Schreierstoren

The story everyone tells about this tower is that women stood here weeping as their men sailed away. It is a good story, and it is almost certainly wrong.

When this tower went up in the 1480s it stood at the water’s edge. There was no station and no embankment. The city wall came down to the harbour here and turned a tight corner, and beyond it was open water and the ships at anchor.

The name is usually translated as the Weepers’ Tower, and a carved stone on the wall, dated 1569, shows a woman in tears with a ship behind her. The legend says sailors’ wives came here to watch the fleets leave, knowing how many men did not come back. They surely did watch, somewhere along this quay. But the older spelling of the name points to something plainer. The wall met the harbour at a sharp angle, and in the Dutch of the time that was a “schreye” corner. The tower on the sharp corner became, over time, the tower of tears.

One departure from here is well recorded. On 4 April 1609 the English captain Henry Hudson left on a small ship, the Halve Maen, hired by the Dutch East India Company to find a northern route to Asia. He did not find it. He turned west instead and sailed up a broad river on the American coast. The Dutch trading post founded at its mouth some fifteen years later was called New Amsterdam, and is now New York.