USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 33
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A Remonstrance Exposing the Bad Conduct of the Barbarous Indians toward the Dutch Nation, sent by Stuyvesant to Holland before the end of the year, tells of the uprising of the River tribes. It says that after the 'firm and irrefragable peace' concluded by Kieft in 1645 the savages near New Amsterdam, 'without any cause so far as we know,' destroyed at various times much of the settlers' property and murdered ten persons, five of them, including Jochem Pietersen Kuyter, on Manhattan itself. The government had demanded in vain the surrender of the murderers and for the sake of peace had 'winked at' the crimes. Then, fourteen days after the governor sailed for the South River taking every able-bodied soldier from the fort and most of the burghers,
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. . . very early in the morning, nigh this City of New Amsterdam, arrived sixty-four canoes full of Indians who before scarcely anyone was yet risen scattered themselves throughout this city and during the following day in many houses and to divers burghers offered numerous insults. ... Thereupon their Sackimas or Chiefs, being summoned before the council, gave very fair words and promised to depart before the evening. They remained nevertheless, with what intent God the Lord only knows.
The city doubled its guards during the night but in the morning the savages wounded Hendrick Van Dyck with an arrow and threatened Paulus Van der Grist with an axe:
Thereupon great uproar and tumult arose; some of the burghers got into conflict with the Indians and some, though few, were killed on both sides.
Nineteen hundred savages, it appears from other accounts, had gathered together on the North River, and seven or eight hundred fully armed had landed on Manhattan. The general belief, as Stuyvesant reported, was that they had not meant to harm the Dutch but were merely on their way to attack a tribe of Indians at the eastern end of Long Island. Some thought, however, that they had planned a raid on New Amsterdam to avenge a squaw whom Van Dyck had shot when he found her stealing peaches in his orchard. At all events Van Dyck seems to have been the only person they tried to kill until the burghers 'got into conflict' with them. It was Cornelis Van Tienhoven who urged on the burghers although as schout he was chiefly responsible for the public peace. Evidently he had learned nothing at all from the result of the evil counsels he had given Governor Kieft in 1643. Tragical again were the effects of his folly. The Indians retreated to Pavonia, burned all the buildings there, killed almost every man, took the women and children captive, and then, crossing to Staten Island, ruined its eleven bouweries and murdered twenty-three of their ninety inhabit- ants. Even the Kuyter bouwerie and another on the upper part of Manhattan were ravaged and the households mur- VOL. I. - 2 B
.
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dered; the same thing happened at one or two spots on Long Island; and above the Harlem River Van der Donck's patroonship and the Bronck and Cornell plantations were sacked although their people escaped. Altogether, within three days fifty colonists (some accounts say one hundred) lost their lives, a hundred and fifty were captured, Cornelis Melyn among them, and three hundred were left homeless and penniless. Twenty-eight bouweries and many lesser farms were desolated and great quantities of recently gar- nered grain were destroyed.
The English towns on Long Island sent word to the city that the Indians meant to kill all their Dutch inhabitants. From the farms in the neighborhood and from the newly settled Esopus region up the North River bands of refugees flocked into New Amsterdam. Deprived of its defenders by Stuyvesant's expedition it sent an express to call him home. The councillors who had remained at home added 'extraor- dinary' members to their board, and with their consent the city magistrates borrowed money from the burghers to pro- tect the transinsular wall by a high screen of planks which the savages could not scale. Fortunately the raiders, lack- ing food and embarrassed by the number of their prisoners, did not attack the city. When the governor returned he forbade any vessel to leave the harbor, any able-bodied man to depart, and sent guards to the suburban settlements. After some parleying the Indians exchanged more than seventy of their captives for a quantity of powder and lead. The life of one Christian, said Stuyvesant, was more valuable than the lives of a hundred barbarians, and to redeem it even contraband articles might rightly be given. The commis- sioners of the United Colonies, learning while in session at New Haven that many Dutchmen had been captured, decided to send two or three messengers to try for their release but let the matter drop when they heard that the worst had passed and that the Dutch themselves were treating with the savages.
Toward the end of October Rising and some of his soldiers
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came from the South River and reembarked on two of the Company's ships which landed them in England. The Re- monstrance about the barbarous natives was despatched at this time, reciting the disastrous effects of the raid and ask- ing for substantial help in soldiers and in money; and it seemed best to the governor and council to send several copies of it because, they said, - driven now to courses which they had condemned the people for adopting, - the Company might be unable to help its province and there- fore the appeal ought also to reach the States General and the city of Amsterdam.
