The Island at the Center of the World (24 page)

It was a pretty bewildering turn of events. “What shall be done with said pretended governor?” Stuyvesant wondered aloud to the council. Was the man insane, or was this an organized tactic on the part of the English that needed to be treated with proper diplomatic niceties? Stuyvesant accepted the help of Van der Donck, and of two other English-speaking men, to investigate. They studied the commission, interrogated Forrester, and concluded that the man was the somewhat potty agent of the estate of an English lord who claimed title to Long Island and surrounding lands. With the assent of Van der Donck and the others, Stuyvesant decided to put the man in irons and ship him to Amsterdam, where government officials could sort through the matter.

The Forrester case was bizarre, but by no means unique. The settling of the North American continent had gone on long enough that it was now firing the imaginations of a fair number of European eccentrics. One sort particularly intrigued was the English noble of modest circumstances. Such men had seen with their own eyes the piece of paper King Charles bestowed on Lord Baltimore, by which he became master of his own private realm in the New World. The dream that took shape in some such minds was of a return to the Middle Ages; America in its virgin freshness they saw as a land of opportunity where dreams could come true, but, in a quixotic reversal of the direction that history would take, their dreams were all about the past, the halcyon days of knights and damsels, when their ancestors were still men of substance. Sir Ferdinando Gorges was one such nobleman who actually did receive title, back in the days of King James, to a huge chunk of North America, which he hoped to divide into medieval estates that he would distribute among his closest associates, who would build castles, gather squires and courts, drink mead, and clobber one another in pageants. Gorges died without ever setting foot in the New World, his dream died in the chaos of the civil war, and his tract eventually became the state of Maine. (Two hundred years later, when the U.S. government, during its own civil war, constructed a military installation on an island in Portland Harbor, somebody had the inspiration to name it after him as a nod to the odd dreamer who inadvertently founded the state, and so it remains Fort Gorges.)

Shortly after Forrester's appearance, yet another eccentric from the British Isles pitched up on the New Amsterdam waterfront with a similar claim. It was, in fact, the second visit from Sir Edmund Plowden, who had also shown up during Kieft's tenure, brandishing a document signed by the deputy general of Ireland, which, he said, gave him title to the area extending from Long Island westward beyond the Hudson River and including all of present-day New Jersey and parts of Delaware and Maryland. Plowden had it all worked out. The kingdom would be called New Albion, and he, its lord, would be styled the Earl Palatine of New Albion. Long Island would henceforth be known as the Isle of Plowden. There was apparently another arraignment at the fort in New Amsterdam, at which Van der Donck seems again to have served. Plowden declared that prior to his arrival in New Amsterdam he had been to New Sweden to inform its governor of his title, and was very much annoyed at the way he had been treated. Stuyvesant, who was perhaps getting used to the drill by now, and who must for once have sympathized with Johan Printz, simply told Plowden to leave the colony. Returning to England, Plowden published a little book called
A Description of the Province of New Albion,
in which, under the dazzling pseudonym of Beauchamp Plantagenet, he extolled the virtues of the new realm and especially of the Earl Palatine himself. He eventually wound up in an English debtors' prison.
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There was one other madcap, and ultimately tragic piece of business at the time of the Forrester episode—late 1647—with which Van der Donck may have assisted Stuyvesant. Harmen van den Bogaert, the onetime barber-surgeon who thirteen years earlier had made the first daring journey westward deep into Iroquois country, had been an active member of the colony ever since. He had married and fathered four children, had purchased an interest in a privateer called
La Garce,
which he then accompanied on a raiding voyage to the Caribbean, then served as supply master to the company, first in New Amsterdam and then at Fort Orange. He had also been involved in the affairs of the murdered wheelwright Claes Swits, to whom he had apparently been related.

In addition to all of this, Van den Bogaert had a secret, which he kept as quiet as possible since its discovery would almost certainly lead to a sentence of death. He had a fondness for men.

In the Calvinist Dutch colony, as in the Puritan English colonies, homosexuality was a crime on a par with murder. Van den Bogaert thought he had found a discreet outlet in the person of his young black servant, Tobias; we have no idea how Tobias felt about the relationship, but somehow the two men were caught in flagrante. Van den Bogaert fled. In 1647 New Netherland, however, there were few places to hide. You couldn't exactly lose yourself in a crowd—everyone knew everyone else. He might have tried to stow himself on a ship, if one were departing, but upon discovery he would have been shipped back for punishment. Instead, he went back to the one place he knew of where few others Europeans had been—into Mohawk country, retracing his journey of years earlier. It was autumn now, not winter, so the going would have been less difficult, but he was alone this time, traveling across dozens of miles of virgin woodland without a guide.

