The Island at the Center of the World (28 page)

Give Van der Donck's mission its context, therefore, and it pops into relief. On the one hand are the records of the colony, still being translated and published, which show a churning settlement inhabited by a mix of tough individuals who see the possibilities of the place and want to explore them. It was a society—something worth fighting for. Then, too, the colonists were quite connected to the wider world. What fueled Van der Donck and his colleagues, what drove them in their idealism, was the spirit of the age. Extraordinary things were happening in Europe, and they knew it. They wrestled with the implications of the Treaty of Münster, and the broader Peace of Westphalia. Like the delegates to the treaty talks, like the members of Van den Enden's circle, they were following in the footsteps of Hugo Grotius, applying his principles of law to their New World colony.

It's also notable that, as radical as the colonists' petition may have been, it was treated seriously in the halls of government. Following the initial presentation, the high mightinesses shuffled in their chairs, flipped through pages, discussed the matter, and appointed a committee to explore it in depth. It had been a nagging issue; now was the time to deal with it.

There must have been some reveling that night in The Hague. The three Americans had to have been delighted with their first appearance before the governing body. But if they hoped for a speedy resolution of their case, they were soon disappointed. Within a matter of days, the States General found itself in the middle of a royalist crisis of its own, which had been building for some time and which now swept all lesser matters aside. The civil war in England was not an isolated event. The Dutch government wasn't based on a constitution, but was a patchwork of institutions and laws, some quite forward-thinking, others relics of the feudal past. It was a republic, but it also had its noble families, and it had a first family, the House of Orange and Nassau. By long tradition, the Prince of Orange was elected as Stadtholder—an office akin to president, but one whose duties were ambiguous. The ambiguity had been a source of irritation to the previous Prince of Orange, Frederik Hendrik, who had served as Stadtholder since 1625, had led the armies to victory in the war on Spain, and steadily and astutely increased his power during his life. His ultimate objective was to convert his family to the status of monarchy, but his big step in that direction had been fantastically ill-timed: in 1641 he had married his fifteen-year-old son, Willem, to Mary Stuart, the nine-year-old daughter of Charles I of England. At virtually the same moment, the English civil war began, and by the end of the decade Charles, to whom Frederik Hendrik had linked his fortunes, was headless.

From the beginning, the Dutch were annoyed that their noble family had hitched itself to royalty, and to doomed royalty at that. Frederik Hendrik's second major blunder was to try to waylay the peace talks at Münster. The Eighty Years' War had been very good for his family; it had made his father, William the Silent, into an icon, the “father of the nation.” Beyond that, the Stadtholder was the head of the army; peace with Spain would mean a shriveling of his significance. But the merchant rulers of the province of Holland, and especially of the city of Amsterdam, had determined that peace was in their interest, and history moved in their direction. The peace treaty was signed, and just as it became clear that he had lost, Frederik Hendrik died.

The matter was far from over, however. The new Stadtholder, Willem, was, at twenty-one, volatile, arrogant, and as indifferent toward his advisors as he was toward his English child-wife. He was smart, but wild, and soon proved a more dangerous force than his father. Only days after the Manhattan delegates had presented their petition, the States of Holland—the regional assembly of the province of Holland, which also met at The Hague—voted to decommission many of the soldiers in its pay. It ought to have been an ordinary postwar measure; the world over, when wars are concluded, armies downsize. But every soldier lost was a lessening of the Stadtholder's power, and Willem reacted as if stung. He sent out orders of his own to the army officers, instructing them to maintain their troops. The officers obeyed the prince. The joyous atmosphere of The Hague instantly clouded. The States General hastily arranged to talk things over with the prince. He agreed to a reduction in troop totals, but only if those let go were Dutch. This sent a chill through the nation's chattering classes; all knew that a sizable portion of the army consisted of mercenaries, and that, in the event of a schism between the prince and the States General, these would be more inclined to stay at his side, less likely to succumb to patriotism. It was suddenly clear that Willem, feeling his power threatened, was actively considering a military move against his own newly independent nation. In fact, Willem was even more intent than his father had been to exchange the title of Stadtholder for a crown. In secret meetings with the French ambassador, he had already accepted French offers to help him achieve what the ambassador referred to in a report as “a grandeur far beyond that of his predecessors.”

