The Island at the Center of the World Part 5

A remarkable number of vectors then came to bear on a single object: the ship Princess Amelia, Princess Amelia, 600 tons, ringed with thirty-eight guns, riding at anchor out in the harbor, her hull neatly packed with 200,000 pounds of red dyewood she had picked up in Curacao. It was the same ship that had brought Stuyvesant here; she was now ready for her return to Amsterdam. Her commander, a twenty-eight-year-old named Jan Claesen Bol, was, like John Farret, one of Stuyvesant's admirers: during his three-month layover on Manhattan, he had sat on Stuyvesant's council, overseeing the matter of Kieft v. Melyn and Kuyter. By mid-September, additional cargo-about 14,000 beaver pelts-had been stowed away, and she was ready for pa.s.sengers. 600 tons, ringed with thirty-eight guns, riding at anchor out in the harbor, her hull neatly packed with 200,000 pounds of red dyewood she had picked up in Curacao. It was the same ship that had brought Stuyvesant here; she was now ready for her return to Amsterdam. Her commander, a twenty-eight-year-old named Jan Claesen Bol, was, like John Farret, one of Stuyvesant's admirers: during his three-month layover on Manhattan, he had sat on Stuyvesant's council, overseeing the matter of Kieft v. Melyn and Kuyter. By mid-September, additional cargo-about 14,000 beaver pelts-had been stowed away, and she was ready for pa.s.sengers.

And so they came: Kieft, eager-now that he had, in Stuyvesant, a powerful ally-to return home and defend himself, to clear his name and see his accusers punished; Kuyter and Melyn, armed with sheafs of doc.u.ments, ready to appeal Stuyvesant's verdict before the States General in The Hague; the Rev. Everardus Bogardus, with whom Kieft had also tangled. And a good many of the lost contingent of soldiers who had bounced from Brazil to Curacao to Manhattan, raggedly and repeatedly crossing Stuyvesant's path, were on board as well, the director having ordered them home in hopes of finally getting them off his back.

They set sail on August 16. The crossing was uneventful. And then, in a bizarre climax to the whole affair, Captain Bol made a cla.s.sic mariner's error, mistaking the Bristol Channel (a.k.a. the False Channel) for the English Channel. The ship ran aground off the coast of Wales. Heavy surf heaved it up and down in three t.i.tanic hammerings, dashing it to pieces against the rocky bottom. For days after, Welsh farmers combed the beach for beaver pelts and other items of value: once-cherished pieces of lives transformed into flotsam.

THE INITIAL NEWS of the wreck of the of the wreck of the Princess Princess must have stunned the residents of New Amsterdam. The general view, once the initial shock wore off, was that G.o.d had been unusually straightforward in punishing Kieft for his many sins, and that the other pa.s.sengers had had the misfortune of being too near the lightning bolt. The house of the director-general was probably not decked out in mourning either. Stuyvesant had tolerated Kieft because of his position; he had supported not the man but the office. As for Melyn and Kuyter, they had been misguided followers of an incoherent new line of thinking that was dangerous and immoral. He must have seen the wreck, in its totality, as an instance of the pure and terrible justice of the Almighty. There had been ugliness on both sides; as with Sodom and Gomorrah, and in the time of the Great Flood, the Lord had chosen to wipe the slate clean. But even in the direst of times He had kept faith with His people, by preserving a leader. Noah had been spared from the Flood, Moses was chosen to lead His people from waywardness. Now Stuyvesant could lead. He could turn his attention to matters of genuine importance. must have stunned the residents of New Amsterdam. The general view, once the initial shock wore off, was that G.o.d had been unusually straightforward in punishing Kieft for his many sins, and that the other pa.s.sengers had had the misfortune of being too near the lightning bolt. The house of the director-general was probably not decked out in mourning either. Stuyvesant had tolerated Kieft because of his position; he had supported not the man but the office. As for Melyn and Kuyter, they had been misguided followers of an incoherent new line of thinking that was dangerous and immoral. He must have seen the wreck, in its totality, as an instance of the pure and terrible justice of the Almighty. There had been ugliness on both sides; as with Sodom and Gomorrah, and in the time of the Great Flood, the Lord had chosen to wipe the slate clean. But even in the direst of times He had kept faith with His people, by preserving a leader. Noah had been spared from the Flood, Moses was chosen to lead His people from waywardness. Now Stuyvesant could lead. He could turn his attention to matters of genuine importance.

And so he did, moving with ferocious competence. Had a lesser man been given the commission to strengthen the Dutch hold on their North American territory, the English would have swept in decades sooner than they did, and the Dutch imprint on Manhattan Island would have been too faint to make a difference to history. The problems that literally surrounded the colony were considerable and they had been allowed to fester. Stuyvesant had stepped into a chess game in which his predecessor had been an inferior player who had committed his resources into one ill-conceived strike while ignoring attacks from other areas. Stuyvesant a.s.sessed the threats, ranked them in order of priority, and went to work. He saw at once what historians later failed to recognize: that New England was not monolithic; there were four separate colonies, each with its own agenda, and they had a hard time getting along. The two southern colonies, Connecticut and New Haven, were aggressive toward the Dutch; the other two, Stuyvesant sensed, wanted to find a way to live with their neighbor. New Plymouth, after all, had been founded by English Pilgrims who had spent long years as guests of the Dutch, and so were predisposed toward them. Ma.s.sachusetts was likewise amenable; it was the largest and most powerful of the New England colonies, and John Winthrop, its elderly governor, who had devoted nearly two decades to fashioning a Puritan utopia in the New World (it was he who coined the phrase "City upon a Hill"), was, despite age and ill health, still the most influential man in New England. (It was largely because he had chosen to live there that Boston, rather than any of the other villages founded about the same time, became the capital.) So Stuyvesant targeted Winthrop. "Honored Sr," began the letter he dictated to Winthrop (at the other end of the pen, translating into English, was one of Stuyvesant's English hangers-on, George Baxter). "I shall be boulde to propose to your wise Consideration, that your selfe, with other indifferent men of yor Countriemen . . . may be pleased to appoint the tyme & place, where & when yourselfe & they will bee pleased to give me a meeting . . ."

