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‘VAN NUYS — A VIEWING’ – PART FOUR

“Starting Right Is Half the Work” — Dutch proverb

VAN NUYS — A VIEWING: PART 6 New Netherland 1654-1664

The story of the Van Nuys family of America begins with Aucke Jansen, farm boy and carpenter, who established his family in New Netherland in 1651. When we left the Jansens in chilly spring 1654, they had given up on Manhattan, where the city was building the Wall through their backyard. (Imagine: ugly palisades and planks a few feet from their window, spiting their View clear up to the Park, and heilas! shading the windowboxes Magi just filled with iris bulbs, watercress and wild strawberries…)

Building the Wall. We’ve seen that the issue of “who’s going to pay for it?” occasioned a rebelllion of the City Council and the wealthy poorters against the Governor, a rebellion pervaded with all kinds of republican, and (so Stuyvesant thought) ”English Puritan” sentiments. The Puritans had beheaded Charles I, and Cromwell and Parliament were running the British Isles. And of course, militant Puritan New England was just next door. New Amsterdam needed urgent defense. But the rich burghers didn’t want to dip into their silk purses just to save the Company money. They gave an argument that sounds much like “taxation without representation is tyranny.” When a Remonstrance to that effect was presented to CEO Stuyvesant, he duly presented it to his corporate board. The Dutch Masters were baffled to find themselves in the position of being expected to think like statesmen, psychologists, anthropologists, city planners, and military generals. After all, they were just businessmen! Externalizing everything human or natural off the balance sheet was the very focus of their lives. And THEY, in Old Amsterdam, certainly weren’t going to pay for building somebody else’s Wall. Stymied, the City Council turned to the Company workers and held a shame auction, asking the carpenters and sawyers and masons to be patriotic and volunteer free work days to the effort. Aucke bid two days free work — one more than the least he could do. It’s the most eloquent expression I’ve found in the records of New Netherland, from either side of the Atlantic, about what Aaron Copland’s Common Man felt about the Powers That Be during that crisis. But that, and the Wall, and the war, are all in the past….

The years of peace between 1654 and 1664 were the pivotal make-or-break decade for Aucke and Magi’s family; thus it was a pivotal decade for New Netherland as a civilization. Also for the colony’s owner the West Indies Company. Thus, too, a crucial tienjaar for its owner, the United Provinces of the Dutch Republic, and their owners: the Dutch people, incorporated as a syndicate of the States General, the House of Orange, the Classis of the Reformed Church of Amsterdam, the Portugese Synagogue of Amsterdam, and the Bewindhebbers of the East India Company; with controlling interest held by the States of Holland and, need we add, the Bank of Amsterdam. All these wholly-owned subsidiaries, therefore, had much in the balance that decade. In fact in 1654, it seemed up at the front office, the Municipal Chamber of Amsterdam, which set all the above cartel up, and more or less ran it with eyes on every ledger and hands in every till, that applying a bit more effort right now, marshalling the forces of all the above institutions to make New Netherland thrive, might tip the scales from failure to success. But what if success itself, just tips the scales back to failure? That’s Broadway, kid….some of the above subsidaries would succeed; some fail. Thus it was a pivotal decade for American history; as it was for the British Empire; the French Empire; the Iroquis Confederacy; and the Leni-Lenape nation. Because capitalism imperialism democracy religious freedom globalism. Or as Mel Brooks put it: ”Tonight, Broadway…tomorrow…?”

The Jansens are headed for the wilds out beyond Breukelen, where, already since 1652, Aucke was part-owner of a good bit of land. Damn good land. And a damn good bit of it! In fact, some of the best land on Long Island. But that spring of 1654, the family only made it as far out of town as an overpriced rental at ‘t Breukeleveer, the Ferry. But Aucke needed to be there: Dir. Gen. Stuyvesant’s first priority, even higher than the Wall, was Building Brooklyn Ferry. Also the Manhattan terminal thereof, and paving de Strand, and setting schoeylingen — planks — along de Heeren Gracht, the Canal, and de Dok, the Dock. Then he and his partner re-did the job after a washout. In 1657 Stuyvesant decreed a Market adjacent to the Canal, and a Joist for the stevedores to haul goods up to the street, which was paved for the purpose, today Stone Street, and many wealthy traders moved in to be near the action. By 1660 all this was up and running. So ‘t Veer, and later Breukeledorp, Brooklyn Village, was Aucke’s base for commuting to those jobs in town. Brooklyn was leafy and salt breezy, quieter than the City, but still busy and loud. Plus, it was built on the side of a hill — an idea fraught with anxiety for any Dutchman, especially farmers.

https://workwhile.agency/magazine/2018-sep-workwhile-design-talk Note the clever play on the motto of the Dutch Republic and Reformed Church, ”Eendraght Maakt Maght” — unity makes strength. Instead the poster declares, Een DRAGHT maakt maght” “One DRINK makes strength!”
‘T Veer…het werk van Aucke Jansz. van Nuys.
The Manhattan ferry landing

Aucke was not a finish carpenter; he wasn’t even a very good joiner it seems. He sometimes rushed a job, sometimes took forever, and disappeared for weeks at a time, likely off farming. He may have been best at dock-pilings and trekschuyt bow-bumpers. Still he is one of a handful of construction foremen who built the New York and Brooklyn Waterfront; built the Wijk of the World on the East River; built the engine of America’s wealth. Aucke was a lead contractor on one of the biggest civic improvement projects in Early America. Could Whitman have been channeling into our souls, any other than Aucke Jasnsz. van Nuys…?

Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore, 
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide, 
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east, 
Others will see the islands large and small; 
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high, 
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them, 
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide…
It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not, 
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence, 
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, 
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd, 
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d, 
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried, 
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d. 

— Excerpt from ”Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” in Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman, 1856

Robert Moses Peter Stuyvesant decreed all this modern apparatus so that farmers from Long Island — Aucke — could bring their fresh produce and cash-crops to Market in Manhattan. Stuyvesant was focused on infrastructure because of his pivot to grain, away from tobacco. Amsterdam had become the world center of the tobacco industry on the fumes of its own weed. Hudson Valley tobacco was a smooth, satisfying smoke, the finest in the world, sold at a premium on the world market in Amsterdam. The Co. handled Virginia tobacco too, but as mid-market stuff. Taking their cue from the market, the Dutch Masters took care to specify standards for cultivation, harvest, curing, shipping, and packaging of all grades, but especially branded New Amsterdam toebak:

Behold, the market, getting their first taste of Midwout Wowie. “De Toebak Drinckers” by Adriaen Brouwer, 1636.

But tobacco destroyed the soil, and of course, killed the population. Grain was a cash-crop too, but greater supplies of grain locally, would both nurture the population of New Netherland, and also grow the profits of the traders and Company. Stuyvesant knew infrastructure reduced costs for the farmer….which would attract more Dutch wheat farmers to settle Long Island, which would in turn, pre-empt the steady trickle of illegal English squatters from stealing those good but sparsely populated meadows. Stuyvesant saw the city as the American entrepot for foodstuffs, including sales to hungry but flinty-soiled New England. This golden grain would be grown in what Stuyvesant planned as ”breadbasket Long Island.”

Magdaleen, recall, was also working hard, raising and educating the kids, and getting paid in wampum for stringing wampum for pay. This too was easier to do from Brooklyn, more later. The family were probably trudging over Park Slope to their farmland whenever they could, if only seasonally to reap the sea oats and black grass from the salt meadows. The colony’s horses placed a premium on this nutritious fodder, which made salt meadows valuable even if not in grain. Midst the hammering of nails, and the clattering of clamshells, and the verhuilende kinderen, and the horncalls of the ferryman — every three hours, whoa, fuggedaboudit! — the Jansens still could conjure all that fragrant sandy loam waiting for them just over the Slope. Can you conjure that green place? He’s no Whitman, but let Jacob Steendam, Aucke’s land partner, help you:

Jacob Steendam, the First Poet of New York, wrote The Praise of New Netherland in 1661 and published it in Amsterdam as promotional literature. He was one of the most remarkable men in New Netherland history, and, it turns out, became a pivotal character in Aucke Jansen’s story during the crucial years discussed below. Excerpts might lure Patient Reader to click the link, to get to the full text of Henry C. Murphy’s 1865 Memoir of Steendam:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14njhmshjEp7oGz5ev8QdZVrOB_x1lobm

http://www.jbrpc.org/video-introduction Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge — salt grass
Steendam was Aucke’s parter-in-farming. WOW.

The land in Aucke’s (and Jacob Steendam’s) name was in the meadows straddling the borders of today’s Flatlands and Flatbush. Like his Manhattan lot straddling Wall Strteet, this land also turns out to have a fascinating, quasi-legendary history. The facts were tracked down in 1924 by Frederick van Dyke and his results were published by the Knickerbocker Press. Keskachauge is a tour-de-force of local history, written to persuade his generation of New Yorkers that those tumble-down shacks in the middle of Brooklyn were a precious heritage for the city and nation, truly historic and truly worth saving:

Here is the link for F. Van Dyke’s Keskachauge:

https://books.google.com/books?id=w80pAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Breukelen+New+Netherland+wheat+farm+soil+woods+forest+Long+Island+road+ferry&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjZ5-uRhMvzAhU0CjQIHQOaCgYQ6AF6BAgKEAM
Above: Frederick van Dyck’s conjectural map re-creation from his book Keskachauge

How did Aucke and his poetic partner get hold of such land? One reason: they were both Company employees, corporate insiders…It turns out, twenty or more years before in the early 1630’s, local executives of the WIC took advantage of a loophole. Director -general Wouter van Twiller, with Andries Hudde, the Company’s surveyor-general; and Wolphert Gerritsen van Couwenhoven, an old-timer who was first recruited by the Company in 1625 to farm Bowery #1, and later worked as steward for Killian van Rensselaer’s patroonship, bought Long Island land titles for themselves in secret side-deals with the Canarsee Indians without Company approval.

The Manatus Map of 1639, erroneously called the Vingboom Map, was probably drawn by Andries Hudde, then the colony’s surveyor. Frederick van Dyke suggests in Kescachauge that Hudde, expected by the Company to highlight the copious land available, deliberately hid the extent to which Long Island was already owned by him. He fudged the shoreline to obscure deep-water Jamaica Bay, as well as its barrier islands containing Indian wampum works, which should be to the left of the heart-shaped farms, 28. Note the long-house marked Kescachew. The label reads Dit zoort van Huizen bewonnen de Wilden — The Indians live in houses like this — perhaps to distract attention away from the obviously Dutch farms and plantages adjacent. Some of Hudde’s land, after he died, was patented to Aucke and J. Steendam.

These estates were named after Amersfoort, whence they came, and Couwenhoven called his ”Achterveldt,” the ”back plain.” Slimy Dir. Gen. Kieft, who replaced the grasping van Twiller, made noises about reforming these irregular land grants, but tolerated them for his own reasons, which had to do with dispossessing and exterminating the Indians. But he did have the plantations assessed…though not taxed… and they are rich. We see why Stuyvesant became interested in this land:

16 morgens of land in two crops of wheat. That’s about 30 acres.

