Speaking of 17th century Dutch ships....

Joined
Jul 9, 2019
Messages
495
Points
323

A Dutch fluit from the 17th century has been found in the Baltic Sea. More importantly, the hull is mostly intact!--with just a few planks missing and some minor damage caused by a trawler collision. The ship has been well-protected from shipworm and deterioration due to the conditions in the Baltic. This is a big deal because fluits are rarely discovered, even as wrecks, and so a clear and well-preserved example of this type of ship construction is quite a boon for us admirers of Dutch ship construction.

A 400-year old ship has been found in the Baltic Sea

 
Last edited:
This is really a best condition - many thanks for sharing with us
 
A Dutch fluit from the 17th century has been found in the Baltic Sea. More importantly, the hull is mostly intact!--with just a few planks missing and some minor damage caused by a trawler collision. The ship has been well-protected from shipworm and deterioration due to the conditions in the Baltic. This is a big deal because fluits are rarely discovered, even as wrecks, and so a clear and well-preserved example of this type of ship construction is quite a boon for us admirers of Dutch ship construction.

A 400-year old ship has been found in the Baltic Sea

Hello Eric

This great news! Thank you for sharing
 
I do not know, if @Ab Hoving already saw this topic, but I guess he know some more details and information about this wreck......
 
Yes, I have seen the footage, but I have no particular information (yet). I guess in the future we will see more of these findings from that area.
I have no information about this particular wreck, but maybe you can find some snippets when you google Niklas Eriksson and prof. Ronnby. They are the Swedes who are mostly involved with findings like this.
 
In grad school, I studied a comparison between Dutch shipbuilding and the Portuguese. The "Fluyts" were really a system of commerce as much as a ship design. Cheap, not built to last, and capable of being sailed by small crews, Fluyts were built by the thousand. There's plenty of in-depth research done by those wonderful historians of the late 19th and early 20th century who had enormous patience. The Dutch certainly kept records. Eventually, the Dutch were building their ship designs in the "Indies" and many such ships, built to Dutch designs with local materials and native labor, were well built. It is interesting that they were usually for trade between locations in the Indian ocean and the Pacific and often spent their entire careers without rounding the Cape.
 
3dJerseyman,
You must have had a great grad school, providing you with so much information about the humble Dutch ship type the fluit.
However, there is one point where I think your info needs a bit of correction. Indeed fluits served the Eastindian Company (VOC) in the trade between the islands of the Indies and the Asian continent, but they were never built in Asia. Fluits sailed with the fleet of Eastindiamen (twice a year) to Batavia (Djakarta) and stayed the rest of their existence in those waters, never to return back to Holland The Company had several shipyards in Asia, like the island of Onrust in the Batavia Bay, but these were only repair yards. There are records of some ships being built on these yards in the two centuries of the existence of the Company, but only of local types and they were quite small. The Dutch shipwrights never adopted working with 'inland' woods and generally sticked to European wood, brought to Asia mostly as a profitable way to ballast the ships on their way to Indonesia.
I thought you might like to know this piece of information.
Ab
 
Last edited:
Back
Top