The Island at the Center of the World (20 page)

Strangely, however, even as it was feeling the weight of the growing population to its north, the Manhattan-based colony also benefited significantly from the stream of refugees moving from England to New England. The Puritan revolt in England was, for all its breadth among the populace, wondrously narrow in ideology. It wasn't enough that you were a fire-breathing Protestant—you had to be the right kind of fire-breathing Protestant, otherwise the very brightness of your flame marked you as in need of theological cleansing. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” declared Exodus as translated under the direction of Charles's father, and Baptists, Anabaptists, Familists, and Mennonites were all marked thereby. It is easy enough to shake one's head at the folly, but in an age awash in incantations and potions, deciding who to make fuel for the pyre was a serious matter.

So people left England in waves. But members of despised sects who chose to follow the Pilgrims' lead and emigrate to America found, to their annoyance after enduring the horrors of the open ocean, that the Puritan majority in New England had followed the same hard-line trajectory as in the old country. In fact, there was even less theological wiggle room in the open spaces of New England. Witchcraft hysteria wouldn't reach its height for some time, but communities moved swiftly to excommunicate alternative religionists and run them out. So there was a double-rebound effect during the early 1640s, with a stream of English sectarians fleeing from Old England to New, then, recalling in their desperation the vaunted tolerance of the Dutch, moving south to seek sanctuary in the Manhattan-based colony. They came straggling through the latticeworked gatehouse of Fort Amsterdam, and Willem Kieft was pleased to have them. He was seriously embattled by this point and recognized that he had to grow his population in order to survive. And—here is the inscrutability of seventeenth-century Dutchness—in addition to giving them land to settle, he also granted them liberty to practice their religion as they saw fit, a genuine rarity in the era. Forbidding his own countrymen even marginal representation while at the same time practically insisting on covering newcomers with the blanket of religious liberty that was part of his proud cultural inheritance—this was apparently not a difficult calculation. It's worth noting, too, that the colonists themselves were fully aware of their status as a haven, and proud of it. Van der Donck, writing of one of these English refugees, summed up the situation with as much of a sense of perspective as a historian from the far future might: “[He] came to New England at the commencement of the troubles in England, in order to escape them, and found that he had got out of the frying pan into the fire. He betook himself, in consequence, under the protection of the Netherlanders, in order that he may, according to the Dutch reformation, enjoy freedom of conscience, which he unexpectedly missed in New England.”

Kieft made the English arrivals swear an oath to the States General and gave them land to settle, and they went about helping to build the foundation of what would become New York City. Several of these were remarkable individuals. Lady Deborah Moody, a self-possessed London aristocrat, had converted to Anabaptism and declared herself ready to die for the outré notion that baptism must be withheld until the recipient was old enough to understand its meaning. Londoners were shocked; she was in her dignified fifties when she crammed into a stench-ridden wooden ship cheek by jowl with peasants and worse, and fled to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There, the court of Salem threatened to banish her unless she renounced her mad ways, Puritan chieftain John Endecott famously declaring “Shee is a dangerous woeman.” Kieft gave her and her followers title to the southwestern tip of Long Island. The take-charge woman herself sketched the plan of her community, to be called Gravesend (the skeleton of her original plan can still be seen in the intersection of McDonald Avenue and Gravesend Neck Road). She then set about tending to her flock of baptism-conscious followers, and thus established, in the corner of Brooklyn that now includes Bensonhurst, Coney Island, Brighton Beach, and Sheepshead Bay, the first New World settlement founded by a woman.

Anne Hutchinson also traveled from England to Massachusetts to Manhattan, in search of freedom to follow her belief that individuals could commune with the divine without any help from organized religion. New England's leaders looked on her as the seventeenth-century equivalent of an anarchist—Hutchinson wanted to do away with original sin, a moral cudgel that Puritan politicians believed indispensable to maintaining law and order. Particularly alarming was the fact that she had rapidly developed a following in Boston. Kieft didn't mind—or maybe he sensed she wouldn't be around long enough to cause trouble: when she showed up in his domain, he placed her in a no-man's-land at the height of the Indian troubles. Less than a year after she and her small band of followers had settled on the land he offered (on Pelham Bay in the Bronx, on the shore of the river that now bears her name), Hutchinson, six of her children, and nine others were massacred in an Indian attack.

