Henry Havard (1838–1921)

Imagine a travel book about Flanders. It will certainly talk about bicycle-racing, beer, bandes-dessinées, surrealism, art nouveau, the Congo, and the First World War, won't it? What else is there?

Now try to imagine that book as it might have been written in the 1870s...

Havard's approach to Flanders is a little bit different from the line he takes in his three Dutch books: this doesn't really pretend to be an account of a specific journey, and there's a lot less direct description of the author's subjective experience. And he didn't have his artist-friends with him, so there are no illustrations. But there's still a lot of colourful anecdote, a lot of it from the medieval period — Havard clearly enjoys nothing more than a good Burgundian story, and regards Charles V and Philip II as the spoilsports who put an end to the really colourful phase of European history. There are some entertaining digressions where he lays into the Belgian clergy whilst pretending to praise their work, and there's a general theme of the opposition between the liberal, enlightened capitalism of the Flemish towns and the conservatism and superstition of the countryside that he sees as the defining element in Flemish history. The book takes its title from the name (Gueux/Geuzen: "beggars") ironically adopted by the 16th century rebels against Spanish authority, revived in the 1870s by Havard's contemporaries in the Flemish liberal movement.

He starts out with Ypres and West Flanders, and slowly works across to cover Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp in the closing chapters. Typically for him, he spends most time on less well-known places like Veurne and Nieuwpoort, and in the three main cities he refers us to other books for the "obvious" stuff and focuses on things he happened to notice (...usually in old manuscripts in the municipal archives) that we probably don't know about. There's a lot about the destructive armed conflicts between neighbouring towns or between trades in the same town, about the complicated relationship between the towns and their (nominal) feudal overlords, but also about the modern traces of medieval institutions like the guilds of crossbowmen and the chambers of rhetoric.

Fun, if you like that sort of thing.… (meer)

For their third journey of "exploration" of his adopted country, in the wet and stormy summer of 1877, Havard and two of his painter friends decided to take a cruise through the province of Zeeland in the trusty tjalk that had carried them around the Zuiderzee a few years earlier.

Unfortunately, the ship had undergone renovations in the meantime, and, as so often happens, came back from the yard with a whole bunch of new problems that weren't there before. Added to the aggravations of waking up in wet cabins were disputes with the professional crew, who objected to Havard's ambitious itinerary, prepared without sufficient regard to wind and tide. So there was a mutiny, and the ship was sent home about three-quarters of the way through the trip. They carried on by train, on foot, and in local boats. Which was fine, except that they then had to cope with Dutch hotels, and with landlords who felt three guests weren't enough to justify cooking dinner...

They start out in Dordrecht (which is the only justification for the mention of South Holland in the title), and visit Zierikzee, Bergen-op-Zoom and Goes before arriving in Veere and exploring the island of Walcheren in detail, including Vlissingen and the provincial capital, Middelburg. After that they make a loop through the Zeeland part of Flanders (Breskens, Terneuzen, Axel and Hulst) before returning to Brabant to visit Breda and 's-Hertogenbosch (Bois-le-Duc), calling briefly in Roosendaal and Tilburg en route.

After two books, we know very well that there are two things that really set Havard's pulse racing: pretty girls in local costume, and well-stocked municipal archives. In the former case it seems to be a largely platonic, aesthetic interest, but when it comes to medieval documents, his prose has a tendency to become somewhat erotic, if not actually pornographic, in its enthusiasm. This book is no exception: in the Middelburg archives he's like an ex-convict in a sex-shop, hardly able to catch his breath as he springs from one medieval charter to the next! He is absolutely charmed by the town-hall janitor in Bergen-op-Zoom, a man who has taught himself palaeography and become a skilled archivist after coming across a forgotten store-room full of mouldering piles of parchment. Sadly, we don't learn the man's name, but Havard devotes at least half a chapter to telling us his story.

We get plenty of pretty girls, as well, of course: the field-workers who chaff the delighted artists on one of their walks, the self-confident village girls with their gold ornaments and starched bonnets, the shy toddler whose mother instructs her to kiss the nice gentleman. Havard is fascinated to learn that in Zeeland it's not usual for women to get married until they are pregnant — probably not very different from rural customs everywhere else in the world, but he wouldn't have known that without access to the work of 20th century social historians (although he might have picked up a few clues to French habits from his contemporary, Emile Zola). And what was obviously different in Zeeland was that such things were openly discussed.

Havard has a lot of fun exploring the medieval past of the smaller Zeeland ports, and the many wars, sieges, floods and fires most of them have undergone (there have been a few more since Havard's time!), even more so in Middelburg and Bergen-op-Zoom. We learn more than we probably intended to about staples and Lombards, Jacqueline of Hainaut and Philip the Bold, but it's all fascinating. Time was obviously pressing (or his companions had seen too many parchments...) by the point when they got to Breda, so there and in 's-Hertogenbosch the military history is condensed a bit, but he clearly loved both ('s-Hertogenbosch is still one of the most attractive cities in the Netherlands).

