When the crew of the Texel fishing boat opened the net, the wooden statue rolled out. “The boys immediately called out that it was a mermaid,” Vonk tells EditieNL. “Everyone was also very enthusiastic, because of course you don’t experience something like this very often.”
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Save yourself
Despite the fishermen not knowing exactly what they had taken out of the water, they immediately realized that it was special and therefore had to be well preserved. Once arrived in the Texel harbor, the crew members took the statue to the maritime museum Kaap Skil.
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“We did think about keeping it ourselves, but we could never take care of it as well as the museum. We could enjoy it for a year and then it would fall apart again,” says Vonk. “The statue has to be preserved in a special way to keep it intact. That’s how it now stands in a container of fresh water.”
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Culture fished out
In the meantime, a little more is known about the image. “We ourselves thought it would be from the seventeenth or eighteenth century. It resembles an image they put on the backs of their ships at the time to embellish it.” And that suspicion is most likely true. The museum thinks the statue dates from 1650.
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“In 1653 a naval battle took place near Scheveningen. That is why three shipwrecks from the Netherlands and England were located there. Because of those three heavy storms from February, the bottom of the North Sea was of course shaken loose. This piece of a wreck may have ended up above the bottom again. ” explains Vonk.
This only makes the find more special for him. “It’s just a piece of culture that we’ve caught. That’s really cool.”
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