PART FOUR OF VAN NUYS — A LONG VIEWING

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.

• 

• 

• 

https://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2020/03/black-in-rembrandts-time-a-myth-shattering-exhibition-on-identity-and-truth/

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…)

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…

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:

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

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.

• 

• 

• 

• 

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

• 

• 

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.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

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.

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!