The Island at the Center of the World Read online

  The directors could receive such complaints with equanimity. The times were very good for the West India Company. Its principal objective was to make money from battling the Spanish, and in 1628 they struck pay dirt. For the better part of a century the riches that Spain extracted from its South American colonies were sent to the homeland via a regular seagoing pipeline called the treasure fleet, consisting of as many as ninety vessels, traveling twice annually. In May of 1628, Piet Heyn, a small, pug-faced seaman who had once been captured by the Spaniards and been forced to spend four years as a rower in a Spanish galley, surprised and swept down on the slow, heavily laden fleet with his thirty-one privateering gunships while lurking in the waters off Cuba. The haul was staggering: twelve million guilders' worth of silver and gold. It was an amount that instantly repaid the company's investors the capital they had risked, and it stoked the fire of the Dutch economy for years. To the people of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, who had been fighting for independence from the once-mighty Spanish empire for decades, it was a signal, as sharp as a pistol shot, of a historic change. The title of a bestselling pamphlet made it plain: Tekel or Balance of the great monarchy of Spain; in which is discovered that she cannot do so much as she supposes herself able to do. Written on the occasion of the conquest of the Silver-Fleet by Gen. P. P. Heyn.

  Beyond the sea that stretched in front of the settlers, then, the world was turning. Heyn's deed seemed proof that the body of the Spanish Empire was in decay. Half a world away on the island of Java, Dutchman Jan Pieterszoon Coen was undertaking an oriental version of Minuit's project: the building of a city (Batavia: the modern Jakarta) in an inhospitable wilderness that would be the base for Dutch trade in southeast Asia. In Frankfurt, meanwhile, William Harvey published his Exercitatio Anatomica De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus, spelling out his theories on the circulation of the blood, while in Italy the physician Santorio Santorio developed the trick of measuring body temperature using a thermometer. The methodical Dutch system of communication (missives went in duplicate or triplicate on different ships) was slow but ensured that news got through; thanks to it, the Manhattanites knew of developments in the wider world and felt themselves a part of it.

  To the north, the Pilgrim colony was limping along, and Minuit, feeling flush and expansive, decided it was time to establish contact. He sent letters of friendship, along with “a rundlet of sugar, and two Holland cheeses.” William Bradford, governor of the struggling English colony, replied with thanks, adding that they were sorry they “must remain your debtors till another time, not having any thing to send you for the present that may be acceptable.” Shortly after, Isaack de Rasière sailed to New Plymouth in person as official envoy of New Netherland, appearing in the Pilgrims' midst with “a noise of trumpets” (the Manhattanites feeling a bit of show was called for) and bringing with him “some cloth of three sorts and colours, and a chest of white sugar,” as well as something the English had little acquaintance with, but which the New Amsterdam traders had become proficient in: belts of strung beads made of seashell, called sewant by the Algonquins, otherwise known as wampum.

  At about this time, and perhaps none too soon, a man of God arrived at Manhattan. But if the settlers expected leadership and encouragement from the colony's first minister they were to be disappointed. The Reverend Jonas Michaelius might well have won a contest for the moodiest, bitchiest resident of New Amsterdam. In his bitter letters home he complained about the voyage, the settlers (“rough and unrestrained”), the climate, the natives (“entirely savage and wild, strangers to all decency, yeah, uncivil and stupid as garden poles, proficient in all wickedness and godlessness; devilish men, who serve nobody but the Devil”), and the food (“scanty and poor”). “I cannot say whether or not I shall remain here any longer after the three years [of his contract] shall have expired,” he wrote home, adding, “we lead a hard and sober existence like poor people.” Michaelius could be excused to some extent for his bitterness: the voyage to the new world had taken his pregnant, sickly wife, leaving him alone to care for their two young daughters.

  For the time being, New Amsterdam was a free trade port. The company allowed freelance businessmen to strike deals with the Indians provided the company itself was the middle man that would resell furs in Europe. Business was being conducted in half a dozen languages; Dutch guilders, beaver skins, and Indian wampum were the common currencies. In a culture based on cheese and butter, cows were also a highly valued and tradable commodity.

  But while beaver furs by the thousands were arriving at the West India Company's warehouse on the Amsterdam waterfront, the settlement was far from turning a profit. The directors wanted their North America colony to repay their investment the way Caribbean salt colonies were doing, and a split formed in the board over how to make it happen. Some of the directors argued that the colony would never work properly without a massive influx of settlers, and that the best way to get people to go there was by allowing wealthy men to establish plantations there. In return for these estates, each patron (patroon in Dutch) would transport a population of farmers, smiths, masons, wheelwrights, bakers, chandlers, and other workers. The directors who favored this scheme proposed themselves as patroons. The other directors thought it was a stupid idea, one that would essentially carve the colony into small fiefs and add to the difficulty of dealing with pirates and renegade traders. Peter Minuit injected himself into this argument, supporting the patroon faction. The Rev. Michaelius took the other side and fired off a raft of letters branding Minuit as a dark force who was in the process of cheating the directors. He managed to convince them that the situation was dire enough that, in 1631, they recalled both Minuit and Michaelius to Holland. They ordered Krol, the lay minister who had been left in charge of Fort Orange, to serve as provisional director of the colony.

