Then I see you. Rain is falling and the women have covered themselves as best they can. But I do not need to see your face, though I long for it. It is by your stride that I know you, strong and forceful. You seem to look straight ahead, and I wonder if you can see me through the cloth. No one calls your name.
I have to reach you, and lunge forward, pushing aside two men in front of me as if they were children, oblivious to any harm I might do. My only thought is to touch you, to pull you away, to stop you taking another step towards the ship.
I never get near you. A pikeman bars my way, and he lowers his pike against my chest. I feel the tip of it through my cloak.
‘Eliza,’ I shout, and again, ‘Eliza.’
You do not turn your head and soon you are gone down the road. The pikemen do not move until all the prisoners have filed past, and the gaol-house doors have swung shut. Then they close up to a phalanx, half facing the crowd, half the departing prisoners, and so keep us at bay as they fill the narrow street.
I can hear myself howling now. There is no way down except this one, and though I try to dodge round the pikemen, I cannot get past, and only reach the quay in time to see you marched up the gangplank of one of the ships, your head finally bowed now as if you do not want to look about you.
It is your lowered head, you who always stood so straight, that fills me with sorrow. I push up as close as I can and shout your name again. It joins with the other names on the air in one desperate woven cry: Eliza, Jonah, Richard, Mary, John.
The Irish and Scottish runaways have no one to shout for them. Loss and dispossession carried them here and now push them further round the world. They have no voice to turn to, no mothers or brothers here to leave. In the new place that emptiness will ring loud and turn to rage.
I shout again. Again you do not pause or lift your head. Low murmurs and cries mingle now with the shouts. You walk into the ship and others follow after you till all are swallowed up. The gangplank is withdrawn, the ship closed. Sailors stand on the quay waiting for the word to slip ropes from the bollards and jump aboard.
I cannot stay there with the grey wooden wall of the hull between us, though all around me mothers and sisters, fathers and sons are still calling out the names of the lost. Scarcely knowing what I am doing I walk along to the end of the quay and look down. The water is high and on the turn. As it falls the tide will carry you away; by sundown you will be out at sea.
I wait, with the tumult behind me, until the ships come down. Only sailors stand on the decks. There is not a single prisoner to be seen and no sound comes except the creak of the spars and the gurgle of the water as it is parted by the prow. You are gone.
With the last of my strength I ride back to my cottage and sit out the day by the fire. I stare at the flames, my mind imprisoned. For hours I stay there, immobile. The light goes down and darkness comes in. Still I sit on, sunk into the last of the embers.
Then the fire is out and I stand up. I am restless suddenly, and have to move, leave the room, get out. The rain has stopped and outside the air is damp and salty. I light my lantern, find my coracle by the water, and push off from the bank. For a while I drift, but then strike out across the mere, my way lit by the lantern on its willow pole. Yellow light falls across the water.
The watchers are nowhere to be seen, their fires all gone. I push out into the expanse, until I can see nothing in the trembling light but the surface of the water and the moon streaks in the sky above. The mere murmurs and laps against the coracle; but otherwise there is a silence that lies over the water. The night is warm, and a mist is gathering. This is how the earth might be if the flood of the Bible should come again, and end the world.
I let my coracle go and wonder where upon the sea you are now, and then, not knowing, give up that also. I want to stay like this for ever, without thought, in this nut-shaped craft that tilts and rights itself. Minutes, or hours, pass, with the moonlight coming and going through the clouds and everything glowing moonlit except for the lantern’s yellow ring of light.
Then, quite suddenly, I feel the coracle bump and sway. Looking down over the side I see, in the shafts of illumination, a great mass, twisting, slipping and knotting together. Hundreds of eyes and tails catch the lamplight: black and silver eels. Over and over they turn, tails over heads, sides over sides. They move in a jellied ball, slimy and lithe. I balance myself in the coracle and let the eels swarm under and around it, feeling with them that great pulse of life. Leaning over I put my hand down to them. The mass parts, under, over and round, and carries on. The eels swim out with the tide and so obey the mysterious laws that nature has laid down for them. I thrill with it too. I watch the glinting ball as it moves on through the mere and know it is time for me to go also, to begin my own journey to the sea.
