Fort Amsterdam

For fort enthusiasts, Fort Amsterdam—just a short walk from Philipsburg—may not stand out at first sight. Throughout its history, it deteriorated more often than it was maintained, receiving only occasional repairs from whichever power occupied it at the time.

Nowadays, only its bastions remain; the cannons you see are later additions from the nineteenth century. Yet this modest fort is famous for one thing: a series of dramatic sieges that revealed its failure to do the one thing it was built for—fending the enemy off at sea.

Its first trial came only two years after the Dutch constructed it in 1631. Built to protect the vital salt trade linking Philipsburg with Brazil and North America, the fort’s guns lacked the range to prevent the Spanish, its persistent nemesis, from slipping safely into Great Bay and seizing Philipsburg. The Dutch appeared to have seriously miscalculated the reach of their guns.

The Spanish held the fort from 1633 to 1648, surviving a failed Dutch attempt to recapture it in 1644 led by Peter Stuyvesant, later governor of New Amsterdam (New York). Stuyvesant had learned his lessons from history and the use of spies, and tried approaching from the landward side, mirroring the earlier Spanish tactic. The assault ended disastrously: “Peg-Leg Pete” lost his limb in the fighting, and the arrival of Spanish reinforcements forced the Dutch to withdraw.

Ironically, the Spanish themselves soon tired of the place, sending letters pleading to abandon what they described as a sweltering rock of little value beyond its salt pans. Their hold finally ended in 1648 with the Treaties of Concordia and Westphalia, which formally returned the island to a divided French–Dutch administration that lasted for centuries.

Fort Amsterdam would never again endure a siege like that of 1644, only brief great-power occupations during the Napoleonic era disturbed its quiet. Little remains of those early conflicts, aside from a statue of Stuyvesant in Port Sint Maarten and a large 17th-century painting in Madrid’s Naval Museum depicting the fort’s first siege.

Today, visitors exploring Fort Amsterdam will be greeted by sweeping views of both Great Bay and Little Bay, and can try to spot Brown Pelicans, the national bird of Sint Maarten.