Among the manuscripts in the Public Library of New York are two letters of Nicasius De Sille's which throw the blame for the recent disaster partly upon the governor him- self. One is addressed to the Amsterdam Chamber of the Company, the other to J. Bontemantel, a member of the Chamber and at the time a burgomaster of Amsterdam. In the first De Sille complained that Stuyvesant always ordered him to accompany him when he went to a distance, thus leaving the province without proper direction, and when at home scoffed at him over the council-board. A governor, De Sille hoped, might be sent out who was not so self-willed and had not so ignorant a schout-fiscal; but in case 'the two' were to be continued in office he himself ought to have a commission that would give him more power. Writing to Bontemantel in the autumn of 1656 he related that the South River forts had been taken 'without stroke or shot.' When the expedition returned to New Amsterdam it found everything 'very desolate.' All the houses at Pavonia and on Staten Island were burned, more than a hundred persons lay dead, and many were wounded. People were wanting to return to Holland, and some merchants were actually leaving. The burghers and the farmers who had flocked into the city were calling down 'vengeance and death' on Cornelis Van Tienhoven and two or three others, crying out that they were the only cause of the calamity. General Stuyvesant was 'not praised' because he made no investigation of the
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matter, seeming to intend to protect the schout-fiscal and to give the complainants no chance to be heard. De Sille him- self could get no hearing from any one because everything had occurred during his absence. There was now, the letter implies, only one councillor besides the two, Van Tienhoven and De Sille, who with the governor composed the 'supreme council.' Stuyvesant and Van Tienhoven, it says, cast three votes in the council while La Montagne and De Sille cast only two and therefore were 'obliged to follow' whether for the good of the Company or not. Moreover, the governor and the schout-fiscal, although they appeared like enemies, were really working together, and La Montagne was also in the ring (in mede in't parquet). Unless a change were made De Sille, he insisted, could not perform his own duties properly and everything would go to ruin. And again he explained that when Stuyvesant left home he gave no proper orders for the conduct of the government, and that either the gov- ernor or he himself, the first councillor, ought always to remain at New Amsterdam.
For a while Stuyvesant debated with his councillors whether it would be wise to attack the offending Indian tribes. The party that had landed on Manhattan, he believed, had been diverted from its original design upon the Long Island tribes by 'a culpable want of vigilance' and the 'too hasty rash- ness' of a few 'hot-headed spirits'; and the council decided that it would be highly imprudent to take the offensive. Only Cornelis Van Tienhoven spoke for war. All agreed that the settlers were greatly to blame for not gathering in com- pact villages, the very smallest of which the savages would never molest; and all said that more caution should be observed in admitting Indians into the settlements. Before the end of November the government renewed its old com- pacts with the Long Island Indians and the Mohawks. Against the River Indians it attempted nothing. From this time on no red man was permitted to remain overnight within the walls of New Amsterdam.
For the South River region, where there was no one now
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to dispute the authority of the governor of New Netherland, Stuyvesant organized a subordinate government with a deputy governor, secretary, and 'court of civil justice.' The most absorbing question of the time, however, was the old ques- tion of taxation, doubly pressing because of the losses and the outlays resulting from the Indian raid.
Some months before, the Company had instructed Stuyve- sant to establish no more patroonships or 'colonies,' fearing presumably that they would promote the growth of the spirit of independence. It reproved him for his failure to send it a complete copy of the Hartford Treaty of 1650, saying that its negotiations had thereby been so delayed that there was now little prospect of ever settling the boundary dispute, and charging him to repair his error at once and never again to make the Company suffer through 'such care- lessness.' Furthermore it wrote:
We have been aware and now again learn with displeasure that the community there cannot be persuaded to raise subsidies ; it looks very strange that people of experience and sound judgment, as the municipal officers and others under you must be, continue to sustain so perverse opinions contrary to all reason and justice and notoriously in contra- diction to the maxims of every well-governed county or city. But what we have said at large in our last letter we repeat now : It is not necessary to wait for their consent and approbation.
