When Charly Gehring holds forth on the hazards of sailing in the seventeenth century, his conversation is sprinkled with Dutch nautical terms not heard in the Netherlands in centuries. He has an appealing habit of talking about people in the present tense: “Van Tienhoven has a lot of skeletons in his closet, but he’s also just about the shrewdest guy on the island,” he will say of a man last seen on Manhattan in 1656.
