The Great Level

by Stella Tillyard

  This is the worst of Nieuw Amsterdam; this and the close hot summers when mosquitoes swarm up from the flatlands, and hang in grey clouds over any shady place. There is no remedy against them in the evening though the natives smear their naked bodies with bear grease, and I myself have done the same when far from the eyes of my countrymen.

  Such are the irritations of this island. Yet it has great wonders too. When the wind drops on a cloudless night, the stars draw close, shining newborn. That’s a sight to make me fall on my knees from the beauty of it.

  When I first arrived here, in the year 1652, I called at the Stadt Huys, not so much to offer my services, as to register my presence. I wished still to be known by the name of engineer; if not to practise then for some pride in myself. I had money for several years of solitude and careful living, which was what I planned when I set out from the old world. I wanted nothing, and no one, or no one I knew living. I had no acquaintance or friend, and many seemed to fear me. I was the ghost of myself, and the inhabitants of Nieuw Amsterdam sensed it. Men, women, children – everyone – moved away if I came near them, so that I always stood alone in any room I entered, and lost the habit of even saying goedemorgen or nodding if I passed a person in the street.

  From those first days I did what I knew how to do, more from habit than from a desire of gain. I began to measure and to map the marshy ground around the city, and this work, with my instruments and papers that I held in my hand, passed the time and gave me a familiarity with myself. After some weeks I left the city and began to venture beyond the wall, to discover and record the composition of the whole island. Then one or two curious men began to talk to me. The surgeon, Varreranger, a man with an understanding of instruments in his own trade, made my acquaintance. Others began to stop and ask what I was doing. Soon, I suppose, a story about me went around.

  The Director-General, Pieter Stuyvesant, called me to his house, where I found him leaning on the gate, resting his wooden stump. It being the first time I had seen him, I did not know he had only one good leg. Stuyvesant took me into his parlour and told me that his men had seen me about and I was known to be an engineer. Did I have any experience in the map trade?

  ‘Mijnheer Stuyvesant, the two go hand in hand.’

  ‘Very well. I need a map. In fact, I need a map that will show people the virtues of this place.’

  ‘Does a map ever show anything else, sir?’

  The Director-General looked at me with a belligerent eye, then leaned back in his chair with a grin. We understood one another. What map of a colony pictures its hardships?

  ‘The fact is,’ Stuyvesant went on, ‘Hendrick Kip is selling parcels of land up in the north-west of the island. The man sees only a quick profit. A village is forming, and I’d like a proper plan for it.’

  Stuyvesant, who puts himself forward as a practical man, is in truth a dreamer who dreams in maps and pictures. He wanted the new settlement put on the footing of a Dutch village, to be called Nieuw Haarlem, with plots of equal size going back from the streets. This picture of Nieuw Haarlem came from the old world or perhaps the world of the landscape painters whose pictures make our flat land hilly and our skies and acres vast. Did he see his home village, wherever it was, where pears ripened to gold against brick walls and the women always had their pails and brushes at the ready?

  ‘We need more people, Mijnheer Brunt. I wish you to make a map to entice them here. Have you done such a thing before?’

  ‘Not exactly, sir, but I know what it is that you require, and am trained in the art.’

  Stuyvesant talked on, and lit up in me the desire to excel that I thought extinguished. I took the job, my first considerable commission here, the contract signed at the Stadt Huys by Stuyvesant and myself. The next day I went straight to work with my notebook and measuring rods. I surveyed the ground up in the north-west of Manatus Eylandt and drew a map that would have pleased my younger self. It showed the village laid out in blocks and streets that might grow out into the countryside. All round the edge, as I had done long ago, I drew Pieter Stuyvesant’s dreams and visions.

  At the top of the map I drew two whales, blowing out the sea, and in the distance three frigates of the West India Company leaning into the wind. Then, for fancy’s sake, came a pair of curled-tailed sea creatures. Down the left side ran the fruit of the land, down the right the harvest of the water. None of the capacity I had as a young man deserted me. Vines with entwining tendrils danced across the paper and the boughs of plums hung heavy with ripe fruit. Heads of corn stood proud as torches. A roe deer lifted her head trustingly, as if she intended to lie down straight in the hunter’s path.

  I drew no wildmen, but rather a curled salmon as it leapt from the river, a lobster and a codfish. Along the bottom walked Nieuw Haarlem’s people: Dutchmen, their wives and children. At the last I drew myself sitting on the top of a canal bank. My hat, in three ink strokes, was outlined against the sky.

  This, my description of the world that might come to be, framed by all the beauties of nature, was much admired, and passed from hand to hand in the office of the Director-General. I made a copy, and sent it to the West India Company in Amsterdam. I heard that it was engraved and sold to people dreaming of another life, both those who might make the crossing, and those whose walls already hung with other worlds.

  Stuyvesant praised my map, and the drawings also. Several men from this city bought parcels of land around the village, and built houses for their sons and daughters, it being cheaper to set them up at a distance than build a house or buy a farm closer to the wall. So Nieuw Haarlem grew, though it is not quite the paradise that the Director-General dreamed of, menaced as it is still by the wildmen and its roads often impassable in the winter.

  Other work came after, piece by piece, and I have never been without a map to make, a new arrival to advise or a piece of draining and embanking to undertake. It is my fortune that the lands and rivers of the English colonies to the north are marshy and muddy and with my help the colonists may put them to productive use. I am often sought out, but take no more work than I need, preferring to have sufficient time for my own thoughts and studies. It is one thing to survive in Nieuw Amsterdam, another to live; and though life may take different shapes for different men, the life I cherish needs less wealth than time, and thus I arrange it so.

  If the day is fine, or the season further advanced, and I have no work to attend to, I may put on my beaver hat and take the paddle that stands against the wall by my front door. On such a day I step out onto the path to find the whole Heere Gracht sunning itself, supine in the early morning. The canal seems motionless; the tide on the turn. It is my custom when I leave the house to lean over and examine the water, as a mother checks her sleeping child for rashes or signs of a sickness.

  Most times I turn north with a skip in my step, for I am to this day pleased with the work I made with the canal, and know the citizens of this place have cause, in better health and firmer ground, to thank me for it. I cross the bridges over the Begijn Gracht and the Heere Gracht itself, and make my way down the lane past the Red Lion tavern to Smee Straet. This street, though it lies within the protection of the wall, is nonetheless insalubrious, distant as it is from the safety of the Fort and flooded if storms come with the spring tides. Stink covers it in summer.

  Free slaves and other people without steady employment live here, crowded three or four to a room. In recent years some natives who have been drawn into Nieuw Amsterdam by trade or by their own curiosity have set up alongside them. Once introduced to the city life, they seldom return to those they lived amongst. This habit of wandering, it seems, was implanted in Adam and Eve, our first mother and father, who left their home to live among creatures unknown to them, and never returned. Such a habit I have never observed in the animal kingdom, for the birds and even whales that cross skies and oceans each year, leave and return. Men and women, having sailed the seas, as I have done, or struck out for a new place, seldom make the journey
back.

  Here on Smee Straet, Gertie Stoffels keeps her house. On warm mornings she sits outside, knees apart under a thick skirt and apron. She wears a dirty cap and keeps a pipe in hand. Gertie is free with words, and knows me for a man who is never loose in conversation.

  ‘Hey, hey, Jan Brunt,’ she says when I come round the corner. ‘Still no woman after all these years? And you a man in the prime of life?’

  You see, we have an understanding.

  ‘I look after myself, Gertie.’

  How Gertie came here I do not know, but she has a brisk business that keeps her handsomely. She owns this house on Smee Straet and a homestead beyond the wall, and has plenty of credit with the merchants at the wharfs. Her respectable business is to find maids for prosperous residents, girls new off the plantations, come here with freedom and nothing else. Some disdain to serve again and prefer to stay with Gertie, or so she says. Any man who wants a woman comes here, and since men outnumber women in this town, she turns a fair profit. Any time I pass Gertie’s, I am likely to see a sailor coming out and a townsman going in.