Chapter 5
Amsterdam, Holland.
Spring and summer, 1652.
This intention, to leave the Great Level and this whole country also, I explain to Van Hooghten as soon as we have successfully repaired the embankment and the flood waters begin to recede. He tries to dissuade me.
‘The work here is not yet finished, Jan. Are you not contracted for the term?’
‘Contracted, Jacob, yes; but with no term given. Therefore I am free to leave whenever I wish, and now choose to do so.’
‘There is still so much to do, and this will be seen as a defeat.’
‘I care not how it is seen except by you. I find simply that it is time to go elsewhere.’
To abandon the Great Level with our work incomplete is a blow to Van Hooghten’s pride. In his friendship for me he feels my loss as his own; but I do not feel the shame that he fears to voice on my behalf. A change has been made in my mind, as if the flood has swept across it also, and left a new landscape.
As to you, Eliza, you are gone. In the months of days and nights since you walked onto the ship I have pushed the picture of you out of my waking mind, certain that if I allowed it to return too often I would be unable to carry on. You are not dead; of that I am certain. I do not wish to think further, and have pushed an accounting of those days beyond my sight. To look at the time of the flood with open eyes I must be far away from here.
Van Hooghten must have a thought of you still in his mind.
‘If it is to do with the girl, Jan, I am sure she lives. Though it is so hard for you now, you will live, too.’
‘I thank you, Jacob; and for all your kindnesses to me.’
Van Hooghten hesitates, seeming overcome.
‘You are a strange man, Jan; I would have said too hidden for my taste, and yet I feel a fondness for you.’
I bow to him. I cannot talk of you because it will bring the deadness in me up to the surface. I cannot talk of myself, because I am disjointed. So I must talk of other matters. I am happy to leave Jacob in friendship and in a way that will allow him to take credit for his work and mine too. My work here I know to be good; but my reputation, set in the balance with all that I have seen, weighs very light with me.
When I first came to the Great Level the fire of ambition burned high inside me. Van Hooghten and I, late into the night, would talk of the renown surely due to us. Jacob wished to have his maps in the collections of noblemen and city councils, in the libraries of great estates. He wanted them printed, colour-washed and signed with his name. He wished that one might be called Van Hooghten’s Map, and show a scatter of new Pacific islands. Then, warming to the theme, he declared that as his eminence rose he might move from paper to rock. If he mapped a new-discovered place, and so brought it into being for those who claimed it, it might be named for him by a grateful Estates General. He would choose its name: Van Hooghtensland or Jacobsland.
In late-night, wine-washed seriousness, I, too, wished for some such memorial. I did not like the idea of time closing over me without a trace. New lands, or lands newly improved, might bear my name. Written on a map, copied, printed and sounded out, it would last for ever.
Now all this de
sire is gone. So much have I seen come up from under the ground that is unknown, so much do I know is lost, that I wish for no memorial to my vanity. Who, in future times, would have a knowledge of the builder of a Bruntsweg, or a Bruntslandt, as it might be? No one, no more than anyone remembers or can name the Roman engineer who built a road here long ago. So what would my name become? A word on the wind, nothing more. Nothing lasts for long, neither improvement nor destruction, only the power of nature which, by fire or flood, can build or break at will.
At the end of March I write to Cornelius Vermuyden with my resignation. Hearing nothing in reply, I buy a passage in a lighter from King’s Lynn to the Port of London with the intention of visiting him. Jacob comes to the quayside to bid me goodbye. As I stand at the foot of the gangplank, he hurries up and embraces me. He holds me very close.
‘Goodbye, Jan.’
He puts his two hands up to my cheeks. We look at one another and I see that tears stand in his eyes, which prompts me to wipe them away, a gesture that makes them fall the more. I feel a surge of tenderness for him, a return of feeling that gives me hope.
