USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century Vol. II > Part 13
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justices appointed by Governor Nicolls. His book tells that it was published to attract settlers to a province which until recently had been 'new or unknown to the English.' Cer- tainly this was true, for the edition of 1667 of Heylin's Cos- mography ignores the fact that the province then belonged to England and says that it contained few people and 'only one village.' Denton's over-enthusiastic tone and the fact that he does not speak in detail of any part of the province except Long Island suggest that he was writing as a land agent on his own or his friends' behalf, yet his specific state- ments seem truthful. Of the city he says:
New York is built most of brick and stone and covered with red and black tile, and the land being high it gives at a distance a pleas- ing aspect to the spectators. The inhabitants consist most of Eng- lish and Dutch and have a considerable trade with the Indians for beaver, otter, raccoon skins, with other furs; and also for bear, deer, and elk skins; and are supplied with venison and fowl in the winter and fish in the summer by the Indians, which they buy at an easy rate. . . .
On Long Island corn and cattle were the chief sources of livelihood. 'Store of flax' was grown, for 'every one' made 'their own linen' as well as woollen cloth. and linsey-woolsey 'for their own wearing.' Had there been more artisans in the province it would soon have been able 'to live without the help of any other country' in the matter of clothing. All artisans lived 'happily' and persons who had no trade be- took themselves to husbandry, got lands of their own, and lived 'exceeding well.'
Along the southern shore of Long Island 'an innumerable multitude of seals,' which made 'an excellent oil,' lay all winter upon the 'broken marshes and beaches or bars of sand,' but the people had not yet learned how to hunt them although in small boats they captured the whales and 'cram- passes' that numerously frequented the same coast. Wild fruits of many kinds were abundant - strawberries so plenti- ful that in June when the 'fields and woods' were 'dyed red' with them the country people, says Denton,
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. . . instantly arm themselves with bottles of wine, cream, and sugar and instead of a coat of mail every one takes a female upon his horse behind him, and so rushing violently into the fields, never leave until they have disrobed them of their red colors and turned them into the old habit.
Only one more passage need be quoted from Denton's laudations. He has not the land agent's accent when he says, in words that are pleasant to remember as an epitaph upon the forefathers of New York:
Were it not to avoid prolixity I could say a great deal more, and yet say too little, how free are those parts of the world from that pride and oppression with their miserable effects, which many, nay, almost all parts of the world are troubled with, being ignorant of the pomp and bravery which aspiring humours are servants to, and striv- ing after almost everywhere: where a wagon or cart gives as good content as a coach, and a piece of their home made cloth better than the finest lawns or richest silks; and though their low-roofed houses may seem to shut their doors against pride and luxury, yet how do they stand wide open to let charity in and out, whether to assist each other or relieve a stranger. . . .
After Denton's book no other was published relating spe- cifically to Long Island until Wood's Sketch of the First Settlement of Long Island and Furman's Antiquities of Long Island appeared in 1824.
Better known to-day than any other old Dutch book about America is a handsome volume, called The New and Unknown World or Description of America, written by Arnold Montanus and first published at Amsterdam in 1671. It is not much more than a compilation from Denton and the earlier Dutch writers, especially Van der Donck. It de- scribes the city according to the witness not of contemporary eyes but of the old engravings, and includes pictures of tropical or mythical animals supposed to be native to the province. John Ogilby, King Charles's cosmographer, pub- lished at London in 1671 a large volume called America which follows Denton and Montanus but enlarges a little upon Denton's description of the city, saying :
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It is placed upon the neck of the Island Manhatans looking towards the sea, encompassed with Hudson's River which is six miles broad ; the town is compact and oval with very fair streets and several good houses ; the rest are built much after the manner of Holland to the number of about 400 houses which in those parts are held consider- able. .
John Josselyn, in the account of his voyages to New Eng- land published in 1674, tells how the English had taken New York from the Dutch and 'turned out their governor with the silver leg,' and describes the city very briefly, saying that it was 'built with brick alla moderna' and, a statement which may be doubted, that 'the meanest house therein ' was 'valued at one hundred pounds.'
