The Island at the Center of the World (35 page)

But it was English Quakers who pushed tolerance to the limit. They had followed other sects that had fled from Old England to New, and then southward into Dutch territory. There they began proselytizing in the largely English towns of Long Island. With their sermonizing and taunting and the jiggling fits of spiritual frenzy for which they were named, they all but invited Stuyvesant's disdain. They were, in his estimation, a threat to the peace and stability of the colony, and probably out of their minds as well. He thought he was being magnanimous when, instead of banishing them, he sent them an English preacher—none other than Adriaen van der Donck's father-in-law, Francis Doughty—but they rejected him, and continued holding their own avant-garde services. When Stuyvesant forbade the town of Vlissingen from abetting them, thirty-one of the villagers, all English, followed the Dutch form of complaint by signing a remonstrance to Stuyvesant. The law of “love peace and libertie . . . which is the glory of the Outward State of Holland,” they reminded him, extends even “to Jewes Turkes and Egiptians.” Therefore, they respectfully refused to obey. The so-called Flushing Remonstrance is considered one of the foundational documents of American liberty, ancestor to the first amendment in the Bill of Rights, which guarantees that the government “shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” But here, too, history has spun it as a Dutch-English story, with the English in the role of lovers of liberty and Stuyvesant, standing in for his non-English colony, as the reactionary boob. In fact, the currents running through the colony were more complex, the Netherlands being the source both of a legal code of tolerance and, at times, of the failure to adhere to it. If the first amendment hearkens back to the Flushing Remonstrance, the Flushing Remonstrance clearly bases itself on the religious freedom guarantee in the Dutch constitutional document.

True to form, Stuyvesant responded to the English remonstrance with a series of arrests and imprisonments. His orthodox roots were showing in all of this: he was pushing hard, and against the inexorable forces of history, for his colony and the island he considered home to become, somehow, eventually, pure. If he had had his way, he would probably have picked off foreign religious elements one by one, scaring each away, until, like the New Englanders he seemed to admire, he had a religious monoculture, a Calvinist oasis in the New World.

But the place had its own character, and it was evolving rapidly. Thirty years later, one of Stuyvesant's successors, Governor Thomas Dongan, casually referenced the varieties of religious experience that had proliferated by then in the New York colony. Besides a Church of England presence, a Dutch Calvinist population, French Calvinists, Dutch Lutherans, and Roman Catholics, there were “Singing Quakers; Ranting Quakers; Sabbatarians; Antisabbatarians; Some Anabaptists some Independants; some Jews.” “In short,” he added to sharpen the point, “of all sorts of opinions there are some, and the most part, of none at all.” Stuyvesant must have lurched in his grave.

I
F THE GROWTH
of the colony brought Stuyvesant headaches, it also brought opportunity—bursts of happiness, even—into his otherwise stormy life. One day in late summer 1655, he found himself with a good sun overhead, the feel of a swaying deck beneath him, and enough wind to fatten the sails and flutter the long thin strands of his hair. Once again, as in his salad days in the Caribbean, he was at sea, heading a flotilla of seven gunboats and three hundred soldiers, bearing down on the enemy. Then, he had been thirty-four, and his assault on the Spanish at St. Martin was squelched by the “rough ball” that had shot off his leg. Now forty-five and in command of a thriving province, he was determined to win the day.

Off the starboard stretched a long ribbon of forest-backed beach that looked every bit as wild as when Henry Hudson had sailed along it in the other direction five decades earlier. Rounding Cape May and advancing into the shoaly bay and then up the river that formed the most neglected area of his domain, he anchored between the two Swedish forts on the western shore. Here he deployed with precision, dividing his men into five companies, sending a contingent of fifty marching off to occupy the only road in the region, thus cutting off communication between the two forts of his enemy, and setting the rest to building a six-foot-high breastworks a stone's throw from the nearer fort. He sent into the fort an ensign named Dirck Smith, accompanied by a drummer escort. The message he carried was a straight-up demand: unconditional surrender.

The Anglo-Dutch War was over. A wave of prosperity was washing through the colony. And with the recent fall of Brazil to the Portuguese, the West India Company had finally—belatedly—committed itself to the Manhattan-based colony, sending troops and ships. So Stuyvesant was at last able to devote his formidable attention to his southern region. The Swedes had maintained their presence here for seventeen years now, settling the region sparsely, in part by bringing in “forest Finns.” Decades before, Sweden had encouraged this particular group of Finns who lived near the Russian border to settle in a remote area of central Sweden, which the Swedish government had wanted cleared. The Finns had a way of life that revolved around “burn-beating” to clear forest and then cultivate the land, making them the perfect subgroup to tame dense, virgin woodland. But they turned out to be too good at their task; when they refused to curtail their way of life and stop decimating forests, the Swedes began shipping them to America. Together with the forest Finns, the Swedes had developed settlements on the South River and cultivated a steady fur trade with the Indians of the region, which had rankled both Kieft and Stuyvesant. They had also taken control of one of the Dutch forts on the river. Now Stuyvesant had come to demand, as he put it, “restitution of our property.”

After a brief wait, the Swedish commander stepped out to survey the force arrayed against him, then asked to be allowed to communicate with his superior in the other fort. “His request was firmly denied,” Stuyvesant later wrote with satisfaction, “and he left discontented.” Finally the Swedish factor, a man named Von Elswick, arrived on the scene to parlay. He and Stuyvesant met on the edge of a marsh just below the fort. The insects of high summer roared around them, the sun glinted off Stuyvesant's armor; his self-assured body language reflected the presence of the hundreds of soldiers behind him. The men apparently spoke in a mixture of languages, falling to diplomats' Latin for precision. Both knew that Stuyvesant had gathered an overwhelming force. The matter was simple: would the Swedes fight and die needlessly, or surrender the Delaware River region to the Dutch?

Von Elswick had no choice but to give in, but as he surrendered he aimed a verbal kick at Stuyvesant.
“Hodie mihi, cras tibi,”
he said in prophetic Latin.
Today it's me, tomorrow it will be you.
He meant it as a vow—that the Swedes would one day return. In fact, it was prophetic in a different way, as in nine years' time another power, in the role of the bigger fish, would give Stuyvesant the same ultimatum he was now offering the Swede.

Stuyvesant parried the jibe and took possession of the forts. New Sweden vanished into history. He took immediate steps to settle the region, which he knew was the only hope for keeping control of it. He started with the Finns whom the Swedes had brought in as laborers. He decided to invite them to stay, and in fact he gave them incentives to continue settling the wilderness. Like so many other aspects of the Manhattan-based colony, this decision would rattle down the centuries, affecting American history in oddly resonant ways. The Finns did indeed put down roots, and over the final decade of Dutch rule more would join them, as word spread in the old country. From the early 1700s into the early 1800s their descendants would migrate down the Appalachian Valley, through the South, and out into the heartland of the new country. They brought with them their forest-clearing skills, which literally opened the American frontier, and something more as well. Throughout northern Europe, this group was renowned for its way with wood, and as the Finns spread they brought their technology with them, and it caught on. There is a long trail of evidence—V-notching, roof construction, and a kind of modular floor plan—to support the idea that the American log cabin, which rooted Appalachia and shaped Abraham Lincoln's Indiana boyhood, thus originated with the Finns of central Sweden and spread following the Latin-Dutch-Swedish parlay between Stuyvesant and Von Elswick in a bee-loud glade along the Delaware River.
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Stuyvesant felt full of himself as he prepared to head back to Manhattan. His colony was thriving. (That it was due in large part to the semirepresentative government that he had bitterly fought was another matter.) The border agreement he had hashed out with the New Englanders was holding. And at long last he had regained control of the southern region, and without firing a shot. As he prepared to board his flagship, the ache in his stump must have dulled somewhat.

I
F HE WAS
experiencing a rare problem-free moment, however, it was about to end. One hundred and fifty miles to the north, canoes were in the river, moving fast through the predawn, paddles knifing the water. On September 15, 1655, six hundred Indians made landfall at the southernmost point of Manhattan Island, below the fort, then flowed through the streets of the town, firing arrows, swinging axes, setting off screams, shrieks, alarms. Similar raids took place to the north on the mainland and on Staten Island, where Indians burned down homes, killed several dozen Europeans, and took more hostages.