As it was so difficult to collect the tenths from the har- vests, the Company added, the effort should be suspended for a year. It approved of the governor's 'measures to raise subsidies' - those taxes upon land and cattle which he had imposed but apparently did not try to collect. And to the city magistrates the Amsterdam Chamber wrote in the same strain, explaining that taxation could no longer be post- poned without bringing ruin on the province, and directing that, as the magistrates had misappropriated the money from the tapsters' excise, using it to send an agent to Holland and to further other 'private matters to the injury and discontent' of the Company, therefore the aforesaid revenue should be
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turned into the Company's treasury as the governor had ordered.
In spite of all this backing from his superiors Governor Stuyvesant walked very cautiously. A property tax was, indeed, collected from the people to pay the public debts recently incurred; but it was laid in a way that shows how loth were the authorities to resort to such an expedient even in a time of great need. It was really not a tax in our sense of the term but in the old English sense a 'benevolence'; and in imposing it the city magistrates took the initiative. The burgomasters, petitioning the provincial government for leave to raise the needed sum, estimated at 4000 guilders, were instructed to get the indorsement of the schepens; and this being done the governor in council empowered them
... to ask from the trading skippers, merchants, factors, passen- gers, and from the common burghery, a voluntary subscription and contribution, each according to his condition, state, and circumstance. And in case of opposition or refusal by disaffected or evil-minded, which the Director-General and Council do not expect, the aforesaid . .. are authorized at the instance of the Director-General to assess such and according to the state and condition of the same to exact a reasonable contribution and promptly to levy execution for the same.
The inhabitants were then summoned before the governor and the city magistrates to offer their contributions or to be assessed for them. The method of assessment was merely a rough guess at what would be 'reasonable' in each case. In this fashion 6305 guilders were pledged by two hundred and twenty-eight persons including a few women and also some non-residents several of whom lived near Fort Orange. The list begins :
The Honorable Lord Petrus Stuyvesant offers for his share 50 guilders above the most, being 150 guilders.
Almost all the provincial and municipal officials gave volun- tarily, some of them as much as 100 guilders. So did the two clergymen and many other citizens rich and poor. Only
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sixty-five, offering nothing at all, were taxed, and these in- cluded of course all absent persons. Some men said that they were willing to pay but asked to have the amounts fixed for them. Others offered sums which the city fathers increased, and a few were told that they need not give as much as they had volunteered to pay. The smallest sum accepted was four guilders, and no one paid more than a hundred excepting three absent skippers each of whom was taxed for as much as the governor had contributed. Some persons of the poorer sort commuted for a certain number of days' labor. No English names appear on the list except those of Thomas Hall and of Isaac Allerton and Thomas Willett who, although non-residents, had business interests on Manhattan. It proved more difficult to collect than to assess the contributions. They were not all paid until two years had gone by.
It would take many years, Stuyvesant and the council had written to Holland, to bring the province back into the flourishing condition it had reached before the Indian foray. Property to the value of a hundred thousand guilders had been destroyed, Pavonia was tenantless, only seven or eight persons remained on Staten Island, and everywhere the white men were in terror of the red men. Even in New Amsterdam it was thought best to patrol the streets on Sun- days while the citizens were at church. Before the spring, the governor ordered, the settlers must abandon all isolated farms and gather into villages - a mandate more easily spoken than obeyed; and each merchant in the city, he said, must contribute a piece of cloth towards a fund for the ransom of such captives as might still be surrendered by the savages. Not all the unfortunates were rescued. Some the Indians insisted upon keeping as hostages, others they had taken so far into the wilderness that they could not be traced.
As a result of the calamity one person justly suffered. In answer to the reports upon it the directors of the Company wrote that they believed that the schout-fiscal 'with clouded
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brains filled with liquor' had been a 'prime cause' of the late 'doleful massacre,' or at all events might have prevented it by caution and good sense. They were 'astonished' that Stuyvesant and the council should wish to shield such a per- son in the face of the reiterated complaints of the community. Having also discovered frauds in the accounts of his brother, Adriaen Van Tienhoven, who had held various minor posts in the province and was now a customs officer on Man- hattan, they ordered that both the offenders be dismissed from their service, and appointed Nicasius De Sille schout- fiscal. Thus in 1656, New Netherland was at last relieved of an official whom for fifteen years it had rightly considered its heaviest burden and deepest disgrace.
