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The Threatened Swan

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VAN NUYS — A VIEWING PART 7 Continuing View of the American experience of wheat farmer Aucke Jansen van Nuys, immigrant ancestor of the Valley’s wheat farmer Isaac Van Nuys…

New Netherland, Old Netherland, Old York, New York 1654-1664 the pivotal decade

The Threatened Swan, by Jan Asselijn, 1650

This famous image was for years erroneously analyzed as an allegory. Decades after it was painted, a nostalgic old-timer had graffitied the canvas with captions for the dog: ”Enemy of the State” and for the egg: ”Holland” and for the noble swan, ”The Grand Pensionary.” Ever since, people assumed it was meant as a political fable, depicting the heroism of the Grand Pensionary of Holland, Johann De Witt, who fended off Monarchy when he led the republican oligarchy in the States General from 1652.

With his officious brother Cornelis, De Witt led the ”True Freedom” party or machine or cabal. They passed laws limiting the traditional powers of the House of Orange, popular defenders of de Kerk and military guardians of The Garden of Holland. De Witt forced through laws in the name of Republicanism (not democracy) that decreed no member of the Orange-Nassau dynasty could be appointed as stadholder of any province. Bizarrely, Amsterdam’s anti-monarchical program was driven by a secret treaty that Cromwell had forced upon the Dutch in 1654: Cromwell, one mafioso dealing with De Witt, another, foresaw a time when a combined Dutch-English force under a popular Protestant Orange, would end Parliamentary Supremacy in both countries, and bring back monarchy. At bottom: the current Prince, a boy of 4, was half-Stuart, and the English court-in-exile was holed up in Het Mauritshuis. De Witt’s role, the price of peace, was to keep Orange, and his relatives the other popular Princes and Counts, and their guests the Stuarts Charles and James, out of Dutch civilian politics forever. The power of the De Witts lasted 20 years, until the Disaster Year — the Rampjaar 1672 – when the silver swans met their fates in the street, amid desperate shouts of ”up the Orange!” …..more anon.

But it turns out, Asselijn painted it in 1650, when De Witt was green in politics and merely a geeky theoretical mathematician, busy inventing numerical alchemy, e.g., actuarial insurance. So the Swan is innocent of politics. Still, Patient Reader, consider the graffiti artist didn’t caption the dog ”The Prince of Orange,” who actually (and brutally) deposed De Witt. The tagger instead invites us to identify, in the Light of Experience, in our own consciences, just what are the true enemies of any peoples’ state? Oh, sure, alphabetically? Everything from apathy to zeal… Maybe our own Dutch hero stuck his thumb in it: Fear Itself is the only real enemy.That’s what Asselijn’s swan is trumpeting too, no allegory about that.

Jacob Steendam, Aucke’s land partner, was one of many local and vocal critics of the WIC; in 1659 he had published and circulated in Mother Amsterdam, the cries of her helpless daughter:

Stuyvesant’s plan for ”breadbasket Long Island” was remarkably successful, on the whole, but it was too slow to achieve its real goal — that is, to make New Netherland permanently dominant in its territory. The onslaught of English settlers, Puritans but others with crazy religions, continued to encroach on the Delaware, in New Jersey and in Connecticut. On the other hand, he favored many other colonies of English, hoping they would be the free-spending marks shoppers thronging his new Farmer’s Market.

Internally, there was the horrifying violence of the Peach Tree War. This was a Raritan reprisal on the Dutch in 1655, prompted when the Company fiscal, van Dyke, went out of a sparkling morning to scratch on his stoep, and spied a little Raritan girl in his garden. She had been drawn by the luscious peaches on his tree; naughtily, she slipped over his swine-trampled fence to pick one. Of course he shot her dead over the stolen peach. During the general Indian conflagration that resulted, the Rockaway tribe — clients to Mohawks — wiped out the Keskachauge, and demanded Stuyvesant re-negotiate the land sales Great Sachem Penhawitz had made. They claimed the patents were extinguished. At first Stuyvesant haughtily refused it as ”protection” money; but he was embarrassed into paying and reporting it when Midwout neighbor Jan Snedeker shouted publicly that it was his land (and Aucke’s) land the Indians were sore about:

To shore up defences against the English as well as the Indians, Midwout and all the towns were to be stockaded and militia-ed up, and Nightwatches set. Aucke Jansen was there, hammering, watching. Stuyvesant’s next challenge was silencing the burghers’, and WIC’s whines — ”how’s it going to be paid for?” — by telling them just how. First a new whip-around, for the constant Fort and Wall and palisade maintenance. Stuyvesant had the medieval law of the wijk, the modern de Stapel, on his side; merchants were traditionally responsible for defence contributions to the sovereign, in case the favored port were attacked. De Stapel, the Law of the Staple, was held in common across all the wijk-wereld. Now it prevailed, too, on Hudson’s River:

