The sea was kept out by a magnificent system of dykes under the
daily superintendence of a board of officers, called dyke-graves, while
the rain-water, which might otherwise have drowned the soil thus
painfully reclaimed, was pumped up by windmills and drained off through
sluices opening and closing with the movement of the tides.

The province of Zeeland was one vast "polder." It was encircled by an
outer dyke of forty Dutch equal to one hundred and fifty English, miles
in extent, and traversed by many interior barriers. The average cost of
dyke-building was sixty florins the rod of twelve feet, or 84,000 florins
the Dutch mile. The total cost of the Zeeland dykes was estimated at
3,360,000 florins, besides the annual repairs.

But it was on the sea that the Netherlanders were really at home, and
they always felt it in their power--as their last resource against
foreign tyranny--to bury their land for ever in the ocean, and to seek a
new country at the ends of the earth. It has always been difficult to
doom to political or personal slavery a nation accustomed to maritime
pursuits. Familiarity with the boundless expanse of ocean, and the habit
of victoriously contending with the elements in their stormy strength,
would seem to inspire a consciousness in mankind of human dignity and
worth. With the exception of Spain, the chief seafaring nations of the
world were already protestant. The counter-league, which was to do battle
so strenuously with the Holy Confederacy, was essentially a maritime
league. "All the maritime heretics of the world, since heresy is best
suited to navigators, will be banded together," said Champagny, "and then
woe to the Spanish Indies, which England and Holland are already
threatening."

The Netherlanders had been noted from earliest times for a free-spoken
and independent personal demeanour. At this epoch they were taking the
lead of the whole world in marine adventure. At least three thousand
vessels of between one hundred and four hundred tons, besides innumerable
doggers, busses, cromstevens, and similar craft used on the rivers and in
fisheries, were to be found in the United Provinces, and one thousand, it
was estimated, were annually built.

They traded to the Baltic regions for honey, wax, tallow, lumber, iron,
turpentine, hemp. They brought from farthest Indies and from America all
the fabrics of ancient civilisation, all the newly discovered products of
a virgin soil, and dispensed t