The covenant - James A. Michener [76]
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