The Great Explosion: Gunpowder, the Great War, and a disaster on the Kent marshes by Dillon Brian

Author:Dillon, Brian
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781844882823
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

Has the world come to an end?

On the morning of the 12th of October 1654, Cornelius Soetens, a clerk employed by the city of Delft, approached the buildings of the former Clarissen Convent – now converted to an arsenal belonging to the States General, or national assembly – on Doelenstraat in the north-east of the city, not far from the headquarters of the city militia and just a block from the protective curve of the Schie River. Less than half a mile to the south-east – across three canals and through a mixed commercial and residential district that included the houses and studios of some of Delft’s most notable painters – lay the main marketplace, bordered by the town hall, the Nieuwe Kerk and St Luke’s Guild Hall: the premises of an association that regulated among other professions the city’s painters, bookbinders and glassmakers. To the north-west of this administrative, religious and mercantile hub the spire of the Oude Kerk leaned (as it still does) a little way from the vertical, though not enough to worry the citizens who passed it by that morning. They may well have included one Simon Decker, lately retired as the church’s verger, who by mid morning had made his way to Doelenstraat to sit for his portrait by the painter Carel Fabritius.

A little before half past ten, the clerk Soetens reached a tower in the convent garden, known as the Secret of Holland. The tower contained 90,000 pounds of gunpowder, much or perhaps most of it in underground stores beneath the building proper. On this autumn morning Soetens and a companion from The Hague were charged with the task of extracting a two-pound sample in order to test its quality. Before they went down the stairs a lamp was lit for them, and the gentleman from The Hague handed his expensive red cloak to a servant for safekeeping. Then he and Soetens advanced into the dark.

What happened inside the powder store remains a mystery. Soetens may have dropped his lamp, or one of the men struck a spark – from a lock, from the stonework at the entrance or the brick walls inside. In an instant the clerk and his visitor, the tower and convent, the surrounding streets and their inhabitants were no more. The earth shook and the masonry, bricks, timbers and tiles that had been Doelenstraat and its surrounding district became airborne, taking with them the contents of houses and shops, bodies and body parts, as well as a considerable quantity of water from the nearby canals and river. A wave of flame and dust and steam sped through the streets. Above ground, the blast wave crossed the meadows, roads and waterways of the flat countryside beyond the city – it was said later that doors had slammed in Delfshaven, ten miles to the south, and even in Haarlem, thirty miles to the north. Windows shattered in The Hague and rattled in Gouda. In Delft itself, the shock passed beneath the streets

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