Stuyvesant knew that while powerful forces in England wanted to wrest control of his colony, in the chaos caused by the civil war, the New England colonies had largely been free to govern themselves as they saw fit. If he could cement a treaty with the leaders of the four respecting borders, it would be a great step toward putting his colony, as well as theirs, on a permanent footing. As it happened, Baxter, who delivered the letter in person, arrived in Boston while leaders of the four New England colonies were gathered there for a meeting, so Winthrop showed it to them. He then wrote back that while his illness had left him with a "Crazines of my head," he was still fit enough to agree with his fellow New Englanders that all wanted likewise to live in peace with the Dutch colony and all "doe readilie embrace yor friendlie motion concerning a meeting." The leaders also jointly sent a similar letter to Stuyvesant, welcoming him to America, "hoping all the English Colonies shall enjoy within your limits all the fruites of a neighbourly and friendly correspondency in a free concourse," and laying out a number of items that needed to be hashed out, including illegal trading activities and a high tariff being charged at Manhattan for shipping. Stuyvesant knew that the civil war in England had increased the New Englanders' reliance on Manhattan as a shipping hub. It must have pleased him that they raised the issue at once-he could use it as a bargaining chit in working out an agreement on borders. The New Englanders signed themselves "Your lovinge Friends the Commissioners of the vnited Colonies."

Next, Stuyvesant pivoted southward. He commissioned a detailed report on events that had taken place in the region the Dutch called the South River. It had been ten years since Peter Minuit led a Swedish expedition up this waterway that the Dutch considered a vital part of their North American territory. It would be no accident that the future cities of Philadelphia, Trenton, Camden, and Wilmington would spring up in this region. Stuyvesant could see, as Minuit had before him and William Penn would after, that water power, water transport, ocean access, and hundreds of square miles of richly exploitable wilderness could be translated directly into industry and commerce.

Kieft had ignored the foreign presence in this southern territory, and the Swedes had used that time to dig in. The leader of New Sweden now was Johan Printz, a great hog of a man whose four-hundred-pound body, as it lumbered within the palisades of his central fort, was less dressed than sided in the armor of the Swedish military. Printz had served as an officer in the Thirty Years' War, leading troops into battle in Germany and Poland before being discharged for surrendering the town of Chemnitz to a Saxon army. His New World posting was a chance to redeem himself by turning this wilderness into a functioning, profit-making colony. The Indians of the region gave him the nickname Big Belly, and he was as formidable in military guile as he was in size. The Dutch had constructed their original military-trading post on the river in what must now have seemed the distant past: 1624, when they were still considering making this region the capital of their colony. They had built Fort Na.s.sau at the confluence of the South River and what they called the Schuyl Kill, Schuyl Kill,*14 or Hidden River-convenient, they believed, to the Indians bringing furs downriver from the west. or Hidden River-convenient, they believed, to the Indians bringing furs downriver from the west.

But there was a flaw in this placement. The trading post was on the east side of the river, so that the Indians had to ford it to reach them. Peter Minuit had seen this problem from the beginning. So when he made his dramatic return to America to found New Sweden, he erected Fort Christina on the west, outflanking the Dutch and making the Swedes instantly more attractive to the Minquas (a.k.a. the Susquehannocks), the tribe that dominated the fur trade in the valley. When Johan Printz took over the Swedish colony, his first move was to further stymie the Dutch by constructing another fort farther downriver, nearer the bay, thus giving the Swedes effective control of the South River. Kieft did nothing to counter this, but the Dutch got help from an unexpected ally: the mosquito. The Swedes had built on a swamp. Soon the fair-skinned soldiers looked, one commander wrote, "as if they had been affected with some horrible disease." The soldiers called the place Fort Myggenborgh-Fort Mosquito; the bugs won, and it was soon abandoned.

But Printz was far from finished. He began an elaborate rumor campaign among the Indians to the effect that the Dutch were planning to slaughter them; at the same time, he sweetened the deals Swedish traders were making with them. Then complaints started streaming into Stuyvesant's Manhattan headquarters from soldiers and company officials stationed on the South River. The Dutch had recently built another trading post on the river, but even before it was finished Printz erected a Swedish fort so close to it that the structures nearly touched. The ma.s.sive Swede was as snide as he was wily, and the Dutch knew he was rubbing their noses in it. The Swedish fort, one officer whined in his report to Stuyvesant, "is the greatest insult in the world . . . for they have located the house about 12 or 13 feet from our palisades, depriving us thereby of our view of the stream." "My lord," another official wrote, "I firmly believe that he [Printz] had it built there more to mock our lords than to expect that it could realize any profit for him, since there is room enough beside our fort to build twenty such houses . . ." Sitting in his office on Manhattan, Stuyvesant was now able to summon a clear mental picture of his southern territory: the flat landscape; its placid river; warships whose masts were surmounted not with the orange, white, and blue flag of the United Provinces*15 but the blue and yellow cross of Sweden; the hidden inlets echoing with the cadences of the Swedish tongue as the golden-haired Nordics bartered with the Indians, struggling to comprehend their allegiances and business tactics. but the blue and yellow cross of Sweden; the hidden inlets echoing with the cadences of the Swedish tongue as the golden-haired Nordics bartered with the Indians, struggling to comprehend their allegiances and business tactics.

Stuyvesant knew from the start that the real threat was from the English, not the Swedes. Dutch forces had already chased out English settlers who had sneaked south from the New Haven colony and tried to stake a claim on the Schuyl Kill. Stopping English activity in the region was paramount, for the Dutch, with their focus on waterways, knew what the English as yet did not: that the South or Delaware River began not in the south but far to the north of Manhattan, and wound its way three hundred miles southward (it would serve as the border between the future states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania) before emptying into Delaware Bay. Thus, if the English ever got control of it, they would have a stranglehold on Manhattan, and the Dutch colony would vanish.

But Stuyvesant also understood the need to attack the Swedish problem before it sapped his colony's strength. He must have had a dossier on his rotund opposite in New Sweden, as he did on John Winthrop in Ma.s.sachusetts. The three men had quite a bit in common. All were autocratic, moralistic Protestants. Printz, like Stuyvesant, was the son of a minister who had been groomed for the ministry but shifted at the last minute into military service. Stuyvesant may have known of Printz's failure on the battlefield; at any rate, he began laying out a course of action to consign New Sweden to history's dustbin. Eventually, he would have to journey to the region personally. For now, however, he issued sheafs of instructions. He ordered his representatives to buy up more land from the Delaware and Minquas. He wanted the Dutch forts on the river repaired. He wanted them stocked with goods, since the Minquas had complained about traveling far with their furs only to find the Dutch traders out of supplies. This was especially important, he wrote, because Printz had not been receiving regular shipments from Sweden.

Another issue: Minquas Indians had complained to him that New Amsterdam's dominant trader, Govert Loockermans, while on a foray on the South River, had killed their chief. Loockermans denied it, claiming he had only roughed the chief up a bit. In a clear example of Stuyvesant's political instincts winning out over his Calvinist upbringing, he instructed his official on the river to "inquire diligently into the circ.u.mstances and truth of the matter, and should you find Govert Loockermans to be at fault, conceal it so that on our part the Indians are given no occasion for new discontent." Then he added brightly, "I thank you very much for the eel which you sent."

