Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory

by Lisa Jardine

  By the 1660s, when the scattered settlement of Rensselaerswijck had been consolidated into the thriving small township of Beverwijck, anyone encountering the settlers would have appreciated the thoroughgoing Dutchness of their way of life, from the language spoken to dress and habits. The records contain specific references to the customs of Amsterdam, in the appointment locally of burgemeesters and schepenen, rather than the representatives of the States General and the West India Company. Methods and manners of taxation and the regulation of trades were also closely modelled on those in the Dutch Republic.

  The administrative and legal system of New Netherland, the structure of ecclesiastical life, the method in which the economy of the colony was ordered, and the way burgher rights were used as expressions of differences in status, were all based on those in the Dutch Republic. So too were the patterns of daily life.

  Births, marriages and deaths were celebrated in New Netherland with simplified versions of the practices back home in the old country. The naming of children, choice of godparents and baptismal gifts display clear parallels with the customs in the Dutch Republic. Misdemeanours – from drunkenness to whoring – were punished with penalties modelled on those at home, as were breaches of promise, and marital discord. Where disputes arose between neighbours, or complaints were laid for insulting behaviour or swearing, both the behaviour and the methods of resolution are those of the Netherlands. Even the nursery rhymes sung by the children of New Netherland for many generations are recognisably those of urban Amsterdam.8

  One curious consequence of the introduction of a robustly Dutch administration in New Netherland was its extension to a group of small communities almost entirely peopled by English immigrants. In order not to over-extend their small group of settlers, the WIC had allowed Long Island to be colonised by men and women from neighbouring English settlements. These communities were among the first to be granted autonomous administrative bodies and local courts, since it was inappropriate for the WIC to try to extend its Dutch powers to them. Nevertheless, the forms of administration and courts adopted were those also favoured by the neighbouring Dutch settlements. So by the 1660s, in spite of growing tension between England and the United Provinces at home, there was an unacknowledged Anglo–Dutch accord in New Netherland, extending to a merging of English and Dutch local interests.

  And then, in August–September 1664, a small flotilla of heavily armed ships, laden with well-equipped soldiers, arrived off the shore of New Netherland from London. Without warning, as part of Anglo–Dutch hostilities on the other side of the world, brought about by commercial greed and ambition, New Netherland was taken by force by the English, and Dutch colonial ambitions in North America came abruptly to an end. New Netherland was absorbed into New England, New Amsterdam became New York, and Fort Orange became Albany (named after Charles II’s brother, Admiral of the Fleet and a keen investor in the English East India and Royal African Companies, James, Duke of York and Albany). Until comparatively recently, history had all but forgotten about the fundamental role played in the region by pioneering souls from the United Provinces.

  Here a short digression is needed concerning Sir Robert Holmes, whom we encountered in Chapter 10, testing seagoing pendulum clocks for the Royal Society. For the catalyst for the seizure of New Netherland was an assault on Dutch settlements on the east coast of Africa by Holmes, under orders from the warmongering factions surrounding the recently returned English King, Charles II. This group had its eye on what it perceived to be extremely lucrative trading opportunities along the coast of Guinea, where, however, the Dutch were firmly installed already in fortified positions at Goree and elsewhere. The profitable commodity – eyed particularly covetously by James, Duke of York, who had acquired a considerable taste for speculative investment in overseas trade – politely known as ‘black gold’ was, of course, African slaves, to be transported at enormous profit to the new European plantations in the West Indies.

  Holmes was first dispatched in 1661 with a small, heavily armed contingent of ships, to ‘assist’ in the Royal African Company’s trading ventures along the Guinea coast. He sailed from Portsmouth in January, reaching the Gambia in early March. On 18 March he forced the surrender of the Dutch fort of St Andreas, and after an unsuccessful attempt to find a legendary store of gold, he returned to England. The expedition brought a storm of diplomatic protest from the Dutch. Samuel Pepys regarded Holmes as fundamentally untrustworthy: ‘He seems to be very well acquainted with the King’s mind and with all the several factions at court. But good God, what an age is this, that a man cannot live without playing the knave and dissimulation.’

