This area of forty square miles,
once a smiling agricultural tract, was totally inundated on the 18th of
November, 1421. Seventy-two thriving market towns and villages were
destroyed, and 100,000 persons perished. Leo made a sketch of the tower
of Huis Merwede, the solitary and only relic of this desolate scene.
The two artists visited Rotterdam, the second commercial city in Holland,
which is fourteen miles from the North Sea and on the right bank of the
Maas. An attractive quay a mile in length is the arriving and starting
point for over 100 steamboats that connect Rotterdam with Dutch towns,
the Rhine, England, France, Russia, and the Mediterranean.
Alfonso and Leo studied the collection of portraits at Boyman's Museum,
and sketched in the River Park the happy people who were grouped under
trees, by the fish ponds, and along the grassy expanses. Alfonso bought a
photograph of the illustrious Erasmus. It is about ten miles to Delft,
once celebrated for its pottery and porcelain, a city to-day of 25,000
inhabitants. Here on the 10th of July, 1584, William of Orange, Founder
of Dutch independence, was shot by an assassin to secure the price set on
William's head by Farnese.
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