The Island at the Center of the World (29 page)

There is an irony in the contrasting views of the colony presented by the bitter rivals Van der Donck and Van Tienhoven. Van der Donck, in his effort to win support for an overseas province that he believed could in time out-earn the entire home country, stressed the bleak state of affairs there, at every turn skewing things toward the desperate, in many cases depicting as current the situation that had existed a few years earlier, in the aftermath of the Indian war. Van Tienhoven's more vibrant depiction may have more accurately reflected the current state of affairs. The irony is that Van der Donck's more forceful and elegant presentation, which after all was intended ultimately to bolster the colony, has over the long term swayed historians and contributed to the image of the Dutch-led settlement as congenitally defective.

Despite Van Tienhoven's presentation before the committee, as Van der Donck returned to The Hague the real excitement was taking place outside the government chamber. Michiel Stael's pamphlet version of the “Remonstrance”—dramatically retitled
Remonstrance of New Netherland, Concerning Its Location, Fruitfulness, and Sorry Condition—
had hit the streets, and it was making a stir not only in The Hague but in Amsterdam, Haarlem, and elsewhere. The
Remonstrance
gave a grim picture of recent events and the colonists' struggle, but Van der Donck's descriptions of a vast, fertile land, “capable of being entirely cultivated by an abundance of people . . . many very fine flats and maize lands” and “very good meadows” that “could with little labor be converted into good tillage land,” of rich soil that bears crops “with less labor and tilling than in the Netherlands,” made an impression. His trademark tangents of poetic cataloguing (the trees of the colony: “post-oak . . . butter oak . . . oil nut . . . hickory . . . water-beech . . . hedge beech, axhandle wood, two sorts of canoe wood, ash, birch, pine, lathwood, Imberen or wild cedar, linden, alder, willow, thorn, elder”) added to the allure, inflaming the imaginations of people who had lived all their lives on forestless plains and polders.

The response to the publication—and to the accompanying map and illustration of New Amsterdam—was immediate. Perhaps through Stael—whose address was given on the title page—people contacted the delegates and pronounced themselves ready to go, to pull up stakes and seek their fortunes on Manhattan. The directors of the West India Company were flabbergasted. “Formerly New Netherland was never spoken of,” they wrote to Stuyvesant, “and now heaven and earth seem to be stirred up by it and every one tries to be the first in selecting the best pieces [of land] there.” Van der Donck and his colleagues acted quickly. They found a ship's captain in Amsterdam willing to convey settlers to Manhattan. People streamed to the harbor; in a short time, one hundred and forty settlers, all paying their own way, had been accepted, and the skipper, Willem Thomassen, pronounced the ship full to capacity. He turned away hundreds more.

Van der Donck then moved to capitalize on this outpouring of interest in the colony. He composed a breathless petition to the committee of the States General—addressing in particular its chairman, Alexander van der Cappellen, whom Van der Donck knew to be an enemy of the West India Company—in which he described the turn of events: the ship now lay ready to sail, and its skipper and owners attested that had they six more such ships they would be able to fill them. “[I]n the hope of better government,” Van der Donck wanted the States General to see, “more passengers begin to set their faces toward New Netherland, according as the passage and opportunity offer.” With his customary attention to details, he then got the ship's captain to attest as much before a notary.

It seems to have been a classic case of popular will exerting sudden pressure on politicans. The same day that Van der Donck presented the evidence of popular interest in the colony, the States General fired off a series of letters to the various chambers of the West India Company, asking them to send representatives to The Hague to appear two weeks hence in a joint meeting with the delegates from Manhattan, to confer “on the whole subject of New Netherland,” and concluding: “Wherein fail not.” A week later, Van der Donck got the Amsterdam chamber of the company to sign a contract with him and the other delegates to charter a ship capable of conveying an additional two hundred settlers to Manhattan. The company would front the costs, and the delegates would arrange the details. The ship would set sail before the first of June.

He was the consummate promoter now, working on all fronts, and getting results. By now he had a close working relationship with the members of the committee of the States General that had been assigned to deal with the colony, and they were showing distinct signs of favoring the cause, each of which elicited a protest from Van Tienhoven. On the committee's recommendation, the States General decided to send a notary from The Hague to the colony; the reason for Van Tienhoven's anger was that in doing so the leaders were taking certain political powers away from Stuyvesant and his council—away from the West India Company—and investing them in an official of the government. From Van der Donck's perspective, it was a step in the right direction.

