The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  a second time: See Siminoff, Crossing the Sound, 41, for Dutch customs; also Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  “For though hee hath no Kingly Robes”: Wood, New England’s Prospect (London, 1643), 79–80; quoted in Kupperman, Settlement, 143–44.

  “a great bunch of hayre”: “muppacuck,” “neyhommauog”: Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (London: 1643; reprinted, ed. John J. Teunissen and Evelyn J. Hinz, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), 186.

  wampum: Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 141–42.

  “They are a very understanding generation”: Kupperman, Settling, quoting from Alexander Whitaker, Good News from Virginia (London, 1613), 86.

  “Cloth, inclining to white”: Williams, Key, 216; also see Settling, 33–44.

  “according to the usual custom”: Confirmation of a deed of sale, March 23, 1653, signed by John Herbert, Robert Seeley, Daniell Lane, and Giles Sylvester, recorded Jan. 28, 1661. Southold Town Records Copied and Explanatory Notes Added by J. Wickham Case, 2 vols. (New York: S. W. Green’s Sons, 1882, 1884), 158–59.

  permanent underclass: John Strong, “Indian Labor During the Post-Contact Period on Long Island, 1626–1700,” in To Know the Place: Exploring Long Island History, ed. Joann P. Krieg and Natalie A. Naylor (Interlaken, NY: Heart of the Lakes, 1995), 23.

  the island seemed preferable: “Ambusco late Sachem of South-hold hath liberty to remove wth his family to Shelter Island to abide there with Mr. Sylvesters permission, but no others to be admitted to come on, or to follow him, wthout particular leave,” Oct. 16, 1675. Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, eds., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York: Procured in Holland, England, and France (Albany: Weed, Parsons, 1853–87, 1858), 14:703.

  Unlike Wyandanch: Lion Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres (Hartford, CT: Acorn, 1901), 27, 29, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/38.

  fire-hardened tips: Strong, Algonquian Peoples, 86. Strong bases his description on an excavation in New Jersey.

  “deny entrance”: For housing, see Strong, Algonquian Peoples, 86–88.

  Indian domestic fires burned: For the details of daily life in this passage, see Bragdon, Native People, 106–7.

  mâuo: Bragdon, Native People, 106.

  Huge bonfires: Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres, 26.

  “warm and thicke woodie bottomes”: Williams, Key, 128.

  “half a hundred”: Paul J. Lindholt, ed. John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler: A Critical Edition of Two Voyages to New-England (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1988), 91.

  civil society: Kupperman, Settling, 4–5, 141–48.

  “Indian barnes”: For food preparation and storage, see Strong, Algonquian Peoples, 100–104.

  “All the neighbors”: Williams, Key, 170.

  three feet across: Strong, Algonquian Peoples, 96.

  Indians didn’t deserve their land: See William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 54–81.

  “choaking weede”: Wood, New England’s Prospect, 94.

  Hobbemok: See Bragdon, Native People, 236, for Indian graveyards located near or within sight of water.

  “a generall Custome”: Williams, Key, 191.

  step across the threshhold: James Hammond Trumbull, “Natick Dictionary,” Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 25 (Washington, DC, 1903), quoted in Bragdon, Native People, 193.

  “description solidifies”: John Updike, Self-Consciousness, quoted by Paul A. Robinson in “Lost Opportunities: Miantonomi and the English in Seventeenth-Century Narragansett Country,” in Northeastern Indian Lives 1632–1816, ed. Robert S. Grumet (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 15.

  ninety thousand Indians: Bragdon, Native People, 25–28; Siminoff, Crossing the Sound, 76.

  God had deserted the Indians: Kupperman, Settling with the Indians, 5–6, 115–18.

  “from the Birth”: Williams, Key, 97.

  “Shall I sleep here?”: Williams, Key, 106; “Cuppaimish,” Williams, Key, 216. Williams compiled his “dictionary” on his way back to England on a visit; he wrote his observations when the book was about to be published, and his comparisons between the Indians and his own countrymen are often to the detriment of the English, who were then in the midst of civil war and social upheaval.

  a Spanish “cob”: Jack Gary, “Material Culture and Multi-Cultural Interactions at Sylvester Manor,” in Hayes and Mrozowski, Historical Archaeology of Sylvester Manor, 100–12, 106.

