An Arcadian Apparatus

The Introduction of the Steam Engine into the Dutch Landscape

LISSA ROBERTS

In 1767 the wealthy Dutch banker John Hope purchased Groenendaal, a country estate situated south of Haarlem, east of the coastal dunes, and near a number of other estates owned by urban oligarchs who sought to overlay their commercial roots with the trappings of aristocratic gentility (fig. 1). Groenendaal covered seventy-four hectares and included a gardeners residence, coach houses, stables, greenhouses, and cold frames for exotic plants. Stylistically, the grounds of the estate were in transition from formal gardens to the naturalism of an English landscape park.1 Better known for his government service and aesthetic interests than his banking abilities, Hope planned to create at Groenendaal a suitable atmosphere for his extensive art collection and complete a transformation of the grounds that would erase the visual boundary between man-made garden and surrounding countryside.2 This entailed more than recontouring the
Lissa Roberts is associate professor of the history of science and technology at the University of Twente. She is writing a cultural history of the introduction of the steam engine to the Netherlands, with the working title Seven Ways of Looking at a Steam Engine. Concurrently, she is overseeing a collaborative research project that, under the title Inventive Intersections, reconsiders the origins of and relationship between modern science and technology from the Scientific Revolution to the Industrial Revolution. She thanks Peter de Clercq for introducing her to Dutch steam engines and John Carson for asking the right question. Thanks also to Eveline Koolhaas, Rob van der Laarse, Jan Verbruggen, and all those in Ithaca, Paris, Seattle, and the Netherlands who commented on various versions of this article. Research for the article was underwritten by a grant from the National Science Foundation. 2004 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/04/4502-0001$8.00 1. Geschiedenis van Groenendaal, Groenendaal 1978 (Heemstede, 1978), 40. For the history of English gardens, see John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, eds. The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, 16201820 (Cambridge, 1997), a collection of primary sources with extensive bibliographical information. 2. J. W. Niemiejer, De kunstverzameling van John Hope, 17371784, Nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek 32 (1981): 127233. Hopes son Thomas would become a well-

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FIG. 1 Map of the Netherlands, showing the location of Groenendaal.

land and planting groves of trees. Ponds and meandering streams had also to be introduced; rectilinear canals, fashionable in an earlier day, would have been out of place. Because of the areas low water table, maintaining a refreshing flow of water presented a challenge. Hope responded in typically Dutch fashion with a wind-powered pumping station. When this proved insufficient, he commissioned the construction of a steam engine to augment his windmill. In 1781 John Hope became the owner of the first steam engine fully designed and built in the Netherlands.3 The machine quickly became a local tourist attraction, and it is acknowledged in histories of Dutch steam engines.4 But it has never been examined as more than a minor historical facta curiosity perhaps, but not significant enough to influence the general line of historical analysis. This is unfortunate, because while historians usually tie the early history of steam engines to mining, manufacturing, and the growth of urban water supply systems,
known arbiter of neoclassical taste in the early nineteenth century; see David Watkin, The English Vision: The Picturesque in Architecture, Landscape and Garden Design (London, 1982), 12326. 3. For a bilingual overview of the history of steam engines in the Netherlands, see Kornelis van der Pols and Jan Verbruggen, Stoombemaling in Nederland/Steam Drainage in the Netherlands, 17701870 (Delft, 1996). 4. I will return to the question of how it was treated in contemporary sources. For histories of early steam engines in the Netherlands, see Adrian Huet, Stoombemaling van polders en boezems (The Hague, 1885); F. Muller, De eerste stoom-machines van ons land, De Ingenieur 41 (1937): 1122; Pols and Verbruggen.

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they actually owed much of their development to the gardening interests of inventors and their patrons.5 Further, Dutch interest in steam during the eighteenth century was most intimately connected to the countrys preoccupation with land reclamation and water management. Discussions of eighteenth-century Dutch involvement with steam that go beyond technical description tend to equate interest in steam with an industrial vision tied to political affiliation.6 According to this view, Dutch advocates of steam in the late eighteenth century were motivated by a desire to reconstruct the Netherlands economy along industrial lines and its politics along democratic lines. Opponents of the House of Orange known as Patriotsare thus painted as doubly progressive, seeking to modernize the Netherlands by harnessing the power of steam and of the people. But John Hope was no Patriot; he and his family supported the House of Orange, and a number of them emigrated during revolutionary times. Nor did Hope possess an industrial vision. Indeed, if we link this phrase to the socioeconomic transformations that characterized the Industrial Revolution, we cannot say that even Patriots were motivated by an industrializing urge. They did want to reinvigorate the Dutch economy, but in the Enlightenment context of working toward a broader revival of Dutch culture based on moral principles.7 If the steam engine symbolized anything to those who championed its introduction to the Netherlands it was the promise not of industrialization but of national regeneration, which they represented by images of an Arcadian reunion with nature. Dutch identity, like the countrys physical existence, is historically entangled with the landscape in a way that is true of few other nations. From early on, the Netherlands and its culture have been shaped by human interactions with the lowland environment, an environment both threatening and promising. Finding the right balance between exploitation and conservation, between profit and security, has been an ongoing Dutch experi5. Lissa Roberts, Water, Steam and Change: The Roles of Land Drainage, Water Supplies and Garden Fountains in the Early Development of the Steam Engine, Endeavour 24 (2000): 5558. For a nineteenth-century case, see M. Norton Wise, Architectures for Steam, in The Architecture of Science, ed. Peter Galison and Emily Thompson (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 10740. 6. The most explicit exponent of this view is the historian Margaret Jacob, who discusses eighteenth-century Dutch science and technology in a number of publications. See, for example, Radicalism in the Dutch Enlightenment, in The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Enlightenment and Revolution, ed. Margaret Jacob and Wijnand Mijnhardt (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), 23739. Jacobs interpretation is cited and paraphrased in what has become the standard history of technology in the Netherlands during the nineteenth century; see Harry Lintsen, Het verloren paradijs, in Geschiedenis van de techniek in Nederland: De wording van een moderne samenleving, 18001890, ed. Harry Lintsen et al., vol. 6 (Zutphen, 1995), 39, 42. 7. Lissa Roberts, The Moral Marketplace: Dutch Science, Politics and Economics in the Long Eighteenth Century, in The Culture of Exchange, ed. Lilianne Weisberg (Philadelphia, forthcoming).

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ment, implicated in the development of novel political organizations, technological innovations, and an aesthetic sensitivity to the landscapes symbolic power.8 Pictorial and literary representations of Dutch steam engines at the time of their introduction during the politically and economically stormy years of the late eighteenth century reveal this complicated process in action. This article begins by tracing the history that led to the construction of the first fully Dutch steam engine on the country estate of an urban oligarch. The goal here is twofold: to highlight the role of gardens and fountain design in the early development of steam engines and to emphasize that Dutch interest in steam during the eighteenth century arose largely from problems of drainage and water management. This concern with the landscapewhether on a private estate or in the national gardenis examined more broadly in the rest of the article, which treats the historical significance of placing such a novel apparatus in the Dutch landscape, both physically and symbolically. While the machine in the garden proved a menacing image in other cultures, the steam engines first Dutch advocates projected it as an Arcadian apparatus.9
The Machine in the Dutch Garden

Two lines of historical development led to the steam engine in John Hopes garden. Steam had first been harnessed in the Netherlands to operate garden fountains.10 But Hope did something new: he commissioned a steam engine to manage the flow of water on his estate, which put his project in the context of another important aspect of the steam engines early career in the Netherlands. Beginning with Willem s Gravesande in the 1720s, advocates had promoted the use of steam engines to manage the countrys overabundant water. In this regard, Groenendaal was a microcosm of the Dutch national garden.11 Only through constant, engineered vigilance, reformers argued, would the Netherlands continue to bloom.

