The Island at the Center of the World (34 page)

There is a linguistic inheritance that would come along with this new relationship to work. Frederick Flipsen's workers, and the assistants to the colony's smiths, wheelwrights, bakers, and gunstock makers, had a looser relationship to their superiors than did workers in traditional guilds; a wheelwright's apprentice might also serve beer in the tavern or help bake bread. In time the typical Dutch word for master
—baas—
would take on a different connotation in the New World, and an Americanism came into being. And no Americanism is more American, and at the same time more New York, than boss. From Tweed to Corleone to Springsteen, the ur-bosses are all-American and utterly New York.
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As New Amsterdam gave way to New York, the word would have a natural attraction for English colonists, too, because in its adapted usage it frankly distinguished itself from the power system that held sway in Old England; it spelled out a different kind of power relationship. “No,” it says, “we have no class system in place here, but there is someone in charge. I'm not your master, lord, or sovereign, but I am your boss. Now get to work.”

In this period of growth and activity, we see the emergence of other customs and usages that would influence American culture—little things, meaningless in themselves, but indications that the Dutch colony never really died out, but became part of something larger. In October of 1661, there was a grain shortage in the city, and the municipal government issued an order to the bakers of the town to restrict themselves to baking bread and not “to bake any more
koeckjes,
jumbles or sweet cake.” It's the tiniest of things, but note the Dutch word. It is pronounced “cook-yehs.” Literally, little cakes. More than a century later, with the publication of
American Cookery,
the first American cookbook, in 1796, Amelia Simmons would lock in print what had by then become a standard usage. It's because the first Manhattanites called them that that Americans would never eat biscuits, but cookies.

While they were waiting (or not) for the bakers to produce their sweets, the women of New Amsterdam were inclined to pick up a head of cabbage, chop it finely, slather it with vinegar and melted butter, and serve it alongside, maybe, a platter of pike with smoked bacon, or veal meatballs.
Koolsla—
“cabbage salad”—was their straightforward name for the dish. Again, jump forward a century. In 1751 a Swedish traveler in the Hudson Valley, in describing a meal his Dutch landlady had served him, fused into the written language a term that was still given the original Dutch pronunciation but now had a phonetic American spelling: cole slaw.

As the town expanded and developed its seasonal routines and rituals, those of the dominant culture tended to prevail. We can imagine how the colony's most iconic legacy got established: every year in early December children of non-Dutch families in New Amsterdam had to have pouted at being left out of something good. As in the home country, the Dutch children would break out in song:

Saint Nicholas, good holy man,

Put on your best coat,

Then gallop to Amsterdam . . .

And on the sixth of the month, the saint's feast day, they would wake to find that he had left treats for them. This, surely, was unbearable; among the English, the French, the German, the Swedish families of Manhattan, pressure was brought to bear on parents, and the Dutch tradition was adopted, and, later, pushed forward a couple of weeks to align with the more generally observed festival of Christmas. So
Sinterklaas
began his American odyssey.

All of this activity—children clamoring, bakers baking, tradesmen muscling their way to the top—intensified as Manhattan matured in its last decade under the Dutch. How New Amsterdam flourished in the years following the establishment of the municipal government is an area that has only recently been studied in depth, thanks largely to Charles Gehring's translation work. Ironically, however, the very intensity of activity in this period of the colony's life has slowed the translating of its records. “In the late 1650s I'm dealing with much more complicated legalese,” Dr. Gehring told me one day in 2002 as I sat observing him at work in his office in the New York State Library. His desk was stacked with volumes of an eighteenth-century guide to Dutch, Latin, and French legal terms; the shelves behind him were lined with the forty massive volumes of
Het Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal,
the definitive historical dictionary of the Dutch language from the year 1500, and the ten-volume
Middelnederlandsch Woordenboek,
which focuses on the sixteenth century. “There's more legal activity now because there are more people,” he said. “And there are more arguments. In the early days the land grants were vague because there was plenty of land. By now people are more packed in, and they are fighting about where property lines are. So you find Stuyvesant having to employ surveyors. And then you see the municipal government order a street plan with all the building lots indicated.”