MATTERS RIGHT OUTSIDE his front door were equally pressing. The fort itself was tumbling down and had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Besides that, Stuyvesant informed his council, the place needed "a school, church, sheet piling, pier and similar highly necessary public works and common buildings." It all had to get started more or less at once, as far as he was concerned. He had a duty to the place, and beyond that, it was his home; he cared about it. If it was to survive against the threats that loomed on all sides, then "this our capital" had to be made strong. He had kept Johannes La Montagne, the Walloon medical doctor who had been the second member of Kieft's government, as a member of his own council, and La Montagne argued that the fund-raising that was necessary for these projects could only happen if he had the colonists on his side. And the only way to do this was to allow the residents to elect a board of representatives to advise him. Stuyvesant agreed. Following the custom in Dutch towns, the residents would select "a double number of nine persons" from among "the most notable, most reasonable, most honorable and most prominent" of them, and out of this group he, Stuyvesant, would then choose "a single number of nine" to serve. The first board included the Bohemian Augustin Herman, Dutch trader Govert Loockermans, English tobacco farmer Thomas Hall, and Michael Janszen, a close friend of Adriaen van der Donck, at whose home Van der Donck stayed when he remained in New Amsterdam overnight. his front door were equally pressing. The fort itself was tumbling down and had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Besides that, Stuyvesant informed his council, the place needed "a school, church, sheet piling, pier and similar highly necessary public works and common buildings." It all had to get started more or less at once, as far as he was concerned. He had a duty to the place, and beyond that, it was his home; he cared about it. If it was to survive against the threats that loomed on all sides, then "this our capital" had to be made strong. He had kept Johannes La Montagne, the Walloon medical doctor who had been the second member of Kieft's government, as a member of his own council, and La Montagne argued that the fund-raising that was necessary for these projects could only happen if he had the colonists on his side. And the only way to do this was to allow the residents to elect a board of representatives to advise him. Stuyvesant agreed. Following the custom in Dutch towns, the residents would select "a double number of nine persons" from among "the most notable, most reasonable, most honorable and most prominent" of them, and out of this group he, Stuyvesant, would then choose "a single number of nine" to serve. The first board included the Bohemian Augustin Herman, Dutch trader Govert Loockermans, English tobacco farmer Thomas Hall, and Michael Janszen, a close friend of Adriaen van der Donck, at whose home Van der Donck stayed when he remained in New Amsterdam overnight.

Van der Donck himself was not among the first "double number of nine," but the method of its selection helps explain his vigorous networking during this time. The board was to be the vehicle for political change in the colony, and becoming a member required winning the support both of the residents and of Stuyvesant himself. It's hard to avoid seeing Van der Donck as calculating, given the determined, almost fawning way he a.s.sists Stuyvesant in this period. Thanks to his marriage, Van der Donck was by now proficient in English, and he volunteered for a novel a.s.signment when a Scotsman named Andrew Forrester made his way through the Dutch towns of Long Island-Vlissingen (later, Flushing), Heemsteede, Gravesend, and New Amersfoort-in September of 1647, waving a large square of parchment, covered in writing and seals, which, he declared to the startled residents, made him governor of the entire region by virtue of a grant from the English crown. He arrived finally in New Amsterdam and, before a snickering crowd, demanded that Stuyvesant surrender to him. "Wherefore I had him taken into custody and on the next day placed under arrest at the City Tavern at the Company's expense," Stuyvesant later explained to his council.

It was a pretty bewildering turn of events. "What shall be done with said pretended governor?" Stuyvesant wondered aloud to the council. Was the man insane, or was this an organized tactic on the part of the English that needed to be treated with proper diplomatic niceties? Stuyvesant accepted the help of Van der Donck, and of two other English-speaking men, to investigate. They studied the commission, interrogated Forrester, and concluded that the man was the somewhat potty agent of the estate of an English lord who claimed t.i.tle to Long Island and surrounding lands. With the a.s.sent of Van der Donck and the others, Stuyvesant decided to put the man in irons and ship him to Amsterdam, where government officials could sort through the matter.

The Forrester case was bizarre, but by no means unique. The settling of the North American continent had gone on long enough that it was now firing the imaginations of a fair number of European eccentrics. One sort particularly intrigued was the English n.o.ble of modest circ.u.mstances. Such men had seen with their own eyes the piece of paper King Charles bestowed on Lord Baltimore, by which he became master of his own private realm in the New World. The dream that took shape in some such minds was of a return to the Middle Ages; America in its virgin freshness they saw as a land of opportunity where dreams could come true, but, in a quixotic reversal of the direction that history would take, their dreams were all about the past, the halcyon days of knights and damsels, when their ancestors were still men of substance. Sir Ferdinando Gorges was one such n.o.bleman who actually did receive t.i.tle, back in the days of King James, to a huge chunk of North America, which he hoped to divide into medieval estates that he would distribute among his closest a.s.sociates, who would build castles, gather squires and courts, drink mead, and clobber one another in pageants. Gorges died without ever setting foot in the New World, his dream died in the chaos of the civil war, and his tract eventually became the state of Maine. (Two hundred years later, when the U.S. government, during its own civil war, constructed a military installation on an island in Portland Harbor, somebody had the inspiration to name it after him as a nod to the odd dreamer who inadvertently founded the state, and so it remains Fort Gorges.) Shortly after Forrester's appearance, yet another eccentric from the British Isles pitched up on the New Amsterdam waterfront with a similar claim. It was, in fact, the second visit from Sir Edmund Plowden, who had also shown up during Kieft's tenure, brandishing a doc.u.ment signed by the deputy general of Ireland, which, he said, gave him t.i.tle to the area extending from Long Island westward beyond the Hudson River and including all of present-day New Jersey and parts of Delaware and Maryland. Plowden had it all worked out. The kingdom would be called New Albion, and he, its lord, would be styled the Earl Palatine of New Albion. Long Island would henceforth be known as the Isle of Plowden. There was apparently another arraignment at the fort in New Amsterdam, at which Van der Donck seems again to have served. Plowden declared that prior to his arrival in New Amsterdam he had been to New Sweden to inform its governor of his t.i.tle, and was very much annoyed at the way he had been treated. Stuyvesant, who was perhaps getting used to the drill by now, and who must for once have sympathized with Johan Printz, simply told Plowden to leave the colony. Returning to England, Plowden published a little book called A Description of the Province of New Albion, A Description of the Province of New Albion, in which, under the dazzling pseudonym of Beauchamp Plantagenet, he extolled the virtues of the new realm and especially of the Earl Palatine himself. He eventually wound up in an English debtors' prison. in which, under the dazzling pseudonym of Beauchamp Plantagenet, he extolled the virtues of the new realm and especially of the Earl Palatine himself. He eventually wound up in an English debtors' prison.*16 There was one other madcap, and ultimately tragic piece of business at the time of the Forrester episode-late 1647-with which Van der Donck may have a.s.sisted Stuyvesant. Harmen van den Bogaert, the onetime barber-surgeon who thirteen years earlier had made the first daring journey westward deep into Iroquois country, had been an active member of the colony ever since. He had married and fathered four children, had purchased an interest in a privateer called La Garce, La Garce, which he then accompanied on a raiding voyage to the Caribbean, then served as supply master to the company, first in New Amsterdam and then at Fort Orange. He had also been involved in the affairs of the murdered wheelwright Claes Swits, to whom he had apparently been related. which he then accompanied on a raiding voyage to the Caribbean, then served as supply master to the company, first in New Amsterdam and then at Fort Orange. He had also been involved in the affairs of the murdered wheelwright Claes Swits, to whom he had apparently been related.

