Chapter 11
New Amsterdam
November 15, 1636
The true American Revolution was going to start here in the New Netherlands, and this time it would bring forth a Calvinist America, not the secular abomination that was born in that other history. That was why the Good Lord had brought about the Ring of Fire, to give humanity a second chance to follow his divine will.
But Karl Brouwer was deeply afraid that the revolution they’d been planning for was going to be a bloody business. And he wasn’t looking forward to that. Not at all. But God’s will was clear enough to him.
He called to his cousin, who had just come in from outside. “Diederik, is there any news yet?”
“Yes, Dominie Brouwer.” Diederik gave a nod that was almost a bow as he came over. “I just got
word from one of my friends. They tried to use that radio of theirs to call the ship the governor is on, but they aren’t getting any answer.”
“Do you have any idea why?”
“No, nor do the papists. It could be all sorts of things. It might mean that the governor has run into trouble. But, more likely, it’s a question of the radio itself failing.”
“Do you think they can fix it?” His cousin shrugged.
Karl bit his lip, considering. If the radio wasn’t working, then they didn’t need to wait for the governor to get all the way to Fort Orange before they moved. It could mean that they had twice as long to carry out their plans as they thought they would. It was a gift from God, the radio failing as it had. “Gather the men, Diederik. We won’t wait. We’ll move today.”
Diederik Hendrix nodded and went to start giving the orders that would gather the faithful to the banner of a free Christian state. The Free Christian State of America.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, two men approached the household of Wolfert Dijkstra. “This is stupid,” said one.
“No. Eduart’s a good Gomarist. He just took that job so that he would have the money to marry his”—the second man wagged his hips suggestively—“African girl.”
The first man shook his head, unconvinced.
Wolfert Dijkstra was a builder and an architect. His house was large and well built. It had his office and a small warehouse on the ground floor, and the residence on the second floor. The sun was just coming up, but Nailah was up, with the Franklin stove on the ground floor heating and the oats soaking, when the quiet knock came. Eduart was in their room, putting on his uniform. He usually had breakfast with the family before heading to the boarding house to go on duty. Mister Dijkstra and the children were just getting up.
Nailah went and checked the side door near the kitchen. There were two men and she recognized them. They were members of Eduart’s congregation, and she didn’t much care for them. But she opened the door because they were Eduart’s fellow congregants, and went to fetch Eduart.
* * *
Eduart came down the stairs buttoning his uniform coat. “What brings you here?”
They looked at Nailah. Then one took Eduart’s arm and pulled him outdoors. And all of a sudden, Nailah was afraid. Things were coming together in her mind. Rumors among the slaves and former slaves about the alliance between the Counter-Remonstrants and the slave owners who were upset over the Emancipation Proclamation. And this barely dawn approach to Eduart, and them not wanting her to hear what they were saying. She went to get Mister Dijkstra. He was a smart man who knew the governor.
* * *
Wolfert Dijkstra listened to Nailah’s concerns without much concern of his own, but he went out onto the second-floor landing to see a reluctant Eduart being escorted to the room that he shared with Nailah by two young men, one of whom had a pistol not just in his belt, but angled in a way that made it easy to get at in a hurry. And his hand reaching for it in response to the opening door.
Wolfert wasn’t a man of action, although he’d done some brawling in his youth. But he was closer to forty than to thirty now, and he had two young children and a business to look after. Still, this situation didn’t lend itself to long pondering, and Wolfert was agile enough. He stepped forward and managed to get a grip on the hand the fellow had around the pistol.
Then he was out of ideas. He had no notion of what to do from here.
The man tried to jerk the gun away, and when that didn’t work, he punched Wolfert hard in the belly. Wolfert uffed, unready for the blow, but still held onto the fellow’s gun hand.
Apparently that was enough for Eduart, who shrugged off the arm of the man holding him and punched the man struggling with Wolfert in the kidney. The man uffed, side stepped, his foot finding air as he was next to the staircase, and almost took Wolfert with him as he fell down the stairs. He did take the gun, which went off, sending a lead ball into the roof, and gun smoke into Wolfert’s eyes, effectively blinding Wolfert for the rest of the fight.
