method of developing the speed of a trotting horse, and it certainly
appears to be a less comfortable one, but ride them they do in many
parts of Holland. I can imagine only one reason for the prevalence of
the custom, and that is that the trotting horses are so rotund and
ponderous that the shafts of no sulky would fit them, and if it did, no
driver could spread his lower limbs so far apart as to drive the horse
from the sulky’s seat. Large and ample as Percherons are some of these
North Holland and Friesland horses, with long, well-groomed tails and
manes; but they have a faster gait than they might be given credit for
when seen hitched to a cart or a farm wagon. Pads with knee braces,
which serve the riders in place of saddles, are strapped to the horses’
backs, and they trot the course with but little less action than blue
grass Kentuckians. A singular thing is that they seldom “break,” their
weight apparently holding them to the trot.
The express trains from Amsterdam to Leeuwarden make the run in just
over three hours and a half, including the ferry passage of an hour
and ten minutes across the neck of the Zuyder Zee from Enkhuizen
to Stavoren. The line runs through Zaandam to Hoorn and thence to
Enkhuizen through the richest farming district in North Holland.
The farmhouses, somewhat more substantially built than those in the
south, resemble what we rather ambiguously call “country residences.”
They have their lawns and their gardens full of flowers, and each
is surrounded with its little moat, bridged by a tiny archway which
connects the house with the road at but a single point.
Enkhuizen is the unfortunate victim of what its inhabitants must
consider to be a depraved taste for salmon rather than herring. The
Rhine salmon has taken the place of the humble herring on the Dutch
menu cards, and the town of Enkhuizen has dwindled accordingly. Of its
fleet of four hundred herring vessels and its population of 40,000
souls in the seventeenth century, not a single fishing smack and only
6,300 descendants of its earlier inhabitants remain.
Aside from the magnitude of its one-time fishing industry, Enkhuizen
courts the fickleness of fame by being the birthplace of Paul Potter.
Born in 1625, he painted his most renowned canvas, “The Bull”--now
in the Mauritshuis at The Hague--at the age of two-and-twenty, and
died but seven years later--only another of the many instances where
Death has chosen to lay his hand upon the shoulder of one so young and
signally gifted in preference to an octogenarian dullard.
Waiting alongside the dock station at Enkhuizen will be the side-wheel
steamer that ferries the passengers the fourteen miles across the
Zuyder Zee to Stavoren in Friesland. The old Dromedary Tower, as they
call it, at the harbor, diminishes rapidly into the general skyline
of Enkhuizen, and you will be sailing out over what was once a broad
isthmus of dry land--for the Zuyder Zee was not always the Zuyder Zee.
Until the thirteenth century it consisted of but a comparatively small
inland lake called Flevo. Near the close of that cycle--in 1282, to
give the exact year--the German ocean burst over the land from the
north, wiping the lives of 80,000 people out of existence and combining
itself and Lake Flevo into one, which was henceforth called the Zuyder
Zee. Above the ferry crossing, beginning at the eastern end of the
little island of Wieringen, they will build the contemplated dam across
it, the first process in the reclamation of more than a million acres
of what was once a fertile, productive district.
In pleasant weather it is a beautiful trip across the neck of the Zee,
but if the breeze blows from the north, bringing with it the customary
cold drizzle of rain, the best method of putting in the time is to go
below to the cabin and follow the invariable custom of the country of
eating bread and great, thin slices of Dutch cheese.
Stavoren is the deadest of all the “dead cities of the Zuyder
Zee.” At the beginning of the thirteenth century the merchants of
Stavoren were prepotent among the rulers of the world of trade and
commerce. Treasures from all the then known corners of the earth
lay in their storehouses. The homes of these merchant princes were
palaces comparable only with those of kings and furnished with the
sumptuousness and incomputable grandeur of the famous abodes of the
Sultan Harun-al-Rashid in the “Arabian Nights.” Previously, Stavoren
had been the residence of all the Frisian princes. But riches
contributed to the pride that came before its fall. To-day the census
taker counts its population in three figures and its commerce is not
worthy of mention in a trade report. The smoke of the lingering express
train that will subsequently carry you to Friesland’s capital is the
only evidence that the town may not be abandoned completely.
