Dutch East India Company Return Ship

Timeline

1. 1671–1680Amsterdam–Batavia route · Dutch East IndiesBetween 1671 and 1680 the VOC retourschip fleet completed about 20–30 round voyages per year, each taking roughly 8 months one way. A typical retourschip was about 45 m long and 11 m wide, with a loaded displacement over 1000 tons and a crew of 150–250. During the disaster year of 1672 the VOC merged several armed retourschips into the Dutch States fleet, fighting alongside Admiral Michiel de Ruyter against the combined Anglo-French fleet. After 1673, with the war subsiding, the fleet quickly resumed commercial operations with high annual cargo volumes.
2. c. 1660–1680VOC shipyard, Oostenburg Island · AmsterdamThe VOC established Europe's largest industrialized shipyard on Oostenburg Island, employing over 2000 skilled craftsmen and able to build multiple retourschips simultaneously. Hulls were mainly of Northern European oak, with keels and ribs of naturally curved-grain timber for strength, below-waterline coatings of sulfur and animal oil against fouling, and regular dry-docking to clear tropical shipworm. In the 1670s stricter standardized hull specifications were introduced, unifying length-to-breadth ratios and gunport layouts, greatly reducing construction costs and easing parts replacement.
3. 1671–1680Batavia (modern Jakarta) · Southeast AsiaEastbound cargoes of the 1670s retourschips consisted mainly of Dutch silver coin, woolen textiles, and lead and tin; the return voyages carried cloves and nutmeg from the Moluccas, pepper and coffee from Java, cotton cloth and indigo from the Coromandel Coast and Bengal, and Japanese copper and porcelain obtained through the Nagasaki trade. Batavia, as the hub of the VOC's Asian network, handled cargo consolidation and transshipment; retourschips completed cargo transfer there and sailed directly via the Cape of Good Hope back to the Netherlands.