Georges Simenon spent the winter of 1929 stuck in Delfzijl. His sailboat, the Ostrogoth, was being recaulked at the local shipyard, the weather was foul, and the young Belgian writer had nothing to do but pace the quays of a Dutch port city he had not planned to spend any time in. According to the story Simenon liked to tell afterward, it was here - in a dockside cafe, on a barge, somewhere along the Ems estuary - that a heavyset, pipe-smoking French police inspector first walked into his head. Maigret would go on to appear in seventy-five novels and twenty-eight short stories. Today a bronze Maigret stands on the Delfzijl waterfront, pipe in hand, looking out over the same gray harbor where Simenon waited out the cold.
The name is a literal description of the place's purpose. Delf was a medieval canal connecting the small Fivel river to the larger Ems estuary; zijl, in old Dutch, is a sluice or water outlet. Delfzijl was, originally, just the sluice where that canal met the sea - a gate in the dike, with whatever settlement clustered around it. The first sluice on the Delf dates to 1317. The canal itself is now incorporated into the Damsterdiep, the waterway that connects Delfzijl inland to the city of Groningen. From medieval times forward, this sluice has been the main sea outlet for the entire province. Goods coming downriver from Groningen reached the sea here; ships coming in from the Ems estuary unloaded here. Six hundred years of cargo have passed through what started as a hole in a dike.
In 1580 the Dutch built a square earthwork sconce and a church at Delfzijl, and in 1591 expanded the works to a six-bastion fortress, just in time for Prince Maurice of Orange to arrive with a fleet of 150 ships and take the place from the Spanish in a combined Dutch and English assault. Three years later the Spanish general Francisco Verdugo tried and failed to take it back. In 1628 the Dutch privateer Piet Hein, fresh off the famous seizure of the Spanish silver fleet, moored his prize ships at Delfzijl. The town stayed strategically valuable for the next two centuries, surviving siege by the Dutch during the Napoleonic occupation of 1813 to 1814 and finally losing its military function when the fortifications were demolished in 1875. The street grid of the old town still traces the outline of the vanished bastions.
By the time Simenon found himself stuck here in the winter of 1929 to 1930, Delfzijl was a working port, not a fortress. Simenon was twenty-six, already a prolific writer of cheap potboilers under various pseudonyms, and only just beginning to think about doing something more serious under his own name. The Ostrogoth, his ten-meter cutter, needed extensive work, and Simenon and his wife Tigy passed several weeks waiting in the cold. The story Simenon told - and there are several versions, none of them fully reliable - was that he sat down in a Delfzijl cafe with a notebook, drew a circle, drew another, and began sketching out a heavy, calm, pipe-smoking inspector who would solve crimes by sitting and watching rather than running and chasing. The first Maigret novel, Pietr-le-Letton, was written in Delfzijl that winter. The town has claimed the inspector as its own ever since, with the Maigret statue on the waterfront unveiled in 1966.
Modern Delfzijl is the fifth-largest seaport in the Netherlands and the largest in the country's northeast. The harbor handles aluminum, chemicals, and salt: the Aluminium Delfzijl smelter produces well over 100,000 tonnes of liquid aluminum a year, and the AkzoNobel chemical complex on the edge of town is responsible for the second-largest volume of chemical exports in the Netherlands, after only Rotterdam. Chlorine is a specialty. Wind turbines turn along the dike. The natural gas fields of the Groningen province come ashore nearby, making Delfzijl a central node in what the Dutch promoters call Energy Valley, a cross-border industrial collaboration with the German city of Emden directly across the Ems estuary. Every five years the city stages DelfSail, the second-largest tall ships festival in the Netherlands after SAIL Amsterdam, and for a few summer days the working port becomes briefly ceremonial again, with sails stacked along the same quays where Simenon's boat once waited out the cold.
Delfzijl sits at 53.33 north, 6.92 east, on the southwest bank of the Ems estuary directly opposite the German town of Emden. From altitude the port is unmistakable - large industrial docks, the AkzoNobel and Aluminium Delfzijl complexes, and the broad estuary opening to the Wadden Sea to the north. Nearest airport is Groningen Airport Eelde (EHGG), about 35 km west-southwest. Emden's airport (EDWE) is just across the border. Recommended viewing altitude 2,500 to 5,000 feet AGL in clear conditions; the wider Ems estuary is best appreciated from higher.