The Leiden Gunpowder Ship Explosion enters the narrative as a remembered catastrophe: while walking with Ben across Ruine Square, Lambert van Mounen explains that the open space had once been a built-up part of Leiden, with the Rapenburg Canal running through the street. His account turns an everyday city landmark into evidence of sudden loss, public rescue, and the way a disaster remains present in local memory.

Setting and Circumstances

Lambert describes the square as a place transformed. In earlier years, houses stood there and the Rapenburg Canal crossed what was then a street. A barge carrying forty thousand pounds of gunpowder, bound for Delft, lay alongside the area. The cargo’s destination and the barge’s presence in the city’s canal landscape establish the ordinary commercial setting from which the disaster erupted.

The immediate circumstance was equally ordinary: the bargemen decided to cook dinner on deck. The account gives no further explanation of how the explosion began, but stresses how quickly its consequences overwhelmed the surrounding neighborhood. In the middle of a settled urban area, a meal aboard a vessel carrying a vast quantity of gunpowder became the prelude to mass destruction.

The Explosion and Its Destruction

The blast occurred at noon. Lambert recounts that it destroyed about three hundred houses, turning the surrounding district into a scene of collapsed buildings and fire. Ben’s astonishment at the number gives the destruction a precise scale: this was not damage confined to the barge, but the devastation of a large section of the city.

Lambert’s father was in Leiden at the time and remembered the event clearly. He was nineteen years old, and, according to Lambert, the explosion and the destruction that followed remained fixed in his memory. The account thus reaches the reader through both a public landmark and a family witness: the empty square marks the altered city, while the father’s recollection supplies a personal connection to the day.

Rescue and Public Relief

Lambert says that the king came to the city and stayed in the streets throughout the night, encouraging those trying to control the fire and rescue people from the ruins. The account presents the king’s presence not as a distant gesture but as sustained support during the immediate response. It also records relief on a broader scale: a collection was raised throughout the kingdom, and one hundred thousand guilders were paid from the treasury for the sufferers.

These actions form the aftermath of the explosion as Lambert remembers it. The destruction had overwhelmed a district, but rescue work and financial assistance extended beyond the immediate scene. The story’s movement from a ruined street to aid organized across the kingdom makes the event both a local catastrophe and an occasion for public responsibility.

Commemoration and Narrative Role

Professor Luzac, a friend of Lambert’s father, was among those killed. Lambert points to a tablet in Saint Peter's Church erected in his memory. Its carved image represents the professor as he appeared when he was found after the explosion, linking a named victim to the wider destruction and giving the disaster a continuing memorial presence.

The episode is told within the boys’ walk through Leiden: the open square prompts Lambert’s explanation, and Ben’s questions draw out the scale of what happened. The change from houses and canal to public square makes the city itself a record of the blast. Through Lambert’s account of his father, the king’s response, and Professor Luzac’s memorial, the explosion is presented not only as sudden destruction but as an event carried forward in family memory and the city’s visible history.