USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 42
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Among the settlers of humble origin the farmers were often illiterate, the townsfolk less often. To judge of this matter by the relative number of names and marks attached to public papers may not be to apply an absolutely accurate test; for it has been said that on early New England docu- ments signed by a number of persons marks sometimes rep- resent the names of men who are known to have been able to write - marks affixed perhaps by others in their absence. Yet it is as good a test as can be devised; it is certainly to be trusted as proving who could if not always who could not write; and it is probably altogether accurate where the total of the names affixed to a paper is not large. As low a level of illiteracy as, in this manner, the surviving documents of New Netherland reveal is shown by a paper signed by Nether- landers and Frenchmen at Boswyck in 1662 with five written names and thirteen marks, and by another signed at the Wallabout in 1663 with six names and nine marks. In 1643 those who spoke for the commonalty of New Amsterdam regarding the election of the Eight Men signed with twenty- four names and nineteen marks. At Breuckelen in 1663 nineteen names and nine marks were signed together. But
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the last formal petition of the people of New Amsterdam, drawn up, as will be told, in 1664 when the English were at their gates, shows sixty-nine signatures and only nine marks. No paper as important as this would have been signed in con- temporary Boston by so democratic a company of men of all ranks and callings; but if such a thing had chanced, the proportion of marks to names would certainly have been as large. Forty-eight 'free burghers' of New Haven signed an agreement in 1639 with thirty-five names and thirteen marks; and at Andover in 1664 five out of eleven members of a coroner's jury could not write their names. As for the English in New Netherland, they set seven names and seven marks to the oath of allegiance taken by Thomas Pell's com- panions at Westchester in 1656, twenty-three names and eighteen marks to a paper drawn up at Hempstead in the same year, and eleven names and nine marks to another signed at Jamaica in 1661. In 1660 the sheriff of the town of Gravesend could not write his name which was Charles Morgan.
The average of feminine education was much higher among the Dutch than among the English. A commercial training often followed the elementary schooling that girls in general received, and a classical training was not uncommon. Tradition says that the young daughters of one De Milt, a baker, were the best Latin scholars in New Netherland, not excepting its clergymen. Sarah, the wife of Doctor Kierstede and the daughter of Annetje Jans, was appointed official interpreter because she was more skilled in the Indian tongues than any one else. It was usual for women as well as men to plead their own cases in court. They were active in commercial life not only as shopkeepers but also as mer- chants in the wider sense, ship-owners, and traders with the Indians in the wilderness. It was common for a wife to hold her husband's power of attorney during his absences, to assist him in his business, and to carry it on after his death even though it were the management of a farrier's shop on the one hand, of a large farm on the other. Both the Great
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and the Small Burgher-Right, as has been told, were open to women.
With this freedom there went, of course, a corresponding degree of consideration at home. The wife was the head of the household, supreme in domestic affairs and her hus- band's equal in the eyes of the law which recognized a com- munity in goods when no ante-nuptial contract existed. Such a contract often assured that the wife and the husband should inherit absolutely from each other. Rights of pri- mogeniture did not exist and daughters inherited equally with sons. English observers noted at the time that the equal way in which the laws divided property in Holland worked against the upgrowth of an aristocracy of idleness. Conversely, in the English-American colonies the difficulty of idleness worked with other inescapable New World in- fluences against the perpetuation of English customs of pri- mogeniture.
The ordinances of Stuyvesant's day as well as of early English days show that on Manhattan children were no more strictly disciplined than in Holland. There, as Bradford had written, the 'great licentiousness of youth' was one of the reasons that decided the Pilgrim Fathers to try their fortunes in America; and, as Blok records when writing of the middle years of the century, all foreign observers were amazed at the liberty granted to children and the free behavior of servants.
