Infrastructure of 19th-century Holland
"Industry has drawn Holland out of nothingness; and it is industry that preserves it. The system of sluices is combined with that of dykes, as a means of defence against…
From: 1861 C.E. To: 1861 C.E.
Location: Netherlands
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From The Dutch at Home by Alphonse Esquiros, 1861.
Industry has drawn Holland out of nothingness; and it is industry that preserves it. The system of sluices is combined with that of dykes, as a means of defence against the waters. It has been said that the Dutch have no architecture. Some civil or religious buildings protest against this opinion, which is far too exclusive; but it must always be borne in mind that the building art is moulded on the nature and necessities of a country.
Now, in Holland, the truly national architecture is the hydraulic architecture, which has produced immense and colossal constructions. The first sluices were of wood: at the present time they are monuments of stone, and the most magnificent works that can be seen. The peculiarity of this art is not elegance, but strength.
To form an idea of the style of such works, you must visit the great Amsterdam sluices, and especially the buildings at Katwyk. This fortress, raised against the sea, has a truly stern and imposing character. Three sluices succeed each other at the mouth of the Rhine, in the canal intended to support the failing strength of the river, and protect Holland on the side. On tempestuous days, it is considered prudent to make concessions to the sea. The sluice gates nearest the mouth of the river allow a passage to the waves, which dash madly at the second gate and are broken against it.
These masses of stone, which defy the ocean; these powerful machines directed by art formed on experience; these gates which open and shut according to the current and bent of the waters and the direction of the wind; all these reveal the existence of an admirable and complicated system; all announce a species of administrative providence that watches over Holland.
The dykes, sluice-gates, and all the great defensive works erected against the "external waters," as the rivers and the sea are called here, would not have sufficed to render Holland habitable, if the country had not also discovered the art of getting rid of the "internal waters." In consequence of rains and overflow of the rivers from time immemorial, pools, lagoons, and perpetual marshes were formed, extending a long distance inland, and everywhere defying cultivation.
Another cause for the presence of water was the extraction of peat. Owing to the want of wood, the inhabitants were constrained to ransack the earth in order to warm themselves, and the exhausted peat-beds were soon converted into lakes. Holland presented then the singular spectacle of a people incessantly menaced by inundations, yet incessantly occupied in producing water.
It is against such a state of things and such dangers that the hydraulic art was summoned to react by the creation of polders. This name, derived from a Dutch word signifying inclosed lands, was given to the ancient marshes, which the first inhabitants surrounded by weak dykes and supplied with clumsy sluices. The system of polders became developed with the progress of agriculture and industry.
In the infancy of the hydraulic art, the employment of machinery was unknown, and it was not till a later date that one of the enemies of Holland, the wind, was put under contribution to dry the land. It is impossible to say who built the first mills destined to draw the water off the polders, but a tradition leads to the belief that the system was practiced in Holland toward the beginning of the 15th century. It is said that in 1408, there lived at Alkmaar in Northern Holland a certain Florent Alkmade, who put up an hydraulic wind-mill. This mill served as a model for many other machines of the same nature, and the invention speedily spread to even remote districts.
At the outset these mills were small and incomplete; they would only act with the wind blowing from one quarter, the north-west, but gradually they increased in power. At the close of the 15th century, the employment of the mills in the Dutch polders had become general From this period date the regular dyking of the low lands, the formation of trenches to discharge and guide the water, the construction of sluice-gates to establish the level between the reservoirs: in a word, a tolerably scientific system of desiccation.
Through this discovery the internal state of the country was changed, and agriculture could spring up. At the present day mills of all shapes and dimensions stand in the middle of rich plains, whose superfluous waters they draw off: their busy wings are in the distance blended together in a tranquil sky, and give the landscape a singular character. Some of these mills are true edifices, which seek the wind at a considerable height; others, smaller and built of wood or brick, are very prettily finished off. This rustic coquetry; these huge sails which flutter in the air like the wings of gigantic and fabulous birds; this tic-tac blended with the rustling sound of the waters, spread over the calm nature of Holland an undefinable charm and movement.
Elsewhere mills, those monuments of a pastoral life, are only employed in one way; but here, on the contrary, they are hydraulic machines, saw and flour grinding-mills. You see some polders served by a single small mill, while several large mills are employed in draining others. Formerly, efforts were limited to draining ground at no great depth; but since science has progressed, the wind is called upon to exhaust even deep marshes.
The polders have given Holland a second nature; this country, agriculturally regarded, is placed under most peculiar conditions. Elsewhere, it is necessary to create the produce of the soil, but here the soil itself must be created. When you now see this land, fabricated and kept up by the hand of man, covered in summer with rich pasturage, fruit and vegetables, and frequently abundant crops, you cannot sufficiently admire the conditions of the art which have converted land buried beneath the waters into a garden.
Bibliography
Alphonse Esquiros, The Dutch at Home, trans. Lascelles Wraxall (London: Chapman and Hall, 1861), 52-56.
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