The Island at the Center of the World (26 page)

At this moment, with his popularity at a low ebb, Stuyvesant walked into a political scandal. It happened that a case of muskets arrived in port at this time. When people found out that it was Stuyvesant himself who had ordered them, and that he intended to sell them to the Indians, in order to maintain goodwill, it became the talk of the town. While the residents were barred from selling firearms to the Indians, the director himself was doing just that, apparently for his own personal gain, and at a time when firearms were in short supply even among the colonists. Stuyvesant was forced to explain his behavior before his own council, but whether or not he had committed a crime he was guilty of violating the politician's first rule: never to give the appearance of wrongdoing. He was thrown on the defensive.

So it was while he was under this cloud that Stuyvesant had to decide what to do with Van der Donck. If he had had the support of his council and the people, he may have executed the man. As it was, however, his onetime loyal lieutenant, Van Dinklagen, was now firmly against him, watching his every move to see that he acted in accordance with Dutch law. It was probably at his insistence that Stuyvesant realized he could not try and punish the man based solely on the sheets of papers confiscated from him—especially as Van der Donck had, from confinement, agreed that it was possible some of what was contained in the pages was in error, since it was raw data that he had compiled from residents. So Stuyvesant ordered Van der Donck to “prove and establish or to revoke what he has injuriously written.” For the time being, Van der Donck was released from confinement. He was, however, banned from serving on the Board of Nine.

Van der Donck stepped outside into the late winter daylight a new man. By imprisoning him, Stuyvesant had anointed him as the people's champion. If Stuyvesant was now on the defensive, Van der Donck, the one under criminal charge, was flush with momentum. And by ordering him to prove the truth of what he had written, Stuyvesant in effect gave him a license to pursue the business of governmental reform.

And so he did. Walking the gabled streets of the young, rude, vibrant town, with the rough winds of early spring at his back and the inhabitants greeting him and congratulating him in their unique mix of accents and languages, he must have felt that everything he had done—from his university days at Leiden to his free-form stint as the lawman of Rensselaerswyck to his diligent politicking among the Manhattanites—had led to this moment. People knew him as an estate owner
—Jonker
(“Young Squire”) is what everybody called him on the street. And that role sharpened his profile as activist: he had the stature of a landowner, and yet he was clearly not following the path of a man like Kiliaen van Rensselaer, who had tried to milk the New World of profits from the comfort of his Dutch home. Van der Donck was invested in the colony personally, in its people and its future.

Everything now went into preparations for a delegation to the Dutch Republic. Legally, all the principal players should be involved, so, beginning the day after he was released from prison, Van der Donck fired off a series of summonses—to Van Dinklagen, La Montagne, Brian Newton, and other councilors and officials—requesting each man “to appear by the first opportunity at The Hague, before their High Mightinesses.” He delivered these, received their answers (mostly variations on, “Of course I won't go”), and recorded the whole thing in a flurry of paperwork. He can't have expected the entire government of the colony to up and sail to Holland to defend itself, but getting these things down on paper was, to him, a necessary step.

It annoyed Stuyvesant no end—so much so that, on May 8, he issued a new ordinance:

Whereas it is daily observed that . . . great abuses are committed in the writing and procuring of depositions by private persons who are neither pledged thereto by oath nor qualified thereto by official authority, whereby frequently many things are written to the advantage of those who have the papers drawn up, interspersed with sinister, obscure and dubious words . . . to the great prejudice and damage of the parties; therefore, in order to prevent this result, dangerous in a republic . . . we annul and declare invalid . . . all affidavits, interrogatories, or other instruments serving as evidence, which are written by private individuals . . .

Undeterred, through May and June, writing like a man possessed, Van der Donck pulled together all the information that he and his colleagues had collected from residents and constructed what would become perhaps the most famous document to come out of the Manhattan-based colony, the
Remonstrance of New Netherland,
an eighty-three-page formal complaint, which he intended to present to the governing body in The Hague and which would in time root the Manhattan colony's structure in Dutch law and, eventually, help give New York City its unique shape and character. Its opening words carry the full measure of Van der Donck's thoughts and emotions. He managed to bundle together in a few lines his exuberant pride in Dutch exploration and discovery, his passion for his adopted homeland, even his familiarity with the local Indians. At the same time, for the benefit of government officials who had little knowledge of the colony, he put the matter of its future development in a concise and accurate historical context, going straight back to the beginning:

