The Orphanmaster (4 page)

“I am the colony’s orphanmaster,” Visser said. “You have cargo for me.”

“Aye,” Kouwenhoven said. “You’re here for your orphans. A sorry collection they are, too.”

“How many dead during passage?” Visser asked.

“By the Lord’s grace just one,” the first mate said. “Disposed of at sea.”

The mate could not recall the boy’s name. In fact, all the circumstances surrounding the ocean burial were unfortunate. The captain stayed in his cabin nursing a vicious hangover from a rummy game the evening before, so there was no one to mumble the words. The purser objected to wasting precious sail canvas on an orphan’s shroud, and the other boys needed clothing, so the child went over in his altogether.

“That gives me ten,” Visser said, referring to
Margrave
’s manifest. “All boys this time, I believe?”

“Take ’em if you want ’em,” Kouwenhoven said. “They’ve been no use to me.” The Dutch orphans brought over by the
Margrave
, the first mate indicated, could be located in the ship’s forward hold.

These were almshouse cases, burdens on the public purse in Patria. New Netherland felt the dire need of willing hands, lots of them, to make the colony work. The population of Europe was not yet convinced that decamping for a rocky, windswept island in America would improve their lot. Life in Holland proved all too comfortable. The new coffeehouses were just coming in, joining the tobacco houses already there. The cheese was as good as ever. No one wanted to leave.

Aet Visser recruited his orphan charges from three sources. Deaths of parents in the colony, deaths of parents on transocean voyages to the colony and these orphan shipments from Patria. Fortune proving to be a rascally mistress, the pool of orphans never dried up.

Visser descended between decks. The holds were reasonably well cleaned, kept shipshape in the way of the Dutch marine, yet foul-smelling after the long voyage. He found his charges, passage-stunned and cowering together in a collection of raglike hammocks.

“You have arrived,” he announced, just to make sure the listless children, few over twelve years of age, realized they had successfully accomplished the transit from the old world to the new. Often he found on ships such as this that the orphans had little idea where they were, why they had been swept off the streets of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the Hague or to what purpose they would serve in America.

“I am the orphanmaster. You will follow me.” His ducklings.

Perhaps the orphans had visions of kindly couples, childless by circumstance or sterility, waiting to adopt their precious new wards, whisking them off to a thorough scrubbing in a hot bath, a steaming dinner of gussied fowl, fatty bacon and candied fruit, then a rosy sleep in a warm bed.

Visser could not recall that particular scenario ever coming to pass in the real world. No orphanages existed in New Amsterdam. The boys would be taken in by settlement families who needed laborers and servants.

In his frequent letters to the government of the home country, the
colony’s director general pleaded for “new blood.” And here was what they sent him, ten gangly children. New blood? New to the colony, perhaps, but exhausted, thin and almost bloodless, as far as Visser could tell.

No kindly couples greeted the orphans. The wealthy burghers of the settlement would inspect the goods and make their choices, picking this or that orphan out from among the cowed assemblage. A servant from the great man’s household, a downstairs maid, say, or a scullery cook, would drag the chosen one away by his filthy neck. Though not before, Visser would hasten to assure, the burgher paid the orphanmaster for the privilege with several strings of seawan, what would be referred to (with a wink) as “expenses.”

He examined his charges now, climbing out of their hammocks and standing shivering in
Margrave
’s hold. They knew not what they were in for, Visser thought, but then, which one of us does?

“Single file,” he barked at them. “Keep in line.”

Puke-stained and filthy, pale almost to transparency, the orphans trooped after Visser through the ship’s mazelike hold. Together they mounted a steep ladder and emerged on deck, to stand blinking in the fresh air and drifting snowflakes.

“Behold,” Visser said, making a sweeping gesture at the rude collection of unpainted, snowcapped dwelling-houses clustered around the wharf. “New Amsterdam settlement, Manhattan Island, the capital of the New Netherland colony. Your new home.”

