Marcel P.T. Chin-A-Lien · ORCID iD 0009-0007-1649-602X · rev03 · FINAL · approved by the author, 7 November 2026 · Origin: DERIVED · Source: rev02 FINAL (4 November 2026), revised against GLIAG-BRF-2026-CUR-01 v1.4 (7 November 2026)

I. The bend in the road

Many years later, when I had at last been given the word that geologists use for a silence in the rock, I would remember that I had heard that silence first as a boy, at the first gentle bend of the Gouverneur van Lansbergenweg, some fifty metres from our house at Welgelegen and some twenty-five from the fort, where my four brothers and I played in our free hours and above all at weekends, cowboys and sheriffs, and Indians with bows and arrows, and where, between one ambush and the next, I noticed that young rock lay on rock that was very much older, and sensed that something there was not as it should be, or was more than it should be, without yet having any word to say which.

We had catapults too, and with them we chased the lizards of the island across the stones of that slope: the lagadishi, the blòblò, which some of us called blou-blou, and now and then an iguana, which in Papiamentu is the yuana. None of us knew then that the stones on which they lay in the sun had been, in a first life, the floor of a sea, and in a second, a reef.

The word, when it came, was unconformity, and it is a clumsy word for so delicate a thing. It means that the earth has kept the first pages of a story and the last ones and lost everything in between. Later I learned a sharper word for this particular silence, nonconformity, which geologists keep for the case where young sediment lies directly on old rock that was born of fire. Below the bend lay the dark floor of the island, the dolerite and the diabase, the diabaas of the old Dutch books, as we still call it on Curaçao long after the rest of the world moved on to another name: lava that had poured out onto the floor of a sea about eighty-eight million years ago and cooled there in pillows, one upon another, until the pile was more than five kilometres thick. On top of it, pale and hard, lay the limestone of the Seroe Domi Formation, a reef that grew through the Miocene and into the Pliocene, broke, slid down its own slopes, grew again, and was lifted at last into the air. Its first beds, the books say, hold pebbles of the diabase, the old floor broken, rolled and swallowed by the new sea. The cherts of the Knip and the sands of Midden-Curaçao, which elsewhere on the island lie between the two, are not there at the bend; the reef laid itself straight down upon the lava. Between the two there ran a line no thicker than a stroke of pencil, and in that line some seventy-two to seventy-six million years were missing. The whole death of the dinosaurs, sixty-six million years ago, fitted inside it with room to spare. We played out our cowboy wars on top of it, and none of us ever fell in.

In my memory the Nijlweg did not yet exist there, or did not yet run on to the Koningin Julianabrug; who knows which, because memory is a sediment too, and it settles. What I know is that the bend lay inside our playground, and that the playground ran from the house up the slope to the fort on the crest of the hill, and that the whole of it, house, bend, slope and fort, is what I have come to call my Memory Lane. It is the place where geology first called me by my name.

II. The hill called Vigilance

The hill is Seru Domi,¹ and the fort on its crest is Waakzaamheid, which means Vigilance. It is a single bastion of coral stone, 872 square metres in all, the smallest of the island’s forts, and it is built, as far as anyone can tell, since no quarry book of 1803 has been found, of the very reef it stands on, so that the hill and the fort seem made of the same stone and it is not easy to say, standing on the parapet, where the earth stops and the work of men begins. We climbed to it om onze vliegers op te laten,² to fly our kites, and to watch the sun go down into the Caribbean, which for me is the most beautiful sea on this globe, and I must set down plainly, because it is the truth and not an ornament, that in nearly fifty years of looking at horizons on several continents I have not seen sunsets finer than those, anywhere.

I know now why the hill stands where it does, and the knowing has taken nothing away. The limestone cap was turned to dolomite three times, each time after it had been lifted above the sea and flushed by seawater mixed with rain, and the last of those dolomites took up zinc, copper and strontium from the basalts below, so that the cover carries a faint fingerprint of the floor it rests on, the way a child carries the face of a grandparent it never met. The beds dip towards the sea, about twenty degrees along the south coast, and the island is lined with these tilted ridges, the cuestas, of which Seru Domi is the one behind Willemstad. The hard cap holds its shape; the basalt inland weathers into soft brown slopes and gullies. And so, from the crest, a gun commands three things at once: the roofs of Otrobanda at the foot of the hill, the narrow mouth of the Sint Annabaai, and the open roadstead where the ships stand off before they enter. A boy with a kite commands the same three things, and asks nothing more of them than the wind.

