The Island at the Center of the World Part 6

In the end, peace prevailed at Munster and Osnabruck. The marathon negotiations were followed by appropriately baroque treaty preparations, then, in 1648, by the signings themselves (history has linked the two treaties by referring to them jointly as the Peace of Westphalia). And then the parties started. They went on for years, crisscrossing central Europe like brushfires. For most of Europe, the celebration was at the end of decades of slaughter. In the United Provinces of the Netherlands, the feelings were much more acute. Independence, recognition, vindication-the results of the treaty amounted to, on a societal level, a catalogue of psychological power terms. When Pauw, his fellow Dutch envoys, and the Spanish representatives put their signatures and seals to a single piece of paper, it signaled the Moment, the ignition of the Golden Age. Publishers ran off copies of the treaty, which became a best-seller. Celebrations flared through every city and village in the seven provinces. Plays, poems, salutes, parades, porcelain tiles, sermons, drinking bouts, brothel binges, painting commissions, public works projects-in every possible human manifestation, the Dutch proclaimed the new age. The euphoria built steadily over the months following the signing.

It was into this atmosphere-of a society conscious of a future laden with prosperity, peace, and power, and alive to the possibilities of secular politics-that Adriaen van der Donck sailed in the beginning of October 1649. He found his homeland reborn, the cause for which his grandfather had fought and become a hero vindicated. The war into which he himself had been born and raised was over. It was a new world, a new country.

But it was not Adriaen van der Donck's country-not anymore. Whatever joy he experienced and celebrations he took part in, he seems not to have wavered in his commitment to his adopted land. He was a prototype of a species that would number in the millions in the coming centuries: the European who crossed the ocean and found, in the vast continent at the other end, a new home and purpose. He was an American.

Into the harbor at Texel, the gra.s.sy, windswept North Sea island from which Henry Hudson had set out forty years earlier, the s.h.i.+p sailed. From there Van der Donck and his colleagues, Jacob van Couwenhoven and Jan Evertsen Bout, would have boarded a public transport boat, and so sailed southward, into the famed forest of masts that was the harborfront of Amsterdam, the most vital city on earth.

Of course, the city had not waited for the signing of a doc.u.ment as the signal to begin its golden era. Prosperity had been building for decades now, and so had Amsterdam. The city had more than doubled in size since Henry Hudson's time, and it was now thirty years since its merchant rulers-with impressive confidence in the city's future growth-had conceived of a staggering urban development project, now nearing completion: a series of concentric ca.n.a.l rings. The ca.n.a.ls of Amsterdam are so iconic that many people a.s.sume they have always been there, but they were dug, by hand, hundreds of tons of earth moved out and sand brought in, forests' worth of pilings driven into the banks, a truly ma.s.sive feat of engineering and city planning. The result was the creation of some of the first suburbs, for the idea was to encircle the core of the city-with its dens of commerce, s.e.x, and drink-with neighborhoods of elegant housing for the army of newly rich, each home backed by ample gardens and provided with access, right out the front door, onto the state-of-the-art in urban transit systems. Here, aside from the incessant thrum of construction, all was serenity and gentility. In a foreshadowing of modern real estate marketing, the ca.n.a.ls themselves were named in blatant appeal to their upwardly mobile clientele: you had the option, depending on the precise alt.i.tude of your pretensions, of living on the Herengracht, or Gentleman's Ca.n.a.l, the Prinsengracht (Prince's Ca.n.a.l), or the Keizersgracht (Emperor's Ca.n.a.l).

Van der Donck had been away for nearly a decade. As for his comrades, Jacob van Couwenhoven, in his thirties, had followed his father to Manhattan as a teenager, and Jan Evertsen Bout had been in the New World since 1634. For all three, roaming into the heart of the city, following the waterway called the Damrak to the central plaza of the Dam, would have been a frontal a.s.sault on the senses.

It was also a premonition of the society they were in the process of helping to create an ocean away. In the Dam, the city's main square, the results of Amsterdam's years of accepting foreigners were on vigorous display. Turbans, saris, and skullcaps mingled in with musketeerish ensembles; the confused remark of a visiting Frenchman-"It appears at first not to be the city of any particular people but to be common to all as the centre of their commerce"-was one that would be echoed in coming centuries by visitors to Amsterdam's offspring across the Atlantic, New York City. The hawkers-Cantonese, Franconians, Gujaratis, Livonians, Lorrainese, Ashken.a.z.im-contributed as much to the visual cacophony as the pyramids of goods each had laid out at the bases of columns ranged around the place. The whole parade of exotic outlanders, Dutch guardsmen, and stout, ap.r.o.ned housewives was set to music by itinerant lutists, fiddlers, bagpipers, and hurdy-gurdy boys; everyone was fueled by street-corner pancake sellers. Rene Descartes, back in Amsterdam after his years in Leiden, found comfort in the anonymity of the bustle. "I can walk out each day in the bustle of the crowds with as much freedom and ease as you have in your paths," he wrote to a country friend. (Then again, it may have gotten to him in the end: in the wake of peace, just as Van der Donck was arriving in Amsterdam, he left for the court of Queen Christina of Sweden, never to return.) The availability of goods and services was stupefying to newcomers: sacks of pepper still giving off the perfumes of southeast Asia, bricks of sugar from the humid deltas of Brazil, hogsheads of Virginia tobacco, Turkish carpets, not to mention berths to Genoa, Smyrna, and Sumatra, and real estate offerings for homes going up at the as-yet-unfinished south end of the ca.n.a.l ring or in the new Jordaan area to the west. You could buy scientific measuring devices, tools for dissecting corpses, or, if you were foolish enough, a pair of spectacles, which were a.s.sociated with a weak intellect ("to sell someone eyegla.s.ses" was Dutch slang for "to deceive"). s.e.x, of course, was another product arrayed in plenitude-tourists could obtain a map of the city's red-light districts, which featured women whose whispered sighs came with French, Swedish, and German accents. If they weren't put off by the charming nicknames of some of the girls (e.g., Krentecut: "Currant c.u.n.t"), the new arrivals might have found the sheer variety hard to pa.s.s up.

