by Mac Griswold
Yellow bricks went wherever the Dutch did. In seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings, they floor tranquil city gardens and backyards. In present-day Amsterdam, rain-polished yellow bricks shine on the residential quays. New York–bound trading vessels often carried Dutch bricks as ballast. In New York City, once New Amsterdam, they still turn up among the cobblestones of SoHo. Nathaniel and his partners used this sturdy material in the first buildings erected on Shelter Island, probably in foundations and chimneys.
Yellow bricks dovetail neatly with our image of the sturdy, benevolent, enterprising Dutch Golden Age—the decades between 1600 and 1672 when the Netherlands ruled the seas, enjoyed a higher standard of living than any other in Europe, and saw an explosion of artists and thinkers. Another set of these same bricks, however, yanks us into the murky back room behind the starched housewives and laughing cavaliers. At the Dutch trade castle Elmina, in Ghana, the steps leading up to the governor’s quarters are built of yellow Dutch brick. During that same Golden Age, the Dutch also efficiently took control of the Atlantic slave trade. Footsteps on Elmina’s brick steps echo the sound of merciless bureaucracy.
On a visit to Amsterdam’s National Maritime Museum, I look at extravagantly beautiful Dutch maps and sea charts, along with books like Dierick Ruyter’s Torch of Navigation (1623), which provided key information to sailors on trade routes to Africa. (I am startled to find that by 1614, Adriaen Block, a Dutch trader and navigator, had already mapped Long Island, the islands offshore, and the Connecticut coast.) A 1646 chart depicts Europe, Africa, and the east coasts of North and South America—Nathaniel’s world on paper. The labels in Dutch and English point out various inscriptions; one reads om slaven te halen: “(in order) to buy slaves.” The lettering runs across the South Atlantic, marking the slave carrier’s route to Brazil. And there is “Mina St. George,” Elmina, on the coast of Guinea. Across the North Atlantic, the mapmaker has labeled Adriaen Block’s Island (Block Island). And between the forks of Long Island, precisely drawn but unnamed, lies Shelter Island.
The yellow bricks at Sylvester Manor speak not only of the extent of Dutch power, but also of the scope of Nathaniel Sylvester’s ambitions. By the time Nathaniel walked out of his new house on Shelter Island in the early spring of 1653 to receive the ceremonial “turfe and twige” from Youghco, the Manhansett sachem, he had sailed around the Atlantic World for a decade as a “merchant factor,” a man in charge of buying and selling goods, his own and others’. Now, for the first time in his life, he was a propertied man. The moment must have resonated with power.
Nathaniel’s Amsterdam
Nathaniel was born in Amsterdam around 1620, when the city reigned as Europe’s center of wealth, culture, and trade. By 1634 one goggle-eyed English traveler reported that five hundred ships left Amsterdam every week. Treasure crammed the warehouses and storerooms: gold, silk, pearls and emeralds, precious spices and dyes. But nothing was more precious in Amsterdam than land. Beginning in the twelfth century, the city had literally been raised out of the marshes and rivers. Pilings shoved into the peat or the stable layer of sand thirteen feet below the surface of the mucky water formed the foundations of many buildings. Worn-out ships were filled with stones, sunk, covered with soil, and paved over. Tiny building lots exploited every square foot of made land; each inch above sea level offered incrementally more safety from the continual threat of flooding. Nathaniel lived with everyday reminders of the dangers of water: the creak and roar of windmills on the defense walls told him that water was constantly being pumped out of Amsterdam. He heard locks opening and closing to flush the canals of garbage and sewage. The city’s fluid environment was at best brackish; drinking water came at a premium. Barges delivered it to your door, or, if you were rich enough, a tiled cistern in your basement collected rainwater from the roof, the only free water in town. When Nathaniel first scouted Shelter Island, nothing could have pleased him more than the many fresh springs and ponds he found. Nothing would have seemed more familiar than the tide flushing the Upper Inlet.
