The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  When these new rules were explained at the fort, Commissioner van Doorn judged his responsibilities discharged, and he instructed his captain to prepare the ship for the long trip to Java.

  On the evening before departure, a gala New Year’s festival was prepared by Van Riebeeck and his gifted wife, Maria. It was attended by their two nieces, attired in the new dresses Kornelia had brought them, and music was provided by Malaccan slaves. Each item of food had come from the Cape: the stock fish, a leg of mutton, cauliflower, cabbage, corn, beets and pumpkin. The wine, of course, was provided by the ship, taken from casks being transported from France to Java, but as Karel said so gracefully when he proposed the toast: ‘Before long, even the wine will come from here.’ And he nodded toward his brother.

  ‘Now for the dessert!’ Van Riebeeck cried, flushed with the good wine. Clapping his hands, he ordered the slaves to bring in the special dish prepared for this night, and from the kitchen came Deborah, heavy with child, bearing in her two hands a large brown-gold earthen crock, straight-sided and with no handles. Looking instinctively at Willem, her grave face expressionless, she awaited a signal from him; with a slight nod of his head he indicated that she must place the pot before Kornelia, and when this was done, and a big spoon provided with nine little dishes, everyone saw with pleasure that it was a most handsome bread pudding, crusty on top and brown, with raisins and lemon peel and orange rind peeking through.

  ‘Our Willem makes it,’ Van Riebeeck said proudly as the diners applauded.

  ‘Did you really make this?’ Kornelia asked as she poised the spoon above the rounded crust.

  ‘I had to learn,’ Willem said.

  ‘But what’s in it?’

  ‘We save bits of bread and cake and biscuit. Eggs and cream. Butter and all the kinds of fruit we can find. At the end, of course …’ He hesitated. ‘You wouldn’t appreciate this, Kornelia, never having lived in Java …’ He felt that he was not expressing himself well, and turning to his brother and Van Riebeeck, he concluded rather lamely: ‘You Java men will understand. When the sugar’s been added and the lemon juice, I dust in a little cinnamon and a lot of nutmeg. To remind us of Java.’

  ‘You’re a fine cook, Willem.’

  ‘Someone had to learn,’ he said. ‘You can’t eat fish and mutton four hundred days a year.’

  At this curious statement the diners looked at one another, but no one thought to correct the speaker. At some spots in the world the year did have four hundred days, and even a small thing like bread pudding helped alleviate the tedium of those long, lonely days.

  When the last wine decanter was emptied, two final conversations occurred. They were monologues, really, for the speakers lectured their listeners without interruption. Karel van Doorn told Commander van Riebeeck, ‘You must strive very hard, Jan, to comply with all Compagnie rules. Waste not a single stuiver. Make your people speak Dutch. Fence in the Compagnie property. Discipline your slaves. Get more cattle and start the wine flowing. Because if you take care of our ships, I can assure you that the Lords will reward you with an assignment in Java.’ Before Van Riebeeck could respond, Karel added reflectively, ‘Didn’t the spices in Willem’s pudding … Well, didn’t they remind you of the great days in Ternate and Amboyna? There’s no place in the world like Java.’

  At this moment Kornelia van Doorn was telling her red-complexioned cousin, ‘Katje, help Willem grow his grapes. Because if he succeeds, he’ll be in line for promotion. Then you can come to Java.’ With a flood of gentleness and affection, she embraced her unlovely cousin and confessed: ‘We haven’t brought you to a paradise, Katje. But he is a husband and his hut is temporary. If you keep him at his work, you’ll both soon be in Java, of that I’m sure.’

  When Willem saw how meticulously the vines from France had been packed and learned how carefully they had been tended on the voyage, he felt that these new stocks would invigorate the Cape vineyard; the hedge of young trees was high enough to break the force of those relentless summer winds and he now knew something about setting his rows in the right direction. Before Karel sailed on to Java the vines were well planted, and one of the last entries the commissioner made in his report to the Lords XVII commended Willem for taking viticulture seriously and predicted: Soon they will be sending casks of wine to Java.

  His last entry was a remarkable one, often to be quoted in both Amsterdam and Batavia but never to be comprehended there or in South Africa; it dealt with slaves and their propensity for running away. In his stay at the Cape he had listened to three days of detailed testimony on the frequency with which slaves of all kinds—Angolans, Malaccans, Madagascans—ran away. It was a madness, he concluded, which no measures open to the Dutch could eliminate, and he reported to the Lords XVII:

  Neither hunger nor thirst, neither the murderous arrow of the Bushman nor the spear of the Hottentot, neither the waterless desert nor the impassable mountain deters the slave from seeking his freedom. I have therefore directed the officers at the Cape to initiate a series of punishments which will impress the slaves with the fact that they are Compagnie property and must obey its laws. At the first attempt to run away, the loss of an ear. At the next attempt, branding on the forehead and the other ear to be cropped. At the third attempt, the nose to be cut off. And at the fourth, the gallows.

  When the Groote Hoorn resumed its way to Java, it was decided that since the prompt production of wine loomed so important, Willem ought to have more assistance at the vineyard, so the slave Jango was excused from his duties at the fort. This was a happy decision, because he quickly displayed an aptitude for handling vines, and when the new plants took root, Van Riebeeck felt that the pressing of wine would soon be a reality.

  But Jango had the weakness of every man of merit: he wanted to be free. And when Willem recommended that the chains be struck off his slave, ‘so that he can move more freely about the vineyard,’ Van Riebeeck reluctantly agreed.

  ‘You may be courting trouble,’ he warned Willem, but the latter said he felt sure Jango would appreicate this opportunity of working outside the fort and could be trusted.

  He was partly right. Without chains, Jango worked diligently, but as soon as the new vines were pruned, he escaped into the wilderness. Two days passed before Willem reported his absence to the fort, where the news caused great agitation. Van Riebeeck was furious with Willem for having delayed the alarm, and in anger dispatched a field force to track down the escapee, but when a muster was taken he found that three other slaves had joined Jango, and their tracks indicated that they were heading directly into Bushmen country, where they would probably be slain. ‘And that’s the end of Compagnie property,’ Van Riebeeck groaned.

  But after a three-day search, Jango and the others were discovered huddled at the foot of a small cliff, cold and hungry. When they were roped together and on the march back to the fort, the soldiers began to speculate on how Commissioner van Doorn’s draconian laws governing runaways would be enforced. ‘You’re going to lose your ears,’ they told the slaves. ‘You know that.’ One Dutchman grabbed Jango’s left ear and sliced at it with his hand: ‘Off it comes!’

  But when the lookout at the fort spotted the returning prisoners, and everyone gathered to see the mutilations, they were disappointed, for Van Riebeeck refused to lop off ears: ‘I do not disfigure my slaves.’ Two assistants argued with him, citing both the new law and the necessity for drastic punishment, but the stubborn little man rejected their counsel. The slaves were moderately whipped, thrown into a corner of the fortress that served as a jail, and kept without food for three days.

  Five days after they were released, Jango ran away again, and Willem was summoned to the fort: ‘We have reason to believe that the slaves have again made union with the Hottentots. Go find Jack and warn him that this must not continue.’

  ‘And Jango?’

  ‘We’ll take care of Jango.’

  So Willem went eastward to confer with Jack, while the usual troop of hunters went af
ter Jango, who this time had taken only two others with him. Willem found Jack at a distant site, unwilling to admit that he was in league with the slaves, unwilling to cooperate in any way.

  ‘What do you want?’ Willem, exasperated, asked his old friend.

  ‘What I said at the fort. Work together.’

  ‘You heard my brother. That can never happen.’

  ‘More ships will come,’ Jack persisted. ‘More cattle will be needed.’