  Well, there is someone here for men of every taste. Turn the corner to Tuyn Straet and then left into Prince Straet and you find another house with the door ajar. On the stoop sits a young woman with mother-of-pearl breasts, her skirt up around her thighs. Fresh young boys line the parlour fire, their collars loose; but they are not clients. In the bed in the wall lies a man, locked in because a town commissioner might come by. The girls joke that they have the easiest job in Nieuw Amsterdam. They are the decoys; in this house it’s the boys who work.

  Either way, as Gertie says, the money comes in. Her girls, she declares, are the best in town. Besides those off the plantations, there are girls who are natives to this place and others from Holland or the English colonies. The native ones are taller than the Dutch, and often better made, their limbs being straight and smooth and their skin unmarked by the pox. Their colour may be attributed to the sun, which they revere, and let shine on them, generation after generation. I have no doubt either that, were they to be instructed as our women are, they would be quite as accomplished, being curious and quick to learn and knowing their own histories without writing, but as a kind of chant that has many different stories in it.

  I bow to Gertie as I pass. She takes her pipe from her mouth and waves it towards me as if she wants to tie me in its smoke. We get along, with little need to speak. At the end of Smee Straet I walk along by the shore until I come to the wall. This wall marks the boundary of our city, a division between Nieuw Amsterdam and whatever lies beyond. It was built to keep the wildmen from coming here, they being thought to menace the small colony from their greater numbers and savage ways. These days, the wildmen seeming fewer from their land being taken or sold for farms, the wall is more often spoken of as a barrier against the English, who press down from the north. Beyond the wall sits my orchard, or what I call my orchard, though it is more a meadow that I leave to nature.

  I keep the meadow almost in its wild state, having there only a couple of large apple trees and a sturdy wooden seat that I have constructed. This I sit upon in the shade on warm afternoons and in the winter too, when snowfall has silenced all of nature but the sea. Several men have tried to buy my orchard from me, the land having acquired in recent years a greater value, but I like it as it is, with tall grass in the summer and bees that come and go amongst the flowers. Here I keep my canoe, turned over under a tree.

  It was with the wildmen that I acquired the skill of making a canoe and preserving it watertight. A Dutchman, or any person familiar with the water, might easily do the same. The wildmen have great skill on all manner of water and say that there is nowhere they cannot reach in their canoes, for they are so light that they may be hoisted shoulderwards and carried overland from one river to the next.

  Though my own canoe is long enough for two men, I propel it with ease and with a single paddle, first one side and then the other. The wildmen like to face forwards in their canoes and see clearly what they are approaching. I do the same yet still prefer the pull of the oars, and to look, as we do in memory, back to where I started. I fancy that therein lies a difference between an old world and a new.

  Once launched on the Oost Rivier, I may let the tide take me down the marshy coast of Lange Eylandt, which is a larger island than any I know from Holland, or any I saw on my travels. On the shore lie piles of stranded bladderwrack that in the summer heave with clouds of flies. There are plentiful small rivers running into the marshes, with otters in them, new-crowned kings of the water with the beavers mostly trapped and gone.

  In the summer I may paddle on for days. I catch fish and travel as the wildmen do until I reach the far end of the island where it breaks into numerous inlets and beaches. Then I walk down to the open ocean and feel myself to be not a man but a part of nature, as is a star, or a dolphin that leaps for joy out in the bay. Far away round our earth lies the old world, while here I stand on the new. Waves rush up to my feet and then pull back, marbled with sand and foam.

  Chapter 2

  The Isle of Ely, upon the Great Level.

  The 20th day of July, 1649.

  Wind from the west, the sky overcast.

