Twice ToldHadrianus Junius, Batavia (1588): a letter on Holland and the infant in the cradle
- Language
- Latin
- Reading
- transcribed from the page image
- Translation
- ours
- Retrieved
- 15 October 2026
Junius breaks off his history to print a letter on Holland that, as he says, bears the name of a Chrysostomus of Naples. He works out from its own figures that it was written in 1514. The part below runs from his introduction through the passage on the drowned villages, to the towers still standing in the water. Long s is printed as s here; the italic of the letter is not marked.
Cæterùm lectori rem non ingratam me facturum reor, si isthîc loco haud importuno Chrysostomi cuiusdam Neapolitani, vt inscriptio præfert, epistolam non inelegantem adiungerem de Olandia, quæ quòd libelli iusti modum non impleat, visa mihi est huc transferenda ne intercidat, quam reuocata ad calculum ratione scripsisse videtur anno sesquimillesimo quarto & decimo. Ea ita habet ad verbum.
Olandia omnis (sicuti ego ab incolis intellexi) passuum ambitu fere septuaginta millium continetur: eam à Septentrione ac Oriente magna pro parte Oceanus; ab Occidente bicornis Rhenus abluit; à meridie quæ nunc dicitur Gelria, olim vt multi volunt, Sicambria terminat. Terra natura eiusmodi est vt ab Oceano ad interiorem partem sit paullo deuexior, sed Rhenus accepto Mosa, multisque alijs fluminibus, licet bipertitus, & mutato nomine in mare influat, tanto tamen aquarum fertur impetu ac magnitudine, vt Oceanum ipsum longè propellat, & tam influens, quàm refluens supra triginta millia passuum inundet, ac alterius penè maris speciem reddat. Quinetiam veluti à vastioribus aquis indignetur absorberi, cum Oceano tamdiu luctatus, ab omni (quod supra memorauimus) pelago illius amarorem excludit. Quapropter iratus ille, vt opinor, ab hinc tres & nonaginta annos licentiùs egressus fines, magnam Olandiæ partem & in ea duos supra septuaginta pagos immersit, è quibus omnibus vnum tantum infantem elapsum natu grandiores affirmant, & cum eo felem, vt in ijsdem fortè cunis vterque inuentus innatauit. Heu rem dictu, nedum visu miserabilem! Enauigaui ego, nec paruo quidem nauigio, loca illa quæ adhuc extant quæ meminerint aratris proscissa, & ferratis peruia plaustris. Visuntur adhuc multis in locis turrium cacumina, quæ tanquam aliqua sepulchrorum monumenta, cadauera ibi oppidorum ab aquarum gurgitibus tumulari, prætereuntes commonent.
Translation
But I think I will do the reader a service if I add here, at a fitting place, a well-written letter on Holland by a certain Chrysostomus of Naples, as its heading says. It is too short to make a proper little book, so I thought I should move it here so that it is not lost. Reckoning it up, he seems to have written it in the year 1514. It reads, word for word:
All of Holland, as I have learned from the people who live there, measures about seventy thousand paces round. The Ocean washes it on the north and east for the most part; the two-horned Rhine washes it on the west; to the south it ends where the land now called Gelderland lies, which was once, as many hold, Sicambria. The land slopes down a little from the Ocean toward the inland side, but the Rhine, which has taken in the Maas and many other rivers, flows into the sea, though split in two and under another name, it nevertheless carries such force and such a volume of water that it drives the Ocean far back, and flooding in and out it covers more than thirty thousand paces and makes it look almost like a second sea. As if it resented being swallowed by the greater waters, after wrestling so long with the Ocean it shuts the Ocean’s bitterness out of all that sea, as we noted above. The Ocean, angry for that, I think, went beyond its bounds too freely 93 years ago and drowned a great part of Holland, and in it seventy-two villages. Of all those villages, the older people say, only one infant escaped, and a cat with it, both found afloat, as it happened, in the same cradle. A thing wretched to tell, let alone to see! I have sailed, and not in a small boat, over those places, which [the clause is garbled in print; probably] people still living remember as ploughland, crossed by iron-shod wagons. In many places the tops of towers can still be seen. Like tombstones, they remind passers-by that the bodies of towns lie buried there under the whirl of the waters.
Notes
The Latin text is Junius’s reprint of 1588 (the book appeared after his death in 1575). Junius ascribes the letter to “Chrysostomus Neapolitanus” by his wording “ut inscriptio praefert” (as its heading says); search results point to a Leuven printing with the humanist Martinus Dorpius, which we have not seen. The date 1514 is Junius’s own sum. The letter says “93 years ago” and does not name the St Elizabeth flood or a year, so reading it as the flood of 1421 is Junius’s calculation and ours. The old people are the source for the child and the cat (“natu grandiores affirmant”): the letter tells it as hearsay, with no name, no place of landing and no mention of a dike. “Ille” in “iratus ille” is the Ocean, whose bitterness the Rhine has just been said to shut out; the angry party that floods Holland is the sea, not the river. The second “quæ” in “quæ adhuc extant quæ meminerint” is printed so and may be a misprint for “qui” (those who remember), which the translation follows; the grammar of the clause is uncertain. In this letter the cat is in the same cradle as the child; nothing says it kept the cradle level.