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 is 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 peddlers, 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 hangs a dry bunch of herbs. 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.
Then, a few days ago, great flocks of geese were driven in from the islands to be plucked by the townswomen whose employment this is. I watched a woman at her task, the goose trapped neck first between her chapped calves. In a few minutes she pulled out its feathers, working both sides of the bird from breast to tail, and then released it, pink and naked, leaving by her feet a pile of feather and down. The bloody tail feathers are cleaned, cut and sold for quills. The lightest down plumps up pillows and mattresses. All day the air is filled with feather fragments that float through the narrow streets and settle on my clothes. Five times a year, I am told, the geese are brought to be plucked, five times returned to their island homes.
The people of Ely Isle like to stay upon their upland. They mistrust outsiders, not just foreigners such as I am, but all those from other places, especially their neighbors, the fensmen, who live out on the meres, and come to Ely only to trade. Though they are close as to miles, the fensmen are spoken of with lowered voices. I have seen townspeople cross themselves in the manner of the old religion when the fensmen pass. Witches are said to be common amongst them, and many, I heard an old man say, still practice the pagan religion that long ago held sway across these islands. Upon my enquiring what this might be, he said that the fensmen make offerings to pagan gods, and declared that no traveler who wishes to return ventures into that treacherous place. Wraiths and spirits live out on the meres also, he added. At night their fires burn and the fensmen pass through them without harm.
The world beyond the Great Level arrives slowly, carried by chapmen who hawk their goods in the streets and bring sheets of printed paper with the news. London news is also told abroad by the carters who go back and forth with eels, goose down and quills. London, I am told by one of them, is a place of felons and dissolute persons. War is again in the air, the struggle between the royal cause and those who want no king. Ireland declares for kings, and the old religion, and rebels against the republic. One day, as I walk up Fore Hill towards the cathedral, I chance on a detachment of soldiers fifty strong on horseback.
The sound of hooves on the flagstones rings loud off the sides of the buildings. A thickset man rides at the head of the group. His long leather coat is spotted with grease and a heavy helmet jogs his knee. I stand in the entrance to a mean shop and measure him with my eyes. He is of middle height and age. With little presence on a horse, he slouches in the saddle and holds his head poorly. He has no air of either modesty or grandeur. Sparse gray hair falls about his shoulders, through which his scalp is pink and visible. Even from a distance I see that he has a growth between his chin and lip that draws the eye to it as to a sore, and others over his lips and brows.
I turn to a native of the place who stands by me.
“Sir, do you know this man?”
“What is it to you?” he asks and considers me keenly, as if I might be the agent of a foreign power. Though I know myself to be a stranger here, it is unpleasant to be brought up close to the disdain of one man for another, where war begins, and might begin at any time.
A young man turns to me as if to suggest without words an acceptance of my presence in this place, and says with kindness in his voice, “It is General Cromwell, come to raise troops for new wars abroad. He once lived here, in St. Mary’s Street, so I know the look of him, though not every man does, or wishes to.”
So this is General Cromwell, who commands the army and was principal amongst those who killed the King. Many here were his supporters; but war has dulled their admiration and their joy at victory. Few run forward to thank him, or kiss his hand. No one cheers or presses close to his horse. General Cromwell does not have a face to love, or even a face to be afraid of.
The horsemen halt at the cathedral door and several foot soldiers come up. A table is called for and set on trestles. Cromwell does not dismount, but carries on towards his old house. Like the man of property he is, he has come to make sure it is in order before he leaves these shores.
Though at first reluctant, a few young men now begin to press up to the table. The harsh weather of the last winter has taken its toll. Food is scarce and most of those who push forward look ragged and poor. I watch one of them, urged on by his companions. As he approaches the table he stands up a little straighter, throws back his shoulders and tips up his chin. Looking at him, I see myself, two months before, advancing in that London room towards Mr. Vermuyden, my maps and drawings in one hand.
The boy signs, and is gestured to one side. Others come up. One man jumps down from a passing cart and approaches, as if possessed of a sudden whim to leave his life and take another without a thought. The helmets of the soldiers glint behind the trestle; the horses sweat in the summer heat and stamp on the cobbles. They dip their heads and flick their tails to drive away the gathering flies. Swords poke out from the soldiers’ long leather coats. The sight excites those who are watching.
Someone shouts for General Cromwell, and more men press forward. Even I, a Dutchman with no notion of the past histories of these islands, feel that what has brought them here, besides hunger, is more than the hatreds that fester from the last wars and now burst out again. In this ruined place people long for something to happen. Men are restless creatures, and tire of standing at street corners, hungry and casting about for work. They chafe at inactivity. The horses, the arrival of General Cromwell, a sense of the danger that is to come: all this stirs the crowd like a sudden squall over a field of corn.
A young man, little more than a child, breaks out of a group, approaches the table and leans over it. A soldier holds out an old quill, but the boy seems to turn away. Then, right there, one of the soldiers comes up, pulls his hands behind his back, pushes his head down and marches him off. Though the boy screams and calls out no one runs forward to help, and I stand there, immobile like the rest.
I look round, but General Cromwell has not returned. The men next to me have already gone. Quickly, the whole crowd breaks up and disperses. I walk away not wanting to encounter a soldier. This is how an army is built, how young men go unsuspecting to war; and the people of this town, after years of fighting, do nothing to stop it.
Later, Van Hooghten, who has been here long enough to know, tells me that many are turning against Parliament. People are sullen. They do not speak out, but look to their own safety. Under the cloak of darkness rich men flee, he says, some to the colonies of Virginia and Maryland, where the planters wish to proclaim Prince Charles their king.
The Prince has got clean away to The Hague, and waits for destiny to pick him out. His court grows daily. In ones and twos men of ambition loyal to the late King arrive there, and bring money, which they lend to the Prince in the hope of future reward. It is said this court is a racketing place, built upon all possible licentiousness. The more such tales are told here, the more the Dutch are reviled by sober men. Van Hooghten’s demand for vigilance now begins to gather sense. We are doubly spied on and disliked, as improvers and as Dutchmen. I am the most careful of men, yet our purpose is now well known. Worse than this, I believe that my traveling box, which contains my instruments and contracts, is opened when I am out. The woman Suckling denies it, the girl who works for her being, she affirms, a drudge who would never give herself the trouble of disturbing a gentleman’s effects. I do not believe her, say nothing and plan to move my lodging as soon as I can find another. We continue our conversations in the evening and I begin to feel the words of the language separate from the general noise and sound one after another plain and clear.
As knowledge of our work gets out, some dozen of the Ely Islanders come forward to offer us their services. Some say they know the meres, others that they worked on the embankments that were destroyed and so can be useful to us. Van Hooghten refuses every offer. None of the people native to this place are to be trusted, he says, as their conduct in the late war plainly shows. Discretion demands that we find our workmen from outside.
When at last we have the men we need, come from Holland and skilled in the arts of triangulation and drawing, it is past midsummer. The days henceforward are shorter and the tides higher. We must quickly map the islands and the watercourses before the rains come and the summer landscape sinks underwater.
I take great pleasure in making maps and charts and know that the creator himself is my guide. When he created the earth, it was without form and covered all over with water, just as this land is in winter. On the second day of the world, he made the firmament that is heaven, and divided the waters with it, so that half the water lay under the firmament and half whirled beyond. It is beautiful to know that, drawn on a map, nature takes the shape and outline that only heaven sees. When he makes a map, a geographer lifts the surface of the earth, as an anatomist might lift the skin off a skull, and pegs it out flat. It gives me joy to think that I will do it.