The Island at the Center of the World (6 page)

At first the company sprinkled its few settlers over a wide area. In the Dutch understanding, laying claim to a patch of territory required inhabiting it (for the English, as would later become an issue, all that was required was having an official representative set foot on a patch of soil not previously claimed by Christians). Also in the Dutch understanding, water was the key to any piece of land. Thus, the company set about dividing its few colonists among the three principal waterways of their territory. What under the English would become the Delaware River, which Hudson had considered exploring but quickly ruled out as a route to Asia due to its shoaly bay, the Dutch called the South River, for the good reason that it formed the southern limit of their territory. For most of their time in North America they called the Hudson the North River (mariners, famously conservative and resistant to change, call it that to this day). The other main waterway—what would become the Connecticut River, which bisects that state—the Dutch called the Fresh River.

These were the highways of the region, the places to which Indians brought pelts, and the means of exploring the interior. The company sent a few settlers to form a small camp on each—literally a few. Two families and six single men were shipped east to the Fresh River. Two families and eight men sailed down the coast to the South River. Eight men stayed on a small island in the harbor. The rest of the families sailed a further hundred and fifty miles up the North River, through the mud-colored tidal chop, by majestic palisades of rock along the western shore, then passing on both shores the undulating humps of the highlands, to the place the traders reported was the key junction of Indian traffic. Here the east-flowing Mohawk River, after traveling all the way from the Great Lakes region, careened over seventy-foot falls before emptying into the North River. Here the newcomers disembarked and stood defenseless before the towering pines. For shelter initially they dug square pits in the ground, lined them with wood, and covered them with bark roofs (a minister who arrived a few years later, when proper houses were being built, sneered at the “hovels and holes” in which the first arrivals “huddled rather than dwelt”).

Catalina and Joris were in the party initially shipped upriver from Manhattan to the falls, where a fort-trading post was to be constructed. The natives of the country appeared soon after the settlers stumbled ashore, exchanged presents, and made other gestures of friendship with the ship's captain. It was disorienting for the newcomers, but the sun had the warmth of spring in it, and the crumbly black earth seemed to cry out to be impregnated with seed. The Rapaljes and the other couples stayed two years at the location, in autumn harvesting grain “as high as a man,” the next spring whispering prayers of thanks when three company ships arrived whose names
—The Cow, The Sheep, The Horse—
betrayed their cargo. During the whole time the Indians “were all quiet as lambs,” as Catalina remembered in old age, coming regularly and trading freely with the settlers.

The initial plan was for an island on the South River, a hundred-odd miles from Manhattan, to become the capital of the new province. This was based on the decidedly mistaken belief that the climate of what would become southern New Jersey approximated that which the Spanish had found in Florida. The balminess of those reports sounded good to the Dutch, who wouldn't have to deal with the extreme bother of a harbor freezing up in the winter, bringing trade and communication to a halt. The first settlers to arrive there were dismayed to find no palm trees. Worse, the bay did indeed freeze over that first winter and in subsequent ones, too, so that attention shifted to the bay to the north, which, thanks to geographic peculiarities, rarely froze despite its latitude.

The knots of colonists scattered over two hundred and fifty miles got to work—cleared ground, felled trees, constructed palisade defenses, sowed grain. Ships arrived. The colonists made deals with the Indians and established a system for trade: in 1625 they bought 5,295 beaver pelts and 463 otter skins, which they loaded onto the ships to be sent back home. The ships in turn brought news. In England, James I, Elizabeth's successor, had died. He had been an awkward monarch—he tended to drool and was given to crude mannerisms—and was never revered as Elizabeth had been. He had unsuccessfully resisted the Dutch rise to power, attempting to ally with Spain at a time when English hatred of Catholicism was at a fever pitch. (Then again, he had, however, also overseen the creation of the King James Bible, one of the world's great literary works.) The nation breathed a sigh of relief when his son Charles—handsome, chaste, dignified—took the throne, not knowing that in time hopes would be dashed in the most violent way, for him and for the nation, and with great consequences for this far-off Dutch province.

