The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

by Bernard Bailyn

  But De Vries, irrepressible, still hoped somehow to extract profit from Swanendael. Amid the rubble, and working with makeshift equipment and untrained crewmen, he rigged together the rudiments of a whaling station—windlass and cranes to lift the carcasses, ovens and boilers to refine the blubber, and a log platform for the barrels. He then took off on an exploratory voyage up the Delaware to form alliances with the natives. When he returned, at the end of the whaling season, only seven of the smallest of seventeen harpooned whales had been brought ashore, and the yield was a mere thirty-two barrels of oil. The poorly equipped and inexperienced crew was exhausted, and the investors in Holland, “one pulling this way and another that way,” had no idea of what, if anything, to do next. Swanendael was abandoned, its skeletons, debris, and ruins a constant reminder of the cost of failure.

  But De Vries’s dreams of instant riches in colonial exploitation had not faded. Persistent and imaginative, more courageous than sage, he and a new set of partners established still another patroonship off the coast of Surinam, manned it with two dozen crewmen, thirty Germans, and refugees from the southern Netherlands, and set out to produce cotton and tobacco. But as he had been warned, the coast of Surinam was hell for everyone. Slaves, he was told, had to be forced to work by the lash, indentured field laborers were likely to rebel, the rate of mortality was fearful, and the hot, dense, wet forests were full of malevolent, vengeful runaway workers gone native. And so it proved. Two English sailors, working as field hands on De Vries’s patroonship, led an uprising in his absence, seized a visiting slave ship with its full cargo, co-opted their Dutch masters with promises to share the booty, and made off for Jamaica, leaving behind a plantation in chaos. De Vries was certain that if the work had continued for another two months, the product would have yielded 150,000 guilders. “The English,” he concluded, “are a villainous people, and would sell their own fathers for servants in the islands.”

  But even so, after all of this, De Vries was still not defeated. In the next few years he visited New Netherland repeatedly, and then remained in the colony for nearly five years after 1638. Indefatigable, still entranced by visions of bustling, enormously profitable plantations—on the Amazon, in the West Indies, on the Hudson: anywhere in this exotic Atlantic world—he once again attempted to establish a patroonship. This time he registered the whole of Staten Island in his name as patroon, and for capital drew into the venture an influential but unreliable cousin, Frederick de Vries. After putting together a small, makeshift settlement on the island, and while awaiting supplies and colonists from home that never arrived, he roamed the countryside in and around the colony looking for real estate bargains and studying the natives. Then once again, and now definitively, his hopes were blasted. The Raritan Indians, infuriated at the treatment they had received by the Dutch governor, wiped out De Vries’s fragile Staten Island settlement in a single devastating raid, part of the bloody race war that raged in the early 1640s. This time there was no recovery. De Vries left America permanently in 1644, thanking God, as he returned to his native city of Hoorn, for having preserved him “through so many perils of savage heathens.”17

  BUT RENSSELAERSWYCK SURVIVED, and its growth made a significant contribution to the emergence of a uniquely complex—multiethnic and multiconfessional—population in the struggling Dutch colony and created endless jurisdictional problems for the colony’s directors. Such a strange community had never been Van Rensselaer’s desire. He dreamed of building in America a structured society where executive authority worked through “representatives from different orders of society … a republic composed of different members each of which in the first instance prevents as far as possible all acts of insolence in its own sphere” and refers “only great and important matters” to the central authority. What he did not want, what he feared above all, was a mere “loose mass of people,” but that, he came to realize, was precisely what was developing, not only in the colony generally but on his own property specifically.

