There were ups and downs as charges and countercharges were registered with the government. In April 1650 a provisional ruling was handed down that favored the petitioners. Although the company’s jurisdiction was not voided, it was severely criticized; New Amsterdam was accorded a municipal government; subsidies were provided for the shipment of prospective emigrants; and Stuyvesant was ordered to return from his post. But the ruling was only provisional, and Van der Donck was obliged to continue his presentations in the hope that it would be fully enacted. Though discouraged by letters from Herrman declaring that Stuyvesant and “that infernal swaggerer Tienhoven” had brought them all to ruin, he made a final effort in an elaborate presentation in February 1652, with every sign of success. But fate, in the form of rumors of war with England, intervened. As war approached, the government’s attention turned to preparedness, and as a result the influence of the militant West India Company rose steadily. When war broke out in July, the provisional rulings were rescinded.
It was the end of Van der Donck’s mission. He could only look forward to returning to the colony and rebuilding his personal life with his English wife (the daughter of the formidable Reverend Doughty) on his extensive property north of Manhattan. He was able to send on his parents and his brother’s family to the colony, but for himself there were endless delays. He had made enemies. His pulsing ambition, supercilious manner, and instinctive rebelliousness had made the authorities cautious in allowing him to return to the contentious scene in Manhattan. And the ascendant West India Company, which had classified him as one of the “silly,” seditious people who try “to upset every kind of government, pretending that they suffered under too heavy a yoke,” wanted to see the end of him.51
Title page of Adriaen van der Donck’s Description of New Netherland (illustration credit 8.2)
So he waited, resumed his legal studies in Leiden, and completed and published his Description of New Netherland. Based on the introductory section of the Remonstrance, it went much further into a detailed description and sympathetic analysis of the exotic world he had known and left behind, a world of wonderment for him, a world of people who though “dirty, slovenly, and careless” nevertheless live by “the law of nature or of nations” and whose medical care, especially the treatment of venereal diseases, “would put many an Italian physician to shame.” These taciturn, unaffected, intelligent people, still in a state of nature, and their strange but well-controlled environment, were a challenge to his imagination and an inspiration to his entrepreneurial instinct.52
When finally, in 1655, six years after he had left the colony, permission to return was granted, it was with the stipulation that he never again engage in politics or law: that he “accept no office whatever it may be, but rather live in private, peacefully and quietly as a common inhabitant, submitting to the orders and commands of the Company or those enacted by its director.” But even that was denied him. He died in 1655, soon after his return to the colony.53
By then the career of his former colleague and ally, Augustine Herrman, had taken a very different path.
Within a year of Van der Donck’s departure for The Hague, Herrman had overcome serious financial difficulties and had come to Stuyvesant’s attention not as a “silly” malcontent but as a reliable, multilingual, energetic entrepreneur, uniquely qualified to represent him in the increasingly complex negotiations with the neighboring colonies. As the director began, haltingly, to find Herrman useful, a secure link between the two was created when in 1651 Herrman married Jannetje Verlett, whose brother had married Stuyvesant’s widowed sister Anna. And equally important to Herrman’s future, Jannetje’s sister had married Dr. George Hack, a German who had settled on the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay and had become a landowner and energetic tobacco planter. With his marriage, the forces that would determine Herrman’s career—his dislike of but growing closeness to Stuyvesant and his ties to the tobacco land of Virginia’s and Maryland’s Eastern Shore—were in place.
In 1652 Stuyvesant sent Herrman on his first, unfortunate, mission, to Rhode Island, that “latrine of New England,” whose government Stuyvesant proposed to rescue from the “rabble” and “bandits” who threatened it. A year later he sent Herrman to Boston to negotiate the difficulties of the new navigation laws that excluded the Dutch from English commerce. Then, in 1659, now Stuyvesant’s “trusty agent,” he was dispatched to Maryland to challenge that colony’s claim to the settlements on the Delaware River which the Dutch had seized in their conquest of New Sweden four years earlier.
