The Shipwrecked Remainders of Europe's China Boom
The recent recovery of large quantities of porcelain from the South China seas highlights eighteenth-century Europe's insatiable desire for tableware from the Orient.
The exploits of the redoubtable ex-Barnado boy, Captain Michael Hatcher, in retrieving cargoes of Chinese porcelain and other valuable artefacts from wreck-sites in the South China Sea have received generous coverage in the press and on television on a world-wide scale. Many readers of History Today will probably have read the press reports of the saga of the Dutch East-Indiaman, Geldermalsen, which has also been recounted in detail from the original archival sources by C.J.A. Jörg in his fascinating book, The Geldermalsen. History and Porcelain (Kemper Publishers, Groningen, 1986). Some readers may also be familiar with the ongoing controversies sparked off in the Netherlands and in Indonesia over this affair. It is not my intention to recount the story of the Geldermalsen yet again; but rather to discuss the wreck in the context of the eighteenth-century China trade and briefly to compare it with other similar shipwreck-finds in the Seven Seas.
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