The Island at the Center of the World (39 page)

Nicolls, meanwhile, was delighted with the deal he had struck. Without firing a shot, he had gotten a thing that he knew full well was of great immediate value and of inestimable future value. All of the English leaders seemed aware of the scope of the achievement. “I saw ye towne upon the Manatos Iland reduced to the obedience of our Soveraigne Lord the Kinge,” John Winthrop intoned after the articles were signed, “Wherby there is way made for the inlargment of his Maties Dominions, by filling yt vacant wildernesse, in tyme, with plantatios of his Maties subiects . . .” Nicolls fired off a letter to the Duke, practically crowing at his accomplishment, declaring New York “the best of all His Majties Townes in America,” and predicting that within five years it would be the main portal for the flow of trade between England and North America.

When the news of the takeover reached King Charles, he whisked a letter to France. His sister Henrietta—the Duchess of Orleans, sister-in-law (and sometime lover) of Louis XIV—was his closest confidante. “You will have heard of our taking of New Amsterdam, which lies just by New England,” he wrote to her chirpily. “'Tis a place of great importance to trade, and a very good town.” The Dutch had done marvels with the wilderness island, the king noted, “but we have got the better of it, and 'tis now called New York.”

B
UT THE
1664 surrender would not be the end of the struggle between the two empires over the colony. The takeover of Manhattan helped ignite the Second Anglo-Dutch War, which would see Dutch warships retaliate by taking the English outpost of Surinam to the north of Brazil, valuable for its sugar plantations, and the spice island of Run in the East Indies, while others sailed up the Thames tributary known as the Medway, surprising the English fleet, torching some of its finest ships, and forcing Whitehall to treat for peace. With a shortsightedness that would have made Van der Donck shake his head in sad recognition, the Dutch government allowed England, in the treaty negotiations, to have its way regarding captured territories: rather than swap them back, each nation would keep its war spoils.

Some Dutch leaders, however, apparently thought that was a bad deal. Only five years after the peace treaty was signed, the Third Anglo-Dutch War broke out, and a Dutch fleet crossed the Atlantic and set about strafing English possessions. It attacked Caribbean ports under English control, swept into the Chesapeake and burned the tobacco fleet about to embark for England, then, in a little-known episode, sailed into New York Harbor in August 1673, precisely nine years after Stuyvesant's surrender, and retook Manhattan. Everything then happened in reverse: a Dutch commander at the head of a flotilla of gunships threatened to reduce the town; inside the fort, an Englishman was in charge, anguishing over what to do. He was outgunned and outmanned. The English surrendered; a new, Dutch-led administration was installed. The English troops paraded out of the fort just as the Dutch under Stuyvesant had done, and the town that had been New Amsterdam and then New York was given a third name: New Orange. The whole colony changed hands: the upriver trading town that the Dutch had named Beverwyck, and which Nicolls had renamed Albany after his patron, was now called Willemstad. The paperwork was barely complete, however, before it all reverted again. Fifteen months after retaking the colony, with the signing of yet another peace treaty, the Dutch gave it back.

But even this was not the end of the tug of war over the island and its trading city. Its namesake, the Duke of York, having labored for a quarter century in his brother's shadow, got the chance truly to impose his vision of empire in 1685, when Charles died and he ascended to the throne. But the rule of James II began to fall apart almost at once. Thanks to his conversion to Roman Catholicism years before, English leaders and much of the population suspected him of being a Popish puppet; real resistance mounted when he installed Catholics in important offices. When it got out that the queen was pregnant—meaning that a Catholic line was in the making—James's rule teetered.

English history has characterized the Glorious Revolution—in which James was ousted and replaced by Willem of Orange, Stadtholder of the Netherlands, and his wife, Mary—as an “invitation.” There is an element of spin doctoring in this. In fact, the Dutch leader—the son of the previous Willem, who had attempted a coup d'état while Van der Donck was in The Hague—capped the century of Dutch-English rivalry by launching a full-scale invasion of the British Isles. More than twenty thousand troops hit the beach at Torbay on the Devon coast, and a month later Willem rode triumphantly into London. The Dutch army took control of Whitehall Palace and all the other power centers, and the Dutch stadtholder was crowned king of England. The so-called invitation was considered by many Englishmen of the time a thorough disgrace, but for others the facts that Mary (who was James's daughter) was the presumptive heir to the English throne and that in Willem they once again had a Protestant monarch made things all right.