The hill had a second nature. A ridge of limestone is dry. The rain sinks through the fractured rock and comes back to the light only where the tighter basement meets it, at the foot of the hill, on plantation land. The rock that made the hill strong made it thirsty, and that thirst, as I would find out a lifetime later in the printed minutes of the colony, once became a contract.

III. The wrong Frenchmen and the wrong Bligh

Popular memory, which likes a story to be short, tells the history of the fort in a single sentence: it was built in 1803 against the French, and in 1804 it was taken by William Bligh of the Bounty, who used it to bombard Fort Amsterdam. The sentence is printed on Dutch Wikipedia to this day. Each clause of it is wrong, unproven or more tangled than it looks, and the truth, as Euwens drew it in 1907 and 1908 out of the Council minutes, the resolutions and the petitions of the colony, is stranger and better.

The French had come, but they had come in 1800. They landed on the twenty-second of July, used Otrobanda as cover for their attacks, so that half of that quarter was destroyed in the fighting, and by early September they had taken a fort that guarded Willemstad. On the thirteenth of September Governor Lauffer signed a capitulation that placed the colony under British protection; the French lifted their blockade, and from October 1800 until early 1803 the British administered the island while Lauffer kept the civil government. The books say the fort on Seru Domi was raised in 1803 against the French coming back, on the hill above the very quarter that had sheltered their assault. The minutes of that year say something else. In the Council session of 24 May 1803 the commissioner read out letters from The Hague warning of trouble between France and Great Britain, and ordering the colony to be on its guard, to trust nobody and always to act defensively. In late June the news arrived that the war had been proclaimed. France was the ally now. The lesson of 1800 was the height; the enemy expected on the horizon in 1803 was British.

In September of that same year the Council uncovered a plot, and the plot passed through our ground. A British corvette, the Suriname, lay in the harbour under a Captain Tucker, who had sworn an oath to the colony and who spent his time at the plantation Welgelegen. A young Schuler had offered to show the British the way to the fort on the hill, and Euwens, who searched the old deeds, found that the surgeon J.C. Schuler owned the plantation Sandrock on the Rooden Weg,³ by then part of Welgelegen, and wrote in a footnote that the fort on the hill could therefore only be Fort Waakzaamheid on the Cortijn hill, on the Rooden Weg. On Saturday the tenth of September a second lieutenant, C.M. de Lange, was sent with a party of soldiers to Welgelegen with a written order for Tucker to return aboard his ship, and as the lieutenant climbed the steps of the landhuis,⁴ Tucker raised his pistol and, in the words Euwens took from the minutes, hem een kogel door het hoofd joeg.⁵ Afterwards a small chest of gunpowder was found in the house. That house was the plantation house of 1803, not ours; but it stood on the same plantation ground as the bend where, a century and a half later, we played.

At half past six on the morning of Tuesday the thirty-first of January 1804 a British squadron appeared off the harbour and gave the town two hours to surrender, and the Council refused. Its commander was not William Bligh of the Bounty, who was somewhere else entirely, but Captain John Bligh of the seventy-four-gun Theseus, a different man with the same surname; Simons, writing in 1868, already called him kommandeur J. Bligh, and still the mistake has been repeated until it hardened into tradition, which is the kind of coincidence that history never resists. With him came the Hercule, the frigates Blanche and Pique and the schooner Gipsy. The ships of the line moved west to the Piscaderabaai, whose little fort fell at once. A landing party, a hundred and ninety men with four guns in the Dutch account and six or seven hundred in the British ones, marched towards the town along the inland side of the limestone ridges, over the basalt lowland, along the plantation roads behind Otrobanda, which is to say that Schuler’s plan of the previous September was carried out to the letter. They found the hill forts empty. Euwens writes that the enemy took possession of the forts De Wreker and Waakzaamheid, on the hill north of the road on the plantation Welgelegen, and there placed four guns in position to fire on the town. He wrote a century after the fact, and no dispatch of 1804 that I know of names the fort; I give his identification as his.

