In Dutch historiography, whaling and sealing seem to have drawn less attention than the respective trading companies, the admiralties, and subsequent activities of the Royal Netherlands Navy, or the endeavours of the merchant fleet setting sail for the Mediterranean or Baltic regions. Dutch whaling and sealing activities during the nineteenth century in particular have been almost completely neglected so far.

This situation not only relates to historiography in general, but one may also discern this neglect (or modest attention at best) in a rather unexpected field: the realm of Dutch maritime historiography. Nearly all studies about whaling and sealing that have seen the light during the last 30 years or so concentrate either on the heyday of the ‘old’ seventeenth- and eighteenth-century whaling expeditions to the Arctic, or on the brief, albeit intensive involvement of the Netherlands in modern, post-war whaling in the Antarctic waters during the period 1946-1964. This statement is corroborated by a number of fairly recently published overviews regarding Dutch maritime historiography. In 1994 Louwrens Hacquebord presented the harvest of one hundred years of historical research concerning Dutch whaling. In this overview – a lengthy article with a close to conclusive listing of publications hidden in the annotations – Hacquebord mentioned Cornelis de Jong and Frank Broeze and their works on nineteenth century whaling. His remarks about the writings of the two authors, however, were rather flat. Hacquebord stated:

He concluded his article with a short chapter on the future of historical whaling research. Albeit the great number of suggestions, ideas, and research projects mentioned there, nothing was devoted to the fact that the nineteenth century deserved more attention than it had received.