The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘Will we see them?’ Willem asked, peering always toward the horizon, as if on this vast sea three tiny ships might accidentally converge.

  ‘Not likely. They may have rushed ahead. They may have lagged. We’ll see them at St. Helena.’

  ‘You think they’re afloat?’

  ‘I’m sure of it.’

  On the long reach, it became apparent that the Van Doorn brothers were heading for Holland with conflicting motivations. For Karel, who had been born there and who vaguely remembered both his mother’s home in Haarlem and his father’s in Amsterdam, it was merely a return to the seats of power where he must establish himself with the Lords XVII against the day when he would become governor-general of Java. For Willem it was quite another matter. He was afraid of Holland, not because he knew anything adverse about it but because he loved the East so much. Those days with the little brown man, wandering through the various quarters and meeting traders from all nations, had enchanted him, while the languorous trip to Formosa had awakened him to the magnitude of his birthland. He was not old enough to comprehend the limitations he suffered as a Java-born Dutchman, and he simply refused to believe that a man born in Amsterdam was inherently superior to one born in Batavia.

  When he questioned Karel about this, his austere brother frowned. ‘The Java Dutch are mainly scum. Would you even dream of marrying a girl from one of those families?’ This perplexed young Willem, for not only had he dreamed of marrying the Van der Kamp girl; he had also dreamed quite actively of marrying the little Balinese who served as his mother’s maid.

  Next morning, for reasons he could not have explained, he rummaged in his gear, found Jack’s ivory bracelet still attached to its silver chain, and defiantly placed it about his neck. When Karel saw this he said sharply, ‘Take that silly thing off. You look like a Javanese.’

  ‘That’s how I want to look,’ and from then on, the bracelet was rarely absent.

  In the middle of March unfavorable winds were encountered, and although the crew remained remarkably healthy, the captain grew apprehensive about his water supply and announced that he was planning to stop at the Cape of Good Hope, where fresh water would surely be available and bartering cattle with the little brown people a possibility.

  During the reddish sunset Willem remained aloft, savoring his first glimpse of the famous rock, and even after the sun had sunk beneath the cold Atlantic, the curve of earth allowed its rays to illuminate the great flat area, and he noticed that the sailors relaxed, for they considered the Cape the halfway point, not in days, for the run to Amsterdam would be long and tedious, but in spirit, for the alien quality of the spice lands was behind them. The Indian Ocean had been traversed; the homeward passage through the Atlantic lay ahead.

  At dawn on March 25 Willem did not see Table Mountain, for as so often happened in these cold waters a wind had risen, bringing clouds but no rain; the flat summit was obliterated. But then the wind abated, and toward noon the lookout shouted, ‘Ship ahoy!’ and there, nestled at the far end of the bay, rode a little merchant vessel. The chief mate and a few oarsmen were dispatched in the skiff to ascertain who she was, but as they drew away, the weather closed in, a stout wind from the southeast forcing the Haerlem’s captain to make sail close-hauled. The other ship became lost to sight as the wind freshened to storm level, pushing the Haerlem toward shore.

  At this point it was still in no real danger, but now the wind veered crazily, so that sails which had been trimmed to hold the ship offshore became instruments for driving it on. ‘Cut the spritsail!’ shouted the captain, but it was too late; fresh blasts caught the sails and drove the little ship hard aground. When the captain tried to swing it around, hoping that other gusts would blow it loose, rolling seas came thundering in. Timbers shivered. Masts creaked. Sails that had been cut loose whipped through the air. And when night fell, the Haerlem was hopelessly wrecked and would probably break apart before morning.

  ‘Anchor chain has parted!’ a watchman’s alarm pierced the night, and the Van Doorn brothers expected the ship to go down. The captain ordered four cannon shots to be fired, trusting that this would alert the other ship to the peril, but the message was not understood. ‘By the grace of God, our only Helper,’ as the captain wrote in his log, ‘the power of the waves abated. We were not ripped apart. And when dawn broke we saw that while our position was hopeless, we were close enough to shore to save those aboard.’ In the misty morning the skiff returned to report that the ship in the roads was the Olifant, so a longboat was lowered and made for the beach, but the Haerlem’s men watched with dismay as the boat foundered in the pounding surf, drowning one sailor who could not swim.

