The Island at the Center of the World (30 page)

Willem's response was unprecedented: he ordered the arrest of several members of the provincial assembly. They were taken to nearby Loevestein Castle and held prisoner.

The news of this shocking breach of authority swept through The Hague. Crowds gathered spontaneously on the streets and plazas around the Binnenhof, and even as they gossiped they were further alarmed by the spectacle of mounted mercenaries gathering on the perimeter. Van der Donck's hot-blooded printer, Michiel Stael, seems to have put out a pamphlet on the affair, for which he was slapped with a libel charge.

Then came the decisive stroke. At the end of July, Willem Frederik, cousin of the Prince of Orange, led ten thousand troops on an all-night march across Holland. Their mission was to take Amsterdam by force. All of Holland was in shock: Willem was restaging the play that had just run in England, at terrible cost to all. A coup d'état was in progress.

But Willem's power play was foiled by the weather. Traveling across the province by night and in a lashing storm, the army arrived at the gates of Amsterdam well past daybreak, by which time the city magistrates had had warning and prepared defenses. Having lost the element of surprise, Willem Frederik paused. A delegation from the States General hurried to the scene to negotiate a settlement. A messenger brought the Prince of Orange the news of the army's blunder while he was at the dinner table. Seeing the end of his dream of royalty, he stormed into his private apartment, where, in the words of one writer, he “was heard stamping his feet and throwing his hat upon the floor.” Soon, the prince and the city reached a compromise on troop reductions. The crisis had passed.

Then, Willem obliged history by dying immediately on the heels of his failed power grab. In an effort to wind down from the affair, he went on a hunting trip with his cousin and fell ill from what was apparently smallpox. On the night of November 6, the States General gathered for an emergency session to hear the startling news that the twenty-four-year-old prince was dead.

Willem's coltish lunges for power kept the case of the Manhattan-based colony shelved for months. All the parties concerned stood on the sidelines and waited to see the outcome of the larger battle between the nation's leading nobleman and its most powerful city. In the course of the mad summer of 1650, it must have struck Van der Donck that his far-off colony, for all its seeming lawlessness, was hardly more chaotic or fragile than the civilized and supposedly stable home country. Far from trying to seize anything by force, he and his colleagues were following the rules—indeed, they were among the first Americans to exercise a right that would achieve near-hallowed status in the colonies and later in the nation: the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.

With the madcap interlude at an end, the government could return to something like normal, and Van der Donck's cause did not seem to have been hurt by the delay. Less than two weeks after Willem's death, Van der Donck was again before the States General, as was Van Tienhoven. All through the winter and into the spring the two men alternated in presenting their cases as Van der Donck tried to have the provisional orders for the reorganization of his colony put into force and Van Tienhoven tried to block them. Van der Donck had his foe repeatedly on the ropes, as the States General asked Van Tienhoven several times to submit answers to Van der Donck's interrogatories concerning his conduct during the Indian war. Each time, however, Van Tienhoven managed to dodge the issue.

Then, astonishingly, in the middle of this high-level politicking that was surely the most important work of his life, Van Tienhoven vanished. The States General had gotten word that the man might attempt to flee the country, and the governing body took the unusual step of issuing a decree forbidding him from leaving, to no avail. As information about his disappearance began to trickle out, the facts proved not only to be a blow to Stuyvesant and the West India Company, but an embarrassment as well. Despite being grossly overweight, “of red and bloated visage,” and sporting a prominently juicy cyst—not to mention having a wife and children in New Amsterdam—Van Tienhoven fancied himself a lady's man, and his vanishing had at its root, in addition to growing doubts over the chances of his mission at The Hague, sex. The girl, Lysbeth Croon, was the daughter of an Amsterdam basketmaker, and Van Tienhoven had assured her that he was single and wanted to marry her on Manhattan. The matter blossomed into a full-fledged sex scandal, with witnesses dragged before notaries to give testimony of prurient behavior observed. (An undertaker's wife testified that Van Tienhoven had paid her three guilders to find a room for him and his young miss, which she did, “at the house of a grocer . . . at the sign of the Universal Friend.” A tavernkeeper's wife reported that he “evinced great friendship and love, calling her always, Dearest, and conversing with her as man and wife are wont to do, sleeping in one bed.”) Van Tienhoven was collared by the sheriff of The Hague and fined, and shortly afterward he and the girl fled the country, boarding a ship bound for Manhattan.