8. See Technology and Culture 43, no. 3 (July 2002), the special issue on Dutch water management. For portrayals of technology in the Dutch landscape, see Ann Adams, Competing Communities in the Great Bog of Europe: Identity and Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago, 2002), 3576. 9. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford, 1967). 10. Roberts, Water, Steam and Change; G. Doorman, Octrooien voor uitvindingen in de Nederlanden uit de 16e18e eeuw (The Hague, 1940), 308. 11. For the image of the Netherlands as a garden, see P. J. van Winter, De Hollandse tuin, Nederlandsch Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 8 (1957): 29121.

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FOUNTAINS

The role of garden fountains in early modern scientific and technological development remains to be fully explored.12 Among other things, such an exploration would illuminate the context of early steam power and the conditions under which nature was engineered to serve human needs and desires. During the early seventeenth century, for example, the architect and engineer Salomon de Caus designed and built gardens for Prince Henry at Richmond Palace in England, the Archduke Albert in Brussels, and the Elector Palatine Frederick V at Heidelberg. These gardens proclaimed the position of De Causs patrons along with his own vision of the divinely ordered natural and moral worlds.13 De Caus filled them with elaborate waterworks and automata. Among his designs was a steam-driven fountain employing a concept that dated back to Hero of Alexandria.14 A century later, Steven Switzerkitchen gardener to the English royal family, landscape architect, and authorbecame so interested in steam power that he included one of the earliest histories of the subject in his Introduction to a General System of Hydrostaticks and Hydraulicks. Like De Caus, Switzers interests spanned the artifactual and the natural, the practical and the philosophical. Ultimately, he wrote, the study of hydrostatics does more particularly belong to a gardener, than to any other person whatsoever, for it is the working gardener who is most drawn to analogize from the order he creates in a garden to the order of nature.15
12. More general works on the history of waterworks are numerous. Two books that draw explicit connections between this general history and the history of science and technology are Erik de Jong, Kunst en Natuur en Kunst: Nederlandse tuin en landschapsarchitectuur, 16501740 (Bussum, 1993), and Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge, 1997). A recent article by Simon Werrett, Wonders Never Cease: Descartes Mtores and the Rainbow Fountain, British Journal for the History of Science 34 (2001): 12947, gives a more specific indication of what such a history has to tell us about the development of seventeenth-century natural philosophy. 13. Hln Vrin, Salomon de Caus, un mcanicien praticien, Revue de lart 129 (2000): 7076; Richard Patterson, The Hortus Palatinus at Heidelberg and the Reformation of the World, parts 1 and 2, Journal of Garden History 1 (1981): 67104, 179 202; Piet Lombaerde, Pietro Sardi, Geworg Mller, Salomon de Caus und die Wasserknste des Coudenberg-Gartens in Brssel, Die Gartenkunst 3 (1991): 15971. Roy Strong describes the garden at Richmond Palace, with its fountains and automata, as the inspiring setting for performances of Shakespeares The Tempest; see The Renaissance Garden in England (London, 1979), 103. 14. Salomon de Caus, Les raisons des forces mouvantes, avec diverses machines, tant utilles que plaisants (Frankfurt, 1615), 15; Marie Boas Hall, Heros Pneumatica: A Study of Its Transmission and Influence, Isis 40 (1949): 3848. Interestingly, Boas Hall sees Hero as an important source not only for technological developments in Renaissance and early modern Europe but also for investigations of Torricelli and Boyle and seventeenth-century corpuscularism more generally. 15. Stephen Switzer, An Introduction to a General System of Hydrostaticks and Hy-

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Switzers history did not mention the first Dutch patent for the applied use of steam. In 1716 the States of Holland granted Jacob van Briemen a patent for a steam-powered fountain. The governments report describes him as someone long involved with the mechanical arts, a man who had read widely to see how his predecessors had tackled the problem of raising water and invested much time and money to realize his invention. Van Briemens apparatus is only vaguely described. Compact and easily transportableit took up somewhere between four and six square feetthe machine used a controlled fire to draw water out of reservoirs and ditches, send it through pipes, and force it to heights as great as sixty feet.16 Intriguingly, Van Briemens application states that his device was similar to those found elsewhere, especially in France. Van Briemen, then, was only one of numerous invisible mechanics in the field of steam-powered waterworks. As the eighteenth century progressed, however, these invisible mechanics were joined by others of greater notoriety. John Theophilus Desaguliers, known for popularizing Newtonian natural philosophy, provided Czar Peter of Russia with a steam pump for a garden fountain in 1717. As Desaguliers explained in A Course of Experimental Philosophy, his design for a modified Savery engine grew out of his collaboration with Willem s Gravesande, who was in London as part of a Dutch diplomatic mission in 1716.17 Willem s Gravesande collaborated with others as well. In 1721 he visited Hesse-Cassel and became involved in a scheme to build steam engines for land reclamation and garden fountains. His two partners were P. J. Roman Von Badeveld, building superintendent to the landgrave of HesseCassel, and Joseph Emmanuel Fischer Von Erlach, who inherited the posidraulicks, Philosophical and Practical, 2 vols. (London, 1729), introduction (advertisement) to the second volume (unpaginated). I thank Ben Weiss of the Burndy Library at the Dibner Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the precise citation. 16. For documents relating to Van Briemens patent application, Nationaal Archief, Archive collection Staten van Holland (archive number 3515), inventaris number 1668, September 1716. Doorman (n. 10 above), 308, mistakenly refers to Van Briemen as Van Brienen. For the lack of detail in many Dutch patent applications, see Karel Davids, Patents and Patentees in the Dutch Republic between c. 1580 and 1720, History and Technology 16 (2000): 26383, at 267. Van Briemens application used a set of qualitative calibrations to describe the apparatus: the machines power to create, its portability and economy. As the historian of patents Christine MacLeod has pointed out, this form of description in patent applications would be replaced in the nineteenth century by standardized, quantitative measurements of power, such as horsepower. Christine MacLeod, Inventing the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1988). 17. I use the term invisible mechanics in partial analogy to Steven Shapins invisible technicians. Steven Shapin, The Invisible Technician, American Scientist 77 (1989): 55463. Mechanics such as Van Brieman are doubly invisible: not only has the record of their individual work been lost to us, there is little recognition of the role played by garden fountains generally in the history of steam technology. John Theophilus Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy, 2 vols. (London, 173344).

