New York at War (3 page)

We remember that Henry Hudson explored the river and that the beaver and otter pelts he brought back with him sparked the ambition of merchants in Amsterdam and her sister city of Hoorn. We remember that his voyage led to the settlement of a Dutch colony and the genesis of the town that would one day become New York City. We don’t always remember that the process of exploration, settlement, and trade came at a price—to be sure, a price paid sporadically and at unpredictable intervals—in human life. From its very inception, the European encounter with the New York region possessed a military dimension, marked by the corpses of ten or twelve Lenape men and by the bones of John Colman, left behind to settle beneath the New Jersey sands.

Fifteen years after Hudson’s voyage, in the summer of 1624, thirty families of Protestants from what is today Belgium arrived in the river estuary under the auspices of a new commercial entity, the Dutch West India Company, or WIC. Inspired by visions of a wilderness teeming with fur-bearing animals and Indians who could be paid to trap them, the company deployed these settlers to small outposts on the Delaware, Connecticut, and Hudson rivers and to a tiny, presumably defensible speck of land (today Governors Island) at the mouth of the strait separating the tip of Manhattan Island (Juet’s Manna-hata) from the Long Island shore. The Dutch had already christened the entire colony New Netherland.

In the spring of 1625, as more vessels arrived carrying settlers and livestock, the Dutch set about turning Manhattan’s tip into their colonial capital. One passenger, an engineer and surveyor named Cryn Fredericks, landed with detailed instructions from the WIC, authorizing him to plan and build a proper settlement for the colonists. Working with the colony’s on-site director, Willem Verhulst, Fredericks chose the southern tip of Manhattan Island as the optimal site for the principal town and administrative headquarters. Fredericks’s choice made sense: the Hudson River estuary afforded a logical landfall for vessels completing or beginning the three-thousand-mile Atlantic crossing, and it was an equally logical port of call for vessels sailing to and from the navigable headwaters of the river 150 miles to the north, where Mohawks of the Iroquois League brought fur pelts from the northern and western wilderness to trade. New York Bay’s secondary conduit to the Atlantic through the East River and Long Island Sound seemed to clinch WIC domination of the southern New England coast and Long Island’s north shore.
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Fredericks also appreciated the natural blessings of the site. The land masses of Staten Island and Long Island sheltered the Upper Bay from the worst ocean storms and fogs, and the bay’s navigable channels made it the best natural deepwater harbor on the East Coast. If the stiff westerly winds and winter ice floes of the lower Hudson River made Manhattan’s western side less than ideal as a place to dock ships, no such problems hampered the East River shoreline. In time the lowermost reaches of that seashell-covered shore, stretching a mile and more east and north from the island’s southern tip, would become North America’s busiest seaport.
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In charging Fredericks and Verhulst with picking a site that would facilitate trade and communication, the West India Company’s directors had an additional goal in mind. They wanted to create a military base of formidable proportions, the first in a network of such bases they anticipated for the Americas and one that would enable them to exert Dutch military might throughout the Western Atlantic. This goal was rooted in the mission of the company from the very start.

The Dutch colony in New Netherland, like the WIC itself, was born from the impetus of war. Dutch merchants had established the WIC in 1621 at the expiration of a twelve-year truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic. Since 1568, the Dutch had been in revolt against their overlords, the Catholic monarchs of Hapsburg Spain. In 1581 the northern Netherlands had declared its independence from Spain in the name of time-honored Dutch liberties, freedom of conscience, and the Reformed (Calvinist) Church. Spain, unwilling to grant the Dutch their independence, fought on; in turn, Dutch patriots—the founders of the WIC among them—extended the war to the high seas, where they intended to raid Spanish ships and overseas Spanish colonies.

