Littell's Living Age/Volume 127/Issue 1643/The Dutch and their Dead Cities
THE DUTCH AND THEIR DEAD CITIES.[1]
In the mean time, as we said, our friend is smoking like a chimney, and, early as it is, applying himself from time to time to the flask of schiedam he produces from his pocket. Those worthy Netherlanders live by gin and tobacco; the heavy clouds breaking up on the horizon ahead on your starboard bow came from the smoke of the numerous distilleries of the flourishing town of Schiedam. And we can hardly conceive the most fanatical of temperance lecturers having the hardihood to persist in a professional tour of the United Provinces, after experiencing the depressing effects of the rawness of their mornings and evenings. Like Mynheer Van Dunk of the national ballad, the Dutchmen, though great drinkers, are no drunkards, chiefly for the reason that in their peculiar climate their sluggish constitutions take a deal of stimulating. Considerably beyond the point where the average Englishman begins to feel decidedly the worse for liquor, the Dutchman is only imbibing medicinally, and he swallows like the sand-beds of his Haarlem tulip-gardens. If he took the pledge, he would have to change his habits and renounce all his favourite enjoyments. For the best part of the year, the whole of his country is enveloped in fogs or dense driving rain. When it does clear up, away from the sand-beds on the coast everything is left soaking; pools are forming in the bottom of the polders, the canals are brimming over, and there is a constant plash of water in course of falling from the pumps. The country people are out in steaming mists, on meadows divided by broad water-ditches. When they go to market, they travel on the canal by trekschuit or jog along on a causeway running through a waste of water. The wealthy citizen, as likely as not, has perched his mansion upon piles driven into the liquid sand that underlies his cellarage. In any case his front windows look out on one canal, his back windows on another: around him is a forest of masts and yards with sails of all sizes hung out to dry, while the great place at the corner of the street is a basin covered with boats and barges. When he takes his pleasure of an evening in his pretty suburban garden, he reposes in a summer-house reared upon poles over a canal that is brilliantly carpeted by duck-weed. The air about him is of course impregnated with damp which is often overcharged with unwholesome exhalations. Naturally he must correct that deleterious atmosphere with ardent spirits and strong tobacco; and as if to make the agreeable regimen easy for over-tender consciences, beneficent nature leaves him little choice in the matter. The inhabitants of great part of Holland are in the position of the seaman in the "Ancient Mariner," — with "water, water everywhere," there is not a drop that is fit to drink. Foreigners fall back on the bottled produce of the German springs; the natives dash their beverage with schiedam, and work the better for it and live the longer.
We grant that, to live in the country with comfort, a man ought to have been born and brought up in it; but it is the very circumstances of the struggle for existance that make a short visit so interesting to strangers. It is the fashion to speak of the Dutch as if they were anything rather than romantic. To our mind, their national history has been a sustained romance of the most sensational character, in which the famous war to the knife that shook them free of the Spanish yoke was merely an episode, and not the most remarkable. Ever since their savage ancestors, migrating westward, settled down in the swampy woodlands of Friesland and North Holland, they have been committed to a ceaseless struggle with the most formidable forces of nature. Heroically enduring and resolutely aggressive, they have hitherto had the best of it in their battle with the waters, although the storm-lashed ocean that assails them from without has found treacherous allies within their entrenchments. For the great rivers that drain the plains and mountains of Northern Europe come down in flood on the Dutch flats; and the spring freshets that follow the of the winter ice, they always threaten to burst their embankments. Frequently the water has had its way for the time, and it has kept its hold on some of the land it has conquered. Not so many centuries ago, although the precise date is uncertain, the sea burst through the northern breakwater. It has left the old land-line marked out by the chain of islands that stretches to Hanover eastward from the Texel, and has rolled the shallow Zuyder Zee over what was once an inhabited country. Nor was there any reason, according to all appearance, why a recurrence of similar disasters should not have drowned the rest of Holland. Much of the surface lies well below the sea-level, with no better natural protection than the barrier of shifting sand-heaps which is sometimes slightest and most vulnerable where the danger is most imminent. The pressure is greatest on the western coast, where, after the prevalence of particular winds, stupencfous masses of troubled water are thrown back on Holland from the narrows at Dover. But man has never relaxed in the work of entrenching and embanking; and now indefatigable industry is supplemented by the resources of science, and organized upon a system that experience has brought almost to perfection. Some of the great sea-dykes, such as those near the Helder and those others that protect the low-lying islands of Friesland, are triumphs of engineering as well as gigantic monuments of labour, while the works that bank in the dangerous flow of the lower Rhine scarcely yield to them in grandeur of execution. The Dutch, at the cost of an immense expenditure, have done nearly all that is to be done by man, and have fortified themselves pretty effectually at all points. Yet, to say nothing of the heavy insurance they have to pay on their lives and property in the shape of the annual outlay on these waterworks, it is nothing but habit and natural courage that can have enabled them to live with easy minds and go on labouring hopefully for the future. For there is little exaggeration in the saying, that the springing of a leak may sink a province; and although the sea has latterly been kept at arm's-length, yet the inundations of the rivers are periodically disastrous. You ought to have strong nerves to slumber tranquilly in stormy weather behind the great bulwarks of Kappel; but in the provinces of Gelderland and North Brabant many a man night after night must go to his bed in unpleasant uncertainty as to whether he may not be swept out of it before morning, to find himself adrift in an archipelago of ice-masses.
