By late 1630 New Amsterdam had a population of only four hundred. It was run down and dilapidated, the fortifications were in disrepair and the five company farms were “vacant and fallen into decay; there was not a living animal on hand belonging to the Company on said Bouweries.” The town had already been eclipsed by the younger community of Boston, in New England; it had failed to thrive under the neglect and parsimony of the company, and many feared the entire enterprise would be lost to the English, whose North American colonies of Virginia and New England were vital and expanding. (Because of the English Civil War, Puritans had fled to America to found their ideal society, swelling the English population dramatically within a handful of years.) Reluctantly, the company loosened its restrictions on the number of new settlers while keeping a firm grip on their civil liberties and freedoms. New arrivals, though ostensibly free citizens, had to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Dutch West India Company by paying yearly fees or taxes.
Within two decades, New Amsterdam resembled a prosperous Dutch town with its gabled roofs, windmills, a stone church, several large stone houses, an expanded fort, a governor’s residence and a school. But since their chief objective was to generate money for their employers, the governors of New Netherland did not respond eagerly to the settlers’ desire to create a civil society. They were heavy-handed in ordering settlers around—removing and promoting them at whim—and taxing them so much that one early settler complained that “under a king, we could not be worse treated.” Many lived under a pall of discontent, and as a result the community and outlying settlements did not thrive. The historians George J. Lankevich and Howard B. Furer noted in A Brief History of New York City that “although physically the town was ‘after the manner of Holland,’ in terms of its ambition and profit it was very un-Dutch.” That is to say, initiative and energy were in short supply. This lack of vitality might seem astonishing, considering that the town and colony were run by a joint stock corporation with the sole objective of generating profits; but is it so odd that a people whose personal freedom and upward mobility were restricted might not leap to their appointed tasks?
One brutal governor in the early 1640s, an Amsterdam merchant named Willem Kieft, managed to start a war with the native peoples of the lower Hudson Valley after demanding tribute from them. His ill-conceived revenue-generating scheme resulted in a horrific massacre of the natives, the deaths of dozens of colonists and the destruction or abandonment of company outposts outside New Amsterdam, which itself was then inundated with refugees. A council of eight leading citizens of the colony sent a report to the Nineteen in Amsterdam outlining the disastrous predicament in which Kieft’s intemperate actions had placed the enterprise: many “skulk, with wives and little ones that still survive, in poverty together, in and around the Fort at the Manhattas where we are not safe for an hour.”
In 1643 Kieft hired a band of English “Indian fighters” led by John Underhill to attack all the surrounding native villages.
They tortured and killed 1,600 natives and brought dozens of captives back to Fort Amsterdam, where Kieft reputedly “laughed right heartily, rubbing his right arm and laughing out loud” while the soldiers brutalized and killed them. One of the prisoners died most horribly when his captors “threw him down, and stuck his private parts, which they had cut off, into his mouth while he was still alive, and after that placed him on a mill-stone and beat his head off.” Not surprisingly, Kieft’s brutality and greed “in a short time nearly brought this country to nought.” The actions of Kieft the merchant-warrior were in direct opposition to the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the people living in New Netherland. Yet, it was these people who suffered most from Kieft’s aggression once the inevitable reprisals came. This type of war, whereby the company’s property was destroyed and its ostensible customers and suppliers were exterminated, was bad for business.
When news of his actions was reported to Amsterdam by dissatisfied colonists, Kieft was swiftly recalled. Leading colonists also fired off strident missives demanding a greater say in the affairs of the colony and corporate outpost. Moreover, they petitioned the States General for a civil governing structure similar to that in place in towns in the Netherlands, that is, a responsible government independent of the company.
Kieft’s replacement would be given the task of returning the settlement of New Netherland and the town of New Amsterdam to profitability. The new governor faced two incompatible visions: to stockholders, the company was a commercial enterprise to generate profit; to the inhabitants of New Netherland, the settlement was their home, and they wanted someone to organize and regulate their society. New Amsterdam had always been run as a company town, with restrictions on what people could do, how they could make a living, where they could live, what goods they could purchase or import or export, what services they could employ and so on. Taxes were high and services meagre. The company feared the unregulated and uncontrolled actions of its employees. Relaxing the rules, however preferable that would have been to the colonists, was not in the company’s immediate interest. The man the Nineteen sent out to replace Kieft as governor of the ultimate company town was himself, not surprisingly, the ultimate company man.