This cross-pollinization of the royal leadership of two longtime rival nations would have an echo in Manhattan when a German-born New Yorker named Jacob Leisler (who, thirty years before, had served as a West India Company soldier under Stuyvesant), apparently under the impression that the Dutch-born king of England would approve, led a handful of radicals in a Calvinist-fueled takeover of the city. But Willem wasn't interested, and Leisler's Rebellion, as history has known it, ended quietly, with Leisler and an associate being hanged for treason and, for good measure, beheaded.

Maybe the main result of this remarkable span—in which the island and surrounding colony changed hands five times in three decades—was that it forced the inhabitants to solidify their identity. Which European power held ultimate control became less important to the Manhattanites than the relationships between their own ethnic communities and their ties to traders, shippers, and family in other parts of the world. What mattered was that cache of rights, which they noisily insisted be honored by whoever had just won control of the place, and which enabled the separate minority communities to flourish.

So Adriaen van der Donck's dream became real in a way he never imagined. The structure he helped win for the place grounded it in Dutch tolerance and diversity, just as he hoped it would, which in turn touched off the island's rapid growth and increased the influx of settlers from around Europe, just as he predicted. What he didn't predict was that the English would appreciate this fact, and maintain the structure, and that it would support a future culture of unprecedented energy and vitality and creativity.

A
ND SO OFF
it went, spiraling upward along its path through history—the colony and city of New York, the jewel in the crown of England's North American possessions. More English settlers came, naturally enough, and also—word having continued to spread about its mixed population and the opportunities for getting ahead—French, German, Scottish, and Irish immigrants, so that by 1692 a newly arrived British military officer would complain to his uncle in England, “Our chiefest unhappyness here is too great a mixture of nations, and English ye least part.”

Newcomers were fully aware of the island's Dutch roots, and noted the continued influence in everything from the gabled houses with their front stoops to the predominance of the language. But a funny thing happened. Over time the outward trappings of Dutchness became synonymous with the region's roots. And as those features faded with time, so, in this thinking, did the colony's significance.

There is an error in this, which would be perpetuated over the centuries. Some in the past have identified the continuance of the colony by examining the Dutch subculture in the Hudson Valley. They noted that Dutch was still being spoken well into the nineteenth century, and the Reformed Dutch Church continued strong. To this day the area around Albany is crammed with towns whose names—Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Watervliet, Rensselaer (after the colony of Rensselaerswyck where Van der Donck first worked), Colonie (also named for Rensselaerswyck, and retaining the Dutch spelling)—reinforce the connection. As late as the 1750s, English officials in that area needed to find Dutch speakers to help them treat with Indians because Dutch was still the only European language the tribes spoke. And of course there are the great families of colonial America—the Van Burens, Roosevelts, Vanderbilts—who are traceable by their Dutch ancestry to New Netherland.

But all of that is missing the point. What matters about the Dutch colony is that it set Manhattan on course as a place of openness and free trade. A new kind of spirit hovered over the island, something utterly alien to New England and Virginia, which is directly traceable to the tolerance debates in Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and to the intellectual world of Descartes, Grotius, and Spinoza. Yes, there were people in Hudson Valley towns who preserved Dutch traditions, but that was mostly a reaction to the English takeover: in the way of minorities everywhere, they entrenched, became self-conscious, and guarded and burnished their traditions, to the point where the “Low Dutch” spoken in the nineteenth century was incomprehensible to visitors from the Netherlands, a relic of the tongue spoken in the Golden Age of two centuries earlier. In fact, the irony in the case of the descendants of the original Dutch settlers is that it would be in finally blending into American culture—which they eventually did—that they paid the truest homage to their heritage.