The mental caliber of the New Netherlanders may be tested by reading the bulky volumes which contain translations of their public papers - popular petitions, complaints, and expositions, official journals, reports, manifestoes, and letters. Many of them besides the Remonstrance of 1649 have the high merits of logical arrangement, lucidity, and dignity. All have a simplicity in strong contrast to the turgid rhetoric in which the New Englander often delighted. Some have a flavor of scholarship, literary skill, and individuality which persists even in the alien language. If none of them has as vivid a picturesqueness as the New Englander and the Vir-
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ginian now and again achieved, on the other hand those that deal with the features and the products of the little-known Western world are much more sane and scientific in spirit than contemporary essays in English. If none has the same sort of historical value as the chronicles of Bradford and Winthrop, some have a descriptive value unmatched in other early colonial records. Among these are the excellent paper called Information in Regard to Taking up Land in New Netherland written by Cornelis Van Tienhoven, De Vries's direc- tions for mariners, and Van der Donck's Description of New Netherland. This, indeed, is an exceptionally intelligent book of its kind, discriminating wisely between established facts and mere information received from sources possibly un- reliable. It contains no statements that can be bracketed, for example, with John Josselyn's where he says that por- cupines in America laid eggs, that frogs sat on their haunches a full foot in height, and that barley in a poor soil degenerated into oats. If Van der Donck repeated Indian tales of the marvels of the forest he doubted their truth, questioning, for instance, whether unicorns existed in New Netherland al- though all the world then believed that they existed some- where. His story of whales seen far up the North River was undoubtedly true. Keen-eyed and sensible, he spoke what seems to have been the first warning against the destruction of American forests, wrote of plants and crops like a botanist and an agriculturist, and, dwelling at length upon the nature and habits of the beaver, produced a chapter which deserves to be cited among the best natural history monographs of the time. Martin Cregier's workmanlike Journal of the Esopus War, again, is not nearly as amusing to read as John Under- hill's account of the Pequot War in his News from America but gives a much better account of the way in which an Indian campaign was conducted. In short, if we look not for self- conscious literary essays but for papers containing informa- tion about current conditions we are so well pleased with the manner of writing of the New Netherlanders that it seems doubly unfortunate that none of them compiled a chronicle VOL. I .- 2 1
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of the fortunes of the province which might be matched with Bradford's and Winthrop's.
With mere literary intent they wrote, so far as we know, nothing whatever in prose. In theology, again, they left scarcely anything to be weighed against the large legacy of New England except a little Latin treatise which Megapo- lensis composed to refute the arguments of his Jesuit ac- quaintance Father Le Moyne. Three adventurers in verse, however, New Netherland could claim - Jacob Steendam, Nicasius De Sille the schout-fiscal of the province, and Domine Selyns.
'Jacob Steendam, Noch Vaster' is the punning way in which this poet wrote his name, steendam meaning 'stone dam' and noch vaster 'still firmer.' He had served the West India Company for a number of years and had already pub- lished a volume of poems before he came, about the year 1650, to New Netherland where he owned houses in the city but seems to have worked as an upholsterer and trader and as a planter on Long Island. In 1659, to excite interest in the province, he caused to be published in Holland a Complaint of New Amsterdam (Klaght van Nieuw Amsterdam) which repre- sents the city, the daughter of Amsterdam and the God of War, abandoned by her parents to her indifferent sponsors the directors of the West India Company, and falling a victim to predatory swine - that is, to the English. Returning to Holland Steendam issued in 1661 a longer poem called The Praise of New Netherland ('T Lof van Nuw-Nederland), dedicated to Secretary Van Ruyven, and in 1662 a set of so- called Spurring Verses (Prikkel Vaersen) urging colonists toward the Delaware country. He appears to have died, probably some ten years later, at Batavia in the island of Java where he was serving as a missionary, comforter of the sick, and master of the East India Company's orphan-house. He is still remembered among the poets of Holland.
Nicasius De Sille wrote in prose a brief History of the First Beginnings of New Utrecht, where he was one of the first settlers, building himself in 1657 a stone house that stood
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until 1850. In the town records, which he kept until 1660, lie embalmed three short poems - a pastoral, a psalm, and an epitaph on the first child born in the town, a little Cor- telyou.
Much more voluminous is the legacy of Domine Selyns, a highly accomplished scholar who composed - often in Latin, once in Greek - about two hundred poems, chiefly epitaphs, epithalamiums, and other 'occasional' verses. Most of them date from days when New Netherland had become New York, but in 1663 he wrote two nuptial odes for the Latin Schoolmaster, Domine Luyck, and a long poem on the Esopus wars.
None of these essays in verse is nearly as ambitious as those of the Bostonian Anne Bradstreet, published in 1650, or as Wigglesworth's Day of Doom, first printed in 1662. In their modest way, however, they make a nearer approach to literary excellence; and, envisaging the things of this world cheer- fully and often gayly and the things of the next world sanely and hopefully, they convince us that their authors would have been pleasant and profitable persons to know.
