The Navy Museum

The Marinemuseum is in the old dockyards of the Royal Netherlands Navy, called Willemsoord. The first building is the Torentje, the clocktower house of 1827, which showed the time across the dockyards. The main focus is the period since 1815, but the story begins in 1488 and continues to the present. The 40,000 items in the collection include 100 examples of the main weapon used at sea for centuries, the cannon, together with model ships, paintings, photographs and artefacts. There are interactive displays about ship engineering and dockyard workers and commemorations of crew members who lost their lives. On the roof of the second building is the captain’s bridge and radar dome from a guided-missile frigate.

Floating in the dock nearby are the iron-clad steamship Schorpioen of 1868, which has a reinforced prow for ramming enemy vessels, and the minesweeper Abraham Crijnssen, which was built in 1936 and served in the Pacific during the Second World War. The submarine Tonijn, built in 1962, is on land so visitors can walk around the outside as well as go inside to use the periscope or try a bunk-bed.