Captain Jan

First edition

Captain Jan (Dutch: Hollands Glorie) is a 1940 novel by Dutch writer Jan de Hartog. The book depicts highly skilled tugboat sailors as modern successors to the bold navigators of the Dutch Golden Age.

The book was published in 1940, just ten days before Nazi Germany invaded and swiftly occupied the hitherto-neutral Netherlands. Under these circumstances, a book with such a name and theme became an immediate best seller in occupied Holland, a potent symbol of Dutch opposition to the occupation.

In fact, the book's plot as such had nothing political, anti-German or anti-Nazi, the sailor protagonists' conflict being mainly with nature and with the paternalistic and authoritarian Kwel Shipping Company which demands feudal-like fealty from its employees. This did not stop the Gestapo from showing a lively interest in its author, forcing him to go into hiding and then escape to England in 1943.