Taken as a whole, the bulk of the written legacies of New Netherland and the number of the practised quills they reveal are rather surprising when we remember that it held only seven or eight thousand people of both sexes and all ages and that none of them was moved to write for the instruction of posterity, for the moral edification of the Old World, or even for his neighbors' spiritual improvement. This is true when only the documents that have been printed are consid- ered. Many others that must be interesting are still un- published, notably the correspondence of Jeremias Van Rensselaer covering the years between 1656 and 1674, and a journal called the New Netherland Mercury which he regu- larly sent to the owners of the patroonship in Holland.
In short, it is not more justifiable to think of New Am- sterdam as a slow-witted, illiterate place than as a drowsy, uneventful place. The more closely we read its chronicles in the words of its own founders and fosterers the more clearly
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we perceive how civilized, how modern it was in its essential habits of mind. If an American of to-day could be trans- ported back two hundred and fifty years he would find him- self more comfortably at home on Manhattan than anywhere else. In some of the English settlements he would have the chance to exercise more direct political power, but in none excepting Rhode Island would he find as much personal freedom, and in none at all a general mental attitude, a pre- vailing temper, as similar to the temper of the America of to-day.
Some of Governor Stuyvesant's most active friends and antagonists died or left Manhattan before the English entered to possess it.
Adriaen Van der Donck died in 1655, two years after he returned from Holland. The well-known Onderdonk family of New York and New Jersey is descended from his son Andrew, and others called Vandunck or Verdunck also trace back, most probably, to the people's tribune or to his brother Daniel. His property, which included the patroonship north of the Harlem River and lands on Long Island, he bequeathed to his wife who soon remarried with a man named O'Neale and followed her father, the Reverend Mr. Doughty, to Vir- ginia. She and her new husband were confirmed in the pos- session of the patroonship by the first English governor. But it was soon divided and sold, portions of it form- ing in after days parts of the manors of Fordham and Philips- burgh. Still later, part of Philipsburgh was known as the 'lower manor' of the Van Cortlandt family by contrast with their larger estate farther north; and the Van Cortlandt house, now a museum in Van Cortlandt Park, stands near the spot where Van der Donck's is believed to have stood. The stream called the Sawkill took its name from his sawmill.
One of the names of his short-lived patroonship, de Jonk- heer's Landt, survives as the name of the city of Yonkers, bestowed upon the township, which had previously been called Philipsburgh, in the year 1788. This name, his writ-
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ings, and the map that bears his own name are Van der Donck's memorials; but only antiquaries remember what Yonkers means, and even the historians who most highly praise the Description of New Netherland usually ignore the fact that Van der Donck also wrote the people's Remonstrance and Petition of 1649.
It was because he intended to enlarge his Description by a history of the colonists in New Netherland that he deferred its publication until he returned to the province, then asking leave of the West India Company to examine the official records in Fort Amsterdam. The Company wrote Stuyvesant to be cautious in this 'difficult matter' lest its own weapons be used against it and it be thereby drawn into 'new troubles and quarrels'; and apparently Stuyvesant refused to let Van der Donck see the records, for the Description was printed with- out an historical chapter. Thus posterity was deprived of what would certainly have been a most valuable possession even though, as has been shown to be probable, the records antedating the administration of Governor Kieft had already disappeared.
David Provoost died in 1656. A versatile person who had been schoolmaster and notary public, a trader with the Indians and New Englanders, commissary in charge of Fort Good Hope, and schout of a Long Island district, he is chiefly re- membered as the founder of a notable family and the ancestor of the first Episcopal bishop of New York. Brian Newton, the military officer of English birth who had come out with Stuyvesant and had sometimes served as his intermediary when dealing with his English neighbors, asked in 1661 to resign his commission and in 1662 was discharged and, appar- rently, returned to Europe. Lady Deborah Moody of Graves- end died in 1659, and in 1662 her son Sir Henry who shortly before had moved to Virginia and who left no children.
Wouter Van Twiller died in Holland in 1656 or 1657. Cornelis Melyn, who had removed with one of his sons to New Haven before he sold his Staten Island patroonship to the
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West India Company, continued to visit New Amsterdam where other members of his family remained. The last mention of his name in the records occurs in 1663. Lubber- tus Van Dincklagen, having refused to serve as vice-director when Stuyvesant was ordered to reinstate him, also betook himself after a time to New Haven where he soon died, prob- ably in 1658. Isaac Allerton likewise died in 1658 at New Haven where he owned one of the finest houses in the town, described as ornamented with four porches. His son, known in Virginia as Colonel Isaac Allerton, there founded a family which long ranked with the most prominent, and after serving for a time in the assembly was appointed to the governor's council in 1687.