Among all the enterprising people in the world, who search for foreign countries, navigable waters and trade, those who bear the name of Netherlanders will very easily be able to hold their rank among the foremost, as is sufficiently known to all those who have in any wise saluted the threshold of history. It will, in like manner, be also confirmed by our following Relation, for in the year of Christ 1609, was the Country of which we now propose to speak, first found and discovered at the expense of the General East India Company—though directing their aim and design elsewhere—by the ship
Half Moon,
whereof Henry Hudson was master and factor. It was afterwards named New Netherland by our people, and that very justly, for it was first discovered, and taken possession of, by Netherlanders and at their expense, so that even at the present day, the natives of the country (who are so old as to remember the event) testify, that on seeing the Dutch ships on their first coming here, they knew not what to make of them . . . We have heard the Indians also frequently say, that they knew of no other world or people previous to the arrival of the Netherlanders here. For these reasons, therefore, and on account of the similarity of Climate, Situation and fertility, this place is rightly called New Netherland. It is situate along the North Coast of America, in the latitude of 38, 39, 40, 41, 42 degrees, or thereabouts. . . . The land of itself is fertile, and capable of being entirely cultivated by an abundance of people . . .

Many other supporting documents were necessary—a formal petition asking the States General to take charge of the colony, and dozens of pages of heavily annotated “additional observations” on the state of affairs, the West India Company's “tyranny,” and the need for “suitable municipal government.” It was a major legal undertaking, appropriate to the gravity of the situation and the potential that Van der Donck and his colleagues saw in the island of Manhattan, the river it lay in, and the continent to which it formed the gateway.

Stuyvesant meanwhile had decided he couldn't stop the Board from sending its delegation, but he would counter them. It was unthinkable that he would go himself in response to the mandamus; he was in the midst of delicate diplomacy with the New England governors and with chiefs of the Raritan, Nyack, and other area tribes. To travel personally, he explained to the States General, “we cannot do consistently with honor and oath.” He would send Cornelis van Tienhoven both to represent him against Melyn's charges and to represent his government in the battle for control of the colony. But while Stuyvesant remained busy managing the affairs of the colony, an instance of how remarkably bluntly he could maintain a grudge occurred on June 14, when a trader named Jacob Loper appeared before him asking for a license to trade on the South River. “Whereas the said Loper married the daughter of Cornelis Melyn,” Stuyvesant's decision was recorded, for all to see, “the honorable director general is of the opinion that the request cannot be granted.”

The Board of Nine, meanwhile, chose a delegation consisting of two of its members—trader Jacob van Couwenhoven and farmer Jan Evertsen Bout—and its ex-leader, Van der Donck. If Stuyvesant protested that he had released Van der Donck from prison with the express order that he not engage in official business, there is no record of it. Van der Donck would certainly have countered that he was only following the order to “prove and establish or to revoke what he has injuriously written.”

The men prepared to leave. Van der Donck spent time with his wife on their estate, making lists of supplies needed and skilled workers he should hire in Europe. He agreed to represent a woman named Annetie van Beyeren, who lived in the Long Island village of Vlissingen (i.e., Flushing), in the settling of her affairs in the home country. And he took on one other piece of legal work in the last days before departure. Willem Blauvelt, the sometime pirate, had been a swaggering presence on the island for many years, and his frigate,
La Garce,
had been a financial interest for many of the prominent men of New Amsterdam, including Augustin Herman, Jacob van Couwenhoven, who was about to accompany Van der Donck to Holland, and former director Kieft. With the full backing and support of the colonial government, the frigate had, throughout the past several years, set off for the West Indies and returned bearing Spanish prizes: ships laden with tobacco, sugar, ebony wood, and wine. All the partners in the venture received profits from these raids; this sort of activity had been the centerpiece of the West India Company's business in the New World.

With peace, however, privateering had become illegal. But Captain Blauvelt had had a hard time coming to terms with the news. Recently, as before, an eager crowd had gathered on the waterfront at the cheery sight of
La Garce,
the Dutch flag snapping at the mast, approaching with a fine prize in tow. The problem was Blauvelt had snagged the Spanish bark “in the river of Tobasco in Campeachy Bay” (on the west coast of the Yucatan Peninsula) five months after the peace treaty was signed, setting off in a series of lawsuits. Van der Donck had been hired by one of the owners of Blauvelt's vessel, and took part in untangling the mess until the day before he sailed for Europe. It was a fitting last piece of business, since it signaled the end of the old order on Manhattan.

