Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  Dutch popular reaction seemed to aim itself less at the English and French enemies than at De Witt. There had always been a tremendous amount of warmth toward the princes of Orange among ordinary people; republicanism was an abstraction for many, but a brave young hero whose image could be stamped on pamphlets and posters was something they could appreciate. That populist feeling could be kept in check as long as everything was going well, but now it came rushing to the fore. Why had De Witt colluded with foreigners to keep their young prince from power? Why had he dispersed the army, which should have been there to protect them? Would Willem have let this happen? To appease the people, De Witt gave Willem, who was now twenty-two, an honorary title: captain-general. But it was too late—everything changed in an instant. People woke up to find their country overrun, and they blamed the disaster on their elite, out-of-touch leaders, with their effete theories. De Witt became the object of instant ridicule. While other countries had monarchs who trained with their troops, De Witt had translated Descartes’s mathematical principles into Dutch. What did a country need more in a leader: an intellectual or a soldier? Under extreme pressure, in July of 1672, just four months after the military invasion began, the States of Holland tore up the agreement to bar Willem of Orange from becoming stadholder and named him to that office.

  The following month, Johan De Witt was attacked by a would-be assassin and wounded. Unable to function, he resigned. But the popular rage against him had reached explosive levels. A crowd in The Hague set on him and his brother just outside the Binnenhof, the seat of government. They were cut with knives, shot, hanged, dismembered, and set afire. The popular account of De Witt’s death ends with his roasted corpse being devoured by the insane mob. We have no way of knowing how much truth is in the cannibalism story, but it certainly says something about how deeply De Witt and other Dutch republicans misjudged the people’s feelings for liberalism.

  Spinoza was living in The Hague at the time of De Witt’s murder. The German philosopher Leibniz (who had attacked him in print but now wanted to become his friend) visited some time later and gave a recollection of the dark day. “He told me that on the day of the murder of the De Witts he felt impelled to go out in the evening and exhibit in the neighborhood of the crime a poster with the words ‘Lowest Barbarians!’ But his landlord had locked the door to prevent his going out and incurring the risk of being torn to pieces.”

  Four years later, in 1677, Baruch Spinoza died at the age of forty-four, apparently from lung disease. His last years, following the murder of De Witt and the end of his dream of a democratic state, were introspective. He rethought his ideas and recast them in soberer terms. He still believed democracy the best form of government, but now he understood better its inherent problems. “Men are of necessity liable to passions,” he wrote, and “prone to vengeance more than mercy.”

  De Witt, Spinoza concluded, had been naive. And so had he. The year 1672 lives on in Dutch memory as the rampjaar, “disaster year.” The country was invaded and overrun. A whole portion of captured territory would never again be Dutch. Much of the land was intentionally flooded in an effort to block the invaders, leaving a sodden mess: a landscape in retrogression. The republican form of government had collapsed. The soaring Dutch economic miracle came to an end. In an astoundingly short time, Amsterdam’s era as a prime influence on the world was over. The city’s great philosopher of liberalism was dead and disgraced. And so, apparently, was liberalism itself.

  Part Three

  CHAPTER

  7

  SEEDS OF INFLUENCE

  Very occasionally when you are researching the past and trying to perform the sleight-of-hand task of resuscitating people who are long dead, you get a bit of unexpected help from something as lifeless as a four-hundred-year-old piece of paper. Before me is a page from a bound volume in the Amsterdam City Archives. The book is the ondertrouwregister, the betrothal register, in which seventeenth-century residents of the city were required to record their intention to marry. At the top of the page, in a looping script that has faded to a pale brown, it says, in antiquated Dutch:

  the 13th of January 1624 Appeared as before Joris Raparlie from Valenciennes, borat worker, age 19 years, residing on the Walenpad, and Catharina Triko from Parijs Pris in vrankrijck Wallonsland, accompanied by Mary Flamengh, her sister, residing in the Nes, age 18.

