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.