  Faced with deadlines for populating Rensselaerswyck or losing it, Van Rensselaer hired recruiting agents and turned to the difficult task of finding people willing to accept his terms and emigrate to the Hudson as tenants and laborers. Since native Dutchmen in the more developed areas of the Netherlands were unwilling to leave, he turned to refugee groups in and around the coastal cities; to impoverished Germans, Norwegians, French, Danes, and English; to the peasants in the Dutch interior district of Utrecht, the most economically depressed area of the Netherlands; and to the tenants on his own estates, some of whom he conscripted. How, precisely, he did all this, what the mechanism was for locating and enticing those he called “poor beggars” into transatlantic resettlement, is not known. What is known is that Van Rensselaer and his agents, once they located prospective emigrants, contracted with them for service over a set number of years at higher wages than any that could be found at home—perhaps four times as high—payable in furs, tobacco, grain, livestock, and credit. Most, to judge from a sample of 174 individuals known to have come over to Van Rensselaer’s property between 1630 and 1644, were single men in their late teens or early twenties. They claimed no less than thirty-two occupations, but in fact at least 60 percent of them were farmers or farmworkers. Most of the rest were construction workers—carpenters, masons, and millwrights; there were also a few tradesmen and artisans. Only approximately half of those who immigrated to Rensselaerswyck were Dutch. Mingling with farmhands from Utrecht, Gelderland, and Friesland were shepherds from Westphalia, carpenters from Denmark, Norway, and France, handymen from Germany, and bakers from England. They were a transient lot. Many failed to fulfill their contracts with Van Rensselaer, drifted off to Manhattan or to tempting possibilities in neighboring colonies, or returned to the familiar world they had left behind.18

  4

  While Van Rensselaer was striving to populate his private estate, managing to recruit perhaps a hundred people by 1643, housing them in frail, thatched, wooden dwellings along the riverbank, the company in Amsterdam was attempting to populate the colony generally. Drawing on footloose foreigners, “ne’re-do-wells snatched off the streets of the city where they had drifted from the hinterland,” unemployed sailors, impoverished farmers, and fringe elements among the ethnic and religious minorities, the company sought to enlarge the settlement on Manhattan and make it a more normal community. A few Africans, of uncertain legal status, taken from captured Spanish or Portuguese ships or drawn from other Dutch possessions, appeared as early as 1625 or 1626, and a major military presence was established with the arrival of the heavily armed Zoutberg, which carried 104 soldiers and 52 sailors, along with a contingent of construction workers brought over to rebuild New Amsterdam’s fort and work on other building projects. Until they were forced into military service, the carpenters, masons, and bricklayers began the rebuilding of the original sod enclosure into a proper quadrangular stone bastion and the construction of wharves, warehouses, and mills. But all such efforts, as well as hopes for developing the Walloons’ farms into an independent agricultural center, faltered for want of manpower. Again and again the company complained of the difficulty of populating the colony and bemoaned the human material they were obliged to accept. Clearly the patroonship plan had solved nothing, and the resident administration of the colony in the mid-1630s was as contentious, as prone to discord verging on violence, as it had been a decade earlier.19

  VERHULST, the first of the regularly appointed directors, had been defeated before he was fully aware of the problems he faced. Like Yeardley in Virginia, he had been elevated to a position of authority though of inferior social status, and he lacked the administrative skills he needed. He found himself surrounded by a council of ambitious, prickly officials appointed by the company: a vice-director, a secretary, a fiscael (protector of the company’s rights and taxes and prosecutor of crimes), a commies (supervisor of the company’s goods and fees), and several others without specific functions. Managers of an obscure outpost o
f at most a few hundred people, they immediately began jostling for position. Hardly settled in, they quarrelled bitterly and denounced one another in blistering letters to the authorities at home. Verhulst, being director, was their principal target.