  The spoken language: Bragdon, Native People, 28–29; Siminoff, Crossing the Sound, 16.

  two English traders: John Stone and John Oldham. See Strong, Algonquian Peoples, 154–56, and Richter, Before the Revolution, 161–68.

  as slaves: See Margaret Ellen Newell, “The Changing Nature of Indian Slavery in New England, 1670–1720,” in Re-Interpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience, ed. Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, distributed by the University of Virginia, 2003) 106–36. For the persistence of Indian bound labor, see the case of an “Indian Boye called Sharper” employed as a servant by Brinley Sylvester in 1726, New Connecticut State Library, Record Group 3, New London County Court, Native Americans (vol. 23, folder 21), June 1726, John Pickett v. John Buroughs re: Sharper.

  ineffectively enforced legislation: New York Council Minutes, Dec. 5, 1679, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 13:537.

  marriage of Indian women: Newell, “Changing Nature,” 127–28; John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the Colonial North (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 172–79.

  their final victory: Siminoff, Crossing the Sound, 72–74.

  growth of the European fur trade: See Richter, Before the Revolution, 151–60.

  six beads for a penny: Wampum first became legal tender in New England in 1637, http://www.dickshovel.com/meto.html.

  “ye English”: Gardiner, Relation, 25.

  King Philip’s War: See Eric B. Schultz and Michael J. Touglas, King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).

  hard cider and West Indian rum: In 1675, Sylvester complained to Governor Edmund Andros of New York Colony about the behavior of drunken Indians threatening violence “to the disquiet of others, not least himself & whole ffamily.” Katherine Lee Priddy, “On the Mend: Cultural Interaction of Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans on Shelter Island, New York” (master’s thesis, University of Massachusetts Boston, 2002), 38, and Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 14:703.

  “Before entering [a harbor]”: Giovanni da Verrazzano, The Voyages of Giovanni da Verrazzano, 1524–28, ed. Lawrence C. Wroth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 137–38, quoted in Bragdon, Native People, 4–5.

  invasive rhizomes and extinction: John L. Strong argues that the cattail analogy doesn’t hold for Long Island’s Algonquians in “The Reaffirmation of Tradition Among the Native Americans of Eastern Long Island,” Long Island Historical Journal 7, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 42–67; and in We Are Still Here: The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island Today (Interlaken, NY: Empire State Books, rev. ed. 1998). On June 15, 2010, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Shinnecock Nation received official recognition from the United States federal government.

  3. AMSTERDAM

  The archaeologist Paul Huey: New York State archaeologist Paul R. Huey, Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, at Sylvester Manor, June 2000.

  in Gouda: Herman Janse, Building Amsterdam (Amsterdam: De Brink, 2001), 42–43; and “‘Gouda’ Bricks Found at Whippingham Church,” http://freespace.virgin.net/roger.hewitt/iwias/gouda
.htm.

  foundations and chimneys: Anne P. Hancock, “The Changing Landscape of a Former Northern Plantation: Sylvester Manor, Shelter Island, New York” (master’s thesis, University of Massachusetts Boston, 2002), 77.

  Atlantic slave trade: See Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Johannes Postma, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003); Johannes Postma, “A Reassessment of the Atlantic Slave Trade”; Henk den Heijer, “The West African Trade of the Dutch West India Company, 1674–1740,” in Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817, eds. Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2003), 115–38, 139–69; and Stuart B. Schwartz, “A Commonwealth within Itself: The Early Brazilian Sugar Industry, 1550–1670,” in Tropical Babylons, Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 158–200.

  Europe’s center: Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Republic and Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), introduction, ch. 5, and appendices.

  English traveler: Brereton, Travels in Holland, 1:65.

  flush the canals: Paul Spies, Koen Kleijn, Jos Smit, and Ernest Kurpershoek, eds., The Canals of Amsterdam (The Hague: SDU Uitgeverij Koninginnegracht, 1993).

  Mary, nineteen: For the civil marriage, July 6, 1613, see Jakob Gijsbert De Hoop Scheffer, History of the Free Churchmen Called the Brownists, Pilgrim Fathers, and Baptists in the Dutch Republic, 1581–1701 (Ithaca, NY: Andrus & Church, 1922), 194; Hoff, “Sylvester Family,” Part Two: “The Arnold Family of Lowestoft, Suffolk, England; Amsterdam; and Southold, Long Island,” NYGBR 125, no. 2 (April 1994): 89–93.