Art and printing were among the goods on offer. There were stalls in which art brokers sold paintings created for the home market, with an emphasis on those two iconic Dutch genres-landscape and still life-that in their very nature spoke of a society broken loose from religious dominance of its mental life and that satisfied a secular consumer urge for evocative scenes and a precise, almost Eastern fascination with ordinary objects in the here-and-now (the terms themselves came into English via the Dutch landschap landschap and and stilleven). stilleven). Prints were common as well: at this moment those depicting the signing of the Treaty of Munster were everywhere, though, if you preferred, you could also find copies of the papal brief denouncing the treaties (much Vatican property had been "secularized" in the agreements). There were also engraved portraits of the signers of the treaty, pictures of various Dutch towns reacting to news of the treaty, and of companies of soldiers swozzling beer in celebration of the treaty. Prints were common as well: at this moment those depicting the signing of the Treaty of Munster were everywhere, though, if you preferred, you could also find copies of the papal brief denouncing the treaties (much Vatican property had been "secularized" in the agreements). There were also engraved portraits of the signers of the treaty, pictures of various Dutch towns reacting to news of the treaty, and of companies of soldiers swozzling beer in celebration of the treaty.

In addition to the increase in intensity, there had been a big change in Amsterdam's central square since Van der Donck had left for the colony of Rensselaerswyck in 1641. One whole side of it, formerly a sprawling neighborhood, had been leveled, and in its place now stood the pilings and foundations of what would become the city's monument to itself in its ascendancy, a new Town Hall, built on cla.s.sical lines, filled with art and slogans aligning the Dutch Republic with Rome and Greece. It was dedicated not only to the peace of '48 but to Peace itself, for, in the first waves of idealism following the diplomatic language about "eternal peace," people really did seem to believe that they had just lived through the war to end all wars. As the tourist Van der Donck stood observing the first courses of stones being laid, that idea was still credible.*23 But the Manhattanites didn't linger in the big city. Their business was pressing; they left soon after they had rested themselves, heading southwest.

Three centuries earlier, the corner of Holland that was their ultimate destination had been the country property of Willem, Count of Holland. Over time, it became useful as a commodious and convenient spot at which the medieval warlords of the region could meet and hash out differences. It was surrounded by a hedgerow that must have been a stunning feature of the landscape because people of the area took to calling the property itself 's Gravenhage- 's Gravenhage-the Count's Hedge. Even after the meeting spot became formalized into a court and a town grew up around it, the name stayed, though it was often shortened to Den Haag, which English emissaries transliterated as "The Hague." From a provincial court, it grew into a national capital with the start of the war for independence.

The city that Van der Donck and his colleagues entered in October of 1649 was small and stately-"the largest village in Europe," people liked to call it-with meadows on one side, an oak forest on another, and the dunes of the coast a short distance away. Planned government town that it was, it had its broad tree-lined avenues where, of an evening, men of standing would promenade or ride in carriages with their families. Everything was cl.u.s.tered around the central government plaza called the Binnenhof, a four-sided fortress-like complex featuring government offices around the sides and, in the center, the thirteenth-century Knights' Hall, the original meeting place of the medieval n.o.bles.

It was a clunky, byzantine style of governing the Dutch had devised, but in essence each of the seven provinces sent a delegation to the States General of whatever size they chose, though each province had only one vote. The few dozen men sat together around a single table, the t.i.tle of president pa.s.sing weekly from one province's lead delegate to the next. The tricky part was that all decisions required a unanimous vote, which made for intense politicking and few resolutions, something the Dutch seem not to have minded terribly, trusting in the adage that the less the government actually did the better.

On October 13, not more than a few days after their arrival, Van der Donck and his comrades won a spot on the States General's daily calendar of business and took the opportunity to present the doc.u.ment Van der Donck had crafted on Manhattan, the "Remonstrance of New Netherland, and the Occurrences There, Addressed to the High and Mighty Lords States General of the United Netherlands, by the People of New Netherland." Van der Donck the jurist, a bit over thirty years of age, took the lead. Years of struggle against Kieft and then Stuyvesant-winning a seat on the representative body, canva.s.sing Manhattanites, being imprisoned and released, and finally sailing back across the ocean-had led to this. In addition to the "Remonstrance," he laid before the governing body several supporting doc.u.ments, including a letter from the Board of Nine introducing him and his colleagues and, as a coup, a letter of reference he had coaxed out of Van d.i.n.klagen, Stuyvesant's disgruntled vice-director. "These persons are thoroughly conversant with the situation of the country," he had written of Van der Donck and his colleagues. "I hope your High Mightinesses will be pleased thereby and extend them a favorable audience . . ."

It was a ripe moment for the Manhattan delegation to present its pet.i.tion. The nation was still in the throes of its independence celebrations, and the speed with which the rulers took up the matter suggested that they were amenable. They knew the name Manhattan well by now, knew of the West India Company's mismanagement of the colony, and were ready to do something about it. The delegation presented itself with clarity and a distinct elan. Above all was their call for "suitable munic.i.p.al government" for New Amsterdam. Van der Donck first painted for them an idyllic word picture, asking them to imagine this island, "Manhathans . . . the Capital of New Netherland," with its glorious geographic placement, "very well adapted on account of the convenience of the river," and an ideal base from which "we may pursue our country's trade . . . from Terra Nova to Cape Florida . . . to the West Indies and to Europe, wherever the Lord our G.o.d shall be pleased to permit." Then came the looming threat: the New Englanders, he added, were "fully aware that our country is better than theirs," thus the States General had to move swiftly to increase trade and settlement. Otherwise, the English would surely take over, and "It will lose even the name of New Netherland, and no Dutchman will have anything to say there."

Van der Donck's personal style is apparent not just in the individual elements of the presentation but in its exhaustiveness. He could not be content with the lengthy "Remonstrance" on its own, but had added to it a "Pet.i.tion of the Commonalty of New Netherland to the States General." Then, for the benefit of the committee members who would study the matter in detail, he added a long section of "Additional Observations on the Preceding Pet.i.tion." This, in turn, he footnoted to within an inch of its life, so that every aspect of the delegates' case-the limitless potential of the colony, the legality of the Dutch claim to the territory, the rights of the people who inhabited it-was covered, doc.u.mented, supported, cross-referenced. The man's exuberance comes through in the utter mania of his doc.u.mentation, which reads in parts like the output of a law clerk on amphetamines. A single sentence of what are already "Additional Observations" might have eight footnotes. At one point, in a sentence in which Van der Donck says that he and his colleagues presume to know the reasons for the colony's mismanagement, which he then goes on to enumerate, he footnotes the word presume presume in order to add: "Not that there is any doubt of it; for it is as clear and notorious as that the sun emits light." in order to add: "Not that there is any doubt of it; for it is as clear and notorious as that the sun emits light."

Then came the props-supporting materials to give the rulers graphic reminders of the fat promise of their overseas province. Beaver pelts were laid before the high and mighty gentlemen, still reeking of the American forests, seeming almost illicit, in this civilized setting, in their bushy fecundity. And there were samples of unspecified "fruits" of the land, which, given the season and timing of the journey, might have meant tobacco, pumpkins, squash, beets, apples, nuts, corn, and certainly sacks of grain, of which the colonists were proud ("I have seen rye," Van der Donck himself would write elsewhere, "which grew so tall that a man of common size would bind the ears together above his head").

