The Island at the Center of the World (14 page)

Van der Donck didn't record his first impression of New Amsterdam, and while by any ordinary measure the look of the place could not have been one to inspire confidence, there had been a decisive change for the better in the affairs of the town and the colony in the past year. History's simplistic reading of the Dutch colony centered around Manhattan—that it was an inconsequential gathering of nobodies until the English eventually took over and began to make a thriving settlement of it—is based on the record of the West India Company. The West India Company ran the place, and the West India Company never succeeded in making it financially viable; ergo, New Amsterdam never really took flight. But that logic overlooks a crucial turn of events. In 1640 the company gave up its monopoly on trade in the region, which had kept the place from developing in any areas except piracy and smuggling, and declared New Netherland a free trading zone. In this new free-market territory, New Amsterdam would be the “staple port,” the hub through which traders' and merchants' ships would pass, where they would pay duties and be cleared for travel. The effect was electric. Small-scale entrepreneurs in Amsterdam who were willing to brave the hazards of the ocean voyage now had, in Manhattan, a hub to exploit—a base around which the circle of Atlantic trade could turn. Gillis Verbrugge formed a partnership with his son, Seth, and launched the first of what would be twenty-seven trading voyages to Manhattan. The business would make Seth a wealthy man, able to support his wife, herself the daughter of a successful businessman, in style. Dirck de Wolff set up a company that shipped manufactured goods to the colonists on Manhattan and brought back furs and tobacco; his profits from this and other international trading ventures bought him an elegant Amsterdam townhouse on the exclusive Herengracht, or Gentleman's Canal, and a vast country estate in the polders near Haarlem.

On Manhattan, meanwhile, that small change would have far-reaching results. It gave rise, within the space of a few years, to an intensively active merchant class—people who wanted to buy, sell, grow, spend. Convinced now that there was a future here, they began putting down roots. What's more, the Manhattan merchants defied categorization. The tailor also brewed beer; the baker doubled as a ship's captain. Joris Rapalje, who by the time Van der Donck arrived at Manhattan had been in the colony for eighteen years, worked for the West India Company but also did stints of entrepreneurship, selling grain on behalf of farmers at Van Rensselaer's colony, and owned and operated a tavern. The looseness of Manhattan society had its disadvantages, but it also made for greater social mobility than in Europe.

Everyone in New Amsterdam had shares in one shipment of cargo or another. “Everyone here is a trader,” one resident remarked in 1650, and it was true, and unprecedented—as was the opportunity for advancement. Govert Loockermans had arrived in Manhattan seven years before Van der Donck, as a sixteen-year-old cook's mate on a West India Company vessel, desperate to get ahead. As soon as the West India Company monopoly ended, he left and signed on as agent for the Verbrugges, overseeing ships and cargo. Over the next few years he would learn to speak English as well as several Indian languages, buy a farm on the East River, and begin leasing ships and moving cargo around New Netherland and the Atlantic, several times being accused of smuggling. He had a fairly sharp mean streak: in an altercation with Raritan Indians, he became infamous when he, in the words of a witness, “tortured the chief's brother in his private parts with a piece of split wood.” He would die, thirty-eight years after his youthful footfall, in the new city of New York, the wealthiest merchant in the colony, owner of one of its finest homes (which would later become the home of the pirate William Kidd and is today the site of a nondescript office building, 7 Hanover Square), one of the richest men in the New World, and one of the purest exemplars of the kind of freeform upward mobility that American culture would inherit from its forgotten colony.

In New Amsterdam itself, the opening of trade was already showing results as Van der Donck arrived. Dozens of lots were leased or bought in the months after the monopoly gave way. Houses were being built, and there was a rise in the level of creature comforts in those houses. When tobacco farmer Jacque de Vernuis died unexpectedly in October 1640, shortly after signing a ten-year lease and leaving behind a Dutch wife, Hester Simons, the inventory of his property included a gray riding coat, a riding cap, shirts, cravats, coifs, stockings and handkerchiefs, pewter dishes, silverware, iron pots, copper kettles, pine chests, curtains, pillows and pillow cases, blankets, three hogs, a fishing rod, a pair of tongs, and “one brass skimmer.” A humble enough collection, but worlds beyond the hardscrabble days of even a few years before.

