It is a pleasant trip of an hour and a half duration down the Maas, past numerous shipyards that are capable of building anything from a canal boat to an ocean-going cargo carrier; past great suction dredges assigned to the perennial duty of keeping the river conquered; past fishers for salmon, who, by treaty, may lower their nets only upon certain days in order to give the German fishers, higher up the stream, an equal opportunity to make a living; past little hamlets whose river docks and picturesque dock tenders serve in lieu of railway stations and the more prosaic red-capped and frock-coated station masters.
But Rotterdam, by reason of her trade, does not coincide with the general idea of Holland. She is more or less cosmopolitan, to be sure, but this phase strikes the traveler less forcibly than her ardent activity. What with her electric cranes and machine shops and sugar refineries and tobacco factories and shipbuilding yards and distilleries, she gives one the impression of a thriving German seaport. The home port claimed by the greater number of the seven hundred or more steam and sailing vessels that make up the merchant marine of Holland, is Rotterdam, and through this port passes at least one-half the country’s total imports by sea and almost as much of her exports, together with four-fifths of Holland’s trade with the Rhine. But Baltimore, in the matter of population, would make two of this, the most active, the most important seaport of the Netherlands.
Still, Rotterdam is essentially Dutch, in fact if not in first appearances. She has her Groote Kerk, the Church of St. Lawrence, begun in 1412; she has her Town Hall, without which, it seems, no town in Holland could survive; she has her picture gallery, although a mediocre one, in the Boymans Museum; she has her old market and her new church; and she has her fish market, where women of the most uncertain antiquity sit and gossip and knit and sell sole between stitches. Here and there, too, she has her old windmill, thatch covered, browbeaten by the weather, massive and ponderous-looking, that, in the very midst of twentieth century hurry and scurry, waves its stiff arms as if depicting in pantomime a scene of other days. And then, in striking contrast, right at the very edge of the old harbor, stands the tallest building in the Netherlands. It must be as sky-scraping as eight or ten stories, and high up under its eaves it displays the advertisement of an American breakfast food. Its builders probably thought that a photographer would be the only mortal who could be induced to rent the top story, so they made the building’s sloping roof into one glorious skylight, under which rural Holland might sit and have its picture taken for the family album.
In spite of its up-to-date spirit, Rotterdam is essentially Dutch, with the canals much in evidence
It was while waiting for a car at the beginning of The Oosterkade and just across the old harbor from this Metropolitan Tower of Rotterdam that the more nearly general of all Dutch customs was brought home to me.
The car had approached its terminus and I was about to mount, when the conductor, more forcibly than politely, requested that I discontinue the attempt and take up my position where I belonged, with the rest of the crowd, in the vicinity of a certain lamp-post a few steps beyond—the Dutch being most precise and systematic. I ambled thither and was standing in the more or less protecting umbrage of the lamp-post, with sarcastic but not envious mien, watching the traction company partake of a large slab of black bread and cheese (until the disappearance of which the car refused to continue) when I was accosted by a small street urchin of about the tender age of seven, who was armed with an immense cigar. I happened to be smoking at the time, and this was what brought the boy in my direction. He wanted a light and wasted no words in asking for it. Being somewhat shocked that a youth of such tender years should be so faithful a slave to the vile, pernicious weed, I submitted to his plea under mental protest. But he seemed not in the least embarrassed, for he saluted and marched off, apparently enjoying the thing as if it had been his fifth since breakfast.
Before I was through with Holland, however, I came to know that every able-bodied male in the kingdom acquires the cigar habit as early in life as his physical condition permits, and I have yet to see the adult Dutchman who doesn’t use tobacco in some form. Holland, by virtue of her colonial holdings in Sumatra and the Straits Settlements, is the paradise of smokers, and tobacco stores in every town, be it large or small, are as thick as saloons in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. If you pay more than the equal value of two American cents for a cigar in Holland you are branded as a foreigner or an extravagant roué. Of course foreigners who unfurl their native colors full in the face of the tobacconist are expected to and do pay more, but a cigar equal in flavor and composition to the best of our ten cent brands can be bought in Holland for five Dutch cents, and often less, if you go about it in the proper manner. The age at which boys learn to smoke in Holland has never been correctly computed, but in the country I have seen lads of five or six serenely eliminating all possible chance of being rewarded the oft-referred-to gold watch at the age of twenty-one, and handling their cigars with as much real enjoyment as their paternal grandparent.