The Island at the Center of the World (23 page)

They set sail on August 16. The crossing was uneventful. And then, in a bizarre climax to the whole affair, Captain Bol made a classic mariner's error, mistaking the Bristol Channel (a.k.a. the False Channel) for the English Channel. The ship ran aground off the coast of Wales. Heavy surf heaved it up and down in three titanic hammerings, dashing it to pieces against the rocky bottom. For days after, Welsh farmers combed the beach for beaver pelts and other items of value: once-cherished pieces of lives transformed into flotsam.

T
HE INITIAL NEWS
of the wreck of the
Princess
must have stunned the residents of New Amsterdam. The general view, once the initial shock wore off, was that God had been unusually straightforward in punishing Kieft for his many sins, and that the other passengers had had the misfortune of being too near the lightning bolt. The house of the director-general was probably not decked out in mourning either. Stuyvesant had tolerated Kieft because of his position; he had supported not the man but the office. As for Melyn and Kuyter, they had been misguided followers of an incoherent new line of thinking that was dangerous and immoral. He must have seen the wreck, in its totality, as an instance of the pure and terrible justice of the Almighty. There had been ugliness on both sides; as with Sodom and Gomorrah, and in the time of the Great Flood, the Lord had chosen to wipe the slate clean. But even in the direst of times He had kept faith with His people, by preserving a leader. Noah had been spared from the Flood, Moses was chosen to lead His people from waywardness. Now Stuyvesant could lead. He could turn his attention to matters of genuine importance.

And so he did, moving with ferocious competence. Had a lesser man been given the commission to strengthen the Dutch hold on their North American territory, the English would have swept in decades sooner than they did, and the Dutch imprint on Manhattan Island would have been too faint to make a difference to history. The problems that literally surrounded the colony were considerable and they had been allowed to fester. Stuyvesant had stepped into a chess game in which his predecessor had been an inferior player who had committed his resources into one ill-conceived strike while ignoring attacks from other areas. Stuyvesant assessed the threats, ranked them in order of priority, and went to work. He saw at once what historians later failed to recognize: that New England was not monolithic; there were four separate colonies, each with its own agenda, and they had a hard time getting along. The two southern colonies, Connecticut and New Haven, were aggressive toward the Dutch; the other two, Stuyvesant sensed, wanted to find a way to live with their neighbor. New Plymouth, after all, had been founded by English Pilgrims who had spent long years as guests of the Dutch, and so were predisposed toward them. Massachusetts was likewise amenable; it was the largest and most powerful of the New England colonies, and John Winthrop, its elderly governor, who had devoted nearly two decades to fashioning a Puritan utopia in the New World (it was he who coined the phrase “City upon a Hill”), was, despite age and ill health, still the most influential man in New England. (It was largely because he had chosen to live there that Boston, rather than any of the other villages founded about the same time, became the capital.)

So Stuyvesant targeted Winthrop. “Honored Sr,” began the letter he dictated to Winthrop (at the other end of the pen, translating into English, was one of Stuyvesant's English hangers-on, George Baxter). “I shall be boulde to propose to your wise Consideration, that your selfe, with other indifferent men of yor Countriemen . . . may be pleased to appoint the tyme & place, where & when yourselfe & they will bee pleased to give me a meeting . . .”

Stuyvesant knew that while powerful forces in England wanted to wrest control of his colony, in the chaos caused by the civil war, the New England colonies had largely been free to govern themselves as they saw fit. If he could cement a treaty with the leaders of the four respecting borders, it would be a great step toward putting his colony, as well as theirs, on a permanent footing. As it happened, Baxter, who delivered the letter in person, arrived in Boston while leaders of the four New England colonies were gathered there for a meeting, so Winthrop showed it to them. He then wrote back that while his illness had left him with a “Crazines of my head,” he was still fit enough to agree with his fellow New Englanders that all wanted likewise to live in peace with the Dutch colony and all “doe readilie embrace yor friendlie motion concerning a meeting.” The leaders also jointly sent a similar letter to Stuyvesant, welcoming him to America, “hoping all the English Colonies shall enjoy within your limits all the fruites of a neighbourly and friendly correspondency in a free concourse,” and laying out a number of items that needed to be hashed out, including illegal trading activities and a high tariff being charged at Manhattan for shipping. Stuyvesant knew that the civil war in England had increased the New Englanders' reliance on Manhattan as a shipping hub. It must have pleased him that they raised the issue at once—he could use it as a bargaining chit in working out an agreement on borders. The New Englanders signed themselves “Your lovinge Friends the Commissioners of the vnited Colonies.”

