The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  When Willem loaded provisions aboard the Princesse Royale he was appalled to find that more than ninety passengers lay in their filthy beds, too weak to walk ashore. Many were obviously close to death, and he saw for himself the difference between the management of the two ships. They had sailed from the same port, on the same day, staffed by officers of comparable background, and they had traversed the same seas in the same temperature. Yet one was healthful, the other a charnel house whose major deaths lay ahead. But when he asked the men at the fort about this, they said, ‘It’s God’s will.’

  He thought much about God in these days of perplexity, and secretly went to the brassbound Bible, trying like his forefathers to ascertain what God wished him to do. And one night by a flickering candle he read a passage which electrified him, for in it God ordered his chosen people to undertake a specific mission:

  And I will establish my covenant between me and thee … And I will give unto thee, and unto thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession …

  God was offering this new land in covenant to his chosen people, and the manner in which a few ardent Dutchmen had been able to withstand for generations the whole power of Spain proved that they were chosen. Willem was convinced that soon the Lords XVII in Amsterdam must recognize the obligation that God was placing upon them. Then they would manfully occupy the Cape, as He intended—and where would they find the cadres to do the job? In Java, of course, where men who understood these waters worked. He would hurry back to Java on the Princesse Royale to be ready when the call came.

  When he informed his officers of this decision, the man from Groningen applauded: ‘Just what I’d do,’ but he would have been incredulous had he known why Willem was doing it.

  On the night before sailing, Van Doorn sat in his quarters, wondering how to safeguard his large Bible. If he took it aboard ship, it would be recognized as Compagnie property and confiscated; this he would not tolerate, for he felt in some mystical way that he had saved the Bible for some grand purpose and that it was dictating his present behavior. So toward morning, when the fort was quiet, he carried it away, and as he walked through the fading darkness, he remembered the post-office stones, where messages of grave importance were deposited, but a moment’s reflection warned him that whereas tightly wrapped and sealed letters might survive in such dampness, a book like this Bible would not. Then he recalled that on one of his climbs of Table Mountain he had come upon a series of caves, not deep, and although the mountain was distant, he set out briskly for it, carrying his treasure, and before midnight, with the moon as guide, he found the cave and hid the canvas-wrapped Bible well in the rear, under a cairn of stones. He was convinced that it would be his lodestone, drawing him back. At noon, when the Princesse Royale sailed, he was a passenger.

  It was a voyage into the bowels of hell. Before the Cape was cleared, sailors were tossing dead bodies overboard, and not a day passed without the quaking death of someone suddenly attacked by fever. When Willem first saw the mouth of a woman struck down by scurvy—gums swollen so grossly that no teeth could be seen—he was aghast; he had crossed this sea in the Haerlem without such affliction and he did not yet fully understand why this ship should be so stricken.

  As it limped down the Straits of Malacca, two and three bodies each day were thrown overboard, and when Van Doorn wanted, in his exuberance, to explain how the Dutch had captured the Portuguese fort that had once blocked these waters, he found no one well enough to listen; the great Indiaman creaked and wallowed in the sea, with more than a hundred and thirty dead and many of the survivors so afflicted that the sweats of Java would kill them within a few months.

  When the charnel ship reached the roadstead at Batavia, there waited the little White Dove, washed and ready for a further trip to Formosa. The two captains met briefly: ‘How was it?’ ‘As always.’ ‘When do you return to Holland?’ ‘Whenever they say.’ On the return trip the Princesse Royale would lose one hundred and fifteen.

  Mevrouw van Doorn was not pleased to learn that her younger son had returned to Java. She suspected that some deficiency in character had driven him to scurry back to an easy land he knew rather than risk his chances in the wintry intellectual climate of Holland, and she feared that this might be the first fatal step in his ultimate degeneration.

  Willem had anticipated his mother’s apprehensions but feared he might sound fatuous if he spread before her his real motivations: a vision from a mountaintop; a friendship with a little savage; a dictate from a buried Bible. Keeping his counsel to himself, he plunged into the solitary job of drafting a long report to his superiors in Batavia, in hopes that they would forward it to the Lords XVII.