Above, note Aucke’s assessment. Note too, the voluntary offering of fat Freddie Flypzen, Aucken’s Midwout neighbor. He was another Company carpenter, and was certainly getting on in the New World to afford a double assessment. Of course he isn’t a family man, like Aucke; and anyway, building civilization isn’t a competition, is it? [Vlypzen may also have had a windfall from an interest in the cargo of Africans from the White Horse]. That Sybrant Jansen listed below Aucke must be Sybout Claesen, who was Aucke’s contracting partner (and relative?) on his various building projects (discussed in the previous post.) Gov. Upstate had to balance the demands of City Hall downstate (and downstairs) for revenues, with the nagging of his corporate board in Amsterdam for profits.

Aldus Spraakt Stuyvesant: In the face of tax revolt, cheating, inflation, and non-existence of other monies, a practical, anti-inflation feudal tax was levied: the quitrents and tithes were to be left standing in the field for collection, presumably by gangs of Company slaves. Thus wheat (and the other cereal grains, pro-rata) became officially legal tender; as well as pay; as well as pannekoeken. The Director-General still faced the fury of the people. He had to take the whip out several times. He even negotiated a tax-holiday for the first year of the levy, on behalf of the farmers. Still, some – even the Midwout schout – balked at having to pay anything at all.

Eventually good grain cash flowed from the villages on those fecund prairies. It was not a big profit to the WIC, but individuals did quite well and the region’s economic course was set for two centuries of constant growth. Anyway it got the WIC off Stuyvesant’s back about his Max Bialystok bookkeeping. And where grain grows, so grows population; so grew Brooklyn. As we shall see, Stuyvesant’s success here implanted and nativized an agriculture that had an enormous effect on the history of the world. And I don’t mean silk.

The last mention Of Magdaleen I found, was her 1659 attempt to collect rent in arrears. A bit oddly, she was told Aucke himself must come to demand it. Ordinarily, as we’ve seen, a wife ought to have power under Dutch law for such things. Even more bizarre: Aucke’s apparent arrest for stock rustling. Somehow Aucke ended up with somebody else’s cow. Oddest of all, and maybe explanatory of the whole thing, was that Aucke’s third wife, married after 1674, was one Geeritje Gyzbrechtsen — a relative, possibly the wife or daughter, or the very same person as, the owner of the cow, Geerit Gyzbersen. Secretarial sloppiness on spellings and names, and mistranslations are everywhere in the record. Maybe the court may have misinterpreted Aucke’s (embarrassed) testimony that Geertje WAS the woman he paid for the cow. So, was Aucke really that smooth an operator, getting his milk for free, without owning that cow?

Sadly, Magi died very soon after in 1660 and was buried at the new Breukelen Kerk. Aucke was just putting the finishing touches on Midwout; the family home seems to have remained in Breukelen until her death. Magi must have been one of the first interrments. And she must have died in childbirth, because Femmetje Jans was listed as a founding church member, see in the last page below. I assume Aucke left the little girl with a family on the Slope, anyway with a nurse or nanny. Femmetje made a very nice marriage a few years later, as we’ll see. Aucke, in Midwout, recall, had to submit his work to Freddie Flypzen’s review to get his right wages. Poor Dr. Polhemus never got his full wages either, and in asking for a raise, only ended up having to do more work. He resigned himself to preaching at three different locations every week — Midwout, Breukelen, and vespers at the Bowery for the restful convenience of the Dir. Gen.’s household and guests. Finally he was joined by Dr. Selyns who took over in Breukelen. St. Nick’s, of course, in Ft. Amsterdam, was served by Dr. Megapolensis and his preacher son Sam. All four of these Dominees were important to the social and political structure of the colony downstate.The following classic is revealing of that side of Old New York society that is scarcely recalled today: https://books.google.com/books/about/History_of_the_First_Reformed_Protestant.html?id=ysXVAAAAMAAJ Only remember, reading about the humorous squabbles between two proud churches, Midwout was the First Reformed Church of Long Island. Breukelen, to Christ? Always a bridesmaid, always a bridesmaid.

Aucke moved to Midwout in 1661, and requested of the Breukelen congregation that they put a fence up around the cemetery to keep the infernal swine from rooting up his wife’s remains. The churchwardens replied with Dutch sympathy that if he wanted to add to the sanctity of the grounds, they would be oh, so grateful, praise God, to receive any gift of free fencing he was inclined to donate. I think I remember reading that he did the job.