Kieft was recalled. When Peter Stuyvesant came stumping in, he pledged loudly that he would curb this speculative abuse and grant no more big spreads…but on those old properties, which the Company seemed only dimly aware of, he slipped in and took the Bouwerij of Amersfoort for himself, with back-door sales or grants or share-tenures of the surrounding land to his own cronies, two of whom seem to be Aucke Jans and Jacob Steendam. And adjacent to these excellently fertile lands was the Money Store, where Magdaleen could go and get plenty wampum at wholesale; it was the Wholesale Wampum District!

These large patents of the good land pre-empted the Company from selling them as small plots. Again, patroons like Jan van Rensselaer and Adriaen van der Donck were outraged at Stuyvesant. Van der Donck sailed home to call the Dir. Gen. out for his hypocrisy, and relentlessly lobbied the Company Chamber in Amsterdam to have him removed and replaced as governor by…Adriaen van der Donck. [Ver Donck seems to have been a bit of a Jared Kushner…a Jonckheer is a “young blood,” a rich man’s son, a showy entitled youth. “De Yonkhers” was what the English heard the Dutch call his estate on the river. He is also, thus, likely to have been the original butt of that New England lout’s ditty about pumped-up Dutch trust-fund kids, Yonkeer Doodle, which might be translated today as ”Young Master Hipster.”]

Map commissioned by A. van der Donck as frontispiece for ”Representation of New Netherland’ Van der Donck had Stuyvesant’s letter of recall from the board in his pocket as he was walking up the gangplank to the ship that would deliver it to the City Tavern in New Amsterdam — when Cromwell attacked Holland and the matter was squashed: ship and letter were recalled for the duration, and the board stuck with Stuyvesant. Ver Donck didn’t quit: the polymath wrote this book, in 1655, with this fabulous map.

The WIC demanded Stuyvesant return flip reorganize develop for profit and tax those big land patents pronto for farm towns. (Remember, they had given over the huge Bouwerij #1 on Manhattan to him in 1651. How many manors does a CEO need?)

From Dr. Strong’s History of the Town of Flatbush, 1864:

Delayed (enabled?) by the War and the internal administrative chaos, in 1654 the Dir. Gen. duly developed the fertile prairies of de Vlakke Bos, including his land and Aucke’s land, as a new model farm town getting started right! MIDWOUT! The hub of the Bay, centered around the First Church of Long Island:

“Flatbush was apparently intended to be Holland’s village, the village of Holland’s care after the long night of the religious wars had ended, and before the struggle with England for supremacy of the sea had begun.” Below is one mid-seventeenth century version of the allegorical Dutch Maiden. She holds the palm of victory and resurrection; she does not bear a martial staff holding a Dutch cap of Liberty. Also, here the emphasis is on the Walled Garden — the mediaeval fortress of protected virginity. The allegorical Belgic Lion, who always appears with the Maiden, is here no living beast, but is reduced to a blazon on a shield. I take this to mean that with the loss of Antwerp, of Flanders and Brabant, the Lion of the South has been sacrificed and is now but an inanimate but rampant buffer between the Maiden and France. The Garden itself, a sacred temenos, is always the Garden of Holland.

From https://coins.nd.edu/colcoin/colcoinintros/NNCommodities.html

Excerpt from Wageninen Agricultural University’s paper on historic Dutch wheat culture:

RELIGIOUS LIFE IN NEW NETHERLAND, 1654-1664

In addition to being a Company Man, and a good wheat farmer, there’s another possible reason Aucke and Jacob got land: they were both of the church, churchy, and so was Stuyvesant. The Director General was the son of a Reformed Church dominee, who married a Reformed dominee’s daughter (Judith Bayard). With all his colorful contradictions, Stuyvesant was a true scion of the Belgic lion, equally staunch in fighting for the cause of the United Provinces — which had only won its war of self-identity in 1648, the year after he arrived in America — and promoting the Reformed Church, causes which he understood as identical. Stuyvesant’s Dutch identity, independence and schoonhijd, was inseperable from Calvinist theology. He understood his political role to be: promote the structured patriarchal middle-class authoritarian community values that had just formed his nation. “Community values” meant the Reformed Church would prevail in New Netherland’s official public life. Few of the worldly businessmen who hovered around the Heeren Gracht doing deals, seemed to care about religion. Stuyvesant thought there was little chance they would ever get it, with only one church on the whole seaboard between the Chesapeake and Hartford. This was St. Nicholas, crammed into Fort Amsterdam. Even that was a tardy arrival: the Company was only embarrassed into building a church at all, in 1638:

De Vries wrote “Voyages to New Netherland” as a memoir of his bad experiences trying to live, trade and invest new money and settlers in the colony. He blamed the Amsterdam Chamber, but mostly the on-site executives, whom he found to be corrupt and incompetent. All the little colonies de Vries planted were wiped out by Indian attacks; those were caused, de Vries accuses, by Kieft’s deliberate provocations. Adriaen van der Donck, of couse, had much to criticise about little St. Nicholas and its churchwardens.
Sir Kenneth’s got Harlem on his mind at the Frans Hals Museum

“When one begins to discuss the question, ‘does it work?’ or even ‘does it pay?’ instead of asking ‘is it God’s will?’ one gets a new set of answers. And one of the first of them is this: that to try and suppress opinions one doesn’t share is much less profitable than to tolerate them.”

— Sir Kenneth Clark, Civilisation Part 8 “The Light of Experience”, about the Age of Reason in Holland.