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tion of royal architect and building inspector at the court of Vienna from his father.18 It is unclear what became of their collaboration beyond the construction of one Newcomen-style steam engine in Hesse-Cassel. A number of other steam engines have been attributed to Fischer Von Erlach, including one that operated fountains in the exotic garden his father constructed for Prince F. A. Von Schwarzenburg in Vienna. This impressive installation, featuring a novel boiler, sent jets of water to a height of seventyfive feet.19 When s Gravesande returned to Leiden as an increasingly renowned professor of philosophy and experimental physics, he called on his mechanical expertise for both the practice-oriented courses he taught at the universitys engineering school and more theory-oriented courses in experimental physics. Among the demonstration devices he commissioned to illustrate his lectures was a primitive model of a Savery steam engine. s Gravesandes successor, Petrus van Musschenbroek, had a more sophisticated replacement built in 1730, but rather than store it in the universitys physics theater he installed it in his garden, where it powered a fountain that spouted water to a height of fifty feet.20 Steam-powered fountains could be found in English gardens as well. The Duke of Chandos, better known for his scheme to supply London with water pumped from the Thames, had one, and one wonders what role that domestic engine played in inspiring his more ambitious conception.21 In 1769 an article appeared in Gentlemans Magazine describing a steam pump designed by William Blakey.22 Blakey had begun work on his modified Savery engine in 1760 by constructing one in his garden, and received a patent
18. For the contract that spelled out details of this partnership and its goals, see R. L. Brouwer, Wederlegging der aanmerkingen van den Heer P. Steenstra over de vuurmachines (Amsterdam, 1774), 59. The partnership is briefly mentioned in a number of secondary sources, the most interesting of which is Simon Schaffer, The Show that Never Ends: Perpetual Motion in the Early Eighteenth Century, British Journal for the History of Science 28 (1995): 15790. 19. The flue wrapped twice around the copper boiler, in order to make thorough use of heat that would otherwise be lost. See J. F. Weidler, Tractatus de machinis hydraulicus (Wittenberg, 1728). For an illustration of the garden and palace where the steam engine was erected, see J. B. Fischer Von Erlach, Entwurff einer historischen Architectur (Vienna, 1721). For more details about J. E. Fischer von Erlach and pictures of his engines, see L. T. C. Rolt and J. S. Allen, The Steam Engine of Thomas Newcomen (Ashbourne, 1993), 7076 and the appendix, which provides a list of all known Newcomen-type steam engines built between 17101733. 20. Petrus van Musschenbroek, Beginselen der Natuurkunde beschreven ten dienste der landgenooten (Leiden, 1736), 393. 21. Rolt and Allen, 29. On Chandoss plan for Londons water supply, see Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science (Cambridge, 1993). 22. The only biography of William Blakey, highly incomplete and faulty, is J. J. Bootsgezel, William BlakeyA Rival to Newcomen, Transactions of the Newcomen Society 16 (193536): 97110.

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for his design in 1766. James Ferguson, whose patronage was responsible for the articles publication, also commissioned Blakey to build a steam-operated fountain for his own garden and went on to praise Blakeys ingenuity in his Lectures on Select Subjects.23 Blakey subsequently installed steam pumps at silk, corn, and rolling mills, but he met with disappointment in the coalfields of Coalbrookdale, where his engine boilers cracked and exploded. He responded by sailing for the continent in search of further contacts and contracts. Paris proved especially inviting. There his design, modified following the coalfield setback, won special approbation from the Acadmie Royale dArchitecture and the Acadmie Royale des Sciences. Armed with these blessings, Blakey won commissions for at least seven steam pumps in and around Paris, including one for the Prince de Conds garden.24 In 1776 Blakey received patents for his design in the Netherlands. Perceiving a new niche, he pitched his design to the Dutchnot, however, as a device with which to create aesthetic effects, but as an answer to their water management problems.
MANAGING WATER

With an entrepreneurs instinct for adaptation, Blakey advertised his French garden experience as good preparation for the challenges posed by the lowland landscape. But he was not the first to propose using steam for water management in the Netherlands. Willem s Gravesande, seeking funds from Leiden University to purchase a model steam engine in 1727, had asserted that steam engines were superior to windmills for powering land reclamation projects, an assertion he echoed in his translation of Desagulierss Course of Experimental Philosophy.25 Curiously, s Gravesande did not pursue this idea when given the chance.26 The first steam-powered
23. Gentlemans Magazine 39 (August 1769), 392; James Ferguson, Lectures on Select Subjects, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh, 1823), 1:31214 (first published in 1770). See also William Blakey, A Short Historical Account of the Invention, Theory and Practice of Fire-Machinery (London, 1793), 5. 24. William Blakey, Observations sur les pompes feu avec balancier (Amsterdam, 1777), 811. See also William Blakey to Van Liender, 27 December 1774, Rotterdam Gemeente Archief, Archief Bataafsch Genootschap, inventaris no. 95, Brieven betreffende de vuurmachine aan Huichelbos van Liender 17701780 (hereafter Brieven). 25. s Gravesande to university trustees, 6 February 1727, University of Leiden Universiteitsbibliotheek, Archief van curatoren van de Leidse Universiteit, vol. 1 (1574 1815). See Peter de Clercq, In de schaduw van s Gravesande: Het Leids physisch kabinet in de tweede helft van de 18e eeuw, Tijdschrift voor de geschiedenis der geneeskunde, natuurwetenschappen, wiskunde en techniek 10 (1987): 14973, at 163. J. T. Desaguliers, De natuurkunde uit ondervindingen opgemaakt, trans. Willem s Gravesande, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 173651), 10812. 26. Rapport en Memorie van de Professoren s Gravesande en Wittichius, en van de landmeter Cruquius wegens haare gedaane inspectie van de Rivier de Merwede van Gorinchem af beneedewaarts, en wegens de voorgeslaage Middelen tot voorkoming van Inundatien, 8 July 1730, Universiteitsbibliotheek, University of Amsterdam.