In the United Provinces, too, power had passed, from brother to brother. Maurits, Prince of Orange, the stadtholder or chief nobleman of the country, had led the fight against Spain since the death of his father, William the Silent, in 1584. But he had grown weak in recent years, and he had fatally compromised his legitimacy six years earlier by resolving a power struggle with the great statesman Jan van Oldenbarnevelt by having the man's head cut off. Maurits's brother, Frederik Hendrik, who at age forty-one was seventeen years his junior, was a brilliant diplomat and military tactician; he would continue the revolt and bring the nation to the verge of final recognition of independence. Under these new leaders the Dutch and the English, united in their common Protestantism, had signed a treaty of cooperation against Catholic Spain, their joint enemy. This treaty provided that each nation would have access to the other's ports, including provincial ports.

The New Netherland settlers, chests heaving and faces streaked with sweat, would have had to pause in their labors to digest this information. They knew perfectly well that a group of English religious pilgrims had settled to their north a few years earlier—“Brownists” they were called at the time, after the Separatist preacher Robert Browne—and they hoped for good relations. In fact, they expected good relations. Remarkably, most of the Walloons who made up the majority of the Dutch colony's early population had come from asylum in the university town of Leiden (spelled Leyden at the time), the same place that had harbored the English Pilgrims. In their flight from persecution in England, the Pilgrims had spent twelve years there as guests of the Dutch before leaving to found a virgin theocracy in the New World.

Events soon derailed the initial settlement strategy in the Dutch province. Joris Rapalje, his wife Catalina, and the other settlers at what was now called Fort Orange (which under the English would become Albany) saw their hard work come to a sudden, grisly end in the spring of 1626. Their settlement on the riverbank was on former hunting grounds of the Mahicans, who had welcomed them. To the north and west stretched the territory of the Mohawks. These two tribes—the first, one of the Algonquin-speaking nations, the second, one of the five tribes of the Iroquois League—had very different backgrounds and beliefs. Their languages were as distinct as English and Russian; they had different customs and little respect for one another. For decades they had been fighting an intermittent war, and the appearance of European traders in their midst stirred the conflict to a new level. In addition, after more than a decade of contact with Europeans, these tribes were reorienting their lives around the acquisition of foreign products: fishing hooks, axes, kettles, glassware, needles, pots, knives, and duffel (the rough wool cloth that originated in the Flemish town of Duffel and which gives us the term “duffel bag”). Later, of course, guns and liquor would be added to the list. Mahicans were even relocating their villages to be closer to the Dutch, in an attempt to form a trade and defensive alliance. Call it friendship or self-interest, by 1626 the Mahicans and Dutch had established a closeness.

This closeness was probably what led Daniel van Crieckenbeeck, the commander of the fort, to ignore explicit orders forbidding interference in intertribal affairs, with results that would redound to the present. One spring day in 1626, a Mahican party of more than two dozen men—like the Dutch “in figure, build and share,” as one writer described, their hair “jet-black, quite sleek and uncurled, and almost as coarse as a horse's tail,” and probably, given the period and the time of year, wearing deer skins loosely about their bodies and tied at the waist—came into the palisade of rough-cut logs and asked Van Crieckenbeeck for Dutch aid in their fight against the Mohawks. The man who asked this favor was most likely a tribal leader named Monemin. Van Crieckenbeeck had his orders; the West India Company had clearly instructed Willem Verhulst, head of the province, that “he shall be very careful not lightly to embroil himself in [the Indians'] quarrels or wars, or to take sides, but to remain neutral . . .” On the other hand, Van Crieckenbeeck surely felt responsible for the well-being of the handful of young couples, including a number of pregnant women and perhaps some infants, in the midst of the forest thousands of miles from home. It stood to reason that helping the Mahicans now would yield a firm ally in the future. So he agreed. The Mahicans led the way, and he and six of his men followed, disappearing into the pines.

