De Vries

De Vries records neither a trade nor a father. It is de Fries, the Frisian, one of that small class of surnames that fixes a man by the province he came out of. Inside Friesland the word is useless, because everyone there is a Frisian. It only works in other people's mouths, in Holland, where the most efficient thing to say about a newcomer was which province had sent him.

Friesland lay along the northern coast and kept its own language, its own habit of running its own affairs, and its own admiralty and fleet. Enough of its people moved south into Holland that a whole region's worth of incomers ended up filed under one word, which stuck to their descendants long after any of them could point at the farm. Dutch popular belief makes De Vries the commonest surname in the country. It is not: De Jong and Jansen both carry more.

Hans Vredeman de Vries (1527 to about 1607) was born in Leeuwarden and raised in Friesland, and left early: Amsterdam and Kampen in 1546, then Mechelen in 1549. He designed ornaments for the parades of Charles V and Philip II, and reading Vitruvius and Serlio in the translation made by his own teacher Pieter Coecke van Aelst, became an internationally known specialist in perspective, publishing on ornament in 1565, garden design in 1583 and perspective in 1604.

Antwerp made him city architect and fortification engineer until he fled the Spanish occupation under Alessandro Farnese after 1585, a Protestant given two years to get out. He went to Frankfurt, then Wolfenbüttel, laying out a fortification and a new town plan for the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, then on to Hamburg, Danzig, Prague and Amsterdam. Nobody recorded where or when he died. The Great Bed of Ware is his.

Adriaen de Vries (about 1556 to 1626) was born in The Hague to a patrician family, the name by then settled in Holland and detached from any farm in the north. His training is obscure, but by 1581 he is documented in Giambologna's studio in Florence, and in 1586 was called to Milan to assist the ailing Leone Leoni's son Pompeo, taking over one of the largest bronze-casting studios in Italy.

He worked in Prague from 1589 to 1594 on busts and reliefs for Rudolf II, and cast the Mercury and the Hercules and the Hydra fountains for Augsburg in 1596. Rudolf made him chamber sculptor in 1601 and he died in Prague in 1626. When Swedish troops sacked the city at the end of the Thirty Years War they carried off Wallenstein's garden statues, and fourteen of those bronzes make Museum De Vries at Drottningholm the largest collection of his work anywhere.

Maarten Gerritszoon Vries, born at Harlingen on 28 February 1589, shipped out for the Hoorn chamber of the East India Company as an ordinary sailor aboard 't Wapen van Hoorn, reaching Batavia on 22 July 1622. By 1638 he was surveying on Dutch Formosa, where he drew a map of the island, signing it Marten Gerritsz Fries, and wrote sailing directions for the run from Batavia to Japan.

Antonio van Diemen sent him north in the fluyt Castricum to look for the gold and silver lands of Spanish rumour. A storm on 19 May 1643 near Hachijojima separated him from the yacht Breskens off an island the crews named Ongeluckich on the spot, and after a week off Honshu firing a gun at intervals, trading smoked salmon for arak and tobacco with fishermen who came aboard in secret, he went on alone. He charted Hokkaido and Urup, passed between Iturup and Urup through the strait that carries his name, and put the first European foot on Sakhalin, where he met the Ainu.

David Pieterszoon de Vries (about 1593 to 1655) was a navigator out of Hoorn who had been most places before America: whaling at Jan Mayen in 1617, Newfoundland in 1620, Canada in 1624 under the French flag. In 1629 he was one of the New Amsterdam men who planted Swanendael at Lewes in Delaware; when he visited in 1632 the settlers had been killed and the fort burned.

He came back twice, founding a settlement on Staten Island in 1639 and Vriessendael north of Pavonia in 1640. He worked as a go-between keeping peace between the Lenape and Director-General William Kieft, tried to stop the Pavonia Massacre and the Massacre at Corlears Hook, and afterwards brought the sachems Oratam and Penhawitz to a truce that Kieft's policies broke. He was a leading figure in the rising that got Kieft recalled for trial, and in October 1643 he left Vriessendael for Holland, sick of how the New Netherlanders treated the people whose country it was.

Tjerk Hiddes was born on 6 August 1622 in the Frisian village of Sexbierum, son of a poor farmer named Hidde Siurds and his wife Swab Tjeirckdochter, and went to sea at twelve. He settled at Harlingen, Frisia's main port, and had made master by 1654. In 1658 he had the troop transport Judith in the fleet sent against Sweden to relieve Copenhagen; at the Battle of the Sound his sea soldiers boarded and took three Swedish vessels, and the Admiralty of Frisia, one of five autonomous Dutch admiralties, made him an extraordinary captain for it.

At Lowestoft in 1665 he worked d'Elff Steden out of a tangle of Dutch ships burning from an English fireship. The battle was a defeat, and men who had shown nerve in it were made heroes by a public that had watched incompetence; his written report was scathing about his own dead commander Van Obdam. With Lieutenant-Admiral Auke Stellingwerf killed as well, the Frisian board appointed him Lieutenant-Admiral of Frisia on 29 June 1665, two ranks in one jump, and the province built twenty-eight new vessels under his eye.

By the Four Days Battle of 1666 he was calling himself De Vries, the Frisian. That is the surname's whole story in one man: a farmer's son at flag rank took as his family name the word other people used for his province. He went in as second to the Zeeland Lieutenant-Admiral Cornelis Evertsen the Elder, took the squadron over when Evertsen was killed on the first day, kept the Groot Frisia as his flagship and fought hard on the fourth, contributing strongly to a Dutch victory.

Six weeks later at the St James's Day Battle his squadron failed to reform its line after a calm and was mauled by Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Tjerk had an arm and a leg shot off and went on trying to rally his ships; the crippled vessel drifted away and was not found until Cornelis Tromp's rear came up the next day. He was got ashore at Flushing and died of his wounds on 6 August 1666, his birthday.

He lies in the Grote Kerk at Harlingen, the memorial since destroyed. His son Tjerk Hiddes the Younger was born four days after the death, was promised a captain's commission to honour the father, and did become one. Four Dutch navy ships have carried the name. The French, who could not get their mouths round it, had called him Kiërkides.

Hidde Sjoerds de Vries was born at Sexbierum on 22 December 1645 and, like his uncle Tjerk Hiddes, made his career with the Frisian Admiralty. Captain of an Admiralty ship in 1683 and promoted rear admiral on 22 March 1692, he commanded that year at Barfleur and La Hougue and off Dunkirk, and in 1694 had the Dutch fleet under him from the Prins Friso. On 29 June, fighting the Dutch-speaking Frenchman Jan Baert, Jean Bart to the French, he took a pistol ball in the chest, and died off Dunkirk on 1 July 1694.

The name kept the geography it was made of. In 2007 there were 71,099 De Vries bearers in the Netherlands, and the densest ground was no city but Kollumerland en Nieuwkruisland, where 3.62 per cent carried it. Some of it went home to the language that made it necessary: Theun de Vries (1907 to 2005) is entered in the record simply as a Frisian writer, and Nyk de Vries, born 1971, is a guitarist, writer and poet who also works in Frisian.