A tour through Holland

by Sir John Carr

We had a very good table d’hote on board, at a moderate price, abundance of Rhine crabs, excellent grapes, and a variety of other fruits, which, as well as the most delicious bread I ever tasted, we purchased at the different towns where we stopped. I had the comfort of being attended by an intelligent, animated fellow, who had been in the service of the immortal Nelson on board of one of the ships which he commanded, and afterwards with the English army in Egypt, who offered his services on board the boat at a very reasonable rate. The richness, novelty, and majesty of the scenery, kept me constantly on the roof of the cabin, from the early hour of starting till the hour of nine at night, when, for the reason stated, we always stopped at some town or village till morning. In these stoppages we entirely depended upon the variable velocity of the current, not to say a word of the caprice of our skipper, or the influence which the residence of any particular favourite or friend might have upon him; the consequence of which was, that we arrived at places to sup and sleep where we were not expected, and of course our patience was put to a little, but never a considerable trial. Within three or four miles of Coblentz, on our right in ascending the river, we passed a pyramidical mausoleum, erected to the memory of the French general Marceau, who distinguished himself at the battle of Mons and Savenai, and died of the wounds which he received at the battle of Altenkirchen in 1796.

At Bendorf, a romantic village on our left, upon a branch of the river, a terrible battle was fought between the French army, commanded by Gen. Hoche, and the Austrians, after the former had effected the passage I have before mentioned, from the white tower, which, after a tremendous slaughter on both sides, terminated in the retreat of the imperial troops. In this battle an extraordinary instance of prowess and enthusiasm occurred, which is said to have decided the fate of the day; the French had frequently attacked an Austrian redoubt, the possession of which was of great consequence to them, and had as often been repulsed with great carnage; at last a French general rode up to the granadiers commanded by Captain Gros, and exclaimed, “Soldiers, swear to me that you will make yourselves masters of that redoubt.” “We swear,” replied Gros, holding up his hand, and his soldiers doing the same: they returned to the attack with redoubled fury, and the havoc became dreadful: the French troops were upon the point of again giving way, when their leader had his right arm crushed by a grape shot, upon which, with a smile of triumph, he grasped his sabre with his left, rallied his men and carried the redoubt. As we turned a considerable meander of the river by Neuendorff, one of the grandest spectacles I almost ever contemplated opened upon me: the mighty rock of Ehrenbreitstein, formerly called the Gibraltar of the Rhine, with its dismantled batteries and ruined castles, rose with awful and unexampled majesty on the south; at its base was the palace formerly belonging to the Elector of Treves, and the town bearing the name of this wonderful fortification; and immediately opposite to it, as we advanced a little farther, the beautiful city of Coblentz appeared. Here we were obliged to be separated from our horse, on account of the Moselle, which discharges itself into the Rhine at this place, the mouth of which we crossed by the assistance of our boatmen’s poles. Over this river there is a handsome stone bridge of many arches, and formerly there was a bridge of boats from this city to Ehrenbreitstein, which has been most judiciously removed, and succeeded by one of the flying bridges before described, by which a more convenient communication is kept completely open, and the navigation is not impeded. Coblentz is a very ancient city; it was the seat of the Roman emperors, and of the kings of the Franks, and a favourite residence of the archbishops and electors of Treves, who, in ancient times of broil and peril, resided in the castle which crowns the majestic rock opposite to the city. Before the revolution there were three parish churches, two colleges, a church belonging to the Jesuits, four convents of monks, dominicans, carmelites, franciscans, and capuchins, and three nunneries. At that period the population of the inhabitants, of the garrison, and the vale of Ehrenbreitstein, was calculated at 13,000 souls; at present it is not supposed to exceed nine thousand. The city has many good and some handsome buildings, and it is further recommended by its supplies of excellent mines, pit-coal, wood, and lime. Its best square is the Clemenstadt; there are several handsome hotels, of which the ancient hotel, the vast rock which formerly protected it, and the antiquity of its buildings, cast a gloomy grandeur over the whole place, which never exhibited so much gaiety as in the winter of 1791, when the French princes and their followers were nobly entertained and protected here by the Elector, before they marched to Champagne, to experience those disasters which finally confirmed the overthrow of their devoted house.