Nathaniel’s parents, Giles and Mary Arnold Sylvester, lived at various addresses during their thirty-eight years in Amsterdam. Giles had emigrated to the Netherlands sometime in the first years of the new century. Mary, nineteen when she married him in 1613, was the daughter of Nathaniel Arnold, a well-to-do English merchant who had moved to Amsterdam from his native Lowestoft, England, about seven years earlier. As immigrants, Giles and Mary were not alone: during the first half of the seventeenth century, 39 percent of all newlyweds in Amsterdam came from abroad. The English, who made up one of the smaller groups of foreigners and were scattered throughout the country, numbered in the tens of thousands.
Tracking the number of English merchants in Amsterdam is no easy task: church lists, marriage records, citizenship registrations, and even the notarial archives in which the Sylvesters are so well recorded don’t always give a profession; the numbers fluctuated between 1613, the date of Giles and Mary’s Amsterdam marriage, and 1651, the last mention of Giles in the notarial archives. Identifying them by English-sounding names doesn’t work: Arnold becomes “Aernouts,” Johnson often simply “Jansz.” Between thirty and forty seems a safe estimate, however. Like a number of others, the Sylvesters were termed “interlopers,” belonging to no guild or merchant association, English or Dutch, paying duty only to the Dutch state. When the Merchant Adventurers, the monopolistic English cloth guild, agitated for the expulsion of interlopers from Amsterdam, the Dutch authorities ignored them, eager to retain the extra trade.
A House on the Singel Canal
In 1634, Giles and Mary and their five sons and two daughters were living on the Singel, or “belt,” Canal, an unusually wide and busy commercial thoroughfare that opened directly onto the harbor. This was not a fancy neighborhood. But it was respectable enough, and on the “good” west side of town. The next canal over, the entirely residential Herengracht, “Gentlemen’s Canal,” was Amsterdam’s Park Avenue. Famous architects designed grand establishments on the Herengracht and enriched their brick façades with orgies of white stone columns, carved masks, and obelisk-crowned gables. Teenaged Nathaniel had only to walk around the corner from his family’s home for a preview in brick and stone of where ambition and drive could take him. Residents of the Herengracht had rear gardens and private coach houses nearby. By contrast, dwellings and warehouses facing the Singel backed onto a mix of achterhuizen, humble trade and domestic buildings, passageways, and blind alleys, or gangen. On the canal itself, the sound of haggling over mussels, fish, fruit, coopers’ and carpenters’ wares, and chandlers’ stores for ships mingled with the clang of small manufactories.
Amsterdam’s houses often stood as tall as five stories. The Sylvesters, like their neighbors, packed family life and business into one building. Goods came to the quay by water on barges or other small craft, as well as by land on sledges or wheelbarrows. When the basement was full, a projecting crane in the front gable hoisted bulky merchandise up to the attic storeroom. When Nathaniel moved to Shelter Island, his tight clustering of the plantation housing and outbuildings within ten acres of home ground may owe as much to his memory of this Dutch economy of space as to the need for security and safety against attack by Indians or other colonists, particularly the Dutch. Despite the allure of other sites on the island’s 8,000 acres, neither he nor his descendants ever budged from this spot.
Five Barrels of Tobacco
On a bright May morning in Amsterdam, I head into the street with a translation of one of the documents concerning the Sylvesters’ early lives there. I hope to track down the location of Nathaniel’s house by following one Evert Pietersson, a “common carter,” who in mid-January 1634 lugged five barrels of tobacco on a wooden sledge from the city’s central Stock Exchange to the Sylvesters’ house. Each barrel stood about four feet tall and weighed 400 to 800 pounds. A notary’s record of his route survives because Pietersson filed a deposition with Amsterdam’s master of tobacco duties. Ac
cording to the young carter, Giles Sylvester had broken the law by failing to pay duty on the tobacco, which had been loaded off a barge from Delft. The streets and many of the houses along the way still exist. I locate the bend in the Singel where the Sylvesters lived by finding the Jan Roodenpoortstoren, a tower mentioned in Pietersson’s deposition.
