New York at War (4 page)

Privateers did play one signal role in the town’s early history. In 1625 or 1626, a privateering ship entered the harbor carrying an unprecedented human cargo: eleven African men seized from Spanish or Portuguese vessels. The names of some of the men—John Francisco, Antony Portugese, Simon Congo, Paul D’Angola—indicated their African origins and Latin ownership. They promptly became slaves of the Dutch West India Company, which put them to work in New Amsterdam. While regular traders would subsequently bring a far larger number of slaves from the Caribbean and Africa to the port on the East River for sale, privateers continued to do their share, since they regarded slaves as prize loot to be plundered from
Patria
’s New World enemies. The global war on Spain and Portugal thus helped to establish chattel slavery as one of New Netherland’s native institutions.

For the next two centuries following the arrival of these first African slaves in New Amsterdam, slavery would be entwined with every aspect of the city’s life, including its military affairs. In the short term, the WIC used its Africans to undertake the task no one else seemed to want. Under a Dutch overseer, the enslaved men toiled to rebuild the crumbling walls of Fort Amsterdam. Indeed, they may have been the first workers charged in 1626 with bringing Cryn Fredericks’s ground plan to fruition.
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Given the West India Company’s military vision for Manhattan, the end result was decidedly lackluster. Part of the reason for this shortfall lies in the priorities of the company itself. Because the colony’s output in fur pelts never proved to be a reliable source of profit over and above expenditures, the Nineteen Gentlemen paid more attention to colonial adventures that seduced them with the lure of vast fortunes and the satisfaction of direct hits against the Spaniards and Portuguese. Thus, at a time when a few slaves were tending the walls of Fort Amsterdam, the WIC was devoting huge sums to employ thousands of sailors, soldiers, and civilians in a war to dominate Brazil that went on intermittently for a quarter of a century.

The company’s neglect of New Amsterdam aggravated another factor that would play a role in the town’s history: resentment of WIC authority. The absolute authority granted to WIC officials by the States General ran up against a stubborn Dutch tradition of self-rule stretching back to the Middle Ages. Dutch villagers and city dwellers alike were used to putting limits on the powers and pretensions of larger, overarching institutions. Nor was the company much loved by the rowdy, unbridled characters who came over from
Patria
on company ships in an era when most solid citizens preferred to prosper safely at home. “Lick my ass,” jeered Paulus Heyman, overseer of the company slaves and sometime brothel keeper, in response to a taunt from a town sentry one night, helping to set off a brawl that left Heyman’s friend Piere Malenfant with stab wounds. Such unruly types may have been in the minority, but their presence colored a more general and abiding reluctance to follow WIC orders and requests.
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Further undermining the company’s vision for the colony was the fact that many settlers in New Amsterdam (and New Netherland generally) were not Dutch. Some were transient adventurers. Others were displaced persons, refugees from Northern Europe’s wars and religious persecutions who often had already settled for a time in the Dutch Republic before crossing the Atlantic. For the polyglot array of English, French, Danes, Norwegians, Germans, Bohemians, and others who ended up on Manhattan Island, any sense of patriotic obligation to the Dutch Republic or the WIC was tenuous at best. Rather than strengthening the town’s military role, the pursuit of wealth by a trans-European array of traders, artisans, and farmers undermined it. The situation boded ill for any vision of New Amsterdam as a strategic citadel.

In the end, it would be the conflict foreshadowed by John Colman’s death in 1609, rather than the global crusade against Catholic Iberia, that would turn New Amsterdam into a military base. The relationship forged by the Dutch and Indians in the wake of Hudson’s voyage remained complex and volatile. While Cryn Fredericks busied himself planning Fort Amsterdam, a war had broken out between Mahican and Iroquois tribes up the Hudson River, partly motivated by rivalry over control of the fur trade with the Dutch. In order to keep New Netherland’s settlers from getting caught in the crossfire, Peter Minuit, Verhulst’s successor as the colony’s director in 1626, had summoned most of the outlying colonists on the Connecticut and Delaware rivers and the upper Hudson to relocate to the tip of Manhattan, in reassuring proximity to the incipient fort. The town itself was partly the result of this ingathering. So was Minuit’s legendary purchase of the entire island from a band of local Lenape, who probably misunderstood the transaction as a mutual sharing of land.
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Suspicion, concealed motives, and a jockeying for advantage underlay even cordial relations between Dutch and Indian. To the Dutch, Indians were
Wilden
, savages who migrated from one primitive bark-and-sapling longhouse and ragged forest village to another, rather than settling in permanent towns like civilized Christians. To the Lenape, the Dutch were
Swannekens
, “salty people,” a reference to their coming from over the sea or perhaps a judgment on the European temperament.

