The Island at the Center of the World Read online

  Merchants and politicians were suddenly interested. Wealthy businessmen organized themselves into five regional chambers, each of which contributed startup funds. The States General, the governing body of the country, added a modest amount, and by October 1623 the West India Company was as flush as any new company in history, with more than seven million guilders in its coffers. The East India Company had exploited Asia to fabulous result; now its new colleague would encompass the Atlantic Rim—its monopoly extending to West Africa, the Caribbean islands, and the coast of North America. It was to be a creature of war as well as trade, and its network of merchants, skippers, sailors, accountants, carpenters, armourers, and soldiers infiltrated the new sphere of interest with remarkable speed. By 1626 an inventory of the company's property, addressed to the directors, included:

  12 ships and yachts destined for the African trade in Guinea, Benin, Angola, Greyn, and Quaqua coasts, with the exported cargoes and expected returns . . .

  1 ship of Dordrecht to Cape Verd, with cargo . . .

  1 ship destined for the trade of the Amazon and the Coast of Guiana . . .

  1 ship of about 130 lasts, 1 yacht well equipped, destined for the trade and colonization of New Netherland . . .

  33 ships . . . which the Company hath still lying here in port, provided with metal and iron guns, and all sorts of supplies of ammunition of war, powder, muskets, arms, sabres, and whatever may be necessary for the equipment, which can be fitted for sea . . .

  Moneys . . . which being in the Treasury, will be applied to keep the foregoing ships at sea, not only to injure the King of Spain, but also by God's blessing to do your High Mightinesses and the Company much service, and the Partners good profit.

  The North American territory would play an economic role in this scheme. The company would exploit it for furs and timber, and also use it as a transportation hub, with ships cycling from Europe to South America and the Caribbean, and then to the North American harbor and so back home. Of course, settlers were required, and raising them proved to be one of the hardest aspects of the whole complex business of creating an Atlantic empire. Times were good in the homeland; the future looked even better. And Amsterdam was probably the best place in the world to be poor (its almshouses, wrote an English consul with some exaggeration, were “more like princes' palaces than lodgings for poor people”). To get people to sign on for a passage to what was now being called New Netherland, they had to find those who were ignorant or desperate or poor enough to leave the deeply civilized bosom of Amsterdam—with its paved streets, its scrubbed floors, its wheels of cheese and tankards of excellent beer, its fluffy pillows and blue-and-white-tiled hearths and cozy peat fires—and venture to the back of beyond, to an absolute and unforgiving wilderness.

  But, as always, the country was loaded with refugees, and, by promising land in exchange for six years of service, the company managed to round up a handful of hale young Walloons—French-speaking exiles from what is today Belgium—made sure, like Noah, that they had a female for every male, and hustled them into the Amsterdam council chamber, where they swore an oath of allegiance to the company and the government.

  The councillor who administered the oath, Claes Peterszen, was a renowned physician and surgeon, so renowned that while we know him from Rembrandt's viscerally famous painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (“Tulp,” or “tulip,” being a nickname, from the flower painted above his front door), at the time it was the doctor who, in agreeing to the portrait, helped make the artist famous. We have a nice mental image, then, of the black-dressed, dignified, austere physician-magistrate with his sharp black V of facial hair, representative of the Dutch political and scientific establishment, and before him, in their rough country attire, the young men and women, shifting and twitching with nerves and exuberant raw youth, who were about to start a new society in a wilderness called Manhattan.

  There was lots of raw youth: four couples were actually married at sea, the ship's captain, Cornelis May (for whom, incidentally, Cape May, New Jersey, is named), doing the honors. Another pair—the ones named at the top of this chapter, Catalina Trico and Joris Rapalje—were smarter. Maybe they knew what conditions would be like on board, and didn't relish the idea of consummating a marriage there. They agreed to take part in the wildly hazardous enterprise on the condition that the company first marry them in a hastier-than-normal ceremony, which took place four days before their ship left Amsterdam on January 25, 1624. “Espousé le 21 de Janvier,” the clerk of the Walloon Church of Amsterdam recorded, without wasting too much time getting the names right, “Joris Raporbie de Valencenne, et Caterine triko.” Being illiterate, both made their marks on the page. He was nineteen, she was eighteen; neither had parents sign the registry, which suggests that both were either alone in the world or alone in that part of the world, which amounted to the same thing. Like many who were to follow, they had nothing to lose.

