The Covenant, page 17
'We cut it out,' the men explained. 'And he lived for three days, always getting weaker till he died.'
The officers were outraged and swore revenge on the Hottentots, but Van Doorn recalled something Jack had told him during his stay at the village: 'We don't ever hunt north. The San . . . that's their land.' That's all he could remember; it had been a warning which he had overlooked, and now his companion was dead.
He suggested that he go east to discuss this tragedy with Jack, and although the officers ridiculed the idea at first, upon reflection they saw that it would be unwise to engage in open warfare with the little brown men if the latter enjoyed superior numbers and a weapon so frightening. So they gave consent, and with two armed companions Van Doorn set out to talk with Jack, taking the arrow with him.
As soon as the Hottentots saw it they showed their fear: 'San. The little ones who live in bush. You must never go their land.' They showed how the arrow worked and explained that they themselves were terrified of these little men who had no cattle, no sheep, no kraals: 'They are terrible enemies if we go their land. If we stay our land, they let us alone.'
It was amusing to Willem to hear the Hottentots speak of this vague enemy as 'the little ones,' but Jack convinced him that the San were truly much smaller: 'We keep our cattle toward the ocean. More difficult for little ones to creep in.'
And so open warfare between the Hottentots and the Dutch was a-voided. One of the men drafted a report to Amsterdam, explaining that the Cape was uninhabitable, worth positively nothing and incapable of providing the supplies the Compagnie fleets required:
Much better we continue to provision at St. Helena. There is no reason why any future Compagnie ship should enter this dangerous Bay, especially since three separate enemies threaten any establishment, the Strandloopers, the Hottentots and these little savages who live in the bush with their poisoned arrows.
At the moment this man was composing such a report, an officer was walking through the fortress gardens and noticing that with the seeds rescued from the wreck of the Haerlem his special group of gardening men had been able to grow pumpkins, watermelons, cabbages, carrots, radishes, turnips, onions, garlic, while his butchers were passing along to the cooks good supplies of eland, steenbok, hippopotamus, penguins from Robben Island and sheep they had stolen from the Hottentot meadows.
In January the sailors at the fort observed one of the great mysteries of the sea. On 16 September 1647, two splendid Compagnie ships had set sail from Holland, intending to make the long journey to Java and back. This could require as much as two years, counting the time that might be spent on side trips to the Spice Islands or Japan. The White Dove was a small, swift flute, economically handled by a crew of only forty-eight and captained by a man who believed that cleanliness and the avoidance of scurvy were just as important as good navigation. When he arrived at the Cape for provisioning, all his men were healthy, thanks to lemon juice and pickled cabbage, and he was eager to continue his passage to Java.
He told the personnel at the fort that the Lords XVII had them in mind and thanked them especially for their rescue of the peppercorns, which would be of immense value when they finally reached Amsterdam.
'Thanks are appreciated,' the fortress officer growled, 'but when do we get away from here?'
'The Christmas fleet out of Batavia,' the captain said. 'It's sure to pick you up.' He asked if any sailors wished to return with him to Java; none did, but his invitation rankled in Willem's mind.
It was not like before. He did not oscillate between Holland and Java. His whole attention was directed to a more specific question: What could he do now to best ensure his return to this Cape? He was finding that it contained all the attraction of Java, all the responsibility of Holland, plus the solid reality of a new continent to be mastered. It was a challenge of such magnitude that his heart beat like a drum when he visualized what it would be like to establish a post here, to organize a working agreement with the Hottentots, to explore the world of the murderous little San, and most of all, to move eastward beyond the dark blue hills he had seen from the top of Table Mountain. Nowhere could he serve Amsterdam and Batavia more effectively than here.
