The Island at the Center of the World (41 page)

Epilogue

THE PAPER TRAIL

T
hrough all the events of this story, in a council room in Fort Amsterdam and in an administrative office above the gate, the successive secretaries of the Manhattan-based colony of New Netherland did what all secretaries do: took notes and filed records. Lots were sold, houses were built, pigs were stolen, knives were drawn, liquor was taxed, property was damaged. The quill scratched its way softly across the sheets of imported rag paper. The directors issued their decrees and the leaders of the colonists their complaints. Letters streamed out—to Curaçao, Virginia, Boston, Amsterdam. The quill dipped into the ink pot, then addressed the paper again, filling row after row with the oddly curling Dutch script of the period.

What happened to these records after Richard Nicolls's troops took possession of them can be summed up in a truism: history is written by the winners. There was probably an element of spite involved in the failure of the English to incorporate the records of the Dutch colony into the first American histories. The bad blood between the two rival nations only intensified with the three wars they fought during the course of the century. The title of one of the many screeds published in England is enough to remind one of the ludicrous level of animosity:
The Dutch-mens Pedigree, Or, A Relation Shewing How They Were First Bred and Descended from a Horse-Turd Which Was Enclosed in a Butter-Box.
Another indication of English antipathy toward the Dutch, which America took in with its mother's milk, so to speak, is the tally of “Dutch” phrases in the language—“Dutch treat,” “Dutch courage,” “double Dutch,” “a Dutch bargain,” “going Dutch,” “Dutch comfort”—all of them derogatory and all coming right out of the seventeenth century.

While the records of other early settlements were being preserved and accessed to create the story of American beginnings, those of the non-English colony were kicked around, fought over, forgotten. Their fitful passage through the next three centuries is an ironically dramatic reflection of how the colony itself has been ignored—Zelig-like, this archive would be connected to some of the major events and figures in American history. In 1685, after King James ordered a reorganization of the colonies, the volumes were tossed onto a stagecoach bound for Boston; three years later they made the same rough trip back to New York when the new monarchs, William and Mary, reversed the ruling. It was probably on one or both of these journeys that some volumes were lost (none of the records prior to 1638 remain, and the crucial period of 1649 to 1652, when Van der Donck was presenting the colonists' case before the States General, has vanished as well). In 1741 the fort, in which the records were once again housed (now called Fort George), was torched in what was widely considered to be a slave conspiracy. The gatehouse burned, but the records were saved by a diligent secretary tossing them out the window. It was a blustery day, and many pages blew away, but the bulk of the records remained intact.

In the buildup to revolution, New York City became a place of chaos and confusion. Bands of radicals did their best to disrupt the British administration. Threats were made on the life of William Tryon, the royal governor of the colony, so that on the morning of December 1, 1775, he found himself trying to conduct business from the lurching deck of a ship, the
Duchess of Gordon,
in New York Harbor, several hundred yards away from the populace he was supposed to be governing. A new matter of concern came to the governor's attention that morning, involving the same radical who had threatened his life. He wrote a hurried letter to the deputy secretary of the province:

Sir—As I am credibly informed that Isaac Sears, at the head of a large body of Connecticut people, intends very shortly to march into the city of New-York, to seize and carry off by violence the public records in the secretary's office, I do hereby require you, without loss of time, to put on board the ship Dutchess of Gordon, all such public acts and records under your care, as immediately concern the interests of the crown, until I can advise with his Majesty's council how they may be better secured. The records for patents for land and public commissions are of the first importance to be put on board the above ship. I am, Sir, your obedient servant, WILLIAM TRYON.

The records that Tryon was anxious to protect included not only those of the English colony of New York but those of the earlier Dutch colony as well. They remained for much of the war in the damp hold of Tryon's ship, where mold set in, the traces of which are still evident on the sheets. Then, according to a letter from the French writer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur to none other than Benjamin Franklin, as the fight over the fate of the city and the colonies reached a climax, the records were moved to the Tower of London. Eventually, the victorious colonists demanded their return. Miraculously, the papers survived the turmoil of the war, although at its end the secretary of the new state of New York reported that many pages were “much mill-dewed and greatly injured”; he added, however, that he had exercised “my best endeavours to preserve them, having frequently exposed them to the sun and air, and several times had them brushed through every leaf.”

