The Eastern Turn

In 1712, the Zuytdorp left the Cape of Good Hope for Batavia under an auspicious wind, carrying silver, passengers, and Company correspondence. Its officers followed the Brouwer Route, which exploited strong westerlies but demanded a circumspect judgment about when to turn north toward Java. Below deck, a motley company of soldiers, artisans, sailors, and families endured a crossing that could last for months. Letters entrusted to the ship sound wistful now, dwelling on gardens and relatives their writers expected to see again.

Company directors had given the route their approbation because it shortened voyages and reduced the wages and provisions consumed at sea. Their critics, however, saw avarice in a policy that rewarded speed while captains navigated longitude with crude estimates. A master who reached Batavia early might exult over a profitable passage; one who sailed too far east faced an implacable combination of reefs and surf. Zuytdorp never arrived, and wreckage later found on Western Australia's cliffs showed that the ocean, not desertion, had ended the voyage.

The Company's inquiry began with a diffident clerk, who hesitated before challenging calculations copied by his superiors. Rumors suggested that an official might embezzle money intended for repairs, yet surviving accounts showed payments without proving theft. A second puzzle concerned clandestine trading, since private cargo could tempt officers to alter a course without recording the decision. Gaps in the logbooks could obfuscate responsibility, but they could also result from hurried copying or the loss of papers at sea.

Witnesses produced a convoluted chain of remembered orders, revised tables, and secondhand remarks, so the inquiry could not assign a single cause. One captain began to equivocate when asked whether he used the approved longitude method, alternately calling it essential and merely advisory. Another hid uncertainty behind circumlocution; six pages of testimony passed before he stated where he normally turned north. Merchants then inundated the directors with petitions, calculations, and warnings about other ships that had vanished along the same corridor.

The Company answered with a conciliatory circular that acknowledged captains' difficulties while requiring earlier turns, repeated depth soundings, and fuller position reports. It was not a contrite confession: the directors accepted no blame, and the circular carefully presented reform as refinement. Even so, the Zuytdorp inquiry made the fast route divisive, separating advocates of economy from officers who valued a wider margin of safety. Rather than make an ignominious admission that Company policy had sacrificed a ship, the directors changed practice without announcing a verdict; gradually, caution redrew the highway across the southern Indian Ocean.