‘Goodbye, Jacob. Let us hope that fate brings us together again one day.’
I stand at the stern of the ship as it puts off into the current and breathe the salty mud and the dense vegetable smell of the marshes, then raise my eyes to the expanse of the Great Level as the current takes the ship. Beyond the marshes the Level stretches away to the horizon where a silver band runs all the way round and gives the land a border of light.
I look up Cornelius Vermuyden at his home when I arrive in London; but I do not encounter him. Mijnheer Vermuyden, his wife tells me, is out of town. He is much engaged in business on behalf of the Earl of Bedford. Vermuyden is a man of the world. He has left a letter for me, and my wages, exactly computed until the last day of March.
The letter contains no rebuke, rather a simple distance that is a farewell. Vermuyden thanks me for my work and makes no mention of the flood. He has closed the letter with his seal, upon which his motto is clearly picked out. Niet Zonder Arbyt. The words curl prettily through the blood-red wax. Niet Zonder Arbyt: Nothing Without Work. I think of the prisoners. I see them in lines on the Great Level, tied one to another, grey and dusty. They thrust their spades in the ground to lift the damp earth as a million prisoners and slaves will do in years to come and millions have done in centuries gone by. For the prisoners who labour on the Great Level these words are a lie. The work they do gives them nothing. Imprisonment and death are their horizon; freedom will be won by a very few.
When I walk out of my lodgings I find London still a haunted city. The murmur of speech and laughter that rises between buildings, that lovely human music that only cities make, is still absent. Instead I hear the sounds of commerce and unease. People crowd the narrow passages: black-clad merchants with beaver hats; women, young and old, in shawls and cloaks. Soldiers walk among the citizens. War is on the march, the great beast waking up for slaughter. Down by the river the wharfs and docks are workshops of destruction. I am careful and silent, the Dutch being unwelcome in this part of town. Soon it is apparent that I cannot stay. My height makes me conspicuous, and though I speak their language, people notice my clogged Dutch sounds and ask me where I am from. Hostility forms the question, and I fear to reply.
I am not welcome in England, and after two weeks I leave without regret. I take a ship for Holland, hoping to feel at home in my own country, but Rotterdam does not bring me the comfort of return. The warm red bricks and gable ends do not soothe me as I expected; and in the cool spaces of the Laurenskerk I feel neither peace nor holiness. I do not travel on to Tholen and my village of Sint-Maartensdijk. I know that my parents will welcome me there, but that they will feel too the failure of my duty to Mijnheer Vermuyden and the whole family. So I write to assure them of my health and my desire to continue in my profession. Having a good deal of ready money by me I send them some as proof of my competence and good intention. Word will reach them soon enough that I have left Vermuyden’s employment.
I move about, going from Rotterdam to The Hague, and The Hague to Leiden. There I think of enrolling once more in the university, until I come to understand that I do not wish to sit and learn from a master, but to learn something else and in some other way. I go on to Amsterdam, where I stay for the most part in a room I take on the first floor of a widow’s house near Dam Square. I venture out to taverns to eat simply and preserve my savings, and otherwise walk off the daylight hours round and round the half-circles of the canals until I am tired enough to sleep. I preserve an air of purpose, but indeed I have none.
One day in summer I find myself by the office of the Dutch West India Company, and fall into conversation there with an engineer lately returned from the New World. A man in funds, he tells me, will always be welcome in Nieuw Amsterdam, the capital city of Nieuw Nederland, the place being depleted of active citizens. An engineer can pick up work there from the colonists, both Dutch and English, who wish to improve their land. When I ask if the passage is a dangerous one, he tells me he has made the voyage many times. No ships of the West India Company went down in the whole of last year, he says. Boredom and sea sickness may be your companions, but you will soon forget the depth of the sea beneath.