He made it to one of the villages that had befriended him years before, and presumably was welcomed by the inhabitants. Meanwhile, Nicolaes Coorn, who had taken over from Van der Donck as the law man of the independent fiefdom of Rensselaerswyck, did a bit of Sherlock Holmes–style reasoning, and sent a woodsman named Hans Vos off westward through the same forests on what may have been America's first bounty hunting expedition.
*17
In a sequence foreshadowing the Wild West of two hundred years later, Vos cornered Van den Bogaert in an Iroquois longhouse used to store grain, and a shootout commenced. Van den Bogaert, once the hero of the colony, now laid low by his sexual proclivities, attempted a distraction by setting fire to the place. Vos caught his man anyway, and brought him back to Fort Orange. Coorn then wrote to Stuyvesant, informing him of the event and asking what should be done with the man.

Stuyvesant wrote back that he himself would stand in judgment at Van den Bogaert's trial, but not until spring, when the ice on the northern stretches of the river had broken and ships could get through. Before that, however, Van den Bogaert, certain of Stuyvesant's judgment and desperate beyond reckoning, escaped from the prison in the fort. As he ran across the frozen expanse of the river, he fell through a hole in the ice and drowned.

So ended the life of the barber-surgeon turned explorer, but the affair didn't end there. Shortly after, the Mohawks—in a turn of events that suggests the depth of their understanding of European ways by this time—sent a delegation to Manhattan to sue the West India Company for damages resulting from the loss of their building and its stores of supplies. In deciding the matter, Stuyvesant might have taken counsel from Adriaen van der Donck, who knew the Mohawks and their methods of deciding grievances better than anyone in the colony. Stuyvesant concluded that the Indians were in the right, and ordered the sale of Van den Bogaert's Manhattan property, the money from which would pay what he acknowledged was the company's debt to the Indians.

Van der Donck seems to have assisted Stuyvesant with yet another matter at about this same time, this one crucial to Stuyvesant's leadership and to the colony as a whole. Besides the threats from the English, Swedes, and Indians, there remained the ongoing problem of insubordination from the semiprivate domain of Rensselaerswyck. With the death of Kiliaen van Rensselaer, the estate was now under the ownership of the diamond merchant's son, and in March of 1648 a new director arrived to run the place. Unluckily for Stuyvesant, Brant van Slichtenhorst, a bluff fifty-nine-year-old with vast experience as an administrator in the Dutch Republic, was virtually his equal in grit and resolve. He understood the language of the charter that Van Rensselaer had won from the West India company, which, in a throwback to the glory days of the Middle Ages for which men like Edmund Plowden pined, gave him almost autocratic powers. Stuyvesant read things differently; his own commission obligated him to rule the entire colony of New Netherland, which included the manor of Rensselaerswyck. It was a dispute over political jurisdiction, and Van Slichtenhorst brought it to the surface just weeks after he started work.

Stuyvesant had sent to Rensselaerswyck a seemingly innocuous proclamation declaring the first Wednesday of May a day of public fasting and thanksgiving throughout the colony. It was common of leaders in all Dutch communities, following storms, fires, invasions, or harsh winters, to set aside a formal day of thanks to the Almighty for seeing the inhabitants through the ordeal. But when the proclamation was handed round during church service in Rensselaerswyck, Van Slichtenhorst saw the symbolism in it, which he considered an infringement of his office. He stomped back to his headquarters and fired off a defiant protest.

Stuyvesant, too, understood the importance of symbols of power and the need to back them up. Almost immediately he set sail from New Amsterdam with a full military escort. When, some days later, the company sloop put in before Rensselaerswyck, Van Slichtenhorst extended him the courtesy of firing a welcoming salvo from the estate's cannons, but when they met and Stuyvesant ordered him to stand down and obey the greater authority of the Dutch colony, Van Slichtenhorst replied sharply, “Your complaints are unjust. I have more reason to complain, on behalf of my Patroon, against you.”

