The Island at the Center of the World

Chapter 8.

Prev List Next

For Van der Donck, the failure of his plans for a colony near Rensselaerswyck brought about a change of thinking. He turned his attention southward. His term in office probably had another year on it, but he had given up on the northern reaches of New Netherland and began spending more and more of his time at what was the undeniable nerve center of Dutch holdings in North America.

BY 1644, 1644, EVENTS EVENTS on Manhattan were reaching a new stage. The opposition to Kieft and his disastrous Indian war had begun to coalesce and was being led by Cornelis Melyn, the farmer who had been Van der Donck"s shipmate on his voyage to New Amsterdam in 1641. Melyn was in his early forties, an upright Fleming from around Antwerp, a tanner by trade, who had also brought with him on that voyage his wife, children, some farm hands, and animals, with the intention to farm a vast tract on Staten Island. His timing was dreadful. Indians destroyed his plantation, and Melyn and his family were forced to cross the North River and seek refuge, along with most everyone else, near the fort on lower Manhattan. He bought land at the spot where the "ca.n.a.l," or ditch, drained into the East River, and built a two-story house on it. Soon after he had a neighbor. Jochem Kuyter was a German who had done service in the Danish navy in the East Indies, then, in search of a peaceful corner of the world to settle down, arrived in Manhattan in 1639. He took up tobacco farming on the north of the island, across the river from the plantation of his friend Jonas Bronck (who would give his name to a New York City borough). Kuyter had had success with his first crops, and was hoping to turn a profit, when a Wickquasgeck a.s.sault destroyed his plans as well, forcing him to move south. The two neighbors, Melyn and Kuyter, compared notes on their mutual suffering and decided to launch an offensive against Kieft and the West India Company. on Manhattan were reaching a new stage. The opposition to Kieft and his disastrous Indian war had begun to coalesce and was being led by Cornelis Melyn, the farmer who had been Van der Donck"s shipmate on his voyage to New Amsterdam in 1641. Melyn was in his early forties, an upright Fleming from around Antwerp, a tanner by trade, who had also brought with him on that voyage his wife, children, some farm hands, and animals, with the intention to farm a vast tract on Staten Island. His timing was dreadful. Indians destroyed his plantation, and Melyn and his family were forced to cross the North River and seek refuge, along with most everyone else, near the fort on lower Manhattan. He bought land at the spot where the "ca.n.a.l," or ditch, drained into the East River, and built a two-story house on it. Soon after he had a neighbor. Jochem Kuyter was a German who had done service in the Danish navy in the East Indies, then, in search of a peaceful corner of the world to settle down, arrived in Manhattan in 1639. He took up tobacco farming on the north of the island, across the river from the plantation of his friend Jonas Bronck (who would give his name to a New York City borough). Kuyter had had success with his first crops, and was hoping to turn a profit, when a Wickquasgeck a.s.sault destroyed his plans as well, forcing him to move south. The two neighbors, Melyn and Kuyter, compared notes on their mutual suffering and decided to launch an offensive against Kieft and the West India Company.

With the huddled ma.s.ses in the fort close to anarchy, Kieft, in an effort to restore order, proposed naming a new council of representatives to a.s.sist him. This mollified people somewhat, and they didn"t put up a fuss when he hand-picked the eight members. Naturally, he chose men whom he believed would support him. He picked Melyn as leader, figuring that the leather-worker-turned-plantation-owner ought to be grateful to the company for giving him such an opportunity for advancement. He also chose two Englishmen, acknowledging the fact that by now twenty percent of the province"s population was English; one of these, Isaac Allerton, was a wily trader who had sailed with the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, Mayflower, then, feeling constricted in their society, had moved from New England to the freer atmosphere of New Amsterdam. then, feeling constricted in their society, had moved from New England to the freer atmosphere of New Amsterdam.

Kieft a.s.sembled the board on June 18. With him, probably, were Cornelis van Tienhoven, his secretary and henchman, and, as a reminder of his authority, a contingent of soldiers. Adriaen van der Donck was not yet one of the board, but he was probably present at this meeting; he had recently arrived in New Amsterdam on one of his frequent river journeys from Rensselaerswyck. Also likely to have been on hand was the town"s minister, Everardus Bogardus, a stout, hard-drinking Calvinist who had begun denouncing Kieft from his pulpit.

The colony, Kieft told the men, was out of cash. The treasury had been emptied fighting the war. He now proposed to raise money by taxing beavers and beer. A cry went up from the board members. The population he proposed to tax had lost their homes, property, and family members thanks to this war. People were living in makeshift dens and wearing rags. They couldn"t pay and would refuse to even if they had the money. And anyway, the men argued, such a tax, without authorization from the company in Amsterdam, was unlawful. Kieft flushed with anger. "I have more power here than the company!" he roared at the men and announced he would do whatever he felt was necessary. Whereupon Kuyter, the ex-sailor, rose menacingly, pointed a heavy finger at the director, and vowed that some day, when Kieft no longer wore the protective mantle of office, Kuyter would "certainly have him." The meeting broke up in chaos, and several days later Kieft"s soldiers were seen hammering placards around the fort informing the residents of the new taxes.

A tax on beavers might have been tolerated, but adding one stuiver to every tankard of beer sold was beyond endurance; a popular uprising ensued. The people refused to pay it, and tavern keepers refused to charge it. Kieft retaliated by sending soldiers down the road to the city tavern, where they arrested Philip Gerritsen, its proprietor.

The board then took action. The members had previously written letters to the West India Company directors in Amsterdam and to the leaders of the Dutch government at The Hague, complaining of their plight, but they were disorganized and anemic pet.i.tions. These men were farmers and traders, not lawyers; these earlier letters were probably written by the Reverend Bogardus, who was as bitter toward Kieft as anyone. "Almighty G.o.d finally, through his righteous judgment, hath in this current year kindled around us the fire of an Indian war," the first letter had lamented. The tone was churchly and groveling, with refrains of "we poor inhabitants of New Netherland" and "Your Honors can easily conceive how wretchedly it fares with us, distressed people."

At the time that letter was written, Van der Donck had been sitting around campfires far to the north, playing card games with the Mohawks and Mahicans. At this point, however, the character of the opposition changes. Up to now the colonists had been fumbling, convinced that they were subject to an injustice but without direction or understanding of the mechanisms for redress of grievances-mechanisms that were of long standing in the Dutch Republic, and in which Van der Donck-the only jurist in the colony-had recently trained.

Van der Donck may have returned north after the meeting with Kieft in June, but his term as law officer of Rensselaerswyck apparently expired in August, and he was back in New Amsterdam by early October, when the Manhattan activists met again, clandestinely. The scent of heated political activity would have been unavoidable and irresistible to the young lawyer. He had journeyed from Leiden to Rensselaerswyck in search of adventure and with a young man"s dreams of great achievement-of helping to found a new society in a brave new world-only to find that his dreams didn"t square with Van Rensselaer"s business plan. But here, in the capital of the Dutch province, was a genuine cause in the making, a political struggle at the cutting edge of legal thought. What rights did individuals have in an overseas outpost? Were they ent.i.tled to the same representation as citizens in the home country? Never before had an outpost of a Dutch trading company demanded political status. Here, Van der Donck must have thought, was his chance to make his mark.

From the fort, where Van der Donck was appearing at this time in a court case related to his duties at Rensselaerswyck, to Cornelis Melyn"s house-the center of the populist opposition to Kieft and the West India Company-it was a three-minute walk along Pearl Street (one can still take it today), with the river on his right and the church and a little row of brick homes on his left. And here they all were, the merchants and traders of the colony, grieving over their dead children, wives, and comrades, bitter at the burning of the homes and acreage in which they had invested their savings, wanting to express their outrage but not quite sure how. Van der Donck knew how. He must have offered himself at about this time as their lawyer, listened to their complaints, and begun to write.

From this point onward, the archives of the colony contain an increasingly more elaborate and strident series of legal pet.i.tions and arguments, doc.u.ments sent by colonists either to the West India Company or to the States General in The Hague, which were aimed at securing the political foundations of the colony. Many of these writings have Adriaen van der Donck"s name on them. There are also many others that were either written anonymously or in the name of one or another of the colonists, people who were illiterate or whose level of education doesn"t match the prose.

Building on an argument put forth by Dr. Willem Frijhoff, a prominent Dutch historian at the Free University of Amsterdam and an authority on the Dutch language and history of the seventeenth century, especially as related to the New Netherland colony, I have culled what I believe to be Van der Donck"s work or work in which he was involved. As Dr. Frijhoff put it to me in an e-mail, these writings, put alongside that which we know came from Van der Donck"s pen, const.i.tute "a coherent vision of a new society, sprung up from an Old Worldtrained academic." Dr. Charles Gehring, the translator of the official records of the colony and a man who knows both the language and the personalities of the colonists better than anyone alive, agrees that Van der Donck is the only likely author of these doc.u.ments. "The only other candidate is Van Tienhoven," he told me, but while Cornelis van Tienhoven was educated, intelligent, and shrewd, as Kieft"s right-hand man he would hardly have been the person to craft a series of doc.u.ments defying the current administration. Dr. Frijhoff finds it remarkable that no historian before him has realized that Van der Donck must have been the force behind these writings, but the neglect of a fairly obvious point is simply another instance of the way that American history has ignored the Dutch colony. This body of writing dovetails with the actions Van der Donck would soon take on behalf of the colony. Put together, these actions and writings fill out a picture of Van der Donck as the pivotal figure in the history of the colony, the man who, more than any other, and in ways that have gone unnoticed, mortared together the foundation stones of a great city. It would probably be overly dramatic to call him the unheralded father of New York City; at the very least, he is an important figure whom history has forgotten.*9 By the twenty-eighth of October 1644 the pet.i.tion was complete, and the difference in tone from the earlier ones is striking. Instead of circuitous groveling before an all-powerful authority, it begins by crisply laying out a history of the colony"s troubles, with the finger pointed directly: "For the sake of appearances, Twelve men were called together here, in November 1641, on the subject of the murder of Claes, the wheelwright; the Director submitted to them whether the blood of the aforesaid wheelwright should not be avenged? Whereupon divers debates arose on the one side and the other . . . [but] a hankering after war had wholly seized on the Director. . . . the aforesaid 12 men could not continue to meet any longer . . . for such was forbidden on pain of corporal punishment. Shortly after, [the director] commenced the war against those of Wesquecqueck, on his own mere motion. . . ."

The letter goes on to describe how Kieft had impaneled the new board, but only after his disastrous war was well under way, and only for the purpose of rubber-stamping his plan for new taxes to pay for it-a case, it in effect argues, of taxation without representation. Then it makes plain its complaint: "That one man . . . should dispose here of our lives and properties at his will and pleasure, in a manner so arbitrary that a King dare not legally do the like." It then takes the bold step of asking that Kieft be recalled and a new governor installed, and continues prophetically, "For it is impossible ever to settle this country until a different system be introduced here," in which villagers will "elect from among themselves a Bailiff or Schout and Schepens, who will be empowered to send their deputies and give their votes on public affairs with the Director and Council; so that the entire country may not be hereafter, at the whim of one man, again reduced to similar danger."

The colonists smuggled the pet.i.tion out of Manhattan in the person of the trader Govert Loockermans, who left shortly after on one of his voyages to Amsterdam on behalf of his patrons, the Verbrugge family. In Amsterdam, the letter, building on the plaintive ones sent earlier by the colonists, made an impact-but not the one the activists were hoping for. The West India Company was at that moment in disarray; losses were mounting, the various regional chambers blaming one another. The nation-and therefore the company-was still at war with Spain, and in Brazil, company soldiers had just lost a major battle against the Spanish, with whom they were locked in a struggle for control of the sugar market. Their North American outpost had foundered for too long. Memos flew back and forth between the company offices in Amsterdam and the government offices in the courtyard complex in The Hague known as the Binnenhof. For both the merchants and the government officials this letter sharpened the focus. It was dawning on them that this North American outpost was an oddity-different from the Dutch colonies in Brazil, Batavia, Taiwan, the Spice Islands, and everywhere else. Others may have caused trouble from time to time, such as the messy ma.s.sacre of Englishmen at Amboyna, but there was no question of their remaining military-trading posts, firmly under company auspices.

Following receipt of this letter, the directors came to the conclusion that they had to treat Manhattan differently, not by acknowledging it as a settlement in its own right, but by cracking down. They agreed with the upstart colonists that Kieft had to go, but not for the reasons the colonists outlined. In the thirty-five years since Henry Hudson had claimed the place for the Dutch, there had never been a strong, capable leader on the ground. The directors had been appalled, earlier, to discover that after launching a war, Kieft had been unwilling to take the field-in fact, had rarely left the safety of the fort. They ignored the letter"s novel a.s.sertion of rights, its talk of representative government for the province. They felt the colonists" pain, but concluded that their plight was due not to the lack of popular representation but to a governor who didn"t understand the use of force.

So they began a search for a new director, and this time they didn"t want an incompetent nepotist. They needed a committed company man who was also a true leader. Someone to keep the colonists in line. An administrator, yes, and a man who was something more-a skillful diplomat-but also something less. They needed a man of nerve and grit and guile, someone unafraid of pain. They needed a boss.

