In the previous chapters, a long line of commanders has passed in review. It has been possible to catch some glimpses of their careers, origins, lives ashore and on board, but the personalities of these men often remain unfathomable. Sometimes, to the joy of the historian, a contemporary happened to noted that a certain commander was pleasant, irascible, a tippler or melancholic. Grasping on to these sorts of remarks, the historian can try to use them to fashion a man of flesh and blood, but in this attempted reconstruction of the commander all sorts of other facts have to be combined to get a well-rounded picture.

Nevertheless, a reconstruction can never be more than an attempt to probe a man’s personality. If a commander was a difficult person, a trait which caused him problems with his ship’s officers, his other crew members or those in authority on shore, there is a good chance that some sort of report of this might have been deposited in the Company archive. In such a case the researcher has some firm basis for an opinion. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of commanders there is no evidence for what sort of men they were in the performance of their duties or ashore. In this chapter, something will be said about those commanders for whom it is possible to find some more data. Alas, the muse of History still guards the answer to the question of how representative they actually were of their group.

‘Humane Heads of Ships’

Why Kornelis Keet jumped overboard into the Indian Ocean on the night of 14 June 1742, on his maiden voyage as commander, has to remain shrouded in mystery. This man from Rotterdam was then forty-five years old and had been married for eighteen years. He left behind a widow and three young children. Was he depressed because he thought he might have to spend as long in the tropics as he had done on his previous voyage? On 22 March 1776, Asmus Hendrik Sterrenberg tried to commit suicide in the same way off La Rochelle, but he was rescued by alert crew members. A sailor who was a good swimmer jumped in after him and, despite his resistance, was able to grab him.