The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  John Canne: Roger Hayden, “Canne, John (d. 1667?)” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4552.

  “is not to be found”: Quoted in Sprunger, Dutch Puritans, 76; Trumpets, 124.

  “for conscience’ sake”: Quakers would not take oaths in God’s name, using the phrase “for conscience’ sake” instead.

  reading as a birthright: Nathaniel’s enterprising maternal aunt, Mercy Arnold Pelham Bruyning (Browning), inherited her husband Browning’s printing business and bookshop; her printed catalogue is titled A Catalogue of Theological, Historical and Physical [Medical] Books with Other Miscellanies Being a Part of the Books of Mercy Browning, Joseph Browning’s Widow, at Her Shop at the Corner of the Exchange, in Amsterdam; with her brother, Elias Arnold, she purchased and profitably sold an edition of the Bible called the “6,000-error Bible.” NAA 795/36; Sprunger, Trumpets, 88, 98–102, 211–12.

  probate inventory: GSDD 1:1.

  Francis Brinley: “Gentleman’s Library of 1713,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register (NEHGR) 12 (January 1858): 75–78.

  a great variety of ideas: David Harris Sacks, “Francis Brinley and His Books, 1650–1719,” presented at “American Origins: The Seventeenth Century,” a workshop of the WMQ and the Early Modern Studies Institute, Huntington Library and University of Southern California, May 2006, 19–20.

  Münster Rebellion: Hermann von Kerrsenbrock, Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness: The Overthrow of Munster, the Famous Metropolis of Westphalia (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007). For the Amsterdam Anabaptist incident, see the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, http://www.gameo.org/encyclopedia/contents/A4755.html.

  baptismal entries: Minister John Paget described the sect in 1635 as “without Sacraments, and had neither Lords Supper nor Baptism administred in their Church, their children for many yeares, remayning unbaptized, and sundry dying unbaptized,” quoted in Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, 70.

  birth order: Henry Hoff gives a conjectural birth order based on other surviving records for the children of Giles and Mary (Arnold) Sylvester as follows: Constant; Grace (Kett) b. 1618; Nathaniel b. c.1620; Mary (also Mercie, Cartwright); Joshua b. c.1626, Peter, b. c.1631; Giles, b. c.1632, Hoff, “Sylvester Family,” 15–16.

  “infinite number”: Brereton, Travels in Holland, 65, quoted in Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, 43.

  the fluyt: Richter Roegholt, A Short History of Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Bekking & Blitz Uitgevers b.v., 2004), 37.

  “ships’ camels”: Janse, Building Amsterdam, 30.

  Dutch environment: Schama, Embarrassment, 10; also see Donna Merwick, “The Shame and the Sorrow: Interpreting Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland,” presentation at the Atlantic History Workshop, NYU, May 2004.

  11.5 million guilders: Wim Klooster, The Dutch in the Americas 1600–1800: A Narrative History with the Catalogue of an Exhibition of Rare Prints, Maps, and Illustrated Books from the John Carter Brown Library (Providence, RI: John Carter Brown Library, 1997), 17–25;

  the WIC: See Henk den Heijer, “The Dutch West India Company, 1621–1791,” in Postma and Enthoven, Riches from Atlantic Commerce, 77–112.

  pinks: “Pink” in Dutch means “little finger,” or “pinkie,” as in English slang. A pink’s narrow stern and high bulwarks protected sheltered deck space, while bulging sides meant attackers found them hard to board; later pinks were built up to 400 tons, but early to the consistent design they were still called “pinks.” The Museum of America and the Sea, Mystic, CT; OED.

  three-ton craft: NS to JWJr, August 8, 1653, MHS Proc., ser. 2, 4: 270; “ye Bay” could be either Boston or Narragansett Bay.

  buying tobacco: NS had loaded tobacco aboard the Seerobbe, and had then gone ashore in April 1644. NAA 1289, fo. 101v–2v.

  Dutch traders: During the English Civil War (1642–49), English colonists depended on Dutch suppliers. As part of the new British mercantilist policy to direct trade, the British Navigation Acts of Trade (1651, 1660, 1663, 1673, 1696) restricted shipping to English colonies only in English vessels manned by Englishmen. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 35–50; Thomas C. Barrow, Trade and Empire: The British Customs Service in Colonial America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 4–35.

  Oranjeboom: For the Dutch in Tidewater Virginia in the 1650s, see “The Calendar to Amsterdam and Rotterdam Notarial Acts Relating to the Virginia Tobacco Trade,” comp. Dr. Jan Kupp, Special Collection, Library of the University of Victoria, B.C., Canada, http://library.uvic.ca/spcoll/book/Kupp_calendar.pdf.

