The Island at the Center of the World (36 page)

But no—that's not quite true. In a strange twist, his book,
A Description of New Netherland—
into which he had poured his knowledge of the colony, its people, its natives, its plants, winds, insects, mountains, snows, dangers, and promises—his book, which had been admitted for publication and then withheld due to the war, came out in the Netherlands right around the time of his death. It became a best-seller, and went into a second edition the following year. Once again, this time posthumously, Van der Donck sparked a wave of interest in a faraway place called Manhattan, an island where ordinary Europeans could throw off the ancient shackles of their castes and guilds and sects. A place to which, now, yet more mixes of peoples—Croats and Prussians, Flemings and Limburgers, Copenhageners and Dieppois—would pin their dreams.

To the front of the second edition of the book, the publisher attached a poem that sung both the author and his subject:

So, reader, if you desire, travel there freely and full of joy.

Although named for the Netherlands, it exceeds it far.

Does such a journey not appeal? Then lend your eyes

To the book by Van der Donck, which like a bright star

Shows the land and people, and will teach you further

That the Netherlands, through her care, can govern New Netherland.

It wasn't very good verse. But it was as close as anyone would come to memorializing the man who first saw the promise of Manhattan Island, dreamed its future, and devoted his life to making the dream real.

The passion for the New World colony that had fueled Van der Donck outlived him. Less than a year after his death and on the heels of the publication of his book, the municipal government of Amsterdam put together an elaborate plan for a colony of its own. Three hundred settlers signed on to emigrate, and the city drew up long lists of start-up supplies—400 pairs of shoes, “50 pairs Prussian blue stockings,” “100 red Rouen caps,” “8 firkins vinegar,” 250 pounds of cheese, 15 hams, 30 smoked tongues—with which it furnished them. Impressed by Stuyvesant's vanquishing of the Swedes, they decided to plant the new settlement on the South River, around one of Stuyvesant's forts. And so it began all over again: a new crop of arrivals, new hopes. “I have been full 5 or 6 hours in the interior in the woods,” wrote one of the settlers, a schoolmaster, shortly after landfall, “and found fine oak and hickory trees, also excellent land for tillage. . . . I already begin to keep school, and have 25 children.” They called the settlement New Amstel. Today it is the city of New Castle, Delaware, and on its central square a tiny, late-seventeenth-century Dutch house of sturdy brick and red-shuttered windows bears testimony to the belated effort to heed Van der Donck. The desires, now, were to exploit the colony's potential and to catch up with English expansion in North America. One would be realized, the other would not.

Chapter 14

NEW YORK

U
nless you are a member of the Dead Sea Scrolls sect or a follower of the philosopher Hegel, it would probably be a mistake to think that the English takeover of Manhattan was inevitable. The fall of Rome, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the American colonists winning their war for independence, the Allies defeating Hitler—we have a tendency to imagine that past events, especially the big ones, had to happen the way they did. But really to believe that is to subscribe to a doctrine that holds that our acts aren't our own, that we are only cogs in a machine carrying out preprogrammed instructions.

In hindsight, however, the takeover does have a certain obviousness. Partly that's because history books have portrayed the event that way, giving us the image of the English population of New England as an inexorable force of nature swelling until, like a glass overflowing, it poured southward almost unconsciously, flooding the Dutch colony. But looked at another way, you might say that the colony cast off its Dutch parent. The seed that Henry Hudson transported to a distant island rooted and grew, and, really, outgrew the mother plant. It was the luckiest thing in the world for Manhattan—for America—that the English wanted it so badly, because, though no one could see it at the time, the Dutch empire was already on the wane, and the English one was only beginning its rise. Van der Donck's mission had been all about the forces of history; his appeal was for the leaders of the Dutch government to take note of them. But the system that fueled the Dutch Golden Age wasn't built to last. The English, meanwhile, especially those in America, would begin experimenting ornately and obsessively with ideas of liberty, unfettered reason, the rights of man. Put elements of the two together—seventeenth-century Dutch tolerance and free-trade principles and eighteenth-century English ideas about self-government—and you have a recipe for a new kind of society. You can almost see the baton passing from the one seventeenth-century power to the other, and at the very center of that changeover is Manhattan.

But no one in the Dutch colony—or for that matter in New England—saw the end that finally came. It wasn't a result of hordes of New Englanders sweeping south. What happened was more calculated, and involved a global set of players, and, like any good final act, some sudden reversals.

