Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
VAN NUYS — A VIEWINGPART7Continuing View of the American experience of wheat farmer Aucke Jansen van Nuys, immigrant ancestor of the Valley’s wheat farmer IsaacVan 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 Rampjaar1672 – 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 Itselfis 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 deadover 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 WhiteHorse]. 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 HardenbroekJacobsen, 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:
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:
VAN NUYS — A VIEWING: PART 6New 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 PuritanNewEngland 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 Bewindhebbersof 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, hadmuch 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 pivotalcharacter 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:
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. Keskachaugeis 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:
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 flipreorganize 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.
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 implantationofreligious freedomEVER 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.
The Valley Village View 