Rijndam Historical

The Rhine — De Rijn — has been the spine of Northern European commerce since before any history was written down. It rises in Switzerland and flows west and north through Germany and the Netherlands, passing through Cologne and Düsseldorf and then splitting into the distributaries that empty into the North Sea near Rotterdam. The Rhine made Rotterdam possible. Rotterdam made HAL possible. Naming a ship Rijndam — Rhine Dam — was a direct acknowledgment of the river that had built everything the company stood on.

The first Rijndam sailed in the early years of the twentieth century, when Holland America Line was becoming a substantial transatlantic operator rather than a small regional company. She was the first of a name that would be used several more times across different generations of ships — a name that would eventually pass through the S-class era and sail into the twenty-first century before the Ryndam (spelled in the English manner) was finally retired in 2015. The first ship established that continuity. Every Rijndam after her was named for the same river, carrying the same geographic logic across a century of different ships and different crossings.

She was built for the Rotterdam-New York service in the era when that route was the busiest emigrant highway in the world. She made her crossings in the company of tens of thousands of people making the same journey, carrying the same hopes, leaving the same things behind. The Rhine dam was behind them. The Hudson was ahead. The first Rijndam helped them cross the distance between.

— In the Wake editorial

My grandmother's family came from the Rhine valley — from a small town on the German side of the river, near where the Rhine enters the Netherlands. They had worked the river in various capacities for generations: ferries, cargo barges, the particular commerce of moving things between one bank and the other. When the economy contracted in the 1890s, her grandfather decided to move the commerce further. He followed the Rhine to its mouth at Rotterdam and then crossed the ocean on a Holland America ship. The ship was called the Rijndam.

My grandmother said her grandfather always felt the name was too perfect to be accidental. A man who left the Rhine for America, crossing on a ship named for the Rhine Dam. She said he considered it either fate or coincidence and decided the difference between those two things was smaller than it looked. He arrived in New Jersey and worked his way west to the Ohio River valley, where the terrain reminded him enough of the Rhine country to feel comprehensible. He spent forty-three years on the Ohio, a different river entirely, making a different living. But he kept a small painting of the Rhine valley on the wall of every house he lived in, and when visitors asked where it was, he said: the river I left. He never said much more than that.

— Lotte H., Columbus, writing about her great-great-grandfather, 2016