The Island at the Center of the World (19 page)

As grim as Kieft's war against the Indians surrounding Manhattan was, it barely registered compared with the scope of battle in the Caribbean, and especially along the Brazilian coast, where hundreds of engagements took place over three decades, great ugly mix-ups of European tactics involving musket battalions and infantry pike charges thrown in with Indian bow-and-arrow warfare, the terrain scarred by siege cannon fire, the European soldiers on both sides stifling in their laughably heavy clothing and often fighting while riddled with yaws, dysentery, and intestinal parasites. Each encounter was punctuated by the ritual of old soldiers on both sides streaming silently out from the ranks to seek out their half-dead comrades amid the corpses and help them along with a swift slit of the throat. The savagery of the battles and grimness of the besieged settlements—“leather, dogs, cats, and rats” was the diet in one town withering under a Dutch siege—speaks to the stakes involved, and also to the pitiless environment that helped shape the man whom Manhattanites would come to call “the General.”

Shortly after leaving the Brazilian sphere to take charge of Curaçao, and no doubt in part to test his own mettle, Stuyvesant had led a successful attack on a Spanish outpost on the Venezuelan coast. Then he settled into the role of administrator, determined to bring Dutch order to a world of tropical chaos and laxity. He had relished the opportunity to retake St. Martin, and his fury at the failure helped feed his commitment to his administrative duties. In the midst of his work and while struggling with the pain of his wound, he took time to pen a letter to Farret, who was now back in the Netherlands, giving him the news of his misfortune. Farret responded with a poem entitled “On the Off-Shot Leg of the Noble, Brave Heer Stuyvesant, Before the Island of St. Martin”:

What mad thunder ball comes roaring towards your leg

My dear Stuyvesant, and causes your collapse?

The right pillar that used to support your body

Is that crushed and stricken off this way in one blow . . .

You presented too fair a mark—O! much too cruel chance!

My Stuyvesant, who falls and tumbles on his bulwark,

Where, like a dutiful soldier, he taunted the enemy,

To lure him into the field, on the Island of St. Marten.

The bullet hits his leg; the rebound touches my heart . . .

But ignoring the pain wouldn't do—doctors told Stuyvesant the stump where his leg had been amputated wouldn't heal in the climate; if he remained, it would fester. He resisted—he had only served eighteen months as head of Dutch operations in the Caribbean—then finally gave in to the idea of recuperating at home.

A sea crossing with such an affliction would have been a brutal affair in the best of circumstances. As it happened, the voyage was horrific.
The Milkmaid
left Curaçao in August of 1644, and didn't put into Dutch port until December. By ship, canal barge, and horse-drawn cart, then, past gabled facades and through a pleasant wintry swirl of peat smoke and stewed vegetables, he was hauled to the home of his sister Anna, who lived near Leiden. Life instantly transformed; the pestilential tropical endurance test of the past nine years vanished. He was in the civilized Dutch countryside, plied with boiled meat and smoked fish, his stump salved and ministered. It was a classic scenario: the wounded soldier returning home to be cared for. And, completing it, he fell in love with his nurse. Judith Bayard was the sister of Anna Stuyvesant's husband and was living with the couple when the invalid arrived. She was no gay young thing but a decided spinster—at thirty-seven, three years older than Stuyvesant—who had previously been living with her father (a minister, which no doubt gave the two something to talk about). When her father died she had joined the household; it was natural enough that she take charge of the patient. Judith came from Breda in the south, the same town from which Adriaen van der Donck hailed. She was a Huguenot, a Calvinist whose family had fled Catholic persecution in France.

