They were a nice bunch of irregulared, the Dutch who, out of interest but once visited their neighbors, the British fellow colonists of Plymouth, elsewhere on the American northeast coast.
The residents of Plymouth, who arrived in 1620 with the ship Mayflower from London, were Puritans, supporters of a strict form of Protestantism who had first fled England and later Holland after political persecution and theological disputes. In Plymouh they were able to put their ‘Puritan’ beliefs into practice.
And how neatly they did! The Dutch visitors, who had traveled to the northeast from their New Amsterdam colony, gazed at the sturdy wooden houses, the uniform clothing and the neat behavior of their upstairs neighbors, which they often knew from Amsterdam. Compared to the raked Plymouth, their own New Amsterdam, on the southern point of Manhattan, was a poor mud pool with a half-finished fort and huts of tree bark.
Not to mention the colorful collection that the settlement populated. RaggamuffinsSchooiers, in the eyes of many Puritans, says the American author Sherill Tippins. “The Puritans had just left Leiden, where they had lived for a long time, because they were annoyed by the loose behavior of their Dutch fellow believers. And now they saw them again.” A prominent Puritein, Isaac Allerton (1586-1659), after disagreement with the leadership later sought salvation among the Dutch, with whom he felt better at home and saw greater opportunities for commercial success.
Tippins (1955) is researching that ‘first two hundred’, the first inhabitants of the New Amsterdam colony. The project, which must result in a historical monograph, is the third time she plunges into the past of her hometown, New York. Earlier she wrote February house (2005), about an early twentieth-century artistic salon in that city, and Inside the Dream Palace (2013), A history of the illustrious Chelsea Hotel, gathering place of Bohemiens, Vagebonden, Painters and Musicians.
For her new project, The First Two Hundredshe was already in 2017 as a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in Amsterdam, this summer she will be back in the Netherlands for fieldwork, including a visit to the orphanage in Woerden where one of her first two hundred grew up. “You can endlessly buried in the archives,” she says in a room at the Nias, “but it’s great to see the country and the cities where these people came from.”
There were neighborly quarrels, adultery, drunkenness
And burying in the archives is not difficult, she says, because the Dutch who settled in the colony were exceptional bookkeepers: they kept everything, from lists of salaries and prices to detailed court reports. They were needed, because there was everything for the non-driving colonial judge: neighbor quarrels, adultery, public intoxication, divorce. Tippins: “For the inhabitants of the colony, that was also a form of entertainment. A request for divorce had to be substantiated and so neighbors and other witnesses were heard, with all kinds of tasty stories.”
Not everything has been preserved, certainly not about the early years of the colony, but enough to find out a lot about the life of the first generations of settlers, all of whom are known by name. Tippins was able to rely on extensive sources in, among others, the New York State Library who also used Russell Shorto for his famous book about the colony, The Island at the Center of the World (2004). More than twelve thousand pages of seventeenth-century Dutch texts in that library survived, among other things, flooding and a fire that-historic irony-mainly put British documents in the ashes.
Linguist Charles Gehring gained access in 1974 and started with the help of the Holland Society in New York an ambitious translation project that is approaching its completion after half a century. For his book, Shorto used Gehrings Expertise and Tippins also benefited from the work of the now 86-year-old. “The man is invaluable.”
A map of New Amsterdam from 1664. It is one of the oldest maps in the area, with a small settlement on the southern point of the island of Manhattan.
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A bartender and a pirate son
Of the first two hundred who can be found by name in the documents, nine are rising in Tippin’s book-in-making in almost living. Divided into three parts: the island, the settlement, the city. Some of them are briefly reviewed in Shorto’s book, but they are central at Tippins. “I didn’t want to write another history of drivers of the colony such as Peter Stuyvesant and others, but of the ordinary people who tried to survive as good and as bad as it went, so bottom-up. “
Who are we talking about? For example about Grietje Reyniers, the Amsterdam bartender of Light morals who left for New Amsterdam with her husband, the son of a Barbaris Pirate, to try her happiness. Readers of Shorto know her from the scabreuze anecdote that they mates from her customers to a broomstick, but Tippins gives her turbulent life much more color. Reyniers was exiled with husband and all from the colony, but she did not give up and her chances turned: the couple gained a fortune as farmers and farmers. “An early American success story,” laughs Tippins. The couple moved back to the colony, although they no longer participated in community life.