There was a final encounter between Van der Donck and Judith Bayard, Stuyvesant's wife. He met her on the street on July 29. Whether they talked and had somehow maintained cordial relations we don't know. She may have been preoccupied: the Stuyvesants' first son, Balthasar, was now twenty-one months old, and the second, Nicholas, a baby of seven months. At any rate, Van der Donck handed her a letter from Melyn to Stuyvesant—which he himself had surely helped write. Stuyvesant still had not allowed Melyn use of his land and property, as the mandamus had ordered. The letter demanded that he do so, and also that he make available to the delegates such documents as they required to present their case, and to do it soon since “time is short and the vessels are making ready.”

Judith handed the letter to Stuyvesant, who slashed out a reply, which he titled, “Answer to Cornelis Melyn's disrespectful Protest handed to my Wife, as she says, by Adriaen van der Donck and A. Hardenbergh,” in which, through clenched teeth, as it were, he granted the man use of his property, and declared, “Who the delinquent is, God and the law have to decide.”

From this letter we have the information that Stuyvesant planned to send his representative Van Tienhoven on the readying vessel, which means that Van der Donck and Van Tienhoven—the sweaty, corpulent, wily defender of Stuyvesant and the West India Company—must have stood on the deck of the same ship as the low spread of the village, with its windmill and fort prominent, receded into mist. Ahead of Van der Donck lay the distant continent of his birth.

Chapter 11

AN AMERICAN IN EUROPE

I
n January 1646 a coach, drawn by six horses, labored through the frozen ruts of a road in the German countryside. With gilt woodwork and attendants tricked out in scarlet capes and hats, it made a vivid impression against the dead landscape. Two rows of retainers rode ahead, swords at their sides. Peasants by the roadside couldn't help but gawk as the entourage passed.

Inside the coach sat a sixty-one-year-old man, his sedate attire in contrast to the grandeur of the vehicle. He had a tapered beard and sharp eyes, an expression of sad, solemn decency. Sharing the cabin with him were his wife and their granddaughter. All three of them must have been weary as they neared the end of their one-hundred-twenty-mile journey. Just now, as they rounded this bend, the steepled skyline of the city of Münster came into view.

The man's name was Adriaen Pauw. He had long been one of the most important men in the Dutch Republic, and now he was about to attempt something that, should it come to pass, would transform European history. He was quite conscious of this—so much so that he would commission the above-described painting of the moment of his arrival to document his role in history. He believed that he and his like-minded colleagues had an opportunity to redraw the rules by which nations had governed themselves for centuries, to lay a new course for politics and for human affairs.

As Pauw's carriage rumbled along, nearly every state in Europe was at war and had been for the entire lifetime of most inhabitants. Going back into the Middle Ages, it had been generally accepted that war was the natural state of nations, that a country defined itself in large part by its clashes with enemies and alliances with friends. In the early 1640s, however, one of those epochal changes of thinking began to occur in the minds of men from different nations and traditions. The new mind-set had its intellectual origins, most notably, in the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, the man who was the guiding light to Adriaen van der Donck and other law students of the era. Twenty years before, Grotius had put forth the idiosyncratic proposition that peace was the natural state of mature, civilized nations, and war ought to be considered only as a last resort, and even then should be governed by rules to which all parties subscribed. Remarkably, monarchs paused in the midst of flinging their armies at one another to read Grotius's book. King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden supposedly kept
De Jure Belli ac Pacis
on his person as he led his troops into battle.

Grotius's radical concept had gained momentum in the intervening years and was now decidedly in the air. The peace negotiations at Münster would be unlike anything that had come before in world history. Each envoy, in expression of his government's awareness of the magnitude of the undertaking, arrived with an entourage of knights, halberdiers, trumpeters, archers, foot soldiers, and an army of retainers; the French delegation numbered one thousand people. As it became clear that a treaty would be reached, each envoy commissioned a suite of portraits of all the dignitaries—the collection in Gripsholm Castle near Stockholm, still intact, runs to seventy-four paintings.

Negotiations actually went on in two places at once—Münster and Osnabrück—and linked together the eight decades of combat between Spain and the Dutch provinces on the one hand and the three decades of brute slaughter that had occupied much of the rest of Europe. Needless to say, Thirty Years' War and Eighty Years' War were names given after the fact; at the time it was simply endless strife.

It was all self-consciously monumental because, as the participants were well aware, it was the first time representatives of European nations had come together as separate political entities rather than as units under the umbrella of the Vatican or the Holy Roman Empire, acknowledged one another as sovereign, and tried to work things out on their own. It was the birth of secular politics, the forerunner of Versailles, Paris, Camp David, and the United Nations, the creation of a political map of Europe that would hold into the twenty-first century. It was, in a political sense, the launch of what historians would one day decide to call the modern era.

