Barentsz was born on Terschelling around 1550, when the island's economy ran on whaling and herring and the long-distance trade that depended on both. He grew up among men who could read the Wadden's shifting buoys by smell as much as sight. As a young cartographer in Amsterdam he sailed three voyages to find a polar route around the top of Eurasia. On the third, in 1596, his ship was caught in the ice of Novaya Zemlya and his crew built a cabin from driftwood and ship's timbers — Het Behouden Huys, the Saved House. Barentsz did not survive the return journey. His mate Gerrit de Veer brought home the journals, which became one of the founding documents of Arctic exploration. The name stuck. Today the sea between Norway and Russia carries it; so does this school.

MIWB is part of NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences, but it lives on Terschelling, ferry-ride from the mainland. It offers two bachelor's degrees on the island — Maritiem Officier, which trains both navigational and engineering officers for the merchant fleet, and Ocean Technology, focused on hydrography and cartography — at the Dutch hbo level. A third bachelor, Maritieme Techniek, runs at Leeuwarden on the mainland. Since 2015 there has also been a master's program, Marine Shipping Innovations, aimed at seafarers with experience already at sea. In partnership with the nearby MSTC the school keeps a simulator center where bridge-watch crews practice approaches to ports they have never seen.

Until recently the school's working teaching vessel was the MV Octans, a former professional ship taken on in 2003. Generations of cadets ran her engines, plotted her courses, and slept in her bunks before earning the right to do those things on bigger boats. The school sold Octans a few months before Storm Eunice tore across northern Europe in February 2022. During that storm, the ship — now under a different owner — sank at Bataviahaven in Lelystad. The cadets who had learned on her watched the news with an odd mix of sadness and relief: that their first ship had survived long enough to teach them, and that she was not theirs to lose.

The main building opened in 1966 and reopened in 2019 after modernization. First- and second-year students live in four square dormitory blocks, four floors each, on the campus. There is a public space with a bar and a sports area; the rest of Terschelling sits just outside, a long thin island of dunes and woods and beach. The student association, Hogere Zeevaartschoolvereniging Willem Barentsz — WBS for short — runs the weekly bar evening, the annual Voorjaarsbal, and the introduction week that nicknames each new class biggen, piglets. Rowing, sailing, and fishing are organized through it. The community is small. Almost everyone on the island knows when the cadets are in town.

There is a pedagogical argument for putting a maritime school on an island in the Wadden Sea. You cannot leave casually. You cross water to arrive and water to depart. The weather is a daily fact, not a forecast. The Brandaris lighthouse turns its beam over the campus every fifteen seconds, eight nautical miles to the horizon, a working machine and not a monument. By the time a cadet has finished a year here, the idea that a ship is a self-contained world bounded by horizon has become physical rather than theoretical. Willem Barentsz, who learned the same lesson the hard way four centuries earlier, would probably recognize the students climbing onto the morning ferry with their kit bags. He would certainly recognize the wind.