the place; and Hoorn is one of these places.”
The emptiness of the streets, the want of all animation, is the shadow of the picture, and the author brings to mind the former bustling prosperity of Hoorn, “filled by an active population, covering the seas with their fleets and the Indies with their counting-houses. Every week a thousand wagons entered the markets, bringing in mountains of cheese from the rich countries around.… Each year there was a bullock fair, first established in 1389, which drew visitors from all corners of Europe. Frenchmen, Danes, Frisons, Germans, and Swedes flocked into the town, and thus augmented its astonishing prosperity. Hoorn then counted twenty-five thousand inhabitants.” It had “massive towers and monumental gates,” and bastions and ramparts, whose place is now occupied by beautiful gardens, shaded by fine trees, and boasting of the few remaining ruinous towers and gates as of picturesque adornments—nothing else. The gate at the entrance of the harbor is of “magnificent proportions and superb in its details.… Among the sculptures I remarked a cow which a peasant-girl is seen employed in milking—a homage to the industry of the country which once enriched the town.” On the top of the other old gate—the Cowgate—is a group of two cows, and on the side facing the town four cows are represented standing, while the heraldic lions by their side support the escutcheon of the town, the arms being a hunting-horn. The remains of the old commerce of Hoorn may be seen on Thursdays, when a market is held in the town, and quantities of cheeses still arrive.
“The numbers of people on foot who pour into the town, the carved and heterogeneously-painted wagons, carts, tilburies, and all kinds of old-fashioned conveyances passing through the east gate, almost incline one to believe that the good old times have once more returned to this city. Farmers and cattle-dealers and their wives arrive in the carriages, for the market-day is a holiday; … they sit stolidly in or upon these antediluvian vehicles. I say stolidly; for I do not know a better term to express the calm, silent, reflective look of both husbands and wives.… At ten o’clock the market-place resembles a park of artillery whence the guns have been withdrawn. The red cheeses piled up by thousands represent to the life the cannon-balls rusted by exposure to the air and rain.”
In the Guildhall is preserved Count Bossu’s silver-gilt drinking-cup; he was a prisoner in Hoorn for three years after his defeat and capture by the insurgent Dutch. The churches are inferior to the dwellings, having been spoilt by whitewash and plaster and absurd Greek peristyles, perhaps supposed at the Reformation to chase away the evil spirits of an age of superstition. The result is deplorable, and has unfortunately outlasted the fanaticism of the moment, which was responsible for these disfigurements. Although the people of Hoorn claim that their town was rich and famous at the end of the thirteenth century, the first authentic documents point to the middle of the fourteenth as the date of regular municipal incorporation, and the walls were not built till 1426. Hoorn has produced many distinguished men—Abel Janzoon Tasman, who discovered Van Dieman’s Land and New Zealand; Jan Pietersz Kœn, who founded Batavia (Java) in 1619; Wouter Corneliszoon Schouten, who in 1616 doubled Cape Horn, which he named after his native town; Jan Albertsz Roodtsens,
a portrait-painter known to art-critics as Rhotius, according to the foolish fancy of the Renaissance for Latinizing one’s “barbaric” name, and others less well known—doctors and lawyers with Latinized names, honorably mentioned as learned men in the archives, and brave seamen, patriotic and enterprising, the Sea-Beggars of the War of Independence against Spain, and successful explorers in tropical seas.
Having passed through Enkhuizen, the birthplace of the painter Paul Potter, Havard goes on to Medemblik, the former capital of West Friesland, and the seat of King Radbod’s power. Here, like a true artist, he was struck by a beautiful scene painted by nature, who in these regions, as everywhere else, has so many changing beauties to offer, to distract one’s attention from even the most perfect human works of art. “The town, with its towers and steeples and with its ancient castle, rose up before us against a background of sky of a rosy tint, fading into lilac-gray and a variety of tints; the town itself appearing of a blackish green, while over our heads the sky was of celestial blue; at the very foot of the town the sea repeated all these splendid colorings and completed the picture. A painter who should reproduce this scene without alteration would not be believed; it would be said he had invented the coloring.” Then follows the same story of desertion, emptiness, and decay, that mark the “dead cities,” of which this is perhaps the oldest of all. For the well known incident of King Radbod (repeated seven centuries later by a cacique of Mexico), and his choice of eternal torments with his forefathers rather than heaven with strangers to his blood, we have no room. It illustrates the clannish
qualities of the old Teutonic stock. Crossing part of the peninsula least tainted by “improvement,” the author, on his way to Texel, passed through many villages such as we have heard about, but the accounts of which we have believed to be exaggerated. But these are not to be found on the beaten track, and he who has seen the typical Brock has only seen an artificially-preserved specimen, handy and hackneyed, kept on exhibition with the avowed consciousness of its attraction to strangers. “Every one has heard of the marvellous cow-houses, paved with delf-tiles and sanded in different colors, cleaner even than the rooms, where one must neither cough, smoke, nor spit; where one must not even walk before putting on a great pair of sabots, or wooden shoes, whitened with chalk—cow-sheds in which the beautiful white-and-black cows are symmetrically arranged upon a litter which is constantly changed, and whose tails are tied up to the ceiling for fear of their becoming soiled. Well, it is in these hamlets that one meets with all this.… Sometimes at the end of the stable or cow-shed one sees a parlor with a number of fresh young girls, with their high caps and golden helmets, working at some fancy work or knitting all sorts of frivolity; the fact is that many of these peasants are millionaires living among their cheeses with the greatest simplicity.”
Of Texel and Oude-Schild the author says:
“When you land, it seems as if you entered a great round basin lined with a thick carpet of verdure; an endless prairie with a few trees … all the country surrounded by high dikes and dunes, which limit the view.… We felt as if we were in an Eden under the waters, with the heavens open above—a bizarre sensation difficult to describe, but which
is very strange and original. The dike that protects the south of the island is almost as grand and important as that of the Helder.… At the place from whence these works spring it was necessary to work under water at a depth of above one hundred feet.… On the North Sea side are moving sands, which, from their desolate aspect, contrast with the rich and verdant meadows they guard from the encroachments of the sea. These dunes are certainly not the least interesting part of the island; they can be entered only on foot or on horse-back. The feet of the horse or man who attempts to cross them sink either to the ankle of the man or the fetlock of the horse. The green meadow suddenly ceases at their edge, and an arid solitude, burnt by the sun, extends beyond our view—we should say a strip of the African desert rather than of the soft and humid soil of Holland.”