Dutch tolerance is so famous, we forget it is no older than Broadway; and it was worked out as much in the Bowery as on the Damrak. During the crucial years that Aucke was hammering Brooklyn Ferry, the sole and only implantation of religious freedom EVER by a European nation on this continent, took place. And it seeded in Brooklyn and voluntered on the “South River’ — the Dutch name for the Delaware — which let Penn blossom in Pennsylvania; and freedom of conscience bore precious fruit in Franklin; and Jefferson…. and the Bill of Rights. It came about because the WIC’S books were a Breughel hellscape of red-ink in the 1650s; the fall of Recife in Brazil to the Portugese was a national calamity, but it also blew new holes in the Company ledger; many of their investors and traders were ruined or homeless or both. So the Amsterdam Chamber were simply furious when their CEO Peter Stuyvesant, soldier, statesman, Latin scholar, Bible scholar, poet, admirer of Spanish literature and cuture, suddenly turned into Archie Bunker when the first Jew stepped off the boat in New Amsterdam.

We know that Jew by name; Asser Levy. Kosher butcher, civic gadfly, pillar of Old New York. All Americans are in Mynheer Levy’s debt, and in the debt of the wealthy Portugese Jews who arrived a few weeks after him, who added their chutzpah to his ongoing efforts at civil rights. These were port Jews from Recife, Brazil, which had just fallen to the Ports. But they had deep contacts within the WIC, and some were investors.

Below, two occasions when Aucke and Asser had court-mediated transactions:

Hmmm…in 1662, Aucke wrote a check to Asser for over 400 fl., quite a lot of money indeed. (Of course it wasn’t a check, but it was a notarized conveyance of funds, and Asser apparently had to pay 1% for the transfer-of-funds service, to the city’s notary.) Was Aucke satisfying a butcher’s debt? Had he borrowed 400 fl. from Asser, and was he re-paying what he owed with interest? Nothing appears acrimonious. In 1665, a very strange case comes up: Aucke had hired out his eldest daughter (as what?) to Mynheer Levy — or Mevrouw Miriam Levy — and before the year was up, the girl up and quit, and went to seek work (as what?) at the house of a wealthy young newlywed Christian couple, the Bayards. Asser Levy went to court and demanded that the maid’s dad, Aucke Jansen, should appear and give good reason why the girl wouldn’t honor her contract. I read this episode with sympathy for Levy. He seems hurt, and wants the public to know he is faultless in the girl’s flight from her contract. It is not outlandish to surmise Anti-Semitism was involved, but it is possible there wasn’t a whiff of it. After all, Aucke and his daughter knew the Levys were Jewish when he hired her out. Levy was a kosher butcher; could it simply be that the girl found it outlandish to keep two sets of plate in the house? Was Levy’s wife a termagant? Or was it all a Dutch-door operetta in which the faithful girl had to flee her mistress because young Hans the cheesemaker next door made her ache so? And we don’t know what the girl was employed to do. If she was stringing wampum, the fluctuating price could be a factor. Aucke did not appear to explain the breach of contract. It ought to be noted that the husband of the girl’s new house, young Balthazar Bayard was Dir. Gen. Stuyvesant’s double-nephew; Baltus was son of Anna Stuyvesant, the governor’s sister, and Samuel Bayard, brother of the governor’s wife. The wife was a daughter of Govert Loockermans, the rich patroon. OY!] But the whole episode does demonstrate nicely that family farming, as family butchering, is inherently a community pursuit for the Dutch colonists: family members were routinely placed elsewhere for employment around the social circle, not merely for the extra wages, but as social connection, social enhancement, social bonding, social climbing, and social exclusion.

It is largely through their perseverance in the face of oppression, that America owes its religious freedom and secular Constitution. In 1654, when Levy arrived, no nation had religious freedom, nor did New Netherland. In 1663, despite Stuyvesant’s bigotry, Jews, Puritans, Lutherans, Mennonites, Presbyrerians and the most-despised Quakers had all established private house-congregations in the colony, and this was due to the will of the Corporation in Amsterdam. The WIC were so pissed off at the way their CEO and Provincial Sec’y Tienhoven dissed and persecuted their faithful investors, that gradually the Board fired Tienhoven — whose hat and cane were found floating in a canal. The Amsterdam chamber came close to demanding free thought in 1663. Just in time. By 1664, religious freedom was de facto in New Netherland, thus too in the new English colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania — and no place else in America. Thus it was affirmed by the English as a convenient fait accompli. It thus remained a de jure precedent in 1790, and happily, ever after. We would never have gotten it otherwise. Thank Asser Levy, Moses da Silva, and a few greedy investors in Holland.

There are a hundred threads in this crazy-quilt of a decade we might yet pull. One we mustn’t fail to grasp emerged in 1655, when de Witte Paerd sailed up the Narrows to land the first purpose-ventured cargo of Africans to be auctioned as farm slaves to the burghers. There had been enslaved Company farmhands, Brazillian drummers, family fieldhands, patroon’s butlers and maids etc. in New Netherland before. Stuyvesant owned thirty or forty. Now came….. ”slavery” — a business, a trade, a solution. As the ordinance makes clear, it would be a lucrative re-export for the Company, should anyone want to sell them South. Aucke hadn’t yet finished de Dok; or the slip on the Lords’ Canal; and Stone Street hadn’t yet been set; so while the illustration gets right the spirit of the calamitous event, the first public auction, we must imagine the Africans wading in irons to the East River Strand, the muck soft under their bare feet, but sharp with glacier stones and piercing shoots of saltgrass.

