It is as imperative that the traveler through Holland should journey from Amsterdam to Alkmaar by canal as it is that he should not overlook the steam tram trip between The Hague and Leyden.

The twenty-four and a half miles between the commercial metropolis and the cheese capital of North Holland is made in a little less than three hours. Taking all things into consideration, it is one of the most enjoyable steamboat excursions in the kingdom. Bearing up through the North Sea Canal and the River Zaan, the packet makes its first stop at Zaandam; then on up the river it winds between the bristling windmills, turns from one canal into another, crosses a small lake, and finally negotiates the waterway that leads eventually to Alkmaar. The polders on either hand are far below the level of the water you are steaming over, so that you see no more than the tops of the farmhouses. Although the wake of the passing boat rattles the reeds along the banks, the fishermen concealed here and there among them seem not the least perturbed, but continue to fish with all their might and main, allowing the steamer to play what havoc it will with the movements and inclinations of their prey.

Alkmaar, and not Edam, is the geographical and industrial center of the cheese trade of North Holland, and the cheese market is the geographical and industrial center of Alkmaar. To give some idea of the length of time they have been marketing cheeses in Alkmaar you will be told upon inquiry that the town weigh-house was constructed in 1582, and for no other purpose than to weigh the cheeses bought and sold at the weekly market. To give some idea of the town’s importance as a cheese center, the astonishing number of forty-odd million pounds of round, golden cheeses are bargained for at the side of the weigh-house in every twelve months.

In addition to the weigh-house the town boasts of but few historically remunerative objects of interest. There is the old Church of St. Lawrence, built in 1470, the surrounding walls and buttresses of which protect a part of the eminent remains of Floris V, Count of Holland and builder of the Hall of the Knights at The Hague, although why they were interred at such a distance to the north of the scenes of his activity is a matter of some conjecture; there are a few relics and mediocre paintings on show in the Municipal Museum; and there is the old water gate that seems to forbid any farther penetration into the town on the part of the packet from Amsterdam. In history Alkmaar played its solemn rÔle by making a stubborn and ultimately successful resistance against the besieging Spaniards in 1573. Five to one were the odds against which the burghers fought and, as at Leyden, the water of the ocean was the all-powerful lever that rewarded the besieged and routed the besiegers.

As early as daybreak the Friday visitor—for Friday is cheese day in Alkmaar—will find plenty of activity in the vicinity of the town weigh-house. It is therefore advisable to reach the place the previous Thursday evening, because the unloading of the cheeses and the stacking of them upon the stone pavement of the market square during the early hours of the following morning are among the most interesting phases of the whole proceeding. And so, by daylight on Friday, gayly painted farm wagons from the surrounding country already fringe three sides of the market, and every one of them is disgorging, two at a time, its load of golden cheeses. On the canal that bounds the fourth side of the square lie berthed a double row of long, narrow boats, also loaded from keel plate to hatch cover with the product of the district. From every point of the compass cheeses are being tossed through the air from the wagons and boats, only to have their flight checked with a smack by the men who catch them and pile them upon the pavement in long, double-decked rows, ten cheeses in width. Later, canvas is thrown over the piles to protect the cheeses from

the rays of the sun until it is time for the cheese makers and the wholesale commission merchants from the cities, soon to descend upon the scene, to commence their dickerings. All through the early morning this unloading continues, its accompanying smacks to be heard half a block away, until perhaps 250,000 cheeses have been piled up in neat rows with alleyways between them, across the market square from one edge to the other.

At half-past nine, half an hour before the market opens, the weighmen, all garbed in immaculate white, meet in executive session in the weigh-house and absorb a ceremonious talking-to by the superintendent of the market—probably upon the subject of honest weights and the penalties to be imposed upon the unfortunate man caught trifling with the rules and regulations of the game.

These weighmen constitute a distinct feature of every cheese market in Holland. Their dress may seem ludicrous and their duties a bit undignified, but they go about their calling with all the seriousness of statesmen. Until recently they were divided, one might say, into four colors: red, blue, green, and yellow, as distinguished by their hat bands. Latterly, a fifth color, orange, has been added. In the weigh-house there are five pairs of scales, each pair painted a different color corresponding to the colors of the weighmen. The “red” weighmen must weigh their barrowfuls of cheeses upon the “red” scales; the “blue” weighmen, upon the “blue” scales, and so on. An Alkmaar cheese weighman holds a life position, is elected by the community, and receives in commissions a certain percentage, determined by the value of the cheeses, of each hundred kilos weighed, or fraction thereof.