  ‘We must get ashore!’ Karel shouted to the captain.

  ‘There is no way,’ the captain replied, but Karel judged that if he could lash two barrels together, they would float him ashore, and it was on this rig that Karel and Willem van Doorn landed at the Cape of Good Hope.

  The following days were a nightmare. Led by the Van Doorns, the crew of the Olifant tried three different times to reach the sinking Haerlem, but always the surf pounded their longboat so that they had to retreat. Fortunately, two English merchantmen sailed into the bay, homeward bound from Java, and with daring seamanship a boat from the Haerlem succeeded in reaching them with a request for help. To the surprise of the Dutch, the English crew agreed to aid in transferring the smaller items of cargo to the Olifant, and for some days they labored at this as if they were in the pay of Amsterdam: ‘… a hundred sockels of mace, eighty-two barrels of raw camphor, eighty bales of choice cinnamon, not wet, and five large boxes of Japanese coats decorated in gold and silver.’ And when this arduous work was completed the English captains offered to carry forty of the Haerlem’s crew to St. Helena, where they could join the main Dutch fleet on its way to Amsterdam.

  But before these good Samaritans sailed, Willem was given a task which he would often recall. ‘Fetch all letters from the post-office stones,’ he was told, and when he started to ask what a post-office stone was, an officer shouted, ‘Get on with it.’

  Ashore, he asked some older hands what he must do, and they explained the system and designated two young sailors to protect him as he roamed the beach, even to the foot of Table Mountain, looking for any large stones which might have been engraved by passing crews. Some covered nothing, but most had under them small packets of letters, wrapped in various ways for protection, and when he held these frail documents in his hands he tried to visualize the cities to which the letters were directed: Delft, Lisbon, Bristol, Nagasaki. The names were like echoes of all he had heard on the voyage so far, the sacred names of sailors’ memories. One letter, addressed to a woman in Madrid, had lain beneath its rock for seven years, and as he stared at it he wondered if she would still be living when it now arrived, or if she would remember the man who had posted it.

  He brought nineteen letters back to the English ships, but six were addressed to Java and other islands to the east. Gravely, as part of the ritual of the sea, the English mate accepted responsibility for seeing that the thirteen European letters were forwarded, after which Willem took the others ashore for reposting under a conspicuous rock.

  When the English ships departed, the Dutch had time to survey their situation, and it was forbidding. It was impossible in this remote spot to make the gear that would have been required to refloat the Haerlem. It had to be abandoned. But its lower holds still contained such enormous wealth that neither the Olifant, nor the Schiedam if put into Table Bay, could possibly convey it all back to Holland. A temporary fortress of some kind must be built ashore; the remaining cargo must then be taken to it; and a cadre of men must remain behind to protect the treasure while the bulk of the crew sailed home in the Olifant.

  Almost immediately the work began, and the foundations for the fort had scarcely been outlined when the work party heard cannon fire, and into the roadstead came the Schiedam. Though marred by the disastrous grounding of the Haerlem, it was a jo
yous reunion of the three crews, and soon so many sailors were working to construct the fort that the captain had to say, ‘Clear most of them out. They’re getting in each other’s way.’

  Now came the exhausting task of rafting the bulk of the Haerlem’s cargo ashore, and with speed lest the battered ship break apart. The Van Doorns worked on deck, supervising the winches that hauled precious bales aloft, and when three sailors were sent to the lower hold to shovel loose peppercorns into bags, Karel directed: ‘You’re not to leave a single bag down there. It’s precious.’

  But soon the men hurried aloft, gasping, and when Karel demanded why they had left their posts, they pointed below and said, ‘Impossible.’

