The windmill that would become De Olde Molen started its life in 1815 near Winschoterzijl, in the waterlogged province of Groningen. Built on the site where two earlier polder mills had stood since 1804 and 1810, it was designed as a working drainage mill -- an octagonal smock mill fitted with two screw pumps and a wingspan of 77 feet, its purpose to keep the reclaimed farmland of Polder Reiderland from returning to marsh. In 1883, it was sold for the modest sum of one hundred guilders to a man named Geert Rikus Luth, eventually passing to the Snelter family, whose name attached itself to the mill for generations. It was a common Dutch windmill with an uncommon future ahead of it.

In 1960, two Dutch businessmen -- Theo Paalman and G.J. Woudenberg -- looked at an aging windmill in Groningen and saw a Caribbean restaurant. They purchased the Molen van Jonker, as the mill was then known, and hired millwright Jan Diederik Medendorp to take it apart. The disassembly took four weeks. Every beam, gear, and timber was cataloged and prepared for shipping, though the original stone base stayed behind in the Netherlands. The structural bents, the windmill mechanisms, 2,000 kilograms of millstones, and assorted gears from other demolished Dutch mills -- including a great spur wheel, a pinion, and the bovenwiel and bonkelaar from a mill purchased for two hundred guilders and demolished in 1958 -- were loaded onto the KNSM cargo ship m.s. Breda. Thirty tons of Dutch milling heritage crossed the Atlantic to Aruba.

Reassembly in Bubali took seven weeks. A new base was constructed on Aruban soil to house the restaurant that was always the point of the exercise, and the mill's body was weatherboarded and fitted with a six-meter-elevated wooden stage platform. The octagonal smock mill, once tasked with draining Dutch polders, was reborn as a dining attraction on a Caribbean island that averages 500 millimeters of rain a year -- a place with no polders to drain and no grain to grind. In 1973, Joseph Patterson bought De Olde Molen from K. Schmand and undertook an extensive restoration, filling the restaurant with furniture and paintings dating from the 9th to the 18th century. Inscriptions inside the mill still record the names of its previous owners back in Groningen, quiet Dutch text on walls that now look out over palm trees and trade winds.

When Medendorp returned to Aruba in 2001, he was disappointed by what he found. The sails had been reattached during Patterson's restoration, but they were too short and mounted incorrectly. The result: the mill now turns clockwise, the opposite of every traditional Dutch windmill. It is a small error with an outsized charm. De Olde Molen was never going to grind grain or pump water on Aruba. Its purpose from the moment Paalman and Woudenberg spotted it in Groningen was to be something transplanted, a conversation piece, a slice of the old country propped up in the new. That it spins backward only sharpens the joke. The mill stands today in Bubali as both windmill museum and restaurant, an octagonal monument to the Dutch talent for moving things -- land from sea, mills across oceans -- and the small imperfections that accumulate when you transplant anything far enough from home.