The Island at the Center of the World Part 8

But no one in the Dutch colony-or for that matter in New England-saw the end that finally came. It wasn't a result of hordes of New Englanders sweeping south. What happened was more calculated, and involved a global set of players, and, like any good final act, some sudden reversals.

The figure at the center of it all, of course, was Peter Stuyvesant. Stuyvesant's main adversary was a man he would never meet-a man whose first, brief, appearance in the history books came years earlier. In 1642, Stuyvesant was still barking orders under the tropical sun of Curacao, Kieft was in charge on Manhattan, and Van der Donck was the lawman up north, roaming the vast estate of the Amsterdam diamond merchant Kiliaen Van Rensselaer. Meanwhile, outside the village of Boston, nine young men stepped from a simple clapboard building onto a long sward of gra.s.s. It was endless wilderness just beyond the surrounding cow pastures and apple trees, but they and the cl.u.s.ter of people gathered around them saw the event through the lens of civilization, embued it with centuries of English tradition. The nine young men were the first cla.s.s of graduates of the college founded with money granted by a Puritan minister named John Harvard.

Overseeing the ceremony was John Winthrop, governor of the Ma.s.sachusetts colony, with whom Peter Stuyvesant would forge a close relationship. But the man who, more than any other individual, would engineer the takeover of Manhattan was one of those nine young scholars stepping into a New England morning in early fall. His name was George Downing. He was a grim, athletic nineteen-year-old possessed of an ambition bordering on aggression, and he happened to be Governor Winthrop's nephew.

As with most of those first generations of Harvard graduates, Downing yearned for London. Shortly after the ceremony, he sailed there, saw the civil war taking shape, p.r.o.nounced himself a Puritan revolutionary, and fought with the Parliamentarians. As the new government came into being, Oliver Cromwell saw the intellect and bulldog ferocity in the young man and made him his amba.s.sador to The Hague. There, Downing proved himself English to the core, which meant, among other things, fostering a loyal hatred of the Dutch. Really, he was an ungainly choice for a diplomat, unless you are more interested in sticking it to the country in question than in smoothing things. In place of the suave manners usually considered necessary in diplomacy, Downing was brusque and obstinate. Jan de Witt and the other leaders of the Dutch government found him repellent, and his colleagues in the English government didn't much care for him either. The diarist Samuel Pepys worked under him and frankly p.r.o.nounced him (to his diary, anyway) a "perfidious rogue."

But Downing had the diplomat's knack of getting what he wanted, and nothing shows it better than his management of his own fate following Cromwell's death in 1658 and the restoration of the Stuarts, in the person of Charles II, to the throne. Downing had been among the most vicious of the anti-Royals, hunting down friends of the Stuart family, and now the same royal family had returned to power. Turning on a dime, he boldly asked the new monarch to excuse his waywardness in supporting Cromwell, and blamed his faulty judgment on his having come of age in the unstable climate of the New World. He then demonstrated his loyalty to the king by trapping and arresting three of his own friends, men who had sentenced Charles's father to death. Downing's shamelessness was rewarded not only by Charles reappointing him to his position as Dutch amba.s.sador, and later knighting him, but, eventually, by the naming of Downing Street in London after him. (Downing College at the University of Cambridge has his name on it, too, as a result of a bequest he made.) So Downing resettled himself at The Hague, and recommenced loathing the Dutch and their trade hegemony and searching, as duty compelled him to do, for cracks in it. Back in New England, meanwhile, the leaders-men who were theologically even more strident than the home country Puritans-were at least as disoriented by the restoration of the Stuarts as Downing, and most were not nearly as adept at switching gears. One result of their quandary, notable for American history in a number of ways, was the struggle for power and territory among the leaders of the English colonies in the early '60s. Ma.s.sachusetts, with its long-standing royal charter, was on firmest ground. But the two southern colonies, Connecticut and New Haven, had formed in an ad hoc way, settlers spilling southward into territory the Dutch had claimed; as yet they had no official sanction in England. It was now necessary to pet.i.tion the royals they had long despised. For New Haven, where Puritanism was purest, this was galling, and the leaders balked.

One man in Connecticut, however, had more flexibility. John Winthrop, the governor of that colony, was the son of the other John Winthrop, governor of Ma.s.sachusetts and the patriarch of all the New England Puritans, and thus the cousin of George Downing. The elder Winthrop had long since died, much to the chagrin of Peter Stuyvesant, who had relied on his pro-Dutch leanings in his dealings with the New England leaders. Stuyvesant now-with disastrous misjudgment-looked to the son for level-headed leadership among the Puritan firebrands. The younger Winthrop has been portrayed by history as a quiet, modest achiever, forever in the shadow of his father. This small, dark knife of a man has not been given credit either for his accomplishments or his political cunning.

In 1661, having overcome his anti-Royalist impulses, Winthrop proposed to travel to London to pet.i.tion Charles for a charter for his colony. His guile shows itself first in his eagerness to go, second in the manner of his leave-taking. After promising William Leete, his counterpart in New Haven, that he would also deliver the pet.i.tion for a charter that the colony had belatedly cobbled together, he sailed off, literally leaving the man standing on sh.o.r.e still holding his doc.u.ment. Next, he chose not to leave from Boston but instead made arrangements with his friend Peter Stuyvesant to sail from Manhattan. Of course, the island was a major travel hub, but sailing on a Dutch ship meant arriving in Holland first and then having to cross to England. Stuyvesant doesn't seem to have found it odd.

Sailing into the Dutch harbor on July 8, Winthrop was shocked by the sound of cannon fire coming from the fort. But the shock turned to delight: his friend Stuyvesant was giving him the honored greeting of a head of state. (The Dutch records inform us that no less than twenty-seven pounds of gun powder were consumed "to salute Governor Winthorp [sic]".) Stuyvesant liked Winthrop. He seemed to like all Englishmen. Hartford was fast-growing but unkempt, and Stuyvesant proudly showed the visitor around his trim little capital: here the fort, here the new brick home of the director himself (Stuyvesant having decided he ought to have a house outside the fort as well as his distant farm), here the newly reinforced wall along the northern perimeter, complete now with guard towers and a central gate at the Highway. Winthrop apparently kept up his stream of convivial chatter, asking lots of questions, complimenting the director on how far he had come with his town. He spent thirteen days in New Amsterdam, and by the end of it he had detailed notes on the place, its fortifications, and troop numbers.

Trying to imagine Stuyvesant's plight at this time gives some sympathy for him. He knew there were English machinations over his colony, and must have been livid over the company's failure to send soldiers for its defense. And yet, when his own people expressed similar anger at being left without protection, he had to defend the directors' decisions.

