KNOWING THE ENEMYAT THE COUNCIL MEETING HELD a few days later to review the outcome, Artemisini took the floor to inform the elders of what had been learned. “We interrogated the captives at length,” he began, “using persuasion and friendship with those inclined to see us less as enemies as captors keeping them alive. Others we had to torture to reveal secrets about the ships and about their homeland. They come from a country called Holland, which is as flat, they say, as our low coral islands but bigger than most of the ones they have seen. It is far to the north, yet to come into our ocean their ships have to travel far to the south, around a land so vast it takes weeks to pass down one side of it.
“Holland is a new country, they say, the result of a war that lasted 80 years with an em
