And so it was. Kieft, fancying himself—De Vries later wrote—a warrior in the style of ancient heroes, deemed the campaign that he “with his co-murderers” launched “a Roman deed” and went about “committing of murders as if he were an actor in a Roman play.” The genocidal scenario that followed would be debated for years and investigated at length, its origins documented in detail. The West India Company would ultimately conclude that the entire venture had been “unnatural, barbarous, unnecessary, unjust, and disgraceful.”
As Kieft’s attacks proceeded, the whole settlement area around New Amsterdam—thirty miles to the east and twenty or more to the north and south—went up in flames. In one raid, at Pavonia, on the Jersey side of the Hudson, the Dutch soldiers massacred eighty Indians. The gruesome scene, perhaps exaggerated in the telling by Cornelis Melyn, Kieft’s worst enemy, whose account was copied by De Vries, played into the Dutch fascination with “atrocity narratives” made familiar in their long, bloody struggle with Spain:
Infants were torn from their mother’s breasts [Melyn wrote], and hacked to pieces in the presence of the parents, and pieces thrown into the fire and in the water, and other sucklings, being bound to small boards, were cut, stuck, and pierced, and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone. Some were thrown into the river, and when the fathers and mothers endeavored to save them, the soldiers would not let them come on land but made both parents and children drown.… Some came to our people in the country with their hands, some with their legs cut off, and some holding their entrails in their arms, and others had such horrible cuts and gashes that worse than they were could never happen.… Did the Duke of Alva in the Netherlands ever do anything more cruel?
Later, it was said, the mother-in-law of Kieft’s loyal secretary, the notorious Cornelis van Tienhoven, “amused herself in kicking about the heads of the dead men which had been brought in as bloody trophies of that midnight slaughter.” In return, the Indians killed or took captive every European they could lay hands on, burned their farms, slaughtered the cattle, and drove the horrified survivors in panic to such safety as New Amsterdam’s barricades (“rather a molehill,” some townsmen said, “than a fort against an enemy”) might provide.
One of the raids in the later Westchester County became legendary in its barbarism. There, veteran Dutch and English troops were led by Capt. John Underhill, an Anglo-Dutch military adventurer and erratic Puritan radical who had been banished from Massachusetts at least three times for serial adultery, riot, and heresy, and in 1637 had justified his reputation as a “condottiere without scruples” in the slaughter of the Pequots in New England. Now settled on Long Island and closely associated with the Dutch, he repeated his earlier military success at the village at Pound Ridge. He disposed his troops to surround the village of wigwams, killed 180 of its inhabitants as they attempted to escape, and burned the rest alive within their bark houses. Some said five hundred died in the flames, others seven hundred. “What was most wonderful,” a witness remarked admiringly, was that “among this vast collection of men, women and children not one was heard to cry or to scream.”
The farming settlements on Manhattan and in the surrounding areas were ruined. In letter after letter, desperate, fevered, passionate, New Netherland’s popular leaders—Kieft’s Council of Eight, led by Melyn—appealed for help to the West India Company and described the colonists’ devastated condition. The settlers, they wrote in November 1643, were
pursued by these wild heathens and barbarous savages with fire and sword; daily in our houses and fields have they cruelly murdered men and women; and with hatchets and tomahawks struck little children dead in their parents’ arms or before their doors; or carried them away into bondage. The houses and grain-barracks are burnt with the produce; cattle of all descriptions are slain and destroyed, and such as remain must perish this approaching winter for the want of fodder.
A year later, in October 1644, they described the results:
Our fields lie fallow and waste; our dwellings and other buildings are burnt … The crop … remains on the field, as well as the hay, standing and rotting … We … have no means to provide necessaries any longer for wives or children. We are seated here in the midst of thousands of Indians and barbarians, from whom is to be experienced neither peace nor pity.
But the barbarism flared on both sides. Dutch war veterans, fresh from Europe’s wartime carnage, indulged in savagery that beggared the most sadistic imagination. Of seven unengaged Indians captured on Long Island in 1644, Melyn reported, three were slaughtered on the spot. The other four were brought to Manhattan’s fort by boat, of whom two, towed behind by ropes around their necks, strangled and drowned. The third, after disputes among the impatient guards, was knifed to death. Then “the soldiers cut strips from the live body of the other, from the hams up the back and shoulders, and down to the knees.” His genitals were cut off and “stuck … into this mouth while he was still alive, and after that [they] placed him on a mill-stone and beat his head off.”33
Kieft’s extermination policy had badly misfired, and with the colony traumatized and himself the object of general condemnation, he sought to shift the blame. It was all the fault of the group that had sought his approval for attack, he declared, led by an insolent, fierce-tempered tobacco farmer turned “freebooter” named Maryn Andriaensen, who had clashed with Kieft on several occasions. Enraged by the accusation, Andriaensen, armed with a sword and a loaded and cocked pistol, stormed into the director’s house and demanded that Kieft admit that he had lied. Disarmed, he was led off under arrest and shipped home for trial, despite the plea of the Council of Eight that he simply be fined and banished briefly. But Andriaensen’s loyal servant, Jacob Slangh, did attempt to carry out the assassination that Andriaensen had threatened. He fired twice at the director but missed his target. He was killed by a sentry, and his head was cut off for display on Manhattan’s gibbet.34
True peace, a permanent peace of accommodation between the races, would never come to New Netherland, nor would there be an end to the mutual fears and animosities. But exhaustion and the need to provide basic sustenance required a truce. The natives withdrew, and gradually the settlers began to rebuild and further extend the range of the settlements.