Adriaen Pauw cut an unusual figure in Münster. The term “baroque,” so fitting to the age, applied as much to personal fashion as to art; ambassadors considered themselves diplomatic peacocks whose personal finery informed others of their nation's magnificence. As a representative of the anomalous Dutch republic, Pauw was one of the few non-nobles in attendance, and his drab Calvinist dress—a study in gray, black, and white—was a signal of what, as far as the Dutch were concerned, the negotiations were all about.
*22
The purpose of the gathering was to get Spain—with the most determinedly regal court in Europe—to acknowledge the independence not only of its long-rebelling protectorate, but of a nation that proposed to exist without a monarchy. Virtually all the titled envoys to the peace negotiations—the Duke of Longueville, Count of Peñaranda, Papal Nuncio Fabio Chigi, Count Hugo Eberhard Kratz von Scharfenstein, Johan Ludwig, Count of Nassau-Hadamar, Count Palatine Charles Gustav—had trouble swallowing this; the very word
ambassador
had always had as its referent a royal court. Pauw was no spartan—he lived in a castle with a moat, surrounded by fields of red-and-white-striped tulips that were his own personal hybrid—but there was a point to be made.

In the end, peace prevailed at Münster and Osnabrück. The marathon negotiations were followed by appropriately baroque treaty preparations, then, in 1648, by the signings themselves (history has linked the two treaties by referring to them jointly as the Peace of Westphalia). And then the parties started. They went on for years, crisscrossing central Europe like brushfires. For most of Europe, the celebration was at the end of decades of slaughter. In the United Provinces of the Netherlands, the feelings were much more acute. Independence, recognition, vindication—the results of the treaty amounted to, on a societal level, a catalogue of psychological power terms. When Pauw, his fellow Dutch envoys, and the Spanish representatives put their signatures and seals to a single piece of paper, it signaled the Moment, the ignition of the Golden Age. Publishers ran off copies of the treaty, which became a best-seller. Celebrations flared through every city and village in the seven provinces. Plays, poems, salutes, parades, porcelain tiles, sermons, drinking bouts, brothel binges, painting commissions, public works projects—in every possible human manifestation, the Dutch proclaimed the new age. The euphoria built steadily over the months following the signing.

It was into this atmosphere—of a society conscious of a future laden with prosperity, peace, and power, and alive to the possibilities of secular politics—that Adriaen van der Donck sailed in the beginning of October 1649. He found his homeland reborn, the cause for which his grandfather had fought and become a hero vindicated. The war into which he himself had been born and raised was over. It was a new world, a new country.

But it was not Adriaen van der Donck's country—not anymore. Whatever joy he experienced and celebrations he took part in, he seems not to have wavered in his commitment to his adopted land. He was a prototype of a species that would number in the millions in the coming centuries: the European who crossed the ocean and found, in the vast continent at the other end, a new home and purpose. He was an American.

Into the harbor at Texel, the grassy, windswept North Sea island from which Henry Hudson had set out forty years earlier, the ship sailed. From there Van der Donck and his colleagues, Jacob van Couwenhoven and Jan Evertsen Bout, would have boarded a public transport boat, and so sailed southward, into the famed forest of masts that was the harborfront of Amsterdam, the most vital city on earth.

Of course, the city had not waited for the signing of a document as the signal to begin its golden era. Prosperity had been building for decades now, and so had Amsterdam. The city had more than doubled in size since Henry Hudson's time, and it was now thirty years since its merchant rulers—with impressive confidence in the city's future growth—had conceived of a staggering urban development project, now nearing completion: a series of concentric canal rings. The canals of Amsterdam are so iconic that many people assume they have always been there, but they were dug, by hand, hundreds of tons of earth moved out and sand brought in, forests' worth of pilings driven into the banks, a truly massive feat of engineering and city planning. The result was the creation of some of the first suburbs, for the idea was to encircle the core of the city—with its dens of commerce, sex, and drink—with neighborhoods of elegant housing for the army of newly rich, each home backed by ample gardens and provided with access, right out the front door, onto the state-of-the-art in urban transit systems. Here, aside from the incessant thrum of construction, all was serenity and gentility. In a foreshadowing of modern real estate marketing, the canals themselves were named in blatant appeal to their upwardly mobile clientele: you had the option, depending on the precise altitude of your pretensions, of living on the Herengracht, or Gentleman's Canal, the Prinsengracht (Prince's Canal), or the Keizersgracht (Emperor's Canal).

Van der Donck had been away for nearly a decade. As for his comrades, Jacob van Couwenhoven, in his thirties, had followed his father to Manhattan as a teenager, and Jan Evertsen Bout had been in the New World since 1634. For all three, roaming into the heart of the city, following the waterway called the Damrak to the central plaza of the Dam, would have been a frontal assault on the senses.