As the Dutch have made their country what it is, so the country has made the Dutch what they are. No wonder that men who, like their fathers before them, have been trained in such a school of self-reliance, should be good soldiers and good sailors, good traders, good farmers, and, above all, good patriots. They have learned to value the blessings they have to toil so hard for, and the country they have to hold by hard fighting. But as the climate is as ungenial as the soil is ungrateful unless it is assiduously kept in condition, they have to make the very most of the means at their disposal, and have naturally learned to practise frugality. Agriculture and dairy-farming alone could scarcely have covered the indispensable expenses of keeping out the ocean, so the Dutch early betook themselves to commerce, to stave off the poverty that threatened them. Bred to maritime adventure off their own dangerous coasts, they carried discovery into every ocean. It would be unfair to say that their early merchants and navigators were stimulated solely by the hope of gain, otherwise they would never have risked lives and ships on their desperate exploring expeditions in frozen latitudes. But, as a rule, being a highly practical people, profit and adventure went hand in hand. With their national determination, they persevered in establishing trading relations where these were most likely to be most lucrative; they set down their foot on the rich Spice Islands, whose revenues have since been such a godsend to the State as well as individuals; they laid themselves out for trade-monopolies, to the exclusion of their rivals, as when they established their factories at Nagasaki in Japan. It must be owned that, in their trading, they often stooped, or even crawled, to conquer, as when the officials of these Japanese establishments consented to degrade themselves annually, in solemn ceremony, before the mikado, that they might retain his countenance by their abject submission. But although, like the Americans, they worshipped the almighty dollar, and are said, in their adoration of it, to have gone so far as to trample on the cross, yet, whatever we may think of their compliances, there can be no question of their courage. And however far-sighted their statesmen and chief burghers may have been, their seamen were by no means of imaginative temperaments, or apt to conjure up remote dangers. They fought their enemies, whoever these were and whenever they met them, without measuring the forces or the power they might provoke; but they fought them all the more fiercely beyond the line, that it was so far a cry to Europe from the Spice Islands and the Spanish main. It was but natural that men who had always been disputing their land to the ocean should be hard to conquer, and impossible to enslave. They held to their property — no men more so: drowning it on occasion did not seem to the Dutchmen such a very desperate resource, since they had familiar experience of inundations, when they had had no time to prepare for them. And the prospect of a terrible revenge sweetened the sacrifice, for no people could be more vindictively fierce when their passions were excited: witness their treatment of De Witt and Olden Barneveld, and the bloody faction fights of the Hooks and the Kabbeljaws, of the Calvinists and the Arminians. Overtax them, oppress them, proscribe their religion, impress their seamen and cripple their commerce — they felt they were being robbed of all that was worth the living for; their phlegmatic natures were slowly wrought up to a white heat, and were not to be cooled down again except by the satisfaction of victory and of vengeance fully gratified. Hence, as we have said, their war of independence with Philip and his captains was but a natural episode in the national history; nor, in saying so, do we forget the acts of almost unparalled heroism which have been made so familiar in the pages of Motley, that it is quite superfluous to do more than advert to them.
But if the progress of scientific inventions has assisted the Dutch in some essential respects, in other ways it has handicapped them more heavily than before in the hot race with eager rivals. When the fleets of their Indian Company used to spend years on the Indian voyage, it mattered little whether they sailed from the Thames or the Ij: and it they chanced to be becalmed for weeks off the Texel, it scarcely troubled the worthy burghers who freighted them. When tedious coasting voyages were made under sail to the European ports, it was of comparatively little consequence that time should be wasted off the bar of the Maas or in tacking about among the shallows of the Zuyder Zee. The transferring the cargoes of those deep-laden ships that could not clear the bar of the Pampas had been submitted to as an inevitable necessity, or else the kameeds or lighters filled with water were secured and sunk on either side of them; then the water was pumped out, and as the emptied lighters rose, their buoyancy lifted the vessel between them. But the growth of the mercantile marine in other countries, improvements in shipbuilding, and, above all, the introduction of steam-power, changed all that. When vessels made swift voyages, sometimes several voyages in the year, time became of the utmost importance to those who were competing in the markets of the world. Could we imagine Amsterdam colonized by Spaniards or Italians, we may be sure it would have lost its trade as Venice did, and pined away in gradual decay, like one of those "dead cities" in northern Holland which we propose to visit with M. Havard by-and-by. Of all the great European seaports, no one perhaps is less favourably situated. But the Dutchmen, habituated to get the better of difficulties, were the last people in the world to resign themselves to commercial extinction and straitened circumstances. Frugal as they are by habit and temperament, they have seldom come to shipwreck through penny wisdom. They began by cutting the great ship-canal which runs parallel to the two seas, from the Ij to the Helder, through the whole length of the province of North Holland. For a time that canal satisfied the expectations of its projectors, and paid the country handsomely though indirectly. But in time it became clear that it answered its purposes but imperfectly. It began to fill up in spite of dredging, and ships sitting deep in the water had to lighten themselves of part of their cargoes at the northern terminus of Nieuwe Diep. Then the prevalent winds which set from the west blew at right angles to the course of the canal. Before it had been decided on originally, an alternative scheme had been broached and rejected, on account of its greater costliness. Subsequently the rejected scheme was brought forward again, rapidly assumed a definite shape, and has resulted in the construction of the great North-Sea Canal.
