News ArticlesBatavia timbers tell a new tale Monday, March 12, 2007 Lecture Reproduced courtesy of freelance journalist Carmelo Amalfi Science Network WA website URL: www.sciencewa.net.au New research work on timbers from the Dutch ship Batavia show that it was built from the same oak on which famous Flemish artists such as Rembrandt and Rubens painted their 17th century masterpieces. Tree-ring dating shows that Western Australia's oldest ship timbers date back to seedlings growing in a Polish oak forest south of Danzig after 1324. In 1628, they were used to build the Batavia, which sank off Geraldton in 1629 on its maiden voyage to Indonesia. By the time the ship was built in 1628, the wood beams sourced from the forests growing along Poland's longest river was already 300 years old - making WA's surviving timbers some of the oldest splinters in maritime history. The link has been made for the first time by WA Museum maritime archaeology assistant curator Wendy van Duivenvoorde just after she received the results from a dendrochronology laboratory in The Netherlands. Batavia struck grief off Morning Reef in the Abrolhos group of islands off Geraldton in 1629. About 125 men, women and children died of ill health, drowned or were killed by mutineers who were later caught and hanged on the islands, about 60km from the WA mainland. The wreck was discovered in 1963 and her timbers raised several years later.
“Batavia's timbers perfectly match the chronology established in the 1970s of Flemish painters' panels, which were made of oak,” she explained. “Those Dutch panel painters used wood from a particular forest area in Poland where it was very fine-ringed, straight and easy to work with. So did the Dutch ship builders.” Ms van Duivenvoorde said the tree ring results are the first example of this type of wood from this area being used in shipbuilding. “This is surprising because the wood is a fine, high quality product thought to be used only for artistic pieces,” she said. Unfortunately, the demands of art and shipbuilding
took its toll on Poland’s oaks, the popular wood completely
exploited by 1643 after which no further examples are known. “The
VOC (United East India Company) would have used a lot of wood to build
ships,” she said. “From
1600 to 1650, the Dutch became the foremost shipbuilding nation
in Europe. “In 1595, for the first time, they used saws driven by windmills to make ships.“Normally it would take 120 days for two men to handsaw 60 beams for a ship. Suddenly, thatbecame four to five days. ”By 1640, about 1000 ships were being built each year in The Netherlands, most of which were exported to Denmark and Sweden, England, France and the Baltic states. Ms van Duivenvoorde, 32, embarked on her archaeological education in 1992 at the University of Amsterdam and has taken part in a number of shipwreck excavations in Italy, Sri Lanka and Turkey. Most of her current research is focused on maritime trade and shipbuilding in the ancient Mediterranean and Northern Europe. Pursuing a PhD in nautical archaeology at Texas A&M University, she helped direct post-excavation research on the Late Bronze Age shipwreck (1325BC) in Uluburun in Turkey. Her interest in the classics took a new course after WA Museum head of maritime archaeology Jeremy Green persuaded her to study in more detail the 17th century timbers in Fremantle.“I was a bit resistant at first,” she confessed, having grown up in Amsterdam surrounded in maritime history and shipwrecks. “But the more I researched, the more interesting it became. Batavia's timbers tell us a lot about how these Dutch ships were built.” The Batavia tree ring study presently is the basis of a PhD dissertation on late 16th and early 17th century construction methods that were used to build Dutch ships of exploration and East Indiamen. Since beginning work at the WA Museum a year ago, Ms Duivenvoorde has received 15 grants and fellowships for her work on the Batavia. The tree ring analysis was carried out by Elsemieke Hanraets at the Dutch RING laboratories in Lelystad. An expert in ship fastenings dating to the Greek and Roman periods, Ms Duivenvoorde has received a travel grant to continue her research work in Turkey and Cyprus in August this year to study copper fastenings excavated at the third century Kyrenia and fifth century Tektas Burnu shipwreck sites. Showing her age
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