The most important map of the period is one, now called the Nicolls Map, which was evidently sent by this governor to England. Roughly drawn but from an accurate survey, it shows on a large scale the whole of Manhattan with the adjacent shores and the islands in the harbor, and gives the names of a few localities including New Harlem and 'The governer that last was his Bowry.' Adjoined to it is a plan of the city on a still larger scale which resembles the Duke's Plan already described but, although less well executed, is supplied with a key indicating various buildings and points of interest such as the fort, the wall and its gates, the 'Town House,' the West India Company's garden, and 'the Old Governer's House' on the water front near the fort.
One of the most attractive maps of the province appeared between 1662 and 1665 in one of the many atlases issued by the Blaeu family of Amsterdam. It is adorned with pictures of native animals and of Indian villages and canoes. A large Dutch map very complete in its nomenclature and showing the harbor, Manhattan, part of Long Island, the Hudson to beyond Albany, and a bit of the Mohawk River, and also in an inset part of the Connecticut River, was published at Middleburg and the Hague in 1666 in a pamphlet bearing on the controversy between the States General and Sir George Downing. It gives the names of the Hudson as
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'The North River, otherwise River Manhattans or Hudson's River, called the Great.' The spelling of the name Hoboken, 'Hopoghan,' supports its supposed Indian origin. About the year 1670 a map of the province appeared as one of the three American maps in the first edition of Visscher's Atlas Minor, published at Amsterdam.
On the map of the province given in Montanus's New World Herrman's view of the city was reproduced with alterations that include an attractive group of palm-trees. This is sometimes called the third picture of the city. The true third picture, bearing the legend Nieuw Amsterdam on- lange Nieuw Jorck genamt (New Amsterdam recently named New York) with the information that the place had been retaken by the Hollanders in 1673 and finally given up again to the English, appeared on a map retouched at this time by a Dutch cartographer, Hugo Allard, to bring it up to date and known as the second Allard Map. It shows the city from the East River side with its batteries and enclosed dock. Etched, most probably, by the distinguished artist Romeyn De Hooghe from a drawing by some unknown hand, during a long period it was frequently reproduced with more or less alteration in books and atlases or as a separate picture. With the title Nieu Amsterdam al New Yorck it figured in a collection of one hundred views of the cities of the world published at Amsterdam by Carel Allard about the year 1680.
It is a pity that a drawing does not survive which, as is told in a letter written by John Davenport of New Haven in 1666, showed the 'three suns and four rainbows' that had recently appeared in the sky of New York. Governor Nicolls had had it made to send to Governor Winthrop.
The burgomasters of New Orange said that there were about six thousand people of the Dutch nation in the province. Ten years earlier the estimated number had been seven or eight thousand, or sometimes ten thousand. Probably most of those who departed, going to Holland, to Curaçoa, or to Carolina, belonged to the floating elements of the popula-
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tion, always abundant in a colonial seaport. Certainly the decline was not due to any lack of fecundity. Our Dutch ancestors married as early, remarried as promptly and re- peatedly when bereaved, and had as many children as the forefathers of New England, for they were pressed upon by the same conditions - so imperative a need for industry and thrift and so plentiful a lack of hired service that a father- less or motherless household was almost an impossibility. One man, a German, is mentioned in the chronicles of Love- lace's time as being the fourth husband of his first wife and the third husband of his second wife whose antecedent spouses had been a Dane and a Dutchman. This is a sample of the way in which a numerous posterity was insured, and also of the way in which different strains of continental blood were intermingled. When all of these strains had blended into one predominantly Dutch, constant intermarriages kept it so intact that many families among the farming people, and many also among the chief people of New York and Albany, came down to recent times with no intermixture, or with scarcely any, of British blood.
Although the Dutch-Americans were only a handful com- pared with their English-American neighbors, and although their city did not draw its increasing population from Hol- land, nevertheless for half a century New York remained a characteristically Dutch city in language, customs, and feel- ing; at the end of a whole century, when it had tenfold as many inhabitants as New Orange, half of them were still considered Dutch; and even after the Revolution travellers noticed the un-English aspect and atmosphere of the place.
For two or three generations even a colloquial acquaint- ance with the English tongue was not universal on Man- hattan; and all through colonial times the English speech of its people was very corrupt, for a large proportion of them heard only Dutch in the family, the church, and the school. The Reformed church permitted no English sermons to be preached from its pulpits until 1764 and did not abolish Dutch sermons until the end of the century; no master taught Eng-
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lish in its school until 1773 and the first who taught it exclu- sively took charge in 1791. In 1785 there was still at least one private pedagogue in the city who taught nothing but Dutch.