4
PIETER STUY VESANT WAS A SERIOUS, INTELLIGENT MAN with squinty eyes and an imperious demeanour. His clean-shaven, fleshy face was dominated by a protuberant nose and a large, blocky chin. In his famous portrait, he stares defiantly, his balding head covered with a tight, dark cap, long locks of curly hair dangling to his shoulders and his lumpy face set off by a starched white collar wrapped tightly around his neck. The attire we see defined his personality and his approach to life: rigid, unyielding, self-righteous and stern. Proud of his university education—a rare occurrence in those days—he was an admirer of culture and education, and preferred the Latin form of his name, Petrus, instead of the plain Pieter. Stuyvesant carried on a voluminous correspondence with one of his friends entirely in verse. He was not a man to back away from his life’s harsh obstacles or realities; he never let setbacks get in the way of his objectives, even when those setbacks were as dire as having his right leg blasted off by a Spanish cannonball at the age of thirty-two. He would come to be defined by the silver-banded wooden peg leg that replaced the one he lost in service to the company, which he would loyally serve for most of his adult life.
Stuyvesant was born around 1612 in a tiny town in the flat farmland of Friesland, in the northern Netherlands. Although his father was a stern Calvinist clergyman, the young Stuyvesant strayed from the strict morality of his upbringing while attending the University of Franeker. Seducing his landlord’s daughter (or some similar scandal) forced Stuyvesant’s departure before he had taken a degree in philosophy. Undaunted, and with irrepressible energy, he immediately cast about for suitable venues for his talent and ambition. At that time, the tall ships crowding the harbour of Amsterdam, their masts and sails stretching skyward, were departing and arriving daily from distant places all over the world. The young man chose the West India Company, enlisting as a lowly clerk. Aboard a ship for the first time in his life, he sailed away to the Caribbean Sea. His officers, impressed with Stuyvesant’s zeal, energy and devotion to duty, quickly promoted him as he moved about the company’s holdings. He specialized in logistics, communication and transportation between Brazil, the Caribbean and New Amsterdam. Combining natural leadership qualities with a lack of deference to authority, Stuyvesant both gained followers and made enemies. Fortunately for him his chief enemy, Jan Claeszoon van Campen, the senior military and political officer of the company’s Caribbean operations, died in 1642. Stuyvesant, just thirty years of age, assumed van Campen’s position as governor of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao (the Dutch West India Company’s American headquarters).
In April 164 4 Stuyvesant led a fleet of twelve battleships carrying more than a thousand troops across Caribbean waters to the Spanish-held island of St. Martin, part of the Antilles chain near Puerto Rico. The island had been
wrested from the West India Company’s control several years earlier during the ongoing struggle between the decaying Spanish Empire and the emerging Dutch Republic, a conflict that also involved the English, French and Portuguese. In recent decades this Caribbean struggle had dwarfed even the battles between these same powers in Indonesia. Great fleets had sallied forth from Europe, disgorging armies of disciplined troops onto American shores. In 1630 a Dutch fleet of 67 ships carrying 1,170 cannons and 7,000 men arrived off Pernambuco (now Recife, Brazil) and swiftly conquered it. During the following years, the West India Company conquered numerous other Portuguese strongholds and extended its control of Brazil’s northeastern coast. Another great battle, the siege of Bahia, involved a Portuguese fleet of 86 ships and over 12,000 troops. Chaos ruled as the struggle for dominance continued throughout the mid-seventeenth century. Trade and travel were undertaken at the mercy of unruly privateers, pirates and national navies. The stakes were high: control over the plantation economies of Brazil and the Caribbean, combined with control over the slave trade from West Africa, was a potent cocktail for profit—provided one could ignore or justify the resulting terrible cost in human misery.
