Taking on fresh provisions was vital to the wellbeing of crews making the eight-month, one-way journey to and from Asia, with scurvy and other diseases claiming many lives. The meat is very short-grained and tastes good, which serves us very well in this time of shortage.” And a day later, “our skiff returned from the Robben Island with 200 birds, mostly penguins, as well as 800 eggs.”ĭespite the hardships, Jansz was able to recognise the potential of the Cape as a victualling station for Dutch ships – he just had to convince the Lords Seventeen (the VOC’s “board of directors”), who were notoriously stingy, according to Groenewald, to establish a permanent settlement there. On Saturday, 15 June, “the crew shot a rhinoceros (which had been fighting with an elephant) near our fortification. This excerpt from Jansz’s journal gives an idea of the kind of challenges and successes the men experienced. (The island is now a popular tourist attraction with a museum, where visitors can learn all about the prison and see the resident penguins which are now an endangered species.) They even ventured to Robben Island – where Nelson Mandela languished in prison from 1964 to 1982 – in skiffs. They bartered livestock and fresh meat from the indigenous KhoeKhoe people and had great success fishing in the nearby Salt River. The journal provided Werz with great detail about the year the men spent at the Cape – including a few very useful clues as to the exact location of the wreck.Īfter the men had made it ashore in 1647 – transferring heavy cargo in the choppy conditions was an ordeal which spanned several weeks and claimed one life – they established a camp among the dunes which they called Zandenburch (“Sandcastle” in English). Through his research, he found a tranche of documents, including the journal kept the by the ship’s junior merchant, Leendert Jansz, who was one of the 62 men who had stayed in Cape Town after the wreck. Putting the disappointment behind him, he continued to investigate the Nieuw Haarlem “as a sort of hobby,” by walking on the beach “whenever was bored” and combing the state archives in the Hague and Cape Town for any information. “She took me to the beach and showed me some timbers,” said Werz, who instantly recognised them as coming from a much more recent 19th-Century wreck. It was a mystery that many serious historians had wanted to solve over the years, and previous attempts to find the wreck had all included many incorrect assumptions. The Haarlem – the ship that “started it all” – was at the top of his wish list. Werz had come to South Africa harbouring hopes of discovering the remains of the many VOC ships wrecked at the Cape. Within a few weeks of arriving, a member of the public phoned to say she thought she’d found the remains of the Nieuw Haarlem. Werz, who started his career as a marine archaeologist in the Netherlands, moved to South Africa in 1988 to take up a lecturing position at the University of Cape Town. The French continued to call at Saldanha Bay from time to time but also had their own colony in Reunion.” ![]() After 1652, according to Groenewald, “the English started to concentrate more on St Helena as a halfway station. ![]() But the experience of the Nieuw Haarlem survivors was the “catalyst” that determined which of the powers would be the first to settle in the region and where precisely they would settle.
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