The Island at the Center of the World (32 page)
His mind filled with these images, Van der Donck spent the months during the height of the war closeted away with pen and paper, and emerged with the manuscript of a book,
A Description of New Netherland,
which brought a humanistic, scientific sensibility to bear on the colony he had come to love. The
Description,
from which I have quoted throughout this book, was unabashedly a paean to the America that Van der Donck knew. He arranged it thematically, devoting sections to the waters, woodlands, wild vines, minerals, winds, seasons, and of course the Indians, each of which received the doting attention of one who had been too long absent.
At the end of the book, in order to make a direct appeal to his audience, he broke out of his anatomical dissection of the colony in favor of a much-used convention of the times, the dialogue. In this case, it was a “Dutch patriot” and a New Netherlander, the former, having read all that came before, standing in for the reader and posing questions. Van der Donck doesn't much trouble to disguise himself in the cloak of the anonymous New Netherlander, but launches into opinions that, as before, in the
Remonstrance
and elsewhere, show an almost eerie foresight. Manhattan and its surrounding region will grow exponentially, he assures his listener, and not so much because the Dutch people themselves will leave their homes for it but because the Netherlands has had a long tradition of welcoming refugees from elsewhere in Europe. It is these masses—“from eastern Europe, Germany, Westphalia, Scandinavia, Wallonia, etc.”—who, having steeped themselves in the Dutch tradition of tolerance, will populate the colony, increasing its multiethnic flavor and its strength and vigor.
In this reverie of his, Van der Donck seems practically to summon the vast sweep of the coming centuries' migrations, the huddled arrivals being processed at Ellis Island, the barrios and ghettos coming into being. Aiding this future mass migration, making it happen and making it stick, he sees a unique cultural glue: “the Dutch have compassionate natures and regard foreigners virtually as native citizens,” with the result that whoever is “prepared to adapt” can make a go of it in their system. This freakish burst of historic clairvoyance is tempered somewhat by his assured statement that the colony would remain Dutch, that would-be emigrants had no need to fear an English takeover anytime “in the next fifty years.”
Van der Donck won a license to publish his work, but publication was withheld because, with the war raging, the government didn't want to draw attention to the colony, which it now feared the English might invade.
At last, late in 1653, four years after his arrival, Van der Donck received permission to leave for Manhattan. But it came at a price. The forces that had branded him a danger had not let go. The heads of the Amsterdam chamber took particular delight in assuring him that his cause was shattered. Finally he understood what he had been up against all these years—that the power he had been attempting to thwart was rooted in the vastness of the Dutch empire. He had been too far ahead of his time, and now he understood it. For the first time in his life, he described himself as “wholly disheartened and cast down.” He penned yet another petition, different in tone from anything he had ever written:
The undersigned, van der Donck, humbly requests consent and passport of the Board to go to New Netherland, offering to resign the commission previously given him as President of the community, or otherwise as its deputy, and promising upon arrival in New Netherland and taking up residence there, to accept no office whatever it may be, but rather to live in private peacefully and quietly as a common inhabitant, submitting to the orders and commands of the Company or those enacted by its director.
His request was granted. He was forbidden from engaging in public life and forbidden to practice law in the colony, on the remarkable grounds that there was no other lawyer in the colony, and thus no one with the knowledge to stand up to him in court. (Actually, Lubbert van Dinklagen, Stuyvesant's former vice-director who was also a trained lawyer, was still in the colony, but he had likewise been silenced by Stuyvesant following his backing of Van der Donck's mission, and had gone into retirement on Staten Island.)
Over a period of several weeks prior to his voyage, Van der Donck turned up repeatedly at the office of an Amsterdam notary public named Jacob de Winter, each time with one or more men and women. Together they sat while the notary carefully inscribed the terms and conditions of a contract, and then each signed or made his or her mark on the paper:
June 4, 1653. Adriaen van der Donck, patroon of his colony in New Netherland, takes Hendrik Cornelisz Broeck into his service as carpenter for a period of three years. He will sail to New Netherland with his own tools. The passage will be paid by Van der Donck . . .
June 13, 1653. Adriaen van der Donck, patroon of his colony in New Netherland, takes Jan Mewesz. and Evert Jansz., both from Steenwijk, into his service as carpenters . . .