At home in New York, Tippins was able to imagine that she was walking in the footsteps of Reyniers. “We know where her house stood, what view she had and where she walked, if she was called from the harbor by sailors. You can imagine it that way.” Again an irony of history: Until the descendants of the 17th-century bartender, the well-known actress and millionaire-heir Gloria Vanderbilt (1924-2019) and CNN journalist Anderson Cooper (1967) belong. Tippins: “He knows, he thinks it is witty. It is not strange either, the Dutch settlers married a lot and later with the British when New Amsterdam was transferred to them.”
Also adventurous were the experiences of Jacob Wolphertsen, son of a Utrecht farmer, who took the crossing as a boy with his parents. He was the only one in his family who learned to read and write – a promising boy. Tippins: “His father arranged Marriage with a woman from a well -to -do Amsterdam merchant family, for whom he is going to work as an agent. Jacob became rich.” But the opposite happens to him as a bartender Grietje: he lives on too large foot, ends up in scam and debts.
Then there is Sara Kierstede, the Norwegian stepdaughter of Pastor Everardus Bogardus who turned out to be a translator between the Dutch and local native nations. She lived with her husband on the southern tip of New Amsterdam, where Indians came to exchange their goods. She learned various indigenous languages and studied their medicinal herbs and plants.
They all acquainted to blame for one of them to be hung
The relationships did not remained harmonious. Governor Willem Kieft waged a cruel and dirty war (1643-1645) against local native peoples. Some of them pop up with name in Tippin’s book. Such as the indigenous leader Ninigret (1610-1677) a skilled political broker who stayed in New Amsterdam and studied the local customs. Tippins: “They tried to repent, but he had nothing to do.” The British also tried. According to tradition, Ninigret replied to the British request to bring the happy message to his people: “First make the English better.”
Also a striking personality was the Jewish butcher of the settlement, Asser Levy, from Amsterdam. He arrived at about the same time with 23 Jews who had fled from Brazil, where the Dutch were driven out by the Portuguese in 1624. Tippins: “Stuyvesant wanted to send the Jews away again, especially because they did not bring any money, but they were allowed to stay.” Later they left, Levy stayed behind and became a successful trader and the first Jewish homeowner in the colony – and in America.
Of course the Dutch, traders in everything, also had slaves. Tippins also devotes a chapter to the defenses of one of them. Manuel ‘De Gerrit de Reus’, a slave -made African man who was ‘captured’ on a Portuguese slave ship. He was put to work in New Amsterdam, but ended up in a murder case with ten fellow sufferers. Tippins: “They all confessed to blame, to prevent one of them from being hung. The authorities then let them pull straws, God would then point out the real guilty person.” Manuel pulled the shortest straw – he had to hang.
Photos Jagoda Lasota
But when he fell around his neck with the noose, the rope broke and Manuel was spared – and that had to be an intervention of providence. Tippins: “Hollands rope was known as very strong, so the suspicion is now that it was a set -up of the settlers. Manuel was a hard worker, and they probably didn’t want to miss his work.” Manuel was later released with the others – presumably because they had provided military services.
No matter how improvised and messy life could be there, the colony liked to advertise itself. A key figure was the poet Jacob Steendam, who stimulated the joys of the New World to attract ship loads of settlers. Steendam was a romantic Avant La Lettre; He traveled to the African gold coast and experienced an affair there with a local woman, whom he sang in his poetry. After New Amsterdam had fallen into British hands, he left, bankrupt, to Batavia in ‘De Oost’; Where he disappears from the annals. His work was rediscovered in the nineteenth century and published in English translation. Tippins: “A composer I met when working on my book about the Chelsea Hotel asked me to put his lyrics, with the idea of putting them to music.” She laughs: “It didn’t happen, he didn’t think the quality of the poems was high enough.”
What can you learn from this ordinary but not so everyday lives? In his book, Russell Shorto goes long lines to the present: the Dutch colony is said to have shaped the American Republic. Tippins is more cautious: “I would not want to extrapolate so quickly to the present, so of this is how we have become who we are.”
But there are certainly influences, she says, apart from the fact that CNN has a descendant of the first two hundred in the studio. “If you walk through New York and feel at Wall Street that the soil is gradually going up, you know: this is the place where the children of the settlers with their sled went off in the winter, as you can read in the sources.”
New York is also still very different from Boston, founded by the English. Tippins: “You can find a certain Dutch mentality or attitude with the first two hundred and you can feel in New York. Not the attitude of the British Puritans, who were always quickly ready with their judgment, but rather tolerance, although it is reluctantly looking up the other side. What is the modern Dutch word for that again?
A 19th-century impression of 17th-century life in New Amsterdam.
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