Sponsored by a trading cartel, the Dutch West India Company, the colony of New Netherland existed to feed Europe’s growing appetite for fur. Chartered in 1624, New Netherland’s main settlement, New Amsterdam, clung to the wedge-shaped tip of Manhattan Island, posted alongside one of the greatest natural harbors on earth.

In 1663, almost four decades after its founding, New Amsterdam existed as a less than mile-square community of fifteen hundred souls.

A red cedar palisade running along its northern boundary lent a contained, almost besieged feel to the town. Digging waterways and erecting windmills, the Dutch colonists slowly made the place over in the familiar image of their homeland, which they called Patria, the fatherland. They
lived at first in dug-out pits, then in cabins, and finally, as the colony grew more prosperous, in sturdy brick or clapboard dwelling-houses.

On the west side of the island’s wedge, along Prince Maurice’s River, stood Fort Amsterdam, a square redoubt with log ramparts and battlements at every corner. To the east side of the fort, protected by its walls from the winds off the bay, lay the town market,
het marckvelt
. Between the fort and river rose up three windmills, what the Dutch called
moolens
, and the town gallows.

Four streets ran north-south, up the island to the wall: Pearl, Smit, Prince and the Broad Way. Eight roads crossed the settlement east to west, including the Strand, on the island’s southern tip, and Langs de Wal, Wall Street, the path that ran below the northern palisade.

Two gates, or
landtpoorts
(“land ports”), led through the wall to the fields and woodlands to the north, one on Pearl Street at the East River, and another on the west side of the island at the Broad Way. But settlers in the middle neighborhoods of the colony wearied of taking the long way around, and had kicked loose the logs in the palisade at several points, in order that they might pass through.

Carved from a stream bed, Heere Gracht, a canal navigable only at high tide, bent north almost to the wall from its starting point at the East River. The island’s busy wharf district ran along its southeastern shore. The Strand, the waterfront street, offered tap houses to sailors and dockworkers. The wealthier colonists resided mainly on Stone or Market streets.

New Amsterdam’s population comingled the dominant half who were Dutch with German, English, Swedish, Polish, French, Jewish and African elements in a fluid, uneasy mix. River indians walked freely down the settlement’s streets, on shopping sprees for sweet pastries or bolts of cloth.

Beyond the wall lived small communities of Africans, strategically located to absorb attacks from maurading native Americans. The African settlements thus acted as shields for the benefit of the Dutch colonists in the town.

One man ruled over the colony, with an iron hand and wooden leg.

Petrus Stuyvesant.

P
iddy Gullee went for water and didn’t come back in October 1663. Lace and Mally turned to the only person they could count on to help. Blandine van Couvering had forged a powerful link with the colony’s African community, one that had been hammered home in July 1659, on a single afternoon almost four years before Piddy’s disappearance.

Blandine turned eighteen that summer, and she knew no more of Africans than any well-born young New Amsterdam woman would. She often passed a collection of cabins outside the palisade wall. “Little Angola,” the townspeople called it.

These were the homes of the “half-free” Africans, a full quarter of the black population of the colony, the ones who could own their land but had to pay a yearly tribute to the government.

Half-liberty. When Blandine thought about it as a young girl, she considered that granting such rights—the Africans also enjoyed a single holiday in spring, after May Day, when they were given free run of the colony—served only to highlight the condition of their servitude. Should anyone have asked, she might have said she opposed slavery. But it did not bear heavily on her young conscience.

Blandine’s own family never possessed a slave. She occasionally witnessed enslaved members of the community as they labored to shore up the walls of the fort. The Company worked the majority, and the director general personally kept a score. Only the wealthiest members of the community could afford to claim ownership of human flesh.

For a long time, to Blandine, Africans represented only one more element in the growing horde that Manhattan drew to itself. All that changed one sparkling July afternoon.

The Dutch made war upon the Esopus tribe that summer of 1659. The violence of the Esopus wars, the retaliatory massacres, the burning of cornfields and villages, happened far to the north of New Amsterdam, near the town of Wildwyck. So far, nothing of it had directly touched the settlement.