  What lifts this bit of bureaucratic scribble up out of the fathomless black sea of past-tense minutiae and makes it possible to relive a scene from centuries ago are the crossed-out words, which I have left in the original Dutch spelling.

  Before I set that scene I will restate the theme of this book to remind the reader of where we are going. As the city of Amsterdam grew to become, briefly, a world center, it developed a number of institutions and ways of seeing and doing that are elements of what we can broadly call liberalism: an ideology centered on beliefs about equality and individual freedom that is the foundation of Western society. The world’s first stock market; a society focused on the concerns and comforts of individuals, one that is run by individuals acting together rather than by some outside force; the concept of tolerance, whether regarding religion, ethnicity, or other differences; art that is bound up with the experience of the individual human being and the desire to know just who each of us is; the family home as a uniquely special place: these are all parts of liberalism in the broadest meaning of the word. The second part of the book’s theme is that Amsterdam’s liberalism was exported in several ways and thus, from several directions, came to influence who we are today.

  Of course, a city is an amorphous thing, and a city’s influence is even more amorphous. Ideas can’t be pinned down like butterfly wings. Yet I think there is a lot of truth in this theme, and value in pondering it. As an outsider who came to live in Amsterdam and was struck over and over by how these forces that govern our world today shaped and molded the city as they developed along with it, I had the idea that one could see Amsterdam as a template for understanding those forces and for reflecting on their value. That was my motivation for writing about Amsterdam and liberalism. Pretty much as soon as the city’s golden age was over, its liberal innovations became less influential, at least until the twentieth century, when Amsterdam became synonymous with lower-case liberalism. But those innovations from the seventeenth century would spread outward in all sorts of ways. This chapter, then, leaves the city and traces some of its lines of influence. And one of the paths by which Amsterdam’s liberalism moved out into the wider world involves these two Flemish teenagers.

  We don’t know when Joris Rapalje and Catalina Trico (to give the more often used spellings of their names) first arrived in Amsterdam. They were poor immigrants from the south who joined the thousands of people heading to the vibrant city in search of a better life. Apparently they did not find it on the canals of Amsterdam, and so they signed up for a colonizing expedition.

  Following the extravagant successes of the early years of the VOC, whose theater of operation was the East Indies, some rich men in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities wanted to do the same thing in what is today called the Atlantic Rim. After all, there were also riches to be plundered in the Americas, the Caribbean islands, and western Africa. A sister company, the Dutch West India Company, came into being in 1621, and by 1623 it had raised seven million guilders: enough to fund any global enterprise. Like the East India Company, it received a government charter and a regional monopoly.

  With the West India Company established, the exploratory trip that the Englishman Henry Hudson had made in 1609 while in the pay of the VOC, which failed to reach Asia by a westerly route but charted portions of the eastern seaboard of North America, took on new significance. The Dutch had claimed the territory Hudson had charted but had done little with it beyond a few more exploratory missions and some freelance fur-trading ventures. Now there was a reason to use it. The colony was given a name: New Netherland. And of course a colony needed colonists. In the midst of the golden a
ge, finding young Dutch men and women who wanted to leave behind their highly evolved civilization and venture into a fathomless wilderness was difficult, but there were lots of recent immigrants who were willing. In particular, a large number of Walloons—French-speaking people from the region of the southern Netherlands known as Wallonia, which is today part of Belgium—had made their way to Amsterdam in recent years, and, by offering land in exchange for six years of their service, the West India Company managed to interest a few dozen of these to be its first settlers.

  For some of them the prospect of a new life in the wilderness had a matchmaking effect: better to face the unknown as a couple than alone. Joris Rapalje and Catalina Trico apparently made it a condition of their going that the West India Company would help them bend the law, which stated that couples seeking to get married had to register three weeks before their wedding, so that anyone with objections could speak up. Their ship left port January 25, 1624, and the document in which the couple registered their intention to marry is dated only twelve days before.