The conditions for the average sailor were ridiculously harsh: disease-ridden, malnourished wretches died by the thousands in the tropical heat and malaria-infested harbours. Stuyvesant saw it all, and used his iron will to command order from this chaos. He connived to supplant his adversaries while simultaneously squeezing profits from the land owned by the company, using the vast numbers of slaves brought from West Africa to Brazil. With the free labour being provided by the slave force, the company traded in sugar, salt, horses, tobacco and dyewood, as well as plundering Spanish treasure galleons.
In his April 164 4 assault on St. Martin, Stuyvesant was not lucky. Spies had informed him that the Spanish forces on the island were sparse and ill-prepared. After landing his company troops and buttressing their fortifications on the beach below the Spanish fortress, he demanded the Spaniards’ immediate surrender. They had no intention of surrendering; indeed, they had been recently reinforced and supplied, and responded with vigorous cannon blasts. Stuyvesant nevertheless ordered his men to the attack, digging in their cannons for a long siege. As the impetuous commander clambered up on the earthen ramparts of his defence to urge his men on to greater glory against the hated Spanish, a cannonball from the fort hurled through the gunpowder-clouded air towards him and smashed into his right leg below the knee, shattering it. Collapsing to the ground in agony, Stuyvesant nevertheless ordered the continuation of the siege. But it was hopeless. His men were driven back, and his mangled body was carted back to his ship, where a surgeon probed the ghastly wound. It did not look good. The leg would have to go.
Seventeenth-century surgical techniques provided little comfort or assurance of success. Without the advantage of targeted anaesthetic, and armed with unsanitized saws and knives, surgeons relied on speed and a great deal of luck when amputating limbs. Death was as likely an outcome as success, particularly in the West Indies, where the stifling humidity and scorching heat provided a ripe environment for infection. Stuyvesant pulled through—as much a testament to his iron will as to the surgeon’s skill. Delirious and feverish after the procedure, he nevertheless wrote to his superiors in the West India Company: “Honorable, Wise, Provident, and Most Prudent Lords,” he began, before informing them that he “did not succeed so well as I had hoped, no small impediment having been the loss of my right leg, it being removed by a rough ball.” The “small impediment,” as he put it, would not let him focus on his administrative tasks, though he tried his damnedest to ignore the infernal pain and sickening pus of the raw stump, which was wrapped in stained and damp bandages. The wound was not healing properly, so Stuyvesant’s physicians advised him to return to a more temperate climate before infection set in. Reluctantly he agreed, leaving his post as head of operations in the Caribbean. He had been in charge for less than a year, and he feared for his career; departing in August, he arrived in Amsterdam in December 164 4 , after a dreadful voyage spent in fever and pain.
Back in Holland, in the home of his sister and brother-in-law, his injury began to heal. The household also included his brother-in-law’s sister, Judith Bayard, the thirty-seven-year-old daughter of a Calvinist minister, who took on the role of nurse during his convalescence. By that age in her life, she was considered a spinster and had probably given up all hope of marriage, but Stuyvesant fell in love with her. She did, after all, speak several languages; she was a fine singer and had a cultivated taste in music and fashionable dress instincts. The couple were married after less than a year, in August 1645 , and prepared for a life together in the New World. This time, though, Stuyvesant would take up a new challenge farther north: he would be the director-general of New Netherland, where the Dutch West India Company hoped he would quell the disturbing push for independent government and deal with the mess left by Willem Kieft. The company was impressed with Stuyvesant’s devotion to duty and his heroic sacrifice of a leg for them; but he was also a man not inclined to question the natural order of things, and they knew where his loyalties lay. The Nineteen felt a stronger director-general would put a halt to the ever-increasing letters of dissent reaching the States General, as the colonists—many of them their own employees—agitated for political rights. The company planned to fight for its monopoly rather than give in.
For his own part, Stuyvesant apparently learned to view the loss of his leg as a clarion call to fulfilling his destiny: surely he had been spared probable death because the Lord had a greater purpose for him.
