by Lisa Jardine
As usual, Hooke insists that he had himself long ago made every one of the discoveries Huygens and Newton claim for themselves. This time he had clear justification for maintaining his influence, and documented the indebtednesses with measured intelligence. A group of well-disposed members attended the lectures in question, including Sir Robert Southwell, Sir John Hoskins, Waller, Edmond Halley, John Wallis, Hans Sloane ‘and divers others’.77 But Huygens and Newton had moved on.78 According to the records, Hooke’s intervention was barely registered, and nobody bothered to respond.79
The mercurial Dutch virtuoso Christiaan Huygens floats in and out of other people’s stories from his adolescence, through the Europe-wide acclaim accorded him in his prime (while he resided in Paris, as Louis XIV’s favourite scientist), down to his decline, depression and death. From his childhood he had been his influential and ambitious father’s favourite. Sir Constantijn was determined to find his second son a lucrative appointment to enable him to utilise his scientific talents, and as an anglophile his first preference would have been for Christiaan to join the scientific community in London. Between October 1661 and April 1665, Sir Constantijn shuttled between Paris and London as he negotiated the return of Orange (seized by Louis XIV) to the house of Orange. While he was at it, he lobbied people in high places to try to secure a position for his son.80
Christiaan preferred Paris. Even the festivities surrounding Charles II’s coronation did not make London seem glamorous to him. After his first visit, he wrote to his brother Lodewijk:
I had little pleasure of my visit to London … The stink of the smoke is unbearable and most unhealthy, the city poorly built, with narrow streets having no proper paving and nothing but hovels … There is little going on and nothing compared with what you see in Paris.81
In December 1666, Christiaan Huygens was appointed to a salaried position in the new Académie royale des sciences in Paris, though he was made a foreign Fellow of the Royal Society, and remained in active contact with his fellow scientists in London throughout his life.
If it is hard to imagine a biography of Christiaan’s father Sir Constantijn which does not straddle the Narrow Sea and consider him in a robustly Anglo–Dutch historical context, the same is even more true of Christiaan, whose life and career as represented in the literature of the history of science are both shadowy and contradictory – depending on whether he is being looked at in a Dutch, English or French context and milieu.
The events described in this and the preceding chapter have made it clear, I hope, that Christiaan Huygens’s claims to priority in the matter of the spring-regulated pocket watch, and pre-eminence in the field of lens-grinding, microscopy and telescopy, are inseparable from his sometimes uncannily close connections with his British and French counterparts. So let it be another of Christiaan Huygens’s involuntary international collaborations at a distance that takes us forward to the final chapter of this story – Anglo–Dutch relations in the New World.
In a letter written on 25 October 1660 from Hartford, Connecticut, where he was governor of the English colony, John Winthrop junior, son of the founder of the English colony at Jamestown, and a considerable scientist in his own right, told the English scientist and educator Samuel Hartlib that he was disappointed that his ‘Telescope of [focal length] about 10 foot doth shew little of Saturne’.82 He asked Hartlib, who acted as an intellectual go-between for scientists and practitioners across Europe, to tell him if he knew ‘the manner of the fabrique of that new Telescopium in holland’, expressing the hope that Christiaan Huygens might have described such an instrument accurately in his Systema Saturnium (System of Saturn), which Winthrop had not yet read. Huygens’s book, announcing his remarkable discovery of Saturn’s rings, had been published the previous year. Winthrop’s anticipation of a copy arriving in Connecticut is further evidence of the ease with which new publications circulated across the known world. It was another year, however, before Hartlib wrote telling Winthrop that ‘some weeks agoe’ he had sent him ‘the Systeme of Saturne with all the Cuts [illustrations]’. Winthrop was gripped by the contents of Huygens’s book, and was keen to observe the phases in Saturn’s appearance himself.
