Where the name "Merrimac" comes from

I often get asked where the name “Merrimac” comes from. Well, here’s the story!

Merrimac is the Native American name of a river in New Hampshire, these days spelled the modern way, Merrimack. It means swift current, so not a bad omen.

I actually got it from a book by Simon Vestdijk, his sixteenth novel Puriteinen en Piraten (Puritans and Pirates), which he himself described as a picaresque novel. I read it when I was fourteen. In the book a ship is built to secretly go pirating, by owners who have a hush-hush arrangement with the mate. Naturally that goes wrong in all sorts of ways, etc. But to my mind the real star of the show was the Merrimac, a ship with an unheard-of length-to-beam ratio for the 18th century: 3 to 1.

Our previous boat already carried the name, after two earlier “false starts”: “Who is Afraid of Red, White and Blue” (a dig at the restoration of Barnett Newman’s painting Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III, which had been slashed in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum; restoring the Waarschip 570 that Koen and I took on was, relatively speaking, just as complicated) and “Havsfru”, the first big purchase Marion and I made together, a Marieholm 26. Havsfru means mermaid in Scandinavian, fitting for a boat built in Scandinavia. However, neither name met the unwritten rules for naming a yacht: short, easy to spell, and pronounceable in lots of languages, including at least Dutch and English.

So when we bought the Scanner 391, we quickly agreed on Merrimac. And when our children were born over the years that followed, the name turned out to be prophetic too: all four of our initials (C, M, E and A) are in the boat’s name.

And then we moved to Harlingen as well. That closed the circle: Harlingen is Simon Vestdijk’s birthplace. Unsurprisingly, the town features in many of his novels, under the pseudonym Lahringen.

Simon Vestdijk is a writer the general public has all but forgotten, yet Adriaan Roland Holst paid him the compliment of being “the man who could write faster than God can read.” He still lives on a little in our Harlingen, with a film festival last year at Milûk and of course as the namesake of the local secondary school. And so, by extension, in the home port of our Merrimac.