June 16, 1653. Adriaen van der Donck . . . engages Helena Wand for a period of six years . . . Helena Wand is obliged to do the household and such as a maid-servant and to assist his family. She will receive as annual wages f36 besides board and lodging.
July 26, 1653. Adriaen van der Donck, living in New Netherland, engages for his colony Henrik Claasz., pottery-maker from Rotterdam . . .
July 28, 1653. Adriaen van der Donck, free man in New Netherland, engages as gardener for a period of three years: Gommaart Paulusz., from Antwerp. . . . Paulusz. shall be obliged to keep the garden of Van der Donck, to set, to plant, to clip and do similar jobs . . .
Van der Donck had apparently succumbed: he would give up his political pretentions. But he hadn't abandoned his home, or the idea of America. And even in defeat he left evidence for the persistence of his vision: records that foreshadow the course of the coming centuries, momentarily shining the light of history onto a handful of individuals who became caught up in the idea of a land of opportunity across the ocean, and followed him there.
PART III
THE INHERITANCE
Chapter 13
BOOMING
O
n a Thursday morning in the thick of winter, 1653, seven men left their narrow, low-ceilinged homes and the warmth of their Delft-tiled hearths, stamped through the streets of lower Manhattan, and entered the gates of the fort. Assembled in the council room there, they swore an oath of service to the States General, then bowed their heads as a minister intoned a prayer—“. . . Thou hast received us in Christ . . . make us fit through Thy grace, that we may do the duties imposed upon us . . .”—that signals, among other things, that we are well before the era of the separation of church and state.
Adriaen van der Donck was still in the Netherlands, struggling against the political fatwa that was preventing him from returning to America, when their honors, the magistrates of the newly incorporated city of New Amsterdam, transacted their first, brief piece of business, putting their signatures to a statement “herewith [to] inform everybody that they shall hold their regular meetings in the house hitherto called the City Tavern, henceforth the City Hall, on Monday mornings from 9 o'clock, to hear there all questions of difference between litigants and decide them as best they can.” Two and a half weeks later, in a physical break from the government of Peter Stuyvesant and the West India Company that was visible to all, they convened at the three-story building on the waterfront that had long been the center of the town's activities. In case anyone missed the significance, the bell in the courtyard out front sounded the change of government.
It was very modest. But it meant something to those involved. For years the settlers of Manhattan Island had insisted that their community was more than a military or trading outpost, that they were not serfs forced to toil for a distant master, but citizens of a modern republic entitled to protection under its laws. As of February 2, 1653, with the signing of a municipal charter, New Amsterdam was a city. The magistrates were quite aware of the heritage of the political offices and legal traditions they took on. The government they formed had a structure—there were two co-mayors and a panel of judges, which, when combined, formed the legislative body—copied from Amsterdam and based on Roman-Dutch law, the Roman part of which had come to Holland by way of the Holy Roman Empire, which in turn traced itself all the way back to the caesars and the Code of Justinian. When, in February of 2003, the speaker of New York's city council cut into a birthday cake and gave a champagne toast in honor of the three hundred fiftieth anniversary of the city's charter, it was to these gatherings in the former tavern that he paid homage.
*31
The city dates its political foundation not to the English takeover, when it was named New York, but to this moment.
Then again, so what? Aside from the bit of arcana that New York is perhaps unique in the United States in that its legal roots go back to ancient Rome, does it mean anything? The political founding of a city may be interesting to a narrow clique of historians but of justifiable indifference to the rest of the world. For that matter, it's also worth noting that Stuyvesant blunted the power of the city government by initially refusing to allow popular election: he himself appointed its first officers.
What matters is what the founding of city government on Manhattan led to. The idea posed at the beginning of this book was that New York City is different in its origins from Boston, Hartford, and other early East Coast cities. It was different because a sulky but dogged English explorer named Hudson happened to chart the area for the Dutch. But it would only matter in the long term—its difference would only stick—once it had a real structure. Municipal incorporation provided that structure, one born of long experience containing and maintaining peace among a dozen cultures. The proclamation that Stuyvesant's superiors forced on him as a result of Van der Donck's efforts granted “to this growing town of New Amsterdam” a government “to be framed, as far as possible and as the situation of the country permits, after the laudable customs of the city of Amsterdam, which gave her name to this first commenced town . . .” Thus the achievement of Adriaen van der Donck. This was the foundation that New York City was built on, and, spreading in every direction, it would color and mold the American continent and the American character.
