Hollands Glorie was first published in 1940, shortly after the Nazis had occupied the Netherlands. Buying this novel of Dutch heroism on the high seas was then an act of symbolic resistance and quickly turned the book into one of the supreme bestsellers of twentieth-century Dutch literature. Meanwhile, its author — who ran away to sea at the age of ten — managed to escape from occupied Holland to England. During the war he worked with other writers such as Johan Fabricius for the ‘Free Netherlands’ radio station in London. He later moved to America and eventually switched to writing in English. His English works include the novel The Hospital and his tetralogy of Quaker history, The Peaceable Kingdom.


Captain Jan is the archetypal tale of Dutch derring-do on the high seas. Set in the early decades of the twentieth century, it is the story of Captain Jan Wandelaar and his ocean tugboat, transporting the huge cranes, dredgers, hoppers and sluicegates which the Dutch employed to build harbours and dams all over the world. Written in a vigorous and salty, non-literary style, the novel traces Jan Wandelaar’s career from common sailor to captain of his own ship, and his epic struggle with the ruthless arch-capitalist Kwel (in Dutch the name means ‘tormenter’), who exploits and abuses the sailors who work for him. The novel paints a sharply critical portrait of the class divide in pre-war Dutch society, pitting plain-spoken honest Dutch sailors against the dirty tricks of Kwel & Co. In the end Wandelaar wins and takes over Kwel’s company, aiming to protect the interests of the sailors and especially of the Dutch tugboat industry against foreign competitors.


De Hartog’s novel offers a peculiar blend of gripping action and rather limited emotion. We witness the fearless spirit and back-breaking labour of these sailors, braving all weathers, in raging storms, with oil platforms, a dredger or a dry dock being towed to South America in record time. But when Jan marries his sweetheart Nellie, it turns out that this rough-hewn sailor is emotionally at home only in a small and sentimental Dutch interior. After Nellie’s death, his relationship with the island tomboy Rikki Kiers is similarly stilted. It is a man’s world on these tugboats, as we see when Rikki comes along as a stowaway to help him in his struggle against Kwel and is shot dead by the wireless operator who tries to sabotage the transport.

Three days later she was buried at sea — a bundle in tarpaulin poised on a plank against the rail. The convoy had been stopped. On the dry-dock the men stood looking on, a row of black dots high up on the wall, beneath the small Dutch flag that fluttered at half-mast.

The crew stood cap in hand, while the Captain prayed ‘Our Father, which art in Heaven,’ very slowly and clearly. Only at the last command, ‘One-two-three, in God’s name,’ did his voice falter. The bo’sun Janus and Bout lifted the plank and the body slid off; there was a faint rushing sound, a splash, and she was gone.’ (p. 307, tr. Carlos Peacock)