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 

 taany 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 

 x)f 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 fa.r 

 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 

 ■•ex-posed to sudden and irretrievable 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 Eomans' 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 Britaimos, " — t 



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 Colseus, 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 



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