Anthony van Hoboken and the Afrikaanse werving
Anthony van Hoboken (1756–1850), in his day the largest private shipowner in Rotterdam, owned from 1835 the field that the corner later faced. His estate, which kept the low numbers of the Rochussenstraat open meadow for a generation, has its own deep dive on . Here he matters only as the owner of the ground. Yet the fortune that bought and held that ground has a history that a site written today cannot ignore. This note states it plainly and then stops.
The contract
From 1831 to 1842 Van Hoboken's shipping firm held a Dutch-government contract. Under it, more than ten of its ships carried some 2,000 to 2,300 African men to the Dutch East Indies to serve as KNIL colonial soldiers. The men were recruited at Elmina on the Gold Coast, and many of them were purchased or formerly enslaved, and manumitted in order to enlist. This was the Afrikaanse werving, the African recruitment, and it produced the soldiers later known in the Indies as Belanda Hitam, "Black Dutchmen". The system worked around the 1814 ban on the Dutch transatlantic slave trade.
A hand-coloured print of about 1850, catalogued as "Villa Hoboken", shows an Italianate country villa. It has a corner tower with an arcaded belvedere, a garden with its urn, and a carriage at the steps. Only the catalogue title links the picture to the estate; nothing in the image itself proves it, so it is shown as an example of such a villa, not as a portrait of a known house.
What this is, and what it is not
This story is more complicated than the easy version suggests. These voyages did not belong to the Atlantic chattel-slave trade to the West Indies or the Americas: the Dutch had abolished their transatlantic trade in 1814, and the transports ran two decades later. The ships sailed east, to the Indies, and the men went as enlisted soldiers rather than as plantation labour for sale. Yet the story is not clean either. Many of the men were purchased or formerly enslaved, then manumitted in order to enlist, and the whole scheme evaded a slave-trade ban. That much is supported by Bram Oosterwijk's biography of Van Hoboken and by the maritime-history record of the voyages, and no more.
The reckoning
The judgement is not only historical. In 2022 Van Hoboken's statue on the Veerhaven was tagged "SLAVENHANDELAAR", slave trader, part of the city's public reckoning with the men on its plinths.
None of this reaches into the building's own history. The Van Hoboken family owned the estate to the east of the 's-Gravendijkwal, and the corner stood on its western edge. They play no part in the story of the works, the firms or the households at the corner. They appear here because a house cannot be separated from the history of the ground it stands on, and because the honest course is to say what the ground's owner did and to mark exactly where his story stops.