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water management project was not undertaken in the Netherlands until 1776, when, thanks to the backing of the Bataafsch Genootschap der Proefondervindelijke Wijsbegeerte te Rotterdam (Batavian Society for Experimental Philosophy of Rotterdam) and financial support from its founder, Steven Hoogendijk, a Newcomen engine was erected under the supervision of the English engineer and inventor Jabez Carter Hornblower in an old gunpowder magazine at Oostpoort (an industrial area on the outskirts of Rotterdam) to help control the water level in Rotterdams canals.27 Inspired by s Gravesande, the society hoped that the Oostpoort engine would convince policy makers and fellow citizens to adopt this innovative technology throughout the Netherlands. Hoogendijk and his colleagues have often been depicted as heroes who joined ideals of social and political progress with technological innovation, but we must resist the temptation to cast their critics in a correspondingly negative light. An inventor of some merit, Hoogendijk attempted to regulate fluctuating water levels at Oostpoort by means of a steam engine coupled to a complex pumping system of his own design. The system failed to work properly, and the understandable response of the officials who observed its unsuccessful test runs was to remain contented with the wind-driven system already in place, whose operation, capacities, and limitations were comfortingly familiar. Though it is easy to argue retrospectively that the future belonged to steam, officials at the time could see no reason to invest limited public resources in a poorly understood technology that had yet to prove its worth.28 Ironically, one of the things that made the wind-powered installation so attractive was that it employed a very effective scoop-wheel design (schepraderen) developed years before by Hoogendijk as part of his ongoing quest to improve the efficiency of water management apparatus.29 It would seem that Hoogendjiks long-term ambitions were victims of his own inventive abilities and that the Oostpoort officials with whom he dealt were not opposed to the introduction of innovative technology per se. Amsterdam faced its own water management problems. Travelers in the Netherlands often contrasted the beauty and cleanliness of other urban centers with the sickening odors given off by Amsterdams canals.30 In 1777
27. Pols and Verbruggen (n. 3 above), 3037. 28. Compare this with the lack of support for steam-powered technology in Sweden during the early eighteenth century. Svante Lindqvist, Technology on Trial: The Introduction of Steam Power Technology into Sweden, 17151736 (Uppsala, 1984). 29. M. J. van Lieberg and H. A. M. Snelders, De bevordering en volmaking der proefondervindelijke wijsbegeerte: De rol van het Bataafsch Genootschap te Rotterdam in de geschiedenis van de natuurwetenschappen, geneeskunde en techniek (17691988) (Amsterdam, 1989), 68. 30. Anne Radcliffe, who visited Amsterdam in 1794, described its canals as the nuisances of Amsterdam. Many of them are entirely stagnant, and, though deep, are so laden with filth, that on a hot day the seculence seems pestilential. Anne Radcliffe, A Journey through Holland Made in the Summer of 1794 (Leiden, 1998), 73.

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the city contracted with William Blakey to build a set of steam pumps to increase the flow of clean water through these living sewers. Blakey and his engine thus completed a journey from aristocratic French gardens through the Dutch rural landscape into the urban context of Amsterdams canals. That migration attested to the fluidity of technological boundaries between public and private, urban and rural, but in this case things did not end well; Blakey had the misfortune of receiving a visit from Amsterdams mayor on the very day that one of his pumps exploded, taking his Dutch career with it. Angered by the withdrawal of municipal support, Blakey gathered up his equipment and departed for Russia, leaving behind another reason for the Dutch to beware of steam-powered promises.31 The next Dutch project that aimed to harness steam for water management was spearheaded neither by a public-spirited society nor by a governmental agency, but by John Hope at Groenendaal. Zuid Kennemerland, which borders the North Sea coast south of Haarlem, consisted originally of coastline dunes, fens, and woodlands. The region had been sparsely inhabited by coastal hunters since 3000 B.C.E., but between the tenth and twelfth centuries changing environmental conditions pushed the coastline inward and built up a wall-like ridge of young dunes, changing the lands contours and creating possibilities for further settlement. Dikes, drainage, and peat extraction brought about new habitation patterns behind the beach walls, all of which conspired to change the face of nature in the region.32 The introduction of bleaching fields and profit-oriented bulb cultivation beginning in the mid-sixteenth century accelerated this process by integrating market-oriented activities with the Kennemer landscape in a way that had indelible consequences for the idyllic character it possessed in the popular imagination.33 Even as the bulb and bleaching fields retreated in the face of economic difficulties in the late seventeenth century, Zuid Kennemerland retained its Arcadian image, thanks in part to the urban oligarchs who bought up land
31. Evidence that Blakey transported the parts of his Amsterdam installation to Russia comes from a letter written by Matthew Boulton, cited in Eric Robinson, The Early Diffusion of Steam Power, Journal of Economic History 34 (1974): 98 n. 33. In traveling to Russia, Blakey followed a small stream of Dutch engineersincluding the former director of Amsterdams public works projectswho went there under contract to Catherine the Great. See Martijn Bakker, A la recherche des ingnieurs disparusles hydrauliciens Nerlandais au dix-huitime sicle, History of Technology 19 (1997): 14358. 32. J. K. de Cock, Bijdrage tot de historische geografie van Kennemerland in de Middeleeuwen op fysisch-geografische grondslag (Groningen, 1965); Jos Kluiters and Frits van Daalen, Zuid-Kennemerland Natuurlijk: Vijfduizend jaar mens en natuur tussen duinen en polders (Haarlem, 1988). 33. On the popular image of Zuid Kennemerland as an earthly paradise, albeit a humanly constructed one, see Koos Levy van Halm et al., eds., De trots van Haarlem: Promotie van een stad in kunst en historie (Haarlem, 1995). This image is beautifully captured in Jacob van Ruisdaels painting Gezicht vanaf de duinen met Haarlem in de verte (View from the dunes with Haarlem in the distance), 167075.

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in the area, built or remodeled stately homes, surrounded them with fashionably landscaped grounds, reforested areas that had been cleared for pastureland, and generally sought to make Zuid Kennemerland a domesticated paradise. By the early eighteenth century a feeling for natural simplicity had softened the regions affection for formal gardens, and by the end of the century it would provide fertile ground for English gardening.34 When John Hope purchased Groenendaal in 1767, its transformation into a landscape park had already begun. To complete the transition, Hope tapped the neighboring Rijnland boezem (reservoir) to supply water for cool ponds and flowing streams on the estate grounds. Because the local water table was relatively low, however, he commissioned the building of an Archimedean-screw windmill to raise the incoming water. When this proved insufficient, Hope asked the amateur engineer Rinze Lieuwe Brouwer to construct a steam engine, which he hoped would be more effective. A merchant by profession, Brouwer possessed considerable talent and industry. Judging from his correspondence with Jan Daniel Huichelbos van Liender, director of the Bataafsch Genootschap and future agent for Boulton and Watt in the Netherlands, Brouwer played the role of local intelligencerreporting on Blakeys adventures, rumors about Matthew Boultons visit to Amsterdam, and municipal projects relating to water management, such as plans to make the IJ more navigable.35 Well-informed and technically talented, he seems to have known most of what there was to know about steam and its applications. No wonder, then, that in 1778 he won a silver medal in a competition sponsored by the Bataafsch Genootschap to describe how steam-powered pumps might be improved to replace windmills for water management.36 It was with this storehouse of knowledge that he came to work for John Hope. While no documents remain to provide details of their communications, we should not be surprised that Hope knew who to contact for such a novel project. As a member of Amsterdams city council, he might have encountered Brouwers interest in the citys water management problems;
34. Eric de Jong, Historisch landschap: Haarlem als hoofdstad van het Hollands Arcadi, in Levy van Halm et al., 130; F. Hopper, The Dutch Regence Garden, Garden History 9 (1981): 11836; A. G. van der Steur, Harlemia Illustrata: Haarlem en Zuid Kennemerland in de prentkunst (Haarlem, 1993). 35. R. L. Brouwer to Van Liender, 23 February 1779, 12 March 1779, 25 April 1779, 28 April 1779, 14 May 1779, 27 May 1779, 7 August 1779, 14 September 1779, 2 November 1779, 15 November 1779, and 25 November 1779, Brieven (n. 24 above); G. J. Borger, Amsterdam en de afdamming van het IJ, Ons Amsterdam 28 (1976): 22633. 36. R. L. Brouwer, Derde Antwoord op de Vraag: Welke is het beste middel of Werktuig, het welk aan eene Stoom- of Vuur-Machine gevoegd, bekwaam is om, zonder merkelijk te ontstellen, geduurende eenige maanden agter een te werken, en tot allerley hoogten beneden de vijf voeten, op te brengen,eene hoeveelheid waters, welke toeneemt naar maate de hoogte, tot welke het moet opgebragt worden, vermindert, en die overeenkomstig is aan het bekend vermogen der Machine, Verhandelingen van het Bataafsch Genootschap 1 (1779): 179210.