  In it he made his sober estimation of what the Dutch might achieve if they were to establish a base at the Cape of Good Hope. A Cautious Calculation he titled it, and in it he reconstructed all he had witnessed during his months as a castaway, informing the merchants in charge of the Compagnie of the potential riches in this new land:

  Three separate vessels gave us seeds, two from Holland, one from England, and every seed we planted produced good vegetables, some bigger than those we see from home. Sailors who know many countries said, ‘This is the sweetest food I have ever eaten.’ On my trip to the native village I saw melons, grapelike climbers and other fruits.

  He compiled meticulous lists of what had flourished in the Compagnie gardens, how many cattle the Hottentots had, and what kinds of birds could be shot on Robben Island. It was a catalogue of value and should have been an encouragement to anyone contemplating the establishment of a provisioning base, but suspicious readers were apt to linger most carefully over those passages in which he detailed the life of the Hottentots:

  They go quite naked with a little piece of skin about their privities. To gain protection for their bodies they smear themselves with a mixture of cow dung and sand, increasing it month after month until they can be smelled for great distances. Men dress their hair with sheep dung, allowing it to harden stiff as a board. The women commonly put the guts of wild beasts when dry around their legs and these serve as an adornment.

  He provided the Compagnie with a careful distinction between the Strandloopers, a degenerate group of scavenging outcasts, the Hottentots, who were herders, and the Bushmen, who lived without cattle in the interior.

  He calculated how many ships could take on fresh vegetables if the Compagnie established a place to grow them at the Cape, and then showed that if they could stabilize relations with the Hottentots, they might also obtain almost unlimited supplies of fresh meat. He advised abandoning the stop at St. Helena, with the sensible caution that if the Dutch did not peaceably withdraw, the English would in time throw them out.

  It was a masterful calculation, prudent in all important matters, and it accomplished nothing. Officials at Batavia felt that a spot so distant was no concern of theirs, while the Lords XVII deemed it impudent for a man little more than a sailor to involve himself in such matters. So far as he could see, nothing happened.

  But a word once written will often accidentally find a life that no one anticipates; it lies folded in a drawer and is forgotten, except that sometimes at moments unexpected someone will ask, during a discussion, ‘Isn’t that what Van Doorn said some years ago?’ The passage from A Cautious Calculation which kept reviving in two cities half a world apart concerned ships:

  How is it that two ships of comparable quality throughout, manned by men of equal health and training, can sail from Amsterdam to Batavia and one arrives with all men ready for work in Java while the other comes into port with one-third of its crew so stricken that they must die within a year from our fevers and another third already buried at sea? There are no such things as good-luck ships and bad-luck ships. There are only fresh food, rest, clean quarters and whatever it is that fights scurvy. A halt of three weeks at the Cape of Good Hope, with fresh vegetables, lemon trees, and meat from the Hottentots would save the Co
mpagnie a thousand lives a year.

  Many of the Lords XVII felt that it was not their duty to worry about the health of sailors, and one said, ‘When the baker bakes a pie, some crust falls to the floor.’ He was applauded by those other Lords who had rebuked a subordinate in Java for sending two ships of Compagnie food to starving field hands in Ceylon: ‘It is not our responsibility to feed the weaklings of the world.’

  But to other members of the ruling body, Van Doorn’s comments on the Cape reverberated, and from time to time these men brought the matter of excessive death to the attention of their fellows. One estimated that it cost the Compagnie a goodly three hundred guilders to land a man at Batavia, and that if he did not work at least five years, that cost could never be recovered, and there the debate ended, with no action taken.

  Mevrouw van Doorn watched with dismay as her younger son slipped into the dull routine of a lesser clerk at the disposal of less able young men who had been trained in Holland. Willem’s brightness dimmed and his shoulders began to droop. He often wore a girlish chain about his neck with an ivory circle dangling from it, and what was most painful of all, he was beginning to drift into the orbit of the few Dutch widows who stayed on at Batavia, but without the family fortunes that Mevrouw had when she decided to remain. They were a fat, sorry lot, ‘sea elephants ridden by any bull that wished,’ and it would not be long before Willem would be coming to inform her that he proposed taking one or the other to wife. After that, nothing could be salvaged.

  And then one day in 1652 as Mevrouw van Doorn, white-haired and plump, arranged for her New Year’s celebration, the startling news reached Batavia that a refreshment station had been started at the Cape of Good Hope under the command of Jan van Riebeeck. It was a matter of debate as to which part of this news was more sensational, the station itself or its proposed manager, but as Hendrickje said loudly, to the delight of her audience, ‘If a man isn’t clever enough to steal from the Compagnie, he won’t be clever enough to steal for it.’

  Willem van Doorn was in the garden when his mother said this, but he caught the name Van Riebeeck and asked as he came through the doors, ‘Van Riebeeck? I met him. What about him?’

  ‘He’s been chosen to head a new settlement at Good Hope.’

  Willem, twenty-seven and already flaccid, just stood in the doorway, framed in spring flowers, and his hands began to tremble, for the long dry period of his life was over. After he gained control he began to ask many questions regarding how he might win an assignment to the Cape, when an aide to the governor-general called him aside: ‘Van Doorn, we’ve been asked to send the new settlement a few of our experienced men. To help them get started.’ And Willem was about to volunteer when the aide said, ‘Younger men, of course, and the council wondered if you could recommend some men for the lower echelons. For the higher, we’ll do the choosing.’

  And so Willem van Doorn, no longer considered young enough for an adventurous post, busied himself with selecting the first contingent of Batavia men to serve at the Cape, and it was a sorry task because none of the men wanted to leave the luxury of Java for that windblown wilderness.

  The fleet sailed and Willem was left behind; his essay was kept in chests, both in Amsterdam and Batavia; and the man who as much as any had spurred the establishment of this new station was barred from joining it. The months passed, and Willem ran down to each incoming fleet to inquire as to affairs at the Cape, and then one day a message reached the council that Commander van Riebeeck was wondering if he might have permission to obtain a few slaves from Java for his personal use in growing vegetables, and the same aide who had dashed Willem’s hopes previously now offered a dazzling proposal: ‘Van Riebeeck’s buying a few slaves for the Cape. And since you drafted that report … I mean, since you know the land there, we thought you might be the man to handle this courtesy.’

  Willem bowed, then bowed again. ‘I would be honored to have such confidence placed in me.’ And when the aide was gone, he dashed to see his mother, shouting, ‘I’m going to the Cape.’

  ‘When?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘With the Christmas fleet.’

  ‘So soon!’ She had longed for the day when her son would announce that he was returning to Holland, ‘to save himself,’ as she put it, and was distraught that he was sentencing himself to a place even more demeaning than Java. Now he would never attain a Compagnie position, and only God knew what might happen to him. But even the Cape was better than lingering here in Java and marrying some local slut. So be it.

  On the eve of departure she sat with him in her spacious reception room and said, ‘When you think of me, I’ll be here in this house. I’ll never sell it. If I went back to Holland, I’d be tormented by memories of my musicians playing in the garden.’

  She seemed so completely the epitome of those Dutch stalwarts who controlled the world—Java, Brazil, Manhattan Island, Formosa—that Willem knew she needed no cosseting from him, but when she took down her Dutch Bible and said, ‘I memorized passages at night when it was death at Spanish hands to own a Bible,’ he was overcome with love and confided: ‘When our ship was breaking apart I crept back and found this great Bible abandoned to the sea. And when I saw that it was the same as yours, I knew I had been sent to save it, and that if I showed it to anyone, it would be taken from me. So I buried it in a cave, and it calls me to return.’

  ‘I’ve never heard a better reason to sail anywhere,’ his mother said, and when the Christmas fleet departed, on December 20, she was at the wharf to bid him farewell. That night, back in her big house, she began her preparations for what she termed ‘the feast of the dying year.’ She borrowed the musicians, supervised the roasting of the pigs, and nodded approvingly when servants dragged in the liquor. As the year ebbed she and her Dutch equals roared old songs and wassailed and fell in stupors and slept them off. Java would always be Queen of the East and Batavia her golden capital.