6
As they did so the importance of the leadership of the “commonalty”—the town’s population at large—became increasingly clear. As New Amsterdam and the surrounding towns and farms began to take on some of the familiar forms of Dutch civil society, governance by an erratic, autocratic agent of a profiteering commercial organization seemed more and more anomalous and arbitrary. By the time Kieft left on his fatal return (1647), the opposition was fully formed, led by sharp-eyed young men whose ambitions were matched by their capacity to survive and flourish in a shifting, complex situation. Some were well connected at home, some were not; some were well educated and well financed, some were not. Like the emerging groups of local leaders in Virginia and Maryland, what they had in common was the ability to seize on the immediate opportunities, exploit them and defend them, and parlay fleeting profits into sustainable advantages.
Govert Loockermans had no support to begin with. He arrived as a cook’s mate, was taken on as a company servant, became a freeman, and ultimately prospered as a factor for a prominent Amsterdam firm. His brother-in-law, Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt, a soldier employed by the West India Company, had become a storekeeper, then a prosperous brewer, merchant, and public official, and eventually burgomaster of New Amsterdam, and, through marriage, a manager of the Van Rensselaer properties. Michiel Jansz., who began as a servant of Van Rensselaer, made a small fortune in a few years on that estate and consolidated his position in New Amsterdam, as did Jacob van Couwenhoven, another of Loockermans’s brothers-in-law, who turned from petty officeholding to tobacco planting, land speculation, and brewing, and joined with others as contractor for transporting two hundred emigrants to the colony. These rising leaders—among whom initially we
re, besides De Vries and Melyn, the latter a merchant from Antwerp who had patented all of Staten Island not claimed by De Vries but had been driven to Manhattan by Indian attacks, Jochem Kuyter, a German veteran of wars in the East Indies, now a prominent tobacco farmer, and Jan Evertsz. Bout, the former superintendent of one of the failed patroonships.35
Two particularly talented and ambitious men became dominant in the growing opposition. Adriaen van der Donck and Augustine Herrman were, in Kieft’s time and after, deeply engaged in the colony’s public controversies, and both produced, for their immediate advantage, works that proved to be of singular historical importance, though ultimately their careers would diverge in significant ways.
THOUGH DRAWN FROM entirely different backgrounds, the two men at first had much in common, aside from their driving ambition. Both were in their twenties when they arrived in the colony; both were well educated and articulate; both had highly developed professional skills—Van der Donck in law, public and private, Herrman in commerce, including mathematics and navigational cartography; and both had family connections that helped them on their way. But they had different temperaments and different relations with authority, which would determine much of their fates in America.
Van der Donck, son of a prominent family of Breda, in Brabant, was a recent student in law from the University of Leiden when he approached Kiliaen van Rensselaer for an appointment in the administration of Rensselaerswyck.36 A distant relation of the patroon, who was in regular touch with Van der Donck’s parents, the young man saw an opportunity for profit and prominence in the colony, and Van Rensselaer, in turn, after checking on Van der Donck’s character, saw an advantage in hiring him as Rensselaerswyck’s schout (sheriff and prosecutor). He is, he wrote, “a young man of education,” a person “who has good judgment,” someone of stature whom he could safely put in charge of law enforcement since “human nature is such that those who have charge of another do not like to be instructed by those who are below them in rank.” Trust him, he wrote optimistically to Director Kieft when Van der Donck left for New Netherland in May 1641. “He will keep up friendly intercourse with you and not treat you so impolitely as you complain others of my people have done.”37
Within two years Van Rensselaer realized his mistake. The problem was not simply that Van der Donck—his badge of office a plumed hat and a silver-plated rapier worn at the end of an elaborate shoulder belt—had heightened the tensions between the patroon’s private jurisdiction and that of New Amsterdam. More important, he had antagonized his sponsor by the fervor of his ambition, inflamed by the opportunities he found in the undeveloped world, by his failure to attend to the patroon’s interests, and by his arrogant antagonism to others in Van Rensselaer’s employ, without respect to rank. In March 1643, in a rambling letter of some 5,500 words, written over a period of four days, Van Rensselaer let the young man know what he thought of his performance. True, he had managed some things with “zeal and diligence,” but he had decided to live not at the entrance to the patroonship, as instructed, but at a remote spot far from the main population center and had bought land outside the manor to facilitate his private purchase of furs. He seemed to be acting “not as an officer but as director,” bragging that he would soon hold that position, while failing to render the services expected of him. In addition he claimed privilege on the basis of kinship, though the relationship was at best remote and in any case irrelevant to advancement. “If you have imagined that you can extort the directorship from me, [Van Rensselaer wrote,] you will be much deceived, for that is not the way to get it.” Further, his demands for supplies and funding were excessive, and his complaints to the proprietor should have been specific and not general. Nor had his legal services been proper. “What displeases me most in you,” Van Rensselaer wrote with deliberate underlining,
and what is quite the contrary of what I had expected of you is that you bring forward a great many charges and do not show me a single legal procedure against any of them, for legal practice does not consist of discourses or words but of formal and judicial actions and procedures.
