USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 21
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This moment was not long delayed. Soon after peace was concluded with the Wechquaeskecks at the house of Jonas Bronck in 1642, Kieft and his people were alarmed by a report that Miantonomi, the ambitious chief of the Narragansetts, was urging all the savage tribes to unite in a general attack on the Dutch and the English; and they knew, moreover, that the embers of local strife had not been effectually quenched. Captain De Vries tells how the revengeful passions of the Indians smouldered, how individual white men fanned them with fresh provocations, and how he warned both sides of the inevitable result. Early in 1643 a drunken Indian, exasper- ated by some real or fancied injury, shot a Dutchman at Hackensack who was thatching a barn. His sachems were afraid to approach Governor Kieft, and when they ventured to do so under De Vries's protection Kieft refused their offer of blood-money and, as in the case of the Wechquaeskecks, demanded the surrender of the culprit. The sachems prom- ised to try to deliver him but laid the blame for the crime upon the persons who made their young men 'crazy' by selling them liquor.
Meanwhile the savages had fallen to fighting among them- selves. Eighty or ninety Mohawks, says De Vries, 'each with a gun on his shoulder,' came down River Mauritius to take tribute from the Wechquaeskecks and their brother Algon- quins who lived at Tappaen where the captain's new bouwerie lay. Some of these River Indians, less warlike and less well armed than the Mohawks - timid 'children' the captain calls them - fled hungry and half frozen to New Amsterdam. There the settlers received them kindly and harbored them
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for a fortnight. Others, to the number of four or five hundred, flocked to De Vries's bouwerie where he had only five white men with him. He was not afraid that they 'would do any harm' but wishing to be 'master in his house' asked Kieft to send him a guard of soldiers. Kieft refused. Then, excited by some fresh alarm, the Indians scattered from the bouwerie and from New Amsterdam, some going to Pavo- nia near the bluff opposite Manhattan now covered by the Stevens estate, some to Corlaer's Hook on the eastern shoulder of Manhattan itself.
On February 24th, while De Vries was sitting at table with the governor, Kieft 'began to state his intentions,' saying that he had a mind 'to wipe the mouths' of these fugitive Indians. Three members of the Board of Twelve Men, he explained, - Damen, Adriaensen, and Planck, - had pre- sented a petition which Secretary Van Tienhoven had drawn up for them and which professed to speak for all the twelve. It advised the governor 'to begin this work' against the sav- ages. De Vries told him that there was no reason for any work of the sort, and that he could not begin it without the consent of all the Twelve Men including himself :
But it appeared that my speaking was of no avail. He had, with his co-murderers, determined to commit the crime, deeming it a Roman deed, and to do it without warning the inhabitants in the open lands so that each one might take care of himself against the retaliation of the Indians, for he could not kill all the Indians.
Perhaps some scheme for personal profit lay behind the action of the governor's 'co-murderers.' Three of them, Planck, Damen, and Van Tienhoven, were evidently close friends, their names appearing together in the records of sev- eral business transactions; and they were also connected by family ties, Planck and Van Tienhoven having married two of Damen's stepdaughters, the sisters of Jan Vinje.
At all events Kieft had made up his mind to follow their advice before he spoke to De Vries. When they had finished their meal he invited the captain into a 'large hall' which he had recently added to his house:
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Coming to it, there stood all his soldiers ready to cross the river to Pavonia to commit the murder. Then spake I again to Governor William Kieft: 'Stop this work; you wish to break the mouths of the Indians but you will also murder our own nation for there are none of the farmers who are aware of it.'