Then, in April of 1650, came the decisive ruling. With nearly all the principals gathered in the chamber—Van der Donck and his colleagues as well as representatives from most of the regional chambers of the West India Company—the committee issued a “Provisional Order respecting the Government, Preservation and Peopling of New Netherland.” No doubt all leaned forward in their chairs as a member of the committee labored through swaths of boilerplate before declaring that the committee, “having inquired into the system of government hitherto maintained in New Netherland,” had concluded that the members of the States General “cannot, and ought not any longer approve of the perverse administration of the privileges and benefits granted by charter to the stockholders of the West India Company [while] neglecting or opposing the good plans and offers submitted for the security of the boundaries and the increase of the population of that country.” There it was—the clear signal of the committee's verdict.

Then came specific orders to be put into effect. First and most importantly, “within the city of New Amsterdam a municipal government . . .” Until such a government came into being, the Board of Nine would continue, “and have jurisdiction over small cases arising between Man and Man . . .” The committee also referenced the sudden popular interest in emigrating to the colony: “Private vessels proceeding to the north parts of America and the islands thereabouts, shall be obliged to convey over all passengers who will present themselves to be taken to New Netherland . . .” And there was a recommendation that a sum of fifteen thousand guilders be put into an account for the benefit of would-be settlers who could not afford the passage.

Off on its own, unadorned by editorializing commentary, was a separate order: “Petrus Stuyvesant, the present Director, shall be instructed to return home and report.”

That was it. The meeting was over—the government had given its unequivocal support to the cause of the delegates. The company representatives were outraged; the Amsterdam chamber quickly prepared a rebuttal. Van der Donck, meanwhile, moved in for the kill. Not content even with this ringing endorsement of his presentation—for the orders still left the West India Company in charge of the colony—he addressed the committee. He was no longer a tentative outlander; six months of appearing at The Hague had given him confidence.

“Noble, Mighty Lords,” he began, flourishes of exultation empurpling his prose. “The very laudable zeal which their High Mightinesses and you, Noble Mighty, have been pleased to evince as well for the preservation of whatever yet remains by God's especial blessing in ruined New Netherland as for the restoration of the sad and prostrate affairs there, supplies me with confidence and courage to lay before you, Noble Mighty, some means which will be highly necessary, and, according to all human calculation, advantageous and profitable to their High Mightinesses' design herein . . .”

He didn't want the States General to forget that the suffering of the settlers of the Manhattan-based colony was due to the disastrous actions of certain West India Company officials—“how much innocent blood, as well of heathens as of Christians and even of sucklings, hath been unnecessarily and barbarously shed.” He asked the committee to accept into the record the list of interrogatories to be put to Van Tienhoven that he had drawn up on Manhattan. Van Tienhoven and others responsible for the Indian war should be prosecuted, he declared.

Van der Donck had determined that Van Tienhoven was disliked in The Hague, and hoped to build on that antipathy to broaden the provisional orders into an outright removal of the West India Company from the colony. But the committee took no action on that front. It did, however, approve of a plan to send two of the delegates—Bout and Van Couwenhoven—back to Manhattan, at the head of a party of settlers, both to convey to Stuyvesant the rulings and to bring a shipment of guns for the defense of the colony. They headed off at once, exchanging exultant farewells with Van der Donck, who would stay to see that the committee's order was adopted by the States General.

Before they left, Van der Donck penned a secret letter they were to deliver. It was addressed to Dr. La Montagne, who had served under both Kieft and Stuyvesant and whom Van der Donck now pinpointed as vital to the power politics being played. This letter was only discovered in 1997—by Dr. Jaap Jacobs, one of the preeminent Dutch historians working on the New Netherland colony—in the Amsterdam Municipal Archives; like a flashlight piercing a centuries-darkened room, it shows Adriaen van der Donck, at this most critical moment of his embassy to The Hague, alive to the wider currents of the era, playing the game of politics with zest and cunning. It also shows that he considered himself leader of the activists' cause. “The old friendship and familiarity bids me to write you these few lines in haste, in order that you may remain assured of our good will towards you,” Van der Donck begins, addressing the man who had sat in judgment on him when Stuyvesant had imprisoned him, but who seems to have taken pains to remain neutral in that and other debates. “I have verbally charged and pressed upon Jacob van Couwenhoven many things to tell you from me, to which I refer.” Then Van der Donck begins massaging in the classic manner of politicians of every era. Certain of triumph, he assures La Montagne that “you will be included in a good position” in “the next government, which we expect shortly.” Then he comes to the point: “It will be very good if you join ranks with the complainants. And it is my request that you will assist the Nine men as much as possible with advice and action . . .” Then he switches tacks to let La Montagne know that the winds of favor have changed direction, and that it wouldn't be wise to remain with the West India Company representatives: “It is well known here that the authors of the war are not punished as they should have been . . . Tienhoven is not in much esteem here and . . . his actions and those of director Kieft regarding the war are damned here by the whole world. The directors try to do their best to defend Stuyvesant, his secretary and their supporters, but they themselves, except for a few, are not in much esteem but are regarded with suspicion . . .”

