Cast Off (28 page)

Bram and I were alone in the vast Indian Ocean.

I cracked open my eyes. The raft was still rocking, but the boards was soft and lumpy, and the masts'd grown leaves.

Leaves?

Not the ocean then. Or the
Lion
. Something else. Somewhere else. Overhead, three trees, not three masts. The biggest trees I'd ever seen, maybe a hundred feet tall.

No, not three trees. Just one. A man's length from the ground, they fed into one thick trunk, bigger around than my granny's house.

That tree must've been growing for a thousand years.

I was too stoved up to sit, so I stayed where I was, looking at the tree but seeing the ocean, the
Lion,
Petra.

Petra.

She lay on the beach next to me. Asleep, not dead. I knew she was alive because I still had a grip on her wrist, and she mine, and I could feel her pulse.

I tried to let go. Nothing doing. Though even if I could pry my fingers off her flesh, I expected they'd stay curled like claws forever, because nothing would ever matter more than holding on. Didn't matter how cold the water was or how hot the sun, or how hungry or thirsty I was, or how many sharks circled us.

Nothing would ever matter more than holding fast to Petra's wrist.

I listened to the waves wash the shore. How long was we adrift? Two days? Three?

Hang on . . . was I dead?

No. I was too sore and thirsty to be in heaven and not sore and thirsty enough to be in hell.

We'd paddled for a while, and then, when we ran out of strength, we let the current carry us. We hardly spoke, 'cept every now and again to keep Petra's spirits up I'd say something like, “I bet we find land before nightfall,” or to keep mine up, she'd say, “At least our clothes will be clean after this.” The first night we sang songs in the dark to keep from being scared. Every shanty we knew, songs our mothers taught us, and songs we made up. Like this one: “A boy and a girl set sail on a lark; they sailed in the day and they sailed in the dark; they hoped they'd not get eaten by a shark; oh, where's that Noah with his great big ark; what's that I see, hoay there, hark! Hell's bells, it's a . . .” Then we pretended to choke and die.

Singing helped until the second day, when our throats was so parched we could hardly make a sound. With no hat, Petra's skin was burnt crisp by midmorning. I offered her my shirt for cover, but she was too pigheaded to take it.

When the sharks found us, 'twas no less than what we expected. Me and Petra shifted nearer each other and pressed our foreheads together. We curled our legs out of the water and waited.

“It'll be quick,” I said.

“It was bound to happen one way or another,” she said.

But more fins came, bigger ones on shiny backs. The dolphins chased the sharks away. Then they showed off for us, one crew jumping and diving while another crew pushed the raft. Petra and me, we screamed for joy, dry throats be damned. The rush of the water and the panting of the dolphins through their blowholes was better than any music.

Around nightfall, the dolphins swam off, and we was alone and adrift again. That was the bleakest time of all. Cold, burnt, parched, and hopeless, I cried with my face turned so Petra wouldn't see me. When the tears ran out, I fought off pictures in my head of bloody decks and angry faces 'til sleep took me and I saw worse in my nightmares.

“That's the tallest tree I've ever seen.”

Petra was awake and staring up, eyes swollen in her blistered face, brows and lashes bleached near white, lips cracked and oozing.

“And the widest,” I agreed.

“Are we dead?”

“Don't think so.”

“No, I don't think so either.”

We watched the leaves shift in the light breeze.

“Any idea where?” she asked.

“None at all.”

“Nor I.”

The bark was smooth and shiny. Silver.

“Are you thirsty?” Petra coughed weakly.

“Just a bit.”

Our throats was too dry to laugh. Using one hand each, we pushed ourselves up to sit and then stared at our wrists.

“Guess we don't need to hold on anymore,” I said.

We tried to let go, but our fingers wouldn't move. Finally Petra wrapped her free hand around my frozen one.

“This will hurt.”

I set my teeth. She tried to be gentle, but even so 'twas like breaking bone. When Petra'd made a little space, she went to work on her own hand, prying open her fingers just enough so's we could slip apart.

“Ready to go find some water?” I asked, rubbing my knuckles.

Petra nodded. If she was like me, it hurt to talk.

We'd washed up on a beach. White powder sand, a calm blue sea. Sea grass lined the shore maybe twenty yards from the water line. Beyond the grass was dense jungle. A ways away a mountain puffed up clouds of gray smoke.

We stumbled away from the shore and into the trees, swaying like people who'd been too long on the water with too little to eat. 'Twas plenty warm out, so I couldn't understand why I was shivering. Petra was shivering too. She caught me looking at her. “An excess of cold moist humors causes body tremors. We were overlong in the water.”

I grunted in answer.

“I don't know how to find fresh water,” she said.

“Look for animal tracks. Follow birds.”

I went ahead, but my legs wouldn't hold me. I staggered and grabbed hold of a vine.

“Are you all right?”

I steadied myself and forced a smile. “Just need to get my land legs.”

We wobbled in a general direction away from the beach, stopping every so often for me to check a broken twig or a chewed leaf. Long vines twisted around tree trunks like wads of brown paper wrung out and left to dry. Little pink flowers trailed over moss beds and waxy white ones hung from trees.

Before long we found a big rock with puddles of rainwater on its face. Without shame we leaned in, one to a puddle, and lapped up the water like dogs. When we'd drunk it all, we slid onto the ground and rested our backs against the rock.

“That's a start,” I said.

“We'll rest just a moment and then go find more,” Petra said.

