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PAGE HOLLAND 9

ZEALAND 29

ROTTERDAM 57

DELFT 131

THE HAGUE 171

Photographs taken expressly for this edition of "Holland" by Dr. CHARLES L. MITCHELL, Philadelphia.

Photogravures by A.W. ELSON & CO., Boston.

PAGE

DUTCH FISHING-BOATS 26

DORDRECHT--CANAL WITH CATHEDRAL IN THE DISTANCE 48

IN ROTTERDAM 64

INTERIOR OF THE CHURCH OF ST. LAWRENCE 80

ON THE MEUSE, NEAR ROTTERDAM 94

THE STEIGER, ROTTERDAM 110

THE STATUE OF TOLLENS 126

NEAR THE ARSENAL, DELFT 134

MONUMENT OF ADMIRAL VAN TROMP 140

STAIRWAY WHERE WILLIAM THE SILENT WAS ASSASSINATED IN THE PRINSENHOF, DELFT 150

REFECTORY OF THE CONVENT OF ST. AGATHA, DELFT 156

OLD DELFT 166

ON THE CANAL NEAR DELFT 174

THE BINNENHOF, THE HAGUE 184

PAUL POTTER'S BULL 198

ON THE ROAD TO SCHEVENINGEN 214

FISHERMAN'S CHILDREN, SCHEVENINGEN 228

THE MAIN DRIVE IN THE BOSCH, THE HAGUE 246

THE VYVER, THE HAGUE 262

HOLLAND.

One who looks for the first time at a large map of Holland must be amazed to think that a country so made can exist. At first sight, it is impossible to say whether land or water predominates, and whether Holland belongs to the continent or to the sea. Its jagged and narrow coast-line, its deep bays and wide rivers, which seem to have lost the outer semblance of rivers and to be carrying fresh seas to the sea; and that sea itself, as if transformed to a river, penetrating far into the land, and breaking it up into archipelagoes; the lakes and vast marshes, the canals crossing each other everywhere,--all leave an impression that a country so broken up must disintegrate and disappear. It would be pronounced a fit home for only beavers and seals, and surely its inhabitants, although of a race so bold as to dwell there, ought never to lie down in peace.

When I first looked at a large map of Holland these thoughts crowded into my mind, and I felt a great desire to know something about the formation of this singular country; and as what I learned impelled me to make a book, I write it now in the hope that I may lead others to read it.

Those who do not know a country usually ask travellers, "What sort of place is it?"

Many have told briefly what kind of country Holland is.

But on one point they were all agreed, and expressed themselves in the same words: Holland is a conquest of man over the sea; it is an artificial country; the Dutch made it; it exists because the Dutch preserve it, and would disappear if they were to abandon it.

To understand these words we must picture to ourselves Holland as it was when the first German tribes, wandering in search of a country, came to inhabit it.

Holland was then almost uninhabitable. It was composed of lakes, vast and stormy as seas, flowing into each other; marshes and morasses, thickets and brushwood; of huge forests, overrun by herds of wild horses; vast stretches of pines, oaks, and alder trees, in which, tradition tells us, you could traverse leagues passing from trunk to trunk without ever putting your foot to the ground. The deep bays carried the northern storms into the very heart of the country. Once a year certain provinces disappeared under the sea, becoming muddy plains which were neither earth nor water, on which one could neither walk nor sail. The large rivers, for lack of sufficient incline to drain them into the sea, strayed here and there, as if uncertain which road to take, and then fell asleep in vast pools amongst the coast-sands. It was a dreary country, swept by strong winds, scourged by continual rain, and enveloped in a perpetual fog, through which nothing was heard save the moaning of the waves, the roaring of wild beasts and the screeching of sea-fowl. The first people who had the courage to pitch their tents in it were obliged to erect with their own hands, hillocks of earth as a protection from the inundations of the rivers and the invasions of the ocean, and they were obliged to live on these heights like shipwrecked-men on lonely islands, descending, when the waters withdrew, to seek nourishment by fishing, hunting, and collecting the eggs which the sea-fowl had laid on the sands. Caesar, when he passed by, gave the first name to this people. The other Latin historians spoke with mingled pity and respect of these intrepid barbarians who lived on "a floating country," exposed to the inclemency of an unfeeling sky and to the fury of the mysterious North Sea. Imagination can picture the Roman soldiers from the heights of the utmost wave-washed citadels of the empire, contemplating with sadness and wonder the wandering tribes of that desolate country, and regarding them as a race accursed of Heaven.

Now, when we reflect that such a region has become one of the richest, most fertile, and best-governed countries in the world, we understand how justly Holland is called the conquest of man.

But it should be added that it is a continuous conquest.

To explain this fact,--to show how the existence of Holland, notwithstanding the great works of defence built by its inhabitants, still requires an incessant struggle fraught with perils,--it is sufficient to glance rapidly at the greatest changes of its physical history, beginning at the time when its people had reduced it to a habitable country.