In addition to all of this, Van den Bogaert had a secret, which he kept as quiet as possible since its discovery would almost certainly lead to a sentence of death. He had a fondness for men.

In the Calvinist Dutch colony, as in the Puritan English colonies, h.o.m.os.e.xuality was a crime on a par with murder. Van den Bogaert thought he had found a discreet outlet in the person of his young black servant, Tobias; we have no idea how Tobias felt about the relationship, but somehow the two men were caught in flagrante. Van den Bogaert fled. In 1647 New Netherland, however, there were few places to hide. You couldn't exactly lose yourself in a crowd-everyone knew everyone else. He might have tried to stow himself on a ship, if one were departing, but upon discovery he would have been shipped back for punishment. Instead, he went back to the one place he knew of where few others Europeans had been-into Mohawk country, retracing his journey of years earlier. It was autumn now, not winter, so the going would have been less difficult, but he was alone this time, traveling across dozens of miles of virgin woodland without a guide.

He made it to one of the villages that had befriended him years before, and presumably was welcomed by the inhabitants. Meanwhile, Nicolaes Coorn, who had taken over from Van der Donck as the law man of the independent fiefdom of Rensselaerswyck, did a bit of Sherlock Holmesstyle reasoning, and sent a woodsman named Hans Vos off westward through the same forests on what may have been America's first bounty hunting expedition.*17 In a sequence foreshadowing the Wild West of two hundred years later, Vos cornered Van den Bogaert in an Iroquois longhouse used to store grain, and a shootout commenced. Van den Bogaert, once the hero of the colony, now laid low by his s.e.xual proclivities, attempted a distraction by setting fire to the place. Vos caught his man anyway, and brought him back to Fort Orange. Coorn then wrote to Stuyvesant, informing him of the event and asking what should be done with the man. In a sequence foreshadowing the Wild West of two hundred years later, Vos cornered Van den Bogaert in an Iroquois longhouse used to store grain, and a shootout commenced. Van den Bogaert, once the hero of the colony, now laid low by his s.e.xual proclivities, attempted a distraction by setting fire to the place. Vos caught his man anyway, and brought him back to Fort Orange. Coorn then wrote to Stuyvesant, informing him of the event and asking what should be done with the man.

Stuyvesant wrote back that he himself would stand in judgment at Van den Bogaert's trial, but not until spring, when the ice on the northern stretches of the river had broken and ships could get through. Before that, however, Van den Bogaert, certain of Stuyvesant's judgment and desperate beyond reckoning, escaped from the prison in the fort. As he ran across the frozen expanse of the river, he fell through a hole in the ice and drowned.

So ended the life of the barber-surgeon turned explorer, but the affair didn't end there. Shortly after, the Mohawks-in a turn of events that suggests the depth of their understanding of European ways by this time-sent a delegation to Manhattan to sue the West India Company for damages resulting from the loss of their building and its stores of supplies. In deciding the matter, Stuyvesant might have taken counsel from Adriaen van der Donck, who knew the Mohawks and their methods of deciding grievances better than anyone in the colony. Stuyvesant concluded that the Indians were in the right, and ordered the sale of Van den Bogaert's Manhattan property, the money from which would pay what he acknowledged was the company's debt to the Indians.

Van der Donck seems to have a.s.sisted Stuyvesant with yet another matter at about this same time, this one crucial to Stuyvesant's leadership and to the colony as a whole. Besides the threats from the English, Swedes, and Indians, there remained the ongoing problem of insubordination from the semiprivate domain of Rensselaerswyck. With the death of Kiliaen van Rensselaer, the estate was now under the ownership of the diamond merchant's son, and in March of 1648 a new director arrived to run the place. Unluckily for Stuyvesant, Brant van Slichtenhorst, a bluff fifty-nine-year-old with vast experience as an administrator in the Dutch Republic, was virtually his equal in grit and resolve. He understood the language of the charter that Van Rensselaer had won from the West India company, which, in a throwback to the glory days of the Middle Ages for which men like Edmund Plowden pined, gave him almost autocratic powers. Stuyvesant read things differently; his own commission obligated him to rule the entire colony of New Netherland, which included the manor of Rensselaerswyck. It was a dispute over political jurisdiction, and Van Slichtenhorst brought it to the surface just weeks after he started work.

Stuyvesant had sent to Rensselaerswyck a seemingly innocuous proclamation declaring the first Wednesday of May a day of public fasting and thanksgiving throughout the colony. It was common of leaders in all Dutch communities, following storms, fires, invasions, or harsh winters, to set aside a formal day of thanks to the Almighty for seeing the inhabitants through the ordeal. But when the proclamation was handed round during church service in Rensselaerswyck, Van Slichtenhorst saw the symbolism in it, which he considered an infringement of his office. He stomped back to his headquarters and fired off a defiant protest.

Stuyvesant, too, understood the importance of symbols of power and the need to back them up. Almost immediately he set sail from New Amsterdam with a full military escort. When, some days later, the company sloop put in before Rensselaerswyck, Van Slichtenhorst extended him the courtesy of firing a welcoming salvo from the estate's cannons, but when they met and Stuyvesant ordered him to stand down and obey the greater authority of the Dutch colony, Van Slichtenhorst replied sharply, "Your complaints are unjust. I have more reason to complain, on behalf of my Patroon, against you."

It was only the beginning of a strident territorial battle between the two men, which would result, among other things, in the founding of the city of Albany. More to the point, we can see here another step in the dance between Stuyvesant and Van der Donck. Van der Donck seems to have accompanied Stuyvesant on this trip. It would have been natural for Stuyvesant to call on his experience: Van der Donck had spent his first three years working as the legal enforcer at Rensselaerswyck; he knew the politics and personalities of the fiefdom and of the West India Company's Fort Orange. And, indeed, the court records of Rensselaerswyck show that, after a long absence, Adriaen van der Donck appears again in the fiefdom's court in July 1648-exactly when Peter Stuyvesant made his trip northward.

So we have a nice picture coming into focus, of the correct, zealous, militaristic, thirty-eight-year-old leader of the colony, working energetically and with considerable creativity to establish control over his domain and secure its position. And as he a.s.sesses the men around him, he comes to rely on the thirty-year-old lawyer who knows so much of the law, the land, and the natives, and who goes out of his way to be of service.

December came. As the last day of the year approached and the ever-present winds off the harbor turned icy, the residents of New Amsterdam met to choose the first replacements to the board of nine representatives. Van der Donck's careful politicking in the community paid off-he was chosen as one of a pool of potential representatives. It was then a foregone conclusion that Stuyvesant, in selecting half of the men from this group, would pick the young man who had been of such service to him. And from the new board's first meeting, Van der Donck, who had already done much behind-the-scenes work with several of these men, stood out, both in the eyes of his fellow representatives and of the director. The others named him their leader and gave him a t.i.tle-"President of the Commonalty." For a short time-a period of days, really-Stuyvesant was well pleased. Together, he must have thought, they could do great things.

Chapter 10.

THE PEOPLE'S CHAMPION.

The sun rose on September 28, 1647, to reveal, bobbing in the steel-colored waters off a gnarled limestone headland on the Welsh coast called Mumbles Point, a lone human figure, nearly lifeless, clinging to a spar of wood. All morning and well into the afternoon the man rode the waves, until at last they tossed him onto a sandbar two miles from sh.o.r.e. Along with the sputtering realization that he was alive came more information: there were other people here, similarly storm-tossed and stranded. Working together, they constructed a makeshift raft out of pieces of debris, and so made their way to the sh.o.r.e.

There, Cornelis Melyn found that his friend and fellow prisoner from the court of Peter Stuyvesant, Jochem Kuyter, was also alive. When the Princess Princess broke up, Kuyter had been on the aft part of the ship, which cracked off in one large piece and floated, with him aboard, toward the scavenging Welshmen onsh.o.r.e. In all, 21 of the 107 pa.s.sengers and crew members survived the wreck. Kieft died, the minister Bogardus died, and so, too, did most of the West India Company soldiers Stuyvesant had sent back to the Netherlands. broke up, Kuyter had been on the aft part of the ship, which cracked off in one large piece and floated, with him aboard, toward the scavenging Welshmen onsh.o.r.e. In all, 21 of the 107 pa.s.sengers and crew members survived the wreck. Kieft died, the minister Bogardus died, and so, too, did most of the West India Company soldiers Stuyvesant had sent back to the Netherlands.

But surviving drowning was only the first stage of what would be an epic escape from fate's grasp. The two Dutchmen managed to cadge a few beaver pelts from the flotsam, which they sold in a nearby town, possibly Swansea, and, using these funds, made their way through the rutted, civil-war-scarred countryside to Bristol, and then to London, which they reached about three weeks later.

From our vantage, the seventeenth century seems an odd combination of the archaic and the modern. On the one hand, no infrastructure to a.s.sist shipwreck victims existed; you had to fight for survival, on land as much as against the waves. Then again, inst.i.tutions that would feel instantly familiar today had a way of kicking into gear. As the various survivors of the wreck of the Princess Princess staggered into London, insurance companies lined up to handle claims, lawsuits were filed, and public examiners picked up their quill pens, dipped them into pots of black iron-gall ink, and took testimony from survivors and eyewitnesses. The tangle of suits and claims took years to settle. staggered into London, insurance companies lined up to handle claims, lawsuits were filed, and public examiners picked up their quill pens, dipped them into pots of black iron-gall ink, and took testimony from survivors and eyewitnesses. The tangle of suits and claims took years to settle.

Melyn and Kuyter had hoped to find in London the long-serving Dutch amba.s.sador, Albert Joachimi, who would help them to get home, but he was in Holland. Diplomatic relations were complicated by the war: King Charles was in prison, and no state in Europe yet recognized the government that Parliament had installed. The two disaffected citizens of the New World languished for months in England before finally winning pa.s.sage to Holland, where they arrived around the end of the year. But the calamity had eroded none of their resolve; if anything, the shipwreck and its result-Kieft drowning and both of them surviving-reinforced their belief in the justness of their cause. They would even tell the story, in later years, that one of them had encountered Kieft on the waves just as he was about to go under, and that the former leader, in extremis, had admitted he had been wrong in his management of the colony and wrong to oppose them, and asked their forgiveness. Not the sort of confession a judge would be likely to accept, but a good indication of how thoroughly vindicated, how righteous and flush with new life and purpose, the two Manhattanites felt after the wreck of the Princess. Princess.

THE WALK FROM the City Tavern on the waterfront in New Amsterdam to the fort at the southern tip of the island was a matter of two minutes or so. It was pleasant enough: stepping out of the tavern-so common a place for transacting business it was now a semiofficial headquarters for many merchants and traders-you found yourself smack on the sh.o.r.e of the East River, looking out on the ships at anchor and across to the farmsteads in the village of Breuckelen. You turned right and walked south, with the river to your left and a row of gabled houses on your right, crossed the little bridge over the ca.n.a.l, continued down the narrow lane extending from it called, sensibly enough, Bridge Street, and there stood the fort, the ragged heart of town. Someone made this simple journey in the first days of January 1649 and delivered a letter to Director-General Stuyvesant. It was from the new a.s.sembly that represented the people of the colony and from now on would stand apart from Stuyvesant's council, which represented the company. The people in New Amsterdam and surrounding towns were calling this a.s.sembly the Board of Nine. the City Tavern on the waterfront in New Amsterdam to the fort at the southern tip of the island was a matter of two minutes or so. It was pleasant enough: stepping out of the tavern-so common a place for transacting business it was now a semiofficial headquarters for many merchants and traders-you found yourself smack on the sh.o.r.e of the East River, looking out on the ships at anchor and across to the farmsteads in the village of Breuckelen. You turned right and walked south, with the river to your left and a row of gabled houses on your right, crossed the little bridge over the ca.n.a.l, continued down the narrow lane extending from it called, sensibly enough, Bridge Street, and there stood the fort, the ragged heart of town. Someone made this simple journey in the first days of January 1649 and delivered a letter to Director-General Stuyvesant. It was from the new a.s.sembly that represented the people of the colony and from now on would stand apart from Stuyvesant's council, which represented the company. The people in New Amsterdam and surrounding towns were calling this a.s.sembly the Board of Nine.*18 The letter informed the director that the Board would like leave to send one or more representatives to The Hague in order to appeal for the Dutch government to take over management of the colony. The letter informed the director that the Board would like leave to send one or more representatives to The Hague in order to appeal for the Dutch government to take over management of the colony.

The pet.i.tion-in effect a request to be allowed to emasculate him-infuriated Stuyvesant. It must have confused him as well. He had actually lauded many of the activities the Board had undertaken in its first year in existence. The members had taken seriously their duties as representatives of the people and served a useful role. When residents brought them complaints about merchants fixing their prices on bread and wine, the Board appealed to Stuyvesant to stop it, and he did. Then, getting bolder, they laid before him a list of measures they said would improve the economy. He fulminated a bit at their effrontery, then, on second thought, decided to take "more closely into consideration and deliberation the pet.i.tion and written remonstrance of the nine elected selectmen, our good and dear subjects," and made the suggested changes. But now, suddenly, the arrogance of these men had shot off the scale. It must have seemed especially strange given that his dutiful protege, Van der Donck, was now in charge of the Board.

At the moment, there wasn't much time for him to dwell on the matter. Another issue was pending, which at first blush seems quite removed. Stuyvesant had to arrange a celebration in honor of an event that had occurred in Europe the previous year. In 1648, in the German city of Munster, negotiations involving representatives from across Europe had culminated in the signing of a peace treaty between Spain and the Dutch Republic. Eighty years of war was officially at an end. The echoes of this great event would reverberate even to the island of Manhattan. The West India Company colony had been founded, after all, as a base for carrying out the war. Manhattan, in the eyes of strategists in the Netherlands all those years ago, had been considered a staging area for launching raids on Spanish vessels coming to and from South America and the Caribbean, such as those carried out by Willem Blauvelt. All that was now in the past. The West India Company directors in Amsterdam would have to rethink the status and future of their North American possession.

In fact, the Munster peace treaty and the pet.i.tion from the Board of Nine were related. Both were elbows from the forces of history into the gut of Peter Stuyvesant, urging him toward the future, toward a new vision for the colony. The peace treaty was something that he needed to accommodate. But he chose to ignore the pet.i.tion, saying he would first have to inform the inhabitants of the several English villages that had begun under Kieft and continued as loyal components of the Dutch colony. Then he put the matter aside.

But the Board did not. From the City Tavern, Adriaen van der Donck was busy greeting and machinating with everyone from ship's captains to fur traders to bakers and distillers, all of whom had an interest in the future of the colony, and all of whom had something to say. Businessmen in the Netherlands had renewed their involvement in Manhattan since the end of Kieft's war with the Indians. Traders in New Amsterdam, with their ties to the world's greatest trading power, were among the most sophisticated on earth. Van der Donck and his fellow Board members met with them and listened as they described the conditions necessary to maintain a stable trade. He catalogued their output, and calculated that eighty thousand beaver pelts per year were pa.s.sing through Manhattan on their way to the fur market in Europe. Because it was so important to the colony, he himself had become an authority on the beaver. He had raised the creatures, studied their life cycle, read everything that the ancient Roman authorities had written about them. (Later he would make it his business to disabuse Europeans of some erroneous beliefs that had originated with Pliny and others, notably about the miraculous powers of beaver t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. "None of these," he concluded confidently about the Latin writers, "had ever seen a beaver.") At the same time, Van der Donck was aware that the beaver trade was only, as he put it, "the means for the initial settlement of this fine country by Europeans." Tobacco was just as important a product, and one with a future. Amsterdam was already the tobacco capital of Europe; that fact, combined with artfully cost-cutting Dutch shipping and trading practices (they pioneered the concept of buying in bulk), led English tobacco farmers in Virginia to rely on Manhattan as a shipping center. The world tobacco trade was in the first stage of its centuries-long surge, and even at this early point the Dutch had developed a marketing savvy that a Philip Morris, a Procter & Gamble, or a Frito-Lay might admire. They created a variety of blends, mixing premium Virginia leaf with lower-grade Manhattan product as well as Dutch-grown to suit a range of tastes and price points, added flavorings (lavender, nutmeg, rosemary, coriander, dill, vinegar), and paid careful attention to packaging. There was even a kind of advertising in the form of popular still life paintings involving tobacco motifs.*19 The civil unrest in England only increased Virginia's dependence on Manhattan as a shipping center. The year before, when it looked as though England would block its colonies in North America from using foreign shippers, the governing body of Virginia derided its own shippers for their high prices and declared that Manhattan was vital to Virginia's economic survival. The recent excavation of the Jamestown settlement has uncovered Delft pottery, Dutch coins and pipes, and Chinese ceramics that came via Dutch shippers-all indications of the Virginians' reliance on Manhattan, and of the power of the Dutch Republic, which by now was not only the leading shipper in the world but the largest maker of manufactured goods.

All of which is to make the point that, where American history has always portrayed Manhattan succeeding as a commercial center only after the English takeover, in fact it was in the late 1640s that the city of New Amsterdam began its rise to become the hub of North American shipping. And now-starting on January 1, 1649, when he took his place on the Board of Nine-Van der Donck began in earnest to organize the businessmen who made the port function.

At the same time, he and his wife were beginning the task of developing their gargantuan estate along the river, just a stone's throw from the northern sh.o.r.e of the island. In keeping with the grandeur of his dream, Van der Donck had given his estate a name: Colen Donck, a compaction of "Van der Donck's Colony." He had building plans; he knew what crops he wanted to plant; he had made lists of the jobs that needed to be filled and the numbers and kinds of workers he wanted to recruit from the home country. Archaeological evidence suggests that he and Mary may have chosen a site for their home at the southern end of a long flat expanse that would have been ideal for large-scale farming. In 1910, New York City workers digging a sewer trench in this area of the present-day Bronx came across what proved to be the foundation of a seventeenth-century farmhouse. A 1667 map of this area shows a house labeled "Van Dunks." The only archaeological excavation of the site was done in 1990, and while the archaeologists found that the integrity of the site had been destroyed by the sewer trench, so that they could not obtain any further information from it, the sewer diggers had found Dutch bricks (slimmer than standard American or English bricks and of a yellow color), Delftware pottery fragments, combs, mirrors, lead window frames, pipestems, even wampum beads. Taken together with the early map of the area, these support the idea that this was the spot where Adriaen van der Donck decided to pursue his American dream. If this was indeed the location of the Van der Donck home, there is a pleasant appropriateness: today the area is Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, a vast, weedy stretch of gra.s.s informally subdivided into fields and pitches in which Bangladeshi and Guyanese cricketers, Irish hurlers, and j.a.panese softball players compete, none of whom, surely, has ever heard of the man who once lorded over the area and who helped make New York City a multicultural enclave.