Councillor La Montagne and Domine Bogardus joined in De Vries's prayers and warnings. Kieft knew that the evil spirits who were urging him to bloodshed had no right to speak for the Board of Twelve Men which he had dissolved a year before; and he ought to have known that it was just the mo- ment when kindness would win the frightened Algonquins to a lasting friendship. Yet, shielding himself behind the fraudulent petition, and asserting that it expressed the wishes of the commonalty who were really for the most part wholly ignorant of his plans, he determined, as La Montagne put it, to build a bridge over which 'war would stalk through the whole country.' To one of his sergeants he gave a commis- sion to take a troop of soldiers from the fort and 'to destroy all the Indians' at Pavonia, sparing the women and children 'as much as possible' but trying to capture them; and to Maryn Adriaensen he gave another to go 'with his men,' meaning a band of volunteers, to Corlaer's plantation and there to act toward the savages as he should 'deem proper.' Secretary Van Tienhoven and Govert Lockermans accom- panied the second party. How both parties carried out their orders Captain De Vries relates :
So was this business begun between the 25th and 26th of February in the year 1643. I remained that night at the governor's sitting up. I went and sat in the kitchen when, about midnight, I heard a great shrieking and I ran to the ramparts of the fort and looked over to Pavonia. Saw nothing but firing and heard the shrieks of the Indians murdered in their sleep. I returned again to the house by the fire. . . . When it was day the soldiers returned to the fort having massacred or murdered eighty Indians and considering they had done a deed of Roman valor in murdering so many in their sleep; where infants were torn from their mothers' breasts and hacked to pieces in the presence of the parents, and the pieces thrown into the fire and in the water, and other sucklings were bound to small boards and then cut, stuck,
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and pierced, and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone. . .. Many fled from the scene and concealed themselves in the neighboring sedge, and when it was morning came out to beg a piece of bread and to be permitted to warm themselves, but they were murdered in cold blood and tossed into the water. . ..
After this exploit, De Vries continues, Kieft thanked the soldiers, shaking their hands and congratulating them. On the same night forty Indians were attacked in the same way at Corlaer's Hook and massacred 'as the Duke of Alva did in the Netherlands but more cruelly.' It was 'indeed a dis- grace' to the nation ruled by the Prince of Orange who in his wars had always tried 'to spill as little blood as was pos- sible.' Nor can it be thought that De Vries exaggerated the horrors of this winter night. Other documents as well as the Remonstrance of New Netherland support his account of it, and most of them fully indorse his censure of Kieft although some explain that the governor was deceived by Van Tien- hoven.
At Corlaer's Hook there is now a waterside park where children of many nationalities peaceably play together. Here as at Pavonia the Algonquins and their children died in 1643 in the belief that the Mohawks had attacked them. For the moment many of the Dutchmen thought the same. Then, fearful of the revenge the savages might wreak, some of the Dutch settlers on Long Island asked leave to attack the Indians there who had always been friendly. Kieft gave orders not to molest them unless they showed enmity. But he had inspired in some breasts and unchained in others feelings of fear, cruelty, and cupidity that he could not control. Marauding parties of Dutchmen and Englishmen pillaged the deserted wigwams at Pavonia and even the farms of the inoffensive Long Island red men. These, deeply insulted, made common cause with the River Indians who burned to avenge their slaughtered brethren, and eleven tribes rose in open war, attacking the settlers who were thinly scattered from the Raritan River at the southwest to the Housatonic at the northeast, wasting the farms, killing the men, and
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carrying off most of the women and children into the forest. All who escaped their sudden, stealthy onslaughts fled to the fort on Manhattan where Governor Kieft was still safely ensconced. Even De Vries's plantation at Tappaen was deso- lated. He himself was spared, with his house and the farmers who had taken refuge under its roof. This was his reward for saving the life of a savage who on the dreadful night of the massacre, thinking that the Mohawks were upon him, had sought shelter in Fort Amsterdam and who now induced his fellows not to attack the 'good chief' and his friends. Otherwise there was safety nowhere except up the river at Fort Orange and Rensselaerswyck where the Mohawks and Mohegans had not risen.
Thoroughly frightened, Kieft proclaimed a day of fasting and prayer and hired all the settlers as soldiers for two months. As much alarmed as he and filled with rage against him, they threatened to depose him and to send him back to Holland. Then he tried to shift the blame for his wicked rashness upon the advisers who had professed to speak in the name of the commonalty. Maryn Adriaensen, doubly embittered by the wreck of his own plantation, hotly resented this meanness. Bursting into Kieft's presence pistol in hand, 'What devilish lies,' he cried, 'have you been telling of me ?' He was seized, disarmed, and imprisoned. Learning of this, two of his fol- lowers hurried to the fort. One of them fired at the governor but missed him and was shot by a sentinel. For a warning his head was set upon the gallows. Nevertheless twenty or thirty other mutineers riotously demanded Adriaensen's release. Kieft declared that he should be fairly tried by a court composed of reputable colonists; but, as he reported to the West India Company, 'nobody was willing' to assist him and so he sent his prisoner to Holland to be dealt with there.
