Nieuw Amsterdam.
The 24th day of April, 1664.
The sky overcast, wind from the east.
Squalls and showers.
High tide by the Stadt Huys at 8 o’clock in the morning.
Three weeks have passed since Hendrick came to my door with the note. For the first few days I stayed in my house or close by. Hope and apprehension, entwined together, stopped me leaving the Heere Gracht. But no one knocked, and little by little I have resumed my usual pursuits: my trips on the water and walks up beyond the wall; my measurements of the tides and wind, my observations and writings.
My heart, that jumped and shook, has quietened, though Nieuw Amsterdam has sharpened a little in outline, as if I saw it with new eyes or I was showing it to a visitor. One day, on the edge of the Oost Rivier, where unkempt ground meets the water and trees still rise from the marsh, I felt that I was not alone. The sun, low in the west, dazzled my eyes. I persuaded myself then that no one was there, or if someone, then one of the wildmen, who can wait and watch without cracking a twig or stirring the water. I walked on and forced myself into tranquillity. There is nothing I can do but wait, and go on as I have always done.
And so at the edge of the known world I write this my account, and add to it both some events of the day and a description of the place that I have come to. I fancy that painters of portraits, and the writers of poems, no less than men such as myself who measure and record the rivers or the tides, have the same desire. We all wish to bring order to the passing world, to stop the pulse of nature for a second and hold it up for all to see. Here, the portrait painter might say, is your beloved, or a great man, not as you will ever see them with your eye, but as if time was stopped and their features fixed. Thus I, too, record the height of the waters, though the waters do not, at the point of high tide, cease their movement, but turn at the very moment of their height, marvelously, in a way that we can never see. Why else record or paint, when all around us nature streams ceaselessly on?
I live on a crooked finger of ground that slides between two rivers and the sea. Some years ago I might have said that Our Lord, the first geographer, measured and laid it out with all its folds, its vantage points; making all the rivers and inland seas, the marshes and mountain ranges; the whole vastness of America. I would have said that he made this land in many layers, one atop another like the pages of a book to be worn and shaped by nature as he intended. These days I simply record what I see.
It is a hard land that we sit upon here. The sea with the wind in it is a rough beast. Already, since I arrived, it has overwhelmed us twice. This morning the prospect of snow hangs in the air, notwithstanding the lateness of the year. I have known it snow here the first day of May, and in the month of October too. And this despite the observable fact that this city lies near forty-one degrees north of the equinoctial line and shares its place on that latitude with the island of Sardinia in the Mediterranean Sea. It is a puzzle why one place should have weeks ago announced spring while here the winter teases us still. Some say it comes from the fact of the earth being not quite round, others from the continuity of this little island with the frozen northern wastes. This I cannot say, only assert that when I have asked the wildmen where the cold comes from or the heat, they laugh and give no opinion, but seldom mind the temperature of the air, frequently walking out half naked in the snow.
This is the worst of Nieuw Amsterdam; this and the close hot summers when mosquitoes swarm up from the flatlands, and hang in gray 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 practice 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 parlor 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 northwest 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 northwest 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 away from 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 with. This habit of wandering, it seems, was implanted in Adam and Eve, our first mother and father, who left their home to live amongst 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 parlor 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 color 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 forward 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 bladder wrack 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.