  The document tells us that Joris was nineteen and came from Valenciennes, a city that today lies in northern France, on the Belgian border. He gave his profession as “borat worker,” that is, someone involved in the production of a cloth made from wool. Some maps of seventeenth-century Amsterdam show a little path called the Walenpad near the Walloon Church that he and Catalina would be married in eight days later—a sweet and plain little church that still exists, on one of the city’s oldest canals, and still offers weekly services in French.

  Catalina was a year younger than her fiancé. She brought her sister along as a witness and gave her place of residence as the Nes: the same street where Dirck van Os lived and where he opened up his home to those who wanted to register to become shareholders in the VOC. We know that the would-be bride and groom were illiterate, since they made marks at the bottom of the page in place of signatures.

  It is the confusion over Catalina’s place of birth—and the crossed-out words in the register—that brings the moment to life. So here is our little scene: The couple—nervous, surely, at the impending voyage into the beyond, not to mention at the prospect of marriage—stands in the sacristy of the Old Church in Amsterdam, which at this time was being used as an office by the commissa-rissen voor huwelijkse zaken, the commissioners for marital affairs. In response to one of the commissioner’s standard questions, “Where were you born?” the young woman pronounces a syllable: PREE. Knowing her native language is French, the commissioner assumes that she is telling him she is from Paris and that she is pronouncing it in the French manner. He writes it, giving it the Dutch spelling, Parijs, and then says aloud, in confirmation, “Parijs,” pronouncing it in the Dutch way: Pah-RAICE. Whereupon the girl realizes the mistake. “No, no,” she tells him. “I’m not from Paris. I’m from a village called Pris.” The commissioner crosses out “Parijs” and writes “Pris.” He assumes this village is in France (which today it is, just over the Belgian border, though it is now called Prisches), and writes “in vrankrijck,” the seventeenth-century Dutch spelling for France, and at the same time says it aloud. “No!” she must have said again. “It’s not in France. It’s in the Walloon country.” So he crosses out “vrankrijck” and writes “Wallonsland.” Thus the occasionally wonderful fact of human error gives us a window onto a quietly momentous scene: the coming together in Amsterdam of two illiterate teenaged peasants who would help set American history in motion.

  Eight days later the couple were married, and four days after that they joined a few dozen other young Walloons who clambered aboard the ship Eendracht, or “Unity,” riding at anchor off the North Sea island of Texel, and set sail into the icy hoar of a North Sea winter. After an ocean crossing that would become commonplace in the coming years but is scarcely imaginable today in its hardship—three months of pitching in Atlantic swells, with most of the time spent crammed into the between decks—they sailed into the grand amphitheater of a New World harbor, its shores bristling with pines, oaks, and hickories, the land beyond unfathomable in its scope and promise.

  The colonists set about making the vastness theirs. The easiest way of doing this was by naming it. A point at the far southern extent they called Cape May, after Cornelis May, one of the first skippers to bring settlers. To the north, they gave a place the name Rhode Island because from the sea it looked red and like an island. Everything between those points was their colony, their New Netherland. Many of the other names they applied to their landscape would also stick, even if the spelling sometimes changed: Breuckelen (Brooklyn), Haerlem, Staten Island, Long Island, East River, Tappan Zee, Vlackebosch (Flatbush), Vlissingen (Flushing), Boswijck (Bushwick), Catskill, Conyne (Coney) Island.

  The English had also recently planted colonies in North America, to the north and the south, so the Dutch were eager to establish their presence over their whole territory. A few families were packed off south, to what they called the South River, which in time became known as the Delaware River. Others went north, up the Hudson River, to found a settlement near the juncture of the Hudson and the Mohawk Rivers; from this place, they would trade with the Indians for beaver pelts. Joris and Catalina initially joined this group. There, at a place the Dutch would name Beverwijck (either after the Dutch city of that name or in honor of the animal that was the town’s raison d’être), which the English would rename Albany, Catalina gave birth to a child, Sarah. It was an event with significance for the whole colony, for when she was a grown woman Sarah Rapalje referred to herself with apparent pride as the “first born christian daughter in New Netherland.”

