Democratic Sentinel, Volume 22, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 December 1898 — The Zuider Zee. [ARTICLE]

The Zuider Zee.

Ancient maps of Holland are a curious and interesting study. They discover changes in configuration such as no other country In the world probably could show in the same period. Take some lying before us as we write. Here is one professing to show us the Netherlands before the twelfth century. There is no Zuider Zee, though there is a considerable Inland sea a little to the north and east of the present Amsterdam; the river Yssel flows straight to the ocean, issuing upon it where now the strait between the mainland and the Island of Texel leads out of the Zuider Zee; Texel and Ylieland and the other Islands that stretch to Groningen to-day are still part of the mainland. By the thlrtesnth century, as we see from the next map, the ocean burst into the land. The Zuider Zee has reached its present proportions, and, indeed, exceeded them, for then, and right on to the seventeenth century, the neck of North Holland is attenuated, and for the greater part the province is composed of inland seas and lakes. By the seventeenth century, however, the work of reclamation has begun; the maps now show where polders have been made—the Beemster and the Wormer, for example; and as we come down to the middle of the present century more and more water disappears and green fields take its place. The last of the inland seas to go was the Lake of Haarlem, so notable in Dutch history, from which (they are the figures of De Amiscis) 923,265,112 cubic meters of water was drained, after thirty-nine months of labor and an Outlay of 7,240,368 florins—the result being a present to Holland of some 40,000 or 50,000 acres of land.