The Kinderdijk cradle and its cat: first ashore at Dordrecht

In November 2022 the Kinderdijk World Heritage site announced a bronze cradle that floats and rocks on the water, in memory of a baby and a cat said to have drifted to its dike in the St Elizabeth flood.⁶ The oldest text we found with the cat in it names no dike and no place.⁷ It says only that of 72 drowned villages one infant escaped, and a cat with it, both afloat in the same cradle.⁷

A painting of 1850

The cat that balances the cradle is at least as old as 1850 in print. On 26 March 1850 the Rotterdamsche courant described a painting by S. Opzoomer, a Rotterdammer living in Antwerp: a sleeping child in a cradle on stormy water, and on the rim a cat that looks terrified.⁹ The paper called it the well-known story of the flood of 18 November 1421, when a cradle with a child came ashore on a dike near Dordrecht, “the Kinderdijk” ever since, while a cat kept the cradle level by jumping from its lowest rim to its highest.⁹ Other papers printed the same notice that week.⁹ A review of the Rotterdam exhibition in June did not care for the subject, but gave the story in a clause: a child saved by a cat’s instinct, giving the place the name Kinderdijk.¹⁰

Five years earlier van der Aa’s gazetteer had a weaker form. Its entry for the dike says that some maintain Kinderdijk took its name from a child who is said to have drifted there with a cradle in the flood, and that others hold the dike bore the name earlier.⁵ There is no cat.⁵ In 1953 P. Hoekstra, writing in De Nieuwe Stem, called the tale of the cradle and its rocking cat “evenzeer aanvechtbaar”, as open to challenge as the 72 villages.¹¹

In 2021 Alfons van Bokhorst of the Biesboschmuseum told Omroep Brabant that the altar painting of the flood, made around 1490, shows the cradle, and called the whole tale a “broodjeaapverhaal”.⁸ The painting is in the Rijksmuseum, on two panels. The museum’s description lists a breach, boats, drowned people and cattle, and no cradle, and Schiereck and Visser, who go through the scenes one by one, name none either.¹²

We looked at both panels in the Rijksmuseum’s scans and found no cradle. That is our reading of an image, not a finding about the painting, and the curator may mean a detail we did not see.

A baby with a family tree

In everything we could read, the cradle reaches Kinderdijk only in the 1840s. In 1677 the baby belongs to Dordrecht. Mathias Balen’s history of that city, printed there that year, is the oldest text we found that gives the child a name and puts a cat on the cradle.¹³ In Balen’s telling the child drifts in as the Great Waard goes under, with a cat for company, reaches Dordrecht, is named Beatrix, and later marries Jakob Roerom.¹³

The line comes from the Roerom family entry.¹³ Balen uses the couple as founders of a line: many distinguished families in Dordrecht and elsewhere, he says, trace their descent from them.¹³ His text does not use the name Kinderdijk.¹⁴ Nor does the key of his own plate, which lists “the child in the cradle, saved”.¹⁵ The Rijksmuseum’s catalogue entry for the plate adds, in its own words, that the child is “by tradition the origin of the name Kinderdijk”.¹⁶ That is the catalogue speaking, not Balen.

The plate’s cartouche names 44 drowned villages, while Balen’s text says 72.¹⁵¹⁷ The 72 had a long life in Dordrecht: Schiereck and Visser report a rhyme about 72 parishes cut into the stones of the Spuipoort, and a city archivist who still wrote in 1931 that “our ancestors did not have lies cut in stone”.¹⁸

The Latin letter that Junius kept

Almost a century before Balen, Hadrianus Junius printed a letter that has the cat but no city. His Batavia (Leiden, 1588) breaks off to reprint a letter on Holland by a “Chrysostomus of Naples”, which Junius reckons was written in 1514.⁷ The letter says that 93 years earlier the Ocean, angry, its writer thinks, broke its bounds and drowned a great part of Holland, and in it 72 villages.⁷

The older people are the source, so the child and the cat are hearsay from the start, with no name, no landing place and no dike.⁷ The 93 years are the letter’s only date. Junius’s 1514, and the reading of those years as the flood of 1421, are his sum and ours.⁷ The cat is in the cradle with the child, and nothing in the sentence has it keeping anything level.

What the chroniclers wrote

The Divisiekroniek, printed at Leiden in 1517, tells the storm in one chapter, with no child, cradle or cat.²¹⁹ It dates the storm to St Elizabeth’s night in 1421, says the dike between Geertruidenberg and Dordrecht gave way, and says 72 parish churches had stood in the farmland behind it.¹¹⁷ Guicciardini’s description of the Netherlands (1567) tells it under Dordrecht, again without a cradle.² Over the following years most of the Grote Waard was lost and the Biesbosch took its place.²⁰

The night itself is disputed. Fockema Andreae, as Hoekstra reports him, has the dike give way at Wieldrecht in the night of 17 to 18 November.²¹ Schiereck and Visser put the flooding in the night of 18 to 19 November.²¹ The dike at Werkendam broke again at the end of December.²² The city account of Dordrecht for 1421 records bread, beer and cheese for the poor and says nothing about the drowned.²³

Kinderdijk was not in the drowned land. It is a stretch of dike in the Alblasserwaard, from the dam at Alblasserdam to the edge of Nieuw-Lekkerland, while the Grote Waard that the breach drowned lay either side of the Maas between Maasdam and Heusden.²⁴

How many drowned

The sources disagree on the dead because they count in different ways: some report, one calculates. Hoekstra says the 72 villages come from a chronicler at Neuss and that a later writer added the 100,000.²⁵ Schiereck and Visser call both figures impossible for a Waard with fewer than 30 villages.²⁵²⁶ They reach “a few dozen” by calculating flood depths and rising speeds, not from a record, and they note that the Tiel chronicle’s 2,000 is not a count for the Waard itself.³²⁷

The range from a few dozen to over 100,000 is the width of the disagreement, not an estimate of ours.³⁴