  Willem’s frown ended the conversation. There was no hope that the kind of union Jack was proposing could ever be effected; white men and brown were destined to live their different lives, one the master, one the outcast, and any attempt to bridge the gap would forever be doomed by the characters of the persons involved. The white men would be stolid and stubborn like Willem, or vain and arrogant like Karel; the brown men would be proud and recalcitrant like Jack …

  A visible shudder raced over Willem’s face, for he had been accorded a glimpse of the future. Staring down the long corridor of Cape history—beyond the fortress and the branding of slaves—he saw with tragic clarity the total disappearance of Jack and his Hottentots. They were destined to be engulfed, overswarmed by ships and horses. Tears of compassion came to his eyes and he wanted to embrace this little man with whom he had shared so many strange adventures, but Jack had turned away, rebuffed for the last time. In his ragged English uniform and his big homemade shoes, he was walking alone toward the mountains, never again to approach the Van Doorns with his proposals.

  When Willem returned to the fort he found that Jango had been retaken and that the heavy iron chains had been returned to his legs. Henceforth he would work at the vines slowly, dragging monstrous weights behind him. But in spite of this dreadful impediment, he ran away a third time, far to the north, where he survived three weeks prior to his recapture. This time, argued the junior officials, his ears really must be cropped, but once more Van Riebeeck refused to carry out the harsh measures which Commissioner van Doorn had authorized, and one of the commander’s subordinates dispatched a secret message to Batavia, informing Karel of this nonfeasance.

  * * *

  The garden-hut in which Katje van Doorn started her married life echoed with an incessant chain of complaints; three were recurrent.

  ‘Why do we have to live in this hut? Why can’t we move to the fort?

  ‘Why can’t I have four slaves, like the commander’s wife?

  ‘How soon can we join Kornelia and your brother in Java?’

  Patiently Willem tried to answer each complaint: ‘You wouldn’t like it at the fort. All those people. What would you do with so many personal slaves? And we’ll have to prove that wine can be made here before they let us go to Java.’ He deceived her on the last point: he had no desire whatever to return to Java; he had found his home in Africa and was determined to stay.

  Katje was not convinced by his arguments, but she did appreciate it when he built a small addition to the hut so that she could have space of her own. Of course, when time came to finish the floor, and he brought in bucketfuls of cow dung mixed with water for her to smooth over the pounded earth not once but many times, she wailed in protest. So he knelt down and did the work for her, producing in time a hard, polished surface not unlike that of weathered pine. It had a cleansing odor too, the clean smell of barnyard and meadow.

  He was startled upon learning that Katje had gone to Van Riebeeck, petitioning him for a servant. The commander pointed out that the only woman available was Deborah, adding delicately that it would hardly be proper for this girl to move into their hut, seeing that she was far pregnant, and with Willem’s child. To his astonishment, Katje saw nothing wrong in this: ‘He’s my husband now, and I need help.’

  ‘Quite impossible,’ Van Riebeeck said, and Katje’s complaints increased.

  On the other hand, she was steadfast in tending the new vines, and so it was she who patiently watered the young plantings and wove the straw protections which shielded them from the winds. She watched their growth with more excitement than a mother follows that of a child, and when the older vines at last yielded a substantial crop of pale white grapes, she picked them with joy, placed them almost reverently in the hand press, and watched with satisfaction as the colorless must ran from the nozzle.

  She and Willem had only the vaguest concept of how wine was made, but they started the fermentation, and in the end something like wine resulted. When it was carried proudly to the fort, Van Riebeeck took the first taste and wrote in his report to the Lords XVII:

  Today, God be praised, wine has been made from grapes grown at the Cape. From our virgin must, pressed from the young French muscadels you sent us, thirty quarts of rich wine have been made. The good years have begun.

  But the next year, when a heavy harvest of grapes made the production of export wine a possibility, it received a harsh reception in Java: ‘More vinegar than wine, more slops than vinegar, our Dutch refused it, our slaves could not drink it, and even the hogs turned away.’ And because sailors aboard the big East Indiamen rejected it too, the Cape wine did not even help to diminish scurvy.

  As a consequence, Willem fell into further disfavor at the fort; his deficiency was harming Van Riebeeck’s chances—as well as his—of getting to Java; Katje, sensing this, constantly railed at him to master the tricks of wine-making, but there was no one from whom he could learn, and the pressings of 1661 were just as unpalatable as those at the start.

