The Orphanmaster Read Online Free PDF Page A

the fatherland. Theylived 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.

3
    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,