And while he was wary of the English, Stuyvesant couldn't resist comparing notes with Winthrop on their respective colonies, and expressing frank envy of the monocultures of New England while complaining how his own population was comprised of the "sc.r.a.pings" of all countries. As pressures grew, he seems to have become more and more a solitary figure, and an oddly evocative image of him at this time comes into view. One of his apparent sources of pleasure was tropical birds, with which he had presumably become fascinated in his years in the Caribbean. Over the years he had instructed company officials on Curacao to send him birds (one packing slip indicates "To the honorable lord director-general P. Stuyvesant," "Four parrots in two cages" and "Twenty-four parakeets"), so that he must have built up quite an aviary by this time. On his farm, alone with the bright squawking of his pets, he must have tried endlessly to pa.r.s.e the problem of how to deal with the English, weighing trust versus suspicion.

Stuyvesant's bonhomie toward Winthrop extended right up to the latter's departure: fifty-five soldiers lined the harbor as Winthrop's ship headed for open water, and unleashed a full military salute. At the other end of his journey, Winthrop arranged a meeting with the directors of the West India Company. Here he played up the fellow-Protestant connection, and the normally reserved men of business were convinced. "He has always shown himself a friend of our nation," they wrote to Stuyvesant, encouraging him in his trust.

If anyone found it suspicious that Winthrop proposed next to travel from Amsterdam to The Hague, it could have been explained away as a family matter. George Downing, English diplomat in residence there, was after all his cousin. They had last seen each other in New England, and were on familiar enough terms that later Winthrop wrote several times to Downing, who was famously stingy with money, to chide him for keeping his mother living near poverty. Secret consultations being what they are, we don't know the details of the meeting between the two cousins in September of 1661, but a map that Winthrop had drawn up of New Amsterdam's fortifications was soon circulating in government channels; this, logically, was the moment in which information about the current military status of the Dutch colony was transferred to English authorities.

Then-this historically momentous journey proceeding to the next phase-it was on to London for Winthrop. Charles II's coronation had taken place just five months earlier, and the city, having thrown off the heavy drape of Puritan rule, was in the midst of its libertine Restoration hoedown, with thundering alehouses, saucy maids, and theaters packing in crowds to see productions of Hamlet, 'Tis a Pity She's a Wh.o.r.e, Hamlet, 'Tis a Pity She's a Wh.o.r.e, and puppet shows satirizing Puritanism. From all of these Winthrop carefully averted his eyes as he applied himself to the task of winning royal favor. and puppet shows satirizing Puritanism. From all of these Winthrop carefully averted his eyes as he applied himself to the task of winning royal favor.

In drab contrast to the satiny surroundings of the king's council chamber, Winthrop-a gray little man with a hooked nose and arched, sardonic-looking eyebrows-bowed low and bowed often that autumn and winter, he smiled through the small indignities (being routinely confused with Josiah Winslow of the Plymouth colony, realizing midway through the discussions that the king thought "Ma.s.sachusetts" and "New England" were one and the same) and emerged with a doc.u.ment that embodied all of his desires, desires he had kept secret from everyone, most of all his New England colleagues. When the charter was finally presented to them, they were staggered. Charles had given Connecticut a grant that extended from the Ma.s.sachusetts border south, including the Dutch territories, and west as far as "the Pacific." Winthrop's quiet, modest, understated ambition was now revealed. He wanted all the territory between Ma.s.sachusetts and Virginia. He wanted his land to stretch to the Pacific Ocean-never mind that no one had any notion how far it was. He wanted everything. And he got it.

New Haven officials were apoplectic at the idea that Winthrop proposed to engulf their colony, but it was a fait accompli-he had the royal signature-and, truly, he was so nice about it, so patient in explaining why it was for the good of all, that his opposite, Governor Leete, gave in quickly, thus ensuring that the future United States would contain no state of New Haven. The bitterest Puritans of the colony talked about picking up stakes and heading for the Dutch territory, where they knew they would be welcomed, but their leaders also knew that Winthrop had that next in his sights.

Stuyvesant, meanwhile, had gotten wind of Winthrop's charter. He wrote to his friend, asking him to confirm that he would respect the Hartford Treaty boundary lines they had drawn up more than a decade earlier. Winthrop's reply was a deft little evasion. The West India Company suggested to Stuyvesant that because of "your anxiety over the patent lately obtained by Governor Winthrop," he should sh.o.r.e up his defenses. But they didn't give him the troops or ships to do so, despite his appeals.

Stuyvesant had troubles quite aside from Winthrop. The boom that had come to New Amsterdam in the eight years since the granting of its city charter was accompanied by a draining away of confidence in Stuyvesant and the West India Company. There had been that chance, in the months following Van der Donck's return, for Stuyvesant to support the reform that people had demanded, and give the entire colony a semblance of popular representation. Then again, the company would probably not have allowed it. At any rate, that was his last hope to win the hearts of the people. Soon after, English colonists on Long Island and on the mainland, who had sworn allegiance to New Netherland, began flipping that allegiance, declaring themselves residents of Connecticut. Winthrop encouraged this and in part engineered it. Stuyvesant complained to the directors that Long Island and "West Chester" were turning English; there had been encroachments on Jonas Bronck's and Adriaen van der Donck's former estates. While the city was thriving, the colony, he wrote, was in "a sad and perilous condition."

Now Winthrop prepared to make his big move, to bring the entire Dutch colony within his jurisdiction. One by one, towns on the mainland were ordered to "yield obedience" to Connecticut, and begin paying taxes to Hartford. Winthrop was no longer Stuyvesant's friend; now he and his colleagues in Connecticut were "unrighteous, stubborn, impudent and pertinacious." New Netherland was disintegrating, and Stuyvesant didn't have the means to stop it.

But no-the end didn't come that way, with an invasion from the north. Winthrop was just about the wiliest creature of all those involved in this end game-the wiliest, that is, but one. His cousin, George Downing, had the better of him there. Downing took the information about Manhattan that Winthrop had given him and put it to other uses. From his diplomat's offices in The Hague, Downing had the wider view of things. He saw the globe scored with the crisscrossing lines of Dutch trade routes. Dutch outposts stippled the coast of India like a beard; they were scattered across the Indonesian archipelago; the Dutch were the only nation on earth with whom the closed islands of j.a.pan would trade. They had control of the spice trade, of cotton, indigo, silk, sugar, cotton, copper, coffee, and dozens of other products. And now, as they moved into West Africa, Downing saw them about to secure an advantage in the one commodity that would tip the balance in the decades ahead: human beings.

