Wat is er gebeurd? Een interpretatie van de scheepsramp van de 18e-eeuwse koopvaarder Queen Anne

Samenvatting

What happened? An interpretation of the shipping disaster of the 18th-century merchantman Queen Anne

This paper focuses on the depositional phase of the Queen Anne, a large, three-masted freighter that sank on the Zuiderzee (a shallow bay of the North Sea, in the north-western Netherlands) sometime between AD 1715 and 1720. This depositional phase entails the moments of a shipping disaster and should be taken into consideration in order to fully understand a wreck site. However, as information on most shipping disasters is solely recorded in historical sources and oral traditions, it can be hard to connect the disaster itself to specific a shipwreck, and vice versa. In the case of the Queen Anne, no information has been found in historical records on the ship’s sinking, and oral accounts have disappeared over time. Fortunately, the excavation of the shipwreck revealed several clues that may help to reconstruct the final moments of this vessel.