INUNDATIONS or THE COASTS. ]61 



During sixteen hundred years, that is to say, ever since written his- 

 tory commenced in these countries, the life of the inhabitants of the 

 shores has been nothing but an incessant strife against the encroach- 

 ment of the waters. During this period the great irruptions of the 

 sea may be counted by hundreds, and among these there are some 

 which, according to the chronicles, must have drowned whole popula- 

 tions of fifty and a hundred thousand souls. During the course of 

 the third century, tradition tells us that the island of Walcheren was 

 separated from the continent ; in 860 the Rhine rose, inundating the 

 country; the palace of Caligula (arx britannica) remaining in the 

 midst of the waves. Towards the middle of the twelfth century the 

 sea made a new irruption, and the Lake Flevo was changed into a 

 gulf, which was still more enlarged in 1225, forming the Zuyder Zee, 

 that vast labyrinth of sandbanks, which, from a geological point of 

 view, is still a dependency of the continent, and is separated by a 

 log row of islands and dunes from the domain of the ocran. In 

 the first years of the thirteenth century the gulf of Jahde was opened 

 at the expense of the land, and never ceased to enlarge itself during 

 two hundred years. In 1230 the terrible inundation of Friesland 

 took place, which is said to have cost the life of a hundred thousand 

 men. The following year the lakes of Haarlem overflowed the 

 ground, then gradually increasing, united with each other to expand 

 into an inland sea towards the middle of the seventeenth century. 

 In 1277 the gulf of the DoUart, which is nearly 22 miles long, and 

 7 miles wide, began to be hollowed out at the expense of the fertile 

 and populous countries, and transformed Friesland into a peninsula. 

 It was only in 1537 that they could arrest the invasions of the sea, 

 which had devoured the town of Torum and 50 villages. Ten years 

 after the first invasion of the waters in the Dollart, an overflowing of 

 the Zuyder Zee drowned 80,000 persons, and changed the configura- 

 tion of the Dutch coast-line. In 1421, 72 villages were submerged 

 at once, and the sea on retiring left only an archipelago of marshy 

 islands and islets, covered with reeds and banks of mud, in the place 

 of fields and groups of habitations : this is the country known under 

 the name of Biesbosch (forest of reeds). Since this epoch many 

 other hardly less terrible catastrophes have taken place on the coasts 

 of Holland, Friesland, Schleswig, and Jutland.* 



Of the row of 23 islands, which extended along the shore 15 

 centuries ago, only 16 fragments remain, and many are nothing 

 * Von H off; vonMaack; Beyer; Baudissin; Karl Miiller, &c. 



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