With the government in a state of crisis, business on all lesser matters came to a halt. Van der Donck refused to sit still, however, and used the time to strike out in another direction. The colony wasn't merely a political cause; it also needed settlers, traders, shippers. Maybe most of all, it needed publicity. So he switched from politician to public relations agent, and went off in search of a printer who would publish his “Remonstrance.” It wouldn't be easy; the document was a sustained attack on one of the most powerful companies in the country. It would have to be a publisher unafraid of controversy.

He found his man. Michiel Stael was a twenty-four-year-old baker's son who, in the wake of the peace treaty, had left his hometown of Delft to come to the capital and set up as a printer of books and pamphlets. The time was right for it: Europe was churning with activity in the aftermath of Westphalia, and the Dutch Republic was the publishing capital of the Continent. Where at the turn of the century there had been four publishers in The Hague, there were now thirty-nine. Stael was eager to make a name for himself. At the time Van der Donck found him, he had just begun, publishing a few pamphlets for the French market. The work he was soon to do reveals a sharp taste for controversy. Nearly all his output for the years 1649 and 1650 would be political, and the titles suggest both the international nature of his business and the hot-off-the-press currency of their contents: “Two Letters of General Cromwell, Telling the Particulars of the Battle Between the English and Scottish Armies at Dunbar,” “Propositions of the Ambassador of Spain to the Lords States General,” “Letter of a Private Individual to the Parliament of Paris on the Detention of Princes Conde, de Conty and Longueville.” He had a penchant for radical politics; the following year he would get in trouble with the law for producing publications critical of some of the leading men in Holland—proving that even in the most liberal of publishing climates there were limits. At one point he would be put in the stocks. His career would climax with him being chased by law officers through the streets of The Hague and into an inn (the Bend of Guinea), where he would escape through a window. He would turn up in Rotterdam a few years later and continue publishing.

Van der Donck found Stael in the cramped apartment he shared with his wife, their child, and his business partner. The print shop was also on the premises, and, appropriate for a man drawn to danger, the place looked out across the outer court of The Hague onto the Gevangenpoort, a squat brick building with an arched gateway that gave entrance into the government complex and also served as the town prison.
*24
With his penchant for sticking it to men in power, Stael must have been delighted by Van der Donck's document and its radical proposal to divest the West India Company of one of its own provinces. As a businessman, he must also have sensed a market for the work—the West India Company was widely seen as a failure now, its share price, once as high as 206 guilders, having fallen to 14—and a ripe target for ridicule. He agreed to publish the “Remonstrance.”

Stael apparently introduced Van der Donck to an engraver named Hendrik Hondius, who lived a few doors away on the Buitenhof. Van der Donck wanted his map of New Netherland to be published alongside the “Remonstrance,” and it seems that Hondius put him in touch with his brother-in-law in Amsterdam, Johannes Jansson, to engrave it. If Van der Donck had done nothing else, publishing this map would have merited a place in history. The so-called Jansson-Visscher map (Claes Visscher produced a corrected edition) would be reprinted thirty-one times between 1650 and the mid-1700s, would become the definitive map not only for the Dutch but for the English as well, and is still reproduced today as the most accurate rendering of northeastern North America in the colonial period and one of the most beautiful examples of early mapmaking. It would show up in drawing rooms, shipping offices, and libraries across Europe, and thus help permanently afix Dutch names—from Cape May to Lange Eylandt to Roode Eylandt (Rhode Island)—to much of northeastern America. It also represents a fine example of the little-studied genre of cartographic propaganda: the conscious use of maps, especially by the Dutch and English, to imprint their mastery of the globe onto European minds. The Jansson-Visscher map purports to show northeastern North America dispassionately, but in fact the Dutch colony is given central position, and, more to the point, the map associates the name of New Netherland with a distinct portion of the globe, an arc of the continent from Cape Cod to Delaware. This followed Van der Donck's dogged insistence on adhering to the broad boundaries originally established by Henry Hudson and the explorer who followed him, Adriaen Block.