Against this dark background of terror, cruelty, and suf- fering the figure of Captain De Vries stands out brightly. He did not lose his courage, his patience, or his sympathy with the. distressed white men on the one hand, the exas-
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perated savages on the other. As soon as the Long Island Indians showed any sign of a desire for peace he went among them with a single companion and persuaded some of them to come, under his protection, into the presence of the hated governor. They trusted De Vries, they said, because they had never heard a lie from him and this was true of very few other white men. As a result of his wise and gentle counsels treaties of peace were signed in the midsummer of 1643 with the Long Island and Westchester tribes, the Hackensacks, and the Tappans.
Governor Winthrop did not deeply sympathize with his fellow-countrymen who suffered in these disasters for, as he wrote, they were persons who
. . . had cast off ordinances and churches and now at last their own people and for large accommodation had subjected themselves to the Dutch. .
Winthrop's account of this war, like his other references to the affairs of New Netherland, is full of inaccuracies. For example, he says that Maryn Adriaensen attacked Governor Kieft because he was jealous of John Underhill whereas, in fact, Underhill had not yet shown himself in New Nether- land. He also says that Roger Williams helped the Dutch to make peace with the Indians. No evidence supports this statement which has been reiterated a hundred times. Wil- liams did, indeed, come to New Amsterdam in 1643 to take ship for Europe, wanting to secure a charter for Providence Plantations and forbidden by the authorities in Boston to embark at their port; and eleven years later he referred to the episode in a letter to these authorities, saying:
Heretofore, not having liberty of taking ship in your jurisdiction, I was forced to repair unto the Dutch where mine eyes did see that first breaking forth of that Indian war which the Dutch begun, upon the slaughter of some Dutch by the Indians; and they questioned not to finish it in a few days, insomuch that the name of peace, which some
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offered to mediate, was foolish and odious to them. But before we weighed anchor their bowries were in flames; Dutch and English were slain. Mine eyes saw their flames at their towns and the flights and hurries of men, women, and children, the present removal of all that could for Holland. . . .
These lines refer to another and a much worse season of disaster which followed close upon the treaties made by Cap- tain De Vries. The savages were not satisfied with the words or the gifts of Governor Kieft, and their sachems, doubting that his ordinances against the selling of liquor would be obeyed, warned him that they might not be able to control the young braves who were 'continually crying for ven- geance.' Yet when the fresh fire broke out the spark came from a distance. There was war among the Indians of the Connecticut Valley; the contagion spread into the upper valley of River Mauritius and southward along its banks; the Dutch were attacked in their vessels on the river, and by September New Amsterdam was again in deadly fear.
Then, as in 1641, Kieft begged for the aid of representatives of the people. Probably they doubted his good faith, for a petition signed by forty-seven persons including three Englishmen asked that he and his council should themselves appoint the members of the proposed board, the people to have the right of veto. Finally the people consented to elect a board of eight. Two of these Eight Select Men, Damen and Kuyter, had served among the Twelve Men. The others were four Netherlanders and two Englishmen - Barent Dircksen, Abraham Pietersen, Gerrit Wolfertsen, and Cor- nelis Melyn, Thomas Hall and Isaac Allerton. As their presi- dent they chose Melyn, the patroon of Staten Island. Their first act was to expel from their board Jan Jansen Damen who had signed the fraudulent petition in the name of the Twelve Men. In spite of his plea that he had been deceived into so doing by the governor's misrepresentations they put in his place Jan Evertsen Bout of Pavonia. Then they re- solved that peace should be kept with the Long Island Ind- ians, war should be declared against the River tribes. In
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conjunction with the governor they set to work to arm and to drill the Dutch colonists and the West India Company's servants and to hire as soldiers fifty or more of the newly arrived English settlers who were all threatening to leave the province. Kuyter was put at the head of the Dutch force; and, through Isaac Allerton, John Underhill was induced to come from Stamford to command the Englishmen. All these burgher soldiers, English and Dutch, took an oath of fealty and devotion to the States General, the West India Company, and the governor and his council.
