A Brill Calendar: May 18

HRH and the Steamship

Few individuals were not impressed when Captain William Wager moored his ship ‘Defiance’ along the quay of the Maas river at Rotterdam.

For a simple reason: they had never seen a vessel propelled by steam-power.

Eight days later, on May 18, 1816, Captain Wager and his crew had the honour to welcome aboard the first King of an embryonic national state, The Netherlands. His Majesty was delighted with the short trip, enabled by a paddle-wheel and driven by an engine designed by James Watt some forty years earlier. Like most important metamorphoses of technology, the steamship can’t be accredited solely to one genius; in this case the American Robert Fulton (1865 – 1815). The embryonic epoch of steam power coincides with the scientific revolution of the 17th century. Most maritime connoisseurs remained distrustful vis-à-vis these modernistic nautical pranks until the middle of the 19th century; while no steamboat refrained from carrying sufficient sail. Not so the Dutch monarch, keen on constructing a prosperous kingdom second to no other contemporary state.

It is seldom that Willem’s entrepreneurial dreams and plans were put in practice and realized so promptly. Before 1816 was over, the first steamboat originating in The Netherlands arose on a wharf at Antwerp, appropriately baptized ‘The Prince of Orange’. A year after the ‘Defiance’ was sighted in the European Delta, she started to serve as a ‘high-tech’ ferry service between Antwerp and Rotterdam; in accordance with Willem’s grand scheme to concentrate miracles of Industrial Revolution in the south of his autocratic Realm, while leaving agriculture and food production to northern provinces.