The estimated expense was as serious a consideration as the engineering difficulties. But it was felt that the commercial existence of Amsterdam was at stake, and that the fate of the city depended on the success of the undertaking. Already the community of merchant princes and cosmopolitan bankers threatened to degenerate into so many speculators and stock-jobbers. So the capital of £2,600,000 was found, the State and the city coming to the assistance of the promoters, and the canal was cut. We had the good fortune to make one of the party when the board of directors made the trial trip from sea to sea; and although knowing little of technical engeneering, we shall never forget the impression made on us by the ingenuity with which difficulties had been surmounted, and the stupendous character of the works at either end. It was a stormy day in the autumn; a formidable surf was rolling in from the North Sea; the Zuyder Zee was heaving in lines of crested breakers; even the inland waters through which the canal is carried were troubled, and dyed a lugubrious grey with the wash of the sand thrown up from the bottom. There was no difficulty in realizing the strain that would be put upon the works in the course of a rough winter. But one had only to look at the triple locks of Schellingwoude on the east, at the locks and harbour of refuge on the North Sea, to be reassured. They were epics of triumphant labour embodied in massive masonry. Each of these stupendous blocks of stone had been hewn in Belgian or Norwegian quarries; each of the ponderous piles, carefully cased in its metal sheathing to protect it from injury from marine insects, had been cut in the forests of northern Europe. Since then the locks have been severely tried, but they have come successfully through the ordeal. Those at Schellingwoude are made free to all the world. As vessels of all burdens pass through them each day by the hundred, it may be understood what an impulse they must have given to the trade of Amsterdam; while in cutting another opening in their line of coast-defences, the Dutch have not only given a fresh challenge to the sea, but have snatched another victory from their enemy. The canal serves not merely as a great inland water highway, but as a mighty drain; and its expenses have been defrayed to a considerable extent by reclaiming the submerged lands that lie along it. Off Amsterdam ground for quays, warehouses, and graving-docks has been gained from the Ij, and the pile-founded city is not only protected by another line of stronger barriers, but has been sanguinely making extensive preparations for the revival of its old commercial prosperity.
There is enough of the romantic, as it seems to us, in all this to gratify the most ardently romantic of travellers, especially if he be somewhat sated with the picturesque in its more popular forms. But even the tame Dutch scenery wins on you insensibly; and, once fond of it, you never lose the attachment. In the sight of the limitless extent of meadow-land, cut up rectangularly at intervals by parallel ditches, grazed over by the drowsy herds of sleek black-and-white cows, and stretching away in the grey distance to a horizon vaguely indicated by the shadowy sails of innumerable windmills, there is something so original that you have no time to tire of it in an ordinary journey — say between the Hague and Amsterdam. The groups of cattle standing up to their hocks in the rank herbage, their well-favoured forms reflected in the pools as they lazily flick away the flies with their tails, are so many pieces by Cuyp or Paul Potter. When you do come upon a bit of copse-wood, or on a wind-blown, weather-beaten avenue of decently-grown timber near the Hague perhaps, or in the environs of Haarlem, you appreciate it all the more that wood is so scarce. You make an expedition to the far-resounding sea — as at the favourite watering-place of Scheveningen, or at Katwyck, where the Rhine is lifted into the ocean by the aid of elaborate machinery, and the scene recalls to you at once the marine pieces by Van de Velde. There you are between the sea and the sand-hills. The breeze is catching up the sand in drifting clouds, and swirling it about you in such flying columns as are the terror of the traveller in the Asian deserts. The leaden-coloured scud drifts across a lowering sky, and everything above and below would be the abomination of bleak desolation but for here and there a blue rift overhead that lets in a stream of sunshine, for the chimneys of the snug fishers' cottages that are smoking to landward, and the flotilla of dingy-sailed fishing-boats that lies rocking on the swell in the offing. When you are staying in a town, you leave your hotel for a stroll; you wander along quays between the stationary and the amphibious population ; you go tripping over the cables of ships and barges, unlading opposite their owners' residences, as they lie moored in wooded alleys under the shelter of umbrageous trees. You pass cellars and taverns, and look down the steps through the open doors at pictures such as Ostade and Teniers have familarized you with. The "sonsy" maiden of the burgher class, in handsome but unassuming costume, framed in the lozenged lattice she is looking out of, might be a reproduction of a Terburg or a Gerard Douw. Turning a corner, with the echoing clamours of some noisy wharf still resounding in your ears, you stumble on some choice morsel of medieval domestic architecture, buttressed and turreted, with its receding angles and projecting windows, reflected in the placid surface of the water that may have stagnated from time immemorial against the weed-grown bricks. And beyond the enceinte of the city, but still entangled in its network of canals, your heart is gladdened by villas and cottages. Often, indeed, they are vulgar to villainy in their style, but the vulgarity is redeemed by the luxuriant brilliancy of the gardens, with their blooming parterres and cages of gay-plumaged tropical birds, and shrubs and hedges that thrive marvellously in the damp, although tortured and contorted into every fantastic device.
