“Thank you, my man,” said the doctor. “But perhaps you’ll tell us whom you are.”
“Certainly,” said the Dutchman; “but keep a look-out for my mates,” and he began.
Chapter Six.
The Dutch Sailor’s Yarn.
As for my name, it is Daal, Van Daal; and if there be any of my kinsfolk going about saying that they have the right to put a “Van” before their name, and that they come of the Van Daals, who were a great family in the seventeenth century, and one of whom was boatswain of Admiral Van Tromp’s flag-ship, all I can answer is that they say the thing that is not; and that people who say such things deserve to be beaten by the beadle all up and down the United Provinces. When I was a little boy, and went to school to the Reverend Pastor Slagkop, there was a boy named Vries—Lucas Vries—who did nothing but eat gingerbread and tell lies. Well, what became of him? He was hanged before he was thirty—hanged at the yard-arm of a Dutch seventy-four at Batavia for piracy, mutiny, and murder: to which shameful end he had clearly been brought by eating gingerbread and telling fibs. Mind this, you little Dutch boys, and keep your tongues between your teeth and your stuyvers in your pockets, when you pass the cake shops, if you wish to escape the fate of Lucas Vries.
And yet I dare say that—ah! so many years ago—I was as fond of gingerbread as most yunkers of my age, and that I did not always tell the strict truth either to my parents at home, or to the Reverend Pastor Slagkop at school (he was a red-headed man who always hit you with his left hand, and he had but one eye, which glared viciously upon you while he beat you). But now that I am old, it is clear that I have a right to give good advice to the young: even to the warning them not to be guilty of the transgressions of which I may have been guilty ever so many years ago; because I have seen so much of the world, and have passed through so many dangers and trials, and have not been hanged. And this has always been my motto. When you are young, practise just as much or as little as you are able; but never forget to preach, whenever you can get anybody to listen to you. To yourself, you may do no good; but you may be, often, of considerable service to other people. A guide-post on the dyke of a canal is of some use, although it never goes to the place the way to which it points out.
That which is now the Kingdom of the Netherlands (Heaven preserve the King thereof, and the Crown Prince, and all their wives and families, and may they live long and prosper: such is the hope of Jan Daal, who drinks all their good healths in a tumbler of Schiedam) was in old times known (as you ought to be well aware, little boys) as the Republic, of the United Provinces; and there was no King—only a kind of ornamental figurehead, not very richly gilt, who was a Prince of the House of Orange, and was called the Stadtholder: the real governors and administrators of the Confederation being certain grand gentlemen called Their High Mightinesses. And very high and mighty airs did they give themselves; and very long robes, and very large periwigs, as flowing as a ship’s mainsail, did they wear, so I have heard my old father say many a time, ever so many years ago. Mynheer Van Bloomersdaal, in his “Pictures of the Glories of Holland”—how I hated that book when I had to learn a page of it, every day, by heart, and how I love it, now that nobody can compel me to remember even a line of it; but I do so for my own pleasure,—Mynheer Van Bloomersdaal, I say, has told us that the United Provinces are seven in number, and consist of Holland Proper, with Gueldres, Zealand, Friesland, Utrecht, Groningen, and Over-Yssel. By the deep, seven. Always be sure that you are right in your soundings; and take care to put fresh tallow in your lead, to make sure what bottom you are steering to.
I think that I must have been born some time toward the end of the last century, or the beginning of the present one, in the great city of Amsterdam, which, after all, has the greatest right to be called the capital of Holland; for The Hague, where the King lives and the Chambers meet, is, though a mighty fine place, only a big village, and a village is not a city any more than a treykschuyt is a three-decker, or a boatswain an admiral. At the same time, mind you, if I was put on my oath before a court-martial, I would not undertake to swear that I may not have been born at Rotterdam, at Dordrecht, at Leyden, at Delft, or even at The Hague itself; for, you see, my father was a peddler, and was continually wandering up and down the country (or rather the canals, for he mostly travelled by treykschuyt), selling all kinds of small matters to whomsoever would buy, that he might keep his wife and small children in bread, cheese, and salt herrings: which were pretty well all we had to live upon. But what does it matter where a fellow was born? The great thing is to be born at all, and to take care to keep your watch, and to turn cheerfully out of your bunk when the hands are turned up to reef topsails in a gale.