The Dutch Wood Trade: Timber, Ships, and the Baltic Lifeline

Before the VOC's spice fleets and the WIC's Atlantic ventures, there was wood. In this episode, Lucas and Luna trace the Dutch wood trade from the Baltic forests of Norway and Poland to the shipyards of the Zaanstreek, where oak and pine became the bones of the Golden Age. They follow the flottas down the Vistula, the sawmills of Saendam, and the timber yards of Amsterdam, showing how a seemingly mundane cargo underpinned Dutch naval power, urban construction, and even the very polders they had just discussed. Along the way, they meet the houtkoper (timber merchant), the houtzaagmolen (sawmill), and the Dutch East India Company's voracious appetite for hulls. The episode unpacks how the Dutch turned a local resource into a Baltic monopoly, and how the loss of the Norwegian timber trade in the eighteenth century signaled the beginning of the end for Dutch maritime supremacy.

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