On Long Island many persons, including descendants of its early English settlers, spoke Dutch as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. The last Dutch preacher of King's County lived until 1824. Albany, remote from the door of immigration, remained almost wholly Dutch until long after the Revolution and still contains a church which holds all its services in the old tongue and imports its pastors from Holland. In some parts of the rural up-river districts it was impossible in the middle of the eighteenth century to find jurors who understood the language of the courts, and in the most secluded parts Dutch was almost exclusively spoken for still another hundred years and is not yet for- gotten. It was doubtless a native of one of these conserva- tive spots who, when the third constitution of the State of New York was under discussion in 1846, proposed an amend- ment to the provision that no one should vote who could not read English. It should be English or Dutch he said, and referred to the Articles of Surrender of 1664 as guaran- teeing that Dutch residents should be protected in all their rights.
Numbers of Germans and Swiss settled in the valleys of the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers during the first half of the eighteenth century, but very few Englishmen entered until after the Revolution. They did not like to become tenants of the great proprietors who soon divided among themselves the eastern shore of the Hudson, while, on the other hand, the Dutchmen who owned small farms, developing in their rustic isolation a narrowness of spirit unknown to their ancestors, were unwilling, it is said, to sell land to English- men and especially to New Englanders. Only on Manhat- tan and in its neighborhood was there any free influx of English settlers. Consequently, in this one of the colonies of England corroboration could long be found for what
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Thomas Mun wrote in the year 1664 about Netherlanders in the kingdom itself. Even those born and bred in the king- dom, he said, were 'among but not of' its people, 'not having so much as one drop of English blood in their hearts.' Shortly before 1750 William Douglass of Boston wrote that the Dutch in New York
. . . because not well dashed or intermixed with the English, though in allegiance above eighty years, do not seem to consult our interests so much as might be expected.
Nor have the old love and the old antipathy died out now that all New Yorkers have been for generations simply Americans. They were strongly expressed on Manhattan during the recent war in South Africa, still more emphatic- ally in the interior parts of the state.
In Delaware the chief offices were long held by persons of Dutch descent, a strong strain of Dutch blood is still dis- tinguishable, and many Dutch names are as well known as in New York, among them Bayard, Van Dyke, Van Zandt, and Vandegrift. In the northern parts of New Jersey Dutch names are still more common and Dutch traditions are cherished. At Bergen, close to Manhattan, the ancestral tongue was remembered for two hundred years by a group of people so conservative that they would not listen to Eng- lish sermons until 1806 and then only on alternate Sundays, and until 1809 kept their church records in Dutch. In 1770 Rutgers College and a theological seminary for students of the Dutch Reformed faith were founded at New Brunswick; and this town is described in a gazetteer of 1810 as containing 6000 people half of them 'of Dutch origin.'
Clear proof of the vitality of New York's slender current of Netherland blood springs from even a superficial acquaint- ance with the surnames well known in the huge city of to-day.
Many pretty puzzles for the historian as well as the genealo- gist are set by the names in the old records, for while sur- names, as has been explained, were quite casually adopted
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in New Netherland, not until later days did any one, Dutch or English, think it needful to spell a name always in the same way even when signing legal documents. Even after the Revolution the first Episcopal bishop of New York wrote his own name sometimes Provoost and sometimes Provost. In earlier days variations were much greater. It is easy to divine that the Beekmans and Beeckmans of to-day had a common ancestor, harder to read La Montagne in Montanye, the form that most of the doctor's descendants now use. La Chair the notary public was also D'la Scheer. Bayard may be found written Beyaerdt, Cregier in half-a-dozen ways. Paulus Leendertsen Van der Grist masquerades in official writings as Leendertzen, Leenders, Van den Grift, Van der Grift, and Van die Grift. The same family name was indif- ferently Voorhis, Voris, Vorhees, or Van Voorhuys; or, to take another example, Couwenhoven, Van Couwenhoven, Kouenhoven, Koowenoven, and Conover.
