National Maritime Museum

Museum · Oosterdok / Kattenburg (Centrum)Amsterdam,Netherlands

The Amsterdam Admiralty's storehouse of 1656 on 2,300 piles, telling the story of the trading companies, with a full-size East Indiaman tied up outside.

The National Maritime Museum is in the storehouse the Amsterdam Admiralty built in 1656, and there is a full-size East Indiaman tied up outside it that you can walk through deck by deck. Inside, the collection is about the companies that paid for all of this: the East and West India Companies, their shares, their fleets, and what those fleets carried. Since 2024 a permanent display sets out the Atlantic trade in enslaved people, built around a two-metre model of a slave ship. Daniël Stalpaert laid the storehouse out as four wings round a square courtyard, driven into made ground on some 2,300 wooden piles shipped from Oslo. It held rigging, guns and charts; gunpowder was kept somewhere else on purpose, because a blast here would have taken streets of the city with it. Fire came anyway, in 1791, and burned out everything but the outer walls. The scorched brick was then plastered to imitate sandstone. The ship at the jetty is a replica, launched in 1990.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Confirm the ship is on its mooring first — The replica East Indiaman is towed away every few years for hull work, and it is what most visitors came for.
Below deck means ship's stairs — They are close to vertical, with a rope rather than a handrail. If that is difficult, the upper deck and the great cabin still give you the scale of the vessel.
Pick one wing and finish it — The four sides of the courtyard hold different subjects and the building is very easy to walk in circles in; a single wing done properly beats a lap of all four.
Slow down at the charts — The museum holds work by the Blaeu family, who published Amsterdam's world atlases, and the interest is in where the coastline stops being drawn and the paper is simply left blank.

Things to do

1
Climb down into the East Indiaman's hold
Take the ship's stairs from the upper deck as far down as you are allowed to go. The headroom drops with every level and the space fills with barrels, cable and stores. Stand on the lowest deck you can and work out where two hundred people would have slept in it.
2
Stand under the courtyard roof and trace a line
Walk into the middle of the glass-roofed courtyard and look straight up. The steel that carries the roof is set out in the crossing lines of an old sea chart, so the pattern above you is chart drawing at building scale. Follow a single line from one edge to the other.
3
Find your own coastline on a seventeenth-century chart
Go to the map cases and pick a world chart. Look for the coast you know best and check how much of it the mapmakers had right. Then follow the shoreline along until the drawn line stops and the paper is left empty, and notice how early that happens.