Hoorn and Enkhuizen

On Sunday, we woke up in Enkhuizen, an old Dutch harbor town in the province of North Holland with a rich maritime history. We were scheduled to do a walking tour in historic Hoorn, named for its horn-shaped harbor, about 12 miles away, a very short bus ride. The town was founded about 1300 and became an important harbor town, trading with the Baltic and Flanders.

Hoorn flourished during the 14th through the 18th century until the Zuiderzee, which provided access to the North Sea, “silted up”and led to changes in the water depth. Subsequently, Hoorn could no longer compete with Amsterdam as a major port, but it remains very picturesque.

The historic part of Hoorn was full of beautiful houses, some of which show a distinct tilt toward the street. The guide explained many historic Dutch houses were built on wooden poles that were sunk deep into the marsh-like land. Over time, due to changes in water levels and general ageing, some of these poles began to rot, leading to some of the houses tilting. This would make me nervous as a homeowner! One of the oldest churches in town had been turned into a fancy hotel; some of our group went there for coffee while we strolled about the town.

We liked this stork (?)

Our guide had got involved in tourism after she retired and at one point we ran into another group of tourists, led by her brother, which made everyone laugh. She was a native of Hoorn and told us her parents met during WWII when her father came to do some work for the Canadian soldiers who liberated the Netherlands. Her mother was a hairdresser who sometimes dyed the hair of Jewish women blonde so they could try to escape the Nazis. Germany had invaded the Netherlands on May 10, 1940 and, after five days of fighting, the Dutch surrendered and Germany occupied the country until 1945.

As in Norway, the Germans were eager to capture members of the royal family to force them to participate in propaganda (or worse) so Queen Wilhelmina (who reigned from 1890 to 1948) was advised that she and her family should escape to safety. The Queen, along with her daughter, Crown Princess Juliana, son-in-law Bernard, and little granddaughters, fled to England on a British Destroyer. Because there was fear of a German invasion in Britain, it was decided to send Crown Princess Juliana and her two young children to Canada. I remember my mother telling me as a child that when Juliana gave birth to a third child, Canada decreed her room at the Ottawa hospital was Dutch territory for the day so that Princess Margriet was born as a citizen of Holland (was that the beginning of my interest in WWII?).

The princesses returned home on August 2, 1945

That was part of the special relationship between the Netherlands and Canada; the rest was that the First Canadian Army played a major role in the liberation of the Dutch people. More than 7,600 Canadians died in the eight-month campaign to liberate the Netherlands. It was the 80th anniversary and Holland was celebrating Remembrance Day on May 4th, with two minutes of silence at 8 pm for all Dutch victims of war – civilians and military personnel – who have died in armed conflict or peace missions in the Netherlands or further afield since the start of the WWII (we were pleased that the two minutes of silence were honored during dinner on the ship).

Drommedaris/the South Gate in Enkhuizen

We returned to the ship for a late lunch, then took a walk on our own to see Enkhuizen before the ship departed at 4. Enkhuizen prospered during the Dutch Golden Age as a major trading and shipping center for herring. However, we really needed a guide to tell us what to admire, other than the South Gate (part of the wall that originally surrounded the city) and a tulip garden. We wandered for about 90 minutes, occasionally encountering other people from the ship but very few locals, then hurried back to the Amadeus for tea. The ship headed for Amsterdam in the late afternoon.