Ships names

All ship's names which are mentioned in the marginalia are listed here. In this section all ship’s names are alphabetically arranged. Every ship name is followed by the number of relevant marginalia entries for that particular ship. When a researcher clicks on a particular ship, she will be linked to the search page.

Ship’s names are not standardized. Different spelling variants and usage of the word ‘de’ appear in the list. The ship’s names are standardized in the indexes of ship’s names in the Generale Missiven.

Further research may be done in the tables of The Dutch East India Company’s shipping between the Netherlands and Asia 1595-1795. This is the digital version of J.R. Bruijn, F.S. Gaastra and I. Schöffer, Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th centuries (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987). The database offers a total for 4,722 outward and 3,359 homeward voyages between the Netherlands and Asia. It is available online at Historici.nl 

The Daily Journals of Batavia offer more information on a great number of these Dutch shipping data, for instance on the preparation of the returning fleet in the Sunda Straits. The Daily Journals also offer thousands of cargo lists and the value of the shipped cargoes.

Batavia was also a trading port for private traders owning their own vessels. They ventured out with a trading pass. The come and go of Batavian citizen (free burghers, Chinese, Mardijkers) was not systematically registered in the Daily Journals. The registration of these privately owned ships was done in separate ‘passen boecken’ or licence books. Unfortunately, these books have not been preserved. Nevertheless, a number of private merchants ships can be traced in this ship’s list.

An international trading port, Batavia also attracted English, French, Portuguese and, by the end of the eighteenth century,  American ships. The Daily Journals of Batavia also register these ‘foreign’ ships, but the information has to be handled with care. The commanders of the English and French ships did not always give accurate information about their ports  of departure or their destinations. Portuguese ships, moreover, used Batavia as a mid-voyageport of call between their settlements in eastern Indonesia – namely Timor and Flores -  and Macau on the South China coast.