MAGNIFICENCE OF STORM-TIDES. 35 
the rich alluvial plains which once belonged to their domain. 
Far inland, the terrified peasant hears the roar of the tumul- 
tuous waters, and well may he tremble when the mountain-waves 
come thundering against the artificial barriers, that separate his 
fields from the raging floods, for the annals of his country relate 
many sad examples of their fury, and tell him that numerous 
villages and extensive meads, once flourishing and fertile, now 
lie buried fathom-deep under the waters of the sea. 
Thus, on the first of November, 1170, the storm-flood, bursting 
through the dykes, submerged all the land between the Texel, 
Medenblik, and Stavoren, formed the island of Wieringen, and 
enlarged the openings by which the Zuiderzee communicated 
with the ocean. The inundations of 1232 and 1242 caused, each 
of them, the death of more than 100,000 persons, and that of 
1287 swept away more than 80,000 victims in Friesland alone. 
The irruption of 1395 considerably widened the channels between 
the Flie and the Texel, and allowed large vessels to sail as far 
as Amsterdam and Enkhuizen, which had not been the case 
before. Whilst reading these accounts, we are led to compare 
the inhabitants of the Dutch lowlands with those of the fertile 
fields and vineyards that clothe the sides of Vesuvius: both 
exposed to sudden and irretrievab'e ruin from the rage of 
two different elements, and yet both contented and careless 
of the future; the first behind the dykes that have often given 
way to the ocean, the latter on the very brink of a menacing 
volcano, 
The tides which sometimes cause such dreadful devastations 
on the shores of the North Sea are, as is well known, incon- 
siderable, or even hardly perceptible in the Mediterranean, and 
thus many years passed ere the Greeks and Romans first wit- 
nessed the grand phenomenon. The Phoenicians, the merchant 
princes of antiquity, who at a very early period of history 
visited the isolated Britons, — 
“ Penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos, ” — 
and sailed far away into the Indian Ocean, were of course well 
acquainted with it; but it first became known to the Greeks 
through the voyage of Coleus, a mariner of Samos, who, accord- 
ing to Herodotus, was driven by a storm through the Straits of 
Hercules into the wide Atlantic 600 years before Christ. About 
D2 
