Abstract
Jaap Bruijn is one of the Netherlands’ most distinguished scholars in the field of maritime history. Now retired, he published a monograph written in Dutch that provides an overview of Dutch maritime employment during the eighteenth century. This period is much less studied than the Golden Age of the preceding century. In this sense, Professor Bruijn’s work is a welcome addition to the existing historiography of the Dutch Republic as a seafaring nation. While the seventeenth century saw the rise of the Republic as very strong political and economic power, the eighteenth century was a period of decline. By the time the Spanish war of succession ended in 1713, the Dutch were no longer one of Europe’s biggest powers, but had to accept a secondary place in the theatre of history. The temporal context described in the introduction is one in which Muslim piracy had become a ‘containable problem’, the navy had ‘ceased to exist as employer for large numbers of seamen’ and the trade routes in European commercial navigation ‘were established’ (p. 11). A more tranquil world is evoked in these words, one in which the Dutch, as a seafaring power, were simply settling in a more permanent position. Still, an overview of Dutch maritime activities during that period is most welcome, particularly as most studies have focussed on specific aspects of Dutch maritime history, with a strong focus on the history of the Dutch East India Company (the VOC). Professor Bruijn is aware of this, pointing out that it is ‘almost inevitable that work and life of the seaman on East India ships receives a disproportionate amount of attention’ (p. 73). Indeed, the VOC remained a force to be reckoned with, and remained the single most important employer for Dutch (and foreign) seafaring personnel. But this focus has also led to an undervaluation of the role played by other branches of maritime navigation, and Professor Bruijn specifically aimed at synthesizing knowledge on these other branches as much as possible in separate chapters. Thus, after a first series of six chapters, all generalist, he decided to focus on each maritime navigation in a separate chapter, discussing the whaling and fishery fleets, the merchant marine, the East India Company navigation and the navy, before concluding with another general chapter discussing the lives of those left behind, the wives and children of the sailors.
The main strength of the work lies in the attempt to offer a broad scope of Dutch eighteenth-century maritime activity, bringing together existing specialist historiography and a number of concrete examples based on the lives of a number of seamen, obtained through archival sources and first-hand ego documents such as travel journals or ships’ logs. The choice to provide a comprehensive history of Dutch maritime life, however, comes with a number of consequences. First of all, it is virtually impossible to be complete. Some of the source material has been lost, and therefore several crucial aspects of a seaman’s career could not be discussed. Additionally, limitations of time and space have forced Professor Bruijn to make personal choices as to highlighting certain aspects of seamen’s lives, while ignoring others, such as the importance of private trade as wage complement for seafarers working in the merchant marine, or the legal means by which professional disputes between seamen, merchants and officers were resolved. In itself, this is not necessarily a major problem, but it is something to keep in mind when considering Zeegang as a guide to understand the scope and functioning of the Dutch maritime enterprise as a whole.
A more serious problem relates to the synthetic nature of the work, and the fact that it is intended for a broader audience. What it provides in detail, it lacks in analysis. While Professor Bruijn manages to provide a picture of the Dutch maritime world of the eighteenth-century in a very accessible writing style, the work does lack explanatory power. Many phenomena were touched upon, but not explained. Examples abound. When discussing commercial navigation out of Zeeland, Bruijn remarks that the import of lobsters from ports in southern Norway was a steady phenomenon, without ever explaining where it came from, or what it meant for those involved (p. 209). When discussing navy employment, the author remarks that ‘seamen and petty officers were always dismissed after a journey’ (p.244), but the reader does not get to know why, or where this practice came from, or whether it differed in times of war, or in other time periods. The lack of analysis has further consequences. Bruijn draws from a very rich pool of existing personal experiences of seamen, and many of their stories are revealing and often very interesting, but it is not always clear how representative these stories are, or how they fit in a larger and more analytical narrative. As a rule, these stories do not offer explanation, they offer illustration. This also makes the temporal context problematic in a sense, as the reader gets the feeling that many of the aspects under discussion might as well have taken place a century earlier or later, that is to say, apart from the role played by a number of big events such as wars, a more time-specific framework is lacking, which makes it hard to understand in what sense the eighteenth century, as far as a sailor working on a Dutch ship goes, was different from other periods in Dutch maritime history.
A third and last point of criticism lies with the structure of the book. Rather than opting for a chronological overview of all things maritime during the eighteenth century, the author has divided the book into twelve thematic chapters. As a constructed narrative, the division makes a lot of sense. The first six chapters, as well as the last one, are all general in nature and draw from all branches of maritime navigation. They deal with the identity of seamen, their enrolment, work and life on board of Dutch ships, the relationship between Dutch and foreign seafarers, and, in a last chapter, with the families staying home. The five other chapters each discuss a branch of maritime employment. Chapters seven to eleven deal with the different professional branches of the maritime industry, as mentioned above. It is a division that makes sense, but that doesn’t manage to avoid overlap, as certain aspects of maritime life within these branches were shared between them. The discussion of certain aspects of life within a certain branch of seafaring relies on a combination of secondary sources and primary material, and can sometimes feel a bit haphazard. Surely, skippers could be drunk, treating their crews well, and professor Bruijn discusses this when describing practices on VOC vessels, using the example of the alcohol addict Bastiaan Verdoes, skipper on the Three Parrots in 1754, amongst others (pp. 234-5). But this discourse could as well have been discussed when writing about the merchant marine, replacing one name with another, as drunkenness was by no means limited to the East India Company. The two pages spent on ‘drunk and evil skippers’ are also not sufficient to deal with the topic in a satisfactory manner. On another hand, there is a lack of comparison between the branches. When discussing career perspectives for seamen working on VOC ships on pp. 221–3, the reader does not get any insight into whether, or how, these differed in other branches, or whether seamen swapped from one branch to another.
In spite of a number of shortcomings inherent to the choice of writing an overview of the Dutch maritime experience of the eighteenth century, Bruijn’s monograph, rich in detail, scope and description, is an important work of reference for any scholar interested in understanding early modern maritime life in general, and maritime employment in all its aspects, a declining Republic’s seafaring force in particular. During the United Provinces’ Golden Age, they fought three wars with the English. During the eighteenth century, only one Anglo-Dutch war was fought, between 1781 and 1784. The maritime competition that was so strong during the seventeenth century had ceased to be a primary element in European maritime developments of the eighteenth century. Still, looking at the Dutch experience during that time can still be revealing for scholars of English maritime history of the eighteenth century, as maritime life in England also found some more structured footing in the eighteenth century; one only needs to think, for instance, of the 1729 Act for the Better Regulation and Government of Seamen in the Merchants Service. While the Dutch scenario was one of decline, the English came out as victorious. These different trajectories of maritime success, however, did not impede the existence of similarities between the experiences of seafarers employed on similar branches of maritime navigation, although fundamental differences, of course, also existed. Bruijn’s book can serve as a mighty good introduction of understanding similarities and differences, and it can therefore only be hoped that, in the near future, it will be translated into English to make it more accessible to international scholars.