As you sail into the harbor, a wide, grass-grown embankment in front
of the town can be seen plainly from the steamer’s deck. This is
the Vrouwensand, and it recalls the legend that attributes the fall
of Stavoren to the whims of a woman. The reader himself must be the
judge whether or not the tale is worth the telling. One writer on
Holland asserts that no author dealing previously with the country
in a literary way has been gifted either with the independence or
the imprudence to avoid it. His predecessors have been numerous and
illustrious, and if the story be so important that each of them has
seen fit to relate it, I can do naught but imitate.
Of all the inhabitants of the old city of Stavoren, none was so blessed
with riches as the wife of a certain wealthy merchant. Continually
bathed in the high lights of smiling fortune, she plucked one by one
the treasures that were thrown daily at her feet. She owned everything
of intrinsic value that the fabulous wealth of her husband could
bestow upon her. But one thing she did not possess, and that was
love. Her character was devoid of a woman’s tenderness. She was cold,
indifferent, supercilious, insouciant. Exaggerated pride in her own
wealth and an undying envy of those whose fortunes dared to compete
with hers--these were the only passions of her life.
One day, while acting as hostess at a great banquet, a stranger from
the Far East was ushered into the room. He had come, he said, to behold
the marvelous wealth of Stavoren with his own eyes, and now that he
had penetrated into this merchant’s house, he felt he had been amply
rewarded.
The merchant’s wife, not impervious to flattery, requested the traveler
to be seated and to partake of the banquet as her unbidden but welcome
guest. He accepted the invitation in part, but asked, according to the
custom of the Orient whence he came, for nothing but some bread and
salt. Servants were dispatched to bring both, but returned, saying that
no such simple articles of food could be found in the house. Thereupon
the stranger, without further word, ate of the costly and unfamiliar
dishes prepared for the banquet.
After the feast he told of his travels, he expatiated upon the
successes and the failures of his life, he discoursed with much
eloquent verbiage upon the instability of earthly fortunes, and he
prognosticated the ultimate fall of wealth and splendor. His hostess
became offended, not only because of his contumelious belittling the
value of riches in her presence and before her guests, but because he
had failed thus far to compliment her upon her personal beauty and the
luxuries to be found in her home. Before he took his leave he mollified
his views to this extent: “O gracious lady,” he said, “marvelous indeed
is your home and fit for a queen; if you traveled far and near you
could not find its equal. But, my lady, among your treasures I miss
one thing, and that is the noblest that all the earth produces.” He
departed forthwith, leaving the gathering in a state of perplexity.
To please the whim of his wife, the merchant dispatched a fleet of
ships to cruise the world until it should find “The noblest thing
that all the earth produces,” whereupon the fleet’s commander should
fill the hulls and cover the decks with it and bring it to Stavoren.
For months the ships sailed about, touching at one port and then at
another, blindly searching for this most costly of all treasures.
One day a heavy sea came over one of the ships, flooding the ’tween
decks and spoiling the provisions. The crew became in need of bread,
but there was no flour with which to bake it. The men grew mutinous.
The captain saw that neither gold nor silks nor precious jewels could
outweigh the value of bread, and the occurrence led him to believe
that bread was the most expensive thing in the world. He reported the
matter to the commander, who agreed with his specious argument, and the
whole fleet hurried to the nearest port, which happened to be Danzig.
They loaded the vessels with the finest wheat, and set sail direct for
Stavoren.
When the merchant’s wife heard of the nature of the cargo the fleet had
brought home, she ordered the wheat thrown into the sea. The poor of
the town begged and implored, stormed and reproached, but of no avail;
the order of the woman was executed to the letter.
By and by myriads of blades of grainless wheat commenced to appear
above the surface of the water. Their stocks and roots collected the
sand as it was washed up by the tides of the German ocean, forming a
great sand dune that blocked the port so that vessels could neither
enter nor leave. The inhabitants of the place were suddenly brought
face to face with the fact that commerce, the source of their wealth,
had to be abandoned. Poverty and want reigned where riches ruled
before. The wife of the once wealthy merchant wandered about from
village to village, begging the bread which no one who had heard
of her improvidence would give her. She suffered death from utter
starvation. Then one night the sea began to boom and, bursting over the
dunes, buried the town forever.
