The Island at the Center of the World (31 page)

In May, Van der Donck appeared before a government committee formally asking to be allowed to return to Manhattan and resume his previous political role—“to hold peaceably the office of President of the Commonalty in New Amsterdam.” He planned not only to be in the colony for the change of administration, not only to deliver personally Stuyvesant's walking papers. He planned to lead the new government.

I
T NEVER HAPPENED,
of course. The shot that sank Van der Donck's mission—robbing him of a major historical achievement, leaving him instead a spectral presence in history, author of a still-remarkable but shadowy contribution—came from a thoroughly unexpected quarter. It wasn't Stuyvesant who upset things—his plans, too, would be waylaid by events. The disruption didn't come from the New England colonies or the Indians of New Netherland, or even from the Swedes camped out along the Delaware River to the south. Its origin was a grim and tempestuous creature who had burst to life, fifty-three years earlier, in the swampy fens of the east of England. As historical figures go, Oliver Cromwell, like Peter Stuyvesant, remains a deeply unlovable sort—complicated and vigorous, but somehow enduringly repellent. Cromwell has been studied endlessly, and yet he remains, in Churchill's words, that “smokey soul.”

But, as with Stuyvesant, history has pasted a cardboard mask onto Cromwell. True, both men were grim, fixable types. On the other hand, Cromwell was not only the originator of the British empire, he was also a shaper of American beginnings. Where the Stuart monarchs had looked on the colonies as a source of income, Cromwell helped root America's myth of origin by viewing it through his religious lens. His spiritual conversion came in his thirties (“Oh, I have lived in and loved darkness and hated the light . . .”), and his Puritanism was virile and practical. He was all for the settling of North America, and, like John Winthrop, he considered New England a shining city on a hill, a potential promised land. At one point he even considered emigrating himself.

As a boy he was physical, tough, and exhibited “no effeminate characteristics,” one chronicler felt compelled to state. He entered Parliament just before Charles dissolved it, and rose to prominence as a critic of the king. When civil war broke out he became a general who inspired devotion. His was the dominant personality in the military junta that took power; he was not yet the Lord Protector, but he was the boss in a rudderless moment in which one was needed. There was nothing of the modern psychologist about him, no notion of giving his countrymen time to heal and find themselves in the aftermath of suffering. The only path out of the ruins led directly to global dominance. With the backing of the nation's businessmen, he raised taxes and ordered the building of a new fleet of warships; under him, the modern English navy came into being. From within the rubble of civil war, he became the architect of empire.

His zeal was primordial. He planned at first to export England's Puritan revolution and set royal heads rolling along the bowling greens of Europe; it didn't catch on, but, transplanted to New England, the Puritan sense of mission, of being chosen by God, seeded the American idea of manifest destiny: of a people preordained first to conquer the continent and then to lead the world.

What did gain traction was his plan to overtake the Dutch as Europe's trading empire—with him the balance in the rivalry between the two nations begins to shift from the Dutch to the English. His “western design” had several components. In the Americas, he would aid New England and try to dislodge the Dutch from Manhattan Island, which by now English traders were beginning to see as crucial to control of the continent. In the Caribbean, Cromwell eyed another island locus: Jamaica, which he would capture from the Spanish in 1655, would become a slave-trading base. He wouldn't get Manhattan, but English “success” with the Jamaica project would of course yield centuries of profits and misery, from the cane fields of the Caribbean to the cotton fields of the American South.

During the civil war, trade between England and its North American colonies had collapsed, and Manhattan had grown in consequence. Now Cromwell hoped to break the Dutch monopoly on trade—in Europe and Asia as well as North America—by means of legislation. The problem with this tactic, so often employed throughout history, is that one can't expect a rival nation to abide by one's own laws, and the Dutch didn't. It happened that the first action in Cromwell's assault on the Dutch trading empire occurred at virtually the moment Van der Donck won his case in the States General. While Van der Donck was shifting from his victory and petitioning the States General to let him to return to Manhattan, in the straits of Dover, one hundred and fifty miles southwest of The Hague, portions of the English and Dutch fleets encountered one another. The weather was brewing and there was a strong northeastern wind. The system of communicating by means of flags and sail position had yet to be developed, and each side was confused about the other's intentions. Foremost in the minds of both commanders was the so-called Navigation Act, the piece of hard-core protectionism that Parliament had recently passed, which was aimed directly at the Dutch. With it, England had declared that only English ships would be permitted to deliver products into English ports. An impertinent clause in the bill called for foreign vessels sailing in the Channel to lower their flags in salute. When this information made its way to the Continent, Dutch commanders expressly ordered their vessels not to do any such thing.