His astronomical observations were interrupted by more pressing local political concerns. Connecticut had been founded during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. Now, in 1661, Winthrop was obliged to return to England to negotiate a new charter for the colony with the returning King, Charles II. He was away for almost two years, during which time he was successful in gaining for the inhabitants of Connecticut a charter from the King, assigning them lands from the Pawcatuck River all the way westwards to the Pacific Ocean. While in England he was also made a Fellow of the Royal Society. He returned to Connecticut in 1663, and in 1664 assisted in Charles II’s seizure of the thriving Dutch settlement on Manhattan Island for the English.83
In January 1665, in the midst of unfolding events following the seizure of Manhattan, Winthrop wrote to Sir Robert Moray at the Royal Society, sending him observations of the moons of Jupiter which he had made with a refracting telescope of ’3 foote and [a] halfe with a concave ey-glasse’. Inspired by Christiaan Huygens’s book, he had, it seems, brought the English-made telescope back with him from London:
Having looked upon Jupiter with a Telescope upon 6th of August last I saw 5 Satellites very distinctly about that planet; I observed it with the best curiosity I could, taking very distinct notice of the number of them, by severall aspects with some convenient time of intermission; and though I was not without some consideration whether that fifthe might not be some fixed star with which Jupiter might at that time be in near conjunction, yet that consideration made me the more carefully to take notice whether I could discern any such difference of one of them from the other four that might by the more twinkling light of it or any other appearance give ground to believe that it might be a fixt star, but I could discern nothing of that nature.84
Winthrop turned out to be mistaken – although a fifth moon of Jupiter was indeed discovered in the nineteenth century, his telescope could not have detected it, and he is indeed most likely to have taken a fixed star, crossing the face of Jupiter, for a satellite circling the planet.
But the accuracy or otherwise of John Winthrop’s observations of Jupiter is not our concern here. What is, is that more than three thousand miles from London, in an American colony, an English astronomical enthusiast’s passion for telescopic observation had been kindled by a young Dutch astronomer who had made an exciting discovery about the planet Saturn. In 1671, Winthrop presented his reflecting telescope as a gift to the new Harvard University – its first recorded astronomical instrument. So the emerging science of astronomy in North America, with a long and distinguished future stretching ahead of it, was, it seems, in its earliest days equally indebted to English and Dutch astronomers back home.
12
Anglo–Dutch Influence Abroad: Competition, Market Forces and Money Markets on a Global Scale
We have observed the development of an unplanned affinity between the English and the Dutch in the course of the seventeenth century. As a result, encounters between them could ordinarily be eased into some kind of agreement. This was, however, decidedly not the case with relations between the two nations overseas. Aggressive commercial competition meant that wherever the paths of Dutch and English financial interests crossed, there was almost bound to be trouble. This in spite of the fact that on the whole the Dutch did not have imperial ambitions along their newly established trade routes.
The Dutch Republic was a seaborne, trading nation at heart, and its expansionist energies were driven by the search for new goods and markets, and a keen eye for potential profit. It regarded the outposts it established as a result of the highly successful activities of its Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) and West India Company (West-Indische Compagnie, or WIC) as first and foremost well-ordered trading posts, rather than colonies. These were settled points o
f exchange for goods and services, whose profits could be returned to the patria (homeland), where wealth would be invested and accumulated long-term for the benefit of the nation – or at least for the benefit of the wealthy speculators who financed longdistance, high-risk ventures.
The Royal Society’s first historian, Thomas Sprat, noted this difference between the English and the Dutch away from home. English merchants carried their way of life with them, establishing it in the new communities they encountered. Dutch merchants were entirely preoccupied with trade:
The Merchants of England live honourably in forein parts; those of Holland meanly, minding their gain alone: ours converse freely, and learn from all; having in their behaviour, very much of the Gentility of the Families, from which so many of them are descended: The others, when they are abroad, shew, that they are onely a Race of plain Citizens, keeping themselves most within their own Cells, and Warehouses; scarce regarding the acquaintance of any, but those, with whom they traffick.1
Sprat’s characterisation of the Dutch as focusing all their efforts in this period on trade and gain, thereby enriching the nation, is in many ways a fair assessment of the United Provinces’ place in seventeenth-century Europe – though here we are, readers will recall, being careful not to attribute temperaments too narrowly to nations. In this final chapter we shall see how the new initiatives in finance, taxation and exchange, which had fuelled the Dutch ‘golden age’ of culture and commerce, were gradually transferred to Britain by a process of more or less conscious emulation, long before the arrival there of William and Mary in 1688.
