The Covenant (22 page)

He would have been asphyxiated had not young Willem seen him fall. Without hesitating, the boy leaped down, shouting for help as he went. Ropes were lowered and the limp body of Karel was hoisted aloft. Willem, with a handkerchief pressed over his face, climbed out, his eyes smarting and his lungs aflame.

For some time he stood by the railing, trying to vomit, but poor Karel lay stretched on the deck, quite inert. Finally the brothers recovered, and Willem would never forget how Karel reacted. It was as if he had been personally assaulted by the pepper, his honor impugned, for with a burst of vitality, his eyes still watering, he went back to the rim of the hold, still not satisfied that the exudations were too powerful to be sustained by any sailor.

“Tear off the other hatches!” he bellowed, and when this accomplished little, for the hold was large and the cargo tightly packed, he ordered holes to be chopped in the upper deck. This, too, proved useless, so in a towering rage he shouted for a ship’s cannon to be moved into position so that it could shoot down into the hold and out the sides of the ship.

“Fire!” he shouted, and a cannonball ripped away five feet of the hull, allowing fresh air into the hold.

“Swing the cannon!” he cried, and from a different angle another shot blasted a tremendous hole in the other side. Three more shots were fired, enabling the gas to escape, and when the hold was cleared, Karel was first down to salvage the precious pepper.

By April 1 the situation was under control. Work was progressing on the mud-walled fort, and a well sixty feet deep dug by the enterprising men was producing fresh water. Transfer of the cargo from the wreck was proceeding so smoothly that the leaders of the three ships could gather on the
Schiedam
to formulate final plans.

The captain gave it as his opinion that the
Olifant
and
Schiedam
should sail for the fatherland, taking with them as many of the
Haerlem’
s crew as possible. He asked what this number would be, but Karel interrupted by saying that the major consideration must be the salvage of the cargo, and that before any sailors were sent home, a
determination must be made as to how many would be needed to man the fort until the next homebound fleet arrived. The captain acceded to this sensible recommendation, and the council decided that sixty or seventy men, if well led by a capable officer, could protect the pepper and cinnamon during that time.

The council members looked at Karel, hoping that he would volunteer to stay behind and guard the cargo, but he realized that his opportunity waited in Holland, and he did not propose endangering it by a protracted absence at the Cape. So it was agreed that two tough marine officers would remain at the fort with a cadre of sixty while the Van Doorn brothers would hurry to St. Helena, where they would catch a fast trading vessel direct to Amsterdam. But on April 12, when the
Olifant
and
Schiedam
departed, young Willem van Doorn stayed onshore: “I feel I’m needed at the fort.” It was the kind of self-confident statement old fighting men could respect, so they concurred. “Hold the fort!” they called as the two little ships sailed off, leaving history’s first group of Dutchmen alone at the Cape.

Only twelve days later, at the end of April when the finest days of autumn came, Willem surprised the fort commanders by announcing, “I’d like to be the first to climb Table Mountain,” and when permission was granted he enlisted two friends. They marched briskly toward the glowing mountain, some dozen miles to the south, and when they stood at its foot Willem cried, “We don’t stop till we reach up there.”

It was a punishing climb, and often the young men came to precipices which they had to circumvent, but at last they reached that broad, gracious plateau which forms the crest of this mountain, and from it they could survey their empire.

To the south lay nothing but the icebound pole. To the west were the empty Atlantic and the New World territories owned by Spain. To the north they saw nothing but wind-swept dunes stretching beyond the power of the eye. But to the east they saw inviting meadows, and the rise of hills, and then the reach of mountains, and then more and more and more, on to a horizon they could only imagine. In silence the three sailors studied the land as it basked in the autumn sun, and often they wheeled about to see the lonely seas across which winds could howl for a thousand miles. But always their eyes returned to those tempting green valleys in the east, those beckoning mountains.

But looking eastward, they ignored the clouds which had formed almost instantaneously over the ocean to the west, and when they turned to descend the mountain, the devil threw his tablecloth and any movement became perilous.

“What can we do?” his companions asked Willem, and he replied with common sense, “Shiver till dawn.” They knew that this would result in anxiety at the fort, but they had no alternative, and when the sun finally rose, dispelling the fog, they marveled anew at the paradise which awaited in the east.

From the first days of isolation the sailors had been aware of the little brown men who occupied the Cape. They were a pitiful lot, “barely human,” one scribe wrote, “dirty, thieving and existing miserably on such shell fish as they could trap.” They were given the name Strandloopers (beach rangers), and to the sailors’ dismay, they had nothing of value to trade but wanted everything they saw. It was a poor relationship, marked by many scuffles and some deaths.

But on June 1, when the marooned men concluded that they had seen everything worth seeing in their temporary home—rhinos feeding in the swales, hippos in the streams, lions prowling at night, and antelope untold—an incident occurred, so bizarre that everyone who later wrote his report of the wreck commented upon it:

Actually, among the Hottentots with whom the Dutch did business during their year as castaways, there were three who had sailed in English ships: Jack, who had been to Java; a man named Herry, who had sailed to the Spice Islands; and Coree, who had actually lived in London for a while. But it was with Jack that these Dutchmen conducted their trade.

