The Dutch East India Company - the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC - was the largest commercial enterprise of its century and, in many ways, of any century before the rise of the modern multinational. By the 1740s, it ran a network of fortified trading posts that stretched from Amsterdam to Cape Town to Galle to Batavia to Nagasaki. The ships that carried this network were the East Indiamen, a class of armed merchantman built for endurance: capable of fighting off pirates and privateers, carrying enormous cargoes, and surviving multi-year voyages around the Cape of Good Hope. Hollandia was one of these. She left Texel under sailing orders to round Britain on the north side - the safer route in summer, avoiding the Channel and its French privateers - which is what put her in the western approaches off Scilly in mid-July. The fleet that sailed with her made it through. She did not.

What happened in those early hours of 13 July is not recorded in any detail - the Wikipedia account is brief, and the contemporary archives of the disaster were thin to begin with. Hollandia became separated from the fleet, struck Gunner Rock near Annet, and sank with all hands. The death toll was 306 people. Among them were 276 sailors and soldiers of the VOC, men who lived together in the cramped lower decks and on the gun ports and yards - many of them young, many of them on their first voyage to the East. The thirty passengers travelled in the great cabin and the officers' quarters. Their identities, mostly, are lost. Some would have been VOC employees taking up posts in Batavia, Ceylon or the Spice Islands. Some would have been wives, family members, clergymen, surgeons. None had reached the world they were going to. The wreck took everyone.

Hollandia was lost in the Western Rocks, the same chain of granite spurs that had claimed HMS Association thirty-six years before her. The same currents and the same shoaling tides that defeated Admiral Shovell defeated her. For 228 years, what remained of the ship sat scattered on the seabed off Annet. In 1968 a London attorney named Rex Cowan began the methodical archive work that eventually found her - going through Dutch records of the VOC's outgoing fleets, English customs entries, and contemporary newspaper accounts of the loss. He used a proton magnetometer, then an advanced piece of geophysical kit, to scan the seabed for the iron signature of buried cannon. On 16 September 1971, the equipment told him the truth. The wreck was there. The recovery yielded a great mass of silver coins struck for the VOC, including the gold-and-silver West-Friesland Rijder of 1742, along with bronze cannons and mortars.

The trade coin Hollandia was carrying was not casual cargo. The VOC's enterprise in Asia ran on European bullion: the Company bought spices, textiles and tea with silver that had been mined in Mexico and Peru, refined in Spain, traded into the Netherlands, and minted into the chunky coins called rijders and ducatons that East Asian merchants accepted. A new ship setting out for Batavia would have carried tens of thousands of these in chests below the waterline. They were what the next year's pepper, the next year's silk, the next year's nutmeg cost. When Hollandia sank, those coins went to the seabed with her crew - and stayed there. The ones now in collections in Amsterdam and London are coins that were minted, packed, lost, and never spent. They are still bright, still legible. They are also, in some quiet way, headstones for the men who carried them.