Die Aussagen dreier Bartmannskrüge zur Schiffahrt um 1700

Abstract

The three bellarmines - or Bartmann jugs - of the German Maritime Museum (DSM) provide information about two very different aspects of shipping. On the one hand they reveal the three important directions taken by Dutch activities in the trade of the jugs of Frechen: The location where the first one (Jug 1 from the Amrum Bank) was found points to trade around the North Sea using coastal ships, and the land in which the second (Jug 2 from Bombay) was used for centuries points to the trading activities with South and Southeast Asia engaged in by the big ships of the Dutch East India Company. The guild-mark on the latter also indicates the third focus of Dutch trade in this context: the presence of Dutch river vessels along the Rhine - the lifeline to the centre of jug production activities. The Dutch constituted, as it were, the cork in the bottleneck of the Rhine, so that everything that entered or left that river passed through their hands. Jug 1 was very probably among the cabin items of a coastal barge captain. On the other hand the function and meaning of the relief designs on the jugs have been deciphered for the first time, and thus serve as an additional historical source for evaluation. The point of departure was the favourable circumstance that Jug 3 bears evidence of the person who commissioned it. This person, who is identifiable by name, was a shipmaster also active as a merchant who functioned as a distributor for Frechen jug-makers. The guild-mark of the shipmaster on the first relief pattern denotes the first profession; the other is revealed by the mark of ownership. Similarly, identified abbreviations of names make it clear that the patterns bearing only trade marks and/or municipal coats of arms refer solely to merchants who acted as distributors and were not cargo shipmasters at the same time. In contrast, potters who worked at their own risk, without contractual obligations to a merchant, decorated their jugs with rosettes and without individual names or marks. The three jugs of the DSM thus provide us with unexpected insights into the forms of organisation employed by the people who made them, transported them by ship and traded in them worldwide, and are consequently highly revealing products of a social class that has otherwise left us with very few objects providing such distinctive information about its daily social conditions. That not only applies to Frechen. The example from Stadtlohn clearly demonstrates that relief designs of a similar type also reveal similar economic structures elsewhere.