Three St. Maarten sites now listed on Dutch maritime heritage registry

Cooperation between Dutch cultural heritage organisation RCE and St. Maarten Archaeological Center SIMARC has resulted in the listing of three local sites on the official Dutch maritime heritage sites registry MaSS.

According to RCE’s website, MaSS – an acronym for Maritime Stepping Stones – is an online database in which locations and stories of maritime heritage are mapped and made accessible to a wide audience. MaSS primarily gives an overview of Dutch shipwrecks, but also highlights other sites that are important for maritime archaeology as a discipline.

The three newly listed St. Maarten sites are the Great Salt Pond saltpans, the original Simpson Bay Bridge, and the Man-O-War Shoal and its associated shipwrecks, such as Proselyte and Jason.

“These three heritage sites were proposed due to their unique overlap between the maritime space and the cultural space of the island inhabitants, bridging between the people on the land and their connections to the sea,” SIMARC said in a press release on Tuesday.

The three sites are the first St. Maarten locations to be listed on the MaSS database.

In comparison, St. Eustatius has 14 listed sites and Saba has 12. In the Dutch Caribbean, only Aruba has fewer listed sites than St. Maarten.

The cooperation between RCE and SIMARC is “part of ongoing efforts to support the full Kingdom partners ratification of the 2001 UNESCO Convention for the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage,” it was stated in the press release.

Since 2020, stakeholders in the Dutch Caribbean, Suriname, and the Netherlands have created a formal taskforce and have been collaborating to this end. Some of the actions included a promotional video about the importance of ratifying the UNESCO convention, listing sites on the MaSS registry, and local educational programmes.

For RCE, several maritime heritage professionals are organising and supporting these efforts. These include scholars Leon Derksen, Martijn Manders, Sabine Waasdorp, and Marieke van Ommeren.

SIMARC Director Dr. Jay Haviser and Culture Department Head Clara Reyes is supporting on behalf of St. Maarten.

The other Dutch Caribbean islands and Suriname also have formal representatives, and all stakeholders meet regularly via Zoom.

“It is the scheduled goal that once this UNESCO convention is fully ratified, there will be a series of Kingdom-level collaborative projects for the continuing education, protection, and promotion of these important maritime heritage sites,