The Pilgrim fathers of New England

by W. Carlos Martyn

In order to reach the interior of the city, it was necessary to cross a number of these broad harbors; and in making the necessary deflections in passing from gracht to gracht, all recollection of the points of the compass vanished from the minds of the bewildered Englishmen, so that they received the impression that they were wandering in a labyrinth from which it was impossible to escape by their own unaided efforts.

The houses were built of brick, and were generally four or five stories high, with fantastic, pointed gables in front. Some of them were elegantly constructed; but the larger number of the citizens seemed desirous of making their dwellings look as like warehouses as possible. Almost every house had a piece of timber projecting from the wall over the uppermost window in the gable, and this was used for hauling up fuel or furniture to the top story. All the residences were erected upon piles of wood driven into the soft, marshy ground; but so insufficient was this precaution in giving stability, that many of the buildings leaned considerably from the perpendicular, and seemed as if about to topple over into the street or splash out of sight through the mud. The roadway between the houses and the water was so narrow, that in some of the finest streets a coach could not conveniently turn round.

Such were some of the strange sights which greeted the wondering eyes of the Pilgrims as they hurriedly trod, on the day of their arrival, from the quay where they had landed, into the interior of the quaint old town in search of lodgings.

A brief residence sufficed to familiarize the exiles with the peculiarities of the city. They soon discovered that Amsterdam stood upon the southern bank of the Ai, a neck of the sea which possessed the appearance of a navigable frith. They examined the quays and piers which rose sheer out of the water, so as to afford the greatest facility for the shipment of goods from the abounding warehouses. They wondered at the peculiar form of the town, which was semicircular, with its straight side on the Ai, while the bow swept several miles inland. The canals were fed by the river Amstel, from which the town was named. An immense exterior belt of water, which the Dutch termed “the cingel,” pursued a zig-zag line round the sites of ancient bastions, which were then crowned with windmills, whose long arms and tireless fingers were incessantly employed in snatching up the ever-encroaching water, and casting it far out into the sea.

From the condition of a fishing-village on the Amstel, in the thirteenth century, Amsterdam had risen, under the fostering privileges of the counts of Flanders, to be a commercial town of some importance even in the fourteenth century. The establishment of the Dutch independence so greatly accelerated its prosperity, that in the beginning of the seventeenth century it had attained the first rank as a maritime city. Antwerp, the old El Dorado, was eclipsed. Amsterdam became the entrepôt of commerce; ships visited it from all nations; its merchants were famed for their honesty and frugality; and its great bank enabled it to take the lead in the pecuniary concerns of Europe. The city was inhabited by a quarter of a million of souls; and seated in its swamp, it was the freest town in the world. It was a city of refuge to the oppressed of all nations; and therein, perhaps, lay the secret of its wonderful prosperity.

Amsterdam was the Venice of the Netherlands. It was literally a spot which had been wrung from the grasp of the unwilling and ever-protesting sea. A perpetual Waterloo conflict was waged between the persistent Hollander and old Neptune for the possession of the soil which man’s skill had usurped. The city, and indeed the Netherlands at large, formed the “debatable ground” of this unique struggle between humanity and the elements. The whole country was a morass, whose buildings were constructed on huge piles; and it was this that gave rise to the saying of Erasmus, that “multitudes of his countrymen were like birds, living on the tops of trees.” Across the forehead of the Netherlands brains and persistence had written their motto, “Labor omnia vincit.”[41]

Such was the city in which the Pilgrims now found themselves domesticated. In some things they found it easy to assimilate with their new neighbors: a common faith was one strong bond of union; a passion for liberty was another. But there were not lacking strong points of dissimilarity. The Pilgrims were orderly and staid; yet they never could reconcile themselves to that spirit of system, or precise, long-authorized method, which formed one of the most remarkable traits in the manners of the Dutch. In all departments of their social economy they seemed to act upon established rules, from which it was esteemed a species of heresy to depart. There were rules for visiting, for sending complimentary messages, for making domestic announcements, for bestowing alms, for out-of-door recreations—every thing was required to be done in a certain way, and no other way was right. Society was an incarnate rule.

Another thing which puzzled the Pilgrims was, that in their various walks they observed that every house was provided with one or more mirrors in frames, fastened by wire rods on the outsides of the windows, and at such an angle as to command a complete view both of the doorway and of all that passed in the street. They afterwards found that these looking-glasses were universal in Holland, and were the solace of the ladies while following their domestic avocations.