‘I plan to clean out the swamp and put the land to use. Improve it, Mr Brunt. Your line of work, I’m told. The whole swamp is useless now, and floods in the high tide.’
‘You know the rise and fall of the tides at your estate?’
‘Yes, yes; all of that is calculated.’
Maybrick seeming vague about the size of the task, I suggested that I come down to Bellevue, as he named his estate, and accompany his engineer in making a proper survey of the land and waters. The idea did not please him.
‘I have drawings made already,’ he said, ‘and a plan for the works. I only wish to know if they are sound and the improvements give me a return for my money.’
We sat in the Ship Tavern, an inn much favoured by the English, being run by one of their number. Maybrick unrolled his drawings and spread them out across a table. The map of his estate was sketchy, and the ground inadequately surveyed, but the plans for drainage were neat and careful.
‘They have evidently been drawn up by a man who knows something of drainage and irrigation.’
‘Of course, Mr Brunt,’ he said, though the look on his face belied his certainty. Perhaps he had paid a man unqualified and now sought to remedy his parsimony. Such a method of proceeding is common everywhere. I have little respect for a man who is not prepared to pay for lasting work from the outset; nonetheless I am prepared, for a fee, to put right what has been hastily done.
‘I cannot say if this scheme will work. I will need to go over the ground, make a fuller map and a detailed survey also of the river and its rise and fall.’
‘You want to pay a visit to Bellevue?’
‘Indeed, sir. To be certain of success, I should have to come several times. Nature may resist what we propose.’
Maybrick looked astonished.
‘Nature resist? Why then, Mr Brunt, it is your job to vanquish nature, as I do on my land.’
I nodded, as I have learned to do with choleric men.
‘To be sure; yet water is a subtle partner.’
‘Partner? Why cannot you simply tell me whether these drawings can be implemented?’
‘To be sure, I should need to have an idea about all the powers nature might summon before I can make any recommendation.’
Maybrick looked uncertain, and then shook his head.
‘No, no; I cannot have it.’
‘Very well. As you wish, Captain.’
The look upon his face was now one of hesitation.
‘But you think that this might work?’
‘It might, with the right man to oversee the works and due care taken in their construction.’
‘Thank you; that is all I require.’
Maybrick fumbled in his deep velvet pocket and drew out his purse. From it he pulled a handful of coins of high value, which he put on the table between us. Then he rolled up the drawings, nodded a curt goodbye and left the inn. I never saw him again.
Looking now from my window over the canal, down the slope to the Oost Rivier, I see where Lange Eylandt begins, stretching away towards the old world, while behind me stands an infinity of land, all shining in the summer heat. It will never be enough for those who want it. Now I see that it never was, neither here, nor in the Great Level, when it lay that winter under its liquid covers, quiet in hibernation.
Chapter 2
King’s Lynn.
The Great Level.
Spring, 1650.
With the end of winter, the flood begins its retreat. I watch the meres shrink to pools and the rivers take their narrow courses once more. Land emerges slick and waterlogged. Meadows form in the spring light, bright with flowers and noisy with geese. Dragonflies flash and career across the water. Nightingales and warblers sing the day down.
In the long wait over the winter many of Van Hooghten’s small band of Dutch navigators took their wages and went home. Their job is done, their maps and plans drawn and settled. Two new rivers will be dug, and, in the north, other cuts will carry away the flood waters of the Rivers Nene and Welland from the meres all about them. Straight seaward lines will replace the meres and islands, that now to my eye look like silver discs scattered across the landscape.
We put the word out for engineers, men who will turn our flat drawings into the new land. Van Hooghten writes to his acquaintance in Amsterdam and round about that we are looking for men familiar with the building of run-off channels and sluices, windmills and locks, as well as the digging of watercourses. Engineers are men accustomed to travel in order to find business. Moreover, their work runs from one project to another and is paid at a rate higher than work that is fixed and certain. For these reasons, and the Great Level being close to Holland, Van Hooghten is confident of finding his men. But word of the strangeness of this place and the failure of the last works seems to have got about. A few men trickle in, but along with eager youngsters who travel for the first time, Van Hooghten has to take on some whose greater experience comes at a price.
