Maartensdijk Historical

Maartensdijk is a small village in the province of Utrecht, in the green, flat country between Amsterdam and the German border. It is not famous for anything in particular — no great cheese, no famous glass, no canal that changed the course of Dutch commerce. It was, when Holland America Line named one of its early ships after it, simply a Dutch village: a church, a cluster of houses, fields stretching to the horizon in every direction the Dutch horizon goes.

The choice of such a small name for a North Atlantic steamship is itself a record of something about the early HAL fleet — the way the company was Dutch in the specific, local, particular sense, not just in the grand sense of Rotterdam and the sea. The Rotterdam-New York route carried people from everywhere in the Netherlands, including the small places: Friesland farms, Zeeland fishing villages, Utrecht polders where the names of the places were known only to the people who lived there. Maartensdijk was one of those names.

The SS Maartensdijk made crossings in the late 19th century on the route that was becoming, in those years, the standard path of Dutch emigration to America. She was not a famous ship and she did not have a famous moment. She was the ship with the small Dutch village name, carrying people from other small Dutch villages to a country that would not know how to say either name. That, too, is part of the story of Dutch emigration: arriving somewhere that cannot pronounce where you're from.

— In the Wake editorial

My great-aunt Geertruida sailed from Rotterdam in 1896. She was twenty-three, she had a sister in Iowa, and she had never been on any boat larger than the river ferry at Arnhem. The ship she sailed on was called the Maartensdijk. She said the Americans at Ellis Island couldn't say it and eventually gave up and wrote "Mary's dyke" in the ledger, which was wrong but phonetically approximate.

She told this story for the rest of her life. Not as a complaint — she had found the whole thing funny, the immigration officer's face while he attempted the double-vowel Dutch syllable that has no English equivalent. She imitated the attempts. She was a good mimic. The story got funnier, she said, the more Dutch she forgot. By the time she had been in Iowa for forty years and her Dutch was mostly for prayers and recipes, the idea that she had arrived on a ship called Maartensdijk and watched an American try to say it struck her as the funniest thing she had done in her life.

She had no idea what happened to the ship. She didn't much follow ships. She knew it had brought her to America and that was sufficient information. What she kept was the story of the name, because the name was the whole experience compressed: the small Dutch village specificity meeting the American blankness, the two languages deciding, in the end, that some things don't translate. You arrive. You go to Iowa. You keep the story of the name.

— Willem B., Des Moines, writing about his great-aunt, 1988