He found no solution to his problem and was in deep confusion when the White Dove prepared to sail, for he could not judge whether he ought to go with her or not. His attention was diverted when that ship's sister, the towering East Indiaman Princesse Royale, limped into the bay. She was a new ship, grand and imposing, with a poop deck like a castle, and instead of the White Dove's complement of forty-nine, she carried three hundred and sixty-eight. Her captain was a no-nonsense veteran who scorned lemon juice and kegs of sauerkraut: 'I captain a great ship and see her through the storms.' As a consequence, twenty-six of his people were already dead, another seventy were deathly ill, and the tropical half of the voyage still loomed.
When the two captains met with the fortress officers, Willem could see clearly how dissimilar they were: A man who runs a big, pompous ship has to be big and pompous. A man who captains a swift little flute can afford to be alert and eager. He was not surprised next morning when the White Dove hauled anchor early, as if it wished to avoid further contact with the poorly run Princesse Royale, nor was he surprised when he found that the White Dove had taken with it a healthy portion of the available fresh vegetables and fresh meat. After sixty-eight steaming-hot days the flute would land in Java without having lost a man.
When Willem loaded provisions aboard the Princesse Royale he was appalled to find that more than ninety passengers lay in their filthy beds, too weak to walk ashore. Many were obviously close to death, and he saw for himself the difference between the management of the two ships. They had sailed from the same port, on the same day, staffed by officers of comparable background, and they had traversed the same seas in the same temperature. Yet one was healthful, the other a charnel house whose major deaths lay ahead. But when he asked the men at the fort about this, they said, 'It's God's will.'
He thought much about God in these days of perplexity, and secretly went to the brassbound Bible, trying like his forefathers to ascertain what God wished him to do. And one night by a flickering candle he read a passage which electrified him, for in it God ordered his chosen people to undertake a specific mission:
And I will establish my covenant between me and thee . . . And I will give unto thee, and unto thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession . . .
God was offering this new land in covenant to his chosen people, and the manner in which a few ardent Dutchmen had been able to withstand for generations the whole power of Spain proved that they were chosen. Willem was convinced that soon the Lords XVII in Amsterdam must recognize the obligation that God was placing upon them. Then they would manfully occupy the Cape, as He intendedand where would they find the cadres to do the job? In Java, of course, where men who understood these waters worked. He would hurry back to Java on the Princesse Royale to be ready when the call came.
When he informed his officers of this decision, the man from Groningen applauded: 'Just what I'd do,' but he would have been incredulous had he known why Willem was doing it.
On the night before sailing, Van Doorn sat in his quarters, wondering how to safeguard his large Bible. If he took it aboard ship, it would be recognized as Compagnie property and confiscated; this he would not tolerate, for he felt in some mystical way that he had saved the Bible for some grand purpose and that it was dictating his present behavior. So toward morning, when the fort was quiet, he carried it away, and as he walked through the fading darkness he remembered the post-office stones, where messages of grave importance were deposited, but a moment's reflection warned him that whereas tightly wrapped and sealed letters might survive in such dampness, a book like this Bible would not. Then he recalled that on one of his climbs of Table Mountain he had come upon a series of caves, not deep, and although the mountain was distant, he set out briskly for it, carrying his treasure, and before midnight, with the moon as guide, he found the cave and hid the canvas-wrapped Bible well in the rear, under a cairn of stones. He was convinced that it would be his lodestone, drawing him back. At noon, when the Princesse Royale sailed, he was a passenger.
It was a voyage into the bowels of hell. Before the Cape was cleared, sailors were tossing dead bodies overboard, and not a day passed without the quaking death of someone suddenly attacked by fever. When Willem first saw the mouth of a woman struck down by scurvyher gums swollen so grossly that no teeth could be seenhe was aghast; he had crossed this sea in the Haerlem without such affliction and he did not yet fully understand why this ship should be so stricken.
As it limped down the Straits of Malacca, two and three bodies each day were thrown overboard, and when Van Doorn wanted, in his exuberance, to explain how the Dutch had captured the Portuguese fort that had once blocked these waters, he found no one well enough to listen; the great Indiaman creaked and wallowed in the sea, with more than a hundred and thirty dead and many of the survivors so afflicted that the sweats of Java would kill them within a few months.
