The Island at the Center of the World (12 page)

At this, the Frenchman and the sentry fell on one another with swords, Malenfant was stabbed through the arm and thigh, and came limping into court seeking compensation.

Clearly, the New Netherland settlers were quite unlike their fellow pioneers to the north, the pious English Pilgrims and the Puritans who were struggling to establish their “new Jerusalem,” governed by godly morality. Whether the Pilgrims, via the Thanksgiving celebration, or the Puritans made truly worthy role models for the nation that was in the distant future is another matter; throughout this period the Puritans were busy massacring the Pequot Indians in the name of God and persecuting internal “heretics” (i.e., anyone who didn't subscribe to their brand of Puritanism). One might say the English and Dutch colonies represented the extreme conservative and liberal wings of the seventeenth-century social spectrum. Technically, hard-line Calvinism was the moral force at work in the Manhattan colony, but in the records of the colony expressions of piety are overwhelmed by accounts like that of a woman who, while her husband dozed on a nearby chair, “dishonorably manipulated the male member” of a certain Irishman while two other men looked on. Excessive rigidity (of the moral kind) was not the sin of New Amsterdam's residents.

There was a kind of duke and duchess of this era of New Amsterdam, who outdid their neighbors for sheer rabble-rousing. Back in Europe, Griet Reyniers had worked as a barmaid at the tavern of Pieter de Winter in Amsterdam. In fact, she practiced two professions at once—the mistress of the tavern once spotted her in a back room, “her petticoat upon her knees,” sexually servicing a party of soldiers. It's impossible to say whether the young Wouter van Twiller wandered into her establishment one evening and became enamored of her. All we know is that when he set sail for Manhattan on
de Zoutberg
(“Salt Mountain”), Griet was on board, too, ready to seek her fortune in a new land. It was a hazardous crossing: the ship was nearly captured by “Turks,” and then it turned the tables and took the prize of a Spanish bark whose hulls were crammed with sugar. Griet was unfazed by the goings-on, and plied her trade at sea—passengers noticed her pulling “the shirts of some of the sailors out of their breeches.” Landing at Manhattan and finding it, so to speak, virgin territory, she set up shop. She took to walking the Strand, hiking her petticoats to display her wares for the sailors. If she had come as Van Twiller's mistress, it may have been as a result of his finally dismissing her that she was observed marching into the fort one day crying out, “I have long enough been the whore of the nobility. From now on I shall be the whore of the rabble!” She had a knack for attention-getting publicity stunts; her trademark was to measure the penises of her customers on a broomstick.

Anthony van Salee was known as The Turk; he was a pirate from Morocco, the son of a Dutch seaman-turned-pirate who became the admiral of the Sultan's fleet and married a Moroccan woman. Anthony was brawny, dark-featured, and a one-man criminal class. From the time of his arrival on Manhattan in the early 1630s, he made trouble: he threatened people with loaded pistols; he roamed the village drunk and cursing; he was accused of stealing. When Hendrick the tailor called him “a Turk, a rascal and a horned beast,” his anger apparently spoke for many. Even Anthony's dog was trouble: once a black townsman named Anthony the Portuguese filed suit, claiming that the man's dog had “damaged” his hog. He won.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Griet and Anthony would come together. They married, and had children, though, since she kept at her work, it wasn't always clear who the father was. From the prone position of childbirth she once asked the midwife who the newly delivered baby looked like. The woman replied, “If you do not know who the father is, how should I know? However, the child is somewhat brown.” The couple became fairly notorious in New Amsterdam, but the point is they were not especially out of the ordinary. In fact, the view that American history has of the Dutch colony centered around Manhattan fits it fairly well to this point: a colorful collection of losers and scalawags, inconsequential and meandering, waiting around for the winds of fate to blow them off the map. The Dutch had succeeded in obtaining a piece of real estate of inestimable value, but while they were experts at turning that to advantage in other parts of the world, here—the efforts of Van den Bogaert and Ambassador Joachimi notwithstanding—they let it languish.

By now, however, others had recognized the value of the land between the thirty-ninth and forty-second parallels on the Atlantic Coast, and were making plays for it. Van Twiller wrote to the English in Massachusetts of his hope that “as good neighbors wee might live in these heathenishe countryes,” but they ignored him—English settlers were already drifting southward into territory claimed by the Dutch. The Fresh River (the Connecticut River) was irresistible, and in 1636 a preacher named Thomas Hooker led the first group of English religious pioneers south from the Massachusetts Bay colony to set up a community on the river. They called it Hartford.

Then there was an internal play made for a portion of the colony. Kiliaen van Rensselaer was an Amsterdam diamond merchant with interests in land reclamation (a popular and profitable undertaking in the United Provinces) and agricultural innovations. He was also one of the founding directors of the West India Company, and one of the ardent advocates for setting up private plantations, or patroonships, to settle New Netherland. Through indominable drive, he got his own planned settlement approved by the board and began the arduous task of gathering colonists to inhabit it. He chose the manager of his estate shrewdly. Bastiaen Krol, the young man who had come over with Joris Rapalje and Catalina Trico, intending to make a career as a minister, had had his plans waylaid several times now. First, Minuit had put him in charge of Fort Orange after Daniel van Crieckenbeeck's death in an Indian ambush. Then, when Minuit was recalled, Krol found himself given the job of interim director of the colony. When that stint was over, he returned to the Dutch Republic. Van Rensselaer met him then, realized the depth of experience he had gained, and offered him a job. Krol carried out his first task brilliantly. Returning to New Netherland, he purchased from the Mahicans the land surrounding Fort Orange, stretching along both sides of the river. Van Rensselaer exaggerated somewhat when he wrote shortly after that his property extended west from the river “indifinitely,” but it did run about nine miles along the river and “two days' journey” inland. In other words, the entrepreneur had taken a vital chunk out of New Netherland, and it was his intention to treat his colony-within-a-colony as a sovereign fiefdom.

But for sheer bravura, nothing beat the return of Peter Minuit to New Netherland. It happened that just before Minuit was recalled from his duties and shipped back on the ill-fated
Unity,
the king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus—a Lutheran warrior who was in the midst of massive participation in the Protestant-versus-Catholic Thirty Years' War in Germany—was looking for new worlds to conquer. Sweden was in the midst of its own Golden Age, and Gustavus was tired of watching as France, Spain, England, and the Dutch Republic exerted their will around the globe. As it happened, Gustavus would die in battle just when Minuit made it back to Amsterdam following his ordeal in England. The crown descended, then, to the head of his six-year-old daughter, Christina, who would grow up to become one of the most cosmopolitan and intellectually nimble monarchs in European history, but for the time being affairs were left in the hands of the chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, who continued Gustavus's policies.

The Dutch had long been the major traders in Sweden, delivering the goods of the world to Stockholm. Oxenstierna came into contact with a Dutch merchant named Samuel Blommaert who was involved in the copper trade in Sweden. This Blommaert was, like Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, a director of the West India Company, and one of those angry over what he realized was a missed opportunity in the North American colony. Van Rensselaer's way of getting around the corporate bureaucracy was to finance his own subcolony; Blommaert's idea was slightly zanier: to defy his own company and country and establish a Swedish colony somewhere within the New Netherland territory. He met secretly with Minuit, and a plan took form. Minuit probably knew the Dutch colony better than anyone alive, and knew in particular that its choice South River territory was all but unguarded.

Thus it happened that sometime in the middle of March 1638, one of the strangest invasion fleets ever to approach American shores sailed between capes May and Henlopen, into what would eventually become Delaware Bay, and made anchor at a rocky point on a tributary called the Minquas Kill. Outfitted in battle armor, with the blue-and-yellow flag of Sweden flying from the mainmast of his ship, the
Kalmar Nyckel,
and looking for all the world like some latter-day medieval knight set to conquer, Peter Minuit was returning to North America—a German native of French extraction and recent Dutch ties, proclaiming a colony on behalf of Sweden in the wilderness that would become the state of Delaware. In the absence of a Dutch resistance force, Minuit was set to make his second imprint on America. Ranged about him on the decks of the two-ship squadron were several dozen Dutch sailors and Swedish soldiers, pikes and muskets at the ready, plumed helmets glinting sunlight. To this day, in gritty, industrial-era homage to that odd arrival, the road that connects the warehouses along the waterfront in Wilmington—the city that grew up around Minuit's landing spot—is called Swedes' Landing.