At ten o’clock promptly the heavy sheets of canvas are dragged from the piles. The market is thus officially opened, and for the ensuing two hours the visitor will be treated to some of the shrewdest of shrewd Dutch bargaining. The stolid, unemotional makers of cheeses stand doggedly by their respective piles, while the crafty wholesale merchants flit hither and yon testing. Not a word passes between them other than a surly “how d’ y’ do” in Dutch. The merchant selects a cheese at random, jams into it an instrument that any competent housewife might mistake for an apple corer, gives it a twist, pulls it out slowly, and tastes the end of the sample thus taken. What remains of the sample is drawn from the instrument, slipped back into the parent cheese, and the tester moves along to attack another pile.

At the end of an hour every merchant on the ground will have tested and tasted every pile of cheeses—in itself no small saporific achievement. Not only will he have used the taste test on the different piles, but he will have called upon his other four senses to confirm or countervail its decision. He will have examined cheeses by sight; he will have held them to his ear and shaken them, as we might an egg; he will have felt of the weight and solidity of them; and he will have taken long, knowing whiffs of their fragrance. At the end of an hour, then, he is qualified to approach this or that particular dealer and offer him so much per hundred kilos for his cheeses. Then it is that Greek meets Greek. In a moment’s time the dull-looking, uncommunicative, apparently unconcerned provincial maker of cheese seems to be transformed into a cunning, canny, clear-headed man of business. The two of them, merchant and maker, stand for a full minute with their right hands outstretched, like a picture of Captain John Smith sealing a treaty with the Indians. Suppose the maker finally agrees to the price offered: without uttering a syllable he grips the hand of the merchant, and the bargain is closed. If he does not agree, he slaps the merchant’s hand a whack that resounds across the square. By eleven-fifteen the walls of the surrounding houses reverberate with what a stranger around the corner might easily suppose to be the premature explosion of a number of toy balloons—for cheese makers are but human and would rather wait in the hope of being offered more for their stock. Competition is the essence of trade, even in Holland.

When a bargain is negotiated, they call a pair of weighmen who load the cheeses upon a barrow—a queer kind of barrow that resembles more a stretcher on sled runners—and carry them to the scales to be weighed. After being weighed and their sale recorded upon the books of the superintendent, the cheeses are loaded back into the wagons and boats to be transferred to the warehouse for shipment.

The cheese goes through no further preliminaries if intended for native consumption. If destined for export, however, it must needs undergo a peculiar, yet withal a simple process: it must be well scraped and painted over with a thin aniline dye which rapidly turns as it dries to a glorious vermilion. The scraping is done by machinery, but the dyeing is done by hand and with almost incredible swiftness by the men employed in some of the establishments in Alkmaar.

The question was asked if the dyeing assisted in the preservation of the cheese or helped to keep it immune from mould or corrodings. Not at all. The ultimate consumer across the seas would turn up his nose at an un-dyed cheese and snub it as a cheap imitation. The foreign public demands that the genuine North Holland cheese bear a distinctive hall-mark. That hall-mark is its coat of red dye. Since this province probably supplies a good three-fifths of the 55,000 tons of cheese exported in a single year the reader can imagine what a deal of red dye it takes to satisfy a foreign fancy.

A distance of thirty miles or more north of Alkmaar lies The Helder, figuratively the top of the kingdom. Geographically, it is only in the same latitude as the most northerly point of Newfoundland at the Straits of Belle Isle, and so there are plenty of towns over in Friesland and Groningen that lie still farther to the north, but these do not have the conditions to contend with that does The Helder. Surrounded on three sides by the waters of the Zuyder Zee and the North Sea, The Helder assumes much of the responsibility of protecting the whole province of North Holland from a general and disastrous inundation. More than any other part of the province, indeed of all Holland, it is exposed to the ravages of the most violent winds, which kick the sea into a maelstrom and pound it with relentless fury upon the coast line.

Here at The Helder may be found the finest fruits of that “big story” of Holland: the constant battle of mere man against an all but omnipotent element—water; the romantic, persistent, patient strife of the Hollander to insure as much as possible his own safety and that of the land which he has weaned from the sea from utter and inexorable annihilation. If for nothing else, it is for this “big story” that one should go to The Helder. If the traveler through Holland has not been already duly impressed with the silent, continuous fight of the Dutch for mere existence, he will return from this northernmost promontory of North Holland with augmented faith in the ingenuity and dogged perseverance of the men who have made a country out of what once was sea bottom.

The foregoing preamble is meant to prepare the traveler to appreciate The Helder. If it fails in its mission, it may be all for the best, because the unanticipated often strikes with the greatest degree of accuracy and forcefulness and brands the experience upon the mind, never to be obliterated.

