The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675
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In other ways too there was a convergence between the lifestyles of the colonists and the Indians. The Finns adopted Indian corn mush thickened with meat as a staple food and used Indian herbal remedies. The Lenapes’ animism, the spirit world that enclosed them, their reliance on guardian spirits, their shamanistic religion, their belief in the reality of dreams, their nomadism and hunting culture—all this was remarkably similar to the Saamis’ world that the Finns knew well; they could easily relate to it. Miscegenation, though not intermarriage, came easily to them, and when children were exchanged for language learning, the Europeans much more often than the Lenapes resisted the return to their homes.
Conversely, as the Europeans increasingly adopted Indian ways, the Indians took on what they could of European external culture. Though shocked at the Europeans’ clumsy boots, their hairy faces, their booming cannons, and the occupational inversion of men doing women’s farmwork, they too practiced burn-beating agriculture and viewed the Finns “as a kindred people.” They were especially intrigued by European clothes and wore what clothes they could get until they fell apart. They paid well, in trade, for caps made of scrap cloth topped with multicolored tassels, and they particularly favored knee-length coats half red and half blue—which amused the Swedes since they resembled the garments forced on Swedish orphans at home. And they quickly adopted the superior technology of firearms and the exciting and destructive power of alcohol.38
In dwellings too in the earliest years, the Europeans approached the natives’ forms. The Finns’ first habitations, modeled on the Lapplanders’ huts, were strikingly similar to the Indians’ wigwams—a circle of poles joined at the top, covered with skins or cloth, with a flap at one side for a door. From these tentlike structures they advanced to small log versions of the Finnish pirtti: low cabins that could be built without nails by two men using only axes. They were, typically, structures of round logs fitted together in notched ends, the chinks caulked with clay and the walls pierced by two or three windows closed by sliding boards or, later, isinglass. As in the most rural parts of Finland, the cabins had smoke holes but not chimneys, and when chimneys appeared they were built of hollowed tree trunks. The foundation stones, when they existed, were unmortared; the floors were usually of dirt, or at best of the flat sides of split logs; and the entrance door, cut into a gable end, was so low one had to stoop to enter. The interiors were utterly sparse. Beds of loose straw covered with sheepskins were set against the walls, and the furnishings were completed with freestanding tables, benches, and chairs of sections of tree trunks, with utensils of tin, iron, and wood. Dark even in bright daylight, lit less commonly by candles than by the ancient “lighting-splints” (smoking torches of pine sticks fixed diagonally to the walls, known even in the immemorial songs of The Kalevala), these cabins, huddled but warm, were serviceable if primitive shelters.39
By Risingh’s time, despite the general decline in the quality of life, the dwellings, at least, had improved. The single-room cabins were larger, and some had crude porch-like entrances and small hallways and storerooms between the entrance door and the large main room. That central living quarter was large enough to be divided into sections by curtains or clothes draped over rails. Though roomier, with more separated spaces than their predecessors, these were still dark, crudely built dwellings that housed family, strangers, and in the early years, barnyard animals. The kitchen equipment still clustered around the corner fireplace, and the ceilings were still the roofs themselves, which were constructed of flat-hewn timbers covered with birch bark held in place by rows of split logs. By the late 1650s some two-story houses appeared. The most notable was Risingh Hall—not as grand as Printzhof which, though built of hewn logs, had glass windows and brick ovens, fireplaces, and chimneys. Risingh’s residence was a simpler affair, probably a double log structure: a two-story section set against a low one-story building. When such houses were built, and there were few of them before 1660, the original cabins were relegated to kitchens, sheds, or smokehouses, and small saunas appeared as well. But even for the officials who lived in such houses, the level of comfort remained low, at best equal to that of prosperous Swedish peasants. Many, especially the Finns, were still struggling with the most elemental problems of physical existence.40