Moreover, surnames were often changed in the course of time. The Remsens of to-day, for instance, descend from a Dutchman known as Rem Jansen Vanderbeeck; the Suy- dams trace back to the three sons of Hendrick Ruycker, or Riker, who assumed the name Suydam about the year 1710. Again, in the adoption of surnames relatives did not always agree. Only inquiry could suggest a relationship between the progeny of the Marten Cornelissen who called himself Van Buren and that of his brother who assumed a name afterwards anglicized into Bloomingdale; or could reveal that the Rutgers family traces back to one Rutger Jacobsen Van Schoenderwart, the Van Wart family to his brother Teunis.
To sources of confusion like these are added those left in the old papers by Dutchmen writing English names and by Englishmen writing Dutch names. The New Englanders turned Wouter Van Twiller into Gwalter Vertrill, and Van Tienhoven into Teinoh or Van Teynoix. Their governors usually addressed Stuyvesant as Governor Peter Stevenson or Stevensen. Philip Pietersen Schuyler's name stands on
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the list of persons who took the oath of allegiance in 1664 as Philip Van Schuiller Paterson. John Underhill became at the point of Dutch pens Jan Van der Hyl, John Lawrence sometimes Jan Laurentsen or Lauwerens, while Delavall was De la Vaal. A so-called Sander Leendertsen, first an em- ployee of the West India Company and afterwards one of the original settlers of Schenectady, was a Scotchman named Alexander (Sandy) Lindesay of the Glen. In later life he called himself Alexander Glen, and his descendants retained this surname.
Sometimes an English name was more or less permanently transformed into a Dutch name. Thomas Davis, an English son-in-law of Domine Schaats of Albany, appears as Tomas Davidtse Kekabel. A Silesian whom the Dutch called Burger Joris (Burgher George) the English called simply Burger, and Burgers his posterity remained. Charles Bridges, it will be remembered, held many offices under Governor Stuyvesant as Carel Van Brugge.
Much more often Dutch names were anglicized in the course of time, as when the son of a Dutchman named Titus Syrachs De Vries figured as Francis Titus. Many New Yorkers with such names as Peters, Williamson, and Johnson are descended, whether they are aware of it or not, from Netherlanders who were known by patronymics like Pieter- sen, Willemsen, and Jansen. Many other Dutch names have been somewhat altered - like Sill (De Sille), Corwin (Corbyn), Drew (Dreuw), Cole (Kool), Kortwright (Kortryk), Has- brook (Hasebroeck), Hoagland (Hooglandt), Cooper (Cuyper), Snediker (Snedicor), Garretson (Gerritsen), Bloodgood (Bloet- goet), Hotaling (Hoogteilingen, Hooghtaling, Hoogtaling), Lansing (Lantsingh), Benson (Bensingh), Paulding (Paul- dinck), Ryerson (Ryerse), Mabie (Mebie), Sigsbee (Sixbe), See (Zy), Riker (Rycker), and Depew (Dupuis, De Puy). Many others which might be thought English are unchanged Dutch or Flemish: Cooley, for example, Post, Potter, Elting, Wendell, Waldron, Lott, Holt, Hegeman, Vedder, Nevius, Terhune, Cordes, Sickels, Vreeland, and Provost. Again,
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while certain New York names which appear to be English are French in origin, like Freer (Frère), Bevier (Bevière), Blanshan, and Truax (Du Truy), others which may seem to be French, like De Lanoy, Demarest (Des Marest), Mesier, Vielé, and De Kay, are known to be Dutch or Flemish; and so it is with some German-sounding names such as Brincker- hoff and Goetchius. Other names, of which Duryea, Oothout, De Milt, Lefferts, and Steffens are differing examples, might be divined to be Dutch, and a multitude very familiar in New York are unmistakably so, notably those with the particle van. When all the various kinds are added together their total seems surprisingly large; and they have spread, although not numerously, throughout the western and even into the southern states, borne by Americans of the seventh or eighth generation easily distinguishable, of course, from the Dutch immigrants who in recent years have settled in New Jersey and in some of the states of the northern middle West.