Dying from within and attacked from without, the Manhattan colony, circa 1640, was thus firmly on the road to extinction. It wasn't even a proper political entity: it had no government; its inhabitants were less citizens of a republic than serfs working at the behest of a multinational company. True, it sat on the verge of a vast continent that Europeans were soon to penetrate, motivated by the zeal to expand their horizons in the wake of men like Galileo, Harvey, Drake, and Hudson, and also by the desire to flee decades of religion-fueled war at home. As the geographic key to unlocking the continent, this region would one day help shift the global center of power. One could argue that it would become the point on which Western civilization itself would pivot as it shifted from the Renaissance era to the modern world, from Eurocentrism to a global perspective. But, for all that promise, it was little more than a place of chaos and slop, of barroom knife fights, soldiers fornicating with Indian women while on guard duty, and a steady stream of wayward newcomers: hard men hoisting themselves out of skiffs and hitting the packed soil of the Strand, purses strung around their necks heavy with Carolus guilders or Spanish pieces of eight, ready to smuggle, drink, trade, whore, and be gone. Henry Hudson had ensured that the settlement was under Dutch auspices, but so far the vaunted characteristic of Dutch society—as a pluralistic, tolerant republic—was in evidence only in a negative way. It might as well have been any nation's dregs clinging to the southern tip of the wilderness island called Manhattan. It was as if the world, having dimly identified this piece of land and water on the edge of the New World as a fulcrum, wasn't yet ready for it, and so let it disintegrate.

It was a community, in other words, sure to die out, one that history could safely forget.

PART II

CLASH OF WILLS

Chapter 5

THE LAWMAN

S
eptember is a vigorous month in Holland. North Sea rains angle down out of charcoal-bottomed clouds. Broad bands of blue sky appear, and the world becomes bathed in smoky light. Suddenly the sun comes on pure and full, shocking the painted-and-varnished shutters on brick facades, threatening to pierce the green murk of the canal surface, bringing ordinary humans close to bursting out in mad spontaneous song. And there is the wind, a constant presence, like an insistent hand on the back, inviting or pushing the inhabitants:
move, make sail, go.

In September 1638 a newcomer entered the town of Leiden, in the province of Holland.
*5
He had come from his home in the city of Breda, forty miles to the south in the seemingly remote and largely Catholic region called Brabant, which, while part of the Dutch Republic, did not have the status of a full province. If he was like other newcomers, he couldn't help but be impressed by what he found in Leiden. In a country known for its neatness, this handsome brick village stood out in the seventeenth century, its alleys and canal sides manicured, the pavement literally scrubbed, the soaring whitewashed walls of its church interiors crisply set off by dark beams. In fact, it was not a village at all—by 1622 its population had reached forty-five thousand—but it maintained a provincial simplicity. The massive sailcloth arms of windmills framed the sky not just on the outskirts but right in the town center. The streets through which the young man walked would have swarmed with children at play—an oddity at this time in Europe. The prevailing thinking elsewhere, in this age of Puritan grimness, was that childhood was a time when chaos and devilry might sweep into the soul, and thus children should be checked, subdued, kept under sober adult submission. The Dutch thinking was the opposite; they hugged and coddled their children, ignoring the scorn of outsiders and following their own experts. “[C]hildren should not be kept on too tight a rein, but allowed to exercise their childishness, so that we do not burden their fragile nature with heavy things,” advised the physician Johan van Beverwijck, the Dr. Spock/Benjamin Weil of his day, whose book
Treasure of Health
was a bestseller. So—as the boisterous street scenes of Jan Steen paintings illustrate—children ran free, and the streets echoed with their play.

A cosmopolitan intensity built as one approached the canal called the Rapenburg—taverns and music halls, curling columns of tobacco smoke. Crossing a little pedestrian bridge over the canal, the newcomer would have met up with crowds of his colleagues—other young men massing on the cobbled quayside before a handsome two-story building with leaded glass panes. The entrance was through an arch in the brick wall to the north. This was the main building of the University of Leiden, the premier academic institution in the Netherlands and a major European center of learning. Into this building the young man walked on September 24, 1638, and penned his name, Adriaen van der Donck, his age, twenty, his home province, and the degree for which he was about to begin studying: law. In seventeen years, he would be dead, in a distant land of which, at this point in his life, he may never have heard. He would cause a stir in America and Europe, but in time it would diminish. Few people in history would remember him. But he would make a mark. He would bring the seed of the best and noblest aspect of seventeenth-century European civilization to fresh soil a world away, where something remarkable would grow. He would play a decisive role in the creation of a great city and a new society.

