In Search of Sloops, Fluyts, and Galleons

On my second and last day in Amsterdam, I made it my mission to find out as much about the medieval Dutch sailing ships, and the Dutch Golden Age, as possible. It's a pretty fascinating area of history (as well as the most pirate-like).

First I waited until 12:30 because there was a little concert going on under the Rijksmuseum, Brass Spheres, part of the Holland festival. It was pretty cool but I think yesterday's band was more impressive :)

Then I actually went into the Rijksmuseum (beeline for the 1600-1700s on the 2nd floor). The Dutch really loved painting, or rather spending their ill-gotten gains on prints, probably the biggest support for artists since the Italian renaissance. This is Rembrandt's most famous:

The Dutch especially liked celebrating their naval victories over the Spanish and particularly (later) the English.

This all began with a civil war against Spain, a religious one. Northern Netherlands wanted to be Protestant (Catholicism being too centralized and not pirate-like). Southern Netherlands (now mostly Belgium) disagreed.

Then there was the rise of the Dutch trading empire. For a long time their entire navy was merchant vessels that armed themselves as necessary. Then the English started being annoying and the Dutch built a dedicated navy, which wiped out the English due to superior tactics (or maybe just some mist offshore). Hence, all profits from world trade routes to the Dutch for the next fifty years.

The museum had disappointingly few ships but there was this galleon (?)

which encouraged me to go to the naval museum. To get there, I took a boat.

It squeezed under bridges

and you'll note that under the bridges are places to tie up a boat, to better hide your loot from the "authorities"

I got off halfway, thinking I could take a tram and arrive sooner, but I forgot that the trams go one-way in Amsterdam (east->west is different than west->east routes). So I ran back to the boat which was just taking off. They had untied it, and although it was still very close to shore, one of the staff told me I couldn't get on.

I said, "Are you serious?" and jumped.

And by jump, I mean I stepped over about four inches of water onto a very very slowly moving boat. They definitely think all tourists are wimps, or likely to sue at any rate.

The naval museum:

This is how a medieval mariner would have felt arriving in a 21st century port, I suppose. Wha??...

So many ship models!!

The Dutch produced extremely detailed maps. This is the "deluxe edition" or whatever (coloured by hand). These books are huge, 4 inches thick, two feet by three feet large. The full map rivaled the Encyclopedia Brittanica (as far as I can tell), with about ten or fifteen volumes.

They seem to have had a very good grasp of North America. I wonder if Columbus just failed to consult the Dutch when he discovered the western route to "India".

The Dutch also spent a lot of time making good navigational equipment

and the compasses in the later warships, because the ships had so much metal in them, were carefully calibrated and surrounded with metal spheres to cancel the effect of the ship itself.

One more ship, this one is a fishing vessel. Even the fishing ships are pretty elaborate, easily able to go into international waters...

Shipbuilders did not build from plans at all, they just did everything by eye. It's so fascinating to read about. And fascinating that a little town specializing in mariners could rise to the top and control the world's trade basically. There have only been a few places like this in history. Some were pretty large, like Rome and the USSR and Silicon Valley. But a few were small, like Amsterdam and Florence. Once you have a concentration of a very valuable skill or industry, you really can innovate so fast. Still, I think the Golden Age is pretty unique... Hey guys, turns out we live on a globe. Let's go look around it.

And it's funny but I keep seeing parallels in literature. The Ferengi, from Star Trek, are pretty much Dutch. And even more so, Issac Asimov's Foundation series had an era of expansion run by merchants (or merchant princes), not by the government. So much about space travel, even well-thought out space travel like in Dune and in C.S. Friedman's This Alien Shore, is about trying to reproduce the feeling of open-sea exploration. How many games or movies have you seen based on traders and pirates (ignoring the fact that the Dutch were both)? It's hard to predict what our future history might hold, but this era is definitely embedded in our global milieu.

Some miscellaneous shots. Hi.

Here is the most hippie shot possible

with a "coffee shop" in the background. Haha. The weather keeps changing from poor

to very very beautiful

At the end of the day I went to Amsterdam Centraal to catch an overnight train to Munich. Goodbye, City of Pirates.