The Island at the Center of the World (27 page)

The city that Van der Donck and his colleagues entered in October of 1649 was small and stately—“the largest village in Europe,” people liked to call it—with meadows on one side, an oak forest on another, and the dunes of the coast a short distance away. Planned government town that it was, it had its broad tree-lined avenues where, of an evening, men of standing would promenade or ride in carriages with their families. Everything was clustered around the central government plaza called the Binnenhof, a four-sided fortress-like complex featuring government offices around the sides and, in the center, the thirteenth-century Knights' Hall, the original meeting place of the medieval nobles.

It was a clunky, byzantine style of governing the Dutch had devised, but in essence each of the seven provinces sent a delegation to the States General of whatever size they chose, though each province had only one vote. The few dozen men sat together around a single table, the title of president passing weekly from one province's lead delegate to the next. The tricky part was that all decisions required a unanimous vote, which made for intense politicking and few resolutions, something the Dutch seem not to have minded terribly, trusting in the adage that the less the government actually did the better.

On October 13, not more than a few days after their arrival, Van der Donck and his comrades won a spot on the States General's daily calendar of business and took the opportunity to present the document Van der Donck had crafted on Manhattan, the “Remonstrance of New Netherland, and the Occurrences There, Addressed to the High and Mighty Lords States General of the United Netherlands, by the People of New Netherland.” Van der Donck the jurist, a bit over thirty years of age, took the lead. Years of struggle against Kieft and then Stuyvesant—winning a seat on the representative body, canvassing Manhattanites, being imprisoned and released, and finally sailing back across the ocean—had led to this. In addition to the “Remonstrance,” he laid before the governing body several supporting documents, including a letter from the Board of Nine introducing him and his colleagues and, as a coup, a letter of reference he had coaxed out of Van Dinklagen, Stuyvesant's disgruntled vice-director. “These persons are thoroughly conversant with the situation of the country,” he had written of Van der Donck and his colleagues. “I hope your High Mightinesses will be pleased thereby and extend them a favorable audience . . .”

It was a ripe moment for the Manhattan delegation to present its petition. The nation was still in the throes of its independence celebrations, and the speed with which the rulers took up the matter suggested that they were amenable. They knew the name Manhattan well by now, knew of the West India Company's mismanagement of the colony, and were ready to do something about it. The delegation presented itself with clarity and a distinct élan. Above all was their call for “suitable municipal government” for New Amsterdam. Van der Donck first painted for them an idyllic word picture, asking them to imagine this island, “Manhathans . . . the Capital of New Netherland,” with its glorious geographic placement, “very well adapted on account of the convenience of the river,” and an ideal base from which “we may pursue our country's trade . . . from Terra Nova to Cape Florida . . . to the West Indies and to Europe, wherever the Lord our God shall be pleased to permit.” Then came the looming threat: the New Englanders, he added, were “fully aware that our country is better than theirs,” thus the States General had to move swiftly to increase trade and settlement. Otherwise, the English would surely take over, and “It will lose even the name of New Netherland, and no Dutchman will have anything to say there.”

Van der Donck's personal style is apparent not just in the individual elements of the presentation but in its exhaustiveness. He could not be content with the lengthy “Remonstrance” on its own, but had added to it a “Petition of the Commonalty of New Netherland to the States General.” Then, for the benefit of the committee members who would study the matter in detail, he added a long section of “Additional Observations on the Preceding Petition.” This, in turn, he footnoted to within an inch of its life, so that every aspect of the delegates' case—the limitless potential of the colony, the legality of the Dutch claim to the territory, the rights of the people who inhabited it—was covered, documented, supported, cross-referenced. The man's exuberance comes through in the utter mania of his documentation, which reads in parts like the output of a law clerk on amphetamines. A single sentence of what are already “Additional Observations” might have eight footnotes. At one point, in a sentence in which Van der Donck says that he and his colleagues presume to know the reasons for the colony's mismanagement, which he then goes on to enumerate, he footnotes the word
presume
in order to add: “Not that there is any doubt of it; for it is as clear and notorious as that the sun emits light.”