Meanwhile, back in Europe… Restoration of Charles II, 1660. He and James returned to England. They planned to use all they’d learned about their gracious hosts of Orange — not least from being inside the shooting barrel during Cromwell’s Naval War against Holland — and about Dutch sea-power and tolerance and politics in general (but not economics; figures made pretty Stuart heads swim) — to put their boots up the nether regions of those insufferable Jew-loving republican Calvinist Netherlands.

Antonio Verrio, The Sea Triumph of Charles II.

By 1661 the WIC was sailing on the Red Sea — ink that is. They sold off much of what became Pennsylvania, Delaware and West Jersey to the City of Amsterdam, who themselves sold it off to others who sold it off. Many of the buyers were those very Quakers and Mennonites and Lutherans of New Amsterdam, I’ll-treated under Belgic Lion Stuyvesant. Here is that fortunate fudging of foreign faiths in the former New Netherland counties; that complication of creeds that led the English to begin their rule there under presumption of religious liberty:

English movements among the Mohawks brought attacks on the upstate frontier

Just before the end came in 1664, there was another urgent whip-around for re-building the Singel, the Fortifications, out of stone, like Amsterdam was doing back home. Freddie Flypzen is prominent with a handsome contributionof 200 fl. Aucke’s contribution, I could find nowhere.

Citizen Philipse

In 1662s Flypzen had married Margaret Hardenbroek Jacobsen, wealthy and driven ship-owning widow played by Agnes Moorehed in my movie. With this tower of strength by his side (and united by a very interesting Dutch law called usus, a kind of pre-nup that allowed Margaret to be the dominant business and trading partner in the marriage) fat Freddie’s ship had come in, see he’s pointing it out! And, since it was really Margaret’s ship, it came laden with gold, spice, molasses, rum, and slaves, and was sent out again, holds groaning with their burden of golden wheat, with Margaret sailing as her own super-cargo to drive the shrewdest bargains she could get.

And there it is above: a caesura, then sudden concern over His Royal Majesty of England. That March, 1664, Charles had granted the land of New Netherland to his brother James Duke of York. A marine-commando invasion force was already being assembled.

I pulled this section out to note the poignant parallel with Cap. Gen. Andres Pico’s 1847 capitulation of Los Angeles and California to the Yankees:

Click to access t-00377.pdf

Much more on the history of Yorkshire-on-the-Bay next time. But I was excited to find a rare document, anonymous but informed, appended to a useful early document compilation by te Paulding. It more or less confirmed to my satisfaction that the historical themes I’d been following, and you’ve been following, are in fact not just wills-o’-the-wisp. In sum:

The Valley’s Wild West

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😈 Hallowe’en 2021 Creepy Neighborhood Award: the Weird, Wicked West Valley

This year the Palsied Hand for creepiest, most terrifying 😱 LA Neighborhood goes to [eunuch strikes gong] 🤔🤭😏🙄🤞🏼🙋‍♀️🤷🏽‍♂️🙈

The old Rancho Las Virgenes, once owned by Miguel Leonis, see below. This trailhead, north of the Kobe site at the end of Las Virgenes Road, is a perfection of West Valley despair. Gorgeous but dangerously sick, protected but a firetrap. This is the core habitat of the rare Engelmann Oaks, which you see, are as exquisite dead as alive. I quickly recognized the mineralization patterns roasting the hills. (Drought schmout, it just rained.) But I only got two hundred yards down the trail when I was overwhelmed with putrid, pungent fumes of natural gas from the blowholes along the trail;— the unmistakable odor of driving up the Turnpike past Elizabeth, NJ. I took to my heels. More on poison gas later….😈

West San Fernando Valley! Go anywhere west of Van Nuys and you’ll find yourself in LA’s Transylvania. The mountains are creepy, the hills are gray like ghosts, the boulders make obscene mocking faces at you, there are gas fumes in the canyons, and the treacherous slopes hide a thousand Ways to Hell. Its bowls and washes cradle weird gated suburbs where ageless rich people seem to go in (Tesla, Tesla, Mercedes, Audi, Tesla…) but never come out. There are stoplights that are red in all directions and never change. Take this virtual tour of the SFV’s strangely sterile, outlandishly pricey, desperately macabre badlands…Timid Reader, you’ll cringe, gasp and retch at these scary, spookly stories! 😈 HA ha ha ha ha….

