COURTESY OF BATAVIALAND MUSEUMThe replica East Indiaman BATAVIA, launched in 1995, will be hauled ashore in Lelystad, The Netherlands, to prevent deterioration and simplify maintenance.
—The 1995 replica Dutch East India Company ship BATAVIA, 650 tons and 186’ LOA, launched in 1995, this year ends her days as a floating exhibit. Her owner, Batavialand Museum in Lelystad, The Netherlands, where she was built, announced its intention to tow her to an Amsterdam dry-dock to be maneuvered onto a custom steel support structure. Once secured, the ship and its structure together were expected to be floated by barge back to Lelystad in October, to be brought ashore permanently as a part of a reconceived museum exhibit to reopen in late 2028.
The replica was built under the direction of Willem Vos, who is now 93, in a decade-long project, as told in WB No. 108 in 1992 (and in a retrospective in WB Nos. 173 and 175 in 2003). The project, partly an individual’s vision, partly a way to keep shipbuilding going, partly a tourism draw, partly a vocational training program for the unemployed, was lauded for its faithfulness to original materials and construction methods, which arguably restricted her usefulness as a sailing replica. The construction was the exhibit. She was based on research into 17th-century shipbuilding, including recovered shipwrecks, including the original BATAVIA of 1628, which archaeologists found and excavated in the 1970s off Western Australia.
In 2025, the replica marked her launching’s 40th anniversary. She has remained in Lelystad with the exception of a trip to Sydney, Australia, in 1999 via a heavy-lift ship to be exhibited at the Australia National Maritime Museum. During that period, she put to sea briefly a couple of times. She remained in Sydney during the 2000 Olympic Games and returned to Holland via lift ship in 2001. Ashore, the hope is that she will be less prone to the deterioration she has suffered and will be easier to maintain. Reimagined museum buildings are also part of the plan.
COURTESY OF BATAVIALAND MUSEUMBatavialand Museum, expected to reopen in 2028, is being reimagined around the ship, which was built with authentic 17th-century tools and techniques, led by Willem Vos.
The construction of an even larger replica, of the 17th-century warship ZEVEN PROVINCIEN, was started in Lelystad in 1995 but halted in 2014 for lack of money. A much smaller ship, a replica of a Dutch fishing smack, is currently under construction at the museum shipyard and carries on the tradition of using authentic methods and materials, replicating an archaeological find. The museum also houses the National Maritime Depot, a repository for undersea archaeological finds in The Netherlands.
For more information (in English), see www.batavialand.nl/en.
—written by Tom Jackson