Next to the National Maritime Museum (Het Scheepvaartmuseum) in Amsterdam floats a replica of an eighteenth-century Dutch East Indiaman (illustration 1). This replica was built in the 1980s and modelled after a real ship also called the Amsterdam, which had set sail in 1749. On the model ship, the attentive museum visitor encounters two types of toilets (illustrations 2 and 3). These toilets hint towards the fact that privacy, aboard a ship like the Amsterdam, might have been an issue. The first type of toilet was meant for the use of the captain, and two such toilets were placed on either side of his cabin at the very rear of the ship. Here, one could sit down in an enclosed space, hidden behind curtains, and use some rags to wipe off. This toilet is not so dissimilar of what nowadays we expect of toilets: a place where one can do one’s business in private.

However, not everyone on the ship had the right to use these toilets; in fact, they would have never served more than a dozen privileged people – the captain himself, merchants, first mate, preacher, doctor, officers, and possibly some elite passengers. On the other side of the ship, the 203 sailors and 127 soldiers aboard the Amsterdam also had two toilets at their disposal, but privacy there was severely lacking. These toilets could be found on the outside of the ship and had to be climbed onto from the forecastle, the highest deck on the forward part of the ship. It was at this spot that most of the crew would gather, at least when they were not sleeping or engaged in work elsewhere.² For these people, excretion would have had to take place in public. A length of rope was used as toilet paper; its end would hang in the salty ocean water. Tellingly, this rope was called het allemansend, the all-men’s-end.

The spaces of ships embody the plausible impossibility of preserving privacy or keeping secrets – or both. A closer look will provide new and curious insights into early modern issues of privacy, secrecy, and their interplay. In this article, I consider these issues in the context of the ships and shipping activities of the Dutch East India Companies, taking together the so-called early companies from 1595 onwards and the United Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) established in 1602, and ultimately dissolved in 1799. In two centuries, almost 2,000 Dutch ships were built to sail to Asia, making over 8,000 voyages and carrying almost one million people from the Netherlands to the Far East.³ This article focusses on some of the notable practices of secrecy and issues concerning privacy on board these ships, which can be pieced together from various historical materials.

For the purposes of this study, privacy is defined as the ‘ability to regulate access to oneself or to one’s material or immaterial resources’ (for further elaboration, see Silva Perez, this volume). This working definition, supported by the historiographical and theoretical overview by Silva Perez, will be used as a lens to examine the flexibility of use of spaces in ships. As will be shown, space aboard was in high demand and quite restricted, making privacy a rare privilege.

I start with a discussion of how we can find out what happened on board, then I discuss the protection of and access to (secret) information and (private) belongings. As will be shown below, we can learn much from cases where privacy was violated and secrets revealed. In the penultimate section my findings deal with several relevant theoretical and historiographical concepts. I conclude by raising some important questions for further research on privacy and secrecy aboard ships.

Most scholarly works offering overviews of the history of the VOC are rather silent about what happened on board the ships.⁴ They focus on the organization of the company, on trade, and on what happened in the places where the ships landed, from South Africa, Japan, and New Zealand to, in particular, the islands of the Indonesian archipelago. Curiously, these gaps in the historiography echo the lacunae in the primary sources.

The ships themselves would seem the most obvious start for finding out what happened there. However, most of the material, visual, and textual sources on Dutch East India Company ships defy a look inside, which makes it difficult for the historian to study the possible strategies practiced by people aboard for regulating access to their bodies and their belongings. Not even one single VOC ship has survived, and shipwrecks on the ocean floor (such as the Amsterdam, which was wrecked on its maiden voyage on the south coast of England, near Hastings) mostly do not even have the hull intact. Nevertheless, by analyzing and interpreting wrecks and all the archaeological findings in and around them, it has at least proved possible to connect ships with the socio-economic context of the places where they had been built and from which they set sail.⁵ The use of spaces aboard, though, does not get much attention in these studies.