For twenty-six days, or twenty-eight as the British biographer Marshall counted them, the British held our hill and shelled Willemstad from it, and Marshall wrote that Bligh fired away every eighteen-pound shot in the squadron. On the afternoon of the first of February burghers and soldiers attacked the position and drove the enemy back inside the fort, at heavy cost, but could not dislodge him, and they attacked again on the fifth and on the sixth. In the last of those fights, Euwens records, a platoon of Frenchmen pursued the retreating British as far as the Rooden Weg, French soldiers fighting beside the Dutch. On the seventh of February an incendiary shot lodged in the roof timbers of the Lutheran church and burned it to its walls, with all the old papers of the congregation, and on the same day an eighteen-pounder burst on the left bastion of a fort, killing two men and wounding fifteen. On the evening of the fourteenth the British tried to set the town on fire and burned only a few houses. The congregation of the Fort Church still shows a British cannonball lodged in its wall as a relic of that year; the identification rests on the tradition of the church, not on any report of the time, and I leave it there, where it has been for two centuries.

Fort Amsterdam never fell. The British had the hill and never had the town. Dysentery and their dead wore them down, and Euwens closes the siege in a single line: Den 26 Febr., Zondagsmorgens, ontruimden de Engelschen heimelijk het fort op den berg.⁶ The Royal Navy’s books put the re-embarkation a day earlier, on the twenty-fifth, and count eighteen British dead and forty-three wounded. By then the defenders had fired almost thirty thousand pounds of gunpowder at the place where, a century and a half later, five boys would fly their kites.

IV. Water, rent and loyalty

After the siege the colony understood how much those empty batteries had helped the enemy. Two men were sent to inspect them, one battery on the hill by the house of Welgelegen and the other on the Cortijn hill, both on the grounds of that plantation, in order to correct the earlier mistake and station a permanent garrison there. A proposal that the colony should simply buy the plantation came to nothing. Instead its owner, John van der Meulen, was paid four hundred pesos a year as rent for the ground the forts occupied, for as long as the war lasted, and in return the garrison was granted vrij water en vrijen doortocht,⁷ free water and free passage. There it is, the thirst of the limestone, written into a contract: the rock that made the hill defensible made its soldiers dependent on their neighbour for every drink.

There was a shadow on it. Van der Meulen had stayed on Welgelegen through the whole siege, unharmed, and in the Council of 24 March 1804 a member named Qurst insinuated collusion. Van der Meulen and the commissioner De Veer were brothers-in-law, both married to daughters of Lodewijk van Utrecht. Twice in six months the plantation on which I would grow up had stood at the centre of a question of loyalty, first with a pistol on its steps and then with a rent on its hills, and the minutes do not say how either question was finally answered in the hearts of the men concerned. The minutes never do.

On New Year’s Day 1807 four British frigates under Captain Brisbane sailed straight into the harbour, stormed Fort Amsterdam in about ten minutes and had the island’s surrender by noon, and on the fourth of March 1816 Curaçao was returned to the Netherlands. From 1826 the plan of Lieutenant-General Krayenhoff sent the guns back to the waterline, to a new Waterfort and to the Riffort, where they could reach ships again instead of streets. The hill forts disappear from the list. Vigilance went to sleep.

V. The hill looks up

It woke once more. On the eleventh of February 1942 some two thousand three hundred American soldiers, who had sailed from New Orleans five days before, came ashore on Aruba and Curaçao, and three days later the British garrison of about fourteen hundred men, which had stood guard over the harbour and the oil since the day after Germany invaded the Netherlands, sailed away. It was a garrison by agreement with the Dutch government in exile, not a conquest, although the American naval records call it occupation duty. On the night of the sixteenth German U-boats attacked the tankers and the refineries, and on the nineteenth of April U-130 shelled the refinery on the Schottegat until a Dutch shore battery drove it off after five rounds. According to the American consulate, the refineries of the two islands supplied seventy per cent of the fuel the Allied forces burned, and that number made the defence of Curaçao a question of the war itself.

The Americans built five batteries on the island. Three of them were for anti-aircraft, with forty-millimetre guns, at Cer’i Domi,⁸ Ceru Karpata and Ceru Warawara, and on our fort they mounted guns on the walls, built barracks and set up an observation post. How many guns stood on Cer’i Domi, no source I have read says, and until somebody reads the records of the Caribbean Defense Command the number stays open, which is where an honest geologist leaves any number he has not measured. The hill that had looked down over the harbour mouth in 1804 now looked up, over the refinery, for aircraft. In 1942 its fate was no longer decided by the reef or the basalt but by the rock oil of other basins, refined at its feet, a fact I note here without comment because the rest of my life would comment on it at length.

