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Alkmaar and The Helder
It is as imperative that the traveler through Holland should journey from Amsterdam to Alkmaar by canal as it is that he should not overlook the steam tram trip between The Hague and Leyden.
The twenty-four and a half miles between the commercial metropolis and the cheese capital of North Holland is made in a little less than three hours. Taking all things into consideration, it is one of the most enjoyable steamboat excursions in the kingdom. Bearing up through the North Sea Canal and the River Zaan, the packet makes its first stop at Zaandam; then on up the river it winds between the bristling windmills, turns from one canal into another, crosses a small lake, and finally negotiates the waterway that leads eventually to Alkmaar. The polders on either hand are far below the level of the water you are steaming over, so that you see no more than the tops of the farmhouses. Although the wake of the passing boat rattles the reeds along the banks, the fishermen concealed here and there among them seem not the least perturbed, but continue to fish with all their might and main, allowing the steamer to play what havoc it will with the movements and inclinations of their prey.
Alkmaar, and not Edam, is the geographical and industrial center of the cheese trade of North Holland, and the cheese market is the geographical and industrial center of Alkmaar. To give some idea of the length of time they have been marketing cheeses in Alkmaar you will be told upon inquiry that the town weigh-house was constructed in 1582, and for no other purpose than to weigh the cheeses bought and sold at the weekly market. To give some idea of the town’s importance as a cheese center, the astonishing number of forty-odd million pounds of round, golden cheeses are bargained for at the side of the weigh-house in every twelve months.
In addition to the weigh-house the town boasts of but few historically remunerative objects of interest. There is the old Church of St. Lawrence, built in 1470, the surrounding walls and buttresses of which protect a part of the eminent remains of Floris V, Count of Holland and builder of the Hall of the Knights at The Hague, although why they were interred at such a distance to the north of the scenes of his activity is a matter of some conjecture; there are a few relics and mediocre paintings on show in the Municipal Museum; and there is the old water gate that seems to forbid any farther penetration into the town on the part of the packet from Amsterdam. In history Alkmaar played its solemn rôle by making a stubborn and ultimately successful resistance against the besieging Spaniards in 1573. Five to one were the odds against which the burghers fought and, as at Leyden, the water of the ocean was the all-powerful lever that rewarded the besieged and routed the besiegers.
As early as daybreak the Friday visitor—for Friday is cheese day in Alkmaar—will find plenty of activity in the vicinity of the town weigh-house. It is therefore advisable to reach the place the previous Thursday evening, because the unloading of the cheeses and the stacking of them upon the stone pavement of the market square during the early hours of the following morning are among the most interesting phases of the whole proceeding. And so, by daylight on Friday, gayly painted farm wagons from the surrounding country already fringe three sides of the market, and every one of them is disgorging, two at a time, its load of golden cheeses. On the canal that bounds the fourth side of the square lie berthed a double row of long, narrow boats, also loaded from keel plate to hatch cover with the product of the district. From every point of the compass cheeses are being tossed through the air from the wagons and boats, only to have their flight checked with a smack by the men who catch them and pile them upon the pavement in long, double-decked rows, ten cheeses in width. Later, canvas is thrown over the piles to protect the cheeses from
the rays of the sun until it is time for the cheese makers and the wholesale commission merchants from the cities, soon to descend upon the scene, to commence their dickerings. All through the early morning this unloading continues, its accompanying smacks to be heard half a block away, until perhaps 250,000 cheeses have been piled up in neat rows with alleyways between them, across the market square from one edge to the other.
At half-past nine, half an hour before the market opens, the weighmen, all garbed in immaculate white, meet in executive session in the weigh-house and absorb a ceremonious talking-to by the superintendent of the market—probably upon the subject of honest weights and the penalties to be imposed upon the unfortunate man caught trifling with the rules and regulations of the game.