  Minuit was filled with rage as he climbed on board the ironically named Unity, his gall only increased by the knowledge that he would have to spend the two-month journey in close confines with Michaelius. He had gone far since leaving the little German town where he was raised, and he wasn't about to take this interruption in his career lightly. In five years he had established a rough but real outpost of European civilization on the edge of a limitless wilderness. He had made peace with the Mohawks to the north following the unfortunate Van Crieckenbeeck incident, forging an alliance that would last through the whole of the colony's existence. He had bought Manhattan and Staten islands as well as huge tracts along the Hudson River and around the bay of the South (Delaware) River from their native inhabitants while also managing to keep good relations with them. In so doing, he had outlined the perimeters of a New World province that occupied a considerable chunk of the Atlantic coast of North America, extending from the future state of Delaware in the south to the city of Albany in the north, and established a trade that sent more than fifty-two thousand furs to Amsterdam. Most important, he had pinpointed and begun to develop the colony's capital, a place whose natural strategic importance was by now apparent to him and his fellow Manhattanites, but which the West India Company directors would realize only belatedly. Even the vengeful Michaelius, for all his complaints about the place, could see this. “True,” he had admitted in wone of his bilious letters home, “this island is the key and principal stronghold of the country.”

  On a cold day in early 1632, then, Minuit stood on the deck of a ship laden with five thousand furs, fruits of the new world bound to warm the old, looking out on a sullen, wintry ocean, and plotting his defense. He had no idea of the rude detour that fate was about to deliver to him, or to the colony he had coaxed into being.

  Chapter 4

  THE KING, THE SURGEON, THE TURK,

  AND THE WHORE

  Charles I, king of England, regarded horses and Dutchmen with something like equal and opposite intensity. As the famous equestrian portrait of Charles by Anthony Van Dyck and the mounted statue of him in Trafalgar Square in London suggest, he was never more at ease than when in the saddle. His devotion to racing was such that he spent a good portion of every year at Newmarket, site of the country's most important turf event. In the year 1632 he came early, leaving London in mid-February for the arduous sixty-mile journey. (“Essex miles” were said to be longer than standard, since the roads in that corner of England were in particularly bad repair.) It was a major undertaking because when the king went to Newmarket, so did everyone else: the political, military, and economic leadership of the country, as well as the king's household (his personal physician, William Harvey, did his historic work on the circulation of the blood while attending Charles at Newmarket). Charles was almost religiously devoted to splendor, and his Newmarket banquets had already become legendary, even infamous: in a single racing season, 7,000 sheep, 6,800 lambs, and 1,500 oxen would be consumed at the eighty-six tables set daily. When not viewing the heats or entertaining, he spent his days at the retreat hunting, playing tennis, or visiting his favorite horses in their stables.

  As to the Dutch, he despised them. For that matter, he couldn't stand French people (never mind that he was married to one) and he considered the Scots, of whom he was one by birth, such irritants that he encouraged as many of them as possible to emigrate to Canada. But the Dutch irked him in several special ways. They were engaged in a vigorous revolt, one that they hoped would, through bloodshed, throw off a monarchy and replace it with a republic. Charles passionately upheld the notion of the divine right of kings and he considered republicanism to be a form of mass hysteria. Of course he believed in freedom for his subjects, he famously explained, “. . . but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consist in having government. . . . It is not their having a share in government; that is nothing appertaining to them.” (He gave this explanati
on to the crowd gathered to watch his beheading.) He was now in the midst of what would become known as the Personal Rule, the eleven-year period in which, having dismissed Parliament because it quarreled with him, he governed on his own. During this time he would grow steadily isolated from his country, the court becoming more insular and the king's spending and partying progressively more lavish, as members of Parliament fumed and the masses moved toward open rebellion. It would end with his worst nightmare coming true: revolt, and his beheading.

  While Charles thought the Dutch rebels mad and dangerous, there was the additional annoyance that currently, in ports around the world, Dutch merchant fleets were giving their English counterparts a thorough spanking. The Dutch were in the process of muscling the English out of the richest source of commerce, the East Indies; Dutch ships now controlled much of the world's trade in sugar, spices, and textiles. Ironically, Charles was hamstrung by his own authoritarian rule: having dismissed Parliament, he couldn't raise the funds he needed to compete.

  Adding to his gall was the fact that, despite all of these irritations, Charles was forced to remain allied with the Dutch. Calvinism held sway in the Dutch provinces that were in revolt against Spain and, going back to Queen Elizabeth's time, England's policy had been to support the revolt in the name of Protestantism. But the alliance was weakening; Charles himself, the English leadership, and the masses of the English people were turning against the Dutch, beginning to see them as the new threat.

  Such was the situation, then, as Charles settled in to enjoy the racing season at Newmarket in March of 1632. There was the deep thud of hooves beating the earth, the roar of the crowd, the bright flash of pennants against the sky. The king was in his element, richly dressed, with flowing chestnut hair and tapered fawn-colored beard (the original Van Dyck), casting a discerning eye over the favorites, placing bets with the Earl of Pembroke, whom everyone knew had a bit of a gambling problem. Surely the last thing on earth Charles would care for here was a distracting, importuning embassy from the upstart Dutch Republic. When Albert Joachimi, the old and dignified ambassador from the States General, rode into Newmarket, asking for an audience, Charles's first reaction was probably to recoil and send him away. But in the current international climate that would have been a political blunder; eventually he agreed to see the man.

