The British fleet sailed away and left Bornholm in peace. Today the defending cannon which never fired can still be seen and on Christiano the soldiers’ barracks have been converted into a main street for the village. The battle that never took place is remembered as a notable victory.
GOTLAND situated latitude 56°50’–58°N and longitude 18°30’– 19°E; area 1,167 sq. m (3,022 sq. km); population approx. 54,000; Sweden. BORNHOLM latitude 55°5’N and longitude 14°41’E; area 227 sq. m (589 sq. km); population approx. 50,000; Denmark
Ameland
A Touch of Winter
Lord, Thou hast given me a cell
Wherein to dwell,
A little house, whose humble roof
Is weather proof.
ROBERT HERRICK
In winter, in the deep and bitter days, the shallow sea between the mainland of Holland and the low Frisian Islands freezes and the daily ferry boat has to be preceded by an ice-breaking tug. At this time of year the very air is gaunt, trees turn to iron, solitary birds cross the muslin sky, and the islands are beneath snow and silence.
People in the distant days used to pull their boats from the water, drive their livestock into barns, and hibernate, sleeping in beds set into warm cupboards in their cosseted houses. It was not until the ice had cracked and melted, the island fields had greened, and the flowers and springtime birds appeared, that life began again.
Standing in one such house, in the village of Hollum on Ameland, one of the middle islands of north Friesland, you could imagine how they lived. The house had belonged to a seventeenth-century Frisian whaling captain. When he came home from the ocean he hung an anchor from an upstairs window to announce his presence and settled in for the winter. The fires were carefully fed, for wood was precious, and no method was neglected that could conserve the domestic warmth. The bed for the commander and his wife in the wall cupboard was like those I had seen in some Scottish islands but much shorter. These people,’ explained my guide, ‘slept sitting up because they feared that if they lay down the blood would rush to their brains and they would surely die.’
They were, however, more realistic in other matters. There was a shelf at the bottom of the cupboard for their baby and another for the chamber pot. When they were all settled the commander said goodnight to his wife, they kissed the baby and then closed the cupboard until the morning.
The Frisian archipelago runs in a straggle along the Netherlands shore into Germany and then, after a long stretch of sea, is continued up the northward coastline to the Danish border. The most westerly is the largest, Texel, throughout history an important maritime defence-work and harbour. From the port of Den Helder I watched, from the point called Land’s End, the coming and going of ships out to the island, lying low and white, like a grin on the horizon. The next island eastwards is Vlieland, where La Lutine, the legendary treasure ship, lies sunk. She was carrying money to pay British troops occupying Texel during the war in 1779 against France and Holland, and bullion valued at more than a million pounds, bound for Hamburg.
In tempestuous weather she was caught between Vlieland and Terschelling, the next of the Frisian group, and was lost. Only one man survived the wreck and he died before he could tell his tale.
Over the years there have been many salvage attempts on La Lutine but only two have yielded anything. The Dutch, soon after the disaster, succeeded in recovering ninety gold and silver bars and in 1860 another hundred bars were brought to the surface together with the ship’s bell and rudder. The latter were taken to Lloyds of London where the rudder can be seen today, fashioned into a unique table, and the Lutine Bell, hung in its cupola, is still rung to give news of a loss at sea.
Beyond Ameland is the island of Schiermonnikoog, a wild place of dunes and drifts; further east still the final island, Rottumeroog, has only one house and looks across a watery frontier to the West German island of Borkum.
It was not quite winter when I journeyed to Ameland, but the year was venturing towards it and a wind chafed across the low sea. The ferry was like a large and cheerful bumble-bee, round nosed, yellow and black. It came into a solitary jetty a few miles west of the little red-roofed town of Holwerd. We set off across the short sea in the early evening, with the daylight seeping away and the ship guided by an odd grove of thin, dead saplings thrust into the mud only a few feet down. This reached far out into the dim sea and the vessel followed it until the jetty of Ameland was in sight.