But we rested longer than a moment. We woke hours later, when the sky that'd been cloudless all morning dumped barrels of rain on us. We turned up our faces and stretched out our arms and let the water pour down our throats and wash away the salt. Swift as it started, the rain stopped and the sky brightened up like nothing had happened.

“Look,” Petra said.

“What?”

“We're still wearing them.”

Of all things, my belt was still on me—with most of the tools still in it. Petra had on her medicine belt too, and her short knife. I checked my jacket pocket. De Ridder's letter was there, dry in its wrappings.

“Sink me,”
I said.

We set off again, a little steadier now, and found a stream with good fresh water. We took our time sipping.

I stood and stretched my back, while Petra sat on a rock with her face tipped to the sky. There was no sign of life anywhere except for us and the birds.

“That's better,” I said.

“Hmm.”

“Miss Petra?”

“Hmm?”

“What d'you suppose we should do now?”

She sighed and pushed herself up to stand. “You're right, of course. We should get started gathering food and firewood and building a shelter while we wait for a ship to pick us up.”

I squinted at the sun winking off dark green leaves and smelled all those little white flowers.

“Or?” I said.

“Or?” she said.

“Or maybe we don't wait for a ship to pick us up,” I said. “Maybe we stay here awhile.”

We both thought about that. Pictured us two here on this island. Not a mixed-race boy and a lone girl, but just us. Bram and Petra.

“There'd be plenty of fish for eating,” I said.

“Coconuts too,” Petra said, seeing it with me, “and likely more fruits as well.”

“Palm leaves would make for a good thatch roof, and with the tools I got left, I could build us something like a house. Or at least a lean-to. And when we got a fire going and our shelter built—”

“And some food stored—”

“What then, Miss Petra? Think of it!”

What then?

Author's Note

There's a well-known adage that you should write what you know. I'd like to add a corollary: It's okay to write what you don't know; just make sure you do a lot of research.

A lot
of research.

I had this great idea for a book about two kids who sail from Amsterdam to the East Indies in the seventeenth century. My only problem was that all I knew about the seventeenth century was that it was the same thing as the 1600s. Also, I was unclear about the whole Holland versus Netherlands thing. And I was rusty on humoral theory.

No matter. I like a challenge. I researched for a full year before I started writing, and after I started writing, I kept researching. I'm still researching. (I like researching.)

Today my
Cast Off
file has almost four hundred different source notes (for a selected bibliography, please visit my website, www.eveyohalem.com). I read lots of books: scholarly academic stuff, journalistic stuff, fiction, memoirs, journals, every first-person account I could find. I spoke to people who knew much more than I—VOC scholars, maritime scholars, curators, my husband (he sails), surgeons, and dentists. I hung out in oddball museums. I traveled to Indonesia, where I slept in the jungle and held baby orangutans, and to the Netherlands, where I retraced every step of Petra's that I could and explored the dark nooks of two different full-scale East Indiamen replicas.

(For the record, I'm a terrible sailor. My husband has tried hard to teach me, but every time he starts to talk about wind and heading up or heading down, I get tired. But I've spent a fair amount of time on boats, and there was this one night a long time ago where I clung to the jib of a thirty-foot sailboat, searching for an unfamiliar harbor in a teeming rainstorm. For the purposes of this novel, I extrapolated.)

I have no research training. It would have helped if I'd majored in history in college, but I didn't. Mostly, I followed my nose. I knew that my story would begin in Amsterdam and take place mostly at sea on an East Indiaman bound for Batavia. I knew two of my characters: a Dutch girl and an East Indian boy, both twelve years old. That's a lot to get started with.

What's surgery like by candlelight below deck on a rocking ship before the invention of anesthesia? How do you fire a four-thousand-pound cannon without getting crushed by the recoil? These were the kinds of questions I tried to answer.

Details about housekeeping, clothing, décor, Dutch fastidiousness (fanatical about their homes, not so much about their bodies), food, and medicine are all authentic. Whether the streets were brick or dirt, the ten p.m. curfew—all true in 1660s Amsterdam.

I tried to convey what it felt like to cram three hundred men onto a 150-foot-long vessel for six months (damp, dark, and airless below, smelled bad, no privacy). The layout of the
Golden
Lion
is based on actual ships of the period, as are the various jobs, daily schedule, terrible food. The
three-million
-florin payroll that got shipped to Batavia twice a year in lead-bound trunks? True.

And there really were laws preventing mixed-race children of Dutch fathers and East Indian mothers from setting foot on Dutch soil, and similar laws preventing Dutch females from going to East India.

All of the characters are fictional, with the exception of Pieter and Eva Van Meerhof. There really was a white European doctor married to a black Khoikhoi woman in Dutch Cape Town in the 1660s (although the real Pieter Van Meerhof was Danish, not Dutch). It was quite a scandal. The names and nationalities of all the sailors on the
Lion
were taken from an actual Dutch ship's log of the period, but I made up the personalities to go with them.

For Petra's and Doctor Clockert's medical knowledge, I have to thank John Woodall's
The Surgeon's Mate,
a seventeent
h-century medical guide no ship's surgeon would have been without.

I tried really hard to get the details right, but I'm sure I made plenty of mistakes, and I take full responsibility for all of them (even though I would prefer to blame other people). Also, this seems like the right place to confess that sometimes I fudged the truth to serve my story. For example, the
Lion
would have been part of a fleet, and she wouldn't have sailed from the Amsterdam harbor because it wasn't deep enough to accommodate such a big ship. Also, Clockert's office would have been much smaller. But the really gross stuff in the book—like wormy water and butt-brooms—is all accurate, because I care deeply about things like that.

Eve Yohalem, New York, August 2014