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Such was the population the Dutch took over in 1655—some six hundred souls in all, an almost equal number of Finns and Swedes and a variety of other north European peoples, most of them peasants or laborers, still lacking both a profitable crop or product and a major settlement center, still scattering to new locations on the west side of the Delaware and into the near backcountry, but also in very small numbers on the east (Jersey) side as well. In the nine years of Dutch rule that followed, the population of the former Swedish colony grew rapidly, along with that of New Netherland as a whole, and it became even more complex ethnically as a result of a strange development that suddenly transformed the region’s governance.41
Immediately upon acquiring New Sweden, Stuyvesant set up a provisional government for the region and ordered the inhabitants to regroup into towns of sixteen to twenty families and to pay taxes for the land granted. The Swedes, “to prevent mischief,” were to be protected, for “an increase in population is the life of a state,” the company had reminded him. Living in towns among the Dutch instead of in scattered farms would usefully reduce their ethnic identity and simplify the Dutch jurisdiction. Thus relocated, “they will be less to fear,” for these were “a sort of people that must be kept under else they will rebell, and of that nation these here are the worst sort.” But this was a futile plan. The Scandinavians refused all orders and enticements to leave their farms and resettle among the Dutch, and they threatened to move off to Maryland, as some had already done, if pressed. And they were reinforced in their determination to live apart and in their own way by the arrival of the last of Sweden’s emigrant ships, the Mercury, whose 110 passengers, 92 of them Värmland Finns in family groups, scattered defiantly among their countrymen in the northern districts. In the end Stuyvesant was obliged to grant “the Swedish nation,” as he called the Scandinavians, limited local self-government to keep them from defecting.42
Meanwhile, in Europe affairs were taking an unexpected turn. The Dutch West India Company, whose North American mandate now stretched from New England to Maryland, was determined somehow to make New Netherland profitable, or at least keep it from becoming a further drain on the company’s dwindling resources. Upon hearing of the conquest of New Sweden the company began negotiations with the city of Amsterdam, which had loaned the company funds to finance the conquest of New Sweden. To pay off that debt and to reinforce the colony generally the company, financially strapped by its losses in Brazil and Guinea, proposed to cede to the city the southern half of New Sweden—from the Christina River south to the mouth of the Delaware—to form a separate colony loosely attached to New Netherland’s greater jurisdiction. The arrangement would be mutually profitable. The company would be relieved of a debt, with the prospect of increased revenues from a growing population’s trade and customs duties, while the city could look forward to having supplies of North American grain, timber, and other products to replace those that could no longer be obtained from the usual Baltic and Polish sources.43
The thirty-five-point contract between the two parties that created the colony of New Amstel (Nieuwer Amstel) detailed the city’s obligation to develop the new subcolony physically, administratively, and politically, and laid out a remarkable set of privileges—land grants, personal subsidies, and tax exemptions—that would be accorded the colonists: perhaps the most generous enticements ever offered prospective settlers. The response was immediate. On Christmas Day 1656, four shiploads of subsidized independent farmers and peasants, 167 people in all, recruited from Gulick (Jülich) in the duchy of Cleves on the Dutch-German border, and committed to at least four years of residence in the colony, sailed off. They arrived on the Delaware, after vicissitudes that include
d a shipwreck on Long Island, four months later. The colony’s new director, Jacob Alrichs, led the debarkation of the passengers, seventy-six of them women and children, together with forty soldiers and their wives and children, and took over the management of New Amstel.44