To have an idea of the measurements and the interior arrangements of early modern ships, it might be insightful to examine early modern models of ships and manuals about shipbuilding, such as Nicolaes Witsen’s Aeloude en hedendaegse scheeps-bouw en bestier (1671) or Cornelis van Yk’s De Nederlandsche scheepsbouw-konst open gestelt (1697).⁶ Drawings with regard to shipbuilding, however, seldom show ships at sea, let alone the people and practices on board. Other visual sources, such as paintings, engravings, and woodcuts in travel journals, present nothing but the exterior of Dutch East India ships.⁷ The interior remained curiously invisible, not only to the contemporary viewer and reader, but also to the later historian.⁸

When it comes to studying privacy aboard, the historian has to combine careful attention to the traces left in other extant documents with a little bit of imagination about how people might have used spaces to protect themselves and their belongings. Ship’s logs or journals, written en route, generally contain remarkably little information concerning what happened on board. In fact, in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these daily written texts display an almost exclusively outward gaze. Once in a while, during the long months of sailing, they narrate encounters with sea monsters or other ships, but mostly just courses taken, wind, weather, sea, and land in sight.⁹ Some (published) travel texts have more exciting stories to tell, though these texts tend to focus on the periods spent on land, not at sea. The compilers of these texts seem to have felt no need to comment on what surely seemed to them to be the self-evident day-to-day routine, and the practices, especially those related to privacy on board, are only mentioned in case of unusual events such as feasts or lawsuits. Lawsuits especially spurred some interesting source material, of which we will encounter several examples in the following sections. They can give us a glimpse of how sailors and officers regulated access to themselves and their resources.

How occasional snippets from written and printed documents can help to find out how the society on board ships worked is shown by the exceptional work of Herman Ketting. His invaluable Leven, werk en rebellie aan boord van Oost-Indiëvaarders (2002) reconstructs work and social life on board ships during the Dutch voyages to the East Indies until the mid-seventeenth century.¹⁰ The present article owes much to Ketting’s meticulous research. His book yields new insights by combining descriptive sources, written during or after a voyage, with prescriptive documents, composed before the trip. These instructies and artikelbrieven for a ship’s authorities and its crew convey some awareness of the risks of many people living closely together, as demonstrated by the clauses on what we would today call hygiene, as well as on unity – to quarrel and to disagree were explicitly prohibited.¹¹ The Company’s instructions however, did not really care for individual members of the crew. They focus only on trying to discipline the crew, telling them what they could or could not do, as well as what they could or could not tell. As will be demonstrated in the following sections, regulation of access to resources and information belonging to the company was a high priority, whereas enabling sailors to regulate access to their own bodies or belongings was not.

The story of Dutch travel to the East Indies began in the 1590s. People from the flourishing cities on the North Sea were motivated by the desire to personally establish long-distance trade with Asia, to commercialize spices and other Asian luxuries, to make profit, and to undermine Portuguese-Spanish monopolies, since the Dutch were in the midst of their revolt against Philip II of Spain.¹² In Holland in the early 1590s, capital, crew, and ships were available; however, the merchants who gathered in the companies that would send out the very first Dutch fleets to the East were uncertain about routes and sailing directions. The valuable knowledge that they wished to obtain was called ‘secrets’. Portugese secreten, concerning maps and navigation, were actively sought after and acquired through spying and buying.¹³

An important source of navigational information for the Dutch was Jan Huygen van Linschoten, who had served as a clerk to the Portuguese archbishop in Goa in India. He had secretly copied Portuguese charts and other documents, bringing all this information to his hometown of Enkhuizen in Holland upon his return.¹⁴ These practices of pilfering information were carried out in the name of public service. In the domain of trade, the particuliere (‘private’) trade of Asian food and objects (as opposed to the official trade monopolized by the VOC) was understood in opposition to the official status enjoyed by the companies. Especially the VOC repeatedly tried to control and limit this private trade, although it existed simultaneously throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹⁵

The debate about whether private trade or private traders (designated in sources as particuliere) would be more beneficial than a state-sponsored business had already taken place in the 1590s. Balthazar de Moucheron, a Dutch merchant and shipowner, argued that it would be better to make the expeditions attempting to find a north-eastern passage to China a private (particulier) trading mission. The reason behind Moucheron’s proposal to own ships privately is an interesting one, linking private with secret. According to him, trading privately would guarantee greater secrecy, observing that private trading ships would not insult the king of Denmark, stir up the king of Spain, or warn the rulers of Moskovy and Tartary.¹⁶ It thus follows that, in some cases, private trade was an enabler of keeping information secret.