On the whole, the Dutch have been a wonderfully conservative people, in spite of their long experiences of republican institutions, and their not unfrequent demonstrations against the aristocracy of birth and intellect. Few nations have changed so little in taste and character, in type of feature, and even in costume; and as it is with themselves, so it is with their country and their buildings. Go into the Trippenhuis at Amsterdam and study Van der Helst's great picture of the jovial arquebusiers celebrating the conclusion of the peace of Westphalia. There are said to be five-and-twenty life-sized portraits in it, and you can easily believe it; for in the streets of the capital at the present day you may meet any number of men with a striking family resemblance to its heroes. You can see that the great artist has treated his subject with equal force and truth. He has permitted himself no idealistic vagaries, but has seized and stereotyped, with an admirable nicety of perception, the manifold shades of the various idiosyncrasies which all preserve a distinctly national character. For that great work of his is the national painting, par excelletice. There are the representatives of those burgher worthies who thought, and toiled, and fought, playing out with patient courage a changing game, with the existence of their country for the stake, and the kings and great captains of Europe for partners, and opponents. Broad, solid faces, bearing the traces of cares and anxious thought, are expanding into jovial hilarity; and for once, in the satisfaction of a common success, small civic differences are forgotten, and good-fellowship is in the ascendant. The hands in the painting, as has often been remarked, are to the full as characteristic as the heads: in spite of the rich ruffles here and there, you could never mistake them for the property of courtiers of Versailles or St. James', or even of patrician merchants of Venice or Genoa. They are Dutch all over — Dutch of the well-to-do burgher class, who have lived well and worked hard. The chamber is simple, as becomes the town-hall of an unpretending nation of citizens and graziers, who were found to regulate their life and conduct by the tenets of an austere religion. Yet their riches would scarcely be worth the having did they not occasionally parade the outward and visible signs of them. Carved wardrobes and richly-chased iron-bound chests, containing handsome jewels and raiment, have always been handed down as heirlooms, even in peasant households; and it is not on so triumphant an occasion as the present that the chief magistrate of the wealthiest of the Dutch cities would be found wanting. Hence all that pomp and personal bravery — the ruffles, the rings, and the golden chains of office — the magnificent doublets, slashed in velvet and brocaded in gold. There are rich drinking-vessels, too; for solid plate as a sign of wealth in reserve is almost indispensable to good credit: besides, it is a mere locking-up of capital; for the precious metals will keep their value, although you may have to lie out of your interest on them. But the menu of the banquet is more substantial than refined: there are few of those entrees and entremets that would be served elsewhere in court rejoicings to tempt the sated palate. There are huge joints, in keeping with the massive beakers — joints that lay a good foundation for drinking and smoking, and to which active men of healthy appetite, celebrating a high occasion by some pardonable excess, might cut and come again.
If we leave the Amsterdam banquet-room — where perhaps we have already lingered too long — we shall find that the pictures in other styles are equally suggestive in the way of preparing us for a tour of Holland. Paul Potter's "Young Bull," with his slightly "raised" look, contrasting the placid rumination of the cow standing near him, may be met with any day now in any retired bit of meadow. Having found a strain of cattle that fatten and milk well in an existence that is necessarily amphibious, the Dutch seem to have made no attempt to change the breed by the importation of foreigners, who might take less kindly to the climate. It is true the milk is rather watery than creamy, but that, is to be expected; and then, as the diluted fluid is given in abundance, there is always a market for the surplus stock with those English dairymen who desire to defraud their customers conscientiously. And the man looking over the fence in Potter's picture is as true to existing nature as the fence itself or the cattle. Rembrandt, Hals, and a host of imitators, with their wonderful power of managing colour, multiply figures and faces that you recognize everywhere as famihar acquaintances. Buildings such as you may still see, with their long narrow windows and their high-pitched roofs are thrown in to form the backgrounds. Ruysdael and his inferiors are fertile in "bits" where the dense masses of deep green vegetation draw extraordinary vigour from the rains and the fogs; or else they give their talents scope on the broad meadows, scattered over with herds of cattle, and dotted with windmills. Ostade and Teniers, combining episodes as they are wont to do, give you in a single tavern-scene a comprehensive epitome of village existence. You may see much the same sort of thing now as you saunter down any village street of a holiday. The same scrupulous cleanliness is preserved amid all the confusion of the revel — there is the same display of delft on the shelves over the highly-polished tables and clean-scoured dressers — the same vulgar expansiveness and Jordaens-like merriment — the same snatches of song and rough love-making, and of course the same haze of tobacco-smoke. As likely as not, the village fiddler still sits perched upon a barrel in the corner, with a jug at his elbow to grease his arm; or, if the weather admits of it, the tables are put out under some spreading tree, while the primitive waggons have pulled up hard by, and the horses, nibbling contentedly in their nosebags, stand patiently waiting the pleasure of "the boors drinking." As there is no fighting to be done at home nowadays, you no longer come upon those picturesque groups of cavaliers that Cuyp and Wouvermans delighted in — the dismounted riders in plumed hats and scarved corselets — the grey or chestnut chargers richly caparisoned. The uniforms of the modern Dutch service are decidedly more serviceable than attractive. But the grey and chestnut hacks are still much as they used to be — as are the famous draught-horses of Friesland and Gelderland. They lay on flesh very kindly; they tend rather to bone than blood; and you see few signs of their ever having been crossed with the more fiery strains of Arabia and Barbary.