The bitter and draining war between the Dutch and the Spanish coincided with a spectacular economic boom in the Netherlands. By the time they dispatched Henry Hudson to find a new, improved route to the Orient, the merchants of the Dutch seaport cities were well on their way to creating Europe’s richest and most urban society. The traders of Amsterdam, Hoorn, Rotterdam, and Haarlem became the continent’s middlemen par excellence, carrying the raw goods and manufactures of the North Sea, the Baltic, the Mediterranean, England, Russia, and France from one end of Europe to the other and earning hefty profits in the process. Dutch traders became the master capitalists of their day, sophisticated bankers and creditors as well as buyers and sellers, always with an eye to exploiting new markets and sources of supply wherever their ships might take them. As a Dutch saying put it, “any Amsterdam skipper would trade with the devil in hell if he could avoid burning his sails.”
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While Dutch merchants consolidated their fortunes, the war had dragged on, exhausting treasuries and armies on both sides and resulting in the twelve-year truce due to expire in 1621. Many in the Netherlands craved peace, not the least because peace amplified opportunities for lucrative trade across borders and oceans. But a war party also existed, led by hard-line Calvinists blazing with anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish fervor. As they saw it, no contradiction existed between waging war and making money; in fact, resuming war meant that Spain’s cargo ships and colonies were fair game as plunder. These merchants and civic officials had gained the political upper hand by 1621 and had resumed the military crusade against Spain. It was such men as these who envisioned, organized, and managed the Dutch West India Company.
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From its very inception, the WIC was a military as well as a commercial organization. Even though the WIC remained a private stock company that had to raise most of its capital from individual investors, the States General of the Netherlands authorized it to wage war, maintain a private army and navy, and negotiate treaties with “foreign princes and potentates,” all in the name of
Patria
(the fatherland). Within the vast territory set aside for it in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific, the company was free to establish outposts and colonies and to monopolize trade. The States General encouraged the WIC to carry the musket and the firebrand to the Spanish Empire, especially to the string of colonial possessions that Spain and its vassal Portugal had claimed in the Americas and the Caribbean.
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The directors of the WIC, nineteen merchants based in Amsterdam and four other cities, needed little encouragement to wage war. While it sent Protestant families and organizers like Cryn Fredericks to the mouth of the Hudson, the company expended far more of its budget and energies dispatching armed fleets to raid prosperous Spanish settlements and ships throughout the Caribbean. It sent sailors and soldiers to seize the Spanish silver fleet off Havana and to elbow the enemy out of Curacao, Aruba, the Angola coast, and Portuguese Brazil, the last of which, with its rich resources in sugar and slave labor, ultimately engaged the attention and money-lust of the “Nineteen Gentlemen” far more than would their fur-collecting base on the Hudson.

It was no surprise, then, that the instructions the company sent to guide Fredericks emphasized the critical importance of building a fort on Manhattan. Such a fort could prove an invaluable stronghold from which to launch and resupply privateers bent on pillaging Spanish fleets and settlements to the south. Moreover, a well-constructed fortress at the mouth of the Hudson, equipped with cannon to sweep interlopers from the watery “roads” before its walls, would secure the gateway to the northern interior of the continent, from which a treasure in fur pelts was pouring down the river.