All three of the young men were in good shape, but Eduart had a bit more training, and his training was much more scientific and professional. Besides, one of the men was at the bottom of the stairs, making close acquaintance with a pot of boiling oats.
The other one faced Eduart alone, with his back to a staircase, and the example of his friend to encourage him to look over his shoulder to see his footing.
That gave Eduart the moment of distraction that his instructors had talked about. He struck two blows, the first a regulation jab at the solar plexus. The second, though, his unarmed combat instructor would make him do fifty push-ups, if he saw it. For that second blow was a haymaker that belonged on a farm. But it landed. And as useless as a haymaker is if the other fellow sees it coming, it delivers a lot of force if it gets through. Another fellow went down the stairs to land on the first, even as Wolfert was blinking gun smoke from his eyes and asking Eduart, “What was all that about?”
“They said they needed my rifle, that it was my duty to God to give it to them, to join them in smiting the papists. I tried to tell them the governor is a Lutheran, but they said he worked for a papist and might as well be one himself, since he brought a bunch of them with him. I didn’t know what to do.” Then, in almost a wail, “They were my friends.”
“Maybe,” Wolfert said, “they were, but if they were, they aren’t any more. Eduart, run to the warehouse and get me some rope to tie them with. Whatever their reasons, we’re taking them to Brechtje’s boarding house.”
They found the reasons surprisingly easy to discover. The young men, both in considerable pain and one suffering fairly severe burns on his face from the boiling oats, were only too happy to tell Wolfert, Brechtje and Eduart what their punishment was going to be when those chosen by God took New Amsterdam away from the papists and founded a Calvinist republic in the New World.
They took them to the new hospital that Anne Jefferson was still setting up. After all, both of them were injured, and Anne’s was the best medical facility in the New World.
* * *
One and a half blocks from the boarding house, the New Amsterdam Hospital was a refitted warehouse, with a steam-powered electrical generator. It needed the boiler both to produce distilled water and for the electricity to run several pieces of equipment, including lights, which allowed surgery even at night. And a refrigerator for keeping things like insulin from going bad.
The wagon carrying Wolfert, the kids, Nailah, Eduart, and the two injured men arrived at the hospital. Brechtje had remained behind at her establishment.
It was Amilia’s shift as duty nurse, and she was looking forward to getting off in another hour. Also, while she knew the basics from books and had some experience—New Amsterdam having rather more than its share of accidents needing medical attention—severe burns over three quarters of a man’s face and another man who was apparently still half-blinded by a near miss from a blackpowder pistol, were beyond her skills so far. She sent a runner to fetch Anne.
If Amilia’s medical skills were still pretty limited, her political and military judgment was topnotch. She had the story out of Wolfert and Eduart in a short while.
She didn’t wait for Anne to arrive. She immediately ordered everything that could be moved packed up for transport to the boarding house. “There is no way that ten soldiers can protect this place and the boarding house.”
She looked over at Oringo, who was mostly recovered and now a recruit in the Governor’s Guard, and the only one whom Eduart actually outranked. He, like her, had the duty last night. “Oringo, I need you to go to Dominie Bogardus and get him to gather his congregation and bring them and any weapons they have to the boarding house. With most of the troops on the way to Fort Orange . . . ”
She stopped. “Blast it. The radio on the boat is out, at least that’s what everyone thinks happened. Never mind. Oringo, go get Bogardus and his people. Eduart, I need you to go wake Sergeant van der Molen, and tell him we need to warn the governor the old-fashioned way.”
“What about the fort?”
She shook her head. “Forget the fort. They will have sent enough men to keep the few soldiers left there from coming out. Even if we could use it, we couldn’t get everyone there in time.”
* * *
By the time Anne got to the hospital, the packing and transport of patients was underway. She treated the burn victim and washed Wolfert’s eyes with saline solution and wrapped them so that they would rest. It would leave him blind for a few days, but was the best thing for long-term recovery of his sight.
