This museum is about an hour and a half drive north of Amsterdam, near the Texel ferry terminal.The museum precinct is a public open space with tickets only needed to go into the internal building galleries, and onto the ships.There are two buildings containing displays - the old tower building, which contains a fairly conventional national navy museum tracing the history of the Dutch Navy, with scores of paintings, models, photographs, artefacts - all well done. The second is an old ordnance workshop that contains history of the dockyard workforce, along with a lot of larger exhibits - guns, directors, consoles etc. Both sets of galleries were well presented, and as good as any national naval museum I have been to.Outside the buildings were many larger artefacts - guns/turrets, torpedos, etc, all with bilingual signage.And finally there were 3 1/2 ships:
Tonijn - a post-war submarine that was distinguished by its three-cylinder construction, which resulted in something quite different to contemporary submarines. The top cylinder, where everyone worked and lived, was small and cramped. There was no access in the museum to the bottom two cylinders, which contained the engines/motors etc.Abraham Crijnssen - this was a Dutch minesweeper built in the late 1930s, which saw service in the Far East - and became famous in Dutch service for escaping to Australia from the DEI by disguising itself as an island during daytime. This was an interesting vessel - small surface warships from the interwar period are uncommon, and it’s great to see this one saved.Schorpioen - An ironclad ram from approx 1870, Another unusual ship.
And finally De Ruyter - the Tromp class frigate - one of the two with the ginormous radar dome. The bridge structure (including dome), and forward gun turret have been saved, and are mounted on land. You can go up into the bridge structure, right up into the dome, which still has the 3-D radar antenna in it.Although not part of the museum, berthed immediately adjacent to the museum is the old Dokkum class minesweeper Hoogeveen (generally similar to the Ton class). I don't know the full story here, but this ship was being preserved as a museum by a separate group, however they ran out of money, and volunteers, and apparently came across chromate paint, and it looks like it is going to end up being scrapped - however in the meantime you can get a decent look at it if you walk around the corner from the museum entry.This is another well-done museum, with well-presented displays, and a good collection of very different ships to tour. Den Helder is a bit out of the way (unless you are taking the Texel ferry), but it really is worth the excursion.
Links:
Marinemuseum - Experience the navy on and under the sea