Seemingly homeless birds sat on the shoals, waiting for bed perhaps, and a formation of black and white geese droned across the dying sky. A cormorant dived near the jetty as if specially carrying out the performance for arriving visitors. There were few people on the boat, a clutch of ornithologists with their travelling eyes and thick clothes and some Ameland people returning from a visit to the mainland, peering out, as islanders always do, to spot familiar landmarks from the sea.
The island has four villages and I spent the evening beside a high fire in a small hotel at Nes, the capital settlement, in the entertaining company of two North Sea gasmen who had been working offshore. Tom and Caspar, both Dutchmen, had been sailors and we talked of the places of the world we knew, and we were eventually joined by a young man from Dublin who runs a restaurant in West Berlin. ‘I come over here to Ameland to get a few days’ peace and quiet,’ he said.
It was a comfortable place. In the dining-room, where I had as good a Bamijoreng as you could get in Bali (the cook came from the former Dutch East Indies), was a piano and, standing against it, a fine dark cello. At weekends a pianist and a man who played the cello went in and everybody had a singsong. Tom described to me the steely days of winter when the sea froze. There had been a plan to build a great dyke joining each of the Frisian Islands to the next from Texel to Rottumeroog, much like the amazing damming of the Zuider Zee, but the ecologists and other environmentalists had succeeded in bedevilling the scheme. In a low country like Holland where the land and the sea are lip to lip people are cautious about up-ending nature. ‘They do not like modern windmills,’ Tom said. ‘The old windmills turn silently but the streamlined things they build today make a terrible noise. Some think it is better to be without the cheap power.’
There has been little change in the families of the islands since the days when Ameland was an independent country (it was neutral during Cromwell’s war against the Dutch). ‘Many people here are called Brouwer and Bruins,’ said Casper. ‘Six out of every ten men in the crew of the ferry have those names.’ The old, independent flag of two crescent moons and six horizontal bars, blue and yellow, still flies in the villages.
That night there was true island weather, a rattling storm of rain and wind, the sort of night when the deeper one’s bed is the better. It was like being in a typhoon at sea, except I was spared the heaving of the ship.
By daybreak the ill wind had gone on its way, leaving a washed-out sky. I went down to the little port near Ballum, now virtually disused and the last resting place of some old forlorn Frisian ships. The harbour looked more of a wreck than the ships. Its moribund jetty was crumbling, the sea ate at the planks, and all that moved there were a few gulls. Even the village from which the harbour takes its name is half a mile inland – as if it has edged away on the quiet.
Within the sea-dykes that rise about it like a rim, the miniature countryside of Ameland is green and pastoral, at least until the dead eye of winter settles balefully upon it. Frisian cattle graze in meadows below a fine nineteenth-century windmill called De Phoenix, performing its silent gymnastics in the North Sea breezes, and a lighthouse, standing like a tall football player in a red-and-white striped jersey.
Beyond the westernmost village of Hollum are fields, adjoining the sea, the home of the powerful horses trained to launch the Ameland lifeboat – the only lifeboat in the world then that used real horsepower for its launching. Ten horses, two pulling the carriage of the boat along the lanes, and eight to pull it into the waves, were used, summoned in an emergency by
a farmer furiously blowing a whistle. They knew the call and galloped to their stations. The lifeboat, housed in the village, was tugged to the shore as quickly, or even faster, as any tractor.
On 14 August 1979, an abrupt North Sea storm caught a German yacht in difficulties off the island and she sent out distress signals. The horses were whistled and harnessed, but then came tragedy. The team of eight that pulled the lifeboat into the pounding sea were drowned by the waves as they sank in the treacherous sand. In vain island men tried to cut them loose from the harness. They died within a few yards of the shore and the whole island grieved. The crew of the yacht was saved.
Today you can walk that dune shore and see, in the marram grass, the grave of the horses. Its gravestone is inscribed and tells of their death with an etching above it. Normally it is a rule that any livestock dying in Ameland must be taken to the mainland for burial or burning in order to keep the island cattle free from the risk of disease. In the case of the horses, however, an exception was made and they are buried on the wave-washed shore, near the place where they lost their lives.