Coblentz derives its name by not a little meander of etymology, from the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle at its base. Ausonius, one of the most celebrated of the Latin poets of the fourth century, wrote five hundred verses in commemoration of this river, which, compared with the majesty of the river into which it rolls and is lost, is scarcely worthy of such an honour: the view from its banks is also in an equal degree of comparative inferiority, and by the unceasing agitation of its confluence, it has the reputation of having alarmed the tender nerves of the river-fish, of which the inhabitants of this city are not so well supplied as the neighbouring towns.

One of the most beautiful objects in this place is the new palace, built to the south of the city, close to the Rhine, by that splendid and amiable prince, the Elector Clemont Vencelas; it is of brick stuccoed, to resemble stone, has a noble Ionic portico, and including its wings, extends one hundred and eighty yards. A further description of its exterior, as I have made a drawing of it, and moreover as it is now converted into an hospital, were useless. Its grand staircase, its apartments consisting of a chapel, an audience-hall, concert-room, library, cabinet, dining-room, besides an immense number of other rooms, excited the admiration of every visitor, by their magnitude, magnificence, or elegance. Its furniture, its mantle-pieces, its tapestry, and inlaid floors, all corresponded in taste and splendor with the rest of the building; now not a vestige of its consequence or original destination remains, but what its walls display. Most of the windows are broken, stuffed with hay, or further disfigured by having linen hanging out to dry from them; the area before the grand front, which was formed into an elegant promenade, is now broken, and its graceful plantation totally destroyed. A little way further to the southward, on the opposite side, under the impending rocks of Ehrenbreitstein, is the old palace, a sombre building, which the Elector Clement quitted almost entirely on account of its gloom, and the humidity of its situation.

The Elector of Treves excited the indignation of the French against him very early in the French revolution, by encouraging the expatriated French princes to reside and hold their counterrevolutionary councils at Coblentz. In September, 1794, General Jourdan, with his accustomed energy, compelled the Austrians to retreat to Hervé, and afterwards to Aix la Chapelle, when, supported by the main body of the army, the French attacked all the enemy’s posts from Ruremonde to Juliers: at this eventful period, General Clairfayt having occupied a strong position upon the Roer, resisted the French for some time, but their ardor and numbers at length compelled the Austrians to retire into Germany, leaving behind them ten thousand of their comrades, killed or taken prisoners, in the short space of three days; and soon afterwards a detachment of the French army, under the command of General Moreau, entered Coblentz as victors, Cologne being already in their possession, and Mainz, or Mayence, the only city in the possession of the allies on the left bank of the Rhine.

I was informed by some French officers who were in the boat with me, that the society in Coblentz was very elegant; that a number of families lived in splendor; and also, that Bonaparte had continued with some modifications the colleges, and most of the public institutions, which the Electors of Treves had at various times established in that city. The vast and celebrated monastery, called in German Karthaus, or La Chartreuse, situated on a high mountain, in the neighbourhood to the west of Coblentz, from which the countries of Treves, Mayence, Cologne, Darmstadt, d’Anspach, and Wied, may be seen, is converted into an observatory, and a place of very agreeable recreation.

Upon my return, in descending the Rhine, I had an opportunity of more closely seeing Ehrenbreitstein, which I was enabled to do from the following circumstance: the Rhine schuyt was uncommonly crowded, and late in the evening we arrived at a hamlet on the right bank of the river to sleep: the house in which we were to pass the night was not able to furnish beds more than barely sufficient for the ladies on board, which at once determined a French officer, one of the party, who had not placed his head upon a pillow for three preceding nights, and who was a wretched invalid, apparently in the last stage of a decline, to hunt amongst the cottagers for a fiddler, to whose miserable sounds this epitome of his nation, with several other officers and petty German merchants, danced till the dawn of day, pour passer le temps, and the boat was ready to proceed. Having found by moon-light a nook in a peasant’s nest, in the most romantic situation under heaven, I lay down, and never awoke till an hour after the boat had departed, in which dilemma I was obliged to hire a punt with two paddles, and by the assistance of a couple of sturdy peasants overtook the passage-boat, which lay off Coblentz, during which I visited Ehrenbreitstein. At its base there is a pretty town and an excellent hotel; opposite to the palace is a walk of limes, close to which was moored the electoral state yacht, or barge, in shape and size resembling our Lord Mayor’s, but not quite so gaudy. The ascent to this stupendous rock, which is eight hundred feet in a perpendicular line above the level of the river, is by a very narrow, steep, and winding path: the noble fortification on its sides, and the castles, arsenals, barracks, and batteries upon its summit, from whence the eye can behold the mountains of Lorraine, the meanders of the Rhine, and the countries through which it flows to a vast distance, and from which the beholder might almost think he could step into the clouds, are all roofless and dismantled. The citadel was erected by the order of the Prince Bishop Herman Hillinus, in the 12th century, upon the ruins of an ancient Roman building.