  But since rich stores lay beneath the deck, Karel leaped down into the hold; the sailors had been right. Salt water, leaking into the pepper, had begun a fermentation so powerful that a deadly gas was being released. Choking and clutching at his throat, Karel tried to get back on deck, but his feet slipped on the oily peppercorns, and he fell, knocking his head against a bulkhead.

  He would have been asphyxiated had not young Willem seen him fall. Without hesitating, the boy leaped down, shouting for help as he went. Ropes were lowered and the limp body of Karel was hoisted aloft. Willem, with a handkerchief pressed over his face, climbed out, his eyes smarting and his lungs aflame.

  For some time he stood by the railing, trying to vomit, but poor Karel lay stretched on the deck, quite inert. Finally the brothers recovered, and Willem would never forget how Karel reacted. It was as if he had been personally assaulted by the pepper, his honor impugned, for with a burst of vitality, his eyes still watering, he went back to the rim of the hold, still not satisfied that the exudations were too powerful to be sustained by any sailor.

  ‘Tear off the other hatches!’ he bellowed, and when this accomplished little, for the hold was large and the cargo tightly packed, he ordered holes to be chopped in the upper deck. This, too, proved useless, so in a towering rage he shouted for a ship’s cannon to be moved into position so that it could shoot down into the hold and out the sides of the ship.

  ‘Fire!’ he shouted, and a cannonball ripped away five feet of the hull, allowing fresh air into the hold.

  ‘Swing the cannon!’ he cried, and from a different angle another shot blasted a tremendous hole in the other side. Three more shots were fired, enabling the gas to escape, and when the hold was cleared, Karel was first down to salvage the precious pepper.

  By April 1 the situation was under control. Work was progressing on the mud-walled fort, and a well sixty feet deep dug by the enterprising men was producing fresh water. Transfer of the cargo from the wreck was proceeding so smoothly that the leaders of the three ships could gather on the Schiedam to formulate final plans.

  The captain gave it as his opinion that the Olifant and Schiedam should sail for the fatherland, taking with them as many of the Haerlem’s crew as possible. He asked what this number would be, but Karel interrupted by saying that the major consideration must be the salvage of the cargo, and that before any sailors were sent home, a determination must be made as to how many would be needed to man the fort until the next homebound fleet arrived. The captain acceded to this sensible recommendation, and the council decided that sixty or seventy men, if well led by a capable officer, could protect the pepper and cinnamon during that time.

  The council members looked at Karel, hoping that he would volunteer to stay behind and guard the cargo, but he realized that his opportunity waited in Holland, and he did not propose endangering it by a protracted absence at the Cape. So it was agreed that two tough marine officers would remain at the fort with a cadre of sixty while the Van Doorn brothers would hurry to St. Helena, where they would catch a fast trading vessel direct to Amsterdam. But on April 12, when the Olifant and Schiedam departed, young Willem van Doorn stayed onshore: ‘I feel I’m needed at the fort.’ It was the kind of self-confident statement old fighting men could respect, so they concurred. ‘Hold the fort!’ they called as the two little ships sailed off, leaving history’s first group of Dutchmen alone at the Cape.

  Only twelve days later, at the end of April when the finest days of autumn came, Willem surprised the fort commanders by announcing, ‘I’d like to be the first to climb Table Mountain,’ and when permission was granted he enlisted two friends. They marched briskly toward the glowing mountain, some dozen miles to the south, and when they stood at its foot Willem cried, ‘We don’t stop till we reach up there.’

  It was a punishing climb, and often the young men came to precipices which they had to circumvent, but at last they reached that broad, gracious plateau which forms the crest of this mountain, and from it they could survey their empire.

  To the south lay nothing but the icebound pole. To the west were the empty Atlantic and the New World territories owned by Spain. To the north they saw nothing but wind-swept dunes stretching beyond the power of the eye. But to the east they saw inviting meadows, and the rise of hills, and then the reach of mountains, and then more and more and more, on to a horizon they could only imagine. In silence the three sailors studied the land as it basked in the autumn sun, and often they wheeled about to see the lonely seas across which winds could howl for a thousand miles. But always their eyes returned to those tempting green valleys in the east, those beckoning mountains.

