Long distance voyaging of the sort that you are interested in was one of the toughest professions you could possibly be a part of in the 1600s. Before a faster southern route was discovered around 1611, the voyage to the Dutch trading bases in the East Indies could take 12-18 months, and the mortality rates for those taking part were astronomical - it has been estimated that no more than one in three of those who made the voyage out to the Indies in the 17th century ever returned. This was not because of conditions on board, grim though these were – though if a ship was unlucky, and spent too long at sea, scurvy could become a maor problem. Mortality rates on board might be as low as around 5%. It was a product of the unhealthy climate, fever and excessive drinking on land, with the former generally involving "the bloody flux" - explosive bouts of dysentery – and the latter probably the single biggest killer of Europeans in this period. All in all, the life expectancy for merchants in Dutch port bases was about three years.

For these reasons, the crews of Dutch East Indiamen were divided into an extremely tough and competent officer class of professional seamen, merchants who (usually by participating in illegal "private trade") might hope to actually make real money from their efforts, and a crew that was often largely comprised of the sweepings of the Dutch waterfronts - men who, for whatever reason, were desperate enough to take the gamble on their lives that the voyage east implied. In the popular perception, therefore, the Company was (in one contemporary's opinion) "a great refuge for all spoilt brats, bankrupts, cashiers, brokers, tenants, bailiffs, informers and suchlike rakes"; its soldiers and sailors were violent, feckless and otherwise unemployable, and its merchants either disgraced debtors or plucked students who would risk anything to restore their failing fortunes.

Discipline thus tended to be exceptionally harsh. Boatswains controlled the crew with tarred rope ends called "starters" and punishments for rowdy and violent behaviour were pretty terrifying. Malefactors could be imprisoned, sometimes for months, in a tiny wooden cell in the forepart of the ship; regulations mandated that men who took part in knife fights - what the Dutch called snicker snee – would have the offending hand placed on a mast and then held there while the man's own knife was thrust through it. He would stay in that position until he released himself, either be working the blade agonisingly back and forth until the wound was big enough for the haft to pass through, or by drawing the whole hand up or down until he was free. Men caught having sex together could be sewn, alive, together, into an old bit of sail and hurled into the sea.

As for food - although Dutch ships carried some fresh food (in the form of animals penned on deck) and even had a little "greenhouse" on the upper deck where a gardener would grow vegetables, most of the food for most of the voyage was cask meat - heavily salted to begin with and then cooked in seawater, rock-hard ship's bread, and dried pulses and vegetables. The bread was notoriously a breeding place for insects, and men learned to tap each portion hard against the sides to dislodge the weevils, cockroaches and worms living within.

All this for a job that - for almost all on board - offered only food, shelter, minimal pay, and no chance to profit (publicly) from the spice trade. It's no surprise that seamen working for the Dutch East India Company were regarded as the lowest of the low - unemployable , for the most part, on ships working European routes.

I wrote all about this in somewhat exhaustive detail in Batavia's Graveyard, a book about one notorious Dutch voyage, if you need more.