In June of 1661, Downing appeared before the States General, and made an expansive appeal on behalf of his nation. England and the Dutch Republic, he intoned, must "be instruments of good and not of hurt to each other." The matter of trade was th.o.r.n.y, but, he advised sagely, "the world is large, there is trade enough for both." This was hogwash. After negotiating a trade treaty with Jan de Witt, he went to London, where he promptly directed his indominable energy to convincing the king that now was the time to hit the Dutch hard, with soldiers, ships, and cannon fire. Living as he did in the bosom of Holland's Golden Age, he had seen the changes brought by the waves of wealth-dour Calvinist clothes swapped for satins and swaggering French fashions, country estates tricked out with faux-Roman pillars, the children of rich merchants (as evidenced by many portraits) growing fat and pink as young sows-and he believed the Dutch had gone soft. Their Atlantic Rim possessions were ripe for picking, starting with the slaving posts in West Africa. "Go on in Guinea," he thundered to the king's council. "If you bang them there, they will be very tame."

Downing was playing to the choir; overwhelmingly, according to Samuel Pepys, the court was "mad for a Dutch war." The only man who really mattered, however, wasn't so sure. The second Charles Stuart to sit on the English throne was a man of wide interests. He was obsessed with clocks, enjoyed redesigning the royal gardens, and spent late nights at "the Royal Tube" (his telescope). He loved dogs, horses, singing Italian songs, tennis (he played daily), and s.e.x (possibly daily-the notorious Nell Gwynn was among his many mistresses and "royal b.a.s.t.a.r.ds" was a category of palace expenditure). His court was the epitome of licentiousness, a mirror image of the years that had preceded it. He had been a teenager when anti-royal forces put a price on his head, and after years hiding in barns, forests, and foreign palaces, he was now where he was meant to be, and ready to live it to the full. He cared about foreign policy, but didn't seem to have an overriding philosophy of where to steer the country. He wasn't especially fond of the Dutch, but admired them, and had some grat.i.tude toward them for putting him up in The Hague. He wasn't sure about launching military raids.

His brother, however, was. James Stuart, at twenty-eight, was bigger and bluffer than the king, a full-out athlete and lifelong soldier, aggressive and full of tally-ho, altogether more of a man's man. He wasn't well liked by the people and some historians have branded him a stooge, but he had something his brother lacked: constancy. When he later converted to Catholicism it was after long deliberation, and he stayed with it despite the fact that it got him deposed only three years into his reign. It was James who saw the magic in Cromwell's idea of an English empire. His brother had made him head of the Admiralty, and from that position he was determined to make good on Cromwell's dream.

The plan began to take shape in 1661. As a first step, the men at the center of power in London-politicians, royals, merchants-agreed that the American colonies, which had been left to themselves while the nation's attention was diverted by civil war, needed reorganizing. Charles and James didn't trust the Puritan leaders there, and soon after the king had sent Winthrop away with his charter it was agreed that it had been a mistake to give the New Englanders leave to take control of Manhattan and the Hudson River corridor, which meant access to the interior of the continent.

Downing then took the lead in arguing for a master plan involving the whole Atlantic Rim. Reading the letters, minutes, and military instructions surrounding this evolving plan, it's remarkable to comprehend that so much history-the changeover of Manhattan Island, the consolidation of the American colonies, the ramping up of the slave trade into an epoch-changing inst.i.tution, the transformation of West Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and North America-was quite calculated and stemmed from a series of meetings among a rather small group of men in London in the years 1661 and 1662.

James backed the plan, and pushed for the king's endors.e.m.e.nt. Warfare was a language that the prince knew and felt comfortable with. In his years of exile he had volunteered and fought valiantly under the French in their war against Spain, leading men in musket-and-horse charges on the snowy plains of northern France and achieving the rank of general, then, when the vicissitudes of the age dictated that the English royals-in-exile should back the Spanish, promptly switching sides and fighting with equal bravery for Spain. Having risked his life a dozen times for lesser ends, he was more than ready to commit himself now to something as big and vital as this. The first objective was to wrest control of the slave ports of West Africa from the Dutch. The prince organized a company to fund the operation, which got the flourishing t.i.tle of The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa. (The Royal Mint commemorated James's desire to exploit the "Guinea Coast" by striking a new coin, which, popularly known as the guinea, would long outlast the trade.) Reorganized as the Royal African Company, this enterprise would become the single greatest shipper of slaves from Africa to America. (The prosaic-sounding 1667 announcement of its public offering of stock stands in stark relief to the impact the words would have down the centuries: "the Royal Company being very sensible how necessary it is that the English English Plantations in Plantations in America America should have a competent and a constant supply of should have a competent and a constant supply of Negro-servants Negro-servants for their own use of Planting, and that at a moderate Rate, have already sent abroad, and shall within eight days dispatch so many Ships for the Coast of for their own use of Planting, and that at a moderate Rate, have already sent abroad, and shall within eight days dispatch so many Ships for the Coast of Africa Africa as shall by G.o.d's permission furnish the said Plantations with at least 3000 Negroes, and will proceed from time to time to provide them a constant and sufficient succession of them . . .") as shall by G.o.d's permission furnish the said Plantations with at least 3000 Negroes, and will proceed from time to time to provide them a constant and sufficient succession of them . . .") In the company's first mission, James picked a roguish Irishman named Robert Holmes and sent him in command of two ships to go raiding in the Cape Verde islands and down the Guinea Coast. Holmes did all that was asked of him: the initial result of James's first corporate adventure was a rout of the Dutch slaving posts. The Dutch amba.s.sador expressed his government's outrage to King Charles (the two countries were after all at peace), and the king tried to brush the matter aside: "And pray, what is Cape Verde? a stinking place; is this of such importance to make so much ado about?" Meanwhile, the ringing success encouraged both the prince and the diplomat to move to the next stage. Downing was sure he could talk his way out of anything. "What ever injuries the Dutch doe them," he wrote of James's warships, "let them be sure to doe the Dutch still greater and lett me alone to mediate between them . . ."

Charles now had some confidence in the geopolitical gambit, and he gave Downing and his brother their next card to play. Settlement of North America had become a primary long-term objective; the slave business was intertwined with it. In March of 1664 the king signed his name to an extraordinary doc.u.ment. In making a gift "unto our Dearest Brother James Duke of York, his Heirs and a.s.signs" of a vast stretch of the North American continent (". . . Together with all the Lands, Islands, Soils, Rivers, Harbors, Mines, Minerals, Quarries, Woods, Marshes, Waters, Lakes, Fishings, Hawking, Hunting and Fowling and all other Royalties, Profits, Commodities and Hereditaments to the said several Islands, Lands and Premises . . ."), he was being more than generous. Much of the land indicated-from Maine to Delaware-he had only recently granted to Winthrop for his Connecticut colony. The gift to his brother was meant to erase that mistake. The "Duke's Charter" took care to single out the "River called Hudsons River," and it was in this that men in Whitehall who were attuned to global economic events were particularly interested.

Like an elephant in the dawn, the full girth of the continent to the edge of which the European colonies had clung for four decades was gradually becoming apparent. It was also apparent by now that the New England colonies were on a kind of shelf, landlocked, unable to access future potential. The beavers of the northeast were on their way to extinction; the future lay to the west, which meant, first, up the Hudson River. And the key to it was Manhattan. This was borne out by the fact that much of their own trade went through Manhattan, which, English leaders now calculated, cost them ten thousand pounds per year in tobacco shipments alone. Having identified the island as the linchpin of the American colonies, a committee at Whitehall determined in January 1664 that it was necessary to take it, and soon. Further, they wanted it in the hands of one of their own men rather than the New Englanders.

Having made their decision, the committee moved quickly. The charter was signed in March; the next month, James summoned a man named Richard Nicolls. Nicolls was forty years old, a lifelong royalist who had stayed at the prince's side all during his Commonwealth exile and fought with him in France. He was smart and capable, which was just as well. James told him he was being entrusted with North America. He would command four gunships and four hundred and fifty men; they would leave within the month. Shortly after, James himself took to sea, cruising the Channel in a naval exercise, smelling the future on the sea air, fully aware that his attack on Manhattan would have to be followed up by further a.s.saults on the Dutch.

Nicolls, meanwhile, sailed west. The squadron had good conditions to start. Then on day sixteen they were hit by crosswinds and foul weather, and in "very great Fogge," Nicolls, on his flagship, the thirty-six gun Guinea, Guinea, lost sight of two of his ships. Ten weeks after leaving Portsmouth, the vessels made landfall, two on Cape Cod, the other two away to the south at Piscataway. lost sight of two of his ships. Ten weeks after leaving Portsmouth, the vessels made landfall, two on Cape Cod, the other two away to the south at Piscataway.

When he came ash.o.r.e at Boston, Nicolls dispatched riders with letters from King Charles to the New England governors, informing them that steps were about to be taken for "the welfare and advancement of those our plantations in America." Arguably the man in the colonies most shocked by Nicolls's arrival was not Stuyvesant but John Winthrop. Nicolls had been ordered by James to "putt Mr Winthropp . . . in mind of the differences which were on foot here"-i.e., that the king had reneged on his promise. Winthrop's dream of a continent-wide colony of Connecticut vanished in a stroke. Smart politician that he was, however, he swiftly adjusted his expectations. While the Ma.s.sachusetts leaders stalled and grumbled, unhappy with the idea of relinquishing power to the crown, Winthrop offered his services in negotiations with Stuyvesant, which Nicolls accepted.

Stuyvesant, meanwhile, was, of all places, one hundred and fifty miles north of Manhattan, at Fort Orange, where there were problems with the Mohawks. He hadn't been caught off guard, but he had been misled. Through one of his English friends he had learned of the English squadron even before it landed, and had his capital dig in-setting watches, preparing defenses, sending men out along Long Island Sound for news of the ships' arrival. Then a remarkable letter arrived from Amsterdam. Before the squadron had left, Downing had taken the unusual step of informing the Dutch government of its existence-in order, he said, to a.s.sure the Dutch that their colony had nothing to fear; England was merely sending a commander to overhaul the administration of the New England colonies.

The Dutch leaders were completely duped; the directors insisted Stuyvesant needn't be alarmed. Nicolls's mission would not affect him, and as to the English residents of the Dutch colony, they would "not give us henceforth so much trouble" because they "prefer to live free under us at peace with their consciences" than risk being persecuted by "a government from which they had formerly fled." So Stuyvesant relaxed his guard, went up the Hudson as planned, and as soon as he arrived at his northern outpost news of impending disaster reached him. He sailed back to Manhattan to find the island in turmoil. The English gunboats were perched at the entrance to the lower harbor, cutting off the river and Manhattan Island. People stepping off the ferry from Breuckelen talked of inhabitants of the English towns forming themselves into companies of foot soldiers. Sailors from a Dutch boat anch.o.r.ed in Gravesend Bay reported the English ships had fired on them.

Stumping into the fort, Stuyvesant dictated a letter to the colony's secretary, which was delivered to Nicolls's ship, asking his business and declaring hopefully that Stuyvesant was not "apt to entertaine any thing of prejudice intended against us." Nicolls's reply came the next morning, a messenger delivering a letter informing Stuyvesant that "in his Majesties Name, I do demand the Towne, Scituate 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 did not relish "the effusion of Christian blood," but if the Dutch did not surrender they would invite "the miseryes of a War."

Stuyvesant's reaction to this thunderbolt was stylishly in period: he returned the letter because it was unsigned. Whereupon Nicolls fired off another: These to the Honorable the Governor of the Manhatoes.Honoured Sir.The neglect of Signing this inclosed Letter, when it was first brought to your hands, by Colonell Geo: Cartwright, was an omission which is now amended, and I must attribute the neglect of it at first, to the over hasty zeale I had dispatching my Answer to the Letter I received from you dated 19/26th instant, I have nothing more to add, either in matter of Forme, then is therein expressed, only that your speedy Answer is necessary to prevent future inconveniences, and will very much obliege. instant, I have nothing more to add, either in matter of Forme, then is therein expressed, only that your speedy Answer is necessary to prevent future inconveniences, and will very much obliege.Your affectionat humble Servant RI: NICOLLS.

Townspeople were rushing through the streets with news and gossip. Stuyvesant tended to be calm in such situations. By now he had the pertinent details. There were maybe five hundred men in New Amsterdam able to bear arms. Nicolls had nearly twice that, plus forces totaling a thousand or more ama.s.sing on Long Island, plus the firepower of his ships. The fort had its cannons, but it was so low on gunpowder they were inconsequential. It was probably hopeless, but Stuyvesant doesn't seem to have had second thoughts: they would fight to the death. Anything else, he informed the leaders of the city government, "would be disapproved of" at home.

At this juncture, a rowboat, with a white flag aloft, approached the sh.o.r.e. In it, of all people, was Winthrop, along with several other New Englanders. They asked for a meeting, and Stuyvesant led them to a tavern. Winthrop urged his "friend" to surrender, and handed him a letter containing Nicolls's terms. They were generous terms-extravagant almost-and yet Stuyvesant was unmoved. Later, at the City Hall, the city officials demanded to see the letter and show it to the citizens. Stuyvesant knew his people: resistance would cave once they heard of the favorable terms. So he tore the letter to pieces.