  He did his best to follow his instructions. He had been told to withdraw the Walloon families from the Delaware, Connecticut, and upper Hudson river posts, leaving behind only small parties of traders, and to concentrate the population at the tip of Manhattan Island. Fort Orange, he was told, would remain the chief fur trading post. New Amsterdam was to be a self-contained agricultural settlement and stock farm whose produce would sustain the population. A spread of nine company farms was to be established on lower Manhattan, with a village formed around a fort at the tip of the island. Above all, he was told to treat the Indians fairly—to see that they came to no harm, that they were not deceived or even mocked, that all contracts were honest and fair, and that the Dutch were to “remain neutral” in their wars. Neither then nor at any other time in the colony’s history did the West India Company propose any kind of governance of the natives, any structure of relationships with them, any purpose in dealing with them except trade. To enforce his rule over the colonists, Verhulst was told to organize a quasi-military government reminiscent of Dale’s regime in Virginia a decade earlier. He was to have the power of corporal punishment and was ordered

  to expel from the colony and to send hither all adulterers and adulteresses, thieves, false witnesses, and useless persons among the Christians, likewise all the lazy persons who draw pay from the company, in order that they may be punished here according to their deserts.

  A repeat offender would be dealt with severely: “in addition to forfeiting the whole of his earned wages, inclusive of tithes, etc. [he was to] be punished by the council as a common thief and be kept in prison until by the first ship returning to the fatherland he can be sent back as a rogue.”20

  But it was Verhulst and not the rogues who was shipped home in disgrace. Beset on all sides by problems he could scarcely perceive, he used his powers aggressively and became short-tempered, impatient, and autocratic. In his single year in office, he ruled “very harshly,” the incoming, censorious secretary Isaac de Rasière reported, “without any legal formality, but merely upon his own authority,” punishing people for what offended him “not according to law but according to his pleasure.”

  Everything went wrong, even in distant Fort Orange. There Daniel van Krieckenbeeck, in command of the outpost, in flat violation of company orders had undertaken “a reckless adventure” by naïvely joining the neighboring Mahican Indians in their long-standing struggle with the more powerful Mohawks, who were seeking direct access to the Dutch traders. Ambushed, Van Krieckenbeeck and three of his small party, which included two Portuguese, had been killed, one of whom had been eaten “after having [been] well roasted. The [other two] they burnt … The Indians carried a leg and an arm home to be divided among their families as a sign they had conquered their enemies.” Hopelessly incompetent, Verhulst was confronted with demands that he resign. When he refused, he was arrested and replaced by his assistant Pieter Minuit.

  Minuit should have had a better time of it, and for a while he did. A thirty-six-year-old Walloon from the German-Dutch border town of Wesel, formerly a diamond cutter and merchant in Utrecht, he was more experienced than Verhulst, of higher social standing (son-in-law of the burgomaster of Cleves), and a ruling elder or deacon of the Walloon church. Quickly fulfilling his initial orders to scout out the land and assess the possibilities of trade with the Indians, he turned to developing the colony. He regularized relations with the Indians by purchasing Manhattan Island and attempting to rein in the illegal traders who had appeared on the Hudson, sped up construction of the fort and the relocation of the colonists, and began shipping home furs, timber, grains, and plants. Though the company’s profits from this nascent production were still far exceeded by its costs, more reinforcements were sent: four more vessels in 1627, then two more in 1628, all with supplies and more of the “rough and unrestrained” migrants—multilingual and multiconfessional—who were proving impossible to control.21

  By 1630 there were some 300 “Dutch” inhabitants in New Netherland, 270 of them in or about New Amsterdam. Conditions were still primitive in the extreme. Within a loosely built wall that enclosed the end of the island were a ramshackle, sod-walled fort and a stone warehouse, thirty or so houses made “of the bark of trees,” and grist and lumber mills still under construction. Beyond the palisade were six farms begun by free colonists, most of them on patches of land that had been cleared and abandoned by the Indians; they were isolated from each other and from the fort for lack of roads. Though the few officials had tolerable if crude dwellings, many of the ordinary settlers still “nestled rather than dwelt” in “hovels and cabins.” Some were crowded together “with their hogs and sheep in makeshift stables without access to fresh water and dangerously exposed to the elements.” Others lived in pits in the ground dug “cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep,” the walls timbered for support and covered with a ceiling of “bark or green sods.” Through the village’s single thoroughfare, Broad Street, ran a canal which has been described as “a befouled and stinking sewer in the warm months of summer and a treacherous ice floe in the winter.” And, despite hopeful remarks that the colony was beginning “to advance bravely” and to harvest its first crops, the leadership—in one of the smallest and most obscure of the many settlements scattered around the globe by Dutch entrepreneurs—was in almost constant turmoil.22

