Included in this writer's morning mail a few days ago was a postcard he had sent himself from Holland. This represented a momentary interest in the speed of the trans-Atlantic mails. On the back of the card was glossy photo graph of a neat white sloop knifing along a Dutch canal, with three well-starched citizens grinnning proudly on its deck.

The man who took that picture must be a genius with a camera. Nobody who is worth anything as a sailor his any time to smile and sail around the Netherlands at the same time. Least of all the Dutch.

Back at the end of August, this writer and two friends converged on a little town between Amsterdam and Rotterdam, pockets stuffed with black-market, Dutch guilders, and hired ourselves a boat. The man who took our money grinned pleasantly and told us we would have much fun.

We headed north. The first day out, we were running on a reach through the Zuider Zoe, when one of these postcard sloops came shipping up astern, pulled out to pass, and then cut under our bow. We all politely stared at its four man crew. They stared right back, and one of them scrambled into his cabin. He promptly reappeared holding an enormous red swallow-tail flat, which he bont onto a halliard and ran up to the top of his mast. After a few minutes he pulled it down again and sailed off. We were very concerned about the whole incident, and asked the first Dutch harbormaster we ran into what was coming off. "Oh," said the harbormaster, "he just wanted to know if you had any smallpox on board."

Scenic Holland

After that, we sailed mostly on canals, or at night. Neither of these were particularly conducive to postcard reproduction. On the canals you couldn't see the boat for the cows. The Dutch canals run merrily through mile after mile of cow pasture, and all the cows spend most of their time sloping fore-and-aft on a dike and watching people sail by. We started mooing at the cows to break the monotony of higher-than-land-level sailing, but one day we mooed, tacked, and tried to start the engine at the same time, and created a shoreline stampede that ended with us being grossly insulted by a sturdy farmer fortunately isolated by 20 yards of muddy water.

Night, sailing was no better. The Dutch are great ones for fishing instead of earning on honest living, and every evening they get out of bed, yawn, and set out for a night with the nets. We found they were very economical fishermen to boot. When a Dutch fisher man reaches his favorite fish hole, he generally shinnies up the mast and blows out all his riding lights to save kerosene. This means that at any moment the erstwhile yachtsman is prone to destroy the means of a fisherman's livelihood with a sharp blow below the waterline.

The only sailors that laugh in Holland are the ones who rent their boats to other people.