So it was with some exuberance that Van der Donck appeared before the entire governing body on February 10, 1652, to make the final argument on behalf of his colony. His adversary had literally fled the field, and in the room were some of the most distinguished men in the country. Adriaen Pauw, who had hoped to retire after successfully concluding the Treaty of Münster, had been called back into service in the aftermath of Prince Willem's abortive coup, and now led the Holland delegation. Pauw would have had some personal interest in the American colony; two decades earlier, his brother, one of the directors of the West India Company, had founded one of the early patroonships on the Hudson River, to which he had given the latinized form of his last name, Pavonia. (He soon abandoned the project and sold the land back to the company, but it was the first permanent settlement in what would become New Jersey, and eventually became the cities of Hoboken and Jersey City.) Also present was Jan de Witt, who would soon rise to become leader of the nation and one of the great European statesmen of the age.

To these assembled worthies Van der Donck made an elaborate presentation energized by his and his colleagues' convictions: that Manhattan and its surrounding territory represented a vital foothold on the unexplored world of the North American continent; that the West India Company had squandered this opportunity, but that it wasn't too late to reverse things. What was needed was new thinking. The leaders should abandon the old ways that allowed the company's bureaucracy to treat it as a feudal possession, and instead take this land across the ocean into the bosom of Dutch law, give its people the rights of Dutch citizens, and give its capital the status of a Dutch city with all the rights and protections that that entailed. Then they would see it flourish, and the Dutch Republic would reap the rewards.

Sensing victory, Van der Donck struck hard on the negative tack, summarizing the case against the West India Company and Stuyvesant, and, in typical fashion, methodically supporting his case with letters, journal entries, resolutions from the Board of Nine, and sworn statements that his colleagues in New Amsterdam had sent him over the previous months, all of which showed that Stuyvesant had not only failed to carry out any of the reforms their committee had voted on but had taken to ruling by fiat. His justice had become summary and brutal, especially against members of the Board (he had confiscated property and threatened them with imprisonment or banishment unless they swore that they knew “nothing of the Director and his government, but what is honest and honorable”). He had even blocked the notary sent over by the States General, forbidding him from doing his job; this man had then joined the opposition, and his letters were included in the sheaf of complaints Van der Donck exhibited.

Nevertheless, the letters revealed that there was still great hope on Manhattan that Van der Donck's mission would achieve results. “The people here are somewhat solaced on learning from the despatch that the affairs of New Netherland are beginning to be thoroughly and truly considered by their High Mightinesses, but they anxiously expect absolute Redress,” one letter read. “Whatever you have done there for the public interest, I, for my part, do especially approve,” Augustin Herman wrote to Van der Donck. “We are anxiously expecting the approval of the redress and a change.”

These updates on the situation in the colony had an affect on the assembly. Among other things, they drove home that the community on Manhattan could no longer be considered an ad hoc collection of soldiers, fur traders, and whores, for whom martial law could suffice. These were men of standing, who had risked everything on the promise of North America, and their government had a responsibility toward them.

Van der Donck went on to discuss the Hartford Treaty, which he found particularly appalling. Not being in Stuyvesant's position on the front lines, it was easy for him to denigrate the agreement for giving up land to the English. As Van der Donck saw it, the New England governors had “pulled the wool over the Director's eyes,” and Van der Donck rued the loss of “many fine bays, kills, rivers and islands . . . and the beautiful Fresh River [the Connecticut River], where full fifty Colonies or more might be planted. . . .”

