The Island at the Center of the World (17 page)

He thus cracks the stereotype of a European of the time as culturally unable to see indigenous peoples as anything other than savages. Through the finely detailed observations of Indian society he later put in writing we can see him, during this period, immersing himself in the culture of the Mohawks and Mahicans, roving the wooded slopes and valleys with them, sitting in their homes, canvassing the women on their cooking methods, observing rituals, fishing and planting techniques, sexual and marriage customs, and “the sucking of their children.” These two dominant tribal groups spoke different languages and had very different cultures—the Mohawks were more settled, living in palisaded villages organized around agriculture, while the Mahicans tended to move with the hunting season—which to Van der Donck helped explain why they were so often at war with one another. He would later describe these natives, for the benefit of curious European readers, as “equal to the average and well-proportioned here in the Netherlands.” He characterized their houses: built snugly so that they “repel rain and wind, and are also fairly warm, but they know nothing about fitting them out with rooms, salons, halls, closets or cabinets.”

He learned some of their languages, classified the Indians of the region as falling into four different language groups, and analyzed these carefully (“Declension and conjugation resemble those in Greek, for they, like the Greeks, have duals in their nouns and even augments in their verbs”). He observed their medicine men firsthand and marveled that “fresh wounds and dangerous injuries they know how to heal wonderfully with virtually nothing,” and “they can treat gonorrhoea and other venereal diseases so easily as to put many an Italian physician to shame.” However, he questioned the “devil-hunting” methods used for the very ill, which “make noise enough to frighten a person in extremity to death.”

He studied their religious practices, and, in answer to the question of whether they could be converted to Christianity, frankly doubted it, but, in a remarkable passage, urged his country to institute a plan of social welfare among the Indians of the colony: “Public authority ought to become involved and provide for sound teaching of our language and the elements of the Christian religion to their youth in good schools established in suitable locations in that country, so that in due course they could and would teach each other further and take pleasure in doing so. It would take a deal of effort and preparation, but without such measures not much good can be achieved among them. The neglect of it is a very bad thing, since the Indians themselves say they would be happy to have their children instructed in our language and religion.”

Van der Donck's major work,
A Description of New Netherland,
from which these quotes are taken, is considered a classic of early American literature, but it has been forgotten by history thanks to the fact that it was written in the language not of the eventual masters of the American colonies but of their bitter rival. (The historian Thomas O'Donnell called the book “one of America's oldest literary treasures,” and said of Van der Donck, “Had he written in English rather than Dutch, his
Description
would certainly have won from posterity the same kind, if not the same amount, of veneration that has been bestowed on Bradford's
Of Plymouth Plantation.”
) The neglect of Van der Donck's book mirrors the treatment American history has given to the whole corpus of records of the Dutch colony centered on Manhattan, and, for that matter, the colony itself. There has only been one published English translation of the
Description.
This translation first appeared in 1841 (the translator, Jeremiah Johnson, was not only a former mayor of Brooklyn but counted himself a descendant of Catalina Trico and Joris Rapalje), and historians have relied on it ever since for the wealth of information the book contains about the colony, the American wilderness that the first Europeans found, and the Indians.

But those generations of historians were apparently ignorant of the fact that the translation from which they were working was badly flawed. In places the translation is accurate and indeed captures the poetry and zeal in the original, but in other places Johnson completely distorts what Van der Donck has to say. The main flaw with this translation, however, which appeared most recently in a 1968 edition of the
Description,
is that it simply omits whole portions of Van der Donck's text. A major section that did not appear in print until 1990, when Dutch scholar Ada Louise Van Gastel published it in translation in an academic journal, and of which historians thus have been ignorant, shows the young Van der Donck making a serious study of the Indians' treaties, contracts, and “government and public policy.” It is fascinating reading in light of Van der Donck's recently completed legal training and the work he would soon undertake in behalf of the Manhattan-based colony.
*8
Looking at it in that context, we see a young man, who is fresh out of law school and filled with new, practical ideas about the law and how governments might function, applying those ideas in a laboratory study of an alien society.

Like a good student of Grotius who also had a practical interest in how Europeans might better deal with the natives, Van der Donck, in this “lost” section of his book, dispassionately analyzed their ideas of right and wrong. He found in force among them none of the “rights, laws, and maxims” common in European countries, but instead a general “law of nature or of nations.” He shows that at least some of the Dutch colonists were aware of the nuances in the Indians' understanding of property rights, noting that to the natives “wind, stream, bush, field, sea, beach, and riverside are open and free to everyone of every nation with which the Indians are not embroiled in open conflict. All those are free to enjoy and move about such places as though they were born there.” He identified their respect for certain principles of war that Europeans also held, such as giving safe conduct to “state envoys” and honoring pacts. He noted, for the sake of future emissaries, that when making an offer such as a land treaty, the protocol was to state the request orally and at the same time give a suitable gift. “The offering is hung up, the request is put, and those to whom it is addressed examine and deliberate the proposition seriously. If they take the offering, the request as made is accepted and consented to, but if it remains where it hangs for over three days the matter is held in abeyance and the petitioner has to alter the conditions or augment the offering or both.”

He seemed to admire that the Indians' government was “of the popular kind,” but found that it had its problems. While a whole village would gather to debate matters of importance, and a chief would work like a politician to sway the people to his preferred course of action, the democracy had an abrupt ending point. If an opponent remained obstinate, eventually “one of the younger chiefs will jump up and in one fell swoop smash the man's skull with an axe in full view of everyone.” Van der Donck was forced to conclude that this species of popular government was “defective and lame.”

So yes, Arent van Curler was right—Adriaen van der Donck had been spending time among the Indian villages in the Catskill Mountains in 1643. And while he was up in the highlands, he began negotiations with tribes to buy a vast tract of land. Two years into what was probably a three-year contract with Van Rensselaer, Van der Donck was chafing—and planning for the future. He saw how things stood at Rensselaerswyck, saw that the old man proposed, against common sense, to run his colony as a medieval fiefdom, with serfs and himself as the law personified, and to do it all from the other end of the ocean. By now Van der Donck had undergone a change in this new world; as with Peter Minuit, what had started as a raw adventure had matured in him into something deeper. He wanted to make something here, something that would last. As with Minuit, it was almost inevitable that he would think to found his own colony.

Immediately on receiving news of this from his nephew, Van Rensselaer dispatched a man to the colony with the mission of purchasing the tract called Catskill from the Indians. He wrote Van Curler a letter filled with invective toward Van der Donck. The man had “dishonestly designed” to deny his patron his rights, which as far as he was concerned included the right to obtain any properties adjacent to his colony. The man was to be “constrained,” and if he “should prove obstinate, he shall be degraded from his office.”

The old man got his way: his agent outmaneuvered Van der Donck, purchased Catskill, and extended his colony by several thousand acres. But Van Rensselaer didn't live to enjoy it. It's tempting, but probably not warranted, to infer that Van der Donck's impudence gave him a literal fit. Whatever the causes, Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, diamond merchant and patroon of Rensselaerswyck, died shortly after, leaving the estate to his sons. The odd medieval fiefdom would continue, existing in its own universe through the period of the English colony of New York and well into the history of the United States (the city of Albany, later the capital of New York State, would eventually be forced to file papers clarifying that its territory was distinct from that of the duchy that entirely surrounded it). In fact, Rensselaerswyck would prosper under the on-site stewardship of Kiliaen's son Jeremias and later managers, eventually sprawling to include upward of a million acres of land and one hundred thousand tenant-farmers.

For Van der Donck, the failure of his plans for a colony near Rensselaerswyck brought about a change of thinking. He turned his attention southward. His term in office probably had another year on it, but he had given up on the northern reaches of New Netherland and began spending more and more of his time at what was the undeniable nerve center of Dutch holdings in North America.

B
Y
1644,
EVENTS
on Manhattan were reaching a new stage. The opposition to Kieft and his disastrous Indian war had begun to coalesce and was being led by Cornelis Melyn, the farmer who had been Van der Donck's shipmate on his voyage to New Amsterdam in 1641. Melyn was in his early forties, an upright Fleming from around Antwerp, a tanner by trade, who had also brought with him on that voyage his wife, children, some farm hands, and animals, with the intention to farm a vast tract on Staten Island. His timing was dreadful. Indians destroyed his plantation, and Melyn and his family were forced to cross the North River and seek refuge, along with most everyone else, near the fort on lower Manhattan. He bought land at the spot where the “canal,” or ditch, drained into the East River, and built a two-story house on it. Soon after he had a neighbor. Jochem Kuyter was a German who had done service in the Danish navy in the East Indies, then, in search of a peaceful corner of the world to settle down, arrived in Manhattan in 1639. He took up tobacco farming on the north of the island, across the river from the plantation of his friend Jonas Bronck (who would give his name to a New York City borough). Kuyter had had success with his first crops, and was hoping to turn a profit, when a Wickquasgeck assault destroyed his plans as well, forcing him to move south. The two neighbors, Melyn and Kuyter, compared notes on their mutual suffering and decided to launch an offensive against Kieft and the West India Company.

With the huddled masses in the fort close to anarchy, Kieft, in an effort to restore order, proposed naming a new council of representatives to assist him. This mollified people somewhat, and they didn't put up a fuss when he hand-picked the eight members. Naturally, he chose men whom he believed would support him. He picked Melyn as leader, figuring that the leather-worker-turned-plantation-owner ought to be grateful to the company for giving him such an opportunity for advancement. He also chose two Englishmen, acknowledging the fact that by now twenty percent of the province's population was English; one of these, Isaac Allerton, was a wily trader who had sailed with the Pilgrims on the
Mayflower,
then, feeling constricted in their society, had moved from New England to the freer atmosphere of New Amsterdam.

Kieft assembled the board on June 18. With him, probably, were Cornelis van Tienhoven, his secretary and henchman, and, as a reminder of his authority, a contingent of soldiers. Adriaen van der Donck was not yet one of the board, but he was probably present at this meeting; he had recently arrived in New Amsterdam on one of his frequent river journeys from Rensselaerswyck. Also likely to have been on hand was the town's minister, Everardus Bogardus, a stout, hard-drinking Calvinist who had begun denouncing Kieft from his pulpit.

The colony, Kieft told the men, was out of cash. The treasury had been emptied fighting the war. He now proposed to raise money by taxing beavers and beer. A cry went up from the board members. The population he proposed to tax had lost their homes, property, and family members thanks to this war. People were living in makeshift dens and wearing rags. They couldn't pay and would refuse to even if they had the money. And anyway, the men argued, such a tax, without authorization from the company in Amsterdam, was unlawful. Kieft flushed with anger. “I have more power here than the company!” he roared at the men and announced he would do whatever he felt was necessary. Whereupon Kuyter, the ex-sailor, rose menacingly, pointed a heavy finger at the director, and vowed that some day, when Kieft no longer wore the protective mantle of office, Kuyter would “certainly have him.” The meeting broke up in chaos, and several days later Kieft's soldiers were seen hammering placards around the fort informing the residents of the new taxes.

A tax on beavers might have been tolerated, but adding one stuiver to every tankard of beer sold was beyond endurance; a popular uprising ensued. The people refused to pay it, and tavern keepers refused to charge it. Kieft retaliated by sending soldiers down the road to the city tavern, where they arrested Philip Gerritsen, its proprietor.

The board then took action. The members had previously written letters to the West India Company directors in Amsterdam and to the leaders of the Dutch government at The Hague, complaining of their plight, but they were disorganized and anemic petitions. These men were farmers and traders, not lawyers; these earlier letters were probably written by the Reverend Bogardus, who was as bitter toward Kieft as anyone. “Almighty God finally, through his righteous judgment, hath in this current year kindled around us the fire of an Indian war,” the first letter had lamented. The tone was churchly and groveling, with refrains of “we poor inhabitants of New Netherland” and “Your Honors can easily conceive how wretchedly it fares with us, distressed people.”