The Island at the Center of the World (25 page)
From the moment they had landed in the United Provinces, Melyn and Kuyter set about making their case, trying to undo Stuyvesant's sentence against them and in the process to make men of power in the home country appreciate the value of their North American colony. They found national politics in a swirl with the signing of the peace treaty with Spain; old alliances were shifting. Before, supporting the West India Company, which had been organized as a for-profit venture to raid Spanish shipping, had been the patriotic thing to do. Now people were free to consider other visions for the North American colony. It took months, but Melyn and Kuyter won a remarkable concession from the governing body, which now lay on the table: a mandamus, an order from the government of the Dutch Republic to the Director-General of the colony of New Netherland. The members of the Board of Nine must have gasped as they read the document—in its tone and language it was an utter vindication of their position. It decried “the war that Director Kieft illegally and contrary to all public Law, had commenced against the Indians” and the atrocities “which must startle the Christian heart that hears of them.” It approved of the fact that popular representatives had been chosen to ensure that such calamities didn't happen again; it noted that Kieft, and after him Stuyvesant, had hampered these representatives. Stuyvesant's sentences against the two men were revoked, pending appeal, and Stuyvesant himself, or a representative, was to return to the home country to explain his conduct.
And there was more. Willem, the Prince of Orange—leader of the army and symbolic head of the Dutch state—had felt strongly enough about the matter that he wanted to weigh in on it as well. He wrote a personal letter, which Melyn had with him:
To Petrus Stuyvesant, Director of New Netherland, the 19
th
of May 1648 Honorable, prudent, and discreet, specially dear.
You will receive by the bearers hereof, Joachim Pietersen Kuyter and Cornelis Melyn, the commands which the High and Mighty Lords States General have resolved to communicate to you, to the end that you allow these people to enjoy their property free and unmolested there . . . we are disposed earnestly to admonish you hereby, in addition, expressly notifying that you shall have to allow said petitioners, peaceably and without objection to enjoy the effect of their High Mightinesses aforesaid resolution.
And herewith,
Honorable, &c.
Willem,
Prince d'Orange.
All of this was riveting to the Board of Nine and their supporters. For the first time they understood that there was a new era taking shape in the home country. And the new climate gave them an opportunity to state their case for a government that would put the colony on a secure footing.
In one of his responses to requests from the Board to be allowed to send delegates to The Hague, Stuyvesant had stalled by suggesting that, as representatives of the people, the Board should be sure that what they were proposing was indeed the will of the people. Now, emboldened by the support from Holland, the Board members decided to follow his suggestion. They would ask the people—one by one—whether they felt there was a need for a reform in government. In a remarkably direct approach to democracy, Van der Donck, Loockermans, Janszen, Herman, and the other members of the Board walked out the front door of the tavern, divided the streets of New Amsterdam among themselves, and began knocking on doors. People must have had a lot to say, because once the canvassing was finished the Board decided to compile a dossier. Van der Donck took on the task of collating the complaints and distilling the thoughts of the entire commonalty into a single document.
Stuyvesant watched the canvassers marching through the town and, as far as he was concerned, openly instigating revolt. He sat on his fury for a time, then it erupted. At some point during the months of January and February 1649, while Van der Donck was putting together his brief, there was a confrontation between the leader and his onetime disciple, in which Stuyvesant tried to comprehend how the younger man could turn on him, perhaps even gave him an opportunity to back down, and then finally severed personal ties. Unfortunately, Van der Donck doesn't record the details of the meeting, saying only that “the General” had, from the time of the door-to-door canvassing, “burned with rage.”
This was the moment when Van der Donck finally showed his hand. Three times now he had gone through the same series of maneuvers with men in power—ingratiating himself as he worked into a position of some authority, then suddenly turning brash, defiant, willful. Now he let his true feelings, his patriotic fervor, show. Stuyvesant would surely have countered that it was he who was acting in the best interests of the colony, pointed out that they were beset on all sides, and made plain that any effort to undermine him in such circumstances was tantamount to treason. Both men had strong points. Stuyvesant was indeed holding the colony together. But at the same time he was blind to what Van der Donck saw: that military and diplomatic maneuvering vis-à-vis the English, Swedes, and Indians would only hold for a short while, that without a revamp of its entire structure the colony would die from within.