The location had a lot going for it. The soil was rich, which Van der Donck could have discovered from the Wickquasgeck Indians from whom he had obtained t.i.tle to the land-they kept a village here, which may have remained through Van der Donck's time.*20 A long, lazy stream ran along this stretch of farmland, skirted the house, and snaked down into the creek that separated Manhattan from the mainland, which the Dutch had named Spuyten Duyvil, or "devil's spout," after the dangerous eddies caused by the tide. By following this in a light sloop, or even in a canoe bought from the Indians, A long, lazy stream ran along this stretch of farmland, skirted the house, and snaked down into the creek that separated Manhattan from the mainland, which the Dutch had named Spuyten Duyvil, or "devil's spout," after the dangerous eddies caused by the tide. By following this in a light sloop, or even in a canoe bought from the Indians,21 the leader of the Board of Nine, in antic.i.p.ation of the millions who would commute into Manhattan, could have made his way into the Harlem River, and then, riding with the tide, headed southward along the coast of the island, and come to dock at the small pier in front of the City Tavern. the leader of the Board of Nine, in antic.i.p.ation of the millions who would commute into Manhattan, could have made his way into the Harlem River, and then, riding with the tide, headed southward along the coast of the island, and come to dock at the small pier in front of the City Tavern.

The agitating residents of the town would have grouped themselves around that same sh.o.r.eline one day in January 1649 to see an amazing sight: a ghost being rowed to the dock. It wasn't a total shock-Cornelis Melyn had written to his compatriots from Bristol, telling them about his and Kuyter's survival-but seeing the man in the flesh had to have reinforced what they had felt on getting word of their survival and Kieft's death: that they had a genuine cause, and that it was just.

As soon as Melyn could get into a secure s.p.a.ce, free from eavesdroppers (his own house, perhaps-there, just a few steps up the sh.o.r.e to the right of the pier) with Van der Donck, Govert Loockermans, Augustin Herman, Jacob Couwenhoven, Thomas Hall, Jan Evertsen Bout, Michael Janszen, and others who considered themselves a part of this new political party, he opened his satchel and spread before them the fruits of his time in the homeland. Doc.u.ments. Papers dramatically inscribed with the flourishes of government business and tied with ribbons bearing heavy official seals.

From the moment they had landed in the United Provinces, Melyn and Kuyter set about making their case, trying to undo Stuyvesant's sentence against them and in the process to make men of power in the home country appreciate the value of their North American colony. They found national politics in a swirl with the signing of the peace treaty with Spain; old alliances were shifting. Before, supporting the West India Company, which had been organized as a for-profit venture to raid Spanish shipping, had been the patriotic thing to do. Now people were free to consider other visions for the North American colony. It took months, but Melyn and Kuyter won a remarkable concession from the governing body, which now lay on the table: a mandamus, an order from the government of the Dutch Republic to the Director-General of the colony of New Netherland. The members of the Board of Nine must have gasped as they read the doc.u.ment-in its tone and language it was an utter vindication of their position. It decried "the war that Director Kieft illegally and contrary to all public Law, had commenced against the Indians" and the atrocities "which must startle the Christian heart that hears of them." It approved of the fact that popular representatives had been chosen to ensure that such calamities didn't happen again; it noted that Kieft, and after him Stuyvesant, had hampered these representatives. Stuyvesant's sentences against the two men were revoked, pending appeal, and Stuyvesant himself, or a representative, was to return to the home country to explain his conduct.

And there was more. Willem, the Prince of Orange-leader of the army and symbolic head of the Dutch state-had felt strongly enough about the matter that he wanted to weigh in on it as well. He wrote a personal letter, which Melyn had with him: To Petrus Stuyvesant, Director of New Netherland, the 19th of May 1648 Honorable, prudent, and discreet, specially dear. of May 1648 Honorable, prudent, and discreet, specially dear.You will receive by the bearers hereof, Joachim Pietersen Kuyter and Cornelis Melyn, the commands which the High and Mighty Lords States General have resolved to communicate to you, to the end that you allow these people to enjoy their property free and unmolested there . . . we are disposed earnestly to admonish you hereby, in addition, expressly notifying that you shall have to allow said pet.i.tioners, peaceably and without objection to enjoy the effect of their High Mightinesses aforesaid resolution.And herewith, Honorable, &c.

Willem, Prince d'Orange.

All of this was riveting to the Board of Nine and their supporters. For the first time they understood that there was a new era taking shape in the home country. And the new climate gave them an opportunity to state their case for a government that would put the colony on a secure footing.

In one of his responses to requests from the Board to be allowed to send delegates to The Hague, Stuyvesant had stalled by suggesting that, as representatives of the people, the Board should be sure that what they were proposing was indeed the will of the people. Now, emboldened by the support from Holland, the Board members decided to follow his suggestion. They would ask the people-one by one-whether they felt there was a need for a reform in government. In a remarkably direct approach to democracy, Van der Donck, Loockermans, Janszen, Herman, and the other members of the Board walked out the front door of the tavern, divided the streets of New Amsterdam among themselves, and began knocking on doors. People must have had a lot to say, because once the canva.s.sing was finished the Board decided to compile a dossier. Van der Donck took on the task of collating the complaints and distilling the thoughts of the entire commonalty into a single doc.u.ment.

Stuyvesant watched the canva.s.sers marching through the town and, as far as he was concerned, openly instigating revolt. He sat on his fury for a time, then it erupted. At some point during the months of January and February 1649, while Van der Donck was putting together his brief, there was a confrontation between the leader and his onetime disciple, in which Stuyvesant tried to comprehend how the younger man could turn on him, perhaps even gave him an opportunity to back down, and then finally severed personal ties. Unfortunately, Van der Donck doesn't record the details of the meeting, saying only that "the General" had, from the time of the door-to-door canva.s.sing, "burned with rage."

This was the moment when Van der Donck finally showed his hand. Three times now he had gone through the same series of maneuvers with men in power-ingratiating himself as he worked into a position of some authority, then suddenly turning brash, defiant, willful. Now he let his true feelings, his patriotic fervor, show. Stuyvesant would surely have countered that it was he who was acting in the best interests of the colony, pointed out that they were beset on all sides, and made plain that any effort to undermine him in such circ.u.mstances was tantamount to treason. Both men had strong points. Stuyvesant was indeed holding the colony together. But at the same time he was blind to what Van der Donck saw: that military and diplomatic maneuvering vis-a-vis the English, Swedes, and Indians would only hold for a short while, that without a revamp of its entire structure the colony would die from within.

There was no compromise possible for either man. As a last attempt at coming to an understanding, Stuyvesant apparently offered to work together: the Board would share the information it had gathered with him, and he would take their advice under consideration. But this would defeat the whole purpose of the delegation, which was to be independent of the West India Company. Van der Donck informed him, as he later wrote, that the Board "would not communicate with him or follow his directions in anything pertaining to the matter."

That cut it. The confrontation ended with Stuyvesant exhibiting what Van der Donck called "a bitter and unconquerable hatred" for the members of the Board, "but princ.i.p.ally against those whom he supposed to be the chief authors" of the move to undermine him. As Van der Donck describes this encounter for the benefit of officials in the Netherlands and characterizes Stuyvesant's change of feelings toward certain once-trusted comrades, the formality of the prose actually seems to heighten the emotions involved, leading one to believe that there really had been warm feelings between the two men: "these persons had been good and dear friends with him always, and he, shortly before, had regarded them as the most honorable, able, intelligent and pious men of the country, yet as soon as they did not follow the General's wishes they were this and that, some of them rascals, liars, rebels, usurers and spendthrifts, in a word, hanging was almost too good for them."

Stuyvesant had reached his limit. Whenever he decided to move, he did it forcefully. One day at the beginning of March, probably accompanied by a contingent of West India Company soldiers, he marched around the corner from the fort to the home of Michael Janszen-the Board member with whom Van der Donck had been friends since the time both had lived at Rensselaerswyck. Van der Donck had, as usual, been staying here, but no one was home at the moment. They searched the place and found the sheaf of papers that contained the lists of residents' complaints and laments about the colony and its management, and also the draft doc.u.ment Van der Donck had been preparing. Stuyvesant took it, and what he found in it confirmed him in his next step. The next day, he had Van der Donck arrested and imprisoned. Then he hastily sent Philip de Truy, his "court messenger," to the members of his council and to some of the Board of Nine, demanding their presence at an emergency "supreme council."

The men-fifteen in all-a.s.sembled in an atmosphere of great tension. Stuyvesant's face, even in light moments, had a jowly grimness to it, and he cannot have seemed anything but black as they waited for him to announce the reason for the unusual gathering. Then he told them that Van der Donck had been arrested and charged with "crimen laesae majestatis"- "crimen laesae majestatis"-high treason. The doc.u.ments found in his possession "grossly slandered" the director-general and contained "great calumnies" against the government leaders in The Hague.

At this moment Stuyvesant's vice-director, Lubbert van d.i.n.klagen, the only lawyer in the colony besides Van der Donck, stunned his superior by interrupting him with a formal protest, charging that "the honorable director . . . has heretofore done and still does many things" on his own, without informing his council, "also because he has caused Adriaen van der Donck to be placed under arrest" without consulting them. It was an electric moment. That Stuyvesant now had insubordination from his own council of hand-picked members-indeed, from his second in command-must have shaken him and given new hope to the Board members present, all of whom had to have been fearing for their own lives as well as Van der Donck's.

Stuyvesant collected himself, and, changing tactics, turned on Van d.i.n.klagen. He read out a pa.s.sage from the confiscated writings in which Van d.i.n.klagen supposedly defamed the government in Holland. Van d.i.n.klagen, indignant now, denied he had ever said such things and demanded to see the pages where they were written. Stuyvesant refused. Then he asked each man present to state for the record his opinion on what should be done with Van der Donck. Van d.i.n.klagen spoke up first, insisting that, in accordance with Dutch law, Van der Donck be examined on the matter and then released on bail. But Brian Newton, who had served Stuyvesant loyally since Curacao, who had been at his side when he lost his leg, declared that the man should remain in prison and be interrogated there. Most of the others agreed. Augustin Herman, in an act of defiance against the entire proceeding, refused to give an opinion.

Stuyvesant had summoned only six of the Board members to this special council-seemingly out of fear that the whole group of them would vote against him. With six of them and eight of his trusted advisors, plus himself, he could be more sure of a favorable outcome. Now, however, it looked as though Van d.i.n.klagen and one or two others would swing the other way, so he adjourned the session without calling a vote. Two days later, he a.s.sembled his ordinary council, without the Board members, and "by a plurality of votes" it decided to keep Van der Donck in custody until a committee had investigated the case. Two days following that, on the eighth of March, with Van der Donck still in confinement, people from all the villages in the area around Manhattan gathered in the church at Stuyvesant's bidding to debate a matter that would have serious import for the colony. Shortly before this public meeting, Stuyvesant had gathered with his council and declared that he would read a "writing" to the populace. Presumably it contained an account of Van der Donck's treasonous behavior and Stuyvesant's decision on punishment.

But he never got to read it. After Van der Donck's arrest and the abortive special council, his compatriots had gathered with Cornelis Melyn and plotted a nervy countermove. Now, in the church, before nearly the entire population of New Amsterdam and the surrounding villages, just as Stuyvesant was getting ready to speak, Melyn rushed to the podium. The States General had given him the task of carrying their mandamus to New Amsterdam and serving it on the director-general himself, or naming some other officer or officers to do so. It was a legal technicality-the serving of a summons-but Melyn, who had a flair for theatrics, wanted to make the most of it. He now declared in a loud voice his intention to fulfill the wishes of the States General by having the Board of Nine serve the mandamus on Stuyvesant. Then he handed it to Arnold van Hardenbergh, a member of the Board, and asked him to read it.

Stuyvesant knew what the doc.u.ment contained, and had no wish to have its chastising language, ordering him back to Europe like a misbehaving child, aired in front of his const.i.tuency. He declared there was no need to read the doc.u.ment, as he was ready to receive it. "I must have the copy," he roared, and reached out to grab the thing. In the scuffle, the doc.u.ment was torn and the heavy wax seal that marked it as an official order of the Dutch government came off. Everyone watched in amazement then as the disc of wax fell, floated toward the ground, and then hung, dangling by a strand of parchment. The symbolism was blatant: here these men stood in the holiest building in the colony, defaming it with their raised voices, while the seal of government dangled between them. In the gasp of silence that followed, Melyn informed Stuyvesant that, if he wanted a copy of the doc.u.ment, there was one for him as well as one to be read to the populace.

The crowd erupted at that point. Stuyvesant must have had soldiers on hand, and things were starting to look ugly. He was a born leader; never had he endured such a breakdown of authority. His impulse was to crack down hard, but he also saw that the place was on the verge of chaos; the event, he later wrote to the States General, was "so shaped that ma.s.sacre and bloodshed might have been the result, had we not converted ourselves from the highest to the lowest, and permitted the indecent servic