Plump Queen Wilhelmina beamed, so did the plump Prince Consort. Comfortable Princess Juliana went out to inspect the new villages near Wieringen and thousands of Dutch trippers on hundreds of excursion boats yelled themselves hoarse. But at Volendam and Marken, those overexploited bits of quaintness, fishing boats were tied in glum rows to the quays, their painted sideboards hauled out of the water, their flags at half-mast. Fisher folk clumped gloomily over the cobblestones in wooden shoes.
Cause of the general rejoicing and the Marken gloom was the same: Holland remade her geography last week with the closing of the last gap in an 18-mi. dike between Wieringen and Friesland, thus putting an end to the famed Zuyder Zee. Some 500,000 acres of rich farmland will be reclaimed from the sea bottom when pumping operations are completed. The rest will make an inland lake (one-third the size of the original Zuyder Zee), to be known from now on as Ijsselmeer, in which the former fishing fleets of Volendam and Marken will be marooned.