The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (52 page)

The results were startling. He had been a
student for two years when he published what seems a rather prosaic book:
De
Thiende
, which means ‘the dime’. It is, among other things, a plea
for uniform measures and money in a country where the Amsterdam pound was not the same
as the Nijmegen pound, and the Amsterdam foot was just an approximation of the Guelder
foot. It would help trade, and it would help the United Provinces, which had a great
muddle of moneys: each province was putting out a very various selection of coins,
guilders, daalders and the rest. More important, it meant that people could be taught
how to work out value and quantity from
first principles, and all on the same basis, not just
judging by eye or relying on their personal and disorderly experience.

In order to get to this nice bureaucratic
solution, Stevin started as he always did, from mathematics. In the process, with the
notion of making calculation easier and fractions more clear, he invented the first
practical decimal system.

He knew of systems which divided by one
hundred – in Antwerp the
aum
measured wine and it was divided into one hundred
pots
– but he wanted to set a standard for measuring that would work
anywhere: for surveyors, for cashiers, for anyone who had to count and calculate.

He dedicated his book to ‘Astronomers,
Surveyors, Measurers of Tapestry, Gaugers … to Money-Masters and to all
Merchants’. He showed how to write down numbers as decimals without awkward
fractions, so it was easy to add or subtract or even find a square root simply by
keeping the decimals lined up accurately; and he made the case for everyone using the
same system, calculating on the basis of tens and not the sixties that were sometimes
used. He did not waste time being modest about ‘the great use of his
invention’. On principle, he wrote in Dutch so everyone in Holland could
understand, but the book was quickly translated into French, and almost as quickly into
English and Danish; it was read everywhere.

He was also a physicist: he changed the
science about the pressure water puts on anything under or in it. He wrote the first
Dutch book on logic, and a book on man’s civic duty. In mathematics he had a
method to carry him almost anywhere. He reorganized the princely lands and money after
the morning when the prince complained he ‘had been handed certain accounts which
he found obscure, and in his opinion unnecessarily long’. He ran experiments: he
may even have beaten Galileo to the simple test of whether weight decides how fast solid
bodies fall, taking the burgomaster of Delft up a church tower to drop two balls of lead
thirty feet onto a sounding board and discovering ‘they fall together onto the
board so simultaneously that their two sounds seem to be one and the same rap’. He
took on practical work dredging the canals of Delft and invented sluices where the force
of water would scour away silt, and he was well-enough
known to be called to Gdansk in Poland to deepen the harbour
there; naturally, since he tested everything, he had to see the harbour for himself. He
also devised new kinds of watermill, and built them to test his theories; the Delft
magistrates wrote him a testimonial saying the mills ‘rebuilt according to the art
of the said Stevin have scoured at least three times as much water as the former mills
usually did’. The people of IJsselstein were less complimentary when their mill
failed and polder land disappeared back under the water. Stevin went to check, again and
again, as though he couldn’t quite believe that his ideas had gone wrong. He put
the failure down to neglect and even sabotage.

Everything had to be engineered. That had
been true when the first peat-diggers tried to defend the land against water, but now
the scale of the work was hugely expanded. There were new trading companies going out to
the East and West Indies, shareholder companies, not just shares in particular ships,
and they depended on practical mathematics: ships had to be navigated, there had to be
walls to keep enemies at bay, waterways to carry goods, surveys to parcel out the newly
conquered lands. Someone had to aim the guns accurately. Someone had to keep the books
and record the buying and selling of shares.
Stadhouder
Maurits saw the need to
train engineers, surveyors, people who had enough maths ‘but only as much of each
as is necessary for a general practical knowledge of engineering’. He proposed a
new school alongside the university at Leiden: the
Duytsche Mathematique.

Stevin planned the school, organized it and
taught there. The teaching was in Dutch because Stevin thought it better than Latin for
practical subjects, a revolution in itself; a few years earlier he’d had to invent
the Dutch words for a ‘triangle’ or something ‘parallel’ and it
would be another eighty years before German universities started lectures in German. The
change of language made the school open to anyone; the clerics, the ones who spoke Latin
both as a
lingua franca
and as a code, had to make room for newcomers. The
curriculum had nothing to do with the medieval plan that had shaped Stevin’s own
time at Leiden: he had studied philosophy or humanities, which included rhetoric and
physics, maths, ethics, Greek and Hebrew. The
new school meant to turn out people with specific skills,
not a rather general culture: a modern school.

Stevin left one other monument, quite
unexpected: the shape of cities round the world. He always meant to write a whole book
on architecture and how to plan a town; he mentioned the subject often, and he left
copious notes.
⁴⁵
He started with drains and foundations, but he kept thinking about
the human beings who would live inside his towns; the beauty of a facade, the rules of
classical building did not matter half as much. When he wrote about the layout of a
house, he worried about fire, he thought out loud about how to keep thieves out, where a
man could exercise, how to save your wife or daughter from sitting in a window to be
seen and ‘being called at by people passing in the street’. Furnace rooms
were a good idea for heating, but ‘those who are not used to them become ill
almost like people who are seasick’. He thought courtyards a good thing because
lovers could not reach their sweethearts easily, but a bad thing because when you lean
out of a window, you can’t see what is happening on the street. You can tell he
had children: two daughters, two sons.

He wanted streets to be regular and facades
to be uniform, no great fuss of pillars and decoration when simple stone looked so good;
he knew he had to plan traffic, and it seemed a good idea to make models before
building. He proposed cities on a rectangular plan, cut up with canals, looking a little
like the simple, squared-off layout of an army camp, but complicated with markets, with
princely houses, with public squares for air and light.