‘They Like Me! They REALLY like me!’ — The West Valley

LEONIS ADOBE: The snake-like road at the bottom of the map is the Ventura Freeway, aka “the 101,” which follows the route of El Camino Real, which is Ventura Blvd, upon which the Leonis Adobe fronts, and has done since 1844. The town of Calabasas was built around the ranch — location location location. It served in good times as a coaching rest stop. But sometime in the mid-1870s, a brutish Basque bully of a sheepherder named Miguel Leonis got control of Rancho El Escorpion by marrying Espiritu, the legitimate Chumash heiress. Leonis turned her ranch house on the Camino into a center of terror and intimidation for the whole West Valley. If arguments and fistfights and lawsuits didn’t settle it Don Miguel’s way, a gang of hitmen at midnight would. Murders and beatings just happened to people who crossed him. He stole, swindled, and connived; he drove off Yankee squatters with blazing shotguns. He acquired land and wealth and water rights simply, it seems, in order to dispossess other people. When he died, he dispossesed Espiritu; she had to wage a court battle for 20 years against the estate; they finally ruled it did belong to Mrs. Leonis, the by-then octagenarian Indian princess. She lived in her adobe home until she died in 1906, still looking great by the way.

Miguel Leonis, the Devil of Calabasas, died in September 1889, while driving a wagon home from a victorious session in court at downtown LA, and a celebratory booze-up afterwards. As his horse plodded across the silent, moonlit Cahuenga Pass (recently bought by the brand-new village of Hollywood), somehow the drunken miser fell from his buckboard and tumbled under the wheels, which left rut-marks across his face and chest. If such a thing could be an accident, it was natural justice, fittingly ‘Hollywood’ in tone and atmosphere. BUT, the ghosts are all in the West Valley. The adobe is famous as one of the most haunted places in LA. The house is a museum, where people come to see ’em — as they did this afternoon with kiddies in costume, etc.

Bonus creep: John Carradine was the last private resident of the adobe, sometime before 1962. His son Keith recalled him as an abusive alcoholic, and his mother as a dangerous schizophrenic; there were beatings, bars on windows, etc. The boys’ childhood must have been pretty harrowing.

👹 KOBE’S DOOM — January 26, 2020, was a foggy, overcast day in the West Valley, not cheery and picturesque like the photo above. It seems the helicopter pilot became disoriented flying over the hills, tricked by the flat gloomy light. The accident shocked the world and sent basketball fans into mourning. The tragedy was compounded by an ugly legacy of accusations and lawsuits that have yet to run their course. This grim LA story just won’t go to its rest, trailing fetid fetters of money, fame, envy, and that most horrifying of all our dooms, human error. It may haunt us for a long time to come. RIP.

FOUNTAIN OF THE WORLD CULT BOMBING SITE

😈 Box Canyon Road is the road the heroine shouldn’t turn onto, in a Shirley Jackson novel. Meandering, narrow, hard to turn around on once inside, it is cut off from the rest of the Valley. This is one of those places that refugees from the new Atomic reality retreated to after the War… land so remote, so uncivilized, so sore to the eye, that nobody else had ever wanted to touch it before. Like many such marginal places in LA, it attracted its own cult; which, like many such cults, attracted its own disgruntled suicide bombers armed with twenty sticks of dynamite.💥 🔥

🛎🛎🛎👺 BONUS POINTS for the Standard Air disaster of 1949, noted in the red box above. The Fountain of Life folks helped rescue the survivors, God bless them all. This ghastly accident followed an eerily similar chain of events to Kobe’s demise; a pilot distracted by passengers, but not badly, flying in morning fog not too bad, descending through a familiar flight path too quickly, but not all that fast… The accident report is fascinating and depressing. It happened right at the Devil’s Slide, by Chatsworth Reservoir. For a chilling View of how the Valley fog can distort our hills for pilots, let lovely 🌋Lopez Canyon be our spokesmodel.👺 Land of Contrasts, indeed!

Top row, see the low hills in fog. Bottom, see the high hills hidden behind the low!

ROCKETDYNE SANTA SUSANA FIELD LABORATORY NUCLEAR REACTOR MELTDOWN SITE / WOOLSEY FIRE RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT 😈 Suck it up, SFV, the wages of sin is dust! 😮‍💨 Lucky that Valley Village is a few blocks out of range of the worst zone. The View has already uncovered the Cold War hubris involved in Rocketdyne’s 1952 sodium-nuclear reactor meltdown and cover-up. Now that we definitively know it’s as bad as we all thought it was, let’s cover it up again.🙈 🕵🏼‍♂️ What about the possibility that the Woolsey Fire was started in the first place by methane or other hydrothermal venting? 🙉

THE DEVIL’S SLIDE, PIONEER CEMETERY, CHATSWORTH PARK SOUTH, VITRIOL FALLS

🤡 Check back issues of the View for the infamous Devil’s Slide. The stagecoach road leads straight down to Oakwood/Pioneer Cemetery, then veers sharply around it at the bottom.

