“Is that all you can think of? Perhaps you should not judge others by yourself. As for your own visits to Indians …” She let the words fall with a bitter contempt—there could be no mistaking her meaning. “You had better return in three weeks, if you want to use my money any more.” This last threat was shouted as she rose to her feet. Her eyes were blazing with rage.

“I shall return,” he said with icy quietness, “when my business is done.” But she had already stormed out of the room.

He left the house at dawn the next day, without having seen her again.

It was a lovely summer morning as the broad, clinker-built boat, rowed by four oarsmen, made its way northward. Instead of taking Hudson’s great river, however, van Dyck’s journey today began the other side of Manhattan, on the East River. In the center of the boat was a great pile of the thick, tough Dutch cloth known as duffel. This legitimate cargo would satisfy any prying eyes.

It was a peaceful scene. After a time, they inched past a long, low slip of land that lay midstream and then, having come nearly eight miles from the wharf at New Amsterdam, they swung across to their right, to a small jetty on the eastern side where a group of men with a wagonload of casks was awaiting them. For this was their real cargo.

It took some time to load all the casks. The foreman, a corpulent Dutch farmer, asked if he wished to test the goods.

“Is it the same as before?” van Dyck inquired.

“Exactly.”

“I’ll trust you.” They’d done business many times.

Brandy. The Indians couldn’t get enough of it. Selling brandy to the Indians was, strictly speaking, illegal. “But the crime is less,” the foreman had genially informed van Dyck, “because I’ve watered it.” Only a little—the Indians couldn’t tell the difference—but enough to add ten extra percentage points to van Dyck’s profits. When the casks were all loaded, the boat pulled away into the stream.

There was only one problem with this operation: the cargo had to be loaded up the East River. Unless he returned all the way back past New Amsterdam, it would be necessary to continue up the eastern side of Manhattan in order to join Hudson’s great North River. And that involved dangers.

For at the top of the East River, the waterway forked. On the left, a narrow channel led around the northern tip of Manhattan. On the right, a broader channel led eastward to the huge sound whose placid waters, sheltered from the ocean by the long island, stretched for nearly a hundred miles. The danger lay at the fork. For even if all three waterways seemed calm, they were secretly pushed or pulled by subtly different tides and currents so that, at their meeting, a complex hydraulic churning took place, made even harder to read by the positioning of several small islands in the intersection. Even on the calmest day when, out in the sound, the soft waters scarcely seemed to stir the reeds, any unpracticed waterman coming to the fork could suddenly find his boat sucked into eddies and whirlpools and smashed uncontrollably into a wall of water that seemed to have arisen like an angry god from the deep. “Hell Gate” they called this place. You avoided it if you could.