After spying and purchasing the aforementioned secrets of Portuguese or English origin, the Dutch in turn developed an interest in protecting their own information. They established practices that can be interpreted as secret intelligence, mostly with regard to warfare,¹⁷ which meant keeping secrets at state level. Regulations were written down so secrets would not be leaked. Such prescriptions of behaviour were often quite detailed as to what everyone on the ship must keep secret, that is, information that they must protect on behalf of the company. Instructions for the entire crew repeatedly stressed that everything associated with the voyage, including ‘all logs, charts, sketches or drawings of lands, towns, rivers, harbours, promontories and coastlines, courses and everything dependent on this’, were to be kept a secret and were not to be copied or made public under any circumstances.¹⁸ Moreover, the authorities on board a ship, especially the admiral of a fleet and his council, were also expected to keep certain information secret from the crew.

While there is no doubt that secrecy towards company information was an important concern, we can ask whether personal privacy existed for people on board an East Indiaman at all. Given the modern understanding of ‘privacy’ as an inviolable human right tied to individuals, it could be argued that ‘there was no privacy’ on board such a ship.¹⁹ This assumption seems obvious to make, given the fact that more than 300 men (a number which sometimes rose to almost 400) occupied a ship forty metres in length. Even when ships sailed in fleets, members of the crew were assigned to individual vessels and did not leave their place of assignment for weeks – sometimes months – on end.

However, privacy, not as a right but as a need, did exist for the people living on board, even though this need was only partially fulfilled. It would be more accurate, from the historian’s perspective, to state not that ‘there was no privacy in such a ship’ but, rather, that privacy was a very difficult need to fulfil, which only required slightly less effort of those who had a more privileged social standing within the strict hierarchy on board. This hierarchy followed a spatial arrangement, which contributed to the privacy of the higher-placed officers when compared to sailors and other lower-ranking crew members.²⁰

On VOC ships such as the Amsterdam, people belonging to the privileged social groups spent most of their time at the rear of the ship, behind the mainmast, where the rest of the crew was not allowed to dwell. People of lower rank (such as the hundreds of sailors and the dozens of soldiers) slept and lived in the area in front of the mast. Between the rear and the front of the ship thus existed an invisible yet sharply drawn border, permeable only from one side.

Unlike the common sailors and soldiers, the more important people on board a Dutch East India Company ship additionally had their own enclosed spaces which included not only toilets but also beds, occasionally placed inside cabins which sometimes even had doors. Still, even when officers were allowed to sleep in beds and cabins, they were mostly required to share these. For instance, a coxswain on board the Ambon in 1640 had to share a small cabin with the preacher and his pregnant wife.²¹ The captain, highest officers, and some privileged passengers had access to secluded spaces of their own, though their activities could still be observed, especially heard, as in the case of the bookkeeper aboard the ship Huis te Foreest, who in 1747 harassed some young slaves and was heard by a colleague.²²

The common sailors on board VOC ships did not have secluded spaces at all. From the 1640s onwards, the majority of the crew slept in hammocks, all hanging on the same deck.²³ Like the activity of sleeping itself, these hammocks were mostly not private in the sense of being exclusive: they were placed in an open space and were meant to be shared. Two sailors slept together in a hammock, besides others slept in the same hammock when they were working, since a continuously sailing ship had men working shifts 24 hours a day. Until the 1640s, sailors seem to have had a little more sleeping space of their own since they slept in berths, called kooien (literally ‘cages’) in Dutch. These berths, though, could not be locked, and curtains seem to have been very rare.²⁴ Moreover, the berths were also shared, both spatially as well as over time, which did not exactly make them a place for privacy.