It was also a premonition of the society they were in the process of helping to create an ocean away. In the Dam, the city's main square, the results of Amsterdam's years of accepting foreigners were on vigorous display. Turbans, saris, and skullcaps mingled in with musketeerish ensembles; the confused remark of a visiting Frenchman—“It appears at first not to be the city of any particular people but to be common to all as the centre of their commerce”—was one that would be echoed in coming centuries by visitors to Amsterdam's offspring across the Atlantic, New York City. The hawkers—Cantonese, Franconians, Gujaratis, Livonians, Lorrainese, Ashkenazim—contributed as much to the visual cacophony as the pyramids of goods each had laid out at the bases of columns ranged around the place. The whole parade of exotic outlanders, Dutch guardsmen, and stout, aproned housewives was set to music by itinerant lutists, fiddlers, bagpipers, and hurdy-gurdy boys; everyone was fueled by street-corner pancake sellers. René Descartes, back in Amsterdam after his years in Leiden, found comfort in the anonymity of the bustle. “I can walk out each day in the bustle of the crowds with as much freedom and ease as you have in your paths,” he wrote to a country friend. (Then again, it may have gotten to him in the end: in the wake of peace, just as Van der Donck was arriving in Amsterdam, he left for the court of Queen Christina of Sweden, never to return.)

The availability of goods and services was stupefying to newcomers: sacks of pepper still giving off the perfumes of southeast Asia, bricks of sugar from the humid deltas of Brazil, hogsheads of Virginia tobacco, Turkish carpets, not to mention berths to Genoa, Smyrna, and Sumatra, and real estate offerings for homes going up at the as-yet-unfinished south end of the canal ring or in the new Jordaan area to the west. You could buy scientific measuring devices, tools for dissecting corpses, or, if you were foolish enough, a pair of spectacles, which were associated with a weak intellect (“to sell someone eyeglasses” was Dutch slang for “to deceive”). Sex, of course, was another product arrayed in plenitude—tourists could obtain a map of the city's red-light districts, which featured women whose whispered sighs came with French, Swedish, and German accents. If they weren't put off by the charming nicknames of some of the girls (e.g., Krentecut: “Currant Cunt”), the new arrivals might have found the sheer variety hard to pass up.

Art and printing were among the goods on offer. There were stalls in which art brokers sold paintings created for the home market, with an emphasis on those two iconic Dutch genres—landscape and still life—that in their very nature spoke of a society broken loose from religious dominance of its mental life and that satisfied a secular consumer urge for evocative scenes and a precise, almost Eastern fascination with ordinary objects in the here-and-now (the terms themselves came into English via the Dutch
landschap
and
stilleven).
Prints were common as well: at this moment those depicting the signing of the Treaty of Münster were everywhere, though, if you preferred, you could also find copies of the papal brief denouncing the treaties (much Vatican property had been “secularized” in the agreements). There were also engraved portraits of the signers of the treaty, pictures of various Dutch towns reacting to news of the treaty, and of companies of soldiers swozzling beer in celebration of the treaty.

In addition to the increase in intensity, there had been a big change in Amsterdam's central square since Van der Donck had left for the colony of Rensselaerswyck in 1641. One whole side of it, formerly a sprawling neighborhood, had been leveled, and in its place now stood the pilings and foundations of what would become the city's monument to itself in its ascendancy, a new Town Hall, built on classical lines, filled with art and slogans aligning the Dutch Republic with Rome and Greece. It was dedicated not only to the peace of '48 but to Peace itself, for, in the first waves of idealism following the diplomatic language about “eternal peace,” people really did seem to believe that they had just lived through the war to end all wars. As the tourist Van der Donck stood observing the first courses of stones being laid, that idea was still credible.
*23

But the Manhattanites didn't linger in the big city. Their business was pressing; they left soon after they had rested themselves, heading southwest.

Three centuries earlier, the corner of Holland that was their ultimate destination had been the country property of Willem, Count of Holland. Over time, it became useful as a commodious and convenient spot at which the medieval warlords of the region could meet and hash out differences. It was surrounded by a hedgerow that must have been a stunning feature of the landscape because people of the area took to calling the property itself
's Gravenhage—
the Count's Hedge. Even after the meeting spot became formalized into a court and a town grew up around it, the name stayed, though it was often shortened to Den Haag, which English emissaries transliterated as “The Hague.” From a provincial court, it grew into a national capital with the start of the war for independence.