One is Adriaan Renswyck, a tall man with sunken cheeks and rheumy blue eyes. Renswyck has years of service in the West India Company behind him and the flux has worn him thin and bad-tempered. His clothes are greasy and black, his beard likewise, a circumstance notable amongst us Dutch, who are a people much given to cleanliness. An earthenware bottle hangs in the pocket of his frock coat and pulls it down on one side. He has no family with him besides a bony orange-coloured cur that follows everywhere at his heels. He is only come, he says, because the wages are good and the work familiar.
By the end of April three dozen Dutchmen are here, in different lodgings all over the Great Level. I place those who will work in the south in the biggest towns, and to each give a copy of my plan. Between them they divide up the work. Four men in Ely take charge of the start of the new river, four in Downham Market have the middle section and the sluice at Denver, four in King’s Lynn the stretch from Denver to the sea. Van Hooghten puts Renswyck at the head of the King’s Lynn section, knowing him to be a man who has experience of command.
Hundreds of labourers must clear the land, lay out the cuts, dig and lift the soil and build the great embankments. Van Hooghten considers the extent of the works and says that hundreds may not be enough. Thousands in the end may be required. Where shall we find them? The mood in the towns is sullen, though we pick up a few dozen men in each, and contrive to begin with them.
When word of our scarcity reaches the Gentlemen Adventurers, General Cromwell offers a solution that solves two problems with it, his own and ours. He will send us prisoners from his wars in Ireland who have been taken in great numbers. They are costly and threaten to escape. He will deliver them to us, Cromwell says, and furthermore will add soldiers from his own army to guard them. He keeps his promise smartly. The first men arrive a few weeks later at King’s Lynn, packed into the holds and on the decks of such merchant ships as Ireland could provide. Many have died on the way. The survivors are ragged. They are insolent men, proud in their hatred of General Cromwell, Van Hooghten tells me. To my mind they are no more than slaves.
We keep the men in barns and storehouses near the towns. General Cromwell sends more soldier guards, tense men who keep one hand on their swords as they walk. Contempt for the Irish sits in them and shows itself in blows and insults that I do not understand. It is the disdain the soldier feels for one of his kind who has been captured, the swagger of the victor, and mixed in with it a resentment of their present task. The prisoners are set to work straight away to build camps for themselves. They put up wooden huts thatched with reeds to sleep in, food stores and depositaries. Adjoining each they build huts for the soldiers. Nine camps in all are built over the whole Great Level.
As the weeks pass, the two camps by King’s Lynn begin to look like a settlement, with paths between the huts and noxious privies dug here and there. The prisoners’ camp, bordering the river, is stockaded round its edge in a rough semicircle. It houses three hundred men in thirty huts. In a few weeks a market establishes itself by the soldier
s’ camp, food laid out for sale on thick reed mats. Milk and summer greenstuffs from the fields of the islands; even meat is to be found. Fenswomen walk through the market wrapped in their cloaks. They sell wildfowl, eels and all manner of fish. The market soon turns into a kind of town. Makeshift taverns and bordellos spring up. Soldiers off duty saunter down the two dirty lanes; anyone who has money or wages is inclined to spend it after hours. At night the river flows through sheets of smoke that glow like orange muslin in the firelight.
The mere is still alive with songs and noises, but I hear them less often now. The world of men is pushing in. A web of other sounds stretches out across the Level; the push and return of toothed saws; shouts, hammers, voices of complaint, wood-groan from the wagon wheels, the dart and snap of the whip. Boots bang on the wooden pathways and Renswyck’s cur barks at the rats that have come off the ships.
