BEACHCOMBERS AND SAILORS

In the new exhibitions the audience is taken to Oudeschild in the Golden Age. The museum’s showpiece is a model of the Reede van Texel of 18 x 4 metres. The model shows in detail the impressive spectacle of hundreds of ships along Texel’s coast. Special viewers allow visitors to zoom in on these scenes, and show exciting animations. Animated scenes from seventeenth-century paintings, projected onto a twenty-metre-long wall behind the model, show a glimpse of what the rhythm of day and night was like during life at sea. Nine rooms of discovery take the visitor further along into the Dock’s world. In each of these rooms history is brought to life through a spatial installation or a piece from the collection and by means of a seventeenth-century figure.

The first floor houses a research laboratory where visitors can admire objects that had been lost, derived from shipwrecks found along Texel’s shores. Innumerable seventeenth- and eighteenth-century objects are displayed thematically, but there is also a showcase that shows all the objects found in one shipwreck. The found objects raise questions about the history of seafaring. By linking the objects to different perspectives, they are put in certain contexts through which they offer us a new point of view on history. The exhibition also offers space for objects found by amateur divers.