Even then Stuyvesant would not give the city a schout of its own but put De Sille in this place also. A few months later De Sille asked permission to seize and seal the property of Van Tienhoven as he had 'absconded.' His hat and cane were found 'floating in the water' near the shore of the island, but what had become of him no one ever knew. His estate was administered upon as that of a dead man. He was, said a witness cited to prove his immoralities in the courts at the Hague, a 'corpulent and thickset person of red and bloated visage and light hair'; or, as another de- scribed him, 'of ruddy face, corpulent body, and having a little wen on the side of his face.' These appear to be the only verbal portraits of a New Netherlander that have come down to us.
Adriaen Van Tienhoven also vanished but was known in after years to be working as a cook in Barbadoes. One or both of the brothers left descendants on Manhattan, and a Van Tienhoven married in 1737 John Jauncey, the founder of a well-known New York family. The name, however, has died out, and two streets that were called Tienhoven for a time were long ago rechristened.
REFERENCE NOTES
PRINCIPAL PUBLISHED DOCUMENTS : Col. Docs., I, XIV (398) ; Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland (270) ; Records of New Amster- dam, I (360) ; Cal. Hist. MSS., Dutch (390) ; Thurloe, State Papers (484).
GENERAL AUTHORITIES : O'Callaghan, Hist. of New Netherland, II (382) ; Register of New Netherland (386) ; Brodhead, Hist. of New York, I (405).
CONVENTIONS : Col. Docs., XIV ; Register of New Netherland; Elting, Dutch Village Communities on the Hudson River (166); Werner, New York Civil List (129).
EXCISE DISPUTES AND REGULATIONS : Col. Docs., XIV; Records of New Amsterdam, I; Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland; Thomann, Colonial Liquor Laws (271).
THOMAS BAXTER: Records of the Colony or Jurisdiction of New Haven (373) ; Bartlett, Naval History of Rhode Island, in Historical Magazine, 1870 (213).
REMONSTRANCE AND PETITION OF COLONIES AND VILLAGES and SHORT NOTES : in Col. Docs., XIV.
PETITION OF CITY MAGISTRATES : in Records of New Amsterdam, I. GRAVESEND: Col. Docs., II.
SECOND PART OF THE AMBOYNA TRAGEDY : in O'Callaghan, Hist. of New Netherland, II, Appendix. [Translated from Dutch MS. copy in N. Y. State Library.]
CROMWELL'S EXPEDITION : Thurloe, State Papers; Hazard, Historical Collections (102) ; Hutchinson, Original Papers (311) ; Records of Massachusetts Bay (312) ; Records of Connecticut Colony (125) ; Records of the Colony or Jurisdiction of New Haven; Records of Plymouth Colony (442). - CROMWELL'S INSTRUCTIONS TO SEDG- WICK AND LEVERETT: in Mass. Hist. Soc. Collections, 4th Series, II.
CITY FINANCES : Col. Docs., XIV ; Records of New Amsterdam, I; and see Reference Notes, Chap. X.
JOHN YOUNG: Youngs, Youngs Family (550); Lamb, Southold, in Mag. of Amer. History, XXIV (303).
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CROMWELL'S SCHEME FOR THE CONQUEST OF AMERICA : Thurloe, State Papers; Von Bischoffsheim, Die Politik des Protectors Oliver Cromwell (147) ; S. R. Gardiner, Hist. of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, London, 1894; Lefèvre-Pontalis, John de Witt (525). WEST INDIA COMPANY : see Reference Notes, Chap. I.
CROMWELL AND THE HARTFORD TREATY: Thurloe, State Papers. COMMERCE OF CONNECTICUT : Weeden, Economic and Social History of
New England (168) .- RANDOLPH (quoted) : in Hutchinson, Origi- nal Papers. - SANFORD (quoted) : Cal. S. P. Col., 1677-1680.
SWEDES ON THE DELAWARE: Col. Docs., I, XII; see Reference Notes, Chap. V.
ARMS OF NEW AMSTERDAM: Early Seals of the City (467).
LETTER FROM BARBADOES : Thurloe, State Papers.
DAVENPORT TO WINTHROP: in Winthrop Papers in Mass. Hist. Soc. Collections, 3d Series, X.
BOGAERT'S LETTER: in Historical Magazine, 1858.