  “glass of sack”: David Pietersz. de Vries: Voyages from Holland to America A.D. 1632 to 1644 (Alckmeer, The Netherlands, 1655), trans. Henry C. Murphy (New York: Billin & Bros., Printers, 1853), 50, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=2MJPAAAAcAAJ.

  February 1644: NAA 1289, fo. 101v–2v.

  plantation wharves: NS purchased 16,000 pounds of tobacco from William Edwards. Surry County, Virginia, Court Records 1652–63, 1:[125]–27.

  black faces: For an estimate of three to five hundred enslaved blacks in Virginia in 1649, see John C. Coombs, “The Phases of Conversion: A New Chronology for the Rise of Slavery in Early Virginia,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 68, no. 3 (July 2011): 332–60, 353.

  “sweet-scented tobacco”: John Rolfe is credited with bringing seeds of a milder Caribbean variety to Jamestown in 1613.

  the tobacco market: Russell R. Menard, “A Note on Chesapeake Tobacco Prices, 1618–1660,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 84 (1976): 402–408; Menard, “The Tobacco Industry in the Chesapeake Colonies, 1617–1730: An Interpretation,” Research in Economic History 5 (1980), 109–77.

  “He who wishes to trade here”: David Pietersz de Vries: Narratives of New Netherland 1609–1664 (Alckmeer, Netherlands, 1655), trans. Henry C. Murphy, ed. J. Franklin Jameson, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 196.

  forty-three: the ownership of the tobacco and the freight costs were disputed on arrival in Amsterdam, see NAA 1678/2051 and NAA 848/903.

  the colony’s capital, “Jemston”: See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), and Martha McCartney, Documentary History of Jamestown Island, vol. 1, Narrative History (Williamsburg: National Park Service, 2000), http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/jame/documentary_history.pdf; Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers, 1607–35 (Baltimore: Genealogical, 2007); “An Early Virginia Census Reprised,” Quarterly Bulletin of the Archeological Society of Virginia 54, no. 4 (December 1999): 178–96; and Jamestown People to 1800: Landowners, Public Officials, Minorities, & Native Leaders (Baltimore: Genealogical, 2012).

  “Commodytyes”: This list of goods was typical of those shipped by Dutch merchants in the heyday of Atlantic trade. Internal evidence supports the writer’s identification as Giles Sylvester II. “A Letter from Barbados by ye Way of Holland Concerning ye Condiccion of Honest Men There, August 9, 1651,” Giles Sylvester, Barbados, to Giles Sylvester, Amsterdam, Tanner Mss. 54, ff.153–544, 44, in V. T. Harlow, ed., Colonizing Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623–67 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1924), 48–53.

  two London ships: de Vries, Voyages (1853 edition), 185–86.

  “all the people”: de Vries, Voyages, (1853 edition), 186.

  “is more Unhelthie”: NS to JWJr, April 7, 1655, MHS Proc., ser. 2, 4: 273–74; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-Colonial Experience,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 41, no. 2 (April 1984): 213–40. Identification of NS’s symptoms as malarial was made by Professor Harold Cook, Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London, 2003.

  noxious swamp vapors: The name “malaria” comes from the Italian mal aria, literally “bad air.” Malarial mosquitoes thrived in European marshes as well as the New World, so Nathaniel may have contracted the disease in the Netherlands
rather than in America. M. J. Dobson, “History of Malaria in England,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 82, Supplement No. 17 (1989): 3–7.

  “his Sicknesse”: NS to [JWJr?], after February 4, 1673, Winthrop Family Papers, MHS.

  Arent Gerritss: NAA 1293/30, March 22, 1646.

  Reijer Evertsen: NAA 1294/68, June 3, 1697.

  WIC duties: NAA 1293/30, March 22, 1646.

  a duplicate report: NAA 1923/30, March 22, 1646, has the marginal notation “June 4, 1649, duplicate to Mr. Bosschieter.” Burgomaster Claes Pieterss Bosschieter, a WIC director from the North Holland chamber, requested this evidence, but the complaint was filed in the WIC’s Amsterdam chamber.

  4. THE OTHER ISLAND: BARBADOS

  bale seal: “Sylvester Manor Artifact Descriptions,” Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research, University of Massachusetts Boston (AFMCAR), April 27, 2005, #22. Two bale seals with discernable marks were found, but no merchants with those seals were identified. Katherine Hayes, pers. comm., Apr. 12, 2012. See Diana DiPaolo Loren, Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment in Colonial America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 45–49.