Disembarking from the train, you will turn instinctively to the north through a wide avenue—a veritable tunnel through the trees. After crossing the drawbridge that spans the canal at the end of the avenue, you must turn abruptly to the left. The first cross street—little more than an alleyway between the houses—is barricaded at its farther extremity by a steep, grass-grown embankment that towers almost to the same altitude as the chimney pots of the house tops below. A flight of thirty-one steps ascends to the top of this peculiar embankment and you scramble up, expecting to behold on the other side a view of—you scarcely know what. You are surprised to discover that the view is a sea-scape, for, if you have failed to observe The Helder’s lofty lighthouse, it has not been suggested to you that the sea is anywhere in the neighborhood.

You will be standing on the top of one of the greatest and strongest dikes in Holland, its business side stretching away before you at an angle of forty degrees for two hundred feet into the Strait of Marsdiep. Extending a total distance of five miles in the arc of a circle, this, then, is the sloping buttress that North Holland relies upon for its very life. A severe storm will lash the water of the strait into spray, and fling it across into the windows of the bordering houses, but the highest of tides cannot come over the backbone of the dike, while at all times the water laps restlessly at its foundations. The top of the dike is mounted with a roadway twelve feet in width. Some feet above the water line at low tide the tops of great stone breakwaters, like the ribs of a dinosaur, stretch seaward at regular intervals. The whole of this remarkable artificial coast is constructed of Norwegian granite.

Upon the summits of a few sand dunes that raise themselves here and there behind the dike the Dutch have completed the construction of some rather crude military fortifications which Napoleon commenced in 1811. But improvements upon them are going on apace, for Holland is not exactly anxious to suffer an experience with regard to her string of islands in the north, in furthering German aggrandizement as did the Danes of Helgoland before the gun muzzles of the British in 1807.

The single point of North Holland, however, most exposed to sea encroachments is a few miles south of The Helder on the North Sea. Here there is a chain of three great dikes, one beyond the other, named significantly, beginning with the one farthest from the shore, “The Waker,” “The Dreamer,” and “The Sleeper.” Still farther to the south, on the same side of the province, are the great sand dunes, three miles in width in some places, under the protection of which the freight boats from Amsterdam creep to their destinations along the North Sea Canal.

Off the northern dunes the combined English and French fleets of war suffered defeat at the hands of the Dutch admirals, de Ruyter and Tromp, two hundred thirty-eight years ago to the day, as I write (the 21st of August), and in September, 1799, two armies of 10,000 and 13,000, English and Russian troops respectively, commanded by the Duke of York, landed here to try their luck at tempting the Dutch to revolt against the French. The Russian forces lost their way and were defeated by the French before they had advanced as far as Alkmaar, and the British, bearing in mind the comforting old adage about discretion being the best part of valor, retreated after having penetrated as far south as Castricum, near Zaandam.

In the town of The Helder itself—why they refer to it as “The” Helder I do not know, unless it be for the reason that the article makes of it a pseudonym for a Dutch John o’ Groats—in the town itself there is little of interest. One street I have in mind, however, which is of rather peculiar construction. The north side of it, from the middle of what ought to be the common roadway, is possibly three and a half feet higher than its south side, the upper part built upon an embankment faced with a brick wall.

The place is full of Dutch sailors and navy people, for about three quarters of a mile down the dike lies Nieuwediep, the Dutch combination of Hampton Roads, Annapolis, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Situated at the mouth of the North Holland Canal, Nieuwediep is the most important naval station in Holland, maintaining large wharves, docks, machine shops, and a naval academy, the students of which, two, four, and six abreast—Holland’s future Tromps and de Ruyters—can be seen strolling up and down the great dike. A fraction of the country’s one hundred vessels of war and of her 8,000 men that man them receive their orders at the station at Nieuwediep.

Across the Strait of Marsdiep is the Island of Texel, the most southerly unit of the long series of vertebrÆ that curve far to the northeast, as if made to fit exactly the coast lines of the provinces of Friesland and Groningen. A steamer plies to Texel from Nieuwediep and returns four times daily; but you may profitably omit the island from your itinerary unless you are particularly interested in natural history and you happen to come upon Texel during the bird nesting season. The northern extremity of the island, called Eyerland, or “The Land of Eggs,” is infested with sea fowl, the eggs of which are collected by the myriads and shipped to the large cities. Texel is seventy-three square miles in area and supports one or two very plain bathing places, but most of its six thousand inhabitants are chiefly engaged in the business of sheep raising on the long, crater-like pasture land hemmed in by the sand dunes.