The humid green lawns seem especially eerie in these Latter Days of drought and sprawl. The 20th century fixation on turning the West Valley into the West Country of England, or Westchester West, with green lawn estates and clapboard churches, seems…a bit like folly, eh? 🤡 The tombstones here are great, creative, not somber. Angelenos, RIP.

😈 The gaping mouths of Vitriol Falls must be fresh in your mind from the recent post:

CHATSWORTH PARK SOUTH https://ssmpa.com/chatsworth-park-south-old.php This was the old RR Ranch, home to Roy, and Dale, and Trigger, pictured below. 😈 Part of it was developed as a skeet-shooting range in the 50s; afterwards the City figured to save it for a park, happily (for wildlife) contiguous to other West Valley parks. But in 2008 they found spent shell casings and lead contamination everywhere. They closed the park for YEARS; in 2013, the City renovation plan emerged, which was to tear out all the nature and turn the site into a giant parking lot for…itself. Finally they came up with something green, but without any imagination or uniqueness or sense of site ecology — just swing-sets and brown lawns and picnic tables — but anyway a few years ago it was re-opened. It was a terrible disgrace for the City of LA to take so long. It took dogged community activism to get that park back; the link above is to the website archive of the Santa Susana Mountains Association. It’s worth a Hallowe’en skim to remind yourself how much citizen work it takes to get the right thing done.

JUAN FLORES CAPTURED “Head ’em off at the Pass!” The Santa Susana Pass, fka Simi Pass, and the San Fernando Pass, and the Newhall Pass, fka Fremont Pass, were collectively “the Pass” — and they were all used by bandits and desperadoes as hideouts and get-aways back in the days when the SFV was the Wild West. One of the dreamiest most charismatic worst was revolutionary hero California rights activist murderer and robber Juan Flores. After he shot the sheriff, but did not shoot the deputy, a massive manhunt was coordinated by Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando owner, U.S. Senator, and former Captain General of the California Lancers, Don Andres Pico. Flores was finally forced to surrender in the Pass. His hanging at Fort Hill, as reported by the Star, was so botched and gruesome it invites Hallowe’en perusal:

SPAHN MOVIE RANCH AND THE MANSON FAMILY CAVE

Roy Rogers wasn’t the only one whose Western-themed ranch hit hard times in the 60s. After the Hollywood studio heyday waned, Ed Spahn kept a movie location ranch going on some camera-ready acres in the Santa Susana Pass by booking it for TV Westerns like Gunsmoke and Bonanza. By the late 60s, even this second-wind was fading, and the ranch lacked business. So when Spahn met a nice fellow called Charles Manson who had been beating around the chaparral after leaving the Fountain of Life, Spahn hired him; and he let the youth’s groovy friends move in to do chores on the place, sleeping rough and running around barefoot and letting the sunshine in. 😈 Helter Skelter! On the new freeways, chic Laurel Canyon was just a few minutes away.

Natural gas — methane — can be smelled all over the West Valley but especially in Porter Ranch. (Natural gas is odorless; if you can detect it, it’s man-made. They put the sulfurous odors in so that it can be detected.) I’ve been driven off trails in Las Virgenes and elsewhere in the Wild West by the stench. It’s awful that the State has recently re-committed to pumping tons of methane into the West Valley storage grounds even after the scandalous Aliso Canyon leaks.

https://projects.laist.com/2019/after-aliso/ LAist.com has put together a good discussion of the problem. 😈 Because educated public discussion is always great at solving society’s problems! HA ha ha ha ha ha……

HAPPY HALLOWE’EN FROM THE VIEW!!😈💥🌋🔥👻🎃🧛🙈🙉🙊⚡️⚰️🦦

The Hudson Valley Van Nuyses

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PART THREE OF “VAN NUYS — A VIEWING”

The navigation lines in the WIC maps converge for some occult reason on Westchester, somewhere east of the Tappan Zee. Mt. Kisco? At 302 feet?

DUTCH STUDIES DEPT.

“We can go to a pub or we can take a beer, and we can come up with many ideas. But: to take an idea; to take the consequences of the idea…to take all the ins and outs, and fill in…and make it work, all the whole, the whole…story….now that is quite a thing. That really becomes something.”

— The opening quote of “Dutchness,” interviewing Dutch designers on their national style. Link below!

