before the main act gets under way. In Washington Irving’s satirical
Stuyvesant’s real life was more bitter than sweet. He came from Friesland in the flat northlands of the Netherlands, an area of devout peasants and grim-faced ultraconformity. His father was a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church and Pieter’s obvious career path was to follow him there. But the young Stuyvesant rebelled, choosing to study philosophy rather than theology and getting himself kicked out of the university for sleeping with his landlord’s daughter. He immediately joined the Dutch West India Company as a clerk, rising quickly through the ranks, until he was appointed the director of the Caribbean colony of Curacao in 1642, just before his thirtieth birthday.
Stuyvesant was ambitious, single-minded, and charismatic, gathering a string of acolytes around him. The most dedicated of these was John Farret, a fellow West India Company employee and an accomplished painter and poet. For many years, the two men enjoyed a diverting correspondence conducted entirely in verse. Farret hero- worshipped Stuyvesant, referring to him as “Excellency” and “My Stuyvesant” and calling Stuyvesant’s own rather clunky verses “godlike.” These letters (which only came to light in the 1920s) have a faint flavor of homoeroticism about them, though there is no suggestion of any sexual liaison. They put a fresh slant on Stuyvesant’s dour and crusty image, rather like discovering Oliver Cromwell had an effeminate Royalist pen pal.
Stuyvesant was two years into his Caribbean appointment when, during an ill-advised expedition to recapture the island of St. Martin from the Spanish, his leg was blown off. He was flamboyantly planting the Dutch flag on a rampart that his troops had thrown up on the beach when a cannonball fired from the island’s fort shattered his right shin. That he lived to tell the tale indicates his considerable resilience. Dutch doctors were the most advanced in Europe and ingenious in devising new techniques of amputation, but none of these was easy or pleasant. Speed was of the essence. Fat and muscle had to be cut away to create a skin flap, and the bone sawn through as quickly as possible. Some surgeons could manage the whole procedure in less than a minute, but the survival rate was less than one in three.
Whoever saved Stuyvesant did an excellent job, but the patient was delirious for several weeks afterward. He got back to his desk as soon as he could, his first act being a letter of apology to the directors of the company, regretting that his attack “did not succeed so well as had hoped, no small impediment having been the loss of my right leg, it being removed by a rough ball.” He then dashed off a poetical note to Farret, who responded with his own attempt, “On the Off-Shot Leg of the Noble, Brave Heer Stuyvesant, Before the Island of St. Marten.” Even by Farret’s fulsome standards, the poem hit new heights of Stuyvesant idolatry: “The bullet hits his leg; the rebound touches my heart….”
Despite his determination to carry on as normal, in the heat of the tropics Stuyvesant’s wound began to fester and he was reluctantly forced to return home to recuperate properly. His nursemaid was the plain but good- hearted spinster Judith Bayard, three years his senior and his brother-in-law’s sister. When he announced his intention to marry her, Farret goaded him by suggesting the marriage would never be consummated because Stuyvesant wasn’t up to the job. Stuyvesant’s verse in response was defiant, and the couple went on to have a pair of sons.
Once better, Stuyvesant reported for duty at the West India Company’s offices in Amsterdam. He had an expensive state-of-the-art wooden leg, and a cheap spare one for emergencies. It was a scene from a seventeenth-century version of
As director-general of the settlement, based in the capital, New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant diligently looked after the company’s interests for the best part of sixteen years. He was a shrewd negotiator: tough, uncompromising, and fair, holding off threats from the Swedes and the Native Americans and even managing for a while to get the New Englanders to accept Dutch sovereignty. In the end, though, it all came to nothing. And because it is the victors who decide what history gets taught in school, very few people today have heard of New Netherland, and if they’ve heard of Pieter Stuyvesant at all, they know only that he was Dutch and had a wooden leg. This is most unfair.
New Netherland was a colony of more than ten thousand people. Unlike most of Puritan New England, it wasn’t founded on religious grounds. It was primarily a trading center, infused with the liberal outlook that made the Netherlands the financial and intellectual powerhouse of the seventeenth century. As a result, it was a melting pot of nationalities and mixed marriages. New Amsterdam was to become New York, but its heart—and tongue— remains Dutch. Many words we consider uniquely American are in fact adopted from Dutch:
This last was originally a sawmill on the Hudson River, named after its owner Jonkheer van der Donck. Adriaen van der Donck was a young lawyer and landowner and Jonkheer was his honorific title (it means “Young Gentleman,” roughly equivalent to the Honorable in English). He had studied at the University of Leiden, where complete religious freedom and lack of censorship were the order of the day, and he was steeped in the new learning of Galileo, Descartes, and Spinoza. Arriving in America in 1641, he immediately fell in love with the country: the landscape, plants, animals, and most of all, the languages and customs of the local Mohican and Mohawk tribes. Recognizing early on the importance of beavers to the fledging economy, he kept them as pets and studied every aspect of their life cycle. He saw New Netherland as a place of almost endless possibility, where laws and governance could be founded on the principles of peace and cooperation between peoples. In the passion he brought to his task of recording and mapping the colony, one can detect the first glimmering of the ideas that led to America’s independence more than a century later.
Stuyvesant’s predecessor as director-general, Willem Kleft, had been very unpopular with the colonists. Against van der Donck’s peaceful principles, he had started a bloody Indian war that drained the colony’s resources and made outlying areas dangerous. Van der Donck used his oratorical skills to oppose Kleft and lobby for his replacement. When Stuyvesant arrived in 1647, van der Donck was appointed “President of the Commonality,” effectively Stuyvesant’s deputy. The two men at first got on well, but the new director-general was easier to admire than to like. Unlike Adriaen van der Donck, he was a deeply conservative man who had no time for anything other than the iron laws of God and their earthly manifestation, the Dutch West India Company. He was an autocrat, referring to his fellow citizens as “subjects” or “his children” and winning arguments not by subtle legal niceties, but by shouting, swearing, and stamping his wooden leg on the floor. The pain caused made him increasingly difficult to deal with. Intractable differences both of character and political aspiration made the relationship with his deputy untenable. Van der Donck was stripped of public office. In quick succession, he lost his job, his right to practice law, and his life. In a tragic irony, he was murdered in an Indian raid.
What Stuyvesant lost was the colony. Ten years after van der Donck’s death, the Second Anglo-Dutch War broke out and four English warships sailed up the Hudson. The Dutch knew they had no chance: The West India Company either couldn’t or wouldn’t send troops to defend the colony properly. The battle-weary Stuyvesant stood bravely at his post as New Netherland’s leading citizens—including his son—pleaded with him to give in. “I would much rather be carried out dead,” he replied. When finally forced to accept the inevitable, he did so proudly, stumping out of Fort Amsterdam in full uniform with his Dutch troops behind him.
It’s hard not to feel sorry for him. Without his cussedness and intelligence, the colony might have fallen to the English much sooner. When it did, it was well established enough for most of the colonists—including Stuyvesant and his family—to segue peacefully into life as New Yorkers. Little is known of Pieter Stuyvesant’s private life, but he did have one passion, inspired by his years in Curacao. He collected tropical birds, and by the time of his death in
