The Island at the Center of the World (11 page)

Eventually, the travelers made their way to the most important village, where they would negotiate. The scene Van den Bogaert describes opens like the third act of a Western, in which the white man finally meets the Indians on their terms. The residents of the village formed two long lines outside the gate of the village, and the Europeans passed ceremonially between the columns, and through the elaborately carved entryway, to the house at the farthest end. The houses here had gables decorated with paintings. In the flickering firelight, amid much whooping and excitement, the men were fed and feted.

And then the rough business tactics began.

A secondary tribal leader berated them for not bringing adequate presents. He showed them the presents the French had given, including French shirts and coats. The atmosphere became tense. As the man kept up his verbal assault the others “sat so close to us here that we could barely sit.” Van den Bogaert counted forty-six people crowded around them in the room. One of the Indians then began to scream, calling them, in Van den Bogaert's translation, “scoundrels,” and his tirade reached such a fury that Willem Thomassen, a hardened sailor, burst into angry tears. Finally, Van den Bogaert hollered back.

At this, the tactic changed. The Indian laughed, suggested there had been a misunderstanding, and said, “You must not be angry. We are happy that you have come here.” An old man stepped forward and put his hand against Van den Bogaert's chest to feel his heart; he announced with approval that the man was not afraid. The Dutchmen had apparently passed a test. Warily, the visitors dispensed knives, scissors, and other presents. Six leaders of the village stepped forward and presented Van den Bogaert with a beaver coat. When they sat down to discuss business, Van den Bogaert learned that these Mohawks would prefer to maintain relations with the Dutch because they feared the Hurons, with whom the French were allied. The Mohawks offered their terms: henceforth, each beaver pelt would be worth four hands of sewant and four hands of cloth (a hand of sewant, or wampum, being one string of beads stretched from outstretched thumb to little finger). When Van den Bogaert did not reply, an old chief from another of the five tribes of the Iroquois confederation, of which the Mohawks were a part, stepped forward. He required a translator because he spoke Onondaga, not Mohawk, and said, “You have not said whether we shall have four hands or not.” Van den Bogaert told them he was not authorized to finalize the deal, but would return in the spring with the answer. They accepted this, but the old man cautioned him, “You must not lie, and come in the spring to us and bring us all an answer. If we receive four hands, then we shall trade our pelts with no one else.”

A provisional agreement was made. The Indians began a chant, which Van den Bogaert diligently recorded. The chant turns out to contain the names of the five tribes of the Iroquois League, through some of whose lands the Dutchmen had traveled, and Van den Bogaert's documentation of it provides the earliest written record of this confederacy that would play a role in the American Revolution. A rough translation of the chant, given to me by Iroquois linguist Gunther Michelson, is: “This white man is a magician. He has leave to go around to all the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, and lie down safely among them. This is a useful thing for the Iroquois League.” The chant indicates how much Van den Bogaert succeeded in impressing the Iroquois. The reference to him as a magician also dates this to the period in which the East Coast Indians, still amazed by the tools of the whites, thought of them as having wondrous powers.

Following the agreement, Van den Bogaert was given a house, presents, and thick portions of bear meat. Although he doesn't mention it, he may have been given other things as well, for the detailed list of Mohawk vocabulary words he compiled includes the words and phrases for man, woman, prostitute, vagina, phallus, testicles, “to have intercourse,” “very beautiful,” “When shall you return?” and “I do not know.”

The three travelers said their farewells and began the long journey home. They arrived back at Fort Orange in late January, where the people had feared them dead. They had traveled to Oneida Lake—nearly as far as Lake Ontario—and back, through savage weather, powered only by their own feet. It is no accident that their route was the one that generations of Americans and millions of tons of goods would follow westward in the coming centuries, once the Erie Canal was constructed. It was the natural highway connecting the Atlantic coast to the heart of the continent, the reason the Dutch had focused their attention on the Hudson River, and why, beginning with Minuit, they saw Manhattan Island as the logical hub. Van den Bogaert's trip would prove to be pioneering in the fullest sense.

