The Dutch Golden Age was built less on warships than on a pear shaped, lightly armed cargo ship called the fluyt, developed by shipwrights in Hoorn in the 16th century. Other European merchant ships were built to double as warships, with thick hulls, reinforced gun decks, and crews large enough to fight. The fluyt dropped most of the guns to maximize cargo. Its hull was narrow at the deck and bulged below the waterline, and with ballast and cargo packed low it was stable and drew little water, letting it sail straight up to shallow Dutch and Baltic quays. Tall square rigged masts caught steady winds aloft, a lateen mizzen helped it work against the wind, and block and tackle let a crew of perhaps 12 to 15 handle a ship that elsewhere needed 40 to 60.

Wind powered sawmills turning out standardized parts made a fluyt cost about half as much as rival ships, and merchants accepted occasional losses to privateers as a cost of cheap transport. By 1670 the Dutch merchant marine controlled 568,000 tons of shipping, about half the European total. The episode also debunks a popular tax story and follows the design’s spread to England and France, a wreck in the Baltic, and a working replica in Nova Scotia.

• Sound Toll registers from 1562 to 1632 show officers assessed ships from bills of lading, not by measuring deck width.
• England captured many fluyts as prizes in the Anglo-Dutch Wars and leased others to carry colonists to America.
• By 1680 the French navy called all its large cargo ships flutes.
• A fluyt found in the Baltic in 2003 carried a carved swan on its transom and three carved flowers on its rudder, linking it to the Swan.
• A replica of the Hector, which carried 189 Scottish immigrants to Nova Scotia in 1773, was built in Pictou in 2000.