There was no compromise possible for either man. As a last attempt at coming to an understanding, Stuyvesant apparently offered to work together: the Board would share the information it had gathered with him, and he would take their advice under consideration. But this would defeat the whole purpose of the delegation, which was to be independent of the West India Company. Van der Donck informed him, as he later wrote, that the Board “would not communicate with him or follow his directions in anything pertaining to the matter.”
That cut it. The confrontation ended with Stuyvesant exhibiting what Van der Donck called “a bitter and unconquerable hatred” for the members of the Board, “but principally against those whom he supposed to be the chief authors” of the move to undermine him. As Van der Donck describes this encounter for the benefit of officials in the Netherlands and characterizes Stuyvesant's change of feelings toward certain once-trusted comrades, the formality of the prose actually seems to heighten the emotions involved, leading one to believe that there really had been warm feelings between the two men: “these persons had been good and dear friends with him always, and he, shortly before, had regarded them as the most honorable, able, intelligent and pious men of the country, yet as soon as they did not follow the General's wishes they were this and that, some of them rascals, liars, rebels, usurers and spendthrifts, in a word, hanging was almost too good for them.”
Stuyvesant had reached his limit. Whenever he decided to move, he did it forcefully. One day at the beginning of March, probably accompanied by a contingent of West India Company soldiers, he marched around the corner from the fort to the home of Michael Janszen—the Board member with whom Van der Donck had been friends since the time both had lived at Rensselaerswyck. Van der Donck had, as usual, been staying here, but no one was home at the moment. They searched the place and found the sheaf of papers that contained the lists of residents' complaints and laments about the colony and its management, and also the draft document Van der Donck had been preparing. Stuyvesant took it, and what he found in it confirmed him in his next step. The next day, he had Van der Donck arrested and imprisoned. Then he hastily sent Philip de Truy, his “court messenger,” to the members of his council and to some of the Board of Nine, demanding their presence at an emergency “supreme council.”
The men—fifteen in all—assembled in an atmosphere of great tension. Stuyvesant's face, even in light moments, had a jowly grimness to it, and he cannot have seemed anything but black as they waited for him to announce the reason for the unusual gathering. Then he told them that Van der Donck had been arrested and charged with
“crimen laesae majestatis”—
high treason. The documents found in his possession “grossly slandered” the director-general and contained “great calumnies” against the government leaders in The Hague.
At this moment Stuyvesant's vice-director, Lubbert van Dinklagen, the only lawyer in the colony besides Van der Donck, stunned his superior by interrupting him with a formal protest, charging that “the honorable director . . . has heretofore done and still does many things” on his own, without informing his council, “also because he has caused Adriaen van der Donck to be placed under arrest” without consulting them. It was an electric moment. That Stuyvesant now had insubordination from his own council of hand-picked members—indeed, from his second in command—must have shaken him and given new hope to the Board members present, all of whom had to have been fearing for their own lives as well as Van der Donck's.
Stuyvesant collected himself, and, changing tactics, turned on Van Dinklagen. He read out a passage from the confiscated writings in which Van Dinklagen supposedly defamed the government in Holland. Van Dinklagen, indignant now, denied he had ever said such things and demanded to see the pages where they were written. Stuyvesant refused. Then he asked each man present to state for the record his opinion on what should be done with Van der Donck. Van Dinklagen spoke up first, insisting that, in accordance with Dutch law, Van der Donck be examined on the matter and then released on bail. But Brian Newton, who had served Stuyvesant loyally since Curaçao, who had been at his side when he lost his leg, declared that the man should remain in prison and be interrogated there. Most of the others agreed. Augustin Herman, in an act of defiance against the entire proceeding, refused to give an opinion.