Realizing that, like as not, these rulers had no clear idea of the geography in question, Van der Donck also produced a meticulous hand-drawn map-probably created by Augustin Herman, who was a skilled cartographer-showing the province in its entirety and covering the coast from Maine to Virginia and extending as far west as central Pennsylvania.

There was perhaps one further piece of doc.u.mentation, the original of which has only recently come to light. In 1992 a researcher at the Austrian National Library came across two pieces of a colored pen-and-ink townscape that had for decades been shelved separately. Fitting them together, he realized he had an early view of New Amsterdam-one that fits into the history of the Dutch colony at precisely this moment. This delicate, ephemerally colored ill.u.s.tration (reproduced on the cover of this book) shows a motley spread of dwellings-some of wood, some gabled brick-hugging the sh.o.r.eline, and a crude fort sporting the Dutch flag. There are no people in the scene. There is reason-which will be discussed below-to believe that Van der Donck brought this almost haunting portrait of his colony's capital to cap his presentation.

All of this work-the delegates' own efforts and those of others on Manhattan who were supporting them-was done, Van der Donck declared, with a touch of feeling surely unusual in an official communication, "for the love of New Netherland." Then, having spread these layers of details and baskets of bounty before the men of government, he exited with a graceful pirouette, adding that he hoped the mighty rulers would "interpret most favorably this our presumption."

Presumption was the right word. The nerve of the Manhattan activists requires a bit of unpacking to appreciate. The Dutch system in the seventeenth century was one in which power was apportioned through well-worn channels. The States General was a fairly weak national body, rather like the original confederation that existed for the first eight years of American independence (the customary t.i.tle of "High and Mighty Gentlemen" being something in the nature of a compensation); it had sway in overseas matters, such as overseeing colonial affairs, but most power was held by the provinces, and by the great overseas trading companies, which functioned almost as branches of government. The maintaining of overseas trading posts by these companies-and their right to make money from them-was deeply embedded in the system. Yet Van der Donck was quite explicit in what he asked of the leaders: "In our opinion this country will never flourish under the Honorable Company's government. . . . It would, therefore, be better and more advantageous for the country and themselves were they rid of it and the remnant of their property transported hence." Remove the niceties and the request is: "Get them out of here, and their belongings, too." It was a call to change the system, to strip West India Company shareholders of a property into which they had put enormous amounts of money and to have the central government take it over directly and give it political status within the Dutch system.

For Van der Donck, Melyn, Govert Loockermans, Augustin Herman, and their colleagues to expect the States General to undercut the entire political-economic system for the sake of a few merchants and settlers cl.u.s.tered on a distant island was certainly bold. So bold, in fact, that some historians have seen their mission as a freak, a pipedream-very forward-looking, perhaps, and in a way antic.i.p.ating the political demands made during the American revolution, but basically out of step with the times.

But it wasn't. As an ill.u.s.tration of how Van der Donck's undertaking meshed with other events, shortly before the delegates had set sail from Manhattan, news of the beheading of King Charles reached the colony. As Van der Donck arrived in Holland, a debate was being waged via pamphlets-which, in the era before the coming of newspapers, were the national soapboxes-on the rights of the people and the limits of monarchs. It was sparked by the presence in the Dutch Republic-to be precise, at the Honselaardijk Palace near The Hague, where he had been living in splendor and taking as full advantage of Dutch haven as had waves of humbler refugees from across Europe-of none other than Charles's son and would-be successor, the future Charles II. One prominent intellectual took the line of traditionalists and argued that even if King Charles had been guilty of crimes that warranted execution, primogeniture-the law by which power transferred in a hereditary monarchy-demanded that his son, who had not partic.i.p.ated in the crimes, should become the new king, and thus that it was right for the country to harbor him until the Cromwellian madness had pa.s.sed. But other people felt uncomfortable about harboring a fugitive royal. In the freewheeling public forum of the Dutch Republic, a law student from the University of Utrecht, a young Dutchman very much of Van der Donck's ilk, fired off a responding pamphlet, which was printed and read everywhere, declaiming that, in the new Europe, and in a newly independent republic, such attachment to royalty was out of step with the times. Monarchs, he declared, derived their power not from G.o.d but from the people. Van der Donck's cause was not king-versus-people, of course. But this debate about the limits of a king's power shows that what it was about-the right of a people to have a voice in their government-was a subject very much in the air at the time the Manhattan delegates presented their case.

There was also outright political activism in the air. As Van der Donck was beginning his mission in The Hague on behalf of the colony, a former Jesuit named Franciscus van den Enden was organizing a kind of Socratic academy in Amsterdam, encouraging young men to experiment freely with ideas of democracy and social equality. The most famous student to emerge from Van den Enden's coterie was Baruch Spinoza, the Amsterdam Jew who would become notorious in his lifetime, and legendary beyond, for continuing to develop the principles of modern philosophy laid down by Descartes. Some of the ideas that would emerge from this circle-democratic government, communal living, joint owners.h.i.+p of property, questioning the literal truth of the Bible, a public school system-sound almost freakishly modern, which makes the point that the roots of the modern world go back farther than is often thought.

Van den Enden's circle would have had a natural affinity with Van der Donck and his idealistic scheme for his colony. It's possible that Van der Donck got to know them during his time in Holland. Certainly they eventually came to know of the Dutch colony, perhaps as a result of his efforts, and would come to make it the focus for one of their schemes, a bizarre, proto-Communist experiment in utopian living. A decade after Van der Donck's mission, Van den Enden would write a draft const.i.tution for such a community, to be based in the American colony. The group actually won a charter for the venture, and in 1663 forty-one latter-day Pilgrims, led by Pieter Plockhoy (who has become known as a father of socialism), settled on Delaware Bay, on land Stuyvesant had won back from the Swedes. But the timing was bad. Just months later, the English took over the whole Dutch colony of New Netherland, and when they did they destroyed the utopian settlement. Plockhoy himself would survive and live the last thirty years of his life in the New World, ending his days upriver, a resident of the new city of Philadelphia.