Your instructions, he told the young schout,
give you power, not to compel obedience but only to make representations in my interest and the words in your oath, to seek in everything my advantage and to protect me from loss … I am not without suspicion that you have indulged ambition too much, from which much harm has come to your and my damage: he who goes slowly gets farther than he who runs fast.
And in a concluding section he made clear the various levels of jurisdiction in the structure of his patroonship and lectured Van der Donck on the paternalistic principles of political authority.38
No doubt Van Rensselaer was unduly controlling in his absentee management of his wilderness domain, unrealistic in hoping to squeeze substantial profits from the labor of his tenants and employees, and insensitive to the sheer brutality of life in the Indians’ world. But Van der Donck’s self-importance, pomposity, and supercilious disdain for his colleagues and the settlers scattered in the woods and stump-filled fields made things worse. He gained credit for some slight efforts to root out illegal trade and to chase down hirelings who reneged on their contracts. But these duties he found to be pedestrian, and he looked around for grander, more exciting possibilities. When in 1643 word reached Amsterdam that he was contemplating the purchase of a large territory in the Catskill Mountains on which to construct his own private colony, his relationship with Van Rensselaer, already embittered, came to an end.39
But however supercilious Van der Donck was to the settlers and his colleagues, he was almost humble in his interest in the land itself, the strange physical environment of the Hudson River valley, the climate, seasons, and plant and animal life. And he was genuinely intrigued by the native Indians, their appearance, lifeways, and languages, all of which he approached with an open and inquisitive mind, the very opposite of the crude reactions of Michaëlius. Amid the turmoil of his misbegotten efforts as schout, he noted with acute perception details of the land and its people—men “so stately, proud, and self-possessed that they will scarcely deign to turn their heads,” women of “an attractive grace.” All of this, years later, in repose three thousand miles from the wilderness scene, he would record in his notable Description of New Netherland.40
For the present, however, after a bitter dispute with Arent van Curler, Van Rensselaer’s trusted nephew, who, when Van der Donck’s house burned down, gave and then denied shelter to the schout, whom he described as “self-seeking and grasping,” Van der Donck moved downriver to New Amsterdam. There he settled on a 24,000-acre tract just north of Manhattan which Kieft had allotted to him for his work in concluding a treaty with the Indians. But if his relations with Kieft began well, they ended badly. With him in his growing opposition to the distracted director was Augustine Herrman, a man of equal ambition.41
Well before Van der Donck had settled in his new property (“Yonkers”: Yonkheer, the young squire), Augustine Herrman had begun his career as a leading merchant in New Amsterdam and a significant property owner in the town and the surrounding areas, including a very large plot adjacent to Van der Donck’s. Little is known of his early years. A Bohemian, born in Prague, the son of a Protestant preacher, he migrated with his family first to Germany then to Holland at the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. There he had become associated with the Amsterdam firm of Peter Gabry and Sons. Stationed in New Netherland as their main agent in America, he quickly found his way into the elaborating intricacies of Atlantic commerce. He managed shipments from and to Holland and the Dutch Caribbean islands, from the Chesapeake tobacco planters to New Amsterdam and beyond, and from upriver fur traders to the markets of Europe. He would in time attempt to produce indigo in the Hudson River valley, deal in slaves shipped from Curaçao for sale in Manhattan, and invest in privateering ventures aimed at Spanish shipping. And he acquired the essentials of surveying while developing his skill in cartography. Of his personality, we know, from
his dealings, that he was persistent, thorough, and unlike Van der Donck, undemonstrative and patient in negotiation. And, one may assume from his expressive portrait, probably drawn by himself, he was sharp-eyed, forceful, and assertive—qualities needed for the political battles that he and Van der Donck were beginning to wage at the end of Kieft’s bloody tenure and which they would relentlessly pursue through the upheavals of his successor’s directorship.42
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 28
