Catharina Maria van der Corput (1921-2012)
Catharina Maria van der Corput (1921–2012) worked in inland navigation. As a daughter of the skippering couple Anna Snel and Arnoldus van der Corput, she grew up on board a boat and was simply one of the crew, like her younger sister Marie van der Corput.
The family lived on the vessel that her father had been hired as a skipper for, sailing up both the Rhine and the Maas in the Netherlands and Belgium. She worked on board from a young age. She once related how she had stood “crying from the cold”, aged about ten or twelve, with the metal mooring cables in her hand when they had to moor to pass through a chamber lock, for instance.
She was an official crew member in the 1940s, and both she and her mother had certificates stating that they were fully acquainted with navigation and possessed the necessary physical capabilities.