On arrival, then, leather boots splashing in the East River shallows where the sloop unloaded passengers (it would be years before a proper pier was constructed), Adriaen van der Donck would have taken a turn through a chaotic, energetic, rough town that was very much in transition. There were perhaps four hundred inhabitants, and it was already one of the most multicultural places on earth; in five years' time a visiting Jesuit priest would report that eighteen languages were spoken in its few dusty lanes. In the summer of 1641 the fort was tumbledown, but there were new houses, some of wood and stone, some of brick, with steep roofs and step gables. From the shore a newcomer would cross over the new Brewer's Bridge spanning the grandly named Heere Gracht (again modeling their New World base on Amsterdam, the residents felt the town needed a “gentleman's canal”—in reality it was a stinking ditch), walk past the five stone houses that formed the shopping district, by the bakery and the midwife's house, and skirt the simple wooden church on Pearl Street (“a mean barn” David de Vries called it), with the minister's house and stable behind. The lanes of the town were riotous with free-ranging pigs and chickens, the farming principle of the period being that one's animals roamed for food, and property was fenced to keep them out, not in.

It was high summer; a Dutchman, unused to the humidity, would work up a sweat as he took in the town. Logic and custom would have him stopping at at least one of the several taverns clustered on the half dozen principle streets—perhaps in the company of Cornelis Melyn, a wealthy Flemish farmer who had made the voyage with him, and who would become instrumental in involving Van der Donck in Manhattan politics. Continuing on his way, Van der Donck might have paused to chat with a German carpenter named Juriaen, who at that moment was building a house for Frenchman Philip Geraerdy, or to observe the English carpenters John Hobson and John Morris, who were fulfilling their contract with Isaac de Forest for “a dwelling house, 30 feet long and 18 feet wide, with 2 4-light windows and 2 3-light windows, 4 beams with brackets and 2 free beams, one partition and one passage way tight inside and outside and the entire house tight all around.”

If he needed evidence that there was new life pulsing through the hardscrabble community, Van der Donck need only have watched the ship he had sailed on being unloaded of its cargo, for which various residents had put in orders from Amsterdam and which they were no doubt now at the waterfront ready to receive. For Tonis Jansen the sailmaker, the crew unloaded one bale of French canvas, two bales of sail cloth, one keg containing 200 pounds of sail yarn. Hendric Jansen, locksmith, got his order of “4 chauldrons of smith's coal, 30 bars of square iron, 60 bars of flat Swedish iron, 150 pieces of hard iron.” The commissary in the West India Company's store signed off on receipt of his goods, which included casks of brandy, sack, and French wine, oil, dried beef and pork, “30 tuns of fine salt,” a case of stationery, 290 pounds of candles, and “2 large crates containing 50 winnowing baskets.” No sooner had the ship put into port than Arent Corssen Stam, a merchant of Haarlem, signed a contract with Gelain Cornelissen, skipper of
Den Eyckenboom,
“immediately to deliver the aforesaid ship ready for sailing, tight, well caulked and provided with anchors, ropes, tackle, sails, running and standing rigging, victuals and other necessaries thereto belonging, and to arm said ship with six cannon and other ammunition in proportion.” He was to deliver a new load of cargo to the English colony of Virginia, there receive another load (probably tobacco), and “sail with the first favorable wind which God shall grant from Virginia direct to London and deliver the ship's cargo to those to whom it shall be consigned.”

Finally, into the fort Van der Donck would have walked, past the latticework guardhouse, and to the director-general's brick house. Here he pulled out a letter of introduction and placed it before Willem Kieft, who had replaced Van Twiller three years before as the West India Company's head of the colony. It was a brief, formal meeting. Then Van der Donck was off again, headed north, one hundred and fifty miles upriver, to the remote settlement that was to be his new home.

There were maybe a hundred residents in the colony of Rensselaerswyck at the time. The few homes, barns, and other signs of human habitation were dwarfed by the staggering expanses of wilderness: the smoking, brooding mountains to the north, the stands of high pine trees, the broad river, and the endless sky. Van der Donck met a man about his own age named Arent van Curler, a nephew of Kiliaen van Rensselaer, who had been in the colony for three years and was its manager. Then he made for the small wooded island just off the western shore of the river and close to Fort Orange, which had been partially cleared for farms. He had decided to make one of these his home. Soon after, a surreal version of the classic Wild West scenario played out when, rested and ready for work, high on the thrill of adventure and still buzzing from the foreignness of it all, Van der Donck emerged from his rough, thatch-roofed dwelling into the bright August morning, and, wearing “a silver-plated rapier with baldric and a black hat with plume,” the badges of his office, exhibited himself for the farmers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and bakers of his domain, as well as for the assorted Mohawks, Mahicans, and West India Company soldiers. As he strode purposefully up the road that ran along the river, past the palisades of Fort Orange and by the fields and workshops of the colony, the residents must have gaped. Here before them in one trim, gallant, and beplumed package was the cutting-edge quintessence of European education, circa 1640, the product of a legal system centuries old, tempered by modern notions that in one form or another, compliments of Galileo, Descartes, and Grotius, placed man at the center of things. Here was one of the Republic's best and brightest. They had a lawman.