Before these preparations were completed the Wechquaes- kecks broke loose beyond the Harlem River and murdered Anne Hutchinson and her household of sixteen, sparing only her little daughter, and some of the settlers on Throgmorton's and Cornell's plantations. When this was known in New England Thomas Hooker declared that the 'bare arm' of God displayed itself in the death of Mrs. Hutchinson, and Thomas Welde wrote:
God's hand is the more apparently seen herein to pick out this woeful woman to make her and those belonging to her an unheard-of heavy example above others. . .
Soon the flame of war burst out along the western shores of river and bay and upon Long Island. Here only Lady Deborah Moody's plantation was saved, her stout party of colonists beating off the attacks of the savages. Francis Doughty, the clergyman who had settled at Mespath, fled with his associates to New Amsterdam where he ministered for a time to his compatriots, the Dutch residents assisting them to support him. He was the first English clergyman who officiated on Manhattan.
Then the savages devastated Manhattan itself so that above the Kalck Hoek Pond only half a dozen bouweries remained and the inhabitants of these were in hourly fear of destruc- tion. Many murders were committed by Indians purporting to come to warn the Christians. From all directions the peo- ple flocked into Fort Amsterdam. Their Eight Men advised
- .
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Kieft to turn to their use and defence the cargoes and crews of two Company ships which lay in the harbor ready to sail with provisions for Curaçoa. Cautious for once, and just when he should not have been, he said that he must obey the Company's orders; and the half-starved refugees saw the wheat that their own fields had produced carried out of their reach. The Eight Men also advised Kieft to hire a hundred and fifty soldiers in New England, to draw a bill upon the Company for the money wherewith to pay them, and as security to mortgage New Netherland to the New Englanders. Thereupon Underhill and Allerton were sent to ask at New Haven permission to recruit a hundred men to be 'led forth' by Underhill. As the confederacy called the United Colonies of New England had recently been formed, New Haven de- cided that it could not grant such a request without the con- sent of its allies. Moreover it doubted whether the Dutch- men's war were 'just.' It would do no more for them than promise to sell them food; and it vainly urged Underhill to remain at Stamford, offering him £20 'to prevent the snares of larger offers for his remove.' Of course Winthrop was mistaken when he wrote that the employment of Underhill was a plot of Governor Kieft's to engage the English in his quarrel with the Indians which they had 'wholly declined as doubting the justice of the cause.'
De Vries now risked his life again on an errand of mercy, going alone among the River Indians to redeem the child of one of his friends. He could no longer do anything for the colony at large. His own prospects in New Netherland were ruined, and he was glad of the chance to sail for Virginia as pilot of a Rotterdam herring-buss which had recently come from New England. Upon his departure, he relates,
. . . in taking leave of William Kieft I told him that this murder which he had committed was so much innocent blood, that it would yet be avenged upon him, and so I left him.
And so, with a prophecy on his lips that soon was verified, Captain De Vries left New Netherland never to come back.
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In 1644 he returned from Virginia to Holland by way of England. His last word upon New Netherland, written at this time, was that the directors of the Company were so jealous of each other that there might as well be no Company, but that if the land were free, as in Virginia,
. .. and everything produced by labor out of the ground, millions would be returned and the land populated at once; there would be no want of cargoes of the productions of the earth as there is of peltries.
In the late autumn of the year 1643 the Eight Men drew up the first communications addressed by the people of New Netherland to the authorities in Holland - a Memorial to the Assembly of the XIX of the West India Company and another to the States General. The latter says in part:
Almost every place is abandoned. We, wretched people, must skulk, with wives and children that still survive, in poverty together, in and around the fort at the Manahatas where we are not safe even for an hour whilst the Indians daily threaten to overwhelm us with it. Very little can be planted this autumn and much less in the spring; so that it will come to pass that all of us who will yet save our lives must of necessity perish next year of hunger and sorrow unless our God have pity on us. We are all here, from the smallest to the greatest, devoid of counsel and means, wholly powerless. The enemy meets with scarcely any resistance. The garrison consists of fifty or sixty soldiers, unprovided with ammunition. Fort Amsterdam, utterly de- fenceless, stands open to the enemy night and day. The Company hath few or no effects here (as the Director hath informed us) ; were it not for this, there would have been still time to receive assistance from the English at the East ere all were lost. But we, helpless in- habitants, are exceedingly poor. The heathens are strong in might . .. and are well provided with guns, powder, and ball, in exchange for beaver, by the private traders who for a long time have had free course here. The rest they take from our brethren whom they murder. In short, we suffer the greatest misery which must astonish a Christian heart to see or hear.
