‘Do you talk of the future when the meres are drained? What rights to fish or graze the land do you maintain?’
‘The right of custom. We have always been here.’
‘You have a lease?’
‘A lease?’
‘A document.’
There is a silence, and a look of confusion passes across your face before you say, ‘I do not know, Jan, and do not wish to talk of it.’
It is as if a door has closed. Fearful that you will get up and leave, I do not pursue the subject but ask instead about the urns.
‘Have you ever seen such urns as have been turned up this winter?’
At that you laugh suddenly, as if I have brought an absurdity into the space.
‘They contain only dust.’
‘Whose, Eliza? Do you know who buried those urns?’
‘Not people of today, but those who came before.’
‘Do you know who?’
‘No, I do not; but it does not matter. They are here, listening; and the spirits also.’
There is no feeling of fear in you. You speak as if it is as obvious as a chair, this rug that we lie upon, or the fire before us.
You say you know about the God of the churches that the uplanders worship. Your people do not find God in a church, but consider that he is everywhere and in everything. This solid fact is simple, not open to a question.
‘It just is,’ you say.
The whole world, you tell me, is divided into three regions: the sky, the earth upon which we sit, and beneath us the watery underworld. No living person can pass the borders, but the spirits and the souls of the dead go freely from one place to another.
‘Do you see them, Eliza?’
‘Mingled together sometimes. A star that travels through the sky has a tail like a sheaf of wheat. We see it composed of spirits in flight.’
I wonder then whether you will begin to speak of your parents, but you do not, and I ask you no more. I summon up my patience. I remember to wait. There is time, I say to myself; I have a lifetime.
PART FOUR
Chapter 1
Nieuw Amsterdam.
August and September, 1664.
Wind from the south, very light.
Great heat throughout the days and nights.
High tide by the Stadt Huys at 5 o’clock in the afternoon.
From there on the Great Level, where we are sitting together by the fire, to here in my house on the Heere Gracht, is no distance, just a moment of reordering. The layers of my life lie stacked in my memory. Every day, and in my dreams, they are shuffled. One stratum slides over another, is laid down and brought up again, existing both then and now. Truly we are alive there in my cottage, where your skin is warm to my hand; and truly I am here, walking along Stadt Huys Laan, where a trickle of people soon collects into a crowd.
It is a bright August morning, the 27th of the month. The heat of the day is still at bay, the colours of the city full and brisk. I am wearing a muslin shirt, and no stockings on my legs. Any other clothes would be a folly when the air will soon get close and hot; nakedness would be true propriety. The women have left off their petticoats and stockings. Here is Hendrikje Beck, who lives a few doors down from me, her pale bosom quite uncovered, and here old Cornelia Vort, airing her red calves with a grunt and a smile. She is come with a slave child who wears nothing but loose pantaloons and a shirt with the sleeves cut off. Only the merchant Asser Levy is dressed correctly, as he always is, in black.
Hendrikje talks excitedly, waving a piece of paper.
‘Ah, Mijnheer Brunt,’ she says when I come up. ‘Here is news.’
I incline my head, but Hendrikje needs no permission from me to keep talking.
‘News from Lange Eylandt, brought this morning with the milk.’
Hendrikje has a farm on Lange Eylandt, though she lives here in the city, letting her son Dirk make the journey each morning across the Oost Rivier with the milk, butter and hard cheese. These she sells to householders all about, is done by mid-morning, and then gives herself over to gossip and her pipe.
Yesterday at first light four English ships sailed into Gravesend Bay by Breukelen, and rattled out their anchors to swing with the current. They are not merchant ships, but men-of-war, Hendrikje says, and pauses in her dramatic way. Dirk, up early with the cows, watched everything from a field by the shore.
Once they secured the warships, the sailors wasted no time in lowering a tender from each boat and then soldiers into them, helmets and pikes as well. The ships’ captains must have known that Gravesend Bay has a good firm jetty. The people of Gravesend came out of their houses, some with their guns, some to marvel as the crowd of soldiers grew with each passage of the tenders until they numbered three hundred.
