During Carnival the city renames itself. The signs go up, the parade winds through the old streets, and Enkhuizen briefly answers to Haringdonk - herring-town. It is not arbitrary nostalgia. Long before the Dutch East India Company arrived in 1602, this was a herring port, its boats working the Zuiderzee and the North Sea beyond. The fish paid for the first phase of the city's wealth and gave the harbour its rhythm: nets out, nets in, salt, barrel, ship. When the VOC came, the herring trade folded into something larger and stranger - cinnamon and pepper and nutmeg arriving in the same basins that had smelled of fish for generations. The Carnival nickname is a reminder of which trade came first.

On the harbour edge stands a stepped-gable warehouse the VOC built to hold spices. It is called the Peperhuis - the Pepper House - and the name has stuck for nearly four centuries. Pepper was not a seasoning then. It was a fortune in dry grains, taxed by weight, hoarded behind locked doors. Inside this building, sacks of it waited for the auctions that set European prices. The architecture is so distinctive that KLM later cast it in miniature for its blue Delft houses given to international travelers, meaning thousands of Peperhuis replicas now sit in living rooms around the world. The original still stands beside the water, today part of the Zuiderzee Museum, which uses the building - and the open-air village that surrounds it - to keep the Zuiderzee's vanished way of life from disappearing entirely.

Something in the air here produced map-makers. Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer, born around 1534, compiled the first true sea-atlas of European waters - a book so useful that the English coined a word for it, calling navigational charts "waggoners" after his name. A generation later Jan Huyghen van Linschoten returned from years in Portuguese service with the trade secrets of the Indian Ocean and published them, breaking the Iberian monopoly and effectively handing the Dutch the keys to Asian commerce. Joris Carolus charted Arctic waters. Dirck Gerritsz Pomp became the first known Dutchman to reach China and Japan. The pattern is hard to miss. A small city of fishermen produced an outsized share of the men who told other Europeans where they were and how to get somewhere else.

The modern economy that grew where the spice trade once was looks, at first glance, almost too neat to be true. Enkhuizen is now part of Seed Valley, a cluster of companies that breed and sell seeds for vegetables and flowers worldwide. Syngenta operates a research facility here. Enza Zaden and Bayer Crop Science are active in the region. The town that once sent the world peppercorns now sends it the genetics of bell peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuces. Even the famous local biscuit - the Echte Enkhuizer Jodekoek, a butter cookie produced here since the early 20th century - keeps an edible thread running back through the food economy. The trade has changed; the impulse to send small valuable things abroad has not.

Two Hemony carillons hang in Enkhuizen, one in the Zuiderkerk and the other inside the Drommedaris - the 1540 harbour tower that still guards the entrance to the inner port. They chime every fifteen minutes, automatically, the way they have for centuries. In summer the city carillonneur plays them by hand. Between the carillons, the late-Gothic Westerkerk with its wooden barrel vault, the 1559 Renaissance Waag where merchants once weighed their imports, and the marina that is now one of the largest in the Netherlands, Enkhuizen reads less like a museum than a working town that simply never had a reason to demolish itself. Eighteen thousand people live here. Trains run twice an hour to Amsterdam. The herring boats are gone, but the harbour still does what harbours do.