Oostenburg: The VOC Shipyard
Why is it significant?
Walk along the Oostenburgergracht and try to strip away everything you see: the apartment blocks, the offices, the parked bikes.
Key Facts
| Place | Oostenburg: The VOC Shipyard |
|---|---|
| Address | Oostenburgergracht, 1018 NC Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.36780, 4.92490 |
| Part of Walk | Spice, Ships and Shadows: Amsterdam's Golden Age Harbour and the Dutch East India Company |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk along the Oostenburgergracht and try to strip away everything you see: the apartment blocks, the offices, the parked bikes. Replace them in your mind with slipways, half-built hulls on their stocks, smoking tar kettles, mountains of timber, and a warehouse so big it dwarfed everything on the island.
Oostenburg was the VOC's own island. From the 1660s the Company concentrated its Amsterdam shipbuilding here: shipyards, rope walks, forges, workshops and the enormous sea warehouse where everything needed for the voyage to Asia was stored. Thousands of people worked here, in one of the largest industrial complexes of its time. The Amsterdam, the ship you just saw, was built on these slipways.
And in 1697 a very tall young foreigner came to work here, calling himself Peter Mikhailov. Everyone knew who he really was: Tsar Peter the First of Russia. He spent months at the VOC yard with an axe in his hand, learning how to build a ship from keel to masts, and the frigate he worked on was named after his patron saints, Peter and Paul. He went home and built a navy and a new capital on the water, Saint Petersburg, full of ideas he had picked up in Amsterdam.
When the VOC was dissolved in 1799, the island lost its purpose. In the nineteenth century the yards were taken over by heavy industry, the machine works that later became Werkspoor, building steam engines and locomotives, and the great Company warehouse is long gone. Today it is a district of homes and offices, still being rebuilt, and few people who live here know what was made on this ground.
So that is the journey of this walk: from a promise on paper at the exchange, to the towers of farewell, the Company's courtyard, the warehouses and wharves... wealth that built the most beautiful city of its age, paid for by sailors who never came home and by millions in Asia, Africa and the Americas who never chose any part of it. Both stories belong to Amsterdam. Thank you for walking them both.