To this day the more superstitious of the fisher-folk who ply their
vocation along that coast of the Zuyder Zee talk of the wonderful
sunken city of Stavoren and how its pinnacles and palaces at the bottom
glitter up through the pellucid waters under the rays of a summer’s
sun.
[Illustration: The most characteristic feature of the Frisian costume
is the metal skull cap worn as the headdress of Friesland’s women]
XII
FRIESLAND AND ITS CAPITAL
Leeuwarden is the most important town in Friesland; therefore its
capital. Also it is the only place in the province that is really
worth a protracted visit. On the way from Stavoren you may wander up
the coast a short distance to Hindeloopen, once famed for its highly
decorated furniture and the many-colored costumes of its natives; you
may stop off at Sneek and see its _stadthuis_ and its _waterpoort_,
better examples of which you will have already seen in North Holland;
you may journey over to the coast town of Harlingen--a much less
interesting fishing port than Volendam--breaking the trip at Franeker
to see the wonderfully ingenious astronomical model of the workings of
the solar system which took one of the more inventive citizens of the
place, Eise Eisenga by name, seven years to construct; but all of these
especial features, and more, can be seen and studied in Leeuwarden.
When you enter the interior of Friesland you will be penetrating
one of the three or four provinces of Holland that are not overrun
with tourists. Even in its capital an American is more or less of a
curiosity and he may expect to be stared at until the people stumble
over each other, almost, in their well-meaning efforts to divine his
nationality; but he may console himself in the thought that they will
be just as curious, if not as humorous, to him as he is to them.
Before the time of the terrific geographical convulsion responsible
for the formation of the Zuyder Zee, there had been but one Friesland,
stretching over much of the entire territory later known as that of
the Dutch Republic, including Holland. Its inhabitants, the Frisians,
were renowned throughout Europe for their physical prowess. Imbued
with an unquenchable love for political independence, they had shaken
off the yokes of the imperial counts and had formed the league of the
seven “Sea Lands” in the eleventh century. After being subjugated for a
time by Charlemagne, they suddenly rebelled, and in 1256 defeated and
put to death the German king, William II of Holland. When the German
ocean rolled in over the land, engulfing considerably more than a
thousand Frisian villages, it separated kindred peoples, creating not
only a geographical but a political chasm between them. West Friesland
became absorbed in Holland, but East Friesland continued its career as
a confederation of independently governed maritime provinces, until
Saxony, hard pressed for funds, sold its sovereignty to the house of
Austria for a paltry 350,000 crowns.
Then Charles V, Count of Holland, Emperor of Germany, King of
Jerusalem, Sicily, and Spain, Duke of Milan, dominator of much in
Asia and Africa and “autocrat of half the world,” established his
predatorial authority, and “this little country, whose statutes
proclaimed her to be ‘free as the wind as long as it blew,’ whose
institutions Charlemagne had honored and left unmolested, who had freed
herself with ready poniard from Norman tyranny, who had never bowed her
neck to feudal chieftain, nor to the papal yoke,” finally forfeited her
independent existence. Her peoples are the only Germanic tribe that
have preserved an unaltered nomenclature since the time of the Romans;
they will be Frisians to-morrow, as they were the day before yesterday.
The most prominent and characteristic feature of the Frisian costume is
the headdress of its women--in fact, it is the only one extant worthy
of any notice whatever, for the remainder of the make-up, not only of
the men but of the women also, is commonplace and unattractive. This
headdress consists of a kind of metal skullcap, as often made of gold
as of silver, fitting closely at the temples and embellished at these
points with a pair of spiral ornaments. Over this is worn a cap of
white or light blue lace, having a so-called “tail piece” dangling down
the back of the neck like the scoop of a fireman’s helmet. On top of
all this, many of the women--as if their violent efforts to adapt the
modern were wrestling with a series of sturdy determinations to retain
the antique--will crown the sublime with the ridiculous by wearing an
old-fashioned black “poke bonnet,” with the strings tied in a bow under
the chin. These gold and silver head-pieces are handed down from one
generation to another, and the gold ones, especially, are expensive;
but that item does not curb the desire and ambition of every mother’s
daughter in Friesland to own one, where the usual heirloom has not been
forthcoming.
