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A Great Drowning of Men

Written by Walt Boyes

28 August 1626 (old style)

The hooves of the cavalry horses thundered as the lifeguards of Friedrich, third of the name, duke of the Danish province Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp, rode for their lives with the duke safely in their midst.

Behind them was the carnage of the battle of Lutter. There, twenty thousand Imperial troops under the command of Jan Tzerclaes, Count Tilly, had managed to rout an equal number of Danish troops under the direct command of Christian IV, King of Denmark.

Most of Christian’s army holed up in Stade, but Friedrich headed for Nordstrand Island, off the west coast of Schleswig.

Tired, hungry, and somewhat fearful for his life, the duke of Gottorp hauled his horse to a stop in the town square of the little town of Husum. It was just dawn, and he and his men had been riding all night.

“Find somebody who knows what is going on around here,” Friedrich ordered. One of his troopers saluted and turned his horse off toward the Rathaus. Well, it would have been a Rathaus if the town had been really big enough for a city hall.

“I want to get to Nordstrand by nightfall,” Friedrich said to his aide de camp. The aide, probably wisely, said nothing.

The trooper returned. “Lord Duke,” he reported, “the burgomaster says that he thinks there are Imperialists on Nordstrand.”

“Nonsense!” Friedrich glared, moustaches quivering. He slapped his leather riding coat. “We will go. If there are Imperials, we’ll just have to beat them!”

The troop remounted, dressed their lines, and started for the dock. There was a decent sized sailing ferry there.

The ferry captain was sitting on a wooden bollard on the dock. He had a piece of wood that he was whittling into something nondescript. His mate stood next to him, smoking a long clay pipe. They watched the cavalry troop ride down the road and out onto the dock.

“Well, Hubertus,” the captain said to the mate, “I guess we’re going for a sail.”

****

It took less time to sail to Sudhaven on Nordstrand Island than it took for Friedrich’s small troop to load themselves and their horses on the ferry. It was a beautiful day, with light wind, and the sea was running fast between the mainland and the island. Soon, the jetty at Sudhaven came into sight, and with it, the ranks of Imperial troops standing on the pier. There was a small group of burghers standing with the soldiers.

Without being told, the ferry captain brought the boat to a stop about fifty feet off the jetty. The ferry rocked in the light chop.

Friedrich went to the rail. “What is this?” he shouted. “And who in the Devil’s Hell are you?”

“I am Pieter Karstense van Nortstrant, the burgomaster,” one of the civilian burghers shouted back, “We have joined the Imperials, my lord.”

Nordstrand was home to a small Catholic population surrounded by Lutherans. As they were an island, and they were small, Friedrich had never bothered about them.

“If you come ashore, My Lord,” van Nortstrant, who was standing beside the obvious commander of the Imperial troops shouted, “you must be taken prisoner.”

Friedrich stood by the rail, his blood pounding in his ears. After being beaten badly the day before at Lutter, and riding cold and hungry through the night to what he thought was going to be his safe haven, only to be repulsed! It could not be, it would not be borne. Friedrich gave a wordless shout of anger, tore off his hat, threw it to the deck and stamped on it.

“With God’s help, this island should sink into the sea!” he shouted.

Friedrich turned to the ferry captain. “Prepare to take me back to Husum.”

22 October 1634 (old style)

It was very early. The sun had just come up, and there was Jan Adriaanzoon walking the dike near Dagebüll for cracks and damage during the previous night, just as he did every morning including Sundays. When ministers remonstrated with him for working on the Sabbath, Jan had always told them, “The sea works on Sundays, so must the engineer.”

Jan was born in the Low Countries, and he called himself Leeghwater, “low water” because, as he told his son Adriaan, “we engineers drain the polders and make the water low.” He always laughed as he said it. Now in his late fifties, Leeghwater had grown corpulent and his big belly shook as he laughed.

There was a wooden footpath laid on top of the dike, and he navigated his ponderous bulk up it to the stairs that led to the top of the sluice. Jan grunted as he knelt to inspect the gaskets on the sluice gate. The leather gaskets were well greased, and looked to be in good shape. Jan levered himself upright and huffed through his mustachios from the exertion. There were wooden stairs leading down from the sluice gate platform. Jan made sure it was easy to get to every gate he’d ever designed.

He’d been working in the Low Countries on trying to make a polder, a reclaimed field, from a low-lying saltmarsh called Beemster. That project was nearly complete but with the unsettled political situation in Holland, he’d agreed to go to Denmark for a while to work on a project to build dikes at Bottschoter in western Schleswig, or northern Frisia, depending on who you talked to.

