One day, while acting as hostess at a great banquet, a stranger from the Far East was ushered into the room. He had come, he said, to behold the marvelous wealth of Stavoren with his own eyes, and now that he had penetrated into this merchant’s house, he felt he had been amply rewarded.
The merchant’s wife, not impervious to flattery, requested the traveler to be seated and to partake of the banquet as her unbidden but welcome guest. He accepted the invitation in part, but asked, according to the custom of the Orient whence he came, for nothing but some bread and salt. Servants were dispatched to bring both, but returned, saying that no such simple articles of food could be found in the house. Thereupon the stranger, without further word, ate of the costly and unfamiliar dishes prepared for the banquet.
After the feast he told of his travels, he expatiated upon the successes and the failures of his life, he discoursed with much eloquent verbiage upon the instability of earthly fortunes, and he prognosticated the ultimate fall of wealth and splendor. His hostess became offended, not only because of his contumelious belittling the value of riches in her presence and before her guests, but because he had failed thus far to compliment her upon her personal beauty and the luxuries to be found in her home. Before he took his leave he mollified his views to this extent: “O gracious lady,” he said, “marvelous indeed is your home and fit for a queen; if you traveled far and near you could not find its equal. But, my lady, among your treasures I miss one thing, and that is the noblest that all the earth produces.” He departed forthwith, leaving the gathering in a state of perplexity.
To please the whim of his wife, the merchant dispatched a fleet of ships to cruise the world until it should find “The noblest thing that all the earth produces,” whereupon the fleet’s commander should fill the hulls and cover the decks with it and bring it to Stavoren. For months the ships sailed about, touching at one port and then at another, blindly searching for this most costly of all treasures.
One day a heavy sea came over one of the ships, flooding the ’tween decks and spoiling the provisions. The crew became in need of bread, but there was no flour with which to bake it. The men grew mutinous. The captain saw that neither gold nor silks nor precious jewels could outweigh the value of bread, and the occurrence led him to believe that bread was the most expensive thing in the world. He reported the matter to the commander, who agreed with his specious argument, and the whole fleet hurried to the nearest port, which happened to be Danzig. They loaded the vessels with the finest wheat, and set sail direct for Stavoren.
When the merchant’s wife heard of the nature of the cargo the fleet had brought home, she ordered the wheat thrown into the sea. The poor of the town begged and implored, stormed and reproached, but of no avail; the order of the woman was executed to the letter.
By and by myriads of blades of grainless wheat commenced to appear above the surface of the water. Their stocks and roots collected the sand as it was washed up by the tides of the German ocean, forming a great sand dune that blocked the port so that vessels could neither enter nor leave. The inhabitants of the place were suddenly brought face to face with the fact that commerce, the source of their wealth, had to be abandoned. Poverty and want reigned where riches ruled before. The wife of the once wealthy merchant wandered about from village to village, begging the bread which no one who had heard of her improvidence would give her. She suffered death from utter starvation. Then one night the sea began to boom and, bursting over the dunes, buried the town forever.
To this day the more superstitious of the fisher-folk who ply their vocation along that coast of the Zuyder Zee talk of the wonderful sunken city of Stavoren and how its pinnacles and palaces at the bottom glitter up through the pellucid waters under the rays of a summer’s sun.
The most characteristic feature of the Frisian costume is the metal skull cap worn as the headdress of Friesland’s women