Vanishing into time through 600 miniature ships in glass bottles

Some of the museum’s most compelling objects are remarkable before visitors even examine the miniature ships. One bottle is made of exceptionally clear laboratory glass. Another is not a bottle at all, but an original gas lamp used during construction of the Afsluitdijk.

The ships themselves can be just as unusual. One is made entirely of amber, including sails that appear too large to have passed through the bottle’s neck. Another recreates the Suriname-Rivier, a lightship built in Haarlem to mark the mouth of the Suriname River. Because a lightship had no engine, its beacon was placed in the hold and the vessel was fitted with a mast and sails for its journey across the Atlantic. The tiny replica now floats as a red ship with a working light.

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The real ship has been rusting away since it no longer had a function.

“The real ship has been rusting away since it no longer had a function,” says Marianne van Haandel, one of 17 volunteers who run the Bottle Ships Museum in Enkhuizen. The museum claims the world’s largest collection of ships in bottles, and each piece comes with its own history.

The collection is housed in the Spuihuisje, a national monument built in the 16th century over a sluice that had protected Enkhuizen’s first inner harbor during high water since the 14th century. The original black-painted wooden gate still hangs above the waterway. Van Haandel says it may once have been raised by horses, then by men after the building was constructed, before an iron lifting mechanism was installed upstairs in the early 19th century. Today, boats and, in summer, paddleboarders pass beneath the building.

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We suspect that the sluice gate was first pulled up by horses, but we do not know that for certain. When the house was later built over it, that was no longer possible, and men had to do it. Heavy work, of course.