Eendracht (1615)

Type

Galleon

Period

17th Century

Nation

Netherlands

Overview: Eendracht ("Concord"/"Unity") was a Dutch East Indiaman built for the VOC and launched in 1615, best known as the ship of Captain Dirk Hartog, who made the second recorded European landfall on the Australian mainland in 1616. The Western Australian Museum, which has researched the ship in depth, states plainly that "No portrait exists of Dirk Hartog—or any contemporary paintings of the ship he skippered, Eendracht" — so any image search should be treated with caution. Specifications: She is recorded as a early 17th century Dutch wooden-hulled 700-ton-burthen East Indiaman, launched in 1615 in the service of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), also described elsewhere as roughly 350 lasten. She carried tonnage: 700 tonnes, 32 guns, crew of around 200, and was built at the Amsterdam dockyard for VOC service. No contemporary plan or painting of this specific hull survives, so modelers must rely on generic early-VOC retourschip references. Service History: Eendracht set sail on 23 January 1616 from the Dutch port of Texel in the company of several other VOC ships, on a trading venture bound for Batavia, under her captain Dirk Hartog, a thirty-five-year-old former private merchant. Sailing down the west Africa coastline, Eendracht became separated from the others in a severe storm and reached the Cape of Good Hope alone around August, staying there until 27 August when Hartog decided to set out unaccompanied across the Indian Ocean. Following the Brouwer Route, she made unexpected landfall on the Australian west coast in October 1616, and Hartog's crew left the famous inscribed pewter plate at Cape Inscription before continuing to Batavia. Eendracht returned to the Netherlands and on 13 May 1619 again set sail from Texel bound for the East Indies, this time under a different captain, reaching Jacatra (Jakarta) on 22 March 1620, and remained in the Indies until wrecked on 13 May 1622. Notable Facts: The land Hartog charted became known as Eendrachtsland, named after his ship Eendracht, meaning "concord", a name used on Dutch maps for decades. Modelers should be careful not to confuse this ship with the far more famous 76-gun Dutch flagship Eendracht of 1653–1665 (blown up at the Battle of Lowestoft) — Ludolf Bakhuysen's well-known painting "The Eendracht and a Fleet of Dutch Men-of-war" depicts that later warship, not Hartog's 1615 East Indiaman, even though the two vessels are frequently mixed up online. A Wikipedia talk-page discussion likewise flags that a widely circulated Commons image supposedly of Hartog's Eendracht is actually catalogued as depicting the unrelated 1615 Eendracht sailed by Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire around Cape Horn, so any image search under this ship's name needs careful cross-checking against these two look-alike vessels before use.