It was only the beginning of a strident territorial battle between the two men, which would result, among other things, in the founding of the city of Albany. More to the point, we can see here another step in the dance between Stuyvesant and Van der Donck. Van der Donck seems to have accompanied Stuyvesant on this trip. It would have been natural for Stuyvesant to call on his experience: Van der Donck had spent his first three years working as the legal enforcer at Rensselaerswyck; he knew the politics and personalities of the fiefdom and of the West India Company's Fort Orange. And, indeed, the court records of Rensselaerswyck show that, after a long absence, Adriaen van der Donck appears again in the fiefdom's court in July 1648—exactly when Peter Stuyvesant made his trip northward.

So we have a nice picture coming into focus, of the correct, zealous, militaristic, thirty-eight-year-old leader of the colony, working energetically and with considerable creativity to establish control over his domain and secure its position. And as he assesses the men around him, he comes to rely on the thirty-year-old lawyer who knows so much of the law, the land, and the natives, and who goes out of his way to be of service.

December came. As the last day of the year approached and the ever-present winds off the harbor turned icy, the residents of New Amsterdam met to choose the first replacements to the board of nine representatives. Van der Donck's careful politicking in the community paid off—he was chosen as one of a pool of potential representatives. It was then a foregone conclusion that Stuyvesant, in selecting half of the men from this group, would pick the young man who had been of such service to him. And from the new board's first meeting, Van der Donck, who had already done much behind-the-scenes work with several of these men, stood out, both in the eyes of his fellow representatives and of the director. The others named him their leader and gave him a title—“President of the Commonalty.” For a short time—a period of days, really—Stuyvesant was well pleased. Together, he must have thought, they could do great things.

Chapter 10

THE PEOPLE'S CHAMPION

T
he sun rose on September 28, 1647, to reveal, bobbing in the steel-colored waters off a gnarled limestone headland on the Welsh coast called Mumbles Point, a lone human figure, nearly lifeless, clinging to a spar of wood. All morning and well into the afternoon the man rode the waves, until at last they tossed him onto a sandbar two miles from shore. Along with the sputtering realization that he was alive came more information: there were other people here, similarly storm-tossed and stranded. Working together, they constructed a makeshift raft out of pieces of debris, and so made their way to the shore.

There, Cornelis Melyn found that his friend and fellow prisoner from the court of Peter Stuyvesant, Jochem Kuyter, was also alive. When the
Princess
broke up, Kuyter had been on the aft part of the ship, which cracked off in one large piece and floated, with him aboard, toward the scavenging Welshmen onshore. In all, 21 of the 107 passengers and crew members survived the wreck. Kieft died, the minister Bogardus died, and so, too, did most of the West India Company soldiers Stuyvesant had sent back to the Netherlands.

But surviving drowning was only the first stage of what would be an epic escape from fate's grasp. The two Dutchmen managed to cadge a few beaver pelts from the flotsam, which they sold in a nearby town, possibly Swansea, and, using these funds, made their way through the rutted, civil-war-scarred countryside to Bristol, and then to London, which they reached about three weeks later.

From our vantage, the seventeenth century seems an odd combination of the archaic and the modern. On the one hand, no infrastructure to assist shipwreck victims existed; you had to fight for survival, on land as much as against the waves. Then again, institutions that would feel instantly familiar today had a way of kicking into gear. As the various survivors of the wreck of the
Princess
staggered into London, insurance companies lined up to handle claims, lawsuits were filed, and public examiners picked up their quill pens, dipped them into pots of black iron-gall ink, and took testimony from survivors and eyewitnesses. The tangle of suits and claims took years to settle.

Melyn and Kuyter had hoped to find in London the long-serving Dutch ambassador, Albert Joachimi, who would help them to get home, but he was in Holland. Diplomatic relations were complicated by the war: King Charles was in prison, and no state in Europe yet recognized the government that Parliament had installed. The two disaffected citizens of the New World languished for months in England before finally winning passage to Holland, where they arrived around the end of the year. But the calamity had eroded none of their resolve; if anything, the shipwreck and its result—Kieft drowning and both of them surviving—reinforced their belief in the justness of their cause. They would even tell the story, in later years, that one of them had encountered Kieft on the waves just as he was about to go under, and that the former leader, in extremis, had admitted he had been wrong in his management of the colony and wrong to oppose them, and asked their forgiveness. Not the sort of confession a judge would be likely to accept, but a good indication of how thoroughly vindicated, how righteous and flush with new life and purpose, the two Manhattanites felt after the wreck of the
Princess.

