The Leiden Gunpowder Disaster of 1807: Negligence or one of History's most Tragic Mysteries?
Monday, January 12, 1807. About a quarter past four in the afternoon…
A wooden cargo ship named the Delfs Welvaaren (translated into English as “The Prosperity of Delft”) is docked near the city center in Leiden, Holland, at the mouth of the Rapenburg Canal. Packed below decks into the hold of the Delf Welvaaren are 369 barrels, or approximately 37,000 lbs of highly combustible black powder.
This volatile cargo, a mixture of sulfur, carbon and potassium nitrate, the oldest known explosive chemical composition on earth, is in Leiden awaiting transport to Holland’s main military armory in the southern Dutch city of Delft.
It will never get there.
On the morning of the 12th of January 1807, mere hours before disaster, the Delf Welvaaren’s Captain received word that his ship won’t be able to proceed to Delft immediately because the other ship’s in the convoy are still icebound in the North Atlantic due to inclement winter weather.
Adam van Schie is the acting Captain of the Delf Welvaaren. He is young and inexperienced. In fact, he has never been in command of any type of ship, let alone a cargo ship packed with highly explosive gunpowder, ever before.
Originally, it was Adam van Schie’s father of the same name, Adam Sr., who had been in command of the Delf Welvaaren. However, prior to setting sail the elder Adam had fallen gravely ill and placed his two son’s Adam Jr. and Saloman in command of the ship.
But on the 10th of January 1807, the very day that the Delf Welvaaren pulled into port in Leiden, the elder van Schie brother, Saloman who unlike his younger brother did have leadership experience at sea, became incapacitated and unfit for command after he broke both his legs in an accidental fall from the ship’s rigging. This left Adam in sole command of the ship.
After receiving word on the morning of January 12, 1807 that the rest of the armament convoy is icebound at sea, the young acting Captain Adam van Schie makes the fateful decision to leave his ship to visit his sister who he hasn’t seen in quite some time and is then currently residing in Leiden with her new husband. In the process, he leaves the Delf Welvaaren and its crew members leaderless and largely unsupervised.
In 1807, Europe was in the grips of the Napoleonic Wars, a series of conflicts that swept across the continent during the first fifteen years of the 19th century as a result of Napoleon Bonaparte’s ascension to power in France and his consequent imperialistic ambitions. Europe will not see war on such a scale again until a century later with the onset of the First World War.
By the time that the Delfs Welvaaren pulled into port in Leiden, the Netherlands had become a puppet state under the control of Napoleonic France. Napoleon Bonaparte installed his younger brother Louis as King regent of the Dutch and renamed the country The Kingdom of Holland as a satellite state of the French Empire.
The Leiden Gunpowder Explosion
The French fear that the Kingdom of Holland will be invaded by Great Britain at any moment and have begun stockpiling arms, including large quantities of black powder, at strategic locations across the country in preparation for an imminent Anglo-led invasion by the recently formed Fourth Coalition. The Fourth Coalition was a cooperative alliance formed by Great Britain, Prussia, Russia and Sweden in an attempt to defeat Napoleon on the battlefield.
In time, the Fourth Coalition will reign victorious over Napoleon’s ill-fated French Empire, but on January 12, 1807 that moment still remained eight years in the future.
Just after 4 o’clock on that fateful winter’s afternoon in 1807 a dredgeman working only 100 yards from the Delfs Walvaaren in the Rapenburg Canal reported that he saw a small explosion which blew the hatches off the deck of the ship.
And then a few seconds later there was an enormous explosion, so loud, it was heard by “King” Louis Napoleon himself over twenty miles away in his palace at the Hague, Holland’s seat of government.
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| Aftermath of the Gunpowder Explosion |
The force of the explosive blast generated by 37,000 pounds of black powder caused the Delf Welvaaren to literally disintegrate. All that was left of the large wooden cargo vessel after the blast were burnt wooden splinters and flaming embers floating on the surface of the canal.
The explosion generated the equivalent force of 20,000 lbs of TNT.
Every member of the ship’s crew was vaporized in an instant. One-hundred and fifty people were killed in seconds and over 200 buildings were completely destroyed.
Not a single building in Leiden was left untouched and those in the city who lived through the massive explosion reported having to, “(W)alk through streets paved with broken glass and roof shingles.”
