Almost every commander who ever served with the VOC had begun his career as ship’s boy, deckhand, sailor or gunner’s mate. At least this was certainly the picture in the eighteenth century and there is no reason to think it would have been otherwise in the seventeenth. All the clues which can be obtained from studying the careers of commanders around 1700 and from delving into their social origins point in that direction. There is nothing which hints at any drastic changes occurring in the preceding decades. Their parents belonged either to what was called the smalle burgerij (lower middle class) – which included small craftsmen and shopkeepers, skippers of small boats, and lower-ranking administrative officials – or to the masses, the lowest group (grauw), which was composed of craftsmen and workers with low skill levels and ordinary seamen. Their fathers had often been seamen themselves. During the first four decades of the eighteenth century there were groups of families in the Chamber towns whose members, connected by all sorts of degrees of kinship, went to sea with the Company they knew and trusted. There were striking examples of such families in the Pomps, the Bents, the Van der Poels and the Brouwers in Enkhuizen, Hoorn, Delfshaven and Rotterdam. These families produced many commanders. For a number of years the post of commander usually went to men who lived in the town in which the Chamber had its seat or came from the area in the immediate vicinity. Three towns on the island of Walcheren in Zealand produced many of the commanders of the Zealand Chamber.

As time passed, gradual shifts emerged in this pattern. Foreigners who had become permanent members of the seafaring personnel of the VOC now began to rise to the highest ranks more frequently. They had often lived in the Chamber towns for years and had been completely assimilated. Naval officers also began to show some interest in working for the Company, if only for a year or two. Towards the end of the century, the VOC appointed increasing numbers of ship’s officers and commanders, both Dutchmen and foreigners, who had been recruited from other branches of the shipping industry. There is no straightforward explanation for what happened. In almost all the Chamber towns population numbers had plunged dramatically, which meant that the potential for recruiting seafaring personnel also declined.