The Real Holland in Zaanse Schans

On a bright, sunny day, contented cows graze in the lush green countryside.

Canals that crisscross the acreage act as fences while enhancing the bucolic beauty.

Beside the fields is a reflective blue lake, and bordering that lake, huge wooden windmill blades reap nature's power to grind mustard seed and grains, saw wood and ingeniously make other necessities inside the attached wooden barns, which in fact are cutting edge 17th Century factories in what is the largest and most advanced manufacturing region in the world of that era.

A gorgeous woman with braided blonde locks cranks the handle on a wishing well, and a bucket emerges with fresh water overlapping the rim.  She takes a long-handled dipper off a bent nail hook and scoops out a cup of fresh, sweet water.

She holds it forth with an inviting smile. 

I drink it all in.

Amsterdam of the 21st Century contrasted sharply from my adolescent imaginings of Holland, but that fantasy/reality still exists in Zaanse Schans,  just a short drive or long bike ride away from the city center. 

Okay, there wasn't a comely milk maid in traditional Dutch clothes offering me a dipper of water, but if you have ever drank well water on a sunny day in the countryside, you know how refreshing and truly quenching that can be, so permit me to fantasize a bit.  The bottle of water offered by my gorgeous wife Julie proved to be a reasonable facsimile.

There were over 600 windmills by these pasturelands at one time, but now there are considerably fewer.  Realistically, major projects like ship building along with so many factories would not have been as tranquil as this scenic tourist village is today, despite their wind-generated power.

The crankshaft, invented and patented in 1593 by Cornelis Corneliszoon van Uitgeest, made Holland's manufacturing prowess possible and has been re-imagined for many purposes since then, including automotive drive shafts. 

Cornelis died just 7 years after receiving his patent and so did not see the many applications of his engineering genius.  To be clear,  he did not invent the first windmill, and other patents had been granted previously for alternative uses of wind power like dredging polders.  His invention used power generated by windmills to go beyond simply rotating in the same manner and direction as the wind blades.

In 1594, Cornelis built his first saw mill utilizing his breakthrough brainchild on a floating raft.  The crankshaft converted the rotation of the windmill blade to a back and forth movement for sawing wood.  It made conversion from raw timber logs into planks thirty times faster.

Rapid production of planks naturally spurred manufacture of products using planks, including houses and commercial buildings.  Ships were natural products for the age of exploration, and with the big city of Amsterdam nearby and great water access, Zaanse Schans became the top ship-building region in Europe, essentially launching the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th Century.

At its peak, 26 shipyards churned out up to 150 ships each year in what is now a quiet pastoral region.

The crankshaft turned Zaanse Schans into the world's first industrial center.

Above, I mentioned "dredging ponders," which probably made you ponder, "What's a ponder?" 

Briefly, ponders are tillable farm lands and even entire regions created from swamps or large bodies of water, like the Zuiderzee, by dredging the water out.  Later in our day trip, we would visit Maarken, located on a peninsula that was formerly an island in the Zuiderzee but now connected by ponder.

Our visit to Zaanse Schans included the tour of a working wind-powerded mill, where the owner demonstrated his methods in a humorous way, explaining that the white powder being ground was not cocaine but an ingredient for paint.

Strolling through the village, we visited a dairy selling delicious cheese and a working mustard factory, where I bought a jar of mustard to bring home which subsequently forced us to check our bags to avoid being branded terrorists. 

By the way, you may be wondering what the relationship is between the Netherlands and Holland, which as school children and beyond most of us believed to be essentially synonymous. 

The Netherlands encompasses several provinces.  The provinces North Holland and South Holland house the country's largest cities, including The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam.  During the Dutch Golden Age, when the Netherlands' power and influence as the world's richest country peaked, North and South together were known simply as Holland. 

While that wasn't actually the entirety of the Netherlands back then either, that's how the country became known, probably because people used that shorthand the same way we might say we're from California without bothering to mention "in the United States of America."

The Kingdom of the Netherlands today includes Aruba and the Dutch Antilles, but in the 17th Century, the Netherlands empire included colonies scattered around the world.

Why are their citizens known to most of the world as Dutch rather than Netherlanders or Hollanders?  "Dutch" originated from the name of their language,  Deutsch, or actually a local dialect of the Germanic language family formerly known as "low Deutsch" and now called Dutch.

"High Deutsch," or Alemanic, is what we now call German, whereas the Germans call that language Deutsch.

Calling Netherlanders "Dutch" is equivalent to calling all Brits "English," although I guess more to the point it would be like calling Americans "English," since that is what we still call our morphed form of the language spoken in Dublin and Edinburgh as well as London and Liverpool.

A couple of days before touring at Zaanze Schans, while still cruising toward the Netherlands aboard the River Queen, a speaker showed the video embedded below, which does a much better job explaining all of this and more in a very amusing way: