Taking Manhattan E-Book

Russell Shorto

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 553

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'An informative and thought-provoking history' The Telegraph 'A story rich in intrigue, diplomacy and personalities' New Statesman 'Offering new perspectives and ideas' Guardian 'Here is the whirligig of history, which Shorto captures vividly in this well-researched, well-written, sprightly book' Literary Review In 1664, England decided to invade the Dutch-controlled city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, had dreams of empire, and their arch-rivals, the Dutch, were in the way. But Richard Nicolls, who led the English flotilla bent on destruction, changed his strategy once he began parleying with Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch leader on Manhattan. Bristling with vibrant characters, Taking Manhattan reveals the founding of New York to be an invention: the result not of a violent English takeover, but of clever negotiations that led to the fusing of the multiethnic, capitalistic society the Dutch had pioneered to the power of the rising English empire. But the birth of what might be termed the first modern city is also a story of the brutal dispossession of Native Americans and of the roots of American slavery. Based on newly translated sources, Taking Manhattan shows how the paradox of New York's origins — boundless opportunity coupled with subjugation and displacement — reflect America's promise and failure to this day.

Leseprobe

TAKING MANHATTAN

ALSO BY RUSSELL SHORTO

Smalltime

Revolution Song

Amsterdam

Descartes’ Bones

The Island at the Center of the World

Saints and Madmen

Gospel Truth

For Saul and Vienne

A peace is of the nature of a conquest;

For then both parties nobly are subdued,

And neither party loser.

—HENRY IV, PART 2, ACT IV, SCENE 2

We’ll have Manhattan,

The Bronx and Staten

Island too . . .

—LORENZ HART AND RICHARD RODGERS

Contents

Prologue: The View from the Mountaintop

Part One

SQUARING OFF

Chapter 1: The Invader

Chapter 2: The Defender

Chapter 3: Enemy Waters

Chapter 4: Stuyvesant’s Error

Part Two

SETTLEMENT AND EXILE

Chapter 5: Rabbits on an Anthill

Chapter 6: The Trailblazer

Chapter 7: The Exile

Chapter 8: Dorothea Angola

Chapter 9: Restoration London

Part Three

A GAME OF CHESS

Chapter 10: Doppelganger

Chapter 11: Gravesend

Chapter 12: The Alchemist

Chapter 13: The Delegation

Chapter 14: The Effusion of Christian Blood

Chapter 15: White Flag

Chapter 16: “The Town of Manhatans”

Part Four

THE INVENTION

Chapter 17: Remaining English

Chapter 18: Merger

Chapter 19: Going Dutch

Chapter 20: The Mystery

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Illustration Credits

TAKING MANHATTAN

Prologue

THE VIEW FROM THE MOUNTAINTOP

The Manhattan skyline seen from the Ramapo Mountains, New Jersey.

The building is so tiny I drive right past it on my first try, despite the GPS’s meticulous instructions. Opening the door, I find myself in a CBD shop. One wall is lined with salves and essential oils, the other with jars of gummies. Unseen speakers pump out music at volume, Van Morrison informing the empty room that it’s a marvelous night for a moon dance.

Behind the shop is a small space furnished with four weathered lounge chairs. Sprawling across two of these, staring into his cell phone, is Chief Vincent Mann, elected and hereditary leader of the Turtle Clan of the Ramapough Lunaape Nation, one of several groups of Lenape people, whose territory encompassed a wide swath of the East Coast of the United States for at least six centuries before Europeans arrived.* The Ramapough group’s ancestral land is gorgeously situated—from some spots in these rambling Ramapo Mountains of northern New Jersey you can see the skyline of Manhattan in the distance—but little of it remains in their possession.

Mann is fifty-five, built like a former fullback, wearing shorts and a T-shirt on this hot summer day, with a beaded choker around his neck. His silver hair is cropped short. I’ve come in hopes of getting some perspective that might help me connect the distant past with the present. He gestures for me to sit and starts speaking almost without prompting, in a gravelly murmur that can’t compete with Van Morrison. He pauses, looks at the ceiling with a grimace. “Hey, Alexa—stop!”

He begins again and proceeds to talk for nearly three-and-a-half hours. It’s a centuries-long litany of abuse that he regales me with. He names battles and broken treaties from the seventeenth century. He knows how many Lenape people were killed at a massacre at present-day Jersey City in 1643. You can see on his face and in his body that this history consumes him: over decades he has crafted himself into a being whose purpose is to call out injustice.

At some point his wife, Michaeline Picaro, knowledge bearer of the Turtle Clan, arrives. Together they run a farm that provides botanicals for the shop, and they work on environmental justice projects in their community of about five thousand people, many of whom live below the poverty line. She’s also training to become a nurse. Generally speaking, both are involved in activities to promote healing among their people. The most recent abuse involves industrial pollution from the 1960s that flooded parts of their land with toxic waste. Mann and Picaro tell me they have been to dozens of funerals of friends and family members who have died from a variety of cancer types. A lawsuit netted a sizable payout, but the money only added insult to injury. “Two-thirds of it went to the law firm,” Chief Mann said. “One-third got distributed among seven hundred or so people. The lawyers said if you don’t sign, you’re not getting anything.”

I imagine most Americans would suppose that the Native people who famously “sold” the island of Manhattan to the Dutch centuries ago for twenty-four dollars’ worth of knives and kettles are strictly of the distant past—that they were slaughtered, or died of diseases the Europeans brought, or were engulfed by waves of European immigration. All of those things happened, and yet the Indigenous groups native to the region survived. They were split apart through treaties and scams, and many were pushed out, bought out, or simply up and moved: to Oklahoma, Kansas, Delaware, and Ontario. Others, though, never went anywhere. “We’re still here,” Picaro told me, “only thirty miles away from where we were all those years ago.”

It’s an alluring notion for a writer of history to reach for in making a point about historic injustice: that descendants of the people who lost Manhattan—the people on the short end of what was arguably history’s greatest and most iconic swindle—live on, precariously, four centuries later, almost literally within the shadows of the skyscrapers. In truth, nobody knows what Indigenous tribe participated in that event, let alone which, if any, of the present-day Lenape groups connect back to it. The US Bureau of Indian Affairs doesn’t even recognize the Ramapough as a tribe, though the state of New Jersey does. The lack of federal recognition has something to do with their tangled lineage but also with a high-powered smear campaign that Donald Trump waged in the 1990s to protect his Atlantic City casinos from what he feared would be future tribal competition. In support of their claims to legitimacy the Ramapough have engaged researchers who created extensive family trees connecting them to the past, and they have their own oral tradition. Mann tells me he can trace his ancestry back to Katonah, a legendary sachem, or chief, of the seventeenth century.

My aim, though, isn’t to try to identify current descendants of the Native people who bartered away Manhattan but to make a broader, perhaps obvious but nevertheless important point at the start of this book: that the people indigenous to the continent are still here. Native America is part of the fabric of the twenty-first-century United States. In fact, New York City has the largest American Indigenous population in the United States: 180,000 people spread across the five boroughs, far more than live in any of the approximately 326 reservations in the country.

Today we are coming to appreciate more keenly than ever before the injustice America has done to Native people. The taking of Manhattan Island by the Dutch in 1626 is the very emblem of that injustice. It was not quite the first act of European dispossession, but it’s certainly one of the more outrageous examples.

That event is not the main subject of this book. The story I tell in these pages is of the second taking of Manhattan, which came thirty-eight years later when the English relieved the Dutch of it, resulting in the birth of New York. But the first taking of the island is very much a part of this story. The Native peoples of the region were a constant, vigorous presence throughout the Dutch period. They were crucial players in the faceoff between the English and the Dutch. And the injustice that the first taking of Manhattan represents remains a part of American reality in our time. The view from the New Jersey mountaintop—the contrast between the impoverished tribal community and the city of power and wealth—is a reminder of our failure to process the injustice that the American experiment is built on. As Michaeline Picaro said to me of her community, “We’re still digging out from the rubble of what happened four centuries ago.”

If the first taking of Manhattan represents a kind of original sin, the second, in 1664, is a richly meaningful event that has been curiously skipped over by the historical record, marginalized, though not exactly forgotten. It’s an episode of American history that everybody knows about and nobody knows about. That there was a Dutch presence—that New York was once called New Amsterdam—somehow holds a place in our collective awareness. But while we are stocked with histories and myths about the Pilgrims, the Puritans, and the Jamestown colonists, not to mention the Revolutionary era, who has any grasp of what that Dutch presence meant or of the struggle for control of this most consequential island? Of the players, what was at stake, and what it meant for the future? The end result of this struggle was far-reaching (the fact that I’m writing this book in English is but one aspect of it), and yet we’ve done this significant piece of our history a terrible disservice, treating it as though what happened was obvious and inevitable and thus not worthy of attention.

Most histories tell us that the story is a simple one. The Dutch had established a wobbly, inconsequential foothold in North America, with their capital, New Amsterdam, at the tip of Manhattan Island. The English engulfed it, renamed it, set up their own system, and thus began New York’s rise.

This book offers a different perspective. It shows that the Dutch presence was substantial and that New York didn’t come about as the result of a hostile takeover, with the English muscling their way in and the Dutch meekly retreating. It was an invention. Hundreds of people on both sides, representing a variety of nationalities, religions, and languages, took part in that act of invention. Thousands of miles away from their home governments, facing the likely prospect of cannon fire and bloodshed, they conceived of a remarkable solution to the problem confronting them. They would in effect disregard orders from their leaders in Europe and, rather than fight, join forces. They would create something wholly new.

If we think of New York as a child, we might see that the two European cultures involved in its birth were parents, each of which would contribute genetic material to the newborn. This is all the more remarkable when we consider that England and the Dutch Republic were rival powers in Europe, who fought a series of vicious wars against one another during this period. Their rivalry was intensified by the fact that they were at different stages in the process of building their history-changing empires. Through the early decades of the seventeenth century, England had been mired in civil turmoil while the Dutch Republic had created a global enterprise whose vastness is difficult to comprehend. The country had a weak central government, but connected to it were two very powerful multinational corporations, which did the work of colonizing and amassing wealth.

Over the course of the seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie) shipped more than one million Europeans to work in its Asian outposts—more than all other European companies combined. It had twelve thousand sailors in its Asian fleet; in addition to fighters and seamen it employed armies of craftsmen, middlemen, administrators, clerks, translators, laborers, and accountants. It was a business enterprise, but its military tactics were unforgiving; its soldiers fought, tortured, burned, enslaved. One could argue that the East India Company has had a greater impact on the world than any other company in history. It revolutionized cartography and shipbuilding, reshaped whole cultures, brought untold misery to those it colonized and enslaved, and moved plants, animals, and insects around the globe, setting off the cycle of invasive species that we still live with. We can track its doings so well because it also pioneered corporate bureaucracy; its existing archives—scattered around the world, tucked in cabinets and file drawers throughout its former colonies—measures some four kilometers. The massive wealth generated by the East India Company was funneled back to the home country, giving rise to the so-called Dutch Golden Age.

The Dutch West India Company, meanwhile, which focused on the Atlantic region, could never match the might of its sibling, but thanks to its Africa trade, it did its part to change the world for the worse. From “incidental” efforts to buy human beings in the 1590s, it grew to eventually ship more than a half million people into lives of slavery. At the same time, the West India Company established the North American colony of New Netherland and the city of New Amsterdam, whose population, often in defiance of the parent company, went about constructing a novel, multiethnic society and a robust trading port that the English would come to covet.

Through these two companies the Dutch had been expanding their global reach for decades, fueling English envy and bitterness toward the little nation across the Channel to the point where hating the Dutch became a national pastime. As England grew and began to conceive of its own empire, including North American colonies, it became clear that the Dutch had to be dealt with.

What took place in and around Manhattan Island in the summer of 1664 began as a classic showdown of military forces in the age of rising European empires. Had you been part of it, it would have seemed like it was leading to death and horror, that it was an inevitable confrontation, fueled by mutual animosity, testosterone, historical forces, and orders from the respective home countries.

The outcome—the way those involved in the showdown decided the affair—shaped the contours of American history and echoes right down to the present. On the one hand, it ensured that the English would control much of the continent and would continue and accelerate the process of taking land from Indigenous people. Once it was under English rule, Manhattan would become an important piece in a geographical puzzle—others included Barbados, Jamaica, the New England colonies, and ports on the western coast of Africa—that, once assembled, would give rise to the British Empire. The annexation of New Netherland essentially fixed the “original” thirteen English colonies in place, ensuring that, for better and for worse, American history and American values would be tied to England’s global push for power.

