[Sidenote:  The struggle with the water.]

Though the North Sea lowland of Europe has suffered from the serious encroachment of the sea from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, when the Zuyder Zee, the Dollart and Jade Bay were formed, nevertheless the counter encroachment of the land upon the water, accomplished through the energy and intelligence of the inhabitants, has more than made good the loss.  Between the Elbe and Scheldt more than 2,000 square miles (5,000 square kilometers) have been reclaimed from river and sea in the past three hundred years.  Holland’s success in draining her large inland waters, like the Haarlem Meer (70 square miles or 180 square kilometers) and the Lake of Ij, has inspired an attempt to recover 800 square miles (2,050 square kilometers) of fertile soil from the borders of the Zuyder Zee and reduce that basin to nearly one-third of its present size.[598] One-fourth of the Netherlands lies below the average of high tides, and in 1844 necessitated 9,000 windmills to pump the waste water into the drainage canals.[599]

The Netherlands, with all its external features of man’s war against the water, has its smaller counterpart in the 1,200 square miles of reclaimed soil about the head of the Wash, which constitute the Fenland of England.  Here too are successive lines of sea-wall, the earliest of them attributed to the Romans, straightened and embanked rivers, drainage canals, windmills and steam pumps, dikes serving as roads, lines of willows and low moist pastures dotted with grazing cattle.  No feature of the Netherlands is omitted.  The low southern part of Lincolnshire is even called Holland, and Dutch prisoners from a naval battle of 1652 were employed there on the work of reclamation, which was begun on a large scale about this time.[600] In the medieval period, the increase of population necessitated measures to improve the drainage and extend the acreage; but there was little co-operation among the land owners, and the maintenance of river dikes and sea-walls was neglected, till a succession of disasters from flooding streams and invading tides in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries led to severe measures against defaulters.  One culprit was placed alive in a breach which his own neglect or criminal cutting had caused, and was built in, by way of educating the Fenlanders to a sense of common responsibility.[601]

The fight against the water on the coast begins later than that against rivers and swamps in the interior of the land; it demands greater enterprise and courage, because it combats two enemies instead of one; but its rewards are correspondingly greater.  The Netherlands by their struggle have acquired not only territory for an additional half million population, but have secured to themselves a strategic position in the maritime trade of the world.

[Sidenote:  Mound villages in river flood-plains.]