  Considering the stupendous dangers awaiting them, first at sea and then on arrival, it wasn't a union a betting man would likely lay money on. And yet, sixty years later, when the English colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland were embroiled in a border dispute and needed evidence of “Christian” occupation of certain lands along the eastern seaboard, the representatives of William Penn found an old woman to testify who was known to have been among the first European settlers. Catalina Trico, now in her eighties, was a widow, but she and Joris had had a long and fruitful marriage. The records of New Netherland show them among the first buyers of land in the wilderness of southern Manhattan, building two houses on Pearl Street steps away from the fort, obtaining a milk cow, borrowing money from the provincial government, moving their homestead to a large tract of farmland across the river in the new village of Breuckelen, and giving birth to and baptizing eleven children. Their first, Sarah, was considered the first European born in what would become New York (in 1656, at the age of thirty, she proclaimed herself “first born christian daughter of New Netherland”). She was born in 1625, and the same records duly show her marriage in 1639, to the overseer of a tobacco plantation in what would become Greenwich Village, and, in turn, the birth of her eight children. Over the course of the brief life of New Netherland and into the history of New York the Rapalje children and their offspring would spread across the region. In the 1770s, John Rapalje would serve as a member of the New York State Assembly (he rejected revolution and became a Loyalist). Their descendants have been estimated at upwards of one million, and in the Hudson Valley town of Fishkill, New York, a lane called Rapalje Road is a quiet suburban testament to the endurance of a long-ago slapdash wedding of two young nobodies on the Amsterdam waterfront, which, as much as any political event, marked the beginning of the immigrant, stake-your-claim civilization not only of Manhattan but of America.

  As the sea-battered ships finally entered the harbor, the passengers gazed out onto a wholly new landscape, stranger and more complex than the flat land they had left. In contemporary scientific terms, the region that would be their new home comprised an intersection of three physiographic provinces: sandy coastal plain, rolling upland hills, and craggy metamorphic ridges, much of which was slashed and gouged by the glaciers of the last ice age, leaving a stippling of streambeds, jumbled moraine, and glacial lakes. Sailing silently into the inner harbor, approaching the southern tip of Manhattan Island, the ships glided into a reedy, marshy expanse of tidal wetland (the Mohawk name for Manhattan—Gänóno—translates as “reeds” or “place of reeds”), a complicated crossover region of freshwater and marine species, where bay, swamp forest, and serpentine barrens bred skying, cawing shore birds—plovers, sandpipers, dowitchers, yellowlegs—as well as thick populations of homebody mallards, and also drew migrating flocks of oldsquaws, mergansers, and wigeons that blackened the gray November sky. Mussels, conchs, clams, and periwinkles encrusted the estuaries, and most of all oysters, some of which, a settler wrote, are “quite large and occasionally containing a small pearl,” while others were tiny and
sweet and another variety was “fine for stewing and frying. As each one fills a big spoon they make a good bite.” Rising up above the island's reedy shoreline were forested hills: the best guess on the origin of the Indian name that would stick is the Delaware mannahata, “hilly island,” though some have suggested that simply “the island” or “the small island” is a more accurate translation.

  Putting foot to solid ground, the settlers decided they liked what they saw. “We were much gratified on arriving in this country,” one wrote home. “Here we found beautiful rivers, bubbling fountains flowing down into the valleys; basins of running waters in the flatlands, agreeable fruits in the woods, such as strawberries, pigeon berries, walnuts, and also . . . wild grapes. The woods abound with acorns for feeding hogs, and with venison. There is considerable fish in the rivers; good tillage land; here is especially free coming and going, without fear of the naked natives of the country. Had we cows, hogs, and other cattle fit for food (which we daily expect in the first ships) we would not wish to return to Holland, for whatever we desire in the paradise of Holland, is here to be found.” In Europe, newspapers as such didn't yet exist, but periodical pamphlets were a major source of news, and no sooner did the first settlers of New Netherland begin writing home than an Amsterdam physician named Nicolaes van Wassenaer started to publish a semiannual pamphlet of the doings in the far-off land. “It is very pleasant, all products being in abundance, though wild,” he wrote in December 1624. “Grapes are of very good flavor, but will be henceforward better cultivated by our people. Cherries are not found there. There are all sorts of fowls, both in the water and in the air. Swans, geese, ducks, bitterns, abound.”