The English soldiers were far too many to fight but they carried no weapons, just sheets of paper, printed in Dutch. These they handed out in the crowd and to every person standing on their stoop. Dirk took one.
‘And here it is,’ says Hendrikje, waving it above her head. ‘An offer of fair terms for those who make no resistance to the English, who declare the whole colony of Nieuw Nederland now to be theirs.’
As Hendrikje reads a shout goes up from the edge of the crowd.
‘Look, look, coming up towards Noten Eylandt.’
People scatter and run down to the wharfs. But I can see them from here, four dots out in the bay, bearing north. If they are warships, all we can do is wait. The city is undefended, the determination of Director-General Stuyvesant uncertain. People spill out from their houses and mill about outside. Noise and confusion fill the streets. Rumours rush from mouth to mouth. It is a hostile force; no, it is an expedition merely; Governor Winthrop of the Connecticut colony is on board the flagship, to what purpose it is unclear, but it cannot be a good one.
Instead of listening to gossip, I go home to my garret where I have a good view of all the waterways. I pick up the ships in the circle of my telescope. They are frigates, built for speed. None of our ships go out to meet them; no warning shots are fired. Little by little their shapes and colours resolve until they are clear and present to my eye. From the main masts, the gold, blue and red Royal Standard wrinkles and stretches against the shimmering sky. At mid-morning I walk down to get a closer look. The scene, as the ships heel over gently in the breeze, is magnificent and, to the children who run around in excitement, joyful. Leaning over the wall by Op’t Waeter two boys with a spyglass pick out the names carved on the ships’ prows: Lion, Guinea, Perseverance, Endeavour.
By the afternoon the little fleet is anchored by Noten Eylandt in plain sight of the Fort, though not so close as to provoke the few soldiers inside. With many others I walk over to the Prince Gracht by Schreijer’s Hoek for a good sight of them. Gerrit Philipse, a trader whose doors open onto the marketplace, comes out to join me.
‘Mijnheer Brunt; good afternoon,’ he says. ‘No doubt what the English are up to, I suppose?’
Hans Dreper, from the tavern on the Heere Gracht, strolls by, wiping his hands on his apron in a casual way as if the sight is just part of his day’s work. He lets his apron drop, pulls out one of the leaflets come in from Lange Eylandt, and joins in.
‘No need to fret yourself, Gerrit. Have a look at this. It means trade for all of us. Let them take over; time will tell whether they have come to stay.’
‘No, the Director-General and the Council must resist,’ Philipse says when he has glanced down the crumpled page of paper.
Dreper laughs, throaty with tobacco.
‘Resist? And where are these resisters, sir? Four frigates and not a single Company warship in sight. It is already too late. If they want to take the city, who is going to stop them? Besides, we will go on here in the same way; the English are already among us, and people from other nations, too.’
As we talk we see a cutter making towards the frigates. The flag of the West India Company ripples out from its mast. Pieter Stuyvesant is putting on a show of nonchalance. He
is sailing out to the English as if to offer them dinner. When the cutter arrives by the Guinea, a rope ladder unravels itself down the hull like a snake down a log. Two tiny figures scramble up, disappear, then, in a few minutes, clamber down again. The cutter tacks back to the jetty and the men walk into the Fort, where the main gate opens and closes, as if at the end of a play.
Night falls and the mosquito clouds come up. I return home and wait, with the rest of Nieuw Amsterdam. Lysbet asks to stay with me in my house. She is frightened about the English soldiers, she says, and does not wish to sleep in her house alone. I am not in a humour for talking, but give my assent before I take the stairs to my chamber on the first floor. I hear Lysbet opening the doors to the bed in the parlour, the creak of mattress against wood as she settles, and then silence fills the house.
Outside, the crickets have begun their metal trilling. I lie in wait for sleep, hoping that it will catch me softly as it passes. Scenes turn in my mind: Cornelius Vermuyden’s nasal voice and his plump hands round my drawings; Jacob Van Hooghten when first I saw him by the jetty at Ely; the Great Level, with its meres floating in the mist; the mud and chaos of the works; and the layers of the road I found, crisp and new as if they had been built yesterday.