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he certainly would have been aware of Amsterdams misadventure with Blakey. More generally, Hopes family was known for patronizing innovative scientific endeavors. They underwrote, for example, the short-lived journal of the Gezelschap der Hollandsche Scheikundigen (Society of Dutch Chemists), a small group of influential Dutch chemists who helped bring the chemical revolution to the Netherlands.37 While they were hardly part of the same socioeconomic set, then, Hope and Brouwer would have had ample opportunity to meet. Brouwer quickly wrote to Boulton and Watt as a first step in deciding whether to have parts manufactured in England or do everything domestically. But while he considered manufacturing possibilities in England and was familiar with Watts engine, having made copies of Watts sketches for Van Liender, Brouwer did not trust Watts openness, nor did he think Watts design appropriate for Groenendaal. He opted instead for a Newcomentype machine, for which he had a brass cylinder, iron piston, and wooden pump made locally.38 Once installed, the apparatus worked most every Monday and Tuesday in the summer months, maintaining the water level and flow in the estates canals, brooks, and ponds.39 As we have already seen, by the 1780s steam-powered fountains already had a long history, in the Netherlands and elsewhere. But John Hope was not interested in jets of water spewing from the mouths of marble gods. He wanted to do what the Dutch had done for centuries: domesticate the landscape. Hope viewed the steam engine as a way of harnessing the power of nature to tame the environment. His steam engine would do what windmills had done for centuries, only more reliably and powerfully. But his plan involved a complex paradox. On one hand, Hope wanted to control the landscape in order to project the appearance of undisturbed nature. On the other, Hope adopted an urban-based approach to realize his rural paradise. Like the steam engine installed at Oostpoort, the purpose of the Groenendaal machine was to raise water levels in the summer months and thereby shield the estates residents from seasonal stench and decay.40
37. Recherches Physico-Chymiques, published 179294. 38. Brouwer to Van Liender, 15 November 1779 and 9 December 1779, Brieven. Not only did Brouwer rely on his own engineering judgement to design the engine, he had enough confidence in local craft skills to have all the parts locally made and assembled. This counters an often-made claim that steam engines could not be and were not constructed without English expertise in the eighteenth century; see, for example, Robinson (n. 31 above). 39. The schedule was published, along with a technical description of the engine, so that the public would know when to visit and see it at work. Den Hollandschen Weeklijkschennieuws-vertalder, no. 49 (8 December 1781), 19495. For further description, see Huet (n. 4 above), 3335. 40. This Dutch attitude toward water and water management can further be underscored by contrasting Hopes project with contemporary engineering schemes in France.

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The Groenendaal engine was erected in 1781 and stood until 1842. The estate remained in private hands until 1913, when the surrounding municipality purchased it for a park. As if to underscore how nature at Groenendaal had been engineered, the entrance to the new park was flanked by Hopes windmill and either the original or a copy of Brouwers pump.41 The pump has since been dismantled, leaving the windmill to stand alone as witness to a fascinating history. That history involved not only the physical (re)construction of the Dutch landscape by an urban oligarch but also, as we will see, a cultural (re)construction. For gardening, technology, and Zuid Kennemerland were all caught up in the task of forging a revivified national identity in the Netherlands during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Arcadian Representations and Real-Life Adaptations

The English or landscape garden style developed during the eighteenth century in reaction to the geometric formalism that reigned in places such as Versailles and Het Loo.42 In contrast to the ordered symmetry that marked formal gardens as works of human ingenuity and power, this new ideal hearkened back to a time before human engineering had covered the traces of Eden. In place of a barricade-like design that plainly demarcated the garden and the world, these new parks gave no clear indication of where they began and where the countryside ended.43 Whether influenced directly by English trends or by similar developments in France and Germany, many estate owners in the Netherlands who
The course of the river that ran through the estate Mrville, for example, was altered for aesthetic effect. While this was common in large landscape parks throughout Europe, at Mrville, in a typically French touch, a mill was built on the river to enhance the rustic aesthetic. The mill was not constructed to make anything work, only to look picturesque. See William Howard Adams, French Gardens, 15001800 (New York, 1979), 131. Hopes steam engine, on the other hand, was admired precisely because it worked. Consider, for example, the comment of Nina dAubigny, who visited Groenendaal in 1790 specifically to see the steam engine. She described it as a machine resembling those that conduct the waters of the Seine throughout Paris and are operated solely by fire; Nina dAubigny, Journal du voyage dHollande (1790), Amsterdam Municipal Archives, entry for 21 August. 41. J. Z. Kannegieter, Een stoomwerktuig op de buitenplaats van een Amsterdams regent in het jaar 1781, Amstelodamus 66 (1973): 2729; F. Muller, De eerste stoommachines van ons land, De Ingenieur 52 (1937): 106. 42. Gardeners . . . instead of humouring Nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our Trees rise in Cones, Globes, and Pyramids. We see the Marks of Scissors upon every Plant and Bush. Joseph Addison, Spectator, 25 June 1712, 7071, quoted in David Watkin, The English Vision (London, 1982), 3 n. 7. 43. Chandra Mukerji argues that much of Versailles design took its cue from Vaubins fortifications, hence the reference here to barricades. See Mukerji (n. 12 above), 5265.

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sought to construct a natural landscape faced a special challenge: their estates were situated in areas only made habitable by centuries of human intervention.44 Naturalizing the landscape in an already engineered environment meant more than borrowing fashionable models from the neighbors. The very idea of nature was filtered through centuries of struggle to make the Netherlands safe and profitable, and the resulting image shied away from the sublime. Displays of natures awesome power were precisely what the ubiquitous dikes were meant to avoid. The Dutch opted instead for an Arcadian idyll, technology peacefully integrated into a pastoral setting to bolster the environments integrity. In literature, pictures, and garden architecture, the Dutch and their technologies appeared as guardians in their garden, keeping both unbridled nature and human rapacity at bay.45 This theme is too broad and complex to explore fully here. Instead, I will focus on two more specific questions: How was the relationship between steam engines and nature represented in Dutch art and literature during the second half of the long eighteenth century? And how did this relate to the steam engines physical introduction to the Netherlands in the politically charged and economically challenging context of this period?
MORALIZING NATURE, NATURALIZING MACHINES

The cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove writes that landscapes represent a way in which certain classes of people have signified themselves and their world through their imagined relationship with nature. 46 But if the adaptation of landscape gardens to the Dutch countryside was first carried out by an urban elite, the landscapes they commissioned were appropriated by garden designers, artists, and writers for more popular consumption. As

