The Beeckestijn was an 18th-century Dutch slave ship working out of Amsterdam. She is depicted in front of the Dutch West India Company warehouses on the Prins Hendrikkade quay by the engraver Hendrik de Leth. [1]
The Beeckestijn was an 18th-century Dutch slave ship working out of Amsterdam. She is depicted in front of the Dutch West India Company warehouses on the Prins Hendrikkade quay by the engraver Hendrik de Leth. [1]
The Beeckestijn [lower-alpha 1] was owned by the Dutch West India Company. (As the WIC gave up her monopoly on slave trade in 1730, but kept the Elmina Castle to provide slave traders, a partly privately owned ship is possible.) She made seven voyages transporting slaves from the African west coast to Suriname in South America and St Eustatius in the Caribbean between 1722 and 1736. Forty-six hundred enslaved Africans were transported, of whom at least 1,000 died during the journey; on some voyages the mortality rate was as high as a third. [1]
Beeckestijn’s maiden voyage, under captain Dirk de Wolf, was out of the Dutch port of Texel on 19 February 1721, she had a crew 63, and was mounted with 26 guns.
The engraving of the Beeckestijn depicted above—the only known 18th-century print of a Dutch West India Company ship—was well known, but it was only with the fortuitous discovery of documents by historian Mark Ponte that the ship was linked to the slave trade. [1]
Slavery was finally abolished in Surinam in 1873. [2]
Mark Ponte is the guest curator of the Amsterdammers en Slavernij exhibition at the Amsterdam City Archives (Amsterdamse Stadsarchief) over the summer of 2020. [2] There are no other known contemporary drawings of Dutch slave ships.
The Dutch East India Company, officially the United Dutch East India Company, was a megacorporation founded by a government-directed consolidation of several rival Dutch trading companies (voorcompagnieën) in the early 17th century. It is believed to be the largest company to ever have existed in recorded history. It was established on March 20, 1602, as a chartered company to trade with Mughal India in the early modern period, from which 50% of textiles and 80% of silks were imported, chiefly from its most developed region known as Bengal Subah. In addition, the company traded with Indianised Southeast Asian countries when the Dutch government granted it a 21-year monopoly on the Dutch spice trade.
New Netherland was a 17th-century colony of the Dutch Republic that was located on what is now the East Coast of the United States. The claimed territories extended from the Delmarva Peninsula to southwestern Cape Cod, while the more limited settled areas are now part of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut, with small outposts in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
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John Gabriel Stedman was a Dutch-born Scottish soldier who wrote The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796). This narrative covers his years in Suriname as a soldier in the Dutch military deployed to assist local troops fighting against groups of escaped slaves. He first recorded his experiences in a personal diary that he later rewrote and expanded into the Narrative. The Narrative was a bestseller of the time and, with its firsthand depictions of slavery and other aspects of colonialism, became an important tool in the fledgling abolitionist movement. When compared with Stedman's personal diary, his published Narrative is a sanitized and romanticized version of Stedman's time in Surinam.
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The Royal African Company (RAC) was an English mercantile (trading) company set up in 1660 by the royal Stuart family and City of London merchants to trade along the west coast of Africa. It was led by the Duke of York, who was the brother of Charles II and later took the throne as James II. It shipped more African slaves to the Americas than any other company in the history of the Atlantic slave trade.
Slave ships were large cargo ships specially built or converted from the 17th to the 19th century for transporting slaves. Such ships were also known as "Guineamen" because the trade involved human trafficking to and from the Guinea coast in West Africa.
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Zacharias Wagenaer was a clerk, illustrator, merchant, member of the Court of Justice, opperhoofd of Deshima and the only German governor of the Dutch Cape Colony. In 35 years he traveled over four continents.
Jan, Johan or Johannes van Walbeeck was a Dutch navigator and cartographer during a 1620s circumnavigation of the earth, an admiral of the Dutch West India Company, and the first governor of the Netherlands Antilles.
Hendrik Carloff was an adventurer active in the 17th century. Carloff began his career as a cabin boy, but rose to become the Commander and Director of the Dutch West India Company. He later joined the Swedish Africa Company and the Danish Africa Company on the Gold Coast, during which time he was involved in the slave trade. Between 1676 and 1677, he was the Governor of Tobago.
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West Indiaman was a general name for any merchantman sailing ship making runs from the Old World to the West Indies and the east coast of the Americas. These ships were generally strong ocean-going ships capable of handling storms in the Atlantic Ocean. The term was used to refer to vessels belonging to the Danish, Dutch, English, and French West India companies.
Dorothy Creole was one of the first black women to arrive in New York. She arrived in 1627. That year, three enslaved African women set foot on the southern shore of Manhattan, arriving in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. Property of the Dutch West India Company, these women were brought to the colony to become the wives of enslaved African men who had arrived in 1625. One of these women was named Dorothy Creole, a surname that she acquired in the New World, and likely began as a descriptive term.
Adriaan de Bruin, earlier called Tabo Jansz, was an enslaved servant (kammermohr) of Dutch politician Adriaan van Bredehoff. Born in Africa and enslaved, he got to the Dutch Republic by way of either the Dutch Caribbean or in Dutch Surinam, and ended up a free man in Hoorn, North Holland. De Bruin and van Bredehoff stood for a portrait (1727) by Nicolaas Verkolje, now in the Westfries Museum in Hoorn.
The History of Dutch slavery talks about slavery in the Netherlands itself, as well as the establishment of slavery outside the Netherlands in which it played a role.