In 1656 Dr. La Montagne was appointed vice-director at Fort Orange. Dirck Van Schelluyne also left New Amster- dam, to serve as secretary of Rensselaerswyck. Domine Selyns asked leave to go back to Holland at the expiration of his four years' term of service and departed in 1664, not then intending to return as he did after a lapse of nineteen years. His place was taken by Samuel Megapolensis, a son of the elder minister, who had studied for three years at Harvard College and passed through the departments of medicine and theology at the University of Leyden, and had recently come back to Manhattan.
Augustine Herrman, after concluding his mission in Mary- land in 1659, went to Virginia to clear the government of New Netherland from the charge of exciting the Indians against the English. On his way home he agreed with the governor of Maryland to make a detailed map of that colony and Vir- ginia. The first of its kind, it was printed in London in 1673. A copy of it may be seen in the Grenville collection in the British Museum, adorned with Herrman's autograph and portrait. In payment for it he received a large grant of land at the head of Chesapeake Bay, now in Cecil and New Castle counties, where he established several manorial estates the chief of which he named for the land of his birth - Nova Bohemia or Bohemia Manor. This name is still remembered,
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the brick house that Herrman built stood until 1786, and it is said that the circumference of his deer park may still be traced. He removed from Manhattan to his new manor with his family, their tutor, and their servants in 1661. Later, when Lord Baltimore had given him other grants, his prop- erties amounted in all to some thirty thousand acres. In 1666 the Maryland assembly passed an act naturalizing him and his sons - the first act of the sort known to have been framed in any of the colonies.
Family traditions assert that Herrman revisited Manhattan while Stuyvesant was still in power, quarrelled with him, was imprisoned in the fort, feigned insanity, asked for the com- pany of his favorite horse, and on the back of this wonderful steed leaped from a window of his prison, swam the North River, and thus escaped from the governor's clutches. The records of New Amsterdam do not mention such an episode, but later writings do say that Herrman came back and quarrelled with Stuyvesant. He had himself painted with his horse, and when it died he gave it honorable burial in the family graveyard at Bohemia Manor. The portrait was burned in later years but an amusingly artless copy of it, still owned by Herr- man's descendants, shows him in a beruffled red coat standing by a white horse which is bleeding profusely from its nos- trils as though it had indeed just performed some difficult feat.
Herrman, wrote Van der Donck, was 'an ingenious man and a lover of the country,' meaning New Netherland. His wife was Jannekin (Jenny) Varleth, probably a sister of Stuyve- sant's brother-in-law Nicholas. Judith Varleth, the sister who was accused of witchcraft at Hartford, married her brother's stepson, the youngest of Stuyvesant's nephews, Nicholas Bayard. Brought to New Amsterdam as a child, he was destined to lead a long and stormy life in the city of New York. Under the Dutch he served as clerk in the office of the provincial secretary, as English secretary to the governor, and as commissary of customs. If tradition may be quoted again, he was a frivolous young man, too fond of horse-racing,
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dancing, and other amusements. History shows that he was well educated, speaking and writing fluently Dutch, French, and English, and that in his maturer years he was energetic and passionate, an ambitious politician, and sometimes an unscrupulous partisan.
REFERENCE NOTES
PRINCIPAL PUBLISHED DOCUMENTS : Col. Docs., I, II, III, XIII, XIV (398) ; Records of New Amsterdam, I-V, VII (360) ; Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland (270) ; Ecc. Records, I (167) ; Cal. Hist. MSS., Dutch (390).
GENERAL AUTHORITIES : O'Callaghan, Hist. of New Netherland, II (382), and Register of New Netherland (386); Brodhead, Hist. of New York, I (405) ; Manual of Ref. Church (96) ; Valentine, Hist. of New York (402) ; Innes, New Amsterdam and its People (357) ; De Voe, The Market Book (308) ; Wilson, New York, Old and New (413) ; Valentine's Manuals, especially 1860, 1862, 1865 (508). - MAPS of the city compiled from data in the records, in Valentine's Manuals, 1852, 1853, 1856, 1857.
CONCERNING NEW NETHERLAND OR MANHATTAN (quoted) : Clarendon Papers (101).
CARTWRIGHT (quoted) : in Clarendon Papers and in Hutchinson, Original Papers (311).
