The Island at the Center of the World (21 page)

He was right about the end of the Indian war, but about nothing else. Everything was collapsing about him. The civil war in England had reached a climax on a June morning in the grassy Northamptonshire uplands, when a massive conflict between the pikestaffed forces of Parliament and the king's cavaliers ended with the Puritan cavalry wing under Oliver Cromwell—crying, “God is our strength!”—cracking the royalist army in half, resulting in the surrender of four thousand of its troops. The English turmoil had the effect of further emboldening the Puritan New Englanders. They had already carved two massive chunks out of the Dutch territory (Connecticut and New Haven), and were continuing to push, shiploads of them crossing the sound from the mainland to the easternmost tip of Long Island and setting up bivouac communities on Dutch soil. To the south, Kieft's failure to pursue the Swedish incursion that Peter Minuit had started on the South River was proving disastrous. The colony of New Sweden now had three forts and maybe three hundred settlers. Its capable military commander had outflanked the Dutch trading post on the river and convinced the Indians of the region to trade exclusively with Swedish agents. As for the gold substance, it was found to be pyrite—fool's gold.

Regarding the colonists and their grievances, Melyn and Kuyter had only begun to mount their opposition to the West India Company and its feudal treatment of them. They now had an ally, a man of property who had a vested interest in the community, who had precisely the skills they needed, who recognized that the colony's problems, external and internal, could only be solved by a dramatic change of status, and who had secretly committed to carry the fight as far as it would go—to the very inner court of the halls of government at The Hague. Van der Donck was poised. He had reached the moment in life when a man moves from student and observer to actor. By 1647 he had a wife and the estate he had longed for. Ironically, he would now have little time for either. The struggle was to be all-consuming, a cause, a chance to apply the principles of justice in an unprecedented way.

The day of Kieft's replacement came at last. In a way, Kieft must have been ready for it: it had happened once before, when he was run out of the French port of La Rochelle. He was a man burdened by the deaths and dismembering tortures he had ordered. As he stood on the waterfront on May 11, 1647, watching a skiff approach from four newly arrived ships at anchor, the strain and darkness had to show in his eyes and face; his breath must have fairly stunk with it. It was a cerulean spring day, and, like characters at the end of an act of a play, all the residents of the community were gathered alongside him, headliners and minor players alike: Joris Rapalje and Catalina Trico, along with their children and grandchildren; Anthony “The Turk” van Salee and his wife Griet Reyniers—both respectable now, but still cantankerous—and their four daughters; Anna van Angola, a widowed African woman who had just received a patent for a farm on Manhattan, as well as Antony Congo, Jan Negro, and other black residents, slaves and free; assorted Danes, Bavarians, and Italians, and a handful of area Indians; Cornelis Swits, son of the murdered Claes Swits; the English refugee leaders Lady Deborah Moody and the Rev. Francis Doughty; Everardus Bogardus, the beer-swilling minister who had assisted the colonists' effort against Kieft by excoriating him from the pulpit; the activists Kuyter and Melyn; the company henchman, Cornelis van Tienhoven, who had slaughtered and tortured Indians while in Kieft's service and was hoping to be kept on in the new administration. And there, too, on the cobbled quayside stood Adriaen van der Donck and his English wife Mary—it is from Van der Donck that we have one of the extant descriptions of this scene. The mood was festive. Shouts went up; celebratory cannon blasts were fired. The day of deliverance had come.

Then, slowly, like gray rain, the silence fell upon them. From a distance they would have seen first the hardness and smallness of the eyes, like sharp pebbles set in the broad plate of the face. Then the flash of the sun on his breastplate must have caught their attention, and the sword at his waist: the efficient, meticulous, militaristic parcel of him. Finally they would have watched him unpacking himself from the boat, and noted at once, as people do such irregularities, that curious movement of his, an unnatural stiffness, and no accompanying grimace or flinch, as if in defiance of pain itself. And all eyes then naturally moving down, and seeing it, the leg that wasn't there.