The two men who stood with feet firmly planted on the swaying decks of their respective men-of-war, eyeing the foreign sails and assessing what to do, were both destined to become legendary figures, and together form a tableau that encapsulated the odd cross-currents of the times. Robert Blake, head of the English fleet, was a flowing-haired, Oxford-educated son of wealth who had taken to sea only recently at the age of fifty. Maarten Tromp, the leathery, pug-like Dutch commander, had gone to sea at age nine, serving under his father's command. When he was twelve, the ship was taken by English pirates, his father killed, and the youth pressed into service as a pirate's slave. He had risen through the ranks of the Dutch navy, and was now admiral of the fleet and the greatest seaman alive. The twist with these two personalities that so characterized the times was that Tromp, of humble origins, was a firm supporter of the House of Orange and of the English Stuarts (he had actually been knighted by Charles I for assisting in his struggle against Parliament), while Blake the dandy was an anti-royal Parliamentarian.

Accounts of what happened off Dover differed, but all agreed that the battle was sparked by Tromp's failure to lower his flag in recognition of English sovereignty. From four o'clock in the afternoon until nine in the evening, forty-two Dutch vessels and twelve larger, more heavily armed English ships hauled off at one another, sometimes from point-blank range, in an encounter that surprised both sides for its savagery. In fact, decades of tensions had built to this. At least some Dutch statesmen had seen it coming. Months earlier a courier pouch had arrived at The Hague with a curious document. It was printed in English, but even those who couldn't read that language could make out the word
AMBOYNA
in large red letters across the title page. A London publisher had reprinted the inflammatory pamphlet of twenty-eight years earlier, describing atrocities committed by the Dutch on Englishmen on the island in the East Indies. Of the two great statesmen in the Dutch government, the twenty-seven-year-old Jan de Witt preferred to believe that this bit of resuscitated jingoism represented only a random stirring among the English rabble, but as wise old Adriaen Pauw glanced over the pamphlet he knew it meant the English were whipping up the populace, preparing them for war.

Events now tumbled quickly toward war. Pauw left for London to take part in emergency talks with Cromwell's Council of State (where, incidentally, the man he would have dealt with as Cromwell's translator and foreign speech writer was no less a figure than the poet John Milton). In The Hague, the mood of magnanimity and optimism that had spread through the republic since the “eternal” peace of '48 had vanished. The government cycled onto a war footing. Orders went out to ships at sea and to outposts across the globe to strengthen their defenses.

The impact of all of this on Adriaen van der Donck was spectacular. The West India Company's fortunes had fallen steadily in recent years, and Van der Donck's assault had further crippled it. But with the first rumors of a war with England, the company, which after all had originally been conceived as a quasi-military entity, came roaring back to life. Its once-powerful directors flushed again with influence. Under pressure from them, and fearing that this was the wrong time to institute liberal reforms, the States General completely reversed its rulings on the Manhattan-based colony. They rescinded the recall of Stuyvesant, and ordered Van der Donck personally to hand back the letter of recall they had given him. On top of that, Van der Donck's activism, which only weeks before had been lauded as the full flowering of Dutch legal progressivism being applied, in a test case, to the nation's overseas province, suddenly looked positively dangerous. He was detained and refused permission to return to America. The ship bearing his family members and belongings left for Manhattan without him. Overnight, things had turned upside-down. He was no longer a patriot but a radical, someone to keep watch on.