He was young, strong, and forthright, with a deep intellectual bent balanced by a roaming hunger for adventure. His family had stature in Breda—one relative had served as a steward in the court of William the Silent, another had been high ranking in the Dutch army—and he came to the university with a certain pedigree. Four decades before, in the early days of the war against Spain, an event had occurred in his home town which by this time had become legend. Breda had been one of many towns in the hands of Spanish occupiers. William the Silent, hero of the Dutch revolt, had recently died, and the Spanish were gaining territory as they marched through the southern reaches of the Low Countries, when a daring Trojan-horse maneuver turned the tide. A contingent of seventy Dutch soldiers concealed themselves beneath layers of turf in a peat boat and floated past the Spanish troops guarding the entrance into Breda. Once inside the gate, they led an uprising that resulted in the town's recapture. The man behind the
turfschip van Breda
was Adriaen van Bergen, grandfather and namesake of Van der Donck. Van Bergen was still remembered as a hero in Breda decades later; the family shared in the patriotic luster, and young Adriaen van der Donck wore the association as a badge of honor.

The university also had ties to the early days of the rebellion. The town of Leiden had withstood a Spanish onslaught in 1574, and as a reward for the bravery of its fighters, William the Silent chose Leiden as the site of the grand university that he believed the Dutch provinces needed if they were to become a nation. In a remarkably short time the university achieved a status equaling that of Bologna or Oxford and became just what William had envisioned: a breeding ground for the new nation's top scientists, politicians, lawyers, and religious figures.

The Dutch spirit of tolerance pervaded the town. Scientists and writers from all over Europe came to have their books published at Leiden, whose printers were cheap, highly skilled, and largely unmuzzled by authorities. Indeed, no statistic gives a better indication of the Dutch role in the intellectual life of the time than the estimate that over the course of the seventeenth century the Netherlands produced one-half of all books published worldwide.

At the time Adriaen van der Donck arrived, about one-third of Leiden's population was comprised of refugees from wars and religious persecution. In a century marked by religious war, Brownists, Baptists, Walloons, Huguenots, Fifth Monarchy Men, and Ashkenazic Jews came here, as well as to other cities in the Dutch Republic, to live and worship. When, early in the century, William Bradford and his fellow Pilgrim leaders, who had fled persecution in England, wrote asking the town whether they might settle there, the magistrates promptly wrote back: “[We] refuse no honest persons ingress to come and have their residence in this city, provided that such persons behave themselves honestly, and submit to all the laws and ordinances here.” The Pilgrims moved in in 1609—the year that Henry Hudson initiated the Dutch claim to its North American territory—taking up residence in the warren of streets surrounding the massive, gothic Pieterskerk, engaging in trades and practicing their faith. They took advantage of the freedom of the press and began printing tracts attacking King Charles's religious restrictions, which they smuggled into England. When Charles's ambassador complained, the town magistrates shielded their new residents, furthering Charles's low opinion of the Dutch. Ironically, it was the Dutch tolerance of religious differences—precisely the thing that had drawn them—that eventually drove some of the Pilgrims away to the New World. They feared that living among practitioners of ungodly faiths would dissipate them. And indeed, when the first group of forty sailed to Cape Cod in 1620, several hundred more stayed behind, many eventually blending into the melting pot of Dutch society.

Tolerance was more than just an attitude in the Dutch Republic. Following the bloody religious persecution of thousands in the previous century at the hands of the Spanish, the Dutch provinces had broken new ground in writing into their 1579 de facto constitution the guarantee that “each person shall remain free, especially in his religion, and that no one shall be persecuted or investigated because of their religion.” This sentence became the ground on which the culturally diverse society of the seventeenth century was built. But as in so many societies—think of the early United States, a slaveholding nation that believed itself to be rooted on the principle of freedom—the guiding rule was often broken. In the 1620s a debate on the meaning and wisdom of tolerance had raged through the Dutch provinces. At its center was a clash that had taken place here, at Leiden University, between two iconic theologians. As one component to a wider debate about Calvinist teachings, the hard-liner, Gomarus, and his followers, having surveyed a continent scarred by religious war, saw in it proof of the dangers of diversity, and argued that strength came from conformity, that repression of non-Calvinist religion was good for the soul and the state both. Gomarus's opponent, Arminius, and his camp, countered that Christian principles of charity compelled tolerance of religious differences, and forbade the persecution of those who had different views. A much quoted forerunner of Arminius named Sebastian Castellio phrased it with persuasive Christian elegance: “Many will be damned on Judgment Day because they killed innocent people, but nobody will be damned because he killed nobody.” Besides, the Arminians pointed out, diversity was good for business.