Out on the water are the groups of fensmen, watching. I see men pause as they put out their eel traps, unbend and turn towards the camps. They stand in their boats, collected against the horizon like bottles on a shelf. When we begin the works I feel a change in the air. It has the quality of a threat. This feeling I try to ignore and rather look forward to the moment when my plans will bear fruit in the pastures and wheat fields of the whole redeemed land.
Once the works start I no longer feel safe to meet you out on the fen, so I leave my lodging and move to a dark lane on the edge of King’s Lynn where I have two rooms with my own door. It is at first an odd circumstance that we are closed into a room with a roof over our heads; but here we can pass the evening together. Here I wait for a soft knock, or to hear the latch lift from its iron bed. When you come to me our nights begin to take on a settled feel. I always have food ready, the coverlets smoothed, and the floors brushed clean. These homely habits delight me, though I know that you will leave before sunrise. In the morning all that is left of us are two plates and knives, and two glasses that stand side by side next to the wooden washtub. Often I leave them when I close the door, so that I can return to a sign that we were here together.
In the small parlour you walk from wall to wall. You pick up one thing after another and ask questions. How is this used, how that? You open the covers of the books that I keep on a shelf and study pages while I say nothing but wonder to myself how a mind might be that has no letters in it. You know about reading; how, you do not say. It is only that you lack the skill. I see that you observe my face when I read. Your eyes follow mine.
One evening I hand you the only English book I have, Mathematical Magick by one John Wilkins, and watch as you run your finger across the biggest letters of the title page, up, down, up and down the bars of the M, withdrawn into concentration. You feel your way round the black letter where the type has pressed and the ink puddled in its shape. Then you hand the book back to me.
‘I wish to learn now.’
It is not a statement, but a demand. We sit side by side at the small table. I write the letters of the alphabet in order on a bare sheet of paper, spaced far enough apart that you can trace them with your finger, and sound them out as I write. Though my Dutch makes me a poor guide to the sounds they make, you learn most of them in those first evening hours. The next day and the next we go on, until you have them easily.
I feel myself a woeful teacher, having no memory of how I myself learned my letters or turned them into words. My English is weighed down with the earthy thickness of Dutch. You seem not to notice, but set about the task with care, not moving from the first group of letters I have written until you are sure of all their sounds.
On the fourth day I make the letters into words and try to explain how they group together in sound. You laugh when you make the first word entire: moon. I put another next to it: fen. You laugh again, with triumph and with joy.
Another day we make a list. You say a few words, and I write them in my own imperfect English: Jan, Eliza, mallard, bread. I want to write all the words that crowd my mind and hear you sound them out – desire, beauty, tomorrow, together – but this I forebear to do, only adding others from the place we are in: mere, sea, eel, heron. You wish to know the useful words of my work and I write some of them for you: cut, embank, washes, tides, sluice, drain. Others, too, that I no longer remember.
My teaching is muddled and inexpert, the sounding of the words and the writing of the letters mixed together. The foolish book of mechanics is all I have to teach you with, but it does not matter. I write out the alphabet and hand you pen, ink and paper; you return with the paper forested with letters with their curls and hooks ready to join to others in the manner I then show you, so that you write in the way of the Dutch, for the English hand I have never mastered.
Though you learn and I teach, I do not simply put words down your throat as a mother feeds a child. Something else happens. We learn together. I see a wonder in you that reminds me of a schoolhouse game, writing in lemon juice, and bringing the paper up to the candle. Near the heat each word came to life and revealed itself. So it is with you, as if the words are already present and now come to the surface. Your delight we share, and both of us are changed; you by the knowledge, I by the joy of the knowledge in you.
When I see that joy cross your face and flash through your eyes I feel a tenderness to weep, though I do not, but rather gather you to me and hold you tight to myself. If afterwards we explore one another by the candlelight, it seems just as if one way of learning takes over from another and enlarges it.
Chapter 3
King’s Lynn.