The enormous cast iron anchor of the Delf Welvaaren was found over 900 meters, a distance of well over half a mile, from the site of the explosion.
It takes months for survivors, and corpses alike, to be dug out of the rubble of Leiden proper and its surrounding neighborhoods. Only days after the disaster, in a rare show of concern and compassion for the Dutch people, King Louis Napoleon travels from The Hague to Leiden to aid in the recovery efforts. In a further act of kindness, in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, the French Imperial government of Napoleon Bonaparte decreed that all residents of Leiden in the Kingdom of Holland would be exempt from paying taxes for the next ten years!
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| King Louis Napoleon Visits the Wounded |
Rumors swirl all across Holland and western Europe about the cause of The Leiden Gunpowder Disaster.
Newspapers in the Netherlands report that the senior Adam van Schie, who was thought to have been captain of the Delf Welvaaren all along, died in the explosion. Since no one at the time knew that command of the ship had changed hands not only once, but twice aboard the Delf Welvaaren, going first from the senior Adam to his son Saloman after the original ship’s captain fell ill and then changing once again from Saloman to Adam Jr. after Saloman broke his legs in a fall, Adam van Schie Sr. was immediately blamed for the gunpowder disaster that killed hundreds and injured over 2000 civilians in Leiden.
However, weeks after the explosion the senior Adam van Schie is spotted at a tavern in his home city of Delft, and it is only after he is confirmed to be alive that the true nature of the command changes aboard the Delf Welvaaren are revealed.
The investigation into the Leiden Gunpowder disaster drags on for months. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who witnessed the explosion are interviewed.
One witness reports that only seconds before the explosion she saw crewmembers aboard the Delf Welvaaren, “throwing potato peels overboard off the deck of the ship and into the water.”
Other witnesses come forward and report that they saw what they believed to be smoke from cooking fires wafting into the air from the deck of the ship only moments before the explosion.
Based on this rather scant testimony the investigation into the cause of the blast concluded that the explosion aboard the Delf Welvaaren had been caused by a spark from a cooking fire which ignited the barrels of gunpowder below.
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| Map Depicting the Extent of the Explosion |
Though this is a plausible theory it does have many holes. For one thing, it is based on the testimony of one witness who reported that she was within literal feet of the ship only moments before it exploded, close enough, in fact, to identify potato peels floating through the air and landing in the water. If this was indeed the case then how did this witness survive the blast and live to tell about it unharmed?
Even back in 1807 this theory seemed pretty suspect and though French authorities officially concluded that a spark from a cooking fire caused the Leiden Gunpowder Disaster, unofficially, everyone still considered the explosion’s true cause to be a mystery.
Then exactly 200 years after the explosion, in the early 2000’s, Dutch historians, reexamining old records from the era of Napoleonic French occupation came up with a new theory for the Leiden Gunpowder Disaster.
It was noted that many witnesses reported seeing a lot of activity on board the ship on the morning of January 12, 1807. Some witnesses who sailed past the Delfs Welvaaren on the canal that day even noticed that, “it appeared as if the crew were conspiring,” and it should be remembered that Adam van Schie, the ship’s captain was absent that day, and visiting his sister in the city center.
This new theory proposed that the explosion had been caused by an errant spark from crewmembers who broke into the cargo hold belowdecks and attempted to steal some of the black powder to sell on the black market.
At the time black powder was an extremely valuable commodity and would have fetched a fortune in the eighteenth century international arms trade. Desperate sailors would literally have been sitting atop a goldmine, and with no supervision aboard ship, perhaps it was just too tempting an opportunity for the crewmembers of the Delfs Welvaaren to resist.
This theory is just as plausible as the initial cooking fire theory proposed by the French government. And in light of the fact that no charges were ever pressed against anyone at all for the Leiden Gunpowder Explosion, and that it would make sense for the French government to not want to reveal to the British and their other enemies the fact that they were stockpiling arms in Holland in preparation for a possible invasion, a cover-up definitely would have been in order.
As it is, the cause of the Leiden Gunpowder Disaster remains unknown to this very day. Perhaps, the tragic explosion that took so many lives on January 12, 1807 is simply a horrible lesson in the results of human negligence, maybe the whole thing was just simply an unfortunate accident, or perhaps, there was something much more sinister at work two centuries ago. History may never know...
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