The figure at the center of it all, of course, was Peter Stuyvesant. Stuyvesant's main adversary was a man he would never meet—a man whose first, brief, appearance in the history books came years earlier. In 1642, Stuyvesant was still barking orders under the tropical sun of Curaçao, Kieft was in charge on Manhattan, and Van der Donck was the lawman up north, roaming the vast estate of the Amsterdam diamond merchant Kiliaen Van Rensselaer. Meanwhile, outside the village of Boston, nine young men stepped from a simple clapboard building onto a long sward of grass. It was endless wilderness just beyond the surrounding cow pastures and apple trees, but they and the cluster of people gathered around them saw the event through the lens of civilization, embued it with centuries of English tradition. The nine young men were the first class of graduates of the college founded with money granted by a Puritan minister named John Harvard.

Overseeing the ceremony was John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts colony, with whom Peter Stuyvesant would forge a close relationship. But the man who, more than any other individual, would engineer the takeover of Manhattan was one of those nine young scholars stepping into a New England morning in early fall. His name was George Downing. He was a grim, athletic nineteen-year-old possessed of an ambition bordering on aggression, and he happened to be Governor Winthrop's nephew.

As with most of those first generations of Harvard graduates, Downing yearned for London. Shortly after the ceremony, he sailed there, saw the civil war taking shape, pronounced himself a Puritan revolutionary, and fought with the Parliamentarians. As the new government came into being, Oliver Cromwell saw the intellect and bulldog ferocity in the young man and made him his ambassador to The Hague. There, Downing proved himself English to the core, which meant, among other things, fostering a loyal hatred of the Dutch. Really, he was an ungainly choice for a diplomat, unless you are more interested in sticking it to the country in question than in smoothing things. In place of the suave manners usually considered necessary in diplomacy, Downing was brusque and obstinate. Jan de Witt and the other leaders of the Dutch government found him repellent, and his colleagues in the English government didn't much care for him either. The diarist Samuel Pepys worked under him and frankly pronounced him (to his diary, anyway) a “perfidious rogue.”

But Downing had the diplomat's knack of getting what he wanted, and nothing shows it better than his management of his own fate following Cromwell's death in 1658 and the restoration of the Stuarts, in the person of Charles II, to the throne. Downing had been among the most vicious of the anti-Royals, hunting down friends of the Stuart family, and now the same royal family had returned to power. Turning on a dime, he boldly asked the new monarch to excuse his waywardness in supporting Cromwell, and blamed his faulty judgment on his having come of age in the unstable climate of the New World. He then demonstrated his loyalty to the king by trapping and arresting three of his own friends, men who had sentenced Charles's father to death. Downing's shamelessness was rewarded not only by Charles reappointing him to his position as Dutch ambassador, and later knighting him, but, eventually, by the naming of Downing Street in London after him. (Downing College at the University of Cambridge has his name on it, too, as a result of a bequest he made.)

So Downing resettled himself at The Hague, and recommenced loathing the Dutch and their trade hegemony and searching, as duty compelled him to do, for cracks in it. Back in New England, meanwhile, the leaders—men who were theologically even more strident than the home country Puritans—were at least as disoriented by the restoration of the Stuarts as Downing, and most were not nearly as adept at switching gears. One result of their quandary, notable for American history in a number of ways, was the struggle for power and territory among the leaders of the English colonies in the early '60s. Massachusetts, with its long-standing royal charter, was on firmest ground. But the two southern colonies, Connecticut and New Haven, had formed in an ad hoc way, settlers spilling southward into territory the Dutch had claimed; as yet they had no official sanction in England. It was now necessary to petition the royals they had long despised. For New Haven, where Puritanism was purest, this was galling, and the leaders balked.

One man in Connecticut, however, had more flexibility. John Winthrop, the governor of that colony, was the son of the other John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts and the patriarch of all the New England Puritans, and thus the cousin of George Downing. The elder Winthrop had long since died, much to the chagrin of Peter Stuyvesant, who had relied on his pro-Dutch leanings in his dealings with the New England leaders. Stuyvesant now—with disastrous misjudgment—looked to the son for level-headed leadership among the Puritan firebrands. The younger Winthrop has been portrayed by history as a quiet, modest achiever, forever in the shadow of his father. This small, dark knife of a man has not been given credit either for his accomplishments or his political cunning.

In 1661, having overcome his anti-Royalist impulses, Winthrop proposed to travel to London to petition Charles for a charter for his colony. His guile shows itself first in his eagerness to go, second in the manner of his leave-taking. After promising William Leete, his counterpart in New Haven, that he would also deliver the petition for a charter that the colony had belatedly cobbled together, he sailed off, literally leaving the man standing on shore still holding his document. Next, he chose not to leave from Boston but instead made arrangements with his friend Peter Stuyvesant to sail from Manhattan. Of course, the island was a major travel hub, but sailing on a Dutch ship meant arriving in Holland first and then having to cross to England. Stuyvesant doesn't seem to have found it odd.