In the cobbled, red-roofed, wide-windowed village of Hollum itself, the house of the whaling commander I mentioned earlier has a garden fence made of whalebones like whitened planks of wood. It is now part of an intimate and delightful museum. Harpoons and drawings of fights against large polar bears, and the heroic death of a whale, surround the stern portrait of Commander Hidde Dirks Kat, an expansive and expensive-looking man in a fur coat and top hat, who was famous as a whaler from this little village to the shores of Labrador in Canada. He may even have been on shouting terms with the whalers whose homes and pictures I had seen on the island of Nantucket off Cape Cod.
The house, its distinctive yellow brick coping denoting that it was the home of a commander, is enclosed and warm, the rooms decorated with blue tiles and the cupboard-beds in one room. Family furniture includes a chair for the baby with a little cubbyhole beneath it where a bowl of hot coals was placed, to keep the infant constantly warm.
There are drawings and photographs of the bone-hard winters that regularly visit this coast; people standing in slightly self-conscious groups on the ice, aircraft and more recently helicopters that have brought relief when the ships could not break through. (The inn at Nes has a photograph of barrels of beer being unloaded from an aircraft that landed on the ice, bringing a look of obvious and happy relief to the faces of the men unloading it.)
In what was the commander’s front room is another relic of those frozen days, a boat-like sledge as delicately carved as fretwork, fine enough for a pantomine fairy queen, but once used daily by postmen to bring the mail across the frozen sea. It was last used in 1925. At the back of the sledge is a saddle upon which the man used to sit while a horse whirled him across the ice. What fun it must have been to be a postman!
In the main village of Nes the clock on the square church tower sounds the short day away. The tower is decorated with three dates, marking its various changes and additions – 1664 at the base, 1732 at the top and 1890 over the door. Many of the houses of Nes display dates from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, not abashed, there are several dated 1974 and 1975 as well.
Large grey clouds, like the heads of old men, moved from the sea, casting their shadows over the farms, the fields and the villages, and then voyaging on towards the Dutch mainland. There was a sense of completeness about Ameland, the year was almost over; women had begun to knit, the visitors had gone, even the birdwatchers were now reduced to a few shivering, but patient, souls.
Nowadays the island is not completely cut off in severe weather. Once the storm clears the helicopter will always get through. But there remains in such places an inward instinct; they will always remain islands. The villages of Ameland have their rivalries and their winter joys, one of which is the December night, the Feast of St Nicholas, when the men of the island, reaching back into a dim past, dress in homemade white costumes and white hats and wear sinister masks. These costumes are made by their wearers in dead secret throughout the year so that no one, and especially no woman, will know who is beneath the disguise. On the Eve of St Nicholas the men roam abroad, in their own village and others, drinking and dancing and taking advantage of their disguise. When I asked at what age these male frolickings were permitted I was told that in the village of Hollum it was a rule that a boy had to be twelve years old before he could partake, whereas boys from the eastern part of the island wore their costumes as soon as they could make one for themselves.
In the village of Buren is the only memorial to a wrecker I have ever seen on any island where wrecking was once often listed among the most active of occupations. It is a bronze figure, a witch-like woman called Ritskemooi, hook-nosed, wearing clogs and a flying cloak, and carrying her wicked lantern. It is reputed that she used that lantern once too often to lure a ship onto the shore and that she found her own son lying drowned on the beach. On wild, ghostly nights, even now, they say you can hear her crying his name in the wind along the shore.
Night came on as I went to the Ameland jetty to leave the island. The ferry blustered into the harbour on a sea serrated with foam; the wind, blowing from the northeast, brought rain with a touch of snow about it. Winter was on its way.
AMELAND situated latitude 52°38’N and longitude 5°45’E; area 35 sq. m (91 sq. km); population approx. 3,000; The Netherlands.
Borkum
The Last Serenade
The setting sun, and music at the close.
