
It's time to tell the world about the historical novel that I have been working on for over five years. The good news is that I have a publisher who is reviewing the manuscript right now. While that’s a big step, it's too early to get excited. But it is never too early to start building interest.
So, here is the pitch:
The Waters Are Never Still weaves together three lives in 17th-century New Netherland: Annatje Berghoorn, a resilient Dutchwoman; Capachick, her Mohican friend caught between cultures; and Arendt van Curler, an unsung historical figure who leads the small patroonship called Rensselaerswyck.
In 1637, fourteen-year-old Annatje Berghoorn sails with her father from Holland to escape the plague. She can scarcely imagine her new life in the colonie living on a rustic farm among the wilden, as the Dutch call the Mohawks (Kanien'kehá:ka) and Mohicans (Muh-he-conneok). Soon after her arrival, she befriends Capachick, a shy and thoughtful young man who is troubled by the changes he has seen for his Mohican clan.
Annatje marries a Dutch tenant farmer and Capachick marries the sister of a Mohawk chief. Worried about her financial security, Annatje begins trading beaver pelts with Capachick on the black market, but keeps her partnership secret from her husband who mistrusts the wilden.
Arendt van Curler struggles to manage the affairs of the growing Rensselaerswyck settlement while his demanding uncle Kiliaen van Rensselaer, the patroon, second-guesses his every move in letters from Amsterdam. All the while, Willem Kieft, Director of New Netherland, wages a brutal war against the Lenape people to the south around Manahata, unsettling the Rensselaerswyck colonists who fear that violence will spread north. Through calm diplomacy, however, Arendt maintains peace and trade with the Mohawks and the Mohicans.
When word of his uncle Kiliaen’s death arrives, Arendt must sail back to Amsterdam to help determine the future of Rensselaerswyck. Petrus Stuyvesant replaces Kieft as Director of New Netherland and immediately clashes with the new director of Rensselaerswyck who replaces Arendt, pushing the colonie toward an uncertain future.
The Waters Are Never Still blends fiction with historical events much like Geraldine Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize winner Caleb's Crossing or Tracy Chevalier’s The Girl With The Pearl Earring. My novel strikes a fictional tangent to Russell Shorto’s non-fiction bestseller about New Netherland, The Island at the Center of the World. It will appeal to readers of early American and Native American history. I'm starting work on a sequel set in Beverwyck in the 1650s, and perhaps someday a third book set in 1664 when the English took over New Netherland and Beverwyck became Albany, New York.

Background
I've been interested in my family's Dutch-American roots since I was about 12 years old when my dad showed me the Van Wie family tree (patrilineal) traced back to Hendrick Gerritse Van Wie in 1664. Both my father and I grew up in Troy and went to high school in Albany, New York, so I was always aware of the early Dutch history of the area, including the annual Tulip Festival in Albany each May. My father showed me pictures of the old family homestead on Van Wie's Point on the Hudson River just south of Albany. Like many Dutch-American descendants, I read what I could find about Dutch history in the area.
In college, I remember talking late one night with a student who was doing her honor's thesis on the Dutch system of "patroonships" which she described as "medieval feudalism exported to North America," or something like that. She described Rensselaerswyck and Beverwyck, which later became Albany after the English took over the Dutch colony of New Netherland in 1664.
Years later in 2004, my interest was rekindled when some distant relatives organized a Van Wie family "reunion" to share our genealogical research and learn about the early history of Albany. Then I read Russell Shorto's "epic story of Dutch Manhattan": The Island at the Center of the World (Doubleday 2004), which opened my eyes to the full fifty-some years of Dutch settlement and trade with the Mohawks and Mohicans. I was impressed to learn of Dr. Charles Gehring's incredible work translating more and more document from that era, bringing new history to life that had sat dormant for centuries. On a subsequent visit to Albany, I visited the New Netherland Research Center and spent an afternoon browsing through the research library. I bought Janny Venema's book Beverwijck and James Bradley's Before Albany and went deeper into the weeds on early history of the upper Hudson Valley. I was blown away by the incredible historical paintings of Len Tantillo. I thought it would be interesting to read some fiction about the Dutch colonial era, but I couldn't find any.
A dozen or so years later, on the ego-rush of publishing The Confluence, I started thinking about writing a novel set in Beverwyck to bring the "colonie" to life for more people. I sketched some ideas for a storyline: a strong female protagonist who runs a tavern in the midst of the feud between Brant van Slichtenhorst, director of Rensselaerswyck, and Peter Stuyvesant, Director General of New Netherland that led to the creation of the Court of Fort Orange. When her husband dies suddenly, she has to keep the business going while suitors compete for her attention... Or something like that.
Then, a couple years later, after publishing Storied Waters, I decided that, yes, I might try to make the jump from creative non-fiction to historical fiction. I'd never written a word of fiction in my life, but I was up for the challenge. In November 2019, I decided to go for it. November is known as #NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month: Sit down, get started, write every day, and see how much of a novel you can write in a month.
How much did I write? Not much. I tried, but realized that this was going to be much harder than I thought and I had lots of research to do. Every sentence I started raised so many questions. What was my female protagonist, Annatje's, backstory? How did she get to the colonie? Who were her friends? She had children- how old and what were they like? What kind of food did they serve in the tavern? How did they speak?
And what about the Mohawks and the Mohicans? I read that they were part of everyday life in the Dutch settlement, sleeping in barns and trading venison for wool cloth. How well did the Dutch and the two tribes get along in the 1640s and 1650s? Wow.
Working backward from 1652 at the height of the (very colorful) Slichtenhorst-Stuyvesant feud, I decided that Annatje would have come from Holland at age 14 with her father in 1638. That put her well back into the earlier years of Rensselaerswyck, which was headed by Arendt van Curler, a young nephew of Kiliaen van Rensselaer, the patroon or owner. I decided that young Annatje needed to meet some of the local Mohicans, so I invented two brothers, Wickepe and Capachick (names borrowed from deeds on land transactions with the Dutch). Annatje and Capachick would become friends.
I started digging into the historical record, much of which was on-line. The Minutes of the Court of Fort Orange provided other colorful characters and interesting problems and incidents. I found the Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts (VRBM) of letters, which offered a treasure trove of internal politics, inventories of buildings and estates, ships logs and journals... lots of raw material and language for dialogue. And many more books, articles, and translated source documents.
While I did my research, I wanted to write something, so I just started writing scenes around various events, real and imagined, to build my skills with character, description, showing-not-telling, and dialogue. Some of those early scenes are still in the book, others were dropped. I also read a couple dozen books about writing fiction, and about revising and rewriting and revising some more.
The result? Well, here we are five years later. It's been a long journey, with a dozen beta readers, many full revisions, a professional editor hired, and more revisions. I'm pleased with where the manuscript is today. I like it very much, even after reading it 100 times. But it can always be better. I look forward to working with another editor to bring this incredible story to life.
And- at risk of jinxing- I have a publisher who asked to review the full manuscript. That is a huge step, but still under a deep fog of uncertainty. I'm hopeful that my path to publication will open before me at some point soon. And now I am starting to work, again, on the story I originally started about Annatje set in 1652 in Beverwyck, which is now the sequel.
I'm wondering if I should offer a few opening chapters of The Waters Are Never Still as a sneak preview? I don't know if that is wise, or if I have the nerve. I'll think about it.

Comments