This is a Long View but it might have been much longer. We’ll pull more dangling threads in the next bit. For instance, the story of Aucke’s mysterious competitor-friend, fellow church builder, Midwout neighbor, and all-around Ned Flanders, that Freryk Vlypzen, Company carpenter, later aka Frederick Phillipsen, Lord of the Manor of Phillipsburg. In the name change lies the hub of what made this decade so crucial and pivotal. For now, take away five things: 1) wheat is the new wampum. 2) Dutch Reformed remains hemmed in a kraal in Flatbush model town, while religious freedom opens wide the Narrows for immigrants from everywhere to New Amsterdam. 3) The Indian balance of power in the Hudson Valley shifted away from the Keskachauge, after Penhawitz’s tribe at the Canarsie wampum works was decimated by the North River Indians, Mohawks; they muscled in to cut out the Leni-Lenape middle-man, and bring their beaver pelts directly to the Dutch. Next were the Mahicans; then the Susquehannocks… 4) The English are prowling; the Connecticut border is completely undefended, and the Dutch are distracted as hell by a debt-bloated balance sheet and the pains of forging modernity; in the light of the above, 5) Black slave labor and Dutch slave trading are going to be just another way of doing business and getting ahead in New Amsterdam — er, New York.

https://www.flatbushhistory.com/articles/samuel-anderson

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/jewsslavesandtheslavetrade.htm

“And Aucke Jansz. van Nuys was DERE! Dat’s de story, Doc — you interested?”

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!!😈💥🌋🔥👻🎃🧛🙈🙉🙊⚡️⚰️🦦

Nichols Trickles

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.37 inches of rain for LA…a fine morning for a foggy hike, though it was dicey footing on the steep trail when I was caught by a cloudburst. The rain exposed some of the fascinatingly complex geology of the canyon, including big chunks of the (famous?) Nichols Diorite. The native plants were refreshed by the velvet fog — as you can see, and hear, in my video.

“Till The Clouds Roll By” — P.G. Wodehouse, Jerome Kern (1915) Sung by Mel Torme

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Gd18MMvoFV0LlE14waSzUka_Vtd4zZe-/view?usp=drivesdk

Wodehouse, the lyricist, lived here in the 1930s. He rented Billy Haines’s fabulously decorated Hollywood pied-a-terre at 1710 N. Stanley Ave, two blocks from the mouth of Nichols Canyon. (When P.G. returned to Blighty, Talullah B. took over the lease.) So Wodehouse and his wife had intimacy with this canyon, and its breezes and fragrances — though if he ever hiked up, I’m sure it was in a sedan chair with a folding drinks-table in the door. The lush neighborhood has been — is — popular with English ex-pats, including David Hockney.

In Medias Res…

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PART FOUR OF VAN NUYS — A LONG VIEWING

”Oyez, Oyez! Attend the Sagacious Counsels and Civilizing Innovations of the Worshipful Governor Peter Stuuuuy-vesant; and the remarkable Litigiousness of the Populace, likewise their Resiliency and Ingenuity; also the Depravity of the English; and the Short Sight of their High Mightinesses the Compangnie of Patria; Upon All of Which, Depend the Prosperity and Posterity of Aucke and Mevrouw Jansz., by right and purchase Klijn-Poorters of the newly-chartered City of New Amsterdam, during the years 1651-1654; Oyez!”

THE STORY SO FAR: Aucke and Magdaleen Jansen (or Jansz. for Jans zoon) van Nuijs, were the proto-ancestors of all the Van Nuyses in America. Aucke was born in Nuis, and Magdalena was from Langendijk outside Alkmaar. I’ve found much new info that shows the couple met in Amsterdam. This means the boerenzoon and boerentochter had left their family farms already for the big city; he, an artisan looking for a wife, she an artisan’s wife looking for an artisan. Aucke was a carpenter’s apprentice, and living in the Eglantierstraat, in the new Jordaan.

  • The Jordaan was developed starting in 1611 as row-housing for the builders, like Aucke, that were building “Old” Amsterdam.
  • Marriage certificate for the Jansens, 1645. He was 22, she was 23.
Jacob van der Ulfft. Note the turbaned trader bottom left. The building in the center is Amsterdam’s old Waag, the “Weighhouse” right where the Dam is lapped by the “reach” (Raak) of the sea — see the boatman tying up at bottom right. Here weights, volumes and prices of cargo were carefully checked, adjusted, and certified. Every trading city that had a Waag had a huge advantage in luring traders; for the traders’ margins, their profits, their cut of the surplus value, could be wiped out in the crumbs that spill, the casks that leak, or the one-peck-per-bushel short measure of grain.
The Dam Looking North, Johannes Lingelbach
The Dam is Aucke and Magdaleen’s Mokum, for that is their church, the Nieuwe Kerk, at left. The new Stadhuis is under construction. As an apprentice or journeyman carpenter from out of town, it’s unlikely he had the skills and Guild connections to take much work there; if he did it’s a credit to him. But there was plenty of other building going on in Amsterdam, probably as much work he could handle. Rents were ballooning. Almost certainly Magdaleen worked at home in piecework handicrafts; these could bring home half the bacon for a Dutch family, on or off the farm. Below is the Lacemaker, by Nicolas Maes.
https://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2020/03/black-in-rembrandts-time-a-myth-shattering-exhibition-on-identity-and-truth/
Amsterdam, and New Amsterdam, were multi-racial spaces. It is strange to imagine but Old Amsterdam, as a city, developed its famous civic institutions and cosmopolitan economy (B of A., 1609) only just before, and in support of, the founding of her two great cosmopolitan daughter entrepots, Batavia (1619) in the east and New Amsterdam (1624) in the west. New Netherland, the Spice Islands, were not “centuries behind” the mother country at all, just very far away, and with very few Dutch feet on the ground. All three cities were part of the evolving plan. The economic rules for all, were sent down in memos from the same cartel of Heeren — Lords — in Amsterdam, all of them cross-partnered with the others, and heavily invested in using both monopolies to arbitrage the world as a single global corporate capitalist colonial trading machine. New Amsterdam was the weak sister.