Chapter 8.

THE ONE-LEGGED MAN.

He was a serious young man-thick-necked, with a piggish face and hard eyes offset by voluptuous lips-standing on the high p.o.o.p deck of a West India Company frigate, staring out into the humid air of the Caribbean Sea. On the deck below and on the surrounding ships, three hundred soldiers awaited his command. He was an administrative agent with little military experience, but West India Company officials, if they had ambitions, expected to see action. It was March 1644; he had left Amsterdam nine years earlier, and had served doggedly through the sticky malarial seasons, first in Brazil and recently on the Dutch-controlled island of Curacao. The company was a major means of advancement for a Dutchman. Not long before the young man had been a clerk; now he commanded a fleet, bearing down on the enemy.

The island of St. Martin appeared on the horizon of emerald water and azure sky. With the Spanish empire weakened, its Caribbean and South American holdings were in play. This little island-strategically located at what the Dutch called the hoek, hoek, or corner, of the Antilles chain-had gone back and forth between the two European powers. The Spanish held it currently, the West India Company wanted it back, and the official was determined to get it for them. His intelligence had told him that the Spaniards had only lightly manned the fort on the island, and indeed his men hit the beach without incident, dug in, and set up a siege cannon. Then the big guns from the fort exploded. The intelligence was wrong. The fort had recently been regarrisoned; the Spaniards were armed to the teeth. But there was an upside for the Dutch commander: this would be his first opportunity to show his mettle. He ordered his men to return fire, then, with the tang of gunpowder perfuming the air, he grabbed a Dutch flag and leaped onto the mounded earth that formed their defensive wall. Apparently, in his zeal, he had moved too close, bringing himself into range of the enemy guns. He was about to plant the flag when the Spaniards unleashed their second volley. The man collapsed, his right leg shattered by a direct hit-probably a stone ball fired as a projectile. Before losing consciousness, he ordered the siege to continue. or corner, of the Antilles chain-had gone back and forth between the two European powers. The Spanish held it currently, the West India Company wanted it back, and the official was determined to get it for them. His intelligence had told him that the Spaniards had only lightly manned the fort on the island, and indeed his men hit the beach without incident, dug in, and set up a siege cannon. Then the big guns from the fort exploded. The intelligence was wrong. The fort had recently been regarrisoned; the Spaniards were armed to the teeth. But there was an upside for the Dutch commander: this would be his first opportunity to show his mettle. He ordered his men to return fire, then, with the tang of gunpowder perfuming the air, he grabbed a Dutch flag and leaped onto the mounded earth that formed their defensive wall. Apparently, in his zeal, he had moved too close, bringing himself into range of the enemy guns. He was about to plant the flag when the Spaniards unleashed their second volley. The man collapsed, his right leg shattered by a direct hit-probably a stone ball fired as a projectile. Before losing consciousness, he ordered the siege to continue.

Thanks to the abundance of wars and the rising tide of scientific inquiry, the seventeenth century saw a large increase in the amount of s.p.a.ce medical treatises devoted to amputation. There were many techniques, all of them hideous. Typically, the patient, fully awake, was placed in a chair with two men holding him down. The doctor would use his hands to "pluck up the skinn and muscles" of the limb in question, then, as one wrote, "we cut the flesh with a rasor or incising knife . . . to the bone, the said bone must be diligently rubbed and sc.r.a.ped with the back of the sayd knife, which back must be made purposely for that effect, to the end the periost which covereth the bone, may be lesse painfull in cutting of the bone. Otherwise it teareth and riveth with the same, so causeth great dolour. . . . This being done, you must saw the bone with a sharpe saw . . ." Without anaesthetic or sedative the horror was often enough that the patient died before the saw finished its work. One surgeon"s handbook frankly instructed doctors how to advise a patient: "Let him prepare his soul as a ready sacrifice to the Lord by earnest prayers. . . . For it is no small presumption to dismember the image of G.o.d."

But while he suffered through weeks of delirium following the amputation of his own leg, Peter Stuyvesant, the thirty-four-year-old son of a Calvinist minister, would not die, and, after the siege of St. Martin had failed, was apologetic in his correspondence with the "Honorable, Wise, Provident, and Most Prudent Lords" of the company in Amsterdam, explaining drily that the attack on the island "did not succeed so well as I had hoped, no small impediment having been the loss of my right leg, it being removed by a rough ball." With herculean exercise of will he ignored the pain and pus flowing from the angry stump and recommenced his ferocious micromanagement of the company"s affairs in the Caribbean: monitoring the salt pans that were the reason for being in this palm-scaped wilderness, strategizing to keep the Dutch possessions from the lurking English, French, and Spanish vessels and from pirates, even fussing about how to get freshly baked bread out to ships that were on maneuvers. The pain level rose, the wound festered in the heavy air, but the sheafs of instructions and resolutions kept coming. Even in a century and an arena in which guts were a necessary part of everyday life, he must have stood out.

He came from plain country. The village of Scherpenzeel in the region of Westsellingwerf in the province of Friesland in the far northern reaches of the Netherlands was known for nothing because no one knew of it at all. It was flat farmland, incised by hedges, the horizon unenc.u.mbered by castles, fortresses, cathedrals, or other sizable manifestations of civilization. It was spa.r.s.ely populated. The villagers were grim, pious, stalwart, self-reliant, and he was one of them. Frisians believed in a natural, unchanging order to things. A peasant gave birth to little peasants. If you were a minister"s son, your career path was preordained. Strangely, however-and this is perhaps a key to understanding his personality, the place at which it twisted away from conformity-Peter Stuyvesant did not follow his father Balthasar, the minister of the Frisian Reformed Church of Scherpenzeel. One possible explanation: in 1627, shortly after his mother"s death, his pious father remarried, and immediately and zestfully set to work siring a new family with his bride. Teenaged sons tend to react strongly to such things; one of a proud and stubborn disposition especially so, perhaps. At about the time of the remarriage, Peter seems to have left home. He studied at the Latin school in the larger town of Dokk.u.m, whose harbor also happened to be a way station for West India Company ships bound for the New World. Growing up, his literal horizon had been as low as they come; to a youth shaped by G.o.d and flat land, these vessels, jutting a hundred feet into the air, taller than anything he had seen, natural or man-made, great cathedrals of wood with spires promising real-world deliverance, must have made an impression.

He went on to attend his father"s alma mater, but he enrolled as a student of philosophy rather than theology-a signal he intended to veer from expectations. Whatever career notions Stuyvesant may have had on entering university changed when he left abruptly after two years. According to a story later told by his enemies, he was kicked out after abusing his landlord"s hospitality by having s.e.x with his daughter. Whether there was any truth to that, he was proud of his university a.s.sociation: ever after, he signed himself Petrus, the latinized (and thus scholarly) form of Pieter.