There was one other item of propaganda embedded in the map. The little pen-and-ink view of New Amsterdam, which Van der Donck had apparently brought with him to illustrate the mournful countenance of the colony to the States General, was to serve a second function. Just as he would use the “Remonstrance” twice—once to impress the rulers with the woeful condition of the colony, and again as a public relations tool to entice settlers—Van der Donck seems to have taken the piece of art to the engraver Johannes Blaeu and asked him to create something from it suitable for publication. The finished colored engraving, labeled “NIEUW AMSTERDAM op 't Eylant Manhattans,” would appear in stand-alone editions as well as an inset view on later editions of the map; it follows the pen-and-ink illustration in every detail, except that where the original artwork shows a tumbledown village devoid of humans, the Manhattan town in Blaeu's engraved view is pert and orderly—chimneyed, gabled, weather-vaned, and bristling with life. Van der Donck's personality—unflagging boosterism for his New World colony and a willingness to flex the truth to suit his audience—is stamped on these items, which are now housed in museums and libraries around the world.

About this time, with the States General preoccupied and Stael getting the “Remonstrance” ready for publication, Van der Donck journeyed south to his native city of Breda to visit his family. Of his two sisters, three brothers, and their spouses and children, most seemed to have been living in Breda at this time. His sister Agatha had gone off to Amboyna with her husband, an official in the East India Company, but had returned after he died there; his sister Johanna was soon to marry a local merchant. So we can imagine a boisterous homecoming, there in the (comparatively) sunny southern city, with its buildings clustered in medieval fashion around the Gothic church. A year before, however, Van der Donck's parents had done something unusual for the times, even in what was the most progressive society in Europe: obtained a legal separation. Even more remarkable, it was Van der Donck's mother, Agatha van Bergen, who agreed to pay alimony to her husband. Little is known about Van der Donck's father, Cornelis; clearly, what money and prestige the family had came from the Van Bergen side. It was Adriaen van Bergen, namesake and grandfather of Adriaen van der Donck, who had become legendary for his role in the liberation of Breda from the Spanish, and the fact that Agatha van Bergen was willing and able to pay her husband one hundred guilders per year suggests that the money was hers by inheritance.
*25

The family greeted the long-gone son. It was a different human being who had returned to them; the bookish boy had become a man, with a wider gait and firmer grip. He had tramped over purple mountains, slept on forest floors, shared meals in native longhouses. For nine years he had breathed a different air. It was in his eyes and voice: Van der Donck arrived in Breda irradiated with enthusiasm—whatever feelings he had over his parents' separation were not enough to quel it. To all his relations, he talked up the American colony that was his home and his cause as a land of opportunity. The only thing that was missing from this potential paradise he himself was in the process of arranging: good government. His passion, coupled with the admiration they must have felt for him—he who had gone into the wilderness and returned a leader of men, a statesman, presenting his case before the national government—swept his family members off their feet. Over the next two years, both of his parents—separately—would liquidate their holdings, pack up everything, and board ships for Manhattan. So, too, would go one of his brothers, his wife, their son, and several servants. His zeal seems to have engulfed everyone in its path.

In The Hague, meanwhile, the colony's petition had been put back on the government calendar. Cornelis van Tienhoven—who had been working behind the scenes to undercut the Manhattan delegation—appeared several times and regaled the high and mighty leaders with information intended to show that the colony was not so bad off. Taxes levied at Manhattan, he argued, were favorable compared with what New Englanders paid. There was good farmland available to settlers. And in what is perhaps the earliest record of Manhattan's high cost of living, he produced a comparison chart of the going rates for farm animals in New Netherland and New England: a farmer on Manhattan could sell a year-old sow for twenty guilders, where in Boston it would only fetch twelve.