessels during the nineteenth century. The seamen’s registry The registration of individual seafarers in Belgium coincided with the introduction of a mandatory insurance for merchant mariners in 1845. Every…
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A collection of sailor’s biographies
We’ve added something new to this website: a collection of sailor’s lives. In a number of short biographies, we explore the lives of some individuals and small groups in the data sets we work with, such as the VOC pay ledgers and records of 19th and 20th-century shipping companies. Our aim with this collection is simply to learn a bit more about the background of the seafarers in our research data. Our quantitative data are a very good starting point for analyzing where sailors came from, how their origin influenced their chances of gaining a promotion to a higher rank on board, and how these things changed over time. But…
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Grant for research on seamen and their international contacts
Great news: DutchCulture has awarded us a grant to document and present shared cultural heritage of merchant seamen who sailed on Dutch ships, 1600-2000. Before the age of cheap flights, the vast majority of Dutch who traveled to such faraway countries as Japan, India and Sri Lanka were sailors. Moreover, these seamen had often already come into contact with other cultures on the way to their destination, as the ships they manned usually employed many foreigners—initially mainly Germans and Scandinavians, later many Chinese, Indonesians and Philippines. With the DutchCulture grant, we are going to investigate the international contacts of merchant seamen who sailed on Dutch ships, 1600-2000: how and to…
- Featured, Methodology, Sailors on 19th and 20th-c Dutch merchant marine, Shipping companies’ records
Reconstructing the career of a 20th-c sailor: the case of Wilfried Julius Lackin
In an earlier post, we explained our methodology for reconstructing careers of sailors from 18th-c data. In this one, Daniël Tuik, researcher on our ongoing Sailors on Dutch merchant marine in the 19th and 20th centuries project, tells about his work with the personnel files of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Stoomboot-Maatschappij (KNSM), a company that operated mainly from Amsterdam between 1856 and 1981. Jigsaw puzzle Reconstructing a career is essentially like putting a large jigsaw puzzle back together. There is no clear overview, because the available information is fragmented across different archival records. As an example I will reconstruct the career of Wilfried Julius Lackin, which is notable for both its…
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First results from our project on the recent history of merchant marine sailors
We can show some first results from our recently started project on sailors aboard Dutch merchant marine ships in the 19th and 20th centuries. Researcher Daniël Tuik has been working on a sample of personnel records from the archives of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Stoomboot-Maatschappij (KNSM), a shipping company that was based in Amsterdam. He tells more about his work in another blog post. The map on the right in Jelle’s tweet shows the birthplaces of KNSM crew members in the 20th century, mainly sailing on trans-Atlantic routes, while the one on the left shows where the sailors came from who appear in the Prize Paper dataset, which also mainly contains…
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Our research soon visible in augmented reality
Together with Dirk Bertels / Studio Louter we have been awarded a subsidy from the Creative Industries Fund NL under the Digital Heritage x Public scheme to build the VOC Data Experience. Visitors to the experience can explore three existing online data sets about the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in augmented reality (AR). In the VOC Data Experience we will unlock three digitized VOC sources for a broad audience in a stimulating way. Visitors will be able to literally ask questions to the crew members of the VOC on an iPad: Where did you come from? What was your chance of survival? Did you participate in the slave trade? To find…
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Women sailors in the ranks of the Dutch East India Company
Last week, Jelle tweeted about the women who dressed up as men to land a job with the VOC and were fired when subsequently their ‘real’ gender became known. Several people have asked for more information, in particular about the origins of the women involved. Below is a spreadsheet that lists their (for obvious reasons fake) names, and their place of origin – all other information available about the individuals are also listed. As you can see in the ‘remarks’ column, there are some really interesting cases: a woman going by the name of ‘Hendrik Huijsloop’ married a fellow sailor on board the Petronella Alida, and the ‘Joannes Burghart’ case…
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Grant awarded for new research into maritime careers
Samenwerkende Maritieme Fondsen (SMF), a body of six historical maritime foundations, have kindly awarded us a grant to do new research into the life and careers of Dutch sailors. We will use this money to broaden our focus to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, allowing us to tell new stories about sailors (on this blog, but also in a book on sailors of the Dutch merchant marine), make some more cool maps, and draw lines through history. Watch this blog and Jelle’s Twitter feed for updates on the project (2019-2023).
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Visualizing networks and careers
We mostly post map visualizations of our historical data on sailors, but we’re working on other visualizations to gain insight into our data as well. Markov models We’ve teamed up with DHLab and Marijn Koolen (@marijnkoolen) of the KNAW-Humanities Cluster to do a thorough analysis of sailor’s careers. As a first step, Marijn produced Markov model visualization of all steps in the career data we reconstructed from the digitized VOC pay ledgers. These visualizations give very good insight into the data. The one pictured below, for example, shows the various ranks from which crew members were promoted to ‘skipper or master’ and the most frequent career steps after having served…
