Willem Usselinx Author:John Franklin Jameson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the general impression in the Netherlands was that nothing of consequence could be accomplished in the West Indies in time of peace. Usselinx, however, though hi... more »ndered by this general apathy, continued to labor in behalf of the company." With the approval of Count Maurice he began going about among the cities of Holland and Zealand for this object; and the States of the latter province instructed their deputies at the Hague to forward his designs." Up to this time he had not been permanently settled in any place, nor had he, apparently, permanently invested his property, probably wishing to keep his capital available in order to become a principal shareholder in the West India Company.TM But now, perhaps because the realization of that scheme began to seem remote even to his sanguine mind, he took the step, an important one, as it proved, of investing a large part of his property in one of those great engineering enterprises by which, in the old phrase, the Dutch have taken Holland ; namely, in the draining of the Beemster, in North Holland. III.—THE BEEMSTER." Mais le desseichement des palus qui doute, qu' il ne tende i 1'agriculture, quad de terres inutiles on en faict de beaux champs labousrables, ou prairie de grand rapport.—J. J. SCALIGER, Discours de la ionction des Mers, etc., Opuscula, 1612. During their centuries of brave and patient conflict with the sea, the men of Holland and Zealand had not contented themselves with waging merely a defensive warfare. Little by little they had advanced Terminus against an enemy more terrible than the Spaniards, gaining lands which their surpassing industry knew how to make valuable, and experience which made them the foremost hydraulic engineers in the world. The skill so acquired they, already in the fifteenth century, began ...« less