Stuyvesant had summoned only six of the Board members to this special council—seemingly out of fear that the whole group of them would vote against him. With six of them and eight of his trusted advisors, plus himself, he could be more sure of a favorable outcome. Now, however, it looked as though Van Dinklagen and one or two others would swing the other way, so he adjourned the session without calling a vote. Two days later, he assembled his ordinary council, without the Board members, and “by a plurality of votes” it decided to keep Van der Donck in custody until a committee had investigated the case. Two days following that, on the eighth of March, with Van der Donck still in confinement, people from all the villages in the area around Manhattan gathered in the church at Stuyvesant's bidding to debate a matter that would have serious import for the colony. Shortly before this public meeting, Stuyvesant had gathered with his council and declared that he would read a “writing” to the populace. Presumably it contained an account of Van der Donck's treasonous behavior and Stuyvesant's decision on punishment.
But he never got to read it. After Van der Donck's arrest and the abortive special council, his compatriots had gathered with Cornelis Melyn and plotted a nervy countermove. Now, in the church, before nearly the entire population of New Amsterdam and the surrounding villages, just as Stuyvesant was getting ready to speak, Melyn rushed to the podium. The States General had given him the task of carrying their mandamus to New Amsterdam and serving it on the director-general himself, or naming some other officer or officers to do so. It was a legal technicality—the serving of a summons—but Melyn, who had a flair for theatrics, wanted to make the most of it. He now declared in a loud voice his intention to fulfill the wishes of the States General by having the Board of Nine serve the mandamus on Stuyvesant. Then he handed it to Arnold van Hardenbergh, a member of the Board, and asked him to read it.
Stuyvesant knew what the document contained, and had no wish to have its chastising language, ordering him back to Europe like a misbehaving child, aired in front of his constituency. He declared there was no need to read the document, as he was ready to receive it. “I must have the copy,” he roared, and reached out to grab the thing. In the scuffle, the document was torn and the heavy wax seal that marked it as an official order of the Dutch government came off. Everyone watched in amazement then as the disc of wax fell, floated toward the ground, and then hung, dangling by a strand of parchment. The symbolism was blatant: here these men stood in the holiest building in the colony, defaming it with their raised voices, while the seal of government dangled between them. In the gasp of silence that followed, Melyn informed Stuyvesant that, if he wanted a copy of the document, there was one for him as well as one to be read to the populace.
The crowd erupted at that point. Stuyvesant must have had soldiers on hand, and things were starting to look ugly. He was a born leader; never had he endured such a breakdown of authority. His impulse was to crack down hard, but he also saw that the place was on the verge of chaos; the event, he later wrote to the States General, was “so shaped that massacre and bloodshed might have been the result, had we not converted ourselves from the highest to the lowest, and permitted the indecent service of the summons.” Recognizing that his enemies had trapped him, he brought the assembly to order, and directed the man to read the scolding document.
When it was done, with all eyes on him, Stuyvesant spoke with wrathful brevity:
“I honor the States and their Commission, and will obey their Commands, and send an Agent to maintain the judgment, as it was well and legally pronounced.”
And then he left.
It was surely the most humiliating moment of Stuyvesant's life. “Mutinous and insulting” he would later call the spectacle. His soldier's pride, his simple, country-bred dignity, had been trampled. He believed steadfastly in his commission, his devotion to the colony was real, and already he was achieving results vis-à-vis the English to the north, but none of this mattered to these men who seemed bent on self-destruction.
Melyn was surely impassioned, but he tended to be too histrionic even for his fellow agitators. Stuyvesant was right to complain about how the man, even before reaching Manhattan, had gotten off the ship in Boston and bragged to the English that he had a commission to send Stuyvesant back to Holland as a prisoner. Such behavior didn't help Stuyvesant in his dealings with the New England governors. Then again, Stuyvesant had provoked the men. It's hard to imagine that the Board would have gone along with the spectacle in the church had Stuyvesant not taken Van der Donck into custody. The crime of high treason was, of course, punishable by death. Their necks were all on the block. He had raised the stakes, and forced them to do the same.
