Qualla: Hollandia (1742 ship)

Hollandia (1742 ship): Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Hollandia was new. The Dutch East India Company had built her in Amsterdam in 1742 to a fresh design - 32 guns, 700 tons, 42 metres on the waterline - and on 3 July 1743 she left Texel for the first time, bound for Batavia at the eastern end of the Company's vast trading world. The fleet she sailed with carried a great cargo of trade coin and a small group of important passengers, thirty in all, who had paid for or earned passage to the colonies. Ten days later, in the dark early hours of 13 July, Hollandia became separated from her fleet in the western approaches and struck Gunner Rock west of Annet, a granite outcrop in the Western Rocks of Scilly. She sank nearby with the loss of every soul aboard - 276 sailors and soldiers, and the thirty passengers, who never saw Annet at all and never reached the East they had set out for. For 228 years she was unfound.

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Hollandia (1742 ship): What the VOC Was

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 stretche...

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Hollandia (1742 ship): The Wreck and the Lost

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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. ...

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Hollandia (1742 ship): Two and a Quarter Centuries Underwater

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Hollandia (1742 ship): What the Coins Bought

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 chu...

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