In the next few days I turn this suggestion over. I am a man who has untied himself from his old life and is free to find another. My family will make no objection, the West India Company being well known and respectable. Nieuw Amsterdam is a place of near two thousand people and I am sure to find work where drainage is proposed. There is nothing to keep me here, and, more than that, I am ready to leave.
I write to my father and describe my departure as an opportunity to advance again in my profession. Two weeks later I stow my trunk and box under the narrow bed of my cabin on the Dolphijn, a sturdy Company ship bound for Nieuw Nederland. I welcome the change and the new life to come.
As the Dolphijn sets sail from Amsterdam to Texel I stand on the foredeck and look back at the Zuider Zee as it streams away under the hull. After the sand dunes of Texel fall over the horizon and the Dolphijn steers out towards the English coast, I begin each day looking out to sea, both forward and back. Once past the island of Alderney the open sea is all around us and the ship shrinks to a dot on the water, a tiny vessel on the wide expanse.
I follow the Dolphijn’s progress on the map and in the log which the captain writes and shows me. He is an unexcitable man, accustomed to this journey. Day after day the Dolphijn rides over the grey sea, groaning with each rise over the swell and exhaling as she comes down. The sun and the stars keep us to our course. The captain navigates calmly, fortified by the forty crossings he has made in his ten years of Company employ.
For many days the past and the future seem suspended. My small cabin is situated just under the main deck, a few feet above the waterline. At night I lie knees up in my short cupboard bed. I listen to the Dolphijn’s hull stretch and creak as it parts the ocean. On rougher nights the water froths past my tiny window, black and green. At first the sea invades me. Night after night I dream I am swimming through it and wake into terror, being uncertain in the instant where I am, if not drowned. Then I remember that I took passage from Amsterdam and that I am afloat.
When I stand on the deck I expect to hear your voice in the hum of the wind on the sails, or that I will see you somewhere far off in my mind, and you will speak to me. But for weeks you are not there, either near or far. When I find you in my memory, halfway across the ocean, you do not come towards me. I know that I must decide, since love itself is a decision. How will I be with you, how confront or accept you?
The choice, out on the ocean, is a simple one: to turn away from you or to take you with me. Looking out at the grey sea, where no man I know regards me or even knows that I am here, I understand that the choice is mine alone, the consequence mine alone also. The days gone by still stand before me, all of them, and all that happened on the Great Level also, but I d
o not have to see or regard them. I can push through them as easily as the prow of the Dolphijn parts the waters of the sea. I can forget. I can rub you out, in the way a child rubs chalk off a slate, and I can begin again. No one I meet in Nieuw Amsterdam will ever know about you or the flood. More than that, I can deny you, and the whole Great Level, to the world and to myself.
It is said that the contrary of to forget is to remember, yet that axiom sounds now like something learned at school, a verse recited or a catechism, just a story in language. The contrary of to forget, I see now, is to be a part of, to live with and to share. I watch the ocean disappear behind me and know that a life without a past is a thin one, a life starved of voices and nourishment. I will not forget; I will let memory live, and you, Eliza, live within in it and so, too, within me. You will be a part of me, sharing my new life and my old, and I will stay true to myself and to you.
Two months later I arrive in Nieuw Amsterdam and the colony of Nieuw Nederland, and here I remain, and make my peace with time. On the deck of the Dolphijn I decide to remember, and to walk forwards with the past beside me as I have not done before. When we made the Great Level we tried to draw the future on the map and then press it into the earth. We called it a new land. Yet it never truly could come into being without a reckoning with the layers beneath.
PART FIVE
Chapter 1
New Amsterdam.
Blossom’s Tavern on Beaver Street by the Broad Way.
The 20th day of July, 1664.
I have sat down many times in the evenings since I came to this town to reply to Mr Lee and his proposal. So often I have written out at the top of the paper in an orderly and correct fashion, Mr Charles Lee, Grace Dieu Plantation, The James River, Virginia Colony – and each time I have abandoned the task. After that first flourish my pen falters in its comfortable scrape and rasp across the paper long before I sign my name, Eliza.
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