When the charnel ship reached the roadstead at Batavia, there waited the little White Dove, washed and ready for a further trip to Formosa. The two captains met briefly: 'How was it?'
'As always.'
'When do you return to Holland?'
'Whenever they say.' On the return trip the Princesse Royale would lose one hundred and fifteen.
Mevrouw van Doorn was not pleased to learn that her younger son had returned to Java. She suspected that some deficiency in character had driven him to scurry back to an easy land he knew rather than risk his chances in the wintry intellectual climate of Holland, and she feared that this might be the first fatal step in his ultimate degeneration.
Willem had anticipated his mother's apprehensions but feared he might sound fatuous if he spread before her his real motivations: a vision from a mountaintop; a friendship with a little savage; a dictate from a buried Bible. Keeping his counsel to himself, he plunged into the solitary job of drafting a long report to his superiors in Batavia, in hopes that they would forward it to the Lords XVII.
In it he made his sober estimation of what the Dutch might achieve if they were to establish a base at the Cape of Good Hope. A Cautious Calculation he titled it, and in it he reconstructed all he had witnessed during his months as a castaway, informing the merchants in charge of the Compagnie of the potential riches in this new land:
Three separate vessels gave us seeds, two from Holland, one from England, and every seed we planted produced good vegetables, some bigger than those we see from home. Sailors who know many countries said, 'This is the sweetest food I have ever eaten.' On my trip to the native village I saw melons, grapelike climbers and other fruits.
He compiled meticulous lists of what had flourished in the Compagnie gardens, how many cattle the Hottentots had, and what kinds of birds could be shot on Robben Island. It was a catalogue of value and should have been an encouragement to anyone contemplating the establishment of a provisioning base, but suspicious readers were apt to linger most carefully over those passages in which he detailed the life of the Hottentots:
They go quite naked with a little piece of skin about their privities. To gain protection for their bodies they smear themselves with a mixture of cow dung and sand, increasing it month after month until they can be smelled for great distances. Men dress their hair with sheep dung, allowing it to harden stiff as a board. The women commonly put the guts of wild beasts when dry around their legs and these serve as an adornment.
He provided the Compagnie with a careful distinction between the Strandloopers, a degenerate group of scavenging outcasts, the Hottentots, who were herders, and the Bushmen, who lived without cattle in the interior.
He calculated how many ships could take on fresh vegetables if the Compagnie established a place to grow them at the Cape, and then showed that if they could stabilize relations with the Hottentots, they might also obtain almost unlimited supplies of fresh meat. He advised abandoning the stop at St. Helena, with the sensible caution that if the Dutch did not peaceably withdraw, the English would in time throw them out.
It was a masterful calculation, prudent in all important matters, and it accomplished nothing. Officials at Batavia felt that a spot so distant was no concern of theirs, while the Lords XVII deemed it impudent for a man little more than a sailor to involve himself in such matters. So far as he could see, nothing happened.
But a word once written will often accidentally find a life that no one anticipates; it lies folded in a drawer and is forgotten, except that sometimes at moments unexpected someone will ask, during a discussion, 'Isn't that what Van Doorn said some years ago?' The passage from A Cautious Calculation which kept reviving in two cities half a world apart concerned ships:
How is it that two ships of comparable quality throughout, manned by men of equal health and training, can sail from Amsterdam to Batavia and one arrives with all men ready for work in Java while the other comes into port with one-third of its crew so stricken that they must die within a year from our fevers and another third already buried at sea? There are no such things as good-luck ships and bad-luck ships. There are only fresh food, rest, clean quarters and whatever it is that fights scurvy. A halt of three weeks at the Cape of Good Hope, with fresh vegetables, lemon trees, and meat from the Hottentots would save the Compagnie a thousand lives a year.
