After facing a world migration in a tornado shaped building, Ella chose to relax at the Haven Hotel before we went out for a Surinamese meal. I decided that since the Maritime Museum was only one long block away I couldn’t just let it sit there like some gigantic mausoleum containing mysteries begging to be explored.
For all I knew maybe this is the port where the Flying Dutchman docked before sailing on forever. Inside the museum there might be the hull of a ghost ship with the bones of a slaughtered sea captain who had the same name as a man whose epitaph I saw in the Old Church in Delft (Poot). Perhaps Captain Poot was killed by mutinous slaves who, as an example of early migratory zest, swam to safety on a Caribbean shore. After that the captain was known as “Boney Poot” from all that was left of him on the deck. Legend would have it that Boney Poot’s ghost drifted along with his boat into Rotterdam out of the mist in the late 1700s.
Inside the museum I was urged to go up a ramp to the Half Deck where there was a movie about to begin. It was thirty-minutes long and it was all about how a deep-sea oil rig works. What? I didn’t come to see the machinery behind keeping oil companies afloat. I came here for Captain Poot and the slave rebellion! Give me the Benito Cereno blues!
So I passed on the oil rig doc. I went to Deck 2. There was an exhibit about Maritime Women. Well, at least Dutch Maritime Women. The guys weren’t going to run an empire without them.
Okay, I got the point, one big hard working maritime family sending ships out into the seas.
I passed my most enjoyable moments sitting on a bench watching old footage of various queens take a swift chop with a hatchet and cutting the cord that sent huge ocean liners into the water.
The tiny string, the tiny hatchet, the elegantly gowned queen in a big wide-brimmed hat, and then the big wide-bottomed boat set adrift. Not quite a ghost ship, but still captivating.