With the turn of the next century, it looked as though the information in the documents would enter the historical record. In 1801 a committee of the New York State Assembly declared that “immediate measures ought to be taken to procure a translation of the records of this State, now in the Secretary's office, which are written in the Dutch language.” One might expect that this directive would be taken seriously since it was authored by Aaron Burr, the most powerful man in the legislature, who was about to leave in order to serve as Thomas Jefferson's vice-president (and would three years later become infamous for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel). But it wasn't until 1818 that a full-scale translation effort was under way. The man selected for this work—Francis Adrian van der Kemp, an elderly Dutch minister and former soldier who had emigrated to New York—did as he was asked. In four years, he produced a translation of the entire twelve thousand pages.

In fact, this episode in the history of the colony's records comes across as a kind of comedy. Such a rate of production is not humanly possible for one man. What's more, Van der Kemp had a faulty grasp of English, he was going blind at the time, and, in an effort to save his eyes as he rushed through the documents, he stopped intermittently to apply belladonna (a deadly poison). The result of Van der Kemp's tour de force effort was twenty-four volumes of handwritten translations—a fiasco of small errors, howlers, and massive, unexplained gaps—that were worse than worthless—worse because they were assumed to be adequate, were housed in the state library in Albany, and used by historians. Eventually, fate occasionally being kind, this entire corpus—which was never published and of which only the original existed—burned in a fire before it could further corrupt history.

The next attempt to bring this chapter of American history to light came in the early twentieth century. A search went out for a translator with a fluid understanding of the Dutch language of the seventeenth century, and one was found: a shy, heavy-set, Dutch-born engineer with a gift for language and a stubbornness for accuracy. But only two years after A. J. F. van Laer began work on a translation of the records, the infamous fire of 1911 struck the New York capitol, which housed the state library. Millions of volumes were destroyed. Once again, the Dutch records dodged catastrophe, thanks to the ironic fact that, being considered of lesser importance, they were housed on a bottom shelf, so that when the shelves collapsed, English colonial records that had been stored above protected them from destruction. Nevertheless, some documents were destroyed, others were badly damaged, both by fire and water, and two years of Van Laer's work was lost. Like a character in a novel, the man, seemingly shell-shocked, continued for a long time after the fire to go to work as usual. His work site was now a smoldering ruin, open to the sky, and he would poke among the debris in search of potential fragments. He continued to be employed in the state archives and eventually produced a translation of four volumes of the Dutch records (which would remain unpublished for half a century), but suffered a nervous collapse as a result of the catastrophe, and turned away from the massive, seemingly jinxed project.

And so to the 1970s, to the era of Watergate, when, as I have outlined at the beginning of this book, another effort was launched to crack the code of the Dutch manuscripts. Gerald Ford succeeded Richard Nixon as president, and selected Nelson Rockefeller, who had just completed his fourth term as New York governor, as his vice-president. Before leaving for Washington, Rockefeller arranged for a modest portion of funds to be dedicated to the project, and the hunt was on again for a translator.

The difficulty was greater than one might imagine. The Dutch language has changed enormously in three hundred years, and in the eighteenth century there was a shift in handwriting style, so that documents written prior to that are often incomprehensible to modern Dutch speakers. Then there is the vast amount of technical knowledge required: weights and measures, how many
mengelen
in an
aam,
the fact that a
daelder
is worth the same as a Carolus guilder but less than a
rijksdaelder.
The job was a niche within a niche.

It was a shock to both men, then, when Peter Christoph, a senior librarian charged with the task of finding a translator, met Charles Gehring at a conference. Gehring had finished a dissertation in Germanic linguistics with a concentration in Netherlandic studies. “Before I had a chance to say anything,” Christoph said, recalling their meeting for me, “he asked me, ‘In your field, do you know of any openings for someone to work with seventeenth-century Dutch documents?' I said, ‘Boy, do I.'”