During the long weeks of his voyage home, Stuyvesant might have spent some time mulling on a side benefit of his enforced trip: that at least he would have an opportunity to get himself a Dutch bride. It must have seemed a stroke of providence that one would all but fall into his lap, or what remained of it. But courtship didn't come easily to him. His brother-in-law, the brother of the woman in question, actually seems to have bet him a quantity of French wine that Stuyvesant wouldn't have the nerve to propose marriage, and even his staunch friend John Farret was dubious, writing in yet another poem that Stuyvesant would never consummate the relationship because “Priapus has died in him.” That got Stuyvesant's dander up. He tore off a response, in verse more purple and heated than usual, accusing his friend of trying to “make sure I will lose the bet of the wine” and declaring that—manly creature that he was—he fully desired the lady to “occupy this bed.” Less than a year later, they were married.
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The wound healed at last, and Stuyvesant declared himself fit for duty. And so one day he came wobbling into the courtyard of the company headquarters in Amsterdam (the building still exists and is occupied by a catering company, whose waiters flit across the same courtyard giving no notice to the bronze statue of Stuyvesant in the center), sporting a new wooden leg and a reputation for grit and efficiency. At nearly the same time, a certain letter arrived in these offices. It came from Manhattan. It presented, in unusually strident and lawyerly terms, the ruined state of affairs in the North American colony. It demanded the removal of Kieft and the installation of a new governor, one who would usher in a representative government, “so that the entire country may not be hereafter, at the whim of one man, again reduced to similar danger.” The directors' heads must have swiveled back and forth from the letter to the hardened young man recently arrived from the New World and eager to get back to his Caribbean post. The directors didn't like this talk of representative government coming from Manhattan any more than they did Kieft's blundering management style. Clearly the tough young Frisian before them could give a damn for Grotius or Descartes; for him the company's law was the only “natural law.” He wasn't a newfangled thinker, but a stout minister's son who understood duty and station. Altogether, an excellent young man. And soon, no doubt, he would learn to manage the peg leg.

M
EANWHILE, IN
S
COTLAND,
on a summer day in 1637 a woman named Jenny Geddes set in motion another chain of events. According to the story that has ossified into myth in Scotland, she was an Edinburgh “kail wife,” or cabbage monger. If you subscribe to the application of chaos theory to history, then her act that day—hurling a stool—was the flapping of the butterfly's wings that led to the hurricane.

Her target on the Sunday in question was the head of one of the most learned and respected men in Scotland, Dr. Hanna, dean of St. Giles Cathedral. The dean stood in his pulpit, stately and berobed, in his hand a slender volume, fresh off the press, the title page of which, in red and black ink and with a sober but elegant border, laid out its purpose: “The Book of Common Prayer, And Administration Of The Sacraments, And other parts of divine service for the use of the Church of Scotland, Printed by Robert Young, Printer to the Kings most Excellent Majestie, M.D.C.XXXVII.” The cathedral was packed with lairds and peasants alike. Everyone, apparently, knew trouble was in the air—they had come spoiling for a fight. Obliging them, the dean opened the book and began reading from it. Whereupon a piercing voice interrupted him—Jenny Geddes, crying out lustily, “Dost thou say mass at my lug [ear]?” She then picked up the stool she had brought (pews were for men—women were required to bring their own stools if they wanted to sit), took aim, and flung it at the dean's head. The place erupted.

The thrown stool was the equivalent of the Shot Heard Round the World, the event that would trip the English Civil War. From now on, King Charles would be forced to give up the role of stately monarch and take on that of a general, commanding armies loyal to him against those marshaled by Parliament. Events surrounding the war would have a multilayered impact on American beginnings, on Manhattan as well as in the English colonies.

Perhaps more than anything else, the English Civil War was a religious war. If the seventeenth century was outlined by the struggle for global empire, the outlines were filled in by warfare brought on by the clash of religious worldviews as societies endured the aftershocks of the Reformation. From the time it had broken from the Catholic Church under Henry VIII, the Church of England had adopted a moderate form of Protestantism, maintaining a hierarchy of church officials and a Rome-influenced taste for fancy vestments and fancy liturgy. Most English people were content with this, but others chafed. Puritanism was not originally an English movement but an ideological implant from the Continent, a kind of Reformation II, a call to keep the revolution going. The English Puritans looked at events in the wider world through a theological lens. They saw the religious strife sweeping the Continent—the Thirty Years' War was essentially a series of attempts by Catholic powers to reverse the breakaway momentum in Protestant countries—and developed, along with their minimalist fashion statement, a belief that England was the New Israel, the place God had anointed as the great bulwark against the Pope and his swaggering red-robed henchmen. Puritanism rolled through English society during the years of Charles's reign, winning over peasants and aristocrats alike. It provided a how-to manual for improving your personal life and a focal point for national pride. And of course there were the fine hats you got to wear.