An admirable collection showing the evolution of the Frisian metal
skull plate is on view in the Frisian Museum in Leeuwarden. Adapted
first as a kind of hair ornament of two coin-sized flat pieces
connected simply by a thin wire, its size developed gradually until
the two small termini became consolidated into a single large one that
covered the entire head of the wearer. The latest specimen in the
Museum is decorated in front with a diamond-studded brooch, the whole
costing in the neighborhood of $1,200.
[Illustration: Leeuwarden’s structural curiosity is the Olde-Hove,
an unfinished church tower of brick, leaning with all the abandon of
Pisa’s Tower]
The Frisian Museum in Leeuwarden contains also about the most valuable
and comprehensive collection of old Delft, Chinese, and Japanese ware
in Holland, tastefully cabineted in one of the large rooms on the
ground floor. To the connoisseur in such matters this room is a treat
that cannot be overlooked with impunity, for the character of its
contents is unparalleled and its value indeterminable. Shelf after
shelf there are of the most delicately tinted tea sets and table
services, vases and urns of every description, and the wooden columns
that support the floor above are hung with graduated festoons of plates
and saucers, so that it would take the greater part of a week to
inspect them all.
On the second floor are a number of tiled rooms furnished in authentic
sixteenth and seventeenth century style, even to the sleeping bunks in
the walls and the miniature ladders that once assisted in climbing into
them. The models of these and most of their furnishings were found in
Hindeloopen. To increase the realistic effect of these apartments the
authorities have introduced groups of three or four stuffed figures
attired in the costumes of the period, posed in front of the fireplace
or about a center table, but they are so stiff and ludicrous-looking
that they might well be dispensed with, and their costumes shown to
better effect behind the glass of a cabinet. In the basement can be
seen a few rooms finished and outfitted with the domestic and culinary
implements of the same centuries.
In addition to all these there are two adjoining rooms on the second
floor of the Museum containing old furniture and decorations bequeathed
to the State by the artist Bisschop. The most conspicuous object in
one of these rooms is an immense cabinet of beautifully carved oak,
black and glossy with age, that would excite the envy of any lover of
the antique. Built in 1610, it was purchased thirty-five years ago by
Bisschop for something like twelve or fifteen dollars; to-day it has a
valuation of $2,000. On its top stand two pieces of old Delft for which
the artist originally gave as little as ten gulden.
The remaining rooms of the Museum contain collections of Roman and
Frisian coins and medals, Roman curiosities found in the neighborhood,
fine old silver plate and flagons, remarkably carved ivory hunting
horns, and, since the early Frisians were alleged by some to be the
first pipe smokers in Europe, an instructive conglomeration of pipes
and tobacco pouches and all the accessory appurtenances necessary to
the full enjoyment of the weed.
The Chancellerie, a large building just around the corner from the
Museum, erected in the reign of Philip II and used originally as a law
court, still serves the government by housing the national archives
and the provincial library. With its handsome Gothic façade, this
building is Friesland’s architectural masterpiece and one of the best
preserved of ancient buildings in all Holland. In forceful contrast to
it is Leeuwarden’s structural curiosity, an unfinished church tower of
brick, called the Olde-Hove, one hundred and thirty feet in height and
marking the western boundary of the city proper. Just when it will take
it into its head to topple over is a problem of uncertain solution,
but, judging from this Dutch Leaning Tower of Pisa’s utter disregard
for the perpendicular, it looks as though it might bury a part of
Leeuwarden’s pretty park under its débris almost any minute.
The city of Leeuwarden is entirely surrounded by the cobra-like coil
of a wide canal, the quays of which afford loading and unloading
facilities for the many boats that ply to and from Leeuwarden from and
to almost every point in Holland. Along the north and west edges of
this canal on the town side they have planted lawns and flower beds on
the site of the old city bastions. And, speaking about flower beds, the
largest geraniums I think I ever saw were growing in a little plot near
the station in Leeuwarden; each cluster of blossoms seemed as great in
diameter as the head of a small cabbage. Friesland is also the land of
begonias, but in Groningen the plants seem to bear a larger flower than
they do in Leeuwarden.
