Dutch history- We sailed, we saw, we stole and got rich

Yesterday Lonneke and me went to the maritime museum in Rotterdam. Two exhibitions were for me most interesting. One concerned the Holland-America line. There used to be a big steamer transporting people from Rotterdam to New York. Old pics and even menus were displayed and it was really fun to see.


The other exhibition concerned the making of maps by our old fleet called the V.O.C. The Dutch have always been good sailers (due to all the water surrounding us-small intermezzo: we even got rid of our spanish invadors by drowning them and us surviving on boats). So we sailed to Asia and stole spices/tea/etc. from countries like India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and China.

The V.O.C. also had cartographs working for them. They made maps from the countries we sailed to and made sure the ships did not perish in low water. One of these maps is shown in the picture. It was really fascinating seeing these old maps being quite accurate and in some the Americas were missing since it was not discovered yet.


There were lots of pirates back then and many wars between fleets. In one of these incidents the English stole our maps and took them to Oxford. Only recently they were discovered in one of Oxford's libraries and given back to The Netherlands. Those were the maps we saw yesterday.