As it happened, Bogardus had several rivermen in his congregation, so a boat was sent after the ship that the governor was on.
* * *
Less than an hour later a mob equipped with muskets and torches arrived at the hospital to take Anne Jefferson into custody, only to find an almost empty building. Cheated of their prey, they put the torches to use, and the building and anything of value that it might have still held went up in flames.
Dominie Brouwer wasn’t happy.
Brechtje’s boarding house,
temporary Government House
Two hours later, the mob had invested the boarding house. Most of them were milling around on the Heerenweg, but dozens had come into the smaller street on which the house’s front entrance was located.
“Okay, Eduart, how many are there?” Sergeant van der Molen asked. “A lot!”
“I was looking for something a bit more precise.” He looked to Oringo. “Recruit?”
Oringo, who Eduart knew was a former soldier for his tribe, looked out with a practiced eye. He’d already studied the crowd in the Heerenweg.
“Two, maybe three hundred all told, mostly young men. Half of them here, the rest mostly in the Heerenweg. But there are a fair number of women with them. I’d say about half have guns, but most of their guns are muzzle-loading smoothbore muskets.” He laughed. “Some of them are matchlocks.”
“Then let’s pray for rain,” the sergeant said, looking at a cloudy sky.
The ground-floor doors and windows were closed, shuttered, and barred. The second floor, though, had gunners at every window. It wasn’t just the squad that the governor had left and the recruits Eduart and Oringo. Dominie Everardus Bogardus was here too, and he’d brought his congregation, many of whom had arms of their own. Mostly those arms were smoothbore muzzle- loading guns, but since they were inside, out of any potential rain, they were in a much better situation than the attackers. There were men, white, black, and red, and a few women with their household arms. The attackers had the numbers, but the defenders had the position.
Eduart looked out the window again. There was a group of young men at the fore, and Eduart recognized Diederik Hendrix leading them. He pointed and someone on the ground must have noticed.
Suddenly, the sergeant shouted, “Down!”
Eduart went down, and so did Oringo and the rest of the soldiers. Most of the civilians too, but not till the shooting started. Several shots rang out. One man was killed and two were wounded. The sergeant said two sacrilegious words, then shouted, “Get to your windows! Ready weapons. Target that mass of young men. Fire!”
Eduart fired. He was shooting into the mass, not aiming at any one person. But that apparently wasn’t the case with the others.
Diederik Hendrix was hit three times in that first fusillade. Two of the wounds were mortal, one of them all but instantaneous. He went down, never to rise again till God rose up the dead.
“Reload!”
Eduart pulled his rifle in, opened the lock, inserted another round, closed the lock, cocked the hammer, pulled a cap from his pouch, and fumbled it on, while he tried not to throw up.
“Aim!”
Eduart aimed, noting peripherally that most of the civilians were still pouring powder into the barrels of their guns.
“Fire!”
Eduart closed his eyes and jerked the trigger. “Reload!”
It seemed like forever, that cycle of aim, fire, reload, with a peppering of fire from the civilians, who by now weren’t even trying to keep up with the soldiers. It went on and on and, at the same time, it passed in an eyeblink until, finally, fire wasn’t followed by reload, but by “Odd numbers, clean your weapons. Even numbers, have your rounds ready, but don’t reload yet.”
Eduart was an even number. He checked his rounds. He had fired seven rounds at a rate of fire that was supposed to be three rounds a minute, although he was a bit slower. The battle had lasted less than three minutes, and the crowd was already running, leaving its dead and wounded behind. Clearly, they hadn’t been prepared to encounter firearms like the Infantes. If they’d heard rumors of the rifles’ accuracy and rate of fire, they hadn’t believed them.
There didn’t seem to be too many dead—yet, anyway—but there were quite a few wounded men out there. Blood was everywhere, as well as . . .
Eduart lost his battle with his stomach. He stuck his head out the window and vomited into the street.
