Tableware on the Cliff

A Dish Nailed to a Cliff

Mara: The twenty-fifth of October, 1616. A Dutch East India Company ship, the Eendracht, comes to a low, bare island off Shark Bay, on Australia's west coast. Her skipper is Dirk Hartog. Jeremy Green of the Western Australian Museum traces it back a step: an earlier Dutch trader, Hendrik Brouwer, and his journey, he says, 'led to the discovery of the western part of Australia by Dirk Hartog in 1616.' Before they leave, an engraved pewter plate is prepared. Then they nail it to a post wedged in a cleft of rock. The spot's called Cape Inscription now.

Eli: The listener who asked wants to know why a Dutch sailor nailed a metal plate to an island in Australia in 1616, and how it ended up in Amsterdam. Today's angle is the improvised mess dish becoming a continent's oldest relic.

Mara: Getting from that cliff to Amsterdam takes more than eighty years, and a company that kept its paperwork. What Hartog actually meant by it stays open the whole way.

Eli: So what did the crew actually write on it?

Mara: Something close to a log entry. 'Is here arrived the ship the Eendracht of Amsterdam,' dated the twenty-fifth of October. Then the names. First the upper merchant, Gillis Miebais of Liège. He's the company's senior trade agent aboard, the man who outranked the skipper on business. Then the skipper, spelled Dirck Hatichs. It says they set sail again on the twenty-seventh for Bantam. It signs off with the under-merchant and the chief steersman. Anno 1616.

Eli: So the founding marker is tableware. A dinner plate, hammered flat by a merchant crew.

Mara: One way to read the choice: the island's low and barren, with no stone fit for carving a monument, so the crew improvised with a pewter dish. But a trader bound for the spice ports leaving its tableware on an empty shore still needs a reason, Eli, and that reason starts with how they got there at all.

The Roaring Forties Gamble

Eli: It starts in a bitter Dutch winter. The Eendracht leaves the Netherlands on the twenty-third of January, 1616. In her hold are eighty thousand silver coins, pieces of eight, to trade for spices in the East Indies. And as she sets sail, twenty-one crew and eight soldiers walk off her across the sea ice to shore. In 1611 a Dutch trader had promoted a faster way to the Spice Islands, the Brouwer Route. Ships rode the roaring forties, the strong westerly winds south of Africa, east across the Indian Ocean, then turned north. The whole trick is knowing when to turn.

Mara: Which means knowing how far east the ship has come.

Eli: And that's the number they couldn't get. Latitude could be measured accurately. Longitude was much harder, only possible in particular circumstances. So ships ran on dead reckoning: start from the last known position, add estimated speed, heading and time, and work out where the ship ought to be. Every small error carries forward. Ships ended up in unknown waters, and some were wrecked, because nobody aboard knew how far they'd sailed.

Mara: And Hartog wasn't even heading for Java. He was bound for Macassar.

Eli: Which put him far enough east to run into the South Land. He was using the route before the company formally adopted it.

Mara: Three days on the island, then. The crew explore. They find no fresh water, no valuable spices, nothing of real value to Hartog or his company. So they leave the scratched plate on its post and resume their journey north to modern-day Indonesia. In the reading tied to the company itself, that fits a seafaring habit: the Dutch left plates, boards or tablets; the French buried coins and bottles; the British marked trees or rocks.

Eli: And the plate itself is plain. It says who came and when they left. It claims no land and gives no commercial reason. On that reading it's a message post for the next ship.

Mara: The other reading takes the same plate as a deliberate act: discovery put on record first, a prior claim for the Dutch Republic and the company. That's the view associated with Jan Pieterszoon Coen and Abel Tasman.

Eli: The Eendracht's logs, which might settle it, are lost. World History Encyclopedia allows that senior officers may have steered Hartog onto that route, but with no sources to show it, counts the discovery as accidental. So the plate stands on its post at Cape Inscription, and whether a hammered dinner dish can outlast eighty years of salt wind up there is the open question.

Half-Buried in the Sand

Mara: February 1697, eighty years on. Three company ships come up this coast: the frigate Geelvinck under Willem de Vlamingh, the Nijptangh, and the galiot Weseltje, a small, flat-bottomed vessel, captained by his own son. They're charting the coast and searching for a missing ship, the Ridderschap van Holland. On the second of February a landing party goes ashore at Cape Inscription. And at the foot of the wooden post overlooking the cape, partly buried in sand, lies Hartog's dish.

Eli: The same post Hartog left behind sailing north. Still upright, decaying, the dish beneath it.

Mara: So the notice Hartog left for the next ship has been lying in the sand, and the next ship is finally here. What it was first put up for, nobody can prove. Whether this crew nails it back up or carries it off decides everything that follows.

Eli: They carry it off. De Vlamingh, or possibly his senior merchant, recognises what it is. A fresh pewter dish is flattened and inscribed: Hartog's words copied, then an account dating the Geelvinck of Amsterdam's arrival to the fourth of February 1697, with its officers and the other two ships. It goes up in the same spot, on a cypress-pine trunk from Rottnest Island. The original goes aboard, bound for Batavia, today's Jakarta, the company's headquarters and main port in Asia since 1619.

Mara: The copy keeps watch on the cliff; the original joins the company's paperwork.

Eli: And Batavia wrote it down. Officials there told the directors back home the old dish had been handed to the commander of the homebound fleet 'in order to be delivered to Your Worships, who will no doubt stand amazed that the same has for so long a series of years been preserved.' The copy had the rougher ride. In 1801 a French captain's crew found de Vlamingh's dish at the foot of its rotted post, and he nailed it to a new one. In 1818 another French expedition leader took it, worried, in his own words, that such a rare plate 'might again be swallowed up by the sands.'

Mara: His ship sank in the Falklands in 1820. The dish survived, reached the French Academy in Paris, and turned up by chance in a storeroom in 1940.

Eli: France gave it to Australia in 1947. Then Australia argued with itself over it.

Mara: The Commonwealth held on to it. The West Australian wrote that 'Vlamingh's plate rightly belongs to Western Australia,' and accused Canberra of 'the dubious game of hanging on to someone else's property.' In 1950 it went west. So the copy came home the long way round, Eli, while Hartog's original sailed for the Netherlands in a company fleet, into company hands.

The Relic in Amsterdam

Eli: Those hands kept it. It sat in the company's archives, and in 1883 it entered the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where it still is. It's in seventeen fragments now, which the museum's conservators say they've aimed to keep complete and legible. Scientists also examined it with synchrotron X-ray fluorescence, an intense beam of light that reads the metal without harming it. The rim kept its original structure. The bowl, where it was hammered flat, didn't.

Mara: So hammering it flat in 1616 changed how it decays four centuries later.

Eli: The two areas corroded differently. The improvisation is built into the damage.

Mara: October 2016, four hundred years on. At the maritime museum in Fremantle, the king and queen of the Netherlands unveil the Hartog dish, on loan from the Rijksmuseum. Beside it sits de Vlamingh's dish, the pair together for the first time since 1988. In 2017 it went on show at the Australian National Maritime Museum, for what was likely its last appearance outside the Netherlands, given how fragile it is.

Eli: The oldest known European object found on Australian soil, said the state's arts minister.

Mara: And where it belongs is still argued. The Rijksmuseum holds it as Dutch national heritage, in the collection that has kept it since 1883. The reading tied to The West Australian, the paper that fought for the copy back in 1947, is that the earliest trace of Europeans on the continent belongs in the country where it stood for more than eighty years. So, for the listener: Hartog nailed a flattened dinner dish to a post as a notice that the Eendracht had passed, out on the roaring-forties route.

Eli: It reached Amsterdam because de Vlamingh lifted it from the sand in 1697 and sent it up the company's chain to its directors, and from there it went into the national museum.

Mara: Back on that cliff in 1616, the crew scratched in their departure date for whoever came next. De Vlamingh's crew came eighty years later. Whether Hartog was sent there or carried there is still open. Company letters about the Eendracht's orders could still turn up, or newly catalogued ledgers from the Amsterdam chamber, or diplomatic papers between Canberra and The Hague.

Eli: One thing to read up on: dead reckoning.

Mara: Follow culture with us to ask where objects from the past belong.

Eli: That's where we'll leave it. I'm Eli.

Mara: And I'm Mara. Thanks for listening. Until next time on Angle.