  In May 1663, Holmes embarked on another voyage to Guinea, whose real purpose was to disrupt Dutch trade in the region and to seize Dutch possessions along the Guinea coast. On 21 January 1664 he attacked Goree, sinking two ships and taking two others, and the island surrendered on the following day. He went on to take the Dutch fort of Anta and a number of other Dutch positions before sailing for England in late June. We get some flavour of Holmes’s naval style from a letter he sent to one of the Duke of York’s officials on the way home. Undisciplined behaviour of a kind which seemed to follow him around had led to a nasty incident. In spite of assurances to the contrary, after seizing the Dutch trading posts at Aga and Anamaboa by force, Holmes’s men had begun to plunder their assets. The Dutch retaliated by blowing up the post, resulting in casualties to the tune of ’80 or 90 whites and blacks’. Which, Holmes reports nonchalantly, ‘the blacks rewarded by cutting off all their heads’:

  Since my Letters from Cape Coast wee have taken in Aga & Anamaboa the former by storm, and after promiseing Quarter to the Flemins & taken possession our men being somewhat greedy of Plunder, the Flemins treacherously blew up the Powder & withall 80 or 90 whites and blacks, which the blacks rewarded by cutting off all their heads […] I know not how my Actions vpon the Coast of Guyny are resented at Court, nor how my Condicion stands […] My service to all friends I am sir, yours. R.H.9

  It was on this return voyage that Holmes produced the story that has earned a permanent place in the history of science, about the amazing accuracy of Huygens’s pendulum clocks, and how they had saved the returning ships from disaster by enabling him to predict how long it would take, in precisely which direction, to make landfall on the Cape Verde islands. The clocks had been kept assiduously wound and to time, he claimed, throughout his marauding adventures.10

  Anti-Dutch feeling was already running high among the hawks in Charles II’s government by 1662–63. But it was Holmes’s buccaneering and unscrupulous naval action off Guinea that brought matters between England and the United Provinces conclusively to a head, and triggered the declaration of war by the Dutch in February 1665 (Holmes was also to provoke the confrontation which led to the third Dutch war in 1672).

  So much for Holmes’s disreputable behaviour on behalf of the English off Africa. As part of the same initiative, the continuing state of heightened Anglo–Dutch tension led to Charles II’s resolving to put an end to Dutch settlement in North America. While Holmes was on the high seas, the King was putting together an expedition to seize New Netherland and give it to his brother James, Duke of York and Albany. In January 1664 a committee set up to consider the likely outcome of an attack concluded that ‘if the King will send three ships and three hundred soldiers under good officers’, the Dutch could be vanquished and their colonies seized. Charles assigned to his brother James (’his Heirs and Assigns’) not only all the lands currently held by the Dutch in New Netherland, but vast tracts of the new continent, from Maine to Delaware.

  A convoy of ships was equipped, and a contingent of soldiers heavily armed for the enterprise, under the Duke of York’s command. James appointed his groom of the bedchamber Richard Nicolls his deputy governor, and Nicolls set off from Portsmouth in May 1664, arriving off Cape Cod ten weeks later, where he informed the English inhabitants of his intentions.

  The English settlers along
the east coast of North America had managed to co-exist remarkably amicably with their Dutch neighbours for more than thirty years, exchanging essential goods with one another, and cooperating in the defensive and other measures needed to prevent the precariously established colonies from destruction, by either hostilities with the local Indian population, or the depredations of the climate.