Suddenly, he was jerked back inside. “Throw up in the corner, you fool! You want to get your bloody head blown off?” the sergeant shouted.
Dominie Everardus Bogardus came in, saw that people were mostly whole, and went on to the next room.
* * *
Elsewhere in the boarding house, Brechtje was busy taking care of, and berating, a blind and helpless Wolfert. Brechtje, it seemed, wasn’t overly impressed by Wolfert’s heroics. “You could have gotten yourself killed, you great fool!” Then she hugged him fiercely.
Wolfert wasn’t sure what was going on, but he liked his prospects. He again considered his house and Brechtje’s boarding house, and this time he had to consider the fact that he might well not have a house by the end of this. That mob that was getting itself shot up out there might well decide to burn his house down if they figured out the part he’d played in this morning’s events.
Or, if the battle went badly, the boarding house might burn.
He decided not to worry about that last, because in that case, they would all be dead.
* * *
Anne Jefferson was mostly ignoring the battle. She had patients to tend. Aside from the newly wounded, there were two surgical patients, a mastectomy that may well have been too late, especially since she had no chemotherapy to follow the surgery, and a compound fracture that would have left the patient crippled. Both those patients were made worse by being moved before they were ready, so Anne was too busy seeing to sick people to pay more than passing attention to the shooting.
She spent her time wishing for disposable latex gloves. What she had instead were two—count them, two—pairs of dishwashing rubber gloves, which were cleaned between surgeries. At times like these, Anne wished for a lot of things from the disposable world of the twentieth century that she’d left behind. Then she went back to work saving lives.
* * *
Dominie Karl Brouwer, in a building across the street and down the block, silently cursed the papists. He cursed his fallen cousin, the up-timers, and himself. Cursed anyone and everyone, except God.
Even in the silence of his soul, he couldn’t curse God. God, who by the act of the Ring of Fire, had spat in the face of all Calvinists and the doctrine of predestination by stepping in and changing the destinies of countless men and women, perhaps of everyone on earth by now. There were men from that other history, men of faith, who hadn’t even been born in this history. How could they fulfill their destiny?
It was as if God had looked at John Calvin’s doctrine and said, “Want to bet? I’ll change it all!”
But he couldn’t think any of that, for to accept that was to accept that Calvin and, especially, Gomarus were wrong. That God found the faith by which he’d lived his life offensive. And that, he could never accept.
Instead, he continued to curse the papists, and the up-timers, and the Remonstrants, and anyone who wasn’t a committed Counter-Remonstrant, and plotted their downfall. In his anger, he turned the mob loose on the governor’s partially built radio tower.
The papist governor’s residence was also burned. What would burn, that is. When it was finished, the residence would be as much of a fort as a residence, with doubled brick walls with packed earth between them. For now, they were barely started. The basement was dug and there was a wooden framework that the bricklayers and plumbers were using for their work, and the whole thing was covered by tarps. But under Dominie Karl Brouwer’s orders, the framework and the tarps were burned and anything easily smashed was smashed.
Hudson River, near West Point
November 16, 1636
It was late in the afternoon when they heard the gunshot. A sailor was sent up into the rigging and saw a boat approaching under oars. It was still a couple of miles back, but with the radio out Adam was wondering if he should turn back or go on. He had the ships turned about and went back to meet the boat.
Having gotten the report, he made sail for New Amsterdam.
Hudson River, approaching New Amsterdam
November 18, 1636
The sun was coming up and they were just now getting back to New Amsterdam. Unwilling to wait a day, Adam decided to abandon the careful scouting he’d planned.
“We go straight in, Captain.”
Captain de Kuiper started giving orders. Five minutes later, before the ship was even tied up, soldiers in the blue and gray of the Netherlands were leaping over the side onto the dock and forming up.
Captain de Kuiper jumped over the side as the gangplank was being run out and shouted, “Company, forward march!” and they started marching. Then, “Company, at the double, march!” and they started running. It wasn’t a sprint, but a steady, ground-eating formation trot. A trot that let them keep formation even as they ran.