This meant that Willem was often with the Hottentots when there was bartering, and as before, he and Jack made a striking pair: Jack seemed even smaller when standing among big Dutchmen, and Willem, now full-grown at twenty-two, towered over his little friend, but they moved everywhere along the bay, hunting and fishing together. Toward mid-July, Jack proposed that Van Doorn accompany him to the village where the sheep-raising Hottentots lived. The fortress commander suspected a trick, but Willem, remembering the responsible manner in which the little fellow had conducted himself at Java, begged for permission.

“You could be killed,” the commander warned.

“I think not,” and with that simple affirmation, young Van Doorn became the first Dutchman to venture eastward toward those beckoning mountains.

It was a journey of about thirty miles through land that gave signs of promising fertility. He passed areas where villages had once stood and learned from Jack that here the land had been grazed flat by cattle. “You have cattle?” the Dutchman asked, indicating with his hands that he meant something bigger than sheep.

“Yes.” Jack laughed, using his forefingers to form horns at his temples, then bellowing like a bull.

“You must bring them to the fort!” Willem cried in excitement.

“No, no!” Jack said firmly. “We don’t trade …” He explained that this was winter, when the cows were carrying their young, and that it was forbidden to trade or eat cattle before summer. But when
they reached his village, and Willem saw the sleek animals, his mouth watered; he intended reporting this miracle to the fort as soon as he returned.

His stay at the village was a revelation. The Hottentots were infinitely lower in the scale of civilization than the Javanese, or the wealthy merchants of the Spice Islands, and to compare them with the organized Chinese was ridiculous. But they were equally far removed from the primitive Strandloopers who foraged at the beach, for they had orderly systems for raising sheep and cows and they lived in substantial kraals. True, they were mostly naked, but their food was of high quality.

Living among the little people for five days encouraged Willem to think that perhaps a permanent settlement might be practical, with Dutch farmers growing the vegetables required by the passing fleets of the Compagnie and subsisting on the sheep and cattle raised by the Hottentots; this possibility he discussed with Jack.

“You grow more cattle, maybe?”

“No. We have plenty.”

“But if we wanted to trade? You give us many cattle?”

“No. We have just enough.”

“But if we needed them? You saw the English ship. Poor food. No meat.”

“Then English grow sheep. English grow cattle.”

He got nowhere with the Hottentots, but when he returned to the fort and told the officers of the wealth lying inland, they grew hungry for beef and organized an expedition to capture some of the cattle. Van Doorn argued that to do this might embitter relations with the brown people, but the other sailors agreed with the officers: if cattle existed out there toward the hills, they should be eaten.

The argument was resolved in early August when Jack led some fifty Hottentots to the fort, bringing not only sheep but also three fine bullocks which they found they could spare. “See,” Van Doorn said when the deal was completed, “we’ve won our point without warfare,” but when the officers commanded Jack to deliver cattle on a regular basis, he demurred.

“Not enough.”

The officers thought he meant that the goods they had offered were not enough and tried to explain that with the wreck of the
Haerlem
they had lost their normal trade goods and had only spices and precious fabrics at the fort. Jack looked at them askance, as if he could
not decipher what they were saying, so one of the officers procured a boat, and with six Hottentots and Van Doorn, went out to the disintegrating hulk to let the little men see for themselves, and to pick up any stray bits of material they might want in trade for their cattle.

It was a futile trip. All that remained aboard the creaking wreck were the heavy guns and anchors and the broken woodwork, and these had no appeal to the Hottentots, who had been taught by Coree after his return from London, “Wood nothing, brass everything.” The brass had long since vanished.

But as the others climbed back into the boat, Willem chanced to find a hidden drawer containing an item of inestimable value. Hearing the officer coming down the gangway to hail him, he slammed the drawer shut and followed the Hottentots ashore.

That night when others were asleep he told the watch, “I want to inspect the
Haerlem
again,” and silently he rowed out to the ship, which had now settled nine feet into the sand. Fastening his line to a stud, he climbed aboard, going quickly to the captain’s quarters, where he opened the drawer. And there it was, with thick brass corner fittings and center clasps.

Carefully opening the brass locks, he turned back the cover and saw the extraordinary words: “Biblia: The Holy Scripture translated into Dutch. Henrick Laurentsz, Bookseller, Amsterdam, 1630.” This was a printing of the very Bible his mother had cherished and he knew it would be most improper to allow a book so sacred to sink at sea, so covering it with his shirt, he carried it back to the fort, where he hid it among his few possessions. Occasionally in the days ahead, when no one was watching, he gingerly opened his Bible, reading here and there from the sacred Word. It was his book, and at the New Year he borrowed a pen and wrote on the first line of the page reserved for family records: “Willem van Doorn, his book, 1 January, 1648.”

The Dutch sailors at Table Bay were not forgotten. During the twelve months they stayed, nearly a hundred Dutch ships engaged in the Java trade passed back and forth between Amsterdam and Batavia, standing far out to sea as they rounded the Cape. Some English ships actually sailed into the bay, offering help as needed, and in August three Compagnie ships anchored near the fort, providing mail, information and tools.

The captain of the
Tiger
, leader of the flotilla, caused Willem
serious trouble, because on the evening prior to his departure for Java, he announced at the fort that any sailors who wished to return to that island for an additional tour of duty were welcome, and three volunteered. “We sail at noon tomorrow,” the captain said, and all that night Willem wrestled with the problem. Intuitively, with a force he would always remember in later years, he shied away from going on to Holland, a land he did not know and to which he felt no attachment. But if he failed to join the
Tiger
, right now, the next fleet would be Europe bound, and he might never see Java again.