Thanks to one thing or another, — to their temperament, to their climate, to their having located themselves in an out-of-the-way corner of Europe, — the Dutch have changed but little, unless when change has been indispensable to their well-being. No doubt they have been kept moving by the irresistible forces of civilization, competition, and invention; and sometimes, being far-sighted men of business, they have even anticipated the pressure. And the consequence is that, proving the truth of the Italian proverb, Chi va piano va sano, they have seldom knowingly missed a chance, and notwithstanding the heavy disadvantages that have weighted them, have made very steady progress in prosperity. Luck has stood their friend more than once, and especially in their colonial affairs. First, they made themselves masters of the Spice Islands. Then they lost them, after having been forced to throw in their lot with Napoleon; and it was only owing to English generosity or indifference that they were re-established in the occupation of these rich possessions. Rich as those possessions were, however, bad management was ruining them, and at one time it threatened to become a serious question for the State whether it might not be prudent to abandon them altogether. At that critical moment the government found a man who undertook to exploiter the resources of Java, so that they should again yield an ample revenue. We do not mean to discuss or defend the morality of the arbitrary policy by which General Van der Bosch created a variety of lucrative monopolies, and practically confiscated the property and persons of the natives for the benefit of their European masters. It is certain that he not only relieved the home treasury from grave embarrassment, and provided it with the capital necessary for works that were becoming indispensable in Holland, but he revived and developed the profitable trade which has been pouring a stream of riches into the mother country. Hitherto good luck has been aiding industry, and there can be no question that the fortunes of Holland, being bound up with the colonial empire she may possibly be deprived of, are resting on foundations at least as precarious as the mud-driven piles that support Amsterdam. So far, however, she has only had reason to congratulate herself. Out of all her trials she has emerged victoriously; intervals of dulness, depression, and servitude have only nerved her to new exertions, which have invariably been followed by fresh advances; and so far as the conduct of her citizens is concerned, there is nothing in her past history that need inspire apprehensions for the future. Nor does she readily admit that she entertains any. The citizens of Amsterdam, like the rich man in the parable, have been pulling down their warehouses that they may build greater, and have been busying themselves, as we have said, over new docks and harbours to receive the affluence of shipping which is to crowd into their port.
These rosy-coloured dreams may all come true, and when a cautious man backs his prognostications with heavy investment of his cherished capital, there is strong prima facie reason for believing that he is very likely to be in the right. But the romance of Holland has by no means ended happily, so far as it has gone, for each of the districts of the United Provinces. If the country has done well on the whole, and looks forward to the future with well-founded confidence, certain parts of it have experienced sad vicissitudes, and must resign themselves to living in the past and in the memory of vanished glories. Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the pride of their wealth and reinvigorated energy, may find melancholy warnings in the history of decaying neighbours, as to the uncertainty of human affairs. One evening we were seated in the Palace of Industry in the former city — a great crystal-roofed building resembling in some respects the Alhambra in Leicester Square — where you may indulge in refreshments while listening to music. Among the adornments of the hall were a display of scutcheons, each of them bearing a municipal coat of arms, and being surmounted by the name of the city that carried it. There were Rotterdam, Haarlem, Leyden, Utrecht, Delft, etc. — populous towns on paying lines of railway, and long familiar for their associations with some remunerative commodity, such as tulips or learning, velvets or pottery. But interspersed through these there were other names — Enkhuizen, Medemblik, Hoorn, Kempen, Monnikendam — which awakened only some faint geographical and historical memories. One was sorely puzzled to remember in some cases what and where one had heard of them; in others, where they were situated. Yet every one of these places had once had a history, though now they have almost dropped out of the recollection of their nearest neighbours, unless on the occasion of a contested election, or when it is a question of making up so many national decorations. These and others are the decaying cities that lie round the margin of the Zuyder Zee, left for the most part half stranded by its receding waters, or silted up by its advancing sands. In their day they had sent out their fleets of trading-ships to the Indies in place of a few miserable fishing-boats; and repeatedly they had changed their merchantmen into war-galleys, fighting out some bitter local feud among themselves, or taking their part in the struggle of the Provinces against invaders from Spain or England. The more reduced they were now, it was plain that they must be the better worth visiting for those who appreciate the picturesqueness of decay. And as none of them had come to a violent end, as their populations had been imperceptibly diminished and impoverished, and as the inhabitants had had ample time to reconcile themselves to oblivion and extinction, there was nothing in the nature of their misfortunes to shock the most sensitive nature, while time might be trusted to have dealt gently with the monuments of their more glorious past. Reading these names, then, and ruminating over the appropriate memories, it struck us that we could scarcely do better than explore the shores of the Zuyder Zee. But it was then late in the year, and we knew something of the difficulties and disagreeables of travelling in bad weather in northern Holland, away from the beaten tracks. So we put off our project to a more convenient season, which, we are sorry to say, has never as yet come to us. In the mean time, however, a French gentleman, an artist, has done what we have delayed to do; and M. Henri Havard has published the account of his experiences in a small illustrated volume entitled, "La Hollande Pittoresgue, Voyage aux Villas Mortes du Zuiderzée."
