by Mac Griswold
At thirty-two feet, Amsterdam’s first English church was about the width of a mansion on the Herengracht. In 1610 the Pilgrim leader William Bradford (then living in Leyden) numbered the booming Separatist congregation at three to four hundred—a tight fit for so compact a building. Within a mere thirteen years, however, schism after schism would splinter the church: a 1623 report stated, “Of this sect there is not above 80.”
The European religious world between 1560 and 1660 boiled with nonconformist sects, some with political agendas: in England alone there were Familists, Arminians, Baptists and Anabaptists, Behmenists and Barrowists and Brownists, Ranters, Muggletonians, Grindletonians, Adamites, Quakers, and a half dozen others. These often coalesced around a single charismatic preacher. Many sects were short-lived. In England, most aimed to “purify” post-Reformation Protestantism, hence the name under which they have all been lumped: Puritans. They sought to sweep aside ceremonies, rituals, ordained priests, vestments, central authority, governmental ties, and above all the Book of Common Prayer. They intended to rely on a covenant organized within each congregation that used only the Bible as its guide. Some groups denied private property rights, the existence of original sin (and therefore the need for baptism), the imposition of tithes, the power of the law, and the sanctity of oaths. (Quakers would hold that swearing a judicial oath imposed a double standard of truth, one for the courtroom and one outside it.) Others espoused communal living and were frequently accused of wife swapping and free love.
In England from the 1580s through the 1630s, orthodox Anglicans panted like dogs for schismatical red meat—and they got it. Three founders of the Sylvesters’ church had been accused of high treason and two were executed in England before their congregation fled for their own lives. The third, Francis Johnson, who would become the church’s first pastor in Amsterdam, languished in prison for four years without accusation or trial. He was freed only on condition that he go into exile.
Separatist life in Amsterdam, inside and outside church, was seldom placid. Keith Sprunger, the most insightful of the Separatists’ historians, describes them as “some of the hardiest and most single-minded souls of the times … Separatists were ideological people who had staked everything on religion, and for them compromise was a thing of the past.” Sprunger notes that the Separatists’ major failings were “schism and bad manners.” Within Giles’s lifetime, believers had willingly suffered martyrdom for the sake of the Ancient Church. With God and justice on your side, what was a bout with a bailiff over some barrels of tobacco?
Nothing illuminates young Nathaniel’s world or is more important to understanding his development than the religious pamphlets of Amsterdam, the tabloids of their day. The cheapness, speed, and availability of print—combined with Dutch authorities’ general laxity toward English religious publications—produced a fantastic spout of ink. Some pamphlets frothed over the minutiae of outer display: Does the wife of an imprisoned minister flout religion if she wears a velvet hat? Others pondered true doctrinal considerations: whether marriage is a religious or a civil ceremony, or whether an entire congregation is stained by the sins of one member. An anti-Separatist pamphleteer outed one Elder of the Ancient Church for upholding the practice of severely beating those who worked for him by citing Exodus 20: 21–22, “that if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and they die not under his hand, but continue a day or two dayes, he should not be punished because they are his money.” Though this was intended as a smear, invoking biblical authority for the rights of ownership would soon justify the extreme treatment of enslaved human property.
As early as the time of Giles and Mary’s marriage in 1613, the Ancient Church had begun its decline. Over the next decades, most of the substantial English merchants defected to the respectable “English Orthodoxicall” Reformed Church, where the formidable John Paget, a onetime army chaplain, shot telling pamphlet arrows against the Separatists while maintaining his own congregation’s useful relationship with the Dutch Reformed Church. Giles and Mary remained pillars of the quarrelsome covenant in the Vlooienburgh, bound to it not only by faith but also by family ties. This “left the Separatist assembly increasingly a circle of ‘buttonmakers and weavers’—people ‘seemingly but Ordinary.’” In 1636, Mary’s oldest brother and Giles arranged for a loan of three thousand guilders for the benefit of the Ancient Church, using its building as collateral. (Judged by the standards of rich Dutch merchants, this sum is small, but the ability to raise it demonstrates that among their covenant, the Sylvesters and Arnolds had good financial contacts and reputations.) Two other brethren were also Giles’s brothers-in-law. Surrounded by uncles and aunts and many cousins in the flock, Nathaniel was a third-generation member of the church. This religious community lit a spark in Nathaniel that lasted his lifetime.