  Verhulst’s expulsion had not calmed the waters. Ordinary people—ambitious, disoriented, forced into contact with strangers from distant parts and with countrymen equally strange—cursed each other in public as “rogues and thieves,” while the colony’s leaders were at each other’s throats. De Rasière, so censorious of others, the acting commies as well as the colony’s secretary, himself became embroiled in a bitter and very public controversy. Gerrit Fongersz, the ondercommies, De Rasière charged, was determined to thwart him at every turn. Not only did he perversely claim to rank above him in Council affairs, but he insisted on marketing his own furs. When De Rasière, who was responsible for enforcing the company’s monopoly of the fur trade, declared that he would confiscate any such illegal shipments and sue for return of Fongersz’s wages, Fongersz replied, “I do not consider you a big enough man for that.” Fongersz, De Rasière decided, was a hopeless drunk. Since Director Minuit, who could not understand where the liquor was coming from, declined to reprimand him, De Rasière did just that, telling Frongersz “to stop [drinking], both on account of its sinfulness and the scandal which it causes in the community.” But it did no good. Forever drunk, Fongersz, De Rasière wrote, “shows his villainous heart, and wishes to defy me” as a person not deserving respect. “I cannot put up with much from such a drunkard and idiot,” De Rasière wrote, and he begged the company “to clip the wings and check the insolence of such a half-senseless person.”

  Beyond all such matters, De Rasière wrote, was the simmering threat of Indian attacks, which might erupt at any time from within the natives’ mysterious world. Van Krieckenbeeck’s fatal folly threatened the entire community clinging to its fragile hold on lower Manhattan. The Indians, De Rasière wrote, echoing company policy, must be treated equitably. And, “much like children, [they must be] kept on friendly terms by kindness and occasional small gifts; one must be familiar with them and allow them to think that one trusts them fully, and meanwhile be on one’s guard, or else things are apt to go wrong.” Weird people, he wrote, everything about them was threatening and repellent: their appearance (“orange color, like the Brazilians”), their primitive dress and ornaments, their indolent way of life (“they cannot by any means be brought to work”), their smell (rank, from smeared grease), their promiscuity and lasciviousness (stimulated by eating “a sort of white salmon”), their bizarre marriage and divorce customs, and their peculiar form of govern
ment.

  As for the company employees who were the majority of the small European population huddled around the fort, De Raisère declared them to be a crude, lazy crowd who drew rations but contributed little. Worse than that, they were driving fur prices up by illegal and fiercely competitive trade with the Indians. The colony’s greatest need was for “sober, industrious persons” who would properly work the land and obey the law. And specialists would help—a dozen or so Norwegians, for example, would be useful in making tar and pitch.23

  De Rasière’s tempestuous term as secretary was short. He returned home in 1628, to be succeeded by Jan van Remunde, who immediately clashed with the director. He peppered the company with charges that Minuit was neglecting his office, allowing New Englanders and unlicensed Dutchmen to snatch the furs that belonged to the company while the company’s sloops “lie idle and are not sent out to trade.” Charges went back and forth between the two. In the midst of their embranglement, the colony’s first preacher, Jonas Michaëlius, arrived, who, it was said, immediately “proceeded to stoke the growing animosities.” In the end he proved to be Minuit’s nemesis.24

  MICHAËLIUS, a well-educated, scholarly minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, was no stranger to overseas ventures. Three years before he arrived in New Netherland (1628) he had served his church and nation at an obscure Dutch station, Fort Nassau, in Mouree, on the coast of West Africa. Ambitious and experienced, he threw himself into the life of the crude settlement on the Hudson and recorded his experiences in vivid letters home.