Adam ran up and reached the front of the column, a little out of breath. He was surprised that Captain de Kuiper was ignoring the fort altogether. Instead, he was leading the troops alongside the Common Ditch, toward the Sheep Pasture.
De Kuiper paused the march and introduced Adam to a short man in his late forties or early fifties. “Mijnheer Visser. He knows the city well.”
“Most of them are holed up in the Church of the Redeemer, Governor,” Visser explained. “The ones with any fight still in them, anyway. There are maybe two dozen more who’ve seized the fort and taken the soldiers there prisoner. You have to know that it’s not everyone who went crazy after you left. A lot of us are on your side. And a lot more are just keeping their heads down, not wanting to get shot.”
“I understand. What we need to know is their dispositions.”
He told them what he could. The Counter-Remonstrant church where the traitors were located was a large building made of half-brick walls, that is, walls that were brick up to a height of about three feet, with wood and daub above that. The Redeemer had a bell tower, but didn’t yet have a bell because it was a new-built church and the bell foundry had run out of copper until they got in a new shipment. But the bell tower meant they might well have a lookout. The Gomarists had the sympathy of a fair amount of the city’s residents. But a lot of the citizenry weren’t in favor of the revolution, either because they were fine with King Fernando or, more often, because they didn’t think the revolutionaries could win and didn’t want to fight.
So what the Gomarists actually controlled was the Church of the Redeemer and a few houses right around it, the fort, and the area right around the boarding house.
Adam looked at his captain.
“Governor, I’ve seen more battles lost by fancy tactics than any other way. They probably know we’re here by now, but they haven’t had time to figure out what to do about it yet. So, most likely, they’ll be forted up in that church, trying to figure out their best tactics. From what this fellow said, I think the boarding house is safe enough for the moment.
“We can deal with the men in the fort later. Few if any of their leaders will be down there. What we should do now is head to the Church of the Redeemer just as fast as we can get there, surround the place with our whole force, and call on them to surrender.”
He pointed to the north, indicating a spot just past the Sheep Pasture that was still out of sight. “This is the fastest way to the church.”
Adam considered. What he wanted to do was fly to Anne’s rescue like a hero out of legend. But he was a reasonable man who listened to his experts, and here was his expert in matters military. “Captain, you have command.”
“Yes, sir! Groot, take three men for a governor’s guard. You’ll bring up the rear.” Groot collected his men.
Captain de Kuiper shouted, “Company, forward march!” After three steps, “Company, at the double, march!”
And they were running again, with Adam in the rear.
It was less than two minutes later that the company reached the square in front of the church, and Captain de Kuiper had spent the run talking to his sergeants. All he shouted was “Execute!”
As they hit the square, four squads of men split off to surround the church.
From inside the church came three shots, fired apparently in panic and not hitting anyone.
Before long the squads were in place, one behind the gazebo in the square, one in the house to the left of the church and one in the house to the right. The last short squad went around back, and took the stable behind the church, shooting a stable hand who went for his gun.
Then the captain, who was stationed at the gazebo, shouted, “In the name of the royal governor and the king in the Low Countries, I call on you to surrender!”
There was a fusillade of shots from the church, and Captain de Kuiper shouted, “Ready! “Aim!
“Fire!”
There was a fusillade of shots and at least two screams that Adam could hear.
“Go!” the captain shouted, and was up and running even as he shouted. Now the men weren’t running as a clustered group. Each man was separated by several feet from the next, giving plenty of room for shots to miss. They’d been trained as skirmishers as well as line soldiers.
There were shots, but not many. Most had been expended in that first rush to fire after the call to surrender. It took considerable time to reload a muzzleloader, and Captain de Kuiper wasn’t going to give them that time.
Still, one man went down as they sprinted for the wall of the church.
Adam ordered his protection detail to go get the man, but Corporal Groot said, “Wait a moment, Governor. We’ll get Joep, but not until the captain makes the breach.”