But if the resolution of the standoff over Manhattan resulted in an English city, it incorporated vital, world-changing elements that the Dutch had brought to North America. It helped to embed the concept of pluralism—and the notion of a society made up of a mix of different kinds of people as a core value—into New York’s foundation and America’s collective identity. It also ensured that the country would embrace capitalism, as both a rapacious and a liberating force, long before the word itself even existed. And the effervescent, messy society that resulted would become a countervailing influence throughout much of American history to the dour, self-righteous, theocratic Puritan sect centered in Boston.

In these and other ways the episode of our early history that gave New York its name helped set not only the city’s but the country’s destiny. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that it has been so thoroughly ignored. One reason is that until relatively recently we lacked documentation of the Dutch presence—or, rather, we ignored it. This book relies on recently translated material, which deepens our understanding of this event. It builds on my 2004 book The Island at the Center of the World, though it is written to stand alone. That earlier book told the story of the Dutch founding of a North American colony. It detailed how the Dutch brought pluralism, free trade, and their brand of imperialism to the place. That story ended with the English takeover.

The present book zeroes in on the moment of transition from Dutch to English ownership, treating it like the world-changing event it was. The idea to write it slowly dawned on me as more volumes of Dutch records emerged from the capable hands of translators Charles Gehring and Janny Venema of the New Netherland Research Center at the New York State Library and Archives, giving details of what was at stake for the players in 1664.

Two questions hovered in my mind as I researched. First: Why does New York mesmerize people from all over the world? More than a few think it’s pretty much the greatest city in the world. It seems to have something embedded in its core—an energy, a fecundity, a self-confidence—that no other city can quite match. This story suggests a partial answer.

Second: Who are we? Americans today feel their country is in a state of crisis. This connects to our sense of identity. How do we reconcile ugliness in our past with values we hope to live up to and with historical achievements we want to celebrate? New York’s birth encompasses the roots of American pluralism and capitalism, things that most of us consider vital. It’s also tied to the devastation of Native peoples and to the start of slavery in America. These too are elemental inheritances.

If reconciling these parts of our history feels impossible, maybe we are trying to do too much. Maybe for a start we simply need to unearth these pieces of the past like archaeologists digging up artifacts, brush them off, and see them in the clear light of day.

_________

* There are many names for the Indigenous people native to the region, including Lenape, Munsee, Munsee Lenape, Lenni Lenape, and Delaware. Though it was rarely employed during the seventeenth century, I will use Lenape in this book because that is the preference of many groups today.

Part One

SQUARING OFF

In 1664, someone in New Amsterdam made a sketch of the city from the East River. Amsterdam artist Johannes Vingboons used it as a model to paint this expressive watercolor—part of an effort to promote business in the Dutch colony.

Chapter 1

THE INVADER

New York is all about water.

Reasonable people may disagree with this assertion. Surely New York is about trade, finance, power. Fashion, food, art, media, design. Fusions and factions. Wall Street and Broadway. Skyscrapers and boroughs.

Yes, but water flows beneath and around all of these. If the coastline of the New York Harbor region were stretched out, it would be longer than the state of California. New York City’s waterfront is bigger than those of Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston combined. As vast as it is, the area that is officially known as the New York–New Jersey Harbor Estuary is even more staggering in its complexity, encompassing such a concatenation of inlets, margins, banks, strands, runnels, rivers, reefs, rivulets, coves, creeks, and kills; of brooks, basins, bays, shoals, shores, islands, islets, and peninsulas; of jetties, bluffs, heights, scallops, spits, crags, beaches, reaches, bends, bights, channels, sandbars, sounds, and points, as to be virtually unmatched in the United States.

And yet, as varied as this shoreline is today, in past centuries, before hardscape and landfill, it was incomparably more jagged and meandering. The word littoral designates any space where land and water meet. Littoral zones are rich, fecund, life-fostering places. New York’s harbor once supplied oysters around the world. It once produced single oysters the size of a dinner plate.

Bivalves aside, the harbor might well be considered the birth mother of America. Maybe that sounds like an exaggeration. Think, though, of some of the resonant names that were processed at Ellis Island or at Castle Garden before it—names like Einstein, Carnegie, Houdini, Frank Capra, Frida Kahlo, Bob Hope, Emma Goldman, Joseph Pulitzer, Lucky Luciano. Then consider that those names stand for tens of millions of others and that the effects of migration multiply over time. Consider that 40 percent of Americans alive today are Americans because New York Harbor beckoned their ancestors. Consider that the harbor became not just a nest for nurturing a city but a conduit for the peopling of a continent. When the Erie Canal was completed in 1825, it made a continuous sea journey possible from any port in the world into that harbor, up the Hudson River, and westward into the Great Lakes and the heart of North America. Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee. You could call these cities the offspring of New York Harbor. Consider that for a portion of the nineteenth century more people and goods came through New York than through all of the country’s other major ports combined.

Water was the reason for valuing this place before any Europeans arrived. Water was and is the primary element in Lenape culture. A version of the traditional water song, sung by Grandmother Clara Soaring Hawk of the Ramapough Lenape at an event I attended in 2024, goes like this:

We sing this song like a lullaby.

The song means the water is the life’s blood of our mother the earth.

Water is the life’s blood of our own bodies.

The location of Manhattan Island—its relationship to the surrounding water and the continent it sits astride—is what drew both a French-speaking, teenaged girl from present-day Belgium in the 1620s and a young Jewish man from Lithuania in the 1650s, despite their awareness that life in such a place would be fantastically more primitive than back home. A woman from west-central Africa, who also arrived in the 1620s, probably in her teens, came unwillingly, but those who hauled her here did so because of the location. Another young woman, from a tribe at the eastern end of Long Island, knew the region from birth, above all in relation to the ocean: as a source of food, tools, and spirituality, of life and death.

This story is about these four people and several hundred others from a variety of backgrounds: their intertwined connections, what they made of this island and region, and how they pushed it forward into history.