Clearly, Van der Donck foresaw a time in the very near future when New Amsterdam, and the entire Dutch colony, would be taken over by the government, given normal political status, and made an integral part of the republic. In one of his petitions to the States General, he stresses the vital role he sees the colony playing in the future of the newly independent nation: “this State . . . alone is of greater extent than the Seventeen Dutch Provinces,
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and . . . in the hour of need, will be found a strong arm, by the assistance it will render in people and provisions; for after the population shall have increased, your High Mightinesses will carry on a very large trade from the one to the other of your own countries—hinc inde et inde hinc—without any save your High Mightinesses' having control or authority over it.” Such an arrangement would have been unprecedented—almost as if New Netherland were an eighth province in the Dutch republic, a noncontiguous state along the lines of an Alaska or Hawaii. Had it happened, of course, history—American, English, and Dutch—would have turned out much differently. In the spring of 1650, at least in Van der Donck's mind, it was a real possibility. The government was on the side of the colonists, Stuyvesant had been recalled, and Van der Donck, an ocean away from Manhattan, was laying out a new administration.

Chapter 12

A DANGEROUS MAN

A
fter all, Peter Stuyvesant was a country boy. Besides, a military compound was no place for toddlers to toddle, no place for a woman. So, sometime around 1650, he must have loaded his wife and their two young sons into a wagon and headed north up the Highway. Within five minutes they were in open country, meadows and pastureland punctuated by stands of forest. The road turned sharply to the right to skirt the bouwerie of his secretary, Van Tienhoven, then cut northward, elbowing through wilderness, before opening, on the left, onto an expanse of lots that were being farmed by freed slaves. Soon this area would form a village in its own right, which for a time would be called Noortwyck, or North District, before a settler from the Long Island village of Greenwyck (Pine District) would relocate here and give his property that name. (It would seem to be from this, not from English sources, that Greenwich Village would receive its name.)

Turning right off the Bouwerie Road, as this stretch of the trail was known, Stuyvesant brought his family down a lane and into the patch of the island he was in the process of taming as his own. In its marshy serenity—snipes and widgeons alighting on swampy ponds, stiff winds coming off the river bending the grasses, cows hunkering under bruised skies—it may have reminded him of home. It was two miles from the pit of troubles that was the capital city of his domain, and it must have seemed an ocean away. From the beginning, the West India Company had set aside this stretch of acreage for the use of the director of the colony, to be farmed by his workers, and so Kieft and his predecessors had used it. Stuyvesant had other ideas. He was a family man now, and he wanted to put down his roots. Within the year he would arrange to buy the farm, called Bouwerie Number One, outright from the company, and then purchase acreage on both sides of it, giving him a plantation stretching from the East River west to the center of the island and covering approximately three hundred acres. Here he built a manor and a chapel. Here he would live out his life and be buried, and here, over the parade of centuries, flappers, shtetl refugees, hippies, and punks—an aggregate of local residents running from Trotsky to Auden to Charlie Parker to Joey Ramone—would shuffle past his tomb.
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Leaving Judith with the young armfuls of Balthasar and Nicholas, he rode daily from this retreat into the maelstrom, greeting, as he passed the company orchard and cemetery and approached the cluster of streets of the town, the matrons, Indians, tapsters, smugglers, sailors, Africans, toughs and urchins, the refugees and erect citizens and slope-shouldered, eye-patched miscreants that formed his populace. And they in turn, at the unmistakable sight of him, with his cuirass and sword, a military princeling on his steed, offered lusty hellos or muttered curses depending on their political views. And then he disappeared into the fort, stiff as oak and ready to work. He was forty years old, beset by troubles on all sides, but possessed of a personality that fed on adversity.

The wounds kept coming, and many were still being inflicted by Van der Donck, even from an ocean away. Every time the Dutch flag appeared in the harbor these days, the sheaf of news that came with it was stippled with his doings. These “seditious persons, like Cornelis Melyn, Adrian van der Donck and some others . . . seem to leave nothing untried, to upset every kind of government,” the company directors wrote him in February 1650. By April they had apparently learned of Stuyvesant's onetime chumminess with Van der Donck and were exasperated that he had given the man an intimacy that he had then exploited for political purposes. “We suppose that you have trusted too much in some of these ringleaders or become too familiar with them,” they wrote, “now that their ingratitude and treachery have come to light, you must still act with the cunning of a fox . . .”

