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Updated: June 2, 2025
The Dutch not only built ships for themselves, but orders were sent to their ship-yards from all parts of the world, inasmuch as in these yards all sorts of vessels, whether for war, commerce, or pleasure, could be built better and cheaper than in any other place. One of the chief centres in which these ship and boat building operations were carried on was the town of Saardam.
He visited at Saardam the thatched cottage which sheltered Peter the Great when he came to Holland under the name of Pierre Michaeloff to study ship-building; and after remaining there half an hour, the Emperor, as he left, remarked to the grand marshal of the palace. "That is the finest monument in Holland."
Referring to the two Dutch towns which are the most rigorously watched over, she says: "Saardam is a page, and Broek a vignette, from the history of Holland. "The people of Broek have neither the taste for, nor the love of, cleanliness; it is with them a fanaticism, a fetichism. A certain means of ensuring from them a favourable reception is the avoidance, not of vices, but dirt."
As he betrayed or revealed his personality in his first novel, so in this first effort in another department of literature he showed in epitome his qualities as a historian and a biographer. The hero of his narrative makes his entrance at once in his character as the shipwright of Saardam, on the occasion of a visit of the great Duke of Marlborough. The portrait instantly arrests attention.
Wilhelmus Kieft, who in 1634 ascended the gubernatorial chair, to borrow a favorite though clumsy appellation of modern phraseologists, was of a lofty descent, his father being inspector of windmills in the ancient town of Saardam; and our hero, we are told, when a boy, made very curious investigations into the nature and operation of these machines, which was one reason why he afterwards came to be so ingenious a governor.
We wonder if he saw him with his own hands building his hut on the frozen plains of Siberia, clothed, not in rich furs and jewels, but bearded and in long, coarse, gray smock-frock; his daughter, the betrothed of an Emperor, clad, not in ermine, but in sheep-skin. Perhaps the lesson with his master the Carpenter of Saardam served him in building his own shelter in that dread abode.
Among them was a young man twenty-five years old, calling himself Peter Mikhailof, who a few weeks later might have been seen at Saardam in Holland, in complete outfit of workman's clothes, in dust and by the sweat of his brow learning the art of ship-carpentry. Such was the first introduction to Europe of the Tsar of Russia!
He visited at Saardam the thatched cottage which sheltered Peter the Great when he came to Holland under the name of Pierre Michaeloff to study ship-building; and after remaining there half an hour, the Emperor, as he left, remarked to the grand marshal of the palace. "That is the finest monument in Holland."
With this gentleman, and with the other persons in Amsterdam that Peter took a fancy to, he lived on very friendly and familiar terms. He often came in from Saardam to visit them, and would sometimes spend a considerable portion of the night in drinking and making merry with them.
There were not wanting illiberal minds, however, who sneered at the governor for thinking to defend his city as he governed it, by mere wind; but William Kieft was not to be jeered out of his windmills; he had seen them perched upon the ramparts of his native city of Saardam; and was persuaded they were connected with the great science of defence; nay, so much piqued was he by having them made a matter of ridicule, that he introduced them into the arms of the city, where they remain to this day, quartered with the ancient beaver of the Manhattoes, an emblem and memento of his policy.
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