New York - The Novel

daren’t say no to her either. So we went to the fort.
    The sun was getting low, but there were a lot of people about. The captain of the fort was in charge. He had some soldiers, but he was trying to muster the volunteers, who were mostly standing around on the area they call the Bowling Green, just in front of the fort. The Mistress didn’t take any notice of the captain. She just walked into the fort with me, and she called to some of the volunteers to come with her. I suppose about twenty of us went in together. Then the Mistress went straight to the gun emplacements, and before anyone realized what she was doing, she took a spike and the hammer from me, and she starts hammering the spike into the powder hole of one of the cannon, so that it can’t be fired. Some of the soldiers saw it, and they started to shout, and try to interfere with her, but she didn’t take any notice, and she hammered that spike down into that cannon so hard that it was stuck fast. Spiking the guns, they call that.
    The soldiers were getting very excited now. They were not well trained. They started to run toward us, and shouted to the volunteers to stop the Mistress. But being all Dutch, those volunteers weren’t volunteering. And by now the Mistress had moved on to the next gun.
    Just then, one of the soldiers got to the Mistress, and he started to swing at her with his musket. There was nothing for me to do but throw myself at him, and before he could strike her, I knocked him down, and hit his head on the ground hard enough for him to stay down. But another soldier was close by me now, and he had a big pistol which he pointed straight at me, and pulled the trigger. I supposed I was about to die. But luckily for me the pistol was not well primed, and it did not fire. The Mistress turned and saw all this, and she called for the volunteers to keep the soldiers off, which they did.
    Well, there was a lot of confusion after that, with the soldiers being uncertain what to do, and more volunteers coming into the fort to help the Mistress, and the captain being at his wits’ end when he found out what was going on. The Mistress kept spiking guns until she ran out of spikes. Then she left the hammer with the volunteers and told them to get on with it.
    The next day, the Dutch landed with six hundred troops on the openground above the wall. They marched to the fort, with quite a few of the Dutch people cheering them on, and the English captain had to surrender. There wasn’t anything he could do about it.
    I was in high favor with the Mistress after that. I had been afraid the Boss might be angry with me for disobeying his orders, and going to the fort; but the day after it all happened, he says to me: “The Mistress says you saved her life.”
    “Yessir,” I said.
    Then he just laughed.
    “I suppose I should be grateful,” he says. And he didn’t give me any trouble about it.

    So the Dutch had New York again. This time they called it New Orange. But that only lasted a year. Sure enough, across the ocean, our masters made another treaty and we were given back to the English again, which didn’t please the Mistress.
    For a while after that, things were pretty quiet. Manhattan was called New York once more, but the new English governor, whose name was Andros, spoke Dutch and helped the merchants—especially the rich ones. He filled in the canal that ran across town. The Mistress said he did it because it reminded people of Amsterdam. But that old ditch used to stink, and I reckon that’s why he did it. They made a fine street called Broad Street over the top.
    And it was at this time that Mr. Master, that we had met on Long Island, came to live in New York. He and the Boss did a good deal of business together. The Boss liked the old fur trade up the river, but the trade down the coast with the West Indies sugar plantations was growing now, and that was the business Mr. Master did. The Boss would take a share in his voyages sometimes, and so would Meinheer Philipse.
    But the Boss did one thing that gave the Mistress great delight. Jan was getting of an age to take a wife, and the Boss arranged a marriage for him with a girl from a good Dutch family. Her name was Lysbet Petersen and she had a considerable fortune. I had seen her in the town, but never spoken to her before the day she came to the house when the betrothal was announced.
    “This is Quash,” Jan told her, giving me a friendly smile, at which theyoung lady gave me a