Like Van der Donck's mission, these projects were probably overly idealistic, products of the first wave of thinkers to come along in the wake of men like Descartes and Grotius, who had aspired to s.h.i.+ft the center of human effort from the church to the human mind. But if, in the end, Van der Donck and his colleagues would not get all they wanted, they would change the system and pave the way for a new society. Why American history has overlooked their accomplishment has to do in part with Anglocentrism and also probably with something as mundane as the way colonial studies have traditionally been divided in American universities: English departments focusing on the English colonies, the Spanish colonies covered in the Spanish department, and so on. This meant both that the Dutch colony was relegated to the margins (few American universities have Dutch departments) and that colonial studies as a whole were approached narrowly. The discipline of history has broken down some of those walls in recent years, as it's become clear that educated Europeans of the seventeenth century were aware of the world and their place in it, and were affected by distant events. To understand events in one region therefore requires an appreciation for what was going on elsewhere. The fact that one volume of primary source material crucial to understanding what the Dutch did on Manhattan Island is ent.i.tled Curacao Papers Curacao Papers ill.u.s.trates the point. There were global networks even then. ill.u.s.trates the point. There were global networks even then.

Give Van der Donck's mission its context, therefore, and it pops into relief. On the one hand are the records of the colony, still being translated and published, which show a churning settlement inhabited by a mix of tough individuals who see the possibilities of the place and want to explore them. It was a society-something worth fighting for. Then, too, the colonists were quite connected to the wider world. What fueled Van der Donck and his colleagues, what drove them in their idealism, was the spirit of the age. Extraordinary things were happening in Europe, and they knew it. They wrestled with the implications of the Treaty of Munster, and the broader Peace of Westphalia. Like the delegates to the treaty talks, like the members of Van den Enden's circle, they were following in the footsteps of Hugo Grotius, applying his principles of law to their New World colony.

It's also notable that, as radical as the colonists' pet.i.tion may have been, it was treated seriously in the halls of government. Following the initial presentation, the high mightinesses shuffled in their chairs, flipped through pages, discussed the matter, and appointed a committee to explore it in depth. It had been a nagging issue; now was the time to deal with it.

There must have been some reveling that night in The Hague. The three Americans had to have been delighted with their first appearance before the governing body. But if they hoped for a speedy resolution of their case, they were soon disappointed. Within a matter of days, the States General found itself in the middle of a royalist crisis of its own, which had been building for some time and which now swept all lesser matters aside. The civil war in England was not an isolated event. The Dutch government wasn't based on a const.i.tution, but was a patchwork of inst.i.tutions and laws, some quite forward-thinking, others relics of the feudal past. It was a republic, but it also had its n.o.ble families, and it had a first family, the House of Orange and Na.s.sau. By long tradition, the Prince of Orange was elected as Stadtholder-an office akin to president, but one whose duties were ambiguous. The ambiguity had been a source of irritation to the previous Prince of Orange, Frederik Hendrik, who had served as Stadtholder since 1625, had led the armies to victory in the war on Spain, and steadily and astutely increased his power during his life. His ultimate objective was to convert his family to the status of monarchy, but his big step in that direction had been fantastically ill-timed: in 1641 he had married his fifteen-year-old son, Willem, to Mary Stuart, the nine-year-old daughter of Charles I of England. At virtually the same moment, the English civil war began, and by the end of the decade Charles, to whom Frederik Hendrik had linked his fortunes, was headless.

From the beginning, the Dutch were annoyed that their n.o.ble family had hitched itself to royalty, and to doomed royalty at that. Frederik Hendrik's second major blunder was to try to waylay the peace talks at Munster. The Eighty Years' War had been very good for his family; it had made his father, William the Silent, into an icon, the "father of the nation." Beyond that, the Stadtholder was the head of the army; peace with Spain would mean a shriveling of his significance. But the merchant rulers of the province of Holland, and especially of the city of Amsterdam, had determined that peace was in their interest, and history moved in their direction. The peace treaty was signed, and just as it became clear that he had lost, Frederik Hendrik died.

The matter was far from over, however. The new Stadtholder, Willem, was, at twenty-one, volatile, arrogant, and as indifferent toward his advisors as he was toward his English child-wife. He was smart, but wild, and soon proved a more dangerous force than his father. Only days after the Manhattan delegates had presented their pet.i.tion, the States of Holland-the regional a.s.sembly of the province of Holland, which also met at The Hague-voted to decommission many of the soldiers in its pay. It ought to have been an ordinary postwar measure; the world over, when wars are concluded, armies downsize. But every soldier lost was a lessening of the Stadtholder's power, and Willem reacted as if stung. He sent out orders of his own to the army officers, instructing them to maintain their troops. The officers obeyed the prince. The joyous atmosphere of The Hague instantly clouded. The States General hastily arranged to talk things over with the prince. He agreed to a reduction in troop totals, but only if those let go were Dutch. This sent a chill through the nation's chattering cla.s.ses; all knew that a sizable portion of the army consisted of mercenaries, and that, in the event of a schism between the prince and the States General, these would be more inclined to stay at his side, less likely to succ.u.mb to patriotism. It was suddenly clear that Willem, feeling his power threatened, was actively considering a military move against his own newly independent nation. In fact, Willem was even more intent than his father had been to exchange the t.i.tle of Stadtholder for a crown. In secret meetings with the French amba.s.sador, he had already accepted French offers to help him achieve what the amba.s.sador referred to in a report as "a grandeur far beyond that of his predecessors."

With the government in a state of crisis, business on all lesser matters came to a halt. Van der Donck refused to sit still, however, and used the time to strike out in another direction. The colony wasn't merely a political cause; it also needed settlers, traders, s.h.i.+ppers. Maybe most of all, it needed publicity. So he switched from politician to public relations agent, and went off in search of a printer who would publish his "Remonstrance." It wouldn't be easy; the doc.u.ment was a sustained attack on one of the most powerful companies in the country. It would have to be a publisher unafraid of controversy.

He found his man. Michiel Stael was a twenty-four-year-old baker's son who, in the wake of the peace treaty, had left his hometown of Delft to come to the capital and set up as a printer of books and pamphlets. The time was right for it: Europe was churning with activity in the aftermath of Westphalia, and the Dutch Republic was the publis.h.i.+ng capital of the Continent. Where at the turn of the century there had been four publishers in The Hague, there were now thirty-nine. Stael was eager to make a name for himself. At the time Van der Donck found him, he had just begun, publis.h.i.+ng a few pamphlets for the French market. The work he was soon to do reveals a sharp taste for controversy. Nearly all his output for the years 1649 and 1650 would be political, and the t.i.tles suggest both the international nature of his business and the hot-off-the-press currency of their contents: "Two Letters of General Cromwell, Telling the Particulars of the Battle Between the English and Scottish Armies at Dunbar," "Propositions of the Amba.s.sador of Spain to the Lords States General," "Letter of a Private Individual to the Parliament of Paris on the Detention of Princes Conde, de Conty and Longueville." He had a penchant for radical politics; the following year he would get in trouble with the law for producing publications critical of some of the leading men in Holland-proving that even in the most liberal of publis.h.i.+ng climates there were limits. At one point he would be put in the stocks. His career would climax with him being chased by law officers through the streets of The Hague and into an inn (the Bend of Guinea), where he would escape through a window. He would turn up in Rotterdam a few years later and continue publis.h.i.+ng.

