INUNDATIONS IN THE NETHEELANDS. 393 



employed in describing the latter, and I content myself with the 

 simple statement I have already made of the quantity of worth- 

 less, and even pestilential, land which has been rendered both 

 productive and salubrious in Lincolnshire, by diking out the sea 

 and the rivers which traverse the fens of that country. 



The almost continued prevalence of west winds upon both 

 coasts of the German Ocean occasions a constant set of the cur- 

 rents of that sea to the east, and both for this reason and on ac- 

 count of the greater violence of storms fi'om the former quarter, 

 the English shores of the North Sea are less exposed to invasion 

 by the waves than those of the Netherlands and the provinces 

 contiguous to thein on the north. The old Netherlandish chron- 

 icles are filled with the most startlino- accounts of the damagje 

 done by the irruptions of the ocean, from west winds or extraor- 

 dinarily high tides, at times long before any considerable extent 

 of sea-coast was diked. Several hundreds of these terrible inun- 

 dations are recorded, and in many of them the loss of human 

 lives is estimated as high as one hundred thousand. It is impos- 

 sible to doubt that there must be enormous exaggeration in these 

 numbers ; for, with all the reckless hardihood shown by men in 

 braving the dangers and privations attached by nature to their 

 birthplace, it is inconceivable that so dense a population as such 

 wholesale destruction of life supposes could find the means of 

 subsistence, or content itself to dwell, on a territory liable a dozen 

 times in a century to such fearful devastation. There can be no 

 doubt, however, that the low continental shores of the German 

 Ocean very frequently suffered immense injury from inundation 

 by the sea, and it is natural, therefore, that the various arts of 

 resistance to the encroachments of the ocean, and, finally, of ag- 

 gressive warfare upon its domain and of permanent conquest of 

 its territory, should have been earher studied and carried to 

 higher perfection in the latter countries, than in England, which 

 had less to lose or to gain by the incursion or the retreat of the 

 waters. 



Indeed, although the confinement of swelling rivers by arti- 

 ficial embankments is of great antiquity, I do not know that the 

 defence or acquisition of land from the sea by diking was ever 

 practiced on a large scale, until systematically undertaken by the 

 Netherlanders a few centuries after the commencement of tlie 

 17* 



