KPM 1888 - 1967 A MOST REMARKABLE SHIPPING COMPANY s.s. "Camphuys" (1 891) 712 GRT Lieuwe Pronk I vrrote most of this fj-ve years ago Just for my fanily. 'iYhen I discovered recently that there is vlrtually no record here in.A,ustraLia in EnSlish o f the contribution the KPM shlps , the'ir o f fic ers and crews made to the .A,Ilted war eff,ort during Wor1d lltar II, I decided to publish lt. L.P | 998 ln memory of my wife, Joy, who shared'the most memorable 36 years of mY life TABLE OF GONTENTS 1. Earliest contact between EuroDe and the Orient The Silk Road 2. The search for a sea route from Europe to the Orient 9 Early explorers 3. The lndonesian Archipelaqo For 350 Years - The Netherlands East lndies Now - lndonesia (i) Geography 13 (ii) Early history 17 4. The struggle for the spice trade. and then. colonies 19 (i) ln the East 19 (ii) ln Europe 25 5. KPM Zg (i) The first 50 years 28 (ii) KPM during World War ll 69 (a) 3rd September, 1939 - 7th December, 1941 69 (b) 7th December 1941 - 7th March, 1942 72 (c) 7th March, 1942 - 1sth August, 1945 93 (d) KPM ships which served beyond the NEI 124 6. Post War - the final years 126 7" The Pronks in Holland. the Netherlands East lndies and Australia 131 Hendrik Willem Pronk 141 Jan Pronk 142 Lucia Johnanna Carolina Pronk 144 Betty Pronk 145 Peter Pronk 147 Lieuwe Pronk 148 I t_ Prologue ln our family, my brothers, sisters and I are the transition generation. The transition from Dutch to Australian and from the fabulous Dutch East lndies of the Colonial Era - where four of us were born - to today's shaky world of universal independence or "Freedom" as it is euphemistically called. My three sons, my sister's children and their children, who all grew up in Australia, knowing little of the Colonial Era or their Dutch ancestry, have been trying for some time to persuade me to write down what I know about it. So I finally decided to do something about it. The trouble was, I knew so little about this ancestry business myself. True, we have our Family Tree, going back a couple of hundred years, but that is really only a lot of names and dates. Pretty dry stuff! What were our grandparents and great grandparents like and what did they do? Where did they live? I didn't know! That is, apart from my paternal grandmother and two uncles and their families. Apart from that, I can remember meeting only one or two of my relatives since I was about 5, or even hearing anything much about them. So that little bit I did know about the family wasn't going to be all that interesting either. But my father and his two brothers were involved throughout their working lives with what was just about the most fascinating shipping company ever - Koninklyke Paketvaart Maatschappy (Royal Packet Navigation Company), formed in Holland a little over a hundred years ago, to operate in the Netherlands East lndies. Those were the fabulous times, in all those intriguing places, brought to life for us by Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham! Times, incidentally, which proved to be a crucial period in history - the closing decades of the Colonial Era. For better or for worse, there was then some semblance of world stability (apart from two world wars and a depression) which is more than can be said for the present era of treedom, independence and general disintegration, as in the USSR, Yugoslavia and elsewhere. Originally KPM operated only in the lndies, surely one of the most beautiful and bountiful areas on Earth. Later, it extended its activities far and wide. And I had spent 13 years of my life - from 1938 to 1950 - as a small part of KPM towards the end of its existence. That, I felt, was a story worth telling, and I could tack the family history bit on to the end. However, it seemed to me, that to get the true "feel" of that story - a bit of the Joseph Conrad touch - it had to be put into perspective. o \Nhy was KPM formed when it was? . Why was it any more interesting than any other shipping company? o What and where were the Netherlands East lndies? . How and when were they discovered by the Europeans? o How did they come to be a Dutch colony, when the Portuguese were the first on the scene and the Spaniards, British and French were also scrambling for colonies in that area at the same time? o How did the Europeans of 500 years ago know about the Orient anyway? o What made them think they could find a sea route to the East, when up till that time the world