The Island at the Center of the World (10 page)

The mileage the English got out of Amboyna was astounding. For decades it fueled the English sense of the Dutch merchants as relentless, bloodless fiends. The Dutch record of atrocities was surely no better or worse than that of the English, Portuguese, or other European empire-builders, but believing it to be more barbarous helped assauge English bitterness that the tiny, water-logged nation had so outdistanced them in the global race. As late as 1691, more than six decades after the incident, John Dryden would write his play
Amboyna: A Tragedy,
employing as characters all the actors in the actual events, from the monstrous Dutch governor, Harmon (“Bring more candles, and burn him from the Wrists up to the Elbows”), to the heroic Englishman Beaumont (“Do; I'll enjoy the Flames like Scaevola; and when one's roasted, give the other hand.”).

But there was also a negative result. The English succeeded so well in portraying the Dutch merchant-soldiers as inexorable that England virtually ceded the East Indies to the Dutch shippers, and refocused its energies elsewhere in Asia. Thus, one far-flung consequence of Amboyna, echoing through the coming centuries, would be the buildup of British India.

Another was New York. No such colony existed or would exist for decades, but in the thrust-and-parry of the two empires-in-the-making in the 1620s and '30s, events on one side of the globe would generate reactions on the other. By now some in England realized that the Dutch-controlled portion of North America was the linchpin to the continent, and they were determined that the Dutch not have control of both the East Indies and the vast unknown riches of North America. Legal minds went to work, and the case for overriding the Dutch claim to its territory was developed.

One month after Joachimi's second audience with the king, Charles's formal reply arrived at The Hague. The king declared he had no intention of suppressing books published in England that dealt with the Amboyna massacre (his response to Dutch anger on this score: “nothing save the balm of justice can heal ulcerated hearts”). Regarding the complaint about the seizure of the ship that had set sail from Manhattan Island, His Majesty countered it by disputing the Dutch claim to the territory. The Dutchmen and their vessel, Charles advised, came from “a certain plantation usurped by them in the north parts of Virginia, which they say was acquired from the natives of the country.” There followed a flurry of attacks on the Dutch claim to Manhattan Island and the territory extending more than a hundred miles to the north and south of it, some quite novel. “[F]irst, it is denied that the Indians were
possessores bonae fidei
of those countries, so as to be able to dispose of them either by sale or donation, their residences being unsettled and uncertain . . . and in the second place, it cannot be proved,
de facto,
that all the Natives of said country had contracted with them at the said pretended sale.” Moreover, the English claimed that they had true title to the land in question, which was “justified by first discovery.” In this, the English were stretching then-accepted legalities to the point of absurdity—an absurdity that underlies all of the land grabs of the age of empire and exploration. The “first discovery” was that of John Cabot, who in 1497 made footfall at Newfoundland. By the logic of the concept of “discovery,” when the foot of an explorer made contact with soil that had not previously been settled by humans whom Europeans regarded as having a proper civilization, that soil, and all soil stretching out from it for as far as the metaphysical aura of discovery could be made to stretch, came under the flag of the explorer's sponsoring nation. Even adherents of this magic-wand approach to extending one's domain, however, had to have marveled at the claim that because an Italian foot once touched the soil of a portion of land astride North America (Newfoundland is, after all, an island)—and never mind the fact that at the time Cabot thought he was in an uninhabited region of Asia—the entire land mass, millions of square miles extending up to the North Pole, westward to the Pacific, and south as far as the Spanish-held territories, miraculously and incontrovertibly became the property of England.

The Dutch didn't buy it. For one thing, they had a different legal basis for ownership. In their scheme, the discoverer also had to occupy and chart the land; thus the decision to send settlers, however few, to each of the three river systems in New Netherland. By May the matter was over; the ship was released. The English had pushed, and the Dutch—who were simply the more powerful nation at the time—had pushed back. Charles had served notice of England's interest in the property in question, but just now he was not in a position to back up his words.