Now, against the walls of the church, the squads readied their grenades. These were the new grenades made in Amsterdam. They didn’t have old-fashioned fuses which needed to be lit. They had a nipple for a cap, the same sort that was used on the rifle. Bang the cap against something hard and you had about five seconds before the grenade went off.
Whack!
One.
Two.
Toss through a window. Three. Four.
Five. Bang!
The wall blocked most of the force and all of the shrapnel.
On this day, that was enough. No more of the Governor’s Guards were injured.
As soon as the grenades went off Sergeant Claes Boogard stepped out from the wall, lifted his right leg, and kicked the door. Sergeant Boogard was six feet three inches tall and weighed close to three hundred pounds, all of it muscle. The double doors to the church burst inward, and the men charged in.
Now one of Adam’s bodyguards went to fetch the downed man.
* * *
Inside the church, it wasn’t packed with people, but it was far from empty. Almost a third of the belligerents were women and some were children. Most of the members of the Church Council, which included Dominie Karl Brouwer and doubled as the leadership of the rebellion, were there also. Adam shook his head in disgust. Heroes that burn down hospitals.
“All right, Captain. Make sure they are disarmed, not a penknife among the lot of them, and that includes the women. And hold them here. It’s as good a place as any, for the moment.”
Of course, they couldn’t leave just yet. They had to organize things here, take the bodies out of the church. There were seven of them, and thirteen wounded. Thankfully, all but one of the dead were men, but several of the wounded were women and two were children.
Searching the congregation for weapons also took time. Time that Adam didn’t want to take, but knew he needed to.
Outside Brechtje’s boarding house
The people outside the boarding house heard the shots and the muffled bangs of the grenades, and some of the mob knew what they were. They could all hear the direction that the sounds came from. New Amsterdam was still a small town, in spite of its growth, and this was still a walking-distance world. The boarding house was less than half a mile from the Church of the Redeemer. And shortly after they heard the shooting, they heard from a friend who worked at the lumberyard next to the port that the royal governor had arrived with his “whole” army. The rebels still had quite a few more men than the governor did, but by now they knew full well how much the Infantes added to the firepower of the Governor’s Guard.
People started deciding that they had other places to be.
Derik van der Kleig called a friend over. “Peter, go to the church, see what’s happening.” Peter ran off.
* * *
Minutes later Peter was back. “They were bringing out the dead, a bunch of them. I saw Hans. He had half his face blown off. And the fucking blue coats were looking barely scuffed. I’m getting out of here.”
“Wait, what about Dominie Brouwer and the others?”
“I didn’t wait to see, but if they aren’t dead, they’re surely going to hang. I’m leaving.” Peter stopped and took a breath. “Look, Derik, we are in rebellion against the crown. We’re traitors. At least, that’s how the royal governor is going to see it. I’m not just leaving here, I’m getting out of New Amsterdam. Maybe Fort Orange, maybe the Indians. I may even go to Boston or Virginia. There has to be some place where His Most Catholic Majesty, king in the Low Countries, doesn’t rule.” Peter picked up his musket and left.
Derik would have followed, but he had a wife, two children, and a cobbler’s shop, all here in New Amsterdam, and his wife wasn’t going to leave her house, whatever he did.
Fifteen minutes later, when the Governor’s Guard actually arrived, Derik and the last of the mob had slipped away. Derik went back to his cobbler shop and hoped that no one noticed that he’d been involved in the rebellion. Or if they had, that they keep it to themselves. Or if they didn’t, that the authorities would choose to look the other way.
* * *
At the head of a column of thirty men—one squad was back at the church keeping an eye on the women, children, and the wounded—Adam Olearius marched to the rescue of his lady.
At the front of the boarding house, Anne stepped out and came to meet him. “It took you long enough. What happened to the radio?” Then, not giving him a chance to answer, she grabbed him and kissed him.
“A tube went out, and it turned out we had the wrong box of spares,” Adam said when she let him come up for air. Then he kissed her again.