Household prayers were said morning and evening, and Sunday services stretched from eight to noon and then from two to five or six o’clock (as they would in New England meetinghouses). According to an approving William Bradford, during these long hours “one ancient widow … sat in a convenient place in the congregation, with a little birchen rod in her hand, and kept little children in great awe from disturbing the congregation.” Besides the brilliant hellfire preaching, fervent praying, and noisy general discussion, young churchgoers did get to enjoy one sensual pleasure—the music of their own voices—thanks to pastor Henry Ainsworth. An accomplished Hebrew scholar, he gave his congregation a new metrical translation of the Book of Psalms, set to well-known tunes of his choosing.
Masters and Pupils
As up-and-coming young merchants, the Sylvester boys learned to write swiftly and legibly in the classic script known as “secretary hand,” but each son made the style his own. (I’m drawn again and again to the marks of ink on the page, simultaneously trying—and denying to myself that I’m trying on such slim evidence—to distinguish individual personalities.) In Nathaniel’s nine surviving letters to John Winthrop Jr., the signature begins with an extra-long, fluid upstroke that sweeps across a quarter of the sheet. More flourishes embellish his pages than those of his brothers, as if he put more stock in formality and self-presentation. As if he were watching himself write. The Sylvesters’ writing masters were English ministers and elders of the Separatist church, many of whom were Cambridge-educated. They taught their pupils from a copybook, with woodcuts or copperplate engravings of various penmanship styles. Nathaniel most likely learned how to cut a quill, mix ink, and set pen to paper under the watchful eye of elder and sometime preacher Jean de l’Écluse, a printer as well as a teacher.
Nathaniel Sylvester’s signature from a letter to Governor John Winthrop Jr., August 8, 1653. (Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society)
When Nathaniel was about twelve, another teacher arrived: John Canne, the church’s first new pastor since Ainsworth’s death. What Nathaniel absorbed from Canne, however, were probably life lessons rather than formal schooling. Both a writer and a printer, Canne published a stream of incendiary books excoriating the Church of England (eight during a six-month period of 1637–38 alone, for example) before returning to England in the late 1640s. Canne had emigrated to Amsterdam in 1632 along with other radical Protestants; they increasingly feared persecution at the hands of their new king, Charles I, who wished to strengthen the Church of England and return his Puritan countrymen to the Anglican fold. After his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, the ultraorthodox William Laud sent agents to the Netherlands in search of religious refugees such as Canne, whom they constantly harassed, seizing books from his house in 1638. Though Canne proved wily—“[He] makes him selfe out of the way and is not to be found”—he was jailed, briefly, for illegal printing. From Canne, Nathaniel learned firsthand the dangers as well as the importance of speaking out for one’s beliefs or taking actions to defend them “for conscience’ sake.”
The Sylvesters in Amsterdam were part of a literate community of restless men and women who listened
directly to the voice of God and whose radical ideas reached each other all over the Atlantic World—in print. Practically swaddled in religious paper (broadsheets, pamphlets, and books), Nathaniel Sylvester had reading as a birthright. The 1680 Shelter Island probate inventory made after his death lists the number of books he owned—sixty—although, sadly, not the titles. The size of this library places Nathaniel among the upper half of colonial book owners in 1680. His brother-in-law Francis Brinley of Rhode Island assembled an impressive 217 volumes between the 1670s and 1713. Many colonists owned books, but usually fewer than five, most often a Bible and religious tracts. Nathaniel’s sixty probably all dealt with religious topics. But since religious discourse in the period touched on a wide range of subjects, secular as well as spiritual, he had access to a great variety of ideas about the self and the world, as well as the language needed to frame an argument and make a convincing case.