After the war the fort became for many years a restaurant, then fell into disrepair, and Monumentenzorg partly restored it in 2012. In 2025 the foundation offered the site for commercial use, on the condition that anything built there be removable and reversible. It may be the only rule ever laid down for that hill that the hill itself would have written.

VI. The stencil

There was a second cause, besides the hill, and it had a name. At the Radulphus College, in the second class, Drs. Roozenburg taught us physical geography, and his course held a short chapter on the geology of Curaçao: about ten pages, run off as a stencil, as was usual in those days. Ten pages. I have since written and read papers of many hundreds of pages, I have worked on giant fields and sat at the tables where Production Sharing Contracts are negotiated, and I do not think any document has ever done more to a life than those ten stencilled pages did to mine.

From then on, whenever I went to the Wetenschappelijke Bibliotheek in Punda, I looked for books on geology, and I did the same in the library of Carmabi at Piscadera, on the shores of the same bay where, some hundred and sixty years before, the British had come ashore to take my hill. The reading showed in my marks. I had a ten, the top mark, in physical geography through the whole of that year, the highest in the class, and I set it down because it is a measurement, and measurements are what a geologist trusts. Then one day Drs. Roozenburg described the work that geologists do: explorers and discoverers, he said, in deserts, in jungles, in little-known foreign countries and regions. My choice was made. At eighteen I left the island for the Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden, and on the thirty-first of May 1977, at the Geologisch en Mineralogisch Instituut on the Garenmarkt, I graduated in geology and became what he had described. That is what I went on to do, in deserts and in jungles and in countries that were little known then and some that are little known still. On the thirty-first of May 2027 it will be fifty years.

VII. The outcrop still asks

The family house at Welgelegen is still the family house, and I return to it almost every year. Each time I pass the bend of the Gouverneur van Lansbergenweg I am aware of the line in the rock, of the eighty-eight million years below it and the reef above it and the long missing time between, and of the boy who played cowboys there and could not have explained what he sensed. I can explain it now, with the vocabulary of four degrees and nearly five decades, and I find that the explanation is only a longer way of saying what he sensed in one look.

And yet, by the standards of my own profession, I have proved nothing. What I hold is testimony, not mapping. The contact has no coordinates, no photograph, no samples, no ages of its own and no place yet on a published map. The geologist I became owes the boy I was three small things, the smallest any field geologist ever asks of an outcrop: a point fixed by satellite, a photograph of the contact, and a pair of hand samples, one from the old rock and one from the young, taken on either side of the line where all that time went missing.

Above the bend, on the crest, the fort called Vigilance still watches the three things it was built to watch, the roofs of Otrobanda, the mouth of the bay and the open sea, and at the hour when the sun goes down into the Caribbean it is still, for me, the finest place on this globe from which to see it go.

· · ·

Soso Lobi
Con todo mi amor
Ku tur mi amor i apresio

Marcel P. T. Chin-A-Lien · Zoetermeer, 4 November 2026

Notes

1. Seru Domi (Papiamentu): seru, hill. The hill and the Seroe Domi Formation share the name, the formation in its older Dutch spelling.

2. Dutch: “to fly our kites”.

3. Rooden Weg (Dutch, old spelling): “the Red Road”.

4. Landhuis (Dutch): the main house of a plantation.

5. Dutch, as printed by P.A. Euwens (1907): “put a bullet through his head”.

6. Dutch, as printed by Euwens (1907): “On 26 February, Sunday morning, the English secretly evacuated the fort on the hill.”

7. Dutch, as printed by Euwens (1908): “free water and free passage”.

8. Cer’i Domi (Papiamentu): the contracted form of Seru Domi.

Sources the chapter draws on

Copyright and citation

© 2026 Marcel P. T. Chin-A-Lien. All rights reserved, including text and data mining under Art. 4(3) Directive (EU) 2019/790. Map data in Figures 1 and 2 © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).

Cite as: Chin-A-Lien, M.P.T. (2026). The Boy Who Listened to Stones: Vigilance on Limestone. The Earth Remembers, Book I, Chapter 4, rev03 FINAL, 7 November 2026. Zenodo. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.24024266

Correspondence: info@gliag.com.