The Island at the Center of the World (16 page)

And whereas the Commonality at our request appointed and instructed these 12 men to communicate their good counsel and advice on the subject of the murder of the late Claes Cornelissen Swits, which was committed by the Indians; this being now completed by them, we do hereby thank them for the trouble they have taken, and shall, with God's help, make use of their rendered written advice in its own time. The said Twelve men shall now, henceforth hold no further meeting, as the same tends to a dangerous consequence, and to the great injury both of the country and of our authority. We therefore, hereby forbid them calling any manner of assemblage or meeting, except by our express order, on pain of being punished as disobedient subjects. Done in fort Amsterdam, this eighth of February, 1642, in New Netherland.

The attempt at winning popular support for his military action having backfired, Kieft went ahead anyway, ordering West India Company soldiers to attack Indian villages. So began what became known as Kieft's War, a series of murderous attacks and counterattacks that would continue for several years. The ugliest assault came on the night of February 25, 1643. David de Vries had once again stayed at the director's home inside Fort Amsterdam, where he sat across the dinner table from Kieft and tried to argue him out of the attack. Kieft stated that he “had a mind to wipe the mouths of the savages,” to which De Vries replied that Kieft had no right to act on his own, that “such work could not be done without the approbation of the Twelve Men; that it could not take place without my assent, who was one of the Twelve Men . . . that he should consider what profit he could derive from this business . . . But it appeared that my speaking was of no avail. He had, with his co-murderers, determined to commit the murder, deeming it a Roman deed, and to do it without warning the inhabitants in the open lands, that each one might take care of himself against the retaliation of the natives, for he could not kill all the Indians.”

The two men had now finished their meal. Kieft did not reply directly, but told De Vries to go into the new great hall he had had built in the fort. There, De Vries found the soldiers massed for their attack. Two parties were formed: one to march two miles to the northwest to launch a raid on a small group of Indians camped at Corlaer's Hook (today the Lower East Side of Manhattan), the other to cross the river and attack a larger group camped in the area of the plantation called Pavonia, at what is now Jersey City, New Jersey.

De Vries found the business disgusting. These Indians, of the Wickquasgeck and Tappan tribes, had come to the Dutch seeking sanctuary from Mohawks farther north, to whom they were behind on tribute payments and who had therefore attacked them in their villages. “Let this work alone,” De Vries said to Kieft. “You will also murder our own nation, for there are none of the settlers in the open country who are aware of it.” But the soldiers went off on their missions. De Vries stayed in the director's quarters that night, sitting up all night by the kitchen hearth, watching the blaze, and waiting. Around midnight, “I heard a great shrieking, and I ran to the ramparts of the fort, and looked over to Pavonia. Saw nothing but firing, and heard the shrieks of the natives murdered in their sleep.” Shortly after, an Indian couple, whom De Vries knew, appeared inexplicably inside the fort. They had managed to flee the massacre, which in the confusion they thought was being done by Mohawks. De Vries told them it was Dutchmen who were annihilating their makeshift village, and that Fort Amsterdam was the last place they should come for refuge. He helped them escape into the woods. In the morning, De Vries heard the returned soldiers boasting that they had “massacred or murdered eighty Indians, and considering they had done a deed of Roman valor, in murdering so many in their sleep.”

De Vries then repeated in his journal an account of the massacre that later appeared in a pamphlet published in the Dutch Republic, written by anonymous inhabitants of the colony in hopes of stirring their countrymen to the abuse of power taking place in the North American colony: “[I]nfants were torn from their mother's breasts, and hacked to pieces in the presence of their parents, and the pieces thrown into the fire and in the water, and other sucklings, being bound to small boards, were cut, stuck, and pierced, and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone. Some were thrown into the river, and when the fathers and mothers endeavored to save them, the soldiers would not let them come on land but made both parents and children drown. . . . Some came to our people in the country with their hands, some with their legs cut off, and some holding their entrails in their arms, and others had such horrible cuts and gashes, that worse than they were could never happen. And these poor simple creatures, as also many of our own people, did not know any better than that they had been attacked by a party of other Indians—the Maquas. After this exploit, the soldiers were rewarded for their services, and Director Kieft thanked them by taking them by the hand and congratulating them.”

The pamphlet that De Vries copied, called “Broad Advice,” probably exaggerated the horrors, but its exaggerations help make the point that the colonists opposed the war against the Indians, and, in fact, were so shocked by the folly and danger of living at the whim of one man that it spurred them to press for some form of representative government. Kieft's War is fairly named. Kieft overrode the vast majority of the residents, and what is striking is that both his hard line and their instincts toward moderation fit with the times. The Dutch were constructing an empire—by definition an ugly business. Over the course of the century the Dutch trading companies, their directors, and soldiers proved themselves as bloody and inexorable as their English, Spanish, and Portuguese counterparts. Kieft was not very different from Dutch administrators in Malacca or Macassar, the English East India Company directors in Calcutta and Madras, or the Portuguese rulers of Goa.

But the colonists who opposed bloodshed were also acting true to type. It was no innate goodness that motivated them, but a practical wisdom won over decades of strife in the Dutch provinces. In both De Vries's journal and the anti-Kieft pamphlet, the passage describing the horrors of the Pavonia attack is followed by a sentence that must have echoed in the minds of many of the colonists: “Did the Duke of Alva in the Netherlands ever do anything more cruel?” Seventy years before, with rebellion against Spanish rule simmering in the Low Countries, the Spanish regent had sent Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, the notorious Duke of Alva, to quell it and reform heretics—that is to say, Protestants. The duke went on an Inquisitional rampage of torture and murder that became known as the Council of Blood, which involved decapitating rebellious nobles and slaughtering commoners in the hundreds.

The Council of Blood became ingrained in the national psyche; it helped vault the Dutch states toward an open war of rebellion. It also reinforced the notion of tolerance as a part of what it meant to be Dutch. This had been building for some time and would continue through the seventeenth century, as more and more people from other parts of Europe came to live in the Dutch provinces. In fact, it's something of a misnomer to think of “Dutch” in this era as an ethnic signifier. The Dutch provinces in the seventeenth century were the melting pot of Europe. As English, French, German, Swedish, and Jewish immigrants came and settled, they adopted the language, “Batavianized” their names (e.g., Bridges became Van Brugge), and, in time, adopted a basic framework for looking at the world one of the main features of which was the need to accommodate others. As the “Dutch” emigrated to their New World colony, then, they brought with them not only a ready-made mix of cultures but a tolerance of differences, the prescription for a multicultural society. In its very seeding, Manhattan was a melting pot.

We should be clear, however, about the meaning of tolerance, which had nothing to do with “celebrating diversity”—a concept that would have been seen as sheer loopiness in the seventeenth century. “Putting up with” was probably closer to the mark. If that sounds wan, consider that in Germany at the time an estimated forty percent of the population died due to the unholy enmeshment of religious intolerance and politics that gave rise to the Thirty Years' War (in the city of Magdeburg alone, thirty thousand were killed in a single day). In the United Provinces, meanwhile, tolerance had developed into a cultural trait. Dutch writers openly acknowledged that knowing how to get along, fit in, accommodate, was good for business. Foreign tourists in the provinces constantly noted it, and usually found it odd, a destabilizing force, a symptom of moral laxity. As they expanded, however, the Dutch put it to use, and it revealed itself in the most mundane ways.

The ruthlessness of Kieft and other merchant warriors masks the fact that the farmers and traders who made up the colony learned Indian languages, adopted Indian farming techniques, embraced the wampum trade, and, for a time and in a great many ways, tried to coexist. Kieft's own council of blood thus led to a reaction on the part of the Manhattanites that came straight from their experiences in Europe. Colonists bemoaned the war on the most practical grounds: they were vastly outnumbered by the Indians, and what was more, the Dutch were not trappers; the fur trade, their whole reason for being here, depended on the Indians. It made better sense to get along than to fight.

Even as the attacks, counterattacks, and colonists' complaints escalated, the settlers tried to maintain their way of life. Thomas Chambers signed a contract to build a house for Jan Schepmoes. Skipper Willem Dircksen agreed to ship cargo for John Turner and Willem Holmers and deliver it safely “on the beach beyond high water, at the island of St. Christopher, in the Caribbees.” Isaac Allerton filed a complaint against Anthony “The Turk” van Salee. John and Richard Ogden, of Stamford, Connecticut, contracted to build a stone church for the company within the walls of Fort Amsterdam. The company finished building a stone tavern and inn at the spot along Pearl Street where arriving sailors and passengers disembarked. Jeuriaen Hendricksz filed a complaint against Anthony “The Turk” van Salee. Jan Haes called Nicolaes Tenner “a rogue and a double rogue,” and Tenner took him to court for slander. Harmen van den Bogaert, who had made the daring winter journey into Mohawk country several years earlier, received the unfortunate Claes Swits's property, having been named in the old man's will, and in turn sold it to James Smith and William Brown. Van den Bogaert later testified, along with Claes's son Adriaen and another man, that they had gotten beer at the tavern of Jan Snediger three times, the first time it was “one pint short in hardly three pints, the second time it was found to be scarcely wine measure, the third time it was found to be a gill short in three pints.” Andries Hudde filed a complaint against Anthony “The Turk” van Salee. Catalina Trico and her daughter Sara testified in a custody case that the promiscuous Nan Beech had told them that “Mr. Smith” had fathered the child she was carrying. Hendrick Jansen sold Willem Adriaensen his “garden dwelling and brewhouse.” Pierre Pia and Jean St. Germain testified, in the case of a shot hog, that they had seen an Englishman with a gun in the vicinity a short time before. Cornelis Hooglandt sold to Willem Tomassen his house across the river on Long Island, together with the right to operate the ferry that had recently gone into regular service to bring Manhattanites to their farmland in what was already being called Breuckelen.

But the trouble was inescapable. Kieft's action had brought about something that heretofore had been unachievable: the unification of area tribes into a confederation, one aimed at slaughtering Europeans. Attacks came without warning, in the deep of night, with a whispering hail of arrows and explosions from the muskets sold to the Indians by traders in the area around Rensselaerswyck. The plantation at Achter Col (today Newark, New Jersey) was reduced to burning heaps. Budding communities on Long Island were decimated. Small groups of Indians made sudden strikes on the outlying farms on Manhattan, hacking cattle, burning crops, killing anyone with a white face, sometimes dragging women and children away into captivity, and forcing residents to seek the safety of the fort.

In a matter of months over the course of 1642 and 1643, years of brutally hard labor—clearing and tilling fields, building by hand the mills that would saw the timber with which they then constructed successively more comfortable homes—were erased. Families huddled in hastily constructed straw huts inside the walls of the fort. Fort Amsterdam occupied approximately the position where the Old Customs House stands today. Standing outside that fortress-like building, it is surprisingly easy to summon the image of those men, women, and children, through the relentless winter months of 1643 and on into the cold spring, gathered inside the walls, here at the extreme southern rim of the island that had been their home, that had, for a time, seemed to offer itself to them, to beckon them to stay, prosper, root their families, and that now seemed ready to tip them into the bay. Refugees in their own homeland now, they huddled in the open courtyard, exposed, at the mercy of their several gods, wondering what would happen to them, but not wondering who to blame.

Chapter 7

THE CAUSE

F
ar to the north, meanwhile, the air still had its glorious native sweetness, complicated by pine needles and grape blossoms and lacking the dark pungency of burned homesteads. Adriaen van der Donck, the young man from Breda who had lived all of his twenty-two-odd years within a few dozen square miles of flat country that had long since been divided, channeled, poldered, and tamed by humans, spent his first months in his new land entranced by the rawness and bigness of its nature, and blissfully cut off from the horrors farther south. The mountains to the north of the colony of Rensselaerswyck loomed like a dreamscape. To one coming from a place where wood was precious, the forest beggared the imagination—“so much so,” Van der Donck wrote, “that practically the whole country is covered with it, and in a manner of speaking, there is too much of it for us, and it's in our way.” The river on which his small house sat was a quarter-mile broad, and yet the winters were of such ferocity that the entire expanse typically froze over every December, leaving the subjects of diamond merchant Kiliaen van Rensselaer cut off from Manhattan and points south, alone with the mountains and the snow-smothered pines, until spring.

Van der Donck decided that April and May were the finest months to explore the countryside. “The trees are then in bloom,” he wrote, “and the woods are full of sweet smells. By mid-May, without fail, we have ripe strawberries, not in the gardens, because they are not planted there, but in the fields, where they grow naturally.” But he found he loved autumn best in this new world: “Above the highlands, advancing northerly, the weather is colder, the fresh waters freeze, the stock is sheltered, the kitchens are provided, and all things are put in order for the winter. The fat oxen and swine are slaughtered. The wild geese, turkeys, and deer are at their best in this season, and easiest obtained.” He observed the bears, “none like the gray and pale-haired bears of Muscovy and Greenland” but rather “of a shiny pitch black color,” and with such an acute sense of smell that “the Indians when setting out to hunt bears . . . impart Esau's odor to their bodies and clothing, that is, they apply the scent of field and forest so that they will not be betrayed by a contrasting scent.” He marveled at the “incredibly numerous” deer; he studied eagles, observed that they “soar very high in the air, beyond the vision of man” and can “strike a fish, and jerk it living from the waters.” He stalked turkeys in the woods, shot quail by the dozens, admired thick populations of “woodcocks, birch-cocks, heath-fowls, pheasants, wood and water snipes.” Like a good Dutchman, he made a special study of the winds of the New World—“the swift and fostering messengers of commerce.”

He noted the contours of the land, the character of the soil in different regions, the native trees and fruits: “The mulberries are better and sweeter than ours, and ripen earlier.” He counted “several kinds of plums, wild or small cherries, juniper, small kinds of apples, many hazelnuts, black currents, gooseberries, blue India figs, and strawberries in abundance all over the country, some of which ripen at half May, and we have them until July; blueberries, raspberries, black-caps, etc., with artichokes, ground-acorns, ground beans, wild onions, and leeks like ours . . .” He was intrigued by a local fruit he called “cicerullen, or water-lemons” (i.e., watermelon), which grew “the size of the stoutest Leyden cabbages,” and that had “a light-textured pulp like a wet sponge in which the pips are embedded. When really ripe and sound, it melts away to a juice as soon as it enters the mouth, and nothing remains to spit out but the pips. . . . they are so refreshing and often served as a beverage.”

He canvassed the gardeners, European and Indian, and, with a seventeenth-century intellectual's passion for the new scientific fad of analyzing and classifying, made an inventory of the wild herbs and edible plants for which European taxonomy had a name: “The plants which are known to us are the following,
viz:
Capilli veneris, scholopendria, angelica, polypodium, verbascum, album, calteus sacerdotis, atriplex hortensis and marina, chortium, turrites, calamus aromaticus, sassafras, rois Virginianum, ranunculus, plantago, bursa pastoris, malva, origaenum, geranicum, althea, cinoroton pseudo, daphine, viola, ireas, indigo silvestris, sigillum, salamonis, sanguis draconum, consolidae, millefolium, noli me tangere, cardo benedictus, agrimonium, serpentariae, coriander, leeks, wild leeks, Spanish figs, elatine, camperfolie, petum male and female, and many other plants.”

Over the course of the next fourteen years, Van der Donck would create an impressive breadth of writing, nearly all of it on the topic of his new home, its inhabitants, both European and Indian, and its need for proper government. But what may be even more striking in his writing than his political skills or legal reasoning is the sheer exuberance that rises from the pages. The man simply fell in love with America. He saw its promise and its grandeur. He reveled in its rawness, and the opportunity it provided. Within a short time of his arrival his mind had skimmed far beyond the plodding mercantile thoughts of the West India Company officials who ran the New Netherland colony; he saw the continent not just as a source of exploitable materials but as a new home, a virgin base for the expansion of the civilization that had nurtured him. He understood that this was a land of incomprehensible vastness (even the Indians “know of no limits to the country” westward, he wrote, and “deem such enquiries to be strange and singular”) into which a new society, an extension of Europe, could grow. He understood that it would need a framework of laws, a system of justice, and he was brazen enough to think he could help carve out such a system. That isn't to say he could have foreseen the New World colonies one day breaking free of their motherlands. He was a product of the seventeenth century, not the eighteenth. But he was, as his writings make plain, one of the first genuine Americans. He was so not because of where he came to live, but because of the expanse of opportunity that opened inside his breast once he arrived—opportunity he imagined not for himself alone but for others.

It's hard to say when that feeling took control of him. Probably in those first months when he wasn't reveling in the landscape he was focused on the practical execution of his work. For he had a job to do, and he threw himself into it with what his employer soon found to be inordinate zeal. From the moment he touched the soil of what he called “the New American World” Van der Donck seems to have been in constant motion. The first issue he faced was that of freelance, off-the-books trading taking place between Rensselaerswyck colonists and those of New Netherland and New England. Within days of his arrival in Rensselaerswyck, he stood in full Cavalier costume before the collected farmers and tradesmen of the colony and delivered his first ordinance, which must have stirred up the lot:

We, Adriaen vander Donck, chief officer, with the commissioners and councilors of the colony of Rensselaerswyck, to all who shall see these or hear them read, greeting. As we see and notice daily the great strife, uproar, quarreling, yes what is more, mutual discord, all of which are causes that generally bring about the ruin of a well ordered community, springing solely from the trade which our inhabitants carry on with the foreign residents . . . have seen fit to order, enjoin, and command, as we do by these, all the inhabitants of the colony . . . that they shall not undertake to buy from or exchange with the residents any goods, or in any manner let them have any beavers, otters or other furs, directly or indirectly, upon fine and forfeiture for the first offense of three times the value of the goods first bought. . . . But, if any shallops or vessels of the Company or any one else come up the river and the inhabitants want to buy anything of which they are in great need, they shall ask permission of the Officer.

Whether or not Van der Donck realized it before leaving Amsterdam, it soon became clear that his duties were less concerned with administering justice for the welfare of a new society than with serving the profit interests of the patroon. Van Rensselaer may have been an ocean away, but through his voluminous instructions he showed himself an inexorable taskmaster unwaveringly focused on efficiency. Van der Donck was to devote himself to cracking down on a black market grain trade, hunting down those who had ventured away from the colony before doing their contracted time, and prosecuting residents who bought and sold beaver pelts on the sly. Van der Donck rode the valleys of the colony on horseback and sailed up and down the North River between Rensselaerswyck and Manhattan on Van Rensselaer's business. In November 1642, he was in New Amsterdam searching for a young woman who had skipped out on her service contract at Rensselaerswyck. When he found her, he discovered that she was pregnant and nearly ready to give birth. In court at Fort Amsterdam, he did his duty by “demanding” that she return to fulfill her obligation, but then struck a deal allowing the woman to stay put until she had delivered and her baby was old enough to travel. The old patroon didn't care to see flexibility in his lawman's personality. “It is your duty to seek my advantage and protect me against loss,” he barked in a letter.

Already, even from faraway Amsterdam, Van Rensselaer could detect, through reports from various quarters, a dangerous willfulness on the part of his law officer, and he began to regret choosing Van der Donck. “What pleases me now in you is the zeal and diligence which I notice in your honor in expediting several matters,” Van Rensselaer wrote early on, but these same qualities came with a downside. The young man took affairs into his own hands—settling disputes as he saw fit, deciding the colony needed a brickyard, working out improvements to the sawmill and gristmill, without consulting Van Rensselaer or Arent van Curler, the commercial officer of the colony and Van Rensselaer's grandnephew. When the patroon demanded that his law officer collect late payments from tenants, Van der Donck visited their shacks, saw that they had no money, and, rather than inform the patroon that he had not carried out his wishes, simply ignored the matter. Van Rensselaer's letters soon began to nag: “Your principal fault has been that you have wanted to prevail over Corler and that you have gone ahead too independently.”

Van der Donck offended the patroon's business principles when he formally protested a direct order from Van Rensselaer that forced farmers in the colony to swear an oath of loyalty to him not only for themselves but on behalf of their servants. Van der Donck seems to have taken the position that the Middle Ages were over, that servants should be held responsible for their own behavior—a notion that Van Rensselaer considered “outrageous.” From this point onward in his career, Van der Donck's personality rings out from the centuries-old pages of letters, court records, and other surviving documents of the period. It is a personality well suited to tackling a raw continent and helping to forge a viable new community: willful, righteous, insistent, arrogant, hot-tempered. It comes through in his private dealings: at one point someone takes him to court to accuse him of slander (the parties arranged an “amicable and a friendly” settlement); another time an argument with a Rensselaerswyck functionary escalated until the two men, as Van Curler later gossiped to the patroon, “pursued each other with swords,” and ended with Van der Donck buffeting the man. Most of all, Van der Donck's headstrong nature is apparent in his relationship with his superior. It seems remarkable that, still in his early twenties, having traveled an ocean away from the only world he had known, he immediately set to defying his patron, a man universally feared and respected as a kind of latter-day medieval prince. “Most honorable, wise, powerful, and right discreet Lord” is how people addressed letters to Van Rensselaer. Van der Donck, by contrast, in his first act on arrival at Rensselaerswyck angered Van Rensselaer by rejecting the farm set aside for him and taking another, at the far end of the colony. He then chose one of the patroon's prized black stallions as his personal mount.

And he persisted in his defiance, as evidenced in the exasperated references to him that peppered Van Rensselaer's letters to other officials of his colony (in which he tended to underline names): “I take it very ill that Officer
vanderdonck
. . . ,”
“And as to
vanderdonck
. . . ,”
“These young people, like
. . .
vanderdonc
k
,
do not think at all of my interests . . .
,” “. . . write me especially how
vanderdonck
behaves in the matter . . .” The relationship that Van der Donck developed with Van Rensselaer—at first insinuating himself as an upright, model-son figure with the older man, then proceeding, stridently, almost flamboyantly, to go against him—would replay itself, first with Willem Kieft in New Amsterdam, then again a few years later with another father-figure, this time with historic consequences. One can only wonder what his relationship with his real father was like.

At times Van Rensselaer seemed to suspect that his law officer held the interests of the colonists over his own. At other times he feared the young man would attempt something like a coup d'état. “From the beginning you have acted not as officer but as director,” he complained at one point, and added sourly that if and when the time for a promotion came he wished “to have the honor of the advancement myself.” Van Rensselaer's fear of the young man somehow trumping him seemed borne out by a tattletale report that Arent van Curler sent him in June 1643. Van der Donck had been spending a great deal of time in the Catskill Mountains to the west of the patroon's lands, and van Curler informed his uncle that “Your Honor may be assured he intends to look for partners to plant a colonie there.”

Van der Donck had indeed been roaming the mountains. His all-consuming fascination with the New World had a focal point: the native inhabitants. The pitched battles and terrorist warfare taking place to the south was between the Europeans and the tribes of the Lower Hudson Valley, which were distinct from the Mohawks and Mahicans in the area around Rensselaerswyck. The mayhem did not reach this far north. Indians remained a constant presence at the trading post and among the homes and farms of the patroon's domain, and soon after his arrival Van der Donck took up with some of them and began venturing into their lands. In Europe a sizable literature had built up by this time about the American natives, and the Dutch in particular, who were eager to develop any arguments that showed their Spanish oppressors in a bad light, had focused on the plight of the Indians at the hands of the conquistadors. At universities such as Leiden, young men read descriptions in flowing Latin of natives who “go naked” and have no knowledge of “that source of all misfortunes, money.” Thus certain educated Europeans formed an idealistic image of these New World inhabitants, an image that wouldn't seem out of place in, say, the 1970s. It was perhaps with this in his mind that Van der Donck was drawn to Indian society.