It was annoying to be scolded in this way and infuriating that Van der Donck seemed to have charmed the States General into siding with him and his cronies. Stuyvesant had by now heard of the provisional orders for the reorganization of the colony, but no one had yet sent him a command to enforce them. Far from doing so, he reacted to the threat of Van der Donck's mission by becoming not more conciliatory but more summary. He had finally had enough insubordination from his vice director, Van Dinklagen, and had the man thrown in prison. He placed spies among the Board of Nine and their associates. He virtually gave up on the quaint idea of allowing the people a voice in their government, and more and more took to deciding matters on his own. Augustin Herman and the other leaders of the opposition sent Van der Donck a stream of correspondence, keeping him updated on these turns of events. “We live like sheep among wolves, one friend not being able to speak to another without suspicion,” one dispatch read. “He proceeds no longer by words or writings,” went another, “but by arrests and stripes.” Reading the pages of complaints against Stuyvesant, you feel in his harshness the uncorking of a long-bottled fury the sources of which are at least guessable. There was the dutiful son of a minister who had watched his godly and upright father remarry and lustily devote himself to his new young bride. There was the would-be wooer so embarrassingly pent up that the brother of the woman he wished to marry bet that he would be unable to ask for her hand. Finally, there was the administrator who put his trust in a young protégé only to see him turn on him and upend heaven and hell to have him ousted.

Meanwhile, he had to deal with matters on other fronts, because the incoming ships were packed with new arrivals, seasickened and unwashed but ready to stake a claim, and this also was a result of the delegation: “Many free people are coming over in this ship. . . . Many free people have taken passage on these two ships. . . . It looks as if many people will come over by every ship . . .” There was a hint of annoyance in the directors' letters—“people here encourage each other with the prospect of becoming mighty lords there, if inclined to work”—but they had to admit that “it may have a good result.”

The irony was that while Van der Donck was pushing with zeal to oust Peter Stuyvesant from his post as director of the colony, Stuyvesant himself was executing some brilliant diplomacy, working hard to ensure the stability of the colony in the face of its steadily encroaching neighbors to the north. Indeed, it is due to the successes of both of these bitter rivals that New York City would develop as it did. Had either failed, the English would probably have swept in before Dutch institutions were established, New York would have become another English New World port town like Boston, and American culture would never have developed as it did.

In his three years on Manhattan, Stuyvesant had nudged and tweaked the New England governors to get them to settle boundaries. They had declared their desire to meet, but had nattered and stalled. And when the aged John Winthrop, on whom Stuyvesant had depended as his best advocate among the Puritan crowd, died in 1649, that upset things further. But brazenness was part of Stuyvesant's arsenal. He recognized the maxim that force can help bring the other side to negotiate, and he put it to work. It happened that a Dutch trading vessel owned by an Italian businessman based in Amsterdam had put into harbor at New Haven. Stuyvesant had determined that the vessel—the
St. Beninio—
was engaged in smuggling. According to Dutch claims, the entire New Haven colony lay in Dutch territory. By now there were so many English settlers there that the point was academic, but Stuyvesant saw the ship's presence as the pretext for an attention-grabbing act. He had previously sold one of the West India Company's ships to the deputy governor of New Haven, with a promise to deliver it. Now—with utter audacity considering that he was at the same time sending polite diplomatic letters to the governor—he undertook a bit of derring-do generally reserved for wartime, known as cutting a ship out of harbor. He had the vessel to be delivered to New Haven stuffed, Trojan horse–like, with soldiers. As her skipper brought her into the harbor at New Haven, he came in alongside the
St. Beninio,
his soldiers leaped aboard, cut the ship's lines, took command, and piloted her out to sea and back to New Amsterdam.

As expected, Theophilus Eaton, the rigid Puritan governor of New Haven, fired off a letter, practically tripping over his clauses in his outrage,
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declaring that Stuyvesant had violated his colony's territory and absconded with a ship doing peaceable business there. Stuyvesant replied with mock innocence (“For what have I either written or done, that may seeme offensive . . .”) while at the same time asserting that it was a Dutch ship, it had violated Dutch laws, and—the zinger—that the Dutch regarded the territory in question as theirs by right of first discovery. In subsequent letters he politely reminded the New England governors of the overwhelming might of the Dutch navy, without bothering to mention that virtually none of that might was under his control.