Tradition tells of a great inundation of Friesland in the sixth century. From that period catastrophes are recorded in every gulf, in every island, one may say, in almost every town, of Holland. It is reckoned that through thirteen centuries one great inundation, besides smaller ones, has taken place every seven years, and, since the country is an extended plain, these inundations were very deluges. Toward the end of the thirteenth century the sea destroyed part of a very fertile peninsula near the mouth of the Ems and laid waste more than thirty villages. In the same century a series of marine inundations opened an immense gap in Northern Holland and formed the Gulf of the Zuyder Zee, killing about eighty thousand people. In 1421 a storm caused the Meuse to overflow, and in one night buried in its waters seventy-two villages and one hundred thousand inhabitants. In 1532 the sea broke the embankments of Zealand, destroyed a hundred villages, and buried for ever a vast tract of the country. In 1570 a tempest produced another inundation in Zealand and in the province of Utrecht; Amsterdam was inundated, and in Friesland twenty thousand people were drowned. Other great floods occurred in the seventeenth century; two terrible ones at the beginning and at the end of the eighteenth; one in 1825, which laid waste Northern Holland, Friesland, Over-Yssel, and Gelderland; another in 1855, when the Rhine, overflowing, flooded Gelderland and the province of Utrecht and submerged a large part of North Brabant. Besides these great catastrophes, there occurred in the different centuries innumerable others which would have been famous in other countries, but were scarcely noticed in Holland--such as the inundation of the large Lake of Haarlem caused by an invasion of the sea. Flourishing towns of the Zuyder Zee Gulf disappeared under water; the islands of Zealand were repeatedly covered by the sea and then again left dry; the villages on the coast from Helder to the mouths of the Meuse were frequently submerged and ruined; and in each of these inundations there was an immense loss of life of both man and beast. It is clear that miracles of courage, constancy, and industry must have been wrought by the Dutch people, first in creating, and then in preserving, such a country.

The enemy against which the Dutch had to defend their country was threefold--the sea, the rivers, and the lakes. The Dutch drained the lakes, drove back the sea, and imprisoned the rivers.

The rivers, another internal enemy of Holland, did not cost less fatigue or fewer sacrifices. Some, like the Rhine, which loses itself in the sand before reaching the ocean, had to be channelled and protected from the tide at their mouths by immense locks; others, like the Meuse, were flanked by large dykes, like those raised to force back the sea; others were turned from their channels. The wandering waters were gathered together, the course of the rivers was regulated, the streams were divided with rigorous precision, and sent in different directions to maintain the equilibrium of the enormous liquid mass,--for the smallest deviation might cause the submersion of whole provinces. In this manner all of the rivers, which originally wandered unrestrained, swamping and devastating the whole country, have been reduced to streams and have become the servants of man.

But the fiercest struggle of all was the battle with the ocean. Holland, as a whole, lies lower than the sea-level; consequently, wherever the coast is not defended by downs it had to be protected by embankments. If these huge bulwarks of earth, wood, and granite were not standing like monuments to witness to the courage and perseverance of the Dutch, it would be impossible to believe that the hand of man, even in the course of many centuries, could have completed such an immense work. In Zealand alone the dykes extend over an area of four hundred kilometers. The western coast of the island of Walcheren is protected by a dyke, the cost of whose construction and preservation put out at interest would, it is calculated, have amounted to a sum great enough to have paid for the building of the dyke of solid copper. Round the town of Helder, at the northern extremity of Northern Holland, there is a dyke made of blocks of Norwegian granite which is ten kilometers long and stretches sixty meters into the sea. The province of Friesland, which is eighty-eight kilometers long, is protected by three rows of enormous palisades sustained by blocks of Norwegian and German granite. Amsterdam, all the towns on the coast of the Zuyder Zee, and all the islands which have been formed by fragments of the land that has disappeared, forming a sort of circle between Friesland and Northern Holland, are protected by dykes. From the mouths of the Ems to the mouths of the Scheldt, Holland is an impenetrable fort, in whose immense bastions the mills are the towers, the locks the gates, the islands the advanced forts; of which, like a real fortress, it shows to its enemy, the sea, only the tips of its steeples and the roofs of its buildings, as though in derision or in challenge.