Chapter 6

THE COUNCIL OF BLOOD

B
y an odd twist of fate, the tragedy that would engulf the Manhattan-based colony of New Netherland, crippling it and ensuring that it would eventually lose its struggle against its English neighbors, was also the event that brought its residents together and preserved the colony's legacy for future centuries. Fate further arranged it that the nightmare would descend in the same month that Adriaen van der Donck, the man who would lead the political struggle that would preserve that legacy, arrived to seek his fortune in the New World.

The disaster came just when things were looking most hopeful for the residents of New Amsterdam and their comrades scattered across the several hundred miles of North Atlantic coast that comprised the province. With trade thrown open, new residents were pouring in, a merchant elite was forming, families were intermarrying, putting down roots. It began with what seemed a random, minor event.

Everyone on Manhattan knew Claes Swits. He was a garrulous old man, a wheelwright by trade, who had made the voyage to the New World with his wife and two grown sons. Before boarding their ship, they had put up at the Amsterdam inn of Peter de Winter, the same establishment where Griet Reyniers had worked as barmaid and prostitute before setting her sights on Manhattan. The inn was a favorite haunt of travelers from Germany; as Swits's surname suggests, he had probably originally come from Switzerland. Like everyone else on Manhattan, he became engaged in several different occupations once he arrived. He leased a two-hundred-acre plantation, called Otterspoor, covering much of what would become Harlem, on which he grew grain and milked cows (as rent he agreed to pay the owner, Jacob van Curler, annually, two hundred pounds of butter and “the just half of all the grain with which God shall bless the field”). Soon after—perhaps finding that the work was too much for a man of his years—he took on a partner. Even then, Claes didn't spend much time on the farm; he was too old, or maybe he just hungered for human contact. He bought a small piece of property on the Wickquasgeck trail, at about what is today Forty-seventh Street and Second Avenue, built a house there, and set up as a jack-of-all-trades. The trail—which diverged from what would become Broadway at about Twenty-third Street and ran up the east side, before reconnecting with it in the north of the island—was alive with traffic now: Indians of the Wickquasgeck tribe's several villages, as well as members of other tribes from farther north and across the river on Long Island, streaming to and from New Amsterdam; Europeans and Africans moving along it as their farms reached up Manhattan. The territory of New Netherland remained vast and wild, but the island at its center was rapidly succumbing to settlement. There was a place here on its east side, the old man figured, for a traveler's rest.

His house on Deutel Bay
*7
became a popular gathering spot, where people could cluster before a homey fire of an evening, drink and sing, curse and argue, maybe step out into the semi-wilderness night and gaze at the moonlight on the C-shaped bay. It was here that Nan Beech, wife of the Englishman Thomas Beech, had “fumbled at the front of the breeches of most all of those who were present,” touching off a skirmish. On another occasion, Ulrich Lupoldt, a West India company official, while drinking at Claes's house, got into a shouting match with Jan Evertsen Bout, who lived across the North River, over rumors that Bout was having his way with a certain “black wench.” Claes seems to have been close friends with or related by marriage to young Harmen Myndersz van den Bogaert, who had made the journey into Mohawk country in the winter of 1634 to renegotiate fur prices; Van den Bogaert frequented the man's tavern-home, and underwrote his loans.

The wheelwright was, by several accounts, a harmless and well-liked old man. He knew many Indians by name. It wouldn't have surprised him in the least, one day in August of 1641, precisely as Adriaen van der Donck was settling into his duties as
schout
of Rensselaerswyck, to find a twenty-seven-year-old Wickquasgeck Indian at his door with a few furs slung over his shoulder, who said he was interested in trading them for some duffel cloth. Claes knew the young man: he lived in a village to the northeast of the island, and had worked for a time for Claes's son. The wheelwright invited him in out of the August sun, gave him something to eat and drink. And as the old man bent over the chest in which he kept his goods for trade, the young Wickquasgeck—who is unnamed in the records, which is unfortunate since he was at the center of what would become a major event in the life of the colony—in a seemingly unpremeditated act, reached for an ax that Claes Swits had leaning against the wall, raised it high, and cut off the old man's head. Then he left.