In the morning knots of citizens gather at the street corners. Soon the taverns are full. Word spreads of troops gathering by the Breukelen ferry, their numbers swelled by English farmers from Lange Eylandt. At mid-morning, when the tide turns, a tender full of soldiers pushes off from the Guinea. Waves in the Nort Rivier slap up against its sides and send puffs of spray into the blue morning air.
Something is happening. Two men disembark, leaving the soldiers on board. It is plain from the way they walk with modesty and without weapons that these are messengers. They are here to hand over something, to tell us something, to open talks. But all this is a matter of form. They know that Nieuw Amsterdam, this little grid of two thousand souls, is open and unguarded. The English can step off their ships and take it.
In the open space in front of the Fort, Pieter Stuyvesant is waiting. The Director-General is surly in his greeting, and despite the impediment of his wooden leg, hurries the visitors into the courtyard. It is plain that he wants them out of sight, yet a group of citizens push in before the gates are closed.
I squeeze in also, and wait with the crowd under the windows of the old Director-General’s residence where the councilmen are assembled. For a few minutes nothing comes from the room inside; then I hear an English voice and Stuyvesant’s gruff reply, too soft to make out the words. There is a sudden gasp followed by a jumble of raised voices, all in Dutch.
‘We must see the terms, Director-General.’
‘The Council must decide as well as yourself.’
‘You do not have the authority to refuse without consulting us.’
‘Show us the paper, sir.’
‘Father, please do not tear it up.’
That is a voice I recognise; it is Balthazar Stuyvesant, the Director-General’s son, only seventeen years old. Pieter Stuyvesant, it seems, is losing his temper.
Then, unexpectedly, Stuyvesant reappears, banging down the stairs, followed by hurrying Council members. The two Englishmen press against the wall and stand aside for them, as if embarrassed by this display.
Stuyvesant turns first to the crowd and then to the councilmen behind him. He has always been a swaggerer, prosperous and unloved.
‘Are none of you with me?’ he shouts. ‘Am I to let this city – the whole colony, too – go without a fight?’
A woman in the front pulls her child close and puts her arms tight round him. People turn and shuffle, but no one speaks. Stuyvesant’s voice comes over to us again. He gobbles his words and they seem to choke him.
‘Where is your honour, your duty to the Company? This is Nieuw Amsterdam, your city.’
Stuyvesant is a stranger to honour and duty. Such words do not sit well in him. Besides, such cloudy ideas have never taken precedence here over trade and freedom of life. The Company has ignored Stuyvesant’s requests for men and ships. Now he is alone.
Stuyvesant spots the tobacco merchant Pieter Moritz and Clef von Kleist the furrier who stand close by me at the edge of the crowd.
‘Are you with me, gentlemen?’ he asks.
They incline their heads in a gesture that a man could take either way, but show no resolution to agree.
‘You, Jan Brunt; you who stay silent so often. What do you say?’
‘I observe that the case is lost.’
Stuyvesant turns away from me. I have not told him what he wanted to hear.
‘You all think I should yield,’ he says. ‘Yet I had rather be carried from here a dead man.’
Not a single citizen of Nieuw Amsterdam comes forward. The silence settles in the dizzy midday heat. Stuyvesant is deserted. No one will help him. I stay still as well. Nausea turns over in my stomach; a feeling of anxiety that arises not from a love of my homeland or a wish to defend the interests of the Company, but from the past rushing through me. Until this moment I have been my own chronicler, sifting and arranging my memories. I have carried my history safe and contained as a sprite in a box. Now England is near and must be acknowledged.
History does not pause for me or for any man, and certainly not for Pieter Stuyvesant, whose face is by turns red and pale. Stuyvesant scrapes his stump across the flagstones. Then he turns away from us to face the two Englishmen.