  When the English ships arrived at the English Massachusetts Bay Colony and Nicolls’s forces disembarked, John Winthrop, the English governor of Connecticut (whom we met at the end of the last chapter, observing the moons of Jupiter through his telescope), was taken entirely by surprise. On his recent trip to London, the King had granted him much of the territory which he had now given with a flourish to James. Winthrop’s Connecticut colony charter was reneged on with a simple message transmitted by Nicolls, who had been ordered to ‘putt Mr Winthropp in mind of the differences which were on foot here’. Nicolls’s arrival with three frigates and three hundred combat-ready, heavily armed forces threatened to destabilise the entire region. Deeply disappointed on behalf of the community he had worked so hard for, John Winthrop was forced to cut his losses and step in as negotiator for Nicolls on the English side, to try to persuade Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Netherland, to surrender rather than provoke a full-scale colonial war.

  There was, however, one further, gratuitous piece of double-dealing by the English homeland administration to be coped with by the beleaguered Winthrop. One of the chief instigators of the aggressive move to seize New Netherland turned out to be his own cousin George Downing, who had grown up in New England, and graduated in the first year of the colony’s new university, Harvard. Now Resident English ambassador at The Hague, having managed to regain the post he had also held under the Commonwealth, Downing was one of the loudest voices arguing that Dutch commercial expansion could only be curtailed by striking at their trading posts across the world:

  [The Dutch] discourse very publicly […] ‘we shall wholly destroy the English in the East Indies, we are masters of Guinea, we shall ruin the English trade in the caribee islands and western parts, and we doubt not but now by the order sent to Cadiz and the Streights, to be masters of those seas and to take and ruin all the English shipping there’.11

  Downing, who was deeply unpopular with the Dutch, expressed vociferous concern at what he characterised as their damaging expansionist ambitions. ‘From 1661 to 1665 his insistence upon resolute English action against Dutch pretensions was sufficiently aggressive to be accounted a principal cause of the ensuing war.’12 His intervention in the Dutch colonial venture in North America was well-informed and effective. He knew both New Netherland and the governor of Connecticut at first hand, and he knew how to dupe them into submission.

  From The Hague, Downing had taken the trouble to inform the States General that the Dutch colonies had nothing to fear from the English forces: Charles II was merely sending a commander to overhaul the administration of the New England colonies. The Dutch administration was suitably reassured: the directors of the WIC informed Stuyvesant that Nicolls’s mission would not affect him.13 Winthrop, who was on cordial terms with Stuyvesant, also reassured him on the strength of Downing’s briefing. So Stuyvesant, who had been at Fort Orange on business when the English troops disembarked, returned to Manhattan to find English gunboats at the entrance to the lower harbour, cutting off the river and Manhattan island. In response to a letter from him asking for reassurance that nothing ‘of prejudice’ was intended against them, Nicolls replied:

  In his Majesties Name, I doe demand the Towne, Situate upon the Island commonly knowne by the Name of Manhatoes with all the Forts there unto belonging, to be rendered unto his Majesties obedience, and Protection into my hands.

  The King, he went on, did not relish ‘the effusion of Christian blood’, but if the Dutch did not surrender they would bring upon themselves ‘the miseryes of a War’. Stuyvesant would have preferred to hold out against the gunships on his doorstep. In the end, though, the leading men of New Amsterdam opted to surrender without a fight, rather than suffer ‘misery, sorrow, conflagration, the dishonour of women, murder of children in their cradles, and in a word, the absolute ruin and destruction of innocent souls’. Apart from a brief period when the United Provinces regained New Netherland in the early 1670s, the Dutch colonisation of America was over.

  Charles II received the news with delight. Although he can have had no idea of the long-term global significance of having acquired the ‘island at the centre of the world’ without a shot being fired, he did appreciate its significance as a trading destination on the expanding English imperial map. ‘You will have heard of our taking of New Amsterdam,’ he wrote to his sister in Paris. ‘’Tis a place of great importance to trade, and a very good town.’

  And yet, forms of Dutch-based regional government continued on English-administered Manhattan island and in surrounding territories, to which they had been adapted over forty years of confrontation and compromise with the authorities of the Dutch West India Company. So did familiar patterns of everyday life, rituals of birth, marriage and death, and even the names of particular localities: Breuckelen (Brooklyn), Deutel Bay (Turtle Bay), Neuw Haarlem (Harlem), Yonkers, the Bronx.