  At first the company sprinkled its few settlers over a wide area. In the Dutch understanding, laying claim to a patch of territory required inhabiting it (for the English, as would later become an issue, all that was required was having an official representative set foot on a patch of soil not previously claimed by Christians). Also in the Dutch understanding, water was the key to any piece of land. Thus, the company set about dividing its few colonists among the three principal waterways of their territory. What under the English would become the Delaware River, which Hudson had considered exploring but quickly ruled out as a route to Asia due to its shoaly bay, the Dutch called the South River, for the good reason that it formed the southern limit of their territory. For most of their time in North America they called the Hudson the North River (mariners, famously conservative and resistant to change, call it that to this day). The other main waterway—what would become the Connecticut River, which bisects that state—the Dutch called the Fresh River.

  These were the highways of the region, the places to which Indians brought pelts, and the means of exploring the interior. The company sent a few settlers to form a small camp on each—literally a few. Two families and six single men were shipped east to the Fresh River. Two families and eight men sailed down the coast to the South River. Eight men stayed on a small island in the harbor. The rest of the families sailed a further hundred and fifty miles up the North River, through the mud-colored tidal chop, by majestic palisades of rock along the western shore, then passing on both shores the undulating humps of the highlands, to the place the traders reported was the key junction of Indian traffic. Here the east-flowing Mohawk River, after traveling all the way from the Great Lakes region, careened over seventy-foot falls before emptying into the North River. Here the newcomers disembarked and stood defenseless before the towering pines. For shelter initially they dug square pits in the ground, lined them with wood, and covered them with bark roofs (a minister who arrived a few years later, when proper houses were being built, sneered at the “hovels and holes” in which the first arrivals “huddled rather than dwelt”).

  Catalina and Joris were in the party initially shipped upriver from Manhattan to the falls, where a fort-trading post was to be constructed. The natives of the country appeared soon after the settlers stumbled ashore, exchanged presents, and made other gestures of friendship with the ship's captain. It was disorienting for the newcomers, but the sun had the warmth of spring in it, and the crumbly black earth seemed to cry out to be impregnated with seed. The Rapaljes and the other couples stayed two years at the location, in autumn harvesting grain “as high as a man,” the next spring whispering prayers of thanks when three company ships arrived whose names—The Cow, The Sheep, The Horse—betrayed their cargo. During the whole time the Indians “were all quiet as lambs,” as Catalina remembered in old age, coming regularly and trading freely with the settlers.

  The initial plan was for an island on the South River, a hundred-odd miles from Manhattan, to become the capital of the new province. This was based on the decidedly mistaken belief that the climate of what would become southern New Jersey approximated that which the Spanish had found in Florida. The balminess of those reports sounded good to the Dutch, who wouldn't have to deal with the extreme bother of a harbor freezing up in the winter, bringing trade and communication to a halt. The first settlers to arrive there were dismayed to find no palm trees. Worse, the bay did indeed freeze over that first winter and in subsequent ones, too, so that attention shifted to the bay to the north, which, thanks to geographic peculiarities, rarely froze despite its latitude.

  The knots of colonists scattered over two hundred and fifty miles got to work—cleared ground, felled trees, constructed palisade defenses, sowed grain. Ships arrived. The colonists made deals with the Indians and established a system for trade: in 1625 they bought 5,295 beaver pelts and 463 otter skins, which they loaded onto the ships to be sent back home. The ships in turn brought news. In England, James I, Elizabeth's successor, had died. He had been an awkward monarch—he tended to drool and was given to crude mannerisms—and was never revered as Elizabeth had been. He had unsuccessfully resisted the Dutch rise to power, attempting to ally with Spain at a time when English hatred of Catholicism was at a fever pitch. (Then again, he had, however, also overseen the creation of the King James Bible, one of the world's great literary works.) The nation breathed a sigh of relief when his son Charles—handsome, chaste, dignified—took the throne, not knowing that in time hopes would be dashed in the most violent way, for him and for the nation, and with great consequences for this far-off Dutch province.