Van der Donck found Stael in the cramped apartment he shared with his wife, their child, and his business partner. The print shop was also on the premises, and, appropriate for a man drawn to danger, the place looked out across the outer court of The Hague onto the Gevangenpoort, a squat brick building with an arched gateway that gave entrance into the government complex and also served as the town prison.*24 With his penchant for sticking it to men in power, Stael must have been delighted by Van der Donck's doc.u.ment and its radical proposal to divest the West India Company of one of its own provinces. As a businessman, he must also have sensed a market for the work-the West India Company was widely seen as a failure now, its share price, once as high as 206 guilders, having fallen to 14-and a ripe target for ridicule. He agreed to publish the "Remonstrance." With his penchant for sticking it to men in power, Stael must have been delighted by Van der Donck's doc.u.ment and its radical proposal to divest the West India Company of one of its own provinces. As a businessman, he must also have sensed a market for the work-the West India Company was widely seen as a failure now, its share price, once as high as 206 guilders, having fallen to 14-and a ripe target for ridicule. He agreed to publish the "Remonstrance."

Stael apparently introduced Van der Donck to an engraver named Hendrik Hondius, who lived a few doors away on the Buitenhof. Van der Donck wanted his map of New Netherland to be published alongside the "Remonstrance," and it seems that Hondius put him in touch with his brother-in-law in Amsterdam, Johannes Jansson, to engrave it. If Van der Donck had done nothing else, publis.h.i.+ng this map would have merited a place in history. The so-called Jansson-Visscher map (Claes Visscher produced a corrected edition) would be reprinted thirty-one times between 1650 and the mid-1700s, would become the definitive map not only for the Dutch but for the English as well, and is still reproduced today as the most accurate rendering of northeastern North America in the colonial period and one of the most beautiful examples of early mapmaking. It would show up in drawing rooms, s.h.i.+pping offices, and libraries across Europe, and thus help permanently afix Dutch names-from Cape May to Lange Eylandt to Roode Eylandt (Rhode Island)-to much of northeastern America. It also represents a fine example of the little-studied genre of cartographic propaganda: the conscious use of maps, especially by the Dutch and English, to imprint their mastery of the globe onto European minds. The Jansson-Visscher map purports to show northeastern North America dispa.s.sionately, but in fact the Dutch colony is given central position, and, more to the point, the map a.s.sociates the name of New Netherland with a distinct portion of the globe, an arc of the continent from Cape Cod to Delaware. This followed Van der Donck's dogged insistence on adhering to the broad boundaries originally established by Henry Hudson and the explorer who followed him, Adriaen Block.

There was one other item of propaganda embedded in the map. The little pen-and-ink view of New Amsterdam, which Van der Donck had apparently brought with him to ill.u.s.trate the mournful countenance of the colony to the States General, was to serve a second function. Just as he would use the "Remonstrance" twice-once to impress the rulers with the woeful condition of the colony, and again as a public relations tool to entice settlers-Van der Donck seems to have taken the piece of art to the engraver Johannes Blaeu and asked him to create something from it suitable for publication. The finished colored engraving, labeled "NIEUW AMSTERDAM op 't Eylant Manhattans," would appear in stand-alone editions as well as an inset view on later editions of the map; it follows the pen-and-ink ill.u.s.tration in every detail, except that where the original artwork shows a tumbledown village devoid of humans, the Manhattan town in Blaeu's engraved view is pert and orderly-chimneyed, gabled, weather-vaned, and bristling with life. Van der Donck's personality-unflagging boosterism for his New World colony and a willingness to flex the truth to suit his audience-is stamped on these items, which are now housed in museums and libraries around the world.

About this time, with the States General preoccupied and Stael getting the "Remonstrance" ready for publication, Van der Donck journeyed south to his native city of Breda to visit his family. Of his two sisters, three brothers, and their spouses and children, most seemed to have been living in Breda at this time. His sister Agatha had gone off to Amboyna with her husband, an official in the East India Company, but had returned after he died there; his sister Johanna was soon to marry a local merchant. So we can imagine a boisterous homecoming, there in the (comparatively) sunny southern city, with its buildings cl.u.s.tered in medieval fas.h.i.+on around the Gothic church. A year before, however, Van der Donck's parents had done something unusual for the times, even in what was the most progressive society in Europe: obtained a legal separation. Even more remarkable, it was Van der Donck's mother, Agatha van Bergen, who agreed to pay alimony to her husband. Little is known about Van der Donck's father, Cornelis; clearly, what money and prestige the family had came from the Van Bergen side. It was Adriaen van Bergen, namesake and grandfather of Adriaen van der Donck, who had become legendary for his role in the liberation of Breda from the Spanish, and the fact that Agatha van Bergen was willing and able to pay her husband one hundred guilders per year suggests that the money was hers by inheritance.*25 The family greeted the long-gone son. It was a different human being who had returned to them; the bookish boy had become a man, with a wider gait and firmer grip. He had tramped over purple mountains, slept on forest floors, shared meals in native longhouses. For nine years he had breathed a different air. It was in his eyes and voice: Van der Donck arrived in Breda irradiated with enthusiasm-whatever feelings he had over his parents' separation were not enough to quel it. To all his relations, he talked up the American colony that was his home and his cause as a land of opportunity. The only thing that was missing from this potential paradise he himself was in the process of arranging: good government. His pa.s.sion, coupled with the admiration they must have felt for him-he who had gone into the wilderness and returned a leader of men, a statesman, presenting his case before the national government-swept his family members off their feet. Over the next two years, both of his parents-separately-would liquidate their holdings, pack up everything, and board s.h.i.+ps for Manhattan. So, too, would go one of his brothers, his wife, their son, and several servants. His zeal seems to have engulfed everyone in its path.

In The Hague, meanwhile, the colony's pet.i.tion had been put back on the government calendar. Cornelis van Tienhoven-who had been working behind the scenes to undercut the Manhattan delegation-appeared several times and regaled the high and mighty leaders with information intended to show that the colony was not so bad off. Taxes levied at Manhattan, he argued, were favorable compared with what New Englanders paid. There was good farmland available to settlers. And in what is perhaps the earliest record of Manhattan's high cost of living, he produced a comparison chart of the going rates for farm animals in New Netherland and New England: a farmer on Manhattan could sell a year-old sow for twenty guilders, where in Boston it would only fetch twelve.

