Call Upon the Water

by Stella Tillyard

  From here, this bright morning in Nieuw Amsterdam fifteen years after that first day, I can see that life does not proceed as we were taught at school, that from the first day of the creation of the world, one day follows another; the past and our history pile up as if we have laid one sheet of paper upon another until the last page. That is what I believed: that time nibbles away at the future, and in that moment puts the present behind its back. The past retreats as each present moment joins it, on and on.

  Yet that is far too simple. Inside us, time sways backwards and forwards from now to then, here to there, and nothing of it is lost or goes away, but it all hangs everywhere, translucent in the air. Some men turn away, and walk on, saying that the past contains only their former selves and ghosts of people and deeds. Others, like myself, live every day with it. One minute I am in Nieuw Amsterdam, the next pulled on a string into the other time that comes with me, so that here on the Heere Gracht, or as I walk across the marketplace, you and I talk. I may pause to greet an acquaintance, and then we go on with our talk, so that I see this place but also that other, and you are both here and there.

  For twelve years I have kept you alive beside me. I have heard your voice, touched your skin. Then came the song and the note that lies on the table in my garret; two such ordinary events that have often, surely, slipped past with the day and gone unnoticed. This time sound and hope jostled in me for weeks. I thought I caught sight of you once, in the crowd on Het Marckvelt, tall and bareheaded as you always were. Now hope has subsided, and left me by myself.

  It is not the first time. Over the years I have sometimes found myself alone, without your voice. Then it seems that loss tunnels holes inside me. I feel loss exactly; it is displacement, not death. To strangers I appear solid and upright, the tall engineer they have come to know in this place. “It’s Jan Brunt,” they say one to another. “A useful man, honest with his prices, careful to execute commissions well.” And to be sure, I am to them no other, though they shun me in the tavern if they want only light conversation. Jan Brunt, engineer, residing for a dozen years now by the Heere Gracht at number 12. They can pull my doorbell any time and as like as not find me at home, upstairs in my garret, or by the fire in the parlor in winter. Yet when I cannot reach you, I know myself to be a man unmade from within. Then, after some days, or in an instant, you return. The world opens again, and in my garden a ladybird shines scarlet in the sun, placing its crooked legs with care across a leaf.

  This morning I have paddled my canoe to the tip of Manatus Eylandt. I am sheltering in the lee of the wharf that faces onto the Stadt Huys, the paddle across my knees. The brisk wind carries a tang of Atlantic salt and seaweed. Around me several ships ride at anchor. From the stern of a West India Company merchantman glass windows glitter and wink, and the Company’s flag ripples above them, striped in blue, white and red. Beside it are anchored three ships from the English colonies. One has hoisted the Red Ensign, in obedience to the English King, but the other two fly that flag without the cross of St. George, in open rebellion to the restored monarch.

  When I come here, I like to let my canoe drift up to one of these great ships as they shift on their anchor chains. It is a dangerous pastime, and draws shouts from the men aboard, who take me for a wildman or lunatic. As I bump against the oak belly of a merchantman, I hear the whole boat groan, and though I have no wish to take another voyage further than my profession demands, my heart lightens with possibility at the sound. If I took passage for Boston and then headed north towards the ice, or went south and continued on past Recife towards the end of the American continent, I might find wonders.

  I glide round the ships and into the shelter of the harbor wall. Here the world is loud with noise. On Stadt Huys Laan a baby pulls at his mother’s breast. He snorts softly as he drinks and his throat clicks as it opens and closes. His mother settles herself and rocks him to sleep, and her chair creaks on the oak floorboards. Over on Het Marckvelt the steady tap of a cane suddenly stops. That’s Tonis Jansens, a full-blown man given to the gout and a limp. Like as not he has run into his friend Peter Wand and now leans on his stick to pass the time of day. Peter Wand sucks his teeth in sympathy when Tonis Jansens complains of the high price of beaver pelts this year. By way of saying goodbye, Jansens raises his hand to show a fist full of carnations he has just bought for his wife Johanna. The flowers are warm with sunlight and rustle like paper as he lifts them.

  Through the hum of voices and the clink of change in the marketplace comes the thud of a hammer. North along Heere Straet, new houses rise, with fine crow gables and birch-wood cladding. This is the very edge of the town. On an empty lot, summer flowers have planted themselves in the cleared ground. A purple vetch straggles over the sandy soil. How tenacious it is, undeterred by lumps and stones in its way. Bees advance towards its flowers and the plant leans towards the bees when it catches their hum, so the pollen can make the leap from the flower throat right into the open collecting pouches.