Aucke’s brother Gooszens was in Mokum already, working in the high-tech business of the day, centered in Amsterdam, which was, of course, gold. Gooszens worked as a gold-thread puller. All day long, he sat underground somewhere, probably in the Goldsmith’s Guild basement, pulling gold into long threads, so that Frans Hals could paint them, woven into the Jolly Toper’s vest. There seems to have been a Dutch uncle, a relative who made the shiddach between Aucke and Meg. It’s likely Magdaleen had the choice between the two brothers.

We are free to imagine Goosz was pasty with a hunched neck, and always had gold flecks in his beard that looked like oyster-cracker crumbs, and talked endlessly about bi-metallism and its ruinous costs. He never walked through Amsterdam but insisted on hailing water-taxis everywhere (like he’s a Rockefeller already…)

The Dutch-American Dream.

Magi preferred Aucke, though he was poorer than Goosz, because of his big hands and strapping framers frame and sun-ruddied cheeks — and because he hated crowded, snooty Amsterdam with its exclusive Poorter-Rights, Guild mafias, and all those stupid tulips, as much as she did. Aucke just wanted to earn enough to get a wife, and just learn enough to build her a farmhouse someday, somewhere that’s green, where a basket of fresh eggs doesn’t cost you a fortune, it makes you a fortune. Both sigh….Aucke got right to work, pounding home nails. Amsterdam was booming, and so was Magdalena. By 1651, they had five kids in the flat, 50 fingers sticky with the waffles en stroop their Uncle Goosz spoiled them with on the Dam. But no sign of land…both sigh. MEANWHILE…

City of New Amsterdam, People of New York by Carl R. Free. The first five pages of Ordinances are related to trying to license and regulate taverns, corkage, and home-brewing-for-export:

May, 1647 — Peter Stuyvesant arrived in failing, demoralized, nearly deserted New Amsterdam, with a brief to KICK ASS. He did so, pivoting on his peg to deliver one roundhouse kick after another to the colonial rump. The WIC insisted New Netherland was going to shape up and, like all elephants must, start paying its own way in this world. Stuyvesant was only 36 when he put peg to ground at the Staten Island Ferry’s Battery Slips Fort New Amsterdam, leading his bride Judith Bayard, with whom he’d just enjoyed a long Curaçao honeymoon. He kissed her, shut her up carefully away from history in a nice brick house with a Dutch door, to keep the pigs from trampling the babies, and came out swinging:

K

Stuyvesant was constantly hen-pecked and double-thought by the WIC. This company was one of the first modern corporations — just after its big sister the East India Company which was the first, and the English East India Company, which was second. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the lamentable defects of “The Corporation” emerged from the beginning: short-term thinking, idees-fixes, waffling, lust for instant profits, rule by memo, retro-active moral superiority, factions within the executive halls, nepotism, pointless budget cuts, bean-counting, and periods of poisonous officiousness alternated with ruinous neglect. (It may just be the psychology that arises when men take on the legal form of incorporation).
Under Stuyvesant the economy jumped nicely, then crashed immediately on the rocks of limited cash flow. Literally, the colonists had no money. Small silver change, tinkling coins in the pocket, were absent. The WIC saw the New Netherland economy as being simply: beads=beavers=tobacco = silver dollars = slaves = guilders = Flemish pounds = silver dollars = spices. There was no place in this cycle for money to return to New Netherland except as specie shipments to New Amsterdam. Investment with no return? Shipping silver to farmers? It will only fly out onto the first English merchant ship that calls in port. Horrifying. With no coin for their daily transactions, the colonists started using chips of broken wampum that had fallen off the string. Brilliant! The Company tried to regulate even that.

[Last but not least, the mighty Flemish pound, worth 6 fl., or 20 schellings

Stuyvesant tolerated the colonists’ ingenious re-purposing of broken wampum as token coins, but the WIC constantly tried to depreciate wampum to force it into a bead-for-bead valuation against beaver pelts and the Bank of Amsterdam’s gold. The interior Indians wanted zeawant as artistic statements and status symbols — belts, sashes, jewelry, wall hangings. The Iroquois would have howled with laughter, packed up their pelts and gone to the English if a Dutch trader insisted they count the number of black and white beads in each fathom (two yards) of zeawant, divide by 6 or 4 or 8, and then give them even more beaver pelts to “make up the difference.”

1651 – The desperate WIC finally actively recruits skilled tradesmen, plus all the long-toothed still un-adopted-after-all-these-years orphans of Mokum, and farm families. Aucke and Magi come over with their kids, possibly arranging work-for-passage through one Andries Kristman. They are given a lot, not down on the water, but up on the exposed-to-the-wilderness outskirts at the northern edge of the colony. It was green and meadowy, but exposed to the wild northern scrub of The Manhatans, Manhattan Island to us.