Alrichs’s travails, in the two years before his death, were agonizing and unending. Settled in Fort Christina, now renamed Altona, he distributed lots to the newcomers, repaired the public houses, and saw to the construction of a log town hall and “a goodly town of about one hundred houses.” But the first year was a nightmare. The population of about six hundred souls, many of them “rough people … as poor as worms, and lazy withal,” only a few of them qualified farmers, fell victim to the damp climate made more miserable by a sequence of heavy rains that ruined the winter fodder. “A hot intermittent fever” and dysentery became epidemic; about one hundred people, many of them children, died. And the diseases were compounded by the arrival of 108 more settlers on the Mill, 11 of whose companions had succumbed to scurvy on the passage, 3 of whom died on landing. The survivors, especially the indentured orphan children taken from Amsterdam’s almshouses, were suffering from a variety of illnesses, some contagious, and they brought with them no supplies. But recruitment continued, in Finland and especially in the farming districts of Gelderland in Holland, leading to the arrival of 137 self-proclaimed artisans, most of them incompetent, 70 more soldiers, and approximately 300 more women and children. There was no way Alrichs could properly provide for them. “Misfortune,” he wrote, “seldom comes alone.… We pray to God and hope that our sins may cease, thus diminishing our punishment. This we desire from the bottom of our hearts.”45
But his prayers went unanswered. He never received the “industrious people” he fervently hoped for, nor the supplies necessary to sustain the people he had. As the population grew, far outstripping the supplies available to support them—several new arrivals sold their extra clothes for food—the colony’s resources declined. Worms destroyed much of the first crop, seed corn had to be consumed, food prices soared, the hot, wet summer was succeeded by a long bitter winter, and many of the muskets they had been given, when first used, “blew up, burst and became useless.” The place was being crushed “like a little willow in its beginning and sprouting.” Then the Amsterdam authorities, fearing financial losses, began cutting back on the subsidies promised the settlers, which further undermined the settlers’ confidence in the future of the colony. By the second year, first the traders among the new arrivals, then others, petitioned to be allowed to remove to Manhattan, though they had not yet paid off their debts to the city. The poorest among them begged Alrichs “with clasped hands” to release them from their four-year commitments: “We have spent, in our hunger, wretchedness, and misery, all that we had saved from our small pittance. We have nothing left wherewith to pay.” But Alrichs, who had lost six of his household, including his wife, in the epidemic, refused. The result of this “too great preciseness” (Stuyvesant)—despite Amsterdam’s order that defection could bring the death penalty—was numerous secret departures for Maryland and Virginia, which Alrichs and his chief military officer, the pugnacious veteran of warfare in Brazil, Alexander D’Hinoyossa, failed to stop. In fact, the soldiers themselves were beginning to desert, especially when rumors began circulating that Maryland was preparing an army to take the place over, an impression greatly strengthened by the arrival of a threatening delegation from Maryland that flatly asserted that colony’s right to all the Delaware lands. By then the entire region, it was said, had acquired “so bad a name that the whole river could not wash it clean.”46
Alrichs, exhausting himself trying to solve these problems, sent a delegation to Maryland to settle relations between the two colonies and to bring back the Finns and Swedes who had defected. That embassy, led by Augustine Herrman, failed in both. But Herrman reported that the escaped Finns and Swedes had not run off because of wretchedness or ill treatment but because they were “entirely idle and lazy … even too lazy to wash their own spoons and plates from which they had eaten.” They simply hoped, he said, “to gain the bread of idleness” in the Chesapeake lands. Meanwhile D’Hinoyossa and an ally, the sheriff Gerrit van Sweringen, were writing secretly to Holland accusing Alrichs of causing all the misery. In December 1659 Alrichs, worn out by his failing efforts in all directions—to provide for the prosperity and health of the colonists, to stem the flow of desertions, and to eliminate the threat of a takeover by the English—died.47
