Captain Jan

Captain Jan (Dutch: Hollands Glorie) is a 1940 novel by Dutch writer Jan de Hartog. The book depicts highly skilled tugboat sailors as modern successors to the bold navigators of the Dutch Golden Age. It was made into a Dutch TV series in 1976.

To some degree the fictional company depicted in the book is inspired by the real-life tugboat shipping company Smit-Wijsmüller, with which de Hartog took a temporary job at in IJmuiden a few months before the German invasion - which quickly came to an end when the tug was captured by the Germans.

At the time of writing the book was already a historical novel, depicting a time before the author's birth which already had a certain romantic patina. De Hartog's work at the Port of Amsterdam might have given him a chance to meet with old sailors of the protagonists' generation and hear their reminiscences.

The book was published in 1940, just ten days before Nazi Germany invaded and swiftly occupied the hitherto-neutral Netherlands. Under these circumstances, a book with such a name and theme became an immediate best seller in occupied Holland, a potent symbol of Dutch opposition to the occupation. As noted by The New Netherland Institute, "(...)The book became a best seller overnight and sustained the Dutch population during the five-year military occupation and suffering under the hated Nazi regime. It is estimated that over a million copies of 'Holland’s Glory' were sold during the war time period. Considering that the entire Dutch population then was well under 10 million, the one million copies sold is an enormous number. ".

In fact, the book's plot as such had nothing political, anti-German or anti-Nazi, the sailor protagonists' conflict being mainly with nature and with the exploiting, authoritarian Kwel Shipping Company which demands feudal-like fealty from its employees. This did not stop the Gestapo from showing a lively interest in its author, forcing him to go into hiding and then escape to England in 1943. As for the book itself - despite its being banned by the Nazis, hidden printing presses from continued to turn it out the book in huge numbers.

In the 1890s and 1900s, the Netherlands saw the fast flourishing of a new kind of shipping: ocean-going tugboats. While hitherto tugboats were strictly local affairs, never going out of sight of shore, the new kind were regularly crossing the oceans, towing Dutch-made dredgers, floating cranes, lighters and sluice gates to Asia, Africa and South America - wherever Dutch engineers were busily building harbors and damming rivers.

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