As random as the murder was, there was an inevitability to it. The Indian had no quarrel with Swits. But fifteen years before, in 1626, around the time that Peter Minuit had purchased the island, a small group of Wickquasgeck Indians who had ventured south to trade furs were set upon by some Europeans, robbed, and murdered—all except a twelve-year-old boy, who had escaped. For fifteen years he had nursed his revenge, as the Europeans increased in numbers and spread out slowly over the island, and then it erupted, perhaps surprising even him.

The murder on the Wickquasgeck road was thus an element in the clockwork regularity of movement that governs culture clashes: an event triggers another, across space and time, which leads to greater, bloodier reprisals. The killing of Claes Swits echoed. It echoed, first and most consequentially, in the brain of Willem Kieft. Sweltering in his office in Fort Amsterdam, where he had recently greeted Van der Donck and wished well in his new position up north, the forty-four-year-old director of the colony reacted to the grim news with something like exhilaration. It was an odd reaction, but he was an odd man. He had been born and raised in Amsterdam, the son of a merchant and a politician's daughter. He had excellent family connections—Rembrandt featured his cousin, Willem van Ruytenburch, in
The Night Watch
(that's him, right of center, in the dashing yellow ensemble and holding his scabbard). But Kieft was something of a black sheep. He had pursued a business opportunity in France, and had failed at it so decisively, with such financial loss to its backers, that a picture of him was tacked over the gallows in the town of La Rochelle, and he was forced to flee. Fantastically enough, he then wound up somewhere in the Ottoman Empire, given the task of ransoming Christians who had been taken prisoner by the Sultan. But, according to a pamphlet published in Antwerp attacking his administration, Kieft turned it into a for-profit venture by buying the release only of those captives who had the smallest price on their heads, leaving the others to languish in Turkish jails, and keeping the balance of the money.

Perhaps it was this cleverness that recommended him to the directors of the West India Company as the right man to replace the hapless Wouter Van Twiller. More likely, it was family connections. He had arrived in 1638, when the province was in disorder, determined to exert the iron authority he believed was necessary to turn the settlement around—never mind that it began turning itself around shortly after his arrival, thanks to the advent of free trade. In fact, his whole problem—the problem of all the colony's directors throughout its lifetime—was the impossibility of the situation. Dutch global expansion during its century of empire was built around not settlement colonies but outposts, which explains why, even though the empire extended as far afield as India, Taiwan, and Java, the Dutch language is not spread around the globe the way English is. The English as overlords either planted settlements or, as in India, imposed elements of their own culture on a society. The Dutch preferred to set up military-trading posts at strategic spots and let the locals bring trade goods to them. The trading companies did not see themselves in the business of establishing permanent colonies.

But New Netherland refused to remain a trading post. It was unique among the way stations of the Dutch empire in that it insisted on becoming a
place.
By some estimates it had, by its end, attracted more settlers from the Dutch Republic than all of the other Dutch outposts combined. Its population wasn't wholly comprised of soldiers and company employees, but ordinary settlers as well, who liked what they found and were hoping to stay. It had streets and buildings, but beyond that, by the 1640s it had developed a style, a way of getting by, which certainly had something to do with the company that ran it but had more to do with the likes of Claes Swits, Govert Loockermans, Joris Rapalje, Catalina Trico, Griet Reyniers, and Anthony “The Turk” van Salee—people who operated around the company, not within it.

The place had a life of its own. And with that came, naturally, a need for political structure. As it was, there was no judicial system; or rather, the system was Kieft. There was no body of case law; he settled disputes however he chose. There was no appeal. Kieft and the other directors of the colony weren't given a mandate to oversee the establishment of a political and legal system; instead, the company shipped them off with a single tool: military dictatorship. It was an effective tool in the sorts of situations in which they found themselves in outposts like Batavia and Macassar, but a hindrance in what was fast becoming a full-fledged society.

But they were very slow to understand the distinction, slow to comprehend that the situation on Manhattan Island was fundamentally different from that on other exotic outposts. None of the series of West India Company employees who headed the New Netherland operation ever truly did comprehend it—except the last of them, and by the time he did it was far too late for the Dutch.