During the period in which ships were built with berths, it seems that one of the most private possessions of sailors was their own mattress to sleep on, a so-called bultzak (bump sack) made of canvas and usually filled with moose hair. There is extant evidence indicating that a sleeping berth was a place to keep some private possessions such as tobacco, pilfered wine rations, some spices to trade privately, knives, and money.²⁵ The very few personal possessions belonging to sailors and soldiers could also be kept in small chests or inside sacks within bigger chests. Although a chest or a sleeping berth was the closest to a private space that the sailors and soldiers of lower rank had access to, their private possessions were neither secret nor secure. Several sources indicate that the contents of berths and chests were in many instances known by fellow mates, as demonstrated by the case of the Scottish sailor in 1623, who frantically took a knife from someone else’s berth to fight with.²⁶ We also find accusations levelled against people who had secretly saved up wine, hidden stolen tobacco, or gone to bed with maps and navigational instruments.²⁷

Generally, the higher someone stood in the hierarchy on board, the more property they owned.²⁸ The captain, for instance, had not only his own bed but also his own desk and some other furniture. The officers also kept their private possessions in a chest of their own, and some (such as the doctor on board) had extra chests on account of their profession.²⁹ However, in all cases, these small personal spaces could be invaded in moments of turmoil.

The kind of turmoil that was most feared was probably mutiny. While the authorities were expected to keep some secrets from the crew, the crew members keeping secrets from the officers on the ship was seen as one of the biggest dangers. Rules for preventing mutiny, warnings of what would happen in cases of transgression, and court cases on mutiny provide several clues into practices of secrecy and even offer some information on spaces of privacy. As even just planning a mutiny could result in capital punishment, privacy was sought to enable keeping the plans secret and to improve the chances of a successful rebellion. Only a few dozen of cases of mutiny or strikes on VOC ships are known, although these are considered to be the tip of the iceberg.³⁰ Since mutiny is by definition a collective action, those involved must have been able to selectively protect information and keep it secret. Talking in low voices about mutiny and making plans in private must have been possible, at least to a certain degree. Matthias van Rossum, who extensively researched mutinies on board Dutch East Indiamen in the 1780s, discusses a case where Javanese mutineers revealed that they were quietly advised on how to proceed.³¹

We have to guess where and when the discussions of mutiny took place on board a ship. Presumably, crowded and open spaces such as those on the foredeck or during the changing of the guard were ideal places or moments, given the frequency and intensity of communication that occurred, which could provide distraction. Spatially, high up on the mast seems likely to have been the most suitable location for a secretive conversation, since the authorities on the ships usually did not climb and, especially when windy, the sailors on the mast must have been visible but not audible. Of a planned mutiny on board a VOC ship in 1675, the sources mention that it was ‘mostly discussed in the masts’.³²

Mutineers attempted to seize authority and reverse power structures. Invading the private spaces of the authorities on board a ship was a powerful way of demonstrating this reversal. Van Rossum writes, for instance, of insurgents who marched into the sleeping quarters of their officers.³³ He further talks about a mutiny on board the Mercuur in 1782, where a mate tried to flee the mutineers by breaking into the captain’s cabin, while the mutineers opened the chests of officers, drank their liquor, and donned their clothes.³⁴

Clothes also played an important part in another issue concerning secrecy and privacy on board VOC ships, namely, in the cases of women who tried to live like men during their service in the Company. At least 70 such women have been identified by Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol.³⁵ Though it might seem unlikely that a woman disguised as a man would go undiscovered in such a crowded space, the Dutch proverb kleren maken de man (‘clothes make the man’) gives us a clue that in these times, there was a way round. Dressing up as a man might have been a way for some women in the early modern period to become someone else and seek another type of life. Someone who had short hair, wore male clothes, and did men’s work could pass as a man in the eyes of contemporaries. The most private kind of information – that is, the most private parts of the human body – remained mostly out of sight on a ship.

Most of our knowledge of women passing as men stems from those cases which were found out and where secrets were revealed. Although some women were identified already when they tried to enrol as a sailor, others were only discovered after weeks or even months, something that suggests the possibility that there could have been cases that were never found out. Most cases of discoveries of men on ships who actually turned out to be women consisted of the literal act of uncovering, when clothing was removed, as, for instance, when someone was sick or wounded. Uncovering and discovery also occasionally happened when urination was done less secretly than usual (after drinking alcohol, for instance).³⁶ At this point, the reader is asked to recall the exposed toilets with which this article began, which provided very little in the way of privacy.

Ships surprisingly share many characteristics with the Utopia sketched in Thomas More’s eponymously titled work of 1516. In More’s ideal city, no private property was allowed, but in all other aspects, the similarities are striking – doors were never locked, everyone could enter, personal space did not exist, everyone was constantly open to inspection and ‘under the eyes of every man’.³⁷ These were worlds with almost no privacy as we understand the concept today. A ship, however, was not an ideal or idealized place but a real space that existed in reality.