INDIAN RAID: Col. Docs., XIII, XIV; Remonstrance . . . Exposing the Bad Conduct of the Barbarous Indians, in Col. Docs., XIII ; the same translated by O'Callaghan as Hostile Conduct of the Barbarous Natives (62).
DE SILLE LETTERS : New Netherland Papers, 1650 (Dutch Documents, MSS., Moore Collection) in N. Y. Public Library, Lenox Building. TAXES: Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland; Records of New Amsterdam, I; Col. Docs., XIV.
VAN TIENHOVEN : J. O. B., The Jaunceys of New York, N.Y., 1876.
CHAPTER XII
THE LATTER YEARS OF NEW NETHERLAND
1655-1663
(GOVERNOR STUYVESANT)
And again we asked, What right had the kings of Spain, France, or England more than the Hollanders or Dutch to the New World - America ? - Augustine Herrman: Journal of the Embassy from New Netherland to Maryland. 1659.
IN Europe several publications relating to New Netherland quickly followed Van der Donck's Remonstrance, printed in 1650. A tract on the Mohawk Indians written by Domine Megapolensis was published at Amsterdam in 1651; and in the same year Joost Hartgers of Amsterdam issued a book that was compiled from this tract, the Remonstrance, and De Laet's history and called a Description of Virginia, New Netherland, New England, Bermuda, and the West India Islands. This is the book already mentioned as containing the first print from the earliest known picture of New Am- sterdam, undoubtedly drawn before the church in the fort was built in 1642.
A map called the Danckers Map, published at some date after 1650, was apparently the basis of the more important Visscher Map of Novi Belgii, Novæque Anglic nec non partis Virginia. This was issued at Amsterdam in Visscher's Atlas Minor in 1655 and was adorned with the second view of New Amsterdam that is known to us, drawn by Augustine Herrman. A copy is still attached to the West India Com- pany's report upon Stuyvesant's South River expedition, pre- served in the archives at the Hague. At this period the Blaeus of Amsterdam and other cartographers also issued atlases containing maps of New Netherland. One which
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was published by the French house of Sanson in 1656 shows the 'Nouveau Pays Bas' extending below New England and including Cape Cod.
The picturesque and valuable journal of Captain De Vries was printed at Alckmaer in 1655 under his own supervision. The title-page describes him as 'Ordnance-Master of the Most Noble Lords the Committed Council of the States of West Friesland and the North Quarter.' The frontispiece is a half-length portrait, inscribed as taken in 1653 when he was sixty years of age and showing a strong aquiline face, the brow encircled by a wreath of laurel. The dedication to the noble lords aforesaid gives an idea of the scope of the book, from which of course only such passages have here been quoted as bear directly on the history of New Amster- dam. It was written, says its author, from his personal experience in America
. . . in order to make known to trading and seafaring persons what trade and profits (accidents excepted) are to be had there, and to point out to them the good havens and roadsteads for securing their ships and goods, and to warn seamen of the rocks, shoals, and dangerous bars, in order that they may avoid them; showing them also what course they must take at sea, and how they must govern themselves by the wind, sun, moon, and stars.
In 1655 was also published a Description (Beschrijvinghe) of New Netherland written, evidently to promote emigration, by Adriaen Van der Donck during his enforced detention in Holland but not issued until after his return to America. A small quarto, the title-page adorned with a curious version of the arms of New Amsterdam, a much excited beaver serv- ing as the crest, it is probably now the rarest and the most costly of the early books relating to the Dutch province. It is chiefly although not wholly a compilation from Van der Donck's own Remonstrance and the second edition of De Laet. The first issue contained a reproduction of the earli- est picture of New Amsterdam; a second, which followed in 1656, showed a reduction of the Visscher Map including the
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second picture, Augustine Herrman's. This reduction has been more often reprinted than any other map of the province; and the picture it bears, showing the fort, the church, a wind- mill, the tall flagstaff used in signalling the arrival of vessels, and a gallows near the water's edge, remains the standard picture of New Amsterdam, for no artist, it seems, or at least no engraver, again depicted the city until the year 1673, nine years after it had become New York. It is true that an old water-color picture of New Amsterdam, now owned by the New York Historical Society, is inscribed to the effect that it was drawn in 1650 on the ship Lydia. But no ship of this name is on record as having entered the port, and the draw- ing appears to be a copy of a later print.
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