Statendam Historical

The Statendam — the States Dam — takes its name from the oldest settled area of Rotterdam, the place where the city began. A dam on the Rotte river, built in the 13th century, around which a market grew, and around the market a town, and around the town a city that became one of the great ports of the world. When Holland America Line named its first Statendam after this place, it was naming it after the foundation of everything HAL stood on: Rotterdam, the water, the dam that made the city possible.

The name was used five times across the history of HAL's fleet. The first Statendam was one of the company's early transatlantic ships, operating in the era when the route was still establishing its rhythms. The second was a ship that was launched but never fully sailed for HAL — requisitioned before her time. The third was built over eight years and then burned in the German invasion of Rotterdam in May 1940. The fourth came later. The fifth is the Statendam most passengers alive today remember — the S-class ship that sailed from 1993 until 2015. Five ships, one name, spanning more than a century of Dutch maritime history.

The first one started it. She was not the most famous Statendam, not the most technologically advanced, not the one that survived the worst or lasted the longest. She was simply the first — the ship that claimed the name from Rotterdam's oldest geography and put it on the Atlantic, where it would stay for generations.

— In the Wake editorial

I teach Dutch maritime history, and I often begin a section with the Statendam name as a case study in how ship names accumulate meaning over time. When the first Statendam sailed, the name meant the city center of Rotterdam — solid, mercantile, Dutch. Nothing more. When the third Statendam burned in May 1940 during the German bombing and invasion, the name acquired a different kind of weight: loss, occupation, the destruction of Rotterdam's own center, the dam after which the ship was named. The name that had begun as a statement of origin became also a record of what origins can mean when they are destroyed.

My students sometimes ask whether HAL should have stopped using the name after 1940. I tell them to think about what the name was doing when it was used again, in 1957 and then again in 1993: it was refusing to let the destruction be final. The Rotterdam that was bombed was rebuilt. The name that burned with the ship was given to new ships. This is how a culture maintains continuity across catastrophe — not by pretending the catastrophe didn't happen, but by insisting that the thing named survives it.

The first Statendam knew none of this. She sailed in the years before any of it — before the wars, before the invasion, before Rotterdam's center was reduced to rubble. She was just the ship with the name that meant the dam, crossing the Atlantic in the late 19th century when that crossing was still new enough to be remarkable. She had no idea what the name would come to carry. Names rarely do.

— Dr. Johan V., maritime historian, Amsterdam, written 2020