Introduction

In 1660, Amsterdam is the trading and map-printing capital of the world. Anneke van Brug is one of the colorists paid to enhance black-and-white maps for a growing number of collectors. Her artistic talent brings her to the attention of the Blaeu printing house, and she begins to color for a rich merchant, Willem de Groot. But Anneke is not content to simply embellish the work of others; she longs to create maps of her own. Cartography, however, is the domain of men—so it is in secret that she borrows the notes her father made on a trip to Africa in 1642 and sets about designing a new map.

Anneke hopes to convince the charismatic de Groot to use his influence to persuade Blaeu to include her map in the Atlas Maior, which will be the largest and most expensive publication of the century. But family secrets, infidelity, and murder endanger her dream. Will her map withstand these threats, or will it be forever lost?

Editorial Review

No Editorial Review Currently Available

Excerpt

Prologue

Amsterdam

June 1699

Anneke

If he had known how it would end, my father would have struck the paintbrush from my young hand. Even so, my mother would have quietly retrieved it, saying she was teaching my brother and me a useful skill. What she would not have said was that the income she made from map coloring allowed us to live a more comfortable life, concealing the fact that my father was not as successful an artist as our circumstances might imply.

The coloring meant different things to each of us. To my mother, it was not only a chore that she carried out as part of her housewifely duties. It also allowed her to, in some small way, take part in the artistic world to which she had aspired. To my brother, it was a spark for his imagination. Where were these places that we so tirelessly transformed? What kind of people lived there?

For me, the task itself was sheer joy. The colors, the beauty I could create, insured that I never resented the work asked of me. I even dreamed of drawing my own maps. This desire would come into play in the unraveling of our lives, but I embraced it, and with it, all that was to come.

Chapter 1

1646

Every night before drifting off to dream, Anneke and Lucas prayed, snuggled into their box bed, and listened to their father’s tales of Africa. Sometimes he spoke of the different peoples his group had come across and of the houses on stilts he had seen. Sometimes he spoke of the heat and the quick, heavy rain. Sometimes he spoke of the terrain, difficult and beautiful. Then he would stop speaking, as though he were there again, and the children often wondered whether he wished himself back in those lands, so different from their home of Holland with its dikes and windmills in a never-ending battle to keep the sea at bay.

When Anneke and Lucas asked him to describe the food, he always spoke of the fruit: bananas, coconuts, melons, and tamarinds.

“It is not just the taste, my children, but the feel of them in your mouth.”

“And what is that like, Papa?” they would always ask.

“Like the cool of the night and the warmth of the sun. Like biting into everything sweet in life.” Anneke would whisper to herself, “tamarind,” and she felt those sensations within the beauty of the word.

“But what do they really taste like, Papa? Name something we have that is like them,” seven-year-old Lucas would insist, and his sister, all of a year older, would roll her eyes. But the only answer Isaac ever gave his son was, “Like nothing you have ever eaten.”

Most of all, the children loved to hear of the strange beasts. There were large cats with spotted coats that ran faster than any horse, and those that seemed a strange breed of horse with black-and-white stripes.

“There are mysterious enormous creatures with long tubes connected to their heads where one would expect a nose to be!” their father would say, and the children would gleefully cry out, “But that is just an elephant, Papa—an elephant with a trunk!”

“Just an elephant!” he would say. “But you cannot imagine what it is like to see one.”

“We’ve seen pictures, Papa. You’ve even drawn pictures for us.”

“So I have, children,” he would say, and his mind would wander to the suspicion he always felt that his drawings might not accurately portray things he held only in his memory.

“Still,” he would continue, “you cannot imagine how thrilling it is to see a real elephant! Before you were born, before I went to Africa, there was a real elephant brought to Amsterdam. Her name was Hansken. The great artist Rembrandt van Rijn himself made many drawings of her, so fascinating did he find her. She was brought from Ceylon and so was a bit different from the elephants I saw in Africa. Even having seen her, I was not prepared for the first time we came across elephants, some using their trunk to pull branches from the trees to feed themselves, some taking up water with their trunk to drink. These elephants were larger than Hansken, with much bigger ears, and they had huge curved tusks coming from their mouths.”

“Were you frightened, Papa?” Anneke always asked, though he had answered her many times.

“No, sweet one. I wasn’t, but I don’t know why.”

The children were vaguely aware that there was a hint of obsession in their father’s tales, though they would not have known how to name it. They had been very young when their father had left them and their mother, Lysbeth, for Africa. He had been part of the 1642 expedition when Jan van Herder had gone to meet with the king of Congo, Nkanga a Lukeni, called Garcia II by the Portuguese. They had gone to Mbanza Congo, called San Salvador. When his mission there was completed, van Herder had pushed his group further, and they had traveled inland to the river Kwango, proceeding in a northeasterly direction.

It had been like a new world opening to Isaac. Everywhere there were wonders, and sometimes terrors. His task had been to make sketches of the land and of the animals and of the peoples. And he had done so at a frenzied pace for weeks on end. There was so much to see and record, and Isaac wondered how God had created lands so different from all he had known that they seemed not to belong to the same world at all. Isaac had used his talents to record all that he could. He wanted his countrymen to see what he had seen. But he also wanted more. He wanted to be recognized for what he would bring home. He wanted to be accepted as an artist, and perhaps even to be respected by the scholars of the day. He, who had come from a humble background, longed for this. Perhaps he could gain fame.

Fate would not have it so, however, and he consoled himself that it must not have been God’s will. On the ship’s journey home, they were caught in a storm. Isaac had brought his satchel with all of his drawings onto the deck when he had gone up to sketch some of the sailors. The storm approached quickly, and he ran to help the seamen as best he could. After the storm, he searched for the bag everywhere, but his efforts were fruitless. Abandoned, it must have been swept overboard.

When he went below deck to the area he shared with some of the other skilled men, there were papers scattered on the floor near his hammock. Picking one up, he saw that it was a page of the copious notes he had written about the land itself. They must have fallen from his satchel when he had gone on deck before the storm and so were saved from oblivion. So distraught was he at the loss of his drawings that he barely looked at the pages he gathered up. He guarded them for the rest of the journey, but gone were his dreams of glory. Who now would know the name of Isaac van Brug? view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

1. What do you think of the moral compromises that Anneke made in order to achieve her goal?

2. What hurdles did Anneke face in achieving her dream? Which of these were particularly due to the fact that she was a woman?

3. What might Anneke’s life have been life if she had not married Daniel?

4. Discuss Lysbeth’s love for Isaac, both at the beginning of the story and at the end.

5. How does Lysbeth feel about the compromises she made to accommodate Isaac’s career as an artist?

6. What was your attitude toward Isaac?

7. What role did Lucas play in the lives of each of the other family members?

8. How would you judge Willem de Groot’s attitude and actions toward Anneke?

9. Did you feel any sympathy for Helena Kregier?

10. Anneke says that she has had a mostly happy life. Going by what else she says in the Epilogue, and what happens over the course of the novel, would you judge her life to have been happy?

11. Were there any historical facts that you found particularly interesting or surprising?

Suggested by Members

by akela (see profile) 01/11/24

Weblinks

»	Author's website

Book Club Recommendations

Recommended to book clubs by 1 of 1 members.

Member Reviews

Rate this book