  Willem had toiled faithfully at the vineyard and deemed himself eligible to become a free man, but he had to acknowledge that the Compagnie retained total control over all he did, so three times he prayerfully petitioned the commander for permission to proclaim himself a burgher, and three times Van Riebeeck refused, for his own release from this semi-prison depended largely upon Willem’s success.

  ‘You’re needed where you are,’ Van Riebeeck said.

  ‘Then give me another slave to help propagate the vines.’

  ‘You have Jango.’

  ‘Then strike off his chains … so he can really work.’

  ‘Won’t he run away again?’

  ‘He has a woman now.’

  Willem said these words with pain, for on those days when Katje upbraided him most sorely, he could not refrain from contemplating what his life might have been like had the Compagnie allowed him to marry Deborah. On trips to the fort he would see her with her two half-white sons, moving through her tasks with placid gentleness as she softly sang to herself, and he would return to his hut and by candlelight finger through the great Bible until he came to that passage in Judges which the ship captain had read to him during the long passage from Malacca: ‘Awake, awake, Deborah, awake, awake, utter a song.’ And he would lower his head into his hands and dream of those golden days.

  And then one day he learned at the fort that Deborah was pregnant again, not with his child this time but with Jango’s, and as an act of compassion for her he insisted that Jango’s chains be struck off, and the next day Jango, Deborah and their boys headed for freedom.

  It was incomprehensible to the soldiers that these slaves would dare such a venture—pregnant woman and two children—but they were gone, headed north for the most dangerous roaming ground of the Bushmen and their poisons. Van Riebeeck, furious at having been talked into unshackling Jango, ordered a troop of soldiers to bring him back at any cost, and for seven days the fort spoke of little else.

  No one was more apprehensive than Willem. He wanted Deborah to survive. He wanted his sons to live into manhood so that they could know this land. And curiously, he hoped that Jango would escape into the freedom he had so courageously sought through all the years of his captivity. Indeed, he felt a companionship with this slave who had tended the grapes so faithfully, dragging his chains behind him. Willem, too, sought freedom, escape from the bitter confines of the fort and its narrow perceptions. No longer did he merely want to be a free burgher; he now wanted absolute freedom, out beyond the flats toward those
green hills he had first seen from the crest of Table Mountain fourteen long years ago. He was hungry for openness, and bigness, and at night he prayed that Jango and Deborah would not be taken.

  ‘They caught them!’ Katje exulted one morning as she returned from the fort, and against his will he allowed her to take him to the gate when the fugitives were dragged in. Jango was quietly defiant. Deborah, not yet visibly with child, held her head up, her face displaying neither anger nor defeat. It was Van Riebeeck who responded in unexpected ways; he absolutely forbade his soldiers to mutilate the slaves. In his regime there would be no cropping of ears, no branding, no nose lopped off. Back went the chains, on Deborah too, but that was all. Physically, Van Riebeeck was a smaller man than any to whom he gave these orders; morally, he was the finest servant the Compagnie would ever send to the Cape.

  The more Willem had observed Van Riebeeck, the higher became his opinion of the man’s ability. The Lords XVII had assigned him impossible tasks; like the ancient Israelites, he was supposed to build great edifices with faulty bricks. He was given a dozen things to do, but no funds with which to do them, and he was even begrudged his manpower. When he enticed sailors from passing ships to stay at the Cape, he built his garrison to one hundred and seventy men, but the Lords commanded him to reduce it to one hundred and twenty on the reasonable grounds that they were operating a commercial store and not a burgeoning civil community.

  But one unexpected reaction startled Willem: ‘I want you, and thirty slaves, and all the free burghers to plant a hedge around our entire establishment. I’ve been ordered to cut the colony off from that empty land out there.’ With a broad gesture of his left hand he indicated all of Africa. ‘We’ll keep the slaves in and the Hottentots out. We’ll protect our cattle and make this little land our Dutch paradise.’

  He led Willem and the burghers in seeking the kind of shrub or tree that would make a proper hedge, and at last they found the ideal solution: ‘This bitter almond throws a strong prickle. Nothing could penetrate these spikes when the tree grows.’