Kieft never understood it at all. He was not a politician. He arrived with a directive to turn around a failing corporate venture, and he was armed with one arrow in his quiver: total fiat, the power of life and death. Those within his jurisdiction were not constituents but subjects, serfs. It was an accepted business model in the seventeenth century. In most situations in which the East and West India Companies found themselves, it worked.

Kieft did make an initial try at satisfying the natural need among his populace to feel that they were in some way involved in the company's decision making. He appointed a council of advisors to assist him. The council consisted of two members. One was Johannes la Montagne, a benign Walloon medical doctor who was well liked and no threat to anyone, including Kieft; as a bonus, he was in debt to the company and so unlikely to go against it. The other councilor was Kieft himself. Kieft further decided that, as director, he would have two votes on the council, and La Montagne would have one vote. Decisions were made by majority rule. Thus Kieft's nod to representative government.

The next order of business was to deal with an immediate outside threat, which came from one of Kieft's predecessors. Peter Minuit, with his Swedish settlement force, had anchored at his chosen spot on a tributary of what the Dutch called the South River in the middle of March 1638, or about two weeks before Kieft stepped ashore on Manhattan. Minuit had calculated the placement of his colony with great deftness. He knew the area (today the Delaware River and lands astride it, encompassing parts of Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) well, and, more to the point, he had an exquisite appreciation of the claims of the Dutch and English in that part of the continent. He knew that the English still held to their right-of-first-discovery claim, by which, in their eyes, the entire coastline—indeed, the entire continent—was theirs. Practically speaking, however, the English colony of Virginia was well to the south, and thus Minuit hoped to avoid detection by them until his settlement had established itself.

As to the Dutch, while the South River territory fell under their claim by means of Hudson's voyage, Minuit knew that the West India Company had been spotty in following up on the claim by buying lands along the South River from the Indian tribes that occupied them. He knew what had been purchased and what had not; specifically, the Dutch had bought title to lands along the eastern shore of the South River (i.e., New Jersey) but not the western shore. Immediately upon landing, then, Minuit gathered the tribal chiefs of the area, held a conclave in the cabin of his flag ship, the
Kalmar Nyckel,
and got them to make their marks on a deed. The point was not, of course, to satisfy tribal notions of land ownership, nor did the Swedish government care much about executing legal transactions with natives. Minuit had his eyes on the Dutch; he wanted to forestall any legal arguments they might make by employing their own system of property transfer. Using the skills he had learned in the service of the Dutch, he purchased the land on the west side of the river, below the branching river the Dutch named the Schuylkill—i.e., the future states of Delaware and Maryland and the corner of Pennsylvania that would become Philadelphia—on behalf of the twelve-year-old Queen Christina of Sweden.

A month later, soldiers at the lone Dutch outpost on the South River spotted Minuit's ship and sent a report to Manhattan, which must have infuriated Kieft. This was a military and diplomatic challenge to Dutch sovereignty by a nation that was supposed to be an ally. And Minuit's role at the center of it must have particularly roiled him. Kieft wasted no time, but sent a communiqué aimed directly at the man who had once held his job. In May, a Dutch vessel sailed down the coast, between the capes that to this day preserve the names—Henlopen and May—given them in the Dutch period, into the bay, up the South River, into the tributary called the Minquas Kill, and made anchor before the rocky outcrop behind which Minuit's men were sweating in the spring air, digging out the perimeter of their fort. A soldier disembarked and handed a letter to the leader of New Sweden:

I, Willem Kieft, Director-General of New-Netherland, residing on the Island of the Manhattes and in Fort Amsterdam, under the authority of their High Mightinesses the Lords States-General of the United Netherlands and the Incorporated West-India Company, Chamber at Amsterdam, make known to you Peter Minuit, who style yourself Commander in the service of Her Royal Majesty of Sweden, that the whole Southriver of New-Netherland has been many years in our possession and secured by us above and below by forts and sealed with our blood, which even happened during your administration of New-Netherland and is well known to you. Now, as you intrude between our forts and begin to build a fort there to our disadvantage and prejudice, which shall never be suffered by us and we are very certain, that her Royal Majesty of Sweden has not given you any order to build fortresses on our rivers or along our coasts, Therefore, in case you proceed with the erection of fortifications and cultivation of the soil and trade in peltries or in any wise attempt to do us injury, We do hereby protest against all damages, expenses and losses, together with all mishaps, bloodsheds and disturbances, which may arise in future time therefrom and that we shall maintain our jurisdiction in such manner, as we shall deem most expedient.