44. Audrey Lambert, The Making of the Dutch Landscape (London, 1971). 45. The humanly constructed character of Dutch nature was noted by many in the nineteenth century and might help to account for the lack of enthusiasm with which Romanticism was received in the Netherlands. Consider, for example, this passage from David Jacob van Lennep, Verhandeling over het belang van Hollands grond en oudheden voor gevoel en verbeelding (1827): [T]hat garden of Holland was not bestowed by nature, but rather almost in defiance of nature, took shape through the skill and courage and perseverance of its inhabitants. . . . But does Holland have only meadows and polders and lakes and marshes, as the stranger, who has never seen the country, imagines? No doubt we are richer than he, if not in awesome and terrifying sights, then certainly in attractive rural scenes. No doubt nature is here more abundant in all that delights both heart and feelings. Quoted in Peter van Zonneveld, Majestic, Wild or Charming: The Romantic Landscape and Dutch Literature, 17501850, in On Country Roads and Fields: The Depiction of the 18th- and 19th-Century Landscape, ed. Wiepke Loos, Robert-Jan te Rijdt, Marjan van Heteren (Amsterdam, 1997), 98. Incidentally, the Van Lennep family owned Groenendaal between 1752 and 1767, at which time it sold the estate to John Hope. David Jacob van Lennep spent his childhood summers at the nearby estate Huis te Manpad. 46. Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London, 1984), 15.

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the resulting representations of nature spread, landscape took on new dimensions of meaning. Nature became a site of moral valuation, while machines such as the steam engine became a naturalized part of their surrounding environment. Landscape gardens began appearing in the Netherlands during the 1760s and 1770s, a worrisome time for many Dutch, who perceived the national economy slipping from the peak it had reached in the Golden Age. 47 While both population and manufacturing output were declining in urban centersthe hub of Dutch economic strength in the seventeenth centurypeople with sufficient capital to invest in banking, bonds, and foreign endeavors continued to reap healthy profits. A widening gap stretched between regents and rentiers, on one hand, and merchants and lower classes on the other.48 Social and moral reformers voiced their discontent with this financial and cultural gap between the elites and the general population and denounced what they saw as the upper classes aristocratic decadence. For them, the countrys economic problems grew out of its cultural malaise. Economic recovery was only possible, they argued, if accompanied by moral regeneration. Demands for reform led to the rise of what the Dutch called economic patriotism and the establishment of enlightened societies that tied improving productivity to serving the community.49 Moral utilitarianism called attention to the Dutch countryside as the source of natural knowledge, the locus of agricultural reform and advances in environmental engineering, and the site of communion with God. Appropriating the naturalist ideal of landscape gardeninginitially the preserve of wealthy estate ownersfor middle-class consumption brought these concerns into the homes of a large swath of the population. We find a good example of this in a popular garden design handbook written by Gijsbert van Laar, nursery owner and landscape architect, in 1802. Van Laar aimed his Magazijn van tuin-sieraaden specifically at a middle-class audience. In it he detailed how desired effects could be produced on a limited budget. What is more, he claimed that middle-class gardeners enjoyed their earthly creations more than the wealthy because they had the moral satisfaction of knowing that they had done the work themselves. Van Laars book succeeded by bringing together his readers need to economize with their desire to improve the combined natural and moral economy.50
47. Roberts, Moral Marketplace (n. 7 above). 48. A good summary can be found in Wantje Fritschy and Joop Toebes, eds., Het ontstaan van het moderne Nederland: Staats- en natievorming tussen 1780 en 1830 (Nijmegen, 1998), 4651. 49. These societies included the Oeconomische Tak, whose members were popularly referred to as economic patriots, and the Maatschappij ter Bervordering van de Landbouw. See Roberts, Moral Marketplace. 50. Gijsbert van Laar, Magazijn van tuin-sieraaden: Verzameling van modellen van

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Receptivity to this formula was nurtured by the Dutch Enlightenment, with its special stress on virtue and physico-theology.51 Children learned to read with primers that, along with the alphabet, taught the values of thrift, virtue, and care for the environment.52 J. F. Martinets Katechismus der natuur, one of the most widely read Dutch books of the eighteenth century, extended this moral training by focusing on what could be learned from both observing and engineering nature. Grand struggles with the natural world taught lessons of vigilance. But a peaceful countryside dotted with villages was equally instructive. As Martinets protagonist instructs his student while they gaze upon such a scene, imagine the earlier state of our country, and compare it with the present. In the past it consisted of wild woods, salt marshes and flooded land: now you see it transformed into a paradise. Unbound nature might be sublime, he explains, but paradise requires a human hand.53 With Martinet, we move from popularizing a new gardening style to the literary representation of Dutch landscapes. Katechismus der natuur can be read as a travelogue in which the local landscape piques its observers philosophical interests. But even absent such moral musings, Dutch travel literature was a thriving genre. Because of its popularity with tourists, many guides featured Zuid Kennemerland, and a stroll past John Hopes estate with its steam engine was often recommended. Guidebooks presented Groenendaals steam engine not merely as a technological novelty but as an integral part of the landscape, a machine to be admired for the natural beauty it sustained. We might regard this constructed continuity as the naturalization of technology.54 A striking way to understand this process of naturalization is to examine contemporary pictorial representations of steam engines. We know of two illustrations of the Groenendaal engine: a cross section drawn by Brouaanleg en sieraad, voor groote en kleine lust-hoven, voornamelijk van dezulke die, met weinig kosten te maken zijn (Magazine of garden decorations: A collection of layouts and decorative models for large and small pleasure gardens, especially those that can be made cheaply) (Amsterdam, 1802). It is helpful to note that in the eighteenth century the Dutch word oeconomie tied domestic and moral responsibilities to more obviously financial or monetary ones; see Roberts, Moral Marketplace. 51. On the Dutch Enlightenment, see Jacob and Mijnhardt (n. 6 above); Dorothe Sturkenboom, Spectators van hartstocht: Sekse en emotionele cultuur in de achttiende eeuw (Hilversum, 1998). 52. Johan Hendrik Swildens, Vaderlandsch A-B Book voor de Nederlandsche Jeugd (Amsterdam, 1781). 53. J. F. Martinet, Katechismus der natuur, vol. 4 (Amsterdam, 1779), 37980. The only monographic study of Martinet is A. N. Paasman, J. N. Martinet: Een Zutphens filosoof in de achttiende eeuw (Zutphen, 1971). 54. L. van Ollefen, De Nederlandsche Stad- en Dorp-Beschrijver (Amsterdam, 1796), 1112. On the naturalization of technology in seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes, see Ann Adams, Competing Communities (n. 8 above). For the naturalization of steam engines in nineteenth-century Berlin, see Wise (n. 5 above).

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FIG. 2 R. L. Brouwer, cross section of the pumping station at Groenendaal, 1780. (Courtesy of Rotterdam Gemeente Archief.)

wer (fig. 2) and an anonymous watercolor made in 1785 (fig. 3). The former provides a structural record of Brouwers design, the latter a souvenir. Note how the visitors in the watercolor do not inspect the machinery, but pose like tourists before the building.55 Note also that the composition does not differentiate between the engine and the windmill it was built to supplement; they occupy the same line, beginning with a tree in the corner and cutting across the foreground. It is not the steam engine that is celebrated here, but the landscape of which it is a part. An important difference between these two portrayals of the Groenendaal engine underscores the point. Like many other eighteenth-century diagrams of steam engines, Brouwers drawing shows his machine at work, indicated by smoke billowing from the engine house. English landscape paintings with steam engines often show them blackening the sky, but their
55. The date 1785 is taken from Pols and Verbruggen (n. 3 above), 40. If the dating of the painting is correct, we can assume that the people in the picture are not the Hopes, as John Hope died in 1784.