Chapter 9

THE GENERAL AND THE
PRINCESS

H
e came with a retinue: four ships of soldiers, his posse of “councilors,” and a wife. He impressed the colonists gathered on the quayside with his grim decorum, his soldier-statesman demeanor. “Peacock like, with great state and pomposity” was Van der Donck's summing-up of their new leader's arrival. The people had likewise turned out in their best: we can imagine, on this spring day in 1647, lots of floppy-brimmed hats, lace collars, tight trousers or hose ribboned at the knees, and wide-topped boots—a scene out of Rembrandt on lower Manhattan.

A formal ceremony took place—the passing of the torch of leadership—beneath the sails of the windmill and the dilapidated walls of the fort and against the stupendous backdrop of the harbor. In his remarks, Stuyvesant vowed to act “like a father over his children.” His signals of power were clear-cut: while the men of the community had removed their hats in his honor, he kept his on. While the colonists remained standing, he took a chair.

Kieft spoke, thanking the colonists for their loyalty and faithfulness to him. It was pure cant, the empty stuff employed by politicians everywhere, and in a normal Dutch outpost it would have been swallowed in silence. But he made the mistake of pausing to give the community the chance to thank him in return, as protocol suggested. Jochem Kuyter filled the pause, giving vent to a sailor's lungful of taunts, the effect of which was that what Kieft deserved was something other than thanks. Cornelis Melyn added a few loud comments of his own. Others began to chime in; the ceremony was about to devolve into a familiar chaos.

Then, somehow, everyone was looking at Stuyvesant. He had presence; people felt it, followed his cues. Now, they shut up. Stuyvesant, of course, had been apprised of the entire situation; in fact, thanks to having seen the file in Amsterdam, which contained the colonists' complaints, he knew more about it than Kieft. He must have had for Kieft the withering disdain that a military officer holds for another who has failed to earn the respect of his subordinates. On the other hand, it would have gone against his every instinct to side with the rabble against authority. He knew at least some of the leaders of the activist camp, knew the names Melyn and Kuyter. He assured the community that under his administration justice would be applied equally and swiftly. Then he brought things to a quick conclusion.

He must have been shocked by this indication of the level of chaos and insubordination in the colony. Curaçao he had run as a military dictatorship, which had worked out in everyone's best interest; he had witnessed the same in Brazil. These outposts were wild lands, in which people were bound to lose all sense of civilization, to devolve into syphilitic delirium and allow themselves to be picked off by savages, disease, and lurking European foes, unless strict order was maintained. Anyone who had come to live in such a place understood that it operated under martial law—they were in no position to demand a voice or express outrage at the management of affairs. It would be necessary for him to remind them of that. And once he did, and they saw the benefits of it, the harmonious society that was possible under a Calvinist corporation, they would quickly fall into line.

There would be no honeymoon with his subjects (for that was how he referred to them). From this, the moment of his arrival, he was immersed in the unique political currents at work in the colony. With the welcome ceremony unceremoniously ended, he and his wife turned and made hastily for their sanctum, their new home, which lay just behind them. Fort Amsterdam was a four-sided structure with bastioned guard towers at its corners. Passing through the front gate and by the secretary's office, the Stuyvesants would have entered the central courtyard. The place was like a refugee camp. All along the right side of the courtyard were the barracks of the company's soldiers, the backbone of the director-general's power in the colony. But soldiers spilled out of the barracks; they were bivouacked around the courtyard and elsewhere in the town. Stuyvesant would have recognized among them some familiar faces, for it was because of him that the town was overrun. The shipload of soldiers who had fled from Brazil to Curaçao, whom Stuyvesant had sent to aid Kieft in New Netherland, were still here. They had arrived at the end of the Indian war, and Kieft hadn't known what to do with them. They were languishing now, underfed, demanding back pay, roaming drunkenly through the streets, causing fights, and destroying property—another problem for Stuyvesant to deal with.

On the left side of the courtyard was the church and, beside it, the gabled brick house reserved for the director-general. Here the newly arrived couple took a few moments to settle in. Stuyvesant rested his aching stump. Judith began the process of recovering from the ordeal of the voyage. She had to have been her husband's equal in grit considering that she had arrived four months pregnant, meaning that she had spent most of the first trimester of her pregnancy being tossed by the Atlantic.

And then the regime began. The change from the old order was immediately apparent. Gone was the leisurely schedule of Thursday council sessions. The new director would be active on every front every day. Cornelis van Tienhoven got his wish—Stuyvesant kept him on as secretary—but he may have regretted it: the volume of paperwork in the secretary's hand—proclamations, propositions, resolutions, judgments, commissions, summonses—increased dramatically and at once.

Stuyvesant had known what the place needed even before coming; his few hours here only confirmed him in his conviction that order—the kind he could bring, a mix of military structure and corporate efficiency, all shot through with a heartfelt Calvinist focus on sinners groveling before a stern God—was the cure. A drunken knife fight broke out the Sunday afternoon after his arrival; on learning that such were regular occurrences, he issued a pair of commandments: the first forbidding tavernkeepers from selling liquor on Sunday (until two in the afternoon), the second decreeing that anyone who drew a knife “in passion or anger” could face six months' imprisonment on bread and water; if he wounded someone with the knife, the sentence jumped to eighteen months.

His justice was blind when it came to distinguishing between colonists and West India Company sailors and soldiers. No one could accuse him—as they had Kieft—of favoring company employees. When two of the sailors from his voyage here were caught in violation of the ordinance forbidding sailors to go ashore without permission, he sentenced them “to be chained for three consecutive months to a wheelbarrow or a handbarrow and put to the hardest labor, strictly on bread and water.”

But these were window dressing—straightforward “quality of life” directives that would play fairly well with the populace. The real issue to be dealt with was the semi-organized mutiny that was festering. As he marched around the little town those first few days, he had with him a piece of paper that fairly burned a hole in his pocket: a copy of the October 1644 letter sent by the colonists, in the names of Jochem Kuyter and Cornelis Melyn, demanding Kieft's recall. Ironically, the letter had achieved its purpose, but in so doing it had brought to the colony a man who looked on such acts as treason. The documents of the Manhattan-based colony give an idea of the complexity of Stuyvesant's mind: on the one hand, and in contrast to the standard view of him, he had a genuine appreciation of nuance, a politician's ability to play opponents off against one another, a capacity to weigh alternatives. For instance, historians have been mystified as to why Stuyvesant chose to retain Kieft's secretary; Cornelis van Tienhoven was greedy, dishonest, and famed for his lechery, all traits that the prim Stuyvesant—the man history remembers—would have abhorred. But Van Tienhoven was also one of the most intelligent men in the colony, a tenacious debater who was doggedly loyal to the West India Company, a man capable by turns of carrying out negotiations with area tribes in their own languages or leading pitiless military assaults on the very same villages. Clearly, Stuyvesant was able to weigh the man's various traits against one another and select according to his benefit. At other times, however, the more elemental Stuyvesant, who saw the world in the black and white of orthodox Calvinism, would predominate. This letter he had carried with him from Amsterdam struck him deeply. Its authors had violated the principles upon which the Dutch empire was founded, principles of order that had a theological underpinning and that had resulted in the creation of a successful and civilized society; the very clarity of the transgression in itself must have been satisfying. He would handle it with the decisiveness it deserved.

Meanwhile, a few steps away down the dusty riverfront streets of the town, clandestine meetings were taking place. The new director had promised a formal review of the case of Kieft versus the citizens of New Netherland, and Kuyter, Melyn, the jurist Adriaen van der Donck, trader Govert Loockermans, Englishman Thomas Hall, a brilliant and multitalented Bohemian from Prague named Augustin Herman, and several other residents of New Amsterdam had taken Stuyvesant at his word and were preparing their case. Stuyvesant had no idea of their intentions, the depth of their commitment. Someone making a casual study of this portion of the records would be confused by the masses of pages, filled with impassioned invective and arguments, devoted to what ought to have been by this date—1647—a stale issue. They had complained about the director and had succeeded in getting him ousted; the war was over. Couldn't they all get on with their lives?

They were getting on with their lives. With the threat of Indian attacks removed, prosperity was returning. The ring of hammers on nailheads was constantly in the air; housing starts were up; fields were being cleared and plowed for planting; the harbor's shipping lanes were busier than they had ever been. And these men didn't want it to happen again—the sudden immersion in chaos. Once again they were building something; now they wanted a voice in the decision making. It hasn't been given much attention in the history books, but the little community on Manhattan represented one of the earliest expressions of modern political impulses: an insistence by the members of the community that they play a role in their own government. There were two major forces at work in the Dutch Republic, and this face-off pitted them squarely against one another. First was that of the empire builders, the merchant-princes and their military-trading captains, the slavers and slaughterers, the builders of outposts whose stone skeletons today form curious weed-strewn tourist attractions in places as far-flung as Ghana, Brazil, and Sri Lanka. The other force was intellectual and political; its roots lay in the Renaissance; it expressed itself in the philosophy of Erasmus, Spinoza, Grotius, and the adopted son Descartes. It had taken root in the trade-oriented, outward-looking cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, and Leiden; and through Kuyter, Melyn, and especially Van der Donck, it had exported itself to American soil. These men examined their situation from two perspectives. First, they had families to think of. But beyond the simple human impulse to protect, they had these ideas in their heads, having to do with being in charge of their own destiny—ideas still fuzzy and immature in relation to how they would develop in the next century, but also fresh and vital. They had passion.

Stuyvesant meanwhile had spent most of his years in an isolated farming province or in military outposts where life was a series of orders given and orders obeyed. He was smart, deep, honest, and narrow. He had little knowledge of intellectual currents in the wider Dutch world, let alone the wider European world. The situation had the makings of a showdown.

Through the days of early June, then, in private homes or the “clandestine groggeries” that Stuyvesant would later complain of, drinking ale from green stubbled-glass goblets, while those around them held to more innocuous games like backgammon and cribbage, the activists laid out a legal case against their former leader, which they believed would become a vehicle for winning a form of representative government for the colony. It's clear that Van der Donck held the pen, and shaped their anger into argument. He laid out, first of all, a long and highly legalistic series of “interrogatories” to be proposed to various men who had played parts in the crisis surrounding the Indian war. The slate of questions to be posted under oath to Hendrick van Dyck, a West India Company soldier who had led attacks on the Indians, cut directly to the core of the conflict and Kieft's responsibility for it:

1. Is he not well aware that the late Director General Kieft, did, on the night between the 24
^th
and 25
^th
February, in the year 1643, send a party of Soldiers over to Pavonia by the bouwery of Jan Evertzoon, and behind Curler's plantation on the Island of Manhatans and cause them to kill a party of Indians, with women and children, who lay there?

2. Did Mr. Kieft previously propose this expedition to the Council, and subsequently communicate it to him as Officer of the Soldiers, which he then was; and did he vote for it?

3. Were not the Indians much embittered by this act; and did not the general war between our Christians and these Americans
*11
follow the next day, and date its commencement from that time?

4. Is it not also true, that all those Indians had fled to the above described place some days before, through dread of the Maicanders;
†12
in the hope of being protected by our people from their enemies?

5. Did not we, the Dutch, in this country, live in peace with these Indians before and until this cruel deed had been wrought on them over at Pavonia and on the Island Manhatans?

The questions for Van Tienhoven, Kieft's secretary and enforcer, began with the disastrous effort to force local tribes to pay a tax to the company for their protection, and grew, in perfect trial lawyer fashion, into a web of damning accusation:

 1. Can he, the Secretary, not fluently speak the Manhatans language, which was used by the Indians hereabout?