The Island at the Center of the World (13 page)
The university's botanical garden was also a (literal) seedbed of innovation. From it came advances in chemistry and botany, and it was here that, through crossbreeding, the Dutch frenzy for tulips began.
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And in the wake of Galileo the observatory was booked up by scholars scouring the night sky for sunspots and evidence to support or refute the theory of planets revolving around the sun.
Van der Donck steeped in this intellectual ferment for three years. In law, just as in science, a revolution was taking place. The very concept of a nation was being redefined. In the aftermath of the Reformation, the medieval notion of a state as existing under the umbrella of Christendom, with its laws ultimately pointing back to the Church, had collapsed, and the modern concept of a state as an independent political entity was coming into being. The dominant legal figure of the age, who did more than anyone to set the parameters by which nations interact to this day, was the Dutch jurist Hugo de Groot, known to history as Hugo Grotius. Grotius is considered the father of international law. (As an indication of his prominence in history, a bas-relief portrait of him adorns the U.S. House of Representatives chamber, alongside those of Moses, Hammurabi, and Thomas Jefferson.) Of his two major works,
Mare Liberum
created the principle of international waters, which were to be open to all nations, while
De Jure Belli ac Pacis,
written in the midst of a century of unprecedented warfare, laid down principles on which war was justified, and how it ought to be conducted.
Grotius dominated the way law was taught at Leiden, especially among the younger, more practical-minded scholars. Judging from his later actions, Van der Donck must have avoided the “antiquarian law” favored by the older generation of purely theoretical teachers, which confined itself to examination of ancient Roman texts, and instead concentrated on what was called “elegant law,” which applied the reasoning of ancient authorities to practical courtroom situations. In this regard he would have been a disciple of Grotius. Grotius's work was also broadly influential because it helped to establish the framework by which the great European powers conducted their affairs—including how England and the Dutch Republic, in their increasingly bitter rivalry over North America and other territories, conducted themselves.
Beyond this, Van der Donck would have been drawn to Grotius because he, like Descartes, based his arguments not on biblical citations but “natural law,” the idea that right and wrong could be determined by applying human reason—or, as Grotius put it, that an act could be judged “from its conformity or non-conformity with rational nature itself.” Traditionally, American history has shown the principles of democratic government coming out of the Enlightenment era of the eighteenth century, with origins in the writings of John Locke in the late seventeenth century. But in recent decades historians have uncovered the early modern roots of those democratic impulses. Some of Grotius's followers, building on his statement of natural law, applied the same kind of radical verve to their writings as would the generation responsible for the American Revolution. One of those disciples—Piet van der Cun, a.k.a. Cunaeus—taught a radical form of Grotius's political thought in his own career at Leiden, and a collection of young idealists formed around him and perpetuated it. Cunaeus's ideas—that a republican form of government was morally superior to a monarchy, and that enterprises like the West India Company enriched a wealthy few to the detriment of both the state and ordinary people—were in the air during Van der Donck's days at Leiden, and helped mold his generation.
For three years Van der Donck studied at Leiden alongside an international contingent of scholars, took part in debating circles organized by the law professors, maybe joined with his colleagues in complaining, as students will, about the food in the dining hall (smoked fish, hashed meat with cabbage, cheese, bread and butter, and beer). In taverns in the evenings, with smoke curling from long clay pipes and Rhenish wine flowing from pewter pitchers, the young men might have applied their debating skills to the all-consuming Galileo-versus-Aristotle and Arminius-versus-Gomarus questions. Then he emerged, in 1641, a “jurist,” an authority on Roman-Dutch law.