Out of this struggle came an elaborate written rationale for tolerance of religious diversity. Its climax—really, a watershed in human thought—came with Arminius's follower Simon Episcopius declaring in a series of carefully reasoned arguments that the strength of a state derived not from maintaining a single, firmly held faith, as was almost universally believed in Europe, but from allowing its citizens freedom of worship and intellectual inquiry. It is impossible to imagine how revolutionary this was, how intoxicating it felt to those who championed it, and how deeply it affected Adriaen van der Donck and his generation of scholars. By Van der Donck's time at Leiden, the tolerance advocates held sway, and the staggering successes of the Golden Age only strengthened their case.

Tolerance was a boon to the university itself, giving it an advantage over other centers of learning in Europe, helping it to become a major international center in the space of a few decades. In any era scholars and scientists are drawn to freedom as fire to oxygen, and in much of seventeenth-century Europe the oxygen was growing thin. Galileo had faced the Inquisition only five years before. His
Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences,
which Isaac Newton would build upon to establish the laws of physics, was being published at Leiden, at a safe remove from Vatican censors, in 1638, just as Van der Donck arrived. Top academics from throughout Europe came to teach at Leiden, attracted by the freedom, as well as by high salaries and other incentives the university offered, such as tax exemption on the alcohol they consumed, up to a healthy forty gallons of wine a year, and a half barrel of beer per month.

As a result, Leiden in the 1630's churned with history-making activity. Van der Donck soaked up the atmosphere generated by new learning then revolutionizing the fields of medicine, physics, and mathematics, and his courses in law and politics would have been imbued with Dutch ideas about democracy, monarchy, and tolerance. The dominant intellectual spirit of the decade—at Leiden and elsewhere—was René Descartes, the Frenchman whose rationalistic method of inquiry brought philosophy and science into the modern era. Descartes had moved to Holland in 1629, seeking intellectual freedom. He lived for most of the next twenty years in an Amsterdam townhouse opposite the Westerkerk. Descartes enrolled at Leiden University in 1630 and lived there for a time, then returned in 1636, seeking a publisher for his new work, and stayed for seven years, easily becoming the most talked-about intellectual in town. The
Discourse on Method
was published at Leiden in 1637, the year before Van der Donck arrived, and it caused a sensation.

It was an epochal moment in which to begin a university education—indeed, one might say it was the moment when modern higher education was born. Scientists, philosophers, and theologians (the titles were more or less interchangeable) opened up a furious debate on the most fundamental aspects of their fields. What would it mean to follow Descartes and base reasoning not on “authority” (Aristotle or the Bible) but on the mind of the thinker and, as Descartes said, its “good sense”? The famous phrase from the
Discourse
that would resound through the centuries, influencing everything from modern science to the Enlightenment political thinking of Thomas Jefferson
—cogito ergo sum,
“I think, therefore I am”—had just been voiced. The age of the individual was at hand, and the young Adriaen van der Donck was at its epicenter.

The place vibrated with the energy of new forms of inquiry. Leiden's anatomical theater was one of the first and the most famous in the world, but the frenzy for dissections was so great that it was often overbooked and professors had to hold their anatomical classes, wrote one scholar in 1638, “in the academic Garden and elsewhere.” Some conducted public dissections in their homes, which they had fitted out with “domestic amphitheaters.” Dogs vanished from the streets of Leiden as medical students became obsessed with the fad for direct observation and study. Johannes de Wale cut open live dogs and pumped their veins to demonstrate the circulation of the blood—work that William Harvey relied on to refine his own theories. Human cadavers were in great demand. Reinier de Graaf became obsessed by the theory that pancreatic fluid was acidic. He was known to stimulate the pancreas of a cadaver so that it would produce fluid, and then to taste it and urge his assembled observers to taste it as well, whereupon he would ask hopefully if they detected an acidic flavor. De Graaf's greater contribution to science came when he proved, by dissecting pregnant rabbits, what was then an outlandish theory, that the ovaries had a role in reproduction. Unfortunately, his discovery was overshadowed by the near simultaneous discovery by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, using his microscope, of spermatozoa, which gave a last gasp of life to the theory stretching back to antiquity that babies came solely from sperm and the female womb was merely a receptacle.