Sailing into the Dutch harbor on July 8, Winthrop was shocked by the sound of cannon fire coming from the fort. But the shock turned to delight: his friend Stuyvesant was giving him the honored greeting of a head of state. (The Dutch records inform us that no less than twenty-seven pounds of gun powder were consumed “to salute Governor Winthorp [sic]”.) Stuyvesant liked Winthrop. He seemed to like all Englishmen. Hartford was fast-growing but unkempt, and Stuyvesant proudly showed the visitor around his trim little capital: here the fort, here the new brick home of the director himself (Stuyvesant having decided he ought to have a house outside the fort as well as his distant farm), here the newly reinforced wall along the northern perimeter, complete now with guard towers and a central gate at the Highway. Winthrop apparently kept up his stream of convivial chatter, asking lots of questions, complimenting the director on how far he had come with his town. He spent thirteen days in New Amsterdam, and by the end of it he had detailed notes on the place, its fortifications, and troop numbers.

Trying to imagine Stuyvesant's plight at this time gives some sympathy for him. He knew there were English machinations over his colony, and must have been livid over the company's failure to send soldiers for its defense. And yet, when his own people expressed similar anger at being left without protection, he had to defend the directors' decisions.

And while he was wary of the English, Stuyvesant couldn't resist comparing notes with Winthrop on their respective colonies, and expressing frank envy of the monocultures of New England while complaining how his own population was comprised of the “scrapings” of all countries. As pressures grew, he seems to have become more and more a solitary figure, and an oddly evocative image of him at this time comes into view. One of his apparent sources of pleasure was tropical birds, with which he had presumably become fascinated in his years in the Caribbean. Over the years he had instructed company officials on Curaçao to send him birds (one packing slip indicates “To the honorable lord director-general P. Stuyvesant,” “Four parrots in two cages” and “Twenty-four parakeets”), so that he must have built up quite an aviary by this time. On his farm, alone with the bright squawking of his pets, he must have tried endlessly to parse the problem of how to deal with the English, weighing trust versus suspicion.

Stuyvesant's bonhomie toward Winthrop extended right up to the latter's departure: fifty-five soldiers lined the harbor as Winthrop's ship headed for open water, and unleashed a full military salute. At the other end of his journey, Winthrop arranged a meeting with the directors of the West India Company. Here he played up the fellow-Protestant connection, and the normally reserved men of business were convinced. “He has always shown himself a friend of our nation,” they wrote to Stuyvesant, encouraging him in his trust.

If anyone found it suspicious that Winthrop proposed next to travel from Amsterdam to The Hague, it could have been explained away as a family matter. George Downing, English diplomat in residence there, was after all his cousin. They had last seen each other in New England, and were on familiar enough terms that later Winthrop wrote several times to Downing, who was famously stingy with money, to chide him for keeping his mother living near poverty. Secret consultations being what they are, we don't know the details of the meeting between the two cousins in September of 1661, but a map that Winthrop had drawn up of New Amsterdam's fortifications was soon circulating in government channels; this, logically, was the moment in which information about the current military status of the Dutch colony was transferred to English authorities.

Then—this historically momentous journey proceeding to the next phase—it was on to London for Winthrop. Charles II's coronation had taken place just five months earlier, and the city, having thrown off the heavy drape of Puritan rule, was in the midst of its libertine Restoration hoedown, with thundering alehouses, saucy maids, and theaters packing in crowds to see productions of
Hamlet, 'Tis a Pity She's a Whore,
and puppet shows satirizing Puritanism. From all of these Winthrop carefully averted his eyes as he applied himself to the task of winning royal favor.

In drab contrast to the satiny surroundings of the king's council chamber, Winthrop—a gray little man with a hooked nose and arched, sardonic-looking eyebrows—bowed low and bowed often that autumn and winter, he smiled through the small indignities (being routinely confused with Josiah Winslow of the Plymouth colony, realizing midway through the discussions that the king thought “Massachusetts” and “New England” were one and the same) and emerged with a document that embodied all of his desires, desires he had kept secret from everyone, most of all his New England colleagues. When the charter was finally presented to them, they were staggered. Charles had given Connecticut a grant that extended from the Massachusetts border south, including the Dutch territories, and west as far as “the Pacific.” Winthrop's quiet, modest, understated ambition was now revealed. He wanted all the territory between Massachusetts and Virginia. He wanted his land to stretch to the Pacific Ocean—never mind that no one had any notion how far it was. He wanted everything. And he got it.

New Haven officials were apoplectic at the idea that Winthrop proposed to engulf their colony, but it was a fait accompli—he had the royal signature—and, truly, he was so nice about it, so patient in explaining why it was for the good of all, that his opposite, Governor Leete, gave in quickly, thus ensuring that the future United States would contain no state of New Haven. The bitterest Puritans of the colony talked about picking up stakes and heading for the Dutch territory, where they knew they would be welcomed, but their leaders also knew that Winthrop had that next in his sights.