National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam
- Tom Briggs
- Jun 30
- 3 min read
I love museums – history nerd that I am – and maritime museums combine both of my obsessions (sailing and history).On vacation, my wife and I found one of the best maritime museums we’ve ever been to in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Housed in the armory and warehouse of the former Dutch East India Company, the National Maritime Museum of the Netherlands displays collections that are unbelievably well done. Additionally, the re-created Dutch East Indiaman floating next to the Museum offers a view into the wooden world that supported the Dutch commerce of the 18th century.
The Museum itself is a large fortress-of-a-building, which has been renovated to hold the collection. You enter the building from the south and walk into a glassed-in courtyard that is striking in its own way, and quite honestly a welcome relief from the heat of the day. The collections are in the surrounding structure on three floors to the north, east and west of the courtyard. I will admit that the west section is devoted to children’s activities, which my wife and I avoided. I like that they separated the historical collections from the children’s displays with several feet of granite.
The north section held a display of maritime art that was representative of the 16th century through the late 18th century. I was unfamiliar with the so-called Eighty Years War between the provinces that would become the Netherlands and Hapsburg Spain. Fought from 1568 to 1648, it ultimately set the stage for the rise of the Dutch Republic and the Dutch East India Company. The latter controlled the spice trade from southeast Asia for most of the 17th and 18th century. They did so in no small part due to the availability of enslaved labor from Africa, which one of the displays focuses on. I found this particularly interesting and surprising; the recognition and acceptance of the role that violence and slavery formed in the rise of the Dutch East India Company.
The east section of the Museum was the most interesting for me; a series of displays on cartography, navigational instruments and ship’s models. The former was informative, describing how then (as now) the navigational information from individual voyages was collected in Amsterdam and then processed into a chart. In the 15th century and the early 16th century, navigational charts were uncommon to keep on ships. The master of the vessel kept a narrative book of sailing directions called a Rutter, which was not unlike the ancient Periplus of Alexander the Great’s time. This information would be collected and drawn into a nautical chart which we’d all be familiar with.
The navigation instruments though … SPECTACULAR! They had several cross staffs from the 16th century; two backstaff’s from the 17th and 18th century; and several octant’s also from the 18th century. They also had modern navigation instruments like sextant’s and even GPS receivers, but these precursors that Dutch navigators used centuries ago … stunning… The walls of the room that held the instruments was its own display of stars, holding the constellations that these instruments needed to find latitude. Additionally, I had never seen a seaman’s tobacco box before. Made of brass, these were common tobacco boxes of the eighteenth century, that Dutch mariner’s had engraved on the top with a perpetual calendar and on the bottom with a ship’s speed table. Now I want one!
The tall ship Amsterdam, was the final part of the collection that I found amazing. Built as a recreation of the 1748 ship which sank on its maiden voyage, the vessel is 1100 tons displacement, 160 feet long, 37 feet wide, with 18 feet draft. She was a truly massive vessel, inside and out and we had a great time exploring her. I would imagine that the British East India Company ships were of similar size, so this ship may make a comeback in my writing. The original wreck can still be seen at low tide near the village of Hastings in the UK.
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