There is an irony in the contrasting views of the colony presented by the bitter rivals Van der Donck and Van Tienhoven. Van der Donck, in his effort to win support for an overseas province that he believed could in time out-earn the entire home country, stressed the bleak state of affairs there, at every turn skewing things toward the desperate, in many cases depicting as current the situation that had existed a few years earlier, in the aftermath of the Indian war. Van Tienhoven's more vibrant depiction may have more accurately reflected the current state of affairs. The irony is that Van der Donck's more forceful and elegant presentation, which after all was intended ultimately to bolster the colony, has over the long term swayed historians and contributed to the image of the Dutch-led settlement as congenitally defective.

Despite Van Tienhoven's presentation before the committee, as Van der Donck returned to The Hague the real excitement was taking place outside the government chamber. Michiel Stael's pamphlet version of the "Remonstrance"-dramatically ret.i.tled Remonstrance of New Netherland, Concerning Its Location, Fruitfulness, and Sorry Condition- Remonstrance of New Netherland, Concerning Its Location, Fruitfulness, and Sorry Condition-had hit the streets, and it was making a stir not only in The Hague but in Amsterdam, Haarlem, and elsewhere. The Remonstrance Remonstrance gave a grim picture of recent events and the colonists' struggle, but Van der Donck's descriptions of a vast, fertile land, "capable of being entirely cultivated by an abundance of people . . . many very fine flats and maize lands" and "very good meadows" that "could with little labor be converted into good tillage land," of rich soil that bears crops "with less labor and tilling than in the Netherlands," made an impression. His trademark tangents of poetic cataloguing (the trees of the colony: "post-oak . . . b.u.t.ter oak . . . oil nut . . . hickory . . . water-beech . . . hedge beech, axhandle wood, two sorts of canoe wood, ash, birch, pine, lathwood, Imberen or wild cedar, linden, alder, willow, thorn, elder") added to the allure, inflaming the imaginations of people who had lived all their lives on forestless plains and polders. gave a grim picture of recent events and the colonists' struggle, but Van der Donck's descriptions of a vast, fertile land, "capable of being entirely cultivated by an abundance of people . . . many very fine flats and maize lands" and "very good meadows" that "could with little labor be converted into good tillage land," of rich soil that bears crops "with less labor and tilling than in the Netherlands," made an impression. His trademark tangents of poetic cataloguing (the trees of the colony: "post-oak . . . b.u.t.ter oak . . . oil nut . . . hickory . . . water-beech . . . hedge beech, axhandle wood, two sorts of canoe wood, ash, birch, pine, lathwood, Imberen or wild cedar, linden, alder, willow, thorn, elder") added to the allure, inflaming the imaginations of people who had lived all their lives on forestless plains and polders.

The response to the publication-and to the accompanying map and ill.u.s.tration of New Amsterdam-was immediate. Perhaps through Stael-whose address was given on the t.i.tle page-people contacted the delegates and p.r.o.nounced themselves ready to go, to pull up stakes and seek their fortunes on Manhattan. The directors of the West India Company were flabbergasted. "Formerly New Netherland was never spoken of," they wrote to Stuyvesant, "and now heaven and earth seem to be stirred up by it and every one tries to be the first in selecting the best pieces [of land] there." Van der Donck and his colleagues acted quickly. They found a s.h.i.+p's captain in Amsterdam willing to convey settlers to Manhattan. People streamed to the harbor; in a short time, one hundred and forty settlers, all paying their own way, had been accepted, and the skipper, Willem Thoma.s.sen, p.r.o.nounced the s.h.i.+p full to capacity. He turned away hundreds more.

Van der Donck then moved to capitalize on this outpouring of interest in the colony. He composed a breathless pet.i.tion to the committee of the States General-addressing in particular its chairman, Alexander van der Cappellen, whom Van der Donck knew to be an enemy of the West India Company-in which he described the turn of events: the s.h.i.+p now lay ready to sail, and its skipper and owners attested that had they six more such s.h.i.+ps they would be able to fill them. "[I]n the hope of better government," Van der Donck wanted the States General to see, "more pa.s.sengers begin to set their faces toward New Netherland, according as the pa.s.sage and opportunity offer." With his customary attention to details, he then got the s.h.i.+p's captain to attest as much before a notary.

It seems to have been a cla.s.sic case of popular will exerting sudden pressure on politicans. The same day that Van der Donck presented the evidence of popular interest in the colony, the States General fired off a series of letters to the various chambers of the West India Company, asking them to send representatives to The Hague to appear two weeks hence in a joint meeting with the delegates from Manhattan, to confer "on the whole subject of New Netherland," and concluding: "Wherein fail not." A week later, Van der Donck got the Amsterdam chamber of the company to sign a contract with him and the other delegates to charter a s.h.i.+p capable of conveying an additional two hundred settlers to Manhattan. The company would front the costs, and the delegates would arrange the details. The s.h.i.+p would set sail before the first of June.

He was the consummate promoter now, working on all fronts, and getting results. By now he had a close working relations.h.i.+p with the members of the committee of the States General that had been a.s.signed to deal with the colony, and they were showing distinct signs of favoring the cause, each of which elicited a protest from Van Tienhoven. On the committee's recommendation, the States General decided to send a notary from The Hague to the colony; the reason for Van Tienhoven's anger was that in doing so the leaders were taking certain political powers away from Stuyvesant and his council-away from the West India Company-and investing them in an official of the government. From Van der Donck's perspective, it was a step in the right direction.

Then, in April of 1650, came the decisive ruling. With nearly all the princ.i.p.als gathered in the chamber-Van der Donck and his colleagues as well as representatives from most of the regional chambers of the West India Company-the committee issued a "Provisional Order respecting the Government, Preservation and Peopling of New Netherland." No doubt all leaned forward in their chairs as a member of the committee labored through swaths of boilerplate before declaring that the committee, "having inquired into the system of government hitherto maintained in New Netherland," had concluded that the members of the States General "cannot, and ought not any longer approve of the perverse administration of the privileges and benefits granted by charter to the stockholders of the West India Company [while] neglecting or opposing the good plans and offers submitted for the security of the boundaries and the increase of the population of that country." There it was-the clear signal of the committee's verdict.

Then came specific orders to be put into effect. First and most importantly, "within the city of New Amsterdam a munic.i.p.al government . . ." Until such a government came into being, the Board of Nine would continue, "and have jurisdiction over small cases arising between Man and Man . . ." The committee also referenced the sudden popular interest in emigrating to the colony: "Private vessels proceeding to the north parts of America and the islands thereabouts, shall be obliged to convey over all pa.s.sengers who will present themselves to be taken to New Netherland . . ." And there was a recommendation that a sum of fifteen thousand guilders be put into an account for the benefit of would-be settlers who could not afford the pa.s.sage.