And so the college dropout found a position with one of the going concerns of the day, signing on at the lowest administrative level. Company officers were soon impressed with his devotion to work, and gave him a rather dubious reward: a posting to the remote island of Fernando de Noronha, two hundred miles off the Brazilian coast, renowned in company ranks for its vigorous rat population. From there he was promoted swiftly to a position in the coastal colony of Pernambuco, and then to Curacao. Like natural leaders before and since, he gathered lieutenants as he went, men attracted to his energy who saw opportunity for themselves in serving alongside him. Unlikely as it may seem given how his career would end, he had a certain fondness for the English, which would carry through his life. There were at least two Englishmen in this posse of his. The man who appears in the Dutch records as Carel Van Brugge was born Charles Bridges in Canterbury; Brian Newton had been in the company"s service for twenty years. These men would ride his coattails all the way to Manhattan, and play roles in its struggle to survive.

But the most revealing of these friendships was with a young man who did not accompany Stuyvesant to Manhattan. John Farret had been born in Amsterdam to English parents. Like Stuyvesant, he won a position with the West India Company on Curacao; the two may have met there, or perhaps earlier in Amsterdam. They formed a fast friendship that mirrored others Stuyvesant would have-with Stuyvesant in the more powerful role, and Farret almost fawning before him. But Farret had something over Stuyvesant; he had completed university, received a degree in law, and was a poet and painter. Stuyvesant envied all of these indications of culture, and their relationship built itself around his envy and Farret"s ingratiating efforts to please. In a development that suggests depths of personality beneath the wooden image of Stuyvesant that history has fashioned, he and Farret kept up a long-distance correspondence . . . in verse. A lengthy catalogue of poems detailing their changing fortunes exists in the Netherlands Maritime Museum in Amsterdam, which, as far as I have been able to determine, has never been translated or published, except for a few snippets.

The existence of this cache of poetry-which was discovered in a Dutch archive in the 1920s-in itself sheds light on their relationship. It was Farret who preserved the poems and bound them in vellum together with his own ill.u.s.trations, apparently proud of his a.s.sociation with the man who had by then become renowned for his leadership of the Manhattan-based colony. Throughout, Farret addresses Stuyvesant as "Excellency" and "My Stuyvesant." "Never a greater honor would befall me or greater reward / than that you should order me around as a servant," he a.s.serts, and declares that "My will is tied to your will, my heart to your heart." At times the correspondence cries out for a latent-h.o.m.os.e.xuality reading (i.e., when the men write of "such pleasure" each receives from the "skilled hand" of the other); it"s probably more profitable, though, to see the poems as little portals onto the relationships between seventeenth-century Dutch merchant-soldiers, in which there was a frank deference to the one"s greater power and in which friendship was expressed in language as baroque as the pink-cheeked detailing in a Frans Hals portrait. Throughout the collection, Farret"s verse is sprightly; Stuyvesant"s ungainly. Stuyvesant admits to an inability to express himself in "rich Latin or fancy French," but Farret, in his response, insists that Stuyvesant could write poetry in those languages if he wanted to, and shamelessly refers to Stuyvesant"s verse as G.o.ddlijck- G.o.ddlijck-"divine."

Stuyvesant served three years as supplies officer on Curacao, working hard at his job and at positioning himself for advancement, and in the process making enemies, among them the commander of Dutch political and military operations in the Caribbean, Jan Claeszoon van Campen. Things could have become difficult for Stuyvesant, but he caught a major break when Van Campen died in 1642, and Stuyvesant won the position. His friends toasted him; Farret wrote a poem for the occasion, praising "Brave Stuyvesant" who was now poised for greatness, and filled with vitriol for Stuyvesant"s detractors-which suggests that Stuyvesant never had qualms about making enemies.

Stuyvesant, too, had to be pleased with his success. A proud, stiff Frisian, raised on a diet of gloomy skies and thick soup, he now ruled a tropical-paradise-c.u.m-malarial-swamp that lay in the no-man"s-land of the Spanish war, from which he lorded over Dutch operations in the entire Caribbean arena. The region was the scene of vivid, hot, b.l.o.o.d.y warfare between the decaying Spanish empire and its breakaway rival. Sugar, salt, dyewood, tobacco, horses, copper-the ways to exploit the Caribbean and coastal South America were intoxicating in their variety, and while the Dutch were eager to capitalize on the weakness of Spain"s grip on the region, the Spanish were unwilling to give up such a stream of wealth easily. Besides opening a new window onto the birth of Manhattan, the ma.s.sive trove of Dutch doc.u.ments being translated by Dr. Charles Gehring in the New York State Library contains hundreds of pages detailing Stuyvesant"s time in the Caribbean and opens other windows onto the unrelentingly grim business of wringing profits out of slaves, Indians, and the land, while simultaneously battling other European colonizers. More than anything else, the doc.u.ments tie together the pieces of the Dutch empire in the Americas, showing Stuyvesant overseeing with militaristic efficiency an army of suppliers, privateers, traders, and couriers pa.s.sing between Manhattan and Curacao as the Dutch sought to solidify their New World holdings. They make clear that Manhattan began its rise as an international port not in the eighteenth century, as the Port of New York, but in the 1630s, as a cog on the circle of trade moving from the Netherlands to western Africa to Brazil and the Caribbean, then to New Amsterdam, and so back to Europe.

In his Caribbean post Stuyvesant became one of the movers of that circle. He was plugged into the communication network that ran through all its nodes, and in this way began to involve himself in the affairs of the Manhattan-based colony. He got word of Kieft"s troubles there, and tried to help, in what would become an extended comedy. While returning to Curacao from the disaster at St. Martin, his ship apparently pa.s.sed in the night another heading in the opposite direction. It contained four hundred and fifty Dutch soldiers who had fled from an outpost in Brazil that the Spanish had overrun. These soldiers had turned up on Curacao, seeking food and orders. They were told there that they could a.s.sist in the action on St. Martin, but arrived late, only to receive a second wave of sh.e.l.ling from the Spanish guns. Eventually, they made it back to Curacao, where the ailing Stuyvesant must have been fairly sickened by their presence: first, because had they shown up earlier they might have turned the tide on St. Martin; second, because food rations were desperately low on Curacao, and he couldn"t afford to feed them. He decided to solve two problems at one go by ordering them to New Amsterdam, where, he hoped, they could a.s.sist Kieft with his Indian troubles. He thought he had seen the last of them.

