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Dutch merchant seamen in Belgian sources
Seafarers have never been bound to a particular flag, which makes it challenging to reconstruct their careers. In this post, Kristof Loockx, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp and visiting researcher at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, addresses a selection of sources that provide more information about Dutch seafarers on the Belgian merchant fleet. In our section on Sailor’s lives, he makes these sources tangible by following two Dutch seafarers who sailed regularly on Belgian merchant vessels during the nineteenth century. The seamen’s registry The registration of individual seafarers in Belgium coincided with the introduction of a mandatory insurance for merchant mariners in 1845. Every…
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Reconstructing the career of a 20th-c sailor: the case of Wilfried Julius Lackin
In an earlier post, we explained our methodology for reconstructing careers of sailors from 18th-c data. In this one, Daniël Tuik, researcher on our ongoing Sailors on Dutch merchant marine in the 19th and 20th centuries project, tells about his work with the personnel files of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Stoomboot-Maatschappij (KNSM), a company that operated mainly from Amsterdam between 1856 and 1981. Jigsaw puzzle Reconstructing a career is essentially like putting a large jigsaw puzzle back together. There is no clear overview, because the available information is fragmented across different archival records. As an example I will reconstruct the career of Wilfried Julius Lackin, which is notable for both its…
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First results from our project on the recent history of merchant marine sailors
We can show some first results from our recently started project on sailors aboard Dutch merchant marine ships in the 19th and 20th centuries. Researcher Daniël Tuik has been working on a sample of personnel records from the archives of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Stoomboot-Maatschappij (KNSM), a shipping company that was based in Amsterdam. He tells more about his work in another blog post. The map on the right in Jelle’s tweet shows the birthplaces of KNSM crew members in the 20th century, mainly sailing on trans-Atlantic routes, while the one on the left shows where the sailors came from who appear in the Prize Paper dataset, which also mainly contains…
