The fluyt: the Dutch cargo ship that carried Europe’s trade

What is a fluyt ship?

A fluyt was a Dutch sailing ship built for one job: carrying as much cargo as possible, as cheaply as possible. The name is the Dutch word fluit, and English and French sailors called it a “flute”. Some English writers also called it a “fly-boat”.

Fluyts were long for their width, with a big hold under a single main deck. Their sterns were rounded into a shape often described as pear-like, and their sides curved inward as they rose, so the top deck was much narrower than the hull below it. Most had three masts. The front two carried square sails, which hang across the ship and work best with the wind behind, and the rear mast often carried a triangular sail set along the length of the ship. They sat fairly shallow in the water, so they could reach small harbours and rivers.

Where and when was the fluyt invented?

The first fluyts were built at Hoorn, a port town north of Amsterdam, in 1595. They grew out of earlier Dutch cargo ships that builders had been making longer and longer. An old story says a Hoorn shipbuilder called Pieter Jansz Liorne invented the fluyt single-handed. A specialist study of the fluyt showed that story comes from a misreading of an old town chronicle. Liorne did build especially slim, unarmed fluyts, but the design was the work of many builders over time.

How big was a fluyt, and how many sailors did it need?

Fluyts came in many sizes. The longest were about 37 metres long, and a fluyt could carry up to about 350 tonnes of goods.

What made them special was how few people they needed. Plenty of pulleys (block and tackle) made the sails easier to handle, and a Dutch maritime museum says a fluyt could be sailed by about 12 men. Over the 1600s, Dutch crews came to carry much more cargo per sailor than before, and a small crew kept running costs down. The price was speed: fluyts were slow but very efficient.

Why were fluyts so cheap to build?

Dutch shipyards also used new machines. In the 1590s a Dutch farmer named Cornelis Corneliszoon built a sawmill driven by a windmill, which could cut timber many times faster than men sawing by hand. With plain hulls, no expensive gun decks and machine-cut planks, one economic historian estimated that a fluyt cost about half as much as a rival ship of the same size, while carrying more.

How did the fluyt make the Dutch rich?

The Dutch called their trade with the Baltic Sea the “mother trade”. Ships carried grain, timber and iron from the Baltic to Amsterdam, and took salt, wine and other goods back. This was bulky, low-value cargo, so the cheapest carrier won, and the fluyt was the cheapest. One Dutch maritime museum estimates that around 500 fluyts a year sailed from the island of Texel for the Baltic.

Cheap shipping let Dutch merchants carry goods for everyone else too, so the Dutch Republic became the carrier of Europe. By around 1670 the Dutch merchant fleet is estimated at about half of all Europe’s merchant shipping. Fluyts also sailed much further afield, and the Dutch East India Company used them into the 1700s alongside its bigger East Indiamen.

Did other countries use fluyts?

Yes. The German port of Lübeck bought fluyts from the Netherlands, and many countries built their own. England, worried about Dutch control of the carrying trade, passed a Navigation Act in 1651 to keep foreign ships out of its trade. During the Anglo-Dutch Wars English merchants captured many Dutch-built ships, and English shipbuilders later adapted the design.

The word itself spread and changed. By about 1680 the French navy used flûte for almost any large cargo or supply ship. So in records from around 1715, a “flute” may mean a navy storeship rather than a true Dutch fluyt.

Were fluyts used in the slave trade?

The Dutch were major slave traders. The Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621, bought captive Africans at forts such as Elmina on the Gold Coast and shipped them across the Atlantic, many to the slave market on Curaçao and to Suriname. In 1730 the company lost its monopoly, and private firms such as the Middelburg Commercial Company of Zeeland carried tens of thousands more people in the 1700s. In 1738 the company ship Leusden ran aground off South America and 664 enslaved people aboard drowned.

The Zeeland archives show the Middelburg company’s slave ships as snows, and other Dutch slave ships of the 1700s are described as frigates. How often fluyts were used for this trade is not clear from the sources, and archaeologists say little is yet known about the ships themselves.

What was the fluyt like by 1715?

The fluyt’s great age was the 1600s, and by the early 1700s rival nations had copied its ideas. But the type was still in use: a German museum holds a model, made around 1900, of a Lübeck fluyt of 1726, and the Dutch East India Company was still sailing fluyts in the 1700s. Some 1600s fluyts survive as wrecks on the floor of the cold, low-salt Baltic, where the shipworm that eats wooden hulls cannot live. One found at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland is nearly intact, though fishing nets have torn away its masts and some deck timbers, and archaeologists are studying it to learn how the type developed.