  English merchants: Jessica Dijkman, “Giles Silvester, An English Merchant in Amsterdam,” research paper commissioned for the Sylvester Manor Project, Griswold Papers, Fales Library, NYU, February 2003.

  English-sounding names: Dijkman, “Giles Sylvester”, 13, and Appendix 2.

  documents: Dijkman, “Giles Sylvester,” Appendix 1, 25–26.

  400 to 800 pounds: Arthur P. Middleton, Tobacco Coast: A Maritime History of the Chesapeake Bay in the Colonial Era (Newport News, VA: Mariners Museum, 1953, Maryland Paperback Bookshelf Edition, 1984), 113.

  “A dispute”: NAA 942/1171.

  merchant with an account: Amsterdam Exchange Bank services included a free transfer service for account holders, bills of exchange, and the issue of a stable currency. Janse, Building Amsterdam, 6–7; Violet Barbour, Capitalism in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966).

  business contacts: See NAA 141/fo 48v–49 v; Keith L. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of the English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1982), 379; NAA 849/123, August 22, 1647.

  business dealings: Giles sold saffron in Amsterdam to a German merchant on behalf of an English merchant, Hendrick Congem. NAA 134, fo 173v, February 7, 1614.

  New Merchants: Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993; new edition, London: Verso, 2003), 111–12, 114–15, 159–69; and Dijkman, “Giles Silvester,” 17.

  tightrope act: Schama, Embarrassment, 609.

  boundary-crosser’s realm: a term used to describe New England’s liminality in the period. Siminoff, Crossing the Sound, 2.

  the law: George Dennis vs.William Maskelyne & Company and Philip Best (with NS as attorney), on Sept. 29, 1665, “Transcript of Trial Involving Nathaniel Sylvester (Original 1665),” SMA, NYU IV/H/4/106/25. See a later appeal (undated) from Governor Richard Nicolls, who signed himself “your affectionate friend and loving servant,” to induce NS to conclude the matter and render a lesser amount to Dennis.

  Virginian tobacco: NAA NA 720/46, Feb. 6, 1626, Dijkman, “Giles Silvester,” Appendix 1, 25.

  his wife, Mary: Giles died either in the Netherlands or in England sometime between May 11, 1651 (NAA 1695/1093, last entry in the Amsterdam Archive for Giles), and Nov. 19, 1652, when “the widow and Heirs of Gyles Sylvester,” apparently on Barbados, successfully petitioned the Committee for Plantation Affairs that they were “not to bee looked upon as Dutch but as English” (Cal. State Papers Col. Series 1574–1660, 393, Nov. 19, 1652). She returned to London before Jan. 26, 1658, when she is mentioned in the will of her son, Peter (British NA Prob 11/273).

  June 1664: Mary died in London before June 28, 1664, see Giles Sylvester, Barbados, to JWJr, New London, June 28, 1664, MHS Proc., ser. 2, 4 (1887–89): 280, and Robert C. Black III, The Younger John Winthrop (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 240–45.

  crisscrossing: Letters (May 29, 1658; June 28, 1664; September 16, 1664; and May 30, 1666) from Giles II (c.1632–d. betw. May 2, 1670, and Apr. 7, 1671) to JWJr, illustrate the family’s transatlantic traffic. Constant (c.1614–1671) is found in Barbados, New England, or the Netherlands in the 1650s, and later in London or Brampton, Yorkshire. Peter (c.1631–will proved Feb. 11, 1658) was also an Atlantic traveler; NS (c.1620–will proved Oct. 2, 1680), once on Shelter Island, apparently traveled only locally with the exception of a single trip in 1661 to England with his wife; Joshua (c.1626–d. June 21, 1706) moved to Shelter Island before Sept. 7, 1660. MHS Proc., ser. 2, 4 (1887–89): 275–77 and 278–82; Hoff, “Sylvester Family,” 13–18.

  trip to England: P. W. Coldham, The Complete Book of Emigrants, 1661–99: A Comprehensive Listing Compiled from English Public Records of Those Who Took Ship to the Americas, etc. (Baltimore: Genealogical, 1990), 20.

