Spice, Ships and Shadows: Amsterdam's Golden Age Harbour and the Dutch East India Company

From the first stock exchange to the Company's shipyard: the towers, warehouses and wharves where the VOC made Amsterdam rich, and the violence and slavery that paid for it

Amsterdam · 11 stops · 26 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Beurs van Berlage: Where VOC Shares Were Born

   Damrak 243, 1012 ZJ Amsterdam, Netherlands

   Stand on the Damrak and take in the long brick building with the square clock tower. No marble columns, no gilded dome: just honest brick, iron and stone, as if a warehouse had decided to become a cathedral of trade.

   This is the Beurs van Berlage, built between 1898 and 1903 by Hendrik Petrus Berlage as the city's exchange. Many people found it far too plain, but it set Dutch architecture on a new path. And it stands on water, in a sense. The Damrak was once the harbour's inner arm, open water reaching almost to the Dam, where ships unloaded right in the heart of the city. Part of it was filled in during the nineteenth century, and this building rose on the new ground.

   Our story begins on 20 March 1602, when the Dutch merged their rival trading ventures into one company, the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the VOC. It was given a monopoly on Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope, and anyone could invest. Merchants put in fortunes, but craftsmen and even servants put in small sums. Of the roughly six and a half million guilders raised across the country, more than half came from Amsterdam.

   The money could not simply be taken out again, so investors began selling their shares to each other. They traded first in the open air near the bridges of the Damrak, and from 1611 in a new exchange building over the Rokin. In 1609 a disgruntled former director, Isaac Le Maire, even tried to drive the price down by selling shares he did not own... the first known bear raid. The authorities banned the practice the following year. Short selling, futures, speculation: much of modern finance was rehearsed within a few hundred metres of where you stand.

   But a share is only a promise, and this walk is about what stood behind that promise: spices, ships, sailors, and the people on the other side of the world who paid the real price. Walk north along the Damrak towards the station, then turn right along the Prins Hendrikkade, until you reach a small round brick tower at the water's edge.

2. 2. Schreierstoren: The Tower of Farewells

   Prins Hendrikkade 94-95, 1012 AE Amsterdam, Netherlands

   In front of you, where the Geldersekade canal meets the harbour, crouches a squat round tower of dark brick with a little pointed cap. It looks almost too modest for the stories people have hung on it.

   The Schreierstoren was built around 1480 as part of Amsterdam's medieval city wall, guarding the corner where the wall met the water. Its name has produced a famous legend: that this was where the wives of sailors stood weeping, schreien, as their husbands sailed away, perhaps for ever. A carved stone set into the wall keeps that tale alive. The less romantic explanation is that the name comes from an old Dutch word for a sharp corner, which is exactly what the wall made here.

   Look for the bronze plaque on the wall. On 4 April 1609 an Englishman named Henry Hudson sailed from Amsterdam in a small ship called the Halve Maen, the Half Moon, hired by the VOC to find a northern route to Asia over the top of Russia. The ice stopped him. So he ignored his orders, turned west across the Atlantic, and sailed up a broad river on the American coast. That river now bears his name, and the Dutch claim it gave rise to New Amsterdam... later known as New York.

   And the legend of weeping wives held a hard truth. Over the two centuries of the VOC, something like a million people sailed to Asia on its ships, soldiers and sailors, many of them poor young men from Germany and Scandinavia. The voyage took the better part of a year, and scurvy, fever and shipwreck took a terrible toll. Fewer than half ever saw this harbour again.

   In the Golden Age the harbour was right here, a forest of masts in front of the city, before the station was built on artificial islands in the nineteenth century and cut Amsterdam off from its water. Now follow the Prins Hendrikkade east, keeping the water on your left, to a building that juts out like the bow of a ship, crawling with sea creatures.

3. 3. Scheepvaarthuis: A Palace for the Shipping Lines

   Prins Hendrikkade 108, 1011 AK Amsterdam, Netherlands

   Walk round to the pointed end of this building and stand where its prow cuts into the street. Then let your eyes climb: brick that ripples like waves, iron railings twisted like seaweed, and everywhere sculpture... sea gods, mermaids, dolphins, anchors, ships, and the stern faces of Dutch navigators.

   This is the Scheepvaarthuis, the Shipping House, built between 1913 and 1916 for six Dutch shipping companies that ran lines to the colonies in the East and the West. The architect was Johan van der Mey, helped by two young designers, Michel de Klerk and Piet Kramer, and together they created the first great building of the style now called the Amsterdam School. Inside, even the door handles, lamps and stained glass tell the story of the sea.