Distant as it is from the great centers of Dutch life and activity,
Leeuwarden seems of more recent vintage than any city of its size you
will have seen so far in the Netherlands; its types are fewer than
in almost any town on the other side of the Zuyder Zee and its old
buildings and churches are less numerous. Most of the former they have
adapted to modern usage, and even the old weigh-house that stands
severely alone beside the canal in the Waagsplein has been turned into
a fire station. The canal that sweeps through the town from west to
east is lined where the space permits with little colonies of shops on
wheels, built of corrugated iron and capable of being closed at night
against the mischievous pranks of young Holland--peripatetic shopping
and marketing districts, offering anything and everything for sale that
may be found in the permanent stores.
Hotel accommodations, however, are more provincial. In the dining-room
everyone is seated at one long table, as in the smaller hotels in The
Hague, so that an ordinary mealtime looks more like a banquet. The
business and social phases of the hotel are conducted in one large room
wherein the men gather after dinner to sit and smoke, read, or play
chess. Here in a corner at a little desk holds forth the head waiter.
Although he is the functionary who assigns you to your room and to
whom you pay your bill, he is not so preëminent as the head waiters of
most of the hotels in the south, for the proprietor usually shows a
preference to manage the place according to his own ideas. As a general
rule he will do his own marketing and, if conditions require it, he is
not above helping to wait upon the table and making himself useful in
many other ways.
Not far from Leeuwarden, in the village of Dronrijp, was born, in 1836,
one of Holland’s most eminent modern artists, although a naturalized
subject of Great Britain since 1873--Sir Laurens Alma Tadema, some
noted examples of whose work are to be seen in the Mesdag Museum in The
Hague.
Another town, Marssum, a few miles distant, is famous as the center
of the cattle district, and dealers and breeders come to some of the
large farms in the vicinity from all over the world, including America,
to purchase blooded Frisian stock. Indeed, all along the thirty-three
miles of railway between Leeuwarden and Groningen the pastures are
dotted with fine, healthy-looking black and white cows. Each field
being surrounded by a small canal eight or ten feet in width, the
cattle may be segregated, one herd from another, by simply closing
the gates on top of the narrow hills that lead across the intervening
canal from one pasture to its neighbor; thus the labor and expense of
building fences is saved. As much as North Holland is noted for its
cheese, just so much is Friesland famed for its butter, and between
130,000,000 and 140,000,000 pounds of it are churned annually. The
conditions of the trade are exceptionally sanitary and at all times
under government inspection.
Here and there through Friesland--in fact, through almost any part of
the Netherlands--you will see a high wooden tripod topped with the
usual cartload of débris that constitutes a stork’s nest; for the
stork, be it remembered, is the national bird of Holland, and if the
farmhouse offers no suitable place, such as a chimney pot, for example,
for the stork to build its summer home, the farmer is wont to court the
luck that a nesting stork about the place is thought to be sure to
bring, and builds a nesting place for it.
They wend their migratory way northward, these storks, from the
interior of Africa near the sources of the Nile, and make their
appearance in Holland contemporaneous with the first signs of
approaching spring. Their coming is regarded as a veritable Godsend by
the Netherlander and the various Dutch journals feature the “stories”
of first reported arrivals, and devote to them an amount of space
commensurate with the importance of the event, while any decrease in
the numbers of the birds is quickly observed and promptly linotyped.
When the storks, so high in the air that they appear as mere specks,
approach the familiar scenes and nesting places of previous summers,
they descend to the earth in pairs to hunt about for their old abodes.
Having finally discovered these, a deal of repairing will have to be
done to render them once more habitable. Both the male and the female
labor with a great deal of energy and no little resourcefulness in
the reconstruction of the old nest, collecting sticks and twigs, and
weaving them together with much mathematical precision. Endowed with
no vocal power of calling each other or criticising their work, their
silence while at the task is punctuated only with a comical snapping of
bill and a suggestive flapping of wings. If a certain pair has been a
little premature, perhaps, and chosen, not always by mistake, another
pair’s nest, the ensuing imbroglio often results in such a complete
destruction of the point at issue that both pairs instead of one must
build anew.