Off on its own, unadorned by editorializing commentary, was a separate order: "Petrus Stuyvesant, the present Director, shall be instructed to return home and report."

That was it. The meeting was over-the government had given its unequivocal support to the cause of the delegates. The company representatives were outraged; the Amsterdam chamber quickly prepared a reb.u.t.tal. Van der Donck, meanwhile, moved in for the kill. Not content even with this ringing endors.e.m.e.nt of his presentation-for the orders still left the West India Company in charge of the colony-he addressed the committee. He was no longer a tentative outlander; six months of appearing at The Hague had given him confidence.

"n.o.ble, Mighty Lords," he began, flourishes of exultation empurpling his prose. "The very laudable zeal which their High Mightinesses and you, n.o.ble Mighty, have been pleased to evince as well for the preservation of whatever yet remains by G.o.d's especial blessing in ruined New Netherland as for the restoration of the sad and prostrate affairs there, supplies me with confidence and courage to lay before you, n.o.ble Mighty, some means which will be highly necessary, and, according to all human calculation, advantageous and profitable to their High Mightinesses' design herein . . ."

He didn't want the States General to forget that the suffering of the settlers of the Manhattan-based colony was due to the disastrous actions of certain West India Company officials-"how much innocent blood, as well of heathens as of Christians and even of sucklings, hath been unnecessarily and barbarously shed." He asked the committee to accept into the record the list of interrogatories to be put to Van Tienhoven that he had drawn up on Manhattan. Van Tienhoven and others responsible for the Indian war should be prosecuted, he declared.

Van der Donck had determined that Van Tienhoven was disliked in The Hague, and hoped to build on that antipathy to broaden the provisional orders into an outright removal of the West India Company from the colony. But the committee took no action on that front. It did, however, approve of a plan to send two of the delegates-Bout and Van Couwenhoven-back to Manhattan, at the head of a party of settlers, both to convey to Stuyvesant the rulings and to bring a s.h.i.+pment of guns for the defense of the colony. They headed off at once, exchanging exultant farewells with Van der Donck, who would stay to see that the committee's order was adopted by the States General.

Before they left, Van der Donck penned a secret letter they were to deliver. It was addressed to Dr. La Montagne, who had served under both Kieft and Stuyvesant and whom Van der Donck now pinpointed as vital to the power politics being played. This letter was only discovered in 1997-by Dr. Jaap Jacobs, one of the preeminent Dutch historians working on the New Netherland colony-in the Amsterdam Munic.i.p.al Archives; like a flashlight piercing a centuries-darkened room, it shows Adriaen van der Donck, at this most critical moment of his emba.s.sy to The Hague, alive to the wider currents of the era, playing the game of politics with zest and cunning. It also shows that he considered himself leader of the activists' cause. "The old friends.h.i.+p and familiarity bids me to write you these few lines in haste, in order that you may remain a.s.sured of our good will towards you," Van der Donck begins, addressing the man who had sat in judgment on him when Stuyvesant had imprisoned him, but who seems to have taken pains to remain neutral in that and other debates. "I have verbally charged and pressed upon Jacob van Couwenhoven many things to tell you from me, to which I refer." Then Van der Donck begins ma.s.saging in the cla.s.sic manner of politicians of every era. Certain of triumph, he a.s.sures La Montagne that "you will be included in a good position" in "the next government, which we expect shortly." Then he comes to the point: "It will be very good if you join ranks with the complainants. And it is my request that you will a.s.sist the Nine men as much as possible with advice and action . . ." Then he switches tacks to let La Montagne know that the winds of favor have changed direction, and that it wouldn't be wise to remain with the West India Company representatives: "It is well known here that the authors of the war are not punished as they should have been . . . Tienhoven is not in much esteem here and . . . his actions and those of director Kieft regarding the war are d.a.m.ned here by the whole world. The directors try to do their best to defend Stuyvesant, his secretary and their supporters, but they themselves, except for a few, are not in much esteem but are regarded with suspicion . . ."

Clearly, Van der Donck foresaw a time in the very near future when New Amsterdam, and the entire Dutch colony, would be taken over by the government, given normal political status, and made an integral part of the republic. In one of his pet.i.tions to the States General, he stresses the vital role he sees the colony playing in the future of the newly independent nation: "this State . . . alone is of greater extent than the Seventeen Dutch Provinces,*26 and . . . in the hour of need, will be found a strong arm, by the a.s.sistance it will render in people and provisions; for after the population shall have increased, your High Mightinesses will carry on a very large trade from the one to the other of your own countries-hinc inde et inde hinc-without any save your High Mightinesses' having control or authority over it." Such an arrangement would have been unprecedented-almost as if New Netherland were an eighth province in the Dutch republic, a noncontiguous state along the lines of an Alaska or Hawaii. Had it happened, of course, history-American, English, and Dutch-would have turned out much differently. In the spring of 1650, at least in Van der Donck's mind, it was a real possibility. The government was on the side of the colonists, Stuyvesant had been recalled, and Van der Donck, an ocean away from Manhattan, was laying out a new administration. and . . . in the hour of need, will be found a strong arm, by the a.s.sistance it will render in people and provisions; for after the population shall have increased, your High Mightinesses will carry on a very large trade from the one to the other of your own countries-hinc inde et inde hinc-without any save your High Mightinesses' having control or authority over it." Such an arrangement would have been unprecedented-almost as if New Netherland were an eighth province in the Dutch republic, a noncontiguous state along the lines of an Alaska or Hawaii. Had it happened, of course, history-American, English, and Dutch-would have turned out much differently. In the spring of 1650, at least in Van der Donck's mind, it was a real possibility. The government was on the side of the colonists, Stuyvesant had been recalled, and Van der Donck, an ocean away from Manhattan, was laying out a new administration.

Chapter 12.

A DANGEROUS MAN.

