Technical Achievements in River Management (1500–1800)

Abstract

This chapter covers the period 1500–1800, characterised by technical achievements in water management, and ending at the advent of the industrial revolution. The introduction of technical improvements reached the Delta relatively late, around 1850, compared to England, where the invention of the steam engine around 1770 in fact heralded a new era. Until the 19th century, muscular strength of humans and animals (horses), sustained by wind- and water power, were the only sources of power that modelled and transformed the natural wetlands into semi-natural and cultural ‘waterscapes’. It was a time during which hundreds of kilometres of canals were dug by hand, thousands of hectares of peat were drained and dredged by hand, hundreds of kilometres of dykes were built by hand and numerous peat-lakes were reclaimed, facilitated by hundreds of wind-watermills. It was the time when writers started to document the trivial, daily events, for example, Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687), the famous writer, poet and diplomat, daily counted roughly 200 barges passing along the canal at the backside of his mansion Hofwijck, close to’s- Gravenhage, and he set his clock right on the track-boat that passed his house at eight o’clock in the evening (www.dbnl.org).This chapter covers one of the most prosperous periods in the history of the Rhine- Meuse Delta, the 17th century, the Golden Age. It deals with the expensive and technically outstanding reclamations of peat-lakes and embankments of salt marshes. It covers the origin and the heydays of the windmill technology, and the track-boat for passenger transport, nowadays still seen as ‘typically Dutch’. It is also a period in which the first reliable descriptions of landscape and waterscape features, useful (and less useful) fish, and other animals and plants were published (see Chapter 8).