The Netherlands

I wanted to write about this map, even though I knew so little about it. It belongs to a friend, and came to her from her father, who lived in Amsterdam as a child. His family, German Jews, had left Germany in the 30's, as the political climate there became dangerous. They were eventually interned by the Nazis but somehow managed to survive. Whether the map was purchased in tribute to their new home, or bought later as a kind of memento, she doesn't know. Having recently returned from a trip there, accompanying another friend, the map was suddenly a lot more interesting to me. There was a lot more ocean than in my travel map, and some of these cities I had now seen.




I was curious about the Latin inscription in the little box floating off the coast and went online to see if I could find a translation. Olim hic Rheni ostium suit et arx Britanica cuius ruine anno 1520.uisae sunt. "Here was once the mouth of the Rhine and Britannia castle whose ruin in 1520 they found." Next to the box is a tiny cross that marks the spot. Which led me to search for "Britanica castle." The name seemed odd for a castle in the Netherlands, and I didn't recall any reference to it my pre-trip studies. My friend and I had been in the area and I wanted to know what we had missed.


Nothing, as it turned out. At least nothing we could have hoped to see. In 1520, after a storm, a large stone ruin appeared on the beach near the estuary of the Oude Rijn (old Rhine.) It was the ruin of a Roman fortification and light house dating from the 1st Century and appears on a Roman map as Lugduno. This would have been the last in a line of fortifications along the Rhine, when it was the northern border of the Roman Empire. It disappeared and reappeared several times during the 1500's, only to vanish completely with the changing of the coastline and is thought to lie a half mile out in the North Sea. The Rhine estuary flows into the sea by the present-day town of Katwijk, which lies just south of Holland's biggest tulip fields. Unbeknownst to us at the time, we stood at the very spot, my friend making photographs and I looking for shells. I had walked from one side of the river to the other over a large culvert, to take the following picture.



Some historians place Caligula here in 40CE, waging his war with Poseidon, his legions hacking at the waves with their swords, at his direction. After the battle, according to Suetonius, the Roman soldiers collected shells in their helmets as spoils of war. This could explain why I couldn't find any keepers. The lighthouse part of Lugduno, the ruins of which probably lie in the frame of my friend's photograph, was supposedly built to commemorate the victory.