T
HE WALK FROM
the City Tavern on the waterfront in New Amsterdam to the fort at the southern tip of the island was a matter of two minutes or so. It was pleasant enough: stepping out of the tavern—so common a place for transacting business it was now a semiofficial headquarters for many merchants and traders—you found yourself smack on the shore of the East River, looking out on the ships at anchor and across to the farmsteads in the village of Breuckelen. You turned right and walked south, with the river to your left and a row of gabled houses on your right, crossed the little bridge over the canal, continued down the narrow lane extending from it called, sensibly enough, Bridge Street, and there stood the fort, the ragged heart of town. Someone made this simple journey in the first days of January 1649 and delivered a letter to Director-General Stuyvesant. It was from the new assembly that represented the people of the colony and from now on would stand apart from Stuyvesant's council, which represented the company. The people in New Amsterdam and surrounding towns were calling this assembly the Board of Nine.
*18
The letter informed the director that the Board would like leave to send one or more representatives to The Hague in order to appeal for the Dutch government to take over management of the colony.

The petition—in effect a request to be allowed to emasculate him—infuriated Stuyvesant. It must have confused him as well. He had actually lauded many of the activities the Board had undertaken in its first year in existence. The members had taken seriously their duties as representatives of the people and served a useful role. When residents brought them complaints about merchants fixing their prices on bread and wine, the Board appealed to Stuyvesant to stop it, and he did. Then, getting bolder, they laid before him a list of measures they said would improve the economy. He fulminated a bit at their effrontery, then, on second thought, decided to take “more closely into consideration and deliberation the petition and written remonstrance of the nine elected selectmen, our good and dear subjects,” and made the suggested changes. But now, suddenly, the arrogance of these men had shot off the scale. It must have seemed especially strange given that his dutiful protégé, Van der Donck, was now in charge of the Board.

At the moment, there wasn't much time for him to dwell on the matter. Another issue was pending, which at first blush seems quite removed. Stuyvesant had to arrange a celebration in honor of an event that had occurred in Europe the previous year. In 1648, in the German city of Münster, negotiations involving representatives from across Europe had culminated in the signing of a peace treaty between Spain and the Dutch Republic. Eighty years of war was officially at an end. The echoes of this great event would reverberate even to the island of Manhattan. The West India Company colony had been founded, after all, as a base for carrying out the war. Manhattan, in the eyes of strategists in the Netherlands all those years ago, had been considered a staging area for launching raids on Spanish vessels coming to and from South America and the Caribbean, such as those carried out by Willem Blauvelt. All that was now in the past. The West India Company directors in Amsterdam would have to rethink the status and future of their North American possession.

In fact, the Münster peace treaty and the petition from the Board of Nine were related. Both were elbows from the forces of history into the gut of Peter Stuyvesant, urging him toward the future, toward a new vision for the colony. The peace treaty was something that he needed to accommodate. But he chose to ignore the petition, saying he would first have to inform the inhabitants of the several English villages that had begun under Kieft and continued as loyal components of the Dutch colony. Then he put the matter aside.

But the Board did not. From the City Tavern, Adriaen van der Donck was busy greeting and machinating with everyone from ship's captains to fur traders to bakers and distillers, all of whom had an interest in the future of the colony, and all of whom had something to say. Businessmen in the Netherlands had renewed their involvement in Manhattan since the end of Kieft's war with the Indians. Traders in New Amsterdam, with their ties to the world's greatest trading power, were among the most sophisticated on earth. Van der Donck and his fellow Board members met with them and listened as they described the conditions necessary to maintain a stable trade. He catalogued their output, and calculated that eighty thousand beaver pelts per year were passing through Manhattan on their way to the fur market in Europe. Because it was so important to the colony, he himself had become an authority on the beaver. He had raised the creatures, studied their life cycle, read everything that the ancient Roman authorities had written about them. (Later he would make it his business to disabuse Europeans of some erroneous beliefs that had originated with Pliny and others, notably about the miraculous powers of beaver testicles. “None of these,” he concluded confidently about the Latin writers, “had ever seen a beaver.”)