What to do next? He was a man of law. He came from a family of renown. He was a graduate of the top university in the country, and the economy was so robust it was practically exploding. Many possibilities must have been open to him—back home in Breda, in Amsterdam, at The Hague, the center of legal and political power in the nation. Instead he opted to leave the country. And not just leave, but to go nowhere, headlong into the wilderness. His country was experiencing one of the greatest flowerings of art and science and one of the most profound economic booms of any nation in any period in history. Its streets were safe, its houses snug, its offices bustling. The cuisine was surely nothing to marvel at, but the beer was fresh and excellent; pipe tobacco was sold in every conceivable grade and form; even the boxes to store it were available in an infinity of materials and styles. Homes were decked out with rugs from Turkey, Chinese porcelain, and Delft tiles; dollhouse makers were in demand, not for child's play but by proud home owners who wanted them to create mini-replicas of their dwellings. It was one of the first societies on earth in which ordinary town-dwelling citizens had developed a worldly sophistication. English travelers were amazed to find that not just the wealthy but ordinary bakers and shopkeepers decorated the walls of their homes with paintings; an obvious sign of their outward-looking nature, the Dutch of this time were the first (as shown in Vermeer's interiors) to decorate their homes with maps. The Dutch at the beginning of the century were also among the first to separate their homes into public areas (downstairs) and private living space (upstairs). A German visiting a Dutch home was astounded that “it is not permissible to ascend the stairs or set foot in a room without first removing one's shoes.” It was the Dutch of this era who invented the idea of the home as a personal, intimate space; one might say they invented coziness.
All of this had happened roughly within the span of Van der Donck's life. Fueled by its global trade, the Netherlands had become a very comfortable place. It was unthinkable that anyone with good prospects would want to leave. It's not beyond reason to suppose Van der Donck took his inspiration from Descartes. The intellectual celebrity would have made a natural model for the young man. He lived in and around Leiden through Van der Donck's time there, and, for all his personal reserve, was a polarizing presence; some professors at the university became his disciples while others bitterly opposed his “natural philosophy.” He had a ruddy attractiveness—dark wavy hair, curling moustache, penetrating eyes—and was a man of action as well as intellect: he had volunteered as a soldier under Maurits, son of William the Silent, and strutted the town with a sword as part of his regular dress. His
Discourse,
which Van der Donck would likely have read while at Leiden, was remarkably chatty and autobiographical for a philosophical work, and a young man of restless and individualistic spirit would have been drawn to the passage near the front in which Descartes, in talking about his own setting-forth, declared that “as soon as my age permitted me to pass from under the control of my instructors, I entirely abandoned the study of letters, and resolved no longer to seek any other science than the knowledge of myself, or of the great book of the world.”
Had Van der Donck wanted to go into overseas trade, the logical route was via the offices of the East or West India Company. But they were too regimented for his nature. As in any large corporation, promotions came slowly and steadily. Van der Donck wanted something more toothsome and wild. Perhaps through his parents, or possibly through one of the pamphlets that served as precursors to newspapers, he had learned of a New World colony-in-the-making, a raw, virgin place that was in need of help. It wasn't the West India Company's New Netherland settlement that attracted him, but the colony-within-a-colony at its northern reaches, the private fiefdom of Amsterdam diamond merchant Kiliaen van Rensselaer. He made an inquiry.
His timing was excellent. Van Rensselaer had steadily enlarged his colony in the eleven years since its founding, buying tracts from the Mahicans; it now covered several hundred thousand acres along both sides of the Hudson River, encircling the West India Company's upriver base of Fort Orange. While the company's own colony centered around Manhattan was floundering, the patroon—a micromanager of the first order—had tended his settlement with great care. He had sent farmers, carpenters, smiths, wheelwrights, and bricklayers, as well as livestock, seed, and bare root trees and vines; from his base in Amsterdam (Van Rensselaer would never live to see his domain), he gave voluminous instructions for clearing forest and planting crops. Houses went up and roads were laid. Van Rensselaer was able to write in January 1641 that “In general, the affairs of the colony are all right, God be praised,” but there was a problem, which stemmed from his success. He had a genuine settlement on his hands now, and it needed a government. While technically his colony was within the boundaries of New Netherland, Van Rensselaer considered it a semi-independent entity. That meant he had to provide his own law and order. Thefts and runaways (farmers who signed on for a specific period of years, and then fled) were on the rise.