  The council had agreed that Van Riebeeck’s slaves must come not from Java, whose natives were intractable, but from Malacca, where the gentler Malayans adjusted more easily to servitude, so when the fleet transited the Straits, Willem’s ship put in to that fine harbor and he went ashore to inform the commandant of the fort that four slaves were to be delivered, whereupon a sergeant and three men went off to the forests back of town, returning shortly with two brown-skinned men and two women. Before nightfall Willem’s ship had overtaken the fleet, and the long journey to the Cape was under way.

  One of the slaves was a girl named Ateh, seventeen years old and beautiful in the tawny manner of most Malayan women. She pouted when the sailors confined her and the others in a caged-off section belowdecks, and she protested when food was thrown at them. She demanded water for washing, and the sailors heard her commanding the others to behave. And at some point in each day, no matter how dismal it had been, she broke into song, whispering words she had learned as a child in her sunlit village. They were songs of little consequence, the ramblings of children and young women in love, but she made the dark hold more acceptable when she sang.

  By the time the journey was half over, this girl Ateh was so well known that even the captain had to take notice of her, and it was he who gave her the name by which she would later be known: ‘Ateh is pagan. If you’re going to sing in a Christian church, you’ve got to have a Christian name.’ Thumbing through his Bible, and keeping to the Old Testament, as the Dutch usually did, he came upon that lyrical passage in Judges which seemed predestined for this singing girl: ‘Awake, awake, Deborah: awake, awake, utter a song …’

  ‘Prophetic!’ he said, closing the book reverently. ‘That shall be her name—Deborah,’ and henceforth she was so called.

  Since it was Willem’s responsibility to deliver the slaves and since he wished to keep them alive if possible, it being usual in these waters that thirty percent died on any passage, he was often belowdecks to satisfy himself that they were properly cared for, and this threw him always into consultation with Debora
h. Before he came down the ladder, she would be huddled in a corner reviling the ill fortune that had brought her there, but when she saw him coming she would move forward to the bars of the cage and begin to sing. She would feign surprise at his arrival and halt her song in mid-note, looking at him shyly, with her face hidden.

  Since the fleet had now entered that part of the Indian Ocean where temperatures were highest, the penned slaves were beginning to suffer. Food, water and air were all lacking, and one midday, when the heat was greatest, Willem saw that Deborah was lying on the deck, near to prostration, and on his own recognizance he unlocked the gate that enclosed the slaves and carried the girl out to where the air was freer, kneeling over her as she slowly revived.

  He was amazed at how slight her body was; and as she lay in shadows her wonderfully placid face with its high cheekbones and softly molded eyelids captivated him, and he stayed with her for a long time. When she revived he found that she could speak the native language of Java, with its curious tradition of forming plurals by speaking the singular twice. If sate was the word for the bamboo-skewered bits of lamb roasted and served with peanut sauce, then two of the delicacies were not sates, as in many languages, but sate-sate; to hear natives speaking rapidly gave the impression of lovely soft voices stuttering, and Willem began to cherish the sound of Deborah’s voice, whether she sang or spoke.

  On most days he arranged some excuse for releasing her from the cage, a partiality which angered both the Dutch seamen and the other slaves. One evening, when the time came for her freedom to end, he suggested that she not go back into the cage but remain with him, and through the long, humid night, when stars danced at the tip of the mast, they stayed together, and after that adventure everyone knew they had become lovers.

  This posed no great problem, for scores of Dutchmen working in Java had mistresses; there was even a ritual for handling their bastard offspring, and no great harm was done. But the captain had been commissioned by Mevrouw van Doorn to look after her son, and when he saw the young Dutchman becoming serious about the little slave girl he felt obligated to warn him as a father might, and one morning when sailors reported: ‘Mijnheer van Doorn kept the little Malaccan in his quarters again,’ the older man summoned Willem to his cabin, where he sat in a large wicker chair behind a table on which rested another of those large Dutch Bibles bound in brass.