Despite the endless attempts by Adriaen van der Donck and others to advise the directors of the West India Company of Manhattan"s strategic importance, it was always an afterthought for them. Brazil, with its more manageable and profitable sugar fields, was the jewel of the company"s operations, and therefore the scene of the bloodiest conflicts with Spain. Complicating the situation was the fact that in coastal Brazil the Dutch were engaged in battle not directly with Spain but with the Portuguese, who were under the va.s.salage of Spain and who were themselves in the process of declaring independence. Like heavyweight boxers, the two empires took turns gathering momentum, unleashing a savage blow on the opponent, then bracing for the response. In one such effort, Portugal sent eighty-six ships and twelve thousand fighting men across the Atlantic from Lisbon to pummel the Dutch ships laying siege to the province of Bahia in eastern Brazil.

As grim as Kieft"s war against the Indians surrounding Manhattan was, it barely registered compared with the scope of battle in the Caribbean, and especially along the Brazilian coast, where hundreds of engagements took place over three decades, great ugly mix-ups of European tactics involving musket battalions and infantry pike charges thrown in with Indian bow-and-arrow warfare, the terrain scarred by siege cannon fire, the European soldiers on both sides stifling in their laughably heavy clothing and often fighting while riddled with yaws, dysentery, and intestinal parasites. Each encounter was punctuated by the ritual of old soldiers on both sides streaming silently out from the ranks to seek out their half-dead comrades amid the corpses and help them along with a swift slit of the throat. The savagery of the battles and grimness of the besieged settlements-"leather, dogs, cats, and rats" was the diet in one town withering under a Dutch siege-speaks to the stakes involved, and also to the pitiless environment that helped shape the man whom Manhattanites would come to call "the General."

Shortly after leaving the Brazilian sphere to take charge of Curacao, and no doubt in part to test his own mettle, Stuyvesant had led a successful attack on a Spanish outpost on the Venezuelan coast. Then he settled into the role of administrator, determined to bring Dutch order to a world of tropical chaos and laxity. He had relished the opportunity to retake St. Martin, and his fury at the failure helped feed his commitment to his administrative duties. In the midst of his work and while struggling with the pain of his wound, he took time to pen a letter to Farret, who was now back in the Netherlands, giving him the news of his misfortune. Farret responded with a poem ent.i.tled "On the Off-Shot Leg of the n.o.ble, Brave Heer Stuyvesant, Before the Island of St. Martin": What mad thunder ball comes roaring towards your legMy dear Stuyvesant, and causes your collapse?The right pillar that used to support your bodyIs that crushed and stricken off this way in one blow . . .You presented too fair a mark-O! much too cruel chance!My Stuyvesant, who falls and tumbles on his bulwark,Where, like a dutiful soldier, he taunted the enemy,To lure him into the field, on the Island of St. Marten.The bullet hits his leg; the rebound touches my heart . . .

But ignoring the pain wouldn"t do-doctors told Stuyvesant the stump where his leg had been amputated wouldn"t heal in the climate; if he remained, it would fester. He resisted-he had only served eighteen months as head of Dutch operations in the Caribbean-then finally gave in to the idea of recuperating at home.

A sea crossing with such an affliction would have been a brutal affair in the best of circ.u.mstances. As it happened, the voyage was horrific. The Milkmaid The Milkmaid left Curacao in August of 1644, and didn"t put into Dutch port until December. By ship, ca.n.a.l barge, and horse-drawn cart, then, past gabled facades and through a pleasant wintry swirl of peat smoke and stewed vegetables, he was hauled to the home of his sister Anna, who lived near Leiden. Life instantly transformed; the pestilential tropical endurance test of the past nine years vanished. He was in the civilized Dutch countryside, plied with boiled meat and smoked fish, his stump salved and ministered. It was a cla.s.sic scenario: the wounded soldier returning home to be cared for. And, completing it, he fell in love with his nurse. Judith Bayard was the sister of Anna Stuyvesant"s husband and was living with the couple when the invalid arrived. She was no gay young thing but a decided spinster-at thirty-seven, three years older than Stuyvesant-who had previously been living with her father (a minister, which no doubt gave the two something to talk about). When her father died she had joined the household; it was natural enough that she take charge of the patient. Judith came from Breda in the south, the same town from which Adriaen van der Donck hailed. She was a Huguenot, a Calvinist whose family had fled Catholic persecution in France. left Curacao in August of 1644, and didn"t put into Dutch port until December. By ship, ca.n.a.l barge, and horse-drawn cart, then, past gabled facades and through a pleasant wintry swirl of peat smoke and stewed vegetables, he was hauled to the home of his sister Anna, who lived near Leiden. Life instantly transformed; the pestilential tropical endurance test of the past nine years vanished. He was in the civilized Dutch countryside, plied with boiled meat and smoked fish, his stump salved and ministered. It was a cla.s.sic scenario: the wounded soldier returning home to be cared for. And, completing it, he fell in love with his nurse. Judith Bayard was the sister of Anna Stuyvesant"s husband and was living with the couple when the invalid arrived. She was no gay young thing but a decided spinster-at thirty-seven, three years older than Stuyvesant-who had previously been living with her father (a minister, which no doubt gave the two something to talk about). When her father died she had joined the household; it was natural enough that she take charge of the patient. Judith came from Breda in the south, the same town from which Adriaen van der Donck hailed. She was a Huguenot, a Calvinist whose family had fled Catholic persecution in France.

During the long weeks of his voyage home, Stuyvesant might have spent some time mulling on a side benefit of his enforced trip: that at least he would have an opportunity to get himself a Dutch bride. It must have seemed a stroke of providence that one would all but fall into his lap, or what remained of it. But courtship didn"t come easily to him. His brother-in-law, the brother of the woman in question, actually seems to have bet him a quant.i.ty of French wine that Stuyvesant wouldn"t have the nerve to propose marriage, and even his staunch friend John Farret was dubious, writing in yet another poem that Stuyvesant would never consummate the relationship because "Priapus has died in him." That got Stuyvesant"s dander up. He tore off a response, in verse more purple and heated than usual, accusing his friend of trying to "make sure I will lose the bet of the wine" and declaring that-manly creature that he was-he fully desired the lady to "occupy this bed." Less than a year later, they were married.*10 The wound healed at last, and Stuyvesant declared himself fit for duty. And so one day he came wobbling into the courtyard of the company headquarters in Amsterdam (the building still exists and is occupied by a catering company, whose waiters flit across the same courtyard giving no notice to the bronze statue of Stuyvesant in the center), sporting a new wooden leg and a reputation for grit and efficiency. At nearly the same time, a certain letter arrived in these offices. It came from Manhattan. It presented, in unusually strident and lawyerly terms, the ruined state of affairs in the North American colony. It demanded the removal of Kieft and the installation of a new governor, one who would usher in a representative government, "so that the entire country may not be hereafter, at the whim of one man, again reduced to similar danger." The directors" heads must have swiveled back and forth from the letter to the hardened young man recently arrived from the New World and eager to get back to his Caribbean post. The directors didn"t like this talk of representative government coming from Manhattan any more than they did Kieft"s blundering management style. Clearly the tough young Frisian before them could give a d.a.m.n for Grotius or Descartes; for him the company"s law was the only "natural law." He wasn"t a newfangled thinker, but a stout minister"s son who understood duty and station. Altogether, an excellent young man. And soon, no doubt, he would learn to manage the peg leg.

