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Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Why are there are there no details of ships hired by the Admiralty of Rotterdam or the Rotterdam Directors?

One mystery, given that the warships built by the Admiralty of Rotterdam, or Admiralty of the Maze, were generally listed with a good deal of information about the ships. In the 1628 to 1633 timeframe, you just did not see dimensions listed, but Rotterdam had the gun lists in most cases. The Staet van Oorlog te Water for the year 1654 had the dimensions (although usually in Maas feet) and lists of guns carried as well. The Admiralty of Amsterdam, during the same period generally had the same sort of data listed, as well. Perhaps the least well documented admiralty was Zeeland. I was surpiised to see that for ships hired in Amsterdam, we had dimensions for ships hired by the Admiralty of Friesland in 1652.

Now, that we have found information about the Amsterdam hired ships for 1652 and 1653, I have seen Ron van Maanen's list of Dutch warships for 1600 to 1800, and was amazed to see that he has a good bit of information about ships hired by the Noorderkwartier Directors, the Zeeland Directors, and to a lesser extent, the Admiralty of Zeeland and Friesland. The only thing he has for the Admiralty of Rotterdam was the gun list for the hired ship Gulden Beer on 25 March 1653. From Dr. Elias, we had the gun list for the English prize Rozenkrans (the former English Garland). There is seemingly nothing else for Rotterdam hired ships. That seems odd, given that the notary archives for Rotterdam have survived. We might expect, given what was found in Amsterdam, that we might find something similar in Rotterdam. I understand that the Zeeland notary archives did not survive World War II. We can only hope that there is notary information about hired ships in the archives in the cities of north Holland (Hoorn, Monnikendam, Edam, Medemblik, and Enkhuizen).

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