No one recorded what Peter Minuit said when, on the third of May, he came tramping into the courtyard of the elegant West India Company headquarters in Amsterdam, livid to the point of distraction, and heard that, on top of everything else, the English were now denying the very right to exist of the colony he had nurtured. He probably didn't feel outrage—not after the way the Dutch directors had treated him. It may be that what struck him most about the international dispute was how unsettled things were—that the colony itself was up for grabs. For at some point after the hearing into his conduct as director of New Netherland—which resulted in his formal dismissal, and which turned on the charge that not enough settlers had been shipped to the colony under his tenure (an outrage because Minuit had repeatedly pressed for more settlers)—he met with Willem Usselincx, who had been the original booster of New Netherland, but who, like Minuit, was now disgruntled. The two of them would soon dream up a secret international colonizing scheme of their own, as audacious as it would be ridiculous.

T
WO YEARS BEFORE
it brought Peter Minuit back to Europe and sailed into an international incident, the
Unity,
shipping the other direction, had delivered to the shores of Manhattan a raw, tough-minded eighteen-year-old named Harmen Myndersz van den Bogaert. He came equipped with training that was certain to be of value in a frontier settlement, having undergone the two-year, hands-on apprenticeship (no book work required) to be inducted into the ancient and not especially venerated guild of the “barber-surgeon.” In that time in the colony he apparently did more than trim the beards of New Netherland's residents, and must have impressed people with his nerves in amputations and blood-letting, because following the run-in with the English over the fate of the colony he was given the weighty responsibility of saving it from another European threat.

By now the colony had an undisputed second city—or rather village. In fact, Fort Orange, the trading post at the conjunction of the Mohawk and Hudson rivers where Joris Rapalje and Catalina Trico had spent their first two years, had become the center of the fur trade. From far out in the uncharted west, Indians came down the Mohawk Valley with their heavy loads of pelts; the traders bought them, stored them at the fort, then shipped them downriver to Manhattan. They had a strong relationship with the Mohawks now, one that would last the whole life span of the Dutch settlement, so the trade seemed secure.

It wasn't. In late 1634, fur traffic on the Mohawk suddenly dried up. The Dutch, whose worldview was based on water, knew the river and lake system of their territory, knew that far out there in the unexplored west lay a series of lakes, which were the main beaver areas hunted by the Indians who supplied them. If the Indians had stopped coming, there could only be one reason: the French, who long before had infiltrated the waterways far to the north and forged fur-trading alliances with Indians of Canada, had moved south into that territory and made new agreements with the Indians there. At this stage the fur trade was the colony's entire reason for being. For decades to come, debts on Manhattan would be paid in the interchangeable currencies of beaver pelts, Dutch guilders, and Indian wampum. While they were prized for their fur, beavers were even more sought-after for the pelt beneath the outer layer of fur, which was made into felt. Felt hats were a status-symbol-cum-necessity throughout Europe, from the Puritans' austere black bonnets to the dashing chapeaux of the Dutch officers in Rembrandt's
The Night Watch
and, later, the English top hat. The entire beaver-to-hat process had a fantastic quality to it. On the production end, hat makers used mercury to separate fur from felt, leading to routine mental illness and, perhaps, to the phrase “mad as a hatter.” The hats were wildly expensive; the English diarist Samuel Pepys paid four pounds five shillings for one in 1641—about three months' wages for an average laborer. This, in turn, meant serious income for the Indian trappers, and for the French, English, and Dutch who competed to trade with them. (It also accounts for the image of the beaver still found on the seal of New York City.) The disruption in the beaver trade was serious. Within a very short time, the French outflanking maneuver would prove to be a coup de grâce. Something had to be done.

The now twenty-two-year-old Harmen van den Bogaert got the desperate commission to do what no resident had yet done: travel into the interior of the continent, seek out the Mohawks in their villages, and convince them that the Dutch were better trading partners. By sheer luck, the journal he kept on the voyage—which details one of the earliest forays by Europeans from the coast westward into the North American continent, provides an extraordinarily rare glimpse of thriving Mohawk villages, and also includes the first-ever Mohawk dictionary—survived. It was discovered in the late nineteenth century and has only recently been studied in depth. It gives a remarkably fresh and full-blooded view of the Eastern Indians, uncolored by the history that was to follow.