  Sylvester insignia: Constant Sylvester, Barbados, to JWJr, Connecticut, April 6, 1659, MHS Proc., ser. 2, 4: 277.

  “Such Sugars”: The sugar was accompanied by some “palm oile … brought us hither from Ginny” (Gold Coast, West Africa) and “barbados tarr,” a thick bitumen from a Barbadian petroleum spring, prized for its medical properties and therefore an astutely chosen gift for JWJr, New England’s premier physician. Constant Sylvester, Barbados, to JWJr, Connecticut, April 6, 1659, MHS Proc., ser. 2, 4: 277; Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, etc. (London: 1657, 1673); ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011), 174.

  Sylvesters of Burford: Merchant marks of Edmund Sylvester (d. 1568), William (d. 1577), Thomas (d. 1586), and Thomas (d. 1650) resemble that of Constant Sylvester; Robert (d. 1601) and Thomas (d. 1624) used similar marks as coats of arms, illustrating their upward social mobility. Janet Kennish, “Burford Sylvesters Charts, One and Two,” Griswold Papers, Fales Library, NYU; Lilian Horsford, London, to Eben Norton Horsford, May 30, 1884, SMA, NYU IV/I/2/112/5; see also Charles Hoppin, “Sylvester,” n.p., n.d., who identifies the Sylvester insignia as similar to the “woolman’s mark,” indicating that the family belonged to a wool guild, Griswold Papers, Fales Library.

  Agnes Sylvester: The sister (d. 1576) of Edmund Sylvester (d. 1571), she married Edmund Harman ca. 1539/40; her granddaughter Agnes married an Edmund Bray; family ties persisted among the Sylvester/Harman descendants in St. Mary Aldermary Parish, London, into the 1630s. See Janet Kennish, Burford Sylvesters and associated research documents, Griswold Papers, Fales Library, NYU. Connections to the English poet and translator Joshuah Silvester (1563–1618) remain to be made with the Sylvesters of Amsterdam and England.

  family memorial: Harman (c.1509–1577), as royal barber to Henry VIII, was well placed to have heard of English ventures in South America; his monument, whose figures have been identified as Tupinambas from coastal Brazil, may celebrate a successful investment in a 1540s English trade or slaving venture in the 1540s. Michael Balfour, “Edmund Harman: Barber and Gentleman,” Tolsey Paper No. 6 (Burford, England: the Tolsey Museum, 1988); Stuart Piggott, “Brazilian Indians on an Elizabethan Monument,” in Ruins in a Landscape: Essays in Antiquarianism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1976), 25–32; David Beers Quinn, “Depictions of America,” in The Maps and Text of the Boke of Idrography Presented by Jean Rotz to Henry VIII, Now in the British Library, ed. Helen Wallis (Oxford: Roxburghe Club, 1981), 53–56; R. G. Marsden, “The Voyage of the ‘Barbara’ of London to Brazil in 1540,” English Historical Review 24 (1909), 96–100; James A. Williamson, Sir John Hawkins: The Time and the Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 7–19; James A. Williamson, Hawkins of Plymouth (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1969), 26–33.

  naked men and women: A plate by Flemish artist Cornelis Bos is the source of the monument’s motif. See Sune Schéle, Cornelis Bos: A Study of the Origins of the Netherland Grotesque (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1965), pl. 50, no. 184; Peter Sherlock, Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (Aldershot, England, and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2008), 197–202.

  “the Indies”: Refers to the European expectation that the Americas were either Asia (hence the “East Indies”) or would produce a western sea route there.

  plot for a warehouse: Barbados National Archive, Deeds, RB3/2, p. 68; Frederick H. Smith, “Disturbing the Peace in Barbados: Constant Silvester of Constant Plantation in the Seventeenth Century,” JBMHS 44 (1998): 38–54; NAA 1294/68.

  smoothly transitioning: Barbados Department of Archives documents indicate the percentage of sugar used in commercial transactions rose from 8 percent in 1644 to 100 percent in 1652, the years that Constant began to transform himself from commodities merchant to sugar planter. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, “The Sugar Industry in the Seventeenth Century: A New Perspective on the Barbadian ‘Sugar Revolution,’” in Schwartz, Tropical Babylons, 289–330, Table 9.1, 292.