So we begin on the water. It’s August 26, 1664,* a Tuesday, late in the summer of what has already been a very busy year for a man named Richard Nicolls as he stands on the deck of a wooden vessel making its way into this broad, tree-bristling amphitheater of a harbor. He is faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, he’s right where he wanted to be: hugging the coast of Long Island, approaching his objective. His problem is he’s alone: it’s just his one ship, gliding toward a vast, ornate waterscape that will soon become enemy territory. That isn’t the case yet because his country, England, and the Dutch Republic, which has had a colony on this stretch of the eastern seaboard of North America for nearly a half century, are at peace. But tensions at home have been building—fueled largely by English jealousy toward the much tinier nation that within a short span has become Europe’s economic powerhouse. This mission of his, as Nicolls knows perfectly well, will likely tip the two longtime rivals into war.

His full convoy, wherever the rest of it is, comprises 4 frigates, 450 men, and 92 cannons, “exceedingly well fitted with all the necessaries for warre,” as a knowledgeable observer put it. The packing of the holds with powder and shot, not to mention firelocks, matchlocks, carabines, saddles and bridles, bandoliers and bells and halberds, flintstones and hatchets and nails, and the manning of the expedition with seasoned soldiers, was the result of careful planning six months earlier in England. But then came a hard ten weeks’ crossing of the Atlantic, an eternity of puking and stinking soldiers pitching up and down with the swells, no doubt contemplating at times the likelihood, the mercy, of a watery grave. The ships became separated and continued to America one by one. Nicolls’s flagship limped into port on the Maine coast; the others found their way to Nantucket. Nicolls and his lieutenants eventually regrouped in Boston. The convoy then set out south for the Dutch colony of New Netherland, but the ships became separated yet again. So here he is, sailing alone toward his future.

It’s not giving much away to say that Nicolls will be the winner in the coming clash. He will set in motion a chain of historical events that will yield a landscape as familiar to us as the back of our collective hand: Coney Island, Central Park, Yankee Stadium, Saks Fifth Avenue, Katz’s Deli, Seinfeld, the Dakota, the Statue of Liberty. Yet for all that, history has mostly forgotten him. The otherwise outstanding Encyclopedia of New York City, to give one instance of the oversight, doesn’t even have an entry for Nicolls, never mind that he willed the city into being, named it, defined its original boundaries, and was the colony’s first governor.

Declaring a winner suggests that the story will have a loser. But while Peter Stuyvesant, Nicolls’s nemesis, is going to be beaten in the most obvious sense, it is possible to see that, in losing, he wins. And therein lies a major reason for New York’s eventual success.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

It’s a frigate, this ship of Nicolls’s, the kind of high-decked, three-masted, cannon-studded wooden vessel that set about conquering the globe in what military historians call the age of fighting sail. Its very name—the Guinea, an homage to recent grim successes on the so-called Guinea Coast of West Africa—signals that we are already knee-deep in moral compromise.

Back home in Europe, the English scientist Robert Hooke has just identified Jupiter’s Great Red Spot through his telescope. In the Dutch city of Delft, Johannes Vermeer is carefully positioning yet another of his costumed models at a table beneath a leaded glass window so that the light falls just so. People in London will soon begin filing insurance claims; Paris has started a public bus system; Amsterdam will shortly install street lighting. It’s a sophisticated world, and Richard Nicolls—multilingual, up-to-date on scientific advances, a friend of earls and countesses as well as of soldiers and commoners—is a man of that world.

But he’s not there. He’s scanning the horizon of an utterly alien environment: the approximately nine million square miles that constitute the New World of North America. The continent has long been the stuff of lore for Englishmen, whose own native wildernesses were largely tamed centuries before. John Smith, for one, summarized the position of his fellow Jamestown settlers in Virginia: “The woods are so wide, the rivers so broad, and the beasts so wild, and wee so unskilled to catch them.” A New Englander described the geography there as “a desart Wildernesse.” And those were the known landscapes. Farther west, rumor had it, were mountains and deserts of unimaginable, inhuman scope.

Englishmen of Nicolls’s day typically refer to America as a wilderness, but they know perfectly well that it is anything but an empty landscape. It is intricately peopled. Europeans have interacted with the Indigenous people—fought, traded, sparred, married—for decades now. Some have learned their languages. Some have attached names to their tribes and lands, committed those names to print, doing their best to spell them out as they have heard them. Sanhican. Naraticon. Canomaker. Mahikan. Minnessinck. Wapanoo. Pequatoo. Waoraneck. Tockwogh. Konekotay. Tappan. Wappinges.

Richard Nicolls has no experience of these peoples, but he knows they are out there: in longhouse villages or wigwams, wandering into Dutch towns to buy bread or to barter for muskets, as wise and duplicitous, as capable of generosity or lethality as any European. If all goes well, he will have to deal with many of them before long.

Nicolls has some awareness too of the fact that this harbor and the island that is his objective give unique access to the continent that lies beyond. This awareness on the part of the English is fairly new. When the European settlement of the continent began six decades earlier, the English thought about little but what was right in front of them. The Jamestown colonizers brought few necessities for the long-term settlement of Virginia but lots of picks and shovels: they believed America to be a literal gold mine. They were going to dig and get rich. The infamous starvation that followed was partially a result of that lack of foresight. The Pilgrims showed up on the Massachusetts coast fired by religious zeal but without a map, a reliable guide, or a plan of action. The friendship they formed with the Pokanoket tribe, climaxing with the famous celebration of thanksgiving, had less to do with openness toward Native culture than with desperation. (Their first interaction with the local tribe involved the Pilgrims stealing the Natives’ corn.)

The Dutch had come to the continent with a different sensibility. As a people whose very culture had been formed by water—the need to control it, to turn the problem of it to advantage—they approached their colony-building with a strategic awareness of geography. This stupendous harbor would be the heart of their New Netherland. The river that fed it was a broad highway into the interior. One hundred and fifty miles up it, another river valley fed into it. This one, the Mohawk, extended westward into the interior—toward vast bodies of water that the Haudenosaunee people told them of. The Great Lakes offered water access to an incomprehensibly vast region of possibility. At the time Nicolls’s ship approaches the harbor, it is still mostly a dream, that exploitation of the heart of the continent, but it’s one that lives in the minds of the Dutch who have made this region their home.

