The Amsterdam Chamber was the largest of all of the six Chambers. It was responsible for half of all the commercial and shipping activities of the Company. Each year it fitted out half of all the ships and appointed half the commanders. Certainly, compared to the four small Chambers, the numbers involved were large. Examining the appointments of commanders as a whole, certain aspects of their professions and lives in Amsterdam tend to stand out conspicuously in comparison with the commanders of the other Chambers. For instance, to a far greater extent than elsewhere, the Amsterdam commanders lived outside the city. For this reason, in the next chapter special attention is devoted to commanders who continued to live in their native places after they had been appointed commander or first mate by the Amsterdam Chamber. Using a random sample, fifty commanders from the city itself or from outside are examined in greater depth.

Almost No Commanders Resident in Exclusive Neighbourhoods

The Jordaan was a part of Amsterdam that was home to a few commanders and retired commanders of the Company. This section of the city was part of the third expansion of Amsterdam which took place in the years 1610–1615. The Jordaan was on the western side of the semicircle of canals which in its turn had expanded out from the medieval centre of the city. It had been designed as a residential and small business quarter. In the eighteenth century it housed a great many tradesmen and labourers. It hummed with small-scale industry. A maze of small alleys and passageways lined with extremely cramped apartments, often in cellars, wound between the streets and the canals. Many of the Amsterdam commanders had spent their youth in the Jordaan. Their fathers and other family members had been coopers, coppersmiths, gold-thread makers, carpenters, grocers, inn-keepers or mariners. Later, after attaining the rank of commander, they continued to live in the Jordaan, albeit at better addresses. Eleven of the twenty-one commanders registered in the Personele Quotisatie of 1742 gave their addresses in Quarters 49–53 which were situated in the western part of the city. The Personele Quotisatie listed each person’s share of a new tax imposed on residents of the province of Holland with an annual income of more than f. 600. It was a list of the well-to-do.