Before he came to Denmark, Jan had bought from a bookseller in Amsterdam some up-time books. They’d been written by a man called George, with the unpronounceable surname of Tchobanoglous and another man called Takashi Asano. While the first name sounded maybe Turkish, and the second sounded like somebody from far Nippon, the men apparently were up-time professors in someplace called the University of California. Their books on water and wastewater treatment and design, said to be from the library of the water treatment plant in Grantville, had some new techniques that Jan was eager to try, if the cursed war would ever end, but the fundamentals were still what Jan knew. Since he’d read the books, he’d taken to calling himself by the up-time title, “hydraulic engineer.”

Jan clattered down the wooden steps from the sluice gate, and walked briskly down the raised earthen dike. This dyke was old, and only a few feet tall, which was why Jan had been hired to replace it with a bigger, stouter, taller dike. After the storm surge in 1632, the Nordfrieslanders decided that they’d have to come up with the money to rebuild and renew the barrier that kept them from the North Sea.

Even though the 1632 storm had been much less severe than the up-timers’ histories described it in the original time line, the Nordfrieslanders didn’t trust the butterfly effect. So they went ahead with the project, despite the very high taxes they were paying because of the war between the Swedes and the Imperials. Jan, with his experience based on a thousand years of dike building in the North Sea and his new up-time knowledge sounded to the burghers like just the ticket.

Jan stood on the dike, looking out to sea. The water was as calm as the North Sea got, at least in the channel between Dagebüll and the big island of Strand, or Nordstrand. There were few clouds. It was a beautiful October day.

After finishing his inspection, it was almost noon, and Jan headed to a tavern. Like nearly all the small towns in Nordfriesland, Dagebüll was built on a raised mound that had been added to for as long as the inhabitants could remember. It was as if Dagebüll had one long street, raised above the fields where crops grew and cattle grazed.

The inn was old, as buildings went, but still had the huge beams exposed in the ceiling that made the building stout. That was important when the winds blew in off the North Sea, and the weather turned.

Jan joined a group of men sitting at a long table under the window, reading newspapers and drinking small beer.

“And what is news today?” he asked his master carpenter, Pieter Jansz, who was reading a broadsheet.

“Work on the Union of Kalmar moves apace. Apparently we are all to be Swedes now.”

“Well, I am Dutch, and not likely to wake up Swedish one day,” Jan said, tugging on his VanDyke beard. “It appears, however that I may be Spanish now.” He sat and picked up another paper from the small pile on the table and nodded thanks when the server brought him a mug of beer.

“Prost!” he said, raising his mug.

He settled down to read. The paper was full of news about the dashing rescue of the Princess Maria Anna by the new “king in the Netherlands,” the former Cardinal-Infante Don Fernando. Jan wasn’t sure he approved of the treaty between the House of Orange and the House of Habsburg ending the Netherlands war. But he was sure that the situation for engineers was going to improve tremendously, especially since the Swede was building docks and a fortified harbor so he could cut off traffic through the Zuider Zee if he wanted to.

There was even talk about draining the whole Zee . . . just like the up-time Hollanders did in the twentieth century. Jan had read about the project in another book that claimed to be “faithfully republished” based on a book in the library of Grantville itself. He was as excited as he could let himself be thinking about working on that project.

The newspaper also had an article about the aftermath of the Galileo business in Italy. Jan sipped his beer and continued to read.

A hand dropped on his shoulder. He looked up to find Jansz standing over him.

“Master,” Jansz said, “we are having some people over for dinner tonight. Will you join us?”

“I would like that,” Jans said.

“Good. We will be seeing you at dinnertime tonight then.”

Jansz went out the door of the inn. Jan ordered some lunch and decided to eat it out in the inn yard. There were some trestle tables there for outdoor eating in good weather. Even though it was October, it wasn’t very cold. There were more scudding clouds in the sky, but the sky was blue and the wind was dying down. Jan ate a nice chunk of ham and a piece of Gouda cheese that reminded him of the Netherlands and home.

After he ate, Jan walked back up to the outer dyke and walked along it, looking out to sea. The wind, he noticed, was coming up. The sea had bigger swells and was raising whitecaps. He could see the rip current in the channel between Dagebüll harbor and Nordstrand off in the distance. There was definitely a change in the weather. He thought he’d best do another inspection before he went to Jansz’s house for dinner. He walked from sluice gate to sluice gate, checking the great wheels and chains that could raise the gates and the pawls that kept the gates closed. He checked the dry wells that were installed every few hundred yards to make sure there was no seepage or at least no more than normal.

When he finished, Jan went back to the inn and finished reading the news broadsides. About seven or eight o’clock, he walked down the inner dike from the inn to the house that Pieter Jansz and his family were living in.

All through dinner, Jan and Jansz discussed the state of the big new sluice that Jansz was building. It was more or less on schedule, which was certainly a wonder, Jan thought. They hardly noticed the wind picking up.

After dinner, they lit their long clay pipes and talked about ...