The Island at the Center of the World (15 page)

Since the notice did not overtly promise a military attack, Minuit ignored it: from the beginning he had staked the venture on his belief that New Netherland would have too few soldiers to cover its territory. He finished the construction of Fort Christina, then, leaving the fort garrisoned by twenty-five men, sailed off, full of hope and dash, for Stockholm, where he intended to put together the next expedition for the New World. This one would be comprised not of soldiers but of colonists. By now Minuit's plan had expanded. He intended to gather not only Swedish Adams and Eves but also refugees from his native Rhine region whom he believed would leap at the opportunity to escape two decades of war and start a new life on new soil. Having worked so hard and diligently in his first effort as colonizer, only to see it taken away from him, had sharpened his ambition, refined it. He wasn't out for adventure any longer. He was a utopian now: he wanted to build a new society.

But Minuit never made it back to Europe. His dream died when he died, in August of 1638, in a hurricane in the Caribbean, where he had sailed to obtain a shipment of tobacco for resale in Europe. Minuit's determination and seventeenth-century-style frontier spirit would, however, have a second legacy in addition to that of Manhattan Island. The little garrison he had left behind at Fort Christina would serve as the base for what, over the course of the next seventeen years, would become a sizable Swedish colony, extending a hundred miles up the Delaware River valley and encompassing the future cities of Philadelphia and Trenton. Out of Minuit's efforts to exploit this rich, wild valley—and, eventually, the Dutch determination to expel the intruding colony—the queer, little-known sidebar to history called New Sweden would make surprising contributions to history.

As Minuit had guessed, Willem Kieft opted for the time being not to mount a serious challenge to the Swedes on his southern flank. For one thing, he had a financial crisis on his hands. The opening of trade resulted in an instantaneous boost for the people of New Netherland, but the West India Company didn't benefit. As the directors in Amsterdam saw it, they had given up the monopoly that might ensure them eventual profits, yet were saddled with administering the colony and protecting its inhabitants. The various agreements they had made with the Indians in their territory required the company to protect them, too, in the case of attack by an enemy tribe. The merchant princes put pressure on their in-country director to find a way out of this quandary.

Kieft tried. First he tackled the blossoming currency crisis. Florins, doubloons, pennies, pieces of eight, schellings, reals, stooters, daelders, oortjes, Brabant stuivers, Carolus guilders, and Flemish pounds all rattled in the tills of New Amsterdam's taverns and jangled in the purses of townspeople: the sort of currency chaos that accompanies a highly laissez-faire, free-trade economy. And coins weren't even the main means of transacting business. Pelts were offered for everything from a glass of French brandy to a town lot. But the major currency, the most common thing dropped into the plate when it came time for contributions during Sunday church service, was sewant. Wampum, as it is now more commonly known, was a much more widely used currency among the East Coast Indians than is generally realized today. For tribes from different linguistic groups, it formed a kind of universal language, a way to cap joint rituals, to seal treaties, pay homage to dignitaries. The very first Dutch traders to follow in Henry Hudson's wake seized on this medium of exchange and expanded it. They learned which variety of polished beads was most highly prized—that of a purple clamshell that came from the easternmost shores of Long Island—and not only adopted it in their dealings with Indians but became wampum speculators among tribes. With the sudden increase in freelance trade on Manhattan had come a flood of low-grade sewant, and Kieft understood that the accompanying confusion was causing financial havoc. Therefore, on one of the regular Thursday “council sessions” in which he and Dr. La Montagne sat, he issued a directive:

Whereas at present very bad seawan is in circulation here and payments are made in nothing but dirty, unpolished stuff that is brought here from other regions where it is worth 50 percent less than here, and the good, polished seawan, ordinarily called Manhattan seawan, is exported and wholly disappears, which tends to the decided ruin and destruction of this country; therefore, in order to provide against this in time, we do hereby for the public good, interdict and forbid all persons, of whatever state, quality or condition they may be, during the coming month of May to receive or give out in payment any unpolished seawan except at the rate of five for one stiver, that is to say, strung, and thereafter six beads for one stiver. Whoever shall be found to have acted contrary thereto shall provisionally forfeit the seawan paid out by him and ten guilders to the poor, the same applying to the receiver as well as to the giver. The price of the well polished seawan shall remain as before, to wit, four beads for one stiver, provided it be strung.