Although Dutch-Lenape relations were fraught from the very beginning, acts of generosity, kindness, and mutual respect between the two parties were not unknown. Some European men and women were genuinely curious about the Lenape way of life, with its loosely affiliated bands of several dozen families who moved from campsite to campsite in a seasonal cycle of planting, harvesting, hunting, and fishing. These colonists endeavored to understand the larger tribal groupings into which these bands organized themselves and jotted down approximations for the Lenape names the Indians used for each tribe: Raritan, Canarsie, Hackensack, Rockaway, Navesink, and a dozen others. The company, like the colonists, exhibited a modicum of respect for the original inhabitants of New Netherland. Convinced that the Indians held legitimate sovereignty and ownership, WIC officials made sure that the settlers paid for Indian land and meticulously recorded their purchases, “lest we call down the wrath of God upon our unrighteous beginnings.” In turn, the Lenape shared their maize and fish with the early settlers, helping to sustain the food supply of the fledgling colony.
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Respect between the two groups, however, was qualified. “I find them entirely savage and wild,” Jonas Michaelius, New Amsterdam’s first clergyman, declared of the
Wilden
, “strangers to all decency, yea, uncivil and stupid as garden poles. . . . They are as thievish and treacherous as they are tall.” Disdain was a two-way street. When angered, Indians called the Dutch
materiotty
(cowards). Dutch fighters “might indeed be something on water,” Lenape warriors taunted them, but they were “of no account on land.”
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Both the colonists and the Lenape had good reason to feel uneasy. Like other European colonists in the seventeenth-century Americas, the Dutch faced what their Puritan neighbors to the north described as “a howling wilderness,” a thick forest that began at their back doors and stretched interminably into the recesses of the continent. New Netherland was never much more than an expanse of woods and river valleys dotted here and there by a handful of trading posts, with farms cleared by settlers radiating out from them. Indians emerged from those woods, sometimes unpredictably, and melted back into them when their business with whites was done. The people of New Amsterdam, with its cluster of streets open on two sides to canoe-frequented waters and on the third to the woods of northern Manhattan, were not immune from this awareness of encroaching wilderness. The sense of vulnerability that Europeans carried with them in their fields and streets was inflamed by the knowledge—shared by both Dutch and Lenape—that the Indians greatly outnumbered the newcomers. While the European settlers of New Amsterdam may not have known about John Colman, some certainly knew that
Wilden
had killed the crew of a Dutch trading vessel off Noten Island in 1619. They all heard the news when Mohawks slaughtered four WIC employees (one was roasted over a fire) who meddled in an Indian conflict near Fort Orange in 1626 and when tribesmen massacred thirty-two Dutchmen in a small whaling outpost at the mouth of the Delaware in 1632. On their side, the Lenape harbored long memories of sporadic humiliations, threatened beheadings, and the occasional murder of their own people by ill-tempered or drunken whites.
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Despite the tensions, the social boundary between the two cultures remained open out of mutual necessity and desire. Indians wandered in and out of Dutch houses in New Amsterdam and Fort Orange, where colonists eager for furs overcame their own reservations about “admitting them to the table, laying napkins before them, presenting wine.” The Lenape appreciated the axe blades, hoes, woolen cloth, and copper kettles the colonists traded for furs and land. They also prized the guns, lead, and gunpowder that traders sold them despite repeated prohibitions issued from Fort Amsterdam. Lenape sachems (chieftains) and traders were adroit bargainers who sought the highest prices for their furs from rival European traders, and they became discriminating purchasers of Dutch manufactures. For their part, whites embraced an array of Indian wares and ways: maize, venison,
sappan
(cornmeal porridge), canoes, and
sewant
or wampum, the whittled seashells that became the colony’s currency. Most emblematic of the cultural exchange was the presence of half-Dutch, half-Indian boys and girls, the children of traders and burghers who cohabited with “well favoured and fascinating” Lenape and Mohawk women.
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This Indian man, very possibly a Lenape, was taken by Dutch soldiers to Europe and displayed as a curiosity to paying audiences at fairs. Engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar,
Unus Americanus ex Virginia. Aetat 23,
Antwerp, 1645. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

The interpenetration of the European and Lenape worlds, however, accelerated tensions to the breaking point. Outside of Manhattan—on Staten Island and Long Island, in the marshlands near Newark Bay, and at discrete landings along the Hudson Valley—Dutch settlers, hungry for land, purchased tracts from the Indians and cleared farmsteads, pressing deeper and deeper into traditional Lenape territory. These settlers’ unfenced cattle trampled and ruined Lenape cornfields, while dogs belonging to the Lenape preyed on farmyard chickens. Homesteaders hired Indians as farmhands but sometimes cheated them out of their wages, or so the Indians claimed. Moreover, it was dawning on the tribes that the land whose use they thought they were sharing with Europeans in exchange for gifts or payments, the
Swannekens
viewed as exclusive property for their own purposes. On the trading front, the Lenape felt increasingly squeezed between the Dutch and the Iroquois to their north. As the Europeans relied more and more heavily on the Iroquoian Mohawks as primary suppliers of pelts, the Lenape accurately discerned that their bargaining position and their power to command respect were slipping away. Some bands had become almost completely dependent on European trade, producing wampum for the Dutch in exchange for the food, clothing, and tools they no longer made themselves. And out on the frontier, as well as in the homes and taverns of New Amsterdam, one ingredient always proved toxic. “They all drink here,” reported a settler, “from the moment they are able to lick a spoon.” The Lenape, who previously drank only water, took quickly to European liquors. Imported and locally produced alcohol was a prime lubricant in Dutch-Indian relations, but the aggression and lack of self-control unleashed in both whites and natives by brandy and beer defeated amity. An explosion awaited only the right trigger.
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