SHAKESPEARE, Richard II
It was the last afternoon at the Kurhalle. Outside, the pigeon-coloured day was diminishing, the long sands stretched out to touch the October sea. Inside, the mustachioed orchestra was playing for the final time that season, that last Kaffe was being drunk and the ultimate cream cakes munched; the sounds of Schubert drifted out to the spot where fat gulls stood or strutted along the promenade. Soon they would have the place to themselves.
Borkum, in the German Frisian Islands, has preserved, indeed even revived, the art of spa gentility. Its visitors, on that final autumn day of the season, enjoyed gentle walks, ample food and violins in the salt air. There were some young people about, one of them sailing a land-yacht far out on the sand-spit, others walking in brisk jeans and heavy sweaters along the bricked streets of the small, proper town. But the wheeled bathing-machines drawn from the water’s edge, the coloured tents, sad now they had been abandoned, Herr Ackerman’s sedate horse-and-buggy rides to view the seal colony, were all as shadows from another time.
Even the journey there had an old-fashioned touch. The port of Borkum is far out on a sand-and-marshland arm of the island. Leaving the ferry, which takes two and a half hours from Emden, passengers embark onto a miniature train, with an orange engine and coloured coaches, which chugs towards the town.
The train journey of seven kilometres takes twenty minutes, rattling through wild dunes and windy marshes, and sheltered copses and gardens too. On the fringes of the town are some practical-looking houses. The tentacles of suburbia reach far out into the North Sea. But, at once, the disappointment is lifted by a jaunty striped lighthouse at the end of a street.
At the end of its brief journey the train clangs into a pretty railway station, tiled and roofed and be-potted with plants, the line running at right angles to the main street once known as the Bismark Strasse. The station does not have much of a platform, its underfoot blocks make it like a street itself. Shops and a café with a pleasing window stand along it. Outside are some large hotels, with peeling paint that somehow adds to their charm.
Before Borkum became a resort it earned its living from the sea – whaling, fishing, trading, and as a naval outpost. In 1902, Erskine Childers wrote a novel centred on the German Frisians, The Riddle of the Sands, now accepted as the first published spy story. Childers, a tormented man (in 1922, in Ireland, he was executed for treason by a British firing squad), purported in the story to warn of the dangers of a German invasion of Britain
‘by a multitude of sea-going lighters’ from bases behind the islands. This novel was produced, as evidence, in 1910 when two young British officers, Lieutenant Vivian Brandon and Captain Bernard Trench, were arrested for spying on Borkum island. At their trial they admitted sending secret information to London on picture postcards and that their Whitehall contact was called ‘Reggie’ whose code address was ‘Sunburnt London’. They were sentenced to four years ‘in a fortress’.
The fashion for sea-bathing, which began for Germany on the neighbouring island of Norderney in the middle of the nineteenth century, brought people and prosperity to Borkum but today there are constant reminders of the maritime past. The most prominent of these is the giant lighthouse (not the one I saw from the train, that was only a satellite). Unlike most of its kind, it is not set on some remote and rocky cape, but is established as the very centrepiece of the town, crowning a grass knoll and looking out over the entire flat island.
Viewed in the day it would not be judged among the most pleasing of lighthouses. It is built of dark brick and has the dire aspect of a prison watchtower. But at night – what a transformation! Its vivid beams sweep around and above the island and far out to sea like the spokes of a great wheel.
In the tidy town and gardens are more reminders of the seafaring life. Red and green buoys mark the streets, and there is an anchor standing among the shops. There are buoys and harpoons, masts and spars in people’s gardens, and careful models of ships in the windows of houses and in restaurants.
As in Ameland, in the Dutch Frisians, the former home of a sea captain is now appropriately a museum – it houses the old Borkum lifeboat resting on its great-wheeled cart. There is a whalebone arch outside the museum door and immediately within a photograph of an avuncular Hindenburg. Bewhiskered sailors and shawled and bonneted ladies gaze from frames upon the domestic implements and the maritime tools and equipment that would have been familiar to them. There are some robust relics of the old bathing days too, when Germans seeking salt air and sunshine flocked to the island beaches, first changing into striped long drawers in the secrecy of wheeled bathing-machines.
My World of Islands Page 12