The Flooding of Nordstrand

As I live in Brooklyn, I was not unaffected by Hurricane Irene, though my preparations amounted to collecting tap water in jars and taping cardboard over my bedroom windows. My neighborhood didn't happen to lie in any of the three "danger zones," and the hurricane only appeared last night as a rather windy rainstorm sans thunder and lightning. No damage to my apartment, no power outages, etc., though other parts of the city experienced flooding and loss of electricity. I tend to be rather stoical in such situations, as I was with that brief earthquake aftershock I also experienced a few days ago: "Well, it didn't harm me or any of my belongings, nor did it disrupt my schedule. Right, then, I have other things to do."

I'm reminded, though, of the Burchardi flood in October of 1634 that enveloped and basically destroyed the island of Nordstrand, off the Jutland peninsula. One of the oldest branches of my family that I can definitively trace came from that island, a fact I discovered while doing genealogical research a year or two ago.

The area itself was already going through a fairly shitty time, recovering from a plague epidemic that had occurred some three decades before and getting their asses handed to them by Frederick III in the Thirty Years' War. This was also not the first flood to hit the area during that timespan: only the most destructive. All in all, not the best time to be a Nordstrander.

After the dikes burst on the night of 11 October: "The sea swallowed more than half of the island. A total of 6,123 people drowned, and 1,339 farms and houses were washed away, as were 28 windmills and 6 clock towers."

The flooding was so great that it permanently altered the entire geographical makeup of Nordstrand Island, creating a cluster of smaller islands in its wake, one of which was also called "Nordstrand." This being Europe in the 1600s, it was naturally perceived as evidence of God's wrath. (Perhaps some influential 17th-century Dutch pastor blamed it on all the sodomy.)

On a more personal level, my ancestor Volkje Jurians was a native of Nordstrand. Evacuated to the nearby mainland town of Husum in Schleswig-Holstein, she met a young sailor called Jan Fransse; the two ended up marrying about four and a half years later. (It would be nice to think they were a love match, though considering marriage at the time was largely a business transaction, it may well have been an arranged act of charity since Volkje had been orphaned by the flood and presumably whatever dowry she'd accumulated had sunk to the bottom of the sea. They did have nine kids over two decades, though, which might speak for itself.)

A short time later, they emigrated to a settlement that would later become Albany, NY, and went on to produce the family line that led to my dubious existence. So, you see, I'm not being facetious when I describe myself as "the residual byproduct of a 17th-century mass drowning"!

It's rather striking to think that, if this island had not been destroyed and thousands of people killed, I wouldn't be alive today.