zijpe polder blaeu 1672 von blaeu joan (1 Ergebnisse)

"Agri Zypani Nova Descript." Copper engraving published by Joan Blaeu as part of a Spanish-language edition of his Atlas Maior, issued around 1672. Beautiful contemporary hand-colouring heightened with gold. Size: 37.5 × 49.5 cm. According to the explanatory text on the reverse of the map, the industriousness of the Hollanders deserves eternal remembrance. With admirable ambition they expanded their territory not through war or conquest but through ingenuity and labourby forcing back the sea itself. By means of dikes and sluices they turned marshes, lagoons and tidal channels into fertile fields. Such reclaimed lands, called "polders," derive their name, according to the scholar Hadrianus Junius, from pol or polle ("low ground" or "pool"). The two most celebrated examples are the Zijpealready diked in the sixteenth centuryand the Beemster, completed in 1611: regions once teeming with fish but now richly productive through divine providence and human effort. Blaeu then describes the wild coast of North Holland as a true natural monster, comparable to the mythic Scylla and Charybdis of antiquity. Especially at the Hondsbossche Zeewering the ocean thunders with an unceasing roar reminiscent of the furious barking of countless dogs. Day and night the waves strike with destructive force, as if trying to devour the land. Against this untameable violence the Hollanders built a monumental embanked dykea "Cyclopean work"as high as a mountain, the result of astonishing human industry. Yet it required constant maintenance: whenever its strength declined, the sea returned with renewed power. That dyke, Blaeu writes, consisted of piles driven deep into the ground, interstices filled with heavy stones and sand, and yearly repairs by skilled craftsmen under the supervision of local magistrates. The sea-wall stretched three miles along the coast and ended at Petten, near Alkmaar, where abundant and particularly tasty mussels grew upon the stones of the dyke itself"delicacies," Blaeu remarks, "that one could scarcely esteem elsewhere after having tasted them." Here lay the origin of the Zijpe: an area of more than eleven thousand Holland morgens (about ten thousand hectares) between Petten and the Hondsbossche Zeewering, bounded by the ocean, the land of the ancient Tuisii (a supposed Germanic tribe) and the islands of Texel and Wieringen. Once it had been a desolate sea-flat cut by treacherous channels and sandbanks that for centuries made settlement impossible. Only Willem van Schagen succeeded in the sixteenth century in enclosing it with dikes, calling the new land Het Nieuweland. His work was continued by Nicolaas de Nicolay, a man of "almost divine ingenuity," who in 1552 surrounded the entire area with a new ring-dyke to strengthen it against the assaults of the ocean. Around the same time the nobleman Godert van Bocholt built saltworks in which seawater was evaporated in large basinsanother sign of human inventiveness. Thus this once saline and barren ground became fertile: the brine was washed away, the soil desalted and drained by canals. The Zijpe yielded rich harvestsuntil nature took revenge in 1570 on All Saints' Day. During a devastating storm surge the sea suddenly broke through the dikes. In a single night the fruit of decades of labour and countless human lives was lost. Houses collapsed, people drowned in their own homes, herds of cattle were swept away by the raging waters. Blaeu calls it a national tragedy, in which "the pain and horror of the living equalled the loss itself." Yet the disaster was followed by rebuilding: the Hollanders, unyielding as ever, restored their dikes, drained the land once more, and proved that no sea is too powerful for their ingenuity, labour, and faith in God. Pieter van den Keere (Petrus Kaerius) engraved a map of the Zijpe polder around 16121617, based on surveys after the reclamation of 1553 and the later re-allotment of 1597. Joan Blaeu revised that map to create the present version. Price: Euro 375,-.