The Island at the Center of the World (22 page)

 2. Did he not, therefore, act as interpreter to the late Director General Kieft, with those Indians?

 3. In what year was he sent to those Natives to collect the contribution of maize from them; if he was not employed, who then was?

 4. To how many tribes was this done; and how are they named?

 5. Did those Indians willingly consent to this contribution; or did they then protest against it; and what were their debates about it?

 6. Can he report in writing—if not, verbally—the result of this mission, which Mr. Kieft entrusted to him?

 7. In what terms did he endeavor to persuade the Indians to consent to the contribution?

 8. In what year was he, deponent, sent by Mr. Kieft to the Raritanus; and did he not go there with a party of armed soldiers and sailors under the command of Heindrich, captain of the
Neptunus
?

 9. What order did the Director give him, the Secretary, particularly in this case; and how did he execute it?

10. Did Mr. Kieft give any different orders to the soldiers generally, when they stood in front of the director's house, previous to setting out?

11. Were not similar expeditions sent out in the same year against the Raritans; and does he know what was the reason and object of them; and what was then accomplished?

12. Did not the Raritans revenge themselves the next year; killing four Christians, on Staten Island; and did they not afterwards destroy the houses of David Pietersen?
*13

In mid-June 1647, Stuyvesant gathered the parties—Kieft on one side, Melyn and Kuyter on the other—for a meeting he intended to be swift and decisive, at which the adversaries would sit quietly and listen to him lay out the situation and render his judgment. He was stunned to receive these long lists of questions, together with demands that they be posed to the parties indicated and a call for the reorganization of the colony. He was known for his temper, and—his soldier's training winning out over his Calvinist upbringing—salty language, and this was a perfect time to unleash some of it. He ordered a hasty end to the session, read through the documents that evening, and, the next day, reconvened his council—which consisted of supporters of Kieft's former government and men he had brought with him from Curaçao—to help him judge the matter. He had, however, already made up his mind—the pages of interrogatories only sharpened his conviction—and he gave his councilors a list of helpful questions to consider as they read over the material. These questions offer an exquisite window into his mind, and onto what might be called the Dutch Empire mind-set, when it came to the matter of popular government:

1. Was it ever heard or seen in any republic that vassals and subjects did without authority from their superiors, conceive, draft and submit to their magistrates self-devised interrogatives to have them examined thereon?

2. Whether it will not be a matter of very bad consequence and prepare the way for worse things to have two malignant private subjects arrogate to themselves the right and presume to subscribe for the entire council interrogatory articles on which to examine the former board, without being authorized thereto by their superiors or orders of the commonalty? I say malignant subjects, in view of the animosity between them and the late director and council, by whom they were held and proved to be disturbers of the public peace . . .

3. Whether, if this right be granted to these cunning fellows, they will on account thereof hereafter not assume and arrogate to themselves greater authority against us and the appointed councilors, to usurp similar, yes, greater power in opposition to us, should our administration not suit their whims?

Stuyvesant's yes-men said yes—they agreed with him wholeheartedly that, in the words of the Englishman Brian Newton, “evil consequences” would ensue if these colonists were allowed to proceed in framing a full-blown legal argument against the lawful administration of the colony. Stuyvesant rejected out of hand the notion that Kuyter, Melyn, and the others were acting as representatives of the colonists via the original board of eight men that Kieft had called together. These men represented of no one but themselves.

Several things now happened virtually simultaneously. Kuyter and Melyn complained that Stuyvesant and his council were prejudiced in favor of Kieft and the West India Company (they might have noted that Kieft, while awaiting passage to Holland, now sat as a member of the council), and therefore any verdict they rendered would be tainted. Stuyvesant, meanwhile, apparently showed Kieft the letter in which, three years earlier, this same handful of men, acting as they said on behalf of their constituents in the colony, had demanded his ouster. The directors in Amsterdam had never shown the document to Kieft. He studied the letter in a growing rage, the realization dawning that his career's ignoble end had come not thanks to the opinion of the directors in Amsterdam but at the hands of his own colonists.