At the same time, Van der Donck was aware that the beaver trade was only, as he put it, “the means for the initial settlement of this fine country by Europeans.” Tobacco was just as important a product, and one with a future. Amsterdam was already the tobacco capital of Europe; that fact, combined with artfully cost-cutting Dutch shipping and trading practices (they pioneered the concept of buying in bulk), led English tobacco farmers in Virginia to rely on Manhattan as a shipping center. The world tobacco trade was in the first stage of its centuries-long surge, and even at this early point the Dutch had developed a marketing savvy that a Philip Morris, a Procter & Gamble, or a Frito-Lay might admire. They created a variety of blends, mixing premium Virginia leaf with lower-grade Manhattan product as well as Dutch-grown to suit a range of tastes and price points, added flavorings (lavender, nutmeg, rosemary, coriander, dill, vinegar), and paid careful attention to packaging. There was even a kind of advertising in the form of popular still life paintings involving tobacco motifs.
*19

The civil unrest in England only increased Virginia's dependence on Manhattan as a shipping center. The year before, when it looked as though England would block its colonies in North America from using foreign shippers, the governing body of Virginia derided its own shippers for their high prices and declared that Manhattan was vital to Virginia's economic survival. The recent excavation of the Jamestown settlement has uncovered Delft pottery, Dutch coins and pipes, and Chinese ceramics that came via Dutch shippers—all indications of the Virginians' reliance on Manhattan, and of the power of the Dutch Republic, which by now was not only the leading shipper in the world but the largest maker of manufactured goods.

All of which is to make the point that, where American history has always portrayed Manhattan succeeding as a commercial center only after the English takeover, in fact it was in the late 1640s that the city of New Amsterdam began its rise to become the hub of North American shipping. And now—starting on January 1, 1649, when he took his place on the Board of Nine—Van der Donck began in earnest to organize the businessmen who made the port function.

At the same time, he and his wife were beginning the task of developing their gargantuan estate along the river, just a stone's throw from the northern shore of the island. In keeping with the grandeur of his dream, Van der Donck had given his estate a name: Colen Donck, a compaction of “Van der Donck's Colony.” He had building plans; he knew what crops he wanted to plant; he had made lists of the jobs that needed to be filled and the numbers and kinds of workers he wanted to recruit from the home country. Archaeological evidence suggests that he and Mary may have chosen a site for their home at the southern end of a long flat expanse that would have been ideal for large-scale farming. In 1910, New York City workers digging a sewer trench in this area of the present-day Bronx came across what proved to be the foundation of a seventeenth-century farmhouse. A 1667 map of this area shows a house labeled “Van Dunks.” The only archaeological excavation of the site was done in 1990, and while the archaeologists found that the integrity of the site had been destroyed by the sewer trench, so that they could not obtain any further information from it, the sewer diggers had found Dutch bricks (slimmer than standard American or English bricks and of a yellow color), Delftware pottery fragments, combs, mirrors, lead window frames, pipestems, even wampum beads. Taken together with the early map of the area, these support the idea that this was the spot where Adriaen van der Donck decided to pursue his American dream. If this was indeed the location of the Van der Donck home, there is a pleasant appropriateness: today the area is Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, a vast, weedy stretch of grass informally subdivided into fields and pitches in which Bangladeshi and Guyanese cricketers, Irish hurlers, and Japanese softball players compete, none of whom, surely, has ever heard of the man who once lorded over the area and who helped make New York City a multicultural enclave.

The location had a lot going for it. The soil was rich, which Van der Donck could have discovered from the Wickquasgeck Indians from whom he had obtained title to the land—they kept a village here, which may have remained through Van der Donck's time.
*20
A long, lazy stream ran along this stretch of farmland, skirted the house, and snaked down into the creek that separated Manhattan from the mainland, which the Dutch had named Spuyten Duyvil, or “devil's spout,” after the dangerous eddies caused by the tide. By following this in a light sloop, or even in a canoe bought from the Indians,
†21
the leader of the Board of Nine, in anticipation of the millions who would commute into Manhattan, could have made his way into the Harlem River, and then, riding with the tide, headed southward along the coast of the island, and come to dock at the small pier in front of the City Tavern.

The agitating residents of the town would have grouped themselves around that same shoreline one day in January 1649 to see an amazing sight: a ghost being rowed to the dock. It wasn't a total shock—Cornelis Melyn had written to his compatriots from Bristol, telling them about his and Kuyter's survival—but seeing the man in the flesh had to have reinforced what they had felt on getting word of their survival and Kieft's death: that they had a genuine cause, and that it was just.

As soon as Melyn could get into a secure space, free from eavesdroppers (his own house, perhaps—there, just a few steps up the shore to the right of the pier) with Van der Donck, Govert Loockermans, Augustin Herman, Jacob Couwenhoven, Thomas Hall, Jan Evertsen Bout, Michael Janszen, and others who considered themselves a part of this new political party, he opened his satchel and spread before them the fruits of his time in the homeland. Documents. Papers dramatically inscribed with the flourishes of government business and tied with ribbons bearing heavy official seals.