The rigid inflatable boat was not designed for tourism. Staff and students at Atlantic College in Wales refined the hull in the mid-1960s as a rescue craft, wanting something that could strike a wave, deform, and hold its line. Six decades later the same shape carries passengers down the Nieuwe Maas. Rib Boat Tour Rotterdam tours depart from Leuvehaven 73, a quay with a far longer memory than the skyline standing over it. Leuvehaven was dug in 1598, the first purpose-built harbour basin in a city that had until then made do with a dammed river mouth. It handled herring, grain, and later steam. On 14 May 1940, ninety minutes of bombardment erased roughly 2.6 square kilometres of the medieval centre and left the Witte Huis — 43 metres, completed in 1898, once the tallest office building in Europe — standing almost alone. Rotterdam did not restore what it lost. It built forward. That decision is legible from the water. The Erasmus Bridge opened in 1996 to a design by Ben van Berkel: 802 metres long, a single asymmetric pylon of 139 metres, angled hard enough that the city calls it the Swan. Behind it rises Kop van Zuid, where De Rotterdam stacked 44 floors of offset towers in 2013. Upstream, the Willemsbrug carries red steel over the same channel. A Rotterdam harbour boat tour reads these as a sequence rather than a set of postcards. The working port explains the rest. Rotterdam remains Europe's largest by tonnage, its quays running some 40 kilometres west to Maasvlakte 2, the reclaimed extension completed in 2013 and built out into the North Sea. Closer in, the Maritime Museum — founded in 1874 under Prince Hendrik — keeps its historic fleet moored in the Leuvehaven basin itself: harbour cranes, tugs, a steam icebreaker. Hotel New York occupies the 1901 headquarters of the Holland America Line, the pier from which hundreds of thousands of emigrants sailed for New York. The SS Rotterdam, 228 metres of 1959 ocean liner, has lain at Katendrecht since 2008. A Rib Boat Tour Rotterdam tour crosses four centuries of that record in a single stretch of water, and the Dutch waterfront landmarks along it were all built for use before they were built for looking at.