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TELANAK
Clipper Ship - Off Batavia, Indonesia

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This clipper ship was the first clipper ship that I ever built, many years ago... The original ship was built in 1859 for the Dutch Far East trading firm of Rutgers & Hissink of Amsterdam and the Telanak was engaged in trade between the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia) and the Netherlands. With it's extra-large forward deckhouse it was undoubtedly meant to carry a fair number of paying passengers.

However, when I built this ship, I admit that I didn't know very much about it. Just its tonnage, the date it was built and this pen and ink drawing in an out-of-print book made from the watercolor painting of the ship by Dutch marine artist J. Spin that hangs in the Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam. Using the tonnage, the drawing, and data on every other clipper of a similar size that I had in my files, I was finally able to turn to and construct the model.

As for the ship, I knew very little else about the ship, except the fact that Capt. C.P. Kuiper, was the "Sailing Master" of the Telanak at around the time I selected for the model (1863) and that his grandson, following in the family tradition, served, until his retirement, as a supertanker captain for the petroleum firm Chevron Nederland. In designing the ship, I elected to show the Telanak off the volcanic cone of Batavia, Java in 1863 and added a native proa off her stern quarter to balance to composition.

Over the years since this clipper ship was built, I have endeavored to discover more about the ship and add to the story - but was not able to turn anything up for many years. Even it's name appeared elusive. I searched high and low through on-line and library copies of Tagalog and Malay dictionaries. But nothing came even remotely close to the name. Finally, last year a chance Internet search turned up a site on Cemetary Culture that said "The Berawan [of Indonesia] call the living soul telanak [and] when the body dies ("loses breath"), the telanak transform into a bělí leta', or spirit of the dead." Well, well, something at last! "The Living Soul", what a striking name for a ship...

Also since the Telanak appeared on the web, I've had a woman in Baltimore contact me. She had turned up the name of the ship on my web page while searching out her family tree. She asked me what more I could tell here about the ship and also told me of the existence of a second painting of the Telanak by the same Dutch artist. (Two paintings of the same ship.. rare indeed!) This one was a fair weather one with all stunsails set. She said that her family had this one in their possession and sent me a jpg of it along with a photo of the captain. The painting was titled "TELANAK. GEZAGV. F.H. POPKEN 1862." She said that "Family lore has it that he was captain of the Telanak and that his daughter Elizabeth Augusta Tropica was born on the ship." [I have recently heard from yet another member of the far-flung Popken clan - this one in Oregon. He he confirms that while his grandmother was born on a ship, ("in the tropics enroute to the Indies... hence Tropica as one of her names.") she could not have been born on theTelanak as she was born in the 1850s and the Telanak was not launched until after her birth.]

Well, this surprised me since I had always assumed that Capt. C.P. Kuiper was the captain. However, any doubt was resolved by the word "Gezagv." for it is short for the Dutch "Gezagvoerder" which means "director, commander, captain, master" - so there certainly is some truth to the family lore... Which leads us into the confusing world of the difference between a "sailing master" & a "captain". Simply put, a sailing master is/was usually an officer in charge of navigating, piloting, and handling the ship. Often times this occurred when he had greater experience in these matters that the captain - or in cases where the captain was busy enough merely handling the business matters of the ship for the owners. Of course, the pristine white hull of the second painting does point out the pitfalls of working to a simple pen and ink sketch! Not having the ship's colors, I naturally assumed that the hull was probably black - as were most of the hulls in those days. I certainly never expected to find it white! Needless-to-say very few hulls were white back then as white hulls were very difficult to keep that way.

This summer, another quick Internet search, turned up yet another surprise: It seems that, according to a Dutch language school page of book reviews, the Telanak served as one of the characters in a 1992 historical novel by Dutch novelist Hella S. Haasse! Titled Heren van de Thee (Men of Tea). According to the review, one of the characters in the novel, Rudolf Kerkhoven, takes passage out to Java on the Telanak in Part I of the book (1869-1873) Mevrouw Haasse also happens to have been born in Batavia in 1918...

Fascinating, I wonder what else will turn up in time.....

Displacement: 754 Tons
Scale: 1 in 690 Length of model: 4" (10 cm) Bottle Size: 20 oz. (570 ml)