Next, Kieft turned his attention to the Indian question. The company did indeed, at considerable expense, supply Fort Amsterdam, Fort Orange, and Fort Nassau on the South River with soldiers, who were there to protect the company's interests and servants, and who were obliged by the land treaties entered into with Indian tribes to offer protection to them as well. Since the company couldn't back out of this arrangement, Kieft hit on what he thought quite a clever notion: to ask the Indians to pay taxes for the service rendered. The idea was too rich to be denied. Thursday came around, and Kieft opened the council meeting with his directive:

Whereas the Company is put to great expense both in building fortifications and in supporting soldiers and sailors, we have therefore resolved to demand from the Indians who dwell around here and whom heretofore we have protected against their enemies, some contributions in the form of skins, maize and seawan, and if there be any nation which is not in a friendly way disposed to make such contribution it shall be urged to do so in the most suitable manner.

The residents who had been on the scene long enough to know the tribal groups in the region of New Amsterdam—the Tappans, the Hackinsacks, the Wickquasgecks, the Raritans—reacted with alarm, telling Kieft this was more or less exactly what not to do. The Indians, these residents knew, were far from simple in their understanding of the real estate transactions they had made with the Europeans. The armful of goods mentioned in each title transfer was not, in their eyes, an outright purchase price, but a token that represented the arrangement to which they were agreeing. That arrangement had them sharing the land with the “purchaser,” and at the same time entering into a defensive alliance.

But while some of the European residents of the colony had surprisingly nuanced views of the natives who lived among them (an example from Van der Donck's writings: “their womenfolk have an attractive grace about them . . . and if they were instructed as our women are they would no doubt differ little from them, if at all”), Kieft was not one of these. The sum of his actions and writings shows him, in fact, as more or less set on a strategy of eventual extermination. After being rebuffed, even laughed at, by several chiefs over his demand of protection payments, he seized on a small matter—the theft of some hogs from a Dutch farm on Staten Island—as the excuse for a punitive expedition. Even without knowing the history one can almost see the chain of events unfolding from there. First there were the ironies: the thieves had apparently not been Indians at all but Dutchmen; the farm belonged to David de Vries, the trader who had tried to shame Van Twiller into behaving like a leader, who was friends with many Indians, spoke several of their dialects, and who, in dinners with Kieft at his quarters in Fort Amsterdam, tried to stop what was coming. “These savages resemble the Italians,” De Vries warned, “being very revengeful.”

But Kieft was inexorable. He sent a posse to the Raritan village that his information told him was the home of the thieves; several Indians were killed. On cue, then, the Raritans attacked De Vries's farm, killing four farm hands and burning down the man's house. Kieft then took his turn. He would not, he decided, be drawn into war, but rather would adopt the classic strategy of pitting his enemies against one another. Thursday came (it happened to be the fourth of July), and he delivered his edict in council:

Whereas the Indians of the Raretangh are daily exhibiting more and more hostility . . . we have therefore considered it most expedient and advisable to induce the Indians, our allies hereabout, to take up arms . . . and in order to encourage them the more we have promised them ten fathoms of seawan for each head, and if they succeed in capturing any of the Indians who have most barbarously murdered our people on Staten Island we have promised them 20 fathoms of seawan for each head.

The offer of bribery yielded fast results. Shortly after the edict was posted, an Indian named Pacham, of a tribe that had had testy relations with the Raritans, strolled past the guardhouse and into Fort Amsterdam holding aloft—with what he presumably felt was appropriate ceremony and pride—a human hand dangling from a stick. On being admitted with his trophy into Kieft's presence, he declared that it belonged to the Raritan chief who had ordered the attack on De Vries's farm.