MEANWHILE, IN S SCOTLAND, on a summer day in 1637 a woman named Jenny Geddes set in motion another chain of events. According to the story that has ossified into myth in Scotland, she was an Edinburgh "kail wife," or cabbage monger. If you subscribe to the application of chaos theory to history, then her act that day-hurling a stool-was the flapping of the b.u.t.terfly"s wings that led to the hurricane. on a summer day in 1637 a woman named Jenny Geddes set in motion another chain of events. According to the story that has ossified into myth in Scotland, she was an Edinburgh "kail wife," or cabbage monger. If you subscribe to the application of chaos theory to history, then her act that day-hurling a stool-was the flapping of the b.u.t.terfly"s wings that led to the hurricane.

Her target on the Sunday in question was the head of one of the most learned and respected men in Scotland, Dr. Hanna, dean of St. Giles Cathedral. The dean stood in his pulpit, stately and berobed, in his hand a slender volume, fresh off the press, the t.i.tle page of which, in red and black ink and with a sober but elegant border, laid out its purpose: "The Book of Common Prayer, And Administration Of The Sacraments, And other parts of divine service for the use of the Church of Scotland, Printed by Robert Young, Printer to the Kings most Excellent Majestie, M.D.C.x.x.xVII." The cathedral was packed with lairds and peasants alike. Everyone, apparently, knew trouble was in the air-they had come spoiling for a fight. Obliging them, the dean opened the book and began reading from it. Whereupon a piercing voice interrupted him-Jenny Geddes, crying out l.u.s.tily, "Dost thou say ma.s.s at my lug [ear]?" She then picked up the stool she had brought (pews were for men-women were required to bring their own stools if they wanted to sit), took aim, and flung it at the dean"s head. The place erupted.

The thrown stool was the equivalent of the Shot Heard Round the World, the event that would trip the English Civil War. From now on, King Charles would be forced to give up the role of stately monarch and take on that of a general, commanding armies loyal to him against those marshaled by Parliament. Events surrounding the war would have a multilayered impact on American beginnings, on Manhattan as well as in the English colonies.

Perhaps more than anything else, the English Civil War was a religious war. If the seventeenth century was outlined by the struggle for global empire, the outlines were filled in by warfare brought on by the clash of religious worldviews as societies endured the aftershocks of the Reformation. From the time it had broken from the Catholic Church under Henry VIII, the Church of England had adopted a moderate form of Protestantism, maintaining a hierarchy of church officials and a Rome-influenced taste for fancy vestments and fancy liturgy. Most English people were content with this, but others chafed. Puritanism was not originally an English movement but an ideological implant from the Continent, a kind of Reformation II, a call to keep the revolution going. The English Puritans looked at events in the wider world through a theological lens. They saw the religious strife sweeping the Continent-the Thirty Years" War was essentially a series of attempts by Catholic powers to reverse the breakaway momentum in Protestant countries-and developed, along with their minimalist fashion statement, a belief that England was the New Israel, the place G.o.d had anointed as the great bulwark against the Pope and his swaggering red-robed henchmen. Puritanism rolled through English society during the years of Charles"s reign, winning over peasants and aristocrats alike. It provided a how-to manual for improving your personal life and a focal point for national pride. And of course there were the fine hats you got to wear.

Puritanism also had a democratic element to it. Following first Martin Luther then John Calvin, the Puritans aimed their wrath at the Catholic idea of a man-made hierarchy that thrust itself between ordinary Christians and their G.o.d. By extension, Catholic paraphernalia-the frilly priests" garb, the gaudy paintings, the candles and incense-interfered with the profound central activity of Christian life-studying and following the Bible-and were thus to be banned. Eventually, suspicion of churchly power translated into politics-the Puritans came to oppose any authority that might interfere with what they saw as their divine mission, even if that authority was their own king. Those who crossed the ocean to settle in North America may have given up on England as the New Israel, but they brought their sense of chosenness along with them. The New World would be the "New Jerusalem." The democratic seed that planted itself in the revolt against Charles would come to flower in the colonies thirteen decades later with the American Revolution. It was this combination of plain-spoken religious zeal tied to political reform that would be the Puritans" great contribution to shaping American destiny; this is why American historians and leaders, down to Ronald Reagan and his "shining city on a hill," have sung the country"s Puritan beginnings. The argument in this book doesn"t deny that influence, but adds to it another that played a genuine role in shaping the American personality.

What made a civil war inevitable in England was Charles, who was willfully out of touch with his subjects. With his country houses, his lacey accessories, his Catholic wife, and his great halls draped with Van Dycks and Rubenses, he existed in his own universe, and his distance from the society he governed grew with every year. At his encouragement, the clergy introduced finery into their dress and adornments to their churches-edging closer to Roman ways. (A Puritan leader characterized Charles"s project to fancify St. Paul"s as "making a seat for a Priest"s a.r.s.e to sit in.") Charles considered the Puritans just as superst.i.tious in their way as the relic-doting Catholics they despised. He was happy to enforce a ban on the printing of their religious tracts-which sent them to the printers of Leiden and Amsterdam.

The Puritan reform movement was strongest in Scotland, and so Charles decided, with an impressive lack of political horse sense, to bring the Scots into line by introducing in their churches a new prayer book and liturgy, one that was decisively more Catholic in ritual and language. The result was Jenny Geddes lobbing her stool and, eventually, the Scots breaking out in open rebellion. Raising money to put down the Scottish uprising required Charles to call Parliament into session for the first time in eleven years. Once it had a.s.sembled, Puritan leaders had a power base from which to carry out their campaign against the king.

Dutch authorities followed every wrinkle in the growing crisis. Beginning in July 1642, Albert Joachimi, the Dutch amba.s.sador in London-who a decade before had pleaded with Charles to release the Unity, Unity, which had been carrying Peter Minuit back from Manhattan when the English impounded it-wrote a series of vivid and increasingly strident dispatches to his superiors at The Hague, which read like what they were, news reports from the front lines: "Some more cavalry have made their appearance here; and infantry are continued to be enlisted by beat of drum." "News is received here of the siege of Sherborne Castle . . . those besieged have slain between two and three hundred of the Parliamentarians . . . The French Amba.s.sador hath taken his leave of the King, and calculates to depart this week . . . A Parliamentman of quality told me, on Sat.u.r.day last, that the Earl of Ess.e.x was with the army within twelve miles of Shrewsbury; that place has been fortified by the King, who keeps his main force there." The old diplomat had a sense of what was coming, and he advised his government to take advantage of Charles"s embattled state and bring to an end the growing friction between the English and Dutch colonies in North America. The States General, he wrote, "should write to the King and request his Majesty to be pleased to order the English in New England to leave the Dutch undisturbed in New Netherland." which had been carrying Peter Minuit back from Manhattan when the English impounded it-wrote a series of vivid and increasingly strident dispatches to his superiors at The Hague, which read like what they were, news reports from the front lines: "Some more cavalry have made their appearance here; and infantry are continued to be enlisted by beat of drum." "News is received here of the siege of Sherborne Castle . . . those besieged have slain between two and three hundred of the Parliamentarians . . . The French Amba.s.sador hath taken his leave of the King, and calculates to depart this week . . . A Parliamentman of quality told me, on Sat.u.r.day last, that the Earl of Ess.e.x was with the army within twelve miles of Shrewsbury; that place has been fortified by the King, who keeps his main force there." The old diplomat had a sense of what was coming, and he advised his government to take advantage of Charles"s embattled state and bring to an end the growing friction between the English and Dutch colonies in North America. The States General, he wrote, "should write to the King and request his Majesty to be pleased to order the English in New England to leave the Dutch undisturbed in New Netherland."

Joachimi felt the need to act because in the Dutch colony the pressure from the north was growing. Thanks to the turmoil in England, the population of New England had swelled to ten times that of New Netherland. What had been in Minuit"s time a pair of low settlements (Plymouth and Ma.s.sachusetts Bay), struggling against imminent death and thankful for the odd care package the Dutch representatives on Manhattan might send their way, was now four fully functioning colonies. Connecticut and New Haven had been carved out of territory the Dutch considered their own. Each of these colonies had its own administration, and all, thanks to the fact that king and parliament were busy facing one another down, acted more or less without interference from the home country. In 1643, in order to strengthen themselves, princ.i.p.ally against the Dutch province, they formed a league, the United Colonies of New England.

Strangely, however, even as it was feeling the weight of the growing population to its north, the Manhattan-based colony also benefited significantly from the stream of refugees moving from England to New England. The Puritan revolt in England was, for all its breadth among the populace, wondrously narrow in ideology. It wasn"t enough that you were a fire-breathing Protestant-you had to be the right kind of fire-breathing Protestant, otherwise the very brightness of your flame marked you as in need of theological cleansing. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," declared Exodus as translated under the direction of Charles"s father, and Baptists, Anabaptists, Familists, and Mennonites were all marked thereby. It is easy enough to shake one"s head at the folly, but in an age awash in incantations and potions, deciding who to make fuel for the pyre was a serious matter.

So people left England in waves. But members of despised sects who chose to follow the Pilgrims" lead and emigrate to America found, to their annoyance after enduring the horrors of the open ocean, that the Puritan majority in New England had followed the same hard-line trajectory as in the old country. In fact, there was even less theological wiggle room in the open s.p.a.ces of New England. Witchcraft hysteria wouldn"t reach its height for some time, but communities moved swiftly to excommunicate alternative religionists and run them out. So there was a double-rebound effect during the early 1640s, with a stream of English sectarians fleeing from Old England to New, then, recalling in their desperation the vaunted tolerance of the Dutch, moving south to seek sanctuary in the Manhattan-based colony. They came straggling through the latticeworked gatehouse of Fort Amsterdam, and Willem Kieft was pleased to have them. He was seriously embattled by this point and recognized that he had to grow his population in order to survive. And-here is the inscrutability of seventeenth-century Dutchness-in addition to giving them land to settle, he also granted them liberty to practice their religion as they saw fit, a genuine rarity in the era. Forbidding his own countrymen even marginal representation while at the same time practically insisting on covering newcomers with the blanket of religious liberty that was part of his proud cultural inheritance-this was apparently not a difficult calculation. It"s worth noting, too, that the colonists themselves were fully aware of their status as a haven, and proud of it. Van der Donck, writing of one of these English refugees, summed up the situation with as much of a sense of perspective as a historian from the far future might: "[He] came to New England at the commencement of the troubles in England, in order to escape them, and found that he had got out of the frying pan into the fire. He betook himself, in consequence, under the protection of the Netherlanders, in order that he may, according to the Dutch reformation, enjoy freedom of conscience, which he unexpectedly missed in New England."

Kieft made the English arrivals swear an oath to the States General and gave them land to settle, and they went about helping to build the foundation of what would become New York City. Several of these were remarkable individuals. Lady Deborah Moody, a self-possessed London aristocrat, had converted to Anabaptism and declared herself ready to die for the outre notion that baptism must be withheld until the recipient was old enough to understand its meaning. Londoners were shocked; she was in her dignified fifties when she crammed into a stench-ridden wooden ship cheek by jowl with peasants and worse, and fled to the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony. There, the court of Salem threatened to banish her unless she renounced her mad ways, Puritan chieftain John Endecott famously declaring "Shee is a dangerous woeman." Kieft gave her and her followers t.i.tle to the southwestern tip of Long Island. The take-charge woman herself sketched the plan of her community, to be called Gravesend (the skeleton of her original plan can still be seen in the intersection of McDonald Avenue and Gravesend Neck Road). She then set about tending to her flock of baptism-conscious followers, and thus established, in the corner of Brooklyn that now includes Bensonhurst, Coney Island, Brighton Beach, and Sheepshead Bay, the first New World settlement founded by a woman.

Anne Hutchinson also traveled from England to Ma.s.sachusetts to Manhattan, in search of freedom to follow her belief that individuals could commune with the divine without any help from organized religion. New England"s leaders looked on her as the seventeenth-century equivalent of an anarchist-Hutchinson wanted to do away with original sin, a moral cudgel that Puritan politicians believed indispensable to maintaining law and order. Particularly alarming was the fact that she had rapidly developed a following in Boston. Kieft didn"t mind-or maybe he sensed she wouldn"t be around long enough to cause trouble: when she showed up in his domain, he placed her in a no-man"s-land at the height of the Indian troubles. Less than a year after she and her small band of followers had settled on the land he offered (on Pelham Bay in the Bronx, on the sh.o.r.e of the river that now bears her name), Hutchinson, six of her children, and nine others were ma.s.sacred in an Indian attack.