Herrman, who undoubtedly knew something of the Eastern Shore through the Hacks before that mission, recognized, as he traveled south into northern Maryland, the region’s great possibilities. He particularly noted, besides the richness of the land, that the upper reaches of Chesapeake Bay were separated from the Delaware River, which was an outlet into the Atlantic, by only a few miles. And it was also clear that this frontier region was beginning to experience a land boom as settlers moved in to claim parcels of vacant land.
Herrman fulfilled his mission to a fault, debating vigorously and learnedly with Maryland’s governor, Josias Fendall, and the proprietor’s brother, Charles Calvert, in defense of the Dutch claim to the Delaware settlements. But increasingly he negotiated as a friend, and gladly remained in Maryland through the winter of 1659–60. By the time he reported back to Stuyvesant he had acquired his first plot of land in that colony’s far northeastern corner. As an affluent and sophisticated landowner and merchant he fitted perfectly Baltimore’s image of a manorial lord, and in short order he received the official title of “Lord” of his property on the narrow neck between the Chesapeake and the Delaware River, which he called Bohemia Manor. In 1660 he acquired rights of denization, and in 1669 he became a naturalized English subject.
Maintaining contact with New Netherland while embracing his role as lord of his extensive Maryland property, Herrman turned to an urgent project. In collaboration with the Hacks and others, he arranged for tobacco-laden vessels from the south to be secretly dragged five to ten miles overland on ox-drawn sledges from the upper tip of Chesapeake Bay to inlets on the shores of the Delaware River, whence they were free to sail, in defiance of the navigation laws, to New Amsterdam or to other Atlantic ports. When the rough trail of wooden rollers becomes a wagon road, he wrote, journeys across the neck will be made in half a day.54
For years, until the English conquest of New Netherland, Herrman not only flourished as the lord of Bohemia Manor but prospered in the smuggling trade while expanding the outward reach of his commercial enterprises. He increased his landholdings to about twenty-five thousand acres and became a notable figure, a “head man,” in Maryland’s local government. But since land in this frontier region was as yet easily acquired, he found it difficult to recruit reliable tenants, and the manor fell into disrepair. Visitors in his later years found him “very miserable both in soul and body,” living alone save for a small team of slaves. The invaluable Jannetje having died in 1661, he had married again, with less success. His new wife, said to be “miserable, doubly miserable,” alienated his sons, one of whom, to Herrman’s sadness, joined the radical Labatist sect which he had earlier favored with a grant of land. His death in 1686—forty years after he had collaborated with Van der Donck in opposing New Netherland’s leadership—would not have been noteworthy had he not left behind a remarkable testimony of his skill, energy, and imagination.55
His original inspiration is clearly recorded. In his report to Stuyvesant in October 1659, he urged, as a primary item of business, that
The South [Delaware] River and the Virginias, with the lands and kills between both, ought to be laid down on an exact scale as to longitude and latitude, in a perfect map, that the country on both sides may be correctly seen,…for some maps which the English have here are utterly imperfect and prejudicial to us. The sooner this is done, the better.
Presented at this point as a way of protecting Dutch interests, the projec
t had broader transnational and personal implications. Herrman had already begun making sketches of the riverine configurations for his own use when Lord Baltimore subsidized the project with a special grant of land. Herrman was launched on an undertaking that would absorb his energies for ten years. When in 1670 his map of the Chesapeake region was completed, Herrman sent it for engraving to William Faithorne in London, who published it in 1673. It was entitled
VIRGINIA
AND
Maryland
As it is Planted and
Inhabited this present
Year 1670 Surveyed and
Exactly Drawne by the
Only Labour and Endeavor
Of
Augustine Herrman
Bohemiensis
Augustine Herrman’s map of Virginia and Maryland (1673), with detail showing the portage route for smuggling tobacco from upper Chesapeake Bay to the Delaware River. The narrowest point was an eight-mile stretch over which vessels of twelve tons were dragged “upon sleys, or in creat carts” by teams of oxen.
Click here to see a larger image.
The map, roughly thirty-one by thirty-seven inches, was elaborately and meticulously plotted. Not only is every waterway and island along Chespeake Bay and the Delaware River (every bay, bend, cove, neck, kill, and overland route) depicted in exquisite detail, but hundreds of habitations (manors, plantations, farms, and Indian encampments) are identified, and terrain features (swamps, hills, and forests) are marked in minuscule lettering. So fine and delicate are the tracings of the twisting waterways that, viewed at a distance, the map seems to be an ornamental filigree rather than a functional chart.
The map’s borders are crowded with sketches and commentaries on the history and prospects of the land. One marginal note comments on the mountains that lay to the west and the likelihood of passages beyond the mountains that might lead out to “the Bay of Mexico or the West Sea.” The great seal of England appears at the top of the map; the coat of arms of the Lords Baltimore, somewhat to the side. And at the bottom Herrman placed his own portrait, a striking image of resolution, intelligence, and self-confidence.56
But the map is not only a meticulous portrayal of the Chesapeake terrain and an example of advanced cartography. In its carefully defined details, its meticulous tracings of the twists and turns of coastlines, riverways, and land routes, it reflects Herrman’s profound personal engagement with this exotic land and the excitement of discovery. The map is the visual expression of the same zest and enthusiasm, the same sense of wonderment and entrepreneurial optimism, that underlay the details of Adriaen van der Donck’s Description of New Netherland. Both documents, by the former leaders of the commonalty, the one verbal, the other visual, transcended the abrasive turmoils that had engrossed their authors, to convey a greater meaning of their endeavors, based on their shared fascination with the land and their expectations of its future.
CHAPTER 9
Carnage and Civility in a Developing Hub of Commerce
1
THOUGH VAN DER DONCK had been suppressed and Herrman had been co-opted and then diverted by Baltimore and Maryland, and though the commonalty had in part been pacified by the grant of a municipal government for New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant had not solved New Netherland’s problems. Conflict continued. Contention followed all of Stuyvesant’s efforts at reform. Population recruitment remained the colony’s most urgent problem, and proposals continued to be made to solve it. In 1648, the year after Stuyvesant’s arrival, the colony’s audit board suggested that slaves might be the key to the colony’s population problem. Under the terms of their scheme, settlers who actually promoted farming and population growth in the colony would be allowed to export farm products in their own vessels directly to Dutch colonial markets, such as Brazil, and to return with shiploads of slaves. In this way Brazil and other Dutch colonies would get cheap produce and New Netherland
would by slave labor be more extensively cultivated than it has hitherto been, because the [free] agricultural laborers who are conveyed thither at great expense to the colonists sooner or later apply themselves to trade and neglect agriculture altogether. Slaves, on the other hand, being brought and maintained there at a cheap rate, various other descriptions of produce would be raised and by their abundance be reduced in price so as to allow … their advantageous exportation [to the Netherlands] and to other parts of Europe.
Two years later came the commonalty’s urgent plea in its Remonstrance, that the government subsidize the free emigration of the Netherlands’ surplus population, “farmers and laborers with other people in straitened circumstances.” And indeed Van der Donck’s personal efforts while in the Netherlands led to a small surge in emigration to the colony.1
In time there would in fact be both sizable slave imports and a significant increase in the number of immigrants from the Netherlands. But in the years immediately following Stuyvesant’s arrival what mainly accounted for a sudden increase in numbers, more than offsetting those who fled the colony during and after Kieft’s war, was not an organized migration from the homeland but an almost untraceable drift into the colony of a miscellany of people from outside the Netherlands: Huguenots directly or indirectly from France; Germans; Walloons; Swedes and Finns; and refugees from Brazil and the Dutch colonies in the Caribbean. Above all, and in greatest numbers, was the movement of English religious dissidents and land-hungry farmers moving south from New England into territory claimed by the Dutch in the lower Hudson River valley and especially on Long Island.