When Van der Donck wrote to Van Rensselaer, asking to be considered for a place in the colony, the merchant must have been pleased. Getting experienced workers of any kind to cross the ocean and take up a new life in his colony was difficult: he was forced to pay substantially more than they would make in the Netherlands, and even then he complained about the quality of person he was able to attract. In the mind of a middle-class businessman who had clawed his way up, Van der Donck's credentials, as a Leiden University jurist, would have shimmered. There was no lawyer in the entire colony of New Netherland; the only university-educated man was the minister in New Amsterdam. It was simply too difficult to interest such people in the posting. Van Rensselaer fired off a letter to one of the minor shareholders in his colony, who happened to live in Leiden: “When convenient please have inquiry made through Mr de laet or some one else regarding a young man, called vander donck, from the barony of breda, who has studied law at Leyden and is desirous of attempting something connected with farming in our colony; and if there are no serious charges against his character, as one can not always get the best to go thither, we might employ him also in some other capacity.”
Once the two met, Van Rensselaer knew how he would employ the young man. He needed someone who could roam the wilds of his untamed land and hunt down outlaws, and also someone with a legal mind, who could administer justice and settle disputes between colonists. He offered Van der Donck the job of
schout,
a Dutch title that combined the duties of sheriff and public prosecutor. It was a difficult posting, but the young man's credentials would give him stature not only among the colonists on his patroonship but among the tough lot in New Amsterdam as well.
To a young man whose education had come more from books than the real world, it must have seemed like a utopian adventure: to march into a raw land and create a system of justice, to be the lawbringer for a whole new community. Van der Donck accepted, and in May 1641 he boarded
Den Eyckenboom
(“The Oak Tree”), bound for the New World. In his pocket was a thick sheaf of instructions from Van Rensselaer, but however detailed they were, they couldn't begin to cover all that lay ahead.
I
T IS EASIER
today to imagine the harbor into which the ship sailed ten long weeks later than it has been at nearly any intervening time period. For more than two centuries it would be the gateway to America and a commercial hub linking North America with Europe, a traffic-choked intersection in which, through the eras, frigates, schooners, steamships, container vessels, and pleasure yachts would belly past one another in their passage into and out of the array of piers that radiated from Manhattan's shoreline like the teeth of a comb. Now there is an odd tranquillity. Sailing in the harbor today, you need only turn your back on the spiny rise of Manhattan and delete from your mind's eye the Statue of Liberty and the mute hulks on Ellis Island and Governor's Island to envision it as it once was. With the water surface rippling nicely and the sails overhead snapping and coughing as they labor, urban noise recedes. For minutes at a time you are alone out here—time to take in the undulate geography of the place, its spread of islands and, as Van der Donck would later describe, its “many and different sea havens.”
We can only imagine how inviting its idyllic shelter would have been after long weeks at the mercy of the open ocean. In its breadth and depth the harbor struck Van der Donck, as it had his countrymen, as a kind of New World version of the IJ, the great island sea fronting Amsterdam, whose lanes, throughout the century, bristled with a forest of masts. These Dutch were a people who knew waterways as others knew the forest or the mountains. To them, land that was inaccessible by water was useless. Conversely, rich land that was cut by navigable rivers and incised by a commodious bay was the ultimate object. This bay was one of the things that had attracted them here; they felt the latent energy in it; they smelled its potential, how it might become a copy of their great home base across the ocean. For now it remained what it had been for millennia: a sculpted wilderness of saltwater, wind, and land. The English would call it New York Harbor. To the Dutch it was too elemental even to require that much of a name. As Van der Donck later noted with his scholar's Latin, “it is named
quasi per excellentiam,
‘The Bay.'”
The ship dropped its anchor some hundreds of yards before the southern shore of Manhattan, with its clutch of gabled houses, its windmill, and the walls of its fort clustered along it. The passengers staggered down into a waiting boat and were rowed ashore.