  It is a month before the dog days when the high summer comes to an end and Sirius shines bright in the sky. I have been on the Great Level for two months now and I am beginning to get the measure of the place. Its contours are no longer strange to my eyes. The town of Ely falls away into green fields after five minutes’ walk. Herds of cattle now surround the town, brought across the causeway to the island to fatten on the summer grass. Before the autumn rains set in they will be on the move again, driven down to London and the slaughterhouses of the market there.

  The woman I lodge with is no more than civil. Mrs Suckling is her name. She takes my money with ill grace and never speaks of the war, though a rough print of General Cromwell hangs inside the door. I stay with her some evenings and begin in a halting way to speak English. She sits in a high-backed chair and smooths down her linen pinafore with short hard sweeps, as if it stood for me, and I were a small boy, poor at grammar, in need of correction. Other times I stay in my room with my books and my figures from the day’s work, or meet Van Hooghten in his lodgings to talk and smoke a pipe.

  I do not go to cathedral services in Ely, though I am told that every person should attend. I dislike the curiosity of the people, and soon find that my separation from the world around me is not uncongenial, being in keeping with my understanding of myself. For the most part I am met with silence or a nod and a stare, but at night I walk quickly, and fear to be attacked. In the daytime children follow me along the streets, darting in and out of passages and doorways and trying insults.

  ‘Boer.’

  ‘Hey, Mr Herring.’

  Bold as crows, boys in gowns run out from the school building by the cathedral, and pull at my sleeve.

  ‘Made of cheese?’

  ‘Go away, stranger.’

  ‘Yes, back to where you came from.’

  I smile to show I wish them no harm, and walk on like a deaf man. If I commanded the language better I might tell them that the place I come from is not so unlike this one, flat and circumscribed by water. But I do not try to speak to them. I smile over their heads and continue on my way. Later I hear their words again, and surprise myself with the thought that, despite such taunts, I am happy to have left my home in search of adventure and fortune.

  Soon I notice that I am not alone in my cowl of silence. There are others as quiet as I am; men and women who hide their faces and go hunched about their business. These are they who sided with the King and now they are the debris of war, abandoned by its retreat. Here are young men discharged from the King’s army with half a limb; traders who supplied the losers; widows and children without support beyond a reluctant parish. They are not wanted and are now called traitors. Most people here were Cromwell’s from the start.

  Yet though victorious, Ely i
s not a place of ease or laughter. The wars have left the town in want. Taverns are closed, at least to the street, and there never was much other entertainment, I fancy. Perhaps a fair will come in, but now all I see are the pedlars, clad in cast-offs. Some sell ribbons and pins, scissors and needles. Others tout vials of medicine, cordials, scorpions from the east, potions of all sorts. Above the bed where I sleep, a dry bunch of herbs hangs suspended. Does it ward off spirits or stop my aches as it gathers dust?

  This is the time of the ague, too. From the standing water of the meres bad air rises up and brings the shivering sickness into town. Some say the ague sits in the air, others that it is heated by the sun, others still that it is brought by spirits who come at night. When the fever rises, people dose themselves with an infusion made from poppy seeds. Whether this has any effect I cannot say, only that Mrs Suckling lives in great fear of the ague, and with good reason, for I have seen it carry off children in a few days from the first sweats. It is a haunting disease; once it enters, there is no getting rid of it. It comes back with no warning, making prisoners of its victims.

  To a man who knows Amsterdam and Leiden, this is a miserable poor place, with scarce a book to be seen in the few good houses that I have been in. Yet, to my surprise, the meres and bogs supply a multitude of foodstuffs and other goods. Stacks of peat stand in the yards by the jetties, taken from the islands that emerge from the water in the summer, friable and easy to cut. Alongside them lie bundles of reeds, the best for baskets and matting, the rest for thatch. The fensmen are now landing many thousands of eels, that are carted in wooden barrels to London for sale, alive in water and tangled together like the hair of the Medusa. These eels are mysterious creatures, with wide lips and roving eyes. It is said they come from across the ocean and return there in the winter.