In August 1647, from the deck of their ship, Stuyvesant and Judith spied the place they would call home for the remainder of their lives. From afar, New Amsterdam appeared to be a quaint town of windmills, gabled roofs and sprawling farms.
But the pretty picture of the growing town concealed a rot that threatened to tear the place apart. It was a shambles, one that might have caused a man of lesser moral certainty to quail. But Stuyvesant . . . was Stuyvesant. It was his duty and a challenge to set this place right.
The after-effects of Kieft’s “land-destroying and people-expelling wars” were everywhere to be seen. The hundreds of soldiers and indigent colonists, employees of the company, wandered about aimlessly. Their ramshackle dwellings littered the muddy streets and clogged the interior courtyard of the dilapidated Fort Amsterdam. Stuyvesant wrote that the fort was “resembling more a mole hill than a fortress, without gates, the walls and bastions trodden underfoot by men and cattle” that wandered freely, grazing through the compound and settlement. There was no proper dock, and drinking establishments had sprouted like mushrooms after a rainstorm. The people, like their settlement, had “grown very wild and loose in their morals.”
Although he had planned to completely reorganize and reform the colony in three years and then move on to his next assignment, Stuyvesant, soon known in New Amsterdam as “the General,” was to rule there for the next seventeen years. He made many changes, ushering the ramshackle outpost through its time of growing pains and into a thriving settlement. He enacted laws forbidding the sale of liquor on Sundays, introduced fines for knife fighting and imposed strict penalties for other misdemeanours and crimes. His punishments usually involved incarceration, hard labour and a diet of bread and water. The punishment for two sailors found ashore after failing to return to their ship on time was “to be chained for three consecutive months to a wheelbarrow or a handbarrow and put to the hardest labour, strictly on bread and water.”
Stuyvesant issued edicts and ordinances to clean the filthy community and to establish official streets, eliminating the winding, uneven alleys and serpentine goat paths by moving houses and realigning property lines. He set speed limits for wagons and paved the major thoroughfares with cobblestones.
He then set his eyes on the unruly and “ubiquitous hogs,” cattle, goats and horses that roamed the community at will, foraging from the garbage that was strew
n liberally in the streets. Residents were soon fined for tossing their “rubbish, filth, ashes, oyster-shells, dead animals or anything like it” into the newly cleaned and straightened streets. Butchers could no longer fling the offal from carcasses out their front doors; animal dung had to be cleaned up by the owner of the animal that produced it; and outhouses were ordered cleaned and maintained so that the cess no longer overflowed, because it “not only creates a great stench and therefore great inconvenience to the passers-by, but also makes the streets foul and unfit for use.”
“The General” outlawed wooden chimneys and thatched roofs, established fire wardens, mandated leather firefighting buckets to be placed at strategic street corners and required “genuine Amsterdam ells, measures and weights to be used in all commercial exchanges.” He created a monetary system that included a standard value for wampum shells and made it illegal not to accept them as legal tender. Stuyvesant then established official market days on Tuesdays and Saturdays, organized a jail and police patrol and created official garbage dumps. Not yet done, he ordered the construction of a great dock for unloading and loading ships’ cargoes. But he also resisted establishing poor relief, refused to finance orphanages and hospitals and would not mandate public schools, despite the great demand.
Stuyvesant did, however, liberally use public funds to maintain and enlarge the fort and the church, and he ordered that a great ditch or planked canal be run through the town. Although there was much grumbling about changing the old ways, Stuyvesant undoubtedly made the town a better place to live.
It was his paternalistic authoritarian style that irritated people the most; he made decisions and enacted taxes, sometimes unpopular ones, without consultation or warning. To many he was nothing other than the head of the company, a man who looked after its needs first and foremost, which was to a certain extent true: Stuyvesant was loyal and steadfast in protecting his employer’s interests, but not exclusively so. Many of his improvements to the settlement and the colony cost money, money that otherwise could have been sent back to the company’s headquarters as profit. Perhaps most galling to the colonists, however, was his maintenance and enforcement of the company’s monopoly in all the colonists’ trade activities, including their dealings with the native peoples. The place could not thrive with these shackles on human initiative, many complained.
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