T
HE
D
UTCH
R
EPUBLIC
'
S
declaration of war against England in July of 1652 was a kind of coming of age for both nations. Their recent histories had been so intertwined that they often seemed like siblings, shifting endlessly from argument to cooperation to vindictiveness. The gunboat salvos in the Channel signaled that in the struggle for control of the indescribably lucrative international trade in this first era of globalization each saw the other as the only real adversary. Their rivalry would dominate the century and give shape and substance to American beginnings.

The First Anglo-Dutch War, as history has titled it, was a true and literal trade war. A peasant in either country could have been forgiven for feeling it lacked pungency: no homes were burned, no villages sacked. The entire thing took place at sea, with England going after the Dutch herring fleet and spice- and fur-laden merchantmen, and the Dutch forced to defend their trading empire. (“The English are about to attack a mountain of gold,” Pauw wryly remarked at the outset, “we are about to attack a mountain of iron.”)

Which did not mean the war lacked in ferocity. The pent-up grudges on both sides came out in a series of savage exchanges that rewrote the books on naval warfare and began the buildup of tactics, rules, and technological innovations that reached a peak more than a century later in the age of Horatio Nelson. The clashes in the Channel and the North Sea that murderous summer marked the debut of “line of battle” fighting, ships of each fleet arrayed stem to stern so that their side-mounted guns could form a long deadly chain. In the culminating sea battle, the largest in world history to date, more than two hundred ships formed opposing ribbons along a sixteen-mile corridor, hulls screeching against one another and cannon unleashing inhuman mayhem (this era before the exploding shell featured such low-tech innovations as the broadside of chains, which sliced through rigging and scissored bodies to pieces). The ships caught up in the encounters were reduced to floating wrecks literally caked in gore, “their masts and tackles,” one correspondent aboard an English vessel reported, “being moiled with brains, hair, pieces of skull.”

Cromwell had caught the Dutch leaders off guard. While he had built a new generation of larger warships, the States General, after nearly coming to civil war with the Prince of Orange over their insistence on decommissioning the military, had laboriously downsized since the peace of '48. As a result, the States General and the regional chambers of the East and West India Companies were now forced to drop all other concerns as they focused on the task of defending trade routes and rigging more ships for battle.

Van der Donck, his cause shelved, himself an exile in his home country, thundered like a caged animal. For months he roamed restlessly back and forth between The Hague, Amsterdam, Leiden, and Breda. In Leiden, he returned to the university and received his
Supremus in jure
degree, which allowed him to appear before the Dutch supreme court. In Amsterdam, he went again to the States General asking to be released, but learned that, at the instigation of the company, word had gone out to every ship captain departing for the Americas that anyone who received him on board would face punishment. In Amsterdam he organized a group of influential friends and together they entered the stately West India Company headquarters to meet with company officials. But this only gave them a chance to loose their pent-up invective over his efforts to rob them of their colony. He was a dangerous man, a “notorious ringleader,” illegitimate representative of a “lawless and mutinous rabble.” He reported this to the States General, and used everything he could think of to appeal to them, pleading that his farm in America was “going fast to ruin,” that he was personally being subjected to “an extraordinary civil banishment,” even reminding them that he was a descendant of the great patriot responsible for liberating Breda during the war for independence. It got him nowhere. The bureaucratic wall had gone up.

Then, indefatigable still, he hit upon another idea for promoting his colony. His embassy was at a standstill, his family had gone on to Manhattan. He was alone and rudderless. In this gap in his life, images gathered. Wild raw mountains, and the river with its majestically broad belly reigning over the landscape. An autumn afternoon in which, following days of rain, a sudden burst of sun ignited the world, cows in a primordial meadow lit to glowing by it, the grass iridescent. Himself, ten or twelve years younger, sitting before the fire in a Mohawk longhouse with its hundred or so inhabitants, discussing theology of all things, agreeing with the dark-eyed chiefs in their belief that God was almighty and good, but arguing against their notion that God was too preoccupied with his eternally enticing female companion deity to pay notice to the affairs of men, thus leaving the devil to hold sway over the Indians in their smoke-filled dwellings, the Europeans on their island stronghold, and people across the waters of every hue and language, all of whom, in the Indians' cosmology, wallowed in wickedness.