In November 1937, Rinus van Mastrigt, an unemployed youth from Rotterdam, took his bike and started on a long journey eastward. His final destination was Batavia, in the Dutch East Indies, where he hoped to make a living as a carpenter. A makeshift sleeping bag and a bike were more or less all he had.
Van Mastrigt cycled through Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, and more than once he was cordially invited to stay with some of the families he met en route.
"The further away you get from Holland, the more generous people are”, he wrote to his mother. In Baghdad, Rinus was offered free lodging: “Imagine letting a complete stranger stay in your house and leaving him alone in your living room! Really, you should try it! And my host is not a wealthy man; he’s just an ordinary sort of bloke.”
Rinus continued his journey, the bike collapsed and so did Rinus, though he managed to survive. He finally reached his destination, Batavia, but no fortune awaited him there. War broke out and Rinus ended up as a POW in a Japanese concentration camp. Returning to Indonesia after the war, Rinus discovered his wife in bed with an American GI.
He decided to emigrate to Argentina, taking his two daughters with him.
Tres Arroyos, in Argentina, had had a fairly large Dutch settlement ever since the 1890s, when small peasants fled the 1889 agrarian crisis that had afflicted the northern Netherlands and Zeeland in particular.
Carolijn Visser has compellingly narrated the story of Rinus van Mastrigt and his two daughters in her book Argentijnse Avonden [Argentinian nights] (Amsterdam, Uitgeverij Contact, 2012).
Thanks to her mediation, Rinus van Mastrigt’s archive is now with the IISH.
Another Dutch cyclist traversed the Middle East at the same time as van Mastrigt. In 1936 and 1938 Gerard Monnink (1907-2001) cycled to Palestine and Egypt. Back in the Netherlands, Monnink gave lectures about the foreign countries he had visited. He told his audience about the economy, folklore, gypsies, shepherds, churches, and monasteries, using his large collection of slides to illustrate his lectures. A collection of these slides is now at the IISH
- More about Gerard Monnink (1907-2001) on the website Wie is wie in Overijssel (in Dutch)
- Photo's on Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/25093484@N04/sets/72157604354450411/
(Margreet Schrevel)