That was in 1974. Gehring has had only one job since, as translator of the archives of the colony. In the way of all nonprofit enterprises, there is a yearly crisis over funding to support the work. Not surprisingly, much of it comes in the way of donations from Americans of Dutch ancestry. There is also a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. As Gehring's output has been published—there are eighteen volumes in print so far—he has become a center of American colonial studies. He is succeeding not only in making the records of America's non-English colony available to researchers, but in broadening the field of colonial studies beyond its historic Anglocentric focus. As a kind of cap to his effort, in 1999 the twelve thousand pages of manuscript records of the Dutch colony were declared a national treasure by the U.S. Department of the Interior. Besides giving the charred pages a belated dignity, the designation also came with funds to help preserve them.

The historians who in recent years have written dissertations and academic papers on the Dutch colony—further broadening awareness of its significance—owe a lot to Gehring and to Janny Venema, a Dutch historian who has worked as assistant to the translator for the past eighteen years. I owe them a great deal as well. Not only have they made the records accessible through their translations, they have allowed me to work alongside them, have answered endless questions, have suggested avenues to explore, and have given me free rein over the shelves and file cabinets of relevant arcana they have collected over the years. Just as valuable, spending time with them has given me a greater feel for the people of the colony than I ever could have gotten from mere books. The New York State Library occupies a soulless 1970s building in downtown Albany, but in the corner where their offices are located it's the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer; for the hours I'm there, life seems richer and wilder. When Charly Gehring holds forth on the hazards of sailing in the seventeenth century, his conversation is sprinkled with Dutch nautical terms not heard in the Netherlands in centuries. He has an appealing habit of talking about people in the present tense: “Van Tienhoven has a lot of skeletons in his closet, but he's also just about the shrewdest guy on the island,” he will say of a man last seen on Manhattan in 1656.

From them, too, I've gotten a sense of the documents as artifacts, which hold stories that don't transfer into type. Sitting with Janny Venema, looking through browned, mold-speckled pages written in the days leading up to the English takeover, I noticed one sheet with a distinctly different writing. The typical scribe's hand is rounded, with intricate little flourishes; this page was filled with thick, jagged, up-and-down strokes. “Oh, that's Stuyvesant,” she said offhandedly. “He must have been in a hurry and there was no secretary around.” It was remarkable to see how well the man's handwriting seemed to match his personality, and indeed, the letter—which has yet to be published—brims with immediacy. He is writing to the directors of the West India Company: English frigates are in the harbor, their guns are trained on the city. At the bottom, Stuyvesant adds that he will give the letter to a skipper who hopes to slip undetected through the Hell Gate and out to sea. The fact that I was holding it was proof that the skipper never sailed. Long Island is lost, Stuyvesant informs his bosses, and New Englanders are massing across the river, ready to invade. The town is low on food and gunpowder; the people tell him they aren't willing to fight for a company that has shown no willingness to support them. The anger in the letter is palpable: the corporate bosses had ignored his endless appeals for reinforcements, and left him in an impossible situation. It isn't Stuyvesant the pig-headed administrator who comes through in the harsh strokes, but a man caught in an inept bureaucracy.

One more, smaller example of how these weathered pages reveal fragments of human life. The outpost of Fort Orange (Albany) had its own administration, and for many years a man named Johannes Dijckman acted as secretary, taking minutes of meetings. We know little about him—just an ordinary man, of no account to history—but elsewhere there is a mention of him having a drinking problem. “Over time, you notice that his handwriting gets harder to read,” Gehring said. “Then, one day in 1655, right in the middle of a meeting, the handwriting changes. A new hand picks up, and you never see the old one again.” Shortly after, Dijckman appears in the deacon's account books; he's on poor relief and will stay on the dole until he dies. “Those last pages of minutes Dijckman takes are covered with stains and blotches,” Venema said. “Who knows what they are: maybe just water. But maybe it's wine. Maybe tears.”