The situation was desperate enough that the mission couldn't wait until spring; choosing two men to accompany him, Jeronimus dela Croix and sailor Willem Thomassen, Van den Bogaert set out on the eleventh of December. They left Fort Orange in icy weather, their packs filled with food as well as knives, scissors, and other items intended as presents, in the company of five Mohawk guides.

Things started out hopefully enough, as they hiked into virgin pine forest, but it was a bad sign when, in the middle of the first night, Van den Bogaert woke up to find the guides silently preparing to leave camp without them. He and his mates threw their things together and hurried to catch up; later they discovered that the Indians' dogs had eaten the meat and cheese from their packs, leaving them with only bread. There followed days of brutal hiking through snow two and a half feet deep, with slashing winds, swirling snow, and sightings of bear and elk through the trees.

On the twentieth, chilled to the bone, they came to a stop before a stream that, Van den Bogaert wrote, was “running very hard with many large chunks of ice . . . so that we were in great danger. Had one of us fallen, it would have been the end. But the Lord God protected us and we made it across. We were soaked up to the waist.” They slogged on, shivering, “with wet and frozen clothing, stockings and shoes.” Then they reached a hilltop and an amazing sight: thirty-two houses set in a clearing, some of them two hundred feet long, each covered with elm bark, the whole surrounded by a picket palisade. The men had reached their goal: a Mohawk village, and a new civilization.

The series of villages they visited in the ensuing days surprised Van den Bogaert with their level of civilization. In one there were “36 houses, row on row in the manner of streets,” each of which held several families. Some of the houses already bore the signs of European contact: iron hinges, bolts, chains. The men found boats and barrels made from bark. They encountered cemeteries, surrounded by palisades “so neatly made that it was a wonder,” the graves painted red, white, and black. A chief's tomb they found was large enough to have an entrance and was decorated with carvings and paintings of animals. In some villages penned bears were being kept and fattened. Each longhouse had several hearths. They were welcomed at the first village and given baked pumpkin, beans, and venison. In the light of the fire that night, Van den Bogaert cut open Thomassen's leg to relieve swelling brought on by the long march, and smeared the cut with bear grease.

The people met them with curiosity or fear. Some, encountering them in the forest, dropped their belongings and ran. In one village, however, “we caused much curiosity in the young and old; indeed, we could hardly pass through the Indians here. They pushed one another into the fire to see us. It was almost midnight before they left us. We could not do anything without having them shamelessly running about us.” The chief presented Van den Bogaert with a mountain lion skin, which he slept with, only to discover that “in the morning I had at least 100 lice.”

There was an irony to the reception the Europeans received in some places. At one village, a chief eagerly invited them into his house, which was set away from the village proper because he feared the smallpox that was beginning to ravage the Indians of the region. No one on either side realized that the illness, which would decimate the Northeast Indians over the course of the century, was a result of the contact with Europeans, who brought diseases to which they themselves were immune but before which the Indians were helpless.

At every village, the people called to them, “Allese rondade!” or “shoot!” There was a great deal of excitement when the men obliged and fired their weapons—here, preserved in the amber of Van den Bogaert's journal, we catch that fleeting moment when Indian society was aware of firearms but hadn't yet begun to use them. On Christmas Eve, Van den Bogaert watched in awe as their shamans went to work, and recorded one of the most detailed and dramatic descriptions of an East Coast Indian healing ritual:

As soon as they arrived, they began to sing, and kindled a large fire, sealing the house all around so that no draft could enter. Then both of them put a snakeskin around their heads and washed their hands and faces. They then took the sick person and laid him before the large fire. Taking a bucket of water in which they had put some medicine, they washed a stick in it 1⁄2 ell long. They stuck it down their throats so that the end could not be seen, and vomited on the patient's head and all over his body. Then they performed many farces with shouting and rapid clapping of hands, as is their custom, with much display, first on one thing and then on the other, so that the sweat rolled off them everywhere.