… later – and what we can learn from them.
"Two ships, two missions, two follies, two groundings, two sinkings and two frightful disasters. One was so long ago that engraving had to do the job of photography; the other was recent enough that some people alive today will have heard about it from their parents. In one, a foreign ship came to grief in British waters; in the other, a British vessel went down in foreign waters, and down she stayed.
First to Texel, safe haven, population 13,500: the largest of the West Frisian Islands off the coast of the Netherlands in the Wadden Sea. Today it is a magnet for Dutch cyclists, walkers, swimmers and riders (the latter an important reminder that Texel is the only known place where an entire navy was defeated by men on horseback, which is another tale altogether).
In June 1743, a 700 ton vessel, VOC Hollandia, set sail on her maiden voyage bound for Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies, now known as Jakarta. In any study of trade between Europe and Asia throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the Dutch East India Company is pivotal, shipping everything from nutmegs and cinnamon to coffee and tobacco, porcelain to rubber. And that is what VOC stands for: Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie…"
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