Introduction

Ships and men – and the interaction between these two components in working and living conditions on board – are the two most important elements in any maritime endeavour. In 1817, the Dutch government through the Minister of Foreign Affairs commented on the possibilities and difficulties of the resumption of whaling by stating,

Twenty-six years later, in his essay on the history of whaling (1843), Captain C. Brandligt reiterated the critical perception of the Dutch government regarding Dutch whaleships and whalemen. He mentioned two elements that are worth scrutiny. First, he referred to the lack of shipbuilding programs in the Netherlands during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Secondly, he questioned the level of sophistication among Dutch whalemen.

In this chapter, the focus will be on the state of the art regarding ships and crews. As was done in previous chapters, a division will be made between South Seas whaling and Arctic whaling. Subsections will deal with the crews of whaleships under the Dutch flag but nineteenth-century data concerning the numbers of crew on board Dutch whaleships – or the compositions of whaleship crews – are scarce. Similarly, figures concerning the wages of whalemen involved in South Seas or Arctic enterprises are scarce. In his many tables regarding Dutch whaling in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, De Jong used 42 hands as a standard size for crews, based on data for the year 1748. De Jong frankly stated that one must be careful in using this figure, as the size of the crew was often determined by the size of the vessel. De Jong's figure may account for the first half of the eighteenth century. In the seventeenth century and also during the first half of the eighteenth century, the ‘standard figure’ may have been quite different than 42, as seventeenth-century whaleships were generally smaller and ships sailing for the Arctic under the Dutch flag after about 1750 were generally larger than the ones used during the first half of the eighteenth century.