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FIG. 3 Anonymous watercolor, managing water on the Groenendaal estate, c. 1785. (Courtesy of Rotterdam Gemeente Archief.)

Dutch counterparts offer no sign that the machines activity altered the environment. On the contrary, the engine forms a part of the scenery. This aesthetic can also be seen in other images from the period. Take the two known pictures of the Oostpoort engine, a watercolor by Gerard van Nijmegen, executed sometime between 1776 and 1780, and a similar drawing by Dirk Langendijk (fig. 4). Both situate the engine within a vista that looks far more pastoral than industrial and urban, near the windmill designed by Steven Hoogendijk in 1742.56 Undisturbed by the sound of machinery or smoky exhalations, the people in these scenes sit peacefully or stroll through the landscape. Or consider the first Watt engine to power a Dutch drainage project, installed in the Blijdorp polder near Rotterdam in 1787, thanks to the efforts of the Bataafsch Genootschap. Again, we know of two illustrations made by contemporary artists. The first, executed by Johannes Prey (fig. 5), shows the steam engine under an unaffected sky, tended by its keeper as a horse lazily grazes nearby and a farmer tends his fields. There is no sign of conflict in this landscape, only the quiet tempo of
56. Dutch artists tended to represent the relationship between cities and countryside with images of continuity; Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1983), 152.

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FIG. 4 Dirk Langendijk, De Oostpoort vuurmachine (The Oostdorp steam engine), c. 1777. (Courtesy of Rotterdam Gemeente Archief.)

a rural afternoon. The second, made by Dirk Langendijk, portrays the official visit made by Stadholder Willem V to Blijdorp in 1790 (fig. 6). Once more the scene commemorates the landscapes Arcadian continuity. The royal coach waits in the background, grazing cows dominate the foreground, and the stadholders entourage stand like tourists before the machine, giving no indication of their rank or purpose. The Dutch countryside rules in Langendijks paintingnot technology, and not the House of Orange.
PATRIOTS, ORANGISTS, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE LANDSCAPE

In fact, Preys realist depiction of the Blijdorp landscape did not match historical reality. Blijdorp was no more at peace than the rest of the Netherlands, where mounting antagonism between Patriots and supporters of the House of Orange was punctuated by the arrival of Prussian troops in 1787.57 Local residents feared that pollution from the steam engine would dry up their cows milk and compromise their livestocks reproductive capabilities long before it drained their polder. They refused to finance its maintenance
57. The best overview of this revolutionary period in Dutch history in English is Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 17801813 (New York, 1977).

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FIG. 5 Johannes Prey, Het stoomgemaal aan de Schie ten noordwesten van Rotterdam (The steam mill on the Schie River northwest from Rotterdam), 1790s. (Courtesy of Atlas van Stolk, Rotterdam.)

and coined a menacing political slogan, die machine is een Keezending, en dat moeten wij niet hebben (It is a Patriot contraption and we will not stand for it), to call for its removal.58 Historians have used this outburst as evidence that a historical divide existed between (industrially) progressive Patriots and antimodern Orangists. The situation was, in fact, more complicated. As already mentioned, some in the Netherlands responded to what they perceived as the countrys decline in the second half of the eighteenth century with calls for reform couched in the rhetoric of patriotism and love of fatherland.59 If some reformers focused on economic renewal through
58. This story has been told many times in Dutch; for a version in English, see Pols and Verbruggen, 4547. Keezen (a breed of dog) was a derogatory term for members of the Patriot movement. 59. For the Dutch origin of the word fatherland, see J. W. Muller, Vaderland en moedertaal, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche Taal-en Letterdkunde 47 (1928): 4362.

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FIG. 6 Detail, Dirk Langendijk, Bezoek van Prins Willem V met gevolg aan het

stoomgemaal ten noordwesten van Rotterdam aan de Schie (Visit by Prince Willem V and his entourage to the steam mill northwest from Rotterdam on the Schie River), 1790. (Courtesy of Rotterdam Gemeente Archief.)

patriotic support for domestic production and consumption, virtually everyone agreed that national revival depended on reinvigorating moral citizenship.60 But with economic and political tensions heightened by the ineffectual rule of Stadholder Willem V, as well as worsening competition and war with England, economic and moral patriotism spilled over into overt political strife in the 1780s. Political Patriots (a loose amalgamation of discontented noblemen, urban regents who benefited from a weak stadholder, middle-class reformers inspired by Enlightenment and American Revolutionary ideals, and tradesmen, artisans, and other members of the

60. Wijnand Mijnhardt argues that the concept of moral citizenship was not replaced by political citizenship and a modern national polity in the Netherlands until the constitution of 1848. Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Dutch Republic as a Town, EighteenthCentury Studies 31 (1998): 34559.

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lower classes who hoped for greater political participation or simply for food on their tables) gained the upper hand in a number of Dutch towns, but met stiff opposition from Orangists (another loose network of aristocratic, intellectual, and popular elements, some of whom owed their positions to the stadholders patronage) in places like Rotterdam. Buttressed by the Prussian military presence, Willem V managed to gain temporary control of the situation in 1787, only to be removed in 1795 by a combination of internal opposition and French revolutionary intervention. This was the context in which Willem V visited Blijdorp in 1790. Unlike local residents, who resented urban intervention in their local affairs and all too easily conflated the patriotic orientation of reform-minded societies such as the Bataafsch Genootschap with political Patriotism, Willem V came to pay homage to a machine that promised to enhance the landscapes integrity. Like so many others who hoped for the reinvigoration of Dutch culture, Willem was able to put partisanship aside in favor of making the Dutch garden bloom again. Impressed by what she saw, his wife asked why there were so few steam engines in the Netherlands. Bataafsch Genootschap representatives replied that cultural conservatismnot political oppositionstood in their way. Judging from the historical record, this was an honest answer.61
HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?

The early nineteenth century was an era of upheaval in the Netherlands. The Batavian Republic gave way to a monarchy under Louis Napoleon, which yielded in turn to direct rule from Paris. Political tumult was matched by economic distress. In response, Patriots of various stripes continued to hold up the community of moral citizens as a political-economic ideal, a goal to be realized concretely through projects such as a national education program and symbolically through the evocation of a tranquil Arcadia.62 The task of evoking that pastoral ideal fell not only to visual artists but to writers as well. The Patriot author Adriaan Loosjess Hollands Arkadia of Wandelingen in de omstreken van Haarlem provides an example. Borrowing from the popular genre of travel literature, Loosjes set his fictional characters to wander through the countryside around Haarlem. Their conversations are anchored in an appreciation for the surrounding landscape, which leads them to discuss a broad range of subjects. Just as Virgil conjured his
61. The willingness of Bataafsch Genootschap members (many of whom had Patriot sympathies) and the stadholder to come together at Blijdorp was not a unique case. It was fairly standard for Dutch societies to exclude political discussion from their meetings by statute and take a conciliatory rhetorical line in the interests of social progress and utility. For an example involving the society Felix Meritis in Amsterdam, see Lissa Roberts, Science Becomes Electric: Dutch Interaction with the Electrical Machine during the Eighteenth Century, Isis 90 (1999): 71112. 62. Jan Lenders, De burger en de volkschool (Nijmegen, 1988).

