Schiedam's gin industry began in 1575, when what is now called the world's first commercial distillery opened on a Schiedam canal. The product was jenever - a juniper-flavored grain spirit, the direct ancestor of English gin. For two centuries jenever was a regional Dutch curiosity. Then, in the late eighteenth century, France's domestic brandy industry stumbled, and the British navy started buying everything Schiedam could ship. The boom that followed transformed the town. By 1880 nearly four hundred distilleries operated within the medieval walls. The air smelled of yeast, hot copper, smoke and sour mash. Coal soot from the malt kilns blackened the brick of every building. The town acquired a nickname it has never quite shaken: Zwart Nazareth, Black Nazareth. It was a complicated honor. The Bible's Nazareth was a humble town that produced something miraculous. So, in its own grimy way, was this one.

Long before the gin, Schiedam was a pilgrimage town - and the reason was a fifteenth-century girl who fell on the ice. Lidwina of Schiedam was fifteen years old in 1395 when she went skating on a frozen canal and broke a rib. The injury never properly healed. By her early twenties she could no longer walk; by her thirties she could not leave her bed. Across thirty-eight years of progressive paralysis she became known throughout the Low Countries as a mystic and visionary, reportedly subsisting on the Eucharist alone and receiving streams of pilgrims at her bedside. After her death in 1433 her cult spread quickly. She was canonized in 1890 as the patron saint of the chronically ill and - in a darkly accurate medical reading of her contemporary accounts - is now considered by some modern researchers to be the earliest reasonably documented case of multiple sclerosis in history. Her relics are kept in the Sint-Liduinabasiliek on the Singel.

In the year 1652, a thirty-three-year-old Schiedammer named Jan van Riebeeck stepped ashore at the southern tip of Africa and founded what would become Cape Town. He had been sent by the Dutch East India Company to establish a refreshment station for ships rounding the Cape on the long haul to Batavia - a garden, a hospital, a freshwater supply. He stayed for ten years. The colony he founded did not remain a Dutch refreshment station for long; it expanded into a settler society and ultimately into apartheid South Africa, a history Van Riebeeck did not foresee and would not have controlled. His likeness, removed from South African banknotes in the post-apartheid 1990s, is no longer a celebrated face on his own continent. In Schiedam a small museum room remembers him and the awkward weight of his afterlife. He grew up in a brick house that still stands a short walk from the Lange Haven.

On 10 August 1856, two passenger trains collided near Schiedam Centrum station. Three people died. It was the first major railway accident in the Netherlands - a country that had only had functioning railways since 1839 - and it forced the first serious Dutch conversation about signaling and timetabling. One hundred and twenty years later, on 4 May 1976, a much worse collision happened on almost exactly the same stretch of track: twenty-four people killed when an express train hit the back of a local service that had stalled. The 1976 Schiedam train accident remains one of the deadliest rail disasters in Dutch history. Both wrecks happened within view of the windmills. A small monument stands near the station today. The trains still pass, more carefully now, on the same alignment.

The gin industry of Schiedam survives in a much-shrunken form. Two distilleries still operate inside the historic centre - Nolet, which produces the internationally famous Ketel One vodka in addition to traditional jenever, and the smaller Onder de Boompjes. The Nationaal Jenevermuseum on the Lange Haven occupies a former distillery and keeps the old copper stills, the malting floor and the cooperage in working order. The shipbuilding industry that replaced jenever in the late nineteenth century - Wilton-Fijenoord and others - has itself largely disappeared, leaving Schiedam to settle into life as a commuter town for Rotterdam, ten minutes by metro down the Nieuwe Maas. The five tall mills still turn. The canal water still reflects the warehouse walls. Black Nazareth has, on balance, cleaned up.