And now, belatedly, the English have cottoned onto this gem of geographic wisdom. That is one impetus for Nicolls’s mission. The English have realized that they will never get anywhere with this continent if they allow their archrivals to hold this, the key to it.

Wind, water; the snaps and sighs of the shrouds overhead; the creaking of a wooden ship’s bones.

Uncertainties surround Richard Nicolls. He has no idea what lies ahead in the harbor and even less of an idea how, should he accomplish his first task, to go about the second, which doesn’t concern these Dutch at all but his fellow Englishmen. He dares not speak openly of this mission. Indeed, on his person are two sets of instructions, one public, to be shown to whoever may ask to see it, and the other private. While he is to “informe all men” about the mission to take the Dutch colony, the private instructions make clear that “the ground and foundation” of his venture is to bring the wayward New England colonies under the king’s rule.

For all the precariousness about what lies ahead, he can take some comfort in certainties of the recent past: expressions of faith in him from the highest authority that came tricked out in pleasing fineries of expression echoing off palace walls:

Our trusty and well beloved Colonel Richard Nicolls . . . imployed by us . . . You are to use great dilligence [in] . . . the possessing . . . and reduceing that people to an entyre submission and obedience to us.

—GIVEN AT OUR COURT AT WHITEHALL THE 23RD OF APRILL 1664, IN THE SIXTEENTH YEARE OF OUR REIGNE

It has been a long, slogging journey from England, and it’s now nearing its end. Having ridden west along the beachy spit variously called Rechaweygh or Rockaway (probably from the Munsee for “sandy place”), Nicolls and his crew glide across a five-mile stretch of open water that separates two long, sandy peninsulas: skinny outstretched arms that function as gateposts, welcoming vessels into the harbor. It’s a tricky passage, though. The eternal rush of water through the Narrows up ahead results in a continual buildup of silt around the more northerly of these two peninsulas, which snags the bottoms of unwary ships. But the ship’s captain, Hugh Hyde, knows where he’s going: he’s making for the tip of the southern peninsula, which the Dutch here call Sant Punt and which the English call Sandy Hook. Captain Hyde is clear on his immediate destination because some of the men aboard the Guinea are New Englanders; they are well acquainted with these waters, as are their compatriots to the south in Virginia. By exploiting geography and their own business sense, the Dutch have made New Amsterdam a commercial hub, which draws trade and transport from the English colonies. This is another impetus for Nicolls’s mission: to take this trade for England.

The ship rounds the sandy nub of the peninsula, tucking itself into this outer reach of the harbor, and the waters go calm. The sensation, relative to the exposed nature of life on the open ocean, might induce relief in a casual sailor, a welcome letting-down of one’s guard, but Nicolls has no room for such luxury. In order to defend a trading empire that runs from Japan to the Caribbean, the tiny Dutch Republic has built one of the most fearsome naval forces in the world, with hundreds of warships. Nicolls knows too that the Dutch favor small vessels, which can more easily maneuver: they are well suited to spaces such as this waterscape of coves and crannies. So while the waters here in the outer harbor are dazzling in the summer sun, changing with the light minute by minute, from milky coffee to cobalt to gunmetal glinting with diamonds, Nicolls isn’t enchanted. His spies have told him that Dutch spies have tracked his progress: very shortly they will know that he is here. His intelligence also informs him that this harbor in which the Dutch capital lies is lightly fortified, but intelligence can be wrong. He could be sailing into a trap.

If Richard Nicolls is cautious, it is not because he’s the sort who shies from conflict. He gave himself over to a military life as a youth. He was leading a cavalry troop into battle at the age of eighteen. Eleven years before entering this harbor, he was part of an army laying siege to the French town of Mousson, for three nights enduring barrages of “hand grenades, fire works, and fire itself” raining down on them as they tried to erect a defensive wall. In the same action, an enemy cannon shot came whizzing through their encampment, piercing three barrels of gunpowder but failing to ignite them: an amazing occurrence that many who witnessed felt showed the hand of God. These were campaigns of mud and rain, of horses and men competing to out-shriek one another in their agonized cries. In a battle at Étampes, 1,400 men were killed in a span of hours, not mowed down with merciful efficiency but hacked, gouged, stabbed with pikes, shot at close range, some even hammered to death by stones when a wall gave way and men on both sides took up pieces of it, lunged at one another, and began bashing in skulls.

Such experience was part of the reason Richard Nicolls was selected for this mission.

Hugh Hyde, Nicolls’s skipper, has chosen a good place both to wait for the other vessels and to keep an eye out for trouble. But the very primeness of the location likely leads Hyde to order the gunners to their stations. The Dutch of New Netherland have been known to post lookouts here, for it commands a view of the entrance to the harbor and thus of all approaches to Manhattan.*

A sail appears, and sure enough, it’s Dutch. Fears of an attack, however, are quickly allayed. It’s only a sloop—single-masted, probably hauling cargo locally. But though it poses no instant threat to them, Nicolls does not want it alerting the Dutch capital of his presence. Captain Hyde orders his men into action. They run the ship down, presumably fire a warning shot, and before long its captain is aboard. He coughs up his name: Claes Verbraech. He has been in the Dutch colony for several years, is based at what they call the South River—the Delaware—and was en route from there to Manhattan. No doubt he was startled to find the guns of an English warship pointed at him.

With Captain Verbraech on ice and his vessel impounded, things go quiet again. The Guinea drops anchor and sets a watch. From this vantage Nicolls has a long, straight line of sight northward. Eight miles across the harbor, the body of water called the Narrows acts like a scope, focusing attention on what lies beyond: the inner portion of the harbor and the southern end of the island the Lenape long ago named after a type of wood that grew there, wood they favored for making bows. Manna-hatta.

The encounter with the sloop will surely have heightened Nicolls’s senses, set him on high alert. At his disposal at present are thirty-six cannons and a crack team of gunners. He has inflicted mountains of harm in the past and will do so again if need be. The world into which he was born was largely devoured by war and theologically fueled hatred during his youth and coming of age. He has spent much of his life since on horseback, a sword in his hand, doing his part to hack a new world into being. He is forty-one years old, has never been married, has no children. Most of the wealth he possesses is in cash or jewelry: light, transferable, a soldier’s savings. All he really has, at least as far as the records of history tell us, is an unwavering, lifelong commitment to a man named York.