There was one clear exception among Dutch trading outposts overseas to their general mercantile strategy of living abroad ‘meanly, minding their gain alone’, in the first half of the seventeenth century. This was the settlement of New Netherland, strategically located at the mouth of the Hudson River, on the east coast of America.2 New Netherland was unique among the ‘factories’ or trading locations established by the Dutch East and West India Companies in developing into a thriving and productive community, closely modelled on its Low Countries roots: ‘Whereas most Dutch colonies in the seventeenth century never developed into much more than trading posts, New Netherland became the first Dutch settlement colony, preceding that of the Cape of Good Hope.’3
New Netherland fits Sprat’s description of a colony with a civilising mission and a commitment to replicating a European way of life in the New World. It was in every respect resolutely Dutch. From the style of roof-truss used in family homes and public buildings, to the manner of grinding corn and the type of bread baked for the community, New Netherland adopted the habits and mores of the homeland, and specifically those of the mercantile hub from which its ships set out, and which was the home of the Dutch trading companies: Amsterdam.
It was an English adventurer and explorer, Henry Hudson, employed by the Dutch East India Company to look for the fabled North-West Passage to the Spice Islands, who discovered New Netherland. Thwarted in his first attempts to journey eastwards to find a North-East Passage to Russia, Hudson decided to head instead westward towards North America. He directed his attention to the area between the thirty-seventh and forty-second parallels, between Chesapeake Bay and Cape Cod, looking for an inlet promising enough to suggest a route through the continent to the Spice Islands, which allegedly lay beyond. In September 1609 he arrived at the mouth of what we now know as the Hudson River, sailing up it as far as what is today Albany, where it became too shallow for a seagoing ship to pass.
In 1615 the States General of the United Provinces granted a patent to the New Netherland Company, authorising it to undertake voyages to establish trading relations, particularly in furs, with the new trading posts precariously established at the mouth of the Hudson, followed, in 1621, by the formation of the Dutch West India Company. In response to protests from the English ambassador at The Hague, Sir Dudley Carleton, that the English had prior claims to this stretch of coastline, the new company sent a small vanguard of settlers to New Netherland, who established Dutch trading posts near Manhattan Island (as it later became) and a fortified headquarters for the region at Fort Orange, close to modern-day Albany.
The most hospitable and fertile place for settlement, however, lay on the coast, at the mouth of the north Hudson River. In early 1626, Paul Minuit, the newly appointed commander of the settlers in the Dutch colony of New Netherland, famously exchanged the small, sheltered island of Manhattan, tucked in between the river mouth and what the Dutch called ‘Lange Eylant’ (Long Island), for goods to the value of sixty guilders with the Indian tribe which lived there.
A contemporary account of the deal is preserved in records of the Dutch West India Company – the organisation responsible for settling the area on behalf of the Dutch, as a trading post for beaver pelts and other commodities to be shipped to Europe for profit. In the last week of November 1626, a Company official in Amsterdam reported in a letter (in Dutch) to his superiors at The Hague the arrival of a ship, the Arms of Amsterdam, which had left New Netherland in late September:
They report that our people are in good heart and live in peace there; the Women also have borne some children there. They have purchased the Island Manhattes [Manhattan] from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders; it is 11,000 morgens in size. They had all their grain sowed by the middle of May, and reaped by the middle of August. They send thence samples of summer grain; such as whet, rye, barley, oats, buckwheat, canary seed, beans and flax.
