The covenant - James A. Michener [127]
At dusk that night the Huguenots gathered in the old French church, two hundred and ninety children and women and men who had dared the terrors of this age to retain their faith. They had braved dogs that hunted them, and men who rode after them on swift horses, and frontier guards who shot at them. They had crossed strange lands and come to towns where their language was unknown, but they had persevered, these woodworkers, and vintners and schoolteachers. They had sought freedom as few in their generation had sought it, volunteering their fortunes and their lives that they might live according to the rules they believed in. And now they were embarking upon the final adventure, this long passage in rolling ships to a land about which they knew nothingexcept that when they reached it they would be free.
'Cling to your God,' the minister cried in French. 'Cling to the inspired teachings of John Calvin. And above all, cling to your language, which is the badge of your courage. Bring up your children to respect that language, as we in exile here in Holland have respected it against all adversity. It is the soul of France, the song of freedom. Let us pray.'
In the morning Paul led his family from the Bosbeecq home and lined them up on the bridge over the canal. 'Oudezijdsvoorburgwal,' he said for the last time. 'Always remember that when we were naked, the good people on this canal clothed us, as it says in the Bible. Keep that name in your heart.'
He then led them to the house of Mijnheer van Doorn, where he knocked on the door, asking that the Widows Bosbeecq appear, and when they did, he told his sons, 'Remember these good women. They saved our lives with their generosity.'
Next he took them to the French church, where the doors were opened for families to say their last prayers, and inside its warm hospitality he and his family prayed in French, committing themselves again to the promises made the night before.
When they left the church and started toward the waterfront where the ships waited, Paul saw as if for the first time the quiet grandeur of this city, the solid walls behind which sat the solid merchants, the stout churches with their stout Dutch ministers, and above all, the charity of the place the simple goodness of these burghers who had accepted refugees from all the world because they knew that if a nation could feed and manage itself, it could accommodate strangers.
He was sorry to leave. Had he reached Holland sooner in his life, he might have become a Dutchman, but he was French, indelibly marked with the mercurial greatness of that land, and Holland was not for him.
Seven different Compagnie ships would carry the Huguenots to their new home. They left at various times and encountered various conditions. Some made the long run in ninety days; the poor China, buffeted all the way by adverse winds, required a hundred and thirty-seven, by which time many of its Frenchmen were dead. The De Pres and sixty others were loaded upon the Java, but not by plan. There were two ships at the wharf that day, Java and Texel, and Paul was inclined to choose the latter, but his friend Vermaas would not allow it: 'Look at the planking, Paul.' He looked and saw nothing amiss, but Vermaas said, 'It's uneven, not laid on carefully. Bad in one, bad in all.' And he led the family to the gangway of the Java.
This occasioned some difficulty because friends of the De Pres were already aboard the Texel, and the boys wanted to stay with them. But Vermaas had convinced Paul that the Java was safer, so there were tearful farewells, and kisses blown and promises to farm together in the new land and it was appropriate that the parting should have been sorrowful, for
after the Texel passed Cape St. Vincent at the tip of Portugal, where Prince Henry the Navigator had dreamed of voyages like this, it ran into heavy seas and perished.
The Java was a medium ship, not small and swift like a flute, nor