The Dutch Republic coalesced in 1581 among the combined Frisians, Groningers, Hollanders, and Utrechters, and most Flemings. The Calvinist Protestant northern states bloodily and relentlessly staved off (literally) re-conquest by their Catholic Spanish overlords in the 80 Years’ War. Out of that harrowing struggle for identity was born “Dutchness:” Which is the title of a delightful documentary that interViews Dutch designers on their stijl: https://youtu.be/opzKlkJVm-c

Nuis is the smallest, least significant dorp in the modern province of Groningen, named for the central city, which was once Groeningen, ‘Greeneries.’ This bit of fertile coastal upland is where Anglo-Saxons had previously farmed and intermarried with the Frisians. A thousand years later, when it was the County of East Friesland, this is where the ancestors of Isaac Van Nuys came from, to America. Het Nij Huis could mean the “New House” or the “Near House.” But when Nijhuis was Nieuw Huis, two or three generations before Aucke Jansen left it to “Build the Wall” on Holland’s American border, it was the newest, but still the smallest, least significant dorp in a vast vanished lordship called Ommelanden. Princes come, princes go, ditto several different Reformations, frequent invasions from Louis 14th to Napoleon to Adolph Hitler, and finally 70 years of Post-War economic miracle in the Netherlands — and little Nuis is … little Nuis.

From Carrie V. Allen’s “A Record of the Family of Isaac Van Nuys (or Van Nice) of Harrodsburg, KY, son of Isaac Van Nuys of Millstone, NJ,” 1916. Digital PDF at wvancestry.com

By 1651, when Aucke Jansen was hired as a carpenter by the West India Company, the United Provinces were the richest nation on the globe, backed by their astonishing sea-and-don’t-forget-river-power. And — this is the embarrassment of riches — simply greedy for more.

The Warenhuis
The Front Office — West Indisch Huis

We’ll look back later on the rise of the merchants of Amsterdam; but their creation, the WIC, was a corporate trading monopoloy for the “whole Western Hemisphere” set up by the Estates General of the Netherlands, a complement to the fearsome East India Company. [Combine two Hemispheres, and you get the punctuation mark atop Amsterdam’s Stadhuis:]

The colors of the Geoctrooieerde West Indische Compagnie — the Chartered West Indies Company. I never realized before but according to Newnetherlandinstitute.org, the shift from orange to red in the Dutch national colors, about 1650, was more or less gradual and inadvertent. One theory is the orange was too bright to “read” against the glare of sea and sky. Another theory is the orange paint faded quickly. It seems like both theories are really two halves of the same theory. But the orange stripe lives on in the flags of the City of New York and the City of Albany.

Van Nuys was a cognomen before it was the family surname. There were so many “Jansens” in the colony, even several other carpenters’ families, that Company recorods had to distinguish them by where they were born. The Company recruited so many carpenters in 1651 because before that, by mismanagement, by double-dealing from their executives (like Peter Minuit, whom I nominate for the honor, “Father of the Non-Compete Clause”), and most alarmingly, by the recurring incidents of rash, drunken shoot-ups of friendly Indians, the trading post at New Amsterdam, and its outlying farms, now faced concerted Indian counter-attack.

The Company was losing money, despite the fortunes in beaver pelts being made by individuals in the market. After 35 years in business, the Company was several hundred thousand guilders in the red on the New Netherland account. A change in board membership, and the appointment of Peter Stuyvesant as governor in 1647, signaled a new effort to ship over actual Dutch farmers capable of growing food and families on small plots. And by preference, the ideal farmer colonist would be also either a professional artisan with an existing family, or a professional soldier without one. Thus, immigrants who would be capable of building an actual Dutch colony. [The previous colonists were too often either jobbing traders, in and out with the tides and uncommitted to the place; or wild-cat fortune hunters who ran off into the woods to sell brandy and firearms to the Indians in exchange for contraband beaver pelts, which they smuggled through the woods to the English at New Haven. [The Co. had accused Peter Minuit of doing just this, and they recalled him as Governor in 1627. Back in Europe, Minuit got revenge by selling his knowledge of the country to the Swedes, who launched him right back to America to build their “New Christiania,” to compete with New Netherland. This was a terrible shonde, for the board back in Mokum.]

[For more background on conditions in New Amsterdam and Brooklyn just before Aucke Jansen’s family arrived, leaf through a few paragraphs from Stiles’s 1867 History of Brooklyn; or link to the whole https://archive.org/details/historyofcityofb01stil?view=theater#page/n9/mode/2u]

To foreshadow the later events of Aucke Jansen’s story a bit, get acquainted with the Flatbush Reformed Church, which is the Mother Church of the Dutch Reformed faith in America. The famous old relic we may visit today is in fact the fourth church building on the site. The first Flatbush church, the original pioneer construction of planks and shingles, as well as its parsonage, were framed, according to Stuyvesant’s measurements and design, by Aucke Jansen van Nuys between 1654-1660. We will revisit this episode in detail. For now, it is enough to say, that Aucke played a central role in the implantation of the Dutch Church in New Netherland, and that this Church itself played a central role in the survival and florescence of Dutchness in America’s history.

