Emerson‘s fall 2024 Kasteel Well cohort visited Amsterdam’s Maritime Museum in late September during their first academic excursion. At the museum, students were confronted with a debate over colonial roots and their role in shaping a modern understanding of history.

The museum is designed to store relics of the Dutch’s Maritime history, including art depicting the Dutch at sea as well as various artifacts. However, the focal point of the museum is “The Amsterdam.”

Found on a dock outside of the main building, “The Amsterdam” is a replica of a famous ship from the 1700s, resembling the ships used to transport enslaved people in the Dutch slave trade, which many students felt failed to accurately address its colonial history.

In recent years, debates around the deep-rooted history of slavery in the United States have been highly present in the media, specifically with the confrontational presence of Confederate figures. One recent instance of this was the debate over changing the name of Faneuil Hall, a popular tourist area in Boston. For Emerson students who attended this excursion, “The Amsterdam” elevated the debate of colonial histories to an international stage.

Zyon Lindeblad, a sophomore writing, literature, and publishing student, did not have a lot of information going into the Maritime Museum, except that it was geared towards adult visitors.

“Going in and actually seeing the history portrayed from a Dutch perspective, a European perspective … was interesting,” said Lindeblad. “A lot of the information around slavery and colonization … was touched on but it was almost like it was separate from everything else.”

According to the Maritime Museum’s website, their mission is to show “how strongly the maritime world and society are connected and specifically what impact this has on the lives of so many individuals.” However, many students commented on the lack of balanced information between the Dutch maritime history and the international slave trade the Dutch took part in.

Isabella Piantini, a sophomore visual media arts student, said they were moved emotionally at the museum.

“It was a very strong experience, because my family’s Caribbean,” Piantini said. “So, this history of bringing enslaved people from Africa to the Caribbean, I was confronted with it in a way that I’ve never thought about before.”

During the excursion, different faculty took small groups of students around the museum. As a result, some students had a different perspective going into the museum than others.

Rob Dückers, the executive director of Emerson College’s Kasteel Well program, said that many of the faculty were not informed about the excursion until a week prior, which contributed to a lack of information given to some students.

“For us, I think, this is a reflection moment—how can we improve on that going forward?” said Dückers. “We’re already thinking of creating something like a faculty manual … the point is not so much that I want to dictate what people have to say or have to teach, but it’s more like opening their eyes.”

According to the Maritime Museum, much of its displays attempt to curate and display Dutch colonial history through an interactive lens. Visitors of the museum enter the model and explore three floors of the ship that contain merchants’ quarters, maps, and product holding areas. Throughout the exhibit, they are encouraged to interact with the features of the ship by laying in the hammocks that the colonial merchants slept in and climbing the stairs between decks.

Boards scattered throughout the replica detail information about colonial history from a Dutch perspective. A principal focus of the ship lies with the Dutch East India Company (VOC), a multinational organization founded in 1602 with the intention of coordinating trade.

The informational panels provide details regarding the spice trade and the wars it caused. They briefly mention the impact that Dutch colonial practices had—and continue to have—on the communities they colonized. One board states, “The VOC … merchants were clearly involved in human trafficking.”

The majority of the boards, however, place a large emphasis on the products traded and voyages made by the ship instead of on the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people who were also on board. According to Slavery and Remembrance, a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Dutch abducted, enslaved, and trafficked over half a million people in just over 200 years.

Stefanie van Gemert, the head of learning at the Maritime Museum, said that in the past, the museum was largely focused on Dutch trade and the stories of life aboard, but that they now try to focus more on the nuances of the ship’s history.

“Now we’ve decided to focus more on the debate … Why is the ship here, why was it built in the first place, and what kind of questions and feelings does it encourage today?’ And then the life aboard and the history of the East India Company and colonial history,” said van Gemert. “We wanted to create a broader narrative on the ship.”

According to van Gemert, the museum is currently presenting most of its information about the ship through text, but in the upcoming year, a round of revisions will take place to expand on how information is displayed.

“Next year we’re going to do a revisionary round … [to decide] what are possibilities to offer our audiences this information in a different manner, so maybe with screens or maybe with a certain playfulness … encouraging the brains to work differently,” van Gemert said.

Van Gemert explained that this will come in the form of interactives, which will be made to “stimulate debate amongst our visitors.”

The Maritime Museum says it is juggling the wants of people who visit the museum. On the replica of “The Amsterdam,” there is a place with pens and paper for people to give their feedback.

According to van Gemert, some visitors want to see less information about slavery and more on the golden age of Dutch trade, while others want to see more information about how the Dutch were involved in the slave trade.

“We try to strike a balance … but we know what we do need to tell: we want to give information that is reflective of history,” said van Gemert. “We want to make it relevant for a broad audience … so we’re not going to hide certain elements from the past, but we’re going to add more narratives.”

According to Dückers, it has been hard to switch from the predominant view of the 17th century in the Netherlands as the golden age to acknowledging the darker side of the time period. Now, he says that museums like the Maritime Museum need to work on incentivizing visitors to re-evaluate their thinking.

“What needs to change is that there, at the moment, is still a museum that thinks very traditionally about [its] collection. What my perspective would be is to turn that around … let’s start with the stories first,” said Dückers. “If you feel that your mission is to introduce a diverse perspective, that should be reflected in your storytelling.”