April 10 – Hoorn, The Netherlands. Today we are docked in Hoorn. This is an old city. It was founded in 716 and acquired city rights (means it could have markets and other rights) in 1357. Its namesake, Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America, was named by Willem Schouten when he rounded it in 1616.
Soon after it was founded Hoorn became a major point for shipping. During the 'Golden Age' Hoorn was the headquarters for the Dutch East India Company (VOC). This was a very busy and prosperous time for Hoorn. Huge profits were made shipping and selling pepper, cloves, mace and nutmeg. It was also famous for Jan Pieterszoon Coen, an officer of the VOC, who raided the Dutch Indies (Indonesia) where he was instrumental in founding Batavia, now named Jakarta, a city we visited earlier on this trip.
In the 1700s Hoorn became a very small fishing village. After Napoleon sized the Netherlands Hoorn interest in fishing lessened and it became a market town for the entire region. After the railroad came to the city it became the center of a network of towns and villages over the entire province of North-Holland. In 1932 the completion of a large dyke completely eliminated Hoorn's access to the sea ending its days as a seaport.
We are going on a walking tour of the city. Most of the tours off the ship are going to be walking tours to some extent. My legs should be in good shape after all the walking trips on the HAL cruise and now a walking tour every day.
The first thing I noticed as we left the ship was Hoorn's huge marina of private boats. Either everyone in Hoorn owns two boats or this is a coastal weekend spot for people from Amsterdam, only 22 miles away. The marina is almost half as big as the city. Near the end of our pier is a very tall, sturdy structure with a tower on it that reminded me of the church towers of New England. It's actually the remains of the old city gate when it was a prosperous harbor town. Unlike some Dutch cities Hoorn was spared from much of the damage that cities like Rotterdam suffered. Many of the building here are very old.
As a market center the most important building in the town was the Weigh House. This is where all the goods came to be weighed for the imposition of the town's tax. This was a bit problematical at the time as each market town could employ their own system of weights. The Weigh House in Hoorn is now the d'Oude Waegh Café. It's located on Rode Steen (Red Stone Square). In the square you will find a statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen who I mentioned above. They almost took it down a few years ago because he was viewed as too brutal in his attacks and the treatment of the indigenous people but cooler heads prevailed. History is history and there's no real reason to deny it or revise it. To change history is to unlearn the lessons learned at so great a cost.
Red Stone Square gets its name from the historical use as a place of public punishment and execution. They have a red stone circle right next to Jan Coen's statue to remind everyone that the stones here used to be dyed red with the blood of the victims. Also on the square is the Westfries Museum. This museum has artifacts from the area's history, old tableware, silver, weapons, maps, books, etc. It opened in 1880 in a building that was constructed in 1632. Before the museum the building was home to the local land management council and was later a courthouse.
On our walk around town we passed a nicely maintained old church that had a number of skylights in its roof. The church had been turned into condominiums and the skylights were put in to give the upper floors some light. The rest of the building's façade remains unchanged. I'd love to have seen the inside to see how they divided the building into homes.
We headed over to the city's main street to see the Grote Kerk (Great Church). It was indeed large with two pepper mill shaped towers flanking the front façade. Alas, it was locked up tight. Disappointing because you know how I like to get inside churches.
I sat on a well-placed bench while D went down the street to do some shopping. Most of the shops had just opened and activity on the street was picking up. Mothers with children in strollers, on foot and riding pedal-less bikes (sort of like a sitting scooter) were heading up and down the street. Men and women on their way to work carrying coffee were doing the same. D came back in about 30 minutes, empty handed.
We walked back to Red Stone Square and went to the d'Oude Waegh Café in the weigh house for some coffee and a slice of Dutch apple pie. This is the third time I've seen apple pie here and none of them look like what we call Dutch apply pie. First of all the top of the pie is not sugar/flour crumbles, it's regular pie crust with a glaze and something like a lattice design but not as regular. Second, every one of the pies here has included raisins and they always serve it with whipped cream at the side. It's delicious! I asked our guide and she said that's how it is all over the Netherlands. She also said that when Dutch people go out for coffee, that's what they get to eat, not Danish, scones or croissants. The coffee and the pie at the Old Weigh House Café were delicious.
Just across the street was a building with a bronze relief of the faces of two women. Our guide explained that that building had been the German HQ for the region during WWII. The two women were moved into a small house in the back. Despite being directly next to the Germans these two women hid refugee Jews in the small house. That takes some steel nerves for sure.
On our way back to the ship we encountered the statues of three boys, one standing on the wall, one seated on it and one climbing up on it. These are The Cabin Boys of Bontekoe. Willam Bontekoe was a Dutch explorer born in Hoorn. He wrote a journal named 'Journael ofte gedenckwaerdige beschrijvinge van de Oost-Indische reyse van Willem Ysbrantsz. Bontekoe van Hoorn, begrijpende veel wonderlijcke en gevaerlijcke saecken hem daer in wedervaren' (Journal or memorable description of the East Indian voyage of Willem Bontekoe from Hoorn, including many remarkable and dangerous things that happened to him there"). How's that for a catchy title? The first part of his journal inspired a children's book titled 'The Cabin Boys of Bontekoe'. Written in 1924, it became very popular and still is today. Bontekoe only made one voyage but because of his book he was better known in the Netherlands than most Dutch explorers. D had to pose with the boys for a picture.
As we walked out onto the dyke that had our ship's pier we passed a hotel that's in a building that was the city jail. Another tenant is the Museum of the 20th Century. We had to stop in and see what that was all about. It was very interesting. They have rooms set up as you would have seen them in every decade of the 1900s. When you go through the displays you realize how much society and our daily lives have changed in only 100 years. In addition to the room displays, in between the rooms were shelves displaying everyday household artifacts from that decade. So much of what I saw there I'd seen in use, either on my grandmother's farm or at my grandfather's hunting cabin.
One item of particular interest to me was a General Electric refrigerator from the 1940s. Essentially it was an old ice box with the compressor and evaporator stuck on the top in a round housing. My grandfather had one in his cabin and it worked up into the 1970s. Since it had no freezer it was eventually relegated to the status of beer fridge in the basement. Did you know that Hoover made washing machines? They have one. They had canister vacuum cleaners starting with the early Electrolux on skids to the Hoover Constellation that looked like a ball and used the exhaust air to float the vacuum across the floor. I remember when those were big in the TV ads of the 60s. It was great fun to walk around the place spotting all those things that at one time during your life were state of the art and are now antiques.
After our walk through the last century it was back to the ship. On our way to the next port we went through an unusual lock. It's directly over a four lane highway. As we went up into the lock we could look down on the cars going beneath us. Cool!
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