All of this paints a picture of Manhattan in its Dutch phase very different from the haggard, inept settlement we get in traditional tellings. But while trade and shipping details suggest that the region was thriving, they aren't what most mattered about the place. Who was there, how they got along, how they mixed—that is the colony's unheralded legacy. From the French Atlantic coast, the pine forests of Denmark, the streets of London, they made their way to this island, and, thanks to a farsighted program started by the city leaders, found someone waiting to offer them “burgher” status as they came off the ship. If they couldn't afford citizenship dues (“twenty guilders in beavers”), they could pay it on installment. Eventually, maybe, they found a way to make enough guilders, beavers, or hands of wampum to convince them that it was worth staying.

The village of Harlem (Nieuw Haarlem, after the city in Holland), founded at this time at the northern end of Manhattan, was a kind of microcosm of this microcosm of the future American society. The initial bloc of thirty-two families who staked out lots along its two lanes came from six different parts of Europe—Denmark, Sweden, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and what is now southern Belgium—and spoke five different languages. Perched alongside one another on the edge of a wilderness continent, families that would have broken up into ghettos in Europe instead had to come together, and learned a common language.

Nothing better shows the kind of mixing that took place in this setting than a phenomenon that was unprecedented elsewhere in the colonies: intermarriage. Scan the marriage records of the Dutch Reformed Church of New Amsterdam and you find a degree of culture-mixing in such a small place that is remarkable for the time. A German man marries a Danish woman. A man from Venice marries a woman from Amsterdam. Isaac Bethloo from “Calis in Vranckryck” (i.e., Calais in France) weds Lysbeth Potters from “Batavia in the East Indies.” Samuel Edsall, reared in the English countryside around Reading, finds himself on Manhattan, where he somehow manages to woo a girl named Jannetje Wessels who spent her early years in the wild heath country of Gelderland near the German border. A Norwegian marries a German. Swedish-English. Danish-Swedish. Prussian-German. German-Danish. French-Dutch. In all, a quarter of the marriages performed in the New Amsterdam church were mixed. Intermarriage also appears among the Africans of the population, as when a man from the island of St. Thomas marries a woman from West Africa, and there are instances of marriage between whites and blacks.

It's easy to imagine Van der Donck, newly returned from Europe and strolling through New Amsterdam, comparing the rush of cultures in its streets to the mix he found on the Dam square in Amsterdam. He had come back to witness something that he himself had helped bring about: the forging of America's first melting pot. It so happened that in this melting pot the common language to which everyone defaulted was Dutch. And it was a seventeenth-century Dutch sensibility—a mix of frankness, piety, a keen business sense, an eye on the wider world, and a willingness to put up with people's differences—that formed the social glue. Already, a type was forming, which visitors were beginning to remark on: worldly, brash, confident, hustling.

Of course, equality was not part of the fabric of this pluralistic society. It wasn't even an ideal. Tolerance—call it grudging acceptance—was the major leap forward in human civilization that had recently occurred, which helped form the societies both of the Dutch Republic and the Manhattan colony. But in the seventeenth century no one believed that blacks and whites, men and women, Catholics and Protestants, were equals, or should be treated as such. Last among the unequals were the Africans. The slaves in the colony were the human workhorses. In trying to get a sense of what life was for the African Manhattanites, however, it's necessary to erase from your mind the idea of the fully formed institution of slavery as it existed in, say, the American South in the early 1800s. The institution was in its early days, and there was a strong belief in the Netherlands that it was morally wrong to buy and sell human beings, so that in the records of the colony you see a queer range of perspectives on Africans and their condition. There is the pious Reverend Jonas Michaelius referring to the black women who have worked in his house as “thievish, lazy, and useless trash,” and there is Stuyvesant, sounding the classic slaver, accusing a woman slave of theft, denouncing a man for his “laziness and unwillingness,” and decreeing that both be sold “for the maximum profit of the Company.” But there are also more than a few cases of owners freeing slaves after a number of years, on the belief that they had done their time, and there are even a few occasions when Europeans are recorded as working for freed Africans. A number of Africans owned property, and Stuyvesant himself declared, in an as-yet unpublished document, that their ownership was to be looked on as “true and free ownership with such privileges as all tracts of land are bestowed on the inhabitants [of this] province.” Slaves also had some legal rights: repeatedly, slaves appear in court, filing lawsuits against Europeans.

It's also necessary to keep in mind the scale of slavery in the colony. Manhattan was far removed from the sugar fields of Brazil and the Caribbean, where slave labor mattered. In its first decades there were no more than a few dozen slaves scattered across the colony at any one time; by the time of the English takeover there were about three hundred. What's notable in the records is less the presence of slaves on Manhattan than the development of the West India Company's slave trade. At first the company had refused to sully itself with the slave trade, but after failing in its other business ventures and seeing the money to be made from the transshipping of humans, it reversed course and became a significant player in one of history's ugliest episodes.

The island of Curaçao was transformed into a processing station for tens of thousands of chained, disease-riddled, and seasickened West Africans, and the records show Stuyvesant—whose title was after all Director-General of New Netherland, Curaçao, Bonaire, and Aruba—in the midst of running the North American colony, managing from afar his vice-director on Curaçao, Matthais Beck. What jangles in reading their correspondence are the humdrum, helter-skelter inventories of goods being moved around the Atlantic, as in a ship that arrived in Curaçao in August 1660 carrying “724 pine planks . . . 1245 pounds of English hardbread . . . 2 barrels of bacon . . . 75 skipples of peas . . .” and “10 Negroes” valued at “130 pieces of eight.”

Africans weren't the only group to receive less-than-equal status. Cultural diversity management was about the last item on Peter Stuyvesant's list of job skills, and it's safe to say he was less than thrilled to see Manhattan's streets becoming an ethnic kaleidoscope. Religion was at the root of it: Stuyvesant despised Jews, loathed Catholics, recoiled at Quakers, and reserved a special hatred for Lutherans. Which is to say, he was the very model of a well-bred mid-seventeenth-century European. Religious bigotry was a mainstay of society. The four New England colonies to the north were founded on it. Across Europe it was universally held that diversity weakened a nation. Of course, the United Provinces of the Netherlands were supposed to be the exception to this rule, but the blanket of tolerance got a bit tattered on the transatlantic voyage. It's strange that the one nod that history has given to the Manhattan-based colony—as a cradle of religious liberty in the early America—is off base. Not that it is wrong exactly, but it needs to be combed out.

Dutch tolerance was indeed renowned throughout Europe, but it continued to be debated in the country, and every decade or so brought a shift in the prevailing cultural winds. One such shift had occurred in 1651. When the stadtholder, Willem II, died following his attempted coup d'état, leaders of all the Dutch provinces bent toward The Hague for a Great Assembly, the first such gathering since 1579, when the separate provinces met to hash out a common nation. The main topic was supposed to be what to do about the lack of a stadtholder, but the assembly turned into a debate on tolerance. The orthodox Calvinist faction chose the assembly as the occasion to push the line that the whole tolerance business had gotten out of hand—that, in effect, before you knew it the streets of Amsterdam would be filled with drug dens and legalized prostitution. A wave of hardline sentiment rippled outward, and it became fashionable for a time to crack down, in particular, on Catholics, Lutherans, and Jews.

It was in this atmosphere that Stuyvesant, whose feelings were strongly antidiversity anyway, moved against the religious groups that had proliferated as the colony had grown. When the Dutch Reformed ministers asked him to block Lutherans from worshipping on the grounds that it “would pave the way for other sects,” so that eventually the place “would become a receptacle for all sorts of heretics and fanatics,” he did so with gusto. In 1654 twenty-three Jews, some of whom had fled the fall of Dutch Brazil, showed up seeking asylum. You can almost see Stuyvesant shaking his head at being told that, on top of the usual heap of issues he had to deal with, he now had a Jewish population. His reaction was matter-of-fact, and perfectly in character: the Jews were “a deceitful race” that would “infect” the colony if he didn't stop them. He barred one from buying land, “for important reasons.” He even refused to allow them to take turns standing guard with the citizens' militia, citing “the aversion and disaffection of this militia to be fellow soldiers of the aforesaid [Jewish] nation.” If they didn't like it, he told Jacob Barsimon and Asser Levy in a terse decree, “consent is hereby given to them to depart whenever and wherever it may please them.” But Abraham de Lucena and Salvador Dandrada, leaders of the Jews, knew their rights in the Dutch system, and appealed to the Dutch Republic. The Jewish community of Amsterdam applied pressure in the time-honored tradition of politics, and won. Stuyvesant's superiors reminded him loftily of the “each person shall remain free in his religion” law (and added that certain influential Jews had invested a “large amount of capital” in the West India Company), and ordered him to back off.