Separatists had to be strenuous debaters, because Anglicans gave as good as they got. The orthodox frequently damned radical Puritans as “Anabaptisticall.” This term arose from the heretical belief that human beings are born free of original sin and therefore do not require the spiritual cleansing of infant baptism, but can choose to be baptized as adults. Anti-Anabaptist hysteria fed upon memories of the infamous Münster Rebellion of 1534, when a radical group of millennial peasants and clerics took over the Westphalian city for eighteen months of legalized polygamy, communal property ownership—and adult rather than infant baptism. Amsterdam had its own Anabaptist outbreak the following year. Forty men and women seized the town hall, ran naked through the streets to proclaim their prelapsarian innocence, and were promptly executed.
The Ancient Church was not “Anabaptisticall”; it did baptize infants and did not rebaptize adult converts. But because for a decade after Henry Ainsworth’s death, the Ancient Church was unable to find a cleric who satisfied all their members or who was willing to preside over their fractious flock, no baptismal entries exist for many of the Sylvester children, leading historians to believe they were Anabaptists. And since no records survived the disbanding of the Ancient Church in 1701, what we know of the birth order or ages of Nathaniel and his brothers and sisters can only be determined from evidence in wills and marriage records.
To the New World
“An infinite number of ships not to be numbered lie here,” an amazed Sir William Brereton wrote on a visit to Amsterdam in 1634. Seventeenth-century panoramas of the city (and every bird’s-eye view and city map of the period) invariably include a view of the harbor on the IJ, the great estuary that stretches far inland. Pieter van der Keere’s Profile of Amsterdam Seen from the IJ (1618) shows a harborside forest of masts pricking the sky.
By the time Brereton wrote, the seagoing Dutch controlled the global trade monopoly previously held by Spain and Portugal. (When Antwerp fell into Spanish hands in 1585, the Jewish community there who had found refuge from the Inquisition in Spain left for Amsterdam along with many other southern Dutch merchants, carrying the knowledge of Portuguese and Spanish maritime routes.) At almost exactly the same time, a new type of vessel, the fluyt, or flute—longer and less beamy than the chubby merchant vessels called cogges, and therefore easier to sail close to the wind—had given the Dutch an immediate advantage. The invention of the wind-driven sawmill, which produced planks to sheath hulls much more quickly and cheaply than hand labor, revolutionized shipbuilding.
Seagoing ships did not sail out of Amsterdam directly but made their preparations for departure or unloaded cargo at Texel, largest of the string of islands between the Zuiderzee and the North Sea. The city’s inner harbor was silting up: to get to the metropolitan piers or naval facilities for refitting, large ships arriving before or after high tide had to be lifted by “ships’ camels,” floating docks that raised their keels and guided vessels across the sandbank—a painstaking, time-consuming process. Hence the importance of the deeper waters and loading facilities at Texel. Moreover, the winds that safely blew the Dutch ships out of the shoaly English Channel and onward to the west crossed this island before reaching Amsterdam. For outbound voyages, hundreds of vessels took on everything from hardtack to cannons. Merchant captains or factors, like Nathaniel and his elder brother, Constant, sometimes waited for weeks, hoping for winds to take them around the rim of the Atlantic, or to the Baltic, or the Mediterranean, or simply across the Channel to England. Waiting in the Texel “roads,” as offshore anchoring grounds are called, they were stuck aboard, unable to risk returning to the city in case a breeze sprang up.
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“Texel” is pronounced “Tessel.” The soft, almost slushy sound of the name feels like a reminder of the softness, the ambiguity, of the Dutch environment: Is it water? Is it land? Is it somewhere in between, still emerging from marsh, or dissolving, on the verge of a flood? I visit Texel in May, to see how the Sylvesters prepared themselves for a merchant voyage to the New World. The island is insanely green and covered with sheep. It’s just past lambing time by about a month, and lambs are running, playing, nursing, wagging their tails, sleeping in the sun. I remember that on Shelter Island, Nathaniel kept five hundred sheep, both for wool and for mutton to salt and ship to Barbados.
The topographical map I bought in the city marks the island’s all-important “sweet wells,” where boats used to stock up on barrels and barrels of water for the weeks of travel ahead. The past is coming closer.