In the spring, the deal with the Mohawks was indeed finalized. The furs began coming again. Van den Bogaert's impact on the colony would not end here—he would later make a final, tragicomic contribution to history. But for now he had done what was asked of him: the colony could go on.

W
HICH, HOWEVER, BEGGED
a question: why bother? While the old ambassador and the young explorer-surgeon were doing their utmost to preserve the colony, its parents, the merchant-princes who ran the West India Company, were running it into the ground. They disagreed over how to manage it, with the result that it went largely unmanaged. To replace the capable Peter Minuit they chose a young clerk in the company's Amsterdam offices with no particular set of skills to recommend him, only a dull devotion to the company and a family relation to an important man connected with the colony. Immediately upon arrival in Manhattan, Wouter van Twiller set about proving himself a drunk and a nonleader. At times he even managed to combine the two traits. Shortly after he began his duties, and on the heels of the recent trouble with England over the ship carrying his predecessor back to Europe, an English trader sailed into the harbor and anchored before the fort. Her captain made clear his intention to sail upriver and trade with the Indians: an open flaunting of Dutch sovereignty. Van Twiller dealt with the matter by boarding the vessel and proceeding to drink with the captain. He became so drunk that David de Vries, a Dutch adventurer who had spent time in the East Indies and now proposed to throw his lot in with the New Amsterdammers, and who had himself just sailed into the harbor, was embarrassed. The English captain then made the bold declaration that he had every right to sail upriver because the river and all the land around it was English. De Vries responded that New Netherland had long been settled by the Dutch, and that their claim was secure. The English captain countered that the area had been discovered by an English explorer, “David Hutson.” That was close enough for De Vries, but he countered, quite properly, that Hudson had charted the river under Dutch auspices. Van Twiller appears to have stayed out of the conversation.

After lying at anchor several days, the English ship set sail and headed upriver in defiance of the Dutch leader. Van Twiller moved quickly. He ordered a cask of wine brought to his office in the fort at once, filled bumpers for himself and the soldiers and other company employees assembled there, and cried out for those who loved the Prince of Orange and him to join him in stopping the Englishman. Whereupon, De Vries reported, “The people all began to laugh at him.”

Van Twiller let the matter go, and the English ship sailed off northward. De Vries was incensed. He sat the man down and explained that it was precisely incidents like this that made or broke a colony. “I said, if it were my matter, I would have helped him away from the fort with beans from the eight-pounders, and not permitted him to sail up the river,” De Vries wrote in his journal, and added that “if the English committed any excesses against us in the East Indies, we should strike back at them; otherwise one cannot control that nation, for they were of so proud a nature, that they thought everything belonged to them.”

Clearly Van Twiller had some decisive weaknesses, but it should also be kept in mind that for this period of the Dutch colony's existence the official records are almost nonexistent, so that history has relied on bits and pieces, such as De Vries's journal, in order to re-create the times. Thanks to the wave of scholarship now under way, however, new evidence is emerging that complicates the picture. A letter written by Van Twiller in 1635 to the company directors, discovered recently in the Dutch National Archives in The Hague by historian Jaap Jacobs, shows Van Twiller building a fort on the Connecticut River (the earliest documentation for the settlement of what would become Hartford), holding the English at bay, and trying to deal with his unruly population—acting, in other words, like the colonial administrator he was supposed to be.

But if Van Twiller was not the outright incompetent that history has made him out to be, he was clearly not equal to the challenge of his rowdy, expanding capital. New Amsterdam now had a downtown arcade of five shops, and dozens of private houses. Ships carried bricks as ballast on the trip from Europe, and the settlers used these—the slender yellow bricks of Holland, which still turn up occasionally in digs in lower Manhattan—in their first houses, particularly in chimney stacks. Ramparts were added to the fort. There was a boathouse and sailmaker's loft, a guardhouse and soldiers' barracks, and a church. But there were few residents with the drive, guts, and pioneering spirit of David de Vries. Many were pirates or itinerant fur traders. The most famous New Amsterdam pirate—Willem Blauvelt—used New Amsterdam as his base to plunder off the Spanish main (the waters north of South America), mixed piracy with privateering, and was a member of the community in good standing who dutifully logged his voyages with the provincial secretary. His financial backers included many of the town's leading citizens.