   The spot was chosen with care. Tradition holds that in 1595 the first Dutch fleet to the East Indies set out from near here: four ships under Cornelis de Houtman, carrying around two hundred and fifty men. The voyage was a disaster of quarrels, disease and violence, and when the ships came back in 1597, fewer than ninety men were still alive. But they had reached Java, and they had proved it could be done.

   Amsterdam went into a frenzy. Within a few years a string of rival companies were racing each other to the Spice Islands, driving up prices in Asia and crashing them at home. The government's answer, in 1602, was to force them all into one: the VOC. So this building marks the start of the whole story, and three hundred years later the shipping companies placed their headquarters right on top of it, a monument to empire built at the height of empire.

   Look carefully at the facade and you will find maps, compass roses and the names of distant ports woven into the decoration. It is beautiful, and it is also propaganda in brick. Today the building is a hotel. Now turn away from the water, and walk south along the Geldersekade, across the Nieuwmarkt, to the Kloveniersburgwal, where the Company itself had its headquarters.

4. 4. Oost-Indisch Huis: Headquarters of the VOC

   Oude Hoogstraat 24, 1012 CE Amsterdam, Netherlands

   Step through the gateway from the Oude Hoogstraat into the courtyard and let the street noise fall away. Brick wings with rows of tall windows close in around you, students lock their bikes, someone hurries past with a laptop... and nothing tells you that this was once the nerve centre of the most powerful company on earth.

   This is the Oost-Indisch Huis, the East India House, built in 1606 and usually credited to the city architect Hendrick de Keyser. It was the headquarters of the VOC's Amsterdam chamber, by far the biggest of the six. Here the directors met, ledgers were kept, sailors were paid, and pepper, nutmeg, mace and cloves were stored and auctioned. The supreme board, the Gentlemen Seventeen, met in Amsterdam six years out of every eight.

   The VOC was not simply a trading business. The Dutch state gave it the right to build forts, raise armies, wage war and sign treaties in Asia. In 1621 its governor-general, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, conquered the Banda Islands, the only source of nutmeg in the world. By most estimates the islands had around fifteen thousand inhabitants. Within a few years only about a thousand remained: the rest had been killed, starved, enslaved or driven away.

   The nutmeg groves were then handed to Dutch planters and worked by enslaved people brought from across Asia. Slavery ran through the whole VOC world, from Batavia on Java to the Cape of Good Hope, and the Company itself owned and traded enslaved people. That is the other half of the profits that once passed through this courtyard.

   The Company did not last for ever. Corruption, war and debt drained it, and in 1799 the VOC was dissolved, its debts taken over by the Dutch state. Today the building belongs to the University of Amsterdam, where students argue about exactly the history you have just heard. Now make your way east, across the bridges, to the Oudeschans canal, and look for a tower with a slender spire rising straight from the water.

5. 5. Montelbaanstoren & the Oudeschans

   Oudeschans 2, 1011 KX Amsterdam, Netherlands

   Find a spot by the canal and look across at the tower rising straight from the water's edge: a sturdy brick base, and on top, a light, almost lacy spire of wood with a clock and an open lantern, as if a fortress had put on a party hat.

   The base is the older half. The Montelbaanstoren was built in 1516, together with the canal in front of you, the Oudeschans, to defend the shipyards of the Lastage, the district outside the medieval walls where Amsterdam's ships were built and repaired. By 1606 the city had grown past it, the tower was useless for war, and Hendrick de Keyser gave it the elegant spire you see today.

   Soon afterwards, the story goes, the tower began to lean towards the water, and the citizens hauled it upright again with ropes and weights. Whether or not it happened quite like that, it is a very Amsterdam problem: everything here stands on soft ground and has to be watched.

   For the VOC, this was a place of departures. It is often said that sailors gathered near the tower to be taken out in smaller boats to the big East Indiamen waiting further out. Many of them had been signed up by so-called soul sellers, lodging-house keepers who fed and housed penniless recruits, then took a share of their future wages in return. A young man could leave for Asia already in debt for the bed he had slept in.

   Rembrandt, who lived just a few minutes' walk away, sketched this tower, and painters have loved its reflection in the Oudeschans ever since. Today it is home to offices of the city's water authority, which feels right for a building that has spent five centuries keeping its feet out of the water. Now walk north along the canal to the harbour front on the Prins Hendrikkade, where the greatest Dutch admiral once lived.

6. 6. Michiel de Ruyter's House on the Prins Hendrikkade

   Prins Hendrikkade 131, 1011 AS Amsterdam, Netherlands

   Stop in front of this tall, narrow house on the waterfront and look for the plaque beside the door. It tells you, in a single line, that Michiel de Ruyter lived here... and in the Netherlands that name still makes people stand a little straighter, or argue a little louder.

   De Ruyter was born in Vlissingen in 1607, the son of a beer porter. As a boy, the story goes, he turned the great wheel in a rope works and once climbed the church tower of his town for a dare. He went to sea at about eleven, rose from ship's boy to merchant captain, and grew rich in trade before the Republic called him into the navy. In time he settled in Amsterdam, in a house on this harbour front.

   His greatest triumph came in June 1667, during the war with England. De Ruyter's fleet sailed up the Thames estuary into the Medway, burned English warships at anchor and towed the pride of the Royal Navy, the Royal Charles, all the way home. Its carved stern still hangs in the Rijksmuseum. In England it was a national humiliation; here it was the stuff of songs.

   But there is another chapter. In 1664 and 1665 De Ruyter led an expedition to West Africa, where he retook forts and trading posts for the West India Company, including posts at the heart of the Atlantic slave trade. For centuries the textbooks left that out. Today Dutch schools and museums tell both stories, and De Ruyter has become a symbol of how the country is learning to look at its Golden Age with both eyes open.

   He died in 1676 after being wounded in a battle off Sicily, and his body was brought home to be buried in the Nieuwe Kerk on the Dam, under a huge marble tomb. Imagine the procession passing these houses, sailors lining the quay. Now walk on just a little further east along the waterfront, to a great warehouse that belonged to the other Dutch company, the one that traded across the Atlantic.

7. 7. West-Indisch Pakhuis: The Atlantic Company's Warehouse

   's-Gravenhekje 1, 1011 TG Amsterdam, Netherlands

   Face the broad warehouse at the corner of the harbour, with its rows of small shuttered windows and its hoisting beam under the roof. It looks solid, practical, almost dull... the kind of building you would walk past without a glance.

   This is the West-Indisch Pakhuis, a warehouse built in the 1640s for the Dutch West India Company, the WIC. The VOC had Asia; the WIC, founded in 1621, was given the Atlantic: West Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas. It traded in sugar, gold, ivory, tobacco and furs, it fought Spain and Portugal at sea, and it founded New Amsterdam on the island of Manhattan.

   And from the 1630s onwards it traded in human beings. The WIC became one of the largest slave traders of its age, shipping enslaved Africans from forts on the Gold Coast to the plantations of Brazil, Suriname and the Caribbean, and through Curaçao to the colonies of other nations. Over two centuries, Dutch ships carried more than half a million enslaved people across the Atlantic, and many thousands died on the way.

   The profits came home to quays like this one. Sugar refineries, tobacco works and banks in Amsterdam grew on that trade, and the city government itself was a co-owner of the colony of Suriname. Slavery in Suriname and the Caribbean colonies was abolished only in 1863, and many of the enslaved were forced to keep working on the plantations for ten more years.

   For a long time, Amsterdam told its Golden Age story without this chapter. That has changed. In 2021 the mayor of Amsterdam formally apologised for the city's role in slavery, followed by the Dutch prime minister in 2022 and King Willem-Alexander in 2023. Every 1 July, on Keti Koti, the end of slavery is commemorated and celebrated across the country. Now cross the water towards the gates of the old navy yard, a few minutes to the east.

8. 8. Marineterrein: The Admiralty's Hidden Yard

   Kattenburgerstraat 5, 1018 JA Amsterdam, Netherlands

   Walk through the gate and notice how the city changes in a few steps. Long brick sheds, old naval buildings, a quiet harbour basin, and on warm days people swimming off the quay... in the middle of Amsterdam, on ground that most citizens were not allowed to enter for more than three hundred years.

   This is the Marineterrein, the navy yard. In the 1650s Amsterdam created three new artificial islands east of the old city, Kattenburg, Wittenburg and Oostenburg, and handed them over to the sea. Kattenburg went to the Admiralty of Amsterdam, one of the five admiralties that ran the navy of the Dutch Republic. Here, behind high walls, its carpenters built and repaired the warships that protected the merchant convoys.

   Think of the scale of it. A big warship of the Golden Age swallowed thousands of oak trees, kilometres of rope, acres of sail and dozens of cannon. Wood came floating down the Rhine from Germany, hemp and tar arrived from the Baltic, and the whole Golden Age economy fed into these slipways. The VOC had its own fleet, but in wartime its convoys relied on the warships that were built and fitted out on yards like this one.

   The yard stayed military long after the Golden Age. After the Republic fell in 1795 the old admiralties were swept away and it became a state naval yard, and through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Dutch navy kept a base here, a closed world in the middle of the capital. Most Amsterdammers only knew it as a long blank wall along the Kattenburgerstraat.

   Then, from 2015, the gates began to open. The navy is gradually leaving, and the old yard is turning into a neighbourhood of workshops, start-ups and open quays, where in summer people swim in the basin where warships once lay. Now walk out of the yard and along the water to the great square building next door, where the Admiralty kept everything its ships needed.

9. 9. Het Scheepvaartmuseum & the Ship Amsterdam

   Kattenburgerplein 1, 1018 KK Amsterdam, Netherlands

   Stand where you can see both of them at once: the vast square storehouse around its inner courtyard, and beside it on the water, a tall three-masted ship, its hull painted in bright colours, its stern carved and gilded, its rigging a maze of ropes against the sky.

   The building is 's Lands Zeemagazijn, the Admiralty's sea storehouse, built in 1656 to designs by the city architect Daniël Stalpaert. Everything the fleet needed was kept here: sails, ropes, anchors, flags, cannonballs, provisions for months at sea. It stands on thousands of wooden piles driven into the mud, and it served the navy for more than three centuries before the National Maritime Museum moved in, in 1973. Look up inside the courtyard and you will see a modern glass roof, its lines inspired by the compass lines on old sea charts.

   The ship is a replica of the Amsterdam, a VOC East Indiaman built here in the city in 1748, and rebuilt by hand from 1985 onwards, plank by plank. Climb aboard in your imagination: more than three hundred people crammed between the decks, sailors, soldiers and a few passengers, with salted meat, ship's biscuit, beer and water for a voyage of eight months or more.

   The real Amsterdam never reached Asia. In January 1749, on her maiden voyage, she was caught in storms in the English Channel, disease spread on board, and the ship ran aground on the beach near Hastings in England. Her wreck still lies there in the sand, and at the lowest tides parts of the hull appear above the water. She was carrying chests of silver to buy spices and textiles in Asia.

   That is the whole VOC economy in one ship: silver out, spices, pepper, tea and porcelain back, and a huge human cost in between. Now cross the bridge behind the museum onto Wittenburg, and look for a church with a little tower standing over the canal.

10. 10. Oosterkerk: The Church of the Shipbuilders

    Kleine Wittenburgerstraat 1, 1018 LS Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Stop by the Wittenburgergracht and look at the church with its small, neat tower rising above the water. It is calm and plain, a Protestant church without fuss, sitting among houses that were once full of the noise of hammers and saws.

    This is the Oosterkerk, the Eastern Church, built between 1669 and 1671. Its architect was Daniël Stalpaert, the same city architect who designed the Admiralty storehouse you have just seen. It was built for a brand new population: the families of the three Eastern Islands, Kattenburg, Wittenburg and Oostenburg, which had been raised out of the water only a few years earlier to make room for shipyards, rope works and warehouses.

    Picture the islands in their prime. Shipwrights in their hundreds, rope makers walking backwards along the rope walks, carpenters, caulkers, blacksmiths and sail makers, and sailors waiting for their next ship. This was the engine room of the Golden Age. The shipwrights of these islands had a nickname, the bijltjes, the little axes, after the tool of their trade, and they had a fierce reputation. In the political conflicts of the eighteenth century, they were famous as loyal and rowdy supporters of the House of Orange.

    It was also a poor district, and it stayed that way. When the VOC collapsed and shipbuilding moved away, the islands slid into poverty, and much of old Kattenburg and Wittenburg was demolished and rebuilt in the twentieth century. The church survived the changes, and today it serves the neighbourhood as a place for concerts and community events.

    Look at the scale of the houses around you. These were not merchants' palaces; they were homes for working families who never saw a share of the Company's profits. The Golden Age had two sides of the city, and you are now standing in the other one. Walk on east along the water to the last island, Oostenburg, where the Company built its own ships.

11. 11. Oostenburg: The VOC Shipyard

    Oostenburgergracht, 1018 NC Amsterdam, Netherlands

    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.