1652 – Above: Capitalism must have growth. To lure more strivers to the City, Old Amsterdam revised its ancient Poorter-recht, the right to be within the city gates by night and trading there by day. It added a second, lower tier of burgher-rights — under the Groot-Poorters would be Klijn-Poorters (cf., petty-bourgeois). Starter citizenship! I think in New Amsterdam, which was given the same law that year when it was incorporated as a City, the small burgher price was 30 fl., about one month’s “nut” for Aucke and Magi’s family. https://newamsterdamstories.archives.nyc/amsterdams-burgher-right Look what that low-low price got them in on:

Many times Stuyvesant explained the wampum problem to his Dutch Masters at the Amsterdam Chamber; many times he begged the Company to send a crate of 30,000, 20,000 OR even 10,000 guilders in loose silver so he could float the local economy. This seems an incredibly small sum compared with the stupefying overall profits of Amsterdam’s global octopus, but their High Mightinesses constantly refused, giving vague excuses. Of course the real explanation was that the cartel wanted all the silver in the world to flow to Batavia for the Chinese trade, and not be tied up in the apron pocket of a Brooklyn dame. As in our own times, the impoverishment of the burghers was a matter of policy to suit the international capitalists. When Viewed from the top, adding or injecting money into the bottom of society is invariably seen as throwing money away. [Paraphrasing Voltaire: when they sent their great ships out to trade the world, Amsterdam didn’t care whether the rats were comfortable.] The problems of current pay started before Stuyvesant and continued long into the English period. They are explained in a comprehensive webpage, Money Substitutes in New Netherland: https://coins.nd.edu/colcoin/colcoinintros/NNWampum.html Excerpts:

“Devaluing poor quality wampum was not successful in solving the problem of ridding the province of poor quality wampum. It seems the law was interpreted as imposing fines for those not adhering to the instituted rates but apparently the ordinance was not enforced as to requiring the poorer wampum to be strung. Indeed, loose wampum continued to circulate to such an extent a resolution was passed on November 30, 1647 to try to deal with that problem. In fact, so much unstrung wampum circulated it was difficult to determine what was good quality and what was poor quality wampum. Several later ordinances and court ruling addressed the quality issue. Indeed, since the 1641 ordinance allowed poor quality beads to remain current, it seems more and more were made.

[In 1660] Stuyvesant [tried to explain] the depreciation of the wampum bead rate would have little effect in remedying the situation, for the real problem centered around the quantity of wampum needed to acquire a beaver. As the supply of wampum increased, individuals would demand more wampum for a beaver, irrespective of how wampum was rated. Stuyvesant saw wampum as a necessary commodity with a fluctuating rate based on supply and demand, and therefore he saw it as a poor money substitute. He once again stated the only way to obtain a stable economy was to replace wampum as a currency with silver coin. He wrote:“It matters little, whether 8 or 10 pieces are counted for a stiver, because the dealer marks, holds or sells his goods, according to the abundance of wampum and the price he had to give for beavers. It would be desirable therefore, as we have repeatedly stated to you, that wampum and beavers, as well as tobacco, should be declared an absolute commodity or merchandise, and that the importation of no other small currency, than silver, should be allowed here.       (Fernow, History, p. 471)

— Excerpts from the website Money Substitutes in New Netherland and Early New York
  • One of the first acts of the new City

1652 – Only four years after the Peace of Muenster/Westphalia ended the 80 and 30 Years’ Wars, war clouds are blowing again over the North Sea. Oliver Cromwell, like the Stuart Kings he toppled, sees the Dutch wijk network as a Mafia, and her garland of trade routes around the globe as a noose strangling England’s trade.

Every ocean in the world, including New England’s and Virginia’s seaboard, was a Dutch lake. The English Puritans, Roundheads to their buckled shoes and feeling their oats since they killed the King, moved families from Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Connecticut — squat ‘n squash. By 1650 Englishmen had the whole eastern third of New Netherland, the Connecticut Valley and New Haven. It’s impossible to believe today but true, that one of the chief reasons for New Englanders to greedily gobble at this Dutch-occupied Pequot and Lenape land, was its Sound-shore adjacency to the tidal flats on which thrived the wampum source, the zeawant, the Manahatans quahog, Mercenaria mercenaria. The clams, dig? Clams’ll get you beavers, Goodman, get it? To stem the invasion, Stuyvesant had to trudge out to Hartford, which was once the Dutch fort Het Huis van Goede Hoop, and negotiate a border.The Director brought along his most trusted advisor and friend, his long-time English Secretary, George Baexter (Baxter), who had been settled with lands and privileges and honors by his Dutch friends. Oh, how bitter was Stuyvesant when he realized Baxter had ceded to the English practically everything east of Westchester and the whole eastern half of Sewan-Hackey, or Long Island! [The Director-General didn’t report his humiliation to the WIC until 1656.) In 1650, maybe Stuyvesant wasn’t suspicious of friendly, helpful, reliable Baxter and his affable brother? Thomas Baxter. They were settling English dissenter families in Brooklyn; these quickly became friends and neighbors to the Dutch farmers. But in the next three years, Stuyvesant became convinced that all these English villagers — half the population of Brooklyn — had turned into a seditious 5th Column working to depose him, subvert Company rule, declare a Parliamentary Republic like Cromwell’s, and drive the Dutchmen back into their ships and out of America forever. His doubts were not far from the truth.

1652 – Amsterdam speaks: the Company orders: and Gov. Stuyvesant officially declares that New Amsterdam is no longer a military fort of the WIC, but a full City of the Netherlands. This means the city’s fisc will be separate from the Company’s fisc; New Amsterdam will have to pay its own budget. The old fight between downstate and upstate begins, though Gov. Upstate was still downstate, stomping angrily around.

“Nice Dutch Colonial, sweet Cape Cod…” “I’m saving beavers for my dream brownstone.” Overheard at Breuckelen Ferry.
  • February 1653: New Amsterdam gets its own Waag, calibrated to Old Amsterdam’s.
“Prepare jointly.” Ha ha! Get it…? They’re joiners…? (Crickets)….

LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION! Glance at the red bit above. Aucke(n) [final n’s are silent in Dutch] and Magdalena’s Manhattan house lot straddled the Wall. That’s why they had to, or chose to, sell. It’s likely they sold at a loss, since the lot was reduced, and what wholesome family would ever want to live on….Wall….Street… Wow. Aucke owned property on Wall Street. Gotverdamme...

Perhaps it is historic irony that the man Aucke sold out to, and had to dun several times for payment, was the Town Drummer. [Going into escrow with a musician —? What did Aucken expect?] On the other hand, Mynheer Tromlaer was certainly getting plenty of work, what with the Atlantic Seaboard on a war footing…The First Anglo-Dutch Sea-War was on. The whole Dutch coast was the theatre of war. The battle depicted below is known as the Battle of Scheveningen, the Battle of the Texel, the Battle of ter Heide….But New Amsterdam was sandwiched between the enemy’s colonies in Connecticut and Virginia. The English had ten times the population of New Netherland, and they just happened to be the burghers’ best customers. It would be desperate if Connecticut attacked, but it was unbearable that Dutch trade and the chain of coin were at a dead stop.

The threat was real, and Stuyvesant’s wrath at the burghers’s sulky malaise was fully justified. So, to be fair, was their sense of being exploited beyond belief and beyond endurance by the Corporation. Through the summer, fall and Sinter Klaas season of 1653, the whole City was broke and angry, feeling under threat and ill-used. The only thing that seemed to keep the economy grinding along were the weekly Court sessions in which creditors and debtors among the petty-burghers performed for each other, and for the officials, their sincere good intentions to pay, or accept payment and quit claim, whenever.

REMONSTRANCES? OR REBELLION? The Wall was built but not paid for. The patriotic burgher who put in the winning construction bid, was none other than Thomas Baxter. Thus, it may have partly been Mr. Baxter’s dunning for his pay that was driving Stuyvesant, the City Council, and the Company to distraction. The City demanded to take over plums of Company revenue like the liquor excises. The Director-General tried to lay all kinds of new taxes; these were resisted stiffly as had been all previous levies. Thomas Baxter, offended at non-payment and all the new taxes, turned vrijbuiter, filibuster, privateer. He chartered a ship and seized sitting-duck cargoes up and down the estuary. Meanwhile, George Baxter was riling the at-their-wits’-end poorters, especially those in the half-English Brooklyn villages, to urge for a “separate peace” with New England and an end to Stuyvesant’s “arbitrary rule.” That summer of ‘53, New Netherland was seething with faction.

https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/1430/ The link is to “Dutch Women in New Netherland” by Michael Eugene Gherke. Our Dutch woman, Madeleen, on December 3, 1653, amidst the turmoil, the want, the wars and rumors of wars, took full advantage of her rights as a Dutch wife. She could handle daily business, conduct her family’s affairs, and appear in court to defend her rights. If her family was to make it through the inflation, they needed her wages and debts certified, just like Aucke’s.

This is the only record of Madaleen I have found, cited in the wampum article. But finding it, I turned up all these other records!

Magi was employed by Andries Kristman, dec’d., to string wampum. That is, to literally make money, or at least to repair it. Remember that the colonists had turned broken, loose beads into chits or tokens in place of coin; and the company insisted that it be strung. Maybe she was stringing junk beads for her baas, to give them small value; or, she might have been dressing old half-bad fathoms with polished new beads, purchased from local Canarsee women. If attractively done, it would double the value. [Starting with Peter Minuit’s misunderstood $24 of ‘trinkets and beads’ — really tools, hunting traps, gadgets and precision instruments — the Indians eagerly traded for Dutch hand-drills which increased their zeawant production. In effect, Peter Minuit was saying, “We’re staying here on this island; you Indians go to your homes across the East River and make as much wampum as you can, and then bring it back here to us for more goodies.” There doesn’t seem to be evidence for the idea I’ve seen repeated, that the Dutch enslaved or coerced Indians into being sweat-shop industrial labor grinding out “inflationary” wampum. Canarsie women were the original and probably only makers of Manhatans sewan, considered by the upstate Iroquois to be far superior to the New England tribes’. Long Island, the Canarsie home base, was Sewan-Hackey, “Quahog Shores.”] Thus we see the Dutch effort to turn shells into money, on the whole successful, was supported by the interface between Indian women and piece-working Brooklyn housewives.

On December 11, 1653, the Burgomaster and Schepens of the City, joining with the self-appointed citizens’ “Peace Commissions” Baxter organized, delivered the following Remonstrance to the Director-General, who took it pretty well, actually, for him. It is worth reading through for the completely unprecedented, yet oddly familiar, consent-of-the-governed social-contract rhetoric employed:

Stuyvesant smelled the blood of an Englishmun all over the document. The English Baxters had foisted their Parliamentary supremacy ideas on the burghers. Surely, nothing at all here comes out of Dutch civil philosophy. So the Governor gritted his teeth and replied to their insolence according to his understanding of reality. The feud dragged on into Christmas:

The bemused WIC supported their chief executive. They also appear to have split the seditious group in half, by seeming to accede to the reasonable “Dutch” burghers demands for their civic dignity, while simply letting the clouds of English revolution roll on by. The Baxters were banished.

1654 — The carpenter and his dame, done with being urban pioneers, and having accumulated enough to buy their farm at last, quit crowded, noisy, fractious Manhattan, for the good life in the open green fields of Brooklyn.

HAPPY LABOR DAY FROM THE VIEW!