  But looking eastward, they ignored the clouds which had formed almost instantaneously over the ocean to the west, and when they turned to descend the mountain, the devil threw his tablecloth and any movement became perilous.

  ‘What can we do?’ his companions asked Willem, and he replied with common sense, ‘Shiver till dawn.’ They knew that this would result in anxiety at the fort, but they had no alternative, and when the sun finally rose, dispelling the fog, they marveled anew at the paradise which awaited in the east.

  From the first days of isolation the sailors had been aware of the little brown men who occupied the Cape. They were a pitiful lot, ‘barely human,’ one scribe wrote, ‘dirty, thieving and existing miserably on such shell fish as they could trap.’ They were given the name Strandloopers (beach rangers), and to the sailors’ dismay, they had nothing of value to trade but wanted everything they saw. It was a poor relationship, marked by many scuffles and some deaths.

  But on June 1, when the marooned men concluded that they had seen everything worth seeing in their temporary home—rhinos feeding in the swales, hippos in the streams, lions prowling at night, and antelope untold—an incident occurred, so bizarre that everyone who later wrote his report of the wreck commented upon it:

  On this day at about two in the afternoon we were approached from the east by a group of some twenty little brown men much different from the pathetic ones we called Strandloopers. They were taller. Their loincloths were cleaner. They moved without fear, and what joyed us most, they led before them a herd of sheep with the most enormous tails we have ever seen. We called them Huttentuts from their manner of stuttering with strange click sounds and got quickly to work trying to trade with them. They were quite willing to give us their sheep for bits of brass, which they cherish.

  And then the most amazing thing happened. From their ranks stepped a man about thirty years old, quick and intelligent of manner, and God’s word, he was dressed in the full uniform of an English sailor, shoes included. What was most remarkable, he spoke good English without any click sounds. Since none of us knew this language, I went running for Willem van Doorn, who had learned it at Java, and when he left the fort, knowing that a Huttentut had come who spoke English, he asked me, ‘Could it be?’ and when he saw the little man in the sailor’s uniform he broke into a run, shouting, ‘Jack! Jack!’ and they embraced many times and fingered the ivory bracelet that we had seen on Van Doorn’s chain. Then they danced a jig of happiness and stood apart talking in a language we did not know of things we had not seen.

  Actually, among the Hottentots with whom the Dutch did business during their year as castaways, there were three wh
o had sailed in English ships: Jack, who had been to Java; a man named Herry, who had sailed to the Spice Islands; and Coree, who had actually lived in London for a while. But it was with Jack that these Dutchmen conducted their trade.

  This meant that Willem was often with the Hottentots when there was bartering, and as before, he and Jack made a striking pair: Jack seemed even smaller when standing among big Dutchmen, and Willem, now full-grown at twenty-two, towered over his little friend, but they moved everywhere along the bay, hunting and fishing together. Toward mid-July, Jack proposed that Van Doorn accompany him to the village where the sheep-raising Hottentots lived. The fortress commander suspected a trick, but Willem, remembering the responsible manner in which the little fellow had conducted himself at Java, begged for permission.

  ‘You could be killed,’ the commander warned.

  ‘I think not,’ and with that simple affirmation, young Van Doorn became the first Dutchman to venture eastward toward those beckoning mountains.

  It was a journey of about thirty miles through land that gave signs of promising fertility. He passed areas where villages had once stood and learned from Jack that here the land had been grazed flat by cattle. ‘You have cattle?’ the Dutchman asked, indicating with his hands that he meant something bigger than sheep.

  ‘Yes.’ Jack laughed, using his forefingers to form horns at his temples, then bellowing like a bull.

  ‘You must bring them to the fort!’ Willem cried in excitement.

  ‘No, no!’ Jack said firmly. ‘We don’t trade …’ He explained that this was winter, when the cows were carrying their young, and that it was forbidden to trade or eat cattle before summer. But when they reached his village, and Willem saw the sleek animals, his mouth watered; he intended reporting this miracle to the fort as soon as he returned.