The Great Level

by Stella Tillyard

  There has been a struggle between those newly settled and those who once lived here, who once owned this land. We who have arrived are already the victors. The natives are everywhere in decline and on the move. This is the way of the world that I have seen before. It is the operation of strength and skill and money, all of which the colonists possess in greater quantity than those who were content to let nature put a sufficiency in their hands. This I learned in another place and I applied the lesson to the New World; there is no more to be said of it.

  When the guests went away the Captain and I walked in the garden. James Maybrick, a slender man of more than forty years and curly-haired; myself by him, a woman of the same height. The Captain wore his soft boots. He took his ease, the strings of his white muslin shirt untied, his velvet breeches loosened. I liked to loop my right arm under his left, a silk shawl over my gown, my ankles neat beneath my skirts. I wore silk slippers with turned heels that the Captain especially liked. Behind the house the oaks begin their rise up the hill; in front the ground falls away to the river where the pinnace and rowboat lie in the boathouse.

  I doubled Captain Maybrick’s patrimony, and year by year his prosperity grew. He and I were happy together in our fashion, though no children were born to us. This lack saddened my husband, it seeming that he had a barren wife. He never gave up hope that we might have a child, being still young enough in years. I had that hope also, but learned to content myself with being fertile in ideas and in carrying them out. Bellevue stood proxy for our progeny. With purchase and drainage I enlarged it to an estate of two thousand acres. Had I been able to find more labour I should have bought more land. The Captain took more of the meadow for his garden until it became the wonder of the place.

  When Captain Maybrick died suddenly of a seizure in his forty-eighth year, I found myself a widow and the mistress of Bellevue. More than once the Captain talked of his own death and, upon my asking what his wishes might be, he answered that he preferred to be buried with his wife Damaris and near to his two sons. Whatever his wish had been I should have honoured it, the dead being not so much gone as all around us, wherever their souls may have taken flight.

  So when my husband died, I had my mistress’s headstone lifted out and the grave dug open. I saw her bones there, the winding sheet fallen away into the sandy soil, eaten by termites. The sight of my mistress’s white bones, arranged as if she slept, did not make me afraid. I greeted them and spoke also to her spirit, which I know to be in the air here, like a soft arm around my shoulder. I laid the Captain’s coffin next to her bones, added his name to hers on the stone and set it back into the sandy ground.

  After I had buried the Captain the visits of condolence began. Single men from miles around stopped to pay me a call, and, stooping over my hand to kiss it, turned their glances to the fittings of the house. They remarked upon the fineness of the situation and I agreed as to its beauty. Yet I took care to make it plain that I intended to observe the strictest mourning, and so I did the whole year after until now.

  Then it was that I took passage on a boat coming up here to New Amsterdam for I had business to transact, thinking once more of the expansion of my estate. And I have found much to interest me, besides the usual duties of commerce. This morning, out on the street to learn the source of the tumults here, I talked to a merchant just arrived from Santa Domingue. It is a fertile place, he says, and many crops may be grown there. In the middle of the island lies a great marsh that collects rainwater from the mountains. Here they grow rice in standing water and with great success. This we spoke of for some time, he having made a tour of these rice fields and seen the ease of cultivation. I have further invited him to visit Bellevue and explain to Mr Hawker how it might be done there.

  The thoughts of my return to Bellevue, and the Virginia colony, bring me to Mr Lee’s proposal. I have not replied to it, but my answer is a blunt one, and I do not wish to clothe it in sweet words. No, is the answer that I will give; no and never. These words must do; they must be enough to forestall any new approach. As to my reasons, I have already written that I have closed my heart enough to keep myself safe. And then, what have I been, until lately, but a possession? I have had no title to myself. I have been a part of men’s estate, a parcel of property, with no claim upon what I am or what I might be. From time immemorial this has been the case for women. That old country that the Captain mourned, how could I feel for it as he did? I could not, even if my station had been higher, because I am a woman. The country that he loved was not my possession, neither as a woman, nor as a person coming from the place I did.

