Spring is the best time to visit Haarlem in Holland. The traveler to
this city passes through wonderful fields covered with broad sheets of
scarlet, white, and yellow tulips. It is a sight never to be forgotten.
But, beautiful as the tulips are, it is not for this that the Hollanders
grow them in such quantities. They grow the bulb not for the flower but
for the “onion,” as it is called.
The cultivation of tulips is a great business in Holland; but today only
a small percentage of the population commercialize the flower, compared
to the number that cultivated it in the seventeenth century. The
tulipomania of that time was really a form of gambling, in which
admiration of the flower and interest in its culture were secondary
matters. In those days thousands of florins were paid for a single bulb.
Tulips grow wild along the northern shores of the Mediterranean, and in
Africa and the Far East. They were introduced into the Low Countries in
the sixteenth century from Constantinople and the Levant. Owing to their
great beauty the flowers became immediate favorites in European gardens.
It was in 1637 that the extraordinary tulipomania first took possession
of the Dutch. Not only were flower merchants seized with it, but almost
every citizen took up tulip growing. A single bulb called the “Semper
Augustus” was sold for thirteen thousand florins, and for another of the
same variety was traded “a new carriage, a pair of gray horses, and
forty-six hundred guilders.” A prize of one hundred thousand florins
offered by the horticultural society at Haarlem was won by the black
tulip of Cornelius van Baerle. But when the government stepped in and
enforced a law against gambling the price of tulips fell to nothing. The
bubble burst, and thousands of dealers were beggared in a single night.
There is an old Dutch proverb which says, “God made the sea; but we make
the shore.” For hundreds of years the Hollanders have proved this true
by literally making the land upon which they live. They must continually
fight against the encroachment of the sea, and a big factor in the work
of keeping the ocean out is done by great windmills, which pump the
water from the fields into the rivers and canals, and thus drain the
land.
Everywhere in Holland windmills can be seen. Besides pumping and
draining, they also saw wood and grind corn. Although nowadays steam and
gasolene engines can do most of the work formerly performed by
windmills, they still form a picturesque part of the Dutch landscape. By
draining whole marshes they have transformed this waste land into
beautiful green and fertile fields. In passing from The Hague to Haarlem
on the train one can see the largest of these “polders,” as the drained
marshes are called.
Windmills were used as early as the twelfth century. In all the older
windmills a shaft called the wind shaft carried four to six arms or
whips, on which long, narrow sails were spread. The tips of the sails
made a circle of sixty to eighty feet in diameter. It is this type of
windmill, with its long arms waving above the landscape, that is
associated so closely with Holland.
[Illustration: RYKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM]
_HOLLAND_
_Art in Holland_