had been thought to be flat? o What was the first contact between Europe and the Orient? And when? I didn't know, so I started to do some research. I found that the answer to the last question was - overland along the Silk Road and that was started, at its Eastern end, in 138 B.C. By this time, the whole thing seemed to be getting a little out of hand - not at all what it set out to be. I now looked like becoming involved not only in the story of the Pronk family and KPM, but also in the geography and early history of the Netherlands East lndies, with only a passing reference to our family. However, by then I had become pretty interested in all this, so I decided to persevere. This is the result. To fill the many gaps in my knowledge of the lndies, I read the following excellent publications :- o "A History of South East Asia" by Professor D.G.E. Hall o The relevant sections of "Encyclopaedia Brittanica" . "The Silk Road" by Norma Martyn o "lnsight Guide - lndonesia" . and several others. o The events leading up to the formation of KPM and the history of its first 50 years are recorded, in Dutch, in the Company's Golden Jubilee publication, "Een Halve Eeuw Paketvaart" (Half a century of KPM) o The section on KPM during World War ll consists partly of translated extracts from the company's 300-page publication "De KPM in Oorlogstyd", which describes the magnificent contribution made by KPM ships, their officers and crews to the Allied war effort. To these I have added my personal recollections of the exploits of some 30 KPM ships involved in the New Guinea campaign in the South West Pacific area, as these were operated by KPM's Sydney office, where I was based throughout the war. Many of the officers of these ships were my friends - a few, very close friends. I saw them leave Sydney in convoy for the war zone, usually at 6 o'clock in the morning and I was there to meet them on their return. lnevitably, some didn't return. And before we start our story, I want to record my very sincere appreciation, and that of the rest of the family, of the tremendous job done by my lovely granddaughter, Jennifer. Despite her very busy and demanding career, she still found time to type all this out on her little computer! Thank you, Jen, for all your help, advice and unfailing support! 1 Earliest Contact between Europe and the Orient The Silk Road A little over 2000 years ago - in 138 BC - a Chinese Emperor of the early Han dynasty sent an expedition Westward from his capital, Chang-An, the present-day city of Sian, to seek out the Yueh-Chih tribes as allies against their mutual enemies, the warlike Hsiung-Nu, who surrounded China's Western and Northwestern borders in Central Asia. Although he didn't realise it at the time, this was the first stage of what was later to become the Silk Road -for over 1000 years, the principal link between Europe and the Orient. Traversing some of the most hostile, barren and forbidding terrain on earth, between Mongolia and Russia in the North and Tibet and Afghanistan in the South, the Silk Road actually consisted of three routes .- . the Southern route, through Khotan and Kurghan; . the Central route, through Kashgar and Samarkand; . ord the Northern route, through Urumchi and Tashkent. All three routes converged, at their Western end, at lsfahan, the ancient capital, or Teheran, the present capital of Persia, now lran. They then split again -depending on their ultimate destinations - through Baghdad or Byzantium, which later on became Constantinople and is now lstanbul. Actually, there were no hard and fast routes - just a string of oases and a few rivers, only accessible by camel trains. A caravan might start off on the Southern route, switch to the Central route, then finish up on the Northern route, depending on the harsh, unpredictable weather or the presence of bands of nomadic marauding raiders. Over the centuries, some of these oases became trading posts, then towns and, in some cases, sizeable cities. But this general development naturally did nothing to improve the weather. Fierce blizzards and sandstorms still swept down from the Gobi desert or the Russian Steppes and raiders continued to terrorise the camel trains for well over a thousand years. The most feared of these - Genghis Khan - was not born until 1 156 AD. The family tradition was carried on by his descendants, including Kublai Khan and Tamerlane. And not until 1240 AD did the Mongols conquer Russia.