  No country can be mine while I am a woman and the property of men. I have been a daughter, a servant and a wife. I have not had possession of myself. Only a widow such as I am, an inheritor, may feel that sense of ownership. And now I do feel it, and the freedom and joy of it. Bellevue is my plantation. It is mine in law and to improve, enjoy and bequeath as I wish. Whom I shall bequeath it to, I do not know, but I have many decades to make my choice. I know the value of my land, of all kinds of land here in this place where land is everything.

  There was a place that once I inhabited, though I did not own it. The loss I suffered was not of possession, but of use. I do not look back at it now, and feel no grief for it. If any person enquires where I am from I always reply that I am from Virginia. Such is the truth. In Virginia, in America, I arrived, and made myself as I wish to be.

  I shall never allow loss to befall me again. My land and my heart are my possessions, never to be relinquished until I die. Bellevue is my safety and my solidity. Owning it, and owning my own heart, I own myself and will never be the property of any man. Sometimes I sing for the joy of it, as I did here in New Amsterdam a few weeks ago, calf-deep in the water by the island’s edge.

  At Bellevue, by the river, the summer air is dense and the heat sits heavy. Snakes come up the riverbank and slide towards the house. At night the crickets rub their noisy legs together, and pause, and begin again. Bellevue, inside, smells of wood in the summer, when the floors grow warm and release the close presence of the woods that grow on the hills behind. To come into the house and feel the heat wrap around me, thick as an unwanted blanket; that is a mark of this new world. There at the water’s edge the night is alive, the velvet air is full of sound.

  No, I shall never marry again. If I need a person for my days or my nights I shall find one. I am content. I have no fear of this vastness, of the forests that stretch beyond the horizon, of the moths bigger than my hand, of my own tomb. Sometimes I lie awake at night and through the windows see the stars that shine and shine in the great dome of heaven, and feel a joy to be in this place. My soul takes flight over the lands we inhabit and the mountains we know. It travels into unknown spaces that are more huge than any we have imagined. It hovers there with the moon, and looks; it sees the unexplored wilderness in all its plenitude. America. My spirit feasts here. This is the fruitful place; this the fertile land.

  PART SIX

  Chapter 1

  Nieuw Amsterdam and New York.

  My house by the Heere Gracht.

  The 28th day of August to the 8th of September, 1664.

  Hot every day.

  Our Director-General, Pieter Stuyvesant, having been forced by his own citizens to hand over the city, Nieuw Amsterdam is dissolving. It will disappear and return, with the same streets but another name, New York. The British agree to stay on their boats at night; but one afternoon I see a pair of soldiers strolling past my house. They look about them with an air of possession already. In this way the handover approaches, but Nieuw Amsterdam seems not to notice or to care. The city lives its last days in the usual way; at work, and with gossip, brandy and tobacco in the evenings.

  Not wanting to idle through the time, and uneasy in crowds, I take a boat to Lange Eylandt and make my way to Quawanckwick. This place was inhabited by wildmen and is still known by the name of those people, though now in the possession of Oloff Van Cortlandt, a wealthy c
itizen who has called me there.

  Van Cortlandt has removed the fallen remains of the old dwelling place and built a clapboard farmhouse in its place. It stands square on a grass meadow surrounded by neat new fields. He now wishes to bring into use the expanse of marshland between his farm and the shore. This is Dutch work, a simple matter of drainage, dykes and windmills at intervals to take away the water that lies on the fields after rain and snowmelt. Yet I have let it hang about me in a way contrary to my usual habits. For the last three months I have been reluctant to go far from the city. I have been waiting, not as Nieuw Amsterdam now waits, with resignation or indifference, but with a hope that has lined my days with golden light. The note I received, a half-glimpse in the street and the sound of a song across the water, kept it alive; but its glimmer is no longer enough. Mijnheer Van Cortlandt is impatient, and I am here in answer to his summons.