The WIC directors had every reason to be confident in Fredericks’s success, for the Dutch had earned their reputation as Europe’s leading military engineers. Centuries of expertise gained erecting dikes against the ravages of the North Sea and draining marshes to create farmland proved to be of great use in wartime. By the early seventeenth century, Dutch armies and their university-trained engineers were adept at building fortifications, a skill they put to use in the Dutch overseas commercial empire. From the East Indies to South Africa to Brazil, the Dutch guarded their colonial outposts against attack from the hinterland and the sea with extensive walls, fronted on the landward side by moats or canals. Almost always, these fortified bases were positioned at the meeting point of a major river with a coastal shore. The forts thus became crossroads and secure warehouses for inland river trade and the traffic it engendered to and from the fatherland.
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Such was the template handed by the WIC directors to Cryn Fredericks. Whoever drafted the drawings (now lost) that the engineer brought with him left little to the imagination. The company demanded a fortification with broad ramparts and five bastions to be located near the water, so “that its fire can sweep both sides of the river”; its outer walls were to be precisely laid out to enclose twenty-five house lots, a market square, a warehouse, and a school. Around the entire fort, Fredericks was supposed to dig a wide moat at a depth of at least eight feet, filled with water from the adjoining bay. This was to be done even on the seaward side, which was to be set back slightly from the shoreline. To accomplish all this, the company instructed Fredericks to enlist the “farm laborers, sailors, and colonists,” women and able-bodied children included, all of whom would be paid for their labor. Even Indians could be hired, although the WIC was careful to underscore that they would be paid a fraction of the wages of white men.
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Fredericks improvised. The company’s grandiose plans suited neither the narrow tip of Manhattan Island nor the resources at hand, so the engineer devised a more modest and practical schema, staking out a four-sided rampart covering a smaller area (today bounded roughly by Whitehall, State, and Bridge Streets and Bowling Green). He built no moat to surround it. Still, the fort’s interior was ample enough to contain a warehouse, WIC offices, barracks, and space for additional public buildings as needed, if not for the multiple house lots the WIC directors had ordered. The fort’s proximity to the small Noten (today Governors) Island, situated like a cork stopper at the mouth of the East River, meant that Dutch artillery placed strategically in the fort and on the island could rake the approaches to the inner harbor with cannon fire, staving off attack by a hostile fleet.

The new fort was the most important structure in all New Netherland. Fort Orange (today’s Albany), constructed 150 miles up the Hudson, might be the critical station for tapping the fur wealth of the interior, but Fredericks’s fort served the entire colony stretching from the Delaware to the Connecticut as administrative headquarters, clearinghouse for contact with the fatherland, and symbol of the WIC’s power. The open space just outside the fort’s northwest gate became an official parade ground and a place to negotiate with Indian delegations. (Today, as Bowling Green, the spot remains a threshold to Manhattan’s southern extremity.)

Although they did not build the fort exactly to specification, Fredericks and Verhulst followed one of the company’s directives to the letter: they christened the stockade Fort Amsterdam, after the Dutch city whose WIC chamber had organized the new colony. Thereafter, the fort would give its name to the town that sprouted up around it: New Amsterdam.
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As more emigrants arrived, bringing materials and skills with them, a presentable village of thatch-roofed, wood-framed, and stone houses emerged outside the fort, punctuated here and there by mills, taverns, gardens, and storehouses. By 1629, some 270 Europeans occupied the town nestled in the shadow of the fort. Bakers, brewers, shopkeepers, and their families lived cheek by jowl with fur traders, mariners, servants, and company clerks. Over the next three decades, settlers spread out to plant grain and tobacco in the meadows and woods beyond the fort, buying land from Indians and clearing farms in the countryside of Manhattan, Staten Island, northern New Jersey, western Long Island, and the Bronx.
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The fort, however, enjoyed a strange fate as New Amsterdam and its satellites continued to grow. As colonists focused their energies on the fur trade, they neglected to complete the structure Fredericks had started before returning to the Netherlands in 1626. The four rampart walls built by WIC laborers were little more than extended mounds of earth that eroded easily. By 1643, a visitor noted that even those mounds had largely “crumbled away, so that one entered the fort on all sides.” Most significantly, Fort Amsterdam was not even manned by a contingent of troops until 1633, when the company dispatched 104 soldiers to accompany a new director to Manhattan. The town’s anticipated role as a privateering base would prove to be similarly modest. True, two of the town’s settlers, the mariner Willem Blauvelt and a barber-surgeon named Harmen van den Bogaert, went on privateering voyages to the Caribbean, returning with plundered Spanish tobacco, wine, and sugar. But no crowd of their townsmen followed them out to sea, as the directors had hoped.
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Fort Amsterdam and the surrounding town of New Amsterdam about 1630, depicted in a seventeenth-century Dutch engraving. In reality, the fort was much smaller, and square in shape. Joost Hartgers,
t’ Fort nieuw Amsterdam op de Manhatans
(Fort New Amsterdam on Manhattan), 1651. NEW YORK STATE ARCHIVES.