The Zeewijk Story and the Missing Second Wreck
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ORIGINAL PAPER
The Zeewijk Story and the Missing Second Wreck Jeremy Green1 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The Dutch East India Company (VOC) ship Zeewijk was wrecked on Half Moon Reef in the Pelsaert (southern) Group of the Houtman Abrolhos islands off the Western Australian coast in 1727. The survivors were able to land on a nearby island, where they eventually built a rescue boat and finally reached their intended destination of Batavia (modern Jakarta) nine months later. At the time of the wreck, the survivors reported evidence of another shipwreck in the area. This paper describes these chronological events, the archaeological investigations and surveys of the site; and it attempts to analyse the veracity of the evidence of a second wreck. Keywords Nautical archaeology VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) Archives
Introduction This paper describes the chronology of the Zeewijk story from the time of the loss in 1727 to the present day. Firstly, the background to the loss of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) ship Zeewijk and the events that followed are described in the journals of the two senior officers of the ship, recorded at the time, and in an anonymous third journal which may have been later copied from one of the two original journals after the survivors reached Batavia. These journals describe the loss of the ship and the discovery of evidence of another shipwreck at the wreck site and other wreck material on nearby islands. The journals describe how the survivors existed and their ultimate journey to Batavia. Following this, in the nineteenth century, evidence of the place where the survivors lived was discovered by a naval party surveying the Houtman Abrolhos, off the Western Australian coast. They, too, found additional evidence of a second shipwreck in the area. Subsequently, the early guano mining industry found further evidence of the Zeewijk survivors. In the 1950s, evidence of the Zeewijk wreck site was discovered, leading to the discovery of the main wreck site in 1967. The journals in the archives were translated, and the Western Australian Museum began a series of surveys and excavations of the Zeewijk in the late 1970s resulting in a comprehensive site plan and a large collection of artefacts from the wreck site. In 2008, the question of whether a & Jeremy Green [email protected] 1
Department of Maritime Archaeology, Western Australian Museum, Cliff Street, Fremantle, WA 6160, Australia
123
Journal of Maritime Archaeology
second wreck lay on the Zeewijk site itself became a prominent issue and a privately sponsored aerial magnetometer survey was conducted over the site in an attempt to determine evidence for this. The results were inconclusive. The discovery of elephants tusks on the wreck site and the fact that there were more cannons than were recorded on the ship had been suggested as evidence of a second wreck on the site. In 2016, a second magne
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