In 1616, a Hoorn sailor named Willem Schouten was looking for a way around Spanish trade restrictions in the Pacific. The Strait of Magellan was a Spanish chokehold. So Schouten and his partner Jacob Le Maire sailed further south than anyone had gone before, past the tip of Tierra del Fuego, and rounded a headland of granite and screaming wind that they named Kaap Hoorn after the town that sponsored them. Cape Horn. Every sailor who has been driven half-mad rounding the bottom of South America in the last four hundred years owes the name to a small Dutch port on the Zuiderzee. Schouten died in the Indian Ocean in 1625, on his way home from another voyage. His town, meanwhile, had become one of the six chambers of the VOC and one of the wealthiest places per capita in seventeenth-century Europe. The harbour was packed with ships. The countinghouses kept three sets of books. The Coens of the world came out of these streets.

In 2011 a protester poured red paint on the Coen statue. In 2012 a panel of historians, journalists, and civic representatives recommended that the city add a plaque acknowledging the violence Coen committed and the people he killed. The plaque went up. The statue stayed. In 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests, a petition asked again for the statue to come down; the city council declined. The position the council reached - and the position large numbers of Hoorn residents disagree with, in both directions - is that erasing the statue would be erasing the argument it forces. Coen is on the square because the nineteenth century put him there. The plaque is on the square because the twenty-first century could not let him stand without comment. The Bandanese, whose descendants today number a few thousand on a few small islands, have not yet been asked what they think. The conversation, like the colonial history it stands on, is unfinished.

Hoorn's wealth peaked in the seventeenth century and ebbed in the eighteenth, leaving behind a historic centre that the prosperity built and the poverty preserved. The Hoofdtoren, the harbour control tower, dates from 1464 and still leans into the wind at the end of the old wharf. The Oosterpoort - the only surviving city gate, built in 1578 - frames the eastern approach. The Waag, the public weighing house from 1609, sits on the Roode Steen across from the Coen statue, as does the Statencollege from 1632 that now houses the Westfries Museum. The Statenlogement of 1613 was the former city hall and the model for the Stadthuys that the Dutch later built in Malacca, Malaysia - two cities still linked by a sister-city relationship that began in 1989 and continues informally today. Walking the streets north of the harbour, between brick gables and bell-shaped pediments, is one of the most concentrated experiences of Golden Age architecture left in the country.

After the trading boom collapsed, Hoorn became a sleepy fishing village on the Zuiderzee for two hundred years - the kind of place that produces a botanist (Martinus Houttuyn), a few painters, and an Olympic sailor or two without ever again punching above its weight. The closing of the Zuiderzee with the Afsluitdijk in 1932 turned the open sea outside the harbour into a freshwater lake. The fish disappeared. The town reoriented toward Amsterdam by rail. In 1631 a Hoorn-born explorer named David Pieterszoon de Vries founded the first European settlement in Delaware, a whaling and trading post he named Zwaanendael. The kill - the inlet - he called Hoornkill after his home town. The settlement was wiped out by the Lenape within a year. The town's Zwaanendael Museum in Lewes, Delaware, is built as a replica of Hoorn's old city hall. The two towns still send delegations to each other, almost four hundred years later, for anniversaries that nobody else thinks about.

Hoorn today is a commuter town for Amsterdam, an hour up the rail line, with about 75,000 people and a historic centre that fills with tourists in summer. The Westfries Museum tells the colonial story honestly now - the gold and the violence on the same wall. The Museum of the 20th Century on the Oostereiland fills in what happened after the empire. Frank and Ronald de Boer, the twin brothers who played for Ajax and the Dutch national team, are from here. So is Miep Gies, who died in Hoorn in 2010 after years of sheltering the Frank family in Amsterdam during the war. The town's contradictions are not unique to it. Most Dutch cities are working through the same audit. What is unusual about Hoorn is that its central square forces the question every time anyone crosses it.