In the centre of the square, or parade upon the top, was formerly mounted the celebrated cannon, called “the Griffon,” as well known to the Germans as that called “Queen Anne’s pocket-piece” is to the English. The former merits the national pride which it has excited. It was cast at Francfort by the order of the Elector, Richard Greifenklau, weighed thirty thousand pounds, and was capable of projecting a ball of one hundred and eighty pounds, to a distance of sixteen miles. Close to the touch-hole there was the following inscription: “Vogel Grief heis ich, meinem gnädigen herrn von Trier dien ich, wo er mich heist gewanten, da will ich Thoren und mauren Zerspalten. Simon gos mich, 1528.” In English—“Griffon is my name, I serve my gracious master of Treves, I shatter gates and walls, whenever he commands me to exert my force. Simon cast me, 1528.” This rock was supplied with water from a well 280 feet deep, which occupied three years in digging, in the year 1481, and has a subterranean communication with Coblentz, dug out of the solid rock: the fortress was justly deemed, when properly garrisoned, impregnable. In the time of the Swedish war, the attacks of eighty thousand French troops on the southern side of it, and of forty thousand on the northern, could make no impression upon it; however, still maintaining its invulnerable character, it was destined to bend to a foe, before which all local advantage is useless, and all enterprise unavailing: after bravely sustaining a blockade for a whole year, by the troops of the French republic, the garrison having endured with the greatest fortitude almost every description of privation and misery, were obliged to surrender to famine, and capitulated on the 28th January, 1799; soon after which the French covered this mighty rock with the ruins of those wonderful fortifications, which had employed the skill of the ablest engineer to complete, and which, but for the want of food, would have defied the force of her assailing enemy to the end of time. The thal, or valley below, is justly celebrated for its fertility and romantic beauty.

Soon after our departure from Coblentz, we passed the island of Obewerth; and a little further on, on our left, the disemboguement of the river Lahn, which flows between two ancient and picturesque towns, called the Upper and Lower Lahnsteins, where the Rhine forms a considerable curve, and expands into the resemblance of a placid lake, adorned with two vast mountains, one crowned with a hoary watch tower, and the base of the other half encircled by a village, and the whole adorned by the captivating combinations of forest scenery, rich meadows, and hanging vineyards and orchards, amidst which, half embosomed in their foliage, the peasant’s peaceful dwelling every now and then gladdened the eye. This lovely view was soon exchanged for one of gloomy magnificence; before we reached Boppart, we entered a melancholy defile of barren and rugged rocks, rising perpendicularly from the river to an immense height, and throwing a shade and horror over the whole scene; here all was silent, and no traces of man were to be found but in a few dispersed fishermen’s huts, and crucifixes. Fear and superstition, “when the day has gone down, and the stars are few,” have long filled every cave with banditti, and every solitary recess with apparitions.

In the course of my passage I frequently, when the boat came very near the land, sprung on shore with two or three other passengers, and varied the scene by walking along the banks for a mile or two, and during these excursions had frequently an opportunity of admiring the astonishing activity and genius of the French, who have, since they became masters of the left bank of the Rhine, nearly finished one of the finest roads in the world, extending from Mayence to Cologne, in the course of which they have cut through many rocks impending over the river, and triumphed over some of the most formidable obstacles Nature could present to the achievement of so wonderful a design. This magnificent undertaking, worthy of Rome in the most shining periods of her history, was executed by the French troops, who, under the direction of able engineers, preferred leaving these monuments of indefatigable toil and elevated enterprize, to passing their time, during the cessation of arms, in towns and barracks, in a state of indolence and inutility.