The presentation was thorough, and Stuyvesant had no one to counter it. The chambers of the West India Company, asked by the government to respond, began to split into factions. The Manhattan-based colony had been “monopolized” by the chamber from Amsterdam, declared the Zeeland representatives, and its mismanagement was Amsterdam's fault. The members from Dordrecht agreed, and suggested a reorganization of the colony's government. Sitting in their pretty little canalside offices just down the road from the house where Jan Vermeer was beginning his quiet career of creating quiet masterpieces, the members from Delft concurred that something had to be done “in order that so magnificent a country may not go to ruin by bad government and management.”

The States General was wholly won over, and at last took the first steps toward a massive reorganization of the colony. Under pressure from the government, the Amsterdam directors sent Stuyvesant a grudging directive: “in order to silence everyone,” he was to establish a municipal government in New Amsterdam with “a bench of justice formed as much as possible on the laws of this city.” The order was nearly lost in the shuffle of circumstances, but it would be enacted, and would change history.

There was some question whether Stuyvesant would have time to charter a city government, however, because in late April the States General drafted the letter Van der Donck had worked and waited for. It was telegraphically blunt:

To Petrus Stuyvesant, Director General in New Netherland

Honorable, &c. We have, in view of the public service, considered it necessary to require you, on sight hereof, to repair hither, in order to furnish us circumstantial and pertinent information, as to the true and actual condition of the country and affairs; also, of the boundary line between the English and Dutch there. Done 27 April, 1652.

The letter demanding Stuyvesant's recall was handed to Van der Donck to deliver in person. Holding it, stepping out of the chamber into the courtyard of the Binnenhof, he must have felt light-headed, drunk on his achievement. And crossing the colonnaded plaza—the same public square in which, seven decades earlier, the leaders of seven separate Dutch states had signed a declaration of independence from Spanish rule—had to underscore the historical nature of it.

Had Van der Donck been a diarist of the likes of his younger contemporary Samuel Pepys, the page for this day would have been starred, and we might have had from it a follow-up scene of revelry at a Hague taphouse, with a throng of bureaucrats, in black hats and flowing capes, high boots perhaps topped with lace cuffs, suddenly conscious of their routine lives and routine government jobs as they gathered around the victorious representative from a far-off land, expressing keen interest, between pinches of snuff and swallows of Rhenish wine, in his holding-forth on every aspect of his country, from its mythic-sounding flora and fauna, to the island capital so enticingly positioned to exploit the continent, to the intriguing sexual forthrightness of the native women. (“They make light of their virtue,” Van der Donck would write, and while they scorn “kissing, romping,” and other sexual play, “at the right time they will decline no proposition and almost all of them are available and ready to carry on with abandon.”) There is little doubt that the government types were taken with Van der Donck. The day before his victory, the States General voted a resolution granting him the right to pass his New Netherland estate on to his heirs—a power reserved for fiefholders such as Kiliaen van Rensselaer, and an indication both that Van der Donck was looking forward to returning home (and siring heirs) and that the officials had been won over as much by the man as by his vision for Manhattan.

It was with this vision in particular that he would have regaled listeners. This new government would definitively establish Manhattan Island as the free-trading hub of the Atlantic. It would guarantee its place as gateway to the North American continent for generations of Europeans. It would be modeled on “the laudable government” of the home country, with personal guarantees of freedom of conscience deriving directly from the Union of Utrecht (“. . . each person shall remain free, especially in his religion . . .”), the de facto Dutch constitution, which dated to the beginning of the war for independence and codified the nation's adherence to ideas of tolerance. And it would be based, too, on certain inherent rights of the people—even to overthrow their rulers should they become oppressive—which stemmed from the so-called Act of Abjuration, the Dutch declaration of independence from Spain.

Van der Donck was exultant, of course, believing that his work in Europe was at an end, and went through a blizzard of errands preparatory to departing for home. He had been away two and a half years, and his property was suffering in his absence. He hired several employees who would serve six-year contracts at Colen Donck. His wife had come to join him in the Netherlands sometime in the preceding year, and together they now purchased supplies and had them loaded for passage.
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He had recently helped his mother sell some of her property, and now she, his brother, sister-in-law, and their servants were preparing to emigrate to Manhattan also. It was springtime: renewal was in the freshening winds, and the victorious emissary would soon be at sea, sailing homeward.