Naturally, not all the old Dutch names are now pronounced as they used to be. Our tongues have forgotten, for instance, the guttural sound of the Dutch sch, speaking it as sk, and also the broad sound of the Dutch uij. Writing this as uy we pronounce it, in such names as Schuyler, Cuyler, Pruyn, Duyckinck, and Frelinghuysen, simply as y. In parts of the country where Dutch names are unfamiliar even the New York pronunciation is not always followed. Roosevelt, for example, is there given a long first syllable whereas it should be spoken, and is in New York, as though written with a single o.
All through the colonial period the Dutch New Yorkers kept themselves numerously and honorably prominent in provincial, municipal, and commercial affairs, and distinctly at the head in social life despite the influence of the official circle that surrounded the English governors. And they have not been swept from their place by the great currents from other parts of America and from all parts of Europe which
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mingle now in the maelstrom called New York. Indeed, while some families once prominent have died out or ceased to play any visible part in public or social life, others - Van Buren, Roosevelt, Cortelyou, Vanderbilt, Depew are names that occur to mind - have in one way or another achieved in modern days a prominence they did not have before.
New Yorkers are still very proud of Dutch descent even when it is masked under names of other origins. In family pride some of them are as tightly and complacently encased as any Virginian. In the more generous sentiment called pride of race they exceed all other Americans, and this feel- ing has strengthened instead of diminishing since the Revo- lution. In the year 1787 a Holland Lodge of freemasons was formed in the city, using the Dutch tongue in its pro- ceedings. An association organized in 1835 for historical, charitable, and social purposes, and called the St. Nicholas Society in honor of the saint whom tradition names as the patron saint of New Amsterdam, was never as flourishing as it is to-day. Although it does not confine its membership to persons of Dutch descent it preserves Dutch customs and sentiments, holding its anniversary meetings with Dutch feasting on St. Nicholas Day in December, and in the spring celebrating the Paas festival, the Easter festival of the Hol- lander. More definitely social in its aims but making colonial descent a requirement for membership is the St. Nicholas Club, founded in 1875. The Holland Society of New York, founded in 1885 chiefly for historical but also for social pur- poses, includes only direct descendants in the male line of Netherlanders by birth or adoption who immigrated before the final establishment of English dominion in 1675. It has published many valuable old records and historical essays. A similar association is the Huguenot Society of America, founded at New York in 1883 with broad and scholarly his- torical aims.
These overt signs of love and respect for the fatherland of New York have brought about a rebirth of personal inter-
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course between men of Dutch blood on opposite sides of the Atlantic and an awakening in Holland of a genuine interest in the history of its connection with its quondam province.
Although not a single building dating from Dutch times now remains on Manhattan, New Amsterdam stamped itself on the aspect of the city by bequeathing it the 'high stoop' house, and ineffaceably affected its topography. Wall Street shows where its northern limits lay. The irregular block where the new custom-house stands preserves the shape of Master Kryn Frederycke's fort, and the Bowling Green in front of it is the Dutchmen's Plain. More remarkably, the place that the Dutchmen chose for their centre of traffic is still, it may again be said, the great financial and commercial mart of Greater New York.
Many Dutch names persist on the map of the city or can be divined under anglicized spellings. In its neighborhood they are still more numerous - town names like Brooklyn, Flushing, Gravesend, New Utrecht, Bergen, Yonkers, and Flatbush, and others like Staten Island, Coney Island, Shooter's (Schutter's) Island, Sandy Hook, Hell Gate, Kill Van Kull, Robbin's Reef (from robyn, a seal), Oyster Bay, 'so named by our nation' wrote Captain De Vries in 1639, and Spuy- tenduyvil Creek which means not Spite-the-Devil, as is some- times said, but Spouting Devil. 'Brooklyn' has gone through transformations which have sometimes caused its origin to be mistaken. At various times it has been Breuckelen, Brookland, Brockland, Brocklin, Brookline, and Brooklyn, the last and now permanent form coinciding more nearly than the intermediate ones with the first of all.
Up the Hudson, of course, Dutch place-names are very frequent although, again, sometimes altered as in the case of Haverstraw (Haverstro), and Catskill (Kaaterskill). Far to the southward and well to the eastward the Hollander's nomenclature survives. Wherever any of the suffixes 'hook' (hoek, a corner), 'kill' (old Dutch kil, a channel), 'gat' (the mouth of a harbor), 'clove' (kloof, a cleft), 'rack' (reeks, a
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