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Adam Wiebe, who in 1616 sailed east from Harlingen to Danzig. Over years he laid out the city’s first wooden watermains, set new flowing fountains in its squares and drained the great marshlands along the Vistula and Motlawa and Radunia rivers by building dikes anchored by roads and great bridges to control the spring and heavy rain runoffs, and dug drainage collector canals and designed wind and horse-driven mills that lifted the turgid water up over the dikes and into the Baltic Sea. Adam Wiebe making dry land, so that the whole Vistula delta of deep river soil could flower into ever more Frisian and Flemish Mennonite farm villages.
    “What is this,” his mother says, pointing with a needle, “these lines here, these things hanging?”
    She is studying the grey picture of the copper engraving of Danzig, the coat of arms in its top left corner, the long, bearded face of Adam in its top right. Across the centre of the picture is printed, “Die Stadt Dantzig,” but above that hangs a wide scroll of Latin, some of which in this printed miniaturization is almost legible through her reading glass. Adam can decipher “Nova inventi,” and more clearly, “MACHINAE ARTIFICIOSAE ,” but then lines of scattered dots, something “Exacta delin—” and a sudden “Sacra” and “Adam Wiebe Ha—,” the words lost inside their engraved, dotted and multi-copied minutiae. Whatever they were once intended to say, below the coat of arms on the left there remains a line drawing of a high hill labelled Bischoffsberg, Bishop’s Hill. The centre is low sagging land along river and marshes with the church spires of the city beyond, but below Adam’s picture on the right there is an elevation almost as high as the hill: it is clearly labelled “Wieben Bastion.” At the urgent request of the Danzig City Council, in the 1640s Adam rebuilt the walls and that particular fortification to protect the city during the Thirty Years War between the Roman Catholic andProtestant kings and dukes and emperors and opportunistic generals for hire anywhere in Europe, and since there were no stones in the watery delta, he reconstructed the entire circuit of the Danzig city wall and redesigned and built its twenty military bastions above the flood plains between the rivers by using rocks and earth from the Bishop’s Hill. The “lines, with things hanging,” across the centre of the picture, are the double cable “Nova inventi” that Adam strung on poles, so that by means of an endless circuit of moving buckets attached to this cable, earth and rocks could be carried from the hill and over the river and the marsh to the bastion walls of the city. So exactly were these buckets designed, so precisely were distance and weight calculated, that no power beyond themselves was needed to make them move: the weight of the filled buckets at the top of the hill carried them down across the valley to the top of the bastion while returning the empty buckets back up the hill. And though the mighty Swedish army under King Gustavus II Adolphus, with its enormous wheeled cannon pulled by six- or eight-horse teams, its cavalry and pikemen and lockstep infantry armed with the lightest, quickest-firing muskets, destroyed much of Europe for pay and ultimately, as they professed to truly believe, for the glory of the Protestant Christian Church, though unnumbered armies trailing even larger rabbles of camp followers ravaged and raped their way, year after horrible year, through the farm villages of the Vistula delta, in thirty years not a single enemy got inside the walls of Danzig: because Adam Wiebe invented the cable car to rebuild the defences of an indefensible city.
    “Na oba doch,”
Adam’s mother says in utter amazement. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
    And she reads aloud the Highgerman caption historianHorst Penner has placed beside the picture: ‘“Adam Wybe (Wiebe) from Harlingen in Holland was apparently the ancestor of most of the