A NEW COUNTRY

Greymouth Evening Star, 11 August 1936, Page 9

A NEW COUNTRY

FROM THE ZUYDER ZEE. j Summer visitors to Europe in search of new lauds and new sights, will find land which is literally new not far from Amsterdam this year, writes Clair Price in the New York Times. A whole new province, so new that it drips with salt, water, is slowly rising from tho old Zuyder Zee. Il is not rising all at once, for tho Zuyder Zee reclamation scheme is by far the biggest thing of the kind which has ever been attempted. By 1960 if is expected that 867 square miles will have been added to the area of Holland— enough new land to support a population of 3,000,000. At present only the first instalment of seventy-seven square miles is finished. populated, and under crops. This summer work is beginning on the second instalment, of 203 square miles, so that visitors may now see both the new land in its reclaimed state and the actual work of raising it from the sea. Eventually, when the whole reclamation scheme is finished, the fishing village of Volendam and the island of Marken will be left high and dp among the reclaimed pastures, and in time are likely to lose the wealth of colour and costume which for generations has made them the show places of the Zuyder Zee. But that will not happen until the draining of the final sections begins. For perhaps another ten years Volendam will remain the home of old Dutch costume, with its little Spaandor Hotel so filled with tho works of Dutch and foreign artists as to make it a miniature art gallery as well as an unpretentious inn. During the tourist season, and especially on Sundays when the attractions of Amsterdam are closed, streams of visitors flow along the dike at Volendam and through the narrow wooden alleys behind the crowded harbour, delighting in a hundred odd details of dike and harbour and bridge, but most of all in the painted houses of blue, red, green and yellow in which the villagers sought, relief from the dull grey monotone of the Zuyder Zee. Marken is much the same sort of place except that being an island, it is more difficult to reach —and also it has no Spaander to immortalise it. You can see the new life which is slowly approaching the new generation if you go away up to the northern end of the Zuyder Zee, where the first reclaimed area —"polder” is the Dutch term —is now a rich checkerboard of green fields, brick-paved roads, and new red-roofed villages. It is an hour’s train journey from Amsterdam due north to Medemblik on the. Wieringcrmer polder—and all that hour you spend looking from your train window at the flat scooped out countryside. Medemblik to-day is the southern terminus of a great dike which looks a little like a Mississippi River levee, except that it is bigger—at. the sea bottom it is 400 feet thick. Faced on its seaward side with slabs of black basalt, it slopes gently up to a, parapet-top twenty-two feet above the waterline, then drops to a level surface 100 feet wide, carrying a doubletrack railway and a roadway. As the Zee stands to-day, you can see where the new land begins by noting where the trees end on the horizon. it is a strange horizon to watch, as you go racing by bus along the polder roads. Only a few years ago if was an ordinary coastline, and the fine paved road beneath your bus was part of the bottom, perhaps five or ten miles out at sea. SOME EARLY VOYAGERS. Henry Hudson passed over these fields in the Hahn Moon on the voyage which enabled him to discovei (hat Now York’s river led, not to China of the South Seas, but only to Albany. The redoubtable William Sehouten passed this way when he christened Cape Horn after his home port of Hoorn, now one of the loveliest of the Zuyder Zee’s “dead cities.” Abel Tasman, another Hoorn man, passed this way when he bestowed his name on Tasmania. A few more years and these new fields will begin to take on an older and richer verdure than they have todav. The biggest of the Dutch polders before the Wieringermeer polder was the Haarlem Lake polder of sixtysix square miles. To-day the Haarlem Lake polder lies in the heart of the Dutch bulb district, and is patterned with colour during the spring season like a vast Delft plate. The polder whose reclamation is beginning this summer lies over on the Friesland side of the Zuyder Zee, where the policemen, the black and white cows, and ■ the north and east winds come from.

Its projected area of 203 square miles makes it far and away the biggest polder which the Dutch have ever attempted, but at present it consists of a small harbour on the Freisland coast which serves tea a base, and a fleet of barges, dredgers, and tugs with the magic word “Zuiderzoewerken” in tall white- letters their black plates. The building of the enclosing dike has just, begun and is expected to take- some five years for its completion. It will not be as massive as the great dike which encloses the Wieringermeer pokier, but it is being built on the same plan. Willow .mattresses are sunk first to pin the dike to the bottom. Then heavy facings of blue boulder clay are put down and between these facings the core of the dike is filled with sand. When completed, the dike will follow a curving course through the Island of Urk, and that island, the largest in the Zuyder Zee, will thus be joined to the mainland. Urk is little more than a long mound on which -a small colony of mound dwellers has been sitting on its heap of herring bones for 600 years, preserving in its medieval folk-lore the tales of villages drowned by the inrush of the North Sea - , > When their harbour is pumped diJ they will meet the fate which has already descended on the humble “pond fishermen” of the coastal villages.