54.
De ensartede, patronymiske og ofte hollandiserede nav-
ne gør det i mange tilfælde helt umuligt at skelne mellem
indvandrerne. Det er derfor uladsiggørligt at foretage en
fuldstændig kortlægning af vidne-gudforældre-relationerne.
55.
Lars Henningsen: Horisonternes land,
Slesvig (online)
2009, nr. 2.
56.
Gøbel: op. cit., 2003, p. 8.
57.
/
view/NT00344_opvarenden. Adressen henviser til National
Archief i Den Haags database over sømænd og soldater, der
tog hyre i det nederlandske ostindiske kompagni. Arbejdet
med at registrere den næsten en million mænd, der var ansat
i kompagniet pågår så vidt vides stadigvæk. Følgeligt må
antallet af vadehavsboere i databasen tænkes at vokse.
58.
Lars Henningsen: op. cit., 2009.
59.
John O. Evjen:
Scandinavian Immigrants in New York,
Minneapolis 1926, p. 151ff.
60.
Wilma Gijsbers: En vestjysk købmands rolle i verdens-
handelen,
Erhvervshistorisk årbog, bd. 47.
Aarhus 1997.
61.
Knud Lyne Rahbek:
Erindringer af mit liv. Bind 1,
Kø-
benhavn 1824, p. 2f.
62.
Knud Lyne Rahbeks anekdote minder påfaldende meget
om historien om de to brødre, Emil og Peter, der i Christian
Winthers digt ”Flugten til Amerika” drømmer om at udvan-
dre til USA, men ender med at måtte opgive deres foreha-
vende, fordi de bliver kaldt ind til spisetid. Det er da hel-
ler ikke utænkeligt, at Christian Winther fik både idéen og
grundhistorien fra Rahbeks erindringer, der udkom i 1824,
mens Winthers digt udkom 1837.
Summary
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch Re-
public was a global economic power, attracting migrant
workers from the entire North Sea region. Among them
were 3-4,000 people from around the Wadden Sea who
settled in Amsterdam. More than 1,700 of these emigrants
married in Amsterdam and they are listed in the City’s mar-
riage bans register, which is this article’s primary source.
The migration from the Wadden Sea to Amsterdam
lasted from the late 1500s to the early 1800s, but it was
most intense in the period 1640-1670. Thirty per cent of
the Wadden Sea people in Amsterdam were women. The
majority probably worked as servant girls. Seventy per cent
were men, of which tradesmen and labourers constituted a
considerable proportion during the early half of the 1600s.
In the second half, sailors became by far the biggest group.
Most of the people, men and women alike, belonged to Am-
sterdam’s urban proletariat.
From the mid-1600’s and thereafter, the great majority
of Wadden Sea people settled close to the harbour in the
north-eastern part of Amsterdam. Despite the high concen-
tration of Wadden Sea people in the same city sector, there
is nothing to indicate that the migrants formed any kind of
ethnic enclave organised on the principle of a common na-
tive soil. Only 18 per cent of Wadden Sea people married a
person from the same region.
Neither is there anything to indicate that the Wadden Sea
people organised a purely Danish immigrant community.
Only 31 per cent – calculated on the basis of present day
national borders – married another Dane. Of the remaining
69 per cent, half married a Dutch person, followed by Ger-
mans, Norwegians and Swedes as preferred partners. In
other words, viewed from the point of view of marriage pat-
terns, everything indicates that the Wadden Sea people were
quickly assimilated into Amsterdam urban society, or at any
rate the city’s migrant society.
Resident migrants were not the only Wadden Sea people
with links to Amsterdam. Many men sailed every spring
from theWadden Sea toAmsterdam to seek a berth on Dutch
ships. Their numbers are not known, but there is no doubt
that the number of sailors on transit through Amsterdam
was far greater than the number of Wadden Sea people who
settled in the city in the 1600s and 1700s. For both sailors
and settlers, however, Amsterdam was an integral part of
the labour market on which they had their sights set. It was
a market with better pay and better job opportunities than
their native labour market, and this was the primary reason
why, for 200 years, a large number of Wadden Sea people
left their homes for the Dutch Republic.
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