Stuyvesant had banked on this reaction: acting more or less in concert with Stuyvesant's wishes, Kieft then wrote a formal complaint, declaring that these men had endeavored “with false and bitter poison, to calumniate their magistrates and to bring them into difficulty,” complaining that they had “dispatched in an irregular manner and clandestinely sent off, that libellous letter,” and demanding that they be prosecuted and his name cleared.

This was what Stuyvesant needed to move forward. He sent a messenger running down Pearl Street to Melyn and Kuyter's houses with a copy of Kieft's letter and an order that they submit a response within forty-eight hours. The leaders of what was rapidly becoming a political party then assembled to prepare their answer. It had to be done with some secrecy: Cornelis van Tienhoven's house stood right next to Kuyter's and Melyn's along the East River shore, and Stuyvesant was keen for information about other conspirators. If there was a time to back down, to respond gingerly and throw themselves on the mercy of the new director-general, it was now. They chose the opposite tack. The letter they crafted on June 22 is long, legalistic, courtly, precise, and unflinching. It is also pure Van der Donck.

The man had been steadily enmeshing himself in the affairs of New Amsterdam for three years now, and especially since his recent marriage and move to his estate to the north of the island. As an attorney, he had appeared before Stuyvesant and his council. And as he had with Kiliaen van Rensselaer and Willem Kieft, he had begun insinuating himself with Stuyvesant from the moment of the new director's arrival. Stuyvesant evinces a fondness for him early in their relationship; it's not hard to imagine the Stuyvesants inviting Van der Donck and his English wife Mary Doughty (by Dutch custom women often kept their maiden names) into the director-general's home. Van der Donck and Stuyvesant's wife, Judith Bayard, must surely have reminisced and talked of mutual acquaintances in their common hometown of Breda. As Stuyvesant spent time with Van der Donck—who at twenty-nine was eight years younger than him—he found him capable and ambitious, a man he could develop into a West India Company official, a man who could help him in managing the colony. As he had with other father figures, Van der Donck took pains to present his model-son visage to Stuyvesant. The week before the preparation of the response to Kieft, Van der Donck magnanimously offered to put on his own account with Rensselaerswyck farmers a shipment of three hundred and fifty bushels of wheat and oats that the new director-general would need for the coming year for his family and animals. Stuyvesant accepted the offer.

At the same time, Van der Donck was involving himself in the affairs of the wider community, representing sailors, merchants, widows, and farmers in court, and associating himself with the colony's ministers, who were naturally men of influence in the community. Van der Donck comes across in the records from this period as a budding politician, a man working hard to make friends in both high and low places. While making himself useful to the director, he was also assisting his friend Melyn—whom he had known since their crossing together six years earlier—and his co-conspirators. And it is clear where his sympathies lay—indeed, it would soon become evident that his whole reason for building a political base was as a platform from which to fight the cause that by now burned inside him.

The letter crafted in response to Kieft's is channeled into the firm banks of legal protocol, but a river of emotion flows through it. It is addressed to Stuyvesant and his council, and begins with a flourish and a bracing succinctness:

Honorable Gentlemen!

The written demand of the late Director General Kieft was sent to us by the Court messenger about 9 o'clock on the 19
^th
June of this year, 1647, with express orders to answer thereunto within twice 24 hours. Coming then to the point—

Item by item, then, it rebuts Kieft's charges that in the earlier letter to the directors in Amsterdam they had libeled him in representing the state of affairs. In some instances emotion shows through in biting irony:

The piles of ashes from the burnt houses, barns, barracks and other buildings, and the bones of the cattle, more than sufficiently demonstrate the ordinary care that was bestowed on the country, God help it, during the war.

At other times, such as when disputing Kieft's charge that the council had agreed with his plan to tax the Indians, it is all business:

The agreeing to the Excise is seen by 3 letters, E., F., G.; by the Acts of the 18, 21, 22 June, 1644, and therefore no further declaration is necessary.