The ship in question carried a gratifyingly rich cargo of furs from the colony – beaver, otter and mink – as well as ‘Oak timber and Hickory’.4
From this report we gather that within a year of gaining ownership, the residents of Manhattan Island were farming their newly acquired land profitably, and consolidating their trade in lucrative furs with the Indians. Within two years, under the direction of Minuit, they had established a permanent settlement: thirty wooden houses along ‘The Strand’, on the flattish south-eastern flank of the island, and one stone building with a thatched roof of river reeds, as the West India Company headquarters, where the precious pelts collected from the interior could be stored before being shipped back to Europe. A fort was built on the south-western point of the island, whence enemy vessels could be attacked as they entered the harbour. Two mills were constructed at the southernmost tip, one for grinding grain, the other for sawing lumber. In contemporary drawings the sails of the windmill can be clearly seen behind the small cluster of Dutch-style cottages – this could almost be a landscape in the United Provinces themselves.
Manhattan Island turned out to have a richly varied terrain, with ample fertile land for cultivation. There was thick forest from which protruded large vertical rocks, grassy meadowlands, high hills in the centre of the island, babbling brooks and reedy ponds. Oaks, chestnut trees, poplar and pine studded the landscape, the inlets teemed with fish, and in summer the meadows were carpeted with wild strawberries. In this hospitable landscape Minuit established the settlement of New Amsterdam, and it duly prospered, its population increasing to 2,500 by the early 1660s.
Numbers in the settlement were swelled by new arrivals not directly involved in the WIC’s commercial business, but rather bent on making a new life there. In April 1637 a ship arrived from Amsterdam and sailed up the Hudson to Fort Orange. On board were some thirty-seven people, hired by their Dutch ‘patroon’ or master, Kiliaen van Rensselaer, to establish a settlement in his name, and there to trade with the Indians on his behalf. By 1642 around one hundred people had settled in the dispersed community around Fort Orange known as Rensselaerswijck, building and equipping a ‘bijeenwoninge’ – literally a ‘living together’, a community. In 1652 this spread-out settlement became the village of Beverwijck, a WIC company village. Eight years later this village had become a small town, inhabited by more than a thousand people. Among those who came to live in Beverwijck were Dutch settlers from Recife in Brazil, once governed by Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, but l
ost in 1654 to the Portuguese, who expelled the Dutch traders, including a group of twenty-three Jews, men, women and children, who were allowed to settle in New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island.5
Between the early years of settlement and the 1650s, the population of New Netherland as a whole grew from a handful to almost eight thousand, a thriving, self-sufficient, Dutch-speaking community.6 That growth in population gradually led to a process of development of forms of government and social structures derived from the ‘old country’ – specifically the city of Amsterdam. According to Dutch custom, the settlements in North America were supposed to be directly controlled by the ‘nineteen lords’ of the Dutch West India Company (drawn predominantly from the governing chambers of Amsterdam and Zeeland). In fact, since most of the voyages to New Netherland were organised by Amsterdam merchants, New Netherland was largely under the administration of the twenty directors of the Amsterdam chamber. In addition to managing the wharves, the equipping of the ships and the sales of the cargoes brought in, they were also expected to administer the colony on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
The settlement at Rensselaerswijck, however, considered itself to be under the direct administration of its patron, Kiliaen van Rensselaer, just as van Rensselaer considered himself entitled to trade directly with the local inhabitants for beaver pelts, rather than via the WIC. In practice, therefore, administration of New Netherland came increasingly to be provided from among its Dutch residents. It was not until the arrival of Petrus (Peter) Stuyvesant in 1645, as the official representative of the WIC, that the situation was eventually regularised and an official voice was given to the population of New Netherland, in the form of an advisory committee of ‘the Nine Men’. The colonists were asked to draw up a list of eighteen nominees, from which Stuyvesant selected nine. These gemeentsmannen or gemeijnsluijden (councillors of the community) were not entitled to meet on their own initiative, but had to wait to be summoned by the director general ‘as is customary in our fatherland’.7