The two matters that occupied the new government in its first weeks form a diptych of the settlement's concerns, which always seemed to veer between the historic and the ridiculous. Into the newly outfitted council chamber, on its first full day in business, burst a raucous knot of locals who were near to blows. Joost Goderis was a harried man; he was married to a woman with a wayward eye; the fact was well known in the town, and he was fed up. He'd recently been out oystering on Oyster (i.e., Ellis) Island, and as he canoed back to Manhattan he encountered his supposed friend Gulyam d'Wys loitering on shore with a gang of young toughs. D'Wys wanted to give the boys something to laugh at, and so he told Goderis (as the court recorded it) “that Joost should give him, deft., a better opportunity to have sexual connection with his, pltf's., wife.” When Goderis tried to maintain his dignity by feigning confusion, d'Wys helpfully explained that “Allard Anthony has had your wife down on her back.” The boys with him laughed and called the man a cuckold who “ought to wear horns, like the cattle in the woods.” Goderis hoped the new municipal board was the sort of body to help a man in emotional distress, and gravely brought the matter before the magistrates.
At the same time, and on a darker front, the magistrates were grappling with daily reports of fallout from the war between England and the Dutch Republic. Stuyvesant—who had fought against the forming of a town government, but who for now seemed to welcome the opportunity to share the burden—regularly stumped over from the fort with three-month-old news from Holland. As in all wars, the reports contained a mix of paranoia, rumor, and inscrutible behavior. “The government in England is at present very odd,” one letter informed Stuyvesant; according to informed sources, the English were demanding “that all apprentices shall again wear blue caps.” While the Dutch leaders pondered that one, it had also become apparent that the American colonies of both countries were in play in the conflict. The West India Company was to begin gearing up once again for privateering work, as it had against Spain. The company proposed that “5 or 6 ordinary, but well manned, frigates” should use Manhattan as a base for attacking English colonies. At the same time, the States General was afraid of a surprise attack, and reported that it was “certainly informed that New Netherland is in great danger and imminently exposed to invasion,” and ordered Stuyvesant and the city magistrates to reinforce defenses.
The magistrates, with Stuyvesant sitting in on their session, took action. The first decision was “to surround the greater part of the City with a high stockade and a small breastwork.” To fund it, the magistrates raised money from the town's wealthiest residents, Stuyvesant matching the top figure of one hundred and fifty guilders. Then they plunged into the details: the palisade along the northern perimeter of the town would be comprised of twelve-foot oak logs, each eighteen inches in circumference and “sharpened at the upper end.” These would be sunk three feet into the earth and be fortified by a four-foot-high breastwork. Payment to the builder, the government declared, “will be made weekly in good wampum.” A crier was sent out, declaring that the town council was asking for bids to carry out the work. Englishman Thomas Baxter signed on to provide the wood, and the thing was built by early July. In the long term, what's notable about this first public works project orchestrated by the town government is not the wall itself but the street that ran along it. It's a safe bet that no matter how wildly they tended to dream, the magistrates could not have imagined that this rough pathway would replace the gleaming, colonnaded bourse of Amsterdam as the epicenter of global finance. It's also worth noting that the wall along Wall Street was built not to keep Indians out, as folklore has it, but to keep the English out.
While the Manhattanites were fearing an attack from New England, the residents of Connecticut, New Haven, Massachusetts, and Plymouth were likewise feeding on a steady diet of rumors that the Dutch were about to move northward against them. One of these rumors—that the Dutch had hired Indians to massacre New England families while they were at church—made it to London, and was packaged by an enterprising printer in the most explosive way. The memory of the killing of ten English traders by Dutch soldiers on the far-off Southeast Asian island of Ambon or Amboyna three decades earlier hadn't died in England, and had been rekindled the year before by republication of the inflammatory pamphlet reporting the event. Now, someone in the English colonies, possibly associated with the government of either Connecticut or New Haven, had the genius to use Amboyna specifically to stir the New Englanders against the multiethnic Dutch-run colony to their south. The new pamphlet that swept through England and was shipped to America was titled “The Second Part of the Tragedy of Amboyna: or a True Relation of a Most Bloody, Treacherous, and Cruel Design of the Dutch in the New Netherlands in America. For the total Ruining and Murthering of the English Colonies in New-England.” It was a double-barreled shot of ethnic hatred, decrying the Indians as “bloody people, fit instruments for so horrid a design,” and lauding an English colonist who had “in one night cut off fourteen hundred of them,” while also seeing the plot as an instance of the genetic wickedness of the Dutch, “Amboyna's treacherous Cruelty extending its self from the East to the West Indies, running in its proper channel of Dutch blood . . .”
The pamphlet was a model of wartime disinformation, forcing the Dutch government to carry out an investigation and deny the accusation while keeping the flame of English public opinion stoked. Months earlier, several New England leaders had disembarked at New Amsterdam to meet with Stuyvesant on the matter. He had assured them that his people had no designs on the English colonies. While on Manhattan, however, the Puritans got an eyeful of the rude, boisterous, growing port city, through which, they well knew, much of their own region's trade passed. If England were to make a play for the Dutch colony and so gain a lock on the interior of the continent and the shipping center of the entire coast, it had better be soon. The trade war was as good a pretext as any, and anyway the story was too good not to use. In addition to supplying the material for the “second Amboyna” pamphlet, the New England governors wrote to Cromwell personally and put the case that his so-called Western Design, by which England would weave the lands of the Atlantic Rim into the beginnings of an empire, would be perfectly served by conquering the island at the mouth of the Hudson River. Cromwell, who had just assumed the title Lord Protector and with it many of the trappings of the king he had helped behead, liked the grandiosity in the plan, agreed it was time to carry it out, and wrote back to say he was sending a four-frigate flotilla and a company of soldiers to Boston, whose “utmost assistance may be given for gaining the Manhattoes.”
At this juncture, Adriaen van der Donck finally sailed back to Manhattan. It's frustrating, but not surprising, that we have no record of his homecoming. People viewed him as a hero; residents had followed every action he undertook in The Hague on their behalf. The new magistrates had him to thank for their jobs, and must still have considered him the leader of the reform party. But there was no public display—no one wanted to incur the wrath of Stuyvesant. It's especially frustrating that we are forced to imagine the encounter between Van der Donck and Stuyvesant, which had to have been freighted with emotion. When last they had been together, Stuyvesant had imprisoned Van der Donck for treason. Since that time, the onetime protégé had spent four years in the Dutch Republic hectoring the government for Stuyvesant's removal, and had actually succeeded, only to have the decision reversed. Now, having gambled everything and lost, he was returning and putting himself at Stuyvesant's mercy. The only item we have shows Van der Donck, shortly after his arrival, asking Stuyvesant for access to the records of the colony, so that he can add to the book he had written, which was still awaiting publication in Amsterdam. Stuyvesant turned him down, citing the advice of the company directors, who warned of “new troubles” from “Meester Adriaen van der Donck,” and feared he would turn “the Company's own weapons . . . upon itself.” Stuyvesant could be a dangerous enemy. Van der Donck had to proceed with extreme caution, and the fact that he drops from the official records at this point suggests that he did.
But that doesn't mean he stayed out of politics. Certainly on his arrival he was busy with domestic matters, reacquainting himself with his property and helping his newly arrived relatives adjust to America. His mother moved into a house on Pearl Street looking out across the East River to the Breuckelen meadows, and his sister-in-law needed help dealing with her teenaged son, who was a bit of a handful (Gysbert van der Donck, along with his friend, the son of Cornelis Melyn, was a member of the gang who had taunted Joost Goderis as a cuckold). But it doesn't fit Adriaen van der Donck's character that he would be content with domesticity.
In fact, he seems to have picked up right where he left off in The Hague, only now working behind the scenes. Within weeks of his return, there was a new political uprising against Stuyvesant. With the colony on the upswing, towns in the vicinity of Manhattan (which would later be incorporated into the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens) were growing, and the leaders of several of these—Gravesende (later Gravesend), Vlissingen (Flushing), Middelburgh (Newtown), Heemsteede (Hempstead), New Amersfoort (Flatlands), Breuckelen (Brooklyn), and Midwout a.k.a. Vlackebos (Flatbush)—began clamoring for their rights. Piracy had sparked the controversy. It was still commonplace in the colony; a recurring problem stemmed from locals who, having failed to make a go of things through legitimate business, turned pirate. The most recent villain was well known to all: Thomas Baxter, who had supplied the oak posts for the “wall,” was marauding along Long Island Sound, stealing horses. The residents of outlying towns assembled to declare that if the company couldn't protect them they would stop paying taxes.