STARTEL LINE OF COLLECTIBLE SILVER COINS - MINTAGE ONLY 20,000 COINS

The Zeewijk Shipwreck 1 Oz silver in triangular shape. This is the 4th coin and completes the series.

The Zeewijk left the Netherlands in 1726 for Batavia with 208 seamen and a rich cargo of more than 315,000 guilders in ten chests. Having lost 28 men by the time it reached the Cape of Good Hope in 1727, further disaster soon struck when the Zeewijk hit reef off the Western Australian coast.

Managing to set up camp on a nearby island and saving the chests of guilders, 11 of the survivors later launched the longboat to raise the alarm in Batavia. Tragically, these men were never seen again.

Meanwhile, the remaining crew salvaged material from the Zeewijk’s wreck and ingeniously built another boat, named ‘Sloepie,’ reinforced with local mangrove timber. More than ten months after being shipwrecked, the men and chests of guilders set sail in Sloepie. After just four weeks, 82 survivors victoriously landed at Batavia in their makeshift boat.

The Zeewijk was the last Dutch East Indiaman to be wrecked off the Western Australian coast and Sloepie was the first boat built by Europeans in Australia.