In fact, there's not much he feels the need to criticise in any way: a few unfortunate modern buildings or crass bits of demolition, some grumpy hoteliers, and the town of Roosendaal and its station (neglected and unpopular to this day...). In any case, he concludes with a warm invitation to all his readers to go off and explore the bits of the Netherlands that he has missed, promising that they will not regret it.… (meer)

In this second book, published two years after the Zuiderzee tour, Havard and his travelling companion, the aristocratic landscape painter Baron de Constant-Rebecque, make a tour of the Northern and Eastern provinces of the Netherlands, starting off in Friesland and Groningen and then heading south parallel to the German border — roughly along the line of what is now the Pieterpad long-distance walking trail — to end up in Maastricht. They stop off to look at historic cities, dolmens, country estates, prisons, fortresses, pretty girls, and other features of interest along the way, and Havard comments on what he sees, learnedly, romantically, wittily or caustically according to the case. The book is illustrated with a dozen or so etchings by Constant-Rebecque, mostly of churches or town-halls.

The hook Havard uses to hang the book on is a German school geography textbook he has come across that describes the Netherlands, together with Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, as Deutsche Aussenländer — states that are not currently part of the German Empire but are German in all other important respects. He's alarmed when his German academic acquaintances fail to be shocked by this, and reflects that when "thirty million squareheads" are fed this sort of thing from the cradle, they're not likely to object if their Kaiser decides to correct these little political inconsistencies. (Given his own recent experiences with the Prussian army, and the likely mood of his French readers, "squareheads" seems pretty mild...) Anyway, this gives him the idea of visiting the frontier areas and showing us how characteristically Dutch they are, and how different their history and cultural background is from Germany. At a couple of points he reminds us how recently German border regions like Bentheim, Berg and Kleve have been made to give up speaking Dutch and integrated into the Prussian education system.

But this is really only a hook, and it's integrated so loosely into the book that it can easily be cut out of the German edition. The main feeling we get from the book is the great pleasure Havard takes in discovering Dutch history and the artefacts it has left behind. He finds a lot of little things to criticise, but — except for the rare cases when they meet unfriendly innkeepers or burgemeesters — he's always careful to make it clear that these are minor blemishes and that the Netherlands is a fantastic place to explore, especially if you like architecture, painting and accounts of old sieges.… (meer)

Henry Havard was an art historian who came to the Netherlands as a political exile after the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871. He's known as one of the first scholars to make a serious study of Delft porcelain, and he wrote extensively about both decorative and fine arts. It sounds as though travel writing was a "day job" to support his studies: when he was able to return to a civil service post in France in 1879, the flow of travel books dried up again.

In the summer of 1873, Havard did something few people at the time would have thought of, but which is now done by thousands of people every year, and which I've done many times: he set off on a sailing boat to explore the picturesque little port-towns around (what was then) the Zuiderzee. From his studies of Dutch history and art, he knew all about the important role played by towns like Hoorn, Enkhuizen, Hindeloopen and Stavoren in the 16th and 17th centuries, and he was curious to see what they were like in real life. On his trip, he was accompanied by the marine artist and retired naval officer J E van Heemskerck van Beest, by the indispensable professional skipper, and for part of the time by a friend who was a conservator for the Royal Library.

They went clockwise from Amsterdam, first visiting Marken, Monnickendam, Volendam and Edam, then Hoorn, Enkhuizen and Medemblik, the new naval port at Den Helder, the island of Texel, then down the Frisian coast from Harlingen to Stavoren, then across to Urk (still an island) and into the mouth of the IJssel to visit Kampen and Zwolle, and finally back to Amsterdam via Harderwijk. Although one or two places seemed to be flourishing - Harlingen and Urk, for instance - most of the ports they call at have only a tiny fraction of their 17th century population. Grass is growing and cows are grazing in the streets of Hoorn and Enkhuizen, which lost their raison d'être when they were no longer accessible by big ships and have yet to find a new purpose. Medemblik has almost been wiped out by epidemics, Stavoren looks as if the population lost interest and went away. Havard wonders if this is a foretaste of the fate of the Netherlands in Europe - the country doesn't seem to have woken up to the industrial revolution yet, and it's almost as though the Dutch are content to rest on their glorious past and slide gently into oblivion.

Whether or not he planned it that way, Havard seems to have played a significant part in the rediscovery of Dutch culture: his book was an immediate success, rapidly translated into Dutch, German and English, and was one of the things that motivated tourists to go and have a look for themselves. Volendam and Marken soon became day-trip destinations for people visiting Amsterdam, as they have remained to this day, even if little or none of the cultural heritage Havard writes about still exists. Of course, a lot of other things happened in the region after the 1870s to accelerate these changes - railways and steam trams started to reach the Zuiderzee, land reclamation and big agriculture accelerated, and finally, shortly after Havard's death, the Afsluitdijk turned the Zuiderzee into a freshwater lake, and fishing was replaced by tourism as the biggest local industry.

The reason for the success of the book isn't hard to find, though: Havard may have been a heavyweight intellectual with a vast stock of historical facts at his disposal, but he was also extraordinarily good at communicating the pleasure (or occasionally, irritation) he took in the things he saw on his trip. From pretty girls in traditional costume (invariably kitted out with large blue eyes and a bashful smile) to sunsets over the Zuiderzee, from church towers to the eccentric and often dubious collections of paintings and artefacts shown off by town-hall caretakers, from disruptive boys to sudden rain showers, he is totally engaged with what he is experiencing, and he makes his provincial tour, on which he's never more than two days' sail from Amsterdam, into something as exotic and surprising as an expedition into central Asia.

Very enjoyable, and a fascinating insight into a part of the world which has changed in every possible way in the last century and a half - from the coastline down.… (meer)