‘Sirs. Go back to your ships. I acknowledge you a too-powerful enemy. I will treat with you, though before I do I demand a letter from Colonel Nicolls signed in the proper form. Come to my house tomorrow; not here, but to my own house. It is just up the street from here at Great Bouwerie; any urchin can point you the way. Come without an escort. There is no need for it.’
And with that he bows and turns back into the old Director-General’s house. The little advantage he has wrestled takes the edge off his humiliation. Nonetheless, the end is ignominious. It will be many years before this scene is painted. When it comes to painting history, surrender doesn’t sell until it can find a mythic tinge. No painter in his own day can shift a picture of defeat.
And so it is that a few days later the articles of surrender are agreed in Stuyvesant’s house at Great Bouwerie. The terms are generous, and printed up for all to read. The Director-General, the Council, and our new masters assure us we will keep our property, liberty of conscience in religion and can trade as we do now.
To mark his victory, Colonel Nicolls wishes the handover to be according to form and for all to see. He demands a ceremony. The officers and soldiers will march out of Fort Amsterdam with drums beating, lighted flares and colours flying. The Dutch will surrender their arms, placing their drawn swords and pikes on the ground in front of them. Then the English will march in.
Stuyvesant signs, and after him the councilmen, one by one. The English sign, leaving off their titles as a mark of respect. It is ten in the morning, everything over in a few minutes. The English bow and take their leave. The Articles lie on Director-General Pieter Stuyvesant’s table.
Chapter 2
King’s Lynn.
Summer and autumn, 1651.
By early summer the prisoners have cleared the path of the new river as far as the site of the sluice and from there all the way to the sea. Warm weather sets in and the shallowest meres disappear. The rivers run low and sink beneath the surface of the fen. Flocks of finches sing in new grasslands, feasting on seeds. In the evenings the skies fill with the rasping cries of geese as they fly to their resting places on the marshes; black nets of starlings shrink and billow from tree to tree.
The prisoners now begin to dig all along the new cut, and to embank the old river on its far side. They labour through the hottest months, controlled by the soldiers. This is devilish work, damp in the marshlands, hot in the listless air. Men languish and die and we do not even know their names. Renswyck orders the prisoners to dig the graves of their dead beyond the camp stoc
kades. I watch the graves fill with water as they dig and see the Irish buried in mud, in unconsecrated ground. The rage of their countrymen grows with each death.
I determine to look out beyond the camps to the new river. I am proud of it, as a father is proud of a child that grows forthright and strong. The cut now runs straight across the landscape, certain and direct. The prisoners dig out the peat, sand and gravel and then line the new cut with clay.
Along the new and the old river, embankments tower up, solid and sturdy, majestic in the flat world they traverse. At their bases they are fully threescore foot wide, narrowing to the top, where a broad sandy path is to be created for the passage of horses and carts as well as those who walk. The washes between the new embankment and the old river are now coming into being, and are a fine sight some hundred and forty feet wide.
A summer storm blows in and rainwater collects in the bottom of the new cut. Standing in the wide trench I look down onto its unsteady surface and see my own trembling face. Inside my cheeks I see my skin ripple. Tiny rills turn over and over on the surface.
‘Jacob,’ I shout. ‘Van Hooghten, come.’
I have forgotten that Van Hooghten is nowhere near; it is Major Wade, out on patrol, who walks up and pushes his neck over the new cut.
‘What in heaven are you looking at, Mr Brunt? Why are you in the water?’
The scorn in his voice disperses my happiness.
‘Major Wade,’ I say, ‘you see the ripples here? They tell me that the water is moving. Now I know that the river will flow as I calculated, and take the water away from the land. From this moment, though we may not see it, the whole Level will begin to dry.’
But Major Wade has no interest in the works. His head disappears and he is gone without another word. For a few moments I stand and watch the water falling over itself in the direction of the sea. Elation spreads through me. All my work has led up to this, the moment when my calculations come to life and nature obeys me. Nothing can hold back my joy. Unobserved in the bottom of the cut, I raise my arms to the sky.
The Great Level Page 14