High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Captain is a 1967 novel by Dutch writer Jan de Hartog. Ocean-going tugboats, a highly specialized field of nautical enterprise in which the Dutch have always taken the lead, were the subject of De Hartog's book, "Hollands Glorie" ("Holland's Glory", translated to English as "Captain Jan") - in which the highly skilled tugboat sailors were depicted (without saying it explicitly) as modern successors to the bold navigators of the Dutch Golden Age. As it happened, 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.