Historians have thought it an odd coincidence that this brief “war” should take place while Stuyvesant happened to be away to the south subduing the Swedes. Trying to make sense of it, some grabbed at an incident in which a Dutchman killed an Indian woman for stealing peaches, decided that this had launched the mayhem, and named it the Peach War. But the evidence for what actually sparked the raids is there, lying in the records. The European residents of New Amsterdam could distinguish between the various tribes of the region, and in reporting the events of September 1655 they noted that the attackers seemed to be from everywhere: “Maquas, Mahikanders, the Indians of the North River from above to below,” they wrote to Stuyvesant. And, strangely, they noted the presence of a chief of the Minquas or Susquehannocks—the tribe from the South River region, precisely where Stuyvesant had sailed. Such a multicultural Indian gathering makes no sense—unless you flip your view of events around, as some recent historians have done, and see it from the Indians' point of view.

We are so used to looking at encounters between whites and Indians through the prism of later centuries that it's hard to fathom that in the 1600s the Indians saw themselves as the dominant players. As far as the Minquas of the South River were concerned, they had devoted seventeen years to cultivating a trading relationship with the Swedes, only to see Stuyvesant and his soldiers destroy it. So the Indians retaliated. In doing so, they were in effect protecting the Swedes, who brought them valuable supplies and who, being weaker than the Indians, deserved their protection. It has also become clear in recent years that East Coast Indians regularly formed alliances with distant tribes. If we grant them that much sophistication, then the reports of the Manhattanites make sense: a Minquas chief orchestrated the attack, and it was a direct result of Stuyvesant's dismantling of New Sweden.

The misnamed Peach War was a blip in the life of the Manhattan-based colony: it was over in a matter of weeks. But it plays a bigger part in this story. Here again, as in so many other places, we have to fill in gaps with guesses. We have to imagine a party of Indians who had come from afar to attack Europeans. Just north of Manhattan, in a long valley, they come across a patch of civilization: a farmhouse, a saw mill, fields under cultivation. They raid the house; a man inside rises up to defend his family. He has always maintained good relations with the Indians of the area, but these are from elsewhere and make no distinctions between whites who are friends or enemies. The man is murdered. His wife escapes, or perhaps is taken prisoner for a time. It is over quickly, the roaring, defiant cries that signal the end of a life swallowed by the wooded hillsides.

The man was Adriaen van der Donck. For some periods of his life his presence and personality are so vivid that he seems to step three-dimensionally out of the pages of historical records. But the image of him in his last years, since his return from Europe, is flat and dim, and the circumstances of his death are sketchy. The death itself isn't even recorded. We know only that Van der Donck was alive in the summer of 1655, that he was dead before January of 1656, and that his house was ransacked by Indians during the multitribal attack in September. So we have to stitch the remnants together with surmise. Interestingly, it's from Stuyvesant that we first hear of Van der Donck being dead, in an indirect reference. As the Manhattanites try to make sense of the Indian attacks, Stuyvesant tells the members of his council of a Wickquasgeck Indian, from the area around Van der Donck's home, coming to discuss what he knows. This Indian, Stuyvesant mentions, “had been a good friend of Van der Donck, and had taken care of his cows for some time.” Thus the verb tense serves as the man's death notice, and the mention of him in conjunction with the attack adds another piece of evidence as to how he died. Since Stuyvesant himself never understood the likely connection between his military actions in the South River and the attacks around Manhattan, it probably never occurred to him that he had been indirectly responsible for the death of his onetime nemesis.

Van der Donck's wife, Mary, survived him. Her father, the Reverend Francis Doughty, had recently accepted a position at a church in Virginia and, following her husband's death, she joined him there. She found regular work as a medical practitioner, purging, sweating, setting bones, and delivering babies. Eventually she married an Englishman named Hugh O'Neale, but, oddly, continued to appear in the records as “Mrs. Van der Donck (alias) O'Neale.” Having given up on the vast estate for which her husband had had such plans, Mary signed it over to her brother, who sold it. And so very quickly after his death at the age of thirty-seven, Adriaen van der Donck—with no progeny or property to recall him to the living—was a forgotten man.