Holland

Holland is one of the queerest countries under the sun. It should

be called Odd-land or Contrary-land, for in nearly everything it is

different from the other parts of the world. In the first place, a large

portion of the country is lower than the level of the sea. Great dikes,

or bulwarks, have been erected at a heavy cost of money and labor

to keep the ocean where it belongs. On certain parts of the coast it

sometimes leans with all its weight against the land, and it is as much

as the poor country can do to stand the pressure. Sometimes the dikes

give way or spring a leak, and the most disastrous results ensue.

They are high and wide, and the tops of some of them are covered with

buildings and trees. They have even fine public roads on them, from

which horses may look down upon wayside cottages. Often the keels of

floating ships are higher than the roofs of the dwellings. The stork

clattering to her young on the house peak may feel that her nest is

lifted far out of danger, but the croaking frog in neighboring bulrushes

is nearer the stars than she. Water bugs dart backward and forward above

the heads of the chimney swallows, and willow trees seem drooping with

shame, because they cannot reach as high as the reeds nearby.

Ditches, canals, ponds, rivers, and lakes are everywhere to be seen.

High, but not dry, they shine in the sunlight, catching nearly all

the bustle and the business, quite scorning the tame fields stretching

damply beside them. One is tempted to ask, “Which is Holland--the shores

or the water?” The very verdure that should be confined to the land

has made a mistake and settled upon the fish ponds. In fact, the entire

country is a kind of saturated sponge or, as the English poet, Butler,

called it,

A land that rides at anchor, and is moor’d,

In which they do not live, but go aboard.

Persons are born, live, and die, and even have their gardens on

canal-boats. Farmhouses, with roofs like great slouched hats pulled over

their eyes, stand on wooden legs with a tucked-up sort of air, as if

to say, “We intend to keep dry if we can.” Even the horses wear a wide

stool on each hoof as if to lift them out of the mire. In short, the

landscape everywhere suggests a paradise for ducks. It is a glorious

country in summer for barefoot girls and boys. Such wading! Such mimic

ship sailing! Such rowing, fishing, and swimming! Only think of a chain

of puddles where one can launch chip boats all day long and never make

a return trip! But enough. A full recital would set all young America

rushing in a body toward the Zuider Zee.

Dutch cities seem at first sight to be a bewildering jungle of houses,

bridges, churches, and ships, sprouting into masts, steeples, and

trees. In some cities vessels are hitched like horses to their owners’

doorposts and receive their freight from the upper windows. Mothers

scream to Lodewyk and Kassy not to swing on the garden gate for fear

they may be drowned! Water roads are more frequent there than common

roads and railways; water fences in the form of lazy green ditches

enclose pleasure-ground, farm, and garden.

Sometimes fine green hedges are seen, but wooden fences such as we

have in America are rarely met with in Holland. As for stone fences, a

Dutchman would lift his hands with astonishment at the very idea. There

is no stone there, except for those great masses of rock that have been

brought from other lands to strengthen and protect the coast. All the

small stones or pebbles, if there ever were any, seem to be imprisoned

in pavements or quite melted away. Boys with strong, quick arms may

grow from pinafores to full beards without ever finding one to start the

water rings or set the rabbits flying. The water roads are nothing less

than canals intersecting the country in every direction. These are of

all sizes, from the great North Holland Ship Canal, which is the wonder

of the world, to those which a boy can leap. Water omnibuses, called

trekschuiten, *{Canal boats. Some of the first named are over thirty

feet long. They look like green houses lodged on barges and are drawn by

horses walking along the bank of the canal. The trekschuiten are divided

into two compartments, first and second class, and when not too crowded,

the passengers make themselves quite at home in them; the men smoke, the

women knit or sew, while children play upon the small outer deck. Many

of the canal boats have white, yellow, or chocolate-colored sails.

This last color is caused by a tanning preparation which is put on

to preserve them.} constantly ply up and down these roads for the

conveyance of passengers; and water drays, called pakschuyten, are used

for carrying fuel and merchandise. Instead of green country lanes,

green canals stretch from field to barn and from barn to garden; and

the farms, or polders, as they are termed, are merely great lakes pumped

dry. Some of the busiest streets are water, while many of the country

roads are paved with brick. The city boats with their rounded sterns,

gilded prows, and gaily painted sides, are unlike any others under the

sun; and a Dutch wagon, with its funny little crooked pole, is a perfect

mystery of mysteries.

“One thing is clear,” cries Master Brightside, “the inhabitants

need never be thirsty.” But no, Odd-land is true to itself still.

Notwithstanding the sea pushing to get in, and the lakes struggling

to get out, and the overflowing canals, rivers, and ditches, in many

districts there is no water fit to swallow; our poor Hollanders must go

dry or drink wine and beer or send far into the inland to Utrecht and

other favored localities for that precious fluid older than Adam yet

younger than the morning dew. Sometimes, indeed, the inhabitants can

swallow a shower when they are provided with any means of catching it;

but generally they are like the albatross-haunted sailors in Coleridge’s

famous poem “The Ancient Mariner.” They see

Water, Water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink!

Great flapping windmills all over the country make it look as if flocks

of huge sea birds were just settling upon it. Everywhere one sees

the funniest trees, bobbed into fantastical shapes, with their trunks

painted a dazzling white, yellow, or red. Horses are often yoked three

abreast. Men, women, and children go clattering about in wooden shoes

with loose heels; peasant girls who cannot get beaux for love, hire them

for money to escort them to the kermis, *{Fair.} and husbands and wives

lovingly harness themselves side by side on the bank of the canal and

drag their pakschuyts to market.

Another peculiar feature of Holland is the dune, or sand hill. These are

numerous along certain portions of the coast. Before they were sown with

coarse reed grass and other plants, to hold them down, they used to send

great storms of sand over the inland. So, to add to the oddities, the

farmers sometimes dig down under the surface to find their soil, and on

windy days DRY SHOWERS (of sand) often fall upon fields that have grown

wet under a week of sunshine.

In short, almost the only familiar thing we Yankees can meet with

in Holland is a harvest song which is quite popular there, though no

linguist could translate it. Even then we must shut our eyes and listen

only to the tune, which I leave you to guess.

Yanker didee dudel down

Didee dudel lawnter;

Yankee viver, voover, vown,

Botermelk and Tawnter!

On the other hand, many of the oddities of Holland serve only to prove

the thrift and perseverance of the people. There is not a richer or more

carefully tilled garden spot in the whole world than this leaky, springy

little country. There is not a braver, more heroic race than its quite,

passive-looking inhabitants. Few nations have equalled it in important

discoveries and inventions; none has excelled it in commerce,

navigation, learning, and science--or set as noble examples in the

promotion of education and public charities; and none in proportion to

its extent has expended more money or labor upon public works.

Holland has its shining annals of noble and illustrious men and women;

its grand, historic records of patience, resistance, and victory; its

religious freedom; its enlightened enterprise; its art, music, and

literature. It has truly been called “the battlefield of Europe”; as

truly may we consider it the asylum of the world, for the oppressed

of every nation have there found shelter and encouragement. If we

Americans, who after all are homeopathic preparations of Holland stock,

can laugh at the Dutch, and call them human beavers and hint that their

country may float off any day at high tide, we can also feel proud, and

say they have proved themselves heroes and that their country will not

float off while there is a Dutchman left to grapple it.

There are said to be at least ninety-nine hundred large windmills in

Holland, with sails ranging from eighty to one hundred and twenty feet

long. They are employed in sawing timber, beating hemp, grinding, and

many other kinds of work; but their principal use is for pumping water

from the lowlands into the canals, and for guarding against the inland

freshets that so often deluge the country. Their yearly cost is said to

be nearly ten million dollars. The large ones are of great power.

The huge circular tower, rising sometimes from the midst of factory

buildings, is surmounted with a smaller one tapering into a caplike

roof. This upper tower is encircled at its base with a balcony, high

above which juts the axis turned by its four prodigious ladder-back

sails.

Many of the windmills are primitive affairs, seeming sadly in need of

Yankee “improvements,” but some of the new ones are admirable. They are

constructed so that by some ingenious contrivance they present their

fans, or wings, to the wind in precisely the right direction to work

with the requisite power. In other words, the miller may take a nap and

feel quite sure that his mill will study the wind and make the most of

it, until he wakens. Should there be but a slight current of air, every

sail will spread itself to catch the faintest breath, but if a heavy

“blow” should come, they will shrink at its touch, like great mimosa

leaves, and only give it half a chance to move them.

One of the old prisons of Amsterdam, called the Rasphouse, because the

thieves and vagrants who were confined there were employed in rasping

logwood, had a cell for the punishment of lazy prisoners. In one corner

of this cell was a pump, and in another, an opening through which a

steady stream of water was admitted. The prisoner could take his choice,

either to stand still and be drowned or to work for dear life at the

pump and keep the flood down until his jailer chose to relieve him.

Now it seems to me that, throughout Holland, nature has introduced this

little diversion on a grand scale. The Dutch have always been forced to

pump for their very existence and probably must continue to do so to the

end of time.

Every year millions of dollars are spent in repairing dikes and

regulating water levels. If these important duties were neglected, the

country would be uninhabitable. Already dreadful consequences, as I have

said, have followed the bursting of these dikes. Hundreds of villages

and towns have from time to time been buried beneath the rush of waters,

and nearly a million persons have been destroyed. One of the most

fearful inundations ever known occurred in the autumn of the year 1570.

Twenty-eight terrible floods had before that time overwhelmed portions

of Holland, but this was the most terrible of all. The unhappy country

had long been suffering under Spanish tyranny; now, it seemed, the

crowning point was given to its troubles. When we read Motley’s history

of the rise of the Dutch republic, we learn to revere the brave people

who have endured, suffered, and dared so much.

Mr. Motley, in his thrilling account of the great inundation, tells us

how a long-continued and violent gale had been sweeping the Atlantic

waters into the North Sea, piling them against the coasts of the Dutch

provinces; how the dikes, taxed beyond their strength, burst in all

directions; how even the Hand-bos, a bulwark formed of oaken piles,

braced with iron, moored with heavy anchors, and secured by gravel and

granite, was snapped to pieces like thread; how fishing boats and bulky

vessels floating up into the country became entangled among the trees

or beat in the roofs and walls of dwellings, and how, at last, all

Friesland was converted into an angry sea. “Multitudes of men, women,

children, of horses, oxen, sheep, and every domestic animal, were

struggling in the waves in every direction. Every boat and every article

which could serve as a boat was eagerly seized upon. Every house was

inundated; even the graveyards gave up their dead. The living infant

in his cradle and the long-buried corpse in his coffin floated side by

side. The ancient flood seemed about to be renewed. Everywhere, upon

the tops of trees, upon the steeples of churches, human beings were

clustered, praying to God for mercy and to their fellow men for

assistance. As the storm at last was subsiding, boats began to ply in

every direction, saving those who were struggling in the water, picking

fugitives from roofs and treetops, and collecting the bodies of those

already drowned.” No less than one hundred thousand human beings had

perished in a few hours. Thousands upon thousands of dumb creatures lay

dead upon the waters, and the damage to property was beyond calculation.

Robles, the Spanish governor, was foremost in noble efforts to save life

and lessen the horrors of the catastrophe. He had previously been hated

by the Dutch because of his Spanish or Portuguese blood, but by his

goodness and activity in their hour of disaster, he won all hearts to

gratitude. He soon introduced an improved method of constructing the

dikes and passed a law that they should in future be kept up by the

owners of the soil. There were fewer heavy floods from this time, though

within less than three hundred years, six fearful inundations swept over

the land.

In the spring there is always great danger of inland freshets,

especially in times of thaw, because the rivers, choked with blocks of

ice, overflow before they can discharge their rapidly rising waters into

the ocean. Adding to this that the sea chafes and presses against the

dikes, it is no wonder that Holland is often in a state of alarm. The

greatest care is taken to prevent accidents. Engineers and workmen are

stationed all along in threatened places, and a close watch is kept up

night and day. When a general signal of danger is given, the inhabitants

all rush to the rescue, eager to combine against their common foe. As,

everywhere else, straw is supposed to be of all things the most helpless

in the water, of course, in Holland, it must be rendered the mainstay

against a rushing tide. Huge straw mats are pressed against the

embankments, fortified with clay and heavy stone, and once adjusted, the

ocean dashes against them in vain.

Raff Brinker, the father of Gretel and Hans, had for years been employed

upon the dikes. It was at the time of a threatened inundation, when

in the midst of a terrible storm, in darkness and sleet, the men were

laboring at a weak spot near the Veermyk sluice, that he fell from the

scaffolding and became insensible. From that hour he never worked again;

though he lived on, mind and memory were gone.

Gretel could not remember him otherwise than as the strange, silent man

whose eyes followed her vacantly whichever way she turned, but Hans had

recollections of a hearty, cheerful-voiced father who was never tired

of bearing him upon his shoulder and whose careless song still seemed

echoing near when he lay awake at night and listened.