TRANSFERWARE WORLDWIDE LECTURE SERIES - Two Worlds in One Shipwreck

1 PM Eastern USA Time

Title: Two Worlds in One Shipwreck

Lecturer:  Wytze Stellingwerf, Archaeologist and Specialist of Late and Post-Medieval Material Culture, Archeologie West-Friesland.

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Description: In 2005 members of the Texel diving club discovered a shipwreck in the Dutch Wadden Sea, loaded with early 19th-century luxury items and tools related to slavery. A decade later extensive archival research was undertaken on this wreck, which resulted in a match: the Pieter Anthony, a frigate destined for the sugar plantations in the Dutch colonies of Surinam and Berbice, located in the northeast of South America. The Pieter Anthony, which departed from Amsterdam in November 1822, sunk only a month later during a storm in the Wadden Sea near the isle of Texel. The ship would never reach its tropical destiny on the other side of the Atlantic. Most of its inventory remained on the seafloor until the wreck was discovered by Dutch divers almost two centuries later. The inventory included lots of British transfer-printed tea wares and other luxurious goods meant for plantation owners in the Western colonies. Apart from that, the divers also found numerous machetes, spades, and hoes, as well as several “kapa’s” – sugarcane kettles – for the production of sugar through slave labor. In recent years the global discussion on the colonial past of Western countries has really brought this unparalleled slavery-related shipwreck inventory to attention. In his lecture, Wytze shall focus on the spectacular amount of transferware that was retrieved from the wreck.

Our speaker: Wytze Stellingwerf (1992, MA) graduated at Leiden University in 2017 for the Masters in Historical Archaeology and currently works as an archaeologist and ceramics specialist of the late- and post-Medieval period in the town of Hoorn in the northern part of the Netherlands. In addition, he regularly works at Museum Kaap Skil on the Dutch isle of Texel, where he documents finds from shipwrecks done by sport divers in the Wadden Sea and North Sea. Wytze has a keen interest in the rise of the Industrial Revolution and its material and sociocultural impact in Western Europe and America, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. Furthermore, the maritime and colonial past of the Netherlands are among his greatest interests. One of the most spectacular cases Wytze worked on the past years is the documentation of the comprehensive inventory of the early 19th-century Pieter Anthony shipwreck.