The Great Level.
Summer, 1650.
Fine hot weather with wind from the west.
As soon as they are confined in the camp the prisoners try to escape. Groups work to tunnel under the stockade or push it down. Soldiers walk the camp perimeters from riverbank round to riverbank. I see them stop at intervals and dig their pike heads into the ground to test for disturbance in the soil that might show a tunnel beneath. In the middle of the stockade a wooden tower rises and a stair winds round it to the top. This is the idea of Adriaan Renswyck; he has built such a thing often in our colonies, he tells me, and is quick to point out its uses. A secure camp, he says, is the first condition for the success of the whole enterprise.
‘Put a pair of soldiers up there day and night, in four watches of six hours. Should any man escape by day he can be fired upon. At night a man cannot go without a lantern; the meres will swallow him. Follow the light when a prisoner breaks out at night and you can get him back.’
Renswyck carries the point with Van Hooghten, and then orders the addition of two more watchtowers, one at each end of the stockade where it meets the river. Lanterns are set to burn at their tops all night. They swing in the breeze and throw shadows over the whole camp. Still not satisfied, Renswyck orders an embankment built beyond the path that runs around the stockade. Any man who slips out must now clamber up its earthen sides and slither down the back, where water collects in a ditch. That accomplished, a prisoner finds himself either straight into the treacherous meres and creeks, or in the makeshift town that has collected round the soldiers’ camp.
From the moment he builds his first watchtower, Renswyck takes on a kind of alertness. The camp begins to absorb him. Although he has little of this country’s language I see him often in the company of two soldiers, Captain Townley and Major Wade. If these two chafe to be off to the wars in Ireland they do not show it. At the camp they have their own world to command. In the morning they round up the work parties and hand out the spade and wooden bucket that each man carries with him to his place of labour. I pass Townley and Wade sometimes when I am in the camp and bow briefly in acknowledgement. They nod back but do not stop to talk. I am a man who holds nothing for them; it is Renswyck who captures whatever attention they have.
The camp is now well guarded, both on the land side and along the river, though the prisoners rarely hazard an escape on water. Few can swim. That skill is rare, and these men are mostly from the damp middle o
f the island of Ireland. Still, they are prepared to hazard a water escape. After a group untie one of the boats and slip across the river in it, Renswyck insists that all the boats be brought into the lee of the watchtowers and tied up there, so that they fan out like a pack of beagles on leashes, and bang against each other through the night.
A few prisoners do get away each week and make it to Lynn to creep aboard a boat leaving; but most are picked up from sheds and barns. No Englishman, it seems, loves an Irishman. They are returned to the camp with little ceremony. Some men disappear, swallowed by the meres. One step into the reeds, one slip in moonless darkness, and they are gone. Water closes over them.
The atmosphere in the camps is sullen. The prisoners work and the Company of Gentlemen Adventurers feeds them. Everyone expects that at the end of the hostilities the prisoners will go back to their country or be shipped to the colonies of the New World as indentured labour, a state little different from that they live in now. General Cromwell cares not where they go as long as they can never again fight against him.
A couple of months after the prisoners’ arrival Renswyck takes delivery of a cartload of boots and leather jerkins, part of a convoy that also brings embanking tools. One day in August we begin in earnest. We are arrived at the moment when the lines come off from the map I have drawn and stretch towards their destination across the ground. This is the time when an engineer, who has perforce been surveyor and map maker, too, becomes himself. This is when the new landscape that I have seen in my mind will begin to come into being.
On the first day of laying out the course I arrive early at its northern end and sit on my horse facing the sea. From the path by the Ouse I look down into the river and watch the force of the tide as it pushes up to meet the water that comes down. The two foes meet, and push up against one another, with no yield from either until one slides over, the other under, and they mingle together in eddies and waves. We will build the sluice at Denver to manage this daily combat and calm the flood.
The Great Level Page 10