In truth, Holland is a fortress, and the Dutch live as though they were in a fort--always in arms against the sea. A host of engineers, dependent on the minister of the interior, is scattered throughout the land, disciplined like an army. These men are continually on the alert, watching over the waters of the interior, anticipating the rupture of the dykes, ordering and directing the works of defence. The expenses of this warfare are distributed: one part is paid by the state, the other by the provinces; every proprietor pays, besides the general imposts, a special tax on the dykes in proportion to the extent of his property and to its proximity to the waters. Any accidental breach, any carelessness, may cause a flood: the danger is ever present. The sentinels are at their posts on the ramparts, and at the first attack of the sea, give the war-cry, whereupon Holland sends out arms, materials, and money. And even when great battles are not in progress, a slow, noiseless struggle is ever going on. Innumerable windmills, even in the drained lakes, are continually working to exhaust the rain-water and the water that oozes from the earth, and to pump it into the canals. Every day the locks of the gulfs and rivers shut their gigantic doors in face of the high tide, which attempts to launch its billows into the heart of the country. Work is continually going on to reinforce any weakened dykes, to fortify the downs by cultivation, to throw up fresh embankments where the downs are low--works towering like immense spears brandished in the midst of the sea, ready to break the first onset of the waves. The sea thunders eternally at the doors of the rivers, ceaselessly lashes their banks, roars forth its eternal menace, raises the crests of its billows curious to behold the contested ground, heaps banks of sand before the doors to destroy the commerce of the cities it wishes to possess; wastes, rasps, and undermines the coasts, and, unable to overthrow the ramparts, against which its impotent waves break in angry foam, it casts ships laden with corpses at the feet of the rebellious country to testify to its fury and its strength.

And here, too, Holland has accomplished many gigantic works, such as the William Canal in North Brabant, which, more than eighty kilometers long and thirty meters wide, crosses the whole of Northern Holland and unites Amsterdam to the North Sea: the new canal, the largest in Europe, which will join Amsterdam to the ocean, across the downs, and another, equally large, which will unite the town of Rotterdam to the sea. The canals are the veins of Holland, and the water is its blood.

But, aside from the canals, the draining of the lakes, and the works of defence, as one passes rapidly through Holland he sees on every side indications of marvellous labor. The ground,--in other countries the gift of nature,--is here the result of industry. Holland acquired the greater part of its riches through commerce, but the earth had to yield its fruits before commerce could exist; and there was no earth--it had to be created. There were banks of sand, broken here and there by layers of peat, and downs which the wind blew about and scattered over the country; large expanses of muddy land, destined, as it seemed, to eternal barrenness. Iron and coal, the first elements of industry, were lacking; there was no wood, for the forests had already been destroyed by storms before agriculture began; there was neither stone nor metal. Nature, as a Dutch poet has said, had denied all its gifts to Holland, and the Dutch were obliged to do everything in spite of her. They began by fertilizing the sand. In some places they made the ground fruitful by placing on it layers of soil brought from a distance, just as a garden is formed; they spread the rubble from the downs over the sodden meadows; they mixed bits of the peat taken from the water with the earth that was too sandy; they dug up clay to give a fresh fertility to the surface of the ground; they strove to till the downs; and thus, by a thousand varied efforts, as they continually warded off the threatening waters, they succeeded in cultivating Holland as highly as other countries more favored by Nature. The Holland of sands and marshes, which the ancients considered barely habitable, now sends abroad, year by year, agricultural products to the value of a hundred million francs, possesses about a million three hundred thousand head of cattle, and may be rated in proportion to its size among the most populous countries in Europe.

It is no longer the grand Holland of the eighteenth century, but it is still, next to England, the greatest colonizing state of the world. It has exchanged its former grandeur for a quiet prosperity; commerce has been limited, agriculture has increased; the republican government has lost its form rather than its substance, for a family of patriotic princes, dear to the people, govern peaceably in the midst of the ancient and the newer liberties. In Holland are to be found riches without ostentation, freedom without insolence, taxes without poverty. The country goes on its way without panics, without insurrections,--preserving, with its fundamental good sense, in its traditions, customs, and freedom, the imprint of its noble origin. It is perhaps amongst all European countries that nation in which there is the best public instruction and the least corruption. Alone, at the extremity of the continent, occupied with its waters and its colonies, it enjoys the fruits of its labors in peace without comment, and can proudly say that no nation in the world has purchased freedom of faith and liberty of government with greater sacrifices.

Such were the thoughts that stimulated my curiosity one fine summer morning at Antwerp, as I was stepping into a ship that was to take me from the Scheldt to Zealand, the most mysterious province of the Netherlands.

ZEALAND.

If a teacher of geography had stopped me at some street-corner, before I had decided to visit Holland, and abruptly asked me, "Where is Zealand?" I should have had nothing to say; and I believe I am not mistaken in the supposition that a great number of my fellow-citizens, if asked the same question, would find it difficult to answer. Zealand is somewhat mysterious even to the Dutch themselves; very few of them have seen it, and of those few the greater part have only passed through it by boat; hence it is mentioned only on rare occasions, and then as if it were a far-off country. From the few words I heard spoken by my fellow-voyagers, I learned that they had never been to the province; so we were all equally curious, and the ship had not weighed anchor ere we entered into conversation, and were exciting each other's curiosity by questions which none of us could answer.

The ship started at sunrise, and for a time we enjoyed the view of the spire of Antwerp Cathedral, wrought of Mechlin lace, as the enamoured Napoleon said of it.

After a short stop at the fort of Lillo and the village of Doel, we left Belgium and entered Zealand.

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