The first church on this site was framed by Aucke. This revered ancient colonial relic, is the fourth.
Mary French writes a blog at nycemeter.wordpress.blog. Believe it or not I can’t link you to her article. I can link you to the brave Haitian Times, which covers the noble effort to put up an historical marker about the forgotten Black Cemetery, where New Amsterdam and Brooklyn families buried their slaves well into the 19th century.

https://haitiantimes.com/2021/06/18/calls-grow-for-flatbush-burial-ground-memorial-ahead-of-juneteenth/

I have not found any evidence that the Van Nuyses owned slaves; they certainly did not in Aucke’s or his children’s generation. But a significant percent of the colonists did own one or two, and throughout its history the whole colony benefitted from the labor of the Company’s slaves. An often overlooked part of African-American history is the importation of slaves to the colonies on Dutch ships; on arrival they were auctioned and re-traded among individual wealthy merchants, who would then re-sell and re-ship their human cargo to the Chesapeake English. But in New Netherland itself, most of the slaves were New World-born, arriving with their owners from the WIC’s colonies in Brazil or the Caribbean. They had been already thoroughly acculturated, and at the corporate level, slaves were often given their own house lots, and given trusted posts, or were highly trained in specialty occupations like cuisine, ceremonial trumpeting, and were precision drummers for the militia or merchant marine.

At the small householder level, New Netherland and later New York slavery tended to take the form of a single personal, permanent, “family farmhand.” These hands were supposed, by community morals, to live and work out in the fields. Stuyvesant (who had plenty of slaves or his own, up to 70 persons) discouraged his middle-class farmers from taking house-servants for moral reasons; the nuclear family was a holy space. Dutchness on the whole discouraged slavery, and kept it modest by New World standards. But Calvinism ha a wide latitude for the institution of bondage; and since there were so many small family farms, that meant there were correspondingly, many more slaves than any place in the North. Of the Northern States before the Civil War, the place with the highest percentage of families owning slaves was Kings County, NY with 30%. It partly explains the otherwise inexplicable fact that the Democratic Party of southern slaveholders has always been run and led by New Yorkers (see, e.g. Martin van Buren).

a place as strange as…

Aucke thrived working under the disastrously hot-headed Peter Stuyvesant; he got land and kept his land by loyally saluting the colors of York when the English drumrolls started — saluting right beside the humiliated Stuyvesant. Aucke made himself useful under the hated English Catholic martinet, Gov. Edmond Andros, installed by the despised Catholic Duke of York, brother of King Charles II. Aucke played it the Company Way — whoever the Company fired, Aucke still was there.

Aucke had three wives, all Dutch. His and Magalene’s Nuis-born children, and his American-born children by his later marriages, all grew up and got married in Brooklyn as Dutch-speaking English subjects. From the original Downtown lot granted him by the Company in 1651, Aucke started early trading land, buying and selling farms all over the Dutch areas of Brooklyn, settling his children, serving a year as Schepen, building infrastructure, and investing in improvements including Brooklyn Ferry.

Two beavers rampant: Seal of the City of New Amsterdam

AMSTERDAM, OUD en NIEUW

In 1585 the Siege and Capture of Antwerp by the Spanish had cut the glittering head off Dutch Civilization at the line that became Belgium. All the wealthy and sophisticated Protestant Walloons and Sephardic Jews of Flanders, not eager to face the Inquisition, kept their heads and left. They took all the glitter and spice and “relationships, bubbeleh!” of Antwerp up to the Protestant province of North Holland. They moved en masse into a cheap, reedy mud-flat port on the south side of the frigid Zuider Zee, where peasants had dammed the Amstel at the Ij, to get some land for a wijk. Amsterdam swelled to accommodate the refugees. No it didn’t swell — it unfolded, built modern infrastructure, and developed. It evolved, grew wealthy and wise and beautiful. It was, and is, the sublime organic expression of a Dutch civilization.

The new Amsterdam Stadhuis, City Hall. The first Classical building in the Netherlands, by van Campen. Begun 1648, completed 1667.