Raw emotion is allowed to emerge once again on the subject of the slaughter of neighboring Indian villages:

It is chiefly manifest from their own act, that the Indians conducted themselves like lambs, before the melancholy spectacle of which they were the victims in the year 1643 over at Pavonia and on the Island Manhatas. Be it remarked, that they allowed themselves, their wives and children to be slaughtered at that time like sheep, and came (so to speak) like lambs to lie in our arms. We appeal in this case to the entire Commonality and to each member of it individually, who hath survived that time, to say how murderously the Indians were then treated. Would to God we may be found to be liars on this point.

Rather than sidestep the issue of whether the colonists have a right to involvement in their government, the letter takes the matter on directly. The late director-general took on “princely power,” the council of eight was the closest thing to a representative body in the colony, and in the face of the outrageous decision to launch a war against the Indians the council acted properly in protesting. In the manner of the “elegant law” that Van der Donck studied at Leiden, the letter lines up ancient authorities to speak on the matter: Diogenes, Ambrose, Aristides, and Xenophon all weigh in on the rights and limitations of rulers in making the decision to go to war. Before Stuyvesant and his council, Kieft had demanded that Melyn and Kuyter be sent to Amsterdam and tried there “as pests and seditious persons.” The letter now demands the right to go there, not as Kieft styled the two men but “as good patriots and proprietors of New Netherland.” The case should be put to the highest governing body in the nation; the issue was not this particular war, this particular colonial administrator, but the rights of citizens in a far-flung outpost. It was a landmark issue; a test case. “Let us then once see what the law of nations thinks of it,” the letter demands, calling on Grotius's recently minted principles of law.

Stuyvesant responded in kind, with an unusually long legal analysis of the situation, suggesting that he, too, saw the matter as a showdown between two competing views of the law. He called on his own ancient authorities, including biblical ones, which reveal his views of governance: “Thou shalt not revile the gods, nor Curse the ruler of thy people” (Exod. 22:28); “curse not the king, no not even in thy thought” (Eccles. 10:20); “Be subject unto the higher powers” (Rom. 13:1). Finally, military man that he was, he called on the Articles of War: “To utter words tending to mutiny and rebellion demands capital punishment.” Technically, after all, the Dutch Republic was still at war with Spain, and Manhattan was an outpost of that war. As much to make an example for the colonists to note as to enforce the law as he saw it, he expressed his view that Cornelis Melyn, as avowed leader of a treasonous party, be put to death, while Jochem Kuyter should be banished and his property confiscated. Melyn expressed his intention to appeal the sentence in Holland, and Stuyvesant (as quoted by Van der Donck) shot back with black wit: “People may think of appealing during my time—should any one do so, I would have him made a foot shorter, pack the pieces off to Holland and let him appeal in that way.”

Nevertheless, at the urging of his council, Stuyvesant amended the sentences of both men to banishment from the colony—effectively giving them an opportunity to appeal—and ordered them to depart by the first available ship.

A remarkable number of vectors then came to bear on a single object: the ship
Princess Amelia,
600 tons, ringed with thirty-eight guns, riding at anchor out in the harbor, her hull neatly packed with 200,000 pounds of red dyewood she had picked up in Curaçao. It was the same ship that had brought Stuyvesant here; she was now ready for her return to Amsterdam. Her commander, a twenty-eight-year-old named Jan Claesen Bol, was, like John Farret, one of Stuyvesant's admirers: during his three-month layover on Manhattan, he had sat on Stuyvesant's council, overseeing the matter of Kieft v. Melyn and Kuyter. By mid-September, additional cargo—about 14,000 beaver pelts—had been stowed away, and she was ready for passengers.

And so they came: Kieft, eager—now that he had, in Stuyvesant, a powerful ally—to return home and defend himself, to clear his name and see his accusers punished; Kuyter and Melyn, armed with sheafs of documents, ready to appeal Stuyvesant's verdict before the States General in The Hague; the Rev. Everardus Bogardus, with whom Kieft had also tangled. And a good many of the lost contingent of soldiers who had bounced from Brazil to Curaçao to Manhattan, raggedly and repeatedly crossing Stuyvesant's path, were on board as well, the director having ordered them home in hopes of finally getting them off his back.