Benjamin Dobbs

Benjamin Dobbs is Jacob Poot’s English cousin and a visitor to Holland who joins the Dutch boys for a skating journey and the December race. He arrives confident that English strength and skill will prevail, but the ice brings him into easy fellowship with his new companions, while encounters in Amsterdam and Leiden test his assumptions about the country. His progress from awkward guest to engaged competitor gives the travel episodes a lively measure of cultural exchange.

Identity and Introduction

Benjamin comes to Holland to stay with Jacob until after the great skating race. Jacob introduces him to the boys as an Englishman who intends to compete, and they gather around the newcomers. Benjamin initially feels awkward among Jacob’s friends: their languages do not yet offer a comfortable common ground, and his attempts to speak Dutch are as uncertain as their reluctance to try English or French. The book presents him as a visitor whose first impressions are shaped by the distance between what he knows and what he is encountering.

That distance does not remain a barrier for long. Benjamin decides that the Dutch boys are a fine group, and skating supplies a shared activity that makes conversation less essential. As Jacob explains the boys’ plans with some French and English to help him, Benjamin begins to join in with a nod or a Dutch affirmative. The episode introduces one of his characteristic roles: he is both a participant in the boys’ adventures and an outsider whose reactions make unfamiliar Dutch practices visible to the reader.

The Journey and Its Encounters

Benjamin and Jacob receive permission to join a long skating expedition from Broek to The Hague, nearly fifty miles, planned for the school holiday around Saint Nicholas’s festival and several extra days off. The trip makes Benjamin a traveling observer as well as a skater. On the way, he sees Amsterdam with his Dutch companions, who know the nearby city so well that its marvels have become ordinary to them. Benjamin, by contrast, is struck by its scale and construction: the city’s ninety-five islands and nearly two hundred bridges, its canals, locks, narrow streets, and tall houses with gables facing the street. He also notices warehouses tucked high beneath roofs, cranes lifting goods past household windows, buildings supported on wooden piles, and small outward-facing mirrors through which residents can watch the street.

His curiosity is sometimes mixed with a quick judgment. When a canal boatman measures the distance to Leiden by the time it takes to smoke a pipe, Benjamin calls the custom ridiculous. Lambert replies by pointing to an English practice he has heard described in books: that the Lord Mayor of London counts horseshoe nails at his installation to demonstrate his learning. Benjamin immediately becomes serious and asks who told Lambert that the custom exists; he says he will investigate it when he gets home. The exchange turns the joke back on its English visitor. Benjamin’s confidence in his own standards is checked by the possibility that the familiar can seem just as strange when viewed from abroad.

Confidence and Competition

The December twentieth race remains in Benjamin’s thoughts even during the sightseeing. He is a superb skater, though he has had fewer opportunities to practise than his Dutch companions, and he has made the most of the practice available to him. Strong, supple, quick, and graceful, he has taken naturally to skating. These qualities make his confidence more than empty boasting, even as he assumes that English fleetness and strength will let him put Holland, and the rest of the world, to shame.

The race gives that confidence a meaningful test. Peter van Holp beats Benjamin in a fair contest, a result that Benjamin receives with vexation but also admiration and surprise. He tells Peter that Peter is the first person ever to beat him fairly. Peter understands the compliment better than he can answer in English and responds with a laughing bow. Benjamin’s defeat does not erase his skill; it reveals instead that ability is not the preserve of the visitor who arrived expecting to dominate. His respect for Peter makes competition a point of connection between them, not merely a contest between national reputations.

History and Cultural Exchange

In Leiden, Benjamin’s response to the city’s past is as energetic as his response to the race. At the Ruine, Lambert describes the destruction caused when a barge carrying forty thousand pounds of gunpowder exploded, killing people and scattering about three hundred houses. The conversation gives Benjamin a concrete encounter with a city whose appearance bears the memory of disaster. His attention then turns to the earlier siege and the burgomaster Van der Werf. Benjamin wants to cheer for him, recalling the city’s resistance to the Spanish, the shortage of food, and the plague that killed hundreds. Lambert warns him to keep quiet because a group of boys cheering in the street could attract the police’s attention.

Benjamin’s enthusiasm shows how he has taken up the history associated with the places on the journey. He recounts the townspeople’s refusal to surrender and Van der Werf’s resolve to defend the city, even when desperate inhabitants pressed him to give in. The account is not just local colour to Benjamin: he treats the burgomaster as a figure worthy of public celebration. Lambert’s warning checks the performance, but not the admiration behind it. In this scene, Benjamin is no longer simply inspecting Holland from the outside; he responds to its historical memory with enough feeling to forget the practical setting around him.

Narrative Role

Benjamin’s visit lets the narrative place Dutch customs beside an English visitor’s assumptions without making either perspective wholly authoritative. His amazement at Amsterdam’s architecture gives detail to the travel writing, while his exchanges with Lambert expose how easily national caricatures can run in both directions. His early language awkwardness recedes through the shared practice of skating; his certainty about the race gives way to respect for Peter; and his historical enthusiasm makes the Dutch past personally compelling to him. Across these episodes, Benjamin’s outsider status is not a fixed limitation but the condition that enables curiosity, comic reversals, and eventual fellowship.