_________

* For the most part, dates will be given in “New Style.” At the time of these events, England still operated on the Julian calendar, while the Dutch Republic followed the newer Gregorian calendar (which we use to this day). The Julian calendar lagged ten days behind the Gregorian. To avoid confusion, people sometimes wrote dates as, for example, “June 5/15.” Another source of confusion: the Julian calendar began the new year not on January 1 but on March 25. Hence, an event occurring on March 15, 1665, in the Dutch Republic or New Amsterdam would have been listed as taking place on March 5, 1664, in England and the English colonies. England switched to New Style dating in 1752.

* Smugglers were a regular presence in the Dutch colony. They were known to steal into the harbor and sneak through the Arthur Kill, behind Staten Island. By doing so, smugglers could attempt to slip past Manhattan, make for the western shore of the river, and sail northward.

Chapter 2

THE DEFENDER

Richard Nicolls may be stuck for the moment off Sandy Hook, left to guess what fury the Dutch might have lurking in one of the harbor’s coves, but we know what lies ahead of him. Leaving the Guinea behind, we can zip northward in our mind’s eye, past the sandy tip of the peninsula, and cross over the waters of the Lower Bay. The view here is of an immensity of blue-brown tidal chop backed by strips of low-lying land rimmed in places with reed beds. To the right is another stretch of sand—Brighton Beach it will be called two centuries later, in imitation of the town of that name in England (an attempt at branding a nascent seaside resort for New Yorkers)—and, straight ahead, the channel that separates Long Island (so named by the Dutch: Lange Eylandt) from Staten Island (ditto, after the Staten Generaal, or States General, the governing body). Passing the site of the future Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, we see down below a stretch of water moving in the other direction, making for the open ocean.

Rounding the southern tip of Long Island, we enter another wide bay, this one more estuarial, fed by the fecund waters of surrounding rivers and streams, principally the one the Mohicans call Muh-he-kun-ne-tuk, or River That Flows Both Ways, which the Dutch refer to as the North River. It will eventually take the name of the explorer Henry Hudson. Crossing this inner bay, we catch a glimpse of what the Dutch call Oyster Island, which exactly 222 years later will become the home of the Statue of Liberty.

And so we come to the southern tip of Manhattan Island and find ourselves hovering above a thriving little patch of civilization. Indeed, New Amsterdam is in a way its own world, a place not quite like any other. Later, American history will decide that it, and the colony of which it has been the capital these forty-odd years, was inconsequential. Washington Irving will almost singlehandedly achieve this feat of dehistoricization by recasting the period as faux-historical slapstick in the book A History of New York: From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, more commonly known as Knickerbocker’s History of New York. Thanks to this satire generations will see the Dutch presence as a somewhat silly prelude to history. Irving’s cartoon image of the place would be amplified when political cartoonists in New York’s nineteenth-century newspapers picked up his comic stock characters—Peg-Leg Pete and Anthony the Trumpeter and Wouter the Doubter—and use them to illustrate political arguments of their day. Mostly, though, the judgment that this period was inconsequential will be recorded by not recording it: it will be ignored.

The reason for that neglect has everything to do with what will transpire here over the next two weeks. It has to do with the fact that the English will win the island and its colony, and as a result later American history will come to see this period through English eyes. And the English of the 1600s want nothing more than to will the Dutch into oblivion or, failing that, into irrelevance. They have it in for the Dutch in the worst way. They curse them casually to let off steam. They make them into bogeymen with which they scare their children. A particularly memorable anti-Dutch screed of the period, a pamphlet entitled “The Dutchmens Pedigree,” purported to show interested readers “How They Were First Bred and Descended from a Horse-Turd Which Was Enclosed in a Butter-Box.” The litany of derogatory expressions in the English language that have the word Dutch in them—Dutch treat, Dutch uncle, Dutch courage, going Dutch—dates to this era of rising, rival empires and the bitter jealousy of the English.

The sense that what the Dutch brought to Manhattan Island is inconsequential, that the history of this place only truly began once the English took the reins, can begin to be dispelled by looking around New Amsterdam.

What we see looks like a cross between a stately little Old World city that Vermeer might paint in the manner of his View of Delft and a backlot set for a Wild West town. There’s a tidy collection of red-tiled rooftops—about three hundred of them, according to a census conducted four years earlier. The city is shaped like a triangle, following the contour of the island’s southern tip, crisscrossed by approximately sixteen streets (depending on what you consider a street). The houses look much like those in Amsterdam, the parent city of this New World outpost: gabled, some of them crammed side by side as if the price of Manhattan real estate were already a thing, each facing the street and giving onto a garden behind. As if to announce the governing nationality of the place, there’s a windmill positioned on the southwestern shore. (There’s also a Dutch flag flying from a nearby pole.) Belying the tidiness, there are scraggly wooden fences, a higgledy-piggledy character to the layout, and farm animals—pigs, cows, sheep—roaming free on the unpaved streets.

And there are the people: about 1,500 live here, a respectable number for a rough-and-ready outpost on the edge of the continent. Sailors, soldiers, farmers, traders, tailors. Investors in voyages, teachers of Latin, bookkeepers, ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church. Dealers in wine and brandy, brewers of beer, bakers of bread, sellers of peas and rye seed. Magistrates and midwives. Thieves, whores, adulterers, libelers, smugglers, murderers, and purveyors of “liquor to the Indians” in defiance of the law. Honest millers, wheelwrights, carpenters, and builders. Tavernkeepers. Landlords and tenants. Wives and husbands, babies and youths. Humble supplicants cowering beneath the moody gaze of a capricious God. People from a panoply of backgrounds: Portuguese, Germans, French, Swedes, a Bohemian from Prague, the odd Italian. Ashkenazim and Frisians, Walloons and Angolans. Enslaved Africans as well as some who were formerly enslaved. Owners of enslaved people too, of course.

Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft, 1660–1661.