  Constant Plantation: Constant and adjacent Carmichael plantations in St. George’s Valley; another in Christ Church Parish. Richard Ligon’s map of Barbados, first published in 1657, does not depict them because Ligon probably based his map on an earlier one of 1638, which does not include all the properties of those who arrived in the 1640s. The Richard Ford 1674 map depicts 844 plantations with the names of their owners and shows their various mills. Both the Ford map and that of Philip Lea (1685) show two windmills and a mansion on each estate. The Christ Church estate mentioned in the census of 1679 does not appear on the maps. Smith, “Disturbing the Peace,” 4; Peter F. Campbell, “Ligon’s Map,” JBMHS 34 (1973): 108–12; William Blaythwayt, comp., The Blaythwayt Atlas, John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, RI, ca. 1683; repr. The Blaythwayt Atlas, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, 1970.

  an eighteenth-century house: The third on the site, it replaces one built after a c.1647 cane fire, which in turn also burned “about the year 1770.” Nathaniel Lucas, “Lucas Manuscript in the Barbados Public Library,” JBMHS 25, no. 3 (May 1958): 149; Ligon, True and Exact History, 95.

  were exiled: Sylvester, A Letter from Barbados, 48–51; Smith, “Disturbing the Peace,” 5–7.

  bloodless siege: For an account of the events of 1650–52, see Carla Giardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–61 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 92–111.

  From the first: NS, “Last Will and Testament, March 19, 1680,” General Sylvester Dering Documents, 1:6. SIHS; New York County Wills, 2:191, 250.

  The concept of human chattel: Edgar McManus, Black Bondage in the North (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 57.

  Richard Ligon: Ligon knew all the Barbados-based players in the Shelter Island story: he mentions Thomas Middleton, Thomas Rous, James Drax, and Humphrey Walrond.

  “The nearer we came”: Ligon, True and Exact History, 20, 21.

  “humble Bee”: Ligon, True and Exact History, 61.

  Amerindian population: See Jerome S. Handler, “The Amerindian Slave Population of Barbados in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” Caribbean Studies 8, no. 4 (1969): 38–64.

  thirty-four Africans: David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change Since 1492 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 183.

  two hundred Africans: Father Antoine Biet, “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit to Barbados in 1654,” Jerome S. Handler, trans. and ed., JBMHS 32 (1967): 50–76, 69; http://jeromehandler.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Biet-67.pdf.

  models: Ligon refers to Sir James Drax and Col. Humphrey Walrond as the most successful planters on Barbados.

  innovative techniques: Ligon, True and Exact History, 69; Justin Roberts, “Working Between the Lines: Labor and Agriculture on Two Barbadian Sugar Pla
ntations, 1796–97,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 63, no. 3 (July 2006): 551–86.

  price of slaves: See Herbert S. Klein, “The Atlantic Slave Trade to 1650,” in Schwartz, Tropical Babylons, 201–36, 226; Larry Gragg, “‘To Procure Negroes’: The English Slave Trade to Barbados, 1627–60,” Slavery and Abolition 16 (1995): 1, 74.

  first Africans: Jerome S. Handler and Frederick W. Lange, Plantation Slavery in Barbados: An Archaeological and Historical Investigation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 15.

  A 1645 census: Watts, West Indies, 151.

  2,030 people: Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 55–56, Table 13, Fig. 2.

  tenfold: Watts, West Indies, 187. According to Ligon the increase in cost per acre between 1647 and 1650 for a plantation set up to make sugar rose from £1 4s to £28. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard have charted the increase and the average prices of Barbadian land in the formative years of sugar, 1638–50. Ligon, True and Exact History, 86; McCusker and Menard, “Sugar Industry,” Fig. 9.1, Table 9.5, 298, 299.

  67-acre Barbadian working plantation: John Pierson to Constant Sylvester, Barbados National Archive, Deeds RB3/2, 782–83; Smith, “Disturbing the Peace,” 4.

  quarter of a teaspoonful: The partners may have paid in actual Barbadian sugar, or as a bill of exchange, a promise to pay by a certain date. Like other staple crops, or like beaver or wampum, sugar became a form of “commodity money.” The price of sugar per hundredweight rose by a fifth of its value in just one year (1652–53), then fell by more than half by 1673, shortly after Constant’s death. Russell R. Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press), 2006, Table 15, 69.

  Dutch capital: Absent any commercial records, occasional references supply the only information. Giles (1584–1651/2) was a member of the Amsterdam Exchange by 1627; his brother-in-law had been a member since 1625: without an exchange account a career in international trade was impossible. Constant Sylvester and a Charles Jacobson solicited financial aid directly from the Dutch in Amsterdam and acted as factors for handling incoming cargoes of colonial produce. Dijkman, Giles Sylvester, 5, 6; Carl Bridenbaugh and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean 1624–90 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 83; and Watts, West Indies, 148–49.