After all, Peter Stuyvesant was a country boy. Besides, a military compound was no place for toddlers to toddle, no place for a woman. So, sometime around 1650, he must have loaded his wife and their two young sons into a wagon and headed north up the Highway. Within five minutes they were in open country, meadows and pastureland punctuated by stands of forest. The road turned sharply to the right to skirt the bouwerie of his secretary, Van Tienhoven, then cut northward, elbowing through wilderness, before opening, on the left, onto an expanse of lots that were being farmed by freed slaves. Soon this area would form a village in its own right, which for a time would be called Noortwyck, or North District, before a settler from the Long Island village of Greenwyck (Pine District) would relocate here and give his property that name. (It would seem to be from this, not from English sources, that Greenwich Village would receive its name.) Turning right off the Bouwerie Road, as this stretch of the trail was known, Stuyvesant brought his family down a lane and into the patch of the island he was in the process of taming as his own. In its marshy serenity-snipes and widgeons alighting on swampy ponds, stiff winds coming off the river bending the gra.s.ses, cows hunkering under bruised skies-it may have reminded him of home. It was two miles from the pit of troubles that was the capital city of his domain, and it must have seemed an ocean away. From the beginning, the West India Company had set aside this stretch of acreage for the use of the director of the colony, to be farmed by his workers, and so Kieft and his predecessors had used it. Stuyvesant had other ideas. He was a family man now, and he wanted to put down his roots. Within the year he would arrange to buy the farm, called Bouwerie Number One, outright from the company, and then purchase acreage on both sides of it, giving him a plantation stretching from the East River west to the center of the island and covering approximately three hundred acres. Here he built a manor and a chapel. Here he would live out his life and be buried, and here, over the parade of centuries, flappers, shtetl refugees, hippies, and punks-an aggregate of local residents running from Trotsky to Auden to Charlie Parker to Joey Ramone-would shuffle past his tomb.*27 Leaving Judith with the young armfuls of Balthasar and Nicholas, he rode daily from this retreat into the maelstrom, greeting, as he pa.s.sed the company orchard and cemetery and approached the cl.u.s.ter of streets of the town, the matrons, Indians, tapsters, smugglers, sailors, Africans, toughs and urchins, the refugees and erect citizens and slope-shouldered, eye-patched miscreants that formed his populace. And they in turn, at the unmistakable sight of him, with his cuira.s.s and sword, a military princeling on his steed, offered l.u.s.ty h.e.l.los or muttered curses depending on their political views. And then he disappeared into the fort, stiff as oak and ready to work. He was forty years old, beset by troubles on all sides, but possessed of a personality that fed on adversity.

The wounds kept coming, and many were still being inflicted by Van der Donck, even from an ocean away. Every time the Dutch flag appeared in the harbor these days, the sheaf of news that came with it was stippled with his doings. These "seditious persons, like Cornelis Melyn, Adrian van der Donck and some others . . . seem to leave nothing untried, to upset every kind of government," the company directors wrote him in February 1650. By April they had apparently learned of Stuyvesant's onetime chumminess with Van der Donck and were exasperated that he had given the man an intimacy that he had then exploited for political purposes. "We suppose that you have trusted too much in some of these ringleaders or become too familiar with them," they wrote, "now that their ingrat.i.tude and treachery have come to light, you must still act with the cunning of a fox . . ."

It was annoying to be scolded in this way and infuriating that Van der Donck seemed to have charmed the States General into siding with him and his cronies. Stuyvesant had by now heard of the provisional orders for the reorganization of the colony, but no one had yet sent him a command to enforce them. Far from doing so, he reacted to the threat of Van der Donck's mission by becoming not more conciliatory but more summary. He had finally had enough insubordination from his vice director, Van d.i.n.klagen, and had the man thrown in prison. He placed spies among the Board of Nine and their a.s.sociates. He virtually gave up on the quaint idea of allowing the people a voice in their government, and more and more took to deciding matters on his own. Augustin Herman and the other leaders of the opposition sent Van der Donck a stream of correspondence, keeping him updated on these turns of events. "We live like sheep among wolves, one friend not being able to speak to another without suspicion," one dispatch read. "He proceeds no longer by words or writings," went another, "but by arrests and stripes." Reading the pages of complaints against Stuyvesant, you feel in his harshness the uncorking of a long-bottled fury the sources of which are at least guessable. There was the dutiful son of a minister who had watched his G.o.dly and upright father remarry and l.u.s.tily devote himself to his new young bride. There was the would-be wooer so embarra.s.singly pent up that the brother of the woman he wished to marry bet that he would be unable to ask for her hand. Finally, there was the administrator who put his trust in a young protege only to see him turn on him and upend heaven and h.e.l.l to have him ousted.

Meanwhile, he had to deal with matters on other fronts, because the incoming s.h.i.+ps were packed with new arrivals, seasickened and unwashed but ready to stake a claim, and this also was a result of the delegation: "Many free people are coming over in this s.h.i.+p. . . . Many free people have taken pa.s.sage on these two s.h.i.+ps. . . . It looks as if many people will come over by every s.h.i.+p . . ." There was a hint of annoyance in the directors' letters-"people here encourage each other with the prospect of becoming mighty lords there, if inclined to work"-but they had to admit that "it may have a good result."

The irony was that while Van der Donck was pus.h.i.+ng with zeal to oust Peter Stuyvesant from his post as director of the colony, Stuyvesant himself was executing some brilliant diplomacy, working hard to ensure the stability of the colony in the face of its steadily encroaching neighbors to the north. Indeed, it is due to the successes of both of these bitter rivals that New York City would develop as it did. Had either failed, the English would probably have swept in before Dutch inst.i.tutions were established, New York would have become another English New World port town like Boston, and American culture would never have developed as it did.

In his three years on Manhattan, Stuyvesant had nudged and tweaked the New England governors to get them to settle boundaries. They had declared their desire to meet, but had nattered and stalled. And when the aged John Winthrop, on whom Stuyvesant had depended as his best advocate among the Puritan crowd, died in 1649, that upset things further. But brazenness was part of Stuyvesant's a.r.s.enal. He recognized the maxim that force can help bring the other side to negotiate, and he put it to work. It happened that a Dutch trading vessel owned by an Italian businessman based in Amsterdam had put into harbor at New Haven. Stuyvesant had determined that the vessel-the St. Beninio- St. Beninio-was engaged in smuggling. According to Dutch claims, the entire New Haven colony lay in Dutch territory. By now there were so many English settlers there that the point was academic, but Stuyvesant saw the s.h.i.+p's presence as the pretext for an attention-grabbing act. He had previously sold one of the West India Company's s.h.i.+ps to the deputy governor of New Haven, with a promise to deliver it. Now-with utter audacity considering that he was at the same time sending polite diplomatic letters to the governor-he undertook a bit of derring-do generally reserved for wartime, known as cutting a s.h.i.+p out of harbor. He had the vessel to be delivered to New Haven stuffed, Trojan horselike, with soldiers. As her skipper brought her into the harbor at New Haven, he came in alongside the St. Beninio, St. Beninio, his soldiers leaped aboard, cut the s.h.i.+p's lines, took command, and piloted her out to sea and back to New Amsterdam. his soldiers leaped aboard, cut the s.h.i.+p's lines, took command, and piloted her out to sea and back to New Amsterdam.

As expected, Theophilus Eaton, the rigid Puritan governor of New Haven, fired off a letter, practically tripping over his clauses in his outrage,*28 declaring that Stuyvesant h