What concerned the directors of the Company most was that a commander sailed his ship and her cargo safely to their intended destination. How he achieved the goal was a minor matter. In each Chamber the appointment of a commander was the result of an allocation system in which each of the directors took his turn. This was not to guarantee that the best available man was appointed, although there were some built-in safety checks which would help to ensure that the choice was a good one. Undoubtedly some conscientious directors did take their duty seriously. In Amsterdam and Zealand especially, these gentlemen were busy with work for the Company on an almost daily basis. The loss of a ship was a personal blow, because its effects were felt in many parts of the business. If the disaster was the fault of one of the men whom he had patronized, it undermined the position of the director concerned in the eyes of his colleagues.

Nevertheless, there were at least some guarantees of professional competence. First and foremost, the candidate for a commander’s post had to pass an examination for each of his promotions through the three ranks of ship’s officers. After 1751, he also had to pass an examination the first time he was promoted to the post of commander. This sort of examination system existed nowhere else in the shipping world at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In 1743 the Amsterdam Chamber had taken the lead in expanding these examinations to include both a theoretical and a practical element. From this distance in time, it is very difficult to ascertain anything about the predictability of these examinations. Besides the examinations themselves, another check was the practice of circulating the nomination to the other Chambers for their comments. In Jakob Welgevaren’s case, the objection raised was ignored, but the Sautijn affair illustrates that the directors in the Amsterdam Chamber did not invariably approve of every candidate. Keizer’s appointment in 1719 was temporarily blocked. Finally, there was the steadily expanding list of rules and regulations on which a commander could fall back in almost any situation if he was uncertain about what he should do. The practice of checking the contents of the ship’s logs introduced in 1743 gave the examiners some insight into how far the regulations were obeyed.