Vliegent Hart

The final voyage

't Vliegend Hart (also rendered Vliegent Hart or Vliegend Hert) was a VOC spiegelretourschip built in 1729–30 at Middelburg; this 1735 loss was her second outbound voyage to Batavia, not her maiden voyage. She left the roadstead of Rammekens near Vlissingen on the afternoon of 3 February 1735 in company with the smaller ship Anna Catharina, carrying a cargo of timber, building brick, iron, gunpowder and wine, along with chests of gold ducats and silver reales and ducatons for the Asian trade.

Within hours, in a north-easterly gale, the Anna Catharina ran aground on a sandbank in the Deurloo Channel and was lost. Vliegend Hart struck the same bank but broke free with the rising tide, drifted into deeper water at the Schooneveld, and anchored for the night — only to founder there as water poured into her damaged hull. Over 400 people died. A contemporary chart by Abraham Anias recorded the positions of both wrecks, and limited salvage by the English diver William Evans in 1736 recovered wine bottles, a cannon, and a handful of coins before the site was lost to memory for nearly two and a half centuries.

What was aboard

Dutch East India Company archival cargo records for the voyage survive and are corroborated by the excavated finds, including a sealed coffer of coin recovered largely intact; a supplementary parcel of silver ducatoons found later is documented as not listed on the official cargo papers, likely private crew trade.

Gold ducats: An intact coffer containing about 2,000 gold ducats was recovered in the 1980s excavation, along with a second chest of gold ducats and Spanish reales found in 1991.

Silver reales and ducatoons: Roughly 5,000 silver reales were recovered with the first coffer, and several cases of silver ducatoons — not listed on the official cargo document — were found in a later season, likely smuggled aboard by crew for private trade.

Bulk cargo: Timber, building brick, iron, gunpowder, and wine formed the outbound bulk cargo, documented in company records and confirmed by excavated material.

Navigational equipment: Instruments including items studied and published by the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and the Netherlands Maritime Museum were recovered and analysed.

How to collect

Confirm the specific recovery campaign: Coin finds are documented from distinct excavation seasons (1980s; 1991); a specific campaign attribution is stronger than a generic 'Vliegend Hart' label.

Distinguish official cargo from smuggled trade silver: Ducatoons found in 1991 were not on the official manifest and are understood as crew-smuggled trade coin — a genuine and documented category, not a red flag by itself, but distinct from the registered specie.

Note the exceptional preservation: Because coin was sealed in chests, sea-cast surfaces from this wreck are often unusually fine; heavily worn material attributed to this wreck warrants extra scrutiny.

Verify against Belgian/Dutch heritage authority records: As a Belgian-waters site under active heritage management, legitimate material should trace to authorized excavation, not casual recovery.