Kieft was mollified. He felt pleased that his plan had succeeded, and vindicated in the character of leadership he was providing. “All men are created equal” was a sentiment off in the future; in the seventeenth century, as in those before, the different races, religions, and genders were seen by one and all as occupying different rungs on the chain of being. To a mind like Kieft's—not especially distinguishable from that of Captain John Mason, who had led the English massacre of the Pequots in Connecticut four years earlier, or Nathaniel Bacon, the Jamestown colony's advocate of Indian extermination—the wild peoples of the world, on whatever continent they lived, understood power, and in the face of it they would assume their naturally subordinant rank. The Raritans showed no signs of retaliating, which proved the point.

The whole business might have ended there. But then, without immediate connection to these events, though perhaps subconsciously kindled by them, the unnamed Wickquasgeck Indian chose this moment to seek vengeance for his uncle's long-ago murder. Claes Swits's old head had barely hit the floor of his Deutel Bay home before Willem Kieft was launched on a full-scale retaliation. The natives had now shown that they could never be trusted; extermination was the only solution.

Waging war requires politicking, and Kieft moved first to gain popular support for his effort against the tribes of the area by asking that the residents nominate a council of twelve men who would assist him in deciding on a course of action. He deserves some credit for bringing into being the first popularly chosen body in what would become New York State, one of the first in the New World, though he had no notion of how this move would backfire on him. The twelve assembled themselves, and chose David de Vries as their president. Also on the council was Joris Rapalje, who, with his wife, Catalina Trico, had stuck it out in the colony, moving from youth into middle age, and had recently begun to prosper. Kieft asked the assembly three questions, which, helpfully, he numbered for them:

1. Whether it is not just to punish the barbarous murder of Claes Swits committed by an Indian and, in case the Indians refuse to surrender the murderer at our request, whether it is not justifiable to ruin the entire village to which he belongs?

2. In what manner the same ought to be put into effect and at what time?

3. By whom it may be undertaken?

To Kieft's annoyance, the twelve did not council war. They agreed that “by all means the murderer according to the proposition of the honorable director should be punished,” but insisted that “two or three times more a sloop be sent by the honorable director to make a friendly request without threats, for the surrender of the murderer . . .” The twelve councilors knew they had no power, so they tried to lay roadblocks in the path of their willful leader. In the event that all-out conflict with the tribes should be called for, they declared, in what seemed a patent stalling tactic, that the colony should first send for two hundred coats of mail from the home country. Also, since by this time Kieft was developing a reputation for, as David de Vries wrote, calling for war while “being himself protected in a good fort, out of which he had not slept a single night during all the years he had been there,” the council added a gentle stipulation that in the event of any military expedition “whereas we acknowledge no other commander than the director . . . therefore . . . the honorable director shall personally lead this expedition . . .”

Kieft had made it plain that the council was to be a rubber-stamp body; he was furious at its willfulness, and decided to try again, this time communing with each representative separately, in the belief that removing the security of the group would cause the simple farmers and tradesmen to give their approval to his plan. But while sailor Jacob Waltingen said he was “ready to do whatever the director and council may order,” and Jacques Bentyn, a West India Company official, gave Kieft a thoroughly satisfactory reply that “it will be best to kill the Indians so as to fill them with fear,” the majority still wanted to take matters slowly and pursue a course of seeking justice for the specific wrong that was done.

To add to Kieft's annoyance, the council of twelve, having failed to give the endorsement it was assembled to provide, then took it upon itself to begin advising the director on other matters. The councilors wanted certain rights for individuals, “according to the custom in Holland.” They wanted a prohibition on the sale of English cattle. Most of all, they wanted themselves, or some like body, to become a permanent representative assembly, as existed in even the smallest villages in the United Provinces. Kieft responded two weeks later with a firm reply in the form of a decree: