Behind the dike near Goes—a typical Dutch scene, with the black and white cattle and the milkmaid
But since the Dutch have made so many brave attempts to discover a goodly portion of the east coast of the United States, there may be found in any geography of America a number of proper names, originally of Dutch origin, but now Anglicized to meet our requirements. They thought so much of the beauties of the lower end of New York Bay that they promptly applied to it the term, “Beautiful Outlet,” or, in Dutch, Helle Gat. “Hell Gate” must obviously be a deal less difficult, although scarcely more poetic. For the same reason does the Americanized Cape Henlopen supplant the correct name of the Friesland town of Hindeloopen from which its discoverer hailed. The name of a certain street in lower Manhattan must also be of Dutch derivation, for our word “Bowery” may be found as bouwerij, which means a “peasant’s dwelling” in the vocabulary of the Netherlands. And these are but a few of the numerous words and syllables heard in America that may be attributed to Dutch influence.
Hard by the town of Goes the tourist will obtain a comprehensive idea of what a real polder looks like, although it is scarcely distinguishable from the fact that all of the scenery along the route from Flushing east is typical, below-sea-level Dutch, lavishly cut by canals into triangles, trapezoids, and parallelograms.
A polder, by way of explanation, is the reclaimed bed of a sheet of water; and since the greater part of Holland lies below the level of the sea, the most of it is polder. Land thus reclaimed is of extraordinary fertility by reason of the fact that the water under which it was once submerged, having been pumped into surrounding canals, is readily available for irrigation purposes in event of a dry season.
The initial move in this really marvelous process of making land while you wait consists of building a dike around the prospective polder to fortify it against future inundations. Next, they literally kick the water out of the inclosed area by means of a peculiarly constructed water wheel, formerly driven by a windmill, but latterly—the Dutch having become inoculated with twentieth century impatience—by the adaptation of steam or gasoline power to the task. Often, however, the bed of the marsh or lake to be reclaimed lies too deep to admit of its water being at once kicked into the main canals to be carried off to the ocean. Such a condition of affairs will necessitate the lake being surrounded with a veritable series of dikes, each higher than the one before, like the amphitheater of a clinic (a slightly exaggerated simile), and each with a canal on its farther side from the polder. The water is then pumped from a lower level to a higher one until, finally, it is forced to admit the utter uselessness of trying to compete with the Dutch. The polder near Goes, known as the Wilhelminapolder, is something like 4,000 acres in extent and was reclaimed from the sea the same year that Napoleon was undoing the history of ecclesiastical architecture in Veere.
Polder making is a specialty with the Dutch engineers, and the end of their ingenuity is not yet in sight. Even now they are making gigantic preparations to spend upwards of $80,000,000 in the reclamation of the whole lower half of the Zuyder Zee, two thirds of which is to be constructed into a polder having an area of 1,400 square miles. The dike will stretch across the Zee from the village of Ewyksluis in North Holland to Piaam in Friesland, the cost of which alone is estimated at about $18,000,000.
Dutch engineers are planning a stupendous project to reclaim the shaded portions that are now part of the Zuyder Zee.