Then came the props—supporting materials to give the rulers graphic reminders of the fat promise of their overseas province. Beaver pelts were laid before the high and mighty gentlemen, still reeking of the American forests, seeming almost illicit, in this civilized setting, in their bushy fecundity. And there were samples of unspecified “fruits” of the land, which, given the season and timing of the journey, might have meant tobacco, pumpkins, squash, beets, apples, nuts, corn, and certainly sacks of grain, of which the colonists were proud (“I have seen rye,” Van der Donck himself would write elsewhere, “which grew so tall that a man of common size would bind the ears together above his head”).

Realizing that, like as not, these rulers had no clear idea of the geography in question, Van der Donck also produced a meticulous hand-drawn map—probably created by Augustin Herman, who was a skilled cartographer—showing the province in its entirety and covering the coast from Maine to Virginia and extending as far west as central Pennsylvania.

There was perhaps one further piece of documentation, the original of which has only recently come to light. In 1992 a researcher at the Austrian National Library came across two pieces of a colored pen-and-ink townscape that had for decades been shelved separately. Fitting them together, he realized he had an early view of New Amsterdam—one that fits into the history of the Dutch colony at precisely this moment. This delicate, ephemerally colored illustration (reproduced on the cover of this book) shows a motley spread of dwellings—some of wood, some gabled brick—hugging the shoreline, and a crude fort sporting the Dutch flag. There are no people in the scene. There is reason—which will be discussed below—to believe that Van der Donck brought this almost haunting portrait of his colony's capital to cap his presentation.

All of this work—the delegates' own efforts and those of others on Manhattan who were supporting them—was done, Van der Donck declared, with a touch of feeling surely unusual in an official communication, “for the love of New Netherland.” Then, having spread these layers of details and baskets of bounty before the men of government, he exited with a graceful pirouette, adding that he hoped the mighty rulers would “interpret most favorably this our presumption.”

Presumption was the right word. The nerve of the Manhattan activists requires a bit of unpacking to appreciate. The Dutch system in the seventeenth century was one in which power was apportioned through well-worn channels. The States General was a fairly weak national body, rather like the original confederation that existed for the first eight years of American independence (the customary title of “High and Mighty Gentlemen” being something in the nature of a compensation); it had sway in overseas matters, such as overseeing colonial affairs, but most power was held by the provinces, and by the great overseas trading companies, which functioned almost as branches of government. The maintaining of overseas trading posts by these companies—and their right to make money from them—was deeply embedded in the system. Yet Van der Donck was quite explicit in what he asked of the leaders: “In our opinion this country will never flourish under the Honorable Company's government. . . . It would, therefore, be better and more advantageous for the country and themselves were they rid of it and the remnant of their property transported hence.” Remove the niceties and the request is: “Get them out of here, and their belongings, too.” It was a call to change the system, to strip West India Company shareholders of a property into which they had put enormous amounts of money and to have the central government take it over directly and give it political status within the Dutch system.

For Van der Donck, Melyn, Govert Loockermans, Augustin Herman, and their colleagues to expect the States General to undercut the entire political-economic system for the sake of a few merchants and settlers clustered on a distant island was certainly bold. So bold, in fact, that some historians have seen their mission as a freak, a pipedream—very forward-looking, perhaps, and in a way anticipating the political demands made during the American revolution, but basically out of step with the times.