The Reverend Francis Doughty, the third of the three semilegendary leaders of English refugees to the Dutch colony, had been forced from his vicarage in Gloucestershire for "nonconformity," shocked the crowd in Ma.s.sachusetts for preaching "that Abraham"s children should have been baptized," then headed for Manhattan. He, too, received a generous grant of land from Kieft and had begun to plant what would be the first European settlement in the future borough of Queens when a vicious Indian attack changed things. Doughty survived, gave up on the wilds of Long Island, and, seeing another opportunity, ensconced himself as minister to the growing English-speaking population of Manhattan. Kieft didn"t approve; he envisioned a buffer zone of communities surrounding New Amsterdam, and he insisted that Doughty take the remains of his English flock back to his Long Island tract. Doughty turns out to have been yet another strong-willed creature, and he rebuffed the director, more or less arguing that if Kieft thought these were safe times to camp out in the wilds he could try it himself. Kieft rescinded the land grant and, for good measure, threw Doughty in the fort"s jail cell for twenty-four hours.

Doughty was thus a natural addition to the colony"s burgeoning anti-Kieft movement. He was also naturally litigious, and found himself in court in June of 1645, accusing another Englishman, William Gerritson, of singing a slanderous song about him and his daughter Mary. It may have been here that he caught the eye of a certain young lawyer-or, more to the point, that his eighteen-year-old daughter did. We don"t know where Adriaen van der Donck and Mary Doughty first met, but it appears Van der Donck was in court at this time. If there was an initial language difficulty between the patrician Dutchman and the young Englishwoman, daughter of a strident and independent-minded father, who would herself prove to be a resourceful pioneer woman, it was soon gotten over. They were married before the year was out.

The romance was put on hold for the time being, however. Shortly before the couple met, the nineteen directors of the West India Company had gathered in Amsterdam to review their affairs in various outposts. They p.r.o.nounced themselves pleased with the synergy between Angola and Brazil: what had been at first a tentative notion of moving slaves from West Africa across the ocean to do work in the company"s fields in South America was now a going concern. "Every thing is, by G.o.d"s blessing, in a good condition," they reported to the government ministers in The Hague, sounding freakishly cheerful about their part in what would become one of humanity"s saddest and ugliest endeavors, "and in consequence of the employment of the negroes, which were from time to time introduced from Angola into Brazil, in planting grain, flour is produced in such quant.i.ty that what used to always cost 8 to 10 guilders, still continues to be sold at the low rate of six stivers . . ."

Regarding Manhattan, while they were quietly arranging for Kieft"s successor, the directors decided to order him to work out a peace treaty that would end the disastrous Indian war. Kieft received these instructions in mid-summer and, perhaps sensing that his term might be coming to an end, took vigorous steps to carry them out. He knew the center of power among the tribes was to the north. The Mohawks and Mahicans kept the Munsee-speaking tribes of the lower river valley within their thrall, regularly sending representatives among them demanding tribute payments. So even though the hostilities were with the more southerly Indians, Kieft determined that the wisest course would be to secure a formal peace treaty with the stronger tribes first, to ensure that the Raritans, Tappans, and other groups closer to Manhattan would follow. This, however, meant penetrating the heart of darkness to the north, exposing himself to the savages. Kieft still had rarely stepped foot outside the radius of New Amsterdam. He needed someone who knew the Indians of the north, who spoke their languages, someone whom they knew and trusted. He turned to Adriaen van der Donck.

Kieft as yet had no knowledge of the letter written the previous autumn demanding his ouster. He certainly didn"t know that Van der Donck had been meeting with the disgruntled colonists. Van der Donck seems to have been playing the role of model son again, keeping himself in the director"s good graces, just as he had done with Kiliaen van Rensselaer before he began defying the old man. He agreed to help.

Kieft also brought with him on the one-hundred-and-fifty-mile journey upriver Johannes La Montagne, the second member of his two-man council, and, no doubt, a contingent of soldiers. The Indians agreed to meet within the confines of Fort Orange; the officials of Rensselaerswyck also took part. One man with an official role was a Mohawk named Agheroense, who knew all the languages of the Iroquois confederation as well as Mahican and would a.s.sist Van der Donck as interpreter. Agheroense-and, presumably, Van der Donck and Director Kieft-had spent the night at the "patroon"s house," where the director of Rensselaerswyck lived. He came downstairs that morning, greeted Van der Donck, who introduced him to Kieft, and the three men sat and chatted at the breakfast table while Agheroense applied his ceremonial face paint. Kieft became visibly excited as he sat watching, for the man was painting his face with a glittering gold substance. He asked Van der Donck to inquire about it; in his mind the dormant hope-first lit in all Europeans by the Spanish discoveries of gold in South America-had reawakened. Could it be that here was the answer to the colony"s financial problems? If so, wouldn"t it also save his own career? Agheroense handed the pot to Van der Donck, who handed it to Kieft, who asked if he could buy it to study more closely.

There had to have been a note of irony playing in Van der Donck"s mind during the peace talks. The student of law and intergovernmental relations had a unique opportunity to observe. On one side of him were Indians with whom he had lived, whose society he had studied, and whom in many ways he admired, while the representative of his own people was a man he despised for his lack of integrity. In the course of the treaty discussions, it became clear to Van der Donck that Kieft had not come prepared. In his later writings about the Indians of the region, where Van der Donck described treaty rituals, he noted that the protocol was to state one"s proposition orally and at the same time offer a suitable gift. The gift was to be hung up as deliberations commenced; the other side had three days to accept the offering and thus signal that an agreement had been reached. Kieft had brought no offering to be hung up. A treaty of this magnitude, with both the Mohawks and the Mahicans, would require something significant, or the chiefs would be insulted. Kieft asked Van der Donck for a loan, and promised to repay him handsomely for his service to the colony.

Van der Donck supplied what was necessary-apparently, a large cache of sewant-and, back in New Amsterdam in late July of 1645, Kieft fulfilled his promise. He gave Van der Donck what he most wanted: his own domain, the patent to a vast tract of land. It was ideally situated, too: not in the far hinterlands to the north but adjacent to Manhattan. Van der Donck"s grant began on the mainland directly to the north of the island, continued along the river for twelve miles, and carried eastward as far as the Bronx River-a total of twenty-four thousand acres. For his services, then, and for keeping his feelings about Kieft in check, he became lord of much of what is today the Bronx and southern Westchester County. He moved at once to purchase the land from the Indians, and over the next year he and Mary got to work, hiring tenant farmers to clear land and carpenters to build a house and a saw mill. (The saw mill became so vital to the community that later grew up in the area that the river on which it stood-and, later, a parkway that ran along it-would be named for it.) With such a vast tract came a kind of unofficial t.i.tle. In the Netherlands, a Jonker Jonk

Prev List Next