DUTCH F
OLKLORE
Forget the place! We drive on and, crossing
Monnikendam to stop at the harbour, we
catch only a glimpse of this once active and
important porttown, founded by mediaeval
monks and flourishing in the sixteenth and seven
teenth century. Here were dockyards providing
ships to the East India Company, here was
trade. Many houses bear witness of bygone
prosperity. At the outskirts stands its large
late-gothic church dating from about 1500,
boasting of an imposing interior with a fine
carved oak screen, and one of our oldest
organs. A graceful tower we meet in the centre,
lifts a carillon of IB bells to the sky, that since
1596 pours out its tinkling sounds.
Putting to sea here does not mean much now,
for the sea is no longer sea, it's a lake, the water
is not salt, since the Enclosure Dyke was com
pleted in 1932.
Marken is connected with the provincial
coast by dikes built as well to the South as to
the North who form the border of a new plan
ned polder and you just happen to come in
time for a last chance to see it in its original
situation as an island. It will become part of
the new reclaimed land.
Also Marken is an ancient settlement: in the
thirteenth century Frisian monks built a mo
nastery, destroyed in the next by an unkind
countess of Holland (why?). The population
resisted in the then following century an attack
by citizens of Kampen, who were out for mar
auding.
So Marken seems not to have been a quiet
place, but the men and women on the tiny isle
kept stubbornly their ground, gaining their
livelihood for a period by whaling and later
on by fishing in the nearby sea. For the last-
named fishery they used butters with a big well,
filled with seawater to keep their catch fresh.
The wooden houses, with an aperture in the
roof to smoke the fish in, stand on piies and on
mounts. Such a mount is called „werf"; there
are four of them, each with its own name, one
Dutch folklore is characterized by a macabre
tenor often leavened by touches of unexpected
mirth or happy endings. The internationally
best-known legend of the Flying Dutchman is
a striking example.
Captain Philip Van der Decken was trying
to get his ship into harbour in the teeth of a
hurricane and called upon the devil to assist
him. In consequence of this rash act he was
doomed to sail the seas till Judgement-Day
with one single night furlough every seven
years. He was redeemed, however, by a Scotch
girl living on the East-Coast of Scotland who
fell in love with his picture and offered to
marry him during his niext furlough on land.
Her father, her brothers, her neighbours and,
in fact, Philip Van der Decken himself, warned
her against this hazardous scheme pointing
out that on board she would see nothing but
lightning and hear nothing but the screeching
of violent storms. But the headstrong girl re
plied that this would be no great change for
her, what with the Scottisch climate and a com
pany of bagpipers practising next-door every
other night and she joined her man by jum
ping off the rocks. This lifted the curse and the
Flying Dutchman came to rest.
o o o
Seeing the Flying Dutchman inevitably led
to disaster like being shipwrecked or taken by
pirates. There was one skipper, however, who
met the ship of Van der Decken and lived to
tell the tale. This was a captain from Makkum
in Friesland whose Friesian disdain for all
things from Holland and Zeeland, including
Van der Decken, knew no bounds. He fired a
cannon at him and threw bottles filled with
gunpowder with burning fuses at him and,
when this did not impede the fatal approach
of the Flying Dutchman, he sang the Friesian
anthem in the Friesian language at him. This
was obviously too much for the sensitive ears
of Van der Decken who turned tail and dis
appeared. o o
the „Monnikenwerf", a reminiscence of the
monks afore mentioned. In 1916 the isle was
entirely inundated.
The interiors of the houses as well as the
old-fashioned dress of men and women are
antique. Their habits and conventions will
change, but how long will they resist the in
trusion of modern ideas once when their in
sularity ends
About the peculiarities and traditions of
their apparel we can tell you nothing being
ignorant about it ourselves.
The houses are much the same in arrange
ment. The livingroom uses to have two cup-
board-beds, one open to show the fine linen
and artistic embroidery. There is truth in the
observation of some author that the wide knee-
breeches of the men recall to mind the Greeks.
Fishermen wore them all over the world.
When you look at the peasant in the view of
Amsterdam, here reproduced, jou recognize his
clothes as being of the same shape as those of
the Marken fishermen and of those at Volen-
dam.
The high bedstead is also quite common in
Holland. An anonymous English author tells
in a circumstantial description of our coimtry
(then the Seven Provinces): „Their Beds are no
other but Land Cabins, high enough to need
a Ladder or stakes; up once, you are walled in
with Wainscot". He adds after a joke about the
danger of falling out of it: „But if you die in it,
this comfort you will leave your friends, that
you died in clean Linen". So far your country-
man-in-the-year-1664.
When everybody has satisfied his or her
curiosity, the Dickens Fellows sail to Volen-
dam and to Lunch.