  In the United Provinces, too, power had passed, from brother to brother. Maurits, Prince of Orange, the stadtholder or chief nobleman of the country, had led the fight against Spain since the death of his father, William the Silent, in 1584. But he had grown weak in recent years, and he had fatally compromised his legitimacy six years earlier by resolving a power struggle with the great statesman Jan van Oldenbarnevelt by having the man's head cut off. Maurits's brother, Frederik Hendrik, who at age forty-one was seventeen years his junior, was a brilliant diplomat and military tactician; he would continue the revolt and bring the nation to the verge of final recognition of independence. Under these new leaders the Dutch and the English, united in their common Protestantism, had signed a treaty of cooperation against Catholic Spain, their joint enemy. This treaty provided that each nation would have access to the other's ports, including provincial ports.

  The New Netherland settlers, chests heaving and faces streaked with sweat, would have had to pause in their labors to digest this information. They knew perfectly well that a group of English religious pilgrims had settled to their north a few years earlier—“Brownists” they were called at the time, after the Separatist preacher Robert Browne—and they hoped for good relations. In fact, they expected good relations. Remarkably, most of the Walloons who made up the majority of the Dutch colony's early population had come from asylum in the university town of Leiden (spelled Leyden at the time), the same place that had harbored the English Pilgrims. In their flight from persecution in England, the Pilgrims had spent twelve years there as guests of the Dutch before leaving to found a virgin theocracy in the New World.

  Events soon derailed the initial settlement strategy in the Dutch p
rovince. Joris Rapalje, his wife Catalina, and the other settlers at what was now called Fort Orange (which under the English would become Albany) saw their hard work come to a sudden, grisly end in the spring of 1626. Their settlement on the riverbank was on former hunting grounds of the Mahicans, who had welcomed them. To the north and west stretched the territory of the Mohawks. These two tribes—the first, one of the Algonquin-speaking nations, the second, one of the five tribes of the Iroquois League—had very different backgrounds and beliefs. Their languages were as distinct as English and Russian; they had different customs and little respect for one another. For decades they had been fighting an intermittent war, and the appearance of European traders in their midst stirred the conflict to a new level. In addition, after more than a decade of contact with Europeans, these tribes were reorienting their lives around the acquisition of foreign products: fishing hooks, axes, kettles, glassware, needles, pots, knives, and duffel (the rough wool cloth that originated in the Flemish town of Duffel and which gives us the term “duffel bag”). Later, of course, guns and liquor would be added to the list. Mahicans were even relocating their villages to be closer to the Dutch, in an attempt to form a trade and defensive alliance. Call it friendship or self-interest, by 1626 the Mahicans and Dutch had established a closeness.

  This closeness was probably what led Daniel van Crieckenbeeck, the commander of the fort, to ignore explicit orders forbidding interference in intertribal affairs, with results that would redound to the present. One spring day in 1626, a Mahican party of more than two dozen men—like the Dutch “in figure, build and share,” as one writer described, their hair “jet-black, quite sleek and uncurled, and almost as coarse as a horse's tail,” and probably, given the period and the time of year, wearing deer skins loosely about their bodies and tied at the waist—came into the palisade of rough-cut logs and asked Van Crieckenbeeck for Dutch aid in their fight against the Mohawks. The man who asked this favor was most likely a tribal leader named Monemin. Van Crieckenbeeck had his orders; the West India Company had clearly instructed Willem Verhulst, head of the province, that “he shall be very careful not lightly to embroil himself in [the Indians'] quarrels or wars, or to take sides, but to remain neutral . . .” On the other hand, Van Crieckenbeeck surely felt responsible for the well-being of the handful of young couples, including a number of pregnant women and perhaps some infants, in the midst of the forest thousands of miles from home. It stood to reason that helping the Mahicans now would yield a firm ally in the future. So he agreed. The Mahicans led the way, and he and six of his men followed, disappearing into the pines.