  I find, when I begin my work, that I am settled by its familiar demands. I start by the shore, walking the tideline. I see where the water streams in rills across the sands and the places where the sea pushes vigorously inland up deep-scored creeks with sandy bottoms and muddy sides. The tide is out, the sun high and the sea is quiet. On the beach the departing waves have deposited sparkling undulations, silver arabesques curled across the sand. On the mud above the sand line the dry purple flowers of sea lavender rustle in the breeze. Flies and beetles, egrets knee deep in mud and black cormorants standing sentinel on outcrops: nature is busy at work.

  I stay several days in comfort at Van Cortlandt’s farm, and make a simple map of the place with which to draw up a plan of works. Perhaps I will leave a little more of the marsh in the plans than the containment of nature demands. I will preserve the edge, where the creeks begin to narrow, though it might with ease be turned to pasture. Here reeds grow in abundance, and shake their feathered heads.

  One evening I sit on the meadow and watch the sun sink red through the reed beds. The light fades and the wind drops. An interval of silence falls over the marsh. Everything is quiet and beautiful. Then, as darkness falls, night herons start their nocturnal song.

  There is no need to destroy all this. Oloff Van Cortlandt will never miss the extra guildern that cutting the reed beds will bring him. I will explain how sedge and reeds can halt the tide surge across his fields in the spring and break the fury of the wind. But the truth is that I wish it this way. It suits me now to let the unimproved land and the new cultivated land exist here together. Both are beautiful, and side by side will help one another.

  Two days later when I get back to Nieuw Amsterdam, the shadow that falls from the Fort onto the stones of Het Marckvelt is sharp in the morning. The time has come: there is no room for equivocation in the brightness, no merging of lines in mist or marsh. Under this sun, in this place now, everything is definite and defined. People have had to make a choice, one thing or the other; and the citizens have chosen England over the Company, a king over the republic. The choice, it is true, has been made in the presence of a gun, but still it is made. Commerce and convenience have swept away old loyalties. So now it is all over. The world has turned and new rulers hold sway over us.

  What is left to perform is the ceremony, the acknowledgement. The English soldiers stand in the sun, lined up and alert, with Colonel Nicolls at their head. Their weapons gleam clean and sharp. At a distance we citizens wait. The walls of Fort Amsterdam rise above us, slanted inwards. The mortar is crumbling. Valerian grows in the spaces between the red bricks. Taking a few steps back I can see the noses of the cannon that stand on the four corners. They point down, unmanned.

  After a few minutes Colonel Nicolls looks up and the crowd follows his gaze. I sense a shifting, a shuffle towards the English. Out of the rustle comes a murmur, the sound of acceptance. The Company flag, a ripple of blue, white and red, drops slowly down the flagpole and disappears. Drums roll inside the fortress and the great doors swing open. For a moment time seems suspended, then the drummers come, sounding the march; and then the standard-bearers with the flags of the Company. Then, at last, in the hush, two by two the men of the garrison cross the shadow of the gateway and step into the sunlight.

  Colonel Nicolls bows. His soldiers turn and bang their pikestaffs on the ground. Out onto the forecourt the Dutch march. Two by two they lay their swords on the ground, straighten up and swing left into Het Marckvelt. A Company ship, the Gideon, is waiting to take any soldiers and others who wish to go. Director-General Stuyvesant is holed up at the Great Bouwerie. He declines to leave, preferring to be a subject of King Charles like the rest of us.

  When the Company soldiers have rounded the corner out of sight, Nicolls turns towards all of us standing there. A trumpeter sounds a triumphant call and then Nicolls declares, speaking in the English language, that from this day the city will have a new name, given us by His Majesty in honour of his brother the Duke of York and Albany. Nieuw Amsterdam will become New York; Fort Orange in the north will be named Albany.

  In the crowd his words are passed along in Dutch by those who understand; people bend towards the news. There is a murmur, then silence as the trumpet sounds again. The English soldiers are moving into the Fort, their flags held high and drums rolling. They go two by two into the shade, until only the sentries are left by the open gates. A few minutes later the red and white of the English flag rises up and unfurls.