And after he was dead, those cities were
built at last: Recife in Brazil, where you can still pick out the framework of the
streets of the Dutch city of Mauritsstad; Colombo in Sri Lanka, Cape Town in South
Africa; the fort at Paramaribo in Surinam. His ideas went with empire all around the
world.

The golden age of Amsterdam is just
beginning: the art, the riches, the great fleets and the complex markets in anything
from paper to grain for bread. Everything is ready.

Consider what had already happened in
Antwerp and Flanders
and Burgundy. Power
became a matter of show and glitz as well as armies and diplomacy, soft power perhaps
but essential when a ruler is surrounded by disorderly, independent towns and dependent
on the big merchant enterprises. Much the same will happen in Amsterdam. The city
burghers insist on their own authority while down the road in The Hague a
stadhouder
prince has to act out the role of ruler as though he were on
stage, all show and fashion and ostentatious rules. Meanwhile the whole nature of the
United Provinces of the Netherlands will change with the great trading companies that
work the East and West Indies: powers that are only partly political and mainly
commercial, able to find, take and organize an empire. The ruler is one among many
powers.

Markets like the Bourse in Catholic Antwerp
have already emancipated themselves from actual, solid goods, so they can buy and sell
the relationships between prices in different places, at different times, and dealers
can speculate as well as calculate. On this, and the older traditions of sharing the
cost of a ship or forming a company to defend the land against the encroaching sea, the
machinery of capitalism can be built.

Information has become a commodity of great
value, to be marketed, exchanged, sometimes hoarded. People want to know, and they
expect to be told; they think knowledge means change. Finding things out is a priority
even on merchant company ships sent to sink the enemy, take his silver and maybe do some
peaceful business as well; the captains are told to bring back specimens and facts. The
Amsterdam presses make the books and newsletters that carry the facts around Europe,
that sometimes give away secrets and sometimes cause scandals.

Paintings have come off the altars and gone
into houses, made for the market and not for the glory of God and the fame of some
patron. The process started long before any Protestant iconoclasm took the pictures out
of churches. Art has become domestic, a commodity; there were art dealers in Antwerp
with crowded shops just as there will be in Amsterdam. Painting was still
craftsman’s work which often amounted to copying; but the idea of the importance
of talent is being born, the value of the original and the personal. Amsterdam,
too, will muddle these two ideas: the
importance of genius, the importance of consumers.

Above all, the world is ready to be counted
and engineered, to put mathematics at the heart of building a fort or a windmill,
keeping the records of a business or laying out a town. Antwerp knew that change, but
rebellion and a war of religious denominations took out the city’s sense of order.
Amsterdam inherited the idea. Both cities shared the same shining, seemingly reasonable
faith which we still maintain.

That faith has roots very deep in time.

Empire fleets sailed out over the Atlantic
and the Pacific and with their voyages our wider world began; a new world, so Francis
Bacon thought, and as philosopher and politician and enthusiast for experiment he wanted
to understand. ‘In our time large parts of the New World and the farthest parts of
the Old are becoming known everywhere, and the store of experiences has grown
immeasurably,’ he wrote in 1620. The Portuguese were all down the coast of Western
Africa, then at the Cape of Good Hope in 1487, in India by 1498. They were on the shores
of Brazil in 1500, to be followed by the French in the 1550s. They reached China in 1513
and Japan in 1543. Christopher Columbus beached at San Salvador in the Bahamas in 1492.
The English were off the coast of North America in 1497. A century later Dutch merchants
sent out their first trading mission to Indonesia, the English were about to try to
settle parts of North America, and the French, Dutch, Swedes and others followed.

This is the usual story of
‘discovery’, how we came to know about the world and make it modern; but if
‘discovery’ means finding unknown places and peoples for the first time, it
is not the right word. The Portuguese found a sea route to India, but the Romans were
trading around Karachi and Gujarat more than a millennium earlier, selling coral and
frankincense that went over the Himalaya to China, buying silk from China and animal
hides and indigo, ivory and ‘long peppers’. Once they knew about the monsoon
winds the ships of Alexandria in Egypt began sailing out to India in the first century
CE
.
⁴⁶
The Romans used cloves and nutmeg
from the Moluccas in Indonesia
in the fourth
century
CE
.
⁴⁷
Usually there were Arab middlemen
involved, but the Romans knew about the world at least at second hand, and how it was
connected. So did the Norsemen, as we have seen, all the way across Russia to Byzantium
and beyond, and west to the shores of North America; the Buddha found in the fields in
Sweden from the eighth century begins to seem less strange when you realize the strength
of these long, long trading runs.

We knew the world. What changed with the
empire fleets was our way of looking at it: of investigating it, not just collecting or
trading it, and trying to use our guns and skills to dominate it. Our world and our way
of thinking seem to start quite abruptly, but both have a long and complex story, the
history of all the necessary conditions for being modern in our particular way. It could
all have worked out very differently, but it could not have happened at all without the
story I have tried to tell.

It starts with those Frisian traders in
their flat-bottomed boats working the coasts of the North Sea and spreading the use of
money: of an abstract way to think about the world and its value. Monks in their cold
cells work out the mathematics of time, and they shape the way others think about the
natural world: not just turning the page of an ancient text but looking, reasoning,
calculating. They help along the process of exchanging ideas across the seas, a busy
trade that keeps them in touch with the ideas of strangers and which gives great value
to the written word. Trading cloth and iron in the shallows on the edge of the world
begins to change the way we see the world; Francis Bacon himself is heir to a millennium
of other people’s work and history.

Norsemen come south and they become the
enemies that the Christian missions need to be sure of their own righteousness. They
also settle, and where they settle they create a new independent kind of town whose
success will change the landscape. Some of them do far more: long before the empire
ships went out, from the time of the Norseman Ohthere, we have evidence of men sailing
on just because they did not know what lay ahead. They went into the unknown.