In that respect, ships can more appropriately be viewed as ‘heterotopias’ as theorized by Michel Foucault. For Foucault, heterotopias approximate utopias with the difference that whereas utopias are ideal and virtual, a heterotopia forms a physical reality. As a heterotopia, ships were simultaneously a part of society as well as located outside society; they were confined spaces that functioned as the microcosm of a society, a physical representation reflecting society’s values and ideals. Foucault even characterized the ship as a heterotopia par excellence, the ultimate ‘other place’.³⁸ Even though it was quite impossible not to be watched on a ship, it must be noted that a ship was not exactly a panoptical device, to use another of Foucault’s favourite metaphors. The ever-watchful eyes were not by definition the eyes of the authorities.

Although service on board was, at least in most cases, voluntary and paid, VOC-ships (or their counterparts from other countries) have frequently been compared to prisons. Both can be described as heterotopias, and both can also be seen as ‘total institutions’ in Erving Goffman’s formulation, that is, as places where many similarly situated people were cut off from the rest of society, enclosed, and administered.³⁹ Lack of privacy and lack of knowledge (in the case of secrets kept by the authorities) amongst the inmates are obvious features prompting such a comparison. To build upon the comparison, a ship can actually be regarded as worse than a prison, since there were fewer escape routes at sea than in the most strictly guarded prison.⁴⁰ As Samuel Johnson allegedly observed with reference to space, ‘No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in jail with the chance of being drowned. […] The man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company’.⁴¹

On land, people of a social standing comparable to those of sailors also had to deal with shared rooms and beds and did not enjoy much privacy as the legal right that we enjoy today.⁴² However, in houses, attics, or basements in towns, people usually slept with family members or other familiar people, whereas in a ship that was mostly not the case. On land, whether in the town or the country, personal possessions could be kept somewhat private, unlike in a ship. Even officers had less privacy aboard a ship than if they had lived on land. The same is probably true for the captain, despite the fact that he had his own cabin and occasionally also his own bedroom with a bed. Moreover, a city provided many opportunities to temporarily hide and isolate oneself, whereas a ship was impossible to leave.

Bringing together issues of privacy and secrecy as they related to practices and spaces on early modern VOC ships may seem to be an obvious scholarly strategy, given that the words ‘secret’ and ‘private’ are closely related in modern English as well as in many other languages. They recur in overlapping fields of meaning and sometimes one term is used to define the other. Moreover, by virtue of being an opposite of ‘public’, both secret and private share a common semantic field. However, secrecy and privacy are usually not explicitly researched together in modern historiography on early modern times. Historians working on secrecy tend to either eschew tackling questions of privacy or explicitly exclude privacy from the ambit of their subject.⁴³

As far as available historiographical literature is concerned, secrecy seems to have been everywhere and all-pervasive in early modern times. This period has been explicitly characterized, for instance, as ‘the age of secrecy’ by such scholars as Perez Zagorin, Jon Snyder, and Daniel Jütte (who has even used the term as the title of his book).⁴⁴ However, the question of whether privacy and a private sphere (as opposed to a Habermasian public sphere) already existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is still a subject of debate.⁴⁵

The public realm seems to have been a place of encountering secrecy, ranging from court culture and religious matters to state affairs and “secret” intelligence.⁴⁶ Privacy, meanwhile, is in the available literature often linked with private spaces and ideas, such as the home and domesticity. This link comes to the fore particularly in Michael McKeon’s work The Secret History of Domesticity.⁴⁷ Even though his book deals much more with what we understand as the ‘private’ and the ‘public’, McKeon also engages with secrecy, especially in the form of so-called ‘secret histories’, books that claimed to reveal secrets of state and (sexual) intrigues of royals and other celebrities.⁴⁸ To be sure, the title of McKeon’s book refers to this very genre.