At the same time, he massaged John Endecott, Winthrop's replacement as governor of Massachusetts (we “Congratulate and reioyce that our neighbours there have Chosen soe worthy & prudent a successour”), in hopes that Endecott would continue Winthrop's tack of treating with the Manhattanites. It worked—the two forged a relationship. Indeed, one of the curiosities of Stuyvesant's term in office was his tendency to impress and even befriend potential enemies—English ones in particular—while treating his own colonists more or less like dirt. Eaton of New Haven and Edward Hopkins of Connecticut remained moody about the Dutch, but the combination of Stuyvesant's wooing of Endecott and his brinksmanship with the southern New Englanders—stealing a ship, resurrecting the Dutch claim to their lands, and brandishing the bogeyman of the Dutch navy—got results. Endecott and the other leaders of Massachusetts wanted peace; they forced the other New Englanders to agree to Stuyvesant's offer to meet and hash out boundaries, and instructed their delegates to “doe your utmost endeavor to make up an Agreement between [the Dutch] and Newhaven & Conecticott least if a warre or broiles arise betweene them wee be chardged and encoragged in it.”

The governors wanted to meet in Boston; Stuyvesant suggested Manhattan. The compromise was Hartford, some miles up what the Dutch called the Fresh River. It was a humming little community of pious breakaways from the other New England territories, but right in its midst sat a squat and forlorn outpost manned by a handful of Dutch soldiers. Twenty-seven years earlier traders from Manhattan had been the first Europeans to establish themselves here, but the population of the Dutch colony was too thin to enable them to cover the region, and they had been forced to watch the English muscle in. Stuyvesant alighted from his ship in September of 1650, pegged up the quay, no doubt greeted Gysbert op Dyck, the commander of the Dutch fort, and greeted his four fellow statesmen. With him as secretaries and interpreters were two Englishmen, George Baxter and Thomas Willett; had things gone differently, this no doubt would have been an occasion where he would have relied on Van der Donck.

The negotiations were intense but cordial. The New Englanders pulled out their best wines and otherwise treated Stuyvesant like a visiting head of state. Eaton and Hopkins did not want to give quarter, but Stuyvesant and Endecott had stacked the deck in their favor by ensuring that all of New England's negotiators were from the less anti-Dutch colonies of Massachusetts or New Plymouth. In the final agreement, Stuyvesant gave up only what was already lost: the territory now indisputably occupied by New Haven and Connecticut. In exchange, he won acknowledgment by the English of a “permanent” boundary between them and the Dutch colony. The negotiators drew a north-south line that ran through Long Island and the mainland, and gave the eastern two-thirds of the island and territory on the mainland east of present-day Greenwich, Connecticut, to New England, and western Long Island and lands west of the same point on the mainland to the Dutch. Today, the division of Long Island into counties with distinctly Dutch and English names—Nassau and Suffolk—reflects this agreement, though the county line runs about ten miles east of the Hartford Treaty line. The Dutch were also allowed to keep their meager trading post, bravely named the “House of Hope,” in Hartford.
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It was a remarkable achievement for Stuyvesant. He had used diplomacy and bluffing to leverage what little military power he had to advantage; he had given up only what had already been lost, and in exchange won from his English neighbors recognition of his colony's sovereignty. The two southern New England colonies were disgruntled, but the line held: throughout the lifetime of the Dutch colony, there would be no invasion from the north.

I
N
T
HE
H
AGUE,
meanwhile, Van der Donck had been making progress as well. Then, once again, the Prince of Orange upset things. On June 5, regular business at the States General chamber was disrupted when the hot-blooded Willem, still incensed over the attempt by the province of Holland to reduce the size of his army, appeared in person and announced that he intended to lead a contingent of soldiers to all the cities of Holland to explain to the military commanders of each that the only valid orders regarding disbanding would come from him. Van der Donck was no doubt in the crowd that gathered in the center of The Hague three days later to observe the grim spectacle of four hundred soldiers, Willem flamboyantly at their head, assembling and riding off in the direction of Dordrecht.

The mission failed. In the face of this major power struggle between the prince and the strongest province in the republic, the towns of Holland closed ranks behind their provincial leaders; some even refused the prince entry. He returned to The Hague in a rage, stalked into the chamber where the States of Holland met, and demanded that the members from the city of Amsterdam pull back on their call for troop reductions. The Amsterdammers, feeling flush, were in a position to respond with legalities. Technically, they informed Willem in an icy reply, it was the stadtholder who served at the pleasure of the provincial assembly, not the other way around. If anyone was in the position of giving orders, it was the States. There was no possible rationale for keeping wartime troop levels intact. In their inactivity, the soldiers would soon start getting into trouble. It was time they went to their homes.