Docked outside the Maritime Museum in Amsterdam is a reproduction of the VOC ship Amsterdam, the original of which was built for the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) in 1748.
In this photo you can see the museum building to the right of the ship.
Tamara and I visited the museum and went on board the ship.
As Tamara remarked, the top of the rigging looks a long way up when you are standing on the deck. Sobering to think that sailors climbed the rigging in high seas when the ship would have been rolling around in the waves.
The Amsterdam was built in 1748 but its maiden voyage kept being delayed and in the end it set sail in January 1749 intending to sail to Batavia (modern day Java).
Fifty of its crew died from disease while it was still in the English Channel and the ship ran aground in a storm off Hastings on England’s south coast.
The wreck can still be seen at low tide and two thirds of the ship is still intact.
Now fast forward to the 1980s and a difficult time in Holland, with rising unemployment. The reproduction of the Amsterdam was built by young volunteers under a scheme financed by the Government and outside sponsors.
To some the ship was a ‘floating provocation and glorification of the theft from, oppression of and slave trading in native populations’ that by its very existence was whitewashing what the VOC had done in the early 1600s, when it killed or made slaves of the population of the Bandanese islands.
In the end the reproduction was completed and the museum describes the circumstances and the history of the VOC without whitewashing anything.
It’s a personal opinion but I don’t see the ship as a glorification of anything other than shipbuilding expertise. It’s much better to tell the whole story than shutter sensitive modern ears that don’t want to hear the story of what is both history and also part of what makes them what and who they are.
If you want to visit, the museum is about half a kilometre east of Central Station, so easy to get to.
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