Not directly related, but interesting nonetheless, I think ...

I am guessing this is the very same Batavia ship of this real-life horror story of mutiny, murder, rape, etcetera.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batavia_(1628_ship)

Batavia's Graveyard by Mike Dash is a book I'd highly recommend to anyone wanting to do a deep dive into this truly bizarre story.

I bought this book based on your comment and I can't put it down!

I just finished it in two sittings. Fantastic read.

Bought it and enjoying the read so far :)

Yeah the story of the Batavia makes the Star Trek mirror universe empire seem like a bunch of boy scouts compared how the VOC ran things.

> Cornelisz and several of the major mutineers had both hands chopped off before being hanged.

> The remaining mutineers were taken to Batavia for trial. Five were hanged, while several others were flogged, keelhauled or dropped from the yardarm on the later voyage back home. Cornelisz' second in command, Jacop Pietersz, was broken on the wheel, the most severe punishment available at the time.

Though luck for Pelsaert because the VOC still thought that was too little too late:

> A board of inquiry decided that Pelsaert had exercised a lack of authority and was therefore partly responsible for what had happened.

Two of the mutineers were also left (to die) on the Australian mainland in 1628 -- 140 years before Australia was "Discovered" by James Cook.

None of that seems particularly bad compared to the orgy of rape and murder orchestrated by Cornelisz and co, who are estimated to have killed 125 of the passangers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batavia_(1628_ship)

The Casefile podcast has a really good episode on the shipwreck.

> Batavia shipwreck reveals a key to Dutch success in 17th-century world trade

And the key to success was posting clickbait headlines to Hacker News?

Yes, but back then it was called Sealbait and it was used to test loyalty. They would write enticing headlines on the outside of sealed correspondence to entice the couriers to break the seal.

Trivia: In the Netherlands we also have buildings from the 16th century that use wood originally tooled as ship beams. A lot of the time they contain holes that were cut out when they were building a ship. When a ship was demolished or never finished sometimes those beams were used for house construction.

As I gather, the interesting part is that the hull was built of oak planks sandwiched between pine planks. Total thickness 18 cm. It seems it was self-reinforcing, not built by "cladding" a frame.

I believe the Dutch were renown for their shipbuilding expertise at the time. Tsar Peter the Great made a visit to the Netherlands to see for himself Dutch construction techniques and even worked with the carpenters at the docks. https://erenow.net/modern/peterthegreat/14.php

What am I missing here? The key is that the boat was made from wood?

Better hull shape, better craftsmanship, sourcing materials from far away, industrial production (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_Nether...: “The shipbuilding district of Zaan, near Amsterdam, became one of the world's earliest known industrialized areas, with around 900 wind-powered sawmills at the end of the 17th century. By the early 17th century Dutch shipyards were producing a large number of ships to a standard design, allowing extensive division of labour, a specialization which further reduced unit costs”)

It's literally explained at the end of the abstract:

> Our research illustrates the compatibility of dendrochronological studies with musealisation of shipwreck assemblages, and the results demonstrate that the VOC successfully coped with timber shortages in the early 17th century through diversification of timber sources (mainly Baltic region, Lübeck hinterland in northern Germany, and Lower Saxony in northwest Germany), allocation of sourcing regions to specific timber products (hull planks from the Baltic and Lübeck, framing elements from Lower Saxony), and skillful woodworking craftmanship (sapwood was removed from all timber elements). These strategies, combined with an innovative hull design and the use of wind-powered sawmills, allowed the Dutch to produce unprecedented numbers of ocean-going ships for long-distance voyaging and interregional trade in Asia, proving key to their success in 17th-century world trade.

They solved a logistics problem (timber shortage), the issue of lumber from different regions having different qualities (using it for different parts of the ship), and had wind-powered proto-industrialization (wind-powered sawmills).

Of course, the paper ends with reinforcing the idea that the VOC was the key to the Dutch economy, totally ignoring the part where grain trade with the Baltics was a much more significant source of income than the VOC ever was, but that not as flashy as colonialist exploitation bringing in the spices and inventing capitalism I guess.

> Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC)

Thanks, I did not realize that bit of context was lost in the copy/paste as I'm Dutch, and VOC can only refer to one thing in my country ;)

Since you might be interested, I've studied history at the university level in English, and it's generally referred to the VOC in English as well to prevent confusion with the English/British East India Company, at least in academic texts.

Actually there's also a Dutch VC firm named VOC Capital.

They even copied the logo, just in case you're not sure that they really named themselves after the blackest page in Dutch history. I love it.

Also, if you look at the maps with the distribution of the sources of the timber it has areas of concentration that map quite closely to the southern remnants of the Hanseatic League (die Hansa in German) cities / trading stations. And some of the wood used has a time frame that sits right in the middle of the peak of the Hanseatic League power (1370-1438). The Dutch-Hanseatic War of 1438-1441 lead to the end of the Hanseatic League's de facto monopolisation of Baltic trade.

Pretty much. From several types woods coming from many sources to be precise. I don't know much about ships, but I remember from one visit in museum that England used to cut down oak forests for their fleet and ship building process relied on all trees being of the same type.

The lumber was binned for quality and good specimens had a seal added denoting ownership by the Navy to prevent pilfering.

Hey redis_mic - don't know why but it looks like all your comments after this one have been auto-deleted. May want to bring that up with moderators.

I understood it more like "it was a very clever, well organized import/forwarding trade operation".

They diversified their wood sources, chose different sources for different parts produced, which made difference during general wood shortage. Also company created some clever tools like wind sawmill and ship designs.

The wind-powered sawmills is a good example of how building in the past were actually more advanced that one thinks about them.

Looks more like the Dutch were able to source different kinds of wood and integrate them into a production of many ships.