Piracy in turn brought another wave of residents, for the “cargo” of pilfered Spanish galleons included not only cases of indigo, chests of sugar, and sacks bulging with pieces of eight, but slaves bound for the Caribbean salt fields. As privateers brought them to Manhattan, some of the Africans became slaves in the West India Company's service; others worked for their freedom or were employed as freedmen from the outset. The very names of Manhattan's Africans—Pedro Negretto, Antony Congo, Jan Negro, Manuel de Spanje, Anthony the Portuguese, Bastiaen d'Angola—evoked their tempestuous journeys, from capture and enslavement in Africa to purchase by Portuguese traders and forced voyage westward on Spanish ships, only to be captured once again by Dutch pirates. Decades later, terms of slavery would be more or less standardized in the colonies, but at this point, on the free-form, slightly anarchic island, some of these people were among the more stable residents of the island; many would become farmers, carpenters, smiths, and barber-surgeons.

Such an unruly population required servicing. Prostitution became a mainstay (the wife of Tymen Jansen was known to “commit adultery . . . not for money, but for otters and beavers”). The island spawned taverns and breweries with remarkable speed—at one point in the early years one-quarter of its buildings were devoted to making or selling alcohol. The “bar scene” seems to have rivaled anything New York City could boast today (and, ironically enough, would occupy the same general downtown quadrant that accounts for much of today's nightlife): an enraged woman who came upon her husband in a tap room later wondered in court “what he was doing with another man's wife . . . touching her breasts and putting his mouth on them.” A man named Simon Root had part of his ear cut off “with a cutlass” and petitioned the court to get a certificate clarifying that it happened in a fairly routine barroom brawl and should not be confused with the standard punishment for thievery. The records are rife with murderous assaults, and the leaders favored extreme forms of punishment—branding, pillorying, whipping, beating with rods, garroting, hanging—in an effort to instill order. Visible punishment of all sorts—removing an ear, boring a hole in the ear or tongue with a redhot poker, “riding the horse,” which involved shackling the evildoer to a wooden horse, often for days at a time, with heavy weights attached to his arms and legs—was prized for its deterrent effect.

Harsh as punishment often was, there was a certain flexibility in carrying it out: people were occasionally let off at the last minute, sometimes in novel ways. On a cold January day in 1641, eight African slaves were brought into the fort, accused of murdering another slave, Jan Premero, “in the woods near their houses” (an area north of the town set aside for slave quarters—today it is where the United Nations resides). The men admitted to the crime “without torture or shackles.” But it couldn't be determined which one did the deed, so the court, in its wisdom, decided they would draw lots to see who would be put to death, thus letting “God designate the culprit.” God chose Manuel Gerrit, a.k.a. “The Giant.” A week later, a crowd gathered near the shore for the entertainment of a public hanging. In theory, drawing lots may have satisfied the law; in reality, hanging a possibly innocent man may have been distasteful to the colony's leaders, or maybe they saw it as a senseless waste of a good slave. There is no proof of tampering in what followed, but the results are suspicious. The executioner fastened “two good ropes” around the man's neck and pushed him off the ladder, whereupon, to the gasps of the spectators, both ropes broke and the man tumbled to the ground unharmed. The crowd clamored for mercy, and the court granted it. The Giant went free; the system worked.

A scene that appears in the court records from a few years later nicely sums up the atmosphere of casual mayhem, of violence erupting in the midst of ordinary life, that reigned in this period:

Piere Malenfant, of Riennes [i.e., Rennes], in Brittany, 35 years of age, declares that yesterday evening about nine o'clock, as it was getting dark, he came from the farm in company with Paulus Heyman and his wife, he carrying the child on his arm and the woman the gun. Near Damen's house, the sentry, named Andries Tummelyn, called out, ‘Who goes there?' He answered, ‘A friend.' Paulus Heyman said, ‘Good evening, Jonker Nobleman,' to which the sentry replied, ‘What do you want, Merchant?' Heyman retorted, ‘Lick my ass.'