  That’s it. Something has come to an end; something else begun. We stand and look up at the flag. Its scarlet cross ripples out over the city. The crowds break up; people drift off to their labour, into their houses, back to the day. How easy it has been.

  I fall in with Mr Sharp who jokes that I am now a subject of the English King. Have I ever seen the King? he asks, though he knows I have not.

  ‘You resemble him,’ he says. ‘King Charles is a tall man, I’m told; swarthy and secretive like yourself.’

  I run along with the joke.

  ‘With the difference that I’m a Dutchman, still, Mr Sharp.’

  ‘Ah, so is he, perhaps; become one in The Hague.’

  He laughs and claps me on the shoulder, a way of telling me who governs here now, though being from New England he has no love for the King, only amusement in so far as it will help a joke. For myself it matters little. Am I a Dutchman still? In truth I do not think so. I am just a man, no more changed inside than the stream that runs beneath the wall at the top of the city, flowing one moment under Manatus Eylandt, the next under Nieuw Amsterdam or New York as it now is named. That stream has a Dutch name, and will soon have an English one. The water in it has the same composition. Besides, the wildmen have another name for it, a name that few of the citizens of this town will ever know.

  In the ground one kind of plant grows next to another. They jostle for space but push their roots down together in the soil. Columbine curls round the straight grass stem; one flowers in spring, the other in the summer. I have watched bees on hot summer days. They do not live in one hive, but many, and fly from portal to portal laden with pollen.

  Then, that wall; what good did it do in the end? The Company built it to keep the wildmen from our city. Soldiers patrolled its length in pairs, looking north for danger. But danger came from a power too far away to be seen. The English arrived by ship and sailed to Lange Eylandt, advancing on us from the east. The wall did not save us; we looked in the wrong place. The wildmen are so little a menace. We made a story that did not fit the turn of history and so were unprepared.

  Sometimes history leaves us forms, conceived in the imagination of man, that are wonders. Such are the figures on my hearth, left in the mud and brought across the sea. They seem as emissaries from one world to another, yet I know not what message they carry, only that the world that made them is no more. Such history as they tell is not what chroniclers write, of nations past or the spreading fame of men, but is the history of all things, of the whole earth as it heaves and wrinkles down the ages. It is all the lives of women and men that seem long gone and mingled with the sk
y, yet still remain around us. The people who made these forms may be forgotten, but still once lived, and now add to the strangeness of the world.

  Every day I look at the figures, and the mystery they hold inside themselves, and know that though so much is unclear to me, yet everything beneath and beyond the heavens happens according to nature’s laws. The English boast of uniting all their possessions in one line from New England down to Carolina, but under the surface everything is already joined. Beneath the rivers and streams lies the clay bed, and under that the old hard rock. Who knows how far the deep rock stretches; under the sea, all the way to the old world, and, further south, to Africa.

  West India Company map makers of my acquaintance, indeed the great Hessel Gerritsz himself, who have surveyed and drawn the wild coasts of Africa and our colonies of Suriname and the south, say that the curved shore of Brazil that finds its easternmost point at Cape Augustine fits snugly into the indent of the coast of Africa. The two lands, they say, must therefore have been broken apart by some great unknown force. It may be that the wildmen and the men of Maroc are thus one and the same people, though of distinct language and custom.

  This notion pleases me, that the two lands once fit to one another as a baby to its mother’s breast, and that one moved away from the other, as a child learns to do without its mother. If the lands were joined, so must have been the people. The same earth fashioned us, and once, perhaps, we all stood side by side. Understanding this notion is not difficult, yet everywhere I see men set themselves one against another. Whether this is the result of ignorance or desire I cannot determine. I am a man who witnesses and records. So I conceive my purpose here, and the small conclusions that I have made from this my life are enough, though many men will make note of how little I have accrued to myself: neither estate, nor family, nor worldly office of any kind. My understanding, in all these years, has come to this: the whole universe just is. It just is.