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A belated answer: as the translation below shows,
these were English miles. The old pre-metric Dutch mile was also called 'hour',
a distance of about 5 km; a race over 10 pre-metric Dutch miles would have
been about 50 km. After 1820 the Dutch mile was 1000 Dutch ells, the mile
and the ell were names for the kilometre and the metre; the old names slowly
withered away, until now only the pound for 500 g and the ounce for 100 g
survive. I would have had no objections whatsoever if they had organized a run
of let's say 4 or 5 pre-metric Dutch miles. The English mile has never been a
standard unit of distance in The Netherlands and it still competes
with the kilometre, so I condemn what happened here, the old Dutch mile
which was once one of our own measuring units would now have been
remembered and honoured that afternoon.
A replica of a 17th century sailing ship was built
to one of our own old inches, the Amsterdam one, somewhat more than the English
inch. I was glad that they had not used the latter for this project. The
Amsterdam inch is otherwise dead, before metrication it and the Amsterdam foot
were the standard units in ship building. The Amsterdam foot was 11 inches,
which is awkward to say the least. Then British units took over in ship
building during the 19th century, and the last change was to metric in the
second half of the last century.
Han
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