Just to be safe, the
schout
ordained that no settler should venture out beyond the palisade wall without armed escort. But it was the high summer season, the raspberries on the hillsides only a short few leagues from town needed gathering and the colonists loved their summer fruit.

A band of a dozen settlers, primarily women and children but with two Company militiamen along, headed out from town through the land gate. The militiamen carried firearms.

Blandine joined them. She enjoyed raspberries as much as anyone, and liked the easy feeling of community among the pickers. It was a tradition. She had picked every year since as a child she went with her mother and father. Blandine always relished getting beyond the confines of the colony’s northern wall to the wilder lands beyond.

The area where the tiny juicy drupelets grew seemed perfectly secure.
Bouweries
—the farms of the countryside—open meadows and dwelling-houses dotted the landscape, marked also by the major thoroughfare of the Post Road, the link between the southern tip of Manhattan and the territories to the north.

As the group passed Little Angola, one of the women there, Mally, hailed Blandine.

“You going berrying?” she asked, seeing the woven basket Blandine carried over her arm.

Blandine knew Mally casually, having employed her and her half-sister, Lace, to do hemming on linens she imported from Patria. The finished product—pillowcases, bedsheets, handkerchiefs—commanded a higher price than raw cloth.

Blandine saw Lace coming up behind Mally, carrying sacks for fruit. No one had any objections to the Africans joining the group, so Mally and Lace came with them.

If Africans had any status in the colony at all, they were usually called by the last name of the region from which they came. So Mally and Lace and others, too, all were given the same last name, Angola. There was no thought behind it, and it was by no choice of the ones so named. The Dutch authorities simply needed a distinguishing label to put down on paper if the Africans were ever hauled into court.

A hot July day. Insect noise swelled from the meadows, died and
swelled again. Two sisters in the group, Tryntie and Aleida Bout, sang a hymn of thanks, “Nederlandtsche Gedenckclanck,” a new anthem celebrating the Protestant victory over the Spanish Catholics in Holland.

A few of the others picked up the song. Blandine noticed that the harsh rasping of the locusts, katydids and crickets easily drowned out the quavering human voices singing God’s praises.

She trailed behind the group. With the journey out of town, her abiding sorrow lifted a little, the sadness she had suffered since she lost her family. Yet these were haunted precincts for Blandine. It had been a different, more carefree girl who traipsed through the sweet berry bushes when she was young.

The road they followed up the island led them to a small rise with a view of the wide river to the west. The water’s surface reflected back the gunmetal blue of the sky. Blandine noticed a flattened thatch of grass. Probably nothing more than a night bed for deer.

As they diverged from the road onto a path, Blandine saw that a collection of canoes had been pulled in amid a reed bed on the rocky Manhattan shore just below her. They stood empty, beached in a line.

From the water, she thought, no one would see the skiffs among the reeds.

The sky was patched with high white cumulus, the men had taken up the hymn along with the women and the group entered in among the scattered cane-fields of raspberries. The fruits dangled, crimson and abundant. Emperor and hairstreak butterflies sipped on the berry sugar. A cloud of them arose as the Dutch, crying out like children, plunged into the bushes.

In a first gluttonous spasm, the settlers didn’t bother with their baskets, they simply stuffed whole handfuls into their mouths.

With Lace and Mally, Blandine wandered away from the others. The berry trail guided them in random directions. Each prickly, laden cane
led to the next, as though there would be a secret revealed at the end of the path.

Blandine left off picking. She sat on the ground amid the canes, her aproned skirts spread about her. She looked east toward the Post Road and a massive stand of jackpines that lined the way. Mentally, she calculated the worth of the trees. Masts for the navies of the world.

Far off, on the roadway, a drover herded a pair of cattle, heading toward town. Then, between one tree and the next, he abruptly disappeared. She waited for the man to show himself again. His cattle wandered down the road without him. She could hear their bells tinkling.

After a quarter hour, the clouds fully reefed the sky, hiding the sun, and a breath of cooler air rose from the river. The colonists quieted, intent on filling their baskets. Blandine struggled to maintain her lightness of heart. The cows still roamed alone. What happened to the drover?