To retrace the journey of the alleged contraband, I leave the sunny cobbles outside the Exchange and cut west around the Nieuwe Kerk, a Gothic church, to the tiny Vogelsdwarsstraat, where Pietersson and his heavy sledge—accompanied by the Delft captain’s servant and one of Sylvester’s employees—first ran into trouble. A producent, a municipal functionary from the customs office, flagged them down. Shouting ensued. The producent said that the captain of the barge from Delft had not paid the requisite duty. Pietersson got nervous—would anyone pay his wages if the duty went unpaid? His escorts insisted that Sylvester would hand over his stuivers on delivery. They instructed Pietersson to go on, and he did. Furious but outgunned, the producent went off to find help. He came back with Jacob Marssen, a bailiff. Marssen caught up with the fugitives at the Molsbrugge crossing on the way to the Singel. He commanded them to halt so that he could impound the five barrels. Apparently, this failed to impress Pietersson, Sylvester’s henchman, or the captain’s servant. The angry little procession of five men and the sledge pressed on—as do I. I arrive at the Singel and spot the Jan Roodenpoortstoren—or rather, its ghost. The brick tower was demolished in the nineteenth century and only white cobbles block out its footprint on the Torensluis, the wide bridge it once straddled. A summery café scene crowds the canal quay: tables and chairs, bright umbrellas, students and tourists in shorts, bicycles, the occasional dog. Music, the murmur of coffee or beer drinkers having a good time. But I am back in the January chill, hearing the rumble of sledge runners against stone and Pietersson’s labored breathing as he drags all five barrels to the top of the arched bridge, around the gate tower, and across to the far quay. The yells of the enraged bailiff and the producent ring in my ears.
Then Pietersson, nearing Sylvester’s house, anxiously asks again who is going to pay him. The collector sees his chance to stake a claim on the barrels. “I will pay you,” he says, handing the sweaty Pietersson eight stuivers—two more than the stipulated payment. The tobacco is now in the possession of the law, momentarily. The producent and the bailiff—and probably a relieved Pietersson—tip the unwieldy barrels off the sledge. At this moment Sylvester pops out of his door, sees the barrels, and faces off with the producent. The court recorder compressed Pietersson’s oral account of this encounter into one stately sentence: “A dispute arose between [the producent] and the said Gillis Silvester, who finally, with the help of the captain’s servant and the worker and his own servant, managed to roll the five barrels of tobacco back unto the sledge and brought them to his cellar, even though they had been impounded…”
Did young Nathaniel witness this fracas? What did he think? Here was his father, fifty years old, a merchant with an account at the Amsterdam Exchange Bank and a ranking position in his church organization, shouting and engaging in what amounted to physical combat with the law.
Ships unloaded their cargoes, such as tobacco, at Amsterdam’s Dam (see dot at left). The Jan Roodenpoortstoren (dot at right) marks the spot where Nathaniel’s father had a fight with a bailiff over five barrels of Virginia tobacco.
It’s not known what happened to Giles, if anything, as a consequence of Pietersson’s testimony, and the notarial records give only a few other clues to what might have been Giles’s characteristic behavior. On other occasions he was cited in court for nonpayment of debts, as were his sons. A family ship evaded the import duties of the Dutch West India Company (WIC); another got a new mast and sheathing and was seized, briefly, for nonpayment to the shipwright. But this was par for the course in a world in which it took at least six weeks to consummate a transoceanic deal involving multiple ports; bills of exchange and IOUs were sometimes held for years. On the other hand, Giles acted as a trusted interpreter for other English merchants, stood surety for fellow traders, and maintained powerful business contacts among his compatriots in the Netherlands, London, and Barbados. He’s called “the honorable Giles Sylvester” or “Mr.” and appears as a creditable witness “known to me” by the notary.
Giles’s business dealings recorded in the notarial archives date to 1614. Although he may have brought capital from England, it’s likelier that his in-laws financed him initially. Giles did well in Amsterdam, laying a basis of wealth and connections that would help his sons to become part of what the historian Robert Brenner has called the New Merchants, the founding fathers of American colonial commerce. Often younger sons of English country gentry or prosperous yeomen, they wanted to take their chances without the protection of the state or the privileges, market monopolies, and fees of the established guilds and the London merchants’ chartered trading companies.
Global traffic crowds the harbor in Pieter van der Keere’s 1618 Profile of Amsterdam Seen from the IJ.