The Reverend Francis Doughty, the third of the three semilegendary leaders of English refugees to the Dutch colony, had been forced from his vicarage in Gloucestershire for “nonconformity,” shocked the crowd in Massachusetts for preaching “that Abraham's children should have been baptized,” then headed for Manhattan. He, too, received a generous grant of land from Kieft and had begun to plant what would be the first European settlement in the future borough of Queens when a vicious Indian attack changed things. Doughty survived, gave up on the wilds of Long Island, and, seeing another opportunity, ensconced himself as minister to the growing English-speaking population of Manhattan. Kieft didn't approve; he envisioned a buffer zone of communities surrounding New Amsterdam, and he insisted that Doughty take the remains of his English flock back to his Long Island tract. Doughty turns out to have been yet another strong-willed creature, and he rebuffed the director, more or less arguing that if Kieft thought these were safe times to camp out in the wilds he could try it himself. Kieft rescinded the land grant and, for good measure, threw Doughty in the fort's jail cell for twenty-four hours.

Doughty was thus a natural addition to the colony's burgeoning anti-Kieft movement. He was also naturally litigious, and found himself in court in June of 1645, accusing another Englishman, William Gerritson, of singing a slanderous song about him and his daughter Mary. It may have been here that he caught the eye of a certain young lawyer—or, more to the point, that his eighteen-year-old daughter did. We don't know where Adriaen van der Donck and Mary Doughty first met, but it appears Van der Donck was in court at this time. If there was an initial language difficulty between the patrician Dutchman and the young Englishwoman, daughter of a strident and independent-minded father, who would herself prove to be a resourceful pioneer woman, it was soon gotten over. They were married before the year was out.

The romance was put on hold for the time being, however. Shortly before the couple met, the nineteen directors of the West India Company had gathered in Amsterdam to review their affairs in various outposts. They pronounced themselves pleased with the synergy between Angola and Brazil: what had been at first a tentative notion of moving slaves from West Africa across the ocean to do work in the company's fields in South America was now a going concern. “Every thing is, by God's blessing, in a good condition,” they reported to the government ministers in The Hague, sounding freakishly cheerful about their part in what would become one of humanity's saddest and ugliest endeavors, “and in consequence of the employment of the negroes, which were from time to time introduced from Angola into Brazil, in planting grain, flour is produced in such quantity that what used to always cost 8 to 10 guilders, still continues to be sold at the low rate of six stivers . . .”

Regarding Manhattan, while they were quietly arranging for Kieft's successor, the directors decided to order him to work out a peace treaty that would end the disastrous Indian war. Kieft received these instructions in mid-summer and, perhaps sensing that his term might be coming to an end, took vigorous steps to carry them out. He knew the center of power among the tribes was to the north. The Mohawks and Mahicans kept the Munsee-speaking tribes of the lower river valley within their thrall, regularly sending representatives among them demanding tribute payments. So even though the hostilities were with the more southerly Indians, Kieft determined that the wisest course would be to secure a formal peace treaty with the stronger tribes first, to ensure that the Raritans, Tappans, and other groups closer to Manhattan would follow. This, however, meant penetrating the heart of darkness to the north, exposing himself to the savages. Kieft still had rarely stepped foot outside the radius of New Amsterdam. He needed someone who knew the Indians of the north, who spoke their languages, someone whom they knew and trusted. He turned to Adriaen van der Donck.

Kieft as yet had no knowledge of the letter written the previous autumn demanding his ouster. He certainly didn't know that Van der Donck had been meeting with the disgruntled colonists. Van der Donck seems to have been playing the role of model son again, keeping himself in the director's good graces, just as he had done with Kiliaen van Rensselaer before he began defying the old man. He agreed to help.

Kieft also brought with him on the one-hundred-and-fifty-mile journey upriver Johannes La Montagne, the second member of his two-man council, and, no doubt, a contingent of soldiers. The Indians agreed to meet within the confines of Fort Orange; the officials of Rensselaerswyck also took part. One man with an official role was a Mohawk named Agheroense, who knew all the languages of the Iroquois confederation as well as Mahican and would assist Van der Donck as interpreter. Agheroense—and, presumably, Van der Donck and Director Kieft—had spent the night at the “patroon's house,” where the director of Rensselaerswyck lived. He came downstairs that morning, greeted Van der Donck, who introduced him to Kieft, and the three men sat and chatted at the breakfast table while Agheroense applied his ceremonial face paint. Kieft became visibly excited as he sat watching, for the man was painting his face with a glittering gold substance. He asked Van der Donck to inquire about it; in his mind the dormant hope—first lit in all Europeans by the Spanish discoveries of gold in South America—had reawakened. Could it be that here was the answer to the colony's financial problems? If so, wouldn't it also save his own career? Agheroense handed the pot to Van der Donck, who handed it to Kieft, who asked if he could buy it to study more closely.

There had to have been a note of irony playing in Van der Donck's mind during the peace talks. The student of law and intergovernmental relations had a unique opportunity to observe. On one side of him were Indians with whom he had lived, whose society he had studied, and whom in many ways he admired, while the representative of his own people was a man he despised for his lack of integrity. In the course of the treaty discussions, it became clear to Van der Donck that Kieft had not come prepared. In his later writings about the Indians of the region, where Van der Donck described treaty rituals, he noted that the protocol was to state one's proposition orally and at the same time offer a suitable gift. The gift was to be hung up as deliberations commenced; the other side had three days to accept the offering and thus signal that an agreement had been reached. Kieft had brought no offering to be hung up. A treaty of this magnitude, with both the Mohawks and the Mahicans, would require something significant, or the chiefs would be insulted. Kieft asked Van der Donck for a loan, and promised to repay him handsomely for his service to the colony.

Van der Donck supplied what was necessary—apparently, a large cache of sewant—and, back in New Amsterdam in late July of 1645, Kieft fulfilled his promise. He gave Van der Donck what he most wanted: his own domain, the patent to a vast tract of land. It was ideally situated, too: not in the far hinterlands to the north but adjacent to Manhattan. Van der Donck's grant began on the mainland directly to the north of the island, continued along the river for twelve miles, and carried eastward as far as the Bronx River—a total of twenty-four thousand acres. For his services, then, and for keeping his feelings about Kieft in check, he became lord of much of what is today the Bronx and southern Westchester County. He moved at once to purchase the land from the Indians, and over the next year he and Mary got to work, hiring tenant farmers to clear land and carpenters to build a house and a saw mill. (The saw mill became so vital to the community that later grew up in the area that the river on which it stood—and, later, a parkway that ran along it—would be named for it.) With such a vast tract came a kind of unofficial title. In the Netherlands, a
Jonker
(or
Yonkheer
) was a young squire or gentleman of property. From this time on, the Dutch records refer to Van der Donck as “the Jonker.” Long after his death the title would remain informally associated with the property—“the Jonker's land,” people would say. In the English period, this was shortened to “Yonkers,” and so it is that a city in lower Westchester County has embedded in its name the only wan tribute American history has ever paid to Adriaen van der Donck.

On his return to Manhattan, Kieft immediately plunged into arrangements for a peace treaty with the Indians of the region. On August 30, 1645, under “the blue canopy of heaven,” the whole town assembled in front of the fort. A stately array of chiefs had assembled—Oratany of the Hackinsack, Sesekemu of the Tappan, Willem of the Rechgawawanck, Mayauwetinnemin for the Nyack, and Aepjen of the Wickquasgeck—either on behalf of their own tribes or in some cases “in the capacity of attorneys of the neighboring chiefs.” Both sides agreed to “a firm and inviolable peace,” and agreed that future disputes would not be settled by violence but discussions. Twenty men on both sides made their marks or signatures at the bottom of the treaty. Adriaen van der Donck was not present, but his soon-to-be father-in-law, the Reverend Doughty, was among the signatories. The next day Kieft issued two proclamations: one ordering a day of general thanksgiving, the second ordering an investigation of the mine from which the Mohawk's intriguing gold material had come. He believed he had pulled off a triple coup: saved his job, stopped the war, and—if preliminary tests on the gold substance were correct—found something that would bring prosperity to the colony and, maybe, an end to the residents' grievances.