142 natgeotraveller.co.uk
on water, both literally and metaphorically,
the horseshoe of canals at its heart
constructed during a period when the Dutch
ruled the waves and this was the world’s
greatest port. The stylish way to explore the
trappings of that 17th-century Golden Age
is aboard a saloon boat with teak flooring so
polished you can skid from bow to stern.
The Tourist is moored outside the equally
dapper Hotel Pulitzer Amsterdam, which fills
a row of converted canal houses. My skipper
has a smart epaulette on each white-shirted
shoulder and a sailor’s cap sitting level on
his head. Even the letters of his name are
arranged tidily. “I’m Onno,” he says. “Although
people who know me tend to cry ‘Oh, no!’”
Onno’s justly proud of his craft, a 43ft
beauty built in 1907 to transfer guests to their
accommodation. Today, transformed from
diesel to eco-friendly electric, it carries a
maximum of 12 passengers. “A more personal
sightseeing experience — this is the cork
we’re floating on!” says Onno, nosing us
through a low-slung bridge separating the
grandly titled Emperor’s Canal from the more
blue-collar Brewers’ Canal.
Reminders of the city’s ocean-going history
are everywhere. We pass the monumental
sweep of Amsterdam Centraal station, a
wind dial on its tower to assist sailors, and
the Basilica of St Nicholas, dedicated to
the patron saint of seafarers. The waterway
widens and we round the green hull of
Science Center NEMO, designed by Renzo
Piano to look like the prow of a hulking
tanker, and then a full-size replica of the
Amsterdam — a Dutch East India Company
cargo ship that was stranded off Hastings in
1749 — a sign we’ve reached the jetty of the
Maritime Museum.
The Dutch East India Company is
synonymous with the Golden Age. Founded
in 1602, it was the first-ever multinational,
making gargantuan profits importing spices
from the Far East. Amsterdam grew into the
‘warehouse of the world’, handling everything
from timber and wine to subtropical fruits
and porcelain. The 17th century was a very
good time to be a Dutch merchant, and their
lavish mansions are strung along the most
exclusive stretch of canal.
Onno spins his brass wheel to take us there,
making a lazy arc into the broad-beamed
Oudeschans — a former ship-building canal
where vessels like the Amsterdam would have
started life — past a tilting lock-keeper’s house
that’s now a pub. Past the Rembrandt House
Museum, the site of the artist’s home for 20
years, where he painted the masterpieces that
make him a totem of the Golden Age. Then a
left and a right and we reach our destination:
Herengracht (‘Gentlemen’s Canal’). This was
for the wealthy set. Lofty merchants’ houses
with gables like elaborate headdresses face
each other across the water, as if waiting for
the orchestra to kick-start a masquerade
dance. And the so-called Golden Bend boasts
the grandest residences of all, their double-
width plots available only to those with
pockets as deep as ditches. “The fronts are
nothing,” Onno comments as we drift past.
“You should see inside!”BEHIND THE FACADES
Museum Van Loon, here at Emperor’s Canal
672, offers the chance to do just that. “The
van Loon family made its money in herring,”
Tonko Grever, the museum’s director, tells
me. I glance around the cavernous entrance
hall with a new respect for rollmops. This
was a powerful dynasty: Willem van Loon
became mayor of Amsterdam and his son
ruled over the East India Company for
30 years.
We walk through reception room after
reception room, up a sweeping staircase to
bedroom after bedroom, out into gardens
with manicured hedges, a golden sundial
and a brick-floored coach house flanked
by classical statues. There are cherry-
wood chests, four-poster beds, stuffed
peacocks on mantelpieces. And, everywhere,
vast portraits of van Loons in ermine or
pearls, for Amsterdam’s merchants loved
commissioning paintings of themselves.
“Rembrandt’s paintings weren’t for
museums,” Tonko reminds me. “They were
hung in private houses like this.”
But for all the bounty earned on the high
seas — all the piles of pearls and peacocks
— Amsterdam’s elite has found that water
can be foe as well as friend. Canal houses
stand on wooden foundation piles driven
deep into the mud, and when the water drops
the piles rot. This is why some houses are
oddly lopsided, leaning against neighbours
like walking wounded, their foundations
subsiding beneath them. Nowhere is wonkier
than the restaurant De Silveren Spiegel (‘The
Silver Spoon’), where I eat that night.
Christopher, a waiter — “and storyteller!”
— takes me on a tour. The restaurant occupies
a pair of houses built in 1614 by Laurens
Spiegel, another leading merchant and city
mayor (although Laurens made his name in
the glamorous world of soap-boiling rather
than herring). With skew-whiff windows
below its stepped gables and floors that sag
like washing lines, The Silver Spoon is the
crooked house of fairytales — so it’s perhaps
fitting that it requires a rainbow’s pot of
gold to maintain; the foundations have been
reinforced once already, and further work is
required next year.
What doesn’t need fixing is the cooking
— dishes of Dutch shrimp, beef loin and
blood-orange mousse are as good as anything
you’ll eat in Amsterdam. But what about canal
lobster? “Erm, no” says Christopher, carefully,
as if humouring a madman. “If that’s a real
thing, the Kitchen of the Unwanted Animal
might sell it. They’ll be at Rolling Kitchens.’’My skipper has a smart
epaulette on each white-
shirted shoulder and a sailor’s
cap sitting level on his head.
Even the letters of his name
are arranged tidily. “I’m
Onno,” he says.
PREVIOUS PAGES: Merchant houses along the Damrak
at sunset; chef Luuk Langendijk holds a freshly caught
canal lobster, Restaurant ASCLOCKWISE: Exterior of Science Center NEMO; Onno,
the skipper of the Tourist; Science Center NEMOAMSTERDAM