This little square is called the Balans, after the city weighhouse that stood here until 1823. A weighhouse was the building where goods were officially weighed, and in a trading town everything passed through it sooner or later.
The had its base around this square. The main warehouse is still standing, and on the spot in front of number 17 stood the Commerciehuis, where the directors met. This is where they decided which ships would sail, with what cargo, and to which coast. The voyages we have come across along the way all began on this square.
In May 1756 a letter arrived here from two traders on Curaçao, Jan van Lennep and Cornelis Stuyling. They asked the directors for a quote. They wanted deliveries twice a year, every six months, of two hundred and fifty to three hundred enslaved people, according to specification.
The reply has survived, and it is short. The directors wrote that they could not meet the request. It was impossible to buy that many people to the given specifications, and they could not fix a price per person. What they would do was have MCC ships call at the island when it happened to suit them. The company sailed, in its own words, on the fortune of trade: it went where business took it at any given moment.
Both letters are held in the , the provincial archive two streets from here.
In the middle of this square, since 2005, stands the slavery monument by Hedi Bogaers. Two white and two black marble columns, with a red vein running straight through them toward the heart. At its foot it reads: to the children, the community, the future, from the ancestors. Every year on 1 July this is where takes place, the commemoration of the abolition of slavery.
And this is where the walk ends. Thanks for coming along with me, and I hope you now see Middelburg just a little differently than you did an hour ago.
Do try one of our other walks too. There is one along the monuments, about everything that has vanished from this city, and one through the greenery of the bolwerken, the old ramparts that became a city park in the nineteenth century.
Sources. Story: Based on the city walk Suiker, cacao en mensen by Viatours and de Drvkkery, supplemented with original letters from the archive of the Middelburgse Commercie Compagnie in the Zeeuws Archief. Photos: Gemeente Middelburg / Uit in Middelburg
