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…