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 what is this place but a kind of colony inside a nation?
“Why do you, with experience of the West India Company, call this place a colony?” I ask.
“You can see that for yourself,” he says. “Men have outside, with a desire for land, have acquired this place and now turn it to a profit. There is a barbarous lot of people ’ere already, of course, who have no notion of improvement and do not want it. I’ve seen it before: a feeble contest that always ends with the defeat of the natives.
“Right now,” Renswick goes on, “our need is to secure the camps. That 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 labor. I pass Townley and Wade sometimes when I am in the camp and bow briefly in acknowledgment. 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 jump into it. Few can swim. That skill is rare, and these men are mostly from the damp middle of the island of Ireland. Still, some are prepared to hazard a water escape. After a group takes 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 labor, a state little different from that they live in now. General Cromwell cares not where they go as long as they can never fight him again.
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 mapmaker, 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 toward 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.
Van Hooghten rides up, and stops by a circle of carts piled with axes, ropes, saws, spades and bundles of wooden pegs I have had made in the camps in the last weeks. I take a deep breath of the mud-heavy air.
“Good morrow, Jacob. Now we start.”
“At last, yes.”
Behind him I can see Major Wade. He leads a line of prisoners, with Captain Townley at the rear.
“I am ready,” I say.
“I’m glad of it. You will see me often, though I must visit in turn all the works that are in train, here and to the west.” Van Hooghten leans over and puts a hand on my shoulder, then turns his horse away; and so we set to work, I to my part, he to his.
The path of the new river will be laid out with rope and pegs, following my plan through reeds and marsh, across the meres and streams. Everything along its route will be cut down. When the new cut is deeper than the existing river bed, water will collect in it and the meres start to drain. Thus we proceed layer by layer, the deepest cut left to the last, and build the high embankments for the new rivers and the old at the same time. Later we will cut divers smaller drainage channels to lead the water to its new outfalls. Lastly we will build the great sluice and its run-off channels. Windmills, as necessary at intervals, will lift standing water from the fields and carry it into the new rivers at times of heavy rain.
The prisoners cut clumps of alder and reeds and lay the stems and branches across the marshy places. Foot by foot they peg down the rope until the whole river course is stretched out across the land. Soon the washes between the rivers are a morass of mud, pitted, scarred and hardened in the summer heat. New grass struggles to push through; here and there a daisy flowers. In my mind’s eye I see a picture of the new landscape, its fields bordered by ditches, stretching away to the horizon. Cattle graze the pastures, and fields of shining grain ripple in the breeze. But this beauty I imagine is a long way off. Instead the landscape turns gray, thick with dust that rises from the churned-up land. The sun shines weakly through it.
Shouts and curses hang over the Level. The men from the towns around dislike working with the prisoners and many collect their wages and leave. The soldiers beat the prisoners with wooden sticks if they throw down their spades. After some weeks it is found expedient to tie one to another those prisoners who try to escape, both as an example to others and as the only way to be sure of them. Such men have then to work as one, lifting their spades and bringing them down together; otherwise the rope between them slackens by one man, tightens by another, and impedes them all.
Worse than the cries of the men and the commands of the soldiers are the times of silence, when the prisoners neither shout nor sing, but push their spades into the ground, lift the soil and throw it without a sound to where the embankment is building. Their acquiescence is tinged with a sullen acceptance of fate that I shrink from despite myself. The weakest prisoners fall ill with the ague that rises from the meres. Many become too sick to work and lie damp and feverish in their huts. Some die, and are buried by their fellows in accordance with their rites, though no priests are allowed them.
But this is not all that is askew. You are now also a part of myself and of the work here. For the first time in my life I have found my drawing, calculating, planning, and the beautiful execution of all, to be insufficient. I wish, also, to be close by you, to eat my dinner and spend my nights with you, to bring to you the best examples of my labor—a piece of land tilled and made productive, a straight and well-lined canal, its water making a picture with the sky above. When once it was enough to know that I worked in accordance with the will of God and to the satisfaction of my master and my family, I desire now to offer you all that I do. This I cannot, for the fact of having agreed to a measure of secrecy with Van Hooghten. Though the generality of our work here is known and the courses of the new rivers now plain, the exact sites of the sluices and outfalls are kept hidden. Van Hooghten reminds me of what happened in the late wars.
“We have no need to go into details with anyone, Jan. Mijnheer Vermuyden has that task, and we only the work of carrying out what is agreed.”
It occurs to me that Van Hooghten’s injunction need not apply to the generalities of the works or to the map we have made of the Great Level drowned, and this I show to you one evening, rolling out the paper on the floor of the little parlor in my lodging. Pride fills me when I look down on the map, where the slow curling rivers are shown with a line for each bank, while thinner lines enclose the large islands. The winter meres, which turn to pasture in the spring, are shown as marsh is on all our Dutch maps, with close-marked dashes. The thousand islands in the meres such as your people make are shown as dots and circles; the towns outlined and colored gray.
The words written upon the map you can now make out easily without the letters falling over one another, and it is the words and not the map itself that capture your attention. You go from one to another, from the towns to the rivers and the biggest islands which have their names written upon them.
Now that you read so well I encourage you to write yourself, and not just for the practice of it. I wish myself to read what you write and so learn, perhaps, something of what you do not say aloud.
“There is nothing for me to write, Jan,” you say when I make this suggestion one evening. Your eyes are full of their challenge.
“You might write a letter.”
“A letter such as you receive from the messengers?”
“Yes. Or from any other person who writes to me.”
“You suggest I write to a person?”
“Yes. Not a letter to send out, but as an exercise in writing.”
“Yet there is no need to write, Jan, since you are here beside me.”
“Write to another.”
“There is no person I can write to. I have no need of writing.”
“Then you may write for yourself.”
“What should I write for myself?”
“Many people have written the story of their life, or related some of their days, and you might do the same.”
This notion hangs in the air. You do not pluck it out, or talk of it again, though you go on with copying and making lists of words, which you add to one by one down the length of the paper I have given you. Strangely enough, it is I who seem to take up the suggestion of relating a story. While I stir the vegetables in the pot, and you sit at the table, I begin at last to unfold my closed self; to talk of the life I lived on Tholen and in Leiden, and soon, in a way vague enough to satisfy Van Hooghten, about the progress of the works.
One evening I describe the cut of the new river that runs straight and proud across the land, and the embankments along both the new and the old rivers.
“How does the embankment hold in the water?”
“By its strength. We build so high and wide, and so solid, that the water is constrained to flow between embankments when it rises.”
“Yet I know that water is stronger than anything.”
“Not if we build properly.”
“Does it ever happen that the embankment fails?”
I pause then, and remember my childhood. I know the force of water; I have seen it.
“Only if we build badly, and leave a weakness for the water to gnaw at. Then an embankment can fail.”
“Water works its own holes.”
“Only if we give it a start. A weakness that water pushes at. That is why my calculations must be correct.”
But my pleasure, though it grows when I talk of my work, has a darkening edge. It has come to me that for one world to be made, another must die. Now, as my vision begins to come into being, I am filled with sadness as well as joy. I have seen that this unimproved world has its own way of being which will be lost. It has, even, its own splendor. I determine to tell you this, but you have turned away and then it is too late, for joy has awoken in us and is roaring round now, and you come to me, very close so that I can feel it in you, and I lower my head and kiss you, and feel the thought as I do so that with you everything opens out as we gather one another in and then all thought is washed away.