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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Window into a truly lost world,
By Mike Daplyn (Totescore, Isle of Skye, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Lost Sea (Hardcover)
Jan de Hartog was one of the select group of writers of the sea (Melville and Conrad are of course pre-eminent)who had come up in the hard school. As a very young boy he ran away to join the Zuider Zee herring fleet, and as an adult made his career at sea, first in windjammers (which he feared and hated) and later in "Holland's Glory", the ocean towing service which features strongly in his books. It's a shame his books are only intermittently in print these days.The Lost Sea of this semi-autobiographical novel is the old Zuider Zee that lay at the heart of the Netherlands from the great floods of the 13th-14th centuries until the 20th century reclamation schemes turned it into the freshwater IJssel Meer. The narrator recollects the time he, like de Hartog, ran away to join the nomadic herring fleet that followed the herring migrations around the rich feeding and spawning grounds. The fleet would sell its catch at sea to the buying-boats, only putting into port on Sunday, when twice in the day all hands would attend the Kerk in their Sunday best and terrorise the town in the interval while their skippers tried to drink each other under the table. It was a harsh and sometimes violent life; there were strong antagonisms between the fishermen from Calvinist and Catholic villages, exacerbated by use of competing types of fishing gear. de Hartog does not romanticise it, but he does take it at its own value - an attitude similar to that of the prairie writers like Willa Cather and George Ryga. And it all went away when the great dykes blocked the tides and the herring migration routes. The most poignant incident in the whole book is a postcript in which the narrator, now middle-aged after WW2, is driving through the polderlands where the herring fleets fished in his boyhood. He gives a lift to some schoolchildren and asks them where they live; he is momentarily aghast when they reply "Emmeloord". Emmeloord was one of the villages drowned in the Middle Ages, and the fishermen of his youth said you could hear its church bells tolling beneath the waves as you sailed by on a dirty night. Now it's the fishermen and their world who are only a ghostly presence.
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