Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij

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Poster from 1910
KPM poster (Victor Trip) ( Maritime Museum Rotterdam)
The Rumphius steamer near Krakatau in 1929 .

The Koninklijke Paketvaart-Maatschappij (KPM) was a Dutch shipping company . KPM was formally based in Amsterdam , but the operations center was in Batavia (now Jakarta ), the capital of the Dutch East Indies . The KPM existed between 1888 and 1966 and was mainly responsible for maintaining the ship connections to and from the Dutch East Indies and for supplying the hinterland of this colonial area. In 1957, part of KPM was absorbed by the state-owned Indonesian shipping company Pelni , and in 1967 the Koninklijke Java-China-Paketvaart Lijnen (KJCPL) took over the remaining portion.

Foundation and development

KPM was founded on September 4, 1888 in Amsterdam by Rotterdamschen Lloyd (RL) and Stoomvaart Maatschappij "Nederland" (SMN, Dutch Steamship Company). From 1916 onwards, the Amsterdam head office was located together with a few other local shipping companies in an office in the shipping house on the Prins-Hendrikkade . The new company took over part of the ships of the Nederlandsch Indische Stoomvaart Maatschappij . After two years of preparation, KPM started the first scheduled trip on January 1, 1891.

The company primarily maintained ship connections for passenger and freight transport between the islands of the Dutch East Indies , the so-called inter-island voyage . The common term for this type of scheduled service for the transport of passengers, mail and goods was paketvaart at the end of the 19th century . The paketvaart was carried out with paketschepen (parcel ships), with the prefix paket (in Dutch meaning postpakket ) still being written with just a k ; later the general spelling pakket , pakketvaart and pakketschepen was introduced, but the shipping company's proper name remained unchanged.

From 1906, routes from the Indian archipelago to other countries were also set up, the so-called buitenlijnen ("outer lines"). These lines were often given names of their own, which gave the appearance that they were separate companies, but in fact they were under the direction of KPM. In 1908 the Java-Australië Lijn (JAL), the Java-Siam Lijn (JSL) in 1910 and the Deli-Straits-China Lijn (DSCL) in 1915 .

In the period between the two world wars , the shipping company's activities grew so much that the KPM fleet overtook those of Rotterdamschen Lloyd and SMN. In terms of both the number of ships and the tonnage , KPM became the largest shipping company in the Netherlands. In World War II it was then abruptly ended, the KPM came from this time forth badly damaged.

Decline

In 1947 the buitenlijnen of the KPM were merged with the independent Java-China-Japan Lijn (JCJL) and incorporated into a new company on January 1, 1948: the Koninklijke Java-China-Paketvaart Lijnen (KJCPL). The KPM concentrated again on the inter-insulaire vaart . But this was soon made more difficult by the establishment of the state of Indonesia in 1949, which went hand in hand with the disappearance of the colonies there. On December 6, 1957, the Indonesian government decided to take possession of the KPM company there and to incorporate it into the Pelni state service . That was implemented in the nationalization in the years 1958 to 1960 after the Indonesian. Parliament had passed new legislation on this in 1958 . After a number of entanglements, most of the ships moved to Singapore in April 1958 , where the new operations center was then set up.

A number of relatively small ships were sold and some of the staff was laid off. With the larger and more modern ships, the shrunken KPM tried to open up new sailing areas in the Far East , such as the Pacific , the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean .

fusion

On January 1, 1967 , KPM merged with Koninklijke Java-China-Paketvaart Lijnen (KJCPL). In fact, it was more of a takeover of the company that had been rebuilt after the loss of the buitenlijnen . KPM brought a fleet of 38 ships with a total capacity of 205,766 gross register tons into the KJCPL. Further mergers followed in 1970 with a few other Dutch shipping companies, from which Nedlloyd emerged . In 1996, Nedlloyd became part of the Royal P&O Nedlloyd company , which in 2005 became the property of the Danish shipping company Mærsk Line .

The Dutch part of the KPM archive was handed over to the National Archive by Nedlloyd, the Indian archive was largely lost when the main headquarters were confiscated . As part of the Nedlloyd collection, the KPM art collection is now owned by the Kunstbezit Koninklijke Nedlloyd Foundation , which has loaned the collection to the Maritime Museum Rotterdam and the Scheepvaart Museum Amsterdam .

Trivia

In the Dutch East Indies the abbreviation KPM was often used jokingly for “Komt Pas Morgen” (“Coming tomorrow”), because of the frequent delays of the KPM.

Web links

Commons : Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

literature

  • MG de Boer: Een halve eeuw paketvaart, 1891-1941 , Amsterdam, 1941
  • H.Th. Bakker: De KPM in oorlogstijd. An overzicht van de verrichtingen van de Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij en hair personeel gedurende de wereldoorlog 1939-1945 , Amsterdam, 1950
  • J. van Beylen et al. (Ed.): Maritieme Encyclopedie. Deel VI , Bussum, 1972, pp. 260-261 ISBN 90-228-1006-2
  • AJJ Mulder: Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij. Wel en wee van een Indische rederij , Alkmaar, 1991, ISBN 90-6013-995-X
  • JNFM à Campo: Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij. Stoomvaart en staatsvorming in de Indonesische archipel 1888-1914 , Hilversum, 1992, ISBN 90-6550-403-6