Watch of the Last Bank

The only paid public employment in the Nieuwlanden: tower men appointed for life from a few families, who count and record what is heard beyond the bank in a book running back four centuries without a gap. The bank's inspectors are likewise appointed, and the office has never been left vacant.

A line of towers along the last bank of the Nieuwlanden, manned through the dark half of the year, whose men watch the Drowned Lands rather than the sea.

Named with it

• Wall-Reeve Cornelia Brask · keeps the tower book, Nieuw Amsterdam
• Warden Pieter Haan · bank charge of the eastern parishes, 4447

Ties

• paid out of the Sluice Court's levy
• acts with the Nieuwlanden chapter

At the table

Ask the tower men what they are doing and they will say that they are watching the bank. Their book has counted the sounds out of the marsh for four hundred years. It sets down no interpretation of them, and nobody from outside the country has ever read it. Whatever comes across the bank is dealt with at the bank itself, by the watch, with the chapter present. The parishes will let a band sit a tower watch, and it is a credential the Kentish landings respect. Companies may be hired to stand a watch; they must not leave the tower.