  Charlton Adam: “‘[1613] July 6, Giles Silvester from Adamchartle,’ List of Marriages of English People Living at Amsterdam, etc.,” Scheffer, History of the Free Churchmen, 194; “[Giles] Silvester of Adam Charlton … now resident in Amsterdam,” NAA 849/123, Aug. 22, 1647. After Giles’s death, c.1651, his sons Constant and Peter stated that their father was “borne in Salisbery in ye County of W—— [Wiltshire].” Hoff, “Sylvester Family,” 14.

  “Brownists”: Scheffer, History of the Free Churchmen, 1–9; Michael E. Moody, “Browne, Robert (1550?–1633)” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3695.

  Vlooienburg: “Flea Town,” perhaps a reference to the district’s low status.

  “Of this sect”: Keith L. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, 68.

  double standard: Howard H. Brinton, Friends for 350 Years (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 2002), 170–72.

  wife swapping: The “Family of Love” basing their beliefs on the works of the mystic Hendrick Niclaes (c.1502–1580), held that the true believer “possessed the spiritual power of God.” Since “non-Familist readers … read H. N. [Niclaes] as dispensing with the ordinary moral code,” contemporary critics repeatedly slung accusations of sexual license at them. John Evelyn (1620–1706), diarist and gardener, stumbling on a Familist community in East Anglia, wrote that they thought of themselves as “a sort of refined Quakers.” Nathaniel and Grizzell became Quakers around 1657. Christopher W. Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 20; John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 868, quoted in Marsh, The Family of Love, 260.

  into exile: Scheffer, History of the Free Churchmen, 13; Michael E. Moody, “Johnson, Francis (bap. 1562, d. 1617)” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14877.

  “schism and bad manners”: Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, 59, 80.

  one Elder: Christopher Lawne, The Prophane Schism of the Brownists or Separatists, with the Impiety, Dissensions, Lewd and Abominable Vices of That Impure Sect, Discovered 1612, quoted in Keith L. Sprunger, Trumpets from the Tower: Engl
ish Puritan Printing in The Netherlands, 1600–40 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1994), 106. “Mansfield the Stripper,” as Lawne calls the Elder, was excommunicated after Lawne’s pamphlet appeared.

  biblical authority: Markus P. M. Vink, “Freedom and Slavery: The Dutch Republic, the VOC World, and the Debate over the ‘World’s Oldest Trade,’” South African Historical Journal 59 (2007): 19–46.

  John Paget: Keith L. Sprunger, “Paget, John (d. 1638)” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/21114.

  “Separatist assembly”: Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, 70.

  three thousand guilders: NAA 848/97.

  “birchen rod”: William Bradford, Divers Recollections of Puritan Strictness (1648), quoted in Scheffer, History of the Free Churchmen, 98.

  Henry Ainsworth: Michael E. Moody, “Ainsworth, Henry (1569–1622)” (ODNB, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/240.

  Book of Psalms: For Ainsworth’s The Book of Psalmes, Englished Both in Prose and Meeter, Imprinted at Amsterdam by Giles Thorp (1612), see Sprunger, Dutch Puritans, 58. Thorpe, a deacon and an elder of the church, had set most of Ainsworth’s works in type. Sprunger, Dutch Puritans, 76. Joseph Thorpe aged twenty-four “from London” who in 1626 married Lydia, Mary Arnold Sylvester’s sister, is probably the same Joseph Thorpe who signed the church loan document in 1634, and a relation of Giles Thorpe. Sprunger, Trumpets, 86; Hoff, “Arnold Family,” 90.

  “secretary hand”: Ambrose Heal, The English Writing-Masters and Their Copy-Books 1570–1800, A Biographical Dictionary & A Bibliography, with an Introduction on the Development of Handwriting by Stanley Morison (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1962).

  nine surviving letters: NS, Shelter Island, to JWJr, Pequitt (New London), Oct. 10, 1654, SMA, NYU I/A/140/3, and MHS collections.

  cut a quill: Heal, English Writing-Masters, xvii; Jean F. Preston and Laetitita Yeandle, English Handwriting 1400–1650: An Introductory Manual (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1999), xi.