The mix of backgrounds among this collection of humanity points to the city’s true identity. Despite its sleepy appearance, it was set up to be an entrepôt, a global trading port. And that mix is perhaps its most distinguishing feature. Keep in mind that this is the seventeenth century, an era in which intolerance (that is, religious intolerance) is official policy in most of Europe, with Louis XIV visiting soldiers upon Protestant households in France to beat and abuse them into returning to Catholicism, with England imposing persecution on religious outliers via an official “witchcraft act,” and with England’s Connecticut colony, just to the north, having tried no fewer than thirty-four people as witches in recent years. In an age in which bloodletting and “animalculism”—the belief that sperm consists of microscopic, fully formed human beings—are considered common sense, so is intolerance. Life is fraught; people die early, horribly, and suddenly, not only from little-understood diseases and foreign invasions but from civil strife. Nothing is more likely to lead people to hate their neighbors than religious differences. People need government for their survival, and government needs to enforce cohesion, which entails weeding out alien forces. Otherwise, as the Englishman Thomas Hobbes memorably penned in Leviathan thirteen years before these events, life would be “nasty, brutish, and short.” For the most part, it is anyway. Variety of opinion is dangerous. Ergo, official intolerance is the norm in most places.

But New Amsterdam—following the home country, which is known for its relative toleration of religious and other differences—seems to tack in the other direction. Twenty-one years prior to Nicolls’s arrival, a visiting Jesuit priest* learned that eighteen languages were being spoken in the little town, and that at a time when the population wasn’t much more than five hundred. In fact, if you count the Native and African languages, which the priest almost certainly did not—Munsee and Unami, Mohawk and Mahican, Popo, Akan, Kimbundu, and Kikongo—there must have been at least twenty-five languages heard in and around the place. And since the time of the priest’s visit, the city has tripled in size. Its complexity and robustness provide vigorous evidence to counter the notion that pluralism begets weakness. We can jot down a preliminary hypothesis here: New York was New York even before it was New York.

The city of New Amsterdam is at this moment on high alert. Voices sound in the hot summer air, guttural syllables, cursing and huffing. Dozens of men are ranged around the triangular perimeter of the town, digging to heap up defenses. Some are Black (“resolved by the Court to demand twenty five negroes from the Rt Hon. Director General and Council for the Space of eight days to labour at the City’s works”), others, white (“At this conjuncture of time and current rumors, the Board . . . decrees and resolves . . . that one third of the inhabitants . . . without any exception shall appear in person or put another in his place furnished with a shovel, spade or wheel-barrow”). A civic guard, armed with pikes and muskets, is parading around the same perimeter. We might picture the guardsmen decked out as in Rembrandt’s Nightwatch, with floppy hats and high leather boots, though it’s probably wise to mentally clothe them more humbly than the artist did his self-important Old World subjects. They march past the diggers, along the waterfront below the fort, across the tip of the island, up the strand astride the East River, across the recently erected plank wall that defines the northern border of the city (the future Wall Street), and back down along the Hudson River shore.

The fort is swarming with men in military uniform. Whereas those marching around the perimeter of the town are lay militia, made up of regular burghers, or citizens, these—about 150 in total—are actual soldiers, in the employ of the West India Company, the for-profit entity that four decades earlier put up the money to launch this colony in the wilderness. Cuirassed and helmeted, with muskets nearby, they are sitting, stewing, waiting for orders.

We can imagine at some point a disturbance among the soldiers, a hasty backpedaling to get out of the way of a man who suddenly bursts from a doorway and stomps with a determined, irregular clip-clop gait through their midst, heading out of the fort with authority. We may imagine some such clumsy deference because Peter Stuyvesant—Petrus, to give him his true first name—has a personality that demands as much. He is a man of somewhat ponderous middle age—about fifty-four at this moment (we don’t know the exact date of his birth)—with a round face, tight mouth, furrowed brow, high forehead, and swooping, angular nose. Wisps of chestnut hair trail down onto his shoulders, which are probably clad in metal sheathing, the political leader having shifted to military mode.

But the eyes are what draw you: he has an ice-cold gaze, packed with intelligence and experience and will. Yet deep down there’s a discernible layer of what must be sadness. It’s the gaze of an impossible-to-please commander, or father, a gaze suggesting an endlessly calculating mind and a naturally impetuous temperament that has belatedly and begrudgingly succumbed to the necessity of patience.

He has been running this colony in the wilderness for seventeen years. His job description has included managing relations with the growing and increasingly pushy English colonies to the north and south; doing likewise with many groups of Native Americans, all of whom have as well their own complex relations with one another; dealing with incursions by other European colonizers in the New World, including from France and Sweden; and trying for every one of those seventeen years to strike a balance between his superiors in the home country, the gentlemen leaders of the West India Company whose dictates and expectations of profits are perennially at odds with their awareness of North American realities, and his often unruly and defiant local population.

Petrus Stuyvesant.

He is tough, disciplined, smart, dogmatic, at times dictatorial. He has become a leader of men in his time on this island. He has learned to leaven ideology with compromise. He has become a father here, twice over, and he and his wife have raised their sons, bought land, improved it, tended it with care. He has sent men to their death. He has become a dealer in human beings. He is the stern son of a Calvinist minister, who laces his speech with both biblical pieties and streaks of blue cursing.

A key to Stuyvesant’s personality might be found in his past—in what happened after he was grievously wounded in battle against the Spanish on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten twenty years earlier, resulting in the horror of having a leg sawed off at the knee without anesthetic. After beating the odds by surviving that ordeal, he elected not to opt for early retirement and a life of convalescent ease amid his country’s Golden Age, as might have been expected, but, once he had learned to manage the wooden substitute appendage, requested a new appointment to another hard-bitten West India Company outpost. He requested, that is, another go at the true enemy—the Anti-Christ.

That would have been Spain, the arch-Catholic empire, against which the Dutch Republic fought a bitter, eighty-year war of independence. Jaap Jacobs, one of the leading scholars of New Netherland, who as I write this book is at work on a biography of the man, thinks Stuyvesant originally came to Manhattan to fight a holy war. “He believed he was chosen for that fight,” Jacobs told me. “He probably believed his recovery from the loss of his leg was a sign of God’s favor.” But the war against the Spanish ended in 1648, a year after Peter Stuyvesant arrived on Manhattan, so almost immediately on arrival he had to shift his focus to the colony itself: making it work, defending it not from the Evil One but from an array of less grandiose threats.