But it wasn't. As an illustration of how Van der Donck's undertaking meshed with other events, shortly before the delegates had set sail from Manhattan, news of the beheading of King Charles reached the colony. As Van der Donck arrived in Holland, a debate was being waged via pamphlets—which, in the era before the coming of newspapers, were the national soapboxes—on the rights of the people and the limits of monarchs. It was sparked by the presence in the Dutch Republic—to be precise, at the Honselaardijk Palace near The Hague, where he had been living in splendor and taking as full advantage of Dutch haven as had waves of humbler refugees from across Europe—of none other than Charles's son and would-be successor, the future Charles II. One prominent intellectual took the line of traditionalists and argued that even if King Charles had been guilty of crimes that warranted execution, primogeniture—the law by which power transferred in a hereditary monarchy—demanded that his son, who had not participated in the crimes, should become the new king, and thus that it was right for the country to harbor him until the Cromwellian madness had passed. But other people felt uncomfortable about harboring a fugitive royal. In the freewheeling public forum of the Dutch Republic, a law student from the University of Utrecht, a young Dutchman very much of Van der Donck's ilk, fired off a responding pamphlet, which was printed and read everywhere, declaiming that, in the new Europe, and in a newly independent republic, such attachment to royalty was out of step with the times. Monarchs, he declared, derived their power not from God but from the people. Van der Donck's cause was not king-versus-people, of course. But this debate about the limits of a king's power shows that what it was about—the right of a people to have a voice in their government—was a subject very much in the air at the time the Manhattan delegates presented their case.

There was also outright political activism in the air. As Van der Donck was beginning his mission in The Hague on behalf of the colony, a former Jesuit named Franciscus van den Enden was organizing a kind of Socratic academy in Amsterdam, encouraging young men to experiment freely with ideas of democracy and social equality. The most famous student to emerge from Van den Enden's coterie was Baruch Spinoza, the Amsterdam Jew who would become notorious in his lifetime, and legendary beyond, for continuing to develop the principles of modern philosophy laid down by Descartes. Some of the ideas that would emerge from this circle—democratic government, communal living, joint ownership of property, questioning the literal truth of the Bible, a public school system—sound almost freakishly modern, which makes the point that the roots of the modern world go back farther than is often thought.

Van den Enden's circle would have had a natural affinity with Van der Donck and his idealistic scheme for his colony. It's possible that Van der Donck got to know them during his time in Holland. Certainly they eventually came to know of the Dutch colony, perhaps as a result of his efforts, and would come to make it the focus for one of their schemes, a bizarre, proto-Communist experiment in utopian living. A decade after Van der Donck's mission, Van den Enden would write a draft constitution for such a community, to be based in the American colony. The group actually won a charter for the venture, and in 1663 forty-one latter-day Pilgrims, led by Pieter Plockhoy (who has become known as a father of socialism), settled on Delaware Bay, on land Stuyvesant had won back from the Swedes. But the timing was bad. Just months later, the English took over the whole Dutch colony of New Netherland, and when they did they destroyed the utopian settlement. Plockhoy himself would survive and live the last thirty years of his life in the New World, ending his days upriver, a resident of the new city of Philadelphia.

Like Van der Donck's mission, these projects were probably overly idealistic, products of the first wave of thinkers to come along in the wake of men like Descartes and Grotius, who had aspired to shift the center of human effort from the church to the human mind. But if, in the end, Van der Donck and his colleagues would not get all they wanted, they would change the system and pave the way for a new society. Why American history has overlooked their accomplishment has to do in part with Anglocentrism and also probably with something as mundane as the way colonial studies have traditionally been divided in American universities: English departments focusing on the English colonies, the Spanish colonies covered in the Spanish department, and so on. This meant both that the Dutch colony was relegated to the margins (few American universities have Dutch departments) and that colonial studies as a whole were approached narrowly. The discipline of history has broken down some of those walls in recent years, as it's become clear that educated Europeans of the seventeenth century were aware of the world and their place in it, and were affected by distant events. To understand events in one region therefore requires an appreciation for what was going on elsewhere. The fact that one volume of primary source material crucial to understanding what the Dutch did on Manhattan Island is entitled
Curaçao Papers
illustrates the point. There were global networks even then.