M. Havard sets out by telling us that there is no more interesting voyage to be made in Europe, as there is none that has been more rarely undertaken. For that there is very satisfactory reason. There are no regular communications between the decaying cities either by land or water, and, as it may be imagined, the accommodation they offer is worse than indifferent even for visitors who are by no means fastidious about their quarters. In the absence of public conveyances, M. Havard's obvious alternative was to charter a coasting craft of light draught, as most of the towns in question are more or less accessible by water. Even that, however, was not so easily done. It appears that the Dutch coasting skippers are bound to register themselves, not only as hailing from certain ports, but as plying on certain boats; and if they desire to infringe on the letter of their engagement, they have to find security for new certificates. The consequence is, that each man is only acquainted with his own especial portion of the coast, and the sea is not to be navigated safely unless by those who have a tolerable knowledge of it. Great part of the Zuyder Zee is a labyrinth of submerged banks intersected by crooked navigable channels. Between the island of Marken and the mainland for instance, we are informed that the depth varies from four feet to two. All difficulties, however, were finally overcome by M. Havard. He and his Dutch companion — a descendant, possibly, of the famous navigator, Von Heemskirk — were fortunate in making the acquaintance of an austere but comparatively adventurous mariner, owner of a tjalk of sixty tons. Captain Sluring knew as much of the Zuyder Zee as most men, and was willing to risk himself to a certain extent in exploring. But he stipulated that he should never have to sail of a Sunday, or when he did not like the look of the weather. That second condition shows the risks that seafaring men must run in these inland waters, for Sluring did not lack courage; and another of the preliminary arrangements of the party was equally suggestive in a different way. They had to arrange the means of storing a great provision of good drinking-water, for in all the districts they intended to visit, the water was so brackish as to be "detestable in taste, and prejudicial to the health of those who are unaccustomed to it;" which goes to confirm our assertion, that the Dutch are excusable if they indulge somewhat freely in gin.
The voyage began with a disembarkation on the isle of Marken. Many ordinary tourists must have sighted it, yet the inhabitants live in almost perpetual isolation. They expect to be swamped every winter, and take their precautions accordingly. Groups of the houses are clustered on the top of artificial mounds, where the people take refuge, with all their portable property, during the annual inundations. At these times communication between the hamlets can only be kept up by boat. Live stock they have none, although the island is all in pasture, except a cow or two to prove the rule, and a few disconsolate sheep. They cut their grass to sell on the mainland, living chiefly by their hay and their fishing. When they die, they are "flitted," as we should say in Scotland, to the top of one of the other mounds, more strongly bastioned than the rest, and bearing the name of the kerkhof. Of course there is neither wood nor stone in the island, so that their houses are built entirely of imported timber; and in the event of a fire breaking out, it generally spreads to a conflagration. Considering how often the Markeners are washed out or burned out, it is strange that the little island should boast some very remarkable collections of old specimens of domestic art. In more than one of the cottages, to say nothing of quaint delft ware and Japanese porcelain, of venerable glass and wonderful metal-work, M. Havard found a half-dozen of venerable armoires of beautiful workmanship, admirably preserved. It shows that there is no village in Holland so remote that the good housewives do not indulge their pet vanity of acquisition, accumulating treasures in a state-chamber, which they only open at intervals to provoke the envy of their neighbours.
Opposite to Marken lies Monnikendam, characteristically named after its founders, and the first works they undertook. In the thirteenth century or earlier, the monks in the northern German convents used occasionally to throw off swarms like bees, sending out their surplus population like the Scandinavian vikings, although the adventures they went in quest of were spiritual. It was a wandering band of the kind that set up the first tabernacles in Marken, and made a settlement on the coast opposite. The arm of the sea that lay between the two monasteries naturally took the name of the Monnikenmeer; and the monks in the mainland having begun by damming, their settlement was naturally christened the monks' dam. Monnikendam is now a place of as much consequence as some of its more northerly neighbours; yet in the days when it had its share of foreign trade, it must have supported a far larger population than at present. Now it would seem, from M. Havard's description, that the people are nodding over their milk-pails, feeling they have nothing particular to do, between the hours when the cows must be attended to, when once the cheese-presses have done their work for the day. The streets and places were grass-grown and deserted; there were few barges to stir the duck-weed on the canals; and the arrival of the little vessel that brought the strangers would have created a sensation, had there been inhabitants enough abroad for a sensation to spread among. As it was, when, in the way of business, they called on a "tinman" some ten minutes after setting foot on shore, they found that the news of their arrival had reached him already by some mysterious means. Yet these drowsy Monnikendammers, phlegmatic as they seem, are not without a sense of poetry. The monks' sea was a poetic appellation enough for the channel between Marken and the mainland; but in modern times it has been rechristened as the "Sea of Gold," which strikes us as a singularly graceful way of paying a tribute of gratitude to the richness of the bottom over which it rolls. The neighbouring dairy-farmers dredge up the sandy mud and spread it as manure over their water-meadows, which are renowned for magnificent pasturage. The next town to Monnikendam is no other than Edam, which has long been advertising its cheeses over great part of Europe. You may see its produce piled like cannon-shot at the doors of provision-dealers from the Shetlands to Sicily, and from the Irish Channel to the Baltic. "Edam" may not have the delicate creaminess of Stilton or Canrohert, or the full-flavoured richness of the Roquefort, that weds itself so naturally with the bouquet of Burgundy, when served up on vine-leaves; but it has a charm of its own coming into a Dutch picture, with the warm scarlet orange of its rind, and the bright golden-yellow of its interior; and as it can be indulged in to any extent by robust digestions, it has all honour paid it in its native country, where vigorous appetites are the rule. Mrs. Micawber remarked that the heel of a Dutch cheese was not adapted to the wants of an infant family; but we suspect if Mrs. Micawber had known more of Holland, she would have found "Edam" a common article of consumption amongst the Dutch children of tender years. At all events, adults devour it in season and out of season. One of your earliest impressions of Holland is the singularity of seeing great slices of cheese served up at breakfast as a matter of course. Considering that cheese-making has always been one of the staple industries of this part of the province of North Holland, and that the land, to say the least of it, supports as many animals as ever it did, it seems almost unaccountable that the population of Edam should have dwindled, in the course of a couple of centuries, to a fifth of its former twenty-five thousand.