Many of the Lords XVII felt that it was not their duty to worry about the health of sailors, and one said, 'When the baker bakes a pie, some crust falls to the floor.' He was applauded by those other Lords who had rebuked a subordinate in Java for sending two ships of Compagnie food to starving field hands in Ceylon: 'It is not our responsibility to feed the weaklings of the world.'
But to other members of the ruling body, Van Doorn's comments on the Cape reverberated, and from time to time these men brought the matter of excessive death to the attention of their fellows. One estimated that it cost the Compagnie a goodly three hundred guilders to land a man at Batavia, and that if he did not work at least five years, that cost could never be recovered, and there the debate ended, with no action taken.
Mevrouw van Doorn watched with dismay as her younger son slipped into the dull routine of a lesser clerk at the disposal of less able young men who had been trained in Holland. Willem's brightness dimmed and his shoulders began to droop. He often wore a girlish chain about his neck with an ivory circle dangling from it, and what was most painful of all, he was beginning to drift into the orbit of the few Dutch widows who stayed on at Batavia, but without the family fortunes that Mevrouw had when she decided to remain. They were a fat, sorry lot, 'sea elephants ridden by any bull that wished,' and it would not be long before Willem would be coming to inform her that he proposed taking one or the other to wife. After that, nothing could be salvaged.
And then one day in 1652 as Mevrouw van Doorn, white-haired and plump, arranged for her New Year's celebration, the startling news reached Batavia that a refreshment station had been started at the Cape of Good Hope under the command of Jan van Riebeeck. It was a matter of debate as to which part of this news was more sensational, the station itself or its proposed manager, but as Hendrickje said loudly, to the delight of her audience, 'If a man isn't clever enough to steal from the Compagnie, he won't be clever enough to steal for it.'
Willem van Doorn was in the garden when his mother said this, but he caught the name Van Riebeeck and asked as he came through the doors, 'Van Riebeeck? I met him. What about him?'
'He's been chosen to head a new settlement at Good Hope.'
Willem, twenty-seven and already flaccid, just stood in the doorway, framed in spring flowers, and his hands began to tremble, for the long dry period of his life was over. After he gained control he began to ask many questions regarding how he might win an assignment to the Cape, when an aide to the governor-general called him aside: 'Van Doorn, we've been asked to send the new settlement a few of our experienced men. To help them get started.' And Willem was about to volunteer when the aide said, 'Younger men, of course, and the council wondered if you could recommend some men for the lower echelons. For the higher, we'll do the choosing.'
And so Willem van Doorn, no longer considered young enough for an adventurous post, busied himself with selecting the first contingent of Batavia men to serve at the Cape, and it was a sorry task because none of the men wanted to leave the luxury of Java for that windblown wilderness.
The fleet sailed and Willem was left behind; his essay was kept in chests, both in Amsterdam and Batavia; and the man who as much as any had spurred the establishment of this new station was barred from joining it. The months passed, and Willem ran down to each incoming fleet to inquire as to affairs at the Cape, and then one day a message reached the council that Commander van Riebeeck was wondering if he might have permission to obtain a few slaves from Java for his personal use in growing vegetables, and the same aide who had dashed Willem's hopes previously now offered a dazzling proposal: 'Van Riebeeck's buying a few slaves for the Cape. And since you drafted that report ... I mean, since you know the land there, we thought you might be the man to handle this courtesy.'
Willem bowed, then bowed again. 'I would be honored to have such confidence placed in me.' And when the aide was gone, he dashed to see his mother, shouting, 'I'm going to the Cape.'
'When?' she asked quietly.
'With the Christmas fleet.'
'So soon!' She had longed for the day when her son would announce that he was returning to Holland, 'to save himself,' as she put it, and was distraught that he was sentencing himself to a place even more demeaning than Java. Now he would never attain a Compagnie position, and only God knew what might happen to him. But even the Cape was better than lingering here in Java and marrying some local slut. So be it.
