Halve Maen (ship, 1608)

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No contemporary representations of the historical vehicle seem to have survived, but all the more so of the first replica.
Replica of the Halve Maen , 2009.

The Halve Maen (in German crescent moon ) was a three-masted sailing ship of the Dutch United East India Company built in 1608 for the Kamer Amsterdam in Amsterdam , then classified as a hunt , with a load capacity of about 30 loads . She had 2 square sails on the fore and main mast and a latin sail on the mizzen mast . The ship was armed with 4 smaller cannons, which were set up in the intermediate deck between the main mast and the forecastle . The rudder was guided from the slightly elevated quarter deck . The crew was probably around 20 men. More precise ship data have not been handed down.

On behalf of the East India Company, she set sail from the Netherlands on April 6, 1609 under the command of the Englishman Henry Hudson to explore the northwestern passage to the Pacific . After a heavy storm in ice and snow at the North Cape , the expedition finally reached the Newfoundland Bank and what is now Canada . From Cape Sable , Hudson followed the East American coast south to the Delaware River , past Manhattan and Long Island . In the summer of 1609 Hudson sailed on the Hudson River named after him to what is now Albany . Since Hudson could not discover a passage to the Pacific in this way, he returned to the Netherlands.

The East India Company sent the Halve Maen from Amsterdam to what was then East India (now Indonesia ) in 1611 . There it was also used in attacks on trading posts of the competition, for example in 1613 on Solor. In 1618 the Halve Maen was set on fire in a battle with English ships off Jakarta and was lost.

On the 300th anniversary of Hudson's research voyage, a replica of the Halve Maen was made in the Netherlands in 1909 based on plans for similar contemporary ships . The ship, christened Halve Maen II , was shipped as deck cargo from Amsterdam to New York and then sailed the Hudson River with a crew of 18 under its own sails. This replica burned down in 1934.

Another replica was started in 1989. This could then take part in the 400th anniversary of the crossing of the Hudson River. The replica, known as Half Moon , traveled to the Hudson and the surrounding area on various occasions and was based in the New Netherland Museum in New York. This replica has been on loan to the Westfries Museum in Hoorn for five years since May 30, 2015 .

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