Windmills and Wooden Shoes

by Blair Jaekel

Riding, instead of driving, would seem with us a less effective method of developing the speed of a trotting horse, and it certainly appears to be a less comfortable one, but ride them they do in many parts of Holland. I can imagine only one reason for the prevalence of the custom, and that is that the trotting horses are so rotund and ponderous that the shafts of no sulky would fit them, and if it did, no driver could spread his lower limbs so far apart as to drive the horse from the sulky’s seat. Large and ample as Percherons are some of these North Holland and Friesland horses, with long, well-groomed tails and manes; but they have a faster gait than they might be given credit for when seen hitched to a cart or a farm wagon. Pads with knee braces, which serve the riders in place of saddles, are strapped to the horses’ backs, and they trot the course with but little less action than blue grass Kentuckians. A singular thing is that they seldom “break,” their weight apparently holding them to the trot.

The express trains from Amsterdam to Leeuwarden make the run in just over three hours and a half, including the ferry passage of an hour and ten minutes across the neck of the Zuyder Zee from Enkhuizen to Stavoren. The line runs through Zaandam to Hoorn and thence to Enkhuizen through the richest farming district in North Holland. The farmhouses, somewhat more substantially built than those in the south, resemble what we rather ambiguously call “country residences.” They have their lawns and their gardens full of flowers, and each is surrounded with its little moat, bridged by a tiny archway which connects the house with the road at but a single point.

Enkhuizen is the unfortunate victim of what its inhabitants must consider to be a depraved taste for salmon rather than herring. The Rhine salmon has taken the place of the humble herring on the Dutch menu cards, and the town of Enkhuizen has dwindled accordingly. Of its fleet of four hundred herring vessels and its population of 40,000 souls in the seventeenth century, not a single fishing smack and only 6,300 descendants of its earlier inhabitants remain.

Aside from the magnitude of its one-time fishing industry, Enkhuizen courts the fickleness of fame by being the birthplace of Paul Potter. Born in 1625, he painted his most renowned canvas, “The Bull”—now in the Mauritshuis at The Hague—at the age of two-and-twenty, and died but seven years later—only another of the many instances where Death has chosen to lay his hand upon the shoulder of one so young and signally gifted in preference to an octogenarian dullard.

Waiting alongside the dock station at Enkhuizen will be the side-wheel steamer that ferries the passengers the fourteen miles across the Zuyder Zee to Stavoren in Friesland. The old Dromedary Tower, as they call it, at the harbor, diminishes rapidly into the general skyline of Enkhuizen, and you will be sailing out over what was once a broad isthmus of dry land—for the Zuyder Zee was not always the Zuyder Zee. Until the thirteenth century it consisted of but a comparatively small inland lake called Flevo. Near the close of that cycle—in 1282, to give the exact year—the German ocean burst over the land from the north, wiping the lives of 80,000 people out of existence and combining itself and Lake Flevo into one, which was henceforth called the Zuyder Zee. Above the ferry crossing, beginning at the eastern end of the little island of Wieringen, they will build the contemplated dam across it, the first process in the reclamation of more than a million acres of what was once a fertile, productive district.

In pleasant weather it is a beautiful trip across the neck of the Zee, but if the breeze blows from the north, bringing with it the customary cold drizzle of rain, the best method of putting in the time is to go below to the cabin and follow the invariable custom of the country of eating bread and great, thin slices of Dutch cheese.

Stavoren is the deadest of all the “dead cities of the Zuyder Zee.” At the beginning of the thirteenth century the merchants of Stavoren were prepotent among the rulers of the world of trade and commerce. Treasures from all the then known corners of the earth lay in their storehouses. The homes of these merchant princes were palaces comparable only with those of kings and furnished with the sumptuousness and incomputable grandeur of the famous abodes of the Sultan Harun-al-Rashid in the “Arabian Nights.” Previously, Stavoren had been the residence of all the Frisian princes. But riches contributed to the pride that came before its fall. To-day the census taker counts its population in three figures and its commerce is not worthy of mention in a trade report. The smoke of the lingering express train that will subsequently carry you to Friesland’s capital is the only evidence that the town may not be abandoned completely.

As you sail into the harbor, a wide, grass-grown embankment in front of the town can be seen plainly from the steamer’s deck. This is the Vrouwensand, and it recalls the legend that attributes the fall of Stavoren to the whims of a woman. The reader himself must be the judge whether or not the tale is worth the telling. One writer on Holland asserts that no author dealing previously with the country in a literary way has been gifted either with the independence or the imprudence to avoid it. His predecessors have been numerous and illustrious, and if the story be so important that each of them has seen fit to relate it, I can do naught but imitate.

Of all the inhabitants of the old city of Stavoren, none was so blessed with riches as the wife of a certain wealthy merchant. Continually bathed in the high lights of smiling fortune, she plucked one by one the treasures that were thrown daily at her feet. She owned everything of intrinsic value that the fabulous wealth of her husband could bestow upon her. But one thing she did not possess, and that was love. Her character was devoid of a woman’s tenderness. She was cold, indifferent, supercilious, insouciant. Exaggerated pride in her own wealth and an undying envy of those whose fortunes dared to compete with hers—these were the only passions of her life.