At this moment, Stuyvesant is probably seething. All in all, he has done a remarkable job of creating a thriving port city. He has known for years that this day might come, repeatedly warned his superiors in Amsterdam about it, told them that if they valued the place, saw its potential for exploiting the continent, they needed to send more soldiers. Nobody was more aware of the looming nature of the English threat in the preceding months.

But his anger isn’t only at the company that employs him. He is also annoyed at himself, for he now realizes that he made a strategic error.

Three months earlier, a man named Seweckenamo strode through the gate and into this same fort, the nerve center of New Netherland, and stood before Stuyvesant. The two knew each other. Like Stuyvesant, Seweckenamo had over the years both fought for and negotiated on behalf of his people. He was a sachem of the Esopus tribe, whose territory lay a hundred miles to the north. Twice in recent years brief but ugly wars had broken out between the Esopus and the Dutch: the first arguably started by Dutch settlers, the second, arguably, by Esopus villagers. Stuyvesant invited Seweckenamo and seven other sachems from area tribes to discuss terms. The sachems brought twenty men with them, who took positions among the Dutch: besides Stuyvesant there were ten men from New Amsterdam and one woman, Sara Kierstede, who served as a translator. Tensions were surely high because the last time the Dutch had invited Native Americans into a settlement on a peace mission—less than a year before, at the village of Wiltwijck, in the Esopus region—the Native people had tricked them, launching a surprise attack, burning down houses and kidnapping women.

Now, though, the mood was different. Sara Kierstede—a gifted linguist who had learned the Mohawk and Mahican languages as a child in the northern part of New Netherland and later picked up the very different Munsee spoken closer to Manhattan, in the process becoming the colony’s most important interpreter—recorded that Seweckenamo “prayed to his God (whom he called Bachtamo) . . . that he might conclude something good with the Dutch in the presence of all the chiefs now here and that the conclusion might remain as solid as a stick,” an example of which he held up. Seweckenamo promised that all tribes of the region would respect this new peace. Stuyvesant asked why, if the Esopus were bent on peace, the other three sachems of their tribe, whom he referred to by name—Keercop, Pamyrawech, and Niskahewan—were not present. Seweckenamo replied that one was old and blind and the other two had given him their assurances that they wanted peace and would abide by the treaty.

In the end, all present swore a vow—“All that has happened formerly shall be forgotten and forgiven and not remembered again”—and each leader inscribed the accompanying document with a signature or mark.

Meanwhile, 150 miles to the north, at nearly the same time that this treaty was being concluded, two Dutchmen serving as Stuyvesant’s emissaries, Jan Dareth and Jacob Loockermans, along with three Mohawks and three Mahicans, left the Dutch outpost of Fort Orange and hiked, sweated, grunted, and plodded for five days, traveling east up a steep mountainside, battling a May snowstorm,* and came at last to a remote English settlement in what would later become western Massachusetts. The next day others arrived: Englishmen from the region, then Native people representing an array of tribes—Abenaki, Agawam, Pajassuck, Nalwetog, Pocumtuck, Wissatinnewag.

Around a council fire they discussed their interlocking interests: land, farms, cattle, furs, wampum, firearms, gunpowder. They brought up wars going back thirty years: family members slaughtered, villages burned, alliances forged and broken, the need to forget past grievances, the weariness of all parties, the benefits of peace. One group, the Soquackick, were absent from the negotiation. They had launched the most recent attacks and didn’t feel safe among so many who likely still considered them enemies. In the end, though, a Pocumtuck negotiator said of the Soquackick, “Let them send us a present, then we will release their prisoners and bring a present back to their land, to thus renew our old friendship.” The other parties eventually signaled their agreement with this, and the council ended. Everyone smoked a pipe. On the way back to Fort Orange, the Dutchmen and their Mohawk allies camped on the banks of the Connecticut River, where fish “jumped up in great quantities.” The Mohawks pulled out nets and caught some as big as twenty-eight inches.

To seal the peace treaty all agreed that the Mohawks, after returning with the Dutch to Fort Orange, would venture to the village of the Pocumtuck, a tribe central to the negotiations, to present wampum. The Mohawk leader, a man named Saheda—“much beloved” by both Native peoples and the Dutch, according to a prominent New Netherlander—would take on this important mission himself.

It may be worth pausing to note how many groups were involved in these interlocking treaties, how small in size each of the groups was, and how complicated the alliances were. It is useful to hold a couple of different notions concerning European-Indigenous relations in the mind at the same time. Taking the long view, and applying our own sense of morality to the past, it’s appropriate to note that the only reason there were European-Indigenous relations was because the Europeans had migrated to North America and began imposing their will on the people they found there. From our perspective that is a historic injustice.

But we can also zoom in on the players on the ground. We might try to erase from our minds the notion of Europeans versus Native Americans or of Dutch versus English. It might be constructive instead to envision dozens of tribes in the northeastern portion of the future United States, speaking a variety of languages, worshipping a panoply of gods, and holding various beliefs about their people, the creation of the world, the meaning of life. Some of these tribes had names like Canarsee, Montauk, and Massapequa. Others called themselves English, or Puritan, and had given their villages names like Boston and New Haven. Their interests may or may not have aligned with those of the mother country, England. Those who were Dutch called their colony New Netherland, its capital New Amsterdam, and its secondary village Beverwijck (the future Albany, New York). They too saw themselves as connected yet distinct from their home country in Europe. Yet another category of tribe was the French who had colonized portions of this New World. We tend to look at historical events in terms of national interests. Shift your perspective instead to the ground level, and, as the historian Daniel Richter has written, “The neat picture breaks down into a kaleidoscope of local and supralocal leaders working at cross-purposes, struggles and alliances among competing interest groups, and tangled family quarrels—the stuff of small town life.”

We might go even further in this leveling exercise and qualify the land claims of the various tribes. Certainly the Europeans were recent arrivals, most of whose settlements in North America were no more than a few decades old. And it’s incontestable that, for example, the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, of whom the Mohawk were a constituent nation, occupied a portion of this region long before the arrival of the Dutch, English, or French tribes. But it’s worth keeping in mind that the Iroquois in their turn had taken portions of that land from the Huron-Wendat peoples, that archaeological evidence points to patterns of warfare and land grabs going back centuries beyond the horizon of the historical record.