It is easier to explain the decadence of Hoorn. Hoorn, like Edam, still lives by its cheese, and does even a larger business in that article, as M. Havard informs us. There is a market held every Thursday, when loaded waggons roll in under the ancient gateways and over the creaking drawbridges; when the farmers drive up the high street in primitive vehicles, covered with quaint carvings and flaunting in paint; and when each consignment of the dairies is duly carried to the town-scales and weighed by ofiicials in the medieval garb of coats of white and caps of colour. But whereas Edam has to be approached by canals, Hoorn lies actually on the sea, and had once a large commerce. It is true that nowadays its harbour is like a patent rat-trap, and it is much more easy to get in than to get out. The outer sluices can only be opened when the water is at a certain level, and the sluices may be sealed hermetically in the course of prolonged bad weather. But once its double harbour, such as it was, used to be filled with tiers of shipping; its hardy seamen were brimful of dash and patriotism, and took as kindly to fighting as to peaceful trade. It sent a formidable contingent to the flying squadrons with which De Ruyter used to sweep the Northern Sea in the scandalous days of the degenerate Stuarts. When he moored his fleet in the Medway, and the sound of his cannonade was heard in the city of London, many of his vessels hailed from Hoorn. One of its gates displays a memorial of these glorious days in the shape of an English coat of arms, in staring colours that are carefully renewed. The legend runs that a couple of negroes from Hoorn, on board one of the admiral's ships, carried off the original of the escutcheon from a vessel lying in the Thames. And the Hoorn people have another trophy to show, in remembrance of another honourable exploit. For they played so conspicuous a part on the day of the great sea-fight, when De Bossu's Spanish armada was shattered in the Zuyder Zee, that they had assigned to them in their share of the spoil the drinking-cup of the captured admiral. Enkhuizen treasures his sword, and Monnikendam his collar of the Golden Fleece. Nor was Hoorn less distinguished in the way of maritime discovery. Tasman sailed from there to discover New Zealand and Tasmania; so did Jan Pietersz Koen, who laid the foundation of his country's colonial prosperity in the South Seas; and Schouter, who was the first to double Tierra del Fuego, the southern extremity of the New World, and who gave the name of his native town to the terrible cape of clouds and storms. Though no longer rich or commercially prosperous, M. Havard found Hoorn still tolerably well-to-do, and, considering the circumstances of the climate, preserving a wonderful air of gaiety. To say nothing of its picturesque ancient gateways, which are somewhat melancholy reminders of departed greatness, the old houses get themselves up as freshly as ever. With scarcely an exception, they have all been maisons de luxe, with pointed roofs and staircase gables, with salient reliefs of grey granite, throwing out the warm colours of their brick façades, and richly decorated with carvings in stone as well as in wood. Hoorn, in short, although it stands among rain and fogs, is apparently one of the most coquettish little towns in the world. As M. Havard observes, it seems as if the only appropriate costume in it were the plumed hat, the jack-boots, and the rapier that we meet with in the portraits of Rubens and Van der Helst.
Enkhuizen, at one time even more prosperous than Hoorn, has now only half Hoorn's population. Its sixty thousand inhabitants have come down to five thousand, and in its harbours, which are said to have once sent out one thousand vessels, there are fewer skiffs than are owned by the fishermen of Marken. And there is one peculiarity about its desolation. There are cities in the neighbouring Low Countries that have seen sad changes — Bruges and Ypres, for example. But Bruges and Ypres, like Hoorn, still cover very much their old extent of ground, though blocks and single houses have dropped out here and there, and although apartments go begging in the dwellings that remain. In Enkhuizen it is very different. A part of the old city is left in decay, but as for the rest, it has disappeared altogether as if its foundations had been razed and the ground swept clean. Long-abandoned sites, like Nineveh and Babylon, are still marked by artificial mounds bestrewed with fragments of brick and pottery. More than half of Enkhuizen is now a verdant meadow, although, if you dig deep beneath the surface, you will find traces in abundance of its departed life. Far away in the quiet of the country, strolling through the fields, M. Havard came upon a solitary gate that once gave access to the city on that side. What stifled the enterprise of Enkhuizen was the silting-up of its harbour: now it has fallen back on the manufacture of the buoys which are so much in demand on the shoals and banks that have been the ruin of it and other localities. But even in its depression and poverty it still finds money to spare for those benevolent objects to which the Dutch subscribe so generously. No city in Europe is more amply provided with charitable institutions than their capital of Amsterdam, and here at Enkhuizen there is an admirably conducted orphan asylum, dating from the more prosperous years of the city in the beginning of the seventeenth century.
