Surabaya Wooden Dock of 1,100 tons was the first floating dry dock of the Dutch East Indies.
Context Surabaya is on Madura Strait at the mouth of the Kali Mas river. By nature, Surabaya offers safe anchorage for ships. I.e. ships can safely anchor off the coast, so boats can communicate with the city proper. The good connections to the interior that the river provided made Surabaya a good location for a harbor. In the mid-1830s, the Dutch Navy decided to locate her main base in the Indies at Surabaya. In the 1840s this led to the construction of the navy base called 'Maritime Establishment' (Dutch: Maritiem Etablissement) just east of the river. The modern commercial harbor known as Port of Tanjung Perak (Dutch: Tandjong Perak) was constructed west of the river in the 1910s.
Construction of the Maritime Establishment started in July 1846. The base consisted of a wet dock, all kinds of repair-, storage- and provisioning facilities, and a dry dock. The wet dock, called 'Bassin' was the center of the base. The Bassin was a place where ships could attach to a quay. The big advantage of this was that for works on a ship, men and materiel did not have to be transported to the ship, but were close at hand.
In the early nineteenth century, some developments led to an urgent need for a dry dock in the Dutch East Indies. The size and length of ships made them ever more vulnerable to some of the undesired effects of careening. The practice of coppering ships made them more economical, but careening was very bad for the copper sheathing. Therefore the required regular inspection could only be done in a dry dock. Steam paddle ships could only be careened after removal of the machinery and wheels, making regular inspection very costly. For screw steam ships the risk of damaging the propeller shaft was too high to careen them. The absence of a dry dock led to the early loss of several ships of the Dutch navy. Ships that could have been repaired on time if a dry dock had been at hand.
A first attempt to realize a dry dock was the construction of a graving dock at Onrust Island. It started in 1841. This first attempt at Onrust lasted till 1844, when so many lives had been lost to malaria that the attempt was stopped. In Surabaya construction of a graving dock was clearly not possible because of the alluvial grounds. At the time, building a floating dry dock was the only option in Surabaya.
Design and Ordering
Direct ancestors of Surabaya dock of 1,100 tons
In the Netherlands Amsterdam was in almost the same situation as Surabaya. It wanted to have a dry dock, but had a problem with the weak grounds of the city. Houses could be supported by driving piles till they hit solid ground, but this was no solution for the massive pressures that a graving dock faced. When the first modern floating dry dock started to operate in New York in 1839-1840, it got the attention of Jan Daniel Diets. He bought the plans of the American floating dry dock, and soon Amsterdam Wooden Drydock I was put into use on 30 November 1842, lifting the frigate Koning Willem II of 39.6 m length, 11 m beam and 3.6 m draught and about 800 tons, belonging to J.P. Janette Walen. The tons mentioned here were indeed Dutch weight tons, i.e. metric tonnes, not tons that relate to the cargo capacity of the ship.
The first Amsterdam dock was immediately successful, and soon docked ships of over 1,000 tons. It gave rise to a habit of inspecting coppered ships before every long voyage. Some people from Le Havre visited Amsterdam in 1843 to see the dock in action. They then ordered Diets to supply the wood for a floating dry dock of 212 Amsterdam feet (28.3133 cm) length (60 m). Soon there was a rumor that the shipping magnates that operated the Amsterdam drydock would operate an equivalent drydock in Surabaya.
Diets would build two more drydocks in Amsterdam. All Amsterdam drydocks were just below 50 m long. At the time, the Noordhollandsch Kanaal was the only deep water connection from Amsterdam to the sea. Willem I Lock was Amsterdam's only connection to the canal. At the time the length of the lock chamber not bothered by the gates was 56.86 m. Sailing ships had bowsprits that were allowed to stick out significantly over the front of the Amsterdam dry dock (see the painting), but extremities could not stick out over the lock gates of Willem I lock. This explains the difference in length between the Amsterdam drydocks and the lock. In Le Havre such an economic limit to the length of the dock did not exist, and so the Havre Dock was much longer at 64 m. For Surabaya, this size limit was also not applicable, and like the dry dock in Le Havre, it would operate in salt water.
Ordering The Dutch government ordered her chief engineer P. Schuyt to visit Le Havre. He was to investigate the changes that the French had made for their drydock. If he approved of them, these changes should also be applied to the new drydock for Surabaya. The measures were also given by Diets, making him the designer of the dock.
Naming At the time Surabaya Wooden Dock of 1,100 tons was simply known as the Surabaya dry dock, or Surabaya floating dry dock (Dutch: drijfdok). The labels "wooden" and "1,100 tons" were added later. At the time of her construction, all floating dry docks were made of wood. For the Dutch, this changed when Onrust Dock of 3,000 tons became operational in 1869. The other wooden drydock in the Dutch East Indies was Onrust Wooden Dock of 1,300 tons.
After the iron Onrust Dock of 3,000 tons arrived at Onrust, Onrust Wooden Dock of 1,300 tons was moved from Onrust to Surabaya. It made that both wooden docks were then in Surabaya, and had to be kept apart by labels like 'big' and 'small', or 'old' and 'new'. Things then got messy when people talked about the big wooden dock because Surabaya Wooden Dock of 1,100 tons was big, or about the 'Surabaya Dock' because Onrust Wooden Dock of 1,300 tons happened to be stationed in Surabaya. In 1909 somebody used the lift capacity to keep the wooden docks apart.
Construction
Constructed together with the Maritime Establishment Surabaya wooden dock of 1,100 tons was constructed at the same time that the Maritime Establishment, the Dutch navy base at Surabaya, was built. The reason is that the announcement that parts of the drydock were to be sent from the Netherlands, forced the authorities to choose a plan for the establishment, and to implement it. In September 1846 the first parts of the dock arrived in Surabaya. Work on the terrain where it was to be constructed then started, as well as work on other facilities for storage of parts and construction of the drydock. Commander C. Tinneveld was actually responsible for assembling the dock. The official head of the project was Captain Velsberg. In March 1847 construction of the basin and dockpit started.
The first shipment of the dock arrived in Batavia on 3 September 1846 on board Prins Frederik der Nederlanden. On 24 September 1846 Prins Frederik der Nederlanden arrived in Surabaya. The second shipment of dock parts was sent on board the frigate Koning der Nederlanden captain J.W. Retgers of 807 ton. On 7 September 1846 at 2:30 pm she was beached on a coral reef near Pulau Dapur (an island north of Batavia). She struck the reef with such force that within a few hours there was 5 feet of water inside the ship. Part of the cargo was saved, but the ship was lost. On 27 September 1846 the ship Vlashandel Captain P.L. Dupain arrived in Batavia with part of the dock.
The government decision to send European wood from the Netherlands to Surabaya would later attract a lot of criticism. In fact, it was not so strange if one considers that the same procedure was followed in Le Havre, and that the Pine and other timber from Narva obviously functioned quite well over there. The added advantage was that the risk of errors on the new shipyard in Surabaya would be less. Engineer Oordt inspected the parts before they were sent. Soon the shipyard found that the European timber which had already been used could not resist the local climate, or only for a very short time. The shipyard decided to use local teak for the parts of the dock that would be submerged, as well as for the beams on the surface (replacing the Narva beams). The rest of the European timber was used to create a floor in the dock pit, as well as for many other uses on the base.
In June 1847 construction of the dry dock started. Judging from the above false start with only European timber, this was probably a restart of construction. The plans for construction were loosely followed. A big difference was that the local shipbuilders thought that the drydock would last longer because of the use of teak. Therefore they made the construction more solid, e.g. by applying cross beams on the sides.
On 2 June 1848 the bottom of the drydock, which was basically a raft, was 'launched'. That is, some water was let into the pit, and when the bottom was afloat, all support was removed. The water was then pumped out, and the coppered bottom of the drydock rested on the floor of the dockpit. On 6 August 1849 Surabaya wooden dock of 1,100 tons was moored in the basin. On 6 October 1849 the screw steamer Samarang was the first ship to use the dock.
Characteristics
General characteristics Wooden floating dry docks were very different from iron docks. The main difference is that wooden drydocks were basically rafts that were lowered by pumping water in and out of the superstructure on the sides. Once the sides were empty the natural flotation power of the raft kicked in. Engineer Oordt gave a description of the third floating dry dock in Amsterdam, and claimed that apart from the dimensions the docks of Le Havre and Surabaya were the same.
Raft and sides The bottom of the dock was a raft. According to the plan it was to be made of pine planks that were 60 cm longer than the total beam of the dock, so they would not split from nails and bolts. The thickness of the planks was to be 30 cm. The planks were made out of so-called 70 feet pines, which were 52–56 cm wide in the middle. These planks were placed alternating, so the end of a plank that came from the top of a tree, would be next to the end of a plank that came from the bottom of a tree. All this was fixed together with small timber. Over this bottom came a pine floor. The planks of the floor were 28 cm wide and 20 cm thick. The length of these planks varied from 10–20 m. The openings between these planks were 3 cm wide, starting 11 cm from the top, and were filled with moss. On the surface, the seams were caulked shut. A third layer of 31-cm-thick planks was laid on top of this, in the same direction as the pines of the first layer. Water that came between these layers was led to the pumps, so it would not make the floor of the dock wet. On top of the first layer, was placed a watertight rectangle of 30 cm wide, which protected the 2nd and 3rd layers. For the Surabaya dock the raft was constructed a bit differently. It was more compact and it was coppered, both measures to keep out shipworms.