However, apart from the publication of what should have stayed private in secret histories, the research methodologies used to analyze historical secrecy do not seem to be equipped to take issues of privacy into account, since they focus mostly on regulating access to only one type of important resource in people’s lives: information. Moreover, although the word ‘secret’ or derivations thereof (secreet or geheim) can be found in various Dutch early modern sources, the words ‘private’ (privé) or ‘privacy’ rarely figure in such sources, a fact which warrants more detailed research.⁴⁹

How can privacy on ships be researched when the word itself was not used? Should historians conclude that, because of the absence of the word in the sources about VOC ships, this subject was not of much concern for contemporaries? We do not find extant evidence of explicit reflections or emotions suggesting that privacy or the lack of it (as we conceive of these terms today) were perceived as problematic or adding to the suffering on board. Furthermore, the stress or fear that could accompany the keeping of secrets is also not commented on in the sources that survived in the archives. The implications of such omissions for the study of early modern emotions aboard ships is less easy to answer. First, it must be mentioned that the documents which are still extant were almost never written by common sailors, who constituted the less-privileged majority on the ships. Second, we can neither conclude that sailors or others on board a VOC ship did not suffer, nor should we downplay the possibility that they might have suffered from lack of privacy or the pressure that accompanies the keeping of secrets.

I hold that the absence of historical evidence about the thoughts of sailors on privacy does not mean that they lacked an interest in privacy itself, and I definitely do not want to convey the impression that these concepts or practices are not interesting subjects for present-day historians. Research on early modern privacy aboard ships can rely on traces – we must look for separate words, practices, spaces, silences, and re-imagine the (im)possibilities in obtaining privacy for entire companies and individual sailors on ships.

Even if the historiographical debates on early modern secrecy and privacy have remarkably little in common and do not often speak to one another, it is useful to study them in tandem, as this article demonstrates. This volume clearly shows that secrecy and privacy are partially (though by no means completely) overlapping notions – both share connections with practices of concealment and exclusion, and both are an opposite of ‘public’. As shown above, private trade was regarded as a more secret kind of trade, and private information was in many instances identical to secret information (although not necessarily the other way around).

On the ship, we can discern a proportional relationship between the level of authority and status on the one hand, and access to personal space and the possibility of secluding oneself on the other, something we recognize as privacy today. The strict hierarchy on board a VOC ship was visible spatially, as can be concluded from the zones on either side of the mainmast. However, even for the captain and other officers, it was very hard to go unnoticed – let alone unheard – on a ship. As in the ‘total institutions’ theorized by Goffman, remaining anonymous was quite impossible on board, given that there was always someone awake and on guard, both officially and unofficially. In cases of mutiny, the relatively private spaces and private possessions of the authorities on a ship were the first to be violated, as a demonstration against their power. Here, it becomes very clear that private spaces were by no means secret spaces.

Analytically, it is helpful to distinguish between vertical and horizontal secrecy. Horizontal secrecy refers to secrecy against other companies or other nations and includes such things as information about routes, navigation, trade, and warfare that the Dutch tried to pilfer from the Portuguese or the English, while at the same time trying to protect this valuable information from enemies. Vertical secrecy existed between people of different hierarchies within the ship and could mostly be discerned top-down – officers and captains could not only withhold information about their goals and destinations from the rest of the crew but also had the prerogative to search the belongings and spaces of sailors and soldiers. Bottom-up secrecy – the crew concealing information from the authorities on the ship – represented one of the biggest dangers to the success of an expedition, as exemplified by the cases of (alleged plans for) mutiny.

Insofar as access to privacy is concerned, an early modern ship seems to have been one of the worst places imaginable, possibly even worse than prisons, especially since the crew members of a VOC ship went on board, in principle, voluntarily, unlike a prison where incarceration was involuntary. We can ask to what extent they were aware that they would be giving up their capacity to regulate access to themselves, and that they would be giving up privacy. Indeed, the ship seems to have been a heterotopia that reflected (though did not celebrate) More’s utopian value of lack of privacy. Writing about heterotopias in the seminal essay ‘Of other spaces’, Foucault concludes with the warning, inspired unmistakably by the horrors of Stalinist repression, that in ‘civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police takes the place of pirates’.⁵⁰ I would like to conclude by observing that three-and-a-half centuries earlier in the Dutch Republic, it appears that a civilization built on boats went hand-in-hand with espionage and adventure, with lack of privacy and pirates as well as dreams.