VAN DER DONCK (cited) : his Beschrijvinghe van Niew Nederlant (425). DAMEN FARM: Valentine, Operations in Real Estate in the City of New
York (451) ; Lamb, Historic Homes and Landmarks, in Mag. of Amer. Hist., XXII (303) ; Innes, New Amsterdam and its People. THE DUKE'S PLAN: Original in British Museum; facsimile in colors in Valentine's Manual, 1859.
HOUSES: Anon., Historical Account of the Early Architecture of this City (59).
DOMESTIC CUSTOMS : Anon., History of the Domestic Affairs of the Inhabitants of New York Anterior to the Revolution, in Valentine's Manual, 1858; Blok, Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Volk, V (348).
TEMPLE (cited) : his Observations on the United Provinces of the Nether- lands (353).
STEENWYCK: Valentine, Cornelis Steenwyck, in Valentine's Manual, 1864.
LA CHAIR: Valentine, Law and Lawyers in New Amsterdam, in Valen- tine's Manual, 1863. - Extracts from his Registers in Year Book of the Holland Society of New York, 1900.
JOGUES (cited) : his Novum Belgium (430).
STEENDAM (cited) : see POETS, post.
GOLF: Extinct Popular Games, in Historical Magazine, 1868 (213).
SELYNS (quoted) : Ecc. Records, I.
SLAVES : see Reference Notes, Chap. VII, especially (for SHIP
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GIDEON) Valentine, Slaves and the Slave Trade in New Netherland (477).
COURTS : Records of New Amsterdam; Cal. of Hist. MSS., Dutch. THOMAS MUN (quoted) : his England's Treasure by Forraign Trade (179). DAUGHTER OF DOMINE SCHAATS: Letters in Ecc. Records, I, and in Cal. of Hist. MSS., Dutch.
MARGRIET STUYVESANT: Will of Balthazar De Hart, 1672, among MS. wills in Surrogate's Office, New York; Records of New Amsterdam, VI; Cal. of Hist. MSS., English (390) ; Purple, Ancient Families of New Amsterdam (184).
NEW UTRECHT: Documents Relating to Long Island (286).
BREEDEN RAEDT (cited) : Breeden Raedt aende Vereenichde Neder- landsche Provintien (76).
POPULATION OF VIRGINIA : Cal. S. P. Col., 1669-1674 (485) ; Child, A New Discourse of Trade (500) ; J. D. Butler, Convicts Shipped to American Colonies, in Amer. Historical Review, II (52) ; Egerton, British Colonial Policy (108).
AUTOGRAPHS AND MARKS : Col. Docs., XIV; histories of Long Island. - NEW HAVEN AGREEMENT: Records of the Colony and Plan- tation of New Haven (372).
WOMEN: Anon., Notable Women of Olden Times, in Valentine's Manual, 1855.
[CHILDREN.] BRADFORD (quoted) : his Hist. of Plymouth Plantation (441) ; BLOK (cited) : as above.
VAN TIENHOVEN (cited) : his Information in Regard to Taking up Land, in Col. Docs., I, and in Doc. Hist., IV (397).
DE VRIES (cited) : his Voyages (527).
JOHN JOSSELYN (cited) : his Account of Two Voyages to New England (529) and his New England's Rarities Discovered, in Transactions and Collections of the Amer. Antiquarian Society, IV.
CREGIER'S JOURNAL OF THE ESOPUS WAR: in Col. Docs., XIII, and in Doc. Hist., IV.
UNDERHILL (cited) : his News from America (369).
MEGAPOLENSIS TO FATHER LE MOYNE: in Manual of Ref. Church.
POETS : Murphy, Anthology of New Netherland (57), and Jacob Steen-
dam Noch Vaster (487) ; J. L. Onderdonk, Jr., History of American Verse, Chicago, 1901.
VAN DER DONCK: see Reference Notes, Chap. VIII.
CORNELIS MELYN : see Reference Notes, Chap. XIII.
ALLERTON FAMILY: Cal. S. P. Col., 1685-1688; P. A. Bruce, Social Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, Richmond, 1907; and see Reference Notes, Chap. VII.
SAMUEL MEGAPOLENSIS: Ecc. Records, I; Manual of Ref. Church. HERRMAN and BAYARD: see Reference Notes, Chap. VIII.
CHAPTER XV
THE FALL OF NEW AMSTERDAM
1663, 1664
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