In the little maritime museum in Oudeschild, the old fishing harbor, the Texel Roads panorama displays model boat making at its height. The display also obsessively records the power of the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, over several centuries. Not recorded here is the parallel course of the WIC, the Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621, which enjoyed its only splashy success shortly after its founding. In 1628, the renowned privateer Admiral Piet Heyn captured half the Spanish silver fleet on its way home from the Americas. Heyn’s booty of 11.5 million guilders was enough to give the WIC shareholders a whopping 50 percent return on their money and to finance the Dutch army for eight months. Heyn’s success apart, the tale of the WIC appears dowdy, not glamorous, its carrying trade of hats and shoes, grain and pelts eclipsed by the splendor of the VOC’s traffic in Eastern spices, silks, and jewels. Eventually, however, what the Americas produced for the Dutch exceeded the spices of the East, especially after the WIC reformed itself in 1674 to focus on the highly profitable African slave trade and the remaining Dutch possessions in the Antilles.
Texel’s museum display is laid out on a big table like a model railroad. The room is dark. The theatrically lit scene shows sea and shore crowded with maritime activities of 1660–70 (a bit late for the Sylvesters’ endeavors in the forties, but not too late to get the idea). The sound track gives us seagulls’ cries and wind and waves. We spectators are making ourselves small enough to fit through the eye of history’s needle. There’s no wharf or dock in this harbor. Lighters carry every cask and bale and all the passengers and crew from the beach to boats several hundred yards offshore. A winch lowers barrels of water from the top of the seawall to the shore below. In just this way, food, water, and cargo to ship to the West Indies—barrels of salt meat, sacks of grain, animals on the hoof (mostly horses), and bundles of staves—were rowed out from the shallow Shelter Island plantation landing to seagoing vessels anchored in deeper water.
On the mini-Texel’s plaster waves, in a gaff-rigged galjoot, a navy supply vessel, sits the artist Willem van de Velde the Elder. From him and other marine painters we know what many of the boats looked like. Here are models of the fluyt, the Dutch maritime workhorse, to study close-up. About 80 to 150 feet long, and typically manned by a crew of six to twelve, these vessels crossed the Atlantic without difficulty. The Sylvesters’ Seerobbe, the Seal, was another class of vessel—a ship, meaning it had a flat stern, or transom—but many of their other carriers were probably fluyts, the favored Dutch commercial transport.
In the Texel display, small pinks with narr
ow, snipelike sterns and bulging sides dart about, carrying local traffic. In New England much larger pinks, some forty-five to fifty feet long, transported goods as far as the West Indies or even Europe. The three-ton craft Nathaniel would commission in 1653 from a boatwright in “ye Bay” was probably a pink. As soon as it was finished, he wrote to Governor John Winthrop Jr., he would carry his bride, Grizzell, across Long Island Sound for a visit.
The day turns bright and breezy; I board a waiting tourist sailboat, the Texelstroom, for a three-hour trip along the shore. The wind freshens as we move out of the harbor. Now we head for the deep water where Nathaniel and Constant would have anchored to wait for the wind. Although captains chose this place because they could have fathoms of anchor chain to play with in heavy storms, when their ships lay too close to each other they often crashed and sank. As we sail only fathoms above the carcasses of such vessels, the dangerous past comes alive.
Back aboard the ferry that will take me to the mainland, a rusty-black crow perches on the foredeck windscreen. Sitting there quietly for the entire ride, he is a reminder of the Swarte Raven, the Black Raven, one of three Dutch vessels mentioned in the Amsterdam record that were trading on the James River in Tidewater Virginia in 1644. Nathaniel, then about twenty-four years old, was on the James too, buying tobacco to load aboard his family’s ship, the Seerobbe.
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The great coastal rivers of Virginia swarmed with Dutch traders during the first half of the seventeenth century. International traffic moved up and down the colonies as well: one Dutch vessel, the Oranjeboom, shuttled regularly from Nansemond, Virginia, to New Amsterdam. Dutch supplies—from muskets to Madeira wine to copper pots—were crucial to English colonies, especially during the English Civil War years when trade with the mother country dwindled. Nathaniel, fluent in Dutch as well as English, probably seemed more Dutch in Virginia than he did in Amsterdam, where he was unmistakably an Englishman.