  In the morning stillness these sounds drift over the water and curl round the rigging of the Prinz Willem, the slender hull of the Leopard, just in from Antwerp, and the Salamander and the Patience, run down from Boston. The ships from the north, like these two, are ever more numerous and bring trade and English goods to this place. A Dutch ship like the Prinz Willem is a rarer sight. Many say that Nieuw Nederland has been left to fend for itself in these last years, and that our English neighbors increase in numbers far faster than do the colonists here.

  Yesterday I shared an evening pipe with William Sharp, an English trader who comes and goes from Massachusetts Bay. Sharp is a short, wiry man of discernment and well worth an hour’s conversation. He drinks my coffee sitting by the unlit stove in my garret, where I have opened both windows to tempt a breeze. He asks me why it is that our Company governors care so little for the colony. I answer that I cannot say, not being privy to the thinking in Amsterdam. Perhaps, I add, the Spice Islands in the east that ooze easy profits now engross speculators instead, whereas this hard spot, this little worm of an island, is scarce worth the trouble.

  “Indeed. It is barely defended,” he says, and raises his eyebrows.

  “The Company maintains the Fort and battery.”

  “Your fort, Mr. Brunt, will deter no one. Where is your militia?”

  He laughs and adds that the doors of the Fort were wide open when he passed it earlier in the day. Boys ran in and out, and not a soldier in sight.

  “Nothing seems in order here.”

  “Herr Stuyvesant, our director-general, is most at his ease when he quarrels, and quarrel he does, with the Company as much as with us in the city. So things come to a halt.”

  “Meanwhile, you are in grave danger of being overrun, Mr. Brunt,” Mr. Sharp says, “and not because Director-General Stuyvesant is a difficult and hot-tempered man. You must reckon with greater things.”

  “What greater things can there be, Mr. Sharp, than the pastimes of boys, and where better place to play than a fort that lies wide open?”

  He taps my knee with the tip of his pipe, his hand curled round the bowl.

  “Governor Winthrop some weeks ago declared that the King now grants him rule not only of the new Connecticut colony, but all the land between that place and Virginia.”

  “Indeed so, sir.”

  Scorn crosses Mr. Sharp’s face, as if I have shown too little interest in his news.

  “Do you know anything of the customs of the English?”

  “Not so much, Mr. Sharp.”

  “Neither us up in New England, nor those wretches who still hanker after the old world in the south?”

  “I care nothing for the quarrels that you English have brought to the New World.”

  “You have never been in England?”

  “Never.”

  I do not like to find myself in deceit, and hope to stop the conversation there. I do not wish that any man or woman should know my history, or pass it round like a dish of meat upon a plate.
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  “Yet you speak the language with ease.”

  “I have learned your language doing business for Englishmen.”

  “Drainage business?”

  “Indeed, sir. There is profit in buying marsh and conjuring a farm from it. That is what I have been able to do for your countrymen as well as my own.”

  “Very good, sir; there’s no end to my countrymen in these days.”

  “Indeed, Mr. Sharp, and I collect new forms of language from them. I am a curious man.”

  “That is indeed true, Mr. Brunt. I notice you have the habits of an antiquary.”

  With this he gets up and begins to cast his eyes round the bare walls of my garret.

  “No portraits or landscapes,” Mr. Sharp remarks, with his back turned from me. “None of the pictures so common in the houses here. No pretty women or cheerful taverns.”

  It is indeed the custom amongst the Dutch to crowd their walls with pictures of people; husband and wife in their separate frames, family groups with children sitting round their parents and dogs weaving in and out. No end of people, and landscapes too, that make crowded Holland much bigger than it is.

  Though we are a practical people we are also gripped by the imaginary scenes our painters make for us. Fantastic pools and waterfalls, which flat Holland can never boast, cool us in the heat of summer. We love maps, because in them the ocean is everywhere fixed to our walls and ships speed us to strange new shores where waves scour great rocks and palms stand over silver sands. No wonder many of us have thirty, forty pictures to a room.

  Why do I have no pictures? people ask. It hurts them to see my walls so bare and speechless. I shrug and smile. Perhaps I am not a Dutchman anymore, I say. But the truth is that my mind teems with pictures. Without even shutting my eyes, I see landscapes. People, sounds and scenes flash past. I can walk into any one of them and find myself in another world, twenty years ago, yesterday, or today, its colors vivid, its sounds alive.

  Pictures do not help me remember. Those few I had I left behind willingly in Amsterdam. A painting fixes a person or a place, freezes them in a moment. Life is trapped. Even you; beyond a few small drawings that run down the margins of sheets of paper filled with calculations, I have no portrait of you. I do not wish for you captured and framed. I want you alive.

  This is what I am thinking as Mr. Sharp starts on my collections, going from one thing to another and returning at last to the hearth by the stove where the two goddesses stand. Now I become uneasy. I am accustomed to Lysbet and her duster, but otherwise wish my goddesses undisturbed.