Next, Stuyvesant pivoted southward. He commissioned a detailed report on events that had taken place in the region the Dutch called the South River. It had been ten years since Peter Minuit led a Swedish expedition up this waterway that the Dutch considered a vital part of their North American territory. It would be no accident that the future cities of Philadelphia, Trenton, Camden, and Wilmington would spring up in this region. Stuyvesant could see, as Minuit had before him and William Penn would after, that water power, water transport, ocean access, and hundreds of square miles of richly exploitable wilderness could be translated directly into industry and commerce.

Kieft had ignored the foreign presence in this southern territory, and the Swedes had used that time to dig in. The leader of New Sweden now was Johan Printz, a great hog of a man whose four-hundred-pound body, as it lumbered within the palisades of his central fort, was less dressed than sided in the armor of the Swedish military. Printz had served as an officer in the Thirty Years' War, leading troops into battle in Germany and Poland before being discharged for surrendering the town of Chemnitz to a Saxon army. His New World posting was a chance to redeem himself by turning this wilderness into a functioning, profit-making colony. The Indians of the region gave him the nickname Big Belly, and he was as formidable in military guile as he was in size. The Dutch had constructed their original military-trading post on the river in what must now have seemed the distant past: 1624, when they were still considering making this region the capital of their colony. They had built Fort Nassau at the confluence of the South River and what they called the
Schuyl Kill,
*14
or Hidden River—convenient, they believed, to the Indians bringing furs downriver from the west.

But there was a flaw in this placement. The trading post was on the east side of the river, so that the Indians had to ford it to reach them. Peter Minuit had seen this problem from the beginning. So when he made his dramatic return to America to found New Sweden, he erected Fort Christina on the west, outflanking the Dutch and making the Swedes instantly more attractive to the Minquas (a.k.a. the Susquehannocks), the tribe that dominated the fur trade in the valley. When Johan Printz took over the Swedish colony, his first move was to further stymie the Dutch by constructing another fort farther downriver, nearer the bay, thus giving the Swedes effective control of the South River. Kieft did nothing to counter this, but the Dutch got help from an unexpected ally: the mosquito. The Swedes had built on a swamp. Soon the fair-skinned soldiers looked, one commander wrote, “as if they had been affected with some horrible disease.” The soldiers called the place Fort Myggenborgh—Fort Mosquito; the bugs won, and it was soon abandoned.

But Printz was far from finished. He began an elaborate rumor campaign among the Indians to the effect that the Dutch were planning to slaughter them; at the same time, he sweetened the deals Swedish traders were making with them. Then complaints started streaming into Stuyvesant's Manhattan headquarters from soldiers and company officials stationed on the South River. The Dutch had recently built another trading post on the river, but even before it was finished Printz erected a Swedish fort so close to it that the structures nearly touched. The massive Swede was as snide as he was wily, and the Dutch knew he was rubbing their noses in it. The Swedish fort, one officer whined in his report to Stuyvesant, “is the greatest insult in the world . . . for they have located the house about 12 or 13 feet from our palisades, depriving us thereby of our view of the stream.” “My lord,” another official wrote, “I firmly believe that he [Printz] had it built there more to mock our lords than to expect that it could realize any profit for him, since there is room enough beside our fort to build twenty such houses . . .” Sitting in his office on Manhattan, Stuyvesant was now able to summon a clear mental picture of his southern territory: the flat landscape; its placid river; warships whose masts were surmounted not with the orange, white, and blue flag of the United Provinces
*15
but the blue and yellow cross of Sweden; the hidden inlets echoing with the cadences of the Swedish tongue as the golden-haired Nordics bartered with the Indians, struggling to comprehend their allegiances and business tactics.

