Barging through the tulips

National Review, August 26, 1991 by Priscilla L. Buckley

IT'S TULIP TIME in Holland. And we are booked for a seven-day cruise that will take us from Amsterdam to Haarlem, Rotterdam, Gouda, Delft, Leyden, and back, on the Juliana, a converted 126-foot-long coal barge that accommodates 18 passengers and a crew of six. On this trip, the passengers are fun, the crew young, helpful, and pleasantly raffish. Cabins are small but comfortable, and the saloon and dining area are lighft and airy. Food, liquor, guided tours, transportation--everything but the tip--is included in rates ranging from about $1,700 to $2,000 a person.

Green fields (it's mid April) filled with browsing cows and sheep, calves and lambs, stretch back from the canals on either side. In and around Haarlem huge greenhouses dot the landscape, emitting an eerie gleam at night. You note the absence of fences; tiny canals, dividing the fields into squares and rectangles, fulfill that function. You notice, too, the absence of dense woods. There is no forest primeval in Holland. You will see no ruined castles on a hill. You will see no hill. But where else can you look up to find a windmill etched against the skyline, its sails now permanently folded, a reminder of the day when the wind was harnessed to keep the waters at bay and keep the grindstones turning?

Zaane Schans is a Dutch version of Massachusetts's Sturbridge Village. Ancient farmhouses and barns, craft shops and stores, and three windmills have been brought here to recreate what a Dutch town a couple of centuries back might have been like.

Kevin, our pleasant and capable 23-year-old captain--he looks about 12--points across the canal to a row of sturdy green-and-white gabled houses. These are "good year houses," built when a fisherman had a good season. Some have large square windows on the front unencumbered by lace curtains. These are Catholic homes built this way, open for all to see, to symbolize their clarity of soul, Kevin tells us. We see, too, a fascinating demonstration of how wooden clogs are made today, one pair turned out by machine every ten minutes, and--on a video, simultaneously--how a clogmaker used to do the same job with hand tools. It took a master craftsman three hours to make one pair.

We pull under a drawbridge in Haarlem and tie up for the night. On the opposite bank is a row of gloriously high, narrow-gabled houses, tilting forward fover the street and leaning one against the other, as if for support. Homeowners in Holland have this problem of their houses sinking and tilting as pilings and supports shift in the wet sands. We take a walk through the Great Market this evening after dinner. The Town Hall stands angular and stark against the evening sky at one end, the great church at the other, as in most Dutch towns. The carillon peels out, as in most Dutch towns most of the time.

Haarlem is the home of Frans Hals, and the quiet and pleasant Frans Hals museum contains a large number of his group paintings of various Watches, local military organizations. But we saw finer Hals portraits at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, to which we were directed by an affable trolley driver who assured us, "I will say you when"--that is, when it was time to get off. The Dutch we found to be uniformly courteous and amusing.

It is in Amsterdam that we first encounter William the Silent, father of Holland's eighty-year-long war of independence. A rather fuzzy painting shows heavily laden men skating along frozen canals toward a walled city. The caption (one of the few not in Dutch) tells us that these are William the Silent's "Sea Urchins" skating to the (unsuccessful) relief of Haarlem. Our Michelin guide tells us that in 1568 Willaim of Orange led a revolt against Philip II's unleashing of the Spanish Inquisition in the Lowlands.

In Delft we will visit the burial vaults of the Royal House of Orange in the Nieuwe Kerk (don't bother), but find more compelling the Prinsenhof Museum. It's a former convent, so quiet one can imagine the rustle of a nun's habit in its silent corridors. It was here, in 1584, that Philip's assassin caught up with William the Silent. The gouges made by the bullets that killed William are presefrved at the foot of a staircase under a protective pane of glass.

At Gouda (pronounced Howda) Michelin tells us that "the Iconoclastic Fury" spared forty of the original seventy stained-glass windows in the Janskerk, Holland's largest church. We are given no other hint about the Iconoclastic Fury but surmise that Dutch Protestants, like their brethren elsewhere in Europen hated the opulence of Rome and smashed church windows and statuary whenever the occasion arose. We also conclude that the Iconoclasts who took out thirty of the Janskerk's really spectacular windows were either lazy or less Furious than usual. Because one of the windows they spared was donated by Philip II--William's archenemy--and is easily identified by his portrait and that of his consort, Mary Tudor of England. The artistry of these windows and their extraordinary perspective are a wonder to behold.