The dunes of Naarden
A government’s historical failure
Door Christien Boomsma
By Christien Boomsma
Christien Boomsma
Henk Schaftenaar is completely at home in archives.
He’s been to so many different archives so many times, that he’s almost part of the furniture. ‘You can go down to the basement’, the staff will tell him. ‘You know what you’re looking for best.’
And he does.
He is eighty years old. In his lifetime, he’s become a rock collector and he can identify pretty much any rock or mineral. He is a soil expert, going out with his auger and his grandson to study the soil. He was a geography teacher, a historian, and the editor of his own magazine. He was always curious about the landscape: why are the cobblestones in the streets of Naarden different from the ones found on the surrounding moors? (Because the stones came from Swedish ships, where they were used as ballast.) Why is the dike so uneven in one spot? (Because the dike was raised in 1919 due to a flood.) And now, he’s received his PhD for his research on landscape history.
Curious document
During one of his many archival expeditions, he found a curious document. In this document, the government announced it would get involved in levelling the dunes near Naarden. His curiosity was piqued. There had been other areas where sand had been extracted: it was often used as a soil improver or to make glass. It was also used to raise roads, or to serve as ballast for ships. Most of these instances involved private use, however, which meant there weren’t many historical documents on them.
‘But here, deep down in the archive, I’d found this piece that showed the government was getting involved. The government was intervening in the landscape, over a period of 160 years’, he says. ‘I was surprised. I decided that when I had the time, after my retirement for instance, I would get to the bottom of it.’
It all had to be done on the cheap
He has since done so. Approximately six weeks before he turns eighty-one, Schaftenaar has received a PhD for his thesis on sand and a megalomaniacal government project that went completely off the rails, 350 years ago.
He is a ‘landscaper down to the bone’, he says. He’s fascinated by the landscape, wondering why the vegetation at the top of the dike differs from that at the bottom. How are people intervening in the landscape and what are their reasons? What do we even know about it?
And when you’re from Naarden, studying sand is only logical. The stronghold used to be surrounded by dunes, not far from what used to be the Zuyder Zee. That’s why people had been extracting and selling sand in small sand quarries since the Middle Ages. ‘My great-great-grandfather was a sand trader’, Schaftenaar says proudly. He was in charge of a private quarry and hired the day labourers, who would carry the sand to the sand barges for a few cents for every wheelbarrow, which weighed approximately a hundred kilos when filled.
Inferior sand
But there’s something strange about the area. Naarden’s sand wasn’t of particularly good quality. ‘It was mainly drift sand’, says Schaftenaar. ‘A very fine, sort of grimy type of sand. It can’t be used to make glass and because it cost too much to transport, they didn’t use it to raise building plots, either. It mainly served as ballast for ships transporting wood to the Baltic Sea.’
Yet for two hundred years, this sand gave many people a job in Naarden. It was excavated so much that the landscape around the town changed from rolling dunes to flat polders.
It’s not until three kilometres outside the old town walls that the old landscape returns: pastures criss-crossed by ditches and marked off by high sandy ridges. The houses there appear to be raised, when in actuality, they were built in the ‘original’ landscape. There are patches of sand that time forgot.
It raises the question: what happened here 350 years ago?
The answer, Schaftenaar now knows, amounts to an overzealous government starting a project and getting waylaid by the harsh reality of the landscape. ‘I compare it to the whole nitrogen issue.’
Disaster year
It all started in 1672, the Disaster year. The French were threatening to take over the Netherlands. Naarden, too, was occupied, although it was taken back a year later by the then newly appointed stadtholder Willem III. ‘He did so by taking cover in the elevated areas around the stronghold’, says Schaftenaar. ‘But even back then, he knew that the stronghold was useless without the surrounding dunes.’
Shortly after, the States of Holland decided that an area of 300 rods – 1,130 metres – outside of Naarden had to be excavated. This would prevent the enemy from being able to hide. Another advantage was that they could flood the area by diverting the river Lek. After all, this had happened several times before during the Resistance, at Leiden and Alkmaar, among other places. ‘But it all had to be done on the cheap’, says Schaftenaar. ‘It was explicitly stated.’
Some owner refused to start digging
The solution was as Dutch as ever: ‘The government wanted the landowners themselves to do the excavating. They would then be able to sell the sand they’d excavated. But it meant the landowners had to dig the canals to transport the sand themselves.’
However, this was easier said than done. Some landowners refused to do anything, says Schaftenaar. ‘They figured that if the government wanted them to do something, it had to compensate them.’
Other landowners did start digging, but did it their own way. While they did install little canals that led to their own plots, they didn’t dig them in such a way that they became a kind of ‘third moat’; it was just a mishmash of separate channels.
Ruined
The inferior quality of the sand also posed a problem. None of the skippers wanted the Naarden sand and went elsewhere, which the government tried to solve by banning this. But this ban was largely ignored. ‘Whenever there were checks in place they lay low for a while and then just went back at it.’
Whenever there were checks in place they lay low for a while
An attempt to buy the land after 1723 and resell it with an excavation contract also failed miserably. Rich, smart individuals bought their neighbours’ land, waited for the government to turn up, and then drove up the price.
Even if they were digging, most owners refused to dig deep enough, since that would make the soil so wet that it became useless for agricultural purposes. ‘The private individuals didn’t want to lose any money on the land’, says Schaftenaar.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, enough land had been excavated for a test inundation – a purposeful flooding that became especially relevant when the French were back at in 1794. But the entire idea turned out to be a flop. Instead of the flatlands around Naarden flooding, other areas did.
Complicated
Schaftenaar’s research also shows it’s not a good idea to lose yourself in the narrative you’re trying to sell. ‘The prevailing story is that the defensive flooding saved us in 1673’, says Schaftenaar. ‘But in reality, it was a lot more complicated than that.’
The inundations weren’t all that successful, he says. Entire areas were destroyed. At the same time, the French weren’t as helpless as we’d like to think. ‘They were able to redirect the water to even more low-lying areas.’
But the government didn’t listen to any of the criticism levelled at them. As far back as 1672, field marshal Paulus Wirtz said there was a serious lack of knowledge on water levels and the effects of inundation. ‘He said “Whenever I try to flood a polder, the farmers on the other side immediately start undoing my work.” But the States of Holland wasn’t interested in any of this.’
As such, his thesis isn’t just a history of sand. ‘It’s the story of a government that overestimated itself’, says Schaftenaar. ‘Just like the government is doing today. They might want farmers to do a lot of things, but then they’re faced with the reality of people who’ve owned their particular piece of land for generations.’