Audiotour Ship the Batavia

Introduction Batavia (ship)

The ship the Batavia lies on the waterfront. Please be careful when crossing the road.

You are now standing in front of the reconstruction of the ship the Batavia, a merchant ship of the United East India Company or VOC in Dutch. This 17th century merchant ship was once the largest ship of its time. But why was is the Batavia that was chosen to be reconstructed?
 
There is an original journal from the 17th century that describes the horrors of the shipwrecking of the Batavia. When the wreck of the Batavia was also found off the coast of Australia in 1963, the idea for the reconstruction began to take shape. A bigger trigger was perhaps the plan of Dutch director Paul Verhoeven to make a movie about the dramatic shipwreck of the Batavia. It was a dark day in Dutch maritime history.
 
The story goes like this:
In the early morning of the 4th of June 1629, the Batavia struck a reef off the coast of Australia on her maiden voyage to the East Indies. On board were 341 people: soldiers, women, and children. The survivors were taken to an island, now known as Beacon Island. Only three months later, in September, a rescue ship arrived. What happened on the island in the meantime is an dark story. A group of survivors rebelled and this mutiny lead to the death of 125 fellow passengers. The movie about these events never materialised, but the ship itself did!
 
The wreck of the Batavia was recovered, but how do you go about rebuilding such a ship without the actual construction drawings? To reconstruct the Batavia, shipbuilder Willem Vos made use of an important book from 1671: Aaloude en Hedendaegsche Scheeps-Bouw en Bestier, written by Nicolaas Witsen, an authority on the subject of shipbuilding from Amsterdam. His work offered valuable clues about how ships were built in those days.
 
Vos also took inspiration from another famous ship from the same era: the Vasa, a Swedish warship that was built in 1628 by order of the Swedish king. In many places in the reconstruction of the Batavia, you can see clear similarities with the construction of the Vasa.
In addition, the builders learned a lot by experimenting as they went along. Step by step, they came to their own conclusions and solutions. This combination of historical sources, comparison and experiments brought the Batavia back to life.