T
HE IDEA THAT
the Dutch colony made important contributions to America is not new. Two nineteenth-century historians of New York who were intimately familiar with the Dutch sources—E. B. O'Callaghan and John Brodhead—saw its overlooked significance, but they were ignored, in part because America was then in the throes of a nostalgia for its Puritan beginnings. After spending four years in Europe on behalf of the state of New York, in which he gathered thousands of documents in archives in Holland and England that pertained to New York's origins (it was from these that the story of Adriaen van der Donck's mission to The Hague would emerge), Brodhead delivered a series of talks to fashionable New York society in the 1840s and 1850s, in which he laid out a case for the unheralded legacy of the Dutch colony. He was excoriated in the press—ridiculed for suggesting that the nation could have had progenitors other than the Puritans of New England. In reacting to Brodhead's claim, one newspaper correspondent showed that the anti-Dutch bias America had inherited from England in the seventeenth century was still alive in the nineteenth; he found it particularly ludicrous that so great and powerful a country as the United States could have gotten where it had by “following the example of the policy of the petty cheese-paring of the Batavian provinces, with their windmills, and barren soil, fit only for fuel . . .” Brodhead wrote a valiant response, which does not seem to have been published, which began:

Yielding to no one in a sincere respect for Puritanism, “wherein it was worthy,” and in a due estimate of its influence upon the destinies of the United States, I must still venture candidly to express my dissent from the opinions of those who self complacently insist, on all occasions, and “usque ad nauseam,” upon tracing back all the admirable features in our Social and political Organization to the “Pilgrim Fathers” and their descendants. Unmeasured eulogy of the excellent pioneers of New England colonization has become so much the fashion, that it is almost a relief to turn to the history of other American settlements and find that there are other men whose actions and influence deserve notice in the annals of our Country. To say nothing of the “Old Dominion” of Virginia, which was permanently settled twelve years before New Plymouth, it seems to me that it is due to historical truth that the influence and the character of the Dutch who first explored and settled the coasts of New York and New Jersey should be fairly set forth.

Brodhead's voice went unheard. Part of the difficulty of making such a case came from the fact that the mass of documents that constituted the records of the colony still lay untranslated. In the 1970s two things changed. One was that the discipline of history came down off its pedestal. People were suddenly interested in social history and “multiculturalism.” The other was that the translation of the records of the Dutch colony got under way. Historians began to call for a reappraisal of this piece of American beginnings. The titles of some of the scholarly papers that emerged—“Writing/Righting Dutch Colonial History,” “Early American History with the Dutch Put In”—suggest the change. The names of many of the historians involved in this reappraisal, on whose work I have relied, are found in the endnotes, bibliography, and acknowledgments of this book. When Scribner's published its important three-volume
Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies
in 1993 and gave prominent attention not only to New Netherland but to New Sweden as well, it signaled that the academic view of the colony and of American beginnings had changed. In August of 2001, in the midst of my work on this book, the
New York Times
ran an editorial on the project to translate the Dutch archives, declaring that after a long time in which scholars of the Dutch colony had been “clamoring for scholarly affirmative action,” the tide had turned and now “a vanquished New Netherland's influence looms larger than ever.”

The idea of the colony as a birthplace of the American melting pot has been simmering for some time. In the last few decades, historians have focused on the vast chunk between New England and Virginia and dubbed the region the Middle Colonies. With the focus has come an appreciation of what this region gave the country. The Middle Colonies, as Patricia Bonomi, one of the premier American historians of recent decades, has written, were both “the birthplace of American religious pluralism” and “a stage for the western world's most complex experience with religious pluralism.” Religious pluralism was the seventeenth century conduit for cultural pluralism, and the coming-together of people from different backgrounds resulted in something new, which began to be remarked on a century after New Netherland's demise. In 1782, when the French-born J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur wrote
Letters from an American Farmer,
one of the earliest descriptions of American society and culture, it was this region he had in mind as he asked: