The East Indiaman: the great ship of the Asia trade

What was an East Indiaman?

“East Indiaman” was the name for the big ships that European trading companies sent to Asia, which Europeans then called the East Indies. Portuguese and Dutch ships came first, and by 1715 the English East India Company and the Dutch East India Company, known by its Dutch initials VOC, were the two biggest. France, Denmark and other countries had smaller fleets of their own.

An East Indiaman had three masts and mostly square sails, the big sheets hung across the ship that work best with the wind behind. The ships were built to carry as much cargo as possible on a very long voyage, and to defend themselves on the way, so they carried cannon like a warship. They were among the largest merchant ships of their time.

How big was an East Indiaman in 1715?

Smaller than many people imagine. The famous Indiamen of over 1,000 tons belong to the late 1700s and early 1800s. Around 1715, English Indiamen usually measured about 350 to 400 tons, and some were smaller. The Queen, which made two voyages between 1715 and 1720, measured 330 tons and sailed with about 60 to 66 men and 18 to 22 guns. Ships slowly grew to around 490 tons by the 1730s.

Dutch VOC ships were built to a few standard lengths, of roughly 130, 145 and 160 Amsterdam feet (an Amsterdam foot was a little shorter than an English one), and they carried far more people. When the Dutch Rooswijk sailed for Asia in 1737, a little after our period, she had 273 people aboard, including 72 soldiers, a few craftsmen and 5 passengers.

Who built and owned the East Indiamen?

The two companies did it differently.

• The English company built a few ships of its own in the early 1600s, but from the middle of that century it found it cheaper to hire them. Groups of private owners paid for each ship, and a managing owner, called the ship’s husband, rented it to the Company for its voyages. Most were built on the River Thames near London, especially at Blackwall, which became the biggest privately owned shipbuilding yard anywhere.
• The Dutch VOC built its own ships in six yards, one for each of its local branches, called chambers: Amsterdam, Middelburg, Delft, Rotterdam, Hoorn and Enkhuizen. Amsterdam’s yard on the island of Oostenburg was by far the biggest, with about 1,300 workers, and built about half of all the VOC’s shipping, measured by tonnage. An East Indiaman took about a year and a half to build. The Dutch called their big ships retourschepen, “return ships”, because they made the whole round trip to Asia and back.

What did East Indiamen carry?

On the way out they carried mostly silver, in bars and Spanish coins, because people in Asia wanted silver and had little use for European goods such as English woollen cloth. On her last voyage, in 1740, the Rooswijk carried gold and silver worth 300,000 Dutch guilders.

On the way home the holds were packed with Asian goods: pepper and other spices, cotton cloth such as calico and muslin from India, silk, Chinese porcelain, indigo dye and saltpetre for making gunpowder. Tea was just beginning to matter. In 1700 it was only about one per cent of the English company’s trade, but by 1740 it was about ten per cent.

How long was the voyage, and how dangerous?

Very long. The ships sailed south through the Atlantic, round the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa, and across the Indian Ocean. Dutch ships stopped at the VOC’s station at the Cape, and English ships on the way home often called at the island of St Helena, far out in the South Atlantic. The Rooswijk took about 11 months to reach the Dutch base at Batavia (now Jakarta) and about six and a half months to come home.

Many sailors and soldiers never came back, and disease was a constant danger: in January 1749, sickness was reported to be killing about three people a day aboard the Dutch ship Amsterdam while she was still in the English Channel. Of the Rooswijk’s 273 people, 85 died before reaching Batavia. Over two centuries the VOC sent more than 4,700 ships to Asia, and more than 3,400 made the voyage home. Some of the rest were wrecked or captured, and others stayed in Asia to trade between Asian ports.

Did pirates attack East Indiamen?

Yes. The most famous attacks of this era happened in the Indian Ocean, far from the Caribbean. In the summer of 1720 the pirate Edward England, in the 34-gun Fancy, and John Taylor, in the Victory, attacked the English Indiaman Cassandra at the island of Johanna (now Anjouan, in the Comoros). Two other merchant ships sailed away. Captain James Macrae put up a long fight, and the pirates lost more than 90 men, but the Cassandra was taken with a cargo worth about £75,000. Macrae, wounded, escaped ashore and was later spared. His own letter describing the fight, written in November 1720, still survives.

In April 1721 Taylor and the French pirate Olivier Levasseur, called “La Buse”, captured the Portuguese Indiaman Nossa Senhora do Cabo, which a storm had already left without masts. She was carrying the retiring Viceroy of Goa and the Archbishop of Goa, and a cargo of gold, silver and jewels. Divers reported finding her wreck off Madagascar in 2025.

The Cassandra did reach the Caribbean in the end: according to later accounts, Taylor sailed her there and handed her to the Spanish governor of Portobelo in 1723 in exchange for a pardon.