  Many of the Dutch residents of New Netherland did not leave. They adjusted to the new regime as to so much else since they had left their homeland. So did the mingled community of those from other countries, of other ethnicities and with other faiths, who had washed up in the Dutch colony, where the spirit of toleration that had been brought from Amsterdam continued to sustain them. Although the Dutch language did not survive as the language of daily life in America, American English still carries traces of its Netherlandish ancestry – a ‘cookie’ is a koekje (small cake) and your ‘boss’ is your baas (master) – just as its culture still contains within it those foundational ideals and aspirations of tolerance, inclusiveness and fairness which had been the defining characteristics of the Dutch settlements in the New World.

  Competition for trade fuelled Anglo–Dutch conflict throughout the seventeenth century, in spite of the obvious shared characteristics of the two countries, as commercial competition escalated into international confrontation. And trade rather than territorial expansion was the driving force behind English and Dutch adventures in North America. It was the lifeblood of the new communities. Finding ways of exploiting local resources commercially or as part of an exchange economy came as second nature to the residents of the villages and townships springing up along the eastern Atlantic seaboard. When Maria van Cortlandt from New Amsterdam married Jeremias van Rensselaer, the director of the Rensselaerswijck colony on the upper Hudson River in 1661, and moved inland, she sent regular shipments of apples to her brother in New Amsterdam, in exchange for barrel-loads of the ‘very large oysters’ so plentiful in her home town, but unavailable upriver.14

  Since it is a while since Sir Constantijn Huygens has made an appearance in this story, his correspondence provides us with a more elite example of longdistance gift-exchange in the Dutch trading company context. While Johan Maurits of Nassau-Segen was governor of the Dutch West India Company at Recife in Brazil between 1637 and 1644 (we saw him laying out his Dutch garden there in Chapter 9), Sir Constantijn took charge of overseeing the building of a great neoclassical mansion for him – today simply known as the Mauritshuis – back home in The Hague, next door to Huygens’s own comparably elegant house in Het Plein. The architect-builder of both was van Campen.

  In May 1642 Johan Maurits wrote to Huygens, thanking him for having supervised the laying of a slate roof for the Mauritshuis, ‘for it would have been an intolerable inconvenience to have a house ill-roofed’. He asked Sir Constantijn to go on keeping an eye on his house’s progress, and he ended by assuring him that as a token of his gratitude he was sending him ample quantities of Brazil’s most desirable commodities: ‘some fine hardwood and some sugar’.15

  Across the Atlantic Ocean from New Netherland, in the Dutch ho
meland, Amsterdam was the trading hub for the United Provinces from the beginning of the seventeenth century. Its role as the key port in the Netherlands had expanded at extraordinary speed in the course of the early decades of the century, not least because of Spanish pressure on its competitor Antwerp, whose position on the Scheldt river meant that it was vulnerable to blockading by hostile forces from the south. In the course of the century, Amsterdam achieved dominant status as the gateway through which foodstuffs, raw materials and finished products arrived in the Low Countries from surrounding territories. It was the main outlet for goods processed or manufactured in the Low Countries to be sold elsewhere. By mid-century, Amsterdam had also become the place to which goods were brought back from all over the world by the East and West India Companies. There they were stored (stapled) to await the moment when a demand for them would emerge somewhere and they could be reexported.16

  Amsterdam was a gigantic warehouse for the known world, ‘the indispensable buffer in international trade’. The power of the city’s position in the international trading network, however, rested on more than simply warehousing and distributing goods. As a leading expert in Dutch economic history has argued, Amsterdam was a centre of information exchange as well as a staple market for goods. In other words, knowledge of potentially marketable products, the demand for them and their present and future potential prices, were concentrated in the highly literate, well-connected, diverse Amsterdam community. The scale and quality of the flow of information in Amsterdam were supported and encouraged by the city’s function as the gateway for goods. But the increasing importance of Amsterdam as a centre of distribution for everything from goods to ideas depended on people and correspondence flowing through the city.