“The carriage was supposed to represent the whole of Holland”
According to De Wildt, the manufacturers wanted the carriage to represent the entire Kingdom of the Netherlands at the time. They used, among other things, Brabant leather, Java wood and Sumatran ivory.
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However, Suriname did not seem represented and this raised questions, says the curator. According to the museum, possible archives with more information about it have been lost.
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The research was a great job, because the gold in the carriage contains a lot of lead particles. This is due to the air pollution to which the carriage has been exposed over the years.
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0:56Billions of lead particles hampered research
According to Gareth Davies, the petrology professor at the VU who led the research, billions of lead particles had to be removed first. This work took four months. The team then compared the gold leaf with Naturalis-supplied samples from various regions of South Africa and Suriname.
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Davies says the gold in the carriage is very similar to that of a gold mine on the Suriname River. Conservative De Wildt thinks this is plausible, since a lot of gold was mined in this area at the time the carriage was made.
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