D’Hinoyossa and Van Sweringen took command and immediately tore into the scattered, fragile community in a rampage of exploitation and autocratic rule. D’Hinoyossa, who would ultimately die by execution for mutiny in the Dutch army, seized all of Alrichs’s papers and, claiming that his predecessor had violated instructions, seized his personal property. When the magistrates refused to concur, D’Hinoyossa dismissed them, then charged Alrichs’s executor and heir, a councilor and the colony’s secretary, with mutiny, sacked him too, denied him Alrichs’s papers, and drove him out of the colony. Inevitably he clashed with New Netherland’s superior authority on the river, in the person of the mild-tempered, sensible Willem Beekman. None of the claims of Manhattan’s authorities would be recognized, D’Hinoyossa declared, because he himself was “the head and fountain of justice.” Beekman reported that D’Hinoyossa threatened to fine anyone who spoke ill of him, and charged him with having violently denounced the Dutch authorities in a tavern brawl. If the city of Amsterdam did not back his authority, D’Hinoyossa had declared, he would turn the place over to the English, the Portuguese, the Swedes, or the Danes. He might well get a commission from Portugal to go privateering along the Atlantic coast, in which case he would “do special damage to the people of Manhattan.” “What the devil did he care,” he was quoted as saying, “whom he served?”48
The conflict of jurisdictions continued, with the local populace driven by D’Hinoyossa into some degree of submission or alienation. When Beekman charged him with having sold for his own profit supplies intended for the settlers, D’Hinoyossa saw to it that the witnesses refused to testify against him. And when Beekman and Stuyvesant sought to bring D’Hinoyossa’s ally Van Sweringen to justice for having shot one of the West India Company’s soldiers, D’Hinoyossa pardoned him of any such crime before an investigation could be made. He seemed to have no scruples, no sense of moderation. When a runaway servant was captured after wounding two of his English captors, D’Hinoyossa ignored both English and Dutch authorities, appointed Van Sweringen judge, and when the man was convicted, hanged him, cut off his head, and displayed it on a post. People feared him. Beekman avoided him as much as possible, anticipating all sorts of false charges: “if you want to beat a dog, it is easy to find a club.”49
Clearly the uneasy, overlapping jurisdictions on the Delaware were not working properly. In addition to the conflicts that erupted again and again between Beekman and D’Hinoyossa, there was the strange situation of the Swedes and Finns. Some enjoyed limited self-government because their farms fell within the company’s jurisdiction; others, within New Amstel’s boundaries, did not. In 1663, when the Amsterdam authorities, fearing further losses, attempted to return New Amstel to the West India Company, the company responded by granting the city the entire Delaware area, thus increasing for the Amsterdam merchants the prospect of eventual profits. And indeed, by the early fall of 1664, when an English force under Sir Robert Carr swept over the whole of New Netherland and put an end to Dutch colonization in North America, the prospects had brightened. Profitable cargoes of wheat, timber, and furs were beginning to be shipped from New Amstel, a sawmill was under construction, and the possible illegal marketing of Chesapeake tobacco, to be purchased by the sale of slaves and locally produced beer, was being planned. The population of the former New Sweden had grown to over a thousand, and the city of Amsterdam was actively and successfully recruiting more colonists—people who were “laborious and skilled in farming … Swedes and Fins (who ar
e already there in reasonable numbers) being … particularly fitted, and of whom many families or households are … expected, as they have been notified by their countrymen … of the good opportunity there.”50
In the summer of 1663 thirty-two Swedes were in Amsterdam waiting passage, and the city was preparing to send 130 more families willing to cover their own expenses. Meanwhile D’Hinoyossa himself returned from a trip to Holland with one hundred colonists, thirty-two of them Finns, and urged the dispatch of fifty slaves who, he believed, would be particularly useful in preparing the fertile but still uncleared valleys and doing “other heavy work.” By then the former New Sweden had 110 farms, two thousand cows and oxen, twenty horses, eighty sheep, and several thousand swine. The whole of New Netherland, on the eve of its demise, had “increased so much in population and commerce, as before they did not in 30 years.” And then in July 1663 the St. Jacob arrived from Amsterdam. It carried, in addition to sixty farm laborers and unmarried women, a small group of radical utopians, most of them Mennonites, led by a remarkably articulate and energetic visionary, Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy. A fringe, a sprig, a tiny offshoot of the vast growth of Protestant utopianism and messianic revivalism in western Europe, Plockhoy’s conventicle settled on the lower Delaware amid the ruins of the West India Company’s devastated settlement, Swanendael.51