This phenomenal growth explains why the WIC had to go all the way to Nuis to find a carpenter willing to go to America. All the really good guild carpenters were building the Stadhuis! Remember the quote at the top —- watch with wonder, the brief animated Growth of Amsterdam:

THE MAGIC OF 1609
In 1609, the City Council of Amsterdam had chartered the Bank of Amsterdam as a public utility, to deal with the ridiculous international coinage problem. The Bank made sure that the coins that came to Amsterdam, were re-coined there in Amsterdam at a premium. It was immediately accepted as the strongest, most sensible, most stable standard in all Europe. The B of A was a wisselbank — an exchange bank — no loans, no credit, no hanky-panky! — and it worked as planned. Merchants flocked there to dump chewed-up shillings and florins for paper certificates. Ah, clever, clever. Currency, good everywhere on Earth, but mostly spent in and around downtown Amsterdam, where you could buy anything. The Bank gradually separated all the gold from the silver in Europe, and arbitraged the silver in Batavia by slipping it to the East India traders. DThe Chinese traders who met them in Batavia, would take nothing else, not even gold! China used silver coins as its own money system, so demanded silver over gold. This worked out fine for Amsterdam, where gold was higher than silver. In 1609 also, the States of Holland (same folks) sent Henry Hudson off on a slow boat to China, where he found the Hudson River. The Amsterdam traders who quickly chartered ships to follow him there, found Leni-Lenape dripping with beaver furs, who had no use at all for, scoffed at and spat at, both their gold AND their silver. Show me the wampum, said the Canarsee. Until they figured out what that meant, the Dutch embarrassed themselves that day at the Battery, offering Venetian glass beads. The Indians were simply too polite to say Feh!

Peter Minuit was not the first Dutchman to grasp how quicksilver “money” is — while it can be a storehouse of value, it is primarily, and most valuably, a simple medium of exchange. This was the secret of the Bank of Amsterdam — one only needs the tokens. The legendary 24 dollars worth of trinkets and beads he traded for Manhattan was not quite a swindle, as often depicted; nor does anybody today believe there was any binding real-estate deal taking place. What it was, was a barely successful guess at what the Indians seemed to want as a medium of exchange. and how they practiced making bargains for land deals and beaver pelts. Very quickly the Dutch realized that, though they had bought themselves a few months to build a town, the beads were a poor substitute for the big-medicine wampum belts which were so apparently prized by all the Indians all up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Just as quickly, the Nieuw Amsterdam merchants realized all this magic wampum was made locally, ONLY from the distinctive shells of particular quahogs and whelks off Long Island, right here! Thus, by St Nick! the Old Amsterdam traders sitting on the money supply of Europe, suddenly found themselves as New Amsterdam traders sitting on the money supply of North America! Double-Dutch! They immediately set up a sweatshop of overworked Canarsee girls digging clams, for a few clams a day, chopping and polishing the shells into beads, stringing them into belts and strips and straps. They then flooded the market with wampum in large denominations and small change. The Indians knew the Dutch didn’t quite understand what wampum belts meant to them — but in war and peace, the beads did their work. The beavers didn’t stand a chance.

Smug classical economists use Dutch wampum as a laugh-line, a counter-example when teaching that the most prudent fisc and the stablest currency is always the tightest. They say that the Dutch inflated the wampum economy, that they ballooned wampum until it was “practically worthless,” and that obviously Nieuw Amsterdam should have kept their wampum hard and tight with high interest rates. My stars, folks, we’re talking about quahog shells. Economists can easily find a way to make anything scarce, hard, unfair. [Good luck with their digital currency! Show me the wampum.]

From the other side, Native scholars have illuminated for us how the Dutch completely misunderstood the spiritual and social traditions surrounding wampum. Those belts, they show, the real ones, not the Dutch knock-offs, were Big Medicine: messages, symbols, carefully-worked remembrances of truces and alliances, wars, and great leaders. As a European Duke would treasure a medal from this monarch, so a local chief would proudly display the wampum of friendship from his sachem or the Dutch governor. But then the Dutch cheapened wampum by turning it into loose cash that eventually just ended up impoverishing and dispossessing the Indians — who certainly didn’t think they were agreeing to trade their land and living, but to share it. Note the recurring imagery of two rivers, or two men clasping hands in friendship:

Both criticisms reveal, from different sides, how difficult it is to make a money — any money — or a land deal — any land deal — that seems both humane, and fair. But wampum didn’t die because of “inflation” — it died because the Indians had pretty much trapped out all the beaver and sold out or their haunts in the Hudson Valley, out of New York, out of New Jersey, out of “Nieuw Netherland.” Wampum was “near worthless” because it had fulfilled its purpose as trade coin — there was nothing else to buy. The customer had been completely dispossessed, and Aucke’s grandkids already needed new land.

The story of the growing pains of New Amsterdam during that turbulent time just as Aucke and his family were getting off the boat, is most delightfully told in the brilliant Broadway musical satire Knickerbocker Holiday, by Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill. I’ve put up the recording, in four files, of the full 1944 radio broadcast with most of the original Broadway cast, including the inspired Walter Huston as the peg-leg tyrant of the Bowery. Click and be drawn…

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17ry0eqFM2QtkUdQ3B-D5NaOifBSyorCA