THE MIGRATION OF the English from the east and north, which would greatly shape New Netherland’s population history, had been in motion since 1639, when an agent of the Earl of Stirling, who claimed possession of the whole of Long Island, began to entice New Englanders to move south and settle on the island. He turned first to a disgruntled group in Lynn, Massachusetts, who felt sufficiently “straitened” in their circumstances to look for resettlement, and brought them to the site of the later Manhasset, a mere twenty miles from New Amsterdam. Expelled from there by a troop of Dutch soldiers, they moved off one hundred miles to the far eastern tip of the island, Montauk Point, and then, disappointed with that bleak spot, settled finally at a place they called Southampton, on the southern, ocean side of the island, still far from any Dutch settlements. There, on an isolated plot eight miles square fronting the sea, thirty miles west of Montauk, they formed a self-governing New England town corporation and brought in a newly arrived preacher, Abraham Pierson, to organize a church society. The community, drawn from various parts of England as distant from each other as Buckinghamshire and Yorkshire, flourished. It soon had forty families—perhaps one hundred souls—who quickly developed bitter disputes on church polity. Within four years Pierson, once a scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, was so deeply disappointed in the community’s loose ties of church and state that he felt impelled to move once again—back across the Sound, north to the stricter Connecticut town of New Haven. But even that more rigorous devotional community disappointed him, and he gathered his remaining adherents and wandered south once more, to found what became Newark, New Jersey.2
Pierson’s and the Lynn community’s discontent in matters of religion and available land and their extraordinary mobility were typical of the impulses that brought hundreds of New Englanders south into Dutch territory. Their comings and goings made Long Island, once sparsely settled by Indians, a world in constant motion.
Thus, while Southampton was being peopled from Lynn, a contingent from New Haven, led by the proto-presbyterian Rev. John Youngs, once of Southwold, Suffolk, England, settled Southold far out on the island’s north shore, where he established friendly relations with the Indians. Dissidents from the recently founded Southampton joined with immigrants from southern England to establish Easthampton, a few miles farther to the east. An English army officer, Lion Gardiner, bought and settled the island that bears his name, nestled in the eastern bay of Long Island, while a group of Barbados merch
ants set up a trading emporium on nearby Shelter Island.3
The drift of the English south to Long Island—freed servants, religious dissidents, and farmers feeling relatively deprived in their landholdings at the edge of a limitless continent—continued through the 1640s and 1650s, spreading steadily west on the island into closer and closer proximity to the Dutch settlements that were expanding east from Manhattan. New Dutch villages on the western end of Long Island—Flatbush, Breuklen, Nieuw Amersfoort (later Flatlands), named for Couwenhoven’s native town, and New Utrecht—were thought of as protective barriers against English encroachment from the east. These Dutchmen soon found themselves close neighbors of some of the most radical English exiles.
It was in 1642 that the fiercely independent Rev. Francis Doughty, Adriaen van der Donck’s future father-in-law, appeared, expelled from Massachusetts for his offensive ideas on baptism, to settle “Maspeth,” which, as the later Newtown, would develop what has been described as a “genuine cultural pluralism.” Similarly, John Throckmorton, a grocer from Norwich, England, who followed Roger Williams into exile in Rhode Island, broke off from even that utterly permissive world to settle Throg’s Neck, a spit of the mainland jutting into the Sound twelve miles from New Amsterdam. At that isolated spot, his nearest neighbor, to the north, was that “woman of a ready wit and bold spirit,” the notorious Anne Hutchinson, an immigrant first from Lincolnshire to Boston, then from Boston to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and finally from Portsmouth to Pelham Bay. There, in isolation, far from the great turmoils of the Puritans’ Bay Colony, she had sought peace on her own terms, only to find death, with her entire family, at the hands of marauding Indians.4
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 30
