Dynamite ship Reinier/Elisabeth

Unique shipwreck near Spijk can be seen again at low tide

Spijk - KABOOM! With a huge bang the Elisabeth flies apart. The ship, also known as dynamite ship Reimer, is ready for departure and is loaded with dynamite. The explosion not only dismembers the Elisabeth. The blast also destroys other ships. 13 people are killed in the catastrophic accident. What remains is a unique shipwreck in the floodplains of the Rhine.

What came before

It is January 1895 when two ships carrying dynamite from Cologne are on their way to the Netherlands. The goods consist of dynamite. The final destination is Port Elisabeth, South Africa, where the dynamite is used in the gold mines.

It is winter and the water in the Rhine is high. Also there is some ice. Customs in the Netherlands considers the cargo too dangerous to continue sailing and orders the dynamite to be divided among several ships. As the weather continues to deteriorate, the cargo is temporarily stored on the German side of the Rhine. Here, on the border, one half of the river belongs to the Netherlands (Spijk) and the other half to Germany (Griethausen).


A month later, on March 20, the weather has improved and the journey can be continued. The cargo will be spread over several ships. Loading is manual work. First, De Gesina, the Vier Gebroeders and the Grete are loaded. At the end of the afternoon, the Elisabeth is loaded. And then things go horribly wrong. The dynamite explodes. Was it a collision between the workers? Was it the roughness of the loaders? Or was it the coal stove aboard the ship? We will never know. What we do know is that 13 people died in the disaster, including the skipper of the Elisabeth and five workers. The damage is also enormous. Several ships sink and the windows as far as Spijk on the other side of the Rhine are destroyed.

1100 boxes with 100,000 kilos of dynamite in total

How powerful the explosion was is shown by the fact that the pressure wave was observed as far as Friesland in the north and Limburg in the far south of the Netherlands.

When is the wreck visible?

The dynamite ship is located in a floodplain opposite the village of Spijk. The wreck is only visible at extremely low tide. So you can only see it during very dry summers when the water level of the Rhine is low. The first time the ship surfaced was in 1967. But the remains of the boat also surfaced in 1991, 2005, 2015, 2018 and 2022.