A tour through Holland

by Sir John Carr

Tobacco had many enemies to contend with. In 1610, the smoking of tobacco was known at Constantinople, but it was thought so injurious a custom, that to remove it by ridicule, a Turk who had been found smoking, was conducted about the streets with a pipe transfixed through his nose: it was a long time before the Dutch cultivated the plant themselves; previous to that period they purchased it, and that the very refuse of the English. In 1615, tobacco began to be sown about Amsfort in Holland.

By James I. the practice of smoking was severely and most whimsically denounced in a work, called “King James the Sixth’s (of Scotland) Counterblast to Tobacco,” in which the royal pedant states, “that some gentlemen of his courts were accustomed to expend no less than three or four hundred pounds a year upon this indulgence.” He also says, “that it was used as a powerful aphrodisiac.” He particularly deplores the case of delicate, wholesome, clean complexioned wives, whose husbands were not ashamed to pollute them with the perpetual stinking torment of tobacco smoke: the concluding sentence of this extraordinary composition is somewhat laughable. “The use of tobacco,” he says, “is a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrid Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”

Few would wish to withhold from a Dutchman the narcotic enjoyment of his pipe, when they reflect, that he seeks no other species of oblivion to his care; for, I believe, notwithstanding a Dutchman’s eulogium upon his pipe, that it produces more oblivion than inspiration: he is scarcely ever seen intoxicated: indeed, drunkenness is held unpardonably infamous in Holland. To keep bad accounts, and to be seen inebriated, are equally disgraceful; and hence the use of wines and spirituous liquors is much less in Holland than in England.

The Dutch agree with Cassio’s reasoning:

——“Oh! that men should put an enemy into their mouths, to steal away their brains! That we should with joy, revel, pleasure, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!”

Othello, Act II. Scene 3.

The spill-houses are not the only objectionable instances of the abuse of the government; the police master is suffered to misuse his authority to a shameful excess. Instead of bringing delinquents to justice, he is in the frequent habit of privately compromising public offence, and putting the sum paid into his own pocket. Some time before I was in Rotterdam, a burgher who had been guilty of adultery, paid twenty thousand guilders to this minister of justice, who thus partaking of the commercial spirit of his country, becomes a merchant in delinquency.

I saw in several shops a great number of articles of English manufacture exposed to sale, particularly Manchester goods. The Dutch manufacture their own woollens, and they are esteemed to be very good. The black cloth of Holland is very well known, which is infinitely of a deeper and superior colour than ours. The principal cloth manufactures are at Leyden and Tielburg. There are also very capital and flourishing manufactures of velvets, silk, and carpets, at Hilversom; and those of linen and table-cloths, which are exquisite, at Overyssel; and numerous paper-mills.

The population of Rotterdam is estimated at sixty thousand inhabitants. Upon the whole, it is a gloomy place to live in; a constant iteration of the same canals, bridges, boats, houses, and figures, will soon damp the spirits of a traveller, unless naturally very vivacious. There is no theatre, no place of public amusement, but the spill-houses I have described, which are as much, at least to feeling minds, not accustomed to them, entitled to that appellation, as any of our houses of correction.

Here I bade adieu to my companions and friends, who proceeded direct to Germany, where I promised to rejoin them. I was by no means sorry to follow a lacquey to that quarter of the suburbs where the Delft boats set off every two hours, with my portmanteau, and to bid adieu to Rotterdam. Our treckschuyt lay ready for starting; at two o’clock, a little bell fastened on the outside of a house where the director resides, announced that all was ready; the horse was fastened to a very long, and rather a thin line, and we slipped through the liquid road, sensible of moving only from passing the objects that lined the sides of the canal, consisting for a considerable way of pretty houses and avenues of trees.