ABSTRACT

‘The goodlyest Haven not of the Lowe Countries only but of all Christendome’: 1 This is how the Italian merchant and historian Lodovico Guicciardini (1521-1589) described the village of Arnemuiden on the eastern board of Walcheren Island in the Scheldt estuary in the English translation (1593) of his book The Description of the Low Countries, which had originally been published in 1567. 2 Guicciardini, who had been living in Antwerp since 1541, also explained why Arnemuiden was the best haven of Europe: ‘For all ships [that] come into Flanders repaire to this port in such sort that you shal somtime see there 400 or 500 saile of ships that passe to and fro into all partes of y world.’ 3 In his original description of Arnemuiden, Guicciardini, for the benefit of merchants and Antwerp underwriters, included a list of distances between Arnemuiden and the main destinations for seafaring across Europe. Thus Arnemuiden sparkled, as it were, at the centre of a compass rose, 4 with Amsterdam at 25 nautical miles, Bremen at 83, Hamburg at 105, the Sound at 180, Danzig at 254, Riga at 300, Reval (Tallinn) at 335, Narva at 365, and in the other direction, Calais at 23 miles, London at 42, Southampton at 62, Dieppe at 54, Rouen at 75, Brest at 125, La Rochelle at 194, Bordeaux at 211, Bilbao at 226, Cape Finistère at 270, Lisbon at 380, Cadiz at 480, Sevilla at 500, Malaga at 540, Madeira at 480, the Canary Islands at 520, and finally Livorno in Tuscany at 780 nautical miles from Arnemuiden. 5