Such freedom went hand in hand with religious freedom, a characteristically Dutch tightrope act involving both church and state authorities, according to the historian Simon Schama. Where the church condemned, the state overlooked, and vice versa, whether the issue was the status of immigrants, regulation of trade, or acceptance of prostitution as a fact of life in a port city. Whatever acceptance the Sylvesters won in Amsterdam thanks to the flexible quality of Dutch culture, they were nevertheless outsiders (and determined to remain so), set apart by their extreme puritanism and their desire to safeguard their English national status. Nathaniel would also resist being an insider: during his lifetime, Shelter Island remained largely in a fluid boundary-crosser’s realm while the Dutch, English, and Indians maneuvered against one another, mounting conflicting claims. At the same time, as a merchant he resorted to the law in his trade dealings with other merchants when absolutely necessary or when expedient. And after his conversion in 1657 to the nascent Society of Friends he supported the tight, persecuted community of his fellow Quakers.
The Sylvesters’ Atlantic transactions began small, with a single load of Virginian tobacco that Giles Sylvester offered to buy from a Dutch trader in Amsterdam in 1626. The entire cosmopolitan family was fluent in Dutch, which would serve them well within the Netherlands’ seaborne empire. Over the next sixty years, as Nathaniel and his elder brother, Constant, planted themselves on Shelter Island and Barbados, the ocean itself also remained home. The speed and frequency of their travels run counter to our conception of the American colonist braving the dangers of waves and wilderness, settling in the New World, and never leaving the farm. After Giles’s death in 1651, his wife, Mary, went to live in London. She then may have spent time on Barbados with Constant, by then already a successful sugar planter, before returning to London, where she died before June 1664 at the ripe old age of sixty-nine. Daughter Mercie had emigrated to Bedfordshire by 1657. By the 1650s, two of the younger sons, Peter and Giles II, had also returned permanently to England from Amsterdam but joined their older brothers in the family business, continually crisscrossing the Atlantic. Nathaniel and Grizzell would also make a trip to England in 1661. Not rootless, but peripatetic and relentlessly entrepreneurial, Nathaniel and his five brothers were elbows-out businessmen, carrying every commodity from horses to salt to wine from port to port, taking advantage of each opportunity to broaden their trade circuits, always jockeying for the best prices.
God’s Word
We have no idea how and why Giles left the tiny village of Charlton Adam, Somerset, where he was born around 1584. Assessing his chances as a young man without apparent capital or connections who wanted to become a merchant, he may have wanted to escape the stranglehold of the English mercantile companies. Or, like Plymouth’s Pilgrims, he may have fled religious persecution at home. Or both. Certainly he and his wife’s family, the Arnolds, defined themselves spiritually as members of a dissident Protestant sect
that had fled England to escape persecution in 1596. One of the sects that were lumped together as “Brownists” or “Anabaptists” by their Anglican adversaries, also called Separatists because they had split with the Church of England, these exiles settled in a part of Amsterdam known as the Binnen Amstel, an area that had then only recently been enclosed within the city walls. Not a particularly desirable neighborhood, it attracted immigrants of all nationalities with cheap housing. Most Separatists were miserably poor, having left behind their English livelihoods; few spoke Dutch on arrival. Within his own congregation, Nathaniel saw the marginal existence that dissenters were willing to endure for their faith.
Giles and Mary’s stretch of the Singel was a “better” neighborhood than the Binnen Amstel. Besides giving Giles ready access to wheeled traffic on a major “bridge street,” this property lay close to the Rouen Quay, a key location for dealings in the French trade. It was a forty-minute walk to church in the Vlooienburg. One of an archipelago of made islands that included industrial districts, the Vlooienburg probably had a gritty, lonely feel, but it was a safe haven for religious nonconformists. The Separatists, who called themselves the Ancient Church, worshipped in members’ houses before building the Englelse Kerk in 1607 on the Lange Houtstraat. Jews, Mennonites, Huguenots, and the occasional Muslim also lived and worshipped nearby, tolerated by the authorities though hardly embraced. Just a bit farther to the northeast stood the city leprosarium.