  Relations with the natives were mostly good at first (the Indians were “all as quiet as lambs and came and traded with all the freedom imaginable,” Catalina remembered in her old age). Then came an incident in which West India Company soldiers involved themselves in a dispute between two tribes, the Mohawk and the Mahicans. Four Dutchmen were killed. The news spread across the hundreds of miles of wilderness that separated the little clusters of colonists. It caused fear and led to a reorganization. A new leader was chosen, a man named Peter Minuit. One of his first orders was to bring the far-flung settlers together. The original thought was to make a small island in the harbor, today called Governors Island, the capital. Minuit chose a different spot and, following standard Dutch business practice, purchased the island where it was to be built, which the Indians called Mannahatta. Thus Catalina and Joris became Manhattanites.

  The capital city of the colony, built at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, is commonly known as New Amsterdam but in fact its name was Amsterdam in New Netherland. It bore a genetic relationship to its parent. For one thing, it looked like a junior version of Amsterdam. The inhabitants built gabled town houses, dug a canal, and erected two windmills. There was a public weigh house, like the one in Amsterdam. Peace was kept by companies of guardsmen, like those that Rembrandt painted.

  There were more important borrowings from Amsterdam. The genetic imprint of the parent city wasn’t clear at the beginning because the West India Company initially tried to run the place along the lines of the VOC in Asia, as a military/trading post in which it had a monopoly on trade. The company wasn’t prepared to establish a full settlement colony. Settlement colonies were a feature of the English empire, which is one reason English is so widespoken in the world today. The narrower Dutch system, in which forts were manned by soldiers and traders who sailed back home after their postings were complete, proved very good at building up a global empire in an astonishingly short time, but it would also be one of the reasons that empire did not last and why, when it collapsed, it did so very suddenly.

  But New Amsterdam was different from Agra, Mandalay, Palem-bang, or the hundreds of other VOC outposts. Here, within a short time, people began buying land, marrying, setting up an orphanage and schools. In other words, they were forming a society. The archives of the colony, which are housed in the New York State Archives in Albany, are bewilderingly ric
h, some twelve thousand pages of court cases, council minutes, and correspondence that run from high politics (negotiating a boundary treaty with the governors of New England, which did not hold but which still defines the borders of several U.S. states) to low comedy (a prostitute measuring her customers’ penis length on a broomstick). These records show Joris and Catalina fully participating as members of the growing community. They start modestly: renting a milk cow from the company, borrowing sixty guilders from the deacons of the church, which they promise to pay back at 5 percent interest. In 1637, Joris buys land for a farm across the river from New Amsterdam, and in 1660 he and his neighbors there request permission to form a hamlet: one piece of the early development of Brooklyn.

  The records show the development of a society and the foundation of a city—the city that would become New York. To the inhabitants of New Amsterdam, it wasn’t an outpost; it became home. And to make it home, they brought the home country to it. They transported farm animals, cherry trees, clay pipes to puff in the evening, brandy to sip, lace, delftware pottery, stolid Dutch furniture. They built their city with slender yellow bricks forged in Dutch kilns that they used as ballast on the voyages over and that centuries later turned up in building sites in Lower Manhattan. (Sitting on my mantel in Amsterdam is one of these artifacts of the transference of culture from old Amsterdam to new. The brick was given to me by the historian Leo Hershkowitz, who as a graduate student in New York in the 1960s knew what the ground held, befriended work crews who were digging foundations for skyscrapers, and scavenged the “junk” that they unearthed and tossed away. I take a strange pleasure in having brought this small chunk of Amsterdam in its golden age, which literally served as a building block of what became New York City, back to where it was made.)