(c/o Roelof van Gelder, 1983, 278 pages)

‘Anyone approaching the city of Amsterdam from the Zuider Zee in the seventeenth century, was faced by a forest of masts. Those, on the other hand, who approached from inland beheld a typical Dutch town skyline: embankments with windmills and behind them a multitude of church roofs and slender spires. Once in the city one saw an astonishing variety of house, and warehouse fronts and, suddenly beside a canal, caught a glimpse of a church steeple.’

(SUN, 1997, 336 pages)

Almost one million people sailed to Asia under the flag of the Dutch East India Company: both cabin boy and governor-general, trooper on a remote outpost in the Spice Islands and the commissioner for trade in Bengal, clerk on an Indian outstation and surgeon in the Batavia hospital. All served the Company, whether briefly or at length, whether profitably or for a pittance, in sickness and in health. Two-thirds of them never set foot in Europe again. Who were these men? Where did they come from?

(Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep, 2002, 304 pages)

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Dutch United East India Company (VOC) was the largest commercial enterprise in Europe - a private organisation of unprecedented size, the world’s first multinational. Its trade network extended from the Cape of Good Hope, Persia and Arabia in the west along the coasts of India, the Indonesian archipelago to the Moluccas, Japan and China in the east.

(Atlas, 2003, 525 pages)

In 1757, Georg Naporra began chronicling his life, which produced a unique document. The first part of Naporra’s hand-written autobiography, covering his youth and his life as a sailor in the service of the Dutch East India Company, was discovered a few years ago by the historian, Roelof van Gelder, in the Rotterdam Maritime Museum. The detailed descriptions provide a probing look into life on board an East Indiaman, seen through the eyes of a crewmember.

(Balans, 2012, 335 pages)

This is the story of a heroic quest to find the mythical Unknown Southern Land, a huge continent imagined as an earthly paradise and presumed to lie in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The expe­dition, led by an elderly Dutch lawyer called Jacob Roggeveen, would be long forgotten but for a discovery he made along the way.