At this, the room went wild. Long-stoppered feelings came flooding out. The company, Stuyvesant himself, the colony's government-it was all a sham; it had never been anything else. For years they had lodged requests and pet.i.tions, asking for a voice in government, and he had sneeringly rejected them, declared them childish fools who didn't understand the complexities of government, and all along he had been nothing but a good soldier blindly carrying out the orders of a bankrupt bureaucracy. Now he expected them to fight and die on his orders. Why should they? Why spill their blood, and try to hold the attackers off, when they all knew the West India Company had sent no reinforcements, despite his appeals. It would have been one thing had the company denied their pet.i.tions for reform on the grounds that its way was better, but it never had a way.

Finally, the town leaders demanded once again to see the letter. In an odd bit of comedy, Stuyvesant offered them the pieces, which Nicasius de Sille took and carefully pasted back together.

Meanwhile, with no answer from Stuyvesant, Nicolls had moved his ships forward, within shot of the city. The English Long Islanders, with muskets and pikes, were gathered along the Breuckelen sh.o.r.e. Some French privateers who were in the area had gotten news of the events, and rushed to the scene as well.

There is then an almost Shakespearean scene, in which Stuyvesant climbs heavily onto the battlements of his fort and stands there, gazing at the guns trained on his town, his long wisps of hair flailed by the wind. He seems, in this moment in which he will be forever frozen in history, almost to have achieved the status of a tragic hero, his leadership, his particular stew of character strengths and flaws, having built this impressive place but also having caused his own people to turn against him. (To add a family dimension to the betrayal, his seventeen-year-old son, Balthasar, had come out on the side of the city leaders.) There was a lone gunner at his side, awaiting his command to touch light to powder. It must have been tempting. A single cannon blast at the ships riding at anchor just beyond the walls would be enough. It would unleash a rain of violence, a storm that would swallow the place, ending the torment, ending things the way they ought to end, in good, quenching blood and fire.

Then, in his direst moment, the church came to give comfort. Two ministers of the town, father and son, both with the ponderous, sonorous name of Megapolensis, appeared at his side. It's hard not to think of Stuyvesant's father here, to imagine the lifelong battle inside him between stalwart devotion to the church, personified in his father's ministry, and that streak of stiff rebelliousness. Maybe it was the church that swayed him. Then, too, the warships, the guns, the French privateers, and the glinting line of weaponry on the opposite sh.o.r.e had to have added up to something in his military calculations. He knew what the pikes and the expectant leers of the foreigners meant. It was a long-standing rule of war that if a besieged fort so much as fired a shot, the forces against it were at liberty to sack and loot; the place would be laid waste. Was he really willing to subject the people he had lived among these seventeen years to such a thing?

The ministers talked lowly to him for a while, and then the three men went down.

But he still wouldn't yield. He crafted another letter to Nicolls, referencing the history of the Dutch claim to the territory, a.s.serting that "we are oblieged to defend Our place," informing him that he had had news from Holland about a treaty between the two countries, and suggesting that Nicolls check with the home office before taking this fateful step. It may have been a bluff, but Stuyvesant was right in thinking this move by England was rash. Contrary to Amba.s.sador Downing's a.s.surances to King Charles, the Dutch would fight to defend their interests. At this moment, the great Dutch admiral Michiel de Ruyter was preparing to launch an expedition for West Africa. When his sweep was over, all but one of the Dutch outposts taken in James's raids would be back in Dutch hands. Outright war would then begin, and, all told, the Dutch would win the Second Anglo-Dutch War, creating a pothole in England's road to empire.

But, pulling back to the broad view, the English were riding to the top of the historical wave. With these events of late summer 1664, the island of Manhattan would be a pivot around which the age would turn, and when it was done the floppy hats, Vermeer interiors, "merry company" portraits, and blue-and-white Delft tiles would be thrust into the past, and ahead would be the Raj and the redcoats, Britannia ruling the waves.

In the end, Stuyvesant truly did stand alone. All of his people deserted him. The leading citizens of New Amsterdam-ninety-three of them, including his son-signed a pet.i.tion asking him to avert "misery, sorrow, conflagration, the dishonor of women, murder of children in their cradles, and, in a word, the absolute ruin and destruction of about fifteen hundred innocent souls." Perhaps it struck him, on reading it, that it showed he had been right all along: this rapid willingness to give up, this spinelessness, this absence of patriotism, was what came of a mongrel society. Mixing religions and races weakened a populace, and here was proof. It would be wrong to think that the citizens of the town had no sense of loyalty, but they were practical people, and at any rate they had little choice. They made clear in their final pet.i.tion to Stuyvesant that they were willing to support their neighbors and their colony, but they had no qualms about abandoning the company that had left them defenseless.

And so they did. The fifteen hundred residents of New Amsterdam, the ten thousand inhabitants of the colony of New Netherland, turned their backs on the company that had long ignored them. Griet Reyniers, onetime Amsterdam barmaid who became Manhattan's first prost.i.tute, abandoned it. So did her husband, Anthony "the Turk" van Salee, the half-Morroccan former pirate. They were now wealthy landowners on Long Island, and their four daughters were married to some of New Amsterdam's up-and-coming businessmen. Joris Rapalje, who with his bride Catalina Trico comprised the Adam and Eve of the colony, had recently died, but Catalina was still very much alive, as were her grown children and their families, and they, too, preferred to acquiesce rather than die. The same went for a.s.ser Levy, the Polish Jew who had battled Stuyvesant over the rights of Jews, and now owned Manhattan's first kosher butcher shop, and for Manuel "the Giant" Gerrit, the African who had escaped hanging in 1641 and who for the past five years had been living as a free landowner on a small farm near Stuyvesant's bouwerie. For all of these people, living peaceably under an English prince who promised to continue the way of life they had fashioned was patently better than fighting and dying.

And so he relented. "I would much rather be carried out dead," he said, and surely everyone believed him, but instead he named six men to meet with their English counterparts and negotiate terms. They met at Stuyvesant's farm. And the next Monday, at eight in the morning, Stuyvesant, fifty-four-years-old, thick of build, with his cuira.s.s and his limp and his small, bold eyes, led a military procession out of the fort, with drummers drumming and flags waving.

Then, as all attention shifted to the waterfront, where Nicolls and his main body of troops was coming ash.o.r.e, a small party of English soldiers entered the deserted fort. Outside, the harbor winds were swirling around the interested throng of mixed nationalities who watched as an English flag went up the flagpole and listened as Nicolls declared the place renamed for his patron, the Duke of York and Albany. Inside the fort, meanwhile, a few soldiers climbed to the office of the colonial secretary, above the gate. In any change of government, gaining possession of the records is among the first steps, for to control a society's vital doc.u.ments is to control its past and future. The soldiers found what they were looking for: rows of bulky leather-bound volumes, forty-eight in all, numbered consecutively on their spines, A to Z and then AA through PP. Wills, deeds, minutes, correspondence, complaints, pet.i.tions, confrontations, agreements-it was all here, meticulously maintained, year by year, day by day, the story of America's first mixed society.

Chapter 15.

INHERITED FEATURES.

As Stuyvesant surrendered the Manhattan colony, America's myth of origin was already coming into being. Starting in the 1660s, a handful of New England clergymen began singing the praises of their parents' and grandparents' generations, which had braved an ocean and a wilderness to start a new life. The story they wove was biblical from first to last. In their modest telling, their forebears were none other than the chosen people of G.o.d, and America (i.e., New England) was the promised land. By the time of the revolutionary generation a century later, the story had become myth. John Adams, himself a descendant of the first Puritans, revered the Pilgrims as the launchers of the American saga.

Certainly the Puritans pa.s.sed down many features to the nation. They were practical, plain-spoken, businesslike, pious-all traits that Americans from Adams on have admired and tried to emulate. But, as many people have noted in recent decades, in which the Puritans have fallen out of favor, they were also self-important zealots. Their form of government was a theocracy. It was rooted in intolerance: freedom of worship, in the words of one prominent New England minister (who became president of Harvard College), was the "first born of all abominations." "'Tis Satan's policy to plead for an indefinite and boundless toleration," declared another. The Puritans' systematic crackdown on alternative views was cruel, unusual, and lethal. People whose crime was being members of the Baptist denomination, or Quakers, or belonging to some other Protestant sect, were beaten with a knotted whip ("to cut their flesh and to put them to suffering"), put in a "horse lock" of irons, had ears lopped off. They were whipped and then tied to a cart and driven through deep snow, "the white snow and crimson blood" making a vivid tapestry. They were hanged in public spectacles. Some were hanged and then had their naked bodies dragged through the streets. These were not ma.s.s "lynchings" but sentences p.r.o.nounced by judicial authorities, in regimes based on an official policy of intolerance. Later, in the 1680s, came the witchcraft mania, which has gone down in history as a particularly vivid example of the dangers of fusing government and religion.

Out of the Puritans' exceptionalism-their belief that the Old World had succ.u.mbed to wickedness and they had been charged by G.o.d to save humanity by founding a new society in a new world-grew the American belief that American society was similarly divinely anointed. In 1845, journalist John O'Sullivan coined the phrase that would carry this doctrine forward across the continent when he declared "the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole continent which providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self government." In the early twentieth century, President Woodrow Wilson extended the manifest destiny concept to cover the globe. In the aftermath of the Great War, Wilson determined that the United States, because of "the sheer genius of this people and the growth of our power" and because it had "seen visions that other nations have not seen," had become not only "a determining factor in the history of mankind" but "the light of the world."

This conviction lives on today, and is directly traceable to the first Puritans. When the sons of those first leaders-Cotton Mather, Thomas Hutchinson, Jeremy Belknap, Thomas Prince-put their beliefs into print, their story found ready listeners. Of course, in this version of American beginnings, the tellers were English and the hearers were English. Subsequent generations were raised on the belief that America's origins were English, and that other traditions wove themselves into the fabric later. And history shows this, does it not? The thirteen original colonies were English colonies. The supporting evidence is overwhelming: the language we speak, our political traditions, many of our customs. This is all so obvious that we don't question it.

But it ought to be questioned. The original colonies were not not all English, and the multiethnic makeup of the Manhattan colony is precisely the point. The fact that the Dutch once established a foothold in North America has been known all along, of course, but after noting it, the national myth of origin promptly dismisses it as irrelevant. It was small, it was short-lived, it was inconsequential. That wasn't all English, and the multiethnic makeup of the Manhattan colony is precisely the point. The fact that the Dutch once established a foothold in North America has been known all along, of course, but after noting it, the national myth of origin promptly dismisses it as irrelevant. It was small, it was short-lived, it was inconsequential. That wasn't us, us, the subtext runs, but someone else, an alien mix of peoples-with strange customs and a different language-who appeared briefly and then vanished, leaving only traces. the subtext runs, but someone else, an alien mix of peoples-with strange customs and a different language-who appeared briefly and then vanished, leaving only traces.

This is false. In the first place, while in population the colony was quickly outpaced by New England, it was hardly small. It covered the whole middle stretch of the East Coast and encompa.s.sed parts of five of what would be the original thirteen states. In terms of historical evidence-of written records-we have a steadily growing mountain of it, thanks to the translation and publication work now going on. But surely the most obvious reason to see the Dutch colony as significant is that we are not talking about a settlement planted in some obscure corner, in a hidden valley or on an inaccessible slope. We are talking about Manhattan. The strange thing would be if the settlers of the most geographically vital island on the continent, which would serve as the gateway between it and Europe, had not not made an imprint on the nation that was to come. made an imprint on the nation that was to come.

Moving the story beyond the English takeover requires, first, realizing that "the Dutch" didn't go anywhere. The people from all over Europe who had built homes and raised families on Manhattan, on Long Island, away to the south along the Delaware River, and across the river from Manhattan in what the English first named "Albania" (sic!) but on second thought called New Jersey, had no reason to leave after Stuyvesant surrendered his colony. In fact, ships from the Dutch Republic, with their mixed loads of European settlers, kept arriving in New York Harbor. (Notaries in Amsterdam, blithely ignoring the political changeover, continued writing "New Netherland"-and sometimes "New York in New Netherland"-on immigration papers well into the 1680s.) And Richard Nicolls-who became the first governor of New York after accepting Stuyvesant's surrender-and his successors actually encouraged the traffic with their longtime foe. They even made a point of naming prominent Dutch merchants to their economic councils to keep the ties strong. That was because these first English governors quickly discovered they were in the awkward but t.i.tillating position of being even more keyed into world trade than London itself. With the English takeover, New York instantly became a unique spot on the globe: the only port city plugged directly into both of the world's two major trading empires. To sever connections to the great trading firms of Amsterdam would have been to strangle their long-sought possession just as it was burgeoning. The traders, bakers, brewers, barkeeps, smugglers, and scam-artists of the town soon realized the same thing the governors did, and felt the power of it: their island was no longer a Dutch settlement, and it wasn't really English either. It had its own trajectory.

The notion of an English takeover brings with it an image of starting afresh, of a house emptied of the possessions of the previous tenant and then filled with the completely different belongings of a new occupant. What happened instead was more in the nature of a cohabitation. Continuity between the Dutch and English eras was established at eight o'clock on Sat.u.r.day morning, the sixth of September 1664. We can imagine a percussion of hooves on dry earth as twelve riders, having traveled north up the Highway and then east along the Bouwerie Road, came to a halt and dismounted before the facade of Peter Stuyvesant's farmhouse. Maybe they paused for a moment to breathe the country air: here were fields under cultivation and, just beyond, stands of forest alternating with salt marshes. (Today the same view takes in an Arab newsstand, a Yemenite Israeli restaurant, a pizza shop, a j.a.panese restaurant, and a Jewish deli.) Following precedent for such occasions, neither Stuyvesant nor Nicolls was present for the meeting that then took place, but each had chosen a slate of commissioners to negotiate the transfer of the colony. Stuyvesant's included four Dutchmen, one Englishman, and one Frenchman; Nicolls's representatives were two of his aides and four New Englanders, including John Winthrop.

We don't know details of the negotiations, which is a pity because there is the suggestion of a move on the part of Peter Stuyvesant that, if true, would amount to a kind of reversal in his long struggle with the colonists, and in particular with Adriaen van der Donck. Nicolls's private instructions from the king authorized him to inform the Dutch colonists only that "they shall continue to enjoy all their possessions (Forts only excepted) and the same freedome in trade with our other good subjects in those parts." But Stuyvesant seems to have instructed his men to push for specific guarantees, and that is what they got. The end result of the negotiations, the so-called Articles of Capitulation, is a remarkable doc.u.ment. Packaged into it-and extended later by the New York City Charter-was a guarantee of rights unparalleled in any English colony. "The Dutch here shall enjoy the liberty of their Consciences," it read. People would be free to come and go as they liked. Trade would be unrestricted: by all means, "Dutch vessels may freely come hither." Most remarkable, the political leaders of the colony would "continue as now they are," provided they swore an oath of allegiance to the king, and in future "the Towne of Manhatans, shall choose Deputyes, and those Deputyes, shall have free Voyces in all Publique affaires." Prefiguring the Bill of Rights, it even stipulated that "the Townesmen of the Manhatons shall not have any Souldier quartered upon them."

It's possible that this unusual slate of freedoms was authorized by the Duke of York himself, who had declared he wanted the Manhattanites to have "immunities and privileges beyond what other parts of my territory doe enjoy." If James was indeed the force behind these articles then he deserves to have his t.i.tle attached to the name of the place. The thinking was that the inhabitants of the island should be allowed to maintain their way of life for the very good reason that the place worked. One has to keep in mind what an oddity the new city of New York was to people of the seventeenth century, with its variety of skin tones and languages and prayer styles coexisting side by side. The English leaders in Whitehall Palace were surely aware of this unusual characteristic of the island across the water, and they may have been confused by it, but at the same time they understood that it was part of what made the place function.

Then again, there is no record that the English offered the particular catalogue of guarantees that made their way into the Articles of Capitulation. It's logical to a.s.sume that the Dutch representatives, on Stuyvesant's orders, pushed for some of these. If so, there is an ironic twist here. Such a slate of individual rights and liberties, preserving the unique society that had come into being in the colony, was just what Van der Donck had fought for, and precisely what Stuyvesant had opposed during his seventeen years in office. Now, faced with the end of the West India Company's rule, which he had stoutly, mulishly, upheld, he seems to have made a turnaround. If his own brand of leadership couldn't save the place, then Van der Donck's vision-government commitments to support free trade, religious liberty, and a form of local political representation-afforded the best protection for its inhabitants in the uncertain future. If this is what Stuyvesant came to think in those final hours, the question is: why? Part of the answer may be that, despite the unending turmoil of his years as director of the colony, he cared about it and its people. Some of his colonists may have argued the proposition, but he apparently had a heart. The second part of the answer is that Stuyvesant understood power. If he had to give up the colony, better to divide it into channels and see that some of it flowed to the people of the colony than to have the English decide what courses it would follow. The result surely wasn't a reversal of character, not a complete break, but a bending that makes for an ironic end to Stuyvesant's long tussle with his colonists.

Maybe then Stuyvesant came away from the negotiations with some degree of satisfaction. But if so it was slim. He had lost his colony, and the directors of the West India Company rubbed salt in the wound by demanding that he return to Amsterdam to face charges of "criminal neglect" in surrendering. After a grim voyage on a ship the ironic appropriateness of whose name-The Crossed Heart-must have raised in him a low chuckle, Stuyvesant found himself in more or less the same position that Van der Donck had been in more than a decade earlier: making his case before the States General while the West India Company threw argument and invective at him ("neglect or treachery . . . scandalous surrender"), blocked his effort to return to America, and kept him exiled in Holland and separated from his family. As further indication that Stuyvesant had undergone something of a transformation with the loss of the colony, he included in his defense testimonials from some of the very Manhattanites who had once denounced his autocratic rule, who now declared that he had done everything in his power to keep the colony together.

The fact that Stuyvesant pet.i.tioned to be allowed to return can't be overlooked. Like Van der Donck, and yet by a very different route, he, too, had become an American. He may have packed his son off to seek his fortune in the Caribbean in the weeks after the English takeover (upon arrival in Curacao, Balthasar Stuyvesant wrote home, inquiring about events and asking his cousin to "take care of the girls on the Manhatans" and "greet them all for me with a kiss"). But America was Stuyvesant's home, and eventually the States General granted him permission to return. He finished out his days as a resident of the rapidly growing settlement, a gentleman farmer, a grandfather, a man of renown always greeted by locals as "the General," a historical curiosity to the incoming population. The capping irony of his life was that in surrendering the colony he had finally won himself the welcome of his fellow colonists. He had joined them at long last, but not as an inhabitant of New Netherland. He died-in 1672, at the age of sixty-two-a New Yorker.

Nicolls, meanwhile, was delighted with the deal he had struck. Without firing a shot, he had gotten a thing that he knew full well was of great immediate value and of inestimable future value. All of the English leaders seemed aware of the scope of the achievement. "I saw ye towne upon the Manatos Iland reduced to the obedience of our Soveraigne Lord the Kinge," John Winthrop intoned after the articles were signed, "Wherby there is way made for the inlargment of his Maties Dominions, by filling yt vacant wildernesse, in tyme, with plantatios of his Maties subiects . . ." Nicolls fired off a letter to the Duke, practically crowing at his accomplishment, declaring New York "the best of all His Majties Townes in America," and predicting that within five years it would be the main portal for the flow of trade between England and North America.

When the news of the takeover reached King Charles, he whisked a letter to France. His sister Henrietta-the d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans, sister-in-law (and sometime lover) of Louis XIV-was his closest confidante. "You will have heard of our taking of New Amsterdam, which lies just by New England," he wrote to her chirpily. "'Tis a place of great importance to trade, and a very good town." The Dutch had done marvels with the wilderness island, the king noted, "but we have got the better of it, and 'tis now called New York."

BUT THE 1664 surrender would not be the end of the struggle between the two empires over the colony. The takeover of Manhattan helped ignite the Second Anglo-Dutch War, which would see Dutch warships retaliate by taking the English outpost of Surinam to the north of Brazil, valuable for its sugar plantations, and the spice island of Run in the East Indies, while others sailed up the Thames tributary known as the Medway, surprising the English fleet, torching some of its finest ships, and forcing Whitehall to treat for peace. With a shortsightedness that would have made Van der Donck shake his head in sad recognition, the Dutch government allowed England, in the treaty negotiations, to have its way regarding captured territories: rather than swap them back, each nation would keep its war spoils. 1664 surrender would not be the end of the struggle between the two empires over the colony. The takeover of Manhattan helped ignite the Second Anglo-Dutch War, which would see Dutch warships retaliate by taking the English outpost of Surinam to the north of Brazil, valuable for its sugar plantations, and the spice island of Run in the East Indies, while others sailed up the Thames tributary known as the Medway, surprising the English fleet, torching some of its finest ships, and forcing Whitehall to treat for peace. With a shortsightedness that would have made Van der Donck shake his head in sad recognition, the Dutch government allowed England, in the treaty negotiations, to have its way regarding captured territories: rather than swap them back, each nation would keep its war spoils.

Some Dutch leaders, however, apparently thought that was a bad deal. Only five years after the peace treaty was signed, the Third Anglo-Dutch War broke out, and a Dutch fleet crossed the Atlantic and set about strafing English possessions. It attacked Caribbean ports under English control, swept into the Chesapeake and burned the tobacco fleet about to embark for England, then, in a little-known episode, sailed into New York Harbor in August 1673, precisely nine years after Stuyvesant's surrender, and retook Manhattan. Everything then happened in reverse: a Dutch commander at the head of a flotilla of gunships threatened to reduce the town; inside the fort, an Englishman was in charge, anguishing over what to do. He was outgunned and outmanned. The English surrendered; a new, Dutch-led administration was installed. The English troops paraded out of the fort just as the Dutch under Stuyvesant had done, and the town that had been New Amsterdam and then New York was given a third name: New Orange. The whole colony changed hands: the upriver trading town that the Dutch had named Beverwyck, and which Nicolls had renamed Albany after his patron, was now called Willemstad. The paperwork was barely complete, however, before it all reverted again. Fifteen months after retaking the colony, with the signing of yet another peace treaty, the Dutch gave it back.

But even this was not the end of the tug of war over the island and its trading city. Its namesake, the Duke of York, having labored for a quarter century in his brother's shadow, got the chance truly to impose his vision of empire in 1685, when Charles died and he ascended to the throne. But the rule of James II began to fall apart almost at once. Thanks to his conversion to Roman Catholicism years before, English leaders and much of the population suspected him of being a Popish puppet; real resistance mounted when he installed Catholics in important offices. When it got out that the queen was pregnant-meaning that a Catholic line was in the making-James's rule teetered.

English history has characterized the Glorious Revolution-in which James was ousted and replaced by Willem of Orange, Stadtholder of the Netherlands, and his wife, Mary-as an "invitation." There is an element of spin doctoring in this. In fact, the Dutch leader-the son of the previous Willem, who had attempted a coup d'etat while Van der Donck was in The Hague-capped the century of Dutch-English rivalry by launching a full-scale invasion of the British Isles. More than twenty thousand troops. .h.i.t the beach at Torbay on the Devon coast, and a month later Willem rode triumphantly into London. The Dutch army took control of Whitehall Palace and all the other power centers, and the Dutch stadtholder was crowned king of England. The so-called invitation was considered by many Englishmen of the time a thorough disgrace, but for others the facts that Mary (who was James's daughter) was the presumptive heir to the English throne and that in Willem they once again had a Protestant monarch made things all right.

This cross-pollinization of the royal leadership of two longtime rival nations would have an echo in Manhattan when a German-born New Yorker named Jacob Leisler (who, thirty years before, had served as a West India Company soldier under Stuyvesant), apparently under the impression that the Dutch-born king of England would approve, led a handful of radicals in a Calvinist-fueled takeover of the city. But Willem wasn't interested, and Leisler's Rebellion, as history has known it, ended quietly, with Leisler and an a.s.sociate being hanged for treason and, for good measure, beheaded.

Maybe the main result of this remarkable span-in which the island and surrounding colony changed hands five times in three decades-was that it forced the inhabitants to solidify their ident.i.ty. Which European power held ultimate control became less important to the Manhattanites than the relationships between their own ethnic communities and their ties to traders, shippers, and family in other parts of the world. What mattered was that cache of rights, which they noisily insisted be honored by whoever had just won control of the place, and which enabled the separate minority communities to flourish.

So Adriaen van der Donck's dream became real in a way he never imagined. The structure he helped win for the place grounded it in Dutch tolerance and diversity, just as he hoped it would, which in turn touched off the island's rapid growth and increased the influx of settlers from around Europe, just as he predicted. What he didn't predict was that the English would appreciate this fact, and maintain the structure, and that it would support a future culture of unprecedented energy and vitality and creativity.

AND SO OFF it went, spiraling upward along its path through history-the colony and city of New York, the jewel in the crown of England's North American possessions. More English settlers came, naturally enough, and also-word having continued to spread about its mixed population and the opportunities for getting ahead-French, German, Scottish, and Irish immigrants, so that by 1692 a newly arrived British military officer would complain to his uncle in England, "Our chiefest unhappyness here is too great a mixture of nations, and English ye least part." it went, spiraling upward along its path through history-the colony and city of New York, the jewel in the crown of England's North American possessions. More English settlers came, naturally enough, and also-word having continued to spread about its mixed population and the opportunities for getting ahead-French, German, Scottish, and Irish immigrants, so that by 1692 a newly arrived British military officer would complain to his uncle in En