  Luckily Mr. Sharp soon loses interest, sits down and returns to his theme.

  “Mr. Brunt, you need to look amongst your own acquaintance to take the temper of the times. Look to Mr. Miller, who buys house after house here, or Mr. Peabody who now owns half the ships that go between Nieuw Amsterdam and the New England ports.”

  This indeed I heard, I say, but it is not a matter for me but for the English.

  “Wake up, Mr. Brunt. Events move at a great pace. Governor Winthrop is already overtaken. In Boston the news is that King Charles has thought better of his last gift, and has revoked it in favor of his own brother, the Duke of York. He now decrees that all the land from Maine to Delaware is granted to his brother, and names especially the Noort Rivier, that they call the Hudson.”

  Mr. Sharp eyes me again, and says as he gets up to leave, “To include this city, Mr. Brunt.”

  Rumors run along streets and round corners; then trickle away. After a few days Nieuw Amsterdam settles back into itself. Now heat lies on Manatus Eylandt, thick and insect-filled. Men loll in the shade. Work and chatter slows. The sun sucks up steadiness and endeavor. We battle summer.

  Then Lysbet tells me there is digging and piling at the top of the street here. A makeshift embankment is rising. I walk up by the canal and find plump Martin Robben, who prefers a spoon to a shovel, throwing sandy earth up the slope. Ezra, a freed slave, labors next to him; and with them a ragged bunch of men from the wharfs.

  “We need to add another ring of defense,” Robben says. “Colonel Schuyler’s orders.”

  The city is stirring, woken from torpor by the English King’s decree. Muskets will glitter at the top of the new embankment, pointing north. If the first wall fails, the fight will come to my door. Walking home, I pass the quiet houses along the Heere Gracht, shuttered against the sun.

  Minutes later, a knock at my door. Philip Schuyler, once colonel of the garrison, stands there. His gray beard glistens with sweat.

  “Mijnheer Brunt, goedemorgen.”

  I bow. Schuyler is a hotheaded man I only pass the time of day with.

  “You have heard that the English King now declares Nieuw Nederland to belong to his brother?”

  “Yes, indeed, sir, some days ago, from the furrier Sharp.”

  “Director-General Stuyvesant being away, I have ordered our defenses strengthened. On behalf of the Company and citizens I ask you to check the embankment.”

  “I have just been there, colonel. It looks in order. You can carry on.”

  I close the door to him and take slow steps to the garret. The goddesses stare at me, one through slitted eyes, the other through pinholes. Apprehension comes over me, the gray feel of London long ago and the city full of ghosts. I ask myself how much it matters which power, on the far side of the world, takes it upon itself to be our master. Looking from my window along the Heere Gracht I see through it to a picture of St. Paul’s cathedral, wrecked and gaping, and fear that war being brought to this place.

  With the new embankment up, fear of the English is set aside. Now rage at the West India Company sweeps through the city. Where is Director-General Stuyvesant when he is needed? Not here: he’s gone to Fort Orange, a week’s sail upriver, and taken most of the garrison with him. The winds of talk shift and veer. More news arrives from Boston. A squadron of warships has put in there with orders that the colonies of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut now place themselves under the sovereignty of the King. Just as Mr. Sharp said, King Charles declares his intention to subdue all of Nieuw Nederland, join it to the English colonies and to bring the whole of the settled area of this place under the English Crown. What belonged to the West India Company will now belong to him.

  It seems to me impossible: to own a mountain or claim a river with a flourish of the royal hand. The ambitious spirit of the English has indeed begun to run fast round the world. More than this small city, the English settlers have always wanted the land. Mountains, marshes, acres, estates, plantations, woods and forests, the rivers that run through. They want the land, and with it the beavers, the bees, the healing plants, and the careful shy deer. They want to own every living thing in this new place and still it might not be enough.

  This thirst for possession is furtive amongst the colonists in the north, who pretend to a pure feeling for God and declare they make a paradise in his name. It breaks out more easily in Maryland and Virginia. The first men from these southern colonies I met in the way of business were taut and bitter with loss. The burning ashes of defeat came with them to the New World. The bitter fire glowed under their new lives. Nothing, not even wealth, could put it out.

  I remember one such smoldering man who came to see me some years ago: Captain Maybrick, a landowner in England and formerly of His Majesty King Charles’s army, as he told me; now a planter near the Chesapeake. Maybrick had enquired in the city for an engineer and been directed to me. The destruction of his English estate during the late wars still pained him, he said, and with the King dead he was unable to return. General Cromwell was sending over plenty of troublesome Irish; he had fresh labor and was resolved to use it.

  “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 might give me a return for my money.”

  We sat in the Ship Tavern, an inn much favored 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?”