The Island at the Center of the World (18 page)

At the time that letter was written, Van der Donck had been sitting around campfires far to the north, playing card games with the Mohawks and Mahicans. At this point, however, the character of the opposition changes. Up to now the colonists had been fumbling, convinced that they were subject to an injustice but without direction or understanding of the mechanisms for redress of grievances—mechanisms that were of long standing in the Dutch Republic, and in which Van der Donck—the only jurist in the colony—had recently trained.

Van der Donck may have returned north after the meeting with Kieft in June, but his term as law officer of Rensselaerswyck apparently expired in August, and he was back in New Amsterdam by early October, when the Manhattan activists met again, clandestinely. The scent of heated political activity would have been unavoidable and irresistible to the young lawyer. He had journeyed from Leiden to Rensselaerswyck in search of adventure and with a young man's dreams of great achievement—of helping to found a new society in a brave new world—only to find that his dreams didn't square with Van Rensselaer's business plan. But here, in the capital of the Dutch province, was a genuine cause in the making, a political struggle at the cutting edge of legal thought. What rights did individuals have in an overseas outpost? Were they entitled to the same representation as citizens in the home country? Never before had an outpost of a Dutch trading company demanded political status. Here, Van der Donck must have thought, was his chance to make his mark.

From the fort, where Van der Donck was appearing at this time in a court case related to his duties at Rensselaerswyck, to Cornelis Melyn's house—the center of the populist opposition to Kieft and the West India Company—it was a three-minute walk along Pearl Street (one can still take it today), with the river on his right and the church and a little row of brick homes on his left. And here they all were, the merchants and traders of the colony, grieving over their dead children, wives, and comrades, bitter at the burning of the homes and acreage in which they had invested their savings, wanting to express their outrage but not quite sure how. Van der Donck knew how. He must have offered himself at about this time as their lawyer, listened to their complaints, and begun to write.

From this point onward, the archives of the colony contain an increasingly more elaborate and strident series of legal petitions and arguments, documents sent by colonists either to the West India Company or to the States General in The Hague, which were aimed at securing the political foundations of the colony. Many of these writings have Adriaen van der Donck's name on them. There are also many others that were either written anonymously or in the name of one or another of the colonists, people who were illiterate or whose level of education doesn't match the prose.

Building on an argument put forth by Dr. Willem Frijhoff, a prominent Dutch historian at the Free University of Amsterdam and an authority on the Dutch language and history of the seventeenth century, especially as related to the New Netherland colony, I have culled what I believe to be Van der Donck's work or work in which he was involved. As Dr. Frijhoff put it to me in an e-mail, these writings, put alongside that which we know came from Van der Donck's pen, constitute “a coherent vision of a new society, sprung up from an Old World–trained academic.” Dr. Charles Gehring, the translator of the official records of the colony and a man who knows both the language and the personalities of the colonists better than anyone alive, agrees that Van der Donck is the only likely author of these documents. “The only other candidate is Van Tienhoven,” he told me, but while Cornelis van Tienhoven was educated, intelligent, and shrewd, as Kieft's right-hand man he would hardly have been the person to craft a series of documents defying the current administration. Dr. Frijhoff finds it remarkable that no historian before him has realized that Van der Donck must have been the force behind these writings, but the neglect of a fairly obvious point is simply another instance of the way that American history has ignored the Dutch colony. This body of writing dovetails with the actions Van der Donck would soon take on behalf of the colony. Put together, these actions and writings fill out a picture of Van der Donck as the pivotal figure in the history of the colony, the man who, more than any other, and in ways that have gone unnoticed, mortared together the foundation stones of a great city. It would probably be overly dramatic to call him the unheralded father of New York City; at the very least, he is an important figure whom history has forgotten.
*9

By the twenty-eighth of October 1644 the petition was complete, and the difference in tone from the earlier ones is striking. Instead of circuitous groveling before an all-powerful authority, it begins by crisply laying out a history of the colony's troubles, with the finger pointed directly: “For the sake of appearances, Twelve men were called together here, in November 1641, on the subject of the murder of Claes, the wheelwright; the Director submitted to them whether the blood of the aforesaid wheelwright should not be avenged? Whereupon divers debates arose on the one side and the other . . . [but] a hankering after war had wholly seized on the Director. . . . the aforesaid 12 men could not continue to meet any longer . . . for such was forbidden on pain of corporal punishment. Shortly after, [the director] commenced the war against those of Wesquecqueck, on his own mere motion. . . .”

The letter goes on to describe how Kieft had impaneled the new board, but only after his disastrous war was well under way, and only for the purpose of rubber-stamping his plan for new taxes to pay for it—a case, it in effect argues, of taxation without representation. Then it makes plain its complaint: “That one man . . . should dispose here of our lives and properties at his will and pleasure, in a manner so arbitrary that a King dare not legally do the like.” It then takes the bold step of asking that Kieft be recalled and a new governor installed, and continues prophetically, “For it is impossible ever to settle this country until a different system be introduced here,” in which villagers will “elect from among themselves a Bailiff or Schout and Schepens, who will be empowered to send their deputies and give their votes on public affairs with the Director and Council; so that the entire country may not be hereafter, at the whim of one man, again reduced to similar danger.”

The colonists smuggled the petition out of Manhattan in the person of the trader Govert Loockermans, who left shortly after on one of his voyages to Amsterdam on behalf of his patrons, the Verbrugge family. In Amsterdam, the letter, building on the plaintive ones sent earlier by the colonists, made an impact—but not the one the activists were hoping for. The West India Company was at that moment in disarray; losses were mounting, the various regional chambers blaming one another. The nation—and therefore the company—was still at war with Spain, and in Brazil, company soldiers had just lost a major battle against the Spanish, with whom they were locked in a struggle for control of the sugar market. Their North American outpost had foundered for too long. Memos flew back and forth between the company offices in Amsterdam and the government offices in the courtyard complex in The Hague known as the Binnenhof. For both the merchants and the government officials this letter sharpened the focus. It was dawning on them that this North American outpost was an oddity—different from the Dutch colonies in Brazil, Batavia, Taiwan, the Spice Islands, and everywhere else. Others may have caused trouble from time to time, such as the messy massacre of Englishmen at Amboyna, but there was no question of their remaining military-trading posts, firmly under company auspices.

Following receipt of this letter, the directors came to the conclusion that they had to treat Manhattan differently, not by acknowledging it as a settlement in its own right, but by cracking down. They agreed with the upstart colonists that Kieft had to go, but not for the reasons the colonists outlined. In the thirty-five years since Henry Hudson had claimed the place for the Dutch, there had never been a strong, capable leader on the ground. The directors had been appalled, earlier, to discover that after launching a war, Kieft had been unwilling to take the field—in fact, had rarely left the safety of the fort. They ignored the letter's novel assertion of rights, its talk of representative government for the province. They felt the colonists' pain, but concluded that their plight was due not to the lack of popular representation but to a governor who didn't understand the use of force.

So they began a search for a new director, and this time they didn't want an incompetent nepotist. They needed a committed company man who was also a true leader. Someone to keep the colonists in line. An administrator, yes, and a man who was something more—a skillful diplomat—but also something less. They needed a man of nerve and grit and guile, someone unafraid of pain. They needed a boss.

Chapter 8

THE ONE-LEGGED MAN

H
e was a serious young man—thick-necked, with a piggish face and hard eyes offset by voluptuous lips—standing on the high poop deck of a West India Company frigate, staring out into the humid air of the Caribbean Sea. On the deck below and on the surrounding ships, three hundred soldiers awaited his command. He was an administrative agent with little military experience, but West India Company officials, if they had ambitions, expected to see action. It was March 1644; he had left Amsterdam nine years earlier, and had served doggedly through the sticky malarial seasons, first in Brazil and recently on the Dutch-controlled island of Curaçao. The company was a major means of advancement for a Dutchman. Not long before the young man had been a clerk; now he commanded a fleet, bearing down on the enemy.

The island of St. Martin appeared on the horizon of emerald water and azure sky. With the Spanish empire weakened, its Caribbean and South American holdings were in play. This little island—strategically located at what the Dutch called the
hoek,
or corner, of the Antilles chain—had gone back and forth between the two European powers. The Spanish held it currently, the West India Company wanted it back, and the official was determined to get it for them. His intelligence had told him that the Spaniards had only lightly manned the fort on the island, and indeed his men hit the beach without incident, dug in, and set up a siege cannon. Then the big guns from the fort exploded. The intelligence was wrong. The fort had recently been regarrisoned; the Spaniards were armed to the teeth. But there was an upside for the Dutch commander: this would be his first opportunity to show his mettle. He ordered his men to return fire, then, with the tang of gunpowder perfuming the air, he grabbed a Dutch flag and leaped onto the mounded earth that formed their defensive wall. Apparently, in his zeal, he had moved too close, bringing himself into range of the enemy guns. He was about to plant the flag when the Spaniards unleashed their second volley. The man collapsed, his right leg shattered by a direct hit—probably a stone ball fired as a projectile. Before losing consciousness, he ordered the siege to continue.

Thanks to the abundance of wars and the rising tide of scientific inquiry, the seventeenth century saw a large increase in the amount of space medical treatises devoted to amputation. There were many techniques, all of them hideous. Typically, the patient, fully awake, was placed in a chair with two men holding him down. The doctor would use his hands to “pluck up the skinn and muscles” of the limb in question, then, as one wrote, “we cut the flesh with a rasor or incising knife . . . to the bone, the said bone must be diligently rubbed and scraped with the back of the sayd knife, which back must be made purposely for that effect, to the end the periost which covereth the bone, may be lesse painfull in cutting of the bone. Otherwise it teareth and riveth with the same, so causeth great dolour. . . . This being done, you must saw the bone with a sharpe saw . . .” Without anaesthetic or sedative the horror was often enough that the patient died before the saw finished its work. One surgeon's handbook frankly instructed doctors how to advise a patient: “Let him prepare his soul as a ready sacrifice to the Lord by earnest prayers. . . . For it is no small presumption to dismember the image of God.”

But while he suffered through weeks of delirium following the amputation of his own leg, Peter Stuyvesant, the thirty-four-year-old son of a Calvinist minister, would not die, and, after the siege of St. Martin had failed, was apologetic in his correspondence with the “Honorable, Wise, Provident, and Most Prudent Lords” of the company in Amsterdam, explaining drily that the attack on the island “did not succeed so well as I had hoped, no small impediment having been the loss of my right leg, it being removed by a rough ball.” With herculean exercise of will he ignored the pain and pus flowing from the angry stump and recommenced his ferocious micromanagement of the company's affairs in the Caribbean: monitoring the salt pans that were the reason for being in this palm-scaped wilderness, strategizing to keep the Dutch possessions from the lurking English, French, and Spanish vessels and from pirates, even fussing about how to get freshly baked bread out to ships that were on maneuvers. The pain level rose, the wound festered in the heavy air, but the sheafs of instructions and resolutions kept coming. Even in a century and an arena in which guts were a necessary part of everyday life, he must have stood out.

He came from plain country. The village of Scherpenzeel in the region of Westsellingwerf in the province of Friesland in the far northern reaches of the Netherlands was known for nothing because no one knew of it at all. It was flat farmland, incised by hedges, the horizon unencumbered by castles, fortresses, cathedrals, or other sizable manifestations of civilization. It was sparsely populated. The villagers were grim, pious, stalwart, self-reliant, and he was one of them. Frisians believed in a natural, unchanging order to things. A peasant gave birth to little peasants. If you were a minister's son, your career path was preordained. Strangely, however—and this is perhaps a key to understanding his personality, the place at which it twisted away from conformity—Peter Stuyvesant did not follow his father Balthasar, the minister of the Frisian Reformed Church of Scherpenzeel. One possible explanation: in 1627, shortly after his mother's death, his pious father remarried, and immediately and zestfully set to work siring a new family with his bride. Teenaged sons tend to react strongly to such things; one of a proud and stubborn disposition especially so, perhaps. At about the time of the remarriage, Peter seems to have left home. He studied at the Latin school in the larger town of Dokkum, whose harbor also happened to be a way station for West India Company ships bound for the New World. Growing up, his literal horizon had been as low as they come; to a youth shaped by God and flat land, these vessels, jutting a hundred feet into the air, taller than anything he had seen, natural or man-made, great cathedrals of wood with spires promising real-world deliverance, must have made an impression.

He went on to attend his father's alma mater, but he enrolled as a student of philosophy rather than theology—a signal he intended to veer from expectations. Whatever career notions Stuyvesant may have had on entering university changed when he left abruptly after two years. According to a story later told by his enemies, he was kicked out after abusing his landlord's hospitality by having sex with his daughter. Whether there was any truth to that, he was proud of his university association: ever after, he signed himself Petrus, the latinized (and thus scholarly) form of Pieter.

And so the college dropout found a position with one of the going concerns of the day, signing on at the lowest administrative level. Company officers were soon impressed with his devotion to work, and gave him a rather dubious reward: a posting to the remote island of Fernando de Noronha, two hundred miles off the Brazilian coast, renowned in company ranks for its vigorous rat population. From there he was promoted swiftly to a position in the coastal colony of Pernambuco, and then to Curaçao. Like natural leaders before and since, he gathered lieutenants as he went, men attracted to his energy who saw opportunity for themselves in serving alongside him. Unlikely as it may seem given how his career would end, he had a certain fondness for the English, which would carry through his life. There were at least two Englishmen in this posse of his. The man who appears in the Dutch records as Carel Van Brugge was born Charles Bridges in Canterbury; Brian Newton had been in the company's service for twenty years. These men would ride his coattails all the way to Manhattan, and play roles in its struggle to survive.

But the most revealing of these friendships was with a young man who did not accompany Stuyvesant to Manhattan. John Farret had been born in Amsterdam to English parents. Like Stuyvesant, he won a position with the West India Company on Curaçao; the two may have met there, or perhaps earlier in Amsterdam. They formed a fast friendship that mirrored others Stuyvesant would have—with Stuyvesant in the more powerful role, and Farret almost fawning before him. But Farret had something over Stuyvesant; he had completed university, received a degree in law, and was a poet and painter. Stuyvesant envied all of these indications of culture, and their relationship built itself around his envy and Farret's ingratiating efforts to please. In a development that suggests depths of personality beneath the wooden image of Stuyvesant that history has fashioned, he and Farret kept up a long-distance correspondence . . . in verse. A lengthy catalogue of poems detailing their changing fortunes exists in the Netherlands Maritime Museum in Amsterdam, which, as far as I have been able to determine, has never been translated or published, except for a few snippets.

The existence of this cache of poetry—which was discovered in a Dutch archive in the 1920s—in itself sheds light on their relationship. It was Farret who preserved the poems and bound them in vellum together with his own illustrations, apparently proud of his association with the man who had by then become renowned for his leadership of the Manhattan-based colony. Throughout, Farret addresses Stuyvesant as “Excellency” and “My Stuyvesant.” “Never a greater honor would befall me or greater reward / than that you should order me around as a servant,” he asserts, and declares that “My will is tied to your will, my heart to your heart.” At times the correspondence cries out for a latent-homosexuality reading (i.e., when the men write of “such pleasure” each receives from the “skilled hand” of the other); it's probably more profitable, though, to see the poems as little portals onto the relationships between seventeenth-century Dutch merchant-soldiers, in which there was a frank deference to the one's greater power and in which friendship was expressed in language as baroque as the pink-cheeked detailing in a Frans Hals portrait. Throughout the collection, Farret's verse is sprightly; Stuyvesant's ungainly. Stuyvesant admits to an inability to express himself in “rich Latin or fancy French,” but Farret, in his response, insists that Stuyvesant could write poetry in those languages if he wanted to, and shamelessly refers to Stuyvesant's verse as
goddlijck—
“divine.”

Stuyvesant served three years as supplies officer on Curaçao, working hard at his job and at positioning himself for advancement, and in the process making enemies, among them the commander of Dutch political and military operations in the Caribbean, Jan Claeszoon van Campen. Things could have become difficult for Stuyvesant, but he caught a major break when Van Campen died in 1642, and Stuyvesant won the position. His friends toasted him; Farret wrote a poem for the occasion, praising “Brave Stuyvesant” who was now poised for greatness, and filled with vitriol for Stuyvesant's detractors—which suggests that Stuyvesant never had qualms about making enemies.

Stuyvesant, too, had to be pleased with his success. A proud, stiff Frisian, raised on a diet of gloomy skies and thick soup, he now ruled a tropical-paradise-cum-malarial-swamp that lay in the no-man's-land of the Spanish war, from which he lorded over Dutch operations in the entire Caribbean arena. The region was the scene of vivid, hot, bloody warfare between the decaying Spanish empire and its breakaway rival. Sugar, salt, dyewood, tobacco, horses, copper—the ways to exploit the Caribbean and coastal South America were intoxicating in their variety, and while the Dutch were eager to capitalize on the weakness of Spain's grip on the region, the Spanish were unwilling to give up such a stream of wealth easily. Besides opening a new window onto the birth of Manhattan, the massive trove of Dutch documents being translated by Dr. Charles Gehring in the New York State Library contains hundreds of pages detailing Stuyvesant's time in the Caribbean and opens other windows onto the unrelentingly grim business of wringing profits out of slaves, Indians, and the land, while simultaneously battling other European colonizers. More than anything else, the documents tie together the pieces of the Dutch empire in the Americas, showing Stuyvesant overseeing with militaristic efficiency an army of suppliers, privateers, traders, and couriers passing between Manhattan and Curaçao as the Dutch sought to solidify their New World holdings. They make clear that Manhattan began its rise as an international port not in the eighteenth century, as the Port of New York, but in the 1630s, as a cog on the circle of trade moving from the Netherlands to western Africa to Brazil and the Caribbean, then to New Amsterdam, and so back to Europe.

In his Caribbean post Stuyvesant became one of the movers of that circle. He was plugged into the communication network that ran through all its nodes, and in this way began to involve himself in the affairs of the Manhattan-based colony. He got word of Kieft's troubles there, and tried to help, in what would become an extended comedy. While returning to Curaçao from the disaster at St. Martin, his ship apparently passed in the night another heading in the opposite direction. It contained four hundred and fifty Dutch soldiers who had fled from an outpost in Brazil that the Spanish had overrun. These soldiers had turned up on Curaçao, seeking food and orders. They were told there that they could assist in the action on St. Martin, but arrived late, only to receive a second wave of shelling from the Spanish guns. Eventually, they made it back to Curaçao, where the ailing Stuyvesant must have been fairly sickened by their presence: first, because had they shown up earlier they might have turned the tide on St. Martin; second, because food rations were desperately low on Curaçao, and he couldn't afford to feed them. He decided to solve two problems at one go by ordering them to New Amsterdam, where, he hoped, they could assist Kieft with his Indian troubles. He thought he had seen the last of them.

Despite the endless attempts by Adriaen van der Donck and others to advise the directors of the West India Company of Manhattan's strategic importance, it was always an afterthought for them. Brazil, with its more manageable and profitable sugar fields, was the jewel of the company's operations, and therefore the scene of the bloodiest conflicts with Spain. Complicating the situation was the fact that in coastal Brazil the Dutch were engaged in battle not directly with Spain but with the Portuguese, who were under the vassalage of Spain and who were themselves in the process of declaring independence. Like heavyweight boxers, the two empires took turns gathering momentum, unleashing a savage blow on the opponent, then bracing for the response. In one such effort, Portugal sent eighty-six ships and twelve thousand fighting men across the Atlantic from Lisbon to pummel the Dutch ships laying siege to the province of Bahia in eastern Brazil.