Puritanism also had a democratic element to it. Following first Martin Luther then John Calvin, the Puritans aimed their wrath at the Catholic idea of a man-made hierarchy that thrust itself between ordinary Christians and their God. By extension, Catholic paraphernalia—the frilly priests' garb, the gaudy paintings, the candles and incense—interfered with the profound central activity of Christian life—studying and following the Bible—and were thus to be banned. Eventually, suspicion of churchly power translated into politics—the Puritans came to oppose any authority that might interfere with what they saw as their divine mission, even if that authority was their own king. Those who crossed the ocean to settle in North America may have given up on England as the New Israel, but they brought their sense of chosenness along with them. The New World would be the “New Jerusalem.” The democratic seed that planted itself in the revolt against Charles would come to flower in the colonies thirteen decades later with the American Revolution. It was this combination of plain-spoken religious zeal tied to political reform that would be the Puritans' great contribution to shaping American destiny; this is why American historians and leaders, down to Ronald Reagan and his “shining city on a hill,” have sung the country's Puritan beginnings. The argument in this book doesn't deny that influence, but adds to it another that played a genuine role in shaping the American personality.

What made a civil war inevitable in England was Charles, who was willfully out of touch with his subjects. With his country houses, his lacey accessories, his Catholic wife, and his great halls draped with Van Dycks and Rubenses, he existed in his own universe, and his distance from the society he governed grew with every year. At his encouragement, the clergy introduced finery into their dress and adornments to their churches—edging closer to Roman ways. (A Puritan leader characterized Charles's project to fancify St. Paul's as “making a seat for a Priest's arse to sit in.”) Charles considered the Puritans just as superstitious in their way as the relic-doting Catholics they despised. He was happy to enforce a ban on the printing of their religious tracts—which sent them to the printers of Leiden and Amsterdam.

The Puritan reform movement was strongest in Scotland, and so Charles decided, with an impressive lack of political horse sense, to bring the Scots into line by introducing in their churches a new prayer book and liturgy, one that was decisively more Catholic in ritual and language. The result was Jenny Geddes lobbing her stool and, eventually, the Scots breaking out in open rebellion. Raising money to put down the Scottish uprising required Charles to call Parliament into session for the first time in eleven years. Once it had assembled, Puritan leaders had a power base from which to carry out their campaign against the king.

Dutch authorities followed every wrinkle in the growing crisis. Beginning in July 1642, Albert Joachimi, the Dutch ambassador in London—who a decade before had pleaded with Charles to release the
Unity,
which had been carrying Peter Minuit back from Manhattan when the English impounded it—wrote a series of vivid and increasingly strident dispatches to his superiors at The Hague, which read like what they were, news reports from the front lines: “Some more cavalry have made their appearance here; and infantry are continued to be enlisted by beat of drum.” “News is received here of the siege of Sherborne Castle . . . those besieged have slain between two and three hundred of the Parliamentarians . . . The French Ambassador hath taken his leave of the King, and calculates to depart this week . . . A Parliamentman of quality told me, on Saturday last, that the Earl of Essex was with the army within twelve miles of Shrewsbury; that place has been fortified by the King, who keeps his main force there.” The old diplomat had a sense of what was coming, and he advised his government to take advantage of Charles's embattled state and bring to an end the growing friction between the English and Dutch colonies in North America. The States General, he wrote, “should write to the King and request his Majesty to be pleased to order the English in New England to leave the Dutch undisturbed in New Netherland.”

Joachimi felt the need to act because in the Dutch colony the pressure from the north was growing. Thanks to the turmoil in England, the population of New England had swelled to ten times that of New Netherland. What had been in Minuit's time a pair of low settlements (Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay), struggling against imminent death and thankful for the odd care package the Dutch representatives on Manhattan might send their way, was now four fully functioning colonies. Connecticut and New Haven had been carved out of territory the Dutch considered their own. Each of these colonies had its own administration, and all, thanks to the fact that king and parliament were busy facing one another down, acted more or less without interference from the home country. In 1643, in order to strengthen themselves, principally against the Dutch province, they formed a league, the United Colonies of New England.