We turn then in a body to you, High and Mighty Lords. ... And should assistance not arrive (contrary to our expectations) we shall through necessity in order to save the lives of those who remain, be obliged to betake ourselves to the English at the East who would like nothing better than to possess this place. . .
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Thus had monopoly, paternal government, and the malad- ministration which meant a careless choice of executives borne their natural fruit. Thus, in less than a score of years, were almost literally fulfilled the predictions of Wassenaer when he wrote that if an 'executioner' should rule New Netherland, ordering its people 'as their superior' instead of guiding them 'as their friend and associate,' he would subvert and nullify everything and they would fly to the neighboring provinces.
In the Pequot War of 1637 the red men had had no fire- arms, and so harmless, relatively, were their arrows that although they wounded one in four of the New Englanders they killed only two men. It was a different thing to fight Indians armed as were those now threatening Manhattan. Moreover, while at the beginning of the year the commonalty had included five hundred men of fighting age now, says the Memorial of the Eight Men to the West India Company, the surviving population consisted 'mainly of women and chil- dren'; the freemen 'exclusive of the English' were only 'about two hundred strong' and were forced for the protection of their families to stay near the fort which was itself 'defence- less' and entirely out of repair, resembling 'rather a molehill than a fort against an enemy.' And as almost all the cattle were destroyed and the houses burned there was a dearth of food and of clothing for the unfortunates who were huddled in 'straw huts' outside the crumbling ramparts.
It was a point in favor of the whites that the Indians, although numerous, acted with little concert. It was a point against them that it was hard to come to blows with roving war-parties that fled into the forest at the approach of any organized force. Bands of soldiers and settlers whom Kieft despatched to Staten Island and beyond the Harlem accom- plished scarcely anything. An expedition to Long Island, led by La Montagne with Kuyter in command of the Dutch and Underhill of the English contingent, did more effective work. Ensign Van Dyck, the commander of the garrison, appears to have been suffering at this time from a wound. But in February, 1644, when Underhill had ascertained that
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a great body of Indians was gathered in a stockaded strong- hold on Strickland Plain, not far from the Bedford Village of to-day, he and Van Dyck and about a hundred and fifty men went by water to Greenwich and, after a long day's march through a hilly country deep in snow, attacked the fort by moonlight, burned it, and almost exterminated its occu- pants, men, women, and children. It was like the burning and the slaughter of the Pequots in their fort near the Mystic River. Hundreds perished - 'some say full seven hundred,' declares the Journal of New Netherland. Only eight escaped. They cannot have been armed like the savages nearer New Amsterdam for they killed none of the white men and wounded only fifteen.
In March peace was again concluded with the Indians of this region and Long Island. As those who were prowling about on Manhattan and those beyond the North River refused to be pacified, Kieft ordered all persons who wished protection for such cattle as remained to them to join in build- ing a 'good solid fence' which stretched across the island a little above the present line of Wall Street.
No help, not even in the way of supplies, had come from Holland - nothing except a bill for some 2500 guilders, drawn by Kieft on the Company, which was sent back pro- tested. In January, when their troubles were at the worst, some of the chief men on Manhattan had equipped a priva- teer named La Garce and sent it to the West Indies to 'annoy the Spaniards' and, of course, to bring back what booty it could. In May it returned freighted with sugar, wine, tobacco, and ebony captured in a hot fight with two Spanish barks; but its cargo could not be utilized in any way until after due process of confiscation by a court of admiralty. Meanwhile a ship bound for Rensselaerswyck had entered the harbor, laden with goods sent by the patroon for his colonists. When the supercargo refused to sell Kieft fifty pairs of shoes for the soldiers the governor took them by force. Discovering then that the vessel carried a large supply of guns and ammunition - wares that none but the Com-
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