Three miles from the fort, they were inundated by a storm of arrows. In one swift, bloody assault, a band of ambushing Mohawks put an end to the Dutch-Mahican alliance and, by the way, altered the history of the world. Van Crieckenbeeck, three of his men, and twenty-four Mahicans, including Monemin, took fatal hits. The Mohawks made a show of their victory, and nicely capped the terror they had caused by roasting and eating one especially unfortunate Dutchman named Tymen Bouwensz.

Meanwhile, the other settlement on the North River was also in turmoil. It had been decided that the settlement in the harbor would be on a tiny, teardrop-shaped island that the colonists called Noten (Nut) Island, after the walnut and chestnut trees they found there. The first settlers who arrived camped here, and their cattle were sent to pasture five hundred yards across the bay, on Manhattan Island. The colony's provisional director, Willem Verhulst, began causing problems from the start. He meted out harsh and inconsistent punishment, infuriating the colonists. He and his wife may also have misappropriated funds or—an even worse offense—cheated Indians. Both because of the colony's Calvinist sense of propriety and out of a practical awareness that it was not a good idea to upset the natives who were surrounding you, the West India Company had sent Verhulst explicit instructions on dealing with the Indians: “He shall also see that no one do the Indians any harm or violence, deceive, mock, or contemn them in any way, but that in addition to good treatment they be shown honesty, faithfulness, and sincerity in all contracts, dealings, and intercourse, without being deceived by shortage of measure, weight or number, and that throughout friendly relations with them be maintained . . .” Whatever the exact offenses, Verhulst and his wife had set the colonists howling; they wanted him gone.

At the moment this crisis was boiling over, a ship arrived from the upriver settlement with news of the Indian attack. The colony was barely a year old and already it was in turmoil, in danger of collapse. It needed a leader, and one stepped forward.

He had grown up speaking German and Dutch was his second language, but his ancestry was French, so his name was pronounced in the French way—“Min-wee.” He is one of those figures of history for whom everything we know about him makes us wish we knew more. He had had no military training, but he was an individualistic, take-charge sort who would affect the course of history in more ways than one. His father had taken part in the northward migration of Protestants fleeing Spanish troops and inquisitors, and settled in the small German town of Wesel, near the Dutch border, and it was here that Peter Minuit grew up. He would turn out to be a scrappy businessman with no fixed loyalties and a great drive to get ahead, and, in good upwardly mobile fashion, he made his first smart move in life by marrying the daughter of the mayor of the nearby town of Kleve. He and his wife then moved seventy-five miles west to the larger Dutch city of Utrecht, where Minuit trained to become a diamond-cutter. He found that a dull occupation, though, and heard of the formation of the West India Company. Through French-speaking circles, he learned further that a party of Walloons was signing on as pioneers in a venture to the New World. He appeared at the stately mansion of West India House on Amsterdam's Brouwersgracht (Brewers' Canal) one day in 1624, asking for a posting to New Netherland, apparently not as a settler or company official but as a private “volunteer” businessman scouting trade opportunities. The directors must have been impressed by his energy. Minuit appears to have shipped out with one of the first groups of settlers, for the company's initial instructions to Verhulst say that “He shall have Pierre Minuyt, as volunteer, and others whom he deems competent thereto sail up the river as far as they can in any way do so, in order to inspect the condition of the land . . .”

Minuit might thus have been among the party of Catalina Trico and Joris Rapalje when they sailed upriver, and he seems, during this early period, to have gathered a good deal of information about the new land. He then apparently returned to Amsterdam for a time, perhaps to deliver the “samples of dyes, drugs, gums, herbs, plants, trees and flowers” the instructions asked him to supply, for the records show him leaving the Dutch Republic once again in January of 1626 and returning to New Netherland on May 4. So he had spent time in the colony, enough time to impress the settlers with his abilities, and then returned to Europe; now he was coming back. Not long after his ship, the
Sea-Mew,
passed through the narrows between
Staten Eylandt
(named in honor of the States General of the United Provinces) and
Lange Eylandt
(named for obvious reasons), and dropped anchor in the harbor, he would have been inundated with the bad news.