Stuyvesant knew from the start that the real threat was from the English, not the Swedes. Dutch forces had already chased out English settlers who had sneaked south from the New Haven colony and tried to stake a claim on the Schuyl Kill. Stopping English activity in the region was paramount, for the Dutch, with their focus on waterways, knew what the English as yet did not: that the South or Delaware River began not in the south but far to the north of Manhattan, and wound its way three hundred miles southward (it would serve as the border between the future states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania) before emptying into Delaware Bay. Thus, if the English ever got control of it, they would have a stranglehold on Manhattan, and the Dutch colony would vanish.

But Stuyvesant also understood the need to attack the Swedish problem before it sapped his colony's strength. He must have had a dossier on his rotund opposite in New Sweden, as he did on John Winthrop in Massachusetts. The three men had quite a bit in common. All were autocratic, moralistic Protestants. Printz, like Stuyvesant, was the son of a minister who had been groomed for the ministry but shifted at the last minute into military service. Stuyvesant may have known of Printz's failure on the battlefield; at any rate, he began laying out a course of action to consign New Sweden to history's dustbin. Eventually, he would have to journey to the region personally. For now, however, he issued sheafs of instructions. He ordered his representatives to buy up more land from the Delaware and Minquas. He wanted the Dutch forts on the river repaired. He wanted them stocked with goods, since the Minquas had complained about traveling far with their furs only to find the Dutch traders out of supplies. This was especially important, he wrote, because Printz had not been receiving regular shipments from Sweden.

Another issue: Minquas Indians had complained to him that New Amsterdam's dominant trader, Govert Loockermans, while on a foray on the South River, had killed their chief. Loockermans denied it, claiming he had only roughed the chief up a bit. In a clear example of Stuyvesant's political instincts winning out over his Calvinist upbringing, he instructed his official on the river to “inquire diligently into the circumstances and truth of the matter, and should you find Govert Loockermans to be at fault, conceal it so that on our part the Indians are given no occasion for new discontent.” Then he added brightly, “I thank you very much for the eel which you sent.”

M
ATTERS RIGHT OUTSIDE
his front door were equally pressing. The fort itself was tumbling down and had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Besides that, Stuyvesant informed his council, the place needed “a school, church, sheet piling, pier and similar highly necessary public works and common buildings.” It all had to get started more or less at once, as far as he was concerned. He had a duty to the place, and beyond that, it was his home; he cared about it. If it was to survive against the threats that loomed on all sides, then “this our capital” had to be made strong. He had kept Johannes La Montagne, the Walloon medical doctor who had been the second member of Kieft's government, as a member of his own council, and La Montagne argued that the fund-raising that was necessary for these projects could only happen if he had the colonists on his side. And the only way to do this was to allow the residents to elect a board of representatives to advise him. Stuyvesant agreed. Following the custom in Dutch towns, the residents would select “a double number of nine persons” from among “the most notable, most reasonable, most honorable and most prominent” of them, and out of this group he, Stuyvesant, would then choose “a single number of nine” to serve. The first board included the Bohemian Augustin Herman, Dutch trader Govert Loockermans, English tobacco farmer Thomas Hall, and Michael Janszen, a close friend of Adriaen van der Donck, at whose home Van der Donck stayed when he remained in New Amsterdam overnight.

Van der Donck himself was not among the first “double number of nine,” but the method of its selection helps explain his vigorous networking during this time. The board was to be the vehicle for political change in the colony, and becoming a member required winning the support both of the residents and of Stuyvesant himself. It's hard to avoid seeing Van der Donck as calculating, given the determined, almost fawning way he assists Stuyvesant in this period. Thanks to his marriage, Van der Donck was by now proficient in English, and he volunteered for a novel assignment when a Scotsman named Andrew Forrester made his way through the Dutch towns of Long Island—Vlissingen (later, Flushing), Heemsteede, Gravesend, and New Amersfoort—in September of 1647, waving a large square of parchment, covered in writing and seals, which, he declared to the startled residents, made him governor of the entire region by virtue of a grant from the English crown. He arrived finally in New Amsterdam and, before a snickering crowd, demanded that Stuyvesant surrender to him. “Wherefore I had him taken into custody and on the next day placed under arrest at the City Tavern at the Company's expense,” Stuyvesant later explained to his council.