Here at The Helder may be found the finest fruits of that “big story” of Holland: the constant battle of mere man against an all but omnipotent element—water; the romantic, persistent, patient strife of the Hollander to insure as much as possible his own safety and that of the land which he has weaned from the sea from utter and inexorable annihilation. If for nothing else, it is for this “big story” that one should go to The Helder. If the traveler through Holland has not been already duly impressed with the silent, continuous fight of the Dutch for mere existence, he will return from this northernmost promontory of North Holland with augmented faith in the ingenuity and dogged perseverance of the men who have made a country out of what once was sea bottom.
The foregoing preamble is meant to prepare the traveler to appreciate The Helder. If it fails in its mission, it may be all for the best, because the unanticipated often strikes with the greatest degree of accuracy and forcefulness and brands the experience upon the mind, never to be obliterated.
Disembarking from the train, you will turn instinctively to the north through a wide avenue—a veritable tunnel through the trees. After crossing the drawbridge that spans the canal at the end of the avenue, you must turn abruptly to the left. The first cross street—little more than an alleyway between the houses—is barricaded at its farther extremity by a steep, grass-grown embankment that towers almost to the same altitude as the chimney pots of the house tops below. A flight of thirty-one steps ascends to the top of this peculiar embankment and you scramble up, expecting to behold on the other side a view of—you scarcely know what. You are surprised to discover that the view is a sea-scape, for, if you have failed to observe The Helder’s lofty lighthouse, it has not been suggested to you that the sea is anywhere in the neighborhood.
You will be standing on the top of one of the greatest and strongest dikes in Holland, its business side stretching away before you at an angle of forty degrees for two hundred feet into the Strait of Marsdiep. Extending a total distance of five miles in the arc of a circle, this, then, is the sloping buttress that North Holland relies upon for its very life. A severe storm will lash the water of the strait into spray, and fling it across into the windows of the bordering houses, but the highest of tides cannot come over the backbone of the dike, while at all times the water laps restlessly at its foundations. The top of the dike is mounted with a roadway twelve feet in width. Some feet above the water line at low tide the tops of great stone breakwaters, like the ribs of a dinosaur, stretch seaward at regular intervals. The whole of this remarkable artificial coast is constructed of Norwegian granite.
Upon the summits of a few sand dunes that raise themselves here and there behind the dike the Dutch have completed the construction of some rather crude military fortifications which Napoleon commenced in 1811. But improvements upon them are going on apace, for Holland is not exactly anxious to suffer an experience with regard to her string of islands in the north, in furthering German aggrandizement as did the Danes of Helgoland before the gun muzzles of the British in 1807.
The single point of North Holland, however, most exposed to sea encroachments is a few miles south of The Helder on the North Sea. Here there is a chain of three great dikes, one beyond the other, named significantly, beginning with the one farthest from the shore, “The Waker,” “The Dreamer,” and “The Sleeper.” Still farther to the south, on the same side of the province, are the great sand dunes, three miles in width in some places, under the protection of which the freight boats from Amsterdam creep to their destinations along the North Sea Canal.
Off the northern dunes the combined English and French fleets of war suffered defeat at the hands of the Dutch admirals, de Ruyter and Tromp, two hundred thirty-eight years ago to the day, as I write (the 21st of August), and in September, 1799, two armies of 10,000 and 13,000, English and Russian troops respectively, commanded by the Duke of York, landed here to try their luck at tempting the Dutch to revolt against the French. The Russian forces lost their way and were defeated by the French before they had advanced as far as Alkmaar, and the British, bearing in mind the comforting old adage about discretion being the best part of valor, retreated after having penetrated as far south as Castricum, near Zaandam.
In the town of The Helder itself—why they refer to it as “The” Helder I do not know, unless it be for the reason that the article makes of it a pseudonym for a Dutch John o’ Groats—in the town itself there is little of interest. One street I have in mind, however, which is of rather peculiar construction. The north side of it, from the middle of what ought to be the common roadway, is possibly three and a half feet higher than its south side, the upper part built upon an embankment faced with a brick wall.
The place is full of Dutch sailors and navy people, for about three quarters of a mile down the dike lies Nieuwediep, the Dutch combination of Hampton Roads, Annapolis, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Situated at the mouth of the North Holland Canal, Nieuwediep is the most important naval station in Holland, maintaining large wharves, docks, machine shops, and a naval academy, the students of which, two, four, and six abreast—Holland’s future Tromps and de Ruyters—can be seen strolling up and down the great dike. A fraction of the country’s one hundred vessels of war and of her 8,000 men that man them receive their orders at the station at Nieuwediep.
Across the Strait of Marsdiep is the Island of Texel, the most southerly unit of the long series of vertebræ that curve far to the northeast, as if made to fit exactly the coast lines of the provinces of Friesland and Groningen. A steamer plies to Texel from Nieuwediep and returns four times daily; but you may profitably omit the island from your itinerary unless you are particularly interested in natural history and you happen to come upon Texel during the bird nesting season. The northern extremity of the island, called Eyerland, or “The Land of Eggs,” is infested with sea fowl, the eggs of which are collected by the myriads and shipped to the large cities. Texel is seventy-three square miles in area and supports one or two very plain bathing places, but most of its six thousand inhabitants are chiefly engaged in the business of sheep raising on the long, crater-like pasture land hemmed in by the sand dunes.