TO OUR PRESIDENT
O Godfried make us laugh
smooth out our brow
good thoughts can never rise
from spirits low
Between Enkhuizen in Holland and Sta
voren in Friesland there is a regular boat-
service. Travellers on this boat can still see,
off the coast near Stavoren, something which
looks like a field of grain in the water. It is a
sand-bank just covered by the water with
halms growing on it.
Many centuries ago the village of Stavoren
was a thriving sea-port town with many weal
thy merchants. The richest inhabitant was a
widow whose fierce pride and arrogance equ
alled her wealth and beauty. She ordered one of
her shipmasters to bring her the most valuable
shipload he could find anywhere in the world.
The captain not being much of a psychologist
came back with a load of marvellous wheat.
„On which side did you load this?" asked
the furious widow. „On starboard" anwsered
the captain.
„Then throw it out on port" ordered the
lady.
This was done and the next day the shoal
had come into being complete with empty
halms. From then on it was difficult to reach
the harbour of Stavoren, trade disappeared
and the proud widow died in direst poverty,
o o o
In the provinces of Gelderland and Overijsel
tales of the „Witte Wiven", white women,
abound. They form bands of vampkes mainly
living on human blood and are always on the
look-out to catch lonely young women who
after a lapse of time become one of the gang.
Sometimes these victims can be retrieved by
their men-folk before the transformation has
taken place but the poor girl is safe only as
long as nobody utters a particular fateful sen
tence varying from case to case in her
presence.
In one case where the young wife of a farmer
had been fetched back from the „Witte Wiven"
this sentence was „Clear out, pig" and, to be
on the safe side, the farmer sold all his pigs.
Alas! the „Witte Wiven" are as sly as they are
We walk to the nearby Hotel Spaander, a
well-known home. It is 80 yaers old, a wooden
structure, for a long period the only hotel and
an attraction for foreigners and Dutchmen.
Among the generations of guests counts a great
number of painters, who left a considerable
collection of works. Those paintings and dra
wings are hung all over the house, but the light
inside is poor and not everything hung to its
advantage.
The lunch will not take all our time and there
will be occasion to look about a bit. Volendam
must have been very picturesque when it con
sisted solely in rows of wooden houses on the
dike and behind, and when its port could be
full of fishing-boats.
Down, behind the ancient part of the village
rises a modern quarter; Modern life has a grip
on the younger people. Traditionel costumes
get out of use. The white muslin caps become
rare. The girls prefer to go bareheaded and have
their hair nicely dressed. The young men wear
modern clothes, only older fishermen retain
their traditional costume; but they become
rare the fishermen as well as their apparel.
Public life has its centre on the dike at
least so it seems to a casual visitor. Everybody
meets everybody there near the shops and the
hotels.
On Sundays, if the weather is fine, young
women in thek becoming costumes parade
along the dike, in rows, sometimes five or six,
arm in arm. But Monday is washing-day and
then the lines along the dike-road are draped
with washed cloth and garments that must dry
and take the view away.
Volendam's Football-Club has a great repu
tation. With this last sudden reflection we
combine a term of the game, the finish, and
awake to become aware of the dreadful length
of our comment. This must end before you are
asleep again.
We augur a pleasant tourSo long
cruel and one day they managed to chase a
fat pig in a field where the farmer, his wife and
a farm-hand were milking the cows. The pig
cannoned into the farm-hand who fell and
shouted „Clear out, pig!" Although this was
not directed at his master's wife, she disappear
ed immediately and is now one of the „Witte
Wiven".
A single instance of unexpected kindliness of
the „Witte Wiven" is the following.
A very poor young fellow with a kind heart
had once, with great courage, deposited a plate
of earthenware with a delicious wheat-cake in
the hollow-where the vampires dwelt in the
fond hope that this would improve their taste.
Some years later he fell in love with the
daughter of a rich soldier but there was another
suitor and a wealthy one at that. The prospec
tive father-in-law ordered that the pluckiest of
the two beaus should have his daughter and
as a test he suggested that each should throw a
spade into the hollow where the „Witte
Wiven" lived and get back as fast as he could
to the girl's house.
The rich suitor's courage failed him and he
returned with his spade but the poor young
fellow executed the order although he thought
it a rather childish prank. Having thrown his
spade into the hollow he ran away, pursued
by one of the „Witte Wiven" who, however,
obviously made no serious effort to catch him
but threw the plate of earthenware his
present of some years ago at his head when
he reached the girl's house. This plate had in
the meantime turned into solid gold which
turned the poor young suitor into a very rich
bridegroom.
On the Continent learned persons love to
quote Aristotle, Horace and show off their
knowledge. In England only the uneducated
people show off thek knowlegde, nobody
quotes Latin and Greek authors in the course
of a conversation, unless he has never read
them.