But as each of these dying towns very much resembles another, it is not our purpose to follow M. Havard in his leisurely circumnavigation of the Zuyder Zee. We have borrowed nearly enough from him to indicate the changes that time and circumstances have brought about in the different provinces of a country that is generally prosperous, and to show that the parts that are the least visited by travellers are very far from being the least interesting. There is Medemblik, once the chief town of West Friesland, with a mint of its own, magnificent basins, spacious quays, and the finest shipbuilding-yards in the whole of Holland. These are all to be seen still, but there is scarcely a sign of life stirring in them. There are only three thousand souls left in the place, and they move about it like spectres gliding round a graveyard. Their sole means of communicating with the outer world are by a single small diligence, which crawls periodically to Hoorn. Harlingen, on the other hand, which lies on the opposite shore of the sea, has rallied again, and is become the great outlet for the cattle, the cheeses, the eggs, and the vegetables which are shipped from Friesland for the English markets. But at Hindelopen, which boasts an antiquity of some thousand years or more, the harbours have filled up, like those of Enkhuizen, till you must pole the boat along among the rank growth of matted weeds that makes the port resemble a polder. Stavoren used to make treaties of its own with foreign nations, and is said at one time to have held the third place in the Hanseatic League. Now Stavoren has dwindled to some hundred houses, half of them falling into ruins; and it has hardly five times as many inhabitants. Kampen was made a city of the empire when Maximilian met the diet at Worms. Its citizens had protected themselves and their wealth with walls and towers, and deep fosses that were flooded from the Yssel. It still shows signs of healthy life, though its streets are ill-paved and many of its houses out of repair; but in spite of the vulgarity of reviving prosperity, M. Havard found it as well worth visiting as any of its neighbours, for its inhabitants have been careful to preserve the monuments of its earlier splendour. They have levelled their walls to let in light and air, but they have laid out the site in gardens and turned their city ditches into stretches of ornamental water. There are plate, paintings, and wood sculptures to be seen in the Stadhuis and elsewhere; there are books in the town library; there are the remains of a number of monastic institutions, for Kampen was Catholic and munificent: above all, some superb gates are left standing, and set off by the trees, shrubs, and flowers that have been planted around them. Then there is Harderwyk, a little town, a sort of Chatham or Cherbourg in miniature, reclaimed like an oasis from the surrounding desert where the sand has gained the upper hand. Strange to say, for Holland, there is little water, except what comes from rain or inundation: the slightest breeze drifts the loose sand over the barren heaths, which are only browsed by some half-starved sheep. But Harderwyk itself and its immediate neighbourhood have been made tolerably habitable by human industry. Its streets and barracks show a military smartness, for it is the great depot whence the recruits are despatched to fill the ranks of the colonial army. It owed its origin to one of those calamities that have destroyed so much property in Holland. The surrounding country was once as fertile as any other part of Gelderland; but in the thirteenth century it was submerged. A handful of shepherds, flying for their lives, took refuge on the highest of the sand-hills, and the collection of huts they established grew into the town of Harderwyk — "the refuge of the shepherds." Though it now smells of pipeclay, and the gown has given place to the uniform, yet its earlier fortunes are associated with learning, and three or four hundred stranger students are said to have attended the famous schools, which educated among others Boerhaave and Linnæus.
We have said nothing of the Helder and Nieuwe Diep, and the stupendous embankments to be seen in their neighbourhood; nor of cities situated somewhat inland, like Leeuwarden, Zwolle, or Amersfoort. Paying a visit to these is merely a question of taking a railway-ticket. But the islands that still act in some measure as a breakwater to shelter the Zuyder Zee from the full force of the North Sea rollers are only to be brought within reach of the traveller if he goes cruising on his own account like M. Havard. The Texel, to be sure, can be reached by chartering a skiff at Nieuwe Diep, and it is better worth an expedition than any of the rest of the group. It is at once the most exposed and by far the richest and most populous. The Texel mutton is as celebrated as the "pré salé" of the French salt marshes, and for the same reason. The pasturage is seasoned with the brine that comes drifting in on the spray from the ocean. But if they can breed sheep of the finest quality, the inhabitants have to pay for it in embankment works and anxiety. To quote Andrew Marvel, the ocean is always threatening to play at leap-frog over their steeples as it has often played before. At intervals the island has been washed almost clean: so late as 1825, it was nearly drowned, and for some time it was very doubtful whether it would ever get its head above water again. Vlieland and Terschelling are so bleak and barren, that man has very much abandoned them to nature. But if it is likely that the sea may some day engulf the Texel, Ameland in a very short time will be again united to the mainland. Dykes and breakwater have been judiciously disposed with that idea, and the water is gradually throwing up an isthmus which will soon turn the island into a peninsula. That line of islands survived the great inundation because, low as they are, they stand comparatively high, and although their soil is sand it is relatively firm. But the little isles of Urk and Schokland that lie well into the Zuyder Zee, off the curve of coast between Stavoren and Kampen, appear only to have been kept in existence by something like a series of miracles. The former has a thriving fishing population of about twelve hundred souls, who, if it were not for the force of habit and the indifference bred by familiarity with danger, must feel very like so many castaways adrift on a frail raft that at any moment may go to pieces beneath them. But as for Schokland, life there becomes too precarious even for amphibious Dutchmen. The island has taken its name from the shocks it constantly receives from the ocean; the people have been gradually leaving it like the rats in a sinking ship; and we are told that the few families who cling to it from affection are fully aware they are tempting providence, and have quite made up their minds to the worst.
We have necessarily done but imperfect justice to M. Havard's most interesting book, and may consequently have conveyed an imperfect idea of the attractions of a summer cruise in those Dutch inland waters. But we have heard of nothing so near home that is likely to be so fruitful of fresh enjoyment, for if Holland generally is too much neglected, these decaying cities have been well-nigh forgotten.
- ↑ La Hollande Pittoresque, Voyage aux Villes Mortes du Zuiderzée. Par M. Henri Havard. E. Plon et Cie., Paris.