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Arcadia to delineate the tension between personal contentment and the painful dislocation caused by Roman injustice, Loosjes landscapes express both patriotic pride and scientific progress, on one hand, and a quietly fearful sense of sociopolitical and moral decay on the other. The peaceful reunion with nature symbolized Loosjes ideal, to form tolerant, enlightened and civilized people. 63 Among the sites his characters visit is Groenendaal, where they admire the steam engine responsible for maintaining its natural beauty. While recognizing the machines technological novelty, Loosjes describes it as blending peacefully into the landscape. This contrasts starkly with his portrayal of the nearby Haarlemmermeer, a lake whose uncontrolled waters menaced the entire region. Proposals to tame this aqueous monster had been floated since the seventeenth century. It is possible that Loosjes knew of contemporary suggestions to drain the lake with steam power; his characters discuss the benefits that would accrue from bringing the Haarlemmermeer under control without mentioning any such specific schemes.64 The books message, nonetheless, is clear: fertility depends on the marriage of human ingenuity and natural integrity. Their union provides a buffer against the unbridled force of either in isolation. While his contemporaries in other parts of Europe romanticized the landscape through sublime exaggeration or harnessed it for industrial exploitation, Loosjes proffered the less shocking vistas of his fatherland as more amenable to moral contemplation. And what made those Arcadian vistas possible, if not the continuity between human ingenuity and respect for the environment? 65 Watt and Boulton had received a personal invitation to enter the Bataafsch Genootschaps 1778 prize essay competition, which they politely turned down; as Boulton explained, they made it a policy never to enter competitions in which they were called upon to discuss the theories and principles of their work.66 The Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen (Dutch Society for Science) announced three additional essay competitions in the early nineteenth century on the topic of the application of steam power to water management, with similar results: no one replied. The question was too technical to elicit broad interest, and it touched on areas of expertise that entrepreneurs would rather use than describe; it was
63. Adriaan Loosjes, Hollands Arkadia of Wandelingen in de omstreken van Haarlem (Dutch Arcadia, or strolls in the area of Haarlem) (Haarlem, 1804), 4. For an interesting discussion of Virgil in relation to pastoral literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, see Marx (n. 9 above), especially 1924. 64. The Haarlemmermeer had been expanding for centuries due to peat extraction and erosion. Its storm-swelled waters threatened to flood both Amsterdam and Leiden in 1836. For eighteenth-century proposals to use steam power to drain the Haarlemmermeer, see Richard Ball to Van Liender, 10 March 1775, and William Blakey to Van Liender, 7 April 1775, Brieven (n. 24 above). 65. Loosjes, 67. The word shocking is his. 66. Matthew Boulton to Van Liender, 29 August 1778, Brieven.

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not in their interest to publicize hard-won knowledge of which they would thereby cease to be the exclusive masters.67 This points to the limited effect that a scholarly society could hope to have on widespread, practical trends. In a context of administrative localism and high commercial risk, societies could only choose between promoting knowledge and popular interest through lectures and essay competitions, on one hand, and stimulating the interest of local government through privately financed projects on the other. What society-based patriotism could not accomplish, however, the coincidental rise during the nineteenth century of centralized government and technologically oriented entrepreneurship did. The Orange King Willem I (181440), who visited Blijdorp with his father in 1790, underwrote the Netherlands first steam railroad. More important, he and his ministers helped create the financial and physical infrastructure needed to support Dutch industrialization. Whether the result of an industrial vision or not, it was the combination of such infrastructural developments and capital investment that put the Netherlands on the road to industrialization.68
A Fuller Picture

Histories of the steam engine tend to focus on industrial and economic progress. Changing the focus to bring in landscape architecture, garden fountain design, land reclamation, and water management helps recover a fuller picture of that history. This complements the work of historians who have demonstrated that steam engines were not the primary motor of the Industrial Revolution.69 Moreover, thinking about the steam engine as a machine in the garden allows us to examine it as a cultural artifact. How were the steam engine and its relationship to its environment interpreted and symbolically projected by those who advocated or observed its presence? Putting these elements together in the case of the steam engines introduction into the Netherlands enables us, further, to think about the place of steam technology in Dutch history without having recourse to the negative concept of industrial retardation employed by economic historians such as Joel Mokyr.70 Rather than investigating why the Dutch didnt industrialize
67. Bob Caron, Een 18de-eeuwse vuurmachine in het Fysisch Kabinet, deel I, Teylers Magazijn 52 (1996): 1114, at 14. 68. M. S. C. Bakker, Overheid en techniek, in Harry Lintsen et al. (n. 6 above), vol. 4 (Zutphen, 1993), 91132. 69. See, for example, Rondo Cameron, A New View of European Industrialization, Economic History Review 38 (1985): 123. 70. Joel Mokyr, Industrialization in the Low Countries, 17951850 (New Haven, Conn., 1976). Mokyr employs a comparative analysis of the quantity, distribution, and power of steam engines in the Netherlands and Belgium to contrast those countries respective levels of industrial development. But he does not include water management

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FIG. 7 Detail, Willem Hekking Jr., Het Haarlemmermeer (The Haarlemmermeer), c. 1850. Courtesy of Atlas van Stolk, Rotterdam.

sooner (that is, why they werent more like the English and Belgians), we should ask what they actually did on both practical and symbolic levels.71 As Svante Lindqvist demonstrates in his study of steam technology in Sweden, the introduction and adaptation of technology in the eighteenth century was a local affair, dependent equally on technological, economic, and cultural concerns.72 In the Netherlands, representations of the steam engine combined with the ways in which it was actually used to determine
among his distributional categories, thus ignoring the primary use to which steam engines were originally put in the Netherlands in both his quantitative analysis and corresponding discussion; see pp. 12829. The phrase industrial retardation comes from Richard Griffiths, Industrial Retardation in the Netherlands, 18301850 (The Hague, 1979), 7. 71. Compare this approach with Harry Lintsen, Van windbemaling naar stoombemaling: Innoveren in Nederland in the negentiende eeuw, Jaarboek voor de geschiedenis van bedrijf en techniek (Utrecht, 1985), pt. 2, 4863, esp. 50. 72. Lindqvist (n. 28 above).

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Dutch cultural understandings of this technology. The steam engines image as an Arcadian apparatus became so well entrenched that it remained current in the mid-nineteenth century. When the artist Willem Hekking Jr. sketched one of the steam engines finally built to drain the Haarlemmermeer in 1849 (fig. 7), he framed it with the most benign of pastoral settings. Nature had been tamed, but only so as to allow for its peaceful continuity with those who inhabited its garden.

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