  The ambassador began the meeting blathering diplomatically and at length about the long friendship between the two nations, which he said had recently been disrupted by “the enemy” seeking “to foment some misunderstanding.” Charles understood perfectly well the subtext of the man's complaint and was no doubt amused by the purposely fuzzy use of “the enemy.” It was true that for decades the English had aided the Dutch in their war on Spain. But two years before, also at Newmarket, Charles had received another emissary, from the Spanish court. This one he had welcomed—in fact, eagerly anticipated, and it had altered the geopolitical landscape considerably.

  Besides horses, Charles's other great and abiding love was for art. His personal collection, which included Raphaels, Titians, Tintorettos, Mantegnas, and Correggios, added both to his royal luster and, because of its staggering cost, to the simmering hatred for him among certain segments of the populace. The fact that, in his collecting, he had become amiable pen pals with the Pope, who had given him paintings from the Vatican collection, only increased Puritan suspicion of him. By now Philip IV, the king of Spain, whose resources were nearly exhausted by the Dutch revolt, wanted very much for England to end its support to the United Provinces. In a stroke of ingenuity that historians have credited to his wife, Philip chose as his emissary to persuade Charles to sign a peace treaty Peter Paul Rubens, the most famous and sought-after artist in Europe. Rubens, who was also something of a politician, considered himself a loyal Dutchman, but he came from Antwerp, in the Catholic-dominated southern provinces, which had chosen not to break with Spain. As Rubens gathered with Philip in Madrid to discuss the mission, his own hope was that if Charles were to end English hostilities with Spain the rebel Dutch provinces would give up on their ruinous rebellion, and the north and south would reunite. He agreed to the mission.

  In England, Charles greeted Rubens with delight. He commissioned the artist to paint the ceiling of the Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace, newly built by Inigo Jones in the modern, forward-looking Palladian style. The central panel of the completed ceiling (today, the only work of Rubens still in its intended position) epitomized Charles's ardent monarchic beliefs: amid a swirling stew of cherubs, his father, James, divine kingship personified, rises to heaven. Proving that the English have always had a sardonic wit, Charles's subjects later executed him outside this very room.

  Rubens also introduced Charles to his pupil, Anthony Van Dyck, who became Charles's court painter; it is thanks to him that we have a gallery of portraits capturing the king's every mood and manner. Charles knighted both men. He also signed a peace treaty with Spain—another step in the movement between England and the Dutch Republic away from friendship and toward confrontation. Rubens was elated and went next to visit his countryman, Ambassador Joachimi, in London, hoping to persuade him that now the best hope for a unified Dutch Republic was for the rebel government to seek terms with Spain. But Rubens seriously underestimated the resolve of the northern provinces. Joachimi was as much a rebel as those he served, and told the painter that the only way the provinces would unify would be if those in the south joined in the war. (They did not and eventually the Catholic southern provinces became the nation of Belgium.)

  It was against this backdrop of England's recent peace treaty with Spain that Joachimi now approached Charles, amid the stamping and whinnying of Newmarket. In using the phrase “the enemy” in relation to both the English and the Dutch, he was implying that, recent treaties aside, Protestants still had to stick together in the face of the universal foe of Catholicism. (“We cannot perceive that his Majesty is indisposed towards us,” Joachimi wrote to the States General after his audience, “because we have neither Saints nor Festivals, wherein the Spanish nation is very superstitious.”) Specifically, the ambassador wanted the king to put a stop to a recent disturbing practice. Since England's treaty with Spain, Spanish ships that had been captured by Dutch privateers were being seized when they entered English ports, contrary to long-standing agreement between the two nations.

  The king heard the man out, and with great decorum dodged the issue. Joachimi went away empty-handed.

  Less than two weeks later, however, Charles, just returned to Whitehall, was forced to deal with the man yet again. This time Joachimi's diplomatic reserve showed signs of cracking. There had been a new development. Another ship had been seized, but this was not a Spanish ship prized by the Dutch. It was a bona fide Dutch vessel, Joachimi informed the king, bound for Amsterdam from “a certain island named Manathans.” Reports indicated that it carried five thousand furs, as well as the former director of the province of New Netherland.

  At that moment, two hundred miles to the southwest, Peter Minuit sat in English custody, fuming. It wasn't enough that he had been (to his mind) unreasonably removed from his post, forced to abandon the colony he had coaxed into being and make the long, hazardous voyage home to defend his conduct. After two frigid months at sea, the Unity had been caught in a storm off the coast of England and forced to make an emergency landfall at Plymouth. There, the courtesy of receiving a troubled ship from a friendly nation was not extended. Crowning the whole bitter turn of events that his life had taken, Minuit was taken prisoner. The only salve for him was the fact that his nemesis, the odious Reverend Michaelius, was also in English custody.