Half Moon, a replica of Henry Hudson’s ship, looks very small sitting on the deck of the heavy-lift ship Traveler, which is carrying the ship to its new berth at the  Westfries Museum in Hoorn, in the Netherlands.  As heavy lift ships go, the Traveler, at 326 feet long, is one of the smaller ships in the Big Lift fleet, yet still looks very large as compared to the 85 feet long Half Moon.  Nevertheless, small as it may have been, the original Half Moon, or Halve Maen in Dutch, was one of the ships that changed the world.

The Halve Maen was a Dutch East India Company vlieboot, a Dutch version of a carrack. Not only did the Halve Maen cross the Atlantic and explore east coast of North America in 1609, but she would later sail to the other side of the globe, where she as destroyed by an English attack on Jakarta in the Dutch East Indies around 1618.  The carracks of Portugal, England, Spain as well as the Dutch vlieboots, opened the world to European exploration. In Western terms, they were the ships of the great “Age of Discovery.”  On the other hand, they were also the plague ships that brought diseases which wiped out an estimated 90% of Native Americans.  That too, is a matter of perspective.